	Teen Spirit
        ===========


Chris' first time didn't happen until he was nineteen years 
old. 

Indeed, until that time he'd never even kissed a girl, though 
there'd been the odd time when he fancied he'd been close. 
But nothing he could ever be sure about. He was always 
very awkward with girls.

In fact, he was awkward with everyone. He only had a 
couple of friends, Pete and Stu, who sometimes came to 
see him, as he would visit their homes. On these occasions, 
they would crank up the stereo, put on their Scorpions, 
Metallica or Nirvana CDs, and mime wildly in front of the 
mirrors pretending to be a Kurt Cobain reduced to playing 
air guitar. Inevitably, one of their mums or, in Stu's and 
Pete's cases, one of their dads, would rap on the door and 
yell at them to turn the volume down. People were trying to 
watch TV. 

Chris had had more friends, like Baz and Martin, at one 
time, but they'd done rather better at their final GCE exams 
and had gone on to university. Chris envied them when they 
met up at Christmas. They were now so much older and 
wiser than him and his mates. And they were having a great 
time at uni, staying up late, drinking in the student bar, 
smoking dope, and, in Martin's case, hanging around with a 
girlfriend. Fuck! It wasn't fair! All he had to look forward 
to, like Stu and Pete, were the re-sits of the exams in which 
they'd just not done well enough to get into a polytechnic 
or university.

Bloody Maths! Bloody General Science! And why, oh why, 
had he opted to do Geography? If only you didn't have to 
go through all this shit!

Most evenings, of course, Chris stayed at home. And most 
of that time in his bedroom, forever putting off doing his 
homework, leafing through imported American comic 
books whilst a selection of Heavy Metal CDs crashed, 
wailed and moaned in the background. His walls were 
splattered with posters of rock stars and a couple of 
pictures of bosomy girls he'd scissored out of GQ or FHM, 
such grown-up magazines, too frightened to blu-tac the 
pictures he really wanted up there above the TV or crappy 
80386 PC his mum had bought him. Christ! What he 
wouldn't do to have one of those Pentiums he'd read about? 
They had over 100 MB of hard disk, 33 MHz of processing 
power and an astronomical 8 MB of RAM! If he'd had that, 
then those pictures he got on the floppy disk he'd copied off 
Stu would load up really quick.

And it was these pictures, or ones a lot like them, Chris 
really wanted on his wall. So much harder core than the 
ones in the porn mags he'd had handed down from Gary at 
the sixth form college. Even though the girls in Penthouse 
and Razzle were a lot better looking. And, it was often 
these pictures he'd masturbate to the most furiously, rather 
than the ones on the floppy disks of women being fucked 
and women fucking each other. If only he could put their 
pictures on the wall instead of the ones of Ritchie 
Blackmore and the equally decrepit Ozzy Osbourne. 

Every evening he found time to lie on his bed, long hair 
splayed over his pillow, one of the porn mags he stored 
under the sock drawer spread open in front of his face. 
Tonight he concentrated on lovely Lucinda's beautiful body. 
His hand pumped furiously at his erect penis while he 
imagined what it would be like to stick it in that airbrushed 
vagina, beneath that thin strip of pubic hair. Or to nuzzle his 
nose between those silicone-enhanced breasts with the 
rather too tiny nipples. What would it feel like to have 
Lucinda impaled on the end of his average length prick?

 "Dinner!" yelled his mum over the cacophony of an 
AC/DC guitar solo, accompanied by a cat-like vocal shriek.

"Must I?" Chris groaned, tucking his penis into his jeans, 
hoping it would deflate to more manageable proportions 
before he joined his sister and mum for one of those ready-
made meals at the only time of the day, besides breakfast, 
his family ever spent any time together.

