Sometimes I didn’t know which book to steal, so I’d just take both of them. As my pal John said, it wasn’t rocket science. All you needed was a sliver of silver paper and the right kind of look. Unfortunately, I had the wrong kind of look. I had criminal hair and a face that said don’t fuck with me because I’m stealing. I could see why Pablo Coehen was so popular. Everything he wrote was a fairy tail. And everybody apart from proper adults, with respectable jobs, liked fairy tales. The big steal was Trattoria and Grabowski with art work so beautiful it would have made Leonardo De Vinci beat his arthritic hands in frustration. That was the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of person that read that kind of book. I had started it, of course, and got to the stage which spun a person’s body about and cut them into oblique planes. Round about that point I got mental cramp and had to stop and cough.   But I was determined to finish that book in this life time. Perhaps it would take a bit longer.

            I had to cough again. I had to work on it and get the proper cough reflex. Cough once. Cough twice and squeeze in an extra cough. That got the phlegm going and soon it was like a bucketful of frogs in my throat. I couldn’t read anymore with the bus jolting me about anyway, so I practiced some more coughing. They had mapped out where I was meant to go, an idiots guide, but some idiots got on the wrong bus regardless and had to come back into Edinburgh and start again. I’d been to the clinic before, so should have known better, but had followed my instincts rather than the map. At least it gave me extra time to cough.

            They had to see that my throat was properly inflamed before they took me, but it was two grand. A grand a week, which was not bad. They liked me because I was a non smoker. Everyone else was smokers. If they needed to get a cohort of non smokers they would have had to pay more money. Even then they were fucked. Middle class people don’t let pharmaceutical companies test their drugs on them. That was what the working class was for. That was were I came in. Non smoker, working class. Easy money. But I didn’t like getting locked up.


            The test went much as I expected. Cough. Cough. Yes you have an inflamed throat. Come back tomorrow and we’ll admit you for the trials. Pick your expenses money from the window today. Most of the guys were here for that. There were a couple of women too. It was a bit like the buroo, guys hanging around waiting to get paid so that they get to fuck and live life until the next day.


            I arrived on campus the next day, bright eyes and a bad cough. There were four units and a lot of tests. I’d put Grabowski away. I didn’t want to know what the bastards were doing to me. I wanted a bit of light reading and just to get some air, walk about, maybe do a bit of work in the gym. The meals were good, better food than I was used to, which was some compensation, but not enough. I could leave at any time, but, of course, I’d be penalised for that. As a volunteer, I wasn’t being paid, but my ‘expenses’ would decline. Bastards. The Foreign Legion for guys that can’t be arsed.


            I’d seen her the first day I arrived. Red hair hanging, long jumpers,   despite the heat and petuala oil. She was pretty in a Laura Ingelis, Little House on the Prairie sort of way. Some times she wore her hair up in those kind of buns, that stuck to the side of her head so that she looked more Germanic. But you couldn’t make Laura Ingelis a German, the thought was ridiculous. I could never remember her name. She told me it dozens of times so that I used to listen out to others saying something to her in the hope that they’d say her name. I always just thought of her as Laura or Hippy Girl.


I knew she liked me. I liked her. What was not to like. She had big tits and was pretty. In another life we would have been happily married and had two respectable mutants. That was not what we were here for. What surprised me was she didn’t really understand how things worked. She tried too hard, so that she made everybody nervous, including herself. She would have known by now that pretty means popular. That’s the way life works. But in the unit people would see her coming and disappear to play computer games or hide in the toilet. She wasn’t used to that.  


I didn’t hide. I really didn’t give a shit. That always work. People always like people that don’t give a shit. It’s the equivalent of being pretty on the outside world. She actually made me laugh. She was probably the closest I’d ever come to liking a Tory. She had some strange ideas about work being good for you and people being work shy and how it was costing us so much more than we could afford. She explained it all with pepper pots and plastic tea cups. I think at one point she killed a tea cup with her enthusiasm. I liked that. Us and them and I was with us. She didn’t make me nervous, but one guy did.


Gordon was a big fucker. He’d a big belly, which was good cause that meant he was slow and he’d have no stamina. But he’d also a big gravely voice that rolled around the room, which wasn’t good because all he ever seemed to talk about was how much he’d like to do Carol. Yeh, that was he name, Carol. And how he’d like to put it in her mouth. Between her big tits and up her cookie box. I mean look at that arse. Would you no just love to stick your cock up that. That conversation never really varied so that I gave a great deal of though to where I should hit him.   But it was cool. I wasn’t here for that.  


I somehow felt sorry for her. I could see the blush spread out like a map from her breasts to her face. She had probably not blushed since primary school. She looked as if she was going to cry. I wanted to go over and hold her hand and tell her that everything would be ok. But everything was never ok and people didn’t live happily ever after. There were no fairytales in real life. I was ready to smack him right on the bridge of the nose when she got up, all untidy angles, spilling a cup of juice,   nearly knocking the table over in her haste to get out. I went after her to apologise.


She was in her room packing. She had a picture of Jesus in his room stretching out his hand shooting out Star Trek rays with a heart that was actually heart shaped.

