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

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!” 

 

 

 

 

The park seat

 

He sat down at one end of the park seat without looking at the person at the other end. In fact, they were only a few feet apart and he knew that whoever it was, they were probably looking at him. But he was taking Charlotte for a walk, quite a shaggy hybrid sort of spaniel.

It was only moments before the other person’s dog was growling. He looked at the woman, and noticed as he usually did if she was attractive. She had long legs now uncrossing as she turned to her dog to calm it. “He’s called George.” she said. About his age, they were both in their mid-fifties. She was slim, about his height, and hair immaculate and already grey.

            He decided he’d reply to her, given there was a degree of appeal in what he saw, “Mine’s called, Charlotte. She’s docile. Don’t worry.”

            To his surprise she replied in a friendly sort of way, “Hmm – George and Charlotte. A royal match.”

            For the first time he looked her directly in her face, “What?”

            She smiled with some amusement, “George, the Third, he was married to Queen Charlotte. Remember?”

            He grunted, as if both ignorant and uninterested. “You’re a teacher, then?” he asked.

            “That’s it,” she said with a similar amused smile. Her hand was still on her black-and-tan Alsatian. “He’s got a bit of spirit.”

            “He’s German?” he said as if it mattered. “A German sheep-dog, right?”

            “Right again,” she said still seeming amused. There was a church bell tolling in the background as it was Sunday. “Do you walk her usually?”
            “Every Sunday. We (meaning his dog and himself) watch the old folk going to the church.”

            “Might see you again, some time.” And she stood up walking off with her dog that was still interested in the spaniel.

            He watched her behind, and her striding with long steps which he decided was elegant. Then he called out, “You left your glasses case here.” She looked around and came back for it. Her usual smile crossed her face again as she thanked him. He stood up deciding to accompany her for a little. They walked side by side. 

She was looking down at the path as she stepped out, and with an expression suggesting she was pleased to have interested him. “What do you do, then?” she said eventually to break the silence in case it became less friendly.

“Oh, I manage the garage. On the by-pass. It’s a petrol station, really.”

She looked at him, “I know the one. Yes,” she said, “perhaps I recognise you. What’s your name if I may ask?”

“Reg.” But he did not ask hers. He was feeling suddenly nervous. Though he often noticed women in the street and the park, and sometimes would follow behind them for a few yards, he’d never got into conversation with one before. In fact, he was more at ease with dogs.

She was smiling again at his loss of composure which was sufficient to have communicated itself to her. “I’m Grace.” She was quite entertained by this awkward man by her side. His awkwardness made her feel she could control him. She felt comfortable, even if he was awkward. Perhaps because he was! The dogs were pulling at their leads as if to get at each other. “Let’s meet again,” she said as if dismissing him for today.

“OK,” he nodded, but kept on walking by her side which amused her. Why she wondered did she not feel threatened. In fact, as they continued and left the park she asked if he’d like to have a cup of coffee, to which he also nodded. His nervousness continued. The dogs were happily interested in each other exploring with their noses. She took him to her small house just outside the park.

When they entered, he stood nervous and still, and as if waiting to be told to sit – which she did in a teacher-like way. And he obediently sat where she indicated. That little-boy quality of his still amused her. But now she was feeling a bit nervous too. She never entertained a man in her house – apart from her brother who was always popping in. 

She left the room to go to her small kitchen to make coffee in her best jug – two of her best cups and saucers as well. When she sat down on the other side of the room with the low table in between with the refreshments on it, they were both silent. It was as if both were out of their depth and yet they felt they should be of an age when ordinary friendliness should have been quite automatic. He leaned forward as if he had something important to say to her, “You lived here long?”

She remained amused at his fumbling for something to break the silence. It relaxed her if she could see his nervousness, because then she could see about relaxing him. She remained sitting up straight and told him it had been her parent’s house, but they were both gone and had left her the house. She had a brother and he had been left a little cottage a few miles away on the coast. She sometimes stayed there for a day or a night. And then amazingly, she found herself saying that he might like to take his dog to stay there briefly.

He didn’t jump at the offer. And she began to feel her nervousness again. The dogs were now lying calmly on the rug in front of the fireplace. He said, rather clumsily, “Do you think we could become friends?”

Her ready smile bloomed again, “Looks like we’re going in that direction.” And she pointed at the dogs, as if it depended on them.

He nodded, and she wondered if he ever smiled. 

“They look as if they like each other. You know, I never got him doctored. I couldn’t.” He looked blank. “It seemed so unkind. So, he gets kind of… fresh. You know.” But she didn’t know why she was telling him; perhaps it was to warn him to protect his Charlotte.

He looked intensely at her, “Sorry, love. I forgot your name.”

“Grace,” she said, But this time she did not smile. It seemed to be increasingly heavy going.

“Ah. Grace. That’s a nice name. Mine’s, Reg.”

“I know. Are you married, Reg?” She felt now she had no idea how to carry on a conversation with this unnerved man. It didn’t seem to matter what she would say.

He shook his head, “No, I’m not.” But he did not elaborate. And he continued to look rather lost with her.

“No, nor am I,” she said, briskly. “Never wanted to,” and she shook her hair back with a flick of her head. “But sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like.” She looked down at her dog and stroked its head. The dog moved slightly in response.

He looked at her, and said in his incongruous way, “Well, we could try.”

She looked up sharply at him and burst out laughing. “What?” she said impulsively, so surprised she didn’t think what she was saying, “Is this a proposal.”

He then blushed, slowly, all over his rugged face. And she cut her laughter short. “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh.” No-one ever proposed before. Not to me.” She was flustered. “I suppose we could try.” She didn’t know whether to take it in a humorous way as if not serious, or if she should respond to his seriousness.

“OK.” It was almost as if she was just buying petrol at his garage.

“Let’s be serious for a moment, Reg. Are you really thinking about this? We don’t know each other, do we. Perhaps we should get to know each other, We only met half-an-hour go.” Her mind was trying to take in what was happening. Just as she was finding it boring, he had now turned her upside down. “We’d better get to know each other properly, I think. Let’s spend the rest of the day together, tell each other everything about ourselves.”

“I’ve got to go to work this afternoon.”

“Oh, OK. Come back afterwards and I’ll cook us a nice meal. What time will you finish.”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Oh, that’s late, isn’t it?”

“It is the shift I’m on.”

“Yes, OK. Well, we could have a bedtime glass of wine, if you like.”

“Yeah,” and he stood up as if being dismissed. “I’ll come back later, if you like.”

“Yes, come back later.” And he put the lead back on the dog and left without saying goodbye. Her first thought was to question herself viciously about why she had agreed to see him at 11 o’clock in the evening. She couldn’t ring him with excuses to cancel as they had not swapped phone numbers. She could just not answer the door; be in bed; be asleep. She sat down again, poured some more coffee and told herself  to think, think hard, what she was doing. Perhaps she could welcome him with a bottle of wine. She could go and get one from the little shop down the road. ‘Fuck,” she allowed herself to say, to herself, ‘it is the last thing I want to have myself turned upside down and inside out like this.’ She decided to go and get a bottle of wine, just in case and come back and decide what she really wanted to do. Was there something nice enough about him to spend a little time with him? But why did she agree to 11 at night. She had to get up for work tomorrow. She had never known how to handle relations with blokes. It was only boys in her class at school who she had any connections with at all. Men, she told herself, are grubby. She went to have a shower.

He meantime was wandering back with Charlotte, the spaniel. He walked slowly feeling dizzy to the other side of the park. Of course, he did not have to go back to the woman after his shift. Best to forget all that silliness. What does she want to marry him for. What could she want him for? For once his curiosity perked up. What were women really like when you got close to them? He had never had the opportunity. Suddenly his life had changed direction, completely. Like going into reverse gear. Or perhaps he suggested to himself it was more the other way. After going backwards away from everything all his life till he was fifty he could not change into forward gear. He had no idea what on earth that would mean, what he would have to do. What would she want? What does a woman want? They don’t want men with no experience. He shouldn’t go back. That’s it.

She waited at 11 pm listening hard for the doorbell as if it might be difficult to hear, still not knowing if she would answer it. 

But it didn’t ring.

Nevertheless, the next Sunday he was out bright and early with Charlotte, and sitting on the park bench as the week before. She too was curious to see if he was walking his dog but was careful not to walk past their bench seat. After all she’d had a proposal of marriage! As she walked around at a distance behind and out of sight, she could see him sitting there. ‘Now what!’ she thought. And no answer came to her, none at all. So she just stood. It was George who gave the game away, because, off the lead in the park, he suddenly realised his new friend Charlotte was over there by the seat. He went racing over before she could move or stop him. When he came near, Charlotte noticed him and jumped-up straining, still on her lead. But Reg let her off not realising what was happening and just wanting to give her a bit of freedom on her walk. The dogs sniffed at each other for a moment and suddenly George was up on her and they were copulating – in public, George and Charlotte. Immediately Reg heard the disturbance and started to shoo them apart. But the dogs were not too keen to part. Grace was now running to control her dog and came up to them lashing George with the leash to distract him from Charlotte. In fact, George was not easily distracted. But as the situation came under control, Reg found he was facing Grace, and she was practically in physical contact with him. They stared at each other. The situation seemed extremely personal.

Perhaps it was as close to intimacy with a woman that Reg had ever been. He backed away, and then sat down on the seat. He had thought about her a lot during that week, a lot. She was standing looking down on him sitting there, not sure whether to flounce away with her anger, or to stay and have it out with him. After a moment of doubt she sat down on the seat with as much distance from him as possible. “You stood me up last Sunday.” She was not exactly haughty but did convey her sense of being completely in the right.

He stared at her, not knowing what to say. But blurted out painfully, “You don’t want a man like me.”

She wondered what he meant, was he referred to something awful he’d done in the past or whatever. But found herself saying,  “Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?” and realised that she could be considering him as a man she wanted. “I mean, I hardly know you.”

He turned to her and, in a brave sort of a way, confessed, “I’ve never been with a woman before.”

She was struck very forcefully by the shame in him about his lack of masculine experience. But what could she say to that? She decided, also bravely, to follow suit, “Well, all I’ve done was play around with a boy in my class. When I was about twelve. Once, my father saw us. He was so cross, he whipped me. He had never done anything to me like that. He was so cross. I cried for a while, all night I think. I wouldn’t look at him for ages afterwards. One day he held me in his arms again and told me never to do that again. And I cried again and told him I was sorry. And I’ve never done anything like that again.”

“What did you play around at?”

“Oh, just looking, and touching… you know…  our parts.” Reg looked at her, wondering what he could say. “Now you think I am disgusting. You look just like he looked at me. My father. He was disgusted with me.”

He continued looking at her distress, “No, Grace. No, no I’m not.”

“I was disgusted with myself. I am. I think I am still. I went to a group for women who had been abused. But they told me I had not been abused. I think they were right and I was just being dirty with the boy.” She looked very sad and even hopeless; and she added irrelevantly perhaps, “He was called John.”

“I never played with anyone. I don’t know anything about a woman,” he said as if he wasn’t actually talking to one of that category.

Her mood seemed to lighten immediately, “Coo, we are much the same, I reckon, Reg.”

He looked curiously at her and then his face darkened with tension and anxiety. “Are you saying we should play around together?”

“Oh,” she laughed loudly, “Oh, of course not.” And she laughed almost hysterically. Two people walking by looked and wondered if she was being molested by the man on the seat next to her. “Of course not. Nobody should suggest that, unless they wanted to. Unless they both wanted to.” She put her hand out to touch his arm, trying to relax his alarm. 

And he did calm a bit. But the dogs were now pulling at the leads as if they’d been stirred by the tension between their owners. He stood. “You’re a bit of a funny woman, aren’t you Grace.” And then he added hurriedly, “But I like talking to you.”

Grace, too, had calmed when she had seen how tense he had become. But he now walked away with Charlotte, who kept pulling back and turning to look at George.

The next time they met was when Grace decided to fill her car at the petrol station on the by-pass. She didn’t usually go there. But she just thought she might, for a change. There was a bit of a queue, so she got out of the car to wipe some bird dirt from her windscreen. The woman driver in front of her was filling her car, and said, out of the blue, “I often come her, don’t you? Because the bloke who runs it is a bit gorgeous, isn’t he.” The woman had a lot of make-up and had tight jeans. “But he’s a bit nervous, isn’t he. He gets all nervous when I look at him.” She laughed in a slightly scoffing way, but also an admiring way. 

When Grace had filled and went in to the cash desk to pay, she was not at all surprised to see it was Reg at the till. He did not look up, and she realised he must have spotted her through the window. When they had finished the transaction she said thankyou, and as there was no-one waiting behind her at that moment, she added, “Let’s go and see a film together.” He did not look up but shook his head slowly as if he was caught off balance and didn’t know what to say to her invitation. But she took his shake of the head as a ‘no’. So she added with a degree of silly abandon, “Well, come round and we can watch some tellie together.” And she chuckled hesitantly.

There was a moment or two of hesitation and then to her surprise he said, “OK”. She immediately thought of the woman outside saying she thought he was a bit gorgeous. Indeed, he could be gorgeous, and had a good physique under his work clothes. She knew what she liked in men – would like in a man.

She left and he watched her through the window. He always said it was the best view. As they walked away, they could not see him looking.

He went around to her house after he’d finished at 6.30. Not on until 11 pm this day. It was a weekday. She heard the doorbell go and was astonished and flustered to see him on the doorstep. She let him in. They hardly spoke, but standing in the hallway, she said, “I’d better cook. I need to go around to the shop to get something. Come with me. You can hold the basket. Is there anything you don’t like to eat?”

When they got back, she sat him in the same chair, and he watched the television news without much interest while she spent the time actively in the kitchen. She spread the table, served the food and they ate. There was not much to say apart from ‘pass the salt’ etc. Neither of them knew what to expect. As they finished, he said, “I should have brought Charlotte, she would have liked to see George again.”

“They’d have got up to no good.” But she was wondering actively what they would get up to themselves. And so was he; the meal was good, but…. now what? She gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen. And then returned to sit down across the table again. She looked as though she was expecting something from him. She lay her arm on the table in a relaxed sort of way as if inviting him to touch it. So he did; he put his hand on her wrist. It felt warm and also exciting to touch this object of desire. She smiled at him and he gazed as if spellbound at her welcoming face. He looked so serious. “Please smile at me,” she asked. And so he did. “You look so gorgeous when you smile,” she said, repeating what the tarty women had said to her at the petrol pump earlier. She seemed to be egging him on to do something, initiate something with her. But he didn’t know what he should be doing. And then with inspiration he picked up the wrist he was touching and kissed the back of her hand. “That was lovely,” she said. So he held it to his lips again. She  said rather matter-of-factly, “I think we could be romantic together.” And now she was tense, having broached the subject that neither of them really understood. 

He could feel the tension in her hand as he held it against his face, and lips. He put it down on the table and cupped it in both of his hands. “Do you really want to try with me?” he said earnestly. 

“We’ll have to teach each other what to do won’t we?” She was trying to be practical to manage the rising tension and excitement between them. 

He nodded, “Yes. Do you mind?” 

She laughed and relaxed a bit at his anxious concern. “Mind? No more than you.” And she took her hand away from his so she could put it to his face and feel the beginnings of stubble. She had not felt that before. She stood and pulled on his arm to follow. When they were together in the bedroom he looked around as if it were some strange forest in the middle of Africa. A woman’s bedroom looked so tidy. He looked at the single bed; it seemed very small. He was feeling terrified again at what he’d have to do to her. She said coyly, “Perhaps we should undress first.” He began to take his clothes off, while she watched. He was naked when she said. “It’s easier for a woman isn’t it. She can see what she’s got to hold,” and she was looking at his penis which was feeling like a growing sausage, “and what she’s got to do with it. But a man can’t see anything much of what a women’s got.” Then she thought of her previous conversation of her forbidden escapade as a schoolgirl. “Would you like to see my parts, so you know what they look like. And what to do with them? I’ve never shown them to a man. I mean a grown man. Like this.” She was feeling devilish and wondering what her father would be thinking now. She felt she was defying everything good. “Shall, I undress now?” she asked.

He nodded and mumbled, “Yes.” 

“Or touch your penis?” he shook his head. But she did touch it and held it. It lay in her hand like the crown jewels. He was so familiar with his own erection, but only when it lay in his own hand. To feel her gentle grip around it now chased away every single thread of tension. She let it go and began to undress, watching him watch her as her body slowly revealed itself. She wondered if he approved of it. It became important that he liked it. “Tell me,” she asked, or demanded. He looked puzzled. “Tell me it is nice. Tell me you want to see my parts, to find them, and find out what they are.”

He was at a loss, “You are a very beautiful woman,” he said, or even recited from the last love-scene he had watched on television.

“You are nice to me,” she smiled. And her panties came down to her ankles. He was looking at her nakedness and stepped forward to give her a powerful hug. She yielded to him, and their bodies swayed gently together for several minutes. He could feel the touch of her skin on his penis which increasingly felt the centre of his body, of the universe.

“Let’s get on the bed. Then you can find out all the parts that a woman has got. Please be gentle with me.” She got on the narrow bed. And spread her thighs to give him space so that he could see what she had got between her legs. 

He looked carefully at her groin. “You are beautiful,” he said with more sincerity.

“So are you,” and she was looking at his penis in its semi-swollen state. “Can I feel your balls?”

“Yes,” he said. She held them. She noticed that as she touched them and held and fondled them, his breathing changed. It was deeper. And his eyes changed as if he was not seeing anything. 

“Look at my parts, Reg.” And while she held on lovingly to his balls, he looked.

“Can I touch you there?”

“Yes, dear Reg. I  want to feel you touching me. It’ll make me feel just like you feel now as I hold you.” So he put his fingers on the wrinkled skin between her thighs. “You can find a slit if you part those folds. Your finger will slip in.” So he did what she invited. And with some fumbling found the slit that was the entrance to her. And now her breathing changed, just like his. “Now,” she said, “there’s a hole you can find. And just in front of the hole I want you to rub it there, Very, very gently. That’s the clit. Ah, you’ve found it.” She lay back to enjoy the rising energy that spread through the skin all round her thighs and hips into every inch of her body it seemed. Her breathing was getting stronger. “Now, Reg, you must do something else. I want to find out what it’s like. You feel that spot you’ve touched with your finger, I want you to lick it. Soothe it with your tongue.

He moved back and withdrew her hand. Hers slipped away from his balls. “Lick it?” he asked.

“I want to see what it’s likc.” She looked up into his face. “Shall we try it? We don’t have to.”

“OK.” He put his head down between her legs and tried to find his way towards her slit with his face and lips to lick her. He didn’t mind so much from a hygiene point of view, but he could feel his erection declining. With some care and difficulty he found the right spot and to his amazement her breathing changed abruptly to a gasping which quickened and quickened and in no time she was crying out as if in a kind of delicious pain. He knew what it was, but had never realised a women reached an orgasm as he did. Moreover, as she came, his erection seemed to respond as well. She told him when he had licked enough. And as if in a daze she asked him to get into her hole. It did entail a lot of nervous fumbling again, but he did it, to his surprise. And the automatic body movements took him over till he too climaxed, dizzyingly, inside her.

They both relaxed together, having discovered what life is all about, it seemed. He lay back nearly off one side of the little bed and she buried her face in his neck, kissing the stubble. They lay for five minutes without moving, then minutes more. No movement as if they were one, and any movement would snap them apart. There were no real thoughts in his mind apart from going over the experience again and again. He had accomplished what a man can accomplish with a woman who was, as he now knew, as beautiful as any he had every watched and followed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                              Meeting herself

 

Laughter infected her. She looked for its source.  Her thin pale hair moved with nervous flicks of her head; her face was pale, too.  A couple of teenagers, a slender boy in tired clothing, faded denim, and a buxom girl with a white tee-shirt with crude slogans; they were holding hands, smoking, laughing together.  It was as if they wanted to infect the rest of the station concourse, bored, waiting, people.  They wanted to make everyone feel left out of the joke.  Her pale face looked towards them, a small smile emerging, half conveying that she approved and encouraged them.  The long line of her nose wound itself, as it were, through the intervening air and prodded exploringly into their space.  But she was also beyond, outside their entangled gaze.

            Then she moved.  The angle of her direction swung, like a searchlight, picked out a man way beyond the line of battered seats.  He was solemnly and studiously looking in a book by the bookstall, a relaxed traveller looking for a cheap novel for the journey.  Her inviting half-smile winged towards him through the air, but unnoticed.

            A curious observer, observing her wan smile and the distant concentration of her sight, would by now have sighted her small toddler pulling at her fawn linen skirt.  He reached wobblingly to put his hand in the large linen bag hanging from her shoulder.  He could feel something there.  She brushed his chubby hand aside as if it was an invading insect.  Her distant line with the bookstall began to falter.  The perturbations broke into it as the hopeful book reader moved away to find his train.  She turned, slightly sharply, to her toddler, repulsing his more demanding efforts to get onto her lap, to explore her inviting bag.  He perched unsafely on his stumpy legs clinging to her knee with his hand and looking perplexed at the wooden response from his mummy.  His face began to pucker as if in distress, but partly as if he'd learned the power of noisy crying.  She put her hand in the bag and withdrew her camera, giving it to him, whilst holding on to the short cord strap.  He immediately went to put it back in her bag - to restore his fascinated project of discovery, which she had uncomprehendingly wiped out so easily. It wasn't the camera he wanted so much as the exploration, the discovery of it, within her.  As the cord loop was still caught in her fingers, he could not get the camera back inside, and he began intelligently to explore the means of attachment of the camera to her fingers, pulling this way and then that in random expectation. During all this she continued a similar random prodding of the air with her directed attention to various corners of the railway station.

 

Our observer of this observing woman would have been pained by the insensitive mis-contact - the toddler intent on exploring his mother; mother intent on probing the contents of the distant air.  Not long after this, the observer would have seen her pick him up as a surprised bundle and pop him carefully into the straps of his pushchair and begin to move off to a crescendo of protest from his affronted dignity and frustrated purpose. Such an observer would have been tempted to emerge from the crowd with words of advice and chastisement on her lips for this absent-minded mother.  But she would have been stopped with the words unspoken, by a surge of people crowding from the gate of one of the platforms; and from the midst of the surge a male arm rose in greeting to wave to the woman's equally welcoming wave, whilst the little child screwed round in his entrapping harness more desperate than ever to find where his mother with her interesting bag had vanished to.

 

The threesome united. The woman's half-inviting smile welcomed the man, whilst the wooden posture of her body remained unaltered. It was a cooling unresponsiveness to his embrace.  His glowing smile keyed immediately into her immobility.  His eyes became momentarily glazed and fixed. They turned to the screaming toddler, a joint protest, how unreasonable when Daddy had come. He quietened quickly in his pushchair when she attended to him for a moment instead. She lifted him up. His face transformed into a strange stare; either deeply puzzled or suspiciously curious, or simply a silent paralysis of fear.  She lifted him in her hands, raising his face level with hers and announcing that his Daddy was here.  Then she handed him into the father's arms.  They hugely enfolded him like a protective coat of love.  His stiff little face smoothed a little, and his hand began an intense exploration of Daddy's ear.  Daddy laughed, and ducked as his little son's hands chased his various features, ear, hair, spectacles.  Mother laughed, and he turned with his own happy gurgle to see his mother's face come to life.

            Our observer might at this point have bitten her tongue, relieved that she had been prevented from interfering with chastising words in this now gloriously happy, and mutually infected, family scene.  She would have found herself inspired, bursting out laughing too.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

If our dark observer from the vantage points she has had could sprout wings, she could have followed the movements of this family unit through London; the taxi, the early morning coffee and croissants in Bayswater, the playing with the toddler in Kensington Gardens whilst the grown-ups began to talk earnestly, albeit interspersed with her instant laughs, joyous but forced, whenever he chuckled, or the toddler coo-ed.  If our fascinated observer had achieved invisibility - shall we give her a name, shall we call her Mary, perhaps - if Mary's skin, already so Africa-black, had gone one step further and become a skin of invisibility, then she could have drawn close and begun to hear their earnest thoughts.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Over lunch the mother, now we shall call her Marie, her thin wild hair, loose, carefree, magnificent, and her complexion a little pink with the tension of the day, the excitement, the prospects of the next four days, sat opposite the man, the father of her first child.  He, in his pressed suit, slightly self-conscious and with his glowing smile, which, at times, encouraged himself as well as her.  Our invisibly present observer sat on the fourth side, opposite the toddler clattering and clamouring happily in his high chair, and charming the bright Italian waitress.

            "It is not," she said "a matter of respect - though I do.  Enormously. You know that.  We wouldn't be here otherwise."

            "I know, my dear, I know." He said. Our puzzled observer – she, a Mary – studied the smooth features of his white face.  Their very smoothness seemed to imply that he was actively smoothing out some inner turmoil.  The woman – our Marie – seemed to notice the same, and she reached out her hand across the table-cloth to put her fingers loosely over his.  She was, Mary noticed, almost gazing into him.  His ever-present, playful smile relaxed a little. "We don't talk about love, do we? My dear Marie; only of respect."

            "No," she said, glancing quickly at her toddler who was investigating bread, which now lay in crumbs on his plastic tray, "We can't.  We know that. Love is not part of it."  The momentary contact was lost; some balance between them had changed.  Her hand remained covering his, but it was a meaningless gesture now.  He moved his hand to grasp her fingers.  They had returned to wood.  Mary, our perceptive observer, felt chilled suddenly at this lost contact, as if it were a real death; she looked at the woman's fingers without a wedding ring.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

What Mary struggled to learn from their earnest discussion were the many unspoken concerns, memories, secrets and wishes that Marie and Jacques negotiated - or were failing to negotiate - at this little restaurant table.

            One such might have been Marie's long-felt pain as the youngest child brought up in the sandy fields of coastal Suffolk; the daughter of a disaffected Church of England minister with sharply declining congregations in his cluster of rural parishes.  They lived most of her childhood in a once magnificent half-timbered Tudor rectory, with a jutted upper story.  It was supported by rotting oak corbels some still proudly showing deeply grained carvings of smiling faces.  The crumbled plaster walls still showed some decorative pargetting because the inclement North Sea weather had not yet got its final grasp on all the fine surfaces.  Her big brother's bedroom still sported the opening of the primitive ‘guarde l’eau’ covered by a makeshift trap door of modern plywood.  In mischievous moments on bored holidays, he would lift it, lie in wait till his little sister moved past on the flagstones underneath, and subject her to a sharp deluge from the upstairs commode.  Her wetness was then accompanied by a shriek of his excited laughter.  If she could leap aside, or he missed, she would retaliate with a shriek of her own equally excited mocking.

            Her father's magisterial aloofness rode above the grinding decay of his house and of his congregations.  He did nothing about it; but it was an acute, corrosive pain for his youngest daughter.  The decay was a visible sore festering on her father's pale countenance.  Later on, as they grew up, his pained silence greeted the contemptuous rebuffs from her brother, and they seemed to hasten her father's decay, his patrician stoop, his gratefully early retirement and his subsequent sudden death.  Decay was inherent in her heart.  A pickling agent seemed to turn everything she touched into a dusty relic of what it should have been.  She survived, as it were, a life-time series of those cold douches, a lifetime of turning them aside with her caustic gay laugh.  Instead of a real movement into joy, those childish laughs turned her away from herself.

 

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Still seated in the bright restaurant, she sat back slightly, "We must be practical." She smoothed back her hair in an elegant movement with her free hand; "Practical, considerate of each other."  She seemed to be struggling for words.  He was looking for something from her.  She knew there was a male pride, that she must not harm. Yet his word ‘love’ was too simple for how complicated it was.  "My respect for you," she continued earnestly "is because we, you and I, can think out things practically.  It is what we are good at."  She was gazing right into him.  He felt her closeness.  But also, it was still somehow unmanageable.  Her fingers softly caressed his again as she felt safer.  He smiled in relaxation.  She suddenly sat right back and laughed happily, "I love that puzzled look of yours, Jacques, I love it."  She emphasised the word ‘love’ as if it was a huge joke.

            The waitress came quickly, spotting her moment to take the order.

            Mary, observing all this, could have been a little irritated, the hesitation, the to-and-fro, so much numb contact -- a dinghy and a jetty jostled each other in a high sea.  By now Mary had learned that Jacques was an affectionate acquaintance from Paris.  He had been recruited to the project again, to provide a little brother or sister to the toddler.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Marie's finding her older sister in bed with her brother one winter night after their father had died, was only known to observer Mary because she had found a route into Marie's secret knowledge.  Mary knew, too, that the tickling and squealing laughter from the bedroom had been a mystery for a long time before that, both fascinating and unaccountably exciting.  Agitated as a child, Marie had never been able to penetrate their shut door with her enquiring eyes.  Nor to ask anything or anyone about it.  She remembered those excited squeals like a repeated dream from her childhood.

            Here she was with Jacques, the child, and similar squeals of laughter.  Only Mary knew how they linked up.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

In the evening at the end of the day, the toddler had been bottled and powdered and put to bed, Marie and Jacques sat in adjacent armchairs, silently contemplating what came next.  Dark Mary, invisible in the recesses of the room, had noticed how their conversation - through the day, over the elaborate and celebratory meal - had petered into desultory attempts to fill in silence.  The practical intimacy in the morning had faded to the stillness of the evening.  The joint project had seemed to come apart: he had been flattered in the anticipation, but had now come to feel impersonal, more flattened. She organised and energised in the initiation and arrangements, but was now tensely aware of the penetration that she would be subjected to.  What once seemed a resounding climax of rationality, could now be an uncalculated animal moment.  He felt put on his metal, his performance mechanically required, not cherished. Mary's impatience with this pair made her laugh unkindly.  She could not discern any charge in the atmosphere; no passion in either of their loins.  Contempt for them was possible. But somehow sympathy came out in Mary, too.

            After minutes of separate silences, Jacques came to the point, "My dear Marie, shall we get on with it?"  Marie, appalled at his lack of passion - but equally relieved that she would not be a vessel to collect a spilling sentimentality - led the way to the bedroom.  They took off their clothes.  He folded his neatly on a chair; she carefully sorting certain items for the laundry basket, to wash tomorrow.  They lay on the bed.  His erection came with certainty, it pointed a direct line to Marie's inside.  She flinched but braved it.

            Afterwards they slept; she deeply, almost as a protection against the proximity.  He, fitful, wondered hazily why this had been important for him.  Mary watched over them as if a guardian angel, for the next three days.  Nights in the same bed, but during the days Jacques went into London, researching motorboats for the magazine he wrote for.  Marie spent the days looking after the toddler, taking her turn in the playgroup. Mary watched her, watching the sad decline of spirit.  The project was biology, not a love-child, like the first; this time a test-tube performance.

            Mary felt a closeness to Marie; yet put at a distance, outside effective influence.  Mary's disembodied sadness seemed lost on Marie who rehearsed her sensible reasons continuously in her mind.  How sensible as she had been not to make a relationship before it had been time to become a mother.  One parent, especially a mother, is as good as two - the independence and therefore the extra attention her children would benefit from.  Frankly, the liability a man is, in a woman's life… !  Mary knew of these arguments, their use to bolster up this lonely woman.  Marie would not yet know what Mary knew about her.  Mary's sadness was that Marie yearned for more than she thought she'd settle for, and her sadness was what Marie does not yet know.  Further, Mary was sad that she was neither a help nor yet truly a relief from Marie’s loneliness.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

On the fourth day Jacques left in the morning.  Marie fumbled with her camera and snapped him, holding in his arms the indifferent toddler, an effigy.  Perhaps Jacques had left another inside her.  We will not know yet awhile.  In the meantime, Marie went back indoors to continue her own life - as if never interrupted.  Her shadow, Mary, decided to remain with her.  The sadness had moved a little nearer.  Mary accompanied Marie almost touching now.  Their twinning had become apparent.  Marie, fully alone again, turned to her radio, she laughed desperately at the frenzy of the chattering disc jockeys.  She frowned at the news broadcasts, hummed and thrummed with the spreading music.  But sometimes she wondered at the new sad presence in her house, as if she were no longer alone.  Then her nervous laughter calmed.

            In the evening after the toddler had been bathed and bedded, more protesting than usual at his pre-occupied mother, Marie also took herself gratefully to bed.  She lay down and her dark sadness lay down beside her.  Mary's laugh, as silent as she was invisible, drew a direct line into Marie's inside.  Marie and Mary made a form of love together.  Their silent laughs mingled in rest at last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My nurse

 

Lying in bed, the rucks in the bed-linen like granite rock to lie on, my future is a composite of past times. In the present my skin is a furnace, alive with its own nature. My member is the centre of the fire. It goes up and down like Tower Bridge. My immobility is agony as that member flags constant demands I do something for it. Sometimes my nurse looks under my bedclothes and will see it saluting her. “Oh,” she says, always, “I'm surprised at you in your condition. We don't want that, do we?” – and drops the sheet back on its throbbing tip. How to catch her attention, how to tell her. Only my eyelids work now – apart from my member hoisting itself with a life of its own. If she would only touch it with the coolness of her fingertips, a fire brigade job, to staunch the firebrand. If only those long, elegant fingers would grip its shaft to establish a control. But never, she never once glanced in the direction of my frantically blinking eyelids.

            They were worried about my eczema. Common, they say, in such cases of paraplegia. Para-bloody-plegia from the neck down, that's what I'd got. The doctor stood gazing out of the window; my nurse stood next to him gazing into him. His well-scrubbed very pink face, well-shaven and smooth as her bosom, betrayed no interest. How could he know the fight I had with my surging skin, humming like the national grid. My struggle did not involve my muscles, my joints, it was a tournament between my mind and its feelings – one that never ceased. I could tell him the prescription I needed – it was standing next to him, resting her long hand in a lingering moment on his folded arm. He was a dapper man, silver hair, still playing squash in his fifties, the healthy and wealthy type. I had known them, sold insurance to them – in those gone days. And she, his nurse, was pure radiance. What a couple, a heroic tableau at the end of my bed. My member addresses them.

            In the end, it was an ointment for her to rub into the eczema. Why could she not rub it into the places I want her to rub!  All I can do is let my thoughts run; I imagine her in all sorts of ways - the nakedness, the flexible writhe of her curves as she moves, the moaning for me at night-time... oh dear. My mind, no match for this fever, retaliates. Often instead, it constructs her in the most absurd antics -= wiping her buttocks, picking the wax from her ears... brushing her teeth. I ask you!  Shaving her calves. Always the intimacy of her flesh. My charged skin won't let her go. And – I tell you – this is a stout fifty-year old matron, with a sour expression, and who ties her waist into a nasty groove between pads of fat above and below. This is not a lithesome 25-year old, dangling a sumptuous cleavage before my eyes as she soothes my paralytic limbs. What more -= I ask you – can I do. I see only an angel, feel only the tongues of desire caressing my skin. So, I hate her, my love.

It is solely the desire of the mind's eye before me. And it is only with a mind that I can fight it. I try to imagine the mathematics of her girth, the hydrodynamics of excess lipids, the chemistry of sweat glands. I try the driest of academic puzzles, the most ditchwater-like affairs of the hum-drum. But to no end - the caverns of my soul have no limit – endless niches and passages in which can be secreted the loathed longing of my skin. Thoroughbred honest thoughts can never hunt them out to the last one, can never dint my body's soaring temperature. When one day I shall be taught the mastery of typing with one toe, or with a stick strapped to my forehead, then the first thing I'll ask for is a massage girl to take me off to a sauna and lay me out and deal with that subcutaneous layer that itches, every Everest-like moment of my libido. Then I will be released for ever. So, I do believe.

            Until then... I love my nurse and fight her in my helplessness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It might have made a difference

                                                                           

I have always believed that friendship is more important than money. But I have to say he did test that belief, most severely.  If he had paid his debt to me, I could have used a substantial amount for her.  It might have made a difference.

            I had asked her “Which is more important, money or friendship?” I remember exactly the moment I asked her.  We were sitting on a small balcony on the top floor of a hotel in Rome.  The morning sun was clear in a spring sky.  The sounds of a small fruit market in the street below seemed a long way away.  The church bell in the campanile across the road had just finished striking ten-thirty, ten deep-throated gongs and one high-pitched bell.  She was just cutting into a fresh pear and carrying a slice towards her lips, her finger pressing it against the knife.  The elegant movement was unhindered by my question and the slice was deposited safely in her soft pink mouth without mishap.  I knew she had been a ...  Well, I don’t know what I would have called her.  She would certainly not have let me even think of calling her a “tart”.  And indeed, it would certainly not have been apt.  She was, I tell you, in a class of her own, an aristocrat, a shark among minnows, a Botticelli amongst Disney cartoons.  But I had not let myself think of all that whilst we were in Rome.  And yet I must have been thinking of it.  It was the one reason she was with me there.

            I was cheating on my new wife of course; if you could call it cheating.  My wife would have called it that, if she had known.  But it was something else I was thinking of, and at the same time not thinking of whilst I was in Rome.

            Another slice of pear moved elegantly to her lips before she spoke.  The juice filled her mouth with a sweetness that showed in her eyes; and her tongue swept across her red/pearl lips leaving them moist.  “You’ve heard of diamonds,” she said.  It was hardly a question, her eyes looked at me from under lids, her moist lips moving in a coquettish smile, unexpected but forbidding.  It was not the glance of a street girl, it was the darting invasion of a woman of style, underplayed, decisive, a confident beauty. I loved her with passion at such moments.  “Diamonds, my friend,” she added, almost as a protest at my naivety, like a threatened demand.  It had a coldness which mingled with her smile like a piquant sauce on red beef.

            She had come to Rome for two days to meet me. It was at my request, but I knew why she had come.  It was not in fact to enjoy money spent on her.  It was to make him jealous – not that she ever could have made him jealous. He would never have noticed. Nevertheless, I knew she would not keep her trip secret, and I knew it could hurt my wife without measure.  But to hurt my wife was not my reason; for my part, it was not to make her jealous.  Instead, it was fascination with this perfect creature.

            And yet she was no creature.  I watched another slice of pear slide sensuously into her mouth.  The sun was burning our skin as we sat, tired by the heat, relaxing in the innuendoes of our circumstances.  She was not a creature, she was sublime, to my eyes – and more.  Her urgent physicality met with exquisite and careful elegance to raise her into an untouchable realm.  It was a mixture to explode with; that allowed no ordinary expression.

            She had loved him dearly, though I had never got her to admit it.  And he with his overbearing weightiness had never responded to her.  She would have had to shout it, and on her knees, before he could look down and hear her.  And she would never bear herself so low.  I knew what a heart there was beneath the calm precision of beauty; within the pout she presented to him, and to me; and to her customers.

            She had been looking at the expensive cases of jewellery in the hotel foyer.  She had spotted a diamond creation for her neck.  It would have looked wonderful, she was right.  I had not said a word at the time.  Now, she asked, “What did you think of the necklace I showed you?” The next slice of pear was on its way.

            ‘My dear,” I began.  Some impatience had crept into my voice I suspect.  I was about to protest as mildly as possible that jewellery costing thousands of pounds was beyond me at present.  But I cautiously changed my line.  “It is as beautiful as you are.” I suspect, however, that she had caught my anxious tone.  That slice of pear got, I thought, a harder bite than the others.  She looked aside and I thought I glimpsed an arching of the eyebrows, but she would not let me see it.  She put down her plate with the knife on it at our feet and dabbed her lips with the napkin.  One more slice of pear waited on the plate.  A slight hardness had come into her features, without perceptible movement.  Her hardness was legendary.  She knew I was about to refuse her request, about to become insubordinate.  She would not press to that point where she was refused, but she felt it all the same.

            I thought of the money he owed me.

            I could have bought her several necklaces with it.  She loved him, I suppose, helplessly.  He was the only person that I saw her give her own money to.  But we all did.  He was like that.  His expansiveness towards everyone was so obvious.  He always knew someone who would do just what you needed doing.  He could always get something fixed.  And then of course there was that forlornness; he needed things and not one of us could arrange it for him.  He contrived thus, an imbalance; and it always cut his skin. His sadness of heart made him curiously magisterial.  And even Florence, whose skin could blunt razor blades gave him her own money out of her wallet.  When I was with her, as now, she never even carried money.  I watched her sitting on this penthouse terrace, in the Roman sun, eating Italian pear and utterly matching the serenity I was buying us. But the motionless tension beneath her skin showed me she was not happy.  It is partly why I had asked the question.

            He had sold my car for me.  It had been a rare Bugatti.  I had longed for Italy then, even before I had found it.  I methodically restored it.  I have always been rather predictable and ponderous. Even at Oxford, where I had first met him, Oliver had criticised my essays for their lack of personality – in the very tenderest way; and as always with that slight hint that I had let him down personally, just a bit; that now I owed him something.  Let him down rather than myself.  Anyway, my one gesture to a creative life occurred when I was sailing amongst the sand-reefs of the Suffolk coast and at the opening of a quiet estuary, and amongst various rotting wooden hulks.  I came upon the rusting corpse of my Bugatti barely beneath the surface.  It scraped under my centre-board and I immediately decided to bring up whatever it was.  I assumed at first it was a piece of war machinery, a tank, a felled bomber.  I had just fallen in love then, perhaps it was for the first time and everything in the world seemed possible.  The local farm mechanic was enthused by my energy. He was familiar with any, and all, requests.  It became a challenge for him and his local villagers to raise it for me.  I spent all the summer scraping rust in my father’s garage, picking out the intricate mechanism, still robust from its 1920s manufacture, and much was still rescuable after the years in the cold Suffolk tides.  I worked doggedly into the winter at weekends when I could leave Oxford, and it was the fascination with restoring this dead machine that led me to change (from my degree in history) to engineering – like my father.  That was how I came to spend five rarely uninspired years at Oxford and cemented the relationship with the paternal Oliver.  He had always pressed me to part with my Bugatti, to lend it to him, to sell it to him, to let him sell it for a very good price through one of his contacts at the University who knew an aristocrat family that wished to surround themselves with fashionable and expensive trivia.  When he met Florence, I was not surprised.  I had always thought of his weighty hungriness as a kind of sleaze, a perfect match for her lewd business of practiced intimacy. They had met, as it happens, silently wafting over the north Oxfordshire countryside in a balloon – she taken along as a decorative accompaniment for the wealthy balloonist, Oliver with his soaring intellectual sparkle having ingratiated himself with the same wealthy man. That was in my last year.  I met them soon after the balloon owner had dropped them both for new hangers-on, and new hobbies.

            She was at tea in Oliver’s rooms, and I fell in love with her instantly.  I do not think she minded particularly as, unimaginative as always, I was no problem to her.  I was in control of myself, my ardour always hovering at the right distance.  She had then given me the address where she worked in London.  She asked no questions and let it be known that none would be asked. They, she and him, were such a contrast: he boisterously loud, impulsive and brilliantly shallow; she instead quiet, deep and inviting.  They had in common their respective hungriness.

            I looked at her relaxed form, the very centre of our warm balcony, cut out of the centre of Rome, just for us.  She had come to me for a couple of days.  Just us together.  After twelve years.  Was it so long?  I looked and knew the shape of her breasts which her blouse now enfolded shapelessly. I was familiar with the long sweep of her thigh to which the canvas trousers now clung.  I have encountered all things about her but have not captured them.  Perhaps, I wistfully wondered, if I had the money, she really would be mine.  But, after all these years of friendship, I still knew myself to be just one among the many who attended and contented her.  And I never challenged that.  I would not do that to her.

            Later, when my father died, I had some money to spend on my Bugatti, for proper repair - the bodywork, the upholstery, the canvas top and the now rare materials for restoring the mechanics.  But I had money too for setting up my own practice as an engineer, and I began to travel.

            As I aged a little, in my 30s, my work grew moderately prosperous.  All my young sisters married and I, amazingly, became a fond uncle several times. Babies unaccountably grew on me. I realised I had outgrown my Bugatti and I let Oliver agree to sell it for me.  He had it around for a year and a half in the yard behind his house in the country outskirts where he lives now.  He did not look after it and he let me know, by slight hints, that this favour put a burden on him.  When he had finally disposed of it for me it was without much ceremony to a car museum somewhere in the north of England.  He was somewhat vague about where it went, and at what price.  I knew it should have been somewhere amongst six figures, but he let me know in small ways that pressing him for details, and for money, was an embarrassment to him.  There were only instalments, he conveyed, paid to him, at this stage.  The money would finally be accumulated and handed over all in one sum in the end.  And when at last he gave me a firm figure, it was probably less than half I might have expected.  But for such a favour, he implied, I could not grumble.  Machines have always come easier than people, I know where I am and can handle them.  Not so the complexity of his generosity which was beyond me.  I have therefore been helplessly waiting more than two years for payment.  I am good-natured at heart, and I do not press him.  But my timidity comes also from a taint of intimidation in our friendship. I could not lose him, whatever it cost me.  And it did cost me - not only the money, and also not only the jealous knowing of her devotion to him, but most painfully having the combination, that is, to cede her loyalty to me which the money might buy.

            And then there was the other thing.

 

­_oooo/­\oooo_

 

Why did I give two minutes of my life to this heavy bully?  Why did I always let his grandly, selfish importance feed on my adulation.  It is because of the moments of something else; his sudden charming concern for some detail in my life – an inquiry about some worrying contract that I had told him about weeks ago and now long-forgotten by me. He recalled his frequent admiration for some charitable donations I made from my father’s estate after I was bereaved; and then often, at times that were most difficult, I was enriched by his lavish gratitude over my forbearance of his longstanding debt – that money.  I always allowed him the enjoyment of giving me these testimonials to my qualities.  And to be quite fair, I enjoyed them too. The naivety in his gushes of warmth gave him that concealed charm.  It was the visible boy in him that he thought he camouflaged with bulk – that was what engaged some sentimental part of me.  I had never striven to reach beyond being his student in those first terms at University when he had tutored me in history.

            She shifted her body, uncrossed and recrossed her lithe legs.  She retrieved with a gracious movement the plate with the slice of pear.  I heaved inwardly at the flow of the perfect body that had once contained something of mine.  What, I wondered now, was in her mind?  Was she thinking of the flight that would swiftly take her away from me back to London after her short two days here?

            I decided at that moment to tell her.

            In spite of marriage, my visits to her address in London continued with a frequency I was sometimes ashamed of. Marriage had been a deeply insignificant event, and I was determined to keep it that way.  The wedding had been entirely a family affair, and so, as far as I was concerned, the marriage had remained.  The reasons for that will have to wait for another occasion.  Florence – perhaps quite simply, she is the straightforward reason – she was always so curiously complimentary about my loyalty to her.  I believed myself her very best consort, of course I did; I suppose they all did. But it was, I always felt, a considerable consolation prize, one that I wished to keep, and sometimes this specialness was confirmed by a boating trip in Regent’s Park, tea at Harrods, a drink and a theatre somewhere near her birthday.  On one occasion, it was about nine months ago, I suppose, it had been quite a special occasion, she had wanted me to take her to collect a painting from an exhibition a friend of mine had just shown.  She had bought one and we took it back to her flat.  We went as usual into the familiar bedroom. Afterwards I noticed there had been a leak in the condom.  I was in the lavatory peeling the thing off me and I noticed a few drops of fluid squeezing from a small puncture near the tip.  I wondered, at the time, if there was a risk of sperm getting through to her. For some reason I decided it would be a delicious pleasure not to tell her.  It was the only cruelty I have ever done her.  It became a precious secret, a warmth for me, a permanent companion to cuddle up to on my own. Even if there was no fertility, I had left something of me in her, a spot of my essence that inevitably she had had to accept.

            A few weeks later Oliver was speaking on the phone to me.  I think I had made a friendly courtesy call, perhaps I was arranging when I would next go to tea at his place in Oxford.  We had avoided mention of the Bugatti for a long time, but he suddenly said, “You’re my biggest creditor.” It intimated that something was up.  “This place,” he indicated the old farmhouse he was living in, “it’s up to the limit.  I’ve got a mortgage broker looking into Swiss mortgages - two or three percent down on building societies here.” I was not sure if he was bursting with his financial anxiety, or if the intricacies of his arrangements were a kind of boast.  Then equally surprisingly he changed tack in his off-putting but characteristic way, “If it were not for you, I’d have the banks onto me.” Suddenly the generosity of his comment warmed me as it always did.  “As soon as the banks have quietened off, I’m going to tackle what I owe you.  I’ve got an idea...” Fortunately, his other phone was ringing, and I was put on hold till I had to ring off.  I was spared the discomfort of hearing the somersaults he was apparently going to turn for me.

            I think it was only coincidence, though, that the next day he was ringing around everyone who knew her with hints that something was up.

            A week later I went to have tea at the weekend with him – my wife indulged my old links with male friends.  But Florence was there on that occasion.  They openly discussed her pregnancy test.  Oliver, as always, was insistent he could sort it out, “I’m pleased you came to me,” he said, his relaxed form lying grotesquely extended in an armchair.  His massive arms placed either side came together at the finger-tips and he viewed her through the lattice they made.  “You know Pearson?” He glanced sideways as if to include me in his pondering.  I had just come in and sat down on a small chair with horsehair showing at the front edge.  Before I could say anything, in fact before I could get my breath from climbing the stairs to his studio in the attic, “You know Pearson, he ran the psychical research club when he was here”. He turned again to Florence, “You know Pearson is a very good friend of mine.  We had dinner a couple of months ago.” In fact, it is probable that that occasion was the only time they had met.  I wondered what Pearson had made of this bombast. He indicated Oxford and its environs with a gentle sweep of his broad hand.

            Florence was less interested in Pearson’s activities as a student in Oxford, but she remained looking pretty in her severe unsmiling sort of way.  “I hope he can do it as soon as possible.”

            “That’s no trouble,” Oliver retorted wildly.  “He’ll do what he’s paid for.” There was an edge of scorn as, true to pattern, Oliver’s respect for others, beginning sky high to prop his high regard for his own impressive connections, then steadily plummeted back with every sentence he spoke about them.  “It’s only a question of paying him.” Then he suddenly reached out with his arms, pushed his sleeves half up to the elbows, flapped his hands up and down as if to subdue anything Florence might say.  “You’re not to worry, dear.  Don’t think about it.  I’ll be glad – no I insist – I’ll take care of everything, Flo.” He glanced a second time at me to collect my approval.  “Brian,” he announced, as if calling me from a distance, “used to have an old Italian car. Not in your day.” It was a gratuitous flatter that silenced any comment I might have added if I had managed to sort out the complexity of it.  He seemed to be implying that he would contribute the money from that sale to Florence’s termination; whilst concealing that money he received from the sale he should have already given to me; whilst also, it seemed, he was challenging me to expose his bluster.

            Florence got up and said she would make a cup of tea. It was a tense moment, as if she did know something of the issue that Oliver and I had over the car.  She said nothing but rather ostentatiously concentrated on moving around the room on her elegant legs as if in some ritual performance to impress our attention.  Oliver, of course appeared oblivious, and directed her to where she would find the milk as he had placed it in a cooler on the window-ledge, the fridge being full because a group of students was coming to supper and one of the female ones had offered to come that morning to prepare food, and she had been so nervous that to reassure her, he had turned the fridge out to accommodate everything she had brought that could possibly go bad.  Florence responded machine-like to his instructions, a beautiful figure on a screen, the projectionist’s puppet.  She lingered a little, motionless and expressionless.  Secretly, I knew she was relieved to have Oliver’s total command of the solution and joyful it had been him who had wanted to help her.

            But she showed nothing of these feelings as she swayed elegantly about the room making tea.

            Oliver turned his attention to me.

            He was insistent.  He was going to arrange the best in Harley Street, through his contact, no expense spared, and he lavishly declaimed with a wide gesture of his grasping hand, it would be all at his expense.  Perhaps he wanted it thought he was responsible for her pregnancy. Within a week it would all be over and back to normal, he concluded confidently.  Naturally Florence, as she produced the tea, seemed gratefully soothed. She said little while she poured our cups and drank hers.  She was listening intently to Oliver’s plans for her.

            Despite his masterly command of her problem, I recalled only those few days before on the telephone, his gratuitous comments that I was so good about the debt to me that was unpaid.

            Then, a few days later he rang to ascertain – he’d known I would agree, he said – that I could not want to press him for money, when Florence was so upset and needed him to fix it for her.

            So I had decided to tell her.  On our paradise, looking down on the sounds and smells of Rome.  She listened, still and grave.  The slice of pear waited on the plate.  I finished telling her: the baby that Oliver had paid to abort was the one I had made in her.  There was a long silence.  Was she thinking carefully about it?  Did I see a slight shrug of the shoulders?  Or not?  I could barely tell.  Any movement was too invisible to be certain.  The final slice of pear slid unperturbed into her perfect mouth.  Had she realised, I could have paid for her to have my child?  If I had had my money.  Would it have made a difference?  It was time for the taxi to be called to take her to the airport.  Her lips tasted slightly of pear as I kissed her goodbye. We never again mentioned the secret I had kept for nine months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roofless districts

 

She was sitting quite on her own on a bench near a tree but in the evening sun, I approached casually and sat against a fallen tree-trunk at a little distance, facing so that I could look at her but without making it obvious I was doing so. There was silence except for the evening sounds that gave relish to this piece of country we were in.

            Eventually she moved her photochromic glasses, pushing them up to the top of her head, like goggles typical of the unfashionable, years-ago styles long before I would remember. Her eyes looked boldly to take a good look at me and then she stared forward in front of her again. I think she had moved her lenses so that I would be able to see her glance. I exclaimed how sunny the weather was for us. Not having anything more brilliant to say, I felt somewhat silly. Nevertheless she replied in the same style, without turning her head, that she liked to be in Roofless Districts, as they are called, when the sun was out shining. I quickly said that it was the other way around, that the sun comes out when she is in a Roofless District because he liked to look at her. She shrugged her shoulders slightly and I thought she blushed just a little. I did not know how to continue – by becoming more personally flattering or by veering into the technical stuff about the Project we were on here. She did not help me. Characteristically, I said nothing. Later I shifted and stood up and said I might go for a couple of drinks for us if she liked. Immediately, I bit my tongue with regret for I knew that it was at least two miles walking to the nearest pub from here. I would have felt really stupid (as I often am) keeping her waiting for an hour or so while I staggered back with two slopping glasses of flat soda-beer. Fortunately, she declined. Having stood up, I decided to move off anyway and announced I was going back. She said nothing. I picked up a stick and began to beat about at the plants on either side of the path, and then felt I was exhibiting more boyishness than would impress. So, I threw away the stick in an embarrassed manner – anyway she had her back to me, what did it matter.

            I decided to wait for the bus-chute which is what passes for public transport in this dreary place. As I waited at the stop, what did I see? I saw a black Ford Chauffeuse – the canoe shaped open top – with this lady driving along on her own. I thumbed for a lift. But she swept by, her hair flowing in gracious streamers as immaculate as her black make-up. I think she noticed me but refused to stop. I will add that she had the courtesy to pretend she had not seen me. Of course, knowing my sensitivity, I was well-aware the implications are the same.

            This was before she knew who I was. Obviously as the Writer, hired for the Project, I had not been greatly in evidence during the sessions of the day. I had merely loitered in the dark corners with my stock-in-trade, and discreet recorder and the stenographer. In fact, I think the most noteworthy aspect of my ensemble was seventeen-year-old Susie who I had rented out for the weekend yesterday from the Agency that I usually go to for my stenographers; they give me a small discount and they push in my direction the girls who do the fastest work transcribing. Susie, incidentally had a noticeably admirable chest. I was always amused that with a limitation for that attribute in her lower field of vision, touch-typing must have come naturally for her.

            If anyone had noticed us, they would probably not have looked further than Susie’s natural gifts. Anyway, eventually our lady did discover who I was, sometime during the second day because, just before the company disbanded she came up to me asking if she could talk something over privately. In fact, Susie and I were in the phone queue waiting with everyone else to ring for a Taxi-Cube. So, I left Susie to it and sauntered off with our lady. She seemed to know where she was going in the Mansion and quickly found us a deserted room. She insisted that I stood with my back flat against the wall and my arms stretched out on either side in the shape of a cross. She moved sporadically about the room as we conversed.

            There was a long pre-amble spoken by her. I had noticed that she had appeared somewhat older, more mature, than the usual teenage starlets one finds on these Pre-write Projects. From what she was manoeuvring to say, it seems she had picked me to rectify her retarded career. From what I had observed of her work during the weekend there seemed to be no reason why she should not have progressed normally into Prime Drama. However, she confessed, she was now only able to get work making those Porn-casts which are transmitted virally all over the world now, or as a Phone-Speaker which of course is a kind of auditory whore. It was pathetic indeed, she said, and to demonstrate she gave me a sample of the erotic Voice-Tone, deep and vibrant that made the blood curdle in my loins. And now, she said, I could see how she was saddled with these Pre-write Projects. And of course, it is always an absolute principle that no-one who takes part in the Pre-write material will ever be cast in the Prime Drama when it is written up.

            What she wanted was her own Tailored Drama play written up by me for her and to her style. An obvious request on the surface, one which I could hardly disappoint her with straightaway. The fact was that as a Pre-write Writer I was hardly at the top of my profession either. A part-time  Phone-Speaker and a second-rate Pre-write Writer is a team nobody would take seriously. Yet I was unwilling to disappoint her as it might be worth a try; after all everyone starts from Nowhere. She asked me point-blank. There was a silence. She had come close to me, leant her elbow against the wall beside my head so that her eyes stared into mine. I could smell the perfume of her nostril-pellets as she breathed.

            In not disappointing her, I gave myself some hope as well.

            She was satisfied and moved away quickly out of the room, the two patches of sequins flickering and flashing joyously on her buttocks. I hurried after her to explain I would need a lift home now. She told me however she probably didn’t have enough petrol to get back to the Bright Areas today and the time-lock on the petrol cap would not open until tomorrow. She smiled and after a moment’s thought she decided we could drive till we caught up the Taxi-Cube train. And that is what we did. In the car she drove from the rear of the two seats and positioned me so that I sat sideways, with one arm crooked over the back of the seat, my fingers touching the carpet of the floor, my other hand pressed forwards against the windscreen deflector. It wasn’t long before we overtook the train of taxis which can only just have left the mansion, but we continued on to a point where the indicators showed it would be stopping (I think to separate one person off). I got out. We made no arrangement but in the spirit of two people who have achieved a business deal we placed our right hands together, palms touching, and gripped hard. This bye-grip is in the highest taste of fashion having appeared only in the last year or so; although they do say it is a rediscovery of a preceding custom, generations ago. But I know nothing about that.

            After a rather long time the train appeared having transacted its deposition of someone. I looked along it hastily for Susie. She, of course, had ordered only a one-person cubicle. It was a tight squeeze for the two of us. I have mentioned the exposure of her bosom which you can imagine caused a sensation as we were pressed chest to chest, she wearing only a small pale-blue under-sling. So squeezes come in many forms, and you can imagine this form imposed on us. Perhaps the old-fashioned word ‘superotic’ crudely describes it best. Then when the Taxi-Cube train started off, the movements of the cubicle rolling us together raised the sensations higher and higher. We tried to adjust ourselves apart, but that only frustrated us both, I believe. I was very pleased with the outcome, and we agreed I would hire her again sometime. Some five minutes later she positioned my arms against the walls of the cubicle; such is the elevation of status of a stenographer following a kind of bodily intimacy.

            As the dusk began to fall, the train reached the limit of the Roofless Districts and exited, plunging us into the glare of the Bright Areas. And of course, it was able to speed up many times so that we very rapidly found ourselves near the destination, decoupling, coupling and so on with the bewildering accuracy of the Electric Eye systems. We arrived at the Agency Hostel. I told Susie I would be needing her for a week further to write up the ad-lib Sketch Dramas of the weekend Project into the final re-write for Prime Drama. I said I would re-programme the Agency for this extra work. I required her when she had the initial typescript ready digitalised properly. I decided to walk her from there, for it was not far through the disused parking lots.

            As I entered the flat my wife looked up quickly. And then moved back to the work she was setting down and then she crawled towards me from behind the web-filaments of the Hydrostatic Deodorants. I have never been able to observe supernumerary legs on her but I swear she has eight black hairy ones.

            She leaned herself loosely against me. It was an embrace which seemed to convey a handful of messages. In particular it seemed to emphasise – ‘look how much I love you’; and at the same time, ‘how I hate you neglecting me for my nose is so sensitive, I can detect even the scent of the after-sex deodorants you have been using with someone else.

            I slipped off my highly fashionable Apron-Tunic and it fell limply to the floor. My wife sank to her knees on the glass bricks and buried her face in the soft leather of the apron. She felt the warm texture with her lips and her cheek and the end of her fingers. I stood for a moment gazing at her reflection in the mirror below the bricks. Then I mounted her carefully from behind. Once inside her I felt for a few brief seconds truly at home again and in the rightful place that was for me.

            After we had finished, we noticed that the children had been watching us fascinated from the gallery. So, I replayed it over on the Video-Set and we all sat in silence watching. My wife positioned my arms decorously as she wanted, and across the arms of the leaves of the armchair. I drifted away and thought of the Roofless Districts and the woman they had contained this weekend who had given me a hope that I had lost years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                        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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I did fall in love

 

When I was 14 I was raped one evening by six men from the barracks. It was quite horrid. But I did not tell the police, or my parents or anyone - and afterwards I felt that my secret was a piece of my life that at last was my own. One of the men came back to see me a week later. He had been the most hesitant of the six and I don't think he did it properly, only pretended, because of what the others would think. But I was not sure, as I did not concentrate much on what was happening to me. In fact, he was the only one I remembered really. I remembered his rifle still half-dangling from his shoulder, the metal clinked on the buckle of my belt. He came back to see me because he wanted to make amends somehow, he said. I asked him what his name was. Later I wrote to the barracks and asked them to punish him. Looking back, I think I quite liked him; and I rather think it was because I liked him that I wanted them to punish him. But I don't know what happened.

            I wasn't very interested in boys when I was a teenager. Later on, when I was 20 or so there were a couple of women, one after the other. I let them teach me things, but I didn't know where it was leading, and I was a bit frightened – about the unknown. I told each of them about the other, and when they eventually met, they fell in love. I was relieved and also felt a warm pleasure that I had brought them together. I liked to think that when they made love they were both thinking about me!

            It was not until my late twenties that I let a man make love to me. It was very passionate indeed. I had for some time begun to have daydreams about love making with men – no-one in particular, no one man at all.

            We met at a party. I hadn't really noticed him until I burst into the lavatory when he had not bolted the door properly. I retreated. When he came out, he saw me watching him and he was a little pink in the face. I felt oddly embarrassed too – but it was just one of those things. It didn't mean anything.

            About two years later we met again and were introduced. We both recognised each other – though I made out that I didn't. Because it seemed so inconsequential. He was again a little embarrassed and awkward to remember the first occasion and then find that I did not remember him. I was again unusually embarrassed too.

            I let him talk to me for a while and then I got away but at the end of the evening, I was leaving at the same time, and he took me home. I sat in the back of the car whilst his wife sat next to him. Two days later, on Monday morning, he rang me. To ask me out. He told me he had been thinking about me over the weekend. I had not thought of him but decided it was better not to say so. I suppose I must have wanted to see him again. He told me he was falling in love with me and insisted I meet him, just once. He was emphatic that he did not do this sort of thing regularly. It was special. He would take me to a pub at lunchtime, he needed to talk about some things. I didn't know what to say on the phone. I wanted to get back to reading the newspaper, snipping out the cuttings. I said I would meet him at midday at the swimming pool. It was not that I like swimming but know I look good in a swimming costume. I take great care buying them and have quite a lot.

            Half an hour beforehand I was there sitting at the side of the water quietly, composing myself. I arranged my body in a way that I hoped looked relaxed, and my mind so that it should be as blank as possible. When he emerged, he looked good too. He noticed me and came across to where I had prepared myself, propped against a low wall. He did not sit down at first and I looked up with a smile, but I’m afraid I still looked serious. It did not seem easy for either of us to say anything. Perhaps he had been a little cross with me for dragging him there, but at that moment my thoughts were as disturbed as the water with boys plunging in and out. I said nothing and waited for him to bargain for what he wanted. His face looked tense and red. Then he decided to move and bending down he picked up my hand and pressed it vigorously to his lips. I held it up and kept touching him to preserve the contact longer. I could not help noticing the thought that my mind decided to produce at that moment: this was the hand that I used to hold the flannel for wiping myself in the lavatory. My hand still held onto his as he straightened up. And I decided to say that I was too confused to stay with him for long today. My body, I added, could be his but I did not yet know about my heart. I said I wanted him to go away and to write to me; tell me what he felt and what he wanted – to put it in writing because my mind was not working face-to-face. I still held his hand as I spoke and this time I pulled it to my lips. I pressed it there for minutes feeling the full veins on the back of it with my tongue. I caressed it with all the surfaces of my face, my cheeks, the hollows of my eyes fitting round his knuckles, my forehead, my small nose gliding across his palm, the tip of my chin on the tip of his fingers. Then I pressed it against the top of my bare shoulder and the side of my neck, which I discovered, had become electric. My body felt very naked, and I thought he might reach out with his arms to take it. He felt like the radiance of the sun. I said I was in too much of a turmoil to be with him, he must go and write what his feelings were, what his dreams are. I told him to go but not to keep me waiting long for his letter; and truly I was already longing and waiting for it. I told him I was so confused but actually in those moments my logic had become as sharp and clear as ice.

            When he wrote to me it was very passionate, he was suddenly a slave to love he said, his body and his soul were racked with agony. He left me no doubts that he was head over heels and nothing would tear his devotion from me till the end of time. Indeed, by now I had no intention of dampening his devotion - neither before nor even after the end of time. Yet, even though love is a wonderful emotion, a tidal wave of emotion is like standing in front of any other tidal wave -0 it can drown you. So I did not reply immediately and when after a few days of agonies he telephoned to ask me what my decision would be, I said I was disappointed. I would have expected him to arrange to see me sooner if he really meant all that he had written in those wonderful things in the letter. He was suddenly agonized anew, because I should doubt him so. I wanted him to come and see me immediately but he said it was impossible, he had his visits to make. But I shall be one of them I insisted - how else could I tell if he was someone I should give my heart to. He must show he would let his patients wait a little for their visit from the doctor, otherwise it meant I was no more than his patients to him.

            When he arrived, I had waited twenty minutes or so; it was cold and damp in the drizzle, standing waiting a few houses up the street from where I lived. I insisted we went to the corner and had a drink in the pub. The person in the flat below me in my house would be going out later - I did not want to give any chance of anybody knowing I had brought a man back. He was not very pleased to find himself in the pub and kept looking at his watch, and sipping his drink and eyeing my drink which I kept safely undrunk in the glass till I thought enough time had passed for the downstairs prying eyes to go out on her afternoon routine. I took the time to ask about his wife. She would skin him I gathered, she was trained as a lawyer he said, she was very hard and independent, she insisted on the best for their children. He was unhappy at home, only at work was there satisfaction, and that is not enough for a full life. He saw in me some new opportunity, he smelled freedom, the oasis in a parched desert. He glanced at his watch. I said calmly he must take his watch off and give it to me while we waited. He could not. I said we would go in a moment and insisted he gave me his watch. As, he said, I was a little younger than he was, actually ten years. I was, he said, a new flower that would blossom in his life. I told him I sensed his power, a power in his emotions. They frightened me but he fascinated me. I could feel warmth in my genitals. I told him I had never made love with a man before. I said we would go back to my flat and make love for the first time. I said we could go now.

            In the few yards down the road, I told him I was frightened. I swallowed hard with a dry throat, and I told him exactly the way I wanted to do it. He nodded. When we got to my flat, we crept up the stairs – just in case of prying-eyes. In the flat at last I pulled all the curtains and in the dark bedroom I laid him on the bed. It seemed a little cold I said but I assumed we would warm up. He said nothing as I had asked of him. I reminded him he promised not touch me with his hands, to lie with his arms stretched on either side motionless. He frowned a little. I didn't want to know what he was thinking. Then in the bathroom I removed my panties, looked in the mirrors, brushed my hair. I looked at my fingernails and decided to wash my hands but the water was cold so I was quick. I arranged myself kneeling astride him as I had done so often and so carefully in my daydreams, with my skirt and my raincoat covering our union like a tent. I put my hands beneath my clothes to find his zip and undid it. I was unfamiliar with a man's trousers and underclothes. He smiled as I rummaged around. Eventually I got hold of him and found an aperture in the folds of material to pull it through. He made little jerky movements with his hips, and I put his thing up into my vagina and held it there to expand into me. But it stayed rather soft. I didn't know how men made themselves stiff, and I smiled at him. But my mind was racing, and I suddenly felt I had gone too far, that I was out of my depth attempting this. I asked him what the matter was, but I did not really want to know. He said I would have to make him stiff. My mind raced on, but I asked him coolly how do I do that. He told me I had to get off him, caress his thing with gentle fingers, with my lips up and down it, from end to end, with my tongue searching right down to his balls. I smelled his warmth and sweat and the slight smell of lavatories too, and also soap. He told me when to get back on top. I arranged my tent of clothes again. Then he came into me properly and worked his way right in. He was very vigorous. I had wanted to do it myself but I let him push up. When he had come himself he seemed to be quite out of control. As he fell back still, I pulled off him and he winced but he lay still. I slumped in my chair by the mirror, and lifting my skirts I thought, as I always do when I rub, of a soft trickle of blood warming my vagina. I came quickly because it was so slippery and afterwards I dozed off as I always do into a short sleep. I woke with him calling to me and asking the time. I looked towards him for the first time. His thing was soft again, a last drop of juice had run out onto the crisp material of his trouser-leg. As I approached him to agree he could rise, he tried to kiss me and I smiled at him. Then he was gone quickly to continue his visits. Please, please write to me straightaway, I told him, to tell every single thought that had gone through his head at every moment of our love-making. I did not know if I craved for him or never wanted to see him again.

            He rang me in the early evening and I told him off because he should be writing to me. I expected a letter in the post the next day. He said he was desperately short of time especially as he could do little else but think of me. But I insisted he must do as I say. He claimed he was no writer but I silenced him and said true love if it was really true would turn anyone into a poet.

            When the letter came two days later, he had laboured hard to tell me everything. It was true he was no writer and love had not turned him into a poet but he had made a huge effort. Curiously, I was not very interested any more in what he actually wrote. I was already thinking of the next time. I had fantasies all the time of what we might do. I stood in front of my mirrors imagining the feelings in every bit of my body if he touched it, stroked it, kissed it, scratched it.

            I decided to write it all to him. I bathed and washed my hair, dressed in the most ravishing evening gown I had in my cupboard and sat in my chair facing the mirror and wrote to the image he had made love to, as if I were him. I did not spare him any of my intimate thoughts on the possibilities ahead of us. Next time I offered him to tie me to the bed in any position he wished. My thoughts whirled ahead to what he might do to me once I was helpless. Any bit of me whatever could be touched by his flesh - and there would be nothing I could do about it. It excited me even though I knew I could never let it be different from that first time, never let him free in my bed. I told him stories about the use of all my orifices. When I finished, I felt satisfied and once again saw myself in the mirror. I was shocked by what I had written, what had come out of me. And I realised I wanted to shock him, to disgust him. I eagerly went to post it to him – I decided to send it to his home, to the midst of the family into the midst of his marriage. Running along the road in such extravagant clothes, I felt them rustle, my skin scoring on the fine material. I returned equally quickly from the post-box and stood in front of my mirrors. Now, pink and a little short of breath.

            He told me after that I must stop. I had gone too far with my letters and my suggestions. He thought it had become an obsession for me, he was worried about me. I told him I wished only to be discreet – as he must have realised. I am a private person. I wish for total privacy. He said he insisted we use ordinary email ,like everyone else. I said I need his letters to hold in my hand like a lifeline.

            He reassured me, in a text message that  he loved me; he mentioned various parts of my body. He only wanted to get all the passions in balance, stabilise our affaire, so that it would not shake itself to bits, he said, and us with it. I thought he was talking to a naughty child - a nuisance child that needed a threat.

            I tried video calling, and on one occasion we met. I explained he must love me my way, that he had created a strange new woman inside me. I said I must be able to see him, I would become his patient so that I could call to see him any day, so that I could ring for a visit from him.

            He turned his hands over with a tried patience. I felt my eyes widen with an enquiring curiosity, like a little girl's, pleading. He announced that doctors could not have their patients for lovers. But I quickly stopped him with the fact that it was not that way, it was the opposite, having his lover become a patient. I said it was best to arrange things through his surgery otherwise his wife might find out. I began to imagine if she did. Her red-faced anger, her white knuckles gripping his hair, her teeth straining to get into his flesh; her screeches of purified protest hanging in our ears pouring pain, The glee of it.... He hushed me and assured me his wife would not find out under any circumstances, if we were careful. But I was already beyond careful. I would not be careful. I won't…. He threatened to ring off.

            The moment was a very delicate one. I calmed down of my own will. After a silence, we spoke of something else. 

            The next evening, I went to the surgery – to register as a patient. The receptionist went away to find out if the doctor would agree – she came back to tell me that he was not, she said officially, taking any more onto his list. She'd agreed a little later to find out why, when I made the kind of fuss that I am so good at. I knew he would make an exception for me. But there was a thin moment of excited anticipation as I waited for her to come back from checking. I was relieved, too, when she nodded from her glass office.

            He told me later he did not know now if I might make trouble. He was concerned I would tackle his wife in some way. He was not sure if I was playing a game. I was so strange, a woman enclosed, he called me. All my fantasies stretched me beyond his view. I said I noticed he had not risked calling my bluff. He had accepted me into his practice. He smiled. He was relaxed. He shook his head to agree as if he was resigned to my whims, and half-liked being pestered by them. Would she leave him, throw him out – he could not come to my flat I told him. Would she throw saucepans?  I was so curious, I wanted to find out, I said. I laughed.

            I had grown to know that resigned shrug of his shoulders - an amused father in a lonely generation.

            One day I played a trick on him. I went to his surgery, waited my turn, and went to his room, sat down in the chair. I demanded that he kiss me, between – the legs. He refused with that torpid resignation and told me to run along. I refused. He explained that his partners or his receptionist could walk in at any moment, I should leave now. I refused again and pouted with my small but full lips he had so often admired. I explained I had come to get money out of him. If he wanted to avoid disgrace he would have to pay. He looked rather blank. He was not sure if this was, or was not, one of my games again. He always thought of me as a gamester, a jester, the glint of the magpie as someone had called it. I said that he did not believe me. It was true, I told him, that I did not need the money - not as money, to spend. I simply wanted his money. I took a digital memory stick from the pocket of my fur coat. I showed it to him. It was a stick. It is a record, I said, of love-making. Ours last week. It is quite clear. I asked if he wanted me to play it, would someone overhear. Alright, he said, alright. But he wasn't alright – not all right himself. He looked grey. He wanted to get me out at any price. He was beginning to think I was serious, my game was another mad artifice, a vulgarity beneath him. I was beginning to win – if he became convinced it was not a game then I had won the game.

            Suddenly he accepted he was a victim; I was winning this real, malign stratagem. He drew out his cheque-book. How much did I want. I could see he still felt he could play along, really felt the abused and innocent lover. Is a hundred pounds enough for you, he asked. No, I said. No cheques, I want ten pounds, just a ten-pound note. He looked at me surprised again; how often had I achieved that?  Only ten pounds. He closed his cheque book. 

            “I am surprised” I started to say with a little pout reforming, “that you think I am worth only one hundred pounds. If you had quoted a true value then I would have let you off. Now I will have to find out what the value is, slowly, bit by bit, ten pounds to start. A little more next time, a little more, how far will you go.”  His perplexed relief clouded a little. He wondered if I would go on. He had tasted my power over him. And so, candidly, had I. He took a ten-pound note from his wallet and said I should go now. He was cold and shaken. I too was cold; a damp loss seemed to have come out of this. But I had won this game.

            I had won the game. I put the valuable piece of paper on the desk and smoothed it with my hand. I looked up at him from the corner of my eye, he looked ever so much older. I picked up the note and tore it in two, slowly, then again, and again till it was very small pieces in the palm of my hand. I dropped them into the bin where he throws the discarded swabs stained with pus or blood.

            Out in the street I waited for him by the car. Perhaps an hour later I was sitting on the bonnet of his car looking cheeky, when he came out to go home. He was furious I was still hanging around. I presumed he was anxious people would wonder what I was doing. I supposed, I said, he'd have some explaining to do to his partners. I got in with him and he drove me home. We were silent. I demanded that he come in with me. I knew he would not. He reached across me in an unromantic way to release the car door and shoved me out with his shoulder. I held the door open so he had to come round to close it again. He told me I was a child. Then he took hold of me by the shoulders and gave me a vigorous kiss on the mouth. I didn't know if it was love; or if it was in hope of silencing me.

            I went up to my flat alone and settled down in front of my mirrors. The digital stick had nothing on it but I put it in the machine to record the sounds I was about to make.

            That evening, I wrote to him the amount of money I wanted, a hundred pounds every month for as long as I still kept his letters. Perhaps, I began to think, it hadn't been such a game; it was real money. But actually I did not want the money. I don't know why I did it.

            It was the blackmail that could then let him present me to his wife as evil. He could tell her now without her being too threatened, or without her destroying their marriage completely. I would not want that after all. She came round to see me a while later. She came on her own – but brought some bottles of ink she got from somewhere. She opened one and threw it at me, over me. Before she opened the next, I had shut the door. When she had gone, I looked at the stain on me. I had spoilt his love for me. I had spoilt a passionate love.

            Perhaps if a man can rape a woman, a woman can destroy a man, and any part of him she wants to destroy….  I don't know why I did it. It felt like the satisfaction of revenge. But revenge for what? That was a long time ago. I have taken a lot of revenges since then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taken In

 

The two girls, Maria and Karin, left in the late autumn to find their fortune in London. Erroneously, they thought that to get on in London, they had to put their best assets on display. For both girls that had meant scouring clothes shops for fashions they could afford which resembled the pictures in music magazines. Thus they stood together by the slip-road onto the M3. Each had a battered case, but springy new jeans-and-blouse outfits with enough chain and metal bits to allure motor-bikers, and enough shiny silky bits to allude to a promising femininity. They did not have to wait long for a lift. A huge lorry picked up the two girls. Karin flopped lumpily into the seat next to the gear lever. Maria came after and sat by the window watching the country pass away behind her. Their four tight legs were a constant attraction for the driver’s eye. His grubby T-shirt was stretched across an expanded tummy, but he was quite a young man with muscular arms, long dark sideboards and a glint in his friendly face that matched his chirpy way of talking.

             “Why’n’t you girls ’n school?!

Karin flashed a cocky smile at him, “What? Nah, we left school. Long time ago. Going up to London,” she paused in case the momentous event that they talked about, and planned for so long was not so impressive to him. “I suppose you’re always going up to London.”

            “S’right.” He was reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket hanging behind the window. “Al’as in London. Portsmouth-London, London-Portsmouth. Tha’s the job. I done it three year, now.”

 “I bet you know London pretty well.” 

            “Yea, s’right. There’s some good bits, a’right. S’bad news taking an’old trolley as this un aroun’ the streets.” He had found his packet of cigarettes. “Y’not been afore. T’London?”

            “Oh, yes – course. We’re going to live there.”

            “Ah! Leavin’ ’ome, eh? I’m still with my Mum,” he smiled at himself. “No reason t’leave, is’t?” Scept, I go drivin’. Friend in Isling’on. Sleep on ’is floor. What about y’ friend. She’s leavin’ ’ome too?” He looked around Karin’s bouncy form at Maria’s pretty face, steadily looking at the road ahead.

“My name’s Karin. Hers is Maria,” Karin nudged Maria as she spoke her name and looked at her.

“My Mum lives in London,” Maria said turning to look at them.

“Yeah, but she hasn’t seen her Mum for a long time. What about your friend in Islington – could he put us up, too? “ Karin’s commanding presence turned away from Maria who subsided gratefully into her solitary trance again, numbed by the jolting rhythm of the lorry.

“Cou’d be.” He said noncommittally.

“What’s your name then?” Karin asked it with a tone of personal invitation.

            “Gary,” he said shortly. He offered her a cigarette.

            Karin took one and handed the packet back, “She dun’t smoke?” referring to Maria. “Give’s a ligh’, then.” And she chuckled as he handed over the matches.

            “You got a girl-friend?”  She glanced at him in an innocent way.

            Gary concentrated on the road. Eventually, “Plenty,” he announced to the girls.

            “I bet,” she admired. There was a silence after that. Karin sensed that she’d made an impact, that he was thinking about her.

            In South London, Gary turned off the main road and into a narrow side street of low poor houses and into a warehouse at the end of the cul-de-sac. “It’s far as I go.” He said bluntly, and jumped down from the lorry, disappearing into the cavernous dark.

            “Where is this?” Maria asked, sitting still in the seat.

            “Dunno. Looks like the backside of London, if you ask me. He’ll take us on to his friend in Islington.”

            “Do you think?”

            “Come on, get down.” She pushed Maria towards the door, and they climbed out stiffly in their tight new clothes. Karin straightened her blouse and brushed the denim of her jeans downwards to stop it cutting her underneath. “He’ll take us on to his friends. He’s got an eye for us. I could see him, all swivelling under his eyelid.” She chuckled proudly in her own way. “You’re looking not too bad as well,” she added patronizingly.

            One thing that Maria had learnt was that bubbling, inviting and eager though Karin was, she herself was nothing short of stunning, one good step on from Karin in turning men’s eyes. She said nothing and left Karin to continue. “Cor his cigarette was a bit of a pong, wasn’t it. Did you notice it? I took a puff. It was like breathing in hot curry or something. I expect it was a high tar.” She pondered with an assured knowingness. They stood beside the lorry, chattering till Gary returned.

            “You’d better get on you’s ways, girls. It’ll get dark soon.”

            “Aren’t we coming on with you?”

            “I’ve gotta get back. Get this unloaded,” he patted the lorry. He moved to the back of the lorry. Karin followed him.

            “I thought we were coming to your friend – the one in Islington, with you?”

            “I’m on me way back a Portsmouth. Haff an ’our take, t’unload ‘er. A cuppa tea. Then, off.”

            “But we thought we could sleep on his floor, or something. We’ve got nowhere to stay tonight. Where do we go?” As her sudden helplessness grew, his face began to darken with anger.

            “I dunno. Go an’ ask the boss, if y’ want.” Gary waved towards the inside of the warehouse.

            “Thanks.” She said sarcastically. “Give our love to mummy,” and she flounced off towards the dark interior. “Come on,” she said sharply to Maria. “He don’t know anything about London.” It was the cruellest insult she could think of at the moment. They minced down the aisle between the mountainous cardboard cartons. The office was a wooden cubicle at the back of the warehouse. Karin went straight up to the open door with a brisk defiant step.

            “Are you his boss, “Karin snapped as if she was about to make a complaint.

            The man was a little older than Gary, and also a bit seedy. He wore a grey suit in a gesture towards the image of a manager. The double-breasted jacket was crimpled and hung open beside his knees as he sat forwards at a large low shelf that functioned as a desk. He didn’t look up. “You came up with Gary?” he continued to mark a sheet of paper with a pencil stuck in his left hand.

            “Yes.” Karin paused. “Now he’s dropped us.”

            “Up to you, love. We carry goods.” He sighed and sat back wearily in his chair. “You want a room for the night?” It was half a question, half a statement. He looked at them. When he did look he was clearly surprised. His eyebrows raised fractionally, and he caught his breath slightly through his open mouth. His teeth were rather grey. You’re a young couple of ladies,” he explained as if they were about ten years old. The man stretched back in his chair as if satisfied with a fine catch. Karin turned to Maria, too angry with humiliation to continue.

            “Well, Mister.” Maria said flatly and quietly, “You want to help us? We haven’t got much money. Have you got a room here?”

            “No money?” He looked Maria up and down slowly; and then his mouth stretched into a tight grin, thick and greasy and suggestive. “Not much money. Plenty of something else. He let out a long gulp of air which seemed to have built up in his lungs. “Well! It is a very long time since a couple of stunners like you wanted to stay with me. I may have cause to be grateful to Gary, for a change.”

            Karin and Maria both stared at the man, hypnotised by a frightened amazement. They were like rabbits caught in headlights. At that moment the warehouse filled with the sound of a fork-lift truck as Gary began to unload the heavier boxes. They both turned to look at him as a relieving distraction.

            The man stood up, “Come along.” He was very big, tall and wide-framed and well covered with flesh. “My name’s Ben,” he said loudly over the din and held out his hand to Maria. She shook it compliantly. The moment of distraction when they could have run, seemed to have closed. And they were drawn into his domineering presence again. Karin meekly shook his hand next.

             “I’m Karin. And she’s Maria,” The man moved through the door of his tiny cubicle and stood between them. “Isn’t Gary coming too?” Karin asked anxiously as if she wanted him as a guardian angel, now, “Will we be alright?”

            “Course you will, my dears.” His attempt at overbearing paternalism only deepened their sense of the sinister. “Come along.” He took them out and to one of the mean houses next to the warehouse, through its unkempt garden of nettles and bushes. He took them in through a filthy kitchen and up to a first-floor bedroom. It was bleak and grubby. A couple of beds filled the room. “Drivers sometimes sleep over. But it’ll do you, won’t it? A couple of girls with no money,” and he laughed. Reaching inside his jacket he pulled out a wallet, took a ten-pound note for each of the girls. And handed the notes to them. Neither Karin nor Maria moved and he dropped the notes at the end of one of the beds. He laughed again. “I’ll be back in a moment. With a bottle,” and he raised his eyebrows in enquiry. He moved out of the room and down the stairs to his grubby kitchen,

            Karin fingered the notes. She looked at Maria, who looked back. Neither of the girls had words for it. Indecision, fear, disgust, a sense of their most excited hopes crashing into this mangy reality. They spoke to each other through their dismayed looks. The man quickly returned, bounding up the stairs. The sound of the fork-lift had ended. They heard the sound of Gary shutting the rear of the lorry. In a moment he started the engine, manoeuvred the vast thing and it roared gently down the little street. It seemed like the last hope of rescue was abandoning them. It turned into the main road with a burst of its diesel engine and was gone.

            “Our case,” Maria turned to Karin with quiet alarm.

“Oh. Our cases.” Karin’s contrasting shriek turned into a sort of accusation as she faced Ben.

“OK, okay, girls. He took ’em out of the cab. They’re behind the door, all locked up. Safe.” Ben’s soothing reassurance took the wind out of their alarm. But it set them back into the enclosing prison that Ben was constructing around them. “They’ll be good and safe for tonight. So will you my dears. Call me Ben….”

            “Call me Ben,” he said again, arranging three glasses on the floor in a bare corner. “It’s some bubbly,” he announced, and the cork flew off with a bang. Karin jumped but Maria was still transfixed in immobility with the confusion inside her. “Let’s get comfortable.” He folded his long legs up as he descended onto one of the low beds. “You,” he said, “come and sit here.” He padded the bed next to him. Maria sat compliant and stiff beside him. His arm went around her shoulder. It was not unfriendly. It was gentle, like a slowly coiling snake, as his fingers searched over the curve of her shoulder, her arm and neck, the softness of her breast. He commanded Karin to bring the glasses and she held them as he poured the fizzy wine with his other hand. Karin stood like a waitress beside them as they sat on the bed and he drank deeply from his glass. “Drink up, girls. This is my big night. I’m a happy man tonight. Come round here.” He gestured to Karin to sit on the other side of the bed. Maria looked at Karin as she sat down, and she looked back. They both confirmed each other’s helplessness, Maria set herself to endure what was to come. London would still be waiting for them tomorrow.

In the morning Maria was watching the growing light beyond the window. All night she had kept track as the clouds began to split up, the chill glare of the moonlight for a few moments at a time flooded the wall beyond the other bed. The temperature had fallen steadily but she did not notice the cold. She lay on her side, at her back the grunting form of his body taking up two-thirds of the little bed. Karin seemed fast asleep on the other one. Maria felt dirty. It didn’t seem likely she could get a bath. Anyway, she felt dirty inside too, right through her. Why did it have to be her she pondered grimly. She had known he would choose her. She thought of her mother’s condemnation. Her mother loved her and has always protected her. Karin was different. Now it was getting a bit lighter she couldn’t let her thoughts go on and on around her misery. She carefully slid out from under the bed clothes, woke Karin gently without too much noise. She slid on her jeans carefully. Her new panties and bra were no use anymore. Ken had thought it fun to slice the strings as he had undressed her with his pocketknife. She kept the blouse outside the jeans hoping that way it wouldn’t show the outline of her breasts so clearly.

            Ken was stirring and grunted, “Help yourselves to breakfast,” he said turning to the pillows. “I’ll be with you in ten minutes. We’ll have a great day today, girls.” His eyes hadn’t opened and he slid into the regular breathing of sleep again. They crept from the room down the stairs, opened the front door, put on their shoes and tripped as quickly as their high heels would allow, down the road and out of sight of the house. Around the corner in the main road, they stopped and looked at each other. Maria said gravely. “We can’t get our cases now, can we?”

            “No.”

“Perhaps, we could sneak back when he’s opened his warehouse.”

“No, it’s Saturday. Remember. We’d have to wait till Monday.”

“But, perhaps he’ll go in there today. We could keep an eye on him.”

“Perhaps.” Karin was looking into the distance. They were both cold. Her watch showed 7.15 in the morning. The clouds were racing as if there was a storm in the upper atmosphere. “It’s a bit risky.” She put her hand out to show Maria something, “Look.”

            Maria starred, “What you take that for?” she said stupidly in amazement. It was Ken’s wallet, Karin had slid it from his jacket on the floor, when he had been otherwise occupied with Maria. “What’s in it?” Maria felt a vengeful rise in her spirits. The girls looked eagerly at a wadge of notes.

            “Let’s go and get a cup of tea.” Karin looked around her. There seemed to be the beginnings of a row of shops in the distance.

            Over cups of tea and some plates of toast, they cautiously disembowelled the contents of Ken’s wallet. The waitress in the tired-looking café looked suspicious but didn’t say anything. “There’s a credit card here.”

            Maria looked. “But it says ‘Mr’. That’s no good for us.”

            “Course it is. I can say I’m the wife. See his signature, doesn’t say ‘Ken’. Just K something. ‘K’ – that’s for Karin, too.” She laughed.

            Maria was sitting with her arms folded. She remembered she had no bra. She hoped she could hide the outline of her nipples showing through the cotton blouse. The man at the next table across the aisle just kept looking at her chest. “I want to go and get some proper clothes. I’m cold. I need a new whats-it.”

            Karin laughed, “I’ve got a couple of good whats-its.” She had also become aware of the man at the other table. She sucked in her breath and straightened her back as if proud of what she too had in front. “You need something as well, Maria, that you can show off with.” She leant across the table confidentially, “That man over there, he’s got an eye for me.” Maria glanced at him. He seemed to be staring straight at her own chest. She felt embarrassed. She looked down at the table and shrugged her shoulders. Karin said, “He’s got a filthy mind that one.”

            “Let’s get out of here. I feel all dirty. I haven’t even done my hair.” Her rich wavy dark hair was tangled in all directions as it had come off the pillow next to him.

            “Yeah, you don’t look too good.” Karin stood up. As they left the table, Karin turned to the man. “You want to keep control of your eyeballs, mate.” And she swept grandly to the door and left. “Where do we find a taxi in these parts?” she said demandingly as she passed the woman at the till.

            The woman in her black linen uniform stopped counting the change. Her clothes were baggy on her thin old body and her cheeks were pale and drawn tight on the bone. “Dunno,” and she returned to counting the notes, hardly looking at  Karin. Then the old cashier said, “E’s got a taxi,” she nodded weakly across toward the man Karin had just abused.

            Karin darted a look in that direction. At first, she seemed uncertain. Maria tugged her elbow to get her out of the café as quickly as possible, “Come on.”. The waitress had turned away from the girls and went to sit by the counter. She seemed tired so early in the day.

 

Having raided Selfridges they stood, in the midst of the milling Saturday crowd with two new pigskin travelling cases.  The shop had been the one that the girls had heard of as the acme of London sophistication. It hadn’t disappointed them. Ken’s credit card had taken a beating. Maria’s strong slender writing had practised a passable simulation of the signature; while Karin’s soft paw had given up and she had turned away aloof from these technical accomplishments.

            They had found miraculously a cruising taxi and lugged their cases inside, “Where to, ladies?” the cabby said brightly.

            Karin as usual took the lead. “We want the best hotel. What’s the best hotel called. He looked around through his glass screen at the two girls. Karin in luminous yellow jeans with assorted zips in pointless places, a strong studded belt with a padlock device for a buckle; her frantic red blouse of some kind of man-made silk was smothered with bright blue and green rocket motifs. Her pale hair had been creamed up into a spikey halo. Maria on the other hand found a shapeless long dress in a drear colour. Her hair had been cut nondescript short and curled out slightly at the ends in a style that was fashionable but not loud. Her attempts at modesty had not quite come off. She looked almost like a voluptuous nun. The cabby stared at Karin’s cheap appearance, “What you looking at, fellow? Eh?” She said aggressively. He said nothing but turned back to his wheel and waited. “What’s it called?! And she nudged Maria.

            “It’s called the Hilton, I think. Like in America, isn’t it?”

            “Yeah, take us to the Hilton.” Karin’s grand manner looked down on him like a failed music hall turn.

            When they had been shown into the large room overlooking the park by the unimpressed porter, Maria sat on one of the twin beds. She slowly began to cry in silence. Karin stood at the window, and said, “There’s a lot of creeps in London, aren’t there.” Maria lay back on the bed and curled on her side and sobbed. Karin came and sat beside her, put an arm across the heaving shoulder, “What do we do now?” Both girls were sunk in a momentary despair, bur Maria began to relax. “Maria, do you want to go back?” Maria shook her head. She sat up and wiped her eyes with her hands; the expensive make-up smudged. “Is it the man last night? Karin asked. Maria nodded. Karin stood up. Her face tightened up into her hard look again, “I wasn’t going to let the bastard get his dirty fingers on my legs.” She said as if she had been convinced she had been in command the night before. “You should have done the same,” she snapped, and heaved her case onto Maria’s bed next to her. She rummaged through the  assorted contents and retrieved the lipstick and powder compact. She went to the dressing table, dabbed st her lips and face, “War paint,” she said confidentially and seriously. “We’ve got to do something!”

            Their question was what?

“We’ll keep on with what we planned, then?” Karin proposed.

“Okay. Let’s go now.”

“But let’s get dressed up.” Their shared belief that life in London was all about wearing the best clothes at the right time had been developed from months of joint study of teenage magazines.

            When Maria had left the closed world of the fairground, she expected the outside world to treat her in the familiar way as a privileged but deprived, beautiful little girl. That the outside world proved to exploit her and ravage her beauty was a shock that she had not expected and did not know how to deal with. Not so for her companion. Karin, who was not so pretty, but more forceful in her personality. She took to the world with the gusto of a hungry man. If she was to be exploited, she was going to make it mutual. She just knew that she had never let her mother get away with anything Karin decided was unjust. 

Nor would the man Ken, get away with it either, she decided. While they sat in the hotel lounge drinking a gin-and-tonic each, Karin looked again at the wallet she had stolen, this time for his address. There was no address in it, but she found a card with a phone number written on it, and the name Ben Wallis. “Must be him,” she announced confidently. Maria nodded with an indifference she felt. She was concentrating on her abused body, as the reality of her ordeal continued to emerge as an enormous obtruding thought like a vast boulder blocking up a river. “I know what we are going to do,” she announced with a sense of liveliness, which failed to enliven Maria.. “Go and ask that barman if he can give us a pen and some paper.” Maria tiredly did so, only to be refused and told to go to their room as there would be a pen and paper there for the use of guests. Karen had heard the exchange and when Maria returned to sit down, she said to Maria, “Let’s get it from the room. But she did not move, so Maria, carrying the vastness of her violation slouched to the lift to fetch what Karin was asking for.

When she returned, Karin who had been musing thoughtfully, took the pen and began to write on the paper.  Maria asked quietly, “What you going to write?” 

“I’m writing him a letter.” Maria did not need to ask who, but waited till Karin finished what turned out to be a laborious task. Maria waited silently and eventually Karin showed the paper to her. Here is what Karin had written:

Dear wife of BenWallis, this is from two girls, Karin  Grove and Maria Hedger. Ben forced us to have sex with him in his flat next his waerhouse. It was rape. He raped us. I tell the date it was 16teenth Novembre. He was a bastard, because we could not stop him. You got to make him pay for what he dun to us. Karin and Maria

Dear BenWallis. This is from those girls who you forced us to have sex with you in the flat next the waerhouse. We sure you know how to sell stuff from your wearhouse on the black, don’t you. Were sure. So you better do it, and we want 100 pouds each week. Get it. 100 nice pounds for us. We are expensiv, see. If you don’t do it, we will tell you wife. Right. See the other letter in here. Shell give you hell. Karin and Maria

Maria looked at the two letters, noting how Karin was included in Ken’s attack. She handed it back. “We don’t know where to send it.”

            “We’ll find out. Here’s this phone number, see.” she waved the bit of paper from the wallet. “Go and do this for us, Maria. Ring them up and say we found a wallet in the street. We found the phone number and it was Ken Wallis. Say we’ll go round to them and give the wallet back.” She flicked her hair back from her face and looked confident. “Say we’d like a bit of a reward, too, if they could afford it. Makes it sound like its all true. ”

            “But he’ll see the money’s all gone. And his card.”

“Don’t be silly. We won’t go and give it back. We just want the address. You have to ask for the address for us to go and give it back.” Maria nodded. “Go on then. There’s a phone somewhere. You can ask the bloke over there, where it is. Him at the bar.” Maria obediently went.

When she returned, Karin looked at her expectantly, “Well, what she say?”

Maria looked shaken. “It wasn’t her. I think it was him.”

            “Oh well, it doesn’t matter, if you got the address. Did you get it?” Maria handed over the paper, showing the address, and the pen as well to Karin. “Come on, let’s go out and get some proper paper and an envelope and a stamp to post it.”

            So, the girls went off to shop for their blackmailing trick. 

            Back in the hotel, Maria wrote out the letters. And put them into better English. Karin didn’t object and went out to post the letter. Then they sat in the bar with another gin-and-tonic. And then they had another and began to feel that things were not so bad. “When, d’you think he’ll get the letter? Karin, what will he do?”

            “Can’t do anything, can he. Not till we contact him and tell him to pay up.”

“How do we get his money? I mean, we can’t just go to his house. We’re not going back to that warehouse, Karin.”

“Nah,” Karin looked thoughtful, “I dunno. Haven’t got that worked out.” She looked intently at Maria. “What do you think? Tell him to come here? The bar? Bring the money to the bar. He can’t cause trouble here, can he.”

            Maria didn’t know; she didn’t want to think about the man. She knew she was somehow linked to him, in her soul because of what he did. But she didn’t want such a creep to be there sealed into her most private place. She didn’t reply to Karin. “You can tell, Karin. He makes me sick.” She shifted in her seat. She could see herself in a mirror attached to the wall opposite, her black hair, her dark eyes wide and broad, her voluptuous mouth. She knew she looked pretty, but she could only think of how he must have seen her. She moved so she was not looking at herself in that mirror. 

            “That’s not much help,” she said protesting, but she did not pursue it. “I will ring him in two days. I think the letter will have got there, then.” She looked reflective as if already planning what she’d say to the creep.

            “We’ve got to get out of here,” Maria said with some concern.

            “Why?”

            “Karin, it’s too expensive.” She kept turning away from the mirror. “He’s going to cancel the card. Then we won’t be able to pay the bill. We’ve got to get as much money out of it as we can. Let’s go and find one of those cashpoints.”

            “OK. Good idea. I wonder how much we can get out of it?”

            “We’ll find out,” And they giggled like two girls much younger than their age, up to mischief. Karin turned to the mirror realising Maria had been avoiding it. Karin’s hair was blonde, long and straight to below her shoulders. It was her best feature. Her face was narrow, and her skin showed a few pock marks where her unfortunate adolescent acne had flourished. She pushed out her handsome and attractive bosom as she looked. “I look good in that mirror,” she said to Maria. “There’s one of those cash machines out near the entrance. Let’s go and see what we can get.” To their surprised dismay, the card had already been cancelled. More to their dismay was their discovery they needed a pin number.

            “So, we got nothing to pay our bill with.” Maria said hopelessly.

            Karin looked anxious too for a moment. She looked occupied in thought for a minute or two, while Maria waited for her to solve the problem. Then she told Maria what they’d do. Maria nodded and added a few things to which Karin nodded. They went to the restaurant and in the mid-afternoon, they ate the biggest meal they could each manage, as if they may not eat ever again – which may be the case. They laughed a bit, mischievously, at the plan they were working out together. The waiter took their room number to add to their account. He watched the back of Maria’s body as the girls walked out. They went quickly to their room and collected just their essentials. Maria had forbidden them to take their nice new cases and the treasures they had just bought. They left the Hilton Hotel quietly and inconspicuously as if they’d be back shortly.

A hundred yards down the street, they both suddenly discharged their tension in guffaws of laughter as they realised they’d done it. They walked on. Maria was feeling bloated; Karin refused to admit it. “Now what?” Maria looked expectantly at Karin, who shrugged her shoulders. They walked on. Maria was concerned that if they did the same again they’d need posh looking bags again to convince the hotel they were the posh types that could afford it. They simply walked for a while through central London, hoping for inspiration. They entered a large railway terminus, St Pancras. It had a bar-restaurant, and they went to sit for tea, which they noticed was expensive. Maria put Ken’s now-useless card on the table to reassure the waitress. Then Karin began to talk about, how they would get out. Karin was looking around and wandered out to the toilet. On the way back she passed a table with a couple of  middle-aged ladies – in the girls’ terms, posh ladies. She arrived back with Maria clutching under her sweater, a handbag that had once hung on the back of the chair of a posh lady. She kept it in her lap under the table and began to bring out the cosmetics and lady stuff. Her purse this time was a bit swollen and they were in luck. Several hundred pounds. Karin stood up leaving the purloined possessions (minus the money) on the spare chair, and she went off to the toilet again, explaining to the waitress as she passed that she was troubled with the ‘monthly’. The waitress nodded considerately. Meanwhile, Maria took off her cardigan and placed it on the chair to hide the unwanted stolen goods. Ten minutes later, as the waitress passed, she said she’d go and rescue her friend who had a bit of trouble down below, and left the cardigan on the chair, again to reassure the waitress. She joined Karin and the hundreds of pounds outside the station and around the corner where she was slouching against a wall. Again, they laughed out loud to break the tension. 

They scrammed away from the station in case someone came looking. The waitress would remember them. They wouldn’t go back but there are a dozen or so London terminuses, they could work through. They found not far away, a hotel, a cheap one this time. Two days later they argued about who would ring Ken to arrange for him to hand over the money. Maria stubbornly, even frantically, refused to speak to the bastard. Karin knew she would have to, but protested nevertheless – Maria she believed just had to get over it.

It was morning, so she rang the warehouse. “Speak to Ken, please.”

“Yeah,” Ken said.

“This is the girls you raped. Last week.”

“”Wha’. Whatya talking about.”

“We want our money. We told you. We sent a letter. And we’ll send one to you wife. You got it didn’t you?” There was a long silence. “You want your wife to know what you do in your flat?”

“You can tell the wife if y’ wantta. I ain’t got no wife. never had one. Hard luck, luv.”

Karin was taken aback. All middle-aged creeps had wives, didn’t they? “Don’t believe you, mate.”

“Go ahead, kid. Which one are you anyway?”

“That don’t matter, does it.”

“Maybe it does. You the blonde one aren’tya. I can tell. Well listen, here, luv. You tell the one with dark hair, Maria she was called. She was a bit of a’right. Tell, her if she comes round for a bit more of the same, she’ll get the money. Go’ it.”

Karin was silent, bit her lip and thought. “Two hundred.”

            Ken, knowing he could send them away with whatever he decided to give, said. “OK. But she’d better be good – okay?” There was silence at both ends of the phone for a minute. “And I don’t want you. I want the other one. Right.”

            Karin put the phone down. She didn’t leave the phone box immediately. She had to consider how to put it to Maria. That wouldn’t be easy. It could be impossible; the way Maria is. When she came out Maria was standing looking at her enquiringly. “He says we’ve got to go to his warehouse.”

            “No,” she looked pale. “I can’t go. You go. You’ve only got to pick up the money.” But she knew Karin couldn’t go alone. She knew she should support her friend. She knew she should go too, but she couldn’t face the filthy creep again. But somehow, she knew she had to. As Karin kept telling her she had to get over it.

            When a little later, they got there, Karin sent the taxi driver away. Maria was trembling, “You should’ve told him to wait.” And she added, imploringly, “It’s dangerous here. With him.”

            Karin said nothing. She held Maria’s hand, gripping it tight. And they advanced into the warehouse. Maria hanging back, and not looking where they went. Karin advanced down the aisle to the little office. Ben was at his desk but noticed the movement and looked up. He looked surprised, “Ha, you here, girls.” 

Karin clenched Maria’s hand tightly. “Start with the money. Give us two hundred.”

“Nah, luv.” He was looking at Maria’s terrified face, hanging back behind Karin. “She OK?”

“She’s OK,” said Karin, and kept tight hold of Maria’s hand in case she started to run.

            “Right,” he said. Ken seemed as if he couldn’t believe his luck. I’ll go and shut the doors. You,” said to Karin, “take her up to the room.” Maria stared at Karin. She looked completely in shock. She looked like a zombie. 

She let Karin lead her out and in through the house to the room. “Don’t leave me this time,” she whispered.

“Alright. Don’t forget. It will soon be over.”

When Ken arrived in the room he told Karin to go down and sit in the office in case anyone came. Karin obediently left. Maria was at the mercy of Ken again. She was less compliant this time, but Ken overpowered her. Enjoyed doing so.

Maria laid back defeated, dirtied and extremely dead right through to her bones. She had no life to make her move. In fact, Ken had to drag her out of the room , down the stairs and in through the side door. He threw her at Karin. Maria stared, but Karin looked away. Ashamed. Karin took over, she said, in her conniving way, “Give me hand with her. You’ve had what you want.” So they each took an arm and led Maria onto the street. Halfway down the street, Karin told Ben, he could go back. As soon as he turned back she whispered to Maria, “We’ve got to run, and as she hauled Maria forward and out of earshot, she said, “I’ve got his cash from his office.” And after they’d got to the end of the road, she said “We’ve done well. Thanks Maria.” Maria stumbled on, and they found an alleyway to hide in till Ben had come racing past and after some time he wandered back resigned to having lost all the cash box.

Maria said nothing till they got back to the hotel. As she got out of the taxi, she had recovered her will to survive and moved of her own accord. There was little conversation between the girls that evening. After they went to sleep in their room, Maria opened her eyes, listened for Karin’s heavy breathing and while she slept, took all the money and silently left. Maria felt like the filthiest piece of womanhood that had ever existed.

 

 

 

 

A wail in the countryside

 

It wasn't pique.  It was something deeper.  The flight was miserable because of it.  All her life she had been beautiful, had enjoyed such admiration for it.  Now she had just reached her 30s, so many years of longing eyes upon her had lost that special thrill.  It was an accident of birth she now told herself.  To be beautiful is not a moral worth.  She had realised that recently.  Those women without natural gifts who make themselves attractive, they have the virtue.  Hers was merely luck, good fortune.  She stepped off the plane.  The sun was hot outside the airport.  It scorched her white suit, blistered her dark glasses.  Her relaxed, erect pose was neutral.  People seemed to leave a space around her. 

            She would wait for ‘them’ to come to her.  If ‘they’ were among the sparse throng waiting for bags, she would leave ‘them’ to spot her.  They were not in view; they must have taken a different flight.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Sitting briefly in the small garden of the hotel after arriving, waiting for the waiter to bring her a drink she felt as out of place as she looked.  But for different reasons.  Her natural exotic features looked out of place anywhere – in her native east London, or in this frantically watered garden in the Dordogne. But she was out of place too because she felt different.  And she had been feeling so different lately.  Was it something other people called jealousy?  This was not a holiday; she had brought some sort of emotional baggage along with her.  ‘They’, the others, were the ones on holiday.

            She was not spying or intruding on them; yet she was not on her holidays.  And yet again, emphatically, she was not on business.  So, she told herself.  On and off during the whole flight she had told herself so.  How come she felt like elastic?  Between her and Gregory.  He had told her it was just holiday time.  And she, no reason, had come along.  His hotel was only a short distance away.  She knew its name.  The waiter gave her directions to it.  He spoke in abbreviated French to make it easy for her to understand.  Now she knew all she needed to know.  In fact, in the event, she would not ever go to their hotel.

            What was that continually rising confusion about? What did she actually want?

            The waiter stuttered on proudly, trying to be kind to this splendid English guest.  Her French was fluent, but she did not embarrass him by showing his efforts were unnecessary.  Her considerate manners had been acquired like one of the accessories she carefully chose.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

The business she had with Gregory in England was a secret from that other one, that other ‘her’ in his life.  It was entirely legitimate, though questionably moral.  As a beautician she was her own advertisement.  Her face had peered out from thousands of adverts – photographed through rose-covered trelliswork, from under a motorbike, couched in a pile of silk underwear.  But always Jane's perfect features.  Those adverts proclaimed her animal-free potions – for beauty and potency.  ‘Momtaz’, she called her range of products, after the beauty of the Taj Mahal - the most fabulous in the world.  Then she had become Zena-Jane, to complement the plain syllable she had been assigned by her grandmother.  ‘He’, that is Gregory, had put up the money for Jane's business, linked it to his own business, a clinic for cosmetic surgery.  He did not do the surgery himself.  He was not a doctor, though he was willing enough to allow people to honour him with that title.  He had his young specialists, teamed up in relays like an athletics match. It was on the supermarket principle – off-the-shelf nose, cheekbones, jaw and so on.  Jane ran the health farm where the customers relaxed, scanned the catalogues, met the surgeons, chose their faces and convalesced in luxury till the skin wounds had faded.

            Not that Jane had been a beneficiary of the treatment; no more than she needed her own spurious potions.  Her beauty rose above that.  But Beatrix had been through it.

            At the time, Beatrix had probably been the wealthiest client of the clinic.  So, it was only partly her new jaw-line that had made him – that is, Gregory – fall in love with her.

            Gregory was significantly older than either of the women – Jane his mistress, or Beatrix his wife.  His steel grey hair met an equally steely eye that sometimes broke into wrinkles.  It did so at unexpectedly tense moments sometimes when he wanted to put you completely at your ease.  Disconcertingly, it always felt like his ease, composed and imposed by him.  He was swarthy and conveyed a purposeful energy in his movements and his severe expression.  He portrayed a pointed single-mindedness which was alluring to women and captured a loyalty from younger men.  That is what made him plausible, regarded as a doctor, a top surgeon; and none of his young doctors minded. One of his assets was that he never fully concealed that roguishness; it was always peeping out like the corner of a handkerchief, casual but self-conscious.  There was self-apology in his manner which gave the necessary charm.  But he was not all assertive, self-centred bluster. Beatrix – that is, his wife – could spot sincerity in him as well.  He genuinely believed he could make everyone happy.

            Beatrix, a long, willowy, blond, could almost have passed for Scandinavian, had she not displayed the characteristic demandingness of the wealthy and educated English.  Coolness of appearance, stiffness of movement; and that apparent air of command in her slightly complaining voice marked her as separate from Gregory or Jane.  And therefore, fascinating to both.  She had inherited that lofty stooped posture towards those who served her.  And yet it did not sit easily.  Her evident docility appeared as a deference to her husband. In so far as Gregory was able, he loved her.  He had rescued her from depression.  He was flattered by her loyalty.  The new petite jaw he had arranged for her was clearly more in keeping with her personality than the previous more Germanic jut.

            Gregory and Beatrix complemented each other grandly. They created a presence in the small village hotel snuggling into a fold of the Dordogne River.

            Beatrix loved him dearly and was grateful to be able to bring out the softer and sentimental side of him – his devotion to re-organising her stables; his passion for small animals, those small enough to pick up and cuddle, from snakes to apes and even caged birds. With her seemingly unlimited wealth, their home could spread into ever larger tracts of deep Surrey countryside. She was immensely proud of him. She was proud of his success, of his tenderness to animals, and indeed in his own pride in managing her life and wealth.

            Because of her devotion, as loyal as the animals, she was blind.  So, Gregory had no difficulty in deflecting small sums, a permanent rivulet, drained from her wealth, and into Jane's luxuriant enterprise.  Beatrix, quiet and unsuspecting, never even wanted to question Gregory's use of her inheritance.  His management of it merely proved his care for her.

            Jane, business-like, knew exactly where the money came from, exactly how the channels were carefully covered.  And exactly what deal he gave her.  They had a discreet chalet in the corner of her health farm; private entrances; nights she gave him by arrangement; other girls provided occasionally when he needed one.

            Now this.

            Here she was in this boiling cauldron, simply because he had asked her to come.  Had she really believed she had to say yes, even to this escapade?  Her contempt for herself was obvious - and justified, she muttered.  Did she believe he would stop seeing her?  If she had refused?  Shun her work, stop the vital ‘rivulet’?  She had not even considered saying ‘no’.  And now she was here.  Without properly knowing why.  If ‘they’ wanted to go off on holiday, well, good luck to them.  Jane did not care.  But suddenly, it was madness to come along too.  Someone's apparently maiden aunt, alone and stashed away in the hotel down the road!  She was exasperated at the thought; she suddenly knew her discomfort all day on the trip; let herself get drawn along into someone else's plan.  All her life she had learned the foolishness of being blindly led.  You had to know what was in it for you; that was it – principle number one.  She could have haggled with him; struck a bargain. And he would remain a businessman. Never forget, she told herself, head turned to the camelias, and hand discretely over her mouth as if burping: his business depended on her.  His clinic depended wholly on her clientele in the health farm.  She was the one – not him – who could play on her clients temptations.  She could supply those whose cheeks he could make blush as with an air-brush.  His beauty-surgery needed just those she could tempt with self-love.

            Was it her business that required her to agree to be here? No.  It was not.  No. Yet she had said: yes!

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

When he arrived in the garden to greet her he said he had no more than an hour.  The hesitant waiter hovered with a half-bottle of champagne till they started to drink; then vanished.  They then rehearsed their moment of meeting.  They had devised their long-standing ritual.  Passion emanated from that moment they closed in together.  They had learned to heighten it; how to condense it, to compress that passion. They recited their ritual poem, inane to the outside observer – it was theirs.  Partly the catholic mass, partly passages from the story of `O', and partly words that they had charged with a personal meaning.  After their soft stuttered murmuring, face to face, they arose and went in from the garden, up to Jane's room, shut the windows and shutters against the afternoon sun.  Their bodies completed an immaculate completion.  Then Gregory left for his hotel, a little late and a little pink, but with his perfectly constructed composure.

            Again, on her own.  It was not just pique she felt.  Something ineffable was left in her heart.  Why did she let him do it to her?  And - she vowed - it was going to stop. She must as she so often resolved, move on from being his fine ornament.

            Jane had had a hard life when young, when merely plain Jane.  She had always looked after herself, driven herself on with vows of revenge.  It had not just been the beatings from one of her stepfathers.  That was common enough.  The girls at school who also knew that kind of life had huddled together.  They made mischief to compensate; and understood each other.  It had been her other stepfather, who had inflicted ambition on her.  He forbade her meals if her homework marks were not good enough.  He locked her in her room if she had exams.  And, the trouble was, she was bright enough to warrant the ambition.  She could achieve what he wanted.  And that did set her aside.  There was no-one then to huddle behind the school hedge with and plot mischief.  She could only keep her own company, harbour her vengeance against the intruder in her family, vow to unburden her brain.  By flaunting her body instead, she pained this step-father tragically. And in the end, she had defeated his intention, effortlessly, with that chosen weapon, her physical beauty, and a career as a simple beautician.

            She folded away her white suit carefully.  Her dark complexion, she caught it in the mirror from the corner of her eye, a shadow that strode across her room.  The texture of her skin was unusually fine for someone dark, and it seemed to clothe her shape in a special glow, a dusky sheen. She was now aged enough to begin to wonder when its gloss would begin to tarnish.  And what then for her?  All her life she had inhabited this beauty.  And how much had it amounted to?  She had a full day before he would be with her again.  She planned it in segments, those for reading, the time for her meticulous body-care, the gentle excursions in the little town, the church, the local museum.  She would seethe in the meantime. And she would be ready for him when he returned.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

However, in fact, she did not have to wait completely uneventfully until the next visit. Sitting at supper on the vine-covered terrace overlooking the river, the meal ordered, her aperitif in her hand, a sleek young man came up to her table and spoke to her.  His English was ‘public school’ and his shallow smile equally so. She had known young men like this ever since she had grown out of her own background.  They could be so immediate but, ultimately, so passive. He was a fine example of England's cream.  He offered her his hand, stood beside the table.  Jane was leaning forward, elbows gently resting gracefully on the white table-cloth, her glass pressed to her sun-rosed cheek.  It was a pensive posture, the straight back alerting the observer to a hidden concentration.  She had been interrupted.  She did not move except to turn her head, a slight bend of the neck and her eyes looking up into his open face.  Otherwise, motionless, an unfriendly stillness.  She was reluctant to emerge from her dream.  He asked if he might be invited to sit down, to eat supper with her.  Equally motionless something changed in her.  There was suddenly a full attention.  Perhaps her eyelids tightened very slightly, or the muscles of her shoulders tensed beneath the thin cloth of her shirt, the weight no longer on her elbows. His offered hand had fallen away as she did not respond to him.  But his face remained as open and as simple as ever.  Where, someone would wonder, did he keep his intelligence, if not in his face?  She refused without emotion, without response; her silence a response in itself. Some would have taken her as hostile. She merely stared back into his face. Its jovial pastiness nodded good-naturedly, and he moved away to another table.  She spent the time of the meal staring ahead of her, over the terrace to the distant valley, much of the time the wine-glass pressed to her cheek pensively, like an insecure child might clutch a favoured toy.  She wondered at this resentment she lived all the time, like a drunk with alcohol.  There was something else too; like jealousy – that bitch Beatrix.  Something like a pity – was it that sponge-like boy.  She observed herself with a distant amazement.  Something was happening to her these days.  A cruel curiosity made her pick over these feelings, like specimens.  When necessary, she knew she would shut them away and get on with her mask, her stainless beauty.  But in this brief incredulous moment on her own she lost herself in a foreign country in her heart.  It would soon be over.  Had she looked she would have seen that the boy spent most of the meal looking at her.

            In the morning, he tried again.  He managed to follow her into breakfast.  She refused his request to sit at table with her. Finally, he encountered her again mid-morning sipping coffee outside the small bar in the central place de la village.  Her cool loose blouse was brilliant green.  It blended with a very slight reddish streak in her dark hair. The blouse rode above the top of her grey linen jeans.  Her appearance was compelling, as always.  He did not invite himself to her table this time but sat at the adjacent one. Slightly behind her, he was in fact closer than if he had faced her from the chair opposite.  She had not changed her pose with his arrival and in her characteristic posture, lightly resting her graceful arms on the table-top, he was facing her, inches from her left shoulder, by her side.

            There was not much about the boy, she thought. “Peter”, he told her, “I'm called”. Tall, slightly awkward with youth, his hair was surprisingly fair, and a little lank, threatening to intrude on his face so that he pushed it back with a thumb and forefinger either side of his forehead in a repeated mannerism.  It tended to make his full face fuller and more present to whoever spoke to him.  She did not.  For him her silence emphasised a quality that he called ethereal. No longer youthfully uncertain, she was not yet old, even by Peter's young standards.  He saw her beauty in a perpetual interlude, never growing, never fading, like the confident endurance of classical marble. Indeed, like a statue, she seemed all surface, and untouchable, and still magnetic.  He began to tell her a few things, hesitantly at first and uninvited: his college; the school he had been to previously; his recent 21st birthday which had culminated in this trip; a girl he had liked but knew he was too young to take seriously; his hopes for a future as a manager for some national opera company where he had connections...

            Without meaning to, Jane idly listened, but never responded, never encouraged this advantaged, callow youth.  Only once did she turn to look into his pleasing face. There was not much to see; except... except one thing.  There was that same plausible earnestness in there, which conveyed that though you would get honesty willingly from him, you were most unlikely to get the whole truth. A plausibility she recognised in all the smart men who pursued her like this.  Reminiscent slightly of her aging man at the hotel up the road. “By any chance,” she enquired at last, “do you know a businessman by the name of Gregory Belgrave?”

            “Of course,” he smiled and, relieved that at last she had addressed him, “how else would I be here?  Why else would I be talking to you?”  He nodded with significance as if scornful of her naivety.

            He got up to go, offered to carry her parcel back for her.  She did not reply; but also did not stop him lifting it and carrying it.  She had bought a piece of local pottery, quite heavy. He continued to smile and chatter away as he walked beside her: about the girl he had just finished with; playing rugby for his college last year; the quite good degree which his father had been proud of.  It was not clear if she listened to any of it.  He accepted her as a challenge, a refusal to be deflated.

            If she had not been so angry, she might have wondered more about who this associate of Gregory's really was.  When they had crossed the bridge and turned up the ancient path to the hotel. he told her he would be ‘trotting off’ now.  She stopped and looked at the boy.  He smiled a slightly cheeky grin; he gave her a mock salute as if a messenger; but really, he mocked the angry authority her silence asserted.  He turned to go.  “And listen to me,” she snapped, calling him back, “I don't want you hanging around, eyeing me all the time.”  She was deliberate in her intention.  She thought that her blunt command was the best insult to his couth aplomb. She felt insulted and was intent on demolishing him. And she succeeded; for the first time he became somewhat crestfallen. This woman his father had brought him to see was no fading violet awaiting his lavish attentions.  If his father had fixed him up with this companion, Peter did not mind too much who she was, but she could enthuse her job a bit more.  If he thought about it, he would have assumed his father had paid her.  It was why, perhaps, he found it too delicate to refer to his father.

            She noticed him begin to sag, “Get out of here,” she added as if throwing out a piece of crumpled litter.  She turned to go into the hotel.  He offered the parcel he was carrying.  She took it gravely letting it hang from her hand in a gesture of casual disregard.  She was resentful, felt affronted by being subjected to the boy's interest.  She felt insulted by his adolescent drool, but also by his chatter to her as if she were his mother; and above all by succumbing to being made so cross by his presence.  Gregory was no different from these casual predators trying their luck – except Gregory always brought it off.  Damn.  Damn him.

            In her room she went to the mirror and stared at what she saw.  As always, the sight was the one thing that would make her feel better about herself. She noticed a warmer feeling swell up inside her.  Ugh, kids. Even big ones.  She gazed on her mature body - no longer a child herself. She believed she had become a person. She forgot her brutal dismissal of the boy.

            Peter too bounced back easily from his rebuffs. Within a 100 metres he had forgotten the beautiful ‘old bag’.  He padded along in his shorts and espadrilles but remembering his view of her chest. He prided himself on how courteous he had remained.  He formed in his thoughts how he could tell it to his father as an amusing story.

            It was not a long walk through the lanes from one hotel to another.  It was a surprisingly green little valley.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

She had never heard that Gregory had a son.  And nor had Beatrix; but that is by-the-by for the moment.

            Peter identified the acacia trees, some ancient and some young yet standing to the same height along the road in front of the rough stone walling.  There were many exotic plants, but many grew in England, and he could imagine again the countryside where he was at school.

            His father would fix it, as everything else in Peter's life; and as Peter would one day fix everything for his own children. Whatever was eating that woman, Dad would set it right, for her, and for Peter.  Dad would know when it was some money that was needed, some flattery, when a good ticking off - and so on.  He looked forward to seeing how his father would deal with it.

