Helen – Love and Other

Chapter 1a

London, Summer, 1974.

The flat smelled of cigarettes, incense and hash smoke drifting through the musky summer air. Music played softly from an LP spinning in the corner, something slow and dreamy with too much guitar for Helen’s taste. Andy insisted that was the point.

The flat belonged to Andy and Helen, a cramped second-floor conversion in a run-down but increasingly fashionable part of London where artists, students, and people avoiding proper jobs were gathering in numbers. The wallpaper peeled in places, the plumbing complained constantly, and the kitchen window didn’t shut properly, but none of them cared. There was freedom in the mild squalor of it all.

In the weeks since Helen and Andy had moved in, their university friends Claire, Simon, and David had become permanent fixtures. The five of them had shared digs throughout most of their English Literature degree, and this felt less like adulthood than an extension of student life with fewer lectures and more wine.

Relationships in the group had always been slightly fluid. Claire drifted easily between Simon and David, sometimes sharing a bed with one, sometimes both. The lines between friendship, sex, and affection blurred easily, softened further by long nights, cheap ****, and hash smoke hanging heavy in the air. But at the centre of it all were always Andy and Helen. The others occasionally joined them, but nobody ever mistook where the real love story was.

The windows were open against the July heat, thin curtains shifting gently in the occasional night breeze rolling up from the street below. Outside, a siren briefly wailed before disappearing back into the London night.

Helen sat cross-legged on the worn rug in nothing but Andy’s oversized shirt and a glass of cheap red wine in her hand. Around her, bodies sprawled comfortably across mismatched furniture and blankets thrown over the floor. Nobody seemed interested in staying dressed in the heat. Bare legs tangled together, half-buttoned shirts hung open, and Claire sat lazily against the armchair in only a loose blouse, entirely unconcerned by the dark curls of sex on full display.

The remains of dinner cluttered every available surface along with empty bottles, overflowing ashtrays and abandoned plates with torn bread still sitting on them.

Andy lounged across the sofa behind her, barefoot and shirtless, one arm hanging lazily over the back as he argued with Simon over whether T. S. Eliot or Philip Larkin had understood loneliness better. Across from them, Claire slowly crumbled hash into tobacco while David tuned a guitar he could barely play.

“You’re both wrong,” Helen said, accepting the joint as Claire passed it over. “Harold Pinter is better than either of them.”

Simon frowned. “Er, Hell’s…Pinter’s a playwright, not a poet.”

Helen smiled as she inhaled slowly. “Feels like poetry to me.”

Nobody seemed especially concerned with time. Or careers. Or tomorrow.

That was what Helen loved about it.

The flat itself was tiny, far too small for five people on a humid summer night, but it felt alive in a way her mother’s immaculate Surrey house never had. There, every room existed for appearances. Here, nothing matched, nothing behaved, and nobody cared.

Andy caught her watching him and smiled. Helen smiled back, warmth spreading through her almost instantly. She took another pull on the joint, then passed it up to Andy on the sofa above her. Her head began to feel deliciously heavy atop her neck and her skin tingled wonderfully.

As David plucked at the guitar’s not-quite-in-tune strings, Helen looked up, drawn by movement above her. Claire had appeared on the sofa next to Andy, their mouths locked together. His cock had grown hard; it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her to simply turn around and take him in her mouth.