Bob Hinshelwood's Other writing Life lived within is only partly private as it is also lived without.

** 1   The music of love     

Joe and friends had, as schools do, formed a small out-of-hours rock band, with faces painted and a gig now and again in a pub or even once in a coffee shop staying open after closing time. He played guitar and practiced non-stop till even his indulgent parents called time. Music he told himself was more important than his girlfriend. He told Millie, and she agreed, with some regret in her voice. When they all left school, Joe went on to the music college far away in London. But the band stayed on, and what’s more Millie stepped in to take Joe’s place, joining the drummer and three other guitarists. She was very background, at first, until she came forward. She sang and played around with her slim body in a form of erotic dancing – so far as the microphone lead would allow her. As she grew in confidence she could add the piccolo to her talents, her favourite instrument she said as the instrument had a feminine voice! When Joe came home in the holidays he joined in and was himself background with a guitar. He watched that lithe body dancing and wondered if she was still his. She always said so. 

            After 3 years, when they were only intermittently together – holidays, very, very occasional weekends because her work demanded shifts as an assistant nurse – Joe went to a Paris Conservatoire for a couple of years. So, they parted….

            He also parted from his parents. They had both sung in the church choir, which had not impressed Joe much. In fact, he never knew whether they went to church for God of for singing. His father drove a tractor on a farm, and his mother ran a sewing group which sold aprons and blouses at summer fairs in the local villages. They had never travelled to a big city apart from London on two occasions.

            Joe’s music taste changed in Paris. He followed the standard expectations to soar above the common pop, and he clamoured for classy classical music Though he stuck to string instruments, he moved more towards composing. Before he left Paris, he had achieved a cello concerto, for which he played solo in an end-of-season performance. His parents travelled all the way abroad to hear him. By the time he then returned, he had learned good-enough French, and had imbibed a world of art and music that took him beyond the barbed-wire boundaries of his humble background. 

            Millie was by then more like  backdrop. She scrubbed multiple bedpans and changed soiled sheets on an endless basis. But knew of course she was a key cogwheel in the health of so many who passed through the wards of the hospital in their neighbouring market town. Not only geography but culture separated them by a great distance. Their letters and texts had faded to a limited trickle. Until he came home. They had each kept an ineradicable place in their hearts, though hardly well-dusted and enjoyed, and not divulged to each other.

            When they met, the day after he arrived back at his parents, Millie’s mind felt like a twanging chorus of guitar vibrations that surprisingly rang through her unsuspecting bones, just as if she had seen him yesterday at the school entrance. And he was knocked over by the presence of the still slim body waiting as he came forward from the carpark to touch her. Not that erotic beckoning from the stage with a microphone, but a clutch of his heart strings as a symphonic cord he might have written for his mentor at the conservatoire. Not a love at first sight, but at second sight. And thus, doubly multiplied. They listened to deafening astral music together and his hand touch her cheek. It was a display of his questing permission to seek possession of her and seeking to belong to her. Just there in her humming presence with shocked surprise, it seemed music had become a material substance. It complimented  her lythe presence. 

            They hesitated and then in unison moved closer together, her frail frame locking into his broad physique. Her higher pitch folding into the softer cello rumble of his gruff chuckles. They met across the distances. She felt a moisture in her eyes; and he felt a powered push in his stomach heading towards his groin. They were physical sensations, and sublime echoes bouncing off of each other. Their arms like maritime hawsers drawing in their hearts to some irresistible union. They neither wished to resist it. 

              “Nice, you could get back to meet,” she said with a helplessly banal note.

              “Got to see you again, haven’t I? For old-time’s sake.” Words did not do it in that moment. So, she hummed an old tune from their band, a tune he had composed early on. He joined in, stamping the drum rhythm with his foot. Neither knew what came next, after the greeting. Should they go their own diverse ways? Or live inseparably for ever?

              Joe, in his smart suit, sighed, “May I kiss you?”

              Millie pulled her head back to look into his eyes, unsure whether to say something amusing as if pretending to be shocked by his cheekiness. But then plunged her mouth passionately onto his, her cheap cotton dress riding up as she stretched herself against him. His arms slowly clutched her tighter and tighter till she felt she would slip between his ribs, and a jangle of guitar strings in her head sang like birds across the clear blue sky. His head told him to jot down chords, golden pitched chords in a harmonic sequence. But this sudden emphatic embrace spoke to him elsewhere in his body that it was the most important thing in the world for him, for her and perhaps it seemed for everyone. 

            But inevitably, this music of their bodies, of their harmonising skins, could not but push everything else away. Nothing, nothing whatever, should let this moment end. Two now-serious young adults building a solo for two, each winging the strings of the other.

              When the kiss eventually subsided a little, he said, “Are we in love again?”

              “Perhaps we have never lost it, wherever you’ve been, Joe.” And he murmured a possible agreement.

              “Well, I had been meaning to go on and see the old Gramps, but I won’t do that now. What shall we do?”

              “Be together,” she advised, and then chuckled.

              “Could do,” he said, joining the chuckle.

            She stepped back gazing at him, but said, “Got to go to a rehearsal. Then a gig. At the Black Horse.”

              “I’ll be there,” he promised as she walked away. He looked at her slender retreating back. It appeared as a plume of soft melody sounding with the rhythmic thrumming of her step. After about twenty yards, she looked back at him. His body swelled with attentive desire. And so did hers. Their hearts reached together and fused. The high clouds shone in the sun with a harmony that rang true to their mood.

            After their baby was born, some year and half later, there was a question whether she would go back to the band and keep organising their infrequent tours He offered to replace her on guitar – although, not her erotic dancing. The band all guffawed at that. But the time seemed right now for the disbanding after seven or eight years. So, Joe and Millie thought they had lost their musical minds in exchange for a baby. Not a bad swap of course, all in all.

            But then, it changed more than their musical habits. Joe went on and went ahead with his composing. Millie and her bass-guitar parted company, as the elegant unused thing hung limply on the sitting room wall of their small flat, and baby Sophie became the cacophony to attend to. Or so it seemed, but in a not-so-distant moment Millie recognised they were not in opposition as it might have seemed to the three of them.

            Joe’s passion for his music being pursued in the provincial city they had moved to left him rather isolated from both friends and colleagues. It was a radical change from Paris. It was not that he regretted the change as such, but the distance that even the electronic media could not fully bridge frustrated his progress. He needed links with the power sources for musical achievement in this country. And that meant having something to show. 

            Something did show up for him. In fact, he could make two opportunities The first was a significant amount of energetic organising to bring a music festival to this city, and to cautiously integrate the two traditions – aspiring popular music with the established avant-garde classical. Aside from that convergence was another innovation. It was his and Millie’s more homely discovery. His creative work entailed practising with the gruff sounds of his cello and Millie’s guitar. Both Millie and baby Sophie might sometimes sit in on his work, and gurgle together to inspire him. However, a moment that came to Millie after only a few occasions was that as Sophie became restless and threatened to interrupt with her screams, the sound of the cello starting up, revised Sophie’s attention. From a couple of months of age, she would attend to the throaty sound rather than to her own need, at least for a few moments. And, as time went on, she could attend for more and more of her Dad’s sonic groping for a completed phrase or chord.

            Millie invited a number of her friends from the ante-natal classes where she had originally met them, to bring the babies to their living-room-studio for similar experiences It varied of course, varied widely, but a proportion followed Sophie at about her age to focus on the sounds Joe made. They were offered the same guitar sounds which also drew Sophie’s tiny concentration. It was not just that it was a means of distracting the baby away from an accelerating writhing and eventual screaming, but it must have some sort of proto-meaning for her new ears. She seemed filled with the reverberating musical colour that filled the room just as Joe’s and Millie’s ears did too. 

            It gave them, Joe and Millie, food for thought. Together from time to time in the evenings they’d turn off the television and discuss their discovery. The very discovery felt like a melodic phrase that had been completed and could then be exploited as the core of a work piece.

            It was formalising a pattern that was needed, and Joe and Millie undertook it; or to be precise it was all three of them. What kind of musical sound would be effective with their Sophie? It was not just any old sound. White noise was a lot less effective. So, they could try out variations; the pitch, the rhythms, soft or strident harmonics. And what kinds of melody – predictably they might start with the forms of various lullabies. And all these combining variables gave calm or strength, blending into a thin mystical air or a whistling tinkle.

            Despite their thrill of a brilliant addition to their family and to the musical territory of their lives, with Millie and Sophie occupied at home, the finances plummeted and poverty beckoned. Time off from their two major pre-occupations was essential. Joe of course was intent on pursuing the important contribution their acoustic experiments could make. Millie for once was more practical. They sat together on the settee in their living room, surrounded by instruments and electronic gear, Millie’s head on his shoulder talking mildly about the need to get the shopping in. Joe listened in to the fantasies of where they could get to with music. Millie refused to go back to her work whilst Sophie was still a ‘part’ of her. Joe, protective of that unit of wife and child, was obviously a little distant but actually less practical. 

              Shortly help in the form of a sadness arrived. Millie’s mother was suddenly widowed. It was an upheaval – emotionally for all. In fact, Sophie felt it too, obviously, because Millie subsided in her mood for a while. Of course, Sophie was the very thing that helped to lift Millie’s mood from time to time, and they both could relax as a unit into Joe’s embrace. But the most significant outcome was that Millie’s Mum, Rose, came to live with them. What an upheaval to fit the family of four plus their musical studio into their one-bed flat. But Rose’s pension made all the difference and left Joe his space to continue his researches, despite the encroaching number of music lessons he took on. Rose thought he should get a regular job in a school, less intrusion in the home, and a valuable separation of work and researching.

              “Don’t you think she has a point, darling?” Millie said in bed one night.

              “Joe turned off the light but grunted his acknowledgment. “Don’t know, love. Do we need the money now. Your Mum helps out and we can go on like we are, can’t we. 

              “I know it is sort of arrangement. But she has to make her bedroom in the studio. She doesn’t complain, but I think she feels there is no place that’s hers properly. You know, private.”

              “I know, I know. You’ve said it before.”

              “Yeah, I said it before, a couple of times.” And she put her head on his shoulder in her characteristic way.

            He touched her hair and stroked it down over her shoulder. “Alright, a couple of times, then.” He added in a routine way, “We’ll have to think about it!”

              “You always say that when you don’t want to think about something.” She was kindly about the protest. In fact, she never protested, and this time was most unusual. And he looked down at her nestling against him.

              “It’s alright,” he said. “I’m thinking of contacting Prof Albright. You know the one who taught us in London.”

              “Well, p’raps you should. “Again, she said it mildly, almost as if she was not trying to push him at all. But such slight friction was so rare between them that he noticed. In fact, they never had arguments at all. She always listened carefully to what he said and called him a genius. Indeed, she believed he was. And he believed in her to hardly a lesser extent. He had learned the science of harmonics from Frances Albright for a term in the year when she was pregnant. And she had learned from him. Then relenting, “She’ll remember us, Joe. She was interested in our baby. Did you tell her when Sophie arrived?”

              “No,” he said stroking her. “I didn’t think.”   And once again, she tutted with slight disapproval. 

              “How’s the little Soph?” he asked, wondering if she had something worrying her about the baby. Or if she was upset about something.

              “No. Nothing.” She sat up and looked at him. “I was just…” but she tailed off deciding to retreat from her irritation. It was not appropriate, she told herself. Not ever. 

            In fact, Frances Albright was pleased to see them. They both went to see her together, and with Sophie, to show her. But what they really went to show, was the digital USB stick with their music on it. Frances had been the one to inspire Joe about harmonics, and how researching the sounds made new evocations in the ears. They explained that the inspiration was their electronic exploration of the harmonic partials as they were called that could be discerned in the baby’s crying. In an emotional sense those complex harmonics could draw blood. Their recordings showed how those complexes could be repeated in an inverted way with the tones of a guitar and a cello, and other string instruments. Frances listened to their recorded recital with fascination. Then the electronic manipulation of wind instruments could replicate some of the timbre of Sophie’s cries. That, combined with the reciprocated complexes of guitar and cello, created a kind of dialogue evoking motherhood with babyhood.

              “Well, you young people have got yourselves something.” She made considerable play in complementing her charming students. They were looking for something from her, and they touched on a wish that she wanted to give them something. 

              “We wanted to know if you think it could be built up into concert performance level?” said Joe.

              “A kinda ‘baby concerto’,” said Millie. They all laughed.

              “Why not,” Frances said, spreading her hands as if she was opening the world to their ideas. Joe and Millie smiled with a hopeful satisfaction. “Modern music, and with synthetic electronic back-up, is of interest to many composers. And audiences.”

              “I hoped I could do the composition. Myself,” Joe put in.

              “Yes, you were the best in that class. I remember. I’m sure you could do it. Perhaps, a bit more coaching on the paper notation for such complex combinations of instrument and manipulated amplifier. I think I know exactly the person. Not in England, I am afraid; in Germany.”

              “And could he get an ensemble together? I think that’s what we lack. We don’t have the connections for that.”

              “Well, you probably do have contacts. There were a few you met in that class.” 

            And Joe nodded, “I didn’t really keep up with any of those friends. Going to Paris, and the baby, you know and all that,” and he gestured that they had been fully occupied.

            Frances understood, “I’m sure my friend, Heinrich, in Germany would have contacts. It is just a question of interesting him in what you have done.” She looked as though she was thinking how that might be done. “I will see him next weekend actually, and sound him out.”

            Joe began to seem a little restless. Millie looked towards him as if encouraging. “Professor Albright, there is a related question. We haven’t got much money and I wondered if you thought there might be a bit of income from this?”

            She looked thoughtful at this new question, “You know as well as I do that experimental music is not necessarily for fortune-hunters. But if it takes off, it could make you for life.” He was pleased and smiled at the thought of providing well for his baby and his wife, and indeed for his mother-in-law. Frances remained thoughtful. I don’t know if there is any financial help from Heinrich. But…” she hesitated, as if not sure how much to say to this eager and needy couple. She seemed to decide to tell them what was in her mind. “ I’m not sure, so don’t get your hopes up, but the School here in London does support some young composers a little. I could put your project up for a grant. I would speak for it, as I think it is an interesting idea, and you have developed it very well so far.”

            “Despite her warning, Joe and Millie did both look hopeful. And momentarily, Sophie stirred in her carry-cot on the floor at Millie’s feet. They all chuckled at the thought that she was joining in the uplift in the conversation. Millie picked her up and held her to her breast as she settled. Then Frances held out her arms to hold the baby too. When she had the six-month old in her arms, Sophie looked around, aware it seemed, that she was meeting a stranger. She gurgled in the direction of her mother. And Frances tactfully handed her back.

            It turned out – no surprise – that Frances and Heinrich knew each other well, intimately actually. So, a kind of melody hummed across the continent to which both Joe and Millie listened. A certain meagre financial contribution came their way. 

            But it was not just the money The important resonance was the encouragement that echoed inside them from a grant however meagre. Nevertheless, the complex electronic comparisons and the ear-sensed harmonies were challenging. Moreover, the pattern of harmonic partials in Sophie’s cries, did not at all resemble the pattern the electronics showed up in either the guitar or the cello – nor the piccolo. However, the intervals between the dominant partials could be replicated between the instruments, in many cases interestingly, and this was the importance they discovered together, that the isolation of the major harmonics, through electronic manipulation, sweetened the wailing into a softened cry of mourning. It held the baby’s characteristic screaming as if through, shall we say, a pillow, or as if, say, cotton wool in the ears, which envelopes one in an intrigued curiosity drawing the listener forward into the sound.

            More than this morphology of the baby’s sounds in musical instruments, Joe and Millie went further: “You, know, Millie, I think we could go further with this. I’m thinking that we can have two babies with the two patterns of harmonics and…” He was searching for the words to capture what he wanted to say.

              “I know what you mean,” she said, almost butting in as if she had been thinking the same thought.

            “Yes, a kind of duet for screaming,” he laughed, and she smiled,

            She said, “A duet for screamers. But I thought you might be going to say something else”, she added. “I was wondering about the patterns of partials in a baby’s scream and the pattern in a mother’s lullabies. What about that?”

            He looked at her, and then pointed a finger at her and said, “Mrs Brilliant’, you are brilliant, aren’t you.” He smiled. “Aren’t I lucky having you. You should have been the one to go to the conservatoire.” They felt happy together.

            “OK, let’s look at the patterns if I sing Hush-a-bye-baby. I’ll sing it softly. Wind up your electronics, Joe.” And so they went to work, interlacing baby with mummy’s voice. They both knew they could find so much else to bring together in harmonic intervals – all those birdsongs, traffic noise, rhythmic footsteps, running taps and so on. And indeed, locking all the electronic versions together with Sophie’s cries had a calming effect on the little baby. She began to hesitate and her cries diminished as the electronic ‘music’ from her past cries took over the airwaves of their flat.

            Heinrich Rittenberger was available as a mentor for the stealthily intruding electronic arm of classical music. So, Joe spent their modest grant on trips to Hanover. 

            Although he and Millie did go together with Sophie on the first occasion, it was not a success. The nature of the trip was to learn, explore and innovate and generally take up residence in the dark studios of computer sound. But, despite Millie’s avowed ‘brilliance’, she and Sophie were inseparable. So, Joe was on his own. He didn’t mind so much because the fascination was one hundred percent. But Millie was very reserved about committing herself to a positive reaction, and determined to stay home in future, and remain a Mum for the while.

            On one occasion, when Joe got back late from the airport, and Millie and Sophie inseparably met him and drove him back home, she was quiet. Her welcome was as usual. But significantly Joe, in his ever-present feeling for her, knew something had changed. It was not a familiar occurrence, and they were both unpractised at managing tensions between them. Tensions remained determinedly ignored even if noticed. Nevertheless, the quietness was heavily palpable when at home. And so, as bedtime for Sophie approached she became restless too, and cried a little. 

            Usually Rose as Millie’s mother, following on Sophie’s heels to her own bed, would comment what a soothing noise Sophie’s gurgles were. And how they could even help Rose to sleep. They knew it was Rose’s soothing too. Those disparate sounds from both of them would waft like a fragrant mist to encompass the whole space of the room. But now, in this moment, what might be penetrating their apartment during this evening was far from fragrant. And best not to touch it as if it was potentially infected with a serious bug. It was so unusual to have a stilted conversation over their meal together that they were both at a loss. Eventually Millie said, “You haven’t said a word about the trip this time.”

            He felt it almost as an accusation rather than her usual interest in him and in their lifetime project together. “There was nothing unusual. Heinrich is always so hospitable. Sometimes I think he is a bit jealous of our new ideas. He seemed to think we had endless ideas.” Joe was relaxing now and sat back with his fork resting on his plate. “He was a bit impatient with the recording I played of that rustling little oak tree we’ve got at the back of the house.” He waved vaguely towards the kitchen window. “He thinks you’re a bit of a genius with your ideas and how that matched with the air coming out of a balloon. I think you are a bit of genius too, don’t I?”

            She smiled and then they heard Sophie stirring in the cot, so Millie went to attend as the loyal maternal servant. He sat turned in his chair watching as the two rapped each other in comfort and adulating gazes.

            When Sophie had supped to her content, and had been relaxed back in the cot, Millie sat to finish her meal. “You know what happened,” she asked invitingly, and of course he shook his head, indicating inquiring interest. “When you left at the airport last week and we waved goodbye.… Well, it must have been about the fifth or sixth time you have gone, I suddenly felt different. I wondered… you know… wondered if you were pleased to be away from us,” and she glanced at the cot. “You know; is it a bit boring now? Sophie’s nearly nine months, isn’t she, and the days are all the same. You go off to your teaching at the school for a couple of days, and I do washing-up,” she said exaggeratedly. Joe turned toward her and put his hand on her arm. But she lifted the fork as if to say ‘stop’, she must finish what she had to say. “You know what hit me in the back of the head?” He looked at her, a puzzled stare. “I had a sudden remembrance. I was sitting alone on a bus and you should have sat next to me. But didn’t.” He opened his mouth to say something. But then couldn’t think of what to say. “I’ve often remembered that moment on the school bus and you forgot me and sat next your football friends.” There, she had said what was on here mind. She felt ashamed.

            He couldn’t reassure her as he did enjoy his trips to see Heinrich and push his career forward. But of course, it was their career. He looked over at Sophie’s cot. The baby was getting in the way. Just as her mother Rose seemed to when she moved in.

            “I’ll cancel the next trip, Millie. Perhaps we need time together.” 

            “There’s plenty of time together, isn’t there?” She looked at him. “I don’t know if I am looking for something, or if I’m telling you off.”

            “We’ll go away somewhere. Take Sophie to the seaside. See what she thinks of the seagulls crying and the waves breaking.”

              Millie smiled again, poked the fork as if stabbing his hand as it lay on her arm, but laughing at what she was doing, she spared his hand. “I’m  trying to wake you up to something. And I don’t know what.”

               “I don’t know what, either.” They both chuckled, as if some hurdle had been surmounted. “You don’t let me forget that you’re the brilliant one,” he said lightly as if their tension didn’t matter.

              “Never,” she said equally lightly, as if it did matter.

              “Let’s find somewhere to go to be together. On holiday.”

              She agreed and they both were happy to be back on good terms, but both knew it had not completely answered the problem.

            And not surprisingly neither of them did anything about finding a place to take the baby to celebrate everything they had together, celebrate being a threesome.

              It was perhaps a couple of months later that he received a letter. Very official. In fact, they had been sitting on the old settee watching television with Millie’s Mum. There was an announcement about the Eurovision contest. They were both interested in popular music and harked back to their days with the old band, though they had now moved on towards the classical genre. But then Millie remarked on the name of the contest. “Isn’t it strange that a music contest is called a ‘vision’?”

              Her Mum began to chide her that it was because it was on tele-vision. Though that was obvious, they both nodded towards her wisdom. And Joe jumped in, “OK. What we’ll do is start up a contest, on European television, of classical music, and we’ll call it Euromusic. What do you think?” Millie and her Mum nodded wisely, smiling to each other at Joe’s enthusiasm. “And we’ll call the trophies, Sophies. OK” They all laughed.

              “That’s not a bad idea,” Sophie said seriously. I could get it organised, while you go and do your creative stuff in Germany. But both thought of Millie still being the figure in the shadows behind the idols. But something moved forwards. Only a couple of days later came Joe’s letter, awarding him this year’s Global Award for Modern Music, never previously won by a British musician. Clearly, it was the outcome of the musical ‘shows’ in Germany which Heinrich had put on. It displayed Joe and Millie’s achievement.

              He showed her the letter at lunchtime before he went to teach at the school. She looked at it and then at him with that mixture on her face of feeling overawed at his success, and once again, left reclining alone on the empty school bus.

              “That’s it,” he said in a determined voice, responding to her dismayed applauding of him. “I will write back, and to Heinrich.” He put the letter firmly on the table and clamped the palm of his hand on it. “I’ll refuse it unless they agree to make it a joint award to both of us, Millie.” She had been listening to the thump of his hand on the paper and the table and wondering about its musicality. She looked up at him, concerned if he was serious or just being amusing.

              He assured her that he meant it, and she silently thought that they would not like him applying a condition, so he’d lose it. But in a sense, he was being absolutely fair to insist on sharing it together. And so she said, “OK, Joe. Making music is a collaboration, isn’t it. So perhaps winning an award can be too.”

              “Good,” he said, “I’ll put that in the letter.”

            The next time Joe went to Germany, his long-delayed trip, she took him to the airport. It was a tense drive together. Sophie remained quiet, asleep in her chair on the back seat. When they arrived, he watched Millie re-arrange the seat in the front for the trip back. When she had done, she turned to address her goodbyes to him. She was aware of how she had made him wait. 

              “Sorry, Joe. I have to get her settled first. Then,” and she chuckled at him, “I’m all yours.” And she giggled again, “For a moment.”

              “I know,” he said, bravely, “Don’t worry. No worries at all.”

            She looked at him quizzically as he reassured her so blandly. And then with a bid for humour. “I know it is hard to share me.” 

            He smiled at her and shrugged his shoulders without denying the disguised rebuke. “You’re worth it. Even to share.”

            She went in to hug him and buried her face in his shoulder. “I know the baby comes between us.”

            “No, no,” he spluttered. “Not at all. I have been thinking,” he said generously, “we must start thinking about the next one.”

            “Oh no, Joe.” She said, feeling exhausted at the thought.

            “OK, we can talk about it when I get back. But don’t think I resent our little Sophie.”

            “Of course, you don’t,” she said reassuringly, but not yet convinced. And they parted.

            “Don’t forget to watch out for another letter from those Awards people,” he told her as a parting shot, “see what they reply.” She nodded and got back in the driving seat, checked Sophie. And drove back to the lonely home and her aimless mother.

            He knew Milllie was not reassured. So, as he waited in the departure lounge for his plane to Germany with nothing else he could think about after that farewell, he sent her a short message to her phone, avowing his dedication to her and to Sophie, and that even Sophie’s interruptions were beautiful to behold.

            She replied with one word, ‘Same’. When he arrived at the airport in Germany, he rang her, as usual. But she did not answer. And again, when he got to his hotel. So unusual! So he asked, by messenger how she was, and explicitly Sophie his beautiful baby. ‘We’re fine’ came the reply. What more could he do but wait for her to resume their proper, usual connection. And this happened after two days – by messenger: ‘Have spent half a day at the hospital with Sophie’. 

            Such brevity could not have alarmed him more. So he sent back: ‘Coming back immediately’. He told Heinrich, with apologies and got the taxi to the airport While waiting there he tried to ring. So he sent a message when his plane would arrive. But to his dismay when he emerged into the arrivals area of the airport she was not there. 

            Something was seriously up. This time, she answered him. “OK, OK, I’ll come and get you” and the click of the phone. So, he had perhaps 30 or 40 minutes to wait. There was nothing to think about except to wonder – or was it panic – about how little Sophie was. She seemed too young to be ill. It was about an hour later the car arrived. He looked in the back at Sophie sleeping there in her carry-cot Then he got in the passenger seat, leant across to give Millie the obligatory peck on the cheek, as she started the engine and slowly moved forward.

            They never had these kinds of silent rows between them. They never had rows, only sensible disagreements they could talk about. “Tell me, Millie. We’re in trouble, aren’t we?”

            “Not really,” but she slowed the car and came to a stop by the side of the road, as if she wanted to discuss something. But she stared out of her side window as if he was not there.

              “You’re not really giving me a chance,” he found himself saying. “I mean, how is Sophie. Really. She looks OK in the back there, and she’s sleeping peacefully.” It was a questioning tone in his voice.

              “No, nothing wrong with her. I mean the doctors wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I think they thought I was fussing too much.” And she fell silent again, waiting for him to do the work.

              “What’s wrong, love?” Although by now there was less love and more irritation at the way she was holding out on him.

              “Joe,” she started, and turned then to face him with an expression of sorrow and apology on her face. “It’s not Sophie. It’s me.” She looked exhausted and worn down. He felt a sudden pulse somewhere in his chest.

              “I know,” he said, and felt a surge of compassion and anxiety. His mind went berserk – was she going to tell him about an affair? Or what? What? But he took hold of her hand and drew it away from the steering wheel of the car. He pulled it, against her partial resistance. to his lips and kissed it. He held it there. And waited.

              “It’s me,” she said at last. And after a pause, “I couldn’t bear you going way again.” And another long pause, “It’s as if we’re no use to you anymore, me and Sophie.”

              “Course you are. Beautiful Millie. And beautiful Sophie.”

              “Shut up,” she said a little fiercely. “I know we mean something to you, but… I  can’t help feeling we’ve lost you. You’ve gone, and we’re not in your heart anymore.” She looked desperate. “I know I’m going crazy, Joe.” And she paused again. “And so, how can you want us? If I am crazy like this?”

              He thought a moment, so unused to this kind of eruption – as of course she was unused to it too. “Well, perhaps if I do still want you when your crazy, I must be crazy too. Then we’re both crazy and it’s alright?” And he kissed the back of her hand again and put it against his stubbly cheek.

              “Don’t make fun of it, Joe,” she said softly, knowing in a way what she was putting him through. “I wasn’t going to say this to you. I told myself not to ask you. But I can’t help it now. I have to ask you; is there someone over there, in Germany. Is it that mentor woman, Frances? Or some German woman who has fallen in love with you. Or some blonde prostitute on the street, you see, Joe,” and she stopped as tears began to come into her eyes, and she blinked them back, “you see how crazy I’ve become.”

              “No, Millie, of course…” and she put her hand against his lips to stop his denials.

              “Of course, there isn’t anyone. I know, almost for certain there isn’t anyone. But… but I can’t help myself when I’m on my own.” Then he put his arm around her, and she leaned her body over to his, her head on his shoulder. Her sobs came. “I’m crazy, Joe, aren’t I?” She mumbled, almost to herself.

              “No, love, I’ve neglected you.” He pressed his lips to the top of head. He felt her hair all over his face. “I guess, I didn’t want to know about you for the last little while. Even though I did, didn’t I?”

