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  Cindy didn’t allow herself to open that particular album very often though. It wasn’t work she was proud of and it certainly wasn’t work a great photo artist should ever claim credit for. But she couldn’t bear to throw the pictures away, and sometimes, when the loneliness and the futility had a grip of her, she would furtively spread them out on her bed and masturbate over them, not undressing but slipping her fingers up her skirt and under the elastic of her soft white knickers, feeling the heat and wetness of her own cunt as she pored over the naked curves of the cold models laid out like tarot cards before her.

  She was always bitterly ashamed in the morning and vowed to throw the prints away, but something always stopped her and she would return them guiltily to their box and tuck them behind her albums until the next time.

  Cindy shivered. It was already late in August and the season would soon be over. Time to go back to her mother’s house in Burnley and another job in another office for the winter, counting off the days on the calendar until next summer, saving her meagre wages for film and sending her prints to unenthusiastic magazine editors.

  The landlady had brought her up the morning’s post and it was another batch of rejection letters, but on the last, scrawled in ink over the pre-printed platitudes, were the words, “find your muse.”

  Cindy scratched her head. What could he mean, find her muse? The sea, the sky, the people, that was her muse. The scent of candy floss and frying onions, the chant of the fairground barkers, the giggles of girls out on the town, surely that was her muse. Why was this man taunting her, rubbing salt into the wound of an already hurtful rejection. Horrid, beastly, rejecting man...

  Enraged, she threw the post down on the floor, bitter tears stinging her eyes, when the copy of Photo World she had bought last night fluttered open and entranced her. Page after glossy page was devoted to a new American photographer called Diane Arbus, and Cindy stared in rapture at the images this woman had created. Twin girls in their party frocks, circus freaks standing by their tawdry tents, a little boy with a toy grenade, elderly nudists lounging casually in their cabin homes.

  Suddenly the editor’s words made sense. Compared to these her own pictures were generic, bland even, perfectly focused abstractions of light and colour but signifying nothing. Nothing that a boy would want to tug himself off over, in fact. The editor was right, she needed to find her muse.

  ***

  It was Saturday morning and fresh holiday-makers were streaming off the trains and into the boarding houses that lined the front, their cases filled with new brightly-coloured clothes and their pockets bulging with money crying out to be spent. But Cindy didn’t put on her Snappy Snaps uniform and chose, instead, a simple skirt in a leafy-green shade and her best cream sweater, her breasts pert and conical in the most up-lifting bra she owned. She tied a gaily coloured headscarf over her short blonde curls and ran a trace of red lipstick over her large full mouth, then, picking up her Rolleiflex, she went out upon the promenade.

  ***

  The day was long and depressing as she walked the length of the busy prom, snapping images here and there, capturing women in cowboy hats at the hoopla stall, boys at the shooting gallery winning prizes for eager girls, toffee apple sellers hawking their sticky ware. But it was all padding, appetisers before the main course, and Cindy despaired of ever finding her muse before the season ended and the long winter began.

  And then she saw her.

  A sad-eyed girl in a swimsuit the colour of wet periwinkles, gleaming green and then purple in the afternoon light. Her beehive hair was black as night, her skin white as snow, her fat breasts cold and nippley in the breeze, her heavy thighs goose-bumping as she stood alone in the water, surrounded by myriads of people and yet totally isolated from them.

  Cindy tiptoed to the water’s edge and focused her camera, glad that she’d loaded her most expensive Kodachrome, already seeing the hues and tones on the paper in the darkroom, the seaweed greens of the water, the mollusc-shell tones of the swimsuit, the vibrancy of the girl’s snow white body, so naked below the flimsy wet fabric, and the inherent sadness in those big grey eyes.

  The girl turned to face her as she heard the imperceptible click of Cindy’s shutter, her soft red mouth opening in a pout of longing. She was more beautiful and sensual than any Marilyn Monroe in her buxom perfection, more alluring than a Diana Dors or a Jane Russell, and, decades later, her likeness would still be gracing the pages of books of sixties photography, as delicious and enigmatic as when Cindy had first captured her spirit.

  ***

  “You took my picture, didn’t you, you fucking cow, you took my fucking picture,” the girl accused Cindy, her big full mouth angry and her eyes on the brink of tears. “I knew it was a mistake to come here alone, I just knew it. But what was I supposed to do? Sit at home in my bedroom for a week with the curtains drawn? Live on cold tins of pilchards? Read the fucking Gideon Bible over and over again...”

  She was crying now, bitter tears of remorse and regret, her face sad and angry all together, her big nipples inappropriately erect under the wet fabric of her swimsuit, and Cindy wanted to comfort her and fuck her simultaneously.

  “I’m sorry...” she began but the girl wasn’t hearing her, wasn’t seeing her, wasn’t even on the planet.

  “We were going to be engaged. Fucking engaged. Had even picked out the fucking ring. And there’s the thing. Engaged couple going on holiday together, lots of tongues wagging in Bacup, I can tell you. And I was even going to let him fuck me, hard as he wanted, and every night too. And what does he tell me? What does the bastard have the nerve to say? On the eve of our engagement. On the eve of the holiday that I’d saved up for all year. That he loves me but he has to marry Violet Evans, that Violet Evans is carrying his child and he has to marry her. He doesn’t even like Violet Evans, hates the sound of her voice, he says, but likes her enough to stick his thing up her and put her in the club. Oh yes, puts Violet Evans in the club while I’m giving him hand jobs behind the Ratter’s Arms...”