When he got downstairs, he found that his mum had 
prepared something very different. In fact, she'd actually 
cooked a kind of casserole, something she did very rarely. 
And a bigger surprise than that was to see a woman, who 
must have been in her mid-thirties (at least!) sitting on the 
chair that used to be his dad's. That was, of course, before 
he ran off with his secretary, whom Chris still hated as a 
blousy bitch, although she was actually quite petite and 
rather pretty. 

"This is Pam," announced Chris' mum with a broad smile. 
"She's staying here for a while."

"Pleased to meet you, Chris," said Pam, extending a firm 
hand to shake his rather limp one. "Tina, your mum, has 
told me so much about you!"

Oh! Christ! A woman! Probably ten years younger than his 
mum, but quite similarly dressed. Chris was relieved he'd 
applied the cream to that persistent zit on his chin. Her hair 
was cut relatively short, she sported long dangling earrings, 
and, unlike his mum, wore no make-up at all. Chris focused 
his gaze on her face, which was slightly broad, the eyes 
wide, the lips thick and fading freckles covering the pale 
skin of her face. Like his mum, she was thick boned, but by 
no means plump. Her hand and bare arm showed that she 
was at least as strong as he was. 

Chris didn't know where to look during the meal, despite 
the many attempts made by both Pam and his mum to 
engage him in conversation. 

Were his studies were going well? "Yeh." Did he play 
football? "Nah." Did he enjoy his day trip to Calais with the 
college three weeks ago? "'S Okay." 

Whenever his eyes caught Pam, he attempted to evaluate 
her. She wore baggy cotton trousers and a kind of silk top 
that showed she had a rather less prominent bosom than his 
mum. Thankfully, it was his sister, Lottie, just fourteen 
years old, who filled in for Chris' lack of communication 
skills and prevented the dinner from descending into sullen 
silence.

Chris couldn't wait to get away from the table. Even though 
dinner went on for almost twice as long as it normally 
would. His mum had bought a cake from Marks & 
Spencer's and even opened a bottle of wine. She was 
definitely making much more of an effort than she did when 
she invited any of her colleagues home from work. And as 
Chris sipped on the wine, its sharp taste such a contrast to 
the frothy lager he normally drank when he went down the 
pub with Stu and Pete at the weekends, he watched his 
mother's eyes and Pam's meet across the table with a 
strange intense warmth. 

All the while Lottie chatted about the time she and Sally 
and Rachel and Pauline had gone to see some crappy boy 
band she was keen on. Bloody hell! When would she grow 
up and listen to decent music?

At least it wasn't as excruciating as that time when his mum 
had brought back that accountant who worked in the City. 
On that occasion, Chris really hated the man, who reminded 
him so much of his dad and the way he'd go on about how 
Chris should cut his hair, study harder and get a girlfriend. 
He was actually rather pleased when his mum's brief 
relationship disintegrated within a month to evenings of 
bitter tears and a silent unanswered phone. So much better 
than those horrible grunting and thumping noises he could 
hear coming from his mum's bedroom late at night when he 
was trying to get some sleep.

Chris eventually made his escape and pulled out the picture 
of Lucinda to finish his interrupted wank. All the while, he 
could hear Pam and his mum laughing and giggling long 
after Lottie had gone to bed and, strangely, long after the 
two of them had also retired, Pam, he was sure, laying her 
head on the sofa bed cushions in his mum's bedroom.

It puzzled him that over the next few weeks, stretching into 
months, with those dreaded exams approaching, that Pam 
still stayed at their house. Didn't she have anywhere else she 
could go? But he got used to sharing breakfast and dinner 
with her, and even found some of the things she said very 
amusing. Gradually, and reticently, Chris became less 
monosyllabic in his replies to her questions and even found 
himself laughing, in an unselfconscious way that rather 
frightened him, to some of her more outrageous comments. 

And all the while, his mum watched the two of them 
together with an indulgent sympathetic smile. 

Lottie, in particular, got on well with Pam, sometimes 
talking rather too much about how wonderful she was 
when they were together and Pam elsewhere.