I’d need to check with Tratoria and Grabowski on that one. The thing about Jesus was that he always had nice eyes. Good eyes. No astigmatism. Usually they were brown, but sometimes they were blue. He always had thick eyelashes to emphasize how good his eyes were and to follow you about. She had the same kind of eyes. Not ones that followed you about, but they were brown. Maybe they did follow you about. I didn’t know. She had big eyes. Big eyes filled with tears. The light of the world.


I didn’t really know what to do. It might as well have been a cow from the field next door that wondered into her room to mooch about and moo and shite on the floor for all the use I was. I found myself cuddling her, trying not to brush against her tits, trying not to get a hard on. I nearly succeeded, but when she kissed me I couldn’t help but get hard, especially when her tongue probed my mouth asking me questions that I could not answer. Fuck it. I was out of that place. I was going with her. I think she said something about forget the money. Forget fuck all. I wanted every pound my blood had paid for. Hers and mine.


Edinburgh is meant to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world. But it had too many pubs. You couldn’t just sit in one and concentrate on getting drunk. There was always the next one and the next one after that until I was tired thinking about it, but trudged after her, hoping that she had not forgotten that I was with her. She was beautiful once again, freed from the indifference of the zombie clinicatarians. She laughed and joked and sprinted from bar to bar. I wanted to put my head down in a cool dark green place, but I kept going. Somehow I made it to last train home time and the cavernous air suited my head and woke me up to the smell of petulia oil.


I sat beside her, quiet at last and moved my paw over her shoulder. She pillowed her head against my shoulder so that if anyone had taken a photograph then we would have been like those old fashioned folk that went to the cinema to cannoodly. She was Laura Ingilis once again, bright and breezy and untouchable, so full of silent plans. She shivered. I took my jacket off and put it over her shoulders. She bequeathed me one kiss, but it ended up, hasty, off target, on my outer ear.


She was drunk. I could see it now, the way her head drooped. She was trying to stay awake. I met one of her yawns with my mouth, sucking up her air and the taste of her.   She wasn’t much of a kisser. She was too slobbery. There was too much saliva. I forced my hand up under her bra strap and felt for her tits. I wanted to squeeze both of them into my mouth and milk their perfection for all eternity. I started pulling her jumper up over her denims. I few guys watched from the corner of their eyes. The train came and I pulled her so that her feet followed and her body jerked along behind.


It’s some kind of law. The last train is always the busiest one. We found ourselves standing in the space between two compartments. She drooped beside me like a tomato plant without water. I started to feel the same way. We both needed a seat, but it was only 40 minutes. The important thing was that we would be back in Glasgow . Home.


I needed a pee. But the toilets were in the next carriage. I didn’t think that I could wait or that I could leave her on her own.   I took her hand and she picked up her luggage and followed me like a child. The toilet was empty and almost clean which was some kind of minor miracle. I held her when I came out and asked her if she needed. She nodded.


She just couldn’t get the door shut. I went in and showed her how to lock it, but as soon as I got back into the corridor the door would bang open. I brought both our stuff into the loo and locked the door. As soon as I did that someone banged on it, trying to get in. I thought maybe it was the ticket collector so the best bet would be to do and say nothing.


She had pulled her denims down. She had on red pants that looked smaller than a hanky. I tried not to look, but I’d never seen a grown woman with a baldy snatch. I wondered is she shaved it or if she had some kind of selective alopecia. She certainly peed as if she was ok, whilst her head drooped on her stalk. I tried picking her up, but she slumped back down, almost falling off the toilet seat. I thought maybe it would be best if I should just leave her there. I could maybe lock the door from the outside with a screwdriver. But, of course, I didn’t have a screwdriver.


I needed to pee myself again. But I didn’t fancy pulling her up and down again like a beanbag so I just peed in the sink my arm supporting me against the movements of the train, watching her head bobbling from side to side following the curves of the train tracks in the scarred metal mirror. I wondered how asleep she was.


I put my nob up against her cheek, one side then the other. She didn’t stir as I hit her like a stage sketch with actors and slippery kippers,   with my cock positioning on her smile


‘Open your mouth’, I said it so softly it was almost a caress. My cock was ready to spring forward to feed itself into her mouth. I said it again louder more strident, but she said nothing looking at me blankly, tight lipped.


I lifted her jumper up and up again snagging it on her red bra. I lifted it more gently and it peeled off like gossamer. She put her arms up like a child you helped to get undressed to go to bed, while my dick beat like a metronome in front of her face. I had to put my arms around her and support her from the rocking motion of the train, otherwise she might have hurt her head on the wash hand basin, whilst I tried and failed to unhook her bra. I pulled it roughly down to her midriff, impatient for the V of non tanned white flesh and rough brown aureole. My kisses were like hers earlier, too full of salvia so that it started to run. I weighed one on my tongue and then the other, undecided which was the more perfect. I wedged one finger inside her cunt. When I was sure it would take I put another in and then another, until I had almost a hand hold inside her.   One nipple grew like a small penis in my mouth, then its twin. I found it hard to balance and stay upright as my legs cramped. I pushed myself up and against the wall,   leaning,   holding the softness of   her two tits together with my dick as an old fashioned   sandwich in between, as   the train bounced them and me about. It was my birthday and I was coming into Glasgow what more could I ask for?