Room Up Top

The sun was starting to set above the gasworks on Bewley Street as the red Routemaster bus moved slowly through the dense late afternoon traffic. From the upper deck, Stephen studied the shops along the high street. He could just make out Mr Bolt in the hardware shop, brown-overalled and brylcreemed, talking to a customer. Stephen had worked there stocking shelves and managing the storeroom every Saturday during his final year at school, and retained fond memories of Jeremy, and his wife Nancy. They had encouraged him to continue at technical college and pursue a career in electronics, rather than clerk in a bank and take banking exams.

Next door was the fishmonger's shop, owned by Mr Finn. Stephen gazed in childlike wonder at the bright array of marine creatures laid out on the marble slabs in the window. Fresh shrimps were selling for a shilling a pint, cod and hake 2s 9d a pound, rock salmon one-and-ninepence. And such a brace of fat salmon, fresh from Scotland their gleaming blue-black scales translucent in the shop lights. Those fish seemed very expensive, but then fresh salmon, as opposed to John West's tinned variety, was an almost unimaginable luxury in Stephen's world.

Miss Merino's wool shop was much the same as always. Many different coloured balls of wool comprised the window display and, to augment them, sun-faded knitting patterns, curling at the edges, depicted various styles of woollen garment, from cardigan to pullover. From the bus, Stephen could make out nothing inside the shop. Yet, instinctively he pressed his legs together, as he felt a familiar twinge in his groin, at the memory of how Miss Merino, and her young companion Susan, had used and changed him for good, the summer holiday before last, when he worked there as a store-boy.

The bus juddered to a halt outside Fine Fare, allowing a lot of new people to board. He heard boisterous young female voices ascending the stairs behind him, and a group of about twelve girls emerged onto the upper deck. Their school uniforms revealed them to be pupils at Lady Margaret's College, the local catholic grammar school, and he sensed them to be sixth formers, only a couple of years younger than he. Looking back, Stephen gazed from girl to girl with sincere but well concealed admiration. Already, he was adept at controlling his features, giving nothing of his emotions away, so the tremor of excitement stimulated by the girls' physical arrival in his daydream lay concealed beneath a mask of indifference.

The memory lingered of Miss Merino's hard clunky shoe pressed into his crotch as he knelt before her on the stone floor of the storeroom. The very assertive Susan twisting his arm cruelly behind his back, and forcing his face forward to kiss Miss Merino's thigh above the knee, as contemptuously she held her full skirt aloft for the purpose. He remembered the triumph in the womens' laughter as they watched him not only submit, but also sigh, and passionately smother the proprietor's nylon stockinged thigh with delicate kiss after kiss after kiss, as Susan pinioned his arm painfully in her grip and kicked his bottom.

The detail of the memory subsided, leaving an exposed craving in Stephen's soul, like a wreck on the shore when the tide goes out. He knew from experience that the baggy grey flannels he wore for work in the engineering design department at the electronics company would conceal his erection, but he still looked nervously down for a damp stain. Fortunately his rampant penis had remained within his underpants this time.

The upper deck was crowded, and there was not enough room for all the girls to sit down. Stephen was glad that the seat next to him was empty and he waited with anticipation to see who would take it. The girl who sat down beside him was a strong well-built sporty type, with broad hips, carrying a large bag with a hockey stick protruding from the end. She smelt freshly showered and he noticed that the ends of her long brown hair were still damp. He felt the seat compress and shift as she lowered her voluptuous bottom and sat down with her considerable full weight, and he felt her hip and thigh press up against his own.

She had a relaxed manner and an imposing physical confidence, so instinctively he conceded space to her, which she took, so that he was squeezed happily between the girl and the side of the bus. She placed the kit bag across her lap, and the end with the protruding hockey stick rested on his leg.

"You don't mind, sir, do you?"

She asked confidently, her voice soft and low, smiling as she turned to face him. Her use of the word "sir", used partly out of politeness, had carried a mocking edge, for he was sure the young woman had instinctively taken his measure already. Stephen returned her steady gaze, almost mesmerised in the moment by her bright brown eyes, and the healthy radiance of her clear skin.

"No Miss," he mumbled, intimidated and at a loss for words. "I'm really quite comfortable." he lied. Comfort was the last thing Stephen wanted or felt right then, but he still lacked the self-knowledge, the language, and the courage, to express his true emotional state.