"Oh crap, Lottie!" Chris exclaimed. "She's not that great. 
And anyway she'll have to leave soon when she finds a 
place of her own to stay."

Lottie seemed very downhearted at this. She went 
untypically quiet and picked at the little scab on her elbow.

"Do you think so?"

"Of course! It's not like she's Dad or anything, is it?"

One evening, Pam knocked on Chris' door and wandered 
into his room while the sounds of Nirvana's Nevermore 
album pounded out its grinding, mechanical rhythm.

"Smells like Teen Spirit?" she commented, reading the 
sleeve notes.

"Yeah! It's great, isn't it?"

"It's got something, I have to admit. Better than most of 
your rock music stuff to my ears. But then I quite like 
house. Do you like house? Or do you just listen to heavy 
metal?"

"Yeah! It's the only stuff worth listening to!"

"Really?" Pam commented, raising a good-humoured 
eyebrow. "So you don't like house at all?"

"Not that. Or rave. Or anything of that dance shit. Sorry, 
rubbish."

This admission from Pam should somehow have lessened 
his opinion of her. After all, if there was anything Chris and 
his mates hated with a vengeance, it was house music. He 
and Stu had once been to a night club and spent the whole 
evening sitting around a table sneering at the ravers as they 
jumped around like lunatics to all that pounding electronic 
shit. Hardcore house and techno crap! Why couldn't they 
play decent metal at these clubs? Something with a bit of 
heavy axe-work where you could shake your hair and play 
air guitar. Fuck! If they'd put on some thrash, death or 
other kind of metal, it'd shit on all that percussive stuff 
where there was no, like, tune at all and almost as good as 
no vocals. But somehow Chris didn't feel like expressing his 
negative feelings as strongly as he normally would.

Chris noticed Pam's strangely downcast face.

"Well, I'm sure that some house is good," he conceded. "It's 
just that I've not heard any."

One morning, a few days later, when his mum and Pam 
were both out of the house, he sneaked into his mum's 
room, something he rarely did, and noticed with some 
disconcertment that the sofa bed showed no evidence at all 
of having been opened. However, he did notice that the 
sheets on his mum's bed mattress were pushed carelessly to 
one side and that there were the still warm indentations of 
two bodies. 

Chris sniffed dismissively. His mum couldn't even be 
bothered to get the other bed made. How could Pam stand 
to share the same bed as his mum? 

Nonetheless, there was something about these shared 
arrangements that troubled him, along with those late-night 
titters and the strangely noisy headboard, though he had no 
very good idea as to what it might mean. You just couldn't 
hope to understand women.

His disconcertment grew, but in a quite different direction, 
when one night he encountered Pam naked in the 
bathroom. He'd drunk perhaps too many lagers with Stu 
that night in the pub, and this was his third visit to the loo 
at an early hour. He pushed open the bathroom door, 
worried rather more that he might puke (again!) than of the 
likelihood of meeting anyone, when there he was 
confronted, only a foot or so away, by Pam's naked body. 

Pam would never have got a job posing for Penthouse, that 
was for sure. Or even for Razzle. Her body was too thick 
and her breasts too small on her broad chest, coloured by 
innumerable freckles, but she was still the first woman that 
Chris had ever seen in the nude. In real life, as it were.

It was only a moment, accompanied by grunted apologies, 
but as Chris sat on the toilet seat, a stream of urine 
splattering against the bowl, he rehearsed in his mind every 
second of what he'd seen. And again and again, his mind 
returned to the memory of that thick bush of pubic hair, so 
different from a porn star's shaved stripe.

This wasn't the only time that Chris saw Pam naked, though 
the only time it was accidental. So vivid and compulsive 
was that image, which he used without the accompaniment 
of Whitehouse or Hustler to achieve a fistful of semen in his 
regular masturbatory sessions, that he made a point of 
engineering a reprise. He actually waited until he heard the 
door of his mum's door open and Pam enter the hallway to 
himself emerge in the hope of seeing more of that bare 
flesh. Only this time, his penis was rock hard under his 
pyjamas. 

