'Education is hanging around until you've caught on' - Robert Frost.
Set during the mid-1980s, Hanging Around Until is the story of Paul Carr, who, at the age of 28, decides to become a mature student at a North-Eastern university in the hope that an education will help give a direction to his life. On arriving at the university Paul discovers he is to share a house with five other students. Two of those housemates – Alison and Julia, each in their own way – turn Paul’s simple quest for an education into a tangle of confusion and uncertainty amid the turmoil of university life during the height of anti-Thatcherite campus activism and the birth of the new Left.
Available here (UK) or here (US)
[Extract]
[….]
‘I frightened myself yesterday,’ she said. ‘I was shaking so much I couldn't get dressed. I was expecting you to come back to my room, hoping you would but scared in case you did. I've been sitting up there for over an hour tonight trying to make sense of it all.’
I sat up and turned towards her. As we kissed, my hand moved up to her breast under the T-shirt. She broke off the kiss and looked down at the place where my hand disappeared under her clothes. I started to move my hand away. She took my other hand in hers as I let it drop. She stood up, still holding my left hand and led me from the room.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs while Alison was three steps above me, still holding my hand. I took a step forward, then another, and then we walked up the stairs together, hand in hand.
Alison moved over to her bed, still holding my hand. We sat down side by side. I kissed her lightly on the lips, lifting the jumper and T-shirt together. She lifted her arms to help me. I dropped the bundled clothes on the floor and she glanced down at them for a second. We kissed again as I reached out to touch a breast with each hand.
‘You are gentle,’ Alison said softly as she began to unbutton my shirt.
‘No, not really. I'm clumsy most of the time.’
‘One of the first things I noticed, and liked, about you was the way you rolled your cigarettes, so graceful, delicate. I could feel those fingers touching me.’
‘These fingers?’ I held up my hand. The fingers looked too thin, too long and too hesitant to be of any real use.
Alison helped me pull off my shirt and then pushed me back onto the bed. She undid and pulled down my trousers. She let her jeans, and then her pale green knickers fall to the floor. She sat down on my thighs, looking into my face as her hand held me. She lowered her face towards me. I felt the tips of her nipples brush my chest and the tickle of her hair. Alison kissed me on the lips; the chin, neck and chest, moving lower until her lips met her hand.
A few moments later, I whispered: ‘Come here. No, all the way up here.’ She crouched as I kissed her deeply. She stroked my hair and smiled down at me as I looked into her eyes from between her thighs.
Alison rose slowly, unwillingly, but in some other, greater, need and moved backwards, lowering herself again. She moved languidly, as slow as a lazy summer afternoon.
A few minutes later she began to speed up, then her back arched, stiffened. She sighed deeply and fell onto my chest. I rolled us onto our sides. Alison opened her eyes and looked at me as I resumed the slow rhythm.
‘Do you like it slow as well?’ she whispered.
‘I prefer to play the slow Blues rather than a twelve-bar boogie.’ I demonstrated both rhythms.
Alison laughed deeply in her throat and hugged me close, ‘I want adagio rather than allegro,’ she said before nibbling at my nose.
‘Yes,’ I whispered as I began to kiss my way slowly down her body, pausing at each breast in turn before moving lower. My tongue entered her navel and trailed lower. I could taste echoes of myself as my tongue moved deeply before returning to trace and caress along the mystery of folds and creases.
My tongue moved deeper again. Alison stiffened and relaxed as it eased her open and crept inside. As my tongue curled and turned and my lips kissed, my fingers traced the journey where my tongue had travelled moments before. Alison moved with the rhythm of my fingers and tongue. Her rhythm changed and mine changed to match hers. My fingers and mouth changed places and the rhythm continued, grew and changed.
As her body relaxed from the sudden stiffness again, I retraced my kisses back up her body and ended with two kisses, one on each closed eyelid. I eased back inside her and felt the warmth enclose me. The slow, gentle rhythm began again.
We lay on our sides facing each other. Alison lay with her head resting on my arm and my body between her thighs. She reached up to stroke my face. I kissed her fingertips and sucked them into my mouth. She held me tightly with her legs breathing hard against my ear. Moments later, I stiffened and then finally relaxed.
Alison trailed her fingers down my sweat-damp chest and rolled onto her back. I lay for a moment between her spread thighs, tracing around a nipple with my finger then I too rolled and lay on my back.
Alison turned and laid her head on my chest, wrapping her legs around me. I could feel a warm dampness on my thigh where she held herself against me. She sighed softly and rolled onto her back.
She looked across the pillow at me. ‘I've been thinking about that since the moment I first saw you.’ She reached out to touch my cheek. ‘For a time I was hoping you'd turn out to be a bastard, but you're not. The more I got to know you the more I wanted you. But that's the problem.’
‘What do you mean?’
She sighed. ‘I just wanted to get through this year and get out of here. I didn't want to get involved with anything… or anyone.’ She lay on her back with her hand over her face.
I reached out a hand towards her, but I couldn't seem to make it touch her. My hand fell back uselessly. ‘I'm sorry. But I wasn't expecting anything like this to happen either.’
‘Pathetique is about right.’ Alison turned to face me. ‘You looked so pathetic lying on your bed earlier. If I'd had any sense, I would have walked away. Would we be here like this if I'd waited for you to make a move?’ She stared across the pillow at me, ignoring the single tear that ran slowly down her cheek, daring me to contradict her. ‘Well?’
‘I never feel really sure,’ I said, hesitating. ‘I'm always afraid to act in case I'm wrong.’
Alison sat up slightly, leaning her head on her hand. The sheet slipped down over her breasts. The small pale nipples stared back at me. I wanted to take one into my mouth and be held. ‘Well, you'll just have to learn how to take a chance, won't you?’ She smiled. ‘Do you know how long it took for me to arrange my dressing gown yesterday morning, so it fell open like that?’
Disorientated by Alison's sudden change of mood, it took me a few seconds to realise what she had said. ‘Did you really arrange it?’
Alison laughed, but did not answer. She smiled at me for a moment and then kissed me on the lips. ‘Why can't I stay angry with you?’ she murmured, more to herself than to me. ‘I suppose you ought to go now, before the others come back.’
‘No, I want to stay.’
‘That's nice to hear,’ she said. ‘Even though I'm not sure I want you to stay.’ She took my hand in hers and turned it over, tracing the lines on my palm. She turned it back over and touched the small scar - diamond-shaped, pale and almost white - in the centre of the back of my hand. ‘After all, I know almost nothing about you, and you don't know much about me.’
‘Does any of that matter?’
She shook her head. ‘Maybe... maybe not.... I don't know.’ She lay back, staring at the ceiling.
[….]
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