            He had not heard of Jane until a couple of weeks ago when Gregory proposed the trip for Peter's wider experience.  He was not, he could tell himself, completely ignorant about women.  But what his father intended was to give him a proper grounding.  In truth his world of women had really only been the female servants at his schools, and the anxious girls at university as ignorantly complacent as himself.  There was a little vegetable garden now, on the right.  Asparagus, he recognised; rosemary, he thought; and smart little rows of leaves for the salade vert.  The road twisted up towards the hotel.

            Beatrix he had heard of and knew a lot about.  His father waxed prolific about her at times. Peter had resented her without meeting. Some might say she was a rival to him; some might say a rival to his mother.  Though, to be honest, his mother had been rather cool and he felt little for her.  He preferred his school from an early age and paid little attention to regular though dull letters to him. It had been decided, too, that it was best he should not meet Beatrix.  He knew it had all been worked out for him by his father.  Sometimes it was a puzzle why he felt so against Beatrix when his father talked on about her. He had for as long as he could remember enjoyed a suave composure towards everyone he met.

            It had been a kind of joy to learn of the secret Jane. A mean laugh at the deceived Beatrix. Perhaps, for Gregory, his unacknowledged son was the one person he could talk to about his secret mistress.  It seemed a prankish joke if his father brought them both on holiday as well.  In his own mind it would be Beatrix who would be left the odd one out.  Though he relented a little and could allow Beatrix to have his father in their hotel together, Peter found his tolerance of his parents' holiday was only on the basis that he would be fixed up himself in the hotel with Jane.

            He sat on the wall for a few moments.  The road had risen to a few metres above the river here. Did it flood in this valley? Everything can be too full once in a lifetime - it was a rule he had once heard.  It had come from the careful girl-friend he had had at university. They had spent a couple of years at college going to social occasions together. They were good friends, and still were; and they had had good friends.  But she had been cautious, and they'd only groped in the car.  He hadn't really minded. But wondered sometimes if he ought to.  She told him she had been traumatised when her parents had died in a fire, an atrocity committed on the farmstead in South Africa.  She had been eleven and it happened shortly after she had been sent to school in Zimbabwe.  She had never been back to South Africa because it had not been good for her. Her uncle was a psychologist in Kings Lynn and had helped her to understand how she must help herself. She had needed, she said, his understanding.  So, he had given it.  Recently she had conveyed to Peter that she was strong enough if he wanted to break off the relationship with her when they both finished their degrees.  So, he had decided to.  Whatever the effects of her trauma, he knew there was a lot on his side of the relationship for him to learn as well.  He judged it by the way his father had talked to him.  And indeed, that was why he had talked to his father.  Gregory had been confident how to handle the problem.  Peter felt relaxed sitting on the wall, reviewing the reasons for being out here; the experience his father had promised would be forthcoming from Jane. At last, he was being invited into the world where others lived so happily.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Beatrix did not consider where her husband disappeared to. Reclining on the lounger by the pool's edge, the hot sun was dripping inertia onto her body.  Beatrix was 37, her muscles were toned to the condition of a 17-year-old, and her skin had been tanned in regular doses under the commercial UV machine at work; her life cared for her in every respect.  Yet she knew she had to fight off that lethargy before it permanently got the better of her.  She was old enough to know that risk.  That state of ennui would come on her slowly; there had been points all through her life when it seemed to pop up compellingly, temptingly.  And if she did not get up off the lounger, find the next paperback to read, get a mid-afternoon drink, plan a shopping trip, then it would flood back into her heart.  Such life activities did not seem to arise smoothly.  They required an energised will.  Why did life not seem more natural?  Distractions were the essence of life for Beatrix.  She barely realised the difference.

            Nevertheless, she had come to be puzzled.  She had everything, material provision in every respect, a loving husband, even an indulgent priest hanging over from her school days (so long ago now) if she were ever to need one.  Her marriage was cruising along absolutely perfectly: the dinners, the theatres and concerts, the house parties (given and invited to); and in just two years time, as she had planned, and Gregory had agreed, she would have reached the point to start their family.  Her health was good, wealth never a problem.  There was no reason for that sinking emptiness, like a bruise in the tummy; no reason for it to open up under her whenever she stopped busying herself.  And she told herself carefully, it didn't!  It did not happen; no.  And why? Because, from long ago, she could control it.  If her mind was busy – reading, planning, arranging – then it never came upon her. And, therefore, it never existed. She was quite content with her logic. She looked at the locker beside her on the edge of the swimming pool – the extra pair of sunglasses, the tumbler of cool water, the comb, the packet of cigarettes with lighter neatly parked on top, the hair-band in case she went in for a dip, the suntan tube, and the insect spray – the last two stood upright together as if guarding the rest. It was all there as she glanced, as so often, to take it in, to check it; a kind of Kim's game that she was always winning.  It reminded her of the locker in the school dormitory when she had gone away at fourteen. It had been the tidiest and best kept locker in the school.  Her parents had been proud of that before they died - even if they had been troubled that she could not keep up with the lessons.

            As she was reminiscing to herself about her childhood and its perfections, a slightly hot blond head emerged, climbing the steps from the road, then his long gangling body, and, last, a pair of white thin legs below the baggy shorts.  The head looked around and glanced back at the long sleek body on the lounger. Someone must be inside that body, but he wondered whether to pass it by as a statue.  Beatrix had a swimming costume cut very high over the hip bones and pulled tight in her crotch.  Peter noticed.  She was quite old, he thought, neutrally.

            With his arrival, she had something outside her own head to concentrate on, to distract.  “You, from England?”  The familiarity of her tone was as a girl of his own age.  He felt uncomfortable at having examined the body so closely.

            “Yes, actually.  Absolutely.”  He chuckled slightly and felt suddenly at his ease with her.  “I'm looking for my father,” he said inquiringly.

            `Where is he?' she asked purposelessly.  As if she thought he were silly enough to have mislaid something, the key to his room, his bathrobe.

            And then a slightly hard look came across her jocular face.  There were no other English in the hotel.  Who could his father be?  “Who is it?” she asked, sounding more puzzled than she intended.

            He told her.  There was silence.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

The scene took place in “their” room on the first floor of the hotel, some mock mahogany and a wide high window showing a lot of sky and the dark green mountains rather near. Gregory had been shaving.  His bathrobe was open and bathing trunks of several sharp colours crossed his stomach.  He turned as Beatrix entered. “Ah”, he said, absent-mindedly and with his usual abbreviated sentences, “Was about to join you.  Missed my chance? Hey?”  Then he saw Peter entering the room behind her. 

            “I'm early, Dad,” he announced unnecessarily with abandoned guile.  “Sorry.” He noticed a moment of apprehension on his father's face. “It's OK.  The hotel found me a room here. I thought I’d prefer to be with you for a couple of days. I’ll move over here tomorrow.”

            “That's good.”  It was a matter of pride for Gregory not to show he was ruffled.  His mind had whizzed around a few things; not so much Beatrix's stern face, but Jane who yet knew nothing of his plans for her. “So.  Gentleman, Pete!  How good to see you.  Good journey?” His genuine pleasure at seeing his son began to win through the momentary alarm.  The smooth sound of his own urbanity calmed him.  It also brought Peter's wide grin back to his face.  Beatrix in striking contrast was not smiling, the thunder on her face reached at least to her waistline!  She was keeping her mouth shut for fear of what would come out.

            “I've met her, Dad.”  Peter beamed as if he was announcing an ascent of the Matterhorn.

            “Indeed you have.”  Gregory had caught sight of his wife's frown.  It was no less conspicuous than the sham Louis Quatorze wardrobe. “What a happy meeting,” he gushed. More in hope.  Jovially, he waved everyone into the room.  They were already there.  And it was now rather a cramped room, so no-one moved.  Gregory was not one to admit a change in the weather till he had to; and Beatrix had been too dumbstruck at the news of Gregory's unknown son to make her sulk audible, yet.  But he could see the moment coming when he would need to dodge the bolts of lightning. “I remember, Peter, when your grandmother first saw you. A baby.  In arms.  Before your time, my dear,” he addressed Beatrix, as an aside. “Peter's twenty-one, now. Three days ago, right?”  Peter nodded.  Beatrix glowered.  “She took one look at you – ‘Orang-utan’ she said.  ‘Long and lanky.’”  He guffawed. Peter laughed.   Beatrix wisely made no comment still.  “She had not known anything about you till I dangled you in her lap – “Wild man of the bungle” she said.”  His infectious joviality came powerfully from the increasing loudness of his voice.  “Oh. Twenty-one years.”

            “She knew what his father was,” Beatrix suddenly added bitterly, “Bungler.”  It was the beginning of the insult which something in her believed would pay him back for the jolt to her sanity she had just received.  With a world that was as carefully groomed as her make-up everyday, an unknown step-son had been a slap in the middle of it, smudging and stinging. The news that Gregory had had a preceding life before her, deflated her dignity.  She felt as crumpled as a discarded bra.  She had never paused to consider any prior relationship in his life.

            “What's that?”  Gregory inquired looking round as if inviting her to join in the joking.

            “A bungle,” she repeated, rather overloud, “You're pretty familiar with that sort of thing, aren't you?”  And she turned suddenly to sit heavily on the end of the bed in a heap.

            “Let's all sit down,” he said managerially; and put himself on the other end of the bed. The room seemed surprisingly small, but with a veranda outside, too hot to venture into in daytime. He was looking relaxed as his robe flopped beside him.  Peter looked around the room and decided to lean his bottom against a convenient chest of drawers, an imitation of something priceless.  So far, he was satisfied that Beatrix had been left to smoulder uselessly.

            Gregory had not finished with his happy reminiscences, “You did look pretty wizened when you were born.”

            “Has he got a mother,” Beatrix asked in mock sweetness. “How many more kids have you got hidden away?”  She turned to sarcasm, “How many mothers?” And then to hate, “What do you think I feel?” She felt he had not thought about her at all. Hearing the sound of her own voice she was in danger of getting worked up into a tirade.  “You're the father of a monkey!  What's the mother?”

            Gregory spread his hands in an appeasing gesture, as if she was being entirely unreasonable.  “Look,” he said and paused while he thought out what she was supposed to look at.  “It was long ago.  He's twenty-one.”  He swept a hand around the tight room towards Peter, as a car salesman might display his wares. “That means it was twenty-one years ago,” he added in all seriousness as if she needed the explanation.  She was about to resume the crescendo that had begun to build up, but he continued, “A kind of birthday occasion.  For him to come down here.”  He appealed for reason as if to a jury that could not possibly convict him.  “What do you think?”  But he did not have a sympathetic audience.

            Beatrix wanted to know why she had not been told. Peter wanted Beatrix to shut up. Gregory was half enjoying the rumpus that only he could sort out.  He stood up and leaned against the window frame.  The afternoon air came through it like a flame-thrower.  His excitement in this temperature brought beads of perspiration to his face.  He looked the part of a manic impresario.  Everyone and everything in sight had been bought with his money and his energy.  All he had to do was dominate them.  Except, of course, the money was hers; and all Peter wanted was his father to himself.

            “Let's all sit down, and take this calmly,” he repeated in his excitement.  Nobody moved as he beamed more desperately at one and then the other of them.  He looked like a conjuror concluding a trick that would amaze his audience.  Beatrix felt tears welling up noisily.  Peter held down his impatience with her by staring blandly at his father. “He's a fine boy,” Gregory said looking round at Peter as if checking for himself.  “The mother,” he started, as if this was a new thought, and continued in a confidential tone to Beatrix, “The mother's a bit of disgrace.”

            “Quite so,” she added bitterly.

            “I haven't seen her for... Ooo.  A long time,” he announced vaguely. “When was it, Pete?” He decided to specify a time for her. “When you were seven.  A bit of a disgrace,” he added as if musing to himself on a memory that pained him. Then, very quickly he brightened up and said, “Well, we don't want to talk about that in front of the boy. That's that,” and he rubbed his hands together.  Peter stared intently at the sobbing figure of Beatrix.  Not with compassion, nor without. Simply curious at the kind of woman his father had married.  Gregory, familiar over the years with his wife's moods, spread his hands again in his usual gesture, “C'mon, darling.” He reverted to a more vernacular accent that referred back to long ago in his childhood origins.  There was a kind of self-mockery in it, “Let's have a smile.”

            The effect on Beatrix was hardly a cessation of her tears, more a sucking them back inside her as she drew herself up into a queenly pose. Without lifting her head, she could still give the immediate impression of looking down her nose. “Handkerchief,” she announced in her own accent that had moved up the scale with an equal and opposite force. “Handkerchief, my dear.”  And Gregory humbly offered his.  The restoration of her aplomb had been cleverly engineered by his descent into a momentary servility.  All of this, a tiny drama they seemed to have accomplished many, many times before in their marriage, was a slick collaborative performance, smoothed and oiled with years of performing together.

            Peter felt a scarring ire in his belly, as if a ball of barbed wire was working its way through his system: Beatrix preening her ego whilst Gregory suddenly cringed.  Peter wanted to send a clenched fist winging its way through the air at her head; but what he said was: “I've met her Dad.  Not Beatrix.  The other one.  Jane.” Despite the innocent air of a lad telling his Dad some news, it was obvious he meant more.  It was truly as if a fist had landed with force on the top of Beatrix's head!  She bounced. Her startle reverberated on the bedsprings and she shot up a couple of inches.

            Gregory, too, labouring to restore Beatrix after Peter's first bombshell, was himself caught unawares by the second.  He mumbled ruefully, “You've really got your timing right today, haven't you, Pete?  We need to get better co-ordinated.”

            Peter looked at his father seriously.  He had already written off Beatrix as unworthy of his father.  She no longer counted for any consideration. “Come on, Dad.  Let's leave her for a minute.  I need to talk it over with you.  Come down to the bar.”  He mooched out of the room.  His quandary was the jaundiced Jane.

            Gregory now torn between the two of them, had every right to be angry with his son who had stirred poison far beyond any reasonable limits. But instead, he turned rather sharply to Beatrix. “See what you've done,” he snapped inexplicably.  He followed his son.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

But Beatrix was no longer going to preserve her role of frail victim wreathed in sobs.  Hampered by her need to redo her make-up, she flounced into the hotel lounge some ten minutes after father and son had reached there. Peter had explained his predicament; the welcome that had not been forthcoming from Jane; the humiliating rebuffs she had delivered like letter bombs.  Gregory had soothed.  The party in question being not present he refused to believe that she was so obstinately unfriendly.  He sustained his familiar wishful thinking and advised persistence and stamina.  And Peter knew no better.

            Beatrix entered, unusually with a presence the size of a mountain like the lion emerging from the cage in the big top. Both the men held their breath. If only she had remained standing, their apprehension at her fury would have prolonged their sudden shrinking. But she sat down suddenly like a pocket-knife snapping shut.  She looked immediately reduced, as reduced as she felt. “Now, she said thickly, “who's Jane. It's not her, that health farm woman. She's not here, is she?”  Suddenly she seemed to be pleading, pleading for an answer.

            “Right.”  Gregory glowed with a hopeless smile.  He swallowed and recovered his garrulousness.  “Well. Jane, of course, is an old colleague,” he turned to Peter as if they had not been having the talk they had in fact had.  He continued as if explaining to Peter. “She is an old colleague, a friend really of Bea's and mine.  We've known her for years.  For years and years.  She works closely with us.  In an associated company, actually.  I've helped her a good deal.  You know what it's like.  In business; scratch my back, scratch yours, what?”

            Beatrix watched him.  The stinging energy she had so recently felt had nearly evaporated. What had happened; why had that woman turned up?  What had Gregory brought her here for, into the midst of their holiday together?  For that matter, what had he brought this spindly illegitimate kid for? “What is going on?” A madhouse. “Where's she staying? Here?”

            “Oh, Bea!” Gregory reacted as if unreasonably taxed. “Of course not. She wanted a holiday. I told her where we were going to be. She found a hotel somewhere around here.”

            “About a kilometre down the road,” Peter added helpfully.

            Beatrix had judged that a tearful performance again so soon would not get the same result.  In that case she could do nothing but express her perplexity, and her deep, deep sense of suspicion.

            “Don't be suspicious.  My dear heart.”  Gregory remonstrated. “It's not like you to get ideas in your head.”  The ambiguity in what he had said was lost on him at that moment.  And on her too.

            “Everybody knows she eats men,” she said to Peter as if he had asked. “Gregory is the only one who has stood up to her temptations. That's right, isn't it Gregory? You've always told me that.”

            “Sure.  I have always told you that.”  This time he was aware of an evasive meaning.  “You have always believed me.  I told young Peter here to come on out to France and he...” even Gregory had to think for a moment what words to use, “he could keep her company for a bit.  Since she is here.  On her own.”

            “I don't see it.” She was close to whining; begging for Gregory's reassurance, “I don't understand.  Why has she come here on her own.  She could get anybody to come with her - from Prince Charming to King Kong; they'd follow her like dogs.” She looked at Peter and before she had a chance to continue, Gregory pounced on her words.

            “But you see, of course, she wants to be alone. That's the problem.  Flies around the proverbial honeypot.  She can't get away”.

            “So you fixed her up with the boy here?”

            “Yup,” he said defiantly, “She is not going to be bothered by him, is she?” Peter blanched.  Gregory did not look at him.

            “Let's pack.  We're going,” she announced as if to Peter.  And she stood up, once again to her queenly height.  But there was no longer the angry flush on her face, no longer the command in her stride.  She posed this time.  Both the men looked at her without movement.  She stopped before she left the lounge and with a revealing hesitation looked back.

            Gregory's astuteness gave him all the winning advantages. He knew she would not go through with leaving unless he sanctioned it.  He allowed the indignity in her hesitation to last for a moment.  And said, “Okay, love.  If you want to.  But I for one will be sad, yes, sad, if we do not have your company here.” He used the term ‘we’ carefully.  She noticed it. Her defeat seemed complete.  She returned to sit beside them again. “Your a good sort,” he said consolingly. “I knew you'd realise there's nothing to be suspicious of. She's not a bad type, Jane.  She wouldn't do anything behind your back either. Would she?”  Peter looked on at this blatant lying.  He studied Gregory's effect; how he handled a woman being difficult. Plenty of tips to tuck away for future use and gain.

            “I'd like to ring her?” Beatrix said, ingenuously. “I'm sure she would like to hear from us.”  She gave them a brave smile, as if adjusting the chairs after a dinner party had left. Anger, suspicion, fear for her marriage, all must be put behind them. “Shall we ring, and give her a surprise?”

            “Sure,” Gregory said relaxing. “Later”'

            “No.  Let's invite her over here for dinner.  And you too,” she said to Peter.

            Peter looked at his father.  His father looked at him.  “It's a lovely idea, my darling.  Peter, never forget the kindness this woman can show.  But Bea, honestly, I know that Jane wants to be away from it all.  She has enough of me at work.  Know what I mean.”

            “Oh, no, Gregory,” she said flirtatiously and perking up. “I don't know what you mean.  I could never have enough of you!”

            “That's a dear,” and he put out his hand to pat her knee leaving it there just slightly longer than necessary to convey a possessiveness; a suggestiveness.

            Her knee felt to her like meat, its skin, dead paper. It did not belong.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Whilst Peter walked back down the lane, Gregory nipped ahead in his brash Porsche, his phone to his ear. Peter rehearsed in his mind all he had learned.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Even Jane realised she could not spend so much of her time looking in the mirror searching her form for any emerging clues to the decay and decomposition to her perfect image which was bound to start someday.  So, she was relieved when the phone rang.  She slumped down with it in front of the wide window.  Even her underwear seemed to be overdressing in the heat. From the earpiece came the familiar metric rhythm of one of their favourite poems. “John Donne,” she said sulkily.

            “J.D., quite right.  Good girl,” Gregory responded breezily.  “Us - we're just like that.”  It was the old formula they had grown up with.  Two people like one.  “Love and poetry, they're symbiotic.  L-and-P.”

            “L, little-a, P,” she recited in response.

            “Love and poetry, like twins who feed each other.”

            “You, little-a, M.  You and me, we're the same”' she continued sing-song fashion.

            “You and me.  My Love.  We go together, always have done.”

            She always thought of way back, at that young age. Gregory and his lanky friend, Len, kids of thirteen, had chased her into an alleyway, scared her half to death, and had cut off one of her pigtails.  She had been five.  Then her violent stepfather had scared her to death too when she got home, with his belt. Forbidden ever to meet those ruffians again. And in fact, still it seemed estranged from them today.

            “So,” he continued now conversationally, “how goes it?” Just the question she could not answer for herself.  So, she was silent.  He picked up the tension and wariness, “I'm coming over.  I'm in the car now.  I got away earlier today.”

            The moment he got to her room, he began again, “You've met Peter, have you?” He spread his remark with a nonchalance he was not feeling.

            “Your weedy office rat,” she enquired.  At first there was some humour, added to the grating displeasure. “What did you send him spying for?”  They sat together on a tiny terrace outside her room, no more than a window ledge.  The hotel shaded them from the afternoon sun. “You - are you getting jealous in your old age? Want to see what I get up to? He's a bit obvious, isn't he? Your office boy.”

            “Come on, GJ,” he appealed to their secret childhood past again.  The closest he could get to her.  The old taunts he and Len had thrown at her - GJ; Gypsy Jane; Gypsy tipsy Jane.  Later they had become daunted and bewildered by her sudden beauty as she emerged as a woman.  It had frightened their unsure manhood.

            “Don't call me that,” she shouted, as she had all those years ago, too.  Now she no longer frightened him, but yet she still sensed he had to work at keeping her on his side.  “He's no bloodhound.  You're wasting your money.  Send him home.”

            “No.  My love. Be nice to him.  In your usual way.  Just be nice.”

            “Oh no,” she said, or wailed, as if she could not believe she was being asked for something so preposterous.  “What the hell does ‘usual way’ mean?  I know what you usually mean.  But he's a boy.  Not with him – what's his business.  He can't be any use to us.”

            “Don't be like that.  He's a good lad.  Needs bringing on a bit.”

            “True,” she said bitingly. “Who is he?”

            “Haven't you guessed?” He kept a pause to convey significance, but she was not having that.  She sparked.

            “Guessed!  Guessed what? Of course, I have.  You've dragged me all the way out here to this wine-spattered nowhere.  The scenery's like wallpaper, the weather is a furnace; the people are cardboard.  And you want to start a quiz-show!  Guess what?”  Gregory gained a thrill when she got into her imaginative outrages.  “And you, fucking love winding me up,” she concluded as she caught the triumphant smile in his eye.

            Gregory audibly swallowed, “Okay, okay.  You win.  A long time ago,” he swallowed again. “Twenty-one years, to be precise, I became a father.  Know what I mean,” he added, hesitant – in a coy way.

            She thought she had a few sudden sarcastic comments bursting into her brain; she prepared to crank up the decibels.  But thought better of it – in these abrupt circumstances. Silence was dignified.  It will leave him guessing, she thought.  Let him swim in an empty pool.  She said nothing. “You still there,” he asked.  She said nothing.  “It's just... a helping hand – for the lad.”

            Now he remained silent, a counter-silence.

            He put his hand to her face and kissed her on the cheek. “I've got to go this time,” he said ambiguously.  She did not ask him to stay.  Her familiar anger had rendered her dumb.  Despite his apparent assured manner, in the car he phoned her back, again. “You're a good girl, my love.  I love you.”

            Still driven to silence, in the end she spoke, “I might.  Help your lad.”  She patted the place on her head where her plait might have been.  “I might,” she repeated sulkily.  “If I feel like it,” in a louder voice.  Then more shrilly, “But I don't.”  She slammed the phone down.

            Gregory switched off his telephone more calmly. He turned. “She'll be okay,” he said reassuringly to the embarrassed boy curled up around his own centre of gravity in the passenger seat.

            Peter unwound himself at the hotel and got out.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Puzzled by the mosaic of interactions he had witnessed, and not alert to most of them, he admired his father's command.  He returned to the hotel to claim his rights with Jane.  The goddess, he believed.  The opposite pole to the beastly Beatrix.  She had shed her loose clothing unceremoniously and sat on the edge of the bed in his room as featureless as he was.

            Furious – with Gregory, with herself – she had confronted the hapless youth with a wooden stare.  She still had on a pale blue silk bra with black lace, which pushed her parts into a deep cleavage.  He slowly took off his clothes, staring hypnotised at her motionless flesh.  He lay on the bed beside her.  No words were spoken.  She looked down at his long, white body.  The unfriendliness of her gaze frightened him.  Mixed with the long excitement it did not seem to be having the expected effect on him.  She picked up his limp organ between thumb and forefinger as if a dead cigarette from an ashtray.  Incensed with everyone and feeling manoeuvred into this, she let it drop again, and said with contempt “You won't get far with that, will you?” She turned her head away. As if reluctantly waiting for him.

            He put out a hand to bury several fingers in the crevasse in her brassiere.  “Can I?” he mumbled, and he started to say something he did not finish.  She let him fumble with the clasp till the straps fell away.  She neither moved nor spoke.  Her breasts came free from the cups.  In other circumstances he would have drooled, would have settled in his mind how he would describe them to his mates.  But at that point his mouth was dry, his stomach trembling with apprehension, every thought about imitating his father had abandoned him.  One palm clutched a globe.   He touched as if it were the most fragile bubble.  Its weight surprised him.  The heavens should have opened; but they did not.  Only an effort of concentration made her breast seem different from a large potato, different from a bag of tepid water.  Her wooden immobility controlled all of him.  He felt an imposter, an intruder, inadequate in the moment of violation.  Furiously, her immobility attacked him.

            But at the same time, it represented her humiliation, the ignominy in Gregory's demand for his son.  The whole of her life she had worked for him, worked under him.... screwed under him!  Her thoughts could not be completed, could not be vulgar enough to describe herself. Her time had been one long degradation by Gregory from her earliest years.  She fumed.  She found herself obediently putting out one slender elegant forearm to feel between his thighs for his sensitive parts again.  They rested in the cradle of her strong fingers.  The balance between gently soothing them and ripping them off was an exceedingly fine one at that moment.  She found herself beginning to squeeze, she felt the temptation to crush this lad's maleness into paste.  The desire to destroy the father through macerating the son was almost irresistible. Almost.

            In turn he looked in alarm at her arm bearing his trophy. He was not sure if he was being offered excitement by this steely woman. In his innocence he uttered “Aagh...!” thickly and as if acquiescing to her powers.  But his fear told him he was in danger. “Ouch.  I say.  That...” She let go. “That hurt a good bit.” Her mercy reprieved the father; and the boy.

            She looked down at his organ again.  And he looked down at it too.  It was stubbornly limp.  In a moment of brief conciliation, she leaned herself across his chest, lowered one shoulder onto his and lay for a moment in contact with him, her face turned away, his arm pinned so that he could not do any foraging or fumbling. After a brief while she said, “I don't think you and I are going to get very far, are we, boy?”  Then she suddenly sat upright, squared her shoulders back so that her breasts hung above him, “Why don't you just rub yourself, and we'll call it a day.” She knew how to hurt. “Perhaps women are not what you are into.”  He obeyed. He would not let her see tears fall. She turned her head and fixed her eyes on the wall in the stiff pose of an artist's model.  Afterwards she climbed silently into her jeans and, buttoning her blouse, she closed the door behind her leaving him wiping himself with a dirty sock.

            She padded barefoot down the stone corridor, her gold sandals in one hand, and her humiliation, unmodified, in her heart. On his bed he allowed himself a few gasping sobs.  He had not cried since his first fight in his school.

            There was the whine of a curlew whistling through the country lanes in the distance.  But neither of them noticed.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Unlike Jane, Beatrix humiliation was screened by a numbness, a grisly emptiness.  It had been inexpressible. The advent of the boy, and, on top, the appearance of the sly Jane and her mystery presence, that spoke volumes of suspicion. It was the very lack of means to express any of it any more that delivered the dark cloud of numbness in thinker and thicker proportions She could only now pretend, a pretence was all the options he left her.  She was a million miles from his confident belief that he had smoothed everything out for her; had settled her ruffled feelings; had, in the process, convinced her of the silliness of her feelings.  Tragically his confidence was unfounded.  They were sitting close together on the hotel terrace in the lateness of that afternoon. The sun was calming towards evening. A tiny lapping sound came from the river some 15 metres below.  Gregory's hand was proprietorially on Beatrix's thigh.  He believed in total possession.  And that was what Beatrix gave him.  Helplessly, she did.  It left her no escape, no room to manoeuvre.  There were no words that could form her predicament, no appeal to him about the hurt that burned like a ruthless acid in the place where she wanted love.  He required only that she pretend; a pretence that he had made everything alright for her again.  Her loneliness was all the more vast for the silence it occupied.

            She could bear it no longer.  She knew she must do it suddenly.  The moment came, the most silent one she had ever heard.  She lurched from the chair to the balustrade at the edge of the terrace.  As if in perfect slow motion, one foot on the top of the rail, a super-human stride into the air, and she threw herself from the terrace.  She briefly noticed the rocks innocently lapped by the gentle water, her wail was not fear, merely a sad defeat.  She hit them head-first.  The water accepted the body.  And carefully rippled around it.

            Gregory was already on his feet leaning over the rail, arms outstretched.  A small knot of hotel guests gathered instantly to gaze down with him at the sudden corpse.  One man was over immediately clambering down, slipping and gashing himself.  Another had miraculously found a rope, and was throwing it down to the climber; making it fast on the rail.  The receptionist had already rung for the ambulance.

            It made the countryside echo with its wail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duncan

 

The South Coast of England from Brighton to Bognor Regis is sometimes known as the Costa Geriatrica.  It is a complacent self-mocking term used by innumerable London civil servants who retire there to watch each other crumble away.  The climate is balmy, the undertaking trade is discretely buoyant and the traffic moves sedately on the roads.

Out there was the world he knew. In here was another world. When Grace left that first evening, Graham tidied his locker.  His clothes had gone back with Grace.  The toothbrush, towel, the magazine she had bought  him, all these he looked at carefully and put away. He felt a desperate affection for these simple things that had come with him as if they represented his only friends in this new place.  The doctor from the outpatients, the nurses there who had taken his blood, the receptionist, all those people he had come to like in the hospital, seemed so far away now.  He had not seen any of them on the ward.  The evening sky outside was darkening, and a nurse came to pull across the curtains over the great plate-glass windows.  He got onto his bed first of all in his pyjamas.  He put on the old dressing-gown that he had since they moved to their present house - was it fourteen years ago.  Opposite his bed was a wall of curtains.

It brought to mind leaving on the train, the platform awash with couples parting. Duncan was two then, and Grace was pregnant. So much unknown.  He felt that mystification again now.  Then too there were fears of death.  It had been wartime, and they may never meet again ‑ lost forever. There was no space, to know what to say. Time had closed into a tight ball. The train had shuddered and jolted inches forwards and gradually it was pulling out of the station away, away. He looked at them looking, his wife, his little son. 

Deadened, he had sat back in a seat after waving from the carriage window, wondering how they would get on at home, making their lives without him.  The night had become dark he pulled down the blind over the window shutting out the other world outside. 

The long, limp hospital curtains now hung before him as if a screen for these old memories to play out upon. Then, that miserable journey, he had not slept on the hard horsehair seats. He jostled the unknown soldier next to him, supporting each other's upright balance. When he had got off the train and walked onto the early morning ferry to Larne the crisp air, and the blue-green deserted mountains chilled his spirit yet again.  This world was foreign, deserted. He had looked at the others as if they were zombies, as he felt himself, cut off from life, as they went aboard, all on the grim business of the war. They dispersed to the submarine bases, the anti-aircraft installations, the small aerodromes from where they tried to hunt the enemy submarines. They were tasting a kind of freedom, the freedom of loneliness it seemed. Belfast would become this mysterious new home. 

He placed the magazine, that Grace had bought for him, on the locker beside the bed, to remain as if it were his only memory. It remained unopened and now he almost felt a disloyal as if he were neglecting her thoughtfulness to him. He glanced at a few pages. Why did she have to buy these things. The people who write the columns will say anything, and he sucked the air through his teeth in disapproval.  It was important to keep his mind focused. Roaming through the junk of his memory... it served no purpose.  But there was so little going on in the ward, and his thoughts were darting to different things as he was  trying to sleep.  He had put the magazine away, ‘how was Grace managing the bolt on the front door?’  He should have seen to it long ago.  Now she would struggle with it on her own so far away.

What would the doctor find tomorrow! He owed it to Grace to let them find out what it was.  She was not worried; she always believed in his strength, reassured him it would be all right.  But no one knew. No one knew what was wrong; even the doctor had found it interesting. And, chilled by the thought of tomorrow’s investigation, he drifted into his first night's disturbed sleep.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The view was a monotonous November grey, some bare trees stood unmoving in the concrete compound of the hospital.  Inside, the pale curtains draped themselves against the aluminium frames of the picture windows. Each of the four beds in `C' alcove faced the world beyond where their inmates had come from.  Would any of them return out there? And if so for how long.  He had had 78 years, a goodly time.  But the last week had happened with such speed.  Investigations, what would they find?  Grace had packed the things he needed, and they had driven here, neither speaking, silently aware of an unknown future. Perhaps they had been ill-assorted for marriage, but neither of them dwelt on the thought. They had been happy - happy for them -  at least for these last 13 years since they’d moved here from London.  And at their age, you never knew how long it would go on.  They had silently driven along the coast, neither thinking those thoughts, though they were known, and both knew the other felt the same. Grace had left quickly. It was an opportunity to shop; practical as ever. Life as usual.  Grace was economical and opportunist.

 

Staff Nurse Timpton had moved in quickly and turned down the bed in crisp fashion to welcome his body. “Thank you, Nurse”'  She whisked off, her slipstream leaving Graham holding his pyjamas. 

“She's the best of them. said a voice from the bed beyond his, A ghastly pale face; a body motionless in bed. “She's like our boy's wife.” the voice continued.  “And they've both got a couple of young ones, about the same ages. Anthea, this one is called.  She doesn't like being joked.”  His strained features hardly looked capable of humour.  “She always comes when you want something - when it's her shift. They change over at one-fifteen.” Graham sat on the edge of his bed listening to this old boy.  He looked very near the end.  “Can you give me a shove up the bed?  It feels better like that,” he said heavily.  Graham did his best to pull the feeble body; “One of the vertebras,” he said briefly. “They say its given way.” The moist old eye in the worn skin looked him over shrewdly.  “Have we met before?”  Then he turned back to face the wall again, away from the damp grey outside the window. “I was Home Office,” he said as if to himself now, as if talking to his own pain, “for most of my time.” 

            

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He sat back on his own bed and the Nurse came round for routine checks, tightening the cuff on his arm. “Not much blood left in me, I expect,” he tried to be light-hearted.  She did not emerge from her heavy effort, so no response came. His mind flashed: the finger clutching his bare arm, the crimson varnished nail, so cruelly painted; where had she got nail-varnish in the wartime? Not that, he told himself; why did he still cling to that old memory.  The Nurse took the earpieces out of her ears.   

“She's a flighty one,” came the frail voice from the next bed. “Told me all about her boyfriends,” and with a despairing laugh, “as if I were interested. They have a different life nowadays.” He seemed exhausted by the thought and relaxed into silence.

They do things differently. Graham thought of Duncan; truly they did have it very different. He  hadn't wanted it for himself, and nor had he begrudged Duncan, well…  not until Duncan had let himself down. Graham sat still sinking into thoughts about Duncan.  It had been such a shock when it had first happened, and still a shock eight years on.  Lesley had come down with the grandchildren in a terrible state.  It had not been a question of understanding it; it simply could not be understood.  They did things differently.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The thoughts left a sense of doom and a tense damp feeling in his skin as if he had been sweating slightly.  He thought of Grace, at home, on her own.  He hoped she had locked up properly before she went to bed. He thought of Lesley, on her own, Duncan's wife, now ex-wife - since Duncan had left her... he had just walked out. That's what Lesley had said.  She just came down to Grace with the grandchildren. It had been inexplicable.  Ever since then it was as if everything had gone wrong with the family.  Somehow, they – he and Grace - had all got tangled up in the friction and quarrels.  Duncan had never been able to explain himself, and yet he had always been so responsible, a Doctor, one who knew about people, about children's upbringing.  Graham caught himself.  There was that little stirring in his stomach that he felt when one of his tempers was coming on.

Thoughts went round and round, stirring his living flesh, churning up emotions and moods that continually needed controlling.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He lay on his back staring. Duncan was middle-aged, and even middle age was different for Duncan's generation.  He seemed so boyish. Perhaps, for Graham, it had been the war years. That's what Grace had said - "We had the war, dear; they don't understand that.  It made us... serious.  More serious than they are now". Nowadays they do what they want. When Graham  was young, it was the economic depression, unemployment, insecurity.  Well, there is unemployment now; but look at the social security; it is a featherbed. In his own generation you had to work for everything. Nothing fell into your lap, and he was proud in his achievement. Not like that now; all this pushing and shoving and getting in first.  In those days, he had been able to feel closer to people. He would never have known Rose like that in any other circumstances.  It just shows, does it not? Why does Rose keep coming to his mind?

Even young and still at school, he had known that if he wanted to have some security, he would have to go out and work hard to get it.  He had gone to night classes and got his exams well enough.  The civil service was secure.  And he had saved to marry. They had bought their own house in 1933. There had been things that had gone wrong of course.  Grace's first child had been born a dead one; but the next year Duncan had come along and he had been healthy, more or less. Of course, he had worried them when he was three and nearly caught his death of a cold. It would have been a great blow. Grace might not have been able to bear it. She had been on her own then because he had gone back to his station, in Aberdeen, after the new baby, Tony, was born. She had not said a word to him about Duncan’s illness until the little chap was out of the critical phase.  He had been cross with Grace for not telling him - but proud of her at the same time for managing their little family on her own.  It made him feel that they, and the home, such as they had, was safe with her.  It had made it all the more difficult when he had found himself with Rose that evening.

The  nurses were beginning to stir. Those thoughts of his, the heavy and light thoughts of the past, seeped back into the underground of his mind. He felt set apart from these young ones.  He was tired and they should care for him.  Grace had always said it had been a hard life for them as a couple, and they had a right to enjoy themselves now he had retired - that was why they had moved down here to the south coast.  Of course, they had enjoyed themselves at times all through; he was sure of that. Though there had been rows and difficulties in the family.  Tony had been surly and difficult at times - and Duncan of course... he was the one for a fight.  But Grace had always been patient and tolerant.  She never lost her temper.  Why was it so difficult that she never lost her temper? It was the great asset the family had was Grace being so even-tempered.  He knew he was not so himself.  It often made him feel worse - but he must not complain.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sister Timpton sailed down the ward at about 7 o’clock. "Come along, Mr Dawson,” she called, “You really must get tidy in the morning,” and she swept by him.  The nurses, he had begun to realise, are at their hardest in the morning, as if they have to reassert their authority all over again for the coming day.  Graham did not feel disposed to go along with it. He noticed the boiling feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he resented that they should give him the problem of dealing with that turmoil there. But what could he do? His lips tightened. He asked when she expected the doctor to come round.  It was urgent in his mind. “We look after you in here,” she coolly replied, and as she did so, her hands went to the top of his pyjama trousers and started to roll them down.  He was surprised by the elegance of her fingers and the gentleness of her touch. He felt a warmth, though stern, as she peeled away the cloth.  “The doctor will come when you are ready to be looked at.” She pushed his pyjama jacket up from his tummy.  He was now exposed from his ribs to his hips in front of her. And she parted the curtains and bustled out. She left a gap in his privacy and occasionally, as he waited, he could see other patients moving around He lay back. 

He thought of his mother who used to use the same steamy and starched manner. At one time, he had lain for weeks when he had been ill as a child.  Just before the First World War, he remembered, because he was convalescing when war was declared.  He had developed such a weakness in his legs and a fever in his head.  Nobody knew what it was. They could only afford to have the doctor once.  He had shaken his head a few times and whispered to mother.  She had been stony-faced and said nothing to him after the doctor had gone. His feet had, ever after, tensed up into a permanent claw-like shape.  His mother had never said anything. Duncan had been very interested in the shape of his father's feet. As a student at his medical school, he seemed to think that there was something special about the feet. Graham had recalled that there may have been others in his family who had deformed feet, extra high arches.  Duncan had got to medical school, so clever, they had almost not known what to do with him; so clever he had made himself unpleasant. He could make them feel such fools.  Mother had said, had warned Graham, it was no good pushing Duncan along.  The child should find his own way.  But if he had the gift of intelligence, Graham thought surely it should be husbanded and brought out.  Perhaps he had made a rod for his back by encouraging Duncan.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He had had to wait all morning for the doctor to arrive. The afternoon began when it seemed the morning was only half-complete.  Lunch things were whisked away with a busy clatter and the thunder of the lift had echoed round the ward. A buxom nurse brought the bedpan.  She could make her body quiver in her starched uniform, which he did not like.  Some of the other men laughed and teased her like schoolboys. Men should control all that even if some women flaunted themselves.  Duncan must have been like that, letting himself notice girls.  It did no good in the long run.  Look where it had got him.

 

She bustled around the bed, tucked the laundered sheets tightly in again so that he was pinned frailly in bed like an invalid.  He felt managed in an old-fashioned way, his legs almost amputated by her enthusiasm with the sheets. “You had forgotten me,” he said morosely trying to be light about it. 

“Don't you worry about the Doctor,” she commanded.  “He'll come when he can.” The fresh creases of her uniform kept brushing against his fingers, or his cheeks.  He moved quickly aside from her close presence.  `Oh, sorry!  Did I knock you?” half mocking. “We're feeling a bit fragile today, are we?' with a momentary hint of quarrelsomeness in her voice, the slightest of threats. But then – “Don't you forget to call me when you want anything. Sister is off this afternoon, so I can make a fuss of you all today.” And she bustled off seemingly satisfied with settling him. But he felt very unsettled.The pain in his back was largely forgotten.  But sometimes it caught him off-guard as he turned, and then his head whizzed in a daze of wincing surprise. They had looked at his blood had told him it was "Myeloma".  Duncan had to explain.  But why should his blood hurt his back?  It did not stand to reason. 

In a stir, the air moved apart and the long ward was cleft by the speeding arrow of time as the Doctor, at last the Doctor, came straight towards him.  He homed like a missile towards his bed.  The Doctor made it no clearer; he said very little, and prodded his back as if it were hardly to do with Graham.  He was a stranger, and young and perhaps he was new.

In fact, the young doctor seemed more interested in the little nurse who was moving around him, fetching things, the blood pressure pump, or the tray with special instruments.  He told Graham there had to be more tests to look into his breastbone. Or his hipbone. He talked quickly and Graham felt inpatient.

He was proud of a long life he had lived.  Yet his two brothers, for ever his comparisons, and who he had outstripped all his life in all the achievements that meant anything, were both hale and hearty. What an irony if he, when he had done so well compared with them, should perish first.  The thought leapt darkly across his mind.  The thing to do was to wait until the consultant came round next.  Then he could know how long it would take them to get him better.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

“Your wife's here, Mr D,” the nurse said hardly bothering to put her head round the partition into the alcove.  Graham glanced back at his newspaper and then turned towards the opening into the alcove.  He put his pen down beside the bed and raised his hand carefully to take off his glasses. 

As Grace came into view he gave her a dignified smile, she pecked him on the cheek, “Hallo, dear.  You’ve got a paper, have you? I brought one in for you just in case. How are you?” she purred.  She made herself natural and at home beside his bed. “So, so,” he said noncommittally.

Graham looked at the basket she had brought and watched her bringing things out.  “It's very good of you,” he said warmly, familiarly. “There's a young chap along the corridor went down for papers.  A lot of the men in here smoke,”

I brought your dressing gown in,” she explained unnecessarily, “and your slippers.”  Grace's homeliness was infectious.  He remembered the separations from her in the wartime, coming home to quiet domestic routines, little Duncan always very serious, and the baby Tony who took up so much of Grace's time in those early days.  She would say the same then – “How are you dear?” 

And he would reply, “So, so,” never liking to tell her how he hated being away from home. 

And she would continue, straightaway “I've done some baked potatoes.  Come along Duncan, clear the table for me.  Daddy is ready to eat.  We'll all eat together today, shall we?”  Her quiet formal organizing never let out how relieved she was to have him back, perhaps she did not let herself know it exactly.  It had been a question of carrying on as normal for all of them in those days; the whole country did.  Grace had played her part, was be an exemplary model of the stoical spirit of wartime. 

Once, he had shown Duncan the gun out of his kitbag, and the small boy had looked carefully at it, not sure if it was a toy his Daddy had brought. It seemed his parents were anxious with it, “Be careful now”, his father had said.  Duncan had taken it thoughtfully as if a little overwhelmed.  Grace had looked out of the corner of her eye as she poured the tea into the cups. 

As soon as he had put it down on the tablecloth, she had said swiftly, “Drink up your tea, Duncan, there's a good boy. Let's show Daddy how grown up you are.” And Duncan had drunk his tea in small swallows, putting the cup down with a slight gasp for breath. His mother had said previously there was something important to talk about now he was five. He had started school and he could do many more things for himself, and could help with little Tony, and did not need to shout and cry anymore.

Graham had been proud of his eldest son.  Yet he sometimes felt a little uneasy about Grace’s way of talking to him.  He never knew exactly what it was about, Grace and Duncan being serious with each other, but he felt uncomfortable.  He had often told her to be more disciplining with the boy. Yet proud he was. And how glad that their oldest had in the end been a boy.  But that was another thought that had to be controlled. Grace would have thought of first baby, the dead one, them little girl. Grace would have been hurt by his thought.

Grace interrupted these reminiscences. She had sat in the robust hospital armchair, “Are they looking after you all right, dear?'” 

“Well enough,” he replied, “can’t grumble.  The food isn’t up to much.  But they're trying hard.” 

“Oh,” she replied. “They're trying hard, of course they are.  Dr Rees was so chatty wasn't he, in the clinic.  He took so much time with us.  To tell the truth,” Grace smirked, “I think the out-patient Sister got a bit fed up with the amount of time he was taking with us.”  Then she continued without a change in her voice, “Has he been round to see you yet?”

“No,” said Graham, “I only came in…” he thought “yesterday, wasn't it?”  He was suddenly slightly puzzled.  He felt he had been lying here for weeks.  “A young lady came round and took a lot of blood from my arm.” He said it partly to calm himself. “She used several syringes. I said to her ‘What are you going to do with it?’  She was from the pathological laboratory.  Anyway it’s someone else's blood isn't it; can't be mine after all those transfusions.”

“It's the pathology department,” Grace corrected him.  “Dr Rees said they would have to test your blood while your here. I don't see what it’s got to do with my back.”  Graham drew in his breath, “It's your bone marrow.”  Grace, still patient, “They have to test that, as well.  How is your back, dear?”  She could ride out his tetchiness by ministering her care. She looked down sadly to her lap where she was still holding the slippers.  She looked up again at Graham's face. “I thought I should ring Duncan last night, too.” 

 That would have been difficult for Grace.  He was grateful.  She always did the phoning, and he was glad she had dealt with Duncan.  He wished, for a reason that escaped him, that he had been able to speak to Duncan. Her eyes were slightly watery. “He seemed very touched,” she said, “He wanted to ring Dr Rees. Sort of doctor to doctor, isn't it?” She continued, somewhat coolly, “I expect he will.” There was a pause. “He said he will come to see you on Sunday, in the afternoon.” And she added, coyly, “I thought you wouldn't mind.”

Graham felt the knot in his stomach tighten.  What would he say to Duncan?  There was nothing to say. Yet there was everything.

Grace was looking at Graham in a plaintive. and slightly accusing way, “Don't get onto...,” she fumbled with her words, “don’t get into any arguments.” He knew he should not lose his temper. 

“He's too full of himself,” he snapped. “You would have thought he could control himself.  He’s 45 and still treats us like…” 

“Lesley said the grandchildren are fine.”  Grace blatantly stepped in, and Graham could see that she was trying to control his outburst before it happened.

But he wasn’t going to be controlled, and he turned up the pressure, “He has become too big for his boots. Doctor’s think they are tin gods,” he said crushingly. “I don’t mind who he is. If he wants to come and see me, he can. If he wants money, he can ask for it,” he raced on grandly. 

“Ooh,” Grace interrupted, “I am sure he only wants to see how you are”.  She tried to soothe the conflagration as if with an inflammable fire-beater.  Graham snorted as if nobody could add a worthwhile word to the crescendo of his implied accusations.  And then he stopped himself, as if realising that Duncan was not present, and no use if he was not present to hear it. 

Suddenly he found in himself how much he really wanted to talk to Duncan about all sorts of things. What changed in that instant? 

Later Grace was beginning to gather her things. He would be on his own. Always loneliness took him back to that moment… 

After she had gone, his thoughts turned naturally to being alone those years ago, away from home, his family trying to get away from bombed London. And when that secret had happened. That moment with Rose. He did his best never to think of it. But then, he had to tell Duncan something of how he understood what had happened, what Duncan had done.

He wanted more than anything to tell Duncan about it, to tell someone about it.  Duncan seemed the only one who could now listen.  But then….  Could he be as bad as Duncan?  He turned his thoughts away and that night he asked the nurse for something to sleep.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The day was bright.  The pale grey clouds were wisps in a clear blue sky. He ran his fingers through his hair.  It was greasy.  His heart ached now for those times which were surely gone.

            He wanted a bath, but simple amenities in the ward were difficult to arrange. His hair had always tended towards greasiness.  Normally, he would ply his hair with liquid paraffin to absorb the dandruff.  It was an old-fashioned remedy, but still the best perhaps. It always looked sleek, fashionable in those days  Grace used to complain of the smell. Somehow that had not mattered.  The smell soon went.  Rose had once suggested he should go to the doctor about his dandruff. That had been a long, long time ago, way back in the wartime.  He had looked at her, and she was not joking; she was worried for him.  He reassured her in the way that had always satisfied her. He used to smile, run his hand through his hair, then frown slightly as if he had it all in hand and had been thinking about the problem. She would smile, hold the bundles of letters or files in her hand, the robust skin of her working hands looked very capable.  He liked the practical no-nonsense style about her.  It reminded him of his mother. 

            The sun was progressing steadily round the corner of the far wing of the hospital building, like a ship rounding into the mouth of a harbour, like the fishing boats returning that time that he and Rose had walked down to the docks, in the evening after work.  They had both been shaken by the news of the plane that had gone missing on its way to the Orkneys.  He should have been on that plane and but for his flu he would have disappeared too.

            Somehow, they had gone for a stroll together outside the offices in Aberdeen. He had been transferred from Belfast, and there were two girls in office for the typing. Rose had a strong highland accent. He had decided to go to the shop downstairs for cigarettes. It happened that she had also been just going to the shops for something. So, in her bright manner, she suggested they wander outside. They found themselves at the waterfront and she had leant on the rail while he went for his cigarettes. Then he returned to her and they gazed in silence over the calm cool water. It was summer, even in the north here. She put her hand on his bare forearm for a moment. They had stood in silence watching the boats against the sky.  Then she smoothed his hair that was ruffled by the mild breeze off the sea in that calm summer dusk.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

After a couple of days, he had resigned himself to the routines of the ward. It was Tuesday. Duncan would be coming down on Sunday evening, all the way from London. Just to see an old man like this; it was surely not necessary.  What would he say to his son? Would he tell him? 

If only he had, on that previous occasion, when was it – five years ago, no seven, it must be – he considered when Duncan and Lesley had split up.  That previous time when Duncan had come down for the evening to talk together. It had been the right time. Duncan had been late on that occasion. Actually, it turned out he had not been coming at all until Graham had rung to ask what was happening.  Grace was away, giving her counsel to Lesley. The meal Graham cooked, was in the oven. And he did not arrive.  When Graham had rung, Duncan was as off-hand as ever. He never did give credit for what had been done for him all his life. Right from the start, he demanded and was given.  He simply took what was given from the word go. He did not even wash properly and had ended up with acne all over his face.

Graham had told him all these things. And look at what he had done with his marriage. Still just taking what he wanted, even in his forties. Graham was just coming home from the war when he was forty.  Their house had been destroyed by a bomb.  Even with the young family, Grace had just got a new house; done it all herself, she had been a wonder, and he had merely come home, ‘demobbed’ to meet his family safe and sound, perhaps the most wondrous moment of his life, or very nearly so. Apart from that other moment. Perhaps she had decided to go shopping just because she saw him leaving and wante to walk with him. He turned his mind away as usual. 

Duncan knew nothing of what they had been through all those years ago.  His life had been protected and so he always thought little difficulties were big ones.  When would he learn.  He would go back to Lesley. Grace was sure. But Graham felt that Duncan had to be put to rights about his weak character. It seemed at the time that he had listened to all that.  He had seemed chastened. And opening up a crack, he told Graham about his unhappiness.  He thought that Lesley did give him a decent life, or rather, what was it….  Graham turned the other way in his chair.  But… Sister Timpton was standing over him. She put him into bed in her formal manner. 

But, when he was settled again, and she has moved on to the next bed, his mind returned to that weekend. When Duncan had arrived for the talk, they went on till two in the morning.  Duncan could have gone on talking.  They had never really talked together like that, not before, not since. 

            But even that long might had done nothing to get him back to Lesley.  It seemed he did not want to go back.  It seemed he wanted it easy. For the first time, Graham had a doubt in his mind about whether Grace was right.  Duncan wouldn’t go back, and Graham knew it. It felt conspiratorial. It had been a precious moment, for both of them.

            Perhaps he knew more of what Duncan felt than he had realised.  There was that time, so long ago now, the touch of skin. They both knew it perhaps. So different from everything else. Rose had wakened his own skin too.  Could he tell Duncan some time.  That would weld their link.  It would be the first time he had told it to anyone.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sister Timpton was on duty again.  He felt his inside grinding with scorn. “Now we are not going to get in the way of the nurses, are we?” she growled. 

“No”, piped Graham in an acquiescing manner which he would never have allowed himself to deliver, except that it quite automatically came out of him.  He felt all that way back to being a little boy again when his mother demanded to know what he had learned at school.  “Nothing”, he had often whispered, because it had been the easiest way of finishing the conversation without receiving the full voltage blast that seemed to be pent up in her waiting for him.

            He felt foolish, and he wandered grumpily to the stairs. A cleaner was scrubbing them equally joylessly and he slunk over her cleaned patch leaving the inevitable footprint tracks in his wake, without a word of apology that he might normally have given her.  She was, he thought to himself, a foreigner and not, therefore, like himself and his kin. Black people should know their place, he thought ungenerously. The problem is that these days people do not know how to be satisfied.

He was always argumentative as a lad, aggressive and argumentative.  Duncan is the same. There had been those scenes, abusing his mother, never a word to his father about any of this business, and now scarring the children for the rest of their lives.  Well, it was some years ago, but he kept it up even now. 

            How did he turn out like this? Graham pictured Duncan as a baby gurgling and chuckling when he was tickled, and what a concentration he had as soon as one put something interesting  into his hand, his teddy bear or a shiny teaspoon or whatever. Surely that was a sign of his intelligence. Why couldn’t he see how things had to be?  What a waste he had made of his life!

            In the morning. the air carried plumes of people’s breath outside the entrance doors of the hospital. Inside the foyer, turned and approached the shop. Grace had told him to get some paper handkerchiefs.  They were more practical than using his own and sending them home with her for washing and ironing.  How could he ever approach Duncan?  He had always shown contempt for his father – Graham sighed again, and he felt for the coins in his dressing-gown pocket.  Grace always said to him not to talk to Duncan; it never did any good. What had all his efforts to talk to Duncan achieved?  His old hands held the coins for the young lady in the shop as if he were a child spending his precious pocket money.  He let her take it, and silently took the newspaper and the tissues, holding them to his chest like part of his body.  He began to climb the stairs again.  It gave him exercise, he told himself, and it passed the time. 

            He looked down at his gnarled old hands carrying his things.  His thoughts flicked to Rose, when she had touched his arm. He thought whether she had touched his hand too.  Not then gnarled, old, and frail. She had touched a man’s hands that had then moved and felt different.  She had told him not to get so fretted and ruffled by the sergeant in charge.  Her face burned indelibly into his memory, her touch.  She had smoothed his hair for him.  Duncan had once said that loving and touching were the same. It touched a chord. Remembering his words somehow helped. It touched the link that they had had. When Duncan came at the weekend, there would be an opportunity to complete one of the unfinished scenes of his life, a scene that had been properly sentenced to abortion, and never properly carried out, and now perhaps he could honour his memory and Rose too, just before it might be too late.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sunday afternoon arrived and Duncan walked in, in a relaxed manner down the floor to Graham’s bed.  The large plate glass windows were darkening as the day outside dimmed.  The evenings were drawing in.  They shook hands warmly and firmly and Graham pointed him to the chair, but Duncan insisted on sitting on the bed, awkwardly; the invalid should sit in the comfort of the chair, They ended up both perched on the bed, one on either side. Duncan looked strained and enquired about his father’s health and comfort.  He had contacted Dr Rees by phone in the week  who said only the things that Graham already knew.

            Father and son found they could talk to each other.  It became fairly relaxed, but conversation rambled around Graham’s illness, the life on the ward, Duncan’s work, the journey down from London. “The doctors say I may go home on tomorrow – or Tuesday.  But the nurses don’t know.  They never say anything.  I don’t think they know very much”. 

“Ma will be glad to have you back again. She’s always worried.  She’s looking for a local gardener, someone to keep the garden going, she said? There must be plenty of people around. If she can find the right one.”

“I’ve lost a bit of height.  Have you noticed. 

“You’re shorter because the vertebrae of your back have got a bit squashed.”  Duncan demonstrated a squashing motion between the palms of his hands Graham took little notice.  Duncan always knew something; he was always telling you something.  But how did he know what was happening.  No-one around the hospital seemed to. Duncan looked blank in his eyes. He probably did not know quite what to say. Perhaps he thought the illness was a serious one and did not like to go on describing it.

            Graham changed the subject, going back to the garden. “We had some wonderful lettuces this year. The wet weather came at the right time.  I suppose you don’t take a lot of interest in gardening.”

“No.  We don’t have a garden in London. Lesley was keen on growing things in pots.  We had back extensions to the house, and terraces on various levels.  She grows lots of flowers in spring and summer.” Duncan seemed pleased to tell him. But now he lived in another house, in another part of London; how long had he been there?  Graham had never visited.  There was a silence.  Both knew that what he said about Lesley was now in the past, a dark boundary separating from the present. A sad moment crossed his heart.  And such a distance from his son, too; such a gap to bridge. 

He searched for something to say.  “How is the little girl?  Milly? 

“She’s three and a half, now.” 

“Is she really,” Graham was surprised. The little girl would see so many things he would not, and he had seen so many things that would mean nothing to her.  Where would there be any common interest? There was some strain between them. What did Duncan want to talk about? – not ordinary things. How could he recreate that precious link, step across that gap – could he do it again? He turned his head and a mass of tumbled and panicky thoughts sped away into a vacuum unexpressed and inexpressible between them.

            He turned his mind to the present, again, “Did you speak to Dr Rees?  He’s a very nice chap.  He does explain things to us.” 

“Yes, I did,”  Duncan nodded. “I think they know what they are doing. 

“Yes,” Graham responded doubtfully “I don’t know if they know what is wrong with me.”  He started off in his lecturing style. “The body is such a complicated thing.  They are so pressed with so much going on.  The young lad here - he’s a registrar to Dr Rees, a young Indian chappy. He is around till ten o’clock some nights  He told me yesterday that there was no room for me now.  I should be leaving. I said that Dr Rees expected me to stay till Monday.  I haven’t got my clothes.  Your mother will have to come in with my things.  It was late in the afternoon yesterday by then. The young chap didn’t look pleased. There seems to be some mix up about whose bed I’m in. Apparently, this is Dr Stephen’s bed. He laughed at the incompetence.

“I expect they have a pressure on beds at the moment.” 

“Well,” Graham continued in a slightly triumphant way, “This is Dr Stephen’s bed.  So, I’m told,” and he shrugged his shoulders in a dismissive way. He looked disconsolate too, as if heavily resigned to some sort of defeat which he had somehow deserved. Duncan said no more about it and looked either puzzled or uninterested. 

            He looked at his watch and said that he had to drive back to London, Graham felt he had lived through his moment that was special without it being that moment at all.  A sadness surprised him, but he left it aside. Duncan discussed the journey times. He hesitated and said, “Dad, I wanted to know how you feel.  That’s why I came down today.”  He hesitated, “I suppose I wanted to know if you find yourself thinking about what is happening - you know what I mean – with your illness.” 

Graham replied almost automatically, “It’s best not to think about these things.  I don’t want to worry Grace. You know.” He began again, in his pompous style, ‘We are all getting older. One could depress oneself if one let oneself think about it.”  Duncan waited for him to finish. Then he began making his farewells though they did not know if they would see each other again. They said goodbye as if there had never been an estrangement, and as if this was a regular weekly visit between father and son. He walked with Duncan slowly down the ward.  They were affable.  Graham felt relieved, embarrassed now by the thought of his self-revelation which thankfully had not materialised. It felt strangely like a release from a pressure in him to confess something to someone.

            He watched Duncan walk towards the stairs whilst he remained standing at the door of the ward. He felt so pleased and proud that his son had been to see him, his son a successful doctor in London.  As he turned away a peculiar dark colour spread across his mood like a filter removing part of the day’s light.  He did not know what this meant.  He tried to turn his thoughts to more sensible things.  He hoped he had advised Duncan best on the route back to London. Tomorrow, Grace would come in the afternoon.  There would be no need to buy a Sunday paper.

In the morning he crawled stiffly to the bathroom and washed and shaved slowly.  When he came back, he asked Nurse James what he could do to help.  It had become a routine in the morning to help with simple things so that the ward could get going early in the day.  Nurse James looked harassed.  He straightened the blankets with her like a child helping mother.  She thanked him as a mother would whose child is more trouble helping then if he was playing by himself.  She bustled off.  He returned to his bed.  It was Sunday. 

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

 “Bad mood this morning?” she chirped in a manner that was not a question but a dismissal. 

“Night was a bit disturbed.” He conceded. 

“Did you take your night sedation?” The flirty nurse asked. 

They were still waiting for the pathology tests.  The last one would be done today.  The doctor said he would come and do a marrow biopsy.  It meant boring into his hip bone.  He tried not to think about it.  He would be coming to the end of his stay. He felt a sort of glow.

The ward was quiet for a moment. Time was dragging. He slid off his bed again and sauntered along the ward looking for someone to have a word with.  One of them perked up a bit when he approached.  “The wife was saying last night she recognised you, Graham – from the dancing, isn’t it?” 

Graham nodded. “Well,” Graham began modestly, “we’ve been going for years.  It is good for you, keeps you fit.”  He did not mention the nostalgia he and Grace always felt for their youth when they had been so keen on dancing.  The times when they had been courting, in fact, they had met originally at a dance. The civil service rowing club had a Christmas dance way back.  He could not remember exactly whilst he was talking to this man. It must have been 1930, say. Graham was reticent about the memories.  “Times have changed.  Things are not he same”, he offered, wanly. The man went into a rush of eager details, and a wish to prolong the contact.  Graham felt imposed upon, a garrulous old man, he thought, and began to pull away.

            “Did you hear what happened in the night to Frank?  Frank, in the bed just here.”  The man gestured to the next bed.  Graham felt annoyed at being held on to, but also, he was curious in a fearful way.  If he had avoided talking about the past too much because he was afraid of being drawn into his own thoughts and feelings, he was also fascinated in a repelled sort of way about the future, and what might be happening to him – like the others here.  One day someone would look at the bed he had been sleeping. Until that moment when he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t think, He knew the man was going to say something dreadful about what had happened to Frank in the night. 

Graham had not known Frank, but he knew he would be affected by anything that happened to any of them in his ward.  The man continued in detail.  “It must have been after midnight.  There was a bit of a commotion.  I hadn’t properly got to sleep.”  It came tumbling out.  “Frank looked blue.  He dropped his glass of water on the floor.  There wasn’t that much in it, because I had checked it for him before lights out.”  He seemed jittery as he spoke. Graham did not take any notice. He was waiting of an impending horror, looking at the now empty bed.  “I got hold of the alarm bell and pushed and pushed, because I thought – ‘This is it for Frank’.  The nurse came, the black girl, at the double.  I’ll give her her due.   She was here in a flash, took one look and rang for the trolley team.  She was back in an instant, and we got him flat on the bed and the curtains pulled around.  I held his wrist for her while she rushed off to the clinical room and came back with a trolley full of all the things they use.  I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.”

            Graham made a consoling nodding movement of his head; he knew it had been the sleeping pill.  And he had already anticipated the end of the story and supposed that Frank was dead. There was no stopping the flow of anxious talk that masqueraded as brave assistance to the nurse.  Graham was relieved that at that moment another man strolled up to them, to see what was being talked about in this tense way.  Graham looked up as if help had arrived in the nick of time.  The anxious old man was rattling on and Graham could now fade away, and slide off.  When he had heard enough to be sure of Frank’s final outcome, he extricated himself and left the other two to swap disaster stories.

            He remembered those dead men. They had never been found. There had been a suspicious incident in the Orkneys.  It was suspected that some enemy parachute troops had landed to keep an eye on the navy’s movements.  Six men from the office had been detailed to go up there to support the police investigation, but the plane had disappeared in a storm just off the coast. There had been a lot of speculation. It had prayed on his mind. There had been a quiet man who Graham had begun to feel friendly towards. They had been going together – until Graham’s flu.

            The plane was missing, and there was a strange silence for a day or so. People spoke in hushed tones.  The typewriters clacked away inhumanly.  They had all seemed to come together in spirit, like the coming together of a congregation at the communion service. Rose did most of his work, and she reported to him all the news that there was – very little – or rather she reported to him the lack of news.  After a couple of days, people began openly to talk of the death of their colleagues. They talked of the deaths in war in general.  Rose had lost her father in the First World War, when she had been a very little girl. They would sometimes go for drinks all together after that when the work finished for the day, and the duty office could be on call from the bar.  It was just one evening when most of the people were off for the weekend, and the duty officer had been called back that he and Rose found themselves together again. She had moved along the pub bench to him, “Let’s go down to look at the harbour,” she had said.  Then he too had wanted to get away from the tense atmosphere. It was no good thinking about these morbid things.  So, she had taken him to look at the harbour at night. Quickly he was compelled to excuse himelf.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Eighteen months later, Graham died after a considerable period of great pain.  Rose who had not thought of him for many, many years knew nothing of that timid, blustering man the war had thrown across her path momentarily, who had brushed her arm with such an electric signal to both of them, and who had blushed every day thereafter when they had been in the office together on their own.  She knew nothing of the thoughts he had harboured and puzzled over down the years, the thoughts that had been rekindled by his son’s own unblushing passions.  She knew nothing of the unadmitted wistful longings that the frail glance of her skin against his had coloured his years in between.  She did not know that they had finally been snuffed out in the midst of pain, during which she had been most thought about.  And even if she had known, she would not have remembered that tiny moment that had seemed so natural to her and which had seemed so unnatural to him.  She never knew she had created that moment so that it had lasted in the darkness of his shame for so long.  She would have marvelled at the prolonged memory it had lived in him for so long like an exotic butterfly confined forever to its chrysalis. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dolmades again

 

They remembered their wedding anniversary every year. Her greying hair was given a special sheen.

 

The young girl could pout her cleavage in an unself-conscious way.  She dressed glamorously, and to the point, for all her customers. But it was not her beauty, or not only.  She had an open naivety that charmed without being loud. He later told himself he had fallen in love that first moment she shyly met him.  It was in the manner of frightened modesty, and it plucked his heart right out and gave it to her.  Such a contrast with the wilful demands of his wife.

            The young girl offered massage, that was all. If he asked for more, she made it seem it was her choice.  Her customers adored it.  Probably she was very much younger than his 50 years.  She could have been anything from, say, 17 to 34.  She would never tell him.  He knew it was, in a way, her calculated ploy.  But it worked and he knew it did so.  She did not mind him spending money on her extravagantly.

 

Stuffed vine leaves, four small turds lying tidily next to each other in the supermarket pack.  She transferred them to an equally neat line-up on a plate for the microwave.  ‘A tin of ratatouille,' she called out and he rose on the other side of the kitchen table to inspect the wall cupboard for the required tin.  Obedient and predictable, the lives of these two married 50-year-olds had plaited themselves into one.  'Good,' he called back, as if he anticipated her cuisine with relish. The television buzzed away like a flock of insects, inhabiting the next room; he slouched through and flopped onto the couch agile for his age.  He was slim and well-kept for his 51 years.  She, lithe and elegantly tinted and carefully casual in her dress, she likewise considered herself to be keeping pace with a distinguished ageing. Her use of face cream, highlights in her coiffure, and comfortably tensioned bra reassured her.

            His desultory attention took in the item on black-holes.  Ostensibly it was matter for advertising copy - to be stored in the back of his mind ready for the required moment.

            But he felt momentarily unnerved.  Sucked through into that alternative universe of perfect images he created, he would live dangerously - kindly and predictably supplied on the supermarket shelves.  It was his work to sell, till such shelves emptied, raided by millions of suburban wives, just like his own.  'How about this, he called to her in the kitchen, ' "Sucked through the black hole into a world without caries".  Or, how about, "Sample the world of odour-free breathers" '.

            She went to the hairdressers once a week and was trim beyond belief, she turned heads in their local Tandoori.  There, sexuality was clean and orderly and regulated carefully by her diary.  She disapproved of the libertarian television and had campaigned herself against the drift towards nudity and explicit swearing.  She enjoyed the news, sipping the last part of her single glass of Chianti, because she could tense the corners of her mouth and press her lips into each other at the antics of various criminals, perverts and politicians; at the contradictions they got themselves into, at the low tricks of sportsmen; at the greedy salaries of possessed businessmen.  She lived as if already transposed into that world of oral hygiene and perfectly formed bosoms, without the need to admit to the methods used. Because she believed their income to be suitably modest, she tutted her tongue at the ostentatious Japanese cars of the neighbours.  She could glance at the netted windows of the pseudo-gothic 'villas' and tell simply by her expert intuition where their holidays were booked this year.

            'Darling,' he said, as she pushed the dolmades delicately around her plate, 'where do you want to go this year?  I heard about Delos.  Do you know, nobody is supposed to spend a night there, its a superstition from the ancient world?'  She concentrated on her plate and the screen - 'No point in booking there then,' she replied seriously.  'No,' he said impatiently.  'When I was in Athens on that trip, I heard about it.  You stay on the next island and take trips.'  She responded, simply, 'Oh!' as if in receipt of religious wisdom. Her lips had pursed at the memory of his trip.  He had gone on his own, about his business; and given her a sense of something moving out of her control.

            It was a moral universe she moved in, and expense-account trips, even without his secretary (oh, the thought!) were beyond the pale.  The thought, in fact, was that the male is the weaker sex, easily bent and broken by scheming young women.  In her heart of hearts, she knew he was not that sort of man.  He was loyal to her till the end of time, she knew.

 

When he met the young girl, she was just a tart.  Probably 25 years younger than him.  He was aware of his narrowing shoulders, the wrinkles in his skin like a plastic bag, though being proud he had remained moderately fat-free where these things matter.  He was up in London, the bad city.  The place where money dazzled and corrupted.  He no longer told his wife his earnings; she would have thought him the equivalent of a muscle-bound athlete who took steroids instead of sufficient exercise. Money sloshed around his bank account, like fish in a trawler's hold.  He bought the young girl a flat - for her work!  She had been enthusiastic, she was the best in the business.  She was straight, she had sworn so.  It was massage, the relaxation businessmen needed. There was nothing suspicious, there was good business to be had.  They would be partners.  Her skill, their fees, his investment.  He had allowed himself to be led in.

 

Because it was his own firm, he could pay himself anything, anything at all. He never told her.  The tightly curled and hair-dressed crown was her only luxury she told herself. She scraped for the maid to clean, to do the supermarket shop, to pay for the catering for their social occasions.  She complained at the expense of everything, of profligate comrade shoppers who spent money like water, at extravagant neighbours with their gadgets for gardens and new-registration cars.  She heard these stories of monetary extravagance each week in the hairdresser's, and each week she reported to him, when she had his listening ear.

 

He could pay the girl for her lost earnings, to travel with him - to Rome, to Florence, to Nice.  The girl would always demur, would hesitate and protest, and then come.  She did not worry about being paid to come, like a common courtesan, but it was his intentions that worried her.  She sought her independence; she would take care to keep it intact.  She had her massage business, and paid her bills.  But she had ambitions to wealth, and a life all to herself.  She had perfect features, a slightly enhanced bust, which contrasted with her slender hips.  Massage demanded as much skin exposure as possible.  If her customers wanted to pay for a little extra satisfaction, then she merely thought of her savings at the building society.

 

He was always amazed at the practicality that was involved in intimacy: his wife's careful hygiene, this girl's pecuniary ambitions.  The girl sought fame and money as a squirrel its winter harvest.

 

He sought intimacy with beauty.  He had the money to buy it, but he lacked the glamour to inspire the girl away from her pedestrian ambitions.

            The girl came on a couple of trips with him. Florence - his wife had said she had seen it before; there were the children too (though grown-up now) to look after.  The girl by contrast was impressed.  The hotel overlooked the fiume Arno, it was beside the Uffizi gallery.  But she enjoyed the shops.  Already in her mind she was getting rich on importing to London, the fabulous leather goods - buying there and selling in London.  Her own trips to Florence.  She gave him his pleasure in bed for the cost of the expenses, and she believed then her debts were paid.  Without wishing it, her unmoved independence inflamed his devotion to her perfect beauty.  Though he knew she did not feel the same - perhaps because of it - the whole relationship was much less complicated than with his wife.  It was simply wants and needs.  Guilt and obligations faded out.  That's why he pursued it.  And pursue it he did.  His wife's practical concentration on house and garden, above all garden, allowed him to dream his dreams of a new life, a new world, a new universe - a passage through the looking-glass, the universe beyond.

 

He spent most of his time with his wife.  They gardened sometimes at weekends.  She enjoyed friends on Saturday evenings, the flourish of supermarket bottles of wine, the fashionable book of recipes, the cut-glass candelabra for the table which they had bought on their honeymoon in Venice twenty years ago.  He liked the fuss around him of housekeeping, the regularity of the chores with the washing-machine, putting out the bin-bags, watering the geraniums.  They talked forever about why the exuberant wisteria never flowered.

            Like all designers he believed his job to be a creative one, yet a hazy satisfaction always clouded his thoughts about his job as he rushed hurriedly to complete everything. Without knowing it, he sensed the looking-glass world beyond the darkened edges of his routines. 

 

Is that why the young girl had been hastened into his life?  The need to stop for relaxation, her insistent line to allow himself to be 'treated like a king', the obvious good sense of entrusting his tensioned body to massage.

            She was an 'ingenue', unread, and deferential; and also a planning and determined woman in business.  It was the contradiction of her near-perfect beauty, her musical laugh, and her spontaneous pleasure in the complements she was always getting, together with the gut-clenching despair of her situation. It was when, as is familiar, a recession came, spare money disappeared, and novelty became a premium in her profession, her profits slipped away.  Her contribution to their expenses began to slip away too, at first without telling him. He was suddenly faced with covering bills that were late, responding to a letter threatening the court.  He was jolted by her lack of response.  She became clogged and not innovatory.  He had always relied on imagination, a flair for the new - and indeed the young girl might herself have been just such a venture for him.  She on the other hand relied on perseverance, sticking to what she knew and had always done. 

      Her customers faded to a trickle.  Money, her route to perfect independence and acclaim, was closing itself off, into an abject reliance on him.  She became depressed, though her beauty never suffered.  She inhabited great expanses of silence; her features seemed to waste away, like a torn artery.  Her indebtedness mounted, a growing obstacle to her cherished aloneness.

            Here, it seemed, was a man in love with a girl like a dream; but he was tied to the dull loyalty to his wife and her morality. There, she seemed, the young girl, her independence of spirit cruelly broken; and he could set her going only heaping her with the one thing she wished to avoid - her reliance on his money. Could he abandon domestic loyalty and reach through the looking-glass reflection - beyond that black-hole and grasp his true love?  Could she, the young girl, abandon her dreams, and greet the obligations of being supplied by the money she needed to use?

            Little by little he edged towards this crux-of-the-matter.  It was a one-way tug-of-war, as she said so little, week after week.  He nudged forwards.  Where he was aimong, in slow motion, was that he and she both gave up something.  It is symmetry, his dependence - on his wife, suburbia, regularity; hers on independence, her talents turned to gold.  In exchange he would have the girl he loved and she the money.  Her morose posture, sank in an inelegant, crumpled armchair, spoke indifferently.  Her delicate perfect mouth never moved, the shock of black luxuriant hair was as soft and untouchable as a wig.  If she could slump more, without movement, she did so.  Then gathering her energy into her long legs, she would suddenly rise out of the chair, and clack her way across the parquet floor, to return to him with a cheap brown envelope.  “It's all I've got for you,” she said in an expert bland apology and indifference.  “But,” he spluttered, as she put it into his hand and he glanced inside at a then wadge of notes, “but you can't afford it, can you?” She was suddenly sitting down again, and she answered flatly, “No.”  She resumed her dejection, “It's only two.”

            Two hundred pounds - he checked.  It was awkward.  The sum meant nothing to him, hardly noticeable.  Yet it was a huge generosity for her.  He imagined her foregoing meals, walking the miles home.... He pocketed the envelope, “You're a good person.”  He tried to match the generosity.  “Well. I've got to pay my debts.  Try to....” and tailed off in a kind of hopeless struggle - not so much the generosity, he saw more of her determined self-reliance.  He wanted to gather her up in his arms, a helpless doll, and reassure her that it was alright, he could take care of everything.  Yet, he knew, that was just what she did not want to happen to her. She preferred her miserable independence to comfort and a worry-free life tied to him.  He felt momentarily frantic about how to help.  Then he looked at her prominent cleavage she always arranged for those stay-away customers she waited for - you tart, he thought.  It made him feel less responsible.

 

In the night, he changed his view.  His prim and wooden wife sleeping silently next to him never moved.  The girl could be won around, he was sure.  If he gave her enough freedom whilst possessing her; if they lived in their flat whilst she went wherever she wanted with whoever she wanted, to do whatever they wanted.  She would probably say, yes.  Wouldn't she?

            He was driven. Always to her.

            After weeks of regular visits, talking to her fractured spirit, but it brought no answer.  Sometimes for distraction, she put on the TV, a tale from the sensational press.  Sometimes an occasional small repayment of debt.

            This young beauty needed to be told, not asked, given instructions on her part to play - selling the flat, handling the business issues for him, whilst he tied up the loose ends of marriage career, friendships.  He would tell his wife last of all, when the air-tickets were bought, when the apartment became ready in Rome (where all the most elegant women are taken and celebrated, he said).

            Compliantly she did as she was told.  But her indifference, her lack of curiosity remained an impenetrable screen, a looking glass painted over with no reflection, no response.  It was simply the case that as she had subsided into anguished inertia, he must make the moves and bring her along to salvation.  She had not even been to see the rather spacious apartment he had found in the Via Sardegna, near the Villa Borghese.  She knew nothing of the lucrative way he had wound up his affairs, even though he used their flat as his accommodation address.  There were multiple copyrights to assign internationally, he had to sustain his portfolio, or sell the sub-interest.  Instead, she had insisted on manning her own station to the end.  In fact, she had never once, categorically, in so many words, said she would be coming on this rescue plan.  It was only late on that he even heard about her young child.

 

Up to the day in question, he had not told his wife.  The secret acts of making-ready had - perhaps unfortunately - been too successfully secret. So far as he could tell, she knew nothing of his fevered and methodical planning.  On the day in question, he rose earlier than usual.  He had to be awake and prepared and seize hold of the opportunity over breakfast.  He waited, normally he would have left home before 8 for work, but he waited on till 9. She had still not left her bedroom. He realised that he had no idea when she normally got up.  At 11, he had arranged to pick up the young girl, and her baggage, including the daughter. To his surprise when his wife came down the stairs and into the breakfast room, she was red faced, her nose dribbled and she was carrying a half-empty bottle of vodka.  She was equally surprised to see him still in the house.  Despite being already drunk, she reacted with guilt and embarrassment.  But that quickly changed to a defiant fury, and she told him to get out of the house.  He retorted in his discomposure by rattily shouting that he was going away anyway, triumphantly as if winning some argument.

            'Go - for good!' she flung at his back.  And he went, his two remaining suitcases stowed already in the boot of his car.  They had never exploded in such a row before.

            It was not the parting he had imagined.

            He drove slowly, depositing the keys of their flat at the agents for a sale when they had done their work.  And then he got lost on his way to the anonymous district where the young girl lived.  He was late when he eventually approached the spot she had told him to pick her up. There she stood, a huge floppy grip on the pavement beside her.  He had known she would come.  A curious sense of completion overcame him.  He felt a kind of paralysis.  As she had never ridden in his car, she did not recognise it edging down the High Street amidst the traffic.  There was nowhere he could possibly have stopped where she had said.  And he glided by with a frozen stare, in his suddenly blank and automatic eyes.  But the child beside her noticed.  The little daughter, perhaps 6, had never seen her mother's friend, so she did not understand this man's stare.  Her small blue eyes merely stared back at the wooden expression in the unknown car.

            His car carried him on the flow of traffic, leaving behind the impossible choice he thought he had made.

 

The vodka bottle was empty when he arrived back; his wife incoherent.

Not bloody dolmades again.  Ever since that Greek restaurant they had gone to with Chuck and Babs, she had thought it chic and aspired to go continental.  The supermarket packet called them 'stuffed vine-leaves'.  For those who did not know the Greek word.  And the packet announced a 'meal for two' - that is, for each one of them, there were two thready black fingers looking cold and unspeakable in their plastic tray.  She asked him for a tin of ratatouille from the cupboard above his head. She liked him sitting in the kitchen watching him work away at the supper for them both.  That way she could feel in charge, and also rather generous, feeding and providing.  Then she told him to go and watch the television.  Because he was a designer, in advertising, she knew he liked to watch the commercials and pinch their ideas for his work.

            There was a slick documentary, sliding in between announcing sensations, and giving information.  Through a black hole, and out the other side is a new universe, a looking-glass image, where light is rays of darkness, and energy is weight.

            He could use such images.  Sucked through the hole, a bit like a tunnel, into the intimate perfection of the glossy world he sold.  His was the job of an interstellar travel agent pushing people through their tunnel of love to paradise.  “How about this?” he called to her distant bustling in the kitchen, “Sucked through the hole into the world without caries.”  He felt satisfied with his idea, hopeful of her polite admiration.  "Graphics - I think black-and-white graphics of a mouth with teeth, and a hole in one of them.  You see.  The mouth sucks, and you are squeezed through the slithery hole into a glitzy world of colour.  Toothbrushes going in and out of mouths just like the hole.”

            It seemed so easy.  Another storyboard to write up tomorrow.  But right now, he was beamed through into his housewifely wife's dream world.  Dolmades and chips. Her trimness of body, her purity of mind, her weekly visit to the hairdresser, who trimmed her and purified her tints.  She turned women's heads in the local Tandoori Indian.  The expense of her bloomed hair made her careful in bed, and planned by her calendar to be trim.  Often she would go happily from an explicit programme on television, to wipe away the perfume and powder from her shocked cheeks, and turn her stern back towards her husband.  The evidence that sex was a national habit made her do her bit in defiance. He was deferential.  Without disagreeing with her, he knew that he would have a harder job if adverts did without body-parts.  One step even worse for her was the evidence day after day of money and greed that sickened her, she said.  She watched the news, her sensitive nostrils alert for the cupidity of businessmen lining their offshore pockets, a category of human that she associated with criminals and assassins, the dishonesty of politicians and the unsportsmanship of sportsmen.  All for personal gain and unworthy worldly riches.  She aspired, and claimed. a higher moral universe sharply outlined by oral hygiene, starched styles of dresses, a hairdresser’s curlers and not too up-to-date technology. 

            She could never have guessed the income he made. She could never have done so as it would have shamed her; and restricted all those sharp comments about the neighbours for flaunting incomes in their garden furniture, cars and ready-to-erect house extensions.  But they flaunted only a tiny version of what he could if he had wanted, and she had known. 'Darling,' he asked her, as she sat next to him whilst they watched the adverts over their individual plastic trays, 'we could go to Barbados this year.'  Her body managed to freeze at this suggestion without actually moving. She had remembered a trip of his, something to do with bathing costumes.  He had to write a line 'a one-piece sunshine' - though in the end it had not been used.  He had gone on his own - as if out of the grip of her control.  She had imagined hot brown tropical girls in Barbados getting in and out of bathing costumes in front of him.  Despite this gripe and disapproval, which she felt in the bottom of her abdomen, she knew he was in fact a faithful husband.  “Here, I am,” he would say, “my heart full of love. Feel it.” And he stroked her back prominently placed facing him on the other side of the bed   He would always make it humorous – “What do I get - a boney backbone in my face!!”  She might roll over and look witheringly at him, in the dark.  Sometimes she would clutch her pale winceyette nightie to her throat and let him kiss her on the cheek, perhaps on the side of her neck.  “Good job I'm turned on by that backbone.  Not many chaps have a thing about backbones.” She liked to be kissed below her ear, happily turning back wrapped in  safety inside her winceyette.  He was a good man, she believed, he never demanded more than he should.  He however would thank her, and inwardly curse - either her, his wife, or the tingling in his loins.

Thinking as he did, about his generation, when they were young.  Death seemed a faraway intruder, one that came as an unnecessary misfortune to those who did not take care.  His own carelessness, with car-driving, diet, sport and drugs, did not come into his calculations then.  It was satisfactorily beyond so many intervening milestones it could to all intents and purposes be discounted.

But his generation reached middle-age, though no-one quite said so. No-one got up one morning and said: This is it; middle-age today.  Birthdays simply came and went without stopping, like an inter-city train passing through featureless country halts without a glance.  Little noticeable signs: worries about the children's schooling, creaking joints, grandchildren, snapshots of forgotten holidays; were nonvocal messages, straws that were not yet the last one, nor even quite the penultimate. Early retirements came and, as everyone says, life got busier.  Everyone says so to prove that life's energy is getting stronger - not weaker.

            Now weaker, the buffers at the terminus are reaching forward for the express train.  It is no longer his generation, the wise pundits on TV, the politicians, the psycho-journalists are now a new generation.  There are those few of us still left, and who can still move our limbs, who now and again meet, almost irrelevant to the jungle of new life going on around us.  There is a new friend for each of us, death itself.  We find, at last, that it has been an old friend for as long as any of us can remember.  It reaches out to us, generously.  It feels like a mother's embrace.

            Oh.  The long trail of life behind.  It is never the same.  As we advance, we change perspective and the world glows differently from beyond.  The cold world gets warmer, the further we advance to look back.  Or, the warm patches merge.  The past glows in an unexpected satisfaction now.  That time of the missed turning, has become a curiosity about the unknown, a what-might-have-been luxury; no longer a regret. 

 

I wonder how she sees it still.

Perhaps being younger, maybe 20 years and more, I never knew her actual age.  That coyness contributed to her miraculousness.  Perhaps being younger she has not reached that mellow glow where all of the past is interesting and everything that happened was, at worst, a novelty, at best a deep profundity.

            All the men around her adored her.  Pat - what an ordinary name for such an out of the ordinary girl.  Entirely wrapped up in her own beauty she was staggeringly oblivious to all that adoration: “Men, I could have them all week, she would say”.  It was true.  What did she want?  What did she think she wanted?  I knew the answer to both.  And I knew - I alone knew they were different.  What she wanted and what she thought she wanted did not match - and that was her problem indeed.  I knew this cleft in her, and that is why I had my opportunity.  The dividing of the ways in my life.  I plunged for it, straight through to the other universe that stood as if in darkness inside her waiting for me.  Because of my knowledge, my study of her, I could have married her. She never fully understood why I had that power - nor why I never in the end did ask her, why I left her to the other one - the property dealer who offered her the money she wanted, she thought she did.  He was a nice well-meaning chap, who she never understood.  Just as I too, was a mystery for her - why I adored her.

            Those questions: she thought she wanted money. That was the key she sought to make her life free.  Poor, voluptuously Mediterranean, largely unschooled intelligence she sought her freedom in material advantages - and her graciously magnetic body was the means to winning her entry into her other universe.  The world of money her universe, her body was the means.  That was what she wanted.  Her customers the vehicles that would journey her through the stars to the other world.  But I knew something different; I knew it was the very adoration, the hugs, consoling - and that meant the attentions of devoted people.  Without her understanding it, I could use my knowledge, play on the neediness she forbade.  What rotten trick I played!  Don't you think so?

            I had met her in the street. Literally.  It was at the Notting Hill carnival.  She had got separated from the others in her party.  I was looking for ideas, for faces to match that I could buy and transform.  She was mildly anxious, asking strangers.  So, I had taken her, in my fatherly style, on a protective search.

 

I had been so afraid that there would be nowhere to stop to pick her up that day. But sunshine shone, and she stepped into my car with her soft grip full of her beauty-instruments, and like the sunshine she smiled brighter than she had ever done. Rome beckoned. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three – Kinky Sorts

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Never too old

 

It was not exactly being and feeling old that made me self-conscious or even embarrassed. It was different. I could quite easily accept a seat in a bus given up by someone younger, or I could sit happily in my rocking chair watching television for an evening. What made me self-conscious was that I had sometimes, quite often, the feelings that went way back to my adolescent years. I still had those feelings that were difficult to control then, and difficult to control even now. When I walk down the street there were, sometimes, even quite often, young women who looked nice, who made a point of looking nice. They were not in my view tarts, but merely women who liked to look nice and who liked to be noticed – discretely of course. And I would notice them, discretely; and I would wonder if they noticed me. And did they think it was nice to be noticed by me? Or would they think I was a lecher, or that they should be aware of me as a creepy old man, a potential abuser? Did they think that they had to be careful about looking nice and who they looked nice for? I knew there was nothing to be afraid of in myself. I had not had a physical fight with anyone since I was about age ten at my junior school. But strangers suspect the worst, don’t they?

            There was little I could do. I knew the women who I noticed were in the thirty to forty age range and quite out of my reach being twice their age, or whatever. I thought that having money and being generous with it, might counteract some of the reaction to my age. And indeed, I was in a position to be quite generous. I had a bit of wealth and very little to spend it on. But in a brief passing in the street, those advantages could not be made manifest in a moment. I sighed. I knew what I was tempted to do. And I knew I could disgrace myself. I had remained all my life impelled to surrender to my lesser and adolescent self.

            No, I did not accost the women I noticed in the street. I knew that would get nowhere. In the present time, there were always ways of finding playmates, even for grand old oldies. But no-one these days plays the desperate adolescent; they are all so free about sex. None of them pant with unfulfilled fantasies that fill the occasional nights of insomnia. My days now in retirement from a medical practice seem to be endless and I spend my time trying to keep fit by walking the dog and treading up and down stairs and by doing kitchen duty for the untidy wife. I had always read a lot and visited the library a fair bit. I sometimes took my laptop there to compose letters to the national newspapers about current affairs. I had quite a line on all those prejudices that liked to separate good from bad into groups staring each other down. I rarely found my letters actually published. In fact, over the years there was only one which was accepted, and which I had cut out and stuck on the fridge door with a small magnet. It was about the narrowness of aeroplane seats when the person next to you is twenty-five stone. You see the prosaic panorama of my life. 

But one day I was sitting at a desk in the library, musing on those newspaper outrages of the day, when I noticed one of the lady assistants at the check-out booth. She was not one of those women who tripped along the pavement in her high-heels inviting the notice of young men. In fact, rather the opposite. She was probably nearer fifty, or perhaps more, and wearing a dull cotton blouse and baggy dark trousers. Not particularly noticeable, not for a raw adolescent mind like mine. But I did notice her. She had lost a button on the front of her blouse and frequently and embarrassingly she pulled the gap in the blouse together. But occasionally it showed a hint of a black lace brassiere, before her shy hand concealed it again. I was intrigued, partly because the bra looked a lot more interesting than the ordinariness of the outer clothing. It was also intrusively intimate to catch a glimpse even only now and again. I tried not to look as though I were staring at her embarrassment. But I had become intrigued.

A few days later when I was again sitting in the library, I noticed the same woman with a different blouse, slightly different colour but not so different as to be noticeable. I decided. When there was nobody in the queue to take out books I went across with a query.

“Do you have any books in the library by P. Reage,” I asked innocently.

“She smiled politely at my request and enquired, “What was the name again. Ray Arge, did you say?” And she turned to the computer ready to type in the name.

“Reage,” I said, and spelled it out. “It’s a French name.

She turned to me again and smiled. “I don’t think we would have anything in French here.” She seemed to feel she was disappointing me and smiled again to make up for it.

“No. I am sure the book has been translated into English.”

“Do you know the title of the book?” And she turned back to the computer ready to check the title in the catalogue.

“The Story of O,” I said innocently.

She was about to type it in, but she stopped and clearly she had heard of it. “You mean that book which is….” She stopped and her face went a little tense, not smiling. And a revealing blush came.

“Yes,” I said, not needing to say more.

“Oh, I don’t think we would have a book like that.” And she added rather incongruously, “You mean like that ‘shades of grey’ book?” I knew I’d embarrassed her. Which was just as I had intended, It’s a public library,” she added.

I went back to my laptop on the desk trying to look downcast and disappointed. But I was secretly pleased to have had such an interesting impact on her. When I looked up she was staring at me, and as she saw me look, the blush came back. I thought that she is someone who will remember me. When I had done my musing for the morning, I left the library, passing her station, and on an impulse I went towards her and said, “I don’t suppose you would care to come and have lunch with me one day?”

She looked up surprised and seeing me, gave one of her smiles. When she realised a moment later the embarrassing book I had asked for, she suddenly looked surprised and her smile changed from professional to a much warmer one. And then she said, “Lunch one day?” She then looked completely confused and in a major conflict whether to say yes or no.

I said, adding my own smile, “I think I’ll take that as a yes.”

She stared blankly, and I found her shyness quite charming. It seemed good to have an impact on someone, even someone unprepossessing. “But I don’t have a lunch break here.” And then she corrected herself. “I mean I only work mornings. I go home at one.”

“OK, Come for lunch, then.”

She seemed to be getting her surprise and confusion under control. “Just for lunch,” she enquired.

“Well, I said, cheekily, “what else?”

She shook her head, “Can’t be too careful, these days.” She was beginning to join me in my light-heartedness. And I had the immediate feeling she would agree to a lunch together. In fact, we arranged it for the next week.

Strangely and foolishly, I felt nervous before we met. But on the dot when we both arrived at the restaurant at exactly the same time, I felt very calm, and resigned in a hopeful sort of way about what would happen. Firstly, to say, the meal was not very good. But that did not matter because the conversation was. And I left satiated. I was pretty sure she did too. She gave me smiles most of the time, in all the varieties possible, from happily complemented to cheekily teasing. I opened the proceedings by telling her to choose whatever she wanted from the menu. And she did, though the menu was not very extensive or thrilling. I then began to start our purpose of getting to know each other. “Do you often pick up men and get them to take you to lunch.”

She then smiled ruefully, “Not often enough.”

“I wonder what would be enough?” 

She shook her head, and said, bluntly, “I don’t mind if you tease me. It could be quite nice. But let’s just do the normal things to get to know each other. I’ll start. I work mornings at the library, and then fetch a couple of grandchildren from their nurseries in the afternoons. I used to be a schoolteacher. For twenty-five years.” I was nodding my head with interest. “I think I was burned out. So I went to the Open University to do a degree in psychology. I am wondering whether to do a doctorate, now.”

I was impressed. There was a lot more inside the rather dowdy external experience she dressed in – as I had spotted. “I retired from being a doctor some years ago, Fiona,” I said as we had just exchanged names.”

“Really, Alan.” She looked impressed.

But I quickly added. “I’ve more or less forgotten about all that. I enjoyed it. But the learning and the routines, they all seemed like a continuation of doing exams when I was kid.”

She was nodding just as I had done. “What did you want to do when you retired?”

“I didn’t know then. I wanted to grow up, I suppose. But I also told myself I had made a good contribution to the world by looking after people. I treated skin diseases. A specialist in dermatology, it is called.” She nodded, but her question about my retirement was a good one. And I had never had to formulate a clear answer to someone else. “I retired simply because my pension became due. Why would I go on? But I didn’t know what would come next.” I went on to tell her where I lived in our town, and that I had been married. “But although we live in the same house sleep in the same bed, we aren’t really married.” I looked her in the eye, “Sexually, I mean.” I kept looking, and she looked back into mine.

She opened her mouth to say something and then paused, but eventually said, “Is that what you want from me?” But she changed the subject – back to matter-of-fact things, where she lived, the problem with her car which might have made her late for our ‘date’. But she kept looking at me in a curious way as if she was trying to say something that wouldn’t come out. Then she told me, “I am married too. Also, our sex is good.” She looked enquiringly at me. And then shook her hair out of her face and looked across the restaurant as if dismissing what she’d said. “Well it’s good for him. I know about good sex for men.” And she stopped as if there was a lot unspoken that would be obvious.

“It looks, Ginny, as if we might converge in some ways.”

She nodded, “I am a fantasist, Alan.”

This struck a question I wanted to ask, and I thought about putting it carefully, and at last said, “Is that why you blushed when I mentioned The Story of O?” Perhaps I was not careful enough because she blushed again, bright and all across her cheeks and neck. “I am sorry. You are blushing again. I shouldn’t poke my nose in so deep, should I?”

“It’s OK, don’t worry about that. It is just that I wonder what you will think of me. I never know what to think of myself.”

I paused a moment to question myself on what I did think. The Story of O is extremely erotic. This woman had already brought up sex. Could she be as frantically adolescent as me? What a thought! “I’m OK with all that. I read the book when I had just left school. It has stuck in my mind all the time ever since. It is very sexy isn’t it.” She nodded at me, but looked at her plate on the table. I continued, “Perhaps we’re both fantasists.” 

“I may regret what I am going to say,” she spoke carefully and slowly. “We don’t always have to be fantasists, Alan.” And she put her hand out and laid it gently on my arm which was leaning on the table between us. Now I wondered if it was me who might be blushing. She wasn’t, she was quite pale. Her lips were fixed in a sort of dead smile now. I wished we were somewhere I could have taken her tightly in my arms and crushed her with a passionate hug. But we were not in such a place. So, instead, I took her hand and pressed it against my lips with affection and held it there longer than was needed and I didn’t want to let it go. It looked as if there might be a tear coming into her eyes. Eventually she pulled her hand away and we moved back as the waitress took away our plates in an unceremonious gesture. A second waiter brought our two glasses of wine, and the main course came. We neither of us spoke for ten minutes or more as we silently ate our meals. When mine was finished I emptied my wine-glass quickly in a nervous gulp. She sipped slowly but continuously and looked steadily at me. Then she mouthed, with a faint whisper, “Not Alan, but René.”

I felt awkward at her provocatively casting me in the role of René who I knew had been the lover of O and had enslaved O in the story. “You flatter me.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did you enjoy O being hurt?”

She looked steadily at me, “I don’t know,” and then with a flick of her head again so that her short hair waved as in a breeze. “I’d have to be in love.” There was a pause. She was obviously thinking things over. Then she went back to the safety of being a librarian. “It’s a much better book than that ‘Fifty shades,”

“I haven’t read it. You can read it to me.” But I wasn’t going to be distracted into that diversion. “We can take it gently.” She nodded again and looked down at her plate, smiling, as if occupied with some thoughts about the topic. I was looking at her now-sad guileless expression. “I’m sorry we hardly know each other, do we?”

“I have to get to the nursery, for the little ones.” 

“Yes, you do. I’ll take you.”

“No I need to take the car to fetch them.”

I was disappointed it was over, and wondered about suggesting another date, “Well, Ginny, I will pursue you. Until you change your mind.”

She looked up, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Good.” I got up and went over to the bar to pay. We were silent as we left. It seemed a bad note to part on. In the street, I put my hand on her shoulder and as she turned towards me, I kissed her passionately on her mouth, tongue and all. In that moment something had changed in the world; the world had changed. In a minute or two, I pulled back to six inches away from her face, and to my own surprise I said. “You are mine. The kiss has sealed it.” But I felt like a fifteen year old, snatching his first kiss with a girl.

“I’m yours,” she whispered, and sank her head on my shoulder. “Don’t hurt me too much.”

“I’ll be able to judge how far you can go.” I said, and she shivered. That was a better note to part on.

Three days later it was the weekend. She was in the library for the morning. I sat at the same  desk gazing at her. She rarely looked in my direction. Saturday was a busy day. She left at 1 pm as usual. I followed her out of the door, and she kept her back to me. She mumbled, “I don’t want to be seen together by the others.” She meant her colleagues in the library. So I crossed the road and began to walk slowly to the corner. I saw she was following me on the other side of the road. After I turned the corner, she crossed the road and came up to me. I did not stop, but said, “You don’t have to get to the nursery today,” as if it was a decision of mine. “Ring your husband and tell him you have to work this afternoon as it is busy in the library.”

We stopped walking and without a word she did what I had said. When she had done, I said, “I know exactly what we will do.” She did not say a word but walked with me. I wanted to put my arm on her shoulder to make her feel safe. But I also wanted her to feel slightly unsafe. When we got to my car, I told her to get in. As I started off, I said, “There’s a sex shop in the next town. Have you ever been there?” 

She shook her head and then looked at me. “Are we going to get something.”

“I’m going to get something.”

She seemed nervous. “What is it. Is it a cane?”

I looked at her and smiled as if she had guessed right. But actually, I said, “No. Not this time.” She did not smile. She was not enjoying this. So I stopped the car and told her to get out whilst I got out too. I walked around and gave her a very enveloping hug. “You are lovely. I will never harm what we are developing here.” I could feel her body relax.

“Sorry.” And she hesitated but went on. “I hardly know you. I hardly know what you want to do with me.”

“I know. It is what you like, right? But it is frightening. I’m sure. I won’t say ‘don’t worry’. But we will build up a most wonderful relationship together. I think I know that. You are right, you don’t know me, and fantasies are one thing, but this is not fantasy anymore.” Her head was on my shoulder. My lips were in her hair. “From today, I want you to let your hair grow. For as long as it will.”

She looked up into my face, and asked rather unnecessarily, “You like long hair?”

“I like your hair long for me. For me.”

“OK.” And then, “I feel better now.”

“If you want, we can stop for a cup of tea and get to know each other a little better.”

“It’s OK,” she said seriously, “I’m getting to know you. I like being hugged when I’m nervous.”

I got back into the car. She hesitated and then got in too. I explained we have a cottage in the country, but only I use it. When I want to get away from the old house and the old marriage for a day or two. I said we’d go there when we’ve been to the shop. 

When we entered, I went over to the shop assistant to ask where they kept what I wanted. I saw Ginny was looking distractedly at the hooks and shelves with the crops and whips. I asked her if she wanted one of them.

She said, “If you do.”

“Pick which one you’d like,” and I saw she’d taken one made of wicked bamboo. 

She looked at me and said with a cruel look, “Actually it might be me that gives you a few with this.”

“Not unless I say so.” We laughed quietly in the silent shop. And then I pointed to the racks of garments and told her which to choose, and get the right size for her.

We drove on, not saying much. But she did say in an amused voice, “So you like those shiny kinky clothes?”

“If you wear them for me.” She smiled as if to herself, as if she was learning about me. 

When we arrived at the little cottage, she hesitated to get out, wondering what was going to happen to her. “Just tell me,” she asked, “will we be staying long? Overnight?”

“No. It will be a little play. A gentle play.” 

She nodded, “Thanks.” I unlocked and we went in. She looked around at the cosy small room, as if she had expected it to be fitted out like a prison. 

I told her to sit in one of the comfortable chairs, and I sat in the other opposite her. “I have not brought any milk for a cap of tea.”

She looked mischievous, as if going to tell me off, but thought better and remained silent.

“Please stand up.” She looked surprised and curious as I had only just told her to sit. But she did stand. “Please take all your clothes off.” She stood for a moment before taking her clothes off slowly. She was very practical and showed no sensuality or erotism in her emerging nudity. She stood naked in front of me. I felt very moved. No woman had ever obeyed me like that. 

And there she stood. I felt like a fifteen-year-old who couldn’t believe his girl-friend really wanted to give herself. “You have got the most fantastic curves, there,” I said. She didn’t move; she remained expressionless. Her hands were clutched in front of her crotch. I said with huge emphasis, “You are beautiful. I can’t believe how beautiful you are, Ginny.” She hardly moved but I thought there was a tear or two coming to her eyes, Tears of thanks and pleasure. Her hands unclutched and she spread her arms away from her body as if inviting me in. I gazed; and she stood enjoying being gazed at. Perhaps she had never been seen as a goddess of beauty before.

I leaned forward and stretched out my hand to touch the smooth skin of her thigh with the knuckle of my forefinger. She watched my touch. “Beautiful,” I mumbled, more to myself now, shocked and confused. 

“Now,” I said when I was a little recovered, Put on the black garment we bought.

“Where is it?” And she looked at me enquiring. I did not move but stared at her. My finger moved away from her thigh back to my lap. She kept looking at me. “It’s not still in the car, is it?” I said nothing. “I’ll have to put some clothes on.” She remained looking at me as if requesting permission. But I did not move. “You don’t want me to go out into the road like this?” And she stared challengingly at me. 

I said one word, “Obedience.” She looked away from me, as if in defeat. Slowly she moved towards the door of the cottage. She really would do that for me. She opened the door and was about to take her nakedness out into the bright afternoon sunshine. “Come here,” I suddenly said. And she came back across the room and stood in front of me as I sat in my chair still leaning forward. She was so close. This time I put the tip of my finger on the soft curve of her tummy, feeling the wondrous touch of it. I slid the finger down towards the hairs above her thighs. She let me do so without moving. “Go and shut the door.” She did as I told her, slowly but without hesitation. She knew I had wanted to test her obedience, and she had passed  the test. “I brought it in. It is in the packet behind the chair you were sitting in.” She looked across the room. Her relief was so palpable. “Put it on.”

She went over to find the garment, the slick black catsuit. It was difficult to put on with only a small zip in the back. I watched her slender limbs struggling. Her curves looked irresistible, the soft flesh almost edible. I knew that in a moment I could stroke every inch of that incomparable vision I was watching. She was finding it difficult and began to feel defeated. She looked over at me to see if I would come and help. I did not move. “Obedience,” I said, as before. So she continued her struggle. Finally, when she had arranged herself in it, and had managed the zipper at the back, she came and stood in front of me again. So close. I let my amazement shine from my face. She smiled, the first smile since she had been in the cottage.

“So you are pleased with yourself, “I said.

After a moment, she said, “Yes,”

“I am pleased with you too. I can’t describe how very pleased with you.” Her smile stayed on her lips. The black material was tight over all her body to her neck, and down to her wrists and ankles. “It is a fetish for me.” I had never seen a woman so blended with such a strokable material. And here she was, inches near to me. I pointed to a door in the corner of the room and told her it was a staircase to the bedroom above. “There is a long mirror in the bedroom. Look at yourself and admire what you see. And look at the image with my eyes that can only see wonder. When you have seen that wonder you have created, that wonder that you are, go and lie on the bed and wait for me. She moved barefoot with grace. I Think she felt herself the image of grace as I saw her; and disappeared up to the bedroom. After a few minutes I heard the bed creak. I lay back in the chair and sighed. It almost felt like a lifetime’s satisfaction compressed into the afternoon. 

I waited for her to compose herself  and relax. And me too. I waited some twenty minutes for her to consider what came next. I left her to think what an image she created, what an amazement she was for me, what a silly old fool I was. Whatever…. 

Eventually when I felt sufficiently relaxed, my eagerness undiluted but sufficiently controlled, I trod slowly up the stairs. She was indeed lying sprawled on the bed. Her head turned, and she watched me. Was she curious what I would want? Was she frightened? Did she know which? “One day, Ginny, you must teach me how to describe this wondrous moment you have given me.” I lay down on the bed beside her. She didn’t know whether to stroke me with the soft vinyl of her body or let me stroke her. I told her to come on top of my body, her legs on my legs, her arms on mine, her lips on my lips. We kissed softly. The passion grew in her, but I kept mine still restrained. Nevertheless, I placed my arms around her silken body slowly feeling the warmth of her curves and her softness. I stroked and stroked her sides as she writhed with excitement. I felt the strong urges inside her, inside her tight garment. She smoothed herself all over me. I told her to find me inside my flies, and she unzipped and her kind hand felt for me there. She drew out my penis and then my balls. I told her to put me in her mouth. As she slid down my body she said she had never done this before. I said it was easy if she followed my instructions. She was eager to do so. And so was I.

I was excited but, as expected, my old-man equipment was slow to work. And I knew what I’d do anyway. I told her that now is the big moment. “Undo the belt of my trousers and pull it free. She was clearly unaccustomed to men’s clothing, but she managed it in the end. She looked serious as she handed it to me. She lay back on my body and looking into my face a few inches below hers. I said a little unkindly, “This is the moment you’ve dreamed about.” She dropped her face on my chest in a resigned manner. “Look at me.” I ordered.

She looked up, and our eyes locked. “No,” she said quietly, knowing what I was about to do. She knew I’d take no notice of her ‘no’. With my hands behind her back, I doubled the belt over, and feeling her gorgeous round buttocks with my left hand, I swung the doubled belt at them. I couldn’t see but it landed somewhere in the right pace on her backside. Her face took on an urgent surprised look and her mouth opened. No cry came out. In fact, her breath had stopped momentarily. She gasped, and her head flailed up and down on my chest a couple of times as a tide of pain swept over her.

“Look at me.” She looked back into my eyes. “Not so bad?” I asked. She shook her head as if I could not possibly know. I felt for the other buttock, and I thrashed the belt down on it. Her head flew back and forth and her eyes seemed as though they couldn’t see for a moment as the feeling charged through her body and took all her attention. A short cry came from her mouth. “You are beautiful,” I said. “Never forget it.” And then I said, “Kiss me.” She had to slide up my body a little to get her lips onto mine. She held on to the kiss. Perhaps she thought that I would delay the next stroke. But I felt for the first buttock and thrashed it. Her mouth jerked off mine. Her faced grimaced. And quickly I did the second buttock. Her whole body writhed a little on top of me. The feeling of her tense body and the tension of the silky, shiny garment was wondrous and knowing the pain that must be in her seemed the opposite, an agony for me too. I was torn. Why did I need to do this to her. And to myself. Because I enjoy the agony in her face, and she’ll enjoy the memory, over and over again.

I thrashed again, and she still refused to cry out. “That’s five.”

She was rigid with tension and the anticipation of another one. I stroked her tightly-clad body and felt it soft beneath the surface. I stroked every part of her I could reach, and even between her thighs. I said, “You know there is only one thing more exciting than stroking this fantastic garment, and that will be when it is off and I can stroke the beautiful soft curves of your real skin. That is what I will be doing soon.”

“Don’t hurt me anymore,” she said quietly. I took no notice and told her to stand beside the bed. But she buried her head in my chest as if it was her only safe place. “Obedience.” Slowly she moved off me and stood by the bed looking down at me. I took two little blue pills out of the breast pocket of my shirt. “Go downstairs and get me a sip of water in a glass so I can take them.” She knew what they were, and why an oldie like me needed them.

“Yes,” she said. I watched the beautiful proportions of the shining goddess move around the bed and disappear downstairs. I took a deep breath and gave out a sigh of satisfaction. I believed I was at a peak moment in my life. I watched as her head of gloriously flourishing blonde hair came back in sight as she mounted the stairs. Then the stunning curves of the body and her limbs. 

She came around the bed with the glass of water, and I took my pills. She stood attendant at the side of the bed. “I shall love it when your lovely hair grows to its full length down you back. I shall want to glorify every inch it grows. Shall I give you money for every inch?”

“What?” It seemed a sudden change of direction for her.

“It’s how to measure the value of it.” I did not know why I had introduced money.

“I thought all this,” she indicated her garment, “was all about sex?”

“It’s about love and preciousness. It’s about uncountable value.” I waffled with my delirious kind of excitement. “Come and lie back on my body – with your body.” She did as required, her face coming close to mine.

“There is only one thing more perfect than stroking the beautiful curves of this sexy garment, and that would be to stroke the beautiful curves of your completely naked skin.” I repeated, pointlessly, and she said nothing. My face was buried in her gorgeous hair. So I continued in my delirium. “You are my heaven.” And then, “I am King of Heaven-land.” She chuckled with a deep sense of satisfaction. We were two rather elderly adolescents making each other happy. “I am your King.” At that her smile broadened and continued. I asked quietly, “What am I?”

“You are my King.”

“Correct. Don’t forget it. Don’t call me anything else.” She still smiled happily. “Your King, my dear Ginny.”

“My King.” My hand went to the belt that was lying beside me on the bed. “Kiss me.”

She kissed me with some passion, and I landed a stroke of the belt on her buttock quite unexpectedly – for her. Her head shot back in surprise and pain. There was no sound. Then she clamped her lips back on mine and pressed hard to endure what was rushing through the nerves of her body. She was tense from top to toe, and then relaxed a bit as the pulse began to subside. She lifted her head, and said without emphasis, “Ouch.” And shook her head sadly, “I didn’t like that one.”

“I know,” I said kindly. And then I landed another one. Her breath gasped. She shook her head with pain. And then, with force, pressed her lips against mine again.

Then, she lifted her head a little, “You bastard.”

“I know,” I said with the same kindly tone. It was as if there were different people; two people beginning a passionate love, and a torture victim with her torturer.

“I’ve dreamed of all this. But, René…. never with so much love from you.” She looked earnestly into my face. “I have done something to your heart, haven’t I?”

“You have,” I said. “It has brought my passion alive. My passion for you.”

“ I love you. You are my dream of….” She stopped because I delivered another thrashing stroke. She couldn’t speak. Her body was tight with the pain. Eventually she said, “Thank you. You bastard.” And laughed.

I laughed too and delivered the next on her sore buttock. She bit her lip and everything in her went tense again.

“Bastard. I can’t….” But she stopped herself from begging me to stop. “Oh, bastard, bastard, bastard.” And she flopped down as if exhausted on top of my body. So I lashed her again. She writhed from side to side on top of me. Her shiny garment sliding sensuous and graciously over me.

“That’s ten of them.” She looked me in the eyes propping herself on her elbows.

“I know,” I said with kindness again, smiling back at her. “You’ve done well.”

“Thank you, sir. My King.” And she added, with a sort of hopeful relief, “ Is that my punishment?”

“Some of it.” And her face clouded with a slight frown as she had thought that the belting might have been completed.

“You mean there’s more.”

“I’ll decide that.”

“I’m asking you to decide,” she said slightly impatiently.

“And I’ll decide when I’ll let you know.”

She sank back onto me. I was very conscious of my penis snug between her thighs. “You bastard. How can I cope?” She snuggled herself onto me, wondering perhaps if another lash would come. “Do you mind me calling you a bastard.”

“You know what I am for you. Tell me.”

“My King.”

“Remember that.”

“I will. My King.” 

Then I told her to stand by the bed. Slowly she relaxed her embrace of me and got up. She stood. “Get down on your knees.” And she did. “On all fours,” which she did. I decided not to comment on her obedience as if taking it for granted. Now get down on the carpet. Press that tummy into it. Press those breasts into it.” She did, perhaps a bit reluctantly. “I want you to crawl over to that wall. Don’t let your tummy stop touching the carpet, nor the breasts. Squirm. You are a worm, at my feet.” And I sat up at the end of the bed to watch her slide.

“Yes, My King.” And she slid herself slowly across the floor, some two or three metres.

“Stand up and face the wall.” She did. 

“Yes, My King.” 

“Put your hands up high on the wall.” 

“Yes, My King.” And she did. 

“Press that tummy and those breasts into the wall.” She moved right up against the wall.

“My King.”

“Reach higher.” And she stretched her hands an inch or so higher.

“Higher, higher.” I said commandingly. “And keep yourself completely still.”

She realised she had to go on tip toe. “That’s right. Now higher still.” She reached very high. Then I was quiet, and looking at that irresistible body, pinned against the wall. “Hmm. That’ll do,” I said as if reluctantly. “We’ll wait a while for the pills to work.” And I sat still and silent just gazing at her back. She was as still as she could be. Which actually was very still. She remained on tip toe, as ordered.

Eventually when I thought that things might be getting ready in my loins. I told her to get back on the floor, tummy and tits never to leave the carpet. “Now climb out of that garment. And don’t let yourself rise off the carpet. 

She struggled with the zip in the back. It seemed perversely out of reach but eventually she managed it and slowly the black thing was rolled down her body, till her pure skin lay waiting for me. I went to crouch down next to her on the floor. I looked at some vaguely pink patches on her buttocks. I had my unkind doubled-up belt in my hand. “Now. Another ten, shall we say.”

She turned her head to look at me. “No,” she said shocked “I can’t”. She hadn’t expected it. “I can’t, Al. Alan. I can’t.” I saw a tear emerge from one eye. 

“Yes, your poor buttocks won’t have the protection of that plastic skin over them. It might feel a lot worse.”

Slowly she began to sob a little. Just gently, and as if she was trying not to. I put out my hand to touch her cheek with a comforting stroke, but she turned her face away. With the back of her head towards me she said, “Do it. If you must.”

“But it is not a question of ‘must’. It is a question of want-to, and of obedience.” She was now sobbing harder. I stroked her tender buttocks.

“I have now made a decision,” I announced rather formally. “We shall leave the next thrashing till next time.” And I dropped the belt on the floor next to me. She turned her face toward me with a new expression. Some hope at last. I said, “I love you, Ginny.”

Her tears ran again. I put out my hand to touch them. “I love you too, Al. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. It is your disobedience.”

“I’m sorry, Alan Sorry, Sorry.”

“Perhaps your disobedience is as painful as my belt on you lovely backside.”

“Yes,” her tears had stopped. “I think it is. I’m sorry. Next time perhaps.”

“Come to the bed with me.” And we stood up and went to the bed, leaving the belt behind, and the pile of the crumpled garment, I lay on the bed. “You, undress me.”

She looked at me and my clothes and did begin to undress me. I moved as she needed to remove them.

“As before, stretch your body over mine, on top of me”. My member was a little erect as it touched her thigh. It stiffened as her thighs parted to let it stand up. I stroked her skin, every single part of it. “It is, as I said, so much better even than stroking that catsuit.”

“Good. It is all yours. Every bit.” 

I rolled her over and knelt over her. I was nearly ready to come into her. “Put my penis into you. It wants to love you.”

She looked a bit hesitant. Maybe worried, “Is that what you want?” And then she relaxed. And she fumbled with my genitals to open her hole and invite me in. It really didn’t take me long, and I was completely unable to pace myself. My thrusting gained speed and furthered its reach inside her. “I love this,” she panted, staring sightless at the ceiling. “I love….” And I came like the volcano I always had been on all my last occasions. I collapsed on her, staying inside as long as I could. She said, “You’re still a man, a fantastic man.”

I had often been told my climaxes were of the best. “It is all your doing, Ginny, the goddess of beauty.”

She buried her face in my neck. “I’m sorry, Alannie.”

“It is not me you have cheated, my dear. I have been to heaven and back.” She chuckled sadly as it were. “It is your fantasies you’ve cheated, your own fantasies.”

“Yes,” she said, and held me round the waist pulling me into her as I was slipping out and comforting me as well as herself. “Next time, Alannie.”

“Next time, I shall thrash you naked. Your buttocks will bruise.”

“Yes, Alan, thrash me. Make me scream. I deserve it. I want it.”

“OK, Ginny. No mercy.” I felt her shiver a little under me.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“But right now. It is your climax. Let us do it.”

“It’s alright. I don’t need it.”

Listen, Ginny. I wasn’t asking you. I was deciding; we will proceed as I just said.” And I moved off her to her side and put my hand gently between her thighs. It was moist. I spread her legs. She was completely inert, passive, compliant. “Let me taste you.” She said nothing, and I put my lips to hers and my tongue slowly slipped into the soft tissue and its moisture. I sensed when I had found the spot as her body gave a slight shudder. I knew where to apply my skills and with a slow rhythm I flicked that spot with my tongue, getting faster and remaining gentle but persistent. She made no more sound until when I was going at speed with her sensitive love-place, there was a terrific shout and her breath seemed to fill the room. She convulsed so I lost my place. With my strength I forced her down on the bed and replaced my tongue with my fingers and very, very gently but with speed, I continued the stimulus on that special part of her. Till there was another short cry, and she held her breath again. And then the third shout. Her body relaxed and she turned away from me. She was done. She turned back to me and hugged me with her arms around my shoulders and waist. She pulled me until my penis was nearly back home in her again. But I had been spent.

We lay a long time in silence. I pounded my brains with how precious this moment was, would always be. I was coming back to reality. How could it fit into my life today? I imagine she was thinking the same.

We lay a long time as if we had found the answer to all appetites till the end of our lives. We clung to a being-together for some hours. When we emerged, it was as if into a new epoch in history. How would it be on Monday morning if I sat there in the library, gazing in her direction whilst she did her work trying not to look at me? Would I accompany her out at 1 pm? When I checked out a book, would she call me her King? Would we tell out spouses and then move together to the pretty little cottage? Would we read The Story of O to each other at bedtime? Finally, would her beautiful buttocks graciously accept a full-scale, naked thrashing next time? “I know you a bit better, Ginny.” 

She nodded, and we decided to go home. Until next time.

 

 

 

 

Men are not much

 

I don't think much of men.  They are all right.  They are all right I suppose when giving me the right excitement, but not much more. Girls give you a better conversation, girls are more interesting, they are more interested.  They ask questions. They give you more reassurance, make you feel good, tell you your hairdresser is wonderful, are envious of the clothes you wear, the shops you buy them at. They want to know where you got your wonderful recipe and will you give it to them.  These are things that make the world go round.

Men - I've had quite a few of them. In fact. as many as I have wanted.  It doesn't take a lot to make yourself the kind of woman a man will take out, spend money on, will buy an expensive shaver for, make me feel good.  But what you ask me about is what I do with my body. And that's what I'm going to tell you about.  It's going to be about what I do with his body.  I have had a lot.  I know what their orgasms are like.  I know how to get them in position for my orgasms.  Right?

Despite my background I’d been to University, and I could give any man an argument that’d make him think. I could simper and then cut his silly conclusions to pieces. It left them truncated and embittered with me. It felt like victory. I was not just pussy. 

Since I'm not too bothered about them, it puts me in a powerful position, doesn't it.  Right? And that's what I live for. Mostly they shy off pretty quick. When I've got a period, I expect them to lick me clean.  Not many are keen on that.  They usually pack their condoms and say bye-bye.  They think they have the mastery of me.  It doesn't bother me much.  But one or two have taken another line.  In fact, I should say three, two have cleaned me up when I've told them to. They filled the bill when required. Like the intelligent handsome boy who had creative ideas about making my blood into cocktails which he could bottle. A new idea for a bloody Mary!  I liked that, it showed imagination.  But he went off the rails by making money out of his advertising, rather than pleasing me.  Another one liked using special apparatus and he often spent a couple of days building it before we used it, and then he'd get on it and I'd have my fun.  But the one I wanted to tell you about was into something altogether more serious. And that is why I want to tell you about him.

I knew there was something that would add zest.  All I knew was somehow men were there to serve. Men were there to pay the price, the price I was interested in asking.  How we got into it was like this.  He showed me those adverts that they have for Sunday leisure wear.  I knew that shiny garments kicked men in the guts.  I sometimes walked down the street and men salivated on the pavement when they walked past my mackintosh.  What I was keen to learn more of was the way men wanted to be treated.  So I asked him what did this word mean - 'dominatrix'.  He told me that this was a woman who had special tricks for getting a man's balls down to size.  I said I could think up some tricks.  He said that was very likely. 