              She mumbled again as if talking to herself, “Thank you. I shouldn’t have asked you all that. It wasn’t fair.” He squeezed her shoulders towards him, and she looked up into his face, and slowly they kissed, as they should have done when they had met twenty minutes before. “I’m sorry. Everything is better when I’m with you.” Her sobs were drying up. “Joe,” she looked earnestly into his face again, “I hated you. I really did. I wanted to put my knee on your balls and crush them into the bed till they were just a mess of blood and your cum. I wanted to go and find another bloke to screw me silly. I wanted to be raped and murdered by some ghastly criminal. You see?” she continued to look earnestly at him. To see the effect of her confession.

              He had nothing to say. He just squeezed her to him as best he could in the car seats. He thought of his anxious meandering thoughts in the plane as he came back. And he decided to state them to Millie. “Look,” he said staring earnestly back into her face, “You and I are a team We’re a team to make us happy, to make you happy, and to make me happy. Then second, we are a team that works together to look after our perfect Sophie. There she is quiet and sleeping in this dark night. And even more we are a team, a team of three with her, to make our project together, about all our sounds and putting them into one great music ensemble, you and me and our Sophie and her cries.” He stopped and looked at Millie, and just as he left a silence at that moment, Sophie stirred and made some smacking sounds with her lips. They both laughed gently. “See, she knows we are all part of the team.”

              “Yes, part of the team. That’s us. Now I’m going to get us home.” And she started the engine again. His arm remained around her shoulders. 

              After a while, he said, “Did your mother know how bad things were?”

              “Oh, Mum. She is leaving. She found a boyfriend!”

              “What. A boyfriend. But she’s getting on for being sixty!”

              “Yep. But age doesn’t stop sex dictating your life. They met a few weeks ago. She moved in with him, yesterday.”

              “Oh, god. You have been abandoned.”

              “Hmm,” she grunted as if rueful that her life had nearly collapsed.

              “And was Sophie ill. What was wrong with her?”

              “Oh, I don’t know. She was crying a lot. Perhaps it was because I was crying a lot. After Mum was going.”

              “It has been difficult for you, hasn’t it.”

              “And,” said matter-of-factly, “a letter came. They don’t want our award to go to both of us. So it is going to someone else.”

              “Ah,” he put his free hand to his brow. “Well, that’s hardly the biggest worry at this moment, is it.” She smiled and concentrated on driving them through the dark evening.

              “I won’t go away again, Millie.”

              “Yes, you will. It is our project. So, we’ll all come too.” He didn’t reply. “Even if Sophie and I have to sit eating strudel all day and night in a café.”

              He smiled, “I see.”

            After they got back, and he unpacked, and she settled Sophie into her cot, and they sat back with a small sip of something relaxing, they looked at each other in silence.

              “I should not have said all that stuff to you, Joe. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you with those things I wanted to do to you. I’m sorry.”

              “Yes, you should tell me, Millie. That is not what you mean really; I think you mean you should not have those thoughts at all. It is OK for you to tell me. Because I know there is another Millie in there, beautiful Millie. My beautiful Millie…. And Millie wants to be in the project. I keep you out, don’t I? That bloody global award keeps you out, doesn’t it?””

              She interrupted him, “I’m not beautiful…. I’m a nothing. But I know Millie is my project.”

              “OK, I’ll remember that every time I see your beautiful body. You know, a long time ago, I think soon after we left school, we were all playing tennis with friends, and we were playing doubles with some others. I said to you in the middle of a game that seeing your body moving around so beautifully, I couldn’t think of anything else but picking you up and rushing you off to throw you on your bed at home and have passionate sex. And you looked at me and said seriously you’d never stop me. Shall we go to bed….?”

            She looked down at her foot in her slipper and quietly said, “Since I am revealing all to you, Joe, there is another thing I should not be saying to you. I was so tangled up in my mind, I really thought I needed to suggest something. It is quite mad. Or perhaps it isn’t. You tell me. I thought that perhaps we should both go off and have affairs with others.” She looked up anxiously at him “You know we’ve both been protected from being single, ever since we were sixteen. We have protected each other – from the adolescent sex market. Perhaps we should throw ourselves into it before it is too late. We might do some growing up that we need to do. I might grow up.”

            Joe looked at her, at his beauty. Did she want her freedom? Whyever? “I have never” he started, “never thought of anything like that. I don’t care about not being grown up, if that’s what I am. Or if that’s what you are.”  He looked saddened and serious. 

            “I might be able to let you go off again. Be a gentleman with your own life. Winning your own awards.”

            “What if you found someone who was actually handsomer, and richer, and cleverer, and better at sex.”

              She thought carefully, “How could I find anyone handsomer, or, er cleverer or better at sex? Of course, richer, yes.” She smiled. “I love you, Joe; and of course, I’d come back to you.” She sounded protesting as if he had not understood. 

              “Of course, I understand what you mean. You frighten me.”

              “No, I am the frightened one.”

              “Let’s not frighten each other, Millie. Of course, there are beautiful women, there are some everywhere. And, yes, sometimes I compare them with you. And I wonder what they’d be like in bed. But it is just sex, Millie. And you, well, I love. Passionately. Beyond passion. And it has stayed like that for eleven years now.” He fell silent. She did not return the passionate claims he was making. “Of course, if that’s your plan, I’ll think about it.”

              “No, it is not a plan. Just a secret thought that I did not want to be secret from you.”

              He was about to add something, “But….” But he decided to end it there.

              “Let’s go to bed,” she said, “together.”.

              “And you could make some noises. And I could take them and fiddle around electronically and take them to Frances Albright.”

              Millie guffawed and gave him a mock slap to the face, “Together – us,” she said, with emphasis. “It’s Heinrich, too. We need to visit him. Together – us.”
 

***** 

 

** 2   Being followed

She liked to wear leather trousers because it made men look when she walked down the street. She would sometimes smile at them, and they usually smiled back. Of course, her fantasy was to walk down the street stark naked and to see what smiles she got then. She never made that real. Until one day….

She was called Bett (short for Bethanie) and one day she had been walking home from work, this time soberly dressed, and she had a distinct sense of being followed. She stopped and half turned to watch who passed. The street was quite crowded, the shops were still open. A number of people passed as she stood aside. One was a nice-looking young man in a grey polo-neck sweater with a physique that looked muscular. She hoped it might have been him who had given her that sense. He did not look as he passed her.

Cheekily, because she had a cheeky personality, she decided to follow him. And she kept only half-a-dozen paces behind. She didn’t mind if he noticed. After a short distance he stopped in front of a lingerie shop as if looking for something to buy. She stopped beside him. He said, without looking at her, “Are you looking for something nice?” His skin was black, and the whites of his eyes shone with interest. His name was Obi.

            She did not tell him she was standing next to something nice. Instead, “Will you buy me something,” she cheekily grinned.

            “That’s what my girlfriend said,” he replied, also with a grin, but not looking at her.

            “Oh, you’ve got a girlfriend? Lucky girl,” she said admiringly. “Go on, buy me something, too.” And she put out her hand to hold his arm by the elbow. The wool of the sweater felt good quality. He gently pulled his arm away.

            Then he turned to her. “Buy you something? OK. But only if you take off your blouse and show me your bra,” He smiled challengingly at her.

            She retorted immediately, “I don’t have one on.”

            “All the better,” he chuckled. So she undid the buttons of her blouse and flashed her naked breasts at him quickly. She slowly did up the buttons. Looking down at them as if indifferent to his reaction. “I said, take it off.”

            “But,” she replied quickly, “only to show you my bra. You will have to buy me one first.” They both laughed, enjoying the moment. But, it was exactly at that moment the girlfriend turned up. “Trouble,” he muttered inaudibly to Bett. 

            She was frowning and looked cross. Her name was Eesha (but she preferred to be called Esther). “I saw that.” They were all silent and serious.

            Bett said, “He’s going to buy me a bra.”

            Obi was uncomfortable but tried to be casual, “It was just a joke, Esther, sweetie.”

            “What,” Bett spluttered, “a joke?” She imitated Esther’s frown and tried to look cross. “After what I’ve just done for you.” But she couldn’t keep her frown going and burst into laughter. They both laughed. Esther was speechless her brown skin puckering round her mouth and her large and beautiful eyes raging fire, and so he put his hands on her shoulders and drew her forwards to kiss her on the lips. She did not resist, but the expression on her face had not changed. She did not know whether to sweep grandly away never to speak to him again, or whether to march him into the shop as if he were a possession. She did the latter. Bett stood outside the window watching Obi chose a bra, and Esther going to the privacy of the fitting room to try it on.

When they came out, Bett was nowhere to be seen.

 As they walked away, Bett hiding in the shop next door pretended to buy their bakeries but watching the couple through the window and amongst the croissants. Cautiously, she emerged and began to follow, at a discrete distance. Nevertheless, Obi glanced behind occasionally. Eventually, she waved at him – finding him irresistible. He stopped, and Esther looked too. Esther then pulled him away by the hand. But instead, he began to saunter back. As he did so, Bett prepared herself, and when a few yards away she wrenched up her blouse, flashing at him again. Passers-by stared. He put out his hand to touch one of the offered fruits. She put up her face and pouted her lips for a kiss. As he obliged by pressing his lips to hers, her breasts pressed against his clothing which felt rough but soft and welcoming. At that moment Esther walloped him from behind with the bag of brassieres she had been swinging by her side. It caught him on the back of the head and his mouth crashed into Bett’s face. They both turned to stare at Esther who said, sarcastically, “Oh, sorry!

They looked like a dramatic trio on stage, as Obi put his arm around Bett’s waist, Her naked headlights shone at Esther and the ugliest spite raging in her face. Obi had changed sides. Bett looked up at him, and with a sweet smile, said, “Buy me a nice bra too. Make me happy.”

            Obi was staring at Esther’s lasering him with hate, and didn’t find it difficult to choose between them, “OK,” he said. And Bett placed her hand on his crutch with a wickedly triumphant look at Esther. The couple then walked back to the lingerie shop. Bett with a proud naked front that had conquered her man, and he with a stirring feeling where her hand was. The passers-by might have thought it was some outrageous porn film being made with a concealed camera somewhere.

            The two shop assistants were disconcerted with the confrontation with Bett’s demonstrated nudity. One of girls went pink, and the other pale. A customer already there decided to abandon her errand and left the shop quickly. Bett continued to smile calmly. Everyone else’s embarrassment seemed to substitute for any of her own. She almost offered her breasts to the assistants, but just said, “Measure me, my dears.” One of the assistants came around the counter with a tape and fumbled. The touch felt gentle and nice to Bett. At the same time. she could feel in her hand that Obi’s interest in her was growing. He was continuously chuckling.

            The simpering girl handed Bett a catalogue and pointed out a few more glamorous products. She chose one; the most expensive. The girl asked if she wished to try it on and pointed to the changing room. Bett started to move in the direction, and said, “Come on,” to Obi. They disappeared, pulling the curtain across. The shop assistants just stood and stared, and listened to the noises emanating from the cubicle. Esther was staring through the window and bashing it with her angry fist as if she might smash the unbreakable glass. 

               When they emerged from behind the curtain, Obi was zipping himself up, and Bett had buttoned her blouse up. She dropped the bra on the counter and said, “No thanks,” and with a knowing look, “I did try it!”
 

***** 

 

** 3    Being in the right

             

It was after I stopped the relationship going on because of his abuse, that something new happened to me. That old relationship was finished, and I had known it for some time. In fact, I was startled he, that is Brogan, began very soon to dominate me with his issues and worries. OK, so we were partners, but that should make us equals. In sex too it was always on his terms, when he wanted it, what positions, you know. We had been willing to accommodate each other. I thought we were willing. It was soon after I became thirty, when of course I was thinking of settling down, and, you know…. a family and so on. He was not the best boyfriend I had had, but you can’t go back through the selection of them and just pick out the best one for the future. One just has to go on. What’s over is over; what’s to come is to come which means starting in the present. So I assumed it would be him. We did have lots of good things going. Mostly it was being able to talk to each other about what was going on, and that included what was going on between us. We had not been at university together, but we had both studied humanities, me literature (English and Spanish), he psychology and counselling. He had been two years older than me, like my older brother (damn him), and Brogan had eventually gone into finance – nice and lucrative; we could have been quite affluent. In contrast, I felt I had been marking time and was a secretary in a doctor’s practice; not so lucrative. But I realise now I was awaiting the urge forwards to a family. Brogan would have been very suitable for that.

              I think the big problem was that I couldn’t adjust to the idea of being a mum and at the same time having a life as a sex partner that put him always first. But actually, equally big was the problem that there was no discussion of sex as part of the family. He had no conception of babies in his life, or in mine. That was not the abuse; his abuse was that he hurt me. When I say we talked things over together, we were not always congenial and calm. We could get infuriated, both of us. But as time went on his furies led to physical assault, pushing and pulling, throwing me to the ground and eventually good hard punches, once to my face with the loss of a tooth. I knew it couldn’t go on. I joined #metoo, and also the discussion forum on the sfw (SafetyForWomen) website. The thing that really put me into action was the advice I got from those and other friends and relations. He had explained that he wanted to try something. His erections are not always as stiff as they could be and he thought that something he had thought up might be interesting. He wanted to put my nipple in the crack by the hinge of the door, and slowly shut the door. It scared me, but I thought it best to tell him I admired his imagination.

            It was something that was discussed quite a bit on those websites and got onto social media and sent around. I did feel lots of support, but of course the support wasn’t present at home when he was actually thinking about this kind of torture. Because I talked about how he had tried to force it on me, there was lots of interest. He described to me what he might do and in fact, if he described it, he then did get a better erection and did a better job. I think it was because he had described it. What really frightened me was that he even thought of doing it to me. I couldn’t believe any more that he even liked me.

            So I posted it up on several  sites. On the whole I had originally thought him a reasonably decent bloke but I didn’t mind saying what he had actually proposed doing. It was because they thought he was trying to force me to do it that it became so important for the others. I did actually say I had prevented it in the end. I am sure that some others don’t manage to prevent such things. I got such a lot of support. And others told about similar things – though not exactly the same. He does have quite a lot of interest in nipples and I do have large and prominent ones. All this seems rather intimate to write down, but it seems necessary to get it out, as it were, and to tell what has happened to me.

            Guys tell me I am attractive, and I have lots of full red hair. I have quite a strong personality. Though I have quite large nipples as I have said, it doesn’t mean I am very busty, and in fact I am quite slim. In fact, one bloke in my past had put his arm right around my back and across my chest without pressing on my tits, just to show how slim I am. I think he meant I should have had bigger ones. He was often quite rude to me. While I am on about this, another guy wanted to sleep all night on top of me. You, know – how uncomfortable! Why would he want to do that? I told him I wasn’t a mattress. He said I was better than a mattress – was that a compliment? Well, I ask you….

              So I was going to tell you something different. It was a bloke, Col (his surname was Nicol, right). We were in bed and we were beginning to be romantic – that means getting physical. He said he liked it if I would squeeze his balls gently. I wasn’t too keen. It seemed so silly. But I did, quite gently, and it got him going. So I told him about Brogan who wanted to shut a nipple in the door. He laughed. He asked if he could do it to me, and I said of course I would not let him. I was quite shocked he couldn’t see it upset me. I was a bit angry, and I told him I’d shut his balls in the door. He laughed again. But then we had good sex. It was the next time we went to bed, he said he had been thinking about me – and I liked that. But – then it came. He thought I was kinky. He thought I was the one who liked talking about the nipple in the door. Well, I ask you….? It wasn’t me that had thought it up. I was the one who had to be careful and dump the bloke, wasn’t I? And now I was being accused of being kinky. Col was thinking I wanted to do these things and he’d like to play with me if I did. I told him off for being so insulting to me. Then he sulked and went home.

              But then life gets like that. I get the blame. When I did get married and we had children in the end, I did find someone decent. He was clean and straight. I think he did love me. At least at first. And we had lovely children. But, you know, children aren’t lovely all the time. That’s natural, right. And sometimes one has to be a bit firm with them. It protects them from getting into danger. I remember the little boy, before he could walk, he crawled too near the electric heater. I had to shout, quite suddenly at him, in case he burned his fingers. The little mite did learn his lessen and drew back from the fire and started crying. All very natural, wasn’t it. But Roger, my husband then, came in from the kitchen where he was cooking, and told me not to shout so loud at the kids. Why would he do that? He didn’t know what the danger was. He said I had made the little one cry. He said it was me that had done it!

              I mention that because it was the first time I had wondered if I could go on being married to someone like that. 

              After our second child, a little girl, things got really bad between Roger and me. He was always telling me off for what I should be doing with the baby. I breastfed her for a long time. Little Lily loved it. But eventually, she needed more and more. One day, she bit me. You know - she bit her mother! I had been breastfeeding for nearly two years, I think it was. And she bit me. I shouted at her and put her down. Then she cried and screamed. Roger told me not to make a fuss. I ask you? What a response! Why not make a fuss? He picked her up, and she calmed down immediately. What are they trying to do to me. I asked Roger that, but he didn’t reply. So later, I asked him again why I was getting all the blame when it was little Lily who had bitten her mother. Can you imagine? - he said it wasn’t quite like that. But it was.

              That was only a couple of months before he decided to walk out on us. He just went! My mother said I should not be so indignant. But she wouldn’t explain what she meant. Well, I decided the children shouldn’t see a father like that. Well, should they?

              When they were growing up a bit I got myself together and decided to join things. I joined the local Labour Party. It was a great thing to do. After all, the Labour Party stands for looking after each other; not like the other lot that stands for looking down on people. I know which side I am on. 

              And after the turmoil and hard work of getting the custody and control of my children, I know I was then looked down on by Roger. He seemed to think I was pig-shit. He was the one who had wanted me, and had been proud of the kids – he said. He said! And then it was he that did the dirty on me, wasn’t it – just left one day. So, I think there is a lot to fight for if an abandoned wife with two darling kids is something to be disgusted with, there’s a lot to put right.

              It was after the little kids started at school, he made a bit of protest at having to pay for them. But then he couldn’t just let them go to an ordinary school. I found the best one I could find. The kids loved it, they really did. It was a bit of a drive to get them there. But worth it. There were good people there. I know I’ve got a bit of an ordinary accent, but I come from a decent family, hard-working, patriotic and…. well, decent, as I say. But Roger didn’t think the school worth it – because he had to pay. He was already expecting another child. Well, he couldn’t expect us to take that into account. So I got the best for them. To cut a story short, I met a bloke. He took his boy to the school sometimes and we’d chat, and he obviously liked me, and was sympathetic as I told him all about Roger, and what he’d done to us. The man was called Mannie. He was a banker, or something. He liked me, and he told me all about the dreadful marriage he’d got. So I was sympathetic to him as well. 

            But he kept on telling me the same kind of stories. Well the stories, they were like how she spent all the money he made, and then complained she had to make up for him not loving her enough. She wanted more love, she’d tell him. Can you imagine? He was so generous, and she always wanted more. I asked him in the end why he put up with it. But he just replied  - what else could he do, every time. But it seemed obvious. He should just get away, shouldn’t he? Keep control of the money and live somewhere else. He asked if he could come around and see me sometimes. He seemed such a sad man. So he came sometimes. And then I suggested we all go away in the summer together, me and my two, and him and his boy. He tried to arrange it, but his cow of a wife wouldn’t let him take their boy. I ask you – how mean can you get?

            So we did go away. But not his boy. Mannie loved Tenerife, he said. I had never been of course. I can hardly spell it. But it was splendid. We stayed in the best hotel there; and went to the best restaurants. It must have cost him a bomb. But he was a banker or something so he could do it. The kids splashed in the hotel swimming pool all day. We didn’t even need to go to the beach. He got a bit impatient with the kids – with mine. I thought it must be because he missed his own boy. Actually, his boy would have loved it too. How mean could Mannie’s wife get! Fancy stopping the boy from having all that. Manny was great at sex, though. No kinks, just straightforward.

            But afterwards something happened. I didn’t understand it. But we had got on well when we met at the school. It was why we decided to go away together. We had even discussed one day moving in together after we got back. He seemed keen. I asked him if he would mind if he didn’t see his boy so much. I thought they’d miss each other. But he seemed to think he’d see him, and he seemed to want to be more with me. Then when we got back, he didn’t say a word about that plan. After a week or two I asked about what we were going to do. He just tried to tell me he was working it out. He said he’d have to work it out with his wife. I told him there wasn’t much to work out, was there. He could just come to my place, and I said if it wasn’t posh enough we could get somewhere bigger and better. I was only renting, and he could afford a nice place for us. He only nodded as if it wasn’t all of the problem. I thought that I had better try to think about what was going on.

            Perhaps he was just having a bit of a fling with me and wasn’t as serious as he said. Perhaps he really had deep problems with women and might want something else. I couldn’t tell what it was, and he wasn’t going to tell. Well, I got him away from that woman after a while, and he came to stay with me, with us. It wasn’t quite his thing, he said. But he could afford a lot of things for the home. He had told me I took up too much room. Whatever did that mean? Eventually we moved. It was a beautiful big place. It was an apartment, not a flat! You know what I mean. But there was a lot of cleaning to do. With two kids there was a lot of disorder to try to keep track of. We didn’t talk much. Sometimes he told me I wanted a lot. He also had some silly complaint about our holiday in Tenerife. It was about the kids only swimming in the swimming pool. Well, I told him, what was the point of going to the beach if they were happy in the swimming pool. And he said a strange thing – what was the point of going to Tenerife, he said! Can you imagine? What a thing to complain about. I don’t see why he had to have a go at me about that. The kids were quite happy there. I had rescued him from the marriage he had, but he didn’t think he owed me anything. I told him he should give a bit more thanks. And that shut him up.

            As you could tell, that affair didn’t go on much longer. After a couple more weeks of his grumpy silences he decided to go back to his life with her, with his wife. I was glad to see the back of him. Except that he left me with the large expensive flat he’d moved us into. I told him just having money isn’t everything in life. And he ought to be helping out with the equally large rent wherever he decided to live. I said the least he could do was to buy it for us. But I didn’t press that as I assumed I’d get it out of Roger. But that didn’t work out Roger wanted to bargain with seeing his children sometimes. But why should he when he’d done what he did – walked out. He told me he had given me children. It was as if he thought it was a kind of gift and I ought to be thanking him for ever. People can be bastards. But then something happened.

            Mannie had tried to introduce me to some of his friends we had posh dinner parties in that big apartment. The conversation wasn’t much. Too much banking. But I could order whatever I wanted from the take-away service of the up-market restaurant just down the road. Of course, his guests always complemented me on the cooking. It was quite slimy because they actually know it had been ordered in. One of these men, quite a bit older took me aside and offered me money, Leslie. He said I’d know what it was for. And from his slimy smile, I knew exactly what it was for. So when I had to finally decide either to find the rent or to move back to a cramped place again, I thought of this chap, Leslie. He came around most weeks for the evening. He never took me out, but played with the children till they went to bed and then played with me. For a while he helped. But – what did he think I was…. I didn’t tell anyone about him because they might think the same as him. Nevertheless, he was quite upmarket, whatever he thought of me – a plummy accent, silver hair, a permanent smile on his puffy lips. But he smoked and I didn’t like that. I told him to go outside, it was bad for the children. He very politely did go outside when he wanted a fag. Well it was a cheroot, he said.

              He was always very considerate with his love-making. And he always made certain I would be satisfied. Sometimes when I wasn’t really in the mood, I had to pretend, which I was quite good at. And I don’t think he ever realised, though I am not sure. My problem was that he was always more pleased with himself about his loving methods, my satisfactions were less important than his feeling proud of himself. I didn’t mind really because it helped a lot with the rent for a while. In the end (maybe it was nine months, getting on for a year), I told him it had to stop and sent him packing. He really wasn’t much use to me, apart from money. I think it upset him; he must have been quite attached to me. But it never really showed, so I didn’t really care. I got back to the GP office work for a few hours every day. But it didn’t pay all the rent. So I was running up a debt. I decided I would go back to Roger and tell him his kids would be on the street if he didn’t cough up to pay off my debts. This time he did, or most of them. And my mother helped. Though she grumbled that I should be managing my life better, especially as I had kids who needed a decent life.

              At this point, in my thirties, I seemed so alone and began to wonder why it had happened to me. Why me? I had all the right attitudes. I did a bit of work for the Labour Party. I loved my kids. I did the weekend shopping for my mum; although I used to add ten quid on to the bill all the time without her noticing. I did have a few friends, and an ‘other mother’ group as we call it these days. But they were basically interested in their kids having friends, having their friends.

              But Leslie had a friend, or perhaps they were more rivals; I don’t really know, and don’t care. And Leslie’s friend had a son who was a bit older than me. It seemed I was still in the up-market world that Mannie had brought me into. It must have been something to do with my attractive body, and maybe my availability. This young man, Jonson Pettit asked me to marry him. He was like them all, well educated, good job (solicitor), suave accent, beautifully dressed and wealthy, and a charm I couldn’t refuse; and shit brains which, of course, even I could measure up to.

              So I married him.

              No money worries, the best schooling for my kids, a poke in the eye for Roger, and a need to keep my Labour Party membership a secret. He was all surface and no centre as one of my friends at the school gates said when Jonson drove up in his Mercedes to fetch us off to his box at the Palladium for a pantomime. Stupidly I told him what that friend at the school gates had said. He frowned, his forehead went all wrinkled. I think he must have done a lot of frowning because his skin showed pale creases up there all the time. I quickly told him how I didn’t agree with what the friend said about him. But he kept wondering why I had told him if it meant nothing to me. I wondered too. I’m not stupid. Maybe I should be more careful what I say. People are so twitchy and sensitive, aren’t they? And then I get the blame for what other people say. I don’t get it. He said his Mercedes had nothing to do with anything. And anyway, I always said it was comfortable to sit in. It was. I said I had no grumbles. He said he didn’t either. But suddenly there was all that tension with us. And he seemed to hold it against me. For days. So I told him to cheer up, it was getting us all down, the children too. And it was. His wrinkles lined up again on his forehead and he went silent as usual. I was beginning to get used to those silences, and the wrinkles. What did he want from me. Just a smile, and love-to-see-you-darling. All surface, I thought just as that somebody had said about him. He said it was just a couple of difficult cases at work. But of course, I knew I was getting the blame, the blame for something I hadn’t really done. It was that other mother who had said Jonson was an empty office-suit. It wasn’t me that said it.

            I wondered what I could do. I couldn’t stay with someone who blamed me all the time. Could I? Well I couldn’t. But, I couldn’t afford the schooling, and I had three kids now. And if we all left him, I’d be so alone. Somehow that being-alone seemed a terrible future. Like a prison I told myself. So we stayed. And he had his flings, young tarts who’d go with anyone. I didn’t bother to ask who they were now. They wouldn’t last anyway. 

            After about a year of this, something happened. I was raped. The clerk from his office who brought round his papers for him from time to time, turned up one day, said he’d been delivering all day and was exhausted. I said Roy, that was his name, could have a cup-of-tea. You know how you do. So, he came in and plonked himself down. It was mid-afternoon. I and my youngest, we were due for our nap. But he got out a flask of something and added it to his tea. As he sipped his tea he filled up the cup each time from his flask. And do you know – he did the same with mine. I didn’t know if I should stop sipping to stop him filling up my cup all the time. It was some super-strong vodka or something. I found after a while I didn’t care. So, madness – we got drunk together. Well, pretty drunk. And then he raped me. I wasn’t too drunk so that I wasn’t out of it, I knew what he was doing. But what can you do? I just lay there for him. It wasn’t too bad, actually. In fact, what was a bit good was that I felt I was getting my own back on Jonson. I remember as Roy left afterwards. I told him to come back some time. Was I crazy? He said I was irresistible. And honestly, it made me give him a smile as I shut the door on him. But it had been a rape. Non-consensual, right?

              When, he knocked on the door the next day, he apologised immediately. I said it was OK, I had not said anything to Jonson. Actually, it was because Jonson was working all evening – he’d told me, as usual! Coud have been ‘flinging’ as I called it. But I didn’t say that to Roy. Roy apologised anyway. He said again he found me irresistible. I laughed and I asked if it was my body or my brains. He laughed. But didn’t tell me. I invited him in. Nevertheless, a month later, I had to tell Roy I was expecting again. I knew because Jonson was not having sex with me anymore. Roy asked me casually if I was going to have an abortion. I declined that and he asked why. Good god, why did he think? I said, because I am a mother! A born mother, I said. But he did not see the light side of that. And he told me I had to get rid of it. I told him it was not an ‘it’, and I’d never speak to him again. And I didn’t. He just shrugged his shoulders and left. 

              So, I had to tell Jonson. Jonson was furious. His forehead more than wrinkled up. He told me it was not a rape, because I had not resisted. Then I was furious. I don’t usually lose my temper. Even though there are so many prats in the world, and even though they seem to come my way all the time. I usually just shrug and send them on their way. But Jonson was being furious with me because I was pregnant because I’d been raped! Well, what would you have done? I threw the flower vase at him off the coffee table. It hit him in the face and the glass smashed. I must have given it a good belting. He ended up with a gash on his cheek. And a rose petal from one of the flowers lodged on the immaculate parting in his hair. If I had been in the mood, I’d have laughed at the sight of him, the ultimate shit-brained prat. And taken a selfie for him. But I didn’t, and I didn’t see him for days. What’s more, one of his mates in his office started a case for him, against me – suing me for physical assault. I had to get out of the house, and I had to leave the kids as I was not a safe mother. I took no notice. And I heard no more of that. Well, suing me because I was raped, I ask you!