It was only when he'd sat down on the toilet, his penis still 
stiff and wholly unable to perform the duties expected of it, 
that Chris worried about whether Pam's eyes might have 
wandered down below his chest to the evidence of his 
longing under his pyjama trousers.

Pam and his mum had a strange friendship, Chris could see 
that. Occasionally, they were so close that they even 
sometimes touched each other, just like sisters might do, 
even once kissing each other when they weren't aware that 
Chris could see them. Other times, there was a curious 
fractiousness in their friendship, rather like what Chris 
experienced when he worried whether Stu might be 
spending more time with Martin than with him. But he 
knew girls were soppy. And that was true whether they 
were young, like Lottie, or really old, like his mum.

Pam started visiting him in his room more often. At first, 
rather hesitantly, and making no comment about the music 
that was the constant wallpaper of his life.

Chris knew that the records he played were about the least 
like house music there was and he somehow felt strangely 
embarrassed about this. Perhaps he ought to buy some CDs 
of the stuff chicks liked. Bon Jovi, perhaps. Or maybe even 
something that wasn't metal, although he had no idea what 
that might be. He wasn't about to buy a Prodigy or 
Chemical Brothers album, although he had a guilty liking 
for some of what he'd heard when sitting in the pub with 
Stu and Pete and had no choice as to what music was 
playing.

Chris couldn't help but notice an increase in the 
changeability of the relationship between his mum and Pam. 
There were moods that were pronounced in not only the 
intensity of their apparent mutual liking for each other, but 
also of something else that reminded him somewhat of the 
time just before his dad ran off with his secretary. One day 
everything was smooth and happy. The next it was jagged 
and tense.

There was one evening when Pam and his mum were 
shouting at each other in Mum's bedroom and Chris was 
surprised to see Lottie shyly and nervously enter his 
bedroom just to sit with him. This was another thing that 
hadn't happened since before their dad had left, but this 
reprise must surely be rather less serious when the other 
person involved wasn't their dad but just their mum's friend.

"Oh! I wish they'd stop!" Lottie wailed. "I wish Pam and 
Mum wouldn't argue like that!"

"It's nothing," Chris grunted.

"I hope Pam doesn't leave us," Lottie continued. "She's my 
best friend in the whole world!"

"Even more than Sophie?" wondered Chris, remarking on 
Lottie's closest friend at the moment.

"It's different. Pam's more like what Dad was like!"

Chris didn't like the analogy at all. But he hoped his sister 
couldn't see the erection that had inexplicably sprung on 
him, hidden though it was by the duvet covering his body.

In fact, what made it most difficult to think of Pam as a 
substitute father was precisely this very aching in his penis. 
An aching he relieved by masturbatory sessions that were 
guiltily focused on Pam. And this obsession was what he 
most feared Pam might notice during her progressively 
frequent visits to his bedroom. Visits that seemed to take 
place rather more often on those evenings when his mum 
was elsewhere, perhaps at her aerobics classes or working 
late in the office. Visits that had become so significant to 
Chris, he made the unprecedented concession of taking off 
his heavy metal CDs, and putting on a radio station, 
randomly chosen, that played quite different music to that 
which he would normally envisage listening to.

These conversations were a novel experience in Chris' life. 
Except perhaps with Lottie, he'd never really chatted with a 
girl or, even, a woman. And they were very different to his 
conversations with Pete and Stu. 

He found himself opening out, talking more freely than he 
imagined he could. He talked about his studies. His feelings 
about Martin and his girlfriend. Why he'd originally chosen 
to study Geography when he could have studied History or 
English. His thoughts when he first met Melissa, his dad's 
lover, and how much he hated her.