The only request he made which I granted was that I put a gag in his mouth so that he was utterly speechless.  Otherwise, he had no say whatever in what happened to him.  I liked those leisure garments.  I chose them for the ones I liked.  I chose them for me.  I thought my cleavage might drive him bananas, I thought my crotch showing a suggestion of my hairs could drive him crazier still.  Over the red shiny gear, I wore a long silken dressing gown, glamorous in its own way, but concealing the intense casing of my body, my gleaming curves.  His gag was unpleasantly uncomfortable.  It kept his mouth wide with his tongue pushed to the back.  He could breathe, but not swallow.  Most of the time he dribbled.  It looked degrading, and he felt it.  He knelt when I told him to kneel.  He felt the shape of my buttocks and of my thigh as his hands slid round the shape of my dressing gown.  He could tell the slippery surface of the latex beneath.  I told him to crawl, and he went down on all fours.  'Not good enough,' I said.  He looked up at me.  'On your belly,' I demanded.  Reluctantly he lowered himself till he was flat on the floor.  I told him he should not raise his stomach or his chin from the pile of my bedroom carpet.  I told him to undress.  There on the floor he wriggled, worm-like, out of his expensive lawyer’s suit.  And while he did so I got from my locked cupboard a rather cruel willow cane that, I had been told, had the most vicious sting – it was especially long, and a heavier duty than most.  While he writhed his way out of the clothes he had worked in today, his skin came slowly into visibility and those clothes were reduced to a rumpled degenerate mess.

I stood above him, the tip of my cane ruffling his hair, pinning the small of his back into the floor, following the curve of his buttock into his thigh.  He never protested but silently obeyed.  I never questioned whether he was enjoying it.  I was exploring my feelings, my feelings of power.

Power meant that I should have no truck with the feelings of my victim.  That is not true.  Power meant that I was fascinated to know his feelings of humiliation and soon it would be pain.  And finally, when he was naked the tip of my cane scored across the skin of his shoulder blades.  I told him that whilst keeping his chin to the floor, he should raise his buttocks and kneel with them in the air.  This was my moment of curiosity.  I couched down slightly at his side; and then I brought down the cane with maximum force on the soft rounds of his bottom.  He collapsed to the floor instantly.  The gag reduced his squawk to a gurgle.  And he tried to breathe heavily, but only through the spittle in his nostrils. He writhed from side to side, still pressing his chin obediently into the carpet.  I told him to resume the position with his bottom in the air, and the next time he should remain totally without movement. He shook his head vigorously.  I took it that he was telling me he couldn't bear the pain.

He was a coward.

Should I have been disappointed?  I am not sure if I was.  The prospect of pain he could not bear, gave me the knowledge that I had power to destroy him.  I told him to stand up.  The cane could wait until later.  He reached the upright position.  There was an angry red line across his buttocks.  Even at that stage there were red beads beginning to ooze from the welts. I told him to stand on his toes, to reach his arms above his head, and to remain there as I wished.  He did so, my man had relinquished all appearance of willpower and initiative.  He was obedience itself.  If you could grovel on tip-toe, he was doing it. He was reduced really to the animal in him. I told him, and his head drooped. It was not so much shame as acknowledgement of the truth.  He was not so steady on his balance.  I threatened him that if he came down off his toes I would cut him three more times on his buttocks.  He nodded gently with understanding.  And he thought he was going to be spared. 

I was standing behind him fascinated by the red weal on his white skin.  I told him that my blackness would never reveal its shame as his white skin was now doing.  I let the dressing gown slip from my shoulders.  I threw it on the bed in front of him.  I told him he would not see me in the garments I had chosen until I decided to reveal myself. He stared straight ahead at the bed as if he no longer had a mind that knew what he was waiting for.  I realised I must restore his capacity to know and to expect, and above all to fear.  I told him to imagine my body, to describe its curves.  For this I reached up and loosened the gag till he could mumble. He started to imagine the clothes that I had tightly encased myself in.  His mind worked weakly, and he told me of the shining red plastic, the smooth tight curves glistening as saliva and smooth as silk.  He remained on his toes avoiding more punishment, at least for the time being.  I admired him for his efforts.  I reached for a pair of long latex gloves from the dressing table.  I closed my inviting body slowly against his back. The parts of my body touching gently the surfaces of his back.  My long arms moved around his waist.  I clutched the shining black gloves in front of him and slowly smoothed the gloves up my hands and my arms above my elbows.  I touched his cheeks on either side with the pure sweetness of their glistening surface.  I told him to smell their smell.   I clutched his belly to me with a firmness of my hands as they smoothed down over his chest and his abdomen.  He trembled with the ecstasy of it.  I was giving him pleasure. I was giving myself pleasure.  I was giving him pleasure without pain, and therefore my pleasure was only half pleasure.  I retrieved from my cleavage a fine steel chain linked with a long leather thong. The chain had a hook at one end. I resumed my position with my hands around his waist.  Now I felt for his balls.  He twitched and shivered when I found them.  I passed the chain twice around the neck of the sack.  The hook was fastened tightly into a link.  He did not murmur but the trembling with ecstasy was now mixed with the tremble of fear.  He did not know what would come next.  The leather thong hung down to his toes.  I released my grip around his body.  He wished to turn and look but I forbade him in order to preserve his blindness to the beauty of my body and the erotism of my clothing. He remained on tip-toe, and was understandably wobbly now. 

I fetched from the cupboard where my cane had been, a blindfold that would keep him from that awareness. He began to be appalled and he hesitated to acquiesce.  Fortunately, the determination in my voice and the determination in the movements of my hand quelled that moment of resistance.  I completed the severance of his senses.

I told him to reach to the floor.  I told him to go down on his knees.  I told him to find the cane where I had dropped it. With relief he crouched on all fours. I watched as his hands in his blindness swept the carpet.  He reached my feet and I told him to caress them.  I allowed him to put my toes to his cheek and then to resume his search for the cane.  I told him I would count to 20 and any number beyond that would be the number of strokes his buttocks would receive.  I said I was not talking idly.  I did not joke.

He searched on with vigour.  Fortunately, for him, he found the cane before the numbers I was counting ran out.  I told him it was the cane that had cruelly hurt him, and he should hug it to his bosom as a loved one. Still kneeling on all fours he did this, and then offered it to me as a sacrament.  But I did not use the cane to strike him.  Instead, I found a way into him with its tip.  The pouted mouth of his back passage accepted the the cane almost without noticing.  Gently I moved it forward into the cavity of his insides.  He did not murmur.  He did not move.  I knew he wondered at this intrusion, relieved that I had spared his skin from further strokes with that cane.  I told him that if I wished it the cane would be used later, but that I would decide. What I wished at this moment was to feel the smell of his fear drifting into my nostrils and on the surface of my skin. I twisted the cane around causing disturbance deep inside his body.  He remained with a kind of awful pleasure.  I withdrew the cane slowly from his anus.

The tip and a few inches of my cane were no longer pristinely new and clean.  I told him to kneel up his head held high in the air, his hands clutched behind the small of his back, his knees remained painfully widely spread.  He did as he was told.  I wiped the soiled cane on the lip beneath his nostrils.  'Filthy,' I said, 'Filth. Do you smell it?'  He nodded obediently.  'This must be cleaned,' I warned.  Lifting one corner of his mouth away from the gag I pushed the tip of my cane in and wiped it carefully on the inside of his mouth. Lifting carefully the corner on the other side of his mouth I wiped a second time to ensure the cleanliness of my cane.  I suggested this might nauseate him, that this might make him vomit.  But, I warned, this was dangerous with the gag in his mouth since he may merely fill his lungs with his own vomit. I told him this was a moment of extreme self-control.  I asked, did he understand.  He nodded his head slightly.  I told him he must control himself like a house-trained animal.  That is what he is.  I told him that now blind, speechless, penetrated and soiled he was in such a state that an animal, even, would be disgusted with itself.  He remained silently impressed by the accuracy of my insults.  I then told him to get himself on the bed.  I have a small divan upon which many men have performed beneath me while I have sucked my pleasure from them.  By this time, blindfolded, he had no notion of where the bed was, and I watched. Carefully and cautiously, he collided with the furniture, and then fell on his back on the bed.  I told him to turn around with his head hanging over the end. I told him to find the chain that held his balls and to reach for the leather thong attached to it.  I told him to serve it to me like a slave offering his monarch a gift.  He did this. From my cupboard at the end of the bed, I drew a small pulley that hooked in the ceiling and ran the leather thong through this.  I could tighten it with a ratcheted wheel and pull his flesh.  It tightened to a point where he began to groan.  I told him to lift his pelvis from the bed to ease himself, which he did.  I wound the thong still tighter till he groaned again.  I told him to reach still higher to save his organs.  And he did.  I wound it further.  I think he could no longer keep this arched position any higher.  So, I relented and left the ratcheted wheel.  I asked if he was in pain.  He nodded.  “It is only in pain”, I said, “that I will give you pleasure, because”, I stressed, “that is my pleasure.” 

“You may touch now if you wish - but only while you suffer,” I said.  His body was arched nine inches from the bed.  His legs strained to keep him there.  He turned his head to the side as I sat on the bed beside him, his hands reached for my voluptuousness.  He began to moan at the exquisite predicament he was in, but I silenced him.  “I will have no sounds from you,” I said.  “No animal can speak or have words.”  He obeyed and felt with a joy in his hands in the midst of a strained body that was beginning to ache and throb in the congested organs which were so tightly bagged.  Despite his abject suffering, I could see a bead of moisture at the tip of his prick.  “There,” I said touching its shaft with my latex hand, 'there is my precious pleasure stick.  Shall I beat it with my cane?” I asked him, touching the blindfold, challenging him to answer, yes.  I noticed that the eager organ stirred slightly in my fingers.  “I shall have to climb upon you,” I said and he looked with some apprehension.  My weight would probably collapse his arched body and tear those isolated balls from him. Astride, I put my slithery hands beneath his buttocks to ease the strain.  I could let go suddenly. I told him and his whole racked body jerked with terror as the tension drew agony from his balls and he thrust in the air to save them.  His mouth gaped and he mumbled some swear words unpleasantly.  I was angry.  I told him that no man had ever abused me in that way.  I lifted myself from his body and stood looking down on his animal form on the bed, and I informed him that he could either remove himself from my house and never return, or he could take a punishment from me of my choosing.  He shut his eyes in an agony of indecision. His body arched with strain and tension and in addition his humiliation changing from a voluntary acquiescence to the beginnings of a terrified helplessness.  He knew the punishment that I would choose, and he had a terror he could not bear it.

I told him I would choose, and I released the leather thong from the wheel and the pulley.  He thought I was about to let him go.  He called my name as if from a very great distance, announcing amorous platitudes which sounded pathetic in his helplessness.  “You will not get away so simply, my friend,” I told him.  I produced some handcuffs from my well-provided cupboard, and restrained his hands stretched out beyond his head.  I then told him to roll over and this he did. I told him to bring his knees beneath his tummy.  This he did though he knew where this would lead.  The strong red wheal had smudged flecks of blood.  He was crouched submissive, even more an animal.  I found once more, the cane as it lay on the floor beside the bed. I sat beside him and placed it before his face.  “This,” I told him “will give you more pain than you could ever imagine.  This has penetrated you with ignominy, your anus and your mind.  You may now kiss it as if it were your betrothed.  Your love for it will be second only to your love for me”'  I told him I commanded it, and I wished to see the passion of his kiss on it.  Looking foolish he tried to display a passionate flurry of kisses upon the inert stick, as the gag got in the way and his saliva dribbled from his chin.  I told him how abject he looked and how it pleased me that I could force him into such subjugation.  He stopped his kissing and I thought for a moment that there was a spark of fury within him, but he suppressed it.  “Yes,” I said, “don't say it.  Total control under the most extreme conditions.  That is what is required of you.  You have a punishment to suffer.”  I spoke quietly like a teacher patiently instructing a pupil with his lesson. “I require you to know it will be my extreme pleasure at the pain that I will inflict”.  He said nothing but I knew that terror was in him and mounting still. I needed now to fasten him more tightly. I laid him out face-down, flat. There were chains from the small legs of the divan which bound his shoulders and ankles.  Once again, I attached the thong from his balls. Sliding it between his thighs and attaching it to the pulley.  I ratcheted up his round buttocks.  His bottom was free to wave in the air, and that was the only gesture he could make.  I told him it would not save him.  He mumbled that he had to warn me -- that he might make a noise, and I confirmed that he certainly would.  I would see to it.  I told him he had voluntarily placed himself in my hands and he had done it for the love of me.  I told him he would pay to the extreme for that love, and I added we would soon start.

Do I need to explain the extreme agony of the cane? Do I need to explain how the agony is multiplied by his helplessness, being unable to effect any influence on me whatsoever?  Do I need to explain that the agony was multiplied by his knowing that he had given me everything for love of me and knowing even that I would only give, in exchange, cruelty and take pleasure?  Do I need to explain not only the agony of the body but the anguish of his spirit, that his love would not be returned with love, but with ruthlessness, with humiliation, and by extracting an abject dribbling scream?  Do I need to explain the torture of learning that a world of love can only transform, for him, into unfairness, degradation and a world of insane agony.  I told him all this as my cane descended on his buttocks.  Again and again, it descended on him, and again and again I told him he has put his love in treacherous hands.  Again and again, my cane beat him.  And again and again I told him of the ecstasy of my pleasure. 

As my orgasm came, my blows on his buttocks became wild and inaccurate.  He believed me to be out of control and he feared extreme danger from me.  Then came my orgasm beyond any means I have to describe it to you.  Then I had finished.  I lay beside him, the sleek texture of my latex garments snugly against his soft white skin.  His white form was a mound that rose to a blood-red peak suspended painfully from my pulley.  I had destroyed a significant area of skin.  I told him at that moment that I was proud of him beyond belief.  I said as I relaxed out of the tension that I would be beneficent, and I would release him if he wished.  He could satisfy himself in any way he wished. He told me no, for the time being at least he would remain in his posture of bonded submission beside me.  And I lay too, half-sleeping for a time that was without measure.  When I looked again his buttocks were encrusted with dried blood. I felt for his scrotum and it was a little swollen.  I released the chain and his balls became loose.  I felt for his penis and held it with my latex hands and for another undefined period we dozed silently, obliviously together, his degraded manhood in my appreciative hands.

After a while, it must have been a long while, I noticed it had begun to stiffen.  He told me to climb between him and the bed beneath, between the restraining chains and draw his needing member into my womanly cleft and with vigour to bring him to his climax.  And this I carefully did in honour of his suffering and by the time he had come, I had relieved many times more.  When he had finished, he remained in his chained bonds and I lay beneath him unusually, unaccustomed, as a woman, in a womanly position.

We dozed a little more.  I believed at that moment that he would never consort with the evil in me again and that the body that I had broken in pain would become a stranger I would never again see.

Shall I tell you what happened thereafter.  Was it as I had suspected, a beginning and a final ending all in the one occasion.  Shall I tell you we became man and wife?  Shall I confide that we embarked from that day, on an ever-more elaborate chorus of refinements to our joint passion?

Or shall I leave you to believe the ending that is happiest for you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 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 remembered a dream she was having; one that was regular every few nights she realised one day. In the dream she saw an eye. A very large eye. She was close up to it and it pressed itself in on her in 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, appeared now 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 became 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? How could he, you might exclaim. 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 to others, 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 - before 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 decisions 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 his own ordeal; 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 Joh 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 the English teacher. 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 himself already been mutilated pointlessly. 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 – till 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 in all. 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. Only one was physical.

            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 on his taste, 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, too, 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, amongst the 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. It spoke as it were in the idiom of the city. She would give herself, 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 was 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 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 polished door-knobs rescued her from the devouring poison of her own humiliation. His echoing scream went on unheard. He could believe in a triumph, as of old. Possibly better than of old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was not from looking at him

 

It was not from looking at him. Her love came instead from looking inside herself at what he made her feel.  He was lanky and had a good physique not yet turned to fat. Perhaps he looked after his body. She imagined him in the gym, weights in his hands, or running on that relentless conveyor belt thing with music pounding a rhythm in his ear buds. But he was not hunky handsome. It was two weeks ago when he had come down from his office he shared with one of those power-dressing executive chickens. The junior office girls called them that, and were jealous and confident that they could out-preen those female executives. Sylvia looked at the young man in his trim suit and genuine leather shoes tapping briskly on the stairs as he descended. 

In the reception area there were a number of girls at their computers, maybe as many as twenty and he looked around. Sylvia looked up at him and he noticed, so he came over immediately, to ask her help to locate an ancient cardboard file. Nice to be distracted away from the boringly unamusing keyboard she had as a companion all day. She led him briskly down the corridor to the old file store, the files she and the girls had not yet copied onto hard-discs. As she inserted her key, she turned to him, “What is your name, love?” He did not answer. But he came to an abrupt halt as she had suddenly stood in front of the locked door. With her sudden stop, his hand went out to touch her shoulder as he stopped himself. She felt herself shiver. And yet she thought immediately that his hand was not cold. Nor was he one of the more creepy executives. The door opened outwards, and she moved back against his body. She almost gasped at the contact as she looked in his eyes and excused herself. His apologetic smile had its impact, too. Oh, she thought, was she going to get slapped into another of those cheap romances in some impossible role as an office tart, again. He was new, and probably had not heard about the pathetic little drama that Bernhard had dragged her through last year. This one was new since then and office gossip replenished itself quickly.

But perhaps he had heard and might try something in this dark quiet space, shrouded by ancient files. He seemed confident but efficient and directed. Yet his smile said something. She moved into the filing room, and again asked his name. He told her, Jonathon, but modified it to Jon as he looked around at the surprisingly large array of shelves and boxes and folders. “So, you are all getting this lot typed in, are you?” he said impressed by the task. 

            “Can I help you find something, Jon?” And added, “I’m Sylvie.”

            “I know,” he said, “you’re Sylvie. “And, no; I’ll have to dig out what I need. It is a letter from a long-ago author. Someone who’s just died and they want to write an obituary about him.” He was looking round the shelves and seemed to be locating what he wanted. “The more they write about him, the more books we sell.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds a bit commercial, doesn’t it?” He seemed a bit apologetic and smiled at her again, and looked towards her in the shadowy room. He gave her his engaging smile. She was leaning against the doorpost looking at him, wondering how he knew her name. What did he know about her. And her indiscretions, if that is what you would call them. And, of course, the gossip would have made something out of her indiscretion last year. As he turned his smile on her, he hesitated, “No, I don’t know much about you.” And then added surprisingly shyly, “I have just noticed you behind your computer screen, sometimes.” She felt embarrassed; or was she a bit anxious in this dark room with a young man who had been noticing her?

He turned back to a shelf that he seemed to have quickly located and in a moment took down a box. Turned back towards the door and towards Sylvie, he passed close as he left the room. “I’ll take this to the canteen and look through it,” he said. She nodded, locking the door. “Come and have a cup of tea,” he invited.

            She looked down embarrassed at her shoes, “OK.” It was not actually the time for her tea break, but she could be excused for granting the wishes of an executive of the company. Oh, she thought, is this another discretion coming up.

            There was no one serving tea in the canteen, only a line of four machines along part of one wall - coffee, tea, snacks. They sat together at a table, with no-one else in the large room. He rummaged through the box of papers seeking the facts about the deceased author and sipped his tea. She looked at his calm, quiet, well-dressed presence. What was she doing here with him? Was he just being friendly, or polite; were there vibrations between them? She excused herself to go to the toilet, and he grunted an acknowledgement.

            She locked the door. And she took some deep breathes.  She began to tell herself that this means nothing. She could go down to the disco and find some stranger to make friends with for the evening. But somehow this seemed different. It was their workplace, so, was there a different and more serious bond to be established. Actually, she told herself, this means nothing; what was she looking for.  She must, she thought, be a lonely woman and searching. It wasn’t the way she saw herself. She wandered back to the table. “Do you need me anymore? Shall I go back to my jolly computer,” she said, sightly cheekily. 

            “If you need to.” He seemed to be stashing the papers back in the box, “I think I’ve got as much as is necessary.” So, she sat down again, opposite him. “How long have you been here, in this place.” And he looked at the wall and the ceiling as if he needed to indicate the building and the company they worked for.

            “Oh, since I left school,” she said, almost as if she were in an interview. Was he awkward with her, she wondered. She was feeling awkward with him. “And that was quite a while ago,” she added.

            He was looking at the floor on the other side of the canteen. “Here’s the office cat,” he pointed out inconsequentially, and there it was stalking elegantly and slowly across the room, taking no notice of them.

            “Do you like cats,” she asked inanely. It was not an exciting conversation. So far.

            He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I live alone and I’ve been told to get a cat to keep me company.”

            “Well, that’s an option.” And then she said cheekily, as there was nothing to lose, and as he was moving his chair back to go. “Why don’t you get a girl-friend to keep you company?”

            His chair stopped moving back. But he stayed with his head looking down and his arms on the table.  Then he looked up and said, equally cheekily “Is this an offer.” And he gave her his winning smile again as he began to stand up.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

She went home wondering about Jon. He certainly dressed well, but his conversation was dire. But at least there was no feverish and sweaty indiscretion for the office to laugh about. He made no appearance for a week or two, and she had to assume that all her anxious wondering for those twenty minutes or so, had been completely made up in her mind. Good, at least there were decent blokes about.  Good that there were even decent executives around, who didn’t assume they owned you.

She didn’t often go to the disco to pick up strangers, and certainly not on her own. But on the Saturday three days later she seriously wondered if she was a lonely girl. A sad thought that. In the end she did not go. On the Monday a letter came. She had enquired about a course at the Open University, in philosophy. She wondered, ironically, which would make her less lonely – a stranger at the disco or a course on philosophy. That is, if she was lonely. She would have a talk with Amelia. Sylvie had known Amelia since school. They were those best of friends who listened well to each other, but always thought the other one was getting a better deal in life. Amelia was certainly not lonely. She had boyfriends all the time, though a different one every time Sylvie heard about them. Perhaps, that was just as lonely. They needed to chat about what they each wanted in their not-so-young lives now.

So, they arranged for a pub drink later in the week. Amelia had always been against that ‘indiscretion’ last year. Even before it became one. But to Sylvie’s surprise she was all for Jon. It was impossible to convince Amelia that there was absolutely and completely nothing there; they’d had tea together, that’s all, and he had not said a word, just looked at the papers in his box, and pointed out the cat. And of course, when it came to discussing the purpose of life, Amelia was all for forgetting about university and philosophy – and to go for Jon. “Much better for the hormones,” she advised. And she stuck to it.

Philosophy had been her father’s interest, besides his union activities. He had died five years ago, and she had heard about Emmanuel Kant, and Freud, and Wittgenstein drove her father mad with incomprehension. She had been good at arty things, she liked pottery. But she had also begun to notice that if she saw a young baby in a pram in the street, she found herself looking longingly. Her Mum had always been adamant – do... not... be… a… one… parent… family. And she could not agree more.

            Amelia had said she would take Sylvie out shopping. The important thing is to wear something striking, “What you must wear are clothes that make men want you to take them off. So, they don’t have to be beautiful clothes in themselves. They just need to hint at what is underneath.” Amelia, no doubt, knew exactly what sort of clothes they were. From what she always related, she was always taking her clothes off. Do, I want to go through all that, Sylvie wondered, just to get a baby perhaps. She thought that, really, she wanted someone who wanted her for what she was. And to be fair, for all Amelia’s adventurous dress-sense and clothes stripping, she had not got much further than Sylvie.

            It was weeks and weeks, literally weeks before she even caught a glimpse of Jon again. And he had obviously not been snooping around looking over the girls typing all day. He just was not around. It was not exactly that he was a good-dresser, nor that he was an executive, he was only an average good-looker; nor even that she knew he had his sex organs, just as she herself did; they had only had tea-time fun momentarily cheeking each other, and that was… fun, it counted for something. It was his honest decent smile she kept seeing in her mind. And that could win anyone, and it probably did. He lived alone and with, or without a cat, but she bet in her sinking heart he had an address book of girls he could choose from. Her mind was becoming silly; perhaps she should take to drink. And she bought herself a bottle of wine for a Saturday evening. It became weekly, but not more. She knew how her brother had got into that for a year or so in his teens. She did sign up for a course at the University, distance-learning and part-time. It was on business studies, and the first thing she learned on the course was its boredom. But quickly a tutor got her interested in co-operative ownership structures. She didn’t know what they were till she was enthused about such co-ownership. Just right for the daughter of a philosophical Union man!

Such an enthusiasm tweaked a lot of hormones in her. But then what? One Friday midday, Jon came wandering into the digitising room of girls. He was looking around. He sauntered over casually and stopped by Brenda, patted her on the shoulder and gave her one of his very-decent-bloke smiles. It was exactly what she had not wanted, as all that from a couple of months ago was fading fast. Now, it leapt again, a captive animal trapped inside her, leaping about with eager frustration. Lucky Brenda, but she said she didn’t care, and may have even said it out loud to herself. Astonishingly, more than astonishingly, he moved on from Brenda and headed for Sylvie. It was exactly what she didn’t want to have to deal with again. There was just nothing about him really…

            But he stopped by her desk as she insisted on finishing the sentence she was keying in.  There was nothing she could do. And she just looked up at him. It seemed the whole room must be looking at her.  This was seriously bad, and she choked back her will to live. And said, “Do you want the filing room again?  Someone else died?” She thought it might have been amusing.  But he was not smiling and in fact looked tense. 

            “No,” he said, “come up to the canteen for a cup of tea.”

            After the last wordless teatime with him, this did not seem a particularly thrilling invitation. But she found herself getting up from her keyboard and saying, “Yes.”

            She was feeling nervous but telling herself she was not. On the way to the door. she managed to trip on someone’s litter bin, and he had to put out his hand to hold her steady. Now, definitely, all the girls must be looking at them.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

They sat down opposite each other. And she looked at him silently. “What can I do for you?”

            “I don’t know. Perhaps quite a lot.” He looked awkward. “It is not really about work. I wondered if we would like to be…. Friends.”

            “Friends, “she spluttered without thinking. “I need to know what you are thinking of.”

            “I just thought we might get to know each other better.”

            Sylvie was finding it hard to process this.  It was not like the approach of a stranger at the disco! She sat back and took a deep breath which calmed her – a little. “Look, Jon. I might like to be friends with you,” she started, but shook her head, “No, I’d like to be more than friends.” It seemed, rightly or wrongly, that something straight needed to be laid out between them. “I need to get clear what you are suggesting or thinking. You know, this is a standard company, executives often thinking the admin girls on the computers are there to play with.” He winced slightly. “Sorry, but I’m nervous and not being good at this. It is not that I am suspicious of you. Definitely not you Jon. You are as decent a man as I have come across, I think. And that may be why I am nervous, simply that you are decent that makes me want more than friendship.”

            He put out his hand as if to say that she did not need to say all this. But she did need to, which is why it came out all in a rush and clumsily. She tried to explain all this. He looked her in the eye. There had been no smile from him yet, “I am nervous, too. Perhaps what we both want could mean a lot to us both. A great deal to us both.” There was a question in his eyes, and in his tone of voice.” She sat back. Was she reassured. She left her hand where he had put his hand on hers. There were people on another table watching them. Perhaps listening in. 

She said more quietly, almost without thinking at all, “If you are free perhaps you could come back to my place and we could talk about this. We need to be more relaxed.”

“Yes, we do,”  he squeezed her hand very, very gently. “I am a cautious man, perhaps. I think we need to learn more about each other. I will be working till six…”

She quickly said, “I will wait behind till you are free.” Without saying any more, she stood up to go back to her station. She looked at the couple of women on the other table. One of them smiled at her.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

She stayed on after her usual time of 5 pm. She had her arrangement with him. It could be important, massive. But he is cautious. It is not, she knew, a question of making him like me, but of whether he will like me as I am. When they left at 6, it was raining. Neither had umbrellas. He decided they should take a taxi. She knew she should have said ‘no’. She did not trust her judgement. Despite her knowing he was a decent man, she could not trust her judgement. 

            But true to her judgement, he got the taxi to take them straight to the address she gave. Her conflict though had not relaxed, but still she let him in and they settled in her flat. He expected her to offer him some coffee, tea, perhaps something more relaxing. They were silent for two or three minutes. “We have to relax,” she said, feeling her turmoil. 

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “I can go round the corner to that convenience store and get a bottle of wine. Would you like that?” 

“No,” she said abruptly. “Let’s be cautious, as you say. No alcohol tonight.” She felt she was being pedantic, perhaps tedious.

“OK, that’s fine. This is the getting-to-know-each-other phase, Right? And he took off his expensive jacket.

            “If you say so.” She agreed, wondering how she could explain the things she had to.

            “I don’t know how to say this. People talk, don’t they, and I heard about some story from last year that involved you.”

            “So you know about me? Is that what you meant about getting to know each other.”

            “No, not at all,” and he stopped, “Well yes. I can see it must take a while to get over it.”

            “Is that why it took so long for you to come back to speak to me? I have been churning inside for months, Jon.” She was protesting.

            “As I say, I am a cautious…” But she suddenly interrupted.

Something was building up inside her - Oh, stop being cautious; stop being cautious – she silently screamed to herself. And suddenly tears began to spill. “I’m sorry but let’s get on and talk about this.”

            “Yes, let’s get that over with if you can talk to me about it. I have some things to say as well.” He leaned forward and seemed earnest and sympathetic. “The chap who did it was sacked, Wasn’t he?”

            There was then a long pause. Her tears flowed silently and she had her hand over her mouth, as if she could not bear to speak it out. Eventually, she blurted out, “But it was all my fault.”

            He looked surprised, and he sat back in the armchair.  “But, he should not have done it?”

            “I don’t know, don’t know. I was drunk. If you want to know. I touched him, we were in a taxi and he was supposed to be taking me home. But I wouldn’t tell him my address. And he couldn’t take me home to his wife and family. I touched him, you know I was drunk and I worked him up in the taxi.so he told the driver to take us to a road by some woods. I was thinking it would be fun. I was so drink. He took me into the woods…. It had been a beautiful summer evening” She was sobbing. “Do you want to know all this?” But as he was going to speak she went on. “He took me into the woods and…  he was brutal to me.  You know… raped me.”

            “Yes, that’s what I heard, Sylvie. I am so sorry, sorry. What an experience.”

            “I didn’t cry out, I should have yelled. Everyone says so. I should have. But I was the one… who started it. In the taxi I was kind of raping him. You know.” She was calming as she could see he was listening, was interested.

            “I can see you could be too desirable to resist, but it didn’t have to be rape did it. Not brutal.”

            “No, he shouldn’t have been brutal, of course not. But when I started pushing him away, he couldn’t hold back and he forced me and hit me. So it was me, you see. I keep thinking how I worked him up, I thought it would be fun, then I changed my mind and he couldn’t stop.” 

            “No, Sylvie. Whatever you did, he should have kept enough control of himself.”

She quite quickly began to recover herself. “I should never have got so drunk. That is what started it. But yes, however other people behave we always have to control ourselves. I know. Everyone has told me that.” And she looked down shamefacedly. He wanted to comfort her, hold her, but she was on the other side of the room. He got up slowly, not to frighten her, perched on the arm of her chair and put his arm around her. He felt fatherly, a long way from being a lover.

“What a way to get to know each other, Jon. I’m sorry. My brother overused drink, for a while. I too was just getting back to it a little in the last few weeks.”

            He stroked her back to comfort her. But wanted to clasp her to his chest. He wanted to unite his sadness for her with her own sadness. “Do you want to lie on your bed and let me cuddle and hold you?”

            “Do you want to? To go to bed with me?”

“No, I am not saying sex. Though sex with you has been on my mind for a long time. No, I mean there are other things partners need from each other.”

“Hmm,” she looked at him curiously, “You don’t want sex with me – a man of caution and control, eh?” She smiled for the first time since he had wandered past Brenda to her station in the office.

He did not smile; he was feeling perplexed. “If we decide it, we can have many years of sex together. We can take it cautiously.” 

She laughed at this point, “Don’t you see, I am someone who will charge in. I would go for sex when my hormones are high.”

“Oh, I do indeed, I see it. But I think for tonight we will not jump without looking. Tonight, we have the powerful experience of last year. I think I should stay with you tonight. I think I should lie with you in bed. I think we should see tomorrow how we feel.”

“Oh, now you worry me. By tomorrow you may have decided - on what you know of me – that we will not become lovers.”

“We both do want it. We are charging in that direction.”

“So, you are teaching me caution! Looks like we could have plenty of clashes on that score, maybe?”

And, at that moment he smiled his cautious male, decent smile. In that moment she knew he was in love. Properly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loving together

 

A bloke came on this chat to me. He was red in the face with rage, Well, I didn't see the redness – on the chat, obviously. But I could tell. "You," he said are chatting with that bitch from White City." I had been looking for a date; my previous girl-friend had found someone else, I had been angry at the humiliation rather than disappointed at the loss. And I replied to this stranger, "No bitch from White City. I know a beauty there, someone I adore." He spluttered (if you can in a chat), "She's a bitch. I divorced her!" So I said, "Oh you were her husband? You must have loved her once. She is easy to love, isn't she." He didn't reply to that, not immediately. I was curious how he knew, but she must have told him; to enrage him presumably. 

Later that evening he sent a cartoon character with a puzzled face, wrinkled brow, staring eyes and open mouth. The next day he wrote, “OK. Maybe you’re right. Once we loved, were in love. Perhaps we could all meet up?” I replied immediately, “Perhaps we could.” So I arranged with you when I’d be round next. And then I arranged with him so to meet up, so we would arrive together. I told him that when we arrived at your house, he must put on the loveliest smile he had ever made.  He did not say anything.

When we did arrive, of course you were flabbergasted to see him, and he did pull a very friendly smile. You looked a mixture of tears and fury. So I held you tight in my arms till you relaxed a little.  Then you looked into my face, and said with a sort of outrage, “With him?” and waved a hand at him. I nodded and you nodded as if obeying. “You are good,” I said. “You are beautiful, Thank you.” You sank limply onto the bed. I said gently, “I am  going to undress you.”

You seemed like you would let anything happen to you. But then you looked up and said, “OK,” as if it was a game. Which it was. When you were undressed, I lay you back on the bed. I tied your hands to the bedposts at its head. And he tied your feet to the bottom posts. We both looked at your wonderful body lying for us on the bed. He said, “She is a bit of stuff, isn’t she, mate.” And I said “More than a bit. A load of stuff.” He nodded and we both smiled.

“OK.” I said to him, “you take her first.” Which he did. He was efficient. He slid in and did the job and slid out again. He was breathing heavily. “Good?” I asked. 

“Good. Mate,” he replied. You looked confused as you lay there helpless. Perhaps hating giving him pleasure, but also you seemed to get something from the penis inside – whoever it was. Then it was my turn. I did it differently. I kissed you. On the lips, the neck, preciously on each breast, each nipple. I felt ecstatic. Slowly, my tongue slid downwards.

Then I entered. It was slippery with his juices, with your juices, and soon would be my juices. I told you that you were perfection. Which you were. You were. And I tried to delay till you came. And you did. You convulsed with your whole body and it set me off – completely. And we reached our peaks together. And we stayed there together for a moment. A moment and a half together. I slowly slid away from you. But kissed you on the lips and kissed you between the thighs. 

He had been sitting on the chair looking on. I untied one of your hands, He untied the other one, and you sat up, your feet still tied. It looked uncomfortable, so I put my arm behind your back for you to lean on. I asked if you two thought you could ever get back together. He stared at you and then shook his head. You were looking at the bed between your thighs. It was messy, and you gave a slight shake of the head. I breathed a sigh of relief, “So, I am the lucky one; the very, very lucky one.” We untied your feet.

We all got dressed in silence. I told him I thought that you and I might need to have a quick word together. It took him a moment to realise he was not needed. He thanked me (not you). And I thanked him. It was a tense moment as he left. He obviously felt excluded suddenly, but seemed to be telling himself he didn’t care about being kicked out. To me, it seemed, we were the most beautiful combination. You let me hug you. “That was perfection,” I said. “You must have had so many men wanting you like that.”

I wondered if you would let all that happen to you again. But I was sure he was gone for good. I told you I would pick you up next week and take you somewhere. You asked, “Where?” But I did not tell you. You asked what you should do till next week, as if you were helpless. I knew you were not, just dazed with the surprise. With being used. With the deep satisfied pleasure that warmed you at that moment, and that you could not understand. “You must dream of what has happened this evening. You must dream of how it could have been better for you.”

Next week I called for you and told you as always how beautiful you are in my eyes. You touched my arm and smiled, as if the compliment was mutual. When we arrived, the door was opened by my wife. She stared. You stared. There was some sort of comprehension on both sides. My wife said to me immediately, “I knew you were up to something.” She turned to you and invited you in as if she were taking charge of the hospitality for a guest. 

Before you entered, I stopped you and made proper introductions. Then I let you enter the house first and stepped in after you. The wife offered you a cup of tea. And I said, “We might like to go to the bedroom straightaway. But you asked for the tea, so we went into the living room. When she brought the tea, she said so this is about being randy is it. You said, “Your husband and I agreed on a threesome.” I was enjoying this dizzying uncertainty in both of you. She said, “Maybe you should have asked for my agreement.” And I said not necessarily.

She looked at you as if appealing to your good nature. She obviously liked you but seemed unsure how much she felt jealous or threatened. I reassured her that it would not affect the marriage and we were bound to each other. You nodded. But she didn’t seem reassured. As she said nothing, I went on. “So, it is consensual, then.”. I added that you two were the most beautiful women in the world – which for me you were. She asked, “What’s going to happen then?” No-one had drunk any of their tea. I sipped mine.

I explained what would happen. My wife was aghast. You looked at me because it was the first time you heard what I was proposing. I said we should go up to the bedroom. You stood up. But she stayed in her chair till I took her arm and as if a puppet she stood and came with me. I suggested we take our clothes off, and you undid your blouse. But she stood still. It was another tense moment. I coaxed her and began to undress her. When you were naked you took over undressing her.

“Will I get a fuck as well?” she asked. I said we would see. I put a chair by the bed and drew her towards it, so that she sat down. I clipped the handcuffs on quickly and bound her to the chair with rope, her feet, her stomach, and around her chest. It was very secure though not too uncomfortably tight. You watched without expression. Perhaps you were enjoying her helplessness, perhaps you remembered the week before. I had not told her about the gag so there was some resistance to putting it tightly into her mouth.

When she was secure and more or less silent beside the bed, I invited you to get on it. You looked at her as you did so. I wondered if you felt sorry for her. I put my hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead and said to her, “You are the most precious one.” You watched. Maybe you were jealous, perhaps you were relieved at my loyalty to my wife. I lay on the bed with you, and we embraced with some passion and kisses and vigorous hugs. We soon forgot her noisy movements.

I was very passionate with you, and you seemed to want to show equally loving affection for me. We took our time slowly and bit by bit we worked each other into the sexual frenzy and lift-off. It was actually very intense indeed. We lay back to relax. She had remained in her chair, bound and gagged, watching our entanglement so intensely. She was coughing and dribbling, and making what noise she could. You and I took no notice at first. Then I got off the bed and released the gag. She glared.

After the glare came one single word from her pained mouth, “Bastards.” One single word, but it filled the room with hate and revenge. Both you and I chuckled briefly. That venom contrasted completely with her total inability to do anything. I touched her soft skin – on her shoulder, her breast, and told her again how precious she was. Then there were two words, “Fuck. Off.” I decided it best not to release her from her bonds. So I got back into bed with you and we slept a bit of the night.

Later in the dark I sat on the edge of the bed and held my wife’s two hands. She was quite motionless. I undid the handcuffs and threw them on the floor. She did not move. If I took away her bonds, I was still, unsure if she would fly into murderous activity, or would she remain inert. I was looking into her face and holding the once cuffed hands. She murmured something. I asked her to repeat it. “Thank you for taking off those cuffs.” I repeated how precious she was and kept repeating. 

She seemed spent and exhausted as if she too had been through the equivalent of a sexual climax. I asked if she would like me to release her, so she could come into the bed with us. She nodded, and I wondered if she would become aggressive as soon as released. But she was limp. With those bonds undone she docilely came into bed. She lay between us, but it was you and she who hugged tightly for the rest of the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                    The ring

 

My head is as thick as lead - that is my excuse.

            When I shut my eyes just now there was a flash as tight as electricity and slowly floating out into my eyes there came this image; a white hopeless body, a beautiful woman, ravished and dead.

            At the beginning I was alone in the womb, but I soon emerged and stood on my feet. And I grew and I grew, among all the ogres and sentinels which watched me.  I know oppression, I know sick envy; like all children I know the confusion of innocence.

            Later…. I can see shining in her eyes, her white hair which falls down all over my trembled hands and lingers around the tenseness of my loins.

            I can't remember the first time I saw her but I can remember right from the beginning the ends of her hair and the slope of her shoulder against me.

            It is the first time we are alone together.  I walk so gingerly, I walk like fragile glass; in the street beside her, by her firm body at so great distance that the air sags between. Inside me I carry many months of unsure longing and the perfect image of her step touching the ground.  I can see without my eyes her graceful twist and the pull of her hips, swaying her bosom and her silent face so straight white in the dark.  When I turn to look at the tumble of softness in her body a sudden shock has broken in my pelvis and there is all power in my arms to scatter the stars in space.

            We walk in the darkness, the air parting around us pressing us in.  We are together alone.  I wonder what it is a boy’s body must do.

            Perhaps it is the stern and bone hard lines of her body, almost yielding which caught him in the middle of his breath.  That night like fear they approached and engulfed each other and as clouds rode by above them, they sank with each other into the mouth of their desire, alone together.

            Perhaps whenever they are touching the broad space around absorbs into them. And beside them there are only slender paths.

            

I know her body.  It is stern and her love soaked in steel and yet I have felt her sway into my touch.  All around I have bent vast caves of air to monuments that strain over us.  In our turmoils, there is light from the surface of our skin, it breaks and blesses between us and it is as if contentment floats out all desires.

            In the air the black silk scarf as she wrapped it, I caught it.  Her hair falls.  And mouth, my mouth, hers, breasts, in the belly-to-belly, the belly-to-belly, the belly-to-belly.  In my mouth I always suck her warmth.  I always drink her eye-joy.

            I have sworn it to her.  If she stoops to her feet, there are some small pieces amongst the dust that will fill with beauty as she touches.  She has held my yearning tightly to her breast.  I walk with my pride a carpet underfoot.  There are no prayers I cannot ask from her.  In our union I feel the whole of her body caressing all mine -- I have sworn it to her, and from her.

            In the daylight her body is blue and light, so fragile it will crack in the hands. At night it is her eyes that fix, they are bridges across the sunset.  And intense.  And in the night, all night, intense.

            I sat - an ecstasy that grew.

            I stopped.  That was it. Real.  I stuck.  There. Her and him - who.  Where was I, where the sky? 

            After about three months he saw them -- her and the other.  After three months he knew, then he saw.  Three months he was part of her body, her mind; part of her gesture, part of her path.  And after three months a paralysis, a meteor crater.  And a split in his spine, he crumbles.

            She had complained of a headache.  It could have been her period.  I believed.  We turned back.  Sadly, a hand on her shoulder.  At her home she sulked, I stayed.  I didn't want to go, to leave her, to let go -- so early, only just the evening.  She sulked, told me to go: walked too far in the afternoon.  Too hot -- she had a headache.  I didn't want to go - I wanted to help her out of it.  I went.  I walked in the street.  For an evening I watched the river and then went back to her.  A light in the window.  I rang.

            He rings the bell.  The light switched out in the window.  There is someone at the window, two at the window, two.  Vanished.

            Two.

            There was no answer to the ring.  I went.  I walked in the street, I walked.  My ring had been unanswerable.

            At times, night is coloured purple and spots start, and the water is in my hair and in my eyes.  At times a dead stone starts a mirage, and flights of freed hope wander.  Delicate hands.  In my skin is a pink greed which stretches and clutches.  Am I walking?  I walk, I walked.  A crust of salt on the skin peels around my eyes.  I walked all night -- numb-purple, cracked bones and a pungent taste of blood in my belly, blood burned with shock.  Belly torn in two, in three cracks, with bones exposed.  A shrine in the belly of two deaths.  A broken harvest of pain.  In the night, at times, I sag, I stay without hope of waiting.  I rang, the jangle; lied and the light switched out.  A stop.

            At times I remember.

            It is silence, the fullness of age.  A day which repeats cycles, drenched in dull magenta brine.  Black is the fullness of oldness, a trench of absences.

            There are days which repeat.

            There are days.  There is never; and it is always now.  There are days which repeat a pattern of silences.

            I have touched ice.  I walk with a crucifix of precious metals in my hands.  There is a glow for ever in the wound where the great pain was removed. Life froze in cascades, a shield now protecting my desires and warming.  I am spread out over my own soft skin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                  Sex and love with Beryl Smith

 

As we were returning from the weekend, we picked up a lonely hitch-hiker that my wife had spotted on the road.  She was a youngish woman, a girl, with a cheeky look.  She had a pronounced bosom and long legs.  My wife was also taken with her and engaged the girl with animated chatter as she often does with attractive women, I sometimes wonder, to bind them in a female loyalty; not that she has ever had cause previously to worry about my fidelity. We had a frank and easy relationship, and we could explain fantasies to each other, so long as they remained fantasies only. 

            When we got near to our home my wife, in an excess of friendliness which she had worked herself into, invited the busty young girl to have supper with us.  She helped us vigorously to unload the car and settle our things back in the flat in the centre of town.  My wife went off to the kitchen to put together the simple meal she had planned. This left me with the young lady who was certainly someone any older woman might want to keep in bounds.  I was more able to look at her now in the light, and out of the car.  Her blonde hair, curled up in a bun at the back of her head, had begun to loosen towards the end of the day and one or two strands curled down by the side of her face, over her shoulder and ended in a little twist on her left breast.  Her sandy-coloured cotton sweat-shirt was quite tight and had the words "University of Life" printed across it with two red hearts on either side of her bosom.  She had tight leather trousers of a brilliant dark blue that finished short of her ankles.  With a thick yellow belt she looked like the trite colours of a Mediterranean beach. I poured her a drink before supper. Her name ws Beryl, she told me. She didn't speak much.  But her lack of words was compensated by the impact of those she did utter.  She suggested I might like to sleep with her for the night instead of with my wife.  A change, they say, is as good as a rest but this girl, whose name I still cannot remember, was offering a challenge not a rest.  I looked at her as she coolly sipped her drink.  I took a glass of sherry through to my wife in the kitchen, before I replied.  Eventually, I said, "There may be some opposition to that".  She struggled with her hair; another blond strand began to unwind.  "She's nice, your wife" she said without much interest, "but a bit of a cow".  And after a moment she added "She talks a lot doesn't she!... don't you want to stop her sometimes?"  At this point my wife came into the room.  "What are you two talking about?" she asked brightly, disguising any suspicion she might have in her mind.  Then she turned to the young girl, and started to tell her about my passion for music, Mozart...  She rattled on about this and was drinking her sherry and asking me to go and lay the table, all at the same time.  I finished my drink in a slow gulp and put the glass down to go and do my duty with the cutlery.

            Beryl wandered into the kitchen when I was laying out the kitchen table for us. She too gulped down her drink and put the glass on the table. She touched my arm and said, ‘She me round the flat. So I paused my duties, and showed her where the toilet was. She just looked and seemed to expect me to show her the rest. There was only our one bedroom, into which she wandered and looked around. I waited as she hesitated till she moved back to the doorway. But she did not walk through. Instead, she closed the door, turned the key, leaned back against the shut door and looked at me suggestively. I was about to say, ‘oh come on, now’ or something when she quietly said, “I need you to show me something.” I go the gist of her meaning and was wondering how to gently dissuade this eager teenager. She was quite pink and in general she was like a ripe plum on a tree waiting to be picked. 

            She undid the button at the top of her blouse. Foolishly I said, trying to be amusing, “It looks as though you want to show me something.”

            “I need you to show me what a man does to a woman.” And, unashamedly, she undid another button. I looked at the soft pink and enticing flesh. The shape of her small breast and its pert  nipple was obvious to see. I wanted to touch it. She was looking steadily into my eyes.

            “I think you’ve probably found out about what men can do.”

            “No,” she said, “We have had a few classes at school.” While still gazing into my face she put one hand into the top of my trousers. 

            “You don’t get to it that way,” I said, still foolishly trying to be jokey about what she obvious desired at that moment. So she began to feel for my flies and found the zip which she pulled down. I began to think this was getting too far  from safety. But my body didn’t think so. It began to stir between in the loins. She really was desirable. And she found quite easily my now rather eager member. She pulled it out of the trousers, and then the balls.

            “Please, will you get onto the bed, sir,” she asked as if addressing her teacher. You can guess I was a bot torn. I did not imagine this could really be a proper seduction. She seemed to be making it into a school lesson. My body, without my permission, really did want to lie on the bed with her. Quickly she took off her clothes and then sat astride me, quite naked. She touched by member and pressed it against the skin of her slender tummy. It felt, of course, like heaven. 

            At that point, my wife called from the other side of the door, to say the meal was ready and what were we doing. Neither Beryl nor I spoke, but Beryl whispered to me, “I want to hug your… er, thing, in my hugging tunnel.” I didn’t say a thing. My wife called again and banged on the door. Beryl lifted herself up and then very slowly lowered her tunnel, as she called it, onto my ‘thing’. She fumbled to get our two parts to marry together, and I entered her very tight love-tunnel to be hugged. I found my body’s thrusting impulses difficult to suppress. She was biting her lip as she brought us together, and the banging on the door it stringer and my wife’s shouting got louder. And then I lost it….  I grabbed her around the waist and rolled over on the bed to complete a very quick intercourse. Beryl gasped a few times quite loudly and then smiled at me. I notice that the banging on the door had stopped.

            Beryl put her lips on mine, and whilst we were sort of kissing she said, “Now, I know what to do.” And she asked, “Did you like it?” I was only just coming out of the mists of my ecstatic sensations, but I whispered back to her lips, “Yes.” It was, unfortunately, the truth.

            When we came out of the bedroom, Beryl with her clothes on again, and me with my trousers in order, there was no sign of my wife. There was a saucepan of pasta on the stove, dried out and beginning to burn, and a now-cooling bowl of Bolognese sauce on the table. It didn’t take long to check that my wife had run out of the flat and left us to it. I knew where she would have gone. I told Beryl, “You’ve had tour lesson. Now you have to go.” She looked a little disappointed, so I said, “You did well; you’ll get a good mark in your exams.”

            She looked  mischievously at me, “I know.”

 

 

                                                                          II

 

When I had finished writing the story you have just read, I looked up and across the hearth at my wife who was reading. She had her large owl-like glasses on her nose.  She was distracted by my stopping the writing and looked up too, an enquiring look.  I had never written anything like that before. Mostly my work was contributing to the business pages on a couple of national newspapers, dry stuff.  I said, with a mischievous grin at her "I've written something different.  Have a look at that while I do the supper.  She looked put out as she put down her book and took the sheets of paper, I passed to her.  I went into the kitchen.  My wife is a handsome woman, but we rarely look at each other nowadays, in our early forties, starting towards the ‘one-day-we-will-be-middle-aged’ horizon.

            When the supper was done, I came out of the kitchen and she was just returning through the front door, a few drops of rain on her mac.  I had heard a noise whilst I was cooking, like the front door latch.  I asked, puzzled, "Where have you been?" - "Just to post a letter." she said idly.  She looked a little flushed.  We sat down to eat supper together.  "So what wicked little fantasies you've got inside that statistical little brain of yours." She twisted her mouth with a mischievous grin as she spoke.  I felt embarrassed; I suddenly didn't know what she was thinking.  After so many years of marriage, so many years of knowing her reactions, so predictably, of being so predictable myself.  I remembered that mischievous grin, from long ago, right back at the beginning when I had begun to accept that we would be getting married; we had been at a party and I had seen that grin when she was dancing with someone else, a handsome fellow we all knew had a lot of women. She was looking lovely then; with her very dark hair; her full round face looked open and wide and honest.  I had been so drawn by her steady eyes that had looked so lovingly at me.  It had been after that party that I had felt suddenly unsure of her; I had insisted we got married quickly, immediately.  Now I felt the same - unsure of her.  What had I done?  What had my fantasies done?  I looked at her now and saw the beautiful and handsome woman I had fallen in love with. I could see the shape of her body I knew so well through the casual relaxed clothes she was wearing this Sunday evening, the tight belt drew the loose dress under the shape of her bust which was large enough to pull lines of tension in the cloth.  I suddenly felt I had spoilt a world of security and contentment. "What did you think of it?" I asked casually but really I was anxious.  She obviously realised already my uncertainty.  I looked around the room, rather nervously. "What," I asked abruptly "have you done with it?"

            "I haven't got it." she said.  I felt aghast.  Had she torn it up - thrown it away in disgust?  I looked at her blankly.  This handsome woman I knew so well.  Had my frank moment of pornography sickened her so much?  It was not like her; she often liked sexual jokes, she was always free about such things.  She was a social worker even, she would not be shocked - or condemning.  She had often told me stories from the child guidance clinic, the violence, the neglect, the child abuse in the families. I almost knew the lives of those young kids she worked with. She had always told me with a shock that was full of compassion and concern.  She was an honest human woman.  But did she think I was like that story I had written?  She had a full sense of life and love of people, a humour and no condemnation.  I loved her very much at that moment. "What have you done with it?" I said in a kind way; but I must have looked disappointed too.  "Have you destroyed it?"  Well, perhaps no harm if she had.

            "No."  She looked yet more mischievous and as if it was a great joke to keep me guessing.  I began to relax as my worst fears of her condemnation receded. 

            "But, it's not here.  You haven't got it.  Where is it?"  I suddenly remembered her going to post a letter ten minutes before. 

            "I've posted it" she said, and stopped as if it was all the explanation needed. 

            "What do you mean?  Where to?  Who too?" I spluttered.  I began again to feel alarm and dismay. A new kind of fear gripped me.  I had never known my wife to betray a faith like this. I thought of the other chaps in the copy room where I sent my articles in.  They would hand it round the room, a page each, and read it out with hoots of laughter as they did with copy they didn't like.  The city editors were their worst victims; they would embroider their slushy prose in a cruel fashion - but they would not need to with mine, "Who have you posted it to?"

            "Your mother." she said.  I went pale.  I could feel it in my face, an icy pallor.  It seeped slowly right down through my guts.  I could no longer eat the meal I had cooked.  Nor could I say anything. “My Mother." I repeated senselessly.  My mother had become a catholic about ten years ago after my father died.  She even went on pilgrimages and gave money to convent homes for pregnant teenagers.  She lectures me every time I go to see her, on the sexual evils of the modern world, about the temptations, about the tarts with whose profession she seemed remarkably familiar, like a doctor researching a cure for cancer.  My mother would have a fit, or worse.  She makes me promise every time I go to see her that my marital relations should be secure and never enjoyable.  Otherwise, she would certainly write a will to leave her estate to the dreadful Church and cut us out, and then die straightaway from grief over her only son.  My head whizzed round in trivial details.  "My Mother." I said stupidly.

            "Well, it will be posted to her on Tuesday, I expect. I put your little story in an envelope and addressed it to her."  She explained this calmly, and continued eating the meal on her own, mine now abandoned.  I wondered if, after all, there was a chance to rescue it before Tuesday, get my story back. 

            "Where is it now?" I prodded her to continue, I begged.  It was dragging each feather from a chicken, one by one; but it was me that was feeling raw and exposed. 

            "I've sent it to a friend and asked her to post it for me. On Tuesday."

            "But," I could not explain this, "whatever for? You know she'd die of the shock. You know what she expects of me. You know she thinks I'm as celibate as all those padres and curates of hers.  It would kill her." 

            But my wife waved her fork in the air and said, when she had carefully swallowed her mouthful, "Nonsense, she's a tough old bird.  She'll put you through the mill for a while, squeeze your overdraft guarantee, that sort of thing."  And she still continued eating.

            "But," I exploded "it will hurt her terribly. You can't do that to her, can you?" She looked sadly at her plate as if mildly protesting that it was now empty and had failed her by remaining empty. 

            And then straight into my eyes, "Why not! She hates me.  You know how she behaved after we married."  I did know how she behaved after we married.  She had pestered me with her ‘illnesses’; she'd taken to her bed and demanded I live at home for days on end.  She had crashed our car, gently but effectively, into the side wall of our house.  My wife continued quietly, and reflectively, "She'll only be like that again, that's all. She hates me and won't even see me except if I dress in black and approach her on my knees as if going to the shrine of a saint." 

            I didn't argue with this exaggeration because I knew what she meant.  "It just seems like revenge."  My wife was just not like that. I could not believe she was doing this to me.  To my mother. I couldn't believe it was happening.

            "It could be revenge," she said. "Unless..." and she blew me a kiss across the table without finishing her sentence.  Then she continued straightened her knife and fork on her plate as if engrossed in being tidy. The same smile played in her eyes, the mischief on her lips. "Eat up your food, it's really very good.  It will get cold." 

            I began to get a grip on myself.  "I don't want to.  I just don't know what's got into you" I said. 

            She pushed her plate a little way in front of her - "Well,," she started, "you seem to think you are the only one who can have a fantasy.  Maybe I do too.  Have you thought of that?"  I had not; but I conceded it was possible. 

            "So, what is your fantasy, then?"

            Perhaps," she whispered drily "perhaps this is one of them.  Something not short of an earthquake is about to shake your life, my dear; unless... And I am completely in command of whether it will or not.  I can ring my friend tomorrow and stop her sending on that envelope; or I may not. This is cat and mouse.  The quality of the next few months of your life are entirely in my hands.  I can unleash the Furies or not". 

            "I hope not." I said emphatically. 

            "Well," she trumped, "that depends." 

            I was shaken.  The whole stability, the basis of my life, of my marriage, seemed to be changing.  "But, what does it depend on?"  I asked at last.

            "It depends on my whim.  And that depends on whether you please me, my dear." She sat back looking at me, as if waiting for me to do something. 

            "How do you want me to please you?" - I thought I had always been willing to do so.  She was being so enormously annoying in not coming to the point; "How do you want to be pleased?". 

            She looked enigmatic again "By satisfying my fantasy."  I now felt impatient "What fantasy?  She smiled sweetly "That you will have to find out. You will have to explore my body until you can find the trigger.  You've got until tomorrow night, haven't you?  After that it may be too late, and my friend may have posted your little masterpiece on to your Mother.  It is up to you and what you can do."

            "But," I replied, still trying to catch up with her, "we do that every weekend.  We do it every Friday night or Saturday night, or both sometimes." 

            She looked down her nose "Well we do - yes, we do that.  But you like it in the dark, you like it under the bedclothes.  It takes you about five minutes and then you climb back into your pyjamas and into your bed.  My fantasy is that you will do something different, something you have never done before." 

            I felt somewhat belittled by this. "You're a bitch right now." I flung out. 

            “That" she said "is not a very good start. I do not feel especially turned on by that.  And anyway you have often flung that sort of thing at me before.  It is not new.  You have to realise that time is not on your side.  You have only until tomorrow evening, remember.  I simply have to do nothing, and the hurricane will break over your head all on its own now.  And I at least will be at work during the day tomorrow.  You had better take stock of your position."

            I was silent for a while, doing what she said – taking stock.  Whatever her fantasy she was having, it didn't excite me.  I thought about it.  She wanted me to take her to bed and to do things to her body that I had never done before.  We were, as she had said, in a bot of a routine. We had never been very explorative. Now, I had no choice.  But perhaps it would be alright anyway; I had never been against going to bed with her. I stood up.  "Okay." I mumbled.  I took her gently up the stairs to our bedroom, and carefully unclothed her body, which I had never really done before.  The sight of her smoothness and roundness nearly made me weep with love for her.  I lay her gently on the bed and I literally explored every part of her body.  And when I found the part of her body she wanted, and when I found what she wanted me to do with it, I knelt on the floor at the end of the bed, and she lay on her back, her knees drawn up and her legs wide apart.  I pressed my tongue against her clitoris and began to regularly massage her there with my saliva.

            And as I began to do this, she lay back with a great sigh, her arms stretched wide to either side of her body and she began to tell the story of her fantasy.  As I went on licking her there till my jaw ached and stroking her labia on either side till the juices ran, slowly her breathing increased, her sentences got shorter. Her juices and my saliva mingled and ran slowly down my chin; and I was not nauseated as I had expected, and I could feel my penis getting warm and stiffer.  After a long time, her story neared its climax; she began to slowly moan and when she came she rubbed her clitoris with great arching movements of her pelvis against my chin and my tongue and my face.  It went on for a long time.  I had never felt her body consumed with such urgency.  Then when she had finished, she clasped my head tightly between her thighs in gratitude, her fingers entwined within my hair. Suddenly she let go and turned on her side and. I swear that in seconds she was asleep. I pulled the bedclothes over her body and nursed my very stiff penis in my hand.  I climbed into my bed, and I lay a long, lonely time trying not to touch it and aggravate the burning feeling in my loins.  As I dozed into sleep I thought of the story of her fantasy and a rich sickness of rage pounded in the pit of my stomach.

 

 

                                                                          III

 

The story of her fantasy was:  She said with her head back and her eyes shut - "One day, about a year ago, I took it into my head to change my life in a special way.  I cut down the number of hours I was working, so that it gave me two hours a day to do something else.  In my mind, I had the idea, which I never told you about, of having fun.  You know, the way women do.  It was a corny idea, earning money working with their bodies.  I knew a good deal about it, in theory, from the mother of one of our children at the clinic; and there were other clients, young school leavers who wanted to prove something to me about themselves.  They told me what fun they were having.  Anyway, the mother who was desperate about feeding her child, told me most.  She found her way into it easily enough. And she enjoyed telling me about the craft of it. She thought it was impressing me. Well, perhaps it was.  So, I took myself into a pub in Deptford at lunchtimes and spent a while there each day.  And from time to time a man would take me off to his living room in a high-rise block.  I did not charge them much - and they did not seem to want very much.  They were mostly lonely, unemployed and separated.  They needed their egos soothed quite as much as their genitals.  They were mostly middle-aged but they wanted consoling, like little boys.  I found it quite pleasant but a bit like social work. They groped around my body and under my clothes.  They admired my breasts, my titties, because they are still nice and firm and I told them I am ten years younger than I am.  Maybe they believed me; they wanted to, I suppose.  Only a few wanted to push their penises into me, and only about two managed to get themselves stiff enough to do so.  Most were relieved that I did not expect a top performance.  It was all desperately anxious and adolescent. I got a reputation for being rather motherly and inexpensive; and when I began to be in demand, I became of more interest to the professional tarts there who had previously avoided me as if alien.  They had not known what to make of me.  One of them, a very skinny woman, who had breasts that had been built up surgically, seemed to know the others and to be a kind of foreman.  She began to acknowledge me.  Eventually she made me a proposition.  I could see I had become type cast and occupied a particular niche - for the impotent and depressed.  So, for a change, I accepted.  Madame Skinny, as I called her, then took me, on a regular basis, after the pubs shut in the afternoon to a large house in a rather derelict street. In the house the rooms were interlaced with spy-holes and one-way mirrors that gave me the opportunity to watch a number of lanky twenty-year-olds doing a professional job on equally lanky but nervous young men with rather well-to-do appearances. In between their customers, the girls talked to me about their work, about men's bodies, their erections and their astonishing variety of tastes.  There were various rooms in the house that catered for various kinds of pleasures - and pains; various kinds of restraint, bondage and punishment.  There were various classes of wardrobes catering for fetishists and transvestites and for those seeking their dreams of governesses, or nurses, or the military.  But mostly my experience had been to cultivate erections and trigger climaxes from elderly boys who had never grown up.  I was fascinated by the craft that these dispassionate girls took seriously. They like I were often unsuccessful with their anxious distracted clients, no matter what complicated accessories were demanded.  Often the more intricate the procedure the more limp was the finale.

 

Clearly I would be expected to work in this household when the time came; and after about ten days, my skinny-loined friend, who I still could not like, explained in a confidential interview that I would now begin to take my turn in operating their elaborate make-believe apparatus called the rack, binding languid limbs to a crucifix and sucking the limp member, or whacking flat buttocks till the wheals glowed in the dark.  My first customer - always the most remembered they said - was a blond and podgy young man, , I dressed up in tight leather, and he grovelled under the flick of my crop across his thighs or his ribs as I stood astride his pale body lying in the bath.  He worked himself to a climax while I peed on the blonde hairs on his chest.  He paid a great deal of money for this.  He never touched my body.  I did this every afternoon for a month; and never once did you suspect, did you?  You knew nothing of my new career.  The rates of pay were not good despite the fees the sad youngsters paid.  But then, I did not want the money.  I never asked for more than twenty pounds for the afternoon, and then I always gave it away to a good charity.  I saw each customer for an hour or less. 

            Usually, each girl took the next one to arrive. There were four girls and me, and ten rooms to choose from.  I can tell you the exact details if it interests you.  Sometimes there were slow times, and if more than one girl was free, the next customer could choose.  They almost never chose me, whatever I picked from the wardrobes to wear; I suppose it was my age, being mostly twice the age of the other girls.  But mostly the ones that got me, acquiesced; and all of them were satisfied and claimed I was exciting.  And in fact, I can say I liked nearly all of them.  Though hardly any excited me.

            After a month when I began to wonder what I would do next, one of the girls suggested to me that we went independent.  She had extraordinary red hair and wore a lipstick that clashed.  I called her Scarlette.  She seemed to know what we would do and how we would work.  We had to buy our way out of the house, and we paid unhesitatingly. The girls were all frightened of the Madame.  She was believed to have violent friends who would scar our faces with razors or burn out our beauty with acid or blow-lamps, if we did not conform and obey. So, my companion and I paid our release money, and promised the same amount in six month’s time.  And you still have not noticed that one of our savings accounts has been closed.  We began to work in the West End in hotels.  This was different altogether.  They were different men, older, assured and no longer frightened of women.  It was then a continual physiology of erections and ejaculations.  Often the men were Arabs and they demanded strenuous activity.  My clothes became more elaborate, more sensuous, tighter and ever more vivid.  I worked in the afternoon only and was strict about leaving for the evening.  Occasionally you were away at a Conference or some other financial jamboree and about three times I made a night of it.  The men here were proud of themselves and of their performances and I realised they looked to me as an assistant to keep their performance at its peak.  I became good, and then even better.  I learned with these men how to remain icy and tender at the same time.  The more unmoved by them I was the more they performed at me.  They were much less interested in unusual equipment and phantasies; they wanted sustained and continuing achievement.  I never once employed my new skills with you.  I now know how to make your body into your heaven, but you have never once suspected.  Often those men's juices ran out of me and warmed my thighs as I walked home to you. But you never knew.

            We were pretty obvious in the bars of the Hilton and other hotels we had to be quick to catch our prey; or else we were moved on.  But sometimes the barman would take me into the stock cellar, and take down his trousers for me to quickly grope and grab what I could find.  Then he would not call the security, and we could wait for a while.  There was a lot of money in this, and you never noticed when the savings account replenished itself.  But again, the fun began to die when the novelty wore off.  I began to think I was coming to the end of this life.  I can actually say that I never thought of those men when I was with you; and also I never once thought of you when I was out in the afternoon looking for them.  Then about three months ago, whatever it was that I had been looking for in this adventure suddenly arrived.  He was not an Arab, but was very dark, a Greek, in tankers, I believe.  Maybe he was sixty-ish, strong, fatherly and still very lithe, a lifetime of money and women behind him. For the first time I felt glamourous - and so much glamour my insides melted, my heart had a job keeping up its thumping.  I knew I glowed with a wonderful blush when he came up to me because his eyes followed my blush right down to the rounded parts of my bosom that were exposed.  I knew he would be gentle with me.  He knew it was his gentleness and strength that captured me.  Suddenly there were only two people left in the world.  We drew together like magnets and the barman must have thought we had expected to meet.  From that day on I followed him like a yacht on the flood of the stream.  That was the night I was unexpectedly ‘delayed at work’, do you remember?  You thought it was my suicidal client; but it was me that had died in a special way, a delicious way, a death delivered by the kind hand of love.  After that first occasion, I knew he would come for me regularly. I was always in the same place waiting for him. I never went with anyone else. The girls had told me this was the biggest risk of the profession, and I did not care.  I forgot you.  Twice or three times in a week he would be there.  My heart would jump into my mouth, and my new life came to me for the afternoon.  And those afternoons when he was not there, I died in a kind of apathy.  Yet he knew of my agony, and a month ago he told me of the new arrangement.  I changed my hours at work, and one day a week he had me for the full day.  It started two weeks ago.  He calls for me at the office in his very large Bentley. We sit together in the back and look hungrily at each other, while his chauffeur drives us to Harrods.  We shop in the morning for the clothes he wants to see me in; and I tell him to buy the shirts and the shoes I like.  Then we take our clothes to the little Knightsbridge flat that he has bought for our meetings.  We change into our clothes, and look in the mirror, and look at each other. Then I embrace his strong wiry body, his crisp new shirt gathered into the belt of his trousers; his smart sleek shoes standing firmly on the floor as his frame supports my swooning love.  Arm in arm we go for lunch, a small aperitif, and omelette; and return to the flat, he, holding in one hand a bottle of his favourite champagne, and in the other my craving body.  Last week he swung me through the door and closed it with a flourish. His free hand caressed my cheek, a look of wonder and passion in his eyes.  I did not move for fear of melting into a pool on the floor.  He gestured to the bedroom and I went obediently, held by the elbow. He reached into the kitchen for two glasses.  "Please, your clothes", and he patted a chair. I obediently undressed, the whispering slither of silk on my skin, the soft clunk of the metal buckle of my belt as it freed my waist and my skirt.  He opened our bottle of champagne as my body gradually presented its smooth, creamy freshness to him.  I pressed my naked body against his expensive suit.  The soft flannel soothed my high-pointed nipples.  My well-used vagina gaped inside me.  He lay me back on the bed and came down beside me.  I undid the buttons of his trousers. I pulled up his shirt.  I kissed the soft skin of his tummy, the wiry hairs over his pubis.  Some of my hair caressed his genitals.  He sighed.  He removed his clothes. I looked at the long dark length of him from the steady eyes gazing into mine, to the pink tip of his penis waiting for me, to the strong sinews of his thighs and calves.  He pressed a glass of champagne to my lips.  I drank it, not taking my eyes off him.  He stroked my aching skin many times, from my shoulder, to my breast, to my waist, to my buttocks. He stroked me.  I saw his penis begin to stir, to waken and straighten.  I put my fingers to touch it, but he moved them away as if it were in agony "Not yet" he breathed.  He lay me back on the bed again, and his lips moved over my skin where his hands had been before.  I breathed heavily on him.  When his mouth came lower, my thighs opened involuntarily.  My body breathed him in.  He pressed my thighs apart and he looked there into the very centre of my being. His fingertips traced the outline of what he saw there.  The tender touch was excruciating.  It was electrical.  My knees drew up, my body opening itself, to give to him.  He poured the drips of icy wine from his glass into my heated crevice. The cold heightened the longing. Then his warm tongue drank from me. I groaned.  He worked on my agony.  My climax hovered.  He poured the wine, he drank it from me.  I burned, he poured, I came, he drank.  I clasped him to me with great tension in an enduring embrace that would not let time come in; and in spite of my iron need, he lifted himself gently into place upon me. His lovely penis slid.  And very carefully and slowly he made me come again with his climax.  In that moment I clutched in my arms all the blossoming love the universe had ever known.

            At the end of the afternoon he paid me well; the chauffer returned me.  I shall meet him again this week, tomorrow.

 

 

                                                                         IV

 

Even my wife's wild fantasy, frenetically impossible as it was, caused my excitement to be saturated with jealousy.  I took heart that it was to me that she told such an intimate web of her mind. The mixture of my unfulfilled excitement, the jealousy and the abased service to her, was a violent new cocktail, like discovering a new colour in the rainbow that no-one had seen before. I felt privileged.  I felt I had never been so close to her.  In the morning I woke late and had to hurry to reach an appointment.

            When she returned from work in the evening, the atmosphere had changed between us.  Sunday evening seemed a vast journey away, the other side of the moon.  She seemed strained and full of something. After supper she brought out of her brief case a sheaf of papers.  At first, I thought it was my story she had retrieved, but I saw it was not, so I asked, "Have you got my story back?".

            "Before we go into that," she commanded, "read what I have here."  She sounded suddenly displeased.  "I think it is self-explanatory.  It is a long letter from a fifteen-year-old girl who I have just started working with at the office."  The letter was indeed a long one.  I read it all through, as I sat opposite my impassive wife.  My anxiety mounted, as you will see, as I went along.  My wife waited for me to finish as if time would not be merciful.  The letter was as follows:

 

Dear Mrs Social Worker,

                                                   I have a lot to say to you and it is a nuisance to wait all the week round till I see you next week.  I've got something on my mind I haven't told you, and I don't know how to tell you. It didn't seem to come out last week.  I've got to tell someone.  There's so much nobody knows.  My Dad used to strap us a lot when we were kids.  I don't expect you know what it's like, but I was frightened of his coming home every day.  My Mum tried to stop him, but she was frightened of him too, so it just meant he strapped us harder.  He thought it was teaching us what's what.  He said we were kids without morals.  I didn't know what those things were then.  I thought they might have been those things which adults used with each other in bed.  But he said we had to keep to our morals, but after Mum died, he had a lot to do with women, lots of them.  People used to tell us it wasn't right.  It all seemed disgusting.  I told myself I wanted to stay a virgin, not to do like he did, not with anyone.  And I did stay a virgin for a long time - really and truly.  Lots of my friends didn't stay virgins quite a long time ago.  They muck around with boys.  Well, I've known a few boys too, now.  I've seen a cock, and I've seen it stand out, and I touched it.  But something different happened last weekend. I never do anything with boys. They want to do it but I don't think they know how.  Nothing ever happened in the past, not even with the man who got me and my brother on the railway cuttings.  He wanted me to suck his prick but my brother got hold of his wallet and ran off with it, so he chased after it and I could get away and get the neighbours on to him. I didn't know him.  So, I kept myself clean, you see.  So that's why I wanted to talk about last weekend because I don't know if I did right.  Well, I know I'm not a virgin now, so I suppose it was wrong, but it seemed so nice., really nice.  He was nice, because he said I was nice.  It's funny isn't it; I suppose you only like people if they like you.  He said he was over forty and that's nearly three times my age.  He said what difference did it make - so I suppose it doesn't matter.  But he wasn't like the boys at school.  And he wasn't like my Dad either. I suppose he's what Dad should have been.  Anyway, I was hitchhiking back from Hull - my Dad didn't want to see me, I think, and I didn't want to see him, but we have to do it because the court says so. That's what you say isn't it.  And my brother is away at the school they put him in.  So, I have to go and see my Dad sometimes.  It still makes me think of my Mum - not the foster one I had, my real one.  I've never talked about all these things.  My Gran always said you have got to forget about the things that upset you.  But there's lots of things you can't sort of forget.  This man stopped in his big car to give me a lift.  He took me all the way right down from near York to London. I’ve had lots of lifts before, but he was different.  He didn't look at me like some of the men, and he didn't put his hand on my leg.  My Gran would have called him a Gentleman. He just said nice things.  He liked what I was wearing.  It was that T-shirt I usually wear, and my yellow belt, you’ve seen them, haven't you; and I got some really nice trousers, my Dad had just given me. He said I looked really nice like he was on holiday in the pacific or somewhere.  He said it was very nice, and I wrote it down afterwards because it was a pretty thing to say.  He told me he was a writer, short-stories for magazines and things.  So, I suppose he thinks these things up all the time. When he got me to where my room is in London I asked him to stay.  I couldn't tell you about it when I came last time.  He came into my room, it's very small, and he stayed all evening.  We went to bed and he made love to me.  He put his hands on my shirt and felt me nipples; and he said he liked my tits.  It makes you feel good doesn't it.  He called my tits my ‘sticking out bits’.  He said he had a sticking out bit and he asked if I wanted to feel it.  I felt like a happy kid with him.  So, I said yes.  He undid the front of his trousers and put my hand inside, between his legs.  I said, it isn't sticking out much.  And he said, we'll see about that then.  He undressed me and I undressed him.  Then he put out the light and we got under the bed clothes on my bed, and his sticking out bit started to stick out properly.  He told me lots of things about me, all sorts of crazy things.  He wanted to lick all my parts he said.  He said if his wife knew he'd have to tie her up and put a gag in her mouth. She would have hysterics.  I don't think he liked his wife.  She must be quite bossy.  After a bit he put his cock between my legs and I could feel it go right into my hole.  I said it was a bit tight, but that’s how he liked it.  It hurt a bit, but I didn't mind because he made me feel warm and nice. His thing was warm somehow and it moved. It was like being on a boat when there's a storm, as he jerked up and down.  But I loved it really.  I don't know if it’s right.  But I want to see him again.  He never told me where he lives or anything.  I don't even l know his name.  Mrs Social Worker, what do I do?  I've got to see him, will you help me to find him.

                                                Love from Beryl Smith

 

 

                                                                          V

 

I sat back when I had read it.  My wife looked thunderous.  She was normally so very even-tempered.  I felt bad about the hitch-hiking girl.  Was my wife angry about what I had done -- to my wife, or what I had done to the girl? It frightened me a bit.  I was still concerned to get back the story I had shown her, I felt in her power still.  I asked if she had retrieved it - "It's quite safe" she said threateningly.  "It was waiting at the Knightsbridge flat when we got there today.  He thought it was a laugh when he read it.  But he said it might be important for us. He sent the chauffeur out to get some photocopies made - `Just in case', he told me."

 

I felt everything slipping away.  A cold fear sucked me from inside.  How many people were going to know about my secret fantasies.  Was she going to take revenge on me?  "You were a shit to that girl" my wife spat at me, “I knew you had been up to something when you had been to Yorkshire and hadn’t got back till so late at night”.  I knew why the revenge was coming.  The professional social worker outraged for her client was going to degrade me as an abuser, and shame me to everyone we knew.  For once I regretted something; I wished I had not written that letter she supposed had come from her client Beryl, and she showed me in the belief it was a genuine description.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Four – All dark

 

 

 

 

 

Love for the husband

 

She was standing there almost as still as the lamppost behind her, almost as slim as the lamppost. As he got out of the taxi and it shot away out of this street, the lady opened the long woollen coat she had hugged around her. Under its folds she revealed the glittering catsuit that she showed to the passing men in cars. Most cars slowed to look. However, he had got a taxi so that he could exit and meet her. 

            “Like what you see, young man?”

            He was in fact quite elderly and unimpressed by her compliment. “Very drawn to you, Mrs Latex.” She closed her coat to avoid disturbing the traffic as it was passing. “Where will you take me, young lady? Have you got a place for the night?”

            “The night? I hope you can afford me all night.” He was tall but casually dressed in a rather ancient looking anorak that did not suit his silver hair. “All right. It is around the corner. Not far. But the first thing….” She stopped talking as he took from his pocket a bundle of notes. “Count them out into my hand.”

            He got to six hundred, “That will do for half. I’ll take the other half when we’ve finished. If you like me, that is.” He put his hand back in his pocket and withdrew another bundle just to show he could afford whatever she wanted. “I could like you, sir. Quite a lot!” She had not moved from her spot, and he expected her to lead the way, but she stayed put and looked into his eyes. “Let’s be clear. I want you to know that I have various bits and pieces for defending myself if you’re the type to get aggressive with a woman like me.”

            “I’ve never been aggressive with a woman. Never hit one. Except when she wanted it for sex. There was one who liked a thick leather belt across her buttocks.” They looked from  a distance like a couple of friends having an innocent chat. “Would your buttocks care for a leather strap?”

            “Not likely,” And an observer would notice her smile for the first time. “But I could tickle up your nice backside if that’s what you’re looking for.” She turned, “Come. And remember I can defend myself. Just so as you know.”

            “Nope. I am looking for love. With a beauty like you. And I should say you are more than a beauty.”

            “I am. I can make your eyes water with beauty. You wait.”

            “I could wait a long time for you.”

            “Well, you won’t have to. It’s just two houses along.”

            “I’m staying the night you know. So we have plenty of time – and slowly does it. Right?”

            “I have some experience, you know. Different gentlemen like it different ways. I’m open to them all.” They were entering the house. Just to let you know, there are hidden cameras, here and there.”

            “I’m not going to hurt you. To be honest, you seem like perfection to me.

”I probably am.” Again she smiled as if she was thinking that she had hit the jackpot with this one. “Take that grubby jacket off.” She had taken him straight to the bedroom. It was large with quite a lot of furniture and a handsome wardrobe opposite the wide bed. He took off the jacket as if obliging her. You might as well take off the rest. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Or would you like a whiskey?” The setting sun was shining through the window, and he pulled the heavy, lush curtains across. 

“Whiskey would do,” He did not remove his clothes but sat down on one of a pair of armchairs. When she returned, she was still wearing her overcoat. “You can take your coat off.” But she sat in the other chair next to him. He turned to look at her, with a thoughtful expression. “I like your catsuit.” Her legs were showing black and scintillating all the way down to her ankles. “It’s latex. Fine stuff. I think I’ll call you Tex, maybe Lady Tex.”

She smiled as if she didn’t mind. “Go ahead. Touch it. It’s nice to touch.”

He put his hand on her calf and slowly, very slowly moved it up her leg exposing her thigh. When he got to her groin she moved and took a gadget from one of the pocket’s. “That’s the pepper-spray. Just in case.” 

From the other pocket she took a spear-like knife. She put both on the table. “That doesn’t look very safe, Lady Tex. I could snap that up as quick as you could.”

“I’ve got other equipment that I won’t show you.” She laughed at that. Then she wriggled her arms out of her coat and sat back in her glittering garment. He stared fascinated at her, from top to toe. “I think you like it.”

“More than. You’re just what I’m looking for. I had seen you before and wondered what you’d be like, what you could do for me.”

“More or less whatever you’d like. But no penetration. Got it? I don’t like diseases.”

“Nor do I.” His hand was still at her groin and he gradually, as slow as he could, stroked her up and down her body. Right down to her ankles again. “Kiss me.” So she leant across the arms of the chairs and gave him a peck on the cheek, and then a full mouth-to-mouth. He sighed. “Perfection. What’s it like to be perfection?”

“It’s OK,” she laughed again. “So long as someone notices.”

“Let’me be clear – I have noticed.”

“You have, I can see.” She put her hand on his which was slowly stroking up and down. She pressed it to her breasts. “I never had implants. I like then slender. What do you think?”

“Perfection.” He looked intently into her face. “Didn’t you get what I think? Perfection.”

“I know. You’ve told me. Sometimes, I’m hard to convince. What’ll you do to convince me?” He hesitated for a moment, then opened the zip on his trousers and brought out the tip of his stirring member. It pushed forwards as if greeting her. She looked down at it. “If I get on the bed, will you undress and then stroke me all over with that thing of yours. It looks as if it might like latex too!”

He stood up and undressed slowly folding his clothes and putting them on the armchair he’d been sitting on. She looked at him silently, and then stood to go to the bed. But first she impulsively put her hand on his back and with energy pulled him close to her in a fervent hug. He put his arms around her with an equal fervency. Then he lifted her slender weight and dropped her gently on the bed. She lay back, shut her eyes, “Massage me with your cock.”

It grew steadily as he softly worshipped the latex. After a long while of longing and slowly enhanced breathing he gasped and offered his organ to her lips. “It’s yours.”

“Not so fast. I think my mouth would like to decide for itself when it is ready. Now, Lord Tex. Tell me. Will you spare me your outflow into my mouth? Or will I swallow it?”

“Swallow.”

“OK. But we’ll keep this going for a bit. Till you are desperate. I like it when the desperation builds up. I like to see all that urging for my perfection. You’ve done this with lots of others who have been perfect for you. Haven’t you?”

“None so perfect as you.”

“Really, that’s perfect, too.” She wriggled her catsuit between his legs. “Come close down on me. Feel the latex with your body. Let that hard thing lie between us for a moment. No stroking or it might take you over, it’ll take the initiative. Feel me, just me – inside this slippery coating. It is sex all over me. Just for you. Because you call me perfect.” 

“Lady Tex, you could possibly be even more perfect than the catsuit, that I’ve admired out there in the street for weeks.” He softly moved his body over its inviting, shiny surface. “Now, why don’t you take it off, and I could feel the even more wonderful skin which is underneath.

She put her mouth on his lips again, with an energy that seemed like passion. “No, I don’t think so. It is of course, as you suspect, just as perfectly smooth and slippery. And just as longing for your skin as yours is longing for mine. Now then, put that cock of yours on my lips. I won’t take you in yet. I will keep….” But she stopped as her lips were closed by the gentle pressure from him. Her tongue slipped out and slithered and tickled him. He groaned.

 

It was another twenty minutes before she allowed him his release. And it was a release; it over-showered her mouth and dribbled across her cheek. He used his finger to slip the escaped juice back into her mouth. He was gasping. And she smiled.

            “Good for you, Lord Tex?

            He took an enormous breath, “Better than.”

            “Now you’re staying the night are you.” There was a command in her voice.

            “That’s the plan, Mrs Perfection.”

            “Lady Perfection, please.”

            “OK, Lady Tex Perfection. Are you keeping that catsuit on?”

            “Well, I’m not taking it off, not even for Mr Tex. Come on and lie next to me. We’ll sleep. You’ve had your pleasure from me, and it was certainly a pleasure and a half, it looked like. And, you’ve got that extra payment for me haven’t you. Go and get it, have your goodnight pee, and get back in for the night.” She turned over as if she had arranged everything.

            They woke early, very early. She offered him tea in bed, switched on the light and hopped out of bed still in her shiny uniform. “This is so bloody hot.” There was some aggression and impatience in her voice as she walked across the room towards the door to get the tea for them. But she stopped halfway. “Look at this.” She was just passing the handsome old wardrobe, and she swung open its two doors. Inside there was a trussed-up man. His wrists tied to his ankles, his knees to his neck, and his neck on a lead to a hook high up on the back wall, a gagged mouth. “Look,” she said indicating the specimen.

            “Christ. Has he been there all night?”

            “Course he has.”

            “So he was here listening in, last night?”

            “Yeah. He’d have been taking it all in.”

“Who the hell is he? What’s he been paying you?”

            “He’s my hubby. 

            “Whaaat?”

“He’s Jake; I call him jerk. I’ll get our tea.”

So the astonished bedfellow sat and looked at the tied up piece of litter hidden in the cupboard for the thrills. He wondered if he should go and untie the wretch. But then it was probably all to show his love for his wife.

When she came back with two cups of tea, “Doesn’t he get to be with you too. Do you have it with your husband.”

“Course I do. But not when I’ve got a customer. He loves to hear me. Drink your tea and we’ll have another go.” He stared at her. “With the doors open. What do you think?”

“I’m up for another go with you, but only with the doors shut. Or we could go to another room.”

“No, we’ll do it here. He will love it. He likes to hear me in passion with another man.” When she finished her tea, she put it on the side and told him to undo the zip down the back of her catsuit.

“Why are you taking it off? I thought I wasn’t supposed to have the pleasure.”

“Well we’re going to have a new pleasure. Just for him.”

The wretched husband with his neck straining upwards could only turn his eyeballs to the left. But he could hear every word they said, every movement they made.

“Well, Lady Perfection, what’s going to happen now?”

“We’re going to have a bloody good fuck together. Properly. In front of him.”

He put his cup down too and turned to her now naked body. “Your body’s got talc all over it.”

“We’ll get in  the shower afterwards. And wash each other down. Don’t worry about a thing. If he doesn’t like it, he can tell me afterwards. When I take the gag out.”

            “Doesn’t he want you too.”

            “Course he does, lover. He’s my husband. We’re good together.”

            “Glad to hear that.”

            “He’s the one that got me into all this. My pimp as it were.”

            “Doesn’t look much like a pimp.”

            “Not at the moment. Now, if you sit on the end of the bed near to him. Get yourself stiff and I’ll get on you lap for a good old fuck. I want the best one I’ve ever had. Got it.”        

“I’ll do my best.”

“Not good enough – I want the perfection you’re always talking about.”

So, in a quick moment they were ready, and she had the greatest of orgasms. Her screeching sounded as if it would bring the neighbours. 

“That’s fine. When I’ve got you out of here, he’ll do me over again. I’m a lucky girl today. And I’ll take the balance off you; the balance of the money.”

He handed it over, got dressed and began to leave. “That’s it,” she said as he moved to kiss her goodbye. “No more. I won’t see you again. Whatever you pay. I’ve been fucked into heaven.” 

“Don’t you want a fuck like that again?

“Not from you. I’ve had you, and that’s good.  You’re good. I am not unappreciative. But…. well, that’s it.”

“But why?”

But she put her finger on her own lips to indicate there was no more to be said. And he left without her accepting the kiss he had offered.

 

 

 

 

 

Down in the underground

 

He was standing at the door of the underground train in London waiting for it to open. He’d done it for decades; it was tedious. There was a handsome middle-aged woman next to him. So he turned towards her and told her she was attractive. She was slim and agile, but nicely curved, and with a pretty face and a wide mouth with sensuous lips. She was perhaps not as well-dressed as she should be, as if she was not aware of how attractive she could be. It was some kind of mischievousness that provoked him; it relieved the boredom. He did not usually do such things at his age. She looked at him and immediately slapped his face. He looked back at her, smiled and thought to himself, well she has spirit, how attractive! He picked his glasses up off the floor and followed her out of the carriage keeping a few metres behind. After about twenty steps she looked back to see where he was, and saw he was following. He was grey-haired but in good shape, well-dressed. After all, she thought, he did say she was attractive. She stopped and turned. She stared at him till he came up to her.

            “What do you want?” she said sternly. He looked at her with amusement in his eyes. His hair was well-cut and he had a fashionable dark stubble around his chin. She actually thought he was quite alluring with his cheeky amusement. She wondered if she’d like to match it and banter with him. “What do you want with me?” she asked again impatiently.”

He replied, “It would be nice to have a quick drink with you.”

            She stared back. People walking along the platform were having to navigate around them as they stood facing each other. She looked at her watch, “I’ll have about twenty minutes.” And she turned to exit with him.

            Sitting face to face across a small table in the pub, she decided to be blunt, no charming seductiveness. She was not going to make it easy for him. “I’m the CEO of a small finance company. We fund art exhibitions and art books. What do you do?” She took a sip from her glass of wine. “I mean what do you do apart from lust after strangers on the underground?”

            His amused expression remained on his face, “No,” he said, “only one stranger on the underground.” He chuckled.

            In spite of herself, she felt a little flattered. She found herself smiling back at him. He was, she thought, just a cheap gigolo. Just trying to prove he was so masculine.  Did she want to put him down, or did she want to be seduced? She felt a little uncomfortable. She put her hand unselfconsciously under her left breast to adjust the cup of her bra. He watched the movement and she suddenly felt embarrassed as if she was deliberate drawing his attention to her ‘assets’. “So, tell me what you do.”

            “Oh, I am just retired.”

            “Well,” she said slightly impatiently, wanting to adjust her bra again to get comfortable, but resisting the temptation, “What did you do?”

            “I was the lead of a team of doctors in a hospital. Orthopaedics.” He spoke in a factual way.

            “And now you’re retired and don’t know what to do.” She was looking equally amused. “So you look for lonely women – to examine their bone-structure, perhaps?” There was a slight sarcasm in her voice.

            “No. Not really.” He looked reflective and she waited. “I have heard the expression, ‘sex after sixty’. It just came to mind when I noticed you. That’s all. Hasn’t happened before.” Again she felt flattered, and she thought, ‘dammit’; something could be fluttering in her tummy. “Are you a lonely woman in the underground?” He asked. This conversation was getting deep quite quickly. She looked at her watch, wondering if she should go, but wanting to stay. 

“Oh, you know. The children have all just left home. And, you know, when the children leave, the husband often does as well.” He looked at her with some sympathy and reached out his hand to touch her on the wrist. She suddenly felt there could be tears in her eyes and she thought, ‘Christ, I didn’t know I still wanted a man. At my age!’ But she just looked down at the hand on her wrist wondering whether to respond to it. Instead, she turned her wrist over to look at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said briskly and stood up. “If you want to contact me, here’s my card.” And she fumbled in the bag at her side. “And,” more hesitant, “if you want a date, I’ll consider it.” She turned away from the table to leave, but stopped, “Are you married?”

            He looked seriously at her, the amused expression had left his face, “Yes.” She raced for the door though he was about to add something. As she got out of the pub, she screamed silently inside her head, ‘Fuck. Him’. It echoed around her skull all afternoon.

            When she left work in the evening, she was careful to go to the ladies and redo her make up. And on the train, she looked around from time to time to see who might be noticing her. But she noticed nobody noticing. She wanted to be beautiful again, as she was when she was twenty-five. She’d spend the evening working on the papers she had taken with her from the office.

            However, when she was at home, after a stale-bread sandwich, she noticed there was a message on her phone. She didn’t dare think who it might be from. She felt like a gawky teenager of fifteen, lost and insecure. The message said: ‘My wife and I are not intimate anymore. The children have all gone.’  And then he had placed one single capital X. 

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

She, Margret, refused to let herself think about anything but work the next day. though her daughter emailed to ask for some money, and her son wanted to talk about something his father wouldn’t because he was too busy having another family.

            But in the early evening, her stale sandwich had the same accompaniment. His message this time said, ‘If you want sex with an after-sixty, you’ll have to kink it.’ This time she decided to reply. But she spent an hour to get it right: ‘You know I’m CEO of my company, I’ll be CEO of our sex. Maggie.’

            He didn’t reply and she wondered if he was put off by her email. Or if he was leaving her to worry about it. That would be quite cruel. Her husband before he split up from her had called her cruel. And he had described how most CEOs are really bullies, licenced bullies. She had hated being called cruel, but from time to time since she had wondered, and had come to accommodate the thought. It could even be called sexy she thought at times. And now, had some kinkster fallen into her lap? But he was sixty! Or was she falling into the hands of a cruelster, like her stern father had been? Before she went to bed, she texted: ‘Rule number one is when you get a message from me you answer within five minutes. Got it?’ She switched off her phone for the night.

            In the morning when she switched on again, the message app indicated messages. One was from him, Paul. She left it till last as if she was indifferent. Which she was not. She was cross with herself. It said, “Well, indeed I get it, but you will have to create a system to enforce your rules.” 

She sighed to herself, Oh, for god’s sake, Maggie, he’s willing to play! Her fingers trembled with excitement as she started to reply. So she stopped and made herself her breakfast coffee. She’d make him wait all day. Nothing as erotic as this had happened for years. She decided to make the most of it before it went bad. What could be erotic electricity about a sixty-year-old grey-head? But she knew she would be determined to find out.

Looking at her computer furtively during the morning in between meetings she found a site which described sexual bullying. Is that what he needed? She told herself she didn’t care, it is what she might like. At a relaxed moment for lunch with her deputy, Sheila, she asked if she had ever heard of erotic kinds of dominance. Ella looked surprised, “Of course, Mags. Everyone knows about that these days. It’s BDSM. Maggie looked at her plate as if interested in the food she was eating. But she knew what she would be spending her spare moments on during the afternoon. She had already decided she would give him a rule to take her for a drink when she wanted. And she wanted one this evening. With him.

            She finished her lunch quickly and told her friend she had work to finish before her committee this afternoon and hurried off. Then when she got down to it, her computer told her masses of info about a whole amazing world, she never knew about and equally a whole rainbow of emotions inside her she had hardly known about. Lucky Paul, if he turned up for the drink this evening, he’d find himself the fortunate object she’d practice on. It was so easy to distil the essence of dominance and submission from all the bits and pieces around the websites, but there really are people who get themselves excited by quite cruel assaults. Some people really looked for and asked for it. And even paid money for it! Would she, Maggie, pay money? She corrected herself; would she, Maggie, take money for it? 

            She was eager when she got home, and sent her text message requiring his attendance upon her in a pub she had chosen. He did not reply within five minutes. So she sent a further text to alarm him; a warning she could be harsh about the rules she made. This time he did reply acknowledging her invitation to a drink with her. And he accepted it, kindly. He made no reference to the second message she had sent. 

            From what she’d read on the websites, disobeying her rule (by not answering an email, and by taking more than 5 minutes to answer another), demanded quite a severe punishment. Things began to turn in her mind. Would he really be the type that would love her to hurt him – with the emphasis on ‘love’ and on ‘hurt’. She’d have to find out slowly. Was he as new to this as she was? She replied telling him the time and the pub she’d meet him, and he should not be late. But he decided she herself would be late.

            When she arrived half-a-hour after the time she’d told him, he was not there. She stepped out of the pub, the phone in her hand. And rang the number she’d been texting. He answered quickly.

            She said, in a tone that she hoped sounded commanding, “You’re not here.”

            “Oh, I waited a quarter of an hour. I assumed you had second thoughts. You did say don’t be late.”

            “No, I said you don’t be late.” She heard him chuckle as if it pleased him to be talked to like this. “So, come back. I’m here. How long will you be.”

            “I’m only a few minutes away.” But it took him a quarter of an hour. She was sitting at a table with a drink. 

When he sat down next to her, she started straightaway, “I slapped you hard once, across the face. You deserve a few more. I tell you what you have done Paul.” And she told him his sins regarding the emails. Then she went on, “And now you have kept me waiting more than a few minutes, haven’t you. And in addition, I’ve had to buy my own drink. That adds up to four transgressions, doesn’t it?” And it was almost to her own surprise as well as his, that she gave him a good slap again. His spectacles went spinning off behind him. Two people at the next table rescued them from under their feet and handed them back with curious and intrigued looks on their faces. He examined the glasses before he placed them back on his nose. “So,” she said, “you’re into all this BDSM stuff, are you? How long have you been playing around with it?”

“Quite a long time. Quite a time.”

“Does your wife know?”

“No, absolutely not at all.”

And after a moment, she asked, “So you like being punished? 

He looked slightly uncertain, but replied with a definite nod of his head, “Yes.” And after a moment, “And I like to dominate. I switch.” She was about to ask what ‘switch’; meant but didn’t want to show her ignorance, and then realised it meant he likes to be dominant as well as dominated. And that made her think about being submissive. Another new thought; it might be interesting too, and could tickle her fancy as the rude saying goes. 

Before he could continue, she asked, “And, Paul, what’s the worst punishment you’ve ever had?”

“Ah,” he said looking out of the window as if remembering some special times, “Well I have had some hard punishments. Mostly with the cane,” he said frankly. “One woman tied me up and caned me as much as she wanted and I could not stop it. I had bruises for nearly ten days. She was cruel; and I thought she was the most beautiful goddess I had ever met. She didn’t want to do it again with me because I didn’t shout loud enough with the pain.” He looked back at Maggie, “Tell me your own worst, or best experience.”

She did not answer that; she did not want to reveal her ignorance. “Are you inviting us to play together?”

He was looking at her, studying her expression. “Maybe. I think you are a very beautiful women. You could be a goddess for many men. But I am not sure you understand any of this stuff we are talking about.”

 She felt a little flustered, and said, “But it was you that said we should get kinky.” And she stopped, not wanting to reveal any more of her sudden fascination.

“If you’ve never done any serious caning, do you think you’d want to learn>”

“I am a quick learner,” she replied quickly more or less admitting her inexperience.

            “OK,” he looked pleased. I have on the off-chance rented someone’s dungeon for the evening.” And then he added, “You know what a dungeon is?” She nodded. “We can go there now,” and he stood up. She stood up too, now feeling not in command. When they were outside and he was waiting to hail a taxi, he said. “You know, the best dominants always say that to use the cane well, you have to have felt it on your own skin, to have been caned properly. So you know what it is you are doing to the person who have entrusted themselves.” She certainly felt that although out of her depth, she was really desperate to swim in this exciting tide. When they had got into the taxi that had just drawn up, he asked, “You know what I’m saying?”

            “That you have to feel it in order to do it?” she queried, “But it is not quite what I’d expected when we set up this evening together.”

            He turned to her and said, “You look completely gorgeous when you’re excited.” She glowed inside with his complement, but also concerned about what was going to happen to her.

            “Will your friend, who you’ve rented this dungeon from, will he be there?”

            “No, I had not arranged that. It is a woman by the way, Alice, who I have got to know. Would you prefer it if we asked her to come? Would that feel safer?”

            Maggie no longer knew what she wanted. But she did manage to see, through her confused excitement, that it might be sensible to have a neutral person there as well, to make sure no-one got out of control. She nodded her head. “Is Alice the goddess who beat you to pulp?”

            He laughed, “No, it isn’t, actually. I never saw that goddess again. But Alice is quite up to that standard. She is perfection.” Maggie wondered what perfection in giving pain would actually mean. She felt a little girl having to dive off the top board in the school swimming pool. Paul got his phone out of his pocket. He found that Alice had not left her work yet.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

When the taxi dropped them outside the premises where the dungeon was, Alice greeted them from her door. They all shook hands with the greatest formality, an irony, Maggie thought, as they were about to sink into the greatest depths of twisted kink.

            And indeed, Maggie thought that Alice was really the goddess to sink all other goddesses. She really was a beauty, and graceful the way she moved as if trained as a ballet-dancer. But not only did Maggie approve, Alice herself approved. too, and enjoyed helping others onto her pedestal. Maggie was fascinated to see the dungeon of a professional. Alice gave her a sincere hug, woman to woman. But with Paul she just stood in front of him with her all-in latex body-suit in order that he could gaze till his eyeballs burst. “Now,” said Alice quietly but taking command , “he told me you want to learn some of the tricks of the trade. Some of my tricks.”

            “I know what he told you, as I was with him when he rang you.”

            “Quite,” Alice continued unruffled by Maggie’s sharp comment, “There are no tricks really. It just helps to have a strong arm for swinging up and down. And she went over to a table to pick up a thin cane. As she flexed it in her hands she had her back to them, and said, “Bend over.” It was not clear who she was giving the instruction to, so they both bent over, and she gave them both a good whack, roughly equal on each set of buttocks. Paul gasped and his feet moved a few inches forward as he tried not to struggle. But Maggie screeched in high pitch, and her back leapt up as she exclaimed in aghast surprise, “I can’t… “ But she didn’t finish what she couldn’t do, and moved around in a few circles holding her buttocks. It seemed outrageous to reduce a mature, middle-aged woman to the desperate inarticulateness of a baby. As Paul was still bent over, Alice gave him another one. He gave the same gasp and gurgled through gritted teeth. Alice put her arm round Maggie’s shoulders and put the cane in Maggie’s hand. She pointed to Paul’s still bent-over buttocks, and said, “Hard as you can.” Paul held still, and Maggie contemplated the task, getting herself into a mindset that could deliver that kind of cruelty to someone else’s back-side. She composed herself, stepped over to Paul, swung right back and did deliver quite a resounding whack. Paul again jumped forwards a little, gasping several times. And through his gritted teeth he gurgled the same as Maggie, “I can’t.” And then, “If you want to carry on, you’ll have to tie me. “

            Alice turned to Maggie, “What do you think? Shall we tie him up and he takes what we decide to give him?” Maggie looked doubtful, knowing she had to learn what to do with this moment of compassion. She nodded. Alice said, I think we’ll just keep it to six strokes from each of us. What do you think?”

            “OK.” Maggie found it easier, in her ignorance, simply to follow what Alice was deciding. Alice told her to get him undressed. “Paul, stand up straight,” Maggie commanded, and he did so keeping his back to the women. Maggie moved round to front him face-to-face, while Alice went to check her bondage frame and its leather straps. “Get those clothes off, Paul. Quick.” She watched his body come into view. He was in reasonably good shape for his age. She put her hand on his hair and ruffled it like a schoolboy’s. She took his spectacles off and suddenly gave him a terrific slap on the face. “Just for fun,” she said.

            He recovered from the surprise and smiled. “Good, I’d like it to be fun for you.” And he repeated. “You are absolutely gorgeous.” Though she knew it was not true – at her age – but she knew he wanted to please her with his compliments, and that indicated that she meant a lot to him already. And perhaps she was indeed a beauty to him – after all beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it. Alice led him to the bondage frame, and as he stood with his arms outstretched, she tightened all the bonds around his four limbs. Maggie was watching how everything was done.

            Maggie then asked, “Do we do the six alternately or each in one batch? And who goes first?”

Alice said, “I’ll do mine, and you watch and try to follow exactly and with as much strength. Listen to the noises he makes. It tells you what power you have over him. And enjoy that.” Maggie said nothing and waited for Alice to start. She picked up the cane and handed it to Alice who stood at the side of the frame, took aim and delivered the first blow. Very hard. Paul roared and jiggled around helplessly in his bonds. Alice stroked her hand across the four stripes on his  buttocks. This last one, without his trousers was a real stinger. She poised herself, took aim and struck again. Paul tried to hold his breath but gasped and groaned. He did mumble, “No,”. But maybe he was commanding himself to control his reactions. The third one, was just as hard, and though he did control a lot of the sound it was still twenty seconds before he could relax, come down off his tip-toes, and the sinews in his arms and legs became less visible.

There were three more left, and Alice cruelly decided to deliver them quickly one after the other so that he had no time to recover from one before the next arrived on his assaulted body. At the end he was limply hanging from the frame and only gradually righted himself. In his own mind that was it. And only when Alice invited Maggie to follow on, did he realise he had to go through it all again. “Christ,” he said. He wanted to say ‘fucking bitches’. But he actually said, “You are my angels, my idols.” And at that moment he suddenly meant it. 

Maggie took the cane and stood, as Alice had done. After the second stroke with Paul now shouting at each, she couldn’t go on. Then she told herself, he actually wanted it, Alice commanded it, and she needed it. So one more, very hard. Paul was beginning to screech as loudly as Maggie had. Then, without mercy, the three quick ones. But also very hard. By the third Paul was out of screeches and hung helpless and completely finished.

Alice came forward to Maggie, “Not bad. Well done, And not bad for him, too, a sixty-year old, or whatever he is.” She smiled with success. Maggie was breathing hard but felt a little infected with Alice’s success. It had been an emotional roller-coaster for her.

The two women undid his bonds. His hands dropped to his sides, and he stood immobile recovering, and feeling both a relief it was over, and indeed a pleasure that he had given the women what they wanted. Indeed. a real pleasure. Alice then looked at Maggie and with her head slightly on one side in sympathy, she said “Now, it’s your turn.” 

Maggie suddenly looked aghast. “What? Tied to that thing?”

“I’m afraid so. It is what we are all here for. You have seen what it has done for him,” and Paul drooped his head as if in apology, “Now you need to go through it for yourself, don’t you.” Maggie took a couple of steps back, as if she could escape. She could not find words. She let Alice lead her back to the frame; she undressed Maggie who passively allowed it, allowed whatever. Alice adjusted the bonds to Maggie, and moved back leaving Maggie feeling alone and completely helpless. A CEO of all people, she said to herself, and now a helpless victim of incredible cruelty she can’t stop. Why has she let herself do this?

Alice took up the cane and stood beside the frame with Maggie looking on at the cane. “Sorry, Maggie. You have to know if this is really your passion.” And delivered the first stroke – as hard as them all. Maggie shrieked and stretched up as if for a saviour to come and rescue her. But there was no saviour. As she relaxed down, Alice took aim and delivered the next. It destroyed any relaxation and shot Maggie as if through the ceiling with a cry that ended in a whooshing wail of agony. Waiting a moment for Maggie to relax again, Alice imperturbably watched to assess when the next one should land. The moment came and Maggie shot out of her skin, her brain thumping against her skull, almost senseless from the surprise, the intensity, the unendingness of the echoing agony through every part of her body. And then, she realised, the last three when there would be no recovery between strokes. She screamed, “No. No more. No don’t go on.” Alice waited till the screams stopped, and then applied the strokes, with unstoppable screaming till after the second, Maggie seemed almost unconscious for the last one. Maggie sagged, thinking only that it was the last. It was over.

Paul came forward and clutched her body with his arms in sympathetic warmth and care. “Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, and buried his face in her luxuriant hair. His naked body showed his excoriated skin over his buttocks and Alice admired all their work. She and Paul undid Maggie’s bond and she fell into their arms as if she could not hold herself up. Slowly she turned and almost with a kind of defiance moved herself away from their supportive arms. 

Grasping desperately at her own command and her CEO presence, she said to Paul. “Now is it Alice’s turn?”

Paul looked at Alice, and said, “Well we rather think it is.” He smiled with an almost gleeful smile. Maggie looked on, and noticed how Alice was taking this suggestion. As the proponent of this exercise with Maggie and Paul, she had no grounds for refusing to have the experience they all needed. “Oh,” she said, “I was whipped  at the start of my career in this business. I know it already.”

“But nothing like a regular top-up. Is there,” Paul said. “And a good caning will give you something more than a whipping. You need to learn the cane too, Alice, my love.”

So, Alice had to take the role of the experienced professional. Experienced in all these aspects of her trade. She was strung up on the frame, her beautiful body filling Paul with astonishing desire – even at his age, as the women might have said. Alice demanded that she have something in her mouth that she could bite on as the pain came. And so Alice too joined the trilogy of cane-fiends. She of course made less noise, but her form writhed in pulsing jerks as the strokes came on her unprotected flesh. 

After the last strokes, Maggie and Paul clasped each other in a satisfied triumph. And almost oblivious of Alice, with her stripes too.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

They tidied up, and then looked at each other as if they wanted to stick together. It was now well into evening. Maggie with her commanding voice took them both home to hers, only a short walk as it happened. Obviously, they could not have gone to Paul’s with his wife innocently unknowing – and sexless. Maggie was up for the new, always. They were all exhausted so they all undressed and got into Maggie’s double bed and were each fitfully sleeping till morning.

Maggie made conventional tea-in-bed for the three of them. Alice and Paul emerged from their half-slumbers as she put down the three mugs. There seemed so much to talk about that no-one new where to start. Maggie, again as a CEO managing a committee meeting, tried to capture something of the amazing atmosphere of three experimentalists in bed together. It felt like they were a hush-hush and underground secret society, bonded together with no-one else in the know. They all agreed and held hands in a circle like kids discovering new friendships. 

Paul announced that he would like to celebrate by have a profoundly satisfying intercourse with his new companion Maggie. She, surprising herself, declined although she would also have surprised herself if she had said yes. So, he then immediately asked Alice. Alice the professional was never in need of such consummation with her subjects, but to her own surprise she accepted. Maggie sat in a chair beside the bed and watched as the two worked up each other’s passions. She watched Paul’s striped bum flailing up and down as he thrashed himself into her. Maggie was fascinated by the scene, that is if she had not been a trifle… what was it, could be a little bit of jealousy. Why had she said no then? After all she, Maggie, had been his first choice. Perhaps she was cautious as she did not know where Paul had been with his organ. Indeed she did not know. But she was watching where it was going now. And so, would he come back to her? After they finished and the post-coital remains of passion died, they drank the now chilled mugs of tea. 

Paul got off the bed asking where the toilet was. At the same time, Alice got off the bed and stood in front of him, close to him, touching again. She put her arms tightly round his neck and lifted her feet off the ground to put them round his hips. He put his hands under her buttocks to support her there. He could feel the firm wheals on her buttocks from the night before. She looked into his face only an inch or two from his, “I enjoyed that fuck. I haven’t had a fuck that enjoyable for a long time.” He smiled into her face, and then kissed her on her two eyelids in an affectionate and grateful way, as if agreeing with her. When he let her down and they came apart from each other. Maggie jumped up and came over to him, as if to claim ‘her man’. She put her hand on his penis and held it, then told him to follow as she led him, penis-first out of the room. Alice, as she was putting her clothes on, waved and said to Paul, “Enjoy,” and arranged her bra comfortably around her, “and don’t forget I could be a fan of yours. If you wanted one.”

When Maggie had Paul in the next room, she pushed him back against the shut door. She also pushed her naked body against his, her breasts into his chest, their genital areas pressed together, and her hand still holding his vital part. “So, was that fuck with her the best you’ve ever had?” she asked with her face an inch from his.

“No,” he said, trying to collect his thoughts. “You are going to  be the best fuck I’ve ever had.” He smiled,

She smiled. “The right answer. And she pulled a little way away. And slapped his face. Hard. Not wearing his glasses they did not fly away. He looked at her. And she smiled again. “I think I can feel I’ve made your prick come hot. It’s swelled a little.” And she looked knowingly into his eyes. He wondered if she would expect him to perform again on her – at his age! “I might just squeeze out of you what she has left.”

Alice at that moment knocked on the door and called out that she was leaving. They did not reply because their mouths were engaged in kissing each other.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

Only a couple of days later, he called on her in her office. Secretly they went together, unseen, to a staff toilet and examined each other’s backside bruises. He loved the touch of her skin, and where its smoothness had been brutally interrupted.

            “Now we have some privacy,” he said with amusement in his eyes, “let’s agree to get married.”

            “OK. For ever.”

            “That’s the idea,”

            “And,” she added, “I know what I am planning for the honeymoon.” He looked quizzically at her, wondering what she had thought up. “For the first night of the honeymoon we’ll have sex. But starting with six of the best on each other’s backsides. It makes me randy just thinking about what we did.”

            He wasn’t surprised. “Or we could invite Alice to the wedding. She could contribute something!”

            “No,” Maggie turned away, “that won’t be necessary.” And she flushed the toilet.

                                                                                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stiff and loose

 

I looked at him and imagined his smart trim buttocks.  With my hands on them.  He was a little stiff in manner and it might be fun to loosen him a bit.  He wore a dark suit, a tie.  A white shirt, and a slightly supercilious frown.  Tall, he looked down at me a bit.  He had no idea I was looking back at him with eyes full of schemes.  I smiled to myself.  I smiled to him, and he seemed to warm.  Judging by his dark skin I assumed he had slavery in his ancestry.  I wondered if he had one of those large genitals that some Caribbean blokes have?  Would I find out, I wondered?

He was looking at me.  Wondering, I think, if I would be a good conquest.  He would find out, if he wanted to.

I asked him if he would like me to get him another drink.  He looked impressed that I had noticed he was standing in the reception room with an empty glass.  He politely agreed.  A quite plummy English accent.  Being black myself, he obviously thought I knew my place.  I like blokes whose looks imply they have money, because sometimes they do – lots of it.  And with it, a reputation that could be damaged by someone like me.  I’m not above a little blackmail, only a little! But then – it depends how he played. I could like this one, quite a bit.

            As I fetched his drink and waited while our hostess poured a couple of glasses of rum-and-coke, I looked at the wealth in this black community. None had got their money from this country but had come here to bank it, launder it even (perhaps). When I brought our drinks back to him, he took his as if not noticing me who had fetched it. He was talking to a superior man with a lighter skin but obviously more exalted in the riches league. I stood quite close to the darker one, a little closer to him than the conventional social distance.  But he seemed unaware of my insignificant presence. So, after a few minutes I shifted my stance and edged closer to the superior one, again giving a message as if I were suggesting something with my proximity. The paler man – I now heard him called Jackson – glanced aside at me as if unsure whether he’d want this irrelevant woman.  His glance obviously told him I was worth considering as he edged slightly closer till our sleeves were touching. To this the darker man – now known to be called Rex – responded by glancing at this woman he had neglected and who had now shifted some inches away from him. He too noted something that it seemed he might have missed, because he looked directly at me and with elegant white teeth, he smiled how grateful he was that I had gone to get him a drink. More appealing as it had come from such a gracious hand, he told me. His attention transferred from his senior colleague to this willing temptress he thought I could become. As his attention turned to me and I to him, the older superior one moved away to find attention elsewhere. For a moment I wondered if I was really here to advance my position in the rich niche, perhaps I should have attended to Jackson instead. But the moment had gone, and Rex looked a lot easier.

            I raised my glass to his, “To your good fortune, Rex.” I shone my teeth at him too. “My gracious hand is always at your service,” and, I added, “if I may.”

            “You may,” he quickly said, as if we were discussing intimacies. He looked into my eyes, and touched my shoulder, finding a little bare skin there. I had made an impression after all. I knew how the evening would progress, if I wanted it to.  And I did. And he could see I did. And after a quick look at me, he asked, “Tell me the name of this delightful person I am just making the acquaintance of?”

            “I’m Cora-Anne Lewis.” And I shook my head waving the longish hair from my eyes in demonstration of my grace and beauty. I too added, “I think I know who you are; you are so well-thought of, aren’t you.” I smiled winningly and appeared to be greatly affected by being in his company.

            He grinned like a boy. With a hesitancy, he then said, regaining his aplomb, If you would excuse me for a few minutes, I have to speak to one or two people. Then perhaps you would accompany me, we could find somewhere to get more acquainted. His hand was still acquainting itself with the skin of my shoulder.

            I nodded of course and took his empty glass from him. He moved away as if I was a dealt-with piece of business, but I knew I had enticed him and if I wanted he would take me to bed. It was not so much the bed that was on my mind though he was a good enough ‘catch’.

            I liked to think I was a good enough catch. But sadly not for the likes of him who would have me for an evening a few times till we tired. My best asset was my hair which flowed and waved a little more freely than most of my kind and could be induced to wave further for evenings such as these. I had a good score for getting myself taken home by someone rich. It could pay for my beauty salon, and more than. I wandered back to the bar, and decided no more for me, as I wanted to keep my wits aworking. I found a place to stand inconspicuously to watch who he spoke to. But I also looked at his body which would be an enjoyment added to the business I was on.

            I saw Jennifer the woman I came with. She had a nearly white skin, always an asset, and with her spirited talk she had several young men around her. She worked in a very different way. She had been brought up in Jamaica, unlike me with my Englishness. My Rex, and he was ‘mine’, for the evening at least, circulated and I noted all those he spoke to who I knew, and starting of course with the senior slave-driver, Jackson. Eventually Rex finished his rounds and was saying his farewells. He glanced over and with an imperceptible nod of his head he indicated for me to come to the door. I too imperceptibly made sure Jennifer knew I was leaving, and with whom.

Because my adopting parents had been in this financial business, I could feel at home in such soirees, but also they sent me to one of those English elite schools to better me from my humble beginnings as the lost off-spring of an immigrant woman from Nigeria. I could swim in this particular niche of black bankers. They all traced their ancestry (often hopefully) to exploited Caribbean slaves. But I suspected my ancestors in Benin were the ones who had traded their ancestors with the English to send off as cargo to the New World. It was not that I especially disapproved of slavery as such; the evening and night I was facing would be little different perhaps, though I might get a bit of excitement from it. And my body would not actually be sold by a trader but would be sold by me.

            I followed him down the stairs at the correct distance so no one observing would connect us. I heard Jennifer tripping down the stairs behind me. But out on the street, I closed up on him and held his arm till he had hailed a taxi to take us to his place. Once the taxi moved off, I suggested he might like to stop at a cash-machine, just in case he liked the way that I kissed him. He looked at me surprised at my organised approach to such practicalities. He assured me it would be alright, he was well-prepared. I snuggled up comfortably again to him. Jennifer, I knew would have taken the taxi number – just in case. She would be getting half of the takings.

            He proudly boasted he had two flats in London, as well as half-a-dozen more round the world. But I could guess that. Nevertheless, I put on a surprised and impressed expression. I always begin as a somewhat simpering innocent who is slightly overwhelmed by the grandeur of these imposing men. The flat was certainly impressive though as impersonal as a hotel room and not a home. He showed me each room. I lingered in the bedroom and told him to bring me a drink. He told me to come back to the living room. So I did. I looked at a small photograph in a frame, obviously his wife and young daughter. I asked if he was divorced. He gestured with his hand as if they were in process with difficulties.  But it really indicated he didn’t care what I thought. I sat myself in an armchair making sure it would be difficult for him to sit down beside me in any comfortable way. I didn’t want a long drawn-out romantic drama. He handed me a drink and then stood beside me as if wondering what conversation to make. Clearly, he was not interested in me. And he began talking to me about money he was making. And then about what he could buy with all the money he was making. I listened to him conveying with my expression how spell-bound I was. It must have been obvious to him, that I was not. But he needed to go through these rituals. His potency was being confirmed by both of us in this socially acceptable fashion, and to be confirmed shortly in a bodily fashion. After a while, I suggested to him, that I’d like to get to the bed and start exploring his amazing person more deeply.

He smiled - the first time. And he led the way. My drink was not drunk, but I left it. Standing at the end of the bed, he asked me to undress. I asked, more provocatively if he would undress me. He declined. But when I was naked, he touched my skin, starting at the shoulder he had touched at our cocktail party. I knelt and he fondled my luxurious hair, and I found my way in through the zip of his flies. We didn’t say much but I did a little gasping as I thought he’d like me to be impressed. And indeed, the stroking of my skin did excite my hormones, more than I cared. The concern was whether he’d be bothered about my hormones as well as his. In fact, when I pulled his erect member gently out of his trousers, he did ask me to undress him.  Which I did with great care, making him feel precious, I hoped. But I didn’t find it difficult actually, and I wondered why he had all evening begun to feel precious to me. When I had done the undressing job we stood facing each other. He put his hands in my hair and pulled my face to his, and he kissed me full on the lips without asking. There was passion in that, and I was surprised. My breath was coming a little faster than I anticipated. I drew back pulling him gently with me till I sat on the end of the bed, and he leaned over me, gradually coming down on top of me. His chest slightly rough with the hairs rubbed gently over my breasts, over my nipples. He was definitely trying to arouse me as well as himself. He was more of a gentleman than I had expected. I was pleased I enthused him. He entered me quickly and came quickly and modestly. He withdrew and held his still erect penis. It remained stiff in his hand. He then advised me that he could keep an erection for as long as I needed if I wanted him to give me an orgasm. It all seemed so practical it was almost deflating, except it was not and it seemed I could be of real interest to him. He also advised me that if he came again, it would make no difference, he would continue with whatever I asked till I was satisfied. I said, yes, and felt I had freedom to ask for anything.

            “Well,” I started, feeling carefree with this now unusual man, “If you let me up to get my bag, I have some cord there to tie you to the bed so I can ravish you.” 

He looked momentarily uncertain and then exclaimed, “By all means. I have never come across such a one!”

            I smiled, pleased with myself, as I think I had pleased him, jolted him out of a regular evening routine. He let me up and I did the business with his hands and wrists at the four corners of the bed. “Now,” I said putting one foot on the bed beside his prostrate and immobilised body. I was rather triumphant and domineering in manner, “you are mine. Taken over in a way never known before.” I put out my hand to take his still erect penis in my fingers as if it were the holy sacrament. “I am in charge.” I knelt across the bed with his loins beneath me. His pleasured stiffness slipped easily between my lower lips; his tip met my bud, and in a special way they kissed each other.  He gasped a little, and I a lot. This was not just a quick fuck for an evening. This was something special. I gasped more, and quickly had several orgasms. I don’t know how many, and I think he may have had one more. I fell forward, kissed his lips with passion and gratitude, and thanked him. And thanked him. He remained still in his bonds and as I raised my head a little, he smiled (the second time that evening).

            I said, “You’re smiling again.” I looked him in the eyes. “it seems to me that you don’t often smile. Perhaps people don’t often please you.”

            He looked back at my eyes but said nothing. Nevertheless, I think I had pleased him, which was a relief because, unusually, he had pleased me.

            I stayed looking down at him. “Now, shall we untie you?”

            “Please.”

            “Hmm, perhaps I won’t. Perhaps, I like you under my control.” He looked sharply at me. 

            “Oh, you look surprised. Perhaps with me in control you can promise me things. Things I deserve.”

            “Oh,” he relaxed, “you mean money.”