              Fortunately, I heard no more because he got drunk one night with his floosie and crashed his car. He was killed and the wretched woman with him was paralysed for life. Serves them right. Wouldn’t you agree? 

              But I got all his money. I deserved it for once. Don’t you agree?
 

***** 

 

** 4   What Clarissa wanted             

"Clarissa," he called, "I'm off."  Michael smoothed his brown hair, slightly distinguished grey at the temples. He seemed satisfied with the image he admired in the mirror. He put on his leather jacket over the brown zipped-up cardigan. It could be cold outside. "Cheerio, darling." It had become mundane, his continuing weekly infidelity with her. He bent over the shapeless mound beneath the bed-clothes, and kissed the top of her head as it showed above the sheets. “See you anon,” he called as he always did, and closed the front door of her flat, leaving her to feel the lesser woman in his life, as she always did. Despite its regular routine, their precise replay each week recharged him again. It renewed his sense of being alive and took him more enthusiastically back to the other life, the one where Clarissa did not belong.

              She had stirred, heard his light tread on the stairs, and fell back inert again beneath the warm blankets. The encounter with Michael always sickened her afterwards. It placed her on the second-hand, used-goods shelf. By next week, she knew, she would be avid for him, his complacent greeting, his energy in bed, inside her. This weekly hunger became a sad misery for her, a weekly numbing of life and hope.

              Later, pedalling her bicycle heavily to work, the sharp tears that were nearly in her eyes began to recede. The crisp morning was bright, inviting a view into the future. Closing off the musty dark of her feverish night, it was always a new beginning to her sense of independence again, alone but it was her own future. She was not just Michael’s 

              If she had an abscess of dirt and guilt deep in her belly, between her legs, she also had a shining, pert brilliance to show the world outside, to charm and to entertain. It was what the Gallery paid for - her engagement with customers, with the necessary critics, though the artists never gave her much time.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Some weeks later, Michael waited for a train home, a light bright evening. It seemed like many others in that summer. But a cloud hung inside him. This morning,  Clarissa, her small, tight face staring intently into his, had told him they must finish. She had been anxious, intense and solicitous of him. Her fresh English composure made her concern seem like tentacles drowning him in a fierce pity. As he sat in the bare waiting room glowered into a book, others would have thought him seriously studying; but inside, he chased a desperate revenge from corner to corner of his mind trying to wrench it out, expunge it, and calm his prickling eyes, smooth the tension from his neck, from his face, from the short breathing of his lungs. Revenge, how? But he forced himself towards a new memory of Clarissa which would be empty, hollow and sterile, simply a sepia photograph for the mantelshelf of his mind. He hated everyone on the station concourse whoever they were as they imagined their active, laughing lives. His train trundled metallically over the hard steel rails. He hardened his feelings equally, to face the family atmosphere at home. Leafy west London suburbs slid anonymously by. He was suddenly hit by the distant view of trees he remembered from the dormitory windows long ago on a similarly bright day in late summer when he was thirteen. He was hit again in a place he had not guarded – the timeless loneliness of childhood. Why had it returned just now?  He could not go straight home after all – full, like this, with emptiness.

              He strolled to the river, very slowly going over the familiar reassuring route. He was more steady now. His schooldays in the country returned to their proper place, the burning anger of betrayal was tied down. He knew his mother had meant for the best, his father had provided properly and as he should. Those days, those school days away from home, whatever else they were, had also been the happiest days of his life. The outdoors, the sports, the comradeship, the pungent challenge of learning in the ancient schoolrooms, being indeed a part of the very history he was learning. It had formed the character he now had, hewn out of the nervous small boy who constantly lost his socks, his squash balls, his pencil leads. He became an accomplished historian, an eloquent barrister, a master of his own feelings, a defender of right-thinking and defender of a world that badly needed such right-minded people. He had not shirked from the world. His legal career took him deeply into the shadowy side of society.

              The towpath beside the river eventually began to empty. He stayed there a long time. The day flourished and waned as he say contemplatively. The evening fishermen and the boys on bicycles defiantly staying out late with nothing to do, began to drift reluctantly home. He looked into the thick Thames water. In the dusk, the river seemed deep with its own despondency too.

             

.....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

Gabriella, his Italian wife, was accustomed to his irregular times. She had expected him back as was usual early on Friday, this week sometime in the course of the morning, after his trip to whichever of his clients it was, incarcerated in a faraway prison. She did not worry too much about his absence for another night, though more often than not he would have let her know. She knew about those one-night stands he only hinted at. She knew about the London flat she had never seen, about his irregularity in recharging his phone so there was no way make to be sure of contacting him. Or, rather, she knew that such a flat did not exist, only a fiction, an excuse, and that he needed this active nightlife with girls he picked up. After all it was England itself that she had been in love with, and now it was her English children she loved. The essential English suburban life had taken her over with a joy she had always hungered for. She had known it from the early childhood years which her family had spent in Brighton, walking to school with the salt winter wind in her face. The sun could still surprise her, punching clear blue patches in the covering cloud, and the fresh spring vegetation that could throw so much green across the world like theatre lighting. The gentle advance of regularity and seemliness was what she had always hankered for, and what she would put up with anything for. She loved what Michael had given her, what she had always loved and looked for. Suburban tinsel and gossip in no way diminished her bubbling charm. She could chat with pious and prurient neighbours as if it was innocent, as if it were the charm of toddlers in the playground discovering each other for the first time.

              Her parents move to the university campus in middle America, and her adolescence back in Rome had dimmd it all – but not taken away her taste for the clear blue and green Englishness. Her three young children were her English side. She had returned ‘home’ here, to her  England when she had married Michael and settled into their Thames Valley village of individual bungalows with practical lofts.

              Properly turning a blind eye, and a stiff upper lip, she knew these were the sensible English ways of dealing with his succession of one-night stands. What she did not know about was Clarissa. She did not know that Clarissa was a true love, a cherished space in his heart, a needed source of energy for his life.

              It was when the third night of absence began to approach that a spasm of un-English panic flooded deep inside her. She remembered her mother so-often yelling and wailing at her father, the coruscating stream of abuse and accusation that lashed across his shoulders. She had always wanted to stroke those emotional wheals better for him. But he had shrugged those shoulders with eloquent contempt and left his two women to glare at each other as he went off to his office in the University for the night to occupy his mind with the higher things in the library.

 

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

She battled with herself for the third night, resisting at all costs the out-of-the-ordinary, resisting with tortured strength her panicking outbursts. She phoned the one friend of Michael's who might tell her something. Richard and Michael had been in the same house at school, different universities but re-joined each other in the same legal practice. Only such old friends might know those things about each other which Gabriella now needed to know; those things which no man of their kind would tell a wife. It seemed a betrayal to make this venture into that world, but Gabriella knew her judgement was solid and sensible.

              Richard had been alarmed. He had known of Clarissa and had met her but could not divulge that to Gabriella at this stage. He told her to leave it to him and he would have news within the day. It was not reassuring to Gabriella. She waited sensibly; her propriety, solidity, and balanced judgement clutched carefully round her unwelcome panic, which flicked on and off like a faulty florescent tube as the day went on.

              Richard found Clarissa's phone number from the Gallery, but had repeatedly got her answering machine. He stayed on at the office in the evening persistently poking the number into the telephone every half-hour and listening bemused to the solemn apology of the machine he now knew by heart. Eventually he had resigned himself to going on all night but returned to his apartment in Pimlico to continue. A note had been left in his box. The unfamiliar writing turned out to be Clarissa's. She wanted him to know, as he was Michael's best friend, that if anyone enquired where she was, she had taken three weeks off work, to go away for a while.

              Clarissa had known that Michael would not take her finishing with him quietly, and if she truly meant it, she must make herself inaccessible. She bought the longest package holiday she could find to the most anonymous resort in Spain.

              Richard, however, construed this note in his own way, misconstrued if that’s more apt. It was a matter of slight to him that Michael had not told him personally that Clarissa and he were going away together, Michael should not have left it to his girl to send the message round; he should not have left his wife in the dark. It was simply as if Michael had done a warp and ricocheted in an incomprehensible direction. And that was a poor show. He decided to confide something to Gabriella. It was overwork, he told her; it was Michael's devotion to her and to the children that had made him overstrain. He had reason he told her guardedly to suppose Michael would be away for three weeks though he could not say where. It was best, he reassured her stolidly, that Michael should get this rest, even if he had gone about it in this wretched way. Richard would support her, he said, and they would confront Michael together when he returned. She should not worry as Richard had known Michael for so long that he knew Michael would come through it. Someone of his background, and schooling, would come through in the end. The school motto had been 'Loyalty and service will prevail'. And he knew Michael would too; he simply needed the patient, strong support of his best friend and of his wife to help him through. It was what friends and family were for.

              Gabriella was heartened. The strong sensible voice of Richard's understanding made all the difference. She went to bed confident she could sleep this fourth night.

              It was therefore especially rude and devastating to be woken half-an-hour later by the police with the news that Michael's body had been found in a weir some miles further down the Thames. He was now in a mortuary in a place she had never heard of.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

At the funeral Richard shook hands with her stiffly. His dark overcoat was open on this bright, late autumn morning, and the beginnings of a middle-aged paunch was showing early on his slender body. Gabriella's unsleeping eyes were red and stained, but the tears that should have come, remained stubbornly unshed, as she thanked him for the very large wreath from the office. He looked into those deep strong eyes to see if he could gauge if she knew yet about Clarissa, and what Clarissa must have done. Richard was quite clear, in spite of the result of the inquest how death had occurred. He had not disclosed the incriminating note he had received from Clarissa. The verdict at the inquest, on the basis of the moderate quantity of alcohol in the blood was that, in fact, death was accidental, tragic in the fullness of his burgeoning career and wrenching a wound in the perfect harmony of the family. The funeral service droned on over the small clump of people.

              So, the inquest had decided; and so, Gabriella chose to believe.

              She spent the evening after the funeral sorting through Michael's personal papers, throwing out all those letters which were in handwriting that was not her own. She tore them up unread. There was no point in upsetting herself unnecessarily.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

Richard took the train back, trundling over the same tracks that had carried Michael’s last journey home. The tightness of Gabriella's waist, the stiff smoothness of her black dress around the curve of her bosom kept flicking into his mind, torturing his desire on this inappropriate occasion. He glued his eyes to the racing scenery outside the window. He thought of the folders on the desk he was going back to. But, he painfully thought too of those young schooldays with Michael, their frantic theories about girls; their holiday together down through Italy, the camping site in Sicily; the haunting evenings strolling nervously through a dock area looking at the prostitutes, and the joint fumbling with the one they clubbed together to pay for. She too had a black dress; it had unbuttoned down the front and each lad had taken a breast in his clutching hands. Michael had been the first to get on top of her as if he had suddenly found what to do between her legs. She had turned her face to one side and her cigarette smoke puffed into Richard's face until Michael had finished. Richard felt sick and both boys quickly dressed, leaving the woman to clean her legs, button her black dress and count her money. It came back unbidden to his mind as he raked through he friendship. Gabriella in her distant black dress brought back all the impossible conflict of childhood so long ago.

              He sickened himself with these thoughts and opened his folder again in his mind; how had Clarissa managed to drown Michael?  Why had he let her do it?  Had he been so very drunk? 

              No answers came to Richard’s bemused mind; or perhaps so many answers he could not decide. He stepped agitatedly down from the train and walked absent-mindedly through the concourse of the railway terminus. This formally dressed, meek-looking London lawyer was seen to let out a wild kick at a litter bin, which grazed the perfect polished shine of his shoe. He chose a swear word to utter silently to himself. It had been so much simpler at a boys school when so young.

              But back to the grown-up present, what should he do about this awful business?  He knew some justice should be sought, and he was the only one in a position to be able to do it. He could not break it to Gabriella – it just would not do – the poor widow. Should he tackle Clarissa?  Would she attack him in some way as she must have done Michael?  Would she seduce him and control him, even – typically, in his moments of greatest doubts, his mind had turned his thoughts towards bodies. Clarissa, on the several occasions when he had met her, had seemed to possess an empowered electric physical presence. And her bright large eyes had always seemed to take in, both hungrily and scoldingly, his furtive glances at her shape. There were very few young women of his acquaintance who did not put up the temperature of his feverish imagination, make him terrified at some intensity in himself, and make him reduce them to indifference, as recompense for disturbing him so. There were more suitable people to concourse with, other than women.

              He cast desperately around with his eyes to find a solid stabilising world to cling to. The station bar presented itself and he went for a gin-and-tonic. He fought off the temptation to study the cheap-looking barmaid, as the sickening feeling tightened in his stomach.

              The gin stiffened him a little and he returned in a taxi to the office, resolved that, whatever it cost him, he had to see that justice and right was done. Michael had been his best friend; if Clarissa had killed him, then Richard must see that something was done. It was a matter of principle. It is what his breeding and his background were for. He turned up the number of the agency the firm used for private investigators. Their report a couple of days later revealed little: Clarissa was clearly still away from her flat; the photographs of her personal letters showed that only those from Michael were love letters; there was a travel agent who had sold her a three-week package in Benidorm; she had left the day before the body had been washed up. He wrote briefly and angrily to her at the hotel:

              Clarissa, 

            I can hardly believe what you have done. I know you caused Michael's death. His wife does not know. I suggest you stay out of the country for good. If you return, I shall make sure you stand trial.

            Yours sincerely,

            Richard Mayhew-Smith

            He felt distinctly stronger. He walked to the pillar box on the corner of the street and posted the devastating letter. All the tensions and hurts of his life went with it, a distant revenge. The tight nausea in his stomach drained away. With great relief he put his hands in his overcoat pocket and positively slouched back along the street, a complacent and decisive man again.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

Clarissa, her large blue eyes, the long blonde hair and her clear, satin-blue bikini, clicked in from the hotel swimming pool on her high-heel beach shoes. The two barmen eyed her mechanically as she passed through the bar, a ritual they knew these northern women expected. She was extremely surprised to find a letter from England waiting for her at reception. No-one knew she was here – and her premonitions raised panicky heartbeats. Putting her sun-glasses and towel on the counter she opened it there. Michael's death was suddenly like a hammer beating on every bone in her body at once. She collapsed clumsily into a low armchair by the entrance to the hotel. The smart reception manager, in his crisp white shirt and black bow-tie, looked up quickly wondering if this was a performance he was expected to play a part in; but instantly he recognised she was completely drawn into herself, her self-conscious beauty forgotten. 

              He came round his counter,  "Senora," he looked down at her crumpled state, her breathing becoming increasingly heavy and frantic, "are you ill?" 

              She shook her head and turned away from him – "Bad news, that's all" she murmured. 

              "Que?" he said uncomprehendingly but understood perfectly her distress; and he went to the bar to fetch a glass of iced water. The barmen were approvingly jealous of the receptionist's good fortune with this bright but now needy English woman. But she, slumped in the chair, felt her body to be dead flesh, her brain fused in her mind. The drips of iced water on her skin gave points of shaper cold in the hot heavy weather but they did not make her jump.

              Later in the evening she let the dapper receptionist come to her room and screw her till he was exhausted; but her body did not come alive. He left and she lay in the dried juices till morning. Her eyes were not asleep, nor were they awake. Towards noon she cleaned herself in her shower and dressed and prepared to take the day steadily and cautiously.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

It was lunchtime when she had got herself ready to emerge from her room, from her collapsed state of mind. Sitting alone in the far corner of the dining room she looked small and unusually grey. 

              She was, pretty soon, approached by Mrs Ambidge, whose dark steely hair was drawn up in a tight bun, "My dear!  We heard you had been ill. I'm so sorry. If there is anything I can do, or my son can do, do ask, please."  Across the room, Mrs Ambidge's son sat at their table, a short, stout asthmatic chemistry teacher; he was shyly watching his mother and Clarissa. 

              "Thank you very much. I'm perfectly alright now" she replied. There was something that was just slightly too curt, that she did not control fully. 

              Mrs Ambidge's tall, angular frame drew itself up as if to protect her dignity, "Well do ask, my dear" she persisted, her loose watery mouth forming an English smile high above Clarissa's table; and she turned back towards her son, her stiff back expressing both a slight rebuff and her determined concern. Clarissa's headache pounded, and the tiredness that filled her eyes was prickling up. The tears just did not come before Mrs Ambidge had turned away; and Clarissa relaxed again into her corner. She had found a clean white blouse, but her crumpled, baggy trousers seemed as shapeless as she felt herself. She would have liked at that moment, for her corner of the room to be bricked off for ever.

              Suddenly Mrs Ambidge's son was beside her table to reinforce his mother's persistence, "Would you like to join us at our table?" he invited in a surprisingly gruff voice. 

              At that moment, with the surprise of his sudden arrival beside her, the tension in her broke and the tears flooded her eyes and dripped slowly from her completely motionless face as she stared blankly back at him. He was so taken aback by his effect upon her that he stuttered, "I'm so sorry" and hurried back to his mother. 

              Clarissa found herself aimlessly recalling, as she watched his retreating back, that he was called Roland, a name which his mother pronounced more like ‘roll-on’, and these aimless thoughts connected stupidly with the deodorant stick of that name which poor Roland Ambidge significantly resembled. This cruel humour cleared her mind of her tears for a moment, and briefly the gaping ache for Michael came back, no less painful but, just in this instant, less crushing of her spirit. Really, she found herself wondering, people like the Ambidges are much more worthy than herself and Michael. They were actually concerned about her distress. She could feel her heart touched by them – from their careful distance.

              She spent the rest of the day sitting in a bar on the beach, a book on her lap, and staring at the sea, its shimmering blue was evanescent and eternal. She felt her soul protected by her sun-glasses. Her dowdiness today screened her from the shy guttural approaches of the young German men, and from the insolent invitation in the stares of the young Spaniards. It was no good, as she had been telling herself, to keep wanting Michael still.

              When she returned to the hotel, the aloof Spaniard behind the reception desk handed her key to her in his proudly professional way, as if both acknowledging and at the same time being calmly aloof from the memory of their encounter in the night. He waited, attentively inquiring as she hesitated. She took off her sun-glasses with one hand. He took in the long cool look her sad eyes gave him, and the slow movement of her breast as it slid along the far side of his desk. So, later in the evening when he finished his duty, he rang up to her room. She was ready for him. Her letter to Richard had been written; and the other letter too. She was resolved and strong. She told her Spaniard to meet her at the bar along the road; she wanted, she said, to drink and to dance, to be entertained and to be excited.

              He did this for her. And when they returned to the hotel late in the night she gave him, in return, her body, activating all its responses to his desire, to feed him her creamy white northern flesh. He left her before his morning duty began and when she saw him later in the day, he was freshly calm, and coolly working at his duties behind the reception desk. He took her key briskly and professionally from her with courtesy. She knew she had used him and been used. But it was a relief to notice that his proud Spanish bearing and her strong English resolve could join in putting their encounter behind them now.

              She hired a car for the day and drove into the mountains, parked and walked and walked and walked. Her tears came unceasingly; dripping from her cheeks they spotted the pale blue cotton of her trousers and left tiny damp patches in the dry, burning soil where, in the heat of the afternoon sun, they evaporated almost instantly.

              She crouched, at length, on a stone with a view through a gap in the hills to the distant sea still everlastingly shimmering in the sun; a glimpse of the town on the shore, its buildings white-washed and infinitesimal like the coating on crystalline fruit. Her tears seemed to stem with the sense of distance. Her body felt dirty, despoiled by her encounters; a church pillaged by invaders, and Michael inside her was a broken crucifix helplessly felled beside the upturned altar. She hated the rapacious Spaniard now.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

She recalled, as she sat in the sinking sunshine, of her convent school, the silent gliding forms of the grey-habited nuns. For her first years there she had spent all her spare time kneeling in the chapel, that innermost homeliness of this welcoming school. And Sister Priscilla, one of the older nuns, had taken to sitting with her, and on her eighth birthday Sister Priscilla had whispered special Latin prayers, kneeling together, the nun's shrunken arm around little Clarissa's fresh young shoulders. Afterwards Clarissa had, with love, sought out Sister Priscilla with a piece of her elaborate birthday cake, sent by her loving father from his base in Cyprus. It was, for Clarissa, a special cake, and a piece for a special nun. Sister Priscilla was solemnly grateful but explained the importance of her own penitent's diet and together they took the slice of cake as an offering to Mary, placing it carefully on the altar in the chapel. Next day the cake had gone, and she could remember how, in her mind's eye then, she imagined Jesus, who remarkably resembled her soldier father, had come to this very church to take her piece of cake to Mary.

              Clarissa became very close to Sister Priscilla for a number of years and was gradually involved as a helper in the nun's duties around the chapel, cleaning, tidying, arranging flowers. Until - one day it changed. They were both busy settling the altar pieces in order when Clarissa clumsily knocked the central crucifix, and it tumbled off the altar crashing against the wooden platform and onto the hard stone floor. The terrific echoing crash in the chapel was like thunder to the pale thirteen-year-old girl, like the announcement of the end of the world. And, in a way, it had been. Sister Priscilla's gaunt old face was ashen with shock and outrage as they both stared at the crucifix on the floor. As Clarissa went to pick it up, the nun brushed her aside with surprising strength and violence in her frail body, and she caught up the precious object. They looked at it carefully and it was not broken but there was a definite change to acorner of the gold metal where it had hit the stone. She set it back on the altar and then led Clarissa mutely out of the chapel. Nothing was said. Clarissa never helped Sister Priscilla again in the chapel. And a few months afterwards, Sister Priscilla silently died without any further words with Clarissa. Clarissa had finally poured it all out in a letter to her mother, her badness, her humiliation, her sadness, her rage and her guilt. But her mother never mentioned it in her letters, nor on the next visit to the school some weeks later.

              Clarissa remained seated on her stone until these experiences had unpacked all of their emotional contents which stayed strewn around the ground. And when she slowly moved from this spot it was like sadly leaving behind an old friend. But her step felt lighter as she retraced her path.

              She arrived back late in the evening, and after a night on her own for the first time since she had heard about Michael's death, she felt cleaner. The sadness and the ache had returned, although now it felt much closer to that familiar old loneliness and emptiness she was used to and knew how to deal with. At lunchtime she asked the Ambidges if she could sit at their table with them.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

A week after Clarissa had posted her letter to Richard, she supposed he would have received it. In fact, it had not arrived. He had carefully slotted the whole affair away in a space in his mind and pigeon-holed it for future attention if necessary. So, when she rang him in London to follow up her letter, they were both taken unawares.

              Richard was confronted in his mind with a conflict; on one hand the image he had of her body and the open friendliness he always remembered in her large pale eyes, and on the other hand the stern duty he felt towards his dead friend. Clarissa on her part was flummoxed to find he had not received the letter. The strength which she had gathered together all week, suddenly abandoned her.

              "Is that Richard Mayhew-Smith?  Did you get my letter?"

              "No," he said flatly trying to gather his thoughts, "no letter."

              "Oh!" she swung her legs off the bed in her room, and sat up with a rising tension, staring down the room to where the late morning sun was scorching the tiles just inside the window. "I got a letter from you, Richard."  As he said nothing at the other end, she tried to keep up the flow. "I don't know who had my address here."  As he still said nothing, she asked, "How did you know my address?"  She was not really interested as there had been so many other things, but she needed to feel a conversation going on with another person before she could steady herself to come to the point about the death.

              But Richard felt on the spot. He could not tell her what he had done, how he had found out, had hired the private investigator. He made a noise as if clearing his throat on the point of speaking. She waited. 

              "Well,..." he said weakly, "well what answer do you have?" he asked more demandingly than he intended.

              "You didn't ask a question."  She protested, not knowing how to deal with his blunt demand. The hurt of his accusation still cut her. How could anyone think she could have done that to Michael. She went on rapidly and anxiously, "Youv'e got it wrong. It's not me. It would not be like me at all."

              "Who was it then?" he asked confused.

              "Oh, don't ask such questions."  She struggled, aghast at the agony in her. She simply could not discuss such a dreadful question.

              But Richard persisted, "What do you know about it? Where did you take him. You left a message for me to pass on to his wife. You went away together. What happened?"

              "No, Richard."  Already her tears were interrupting her coherence, "I told you I was going away; I, me, just me. Not him and me."

              "You didn't say so" he said. He could not remember what her note had said exactly, only what he thought it had said. "You were going away for three weeks together."

              "No, Richard, no. I've got to come home and explain it to you. I thought I put it in my letter."  she exclaimed wildly.

              "What letter," he complained. "I haven't had your letter. I told you", he said pedantically trying to take root in facts against the flood of her protest.

              "Let me come home Richard. I must explain to you, to someone. I'll go away again if I must. Let me come back now. Please."

              Richard hesitated. He knew he would not stand his ground face to face with her. He started to say something without knowing what was going to come out. But she had put down the phone. She was packed her things in her panicked state. Her receptionist was courteous formality – almost insolently so – as she booked out and raced for the airport.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

Richard phoned his home where his cleaning lady could tell him if a letter had come from Spain. He rushed back to read it. He stood in his dark overcoat, the restless alarm rising up inside him as he felt a storm closing in on him:

            Dear Richard Mayhew-Smith,

              Whatever you do don't think I caused it. I loved him but he used me. Yes, I used him. We should never have done it. But it was love between us. You must know. I told him to finish it. Perhaps he loved me more than I realised. You are so angry with me, I cannot write what I want to. You simply have to believe me, he killed himself. He couldn't live without me. I don't know what I shall do if you don't believe me. And you must tell his wife that I am innocent. You know I wouldn’t do that,

            Clarrissa Arden

            Ps – I’m writing to his wife

            It had not been coherent, but accurately she represented her surging panic in her thoughts at the time, the tortured condemnation of her conscience. She could not grapple with it. Had he loved her, had he? Had she destroyed him, not just his love? But destroyed him. Or was he destroying her. She knew she had been incoherent. She was in fragments, and no Ambidge, nor anyone, no receptionist could have held her together at that exploding moment.

              She had also written her other letter – to Gabriella – to protest her innocence. It was important that both of them, Gabriella and Richard, knew it. She had not wanted to take Gabriella's husband away from her – neither by loving him nor by killing him.

              Well, Richard thought, what a silly woman Clarissa is, as he tried to swallow the dryness in his throat; what a silly woman. It is a further unholy mess. He chose another swear word carefully. In the midst of trembling with fury at Clarissa, he was impressed at how clearly he was thinking. If Clarissa had really written to Gabriella about murdering Michael, even if only to deny it, Gabriella would be upset all over again. Gabriella would have to be rung; he would have to do it. She at least would be a sensible woman, he reassured himself hopefully. He went to his cupboard of drinks and busied himself with a gin-and-tonic until his cleaning lady had finished, put her things away, got methodically into her street clothes and left for the day.

              He rested the telephone beside him on the arm of the chair, settled his mind on sensible words he could reach for easily to use, and dialled her number. Totally unexpectedly, Gabriella was not impressed by his loyalty and thoughtfulness towards her in ringing up about the matter. "I rang. Last night. At your office." She set off excitedly, "You weren't in. They couldn't find you." She was protesting in a high-pitched tone.

              Richard was taken aback as if a large dog had aggressively greeted him by leaping up with its full weight against him. "I rang you," he said as calmly as he could "because I wanted to discuss something with you."  A couple of his school friends had gone into the diplomatic service; he knew how they approached difficult things.

              But Gabriella was not going to be delicately approached. "Discuss something!" she exclaimed, "I know exactly what you've rung me about," she shouted into the phone, "don't I?"  She yelled even louder. "It's one of Michael's tarts isn't it?"  Richard winced and made unseen calming movements with his hands to the voice on the phone. "I've had a letter from one of his tarts; someone in Spain. You've been writing to her about us."  She ended shrilly and with a final twist of unarguable protest.

              Richard felt the knife slice into his confidence. He was without words. Even his breathe seemed to have left him. he was silent.

              "Well?" Gabriella enquired, challengingly and angry, "What ‘something’ did you want to talk about!"  Her sarcasm could not reduce Richard any further. This violent woman seemed completely triumphant over him. After a moment, "What is this about suicide?" she demanded, "It's nonsense." She demanded his agreement. Her fear brought to mind the enormous insurance that might be at stake – suddenly denied her. It was the one thing she had consoled herself with in this tragedy, that Michael had left her provided with the money to keep her house, her children, her life exactly as before. The ongoing stability meant everything, everything. "Why is she talking about suicide?  It's not true. You know it, don't you?” Clearly, she was knowledgeable and knew the insurance company would not pay out for a suicide. Clearly, she was being crushed by more than the loss  of her husband.

              "I thought she had killed him." Richard felt not in control of the conversation.