And all the time, Pam sat next to him on the bed. Wearing a 
tee-shirt under which Chris knew just what treasures were 
hidden. The nipples and the slight upward turn to the 
bosom. Wearing baggy trousers that hid the hairy patch that 
featured so vividly in his masturbatory fantasies. 
Meanwhile, he sat in his Guns & Roses tee-shirt, with jeans, 
trainers and lank brown hair that fell so often over his face, 
thankfully obscuring those persistent zits of his.

And then, most troubling of all, were those occasions when 
Pam touched him. A kiss on the cheek when they met or 
parted. The clasped hand when Chris was close to tears as 
he described his anxieties when his dad drive off with 
Melissa in the Volvo packed with all those old rock LPs of 
his dad's. The ones he used to listen to before he was able 
to buy his own CDs. The occasional tousle of his lank long 
hair when he said something that somehow touched or 
otherwise affected Pam.

She spoke to him too, but her confessions, in comparison to 
his, were undetailed and unfocused. The boyfriend she'd 
almost married. The friends she'd made who taught her that 
there was more to hope for than a life of marriage to and 
sex with a man. (She said this almost bitterly, which 
puzzled Chris, who assumed that was what all women most 
wanted). The break-up between her own parents who'd 
waited until she was at university to announce the fact. 

But it was the touches that Chris remembered most well. 
His hand would burn for hours with the memory of her 
fingers. His cheek held an imprint of her kiss that he would 
later run over to the mirror to check was not in some 
mysterious way visible to anyone who cared to look for it.

But despite all these many and various forewarnings, when 
Chris actually did have sex with Pam, it came entirely by 
surprise.

Chris came home late from college. He'd just been visiting 
Pete where they'd been listening to Rage Against the 
Machine, an outfit a little too radical for Chris' taste, and 
looking at the images on Pete's computer of some hardcore 
photographs now copied onto the floppy disk in Chris' 
jacket pocket. He was looking forward to the time he 
would copy them onto his hard-drive and enjoy them more 
fully than he could at Pete's house. His penis was already 
half-stiff with anticipation.

He pushed open his bedroom door, ready to fling off his 
jacket and eager to turn on his computer, when he saw, 
very much to his surprise, that Pam was sitting on his bed. 
She sat there quite distractedly, thumbing through a copy of 
one of his imported American comic books, one he 
especially liked, as the women it showed were remarkably 
voluptuous.

She raised her head as Chris entered and smiled at him 
broadly.

"Hi! You don't mind if I look at your comics, do you?"

"No, not at all," said Chris gallantly, but nervous in case 
Pam should guess what it was he found so appealing in this 
particular comic book.

Pam placed the comic book to one side and patted the 
mattress beside her, suggesting that Chris should sit there. 
He did so nervously, horribly aware that the stiffness in his 
trousers was, instead of becoming becalmed, stirring wholly 
inappropriately.

"The girls in the comic are pretty sexy, aren't they?" Pam 
commented. "You like girls, don't you?"

Chris nodded. They'd never before discussed his interests in 
or, more particularly, his failures with women. 

"Yeah. They're not bad!"

"Not bad at all! Do you like your women like that? Slim, 
like hourglasses, but busty at the same time?"

Chris nodded. He slightly swallowed. "Yeah. It's cool." 
Then he remembered that Pam wasn't nearly so shaped, 
being rather thicker round the waist and with a smaller 
bosom. "But I like girls that don't have... that aren't... well, 
other types of girls!"

He put his jacket on the bed behind him, hoping that the 
floppy disk wouldn't fall out of the pocket.

"And you've not got a girlfriend, have you?"

Chris coughed. "No."

Pam sighed and looked away for a moment towards the 
dressing table mirror where the two were reflected, looking 
very nervous, and hugely ill-matched.

She looked back at Chris and glanced down at his trousers 
where her eyes, Chris knew, penetrated through the denim 
and could see every vein of the penis pressing against his 
buttoned fly.

"Sod it!" she suddenly said. "This is fucking stupid!"