            “No, I don’t want your money,” I said enigmatically. “Maybe I want something else.” And I was thinking of something else. But I said, “Well, yes of course, if you want to give me money. And it would be nice to know what I am worth. We could bargain a little. But no, it is not so important.  I can earn as much money as I could want from all you rich guys. I have half-a-dozen of you on my books. But, if I wanted to bargain for something else, you might be just the person for me.” He looked puzzled. “Perhaps I should leave you to guess,” I said teasingly. “Perhaps I will keep you in the ropes till you guess right.” I cocked my head as if I were enquiring if this would be fun. He showed no reaction.

            I was still sitting astride him. My orgasms a range of mountain peaks still within vivid memory. And as far as I could tell his erect member was still remembering my peaks and his. He was still swollen up inside me. Stiff as a slug of whiskey. I tweaked a muscle or two in my bottom and squeezed him there. A few twinges of electric feelings crossed his face. But he wasn’t talking to me.

            “You’ve got no guesses, what I want from you?” But he wasn’t talking to me. He lay there passive and unmoving. He looked as if there might be something he was thinking of. I knew what it was. So, I started moving up and down. Thrusting his erection yet again into me and out. It took quite a while this time. But I was in no hurry.  This time I watched the moving expressions on his face.  I stoked his cheek as if he were the softest and loveliest doll I had ever had.  All those men I had satisfied were like dolls to me.  I could play with them and stroke them and give them house-room inside me. Or not, just as I wanted. But of course, this one, he was more than a doll. More a play-mate. I could play his mind. He was human. Just about - and more than. I slowed down my rhythm a little. But he began to move himself; he did not want me to slow it. So, I stopped. And I sat with all my weight down on his hips so he could hardly thrust himself in and out. 

            So he stopped trying. “What is it you want?”.

            I looked straight in his face as if he were a little boy who could not please teacher at school. Then I laughed, “I only want to give you another cum, up my sex-hole. It is what you want, and it’s what I want.” I laughed. And I started my rhythm again. This time his climax was an explosion. The Big Bang. He nearly tossed me off him. But I hung on and kept him going till it subsided. “Not bad, boy. You’re good. Right?” And I looked at him admiringly. “And I’m good. Right?” He didn’t respond; he was recovering from the big one. I stroked his face, his chest, And I felt for the root of his penis at the entrance to my pussy. There was so much juice about; his and mine. Slowly, he came back to me. His swelling inside didn’t seem to be subsiding much. When he had opened his eyes and he was back with me, I simply said, “Well done, champion.” He heaved a great breath and shut his eyes again.

            I lay my body down on his chest, my cheek against his chin, my nipples feeling the hairs on his chest. And I put my hand between us to feel my pleasure bulb at my entrance and began to soothe it with the tip of my finger. It responded, and so did I, and so did my cavity, squeezing softly on his swelling. He lay back, and more than ever, more than even previously, he left me to take charge of our satisfactions. He was a little boy, a baby breathing beside me, leaving life and the future to me entirely. My orgasm this time was slow, and his thrusting tool twitched along with my pleasure strokes as if I could do us both together. And miraculously we came together, softly and gently and in a happy clutch of tiny, subtle jerking. We had spent each other. Surely.

            I think we dozed briefly. I became aware of his erection shrinking out of me. I asked if he had completed, but I got no confirmation. I knew though that he was done.  For today. It was no fun keeping him tied, now. So, I moved off him and he grunted and shifted a little.  I untied him, feeling something special had happened. “I know now that this profession I have chosen, has been the right one for me.” He did not open his eyes. But as I released his arms, he brought them back on the bed. “And pretty good for you, Rex, as well.” I got off his body and went to release his ankles. He lay, looking played out. “I think you like me in charge, Rex” and then, “I’ll do it again for you.”.

            He shook his head slightly as if he did not want to think about it.

He got off the bed. He seemed tight in his body and started to dress himself, wiping himself down with some tissues. He did not look at me. He seemed to be expressing an indifference as if he were simply getting off a train at his station. I wondered if I had really made an impression.  Of course, I had; I knew I had.

He knew I had too. But he didn’t want to know. He didn’t look at me. Some men are stiff and unyielding, just like their erections. He asked if he should call me a taxi. I did not answer. But he called one. I wiped myself on his tissues and went to his bathroom and flushed and wiped and came back to get dressed. It was now late. He was at his desk listening to his voicemails on his mobile cell-phone. I looked over to find a piece of paper and wrote down my phone number on it.

When the taxi honked in the road outside, he walked me to the door, courteous, holding my arm, a gentleman, recovered. As he opened the door, I turned to him and said, “Use my phone number to leave a message. Tell me, what I would have been worth if you had decided to pay me.” He smiled. Again. He touched my cheek and I left for home. I got in the taxi and the driver started off. I wondered whether I would offer to pay the fare with my body as I normally would`. But, it seemed the body had done its work that evening. 

Rex was on my mind for a while. I don’t think I had managed to loosen him up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thing that goes in mouths

 

It was around the age of 10 and my mother told me what to expect.  It wasn’t very reassuring.  I had an older brother and he crashed his bike and had a nasty wound on his leg that slashed an artery.  They said he was lucky not lose a lot more blood, but a passer-by was a nurse who knew what to do and improvised a tourniquet.  So, when Mum told me I would soon start bleeding I remember asking if it would be like Jimmy.  She smiled and said it was just a nuisance, it happened with all women.  I asked if men had that as well.  She said, no of course not, they had different bodies.  I knew that, because Dad did not always shut the lavatory door when he went to pee, and I knew he stood up to do it, with a thing that could shoot the urine a bit like a hose pipe.  At the time, my curiosity shot up.  And I asked what it was that Dad had between his legs.  But Mum was too embarrassed to tell me, and so I had to ask my brother later.  I found I had to know about these things, so I asked Mum a week or two later, why Dad had a different thing to me and her, and she merely said that they did things together.  What things? She didn’t want to tell me, so I asked if I could come and watch.

My brother didn’t tell me either, but then he didn’t tell me anything in those days.  One of the teachers at school liked me.  I sort of knew I was teacher’s favourite in the class, and sometimes we would chat after a lesson.  So, I decided to ask her about what Dads and Mums did together.  She looked at me with a soft gleam in her eye.  She said it was difficult to explain, but maybe I’d like to come and see her with her husband.  So, I did.

They were very friendly to me.  I had told Mum I was going to see a friend after school.  But I hung around till it was evening and went to the teacher’s house.  The Dad, who was called Jimmy like my brother, gave me a little hug.  Hanna, my teacher gave me a hug too.  I felt special and they took me into their bedroom. Jimmy asked me what I knew about the thing they were going to do.  I said, “Nothing”.  He seemed very friendly to me, they took their clothes off and asked me if I wanted to as well.  I didn’t want to, so they didn’t mind.  “You see we have different things between our legs,” he said.  I looked at his, because I knew what she had – the same as me and my Mum.  I looked at Jimmy’s waggly things and wondered what he did with them.  I knew he peed with them.  And I said to him, “You pee with that, don’t you.” And he agreed.

“Do you want to touch it?” he asked.  Of course I did, and I put out my had gingerly and put my finger on it. 

“Go on hold it,” my teacher said.  So I put my fingers around the longish thing.  He told me that was nice to feel, and the thing began to get bigger, or fatter at least.  She said hold on to it and stroke it.  So I did with my other hand.  It seemed strange.  But they were so nice I felt quite happy with them.  And he said I was making him feel good, which was nice for me too.  She said, “Do you know what he really likes. He would like you to put the end in your mouth.  Would you like to do that?” I really didn’t and I shook my head. I knew what came out of it, his pee.  I think she realised what I was thinking and said “That thing – we call it a penis – gets longer and bigger and it pushes out some white stuff.  It is called semen.  It is not his pee at all.”  Then she knelt down, and pushing me a little away from his thing, she put it in her mouth and sucked on it.  It was what I do with an iced lolly.  He made some noises as if he was agreeing with her and wanted what she was doing. “She turned to me and took the thing out of her mouth, “You see how he likes this.”  And it was growing bigger, but also stiff.  It was so interesting for me to watch.  But then I said, “Can I try, too,” and she moved away to let me put the penis in my mouth.  It didn’t taste of anything.  It felt very big in my mouth and I didn’t want to bite it.  It might hurt him. So, I just left it in and he sort of pushed and pulled so it went into my mouth and slipped back again.  I didn’t see what the point of it was.  Then she pulled me away from him gently and as she sat down on the bed, she opened her legs and said “I have a kind of mouth here for him.” And she showed me the folds between her legs a bit like mine only much bigger than me.  “We call it a vagina,” she said, “And he puts his penis in it, like he put it in my mouth and in your mouth.” It was all so new to me, and I wondered why they would want to do all that.

Then, he said, “Shall I show you how I put my penis in her vagina?”  I know I had my hand between my legs, wondering what would happen if he, or someone, went there.

“Yes please” I said as if it was all being done for me.  So he knelt in front of her and she opened her legs further. And his slippery penis covered in my saliva slid into her.  I couldn’t really see exactly.  But then something took them over.  I watched as her back jerked and she leant back on her arms.  And he pushed and pushed into her.  They both made noises which weren’t words.  But sometimes she said, ‘yes’ with a kind of pant.  It went on for a while and it was obvious they were enjoying it.  But I couldn’t understand what was enjoyable.  I tried to ask what they were feeling, but they took no notice of me. I felt alone suddenly and wondered if I should run home.  But I stayed watching.  They seemed so, er… silly.  I wondered if my Mum and Dad did that.  But it was getting frantic for them, I thought and suddenly it was as if he burst, and he fell on top of her on the bed, and she let out a cry and said, “I love you.  Do me please, do me”.  She seemed to me to be lost and maybe gone mad.  And she gave a quiet screech.  And they lay still with Jimmy on top of her.  I waited and didn’t know what to do. 

Then my teacher said to me, “Penny, that’s what happens.  Come here.” And she held out a hand from under him as if she wanted to hold mine.  So I came near to them and held her hand.  He rolled off her and seemed to be exhausted.  She said to me, “Would you like to do that?”  And I replied that I didn’t know.  And I didn’t.  It seemed so strange and not at all grown up.  I had seen boys fighting in the playground, lying on top of each other. But this seemed quite different. She put her hand between my legs and stroked where my folds are.  “Do you feel anything nice there?”  And I shook my head.  “Well,” she said kindly, that’s what men and women do.  One day you will know how it feels.  And then you will keep wanting the feeling.”

I wandered home slowly, and tried to make sense of what I had seen.  I wondered if my brother and I could try out something like that.  There must be some special feeling but I could not imagine it.  I decided to explore more what I had between my thighs.  When it came to it, my brother did not want to play around with me and seemed as embarrassed as our Mum.  I think I never felt comfortable in maths classes after that with Hanna, the teacher.

 

…..ooooo0ooooo…..

 

Of course. there were other boys at school.  And I came to be known as someone who would experiment with them.  I had learned how to say ‘I love you’ at the right moment, but not one of them seemed to be interested. Some took a very short time and got up and went away.  Mostly they took no notice of me, but I did learn what the feeling was like.  I could see how Hanna wanted to show me.  My folds soon started bleeding, and all in all I felt very grown-up suddenly.  It was not difficult to realise that I could give myself the feeling if I rubbed myself in the right way on the right place.  And what happened was that if I could go on longer than any of the boys when they were inside me, I could get a real thrill out of it.  It was like a satellite going into orbit.  I wondered why it didn’t happen when the boys were stiff inside me. They didn’t gasp or scream, just stopped when they got tired.

Eventually, when I was 16, I suppose, there was one special boy who was not so pre-occupied with his sex feelings, but who was interested in mine. That was something new.  Not quite all men were self-obsessed with sex. This one was kind, he was called Alan. I think he sometimes thought I looked a mess.  It didn’t put him off but made him concerned.  I have not really known that men could be concerned.  I told him we were poor.  By then Dad had been sacked – some 6 months before his enquiry. And Dad had hardly got out of bed since. Often, he would not get out even to have a pee.  So Alan thought I needed things.  He gave me a handbag one day when we went across the fields on a warm day to do it in the open.  I was surprised and said it was kind, and in fact I needed it.  He said he had stolen it from his sister who had got it from a friend (probably a boy).  The next time we had sex, he gave me some money; not much, five pounds.  I gave it to Mum and told her I had found it in the street.  I said to Alan again, that he was kind.  We agreed he would give me money for the family every time we did sex.  We both knew what sex for money meant.  And rather worried, he asked if that was the only reason I would keep having sex.  I said, of course not.  And it was true I wanted that stunning satisfaction from him.  It was just nice to have a bit of money for my Mum too.  I don’t know if he believed me.  But soon he went away to university, and we lost touch.

I realised it didn’t much matter who the boy was, or now, who the adult blokes were, as I was emerging from school, and I had decided my path.  The man who put me onto it was quite a bit older. We used to talk about the difference between love and sex.  I said love did not exist.  He was shocked and told me he would show me it did.  I said that all he loved was my titties and that I’d go to bed with him whenever he wanted.  Yes, he said, “That helps”. And he laughed.  But I had already told him about my arrangement with Alan.  And he agreed to something similar.  It was a significantly bigger income than the one from Alan, and I could rent a tiny flat just a room really.  He didn’t like it much and took me to hotels.  He had a wife he had to keep secrets from.  He was called Josh.  And he had a good job.  So I was a looked-after mistress.  I didn’t mind.

When I had met him the first time, he asked my name, and I told him – Penelope (Penny), and so when we had set the arrangement he told me Penny was a good name.  I said to him, “Well, if you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves.” And this put an idea in my head – though perhaps it had been there a long time.  Because I did not see him all the time, I wondered if I could employ the rest of my time, in a similar money operation! 

On the internet, I found a website designer who worked for girls like me. I wrote the text, and he did the design and programming.  It was not out of the ordinary, but I did write for it quite well.  He was paid, as you can imagine in the currency I was beginning to trade in.  I really didn’t mind who used my body, they were all satisfying.  Most such girls don’t think that, and they called me an egalitarian.  Interestingly, I got much less abuse than most working girls.  My webby man liked me and told me I was the best of all the girls he worked for.  I think he would have taken me on for some more permanent relationship – a wife for instance.  But at the time I was enjoying my freedom.  My Dad had died, and my Mum was working all hours, and I seemed to find it easy enough to get my kind of work, so I could give her things of one kind or another, though I think she liked cash best.  I toyed with the idea of telling her how I earned my money, just as a revenge for her leaving me in the dark when I was so curious.

 

…..ooooo0ooooo…..

 

Actually, my curiosity remained with me, and as I got more requests from some of my clients that seemed a bit kinky, I got more inventive with what I could offer and do with them.

            I told my Mum that I was freelance; doing advertising. Not entirely false. And she didn’t ask much about it. She was more worried about my brother; he was into drugs. And she told me, in a shocked whisper, that he went with prostitutes! I had nodded wisely as if understanding her shock and sympathising. 

            My website called it ‘creative living with your body’. These euphemisms were often misunderstood, and I often got into difficulty with the server. So I had to change from one to another quite often. Clearly, it was not going to last for ever and I wondered what I should do. Perhaps go to university and get a career. Maybe mathematics. What is trigonometry? And it was then I thought of Hanna who had been so unexpectedly kind. I was still amazed at how she had handled my innocent childish questions. Was she the reason, I had sometimes wondered, why sex had never seemed more unusual than any other kind of shopping. I found out from that primary school that she was still there, now Head of the school. So I went to see her, and turned up one day. She did not recognise me when I was taken through by the secretary to her office. When I explained who I was, she seemed rather confused. She seemed really excited to see me, and also as if I was an interruption. I suppose I was, so she told me she would meet me later, after work. For her, the Head, work went on till the evening.

            I met her outside the school, and we went to a local pub for a drink. Hanna was thrilled to see me. “And what are you doing with your life, Penny, my dear?” Her hand was around her glass of wine as it stood on the little pub table.

            I shrugged my shoulders, wondering if she would care to hear what direction my life had actually gone in. But then what else had I gone to see her for. “Oh, I have an easy life. In the sex industry, as it is called.” 

“How interesting.” She looked politely interested and concealed any shock she might have felt. 

“I can give you the address of my website if you want.”

She nodded in a considered way, as if she might take a polite interest. “You were always curious, weren’t you. When you were young.” And she smiled at the memory emerging in her mind.

I didn’t want to say she and her husband had probably put me on to it. She might have felt I had come to meet her in order to blame them. And I absolutely didn’t see any blame. “I asked how her husband was.

She did not answer immediately, “He died,” she said in a quiet voice. And I wished I had not asked. “Quite young.” I didn’t know what to say. I was still young, probably still younger than when she had been my teacher at age ten. And in addition, it seemed to me death was more unspeakable than sex – much more in fact, as I could speak easily about sex. “It was about two years ago. He had a bad cancer of his prostate gland.”

“I am sorry to hear that. You must have been sad,” I said conventionally. “I met him once.” 

“I know,” she muttered with a thoughtful look in her eye. “I loved him. We had a good marriage.” She sounded as if she might want to talk on about her loss.

“I put his penis in my mouth.” I chuckled, but she did not move. “Do you remember? And I think you shouted out ‘I love you’ at him.”

“Yes, I did, Penny.” She was still looking thoughtful. “We always wondered what happened to you after that.”

“Oh, I went on to big school and I got interested in the boys there. And learnt a lot. More from them than from the lessons.” And I chuckled again. But I felt I had spoiled her beginning talk about her husband. I had interrupted as I did not want to go into whatever it meant, sadness, grief and so on. My life had been more with people seeking excitement.

But she spared me more details, and said, “We often wondered what effect it had on you. We were anxious we may have given you too much to think about at your age.”

“Oh no. It made me what I am. And I am not ashamed of that.” And after a little reflection, I added, “But there are some who think I am a disgrace. My Mum doesn’t know anything about it. She would feel disgraced. “But…” and I lost words for what I wanted to say.

“Sex is part of life, isn’t it. No-one can escape that. It is a peculiarity that we get so bothered about the morals of sex.”

“There are no morals about sex, Hanna. No more than there are morals about shaking hands.” She did smile then. 

“You’ve got a mind that works in interesting ways, Penny.”

“That may be why I came to find you. I think I am moving on. I wanted to talk to you about what I might do next. You were always the best teacher when I was young, and I thought that you might know what’s best for me now.”

She raised her eye-brows in surprise. “I’ll see what I can do. What about marriage and a family? Have you got any children.”

I exhaled and shrugged my shoulders as if her suggestion was inconceivable, “Nah. Never really thought about it. Have you got children, Hanna?”

“I have two. Thank God. I feel he still lives – Brendon lives. Through them.”

“I see. Yes, he does still live. I’m sure. You are lucky to have found someone who wants you fertile. Men want us for so many things – for love, for sex, for children. You were fortunate you had someone who wanted you for all those.”

I thought her eyes may have got a bit moist then, “Yes. He did.”

“ I have not been so lucky. They only want sex from me. Not the rest.”

“I was very careful in choosing. I went in search and chose carefully. Maybe you have not been so careful in searching, Penny.”

I almost never feel chastised – ever. But for a moment I thought that might have been a criticism. I think it was. And it was true indeed. I had not done any particular searching. I had a website and they searched for me, for what they wanted. I went inside myself for a moment then as we sat together. My old teacher telling me off.

            There as a silence. We were now both a bit tense; she because of her lost husband, and me because she put her finger on my failure. Eventually I said, “Mmm, perhaps that is what I need from you, Hanna.” I liked using my teacher’s first name. It made us equal. “How does one make a search? And is it what I want to search for.”

            She finished a drop in the bottom of her wine glass and shifted her chair as if getting up to go. “Come and see me for Sunday lunch. I’d like to get to know more about you. I will tell you my address.”

            So she left the pub having told me the address. It is hard to describe what I felt. It seemed a bit like what people call depressed. I felt unusually lacking in curiosity or excitement. I looked round the pub for what sort of men were there. It was a habit; indeed a professional habit, perhaps. And when I thought of it like that, I stopped. I had better do something about what to do with the next phase of my life, and really who will I actually be in the next phase. She had begun to make me think I did not know who I was properly. Just a sex machine, without the dimensions of being human?

            Over Sunday lunch, just her and me in her small living room, plates on our laps, she started (after all the pleasantries of arrival and serving the meal). “Two years ago, he died. So, now, is the time when I too start the next phase of my life as well, Penny. Shall we do it together? That’s my question – on the dinner plate today! To put it bluntly, Penny, sex has always been a force in my life as well. I have shrouded it in privacy, and you have waved it like a flag. Maybe we need to learn something from each other. Teach each other something.” This left a long silence while we ate the meal. She was a good cook. And I had second helpings of desert. Later she said, “You called it the thing that goes in mouths. We were always amused by that; Brendon and I were amused. We met at school when we were eleven. We were close friends, and had sex first when we were fourteen. I had another boy when I was eighteen for 6 months. Then Brendon and I came back together. We had both missed each other so much we knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. Now he has gone, and I won’t spend the rest of my life with him.” She smiled dolefully at me, and I shamefully froze as the sadness hit me.

            I didn’t want to hear about her grief. But then it struck me that she was making an overture to me. Should we come together in this love-bind, a sex-bond too maybe. Having thought this through, I then said, rather coldly, “That would work between us, if you were telling me I should be thinking of having children.”

            She looked a bit perplexed, but gradually saw what I had made of her speech. “I didn’t really mean that, but it could I suppose be a possibility. Is that why you tracked me done?” she asked with a sincere curiosity. It was almost as if she felt I was proposing to her. I wondered if I really had looked for her, for that reason. I could say I had been sort of in love with her when we had had the intimacy in my childhood.

            I eventually said, “I’m not sure if I was really looking for that. I am quite happy to sleep with you sometimes, Penny, if you want. To be honest, I am not short of sex. So it would be more for your satisfaction than mine. I think it was the need I have for the love of a friend. When you took me seriously those years ago you became the best friend I have had all my life. Perhaps the only real friend who has not wanted to take something from me all the time.”

            She smiled, “Interesting. As I said, your mind works in miraculously unusual ways.” She smiled as before. “Let’s leave the sex aside for the time being,” she said, sounding more like a teacher, now. 

            “Yes, I am a bot obsessed, aren’t I?”

“Maybe.”

            “And not very good at the sad things. I guess you have noticed.”

            “I had noticed; you are right. And I am sorry to burden you.”

“No, don’t be sorry on my behalf. I probably need to listen to these things. It is just as much life as my professional expertise is.”

She looked carefully at me, as if trying to decide something about me. “OK, I need the best friend I have ever had, as well. When I was five years old my mother died. In a car accident. I survived it. So when Brendon died it brought all that back again. But in a new way, I suppose. Tell me if you don’t want to hear this, Penny.”

“Well, I don’t, but it will be good for me. That is what you have been indicating. I should get away from all this sex-obsession. I know I should, and that’s why I came to see you – to get beyond it.”

“Perhaps no one gets beyond it – only hides it like I do.”

“Go on Hanna, you must tell me what you need to say. I shall be a good friend to you.”

She smiled and looked increasingly tearful. So she decided to use my invitation. “I can’t get it out of my head. I know prostate cancer is very common, Apparently most men get it, at least in a benign form. I was…” she hesitated awkwardly. “I was sex mad with Brendon since I was fourteen, and before. It always felt it was abnormal in me. It is why I took you seriously when you were so young. I can’t get it out of my head. Did all that sex Brendon and I had result in it becoming his killer-cancer. Do you know, Penny,” and she looked searchingly at me, “I feel a kind of guilt that I caused it, I killed him. I know it is crazy, but feelings can be crazy can’t they?”

“I have never felt guilty, ever in my life, Hanna.” Her head dropped and she looked into her lap. I realised how unsympathetic I must have sounded. “I know that’s a bit mad too, isn’t it. I need to learn about this. What is it you did? Tell me what it is like to be guilty of killing even when you aren’t.”

“Aren’t I? I don’t know. It is the feeling. It is not what I did. Well, I imagine what I did. I just wanted his body all the time. I wanted him beside me, holding me, inside me, all the time. And it must have been too much.”

“Didn’t he want it too?”

She was in tears now, “He did. And he demanded it. I know. I know. But perhaps I should have held back, or rationed or something, “She was waving her hands around wildly in desperation.” I tried to imagine what I would want if I were in that state. So I got up and I put my arms around her body and its vigorous movements. “You don’t need this, You don’t need this, Penny.”

“I think I probably do. You can’t possibly be responsible. But somehow you feel it.”

She calmed a bit, but only a little. “But the next thing Penny is even crazier.” She. shook her head in exasperation at herself. “I think of my mother. In the car. Driving off the road. I think I caused her to drive off the road.” And her tears came back.

“How could you have done that? You were only five, you said.”

“I was only five,” she started and there was a long pause. “It wasn’t me that caused it. I had been cross with her because she insisted on the seat belt and it was uncomfortable. In the end it is what saved me. But she died as we came off the road. I know it wasn’t me that caused it. It was some other driver my father told me much later. But I feel guilty as if being cross with her had made her careless or something or other – I don’t know.” She was talking as much to herself now, to her tears. I was for a moment no more than a recording machine. But she slowly calmed herself, having spoken all this in her rushed sentences.

And she eventually looked at me, “Oh god, I am a mess. I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“Of course, you should,” I said reassuringly, but not knowing what to say. “ I guess it is a problem that you don’t have Brendon to talk to. When you lose someone so close you don’t have them you can talk to about losing them.”

“There you go,” she said, almost smiling, “your weird and wonderful mind can say it all.” She looked straight at me. “I need a new Brendon. And I’ll never find another one. I know….”

I was a bit shaken that after all these twenty years or so, when we had not seen each other, not really thought of each other perhaps, I was the only friend she could let all this out to. But I said, “Who else have you talked to about this?”

“Not like this, no-one.” It felt like a big responsibility and so far out of my field of operation. But as I had said earlier, perhaps I should be learning some if this from her. “Thank you Penny, you are actually a good friend even though we have been so apart for so long. I hope we will grow close perhaps.” It was as if she was winding up this outburst. She was recovering herself. Was I being dismissed?

But no,  she started anew, “I looked up your website. It is all very cryptic. What would you do for me, if I applied for some service?”

I was taken aback. Her mind too was capable of mischievously intricate twists. Just like mine as she had perhaps said. “You’d have to be interviewed and we do that online, doubly encrypted for secrecy, to find out what your private world of fantasy is, and we’d try to find a way of playing it out.”

            “I might give it a try.”

            “Oh, come on Hanna, you don’t have to go through the site. We’re friends, we can talk. We’ve just talked, with intimacy about private thoughts.”

            “Not my fantasies though.”

            “Oh, I doubt if they’re as upsetting as what you’ve just told me.”

            “That’s true.” And she became silent.

            Eventually she looked up and as if she were about to say goodbye and finish our discussion. She said, “Tell me when you’d like a little session in bed, one night.”

            I was a little startled by the abruptness of the dismissal. “Tell me too, when you want to be interviewed about you fantasies and satisfactions.”

            We then took our farewells, and she parted by saying, “Let’s meet again soon, good friend.” I nodded and she suddenly embraced me with passion. Our mouths joined and her tongue reached into my mouth. I thought of that time when I had held Brendon’s thing in my mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

With Grace: Without her

 

As he reached his climax, it burst out of him how much he loved her.  He had not ever meant to say such a thing.  It had never happened before.  Her mouth being full of him, she made no response, but completed the job.

            Later, he apologised.  She shrugged her shoulders as if it did not matter.  He was familiar with her indifference.  Even after his climax, her beauty almost tortured him to look at her.

 

* * *

 

They had met on the ferry just out of Boulogne. She was sitting on deck in the full sun but huddled as if cold - but perhaps in loneliness.  He sat down beside her, purely because her beauty touched him.

            At Folkestone he offered to drive her back to London.  They stood, discussing it on the pavement.  Two passing youths spat at them and walked on, but then turning, one said, “Fuck her white, mister”.  “Then fuck yourself,” the other joined in.  She stared at them as if accustomed to abuse.

            Her black skin was as pure as it was at puberty.  He had white distinguished looks.  “C’mon,” she said to him quietly, accepting his lift, “let’s go”. They turned from the retreating youths.  “You whites are trash,” she added, with hardness and indifference.  He pointed out where one of the youths had landed a small gob of beery saliva on her leather jacket, on the round of her breast. He offered to wipe it off for her. She ignored such gallantry and found a tissue in her bag.  She spent the journey redoing her nail-varnish

 

.* * *

 

That had been three years ago.  Suddenly, entranced for the first time in middle-age, he had bought her a flat.  He had persuaded her that it would be a good investment - could be sold in three years, and they would share the profits.  She contributed to the mortgage. In their brief meetings, she often talked to him incessantly about her independence, about paying her own way. He took her out sometimes and gave her expensive presents of clothes and perfumes and sometimes money.  She graciously accepted these on the grounds that she would be repaying the debt with services.  His wife never knew of this liaison; might even have approved that he was being catered for in the “groin-department” as she loftily called it.

            She served his needs immaculately and expertly with the whole of her lythe, perfect body, and the careful reserve of her quiet mind.  It was a return-payment; as it were, she was the gift, but one that he could never possess.  Sometimes he arrived at their flat for tea, sometimes at coffee-time, sometimes for drinks before supper.  Often, she would be sitting huddled in her loneliness as he had first seen her.  Sometimes she would not answer the bell, and he would return later when he could. Often, she would take him into the back, her carefully kept boudoir, and provide the momentary and expected gift of her soul, and recompense him for what he had given her, and she restored her own sense of independence,

            At first, he had wanted to tell her of her beauty, of her purity, of how his breath had been taken away that first time he had sat down beside her, and her presence had somehow, indelibly, soaked into him.  Of how it had never changed for him since that first moment. Often, he would start words of admiration.  And she would walk away, or flick the television on, or hunt in her bag for the things to work on her fingernails of her eye-lines.

            Sometimes she would mention men who hassled her for marriage, and who offered her the earth or more.  He heard about the man she had been in love with who always promised, but never left his wife.

            Often, he heard of her resolve, ever after that break-up, that she would fend for herself; truly unburdened with emotions and dependence.  No-one would do anything for her that she could not do for herself - and had already done.  He heard the bitterness in her tone that offers of marriage, of everything else too, undermined her heroic self-support.  He sensed very quickly that his love for her would hassle her into an obligation she would never accept.

 

* * *

 

When they arrested her, she caused a fuss.  He arrived in the middle of it; the small basement door was open and out of it flowed screeches, interrupted by gruff, controlled threats.   He rushed in to help.  She ignored his entry, taken up as she was with her screaming justifications. A policewoman on either side of her, she faced a ruddy-faced young PC who took her torrents of self-defence and abuse with an old-fashioned fortitude, reminding her of her rights and of the number of potential charges she was steadily clocking up.

            He sized up the situation as he entered, walking between them, he took her beautiful delicate face in both his hands, and whilst she aimed her pointed shoes at his shins violently, he kissed her full and passionately on her spluttering mouth.  Her words became muffled and stopped as if choked off in a suffocation.  “And, who are you, sir?” the dignified young policeman demanded.

            But he took no notice, brought out his handkerchief to dab the tears and smudges from her face.  He put an arm around her shoulders and pressed her towards the privacy of her bedroom. Such was his command that the police let him do it.  And she too allowed herself to be helped into shape.

            The same happened in court.  Her explosion of denigrating protests resulted in her being sent down for contempt. Two days of white racists in the women’s prison convinced her it was less humiliating to return to the court to apologise to the magistrate.  When he escorted her from the building to take her home, she was ready to spit fury at anything that moved.  She sat in the taxi briskly filing her nails, defying him to speak to her.  Back in their flat, she huddled into her familiar chair seeking the withdrawal into her lonely posture to calm her indignity - the indignity of the court and indeed at her own of being helped by him.

            He went out immediately to shop for a simple meal, which he then cooked for her. Immediately afterwards, she invited him to leave.  Which he did.

            The charge against her - running a disorderly house - was more of a potential disaster for him.  He, after all, owned the flat - had so much to lose from public knowledge of his link with her and her business.

            She refused to talk to him about what had happened, about what had brought the police in, about the details of her business.  Her sole communication about it was to turn her mouth down in a sour expression, shrug her shoulders and say, “It will only be a fine,” as if he would be the one to pay it.  She could not enlighten him on the further investigations the police were conducting into her - their flat - and him.

            So far as he knew, she continued her business there.

 

.* * *

When her body was found, one of her clients had practised extreme cruelty upon it, before mutilating and disembowelling her. The final cause of death was by suffocation due to her breast implants, torn from their site, and thrust deep into her throat.

He was quickly convicted. His coiffured wife never attended his trial.  He began the long years of his sentence at the bottom of the pile in the prison, the perverse sex offender being the just object of everyone else’s violence.  He demanded solitary confinement and was given it. What else could these long days of loneliness be filled with but his haunting memories of her - the devoted expertness of her body, those momentary gifts of hers to him.  Despite dedicating those unending hours to recollections of love for her, his degraded situation continually forced him to wonder if the verdict on him had been right, if he had entered some blacked out moment of sadistic murder, as if some dark unknown passion had demanded an end to her indifference and in revenge he had torn her apart to look for her responding love that never came.  Was there some monstrous evil that had lurked in him and shown itself momentarily - even unknown in its showing itself?  And if it was so, such a monstrousness must be in him still.  He searched for it in his dark sadness, in his loneliness, in his indignation and rage, guided only by the proclamations of the court and of the tabloid press, which together told of his ‘true’ character.  He kept these cuttings, and added to them when he found occasional further reports.  He searched for details, which he could find in himself.  He reviewed his life, the angry rivalries as a child with his brothers, his fights in school playgrounds and dormitories with boy comrades.  His arguments with his father when a teenager. His sad annoyance with his stiff and stately wife, and the enduring aggrieved resentment at their childlessness. His rather ruthless ambition in the law firm.  And finally, his success as a writer of those damning murder/thriller novels.  Had all this culminated in a paroxysm of blind forgotten sadism towards the object of his purist, most generous and tolerant love?

A year later a similar murder of a black prostitute occurred in a wealthy part of London.  The police reviewed his case.  The court released him.  The media reported the fact.  He left prison without interest.

            His shamed wife never replied to his letters.

            He turned his writer’s mind to an autobiography.  He became very rich.

 

* * *

When I first saw her body - because, yes, it was in fact me who had found her, and in fact called the police who regarded me as ‘red-handed’, and in fact I was literally so red-handed, with the blush of her life-blood on me from touching her - I saw her and stood still.  In that moment I was no longer present, staring at the window, perhaps for 20 minutes, whilst the corner of my eye concentrated hard upon the sculpted form on the bed.  It was a huge rose-bloom, a fulsome bud opened by a knife. It blew the careful space of her tidy bedroom into an eternal memory for me.  My thoughts shrank down into the single minimal dimension of a straight line that stretched from my eye to the featureless plane of her recently cleaned window.  I could not look, yet I saw. No doubting I saw. I shrank too into an unthinking blot, a stain which I would never clean.

            The white insistence of her still eyes stared more starkly as if they were varnish, like un-skied mountain slopes at night, simply waiting.  They invited real life to grow there.  Those whites were the only unsullied - not sullied with blood - surface she still had.  It was the blooded surfaces that the whites contrasted with, they did not compare to her brownness.  Those whitenesses were an invitation into the messages from her dead soul.  They said nothing, both quietly and loudly; like the white of an envelope creates a curiosity and a communication, all at once. The whites of those wide sad eyes spoke of her poor dead soul within.  I looked at those dead eyes then, as they spoke horror to me, and there was no longer an indifference in her.  They spoke to me of a cold magic, a charm that I could hope to meet again only when dead.

Cautiously with darting motions, my eyes, also deadened, glanced upon what he had done to her. Just above the black shrubbery of her lower hairs there was a vertical cut of, say, one-and-a-half inches, running northwards up her tummy.  Its edges were slightly parted as if in shy invitation. Subsequently more semen was believed to be inside that hole.  Smears of blood, shaded streaks against the dark skin, surrounded that slit; a fulgent expressive energy, a pulse of some explosive slaughtering passion, caught in a sublime moment of art on her abdomen.

Further up was the dramatic swipe from hip-crest to hip-crest, a line that seemed to cut her in half, slicing only millimetres below her belly button.  It formed a grand smile that had opened, and slowly I saw a blind satisfied grin, releasing a disordered tumble of in-things to the world outside.  As if the gates of a crowded playground had swung wide to let the active play of uncounted children spill uncontained into the world.  They were dark, bloodshot and distended bubbles of bowel, or short, wrinkled pearl-grey strings, or stretched sheets of fanned-out veins.  All were markers of her inner life come outwards.

Her face was strewn with red-streaks as elsewhere in a ghastly tattoo.  They darkened her perfect skin patchily and shaded into the lean hopeful curves of her dear cheeks.  Streaks bled from her mouth like flames licking up from a grate.  Their still fire pictured the horror-passion, a struggle between mouth and intruder, between despair and defeat.  It was a poem of life and death, and it played round her mouth like children on the common.  The wide stretched mouth, sliced either side and so no longer hers, poured with distress, with openness and fullness.  Its sour turns and sudden glittering smiles for me had gone in the stretching he had forced on its willing cavity.  There, it contained now, a retching fullness of foreign matter that gave out a blue-grey glimpse between the frozen clots of red around those once white teeth.  It was a fine full fit that pretended well-enough to be a lover in her loved mouth. It had become the centre of a completed poem, lyrical, tragic, quiet - a night without dream in there. Her lungs had pleaded for air in those final moments, and were left unfilled.

            Across her chest were thin stripes on the dark and smudged skin, lines where the dark colour had been forced to give way and slender furrows of red beads had grown.  They were the light touch of a wire in cheese.  Her bosom had born its nakedness and had celebrated, as if with streaks of fire, an obsessive attention to those pure curved mounds. A long time ago, a rhythmic, purifying flagellation was a solemn hymn to god.  Now, its pain still rang out echoes in that room that made me put my hands to my ears even then.  Her breasts were the altar and the flesh together.  Each one of the pair had then been torn open as if an envelope with frantic news, as if they contained messages of forgiveness.  Each breast had yielded, not a milk - no, never that - each had born a soft gelatinous package, weighty and malleable - like fluid mercury, the liquid jewel.  Each package had been torn out as if scooped with a sharp curette, leaving its breast like a robbed purse, as if the devout Inca, ripping the heart from the victim of worship, could praise the sun with blood, but had failed to cast a glance backwards at the bud from which the sun had risen.  Each breast had slumped in the sadness of loss, shapeless.  How her breath must have heaved under them. Beauty continued to roam upon her, like the rays around the horizon of the new-day’s sun.  Those breasts had become relics of light and the world. Their nature had flown and light and the world were thereby intensified.

            Her limbs were stretched out to the far corners of the bed, a web, a net to catch stars.  Her sinews were tracks of light in, as it were, the sky at dusk, a sign as much of welcome to the day as of passive good-night.  A greeting with open arms and legs to all experiences, a zest, in the stillness, like sipping iced water with a hot Mediterranean view, inviting the weary traveller to come and rest in silent inward contemplation.  She lay vainly and hideously stretched and prepared.

 

All in a moment’s flash when I looked, she in disorder in the soft boudoir where she kept her things tidily and ready for her. My eyes centred in on the knife, his knife.  Its handle only visible, whilst its blade he had plunged fully into the top of her thigh. The polished shine of its brass and wood hovered erect above the crest of her pubis, as if a snake charmed, risen from within and stuck petrified in its deadly climax.

            It was mercy that made me feel its handle and draw its stained blade from her deep flesh.  I hesitated and drew a faint scratch across my own abdomen from hip-crest to hip-crest, in a twinned climax of death.

 

* * *

 

In my solitary confinement what else did I have to do but rehearse in my memory - as if still real - the love I had felt for her. Often, I would stretch myself on that undignified prison bed, stretch each limb to one corner and call up a vision of her – bending, stretching, dancing for me.

 

What else might I do in my empty hours but twin my body to hers as I had in that last moment?  I thought I might live a twinned death in those moments.  A starfish, stranded and tortured in pain as if the drying sun had been too quick to let it reach the sea again.  For hours, in that sill prison-cell I might wait for death to come.

 

As I had when I had found her.  I had endured then moments that lasted forever like death.

 

Lying there in my posture of remembrance, I would find my body responding in ritual.  I recalled it was the energy that had astonished me.  As I had cast away that knife of his, I had knelt over, then lain upon her ruin.  Just as I now lie matching the direction of her limbs with my own stretched out.  I had pressed mine to hers as if the life in mine would do for us both.  The weight on her freed bowels brought more to the surface in a sensuous caressing slither under me, accompanied by a strained gurgling sound.  Her opened being had propelled me in a paroxysm that came because she had never strayed from an independence she proclaimed every moment in her separated way.  I could not alter the impulsion of my own body as it subsided in murmurings of how I had loved her which she could never hear.  Her bowels churned when I rose from her body and became still again.  I wept for many minutes.  Her eyes maintained her familiar indifference.

 

She had been all through this alone, as she would have wanted.  Now I, on my own, was destroyed by it.  I called the police as the only others in the whole world who might now know what to do.

 

In this way I managed, whilst in prison, to spend my time with Grace.  But then, it was when they let me out.... The dark days came.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!” 

 

 

 

 

The park seat

 

He sat down at one end of the park seat without looking at the person at the other end. In fact, they were only a few feet apart and he knew that whoever it was, they were probably looking at him. But he was taking Charlotte for a walk, quite a shaggy hybrid sort of spaniel.

It was only moments before the other person’s dog was growling. He looked at the woman, and noticed as he usually did if she was attractive. She had long legs now uncrossing as she turned to her dog to calm it. “He’s called George.” she said. About his age, they were both in their mid-fifties. She was slim, about his height, and hair immaculate and already grey.

            He decided he’d reply to her, given there was a degree of appeal in what he saw, “Mine’s called, Charlotte. She’s docile. Don’t worry.”

            To his surprise she replied in a friendly sort of way, “Hmm – George and Charlotte. A royal match.”

            For the first time he looked her directly in her face, “What?”

            She smiled with some amusement, “George, the Third, he was married to Queen Charlotte. Remember?”

            He grunted, as if both ignorant and uninterested. “You’re a teacher, then?” he asked.

            “That’s it,” she said with a similar amused smile. Her hand was still on her black-and-tan Alsatian. “He’s got a bit of spirit.”

            “He’s German?” he said as if it mattered. “A German sheep-dog, right?”

            “Right again,” she said still seeming amused. There was a church bell tolling in the background as it was Sunday. “Do you walk her usually?”
            “Every Sunday. We (meaning his dog and himself) watch the old folk going to the church.”

            “Might see you again, some time.” And she stood up walking off with her dog that was still interested in the spaniel.

            He watched her behind, and her striding with long steps which he decided was elegant. Then he called out, “You left your glasses case here.” She looked around and came back for it. Her usual smile crossed her face again as she thanked him. He stood up deciding to accompany her for a little. They walked side by side. 

She was looking down at the path as she stepped out, and with an expression suggesting she was pleased to have interested him. “What do you do, then?” she said eventually to break the silence in case it became less friendly.

“Oh, I manage the garage. On the by-pass. It’s a petrol station, really.”

She looked at him, “I know the one. Yes,” she said, “perhaps I recognise you. What’s your name if I may ask?”

“Reg.” But he did not ask hers. He was feeling suddenly nervous. Though he often noticed women in the street and the park, and sometimes would follow behind them for a few yards, he’d never got into conversation with one before. In fact, he was more at ease with dogs.

She was smiling again at his loss of composure which was sufficient to have communicated itself to her. “I’m Grace.” She was quite entertained by this awkward man by her side. His awkwardness made her feel she could control him. She felt comfortable, even if he was awkward. Perhaps because he was! The dogs were pulling at their leads as if to get at each other. “Let’s meet again,” she said as if dismissing him for today.

“OK,” he nodded, but kept on walking by her side which amused her. Why she wondered did she not feel threatened. In fact, as they continued and left the park she asked if he’d like to have a cup of coffee, to which he also nodded. His nervousness continued. The dogs were happily interested in each other exploring with their noses. She took him to her small house just outside the park.

When they entered, he stood nervous and still, and as if waiting to be told to sit – which she did in a teacher-like way. And he obediently sat where she indicated. That little-boy quality of his still amused her. But now she was feeling a bit nervous too. She never entertained a man in her house – apart from her brother who was always popping in. 

She left the room to go to her small kitchen to make coffee in her best jug – two of her best cups and saucers as well. When she sat down on the other side of the room with the low table in between with the refreshments on it, they were both silent. It was as if both were out of their depth and yet they felt they should be of an age when ordinary friendliness should have been quite automatic. He leaned forward as if he had something important to say to her, “You lived here long?”

She remained amused at his fumbling for something to break the silence. It relaxed her if she could see his nervousness, because then she could see about relaxing him. She remained sitting up straight and told him it had been her parent’s house, but they were both gone and had left her the house. She had a brother and he had been left a little cottage a few miles away on the coast. She sometimes stayed there for a day or a night. And then amazingly, she found herself saying that he might like to take his dog to stay there briefly.

He didn’t jump at the offer. And she began to feel her nervousness again. The dogs were now lying calmly on the rug in front of the fireplace. He said, rather clumsily, “Do you think we could become friends?”

Her ready smile bloomed again, “Looks like we’re going in that direction.” And she pointed at the dogs, as if it depended on them.

He nodded, and she wondered if he ever smiled. 

“They look as if they like each other. You know, I never got him doctored. I couldn’t.” He looked blank. “It seemed so unkind. So, he gets kind of… fresh. You know.” But she didn’t know why she was telling him; perhaps it was to warn him to protect his Charlotte.

He looked intensely at her, “Sorry, love. I forgot your name.”

“Grace,” she said, But this time she did not smile. It seemed to be increasingly heavy going.

“Ah. Grace. That’s a nice name. Mine’s, Reg.”

“I know. Are you married, Reg?” She felt now she had no idea how to carry on a conversation with this unnerved man. It didn’t seem to matter what she would say.

He shook his head, “No, I’m not.” But he did not elaborate. And he continued to look rather lost with her.

“No, nor am I,” she said, briskly. “Never wanted to,” and she shook her hair back with a flick of her head. “But sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like.” She looked down at her dog and stroked its head. The dog moved slightly in response.

He looked at her, and said in his incongruous way, “Well, we could try.”

She looked up sharply at him and burst out laughing. “What?” she said impulsively, so surprised she didn’t think what she was saying, “Is this a proposal.”

He then blushed, slowly, all over his rugged face. And she cut her laughter short. “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh.” No-one ever proposed before. Not to me.” She was flustered. “I suppose we could try.” She didn’t know whether to take it in a humorous way as if not serious, or if she should respond to his seriousness.

“OK.” It was almost as if she was just buying petrol at his garage.

“Let’s be serious for a moment, Reg. Are you really thinking about this? We don’t know each other, do we. Perhaps we should get to know each other, We only met half-an-hour go.” Her mind was trying to take in what was happening. Just as she was finding it boring, he had now turned her upside down. “We’d better get to know each other properly, I think. Let’s spend the rest of the day together, tell each other everything about ourselves.”

“I’ve got to go to work this afternoon.”

“Oh, OK. Come back afterwards and I’ll cook us a nice meal. What time will you finish.”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Oh, that’s late, isn’t it?”

“It is the shift I’m on.”

“Yes, OK. Well, we could have a bedtime glass of wine, if you like.”

“Yeah,” and he stood up as if being dismissed. “I’ll come back later, if you like.”

“Yes, come back later.” And he put the lead back on the dog and left without saying goodbye. Her first thought was to question herself viciously about why she had agreed to see him at 11 o’clock in the evening. She couldn’t ring him with excuses to cancel as they had not swapped phone numbers. She could just not answer the door; be in bed; be asleep. She sat down again, poured some more coffee and told herself  to think, think hard, what she was doing. Perhaps she could welcome him with a bottle of wine. She could go and get one from the little shop down the road. ‘Fuck,” she allowed herself to say, to herself, ‘it is the last thing I want to have myself turned upside down and inside out like this.’ She decided to go and get a bottle of wine, just in case and come back and decide what she really wanted to do. Was there something nice enough about him to spend a little time with him? But why did she agree to 11 at night. She had to get up for work tomorrow. She had never known how to handle relations with blokes. It was only boys in her class at school who she had any connections with at all. Men, she told herself, are grubby. She went to have a shower.

He meantime was wandering back with Charlotte, the spaniel. He walked slowly feeling dizzy to the other side of the park. Of course, he did not have to go back to the woman after his shift. Best to forget all that silliness. What does she want to marry him for. What could she want him for? For once his curiosity perked up. What were women really like when you got close to them? He had never had the opportunity. Suddenly his life had changed direction, completely. Like going into reverse gear. Or perhaps he suggested to himself it was more the other way. After going backwards away from everything all his life till he was fifty he could not change into forward gear. He had no idea what on earth that would mean, what he would have to do. What would she want? What does a woman want? They don’t want men with no experience. He shouldn’t go back. That’s it.

She waited at 11 pm listening hard for the doorbell as if it might be difficult to hear, still not knowing if she would answer it. 

But it didn’t ring.

Nevertheless, the next Sunday he was out bright and early with Charlotte, and sitting on the park bench as the week before. She too was curious to see if he was walking his dog but was careful not to walk past their bench seat. After all she’d had a proposal of marriage! As she walked around at a distance behind and out of sight, she could see him sitting there. ‘Now what!’ she thought. And no answer came to her, none at all. So she just stood. It was George who gave the game away, because, off the lead in the park, he suddenly realised his new friend Charlotte was over there by the seat. He went racing over before she could move or stop him. When he came near, Charlotte noticed him and jumped-up straining, still on her lead. But Reg let her off not realising what was happening and just wanting to give her a bit of freedom on her walk. The dogs sniffed at each other for a moment and suddenly George was up on her and they were copulating – in public, George and Charlotte. Immediately Reg heard the disturbance and started to shoo them apart. But the dogs were not too keen to part. Grace was now running to control her dog and came up to them lashing George with the leash to distract him from Charlotte. In fact, George was not easily distracted. But as the situation came under control, Reg found he was facing Grace, and she was practically in physical contact with him. They stared at each other. The situation seemed extremely personal.

Perhaps it was as close to intimacy with a woman that Reg had ever been. He backed away, and then sat down on the seat. He had thought about her a lot during that week, a lot. She was standing looking down on him sitting there, not sure whether to flounce away with her anger, or to stay and have it out with him. After a moment of doubt she sat down on the seat with as much distance from him as possible. “You stood me up last Sunday.” She was not exactly haughty but did convey her sense of being completely in the right.

He stared at her, not knowing what to say. But blurted out painfully, “You don’t want a man like me.”

She wondered what he meant, was he referred to something awful he’d done in the past or whatever. But found herself saying,  “Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?” and realised that she could be considering him as a man she wanted. “I mean, I hardly know you.”

He turned to her and, in a brave sort of a way, confessed, “I’ve never been with a woman before.”

She was struck very forcefully by the shame in him about his lack of masculine experience. But what could she say to that? She decided, also bravely, to follow suit, “Well, all I’ve done was play around with a boy in my class. When I was about twelve. Once, my father saw us. He was so cross, he whipped me. He had never done anything to me like that. He was so cross. I cried for a while, all night I think. I wouldn’t look at him for ages afterwards. One day he held me in his arms again and told me never to do that again. And I cried again and told him I was sorry. And I’ve never done anything like that again.”

“What did you play around at?”

“Oh, just looking, and touching… you know…  our parts.” Reg looked at her, wondering what he could say. “Now you think I am disgusting. You look just like he looked at me. My father. He was disgusted with me.”

He continued looking at her distress, “No, Grace. No, no I’m not.”

“I was disgusted with myself. I am. I think I am still. I went to a group for women who had been abused. But they told me I had not been abused. I think they were right and I was just being dirty with the boy.” She looked very sad and even hopeless; and she added irrelevantly perhaps, “He was called John.”

“I never played with anyone. I don’t know anything about a woman,” he said as if he wasn’t actually talking to one of that category.

Her mood seemed to lighten immediately, “Coo, we are much the same, I reckon, Reg.”

He looked curiously at her and then his face darkened with tension and anxiety. “Are you saying we should play around together?”

“Oh,” she laughed loudly, “Oh, of course not.” And she laughed almost hysterically. Two people walking by looked and wondered if she was being molested by the man on the seat next to her. “Of course not. Nobody should suggest that, unless they wanted to. Unless they both wanted to.” She put her hand out to touch his arm, trying to relax his alarm. 

And he did calm a bit. But the dogs were now pulling at the leads as if they’d been stirred by the tension between their owners. He stood. “You’re a bit of a funny woman, aren’t you Grace.” And then he added hurriedly, “But I like talking to you.”

Grace, too, had calmed when she had seen how tense he had become. But he now walked away with Charlotte, who kept pulling back and turning to look at George.

The next time they met was when Grace decided to fill her car at the petrol station on the by-pass. She didn’t usually go there. But she just thought she might, for a change. There was a bit of a queue, so she got out of the car to wipe some bird dirt from her windscreen. The woman driver in front of her was filling her car, and said, out of the blue, “I often come her, don’t you? Because the bloke who runs it is a bit gorgeous, isn’t he.” The woman had a lot of make-up and had tight jeans. “But he’s a bit nervous, isn’t he. He gets all nervous when I look at him.” She laughed in a slightly scoffing way, but also an admiring way. 

When Grace had filled and went in to the cash desk to pay, she was not at all surprised to see it was Reg at the till. He did not look up, and she realised he must have spotted her through the window. When they had finished the transaction she said thankyou, and as there was no-one waiting behind her at that moment, she added, “Let’s go and see a film together.” He did not look up but shook his head slowly as if he was caught off balance and didn’t know what to say to her invitation. But she took his shake of the head as a ‘no’. So she added with a degree of silly abandon, “Well, come round and we can watch some tellie together.” And she chuckled hesitantly.

There was a moment or two of hesitation and then to her surprise he said, “OK”. She immediately thought of the woman outside saying she thought he was a bit gorgeous. Indeed, he could be gorgeous, and had a good physique under his work clothes. She knew what she liked in men – would like in a man.

She left and he watched her through the window. He always said it was the best view. As they walked away, they could not see him looking.

He went around to her house after he’d finished at 6.30. Not on until 11 pm this day. It was a weekday. She heard the doorbell go and was astonished and flustered to see him on the doorstep. She let him in. They hardly spoke, but standing in the hallway, she said, “I’d better cook. I need to go around to the shop to get something. Come with me. You can hold the basket. Is there anything you don’t like to eat?”

When they got back, she sat him in the same chair, and he watched the television news without much interest while she spent the time actively in the kitchen. She spread the table, served the food and they ate. There was not much to say apart from ‘pass the salt’ etc. Neither of them knew what to expect. As they finished, he said, “I should have brought Charlotte, she would have liked to see George again.”

“They’d have got up to no good.” But she was wondering actively what they would get up to themselves. And so was he; the meal was good, but…. now what? She gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen. And then returned to sit down across the table again. She looked as though she was expecting something from him. She lay her arm on the table in a relaxed sort of way as if inviting him to touch it. So he did; he put his hand on her wrist. It felt warm and also exciting to touch this object of desire. She smiled at him and he gazed as if spellbound at her welcoming face. He looked so serious. “Please smile at me,” she asked. And so he did. “You look so gorgeous when you smile,” she said, repeating what the tarty women had said to her at the petrol pump earlier. She seemed to be egging him on to do something, initiate something with her. But he didn’t know what he should be doing. And then with inspiration he picked up the wrist he was touching and kissed the back of her hand. “That was lovely,” she said. So he held it to his lips again. She  said rather matter-of-factly, “I think we could be romantic together.” And now she was tense, having broached the subject that neither of them really understood. 

He could feel the tension in her hand as he held it against his face, and lips. He put it down on the table and cupped it in both of his hands. “Do you really want to try with me?” he said earnestly. 

“We’ll have to teach each other what to do won’t we?” She was trying to be practical to manage the rising tension and excitement between them. 

He nodded, “Yes. Do you mind?” 

She laughed and relaxed a bit at his anxious concern. “Mind? No more than you.” And she took her hand away from his so she could put it to his face and feel the beginnings of stubble. She had not felt that before. She stood and pulled on his arm to follow. When they were together in the bedroom he looked around as if it were some strange forest in the middle of Africa. A woman’s bedroom looked so tidy. He looked at the single bed; it seemed very small. He was feeling terrified again at what he’d have to do to her. She said coyly, “Perhaps we should undress first.” He began to take his clothes off, while she watched. He was naked when she said. “It’s easier for a woman isn’t it. She can see what she’s got to hold,” and she was looking at his penis which was feeling like a growing sausage, “and what she’s got to do with it. But a man can’t see anything much of what a women’s got.” Then she thought of her previous conversation of her forbidden escapade as a schoolgirl. “Would you like to see my parts, so you know what they look like. And what to do with them? I’ve never shown them to a man. I mean a grown man. Like this.” She was feeling devilish and wondering what her father would be thinking now. She felt she was defying everything good. “Shall, I undress now?” she asked.

He nodded and mumbled, “Yes.” 

“Or touch your penis?” he shook his head. But she did touch it and held it. It lay in her hand like the crown jewels. He was so familiar with his own erection, but only when it lay in his own hand. To feel her gentle grip around it now chased away every single thread of tension. She let it go and began to undress, watching him watch her as her body slowly revealed itself. She wondered if he approved of it. It became important that he liked it. “Tell me,” she asked, or demanded. He looked puzzled. “Tell me it is nice. Tell me you want to see my parts, to find them, and find out what they are.”

He was at a loss, “You are a very beautiful woman,” he said, or even recited from the last love-scene he had watched on television.

“You are nice to me,” she smiled. And her panties came down to her ankles. He was looking at her nakedness and stepped forward to give her a powerful hug. She yielded to him, and their bodies swayed gently together for several minutes. He could feel the touch of her skin on his penis which increasingly felt the centre of his body, of the universe.

“Let’s get on the bed. Then you can find out all the parts that a woman has got. Please be gentle with me.” She got on the narrow bed. And spread her thighs to give him space so that he could see what she had got between her legs. 

He looked carefully at her groin. “You are beautiful,” he said with more sincerity.

“So are you,” and she was looking at his penis in its semi-swollen state. “Can I feel your balls?”

“Yes,” he said. She held them. She noticed that as she touched them and held and fondled them, his breathing changed. It was deeper. And his eyes changed as if he was not seeing anything. 

“Look at my parts, Reg.” And while she held on lovingly to his balls, he looked.

“Can I touch you there?”

“Yes, dear Reg. I  want to feel you touching me. It’ll make me feel just like you feel now as I hold you.” So he put his fingers on the wrinkled skin between her thighs. “You can find a slit if you part those folds. Your finger will slip in.” So he did what she invited. And with some fumbling found the slit that was the entrance to her. And now her breathing changed, just like his. “Now,” she said, “there’s a hole you can find. And just in front of the hole I want you to rub it there, Very, very gently. That’s the clit. Ah, you’ve found it.” She lay back to enjoy the rising energy that spread through the skin all round her thighs and hips into every inch of her body it seemed. Her breathing was getting stronger. “Now, Reg, you must do something else. I want to find out what it’s like. You feel that spot you’ve touched with your finger, I want you to lick it. Soothe it with your tongue.

He moved back and withdrew her hand. Hers slipped away from his balls. “Lick it?” he asked.

“I want to see what it’s likc.” She looked up into his face. “Shall we try it? We don’t have to.”

“OK.” He put his head down between her legs and tried to find his way towards her slit with his face and lips to lick her. He didn’t mind so much from a hygiene point of view, but he could feel his erection declining. With some care and difficulty he found the right spot and to his amazement her breathing changed abruptly to a gasping which quickened and quickened and in no time she was crying out as if in a kind of delicious pain. He knew what it was, but had never realised a women reached an orgasm as he did. Moreover, as she came, his erection seemed to respond as well. She told him when he had licked enough. And as if in a daze she asked him to get into her hole. It did entail a lot of nervous fumbling again, but he did it, to his surprise. And the automatic body movements took him over till he too climaxed, dizzyingly, inside her.

They both relaxed together, having discovered what life is all about, it seemed. He lay back nearly off one side of the little bed and she buried her face in his neck, kissing the stubble. They lay for five minutes without moving, then minutes more. No movement as if they were one, and any movement would snap them apart. There were no real thoughts in his mind apart from going over the experience again and again. He had accomplished what a man can accomplish with a woman who was, as he now knew, as beautiful as any he had every watched and followed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                              Meeting herself

 

Laughter infected her. She looked for its source.  Her thin pale hair moved with nervous flicks of her head; her face was pale, too.  A couple of teenagers, a slender boy in tired clothing, faded denim, and a buxom girl with a white tee-shirt with crude slogans; they were holding hands, smoking, laughing together.  It was as if they wanted to infect the rest of the station concourse, bored, waiting, people.  They wanted to make everyone feel left out of the joke.  Her pale face looked towards them, a small smile emerging, half conveying that she approved and encouraged them.  The long line of her nose wound itself, as it were, through the intervening air and prodded exploringly into their space.  But she was also beyond, outside their entangled gaze.

            Then she moved.  The angle of her direction swung, like a searchlight, picked out a man way beyond the line of battered seats.  He was solemnly and studiously looking in a book by the bookstall, a relaxed traveller looking for a cheap novel for the journey.  Her inviting half-smile winged towards him through the air, but unnoticed.

            A curious observer, observing her wan smile and the distant concentration of her sight, would by now have sighted her small toddler pulling at her fawn linen skirt.  He reached wobblingly to put his hand in the large linen bag hanging from her shoulder.  He could feel something there.  She brushed his chubby hand aside as if it was an invading insect.  Her distant line with the bookstall began to falter.  The perturbations broke into it as the hopeful book reader moved away to find his train.  She turned, slightly sharply, to her toddler, repulsing his more demanding efforts to get onto her lap, to explore her inviting bag.  He perched unsafely on his stumpy legs clinging to her knee with his hand and looking perplexed at the wooden response from his mummy.  His face began to pucker as if in distress, but partly as if he'd learned the power of noisy crying.  She put her hand in the bag and withdrew her camera, giving it to him, whilst holding on to the short cord strap.  He immediately went to put it back in her bag - to restore his fascinated project of discovery, which she had uncomprehendingly wiped out so easily. It wasn't the camera he wanted so much as the exploration, the discovery of it, within her.  As the cord loop was still caught in her fingers, he could not get the camera back inside, and he began intelligently to explore the means of attachment of the camera to her fingers, pulling this way and then that in random expectation. During all this she continued a similar random prodding of the air with her directed attention to various corners of the railway station.

 

Our observer of this observing woman would have been pained by the insensitive mis-contact - the toddler intent on exploring his mother; mother intent on probing the contents of the distant air.  Not long after this, the observer would have seen her pick him up as a surprised bundle and pop him carefully into the straps of his pushchair and begin to move off to a crescendo of protest from his affronted dignity and frustrated purpose. Such an observer would have been tempted to emerge from the crowd with words of advice and chastisement on her lips for this absent-minded mother.  But she would have been stopped with the words unspoken, by a surge of people crowding from the gate of one of the platforms; and from the midst of the surge a male arm rose in greeting to wave to the woman's equally welcoming wave, whilst the little child screwed round in his entrapping harness more desperate than ever to find where his mother with her interesting bag had vanished to.

 

The threesome united. The woman's half-inviting smile welcomed the man, whilst the wooden posture of her body remained unaltered. It was a cooling unresponsiveness to his embrace.  His glowing smile keyed immediately into her immobility.  His eyes became momentarily glazed and fixed. They turned to the screaming toddler, a joint protest, how unreasonable when Daddy had come. He quietened quickly in his pushchair when she attended to him for a moment instead. She lifted him up. His face transformed into a strange stare; either deeply puzzled or suspiciously curious, or simply a silent paralysis of fear.  She lifted him in her hands, raising his face level with hers and announcing that his Daddy was here.  Then she handed him into the father's arms.  They hugely enfolded him like a protective coat of love.  His stiff little face smoothed a little, and his hand began an intense exploration of Daddy's ear.  Daddy laughed, and ducked as his little son's hands chased his various features, ear, hair, spectacles.  Mother laughed, and he turned with his own happy gurgle to see his mother's face come to life.

            Our observer might at this point have bitten her tongue, relieved that she had been prevented from interfering with chastising words in this now gloriously happy, and mutually infected, family scene.  She would have found herself inspired, bursting out laughing too.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

If our dark observer from the vantage points she has had could sprout wings, she could have followed the movements of this family unit through London; the taxi, the early morning coffee and croissants in Bayswater, the playing with the toddler in Kensington Gardens whilst the grown-ups began to talk earnestly, albeit interspersed with her instant laughs, joyous but forced, whenever he chuckled, or the toddler coo-ed.  If our fascinated observer had achieved invisibility - shall we give her a name, shall we call her Mary, perhaps - if Mary's skin, already so Africa-black, had gone one step further and become a skin of invisibility, then she could have drawn close and begun to hear their earnest thoughts.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Over lunch the mother, now we shall call her Marie, her thin wild hair, loose, carefree, magnificent, and her complexion a little pink with the tension of the day, the excitement, the prospects of the next four days, sat opposite the man, the father of her first child.  He, in his pressed suit, slightly self-conscious and with his glowing smile, which, at times, encouraged himself as well as her.  Our invisibly present observer sat on the fourth side, opposite the toddler clattering and clamouring happily in his high chair, and charming the bright Italian waitress.

            "It is not," she said "a matter of respect - though I do.  Enormously. You know that.  We wouldn't be here otherwise."

            "I know, my dear, I know." He said. Our puzzled observer – she, a Mary – studied the smooth features of his white face.  Their very smoothness seemed to imply that he was actively smoothing out some inner turmoil.  The woman – our Marie – seemed to notice the same, and she reached out her hand across the table-cloth to put her fingers loosely over his.  She was, Mary noticed, almost gazing into him.  His ever-present, playful smile relaxed a little. "We don't talk about love, do we? My dear Marie; only of respect."

            "No," she said, glancing quickly at her toddler who was investigating bread, which now lay in crumbs on his plastic tray, "We can't.  We know that. Love is not part of it."  The momentary contact was lost; some balance between them had changed.  Her hand remained covering his, but it was a meaningless gesture now.  He moved his hand to grasp her fingers.  They had returned to wood.  Mary, our perceptive observer, felt chilled suddenly at this lost contact, as if it were a real death; she looked at the woman's fingers without a wedding ring.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

What Mary struggled to learn from their earnest discussion were the many unspoken concerns, memories, secrets and wishes that Marie and Jacques negotiated - or were failing to negotiate - at this little restaurant table.

            One such might have been Marie's long-felt pain as the youngest child brought up in the sandy fields of coastal Suffolk; the daughter of a disaffected Church of England minister with sharply declining congregations in his cluster of rural parishes.  They lived most of her childhood in a once magnificent half-timbered Tudor rectory, with a jutted upper story.  It was supported by rotting oak corbels some still proudly showing deeply grained carvings of smiling faces.  The crumbled plaster walls still showed some decorative pargetting because the inclement North Sea weather had not yet got its final grasp on all the fine surfaces.  Her big brother's bedroom still sported the opening of the primitive ‘guarde l’eau’ covered by a makeshift trap door of modern plywood.  In mischievous moments on bored holidays, he would lift it, lie in wait till his little sister moved past on the flagstones underneath, and subject her to a sharp deluge from the upstairs commode.  Her wetness was then accompanied by a shriek of his excited laughter.  If she could leap aside, or he missed, she would retaliate with a shriek of her own equally excited mocking.

            Her father's magisterial aloofness rode above the grinding decay of his house and of his congregations.  He did nothing about it; but it was an acute, corrosive pain for his youngest daughter.  The decay was a visible sore festering on her father's pale countenance.  Later on, as they grew up, his pained silence greeted the contemptuous rebuffs from her brother, and they seemed to hasten her father's decay, his patrician stoop, his gratefully early retirement and his subsequent sudden death.  Decay was inherent in her heart.  A pickling agent seemed to turn everything she touched into a dusty relic of what it should have been.  She survived, as it were, a life-time series of those cold douches, a lifetime of turning them aside with her caustic gay laugh.  Instead of a real movement into joy, those childish laughs turned her away from herself.

 

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Still seated in the bright restaurant, she sat back slightly, "We must be practical." She smoothed back her hair in an elegant movement with her free hand; "Practical, considerate of each other."  She seemed to be struggling for words.  He was looking for something from her.  She knew there was a male pride, that she must not harm. Yet his word ‘love’ was too simple for how complicated it was.  "My respect for you," she continued earnestly "is because we, you and I, can think out things practically.  It is what we are good at."  She was gazing right into him.  He felt her closeness.  But also, it was still somehow unmanageable.  Her fingers softly caressed his again as she felt safer.  He smiled in relaxation.  She suddenly sat right back and laughed happily, "I love that puzzled look of yours, Jacques, I love it."  She emphasised the word ‘love’ as if it was a huge joke.

            The waitress came quickly, spotting her moment to take the order.

            Mary, observing all this, could have been a little irritated, the hesitation, the to-and-fro, so much numb contact -- a dinghy and a jetty jostled each other in a high sea.  By now Mary had learned that Jacques was an affectionate acquaintance from Paris.  He had been recruited to the project again, to provide a little brother or sister to the toddler.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Marie's finding her older sister in bed with her brother one winter night after their father had died, was only known to observer Mary because she had found a route into Marie's secret knowledge.  Mary knew, too, that the tickling and squealing laughter from the bedroom had been a mystery for a long time before that, both fascinating and unaccountably exciting.  Agitated as a child, Marie had never been able to penetrate their shut door with her enquiring eyes.  Nor to ask anything or anyone about it.  She remembered those excited squeals like a repeated dream from her childhood.

            Here she was with Jacques, the child, and similar squeals of laughter.  Only Mary knew how they linked up.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

In the evening at the end of the day, the toddler had been bottled and powdered and put to bed, Marie and Jacques sat in adjacent armchairs, silently contemplating what came next.  Dark Mary, invisible in the recesses of the room, had noticed how their conversation - through the day, over the elaborate and celebratory meal - had petered into desultory attempts to fill in silence.  The practical intimacy in the morning had faded to the stillness of the evening.  The joint project had seemed to come apart: he had been flattered in the anticipation, but had now come to feel impersonal, more flattened. She organised and energised in the initiation and arrangements, but was now tensely aware of the penetration that she would be subjected to.  What once seemed a resounding climax of rationality, could now be an uncalculated animal moment.  He felt put on his metal, his performance mechanically required, not cherished. Mary's impatience with this pair made her laugh unkindly.  She could not discern any charge in the atmosphere; no passion in either of their loins.  Contempt for them was possible. But somehow sympathy came out in Mary, too.

            After minutes of separate silences, Jacques came to the point, "My dear Marie, shall we get on with it?"  Marie, appalled at his lack of passion - but equally relieved that she would not be a vessel to collect a spilling sentimentality - led the way to the bedroom.  They took off their clothes.  He folded his neatly on a chair; she carefully sorting certain items for the laundry basket, to wash tomorrow.  They lay on the bed.  His erection came with certainty, it pointed a direct line to Marie's inside.  She flinched but braved it.

            Afterwards they slept; she deeply, almost as a protection against the proximity.  He, fitful, wondered hazily why this had been important for him.  Mary watched over them as if a guardian angel, for the next three days.  Nights in the same bed, but during the days Jacques went into London, researching motorboats for the magazine he wrote for.  Marie spent the days looking after the toddler, taking her turn in the playgroup. Mary watched her, watching the sad decline of spirit.  The project was biology, not a love-child, like the first; this time a test-tube performance.

            Mary felt a closeness to Marie; yet put at a distance, outside effective influence.  Mary's disembodied sadness seemed lost on Marie who rehearsed her sensible reasons continuously in her mind.  How sensible as she had been not to make a relationship before it had been time to become a mother.  One parent, especially a mother, is as good as two - the independence and therefore the extra attention her children would benefit from.  Frankly, the liability a man is, in a woman's life… !  Mary knew of these arguments, their use to bolster up this lonely woman.  Marie would not yet know what Mary knew about her.  Mary's sadness was that Marie yearned for more than she thought she'd settle for, and her sadness was what Marie does not yet know.  Further, Mary was sad that she was neither a help nor yet truly a relief from Marie’s loneliness.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

On the fourth day Jacques left in the morning.  Marie fumbled with her camera and snapped him, holding in his arms the indifferent toddler, an effigy.  Perhaps Jacques had left another inside her.  We will not know yet awhile.  In the meantime, Marie went back indoors to continue her own life - as if never interrupted.  Her shadow, Mary, decided to remain with her.  The sadness had moved a little nearer.  Mary accompanied Marie almost touching now.  Their twinning had become apparent.  Marie, fully alone again, turned to her radio, she laughed desperately at the frenzy of the chattering disc jockeys.  She frowned at the news broadcasts, hummed and thrummed with the spreading music.  But sometimes she wondered at the new sad presence in her house, as if she were no longer alone.  Then her nervous laughter calmed.

            In the evening after the toddler had been bathed and bedded, more protesting than usual at his pre-occupied mother, Marie also took herself gratefully to bed.  She lay down and her dark sadness lay down beside her.  Mary's laugh, as silent as she was invisible, drew a direct line into Marie's inside.  Marie and Mary made a form of love together.  Their silent laughs mingled in rest at last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My nurse

 

Lying in bed, the rucks in the bed-linen like granite rock to lie on, my future is a composite of past times. In the present my skin is a furnace, alive with its own nature. My member is the centre of the fire. It goes up and down like Tower Bridge. My immobility is agony as that member flags constant demands I do something for it. Sometimes my nurse looks under my bedclothes and will see it saluting her. “Oh,” she says, always, “I'm surprised at you in your condition. We don't want that, do we?” – and drops the sheet back on its throbbing tip. How to catch her attention, how to tell her. Only my eyelids work now – apart from my member hoisting itself with a life of its own. If she would only touch it with the coolness of her fingertips, a fire brigade job, to staunch the firebrand. If only those long, elegant fingers would grip its shaft to establish a control. But never, she never once glanced in the direction of my frantically blinking eyelids.

            They were worried about my eczema. Common, they say, in such cases of paraplegia. Para-bloody-plegia from the neck down, that's what I'd got. The doctor stood gazing out of the window; my nurse stood next to him gazing into him. His well-scrubbed very pink face, well-shaven and smooth as her bosom, betrayed no interest. How could he know the fight I had with my surging skin, humming like the national grid. My struggle did not involve my muscles, my joints, it was a tournament between my mind and its feelings – one that never ceased. I could tell him the prescription I needed – it was standing next to him, resting her long hand in a lingering moment on his folded arm. He was a dapper man, silver hair, still playing squash in his fifties, the healthy and wealthy type. I had known them, sold insurance to them – in those gone days. And she, his nurse, was pure radiance. What a couple, a heroic tableau at the end of my bed. My member addresses them.

            In the end, it was an ointment for her to rub into the eczema. Why could she not rub it into the places I want her to rub!  All I can do is let my thoughts run; I imagine her in all sorts of ways - the nakedness, the flexible writhe of her curves as she moves, the moaning for me at night-time... oh dear. My mind, no match for this fever, retaliates. Often instead, it constructs her in the most absurd antics -= wiping her buttocks, picking the wax from her ears... brushing her teeth. I ask you!  Shaving her calves. Always the intimacy of her flesh. My charged skin won't let her go. And – I tell you – this is a stout fifty-year old matron, with a sour expression, and who ties her waist into a nasty groove between pads of fat above and below. This is not a lithesome 25-year old, dangling a sumptuous cleavage before my eyes as she soothes my paralytic limbs. What more -= I ask you – can I do. I see only an angel, feel only the tongues of desire caressing my skin. So, I hate her, my love.

It is solely the desire of the mind's eye before me. And it is only with a mind that I can fight it. I try to imagine the mathematics of her girth, the hydrodynamics of excess lipids, the chemistry of sweat glands. I try the driest of academic puzzles, the most ditchwater-like affairs of the hum-drum. But to no end - the caverns of my soul have no limit – endless niches and passages in which can be secreted the loathed longing of my skin. Thoroughbred honest thoughts can never hunt them out to the last one, can never dint my body's soaring temperature. When one day I shall be taught the mastery of typing with one toe, or with a stick strapped to my forehead, then the first thing I'll ask for is a massage girl to take me off to a sauna and lay me out and deal with that subcutaneous layer that itches, every Everest-like moment of my libido. Then I will be released for ever. So, I do believe.

            Until then... I love my nurse and fight her in my helplessness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It might have made a difference

                                                                           

I have always believed that friendship is more important than money. But I have to say he did test that belief, most severely.  If he had paid his debt to me, I could have used a substantial amount for her.  It might have made a difference.

            I had asked her “Which is more important, money or friendship?” I remember exactly the moment I asked her.  We were sitting on a small balcony on the top floor of a hotel in Rome.  The morning sun was clear in a spring sky.  The sounds of a small fruit market in the street below seemed a long way away.  The church bell in the campanile across the road had just finished striking ten-thirty, ten deep-throated gongs and one high-pitched bell.  She was just cutting into a fresh pear and carrying a slice towards her lips, her finger pressing it against the knife.  The elegant movement was unhindered by my question and the slice was deposited safely in her soft pink mouth without mishap.  I knew she had been a ...  Well, I don’t know what I would have called her.  She would certainly not have let me even think of calling her a “tart”.  And indeed, it would certainly not have been apt.  She was, I tell you, in a class of her own, an aristocrat, a shark among minnows, a Botticelli amongst Disney cartoons.  But I had not let myself think of all that whilst we were in Rome.  And yet I must have been thinking of it.  It was the one reason she was with me there.

            I was cheating on my new wife of course; if you could call it cheating.  My wife would have called it that, if she had known.  But it was something else I was thinking of, and at the same time not thinking of whilst I was in Rome.

            Another slice of pear moved elegantly to her lips before she spoke.  The juice filled her mouth with a sweetness that showed in her eyes; and her tongue swept across her red/pearl lips leaving them moist.  “You’ve heard of diamonds,” she said.  It was hardly a question, her eyes looked at me from under lids, her moist lips moving in a coquettish smile, unexpected but forbidding.  It was not the glance of a street girl, it was the darting invasion of a woman of style, underplayed, decisive, a confident beauty. I loved her with passion at such moments.  “Diamonds, my friend,” she added, almost as a protest at my naivety, like a threatened demand.  It had a coldness which mingled with her smile like a piquant sauce on red beef.

            She had come to Rome for two days to meet me. It was at my request, but I knew why she had come.  It was not in fact to enjoy money spent on her.  It was to make him jealous – not that she ever could have made him jealous. He would never have noticed. Nevertheless, I knew she would not keep her trip secret, and I knew it could hurt my wife without measure.  But to hurt my wife was not my reason; for my part, it was not to make her jealous.  Instead, it was fascination with this perfect creature.

            And yet she was no creature.  I watched another slice of pear slide sensuously into her mouth.  The sun was burning our skin as we sat, tired by the heat, relaxing in the innuendoes of our circumstances.  She was not a creature, she was sublime, to my eyes – and more.  Her urgent physicality met with exquisite and careful elegance to raise her into an untouchable realm.  It was a mixture to explode with; that allowed no ordinary expression.

            She had loved him dearly, though I had never got her to admit it.  And he with his overbearing weightiness had never responded to her.  She would have had to shout it, and on her knees, before he could look down and hear her.  And she would never bear herself so low.  I knew what a heart there was beneath the calm precision of beauty; within the pout she presented to him, and to me; and to her customers.

            She had been looking at the expensive cases of jewellery in the hotel foyer.  She had spotted a diamond creation for her neck.  It would have looked wonderful, she was right.  I had not said a word at the time.  Now, she asked, “What did you think of the necklace I showed you?” The next slice of pear was on its way.

            ‘My dear,” I began.  Some impatience had crept into my voice I suspect.  I was about to protest as mildly as possible that jewellery costing thousands of pounds was beyond me at present.  But I cautiously changed my line.  “It is as beautiful as you are.” I suspect, however, that she had caught my anxious tone.  That slice of pear got, I thought, a harder bite than the others.  She looked aside and I thought I glimpsed an arching of the eyebrows, but she would not let me see it.  She put down her plate with the knife on it at our feet and dabbed her lips with the napkin.  One more slice of pear waited on the plate.  A slight hardness had come into her features, without perceptible movement.  Her hardness was legendary.  She knew I was about to refuse her request, about to become insubordinate.  She would not press to that point where she was refused, but she felt it all the same.

            I thought of the money he owed me.

            I could have bought her several necklaces with it.  She loved him, I suppose, helplessly.  He was the only person that I saw her give her own money to.  But we all did.  He was like that.  His expansiveness towards everyone was so obvious.  He always knew someone who would do just what you needed doing.  He could always get something fixed.  And then of course there was that forlornness; he needed things and not one of us could arrange it for him.  He contrived thus, an imbalance; and it always cut his skin. His sadness of heart made him curiously magisterial.  And even Florence, whose skin could blunt razor blades gave him her own money out of her wallet.  When I was with her, as now, she never even carried money.  I watched her sitting on this penthouse terrace, in the Roman sun, eating Italian pear and utterly matching the serenity I was buying us. But the motionless tension beneath her skin showed me she was not happy.  It is partly why I had asked the question.

            He had sold my car for me.  It had been a rare Bugatti.  I had longed for Italy then, even before I had found it.  I methodically restored it.  I have always been rather predictable and ponderous. Even at Oxford, where I had first met him, Oliver had criticised my essays for their lack of personality – in the very tenderest way; and as always with that slight hint that I had let him down personally, just a bit; that now I owed him something.  Let him down rather than myself.  Anyway, my one gesture to a creative life occurred when I was sailing amongst the sand-reefs of the Suffolk coast and at the opening of a quiet estuary, and amongst various rotting wooden hulks.  I came upon the rusting corpse of my Bugatti barely beneath the surface.  It scraped under my centre-board and I immediately decided to bring up whatever it was.  I assumed at first it was a piece of war machinery, a tank, a felled bomber.  I had just fallen in love then, perhaps it was for the first time and everything in the world seemed possible.  The local farm mechanic was enthused by my energy. He was familiar with any, and all, requests.  It became a challenge for him and his local villagers to raise it for me.  I spent all the summer scraping rust in my father’s garage, picking out the intricate mechanism, still robust from its 1920s manufacture, and much was still rescuable after the years in the cold Suffolk tides.  I worked doggedly into the winter at weekends when I could leave Oxford, and it was the fascination with restoring this dead machine that led me to change (from my degree in history) to engineering – like my father.  That was how I came to spend five rarely uninspired years at Oxford and cemented the relationship with the paternal Oliver.  He had always pressed me to part with my Bugatti, to lend it to him, to sell it to him, to let him sell it for a very good price through one of his contacts at the University who knew an aristocrat family that wished to surround themselves with fashionable and expensive trivia.  When he met Florence, I was not surprised.  I had always thought of his weighty hungriness as a kind of sleaze, a perfect match for her lewd business of practiced intimacy. They had met, as it happens, silently wafting over the north Oxfordshire countryside in a balloon – she taken along as a decorative accompaniment for the wealthy balloonist, Oliver with his soaring intellectual sparkle having ingratiated himself with the same wealthy man. That was in my last year.  I met them soon after the balloon owner had dropped them both for new hangers-on, and new hobbies.

            She was at tea in Oliver’s rooms, and I fell in love with her instantly.  I do not think she minded particularly as, unimaginative as always, I was no problem to her.  I was in control of myself, my ardour always hovering at the right distance.  She had then given me the address where she worked in London.  She asked no questions and let it be known that none would be asked. They, she and him, were such a contrast: he boisterously loud, impulsive and brilliantly shallow; she instead quiet, deep and inviting.  They had in common their respective hungriness.

            I looked at her relaxed form, the very centre of our warm balcony, cut out of the centre of Rome, just for us.  She had come to me for a couple of days.  Just us together.  After twelve years.  Was it so long?  I looked and knew the shape of her breasts which her blouse now enfolded shapelessly. I was familiar with the long sweep of her thigh to which the canvas trousers now clung.  I have encountered all things about her but have not captured them.  Perhaps, I wistfully wondered, if I had the money, she really would be mine.  But, after all these years of friendship, I still knew myself to be just one among the many who attended and contented her.  And I never challenged that.  I would not do that to her.

            Later, when my father died, I had some money to spend on my Bugatti, for proper repair - the bodywork, the upholstery, the canvas top and the now rare materials for restoring the mechanics.  But I had money too for setting up my own practice as an engineer, and I began to travel.

            As I aged a little, in my 30s, my work grew moderately prosperous.  All my young sisters married and I, amazingly, became a fond uncle several times. Babies unaccountably grew on me. I realised I had outgrown my Bugatti and I let Oliver agree to sell it for me.  He had it around for a year and a half in the yard behind his house in the country outskirts where he lives now.  He did not look after it and he let me know, by slight hints, that this favour put a burden on him.  When he had finally disposed of it for me it was without much ceremony to a car museum somewhere in the north of England.  He was somewhat vague about where it went, and at what price.  I knew it should have been somewhere amongst six figures, but he let me know in small ways that pressing him for details, and for money, was an embarrassment to him.  There were only instalments, he conveyed, paid to him, at this stage.  The money would finally be accumulated and handed over all in one sum in the end.  And when at last he gave me a firm figure, it was probably less than half I might have expected.  But for such a favour, he implied, I could not grumble.  Machines have always come easier than people, I know where I am and can handle them.  Not so the complexity of his generosity which was beyond me.  I have therefore been helplessly waiting more than two years for payment.  I am good-natured at heart, and I do not press him.  But my timidity comes also from a taint of intimidation in our friendship. I could not lose him, whatever it cost me.  And it did cost me - not only the money, and also not only the jealous knowing of her devotion to him, but most painfully having the combination, that is, to cede her loyalty to me which the money might buy.

            And then there was the other thing.

 

­_oooo/­\oooo_

 

Why did I give two minutes of my life to this heavy bully?  Why did I always let his grandly, selfish importance feed on my adulation.  It is because of the moments of something else; his sudden charming concern for some detail in my life – an inquiry about some worrying contract that I had told him about weeks ago and now long-forgotten by me. He recalled his frequent admiration for some charitable donations I made from my father’s estate after I was bereaved; and then often, at times that were most difficult, I was enriched by his lavish gratitude over my forbearance of his longstanding debt – that money.  I always allowed him the enjoyment of giving me these testimonials to my qualities.  And to be quite fair, I enjoyed them too. The naivety in his gushes of warmth gave him that concealed charm.  It was the visible boy in him that he thought he camouflaged with bulk – that was what engaged some sentimental part of me.  I had never striven to reach beyond being his student in those first terms at University when he had tutored me in history.

            She shifted her body, uncrossed and recrossed her lithe legs.  She retrieved with a gracious movement the plate with the slice of pear.  I heaved inwardly at the flow of the perfect body that had once contained something of mine.  What, I wondered now, was in her mind?  Was she thinking of the flight that would swiftly take her away from me back to London after her short two days here?

            I decided at that moment to tell her.

            In spite of marriage, my visits to her address in London continued with a frequency I was sometimes ashamed of. Marriage had been a deeply insignificant event, and I was determined to keep it that way.  The wedding had been entirely a family affair, and so, as far as I was concerned, the marriage had remained.  The reasons for that will have to wait for another occasion.  Florence – perhaps quite simply, she is the straightforward reason – she was always so curiously complimentary about my loyalty to her.  I believed myself her very best consort, of course I did; I suppose they all did. But it was, I always felt, a considerable consolation prize, one that I wished to keep, and sometimes this specialness was confirmed by a boating trip in Regent’s Park, tea at Harrods, a drink and a theatre somewhere near her birthday.  On one occasion, it was about nine months ago, I suppose, it had been quite a special occasion, she had wanted me to take her to collect a painting from an exhibition a friend of mine had just shown.  She had bought one and we took it back to her flat.  We went as usual into the familiar bedroom. Afterwards I noticed there had been a leak in the condom.  I was in the lavatory peeling the thing off me and I noticed a few drops of fluid squeezing from a small puncture near the tip.  I wondered, at the time, if there was a risk of sperm getting through to her. For some reason I decided it would be a delicious pleasure not to tell her.  It was the only cruelty I have ever done her.  It became a precious secret, a warmth for me, a permanent companion to cuddle up to on my own. Even if there was no fertility, I had left something of me in her, a spot of my essence that inevitably she had had to accept.

            A few weeks later Oliver was speaking on the phone to me.  I think I had made a friendly courtesy call, perhaps I was arranging when I would next go to tea at his place in Oxford.  We had avoided mention of the Bugatti for a long time, but he suddenly said, “You’re my biggest creditor.” It intimated that something was up.  “This place,” he indicated the old farmhouse he was living in, “it’s up to the limit.  I’ve got a mortgage broker looking into Swiss mortgages - two or three percent down on building societies here.” I was not sure if he was bursting with his financial anxiety, or if the intricacies of his arrangements were a kind of boast.  Then equally surprisingly he changed tack in his off-putting but characteristic way, “If it were not for you, I’d have the banks onto me.” Suddenly the generosity of his comment warmed me as it always did.  “As soon as the banks have quietened off, I’m going to tackle what I owe you.  I’ve got an idea...” Fortunately, his other phone was ringing, and I was put on hold till I had to ring off.  I was spared the discomfort of hearing the somersaults he was apparently going to turn for me.

            I think it was only coincidence, though, that the next day he was ringing around everyone who knew her with hints that something was up.

            A week later I went to have tea at the weekend with him – my wife indulged my old links with male friends.  But Florence was there on that occasion.  They openly discussed her pregnancy test.  Oliver, as always, was insistent he could sort it out, “I’m pleased you came to me,” he said, his relaxed form lying grotesquely extended in an armchair.  His massive arms placed either side came together at the finger-tips and he viewed her through the lattice they made.  “You know Pearson?” He glanced sideways as if to include me in his pondering.  I had just come in and sat down on a small chair with horsehair showing at the front edge.  Before I could say anything, in fact before I could get my breath from climbing the stairs to his studio in the attic, “You know Pearson, he ran the psychical research club when he was here”. He turned again to Florence, “You know Pearson is a very good friend of mine.  We had dinner a couple of months ago.” In fact, it is probable that that occasion was the only time they had met.  I wondered what Pearson had made of this bombast. He indicated Oxford and its environs with a gentle sweep of his broad hand.

            Florence was less interested in Pearson’s activities as a student in Oxford, but she remained looking pretty in her severe unsmiling sort of way.  “I hope he can do it as soon as possible.”

            “That’s no trouble,” Oliver retorted wildly.  “He’ll do what he’s paid for.” There was an edge of scorn as, true to pattern, Oliver’s respect for others, beginning sky high to prop his high regard for his own impressive connections, then steadily plummeted back with every sentence he spoke about them.  “It’s only a question of paying him.” Then he suddenly reached out with his arms, pushed his sleeves half up to the elbows, flapped his hands up and down as if to subdue anything Florence might say.  “You’re not to worry, dear.  Don’t think about it.  I’ll be glad – no I insist – I’ll take care of everything, Flo.” He glanced a second time at me to collect my approval.  “Brian,” he announced, as if calling me from a distance, “used to have an old Italian car. Not in your day.” It was a gratuitous flatter that silenced any comment I might have added if I had managed to sort out the complexity of it.  He seemed to be implying that he would contribute the money from that sale to Florence’s termination; whilst concealing that money he received from the sale he should have already given to me; whilst also, it seemed, he was challenging me to expose his bluster.

            Florence got up and said she would make a cup of tea. It was a tense moment, as if she did know something of the issue that Oliver and I had over the car.  She said nothing but rather ostentatiously concentrated on moving around the room on her elegant legs as if in some ritual performance to impress our attention.  Oliver, of course appeared oblivious, and directed her to where she would find the milk as he had placed it in a cooler on the window-ledge, the fridge being full because a group of students was coming to supper and one of the female ones had offered to come that morning to prepare food, and she had been so nervous that to reassure her, he had turned the fridge out to accommodate everything she had brought that could possibly go bad.  Florence responded machine-like to his instructions, a beautiful figure on a screen, the projectionist’s puppet.  She lingered a little, motionless and expressionless.  Secretly, I knew she was relieved to have Oliver’s total command of the solution and joyful it had been him who had wanted to help her.

            But she showed nothing of these feelings as she swayed elegantly about the room making tea.

            Oliver turned his attention to me.

            He was insistent.  He was going to arrange the best in Harley Street, through his contact, no expense spared, and he lavishly declaimed with a wide gesture of his grasping hand, it would be all at his expense.  Perhaps he wanted it thought he was responsible for her pregnancy. Within a week it would all be over and back to normal, he concluded confidently.  Naturally Florence, as she produced the tea, seemed gratefully soothed. She said little while she poured our cups and drank hers.  She was listening intently to Oliver’s plans for her.

            Despite his masterly command of her problem, I recalled only those few days before on the telephone, his gratuitous comments that I was so good about the debt to me that was unpaid.

            Then, a few days later he rang to ascertain – he’d known I would agree, he said – that I could not want to press him for money, when Florence was so upset and needed him to fix it for her.

            So I had decided to tell her.  On our paradise, looking down on the sounds and smells of Rome.  She listened, still and grave.  The slice of pear waited on the plate.  I finished telling her: the baby that Oliver had paid to abort was the one I had made in her.  There was a long silence.  Was she thinking carefully about it?  Did I see a slight shrug of the shoulders?  Or not?  I could barely tell.  Any movement was too invisible to be certain.  The final slice of pear slid unperturbed into her perfect mouth.  Had she realised, I could have paid for her to have my child?  If I had had my money.  Would it have made a difference?  It was time for the taxi to be called to take her to the airport.  Her lips tasted slightly of pear as I kissed her goodbye. We never again mentioned the secret I had kept for nine months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roofless districts

 

She was sitting quite on her own on a bench near a tree but in the evening sun, I approached casually and sat against a fallen tree-trunk at a little distance, facing so that I could look at her but without making it obvious I was doing so. There was silence except for the evening sounds that gave relish to this piece of country we were in.

            Eventually she moved her photochromic glasses, pushing them up to the top of her head, like goggles typical of the unfashionable, years-ago styles long before I would remember. Her eyes looked boldly to take a good look at me and then she stared forward in front of her again. I think she had moved her lenses so that I would be able to see her glance. I exclaimed how sunny the weather was for us. Not having anything more brilliant to say, I felt somewhat silly. Nevertheless she replied in the same style, without turning her head, that she liked to be in Roofless Districts, as they are called, when the sun was out shining. I quickly said that it was the other way around, that the sun comes out when she is in a Roofless District because he liked to look at her. She shrugged her shoulders slightly and I thought she blushed just a little. I did not know how to continue – by becoming more personally flattering or by veering into the technical stuff about the Project we were on here. She did not help me. Characteristically, I said nothing. Later I shifted and stood up and said I might go for a couple of drinks for us if she liked. Immediately, I bit my tongue with regret for I knew that it was at least two miles walking to the nearest pub from here. I would have felt really stupid (as I often am) keeping her waiting for an hour or so while I staggered back with two slopping glasses of flat soda-beer. Fortunately, she declined. Having stood up, I decided to move off anyway and announced I was going back. She said nothing. I picked up a stick and began to beat about at the plants on either side of the path, and then felt I was exhibiting more boyishness than would impress. So, I threw away the stick in an embarrassed manner – anyway she had her back to me, what did it matter.

            I decided to wait for the bus-chute which is what passes for public transport in this dreary place. As I waited at the stop, what did I see? I saw a black Ford Chauffeuse – the canoe shaped open top – with this lady driving along on her own. I thumbed for a lift. But she swept by, her hair flowing in gracious streamers as immaculate as her black make-up. I think she noticed me but refused to stop. I will add that she had the courtesy to pretend she had not seen me. Of course, knowing my sensitivity, I was well-aware the implications are the same.

            This was before she knew who I was. Obviously as the Writer, hired for the Project, I had not been greatly in evidence during the sessions of the day. I had merely loitered in the dark corners with my stock-in-trade, and discreet recorder and the stenographer. In fact, I think the most noteworthy aspect of my ensemble was seventeen-year-old Susie who I had rented out for the weekend yesterday from the Agency that I usually go to for my stenographers; they give me a small discount and they push in my direction the girls who do the fastest work transcribing. Susie, incidentally had a noticeably admirable chest. I was always amused that with a limitation for that attribute in her lower field of vision, touch-typing must have come naturally for her.

            If anyone had noticed us, they would probably not have looked further than Susie’s natural gifts. Anyway, eventually our lady did discover who I was, sometime during the second day because, just before the company disbanded she came up to me asking if she could talk something over privately. In fact, Susie and I were in the phone queue waiting with everyone else to ring for a Taxi-Cube. So, I left Susie to it and sauntered off with our lady. She seemed to know where she was going in the Mansion and quickly found us a deserted room. She insisted that I stood with my back flat against the wall and my arms stretched out on either side in the shape of a cross. She moved sporadically about the room as we conversed.

            There was a long pre-amble spoken by her. I had noticed that she had appeared somewhat older, more mature, than the usual teenage starlets one finds on these Pre-write Projects. From what she was manoeuvring to say, it seems she had picked me to rectify her retarded career. From what I had observed of her work during the weekend there seemed to be no reason why she should not have progressed normally into Prime Drama. However, she confessed, she was now only able to get work making those Porn-casts which are transmitted virally all over the world now, or as a Phone-Speaker which of course is a kind of auditory whore. It was pathetic indeed, she said, and to demonstrate she gave me a sample of the erotic Voice-Tone, deep and vibrant that made the blood curdle in my loins. And now, she said, I could see how she was saddled with these Pre-write Projects. And of course, it is always an absolute principle that no-one who takes part in the Pre-write material will ever be cast in the Prime Drama when it is written up.

            What she wanted was her own Tailored Drama play written up by me for her and to her style. An obvious request on the surface, one which I could hardly disappoint her with straightaway. The fact was that as a Pre-write Writer I was hardly at the top of my profession either. A part-time  Phone-Speaker and a second-rate Pre-write Writer is a team nobody would take seriously. Yet I was unwilling to disappoint her as it might be worth a try; after all everyone starts from Nowhere. She asked me point-blank. There was a silence. She had come close to me, leant her elbow against the wall beside my head so that her eyes stared into mine. I could smell the perfume of her nostril-pellets as she breathed.

            In not disappointing her, I gave myself some hope as well.

            She was satisfied and moved away quickly out of the room, the two patches of sequins flickering and flashing joyously on her buttocks. I hurried after her to explain I would need a lift home now. She told me however she probably didn’t have enough petrol to get back to the Bright Areas today and the time-lock on the petrol cap would not open until tomorrow. She smiled and after a moment’s thought she decided we could drive till we caught up the Taxi-Cube train. And that is what we did. In the car she drove from the rear of the two seats and positioned me so that I sat sideways, with one arm crooked over the back of the seat, my fingers touching the carpet of the floor, my other hand pressed forwards against the windscreen deflector. It wasn’t long before we overtook the train of taxis which can only just have left the mansion, but we continued on to a point where the indicators showed it would be stopping (I think to separate one person off). I got out. We made no arrangement but in the spirit of two people who have achieved a business deal we placed our right hands together, palms touching, and gripped hard. This bye-grip is in the highest taste of fashion having appeared only in the last year or so; although they do say it is a rediscovery of a preceding custom, generations ago. But I know nothing about that.

            After a rather long time the train appeared having transacted its deposition of someone. I looked along it hastily for Susie. She, of course, had ordered only a one-person cubicle. It was a tight squeeze for the two of us. I have mentioned the exposure of her bosom which you can imagine caused a sensation as we were pressed chest to chest, she wearing only a small pale-blue under-sling. So squeezes come in many forms, and you can imagine this form imposed on us. Perhaps the old-fashioned word ‘superotic’ crudely describes it best. Then when the Taxi-Cube train started off, the movements of the cubicle rolling us together raised the sensations higher and higher. We tried to adjust ourselves apart, but that only frustrated us both, I believe. I was very pleased with the outcome, and we agreed I would hire her again sometime. Some five minutes later she positioned my arms against the walls of the cubicle; such is the elevation of status of a stenographer following a kind of bodily intimacy.

            As the dusk began to fall, the train reached the limit of the Roofless Districts and exited, plunging us into the glare of the Bright Areas. And of course, it was able to speed up many times so that we very rapidly found ourselves near the destination, decoupling, coupling and so on with the bewildering accuracy of the Electric Eye systems. We arrived at the Agency Hostel. I told Susie I would be needing her for a week further to write up the ad-lib Sketch Dramas of the weekend Project into the final re-write for Prime Drama. I said I would re-programme the Agency for this extra work. I required her when she had the initial typescript ready digitalised properly. I decided to walk her from there, for it was not far through the disused parking lots.

            As I entered the flat my wife looked up quickly. And then moved back to the work she was setting down and then she crawled towards me from behind the web-filaments of the Hydrostatic Deodorants. I have never been able to observe supernumerary legs on her but I swear she has eight black hairy ones.

            She leaned herself loosely against me. It was an embrace which seemed to convey a handful of messages. In particular it seemed to emphasise – ‘look how much I love you’; and at the same time, ‘how I hate you neglecting me for my nose is so sensitive, I can detect even the scent of the after-sex deodorants you have been using with someone else.

            I slipped off my highly fashionable Apron-Tunic and it fell limply to the floor. My wife sank to her knees on the glass bricks and buried her face in the soft leather of the apron. She felt the warm texture with her lips and her cheek and the end of her fingers. I stood for a moment gazing at her reflection in the mirror below the bricks. Then I mounted her carefully from behind. Once inside her I felt for a few brief seconds truly at home again and in the rightful place that was for me.

            After we had finished, we noticed that the children had been watching us fascinated from the gallery. So, I replayed it over on the Video-Set and we all sat in silence watching. My wife positioned my arms decorously as she wanted, and across the arms of the leaves of the armchair. I drifted away and thought of the Roofless Districts and the woman they had contained this weekend who had given me a hope that I had lost years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                        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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I did fall in love

 

When I was 14 I was raped one evening by six men from the barracks. It was quite horrid. But I did not tell the police, or my parents or anyone - and afterwards I felt that my secret was a piece of my life that at last was my own. One of the men came back to see me a week later. He had been the most hesitant of the six and I don't think he did it properly, only pretended, because of what the others would think. But I was not sure, as I did not concentrate much on what was happening to me. In fact, he was the only one I remembered really. I remembered his rifle still half-dangling from his shoulder, the metal clinked on the buckle of my belt. He came back to see me because he wanted to make amends somehow, he said. I asked him what his name was. Later I wrote to the barracks and asked them to punish him. Looking back, I think I quite liked him; and I rather think it was because I liked him that I wanted them to punish him. But I don't know what happened.

            I wasn't very interested in boys when I was a teenager. Later on, when I was 20 or so there were a couple of women, one after the other. I let them teach me things, but I didn't know where it was leading, and I was a bit frightened – about the unknown. I told each of them about the other, and when they eventually met, they fell in love. I was relieved and also felt a warm pleasure that I had brought them together. I liked to think that when they made love they were both thinking about me!

            It was not until my late twenties that I let a man make love to me. It was very passionate indeed. I had for some time begun to have daydreams about love making with men – no-one in particular, no one man at all.

            We met at a party. I hadn't really noticed him until I burst into the lavatory when he had not bolted the door properly. I retreated. When he came out, he saw me watching him and he was a little pink in the face. I felt oddly embarrassed too – but it was just one of those things. It didn't mean anything.

            About two years later we met again and were introduced. We both recognised each other – though I made out that I didn't. Because it seemed so inconsequential. He was again a little embarrassed and awkward to remember the first occasion and then find that I did not remember him. I was again unusually embarrassed too.

            I let him talk to me for a while and then I got away but at the end of the evening, I was leaving at the same time, and he took me home. I sat in the back of the car whilst his wife sat next to him. Two days later, on Monday morning, he rang me. To ask me out. He told me he had been thinking about me over the weekend. I had not thought of him but decided it was better not to say so. I suppose I must have wanted to see him again. He told me he was falling in love with me and insisted I meet him, just once. He was emphatic that he did not do this sort of thing regularly. It was special. He would take me to a pub at lunchtime, he needed to talk about some things. I didn't know what to say on the phone. I wanted to get back to reading the newspaper, snipping out the cuttings. I said I would meet him at midday at the swimming pool. It was not that I like swimming but know I look good in a swimming costume. I take great care buying them and have quite a lot.

            Half an hour beforehand I was there sitting at the side of the water quietly, composing myself. I arranged my body in a way that I hoped looked relaxed, and my mind so that it should be as blank as possible. When he emerged, he looked good too. He noticed me and came across to where I had prepared myself, propped against a low wall. He did not sit down at first and I looked up with a smile, but I’m afraid I still looked serious. It did not seem easy for either of us to say anything. Perhaps he had been a little cross with me for dragging him there, but at that moment my thoughts were as disturbed as the water with boys plunging in and out. I said nothing and waited for him to bargain for what he wanted. His face looked tense and red. Then he decided to move and bending down he picked up my hand and pressed it vigorously to his lips. I held it up and kept touching him to preserve the contact longer. I could not help noticing the thought that my mind decided to produce at that moment: this was the hand that I used to hold the flannel for wiping myself in the lavatory. My hand still held onto his as he straightened up. And I decided to say that I was too confused to stay with him for long today. My body, I added, could be his but I did not yet know about my heart. I said I wanted him to go away and to write to me; tell me what he felt and what he wanted – to put it in writing because my mind was not working face-to-face. I still held his hand as I spoke and this time I pulled it to my lips. I pressed it there for minutes feeling the full veins on the back of it with my tongue. I caressed it with all the surfaces of my face, my cheeks, the hollows of my eyes fitting round his knuckles, my forehead, my small nose gliding across his palm, the tip of my chin on the tip of his fingers. Then I pressed it against the top of my bare shoulder and the side of my neck, which I discovered, had become electric. My body felt very naked, and I thought he might reach out with his arms to take it. He felt like the radiance of the sun. I said I was in too much of a turmoil to be with him, he must go and write what his feelings were, what his dreams are. I told him to go but not to keep me waiting long for his letter; and truly I was already longing and waiting for it. I told him I was so confused but actually in those moments my logic had become as sharp and clear as ice.

            When he wrote to me it was very passionate, he was suddenly a slave to love he said, his body and his soul were racked with agony. He left me no doubts that he was head over heels and nothing would tear his devotion from me till the end of time. Indeed, by now I had no intention of dampening his devotion - neither before nor even after the end of time. Yet, even though love is a wonderful emotion, a tidal wave of emotion is like standing in front of any other tidal wave -0 it can drown you. So I did not reply immediately and when after a few days of agonies he telephoned to ask me what my decision would be, I said I was disappointed. I would have expected him to arrange to see me sooner if he really meant all that he had written in those wonderful things in the letter. He was suddenly agonized anew, because I should doubt him so. I wanted him to come and see me immediately but he said it was impossible, he had his visits to make. But I shall be one of them I insisted - how else could I tell if he was someone I should give my heart to. He must show he would let his patients wait a little for their visit from the doctor, otherwise it meant I was no more than his patients to him.

            When he arrived, I had waited twenty minutes or so; it was cold and damp in the drizzle, standing waiting a few houses up the street from where I lived. I insisted we went to the corner and had a drink in the pub. The person in the flat below me in my house would be going out later - I did not want to give any chance of anybody knowing I had brought a man back. He was not very pleased to find himself in the pub and kept looking at his watch, and sipping his drink and eyeing my drink which I kept safely undrunk in the glass till I thought enough time had passed for the downstairs prying eyes to go out on her afternoon routine. I took the time to ask about his wife. She would skin him I gathered, she was trained as a lawyer he said, she was very hard and independent, she insisted on the best for their children. He was unhappy at home, only at work was there satisfaction, and that is not enough for a full life. He saw in me some new opportunity, he smelled freedom, the oasis in a parched desert. He glanced at his watch. I said calmly he must take his watch off and give it to me while we waited. He could not. I said we would go in a moment and insisted he gave me his watch. As, he said, I was a little younger than he was, actually ten years. I was, he said, a new flower that would blossom in his life. I told him I sensed his power, a power in his emotions. They frightened me but he fascinated me. I could feel warmth in my genitals. I told him I had never made love with a man before. I said we would go back to my flat and make love for the first time. I said we could go now.

            In the few yards down the road, I told him I was frightened. I swallowed hard with a dry throat, and I told him exactly the way I wanted to do it. He nodded. When we got to my flat, we crept up the stairs – just in case of prying-eyes. In the flat at last I pulled all the curtains and in the dark bedroom I laid him on the bed. It seemed a little cold I said but I assumed we would warm up. He said nothing as I had asked of him. I reminded him he promised not touch me with his hands, to lie with his arms stretched on either side motionless. He frowned a little. I didn't want to know what he was thinking. Then in the bathroom I removed my panties, looked in the mirrors, brushed my hair. I looked at my fingernails and decided to wash my hands but the water was cold so I was quick. I arranged myself kneeling astride him as I had done so often and so carefully in my daydreams, with my skirt and my raincoat covering our union like a tent. I put my hands beneath my clothes to find his zip and undid it. I was unfamiliar with a man's trousers and underclothes. He smiled as I rummaged around. Eventually I got hold of him and found an aperture in the folds of material to pull it through. He made little jerky movements with his hips, and I put his thing up into my vagina and held it there to expand into me. But it stayed rather soft. I didn't know how men made themselves stiff, and I smiled at him. But my mind was racing, and I suddenly felt I had gone too far, that I was out of my depth attempting this. I asked him what the matter was, but I did not really want to know. He said I would have to make him stiff. My mind raced on, but I asked him coolly how do I do that. He told me I had to get off him, caress his thing with gentle fingers, with my lips up and down it, from end to end, with my tongue searching right down to his balls. I smelled his warmth and sweat and the slight smell of lavatories too, and also soap. He told me when to get back on top. I arranged my tent of clothes again. Then he came into me properly and worked his way right in. He was very vigorous. I had wanted to do it myself but I let him push up. When he had come himself he seemed to be quite out of control. As he fell back still, I pulled off him and he winced but he lay still. I slumped in my chair by the mirror, and lifting my skirts I thought, as I always do when I rub, of a soft trickle of blood warming my vagina. I came quickly because it was so slippery and afterwards I dozed off as I always do into a short sleep. I woke with him calling to me and asking the time. I looked towards him for the first time. His thing was soft again, a last drop of juice had run out onto the crisp material of his trouser-leg. As I approached him to agree he could rise, he tried to kiss me and I smiled at him. Then he was gone quickly to continue his visits. Please, please write to me straightaway, I told him, to tell every single thought that had gone through his head at every moment of our love-making. I did not know if I craved for him or never wanted to see him again.

            He rang me in the early evening and I told him off because he should be writing to me. I expected a letter in the post the next day. He said he was desperately short of time especially as he could do little else but think of me. But I insisted he must do as I say. He claimed he was no writer but I silenced him and said true love if it was really true would turn anyone into a poet.

            When the letter came two days later, he had laboured hard to tell me everything. It was true he was no writer and love had not turned him into a poet but he had made a huge effort. Curiously, I was not very interested any more in what he actually wrote. I was already thinking of the next time. I had fantasies all the time of what we might do. I stood in front of my mirrors imagining the feelings in every bit of my body if he touched it, stroked it, kissed it, scratched it.

            I decided to write it all to him. I bathed and washed my hair, dressed in the most ravishing evening gown I had in my cupboard and sat in my chair facing the mirror and wrote to the image he had made love to, as if I were him. I did not spare him any of my intimate thoughts on the possibilities ahead of us. Next time I offered him to tie me to the bed in any position he wished. My thoughts whirled ahead to what he might do to me once I was helpless. Any bit of me whatever could be touched by his flesh - and there would be nothing I could do about it. It excited me even though I knew I could never let it be different from that first time, never let him free in my bed. I told him stories about the use of all my orifices. When I finished, I felt satisfied and once again saw myself in the mirror. I was shocked by what I had written, what had come out of me. And I realised I wanted to shock him, to disgust him. I eagerly went to post it to him – I decided to send it to his home, to the midst of the family into the midst of his marriage. Running along the road in such extravagant clothes, I felt them rustle, my skin scoring on the fine material. I returned equally quickly from the post-box and stood in front of my mirrors. Now, pink and a little short of breath.

            He told me after that I must stop. I had gone too far with my letters and my suggestions. He thought it had become an obsession for me, he was worried about me. I told him I wished only to be discreet – as he must have realised. I am a private person. I wish for total privacy. He said he insisted we use ordinary email ,like everyone else. I said I need his letters to hold in my hand like a lifeline.

            He reassured me, in a text message that  he loved me; he mentioned various parts of my body. He only wanted to get all the passions in balance, stabilise our affaire, so that it would not shake itself to bits, he said, and us with it. I thought he was talking to a naughty child - a nuisance child that needed a threat.

            I tried video calling, and on one occasion we met. I explained he must love me my way, that he had created a strange new woman inside me. I said I must be able to see him, I would become his patient so that I could call to see him any day, so that I could ring for a visit from him.

            He turned his hands over with a tried patience. I felt my eyes widen with an enquiring curiosity, like a little girl's, pleading. He announced that doctors could not have their patients for lovers. But I quickly stopped him with the fact that it was not that way, it was the opposite, having his lover become a patient. I said it was best to arrange things through his surgery otherwise his wife might find out. I began to imagine if she did. Her red-faced anger, her white knuckles gripping his hair, her teeth straining to get into his flesh; her screeches of purified protest hanging in our ears pouring pain, The glee of it.... He hushed me and assured me his wife would not find out under any circumstances, if we were careful. But I was already beyond careful. I would not be careful. I won't…. He threatened to ring off.

            The moment was a very delicate one. I calmed down of my own will. After a silence, we spoke of something else. 

            The next evening, I went to the surgery – to register as a patient. The receptionist went away to find out if the doctor would agree – she came back to tell me that he was not, she said officially, taking any more onto his list. She'd agreed a little later to find out why, when I made the kind of fuss that I am so good at. I knew he would make an exception for me. But there was a thin moment of excited anticipation as I waited for her to come back from checking. I was relieved, too, when she nodded from her glass office.

            He told me later he did not know now if I might make trouble. He was concerned I would tackle his wife in some way. He was not sure if I was playing a game. I was so strange, a woman enclosed, he called me. All my fantasies stretched me beyond his view. I said I noticed he had not risked calling my bluff. He had accepted me into his practice. He smiled. He was relaxed. He shook his head to agree as if he was resigned to my whims, and half-liked being pestered by them. Would she leave him, throw him out – he could not come to my flat I told him. Would she throw saucepans?  I was so curious, I wanted to find out, I said. I laughed.

            I had grown to know that resigned shrug of his shoulders - an amused father in a lonely generation.

            One day I played a trick on him. I went to his surgery, waited my turn, and went to his room, sat down in the chair. I demanded that he kiss me, between – the legs. He refused with that torpid resignation and told me to run along. I refused. He explained that his partners or his receptionist could walk in at any moment, I should leave now. I refused again and pouted with my small but full lips he had so often admired. I explained I had come to get money out of him. If he wanted to avoid disgrace he would have to pay. He looked rather blank. He was not sure if this was, or was not, one of my games again. He always thought of me as a gamester, a jester, the glint of the magpie as someone had called it. I said that he did not believe me. It was true, I told him, that I did not need the money - not as money, to spend. I simply wanted his money. I took a digital memory stick from the pocket of my fur coat. I showed it to him. It was a stick. It is a record, I said, of love-making. Ours last week. It is quite clear. I asked if he wanted me to play it, would someone overhear. Alright, he said, alright. But he wasn't alright – not all right himself. He looked grey. He wanted to get me out at any price. He was beginning to think I was serious, my game was another mad artifice, a vulgarity beneath him. I was beginning to win – if he became convinced it was not a game then I had won the game.

            Suddenly he accepted he was a victim; I was winning this real, malign stratagem. He drew out his cheque-book. How much did I want. I could see he still felt he could play along, really felt the abused and innocent lover. Is a hundred pounds enough for you, he asked. No, I said. No cheques, I want ten pounds, just a ten-pound note. He looked at me surprised again; how often had I achieved that?  Only ten pounds. He closed his cheque book. 

            “I am surprised” I started to say with a little pout reforming, “that you think I am worth only one hundred pounds. If you had quoted a true value then I would have let you off. Now I will have to find out what the value is, slowly, bit by bit, ten pounds to start. A little more next time, a little more, how far will you go.”  His perplexed relief clouded a little. He wondered if I would go on. He had tasted my power over him. And so, candidly, had I. He took a ten-pound note from his wallet and said I should go now. He was cold and shaken. I too was cold; a damp loss seemed to have come out of this. But I had won this game.

            I had won the game. I put the valuable piece of paper on the desk and smoothed it with my hand. I looked up at him from the corner of my eye, he looked ever so much older. I picked up the note and tore it in two, slowly, then again, and again till it was very small pieces in the palm of my hand. I dropped them into the bin where he throws the discarded swabs stained with pus or blood.

            Out in the street I waited for him by the car. Perhaps an hour later I was sitting on the bonnet of his car looking cheeky, when he came out to go home. He was furious I was still hanging around. I presumed he was anxious people would wonder what I was doing. I supposed, I said, he'd have some explaining to do to his partners. I got in with him and he drove me home. We were silent. I demanded that he come in with me. I knew he would not. He reached across me in an unromantic way to release the car door and shoved me out with his shoulder. I held the door open so he had to come round to close it again. He told me I was a child. Then he took hold of me by the shoulders and gave me a vigorous kiss on the mouth. I didn't know if it was love; or if it was in hope of silencing me.

            I went up to my flat alone and settled down in front of my mirrors. The digital stick had nothing on it but I put it in the machine to record the sounds I was about to make.

            That evening, I wrote to him the amount of money I wanted, a hundred pounds every month for as long as I still kept his letters. Perhaps, I began to think, it hadn't been such a game; it was real money. But actually I did not want the money. I don't know why I did it.

            It was the blackmail that could then let him present me to his wife as evil. He could tell her now without her being too threatened, or without her destroying their marriage completely. I would not want that after all. She came round to see me a while later. She came on her own – but brought some bottles of ink she got from somewhere. She opened one and threw it at me, over me. Before she opened the next, I had shut the door. When she had gone, I looked at the stain on me. I had spoilt his love for me. I had spoilt a passionate love.

            Perhaps if a man can rape a woman, a woman can destroy a man, and any part of him she wants to destroy….  I don't know why I did it. It felt like the satisfaction of revenge. But revenge for what? That was a long time ago. I have taken a lot of revenges since then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taken In

 

The two girls, Maria and Karin, left in the late autumn to find their fortune in London. Erroneously, they thought that to get on in London, they had to put their best assets on display. For both girls that had meant scouring clothes shops for fashions they could afford which resembled the pictures in music magazines. Thus they stood together by the slip-road onto the M3. Each had a battered case, but springy new jeans-and-blouse outfits with enough chain and metal bits to allure motor-bikers, and enough shiny silky bits to allude to a promising femininity. They did not have to wait long for a lift. A huge lorry picked up the two girls. Karin flopped lumpily into the seat next to the gear lever. Maria came after and sat by the window watching the country pass away behind her. Their four tight legs were a constant attraction for the driver’s eye. His grubby T-shirt was stretched across an expanded tummy, but he was quite a young man with muscular arms, long dark sideboards and a glint in his friendly face that matched his chirpy way of talking.

             “Why’n’t you girls ’n school?!

Karin flashed a cocky smile at him, “What? Nah, we left school. Long time ago. Going up to London,” she paused in case the momentous event that they talked about, and planned for so long was not so impressive to him. “I suppose you’re always going up to London.”

            “S’right.” He was reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket hanging behind the window. “Al’as in London. Portsmouth-London, London-Portsmouth. Tha’s the job. I done it three year, now.”

 “I bet you know London pretty well.” 

            “Yea, s’right. There’s some good bits, a’right. S’bad news taking an’old trolley as this un aroun’ the streets.” He had found his packet of cigarettes. “Y’not been afore. T’London?”

            “Oh, yes – course. We’re going to live there.”

            “Ah! Leavin’ ’ome, eh? I’m still with my Mum,” he smiled at himself. “No reason t’leave, is’t?” Scept, I go drivin’. Friend in Isling’on. Sleep on ’is floor. What about y’ friend. She’s leavin’ ’ome too?” He looked around Karin’s bouncy form at Maria’s pretty face, steadily looking at the road ahead.

“My name’s Karin. Hers is Maria,” Karin nudged Maria as she spoke her name and looked at her.

“My Mum lives in London,” Maria said turning to look at them.

“Yeah, but she hasn’t seen her Mum for a long time. What about your friend in Islington – could he put us up, too? “ Karin’s commanding presence turned away from Maria who subsided gratefully into her solitary trance again, numbed by the jolting rhythm of the lorry.

“Cou’d be.” He said noncommittally.

“What’s your name then?” Karin asked it with a tone of personal invitation.

            “Gary,” he said shortly. He offered her a cigarette.

            Karin took one and handed the packet back, “She dun’t smoke?” referring to Maria. “Give’s a ligh’, then.” And she chuckled as he handed over the matches.

            “You got a girl-friend?”  She glanced at him in an innocent way.

            Gary concentrated on the road. Eventually, “Plenty,” he announced to the girls.

            “I bet,” she admired. There was a silence after that. Karin sensed that she’d made an impact, that he was thinking about her.

            In South London, Gary turned off the main road and into a narrow side street of low poor houses and into a warehouse at the end of the cul-de-sac. “It’s far as I go.” He said bluntly, and jumped down from the lorry, disappearing into the cavernous dark.

            “Where is this?” Maria asked, sitting still in the seat.

            “Dunno. Looks like the backside of London, if you ask me. He’ll take us on to his friend in Islington.”

            “Do you think?”

            “Come on, get down.” She pushed Maria towards the door, and they climbed out stiffly in their tight new clothes. Karin straightened her blouse and brushed the denim of her jeans downwards to stop it cutting her underneath. “He’ll take us on to his friends. He’s got an eye for us. I could see him, all swivelling under his eyelid.” She chuckled proudly in her own way. “You’re looking not too bad as well,” she added patronizingly.

            One thing that Maria had learnt was that bubbling, inviting and eager though Karin was, she herself was nothing short of stunning, one good step on from Karin in turning men’s eyes. She said nothing and left Karin to continue. “Cor his cigarette was a bit of a pong, wasn’t it. Did you notice it? I took a puff. It was like breathing in hot curry or something. I expect it was a high tar.” She pondered with an assured knowingness. They stood beside the lorry, chattering till Gary returned.

            “You’d better get on you’s ways, girls. It’ll get dark soon.”

            “Aren’t we coming on with you?”

            “I’ve gotta get back. Get this unloaded,” he patted the lorry. He moved to the back of the lorry. Karin followed him.

            “I thought we were coming to your friend – the one in Islington, with you?”

            “I’m on me way back a Portsmouth. Haff an ’our take, t’unload ‘er. A cuppa tea. Then, off.”

            “But we thought we could sleep on his floor, or something. We’ve got nowhere to stay tonight. Where do we go?” As her sudden helplessness grew, his face began to darken with anger.

            “I dunno. Go an’ ask the boss, if y’ want.” Gary waved towards the inside of the warehouse.

            “Thanks.” She said sarcastically. “Give our love to mummy,” and she flounced off towards the dark interior. “Come on,” she said sharply to Maria. “He don’t know anything about London.” It was the cruellest insult she could think of at the moment. They minced down the aisle between the mountainous cardboard cartons. The office was a wooden cubicle at the back of the warehouse. Karin went straight up to the open door with a brisk defiant step.