              "Killed him!  Of course she didn't. Why should she?"  Gabriella's scorn peaked, "Why should she?  She was probably making a good living out of Michael. Wasn't she? - you would know."  She was suddenly hurt that Richard would know more than her, Michael's wife. The wound once opened, rapidly gaped, and her rage began to spurt like arterial blood. "Where are you?  I'm coming to London. Don't go out. I'm going to talk to you. I'll get the train straight after the children are back from school."  The receiver went down. Richard went to the cupboard and toyed with the gin bottle. he looked at his watch in indecision. Three hours perhaps before this hysterical woman descended on him. He had no idea what she was going to demand. He put the bottle back on top of the cupboard and eased himself down into his armchair. His stack of tapes was on one side of him, and a rack of magazines and newspapers tidied by his cleaner on the other. He felt himself vaguely the guardian of Michael's posthumous honour, a duty to support Michael's wife and family. The question was: what was for the best for them all now? Ironically, Michael would have been the one to know. Richard had no idea what he should say to Gabriella.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

When Gabriella turned up at Richard's flat, flustered and tired, her eyes grey and lifeless, she stumbled in clumsily. Richard took her arm gently, guiding her to the small living room. She stood looking around nervously. Richard hesitated. He offered the chair opposite his. She turned to face him. She seemed frail. "Oh, Richard, don't let her spoil things."

              He did not know what she meant. She was clearly overwrought. "Don't worry at all my dear. What can she do?"

              His week silvery voice comforted her. She was relieved he was not angry with her earlier outbursts. "Richard, we must destroy the letters. You had one from her, and I had one. We must stop her writing to people."

              Richard nodded gravely. He thought it best to agree with this unpredictable woman, however irrational. But more than that it was indeed best to stop these letters, stop her writing to everyone else. But how could Clarissa be stopped. What would stop her?  He did not like to explain to Gabriella that he was the one who had provoked it. She might easily have another outburst. You could not predict what would happen with a woman like this. Women became so emotional, unless they had had a proper background; and this one had lived all over the world. Michael, it seemed had liked it all; he had called it liveliness. He had known how to handle Gabriella's temperament. "I'll talk to her if you like," he said reassuringly, "I'm sure she'll be sensible."

              "Do you know her?" Gabriella asked suddenly, as suspicion darted into her eyes, "She doesn't seem sensible to me. Have you met her Richard?" she asked darkly.

              "Yes," he said, honestly, but immediately wondered if that was an unwise admission.

              "Have you?" she hardly asked it, more a heavy beat in her heart, "Have you?"  And they were both aware of her deep burning anger again, a further betrayal. "What is she like then?"

              "I shall go and make us some tea," he said determinedly, taking a command of this situation before he was out of his depth again. He moved carefully out of the room. When he returned with the ordered tray of tea, she was seated and more composed. Richard felt relieved again, and hopeful that she could control herself.

              "Now, Richard," she settled herself comfortably into the chair with her warming cup of tea and started off matter-of-factly as if planning together some nice arrangement, a buffet lunch party, a trip for the church congregation to Ascot this year.... "We must stop this meddling girl from spreading stories."  It seemed so incongruous that this apparently innocent suburban lady could be intriguing and revengeful, "Let's destroy the letters she's sent. Let's do it now. Go and get yours."  Richard obediently picked it from some papers on his small Queen Anne desk. As if in a ritual they both tore the paper to pieces. "Now," she said satisfied, "we must keep her mouth shut. Will money do it? What do you think.? You know her."

              Richard had not the slightest idea; but he felt he was being told what to think, "We can but see," he said seriously and cautiously. "Girls like this can be unpredictable, you know. Sometimes they can be vindictive."

              "But is she so?  Richard, you know her," again her imploring kind of question which was really telling him what to agree to.

              "I've met her, my dear. Don't you worry. There are always ways of getting people to be sensible."

              "If it's money, we could both contribute. Half and half. What do you say?" she enquired with her anxious pleading. Richard had not considered this possibility. "How much do you think she'll want?"

              "We shall see," he said calmingly. The more insistent she became the more he needed to calm himself by calming her. He supposed that Clarissa would be perfectly amenable so long as he removed the ridiculous threat he'd made. But he could not tell Gabriella about that. "I don't suppose it needs money. She'll be reasonable, I'm sure."

              Gabriella looked at him curiously. It struck her he must know something, "Why do you say that?  Do you know something?  What is it?"

              He realised his soothing had already been excessive. He still did not want to admit how he had meddled in this hornet's nest. He put his cup of tea to his lips for a moment to consider his position again with this explosive woman.

              At that point the doorbell rang.

             

....ooooOOOOoooo....

             

Richard climbed slowly to his feet, putting down the cup, "Excuse me," he said politely, "I'd better just deal with this."  He felt relieved to be given a moment away from having to admit what he had done. It was only as he was treading down the passage to the door-phone machine that it dawned on him who this unexpected caller might be. His heart suddenly pounded, for all sorts of reasons. Could she have got a flight and be back from Spain already!  No, he told himself forlornly as he realised the frightful situation that he was about to open the door to. He picked up the door-phone. Her voice crackled and was distorted, but it was undoubtedly her. He could do nothing but let her in. He pressed the button to release the front door. It was like having to press the button on the electric chair at his own execution. He went out heavily onto the landing and waited for the whirring of the lift to bring her up. She came out of the lift, struggling with her luggage and he helped her into the passageway of his flat. Gabriella had risen from her chair and watched this scene from the other end of the passage, dark suspicion in her flashing eyes.

              Clarissa, in contrast, was flushed and fair and still in her thin dress from the Mediterranean. She stared uncertainly at Gabriella, both women guessing who the other one was. Richard started, rather hopefully, to make formal introductions of these two women at either end of the passage, sandwiching him on either side.

              "Oh, stop it, Richard," Gabriella said in a most imperious English voice she had practiced for years. Her worst fears confirmed, she waited, glowering and reddening, as Clarissa advanced slowly down the passage offering her hand submissively to shake. Gabriella turned on her heel and retreated into the living room, leaving Richard with the words stuck stationery in his mouth, and Clarissa's hand still offering but empty.

              And when they were all standing awkwardly in the comfortable living room, she continued sarcastically, "So this is her. This is who we were just talking about."  Her eyelids were lowered as she looked at Clarissa. "What do you want from us?  We were just discussing how much money you would want."  Her insults included Richard in her ‘we’ as a solid opposition to this lone girl.

              Clarissa looked blank and glanced at Richard, to see if she was completely on her own and faced by the combined hatred of these two. She saw nothing in Richard, who was staring at the polish on his shoes. She felt like the schoolgirl, whose crime had brought her the ultimate disgrace. Her insides clutched at the familiar emptiness of her being. She had heard from Michael about Gabriella's vindictiveness.

              "So, this is the tart."  Gabriella continued insultingly and provokingly. She looked at Clarissa's thin dress, "You don't wear much, do you?" Gabriella was being driven in a direction she had no control over. Her impropriety was a pain to some saddened part of herself as well as a shrill alarm to the others. Richard winced as each of the insults drew blood. He looked at Clarissa standing helplessly there wondering if she would descend to comparable depths and retaliate all over his living room. Clarissa glanced at Richard again, so that their eyes met. Richard looked away, but Clarissa had already noted his disgust at the monstrous state of the woman they were both confronted with. Gabriela noticed this embarrassed contact and was suddenly driven to a new pain and a deeper viciousness. She sought what she could say, "Well, well, Richard. Do you fancy her. I think maybe you do!  It's what men like you want, isn't it?  Have you tried this one?  Did you and Michael share her."  Her withering challenges escalated, all the time knowing that she was giving these careful English people the victory they could silently claim. Richard said a dignified nothing. And Gabriella continued, remembering the scene of Richard helping the girl in with her bags, "Moving her in with you, Richard? That's a nice happy little household."  Her fury was stopping the bitterness and failure from turning to tears. "Perhaps you have both arranged this from the beginning. That's a bit beneath you, isn't it?" she flung at Richard, no longer really knowing what she was trying to say.

              "Please be quiet," Clarissa suddenly said in a low voice and with quite chilling undertones. "I don't know what you are trying to do, but you seem totally to have lost your reason. Perhaps we all need to calm down."  The iciness in her voice increased as she spoke, and as it did so, the darkening rage in Gabriella's face darkened further.

              "Reason... calm down...!" she spluttered and suddenly turned her back to try to control herself. Shame and fury struggled together.

              Clarissa's sense of utter collapse inside her made her feel there was nothing to lose. She turned to Richard, "Well, what are you going to do?" she demanded of him. The challenge which would have normally seemed so reckless had she been able to feel anything inside her, took over as the only way she could deal with the threats he had made, "What are you going to do now that I am here?"  That desperateness felt like her last resort, powering him to settle it all. To Richard her loud challenge seemed almost like a strength, a magnificence. He was impressed. "Will you call the police?" she challenged.

              "I don't think we need to do that," he soothed. "Perhaps you can forgive me; forgive me for upsetting you." He used his smooth words as if trying to caress her, placate her. "We can agree, perhaps, to forget, er, forget what has been happening."  He was careful enough not to say anything so specific that Gabriella would grasp what he had done with his threats to Clarissa. Richard's soft placating tone was magical to Clarissa, water to a thirsty throat in the desert.

              Gabriella, however, was attentive to Clarissa's statuesque defiance and Richard's accomplished soothing strokes. It was too much for her in her unsuccessful struggle with her own temperament. She was fired and flaming, and these English were giving a lesson in measured propriety and sensible conduct. "What," Gabriella, spun back to face them, "what is supposed to have been happening?"  Neither Clarissa nor Richard moved. She was finally broken by the presence of these two who had the presence of mind not to respond to her uncontrolled fury.

              At that moment, Clarissa brought her stiffened body to its height and said austerely and with a rightful superiority "I don't think your attitude is helping, Mrs Lavenham. I am quite willing to leave you alone. I have no wish to do more than offer my condolences again for your bereavement; provided all accusations and threats are withdrawn" she glanced at Richard, "We can all leave here without any fears."

              Richard nodded gravely and significantly. He looked at her. The solemn strength he saw in her confrontation of this ridiculous widow caught his breath. She was magnificent. Clarissa felt how she carried Richard with her. Her coolness and stature heightened in every moment of Gabriella's fury; Gabriella crumbled into shapeless pieces.

              It was too much. Gabriella saw this exhibition of smooth, impeccable assurance in Clarissa as the trigger: "Get out of my way." She dashed at Clarissa, grabbing her dress at the shoulder and throwing her across the room. It was the final gesture she could think of, to physically hurt and humiliate. But she also looked aghast at what she had done, had been provoked to; yet still furiously vindictive at the dress she had torn, at the white shoulder she had scratched, and the triumphantly calm English scorn on the now smooth unperturbable faces.

              Gabriella hesitated at the spectacle. "Forget it," she spat, in her morass of defeat. "Forget all of it." And she stumbled hectically out of the flat.

              Richard reached gently towards Clarissa to set her on her feet. Her shoulder was bleeding where the nails had scored lines. He pointed to them and, in attempting to normalise the moment by being practical, offered to bathe the wound, as if it were not more than a child's simple graze.

              "Hold me," she said desperately and stood up to press her pained body into his arms. And he allowed his needed arms to move around her. Her tears flooded as the emotional tension broke out in her limp body. "I need to be held," she said earnestly, a serious frown on her face. And, indeed she did, but she knew where she was going. Her body was trembling with shock and the violence. But also, she knew, though she did not say it, that with such a baby as Richard (like Michael) she never need again to be provided and protected as properly intended.

              She knew Michael would live on inside her, but suddenly and swiftly perhaps Richard could give her the new life she had so recently started to search for. She might already have bridged that terrifyingly lonely gap into the future. Richard was the class and the temperament she could handle.

*****  

 

** 5  The cellar            

            I live in the cellar now. There are no windows and I have lost track of the days. The noises in the house give me only an intermittent idea of night and day.

            They took away my clothes and everything else. There is only my bucket for my waste. With my hands manacled I can do nothing to amuse the hours of my life, except to play with my thoughts. They will turn on the light or turn it off as I request, when they leave me each time they visit. I have grown to know many of their familiar noises, their smells, their routines. and I wonder how they are getting on with their plan.

            I do not think much now about my own predicament though it saddens me that the hours are all the same and my life flows without interruptions which would give it a meaning. Their plan is of immense world importance and the part I play in it had to be. I had not meant to intrude on them at that moment.

            They are fond of me and in their hearts is a gratitude for my sacrifice. But, oh, I did love her so much in my own quiet way before he erupted into her life.

            I hardly know now how I managed to buy this house ten years ago. It is in the middle of a row of houses not far from the river at Hammersmith. She was not the first lodger I had, but it must have been nine years or more since I first saw Irenia. My heart has always been one of quiet passions – so it was over many months that it grew and swelled out with love for her and for her freshness of being, a woman. My eyes are still capable of gentle dampness as I turn over these thoughts and phrases in my mind.

            Without doubt, she was aware of how her presence stretched me out with warmth and substance. She gave me small tokens of her recognition – a button from her raincoat she left on the window-sill, half a ball of string. These were things I could just possibly have used. Nothing was ever spoken. I thought of taking her underwear drying on the line in the bathroom but that seemed to defile a sense of purity that seemed to be spreading inside me. Even the thought of stealing from I did not want to keep.

            She was young then. She still is a woman of fine, fine beauty. She still knows of the swelling in my chest that keeps my hours warm for me. But now she has him.

            At the time, I was a bus conductor for a while. That was when buses had conductors. But later I changed to selling papers in the street. I liked meeting the people who came and went. They formed a swirl of life around me. I am sure she had not ridden on my bus before the first time I saw her. I knew all the people and could recognise a new traveller immediately. She fell up the stairs on the bus, and her leg bled from the scratch where the garden fork she had just bought had caught between her ankles. I had helped her onto a seat, and she was distracted and slow in paying her fare. I helped her off at her stop. I did not suspect then that she had studied law and was then struggling with a few cases at the bar. Later when I used to chat briefly with her at my paper stall she had already moved into her journalistic career. It was not until much later that she actually appeared in many of the papers I would have been selling.

            A few years ago, perhaps nine or ten, I cannot remember exactly though sometimes I ask them the date, she needed a place to live and asked me to keep an eye on the ads in the evenings. To cut a long story short, she moved into the upper floor of this house. She was not the first lodger I had, but she did pay me the best rent. And she was the quietest. She told me once, a journalist is best if she has most contacts, but in spite of that she had no friends. In all that time she was here, she had two visitors. Once a man called on her one Sunday afternoon. It was wet, wild and autumn. He left after an hour or so in a hurry. After that her arm was stiff and she kept it close to the side of her body for several weeks. He was a foreigner from the East. And once her father came in the evening and stayed for a long time. Afterwards her eyes were pink and then she started buying expensive jewellery and she went to Paris for the weekend, sometimes several weekends in a row. And then she must have given up her job altogether. I did not see her name in the papers any more and she spent a lot of time in her rooms and she told me her life was boring. It was a good long time, many years, during which she constantly bought herself expensive things, before she got out of that state. It was when he appeared, I suppose.

            I try not to bemoan my fate. I know they are frightened of me. That was why just lately they took away the two folding chairs that had hung from the hooks on the wall. They had explained from the beginning that they would leave me nothing in my cellar. They feared I may escape - dig my way out through the bare earth floor. So they took everything I could dig with - anything that might conceal a hole – table, clothes, paper. I would never have done such a thing to them. But I never said so. Frightening them kept me close to them somehow. But I missed those chairs. There were two because sometimes she would take the second one down and sit opposite to me on mine. She would stay with me for an hour or so sometimes. We rarely spoke. But sometimes she talked. I would ask how the plan was getting on. Sometimes she said he did not like her talking to me. Secretly, I think that is why the chairs went.

            When I play with my thoughts, putting them in order like this, there is one that I wonder what to do with, where to place it. It concerns her and those times she used to spend sitting with me in my cellar. They were privileged times. Before he came, and so before the cellar, I would only glimpse her passing on the stairs, see her through the front window coming in at the garden gate at some time of the day or evening. I would smell the rich scent she used in her bath hanging in the warm wet air afterwards. My mind's eye would imagine her long body wet and soaping – preparing herself for some glamorous occasion I imagined. Yet, she often only spent the rest of her evening in her rooms. She was very pure. I would never interrupt her there. But my thoughts quite often played with her body when I was in a good mood.

            I have not been an active man, so she probably never thought of my body. Yet, in this one memory of her, she did notice. It too was very pure in her own way. We sat silently. As was frequent, my hands were manacled to the back of my chair. I let them do that whenever they wanted. On this occasion, she put out her hand to take my penis gently. She let it lie there, and we looked at it, perhaps for half an hour. In that time, it grew very hard and then gradually softer again. She let it drop from her hand and she never held me again. I treasure that, and my sojourn is worth it just for that moment it lay in her hand.

            My health must be poor now. For the years of inactivity have made me tired; and my manacled arms are thin. The half-damp soil on which I sleep at night and the atmosphere of mould instil a smell of disease. But I am not a dog in a kennel. I am not a mere animal. I have a mind, which is alive and plays with my thoughts. My mind can still see and stroke and enjoy in a thousand ways. Those things are still mine because I can still think them. My mind still has its great love. I think it may be an obsession to form my mind around her shape every day. I feel her in imagination and sense the smell and draft of her hair. I tend the sadness I used to see in her face. It is easier with my light off. Sometimes I wait days before I ask for it to be switched on. And then when I see her there it is no less than my mind imagined. She pauses often as if she knows I have a way of drinking from her. She is a flower that pauses in the breeze knowing in satisfaction she has built the hive for honey, she has turned the garden into a radiance of colour. I gaze at her without movement. My thin arms sag sometimes. Afterwards I look at the patch of earth where she stood. It is especially purified. I cannot move to touch it.

            She wears simple clothes, they line her curves in graceful arcs. Her clothes are free. Years ago what haunted me were her clothes. Then she wore clothes that wrapped her carefully. They stretched across the nakedness that must lie inside. She made her clothes radiate. They were gold-leaf. She was living marble.

            Now her wealth is so vast she could buy clothes of gold and jewels. But now, she makes the clothes she wears look awkward, anxious to be off her. They are loose, so free from her that the air in between shines with a vivacity as if they had already left her.

            My mind strokes obsessionally. That is the furniture of my cellar. I want nothing more. After they overpowered me and put me down here, I have never been violent again. I never lost my temper in my life, but I was angry when they took my house away from me; because they took me as well. I was frightened they would take my life, but they could not do that, not then. I know now. They are good people in their own way. And they have to do what they are planning. And they have left me my mind, which plays and strokes her. I am closer to her now than I would ever have been otherwise.

            Irenia's eyes never blinked. I could not gaze back at them for long without flicking my gaze to the side or downwards. The stillness at that moment fired a flood inside me. She once told me of games she and friends played. The game where who could resist blinking was the winner, when your opponent made to punch you on the nose. She always won. She told me. I remembered, even in that moment of stillness when they came. Before they did it. I remembered her stillness. She had never flinched, she had told me, when her mother beat her on the palm of the hands. No – my mind is rearranging its toys too much. They had come. Together. I did not flinch. I tried to stare into her face as she watched me.

            My hands will not be sore again where the manacles were. When they first put me in manacles, the skin of my hands and wrists rubbed and became sore. After months it gradually healed over. But now little sores had appeared again... But let me finish this as it finished. I think my health is leaving me. Sometimes when I have lain on my hand, it is not there in the morning. Instead, I am waving a live thing, a joyful banner that describes life, a semaphore that has escaped defeat and darkness. But they had come finally. They knew it was the moment before death. It was the sadness I objected to, not the pain, the sadness that she caused me. She invited him to do it. She merely gazed in still attention as he slid the thin blade beneath my ribs. If only it had been her, if only she had made a steely search into my interior, then it would have been her that I would have given my life to. If only she had found my heart with her knife, then I would have gone on dreaming.

 

***** 

 

** 6  Her untouchable beauty

I was what they call a stalker. What’s wrong with that? Just following as you might on Facebook. I just did it in the street, or the park, wherever she went. Yes, it was just one of her followers. I was not promiscuous. Tall, elegant in her walk. I caught pictures of her on my phone. If I sat on a seat by the small stream and she walked past on the path and over the bridge, I could fidget in an unobtrusive way as I poke away at the screen. And… oops, the camera went off just as she passed. I didn’t notice what I was doing. Did I? And she didn’t notice me, or my movements. But there she was captured. And back at home my Photoshop could put her in all sorts of positions, and dress her in all sorts of ways – or not dress her at all.

             

            That’s how it started. I am not really as creepy as all that sounds. I have my girlfriends. None very serious. I rarely think about one or the other unless we are planning to go out somewhere. But this one is special, who I don’t go out with. I look all over the media for her and have not found her; no details apart from what I see as I follow her in the street, in the park. I know nothing, have never seen her get in a car whose registration I could jot down. But of course, I knew where she lived. Not a stone’s throw from my flat which is how I first noticed her. She was, to put it poetically, a perfect ornament on an altar. Even when she was slopping down to the laundromat in her slippers and last-year’s jeans, I’d have fallen at her feet if she had only looked at me. I’d have made her my stiff offering if only she’d noticed I was following at the obligatory twenty paces. It was sex, I knew it was sex. And she could have taken so much of it, so much out of me. If she had known, but she did not know.

            She seemed infinitely distant. Unreachable, she seemed enclosed in her own bubble of temptation and excitement, She was quite stunningly beautiful in a statuesque and commanding way, The word ‘impressive’ doesn’t quite cover it as she gave off a physical, sexual urgency which infected all men (I imagine) who came within range.

            I had been under her spell for some time as you can imagine, a longing looker from the distance she kept. So, imagine my astonishment when on one occasion, as I was sitting nonchalant on my park bench watching her strutting along the path, she stopped and looked directly at me. It was as if she had known all along I was adoring her. And it seemed she had. “You’ve been following me!” It was not exactly aggressive, and I was not sure if she was saying she had seen fascination. Or did she think I was waiting my chance to rape her – women do think that, don’t they. They sometimes would like to think they can drive a man crazy just by the way they look, that he’d jump on her unasked. An old girlfriend once told me that all women indulge in rape fantasies of that kind, but I don’t sprpose that it is true of every woman; perhaps only the one’s who lack any chance of looking that spectacular.

            I smiled and grunted, or something.

            “Look,” she said, and held out the screen of her phone showing me fiddling with my phone. It was a ten-second clip of me holding my phone  as if accidentally I was sneaking a photo of her. Snap, snap - as it were.

            I laughed and stood up to speak to her. “I think you are a stalker.” I admonished playfully. “And I am sincerely charmed.” 

            “Well, kiddo, why me?” She asked in a derogatory fashion. Her accent was slightly plummy, but the words seemed, well, everyday ordinary. 

            She was tall and slim and with a practiced elegance as she stood in front of me. Her face was not that of a classical celebrity beauty. But it had a kind of pressing energy and her lips were full. “Me? – kiddo?” I asked as we were both seriously grown adults. Both of us in our thirties. “Kiddo? Yep, I’ve followed you around a bit. I’d say I am a bit fascinated.” She remained looking at me, impassively. She seemed to be making a judgement. I began to wonder how well I came out in her judgement. I doubted if it was a reciprocal adoration. I was feeling small and stupid, and certainly with no claim on this vigorously beautiful spirit. Now, meeting her face-to-face, I began to wonder how divine she actually was. There was something very human about her indecision. 

            “Sorry, that wasn’t polite.”

            “No matter, no matter; we don’t know each other. But,” I said in a hesitant way, not because I was hesitating, but to try to make myself unthreatening, “do you think we could get to know each other?”

            She took a deep breath as if undecided what to reply, and as she did so she seemed to grow taller. It seemed so – nearly to an equal height with me. And her chest pushed forward. Her breasts were of an average swelling. I was taking in every inch of her while I had the chance. It was as if she liked the look of what she saw but couldn’t trust herself. I am told I have a quite striking appearance, and to be fair I do not have difficulty finding smart and clever girls who make a show of what they look like, to accompany me. I often find they are more interested in me than I am in them – sadly. How does mutual attraction start? Well, this woman’s accosting me could possible start to answer that. It was not that I particularly wanted her interest. I was quite happy to simply look at her, watch her walking ahead of me, her long legs in elegant, poised strides, her slim body was lithe in its movements as if almost swimming through the space in which she moved. I had no problem in simply following. Strange, you may say. Especially for someone with mature experience as I was. But it was that she seemed untouchable, unreachable even, that bound me to my watchful fascination. Eventually she said ‘no’, quite decisively. That was not unexpected – and even not entirely unwanted. But she did not immediately move away. I am quite tall, as well as having a physique that is well toned at the gym. She wore only modest heels but nevertheless she was more-or-less equal in height. And what I thought was that I could, with no trouble, lean forward quickly and kiss her on her generous-looking lips with passion. I didn’t do that as I also felt I did not want that proximity. Why? There was something for my small mind to puzzle over in my bouts of insomnia.

            “No, you’re a weirdo that likes watching from behind, aren’t you? You like watching my bum move.” I could not deny that fascination, so I smiled and nodded shyly. “Well, stop it.”

            “That’s not fair,” I said quickly as I knew she’d want me to stop my fascinated following. And I had often thought what I’d say. “You’ve just told me I’m a weirdo, but you can’t expect me to stop being one, just in two seconds because you’ve asked. It is me, you know. I love the beautiful view of you in the distance. I don’t want to touch you, only to adore.”

            She was looking surprised.

            And I knew that I am weird.

            “You just want to look,” she enquired.

            “Yes, That’s it. That’s all.”

            “Why?” And she almost seemed disappointed. It was as if she thought my adoration was not enough unless I wanted to grope her, kiss her, desire the touch of her skin. She took a step back on the path and nearly collided with a pushchair that a foreign-looking nanny was grumpily pushing. She apologised to the nanny who took no notice. 

            I replied to her, “Why do I only want to look? Well. You are perfectly beautiful. Not just the shape of you, but the way you move, the atmosphere of pure air you create around you. You shouldn’t have the grubby hands of a filthy weirdo man touching you. I think that’s why.”

            “You are weird,” she said uncomprehendingly, and in fact seemingly not believing me. “So, you want to just follow me around, watching my backside, the way I move?" And she added afteer a moment, " And don’t I have a choice?”

            I didn’t want to challenge her by saying she was quite right, as she had no choice. I’d just go on looking and watching in my weird and distant way. So I said, “You are beautiful to watch, people should enjoy you. It’s only fair. You could have been a ballet dancer.”

            She looked surprise, “I am a ballet dancer.” I was surprised. And yet not surprised of course as she had the grace, and poise and inviting yearning in all her movements. That was, after all, what fascinated me, and she cou.d see it. “So you go to the ballet, do you?”

            “Not much,” I said vaguely. In fact, I did not, “Just watched bits on the TV when it is there, or YouTube.” She was certainly finding me difficult to understand. 

“You should go sometimes.”

            “I don’t need to,” I said; and I meant that I could just watch her in the street. I’m sure she got what I meant.

            “So what do I get out of it.”

            “You get an audience, I suppose. You don’t have to rehearse or anything. You are just a star without trying.”

            “Hmm, and you get a show without paying.” She was kind of scoffing, but I thought there was a hint of humour behind it. She might even have been enjoying this conversation.

            “Oh,” I said quite quickly responding to the slightly more joyful tone, “Is it money you want? I am a rich man – though I may not look it. I’d be delighted to give you money.” And she certainly looked confused at that point. What more could she want, a man with money, who adored her like a goddess and who wanted to enrich her. So I added, “And I’m handsome too.”

            She looked uncertainly at me. In other circumstances she might have given me a passionate kiss on the lips. 

            “You’re not a creepy kind of weirdo, like them as hides behind tree-trunks as if you can’t see them. You’re all straight about it. That’s strange.”

            “To be honest, I’m a weird kind of weirdo,” I said in my most charming way. She was shaking her head in her most puzzled way. It was not a straightforward pick-up in the park by a desirable man who desired her. She was out of her depth. I didn’t like that.

            I decided to confide something to her. “It’s difficult being here talking to you, even though it’s quite fun. But I have got my hormones whizzing around in my bloodstream, driving themselves crazy. I think that’s why I want to keep a distance.” She looked as if she could not take any more and she too wanted a distance from this persistent weirdo. “Listen,” I said, “Why don’t you let me give you some money from time to time. Some money whatever amount would make a difference to you. Just sometimes.” And I added, “It might calm the hormones a bit.” She shook her head in a conflicted confusion. I then said, as I felt an urgency, “I’ve got to go. This conversation has been a fantastic moment for me. But I have to go. To get home. To relieve myself.” 

            She remained tense. And as I turned to leave her, she said, give me your phone  number. I’ll ring you some time.”

            I was tempted but knew I couldn’t bear that intimacy. The waiting. “No, if you want to tell me something, I’ll be walking behind you sometimes. Keep a look out.” I left her, poor thing. I really had not meant to overwhelm her with my weirdness.

            As I walked briskly back to my bare and utilitarian flat, I thought her total and absolute ordinariness (though extraordinary in her exciting beauty) and me with my weirdest form of being weird, we would make the most perfect complementary couple; she with the way she lived so perfectly in her body, and with my hatred of my body with its hormones whilst sprouting my weird intelligence, we could form wonderful antidotes to each other. On the other hand, it could be nothing but complete conflicted warfare. Why was I thinking like that? When I got back to the flat. I rang the most willing of my girlfriends to come around immediately. Which she did. She did it twice. And when she was gone. I did it a third time. By then I was beginning to get over what had happened with the ballet dancer. And, amazing wasn’t it, I had not even asked her, her name!

