Biceps! The Peakwick Papers I

The Peakwick Papers by Charles Swellickens

Part 1

I’m 16. Me and my classmates are on our way to Austria for two weeks of sightseeing, adventure sports and practising our German (and we’re also going to be drinking as much alcohol as we can get our hands on and trying to pull every Austrian female we meet, but those things were not in the official trip description sent out by the school to our parents, as I remember).

The coach is at Dover, waiting to board the ferry to France. Though we were in high spirits when we left London, now, two hours later, not having moved for fifteen minutes, even the most boisterous are low on energy, and the coach is pretty quiet except for the tinny sounds being emitted by a few Walkman headphones.

Then, suddenly, from a few seats in front of me, swearing and cursing, exclamations of disgust, other boys are getting up from the other side of the coach and moving across to see what’s causing these outbursts, and I look out of the window where the others are looking and see a couple of women to our left have got out of their car.

Immediately, I only have eyes for one of them. I remember her long, dark, curly hair and that she was wearing sunglasses. And I remember she was wearing a vest (although curiously, even if I close my eyes and try really hard to visualise that moment again, I can’t remember what colour it was). Anyway, what I can absolutely remember is that she was leaning on the car, resting her chin in her hand, her elbow on the roof. And the way she was standing and leaning on the car roof was showing off, in its full glory, the biggest bicep I had ever seen on a woman.

This was why my classmates were making exclamations of disgust, which soon turned into just shouting foul-mouthed abuse at her through the window. Now I’m not going to pretend that I was some kind of sensitive teenage boy, averse to a bit of foul-mouthed abuse of my own at certain times, but this was most definitely not one of those times.

I sat up and stared at her. Or rather, at her beautiful arm, her beautiful full bicep. The adrenaline rush came, my heart raced, I felt my mouth dry. Was anyone else on that coach feeling The Madness too? One of my classmates, perhaps one of the teachers?
I wouldn’t have noticed. I’ll never know. There was me, and there was her muscle, and for a moment there was nothing else.

And as suddenly as I had seen her, the coach began to move and she was out of sight and I could hear the others commenting how she looked like a man, how they hated women with muscles, how disgusting she had looked. And I thought of all those magazines I had under my bed at home, and all the women inside them and how turned on they made me feel. And I wondered if there was something wrong with me and whether I would ever be normal.

Once on the ferry I wanted to get away from the group. I wanted to locate this woman and gaze upon her and her magnificent muscular arms for the whole trip. I dreamed of just ditching the whole thing and spending the holiday with Miss Muscle and her friend at a beach house in the South of France.

So I told my mates I wasn’t good on boats and needed some air. For the whole crossing I wandered the decks, avoiding the other boys, desperate to see her and feel that adrenaline rush again. But I searched in vain. I never found her, and the fact that I had taken myself off for the whole of the boat journey just made me feel even more different, even more abnormal. It was a long way from the French coast to the hostel in Austria, and it seemed even longer with these thoughts in my head.