            “Are you his boss, “Karin snapped as if she was about to make a complaint.

            The man was a little older than Gary, and also a bit seedy. He wore a grey suit in a gesture towards the image of a manager. The double-breasted jacket was crimpled and hung open beside his knees as he sat forwards at a large low shelf that functioned as a desk. He didn’t look up. “You came up with Gary?” he continued to mark a sheet of paper with a pencil stuck in his left hand.

            “Yes.” Karin paused. “Now he’s dropped us.”

            “Up to you, love. We carry goods.” He sighed and sat back wearily in his chair. “You want a room for the night?” It was half a question, half a statement. He looked at them. When he did look he was clearly surprised. His eyebrows raised fractionally, and he caught his breath slightly through his open mouth. His teeth were rather grey. You’re a young couple of ladies,” he explained as if they were about ten years old. The man stretched back in his chair as if satisfied with a fine catch. Karin turned to Maria, too angry with humiliation to continue.

            “Well, Mister.” Maria said flatly and quietly, “You want to help us? We haven’t got much money. Have you got a room here?”

            “No money?” He looked Maria up and down slowly; and then his mouth stretched into a tight grin, thick and greasy and suggestive. “Not much money. Plenty of something else. He let out a long gulp of air which seemed to have built up in his lungs. “Well! It is a very long time since a couple of stunners like you wanted to stay with me. I may have cause to be grateful to Gary, for a change.”

            Karin and Maria both stared at the man, hypnotised by a frightened amazement. They were like rabbits caught in headlights. At that moment the warehouse filled with the sound of a fork-lift truck as Gary began to unload the heavier boxes. They both turned to look at him as a relieving distraction.

            The man stood up, “Come along.” He was very big, tall and wide-framed and well covered with flesh. “My name’s Ben,” he said loudly over the din and held out his hand to Maria. She shook it compliantly. The moment of distraction when they could have run, seemed to have closed. And they were drawn into his domineering presence again. Karin meekly shook his hand next.

             “I’m Karin. And she’s Maria,” The man moved through the door of his tiny cubicle and stood between them. “Isn’t Gary coming too?” Karin asked anxiously as if she wanted him as a guardian angel, now, “Will we be alright?”

            “Course you will, my dears.” His attempt at overbearing paternalism only deepened their sense of the sinister. “Come along.” He took them out and to one of the mean houses next to the warehouse, through its unkempt garden of nettles and bushes. He took them in through a filthy kitchen and up to a first-floor bedroom. It was bleak and grubby. A couple of beds filled the room. “Drivers sometimes sleep over. But it’ll do you, won’t it? A couple of girls with no money,” and he laughed. Reaching inside his jacket he pulled out a wallet, took a ten-pound note for each of the girls. And handed the notes to them. Neither Karin nor Maria moved and he dropped the notes at the end of one of the beds. He laughed again. “I’ll be back in a moment. With a bottle,” and he raised his eyebrows in enquiry. He moved out of the room and down the stairs to his grubby kitchen,

            Karin fingered the notes. She looked at Maria, who looked back. Neither of the girls had words for it. Indecision, fear, disgust, a sense of their most excited hopes crashing into this mangy reality. They spoke to each other through their dismayed looks. The man quickly returned, bounding up the stairs. The sound of the fork-lift had ended. They heard the sound of Gary shutting the rear of the lorry. In a moment he started the engine, manoeuvred the vast thing and it roared gently down the little street. It seemed like the last hope of rescue was abandoning them. It turned into the main road with a burst of its diesel engine and was gone.

            “Our case,” Maria turned to Karin with quiet alarm.

“Oh. Our cases.” Karin’s contrasting shriek turned into a sort of accusation as she faced Ben.

“OK, okay, girls. He took ’em out of the cab. They’re behind the door, all locked up. Safe.” Ben’s soothing reassurance took the wind out of their alarm. But it set them back into the enclosing prison that Ben was constructing around them. “They’ll be good and safe for tonight. So will you my dears. Call me Ben….”

            “Call me Ben,” he said again, arranging three glasses on the floor in a bare corner. “It’s some bubbly,” he announced, and the cork flew off with a bang. Karin jumped but Maria was still transfixed in immobility with the confusion inside her. “Let’s get comfortable.” He folded his long legs up as he descended onto one of the low beds. “You,” he said, “come and sit here.” He padded the bed next to him. Maria sat compliant and stiff beside him. His arm went around her shoulder. It was not unfriendly. It was gentle, like a slowly coiling snake, as his fingers searched over the curve of her shoulder, her arm and neck, the softness of her breast. He commanded Karin to bring the glasses and she held them as he poured the fizzy wine with his other hand. Karin stood like a waitress beside them as they sat on the bed and he drank deeply from his glass. “Drink up, girls. This is my big night. I’m a happy man tonight. Come round here.” He gestured to Karin to sit on the other side of the bed. Maria looked at Karin as she sat down, and she looked back. They both confirmed each other’s helplessness, Maria set herself to endure what was to come. London would still be waiting for them tomorrow.

In the morning Maria was watching the growing light beyond the window. All night she had kept track as the clouds began to split up, the chill glare of the moonlight for a few moments at a time flooded the wall beyond the other bed. The temperature had fallen steadily but she did not notice the cold. She lay on her side, at her back the grunting form of his body taking up two-thirds of the little bed. Karin seemed fast asleep on the other one. Maria felt dirty. It didn’t seem likely she could get a bath. Anyway, she felt dirty inside too, right through her. Why did it have to be her she pondered grimly. She had known he would choose her. She thought of her mother’s condemnation. Her mother loved her and has always protected her. Karin was different. Now it was getting a bit lighter she couldn’t let her thoughts go on and on around her misery. She carefully slid out from under the bed clothes, woke Karin gently without too much noise. She slid on her jeans carefully. Her new panties and bra were no use anymore. Ken had thought it fun to slice the strings as he had undressed her with his pocketknife. She kept the blouse outside the jeans hoping that way it wouldn’t show the outline of her breasts so clearly.

            Ken was stirring and grunted, “Help yourselves to breakfast,” he said turning to the pillows. “I’ll be with you in ten minutes. We’ll have a great day today, girls.” His eyes hadn’t opened and he slid into the regular breathing of sleep again. They crept from the room down the stairs, opened the front door, put on their shoes and tripped as quickly as their high heels would allow, down the road and out of sight of the house. Around the corner in the main road, they stopped and looked at each other. Maria said gravely. “We can’t get our cases now, can we?”

            “No.”

“Perhaps, we could sneak back when he’s opened his warehouse.”

“No, it’s Saturday. Remember. We’d have to wait till Monday.”

“But, perhaps he’ll go in there today. We could keep an eye on him.”

“Perhaps.” Karin was looking into the distance. They were both cold. Her watch showed 7.15 in the morning. The clouds were racing as if there was a storm in the upper atmosphere. “It’s a bit risky.” She put her hand out to show Maria something, “Look.”

            Maria starred, “What you take that for?” she said stupidly in amazement. It was Ken’s wallet, Karin had slid it from his jacket on the floor, when he had been otherwise occupied with Maria. “What’s in it?” Maria felt a vengeful rise in her spirits. The girls looked eagerly at a wadge of notes.

            “Let’s go and get a cup of tea.” Karin looked around her. There seemed to be the beginnings of a row of shops in the distance.

            Over cups of tea and some plates of toast, they cautiously disembowelled the contents of Ken’s wallet. The waitress in the tired-looking café looked suspicious but didn’t say anything. “There’s a credit card here.”

            Maria looked. “But it says ‘Mr’. That’s no good for us.”

            “Course it is. I can say I’m the wife. See his signature, doesn’t say ‘Ken’. Just K something. ‘K’ – that’s for Karin, too.” She laughed.

            Maria was sitting with her arms folded. She remembered she had no bra. She hoped she could hide the outline of her nipples showing through the cotton blouse. The man at the next table across the aisle just kept looking at her chest. “I want to go and get some proper clothes. I’m cold. I need a new whats-it.”

            Karin laughed, “I’ve got a couple of good whats-its.” She had also become aware of the man at the other table. She sucked in her breath and straightened her back as if proud of what she too had in front. “You need something as well, Maria, that you can show off with.” She leant across the table confidentially, “That man over there, he’s got an eye for me.” Maria glanced at him. He seemed to be staring straight at her own chest. She felt embarrassed. She looked down at the table and shrugged her shoulders. Karin said, “He’s got a filthy mind that one.”

            “Let’s get out of here. I feel all dirty. I haven’t even done my hair.” Her rich wavy dark hair was tangled in all directions as it had come off the pillow next to him.

            “Yeah, you don’t look too good.” Karin stood up. As they left the table, Karin turned to the man. “You want to keep control of your eyeballs, mate.” And she swept grandly to the door and left. “Where do we find a taxi in these parts?” she said demandingly as she passed the woman at the till.

            The woman in her black linen uniform stopped counting the change. Her clothes were baggy on her thin old body and her cheeks were pale and drawn tight on the bone. “Dunno,” and she returned to counting the notes, hardly looking at  Karin. Then the old cashier said, “E’s got a taxi,” she nodded weakly across toward the man Karin had just abused.

            Karin darted a look in that direction. At first, she seemed uncertain. Maria tugged her elbow to get her out of the café as quickly as possible, “Come on.”. The waitress had turned away from the girls and went to sit by the counter. She seemed tired so early in the day.

 

Having raided Selfridges they stood, in the midst of the milling Saturday crowd with two new pigskin travelling cases.  The shop had been the one that the girls had heard of as the acme of London sophistication. It hadn’t disappointed them. Ken’s credit card had taken a beating. Maria’s strong slender writing had practised a passable simulation of the signature; while Karin’s soft paw had given up and she had turned away aloof from these technical accomplishments.

            They had found miraculously a cruising taxi and lugged their cases inside, “Where to, ladies?” the cabby said brightly.

            Karin as usual took the lead. “We want the best hotel. What’s the best hotel called. He looked around through his glass screen at the two girls. Karin in luminous yellow jeans with assorted zips in pointless places, a strong studded belt with a padlock device for a buckle; her frantic red blouse of some kind of man-made silk was smothered with bright blue and green rocket motifs. Her pale hair had been creamed up into a spikey halo. Maria on the other hand found a shapeless long dress in a drear colour. Her hair had been cut nondescript short and curled out slightly at the ends in a style that was fashionable but not loud. Her attempts at modesty had not quite come off. She looked almost like a voluptuous nun. The cabby stared at Karin’s cheap appearance, “What you looking at, fellow? Eh?” She said aggressively. He said nothing but turned back to his wheel and waited. “What’s it called?! And she nudged Maria.

            “It’s called the Hilton, I think. Like in America, isn’t it?”

            “Yeah, take us to the Hilton.” Karin’s grand manner looked down on him like a failed music hall turn.

            When they had been shown into the large room overlooking the park by the unimpressed porter, Maria sat on one of the twin beds. She slowly began to cry in silence. Karin stood at the window, and said, “There’s a lot of creeps in London, aren’t there.” Maria lay back on the bed and curled on her side and sobbed. Karin came and sat beside her, put an arm across the heaving shoulder, “What do we do now?” Both girls were sunk in a momentary despair, bur Maria began to relax. “Maria, do you want to go back?” Maria shook her head. She sat up and wiped her eyes with her hands; the expensive make-up smudged. “Is it the man last night? Karin asked. Maria nodded. Karin stood up. Her face tightened up into her hard look again, “I wasn’t going to let the bastard get his dirty fingers on my legs.” She said as if she had been convinced she had been in command the night before. “You should have done the same,” she snapped, and heaved her case onto Maria’s bed next to her. She rummaged through the  assorted contents and retrieved the lipstick and powder compact. She went to the dressing table, dabbed st her lips and face, “War paint,” she said confidentially and seriously. “We’ve got to do something!”

            Their question was what?

“We’ll keep on with what we planned, then?” Karin proposed.

“Okay. Let’s go now.”

“But let’s get dressed up.” Their shared belief that life in London was all about wearing the best clothes at the right time had been developed from months of joint study of teenage magazines.

            When Maria had left the closed world of the fairground, she expected the outside world to treat her in the familiar way as a privileged but deprived, beautiful little girl. That the outside world proved to exploit her and ravage her beauty was a shock that she had not expected and did not know how to deal with. Not so for her companion. Karin, who was not so pretty, but more forceful in her personality. She took to the world with the gusto of a hungry man. If she was to be exploited, she was going to make it mutual. She just knew that she had never let her mother get away with anything Karin decided was unjust. 

Nor would the man Ken, get away with it either, she decided. While they sat in the hotel lounge drinking a gin-and-tonic each, Karin looked again at the wallet she had stolen, this time for his address. There was no address in it, but she found a card with a phone number written on it, and the name Ben Wallis. “Must be him,” she announced confidently. Maria nodded with an indifference she felt. She was concentrating on her abused body, as the reality of her ordeal continued to emerge as an enormous obtruding thought like a vast boulder blocking up a river. “I know what we are going to do,” she announced with a sense of liveliness, which failed to enliven Maria.. “Go and ask that barman if he can give us a pen and some paper.” Maria tiredly did so, only to be refused and told to go to their room as there would be a pen and paper there for the use of guests. Karen had heard the exchange and when Maria returned to sit down, she said to Maria, “Let’s get it from the room. But she did not move, so Maria, carrying the vastness of her violation slouched to the lift to fetch what Karin was asking for.

When she returned, Karin who had been musing thoughtfully, took the pen and began to write on the paper.  Maria asked quietly, “What you going to write?” 

“I’m writing him a letter.” Maria did not need to ask who, but waited till Karin finished what turned out to be a laborious task. Maria waited silently and eventually Karin showed the paper to her. Here is what Karin had written:

Dear wife of BenWallis, this is from two girls, Karin  Grove and Maria Hedger. Ben forced us to have sex with him in his flat next his waerhouse. It was rape. He raped us. I tell the date it was 16teenth Novembre. He was a bastard, because we could not stop him. You got to make him pay for what he dun to us. Karin and Maria

Dear BenWallis. This is from those girls who you forced us to have sex with you in the flat next the waerhouse. We sure you know how to sell stuff from your wearhouse on the black, don’t you. Were sure. So you better do it, and we want 100 pouds each week. Get it. 100 nice pounds for us. We are expensiv, see. If you don’t do it, we will tell you wife. Right. See the other letter in here. Shell give you hell. Karin and Maria

Maria looked at the two letters, noting how Karin was included in Ken’s attack. She handed it back. “We don’t know where to send it.”

            “We’ll find out. Here’s this phone number, see.” she waved the bit of paper from the wallet. “Go and do this for us, Maria. Ring them up and say we found a wallet in the street. We found the phone number and it was Ken Wallis. Say we’ll go round to them and give the wallet back.” She flicked her hair back from her face and looked confident. “Say we’d like a bit of a reward, too, if they could afford it. Makes it sound like its all true. ”

            “But he’ll see the money’s all gone. And his card.”

“Don’t be silly. We won’t go and give it back. We just want the address. You have to ask for the address for us to go and give it back.” Maria nodded. “Go on then. There’s a phone somewhere. You can ask the bloke over there, where it is. Him at the bar.” Maria obediently went.

When she returned, Karin looked at her expectantly, “Well, what she say?”

Maria looked shaken. “It wasn’t her. I think it was him.”

            “Oh well, it doesn’t matter, if you got the address. Did you get it?” Maria handed over the paper, showing the address, and the pen as well to Karin. “Come on, let’s go out and get some proper paper and an envelope and a stamp to post it.”

            So, the girls went off to shop for their blackmailing trick. 

            Back in the hotel, Maria wrote out the letters. And put them into better English. Karin didn’t object and went out to post the letter. Then they sat in the bar with another gin-and-tonic. And then they had another and began to feel that things were not so bad. “When, d’you think he’ll get the letter? Karin, what will he do?”

            “Can’t do anything, can he. Not till we contact him and tell him to pay up.”

“How do we get his money? I mean, we can’t just go to his house. We’re not going back to that warehouse, Karin.”

“Nah,” Karin looked thoughtful, “I dunno. Haven’t got that worked out.” She looked intently at Maria. “What do you think? Tell him to come here? The bar? Bring the money to the bar. He can’t cause trouble here, can he.”

            Maria didn’t know; she didn’t want to think about the man. She knew she was somehow linked to him, in her soul because of what he did. But she didn’t want such a creep to be there sealed into her most private place. She didn’t reply to Karin. “You can tell, Karin. He makes me sick.” She shifted in her seat. She could see herself in a mirror attached to the wall opposite, her black hair, her dark eyes wide and broad, her voluptuous mouth. She knew she looked pretty, but she could only think of how he must have seen her. She moved so she was not looking at herself in that mirror. 

            “That’s not much help,” she said protesting, but she did not pursue it. “I will ring him in two days. I think the letter will have got there, then.” She looked reflective as if already planning what she’d say to the creep.

            “We’ve got to get out of here,” Maria said with some concern.

            “Why?”

            “Karin, it’s too expensive.” She kept turning away from the mirror. “He’s going to cancel the card. Then we won’t be able to pay the bill. We’ve got to get as much money out of it as we can. Let’s go and find one of those cashpoints.”

            “OK. Good idea. I wonder how much we can get out of it?”

            “We’ll find out,” And they giggled like two girls much younger than their age, up to mischief. Karin turned to the mirror realising Maria had been avoiding it. Karin’s hair was blonde, long and straight to below her shoulders. It was her best feature. Her face was narrow, and her skin showed a few pock marks where her unfortunate adolescent acne had flourished. She pushed out her handsome and attractive bosom as she looked. “I look good in that mirror,” she said to Maria. “There’s one of those cash machines out near the entrance. Let’s go and see what we can get.” To their surprised dismay, the card had already been cancelled. More to their dismay was their discovery they needed a pin number.

            “So, we got nothing to pay our bill with.” Maria said hopelessly.

            Karin looked anxious too for a moment. She looked occupied in thought for a minute or two, while Maria waited for her to solve the problem. Then she told Maria what they’d do. Maria nodded and added a few things to which Karin nodded. They went to the restaurant and in the mid-afternoon, they ate the biggest meal they could each manage, as if they may not eat ever again – which may be the case. They laughed a bit, mischievously, at the plan they were working out together. The waiter took their room number to add to their account. He watched the back of Maria’s body as the girls walked out. They went quickly to their room and collected just their essentials. Maria had forbidden them to take their nice new cases and the treasures they had just bought. They left the Hilton Hotel quietly and inconspicuously as if they’d be back shortly.

A hundred yards down the street, they both suddenly discharged their tension in guffaws of laughter as they realised they’d done it. They walked on. Maria was feeling bloated; Karin refused to admit it. “Now what?” Maria looked expectantly at Karin, who shrugged her shoulders. They walked on. Maria was concerned that if they did the same again they’d need posh looking bags again to convince the hotel they were the posh types that could afford it. They simply walked for a while through central London, hoping for inspiration. They entered a large railway terminus, St Pancras. It had a bar-restaurant, and they went to sit for tea, which they noticed was expensive. Maria put Ken’s now-useless card on the table to reassure the waitress. Then Karin began to talk about, how they would get out. Karin was looking around and wandered out to the toilet. On the way back she passed a table with a couple of  middle-aged ladies – in the girls’ terms, posh ladies. She arrived back with Maria clutching under her sweater, a handbag that had once hung on the back of the chair of a posh lady. She kept it in her lap under the table and began to bring out the cosmetics and lady stuff. Her purse this time was a bit swollen and they were in luck. Several hundred pounds. Karin stood up leaving the purloined possessions (minus the money) on the spare chair, and she went off to the toilet again, explaining to the waitress as she passed that she was troubled with the ‘monthly’. The waitress nodded considerately. Meanwhile, Maria took off her cardigan and placed it on the chair to hide the unwanted stolen goods. Ten minutes later, as the waitress passed, she said she’d go and rescue her friend who had a bit of trouble down below, and left the cardigan on the chair, again to reassure the waitress. She joined Karin and the hundreds of pounds outside the station and around the corner where she was slouching against a wall. Again, they laughed out loud to break the tension. 

They scrammed away from the station in case someone came looking. The waitress would remember them. They wouldn’t go back but there are a dozen or so London terminuses, they could work through. They found not far away, a hotel, a cheap one this time. Two days later they argued about who would ring Ken to arrange for him to hand over the money. Maria stubbornly, even frantically, refused to speak to the bastard. Karin knew she would have to, but protested nevertheless – Maria she believed just had to get over it.

It was morning, so she rang the warehouse. “Speak to Ken, please.”

“Yeah,” Ken said.

“This is the girls you raped. Last week.”

“”Wha’. Whatya talking about.”

“We want our money. We told you. We sent a letter. And we’ll send one to you wife. You got it didn’t you?” There was a long silence. “You want your wife to know what you do in your flat?”

“You can tell the wife if y’ wantta. I ain’t got no wife. never had one. Hard luck, luv.”

Karin was taken aback. All middle-aged creeps had wives, didn’t they? “Don’t believe you, mate.”

“Go ahead, kid. Which one are you anyway?”

“That don’t matter, does it.”

“Maybe it does. You the blonde one aren’tya. I can tell. Well listen, here, luv. You tell the one with dark hair, Maria she was called. She was a bit of a’right. Tell, her if she comes round for a bit more of the same, she’ll get the money. Go’ it.”

Karin was silent, bit her lip and thought. “Two hundred.”

            Ken, knowing he could send them away with whatever he decided to give, said. “OK. But she’d better be good – okay?” There was silence at both ends of the phone for a minute. “And I don’t want you. I want the other one. Right.”

            Karin put the phone down. She didn’t leave the phone box immediately. She had to consider how to put it to Maria. That wouldn’t be easy. It could be impossible; the way Maria is. When she came out Maria was standing looking at her enquiringly. “He says we’ve got to go to his warehouse.”

            “No,” she looked pale. “I can’t go. You go. You’ve only got to pick up the money.” But she knew Karin couldn’t go alone. She knew she should support her friend. She knew she should go too, but she couldn’t face the filthy creep again. But somehow, she knew she had to. As Karin kept telling her she had to get over it.

            When a little later, they got there, Karin sent the taxi driver away. Maria was trembling, “You should’ve told him to wait.” And she added, imploringly, “It’s dangerous here. With him.”

            Karin said nothing. She held Maria’s hand, gripping it tight. And they advanced into the warehouse. Maria hanging back, and not looking where they went. Karin advanced down the aisle to the little office. Ben was at his desk but noticed the movement and looked up. He looked surprised, “Ha, you here, girls.” 

Karin clenched Maria’s hand tightly. “Start with the money. Give us two hundred.”

“Nah, luv.” He was looking at Maria’s terrified face, hanging back behind Karin. “She OK?”

“She’s OK,” said Karin, and kept tight hold of Maria’s hand in case she started to run.

            “Right,” he said. Ken seemed as if he couldn’t believe his luck. I’ll go and shut the doors. You,” said to Karin, “take her up to the room.” Maria stared at Karin. She looked completely in shock. She looked like a zombie. 

She let Karin lead her out and in through the house to the room. “Don’t leave me this time,” she whispered.

“Alright. Don’t forget. It will soon be over.”

When Ken arrived in the room he told Karin to go down and sit in the office in case anyone came. Karin obediently left. Maria was at the mercy of Ken again. She was less compliant this time, but Ken overpowered her. Enjoyed doing so.

Maria laid back defeated, dirtied and extremely dead right through to her bones. She had no life to make her move. In fact, Ken had to drag her out of the room , down the stairs and in through the side door. He threw her at Karin. Maria stared, but Karin looked away. Ashamed. Karin took over, she said, in her conniving way, “Give me hand with her. You’ve had what you want.” So they each took an arm and led Maria onto the street. Halfway down the street, Karin told Ben, he could go back. As soon as he turned back she whispered to Maria, “We’ve got to run, and as she hauled Maria forward and out of earshot, she said, “I’ve got his cash from his office.” And after they’d got to the end of the road, she said “We’ve done well. Thanks Maria.” Maria stumbled on, and they found an alleyway to hide in till Ben had come racing past and after some time he wandered back resigned to having lost all the cash box.

Maria said nothing till they got back to the hotel. As she got out of the taxi, she had recovered her will to survive and moved of her own accord. There was little conversation between the girls that evening. After they went to sleep in their room, Maria opened her eyes, listened for Karin’s heavy breathing and while she slept, took all the money and silently left. Maria felt like the filthiest piece of womanhood that had ever existed.

 

 

 

 

A wail in the countryside

 

It wasn't pique.  It was something deeper.  The flight was miserable because of it.  All her life she had been beautiful, had enjoyed such admiration for it.  Now she had just reached her 30s, so many years of longing eyes upon her had lost that special thrill.  It was an accident of birth she now told herself.  To be beautiful is not a moral worth.  She had realised that recently.  Those women without natural gifts who make themselves attractive, they have the virtue.  Hers was merely luck, good fortune.  She stepped off the plane.  The sun was hot outside the airport.  It scorched her white suit, blistered her dark glasses.  Her relaxed, erect pose was neutral.  People seemed to leave a space around her. 

            She would wait for ‘them’ to come to her.  If ‘they’ were among the sparse throng waiting for bags, she would leave ‘them’ to spot her.  They were not in view; they must have taken a different flight.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Sitting briefly in the small garden of the hotel after arriving, waiting for the waiter to bring her a drink she felt as out of place as she looked.  But for different reasons.  Her natural exotic features looked out of place anywhere – in her native east London, or in this frantically watered garden in the Dordogne. But she was out of place too because she felt different.  And she had been feeling so different lately.  Was it something other people called jealousy?  This was not a holiday; she had brought some sort of emotional baggage along with her.  ‘They’, the others, were the ones on holiday.

            She was not spying or intruding on them; yet she was not on her holidays.  And yet again, emphatically, she was not on business.  So, she told herself.  On and off during the whole flight she had told herself so.  How come she felt like elastic?  Between her and Gregory.  He had told her it was just holiday time.  And she, no reason, had come along.  His hotel was only a short distance away.  She knew its name.  The waiter gave her directions to it.  He spoke in abbreviated French to make it easy for her to understand.  Now she knew all she needed to know.  In fact, in the event, she would not ever go to their hotel.

            What was that continually rising confusion about? What did she actually want?

            The waiter stuttered on proudly, trying to be kind to this splendid English guest.  Her French was fluent, but she did not embarrass him by showing his efforts were unnecessary.  Her considerate manners had been acquired like one of the accessories she carefully chose.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

The business she had with Gregory in England was a secret from that other one, that other ‘her’ in his life.  It was entirely legitimate, though questionably moral.  As a beautician she was her own advertisement.  Her face had peered out from thousands of adverts – photographed through rose-covered trelliswork, from under a motorbike, couched in a pile of silk underwear.  But always Jane's perfect features.  Those adverts proclaimed her animal-free potions – for beauty and potency.  ‘Momtaz’, she called her range of products, after the beauty of the Taj Mahal - the most fabulous in the world.  Then she had become Zena-Jane, to complement the plain syllable she had been assigned by her grandmother.  ‘He’, that is Gregory, had put up the money for Jane's business, linked it to his own business, a clinic for cosmetic surgery.  He did not do the surgery himself.  He was not a doctor, though he was willing enough to allow people to honour him with that title.  He had his young specialists, teamed up in relays like an athletics match. It was on the supermarket principle – off-the-shelf nose, cheekbones, jaw and so on.  Jane ran the health farm where the customers relaxed, scanned the catalogues, met the surgeons, chose their faces and convalesced in luxury till the skin wounds had faded.

            Not that Jane had been a beneficiary of the treatment; no more than she needed her own spurious potions.  Her beauty rose above that.  But Beatrix had been through it.

            At the time, Beatrix had probably been the wealthiest client of the clinic.  So, it was only partly her new jaw-line that had made him – that is, Gregory – fall in love with her.

            Gregory was significantly older than either of the women – Jane his mistress, or Beatrix his wife.  His steel grey hair met an equally steely eye that sometimes broke into wrinkles.  It did so at unexpectedly tense moments sometimes when he wanted to put you completely at your ease.  Disconcertingly, it always felt like his ease, composed and imposed by him.  He was swarthy and conveyed a purposeful energy in his movements and his severe expression.  He portrayed a pointed single-mindedness which was alluring to women and captured a loyalty from younger men.  That is what made him plausible, regarded as a doctor, a top surgeon; and none of his young doctors minded. One of his assets was that he never fully concealed that roguishness; it was always peeping out like the corner of a handkerchief, casual but self-conscious.  There was self-apology in his manner which gave the necessary charm.  But he was not all assertive, self-centred bluster. Beatrix – that is, his wife – could spot sincerity in him as well.  He genuinely believed he could make everyone happy.

            Beatrix, a long, willowy, blond, could almost have passed for Scandinavian, had she not displayed the characteristic demandingness of the wealthy and educated English.  Coolness of appearance, stiffness of movement; and that apparent air of command in her slightly complaining voice marked her as separate from Gregory or Jane.  And therefore, fascinating to both.  She had inherited that lofty stooped posture towards those who served her.  And yet it did not sit easily.  Her evident docility appeared as a deference to her husband. In so far as Gregory was able, he loved her.  He had rescued her from depression.  He was flattered by her loyalty.  The new petite jaw he had arranged for her was clearly more in keeping with her personality than the previous more Germanic jut.

            Gregory and Beatrix complemented each other grandly. They created a presence in the small village hotel snuggling into a fold of the Dordogne River.

            Beatrix loved him dearly and was grateful to be able to bring out the softer and sentimental side of him – his devotion to re-organising her stables; his passion for small animals, those small enough to pick up and cuddle, from snakes to apes and even caged birds. With her seemingly unlimited wealth, their home could spread into ever larger tracts of deep Surrey countryside. She was immensely proud of him. She was proud of his success, of his tenderness to animals, and indeed in his own pride in managing her life and wealth.

            Because of her devotion, as loyal as the animals, she was blind.  So, Gregory had no difficulty in deflecting small sums, a permanent rivulet, drained from her wealth, and into Jane's luxuriant enterprise.  Beatrix, quiet and unsuspecting, never even wanted to question Gregory's use of her inheritance.  His management of it merely proved his care for her.

            Jane, business-like, knew exactly where the money came from, exactly how the channels were carefully covered.  And exactly what deal he gave her.  They had a discreet chalet in the corner of her health farm; private entrances; nights she gave him by arrangement; other girls provided occasionally when he needed one.

            Now this.

            Here she was in this boiling cauldron, simply because he had asked her to come.  Had she really believed she had to say yes, even to this escapade?  Her contempt for herself was obvious - and justified, she muttered.  Did she believe he would stop seeing her?  If she had refused?  Shun her work, stop the vital ‘rivulet’?  She had not even considered saying ‘no’.  And now she was here.  Without properly knowing why.  If ‘they’ wanted to go off on holiday, well, good luck to them.  Jane did not care.  But suddenly, it was madness to come along too.  Someone's apparently maiden aunt, alone and stashed away in the hotel down the road!  She was exasperated at the thought; she suddenly knew her discomfort all day on the trip; let herself get drawn along into someone else's plan.  All her life she had learned the foolishness of being blindly led.  You had to know what was in it for you; that was it – principle number one.  She could have haggled with him; struck a bargain. And he would remain a businessman. Never forget, she told herself, head turned to the camelias, and hand discretely over her mouth as if burping: his business depended on her.  His clinic depended wholly on her clientele in the health farm.  She was the one – not him – who could play on her clients temptations.  She could supply those whose cheeks he could make blush as with an air-brush.  His beauty-surgery needed just those she could tempt with self-love.

            Was it her business that required her to agree to be here? No.  It was not.  No. Yet she had said: yes!

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

When he arrived in the garden to greet her he said he had no more than an hour.  The hesitant waiter hovered with a half-bottle of champagne till they started to drink; then vanished.  They then rehearsed their moment of meeting.  They had devised their long-standing ritual.  Passion emanated from that moment they closed in together.  They had learned to heighten it; how to condense it, to compress that passion. They recited their ritual poem, inane to the outside observer – it was theirs.  Partly the catholic mass, partly passages from the story of `O', and partly words that they had charged with a personal meaning.  After their soft stuttered murmuring, face to face, they arose and went in from the garden, up to Jane's room, shut the windows and shutters against the afternoon sun.  Their bodies completed an immaculate completion.  Then Gregory left for his hotel, a little late and a little pink, but with his perfectly constructed composure.

            Again, on her own.  It was not just pique she felt.  Something ineffable was left in her heart.  Why did she let him do it to her?  And - she vowed - it was going to stop. She must as she so often resolved, move on from being his fine ornament.

            Jane had had a hard life when young, when merely plain Jane.  She had always looked after herself, driven herself on with vows of revenge.  It had not just been the beatings from one of her stepfathers.  That was common enough.  The girls at school who also knew that kind of life had huddled together.  They made mischief to compensate; and understood each other.  It had been her other stepfather, who had inflicted ambition on her.  He forbade her meals if her homework marks were not good enough.  He locked her in her room if she had exams.  And, the trouble was, she was bright enough to warrant the ambition.  She could achieve what he wanted.  And that did set her aside.  There was no-one then to huddle behind the school hedge with and plot mischief.  She could only keep her own company, harbour her vengeance against the intruder in her family, vow to unburden her brain.  By flaunting her body instead, she pained this step-father tragically. And in the end, she had defeated his intention, effortlessly, with that chosen weapon, her physical beauty, and a career as a simple beautician.

            She folded away her white suit carefully.  Her dark complexion, she caught it in the mirror from the corner of her eye, a shadow that strode across her room.  The texture of her skin was unusually fine for someone dark, and it seemed to clothe her shape in a special glow, a dusky sheen. She was now aged enough to begin to wonder when its gloss would begin to tarnish.  And what then for her?  All her life she had inhabited this beauty.  And how much had it amounted to?  She had a full day before he would be with her again.  She planned it in segments, those for reading, the time for her meticulous body-care, the gentle excursions in the little town, the church, the local museum.  She would seethe in the meantime. And she would be ready for him when he returned.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

However, in fact, she did not have to wait completely uneventfully until the next visit. Sitting at supper on the vine-covered terrace overlooking the river, the meal ordered, her aperitif in her hand, a sleek young man came up to her table and spoke to her.  His English was ‘public school’ and his shallow smile equally so. She had known young men like this ever since she had grown out of her own background.  They could be so immediate but, ultimately, so passive. He was a fine example of England's cream.  He offered her his hand, stood beside the table.  Jane was leaning forward, elbows gently resting gracefully on the white table-cloth, her glass pressed to her sun-rosed cheek.  It was a pensive posture, the straight back alerting the observer to a hidden concentration.  She had been interrupted.  She did not move except to turn her head, a slight bend of the neck and her eyes looking up into his open face.  Otherwise, motionless, an unfriendly stillness.  She was reluctant to emerge from her dream.  He asked if he might be invited to sit down, to eat supper with her.  Equally motionless something changed in her.  There was suddenly a full attention.  Perhaps her eyelids tightened very slightly, or the muscles of her shoulders tensed beneath the thin cloth of her shirt, the weight no longer on her elbows. His offered hand had fallen away as she did not respond to him.  But his face remained as open and as simple as ever.  Where, someone would wonder, did he keep his intelligence, if not in his face?  She refused without emotion, without response; her silence a response in itself. Some would have taken her as hostile. She merely stared back into his face. Its jovial pastiness nodded good-naturedly, and he moved away to another table.  She spent the time of the meal staring ahead of her, over the terrace to the distant valley, much of the time the wine-glass pressed to her cheek pensively, like an insecure child might clutch a favoured toy.  She wondered at this resentment she lived all the time, like a drunk with alcohol.  There was something else too; like jealousy – that bitch Beatrix.  Something like a pity – was it that sponge-like boy.  She observed herself with a distant amazement.  Something was happening to her these days.  A cruel curiosity made her pick over these feelings, like specimens.  When necessary, she knew she would shut them away and get on with her mask, her stainless beauty.  But in this brief incredulous moment on her own she lost herself in a foreign country in her heart.  It would soon be over.  Had she looked she would have seen that the boy spent most of the meal looking at her.

            In the morning, he tried again.  He managed to follow her into breakfast.  She refused his request to sit at table with her. Finally, he encountered her again mid-morning sipping coffee outside the small bar in the central place de la village.  Her cool loose blouse was brilliant green.  It blended with a very slight reddish streak in her dark hair. The blouse rode above the top of her grey linen jeans.  Her appearance was compelling, as always.  He did not invite himself to her table this time but sat at the adjacent one. Slightly behind her, he was in fact closer than if he had faced her from the chair opposite.  She had not changed her pose with his arrival and in her characteristic posture, lightly resting her graceful arms on the table-top, he was facing her, inches from her left shoulder, by her side.

            There was not much about the boy, she thought. “Peter”, he told her, “I'm called”. Tall, slightly awkward with youth, his hair was surprisingly fair, and a little lank, threatening to intrude on his face so that he pushed it back with a thumb and forefinger either side of his forehead in a repeated mannerism.  It tended to make his full face fuller and more present to whoever spoke to him.  She did not.  For him her silence emphasised a quality that he called ethereal. No longer youthfully uncertain, she was not yet old, even by Peter's young standards.  He saw her beauty in a perpetual interlude, never growing, never fading, like the confident endurance of classical marble. Indeed, like a statue, she seemed all surface, and untouchable, and still magnetic.  He began to tell her a few things, hesitantly at first and uninvited: his college; the school he had been to previously; his recent 21st birthday which had culminated in this trip; a girl he had liked but knew he was too young to take seriously; his hopes for a future as a manager for some national opera company where he had connections...

            Without meaning to, Jane idly listened, but never responded, never encouraged this advantaged, callow youth.  Only once did she turn to look into his pleasing face. There was not much to see; except... except one thing.  There was that same plausible earnestness in there, which conveyed that though you would get honesty willingly from him, you were most unlikely to get the whole truth. A plausibility she recognised in all the smart men who pursued her like this.  Reminiscent slightly of her aging man at the hotel up the road. “By any chance,” she enquired at last, “do you know a businessman by the name of Gregory Belgrave?”

            “Of course,” he smiled and, relieved that at last she had addressed him, “how else would I be here?  Why else would I be talking to you?”  He nodded with significance as if scornful of her naivety.

            He got up to go, offered to carry her parcel back for her.  She did not reply; but also did not stop him lifting it and carrying it.  She had bought a piece of local pottery, quite heavy. He continued to smile and chatter away as he walked beside her: about the girl he had just finished with; playing rugby for his college last year; the quite good degree which his father had been proud of.  It was not clear if she listened to any of it.  He accepted her as a challenge, a refusal to be deflated.

            If she had not been so angry, she might have wondered more about who this associate of Gregory's really was.  When they had crossed the bridge and turned up the ancient path to the hotel. he told her he would be ‘trotting off’ now.  She stopped and looked at the boy.  He smiled a slightly cheeky grin; he gave her a mock salute as if a messenger; but really, he mocked the angry authority her silence asserted.  He turned to go.  “And listen to me,” she snapped, calling him back, “I don't want you hanging around, eyeing me all the time.”  She was deliberate in her intention.  She thought that her blunt command was the best insult to his couth aplomb. She felt insulted and was intent on demolishing him. And she succeeded; for the first time he became somewhat crestfallen. This woman his father had brought him to see was no fading violet awaiting his lavish attentions.  If his father had fixed him up with this companion, Peter did not mind too much who she was, but she could enthuse her job a bit more.  If he thought about it, he would have assumed his father had paid her.  It was why, perhaps, he found it too delicate to refer to his father.

            She noticed him begin to sag, “Get out of here,” she added as if throwing out a piece of crumpled litter.  She turned to go into the hotel.  He offered the parcel he was carrying.  She took it gravely letting it hang from her hand in a gesture of casual disregard.  She was resentful, felt affronted by being subjected to the boy's interest.  She felt insulted by his adolescent drool, but also by his chatter to her as if she were his mother; and above all by succumbing to being made so cross by his presence.  Gregory was no different from these casual predators trying their luck – except Gregory always brought it off.  Damn.  Damn him.

            In her room she went to the mirror and stared at what she saw.  As always, the sight was the one thing that would make her feel better about herself. She noticed a warmer feeling swell up inside her.  Ugh, kids. Even big ones.  She gazed on her mature body - no longer a child herself. She believed she had become a person. She forgot her brutal dismissal of the boy.

            Peter too bounced back easily from his rebuffs. Within a 100 metres he had forgotten the beautiful ‘old bag’.  He padded along in his shorts and espadrilles but remembering his view of her chest. He prided himself on how courteous he had remained.  He formed in his thoughts how he could tell it to his father as an amusing story.

            It was not a long walk through the lanes from one hotel to another.  It was a surprisingly green little valley.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

She had never heard that Gregory had a son.  And nor had Beatrix; but that is by-the-by for the moment.

            Peter identified the acacia trees, some ancient and some young yet standing to the same height along the road in front of the rough stone walling.  There were many exotic plants, but many grew in England, and he could imagine again the countryside where he was at school.

            His father would fix it, as everything else in Peter's life; and as Peter would one day fix everything for his own children. Whatever was eating that woman, Dad would set it right, for her, and for Peter.  Dad would know when it was some money that was needed, some flattery, when a good ticking off - and so on.  He looked forward to seeing how his father would deal with it.

            He had not heard of Jane until a couple of weeks ago when Gregory proposed the trip for Peter's wider experience.  He was not, he could tell himself, completely ignorant about women.  But what his father intended was to give him a proper grounding.  In truth his world of women had really only been the female servants at his schools, and the anxious girls at university as ignorantly complacent as himself.  There was a little vegetable garden now, on the right.  Asparagus, he recognised; rosemary, he thought; and smart little rows of leaves for the salade vert.  The road twisted up towards the hotel.

            Beatrix he had heard of and knew a lot about.  His father waxed prolific about her at times. Peter had resented her without meeting. Some might say she was a rival to him; some might say a rival to his mother.  Though, to be honest, his mother had been rather cool and he felt little for her.  He preferred his school from an early age and paid little attention to regular though dull letters to him. It had been decided, too, that it was best he should not meet Beatrix.  He knew it had all been worked out for him by his father.  Sometimes it was a puzzle why he felt so against Beatrix when his father talked on about her. He had for as long as he could remember enjoyed a suave composure towards everyone he met.

            It had been a kind of joy to learn of the secret Jane. A mean laugh at the deceived Beatrix. Perhaps, for Gregory, his unacknowledged son was the one person he could talk to about his secret mistress.  It seemed a prankish joke if his father brought them both on holiday as well.  In his own mind it would be Beatrix who would be left the odd one out.  Though he relented a little and could allow Beatrix to have his father in their hotel together, Peter found his tolerance of his parents' holiday was only on the basis that he would be fixed up himself in the hotel with Jane.

            He sat on the wall for a few moments.  The road had risen to a few metres above the river here. Did it flood in this valley? Everything can be too full once in a lifetime - it was a rule he had once heard.  It had come from the careful girl-friend he had had at university. They had spent a couple of years at college going to social occasions together. They were good friends, and still were; and they had had good friends.  But she had been cautious, and they'd only groped in the car.  He hadn't really minded. But wondered sometimes if he ought to.  She told him she had been traumatised when her parents had died in a fire, an atrocity committed on the farmstead in South Africa.  She had been eleven and it happened shortly after she had been sent to school in Zimbabwe.  She had never been back to South Africa because it had not been good for her. Her uncle was a psychologist in Kings Lynn and had helped her to understand how she must help herself. She had needed, she said, his understanding.  So, he had given it.  Recently she had conveyed to Peter that she was strong enough if he wanted to break off the relationship with her when they both finished their degrees.  So, he had decided to.  Whatever the effects of her trauma, he knew there was a lot on his side of the relationship for him to learn as well.  He judged it by the way his father had talked to him.  And indeed, that was why he had talked to his father.  Gregory had been confident how to handle the problem.  Peter felt relaxed sitting on the wall, reviewing the reasons for being out here; the experience his father had promised would be forthcoming from Jane. At last, he was being invited into the world where others lived so happily.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Beatrix did not consider where her husband disappeared to. Reclining on the lounger by the pool's edge, the hot sun was dripping inertia onto her body.  Beatrix was 37, her muscles were toned to the condition of a 17-year-old, and her skin had been tanned in regular doses under the commercial UV machine at work; her life cared for her in every respect.  Yet she knew she had to fight off that lethargy before it permanently got the better of her.  She was old enough to know that risk.  That state of ennui would come on her slowly; there had been points all through her life when it seemed to pop up compellingly, temptingly.  And if she did not get up off the lounger, find the next paperback to read, get a mid-afternoon drink, plan a shopping trip, then it would flood back into her heart.  Such life activities did not seem to arise smoothly.  They required an energised will.  Why did life not seem more natural?  Distractions were the essence of life for Beatrix.  She barely realised the difference.

            Nevertheless, she had come to be puzzled.  She had everything, material provision in every respect, a loving husband, even an indulgent priest hanging over from her school days (so long ago now) if she were ever to need one.  Her marriage was cruising along absolutely perfectly: the dinners, the theatres and concerts, the house parties (given and invited to); and in just two years time, as she had planned, and Gregory had agreed, she would have reached the point to start their family.  Her health was good, wealth never a problem.  There was no reason for that sinking emptiness, like a bruise in the tummy; no reason for it to open up under her whenever she stopped busying herself.  And she told herself carefully, it didn't!  It did not happen; no.  And why? Because, from long ago, she could control it.  If her mind was busy – reading, planning, arranging – then it never came upon her. And, therefore, it never existed. She was quite content with her logic. She looked at the locker beside her on the edge of the swimming pool – the extra pair of sunglasses, the tumbler of cool water, the comb, the packet of cigarettes with lighter neatly parked on top, the hair-band in case she went in for a dip, the suntan tube, and the insect spray – the last two stood upright together as if guarding the rest. It was all there as she glanced, as so often, to take it in, to check it; a kind of Kim's game that she was always winning.  It reminded her of the locker in the school dormitory when she had gone away at fourteen. It had been the tidiest and best kept locker in the school.  Her parents had been proud of that before they died - even if they had been troubled that she could not keep up with the lessons.

            As she was reminiscing to herself about her childhood and its perfections, a slightly hot blond head emerged, climbing the steps from the road, then his long gangling body, and, last, a pair of white thin legs below the baggy shorts.  The head looked around and glanced back at the long sleek body on the lounger. Someone must be inside that body, but he wondered whether to pass it by as a statue.  Beatrix had a swimming costume cut very high over the hip bones and pulled tight in her crotch.  Peter noticed.  She was quite old, he thought, neutrally.

            With his arrival, she had something outside her own head to concentrate on, to distract.  “You, from England?”  The familiarity of her tone was as a girl of his own age.  He felt uncomfortable at having examined the body so closely.

            “Yes, actually.  Absolutely.”  He chuckled slightly and felt suddenly at his ease with her.  “I'm looking for my father,” he said inquiringly.

            `Where is he?' she asked purposelessly.  As if she thought he were silly enough to have mislaid something, the key to his room, his bathrobe.

            And then a slightly hard look came across her jocular face.  There were no other English in the hotel.  Who could his father be?  “Who is it?” she asked, sounding more puzzled than she intended.

            He told her.  There was silence.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

The scene took place in “their” room on the first floor of the hotel, some mock mahogany and a wide high window showing a lot of sky and the dark green mountains rather near. Gregory had been shaving.  His bathrobe was open and bathing trunks of several sharp colours crossed his stomach.  He turned as Beatrix entered. “Ah”, he said, absent-mindedly and with his usual abbreviated sentences, “Was about to join you.  Missed my chance? Hey?”  Then he saw Peter entering the room behind her. 

            “I'm early, Dad,” he announced unnecessarily with abandoned guile.  “Sorry.” He noticed a moment of apprehension on his father's face. “It's OK.  The hotel found me a room here. I thought I’d prefer to be with you for a couple of days. I’ll move over here tomorrow.”

            “That's good.”  It was a matter of pride for Gregory not to show he was ruffled.  His mind had whizzed around a few things; not so much Beatrix's stern face, but Jane who yet knew nothing of his plans for her. “So.  Gentleman, Pete!  How good to see you.  Good journey?” His genuine pleasure at seeing his son began to win through the momentary alarm.  The smooth sound of his own urbanity calmed him.  It also brought Peter's wide grin back to his face.  Beatrix in striking contrast was not smiling, the thunder on her face reached at least to her waistline!  She was keeping her mouth shut for fear of what would come out.

            “I've met her, Dad.”  Peter beamed as if he was announcing an ascent of the Matterhorn.

            “Indeed you have.”  Gregory had caught sight of his wife's frown.  It was no less conspicuous than the sham Louis Quatorze wardrobe. “What a happy meeting,” he gushed. More in hope.  Jovially, he waved everyone into the room.  They were already there.  And it was now rather a cramped room, so no-one moved.  Gregory was not one to admit a change in the weather till he had to; and Beatrix had been too dumbstruck at the news of Gregory's unknown son to make her sulk audible, yet.  But he could see the moment coming when he would need to dodge the bolts of lightning. “I remember, Peter, when your grandmother first saw you. A baby.  In arms.  Before your time, my dear,” he addressed Beatrix, as an aside. “Peter's twenty-one, now. Three days ago, right?”  Peter nodded.  Beatrix glowered.  “She took one look at you – ‘Orang-utan’ she said.  ‘Long and lanky.’”  He guffawed. Peter laughed.   Beatrix wisely made no comment still.  “She had not known anything about you till I dangled you in her lap – “Wild man of the bungle” she said.”  His infectious joviality came powerfully from the increasing loudness of his voice.  “Oh. Twenty-one years.”

            “She knew what his father was,” Beatrix suddenly added bitterly, “Bungler.”  It was the beginning of the insult which something in her believed would pay him back for the jolt to her sanity she had just received.  With a world that was as carefully groomed as her make-up everyday, an unknown step-son had been a slap in the middle of it, smudging and stinging. The news that Gregory had had a preceding life before her, deflated her dignity.  She felt as crumpled as a discarded bra.  She had never paused to consider any prior relationship in his life.

            “What's that?”  Gregory inquired looking round as if inviting her to join in the joking.

            “A bungle,” she repeated, rather overloud, “You're pretty familiar with that sort of thing, aren't you?”  And she turned suddenly to sit heavily on the end of the bed in a heap.

            “Let's all sit down,” he said managerially; and put himself on the other end of the bed. The room seemed surprisingly small, but with a veranda outside, too hot to venture into in daytime. He was looking relaxed as his robe flopped beside him.  Peter looked around the room and decided to lean his bottom against a convenient chest of drawers, an imitation of something priceless.  So far, he was satisfied that Beatrix had been left to smoulder uselessly.

            Gregory had not finished with his happy reminiscences, “You did look pretty wizened when you were born.”

            “Has he got a mother,” Beatrix asked in mock sweetness. “How many more kids have you got hidden away?”  She turned to sarcasm, “How many mothers?” And then to hate, “What do you think I feel?” She felt he had not thought about her at all. Hearing the sound of her own voice she was in danger of getting worked up into a tirade.  “You're the father of a monkey!  What's the mother?”

            Gregory spread his hands in an appeasing gesture, as if she was being entirely unreasonable.  “Look,” he said and paused while he thought out what she was supposed to look at.  “It was long ago.  He's twenty-one.”  He swept a hand around the tight room towards Peter, as a car salesman might display his wares. “That means it was twenty-one years ago,” he added in all seriousness as if she needed the explanation.  She was about to resume the crescendo that had begun to build up, but he continued, “A kind of birthday occasion.  For him to come down here.”  He appealed for reason as if to a jury that could not possibly convict him.  “What do you think?”  But he did not have a sympathetic audience.

            Beatrix wanted to know why she had not been told. Peter wanted Beatrix to shut up. Gregory was half enjoying the rumpus that only he could sort out.  He stood up and leaned against the window frame.  The afternoon air came through it like a flame-thrower.  His excitement in this temperature brought beads of perspiration to his face.  He looked the part of a manic impresario.  Everyone and everything in sight had been bought with his money and his energy.  All he had to do was dominate them.  Except, of course, the money was hers; and all Peter wanted was his father to himself.

            “Let's all sit down, and take this calmly,” he repeated in his excitement.  Nobody moved as he beamed more desperately at one and then the other of them.  He looked like a conjuror concluding a trick that would amaze his audience.  Beatrix felt tears welling up noisily.  Peter held down his impatience with her by staring blandly at his father. “He's a fine boy,” Gregory said looking round at Peter as if checking for himself.  “The mother,” he started, as if this was a new thought, and continued in a confidential tone to Beatrix, “The mother's a bit of disgrace.”

            “Quite so,” she added bitterly.

            “I haven't seen her for... Ooo.  A long time,” he announced vaguely. “When was it, Pete?” He decided to specify a time for her. “When you were seven.  A bit of a disgrace,” he added as if musing to himself on a memory that pained him. Then, very quickly he brightened up and said, “Well, we don't want to talk about that in front of the boy. That's that,” and he rubbed his hands together.  Peter stared intently at the sobbing figure of Beatrix.  Not with compassion, nor without. Simply curious at the kind of woman his father had married.  Gregory, familiar over the years with his wife's moods, spread his hands again in his usual gesture, “C'mon, darling.” He reverted to a more vernacular accent that referred back to long ago in his childhood origins.  There was a kind of self-mockery in it, “Let's have a smile.”

            The effect on Beatrix was hardly a cessation of her tears, more a sucking them back inside her as she drew herself up into a queenly pose. Without lifting her head, she could still give the immediate impression of looking down her nose. “Handkerchief,” she announced in her own accent that had moved up the scale with an equal and opposite force. “Handkerchief, my dear.”  And Gregory humbly offered his.  The restoration of her aplomb had been cleverly engineered by his descent into a momentary servility.  All of this, a tiny drama they seemed to have accomplished many, many times before in their marriage, was a slick collaborative performance, smoothed and oiled with years of performing together.

            Peter felt a scarring ire in his belly, as if a ball of barbed wire was working its way through his system: Beatrix preening her ego whilst Gregory suddenly cringed.  Peter wanted to send a clenched fist winging its way through the air at her head; but what he said was: “I've met her Dad.  Not Beatrix.  The other one.  Jane.” Despite the innocent air of a lad telling his Dad some news, it was obvious he meant more.  It was truly as if a fist had landed with force on the top of Beatrix's head!  She bounced. Her startle reverberated on the bedsprings and she shot up a couple of inches.

            Gregory, too, labouring to restore Beatrix after Peter's first bombshell, was himself caught unawares by the second.  He mumbled ruefully, “You've really got your timing right today, haven't you, Pete?  We need to get better co-ordinated.”

            Peter looked at his father seriously.  He had already written off Beatrix as unworthy of his father.  She no longer counted for any consideration. “Come on, Dad.  Let's leave her for a minute.  I need to talk it over with you.  Come down to the bar.”  He mooched out of the room.  His quandary was the jaundiced Jane.

            Gregory now torn between the two of them, had every right to be angry with his son who had stirred poison far beyond any reasonable limits. But instead, he turned rather sharply to Beatrix. “See what you've done,” he snapped inexplicably.  He followed his son.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

But Beatrix was no longer going to preserve her role of frail victim wreathed in sobs.  Hampered by her need to redo her make-up, she flounced into the hotel lounge some ten minutes after father and son had reached there. Peter had explained his predicament; the welcome that had not been forthcoming from Jane; the humiliating rebuffs she had delivered like letter bombs.  Gregory had soothed.  The party in question being not present he refused to believe that she was so obstinately unfriendly.  He sustained his familiar wishful thinking and advised persistence and stamina.  And Peter knew no better.

            Beatrix entered, unusually with a presence the size of a mountain like the lion emerging from the cage in the big top. Both the men held their breath. If only she had remained standing, their apprehension at her fury would have prolonged their sudden shrinking. But she sat down suddenly like a pocket-knife snapping shut.  She looked immediately reduced, as reduced as she felt. “Now, she said thickly, “who's Jane. It's not her, that health farm woman. She's not here, is she?”  Suddenly she seemed to be pleading, pleading for an answer.

            “Right.”  Gregory glowed with a hopeless smile.  He swallowed and recovered his garrulousness.  “Well. Jane, of course, is an old colleague,” he turned to Peter as if they had not been having the talk they had in fact had.  He continued as if explaining to Peter. “She is an old colleague, a friend really of Bea's and mine.  We've known her for years.  For years and years.  She works closely with us.  In an associated company, actually.  I've helped her a good deal.  You know what it's like.  In business; scratch my back, scratch yours, what?”

            Beatrix watched him.  The stinging energy she had so recently felt had nearly evaporated. What had happened; why had that woman turned up?  What had Gregory brought her here for, into the midst of their holiday together?  For that matter, what had he brought this spindly illegitimate kid for? “What is going on?” A madhouse. “Where's she staying? Here?”

            “Oh, Bea!” Gregory reacted as if unreasonably taxed. “Of course not. She wanted a holiday. I told her where we were going to be. She found a hotel somewhere around here.”

            “About a kilometre down the road,” Peter added helpfully.

            Beatrix had judged that a tearful performance again so soon would not get the same result.  In that case she could do nothing but express her perplexity, and her deep, deep sense of suspicion.

            “Don't be suspicious.  My dear heart.”  Gregory remonstrated. “It's not like you to get ideas in your head.”  The ambiguity in what he had said was lost on him at that moment.  And on her too.

            “Everybody knows she eats men,” she said to Peter as if he had asked. “Gregory is the only one who has stood up to her temptations. That's right, isn't it Gregory? You've always told me that.”

            “Sure.  I have always told you that.”  This time he was aware of an evasive meaning.  “You have always believed me.  I told young Peter here to come on out to France and he...” even Gregory had to think for a moment what words to use, “he could keep her company for a bit.  Since she is here.  On her own.”

            “I don't see it.” She was close to whining; begging for Gregory's reassurance, “I don't understand.  Why has she come here on her own.  She could get anybody to come with her - from Prince Charming to King Kong; they'd follow her like dogs.” She looked at Peter and before she had a chance to continue, Gregory pounced on her words.

            “But you see, of course, she wants to be alone. That's the problem.  Flies around the proverbial honeypot.  She can't get away”.

            “So you fixed her up with the boy here?”

            “Yup,” he said defiantly, “She is not going to be bothered by him, is she?” Peter blanched.  Gregory did not look at him.

            “Let's pack.  We're going,” she announced as if to Peter.  And she stood up, once again to her queenly height.  But there was no longer the angry flush on her face, no longer the command in her stride.  She posed this time.  Both the men looked at her without movement.  She stopped before she left the lounge and with a revealing hesitation looked back.

            Gregory's astuteness gave him all the winning advantages. He knew she would not go through with leaving unless he sanctioned it.  He allowed the indignity in her hesitation to last for a moment.  And said, “Okay, love.  If you want to.  But I for one will be sad, yes, sad, if we do not have your company here.” He used the term ‘we’ carefully.  She noticed it. Her defeat seemed complete.  She returned to sit beside them again. “Your a good sort,” he said consolingly. “I knew you'd realise there's nothing to be suspicious of. She's not a bad type, Jane.  She wouldn't do anything behind your back either. Would she?”  Peter looked on at this blatant lying.  He studied Gregory's effect; how he handled a woman being difficult. Plenty of tips to tuck away for future use and gain.

            “I'd like to ring her?” Beatrix said, ingenuously. “I'm sure she would like to hear from us.”  She gave them a brave smile, as if adjusting the chairs after a dinner party had left. Anger, suspicion, fear for her marriage, all must be put behind them. “Shall we ring, and give her a surprise?”

            “Sure,” Gregory said relaxing. “Later”'

            “No.  Let's invite her over here for dinner.  And you too,” she said to Peter.

            Peter looked at his father.  His father looked at him.  “It's a lovely idea, my darling.  Peter, never forget the kindness this woman can show.  But Bea, honestly, I know that Jane wants to be away from it all.  She has enough of me at work.  Know what I mean.”

            “Oh, no, Gregory,” she said flirtatiously and perking up. “I don't know what you mean.  I could never have enough of you!”

            “That's a dear,” and he put out his hand to pat her knee leaving it there just slightly longer than necessary to convey a possessiveness; a suggestiveness.

            Her knee felt to her like meat, its skin, dead paper. It did not belong.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Whilst Peter walked back down the lane, Gregory nipped ahead in his brash Porsche, his phone to his ear. Peter rehearsed in his mind all he had learned.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Even Jane realised she could not spend so much of her time looking in the mirror searching her form for any emerging clues to the decay and decomposition to her perfect image which was bound to start someday.  So, she was relieved when the phone rang.  She slumped down with it in front of the wide window.  Even her underwear seemed to be overdressing in the heat. From the earpiece came the familiar metric rhythm of one of their favourite poems. “John Donne,” she said sulkily.

            “J.D., quite right.  Good girl,” Gregory responded breezily.  “Us - we're just like that.”  It was the old formula they had grown up with.  Two people like one.  “Love and poetry, they're symbiotic.  L-and-P.”

            “L, little-a, P,” she recited in response.

            “Love and poetry, like twins who feed each other.”

            “You, little-a, M.  You and me, we're the same”' she continued sing-song fashion.

            “You and me.  My Love.  We go together, always have done.”

            She always thought of way back, at that young age. Gregory and his lanky friend, Len, kids of thirteen, had chased her into an alleyway, scared her half to death, and had cut off one of her pigtails.  She had been five.  Then her violent stepfather had scared her to death too when she got home, with his belt. Forbidden ever to meet those ruffians again. And in fact, still it seemed estranged from them today.

            “So,” he continued now conversationally, “how goes it?” Just the question she could not answer for herself.  So, she was silent.  He picked up the tension and wariness, “I'm coming over.  I'm in the car now.  I got away earlier today.”

            The moment he got to her room, he began again, “You've met Peter, have you?” He spread his remark with a nonchalance he was not feeling.

            “Your weedy office rat,” she enquired.  At first there was some humour, added to the grating displeasure. “What did you send him spying for?”  They sat together on a tiny terrace outside her room, no more than a window ledge.  The hotel shaded them from the afternoon sun. “You - are you getting jealous in your old age? Want to see what I get up to? He's a bit obvious, isn't he? Your office boy.”

            “Come on, GJ,” he appealed to their secret childhood past again.  The closest he could get to her.  The old taunts he and Len had thrown at her - GJ; Gypsy Jane; Gypsy tipsy Jane.  Later they had become daunted and bewildered by her sudden beauty as she emerged as a woman.  It had frightened their unsure manhood.

            “Don't call me that,” she shouted, as she had all those years ago, too.  Now she no longer frightened him, but yet she still sensed he had to work at keeping her on his side.  “He's no bloodhound.  You're wasting your money.  Send him home.”

            “No.  My love. Be nice to him.  In your usual way.  Just be nice.”

            “Oh no,” she said, or wailed, as if she could not believe she was being asked for something so preposterous.  “What the hell does ‘usual way’ mean?  I know what you usually mean.  But he's a boy.  Not with him – what's his business.  He can't be any use to us.”

            “Don't be like that.  He's a good lad.  Needs bringing on a bit.”

            “True,” she said bitingly. “Who is he?”

            “Haven't you guessed?” He kept a pause to convey significance, but she was not having that.  She sparked.

            “Guessed!  Guessed what? Of course, I have.  You've dragged me all the way out here to this wine-spattered nowhere.  The scenery's like wallpaper, the weather is a furnace; the people are cardboard.  And you want to start a quiz-show!  Guess what?”  Gregory gained a thrill when she got into her imaginative outrages.  “And you, fucking love winding me up,” she concluded as she caught the triumphant smile in his eye.

            Gregory audibly swallowed, “Okay, okay.  You win.  A long time ago,” he swallowed again. “Twenty-one years, to be precise, I became a father.  Know what I mean,” he added, hesitant – in a coy way.

            She thought she had a few sudden sarcastic comments bursting into her brain; she prepared to crank up the decibels.  But thought better of it – in these abrupt circumstances. Silence was dignified.  It will leave him guessing, she thought.  Let him swim in an empty pool.  She said nothing. “You still there,” he asked.  She said nothing.  “It's just... a helping hand – for the lad.”

            Now he remained silent, a counter-silence.

            He put his hand to her face and kissed her on the cheek. “I've got to go this time,” he said ambiguously.  She did not ask him to stay.  Her familiar anger had rendered her dumb.  Despite his apparent assured manner, in the car he phoned her back, again. “You're a good girl, my love.  I love you.”

            Still driven to silence, in the end she spoke, “I might.  Help your lad.”  She patted the place on her head where her plait might have been.  “I might,” she repeated sulkily.  “If I feel like it,” in a louder voice.  Then more shrilly, “But I don't.”  She slammed the phone down.

            Gregory switched off his telephone more calmly. He turned. “She'll be okay,” he said reassuringly to the embarrassed boy curled up around his own centre of gravity in the passenger seat.

            Peter unwound himself at the hotel and got out.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Puzzled by the mosaic of interactions he had witnessed, and not alert to most of them, he admired his father's command.  He returned to the hotel to claim his rights with Jane.  The goddess, he believed.  The opposite pole to the beastly Beatrix.  She had shed her loose clothing unceremoniously and sat on the edge of the bed in his room as featureless as he was.

            Furious – with Gregory, with herself – she had confronted the hapless youth with a wooden stare.  She still had on a pale blue silk bra with black lace, which pushed her parts into a deep cleavage.  He slowly took off his clothes, staring hypnotised at her motionless flesh.  He lay on the bed beside her.  No words were spoken.  She looked down at his long, white body.  The unfriendliness of her gaze frightened him.  Mixed with the long excitement it did not seem to be having the expected effect on him.  She picked up his limp organ between thumb and forefinger as if a dead cigarette from an ashtray.  Incensed with everyone and feeling manoeuvred into this, she let it drop again, and said with contempt “You won't get far with that, will you?” She turned her head away. As if reluctantly waiting for him.

            He put out a hand to bury several fingers in the crevasse in her brassiere.  “Can I?” he mumbled, and he started to say something he did not finish.  She let him fumble with the clasp till the straps fell away.  She neither moved nor spoke.  Her breasts came free from the cups.  In other circumstances he would have drooled, would have settled in his mind how he would describe them to his mates.  But at that point his mouth was dry, his stomach trembling with apprehension, every thought about imitating his father had abandoned him.  One palm clutched a globe.   He touched as if it were the most fragile bubble.  Its weight surprised him.  The heavens should have opened; but they did not.  Only an effort of concentration made her breast seem different from a large potato, different from a bag of tepid water.  Her wooden immobility controlled all of him.  He felt an imposter, an intruder, inadequate in the moment of violation.  Furiously, her immobility attacked him.

            But at the same time, it represented her humiliation, the ignominy in Gregory's demand for his son.  The whole of her life she had worked for him, worked under him.... screwed under him!  Her thoughts could not be completed, could not be vulgar enough to describe herself. Her time had been one long degradation by Gregory from her earliest years.  She fumed.  She found herself obediently putting out one slender elegant forearm to feel between his thighs for his sensitive parts again.  They rested in the cradle of her strong fingers.  The balance between gently soothing them and ripping them off was an exceedingly fine one at that moment.  She found herself beginning to squeeze, she felt the temptation to crush this lad's maleness into paste.  The desire to destroy the father through macerating the son was almost irresistible. Almost.

            In turn he looked in alarm at her arm bearing his trophy. He was not sure if he was being offered excitement by this steely woman. In his innocence he uttered “Aagh...!” thickly and as if acquiescing to her powers.  But his fear told him he was in danger. “Ouch.  I say.  That...” She let go. “That hurt a good bit.” Her mercy reprieved the father; and the boy.

            She looked down at his organ again.  And he looked down at it too.  It was stubbornly limp.  In a moment of brief conciliation, she leaned herself across his chest, lowered one shoulder onto his and lay for a moment in contact with him, her face turned away, his arm pinned so that he could not do any foraging or fumbling. After a brief while she said, “I don't think you and I are going to get very far, are we, boy?”  Then she suddenly sat upright, squared her shoulders back so that her breasts hung above him, “Why don't you just rub yourself, and we'll call it a day.” She knew how to hurt. “Perhaps women are not what you are into.”  He obeyed. He would not let her see tears fall. She turned her head and fixed her eyes on the wall in the stiff pose of an artist's model.  Afterwards she climbed silently into her jeans and, buttoning her blouse, she closed the door behind her leaving him wiping himself with a dirty sock.

            She padded barefoot down the stone corridor, her gold sandals in one hand, and her humiliation, unmodified, in her heart. On his bed he allowed himself a few gasping sobs.  He had not cried since his first fight in his school.

            There was the whine of a curlew whistling through the country lanes in the distance.  But neither of them noticed.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Unlike Jane, Beatrix humiliation was screened by a numbness, a grisly emptiness.  It had been inexpressible. The advent of the boy, and, on top, the appearance of the sly Jane and her mystery presence, that spoke volumes of suspicion. It was the very lack of means to express any of it any more that delivered the dark cloud of numbness in thinker and thicker proportions She could only now pretend, a pretence was all the options he left her.  She was a million miles from his confident belief that he had smoothed everything out for her; had settled her ruffled feelings; had, in the process, convinced her of the silliness of her feelings.  Tragically his confidence was unfounded.  They were sitting close together on the hotel terrace in the lateness of that afternoon. The sun was calming towards evening. A tiny lapping sound came from the river some 15 metres below.  Gregory's hand was proprietorially on Beatrix's thigh.  He believed in total possession.  And that was what Beatrix gave him.  Helplessly, she did.  It left her no escape, no room to manoeuvre.  There were no words that could form her predicament, no appeal to him about the hurt that burned like a ruthless acid in the place where she wanted love.  He required only that she pretend; a pretence that he had made everything alright for her again.  Her loneliness was all the more vast for the silence it occupied.

            She could bear it no longer.  She knew she must do it suddenly.  The moment came, the most silent one she had ever heard.  She lurched from the chair to the balustrade at the edge of the terrace.  As if in perfect slow motion, one foot on the top of the rail, a super-human stride into the air, and she threw herself from the terrace.  She briefly noticed the rocks innocently lapped by the gentle water, her wail was not fear, merely a sad defeat.  She hit them head-first.  The water accepted the body.  And carefully rippled around it.

            Gregory was already on his feet leaning over the rail, arms outstretched.  A small knot of hotel guests gathered instantly to gaze down with him at the sudden corpse.  One man was over immediately clambering down, slipping and gashing himself.  Another had miraculously found a rope, and was throwing it down to the climber; making it fast on the rail.  The receptionist had already rung for the ambulance.

            It made the countryside echo with its wail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duncan

 

The South Coast of England from Brighton to Bognor Regis is sometimes known as the Costa Geriatrica.  It is a complacent self-mocking term used by innumerable London civil servants who retire there to watch each other crumble away.  The climate is balmy, the undertaking trade is discretely buoyant and the traffic moves sedately on the roads.

Out there was the world he knew. In here was another world. When Grace left that first evening, Graham tidied his locker.  His clothes had gone back with Grace.  The toothbrush, towel, the magazine she had bought  him, all these he looked at carefully and put away. He felt a desperate affection for these simple things that had come with him as if they represented his only friends in this new place.  The doctor from the outpatients, the nurses there who had taken his blood, the receptionist, all those people he had come to like in the hospital, seemed so far away now.  He had not seen any of them on the ward.  The evening sky outside was darkening, and a nurse came to pull across the curtains over the great plate-glass windows.  He got onto his bed first of all in his pyjamas.  He put on the old dressing-gown that he had since they moved to their present house - was it fourteen years ago.  Opposite his bed was a wall of curtains.

It brought to mind leaving on the train, the platform awash with couples parting. Duncan was two then, and Grace was pregnant. So much unknown.  He felt that mystification again now.  Then too there were fears of death.  It had been wartime, and they may never meet again ‑ lost forever. There was no space, to know what to say. Time had closed into a tight ball. The train had shuddered and jolted inches forwards and gradually it was pulling out of the station away, away. He looked at them looking, his wife, his little son. 

Deadened, he had sat back in a seat after waving from the carriage window, wondering how they would get on at home, making their lives without him.  The night had become dark he pulled down the blind over the window shutting out the other world outside. 

The long, limp hospital curtains now hung before him as if a screen for these old memories to play out upon. Then, that miserable journey, he had not slept on the hard horsehair seats. He jostled the unknown soldier next to him, supporting each other's upright balance. When he had got off the train and walked onto the early morning ferry to Larne the crisp air, and the blue-green deserted mountains chilled his spirit yet again.  This world was foreign, deserted. He had looked at the others as if they were zombies, as he felt himself, cut off from life, as they went aboard, all on the grim business of the war. They dispersed to the submarine bases, the anti-aircraft installations, the small aerodromes from where they tried to hunt the enemy submarines. They were tasting a kind of freedom, the freedom of loneliness it seemed. Belfast would become this mysterious new home. 

He placed the magazine, that Grace had bought for him, on the locker beside the bed, to remain as if it were his only memory. It remained unopened and now he almost felt a disloyal as if he were neglecting her thoughtfulness to him. He glanced at a few pages. Why did she have to buy these things. The people who write the columns will say anything, and he sucked the air through his teeth in disapproval.  It was important to keep his mind focused. Roaming through the junk of his memory... it served no purpose.  But there was so little going on in the ward, and his thoughts were darting to different things as he was  trying to sleep.  He had put the magazine away, ‘how was Grace managing the bolt on the front door?’  He should have seen to it long ago.  Now she would struggle with it on her own so far away.

What would the doctor find tomorrow! He owed it to Grace to let them find out what it was.  She was not worried; she always believed in his strength, reassured him it would be all right.  But no one knew. No one knew what was wrong; even the doctor had found it interesting. And, chilled by the thought of tomorrow’s investigation, he drifted into his first night's disturbed sleep.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The view was a monotonous November grey, some bare trees stood unmoving in the concrete compound of the hospital.  Inside, the pale curtains draped themselves against the aluminium frames of the picture windows. Each of the four beds in `C' alcove faced the world beyond where their inmates had come from.  Would any of them return out there? And if so for how long.  He had had 78 years, a goodly time.  But the last week had happened with such speed.  Investigations, what would they find?  Grace had packed the things he needed, and they had driven here, neither speaking, silently aware of an unknown future. Perhaps they had been ill-assorted for marriage, but neither of them dwelt on the thought. They had been happy - happy for them -  at least for these last 13 years since they’d moved here from London.  And at their age, you never knew how long it would go on.  They had silently driven along the coast, neither thinking those thoughts, though they were known, and both knew the other felt the same. Grace had left quickly. It was an opportunity to shop; practical as ever. Life as usual.  Grace was economical and opportunist.

 

Staff Nurse Timpton had moved in quickly and turned down the bed in crisp fashion to welcome his body. “Thank you, Nurse”'  She whisked off, her slipstream leaving Graham holding his pyjamas. 

“She's the best of them. said a voice from the bed beyond his, A ghastly pale face; a body motionless in bed. “She's like our boy's wife.” the voice continued.  “And they've both got a couple of young ones, about the same ages. Anthea, this one is called.  She doesn't like being joked.”  His strained features hardly looked capable of humour.  “She always comes when you want something - when it's her shift. They change over at one-fifteen.” Graham sat on the edge of his bed listening to this old boy.  He looked very near the end.  “Can you give me a shove up the bed?  It feels better like that,” he said heavily.  Graham did his best to pull the feeble body; “One of the vertebras,” he said briefly. “They say its given way.” The moist old eye in the worn skin looked him over shrewdly.  “Have we met before?”  Then he turned back to face the wall again, away from the damp grey outside the window. “I was Home Office,” he said as if to himself now, as if talking to his own pain, “for most of my time.” 

            

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He sat back on his own bed and the Nurse came round for routine checks, tightening the cuff on his arm. “Not much blood left in me, I expect,” he tried to be light-hearted.  She did not emerge from her heavy effort, so no response came. His mind flashed: the finger clutching his bare arm, the crimson varnished nail, so cruelly painted; where had she got nail-varnish in the wartime? Not that, he told himself; why did he still cling to that old memory.  The Nurse took the earpieces out of her ears.   

“She's a flighty one,” came the frail voice from the next bed. “Told me all about her boyfriends,” and with a despairing laugh, “as if I were interested. They have a different life nowadays.” He seemed exhausted by the thought and relaxed into silence.

They do things differently. Graham thought of Duncan; truly they did have it very different. He  hadn't wanted it for himself, and nor had he begrudged Duncan, well…  not until Duncan had let himself down. Graham sat still sinking into thoughts about Duncan.  It had been such a shock when it had first happened, and still a shock eight years on.  Lesley had come down with the grandchildren in a terrible state.  It had not been a question of understanding it; it simply could not be understood.  They did things differently.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The thoughts left a sense of doom and a tense damp feeling in his skin as if he had been sweating slightly.  He thought of Grace, at home, on her own.  He hoped she had locked up properly before she went to bed. He thought of Lesley, on her own, Duncan's wife, now ex-wife - since Duncan had left her... he had just walked out. That's what Lesley had said.  She just came down to Grace with the grandchildren. It had been inexplicable.  Ever since then it was as if everything had gone wrong with the family.  Somehow, they – he and Grace - had all got tangled up in the friction and quarrels.  Duncan had never been able to explain himself, and yet he had always been so responsible, a Doctor, one who knew about people, about children's upbringing.  Graham caught himself.  There was that little stirring in his stomach that he felt when one of his tempers was coming on.

Thoughts went round and round, stirring his living flesh, churning up emotions and moods that continually needed controlling.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He lay on his back staring. Duncan was middle-aged, and even middle age was different for Duncan's generation.  He seemed so boyish. Perhaps, for Graham, it had been the war years. That's what Grace had said - "We had the war, dear; they don't understand that.  It made us... serious.  More serious than they are now". Nowadays they do what they want. When Graham  was young, it was the economic depression, unemployment, insecurity.  Well, there is unemployment now; but look at the social security; it is a featherbed. In his own generation you had to work for everything. Nothing fell into your lap, and he was proud in his achievement. Not like that now; all this pushing and shoving and getting in first.  In those days, he had been able to feel closer to people. He would never have known Rose like that in any other circumstances.  It just shows, does it not? Why does Rose keep coming to his mind?

Even young and still at school, he had known that if he wanted to have some security, he would have to go out and work hard to get it.  He had gone to night classes and got his exams well enough.  The civil service was secure.  And he had saved to marry. They had bought their own house in 1933. There had been things that had gone wrong of course.  Grace's first child had been born a dead one; but the next year Duncan had come along and he had been healthy, more or less. Of course, he had worried them when he was three and nearly caught his death of a cold. It would have been a great blow. Grace might not have been able to bear it. She had been on her own then because he had gone back to his station, in Aberdeen, after the new baby, Tony, was born. She had not said a word to him about Duncan’s illness until the little chap was out of the critical phase.  He had been cross with Grace for not telling him - but proud of her at the same time for managing their little family on her own.  It made him feel that they, and the home, such as they had, was safe with her.  It had made it all the more difficult when he had found himself with Rose that evening.

The  nurses were beginning to stir. Those thoughts of his, the heavy and light thoughts of the past, seeped back into the underground of his mind. He felt set apart from these young ones.  He was tired and they should care for him.  Grace had always said it had been a hard life for them as a couple, and they had a right to enjoy themselves now he had retired - that was why they had moved down here to the south coast.  Of course, they had enjoyed themselves at times all through; he was sure of that. Though there had been rows and difficulties in the family.  Tony had been surly and difficult at times - and Duncan of course... he was the one for a fight.  But Grace had always been patient and tolerant.  She never lost her temper.  Why was it so difficult that she never lost her temper? It was the great asset the family had was Grace being so even-tempered.  He knew he was not so himself.  It often made him feel worse - but he must not complain.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sister Timpton sailed down the ward at about 7 o’clock. "Come along, Mr Dawson,” she called, “You really must get tidy in the morning,” and she swept by him.  The nurses, he had begun to realise, are at their hardest in the morning, as if they have to reassert their authority all over again for the coming day.  Graham did not feel disposed to go along with it. He noticed the boiling feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he resented that they should give him the problem of dealing with that turmoil there. But what could he do? His lips tightened. He asked when she expected the doctor to come round.  It was urgent in his mind. “We look after you in here,” she coolly replied, and as she did so, her hands went to the top of his pyjama trousers and started to roll them down.  He was surprised by the elegance of her fingers and the gentleness of her touch. He felt a warmth, though stern, as she peeled away the cloth.  “The doctor will come when you are ready to be looked at.” She pushed his pyjama jacket up from his tummy.  He was now exposed from his ribs to his hips in front of her. And she parted the curtains and bustled out. She left a gap in his privacy and occasionally, as he waited, he could see other patients moving around He lay back. 

He thought of his mother who used to use the same steamy and starched manner. At one time, he had lain for weeks when he had been ill as a child.  Just before the First World War, he remembered, because he was convalescing when war was declared.  He had developed such a weakness in his legs and a fever in his head.  Nobody knew what it was. They could only afford to have the doctor once.  He had shaken his head a few times and whispered to mother.  She had been stony-faced and said nothing to him after the doctor had gone. His feet had, ever after, tensed up into a permanent claw-like shape.  His mother had never said anything. Duncan had been very interested in the shape of his father's feet. As a student at his medical school, he seemed to think that there was something special about the feet. Graham had recalled that there may have been others in his family who had deformed feet, extra high arches.  Duncan had got to medical school, so clever, they had almost not known what to do with him; so clever he had made himself unpleasant. He could make them feel such fools.  Mother had said, had warned Graham, it was no good pushing Duncan along.  The child should find his own way.  But if he had the gift of intelligence, Graham thought surely it should be husbanded and brought out.  Perhaps he had made a rod for his back by encouraging Duncan.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He had had to wait all morning for the doctor to arrive. The afternoon began when it seemed the morning was only half-complete.  Lunch things were whisked away with a busy clatter and the thunder of the lift had echoed round the ward. A buxom nurse brought the bedpan.  She could make her body quiver in her starched uniform, which he did not like.  Some of the other men laughed and teased her like schoolboys. Men should control all that even if some women flaunted themselves.  Duncan must have been like that, letting himself notice girls.  It did no good in the long run.  Look where it had got him.

 

She bustled around the bed, tucked the laundered sheets tightly in again so that he was pinned frailly in bed like an invalid.  He felt managed in an old-fashioned way, his legs almost amputated by her enthusiasm with the sheets. “You had forgotten me,” he said morosely trying to be light about it. 

“Don't you worry about the Doctor,” she commanded.  “He'll come when he can.” The fresh creases of her uniform kept brushing against his fingers, or his cheeks.  He moved quickly aside from her close presence.  `Oh, sorry!  Did I knock you?” half mocking. “We're feeling a bit fragile today, are we?' with a momentary hint of quarrelsomeness in her voice, the slightest of threats. But then – “Don't you forget to call me when you want anything. Sister is off this afternoon, so I can make a fuss of you all today.” And she bustled off seemingly satisfied with settling him. But he felt very unsettled.The pain in his back was largely forgotten.  But sometimes it caught him off-guard as he turned, and then his head whizzed in a daze of wincing surprise. They had looked at his blood had told him it was "Myeloma".  Duncan had to explain.  But why should his blood hurt his back?  It did not stand to reason. 

In a stir, the air moved apart and the long ward was cleft by the speeding arrow of time as the Doctor, at last the Doctor, came straight towards him.  He homed like a missile towards his bed.  The Doctor made it no clearer; he said very little, and prodded his back as if it were hardly to do with Graham.  He was a stranger, and young and perhaps he was new.

In fact, the young doctor seemed more interested in the little nurse who was moving around him, fetching things, the blood pressure pump, or the tray with special instruments.  He told Graham there had to be more tests to look into his breastbone. Or his hipbone. He talked quickly and Graham felt inpatient.

He was proud of a long life he had lived.  Yet his two brothers, for ever his comparisons, and who he had outstripped all his life in all the achievements that meant anything, were both hale and hearty. What an irony if he, when he had done so well compared with them, should perish first.  The thought leapt darkly across his mind.  The thing to do was to wait until the consultant came round next.  Then he could know how long it would take them to get him better.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

“Your wife's here, Mr D,” the nurse said hardly bothering to put her head round the partition into the alcove.  Graham glanced back at his newspaper and then turned towards the opening into the alcove.  He put his pen down beside the bed and raised his hand carefully to take off his glasses. 

As Grace came into view he gave her a dignified smile, she pecked him on the cheek, “Hallo, dear.  You’ve got a paper, have you? I brought one in for you just in case. How are you?” she purred.  She made herself natural and at home beside his bed. “So, so,” he said noncommittally.

Graham looked at the basket she had brought and watched her bringing things out.  “It's very good of you,” he said warmly, familiarly. “There's a young chap along the corridor went down for papers.  A lot of the men in here smoke,”

I brought your dressing gown in,” she explained unnecessarily, “and your slippers.”  Grace's homeliness was infectious.  He remembered the separations from her in the wartime, coming home to quiet domestic routines, little Duncan always very serious, and the baby Tony who took up so much of Grace's time in those early days.  She would say the same then – “How are you dear?” 

And he would reply, “So, so,” never liking to tell her how he hated being away from home. 

And she would continue, straightaway “I've done some baked potatoes.  Come along Duncan, clear the table for me.  Daddy is ready to eat.  We'll all eat together today, shall we?”  Her quiet formal organizing never let out how relieved she was to have him back, perhaps she did not let herself know it exactly.  It had been a question of carrying on as normal for all of them in those days; the whole country did.  Grace had played her part, was be an exemplary model of the stoical spirit of wartime. 

Once, he had shown Duncan the gun out of his kitbag, and the small boy had looked carefully at it, not sure if it was a toy his Daddy had brought. It seemed his parents were anxious with it, “Be careful now”, his father had said.  Duncan had taken it thoughtfully as if a little overwhelmed.  Grace had looked out of the corner of her eye as she poured the tea into the cups. 

As soon as he had put it down on the tablecloth, she had said swiftly, “Drink up your tea, Duncan, there's a good boy. Let's show Daddy how grown up you are.” And Duncan had drunk his tea in small swallows, putting the cup down with a slight gasp for breath. His mother had said previously there was something important to talk about now he was five. He had started school and he could do many more things for himself, and could help with little Tony, and did not need to shout and cry anymore.

Graham had been proud of his eldest son.  Yet he sometimes felt a little uneasy about Grace’s way of talking to him.  He never knew exactly what it was about, Grace and Duncan being serious with each other, but he felt uncomfortable.  He had often told her to be more disciplining with the boy. Yet proud he was. And how glad that their oldest had in the end been a boy.  But that was another thought that had to be controlled. Grace would have thought of first baby, the dead one, them little girl. Grace would have been hurt by his thought.

Grace interrupted these reminiscences. She had sat in the robust hospital armchair, “Are they looking after you all right, dear?'” 

“Well enough,” he replied, “can’t grumble.  The food isn’t up to much.  But they're trying hard.” 

“Oh,” she replied. “They're trying hard, of course they are.  Dr Rees was so chatty wasn't he, in the clinic.  He took so much time with us.  To tell the truth,” Grace smirked, “I think the out-patient Sister got a bit fed up with the amount of time he was taking with us.”  Then she continued without a change in her voice, “Has he been round to see you yet?”

“No,” said Graham, “I only came in…” he thought “yesterday, wasn't it?”  He was suddenly slightly puzzled.  He felt he had been lying here for weeks.  “A young lady came round and took a lot of blood from my arm.” He said it partly to calm himself. “She used several syringes. I said to her ‘What are you going to do with it?’  She was from the pathological laboratory.  Anyway it’s someone else's blood isn't it; can't be mine after all those transfusions.”

“It's the pathology department,” Grace corrected him.  “Dr Rees said they would have to test your blood while your here. I don't see what it’s got to do with my back.”  Graham drew in his breath, “It's your bone marrow.”  Grace, still patient, “They have to test that, as well.  How is your back, dear?”  She could ride out his tetchiness by ministering her care. She looked down sadly to her lap where she was still holding the slippers.  She looked up again at Graham's face. “I thought I should ring Duncan last night, too.” 

 That would have been difficult for Grace.  He was grateful.  She always did the phoning, and he was glad she had dealt with Duncan.  He wished, for a reason that escaped him, that he had been able to speak to Duncan. Her eyes were slightly watery. “He seemed very touched,” she said, “He wanted to ring Dr Rees. Sort of doctor to doctor, isn't it?” She continued, somewhat coolly, “I expect he will.” There was a pause. “He said he will come to see you on Sunday, in the afternoon.” And she added, coyly, “I thought you wouldn't mind.”

Graham felt the knot in his stomach tighten.  What would he say to Duncan?  There was nothing to say. Yet there was everything.

Grace was looking at Graham in a plaintive. and slightly accusing way, “Don't get onto...,” she fumbled with her words, “don’t get into any arguments.” He knew he should not lose his temper. 

“He's too full of himself,” he snapped. “You would have thought he could control himself.  He’s 45 and still treats us like…” 

“Lesley said the grandchildren are fine.”  Grace blatantly stepped in, and Graham could see that she was trying to control his outburst before it happened.

But he wasn’t going to be controlled, and he turned up the pressure, “He has become too big for his boots. Doctor’s think they are tin gods,” he said crushingly. “I don’t mind who he is. If he wants to come and see me, he can. If he wants money, he can ask for it,” he raced on grandly. 

“Ooh,” Grace interrupted, “I am sure he only wants to see how you are”.  She tried to soothe the conflagration as if with an inflammable fire-beater.  Graham snorted as if nobody could add a worthwhile word to the crescendo of his implied accusations.  And then he stopped himself, as if realising that Duncan was not present, and no use if he was not present to hear it. 

Suddenly he found in himself how much he really wanted to talk to Duncan about all sorts of things. What changed in that instant? 

Later Grace was beginning to gather her things. He would be on his own. Always loneliness took him back to that moment… 

After she had gone, his thoughts turned naturally to being alone those years ago, away from home, his family trying to get away from bombed London. And when that secret had happened. That moment with Rose. He did his best never to think of it. But then, he had to tell Duncan something of how he understood what had happened, what Duncan had done.

He wanted more than anything to tell Duncan about it, to tell someone about it.  Duncan seemed the only one who could now listen.  But then….  Could he be as bad as Duncan?  He turned his thoughts away and that night he asked the nurse for something to sleep.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The day was bright.  The pale grey clouds were wisps in a clear blue sky. He ran his fingers through his hair.  It was greasy.  His heart ached now for those times which were surely gone.

            He wanted a bath, but simple amenities in the ward were difficult to arrange. His hair had always tended towards greasiness.  Normally, he would ply his hair with liquid paraffin to absorb the dandruff.  It was an old-fashioned remedy, but still the best perhaps. It always looked sleek, fashionable in those days  Grace used to complain of the smell. Somehow that had not mattered.  The smell soon went.  Rose had once suggested he should go to the doctor about his dandruff. That had been a long, long time ago, way back in the wartime.  He had looked at her, and she was not joking; she was worried for him.  He reassured her in the way that had always satisfied her. He used to smile, run his hand through his hair, then frown slightly as if he had it all in hand and had been thinking about the problem. She would smile, hold the bundles of letters or files in her hand, the robust skin of her working hands looked very capable.  He liked the practical no-nonsense style about her.  It reminded him of his mother. 

            The sun was progressing steadily round the corner of the far wing of the hospital building, like a ship rounding into the mouth of a harbour, like the fishing boats returning that time that he and Rose had walked down to the docks, in the evening after work.  They had both been shaken by the news of the plane that had gone missing on its way to the Orkneys.  He should have been on that plane and but for his flu he would have disappeared too.

            Somehow, they had gone for a stroll together outside the offices in Aberdeen. He had been transferred from Belfast, and there were two girls in office for the typing. Rose had a strong highland accent. He had decided to go to the shop downstairs for cigarettes. It happened that she had also been just going to the shops for something. So, in her bright manner, she suggested they wander outside. They found themselves at the waterfront and she had leant on the rail while he went for his cigarettes. Then he returned to her and they gazed in silence over the calm cool water. It was summer, even in the north here. She put her hand on his bare forearm for a moment. They had stood in silence watching the boats against the sky.  Then she smoothed his hair that was ruffled by the mild breeze off the sea in that calm summer dusk.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

After a couple of days, he had resigned himself to the routines of the ward. It was Tuesday. Duncan would be coming down on Sunday evening, all the way from London. Just to see an old man like this; it was surely not necessary.  What would he say to his son? Would he tell him? 

If only he had, on that previous occasion, when was it – five years ago, no seven, it must be – he considered when Duncan and Lesley had split up.  That previous time when Duncan had come down for the evening to talk together. It had been the right time. Duncan had been late on that occasion. Actually, it turned out he had not been coming at all until Graham had rung to ask what was happening.  Grace was away, giving her counsel to Lesley. The meal Graham cooked, was in the oven. And he did not arrive.  When Graham had rung, Duncan was as off-hand as ever. He never did give credit for what had been done for him all his life. Right from the start, he demanded and was given.  He simply took what was given from the word go. He did not even wash properly and had ended up with acne all over his face.

Graham had told him all these things. And look at what he had done with his marriage. Still just taking what he wanted, even in his forties. Graham was just coming home from the war when he was forty.  Their house had been destroyed by a bomb.  Even with the young family, Grace had just got a new house; done it all herself, she had been a wonder, and he had merely come home, ‘demobbed’ to meet his family safe and sound, perhaps the most wondrous moment of his life, or very nearly so. Apart from that other moment. Perhaps she had decided to go shopping just because she saw him leaving and wante to walk with him. He turned his mind away as usual. 

Duncan knew nothing of what they had been through all those years ago.  His life had been protected and so he always thought little difficulties were big ones.  When would he learn.  He would go back to Lesley. Grace was sure. But Graham felt that Duncan had to be put to rights about his weak character. It seemed at the time that he had listened to all that.  He had seemed chastened. And opening up a crack, he told Graham about his unhappiness.  He thought that Lesley did give him a decent life, or rather, what was it….  Graham turned the other way in his chair.  But… Sister Timpton was standing over him. She put him into bed in her formal manner. 

But, when he was settled again, and she has moved on to the next bed, his mind returned to that weekend. When Duncan had arrived for the talk, they went on till two in the morning.  Duncan could have gone on talking.  They had never really talked together like that, not before, not since. 

            But even that long might had done nothing to get him back to Lesley.  It seemed he did not want to go back.  It seemed he wanted it easy. For the first time, Graham had a doubt in his mind about whether Grace was right.  Duncan wouldn’t go back, and Graham knew it. It felt conspiratorial. It had been a precious moment, for both of them.

            Perhaps he knew more of what Duncan felt than he had realised.  There was that time, so long ago now, the touch of skin. They both knew it perhaps. So different from everything else. Rose had wakened his own skin too.  Could he tell Duncan some time.  That would weld their link.  It would be the first time he had told it to anyone.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sister Timpton was on duty again.  He felt his inside grinding with scorn. “Now we are not going to get in the way of the nurses, are we?” she growled. 

“No”, piped Graham in an acquiescing manner which he would never have allowed himself to deliver, except that it quite automatically came out of him.  He felt all that way back to being a little boy again when his mother demanded to know what he had learned at school.  “Nothing”, he had often whispered, because it had been the easiest way of finishing the conversation without receiving the full voltage blast that seemed to be pent up in her waiting for him.

            He felt foolish, and he wandered grumpily to the stairs. A cleaner was scrubbing them equally joylessly and he slunk over her cleaned patch leaving the inevitable footprint tracks in his wake, without a word of apology that he might normally have given her.  She was, he thought to himself, a foreigner and not, therefore, like himself and his kin. Black people should know their place, he thought ungenerously. The problem is that these days people do not know how to be satisfied.

He was always argumentative as a lad, aggressive and argumentative.  Duncan is the same. There had been those scenes, abusing his mother, never a word to his father about any of this business, and now scarring the children for the rest of their lives.  Well, it was some years ago, but he kept it up even now. 

            How did he turn out like this? Graham pictured Duncan as a baby gurgling and chuckling when he was tickled, and what a concentration he had as soon as one put something interesting  into his hand, his teddy bear or a shiny teaspoon or whatever. Surely that was a sign of his intelligence. Why couldn’t he see how things had to be?  What a waste he had made of his life!

            In the morning. the air carried plumes of people’s breath outside the entrance doors of the hospital. Inside the foyer, turned and approached the shop. Grace had told him to get some paper handkerchiefs.  They were more practical than using his own and sending them home with her for washing and ironing.  How could he ever approach Duncan?  He had always shown contempt for his father – Graham sighed again, and he felt for the coins in his dressing-gown pocket.  Grace always said to him not to talk to Duncan; it never did any good. What had all his efforts to talk to Duncan achieved?  His old hands held the coins for the young lady in the shop as if he were a child spending his precious pocket money.  He let her take it, and silently took the newspaper and the tissues, holding them to his chest like part of his body.  He began to climb the stairs again.  It gave him exercise, he told himself, and it passed the time. 

            He looked down at his gnarled old hands carrying his things.  His thoughts flicked to Rose, when she had touched his arm. He thought whether she had touched his hand too.  Not then gnarled, old, and frail. She had touched a man’s hands that had then moved and felt different.  She had told him not to get so fretted and ruffled by the sergeant in charge.  Her face burned indelibly into his memory, her touch.  She had smoothed his hair for him.  Duncan had once said that loving and touching were the same. It touched a chord. Remembering his words somehow helped. It touched the link that they had had. When Duncan came at the weekend, there would be an opportunity to complete one of the unfinished scenes of his life, a scene that had been properly sentenced to abortion, and never properly carried out, and now perhaps he could honour his memory and Rose too, just before it might be too late.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sunday afternoon arrived and Duncan walked in, in a relaxed manner down the floor to Graham’s bed.  The large plate glass windows were darkening as the day outside dimmed.  The evenings were drawing in.  They shook hands warmly and firmly and Graham pointed him to the chair, but Duncan insisted on sitting on the bed, awkwardly; the invalid should sit in the comfort of the chair, They ended up both perched on the bed, one on either side. Duncan looked strained and enquired about his father’s health and comfort.  He had contacted Dr Rees by phone in the week  who said only the things that Graham already knew.

            Father and son found they could talk to each other.  It became fairly relaxed, but conversation rambled around Graham’s illness, the life on the ward, Duncan’s work, the journey down from London. “The doctors say I may go home on tomorrow – or Tuesday.  But the nurses don’t know.  They never say anything.  I don’t think they know very much”. 

“Ma will be glad to have you back again. She’s always worried.  She’s looking for a local gardener, someone to keep the garden going, she said? There must be plenty of people around. If she can find the right one.”

“I’ve lost a bit of height.  Have you noticed. 

“You’re shorter because the vertebrae of your back have got a bit squashed.”  Duncan demonstrated a squashing motion between the palms of his hands Graham took little notice.  Duncan always knew something; he was always telling you something.  But how did he know what was happening.  No-one around the hospital seemed to. Duncan looked blank in his eyes. He probably did not know quite what to say. Perhaps he thought the illness was a serious one and did not like to go on describing it.

            Graham changed the subject, going back to the garden. “We had some wonderful lettuces this year. The wet weather came at the right time.  I suppose you don’t take a lot of interest in gardening.”

“No.  We don’t have a garden in London. Lesley was keen on growing things in pots.  We had back extensions to the house, and terraces on various levels.  She grows lots of flowers in spring and summer.” Duncan seemed pleased to tell him. But now he lived in another house, in another part of London; how long had he been there?  Graham had never visited.  There was a silence.  Both knew that what he said about Lesley was now in the past, a dark boundary separating from the present. A sad moment crossed his heart.  And such a distance from his son, too; such a gap to bridge. 

He searched for something to say.  “How is the little girl?  Milly? 

“She’s three and a half, now.” 

“Is she really,” Graham was surprised. The little girl would see so many things he would not, and he had seen so many things that would mean nothing to her.  Where would there be any common interest? There was some strain between them. What did Duncan want to talk about? – not ordinary things. How could he recreate that precious link, step across that gap – could he do it again? He turned his head and a mass of tumbled and panicky thoughts sped away into a vacuum unexpressed and inexpressible between them.

            He turned his mind to the present, again, “Did you speak to Dr Rees?  He’s a very nice chap.  He does explain things to us.” 

“Yes, I did,”  Duncan nodded. “I think they know what they are doing. 

“Yes,” Graham responded doubtfully “I don’t know if they know what is wrong with me.”  He started off in his lecturing style. “The body is such a complicated thing.  They are so pressed with so much going on.  The young lad here - he’s a registrar to Dr Rees, a young Indian chappy. He is around till ten o’clock some nights  He told me yesterday that there was no room for me now.  I should be leaving. I said that Dr Rees expected me to stay till Monday.  I haven’t got my clothes.  Your mother will have to come in with my things.  It was late in the afternoon yesterday by then. The young chap didn’t look pleased. There seems to be some mix up about whose bed I’m in. Apparently, this is Dr Stephen’s bed. He laughed at the incompetence.

“I expect they have a pressure on beds at the moment.” 

“Well,” Graham continued in a slightly triumphant way, “This is Dr Stephen’s bed.  So, I’m told,” and he shrugged his shoulders in a dismissive way. He looked disconsolate too, as if heavily resigned to some sort of defeat which he had somehow deserved. Duncan said no more about it and looked either puzzled or uninterested. 

            He looked at his watch and said that he had to drive back to London, Graham felt he had lived through his moment that was special without it being that moment at all.  A sadness surprised him, but he left it aside. Duncan discussed the journey times. He hesitated and said, “Dad, I wanted to know how you feel.  That’s why I came down today.”  He hesitated, “I suppose I wanted to know if you find yourself thinking about what is happening - you know what I mean – with your illness.” 

Graham replied almost automatically, “It’s best not to think about these things.  I don’t want to worry Grace. You know.” He began again, in his pompous style, ‘We are all getting older. One could depress oneself if one let oneself think about it.”  Duncan waited for him to finish. Then he began making his farewells though they did not know if they would see each other again. They said goodbye as if there had never been an estrangement, and as if this was a regular weekly visit between father and son. He walked with Duncan slowly down the ward.  They were affable.  Graham felt relieved, embarrassed now by the thought of his self-revelation which thankfully had not materialised. It felt strangely like a release from a pressure in him to confess something to someone.

            He watched Duncan walk towards the stairs whilst he remained standing at the door of the ward. He felt so pleased and proud that his son had been to see him, his son a successful doctor in London.  As he turned away a peculiar dark colour spread across his mood like a filter removing part of the day’s light.  He did not know what this meant.  He tried to turn his thoughts to more sensible things.  He hoped he had advised Duncan best on the route back to London. Tomorrow, Grace would come in the afternoon.  There would be no need to buy a Sunday paper.

In the morning he crawled stiffly to the bathroom and washed and shaved slowly.  When he came back, he asked Nurse James what he could do to help.  It had become a routine in the morning to help with simple things so that the ward could get going early in the day.  Nurse James looked harassed.  He straightened the blankets with her like a child helping mother.  She thanked him as a mother would whose child is more trouble helping then if he was playing by himself.  She bustled off.  He returned to his bed.  It was Sunday. 

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

 “Bad mood this morning?” she chirped in a manner that was not a question but a dismissal. 

“Night was a bit disturbed.” He conceded. 

“Did you take your night sedation?” The flirty nurse asked. 

They were still waiting for the pathology tests.  The last one would be done today.  The doctor said he would come and do a marrow biopsy.  It meant boring into his hip bone.  He tried not to think about it.  He would be coming to the end of his stay. He felt a sort of glow.

The ward was quiet for a moment. Time was dragging. He slid off his bed again and sauntered along the ward looking for someone to have a word with.  One of them perked up a bit when he approached.  “The wife was saying last night she recognised you, Graham – from the dancing, isn’t it?” 

Graham nodded. “Well,” Graham began modestly, “we’ve been going for years.  It is good for you, keeps you fit.”  He did not mention the nostalgia he and Grace always felt for their youth when they had been so keen on dancing.  The times when they had been courting, in fact, they had met originally at a dance. The civil service rowing club had a Christmas dance way back.  He could not remember exactly whilst he was talking to this man. It must have been 1930, say. Graham was reticent about the memories.  “Times have changed.  Things are not he same”, he offered, wanly. The man went into a rush of eager details, and a wish to prolong the contact.  Graham felt imposed upon, a garrulous old man, he thought, and began to pull away.

            “Did you hear what happened in the night to Frank?  Frank, in the bed just here.”  The man gestured to the next bed.  Graham felt annoyed at being held on to, but also, he was curious in a fearful way.  If he had avoided talking about the past too much because he was afraid of being drawn into his own thoughts and feelings, he was also fascinated in a repelled sort of way about the future, and what might be happening to him – like the others here.  One day someone would look at the bed he had been sleeping. Until that moment when he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t think, He knew the man was going to say something dreadful about what had happened to Frank in the night. 

Graham had not known Frank, but he knew he would be affected by anything that happened to any of them in his ward.  The man continued in detail.  “It must have been after midnight.  There was a bit of a commotion.  I hadn’t properly got to sleep.”  It came tumbling out.  “Frank looked blue.  He dropped his glass of water on the floor.  There wasn’t that much in it, because I had checked it for him before lights out.”  He seemed jittery as he spoke. Graham did not take any notice. He was waiting of an impending horror, looking at the now empty bed.  “I got hold of the alarm bell and pushed and pushed, because I thought – ‘This is it for Frank’.  The nurse came, the black girl, at the double.  I’ll give her her due.   She was here in a flash, took one look and rang for the trolley team.  She was back in an instant, and we got him flat on the bed and the curtains pulled around.  I held his wrist for her while she rushed off to the clinical room and came back with a trolley full of all the things they use.  I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.”

            Graham made a consoling nodding movement of his head; he knew it had been the sleeping pill.  And he had already anticipated the end of the story and supposed that Frank was dead. There was no stopping the flow of anxious talk that masqueraded as brave assistance to the nurse.  Graham was relieved that at that moment another man strolled up to them, to see what was being talked about in this tense way.  Graham looked up as if help had arrived in the nick of time.  The anxious old man was rattling on and Graham could now fade away, and slide off.  When he had heard enough to be sure of Frank’s final outcome, he extricated himself and left the other two to swap disaster stories.

            He remembered those dead men. They had never been found. There had been a suspicious incident in the Orkneys.  It was suspected that some enemy parachute troops had landed to keep an eye on the navy’s movements.  Six men from the office had been detailed to go up there to support the police investigation, but the plane had disappeared in a storm just off the coast. There had been a lot of speculation. It had prayed on his mind. There had been a quiet man who Graham had begun to feel friendly towards. They had been going together – until Graham’s flu.

            The plane was missing, and there was a strange silence for a day or so. People spoke in hushed tones.  The typewriters clacked away inhumanly.  They had all seemed to come together in spirit, like the coming together of a congregation at the communion service. Rose did most of his work, and she reported to him all the news that there was – very little – or rather she reported to him the lack of news.  After a couple of days, people began openly to talk of the death of their colleagues. They talked of the deaths in war in general.  Rose had lost her father in the First World War, when she had been a very little girl. They would sometimes go for drinks all together after that when the work finished for the day, and the duty office could be on call from the bar.  It was just one evening when most of the people were off for the weekend, and the duty officer had been called back that he and Rose found themselves together again. She had moved along the pub bench to him, “Let’s go down to look at the harbour,” she had said.  Then he too had wanted to get away from the tense atmosphere. It was no good thinking about these morbid things.  So, she had taken him to look at the harbour at night. Quickly he was compelled to excuse himelf.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Eighteen months later, Graham died after a considerable period of great pain.  Rose who had not thought of him for many, many years knew nothing of that timid, blustering man the war had thrown across her path momentarily, who had brushed her arm with such an electric signal to both of them, and who had blushed every day thereafter when they had been in the office together on their own.  She knew nothing of the thoughts he had harboured and puzzled over down the years, the thoughts that had been rekindled by his son’s own unblushing passions.  She knew nothing of the unadmitted wistful longings that the frail glance of her skin against his had coloured his years in between.  She did not know that they had finally been snuffed out in the midst of pain, during which she had been most thought about.  And even if she had known, she would not have remembered that tiny moment that had seemed so natural to her and which had seemed so unnatural to him.  She never knew she had created that moment so that it had lasted in the darkness of his shame for so long.  She would have marvelled at the prolonged memory it had lived in him for so long like an exotic butterfly confined forever to its chrysalis. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dolmades again

 

They remembered their wedding anniversary every year. Her greying hair was given a special sheen.

 

The young girl could pout her cleavage in an unself-conscious way.  She dressed glamorously, and to the point, for all her customers. But it was not her beauty, or not only.  She had an open naivety that charmed without being loud. He later told himself he had fallen in love that first moment she shyly met him.  It was in the manner of frightened modesty, and it plucked his heart right out and gave it to her.  Such a contrast with the wilful demands of his wife.

            The young girl offered massage, that was all. If he asked for more, she made it seem it was her choice.  Her customers adored it.  Probably she was very much younger than his 50 years.  She could have been anything from, say, 17 to 34.  She would never tell him.  He knew it was, in a way, her calculated ploy.  But it worked and he knew it did so.  She did not mind him spending money on her extravagantly.

 

Stuffed vine leaves, four small turds lying tidily next to each other in the supermarket pack.  She transferred them to an equally neat line-up on a plate for the microwave.  ‘A tin of ratatouille,' she called out and he rose on the other side of the kitchen table to inspect the wall cupboard for the required tin.  Obedient and predictable, the lives of these two married 50-year-olds had plaited themselves into one.  'Good,' he called back, as if he anticipated her cuisine with relish. The television buzzed away like a flock of insects, inhabiting the next room; he slouched through and flopped onto the couch agile for his age.  He was slim and well-kept for his 51 years.  She, lithe and elegantly tinted and carefully casual in her dress, she likewise considered herself to be keeping pace with a distinguished ageing. Her use of face cream, highlights in her coiffure, and comfortably tensioned bra reassured her.

            His desultory attention took in the item on black-holes.  Ostensibly it was matter for advertising copy - to be stored in the back of his mind ready for the required moment.

            But he felt momentarily unnerved.  Sucked through into that alternative universe of perfect images he created, he would live dangerously - kindly and predictably supplied on the supermarket shelves.  It was his work to sell, till such shelves emptied, raided by millions of suburban wives, just like his own.  'How about this, he called to her in the kitchen, ' "Sucked through the black hole into a world without caries".  Or, how about, "Sample the world of odour-free breathers" '.

            She went to the hairdressers once a week and was trim beyond belief, she turned heads in their local Tandoori.  There, sexuality was clean and orderly and regulated carefully by her diary.  She disapproved of the libertarian television and had campaigned herself against the drift towards nudity and explicit swearing.  She enjoyed the news, sipping the last part of her single glass of Chianti, because she could tense the corners of her mouth and press her lips into each other at the antics of various criminals, perverts and politicians; at the contradictions they got themselves into, at the low tricks of sportsmen; at the greedy salaries of possessed businessmen.  She lived as if already transposed into that world of oral hygiene and perfectly formed bosoms, without the need to admit to the methods used. Because she believed their income to be suitably modest, she tutted her tongue at the ostentatious Japanese cars of the neighbours.  She could glance at the netted windows of the pseudo-gothic 'villas' and tell simply by her expert intuition where their holidays were booked this year.

            'Darling,' he said, as she pushed the dolmades delicately around her plate, 'where do you want to go this year?  I heard about Delos.  Do you know, nobody is supposed to spend a night there, its a superstition from the ancient world?'  She concentrated on her plate and the screen - 'No point in booking there then,' she replied seriously.  'No,' he said impatiently.  'When I was in Athens on that trip, I heard about it.  You stay on the next island and take trips.'  She responded, simply, 'Oh!' as if in receipt of religious wisdom. Her lips had pursed at the memory of his trip.  He had gone on his own, about his business; and given her a sense of something moving out of her control.

            It was a moral universe she moved in, and expense-account trips, even without his secretary (oh, the thought!) were beyond the pale.  The thought, in fact, was that the male is the weaker sex, easily bent and broken by scheming young women.  In her heart of hearts, she knew he was not that sort of man.  He was loyal to her till the end of time, she knew.

 

When he met the young girl, she was just a tart.  Probably 25 years younger than him.  He was aware of his narrowing shoulders, the wrinkles in his skin like a plastic bag, though being proud he had remained moderately fat-free where these things matter.  He was up in London, the bad city.  The place where money dazzled and corrupted.  He no longer told his wife his earnings; she would have thought him the equivalent of a muscle-bound athlete who took steroids instead of sufficient exercise. Money sloshed around his bank account, like fish in a trawler's hold.  He bought the young girl a flat - for her work!  She had been enthusiastic, she was the best in the business.  She was straight, she had sworn so.  It was massage, the relaxation businessmen needed. There was nothing suspicious, there was good business to be had.  They would be partners.  Her skill, their fees, his investment.  He had allowed himself to be led in.

 

Because it was his own firm, he could pay himself anything, anything at all. He never told her.  The tightly curled and hair-dressed crown was her only luxury she told herself. She scraped for the maid to clean, to do the supermarket shop, to pay for the catering for their social occasions.  She complained at the expense of everything, of profligate comrade shoppers who spent money like water, at extravagant neighbours with their gadgets for gardens and new-registration cars.  She heard these stories of monetary extravagance each week in the hairdresser's, and each week she reported to him, when she had his listening ear.

 

He could pay the girl for her lost earnings, to travel with him - to Rome, to Florence, to Nice.  The girl would always demur, would hesitate and protest, and then come.  She did not worry about being paid to come, like a common courtesan, but it was his intentions that worried her.  She sought her independence; she would take care to keep it intact.  She had her massage business, and paid her bills.  But she had ambitions to wealth, and a life all to herself.  She had perfect features, a slightly enhanced bust, which contrasted with her slender hips.  Massage demanded as much skin exposure as possible.  If her customers wanted to pay for a little extra satisfaction, then she merely thought of her savings at the building society.

 

He was always amazed at the practicality that was involved in intimacy: his wife's careful hygiene, this girl's pecuniary ambitions.  The girl sought fame and money as a squirrel its winter harvest.

 

He sought intimacy with beauty.  He had the money to buy it, but he lacked the glamour to inspire the girl away from her pedestrian ambitions.

            The girl came on a couple of trips with him. Florence - his wife had said she had seen it before; there were the children too (though grown-up now) to look after.  The girl by contrast was impressed.  The hotel overlooked the fiume Arno, it was beside the Uffizi gallery.  But she enjoyed the shops.  Already in her mind she was getting rich on importing to London, the fabulous leather goods - buying there and selling in London.  Her own trips to Florence.  She gave him his pleasure in bed for the cost of the expenses, and she believed then her debts were paid.  Without wishing it, her unmoved independence inflamed his devotion to her perfect beauty.  Though he knew she did not feel the same - perhaps because of it - the whole relationship was much less complicated than with his wife.  It was simply wants and needs.  Guilt and obligations faded out.  That's why he pursued it.  And pursue it he did.  His wife's practical concentration on house and garden, above all garden, allowed him to dream his dreams of a new life, a new world, a new universe - a passage through the looking-glass, the universe beyond.

 

He spent most of his time with his wife.  They gardened sometimes at weekends.  She enjoyed friends on Saturday evenings, the flourish of supermarket bottles of wine, the fashionable book of recipes, the cut-glass candelabra for the table which they had bought on their honeymoon in Venice twenty years ago.  He liked the fuss around him of housekeeping, the regularity of the chores with the washing-machine, putting out the bin-bags, watering the geraniums.  They talked forever about why the exuberant wisteria never flowered.

            Like all designers he believed his job to be a creative one, yet a hazy satisfaction always clouded his thoughts about his job as he rushed hurriedly to complete everything. Without knowing it, he sensed the looking-glass world beyond the darkened edges of his routines. 

 

Is that why the young girl had been hastened into his life?  The need to stop for relaxation, her insistent line to allow himself to be 'treated like a king', the obvious good sense of entrusting his tensioned body to massage.

            She was an 'ingenue', unread, and deferential; and also a planning and determined woman in business.  It was the contradiction of her near-perfect beauty, her musical laugh, and her spontaneous pleasure in the complements she was always getting, together with the gut-clenching despair of her situation. It was when, as is familiar, a recession came, spare money disappeared, and novelty became a premium in her profession, her profits slipped away.  Her contribution to their expenses began to slip away too, at first without telling him. He was suddenly faced with covering bills that were late, responding to a letter threatening the court.  He was jolted by her lack of response.  She became clogged and not innovatory.  He had always relied on imagination, a flair for the new - and indeed the young girl might herself have been just such a venture for him.  She on the other hand relied on perseverance, sticking to what she knew and had always done. 

      Her customers faded to a trickle.  Money, her route to perfect independence and acclaim, was closing itself off, into an abject reliance on him.  She became depressed, though her beauty never suffered.  She inhabited great expanses of silence; her features seemed to waste away, like a torn artery.  Her indebtedness mounted, a growing obstacle to her cherished aloneness.

            Here, it seemed, was a man in love with a girl like a dream; but he was tied to the dull loyalty to his wife and her morality. There, she seemed, the young girl, her independence of spirit cruelly broken; and he could set her going only heaping her with the one thing she wished to avoid - her reliance on his money. Could he abandon domestic loyalty and reach through the looking-glass reflection - beyond that black-hole and grasp his true love?  Could she, the young girl, abandon her dreams, and greet the obligations of being supplied by the money she needed to use?

            Little by little he edged towards this crux-of-the-matter.  It was a one-way tug-of-war, as she said so little, week after week.  He nudged forwards.  Where he was aimong, in slow motion, was that he and she both gave up something.  It is symmetry, his dependence - on his wife, suburbia, regularity; hers on independence, her talents turned to gold.  In exchange he would have the girl he loved and she the money.  Her morose posture, sank in an inelegant, crumpled armchair, spoke indifferently.  Her delicate perfect mouth never moved, the shock of black luxuriant hair was as soft and untouchable as a wig.  If she could slump more, without movement, she did so.  Then gathering her energy into her long legs, she would suddenly rise out of the chair, and clack her way across the parquet floor, to return to him with a cheap brown envelope.  “It's all I've got for you,” she said in an expert bland apology and indifference.  “But,” he spluttered, as she put it into his hand and he glanced inside at a then wadge of notes, “but you can't afford it, can you?” She was suddenly sitting down again, and she answered flatly, “No.”  She resumed her dejection, “It's only two.”

            Two hundred pounds - he checked.  It was awkward.  The sum meant nothing to him, hardly noticeable.  Yet it was a huge generosity for her.  He imagined her foregoing meals, walking the miles home.... He pocketed the envelope, “You're a good person.”  He tried to match the generosity.  “Well. I've got to pay my debts.  Try to....” and tailed off in a kind of hopeless struggle - not so much the generosity, he saw more of her determined self-reliance.  He wanted to gather her up in his arms, a helpless doll, and reassure her that it was alright, he could take care of everything.  Yet, he knew, that was just what she did not want to happen to her. She preferred her miserable independence to comfort and a worry-free life tied to him.  He felt momentarily frantic about how to help.  Then he looked at her prominent cleavage she always arranged for those stay-away customers she waited for - you tart, he thought.  It made him feel less responsible.

 

In the night, he changed his view.  His prim and wooden wife sleeping silently next to him never moved.  The girl could be won around, he was sure.  If he gave her enough freedom whilst possessing her; if they lived in their flat whilst she went wherever she wanted with whoever she wanted, to do whatever they wanted.  She would probably say, yes.  Wouldn't she?

            He was driven. Always to her.

            After weeks of regular visits, talking to her fractured spirit, but it brought no answer.  Sometimes for distraction, she put on the TV, a tale from the sensational press.  Sometimes an occasional small repayment of debt.

            This young beauty needed to be told, not asked, given instructions on her part to play - selling the flat, handling the business issues for him, whilst he tied up the loose ends of marriage career, friendships.  He would tell his wife last of all, when the air-tickets were bought, when the apartment became ready in Rome (where all the most elegant women are taken and celebrated, he said).

            Compliantly she did as she was told.  But her indifference, her lack of curiosity remained an impenetrable screen, a looking glass painted over with no reflection, no response.  It was simply the case that as she had subsided into anguished inertia, he must make the moves and bring her along to salvation.  She had not even been to see the rather spacious apartment he had found in the Via Sardegna, near the Villa Borghese.  She knew nothing of the lucrative way he had wound up his affairs, even though he used their flat as his accommodation address.  There were multiple copyrights to assign internationally, he had to sustain his portfolio, or sell the sub-interest.  Instead, she had insisted on manning her own station to the end.  In fact, she had never once, categorically, in so many words, said she would be coming on this rescue plan.  It was only late on that he even heard about her young child.

 

Up to the day in question, he had not told his wife.  The secret acts of making-ready had - perhaps unfortunately - been too successfully secret. So far as he could tell, she knew nothing of his fevered and methodical planning.  On the day in question, he rose earlier than usual.  He had to be awake and prepared and seize hold of the opportunity over breakfast.  He waited, normally he would have left home before 8 for work, but he waited on till 9. She had still not left her bedroom. He realised that he had no idea when she normally got up.  At 11, he had arranged to pick up the young girl, and her baggage, including the daughter. To his surprise when his wife came down the stairs and into the breakfast room, she was red faced, her nose dribbled and she was carrying a half-empty bottle of vodka.  She was equally surprised to see him still in the house.  Despite being already drunk, she reacted with guilt and embarrassment.  But that quickly changed to a defiant fury, and she told him to get out of the house.  He retorted in his discomposure by rattily shouting that he was going away anyway, triumphantly as if winning some argument.

            'Go - for good!' she flung at his back.  And he went, his two remaining suitcases stowed already in the boot of his car.  They had never exploded in such a row before.

            It was not the parting he had imagined.

            He drove slowly, depositing the keys of their flat at the agents for a sale when they had done their work.  And then he got lost on his way to the anonymous district where the young girl lived.  He was late when he eventually approached the spot she had told him to pick her up. There she stood, a huge floppy grip on the pavement beside her.  He had known she would come.  A curious sense of completion overcame him.  He felt a kind of paralysis.  As she had never ridden in his car, she did not recognise it edging down the High Street amidst the traffic.  There was nowhere he could possibly have stopped where she had said.  And he glided by with a frozen stare, in his suddenly blank and automatic eyes.  But the child beside her noticed.  The little daughter, perhaps 6, had never seen her mother's friend, so she did not understand this man's stare.  Her small blue eyes merely stared back at the wooden expression in the unknown car.

            His car carried him on the flow of traffic, leaving behind the impossible choice he thought he had made.

 

The vodka bottle was empty when he arrived back; his wife incoherent.

Not bloody dolmades again.  Ever since that Greek restaurant they had gone to with Chuck and Babs, she had thought it chic and aspired to go continental.  The supermarket packet called them 'stuffed vine-leaves'.  For those who did not know the Greek word.  And the packet announced a 'meal for two' - that is, for each one of them, there were two thready black fingers looking cold and unspeakable in their plastic tray.  She asked him for a tin of ratatouille from the cupboard above his head. She liked him sitting in the kitchen watching him work away at the supper for them both.  That way she could feel in charge, and also rather generous, feeding and providing.  Then she told him to go and watch the television.  Because he was a designer, in advertising, she knew he liked to watch the commercials and pinch their ideas for his work.

            There was a slick documentary, sliding in between announcing sensations, and giving information.  Through a black hole, and out the other side is a new universe, a looking-glass image, where light is rays of darkness, and energy is weight.

            He could use such images.  Sucked through the hole, a bit like a tunnel, into the intimate perfection of the glossy world he sold.  His was the job of an interstellar travel agent pushing people through their tunnel of love to paradise.  “How about this?” he called to her distant bustling in the kitchen, “Sucked through the hole into the world without caries.”  He felt satisfied with his idea, hopeful of her polite admiration.  "Graphics - I think black-and-white graphics of a mouth with teeth, and a hole in one of them.  You see.  The mouth sucks, and you are squeezed through the slithery hole into a glitzy world of colour.  Toothbrushes going in and out of mouths just like the hole.”