            Things continued. I followed her, and she pretended not to notice. Sometimes I saw her twice a day, and sometimes it was a couple of days in between my glimpses. It was a good three weeks, when she suddenly stopped in the park and with a determined step came back with her gaze firmly fixed on me. As she came up to me she handed me a piece of paper, looked me sternly in the eye as if she’d just given me my orders, and turned marching off in her original direction. I did not look at the message on the paper as I followed for a while. And then decided to return to my flat to read it. I sat down carefully with a can of beer. The note told me to meet her later at a specific pub, at a specific time. She had picked the pub specially she said – ‘it’s by the cash machine (haha)’, she wrote. I looked at my watch. I had a couple of hours. I told my hormones to relax. I needed to control the sudden panic.

            I was there half-an-hour early. Why had I gone. It seemed she wanted to meet. She did not have to meet close to, for me to grant the money – it was money I felt I owed to her, the only thing of value I thought I could give her. When she came in the door, she was dressed well. Not sexy and cheap. Well-dressed and sleek, showing her figure modestly. Two men by the door looked at her with interest. She had provoked their hormones as well. She went to the bar and got herself a drink, and then walked over to the other side of the room. There were not many people there at this time in the early evening. There was a low and comfortable looking settee facing my side of the room. She sat down and faced me, looking in my direction. She was waiting for me to cross the distance to come to her. I had a decision – to go home and keep the distance, or to cross the room and raise the panic in my head which my hormones were setting fire to. She nodded slightly towards the empty space beside her on the settee, asking me to come over to her. I looked and looked and after a couple of minutes I stood and wandered casually (not really casual) over to the settee. She looked at me. We looked at each other. To break the silence, I told her again she was beautiful. She looked steadily at me and told me that in a minute when she’d finished her drink she wanted me to come outside with her. I asked her how much she wanted. I meant the money. I would happily have given her anything, anything. I had lost my presence of mind. She looked a bit distracted by my question, “Oh, anything. I don’t mind. Anything you feel like. Let’s go.” And she stood up to lead me out of the pub.

            When outside she held my arm with her hand. I was wearing a tee-shirt on this sunny warm evening, so she held my skin. The touch started up an electric tingling all over my me. In her elegant high-heels she brought me to the side of the pub where there was an alley where I supposed the cash machine was. But it wasn’t. Halfway down the empty alley she suddenly stopped and pushed me against the wall. I felt kind of imprisoned by her body pressing me back – even though I knew I had the simple strength to push her away. I did want to push her away. But I didn’t do it. She pressed her body against mine. In my head the panic rose higher and higher, rising and rising. And at the other end of me something different was happening, something different was rising, literally. I decided I must really forget about what was happening in my head. She put her hand between my thighs in a vigorous, even rough, kind of way. So I put my hand between her things. I was familiar with female genitals, and she was obviously familiar with male ones. We negotiated clothing and satisfied each other. Then she kissed me on the lips, firmly passionately, desperately. And I kissed her back.

            How could I remember all the details, every one that she did. I was so familiar with all the actions, but it was who was acting those actions that counted so differently on this occasion. When our mouths separated a fraction. I said, “A Goddess with her shit kiddo.”

            And after a moment she replied, “A man with his Goddess.” And she kissed me again; less desperate, more joyous. Then she pulled away. And said, “I’ve dumped my boyfriend.” And she looked enquiringly in my face.

            I was desperate. I wanted to change the subject, “Where’s the cash machine?” She pulled away from me and laughed deeply. I smiled in response, but only pretended.

            “I’ve got to take you in hand, haven’t I? Let’s go back inside and have a drink. Together.” She emphasised the last word. 

            We walked slowly back down the alleyway. I said, “I wish I could stay in command of myself.” I said as much to myself as to her. More to myself actually.

            “You did OK. As far as I am concerned. I’m pleased with you, so I’ll get the drinks.” We entered the pub and I was sent to sit on her settee and in a moment she brought over a bottle of champagne with two glasses. “I can’t really afford this. But it is a momentous occasion, isn’t it. I have become a Goddess.” She laughed. I was beginning to relax with her calm ordinary control of everything.

            “You can afford anything you want, now.” And I went through the expert motions of uncorking the champagne.

            She clinked glasses with me. “To a moment of perfection,” she announced.”

            “To the Goddess of perfection,” I responded.

            She laughed, “A giddy Goddess. I have put all my eggs in one basket in these last couple of weeks. You owe me.”

            “I hope you’ll come to think it worthwhile.”

            “I already think it is.” And she sipped her Champagne, looking over the edge of her glass at me with shining eyes. Then she looked serious, “You’ve got problems, haven’t you. You think you’re not worth more than a turd that sticks out of your own arsehole.”

            I smiled at her, “You put it beutifully.”

            “What is it you want, “You’ve got money, you have an idle life, and now you have a beautiful Goddess. What more do you want? We could have sex in more comfort perhaps. But I couldn’t wait.” She sipped again. “What is it you want?”

            “That’s a thoughtful comment. It is a good question. I will need you to help me answer it.” And I thought -- ‘Oh god, what am I saying, I’m going the way she wants’. But at that moment I really wanted. I did not want to jump up screaming and race back to my empty flat. I lay back against the soft settee. How does one change one’s being. But in truth, just being here suggested I had. I looked towards her and to test – to test myself, really – I said, “Will you come back to my place and we spend the night together?”

            She smiled, more joy in her eyes, “About time you asked.”

            I smiled too, her joy was infectious. I felt warm and warmed by her, “So the Goddess accepted the turd.” She laughed and gave me a mock slap on the cheek, in the most relaxed gesture any woman had made towards me, ever. It looked like she might be good for me.

            She then looked seriously at me, “What made you pick me out. You think I’m different from all those fuck-dollies you’ve got.”

            “You are different.”

            “No, I’m ordinary, like the rest.”

            “You are untouchable, that’s what makes you different.” And I put out my hand to touch hers that was holding her glass. A very gentle touch that turned into a stroke. It was electric. “I touch the untouchable.”

            She didn’t pursue it. She seemed to glow. It was a perfect moment. We were still, and silent. Nothing needed to be said. We were going to be together all night.

            In the morning, she woke me. “Touch me again.” So I put my hand between her thighs. Afterwards she said, “See, I am not so untouchable.”

            As I thought about my day ahead, I said, “I think I might go out to see if I can find you to follow.”

            “You still want to?”

            “It is what I’ve wanted to do every day for the last couple of years. It is what I’ve lived for.”

            She shook her head slightly as if incomprehensible. “It’ll cost you.”

            “It’ll be worth it. It’s what made you a Goddess. Someone I could worship from a distance. It made all the difference.”

            “But you’ve worshipped me close up, now.”

            “I have, I have,” and I turned, and we hugged in our nakedness. “There’s no greater closeness than skin to skin. And I have touched you.” I was puzzled. “And you haven’t become just another fuck-dolly as you called them.”

            “I’m glad to hear that,” and she looked wickedly mischievous, “Touch me again”

            When she finished, I took my hand gently away. “When I touch you it is for both of us. When I touch them, it is for me.”

            “And you’re not worth it?”

            “I suppose. They just become a collection of turds I play with.”

            “I do understand a little bit.” And after a pause, she suggested, “Let me touch you.” So she put her hand between my thighs to find me, then her mouth too, and then I penetrated her. As she rode me, she gently said, This is for both of us.” And she stopped momentarily, bending down towards me, “And for why? Why both of us.”

            I knew the answer she expected, “Because we’re both worth it.” Then she continued and as her energy mounted, so did mine.

            Maybe one day, I might believe it too.

 

***** 

 

** 7  Glazed pottery

Those memories of his wife, Christine, resurfaced into his mind with the rhythm of his grinding, the circling of the wheel between his hands, the rocking back and forth as he loaded the kiln.  Christine was buried in him; they had been together in a marriage he had won and valued. But he had never released another memory from years ago. That girl, Jenny, imprisoned as a memory many years ago, and so far away. She remained a wave, a goodbye as it were. Her insistent kissing at the quarry as it dynamited in an explosion that would forever interrupt. Forever interrupt.

            In the afternoon, the Frenchman, Jean-Paul, brought round to the pottery a small machine, trundling it on a porter's trolley. The air was thick with warm pollen and insects and the heat of the summer day drove moisture into the surface of everything. The world was waiting for the thunder to come in the evening. They had worked out the design of this electric grinding-mill together, and Jean-Paul had made the parts in his metal-workshop behind the village garage, once the forge.  He had put the parts together, and they had tried it out over the past couple of weeks, adjusting the play and clearances of the various movements.  The potter had arranged finally for Jean-Paul to bring it this afternoon.  He knew he’d be charged for all the materials and the labour, but this had not been mentioned yet. The potter had cleared a space in the pottery, and he had extended the bench by three feet with some planks of rough wood.  He and Jean-Paul heaved it up into position. 

            They plugged it in with the extension lead, coiled like a long snake, reaching the socket.  The ingredients were put into the mill from the top, wet or dry, and Jean-Paul proudly switched it on for the demonstration. They both watched satisfied for a moment. An older man, originally from Lille, Jean-Paul had settled with a small thin English woman whose cooking he once declared as good as anyone's in France.  His bald head, expansive cheeks to match, his grin and a body muscled as if with steak, contrasted with the potter's lean ascetic seediness.  The thinness of the potter's body was accentuated by the way he pulled his hair forward with his fingers after the rare baths he took. The frame of dark hair, black eyebrows and eyes that pierced steel armour, as it were, contributed over-all a tense ferret-like intrusiveness next to Jean-Paul's wide bonhomie.

            The trolley had stirred up the gravel of the path and there was a thin film of dust, like dry dew, on Jean-Paul's shoes. In that equally hot summer, long ago, Jenny, his girl before Christine, just as dusty after the explosion. It had captured his eyes and had softened them briefly with  lost love. His boy tears had been ready to tumble that day it had all gone wrong.

            The potter was duly grateful for the machine.  It would save a great deal of pulverising effort. Reducing his glazes by hand took many hours.  But it had been the secret of the high demand for the  subtleties of his work. Jean-Paul presented his bill, forceful and jovial at the same time.  The potter felt only the appreciation deep inside, a remote gratitude that they had worked so well together.  In the face of Jean-Paul's swelling affability, he could only stare out of the window, his distant gaze intense enough to shatter the glass, a few tendrils of clematis gently stared back waving slightly in the humid breath outside. He stated absently that they could meet in the bar the next evening to settle the money.  Jean-Paul briefly patted the immobile shoulder, warmly it seemed, but secretly uncertain at this impassive stranger, still a strange intruder that no-one had welcomed into the village those years ago, silent and still. Jean-Paul departed. The potter’s embarrassing uprush of passion, to catch hold of Jean-Paul around the waist in a hug, as he might his father, fell to the floor as lost love. And he stared immobile at the blue horizon in the window. That immobility, like a mill, ground his passions into dry dust.

            Long-ago his leg had been amputated.  They burned it to ashes they had told him, in the hospital's incinerator.  They gave the ashes to him in a small plastic pot.  Because he had asked for them. So, long-ago he had tested how he might grind his own ashes into the glaze that emerged as ash grey on the simple pots and mugs he had begun to make. He had discovered in that long-ago explosion that falling in love with Jenny had been like grinding down a powder, the memory gets drier as you go on, so when you are older it is a finer texture and it clings to you in a coating that has changed the colour of your life.

            When he was in the pub, he was different, the after-sense of the local-brew cider.  He sat on the corner bench. and alone as usual to be sure, but a simple grin growing across the dusty leather of his cheek.  He stared away, above the hem of the glass beer mug to watch the sun, as red as peonies, dropping westward into the flat land.

            Jean-Paul plumped his strong, bouncing limbs beside the potter, and they looked each other in the face for a conspiratorial moment. Then fishing in his trouser pockets as if he had forgotten where he had put it, he drew out a role of cash.  “Fine”' he said flatly, as if Jean-Paul had asked.  “The little divil'll do enything.”

            “Sure.  I made it just like that.”  Jean-Paul raised his hand, finger and thumb touching each other, “Comme ça.” He took the wad of notes, unceremoniously transferring them to his pocket.  “Want another one. I will do it the same.  Just for you,” he offered.  But nothing more from the potter.  The Frenchman removed himself politely to wander down the dark empty public bar.

            On his own he reminisced. At first his job as a labourer in the antique coke furnaces of the plant, had earned him little. After the rent he had little more than pocket money to live on.  His job had been a form of slavery, in the potteries, making heavy-duty sewer pipes, lavatory equipment and what-have-you, and his holidays entailed a merciful staying in bed. If he went out, he spent what he hadn’t got. So, when he married Christine there was nothing to go round. Even the payments to up-grade her wheelchair were beyond his means. 

            Christine had been pretty, and the multiple fractures of her lithe body had not completely damaged the pert fragrance of charm. The facial surgery had not been completely successful but the distortions to her smile in no way made it less engaging than when she had twisted her loving parents round her little finger as a doted-upon child of the elderly couple who had wanted and adopted her. Life, it seemed to her, was for putting her foot down when she wanted something, and for lashing out – in private and in hidden ways – when she felt their doting ceased. 

            Her homework at school required her Mum to hold her book whilst Christine arranged her limbs to write the essay. And every time Mum moved, she could admonish with a sigh or a pout, “Keep’t still Mum, won’tya” 

            She knew that an audience would side with her in her disabled condition, and she had the power of helplessness to control them.

            His flashbacks resumed unabated.

            But his new grinding-mill offered some respite.  It would swallow anything, from toe-nails and bottle-tops, to auburn locks and artichokes.  All reduced to proverbial dust, and in such quantities!  A litre at a time.

            They had met in the gym where their physiotherapists had brought them.  Christine loved his damaged body and cared for it.  And he loved hers.  They did love each other tenderly, and although it had not always been easy between them, their silent tenderness for each other always prevailed in the end. It had been later that their tenderness matched the punching words, her punching words. He would sometimes stroke her hair as he passed behind her wheelchair in their sparce room, a gesture of high admiration, incongruous in their abode of near animal primitiveness. A gesture that was without anticipation, without reason, without guile.  Sometimes when she could reach, without warning, she would place a small kiss at the corner of his mouth, just where the lips joined and turned inwards within a slight fold in the cheek.

            Her RTA when she was a wild adolescent had cured her of that wildness and laid her up in hospital with the paraplegia – still and numb below her waist. The motorbike had literally run over her body cracking her spine and with it her spinal cord and all those nerves to the legs. The doctors had explained it all to her answering her persistent questioning. And despite all her questions and their information, she had never walked again since she was thirteen.

            When she did, surprisingly, become pregnant, there was such mutual joy in the success of her body. They matched each other in their joint thrill, and they would lie clinging motionless together on whatever part of the floor or furniture they could tumble upon.  Their triumph in each other’s triumph.  Being that much older, he took it on himself to manage her care. And so, when she died, carrying off both herself and the little being inside her, he had made a decision not to call for help, for interference, for the intrusion of that official world that would claim lives and deaths as public property.  Instead, it would forever remain his locked in his tight self-sufficiency. 

            Their rural idyll pleasantly came to embrace them and they planned the structure and details of their new home, taking account of her wheelchair.  She too had done striking work on drawing up the developments, and the planning that went into the pottery.  There life had become steadily clearer; tidy, organised and discretely aloofness within a complex of workshops and habitation at the end of this village, like a foreigner at a wedding.  They were there, but not of it. The strange couple were self-contained, and surprisingly entrepreneurial with the passing tourist trade.  There was a high line of elderly cypresses marking off the front of the yard, which served to form a darkened sinister boundary and also provided its unmistakable title: The Cypress Stand Pottery.  Built on the flat surface of an old gravel pit that in ancient times had eaten away the slope of the hill sheltering the village, it held a gloomy forbidding mystery. 

            The private intimacy of the couple within their lair led to a phobic isolation as they drew into their impenetrable domestic realm and the concentration on their separate crafts; she with her intricate weaving, and he with his subtle multi-colouring of his everyday crockery. 

            Christine’s parents had been astonished but relieved that the potter would take over the arduous responsibilities they had striven to carry, and he had willingly taken over. And she, devotedly, massaged many times a day the multiple sores on the stump of his missing leg. 

            He began his special interest in the glazes. His intimate and productive care of nature itself took some half of his working time. Precisely because he could derive from the natural countryside, he extracted and processed them systematically and exhaustively. He was uncharacteristically joyfully exuberant at the colours that could be born in the kiln to surprise him when he opened it and drew the quiet pots out – one a chilled milk blue, another a globuled green colour of ferns and so on. But also, it was just as much a set of new and varied textures he sought from the unsuspecting Suffolk soils – an abrasive, rough crag, fragile shark-tooth flint fragments, or warts of polluted sand.  From their arrival, he had foraged and plotted the fields and miniature heathland in the immediate vicinity of the village. Then, as weeks went on, the perimeter of his world was mapped out as a steady sedate ripple of potter's knowledge, encompassing the old quarry pits, the riverside bog, the ripe forest humus and that tiny hillside graveyard reaching back, it is known, to Saxon times. 

            Times, in their ancient marriage home before they had refurbished it, had been harsh for some years.  They had lived there, in the tight cluttered room, slowly renovating and renewing and re-arranging. Their home, would for years to come grow its gradual sedate and settled rootedness. Until that fateful night.

            It was the previous day, they had had one of their spectacular rows, one of the worst, sustained well, into the day.  So, the next morning, he woke and she had already left the bed, her blankets rumpled and pushed back. He saw the spilt blood, red, fresh-looking, and seeping through the sheets. Heaving her body from the bed to the chair had squeezed put her leaking womb. He knew what had happened, and had even been warned by the gruff and puffy doctor in the town 15 miles away.  The potter moved with speed but contrived a deliberation.

            There she lay.  The bathroom was spattered with blood, spread in wide sweeps across the floor as she had obviously struggled to get herself cleaned.  White paint was smeared by hand-grips, fingers scratching the grain, her raw fluid seeping into its open pores.  Her eyes were now fixed, staring bleakly, widely, straight past his horrified, resigned face.

            There was no need to take time to think, it was obvious what had happened. But, took time, he did, with an expression that remained motionless and as still as a quiet pond in summer; she was at peace at last. He waited as if for the scene to change, and to rewind to a moment for an alternative future.  It might be that she would slide upwards into a reversion to normality, to a revised life, to hope. However, the only movement was the imperceptible ooze of the last of her blood from her pale unashamed nakedness.

            His still recorded  like a blank white page of paper the sturdy up and down stamina of their injured relationship. Not just paralysis and amputation. There was that steady persistent protest. Even with that new husband some years ago, she had flexed the muscles of her complaints and blames, “Yu’ve only lost the one o’ them, But I lost’m both. And”, she bitterly added, “I got to carry them all and forever. So get yer one leg moving an’ ‘elp me.” One could have said, unkindly, that nobody could have become better adapted for life in a wheelchair!

            His solemn faith in his own survival demanded his devotion, a ritual sacrament, a recompense to her. And to the one before. And, moreover, to his own speedily aging parents, hampered by their dedication to alcohol and tobacco. He could have claimed that no-one outclassed him as an advocate of the benefits of physiotherapy or of the virtuous rights of the disabled. He looked after them, himself and Christine, the two of them without stint, as a substitute that stood in for the slavery he had given up in the Staffordshire potteries. It was a kind of golden jackpot in their moment of need when she received so belatedly such a lavish and long fought-for compensation for the road accident. 

            She had refused to use her compensation money frivolously, though he had never really suggested it. Instead, she planned this investment they had just accomplished, their home, their crafts their live renewed, and he had thought, the little one on it way to join than in nine months. She had the general idea, and he the more dogged intelligence.  So, bored with his job sweeping out the coal dust, he had readily agreed. And eventually they acquired their run-down, barn-like accommodation in remotest tourist Suffolk. Her sad and befuddled parents lived out briefly the rest of their brief lives there too, and then the new potter and his wife held themselves to each other as completely self-sufficient. The tenderness that flowed between them after her demanding compliance that energised his generous servitude was only one other dimension of their now newly-nourished lives lived between handicap and creativity. 

            A robust solitary determination had set in as a couple, not only in doing battle against their conditions which they righted stubbornly, but equally in the battles their frugal bleakness engendered over who of them took charge.  Even on his last day at the furnace, he had creaked home on his false leg, coaldust-smeered, sent off optimistically by his colleagues, walking to save the bus-fare. The deputy director of energy services at the plant had popped in to shake his hand carefully and to wish him well.  So, he'd arrived home with an unaccustomed and willing sense of his own place in the world.  But she, alone all day, had planned the packing and the transport to their ancient  barn and for their remote life.  And her planning had not included his relaxed moment of bonhomie which he wished to cherish. She had no time for that.

            “Come along, fine fellow,' she called cheerlessly, 'We'm got work to do.  We'm off tomorrow.  Remember?”

            “Do you want to know what happened at the ...”

            “Not now, my luv.”

            “The fellows really did me proud.  Righty proud.”

            “We've got to move some of this stuff.  Here's a list.  You know I bin working it out all day.”

            “You've been working it out all month!”

            “Eh?  Well, who else would do it? Not you.”

            “Oh, give over.”

            “Give over what?  What?  Some's got to get us going.  If it's no’ me, it's no’ going to be you.  You'd sit on yay flat-pan arse all day.  I mean’t.  Someone's go’ sort out our life.  It's me what got t’ barn organised, bought, paid for.  What?”

            He shrugged his shoulders.  It was true she had worried away at all the arranging and transporting work to their pottery barn.  “Okay, okay. I know what you've been doing. But lord-luv-us, let me rest for a moment.”

            “Rest!  I've been resting all day.  What else can I do?  Give me that, o’ there.  You know I can't get a’moving without’t.  See these cases, a’ packed up.  I've go’ t’move ‘em, and if you're going t’ rest, I need me crutch – in order to do it meself.”  She began to heave herself from the chair onto the crutch he had passed across. Muttering all the time through her efforts, “Him downstairs, he go’m for me.  From the market.  Well, you wouldn't have thought a’bring them in, would you?”

            No, he had not brought in the boxes for packing. Rising to a defiant tone, his voice spoke, “Quite right.  No, I wouldn't, would I?”

            “Have a good look.  Watch me pack up.”

            “OK.  I'll drink me cuppa tea.  Go ahead.”

            “Whatya trying a’do, make me cry?  Okay, I'll cry.  Fall over?  Okay, tha’s whatya want?”  And she lifted the crutch and swung it at his head.  His cup crashed onto the table.  The aluminium tube clubbed the side of his face.  His chair, as he flinched away, went over.  The impetus of her violence sent her crashing the other way on the wooden floor but rebounding from the table she collapsed heavily and deafeningly, the wooden furniture collapsing and arousing him downstairs.

            When they had arrived in the village, some two years before this, it had been as if from Mars.  The misery of their problems had left them feeling initially bereft, as if they had lost their way in emptiness.  Their increased inwardness had raised the temperature between them higher and drawn the shutters even closer against the people out there.  They believed their passions – of love, of shouting – sailed sublimely above the village.

            In recent years, she had developed her textile crafts. He noticed that white shift, tired and old which she slept in, and had woven and printed and then sown into its usefulness. And now, he found her, this early morning, sprawled in that whiteness besmirched by the blood from the failed pregnancy, positioned awry on the floor. The shift had retired into a roll under her armpits, and one breast had nodded out into the air as if to breathe its last there.  The home-spun linen had become rucked as she had slid, mistily, clawing at the woodwork. He looked again and again as it had folded untidily up around her armpits as if she were desperately hot. She had not called out to him for help.  The blood, he saw, had poured, had strayed in a glistening elongated bubble, dribbling  into the dust and the shavings of the wood he had worked.  It rose above the powdery debris as if in disdain, containing her life it had stolen away from her and infused into the refuse and grime. When he did move, it was to give her one last kiss on her dry lips.  It was a kiss of forgiveness, he thought. Again. 

            Then the long years folded back. The vista in his mind changed, the time was the past. But the heart-throbbing pain remained as a return to that time before. As a boy, with Jenny, aged 15, a poppy-red sky breaking outside the village, he had taken the small hand.  Not knowing quite what else to do.  The dry mud path up to the far away edge of the quarry scrunched with pebbles beneath their feet.  So many times, he had spied on couples from behind a hedge. They had taken their love-prize for a moment of privacy. Now he nervously wondered if daring comrades spied on him. 

            Such was his memory of Jenny at this new tragic moment. In those now-gone days, he was never very school-minded but he had a knowingness.  Now, he was aged twice as old, or more, grinding with a pestle on the bench a slurry of glass and red-brown rust.  He was two hundred miles from that tragedy with the girl, her small hand in his. Eighteen years away from it.  Now, his home with Christine, an ancient barn with crumbling beams, a nightmare the insurance company would not risk.  He crossed the floor on his limping leg. The scuffed bottoms of his dungarees, scraped through the dust, leaving trails.  His lurch threatened the safety of the racks of biscuit-fired pots packed in such close aisles.

            Back then, Jenny, in his vivid recall, “Come on. Screw you it into me,” she meowed. And she had tugged her small hand from his grip and run away off into the sunset ahead of him, mischievously.  She dived through the gap in the barbed wire with him hard on her heels catching her. When he had her again, they fell to the ground, both laughing, two kids exploring bodies.  They rolled in each other’s arms, their mouths together.

            “Where is that ball-point?” she said with an emphasis. “The one between your legs. Will I see it?'  And she guffawed hugely. She pushed him back again on the thin grass and clamped her open laughing mouth on his lips again.  It was partly out of young clumsy desire, and partly to silence their moment of fear.  She began a moment of fumbling with his trousers getting him out, as a farmer ousts a pig from a sty. A silent quietness swept inside him in those first innocent and adolescent fervours. When the rumbles in the ground had faded away, she laughingly lay back. Their lips found the new sensations. It was no longer mischievousness, but was moving into …   what. Into a moment of feverish newness.

Then… An instant of mighty noise had split the air, their ears. Their bodies fell still in astonishment.  Both instantly struck motionless were in terror.  Living all their childhood in the village, by the quarry, they were familiar with these explosions.  But having run out of bounds, new lovers seeking a stolen privacy, for a moment they felt caught out.  They had penetrated the private land and were right up by the quarry works.  The explosion wrecked the air. It had momentarily stopped them.  Only momentarily. When the rumbles in the ground had faded away, she laughingly lay back. Then, they fell happily to kissing again, her soft body a breathless electric force pressing down upon him. 

But only for a moment, out of the air, out of the cloud of red dust that reached them from the explosion, on the soft breeze, some rocks that had been scattered high into the air began to fall back again. Big dangerous ones. On them.

            The crashing rain of rock chips, stones and sizeable boulders, stuttered violently upon them in a crescendo of wounds.  The small couple were literally pulverised; it showed the red danger-warning at the bottom of the path had proved correct. As a target for the catapults of the village boys that notice had become too familiar to take notice of its warning. 

            The rocks had concussed him. Unconscious, he lay a day and a half there.  When he came round the falling debris had so lacerated his exposed leg that had stuck out from under her imprisoning body, it had festered into a raging cellulitis, later needing amputation in hospital.  But worse.  Even before his returning consciousness had become aware of the agony in his leg, he felt the crush of her flaccid body, still sprawled on top of him, in that posture of excited pressure as their mouths had met – that day or so before.  Her mass now spilled from its orifices, and it weighed heavy and spongily across his own body. It had protected him from the 'vengeance' of the quarry explosion, protected all of him except for his one exposed leg – and that received his share of the descending disaster from the sky.  It had stunned, ultimately battered her mischievous body into a corpse, the stones and boulders building up around them into the beginnings of a joint grave that failed to be completed.  And all over everywhere, a thick plaster of powder covering him, inside and out.  His regained a consciousness that dawned dizzily upon this macabre blanket, but that first impression was immediate and it was followed by an enduring clogged sense in his throat as the first fit of coughing erupted, promising himself an encroaching death of his own.  Piled up rubble around him and a closing mound of the poor destroyed girl above, he seemed trapped and convulsed, motionlessly coughing.  He fought to move her bulk, and that introduced him to the excruciating ache in his leg.  And the rest of him felt distantly like a collection of crumpled litter. She pressed down on him as if pleading for his rescuing protection against the lethal downpour, but of course pathetically too late.

            Her helpless body lay surprisingly intimate on top of him.  Where her face lolled against his engrimed arm, there appeared a dark smudge of black dust.  The wound on the side of his head had clotted a brown-red between them.  As he moved, it formed an enlarging drop, a round and glistening bubble.  It began to trickle, thick and slow, across the coal dust smudge on her cheek. There was nothing else he could do but heave her off him, amidst all the painful assaults on his senses.  He could only edge himself slowly from under her and slide himself along the ground. He had dragged his useless leg rigidly behind.  The grey/red dust and stones became a vivid world of agony for the enduring journey back down the path they had joyfully chased up. The story of a first romance. 

