Pleasant Vices by Judy Astley

‘There’s usually at least six over by the gap in the fence.’
    Daisy swivelled round to look. ‘Not one,’ she said. ‘We must be losing our appeal. Probably too old. I expect they turn up in droves to watch year eight, all those twelve and thirteen-year-olds, just on the turn. We’re cooked, finished, and obviously of no interest to the pervs.’
    â€˜No you’re wrong,’ Emma said, suddenly perking up and running her fingers through her wind-ravaged yellow hair. ‘Look, there’s that one from Ben’s lot, the one who looks more like someone’s dad.’
    Daisy recognized the description before she actually saw Oliver, and immediately started arranging her long legs in a decorative pose, leaning, seductively she hoped, against the goalpost with her skirt ‘accidentally’ hiked up and showing her gym knickers. They were baggy and truly horrible, and always referred to as ‘bloody bloomers’, but nevertheless, Daisy reasoned, they
were
knickers, and from what she heard Ben saying, that was what boys all wanted to have access to, visually or manually.
    Daisy had a soft spot for Oliver; there was an Italian look about him, very dark and knowing. Holidaying at Lake Como when she was thirteen, Daisy had been thrilled by the attention she had attracted from waiters, cab drivers and strangers in the street – a constant stream of exotic, appreciative noises, hissings through dangerous white teeth, low, sly whistles, deliciously rude-sounding foreign words, then the covert squeezes and prods. ‘Don’t take any notice,’ Jenny had instructed her, appalled that her baby daughter was already being treated as a sex object. ‘Don’t meet their eyes and they’ll leave you alone.’
    But Daisy had gazed brazenly into every passing velvet-dark eye, so different from those of cold, gawky English boys, who blushed to the roots of their acne if she so much as blinked at them. Two years later, on a chill English hockey pitch, Daisy could feel the glint in Oliver’s eyes from a hundred yards and suddenly sensed ice-cream and sunshine.
    â€˜Don’t hog it, Ben,’ Oliver ordered, reaching out his hand. Ben inhaled deeply and passed the loosely rolled spliff over to Oliver, who took a well-practised toke. ‘Not bad, this stuff. Usual supplier?’ he asked Ben.
    â€˜Yeah. But they’re putting the price up for next time. Unless we order more, that is.’
    â€˜Don’t really need it do we?’ Oliver leaned contentedly on the fence. ‘Not when we can get off on watching totty like your little sister. I like a girl who hitches her skirt up instead of down when she knows a bloke is looking. It’s a very promising sign.’
    Ben was watching Emma who was jogging up and down on the spot to keep warm, her games skirt flashing her navy blue underwear at him. It was amazing, he thought, how those awful regulation knickers, so unappealing when left drying stiffly on the laundry room radiator at home, could actually become quite sexy when they were on a non-family bottom.
    A laugh rumbled from Oliver. ‘Another time, we should bring binoculars, pretend we’re doing a survey on the incidence of black-headed gulls in London’s open spaces or something. A good way of combining A-level biology with, well, A-level biology.’
    â€˜I’m spending my life spying on sporty women,’ Ben muttered. ‘I’m getting a taste for it. God what will I be like when I’m sixty?’ Emma’s legs were even firmer than Carol Mathieson’s, but under those awful knickers he knew there would be a barbed wire fence of deceptively flimsy frills from Knickerbox.
    â€˜By sixty you’ll probably have been arrested for it,’ Oliver concluded, stubbing out the remains of the joint and making a private bet with himself that he would personally dispose of Daisy Collins’s virginity before