Free Fall

It's roughly 7.30 AM on the 21st November 1992.

Mrs Moering is waving goodbye to her husband from the doorstep as he pulls the motorcycle helmet over his head. She's holding a piece of toast covered in damson jam. The door is painted green, apart from the brass knocker and the number twenty-four, also brass. The house is a semi-detached, somewhere in suburban Manchester.

Mr Moering, recently turned thirty, is an excellent motorcyclist. In fact, such is his love of motorcycles that he never learned to drive any other vehicle. He loves everything about his wife. He loves her strawberry-blond hair. He loves her Oldham accent. He loves the fact that she'll wake up early so that they can have one more round before he leaves for work. Most of all, he loves the fact that she is pregnant.

Mrs Moering is big and round and perfect. She doesn't shout. She doesn't break things. She always knows exactly when to say what and how to love her husband. She's on maternity leave from work, but normally, she'd be busy typing away in the reception of one of the fancy hotels in central Manchester. Everything is perfect.

Mr Moering comes a cropper on one of the trickier bends on his way to work. It wasn't his fault, the pillark in the Mercedes trying to overtake on a tight corner was to blame. In fact, even that would have been fine, if the driver of the lorry behind had been watching the road and not fiddling with the radio. He would have seen Mr Moering go over. He would have seen that the Mercedes driver hadn't stopped. He most definitely wouldn't have run over Mr Moering.

At the funeral, Mrs Moering bawls like a baby and is escorted home by Mr Moerings's co-worker and best friend. They have coffee and they talk. You know how it goes.

---

I was never fortunate enough to meet my Father. My Mother, on the other hand, was an entirely different kettle of fish.

Now AJ, as we have already established, was not quite on the same frequency as everyone else. My Mother wasn't even on the radio... But I did love her. I loved her in a way that only a son could love his Mother. I loved her in a way that she couldn't return. Strangely, I was thinking about my Mother the night that I first made love to AJ; the night I first made love to anyone.

It wasn't exactly the perfect situation: we were two run aways, in a squat in an unfamiliar city called Liverpool and there were people in the back room of the house high on acid, doing weird things to one another with bondage gear. As I said, not ideal. I would have paid for us to stay the night in the hotel, except I hadn't the money. I hadn't been expecting to run away. I had been expecting to get the train home and get the bollocking of a lifetime from AJ's father.

I'll admit, I was clumsy. It took me three goes just to get the condom on because it was dark and there was no electricity in the squat. I didn't know what I was doing... I hadn't even got as far as a first kiss before that night. I was embarassed by my underware, especially because AJ had bought it and to top it all off, every so often there would be calls for us to join the games going on in the back room.

It hadn't occured to me then, actually, it didn't occur to me until years later, but that wasn't necessarily AJ's first time too, as I had assumed on the night. You see, there was an incident when she was relatively small that had, well, popped her cherry.

You know how people can do it horse riding and stuff, accidentally? AJ did it on a particularly pointy rock while on a beach in Cornwall when she was seven years old. There had been lots of blood, or so she said, and her Father had gotten angry and ranted and raved about it for weeks afterwards.

"Me? What about you? If you had been watching her on the beach, she wouldn't have gotten hurt. If you had been watching her, my daughter wouldn't have lost her virginity to a rock!"

She could have been sleeping around behind my back; behind everyone's backs. She could have been THE most experienced girl in school. She could have been a godess in bed. She could have had the filthiest STIs. She could have had AIDs or HIV. She could have been anything...

I didn't know her at all really, but I made love to her that night, on the floor of the squat with people playing bondage games in the back room. We were hungry and tired. We were dirty, especially her, from play fighting on various stretches of grass whilst receiving the tuts and scorn of passers bye. She lay there on the dusty floorboards like some kind of dirty-faced angel, with her peroxide blonde hair and those stunning blue eyes of her.

God, I must have been the most terrible fuck. I must have done everything wrong, but neither of us cared. Well, I certainely didin't. It was just us loosing our virginity together, like the world should be and the rest... The rest didn't matter at all.