            After their row, forgiveness was never mutual. Now, in this moment, he alone survived to forgive their row. She in that wrinkled linen shift with irregular smears of blood was inert and indifferent to him and to the responsibility for her nagging. The row, their rows, were village gossip.  The line of secretive cypresses around their barn was not privacy enough. 

            His gruff response to enquiries from neighbours did not calm their suspicions.  By contrast it aroused them. There were not many in that village, but that was all the more reason why they noticed each other’s business – including the outsiders. Especially the outsiders' perhaps. Indeed, he had hardly troubled to know them as friends, one from another. 

            The 'closed' sign on the pottery showroom announced to the village some irregular occurrence, the shut-up look of the whole premises, the gathering leaves and dust in the autumnal breezes across the parking area, on the front steps even, meant a radical departure from proper expectations.

            And he failed altogether to think the neighbours would interpret all these signs at all. No need at that precise moment to consider the gossip-machine, the scandal-harvesting.  Indeed, he could only consider his own predicament, could only consider how he might proceed.  Grief, he assumed, if he had thought it out, ought to confer rights. And if he had thought, he would have considered he had rights to proceed in his grief in any way that could confer relief on him.

            There had been no means by which he could effectively conceal the blood stains on the rough wood walls of their lavatory.  And he had never made any attempt in fact to conceal them.  He had scraped them from the walls, from the floor, the largest of the dried crusted blots for his own purposes – not for concealment of a crime.  And those clots had left enduring stains which were not altogether against his liking.  They confirmed in one way – a sadly unpremeditated way – that her very being did survive. 

            He never knew who first told the police that she was missing. They never gave any significance to those relics of brown grit in a glass tube, labelled 'iron-laden specimen glaze' as well as other jars on the shelf above his glazing bench.

            To be sure the police had been thorough.  They had the testimony of neighbours, and others, testimony to the angry rows, the noise, the violence. But without a body, no prosecution in a murder trial is very certain, no conviction is safe. So, they had no explanatory post-mortem evidence of her miscarriage (or of a risky abortion). No murder occurs without a body; and yet precisely because the body was missing, they were suspicious of what he had done with her. He, reluctantly, lied saying she had left him to go away somewhere, and would never let him know. But they, the police, could hardly believe a wheelchair bound cripple could abscond successfully from her home in the remote countryside – could they?

            He walked more and more in the fields and the soft hills of Suffolk, He flicked the leaves in the hedgerows with his outstretched fingers, his arms wide like a scarecrows or a fumbling aircraft careering in trouble, clipping the vegetation it should be soaring above.  Fallen autumn leaves were building in wind-strewn piles. He scuffed his feet amongst them, the bestirred matter squabbled and subsided in his wake and fluttered away like sad birds dying.    He watched the yellow, the brown, the red and the gold as they blended, and as he would blend them. The friable surface of stillness settled back after his passing, resenting his passing.  A trance that was left behind which meant nothing.

            It was not a journey, not a leisure; it was progress through the lanes merely to return.  He coughed as he entered the gap beneath the line of darkened old trees. A nervous gesture some would say, harking back to that adolescent disaster – nervous facsimiles of the coughs that racked him as he slid himself down the path from that old quarry site.  Once more inside the tired days of the house, the windows were filmed with dust, and when he drew his finger down, a black crescent came off on the tip.  It tasted of dryness and faintly of salt.  He peered into the dark inside of the house as if suspicious that an intruder remained in there awaiting him. 

            So, with all his time exploring those empty Suffolk spaces, he had known exactly where to start his task of concealing his most precious of all relics.  A double incline slid together, rare in this terrain, and hiding behind a copse where pheasants were stealthily bred for the hunting season.  A half-hearted working of flints had been abandoned presumably because it had been so inaccessible in those old days, and then forgotten.  It was here, he knew, one day he would find a place to park his own mortal remains when he lay down to die, on some cold winter's night, covering himself with misshapen and discarded flint waste. There, his life's warmth would ebb determinedly away and leave him his private future for eternity.

            So, when, unexpectedly, he was faced with Christine’s newly dead body, he knew exactly where to bring her, the sloping hollow that faced out across the reed-beds just above the tidal reach.  And over against the southern sky the wide rise of the hill with three ancient barrows on top.  Those dead would be her companions as she lay beneath a cache of disturbed stones.

            But such a distance from the village, and the weight of her precious and now rigid frame, had made it a problem as it was too far, and she too heavy.  Ever practical, he had been forced to take it there in parts.  The larger-than-usual bag he humped across his shoulders on those journeys meant nothing particular to his prying neighbours, their unbright eyes having become so familiar with his daily country meanderings.  It was done in a couple of afternoons.

            And months and months later, after his trial, it took a couple of afternoons to retrieve the now desiccated remains.

            At peace, and found not guilty, and with his precious treasure, stowed away again at home, he had decided after the trial to stay on at the old barns, sheltering behind the line of cypresses acting as a timber screen to defy the winter winds from the North Sea, and the summer humidity seeping up from the river.  His new grind-mill would continue testing the texture, and forging the hues, for new glazes. Every speck and spot of his retrieved treasure, would become emblazoned and glazed onto his unsuspecting pots in such spectacular ways as the element-rich colouring from iron and calcium and sodium, all those earths and rare earths she had unknowingly bequeathed with her loving death.

 

***** 

 

** 8  Evening out

The fine autumn evening was beginning to close in. Alan was lounging on the settee with a can of beer in one hand and the TV screen on the wall jibber-jabbering about some football feat. Sal was lounging the other end of the settee looking at Alan, bored with talk-talk feeding into her head. Her long hair was awry, as was her mood. She had dressed sloppy to match Alan. She slowly stood up putting her wine-glass on the table, said, “OK,” to the non-listening Alan, and quietly left their living room. 

Thirty minutes later, Sal suddenly burst in through their living room door. “I’m fucking fed up with this, Alan,” she threw at him with no attempt to conceal her anger.

He looked at Sal in astonishment. She did not elaborate on what ‘this’ was. She was wearing clothes he’d never seen before and she must have kept secret: a tight leather skirt, long shiny boots, a lace blouse allowed a suggestion of her bra-less nipples, half covered by a small black leather jacket with long sleeves down to her knuckles. Her face was thickly painted with make-up. Her long dark hair was scraped back into a ponytail which she had managed to fan out over her shoulder-blades. And her dark eyeshadow emphasised the whites of her eyes which shone at him like fizzing lightening. She was slim, presenting her body invitingly. Her image was provocative. Very. But it was not to lure him. She was aiming to provoke him differently. “I’m fucking fed-up,” she repeated and stood still and erect, in front of him, glaring pointedly as if she expected a response. She was angry. He should have been aroused by the image, her challenging stance. She looked gleaming with desire, a conquest on offer, cheap, and ‘available’, a tart in her late-twenties. They’d been married six years, and perhaps boredom was setting in. He wiped his hand across his eyes. Was the plan to make him jealous that she’d find someone else? He couldn’t tell what she was angry about. She’d never dressed like a whore, even when he’d known her at school, and she’d flirted with boys.

He decided to stand up to face whatever she was doing. He put down his beer-can and flicked the TV remote which turned in fact to some wailing pop-music till he hit the right button. His baggy clothes hung in contrast, and their dusty, dim colours seemed blurred in the fading light. His bald shaved head looked like the shiny white of an egg, with half the shell gone. He was hardly a match for her dressed-up image. He felt dowdy, and she was vibrating.

“What’s up, Sal?” he asked with innocence. He seemed a kid, confused and lost, facing her sexual challenge. It made him sexy. He wanted her a lot. He stepped forward and held her shoulders as if to comfort whatever was suddenly wrong. So she kicked his shin with her boot. He stood back in surprise and let go of her. There was a big question mark imprinted on his face.

She continued scowling, “You don’t fucking get it, do you?” she said again with a thrumming urgency. He looked at her with painful surprise, conflicted and confused. He knew he was not too smart and often didn’t ‘get’ things. He had never shone at school, and as an electrician now, he could not keep up with the constant new regulations imposed on his trade. But it was true he didn’t ‘get’ what was going on in his home right now, with his wife. He looked at her slender body, sizzling and decorated to get the hormones going. He had always thought she was a luscious shape of human flesh formed in curves around her strict and upright centre, which he admired and desired. But now the hard steel edges were bruising him. When he made no response, she said again. “You don’t get it,” and looked away. Then, almost as if she had rehearsed it, “You just think I’m a weak, helpless woman, so you can think you’re a fucking male dick.” She looked with scorn at his drab appearance and his casual, sit-around life-style. “I’m going out this evening.” And with emphasis, “To get laid.” She emphasised it to get him going, hardly a cupid’s arrow and more like buckshot to blast him to pieces. Which it did. 

She stretched her arms up and no man could mistake the commanding invitation of that lithe pose. And waiting for some response from his sagging stance, she sighed with a disappointment. She wanted him to know she was excited. And to see she was determined on satisfaction. And she was telling him it would not be him. 

His non-response rejected her, even though she knew she would not have let him have her at that moment. Not this evening. She went on, “Fuck you, Alan. I’m going down that pub, in the next village. The Roast Pig or whatever it’s called. Full of grubby blokes, all as dirty and ugly as their fag-ends. I’m going down there, and crash through their door looking like this,” and she indicated her clothes as if he might not have noticed them. “I’ll slam the door shut so it bangs and they all look at me. Then if any of them got the guts to come at me, they can have me. If they all want me, they can all have me.”

She no longer expected a reply. He was aghast at this new person, almost not a person, a sudden make-over, with venom. Normally they never talked about how their lives were, what they were feeling, what she wanted, the frustrations. He knew though, that she was bored with working at the supermarket check-out, smiling impersonally at customers she did not know. They had wanted to have children together by now, but none had come along. 

As if they were on the same track, she said, almost angrily reassuring him, “And if I fucking get pregnant, we’ll get rid of it. OK?” At that moment the front doorbell rang. She sighed, as if defeated in her efforts with him, and briskly turned to answer the door. Silently she and Rose, her friend from around the corner, came back in. Rose was dressed similarly, black shiny ankle boots, and patterned tights, with a short silver, satin skirt slit at the side of her thigh. A black silky blouse with the top buttons undone, inviting more exploration; a silky scarf around her shoulders. She had the same painted make-up and her reddish-blonde hair looked curled and waved at the hairdressers that afternoon. They both stood with their high stiletto heels stabbing the carpet and staring at him. He thought of grabbing them and fucking them, but they were intimidating, not inviting him. Their stern impassive defiance put a wall round them.

Rose said, rather unnecessarily, “We’re going together.”

Alan, at a loss, as so often, said weakly, “You don’t have to go.”

Sal scoffed, “Huh.” And the two women grinned at each other. “Yes, we’re going, whatever you sodding think.”

“You want me to come along too?” he asked, dreading having to go with them and also dreading having to stay at home on his own.

“You can stay here,” Sal said, “And wank yourself with your remote.” And laughing, they turned on their sharp heels and made for the door. Their swaying hips seemed almost to laugh at his sad dejection,  as they swaggered confidently away from him without looking back. 

“Look after your fucking selves, for god’s sake.” 

“We can do that alright, ‘big man’,” Rose yelled back sarcastically as they scuttled down the steps in their titillating gear.

 

He was lying in bed long after midnight; sleep was refusing to soothe him. Sal returned. He did not turn over to look at her as she undressed. She got in beside him, and he turned over to face her. She had a swollen eye. After a minute or so, he said, “You’re going to get a black eye, there.”

            She looked at him with the other eye. “There were five,” she said. “And one was nasty; fucking hit me, he did. I’ve never been slapped in the face so bloody hard,” and she pointed with her finger at her eye.

            “Fucking, damn stupid,” he said, giving the obvious verdict.

            “Yes. There weren’t any love in it.” And she shut both her eyes. “Rose had to go off to the hospital; I think she had a broken bone in one of her hands.”

            “You’re crazy, Sal, you know that?”

            “I hated it; every minute of it, Alan. I couldn’t stop them, once they’d started. I think they hated us.” She looked expressionless as she lay in his arms.

            He felt sort of sorry for her. And the urge was suddenly so strong he penetrated her. She hardly moved. As he lay back afterwards, he said with resigned satisfaction, “Number six”.

            “Thanks,” she muttered and remained limply holding him. “More like love, that was. Fucking, thank you.” 
 

***** 

 

** 9  I met one

 

I met one of them. She was the daughter of a US magnate. He had been some lucky teenager who mastered social media in the early days and shot into the lead, that is, he shot into the lead as a money-spinner. So, she was a rich girl, still is. Why would I go to meet such a person? – such a minor descendent. She should have been a shadow in her father’s shadow, a sub-person perhaps? Rachel Grainger. Well, she had a major problem. I will tell you the story. 

Good to gain fame by virtue of a serious defect. She didn’t have to try very hard. All she did was just to be herself, if you know what I mean. I was a psychologist, trained and with a not very good degree at a rather prestigious university in the UK. The point is we fell in love. It was not so unusual, because she was good at falling in love. I wasn’t; she taught me – in her own way.

That’s the way the story starts, not in Stockholm, but with the Stockholm syndrome. I was doing some research when I was very young, in order to try to get my Masters level qualification. I hit on a rich seam, one that hits, in fact, on the emotions as well as the academic intellect. I am writing this, twenty years after she was kidnapped. She was not the eldest, but she was the easiest to kidnap. It had been the kidnapper’s intention to extract as much of the father’s fortune as possible.

She had been living with her family in Detroit, not a tourist attraction. She was sixteen at the time, and thin, anorexic really, so that I, even with my paralysed arm, could have picked her up and carried her off. But I was there to interview her about the experience but got no reply from my attempts to contact her – text, phone, her father’s media system. So I prowled the neighbourhoods till I spotted her one day after some three weeks sauntering through the uninspiring streets. Twenty years on, she was now quite plump, not especially attractive, but a friendly kind of face. Even then, after all those years she had a thuggish looking guy fifteen yards behind her, nonchalantly looking in shop windows in a most unlikely simulation of an idle shopper. He looked threatening instead, and muscular. He was dark haired, close-cropped, and thick around the neck and upper arms.

She went into a shop where coffee and pancakes were served. She sat at a table, and the evil guy eventually sat down at her table opposite her. I wondered if I should go up to the table and introduce myself. Why not? Nothing to lose – except my front teeth, if the guy took a slug at me.

In the event, she just looked at me, with a friendly stare evolving into a smile. He, the thug, did not smile but stood up and went to the next table, so I could sit opposite her. The smile continued on her face, an inquiring lilt to the lips.

“Excuse me for interrupting,” I asked innocently. She made no response and continued looking at me as if I was an interesting breed of dog or something that caught her attention. “Are you still in danger?” And I nodded briefly behind me in the direction her thug had gone.

“You never know.” Her look of enquiry had not faded. For some reason I did not feel awkward about meeting her unasked. She enjoyed being an object of special interest, I decided.

“I’m a psychologist. I just wondered if I could interview you and your experiences?” 

She looked down, almost as if disappointed. “You’re not the first.”

“Of course. You must be bored with us.”

“Not at all.” She looked slightly bored as if she had been through all this preamble too many times. She moved her chair as if about to get up. “Any time. Just contact me.”

“And I’d like to interview him.” I nodded again in the direction of her ‘thug’.

“You’d better ask him,” but she looked surprised, intrigued.

“Could we make a time now?” I asked, more insistently. And I added, “Mrs Grainger?”

“I’m not Mrs Grainger,” she said quickly. And I had a sudden moment of fear that I’d mistaken who she was. “I’m Ms Ratten, Rachel.” I must have looked a little confused. “Was it about my kidnapping?”

“It was.”

“I have half-a-dozen people a month trying to contact me. I ignore them.” And she looked bored and ready to go. “If you want me, contact me. If it’s him, go ask.”

“I’d like to arrange it now. What about tomorrow morning. Could we? Say 10-ish?”

She nodded, “Well, OK.” When I pushed her, she was surprisingly compliant. “Can I go, now?”

“Sure.” I said reassuringly. “Unless you’d like me to call them over to give us another coffee together.”

She hesitated, again surprisingly. She looked at her watch. “Sorry, I think I’d better go. I have something to do.” And she added slightly mischievously, “Otherwise I could have stayed and asked all about you.” And she stood.

“My name’s Mike, Mike Barland. Rachel.” She looked as if she had never heard of such a name. She probably hadn’t. “Where do we meet? Here? I’ll bring my recorder.”

She looked around the cafe. “OK. Ten then.”

And she moved off behind me. I heard another chair scrape the floor and knew her guard was about to prowl along behind her. I sat back in my chair. Got my coffee cup filled again and wrote a page of impressions from the contact so far.

The next day I was early, and sat at the same table, a coffee poured in front of me. She arrived ten minutes late. She beamed at me as I stood up beside my chair. She offered a hand I shook. “You’re looking good,” I said politely. If her beaming could possibly have got a bit sunnier, it did. We sat. I switched on the recorder. I had decided to plunge in with as much energy, even provocation as possible. “So, you go for dangerous men?”

“Yep. Sure.” She sat back completely relaxed and unruffled. “What about you?” her beaming had changed to a friendly and appreciative smile.

It was my turn to stay calm. “I prefer beautiful women, I guess.” And I put on my most benevolent beam. She unwound a silk scarf from her neck and looked as if I had said she was one of those beautiful women. “Like you,” I said to please her. She looked up, straight into my eyes, as if she was already inviting me to bed. “But first, I wanted to get on with this interview I have to do.” I wasn’t sure why I had said ‘but first’. It seemed as if I was expecting something afterwards. Perhaps I did want to accept her inviting smiling at me. To my mind she was not particularly beautiful, except in her soft invitingness (if that is a word).

At that point the guard came up to the table and said, “I go, put car?” She looked up at him in a significant way. It was as if there were messages in the interchange, as if he were asking if she was comfortable with this stranger, me. And she responded affirmatively, letting him go.

Back to her and me. In this public coffee bar sitting at an often-wiped plastic-topped table with customers walking up and down the aisle next to us, there was a sudden intimacy, a sort of excluding intimacy, as if the rest of the bustle was on some cinema screen. She looked relaxed, open. I felt invited to ask anything I wanted. It was positively homely. But something held me back, despite my experience as a researcher. ‘Get on with it’, I told myself. So, “You are kind to let me listen in to your experience. They must have been terrible. Tell me the worst moment of your kidnapping and the best.”

Her smile had not altered, and she leant forward looking onto my eyes as if she were about to savour a beautiful dish of food. My mind immediately moved to her ample figure which had blown out a little since the pictures of her after her rescue. I imagined her soft skin and even thought of stroking it. “The best moment, first. You know, they grabbed me. With their arms, two of them. My father had always kept me safe, so safe, and anyone I went out with he had to find out about them. But these two, because they were just uninvited criminals were unknown to him, or to me. The held me down, hard. But it felt like a freedom, you know. You probably wouldn’t understand. It felt like they wanted me. I was in the bedroom and in my nightdress, and they’d been hiding there for some time, till I came to bed. They pinned me down to the floor, and first they strapped something sticky round my mouth so I couldn’t scream. But I didn’t try. Like I said it felt like a freedom. I didn’t have to have his permission to be wanted.” She sat back as if satisfied, or she might have been thinking of something else to say to try to make me understand, though she seemed to believe I would not. “I wasn’t crazy, you know. It seemed a perfectly simple way to be me with anyone else.” I was nodding my understanding. This precious girl that her father kept locked up has, she seemed to be saying, been rescued from him. “They tied me. My wrists to my ankles; my knees to my throat. Have you ever been tied up?” 

I stopped nodding. “No, er… it could be uncomfortable.” She was waiting for me to expand. “So you had felt locked up by your father, all your life, I guess. 

Now she nodded, “You got it.” And she glanced away as if noticing the world around for the first time. “I guess it is nice to be precious for him. I’ve got Alberto who follows me around. Alberto from Mexico. He keeps me safe.” And she glanced to the door as if she expected him to come in.

“OK. He’s gone out to check the car. Do you feel safe with me, right now?”

She laughed, almost silently as if I was being ridiculous. “You’re a nice guy, right? You’re not dangerous. There was still a laugh in her throat as if she was mocking me. “I’ll do what you want.” 

I was uncertain what that meant. It seemed like she was giving me a very wide permission. “Let’s get back to that moment. Freedom you say. But you couldn’t move.”

She put up her hand to stop me, “Freedom from my Dad. That’s what I said. I didn’t have to have permission to be wanted by someone. I was nineteen then. My Mom had left years before. It had just been me and my Dad for years. I loved him. I’d have done anything for him. Well, I would now. I asked him if I should talk to you. He said I should, so I am talking to you.” She put her head on one side as if asking me what I thought of that. She was not talking to me because I had asked, but because her Father had said she should.

It put me in my place. I wanted to ask her what it would feel like if I tied her up. But that was not my interviewing technique. “It sounds very uncomfortable to be tied like that?”

“Yep,” she said as if disinterested. “But I liked it. It seemed something so new. It was…. kind of exciting. You know. They carried me out of the house. I don’t know how no-one noticed. But they did it. I was in the boot of their car, and they drove off.”

“You weren’t frightened?”

“Yes, I was. Yes and no. It was exciting, as well, I told you.  They were taking me to something new.”

Sounds like you were bored with your life at home?”

“Well, wouldn’t you be?” Then she stopped and changed her tone, “Look I want some more coffee, and I’d like a doughnut. I saw some on the counter.”

“OK, of course.” And I waved to a waitress till she saw me and came over for my order. This waitress looked hard at me. She was slim, fresh, innocent. What a contrast to the tired and bored Rachel. I felt I was invited to meet a challenge from this young girl, in contrast to Rachel’s heavy predictability. I turned back to my job. “Can I ask you; had you had relations with men, were you an experienced woman of nineteen?”

She looked at me with a new blank disinterest, “What do you think?” I wondered if she had noticed my interest in the sexy waitress. 

“Did you think they were taking you away to…. err, use you for sex? What did you think it was all about?”

“I knew what it was all about. They would sell me back for money. It was obvious, wasn’t it?” And then she said more reflectively. “Of course I wanted to be used for their sex. I was a pure young girl wanting to be impure. That’s obvious too. Isn’t it?” I nodded. 

“Didn’t you want sex at that age? Whatever the conditions?” I wasn’t going to answer that. She went on, “I was excited, I told you. My worry was I’d get pregnant.” She continued to look reflective. “But I might have wanted that too. I wanted a woman’s body. It was as if I’d been kept in a prison, wrapped up in a condom as it were.” I was surprised at her inventive imagery. She had seemed to have so little sparkle in her.

“And did they use you, Rachel?”

“Of course they did. In fact….” And she stopped. The doughnut arrived. I didn’t look in the direction of the waitress. But Rachel remained hesitant. “I haven’t told anyone else this. I asked them. I fucking asked them.” For the first time something like shame or embarrassment clouded her expression for a moment, and then her inviting smile returned. “I asked them to rape me because I wanted to know what it was like.” This time there was a little laugh that was more like a scoff. It was scoffing at herself, as if it was silly and juvenile.

“I can see,” I said.

She looked at me sharply, “What can you see?”

“You wanted to know what it was like to be a woman.”

She looked at me sharply again, as if surprised that I would understand. “Perhaps you understand.” She seemed to be reluctant to admit she was a little impressed by my understanding her. She gave a deep sigh as if she was not accustomed to being understood. The sigh heaved her ample breasts up and then down. I think she noticed me looking at them.

“So did you find out what it was like to be a women?”

She hesitated again. “Yes, I did. Fuck me, I did. They were good at it. Both of them. I know what good sex is.,” and she added ruefully, “ There’s not much else in my life.” She sat back and was looking at me. “The only other thing in my life is fuckers coming around and asking me about it.” She was getting crude, and implied her scoffing might be returning. “You can have me if you want.” She said it in a very matter-of-fact way, as if she was asking for another doughnut.

“That might be very nice,” I said politely, “But first let’s get back to the interview.” 

Her smile was now fading. She looked down at her plate. “OK. OK, it was exciting. Of course. I admit it. I don’t care what you say in your report.”

“Because you felt wanted. Desired.”

“Well - wanted in a different way from my Father. I loved him. Don’t get that wrong. And he wanted the best for me. And he paid out four million for me, didn’t he. That’s love, isn’t it.” She looked up at me and repeated her invitation. “Are you sure you don’t want to stuff my vagina.” She sniggered at her own crudeness. “I’m waiting, you know. I’m anybody’s.” She waved her arms slightly in a distracted sort of way as if being absurd could cancel everything people said about her.

I tried not to sound pompous, “I am not here for that, Rachel.” She really was not very attractive. I felt a sadness for her. She seemed so lost as this kind of celebrity, or anti-celebrity who had no respect in the public media. “I am just interested in the experience you had. It must have been bad and good at the same time. I think that’s important.”

“Huh,” she started. “I’m just a thing. An ornament on the shelf. An ugly ornament, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know about that. You are someone who had a terrible experience. And can teach everyone else something about it. Something about human beings, the good and the bad.” 

She shook her head, as if giving up. “OK, what you wanna know?”

“Well, I guess I want to know all the things I don’t know about it. About what it was like.” I tried to look serious and sympathetic – because I did feel it, even in this now tense situation. “I guess it is pretty traumatic to go over it all again – just remembering.”

“You’re sounding like my therapist!”

“Good,” I said, no longer knowing how to handle this distraught women. Perhaps I should just go home with her and stuff her vagina – as she put it – If it could make her feel better. “It’s OK. You’ve had an experience only a few people have had. Perhaps we should all know more what it was like.”

“Why?” She was now asking a question difficult to answer. “Why can’t you be interested in me. Not just interested in the one experience I’ve ever had. That’s all I am for everybody. The fucking body that was raped by my kidnappers.”

“It is not quite like that. I’m sorry you feel like that. Maybe we should start with everything else you are.”

And the interview went on….

 

She told me about her mother and her father, and other relatives, the social occasion, last thanksgiving, and so on. She was very compliant. It was all very prosaic. She was right she is of no interest except what had happened to her those five years ago. I was feeling sorry for her. And she asked for another doughnut. I couldn’t help myself from looking at her slightly expanded waistline. I did call for another doughnut, but said, “If I really wanted to be good to you I’d say ‘no’. I’d control your eating so that you lost a bit of that weight and you’d show that slim beauty that is hiding inside your body.” 

Her smile returned and she looked intensely at me. “Would you do that for me?” I had pleased her for once – my reference to her slim beauty, I supposed. 

And at that moment, she did appeal to me. It was not her physical presence but that she could appreciate me, could appreciate something I’d said to her. It switched on an electric light in her that shone in her smile in a different way from before. For a moment I felt very drawn to her. Well, to be honest, it was more than a moment. I put my arm across the café table and laid my hand on her arm. She looked at it as if it was a wasp or some uninvited insect about to prey on her. “It feels good to touch your arm,” I persisted.”

“Oh,” she said, almost as if triumphant, “So you do want me?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just that for a moment I saw something warm and alive, and beautiful in your heart.” She looked blank. “You just think you’re a pile of trash, don’t you?”

“I’m not garbage,” she said defensively. “That’s what those two bastard’s told me I am.” She was looking hard and angry.

“I’m not saying you are garbage or trash. “I’m saying you’ve got beauty in your heart.”

“Are you?” she said suspiciously. She was not going to let me get away easily. She’d misunderstood me, and wasn’t going to let that easily go. “You think I’m garbage. You think you can touch me up when you feel like it.” So I took my hand away. She noticed and seemed momentarily reflective. “I liked your hand on me.” And then she quickly reverted, “Is this what your interviews are like. Just a way to get to fucking me?”

“No,” I said, “I’ve abandoned the interview. I made you feel a specimen, Just an ornament. I’m sorry about that.”

“So now you just want to stuff me instead.”

“No. Not at all. Well, I mean….” I didn’t mean to say that to her. “I mean, that may come later. Right now, I was trying to say, I know what it’s like to feel I’m a waste of space, no confidence no use to anyone. It’s what I used to tell myself when I was a kid.”

She was looking with some curiosity, but perhaps not believing I could possibly understand how she felt. “So,” she enquired eventually, “What changed?” She looked sceptical.

“Well, it changed a bit after my book. You know I wrote a book about holocaust survivors – the non-Jewish ones who get neglected. Everyone thought I was great. They told me good things about my sensitivity. I hadn’t had many compliments in my life.”

“Why?”

“Oh. My parents put me up for adoption when I was a few years old. Then the agency couldn’t find anyone who wanted to adopt me. I think it was because I was black.”

“Yeah,” she said as if beginning to be a little sympathetic. “Probably the same over here in the States.” She looked a little speculative. “If you’re black, you can give a good fuck. That’s all.” She seemed to be relenting a little. “If you’re rich you’re an ornament, if you’re black you’re just a fuck-machine.”

I nodded, not so much because I agreed with that, but because she seemed to be commiserating; we had something in common. “Seems like you’re interviewing me, now.”

She laughed out loud for the first time. “Tables turned. You’re not an ace interviewer, are you.” I smiled at her glee but didn’t feel the humour. “Sorry, she said. “We’re both garbage. Two bits of litter.” But she was obviously feeling in a better mood.

