CAUTION. This chapter contains scenes of juvenile sexual exploration that may offend. It is not graphic, but it is necessary for the plot. There are also elements that relate to child abuse and these may affect some readers. Obviously, I hope my writing affects my readers, but not in that way.

CHAPTER 13
That was the start of my ‘official’ running career, though to me running was still the intricate thrills of tussock-leaping over the bogs, or fast descents as I hit just the right outcrop of rock to keep me upright, wild days of gales and rain where we drank from the air, and crisp days of frost where the ice cracked under our feet as the steam from our breath swept past our faces, and as we stopped and doffed our woolly hats more steam rose from our hair. It was the simple joy of being alive, of being young and fit, as Nana led me over the lower fells.

Other days she would insist I did things at a walk, as we hit the High Tops with full rucksacks. She used her old crook for balance on those days, but one day surprised me by producing a very well-worn ice-axe, and in a shaded ghyll filled with early snow she taught me how to cut steps and dance up it, and how to catch myself if I fell.

“This isn’t your rock climbing, Stevie, this is mountaineering. This is looking at the whole great beast that is a fell, and not picking at some scab on its side”

She could be a real snob at times. I still loved her to bits, especially on wild days when she would just yell at the sky, “Yes! This is it, lad, this is being alive!”

Each Monday, after school, I would have more growth juice, and though it left my arse sore and bruised black I knew it was making a difference as Mam had to let the hems down on my trousers and, hair by hair, I started to get what the other boys had always seemed almost to revel in. And I ran, not just at Nana’s but at events all over Cumberland and Westmorland, even into Lancashire proper, and not just Furness. They had published the bill to bugger about with county boundaries, but we ignored it. Furness was still a foreign county, but Lancashire…across the Sands….that was really foreign. This attitude, from a lad who had spent half his life properly abroad; early teenaged years are a time of passions, sometimes odd ones. Speaking of passions…

One night, as Christmas approached, and Iain had football practice, I walked Emily home, as was our practice. A couple of streets away from her door we ducked into a little passage for a snog, one of those that were rapidly becoming the norm for us, and as my fingers meshed themselves in her hair, she was pressing her tongue into my mouth and I was doing my best to push it back into hers. My heart was hammering as if I was in a hard sprint home, and I slowly drew my right hand onto her cheek as she pressed me back against the bricks. I stroked her face, and then slowly, slowly, wetting myself with nerves I traced the line of her chin, and her throat, and just as my palsied hands were drifting towards the slope of her thirteen year old breasts, she simply took that hand and placed it right THERE, and I had a girl’s breast under my hand for the first time ever, although it was through a cardigan, and a blouse, and, I suppose, a bra, and that thought got me so worked up I didn’t notice immediately when she moved in closer. A thigh went between mine, and she moaned into my mouth as the rest of her followed, and that part of her started to grind against my leg, and suddenly she was clutching my hair and shuddering, going “Ah! Ah! Ah!”, then the fingers of one hand digging into my shoulder so hard they left a bruise, as my girlfriend came dry-humping my hard thigh.

She continued to have little twitches for a minute, like those aftershocks we read about in geography, and then she kissed me very, very gently.

“Oh Stevie, that’s so much nicer than on my hand, Thank you….but what about you, are you OK?”

I realised she was feeling me between the legs, and while I was sort of hard, which I had read about, and joked about with the other boys, it was in my chest that I ached for her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I fell back on what I had heard from the other boys.

“It’s OK, Em, it would be too messy for me, I’ll, er….use my hand later. That was great!”

She looked disappointed. “But you didn’t, you know…”

“Yes, but I was there to help you, which was lovely”

“Steve Jones, you are so sweet, and I love you”

She was, I think, a realist at her romantic heart, and rather than wait for an answer she might not get, she just kissed me again. It was still my chest that screamed at me, not just my todger, and I had no idea why.

That moment changed the dynamic between us forever. We had now had sex, of a sort, and that meant that our hands declared their right to roam beyond their prior boundaries, and a few days later, in what we thought of as our passageway, in the darkness of a Northern Winter evening, she slipped my hand under the bottom of her blouse, and then under the band of her bra until her hard point and smooth softness was under my palm, and she got to her happy place once more.

All I can say is that I was fucking confused. I was a teenaged boy. I had my hands on a girl’s bare breasts, while she had an orgasm rubbing herself against me, and…nothing. I had a sort of erection, but not the hard, painful ones the other boys boasted about, and when I tried, in bed, later, with memories of Emily’s flushed face playing in my mind’s eye, and tried my hand….still nothing. I thought of what helped her, what made her shiver, and tried touching one of my own nipples.

Oh god, it was nice, so nice, and I spent the next hour teasing and playing, and then stroking my todger as I knew I was supposed to and, ooooooh. Oh god. Oh my, and there wasn’t much of anything, but just like Em I found myself twitching in little bursts for a couple of minutes. Something had hit me from all directions at once, and I was very, very pleased it had. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I was determined to explore it as fully as I could.

Somehow, the fact that my nipples were bigger passed my sex-crazed weasel of a teenaged mind right by.

The next day, as my post orgasmic body started making tea, Mam crashed the car into a lamp post. Her friend Gordon was along for the ride, of course. The nice policeman recognised his cologne, and got Mam to blow him into a little bag with some chemicals in, and then arrested her for being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle.

She spent that night in the cells, and for the first time in my life I was taken with Iain from our home by Social Services. It wouldn’t be the last time, but at least for the present it was only to emergency fosterers, not…that place.

They were a nice enough couple, and they stayed at ours long enough to help finish cooking the tea, and to help eating it, of course, and then we were off to theirs in their Cortina. They were nice enough, and we took all our school things ready for the next day, which was an odd sort of experience, as the news of the gin-soaked woman had gone all round school. Em was solicitous, of course, and as Mam had been let out n the morning we were able to go home afterwards, which meant, naturally, that I got to walk her home, and….and I moved her hand to my chest, and she put her other down there, and this time it was me who moaned into her mouth.

With hindsight, neither of us knew anything much about se beyond basic biology, what we had heard from schoolmates, and what we had discovered exploring our own bodies. We were very young, we weren’t subject to all the information that rains down on the heads of today’s children, and there was nothing to show where I was odd. There were strict limits engrained n us, and our hands never went inside clothing below the waist. There was certainly no thought of actual intercourse, that was beyond ‘naughty’, although my fantasies did include a vaguely-realised sort of copulation thing that was more a web of sounds and textures than a mental porn film.

Mam was back, and already crying onto her friend’s shoulder, when I got home. She started quietly, accusingly, and then it built up and up, until she was simultaneously accusing me of grotesque acts with Sid and precocious ones with Emily, and her voice rose and rose until she threw her glass at my head, and then there was the knock at the door, and the uniforms, and the emergency foster carers, this time without tea first as Mam was taken to the hospital instead of the nick.

I really, really don’t want to go into details, but that was when it all went really, really bad for us. Social Services marked us down as ‘at risk’, and Iain was packed off to longer-term foster parents. I wasn’t; they cut me away from my brother like I was a diseased limb.

As a disturbed teenager, as someone being seen by a mental health practitioner every bloody Monday, I needed much better care. Care from professionals, not like poor volunteers whose puppy I might bugger.

I went to Castle Keep. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it, but as Carlisle has a castle anything of any note is named after it. Castle chippy, castle newsagents, the Castle pub, even castle bloody adult book shop.

And Castle Keep secure care home. Mitchell was there to look after me.