Free Imperfect Strangers by David Staniforth Page B

Mother cleans in the day, and I’d be in the way, and I’d likely get some what-for.
    “Why don’t you go and put some dry clothes on?”
    Again I shrugged. “Can’t be bothered.”
    “My mum says it’s a shame.” She did not say what was a shame, just that it was.
    “W- Would you like this?” I asked, fumbling in my trouser pocket. I found it on the floor when collecting the clear plastic halves for my model making, but Heather didn’t need to know that. “I got it from the machine, that’s...” I drew the ring from my pocket and presented it to her in my outstretched palm. My hand shook and the cut-plastic ring seemed to exaggerate the tremor. “I w- w– I w-wanted a toy soldier, b- but I got this.” It was lie, and lies are bad, but I didn’t want her to think it had been on the floor. I didn’t want her to know it was a prize that had been chucked by another boy in disgust at receiving something intended for a girl.
    Heather smiled and looked as if she had been about to take it from my hand, but she stopped herself. She then stepped back a pace and placed her hands on her hips. “That’s not the way to give a girl a ring. You have to kneel on the floor, just one knee, and then offer it to me.”
    I looked along the length of the passage, towards the pavement. Feeling safe that we were alone, I turned back to Heather and knelt on the floor. My hand shaking, I held the ring aloft in my outstretched palm.
    “You have to ask me.”
    “W– Would you like this r-r-ring?”
    “You have to say with this ring I thee wed.”
    “But I d– d–….  I d– d–”
    “I do too. Thank you.”
    Heather snatched the ring. I never had a chance to finish saying: I don't want to. But it was too late, she had the ring on her finger and she was looking at it with pride, her fingers outstretched. What will Mother say when she finds out I’m married?
    Heather then held out her hand to me, beckoning with wavering fingers that I should take hold.
    I reached forward and gently gripped her fingers while rising to my feet. They felt soft and warm. Her fingers were delicate and had perfect nails that were all pink and shiny.
    “Come on,” she said. “Now we’re married, I need you to do something for me.”
    The grass on Heather’s back garden was tall. Up to our knees. Mother’s grass was perfectly manicured, cut every other day throughout the summer. It would have been amazing to roll on. But I was not allowed to play on it, on account of the fact that my heavy, clumsy feet would ruin it. Mother’s feet were larger than mine, though, so I never fully understood why it was that mine should be heavier. Still, I did as I was told and stayed off the grass. I would have what-for if I played on it. I already had more than enough what-for as it was.
    “ Algiyer wot fer , ” she would say if, after receiving a scutch, I even dared to ask, what it was for? And then, scutch again. Harder, with more force, knuckles this time, just above my ear. I stopped asking why, and just took the punishments when they came.
    Heather's socks, which in the passage had reached to her knees, smoothly covering her calves with brilliant white, had now fallen to her ankles, weighed down with wetness. My trousers were also heavy, so heavy I had to put my left hand in the pocket to prevent them from coming down. There was no pocket in the left though, just a fringe of frayed material where the pocket should have been. While others held me down, Paul Frazer had ripped it away and run around the schoolyard shouting that it smelled of pee.
    It did not smell of pee.
    One thing I could positively say is that my clothes and me were clean. Too clean! Painfully clean. Scrubbing brush and Vim clean.
    Heather held my right hand, but we were apart, our arms at full stretch. She stood there a moment like that, her socks, no longer a gleaming white, but a murky-pale-grey, and bunched above her pristine black shoes, water droplets on the surface glinting