This was the first time Chris had heard an adult in real life, 
who wasn't someone in the pub or at the bus stop, use one 
of those words he was still nervous about using himself, 
even with his mates. 

But this was nothing compared to the confusion that 
muddled his thoughts and nearly panicked him as she 
placed a hand, at the end of an arm mostly covered by the 
loose cotton of her sweater, on, of all places, that part of 
his crotch where his penis was most obviously erect.

"Uuuhh!" he moaned despite himself.

"Euurrghh!" Pam echoed, who turned her head round and 
somehow, Chris not exactly sure how, pushed her face with 
her thick lips onto his mouth. And then Chris responded, 
without thought or premeditation, by pressing his tongue 
and lips onto Pam's.

They were kissing. They were bloody kissing! It was really 
weird. Her mouth was so liquid, a pool of slightly garlic-
tasting saliva slobbering against his own, his tongue 
pressing against the teeth that in his memory were white 
and wholly regularly, but now seemed to grow enormous in 
his mind as her tongue pushed into his.

The steps that led towards them actually fucking were 
disconnected but somehow inevitable. 

The clothes came off as soon as their mouths parted, Pam 
spending more time divesting Chris of his than she did her 
own. Her tee-shirt and trousers were less of a struggle to 
remove than Chris' tight jeans. And underneath his penis 
ached almost painfully with desire and came free of his 
underpants before his jeans, socks and trainers were flung 
to the floor.

It was one thing to see a woman naked, Chris discovered, 
but a wholly different thing to have one naked against your 
body. In the perspiration and anxiety of these first gropings 
it hardly mattered whether her bosom was of super-heroine 
stature or whether her bum was like the swelling 
monstrosity of his fantasies. It was flesh, glorious flesh, far 
too much of it for his metal-addled brain to focus on in its 
entirety. 

There were freckles there, a mole here, short brown hairs 
on her forearms, a bosom that flattened as she fell 
backwards onto the mattress, and legs that clasped his 
buttocks as he positioned himself above her.

Chris had an idea of how a man should fuck from the 
pictures he'd seen. It was something like doing press-ups 
only with your prick engulfed inside a twat. But, in real life, 
with a truly hairy vulva just inches away from his fully erect 
penis, his arms around her shoulders and his mouth pressed 
to hers, it seemed less obvious to him just how he should 
attain the posture of penetration.

It was Pam who guided his penis into her vagina. It was 
Pam who made the exertion that allowed Chris' instincts to 
take control. And there, for a few moments, Chris knew, he 
was fucking. He was actually bloody doing it! Just like in 
the photos. Just like in that porno video he'd watched over 
and over again at Martin's place before he went to 
university. It was the real fucking deal!

His buttocks pushed his penis in and out, his glans sore and 
tender, and surprised at the moistness of the orifice that so 
easily accommodated it. And as he fucked mechanically, no 
imagination required at all and rather more physical effort 
than he'd envisaged, it was Pam who seemed the most 
excited. She gasped and swore, repeating again and again 
all those swear words that still sounded very strange indeed 
coming from, of all things, a woman. A woman perhaps 
fifteen years older than him!

It was far too soon when he ejaculated. He knew that. In 
fact, he'd dreaded it happening. But it did. Just when Chris 
thought he'd got the hang of all this. Just when he thought 
he'd almost got to the stage when it was natural and, even, 
in a strange way he'd never really thought of before, a very 
pleasant and thoroughly intimate, almost loving, activity. 
He was only just beginning to see Pam as a sexual animal, 
someone who had her own needs and desires. 

But he was also concerned about how he would tell his 
mates about this first time, imagining how Stu would react 
when he announced that of the three mates he was now the 
only virgin. 

Far too soon came that release of semen so familiar from all 
those masturbatory sessions when, at least recently, the 
image in his mind was so vividly like (but also unlike) that 
of the woman he was currently making love to.

"I suppose it couldn't last long, could it?" said Pam 
sympathetically, as their bodies separated.

