LITMIR.BIZ

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a real idiot. I was like a spider, scuttling up rock faces that give me vertigo now just thinking about them. How the hell I never got cragfast, I don’t know.

      I’d got a bit more sense since my close encounter with the mountain rescue, but I still liked climbing by myself. The second time I went up Pillar Rock had been the previous spring. After I heard my mountain rescue friends talking about the accident, some ghoulish subconscious impulse took me back there. I remember pausing in the Notch and looking down and picturing the guy tumbling through the air. I wondered what it must feel like. All I had to do to find out was let go.

      Don’t worry, it wasn’t a serious thought. If I was going to fall, it would be off something that would impress my rescue mates! But dismissing the Slab and Notch as a ‘mere’ scramble now got me into more bother.

      ‘Let’s go up there then,’ she said.

      ‘With you? No way!’

      ‘Why not? You just said it was dead easy.’

      ‘Yeah, but not for someone like you.’

      ‘What do you mean, like me? We do climbing at my school. I’ve been on the wall at the sports centre.’

      This was true, though, as I learned later, Imogen’s desire to take up rock climbing seriously had provoked a loud and unified negative from her parents, and the school had been instructed to make sure she didn’t get near the wall again.

      Well, her parents might have got their way, but with me it was no contest.

      In my defence, she did make it clear that she was going to have a go with or without me, and by going along with her at least I could make sure she was on the end of my rope.

      And to tell the truth, this readiness of hers to go spidering up a rock face the way I’d been doing for years had an effect on me like the sight of her dancing on the lawn.

      So up we went, me first, then Imogen after I’d got her belayed. There were no problems, and she clearly wasn’t in the slightest fazed by having several hundred feet of air beneath her at the most exposed points.

      It was worth it just to see her face as she stood on the top of the rock.

      It’s a marvellous place to be, beautifully airy in three directions with the huge bulk of Pillar Fell itself looming behind.

      She drank it all in then she turned towards me, a wide smile on her face.

      ‘Thanks,’ she said, pulling her hat off so that her golden hair once more floated in the gentle breeze.

      Then in one fluid movement she pulled her T-shirt over her head, kicked off her trainers, pushed down her shorts and stepped out of them.

      ‘Would you like to fuck me?’ she said.

      I stood staring at her, dumbfounded.

      Part of me was thinking that anyone on their way up the path to the summit of Pillar has a perfect view of the top of the rock.

      Another part was thinking there was next to nothing of her! She was so skinny her ribs showed, her breasts looked like they’d just begun to form, she looked more like ten than fourteen. She was as far as you could get from those pneumatic images in the porn mags that got passed around at school.

      But despite the danger of being overlooked, despite her lack of any obvious feminine attractiveness, my heart and my soul and, yes, my body was crying out in answer to her question: Oh yes, I’d like to fuck you very much!

      And I did.

      What was it like? It was a first for me, and for her too. I knew that because I ended up with blood on my cock. So, a pair of raw virgins, but we meshed like we’d been doing it for years, and unless they ran lessons in faking it at that expensive boarding school of hers, she enjoyed it every bit as much as I did. I can’t take any credit for that. While it was happening I was totally absorbed in my own feelings. But afterwards as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms, I knew I wanted this to be for ever.

      In the end it was her who pushed me away and stood up.

      ‘Mustn’t be late,’ she said, ‘or those two will run scared and give the game away.’

      She got dressed as quickly as she’d stripped, but not through any modest need to cover up. I’ve never met anyone as unselfconscious as Imogen.

      I lay there and watched her, then followed suit. She would have done the descent unroped, but I wouldn’t let her.

      On the long walk back I don’t think we exchanged more than half a dozen words. There was lots I wanted to say but, like I told you, communication wasn’t my thing.

      With about a quarter mile to go she halted and put her hand on my chest.

      ‘I’m OK from now on,’ she said.

      I said, ‘Yeah. When…how…?’

      ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you when I want you.’

      And she was gone.

      So there you have it, Elf. Sex, rites of passage, teenage trauma, all the steamy stuff you people like to paddle your inquisitive little fingers in.

      Watch out that you don’t find yourself touching something nasty!

      But that’s what turns you on, isn’t it?

      That’s what turns you on!

       Elf

       i

      When she was thirteen Alva Ozigbo’s English teacher had asked her class to write about what they wanted to be when they grew up.

      That night Alva sat so long over the assignment that both her parents asked if there was something they could help with.

      She regarded them long and assessingly before shaking her head.

      Her father, Ike, big, black and ebullient, was a consultant cardiologist at the Greater Manchester Teaching Hospital. Her mother, Elvira, slender, blonde and self-contained, had been an actress. She’d left her native Sweden in her teens to study in London in the belief that the English-speaking world would offer far greater opportunities. For a while her Scandinavian looks had got her parts that required Scandinavian looks, but it soon became clear that her best future lay on the stage. The nearest she got to a film career was being screentested for a Bergman movie. She still talked of it as a missed opportunity but the truth was the camera didn’t love her. On screen she became almost transparent, and by her mid-twenties she was resigned to a career of secondary roles in the theatre. She was Dina in The Pillars of the Community at the Royal Exchange when she met Ike Ozigbo. When they married six months later, she made a rare joke as they walked down the aisle together after the ceremony.

      ‘I always knew I’d get a starring role one day.’

      To which he’d romantically replied, ‘And it’s going to be a recordbreaking run!’

      So it had proved.

      Thirteen-year-old Alva was proud of her father, but it had always been her mother she pestered for stories of her life on the stage. Now, after vacillating for a good hour between the two main exemplars in her life, it was not without a small twinge of disloyalty that she finally wrote that what she wanted to be was an actress.

      At the time she meant it. But somewhere over the next few years that urge to get inside the skin of a character had changed from interpretation to analysis. She discovered that wanting to understand was not the same as wanting to be. The actress had to lose herself in the part; Alva found that she wanted to preserve herself, to remain the detached observer even as all the intricate wirings of personality and motivation were laid bare.

      Psychiatry

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