  ***

  The girl was sobbing violently now, her speech discordant, and, before she realised what she was doing Cindy was in the water and holding her, speaking meaningless words of comfort, but soothing the other’s grief and torment with her own closeness and heat, the closeness that only two bodies together can produce. Cindy fully dressed and warm, the girl cold and nearly naked, her wet swimsuit sucking up all of Cindy’s heat.

  But Cindy’s heat is willingly given, and her heart is thumping and her cunt on fire.

  ***

  They stood like that for a long time, maybe five minutes, maybe five hours. Who knew? Cindy and the periwinkle girl who had risen out of the water like Botticelli’s Venus, two lost souls bonded together and attached like fleshy limpets, hearts beating as one, their cunts welded together like suckling molluscs.

  It was the girl who finally broke the hold, peeled herself off Cindy like two cells separating on a microscope slide.

  “I’ve ruined your shoes.”

  “I have others.”

  A pause then, while the sea caressed their feet and they looked at each other, drank each other in with their eyes the way their bodies had suckled together like gastropods, took the time to fall in love all over again.

  “I’m cold,” the girl finally said, her nipples up like liquorice sticks to prove it, “I need to get dressed.”

  Cindy nodded, knowing that happiness like this was never built to last. “Of course,” she said, eyes downcast.

  The girl hesitated.

  “Yes?” Cindy asked, eyes full of hope.

  “Will you, I mean, it’s a cheek and all that, but... Will you come home with me?”

  “Where do you live?”

  The girl had a room on the South Shore, not far. A small double on the top floor, a sink, a wardrobe and a tiny skylight. Not a room for sunny days and sea views, but a closeted
chamber for night time liaisons and secret fumbling under the shrouds of darkness.

  Cindy sat on the bed and watched like a cat, alert, aroused, ready. But the girl was toying with her still, not ready to commit just yet.

  “I’m freezing,” she said, rubbing herself all over with a big blue towel that smelt of washing powder and damp rooms, “aren’t you cold?”

  Cindy shook her head and the girl smiled.

  “I need to change, do you mind?”

  Cindy shook her head again, and the girl turned her back to her and peeled her wet swimsuit off, like an iridescent snake shedding its skin and turning into an alabaster statue. Her skin was milk white, almost blue, her long black hair, drying now, fallen out of its beehive and cascading onto her shoulders, her thick waist and ample hips superb, her ass to die for.

  Cindy gasped, and the girl laughed, reaching for the towel again. “Are you peeping at my big fat bum?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare...”

  “It’s alright, I like you looking at me.”

  There it was. Bold and provocative. An invitation. Or maybe a challenge. Cindy gulped but said nothing.

  “Pass me my knickers, would you?” the girl said, turning to face her. She smelt of soap and salt water and a lingering hint of this morning’s perfume. Her breasts were large and full, so white that the veins beneath showed blue, the big erect nipples the colour of sleek black olives, her round belly an arctic landscape of virgin snow, her thighs thick and full, still slightly goose-bumped and oh so very white.

  But it was the girl’s beautiful cunt that riveted Cindy’s gaze, not shaved and sculpted like the ones in the photographs that she pored over when the longing got to be too much, but covered in thick dark hair, a sleek blue-black pelt like panther fur, fragrant and inviting, hinting of the forbidden delights that lay within.

  Cindy wanted to say I love you when she opened her mouth, but the only words that came out were, “My feet are wet, can you lend me a pair of stockings?” And she lifted her skirt up to let her see.

  She had on a pair of clean white panties, not skimpy but not full either, and they clung to her like a second skin. Her own bush was darker than her curly blonde hair, light brown at the edges with a dark stripe up the middle like tiger skin, and it showed through the white cotton of her pants, secret and full, and in desperate need of loving.

  This is it, this is me, Cindy’s cunt seemed say from deep within the crease of her thighs. Her full skirt was spread out around her like a leafy halo, like she was the Madonna of sex, a chocolate crème woman desperate to be licked, a sugar baby in search of a loving tongue’s caress.

  “Let me help with those,” the girl said, as she bent over her, still naked, then knelt and started to unfasten Cindy’s suspenders.

  ***

  “You look like a flower,” she said softly, peeling Cindy’s nylons down, “a beautiful white and gold flower with your big circle of green leaves all around you. I think I’ll call you my little weed. Say it for me, like they do on the television. Wee-ed, Wee-ed!”

  They were close now, oh so very close, their hot breath on each other’s skins. Their hearts racing.

  “When will I say it?” Cindy asked, finally reaching for her, hands on the girls naked shoulders, in her still damp hair.

  “When I’m fucking you,” the girl replied, her face very close, “when I’m holding you close and kissing your lips, grinding my pussy against yours, feeling your fingers inside me...”

  Cindy groaned, delirious with happiness, and arched her back. “Pull my panties down before you kiss me,” was all she managed to say.

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