Mister Kreasey's Demon

Mallaby appeared to have billeted herself, as if quite unable to disengage until she had a prognosis delivered into her hands explaining the likely progress of the exotic snake that was sure to slither across her hand-tufted Axminster and irretrievably shed into its pile some unsavoury impedimenta.

'I could tell her you're not here,' she tried.

The doctor looked hopeful. She might just succeed in ridding the first floor of his sixteen-year-old visitor. It wasn't so much that her 'middle-aged-dismissed-teacher-cum-neighbour' might have been baby-snatching, but that "the student girl" might bring in the type of mud that Mallaby must have always noted on the heels of stilettos - the mud of youth's promiscuity, mud too late to blemish the doctor but always liable to depreciate her investment a tad at the upmarket end of Blackheath's Vanbrugh Park.

'It'll be Amy - a pupil,' he tried.

Doctor Mallaby hadn't blinked, her back still erect, her face tight, discerning, a long, dried prune - but a quality prune.

'She'll have brought her coursework authentication sheet. As her - her former teacher, I've still need to endorse it - in absentia' he added, hoping to sound plausible enough to distract his neighbour from what she would regard as the more lurid truths starting to worm their way out of the backstreets and up onto the hallowed soil of her beloved Wisteria.

'It's your rental. You see who you like mister Kreasey,' she said turning from him, her lips pursed rigid to contain her defeat and anger.

'...managed to keep your balance across a gravel drive - on those?' Mallaby's voice had resurrected itself at the bottom of the stairway.

'Is it okay then? If I see 'im?' Kreasey heard the younger voice try again.

He wondered whether Amy had appeared before Mallaby in her very highest heels, the ones that gave her an extra three-and-a-half inches of height over a world that had always seemed to look down on her. On her first visit, he'd noticed, Amy was slightly undernourished and shivering in a short skirt with a slit up the side. She'd been clutching her essay to her low-necked top and he'd wanted to, but couldn't, tell her that she'd made him happy enough - just by appearing on his doorstep with her essay and those eyes which spoke of deprivation and yet which held, for him, openness more beautiful in itself than any he'd seen in any student before.

He heard first the outer door, then doctor Mallaby's door shut. He waited for "Charlie" perfume and the new voice bubbling on a fire of youth and pheromones to fill his room.

'Remember these?' Amy chuckled.

Amy's newly varnished fingernails, like red-tipped washing pegs, pinched each trouser leg of the boxer shorts he'd worn for lunchtime badminton sessions at the college. She was suspending the shorts to the side of her face, that openness and expectation in her greyish-blue eyes so good-natured and irresponsible, as he wanted to be.

'Haven't seen you in these yet, have I? Want me to...'

He'd lost her words, could only smell the sweet perfume masking a vague hint of TCP in the room. He wished the tablets he'd taken hadn't left him staring so foolishly at the lips of a vibrant sixteen-year-old in his bedroom.

'You know, there's a spot on your face?'

'Is that what you see?' she responded. 'Are you being my teacher, or something else?'

'I am your teacher', he said, as he stood looking at the girl. 'And I don't like spots - not on your face.'

'You want me to be perfect? Like my essay?'

'You- you are perfect - well, almost,' and before his eyes there seemed to parade the mass of pimply post-pubic youths - her set in History12d.

She was searching his eyes, confused. He recalled better times, those moments when her face had shared that open comic side of her lovemaking with him. He so wished he could deliver her from the dross that was her peer group. Unblessed though their encounters had been, he couldn't forget that she'd tried to be his passport to those from 12d... those who always seemed to be gathering, getting closer...