Kissing practice

I had a list of girls I liked and rated them from one to ten in a small spiral notebook I kept for this purpose, much of it written in primitive French and German, so that my mum couldn't read it. Or Latinized versions of English words, like 'osculate' meaning to kiss. An act that I rarely performed but often practiced.

After the lights were out I waited for my brother to fall asleep. When I heard his measured breathing I turned to my arm outstretched on the pillow next to me. Hello beautiful arm, not arm, beautiful Lorraine or Vicky or Susan, a motley parade of girls' faces passed in front of me, acquaintances and friends and strangers from the market place, young fresh faced girls and older women, especially women in silk headscarves, all of them completely unaware of my evil intentions. Each face came up clearly, like Audie Murphy's dead pals in "To Hell & Back" which I had just seen with Wilkin at the Majestic, the same night old Mister Illingworth lost his glass eye and everyone was looking for it under the seats while Audie was mowing down Germans like a scythe cutting down stalks of hay. Each face stirred some vague but pleasant sediment somewhere inside, I stroked the smooth inner arm with my right hand, caressing it in what I assumed was a professional manner, and then came the kiss. A slow approach, lips grazing the skin, slowly bearing down, mouth opening slyly, and the eyes smushed shut, this apparently an essential ingredient of a properly delivered smacker,  no peeping allowed. Frank had told me that if you opened your eyes, your penis would shrink down to nothing. But that I shouldn't worry about that just yet. When the contact was made, it was electric, a shuddering thrill vibrating through my body, warm, sentimental, a blissful mental state. Could life be like this, this strange anticipation? My teeth grazing the arm, my mouth soft against my skin, was this what girls' mouths felt like, their lips, how smooth, silky they must surely be, smooth as the old silk pillow on the couch downstairs. But where did tongues belong? How to insert them into the matching mouth? Mine darted out and licked against the skin of my arm, causing a pleasant tingling all over me, ooh I must be doing it right, I darted my tongue again, and was beginning to nuzzle when my brother's voice shocked me into an upright position,

"What the bluddy 'ell are you doing?" Rodney said in a stage whisper.

"Kissing your bloody arm! You're not all there you're not..."

He had been leaning over me, observing my technique, while I thought he was sleeping.

"I was just practicing, for the school play. I have to kiss somebody and I wanted to get it right.

"Bloody queer you are..have you forgot you go to a boys' school? Hey, what's your arm' name then? Does it have a name? Have you been seeing her long?"

I didn't answer.

Hey, if you like your arm, wait and see what your hand can do!

Now get to sleep. You're late for school every day as it is...

Embarrassed at being caught, I let my arm drift away from me, the girls faces faded from closeup into a distant  montage, like an old black and white film, dim, jerky, faraway. I tried to round them up again, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, be my guides, little TV cowboys spinning lariats, round up my girls, get them in line. Corall them. Lorraine is an elfin girl who wears shoes with four inch soles, supposedly the height of fashion, but they give her the appearance of a toy, a Pinocchio figurine, elevated past her status... in the Saturday market place she had her legs up on the seat of a public bench, the shoes enormous on her tiny feet, her legs bare almost down to the crack between her limber thighs, close to the bone of it all, something almost revealed, what new configuration of flesh might be exposed where the thighs meet the body and the curves continue upward like the bodies on the figures on a vase in the encyclopedia?. Her sister Rosie taller longer, way past my bedtime Rosie, big wet mouth, I saw that mouth once form an O, round as a Polo mint, so that's where the tongue goes, inside that rubbery halo? And then what? What strange exercise performed? Touch the teeth, are they involved too. I had seen love bites on Rosie's swanlike neck, so the teeth were in some way involved. Not to bite the tongue though, I'd done that by accident and it was painful. That was another reason having your own teeth was so important. None of these maneuvers were possible if you wore dentures.

Who could I ask these questions without embarrassment? Nobody would tell me anything. My brother's heavy breathing seemed to indicate he was asleep for real this time, I grabbed my arm, a little roughly perhaps, and began to practice again.