            It seemed so easy.  Another storyboard to write up tomorrow.  But right now, he was beamed through into his housewifely wife's dream world.  Dolmades and chips. Her trimness of body, her purity of mind, her weekly visit to the hairdresser, who trimmed her and purified her tints.  She turned women's heads in the local Tandoori Indian.  The expense of her bloomed hair made her careful in bed, and planned by her calendar to be trim.  Often she would go happily from an explicit programme on television, to wipe away the perfume and powder from her shocked cheeks, and turn her stern back towards her husband.  The evidence that sex was a national habit made her do her bit in defiance. He was deferential.  Without disagreeing with her, he knew that he would have a harder job if adverts did without body-parts.  One step even worse for her was the evidence day after day of money and greed that sickened her, she said.  She watched the news, her sensitive nostrils alert for the cupidity of businessmen lining their offshore pockets, a category of human that she associated with criminals and assassins, the dishonesty of politicians and the unsportsmanship of sportsmen.  All for personal gain and unworthy worldly riches.  She aspired, and claimed. a higher moral universe sharply outlined by oral hygiene, starched styles of dresses, a hairdresser’s curlers and not too up-to-date technology. 

            She could never have guessed the income he made. She could never have done so as it would have shamed her; and restricted all those sharp comments about the neighbours for flaunting incomes in their garden furniture, cars and ready-to-erect house extensions.  But they flaunted only a tiny version of what he could if he had wanted, and she had known. 'Darling,' he asked her, as she sat next to him whilst they watched the adverts over their individual plastic trays, 'we could go to Barbados this year.'  Her body managed to freeze at this suggestion without actually moving. She had remembered a trip of his, something to do with bathing costumes.  He had to write a line 'a one-piece sunshine' - though in the end it had not been used.  He had gone on his own - as if out of the grip of her control.  She had imagined hot brown tropical girls in Barbados getting in and out of bathing costumes in front of him.  Despite this gripe and disapproval, which she felt in the bottom of her abdomen, she knew he was in fact a faithful husband.  “Here, I am,” he would say, “my heart full of love. Feel it.” And he stroked her back prominently placed facing him on the other side of the bed   He would always make it humorous – “What do I get - a boney backbone in my face!!”  She might roll over and look witheringly at him, in the dark.  Sometimes she would clutch her pale winceyette nightie to her throat and let him kiss her on the cheek, perhaps on the side of her neck.  “Good job I'm turned on by that backbone.  Not many chaps have a thing about backbones.” She liked to be kissed below her ear, happily turning back wrapped in  safety inside her winceyette.  He was a good man, she believed, he never demanded more than he should.  He however would thank her, and inwardly curse - either her, his wife, or the tingling in his loins.

Thinking as he did, about his generation, when they were young.  Death seemed a faraway intruder, one that came as an unnecessary misfortune to those who did not take care.  His own carelessness, with car-driving, diet, sport and drugs, did not come into his calculations then.  It was satisfactorily beyond so many intervening milestones it could to all intents and purposes be discounted.

But his generation reached middle-age, though no-one quite said so. No-one got up one morning and said: This is it; middle-age today.  Birthdays simply came and went without stopping, like an inter-city train passing through featureless country halts without a glance.  Little noticeable signs: worries about the children's schooling, creaking joints, grandchildren, snapshots of forgotten holidays; were nonvocal messages, straws that were not yet the last one, nor even quite the penultimate. Early retirements came and, as everyone says, life got busier.  Everyone says so to prove that life's energy is getting stronger - not weaker.

            Now weaker, the buffers at the terminus are reaching forward for the express train.  It is no longer his generation, the wise pundits on TV, the politicians, the psycho-journalists are now a new generation.  There are those few of us still left, and who can still move our limbs, who now and again meet, almost irrelevant to the jungle of new life going on around us.  There is a new friend for each of us, death itself.  We find, at last, that it has been an old friend for as long as any of us can remember.  It reaches out to us, generously.  It feels like a mother's embrace.

            Oh.  The long trail of life behind.  It is never the same.  As we advance, we change perspective and the world glows differently from beyond.  The cold world gets warmer, the further we advance to look back.  Or, the warm patches merge.  The past glows in an unexpected satisfaction now.  That time of the missed turning, has become a curiosity about the unknown, a what-might-have-been luxury; no longer a regret. 

 

I wonder how she sees it still.

Perhaps being younger, maybe 20 years and more, I never knew her actual age.  That coyness contributed to her miraculousness.  Perhaps being younger she has not reached that mellow glow where all of the past is interesting and everything that happened was, at worst, a novelty, at best a deep profundity.

            All the men around her adored her.  Pat - what an ordinary name for such an out of the ordinary girl.  Entirely wrapped up in her own beauty she was staggeringly oblivious to all that adoration: “Men, I could have them all week, she would say”.  It was true.  What did she want?  What did she think she wanted?  I knew the answer to both.  And I knew - I alone knew they were different.  What she wanted and what she thought she wanted did not match - and that was her problem indeed.  I knew this cleft in her, and that is why I had my opportunity.  The dividing of the ways in my life.  I plunged for it, straight through to the other universe that stood as if in darkness inside her waiting for me.  Because of my knowledge, my study of her, I could have married her. She never fully understood why I had that power - nor why I never in the end did ask her, why I left her to the other one - the property dealer who offered her the money she wanted, she thought she did.  He was a nice well-meaning chap, who she never understood.  Just as I too, was a mystery for her - why I adored her.

            Those questions: she thought she wanted money. That was the key she sought to make her life free.  Poor, voluptuously Mediterranean, largely unschooled intelligence she sought her freedom in material advantages - and her graciously magnetic body was the means to winning her entry into her other universe.  The world of money her universe, her body was the means.  That was what she wanted.  Her customers the vehicles that would journey her through the stars to the other world.  But I knew something different; I knew it was the very adoration, the hugs, consoling - and that meant the attentions of devoted people.  Without her understanding it, I could use my knowledge, play on the neediness she forbade.  What rotten trick I played!  Don't you think so?

            I had met her in the street. Literally.  It was at the Notting Hill carnival.  She had got separated from the others in her party.  I was looking for ideas, for faces to match that I could buy and transform.  She was mildly anxious, asking strangers.  So, I had taken her, in my fatherly style, on a protective search.

 

I had been so afraid that there would be nowhere to stop to pick her up that day. But sunshine shone, and she stepped into my car with her soft grip full of her beauty-instruments, and like the sunshine she smiled brighter than she had ever done. Rome beckoned. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three – Kinky Sorts

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Never too old

 

It was not exactly being and feeling old that made me self-conscious or even embarrassed. It was different. I could quite easily accept a seat in a bus given up by someone younger, or I could sit happily in my rocking chair watching television for an evening. What made me self-conscious was that I had sometimes, quite often, the feelings that went way back to my adolescent years. I still had those feelings that were difficult to control then, and difficult to control even now. When I walk down the street there were, sometimes, even quite often, young women who looked nice, who made a point of looking nice. They were not in my view tarts, but merely women who liked to look nice and who liked to be noticed – discretely of course. And I would notice them, discretely; and I would wonder if they noticed me. And did they think it was nice to be noticed by me? Or would they think I was a lecher, or that they should be aware of me as a creepy old man, a potential abuser? Did they think that they had to be careful about looking nice and who they looked nice for? I knew there was nothing to be afraid of in myself. I had not had a physical fight with anyone since I was about age ten at my junior school. But strangers suspect the worst, don’t they?

            There was little I could do. I knew the women who I noticed were in the thirty to forty age range and quite out of my reach being twice their age, or whatever. I thought that having money and being generous with it, might counteract some of the reaction to my age. And indeed, I was in a position to be quite generous. I had a bit of wealth and very little to spend it on. But in a brief passing in the street, those advantages could not be made manifest in a moment. I sighed. I knew what I was tempted to do. And I knew I could disgrace myself. I had remained all my life impelled to surrender to my lesser and adolescent self.

            No, I did not accost the women I noticed in the street. I knew that would get nowhere. In the present time, there were always ways of finding playmates, even for grand old oldies. But no-one these days plays the desperate adolescent; they are all so free about sex. None of them pant with unfulfilled fantasies that fill the occasional nights of insomnia. My days now in retirement from a medical practice seem to be endless and I spend my time trying to keep fit by walking the dog and treading up and down stairs and by doing kitchen duty for the untidy wife. I had always read a lot and visited the library a fair bit. I sometimes took my laptop there to compose letters to the national newspapers about current affairs. I had quite a line on all those prejudices that liked to separate good from bad into groups staring each other down. I rarely found my letters actually published. In fact, over the years there was only one which was accepted, and which I had cut out and stuck on the fridge door with a small magnet. It was about the narrowness of aeroplane seats when the person next to you is twenty-five stone. You see the prosaic panorama of my life. 

But one day I was sitting at a desk in the library, musing on those newspaper outrages of the day, when I noticed one of the lady assistants at the check-out booth. She was not one of those women who tripped along the pavement in her high-heels inviting the notice of young men. In fact, rather the opposite. She was probably nearer fifty, or perhaps more, and wearing a dull cotton blouse and baggy dark trousers. Not particularly noticeable, not for a raw adolescent mind like mine. But I did notice her. She had lost a button on the front of her blouse and frequently and embarrassingly she pulled the gap in the blouse together. But occasionally it showed a hint of a black lace brassiere, before her shy hand concealed it again. I was intrigued, partly because the bra looked a lot more interesting than the ordinariness of the outer clothing. It was also intrusively intimate to catch a glimpse even only now and again. I tried not to look as though I were staring at her embarrassment. But I had become intrigued.

A few days later when I was again sitting in the library, I noticed the same woman with a different blouse, slightly different colour but not so different as to be noticeable. I decided. When there was nobody in the queue to take out books I went across with a query.

“Do you have any books in the library by P. Reage,” I asked innocently.

“She smiled politely at my request and enquired, “What was the name again. Ray Arge, did you say?” And she turned to the computer ready to type in the name.

“Reage,” I said, and spelled it out. “It’s a French name.

She turned to me again and smiled. “I don’t think we would have anything in French here.” She seemed to feel she was disappointing me and smiled again to make up for it.

“No. I am sure the book has been translated into English.”

“Do you know the title of the book?” And she turned back to the computer ready to check the title in the catalogue.

“The Story of O,” I said innocently.

She was about to type it in, but she stopped and clearly she had heard of it. “You mean that book which is….” She stopped and her face went a little tense, not smiling. And a revealing blush came.

“Yes,” I said, not needing to say more.

“Oh, I don’t think we would have a book like that.” And she added rather incongruously, “You mean like that ‘shades of grey’ book?” I knew I’d embarrassed her. Which was just as I had intended, It’s a public library,” she added.

I went back to my laptop on the desk trying to look downcast and disappointed. But I was secretly pleased to have had such an interesting impact on her. When I looked up she was staring at me, and as she saw me look, the blush came back. I thought that she is someone who will remember me. When I had done my musing for the morning, I left the library, passing her station, and on an impulse I went towards her and said, “I don’t suppose you would care to come and have lunch with me one day?”

She looked up surprised and seeing me, gave one of her smiles. When she realised a moment later the embarrassing book I had asked for, she suddenly looked surprised and her smile changed from professional to a much warmer one. And then she said, “Lunch one day?” She then looked completely confused and in a major conflict whether to say yes or no.

I said, adding my own smile, “I think I’ll take that as a yes.”

She stared blankly, and I found her shyness quite charming. It seemed good to have an impact on someone, even someone unprepossessing. “But I don’t have a lunch break here.” And then she corrected herself. “I mean I only work mornings. I go home at one.”

“OK, Come for lunch, then.”

She seemed to be getting her surprise and confusion under control. “Just for lunch,” she enquired.

“Well, I said, cheekily, “what else?”

She shook her head, “Can’t be too careful, these days.” She was beginning to join me in my light-heartedness. And I had the immediate feeling she would agree to a lunch together. In fact, we arranged it for the next week.

Strangely and foolishly, I felt nervous before we met. But on the dot when we both arrived at the restaurant at exactly the same time, I felt very calm, and resigned in a hopeful sort of way about what would happen. Firstly, to say, the meal was not very good. But that did not matter because the conversation was. And I left satiated. I was pretty sure she did too. She gave me smiles most of the time, in all the varieties possible, from happily complemented to cheekily teasing. I opened the proceedings by telling her to choose whatever she wanted from the menu. And she did, though the menu was not very extensive or thrilling. I then began to start our purpose of getting to know each other. “Do you often pick up men and get them to take you to lunch.”

She then smiled ruefully, “Not often enough.”

“I wonder what would be enough?” 

She shook her head, and said, bluntly, “I don’t mind if you tease me. It could be quite nice. But let’s just do the normal things to get to know each other. I’ll start. I work mornings at the library, and then fetch a couple of grandchildren from their nurseries in the afternoons. I used to be a schoolteacher. For twenty-five years.” I was nodding my head with interest. “I think I was burned out. So I went to the Open University to do a degree in psychology. I am wondering whether to do a doctorate, now.”

I was impressed. There was a lot more inside the rather dowdy external experience she dressed in – as I had spotted. “I retired from being a doctor some years ago, Fiona,” I said as we had just exchanged names.”

“Really, Alan.” She looked impressed.

But I quickly added. “I’ve more or less forgotten about all that. I enjoyed it. But the learning and the routines, they all seemed like a continuation of doing exams when I was kid.”

She was nodding just as I had done. “What did you want to do when you retired?”

“I didn’t know then. I wanted to grow up, I suppose. But I also told myself I had made a good contribution to the world by looking after people. I treated skin diseases. A specialist in dermatology, it is called.” She nodded, but her question about my retirement was a good one. And I had never had to formulate a clear answer to someone else. “I retired simply because my pension became due. Why would I go on? But I didn’t know what would come next.” I went on to tell her where I lived in our town, and that I had been married. “But although we live in the same house sleep in the same bed, we aren’t really married.” I looked her in the eye, “Sexually, I mean.” I kept looking, and she looked back into mine.

She opened her mouth to say something and then paused, but eventually said, “Is that what you want from me?” But she changed the subject – back to matter-of-fact things, where she lived, the problem with her car which might have made her late for our ‘date’. But she kept looking at me in a curious way as if she was trying to say something that wouldn’t come out. Then she told me, “I am married too. Also, our sex is good.” She looked enquiringly at me. And then shook her hair out of her face and looked across the restaurant as if dismissing what she’d said. “Well it’s good for him. I know about good sex for men.” And she stopped as if there was a lot unspoken that would be obvious.

“It looks, Ginny, as if we might converge in some ways.”

She nodded, “I am a fantasist, Alan.”

This struck a question I wanted to ask, and I thought about putting it carefully, and at last said, “Is that why you blushed when I mentioned The Story of O?” Perhaps I was not careful enough because she blushed again, bright and all across her cheeks and neck. “I am sorry. You are blushing again. I shouldn’t poke my nose in so deep, should I?”

“It’s OK, don’t worry about that. It is just that I wonder what you will think of me. I never know what to think of myself.”

I paused a moment to question myself on what I did think. The Story of O is extremely erotic. This woman had already brought up sex. Could she be as frantically adolescent as me? What a thought! “I’m OK with all that. I read the book when I had just left school. It has stuck in my mind all the time ever since. It is very sexy isn’t it.” She nodded at me, but looked at her plate on the table. I continued, “Perhaps we’re both fantasists.” 

“I may regret what I am going to say,” she spoke carefully and slowly. “We don’t always have to be fantasists, Alan.” And she put her hand out and laid it gently on my arm which was leaning on the table between us. Now I wondered if it was me who might be blushing. She wasn’t, she was quite pale. Her lips were fixed in a sort of dead smile now. I wished we were somewhere I could have taken her tightly in my arms and crushed her with a passionate hug. But we were not in such a place. So, instead, I took her hand and pressed it against my lips with affection and held it there longer than was needed and I didn’t want to let it go. It looked as if there might be a tear coming into her eyes. Eventually she pulled her hand away and we moved back as the waitress took away our plates in an unceremonious gesture. A second waiter brought our two glasses of wine, and the main course came. We neither of us spoke for ten minutes or more as we silently ate our meals. When mine was finished I emptied my wine-glass quickly in a nervous gulp. She sipped slowly but continuously and looked steadily at me. Then she mouthed, with a faint whisper, “Not Alan, but René.”

I felt awkward at her provocatively casting me in the role of René who I knew had been the lover of O and had enslaved O in the story. “You flatter me.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did you enjoy O being hurt?”

She looked steadily at me, “I don’t know,” and then with a flick of her head again so that her short hair waved as in a breeze. “I’d have to be in love.” There was a pause. She was obviously thinking things over. Then she went back to the safety of being a librarian. “It’s a much better book than that ‘Fifty shades,”

“I haven’t read it. You can read it to me.” But I wasn’t going to be distracted into that diversion. “We can take it gently.” She nodded again and looked down at her plate, smiling, as if occupied with some thoughts about the topic. I was looking at her now-sad guileless expression. “I’m sorry we hardly know each other, do we?”

“I have to get to the nursery, for the little ones.” 

“Yes, you do. I’ll take you.”

“No I need to take the car to fetch them.”

I was disappointed it was over, and wondered about suggesting another date, “Well, Ginny, I will pursue you. Until you change your mind.”

She looked up, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Good.” I got up and went over to the bar to pay. We were silent as we left. It seemed a bad note to part on. In the street, I put my hand on her shoulder and as she turned towards me, I kissed her passionately on her mouth, tongue and all. In that moment something had changed in the world; the world had changed. In a minute or two, I pulled back to six inches away from her face, and to my own surprise I said. “You are mine. The kiss has sealed it.” But I felt like a fifteen year old, snatching his first kiss with a girl.

“I’m yours,” she whispered, and sank her head on my shoulder. “Don’t hurt me too much.”

“I’ll be able to judge how far you can go.” I said, and she shivered. That was a better note to part on.

Three days later it was the weekend. She was in the library for the morning. I sat at the same  desk gazing at her. She rarely looked in my direction. Saturday was a busy day. She left at 1 pm as usual. I followed her out of the door, and she kept her back to me. She mumbled, “I don’t want to be seen together by the others.” She meant her colleagues in the library. So I crossed the road and began to walk slowly to the corner. I saw she was following me on the other side of the road. After I turned the corner, she crossed the road and came up to me. I did not stop, but said, “You don’t have to get to the nursery today,” as if it was a decision of mine. “Ring your husband and tell him you have to work this afternoon as it is busy in the library.”

We stopped walking and without a word she did what I had said. When she had done, I said, “I know exactly what we will do.” She did not say a word but walked with me. I wanted to put my arm on her shoulder to make her feel safe. But I also wanted her to feel slightly unsafe. When we got to my car, I told her to get in. As I started off, I said, “There’s a sex shop in the next town. Have you ever been there?” 

She shook her head and then looked at me. “Are we going to get something.”

“I’m going to get something.”

She seemed nervous. “What is it. Is it a cane?”

I looked at her and smiled as if she had guessed right. But actually, I said, “No. Not this time.” She did not smile. She was not enjoying this. So I stopped the car and told her to get out whilst I got out too. I walked around and gave her a very enveloping hug. “You are lovely. I will never harm what we are developing here.” I could feel her body relax.

“Sorry.” And she hesitated but went on. “I hardly know you. I hardly know what you want to do with me.”

“I know. It is what you like, right? But it is frightening. I’m sure. I won’t say ‘don’t worry’. But we will build up a most wonderful relationship together. I think I know that. You are right, you don’t know me, and fantasies are one thing, but this is not fantasy anymore.” Her head was on my shoulder. My lips were in her hair. “From today, I want you to let your hair grow. For as long as it will.”

She looked up into my face, and asked rather unnecessarily, “You like long hair?”

“I like your hair long for me. For me.”

“OK.” And then, “I feel better now.”

“If you want, we can stop for a cup of tea and get to know each other a little better.”

“It’s OK,” she said seriously, “I’m getting to know you. I like being hugged when I’m nervous.”

I got back into the car. She hesitated and then got in too. I explained we have a cottage in the country, but only I use it. When I want to get away from the old house and the old marriage for a day or two. I said we’d go there when we’ve been to the shop. 

When we entered, I went over to the shop assistant to ask where they kept what I wanted. I saw Ginny was looking distractedly at the hooks and shelves with the crops and whips. I asked her if she wanted one of them.

She said, “If you do.”

“Pick which one you’d like,” and I saw she’d taken one made of wicked bamboo. 

She looked at me and said with a cruel look, “Actually it might be me that gives you a few with this.”

“Not unless I say so.” We laughed quietly in the silent shop. And then I pointed to the racks of garments and told her which to choose, and get the right size for her.

We drove on, not saying much. But she did say in an amused voice, “So you like those shiny kinky clothes?”

“If you wear them for me.” She smiled as if to herself, as if she was learning about me. 

When we arrived at the little cottage, she hesitated to get out, wondering what was going to happen to her. “Just tell me,” she asked, “will we be staying long? Overnight?”

“No. It will be a little play. A gentle play.” 

She nodded, “Thanks.” I unlocked and we went in. She looked around at the cosy small room, as if she had expected it to be fitted out like a prison. 

I told her to sit in one of the comfortable chairs, and I sat in the other opposite her. “I have not brought any milk for a cap of tea.”

She looked mischievous, as if going to tell me off, but thought better and remained silent.

“Please stand up.” She looked surprised and curious as I had only just told her to sit. But she did stand. “Please take all your clothes off.” She stood for a moment before taking her clothes off slowly. She was very practical and showed no sensuality or erotism in her emerging nudity. She stood naked in front of me. I felt very moved. No woman had ever obeyed me like that. 

And there she stood. I felt like a fifteen-year-old who couldn’t believe his girl-friend really wanted to give herself. “You have got the most fantastic curves, there,” I said. She didn’t move; she remained expressionless. Her hands were clutched in front of her crotch. I said with huge emphasis, “You are beautiful. I can’t believe how beautiful you are, Ginny.” She hardly moved but I thought there was a tear or two coming to her eyes, Tears of thanks and pleasure. Her hands unclutched and she spread her arms away from her body as if inviting me in. I gazed; and she stood enjoying being gazed at. Perhaps she had never been seen as a goddess of beauty before.

I leaned forward and stretched out my hand to touch the smooth skin of her thigh with the knuckle of my forefinger. She watched my touch. “Beautiful,” I mumbled, more to myself now, shocked and confused. 

“Now,” I said when I was a little recovered, Put on the black garment we bought.

“Where is it?” And she looked at me enquiring. I did not move but stared at her. My finger moved away from her thigh back to my lap. She kept looking at me. “It’s not still in the car, is it?” I said nothing. “I’ll have to put some clothes on.” She remained looking at me as if requesting permission. But I did not move. “You don’t want me to go out into the road like this?” And she stared challengingly at me. 

I said one word, “Obedience.” She looked away from me, as if in defeat. Slowly she moved towards the door of the cottage. She really would do that for me. She opened the door and was about to take her nakedness out into the bright afternoon sunshine. “Come here,” I suddenly said. And she came back across the room and stood in front of me as I sat in my chair still leaning forward. She was so close. This time I put the tip of my finger on the soft curve of her tummy, feeling the wondrous touch of it. I slid the finger down towards the hairs above her thighs. She let me do so without moving. “Go and shut the door.” She did as I told her, slowly but without hesitation. She knew I had wanted to test her obedience, and she had passed  the test. “I brought it in. It is in the packet behind the chair you were sitting in.” She looked across the room. Her relief was so palpable. “Put it on.”

She went over to find the garment, the slick black catsuit. It was difficult to put on with only a small zip in the back. I watched her slender limbs struggling. Her curves looked irresistible, the soft flesh almost edible. I knew that in a moment I could stroke every inch of that incomparable vision I was watching. She was finding it difficult and began to feel defeated. She looked over at me to see if I would come and help. I did not move. “Obedience,” I said, as before. So she continued her struggle. Finally, when she had arranged herself in it, and had managed the zipper at the back, she came and stood in front of me again. So close. I let my amazement shine from my face. She smiled, the first smile since she had been in the cottage.

“So you are pleased with yourself, “I said.

After a moment, she said, “Yes,”

“I am pleased with you too. I can’t describe how very pleased with you.” Her smile stayed on her lips. The black material was tight over all her body to her neck, and down to her wrists and ankles. “It is a fetish for me.” I had never seen a woman so blended with such a strokable material. And here she was, inches near to me. I pointed to a door in the corner of the room and told her it was a staircase to the bedroom above. “There is a long mirror in the bedroom. Look at yourself and admire what you see. And look at the image with my eyes that can only see wonder. When you have seen that wonder you have created, that wonder that you are, go and lie on the bed and wait for me. She moved barefoot with grace. I Think she felt herself the image of grace as I saw her; and disappeared up to the bedroom. After a few minutes I heard the bed creak. I lay back in the chair and sighed. It almost felt like a lifetime’s satisfaction compressed into the afternoon. 

I waited for her to compose herself  and relax. And me too. I waited some twenty minutes for her to consider what came next. I left her to think what an image she created, what an amazement she was for me, what a silly old fool I was. Whatever…. 

Eventually when I felt sufficiently relaxed, my eagerness undiluted but sufficiently controlled, I trod slowly up the stairs. She was indeed lying sprawled on the bed. Her head turned, and she watched me. Was she curious what I would want? Was she frightened? Did she know which? “One day, Ginny, you must teach me how to describe this wondrous moment you have given me.” I lay down on the bed beside her. She didn’t know whether to stroke me with the soft vinyl of her body or let me stroke her. I told her to come on top of my body, her legs on my legs, her arms on mine, her lips on my lips. We kissed softly. The passion grew in her, but I kept mine still restrained. Nevertheless, I placed my arms around her silken body slowly feeling the warmth of her curves and her softness. I stroked and stroked her sides as she writhed with excitement. I felt the strong urges inside her, inside her tight garment. She smoothed herself all over me. I told her to find me inside my flies, and she unzipped and her kind hand felt for me there. She drew out my penis and then my balls. I told her to put me in her mouth. As she slid down my body she said she had never done this before. I said it was easy if she followed my instructions. She was eager to do so. And so was I.

I was excited but, as expected, my old-man equipment was slow to work. And I knew what I’d do anyway. I told her that now is the big moment. “Undo the belt of my trousers and pull it free. She was clearly unaccustomed to men’s clothing, but she managed it in the end. She looked serious as she handed it to me. She lay back on my body and looking into my face a few inches below hers. I said a little unkindly, “This is the moment you’ve dreamed about.” She dropped her face on my chest in a resigned manner. “Look at me.” I ordered.

She looked up, and our eyes locked. “No,” she said quietly, knowing what I was about to do. She knew I’d take no notice of her ‘no’. With my hands behind her back, I doubled the belt over, and feeling her gorgeous round buttocks with my left hand, I swung the doubled belt at them. I couldn’t see but it landed somewhere in the right pace on her backside. Her face took on an urgent surprised look and her mouth opened. No cry came out. In fact, her breath had stopped momentarily. She gasped, and her head flailed up and down on my chest a couple of times as a tide of pain swept over her.

“Look at me.” She looked back into my eyes. “Not so bad?” I asked. She shook her head as if I could not possibly know. I felt for the other buttock, and I thrashed the belt down on it. Her head flew back and forth and her eyes seemed as though they couldn’t see for a moment as the feeling charged through her body and took all her attention. A short cry came from her mouth. “You are beautiful,” I said. “Never forget it.” And then I said, “Kiss me.” She had to slide up my body a little to get her lips onto mine. She held on to the kiss. Perhaps she thought that I would delay the next stroke. But I felt for the first buttock and thrashed it. Her mouth jerked off mine. Her faced grimaced. And quickly I did the second buttock. Her whole body writhed a little on top of me. The feeling of her tense body and the tension of the silky, shiny garment was wondrous and knowing the pain that must be in her seemed the opposite, an agony for me too. I was torn. Why did I need to do this to her. And to myself. Because I enjoy the agony in her face, and she’ll enjoy the memory, over and over again.

I thrashed again, and she still refused to cry out. “That’s five.”

She was rigid with tension and the anticipation of another one. I stroked her tightly-clad body and felt it soft beneath the surface. I stroked every part of her I could reach, and even between her thighs. I said, “You know there is only one thing more exciting than stroking this fantastic garment, and that will be when it is off and I can stroke the beautiful soft curves of your real skin. That is what I will be doing soon.”

“Don’t hurt me anymore,” she said quietly. I took no notice and told her to stand beside the bed. But she buried her head in my chest as if it was her only safe place. “Obedience.” Slowly she moved off me and stood by the bed looking down at me. I took two little blue pills out of the breast pocket of my shirt. “Go downstairs and get me a sip of water in a glass so I can take them.” She knew what they were, and why an oldie like me needed them.

“Yes,” she said. I watched the beautiful proportions of the shining goddess move around the bed and disappear downstairs. I took a deep breath and gave out a sigh of satisfaction. I believed I was at a peak moment in my life. I watched as her head of gloriously flourishing blonde hair came back in sight as she mounted the stairs. Then the stunning curves of the body and her limbs. 

She came around the bed with the glass of water, and I took my pills. She stood attendant at the side of the bed. “I shall love it when your lovely hair grows to its full length down you back. I shall want to glorify every inch it grows. Shall I give you money for every inch?”

“What?” It seemed a sudden change of direction for her.

“It’s how to measure the value of it.” I did not know why I had introduced money.

“I thought all this,” she indicated her garment, “was all about sex?”

“It’s about love and preciousness. It’s about uncountable value.” I waffled with my delirious kind of excitement. “Come and lie back on my body – with your body.” She did as required, her face coming close to mine.

“There is only one thing more perfect than stroking the beautiful curves of this sexy garment, and that would be to stroke the beautiful curves of your completely naked skin.” I repeated, pointlessly, and she said nothing. My face was buried in her gorgeous hair. So I continued in my delirium. “You are my heaven.” And then, “I am King of Heaven-land.” She chuckled with a deep sense of satisfaction. We were two rather elderly adolescents making each other happy. “I am your King.” At that her smile broadened and continued. I asked quietly, “What am I?”

“You are my King.”

“Correct. Don’t forget it. Don’t call me anything else.” She still smiled happily. “Your King, my dear Ginny.”

“My King.” My hand went to the belt that was lying beside me on the bed. “Kiss me.”

She kissed me with some passion, and I landed a stroke of the belt on her buttock quite unexpectedly – for her. Her head shot back in surprise and pain. There was no sound. Then she clamped her lips back on mine and pressed hard to endure what was rushing through the nerves of her body. She was tense from top to toe, and then relaxed a bit as the pulse began to subside. She lifted her head, and said without emphasis, “Ouch.” And shook her head sadly, “I didn’t like that one.”

“I know,” I said kindly. And then I landed another one. Her breath gasped. She shook her head with pain. And then, with force, pressed her lips against mine again.

Then, she lifted her head a little, “You bastard.”

“I know,” I said with the same kindly tone. It was as if there were different people; two people beginning a passionate love, and a torture victim with her torturer.

“I’ve dreamed of all this. But, René…. never with so much love from you.” She looked earnestly into my face. “I have done something to your heart, haven’t I?”

“You have,” I said. “It has brought my passion alive. My passion for you.”

“ I love you. You are my dream of….” She stopped because I delivered another thrashing stroke. She couldn’t speak. Her body was tight with the pain. Eventually she said, “Thank you. You bastard.” And laughed.

I laughed too and delivered the next on her sore buttock. She bit her lip and everything in her went tense again.

“Bastard. I can’t….” But she stopped herself from begging me to stop. “Oh, bastard, bastard, bastard.” And she flopped down as if exhausted on top of my body. So I lashed her again. She writhed from side to side on top of me. Her shiny garment sliding sensuous and graciously over me.

“That’s ten of them.” She looked me in the eyes propping herself on her elbows.

“I know,” I said with kindness again, smiling back at her. “You’ve done well.”

“Thank you, sir. My King.” And she added, with a sort of hopeful relief, “ Is that my punishment?”

“Some of it.” And her face clouded with a slight frown as she had thought that the belting might have been completed.

“You mean there’s more.”

“I’ll decide that.”

“I’m asking you to decide,” she said slightly impatiently.

“And I’ll decide when I’ll let you know.”

She sank back onto me. I was very conscious of my penis snug between her thighs. “You bastard. How can I cope?” She snuggled herself onto me, wondering perhaps if another lash would come. “Do you mind me calling you a bastard.”

“You know what I am for you. Tell me.”

“My King.”

“Remember that.”

“I will. My King.” 

Then I told her to stand by the bed. Slowly she relaxed her embrace of me and got up. She stood. “Get down on your knees.” And she did. “On all fours,” which she did. I decided not to comment on her obedience as if taking it for granted. Now get down on the carpet. Press that tummy into it. Press those breasts into it.” She did, perhaps a bit reluctantly. “I want you to crawl over to that wall. Don’t let your tummy stop touching the carpet, nor the breasts. Squirm. You are a worm, at my feet.” And I sat up at the end of the bed to watch her slide.

“Yes, My King.” And she slid herself slowly across the floor, some two or three metres.

“Stand up and face the wall.” She did. 

“Yes, My King.” 

“Put your hands up high on the wall.” 

“Yes, My King.” And she did. 

“Press that tummy and those breasts into the wall.” She moved right up against the wall.

“My King.”

“Reach higher.” And she stretched her hands an inch or so higher.

“Higher, higher.” I said commandingly. “And keep yourself completely still.”

She realised she had to go on tip toe. “That’s right. Now higher still.” She reached very high. Then I was quiet, and looking at that irresistible body, pinned against the wall. “Hmm. That’ll do,” I said as if reluctantly. “We’ll wait a while for the pills to work.” And I sat still and silent just gazing at her back. She was as still as she could be. Which actually was very still. She remained on tip toe, as ordered.

Eventually when I thought that things might be getting ready in my loins. I told her to get back on the floor, tummy and tits never to leave the carpet. “Now climb out of that garment. And don’t let yourself rise off the carpet. 

She struggled with the zip in the back. It seemed perversely out of reach but eventually she managed it and slowly the black thing was rolled down her body, till her pure skin lay waiting for me. I went to crouch down next to her on the floor. I looked at some vaguely pink patches on her buttocks. I had my unkind doubled-up belt in my hand. “Now. Another ten, shall we say.”

She turned her head to look at me. “No,” she said shocked “I can’t”. She hadn’t expected it. “I can’t, Al. Alan. I can’t.” I saw a tear emerge from one eye. 

“Yes, your poor buttocks won’t have the protection of that plastic skin over them. It might feel a lot worse.”

Slowly she began to sob a little. Just gently, and as if she was trying not to. I put out my hand to touch her cheek with a comforting stroke, but she turned her face away. With the back of her head towards me she said, “Do it. If you must.”

“But it is not a question of ‘must’. It is a question of want-to, and of obedience.” She was now sobbing harder. I stroked her tender buttocks.

“I have now made a decision,” I announced rather formally. “We shall leave the next thrashing till next time.” And I dropped the belt on the floor next to me. She turned her face toward me with a new expression. Some hope at last. I said, “I love you, Ginny.”

Her tears ran again. I put out my hand to touch them. “I love you too, Al. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. It is your disobedience.”

“I’m sorry, Alan Sorry, Sorry.”

“Perhaps your disobedience is as painful as my belt on you lovely backside.”

“Yes,” her tears had stopped. “I think it is. I’m sorry. Next time perhaps.”

“Come to the bed with me.” And we stood up and went to the bed, leaving the belt behind, and the pile of the crumpled garment, I lay on the bed. “You, undress me.”

She looked at me and my clothes and did begin to undress me. I moved as she needed to remove them.

“As before, stretch your body over mine, on top of me”. My member was a little erect as it touched her thigh. It stiffened as her thighs parted to let it stand up. I stroked her skin, every single part of it. “It is, as I said, so much better even than stroking that catsuit.”

“Good. It is all yours. Every bit.” 

I rolled her over and knelt over her. I was nearly ready to come into her. “Put my penis into you. It wants to love you.”

She looked a bit hesitant. Maybe worried, “Is that what you want?” And then she relaxed. And she fumbled with my genitals to open her hole and invite me in. It really didn’t take me long, and I was completely unable to pace myself. My thrusting gained speed and furthered its reach inside her. “I love this,” she panted, staring sightless at the ceiling. “I love….” And I came like the volcano I always had been on all my last occasions. I collapsed on her, staying inside as long as I could. She said, “You’re still a man, a fantastic man.”

I had often been told my climaxes were of the best. “It is all your doing, Ginny, the goddess of beauty.”

She buried her face in my neck. “I’m sorry, Alannie.”

“It is not me you have cheated, my dear. I have been to heaven and back.” She chuckled sadly as it were. “It is your fantasies you’ve cheated, your own fantasies.”

“Yes,” she said, and held me round the waist pulling me into her as I was slipping out and comforting me as well as herself. “Next time, Alannie.”

“Next time, I shall thrash you naked. Your buttocks will bruise.”

“Yes, Alan, thrash me. Make me scream. I deserve it. I want it.”

“OK, Ginny. No mercy.” I felt her shiver a little under me.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“But right now. It is your climax. Let us do it.”

“It’s alright. I don’t need it.”

Listen, Ginny. I wasn’t asking you. I was deciding; we will proceed as I just said.” And I moved off her to her side and put my hand gently between her thighs. It was moist. I spread her legs. She was completely inert, passive, compliant. “Let me taste you.” She said nothing, and I put my lips to hers and my tongue slowly slipped into the soft tissue and its moisture. I sensed when I had found the spot as her body gave a slight shudder. I knew where to apply my skills and with a slow rhythm I flicked that spot with my tongue, getting faster and remaining gentle but persistent. She made no more sound until when I was going at speed with her sensitive love-place, there was a terrific shout and her breath seemed to fill the room. She convulsed so I lost my place. With my strength I forced her down on the bed and replaced my tongue with my fingers and very, very gently but with speed, I continued the stimulus on that special part of her. Till there was another short cry, and she held her breath again. And then the third shout. Her body relaxed and she turned away from me. She was done. She turned back to me and hugged me with her arms around my shoulders and waist. She pulled me until my penis was nearly back home in her again. But I had been spent.

We lay a long time in silence. I pounded my brains with how precious this moment was, would always be. I was coming back to reality. How could it fit into my life today? I imagine she was thinking the same.

We lay a long time as if we had found the answer to all appetites till the end of our lives. We clung to a being-together for some hours. When we emerged, it was as if into a new epoch in history. How would it be on Monday morning if I sat there in the library, gazing in her direction whilst she did her work trying not to look at me? Would I accompany her out at 1 pm? When I checked out a book, would she call me her King? Would we tell out spouses and then move together to the pretty little cottage? Would we read The Story of O to each other at bedtime? Finally, would her beautiful buttocks graciously accept a full-scale, naked thrashing next time? “I know you a bit better, Ginny.” 

She nodded, and we decided to go home. Until next time.

 

 

 

 

Men are not much

 

I don't think much of men.  They are all right.  They are all right I suppose when giving me the right excitement, but not much more. Girls give you a better conversation, girls are more interesting, they are more interested.  They ask questions. They give you more reassurance, make you feel good, tell you your hairdresser is wonderful, are envious of the clothes you wear, the shops you buy them at. They want to know where you got your wonderful recipe and will you give it to them.  These are things that make the world go round.

Men - I've had quite a few of them. In fact. as many as I have wanted.  It doesn't take a lot to make yourself the kind of woman a man will take out, spend money on, will buy an expensive shaver for, make me feel good.  But what you ask me about is what I do with my body. And that's what I'm going to tell you about.  It's going to be about what I do with his body.  I have had a lot.  I know what their orgasms are like.  I know how to get them in position for my orgasms.  Right?

Despite my background I’d been to University, and I could give any man an argument that’d make him think. I could simper and then cut his silly conclusions to pieces. It left them truncated and embittered with me. It felt like victory. I was not just pussy. 

Since I'm not too bothered about them, it puts me in a powerful position, doesn't it.  Right? And that's what I live for. Mostly they shy off pretty quick. When I've got a period, I expect them to lick me clean.  Not many are keen on that.  They usually pack their condoms and say bye-bye.  They think they have the mastery of me.  It doesn't bother me much.  But one or two have taken another line.  In fact, I should say three, two have cleaned me up when I've told them to. They filled the bill when required. Like the intelligent handsome boy who had creative ideas about making my blood into cocktails which he could bottle. A new idea for a bloody Mary!  I liked that, it showed imagination.  But he went off the rails by making money out of his advertising, rather than pleasing me.  Another one liked using special apparatus and he often spent a couple of days building it before we used it, and then he'd get on it and I'd have my fun.  But the one I wanted to tell you about was into something altogether more serious. And that is why I want to tell you about him.

I knew there was something that would add zest.  All I knew was somehow men were there to serve. Men were there to pay the price, the price I was interested in asking.  How we got into it was like this.  He showed me those adverts that they have for Sunday leisure wear.  I knew that shiny garments kicked men in the guts.  I sometimes walked down the street and men salivated on the pavement when they walked past my mackintosh.  What I was keen to learn more of was the way men wanted to be treated.  So I asked him what did this word mean - 'dominatrix'.  He told me that this was a woman who had special tricks for getting a man's balls down to size.  I said I could think up some tricks.  He said that was very likely. 

The only request he made which I granted was that I put a gag in his mouth so that he was utterly speechless.  Otherwise, he had no say whatever in what happened to him.  I liked those leisure garments.  I chose them for the ones I liked.  I chose them for me.  I thought my cleavage might drive him bananas, I thought my crotch showing a suggestion of my hairs could drive him crazier still.  Over the red shiny gear, I wore a long silken dressing gown, glamorous in its own way, but concealing the intense casing of my body, my gleaming curves.  His gag was unpleasantly uncomfortable.  It kept his mouth wide with his tongue pushed to the back.  He could breathe, but not swallow.  Most of the time he dribbled.  It looked degrading, and he felt it.  He knelt when I told him to kneel.  He felt the shape of my buttocks and of my thigh as his hands slid round the shape of my dressing gown.  He could tell the slippery surface of the latex beneath.  I told him to crawl, and he went down on all fours.  'Not good enough,' I said.  He looked up at me.  'On your belly,' I demanded.  Reluctantly he lowered himself till he was flat on the floor.  I told him he should not raise his stomach or his chin from the pile of my bedroom carpet.  I told him to undress.  There on the floor he wriggled, worm-like, out of his expensive lawyer’s suit.  And while he did so I got from my locked cupboard a rather cruel willow cane that, I had been told, had the most vicious sting – it was especially long, and a heavier duty than most.  While he writhed his way out of the clothes he had worked in today, his skin came slowly into visibility and those clothes were reduced to a rumpled degenerate mess.

I stood above him, the tip of my cane ruffling his hair, pinning the small of his back into the floor, following the curve of his buttock into his thigh.  He never protested but silently obeyed.  I never questioned whether he was enjoying it.  I was exploring my feelings, my feelings of power.

Power meant that I should have no truck with the feelings of my victim.  That is not true.  Power meant that I was fascinated to know his feelings of humiliation and soon it would be pain.  And finally, when he was naked the tip of my cane scored across the skin of his shoulder blades.  I told him that whilst keeping his chin to the floor, he should raise his buttocks and kneel with them in the air.  This was my moment of curiosity.  I couched down slightly at his side; and then I brought down the cane with maximum force on the soft rounds of his bottom.  He collapsed to the floor instantly.  The gag reduced his squawk to a gurgle.  And he tried to breathe heavily, but only through the spittle in his nostrils. He writhed from side to side, still pressing his chin obediently into the carpet.  I told him to resume the position with his bottom in the air, and the next time he should remain totally without movement. He shook his head vigorously.  I took it that he was telling me he couldn't bear the pain.

He was a coward.

Should I have been disappointed?  I am not sure if I was.  The prospect of pain he could not bear, gave me the knowledge that I had power to destroy him.  I told him to stand up.  The cane could wait until later.  He reached the upright position.  There was an angry red line across his buttocks.  Even at that stage there were red beads beginning to ooze from the welts. I told him to stand on his toes, to reach his arms above his head, and to remain there as I wished.  He did so, my man had relinquished all appearance of willpower and initiative.  He was obedience itself.  If you could grovel on tip-toe, he was doing it. He was reduced really to the animal in him. I told him, and his head drooped. It was not so much shame as acknowledgement of the truth.  He was not so steady on his balance.  I threatened him that if he came down off his toes I would cut him three more times on his buttocks.  He nodded gently with understanding.  And he thought he was going to be spared. 

I was standing behind him fascinated by the red weal on his white skin.  I told him that my blackness would never reveal its shame as his white skin was now doing.  I let the dressing gown slip from my shoulders.  I threw it on the bed in front of him.  I told him he would not see me in the garments I had chosen until I decided to reveal myself. He stared straight ahead at the bed as if he no longer had a mind that knew what he was waiting for.  I realised I must restore his capacity to know and to expect, and above all to fear.  I told him to imagine my body, to describe its curves.  For this I reached up and loosened the gag till he could mumble. He started to imagine the clothes that I had tightly encased myself in.  His mind worked weakly, and he told me of the shining red plastic, the smooth tight curves glistening as saliva and smooth as silk.  He remained on his toes avoiding more punishment, at least for the time being.  I admired him for his efforts.  I reached for a pair of long latex gloves from the dressing table.  I closed my inviting body slowly against his back. The parts of my body touching gently the surfaces of his back.  My long arms moved around his waist.  I clutched the shining black gloves in front of him and slowly smoothed the gloves up my hands and my arms above my elbows.  I touched his cheeks on either side with the pure sweetness of their glistening surface.  I told him to smell their smell.   I clutched his belly to me with a firmness of my hands as they smoothed down over his chest and his abdomen.  He trembled with the ecstasy of it.  I was giving him pleasure. I was giving myself pleasure.  I was giving him pleasure without pain, and therefore my pleasure was only half pleasure.  I retrieved from my cleavage a fine steel chain linked with a long leather thong. The chain had a hook at one end. I resumed my position with my hands around his waist.  Now I felt for his balls.  He twitched and shivered when I found them.  I passed the chain twice around the neck of the sack.  The hook was fastened tightly into a link.  He did not murmur but the trembling with ecstasy was now mixed with the tremble of fear.  He did not know what would come next.  The leather thong hung down to his toes.  I released my grip around his body.  He wished to turn and look but I forbade him in order to preserve his blindness to the beauty of my body and the erotism of my clothing. He remained on tip-toe, and was understandably wobbly now. 

I fetched from the cupboard where my cane had been, a blindfold that would keep him from that awareness. He began to be appalled and he hesitated to acquiesce.  Fortunately, the determination in my voice and the determination in the movements of my hand quelled that moment of resistance.  I completed the severance of his senses.

I told him to reach to the floor.  I told him to go down on his knees.  I told him to find the cane where I had dropped it. With relief he crouched on all fours. I watched as his hands in his blindness swept the carpet.  He reached my feet and I told him to caress them.  I allowed him to put my toes to his cheek and then to resume his search for the cane.  I told him I would count to 20 and any number beyond that would be the number of strokes his buttocks would receive.  I said I was not talking idly.  I did not joke.

He searched on with vigour.  Fortunately, for him, he found the cane before the numbers I was counting ran out.  I told him it was the cane that had cruelly hurt him, and he should hug it to his bosom as a loved one. Still kneeling on all fours he did this, and then offered it to me as a sacrament.  But I did not use the cane to strike him.  Instead, I found a way into him with its tip.  The pouted mouth of his back passage accepted the the cane almost without noticing.  Gently I moved it forward into the cavity of his insides.  He did not murmur.  He did not move.  I knew he wondered at this intrusion, relieved that I had spared his skin from further strokes with that cane.  I told him that if I wished it the cane would be used later, but that I would decide. What I wished at this moment was to feel the smell of his fear drifting into my nostrils and on the surface of my skin. I twisted the cane around causing disturbance deep inside his body.  He remained with a kind of awful pleasure.  I withdrew the cane slowly from his anus.

The tip and a few inches of my cane were no longer pristinely new and clean.  I told him to kneel up his head held high in the air, his hands clutched behind the small of his back, his knees remained painfully widely spread.  He did as he was told.  I wiped the soiled cane on the lip beneath his nostrils.  'Filthy,' I said, 'Filth. Do you smell it?'  He nodded obediently.  'This must be cleaned,' I warned.  Lifting one corner of his mouth away from the gag I pushed the tip of my cane in and wiped it carefully on the inside of his mouth. Lifting carefully the corner on the other side of his mouth I wiped a second time to ensure the cleanliness of my cane.  I suggested this might nauseate him, that this might make him vomit.  But, I warned, this was dangerous with the gag in his mouth since he may merely fill his lungs with his own vomit. I told him this was a moment of extreme self-control.  I asked, did he understand.  He nodded his head slightly.  I told him he must control himself like a house-trained animal.  That is what he is.  I told him that now blind, speechless, penetrated and soiled he was in such a state that an animal, even, would be disgusted with itself.  He remained silently impressed by the accuracy of my insults.  I then told him to get himself on the bed.  I have a small divan upon which many men have performed beneath me while I have sucked my pleasure from them.  By this time, blindfolded, he had no notion of where the bed was, and I watched. Carefully and cautiously, he collided with the furniture, and then fell on his back on the bed.  I told him to turn around with his head hanging over the end. I told him to find the chain that held his balls and to reach for the leather thong attached to it.  I told him to serve it to me like a slave offering his monarch a gift.  He did this. From my cupboard at the end of the bed, I drew a small pulley that hooked in the ceiling and ran the leather thong through this.  I could tighten it with a ratcheted wheel and pull his flesh.  It tightened to a point where he began to groan.  I told him to lift his pelvis from the bed to ease himself, which he did.  I wound the thong still tighter till he groaned again.  I told him to reach still higher to save his organs.  And he did.  I wound it further.  I think he could no longer keep this arched position any higher.  So, I relented and left the ratcheted wheel.  I asked if he was in pain.  He nodded.  “It is only in pain”, I said, “that I will give you pleasure, because”, I stressed, “that is my pleasure.” 

“You may touch now if you wish - but only while you suffer,” I said.  His body was arched nine inches from the bed.  His legs strained to keep him there.  He turned his head to the side as I sat on the bed beside him, his hands reached for my voluptuousness.  He began to moan at the exquisite predicament he was in, but I silenced him.  “I will have no sounds from you,” I said.  “No animal can speak or have words.”  He obeyed and felt with a joy in his hands in the midst of a strained body that was beginning to ache and throb in the congested organs which were so tightly bagged.  Despite his abject suffering, I could see a bead of moisture at the tip of his prick.  “There,” I said touching its shaft with my latex hand, 'there is my precious pleasure stick.  Shall I beat it with my cane?” I asked him, touching the blindfold, challenging him to answer, yes.  I noticed that the eager organ stirred slightly in my fingers.  “I shall have to climb upon you,” I said and he looked with some apprehension.  My weight would probably collapse his arched body and tear those isolated balls from him. Astride, I put my slithery hands beneath his buttocks to ease the strain.  I could let go suddenly. I told him and his whole racked body jerked with terror as the tension drew agony from his balls and he thrust in the air to save them.  His mouth gaped and he mumbled some swear words unpleasantly.  I was angry.  I told him that no man had ever abused me in that way.  I lifted myself from his body and stood looking down on his animal form on the bed, and I informed him that he could either remove himself from my house and never return, or he could take a punishment from me of my choosing.  He shut his eyes in an agony of indecision. His body arched with strain and tension and in addition his humiliation changing from a voluntary acquiescence to the beginnings of a terrified helplessness.  He knew the punishment that I would choose, and he had a terror he could not bear it.

I told him I would choose, and I released the leather thong from the wheel and the pulley.  He thought I was about to let him go.  He called my name as if from a very great distance, announcing amorous platitudes which sounded pathetic in his helplessness.  “You will not get away so simply, my friend,” I told him.  I produced some handcuffs from my well-provided cupboard, and restrained his hands stretched out beyond his head.  I then told him to roll over and this he did. I told him to bring his knees beneath his tummy.  This he did though he knew where this would lead.  The strong red wheal had smudged flecks of blood.  He was crouched submissive, even more an animal.  I found once more, the cane as it lay on the floor beside the bed. I sat beside him and placed it before his face.  “This,” I told him “will give you more pain than you could ever imagine.  This has penetrated you with ignominy, your anus and your mind.  You may now kiss it as if it were your betrothed.  Your love for it will be second only to your love for me”'  I told him I commanded it, and I wished to see the passion of his kiss on it.  Looking foolish he tried to display a passionate flurry of kisses upon the inert stick, as the gag got in the way and his saliva dribbled from his chin.  I told him how abject he looked and how it pleased me that I could force him into such subjugation.  He stopped his kissing and I thought for a moment that there was a spark of fury within him, but he suppressed it.  “Yes,” I said, “don't say it.  Total control under the most extreme conditions.  That is what is required of you.  You have a punishment to suffer.”  I spoke quietly like a teacher patiently instructing a pupil with his lesson. “I require you to know it will be my extreme pleasure at the pain that I will inflict”.  He said nothing but I knew that terror was in him and mounting still. I needed now to fasten him more tightly. I laid him out face-down, flat. There were chains from the small legs of the divan which bound his shoulders and ankles.  Once again, I attached the thong from his balls. Sliding it between his thighs and attaching it to the pulley.  I ratcheted up his round buttocks.  His bottom was free to wave in the air, and that was the only gesture he could make.  I told him it would not save him.  He mumbled that he had to warn me -- that he might make a noise, and I confirmed that he certainly would.  I would see to it.  I told him he had voluntarily placed himself in my hands and he had done it for the love of me.  I told him he would pay to the extreme for that love, and I added we would soon start.

Do I need to explain the extreme agony of the cane? Do I need to explain how the agony is multiplied by his helplessness, being unable to effect any influence on me whatsoever?  Do I need to explain that the agony was multiplied by his knowing that he had given me everything for love of me and knowing even that I would only give, in exchange, cruelty and take pleasure?  Do I need to explain not only the agony of the body but the anguish of his spirit, that his love would not be returned with love, but with ruthlessness, with humiliation, and by extracting an abject dribbling scream?  Do I need to explain the torture of learning that a world of love can only transform, for him, into unfairness, degradation and a world of insane agony.  I told him all this as my cane descended on his buttocks.  Again and again, it descended on him, and again and again I told him he has put his love in treacherous hands.  Again and again, my cane beat him.  And again and again I told him of the ecstasy of my pleasure. 

As my orgasm came, my blows on his buttocks became wild and inaccurate.  He believed me to be out of control and he feared extreme danger from me.  Then came my orgasm beyond any means I have to describe it to you.  Then I had finished.  I lay beside him, the sleek texture of my latex garments snugly against his soft white skin.  His white form was a mound that rose to a blood-red peak suspended painfully from my pulley.  I had destroyed a significant area of skin.  I told him at that moment that I was proud of him beyond belief.  I said as I relaxed out of the tension that I would be beneficent, and I would release him if he wished.  He could satisfy himself in any way he wished. He told me no, for the time being at least he would remain in his posture of bonded submission beside me.  And I lay too, half-sleeping for a time that was without measure.  When I looked again his buttocks were encrusted with dried blood. I felt for his scrotum and it was a little swollen.  I released the chain and his balls became loose.  I felt for his penis and held it with my latex hands and for another undefined period we dozed silently, obliviously together, his degraded manhood in my appreciative hands.

After a while, it must have been a long while, I noticed it had begun to stiffen.  He told me to climb between him and the bed beneath, between the restraining chains and draw his needing member into my womanly cleft and with vigour to bring him to his climax.  And this I carefully did in honour of his suffering and by the time he had come, I had relieved many times more.  When he had finished, he remained in his chained bonds and I lay beneath him unusually, unaccustomed, as a woman, in a womanly position.

We dozed a little more.  I believed at that moment that he would never consort with the evil in me again and that the body that I had broken in pain would become a stranger I would never again see.

Shall I tell you what happened thereafter.  Was it as I had suspected, a beginning and a final ending all in the one occasion.  Shall I tell you we became man and wife?  Shall I confide that we embarked from that day, on an ever-more elaborate chorus of refinements to our joint passion?

Or shall I leave you to believe the ending that is happiest for you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 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 remembered a dream she was having; one that was regular every few nights she realised one day. In the dream she saw an eye. A very large eye. She was close up to it and it pressed itself in on her in 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, appeared now 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 became 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? How could he, you might exclaim. 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 to others, 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 - before 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 decisions 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 his own ordeal; 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 Joh 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 the English teacher. 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 himself already been mutilated pointlessly. 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 – till 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 in all. 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. Only one was physical.

            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 on his taste, 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, too, 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, amongst the 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. It spoke as it were in the idiom of the city. She would give herself, 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 was 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 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 polished door-knobs rescued her from the devouring poison of her own humiliation. His echoing scream went on unheard. He could believe in a triumph, as of old. Possibly better than of old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was not from looking at him

 

It was not from looking at him. Her love came instead from looking inside herself at what he made her feel.  He was lanky and had a good physique not yet turned to fat. Perhaps he looked after his body. She imagined him in the gym, weights in his hands, or running on that relentless conveyor belt thing with music pounding a rhythm in his ear buds. But he was not hunky handsome. It was two weeks ago when he had come down from his office he shared with one of those power-dressing executive chickens. The junior office girls called them that, and were jealous and confident that they could out-preen those female executives. Sylvia looked at the young man in his trim suit and genuine leather shoes tapping briskly on the stairs as he descended. 

In the reception area there were a number of girls at their computers, maybe as many as twenty and he looked around. Sylvia looked up at him and he noticed, so he came over immediately, to ask her help to locate an ancient cardboard file. Nice to be distracted away from the boringly unamusing keyboard she had as a companion all day. She led him briskly down the corridor to the old file store, the files she and the girls had not yet copied onto hard-discs. As she inserted her key, she turned to him, “What is your name, love?” He did not answer. But he came to an abrupt halt as she had suddenly stood in front of the locked door. With her sudden stop, his hand went out to touch her shoulder as he stopped himself. She felt herself shiver. And yet she thought immediately that his hand was not cold. Nor was he one of the more creepy executives. The door opened outwards, and she moved back against his body. She almost gasped at the contact as she looked in his eyes and excused herself. His apologetic smile had its impact, too. Oh, she thought, was she going to get slapped into another of those cheap romances in some impossible role as an office tart, again. He was new, and probably had not heard about the pathetic little drama that Bernhard had dragged her through last year. This one was new since then and office gossip replenished itself quickly.

But perhaps he had heard and might try something in this dark quiet space, shrouded by ancient files. He seemed confident but efficient and directed. Yet his smile said something. She moved into the filing room, and again asked his name. He told her, Jonathon, but modified it to Jon as he looked around at the surprisingly large array of shelves and boxes and folders. “So, you are all getting this lot typed in, are you?” he said impressed by the task. 

            “Can I help you find something, Jon?” And added, “I’m Sylvie.”

            “I know,” he said, “you’re Sylvie. “And, no; I’ll have to dig out what I need. It is a letter from a long-ago author. Someone who’s just died and they want to write an obituary about him.” He was looking round the shelves and seemed to be locating what he wanted. “The more they write about him, the more books we sell.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds a bit commercial, doesn’t it?” He seemed a bit apologetic and smiled at her again, and looked towards her in the shadowy room. He gave her his engaging smile. She was leaning against the doorpost looking at him, wondering how he knew her name. What did he know about her. And her indiscretions, if that is what you would call them. And, of course, the gossip would have made something out of her indiscretion last year. As he turned his smile on her, he hesitated, “No, I don’t know much about you.” And then added surprisingly shyly, “I have just noticed you behind your computer screen, sometimes.” She felt embarrassed; or was she a bit anxious in this dark room with a young man who had been noticing her?

He turned back to a shelf that he seemed to have quickly located and in a moment took down a box. Turned back towards the door and towards Sylvie, he passed close as he left the room. “I’ll take this to the canteen and look through it,” he said. She nodded, locking the door. “Come and have a cup of tea,” he invited.

            She looked down embarrassed at her shoes, “OK.” It was not actually the time for her tea break, but she could be excused for granting the wishes of an executive of the company. Oh, she thought, is this another discretion coming up.

            There was no one serving tea in the canteen, only a line of four machines along part of one wall - coffee, tea, snacks. They sat together at a table, with no-one else in the large room. He rummaged through the box of papers seeking the facts about the deceased author and sipped his tea. She looked at his calm, quiet, well-dressed presence. What was she doing here with him? Was he just being friendly, or polite; were there vibrations between them? She excused herself to go to the toilet, and he grunted an acknowledgement.

            She locked the door. And she took some deep breathes.  She began to tell herself that this means nothing. She could go down to the disco and find some stranger to make friends with for the evening. But somehow this seemed different. It was their workplace, so, was there a different and more serious bond to be established. Actually, she told herself, this means nothing; what was she looking for.  She must, she thought, be a lonely woman and searching. It wasn’t the way she saw herself. She wandered back to the table. “Do you need me anymore? Shall I go back to my jolly computer,” she said, sightly cheekily. 

            “If you need to.” He seemed to be stashing the papers back in the box, “I think I’ve got as much as is necessary.” So, she sat down again, opposite him. “How long have you been here, in this place.” And he looked at the wall and the ceiling as if he needed to indicate the building and the company they worked for.

            “Oh, since I left school,” she said, almost as if she were in an interview. Was he awkward with her, she wondered. She was feeling awkward with him. “And that was quite a while ago,” she added.

            He was looking at the floor on the other side of the canteen. “Here’s the office cat,” he pointed out inconsequentially, and there it was stalking elegantly and slowly across the room, taking no notice of them.

            “Do you like cats,” she asked inanely. It was not an exciting conversation. So far.

            He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I live alone and I’ve been told to get a cat to keep me company.”

            “Well, that’s an option.” And then she said cheekily, as there was nothing to lose, and as he was moving his chair back to go. “Why don’t you get a girl-friend to keep you company?”

            His chair stopped moving back. But he stayed with his head looking down and his arms on the table.  Then he looked up and said, equally cheekily “Is this an offer.” And he gave her his winning smile again as he began to stand up.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

She went home wondering about Jon. He certainly dressed well, but his conversation was dire. But at least there was no feverish and sweaty indiscretion for the office to laugh about. He made no appearance for a week or two, and she had to assume that all her anxious wondering for those twenty minutes or so, had been completely made up in her mind. Good, at least there were decent blokes about.  Good that there were even decent executives around, who didn’t assume they owned you.

She didn’t often go to the disco to pick up strangers, and certainly not on her own. But on the Saturday three days later she seriously wondered if she was a lonely girl. A sad thought that. In the end she did not go. On the Monday a letter came. She had enquired about a course at the Open University, in philosophy. She wondered, ironically, which would make her less lonely – a stranger at the disco or a course on philosophy. That is, if she was lonely. She would have a talk with Amelia. Sylvie had known Amelia since school. They were those best of friends who listened well to each other, but always thought the other one was getting a better deal in life. Amelia was certainly not lonely. She had boyfriends all the time, though a different one every time Sylvie heard about them. Perhaps, that was just as lonely. They needed to chat about what they each wanted in their not-so-young lives now.

So, they arranged for a pub drink later in the week. Amelia had always been against that ‘indiscretion’ last year. Even before it became one. But to Sylvie’s surprise she was all for Jon. It was impossible to convince Amelia that there was absolutely and completely nothing there; they’d had tea together, that’s all, and he had not said a word, just looked at the papers in his box, and pointed out the cat. And of course, when it came to discussing the purpose of life, Amelia was all for forgetting about university and philosophy – and to go for Jon. “Much better for the hormones,” she advised. And she stuck to it.

Philosophy had been her father’s interest, besides his union activities. He had died five years ago, and she had heard about Emmanuel Kant, and Freud, and Wittgenstein drove her father mad with incomprehension. She had been good at arty things, she liked pottery. But she had also begun to notice that if she saw a young baby in a pram in the street, she found herself looking longingly. Her Mum had always been adamant – do... not... be… a… one… parent… family. And she could not agree more.

            Amelia had said she would take Sylvie out shopping. The important thing is to wear something striking, “What you must wear are clothes that make men want you to take them off. So, they don’t have to be beautiful clothes in themselves. They just need to hint at what is underneath.” Amelia, no doubt, knew exactly what sort of clothes they were. From what she always related, she was always taking her clothes off. Do, I want to go through all that, Sylvie wondered, just to get a baby perhaps. She thought that, really, she wanted someone who wanted her for what she was. And to be fair, for all Amelia’s adventurous dress-sense and clothes stripping, she had not got much further than Sylvie.

            It was weeks and weeks, literally weeks before she even caught a glimpse of Jon again. And he had obviously not been snooping around looking over the girls typing all day. He just was not around. It was not exactly that he was a good-dresser, nor that he was an executive, he was only an average good-looker; nor even that she knew he had his sex organs, just as she herself did; they had only had tea-time fun momentarily cheeking each other, and that was… fun, it counted for something. It was his honest decent smile she kept seeing in her mind. And that could win anyone, and it probably did. He lived alone and with, or without a cat, but she bet in her sinking heart he had an address book of girls he could choose from. Her mind was becoming silly; perhaps she should take to drink. And she bought herself a bottle of wine for a Saturday evening. It became weekly, but not more. She knew how her brother had got into that for a year or so in his teens. She did sign up for a course at the University, distance-learning and part-time. It was on business studies, and the first thing she learned on the course was its boredom. But quickly a tutor got her interested in co-operative ownership structures. She didn’t know what they were till she was enthused about such co-ownership. Just right for the daughter of a philosophical Union man!

Such an enthusiasm tweaked a lot of hormones in her. But then what? One Friday midday, Jon came wandering into the digitising room of girls. He was looking around. He sauntered over casually and stopped by Brenda, patted her on the shoulder and gave her one of his very-decent-bloke smiles. It was exactly what she had not wanted, as all that from a couple of months ago was fading fast. Now, it leapt again, a captive animal trapped inside her, leaping about with eager frustration. Lucky Brenda, but she said she didn’t care, and may have even said it out loud to herself. Astonishingly, more than astonishingly, he moved on from Brenda and headed for Sylvie. It was exactly what she didn’t want to have to deal with again. There was just nothing about him really…

            But he stopped by her desk as she insisted on finishing the sentence she was keying in.  There was nothing she could do. And she just looked up at him. It seemed the whole room must be looking at her.  This was seriously bad, and she choked back her will to live. And said, “Do you want the filing room again?  Someone else died?” She thought it might have been amusing.  But he was not smiling and in fact looked tense. 

            “No,” he said, “come up to the canteen for a cup of tea.”

            After the last wordless teatime with him, this did not seem a particularly thrilling invitation. But she found herself getting up from her keyboard and saying, “Yes.”

            She was feeling nervous but telling herself she was not. On the way to the door. she managed to trip on someone’s litter bin, and he had to put out his hand to hold her steady. Now, definitely, all the girls must be looking at them.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

They sat down opposite each other. And she looked at him silently. “What can I do for you?”

            “I don’t know. Perhaps quite a lot.” He looked awkward. “It is not really about work. I wondered if we would like to be…. Friends.”

            “Friends, “she spluttered without thinking. “I need to know what you are thinking of.”

            “I just thought we might get to know each other better.”

            Sylvie was finding it hard to process this.  It was not like the approach of a stranger at the disco! She sat back and took a deep breath which calmed her – a little. “Look, Jon. I might like to be friends with you,” she started, but shook her head, “No, I’d like to be more than friends.” It seemed, rightly or wrongly, that something straight needed to be laid out between them. “I need to get clear what you are suggesting or thinking. You know, this is a standard company, executives often thinking the admin girls on the computers are there to play with.” He winced slightly. “Sorry, but I’m nervous and not being good at this. It is not that I am suspicious of you. Definitely not you Jon. You are as decent a man as I have come across, I think. And that may be why I am nervous, simply that you are decent that makes me want more than friendship.”

            He put out his hand as if to say that she did not need to say all this. But she did need to, which is why it came out all in a rush and clumsily. She tried to explain all this. He looked her in the eye. There had been no smile from him yet, “I am nervous, too. Perhaps what we both want could mean a lot to us both. A great deal to us both.” There was a question in his eyes, and in his tone of voice.” She sat back. Was she reassured. She left her hand where he had put his hand on hers. There were people on another table watching them. Perhaps listening in. 

She said more quietly, almost without thinking at all, “If you are free perhaps you could come back to my place and we could talk about this. We need to be more relaxed.”

“Yes, we do,”  he squeezed her hand very, very gently. “I am a cautious man, perhaps. I think we need to learn more about each other. I will be working till six…”

She quickly said, “I will wait behind till you are free.” Without saying any more, she stood up to go back to her station. She looked at the couple of women on the other table. One of them smiled at her.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

She stayed on after her usual time of 5 pm. She had her arrangement with him. It could be important, massive. But he is cautious. It is not, she knew, a question of making him like me, but of whether he will like me as I am. When they left at 6, it was raining. Neither had umbrellas. He decided they should take a taxi. She knew she should have said ‘no’. She did not trust her judgement. Despite her knowing he was a decent man, she could not trust her judgement. 

            But true to her judgement, he got the taxi to take them straight to the address she gave. Her conflict though had not relaxed, but still she let him in and they settled in her flat. He expected her to offer him some coffee, tea, perhaps something more relaxing. They were silent for two or three minutes. “We have to relax,” she said, feeling her turmoil. 

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “I can go round the corner to that convenience store and get a bottle of wine. Would you like that?” 

“No,” she said abruptly. “Let’s be cautious, as you say. No alcohol tonight.” She felt she was being pedantic, perhaps tedious.

“OK, that’s fine. This is the getting-to-know-each-other phase, Right? And he took off his expensive jacket.

            “If you say so.” She agreed, wondering how she could explain the things she had to.

            “I don’t know how to say this. People talk, don’t they, and I heard about some story from last year that involved you.”

            “So you know about me? Is that what you meant about getting to know each other.”

            “No, not at all,” and he stopped, “Well yes. I can see it must take a while to get over it.”

            “Is that why it took so long for you to come back to speak to me? I have been churning inside for months, Jon.” She was protesting.

            “As I say, I am a cautious…” But she suddenly interrupted.

Something was building up inside her - Oh, stop being cautious; stop being cautious – she silently screamed to herself. And suddenly tears began to spill. “I’m sorry but let’s get on and talk about this.”

            “Yes, let’s get that over with if you can talk to me about it. I have some things to say as well.” He leaned forward and seemed earnest and sympathetic. “The chap who did it was sacked, Wasn’t he?”

            There was then a long pause. Her tears flowed silently and she had her hand over her mouth, as if she could not bear to speak it out. Eventually, she blurted out, “But it was all my fault.”

            He looked surprised, and he sat back in the armchair.  “But, he should not have done it?”

            “I don’t know, don’t know. I was drunk. If you want to know. I touched him, we were in a taxi and he was supposed to be taking me home. But I wouldn’t tell him my address. And he couldn’t take me home to his wife and family. I touched him, you know I was drunk and I worked him up in the taxi.so he told the driver to take us to a road by some woods. I was thinking it would be fun. I was so drink. He took me into the woods…. It had been a beautiful summer evening” She was sobbing. “Do you want to know all this?” But as he was going to speak she went on. “He took me into the woods and…  he was brutal to me.  You know… raped me.”

            “Yes, that’s what I heard, Sylvie. I am so sorry, sorry. What an experience.”

            “I didn’t cry out, I should have yelled. Everyone says so. I should have. But I was the one… who started it. In the taxi I was kind of raping him. You know.” She was calming as she could see he was listening, was interested.

            “I can see you could be too desirable to resist, but it didn’t have to be rape did it. Not brutal.”

            “No, he shouldn’t have been brutal, of course not. But when I started pushing him away, he couldn’t hold back and he forced me and hit me. So it was me, you see. I keep thinking how I worked him up, I thought it would be fun, then I changed my mind and he couldn’t stop.” 

            “No, Sylvie. Whatever you did, he should have kept enough control of himself.”

She quite quickly began to recover herself. “I should never have got so drunk. That is what started it. But yes, however other people behave we always have to control ourselves. I know. Everyone has told me that.” And she looked down shamefacedly. He wanted to comfort her, hold her, but she was on the other side of the room. He got up slowly, not to frighten her, perched on the arm of her chair and put his arm around her. He felt fatherly, a long way from being a lover.

“What a way to get to know each other, Jon. I’m sorry. My brother overused drink, for a while. I too was just getting back to it a little in the last few weeks.”

            He stroked her back to comfort her. But wanted to clasp her to his chest. He wanted to unite his sadness for her with her own sadness. “Do you want to lie on your bed and let me cuddle and hold you?”

            “Do you want to? To go to bed with me?”

“No, I am not saying sex. Though sex with you has been on my mind for a long time. No, I mean there are other things partners need from each other.”

“Hmm,” she looked at him curiously, “You don’t want sex with me – a man of caution and control, eh?” She smiled for the first time since he had wandered past Brenda to her station in the office.

He did not smile; he was feeling perplexed. “If we decide it, we can have many years of sex together. We can take it cautiously.” 

She laughed at this point, “Don’t you see, I am someone who will charge in. I would go for sex when my hormones are high.”

“Oh, I do indeed, I see it. But I think for tonight we will not jump without looking. Tonight, we have the powerful experience of last year. I think I should stay with you tonight. I think I should lie with you in bed. I think we should see tomorrow how we feel.”

“Oh, now you worry me. By tomorrow you may have decided - on what you know of me – that we will not become lovers.”

“We both do want it. We are charging in that direction.”

“So, you are teaching me caution! Looks like we could have plenty of clashes on that score, maybe?”

And, at that moment he smiled his cautious male, decent smile. In that moment she knew he was in love. Properly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loving together

 

A bloke came on this chat to me. He was red in the face with rage, Well, I didn't see the redness – on the chat, obviously. But I could tell. "You," he said are chatting with that bitch from White City." I had been looking for a date; my previous girl-friend had found someone else, I had been angry at the humiliation rather than disappointed at the loss. And I replied to this stranger, "No bitch from White City. I know a beauty there, someone I adore." He spluttered (if you can in a chat), "She's a bitch. I divorced her!" So I said, "Oh you were her husband? You must have loved her once. She is easy to love, isn't she." He didn't reply to that, not immediately. I was curious how he knew, but she must have told him; to enrage him presumably. 

Later that evening he sent a cartoon character with a puzzled face, wrinkled brow, staring eyes and open mouth. The next day he wrote, “OK. Maybe you’re right. Once we loved, were in love. Perhaps we could all meet up?” I replied immediately, “Perhaps we could.” So I arranged with you when I’d be round next. And then I arranged with him so to meet up, so we would arrive together. I told him that when we arrived at your house, he must put on the loveliest smile he had ever made.  He did not say anything.

When we did arrive, of course you were flabbergasted to see him, and he did pull a very friendly smile. You looked a mixture of tears and fury. So I held you tight in my arms till you relaxed a little.  Then you looked into my face, and said with a sort of outrage, “With him?” and waved a hand at him. I nodded and you nodded as if obeying. “You are good,” I said. “You are beautiful, Thank you.” You sank limply onto the bed. I said gently, “I am  going to undress you.”

You seemed like you would let anything happen to you. But then you looked up and said, “OK,” as if it was a game. Which it was. When you were undressed, I lay you back on the bed. I tied your hands to the bedposts at its head. And he tied your feet to the bottom posts. We both looked at your wonderful body lying for us on the bed. He said, “She is a bit of stuff, isn’t she, mate.” And I said “More than a bit. A load of stuff.” He nodded and we both smiled.

“OK.” I said to him, “you take her first.” Which he did. He was efficient. He slid in and did the job and slid out again. He was breathing heavily. “Good?” I asked. 

“Good. Mate,” he replied. You looked confused as you lay there helpless. Perhaps hating giving him pleasure, but also you seemed to get something from the penis inside – whoever it was. Then it was my turn. I did it differently. I kissed you. On the lips, the neck, preciously on each breast, each nipple. I felt ecstatic. Slowly, my tongue slid downwards.

Then I entered. It was slippery with his juices, with your juices, and soon would be my juices. I told you that you were perfection. Which you were. You were. And I tried to delay till you came. And you did. You convulsed with your whole body and it set me off – completely. And we reached our peaks together. And we stayed there together for a moment. A moment and a half together. I slowly slid away from you. But kissed you on the lips and kissed you between the thighs. 

He had been sitting on the chair looking on. I untied one of your hands, He untied the other one, and you sat up, your feet still tied. It looked uncomfortable, so I put my arm behind your back for you to lean on. I asked if you two thought you could ever get back together. He stared at you and then shook his head. You were looking at the bed between your thighs. It was messy, and you gave a slight shake of the head. I breathed a sigh of relief, “So, I am the lucky one; the very, very lucky one.” We untied your feet.

We all got dressed in silence. I told him I thought that you and I might need to have a quick word together. It took him a moment to realise he was not needed. He thanked me (not you). And I thanked him. It was a tense moment as he left. He obviously felt excluded suddenly, but seemed to be telling himself he didn’t care about being kicked out. To me, it seemed, we were the most beautiful combination. You let me hug you. “That was perfection,” I said. “You must have had so many men wanting you like that.”

I wondered if you would let all that happen to you again. But I was sure he was gone for good. I told you I would pick you up next week and take you somewhere. You asked, “Where?” But I did not tell you. You asked what you should do till next week, as if you were helpless. I knew you were not, just dazed with the surprise. With being used. With the deep satisfied pleasure that warmed you at that moment, and that you could not understand. “You must dream of what has happened this evening. You must dream of how it could have been better for you.”

Next week I called for you and told you as always how beautiful you are in my eyes. You touched my arm and smiled, as if the compliment was mutual. When we arrived, the door was opened by my wife. She stared. You stared. There was some sort of comprehension on both sides. My wife said to me immediately, “I knew you were up to something.” She turned to you and invited you in as if she were taking charge of the hospitality for a guest. 

Before you entered, I stopped you and made proper introductions. Then I let you enter the house first and stepped in after you. The wife offered you a cup of tea. And I said, “We might like to go to the bedroom straightaway. But you asked for the tea, so we went into the living room. When she brought the tea, she said so this is about being randy is it. You said, “Your husband and I agreed on a threesome.” I was enjoying this dizzying uncertainty in both of you. She said, “Maybe you should have asked for my agreement.” And I said not necessarily.

She looked at you as if appealing to your good nature. She obviously liked you but seemed unsure how much she felt jealous or threatened. I reassured her that it would not affect the marriage and we were bound to each other. You nodded. But she didn’t seem reassured. As she said nothing, I went on. “So, it is consensual, then.”. I added that you two were the most beautiful women in the world – which for me you were. She asked, “What’s going to happen then?” No-one had drunk any of their tea. I sipped mine.

I explained what would happen. My wife was aghast. You looked at me because it was the first time you heard what I was proposing. I said we should go up to the bedroom. You stood up. But she stayed in her chair till I took her arm and as if a puppet she stood and came with me. I suggested we take our clothes off, and you undid your blouse. But she stood still. It was another tense moment. I coaxed her and began to undress her. When you were naked you took over undressing her.

“Will I get a fuck as well?” she asked. I said we would see. I put a chair by the bed and drew her towards it, so that she sat down. I clipped the handcuffs on quickly and bound her to the chair with rope, her feet, her stomach, and around her chest. It was very secure though not too uncomfortably tight. You watched without expression. Perhaps you were enjoying her helplessness, perhaps you remembered the week before. I had not told her about the gag so there was some resistance to putting it tightly into her mouth.

When she was secure and more or less silent beside the bed, I invited you to get on it. You looked at her as you did so. I wondered if you felt sorry for her. I put my hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead and said to her, “You are the most precious one.” You watched. Maybe you were jealous, perhaps you were relieved at my loyalty to my wife. I lay on the bed with you, and we embraced with some passion and kisses and vigorous hugs. We soon forgot her noisy movements.

I was very passionate with you, and you seemed to want to show equally loving affection for me. We took our time slowly and bit by bit we worked each other into the sexual frenzy and lift-off. It was actually very intense indeed. We lay back to relax. She had remained in her chair, bound and gagged, watching our entanglement so intensely. She was coughing and dribbling, and making what noise she could. You and I took no notice at first. Then I got off the bed and released the gag. She glared.

After the glare came one single word from her pained mouth, “Bastards.” One single word, but it filled the room with hate and revenge. Both you and I chuckled briefly. That venom contrasted completely with her total inability to do anything. I touched her soft skin – on her shoulder, her breast, and told her again how precious she was. Then there were two words, “Fuck. Off.” I decided it best not to release her from her bonds. So I got back into bed with you and we slept a bit of the night.

Later in the dark I sat on the edge of the bed and held my wife’s two hands. She was quite motionless. I undid the handcuffs and threw them on the floor. She did not move. If I took away her bonds, I was still, unsure if she would fly into murderous activity, or would she remain inert. I was looking into her face and holding the once cuffed hands. She murmured something. I asked her to repeat it. “Thank you for taking off those cuffs.” I repeated how precious she was and kept repeating. 

She seemed spent and exhausted as if she too had been through the equivalent of a sexual climax. I asked if she would like me to release her, so she could come into the bed with us. She nodded, and I wondered if she would become aggressive as soon as released. But she was limp. With those bonds undone she docilely came into bed. She lay between us, but it was you and she who hugged tightly for the rest of the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                    The ring

 

My head is as thick as lead - that is my excuse.

            When I shut my eyes just now there was a flash as tight as electricity and slowly floating out into my eyes there came this image; a white hopeless body, a beautiful woman, ravished and dead.

            At the beginning I was alone in the womb, but I soon emerged and stood on my feet. And I grew and I grew, among all the ogres and sentinels which watched me.  I know oppression, I know sick envy; like all children I know the confusion of innocence.

            Later…. I can see shining in her eyes, her white hair which falls down all over my trembled hands and lingers around the tenseness of my loins.

            I can't remember the first time I saw her but I can remember right from the beginning the ends of her hair and the slope of her shoulder against me.

            It is the first time we are alone together.  I walk so gingerly, I walk like fragile glass; in the street beside her, by her firm body at so great distance that the air sags between. Inside me I carry many months of unsure longing and the perfect image of her step touching the ground.  I can see without my eyes her graceful twist and the pull of her hips, swaying her bosom and her silent face so straight white in the dark.  When I turn to look at the tumble of softness in her body a sudden shock has broken in my pelvis and there is all power in my arms to scatter the stars in space.

            We walk in the darkness, the air parting around us pressing us in.  We are together alone.  I wonder what it is a boy’s body must do.

            Perhaps it is the stern and bone hard lines of her body, almost yielding which caught him in the middle of his breath.  That night like fear they approached and engulfed each other and as clouds rode by above them, they sank with each other into the mouth of their desire, alone together.

            Perhaps whenever they are touching the broad space around absorbs into them. And beside them there are only slender paths.

            

I know her body.  It is stern and her love soaked in steel and yet I have felt her sway into my touch.  All around I have bent vast caves of air to monuments that strain over us.  In our turmoils, there is light from the surface of our skin, it breaks and blesses between us and it is as if contentment floats out all desires.

            In the air the black silk scarf as she wrapped it, I caught it.  Her hair falls.  And mouth, my mouth, hers, breasts, in the belly-to-belly, the belly-to-belly, the belly-to-belly.  In my mouth I always suck her warmth.  I always drink her eye-joy.

            I have sworn it to her.  If she stoops to her feet, there are some small pieces amongst the dust that will fill with beauty as she touches.  She has held my yearning tightly to her breast.  I walk with my pride a carpet underfoot.  There are no prayers I cannot ask from her.  In our union I feel the whole of her body caressing all mine -- I have sworn it to her, and from her.

            In the daylight her body is blue and light, so fragile it will crack in the hands. At night it is her eyes that fix, they are bridges across the sunset.  And intense.  And in the night, all night, intense.

            I sat - an ecstasy that grew.

            I stopped.  That was it. Real.  I stuck.  There. Her and him - who.  Where was I, where the sky? 

            After about three months he saw them -- her and the other.  After three months he knew, then he saw.  Three months he was part of her body, her mind; part of her gesture, part of her path.  And after three months a paralysis, a meteor crater.  And a split in his spine, he crumbles.

            She had complained of a headache.  It could have been her period.  I believed.  We turned back.  Sadly, a hand on her shoulder.  At her home she sulked, I stayed.  I didn't want to go, to leave her, to let go -- so early, only just the evening.  She sulked, told me to go: walked too far in the afternoon.  Too hot -- she had a headache.  I didn't want to go - I wanted to help her out of it.  I went.  I walked in the street.  For an evening I watched the river and then went back to her.  A light in the window.  I rang.

            He rings the bell.  The light switched out in the window.  There is someone at the window, two at the window, two.  Vanished.

            Two.

            There was no answer to the ring.  I went.  I walked in the street, I walked.  My ring had been unanswerable.

            At times, night is coloured purple and spots start, and the water is in my hair and in my eyes.  At times a dead stone starts a mirage, and flights of freed hope wander.  Delicate hands.  In my skin is a pink greed which stretches and clutches.  Am I walking?  I walk, I walked.  A crust of salt on the skin peels around my eyes.  I walked all night -- numb-purple, cracked bones and a pungent taste of blood in my belly, blood burned with shock.  Belly torn in two, in three cracks, with bones exposed.  A shrine in the belly of two deaths.  A broken harvest of pain.  In the night, at times, I sag, I stay without hope of waiting.  I rang, the jangle; lied and the light switched out.  A stop.

            At times I remember.

            It is silence, the fullness of age.  A day which repeats cycles, drenched in dull magenta brine.  Black is the fullness of oldness, a trench of absences.

            There are days which repeat.

            There are days.  There is never; and it is always now.  There are days which repeat a pattern of silences.

            I have touched ice.  I walk with a crucifix of precious metals in my hands.  There is a glow for ever in the wound where the great pain was removed. Life froze in cascades, a shield now protecting my desires and warming.  I am spread out over my own soft skin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                  Sex and love with Beryl Smith

 

As we were returning from the weekend, we picked up a lonely hitch-hiker that my wife had spotted on the road.  She was a youngish woman, a girl, with a cheeky look.  She had a pronounced bosom and long legs.  My wife was also taken with her and engaged the girl with animated chatter as she often does with attractive women, I sometimes wonder, to bind them in a female loyalty; not that she has ever had cause previously to worry about my fidelity. We had a frank and easy relationship, and we could explain fantasies to each other, so long as they remained fantasies only. 

            When we got near to our home my wife, in an excess of friendliness which she had worked herself into, invited the busty young girl to have supper with us.  She helped us vigorously to unload the car and settle our things back in the flat in the centre of town.  My wife went off to the kitchen to put together the simple meal she had planned. This left me with the young lady who was certainly someone any older woman might want to keep in bounds.  I was more able to look at her now in the light, and out of the car.  Her blonde hair, curled up in a bun at the back of her head, had begun to loosen towards the end of the day and one or two strands curled down by the side of her face, over her shoulder and ended in a little twist on her left breast.  Her sandy-coloured cotton sweat-shirt was quite tight and had the words "University of Life" printed across it with two red hearts on either side of her bosom.  She had tight leather trousers of a brilliant dark blue that finished short of her ankles.  With a thick yellow belt she looked like the trite colours of a Mediterranean beach. I poured her a drink before supper. Her name ws Beryl, she told me. She didn't speak much.  But her lack of words was compensated by the impact of those she did utter.  She suggested I might like to sleep with her for the night instead of with my wife.  A change, they say, is as good as a rest but this girl, whose name I still cannot remember, was offering a challenge not a rest.  I looked at her as she coolly sipped her drink.  I took a glass of sherry through to my wife in the kitchen, before I replied.  Eventually, I said, "There may be some opposition to that".  She struggled with her hair; another blond strand began to unwind.  "She's nice, your wife" she said without much interest, "but a bit of a cow".  And after a moment she added "She talks a lot doesn't she!... don't you want to stop her sometimes?"  At this point my wife came into the room.  "What are you two talking about?" she asked brightly, disguising any suspicion she might have in her mind.  Then she turned to the young girl, and started to tell her about my passion for music, Mozart...  She rattled on about this and was drinking her sherry and asking me to go and lay the table, all at the same time.  I finished my drink in a slow gulp and put the glass down to go and do my duty with the cutlery.

            Beryl wandered into the kitchen when I was laying out the kitchen table for us. She too gulped down her drink and put the glass on the table. She touched my arm and said, ‘She me round the flat. So I paused my duties, and showed her where the toilet was. She just looked and seemed to expect me to show her the rest. There was only our one bedroom, into which she wandered and looked around. I waited as she hesitated till she moved back to the doorway. But she did not walk through. Instead, she closed the door, turned the key, leaned back against the shut door and looked at me suggestively. I was about to say, ‘oh come on, now’ or something when she quietly said, “I need you to show me something.” I go the gist of her meaning and was wondering how to gently dissuade this eager teenager. She was quite pink and in general she was like a ripe plum on a tree waiting to be picked. 

            She undid the button at the top of her blouse. Foolishly I said, trying to be amusing, “It looks as though you want to show me something.”

            “I need you to show me what a man does to a woman.” And, unashamedly, she undid another button. I looked at the soft pink and enticing flesh. The shape of her small breast and its pert  nipple was obvious to see. I wanted to touch it. She was looking steadily into my eyes.

            “I think you’ve probably found out about what men can do.”

            “No,” she said, “We have had a few classes at school.” While still gazing into my face she put one hand into the top of my trousers. 

            “You don’t get to it that way,” I said, still foolishly trying to be jokey about what she obvious desired at that moment. So she began to feel for my flies and found the zip which she pulled down. I began to think this was getting too far  from safety. But my body didn’t think so. It began to stir between in the loins. She really was desirable. And she found quite easily my now rather eager member. She pulled it out of the trousers, and then the balls.

            “Please, will you get onto the bed, sir,” she asked as if addressing her teacher. You can guess I was a bot torn. I did not imagine this could really be a proper seduction. She seemed to be making it into a school lesson. My body, without my permission, really did want to lie on the bed with her. Quickly she took off her clothes and then sat astride me, quite naked. She touched by member and pressed it against the skin of her slender tummy. It felt, of course, like heaven. 

            At that point, my wife called from the other side of the door, to say the meal was ready and what were we doing. Neither Beryl nor I spoke, but Beryl whispered to me, “I want to hug your… er, thing, in my hugging tunnel.” I didn’t say a thing. My wife called again and banged on the door. Beryl lifted herself up and then very slowly lowered her tunnel, as she called it, onto my ‘thing’. She fumbled to get our two parts to marry together, and I entered her very tight love-tunnel to be hugged. I found my body’s thrusting impulses difficult to suppress. She was biting her lip as she brought us together, and the banging on the door it stringer and my wife’s shouting got louder. And then I lost it….  I grabbed her around the waist and rolled over on the bed to complete a very quick intercourse. Beryl gasped a few times quite loudly and then smiled at me. I notice that the banging on the door had stopped.

            Beryl put her lips on mine, and whilst we were sort of kissing she said, “Now, I know what to do.” And she asked, “Did you like it?” I was only just coming out of the mists of my ecstatic sensations, but I whispered back to her lips, “Yes.” It was, unfortunately, the truth.

            When we came out of the bedroom, Beryl with her clothes on again, and me with my trousers in order, there was no sign of my wife. There was a saucepan of pasta on the stove, dried out and beginning to burn, and a now-cooling bowl of Bolognese sauce on the table. It didn’t take long to check that my wife had run out of the flat and left us to it. I knew where she would have gone. I told Beryl, “You’ve had tour lesson. Now you have to go.” She looked a little disappointed, so I said, “You did well; you’ll get a good mark in your exams.”

            She looked  mischievously at me, “I know.”

 

 

                                                                          II

 

When I had finished writing the story you have just read, I looked up and across the hearth at my wife who was reading. She had her large owl-like glasses on her nose.  She was distracted by my stopping the writing and looked up too, an enquiring look.  I had never written anything like that before. Mostly my work was contributing to the business pages on a couple of national newspapers, dry stuff.  I said, with a mischievous grin at her "I've written something different.  Have a look at that while I do the supper.  She looked put out as she put down her book and took the sheets of paper, I passed to her.  I went into the kitchen.  My wife is a handsome woman, but we rarely look at each other nowadays, in our early forties, starting towards the ‘one-day-we-will-be-middle-aged’ horizon.

            When the supper was done, I came out of the kitchen and she was just returning through the front door, a few drops of rain on her mac.  I had heard a noise whilst I was cooking, like the front door latch.  I asked, puzzled, "Where have you been?" - "Just to post a letter." she said idly.  She looked a little flushed.  We sat down to eat supper together.  "So what wicked little fantasies you've got inside that statistical little brain of yours." She twisted her mouth with a mischievous grin as she spoke.  I felt embarrassed; I suddenly didn't know what she was thinking.  After so many years of marriage, so many years of knowing her reactions, so predictably, of being so predictable myself.  I remembered that mischievous grin, from long ago, right back at the beginning when I had begun to accept that we would be getting married; we had been at a party and I had seen that grin when she was dancing with someone else, a handsome fellow we all knew had a lot of women. She was looking lovely then; with her very dark hair; her full round face looked open and wide and honest.  I had been so drawn by her steady eyes that had looked so lovingly at me.  It had been after that party that I had felt suddenly unsure of her; I had insisted we got married quickly, immediately.  Now I felt the same - unsure of her.  What had I done?  What had my fantasies done?  I looked at her now and saw the beautiful and handsome woman I had fallen in love with. I could see the shape of her body I knew so well through the casual relaxed clothes she was wearing this Sunday evening, the tight belt drew the loose dress under the shape of her bust which was large enough to pull lines of tension in the cloth.  I suddenly felt I had spoilt a world of security and contentment. "What did you think of it?" I asked casually but really I was anxious.  She obviously realised already my uncertainty.  I looked around the room, rather nervously. "What," I asked abruptly "have you done with it?"

            "I haven't got it." she said.  I felt aghast.  Had she torn it up - thrown it away in disgust?  I looked at her blankly.  This handsome woman I knew so well.  Had my frank moment of pornography sickened her so much?  It was not like her; she often liked sexual jokes, she was always free about such things.  She was a social worker even, she would not be shocked - or condemning.  She had often told me stories from the child guidance clinic, the violence, the neglect, the child abuse in the families. I almost knew the lives of those young kids she worked with. She had always told me with a shock that was full of compassion and concern.  She was an honest human woman.  But did she think I was like that story I had written?  She had a full sense of life and love of people, a humour and no condemnation.  I loved her very much at that moment. "What have you done with it?" I said in a kind way; but I must have looked disappointed too.  "Have you destroyed it?"  Well, perhaps no harm if she had.

            "No."  She looked yet more mischievous and as if it was a great joke to keep me guessing.  I began to relax as my worst fears of her condemnation receded. 

            "But, it's not here.  You haven't got it.  Where is it?"  I suddenly remembered her going to post a letter ten minutes before. 

            "I've posted it" she said, and stopped as if it was all the explanation needed. 

            "What do you mean?  Where to?  Who too?" I spluttered.  I began again to feel alarm and dismay. A new kind of fear gripped me.  I had never known my wife to betray a faith like this. I thought of the other chaps in the copy room where I sent my articles in.  They would hand it round the room, a page each, and read it out with hoots of laughter as they did with copy they didn't like.  The city editors were their worst victims; they would embroider their slushy prose in a cruel fashion - but they would not need to with mine, "Who have you posted it to?"

            "Your mother." she said.  I went pale.  I could feel it in my face, an icy pallor.  It seeped slowly right down through my guts.  I could no longer eat the meal I had cooked.  Nor could I say anything. “My Mother." I repeated senselessly.  My mother had become a catholic about ten years ago after my father died.  She even went on pilgrimages and gave money to convent homes for pregnant teenagers.  She lectures me every time I go to see her, on the sexual evils of the modern world, about the temptations, about the tarts with whose profession she seemed remarkably familiar, like a doctor researching a cure for cancer.  My mother would have a fit, or worse.  She makes me promise every time I go to see her that my marital relations should be secure and never enjoyable.  Otherwise, she would certainly write a will to leave her estate to the dreadful Church and cut us out, and then die straightaway from grief over her only son.  My head whizzed round in trivial details.  "My Mother." I said stupidly.

            "Well, it will be posted to her on Tuesday, I expect. I put your little story in an envelope and addressed it to her."  She explained this calmly, and continued eating the meal on her own, mine now abandoned.  I wondered if, after all, there was a chance to rescue it before Tuesday, get my story back. 

            "Where is it now?" I prodded her to continue, I begged.  It was dragging each feather from a chicken, one by one; but it was me that was feeling raw and exposed. 

            "I've sent it to a friend and asked her to post it for me. On Tuesday."

            "But," I could not explain this, "whatever for? You know she'd die of the shock. You know what she expects of me. You know she thinks I'm as celibate as all those padres and curates of hers.  It would kill her." 

            But my wife waved her fork in the air and said, when she had carefully swallowed her mouthful, "Nonsense, she's a tough old bird.  She'll put you through the mill for a while, squeeze your overdraft guarantee, that sort of thing."  And she still continued eating.

            "But," I exploded "it will hurt her terribly. You can't do that to her, can you?" She looked sadly at her plate as if mildly protesting that it was now empty and had failed her by remaining empty. 

            And then straight into my eyes, "Why not! She hates me.  You know how she behaved after we married."  I did know how she behaved after we married.  She had pestered me with her ‘illnesses’; she'd taken to her bed and demanded I live at home for days on end.  She had crashed our car, gently but effectively, into the side wall of our house.  My wife continued quietly, and reflectively, "She'll only be like that again, that's all. She hates me and won't even see me except if I dress in black and approach her on my knees as if going to the shrine of a saint." 

            I didn't argue with this exaggeration because I knew what she meant.  "It just seems like revenge."  My wife was just not like that. I could not believe she was doing this to me.  To my mother. I couldn't believe it was happening.

            "It could be revenge," she said. "Unless..." and she blew me a kiss across the table without finishing her sentence.  Then she continued straightened her knife and fork on her plate as if engrossed in being tidy. The same smile played in her eyes, the mischief on her lips. "Eat up your food, it's really very good.  It will get cold." 

            I began to get a grip on myself.  "I don't want to.  I just don't know what's got into you" I said. 

            She pushed her plate a little way in front of her - "Well,," she started, "you seem to think you are the only one who can have a fantasy.  Maybe I do too.  Have you thought of that?"  I had not; but I conceded it was possible. 

            "So, what is your fantasy, then?"

            Perhaps," she whispered drily "perhaps this is one of them.  Something not short of an earthquake is about to shake your life, my dear; unless... And I am completely in command of whether it will or not.  I can ring my friend tomorrow and stop her sending on that envelope; or I may not. This is cat and mouse.  The quality of the next few months of your life are entirely in my hands.  I can unleash the Furies or not". 

            "I hope not." I said emphatically. 

            "Well," she trumped, "that depends." 

            I was shaken.  The whole stability, the basis of my life, of my marriage, seemed to be changing.  "But, what does it depend on?"  I asked at last.

            "It depends on my whim.  And that depends on whether you please me, my dear." She sat back looking at me, as if waiting for me to do something. 

            "How do you want me to please you?" - I thought I had always been willing to do so.  She was being so enormously annoying in not coming to the point; "How do you want to be pleased?". 

            She looked enigmatic again "By satisfying my fantasy."  I now felt impatient "What fantasy?  She smiled sweetly "That you will have to find out. You will have to explore my body until you can find the trigger.  You've got until tomorrow night, haven't you?  After that it may be too late, and my friend may have posted your little masterpiece on to your Mother.  It is up to you and what you can do."

            "But," I replied, still trying to catch up with her, "we do that every weekend.  We do it every Friday night or Saturday night, or both sometimes." 

            She looked down her nose "Well we do - yes, we do that.  But you like it in the dark, you like it under the bedclothes.  It takes you about five minutes and then you climb back into your pyjamas and into your bed.  My fantasy is that you will do something different, something you have never done before." 

            I felt somewhat belittled by this. "You're a bitch right now." I flung out. 

            “That" she said "is not a very good start. I do not feel especially turned on by that.  And anyway you have often flung that sort of thing at me before.  It is not new.  You have to realise that time is not on your side.  You have only until tomorrow evening, remember.  I simply have to do nothing, and the hurricane will break over your head all on its own now.  And I at least will be at work during the day tomorrow.  You had better take stock of your position."

            I was silent for a while, doing what she said – taking stock.  Whatever her fantasy she was having, it didn't excite me.  I thought about it.  She wanted me to take her to bed and to do things to her body that I had never done before.  We were, as she had said, in a bot of a routine. We had never been very explorative. Now, I had no choice.  But perhaps it would be alright anyway; I had never been against going to bed with her. I stood up.  "Okay." I mumbled.  I took her gently up the stairs to our bedroom, and carefully unclothed her body, which I had never really done before.  The sight of her smoothness and roundness nearly made me weep with love for her.  I lay her gently on the bed and I literally explored every part of her body.  And when I found the part of her body she wanted, and when I found what she wanted me to do with it, I knelt on the floor at the end of the bed, and she lay on her back, her knees drawn up and her legs wide apart.  I pressed my tongue against her clitoris and began to regularly massage her there with my saliva.

            And as I began to do this, she lay back with a great sigh, her arms stretched wide to either side of her body and she began to tell the story of her fantasy.  As I went on licking her there till my jaw ached and stroking her labia on either side till the juices ran, slowly her breathing increased, her sentences got shorter. Her juices and my saliva mingled and ran slowly down my chin; and I was not nauseated as I had expected, and I could feel my penis getting warm and stiffer.  After a long time, her story neared its climax; she began to slowly moan and when she came she rubbed her clitoris with great arching movements of her pelvis against my chin and my tongue and my face.  It went on for a long time.  I had never felt her body consumed with such urgency.  Then when she had finished, she clasped my head tightly between her thighs in gratitude, her fingers entwined within my hair. Suddenly she let go and turned on her side and. I swear that in seconds she was asleep. I pulled the bedclothes over her body and nursed my very stiff penis in my hand.  I climbed into my bed, and I lay a long, lonely time trying not to touch it and aggravate the burning feeling in my loins.  As I dozed into sleep I thought of the story of her fantasy and a rich sickness of rage pounded in the pit of my stomach.

 

 

                                                                          III

 

The story of her fantasy was:  She said with her head back and her eyes shut - "One day, about a year ago, I took it into my head to change my life in a special way.  I cut down the number of hours I was working, so that it gave me two hours a day to do something else.  In my mind, I had the idea, which I never told you about, of having fun.  You know, the way women do.  It was a corny idea, earning money working with their bodies.  I knew a good deal about it, in theory, from the mother of one of our children at the clinic; and there were other clients, young school leavers who wanted to prove something to me about themselves.  They told me what fun they were having.  Anyway, the mother who was desperate about feeding her child, told me most.  She found her way into it easily enough. And she enjoyed telling me about the craft of it. She thought it was impressing me. Well, perhaps it was.  So, I took myself into a pub in Deptford at lunchtimes and spent a while there each day.  And from time to time a man would take me off to his living room in a high-rise block.  I did not charge them much - and they did not seem to want very much.  They were mostly lonely, unemployed and separated.  They needed their egos soothed quite as much as their genitals.  They were mostly middle-aged but they wanted consoling, like little boys.  I found it quite pleasant but a bit like social work. They groped around my body and under my clothes.  They admired my breasts, my titties, because they are still nice and firm and I told them I am ten years younger than I am.  Maybe they believed me; they wanted to, I suppose.  Only a few wanted to push their penises into me, and only about two managed to get themselves stiff enough to do so.  Most were relieved that I did not expect a top performance.  It was all desperately anxious and adolescent. I got a reputation for being rather motherly and inexpensive; and when I began to be in demand, I became of more interest to the professional tarts there who had previously avoided me as if alien.  They had not known what to make of me.  One of them, a very skinny woman, who had breasts that had been built up surgically, seemed to know the others and to be a kind of foreman.  She began to acknowledge me.  Eventually she made me a proposition.  I could see I had become type cast and occupied a particular niche - for the impotent and depressed.  So, for a change, I accepted.  Madame Skinny, as I called her, then took me, on a regular basis, after the pubs shut in the afternoon to a large house in a rather derelict street. In the house the rooms were interlaced with spy-holes and one-way mirrors that gave me the opportunity to watch a number of lanky twenty-year-olds doing a professional job on equally lanky but nervous young men with rather well-to-do appearances. In between their customers, the girls talked to me about their work, about men's bodies, their erections and their astonishing variety of tastes.  There were various rooms in the house that catered for various kinds of pleasures - and pains; various kinds of restraint, bondage and punishment.  There were various classes of wardrobes catering for fetishists and transvestites and for those seeking their dreams of governesses, or nurses, or the military.  But mostly my experience had been to cultivate erections and trigger climaxes from elderly boys who had never grown up.  I was fascinated by the craft that these dispassionate girls took seriously. They like I were often unsuccessful with their anxious distracted clients, no matter what complicated accessories were demanded.  Often the more intricate the procedure the more limp was the finale.

 

Clearly I would be expected to work in this household when the time came; and after about ten days, my skinny-loined friend, who I still could not like, explained in a confidential interview that I would now begin to take my turn in operating their elaborate make-believe apparatus called the rack, binding languid limbs to a crucifix and sucking the limp member, or whacking flat buttocks till the wheals glowed in the dark.  My first customer - always the most remembered they said - was a blond and podgy young man, , I dressed up in tight leather, and he grovelled under the flick of my crop across his thighs or his ribs as I stood astride his pale body lying in the bath.  He worked himself to a climax while I peed on the blonde hairs on his chest.  He paid a great deal of money for this.  He never touched my body.  I did this every afternoon for a month; and never once did you suspect, did you?  You knew nothing of my new career.  The rates of pay were not good despite the fees the sad youngsters paid.  But then, I did not want the money.  I never asked for more than twenty pounds for the afternoon, and then I always gave it away to a good charity.  I saw each customer for an hour or less. 

            Usually, each girl took the next one to arrive. There were four girls and me, and ten rooms to choose from.  I can tell you the exact details if it interests you.  Sometimes there were slow times, and if more than one girl was free, the next customer could choose.  They almost never chose me, whatever I picked from the wardrobes to wear; I suppose it was my age, being mostly twice the age of the other girls.  But mostly the ones that got me, acquiesced; and all of them were satisfied and claimed I was exciting.  And in fact, I can say I liked nearly all of them.  Though hardly any excited me.

            After a month when I began to wonder what I would do next, one of the girls suggested to me that we went independent.  She had extraordinary red hair and wore a lipstick that clashed.  I called her Scarlette.  She seemed to know what we would do and how we would work.  We had to buy our way out of the house, and we paid unhesitatingly. The girls were all frightened of the Madame.  She was believed to have violent friends who would scar our faces with razors or burn out our beauty with acid or blow-lamps, if we did not conform and obey. So, my companion and I paid our release money, and promised the same amount in six month’s time.  And you still have not noticed that one of our savings accounts has been closed.  We began to work in the West End in hotels.  This was different altogether.  They were different men, older, assured and no longer frightened of women.  It was then a continual physiology of erections and ejaculations.  Often the men were Arabs and they demanded strenuous activity.  My clothes became more elaborate, more sensuous, tighter and ever more vivid.  I worked in the afternoon only and was strict about leaving for the evening.  Occasionally you were away at a Conference or some other financial jamboree and about three times I made a night of it.  The men here were proud of themselves and of their performances and I realised they looked to me as an assistant to keep their performance at its peak.  I became good, and then even better.  I learned with these men how to remain icy and tender at the same time.  The more unmoved by them I was the more they performed at me.  They were much less interested in unusual equipment and phantasies; they wanted sustained and continuing achievement.  I never once employed my new skills with you.  I now know how to make your body into your heaven, but you have never once suspected.  Often those men's juices ran out of me and warmed my thighs as I walked home to you. But you never knew.

            We were pretty obvious in the bars of the Hilton and other hotels we had to be quick to catch our prey; or else we were moved on.  But sometimes the barman would take me into the stock cellar, and take down his trousers for me to quickly grope and grab what I could find.  Then he would not call the security, and we could wait for a while.  There was a lot of money in this, and you never noticed when the savings account replenished itself.  But again, the fun began to die when the novelty wore off.  I began to think I was coming to the end of this life.  I can actually say that I never thought of those men when I was with you; and also I never once thought of you when I was out in the afternoon looking for them.  Then about three months ago, whatever it was that I had been looking for in this adventure suddenly arrived.  He was not an Arab, but was very dark, a Greek, in tankers, I believe.  Maybe he was sixty-ish, strong, fatherly and still very lithe, a lifetime of money and women behind him. For the first time I felt glamourous - and so much glamour my insides melted, my heart had a job keeping up its thumping.  I knew I glowed with a wonderful blush when he came up to me because his eyes followed my blush right down to the rounded parts of my bosom that were exposed.  I knew he would be gentle with me.  He knew it was his gentleness and strength that captured me.  Suddenly there were only two people left in the world.  We drew together like magnets and the barman must have thought we had expected to meet.  From that day on I followed him like a yacht on the flood of the stream.  That was the night I was unexpectedly ‘delayed at work’, do you remember?  You thought it was my suicidal client; but it was me that had died in a special way, a delicious way, a death delivered by the kind hand of love.  After that first occasion, I knew he would come for me regularly. I was always in the same place waiting for him. I never went with anyone else. The girls had told me this was the biggest risk of the profession, and I did not care.  I forgot you.  Twice or three times in a week he would be there.  My heart would jump into my mouth, and my new life came to me for the afternoon.  And those afternoons when he was not there, I died in a kind of apathy.  Yet he knew of my agony, and a month ago he told me of the new arrangement.  I changed my hours at work, and one day a week he had me for the full day.  It started two weeks ago.  He calls for me at the office in his very large Bentley. We sit together in the back and look hungrily at each other, while his chauffeur drives us to Harrods.  We shop in the morning for the clothes he wants to see me in; and I tell him to buy the shirts and the shoes I like.  Then we take our clothes to the little Knightsbridge flat that he has bought for our meetings.  We change into our clothes, and look in the mirror, and look at each other. Then I embrace his strong wiry body, his crisp new shirt gathered into the belt of his trousers; his smart sleek shoes standing firmly on the floor as his frame supports my swooning love.  Arm in arm we go for lunch, a small aperitif, and omelette; and return to the flat, he, holding in one hand a bottle of his favourite champagne, and in the other my craving body.  Last week he swung me through the door and closed it with a flourish. His free hand caressed my cheek, a look of wonder and passion in his eyes.  I did not move for fear of melting into a pool on the floor.  He gestured to the bedroom and I went obediently, held by the elbow. He reached into the kitchen for two glasses.  "Please, your clothes", and he patted a chair. I obediently undressed, the whispering slither of silk on my skin, the soft clunk of the metal buckle of my belt as it freed my waist and my skirt.  He opened our bottle of champagne as my body gradually presented its smooth, creamy freshness to him.  I pressed my naked body against his expensive suit.  The soft flannel soothed my high-pointed nipples.  My well-used vagina gaped inside me.  He lay me back on the bed and came down beside me.  I undid the buttons of his trousers. I pulled up his shirt.  I kissed the soft skin of his tummy, the wiry hairs over his pubis.  Some of my hair caressed his genitals.  He sighed.  He removed his clothes. I looked at the long dark length of him from the steady eyes gazing into mine, to the pink tip of his penis waiting for me, to the strong sinews of his thighs and calves.  He pressed a glass of champagne to my lips.  I drank it, not taking my eyes off him.  He stroked my aching skin many times, from my shoulder, to my breast, to my waist, to my buttocks. He stroked me.  I saw his penis begin to stir, to waken and straighten.  I put my fingers to touch it, but he moved them away as if it were in agony "Not yet" he breathed.  He lay me back on the bed again, and his lips moved over my skin where his hands had been before.  I breathed heavily on him.  When his mouth came lower, my thighs opened involuntarily.  My body breathed him in.  He pressed my thighs apart and he looked there into the very centre of my being. His fingertips traced the outline of what he saw there.  The tender touch was excruciating.  It was electrical.  My knees drew up, my body opening itself, to give to him.  He poured the drips of icy wine from his glass into my heated crevice. The cold heightened the longing. Then his warm tongue drank from me. I groaned.  He worked on my agony.  My climax hovered.  He poured the wine, he drank it from me.  I burned, he poured, I came, he drank.  I clasped him to me with great tension in an enduring embrace that would not let time come in; and in spite of my iron need, he lifted himself gently into place upon me. His lovely penis slid.  And very carefully and slowly he made me come again with his climax.  In that moment I clutched in my arms all the blossoming love the universe had ever known.

            At the end of the afternoon he paid me well; the chauffer returned me.  I shall meet him again this week, tomorrow.

 

 

                                                                         IV

 

Even my wife's wild fantasy, frenetically impossible as it was, caused my excitement to be saturated with jealousy.  I took heart that it was to me that she told such an intimate web of her mind. The mixture of my unfulfilled excitement, the jealousy and the abased service to her, was a violent new cocktail, like discovering a new colour in the rainbow that no-one had seen before. I felt privileged.  I felt I had never been so close to her.  In the morning I woke late and had to hurry to reach an appointment.

            When she returned from work in the evening, the atmosphere had changed between us.  Sunday evening seemed a vast journey away, the other side of the moon.  She seemed strained and full of something. After supper she brought out of her brief case a sheaf of papers.  At first, I thought it was my story she had retrieved, but I saw it was not, so I asked, "Have you got my story back?".

            "Before we go into that," she commanded, "read what I have here."  She sounded suddenly displeased.  "I think it is self-explanatory.  It is a long letter from a fifteen-year-old girl who I have just started working with at the office."  The letter was indeed a long one.  I read it all through, as I sat opposite my impassive wife.  My anxiety mounted, as you will see, as I went along.  My wife waited for me to finish as if time would not be merciful.  The letter was as follows:

 

Dear Mrs Social Worker,

                                                   I have a lot to say to you and it is a nuisance to wait all the week round till I see you next week.  I've got something on my mind I haven't told you, and I don't know how to tell you. It didn't seem to come out last week.  I've got to tell someone.  There's so much nobody knows.  My Dad used to strap us a lot when we were kids.  I don't expect you know what it's like, but I was frightened of his coming home every day.  My Mum tried to stop him, but she was frightened of him too, so it just meant he strapped us harder.  He thought it was teaching us what's what.  He said we were kids without morals.  I didn't know what those things were then.  I thought they might have been those things which adults used with each other in bed.  But he said we had to keep to our morals, but after Mum died, he had a lot to do with women, lots of them.  People used to tell us it wasn't right.  It all seemed disgusting.  I told myself I wanted to stay a virgin, not to do like he did, not with anyone.  And I did stay a virgin for a long time - really and truly.  Lots of my friends didn't stay virgins quite a long time ago.  They muck around with boys.  Well, I've known a few boys too, now.  I've seen a cock, and I've seen it stand out, and I touched it.  But something different happened last weekend. I never do anything with boys. They want to do it but I don't think they know how.  Nothing ever happened in the past, not even with the man who got me and my brother on the railway cuttings.  He wanted me to suck his prick but my brother got hold of his wallet and ran off with it, so he chased after it and I could get away and get the neighbours on to him. I didn't know him.  So, I kept myself clean, you see.  So that's why I wanted to talk about last weekend because I don't know if I did right.  Well, I know I'm not a virgin now, so I suppose it was wrong, but it seemed so nice., really nice.  He was nice, because he said I was nice.  It's funny isn't it; I suppose you only like people if they like you.  He said he was over forty and that's nearly three times my age.  He said what difference did it make - so I suppose it doesn't matter.  But he wasn't like the boys at school.  And he wasn't like my Dad either. I suppose he's what Dad should have been.  Anyway, I was hitchhiking back from Hull - my Dad didn't want to see me, I think, and I didn't want to see him, but we have to do it because the court says so. That's what you say isn't it.  And my brother is away at the school they put him in.  So, I have to go and see my Dad sometimes.  It still makes me think of my Mum - not the foster one I had, my real one.  I've never talked about all these things.  My Gran always said you have got to forget about the things that upset you.  But there's lots of things you can't sort of forget.  This man stopped in his big car to give me a lift.  He took me all the way right down from near York to London. I’ve had lots of lifts before, but he was different.  He didn't look at me like some of the men, and he didn't put his hand on my leg.  My Gran would have called him a Gentleman. He just said nice things.  He liked what I was wearing.  It was that T-shirt I usually wear, and my yellow belt, you’ve seen them, haven't you; and I got some really nice trousers, my Dad had just given me. He said I looked really nice like he was on holiday in the pacific or somewhere.  He said it was very nice, and I wrote it down afterwards because it was a pretty thing to say.  He told me he was a writer, short-stories for magazines and things.  So, I suppose he thinks these things up all the time. When he got me to where my room is in London I asked him to stay.  I couldn't tell you about it when I came last time.  He came into my room, it's very small, and he stayed all evening.  We went to bed and he made love to me.  He put his hands on my shirt and felt me nipples; and he said he liked my tits.  It makes you feel good doesn't it.  He called my tits my ‘sticking out bits’.  He said he had a sticking out bit and he asked if I wanted to feel it.  I felt like a happy kid with him.  So, I said yes.  He undid the front of his trousers and put my hand inside, between his legs.  I said, it isn't sticking out much.  And he said, we'll see about that then.  He undressed me and I undressed him.  Then he put out the light and we got under the bed clothes on my bed, and his sticking out bit started to stick out properly.  He told me lots of things about me, all sorts of crazy things.  He wanted to lick all my parts he said.  He said if his wife knew he'd have to tie her up and put a gag in her mouth. She would have hysterics.  I don't think he liked his wife.  She must be quite bossy.  After a bit he put his cock between my legs and I could feel it go right into my hole.  I said it was a bit tight, but that’s how he liked it.  It hurt a bit, but I didn't mind because he made me feel warm and nice. His thing was warm somehow and it moved. It was like being on a boat when there's a storm, as he jerked up and down.  But I loved it really.  I don't know if it’s right.  But I want to see him again.  He never told me where he lives or anything.  I don't even l know his name.  Mrs Social Worker, what do I do?  I've got to see him, will you help me to find him.

                                                Love from Beryl Smith

 

 

                                                                          V

 

I sat back when I had read it.  My wife looked thunderous.  She was normally so very even-tempered.  I felt bad about the hitch-hiking girl.  Was my wife angry about what I had done -- to my wife, or what I had done to the girl? It frightened me a bit.  I was still concerned to get back the story I had shown her, I felt in her power still.  I asked if she had retrieved it - "It's quite safe" she said threateningly.  "It was waiting at the Knightsbridge flat when we got there today.  He thought it was a laugh when he read it.  But he said it might be important for us. He sent the chauffeur out to get some photocopies made - `Just in case', he told me."

 

I felt everything slipping away.  A cold fear sucked me from inside.  How many people were going to know about my secret fantasies.  Was she going to take revenge on me?  "You were a shit to that girl" my wife spat at me, “I knew you had been up to something when you had been to Yorkshire and hadn’t got back till so late at night”.  I knew why the revenge was coming.  The professional social worker outraged for her client was going to degrade me as an abuser, and shame me to everyone we knew.  For once I regretted something; I wished I had not written that letter she supposed had come from her client Beryl, and she showed me in the belief it was a genuine description.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Four – All dark

 

 

 

 

 

Love for the husband

 

She was standing there almost as still as the lamppost behind her, almost as slim as the lamppost. As he got out of the taxi and it shot away out of this street, the lady opened the long woollen coat she had hugged around her. Under its folds she revealed the glittering catsuit that she showed to the passing men in cars. Most cars slowed to look. However, he had got a taxi so that he could exit and meet her. 

            “Like what you see, young man?”

            He was in fact quite elderly and unimpressed by her compliment. “Very drawn to you, Mrs Latex.” She closed her coat to avoid disturbing the traffic as it was passing. “Where will you take me, young lady? Have you got a place for the night?”

            “The night? I hope you can afford me all night.” He was tall but casually dressed in a rather ancient looking anorak that did not suit his silver hair. “All right. It is around the corner. Not far. But the first thing….” She stopped talking as he took from his pocket a bundle of notes. “Count them out into my hand.”

            He got to six hundred, “That will do for half. I’ll take the other half when we’ve finished. If you like me, that is.” He put his hand back in his pocket and withdrew another bundle just to show he could afford whatever she wanted. “I could like you, sir. Quite a lot!” She had not moved from her spot, and he expected her to lead the way, but she stayed put and looked into his eyes. “Let’s be clear. I want you to know that I have various bits and pieces for defending myself if you’re the type to get aggressive with a woman like me.”

            “I’ve never been aggressive with a woman. Never hit one. Except when she wanted it for sex. There was one who liked a thick leather belt across her buttocks.” They looked from  a distance like a couple of friends having an innocent chat. “Would your buttocks care for a leather strap?”

            “Not likely,” And an observer would notice her smile for the first time. “But I could tickle up your nice backside if that’s what you’re looking for.” She turned, “Come. And remember I can defend myself. Just so as you know.”

            “Nope. I am looking for love. With a beauty like you. And I should say you are more than a beauty.”

            “I am. I can make your eyes water with beauty. You wait.”

            “I could wait a long time for you.”

            “Well, you won’t have to. It’s just two houses along.”

            “I’m staying the night you know. So we have plenty of time – and slowly does it. Right?”

            “I have some experience, you know. Different gentlemen like it different ways. I’m open to them all.” They were entering the house. Just to let you know, there are hidden cameras, here and there.”

            “I’m not going to hurt you. To be honest, you seem like perfection to me.

”I probably am.” Again she smiled as if she was thinking that she had hit the jackpot with this one. “Take that grubby jacket off.” She had taken him straight to the bedroom. It was large with quite a lot of furniture and a handsome wardrobe opposite the wide bed. He took off the jacket as if obliging her. You might as well take off the rest. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Or would you like a whiskey?” The setting sun was shining through the window, and he pulled the heavy, lush curtains across. 

“Whiskey would do,” He did not remove his clothes but sat down on one of a pair of armchairs. When she returned, she was still wearing her overcoat. “You can take your coat off.” But she sat in the other chair next to him. He turned to look at her, with a thoughtful expression. “I like your catsuit.” Her legs were showing black and scintillating all the way down to her ankles. “It’s latex. Fine stuff. I think I’ll call you Tex, maybe Lady Tex.”

She smiled as if she didn’t mind. “Go ahead. Touch it. It’s nice to touch.”

He put his hand on her calf and slowly, very slowly moved it up her leg exposing her thigh. When he got to her groin she moved and took a gadget from one of the pocket’s. “That’s the pepper-spray. Just in case.” 

From the other pocket she took a spear-like knife. She put both on the table. “That doesn’t look very safe, Lady Tex. I could snap that up as quick as you could.”

“I’ve got other equipment that I won’t show you.” She laughed at that. Then she wriggled her arms out of her coat and sat back in her glittering garment. He stared fascinated at her, from top to toe. “I think you like it.”

“More than. You’re just what I’m looking for. I had seen you before and wondered what you’d be like, what you could do for me.”

“More or less whatever you’d like. But no penetration. Got it? I don’t like diseases.”

“Nor do I.” His hand was still at her groin and he gradually, as slow as he could, stroked her up and down her body. Right down to her ankles again. “Kiss me.” So she leant across the arms of the chairs and gave him a peck on the cheek, and then a full mouth-to-mouth. He sighed. “Perfection. What’s it like to be perfection?”

“It’s OK,” she laughed again. “So long as someone notices.”

“Let’me be clear – I have noticed.”

“You have, I can see.” She put her hand on his which was slowly stroking up and down. She pressed it to her breasts. “I never had implants. I like then slender. What do you think?”