"I wish there were more polite boys like you," the girl observed, dropping the "sir", still smiling as she turned her face to the front. Stephen interpreted this as a jest, but still wondered more in hope than with reason whether she meant more.

Reaching down over the bag, the girl scratched an itch on her bare knee. Her skirt only reached three-quarters of the way down her thighs, and this movement meant that Stephen was unable now to resist glancing at her legs. He saw that they were beautiful, but not in a conventional way, for they were not slim and elegant like the female legs in the stocking adverts he pored over in his mother's magazines, but full and strong looking. The young woman's legs looked like they could do great deeds, carry her effortlessly over mountains, or subdue an Arabian stallion in their powerful grip on a desert ride, as she galloped through the night and into the dawn. How well, he thought, the girl's legs matched her character, complementing her proud and confident nature. This simple observation renewed in Stephen a sense of wonder at the breathtaking variety and power of female dominion, which seemed to him always to exist just beneath the surface of things.

"I don't mind you staring"

Stephen was jolted from his reverie by the young lady's voice in his ear. He turned his head towards her. She had a beatific smile on her face, and was looking ahead. He felt the comforting warmth of her thigh pressing insistently against his own. Their secret.

The girls who had been unable to find seats were standing, in breach of corporation regulations, at the rear of the deck. One of them had a transistor radio, which was tuned into Radio Caroline. A petite blond girl was singing wistfully along with Diana Ross & the Supremes, a sad brooding "Where Did Our Love Go?" which faded into the compassionate affirmation of love proclaimed by The Four Tops in "I'll Be There".

Stephen loved Tamla Motown, and also the new tougher soul from the south, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and the like. He liked going out dancing with his friends at weekends, and they had just found a brilliant new club down the Seven Sisters Road. But he remembered also a few weeks earlier, lying under the bedclothes in the small hours, with his radio under the pillow to prevent it disturbing the rest of the family, listening to one of the new underground stations in Europe. He was gently masturbating to images of Miss Merino and Susan.

At first he had not believed that such a song could exist. The music moved slowly; you couldn't dance to it. It was messy and discordant, with droning electrified strings, which made it somehow Oriental or Indian sounding to his ears, but nothing like the Beatles playing with sitars. No, Stephen sensed that this blew in from another place altogether, one you could not find on a map. Despite its looseness and discord, it had epic grandeur, completeness.

The American singer did not have much of a voice really and he did not sing but lazily intoned the words, slowly around a simple tune, as if he were not very confident in his ability to carry off this difficult feat. And the words, the words, of shiny, shiny boots of leather, a Mistress, a whip, and someone called Severin, which so fitted the weird music, the words made something resonate somewhere deep in Stephen's soul.

He climaxed gushingly to the closing bars of the song, recalling how smooth Susan's firm white buttocks had felt and tasted on his lips when he knelt behind her and she lifted her skirt for what she had called his "respect lessons". He remembered the delicious sensation of her nylon knicker-clad bum smothering his nose and mouth as she sat astride his face, having tied up his wrists, ankles and his balls with wool from the store. On several occasions Susan had whiled away her lunch hour in this position, enjoying her oxtail soup and chicken sandwich, and reading women's magazines, while he went hungry. He remembered vividly the thrilling, suffocating weight of the young woman's bottom on his face, her strong but intimate musky female scent which lingered in his memory for days afterwards, pervading his thoughts and conditioning his responses, even when he was not in Susan's presence. She would idly rock herself to and fro, wedging his nose into the crack between her cheeks, making him take in her scent ever more deeply, and goading him with slaps and pinches to extend his tongue to pleasure her through her panty crotch. Occasionally she'd lift her bottom clear, to let him breathe freely, and to view her beautiful instrument of his suppression, before planting it back down full square on his face, and resuming her sensuous motion.

On one occasion Miss Merino, coming in from serving a customer and finding Susan queening him in this position, had trodden on his engorged penis with her shoe, and then straddled him to take her own sexual satisfaction. The women had embraced and kissed, while Susan remained mounted on his face, her crotch lubricating alarmingly in the throes of her passion. He found that the intimate sexual scents and tastes of Susan came to life in his memory as he ejaculated to this image, emptying his balls into the Kleenex.

"Any more fares please?"

