Who Will Love Polly Odlum? Read Intro      Back to Books With eyes closed and head flung back, Polly basked in the feel of his breath breezing delicately across the v-neck of her bare skin as he slept soundly on her shoulder. Completely and utterly still she sat. Still, but for the smallest of slow, careful shifts she made with her other shoulder as she manoeuvred it into position. As, millimetre by millimetre, she hunched it up, so that her T-shirt gaped away - ever so slightly, so that his warm breath carried on - ever so gently. Carried on, on in between soft cloth and softer skin. And she sighed. Lazily she opened one eye, then the other and gazed down at him. Then, yielding to temptation she brought her hand up to his hair and gently curled a jet-black lock around her finger. His long eyelashes fluttered, his breathing halted, she paused, but he didn’t wake and she dared to brush away a stray lash from below his left eye, from his smooth sallow skin, which she then stroked delicately along the ridge of his perfectly sculpted cheekbone. Dragging her eyes away from him, she glanced around the lecture hall at the rows and rows of students stretching out in front of her, all hunched low over pages, all writing furiously, all anxious to record the lecturer’s every word - conscious perhaps - unlike Polly who’d more pleasurable things on hand, and on shoulder, of the likely need to regurgitate them at some point in the future. And seeing that no-one was enviously watching them - him and her - she felt disappointed, but relieved too, that she could go on enjoying him unnoticed. For had anyone been watching they’d probably have wondered why she didn’t nudge him awake and tell him to keep his distance. As one would expect a person to do, when a stranger falls asleep on their shoulder. For that’s what he was - a stranger. Not that he felt like one to Polly. How could he? When for months now, she’d spend her days staring at him over the heads of her fellow-students, pleading with him to notice her. Not that she really expected him to. When, for months she’d spend her nights imagining all sorts of convoluted scenarios: stuck lifts, capsizing ferries, raging infernos, which would throw them together and through which they’d survive, shaken but unharmed. All silly day-dreams she knew and she never really expected anything to happen. Not really. But then, twenty minutes ago, Davy Long - for that was the sleeping beauty’s name, ignorant of the perilous situations he and she survived each night, ignorant of her very existence, happened to sit down beside her. And she, once satisfied that he was unaware of the deafening thump-thump of her heart, began to enjoy this unexpected proximity. And even more when his head began to slump, then slump some more, until finally it fell sideways onto her very own shoulder. And although, still a long, long way off from happy-ever-after, it was closer to the beginning of it than she’d ever been before. But Polly was human and greedily she was beginning to realise that there was still more pleasure within reach. That, after weeks and weeks of imagining what it would be like to kiss him, the opportunity was hers for the taking. And so, gently, she now began to trace his lips with her finger and oblivious and snug as a new-born babe he slept on, making little contented noises and nestling further into her neck. And ever so carefully she turned his head towards her, little by little, until his lips were in reach. And she paused, just before kissing him; to savour his smell - not clean exactly - but agreeably evocative of an old comfort sheet she’d had as a child, with all its scent of washing powder gone, replaced by a subtle mixture of sweat and breath and warmth and time. Then she leant towards him but, as she did, her elbow hit against her metal pencil-case and sent it clattering to the floor. Crash. Bang. Too late. Her chance was gone. Davy bolted upright and stared around with wide-open eyes. She looked away. Quickly. Guiltily. Knowing that she had been trying to take what wasn’t her to take and feeling very, very annoyed that she hadn’t been quicker off the mark. Oblivious to poor Polly’s lost opportunity, Professor Kiely drew to a close. “And I expect that between now and the submission date, at least five percent of you will experience the tragic and unexpected death of a very close and cherished relative,” she was saying in her monotonous voice, responsible for sending more than just Davy to sleep. “And when that five percent come to me, I’ll be sympathetic of course, but I won’t take a balled-up sodden hanky and red-rimmed eyes as sufficient proof of a family death. I’ll need to see the body. Alright?” The rows of eighteen-year-olds before her gave a sluggish response of nods and grunts and shuffled in their seats, gathering up their things. Feeling more composed now, thinking she might salvage the situation with a smile or a light-hearted reference to their recent intimacy, Polly dared to turn to him, but he was gone. She looked around to catch a glimpse of him going out the door. “Did I tell anyone to leave?” shouted the lecturer, but Davy didn’t hear. “You,” she called out, pointing at Polly. “Go call him back.” “Me?” asked Polly anxiously. “Yes, you. Go on.” Polly got up and hurried out after him. Seeing him standing by a pillar, she took a deep, deep breath. There wasn’t any point in holding out for blazing infernos and capsizing ferries, for they were few and far between. And lifts terrified her so much that she never took them; unlikely then that she’d ever find herself stuck in one with him (deserted building, emergency line down, power cut, sub-zero temperatures, sleeping bag, bottle of champagne - yes, a sleeping bag and a bottle of champagne - he happened to be on his way to a party you see - a lot of time and thought went into these scenarios). No, Polly realised that she had to take whatever opportunity presented itself. So now she took another deep breath and cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she called, but too timidly for him to hear. “Excuse me,” she called again. Davy turned around and she walked towards him smiling a dimpled shy smile, wobbling on her usually comfortable, low, thick heels which nervousness