Chris gazed sadly down at his twitching penis. It seemed 
such a pathetic thing now. Deflated and dripping. And yet 
just a moment ago, he felt so proud of the same thing as it 
pushed and thrust inside the vagina whose warmth and 
moistness was now just a memory imprinted rather more 
vividly in his mind than any other memory of their 
conjoining.

"Was it all right?" asked Chris nervously.

Pam laughed sympathetically.

She kissed him on the cheek with the same almost innocent 
affection she used to do, although it seemed almost 
incongruous now that the two of them were naked. Chris' 
lank hair was sticking to the sweat on his face. There was a 
pool of perspiration on Pam's torso where their two bodies 
had pressed together.

"You did very well, Chris. Very well, indeed!"

At the time, this seemed to Chris a confirmation of what he 
most hoped for: that this encounter, brief and hectic though 
it had been, and, in some way, not quite as satisfying as that 
of his virgin fantasies, would not be all. That it would be a 
prelude to many more such couplings. In fact, he was 
already thinking, even as Pam got dressed again and kissed 
him goodbye, anxious to get away before Chris' mum 
returned from her aerobics class, that this was just the first 
of many more such encounters to come. 

And next time, he was sure, it would be better. It would 
last much longer. And perhaps he could do those other 
things you were supposed to do. Like foreplay, for 
instance.

Alas, this was not to be. 

Pam never came into Chris' room again, although he spent 
many hours in anticipation, just waiting, unable, more than 
ever before, to concentrate on his studies. 

In fact, Pam seemed to make every effort to ensure that 
there was no time at all that Chris and she could spend time 
together alone. She even stopped going to the toilet late at 
night, although a sleepless Chris waited anxiously for the 
door to his mum's bedroom to open.

The tension between his mum and Pam seemed to grow. An 
icy blast took hold of any room his mum and Pam were in 
at any time that Chris saw them together. And these were 
the only times that Chris ever saw Pam nowadays. 

Lottie could sense it too. His only nocturnal visitor now 
was his sister who entered his room and sat with him. The 
both of them were strangely silent and unable to express 
more than the most desultory words, but glad of each 
other's company, while overhearing the most ferocious row 
going on in his mum's room. A row in which Chris was sure 
he heard not only Pam, but his mum, shout those words he 
still thought were only right in a movie or said in the pub 
when you were really drunk. And the shouting went on and 
on, interspersed with quieter spells in which Chris could 
hear the distinct sound of choked sobs.

That was the last night his mum and Pam spent together. In 
fact, Chris never saw Pam again at all. She wasn't there at 
breakfast and when he got home from school she had 
moved out altogether.

The house was strangely empty now. Emptier than it had 
been at any time since Dad had left. And Chris' mum was 
just as distraught and moody as she had been on that earlier 
occasion.

Perhaps Chris should have known what it would be like. 
After all, he had lived through a similar period before. But 
this time, it was somehow worse. Especially as he became 
aware that his mum no longer treated him with quite the 
same indulgence as before. Nothing he could do these days 
was right. And sometimes his mum would just burst into 
tears when he came into the same room as her.

"How could you?" she said one evening, her tear-smeared 
eyes glaring at Chris accusingly across the kitchen from the 
stool where she sat. "My own son! What have I ever done 
to deserve it?"

"What, Mum..."

"How could you?"

"How could I what?"

His mum looked at him accusingly. And then she cracked 
into huge sobs that shuddered and shook her body until 
such time that a confused Chris took the only release 
available to him, his own eyes beginning to fill with tears. 
He ran off to his bedroom to put a Nirvana CD on his 
stereo and to sit on the edge of his bed staring into space, 
barely able to focus on his own image in the dressing table 
mirror that had once reflected both his naked body and that 
of Pam's.

At least, however, he reflected as he struggled to remember 
just what Pam had looked like in that reflection, he wasn't a 
virgin anymore. 

That was one thing to be pleased about.