The voice of the conductress ascending the stairs heralded her arrival on the upper deck, and brought Stephen abruptly back to earth. He instantly recognised Marsha's voice.

"Ladies, you KNOW that I can't let you stand here. It's not safe, you'll have to go downstairs," the conductress explained to the girls standing at the back.

"But wait a while. Why are you standing when there are all these gentlemen seated?"

She approached a man in his thirties who guiltily stood up at her approach, and gave his seat to the nearest of the young women. Another man, in his early twenties and hard looking, in a black leather jacket, seemed to resist for a while. But as soon as he felt Marsha's presence looming at his side, and looked up at her, shrinking visibly he stood up and left his seat for another of the young ladies to occupy. Even an elderly man at the front of the bus stood up and gestured towards a girl to have his seat, which she accepted as her right with a teasing smile, leaving him to make his way slowly to the back of the bus and with difficulty down the stairs.

Stephen knew that Catherine the Great could not have ruled that bus any more effectively than Marsha.

He would have been up sooner but, squeezed snugly between the girl on his left and the wall, he felt his manoeuvrability and will to move impaired.

"Stephen, I am surprised to find YOU sitting when there are ladies standing"

Stephen blushed and could not look Marsha in the face. The girl came to his support.

" Oh, he's been the perfect gentleman - he just didn't want to disturb me after I'd just made myself so comfortable," she graciously explained to the bus conductress, spreading herself out even more widely on the seat, which Stephen appreciated. However, he was goaded into action by Marsha's presence.

"Thank you so much, but please do excuse me if it's no trouble, Miss. My stop is coming now," Stephen politely said to the girl. As she eased herself up out of her seat, to let him out, the two women shared a conspiratorial smile.

Marsha was still smiling as he at last found the courage to meet her gaze. He remembered that she was always a striking dresser, but it had been a while. Now, her hair was dyed jet black, and she was wearing dark eye shadow and a bright pink lipstick. She wore a navy shirt, and a baggy shapeless coat, but on her legs she wore tight black jeans that accentuated her full womanly figure, and she had on high-heeled boots, the black leather surprisingly well maintained and unscuffed for her current active occupation as a clippy.

"Come round for tea one day. I'm sure you and Susan have a lot to talk about, "

Marsha whispered touching his arm, half teasing, but with a genuine warmth and sincerity. Stephen had once visited the large house she shared with a retired bank manager, a meekly behaved man of almost sixty, and her daughter Susan, and the prospect felt suddenly attractive after all this time. He knew now that Marsha was aware of most of what had happened between Susan, Miss Merino and he at the wool shop, and that she was of the same stuff but wiser and greater, and he just didn't care.

"Thanks Marsha. I'll do that," Stephen smiled, handing her his fourpenny fare. Marsha took the large brown coins, keyed in the sum, spun the handle on her silver ticket machine, and tore off Stephen's ticket, handing it to him with a flourish.

Stephen realised that she was old enough to be his mother, but all of a sudden he found Marsha insanely attractive. He felt envious of the former bank manager for having such a woman to adore and serve, in the privacy of the big house.

Stephen made his way down the stairs and alighted when the bus stopped, a couple of stops short of his street. He felt like a walk.

There was a smell of spring in the early March air, and the evening was still young. Stephen popped into a corner newsagents to buy an evening paper and a Mars bar. Seeing the date on the paper, and a quick bit of mental arithmetic later, he could hardly believe it, but in less than three months time he would be getting on a 'plane and flying all the way to California. Some American electronics company, in a place he'd never heard of called Palo Alto, had advertised locally for engineers, and he'd applied and been accepted following an interview in London. The pay was fantastic - double what he was earning in England. Throughout a morbid February he had wanked nightly to the images of immaculately made -up San Francisco society women, and tanned California beach-girls, sitting on his face and jerking him off, but now he was in one of his abstinence modes.

Stephen stopped on the corner of his street to chat with a friend, and make arrangements for the coming Saturday night in Finsbury Park. Somewhere, a dog was barking, and curtains were being drawn in the tightly packed Victorian terraced houses all down the street.

The boys finally said goodbye, and Stephen set off briskly on the final few minutes of his journey, wondering what his mum had made for tea. Remembering that the Avengers were on TV tonight, he found that the prospect of seeing Emma Peel again put an extra spring in his step all the way home, and he wondered if she would be wearing leather again tonight.

-oo-