My Kindly Neighbour

Being left at home for the first time while your parents go out is a big day for a ten-year old boy  when you’re used to babysitters, or being dragged out shopping all afternoon when all you wants is to stay home and play in the yard. 

Some big days turn out bigger than others though, and this one would become the most monumental day of my short life…
 
Middle of summer, beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon.  

My parents had extracted a solemn promise, on pain of death – well, a month’s grounding at least – that I wouldn’t leave the backyard under any circumstances, and (my mom) somewhat reluctantly agreed that I could stay home while they went to do the weekly food shopping. Considering it took about four hours, including the trip to and from town and the afternoon tea they insisted on having, the last thing I wanted to do on a day like that was to traipse round a shopping centre and food hall.  

I wondered round the house, strangely silent and cool with no one else present, as if it now belonged to me, and I was its Master – but the lure of the sun and the basketball hoop in the back yard meant the inspection of my kingdom lasted no more than ten minutes. Before long, dressed in socks, shorts and a tee-shirt I was running around like a demented thing on the asphalt “Court”  my dad had laid the previous summer – a 15´ x 10´  rectangle set between the garage and the lawn, with a hoop set on  a winch so I could raise or lower it as my energy level decreased. I loved to pretend I was the Harlem Globetrotters (yes, that ages me, doesn’t it?) in an exhibition game at The Gardens, only they don’t have to play on asphalt, do they? 

So when I tripped, stumbled, and fell, at full pace, trying to make a rebound, ball in hands, there was nothing to protect my knees as I went down, scraping the left really badly, the right not quite so. I let go a long, loud, “ahhhhhhhhhhhh!”  and finished up half lying, half sitting, on the hot tarmac. It’s all well and good having the run of the house and garden, but I started to cry, hard, at the pain, and harder at the realization that I was alone. No mommy to come running out to soothe her little man. No dad to laugh, gently, and give me strength and courage to deal with the pain. Talk about distraught. 

“Philip, what’s the matter, are you hurt?” 

I looked up, and there, at the fence between our house and our neighbours, the Broomes, was Mrs B., sunglasses raised on her head, and some sort of towelling sun-robe affair. The fence was too high for me to see over, but to an adult, no more than chest high, so that was all I could see of my Florence Nightingale as I desperately tried to stem the choking sobs. I may only be ten, but I want to be a man to a lady, you know? And especially an “old” lady, like Mrs B.

I say old, because she must have been all of forty – but to a ten-year-old… 

I turned my now bleeding knee towards her, and sobbed out that I’d tripped playing hoops. She winced at the sight of my injury (although a knee scrape is hardly an amputation case for a ten-year-old, now, is it?) and told me to stay right where I was, as she was coming round. 

In no time at all, she was there, flip-flops clicking against her feet, a bright, flowery sun robe tied at the waist. She knelt down beside me and ran one hand through my hair, as the other gently checked around the graze on my left knee.  

She smiled down at me, “Nothing broken, but that knee wants cleaning and treating; do you think can you walk?” 

She got down even lower, told me to put an arm around her shoulder, and helped me to my feet. I cried out as I put my weight on my left foot, so she shrugged my arm off her shoulder, slipped her arms under my thighs and around my back, and lifted me effortlessly into her embrace. She smelled of suntan lotion and I could feel how hot she was through the robe – she must have been sunbathing on their deck, that’s why she’d been at the fence so quick when I fell – I could also feel the softness of her chest against mine. In fact, the flimsy robe had shifted in her efforts to lift me, and I realised with a huge flush of embarrassment, and an almost electric jolt to my groin, that she wasn’t wearing any top under it –  she must have been sunbathing topless in the privacy of their garden, and simply pulled it on quickly before she came to see what was wrong.  

My face was inches away from her and I could see as clear as day, for the first time since I was a baby, in the flesh, a gorgeous curved breast – all of it, nipple included – which for some as then unknown reason, I felt an almost overwhelming desire to take in my mouth and suck. Her warm hand felt good on the underside of my legs, too, and the evil, stinging pain somehow diminished as she looked at me, still smiling, apparently oblivious to her exposure, and my growing physical excitement.  

She carried me out of our yard, round the end of the fence, and into her own garden, saying, “come on, let’s get you sorted out, young man”. I couldn’t work out why we weren’t going to my house, and as if reading my mind, she said, “Your mom told me you were home alone, and asked me to keep an ear and eye on you. I don’t know where she keeps your first-aid stuff, and I’m sure you don’t, do you?” I probably did, but oddly enough, I couldn’t think straight right at that moment, all I wanted was to be close to her warm skin – and another thing in my mind was, going to their place, I’d probably get a glass or two of Mrs B’s amazing home-made lemonade – so like I was going to argue to stay at ours!  

She stepped up onto the decking, and gently lay me on the lounger, bending low, this time revealing both breasts to my gaze.