“But,” I said, wanting to change the subject, “You should write a book. Seriously.”

“What?” she said looking aghast. “Why?”

“Well, you’re intelligent. You’ve got time; and connections. And you’ve got this horrendous experience everyone is fascinated with.”

“They’re not fascinated with it.”

“Irresistible fascination. The worst trauma this side of being murdered. Right. And it is exciting, too. What could be more complicated, complex, intriguing. How could anyone ever cope with such a combination – everyone will ask that.”

“Rubbish.”

“It is not rubbish. You don’t know what your life’s about. You can’t give yourself a reason to exist. Well, this is it. And if you want help with the writing, you know a writer. Me!”

She looked at me with surprise as if she could not have conceived of a black being a writer. “Yeah,” she mumbled as if she had to keep her thoughts to herself.

So, I said, “A black writer. What would Daddy say to that?” She did not answer.

As we left the coffee shop, she put her arm in mine and said “Wish the world didn’t hate your lot so much – cos I could fall in love with you.” I squeezed her arm with my elbow.

“We could emigrate to Nigeria!” 

She pulled her arm from mine abruptly and stopped, staring into my face with an angry gleam. “If you want me, have me. If you don’t, fuck off, and stuff your own ass.” She turned to start walking again. “That’s your choice.” And as we started walking again, I put her arm under mine as before. It is no use to me, except for a nice lady to hold; it is withered and I don’t know what it felt like to her. I was thinking about the choice he gave me. As we walked away close together, I think she thought I had chosen the first option. I wondered about the other kidnapped victim I had lined up for my research sample. Falling for the first of them, did not promise well. Her thug-man fell into step some twenty paces behind us.

 

***** 

 

** 10 His view of himself

The morning’s coolness dripped from the trees before the sun’s power was turned up. The park steamed with green in the early summer morning. He stared to either side, trying self-consciously not to appear as if he was noticing something. The whir, he imagined in his head, would have been coming from directly behind him. Then it cut; and then it would be coming from directly ahead. He walked calmly into it as if it were not there. The whirring faded, or it was as if it panned slowly right to the lake and the time island of yellow trees stranded alone in the middle. 

            On the bench seat, he sat watching the scene. What had brought this mother with her child out so early, both so crisply dressed, well-ironed, combed? – a whole other, stranger’s world, the links unknown to him. The woman in the light linen cotton skirt was holding the camera up to snap her toddler chasing the ducks with a fragment of bread in his hand. She shot two quick pictures of him, calling at him. Then she put the small Japanese mechanism in the large pocket in the front of her skirt, smoothed her hair with a tired gesture and took the child back to the push-chair. They went off on this bright light morning towards the dusty brown buildings where the rush hour was picking up. 

            All the interweaving themes of her 30, or may be 35, years mould themselves into the pattern of her life now. Then, at this point – his watching moment – her unique stream of being emerges marginally from her hazy distance. It is a thin sliver of time pressed against the next. On the bench, he watched; he had been the one, serendipitously, to capture this slice of her, but only this one. There was a companionship in putting together these two unknowns, these transient untouching moments. 

            His night had been hard and long, yet the morning so bright. The air cleared for a new day in the city.  He simply sat for some moments today in the park on his way home, before going restfully to bed. 

            She had disappeared with the toddler in the pushchair when he next looked.  The clump of bushes which had swallowed them had then begun to disgorge more people, single - purposefully stepping across the park to their workplaces.  He didn't want to feel the companionship of more unrelated strangers.  He got up to begin his walk home; this life moment was finished, the next to be experienced. Cut.

 

For as long as he could remember it had been happening.  He knew it was imaginary.  He was home again after the night-shift. He looked up from the bathroom basin, cleaning his teeth, and saw himself in his mirror.  The camera whirred, zooming in on his white-frothed mouth - every detail a fascination.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

He slipped into his side of the bed by mid-morning, some hours after Angela had got into her side. He looked across; the peaceful repose of her face like a ripe and tempting fruit.  He turned away and curled up to sleep.  The camera shut down.

            He was alone, the stream of his life-patterns stilled. A little viewfinder in his head kept a watchful attention going.  He thought of her next to him.  She would get up several hours before he woke; do various pieces of business, shop for a good meal and cook it by the time he woke.  Then their strands would part - she going into her workshop, the gems the precious stones, her precise tools firmly made, adjusted for her jewellery work; and he would read a book, the papers perhaps, watch the early evening news, and then march off across to the bus, to the walk across the park, to the Whitehall dungeon where he was night man receiving the incoming coded messages for the Ministry.

            Beyond the closed shutters of his eyes, he could see her jewellery laid out sensuously, the gallery owner who took them, taking pictures of her very best pieces. The pure surface of her skin a throbbing rose-pink in his flash-bulb glowed in the champagne light.  The owner's expensive lens explored her pores in close-up, the glistening, polished silver white circling her nipples, the crushed gems bursting colourful, from her navel. He lay in bed thinking of those photographs. In her undone red-wine enthusiasm she had proudly shown him those ikons that had been photographed. Her wide loose smile hung over the sensuous records of her craft. They stung him as they riffled through his amazed, perplexed fingers. The pain of his jealousy had so sensitively been wrought from her body by the owner.  The pain numbed his limbs, numbed his desire for her; he slept. The owner was her owner.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

The fever of those photograph-memories woke him in the night.  The glossy images still lay as if in his quiet fingers: the precious metallic orchid, Faberge-like, nestling in the fur of her armpit, in the fur of her pubis; the strong restraining gold-link choker stretched her chin up; the thrust of the thin silver-gilt hair grip left a small charmed gem extruding bright blue from the red of her secret place; even the pearly drops of that fresh saliva, splashed upon the diamond-set necklace she clenched gently between her teeth.

            His fever drove against the sleep in his mind.  The restlessness became wakeful, his eyes watched the dark; and the camera watched every stroke of his insomnia.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

When he woke, he noticed the long absent shape in the bed alongside him where she had lain. Together with his own imprint, two patterns that intersected without touching.  The thought of that shape beside him, that emptiness, came back as he strolled early in the evening with promise of dusk in the sky, its same separate shape in the clouds moving inevitably into the horizon behind him.

            Yet again the record of his journey to work, the slow pan of his walk through the park, the lake, the ducks always as usual.  The fascination of every detail was an intruding comfort.  His stardom upon the stage of the world, a stardom only in his self-consciousness.

            He remembered his father's jaded sadness on those mornings on holiday, one equally bright summer.  His mother rose in her early morning moods, he remembered. Those agonised summer days that year, I could not bear them, he said to himself, wondering if the camera could pick up the slight watering he felt in his eye.  Inside his head he could hear himself speaking out, with feeling: “I remember that time as long, long ago - and very formative.  I was a child of ten maybe, becalmed apparently before adolescence, but churning inside about Mum and Dad”.

            He could see the image, his own talking face, filling the screen, an intimate documentary now, "I can reach back even now, twenty-seven years ago. I had a room in the better-than-average guest house at Brightlingsea. Mine was next to my parent's room, on that holiday. They were next along the dark soft corridor. My mother hardly spoke to my father and me, she just looked at us - there had been a frozen grey look in her eyes, pale flashes whose light had died. I had a balcony that looked out over the sea.  Its rhythm lapped on the shingle, car noise, now and then, went along the road by the front beneath the balconies of the house.  My balcony ran along the house to theirs.  A heavy wooden trellis separated the two.  If I stood by the trellis, I could listen in to what they said late at night.  The window-doors were open.  They didn't know I remained awake worrying.

     I found that I could climb round the white trellis barrier and could look through the heavy lace curtains - they were almost night curtains. The rather open pattern framing of squares let me see in. By coming up close to the mesh, I could frame my parents in bed. Mum sat bolt upright, her chin expressing a fastidious contempt, my dad lay in a position that seemed to mean he was relaxed but with one tense arm across her, and slowly touching her skin more mechanical than loving.  “I'm fed up with hearing”, she said “that you think I'm cold”. “Well,” my dad said tensely, appeasing, “it's not exactly that.  But...” his pause was to indicate to her he was trying to be considerate, thoughtful “... we don't, you know... make love together much... do we?”  Mum tensed up in her body, growing more vertical against the back of the bed, her posture like a victim knowing that the thumbscrews are going to go on being tightened, wondering how much more she could bear before screaming out. 

     ‘My dad sensed this and left the rest silent - which was no less torturing to Mum than his considerate appeals, I guessed. If I moved my head back a bit, I could just get her face in the square of the trellis.  She was as still as a stone.  By moving my head forward, I could get, in the opening of the mesh, a wide angle of her shoulders, even more and the whole of her immobile body.  I could move forwards and backwards and animate the immobile image of her. Eventually my father moved away.  I believed his kindly submissiveness, when I was that age, to be merely his duty to her.  Their bedside lamp went out.  I clambered back to my room and lay a long night considering in every proportion the image of Mum's face in the squared opening, in every possible position that I could manoeuvre it with my movements.  In the morning, I went into their room to see them; my father lay in bed alone.  Mum's nightdress was on the chair, only her shape in the other side of the bed.  Dad was brightly friendly as if he owed it to me, and I owed the same back to him.

     ‘Mum didn't appear for the rest of that day and I didn't see her till breakfast the day after.  Instead, my Dad and I did things together, like we had not done before. We both pretended it was normal - but it wasn't.  That day we drove miles, the whole day we went from one thing to another.  I remember a vast old tower, built in the middle-ages in a town further along the coast.  The tower, I believe, had once looked out over the sea - in the time of Henry VIII, perhaps.  It was round on many floors and my dad played at locking me up deep down in the dungeon underground - and then I played locking him up.  But all the time I thought of my Mum somewhere else, I couldn't imagine what she was doing - or whether she was thinking about me.  I remember then thinking how I would tell her everywhere we'd been, not let her get out of anything we had done, not let her feel left out.  My Dad took me to see a film, in a cinema, for the first time in my life.  I don't remember what film it was; I think he'd chosen it at random.  But I do remember the dark place like the prison tower we had been to - and the enormous faces that came up on the screen, filling the wall; faces just framed by the rectangular opening of light.  As the curtains swung back at the end, I know I was reminded of the curtains in my parents' window.  My Dad and I did not speak as we went home.  I know I went to sleep before I could think of going out across the balconies. But I know the following night, after Mum had come back to us, I did go and spy on them again - I made their faces fill up the opening of light, just as I'd seen in the cinema.

     ‘I listened to their talk as I moved their images around under the control of my eyes.  They talked about me - my Mother seemed near tears; and my Dad tried comforting but didn't seem to care too much.  They seemed to think she would miss me for some reason; and that I would miss them.  Mum seemed to be going away and I felt very sorry for her - and all their talk about me seemed so natural, so much what their lives were for.  If they were planning things that were going to be bad for me, we were such a sad family of three.  The only family I really knew; but a sad one compared with what I thought other families were.  And I felt sad for me that I was part of that kind of family.  And it was sad even, perhaps especially sad, that no-one knew I was there and knew about all it this.  But I was alone, and no-one knew I how alone I was.  Then I thought to myself, when I was back in bed, supposing this was a film, something or someone making a film of all this; then the whole world could know. I wouldn't be alone, I would fill a whole wall with me, and what the world would want to know about me.  That was when it started.’

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

The image on the television screen thrown up in his mind’s eye, stilled - the face, confiding and intimate, relaxed. It faded into darkness.  His work beckoned, another night in the obscure darkness of the Ministry dungeon, the lonely darkness. He rose from the park bench, the evening light jaded by the street-lamps as it died slowly away. He walked solitary and sedately into work. The rest of the world relaxed.

            Eight days out of fourteen and then a six-day `fortnight-end'.  Angela often relaxed her own routine too on his days off. Though they both continued to spend the nights awake and the days asleep, they seemed to coincide in their times more. On these occasions every now and again she would indulge her forbidden craving for drink. Her particular intake was a liberal supply of salted brown ale, followed by repeated (several times) bottles of Greek retsina wine enhanced with lemon juice and a very sweet liqueur, or with honey itself. Invariably, on those occasions she ended up in a damp patch of her own urine that seeped through the pores of her jeans and into the bare grain of the pine chair; and equally the consciousness of her mind would dissolve into a similar shapeless puddle and seep out of existence.

            On this occasion he had hired a video camera for his, and their, entertainment. Firstly he had cooked for her: a fresh salmon mousse made with olive oil and goose fat, enough peanut butter to give a mystery to it and the freshest Scottish salmon he could find in London; then a salad of very crisp, barely red tomatoes sliced fine slivers of two cheeses, mozzarella and feta, with a meagre dressing of Worchester sauce and tarragon-flavoured olive oil; then for a main dish he served fine sirloin cut in cubes and plunged in garlic-flavoured boiling butter, and mixed with similarly fried croutons cut from a sweet milk loaf, and all garnished and covered with mange-tout steamed to body heat and slivers of deep fried courgettes in lemon-spiced wholemeal batter; for desert there were curd and almond-filled meringues spread with double cream into which gritty brown sugar had been stirred. 

            The whirring camera concentrated upon the framed view of his baroque gestures with the sliver gilt serving spoons.  She reached the beginning of her meal. She, and he, smiling across the table with the expert cuisine that served the camera, and all who would eventually watch it. He was careful to plan the video, its sound and vision displaying their meaning for each other. Smiled and her head engulfed he mouthfuls slowly.

            He proceeded carefully through the stages he had made, the whirring record of thir joined mealtime.  "Evidence," he thought.  And then stacking the plates neatly, he took his wife's body through the flat keeping her pressed, firmly and gently, to his own body. She, an imagined accomplice washed in the shower till she ran clean with water and a steaming pink freshness.  He undressed her, she vaguely curious, her clothes in wet lumps in the bottom of the shower. Then wrapped carelessly in her huge bath towel, he welcomed her back to the scene of his camera, and fitted her snugly into the shape on the bed she had left those hours befores.  He imagined the screen filled with her form, the image lingering slowly.  He returned in a few moments with the various things he had conjured in his mind, his own breathing a little stronger now.  He took the video camera in his hands with the care of a mother moving her baby; and rested it lovingly and precisely in the corner of the bedroom so its angle of view took in as much as possible of the scene he was going to play out with her.  He set it going.

            He unfolded her body in a picture precise as he had longed for. Her towel opened as if a flower in his mind, in bloom, on display as the occasion for display and beauty. Would she a wake, he wondered, before he had accomplished his scene for the camera.  He then left her for a moment on a journey he dreamed.

He gathered an accumulation of jewellery from her workshop; that he had quickly raid. Then back in their intimate boudoir, he took a small pin and prodded it at her eyelid.  She did not move, her stupor now a full anaesthesia. Her helplessness was vastly exposed, a landscape of vulnerable innocence and unconsciousness, a victim tempting menace.  He slipped his hand beneath her body hardly knowing any longer if it was cold meat or deeply loved woman. The camera, he imagined, recorded each of his careful movements with an avid, fascinated compassion.  He rolled her over and straightened her arms.  He felt for the slender bone above each elbow and slowly used a length of fine silver wire to form a figure-of-eight around her arms that pinned them behind her, threading the wire a number of times till she was properly fixed.  Then he rolled her back onto her front again, her back arching painfully over her bound arms. She lay there, her head lolled to one side, the sinews of her shoulders looking taut and strained; her lovely mouth was relaxed and her lips slightly apart for her breathing.  The red around her eyes was paler now but it appeared, as ever, as if she had just finished crying.  In spite of the stillness of her unconsciousness and the dull, undisturbed rhythm of her breathing, there was still a lithe presence in her body which he now stared at with a fearsome coldness.  Her legs spread easily apart when he moved them with gentle pressure; and the handful of small gemstones slipped easily from his fingers into her vagina.  Their multiple colouring glistened with the moisture there as he pressed handful after handful from the vast old-fashioned sweet jar into the deepest part of her. It took more than he ever thought - the huge beauty of the stones crammed into the precious secrecy of her spaces.  He thrust more and more into her until, like a briming, slopping milk-pail some of the gems slowly leaked back out of her.  Then he took the lips of her vagina to cover over her rich feast by stretching them tightly together; and using a long and elegant hatpin she had made, he ran it back and forth through those lips, side to side, like sewing the succulent stuffing into the Christmas turkey; the precious stitchwork in the seam of a rich altar cloth.  The glowing red gem of the hatpin came at last to rest, precisely over her special spot, like a buoy marking the twisted agony of a wreck.

            Her breath was blowing in and out of her body now. Her legs seemed to judder and one at a time came straight, till the burning red jewel glowed from the deep pointed pit of golden hairs.  His hands hardly dared to touch her as if her beauty would scorch him.  Her head was lolling slightly from side to side in a lighter level of unconsciousness.  He slithered one small gem under each eyelid which made the twitching reflex eye-movements more visible.  An unwilled mechanical process was beginning.  Slowly he began to fill each of her nostrils with more small stones, pressing them as far back into her as he could, on both sides.  Gradually she could contain no more there and a few trickled back across her cheeks to lie in tiny puddles of colour in the bedsheet.  Her mouth was wide open, gasping rather, now.  He imagined the rhythm of her body and the methodical movements of his fingers, framed symmetrically in his imagined viewfinder, the screen filling an entire wall with the sense of an undefended menace.

            After this he poured a slow stream of gemstones from the jar into her gasping mouth; the sucking in of her breath drew the stones like a gurgle of water round the plughole of a basin.  Stronger, more jerky, hiccupping and silent coughing movements took place.  As her mouth and throat slowly filled her gasps and the choking intensified. Eventually her mouth was full, abrim to her even teeth.  Her rose-pink lips stretching uselessly aside began to darken.  The heaving of her chest was now airless.  She could take no more into her.  Her eyes flickered and lost their bright stones.  He stroked her fine and welcoming breasts - he kissed and caressed them, moving his moist lips over them as her body fought writhing and dipping, in extremis, mindless and hopeless.  It was over more quickly than he expected; the last twitches of dying muscles in her neck, in her legs, soon stopped.  He lay against the smooth, soft, beautiful body.

It was finished.  The camera he imagined whirred to a stop, his performance over.  He rose slowly with sad movements; and turned to the video, its record complete; he switched it off.  "It is over," he thought, "finished".

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

On the next day, he returned the camera he had rented; its journey parting with him forever.  He placed the memory-stick in the machine at home in order to watch from the comfort of their large settee.  The image on the television screen came up quickly; Angie lying in her washed drunken beauty, relaxed, her beautiful generous lips slightly parted with her breathing, as if drawing in strength from his side of the bed.  From the right of the screen his naked body appeared, still glistening from the shower. He moved slowly over the bed, and the sensitive point of his penis tipped her lovely mouth in the slightest silent greeting.  Her lips drew into a smile and her mouth invited him in.  The swelling end of his penis became a red glowing gemstone that thrust right into her opened body. Each orifice welcomed him

            On the settee, she murmured slightly and moved lovingly towards him as she watched. Her head nestled into his shoulder.  Close beside him, too close to focus, her ear-ring with its frail green stone stared through her trim hair, as if a watching eye in the midst of the fur of a cat. Angie’s eyes, softly with love and tears, intoxicated him, coldly observed him. Two strangers (again) wedded on screen. The machine whirred on. Only the camera in his head restless recording it still. Till eventually all three – it, him, Angie, all three – were composed in rest.

 

***** 

 

** 11 Sylvia

 

Sylvia was very shy in herself. But she could command a strong presence at committees and meetings with her crisp, sharpened comments that silenced the most hesitant.

Sylvia was the most unresponsive to the smooth but unknown icon brought in by the corporation to run the investigation service of the company. Beneath labouring brows there had been a good deal of sly watching. Sylvia was no exception. More surreptitious than the others, yet, hidden, there was a response in Sylvia. Her quiet life was routinely served by sisters, nieces, a few ageing aunts and her wayward father. The youngest of a large family she perpetually had the attitude of the one left behind.

            Being the person who worked closest to Graham, and half aware of her own rough-edges, she needed to get him used to her slowly. The sparkle she felt was uncomfortable, and she denied to herself. A visceral plunge in her tummy was common with certain film-stars, and, in those faraway days, when she danced all night alone in the clubs. What Graham meant to her was simply a man taking over – a sleek suit, a club tie, a car always fresh from the carwash and... Graham as if always on tip-toe, clipped his sentences, had a silver tongue for the secretaries and flirted whenever it was necessary. These were the only features she allowed herself briefly to commit to paper in her regular letters to her relatives. She never remembered her dreams.

Sylvia was watchful; a watchfulness that meant distance; a scrutiny that restlessly absorbed those around her. She was no gossip. Her discretion was legendary.

Then she it began to surface, a dream she began to remember; one that seemed regular every few nights. One day, she realised it was happening. In the dream she saw an eye. A very large eye. She was close up to it and it pressed itself in on her with its very large proportions. It had the dimensions of a wall, a rock face, a sculptured relief in marble, an Assyrian frieze of ancient conquests. It was, as it were a blind, stone stare stretching above, to either side, blankly. There was nothing to do but curiously to watch it and, as she watched, its stillness broke. Rather below and to her left there was a sudden movement, a slight movement, a little, scratchy, swallowing movement. What had, to a glance, looked like features of the texture, the uneven face of the rock, now appeared as an organ, an aperture small but sinister. It was a mouth, a mouth of stone preparing to eat, stone lips of a square shape hardly opened, as if smacking together before a good meal; a small crushing sound as a stone slid upon stone, a tiny expression of a strength hidden in reserve. She felt it an alien. Impossible to confront, impossible to escape. It had paralysed her as a spider its fly, whilst it prepared its venom. She could merely wait whilst it waited, focus on that hungry patch of eye that held her relentlessly for an unhappy fate.

            She now realised she always woke from this dream with an alertness that precluded sleep. It forced on her the day’s worries instead. It had happened, it had regularly happened, time and again in the last months. It was since Graham had come to the office.

Nor was Sylvia a beauty. Somewhere in her mid-thirties, she had had a long war with her plumpness and had not won all the battles. In a way, something in her was relieved to be out of any competition, not that she could have told herself that. Yet, he seemed to like her. Graham’s slight swagger gave way quickly to a seriousness at work. When they were together - and often they worked closely because her responsibilities for day-to-day operations meant she reported to him more than the others - she saw a deeper side. Now and again that smooth confidence might snap. She quickly knew how to steer him through it. She felt her quietness understood. He saw her life in hiding. He was relieved by it.

            A shy deep smile came on his face when she met him. It replaced the cool charm that others got from him. He seemed to share a personal sadness. Each held a secret sadness never to be conveyed to each other. Over months working together, he too seemed surprised at a mysterious closeness they built up.

 

…..oo0oo…..

 

When he had been active with girls, Graham would not have interested himself in Sylvia. It was a kind of unthought cruelty. A disdain. He would not even have looked at her. Not considered her thoughts. He might have even felt a kind of insult if inadvertently seen accompanied by her ordinariness. Her lack of vivacious show.

            Had he got used to his abrupt celibacy?  After his obsessive sexuality in the army, his military career finished, and of course his career with girls. He was forced back on himself. Had he ever properly coped with that secret of his? How could he, you might exclaim; such a secretive secret. Unwittingly, Sylvia was drawn into the ramifications of it. It was not that he no longer looked at women, indeed he did. He often looked longingly. Their bodies, as if each an invitation. In the past, he would have planned approaches, smoothly, charmingly. Each time a new challenge. It had been a great shock to have found that having survived, his urges remained the same, just as obsessive. What had happened to him made no difference to his interest. That was the bigger cruelty of it.

            A good soldier for nearly sixteen years, he had never really mixed. He had forged a single direction. Some would say he exploited his string of partners of the night, almost anonymous, some he had known well till sexually consummated. Then he cast them off. So often before, he had assumed his conquest brought gratitude from the one he had conquered. Sylvia was different. She might he half-wondered - then banishing such an emboldened and reckless thought - be bringing to life a new side of himself. He could say that her dogged support of his work in the agency left him profoundly grateful to her. It was the only word for it. 

            He found himself chatting to her in personal ways, drinking tea together with no-one else around, out of sight of those who might be impressed – or scoffing. This new departure stirred other things. He became interested in her. Secretly, though unexpressed – even to himself – he could wonder what it was to be plain. Did she care?  It occurred to him for the first time that she may not view beauty as the compulsive pursuit above everything, as he did. But what then?  He could have wondered what pain she might have been through – have come through it and kept her strength of mind. There could, if he knew what it was, be something admirable there, something to respect. Was respect a completely new virtue for Graham?  He too had survived; but had he grown a strength of mind from it?

 

….oo0oo….

 

For Sylvia this suave man was a new encounter. But one like all other new encounters, to be confronted in the usual way; down-to-earth, practical, unsentimental; his perfect assistant, reliable, responsible, taking authority when required. His elegance, though, was a mystery, a land of different values -- on her part simply to be ignored. The place to be was where everything was in order, in place. Never in her life would she have allowed the view that she took after her mother in any way. It would merely have been the occasion for one of her precise and articulate retorts, facing the speaker up to his own mistakes. And yet. Family resemblances cannot be completely dismissed always, can they?  Her mother had run a neat but poor household. With every child she had she became tidier, more ordered, and more harassed – and indeed poorer as well. Everyone had their job around the house. As a girl, at the younger end, Sylvia cleaned the door handles every day. Great care was demanded of everyone to respect the door handles. In fact, nobody should open the doors with the knob, if possible. Similar rules of usage applied to the cooker - one ring only to be used if possible - the cutlery, the bathroom fittings; in fact everything touchable or dirtiable, including the cleaning implements themselves. “Why don’t we all where gloves, Mum?” Sylvia had once asked, in her familiar practical way even then. “You don’t wear gloves indoors. Don’t be silly, dear,” Mother had answered the question with a tired tolerance, in her usual bland but definite way. But however firm, her father took no notice, coming and going at whatever time of day, stomping about in clumsy boots, scraping and dirtying, and grasping door-knobs as he pleased - sometimes hanging onto them tight, of necessity, when he’d had a bit to drink. He was comfortably uncouth, indomitably loving in the teeth of mother’s gales of instructions that he was ignoring. But Sylvia would not have admitted to taking after him either. The only disaffection with her father had come when she had experimented, with the other girls at school, with cosmetics. Father had rather alarmingly reacted. Lipstick she discovered could be as forbidden as dirty door-knobs. In defiance, she had taken the advice of another troubled girl who told her you could make your lips red by biting them. Sylvia had done this for a while but shortly such a gesture towards bodily appeal had died out. And she had resigned herself as father had wished, to a comeliness of nature rather than an electricity of the body.

            It was therefore something of a surprise to find herself responding to Graham and his elaborate manners, with a warmth which would have only seemed natural to a different sort of woman altogether. Without experience of such things, Sylvia nevertheless made a gesture one day. She laid her hand purposefully on his. Without experience she did not know what to make of the rather violent withdrawal of the hand. Someone else might have regarded it as perverse. Graham’s assiduous manners, his shyly engaging glances, his courtesy, then followed by such a rebuff. Some might call it a rather cruel game with her. But Sylvia was hurled into uncertainty.

 

….oo0oo….

 

Perhaps it was the following from the reading list at school. Young minds exposed to John Fowles and his mysterious Magi:

I think anyone but a doctor would have fainted. I should have liked to have fainted. The room was bare. In the middle was a table. Roped to the table was a young man. The cousin. He was naked except for a bloodstained singlet, and he had been badly burnt around the mouth and eyes. But I could see only one thing. Where his genitals should have been, there was nothing but a black-red hole. They had cut off his penis and scrotal sac. With a pair of wire-cutters.

Too much for most people at the best of times, Fowles’ masterpiece had foolishly been set by his English teacher and Graham, as sensitive as any schoolchild of 15, had been spattered with the emotional fallout from it. Whilst the others in his class giggled in embarrassment and horror, Graham kept quiet for weeks, avoiding his mates. Alone he fought with a pervasive sense of having already been mutilated pointlessly by this vivid and explicit desctption. Imaginatively, we could perhaps wonder if that was a formative influence; one that led directly to his feverish philandering for many years.

            Of course, Sylvia knew nothing of these complexities in Graham. Of course, he said nothing. Indeed, he barely had words for them himself. To tell the truth his past was indeed obscure, as secret as an official secret, and locked away for thirty years in the public records.

 

….oo0oo….

 

Trips abroad for the company were occasionally required; a couple or so a year. Graham did most of them personally, and alone. Unless a camera was needed, and a man would fly out for a day (or a night as the case may be). Those occasions were only if people had to be tracked. For documents, mere print copy was sufficient. In fact, Graham was away at the time when he might have celebrated a first anniversary with the company. It was not that he celebrated such things or would even have thought of such a thing. Indeed, given the cynical nature of the business they were in, nobody else in the office was liable to such sentiment either.

