Stella

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Stella

It was strange that Stella – both of them, in fact – should have had such a profound effect on a person. Boy to man.

Raven-haired Stella with the shapely figure and robust, sometimes coarse manner was taller than Steve. The other Stella, the blonde with no ambition, no fun and no shape, had an unmistakeably acerbic taste.

So who was first? Difficult to say; Steve always said that he’d first experienced the two at the same time. It was a Thursday, he’d said on repeated occasions. It was the Thursday after his seventeenth birthday when he’d first gone to The Plough with Raymond – far enough up the other end of town for them not to be caught. Yes he remembered it well.

“What’s it going to be luv?” Tricky question for a young man who’d never had to order for himself before – and who’d never been asked such a question by a woman with a cleavage on such public display; it was difficult not to look.
“Err, I’ll have a,” there was a horrible pause during which Raymond stared at him worryingly and Steve gazed apparently nonchalantly up and down the bar.
“We’ll have two of those!” announced Raymond pointing vaguely at a pump in front of him. Twenty year old Stella smiled knowingly, glancing at Ted sitting quietly at the end of the bar.
“Pints?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” replied Raymond with a mock gravitas in his voice. Stella smiled again.

That evening had passed slowly, so slowly. Steve had spent most of it watching the barmaid reaching up to the optics and down for the crisps. Raymond had not said much – he’d had his back to the bar and so couldn’t see her.

By the fourth visit to the Plough she knew what they wanted and started serving their drinks as they came through the old heavy wooden door with the acid etched glass. Thursday nights became somewhat predictable; Steve watching her, Raymond talking about football and the two of them sinking a few pints - well it started as just a couple and began to increase. Oddly enough, the slurred words and slightly staggered gait they’d suffered after their first visit, seemed to become less of an issue as time went on. And what’s more, the more Steve went to the bar, the more bar maid seemed to like to see him. He looked forward to going to the Plough on a Thursday evening – just to see her.

It all changed when Raymond had to revise one Thursday.

“Hi Steve, on your lonesome?”
“Yeah…he’s rev…staying in this evening.”
“Who you gonna talk to then?” It was a genuinely friendly question which made Steve start for a moment – he was sure he detected a hint of condescension in her question. He knew why he’d come on his own that Thursday, but she wasn’t the one he was going to tell.
“You, I suppose.” He both surprised and embarrassed himself at the same time, although part of him was quite pleased at the firmness of the gaze he’d engaged her with.