Free The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore by Paul Burman

night, when the dark sky seems so bitten by cold it might snap in half and leave darkness floating across the world forever, she leads me through the rites of my first clumsy coupling on the wooden floor of a gazebo in someone’s back garden. One of her friends has turned eighteen, been allowed to throw a party; the house is crowded, but Kate finds a space for just the two of us.
    I work Saturdays behind a fruit and veg stall on Market Square, and am moved to prepare for this consummation by the way her eyes beckoned the last time we met, the way she embraced me, the way she planted her hands in my pockets when we danced at the end of that evening. During my lunch break, I set out to buy condoms, and sidle up and down the aisles of three pharmacies, hoping to pluck up courage, but turn heel each time a shop assistant approaches.
    â€œJust browsing,” I mumble and scuttle off.
    It’s a fruitless effort and I spend the afternoon weighing potatoes, onions, Brussels sprouts and rhubarb, cursing my cowardice.
    Jumping off the bus in Abetsby that evening, onto a pavement of black ice, I know what I’ve got to do.
    I march into the backyard of The Duke of York, past the stacks of empty kegs and crates, and into the Gents toilets – a weakly-lit bunker of cracked tiles, damp cement, a leaking cistern and a stained, stainless steel urinal. Shovelling a fistful of coins into the condom vending machine, I grapple with the handle, pocket the packets and march out again.
    The stench of mildew, naphthalene, urine and bad drains stays with me, so I spit into the gutter and take a deep breath of icy night. There’s stuff-all romantic about these preparations, nothing uplifting – I feel shrivelled by the process – and, to cap it all, the crappy bus service has made me late.
    Kate’ll wonder where the hell I am, whether I’ve got lost or if I’ve stood her up. Too much can happen at a party in thirty minutes, and I’ve seen the way blokes look at her. So I clutch her scribbled map and run twenty paces, walk twenty, run twenty, walk twenty, until the stitch in my side makes me stop.
    What really pisses me off is not that Abetsby’s bigger than I thought it was, but that there are so many new housing estates beyond the town centre it’s a bloody labyrinth. Street after street of identical suburban boxes, accommodating all-too-familiar ingredients: the same old beginnings and endings of never-never dreams and recriminations, TV programmes, mortgage statements, the burden of nine-to-five jobs, the stale defeat of drained love, the prospect of a holiday to Costa Brava in a year’s time and a retirement plan in ten or twenty or thirty – the cloned lives of Mum and Brian… from all of which I’m feeling remote because Kate’s begun to breathe a different sort of life into me. As long as I don’t get lost, as long as I don’t lose her.
    And then there’s the house. I hear the pounding of a bass rhythm from the end of the road, and notice the garish pulsing of yellow, blue and red lights through the drawn curtains of a front room. I knock at the door, but there’s no answer, so go to a window and bang on the glass.
    â€œI was worried you’d missed the bus,” she says, skipping into my arms, her arms outstretched.
    â€œIt was late. Couldn’t find the house. Thought it was closer to the centre of town.”
    â€œYou’re here now, though.”
    I touch the inside pocket of my jacket and nod.
    â€œYeah,” I say.
    She leans closer, embraces me, pushes her hands into the back pockets of my jeans, speaks soft words next to my ear: “Tonight’s a good night, Major Tom.”
    But I’m still wearing remnants of winter. “What for?”
    â€œTo fly me to the moon,” she laughs and plants a brief kiss on my neck.
    It’s hard to thaw from the day’s anxieties and the long dash through the maze of this