            However, he was surprised to receive a `not to be opened till the first of the month; envelope. Obviously, a card inside it, and moreover with his name scribbled clearly in Sylvia’s handwriting. He had popped it into his pile for packing. And so quickly that he could overlook a momentary stir in his head. He had had to overlook a sharp pang of something mingled with his surprise. A pang. The point was that it was an unidentifiable pang, and therefore easily dismissed, rendered quickly momentary. But yet, to his surprise – it was thus a second surprise that it had registered as something. He was, though, honest enough to remember it a few days later. On the first of the month, rising early, the promise of a continental breakfast, croissant and coffee, and then a long drive south. He remembered, with an amused curiosity, to open the card. The sturdy characteristic cynicism of his current profession was a long haul from the world that Sylvia had stirred up in some distant ventricle of his heart or his brain. Graham was never one to pause for a precision in his feelings. He was confronted by a moment which wiped any amusement away and threw confusion in its place. He could not find the envelope. It was simply not packed with the rest of his things. He tried to think back to the last time he had had it. And think forward from there through all the possible alternatives. The only possibility in the dingy hotel room in Dijon was to look through all his bags and possessions that he had with him. A laborious process, that he at first hung back from. Was it that important. It seemed so. And he unpacked completely.

            So, he discovered, not the card, but how much it meant to him. It made no sense – only a sensation, as if some organ from the pit of his stomach was dislodged. Perhaps it was its senselessness to him that meant it could not be dismissed in an instant. It lasted for fully a couple of hours till he found a postcard, and a stamp, and composed a jolly message and had sought out a post-box to send it to her. Then he seemed to have exorcised something.

            Unfocussed and therefore unexplained, it continued as a disturbing memory for the rest of the day. Dimly, as a kind of sadness, a feeling of having let her down, of having been casual about something entrusted to him. He turned his mind resolutely against any suggestion that he should be responding in his own way to an intimate approach from Sylvia. Such a thought was not to be endorsed by thinking it. Telling himself that it was just one of those things – odds and ends do go missing when travelling. He returned home eventually with a feeling that something rippled in his relationship with Sylvia. Not admitting to himself that he was drawn in an old-fashioned yet quite impossible way. It was far more complex than the electric and quick-fire relations with his women in the past. It was both quite normal and quite forbidden. For Graham the past dominated everything.

 

….oo0oo….

 

That domineering past had been one of those impossible missions, in Connemarra, the wrong side of the border; living rough - bits of woodland for home. He went for three weeks at a time; on his own, no contact with anyone. No traces to be discovered – until they might emerge long after he had gone. He had done it, surviving himself, but tracking them, for months. In Guyana, in the Falklands, even in Iraq; he had been the expert. But never more than a month each time. But in the Irish Republic he had kept it up indefinitely, tracking the patterns of border crossings, transport movements, troop training. Till the IRA began putting together his own patterns. Then they made predictions. He was caught by dogs in the end. In fact, he might have killed them; one by one. But six dogs at once, he only dealt with four. It was their barking led the men with guns to catch up. They beat him physically and then pinned him to a broad-trunked tree with nails through various folds of skin - above his shoulders, beside his hips. They broke both his arms. The two men relaxed after their exertion. Graham, through the misty gales of pain, realised that their extreme energy with him had come out of their fear. Now he was broken that fear gave way to contempt. They smoked. “Will you look at that one over there,” the large man said pointing to one of the two remaining dogs. It was sniffing round one dead companion. It nuzzled the body as if trying to bring it to life again. “It’s looking for a copulation,” and both men laughed. The dog gave up shortly, lifted its leg against the corpse, and moved away. The men laughed again. Graham was barely looking on. The two dogs came up to the men, seeking, as if for their reward. One man looked at the other. “They’ll be wanting a morsel to eat. Will you cut them a little meat?”  The other man smiled and stood up. He took a woodman’s knife from his belt and sliced some meat from Graham. Graham’s scream echoed uselessly in the wooded landscape. Even his training could not stop that scream. The man nailed the small blooded pieces to a tree opposite. He sat down and the men jeered as the dogs jumped in the air to reach the morsel. The men laughed and threw sticks at the dogs. When finally torn from its nail, the two dogs quarrelled over it. It was hardly a meal for either of them. They seemed dissatisfied with the treat and sniffed around the men for more. Graham’s scream echoed still inside his head, an echo to continue for his remaining years. But his mouth had shut and his breath was all gone. The raw pain between his legs was twofold. One was physical, the other was… more ghastly.

            When the men left they piled the corpses of the four dogs round Graham’s feet.

            His preference, as they left, was to die. He could not conceive of recovery. But the Army was tipped off and a day later they retrieved his destroyed body.

 

….oo0oo….

 

The agency were later to meet their opposite numbers from a comparable German company in a European link-up. The whole world of investigation was broadening. The two agencies chose Athens to honeymoon their marriage. And on this trip Graham had his team of colleagues, half-a-dozen, amounting to half those in his office. And that included Sylvia.

            The trip was for five days. In the sun, the exotic food, the out-of-the-ordinary working, the team found themselves in a different daily contact with each other. And Graham found himself one evening still with the drains of retsina in a bottle staring across a white-clothed table in the Plaka, at Sylvia. The rest of the team had drifted off unconcerned in ones and twos. In that atmosphere, cooking smells in the open bustle of sauntering feet on the streets, the sharp and spicy wine still tasting, Graham found himself switching into an habitual charm with his female companion. Habits resurface.

            Equally, it was haphazard for Sylvia. Though she knew the persisting magnetism, there was, also, a draw of sadness between them. She allowed it to be. Her wine left her relaxed, open, for the first time in her life. Rather than taking any positive steps to react, to move forward, they found themselves – no other way of putting it – wandering in the narrow uneven streets, amongst the lit restaurants flowing onto the streets full of arm-in-arm lovers. The eager traders at once base and aloof. Towering enigmatic above, the shattered face of the acropolis, its arc-lit form, as a sign of the transitoriness of life and also the durability of its effects.

            They found themselves wandering - neither would remember how it happened – hand-in-hand. It had seemed so natural – the place, the warmth, the after-supper glow. Two hands that sought more than their owners knew – or could deliver.

            They clasped in the warmth and glow of the human bustle. And beneath the brooding feline presence of the stony relics above. She turned and stopped him. Her well-known earnestness ran as veins though her passion like a freely freckled marble. She explained in her blunt way the enduring innocence of her body – decent living, as she put it. She was pleased with the slightly archaic expression the ‘innocence of her body’. It spoke as it were in the idiom of the city. She would give herself, her body she vowed, if he wanted. Apologetic, too, she addressed the shame of her body she inhabited, its pressing plainness, a `lumpiness’ she called it. However, for what it was worth she offered it to serve his passions.

            Graham, drunk, was intoxicated too by his own confusion. The familiarity of a woman’s overture, of her abasement, of her confessional offering, of the gift of a body as if it were spirit; this all overwhelmed him with both its familiarity and its impossibility. He was drawn to his own familiar responses and was pulled by them. He assured, reassured, secured her loosened esteem and her uncertainty in desire. All familiar, a pattern, a reflex. And yet, the knowledge; at the same time the cruel, entrapping, obstructing knowledge of his maiming. He knew this sureness of his old touch; his stale relentless scripts could no longer succeed. In the past he had always known that whatever sour taste was left the morning after, it was short-lived compared to the joined movement of ecstasy the night before. Now, oh god, now it was only `as if’ he could lead her there. And the familiarity led him, despite his knowledge that the fate of this tenderness between them could only be implacable as stone.

            Sylvia in blunt fashion, stole a look at Graham and she announced their intention. Having her articulate sense so developed, she knew her desires in words as soon as she knew them. For Sylvia it was more to know them in words than in actual experience. It was not that she lacked experience completely. But it had always been furtive, hidden, hurried and totally unfulfilled. And above all a long time ago.

            “Graham. I’m not thinking about the work anymore. You’re about to become my lover.” Although it was half a question, she felt the relief at achieving such openness. It is what words do – keys to open doors in the mind. She was also surprised at herself – her confidence with words. But not only that, the words themselves implied a confidence with her physical body. It was not a confidence she was familiar with. It was a confidence that came embedded in the proximity of the words to her body’s contact with him.

            She knew Graham’s power, his intent look. Was it horror she saw in his face? Or was it desire?  He managed no more than an inarticulate, “Ah!”  She decided instantly that it was desire, such was the confidence he had created in her. And if it was horror, that was only the horror of his own desire.

            Not given to reassurance, she found herself talking to him about mixing pleasure and business. “Jennifer had an affair with one of the young `ops’”  They kept it quiet nearly till she left. There’s a lot that has gone on in the office. People get a bit nervous if they know. But mostly nobody knows.”

            “But people must talk,” Graham went along with her thinking in a lame sort of way. Though positively charmed by the openness he could never emulate. His conquest was complete. The triumph of the old habit, seduction.

            “Yes. People talk. But no-one knows. If people talk a lot... I mean if so much is talked about, nobody knows what to believe.”

            Together they started walking back down the bright little street. Soon, they would come to their hotel.

 

….oo0oo….

 

When they got there, the same haunted look crossed Graham’s face. But removed itself in a moment. He felt pressed by her, by what seemed to be her desperateness. It was hard to know if her directness of speech came from her innocence or alternatively from an unsuspected depth of experience. However, pinned in his own dilemma, which she could know nothing about, he still found a rising irritation. Graham’s bad temper worried him; there was a degree of vindictiveness in him which over the years he had been forced to acknowledge partially. It was an urge he knew had erupted so often in dropping his women over-quickly, unnecessarily quickly. He’d been inventive in providing himself with good reasons. One of them needed to be made less vain; another needed to be shown she could not control everyone; and so on, and so on, and so on, until the very inventions had themselves become suspicious, even to him. He could by now have had a fat dossier of letters expressing various unsolicited expressions of post-coital indignation against him; except that he had always scrunched them up in unceremonious contempt that the one in question could not learn the lesson he had been prepared to give.

            Now his rising justification was that she would only deserve any disappointment - deserve it for pushing and pressing him. It could not, even now, be quite recognised what this was; that it was in fact his own disappointment twisted into something different. Perhaps, even, he could be taking the opportunity to punish somebody, just anybody would do – just someone who happened to offer herself for the punishment – as a return for his own suffering. A suffering that had gone completely unavenged so far as he knew. In the charging panic of his feelings there was no chance he could unravel this tangle. He allowed, in a cruelly passive way, the usual course of events to take over.

            When they kissed, as they neared the hotel, Sylvia could feel the vibrating passion in this lovely man who was also her friend and colleague. Her body glowed for a moment with enduring ardour – a quiet, unhurried timelessness in his arms. She would give everything; and receive. Received the knowledge that she had pleasured him. Always so cautious, so tidy, she now knew she had loosened what goodness there was in her; free to be plucked by him. By the gracious goodness she knew in him.

            Graham’s regret at what he was doing to her amounted to a repeat of his own ineffable suffering. A perverse triumph lay in knowing that she too would soon be cut off in the midst of her winging expectation.

            At first, she did not notice, as he let her peel away the clothes from the fruit of her appetite, from the trusted altar she desired.

Did she see what at first she could not let her eyes focus on?  The raw red scar descending between his legs, veiled in his dark pubic hairs. Did she draw back quickly, as if in danger?  If she had been an emotional woman she might have screamed. The missing parts were, to her, a real presence. He watched, impassive from a great distance beyond screams. Every shade of her response, fascinated. He allowed her that momentary agony of loneliness.

            She looked up at his cold eye. Did he, she asked, find it funny?  Or, desperately looking for pity from her. If it had simply been told to her, she could have given her pity, her understanding. She could have consoled. Her heart prepared to tear in pieces for him. But she gained no clue. She was brutally alone. Desire mixed with a horror in an unmanageable concoction.

“You bastard,” she said softly. “You should have told me.”

Did a tear leak undisciplined from his eye?

            “Don’t cry on me,” she barked, and stood up. She bit her lip to control her own feelings. “I can’t stand this.”  She turned her back as if to make a wall between her and him. “So this is your secret. Everybody said you had a secret. You were too good to be true.”

            Graham had said no word. He had not moved, watched her with a distant fascination. She hurriedly put back her clothes on her cold body.

 

….oo0oo….

 

At breakfast they spoke together as usual. They were familiar colleagues. Her eyes were slightly circled in red as if needing more sleep. Her mouth chewed on the toast as if disconnected from the stony stillness of the rest of her face. He was pale. They worked on, as always, during the day. Her duties with polishing his broad outlines rescued her from the devouring poison of her own humiliation. His echoing scream went on unheard. He could believe in his triumphs and conquests as of old. Possibly this one even better than of old.

 

***** 

 

** 12  One of those things

I am quite a tall guy. I’m not overweight though, and have good muscles. But I was always noticeably tall, even at school. They used to tease me – ‘big bloke, puny prick’. They thought it was funny. I didn’t mind, because actually it is quite big, well, strikingly big. I know because me and bro measured it. When I was ten and it was longer than his; he was sixteen. He was jealous because he told me it was too big and I’d never get it in anyone’s hole. It was quite thick too. 

Even some of the girls said it to me. But they said it  for different reasons, not because they were jealous or anything, but because they wanted to see it. They’d say, ‘Why’d they call you that. Have you got one of those things.’ I would always tell them I had a nice one. It made them bring me things, a bit of chocolate or a cigarette or something if they wanted to see it. They were usually fascinated. They must have wondered what I could do with it. And of course, I wondered too, as I didn’t really know till I was about fifteen. But we’d be behind a sports shed and they’d look at it, and a bit embarrassed they’d put a finger out and touch it with the tip. And pull away as if it gave them a little electric shock. But it was me that got a little electric shock to be touched like that. It was quite annoying as the bloody thing wanted something more, but I didn’t know what to ask for.

Then one day there was a girl who had the longest hair, right down to her waist. The teachers were always telling her to get it cut or put it out of the way. In those wretched cooking classes, it would flop in the custard or the gravy. But I liked to touch it. And once, I sucked the gravy off the ends. She told me that she’d given me a treat sucking the gravy so I could show her what I’d got. She didn’t say she’d suck it for me. But I thought I might ask. I’d seen a tart do that to a guy on some website, and wondered what it felt like. This girl wasn’t shy. We were behind the shed, and it was drizzling with rain, I remember, but I didn’t care, because I liked this girl for some reason. I wanted her to be pleased. And she was. “God, luv us,” she said. That’s a big one.” She sounded as if she knew plenty about all this. and she grabbed it nice and firmly, friendly, as if she was shaking hands or something. No tickling with her finger-tips. She looked me straight in the face as if she was not embarrassed at all. She seemed quite something. “It’s bigger than my Dad’s, and he’s big, he says.” It really felt good, not because she was impressed, but because in her hand it felt different. It wasn’t like when I hold it to have a pee. It felt different and friendly, more than friendly. It began to change. Like when I am wanking, but better, a lot better. I sort of groaned. I didn’t mean to groan. But she laughed and said, “That’s good isn’t it.” I nodded and told her to go on. And it swelled up and kept going. “Christ,” she said, “I don’t know if I’d like all that inside me.”

When I came, which was very quick, my thing spat all over her school skirt. I said “Sorry.”

She laughed, “Huh, you couldn’t help that, could ya.”And she kept holding it till it started to go down. “I should have put my mouth on you to keep us all tidy,” she said in a matter-of-fact housewifely way.

“Next time,” I said. 

She laughed, “Oh yeah!” she made it sound as if I’d been lucky to have her wank me again.”

“I’d like to do it again with you.”

“I bet you would. You’re horny. My Dad doesn’t come like that even.” She was scrubbing her skirt with a bit of old tissue. “I better go home. I can’t go back this afternoon.”

“I’ll come with you,” I said, not wanting to leave her, and I touched her long hair.

“No, you won’t.”

“Would you like me to put it inside, next time?”

She stopped with the tissue and looked at me, “Inside me? Ooof.” She looked a bit doubtful, and thinking of the size. “Well, yes. We could try. My Dad’s never done that. But I’ve always wanted to try.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” I said, now slightly nervous for some reason.

“Why not?” She shrugged her shoulders as if agreeing in order to oblige me. Then she left me and went to collect her anorak and her bicycle to go home. And I went to learn geometry. I remember, because it was a lesson about circles and I was thinking of her hole.

It was a long time before we met again, well maybe three weeks. I knew she’d told friends, because a few of the girls kept looking at me. One or two asked to go behind the sports shed, but I said ‘no’ to them all. We didn’t see each other much; our classes didn’t coincide very often. But one day she left me a note – ‘Come round on Saturday. Bring the big one.’ With an emoji looking surprised, and she gave me the address. I texted back, ‘OK’.

When I got there, it was Saturday, but I was a bit early, because I couldn’t wait to see what we’d do. Luckily, she answered the door; perhaps she was up because she couldn’t wait either. “Fuck,” she said with some alarm. “Can’t you wait. My Mum and Dad haven’t gone yet. Come back about half-past eleven. And she shut the door. I sat in the park a little way away. It was drizzling with rain again. I looked at my phone trying to find the website which showed girls doing things to blokes. I waited a couple of hours or so. The sun began to weakly shine and so did I; I was a bit nervous. I saw the car was not in the little drive, so her parents had gone. When I rang the bell, she came quickly and grabbed me pulling me in quickly. “We’ll go to my bedroom.” The house smelled of cooking. It seemed untidy with things all over the place. We went upstairs. She shut the door of her bedroom. She began pulling her sweater off. “Have you ever seen a girl’s boobs?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.” But she knew it wasn’t the truth.

When her tee-shirt came off, she said, “There they are.” She had no bra, so I looked at them. And I looked at her looking at me to see if they were what I had expected. They were not; they were quite small swellings on her chest, no sign of a Hollywood cleavage. But the nipples were standing out in a way I had not expected. I’ve heard nipples called pert. So I put out my hand to touch one of them. She was soft and warm, but she shivered as if my touch sent electricity through her, especially when I rubbed the nipples between my thumb and finger. I was gentle. I didn’t want to hurt but honestly I didn’t know if she would have liked them pinched. “You can suck them if you like.” I said I’d like to. And sucked them dutifully. But it seemed to do more for her than for me. She pushed me away a few inches, and said, “Come on, let’s look at the big one.” And as I took my trousers down, she slipped off her jeans till she was completely naked. She stood just looking at me as I took all my clothes off. “Come on,” and she yanked my hand so I fell on her bed, with her beside me. It was a single bed so we were close together and our skin touching from toe to head. “Let’s kiss.” And she started.

Actually, I was not bothered about kissing too much as my ‘thing’ was already demanding more attention. The whole body skin contact was overwhelming, smooth and soothing and also exciting, exciting. She pulled back and asked if I didn’t like kissing. I shrugged and she said, “OK.” And went in search of my thing. It didn’t take her long to find it, and I was groaning a bit. “Don’t you come too soon,” she said. And I began to feel a bit awkward. It felt as though if I tried to control myself, the whole thing would subside. 

I didn’t now how to explain that to her, so I just said, “Let me find your hole and put it in.”

“OK,” she said. But of course I didn’t know much about her hole – a very different prospect from my sticking out prick which she was just holding and hanging on to. “Christ, you’re huge. I think your thing likes me.” She laughed. “You don’t know where to put the fucking thing, do you.” And she laughed gaily. It seemed to be fun for her that a man couldn’t find his way around her fleshy bits. She was in charge, and she opened her crack with her fingers, lying back with me lying on top. She put the end of the penis against her soft place and told me to push. Which I did, and pushed and pushed and it was extraordinary, quite tight. She was stretching back and biting her lip as if it might be hurting her. But I couldn’t help it. The feeling of going into this tight space made it more urgent every millimetre I went in. And every millimetre made me push in harder. Till my tummy touched hers. And I felt her thin little hairs mingled with mine. She was sort of panting slightly as if I was taking up so much room in her she could not breath. Her hands were around my back and my bottom, pulling me into her. I began to move inside her, pulling back a little and then thrusting in as if I wanted to get further and further into her. It was urgent as if something immense depended on my thrusting. She lifted her legs around my buttocks. And it was hard to get back far enough to make a good thrust, but she helped with her legs holding me tight in between them.

I was completely helpless to control any of it now, until I burst all my stuff into her. She was groaning now. And I flopped down, and she stopped groaning. “keep going, damn you,” she said with gritted teeth, and tried pushing me in with her legs. So, I started again, not with excitement now but more with duty! I was spent, but there was a way of thanking her, which was to keep going, to keep going for her. She started groaning again, and that was charming – no, not charm, it was her excitement which was also now exciting for me. I was getting excited that I could give her the excitement. So I went on, but I was exhausted and willed myself into it. Until just at the moment when I could not last any longer, she gave a frantic yell, and clung to me with all four limbs as if death could have taken her. Se was thrashing about with her own cumm for about a minute or more.

 “Fuck you – I’ll not find better,” she growled, as if hating me. I was pleased with her. And definitely with myself. I said nothing, because I felt the same and could not say that it could never be better, it as well as she had said it. I lay for a while on top of her, kissing the lobe of her ear. Her legs relaxed and slid down next to mine. Her thighs remained wide apart which made me feel everything inside her and outside now belonged to me. Gradually my thing that had done us both good service relaxed itself too, and in a final slip it was out of her. There were tears in her eyes at that moment of parting. “Oh, Christ,” she muttered.

“I don’t think Christ had much to do with it.” I was being jocular in a moment when she had not yet collected herself.

“Get off me,” she suddenly said irritably. I rolled to one side and slowly she sat up looking at me. She shook her head from side to side, “I didn’t know it would be like that.” She continued slowly shaking her head. “You’re big, you bastard. You really hurt me going in. But, for god’s sake I enjoyed it. The hurt, I mean. Christ, it felt like the meaning of life, down there. I want that feeling again and again. I mean the hurt, the knowing it will hurt, and it will… I don’t know. It will be the meaning of everything. You’re a bastard; I don’t know who I am anymore.” She suddenly leant across and flung her arms around my neck and pulled us together with all her force. “I’m a pervert aren’t I? Sex and hurt all mixed up.”

I said nothing, she was saying all the things that needed saying. It was true I could call it a pain, It was. It was kind of a dreadful need I felt as I went into her - a dreadful pain. I was out of control. It was like a need I couldn’t stop, desperate. I was out of control as if it was just agony I couldn’t stop. Eventually, I said quite calmly, “I think it might be so painful next time. They say the tissues have to be pushed apart.”

She looked at me with a kind of contempt at my nonsense. That’s not what I’m bloody talking about. It was so out of control I didn’t know if I could stand it.” Then she pushed me away, “And I couldn’t stop it. Then after a moment, she got off the bed. “I’m going to get a cup of tea. I want to feel something normal. And I won’t get that from you and your outsize dick!” She went to the door, “Come downstairs when you’re ready.” She went out. I heard her in the kitchen. I think I dozed off, because then she was there sitting down on the bed with two mugs of tea. I took one from her hand. “Christ you bastard, I’ll never forget you. You’ll always be part of my life.” She sipped her tea. “For ever, for fucking ever.”

Her crude swearing seemed to express the extreme state we were in, and I was not offended. “It sounds like we’re in love.”

She nodded, “I suppose so.” She looked thoughtful. “If I’ll end up pregnant now, will you marry me.”

“Of course.” 

She smiled, as if calmed down a little now. “That’s the right answer.” And as we sat close to each other on the bed, both naked, she put her arms around me again and kissed me on the cheek. “So, you don’t like kissing?” And she shook her head as if disapproving.

“I never said that. I just had something more urgent going on.”

Her head was on my shoulder. “Perhaps, I can teach you something. How to kiss.” And then more thoughtfully, “Kissing is love, fucking is sex. We don’t know the difference, do we?”

“I don’t know. I just think you are the most beautiful girl in the school,” I stroked her lovely hair. “And when you leave school, you will be the most beautiful woman in the world. That’s not sex. Even if I never have sex with you again, it will still be true. All my life. You’re the most beautiful” I was earnest. 

“Oh yes. We’ll see. When you go off behind the sports shed with some other pussy and show her your… er, pussy-stuffer then we’ll see.”

“I’m not going to do that.” I was still earnest. 

“We’ll see. But honestly, I wouldn’t like it if you did. Be mine.” She looked sad. “My Dad loves my Mum but he still likes sticking his weedy little penis down my throat.” 

I was now a bit shocked. But I realised the girl would not have been so confident with me if she’d not been brought into sex already. I had her Dad to thank for what had just happened between us. Or did I? “I wouldn’t like it if he did it again to you.”

She looked at me sharply, “What do you mean. He comes to me more or less every week. I can’t stop him, can I?” She looked at me. She was earnest now. “Would you be jealous?”

“I suppose.” And added, “It’s not natural.”

“Nothing’s more natural than sex. Is it. We’re all animals. That’s what I was saying, love is different. Isn’t it?” She looked enquiringly at me. “You think I should tell him to stop.”

“Well it’s not happening to other people, is it?”

“Huh, you think. You go around our year and ask how many have had sex with their Dads or their brothers. Or anyone else in the family. You’ll see.” She was getting a bit heated, determined to convince me her relations were normal enough.

“Does your Mother know?”

“No, of course not. Well, I suppose not. I can’t ask her, can I? Just because your mother has not ever got your whopper in her gob, you think she has never thought about it. I bet she has. Specially your whopper.” And she put her hand on it. It felt a bit like responding to her touch, as always when a girl touches it. “She’s missed out on something, hasn’t she? Your Mum?” She looked down at her hand and my penis. 

“Do you think they’re making love together, or making sex?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Those Mums and Dads.”

“Oh they’re making sex. It’s this in here,” she put her hand on my chest over where the heart is. “That’s what is making love to me.” And she kissed me at the bottom of my rib cage on the left side of my chest. 

“You’re beautiful,” I said, really meaning it.

“So you want me to stop my Dad? Well, since it’s you – and your fucking penis – I will have a go.”

“Could you say you’ll tell your Mother – If he doesn’t stop?”

“Thanks for the advice. I don’t think that’s the best way to go about it.” She spoke forcefully as if I was a simpleton to consider such a threatening approach. “Leave it to me for god’s sake. He’s my Dad. Don’t interfere.”

“Right,” I said holding up a hand as if surrendering. “But, I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be better if I got some more experience, with others. You know, I’ve not had sex with anyone else before.”

“Nor have I?” she looked indignant.

“Yes, you have. Your Dad.”

“Oh great you bastard. Now you think you’ll threaten me. Right? If I don’t stop my Dad you’ll go off with other girls.”

“No, no. I hadn’t thought that at all.”

“Course you had. That’s exactly what you thought.”

“No,” I said with some alarm at the way we were suddenly getting upset with each other. “No, I just thought it might be good if I was more experienced.”

“Like me; I’m experienced, you said. With Dad. Hmm. Well you can get your experience with me. Right? Is that such a bad deal?”

“That’s a perfect deal, Mags.” I wanted to calm the situation.

She paused a moment, put head back on my shoulder, “I know. So, we’ve just proved we can both get jealous.”

“OK,” I said, “it’s evens.”

“Let’s live for each other, OK? Whoever crops up in our lives. Help me to sort out the thing with my Dad. But I don’t want to get threatening. I’ve got to tell him…. Let me see. That I need to develop separately, find people outside the family.”

“Yeah, good, something like that. He must understand that. What’s he gonna say to you, then?

“No idea. But what he should say, is he’s glad I’m growing up and that he hopes my experiences with him will benefit me and make me more grown up.” 

I shrugged at what she was thinking. To my mind he should be ashamed of himself. It made me wonder what I was getting into with this girl who thought it was so normal, just a part of growing up. Supposing we got married like we were saying and we had a little girl, what would she expect me as a Dad to do to our girl. I don’t think I’d do what her Dad did. I couldn’t imagine I’d need anything more than her as my wife. After all she was so competent and confident. But then I had to think if she had an advantage just because her Father interfered with her sexually for so long. But I decided to ask – “When did it all start with your Father? How old were you?”

“Why? What does it matter.”

“I just wondered. If we had a daughter, would you expect me to do the same as your Dad?”

“Well, I don’t suppose you would, would you? You disapprove so much.” She looked challenging again, “Well, you’ve just done all right with it, haven’t you? He never actually raped me you know.” And then she said, almost viciously, “You were the first person to do that to me, you know.”

“What, rape you?”

And then she put her head on my shoulder again, “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean rape – just fucking, that’s all. Your fucking prick didn’t rape me. I want it for me – for breakfast, and lunch and for tea.”

I stroked her lovely hair as her head lay against my arm and the hair flowed down over both our bare chests. “Well, my wormy thing is all for your hole, any time of day or night.”

“Well, not a worm it’s a snake a bloody big boa constrictor. It’s got me in its clutches.” And she looked up at me to see if I was taking offence or enjoying her amusement. “And it’s got me in its clutches.” 

I nearly said, ‘Like your Dad’, but thought it best not to say it. But she more or less said it for me. “I’ve got to get out of my Dad’s clutches.”

We had our arms around each other then. And lay back down on the bed, very close and hugged for quite a long time silently. Eventually she said, “You’d better get out of here before they get back. He won’t like it if he thinks you’ve been in the bedroom ever since they left.” And indeed, I didn’t want anyone to know either. So, reluctantly we put our clothes on slowly and we had a big hug just before we opened the front door as I was going to leave. But of course, the worst happened. Her parents came through the door and saw us break up guiltily from our hug. There was immediately a heavy black silence as we all stood still taking in the situation and scared of what would come next.