“Perfection.” He looked intently into her face. “Didn’t you get what I think? Perfection.”

“I know. You’ve told me. Sometimes, I’m hard to convince. What’ll you do to convince me?” He hesitated for a moment, then opened the zip on his trousers and brought out the tip of his stirring member. It pushed forwards as if greeting her. She looked down at it. “If I get on the bed, will you undress and then stroke me all over with that thing of yours. It looks as if it might like latex too!”

He stood up and undressed slowly folding his clothes and putting them on the armchair he’d been sitting on. She looked at him silently, and then stood to go to the bed. But first she impulsively put her hand on his back and with energy pulled him close to her in a fervent hug. He put his arms around her with an equal fervency. Then he lifted her slender weight and dropped her gently on the bed. She lay back, shut her eyes, “Massage me with your cock.”

It grew steadily as he softly worshipped the latex. After a long while of longing and slowly enhanced breathing he gasped and offered his organ to her lips. “It’s yours.”

“Not so fast. I think my mouth would like to decide for itself when it is ready. Now, Lord Tex. Tell me. Will you spare me your outflow into my mouth? Or will I swallow it?”

“Swallow.”

“OK. But we’ll keep this going for a bit. Till you are desperate. I like it when the desperation builds up. I like to see all that urging for my perfection. You’ve done this with lots of others who have been perfect for you. Haven’t you?”

“None so perfect as you.”

“Really, that’s perfect, too.” She wriggled her catsuit between his legs. “Come close down on me. Feel the latex with your body. Let that hard thing lie between us for a moment. No stroking or it might take you over, it’ll take the initiative. Feel me, just me – inside this slippery coating. It is sex all over me. Just for you. Because you call me perfect.” 

“Lady Tex, you could possibly be even more perfect than the catsuit, that I’ve admired out there in the street for weeks.” He softly moved his body over its inviting, shiny surface. “Now, why don’t you take it off, and I could feel the even more wonderful skin which is underneath.

She put her mouth on his lips again, with an energy that seemed like passion. “No, I don’t think so. It is of course, as you suspect, just as perfectly smooth and slippery. And just as longing for your skin as yours is longing for mine. Now then, put that cock of yours on my lips. I won’t take you in yet. I will keep….” But she stopped as her lips were closed by the gentle pressure from him. Her tongue slipped out and slithered and tickled him. He groaned.

 

It was another twenty minutes before she allowed him his release. And it was a release; it over-showered her mouth and dribbled across her cheek. He used his finger to slip the escaped juice back into her mouth. He was gasping. And she smiled.

            “Good for you, Lord Tex?

            He took an enormous breath, “Better than.”

            “Now you’re staying the night are you.” There was a command in her voice.

            “That’s the plan, Mrs Perfection.”

            “Lady Perfection, please.”

            “OK, Lady Tex Perfection. Are you keeping that catsuit on?”

            “Well, I’m not taking it off, not even for Mr Tex. Come on and lie next to me. We’ll sleep. You’ve had your pleasure from me, and it was certainly a pleasure and a half, it looked like. And, you’ve got that extra payment for me haven’t you. Go and get it, have your goodnight pee, and get back in for the night.” She turned over as if she had arranged everything.

            They woke early, very early. She offered him tea in bed, switched on the light and hopped out of bed still in her shiny uniform. “This is so bloody hot.” There was some aggression and impatience in her voice as she walked across the room towards the door to get the tea for them. But she stopped halfway. “Look at this.” She was just passing the handsome old wardrobe, and she swung open its two doors. Inside there was a trussed-up man. His wrists tied to his ankles, his knees to his neck, and his neck on a lead to a hook high up on the back wall, a gagged mouth. “Look,” she said indicating the specimen.

            “Christ. Has he been there all night?”

            “Course he has.”

            “So he was here listening in, last night?”

            “Yeah. He’d have been taking it all in.”

“Who the hell is he? What’s he been paying you?”

            “He’s my hubby. 

            “Whaaat?”

“He’s Jake; I call him jerk. I’ll get our tea.”

So the astonished bedfellow sat and looked at the tied up piece of litter hidden in the cupboard for the thrills. He wondered if he should go and untie the wretch. But then it was probably all to show his love for his wife.

When she came back with two cups of tea, “Doesn’t he get to be with you too. Do you have it with your husband.”

“Course I do. But not when I’ve got a customer. He loves to hear me. Drink your tea and we’ll have another go.” He stared at her. “With the doors open. What do you think?”

“I’m up for another go with you, but only with the doors shut. Or we could go to another room.”

“No, we’ll do it here. He will love it. He likes to hear me in passion with another man.” When she finished her tea, she put it on the side and told him to undo the zip down the back of her catsuit.

“Why are you taking it off? I thought I wasn’t supposed to have the pleasure.”

“Well we’re going to have a new pleasure. Just for him.”

The wretched husband with his neck straining upwards could only turn his eyeballs to the left. But he could hear every word they said, every movement they made.

“Well, Lady Perfection, what’s going to happen now?”

“We’re going to have a bloody good fuck together. Properly. In front of him.”

He put his cup down too and turned to her now naked body. “Your body’s got talc all over it.”

“We’ll get in  the shower afterwards. And wash each other down. Don’t worry about a thing. If he doesn’t like it, he can tell me afterwards. When I take the gag out.”

            “Doesn’t he want you too.”

            “Course he does, lover. He’s my husband. We’re good together.”

            “Glad to hear that.”

            “He’s the one that got me into all this. My pimp as it were.”

            “Doesn’t look much like a pimp.”

            “Not at the moment. Now, if you sit on the end of the bed near to him. Get yourself stiff and I’ll get on you lap for a good old fuck. I want the best one I’ve ever had. Got it.”        

“I’ll do my best.”

“Not good enough – I want the perfection you’re always talking about.”

So, in a quick moment they were ready, and she had the greatest of orgasms. Her screeching sounded as if it would bring the neighbours. 

“That’s fine. When I’ve got you out of here, he’ll do me over again. I’m a lucky girl today. And I’ll take the balance off you; the balance of the money.”

He handed it over, got dressed and began to leave. “That’s it,” she said as he moved to kiss her goodbye. “No more. I won’t see you again. Whatever you pay. I’ve been fucked into heaven.” 

“Don’t you want a fuck like that again?

“Not from you. I’ve had you, and that’s good.  You’re good. I am not unappreciative. But…. well, that’s it.”

“But why?”

But she put her finger on her own lips to indicate there was no more to be said. And he left without her accepting the kiss he had offered.

 

 

 

 

 

Down in the underground

 

He was standing at the door of the underground train in London waiting for it to open. He’d done it for decades; it was tedious. There was a handsome middle-aged woman next to him. So he turned towards her and told her she was attractive. She was slim and agile, but nicely curved, and with a pretty face and a wide mouth with sensuous lips. She was perhaps not as well-dressed as she should be, as if she was not aware of how attractive she could be. It was some kind of mischievousness that provoked him; it relieved the boredom. He did not usually do such things at his age. She looked at him and immediately slapped his face. He looked back at her, smiled and thought to himself, well she has spirit, how attractive! He picked his glasses up off the floor and followed her out of the carriage keeping a few metres behind. After about twenty steps she looked back to see where he was, and saw he was following. He was grey-haired but in good shape, well-dressed. After all, she thought, he did say she was attractive. She stopped and turned. She stared at him till he came up to her.

            “What do you want?” she said sternly. He looked at her with amusement in his eyes. His hair was well-cut and he had a fashionable dark stubble around his chin. She actually thought he was quite alluring with his cheeky amusement. She wondered if she’d like to match it and banter with him. “What do you want with me?” she asked again impatiently.”

He replied, “It would be nice to have a quick drink with you.”

            She stared back. People walking along the platform were having to navigate around them as they stood facing each other. She looked at her watch, “I’ll have about twenty minutes.” And she turned to exit with him.

            Sitting face to face across a small table in the pub, she decided to be blunt, no charming seductiveness. She was not going to make it easy for him. “I’m the CEO of a small finance company. We fund art exhibitions and art books. What do you do?” She took a sip from her glass of wine. “I mean what do you do apart from lust after strangers on the underground?”

            His amused expression remained on his face, “No,” he said, “only one stranger on the underground.” He chuckled.

            In spite of herself, she felt a little flattered. She found herself smiling back at him. He was, she thought, just a cheap gigolo. Just trying to prove he was so masculine.  Did she want to put him down, or did she want to be seduced? She felt a little uncomfortable. She put her hand unselfconsciously under her left breast to adjust the cup of her bra. He watched the movement and she suddenly felt embarrassed as if she was deliberate drawing his attention to her ‘assets’. “So, tell me what you do.”

            “Oh, I am just retired.”

            “Well,” she said slightly impatiently, wanting to adjust her bra again to get comfortable, but resisting the temptation, “What did you do?”

            “I was the lead of a team of doctors in a hospital. Orthopaedics.” He spoke in a factual way.

            “And now you’re retired and don’t know what to do.” She was looking equally amused. “So you look for lonely women – to examine their bone-structure, perhaps?” There was a slight sarcasm in her voice.

            “No. Not really.” He looked reflective and she waited. “I have heard the expression, ‘sex after sixty’. It just came to mind when I noticed you. That’s all. Hasn’t happened before.” Again she felt flattered, and she thought, ‘dammit’; something could be fluttering in her tummy. “Are you a lonely woman in the underground?” He asked. This conversation was getting deep quite quickly. She looked at her watch, wondering if she should go, but wanting to stay. 

“Oh, you know. The children have all just left home. And, you know, when the children leave, the husband often does as well.” He looked at her with some sympathy and reached out his hand to touch her on the wrist. She suddenly felt there could be tears in her eyes and she thought, ‘Christ, I didn’t know I still wanted a man. At my age!’ But she just looked down at the hand on her wrist wondering whether to respond to it. Instead, she turned her wrist over to look at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said briskly and stood up. “If you want to contact me, here’s my card.” And she fumbled in the bag at her side. “And,” more hesitant, “if you want a date, I’ll consider it.” She turned away from the table to leave, but stopped, “Are you married?”

            He looked seriously at her, the amused expression had left his face, “Yes.” She raced for the door though he was about to add something. As she got out of the pub, she screamed silently inside her head, ‘Fuck. Him’. It echoed around her skull all afternoon.

            When she left work in the evening, she was careful to go to the ladies and redo her make up. And on the train, she looked around from time to time to see who might be noticing her. But she noticed nobody noticing. She wanted to be beautiful again, as she was when she was twenty-five. She’d spend the evening working on the papers she had taken with her from the office.

            However, when she was at home, after a stale-bread sandwich, she noticed there was a message on her phone. She didn’t dare think who it might be from. She felt like a gawky teenager of fifteen, lost and insecure. The message said: ‘My wife and I are not intimate anymore. The children have all gone.’  And then he had placed one single capital X. 

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

She, Margret, refused to let herself think about anything but work the next day. though her daughter emailed to ask for some money, and her son wanted to talk about something his father wouldn’t because he was too busy having another family.

            But in the early evening, her stale sandwich had the same accompaniment. His message this time said, ‘If you want sex with an after-sixty, you’ll have to kink it.’ This time she decided to reply. But she spent an hour to get it right: ‘You know I’m CEO of my company, I’ll be CEO of our sex. Maggie.’

            He didn’t reply and she wondered if he was put off by her email. Or if he was leaving her to worry about it. That would be quite cruel. Her husband before he split up from her had called her cruel. And he had described how most CEOs are really bullies, licenced bullies. She had hated being called cruel, but from time to time since she had wondered, and had come to accommodate the thought. It could even be called sexy she thought at times. And now, had some kinkster fallen into her lap? But he was sixty! Or was she falling into the hands of a cruelster, like her stern father had been? Before she went to bed, she texted: ‘Rule number one is when you get a message from me you answer within five minutes. Got it?’ She switched off her phone for the night.

            In the morning when she switched on again, the message app indicated messages. One was from him, Paul. She left it till last as if she was indifferent. Which she was not. She was cross with herself. It said, “Well, indeed I get it, but you will have to create a system to enforce your rules.” 

She sighed to herself, Oh, for god’s sake, Maggie, he’s willing to play! Her fingers trembled with excitement as she started to reply. So she stopped and made herself her breakfast coffee. She’d make him wait all day. Nothing as erotic as this had happened for years. She decided to make the most of it before it went bad. What could be erotic electricity about a sixty-year-old grey-head? But she knew she would be determined to find out.

Looking at her computer furtively during the morning in between meetings she found a site which described sexual bullying. Is that what he needed? She told herself she didn’t care, it is what she might like. At a relaxed moment for lunch with her deputy, Sheila, she asked if she had ever heard of erotic kinds of dominance. Ella looked surprised, “Of course, Mags. Everyone knows about that these days. It’s BDSM. Maggie looked at her plate as if interested in the food she was eating. But she knew what she would be spending her spare moments on during the afternoon. She had already decided she would give him a rule to take her for a drink when she wanted. And she wanted one this evening. With him.

            She finished her lunch quickly and told her friend she had work to finish before her committee this afternoon and hurried off. Then when she got down to it, her computer told her masses of info about a whole amazing world, she never knew about and equally a whole rainbow of emotions inside her she had hardly known about. Lucky Paul, if he turned up for the drink this evening, he’d find himself the fortunate object she’d practice on. It was so easy to distil the essence of dominance and submission from all the bits and pieces around the websites, but there really are people who get themselves excited by quite cruel assaults. Some people really looked for and asked for it. And even paid money for it! Would she, Maggie, pay money? She corrected herself; would she, Maggie, take money for it? 

            She was eager when she got home, and sent her text message requiring his attendance upon her in a pub she had chosen. He did not reply within five minutes. So she sent a further text to alarm him; a warning she could be harsh about the rules she made. This time he did reply acknowledging her invitation to a drink with her. And he accepted it, kindly. He made no reference to the second message she had sent. 

            From what she’d read on the websites, disobeying her rule (by not answering an email, and by taking more than 5 minutes to answer another), demanded quite a severe punishment. Things began to turn in her mind. Would he really be the type that would love her to hurt him – with the emphasis on ‘love’ and on ‘hurt’. She’d have to find out slowly. Was he as new to this as she was? She replied telling him the time and the pub she’d meet him, and he should not be late. But he decided she herself would be late.

            When she arrived half-a-hour after the time she’d told him, he was not there. She stepped out of the pub, the phone in her hand. And rang the number she’d been texting. He answered quickly.

            She said, in a tone that she hoped sounded commanding, “You’re not here.”

            “Oh, I waited a quarter of an hour. I assumed you had second thoughts. You did say don’t be late.”

            “No, I said you don’t be late.” She heard him chuckle as if it pleased him to be talked to like this. “So, come back. I’m here. How long will you be.”

            “I’m only a few minutes away.” But it took him a quarter of an hour. She was sitting at a table with a drink. 

When he sat down next to her, she started straightaway, “I slapped you hard once, across the face. You deserve a few more. I tell you what you have done Paul.” And she told him his sins regarding the emails. Then she went on, “And now you have kept me waiting more than a few minutes, haven’t you. And in addition, I’ve had to buy my own drink. That adds up to four transgressions, doesn’t it?” And it was almost to her own surprise as well as his, that she gave him a good slap again. His spectacles went spinning off behind him. Two people at the next table rescued them from under their feet and handed them back with curious and intrigued looks on their faces. He examined the glasses before he placed them back on his nose. “So,” she said, “you’re into all this BDSM stuff, are you? How long have you been playing around with it?”

“Quite a long time. Quite a time.”

“Does your wife know?”

“No, absolutely not at all.”

And after a moment, she asked, “So you like being punished? 

He looked slightly uncertain, but replied with a definite nod of his head, “Yes.” And after a moment, “And I like to dominate. I switch.” She was about to ask what ‘switch’; meant but didn’t want to show her ignorance, and then realised it meant he likes to be dominant as well as dominated. And that made her think about being submissive. Another new thought; it might be interesting too, and could tickle her fancy as the rude saying goes. 

Before he could continue, she asked, “And, Paul, what’s the worst punishment you’ve ever had?”

“Ah,” he said looking out of the window as if remembering some special times, “Well I have had some hard punishments. Mostly with the cane,” he said frankly. “One woman tied me up and caned me as much as she wanted and I could not stop it. I had bruises for nearly ten days. She was cruel; and I thought she was the most beautiful goddess I had ever met. She didn’t want to do it again with me because I didn’t shout loud enough with the pain.” He looked back at Maggie, “Tell me your own worst, or best experience.”

She did not answer that; she did not want to reveal her ignorance. “Are you inviting us to play together?”

He was looking at her, studying her expression. “Maybe. I think you are a very beautiful women. You could be a goddess for many men. But I am not sure you understand any of this stuff we are talking about.”

 She felt a little flustered, and said, “But it was you that said we should get kinky.” And she stopped, not wanting to reveal any more of her sudden fascination.

“If you’ve never done any serious caning, do you think you’d want to learn>”

“I am a quick learner,” she replied quickly more or less admitting her inexperience.

            “OK,” he looked pleased. I have on the off-chance rented someone’s dungeon for the evening.” And then he added, “You know what a dungeon is?” She nodded. “We can go there now,” and he stood up. She stood up too, now feeling not in command. When they were outside and he was waiting to hail a taxi, he said. “You know, the best dominants always say that to use the cane well, you have to have felt it on your own skin, to have been caned properly. So you know what it is you are doing to the person who have entrusted themselves.” She certainly felt that although out of her depth, she was really desperate to swim in this exciting tide. When they had got into the taxi that had just drawn up, he asked, “You know what I’m saying?”

            “That you have to feel it in order to do it?” she queried, “But it is not quite what I’d expected when we set up this evening together.”

            He turned to her and said, “You look completely gorgeous when you’re excited.” She glowed inside with his complement, but also concerned about what was going to happen to her.

            “Will your friend, who you’ve rented this dungeon from, will he be there?”

            “No, I had not arranged that. It is a woman by the way, Alice, who I have got to know. Would you prefer it if we asked her to come? Would that feel safer?”

            Maggie no longer knew what she wanted. But she did manage to see, through her confused excitement, that it might be sensible to have a neutral person there as well, to make sure no-one got out of control. She nodded her head. “Is Alice the goddess who beat you to pulp?”

            He laughed, “No, it isn’t, actually. I never saw that goddess again. But Alice is quite up to that standard. She is perfection.” Maggie wondered what perfection in giving pain would actually mean. She felt a little girl having to dive off the top board in the school swimming pool. Paul got his phone out of his pocket. He found that Alice had not left her work yet.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

When the taxi dropped them outside the premises where the dungeon was, Alice greeted them from her door. They all shook hands with the greatest formality, an irony, Maggie thought, as they were about to sink into the greatest depths of twisted kink.

            And indeed, Maggie thought that Alice was really the goddess to sink all other goddesses. She really was a beauty, and graceful the way she moved as if trained as a ballet-dancer. But not only did Maggie approve, Alice herself approved. too, and enjoyed helping others onto her pedestal. Maggie was fascinated to see the dungeon of a professional. Alice gave her a sincere hug, woman to woman. But with Paul she just stood in front of him with her all-in latex body-suit in order that he could gaze till his eyeballs burst. “Now,” said Alice quietly but taking command , “he told me you want to learn some of the tricks of the trade. Some of my tricks.”

            “I know what he told you, as I was with him when he rang you.”

            “Quite,” Alice continued unruffled by Maggie’s sharp comment, “There are no tricks really. It just helps to have a strong arm for swinging up and down. And she went over to a table to pick up a thin cane. As she flexed it in her hands she had her back to them, and said, “Bend over.” It was not clear who she was giving the instruction to, so they both bent over, and she gave them both a good whack, roughly equal on each set of buttocks. Paul gasped and his feet moved a few inches forward as he tried not to struggle. But Maggie screeched in high pitch, and her back leapt up as she exclaimed in aghast surprise, “I can’t… “ But she didn’t finish what she couldn’t do, and moved around in a few circles holding her buttocks. It seemed outrageous to reduce a mature, middle-aged woman to the desperate inarticulateness of a baby. As Paul was still bent over, Alice gave him another one. He gave the same gasp and gurgled through gritted teeth. Alice put her arm round Maggie’s shoulders and put the cane in Maggie’s hand. She pointed to Paul’s still bent-over buttocks, and said, “Hard as you can.” Paul held still, and Maggie contemplated the task, getting herself into a mindset that could deliver that kind of cruelty to someone else’s back-side. She composed herself, stepped over to Paul, swung right back and did deliver quite a resounding whack. Paul again jumped forwards a little, gasping several times. And through his gritted teeth he gurgled the same as Maggie, “I can’t.” And then, “If you want to carry on, you’ll have to tie me. “

            Alice turned to Maggie, “What do you think? Shall we tie him up and he takes what we decide to give him?” Maggie looked doubtful, knowing she had to learn what to do with this moment of compassion. She nodded. Alice said, I think we’ll just keep it to six strokes from each of us. What do you think?”

            “OK.” Maggie found it easier, in her ignorance, simply to follow what Alice was deciding. Alice told her to get him undressed. “Paul, stand up straight,” Maggie commanded, and he did so keeping his back to the women. Maggie moved round to front him face-to-face, while Alice went to check her bondage frame and its leather straps. “Get those clothes off, Paul. Quick.” She watched his body come into view. He was in reasonably good shape for his age. She put her hand on his hair and ruffled it like a schoolboy’s. She took his spectacles off and suddenly gave him a terrific slap on the face. “Just for fun,” she said.

            He recovered from the surprise and smiled. “Good, I’d like it to be fun for you.” And he repeated. “You are absolutely gorgeous.” Though she knew it was not true – at her age – but she knew he wanted to please her with his compliments, and that indicated that she meant a lot to him already. And perhaps she was indeed a beauty to him – after all beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it. Alice led him to the bondage frame, and as he stood with his arms outstretched, she tightened all the bonds around his four limbs. Maggie was watching how everything was done.

            Maggie then asked, “Do we do the six alternately or each in one batch? And who goes first?”

Alice said, “I’ll do mine, and you watch and try to follow exactly and with as much strength. Listen to the noises he makes. It tells you what power you have over him. And enjoy that.” Maggie said nothing and waited for Alice to start. She picked up the cane and handed it to Alice who stood at the side of the frame, took aim and delivered the first blow. Very hard. Paul roared and jiggled around helplessly in his bonds. Alice stroked her hand across the four stripes on his  buttocks. This last one, without his trousers was a real stinger. She poised herself, took aim and struck again. Paul tried to hold his breath but gasped and groaned. He did mumble, “No,”. But maybe he was commanding himself to control his reactions. The third one, was just as hard, and though he did control a lot of the sound it was still twenty seconds before he could relax, come down off his tip-toes, and the sinews in his arms and legs became less visible.

There were three more left, and Alice cruelly decided to deliver them quickly one after the other so that he had no time to recover from one before the next arrived on his assaulted body. At the end he was limply hanging from the frame and only gradually righted himself. In his own mind that was it. And only when Alice invited Maggie to follow on, did he realise he had to go through it all again. “Christ,” he said. He wanted to say ‘fucking bitches’. But he actually said, “You are my angels, my idols.” And at that moment he suddenly meant it. 

Maggie took the cane and stood, as Alice had done. After the second stroke with Paul now shouting at each, she couldn’t go on. Then she told herself, he actually wanted it, Alice commanded it, and she needed it. So one more, very hard. Paul was beginning to screech as loudly as Maggie had. Then, without mercy, the three quick ones. But also very hard. By the third Paul was out of screeches and hung helpless and completely finished.

Alice came forward to Maggie, “Not bad. Well done, And not bad for him, too, a sixty-year old, or whatever he is.” She smiled with success. Maggie was breathing hard but felt a little infected with Alice’s success. It had been an emotional roller-coaster for her.

The two women undid his bonds. His hands dropped to his sides, and he stood immobile recovering, and feeling both a relief it was over, and indeed a pleasure that he had given the women what they wanted. Indeed. a real pleasure. Alice then looked at Maggie and with her head slightly on one side in sympathy, she said “Now, it’s your turn.” 

Maggie suddenly looked aghast. “What? Tied to that thing?”

“I’m afraid so. It is what we are all here for. You have seen what it has done for him,” and Paul drooped his head as if in apology, “Now you need to go through it for yourself, don’t you.” Maggie took a couple of steps back, as if she could escape. She could not find words. She let Alice lead her back to the frame; she undressed Maggie who passively allowed it, allowed whatever. Alice adjusted the bonds to Maggie, and moved back leaving Maggie feeling alone and completely helpless. A CEO of all people, she said to herself, and now a helpless victim of incredible cruelty she can’t stop. Why has she let herself do this?

Alice took up the cane and stood beside the frame with Maggie looking on at the cane. “Sorry, Maggie. You have to know if this is really your passion.” And delivered the first stroke – as hard as them all. Maggie shrieked and stretched up as if for a saviour to come and rescue her. But there was no saviour. As she relaxed down, Alice took aim and delivered the next. It destroyed any relaxation and shot Maggie as if through the ceiling with a cry that ended in a whooshing wail of agony. Waiting a moment for Maggie to relax again, Alice imperturbably watched to assess when the next one should land. The moment came and Maggie shot out of her skin, her brain thumping against her skull, almost senseless from the surprise, the intensity, the unendingness of the echoing agony through every part of her body. And then, she realised, the last three when there would be no recovery between strokes. She screamed, “No. No more. No don’t go on.” Alice waited till the screams stopped, and then applied the strokes, with unstoppable screaming till after the second, Maggie seemed almost unconscious for the last one. Maggie sagged, thinking only that it was the last. It was over.

Paul came forward and clutched her body with his arms in sympathetic warmth and care. “Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, and buried his face in her luxuriant hair. His naked body showed his excoriated skin over his buttocks and Alice admired all their work. She and Paul undid Maggie’s bond and she fell into their arms as if she could not hold herself up. Slowly she turned and almost with a kind of defiance moved herself away from their supportive arms. 

Grasping desperately at her own command and her CEO presence, she said to Paul. “Now is it Alice’s turn?”

Paul looked at Alice, and said, “Well we rather think it is.” He smiled with an almost gleeful smile. Maggie looked on, and noticed how Alice was taking this suggestion. As the proponent of this exercise with Maggie and Paul, she had no grounds for refusing to have the experience they all needed. “Oh,” she said, “I was whipped  at the start of my career in this business. I know it already.”

“But nothing like a regular top-up. Is there,” Paul said. “And a good caning will give you something more than a whipping. You need to learn the cane too, Alice, my love.”

So, Alice had to take the role of the experienced professional. Experienced in all these aspects of her trade. She was strung up on the frame, her beautiful body filling Paul with astonishing desire – even at his age, as the women might have said. Alice demanded that she have something in her mouth that she could bite on as the pain came. And so Alice too joined the trilogy of cane-fiends. She of course made less noise, but her form writhed in pulsing jerks as the strokes came on her unprotected flesh. 

After the last strokes, Maggie and Paul clasped each other in a satisfied triumph. And almost oblivious of Alice, with her stripes too.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

They tidied up, and then looked at each other as if they wanted to stick together. It was now well into evening. Maggie with her commanding voice took them both home to hers, only a short walk as it happened. Obviously, they could not have gone to Paul’s with his wife innocently unknowing – and sexless. Maggie was up for the new, always. They were all exhausted so they all undressed and got into Maggie’s double bed and were each fitfully sleeping till morning.

Maggie made conventional tea-in-bed for the three of them. Alice and Paul emerged from their half-slumbers as she put down the three mugs. There seemed so much to talk about that no-one new where to start. Maggie, again as a CEO managing a committee meeting, tried to capture something of the amazing atmosphere of three experimentalists in bed together. It felt like they were a hush-hush and underground secret society, bonded together with no-one else in the know. They all agreed and held hands in a circle like kids discovering new friendships. 

Paul announced that he would like to celebrate by have a profoundly satisfying intercourse with his new companion Maggie. She, surprising herself, declined although she would also have surprised herself if she had said yes. So, he then immediately asked Alice. Alice the professional was never in need of such consummation with her subjects, but to her own surprise she accepted. Maggie sat in a chair beside the bed and watched as the two worked up each other’s passions. She watched Paul’s striped bum flailing up and down as he thrashed himself into her. Maggie was fascinated by the scene, that is if she had not been a trifle… what was it, could be a little bit of jealousy. Why had she said no then? After all she, Maggie, had been his first choice. Perhaps she was cautious as she did not know where Paul had been with his organ. Indeed she did not know. But she was watching where it was going now. And so, would he come back to her? After they finished and the post-coital remains of passion died, they drank the now chilled mugs of tea. 

Paul got off the bed asking where the toilet was. At the same time, Alice got off the bed and stood in front of him, close to him, touching again. She put her arms tightly round his neck and lifted her feet off the ground to put them round his hips. He put his hands under her buttocks to support her there. He could feel the firm wheals on her buttocks from the night before. She looked into his face only an inch or two from his, “I enjoyed that fuck. I haven’t had a fuck that enjoyable for a long time.” He smiled into her face, and then kissed her on her two eyelids in an affectionate and grateful way, as if agreeing with her. When he let her down and they came apart from each other. Maggie jumped up and came over to him, as if to claim ‘her man’. She put her hand on his penis and held it, then told him to follow as she led him, penis-first out of the room. Alice, as she was putting her clothes on, waved and said to Paul, “Enjoy,” and arranged her bra comfortably around her, “and don’t forget I could be a fan of yours. If you wanted one.”

When Maggie had Paul in the next room, she pushed him back against the shut door. She also pushed her naked body against his, her breasts into his chest, their genital areas pressed together, and her hand still holding his vital part. “So, was that fuck with her the best you’ve ever had?” she asked with her face an inch from his.

“No,” he said, trying to collect his thoughts. “You are going to  be the best fuck I’ve ever had.” He smiled,

She smiled. “The right answer. And she pulled a little way away. And slapped his face. Hard. Not wearing his glasses they did not fly away. He looked at her. And she smiled again. “I think I can feel I’ve made your prick come hot. It’s swelled a little.” And she looked knowingly into his eyes. He wondered if she would expect him to perform again on her – at his age! “I might just squeeze out of you what she has left.”

Alice at that moment knocked on the door and called out that she was leaving. They did not reply because their mouths were engaged in kissing each other.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

Only a couple of days later, he called on her in her office. Secretly they went together, unseen, to a staff toilet and examined each other’s backside bruises. He loved the touch of her skin, and where its smoothness had been brutally interrupted.

            “Now we have some privacy,” he said with amusement in his eyes, “let’s agree to get married.”

            “OK. For ever.”

            “That’s the idea,”

            “And,” she added, “I know what I am planning for the honeymoon.” He looked quizzically at her, wondering what she had thought up. “For the first night of the honeymoon we’ll have sex. But starting with six of the best on each other’s backsides. It makes me randy just thinking about what we did.”

            He wasn’t surprised. “Or we could invite Alice to the wedding. She could contribute something!”

            “No,” Maggie turned away, “that won’t be necessary.” And she flushed the toilet.

                                                                                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stiff and loose

 

I looked at him and imagined his smart trim buttocks.  With my hands on them.  He was a little stiff in manner and it might be fun to loosen him a bit.  He wore a dark suit, a tie.  A white shirt, and a slightly supercilious frown.  Tall, he looked down at me a bit.  He had no idea I was looking back at him with eyes full of schemes.  I smiled to myself.  I smiled to him, and he seemed to warm.  Judging by his dark skin I assumed he had slavery in his ancestry.  I wondered if he had one of those large genitals that some Caribbean blokes have?  Would I find out, I wondered?

He was looking at me.  Wondering, I think, if I would be a good conquest.  He would find out, if he wanted to.

I asked him if he would like me to get him another drink.  He looked impressed that I had noticed he was standing in the reception room with an empty glass.  He politely agreed.  A quite plummy English accent.  Being black myself, he obviously thought I knew my place.  I like blokes whose looks imply they have money, because sometimes they do – lots of it.  And with it, a reputation that could be damaged by someone like me.  I’m not above a little blackmail, only a little! But then – it depends how he played. I could like this one, quite a bit.

            As I fetched his drink and waited while our hostess poured a couple of glasses of rum-and-coke, I looked at the wealth in this black community. None had got their money from this country but had come here to bank it, launder it even (perhaps). When I brought our drinks back to him, he took his as if not noticing me who had fetched it. He was talking to a superior man with a lighter skin but obviously more exalted in the riches league. I stood quite close to the darker one, a little closer to him than the conventional social distance.  But he seemed unaware of my insignificant presence. So, after a few minutes I shifted my stance and edged closer to the superior one, again giving a message as if I were suggesting something with my proximity. The paler man – I now heard him called Jackson – glanced aside at me as if unsure whether he’d want this irrelevant woman.  His glance obviously told him I was worth considering as he edged slightly closer till our sleeves were touching. To this the darker man – now known to be called Rex – responded by glancing at this woman he had neglected and who had now shifted some inches away from him. He too noted something that it seemed he might have missed, because he looked directly at me and with elegant white teeth, he smiled how grateful he was that I had gone to get him a drink. More appealing as it had come from such a gracious hand, he told me. His attention transferred from his senior colleague to this willing temptress he thought I could become. As his attention turned to me and I to him, the older superior one moved away to find attention elsewhere. For a moment I wondered if I was really here to advance my position in the rich niche, perhaps I should have attended to Jackson instead. But the moment had gone, and Rex looked a lot easier.

            I raised my glass to his, “To your good fortune, Rex.” I shone my teeth at him too. “My gracious hand is always at your service,” and, I added, “if I may.”

            “You may,” he quickly said, as if we were discussing intimacies. He looked into my eyes, and touched my shoulder, finding a little bare skin there. I had made an impression after all. I knew how the evening would progress, if I wanted it to.  And I did. And he could see I did. And after a quick look at me, he asked, “Tell me the name of this delightful person I am just making the acquaintance of?”

            “I’m Cora-Anne Lewis.” And I shook my head waving the longish hair from my eyes in demonstration of my grace and beauty. I too added, “I think I know who you are; you are so well-thought of, aren’t you.” I smiled winningly and appeared to be greatly affected by being in his company.

            He grinned like a boy. With a hesitancy, he then said, regaining his aplomb, If you would excuse me for a few minutes, I have to speak to one or two people. Then perhaps you would accompany me, we could find somewhere to get more acquainted. His hand was still acquainting itself with the skin of my shoulder.

            I nodded of course and took his empty glass from him. He moved away as if I was a dealt-with piece of business, but I knew I had enticed him and if I wanted he would take me to bed. It was not so much the bed that was on my mind though he was a good enough ‘catch’.

            I liked to think I was a good enough catch. But sadly not for the likes of him who would have me for an evening a few times till we tired. My best asset was my hair which flowed and waved a little more freely than most of my kind and could be induced to wave further for evenings such as these. I had a good score for getting myself taken home by someone rich. It could pay for my beauty salon, and more than. I wandered back to the bar, and decided no more for me, as I wanted to keep my wits aworking. I found a place to stand inconspicuously to watch who he spoke to. But I also looked at his body which would be an enjoyment added to the business I was on.

            I saw Jennifer the woman I came with. She had a nearly white skin, always an asset, and with her spirited talk she had several young men around her. She worked in a very different way. She had been brought up in Jamaica, unlike me with my Englishness. My Rex, and he was ‘mine’, for the evening at least, circulated and I noted all those he spoke to who I knew, and starting of course with the senior slave-driver, Jackson. Eventually Rex finished his rounds and was saying his farewells. He glanced over and with an imperceptible nod of his head he indicated for me to come to the door. I too imperceptibly made sure Jennifer knew I was leaving, and with whom.

Because my adopting parents had been in this financial business, I could feel at home in such soirees, but also they sent me to one of those English elite schools to better me from my humble beginnings as the lost off-spring of an immigrant woman from Nigeria. I could swim in this particular niche of black bankers. They all traced their ancestry (often hopefully) to exploited Caribbean slaves. But I suspected my ancestors in Benin were the ones who had traded their ancestors with the English to send off as cargo to the New World. It was not that I especially disapproved of slavery as such; the evening and night I was facing would be little different perhaps, though I might get a bit of excitement from it. And my body would not actually be sold by a trader but would be sold by me.

            I followed him down the stairs at the correct distance so no one observing would connect us. I heard Jennifer tripping down the stairs behind me. But out on the street, I closed up on him and held his arm till he had hailed a taxi to take us to his place. Once the taxi moved off, I suggested he might like to stop at a cash-machine, just in case he liked the way that I kissed him. He looked at me surprised at my organised approach to such practicalities. He assured me it would be alright, he was well-prepared. I snuggled up comfortably again to him. Jennifer, I knew would have taken the taxi number – just in case. She would be getting half of the takings.

            He proudly boasted he had two flats in London, as well as half-a-dozen more round the world. But I could guess that. Nevertheless, I put on a surprised and impressed expression. I always begin as a somewhat simpering innocent who is slightly overwhelmed by the grandeur of these imposing men. The flat was certainly impressive though as impersonal as a hotel room and not a home. He showed me each room. I lingered in the bedroom and told him to bring me a drink. He told me to come back to the living room. So I did. I looked at a small photograph in a frame, obviously his wife and young daughter. I asked if he was divorced. He gestured with his hand as if they were in process with difficulties.  But it really indicated he didn’t care what I thought. I sat myself in an armchair making sure it would be difficult for him to sit down beside me in any comfortable way. I didn’t want a long drawn-out romantic drama. He handed me a drink and then stood beside me as if wondering what conversation to make. Clearly, he was not interested in me. And he began talking to me about money he was making. And then about what he could buy with all the money he was making. I listened to him conveying with my expression how spell-bound I was. It must have been obvious to him, that I was not. But he needed to go through these rituals. His potency was being confirmed by both of us in this socially acceptable fashion, and to be confirmed shortly in a bodily fashion. After a while, I suggested to him, that I’d like to get to the bed and start exploring his amazing person more deeply.

He smiled - the first time. And he led the way. My drink was not drunk, but I left it. Standing at the end of the bed, he asked me to undress. I asked, more provocatively if he would undress me. He declined. But when I was naked, he touched my skin, starting at the shoulder he had touched at our cocktail party. I knelt and he fondled my luxurious hair, and I found my way in through the zip of his flies. We didn’t say much but I did a little gasping as I thought he’d like me to be impressed. And indeed, the stroking of my skin did excite my hormones, more than I cared. The concern was whether he’d be bothered about my hormones as well as his. In fact, when I pulled his erect member gently out of his trousers, he did ask me to undress him.  Which I did with great care, making him feel precious, I hoped. But I didn’t find it difficult actually, and I wondered why he had all evening begun to feel precious to me. When I had done the undressing job we stood facing each other. He put his hands in my hair and pulled my face to his, and he kissed me full on the lips without asking. There was passion in that, and I was surprised. My breath was coming a little faster than I anticipated. I drew back pulling him gently with me till I sat on the end of the bed, and he leaned over me, gradually coming down on top of me. His chest slightly rough with the hairs rubbed gently over my breasts, over my nipples. He was definitely trying to arouse me as well as himself. He was more of a gentleman than I had expected. I was pleased I enthused him. He entered me quickly and came quickly and modestly. He withdrew and held his still erect penis. It remained stiff in his hand. He then advised me that he could keep an erection for as long as I needed if I wanted him to give me an orgasm. It all seemed so practical it was almost deflating, except it was not and it seemed I could be of real interest to him. He also advised me that if he came again, it would make no difference, he would continue with whatever I asked till I was satisfied. I said, yes, and felt I had freedom to ask for anything.

            “Well,” I started, feeling carefree with this now unusual man, “If you let me up to get my bag, I have some cord there to tie you to the bed so I can ravish you.” 

He looked momentarily uncertain and then exclaimed, “By all means. I have never come across such a one!”

            I smiled, pleased with myself, as I think I had pleased him, jolted him out of a regular evening routine. He let me up and I did the business with his hands and wrists at the four corners of the bed. “Now,” I said putting one foot on the bed beside his prostrate and immobilised body. I was rather triumphant and domineering in manner, “you are mine. Taken over in a way never known before.” I put out my hand to take his still erect penis in my fingers as if it were the holy sacrament. “I am in charge.” I knelt across the bed with his loins beneath me. His pleasured stiffness slipped easily between my lower lips; his tip met my bud, and in a special way they kissed each other.  He gasped a little, and I a lot. This was not just a quick fuck for an evening. This was something special. I gasped more, and quickly had several orgasms. I don’t know how many, and I think he may have had one more. I fell forward, kissed his lips with passion and gratitude, and thanked him. And thanked him. He remained still in his bonds and as I raised my head a little, he smiled (the second time that evening).

            I said, “You’re smiling again.” I looked him in the eyes. “it seems to me that you don’t often smile. Perhaps people don’t often please you.”

            He looked back at my eyes but said nothing. Nevertheless, I think I had pleased him, which was a relief because, unusually, he had pleased me.

            I stayed looking down at him. “Now, shall we untie you?”

            “Please.”

            “Hmm, perhaps I won’t. Perhaps, I like you under my control.” He looked sharply at me. 

            “Oh, you look surprised. Perhaps with me in control you can promise me things. Things I deserve.”

            “Oh,” he relaxed, “you mean money.”

            “No, I don’t want your money,” I said enigmatically. “Maybe I want something else.” And I was thinking of something else. But I said, “Well, yes of course, if you want to give me money. And it would be nice to know what I am worth. We could bargain a little. But no, it is not so important.  I can earn as much money as I could want from all you rich guys. I have half-a-dozen of you on my books. But, if I wanted to bargain for something else, you might be just the person for me.” He looked puzzled. “Perhaps I should leave you to guess,” I said teasingly. “Perhaps I will keep you in the ropes till you guess right.” I cocked my head as if I were enquiring if this would be fun. He showed no reaction.

            I was still sitting astride him. My orgasms a range of mountain peaks still within vivid memory. And as far as I could tell his erect member was still remembering my peaks and his. He was still swollen up inside me. Stiff as a slug of whiskey. I tweaked a muscle or two in my bottom and squeezed him there. A few twinges of electric feelings crossed his face. But he wasn’t talking to me.

            “You’ve got no guesses, what I want from you?” But he wasn’t talking to me. He lay there passive and unmoving. He looked as if there might be something he was thinking of. I knew what it was. So, I started moving up and down. Thrusting his erection yet again into me and out. It took quite a while this time. But I was in no hurry.  This time I watched the moving expressions on his face.  I stoked his cheek as if he were the softest and loveliest doll I had ever had.  All those men I had satisfied were like dolls to me.  I could play with them and stroke them and give them house-room inside me. Or not, just as I wanted. But of course, this one, he was more than a doll. More a play-mate. I could play his mind. He was human. Just about - and more than. I slowed down my rhythm a little. But he began to move himself; he did not want me to slow it. So, I stopped. And I sat with all my weight down on his hips so he could hardly thrust himself in and out. 

            So he stopped trying. “What is it you want?”.

            I looked straight in his face as if he were a little boy who could not please teacher at school. Then I laughed, “I only want to give you another cum, up my sex-hole. It is what you want, and it’s what I want.” I laughed. And I started my rhythm again. This time his climax was an explosion. The Big Bang. He nearly tossed me off him. But I hung on and kept him going till it subsided. “Not bad, boy. You’re good. Right?” And I looked at him admiringly. “And I’m good. Right?” He didn’t respond; he was recovering from the big one. I stroked his face, his chest, And I felt for the root of his penis at the entrance to my pussy. There was so much juice about; his and mine. Slowly, he came back to me. His swelling inside didn’t seem to be subsiding much. When he had opened his eyes and he was back with me, I simply said, “Well done, champion.” He heaved a great breath and shut his eyes again.

            I lay my body down on his chest, my cheek against his chin, my nipples feeling the hairs on his chest. And I put my hand between us to feel my pleasure bulb at my entrance and began to soothe it with the tip of my finger. It responded, and so did I, and so did my cavity, squeezing softly on his swelling. He lay back, and more than ever, more than even previously, he left me to take charge of our satisfactions. He was a little boy, a baby breathing beside me, leaving life and the future to me entirely. My orgasm this time was slow, and his thrusting tool twitched along with my pleasure strokes as if I could do us both together. And miraculously we came together, softly and gently and in a happy clutch of tiny, subtle jerking. We had spent each other. Surely.

            I think we dozed briefly. I became aware of his erection shrinking out of me. I asked if he had completed, but I got no confirmation. I knew though that he was done.  For today. It was no fun keeping him tied, now. So, I moved off him and he grunted and shifted a little.  I untied him, feeling something special had happened. “I know now that this profession I have chosen, has been the right one for me.” He did not open his eyes. But as I released his arms, he brought them back on the bed. “And pretty good for you, Rex, as well.” I got off his body and went to release his ankles. He lay, looking played out. “I think you like me in charge, Rex” and then, “I’ll do it again for you.”.

            He shook his head slightly as if he did not want to think about it.

He got off the bed. He seemed tight in his body and started to dress himself, wiping himself down with some tissues. He did not look at me. He seemed to be expressing an indifference as if he were simply getting off a train at his station. I wondered if I had really made an impression.  Of course, I had; I knew I had.

He knew I had too. But he didn’t want to know. He didn’t look at me. Some men are stiff and unyielding, just like their erections. He asked if he should call me a taxi. I did not answer. But he called one. I wiped myself on his tissues and went to his bathroom and flushed and wiped and came back to get dressed. It was now late. He was at his desk listening to his voicemails on his mobile cell-phone. I looked over to find a piece of paper and wrote down my phone number on it.

When the taxi honked in the road outside, he walked me to the door, courteous, holding my arm, a gentleman, recovered. As he opened the door, I turned to him and said, “Use my phone number to leave a message. Tell me, what I would have been worth if you had decided to pay me.” He smiled. Again. He touched my cheek and I left for home. I got in the taxi and the driver started off. I wondered whether I would offer to pay the fare with my body as I normally would`. But, it seemed the body had done its work that evening. 

Rex was on my mind for a while. I don’t think I had managed to loosen him up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thing that goes in mouths

 

It was around the age of 10 and my mother told me what to expect.  It wasn’t very reassuring.  I had an older brother and he crashed his bike and had a nasty wound on his leg that slashed an artery.  They said he was lucky not lose a lot more blood, but a passer-by was a nurse who knew what to do and improvised a tourniquet.  So, when Mum told me I would soon start bleeding I remember asking if it would be like Jimmy.  She smiled and said it was just a nuisance, it happened with all women.  I asked if men had that as well.  She said, no of course not, they had different bodies.  I knew that, because Dad did not always shut the lavatory door when he went to pee, and I knew he stood up to do it, with a thing that could shoot the urine a bit like a hose pipe.  At the time, my curiosity shot up.  And I asked what it was that Dad had between his legs.  But Mum was too embarrassed to tell me, and so I had to ask my brother later.  I found I had to know about these things, so I asked Mum a week or two later, why Dad had a different thing to me and her, and she merely said that they did things together.  What things? She didn’t want to tell me, so I asked if I could come and watch.

My brother didn’t tell me either, but then he didn’t tell me anything in those days.  One of the teachers at school liked me.  I sort of knew I was teacher’s favourite in the class, and sometimes we would chat after a lesson.  So, I decided to ask her about what Dads and Mums did together.  She looked at me with a soft gleam in her eye.  She said it was difficult to explain, but maybe I’d like to come and see her with her husband.  So, I did.

They were very friendly to me.  I had told Mum I was going to see a friend after school.  But I hung around till it was evening and went to the teacher’s house.  The Dad, who was called Jimmy like my brother, gave me a little hug.  Hanna, my teacher gave me a hug too.  I felt special and they took me into their bedroom. Jimmy asked me what I knew about the thing they were going to do.  I said, “Nothing”.  He seemed very friendly to me, they took their clothes off and asked me if I wanted to as well.  I didn’t want to, so they didn’t mind.  “You see we have different things between our legs,” he said.  I looked at his, because I knew what she had – the same as me and my Mum.  I looked at Jimmy’s waggly things and wondered what he did with them.  I knew he peed with them.  And I said to him, “You pee with that, don’t you.” And he agreed.

“Do you want to touch it?” he asked.  Of course I did, and I put out my had gingerly and put my finger on it. 

“Go on hold it,” my teacher said.  So I put my fingers around the longish thing.  He told me that was nice to feel, and the thing began to get bigger, or fatter at least.  She said hold on to it and stroke it.  So I did with my other hand.  It seemed strange.  But they were so nice I felt quite happy with them.  And he said I was making him feel good, which was nice for me too.  She said, “Do you know what he really likes. He would like you to put the end in your mouth.  Would you like to do that?” I really didn’t and I shook my head. I knew what came out of it, his pee.  I think she realised what I was thinking and said “That thing – we call it a penis – gets longer and bigger and it pushes out some white stuff.  It is called semen.  It is not his pee at all.”  Then she knelt down, and pushing me a little away from his thing, she put it in her mouth and sucked on it.  It was what I do with an iced lolly.  He made some noises as if he was agreeing with her and wanted what she was doing. “She turned to me and took the thing out of her mouth, “You see how he likes this.”  And it was growing bigger, but also stiff.  It was so interesting for me to watch.  But then I said, “Can I try, too,” and she moved away to let me put the penis in my mouth.  It didn’t taste of anything.  It felt very big in my mouth and I didn’t want to bite it.  It might hurt him. So, I just left it in and he sort of pushed and pulled so it went into my mouth and slipped back again.  I didn’t see what the point of it was.  Then she pulled me away from him gently and as she sat down on the bed, she opened her legs and said “I have a kind of mouth here for him.” And she showed me the folds between her legs a bit like mine only much bigger than me.  “We call it a vagina,” she said, “And he puts his penis in it, like he put it in my mouth and in your mouth.” It was all so new to me, and I wondered why they would want to do all that.

Then, he said, “Shall I show you how I put my penis in her vagina?”  I know I had my hand between my legs, wondering what would happen if he, or someone, went there.

“Yes please” I said as if it was all being done for me.  So he knelt in front of her and she opened her legs further. And his slippery penis covered in my saliva slid into her.  I couldn’t really see exactly.  But then something took them over.  I watched as her back jerked and she leant back on her arms.  And he pushed and pushed into her.  They both made noises which weren’t words.  But sometimes she said, ‘yes’ with a kind of pant.  It went on for a while and it was obvious they were enjoying it.  But I couldn’t understand what was enjoyable.  I tried to ask what they were feeling, but they took no notice of me. I felt alone suddenly and wondered if I should run home.  But I stayed watching.  They seemed so, er… silly.  I wondered if my Mum and Dad did that.  But it was getting frantic for them, I thought and suddenly it was as if he burst, and he fell on top of her on the bed, and she let out a cry and said, “I love you.  Do me please, do me”.  She seemed to me to be lost and maybe gone mad.  And she gave a quiet screech.  And they lay still with Jimmy on top of her.  I waited and didn’t know what to do. 

Then my teacher said to me, “Penny, that’s what happens.  Come here.” And she held out a hand from under him as if she wanted to hold mine.  So I came near to them and held her hand.  He rolled off her and seemed to be exhausted.  She said to me, “Would you like to do that?”  And I replied that I didn’t know.  And I didn’t.  It seemed so strange and not at all grown up.  I had seen boys fighting in the playground, lying on top of each other. But this seemed quite different. She put her hand between my legs and stroked where my folds are.  “Do you feel anything nice there?”  And I shook my head.  “Well,” she said kindly, that’s what men and women do.  One day you will know how it feels.  And then you will keep wanting the feeling.”

I wandered home slowly, and tried to make sense of what I had seen.  I wondered if my brother and I could try out something like that.  There must be some special feeling but I could not imagine it.  I decided to explore more what I had between my thighs.  When it came to it, my brother did not want to play around with me and seemed as embarrassed as our Mum.  I think I never felt comfortable in maths classes after that with Hanna, the teacher.

 

…..ooooo0ooooo…..

 

Of course. there were other boys at school.  And I came to be known as someone who would experiment with them.  I had learned how to say ‘I love you’ at the right moment, but not one of them seemed to be interested. Some took a very short time and got up and went away.  Mostly they took no notice of me, but I did learn what the feeling was like.  I could see how Hanna wanted to show me.  My folds soon started bleeding, and all in all I felt very grown-up suddenly.  It was not difficult to realise that I could give myself the feeling if I rubbed myself in the right way on the right place.  And what happened was that if I could go on longer than any of the boys when they were inside me, I could get a real thrill out of it.  It was like a satellite going into orbit.  I wondered why it didn’t happen when the boys were stiff inside me. They didn’t gasp or scream, just stopped when they got tired.

Eventually, when I was 16, I suppose, there was one special boy who was not so pre-occupied with his sex feelings, but who was interested in mine. That was something new.  Not quite all men were self-obsessed with sex. This one was kind, he was called Alan. I think he sometimes thought I looked a mess.  It didn’t put him off but made him concerned.  I have not really known that men could be concerned.  I told him we were poor.  By then Dad had been sacked – some 6 months before his enquiry. And Dad had hardly got out of bed since. Often, he would not get out even to have a pee.  So Alan thought I needed things.  He gave me a handbag one day when we went across the fields on a warm day to do it in the open.  I was surprised and said it was kind, and in fact I needed it.  He said he had stolen it from his sister who had got it from a friend (probably a boy).  The next time we had sex, he gave me some money; not much, five pounds.  I gave it to Mum and told her I had found it in the street.  I said to Alan again, that he was kind.  We agreed he would give me money for the family every time we did sex.  We both knew what sex for money meant.  And rather worried, he asked if that was the only reason I would keep having sex.  I said, of course not.  And it was true I wanted that stunning satisfaction from him.  It was just nice to have a bit of money for my Mum too.  I don’t know if he believed me.  But soon he went away to university, and we lost touch.

I realised it didn’t much matter who the boy was, or now, who the adult blokes were, as I was emerging from school, and I had decided my path.  The man who put me onto it was quite a bit older. We used to talk about the difference between love and sex.  I said love did not exist.  He was shocked and told me he would show me it did.  I said that all he loved was my titties and that I’d go to bed with him whenever he wanted.  Yes, he said, “That helps”. And he laughed.  But I had already told him about my arrangement with Alan.  And he agreed to something similar.  It was a significantly bigger income than the one from Alan, and I could rent a tiny flat just a room really.  He didn’t like it much and took me to hotels.  He had a wife he had to keep secrets from.  He was called Josh.  And he had a good job.  So I was a looked-after mistress.  I didn’t mind.

When I had met him the first time, he asked my name, and I told him – Penelope (Penny), and so when we had set the arrangement he told me Penny was a good name.  I said to him, “Well, if you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves.” And this put an idea in my head – though perhaps it had been there a long time.  Because I did not see him all the time, I wondered if I could employ the rest of my time, in a similar money operation! 

On the internet, I found a website designer who worked for girls like me. I wrote the text, and he did the design and programming.  It was not out of the ordinary, but I did write for it quite well.  He was paid, as you can imagine in the currency I was beginning to trade in.  I really didn’t mind who used my body, they were all satisfying.  Most such girls don’t think that, and they called me an egalitarian.  Interestingly, I got much less abuse than most working girls.  My webby man liked me and told me I was the best of all the girls he worked for.  I think he would have taken me on for some more permanent relationship – a wife for instance.  But at the time I was enjoying my freedom.  My Dad had died, and my Mum was working all hours, and I seemed to find it easy enough to get my kind of work, so I could give her things of one kind or another, though I think she liked cash best.  I toyed with the idea of telling her how I earned my money, just as a revenge for her leaving me in the dark when I was so curious.

 

…..ooooo0ooooo…..

 

Actually, my curiosity remained with me, and as I got more requests from some of my clients that seemed a bit kinky, I got more inventive with what I could offer and do with them.

            I told my Mum that I was freelance; doing advertising. Not entirely false. And she didn’t ask much about it. She was more worried about my brother; he was into drugs. And she told me, in a shocked whisper, that he went with prostitutes! I had nodded wisely as if understanding her shock and sympathising. 

            My website called it ‘creative living with your body’. These euphemisms were often misunderstood, and I often got into difficulty with the server. So I had to change from one to another quite often. Clearly, it was not going to last for ever and I wondered what I should do. Perhaps go to university and get a career. Maybe mathematics. What is trigonometry? And it was then I thought of Hanna who had been so unexpectedly kind. I was still amazed at how she had handled my innocent childish questions. Was she the reason, I had sometimes wondered, why sex had never seemed more unusual than any other kind of shopping. I found out from that primary school that she was still there, now Head of the school. So I went to see her, and turned up one day. She did not recognise me when I was taken through by the secretary to her office. When I explained who I was, she seemed rather confused. She seemed really excited to see me, and also as if I was an interruption. I suppose I was, so she told me she would meet me later, after work. For her, the Head, work went on till the evening.

            I met her outside the school, and we went to a local pub for a drink. Hanna was thrilled to see me. “And what are you doing with your life, Penny, my dear?” Her hand was around her glass of wine as it stood on the little pub table.

            I shrugged my shoulders, wondering if she would care to hear what direction my life had actually gone in. But then what else had I gone to see her for. “Oh, I have an easy life. In the sex industry, as it is called.” 

“How interesting.” She looked politely interested and concealed any shock she might have felt. 

“I can give you the address of my website if you want.”

She nodded in a considered way, as if she might take a polite interest. “You were always curious, weren’t you. When you were young.” And she smiled at the memory emerging in her mind.

I didn’t want to say she and her husband had probably put me on to it. She might have felt I had come to meet her in order to blame them. And I absolutely didn’t see any blame. “I asked how her husband was.

She did not answer immediately, “He died,” she said in a quiet voice. And I wished I had not asked. “Quite young.” I didn’t know what to say. I was still young, probably still younger than when she had been my teacher at age ten. And in addition, it seemed to me death was more unspeakable than sex – much more in fact, as I could speak easily about sex. “It was about two years ago. He had a bad cancer of his prostate gland.”

“I am sorry to hear that. You must have been sad,” I said conventionally. “I met him once.” 

“I know,” she muttered with a thoughtful look in her eye. “I loved him. We had a good marriage.” She sounded as if she might want to talk on about her loss.

“I put his penis in my mouth.” I chuckled, but she did not move. “Do you remember? And I think you shouted out ‘I love you’ at him.”

“Yes, I did, Penny.” She was still looking thoughtful. “We always wondered what happened to you after that.”

“Oh, I went on to big school and I got interested in the boys there. And learnt a lot. More from them than from the lessons.” And I chuckled again. But I felt I had spoiled her beginning talk about her husband. I had interrupted as I did not want to go into whatever it meant, sadness, grief and so on. My life had been more with people seeking excitement.

But she spared me more details, and said, “We often wondered what effect it had on you. We were anxious we may have given you too much to think about at your age.”

“Oh no. It made me what I am. And I am not ashamed of that.” And after a little reflection, I added, “But there are some who think I am a disgrace. My Mum doesn’t know anything about it. She would feel disgraced. “But…” and I lost words for what I wanted to say.

“Sex is part of life, isn’t it. No-one can escape that. It is a peculiarity that we get so bothered about the morals of sex.”

“There are no morals about sex, Hanna. No more than there are morals about shaking hands.” She did smile then. 

“You’ve got a mind that works in interesting ways, Penny.”

“That may be why I came to find you. I think I am moving on. I wanted to talk to you about what I might do next. You were always the best teacher when I was young, and I thought that you might know what’s best for me now.”

She raised her eye-brows in surprise. “I’ll see what I can do. What about marriage and a family? Have you got any children.”

I exhaled and shrugged my shoulders as if her suggestion was inconceivable, “Nah. Never really thought about it. Have you got children, Hanna?”

“I have two. Thank God. I feel he still lives – Brendon lives. Through them.”

“I see. Yes, he does still live. I’m sure. You are lucky to have found someone who wants you fertile. Men want us for so many things – for love, for sex, for children. You were fortunate you had someone who wanted you for all those.”

I thought her eyes may have got a bit moist then, “Yes. He did.”

“ I have not been so lucky. They only want sex from me. Not the rest.”

“I was very careful in choosing. I went in search and chose carefully. Maybe you have not been so careful in searching, Penny.”

I almost never feel chastised – ever. But for a moment I thought that might have been a criticism. I think it was. And it was true indeed. I had not done any particular searching. I had a website and they searched for me, for what they wanted. I went inside myself for a moment then as we sat together. My old teacher telling me off.

            There as a silence. We were now both a bit tense; she because of her lost husband, and me because she put her finger on my failure. Eventually I said, “Mmm, perhaps that is what I need from you, Hanna.” I liked using my teacher’s first name. It made us equal. “How does one make a search? And is it what I want to search for.”

            She finished a drop in the bottom of her wine glass and shifted her chair as if getting up to go. “Come and see me for Sunday lunch. I’d like to get to know more about you. I will tell you my address.”

            So she left the pub having told me the address. It is hard to describe what I felt. It seemed a bit like what people call depressed. I felt unusually lacking in curiosity or excitement. I looked round the pub for what sort of men were there. It was a habit; indeed a professional habit, perhaps. And when I thought of it like that, I stopped. I had better do something about what to do with the next phase of my life, and really who will I actually be in the next phase. She had begun to make me think I did not know who I was properly. Just a sex machine, without the dimensions of being human?

            Over Sunday lunch, just her and me in her small living room, plates on our laps, she started (after all the pleasantries of arrival and serving the meal). “Two years ago, he died. So, now, is the time when I too start the next phase of my life as well, Penny. Shall we do it together? That’s my question – on the dinner plate today! To put it bluntly, Penny, sex has always been a force in my life as well. I have shrouded it in privacy, and you have waved it like a flag. Maybe we need to learn something from each other. Teach each other something.” This left a long silence while we ate the meal. She was a good cook. And I had second helpings of desert. Later she said, “You called it the thing that goes in mouths. We were always amused by that; Brendon and I were amused. We met at school when we were eleven. We were close friends, and had sex first when we were fourteen. I had another boy when I was eighteen for 6 months. Then Brendon and I came back together. We had both missed each other so much we knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. Now he has gone, and I won’t spend the rest of my life with him.” She smiled dolefully at me, and I shamefully froze as the sadness hit me.

            I didn’t want to hear about her grief. But then it struck me that she was making an overture to me. Should we come together in this love-bind, a sex-bond too maybe. Having thought this through, I then said, rather coldly, “That would work between us, if you were telling me I should be thinking of having children.”

            She looked a bit perplexed, but gradually saw what I had made of her speech. “I didn’t really mean that, but it could I suppose be a possibility. Is that why you tracked me done?” she asked with a sincere curiosity. It was almost as if she felt I was proposing to her. I wondered if I really had looked for her, for that reason. I could say I had been sort of in love with her when we had had the intimacy in my childhood.

            I eventually said, “I’m not sure if I was really looking for that. I am quite happy to sleep with you sometimes, Penny, if you want. To be honest, I am not short of sex. So it would be more for your satisfaction than mine. I think it was the need I have for the love of a friend. When you took me seriously those years ago you became the best friend I have had all my life. Perhaps the only real friend who has not wanted to take something from me all the time.”

            She smiled, “Interesting. As I said, your mind works in miraculously unusual ways.” She smiled as before. “Let’s leave the sex aside for the time being,” she said, sounding more like a teacher, now. 

            “Yes, I am a bot obsessed, aren’t I?”

“Maybe.”

            “And not very good at the sad things. I guess you have noticed.”

            “I had noticed; you are right. And I am sorry to burden you.”

“No, don’t be sorry on my behalf. I probably need to listen to these things. It is just as much life as my professional expertise is.”

She looked carefully at me, as if trying to decide something about me. “OK, I need the best friend I have ever had, as well. When I was five years old my mother died. In a car accident. I survived it. So when Brendon died it brought all that back again. But in a new way, I suppose. Tell me if you don’t want to hear this, Penny.”

“Well, I don’t, but it will be good for me. That is what you have been indicating. I should get away from all this sex-obsession. I know I should, and that’s why I came to see you – to get beyond it.”

“Perhaps no one gets beyond it – only hides it like I do.”

“Go on Hanna, you must tell me what you need to say. I shall be a good friend to you.”

She smiled and looked increasingly tearful. So she decided to use my invitation. “I can’t get it out of my head. I know prostate cancer is very common, Apparently most men get it, at least in a benign form. I was…” she hesitated awkwardly. “I was sex mad with Brendon since I was fourteen, and before. It always felt it was abnormal in me. It is why I took you seriously when you were so young. I can’t get it out of my head. Did all that sex Brendon and I had result in it becoming his killer-cancer. Do you know, Penny,” and she looked searchingly at me, “I feel a kind of guilt that I caused it, I killed him. I know it is crazy, but feelings can be crazy can’t they?”

“I have never felt guilty, ever in my life, Hanna.” Her head dropped and she looked into her lap. I realised how unsympathetic I must have sounded. “I know that’s a bit mad too, isn’t it. I need to learn about this. What is it you did? Tell me what it is like to be guilty of killing even when you aren’t.”

“Aren’t I? I don’t know. It is the feeling. It is not what I did. Well, I imagine what I did. I just wanted his body all the time. I wanted him beside me, holding me, inside me, all the time. And it must have been too much.”

“Didn’t he want it too?”

She was in tears now, “He did. And he demanded it. I know. I know. But perhaps I should have held back, or rationed or something, “She was waving her hands around wildly in desperation.” I tried to imagine what I would want if I were in that state. So I got up and I put my arms around her body and its vigorous movements. “You don’t need this, You don’t need this, Penny.”

“I think I probably do. You can’t possibly be responsible. But somehow you feel it.”

She calmed a bit, but only a little. “But the next thing Penny is even crazier.” She. shook her head in exasperation at herself. “I think of my mother. In the car. Driving off the road. I think I caused her to drive off the road.” And her tears came back.

“How could you have done that? You were only five, you said.”

“I was only five,” she started and there was a long pause. “It wasn’t me that caused it. I had been cross with her because she insisted on the seat belt and it was uncomfortable. In the end it is what saved me. But she died as we came off the road. I know it wasn’t me that caused it. It was some other driver my father told me much later. But I feel guilty as if being cross with her had made her careless or something or other – I don’t know.” She was talking as much to herself now, to her tears. I was for a moment no more than a recording machine. But she slowly calmed herself, having spoken all this in her rushed sentences.

And she eventually looked at me, “Oh god, I am a mess. I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“Of course, you should,” I said reassuringly, but not knowing what to say. “ I guess it is a problem that you don’t have Brendon to talk to. When you lose someone so close you don’t have them you can talk to about losing them.”

“There you go,” she said, almost smiling, “your weird and wonderful mind can say it all.” She looked straight at me. “I need a new Brendon. And I’ll never find another one. I know….”

I was a bit shaken that after all these twenty years or so, when we had not seen each other, not really thought of each other perhaps, I was the only friend she could let all this out to. But I said, “Who else have you talked to about this?”

“Not like this, no-one.” It felt like a big responsibility and so far out of my field of operation. But as I had said earlier, perhaps I should be learning some if this from her. “Thank you Penny, you are actually a good friend even though we have been so apart for so long. I hope we will grow close perhaps.” It was as if she was winding up this outburst. She was recovering herself. Was I being dismissed?

But no,  she started anew, “I looked up your website. It is all very cryptic. What would you do for me, if I applied for some service?”

I was taken aback. Her mind too was capable of mischievously intricate twists. Just like mine as she had perhaps said. “You’d have to be interviewed and we do that online, doubly encrypted for secrecy, to find out what your private world of fantasy is, and we’d try to find a way of playing it out.”

            “I might give it a try.”

            “Oh, come on Hanna, you don’t have to go through the site. We’re friends, we can talk. We’ve just talked, with intimacy about private thoughts.”

            “Not my fantasies though.”

            “Oh, I doubt if they’re as upsetting as what you’ve just told me.”

            “That’s true.” And she became silent.

            Eventually she looked up and as if she were about to say goodbye and finish our discussion. She said, “Tell me when you’d like a little session in bed, one night.”

            I was a little startled by the abruptness of the dismissal. “Tell me too, when you want to be interviewed about you fantasies and satisfactions.”

            We then took our farewells, and she parted by saying, “Let’s meet again soon, good friend.” I nodded and she suddenly embraced me with passion. Our mouths joined and her tongue reached into my mouth. I thought of that time when I had held Brendon’s thing in my mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

With Grace: Without her

 

As he reached his climax, it burst out of him how much he loved her.  He had not ever meant to say such a thing.  It had never happened before.  Her mouth being full of him, she made no response, but completed the job.

            Later, he apologised.  She shrugged her shoulders as if it did not matter.  He was familiar with her indifference.  Even after his climax, her beauty almost tortured him to look at her.

 

* * *

 

They had met on the ferry just out of Boulogne. She was sitting on deck in the full sun but huddled as if cold - but perhaps in loneliness.  He sat down beside her, purely because her beauty touched him.

            At Folkestone he offered to drive her back to London.  They stood, discussing it on the pavement.  Two passing youths spat at them and walked on, but then turning, one said, “Fuck her white, mister”.  “Then fuck yourself,” the other joined in.  She stared at them as if accustomed to abuse.

            Her black skin was as pure as it was at puberty.  He had white distinguished looks.  “C’mon,” she said to him quietly, accepting his lift, “let’s go”. They turned from the retreating youths.  “You whites are trash,” she added, with hardness and indifference.  He pointed out where one of the youths had landed a small gob of beery saliva on her leather jacket, on the round of her breast. He offered to wipe it off for her. She ignored such gallantry and found a tissue in her bag.  She spent the journey redoing her nail-varnish

 

.* * *

 

That had been three years ago.  Suddenly, entranced for the first time in middle-age, he had bought her a flat.  He had persuaded her that it would be a good investment - could be sold in three years, and they would share the profits.  She contributed to the mortgage. In their brief meetings, she often talked to him incessantly about her independence, about paying her own way. He took her out sometimes and gave her expensive presents of clothes and perfumes and sometimes money.  She graciously accepted these on the grounds that she would be repaying the debt with services.  His wife never knew of this liaison; might even have approved that he was being catered for in the “groin-department” as she loftily called it.

            She served his needs immaculately and expertly with the whole of her lythe, perfect body, and the careful reserve of her quiet mind.  It was a return-payment; as it were, she was the gift, but one that he could never possess.  Sometimes he arrived at their flat for tea, sometimes at coffee-time, sometimes for drinks before supper.  Often, she would be sitting huddled in her loneliness as he had first seen her.  Sometimes she would not answer the bell, and he would return later when he could. Often, she would take him into the back, her carefully kept boudoir, and provide the momentary and expected gift of her soul, and recompense him for what he had given her, and she restored her own sense of independence,

            At first, he had wanted to tell her of her beauty, of her purity, of how his breath had been taken away that first time he had sat down beside her, and her presence had somehow, indelibly, soaked into him.  Of how it had never changed for him since that first moment. Often, he would start words of admiration.  And she would walk away, or flick the television on, or hunt in her bag for the things to work on her fingernails of her eye-lines.

            Sometimes she would mention men who hassled her for marriage, and who offered her the earth or more.  He heard about the man she had been in love with who always promised, but never left his wife.

            Often, he heard of her resolve, ever after that break-up, that she would fend for herself; truly unburdened with emotions and dependence.  No-one would do anything for her that she could not do for herself - and had already done.  He heard the bitterness in her tone that offers of marriage, of everything else too, undermined her heroic self-support.  He sensed very quickly that his love for her would hassle her into an obligation she would never accept.

 

* * *

 

When they arrested her, she caused a fuss.  He arrived in the middle of it; the small basement door was open and out of it flowed screeches, interrupted by gruff, controlled threats.   He rushed in to help.  She ignored his entry, taken up as she was with her screaming justifications. A policewoman on either side of her, she faced a ruddy-faced young PC who took her torrents of self-defence and abuse with an old-fashioned fortitude, reminding her of her rights and of the number of potential charges she was steadily clocking up.

            He sized up the situation as he entered, walking between them, he took her beautiful delicate face in both his hands, and whilst she aimed her pointed shoes at his shins violently, he kissed her full and passionately on her spluttering mouth.  Her words became muffled and stopped as if choked off in a suffocation.  “And, who are you, sir?” the dignified young policeman demanded.

            But he took no notice, brought out his handkerchief to dab the tears and smudges from her face.  He put an arm around her shoulders and pressed her towards the privacy of her bedroom. Such was his command that the police let him do it.  And she too allowed herself to be helped into shape.

            The same happened in court.  Her explosion of denigrating protests resulted in her being sent down for contempt. Two days of white racists in the women’s prison convinced her it was less humiliating to return to the court to apologise to the magistrate.  When he escorted her from the building to take her home, she was ready to spit fury at anything that moved.  She sat in the taxi briskly filing her nails, defying him to speak to her.  Back in their flat, she huddled into her familiar chair seeking the withdrawal into her lonely posture to calm her indignity - the indignity of the court and indeed at her own of being helped by him.

            He went out immediately to shop for a simple meal, which he then cooked for her. Immediately afterwards, she invited him to leave.  Which he did.

            The charge against her - running a disorderly house - was more of a potential disaster for him.  He, after all, owned the flat - had so much to lose from public knowledge of his link with her and her business.

            She refused to talk to him about what had happened, about what had brought the police in, about the details of her business.  Her sole communication about it was to turn her mouth down in a sour expression, shrug her shoulders and say, “It will only be a fine,” as if he would be the one to pay it.  She could not enlighten him on the further investigations the police were conducting into her - their flat - and him.

            So far as he knew, she continued her business there.

 

.* * *

When her body was found, one of her clients had practised extreme cruelty upon it, before mutilating and disembowelling her. The final cause of death was by suffocation due to her breast implants, torn from their site, and thrust deep into her throat.

He was quickly convicted. His coiffured wife never attended his trial.  He began the long years of his sentence at the bottom of the pile in the prison, the perverse sex offender being the just object of everyone else’s violence.  He demanded solitary confinement and was given it. What else could these long days of loneliness be filled with but his haunting memories of her - the devoted expertness of her body, those momentary gifts of hers to him.  Despite dedicating those unending hours to recollections of love for her, his degraded situation continually forced him to wonder if the verdict on him had been right, if he had entered some blacked out moment of sadistic murder, as if some dark unknown passion had demanded an end to her indifference and in revenge he had torn her apart to look for her responding love that never came.  Was there some monstrous evil that had lurked in him and shown itself momentarily - even unknown in its showing itself?  And if it was so, such a monstrousness must be in him still.  He searched for it in his dark sadness, in his loneliness, in his indignation and rage, guided only by the proclamations of the court and of the tabloid press, which together told of his ‘true’ character.  He kept these cuttings, and added to them when he found occasional further reports.  He searched for details, which he could find in himself.  He reviewed his life, the angry rivalries as a child with his brothers, his fights in school playgrounds and dormitories with boy comrades.  His arguments with his father when a teenager. His sad annoyance with his stiff and stately wife, and the enduring aggrieved resentment at their childlessness. His rather ruthless ambition in the law firm.  And finally, his success as a writer of those damning murder/thriller novels.  Had all this culminated in a paroxysm of blind forgotten sadism towards the object of his purist, most generous and tolerant love?

A year later a similar murder of a black prostitute occurred in a wealthy part of London.  The police reviewed his case.  The court released him.  The media reported the fact.  He left prison without interest.

            His shamed wife never replied to his letters.

            He turned his writer’s mind to an autobiography.  He became very rich.

 

* * *

When I first saw her body - because, yes, it was in fact me who had found her, and in fact called the police who regarded me as ‘red-handed’, and in fact I was literally so red-handed, with the blush of her life-blood on me from touching her - I saw her and stood still.  In that moment I was no longer present, staring at the window, perhaps for 20 minutes, whilst the corner of my eye concentrated hard upon the sculpted form on the bed.  It was a huge rose-bloom, a fulsome bud opened by a knife. It blew the careful space of her tidy bedroom into an eternal memory for me.  My thoughts shrank down into the single minimal dimension of a straight line that stretched from my eye to the featureless plane of her recently cleaned window.  I could not look, yet I saw. No doubting I saw. I shrank too into an unthinking blot, a stain which I would never clean.

            The white insistence of her still eyes stared more starkly as if they were varnish, like un-skied mountain slopes at night, simply waiting.  They invited real life to grow there.  Those whites were the only unsullied - not sullied with blood - surface she still had.  It was the blooded surfaces that the whites contrasted with, they did not compare to her brownness.  Those whitenesses were an invitation into the messages from her dead soul.  They said nothing, both quietly and loudly; like the white of an envelope creates a curiosity and a communication, all at once. The whites of those wide sad eyes spoke of her poor dead soul within.  I looked at those dead eyes then, as they spoke horror to me, and there was no longer an indifference in her.  They spoke to me of a cold magic, a charm that I could hope to meet again only when dead.

Cautiously with darting motions, my eyes, also deadened, glanced upon what he had done to her. Just above the black shrubbery of her lower hairs there was a vertical cut of, say, one-and-a-half inches, running northwards up her tummy.  Its edges were slightly parted as if in shy invitation. Subsequently more semen was believed to be inside that hole.  Smears of blood, shaded streaks against the dark skin, surrounded that slit; a fulgent expressive energy, a pulse of some explosive slaughtering passion, caught in a sublime moment of art on her abdomen.

Further up was the dramatic swipe from hip-crest to hip-crest, a line that seemed to cut her in half, slicing only millimetres below her belly button.  It formed a grand smile that had opened, and slowly I saw a blind satisfied grin, releasing a disordered tumble of in-things to the world outside.  As if the gates of a crowded playground had swung wide to let the active play of uncounted children spill uncontained into the world.  They were dark, bloodshot and distended bubbles of bowel, or short, wrinkled pearl-grey strings, or stretched sheets of fanned-out veins.  All were markers of her inner life come outwards.

Her face was strewn with red-streaks as elsewhere in a ghastly tattoo.  They darkened her perfect skin patchily and shaded into the lean hopeful curves of her dear cheeks.  Streaks bled from her mouth like flames licking up from a grate.  Their still fire pictured the horror-passion, a struggle between mouth and intruder, between despair and defeat.  It was a poem of life and death, and it played round her mouth like children on the common.  The wide stretched mouth, sliced either side and so no longer hers, poured with distress, with openness and fullness.  Its sour turns and sudden glittering smiles for me had gone in the stretching he had forced on its willing cavity.  There, it contained now, a retching fullness of foreign matter that gave out a blue-grey glimpse between the frozen clots of red around those once white teeth.  It was a fine full fit that pretended well-enough to be a lover in her loved mouth. It had become the centre of a completed poem, lyrical, tragic, quiet - a night without dream in there. Her lungs had pleaded for air in those final moments, and were left unfilled.

            Across her chest were thin stripes on the dark and smudged skin, lines where the dark colour had been forced to give way and slender furrows of red beads had grown.  They were the light touch of a wire in cheese.  Her bosom had born its nakedness and had celebrated, as if with streaks of fire, an obsessive attention to those pure curved mounds. A long time ago, a rhythmic, purifying flagellation was a solemn hymn to god.  Now, its pain still rang out echoes in that room that made me put my hands to my ears even then.  Her breasts were the altar and the flesh together.  Each one of the pair had then been torn open as if an envelope with frantic news, as if they contained messages of forgiveness.  Each breast had yielded, not a milk - no, never that - each had born a soft gelatinous package, weighty and malleable - like fluid mercury, the liquid jewel.  Each package had been torn out as if scooped with a sharp curette, leaving its breast like a robbed purse, as if the devout Inca, ripping the heart from the victim of worship, could praise the sun with blood, but had failed to cast a glance backwards at the bud from which the sun had risen.  Each breast had slumped in the sadness of loss, shapeless.  How her breath must have heaved under them. Beauty continued to roam upon her, like the rays around the horizon of the new-day’s sun.  Those breasts had become relics of light and the world. Their nature had flown and light and the world were thereby intensified.

            Her limbs were stretched out to the far corners of the bed, a web, a net to catch stars.  Her sinews were tracks of light in, as it were, the sky at dusk, a sign as much of welcome to the day as of passive good-night.  A greeting with open arms and legs to all experiences, a zest, in the stillness, like sipping iced water with a hot Mediterranean view, inviting the weary traveller to come and rest in silent inward contemplation.  She lay vainly and hideously stretched and prepared.

 

All in a moment’s flash when I looked, she in disorder in the soft boudoir where she kept her things tidily and ready for her. My eyes centred in on the knife, his knife.  Its handle only visible, whilst its blade he had plunged fully into the top of her thigh. The polished shine of its brass and wood hovered erect above the crest of her pubis, as if a snake charmed, risen from within and stuck petrified in its deadly climax.

            It was mercy that made me feel its handle and draw its stained blade from her deep flesh.  I hesitated and drew a faint scratch across my own abdomen from hip-crest to hip-crest, in a twinned climax of death.

 

* * *

 

In my solitary confinement what else did I have to do but rehearse in my memory - as if still real - the love I had felt for her. Often, I would stretch myself on that undignified prison bed, stretch each limb to one corner and call up a vision of her – bending, stretching, dancing for me.

 

What else might I do in my empty hours but twin my body to hers as I had in that last moment?  I thought I might live a twinned death in those moments.  A starfish, stranded and tortured in pain as if the drying sun had been too quick to let it reach the sea again.  For hours, in that sill prison-cell I might wait for death to come.

 

As I had when I had found her.  I had endured then moments that lasted forever like death.

 

Lying there in my posture of remembrance, I would find my body responding in ritual.  I recalled it was the energy that had astonished me.  As I had cast away that knife of his, I had knelt over, then lain upon her ruin.  Just as I now lie matching the direction of her limbs with my own stretched out.  I had pressed mine to hers as if the life in mine would do for us both.  The weight on her freed bowels brought more to the surface in a sensuous caressing slither under me, accompanied by a strained gurgling sound.  Her opened being had propelled me in a paroxysm that came because she had never strayed from an independence she proclaimed every moment in her separated way.  I could not alter the impulsion of my own body as it subsided in murmurings of how I had loved her which she could never hear.  Her bowels churned when I rose from her body and became still again.  I wept for many minutes.  Her eyes maintained her familiar indifference.

 

She had been all through this alone, as she would have wanted.  Now I, on my own, was destroyed by it.  I called the police as the only others in the whole world who might now know what to do.

 

In this way I managed, whilst in prison, to spend my time with Grace.  But then, it was when they let me out.... The dark days came.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!” 

 

 

 

 

The park seat

 

He sat down at one end of the park seat without looking at the person at the other end. In fact, they were only a few feet apart and he knew that whoever it was, they were probably looking at him. But he was taking Charlotte for a walk, quite a shaggy hybrid sort of spaniel.

It was only moments before the other person’s dog was growling. He looked at the woman, and noticed as he usually did if she was attractive. She had long legs now uncrossing as she turned to her dog to calm it. “He’s called George.” she said. About his age, they were both in their mid-fifties. She was slim, about his height, and hair immaculate and already grey.

            He decided he’d reply to her, given there was a degree of appeal in what he saw, “Mine’s called, Charlotte. She’s docile. Don’t worry.”

            To his surprise she replied in a friendly sort of way, “Hmm – George and Charlotte. A royal match.”

            For the first time he looked her directly in her face, “What?”

            She smiled with some amusement, “George, the Third, he was married to Queen Charlotte. Remember?”

            He grunted, as if both ignorant and uninterested. “You’re a teacher, then?” he asked.

            “That’s it,” she said with a similar amused smile. Her hand was still on her black-and-tan Alsatian. “He’s got a bit of spirit.”

            “He’s German?” he said as if it mattered. “A German sheep-dog, right?”

            “Right again,” she said still seeming amused. There was a church bell tolling in the background as it was Sunday. “Do you walk her usually?”
            “Every Sunday. We (meaning his dog and himself) watch the old folk going to the church.”

            “Might see you again, some time.” And she stood up walking off with her dog that was still interested in the spaniel.

            He watched her behind, and her striding with long steps which he decided was elegant. Then he called out, “You left your glasses case here.” She looked around and came back for it. Her usual smile crossed her face again as she thanked him. He stood up deciding to accompany her for a little. They walked side by side. 

She was looking down at the path as she stepped out, and with an expression suggesting she was pleased to have interested him. “What do you do, then?” she said eventually to break the silence in case it became less friendly.

“Oh, I manage the garage. On the by-pass. It’s a petrol station, really.”

She looked at him, “I know the one. Yes,” she said, “perhaps I recognise you. What’s your name if I may ask?”

“Reg.” But he did not ask hers. He was feeling suddenly nervous. Though he often noticed women in the street and the park, and sometimes would follow behind them for a few yards, he’d never got into conversation with one before. In fact, he was more at ease with dogs.

She was smiling again at his loss of composure which was sufficient to have communicated itself to her. “I’m Grace.” She was quite entertained by this awkward man by her side. His awkwardness made her feel she could control him. She felt comfortable, even if he was awkward. Perhaps because he was! The dogs were pulling at their leads as if to get at each other. “Let’s meet again,” she said as if dismissing him for today.

“OK,” he nodded, but kept on walking by her side which amused her. Why she wondered did she not feel threatened. In fact, as they continued and left the park she asked if he’d like to have a cup of coffee, to which he also nodded. His nervousness continued. The dogs were happily interested in each other exploring with their noses. She took him to her small house just outside the park.

When they entered, he stood nervous and still, and as if waiting to be told to sit – which she did in a teacher-like way. And he obediently sat where she indicated. That little-boy quality of his still amused her. But now she was feeling a bit nervous too. She never entertained a man in her house – apart from her brother who was always popping in. 

She left the room to go to her small kitchen to make coffee in her best jug – two of her best cups and saucers as well. When she sat down on the other side of the room with the low table in between with the refreshments on it, they were both silent. It was as if both were out of their depth and yet they felt they should be of an age when ordinary friendliness should have been quite automatic. He leaned forward as if he had something important to say to her, “You lived here long?”

She remained amused at his fumbling for something to break the silence. It relaxed her if she could see his nervousness, because then she could see about relaxing him. She remained sitting up straight and told him it had been her parent’s house, but they were both gone and had left her the house. She had a brother and he had been left a little cottage a few miles away on the coast. She sometimes stayed there for a day or a night. And then amazingly, she found herself saying that he might like to take his dog to stay there briefly.

He didn’t jump at the offer. And she began to feel her nervousness again. The dogs were now lying calmly on the rug in front of the fireplace. He said, rather clumsily, “Do you think we could become friends?”

Her ready smile bloomed again, “Looks like we’re going in that direction.” And she pointed at the dogs, as if it depended on them.

He nodded, and she wondered if he ever smiled. 

“They look as if they like each other. You know, I never got him doctored. I couldn’t.” He looked blank. “It seemed so unkind. So, he gets kind of… fresh. You know.” But she didn’t know why she was telling him; perhaps it was to warn him to protect his Charlotte.

He looked intensely at her, “Sorry, love. I forgot your name.”

“Grace,” she said, But this time she did not smile. It seemed to be increasingly heavy going.

“Ah. Grace. That’s a nice name. Mine’s, Reg.”

“I know. Are you married, Reg?” She felt now she had no idea how to carry on a conversation with this unnerved man. It didn’t seem to matter what she would say.

He shook his head, “No, I’m not.” But he did not elaborate. And he continued to look rather lost with her.

“No, nor am I,” she said, briskly. “Never wanted to,” and she shook her hair back with a flick of her head. “But sometimes, I wonder what it would have been like.” She looked down at her dog and stroked its head. The dog moved slightly in response.

He looked at her, and said in his incongruous way, “Well, we could try.”

She looked up sharply at him and burst out laughing. “What?” she said impulsively, so surprised she didn’t think what she was saying, “Is this a proposal.”

He then blushed, slowly, all over his rugged face. And she cut her laughter short. “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh.” No-one ever proposed before. Not to me.” She was flustered. “I suppose we could try.” She didn’t know whether to take it in a humorous way as if not serious, or if she should respond to his seriousness.

“OK.” It was almost as if she was just buying petrol at his garage.

“Let’s be serious for a moment, Reg. Are you really thinking about this? We don’t know each other, do we. Perhaps we should get to know each other, We only met half-an-hour go.” Her mind was trying to take in what was happening. Just as she was finding it boring, he had now turned her upside down. “We’d better get to know each other properly, I think. Let’s spend the rest of the day together, tell each other everything about ourselves.”

“I’ve got to go to work this afternoon.”

“Oh, OK. Come back afterwards and I’ll cook us a nice meal. What time will you finish.”

“Eleven o’clock.”

“Oh, that’s late, isn’t it?”

“It is the shift I’m on.”

“Yes, OK. Well, we could have a bedtime glass of wine, if you like.”

“Yeah,” and he stood up as if being dismissed. “I’ll come back later, if you like.”

“Yes, come back later.” And he put the lead back on the dog and left without saying goodbye. Her first thought was to question herself viciously about why she had agreed to see him at 11 o’clock in the evening. She couldn’t ring him with excuses to cancel as they had not swapped phone numbers. She could just not answer the door; be in bed; be asleep. She sat down again, poured some more coffee and told herself  to think, think hard, what she was doing. Perhaps she could welcome him with a bottle of wine. She could go and get one from the little shop down the road. ‘Fuck,” she allowed herself to say, to herself, ‘it is the last thing I want to have myself turned upside down and inside out like this.’ She decided to go and get a bottle of wine, just in case and come back and decide what she really wanted to do. Was there something nice enough about him to spend a little time with him? But why did she agree to 11 at night. She had to get up for work tomorrow. She had never known how to handle relations with blokes. It was only boys in her class at school who she had any connections with at all. Men, she told herself, are grubby. She went to have a shower.

He meantime was wandering back with Charlotte, the spaniel. He walked slowly feeling dizzy to the other side of the park. Of course, he did not have to go back to the woman after his shift. Best to forget all that silliness. What does she want to marry him for. What could she want him for? For once his curiosity perked up. What were women really like when you got close to them? He had never had the opportunity. Suddenly his life had changed direction, completely. Like going into reverse gear. Or perhaps he suggested to himself it was more the other way. After going backwards away from everything all his life till he was fifty he could not change into forward gear. He had no idea what on earth that would mean, what he would have to do. What would she want? What does a woman want? They don’t want men with no experience. He shouldn’t go back. That’s it.

She waited at 11 pm listening hard for the doorbell as if it might be difficult to hear, still not knowing if she would answer it. 

But it didn’t ring.

Nevertheless, the next Sunday he was out bright and early with Charlotte, and sitting on the park bench as the week before. She too was curious to see if he was walking his dog but was careful not to walk past their bench seat. After all she’d had a proposal of marriage! As she walked around at a distance behind and out of sight, she could see him sitting there. ‘Now what!’ she thought. And no answer came to her, none at all. So she just stood. It was George who gave the game away, because, off the lead in the park, he suddenly realised his new friend Charlotte was over there by the seat. He went racing over before she could move or stop him. When he came near, Charlotte noticed him and jumped-up straining, still on her lead. But Reg let her off not realising what was happening and just wanting to give her a bit of freedom on her walk. The dogs sniffed at each other for a moment and suddenly George was up on her and they were copulating – in public, George and Charlotte. Immediately Reg heard the disturbance and started to shoo them apart. But the dogs were not too keen to part. Grace was now running to control her dog and came up to them lashing George with the leash to distract him from Charlotte. In fact, George was not easily distracted. But as the situation came under control, Reg found he was facing Grace, and she was practically in physical contact with him. They stared at each other. The situation seemed extremely personal.

Perhaps it was as close to intimacy with a woman that Reg had ever been. He backed away, and then sat down on the seat. He had thought about her a lot during that week, a lot. She was standing looking down on him sitting there, not sure whether to flounce away with her anger, or to stay and have it out with him. After a moment of doubt she sat down on the seat with as much distance from him as possible. “You stood me up last Sunday.” She was not exactly haughty but did convey her sense of being completely in the right.

He stared at her, not knowing what to say. But blurted out painfully, “You don’t want a man like me.”

She wondered what he meant, was he referred to something awful he’d done in the past or whatever. But found herself saying,  “Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?” and realised that she could be considering him as a man she wanted. “I mean, I hardly know you.”

He turned to her and, in a brave sort of a way, confessed, “I’ve never been with a woman before.”

She was struck very forcefully by the shame in him about his lack of masculine experience. But what could she say to that? She decided, also bravely, to follow suit, “Well, all I’ve done was play around with a boy in my class. When I was about twelve. Once, my father saw us. He was so cross, he whipped me. He had never done anything to me like that. He was so cross. I cried for a while, all night I think. I wouldn’t look at him for ages afterwards. One day he held me in his arms again and told me never to do that again. And I cried again and told him I was sorry. And I’ve never done anything like that again.”

“What did you play around at?”

“Oh, just looking, and touching… you know…  our parts.” Reg looked at her, wondering what he could say. “Now you think I am disgusting. You look just like he looked at me. My father. He was disgusted with me.”

He continued looking at her distress, “No, Grace. No, no I’m not.”

“I was disgusted with myself. I am. I think I am still. I went to a group for women who had been abused. But they told me I had not been abused. I think they were right and I was just being dirty with the boy.” She looked very sad and even hopeless; and she added irrelevantly perhaps, “He was called John.”

“I never played with anyone. I don’t know anything about a woman,” he said as if he wasn’t actually talking to one of that category.

Her mood seemed to lighten immediately, “Coo, we are much the same, I reckon, Reg.”

He looked curiously at her and then his face darkened with tension and anxiety. “Are you saying we should play around together?”

“Oh,” she laughed loudly, “Oh, of course not.” And she laughed almost hysterically. Two people walking by looked and wondered if she was being molested by the man on the seat next to her. “Of course not. Nobody should suggest that, unless they wanted to. Unless they both wanted to.” She put her hand out to touch his arm, trying to relax his alarm. 

And he did calm a bit. But the dogs were now pulling at the leads as if they’d been stirred by the tension between their owners. He stood. “You’re a bit of a funny woman, aren’t you Grace.” And then he added hurriedly, “But I like talking to you.”

Grace, too, had calmed when she had seen how tense he had become. But he now walked away with Charlotte, who kept pulling back and turning to look at George.

The next time they met was when Grace decided to fill her car at the petrol station on the by-pass. She didn’t usually go there. But she just thought she might, for a change. There was a bit of a queue, so she got out of the car to wipe some bird dirt from her windscreen. The woman driver in front of her was filling her car, and said, out of the blue, “I often come her, don’t you? Because the bloke who runs it is a bit gorgeous, isn’t he.” The woman had a lot of make-up and had tight jeans. “But he’s a bit nervous, isn’t he. He gets all nervous when I look at him.” She laughed in a slightly scoffing way, but also an admiring way. 

When Grace had filled and went in to the cash desk to pay, she was not at all surprised to see it was Reg at the till. He did not look up, and she realised he must have spotted her through the window. When they had finished the transaction she said thankyou, and as there was no-one waiting behind her at that moment, she added, “Let’s go and see a film together.” He did not look up but shook his head slowly as if he was caught off balance and didn’t know what to say to her invitation. But she took his shake of the head as a ‘no’. So she added with a degree of silly abandon, “Well, come round and we can watch some tellie together.” And she chuckled hesitantly.

There was a moment or two of hesitation and then to her surprise he said, “OK”. She immediately thought of the woman outside saying she thought he was a bit gorgeous. Indeed, he could be gorgeous, and had a good physique under his work clothes. She knew what she liked in men – would like in a man.

She left and he watched her through the window. He always said it was the best view. As they walked away, they could not see him looking.

He went around to her house after he’d finished at 6.30. Not on until 11 pm this day. It was a weekday. She heard the doorbell go and was astonished and flustered to see him on the doorstep. She let him in. They hardly spoke, but standing in the hallway, she said, “I’d better cook. I need to go around to the shop to get something. Come with me. You can hold the basket. Is there anything you don’t like to eat?”

When they got back, she sat him in the same chair, and he watched the television news without much interest while she spent the time actively in the kitchen. She spread the table, served the food and they ate. There was not much to say apart from ‘pass the salt’ etc. Neither of them knew what to expect. As they finished, he said, “I should have brought Charlotte, she would have liked to see George again.”

“They’d have got up to no good.” But she was wondering actively what they would get up to themselves. And so was he; the meal was good, but…. now what? She gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen. And then returned to sit down across the table again. She looked as though she was expecting something from him. She lay her arm on the table in a relaxed sort of way as if inviting him to touch it. So he did; he put his hand on her wrist. It felt warm and also exciting to touch this object of desire. She smiled at him and he gazed as if spellbound at her welcoming face. He looked so serious. “Please smile at me,” she asked. And so he did. “You look so gorgeous when you smile,” she said, repeating what the tarty women had said to her at the petrol pump earlier. She seemed to be egging him on to do something, initiate something with her. But he didn’t know what he should be doing. And then with inspiration he picked up the wrist he was touching and kissed the back of her hand. “That was lovely,” she said. So he held it to his lips again. She  said rather matter-of-factly, “I think we could be romantic together.” And now she was tense, having broached the subject that neither of them really understood. 

He could feel the tension in her hand as he held it against his face, and lips. He put it down on the table and cupped it in both of his hands. “Do you really want to try with me?” he said earnestly. 

“We’ll have to teach each other what to do won’t we?” She was trying to be practical to manage the rising tension and excitement between them. 

He nodded, “Yes. Do you mind?” 

She laughed and relaxed a bit at his anxious concern. “Mind? No more than you.” And she took her hand away from his so she could put it to his face and feel the beginnings of stubble. She had not felt that before. She stood and pulled on his arm to follow. When they were together in the bedroom he looked around as if it were some strange forest in the middle of Africa. A woman’s bedroom looked so tidy. He looked at the single bed; it seemed very small. He was feeling terrified again at what he’d have to do to her. She said coyly, “Perhaps we should undress first.” He began to take his clothes off, while she watched. He was naked when she said. “It’s easier for a woman isn’t it. She can see what she’s got to hold,” and she was looking at his penis which was feeling like a growing sausage, “and what she’s got to do with it. But a man can’t see anything much of what a women’s got.” Then she thought of her previous conversation of her forbidden escapade as a schoolgirl. “Would you like to see my parts, so you know what they look like. And what to do with them? I’ve never shown them to a man. I mean a grown man. Like this.” She was feeling devilish and wondering what her father would be thinking now. She felt she was defying everything good. “Shall, I undress now?” she asked.

He nodded and mumbled, “Yes.” 

“Or touch your penis?” he shook his head. But she did touch it and held it. It lay in her hand like the crown jewels. He was so familiar with his own erection, but only when it lay in his own hand. To feel her gentle grip around it now chased away every single thread of tension. She let it go and began to undress, watching him watch her as her body slowly revealed itself. She wondered if he approved of it. It became important that he liked it. “Tell me,” she asked, or demanded. He looked puzzled. “Tell me it is nice. Tell me you want to see my parts, to find them, and find out what they are.”

He was at a loss, “You are a very beautiful woman,” he said, or even recited from the last love-scene he had watched on television.

“You are nice to me,” she smiled. And her panties came down to her ankles. He was looking at her nakedness and stepped forward to give her a powerful hug. She yielded to him, and their bodies swayed gently together for several minutes. He could feel the touch of her skin on his penis which increasingly felt the centre of his body, of the universe.

“Let’s get on the bed. Then you can find out all the parts that a woman has got. Please be gentle with me.” She got on the narrow bed. And spread her thighs to give him space so that he could see what she had got between her legs. 

He looked carefully at her groin. “You are beautiful,” he said with more sincerity.

“So are you,” and she was looking at his penis in its semi-swollen state. “Can I feel your balls?”

“Yes,” he said. She held them. She noticed that as she touched them and held and fondled them, his breathing changed. It was deeper. And his eyes changed as if he was not seeing anything. 

“Look at my parts, Reg.” And while she held on lovingly to his balls, he looked.

“Can I touch you there?”

“Yes, dear Reg. I  want to feel you touching me. It’ll make me feel just like you feel now as I hold you.” So he put his fingers on the wrinkled skin between her thighs. “You can find a slit if you part those folds. Your finger will slip in.” So he did what she invited. And with some fumbling found the slit that was the entrance to her. And now her breathing changed, just like his. “Now,” she said, “there’s a hole you can find. And just in front of the hole I want you to rub it there, Very, very gently. That’s the clit. Ah, you’ve found it.” She lay back to enjoy the rising energy that spread through the skin all round her thighs and hips into every inch of her body it seemed. Her breathing was getting stronger. “Now, Reg, you must do something else. I want to find out what it’s like. You feel that spot you’ve touched with your finger, I want you to lick it. Soothe it with your tongue.

He moved back and withdrew her hand. Hers slipped away from his balls. “Lick it?” he asked.

“I want to see what it’s likc.” She looked up into his face. “Shall we try it? We don’t have to.”

“OK.” He put his head down between her legs and tried to find his way towards her slit with his face and lips to lick her. He didn’t mind so much from a hygiene point of view, but he could feel his erection declining. With some care and difficulty he found the right spot and to his amazement her breathing changed abruptly to a gasping which quickened and quickened and in no time she was crying out as if in a kind of delicious pain. He knew what it was, but had never realised a women reached an orgasm as he did. Moreover, as she came, his erection seemed to respond as well. She told him when he had licked enough. And as if in a daze she asked him to get into her hole. It did entail a lot of nervous fumbling again, but he did it, to his surprise. And the automatic body movements took him over till he too climaxed, dizzyingly, inside her.

They both relaxed together, having discovered what life is all about, it seemed. He lay back nearly off one side of the little bed and she buried her face in his neck, kissing the stubble. They lay for five minutes without moving, then minutes more. No movement as if they were one, and any movement would snap them apart. There were no real thoughts in his mind apart from going over the experience again and again. He had accomplished what a man can accomplish with a woman who was, as he now knew, as beautiful as any he had every watched and followed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                              Meeting herself

 

Laughter infected her. She looked for its source.  Her thin pale hair moved with nervous flicks of her head; her face was pale, too.  A couple of teenagers, a slender boy in tired clothing, faded denim, and a buxom girl with a white tee-shirt with crude slogans; they were holding hands, smoking, laughing together.  It was as if they wanted to infect the rest of the station concourse, bored, waiting, people.  They wanted to make everyone feel left out of the joke.  Her pale face looked towards them, a small smile emerging, half conveying that she approved and encouraged them.  The long line of her nose wound itself, as it were, through the intervening air and prodded exploringly into their space.  But she was also beyond, outside their entangled gaze.

            Then she moved.  The angle of her direction swung, like a searchlight, picked out a man way beyond the line of battered seats.  He was solemnly and studiously looking in a book by the bookstall, a relaxed traveller looking for a cheap novel for the journey.  Her inviting half-smile winged towards him through the air, but unnoticed.

            A curious observer, observing her wan smile and the distant concentration of her sight, would by now have sighted her small toddler pulling at her fawn linen skirt.  He reached wobblingly to put his hand in the large linen bag hanging from her shoulder.  He could feel something there.  She brushed his chubby hand aside as if it was an invading insect.  Her distant line with the bookstall began to falter.  The perturbations broke into it as the hopeful book reader moved away to find his train.  She turned, slightly sharply, to her toddler, repulsing his more demanding efforts to get onto her lap, to explore her inviting bag.  He perched unsafely on his stumpy legs clinging to her knee with his hand and looking perplexed at the wooden response from his mummy.  His face began to pucker as if in distress, but partly as if he'd learned the power of noisy crying.  She put her hand in the bag and withdrew her camera, giving it to him, whilst holding on to the short cord strap.  He immediately went to put it back in her bag - to restore his fascinated project of discovery, which she had uncomprehendingly wiped out so easily. It wasn't the camera he wanted so much as the exploration, the discovery of it, within her.  As the cord loop was still caught in her fingers, he could not get the camera back inside, and he began intelligently to explore the means of attachment of the camera to her fingers, pulling this way and then that in random expectation. During all this she continued a similar random prodding of the air with her directed attention to various corners of the railway station.

 

Our observer of this observing woman would have been pained by the insensitive mis-contact - the toddler intent on exploring his mother; mother intent on probing the contents of the distant air.  Not long after this, the observer would have seen her pick him up as a surprised bundle and pop him carefully into the straps of his pushchair and begin to move off to a crescendo of protest from his affronted dignity and frustrated purpose. Such an observer would have been tempted to emerge from the crowd with words of advice and chastisement on her lips for this absent-minded mother.  But she would have been stopped with the words unspoken, by a surge of people crowding from the gate of one of the platforms; and from the midst of the surge a male arm rose in greeting to wave to the woman's equally welcoming wave, whilst the little child screwed round in his entrapping harness more desperate than ever to find where his mother with her interesting bag had vanished to.

 

The threesome united. The woman's half-inviting smile welcomed the man, whilst the wooden posture of her body remained unaltered. It was a cooling unresponsiveness to his embrace.  His glowing smile keyed immediately into her immobility.  His eyes became momentarily glazed and fixed. They turned to the screaming toddler, a joint protest, how unreasonable when Daddy had come. He quietened quickly in his pushchair when she attended to him for a moment instead. She lifted him up. His face transformed into a strange stare; either deeply puzzled or suspiciously curious, or simply a silent paralysis of fear.  She lifted him in her hands, raising his face level with hers and announcing that his Daddy was here.  Then she handed him into the father's arms.  They hugely enfolded him like a protective coat of love.  His stiff little face smoothed a little, and his hand began an intense exploration of Daddy's ear.  Daddy laughed, and ducked as his little son's hands chased his various features, ear, hair, spectacles.  Mother laughed, and he turned with his own happy gurgle to see his mother's face come to life.

            Our observer might at this point have bitten her tongue, relieved that she had been prevented from interfering with chastising words in this now gloriously happy, and mutually infected, family scene.  She would have found herself inspired, bursting out laughing too.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

If our dark observer from the vantage points she has had could sprout wings, she could have followed the movements of this family unit through London; the taxi, the early morning coffee and croissants in Bayswater, the playing with the toddler in Kensington Gardens whilst the grown-ups began to talk earnestly, albeit interspersed with her instant laughs, joyous but forced, whenever he chuckled, or the toddler coo-ed.  If our fascinated observer had achieved invisibility - shall we give her a name, shall we call her Mary, perhaps - if Mary's skin, already so Africa-black, had gone one step further and become a skin of invisibility, then she could have drawn close and begun to hear their earnest thoughts.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Over lunch the mother, now we shall call her Marie, her thin wild hair, loose, carefree, magnificent, and her complexion a little pink with the tension of the day, the excitement, the prospects of the next four days, sat opposite the man, the father of her first child.  He, in his pressed suit, slightly self-conscious and with his glowing smile, which, at times, encouraged himself as well as her.  Our invisibly present observer sat on the fourth side, opposite the toddler clattering and clamouring happily in his high chair, and charming the bright Italian waitress.

            "It is not," she said "a matter of respect - though I do.  Enormously. You know that.  We wouldn't be here otherwise."

            "I know, my dear, I know." He said. Our puzzled observer – she, a Mary – studied the smooth features of his white face.  Their very smoothness seemed to imply that he was actively smoothing out some inner turmoil.  The woman – our Marie – seemed to notice the same, and she reached out her hand across the table-cloth to put her fingers loosely over his.  She was, Mary noticed, almost gazing into him.  His ever-present, playful smile relaxed a little. "We don't talk about love, do we? My dear Marie; only of respect."

            "No," she said, glancing quickly at her toddler who was investigating bread, which now lay in crumbs on his plastic tray, "We can't.  We know that. Love is not part of it."  The momentary contact was lost; some balance between them had changed.  Her hand remained covering his, but it was a meaningless gesture now.  He moved his hand to grasp her fingers.  They had returned to wood.  Mary, our perceptive observer, felt chilled suddenly at this lost contact, as if it were a real death; she looked at the woman's fingers without a wedding ring.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

What Mary struggled to learn from their earnest discussion were the many unspoken concerns, memories, secrets and wishes that Marie and Jacques negotiated - or were failing to negotiate - at this little restaurant table.

            One such might have been Marie's long-felt pain as the youngest child brought up in the sandy fields of coastal Suffolk; the daughter of a disaffected Church of England minister with sharply declining congregations in his cluster of rural parishes.  They lived most of her childhood in a once magnificent half-timbered Tudor rectory, with a jutted upper story.  It was supported by rotting oak corbels some still proudly showing deeply grained carvings of smiling faces.  The crumbled plaster walls still showed some decorative pargetting because the inclement North Sea weather had not yet got its final grasp on all the fine surfaces.  Her big brother's bedroom still sported the opening of the primitive ‘guarde l’eau’ covered by a makeshift trap door of modern plywood.  In mischievous moments on bored holidays, he would lift it, lie in wait till his little sister moved past on the flagstones underneath, and subject her to a sharp deluge from the upstairs commode.  Her wetness was then accompanied by a shriek of his excited laughter.  If she could leap aside, or he missed, she would retaliate with a shriek of her own equally excited mocking.

            Her father's magisterial aloofness rode above the grinding decay of his house and of his congregations.  He did nothing about it; but it was an acute, corrosive pain for his youngest daughter.  The decay was a visible sore festering on her father's pale countenance.  Later on, as they grew up, his pained silence greeted the contemptuous rebuffs from her brother, and they seemed to hasten her father's decay, his patrician stoop, his gratefully early retirement and his subsequent sudden death.  Decay was inherent in her heart.  A pickling agent seemed to turn everything she touched into a dusty relic of what it should have been.  She survived, as it were, a life-time series of those cold douches, a lifetime of turning them aside with her caustic gay laugh.  Instead of a real movement into joy, those childish laughs turned her away from herself.

 

....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Still seated in the bright restaurant, she sat back slightly, "We must be practical." She smoothed back her hair in an elegant movement with her free hand; "Practical, considerate of each other."  She seemed to be struggling for words.  He was looking for something from her.  She knew there was a male pride, that she must not harm. Yet his word ‘love’ was too simple for how complicated it was.  "My respect for you," she continued earnestly "is because we, you and I, can think out things practically.  It is what we are good at."  She was gazing right into him.  He felt her closeness.  But also, it was still somehow unmanageable.  Her fingers softly caressed his again as she felt safer.  He smiled in relaxation.  She suddenly sat right back and laughed happily, "I love that puzzled look of yours, Jacques, I love it."  She emphasised the word ‘love’ as if it was a huge joke.

            The waitress came quickly, spotting her moment to take the order.

            Mary, observing all this, could have been a little irritated, the hesitation, the to-and-fro, so much numb contact -- a dinghy and a jetty jostled each other in a high sea.  By now Mary had learned that Jacques was an affectionate acquaintance from Paris.  He had been recruited to the project again, to provide a little brother or sister to the toddler.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

Marie's finding her older sister in bed with her brother one winter night after their father had died, was only known to observer Mary because she had found a route into Marie's secret knowledge.  Mary knew, too, that the tickling and squealing laughter from the bedroom had been a mystery for a long time before that, both fascinating and unaccountably exciting.  Agitated as a child, Marie had never been able to penetrate their shut door with her enquiring eyes.  Nor to ask anything or anyone about it.  She remembered those excited squeals like a repeated dream from her childhood.

            Here she was with Jacques, the child, and similar squeals of laughter.  Only Mary knew how they linked up.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

In the evening at the end of the day, the toddler had been bottled and powdered and put to bed, Marie and Jacques sat in adjacent armchairs, silently contemplating what came next.  Dark Mary, invisible in the recesses of the room, had noticed how their conversation - through the day, over the elaborate and celebratory meal - had petered into desultory attempts to fill in silence.  The practical intimacy in the morning had faded to the stillness of the evening.  The joint project had seemed to come apart: he had been flattered in the anticipation, but had now come to feel impersonal, more flattened. She organised and energised in the initiation and arrangements, but was now tensely aware of the penetration that she would be subjected to.  What once seemed a resounding climax of rationality, could now be an uncalculated animal moment.  He felt put on his metal, his performance mechanically required, not cherished. Mary's impatience with this pair made her laugh unkindly.  She could not discern any charge in the atmosphere; no passion in either of their loins.  Contempt for them was possible. But somehow sympathy came out in Mary, too.

            After minutes of separate silences, Jacques came to the point, "My dear Marie, shall we get on with it?"  Marie, appalled at his lack of passion - but equally relieved that she would not be a vessel to collect a spilling sentimentality - led the way to the bedroom.  They took off their clothes.  He folded his neatly on a chair; she carefully sorting certain items for the laundry basket, to wash tomorrow.  They lay on the bed.  His erection came with certainty, it pointed a direct line to Marie's inside.  She flinched but braved it.

            Afterwards they slept; she deeply, almost as a protection against the proximity.  He, fitful, wondered hazily why this had been important for him.  Mary watched over them as if a guardian angel, for the next three days.  Nights in the same bed, but during the days Jacques went into London, researching motorboats for the magazine he wrote for.  Marie spent the days looking after the toddler, taking her turn in the playgroup. Mary watched her, watching the sad decline of spirit.  The project was biology, not a love-child, like the first; this time a test-tube performance.

            Mary felt a closeness to Marie; yet put at a distance, outside effective influence.  Mary's disembodied sadness seemed lost on Marie who rehearsed her sensible reasons continuously in her mind.  How sensible as she had been not to make a relationship before it had been time to become a mother.  One parent, especially a mother, is as good as two - the independence and therefore the extra attention her children would benefit from.  Frankly, the liability a man is, in a woman's life… !  Mary knew of these arguments, their use to bolster up this lonely woman.  Marie would not yet know what Mary knew about her.  Mary's sadness was that Marie yearned for more than she thought she'd settle for, and her sadness was what Marie does not yet know.  Further, Mary was sad that she was neither a help nor yet truly a relief from Marie’s loneliness.

 

                                                         ....ooooOOOOoooo....

 

On the fourth day Jacques left in the morning.  Marie fumbled with her camera and snapped him, holding in his arms the indifferent toddler, an effigy.  Perhaps Jacques had left another inside her.  We will not know yet awhile.  In the meantime, Marie went back indoors to continue her own life - as if never interrupted.  Her shadow, Mary, decided to remain with her.  The sadness had moved a little nearer.  Mary accompanied Marie almost touching now.  Their twinning had become apparent.  Marie, fully alone again, turned to her radio, she laughed desperately at the frenzy of the chattering disc jockeys.  She frowned at the news broadcasts, hummed and thrummed with the spreading music.  But sometimes she wondered at the new sad presence in her house, as if she were no longer alone.  Then her nervous laughter calmed.

            In the evening after the toddler had been bathed and bedded, more protesting than usual at his pre-occupied mother, Marie also took herself gratefully to bed.  She lay down and her dark sadness lay down beside her.  Mary's laugh, as silent as she was invisible, drew a direct line into Marie's inside.  Marie and Mary made a form of love together.  Their silent laughs mingled in rest at last.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My nurse

 

Lying in bed, the rucks in the bed-linen like granite rock to lie on, my future is a composite of past times. In the present my skin is a furnace, alive with its own nature. My member is the centre of the fire. It goes up and down like Tower Bridge. My immobility is agony as that member flags constant demands I do something for it. Sometimes my nurse looks under my bedclothes and will see it saluting her. “Oh,” she says, always, “I'm surprised at you in your condition. We don't want that, do we?” – and drops the sheet back on its throbbing tip. How to catch her attention, how to tell her. Only my eyelids work now – apart from my member hoisting itself with a life of its own. If she would only touch it with the coolness of her fingertips, a fire brigade job, to staunch the firebrand. If only those long, elegant fingers would grip its shaft to establish a control. But never, she never once glanced in the direction of my frantically blinking eyelids.

            They were worried about my eczema. Common, they say, in such cases of paraplegia. Para-bloody-plegia from the neck down, that's what I'd got. The doctor stood gazing out of the window; my nurse stood next to him gazing into him. His well-scrubbed very pink face, well-shaven and smooth as her bosom, betrayed no interest. How could he know the fight I had with my surging skin, humming like the national grid. My struggle did not involve my muscles, my joints, it was a tournament between my mind and its feelings – one that never ceased. I could tell him the prescription I needed – it was standing next to him, resting her long hand in a lingering moment on his folded arm. He was a dapper man, silver hair, still playing squash in his fifties, the healthy and wealthy type. I had known them, sold insurance to them – in those gone days. And she, his nurse, was pure radiance. What a couple, a heroic tableau at the end of my bed. My member addresses them.

            In the end, it was an ointment for her to rub into the eczema. Why could she not rub it into the places I want her to rub!  All I can do is let my thoughts run; I imagine her in all sorts of ways - the nakedness, the flexible writhe of her curves as she moves, the moaning for me at night-time... oh dear. My mind, no match for this fever, retaliates. Often instead, it constructs her in the most absurd antics -= wiping her buttocks, picking the wax from her ears... brushing her teeth. I ask you!  Shaving her calves. Always the intimacy of her flesh. My charged skin won't let her go. And – I tell you – this is a stout fifty-year old matron, with a sour expression, and who ties her waist into a nasty groove between pads of fat above and below. This is not a lithesome 25-year old, dangling a sumptuous cleavage before my eyes as she soothes my paralytic limbs. What more -= I ask you – can I do. I see only an angel, feel only the tongues of desire caressing my skin. So, I hate her, my love.

It is solely the desire of the mind's eye before me. And it is only with a mind that I can fight it. I try to imagine the mathematics of her girth, the hydrodynamics of excess lipids, the chemistry of sweat glands. I try the driest of academic puzzles, the most ditchwater-like affairs of the hum-drum. But to no end - the caverns of my soul have no limit – endless niches and passages in which can be secreted the loathed longing of my skin. Thoroughbred honest thoughts can never hunt them out to the last one, can never dint my body's soaring temperature. When one day I shall be taught the mastery of typing with one toe, or with a stick strapped to my forehead, then the first thing I'll ask for is a massage girl to take me off to a sauna and lay me out and deal with that subcutaneous layer that itches, every Everest-like moment of my libido. Then I will be released for ever. So, I do believe.

            Until then... I love my nurse and fight her in my helplessness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It might have made a difference

                                                                           

I have always believed that friendship is more important than money. But I have to say he did test that belief, most severely.  If he had paid his debt to me, I could have used a substantial amount for her.  It might have made a difference.

            I had asked her “Which is more important, money or friendship?” I remember exactly the moment I asked her.  We were sitting on a small balcony on the top floor of a hotel in Rome.  The morning sun was clear in a spring sky.  The sounds of a small fruit market in the street below seemed a long way away.  The church bell in the campanile across the road had just finished striking ten-thirty, ten deep-throated gongs and one high-pitched bell.  She was just cutting into a fresh pear and carrying a slice towards her lips, her finger pressing it against the knife.  The elegant movement was unhindered by my question and the slice was deposited safely in her soft pink mouth without mishap.  I knew she had been a ...  Well, I don’t know what I would have called her.  She would certainly not have let me even think of calling her a “tart”.  And indeed, it would certainly not have been apt.  She was, I tell you, in a class of her own, an aristocrat, a shark among minnows, a Botticelli amongst Disney cartoons.  But I had not let myself think of all that whilst we were in Rome.  And yet I must have been thinking of it.  It was the one reason she was with me there.

            I was cheating on my new wife of course; if you could call it cheating.  My wife would have called it that, if she had known.  But it was something else I was thinking of, and at the same time not thinking of whilst I was in Rome.

            Another slice of pear moved elegantly to her lips before she spoke.  The juice filled her mouth with a sweetness that showed in her eyes; and her tongue swept across her red/pearl lips leaving them moist.  “You’ve heard of diamonds,” she said.  It was hardly a question, her eyes looked at me from under lids, her moist lips moving in a coquettish smile, unexpected but forbidding.  It was not the glance of a street girl, it was the darting invasion of a woman of style, underplayed, decisive, a confident beauty. I loved her with passion at such moments.  “Diamonds, my friend,” she added, almost as a protest at my naivety, like a threatened demand.  It had a coldness which mingled with her smile like a piquant sauce on red beef.

            She had come to Rome for two days to meet me. It was at my request, but I knew why she had come.  It was not in fact to enjoy money spent on her.  It was to make him jealous – not that she ever could have made him jealous. He would never have noticed. Nevertheless, I knew she would not keep her trip secret, and I knew it could hurt my wife without measure.  But to hurt my wife was not my reason; for my part, it was not to make her jealous.  Instead, it was fascination with this perfect creature.

            And yet she was no creature.  I watched another slice of pear slide sensuously into her mouth.  The sun was burning our skin as we sat, tired by the heat, relaxing in the innuendoes of our circumstances.  She was not a creature, she was sublime, to my eyes – and more.  Her urgent physicality met with exquisite and careful elegance to raise her into an untouchable realm.  It was a mixture to explode with; that allowed no ordinary expression.

            She had loved him dearly, though I had never got her to admit it.  And he with his overbearing weightiness had never responded to her.  She would have had to shout it, and on her knees, before he could look down and hear her.  And she would never bear herself so low.  I knew what a heart there was beneath the calm precision of beauty; within the pout she presented to him, and to me; and to her customers.

            She had been looking at the expensive cases of jewellery in the hotel foyer.  She had spotted a diamond creation for her neck.  It would have looked wonderful, she was right.  I had not said a word at the time.  Now, she asked, “What did you think of the necklace I showed you?” The next slice of pear was on its way.

            ‘My dear,” I began.  Some impatience had crept into my voice I suspect.  I was about to protest as mildly as possible that jewellery costing thousands of pounds was beyond me at present.  But I cautiously changed my line.  “It is as beautiful as you are.” I suspect, however, that she had caught my anxious tone.  That slice of pear got, I thought, a harder bite than the others.  She looked aside and I thought I glimpsed an arching of the eyebrows, but she would not let me see it.  She put down her plate with the knife on it at our feet and dabbed her lips with the napkin.  One more slice of pear waited on the plate.  A slight hardness had come into her features, without perceptible movement.  Her hardness was legendary.  She knew I was about to refuse her request, about to become insubordinate.  She would not press to that point where she was refused, but she felt it all the same.

            I thought of the money he owed me.

            I could have bought her several necklaces with it.  She loved him, I suppose, helplessly.  He was the only person that I saw her give her own money to.  But we all did.  He was like that.  His expansiveness towards everyone was so obvious.  He always knew someone who would do just what you needed doing.  He could always get something fixed.  And then of course there was that forlornness; he needed things and not one of us could arrange it for him.  He contrived thus, an imbalance; and it always cut his skin. His sadness of heart made him curiously magisterial.  And even Florence, whose skin could blunt razor blades gave him her own money out of her wallet.  When I was with her, as now, she never even carried money.  I watched her sitting on this penthouse terrace, in the Roman sun, eating Italian pear and utterly matching the serenity I was buying us. But the motionless tension beneath her skin showed me she was not happy.  It is partly why I had asked the question.

            He had sold my car for me.  It had been a rare Bugatti.  I had longed for Italy then, even before I had found it.  I methodically restored it.  I have always been rather predictable and ponderous. Even at Oxford, where I had first met him, Oliver had criticised my essays for their lack of personality – in the very tenderest way; and as always with that slight hint that I had let him down personally, just a bit; that now I owed him something.  Let him down rather than myself.  Anyway, my one gesture to a creative life occurred when I was sailing amongst the sand-reefs of the Suffolk coast and at the opening of a quiet estuary, and amongst various rotting wooden hulks.  I came upon the rusting corpse of my Bugatti barely beneath the surface.  It scraped under my centre-board and I immediately decided to bring up whatever it was.  I assumed at first it was a piece of war machinery, a tank, a felled bomber.  I had just fallen in love then, perhaps it was for the first time and everything in the world seemed possible.  The local farm mechanic was enthused by my energy. He was familiar with any, and all, requests.  It became a challenge for him and his local villagers to raise it for me.  I spent all the summer scraping rust in my father’s garage, picking out the intricate mechanism, still robust from its 1920s manufacture, and much was still rescuable after the years in the cold Suffolk tides.  I worked doggedly into the winter at weekends when I could leave Oxford, and it was the fascination with restoring this dead machine that led me to change (from my degree in history) to engineering – like my father.  That was how I came to spend five rarely uninspired years at Oxford and cemented the relationship with the paternal Oliver.  He had always pressed me to part with my Bugatti, to lend it to him, to sell it to him, to let him sell it for a very good price through one of his contacts at the University who knew an aristocrat family that wished to surround themselves with fashionable and expensive trivia.  When he met Florence, I was not surprised.  I had always thought of his weighty hungriness as a kind of sleaze, a perfect match for her lewd business of practiced intimacy. They had met, as it happens, silently wafting over the north Oxfordshire countryside in a balloon – she taken along as a decorative accompaniment for the wealthy balloonist, Oliver with his soaring intellectual sparkle having ingratiated himself with the same wealthy man. That was in my last year.  I met them soon after the balloon owner had dropped them both for new hangers-on, and new hobbies.