had transformed into mere slivers of stilettos. She tried to steady herself - right foot in front of the left, left foot in front of the right, slowly, no tripping - until finally she reached him. “Hello,” he said and smiled. She was distracted. By the beautiful way he’d said hello. By the beautiful way he’d smiled. By his beautiful eyes. Were they grey or blue? She peered a little closer then, realising he was staring back at her, she pulled herself together, stepped back out of his personal space and remembered the message. “I was sent for you. You’re to come back. We’re waiting.” Oh God, she could have wept. She sounded as if she’d come from Der Führer himself and that without further ado she was likely to catch a firm hold of him and frog-march him back to where the death squad awaited. She tried again, to soften it a little. “What I mean is that she sent me to ask you to come back. That’s if you want to. Well, that’s not what she said exactly, she didn’t say anything about coming back if you want to. In fact I think she wants you to come back even if you don’t want to, if you know what I mean.” He was staring. “Look, what I’m trying to say is that it’s no business of mine whether you come back or not, I’m just passing on the message. Not because I want to particularly, but because she asked me. Asked me, to ask you to come back, that is. Told me really, told me rather than asked, I suppose.” He was still staring, maybe she hadn’t made herself clear, but how was a girl to think straight with all this staring with beautiful blue-grey eyes going on. “Do you understand me?” she finished weakly. “I think so.” “So you’re going to come back?” “I think it’s a bit late,” he said, looking over her shoulder. She turned around and caught glimpses of the lecturer’s scarlet suit bobbing in the swell of student denim exiting the lecture hall. “Well, just so as you know I passed on the message,” she said. And, having no desire to wait around to explain why she’d failed to return him, she hurried off. Inside the ladies’, her favourite refuge in times of crisis, Polly banged her head against the cubicle wall. Well, not banged exactly, for her resolve faltered every time her forehead neared the white tiles and instead she ended up hitting them softly. She just felt so mad, for, if she’d deliberately set out to, she couldn’t have managed to sound so, so stupid. Why, oh why, had she bothered with the message anyway. Why hadn’t she just gone up to him and teasingly asked him if he made a habit of falling asleep on strangers? Why? Because she was Polly, of course. Realising that as much as she might like to, she couldn’t spend the rest of her day, or life for that matter, in the sanctuary of the cubicle, reluctantly she opened the door, went to step out but then, catching a glimpse of Professor Kiely fixing her hair at the mirror before her, she hurriedly retreated. Leaning against the door she breathed a sigh of relief at not having been spotted, just as Professor Kiely on the far side of it, having witnessed Polly’s look of horror and hasty turnabout in the mirror, wondered was it that she was getting older or were each year’s intake of students really more peculiar than the last. And, as Polly listened out for Professor Kiely’s departure, it struck her that she was complicating things as usual. Why hadn’t she simply walked out and pretended not to notice the lecturer? Why? Because she was Polly. She banged down the toilet seat, sat down and waited, thinking how very ridiculous she was. She really did complicate or make a mess of everything. Take the whole college thing. It seemed to her that within a day of starting every other student, including her cousin Cliona, knew how it all worked; knew how to transform themselves into looking like students overnight; knew how to instantly surround themselves with a huge bunch of friends; even knew how to talk to boys, as if, well, as if they weren’t members of the opposite sex. Both she and Cliona had started off knowing only each other yet now, any time Polly met Cliona, she was centre-stage of a huge gang (boys included) moving as one as Polly came against them on her lonely ownsome. And just six months ago, the two of them could have been taken for twins - same brown uniform, same stocky white legs and same short dark hair, neatly tucked behind their ears. So how had Cliona managed to sprout deadlocks which hung down to her bum when Polly’s own hair hadn’t grown more than an inch? Who’d explained to Cliona the knack of wearing clothes so that they looked like they might have come from some trendy second-hand shop, but obviously hadn’t? Yet, no matter how hard Polly tried, her clothes always looked like they’d come from Marks and Spencer’s end-of-season-sale, sensible, of good quality, and always, always, completely wrong. As for legs well, she thought, raising her skirt to examine them, they were no less solid or white than they’d been in school but it wouldn’t surprise her at all if, underneath the big and baggy khaki fatigues Cliona had taken to wearing, she now had legs to rival Naomi Campbell’s. Hearing the outer door bang shut and deciding that the coast was clear Polly emerged from the cubicle. She caught sight of her reflection in the mirror as she did so and stared at it and saw nothing that pleased her. When her mother said, ‘But lovey, you are pretty’, in response to her daughter’s frequent laments, wrongly Polly suspected that she really didn’t mean it, since in the same breath she’d carry on to reassure her daughter that ‘Personality was far more important’. But right now Polly felt her personality was about as engaging as that of a goldfish. And as for looks, well, if she and Woody Allen were the only contestants in a beauty pageant, it would be a close call as to who’d get to wear the crown. Now Polly’s attention had focused in on her eyebrows. As she stared at them in the mirror and wondered at their thickness, it struck her that Cliona’s old joke about the two of them having eyebrows to rival Mr Burke’s, their old science teacher, was no longer apt, not in relation to Cliona at least. For it suddenly dawned on Polly that Cliona’s had disappeared and in their stead were two pencil-thin arches.   Read Intro      Back to Books