Johnny was sitting in the phone shop, getting his account sorted out because the app wasn't working, and the assistant had gone out the back to check something. A girl walked in pushing a baby buggy. She looked about twenty. Medium height, quite slim, long fair hair and quite pretty. She sat across from Johnny and he smiled at her. He was surprised when she smiled back, because people are so wary of one another these days, but Johnny supposed he looked harmless - as indeed he was - and for a man of sixty-five to smile kindly at a young woman really shouldn't be a cause for concern. After all, she was well over the age of consent (if that was to enter the equation) and she had clearly had sex at least once, because she had a baby.
She looked a bit lonely and quite grateful for the old man's polite attention, and as they both sat there waiting they occasionally glanced at each other. When they both did it at the same time, she giggled.
Eventually, the assistant solved Johnny's problem and he left the shop, walking up the quiet, pedestrianised street to the cafe at the top. He ordered a coffee and a slice of fruit cake, and sat at a table in the window. The place was almost empty; this was a dying town in the Scottish Borders on a cool Wednesday morning in September. Watching the world go by, he spotted the girl in the distance, emerging from the phone shop and walking up the street. As she got closer, Johnny took out his phone and looked at the sports news. He didn't want her to think he was watching her - and he wasn't really doing that anyway. She was part of the world he was watching going by, that's all.
She was nice, though, he found himself thinking. She was very real, but at the same time he saw she was a statistic, a small-town single mother with nothing much going for her, but she was respectable, polite and when she looked at him with her head lowered and her eyes peering upwards, and smiled that shy, wide smile, she touched his heart.
The cafe door opened and she struggled to manoeuvre the buggy in. Johnny leapt to his feet to help her but by the time he got there, she was in.
"Thanks very much anyway," she said, looking over at the table in the window. "Do you mind if we share your table? Deshaun likes it there, looking out the window. She leaned down and stroked the little boy's face.
"Sure," Johnny said. "What would you like to drink?"
When he brought the drinks and biscuits over, the girl and her son were happily ensconced at his table and Johnny felt a bit awkward, but the girl took charge.
"I'm Kelsey," she said. "It's very nice of you."
They began chatting and it was surprisingly natural and unforced. He discovered she was nineteen and had always lived in the town. She had a little flat half a mile away. Deshaun was eighteen months old and a good boy, she said. All her friends had nightmare little brats but hers was an angel. Quiet, went down for his sleep with no trouble and ate his baby food like he should.
Johnny walked Kelsey home and helped her carry the buggy up the steps to the front door. She invited him in for a rest and he was slightly offended until he realised he could really do with a sit-down.
She put Deshaun in a playpen and Johnny followed her into the kitchen, where she poured them a glass of milk each.
"Two bedrooms," she said proudly, quickly showing him into the little boy's quarters, then her own bigger room. The bed was unmade but the room smelled sweet with cheap perfume. There was no proper furniture, just a plastic-framed material wardrobe in which hung her clothes. In a little compartment was her underwear.
They sat in the front room and Johnny looked through some CDs of singers he might have heard of but didn't actually know. They all sounded the same to him and he had a terrible feeling that all the good songs had already been written and these people were making the most of the dregs. She asked him about his taste in music and he was careful not to criticise hers while reeling off the names of 70s bands like Led Zeppelin and Gentle Giant, his personal favourite.
"My grandpa used to have all that progressive stuff," she said. "That's what you call it, isn't it? Rick Wakeman and all that stuff. Van der Graaf Generation."
"Generator," Johnny said quietly.
"Sorry, yes, I knew that. I like some of that, actually. Tell you what, why don't you bring some round and we'll see if there's anything I know?" She was smiling at him with her head bowed again, shy and trying to hide, yet cheeky and naughty.
"Okay, when?"
"Tonight?" she ventured. "Deshaun goes down at seven, so half past?"
There was an odd spring in Johnny's step as he walked home. He spent the afternoon planning what music he would take, and wondering if this constituted a date. Him and a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Was it illegal in some way? He thought not. Was it unnatural? Maybe a little. Weird? It might seem so to an outsider, but he and Kelsey had a connection. There was something about the way she smiled at him as if these were special smiles that not everybody received.
But how many old men had fallen foul of that kind of thing? Kidding themselves, imagining things, only to be brought up sharply in due course. He thought about that expression, in due course, and how much it resembled intercourse. And of course, he would love to have sex with her, but his saggy old body in bed with her pristine young one? He tried to put it out of his mind.
He bought a bottle of wine, bland and sweetish because he thought she might not be accustomed to wine at all. She probably drank vodka and coke.
At 7:35 he was on the settee with her and she had chosen H to He, Who Am The Only One, the Van der Graaf Generator album.
"Killer," she said as the first track began. "It's good fun, this one. And I like House With No Door. What's the album title mean, though?"
"Fuck knows," he said, his tongue loosened in advance by a few glasses at home before he left.
"Oh my God," Kelsey said, hand over her mouth. "You said fuck."
"Sorry," Johnny said hastily.
"No," she replied. " I kind of like it. You're just like me really. Just a lot..."
"Older," Johnny stepped in to help her out.
"Yeah," she said. "And you've had a few before you arrived. Just like I did."
They spent a happy few minutes passing this conversational ball around, both relaxing, relieved.
"How many women have you had?" she asked.
"Had?" he queried. "Married, lived with..."
"Shagged," she said firmly, head down and eyes up. "Go on, I bet you did okay for yourself."
"I've done, um, okay, as you put it," he conceded, both delighted and somewhat taken aback to be having this conversation.
"You can't ask me that," she said in mock admonishment. "A gentleman never asks a lady."
"And you are a lady," he replied.
"Am I? You think so?" she giggled, then paused. "Five. Including my ex."
Kelsey laid a hand firmly on Johnny's thigh.
"You're all right, you are," she said, and he, picking up her hand, kissed it.
"You make me feel so, I don't know, safe," she said. "Like your world is a good place to be in, but mine..."
"What's wrong with yours?" Johnny asked, melting inside.
"Oh, it's all a kind of struggle," she began. "Even before Deshaun it was tight, money I mean. but it's not just that, it's people."
"Don't get along with your parents?"
"They moved to Yorkshire. My dad's a policeman. Had enough of Scotland, got a job in Barnsley. Grandparents all dead. Friends unemployed. And as for Gary..."
"That Deshaun's dad?"
"He's the biological father," she said flatly. "He's not a dad. Has no interest whatsoever. And he's a waste of space in general. Waster. Useless in bed." Her eyes flicked up at Johnny for a reaction and the man smiled gently at her. "Are you good in bed, Johnny?" she asked seriously.
"That's not for me to say," he replied awkwardly. "Never had any complaints."
"D'you want to show me?" she asked, placing her other hand on his other thigh. Johnny couldn't believe how quickly this was moving. He wished he had recorded her invitation in case it all went wrong later. Yet somehow he felt he could trust her.