            She was at tea in Oliver’s rooms, and I fell in love with her instantly.  I do not think she minded particularly as, unimaginative as always, I was no problem to her.  I was in control of myself, my ardour always hovering at the right distance.  She had then given me the address where she worked in London.  She asked no questions and let it be known that none would be asked. They, she and him, were such a contrast: he boisterously loud, impulsive and brilliantly shallow; she instead quiet, deep and inviting.  They had in common their respective hungriness.

            I looked at her relaxed form, the very centre of our warm balcony, cut out of the centre of Rome, just for us.  She had come to me for a couple of days.  Just us together.  After twelve years.  Was it so long?  I looked and knew the shape of her breasts which her blouse now enfolded shapelessly. I was familiar with the long sweep of her thigh to which the canvas trousers now clung.  I have encountered all things about her but have not captured them.  Perhaps, I wistfully wondered, if I had the money, she really would be mine.  But, after all these years of friendship, I still knew myself to be just one among the many who attended and contented her.  And I never challenged that.  I would not do that to her.

            Later, when my father died, I had some money to spend on my Bugatti, for proper repair - the bodywork, the upholstery, the canvas top and the now rare materials for restoring the mechanics.  But I had money too for setting up my own practice as an engineer, and I began to travel.

            As I aged a little, in my 30s, my work grew moderately prosperous.  All my young sisters married and I, amazingly, became a fond uncle several times. Babies unaccountably grew on me. I realised I had outgrown my Bugatti and I let Oliver agree to sell it for me.  He had it around for a year and a half in the yard behind his house in the country outskirts where he lives now.  He did not look after it and he let me know, by slight hints, that this favour put a burden on him.  When he had finally disposed of it for me it was without much ceremony to a car museum somewhere in the north of England.  He was somewhat vague about where it went, and at what price.  I knew it should have been somewhere amongst six figures, but he let me know in small ways that pressing him for details, and for money, was an embarrassment to him.  There were only instalments, he conveyed, paid to him, at this stage.  The money would finally be accumulated and handed over all in one sum in the end.  And when at last he gave me a firm figure, it was probably less than half I might have expected.  But for such a favour, he implied, I could not grumble.  Machines have always come easier than people, I know where I am and can handle them.  Not so the complexity of his generosity which was beyond me.  I have therefore been helplessly waiting more than two years for payment.  I am good-natured at heart, and I do not press him.  But my timidity comes also from a taint of intimidation in our friendship. I could not lose him, whatever it cost me.  And it did cost me - not only the money, and also not only the jealous knowing of her devotion to him, but most painfully having the combination, that is, to cede her loyalty to me which the money might buy.

            And then there was the other thing.

 

­_oooo/­\oooo_

 

Why did I give two minutes of my life to this heavy bully?  Why did I always let his grandly, selfish importance feed on my adulation.  It is because of the moments of something else; his sudden charming concern for some detail in my life – an inquiry about some worrying contract that I had told him about weeks ago and now long-forgotten by me. He recalled his frequent admiration for some charitable donations I made from my father’s estate after I was bereaved; and then often, at times that were most difficult, I was enriched by his lavish gratitude over my forbearance of his longstanding debt – that money.  I always allowed him the enjoyment of giving me these testimonials to my qualities.  And to be quite fair, I enjoyed them too. The naivety in his gushes of warmth gave him that concealed charm.  It was the visible boy in him that he thought he camouflaged with bulk – that was what engaged some sentimental part of me.  I had never striven to reach beyond being his student in those first terms at University when he had tutored me in history.

            She shifted her body, uncrossed and recrossed her lithe legs.  She retrieved with a gracious movement the plate with the slice of pear.  I heaved inwardly at the flow of the perfect body that had once contained something of mine.  What, I wondered now, was in her mind?  Was she thinking of the flight that would swiftly take her away from me back to London after her short two days here?

            I decided at that moment to tell her.

            In spite of marriage, my visits to her address in London continued with a frequency I was sometimes ashamed of. Marriage had been a deeply insignificant event, and I was determined to keep it that way.  The wedding had been entirely a family affair, and so, as far as I was concerned, the marriage had remained.  The reasons for that will have to wait for another occasion.  Florence – perhaps quite simply, she is the straightforward reason – she was always so curiously complimentary about my loyalty to her.  I believed myself her very best consort, of course I did; I suppose they all did. But it was, I always felt, a considerable consolation prize, one that I wished to keep, and sometimes this specialness was confirmed by a boating trip in Regent’s Park, tea at Harrods, a drink and a theatre somewhere near her birthday.  On one occasion, it was about nine months ago, I suppose, it had been quite a special occasion, she had wanted me to take her to collect a painting from an exhibition a friend of mine had just shown.  She had bought one and we took it back to her flat.  We went as usual into the familiar bedroom. Afterwards I noticed there had been a leak in the condom.  I was in the lavatory peeling the thing off me and I noticed a few drops of fluid squeezing from a small puncture near the tip.  I wondered, at the time, if there was a risk of sperm getting through to her. For some reason I decided it would be a delicious pleasure not to tell her.  It was the only cruelty I have ever done her.  It became a precious secret, a warmth for me, a permanent companion to cuddle up to on my own. Even if there was no fertility, I had left something of me in her, a spot of my essence that inevitably she had had to accept.

            A few weeks later Oliver was speaking on the phone to me.  I think I had made a friendly courtesy call, perhaps I was arranging when I would next go to tea at his place in Oxford.  We had avoided mention of the Bugatti for a long time, but he suddenly said, “You’re my biggest creditor.” It intimated that something was up.  “This place,” he indicated the old farmhouse he was living in, “it’s up to the limit.  I’ve got a mortgage broker looking into Swiss mortgages - two or three percent down on building societies here.” I was not sure if he was bursting with his financial anxiety, or if the intricacies of his arrangements were a kind of boast.  Then equally surprisingly he changed tack in his off-putting but characteristic way, “If it were not for you, I’d have the banks onto me.” Suddenly the generosity of his comment warmed me as it always did.  “As soon as the banks have quietened off, I’m going to tackle what I owe you.  I’ve got an idea...” Fortunately, his other phone was ringing, and I was put on hold till I had to ring off.  I was spared the discomfort of hearing the somersaults he was apparently going to turn for me.

            I think it was only coincidence, though, that the next day he was ringing around everyone who knew her with hints that something was up.

            A week later I went to have tea at the weekend with him – my wife indulged my old links with male friends.  But Florence was there on that occasion.  They openly discussed her pregnancy test.  Oliver, as always, was insistent he could sort it out, “I’m pleased you came to me,” he said, his relaxed form lying grotesquely extended in an armchair.  His massive arms placed either side came together at the finger-tips and he viewed her through the lattice they made.  “You know Pearson?” He glanced sideways as if to include me in his pondering.  I had just come in and sat down on a small chair with horsehair showing at the front edge.  Before I could say anything, in fact before I could get my breath from climbing the stairs to his studio in the attic, “You know Pearson, he ran the psychical research club when he was here”. He turned again to Florence, “You know Pearson is a very good friend of mine.  We had dinner a couple of months ago.” In fact, it is probable that that occasion was the only time they had met.  I wondered what Pearson had made of this bombast. He indicated Oxford and its environs with a gentle sweep of his broad hand.

            Florence was less interested in Pearson’s activities as a student in Oxford, but she remained looking pretty in her severe unsmiling sort of way.  “I hope he can do it as soon as possible.”

            “That’s no trouble,” Oliver retorted wildly.  “He’ll do what he’s paid for.” There was an edge of scorn as, true to pattern, Oliver’s respect for others, beginning sky high to prop his high regard for his own impressive connections, then steadily plummeted back with every sentence he spoke about them.  “It’s only a question of paying him.” Then he suddenly reached out with his arms, pushed his sleeves half up to the elbows, flapped his hands up and down as if to subdue anything Florence might say.  “You’re not to worry, dear.  Don’t think about it.  I’ll be glad – no I insist – I’ll take care of everything, Flo.” He glanced a second time at me to collect my approval.  “Brian,” he announced, as if calling me from a distance, “used to have an old Italian car. Not in your day.” It was a gratuitous flatter that silenced any comment I might have added if I had managed to sort out the complexity of it.  He seemed to be implying that he would contribute the money from that sale to Florence’s termination; whilst concealing that money he received from the sale he should have already given to me; whilst also, it seemed, he was challenging me to expose his bluster.

            Florence got up and said she would make a cup of tea. It was a tense moment, as if she did know something of the issue that Oliver and I had over the car.  She said nothing but rather ostentatiously concentrated on moving around the room on her elegant legs as if in some ritual performance to impress our attention.  Oliver, of course appeared oblivious, and directed her to where she would find the milk as he had placed it in a cooler on the window-ledge, the fridge being full because a group of students was coming to supper and one of the female ones had offered to come that morning to prepare food, and she had been so nervous that to reassure her, he had turned the fridge out to accommodate everything she had brought that could possibly go bad.  Florence responded machine-like to his instructions, a beautiful figure on a screen, the projectionist’s puppet.  She lingered a little, motionless and expressionless.  Secretly, I knew she was relieved to have Oliver’s total command of the solution and joyful it had been him who had wanted to help her.

            But she showed nothing of these feelings as she swayed elegantly about the room making tea.

            Oliver turned his attention to me.

            He was insistent.  He was going to arrange the best in Harley Street, through his contact, no expense spared, and he lavishly declaimed with a wide gesture of his grasping hand, it would be all at his expense.  Perhaps he wanted it thought he was responsible for her pregnancy. Within a week it would all be over and back to normal, he concluded confidently.  Naturally Florence, as she produced the tea, seemed gratefully soothed. She said little while she poured our cups and drank hers.  She was listening intently to Oliver’s plans for her.

            Despite his masterly command of her problem, I recalled only those few days before on the telephone, his gratuitous comments that I was so good about the debt to me that was unpaid.

            Then, a few days later he rang to ascertain – he’d known I would agree, he said – that I could not want to press him for money, when Florence was so upset and needed him to fix it for her.

            So I had decided to tell her.  On our paradise, looking down on the sounds and smells of Rome.  She listened, still and grave.  The slice of pear waited on the plate.  I finished telling her: the baby that Oliver had paid to abort was the one I had made in her.  There was a long silence.  Was she thinking carefully about it?  Did I see a slight shrug of the shoulders?  Or not?  I could barely tell.  Any movement was too invisible to be certain.  The final slice of pear slid unperturbed into her perfect mouth.  Had she realised, I could have paid for her to have my child?  If I had had my money.  Would it have made a difference?  It was time for the taxi to be called to take her to the airport.  Her lips tasted slightly of pear as I kissed her goodbye. We never again mentioned the secret I had kept for nine months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roofless districts

 

She was sitting quite on her own on a bench near a tree but in the evening sun, I approached casually and sat against a fallen tree-trunk at a little distance, facing so that I could look at her but without making it obvious I was doing so. There was silence except for the evening sounds that gave relish to this piece of country we were in.

            Eventually she moved her photochromic glasses, pushing them up to the top of her head, like goggles typical of the unfashionable, years-ago styles long before I would remember. Her eyes looked boldly to take a good look at me and then she stared forward in front of her again. I think she had moved her lenses so that I would be able to see her glance. I exclaimed how sunny the weather was for us. Not having anything more brilliant to say, I felt somewhat silly. Nevertheless she replied in the same style, without turning her head, that she liked to be in Roofless Districts, as they are called, when the sun was out shining. I quickly said that it was the other way around, that the sun comes out when she is in a Roofless District because he liked to look at her. She shrugged her shoulders slightly and I thought she blushed just a little. I did not know how to continue – by becoming more personally flattering or by veering into the technical stuff about the Project we were on here. She did not help me. Characteristically, I said nothing. Later I shifted and stood up and said I might go for a couple of drinks for us if she liked. Immediately, I bit my tongue with regret for I knew that it was at least two miles walking to the nearest pub from here. I would have felt really stupid (as I often am) keeping her waiting for an hour or so while I staggered back with two slopping glasses of flat soda-beer. Fortunately, she declined. Having stood up, I decided to move off anyway and announced I was going back. She said nothing. I picked up a stick and began to beat about at the plants on either side of the path, and then felt I was exhibiting more boyishness than would impress. So, I threw away the stick in an embarrassed manner – anyway she had her back to me, what did it matter.

            I decided to wait for the bus-chute which is what passes for public transport in this dreary place. As I waited at the stop, what did I see? I saw a black Ford Chauffeuse – the canoe shaped open top – with this lady driving along on her own. I thumbed for a lift. But she swept by, her hair flowing in gracious streamers as immaculate as her black make-up. I think she noticed me but refused to stop. I will add that she had the courtesy to pretend she had not seen me. Of course, knowing my sensitivity, I was well-aware the implications are the same.

            This was before she knew who I was. Obviously as the Writer, hired for the Project, I had not been greatly in evidence during the sessions of the day. I had merely loitered in the dark corners with my stock-in-trade, and discreet recorder and the stenographer. In fact, I think the most noteworthy aspect of my ensemble was seventeen-year-old Susie who I had rented out for the weekend yesterday from the Agency that I usually go to for my stenographers; they give me a small discount and they push in my direction the girls who do the fastest work transcribing. Susie, incidentally had a noticeably admirable chest. I was always amused that with a limitation for that attribute in her lower field of vision, touch-typing must have come naturally for her.

            If anyone had noticed us, they would probably not have looked further than Susie’s natural gifts. Anyway, eventually our lady did discover who I was, sometime during the second day because, just before the company disbanded she came up to me asking if she could talk something over privately. In fact, Susie and I were in the phone queue waiting with everyone else to ring for a Taxi-Cube. So, I left Susie to it and sauntered off with our lady. She seemed to know where she was going in the Mansion and quickly found us a deserted room. She insisted that I stood with my back flat against the wall and my arms stretched out on either side in the shape of a cross. She moved sporadically about the room as we conversed.

            There was a long pre-amble spoken by her. I had noticed that she had appeared somewhat older, more mature, than the usual teenage starlets one finds on these Pre-write Projects. From what she was manoeuvring to say, it seems she had picked me to rectify her retarded career. From what I had observed of her work during the weekend there seemed to be no reason why she should not have progressed normally into Prime Drama. However, she confessed, she was now only able to get work making those Porn-casts which are transmitted virally all over the world now, or as a Phone-Speaker which of course is a kind of auditory whore. It was pathetic indeed, she said, and to demonstrate she gave me a sample of the erotic Voice-Tone, deep and vibrant that made the blood curdle in my loins. And now, she said, I could see how she was saddled with these Pre-write Projects. And of course, it is always an absolute principle that no-one who takes part in the Pre-write material will ever be cast in the Prime Drama when it is written up.

            What she wanted was her own Tailored Drama play written up by me for her and to her style. An obvious request on the surface, one which I could hardly disappoint her with straightaway. The fact was that as a Pre-write Writer I was hardly at the top of my profession either. A part-time  Phone-Speaker and a second-rate Pre-write Writer is a team nobody would take seriously. Yet I was unwilling to disappoint her as it might be worth a try; after all everyone starts from Nowhere. She asked me point-blank. There was a silence. She had come close to me, leant her elbow against the wall beside my head so that her eyes stared into mine. I could smell the perfume of her nostril-pellets as she breathed.

            In not disappointing her, I gave myself some hope as well.

            She was satisfied and moved away quickly out of the room, the two patches of sequins flickering and flashing joyously on her buttocks. I hurried after her to explain I would need a lift home now. She told me however she probably didn’t have enough petrol to get back to the Bright Areas today and the time-lock on the petrol cap would not open until tomorrow. She smiled and after a moment’s thought she decided we could drive till we caught up the Taxi-Cube train. And that is what we did. In the car she drove from the rear of the two seats and positioned me so that I sat sideways, with one arm crooked over the back of the seat, my fingers touching the carpet of the floor, my other hand pressed forwards against the windscreen deflector. It wasn’t long before we overtook the train of taxis which can only just have left the mansion, but we continued on to a point where the indicators showed it would be stopping (I think to separate one person off). I got out. We made no arrangement but in the spirit of two people who have achieved a business deal we placed our right hands together, palms touching, and gripped hard. This bye-grip is in the highest taste of fashion having appeared only in the last year or so; although they do say it is a rediscovery of a preceding custom, generations ago. But I know nothing about that.

            After a rather long time the train appeared having transacted its deposition of someone. I looked along it hastily for Susie. She, of course, had ordered only a one-person cubicle. It was a tight squeeze for the two of us. I have mentioned the exposure of her bosom which you can imagine caused a sensation as we were pressed chest to chest, she wearing only a small pale-blue under-sling. So squeezes come in many forms, and you can imagine this form imposed on us. Perhaps the old-fashioned word ‘superotic’ crudely describes it best. Then when the Taxi-Cube train started off, the movements of the cubicle rolling us together raised the sensations higher and higher. We tried to adjust ourselves apart, but that only frustrated us both, I believe. I was very pleased with the outcome, and we agreed I would hire her again sometime. Some five minutes later she positioned my arms against the walls of the cubicle; such is the elevation of status of a stenographer following a kind of bodily intimacy.

            As the dusk began to fall, the train reached the limit of the Roofless Districts and exited, plunging us into the glare of the Bright Areas. And of course, it was able to speed up many times so that we very rapidly found ourselves near the destination, decoupling, coupling and so on with the bewildering accuracy of the Electric Eye systems. We arrived at the Agency Hostel. I told Susie I would be needing her for a week further to write up the ad-lib Sketch Dramas of the weekend Project into the final re-write for Prime Drama. I said I would re-programme the Agency for this extra work. I required her when she had the initial typescript ready digitalised properly. I decided to walk her from there, for it was not far through the disused parking lots.

            As I entered the flat my wife looked up quickly. And then moved back to the work she was setting down and then she crawled towards me from behind the web-filaments of the Hydrostatic Deodorants. I have never been able to observe supernumerary legs on her but I swear she has eight black hairy ones.

            She leaned herself loosely against me. It was an embrace which seemed to convey a handful of messages. In particular it seemed to emphasise – ‘look how much I love you’; and at the same time, ‘how I hate you neglecting me for my nose is so sensitive, I can detect even the scent of the after-sex deodorants you have been using with someone else.

            I slipped off my highly fashionable Apron-Tunic and it fell limply to the floor. My wife sank to her knees on the glass bricks and buried her face in the soft leather of the apron. She felt the warm texture with her lips and her cheek and the end of her fingers. I stood for a moment gazing at her reflection in the mirror below the bricks. Then I mounted her carefully from behind. Once inside her I felt for a few brief seconds truly at home again and in the rightful place that was for me.

            After we had finished, we noticed that the children had been watching us fascinated from the gallery. So, I replayed it over on the Video-Set and we all sat in silence watching. My wife positioned my arms decorously as she wanted, and across the arms of the leaves of the armchair. I drifted away and thought of the Roofless Districts and the woman they had contained this weekend who had given me a hope that I had lost years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                        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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I did fall in love

 

When I was 14 I was raped one evening by six men from the barracks. It was quite horrid. But I did not tell the police, or my parents or anyone - and afterwards I felt that my secret was a piece of my life that at last was my own. One of the men came back to see me a week later. He had been the most hesitant of the six and I don't think he did it properly, only pretended, because of what the others would think. But I was not sure, as I did not concentrate much on what was happening to me. In fact, he was the only one I remembered really. I remembered his rifle still half-dangling from his shoulder, the metal clinked on the buckle of my belt. He came back to see me because he wanted to make amends somehow, he said. I asked him what his name was. Later I wrote to the barracks and asked them to punish him. Looking back, I think I quite liked him; and I rather think it was because I liked him that I wanted them to punish him. But I don't know what happened.

            I wasn't very interested in boys when I was a teenager. Later on, when I was 20 or so there were a couple of women, one after the other. I let them teach me things, but I didn't know where it was leading, and I was a bit frightened – about the unknown. I told each of them about the other, and when they eventually met, they fell in love. I was relieved and also felt a warm pleasure that I had brought them together. I liked to think that when they made love they were both thinking about me!

            It was not until my late twenties that I let a man make love to me. It was very passionate indeed. I had for some time begun to have daydreams about love making with men – no-one in particular, no one man at all.

            We met at a party. I hadn't really noticed him until I burst into the lavatory when he had not bolted the door properly. I retreated. When he came out, he saw me watching him and he was a little pink in the face. I felt oddly embarrassed too – but it was just one of those things. It didn't mean anything.

            About two years later we met again and were introduced. We both recognised each other – though I made out that I didn't. Because it seemed so inconsequential. He was again a little embarrassed and awkward to remember the first occasion and then find that I did not remember him. I was again unusually embarrassed too.

            I let him talk to me for a while and then I got away but at the end of the evening, I was leaving at the same time, and he took me home. I sat in the back of the car whilst his wife sat next to him. Two days later, on Monday morning, he rang me. To ask me out. He told me he had been thinking about me over the weekend. I had not thought of him but decided it was better not to say so. I suppose I must have wanted to see him again. He told me he was falling in love with me and insisted I meet him, just once. He was emphatic that he did not do this sort of thing regularly. It was special. He would take me to a pub at lunchtime, he needed to talk about some things. I didn't know what to say on the phone. I wanted to get back to reading the newspaper, snipping out the cuttings. I said I would meet him at midday at the swimming pool. It was not that I like swimming but know I look good in a swimming costume. I take great care buying them and have quite a lot.

            Half an hour beforehand I was there sitting at the side of the water quietly, composing myself. I arranged my body in a way that I hoped looked relaxed, and my mind so that it should be as blank as possible. When he emerged, he looked good too. He noticed me and came across to where I had prepared myself, propped against a low wall. He did not sit down at first and I looked up with a smile, but I’m afraid I still looked serious. It did not seem easy for either of us to say anything. Perhaps he had been a little cross with me for dragging him there, but at that moment my thoughts were as disturbed as the water with boys plunging in and out. I said nothing and waited for him to bargain for what he wanted. His face looked tense and red. Then he decided to move and bending down he picked up my hand and pressed it vigorously to his lips. I held it up and kept touching him to preserve the contact longer. I could not help noticing the thought that my mind decided to produce at that moment: this was the hand that I used to hold the flannel for wiping myself in the lavatory. My hand still held onto his as he straightened up. And I decided to say that I was too confused to stay with him for long today. My body, I added, could be his but I did not yet know about my heart. I said I wanted him to go away and to write to me; tell me what he felt and what he wanted – to put it in writing because my mind was not working face-to-face. I still held his hand as I spoke and this time I pulled it to my lips. I pressed it there for minutes feeling the full veins on the back of it with my tongue. I caressed it with all the surfaces of my face, my cheeks, the hollows of my eyes fitting round his knuckles, my forehead, my small nose gliding across his palm, the tip of my chin on the tip of his fingers. Then I pressed it against the top of my bare shoulder and the side of my neck, which I discovered, had become electric. My body felt very naked, and I thought he might reach out with his arms to take it. He felt like the radiance of the sun. I said I was in too much of a turmoil to be with him, he must go and write what his feelings were, what his dreams are. I told him to go but not to keep me waiting long for his letter; and truly I was already longing and waiting for it. I told him I was so confused but actually in those moments my logic had become as sharp and clear as ice.

            When he wrote to me it was very passionate, he was suddenly a slave to love he said, his body and his soul were racked with agony. He left me no doubts that he was head over heels and nothing would tear his devotion from me till the end of time. Indeed, by now I had no intention of dampening his devotion - neither before nor even after the end of time. Yet, even though love is a wonderful emotion, a tidal wave of emotion is like standing in front of any other tidal wave -0 it can drown you. So I did not reply immediately and when after a few days of agonies he telephoned to ask me what my decision would be, I said I was disappointed. I would have expected him to arrange to see me sooner if he really meant all that he had written in those wonderful things in the letter. He was suddenly agonized anew, because I should doubt him so. I wanted him to come and see me immediately but he said it was impossible, he had his visits to make. But I shall be one of them I insisted - how else could I tell if he was someone I should give my heart to. He must show he would let his patients wait a little for their visit from the doctor, otherwise it meant I was no more than his patients to him.

            When he arrived, I had waited twenty minutes or so; it was cold and damp in the drizzle, standing waiting a few houses up the street from where I lived. I insisted we went to the corner and had a drink in the pub. The person in the flat below me in my house would be going out later - I did not want to give any chance of anybody knowing I had brought a man back. He was not very pleased to find himself in the pub and kept looking at his watch, and sipping his drink and eyeing my drink which I kept safely undrunk in the glass till I thought enough time had passed for the downstairs prying eyes to go out on her afternoon routine. I took the time to ask about his wife. She would skin him I gathered, she was trained as a lawyer he said, she was very hard and independent, she insisted on the best for their children. He was unhappy at home, only at work was there satisfaction, and that is not enough for a full life. He saw in me some new opportunity, he smelled freedom, the oasis in a parched desert. He glanced at his watch. I said calmly he must take his watch off and give it to me while we waited. He could not. I said we would go in a moment and insisted he gave me his watch. As, he said, I was a little younger than he was, actually ten years. I was, he said, a new flower that would blossom in his life. I told him I sensed his power, a power in his emotions. They frightened me but he fascinated me. I could feel warmth in my genitals. I told him I had never made love with a man before. I said we would go back to my flat and make love for the first time. I said we could go now.

            In the few yards down the road, I told him I was frightened. I swallowed hard with a dry throat, and I told him exactly the way I wanted to do it. He nodded. When we got to my flat, we crept up the stairs – just in case of prying-eyes. In the flat at last I pulled all the curtains and in the dark bedroom I laid him on the bed. It seemed a little cold I said but I assumed we would warm up. He said nothing as I had asked of him. I reminded him he promised not touch me with his hands, to lie with his arms stretched on either side motionless. He frowned a little. I didn't want to know what he was thinking. Then in the bathroom I removed my panties, looked in the mirrors, brushed my hair. I looked at my fingernails and decided to wash my hands but the water was cold so I was quick. I arranged myself kneeling astride him as I had done so often and so carefully in my daydreams, with my skirt and my raincoat covering our union like a tent. I put my hands beneath my clothes to find his zip and undid it. I was unfamiliar with a man's trousers and underclothes. He smiled as I rummaged around. Eventually I got hold of him and found an aperture in the folds of material to pull it through. He made little jerky movements with his hips, and I put his thing up into my vagina and held it there to expand into me. But it stayed rather soft. I didn't know how men made themselves stiff, and I smiled at him. But my mind was racing, and I suddenly felt I had gone too far, that I was out of my depth attempting this. I asked him what the matter was, but I did not really want to know. He said I would have to make him stiff. My mind raced on, but I asked him coolly how do I do that. He told me I had to get off him, caress his thing with gentle fingers, with my lips up and down it, from end to end, with my tongue searching right down to his balls. I smelled his warmth and sweat and the slight smell of lavatories too, and also soap. He told me when to get back on top. I arranged my tent of clothes again. Then he came into me properly and worked his way right in. He was very vigorous. I had wanted to do it myself but I let him push up. When he had come himself he seemed to be quite out of control. As he fell back still, I pulled off him and he winced but he lay still. I slumped in my chair by the mirror, and lifting my skirts I thought, as I always do when I rub, of a soft trickle of blood warming my vagina. I came quickly because it was so slippery and afterwards I dozed off as I always do into a short sleep. I woke with him calling to me and asking the time. I looked towards him for the first time. His thing was soft again, a last drop of juice had run out onto the crisp material of his trouser-leg. As I approached him to agree he could rise, he tried to kiss me and I smiled at him. Then he was gone quickly to continue his visits. Please, please write to me straightaway, I told him, to tell every single thought that had gone through his head at every moment of our love-making. I did not know if I craved for him or never wanted to see him again.

            He rang me in the early evening and I told him off because he should be writing to me. I expected a letter in the post the next day. He said he was desperately short of time especially as he could do little else but think of me. But I insisted he must do as I say. He claimed he was no writer but I silenced him and said true love if it was really true would turn anyone into a poet.

            When the letter came two days later, he had laboured hard to tell me everything. It was true he was no writer and love had not turned him into a poet but he had made a huge effort. Curiously, I was not very interested any more in what he actually wrote. I was already thinking of the next time. I had fantasies all the time of what we might do. I stood in front of my mirrors imagining the feelings in every bit of my body if he touched it, stroked it, kissed it, scratched it.

            I decided to write it all to him. I bathed and washed my hair, dressed in the most ravishing evening gown I had in my cupboard and sat in my chair facing the mirror and wrote to the image he had made love to, as if I were him. I did not spare him any of my intimate thoughts on the possibilities ahead of us. Next time I offered him to tie me to the bed in any position he wished. My thoughts whirled ahead to what he might do to me once I was helpless. Any bit of me whatever could be touched by his flesh - and there would be nothing I could do about it. It excited me even though I knew I could never let it be different from that first time, never let him free in my bed. I told him stories about the use of all my orifices. When I finished, I felt satisfied and once again saw myself in the mirror. I was shocked by what I had written, what had come out of me. And I realised I wanted to shock him, to disgust him. I eagerly went to post it to him – I decided to send it to his home, to the midst of the family into the midst of his marriage. Running along the road in such extravagant clothes, I felt them rustle, my skin scoring on the fine material. I returned equally quickly from the post-box and stood in front of my mirrors. Now, pink and a little short of breath.

            He told me after that I must stop. I had gone too far with my letters and my suggestions. He thought it had become an obsession for me, he was worried about me. I told him I wished only to be discreet – as he must have realised. I am a private person. I wish for total privacy. He said he insisted we use ordinary email ,like everyone else. I said I need his letters to hold in my hand like a lifeline.

            He reassured me, in a text message that  he loved me; he mentioned various parts of my body. He only wanted to get all the passions in balance, stabilise our affaire, so that it would not shake itself to bits, he said, and us with it. I thought he was talking to a naughty child - a nuisance child that needed a threat.

            I tried video calling, and on one occasion we met. I explained he must love me my way, that he had created a strange new woman inside me. I said I must be able to see him, I would become his patient so that I could call to see him any day, so that I could ring for a visit from him.

            He turned his hands over with a tried patience. I felt my eyes widen with an enquiring curiosity, like a little girl's, pleading. He announced that doctors could not have their patients for lovers. But I quickly stopped him with the fact that it was not that way, it was the opposite, having his lover become a patient. I said it was best to arrange things through his surgery otherwise his wife might find out. I began to imagine if she did. Her red-faced anger, her white knuckles gripping his hair, her teeth straining to get into his flesh; her screeches of purified protest hanging in our ears pouring pain, The glee of it.... He hushed me and assured me his wife would not find out under any circumstances, if we were careful. But I was already beyond careful. I would not be careful. I won't…. He threatened to ring off.

            The moment was a very delicate one. I calmed down of my own will. After a silence, we spoke of something else. 

            The next evening, I went to the surgery – to register as a patient. The receptionist went away to find out if the doctor would agree – she came back to tell me that he was not, she said officially, taking any more onto his list. She'd agreed a little later to find out why, when I made the kind of fuss that I am so good at. I knew he would make an exception for me. But there was a thin moment of excited anticipation as I waited for her to come back from checking. I was relieved, too, when she nodded from her glass office.

            He told me later he did not know now if I might make trouble. He was concerned I would tackle his wife in some way. He was not sure if I was playing a game. I was so strange, a woman enclosed, he called me. All my fantasies stretched me beyond his view. I said I noticed he had not risked calling my bluff. He had accepted me into his practice. He smiled. He was relaxed. He shook his head to agree as if he was resigned to my whims, and half-liked being pestered by them. Would she leave him, throw him out – he could not come to my flat I told him. Would she throw saucepans?  I was so curious, I wanted to find out, I said. I laughed.

            I had grown to know that resigned shrug of his shoulders - an amused father in a lonely generation.

            One day I played a trick on him. I went to his surgery, waited my turn, and went to his room, sat down in the chair. I demanded that he kiss me, between – the legs. He refused with that torpid resignation and told me to run along. I refused. He explained that his partners or his receptionist could walk in at any moment, I should leave now. I refused again and pouted with my small but full lips he had so often admired. I explained I had come to get money out of him. If he wanted to avoid disgrace he would have to pay. He looked rather blank. He was not sure if this was, or was not, one of my games again. He always thought of me as a gamester, a jester, the glint of the magpie as someone had called it. I said that he did not believe me. It was true, I told him, that I did not need the money - not as money, to spend. I simply wanted his money. I took a digital memory stick from the pocket of my fur coat. I showed it to him. It was a stick. It is a record, I said, of love-making. Ours last week. It is quite clear. I asked if he wanted me to play it, would someone overhear. Alright, he said, alright. But he wasn't alright – not all right himself. He looked grey. He wanted to get me out at any price. He was beginning to think I was serious, my game was another mad artifice, a vulgarity beneath him. I was beginning to win – if he became convinced it was not a game then I had won the game.

            Suddenly he accepted he was a victim; I was winning this real, malign stratagem. He drew out his cheque-book. How much did I want. I could see he still felt he could play along, really felt the abused and innocent lover. Is a hundred pounds enough for you, he asked. No, I said. No cheques, I want ten pounds, just a ten-pound note. He looked at me surprised again; how often had I achieved that?  Only ten pounds. He closed his cheque book. 

            “I am surprised” I started to say with a little pout reforming, “that you think I am worth only one hundred pounds. If you had quoted a true value then I would have let you off. Now I will have to find out what the value is, slowly, bit by bit, ten pounds to start. A little more next time, a little more, how far will you go.”  His perplexed relief clouded a little. He wondered if I would go on. He had tasted my power over him. And so, candidly, had I. He took a ten-pound note from his wallet and said I should go now. He was cold and shaken. I too was cold; a damp loss seemed to have come out of this. But I had won this game.

            I had won the game. I put the valuable piece of paper on the desk and smoothed it with my hand. I looked up at him from the corner of my eye, he looked ever so much older. I picked up the note and tore it in two, slowly, then again, and again till it was very small pieces in the palm of my hand. I dropped them into the bin where he throws the discarded swabs stained with pus or blood.

            Out in the street I waited for him by the car. Perhaps an hour later I was sitting on the bonnet of his car looking cheeky, when he came out to go home. He was furious I was still hanging around. I presumed he was anxious people would wonder what I was doing. I supposed, I said, he'd have some explaining to do to his partners. I got in with him and he drove me home. We were silent. I demanded that he come in with me. I knew he would not. He reached across me in an unromantic way to release the car door and shoved me out with his shoulder. I held the door open so he had to come round to close it again. He told me I was a child. Then he took hold of me by the shoulders and gave me a vigorous kiss on the mouth. I didn't know if it was love; or if it was in hope of silencing me.

            I went up to my flat alone and settled down in front of my mirrors. The digital stick had nothing on it but I put it in the machine to record the sounds I was about to make.

            That evening, I wrote to him the amount of money I wanted, a hundred pounds every month for as long as I still kept his letters. Perhaps, I began to think, it hadn't been such a game; it was real money. But actually I did not want the money. I don't know why I did it.

            It was the blackmail that could then let him present me to his wife as evil. He could tell her now without her being too threatened, or without her destroying their marriage completely. I would not want that after all. She came round to see me a while later. She came on her own – but brought some bottles of ink she got from somewhere. She opened one and threw it at me, over me. Before she opened the next, I had shut the door. When she had gone, I looked at the stain on me. I had spoilt his love for me. I had spoilt a passionate love.

            Perhaps if a man can rape a woman, a woman can destroy a man, and any part of him she wants to destroy….  I don't know why I did it. It felt like the satisfaction of revenge. But revenge for what? That was a long time ago. I have taken a lot of revenges since then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taken In

 

The two girls, Maria and Karin, left in the late autumn to find their fortune in London. Erroneously, they thought that to get on in London, they had to put their best assets on display. For both girls that had meant scouring clothes shops for fashions they could afford which resembled the pictures in music magazines. Thus they stood together by the slip-road onto the M3. Each had a battered case, but springy new jeans-and-blouse outfits with enough chain and metal bits to allure motor-bikers, and enough shiny silky bits to allude to a promising femininity. They did not have to wait long for a lift. A huge lorry picked up the two girls. Karin flopped lumpily into the seat next to the gear lever. Maria came after and sat by the window watching the country pass away behind her. Their four tight legs were a constant attraction for the driver’s eye. His grubby T-shirt was stretched across an expanded tummy, but he was quite a young man with muscular arms, long dark sideboards and a glint in his friendly face that matched his chirpy way of talking.

             “Why’n’t you girls ’n school?!

Karin flashed a cocky smile at him, “What? Nah, we left school. Long time ago. Going up to London,” she paused in case the momentous event that they talked about, and planned for so long was not so impressive to him. “I suppose you’re always going up to London.”

            “S’right.” He was reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket hanging behind the window. “Al’as in London. Portsmouth-London, London-Portsmouth. Tha’s the job. I done it three year, now.”

 “I bet you know London pretty well.” 

            “Yea, s’right. There’s some good bits, a’right. S’bad news taking an’old trolley as this un aroun’ the streets.” He had found his packet of cigarettes. “Y’not been afore. T’London?”

            “Oh, yes – course. We’re going to live there.”

            “Ah! Leavin’ ’ome, eh? I’m still with my Mum,” he smiled at himself. “No reason t’leave, is’t?” Scept, I go drivin’. Friend in Isling’on. Sleep on ’is floor. What about y’ friend. She’s leavin’ ’ome too?” He looked around Karin’s bouncy form at Maria’s pretty face, steadily looking at the road ahead.

“My name’s Karin. Hers is Maria,” Karin nudged Maria as she spoke her name and looked at her.

“My Mum lives in London,” Maria said turning to look at them.

“Yeah, but she hasn’t seen her Mum for a long time. What about your friend in Islington – could he put us up, too? “ Karin’s commanding presence turned away from Maria who subsided gratefully into her solitary trance again, numbed by the jolting rhythm of the lorry.

“Cou’d be.” He said noncommittally.

“What’s your name then?” Karin asked it with a tone of personal invitation.

            “Gary,” he said shortly. He offered her a cigarette.

            Karin took one and handed the packet back, “She dun’t smoke?” referring to Maria. “Give’s a ligh’, then.” And she chuckled as he handed over the matches.

            “You got a girl-friend?”  She glanced at him in an innocent way.

            Gary concentrated on the road. Eventually, “Plenty,” he announced to the girls.

            “I bet,” she admired. There was a silence after that. Karin sensed that she’d made an impact, that he was thinking about her.

            In South London, Gary turned off the main road and into a narrow side street of low poor houses and into a warehouse at the end of the cul-de-sac. “It’s far as I go.” He said bluntly, and jumped down from the lorry, disappearing into the cavernous dark.

            “Where is this?” Maria asked, sitting still in the seat.

            “Dunno. Looks like the backside of London, if you ask me. He’ll take us on to his friend in Islington.”

            “Do you think?”

            “Come on, get down.” She pushed Maria towards the door, and they climbed out stiffly in their tight new clothes. Karin straightened her blouse and brushed the denim of her jeans downwards to stop it cutting her underneath. “He’ll take us on to his friends. He’s got an eye for us. I could see him, all swivelling under his eyelid.” She chuckled proudly in her own way. “You’re looking not too bad as well,” she added patronizingly.

            One thing that Maria had learnt was that bubbling, inviting and eager though Karin was, she herself was nothing short of stunning, one good step on from Karin in turning men’s eyes. She said nothing and left Karin to continue. “Cor his cigarette was a bit of a pong, wasn’t it. Did you notice it? I took a puff. It was like breathing in hot curry or something. I expect it was a high tar.” She pondered with an assured knowingness. They stood beside the lorry, chattering till Gary returned.

            “You’d better get on you’s ways, girls. It’ll get dark soon.”

            “Aren’t we coming on with you?”

            “I’ve gotta get back. Get this unloaded,” he patted the lorry. He moved to the back of the lorry. Karin followed him.

            “I thought we were coming to your friend – the one in Islington, with you?”

            “I’m on me way back a Portsmouth. Haff an ’our take, t’unload ‘er. A cuppa tea. Then, off.”

            “But we thought we could sleep on his floor, or something. We’ve got nowhere to stay tonight. Where do we go?” As her sudden helplessness grew, his face began to darken with anger.

            “I dunno. Go an’ ask the boss, if y’ want.” Gary waved towards the inside of the warehouse.

            “Thanks.” She said sarcastically. “Give our love to mummy,” and she flounced off towards the dark interior. “Come on,” she said sharply to Maria. “He don’t know anything about London.” It was the cruellest insult she could think of at the moment. They minced down the aisle between the mountainous cardboard cartons. The office was a wooden cubicle at the back of the warehouse. Karin went straight up to the open door with a brisk defiant step.

            “Are you his boss, “Karin snapped as if she was about to make a complaint.

            The man was a little older than Gary, and also a bit seedy. He wore a grey suit in a gesture towards the image of a manager. The double-breasted jacket was crimpled and hung open beside his knees as he sat forwards at a large low shelf that functioned as a desk. He didn’t look up. “You came up with Gary?” he continued to mark a sheet of paper with a pencil stuck in his left hand.

            “Yes.” Karin paused. “Now he’s dropped us.”

            “Up to you, love. We carry goods.” He sighed and sat back wearily in his chair. “You want a room for the night?” It was half a question, half a statement. He looked at them. When he did look he was clearly surprised. His eyebrows raised fractionally, and he caught his breath slightly through his open mouth. His teeth were rather grey. You’re a young couple of ladies,” he explained as if they were about ten years old. The man stretched back in his chair as if satisfied with a fine catch. Karin turned to Maria, too angry with humiliation to continue.

            “Well, Mister.” Maria said flatly and quietly, “You want to help us? We haven’t got much money. Have you got a room here?”

            “No money?” He looked Maria up and down slowly; and then his mouth stretched into a tight grin, thick and greasy and suggestive. “Not much money. Plenty of something else. He let out a long gulp of air which seemed to have built up in his lungs. “Well! It is a very long time since a couple of stunners like you wanted to stay with me. I may have cause to be grateful to Gary, for a change.”

            Karin and Maria both stared at the man, hypnotised by a frightened amazement. They were like rabbits caught in headlights. At that moment the warehouse filled with the sound of a fork-lift truck as Gary began to unload the heavier boxes. They both turned to look at him as a relieving distraction.

            The man stood up, “Come along.” He was very big, tall and wide-framed and well covered with flesh. “My name’s Ben,” he said loudly over the din and held out his hand to Maria. She shook it compliantly. The moment of distraction when they could have run, seemed to have closed. And they were drawn into his domineering presence again. Karin meekly shook his hand next.

             “I’m Karin. And she’s Maria,” The man moved through the door of his tiny cubicle and stood between them. “Isn’t Gary coming too?” Karin asked anxiously as if she wanted him as a guardian angel, now, “Will we be alright?”

            “Course you will, my dears.” His attempt at overbearing paternalism only deepened their sense of the sinister. “Come along.” He took them out and to one of the mean houses next to the warehouse, through its unkempt garden of nettles and bushes. He took them in through a filthy kitchen and up to a first-floor bedroom. It was bleak and grubby. A couple of beds filled the room. “Drivers sometimes sleep over. But it’ll do you, won’t it? A couple of girls with no money,” and he laughed. Reaching inside his jacket he pulled out a wallet, took a ten-pound note for each of the girls. And handed the notes to them. Neither Karin nor Maria moved and he dropped the notes at the end of one of the beds. He laughed again. “I’ll be back in a moment. With a bottle,” and he raised his eyebrows in enquiry. He moved out of the room and down the stairs to his grubby kitchen,

            Karin fingered the notes. She looked at Maria, who looked back. Neither of the girls had words for it. Indecision, fear, disgust, a sense of their most excited hopes crashing into this mangy reality. They spoke to each other through their dismayed looks. The man quickly returned, bounding up the stairs. The sound of the fork-lift had ended. They heard the sound of Gary shutting the rear of the lorry. In a moment he started the engine, manoeuvred the vast thing and it roared gently down the little street. It seemed like the last hope of rescue was abandoning them. It turned into the main road with a burst of its diesel engine and was gone.

            “Our case,” Maria turned to Karin with quiet alarm.

“Oh. Our cases.” Karin’s contrasting shriek turned into a sort of accusation as she faced Ben.

“OK, okay, girls. He took ’em out of the cab. They’re behind the door, all locked up. Safe.” Ben’s soothing reassurance took the wind out of their alarm. But it set them back into the enclosing prison that Ben was constructing around them. “They’ll be good and safe for tonight. So will you my dears. Call me Ben….”

            “Call me Ben,” he said again, arranging three glasses on the floor in a bare corner. “It’s some bubbly,” he announced, and the cork flew off with a bang. Karin jumped but Maria was still transfixed in immobility with the confusion inside her. “Let’s get comfortable.” He folded his long legs up as he descended onto one of the low beds. “You,” he said, “come and sit here.” He padded the bed next to him. Maria sat compliant and stiff beside him. His arm went around her shoulder. It was not unfriendly. It was gentle, like a slowly coiling snake, as his fingers searched over the curve of her shoulder, her arm and neck, the softness of her breast. He commanded Karin to bring the glasses and she held them as he poured the fizzy wine with his other hand. Karin stood like a waitress beside them as they sat on the bed and he drank deeply from his glass. “Drink up, girls. This is my big night. I’m a happy man tonight. Come round here.” He gestured to Karin to sit on the other side of the bed. Maria looked at Karin as she sat down, and she looked back. They both confirmed each other’s helplessness, Maria set herself to endure what was to come. London would still be waiting for them tomorrow.

In the morning Maria was watching the growing light beyond the window. All night she had kept track as the clouds began to split up, the chill glare of the moonlight for a few moments at a time flooded the wall beyond the other bed. The temperature had fallen steadily but she did not notice the cold. She lay on her side, at her back the grunting form of his body taking up two-thirds of the little bed. Karin seemed fast asleep on the other one. Maria felt dirty. It didn’t seem likely she could get a bath. Anyway, she felt dirty inside too, right through her. Why did it have to be her she pondered grimly. She had known he would choose her. She thought of her mother’s condemnation. Her mother loved her and has always protected her. Karin was different. Now it was getting a bit lighter she couldn’t let her thoughts go on and on around her misery. She carefully slid out from under the bed clothes, woke Karin gently without too much noise. She slid on her jeans carefully. Her new panties and bra were no use anymore. Ken had thought it fun to slice the strings as he had undressed her with his pocketknife. She kept the blouse outside the jeans hoping that way it wouldn’t show the outline of her breasts so clearly.

            Ken was stirring and grunted, “Help yourselves to breakfast,” he said turning to the pillows. “I’ll be with you in ten minutes. We’ll have a great day today, girls.” His eyes hadn’t opened and he slid into the regular breathing of sleep again. They crept from the room down the stairs, opened the front door, put on their shoes and tripped as quickly as their high heels would allow, down the road and out of sight of the house. Around the corner in the main road, they stopped and looked at each other. Maria said gravely. “We can’t get our cases now, can we?”

            “No.”

“Perhaps, we could sneak back when he’s opened his warehouse.”

“No, it’s Saturday. Remember. We’d have to wait till Monday.”

“But, perhaps he’ll go in there today. We could keep an eye on him.”

“Perhaps.” Karin was looking into the distance. They were both cold. Her watch showed 7.15 in the morning. The clouds were racing as if there was a storm in the upper atmosphere. “It’s a bit risky.” She put her hand out to show Maria something, “Look.”

            Maria starred, “What you take that for?” she said stupidly in amazement. It was Ken’s wallet, Karin had slid it from his jacket on the floor, when he had been otherwise occupied with Maria. “What’s in it?” Maria felt a vengeful rise in her spirits. The girls looked eagerly at a wadge of notes.

            “Let’s go and get a cup of tea.” Karin looked around her. There seemed to be the beginnings of a row of shops in the distance.

            Over cups of tea and some plates of toast, they cautiously disembowelled the contents of Ken’s wallet. The waitress in the tired-looking café looked suspicious but didn’t say anything. “There’s a credit card here.”

            Maria looked. “But it says ‘Mr’. That’s no good for us.”

            “Course it is. I can say I’m the wife. See his signature, doesn’t say ‘Ken’. Just K something. ‘K’ – that’s for Karin, too.” She laughed.

            Maria was sitting with her arms folded. She remembered she had no bra. She hoped she could hide the outline of her nipples showing through the cotton blouse. The man at the next table across the aisle just kept looking at her chest. “I want to go and get some proper clothes. I’m cold. I need a new whats-it.”

            Karin laughed, “I’ve got a couple of good whats-its.” She had also become aware of the man at the other table. She sucked in her breath and straightened her back as if proud of what she too had in front. “You need something as well, Maria, that you can show off with.” She leant across the table confidentially, “That man over there, he’s got an eye for me.” Maria glanced at him. He seemed to be staring straight at her own chest. She felt embarrassed. She looked down at the table and shrugged her shoulders. Karin said, “He’s got a filthy mind that one.”

            “Let’s get out of here. I feel all dirty. I haven’t even done my hair.” Her rich wavy dark hair was tangled in all directions as it had come off the pillow next to him.

            “Yeah, you don’t look too good.” Karin stood up. As they left the table, Karin turned to the man. “You want to keep control of your eyeballs, mate.” And she swept grandly to the door and left. “Where do we find a taxi in these parts?” she said demandingly as she passed the woman at the till.

            The woman in her black linen uniform stopped counting the change. Her clothes were baggy on her thin old body and her cheeks were pale and drawn tight on the bone. “Dunno,” and she returned to counting the notes, hardly looking at  Karin. Then the old cashier said, “E’s got a taxi,” she nodded weakly across toward the man Karin had just abused.

            Karin darted a look in that direction. At first, she seemed uncertain. Maria tugged her elbow to get her out of the café as quickly as possible, “Come on.”. The waitress had turned away from the girls and went to sit by the counter. She seemed tired so early in the day.

 

Having raided Selfridges they stood, in the midst of the milling Saturday crowd with two new pigskin travelling cases.  The shop had been the one that the girls had heard of as the acme of London sophistication. It hadn’t disappointed them. Ken’s credit card had taken a beating. Maria’s strong slender writing had practised a passable simulation of the signature; while Karin’s soft paw had given up and she had turned away aloof from these technical accomplishments.

            They had found miraculously a cruising taxi and lugged their cases inside, “Where to, ladies?” the cabby said brightly.

            Karin as usual took the lead. “We want the best hotel. What’s the best hotel called. He looked around through his glass screen at the two girls. Karin in luminous yellow jeans with assorted zips in pointless places, a strong studded belt with a padlock device for a buckle; her frantic red blouse of some kind of man-made silk was smothered with bright blue and green rocket motifs. Her pale hair had been creamed up into a spikey halo. Maria on the other hand found a shapeless long dress in a drear colour. Her hair had been cut nondescript short and curled out slightly at the ends in a style that was fashionable but not loud. Her attempts at modesty had not quite come off. She looked almost like a voluptuous nun. The cabby stared at Karin’s cheap appearance, “What you looking at, fellow? Eh?” She said aggressively. He said nothing but turned back to his wheel and waited. “What’s it called?! And she nudged Maria.

            “It’s called the Hilton, I think. Like in America, isn’t it?”

            “Yeah, take us to the Hilton.” Karin’s grand manner looked down on him like a failed music hall turn.

            When they had been shown into the large room overlooking the park by the unimpressed porter, Maria sat on one of the twin beds. She slowly began to cry in silence. Karin stood at the window, and said, “There’s a lot of creeps in London, aren’t there.” Maria lay back on the bed and curled on her side and sobbed. Karin came and sat beside her, put an arm across the heaving shoulder, “What do we do now?” Both girls were sunk in a momentary despair, bur Maria began to relax. “Maria, do you want to go back?” Maria shook her head. She sat up and wiped her eyes with her hands; the expensive make-up smudged. “Is it the man last night? Karin asked. Maria nodded. Karin stood up. Her face tightened up into her hard look again, “I wasn’t going to let the bastard get his dirty fingers on my legs.” She said as if she had been convinced she had been in command the night before. “You should have done the same,” she snapped, and heaved her case onto Maria’s bed next to her. She rummaged through the  assorted contents and retrieved the lipstick and powder compact. She went to the dressing table, dabbed st her lips and face, “War paint,” she said confidentially and seriously. “We’ve got to do something!”

            Their question was what?

“We’ll keep on with what we planned, then?” Karin proposed.

“Okay. Let’s go now.”

“But let’s get dressed up.” Their shared belief that life in London was all about wearing the best clothes at the right time had been developed from months of joint study of teenage magazines.

            When Maria had left the closed world of the fairground, she expected the outside world to treat her in the familiar way as a privileged but deprived, beautiful little girl. That the outside world proved to exploit her and ravage her beauty was a shock that she had not expected and did not know how to deal with. Not so for her companion. Karin, who was not so pretty, but more forceful in her personality. She took to the world with the gusto of a hungry man. If she was to be exploited, she was going to make it mutual. She just knew that she had never let her mother get away with anything Karin decided was unjust. 

Nor would the man Ken, get away with it either, she decided. While they sat in the hotel lounge drinking a gin-and-tonic each, Karin looked again at the wallet she had stolen, this time for his address. There was no address in it, but she found a card with a phone number written on it, and the name Ben Wallis. “Must be him,” she announced confidently. Maria nodded with an indifference she felt. She was concentrating on her abused body, as the reality of her ordeal continued to emerge as an enormous obtruding thought like a vast boulder blocking up a river. “I know what we are going to do,” she announced with a sense of liveliness, which failed to enliven Maria.. “Go and ask that barman if he can give us a pen and some paper.” Maria tiredly did so, only to be refused and told to go to their room as there would be a pen and paper there for the use of guests. Karen had heard the exchange and when Maria returned to sit down, she said to Maria, “Let’s get it from the room. But she did not move, so Maria, carrying the vastness of her violation slouched to the lift to fetch what Karin was asking for.

When she returned, Karin who had been musing thoughtfully, took the pen and began to write on the paper.  Maria asked quietly, “What you going to write?” 

“I’m writing him a letter.” Maria did not need to ask who, but waited till Karin finished what turned out to be a laborious task. Maria waited silently and eventually Karin showed the paper to her. Here is what Karin had written:

Dear wife of BenWallis, this is from two girls, Karin  Grove and Maria Hedger. Ben forced us to have sex with him in his flat next his waerhouse. It was rape. He raped us. I tell the date it was 16teenth Novembre. He was a bastard, because we could not stop him. You got to make him pay for what he dun to us. Karin and Maria

Dear BenWallis. This is from those girls who you forced us to have sex with you in the flat next the waerhouse. We sure you know how to sell stuff from your wearhouse on the black, don’t you. Were sure. So you better do it, and we want 100 pouds each week. Get it. 100 nice pounds for us. We are expensiv, see. If you don’t do it, we will tell you wife. Right. See the other letter in here. Shell give you hell. Karin and Maria

Maria looked at the two letters, noting how Karin was included in Ken’s attack. She handed it back. “We don’t know where to send it.”

            “We’ll find out. Here’s this phone number, see.” she waved the bit of paper from the wallet. “Go and do this for us, Maria. Ring them up and say we found a wallet in the street. We found the phone number and it was Ken Wallis. Say we’ll go round to them and give the wallet back.” She flicked her hair back from her face and looked confident. “Say we’d like a bit of a reward, too, if they could afford it. Makes it sound like its all true. ”

            “But he’ll see the money’s all gone. And his card.”

“Don’t be silly. We won’t go and give it back. We just want the address. You have to ask for the address for us to go and give it back.” Maria nodded. “Go on then. There’s a phone somewhere. You can ask the bloke over there, where it is. Him at the bar.” Maria obediently went.

When she returned, Karin looked at her expectantly, “Well, what she say?”

Maria looked shaken. “It wasn’t her. I think it was him.”

            “Oh well, it doesn’t matter, if you got the address. Did you get it?” Maria handed over the paper, showing the address, and the pen as well to Karin. “Come on, let’s go out and get some proper paper and an envelope and a stamp to post it.”

            So, the girls went off to shop for their blackmailing trick. 

            Back in the hotel, Maria wrote out the letters. And put them into better English. Karin didn’t object and went out to post the letter. Then they sat in the bar with another gin-and-tonic. And then they had another and began to feel that things were not so bad. “When, d’you think he’ll get the letter? Karin, what will he do?”

            “Can’t do anything, can he. Not till we contact him and tell him to pay up.”

“How do we get his money? I mean, we can’t just go to his house. We’re not going back to that warehouse, Karin.”

“Nah,” Karin looked thoughtful, “I dunno. Haven’t got that worked out.” She looked intently at Maria. “What do you think? Tell him to come here? The bar? Bring the money to the bar. He can’t cause trouble here, can he.”

            Maria didn’t know; she didn’t want to think about the man. She knew she was somehow linked to him, in her soul because of what he did. But she didn’t want such a creep to be there sealed into her most private place. She didn’t reply to Karin. “You can tell, Karin. He makes me sick.” She shifted in her seat. She could see herself in a mirror attached to the wall opposite, her black hair, her dark eyes wide and broad, her voluptuous mouth. She knew she looked pretty, but she could only think of how he must have seen her. She moved so she was not looking at herself in that mirror. 

            “That’s not much help,” she said protesting, but she did not pursue it. “I will ring him in two days. I think the letter will have got there, then.” She looked reflective as if already planning what she’d say to the creep.

            “We’ve got to get out of here,” Maria said with some concern.

            “Why?”

            “Karin, it’s too expensive.” She kept turning away from the mirror. “He’s going to cancel the card. Then we won’t be able to pay the bill. We’ve got to get as much money out of it as we can. Let’s go and find one of those cashpoints.”

            “OK. Good idea. I wonder how much we can get out of it?”

            “We’ll find out,” And they giggled like two girls much younger than their age, up to mischief. Karin turned to the mirror realising Maria had been avoiding it. Karin’s hair was blonde, long and straight to below her shoulders. It was her best feature. Her face was narrow, and her skin showed a few pock marks where her unfortunate adolescent acne had flourished. She pushed out her handsome and attractive bosom as she looked. “I look good in that mirror,” she said to Maria. “There’s one of those cash machines out near the entrance. Let’s go and see what we can get.” To their surprised dismay, the card had already been cancelled. More to their dismay was their discovery they needed a pin number.

            “So, we got nothing to pay our bill with.” Maria said hopelessly.

            Karin looked anxious too for a moment. She looked occupied in thought for a minute or two, while Maria waited for her to solve the problem. Then she told Maria what they’d do. Maria nodded and added a few things to which Karin nodded. They went to the restaurant and in the mid-afternoon, they ate the biggest meal they could each manage, as if they may not eat ever again – which may be the case. They laughed a bit, mischievously, at the plan they were working out together. The waiter took their room number to add to their account. He watched the back of Maria’s body as the girls walked out. They went quickly to their room and collected just their essentials. Maria had forbidden them to take their nice new cases and the treasures they had just bought. They left the Hilton Hotel quietly and inconspicuously as if they’d be back shortly.

A hundred yards down the street, they both suddenly discharged their tension in guffaws of laughter as they realised they’d done it. They walked on. Maria was feeling bloated; Karin refused to admit it. “Now what?” Maria looked expectantly at Karin, who shrugged her shoulders. They walked on. Maria was concerned that if they did the same again they’d need posh looking bags again to convince the hotel they were the posh types that could afford it. They simply walked for a while through central London, hoping for inspiration. They entered a large railway terminus, St Pancras. It had a bar-restaurant, and they went to sit for tea, which they noticed was expensive. Maria put Ken’s now-useless card on the table to reassure the waitress. Then Karin began to talk about, how they would get out. Karin was looking around and wandered out to the toilet. On the way back she passed a table with a couple of  middle-aged ladies – in the girls’ terms, posh ladies. She arrived back with Maria clutching under her sweater, a handbag that had once hung on the back of the chair of a posh lady. She kept it in her lap under the table and began to bring out the cosmetics and lady stuff. Her purse this time was a bit swollen and they were in luck. Several hundred pounds. Karin stood up leaving the purloined possessions (minus the money) on the spare chair, and she went off to the toilet again, explaining to the waitress as she passed that she was troubled with the ‘monthly’. The waitress nodded considerately. Meanwhile, Maria took off her cardigan and placed it on the chair to hide the unwanted stolen goods. Ten minutes later, as the waitress passed, she said she’d go and rescue her friend who had a bit of trouble down below, and left the cardigan on the chair, again to reassure the waitress. She joined Karin and the hundreds of pounds outside the station and around the corner where she was slouching against a wall. Again, they laughed out loud to break the tension. 

They scrammed away from the station in case someone came looking. The waitress would remember them. They wouldn’t go back but there are a dozen or so London terminuses, they could work through. They found not far away, a hotel, a cheap one this time. Two days later they argued about who would ring Ken to arrange for him to hand over the money. Maria stubbornly, even frantically, refused to speak to the bastard. Karin knew she would have to, but protested nevertheless – Maria she believed just had to get over it.

It was morning, so she rang the warehouse. “Speak to Ken, please.”

“Yeah,” Ken said.

“This is the girls you raped. Last week.”

“”Wha’. Whatya talking about.”

“We want our money. We told you. We sent a letter. And we’ll send one to you wife. You got it didn’t you?” There was a long silence. “You want your wife to know what you do in your flat?”

“You can tell the wife if y’ wantta. I ain’t got no wife. never had one. Hard luck, luv.”

Karin was taken aback. All middle-aged creeps had wives, didn’t they? “Don’t believe you, mate.”

“Go ahead, kid. Which one are you anyway?”

“That don’t matter, does it.”

“Maybe it does. You the blonde one aren’tya. I can tell. Well listen, here, luv. You tell the one with dark hair, Maria she was called. She was a bit of a’right. Tell, her if she comes round for a bit more of the same, she’ll get the money. Go’ it.”

Karin was silent, bit her lip and thought. “Two hundred.”

            Ken, knowing he could send them away with whatever he decided to give, said. “OK. But she’d better be good – okay?” There was silence at both ends of the phone for a minute. “And I don’t want you. I want the other one. Right.”

            Karin put the phone down. She didn’t leave the phone box immediately. She had to consider how to put it to Maria. That wouldn’t be easy. It could be impossible; the way Maria is. When she came out Maria was standing looking at her enquiringly. “He says we’ve got to go to his warehouse.”

            “No,” she looked pale. “I can’t go. You go. You’ve only got to pick up the money.” But she knew Karin couldn’t go alone. She knew she should support her friend. She knew she should go too, but she couldn’t face the filthy creep again. But somehow, she knew she had to. As Karin kept telling her she had to get over it.

            When a little later, they got there, Karin sent the taxi driver away. Maria was trembling, “You should’ve told him to wait.” And she added, imploringly, “It’s dangerous here. With him.”

            Karin said nothing. She held Maria’s hand, gripping it tight. And they advanced into the warehouse. Maria hanging back, and not looking where they went. Karin advanced down the aisle to the little office. Ben was at his desk but noticed the movement and looked up. He looked surprised, “Ha, you here, girls.” 

Karin clenched Maria’s hand tightly. “Start with the money. Give us two hundred.”

“Nah, luv.” He was looking at Maria’s terrified face, hanging back behind Karin. “She OK?”

“She’s OK,” said Karin, and kept tight hold of Maria’s hand in case she started to run.

            “Right,” he said. Ken seemed as if he couldn’t believe his luck. I’ll go and shut the doors. You,” said to Karin, “take her up to the room.” Maria stared at Karin. She looked completely in shock. She looked like a zombie. 

She let Karin lead her out and in through the house to the room. “Don’t leave me this time,” she whispered.

“Alright. Don’t forget. It will soon be over.”

When Ken arrived in the room he told Karin to go down and sit in the office in case anyone came. Karin obediently left. Maria was at the mercy of Ken again. She was less compliant this time, but Ken overpowered her. Enjoyed doing so.

Maria laid back defeated, dirtied and extremely dead right through to her bones. She had no life to make her move. In fact, Ken had to drag her out of the room , down the stairs and in through the side door. He threw her at Karin. Maria stared, but Karin looked away. Ashamed. Karin took over, she said, in her conniving way, “Give me hand with her. You’ve had what you want.” So they each took an arm and led Maria onto the street. Halfway down the street, Karin told Ben, he could go back. As soon as he turned back she whispered to Maria, “We’ve got to run, and as she hauled Maria forward and out of earshot, she said, “I’ve got his cash from his office.” And after they’d got to the end of the road, she said “We’ve done well. Thanks Maria.” Maria stumbled on, and they found an alleyway to hide in till Ben had come racing past and after some time he wandered back resigned to having lost all the cash box.

Maria said nothing till they got back to the hotel. As she got out of the taxi, she had recovered her will to survive and moved of her own accord. There was little conversation between the girls that evening. After they went to sleep in their room, Maria opened her eyes, listened for Karin’s heavy breathing and while she slept, took all the money and silently left. Maria felt like the filthiest piece of womanhood that had ever existed.

 

 

 

 

A wail in the countryside

 

It wasn't pique.  It was something deeper.  The flight was miserable because of it.  All her life she had been beautiful, had enjoyed such admiration for it.  Now she had just reached her 30s, so many years of longing eyes upon her had lost that special thrill.  It was an accident of birth she now told herself.  To be beautiful is not a moral worth.  She had realised that recently.  Those women without natural gifts who make themselves attractive, they have the virtue.  Hers was merely luck, good fortune.  She stepped off the plane.  The sun was hot outside the airport.  It scorched her white suit, blistered her dark glasses.  Her relaxed, erect pose was neutral.  People seemed to leave a space around her. 

            She would wait for ‘them’ to come to her.  If ‘they’ were among the sparse throng waiting for bags, she would leave ‘them’ to spot her.  They were not in view; they must have taken a different flight.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Sitting briefly in the small garden of the hotel after arriving, waiting for the waiter to bring her a drink she felt as out of place as she looked.  But for different reasons.  Her natural exotic features looked out of place anywhere – in her native east London, or in this frantically watered garden in the Dordogne. But she was out of place too because she felt different.  And she had been feeling so different lately.  Was it something other people called jealousy?  This was not a holiday; she had brought some sort of emotional baggage along with her.  ‘They’, the others, were the ones on holiday.

            She was not spying or intruding on them; yet she was not on her holidays.  And yet again, emphatically, she was not on business.  So, she told herself.  On and off during the whole flight she had told herself so.  How come she felt like elastic?  Between her and Gregory.  He had told her it was just holiday time.  And she, no reason, had come along.  His hotel was only a short distance away.  She knew its name.  The waiter gave her directions to it.  He spoke in abbreviated French to make it easy for her to understand.  Now she knew all she needed to know.  In fact, in the event, she would not ever go to their hotel.

            What was that continually rising confusion about? What did she actually want?

            The waiter stuttered on proudly, trying to be kind to this splendid English guest.  Her French was fluent, but she did not embarrass him by showing his efforts were unnecessary.  Her considerate manners had been acquired like one of the accessories she carefully chose.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

The business she had with Gregory in England was a secret from that other one, that other ‘her’ in his life.  It was entirely legitimate, though questionably moral.  As a beautician she was her own advertisement.  Her face had peered out from thousands of adverts – photographed through rose-covered trelliswork, from under a motorbike, couched in a pile of silk underwear.  But always Jane's perfect features.  Those adverts proclaimed her animal-free potions – for beauty and potency.  ‘Momtaz’, she called her range of products, after the beauty of the Taj Mahal - the most fabulous in the world.  Then she had become Zena-Jane, to complement the plain syllable she had been assigned by her grandmother.  ‘He’, that is Gregory, had put up the money for Jane's business, linked it to his own business, a clinic for cosmetic surgery.  He did not do the surgery himself.  He was not a doctor, though he was willing enough to allow people to honour him with that title.  He had his young specialists, teamed up in relays like an athletics match. It was on the supermarket principle – off-the-shelf nose, cheekbones, jaw and so on.  Jane ran the health farm where the customers relaxed, scanned the catalogues, met the surgeons, chose their faces and convalesced in luxury till the skin wounds had faded.

            Not that Jane had been a beneficiary of the treatment; no more than she needed her own spurious potions.  Her beauty rose above that.  But Beatrix had been through it.

            At the time, Beatrix had probably been the wealthiest client of the clinic.  So, it was only partly her new jaw-line that had made him – that is, Gregory – fall in love with her.

            Gregory was significantly older than either of the women – Jane his mistress, or Beatrix his wife.  His steel grey hair met an equally steely eye that sometimes broke into wrinkles.  It did so at unexpectedly tense moments sometimes when he wanted to put you completely at your ease.  Disconcertingly, it always felt like his ease, composed and imposed by him.  He was swarthy and conveyed a purposeful energy in his movements and his severe expression.  He portrayed a pointed single-mindedness which was alluring to women and captured a loyalty from younger men.  That is what made him plausible, regarded as a doctor, a top surgeon; and none of his young doctors minded. One of his assets was that he never fully concealed that roguishness; it was always peeping out like the corner of a handkerchief, casual but self-conscious.  There was self-apology in his manner which gave the necessary charm.  But he was not all assertive, self-centred bluster. Beatrix – that is, his wife – could spot sincerity in him as well.  He genuinely believed he could make everyone happy.

            Beatrix, a long, willowy, blond, could almost have passed for Scandinavian, had she not displayed the characteristic demandingness of the wealthy and educated English.  Coolness of appearance, stiffness of movement; and that apparent air of command in her slightly complaining voice marked her as separate from Gregory or Jane.  And therefore, fascinating to both.  She had inherited that lofty stooped posture towards those who served her.  And yet it did not sit easily.  Her evident docility appeared as a deference to her husband. In so far as Gregory was able, he loved her.  He had rescued her from depression.  He was flattered by her loyalty.  The new petite jaw he had arranged for her was clearly more in keeping with her personality than the previous more Germanic jut.

            Gregory and Beatrix complemented each other grandly. They created a presence in the small village hotel snuggling into a fold of the Dordogne River.

            Beatrix loved him dearly and was grateful to be able to bring out the softer and sentimental side of him – his devotion to re-organising her stables; his passion for small animals, those small enough to pick up and cuddle, from snakes to apes and even caged birds. With her seemingly unlimited wealth, their home could spread into ever larger tracts of deep Surrey countryside. She was immensely proud of him. She was proud of his success, of his tenderness to animals, and indeed in his own pride in managing her life and wealth.

            Because of her devotion, as loyal as the animals, she was blind.  So, Gregory had no difficulty in deflecting small sums, a permanent rivulet, drained from her wealth, and into Jane's luxuriant enterprise.  Beatrix, quiet and unsuspecting, never even wanted to question Gregory's use of her inheritance.  His management of it merely proved his care for her.

            Jane, business-like, knew exactly where the money came from, exactly how the channels were carefully covered.  And exactly what deal he gave her.  They had a discreet chalet in the corner of her health farm; private entrances; nights she gave him by arrangement; other girls provided occasionally when he needed one.

            Now this.

            Here she was in this boiling cauldron, simply because he had asked her to come.  Had she really believed she had to say yes, even to this escapade?  Her contempt for herself was obvious - and justified, she muttered.  Did she believe he would stop seeing her?  If she had refused?  Shun her work, stop the vital ‘rivulet’?  She had not even considered saying ‘no’.  And now she was here.  Without properly knowing why.  If ‘they’ wanted to go off on holiday, well, good luck to them.  Jane did not care.  But suddenly, it was madness to come along too.  Someone's apparently maiden aunt, alone and stashed away in the hotel down the road!  She was exasperated at the thought; she suddenly knew her discomfort all day on the trip; let herself get drawn along into someone else's plan.  All her life she had learned the foolishness of being blindly led.  You had to know what was in it for you; that was it – principle number one.  She could have haggled with him; struck a bargain. And he would remain a businessman. Never forget, she told herself, head turned to the camelias, and hand discretely over her mouth as if burping: his business depended on her.  His clinic depended wholly on her clientele in the health farm.  She was the one – not him – who could play on her clients temptations.  She could supply those whose cheeks he could make blush as with an air-brush.  His beauty-surgery needed just those she could tempt with self-love.

            Was it her business that required her to agree to be here? No.  It was not.  No. Yet she had said: yes!

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

When he arrived in the garden to greet her he said he had no more than an hour.  The hesitant waiter hovered with a half-bottle of champagne till they started to drink; then vanished.  They then rehearsed their moment of meeting.  They had devised their long-standing ritual.  Passion emanated from that moment they closed in together.  They had learned to heighten it; how to condense it, to compress that passion. They recited their ritual poem, inane to the outside observer – it was theirs.  Partly the catholic mass, partly passages from the story of `O', and partly words that they had charged with a personal meaning.  After their soft stuttered murmuring, face to face, they arose and went in from the garden, up to Jane's room, shut the windows and shutters against the afternoon sun.  Their bodies completed an immaculate completion.  Then Gregory left for his hotel, a little late and a little pink, but with his perfectly constructed composure.

            Again, on her own.  It was not just pique she felt.  Something ineffable was left in her heart.  Why did she let him do it to her?  And - she vowed - it was going to stop. She must as she so often resolved, move on from being his fine ornament.

            Jane had had a hard life when young, when merely plain Jane.  She had always looked after herself, driven herself on with vows of revenge.  It had not just been the beatings from one of her stepfathers.  That was common enough.  The girls at school who also knew that kind of life had huddled together.  They made mischief to compensate; and understood each other.  It had been her other stepfather, who had inflicted ambition on her.  He forbade her meals if her homework marks were not good enough.  He locked her in her room if she had exams.  And, the trouble was, she was bright enough to warrant the ambition.  She could achieve what he wanted.  And that did set her aside.  There was no-one then to huddle behind the school hedge with and plot mischief.  She could only keep her own company, harbour her vengeance against the intruder in her family, vow to unburden her brain.  By flaunting her body instead, she pained this step-father tragically. And in the end, she had defeated his intention, effortlessly, with that chosen weapon, her physical beauty, and a career as a simple beautician.

            She folded away her white suit carefully.  Her dark complexion, she caught it in the mirror from the corner of her eye, a shadow that strode across her room.  The texture of her skin was unusually fine for someone dark, and it seemed to clothe her shape in a special glow, a dusky sheen. She was now aged enough to begin to wonder when its gloss would begin to tarnish.  And what then for her?  All her life she had inhabited this beauty.  And how much had it amounted to?  She had a full day before he would be with her again.  She planned it in segments, those for reading, the time for her meticulous body-care, the gentle excursions in the little town, the church, the local museum.  She would seethe in the meantime. And she would be ready for him when he returned.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

However, in fact, she did not have to wait completely uneventfully until the next visit. Sitting at supper on the vine-covered terrace overlooking the river, the meal ordered, her aperitif in her hand, a sleek young man came up to her table and spoke to her.  His English was ‘public school’ and his shallow smile equally so. She had known young men like this ever since she had grown out of her own background.  They could be so immediate but, ultimately, so passive. He was a fine example of England's cream.  He offered her his hand, stood beside the table.  Jane was leaning forward, elbows gently resting gracefully on the white table-cloth, her glass pressed to her sun-rosed cheek.  It was a pensive posture, the straight back alerting the observer to a hidden concentration.  She had been interrupted.  She did not move except to turn her head, a slight bend of the neck and her eyes looking up into his open face.  Otherwise, motionless, an unfriendly stillness.  She was reluctant to emerge from her dream.  He asked if he might be invited to sit down, to eat supper with her.  Equally motionless something changed in her.  There was suddenly a full attention.  Perhaps her eyelids tightened very slightly, or the muscles of her shoulders tensed beneath the thin cloth of her shirt, the weight no longer on her elbows. His offered hand had fallen away as she did not respond to him.  But his face remained as open and as simple as ever.  Where, someone would wonder, did he keep his intelligence, if not in his face?  She refused without emotion, without response; her silence a response in itself. Some would have taken her as hostile. She merely stared back into his face. Its jovial pastiness nodded good-naturedly, and he moved away to another table.  She spent the time of the meal staring ahead of her, over the terrace to the distant valley, much of the time the wine-glass pressed to her cheek pensively, like an insecure child might clutch a favoured toy.  She wondered at this resentment she lived all the time, like a drunk with alcohol.  There was something else too; like jealousy – that bitch Beatrix.  Something like a pity – was it that sponge-like boy.  She observed herself with a distant amazement.  Something was happening to her these days.  A cruel curiosity made her pick over these feelings, like specimens.  When necessary, she knew she would shut them away and get on with her mask, her stainless beauty.  But in this brief incredulous moment on her own she lost herself in a foreign country in her heart.  It would soon be over.  Had she looked she would have seen that the boy spent most of the meal looking at her.

            In the morning, he tried again.  He managed to follow her into breakfast.  She refused his request to sit at table with her. Finally, he encountered her again mid-morning sipping coffee outside the small bar in the central place de la village.  Her cool loose blouse was brilliant green.  It blended with a very slight reddish streak in her dark hair. The blouse rode above the top of her grey linen jeans.  Her appearance was compelling, as always.  He did not invite himself to her table this time but sat at the adjacent one. Slightly behind her, he was in fact closer than if he had faced her from the chair opposite.  She had not changed her pose with his arrival and in her characteristic posture, lightly resting her graceful arms on the table-top, he was facing her, inches from her left shoulder, by her side.

            There was not much about the boy, she thought. “Peter”, he told her, “I'm called”. Tall, slightly awkward with youth, his hair was surprisingly fair, and a little lank, threatening to intrude on his face so that he pushed it back with a thumb and forefinger either side of his forehead in a repeated mannerism.  It tended to make his full face fuller and more present to whoever spoke to him.  She did not.  For him her silence emphasised a quality that he called ethereal. No longer youthfully uncertain, she was not yet old, even by Peter's young standards.  He saw her beauty in a perpetual interlude, never growing, never fading, like the confident endurance of classical marble. Indeed, like a statue, she seemed all surface, and untouchable, and still magnetic.  He began to tell her a few things, hesitantly at first and uninvited: his college; the school he had been to previously; his recent 21st birthday which had culminated in this trip; a girl he had liked but knew he was too young to take seriously; his hopes for a future as a manager for some national opera company where he had connections...

            Without meaning to, Jane idly listened, but never responded, never encouraged this advantaged, callow youth.  Only once did she turn to look into his pleasing face. There was not much to see; except... except one thing.  There was that same plausible earnestness in there, which conveyed that though you would get honesty willingly from him, you were most unlikely to get the whole truth. A plausibility she recognised in all the smart men who pursued her like this.  Reminiscent slightly of her aging man at the hotel up the road. “By any chance,” she enquired at last, “do you know a businessman by the name of Gregory Belgrave?”

            “Of course,” he smiled and, relieved that at last she had addressed him, “how else would I be here?  Why else would I be talking to you?”  He nodded with significance as if scornful of her naivety.

            He got up to go, offered to carry her parcel back for her.  She did not reply; but also did not stop him lifting it and carrying it.  She had bought a piece of local pottery, quite heavy. He continued to smile and chatter away as he walked beside her: about the girl he had just finished with; playing rugby for his college last year; the quite good degree which his father had been proud of.  It was not clear if she listened to any of it.  He accepted her as a challenge, a refusal to be deflated.

            If she had not been so angry, she might have wondered more about who this associate of Gregory's really was.  When they had crossed the bridge and turned up the ancient path to the hotel. he told her he would be ‘trotting off’ now.  She stopped and looked at the boy.  He smiled a slightly cheeky grin; he gave her a mock salute as if a messenger; but really, he mocked the angry authority her silence asserted.  He turned to go.  “And listen to me,” she snapped, calling him back, “I don't want you hanging around, eyeing me all the time.”  She was deliberate in her intention.  She thought that her blunt command was the best insult to his couth aplomb. She felt insulted and was intent on demolishing him. And she succeeded; for the first time he became somewhat crestfallen. This woman his father had brought him to see was no fading violet awaiting his lavish attentions.  If his father had fixed him up with this companion, Peter did not mind too much who she was, but she could enthuse her job a bit more.  If he thought about it, he would have assumed his father had paid her.  It was why, perhaps, he found it too delicate to refer to his father.

            She noticed him begin to sag, “Get out of here,” she added as if throwing out a piece of crumpled litter.  She turned to go into the hotel.  He offered the parcel he was carrying.  She took it gravely letting it hang from her hand in a gesture of casual disregard.  She was resentful, felt affronted by being subjected to the boy's interest.  She felt insulted by his adolescent drool, but also by his chatter to her as if she were his mother; and above all by succumbing to being made so cross by his presence.  Gregory was no different from these casual predators trying their luck – except Gregory always brought it off.  Damn.  Damn him.

            In her room she went to the mirror and stared at what she saw.  As always, the sight was the one thing that would make her feel better about herself. She noticed a warmer feeling swell up inside her.  Ugh, kids. Even big ones.  She gazed on her mature body - no longer a child herself. She believed she had become a person. She forgot her brutal dismissal of the boy.

            Peter too bounced back easily from his rebuffs. Within a 100 metres he had forgotten the beautiful ‘old bag’.  He padded along in his shorts and espadrilles but remembering his view of her chest. He prided himself on how courteous he had remained.  He formed in his thoughts how he could tell it to his father as an amusing story.

            It was not a long walk through the lanes from one hotel to another.  It was a surprisingly green little valley.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

She had never heard that Gregory had a son.  And nor had Beatrix; but that is by-the-by for the moment.

            Peter identified the acacia trees, some ancient and some young yet standing to the same height along the road in front of the rough stone walling.  There were many exotic plants, but many grew in England, and he could imagine again the countryside where he was at school.

            His father would fix it, as everything else in Peter's life; and as Peter would one day fix everything for his own children. Whatever was eating that woman, Dad would set it right, for her, and for Peter.  Dad would know when it was some money that was needed, some flattery, when a good ticking off - and so on.  He looked forward to seeing how his father would deal with it.

            He had not heard of Jane until a couple of weeks ago when Gregory proposed the trip for Peter's wider experience.  He was not, he could tell himself, completely ignorant about women.  But what his father intended was to give him a proper grounding.  In truth his world of women had really only been the female servants at his schools, and the anxious girls at university as ignorantly complacent as himself.  There was a little vegetable garden now, on the right.  Asparagus, he recognised; rosemary, he thought; and smart little rows of leaves for the salade vert.  The road twisted up towards the hotel.

            Beatrix he had heard of and knew a lot about.  His father waxed prolific about her at times. Peter had resented her without meeting. Some might say she was a rival to him; some might say a rival to his mother.  Though, to be honest, his mother had been rather cool and he felt little for her.  He preferred his school from an early age and paid little attention to regular though dull letters to him. It had been decided, too, that it was best he should not meet Beatrix.  He knew it had all been worked out for him by his father.  Sometimes it was a puzzle why he felt so against Beatrix when his father talked on about her. He had for as long as he could remember enjoyed a suave composure towards everyone he met.

            It had been a kind of joy to learn of the secret Jane. A mean laugh at the deceived Beatrix. Perhaps, for Gregory, his unacknowledged son was the one person he could talk to about his secret mistress.  It seemed a prankish joke if his father brought them both on holiday as well.  In his own mind it would be Beatrix who would be left the odd one out.  Though he relented a little and could allow Beatrix to have his father in their hotel together, Peter found his tolerance of his parents' holiday was only on the basis that he would be fixed up himself in the hotel with Jane.

            He sat on the wall for a few moments.  The road had risen to a few metres above the river here. Did it flood in this valley? Everything can be too full once in a lifetime - it was a rule he had once heard.  It had come from the careful girl-friend he had had at university. They had spent a couple of years at college going to social occasions together. They were good friends, and still were; and they had had good friends.  But she had been cautious, and they'd only groped in the car.  He hadn't really minded. But wondered sometimes if he ought to.  She told him she had been traumatised when her parents had died in a fire, an atrocity committed on the farmstead in South Africa.  She had been eleven and it happened shortly after she had been sent to school in Zimbabwe.  She had never been back to South Africa because it had not been good for her. Her uncle was a psychologist in Kings Lynn and had helped her to understand how she must help herself. She had needed, she said, his understanding.  So, he had given it.  Recently she had conveyed to Peter that she was strong enough if he wanted to break off the relationship with her when they both finished their degrees.  So, he had decided to.  Whatever the effects of her trauma, he knew there was a lot on his side of the relationship for him to learn as well.  He judged it by the way his father had talked to him.  And indeed, that was why he had talked to his father.  Gregory had been confident how to handle the problem.  Peter felt relaxed sitting on the wall, reviewing the reasons for being out here; the experience his father had promised would be forthcoming from Jane. At last, he was being invited into the world where others lived so happily.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Beatrix did not consider where her husband disappeared to. Reclining on the lounger by the pool's edge, the hot sun was dripping inertia onto her body.  Beatrix was 37, her muscles were toned to the condition of a 17-year-old, and her skin had been tanned in regular doses under the commercial UV machine at work; her life cared for her in every respect.  Yet she knew she had to fight off that lethargy before it permanently got the better of her.  She was old enough to know that risk.  That state of ennui would come on her slowly; there had been points all through her life when it seemed to pop up compellingly, temptingly.  And if she did not get up off the lounger, find the next paperback to read, get a mid-afternoon drink, plan a shopping trip, then it would flood back into her heart.  Such life activities did not seem to arise smoothly.  They required an energised will.  Why did life not seem more natural?  Distractions were the essence of life for Beatrix.  She barely realised the difference.

            Nevertheless, she had come to be puzzled.  She had everything, material provision in every respect, a loving husband, even an indulgent priest hanging over from her school days (so long ago now) if she were ever to need one.  Her marriage was cruising along absolutely perfectly: the dinners, the theatres and concerts, the house parties (given and invited to); and in just two years time, as she had planned, and Gregory had agreed, she would have reached the point to start their family.  Her health was good, wealth never a problem.  There was no reason for that sinking emptiness, like a bruise in the tummy; no reason for it to open up under her whenever she stopped busying herself.  And she told herself carefully, it didn't!  It did not happen; no.  And why? Because, from long ago, she could control it.  If her mind was busy – reading, planning, arranging – then it never came upon her. And, therefore, it never existed. She was quite content with her logic. She looked at the locker beside her on the edge of the swimming pool – the extra pair of sunglasses, the tumbler of cool water, the comb, the packet of cigarettes with lighter neatly parked on top, the hair-band in case she went in for a dip, the suntan tube, and the insect spray – the last two stood upright together as if guarding the rest. It was all there as she glanced, as so often, to take it in, to check it; a kind of Kim's game that she was always winning.  It reminded her of the locker in the school dormitory when she had gone away at fourteen. It had been the tidiest and best kept locker in the school.  Her parents had been proud of that before they died - even if they had been troubled that she could not keep up with the lessons.

            As she was reminiscing to herself about her childhood and its perfections, a slightly hot blond head emerged, climbing the steps from the road, then his long gangling body, and, last, a pair of white thin legs below the baggy shorts.  The head looked around and glanced back at the long sleek body on the lounger. Someone must be inside that body, but he wondered whether to pass it by as a statue.  Beatrix had a swimming costume cut very high over the hip bones and pulled tight in her crotch.  Peter noticed.  She was quite old, he thought, neutrally.

            With his arrival, she had something outside her own head to concentrate on, to distract.  “You, from England?”  The familiarity of her tone was as a girl of his own age.  He felt uncomfortable at having examined the body so closely.

            “Yes, actually.  Absolutely.”  He chuckled slightly and felt suddenly at his ease with her.  “I'm looking for my father,” he said inquiringly.

            `Where is he?' she asked purposelessly.  As if she thought he were silly enough to have mislaid something, the key to his room, his bathrobe.

            And then a slightly hard look came across her jocular face.  There were no other English in the hotel.  Who could his father be?  “Who is it?” she asked, sounding more puzzled than she intended.

            He told her.  There was silence.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

The scene took place in “their” room on the first floor of the hotel, some mock mahogany and a wide high window showing a lot of sky and the dark green mountains rather near. Gregory had been shaving.  His bathrobe was open and bathing trunks of several sharp colours crossed his stomach.  He turned as Beatrix entered. “Ah”, he said, absent-mindedly and with his usual abbreviated sentences, “Was about to join you.  Missed my chance? Hey?”  Then he saw Peter entering the room behind her. 

            “I'm early, Dad,” he announced unnecessarily with abandoned guile.  “Sorry.” He noticed a moment of apprehension on his father's face. “It's OK.  The hotel found me a room here. I thought I’d prefer to be with you for a couple of days. I’ll move over here tomorrow.”

            “That's good.”  It was a matter of pride for Gregory not to show he was ruffled.  His mind had whizzed around a few things; not so much Beatrix's stern face, but Jane who yet knew nothing of his plans for her. “So.  Gentleman, Pete!  How good to see you.  Good journey?” His genuine pleasure at seeing his son began to win through the momentary alarm.  The smooth sound of his own urbanity calmed him.  It also brought Peter's wide grin back to his face.  Beatrix in striking contrast was not smiling, the thunder on her face reached at least to her waistline!  She was keeping her mouth shut for fear of what would come out.

            “I've met her, Dad.”  Peter beamed as if he was announcing an ascent of the Matterhorn.

            “Indeed you have.”  Gregory had caught sight of his wife's frown.  It was no less conspicuous than the sham Louis Quatorze wardrobe. “What a happy meeting,” he gushed. More in hope.  Jovially, he waved everyone into the room.  They were already there.  And it was now rather a cramped room, so no-one moved.  Gregory was not one to admit a change in the weather till he had to; and Beatrix had been too dumbstruck at the news of Gregory's unknown son to make her sulk audible, yet.  But he could see the moment coming when he would need to dodge the bolts of lightning. “I remember, Peter, when your grandmother first saw you. A baby.  In arms.  Before your time, my dear,” he addressed Beatrix, as an aside. “Peter's twenty-one, now. Three days ago, right?”  Peter nodded.  Beatrix glowered.  “She took one look at you – ‘Orang-utan’ she said.  ‘Long and lanky.’”  He guffawed. Peter laughed.   Beatrix wisely made no comment still.  “She had not known anything about you till I dangled you in her lap – “Wild man of the bungle” she said.”  His infectious joviality came powerfully from the increasing loudness of his voice.  “Oh. Twenty-one years.”

            “She knew what his father was,” Beatrix suddenly added bitterly, “Bungler.”  It was the beginning of the insult which something in her believed would pay him back for the jolt to her sanity she had just received.  With a world that was as carefully groomed as her make-up everyday, an unknown step-son had been a slap in the middle of it, smudging and stinging. The news that Gregory had had a preceding life before her, deflated her dignity.  She felt as crumpled as a discarded bra.  She had never paused to consider any prior relationship in his life.

            “What's that?”  Gregory inquired looking round as if inviting her to join in the joking.

            “A bungle,” she repeated, rather overloud, “You're pretty familiar with that sort of thing, aren't you?”  And she turned suddenly to sit heavily on the end of the bed in a heap.

            “Let's all sit down,” he said managerially; and put himself on the other end of the bed. The room seemed surprisingly small, but with a veranda outside, too hot to venture into in daytime. He was looking relaxed as his robe flopped beside him.  Peter looked around the room and decided to lean his bottom against a convenient chest of drawers, an imitation of something priceless.  So far, he was satisfied that Beatrix had been left to smoulder uselessly.

            Gregory had not finished with his happy reminiscences, “You did look pretty wizened when you were born.”

            “Has he got a mother,” Beatrix asked in mock sweetness. “How many more kids have you got hidden away?”  She turned to sarcasm, “How many mothers?” And then to hate, “What do you think I feel?” She felt he had not thought about her at all. Hearing the sound of her own voice she was in danger of getting worked up into a tirade.  “You're the father of a monkey!  What's the mother?”

            Gregory spread his hands in an appeasing gesture, as if she was being entirely unreasonable.  “Look,” he said and paused while he thought out what she was supposed to look at.  “It was long ago.  He's twenty-one.”  He swept a hand around the tight room towards Peter, as a car salesman might display his wares. “That means it was twenty-one years ago,” he added in all seriousness as if she needed the explanation.  She was about to resume the crescendo that had begun to build up, but he continued, “A kind of birthday occasion.  For him to come down here.”  He appealed for reason as if to a jury that could not possibly convict him.  “What do you think?”  But he did not have a sympathetic audience.

            Beatrix wanted to know why she had not been told. Peter wanted Beatrix to shut up. Gregory was half enjoying the rumpus that only he could sort out.  He stood up and leaned against the window frame.  The afternoon air came through it like a flame-thrower.  His excitement in this temperature brought beads of perspiration to his face.  He looked the part of a manic impresario.  Everyone and everything in sight had been bought with his money and his energy.  All he had to do was dominate them.  Except, of course, the money was hers; and all Peter wanted was his father to himself.

            “Let's all sit down, and take this calmly,” he repeated in his excitement.  Nobody moved as he beamed more desperately at one and then the other of them.  He looked like a conjuror concluding a trick that would amaze his audience.  Beatrix felt tears welling up noisily.  Peter held down his impatience with her by staring blandly at his father. “He's a fine boy,” Gregory said looking round at Peter as if checking for himself.  “The mother,” he started, as if this was a new thought, and continued in a confidential tone to Beatrix, “The mother's a bit of disgrace.”

            “Quite so,” she added bitterly.

            “I haven't seen her for... Ooo.  A long time,” he announced vaguely. “When was it, Pete?” He decided to specify a time for her. “When you were seven.  A bit of a disgrace,” he added as if musing to himself on a memory that pained him. Then, very quickly he brightened up and said, “Well, we don't want to talk about that in front of the boy. That's that,” and he rubbed his hands together.  Peter stared intently at the sobbing figure of Beatrix.  Not with compassion, nor without. Simply curious at the kind of woman his father had married.  Gregory, familiar over the years with his wife's moods, spread his hands again in his usual gesture, “C'mon, darling.” He reverted to a more vernacular accent that referred back to long ago in his childhood origins.  There was a kind of self-mockery in it, “Let's have a smile.”

            The effect on Beatrix was hardly a cessation of her tears, more a sucking them back inside her as she drew herself up into a queenly pose. Without lifting her head, she could still give the immediate impression of looking down her nose. “Handkerchief,” she announced in her own accent that had moved up the scale with an equal and opposite force. “Handkerchief, my dear.”  And Gregory humbly offered his.  The restoration of her aplomb had been cleverly engineered by his descent into a momentary servility.  All of this, a tiny drama they seemed to have accomplished many, many times before in their marriage, was a slick collaborative performance, smoothed and oiled with years of performing together.

            Peter felt a scarring ire in his belly, as if a ball of barbed wire was working its way through his system: Beatrix preening her ego whilst Gregory suddenly cringed.  Peter wanted to send a clenched fist winging its way through the air at her head; but what he said was: “I've met her Dad.  Not Beatrix.  The other one.  Jane.” Despite the innocent air of a lad telling his Dad some news, it was obvious he meant more.  It was truly as if a fist had landed with force on the top of Beatrix's head!  She bounced. Her startle reverberated on the bedsprings and she shot up a couple of inches.

            Gregory, too, labouring to restore Beatrix after Peter's first bombshell, was himself caught unawares by the second.  He mumbled ruefully, “You've really got your timing right today, haven't you, Pete?  We need to get better co-ordinated.”

            Peter looked at his father seriously.  He had already written off Beatrix as unworthy of his father.  She no longer counted for any consideration. “Come on, Dad.  Let's leave her for a minute.  I need to talk it over with you.  Come down to the bar.”  He mooched out of the room.  His quandary was the jaundiced Jane.

            Gregory now torn between the two of them, had every right to be angry with his son who had stirred poison far beyond any reasonable limits. But instead, he turned rather sharply to Beatrix. “See what you've done,” he snapped inexplicably.  He followed his son.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

But Beatrix was no longer going to preserve her role of frail victim wreathed in sobs.  Hampered by her need to redo her make-up, she flounced into the hotel lounge some ten minutes after father and son had reached there. Peter had explained his predicament; the welcome that had not been forthcoming from Jane; the humiliating rebuffs she had delivered like letter bombs.  Gregory had soothed.  The party in question being not present he refused to believe that she was so obstinately unfriendly.  He sustained his familiar wishful thinking and advised persistence and stamina.  And Peter knew no better.

            Beatrix entered, unusually with a presence the size of a mountain like the lion emerging from the cage in the big top. Both the men held their breath. If only she had remained standing, their apprehension at her fury would have prolonged their sudden shrinking. But she sat down suddenly like a pocket-knife snapping shut.  She looked immediately reduced, as reduced as she felt. “Now, she said thickly, “who's Jane. It's not her, that health farm woman. She's not here, is she?”  Suddenly she seemed to be pleading, pleading for an answer.

            “Right.”  Gregory glowed with a hopeless smile.  He swallowed and recovered his garrulousness.  “Well. Jane, of course, is an old colleague,” he turned to Peter as if they had not been having the talk they had in fact had.  He continued as if explaining to Peter. “She is an old colleague, a friend really of Bea's and mine.  We've known her for years.  For years and years.  She works closely with us.  In an associated company, actually.  I've helped her a good deal.  You know what it's like.  In business; scratch my back, scratch yours, what?”

            Beatrix watched him.  The stinging energy she had so recently felt had nearly evaporated. What had happened; why had that woman turned up?  What had Gregory brought her here for, into the midst of their holiday together?  For that matter, what had he brought this spindly illegitimate kid for? “What is going on?” A madhouse. “Where's she staying? Here?”

            “Oh, Bea!” Gregory reacted as if unreasonably taxed. “Of course not. She wanted a holiday. I told her where we were going to be. She found a hotel somewhere around here.”

            “About a kilometre down the road,” Peter added helpfully.

            Beatrix had judged that a tearful performance again so soon would not get the same result.  In that case she could do nothing but express her perplexity, and her deep, deep sense of suspicion.

            “Don't be suspicious.  My dear heart.”  Gregory remonstrated. “It's not like you to get ideas in your head.”  The ambiguity in what he had said was lost on him at that moment.  And on her too.

            “Everybody knows she eats men,” she said to Peter as if he had asked. “Gregory is the only one who has stood up to her temptations. That's right, isn't it Gregory? You've always told me that.”

            “Sure.  I have always told you that.”  This time he was aware of an evasive meaning.  “You have always believed me.  I told young Peter here to come on out to France and he...” even Gregory had to think for a moment what words to use, “he could keep her company for a bit.  Since she is here.  On her own.”

            “I don't see it.” She was close to whining; begging for Gregory's reassurance, “I don't understand.  Why has she come here on her own.  She could get anybody to come with her - from Prince Charming to King Kong; they'd follow her like dogs.” She looked at Peter and before she had a chance to continue, Gregory pounced on her words.

            “But you see, of course, she wants to be alone. That's the problem.  Flies around the proverbial honeypot.  She can't get away”.

            “So you fixed her up with the boy here?”

            “Yup,” he said defiantly, “She is not going to be bothered by him, is she?” Peter blanched.  Gregory did not look at him.

            “Let's pack.  We're going,” she announced as if to Peter.  And she stood up, once again to her queenly height.  But there was no longer the angry flush on her face, no longer the command in her stride.  She posed this time.  Both the men looked at her without movement.  She stopped before she left the lounge and with a revealing hesitation looked back.

            Gregory's astuteness gave him all the winning advantages. He knew she would not go through with leaving unless he sanctioned it.  He allowed the indignity in her hesitation to last for a moment.  And said, “Okay, love.  If you want to.  But I for one will be sad, yes, sad, if we do not have your company here.” He used the term ‘we’ carefully.  She noticed it. Her defeat seemed complete.  She returned to sit beside them again. “Your a good sort,” he said consolingly. “I knew you'd realise there's nothing to be suspicious of. She's not a bad type, Jane.  She wouldn't do anything behind your back either. Would she?”  Peter looked on at this blatant lying.  He studied Gregory's effect; how he handled a woman being difficult. Plenty of tips to tuck away for future use and gain.

            “I'd like to ring her?” Beatrix said, ingenuously. “I'm sure she would like to hear from us.”  She gave them a brave smile, as if adjusting the chairs after a dinner party had left. Anger, suspicion, fear for her marriage, all must be put behind them. “Shall we ring, and give her a surprise?”

            “Sure,” Gregory said relaxing. “Later”'

            “No.  Let's invite her over here for dinner.  And you too,” she said to Peter.

            Peter looked at his father.  His father looked at him.  “It's a lovely idea, my darling.  Peter, never forget the kindness this woman can show.  But Bea, honestly, I know that Jane wants to be away from it all.  She has enough of me at work.  Know what I mean.”

            “Oh, no, Gregory,” she said flirtatiously and perking up. “I don't know what you mean.  I could never have enough of you!”

            “That's a dear,” and he put out his hand to pat her knee leaving it there just slightly longer than necessary to convey a possessiveness; a suggestiveness.

            Her knee felt to her like meat, its skin, dead paper. It did not belong.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Whilst Peter walked back down the lane, Gregory nipped ahead in his brash Porsche, his phone to his ear. Peter rehearsed in his mind all he had learned.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Even Jane realised she could not spend so much of her time looking in the mirror searching her form for any emerging clues to the decay and decomposition to her perfect image which was bound to start someday.  So, she was relieved when the phone rang.  She slumped down with it in front of the wide window.  Even her underwear seemed to be overdressing in the heat. From the earpiece came the familiar metric rhythm of one of their favourite poems. “John Donne,” she said sulkily.

            “J.D., quite right.  Good girl,” Gregory responded breezily.  “Us - we're just like that.”  It was the old formula they had grown up with.  Two people like one.  “Love and poetry, they're symbiotic.  L-and-P.”

            “L, little-a, P,” she recited in response.

            “Love and poetry, like twins who feed each other.”

            “You, little-a, M.  You and me, we're the same”' she continued sing-song fashion.

            “You and me.  My Love.  We go together, always have done.”

            She always thought of way back, at that young age. Gregory and his lanky friend, Len, kids of thirteen, had chased her into an alleyway, scared her half to death, and had cut off one of her pigtails.  She had been five.  Then her violent stepfather had scared her to death too when she got home, with his belt. Forbidden ever to meet those ruffians again. And in fact, still it seemed estranged from them today.

            “So,” he continued now conversationally, “how goes it?” Just the question she could not answer for herself.  So, she was silent.  He picked up the tension and wariness, “I'm coming over.  I'm in the car now.  I got away earlier today.”

            The moment he got to her room, he began again, “You've met Peter, have you?” He spread his remark with a nonchalance he was not feeling.

            “Your weedy office rat,” she enquired.  At first there was some humour, added to the grating displeasure. “What did you send him spying for?”  They sat together on a tiny terrace outside her room, no more than a window ledge.  The hotel shaded them from the afternoon sun. “You - are you getting jealous in your old age? Want to see what I get up to? He's a bit obvious, isn't he? Your office boy.”

            “Come on, GJ,” he appealed to their secret childhood past again.  The closest he could get to her.  The old taunts he and Len had thrown at her - GJ; Gypsy Jane; Gypsy tipsy Jane.  Later they had become daunted and bewildered by her sudden beauty as she emerged as a woman.  It had frightened their unsure manhood.

            “Don't call me that,” she shouted, as she had all those years ago, too.  Now she no longer frightened him, but yet she still sensed he had to work at keeping her on his side.  “He's no bloodhound.  You're wasting your money.  Send him home.”

            “No.  My love. Be nice to him.  In your usual way.  Just be nice.”

            “Oh no,” she said, or wailed, as if she could not believe she was being asked for something so preposterous.  “What the hell does ‘usual way’ mean?  I know what you usually mean.  But he's a boy.  Not with him – what's his business.  He can't be any use to us.”

            “Don't be like that.  He's a good lad.  Needs bringing on a bit.”

            “True,” she said bitingly. “Who is he?”

            “Haven't you guessed?” He kept a pause to convey significance, but she was not having that.  She sparked.

            “Guessed!  Guessed what? Of course, I have.  You've dragged me all the way out here to this wine-spattered nowhere.  The scenery's like wallpaper, the weather is a furnace; the people are cardboard.  And you want to start a quiz-show!  Guess what?”  Gregory gained a thrill when she got into her imaginative outrages.  “And you, fucking love winding me up,” she concluded as she caught the triumphant smile in his eye.

            Gregory audibly swallowed, “Okay, okay.  You win.  A long time ago,” he swallowed again. “Twenty-one years, to be precise, I became a father.  Know what I mean,” he added, hesitant – in a coy way.

            She thought she had a few sudden sarcastic comments bursting into her brain; she prepared to crank up the decibels.  But thought better of it – in these abrupt circumstances. Silence was dignified.  It will leave him guessing, she thought.  Let him swim in an empty pool.  She said nothing. “You still there,” he asked.  She said nothing.  “It's just... a helping hand – for the lad.”

            Now he remained silent, a counter-silence.

            He put his hand to her face and kissed her on the cheek. “I've got to go this time,” he said ambiguously.  She did not ask him to stay.  Her familiar anger had rendered her dumb.  Despite his apparent assured manner, in the car he phoned her back, again. “You're a good girl, my love.  I love you.”

            Still driven to silence, in the end she spoke, “I might.  Help your lad.”  She patted the place on her head where her plait might have been.  “I might,” she repeated sulkily.  “If I feel like it,” in a louder voice.  Then more shrilly, “But I don't.”  She slammed the phone down.

            Gregory switched off his telephone more calmly. He turned. “She'll be okay,” he said reassuringly to the embarrassed boy curled up around his own centre of gravity in the passenger seat.

            Peter unwound himself at the hotel and got out.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Puzzled by the mosaic of interactions he had witnessed, and not alert to most of them, he admired his father's command.  He returned to the hotel to claim his rights with Jane.  The goddess, he believed.  The opposite pole to the beastly Beatrix.  She had shed her loose clothing unceremoniously and sat on the edge of the bed in his room as featureless as he was.

            Furious – with Gregory, with herself – she had confronted the hapless youth with a wooden stare.  She still had on a pale blue silk bra with black lace, which pushed her parts into a deep cleavage.  He slowly took off his clothes, staring hypnotised at her motionless flesh.  He lay on the bed beside her.  No words were spoken.  She looked down at his long, white body.  The unfriendliness of her gaze frightened him.  Mixed with the long excitement it did not seem to be having the expected effect on him.  She picked up his limp organ between thumb and forefinger as if a dead cigarette from an ashtray.  Incensed with everyone and feeling manoeuvred into this, she let it drop again, and said with contempt “You won't get far with that, will you?” She turned her head away. As if reluctantly waiting for him.

            He put out a hand to bury several fingers in the crevasse in her brassiere.  “Can I?” he mumbled, and he started to say something he did not finish.  She let him fumble with the clasp till the straps fell away.  She neither moved nor spoke.  Her breasts came free from the cups.  In other circumstances he would have drooled, would have settled in his mind how he would describe them to his mates.  But at that point his mouth was dry, his stomach trembling with apprehension, every thought about imitating his father had abandoned him.  One palm clutched a globe.   He touched as if it were the most fragile bubble.  Its weight surprised him.  The heavens should have opened; but they did not.  Only an effort of concentration made her breast seem different from a large potato, different from a bag of tepid water.  Her wooden immobility controlled all of him.  He felt an imposter, an intruder, inadequate in the moment of violation.  Furiously, her immobility attacked him.

            But at the same time, it represented her humiliation, the ignominy in Gregory's demand for his son.  The whole of her life she had worked for him, worked under him.... screwed under him!  Her thoughts could not be completed, could not be vulgar enough to describe herself. Her time had been one long degradation by Gregory from her earliest years.  She fumed.  She found herself obediently putting out one slender elegant forearm to feel between his thighs for his sensitive parts again.  They rested in the cradle of her strong fingers.  The balance between gently soothing them and ripping them off was an exceedingly fine one at that moment.  She found herself beginning to squeeze, she felt the temptation to crush this lad's maleness into paste.  The desire to destroy the father through macerating the son was almost irresistible. Almost.

            In turn he looked in alarm at her arm bearing his trophy. He was not sure if he was being offered excitement by this steely woman. In his innocence he uttered “Aagh...!” thickly and as if acquiescing to her powers.  But his fear told him he was in danger. “Ouch.  I say.  That...” She let go. “That hurt a good bit.” Her mercy reprieved the father; and the boy.

            She looked down at his organ again.  And he looked down at it too.  It was stubbornly limp.  In a moment of brief conciliation, she leaned herself across his chest, lowered one shoulder onto his and lay for a moment in contact with him, her face turned away, his arm pinned so that he could not do any foraging or fumbling. After a brief while she said, “I don't think you and I are going to get very far, are we, boy?”  Then she suddenly sat upright, squared her shoulders back so that her breasts hung above him, “Why don't you just rub yourself, and we'll call it a day.” She knew how to hurt. “Perhaps women are not what you are into.”  He obeyed. He would not let her see tears fall. She turned her head and fixed her eyes on the wall in the stiff pose of an artist's model.  Afterwards she climbed silently into her jeans and, buttoning her blouse, she closed the door behind her leaving him wiping himself with a dirty sock.

            She padded barefoot down the stone corridor, her gold sandals in one hand, and her humiliation, unmodified, in her heart. On his bed he allowed himself a few gasping sobs.  He had not cried since his first fight in his school.

            There was the whine of a curlew whistling through the country lanes in the distance.  But neither of them noticed.

 

                                                          ---------- <^> ----------

 

Unlike Jane, Beatrix humiliation was screened by a numbness, a grisly emptiness.  It had been inexpressible. The advent of the boy, and, on top, the appearance of the sly Jane and her mystery presence, that spoke volumes of suspicion. It was the very lack of means to express any of it any more that delivered the dark cloud of numbness in thinker and thicker proportions She could only now pretend, a pretence was all the options he left her.  She was a million miles from his confident belief that he had smoothed everything out for her; had settled her ruffled feelings; had, in the process, convinced her of the silliness of her feelings.  Tragically his confidence was unfounded.  They were sitting close together on the hotel terrace in the lateness of that afternoon. The sun was calming towards evening. A tiny lapping sound came from the river some 15 metres below.  Gregory's hand was proprietorially on Beatrix's thigh.  He believed in total possession.  And that was what Beatrix gave him.  Helplessly, she did.  It left her no escape, no room to manoeuvre.  There were no words that could form her predicament, no appeal to him about the hurt that burned like a ruthless acid in the place where she wanted love.  He required only that she pretend; a pretence that he had made everything alright for her again.  Her loneliness was all the more vast for the silence it occupied.

            She could bear it no longer.  She knew she must do it suddenly.  The moment came, the most silent one she had ever heard.  She lurched from the chair to the balustrade at the edge of the terrace.  As if in perfect slow motion, one foot on the top of the rail, a super-human stride into the air, and she threw herself from the terrace.  She briefly noticed the rocks innocently lapped by the gentle water, her wail was not fear, merely a sad defeat.  She hit them head-first.  The water accepted the body.  And carefully rippled around it.

            Gregory was already on his feet leaning over the rail, arms outstretched.  A small knot of hotel guests gathered instantly to gaze down with him at the sudden corpse.  One man was over immediately clambering down, slipping and gashing himself.  Another had miraculously found a rope, and was throwing it down to the climber; making it fast on the rail.  The receptionist had already rung for the ambulance.

            It made the countryside echo with its wail.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Duncan

 

The South Coast of England from Brighton to Bognor Regis is sometimes known as the Costa Geriatrica.  It is a complacent self-mocking term used by innumerable London civil servants who retire there to watch each other crumble away.  The climate is balmy, the undertaking trade is discretely buoyant and the traffic moves sedately on the roads.

Out there was the world he knew. In here was another world. When Grace left that first evening, Graham tidied his locker.  His clothes had gone back with Grace.  The toothbrush, towel, the magazine she had bought  him, all these he looked at carefully and put away. He felt a desperate affection for these simple things that had come with him as if they represented his only friends in this new place.  The doctor from the outpatients, the nurses there who had taken his blood, the receptionist, all those people he had come to like in the hospital, seemed so far away now.  He had not seen any of them on the ward.  The evening sky outside was darkening, and a nurse came to pull across the curtains over the great plate-glass windows.  He got onto his bed first of all in his pyjamas.  He put on the old dressing-gown that he had since they moved to their present house - was it fourteen years ago.  Opposite his bed was a wall of curtains.

It brought to mind leaving on the train, the platform awash with couples parting. Duncan was two then, and Grace was pregnant. So much unknown.  He felt that mystification again now.  Then too there were fears of death.  It had been wartime, and they may never meet again ‑ lost forever. There was no space, to know what to say. Time had closed into a tight ball. The train had shuddered and jolted inches forwards and gradually it was pulling out of the station away, away. He looked at them looking, his wife, his little son. 

Deadened, he had sat back in a seat after waving from the carriage window, wondering how they would get on at home, making their lives without him.  The night had become dark he pulled down the blind over the window shutting out the other world outside. 

The long, limp hospital curtains now hung before him as if a screen for these old memories to play out upon. Then, that miserable journey, he had not slept on the hard horsehair seats. He jostled the unknown soldier next to him, supporting each other's upright balance. When he had got off the train and walked onto the early morning ferry to Larne the crisp air, and the blue-green deserted mountains chilled his spirit yet again.  This world was foreign, deserted. He had looked at the others as if they were zombies, as he felt himself, cut off from life, as they went aboard, all on the grim business of the war. They dispersed to the submarine bases, the anti-aircraft installations, the small aerodromes from where they tried to hunt the enemy submarines. They were tasting a kind of freedom, the freedom of loneliness it seemed. Belfast would become this mysterious new home. 

He placed the magazine, that Grace had bought for him, on the locker beside the bed, to remain as if it were his only memory. It remained unopened and now he almost felt a disloyal as if he were neglecting her thoughtfulness to him. He glanced at a few pages. Why did she have to buy these things. The people who write the columns will say anything, and he sucked the air through his teeth in disapproval.  It was important to keep his mind focused. Roaming through the junk of his memory... it served no purpose.  But there was so little going on in the ward, and his thoughts were darting to different things as he was  trying to sleep.  He had put the magazine away, ‘how was Grace managing the bolt on the front door?’  He should have seen to it long ago.  Now she would struggle with it on her own so far away.

What would the doctor find tomorrow! He owed it to Grace to let them find out what it was.  She was not worried; she always believed in his strength, reassured him it would be all right.  But no one knew. No one knew what was wrong; even the doctor had found it interesting. And, chilled by the thought of tomorrow’s investigation, he drifted into his first night's disturbed sleep.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The view was a monotonous November grey, some bare trees stood unmoving in the concrete compound of the hospital.  Inside, the pale curtains draped themselves against the aluminium frames of the picture windows. Each of the four beds in `C' alcove faced the world beyond where their inmates had come from.  Would any of them return out there? And if so for how long.  He had had 78 years, a goodly time.  But the last week had happened with such speed.  Investigations, what would they find?  Grace had packed the things he needed, and they had driven here, neither speaking, silently aware of an unknown future. Perhaps they had been ill-assorted for marriage, but neither of them dwelt on the thought. They had been happy - happy for them -  at least for these last 13 years since they’d moved here from London.  And at their age, you never knew how long it would go on.  They had silently driven along the coast, neither thinking those thoughts, though they were known, and both knew the other felt the same. Grace had left quickly. It was an opportunity to shop; practical as ever. Life as usual.  Grace was economical and opportunist.

 

Staff Nurse Timpton had moved in quickly and turned down the bed in crisp fashion to welcome his body. “Thank you, Nurse”'  She whisked off, her slipstream leaving Graham holding his pyjamas. 

“She's the best of them. said a voice from the bed beyond his, A ghastly pale face; a body motionless in bed. “She's like our boy's wife.” the voice continued.  “And they've both got a couple of young ones, about the same ages. Anthea, this one is called.  She doesn't like being joked.”  His strained features hardly looked capable of humour.  “She always comes when you want something - when it's her shift. They change over at one-fifteen.” Graham sat on the edge of his bed listening to this old boy.  He looked very near the end.  “Can you give me a shove up the bed?  It feels better like that,” he said heavily.  Graham did his best to pull the feeble body; “One of the vertebras,” he said briefly. “They say its given way.” The moist old eye in the worn skin looked him over shrewdly.  “Have we met before?”  Then he turned back to face the wall again, away from the damp grey outside the window. “I was Home Office,” he said as if to himself now, as if talking to his own pain, “for most of my time.” 

            

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He sat back on his own bed and the Nurse came round for routine checks, tightening the cuff on his arm. “Not much blood left in me, I expect,” he tried to be light-hearted.  She did not emerge from her heavy effort, so no response came. His mind flashed: the finger clutching his bare arm, the crimson varnished nail, so cruelly painted; where had she got nail-varnish in the wartime? Not that, he told himself; why did he still cling to that old memory.  The Nurse took the earpieces out of her ears.   

“She's a flighty one,” came the frail voice from the next bed. “Told me all about her boyfriends,” and with a despairing laugh, “as if I were interested. They have a different life nowadays.” He seemed exhausted by the thought and relaxed into silence.

They do things differently. Graham thought of Duncan; truly they did have it very different. He  hadn't wanted it for himself, and nor had he begrudged Duncan, well…  not until Duncan had let himself down. Graham sat still sinking into thoughts about Duncan.  It had been such a shock when it had first happened, and still a shock eight years on.  Lesley had come down with the grandchildren in a terrible state.  It had not been a question of understanding it; it simply could not be understood.  They did things differently.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The thoughts left a sense of doom and a tense damp feeling in his skin as if he had been sweating slightly.  He thought of Grace, at home, on her own.  He hoped she had locked up properly before she went to bed. He thought of Lesley, on her own, Duncan's wife, now ex-wife - since Duncan had left her... he had just walked out. That's what Lesley had said.  She just came down to Grace with the grandchildren. It had been inexplicable.  Ever since then it was as if everything had gone wrong with the family.  Somehow, they – he and Grace - had all got tangled up in the friction and quarrels.  Duncan had never been able to explain himself, and yet he had always been so responsible, a Doctor, one who knew about people, about children's upbringing.  Graham caught himself.  There was that little stirring in his stomach that he felt when one of his tempers was coming on.

Thoughts went round and round, stirring his living flesh, churning up emotions and moods that continually needed controlling.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He lay on his back staring. Duncan was middle-aged, and even middle age was different for Duncan's generation.  He seemed so boyish. Perhaps, for Graham, it had been the war years. That's what Grace had said - "We had the war, dear; they don't understand that.  It made us... serious.  More serious than they are now". Nowadays they do what they want. When Graham  was young, it was the economic depression, unemployment, insecurity.  Well, there is unemployment now; but look at the social security; it is a featherbed. In his own generation you had to work for everything. Nothing fell into your lap, and he was proud in his achievement. Not like that now; all this pushing and shoving and getting in first.  In those days, he had been able to feel closer to people. He would never have known Rose like that in any other circumstances.  It just shows, does it not? Why does Rose keep coming to his mind?

Even young and still at school, he had known that if he wanted to have some security, he would have to go out and work hard to get it.  He had gone to night classes and got his exams well enough.  The civil service was secure.  And he had saved to marry. They had bought their own house in 1933. There had been things that had gone wrong of course.  Grace's first child had been born a dead one; but the next year Duncan had come along and he had been healthy, more or less. Of course, he had worried them when he was three and nearly caught his death of a cold. It would have been a great blow. Grace might not have been able to bear it. She had been on her own then because he had gone back to his station, in Aberdeen, after the new baby, Tony, was born. She had not said a word to him about Duncan’s illness until the little chap was out of the critical phase.  He had been cross with Grace for not telling him - but proud of her at the same time for managing their little family on her own.  It made him feel that they, and the home, such as they had, was safe with her.  It had made it all the more difficult when he had found himself with Rose that evening.

The  nurses were beginning to stir. Those thoughts of his, the heavy and light thoughts of the past, seeped back into the underground of his mind. He felt set apart from these young ones.  He was tired and they should care for him.  Grace had always said it had been a hard life for them as a couple, and they had a right to enjoy themselves now he had retired - that was why they had moved down here to the south coast.  Of course, they had enjoyed themselves at times all through; he was sure of that. Though there had been rows and difficulties in the family.  Tony had been surly and difficult at times - and Duncan of course... he was the one for a fight.  But Grace had always been patient and tolerant.  She never lost her temper.  Why was it so difficult that she never lost her temper? It was the great asset the family had was Grace being so even-tempered.  He knew he was not so himself.  It often made him feel worse - but he must not complain.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sister Timpton sailed down the ward at about 7 o’clock. "Come along, Mr Dawson,” she called, “You really must get tidy in the morning,” and she swept by him.  The nurses, he had begun to realise, are at their hardest in the morning, as if they have to reassert their authority all over again for the coming day.  Graham did not feel disposed to go along with it. He noticed the boiling feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he resented that they should give him the problem of dealing with that turmoil there. But what could he do? His lips tightened. He asked when she expected the doctor to come round.  It was urgent in his mind. “We look after you in here,” she coolly replied, and as she did so, her hands went to the top of his pyjama trousers and started to roll them down.  He was surprised by the elegance of her fingers and the gentleness of her touch. He felt a warmth, though stern, as she peeled away the cloth.  “The doctor will come when you are ready to be looked at.” She pushed his pyjama jacket up from his tummy.  He was now exposed from his ribs to his hips in front of her. And she parted the curtains and bustled out. She left a gap in his privacy and occasionally, as he waited, he could see other patients moving around He lay back. 

He thought of his mother who used to use the same steamy and starched manner. At one time, he had lain for weeks when he had been ill as a child.  Just before the First World War, he remembered, because he was convalescing when war was declared.  He had developed such a weakness in his legs and a fever in his head.  Nobody knew what it was. They could only afford to have the doctor once.  He had shaken his head a few times and whispered to mother.  She had been stony-faced and said nothing to him after the doctor had gone. His feet had, ever after, tensed up into a permanent claw-like shape.  His mother had never said anything. Duncan had been very interested in the shape of his father's feet. As a student at his medical school, he seemed to think that there was something special about the feet. Graham had recalled that there may have been others in his family who had deformed feet, extra high arches.  Duncan had got to medical school, so clever, they had almost not known what to do with him; so clever he had made himself unpleasant. He could make them feel such fools.  Mother had said, had warned Graham, it was no good pushing Duncan along.  The child should find his own way.  But if he had the gift of intelligence, Graham thought surely it should be husbanded and brought out.  Perhaps he had made a rod for his back by encouraging Duncan.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

He had had to wait all morning for the doctor to arrive. The afternoon began when it seemed the morning was only half-complete.  Lunch things were whisked away with a busy clatter and the thunder of the lift had echoed round the ward. A buxom nurse brought the bedpan.  She could make her body quiver in her starched uniform, which he did not like.  Some of the other men laughed and teased her like schoolboys. Men should control all that even if some women flaunted themselves.  Duncan must have been like that, letting himself notice girls.  It did no good in the long run.  Look where it had got him.

 

She bustled around the bed, tucked the laundered sheets tightly in again so that he was pinned frailly in bed like an invalid.  He felt managed in an old-fashioned way, his legs almost amputated by her enthusiasm with the sheets. “You had forgotten me,” he said morosely trying to be light about it. 

“Don't you worry about the Doctor,” she commanded.  “He'll come when he can.” The fresh creases of her uniform kept brushing against his fingers, or his cheeks.  He moved quickly aside from her close presence.  `Oh, sorry!  Did I knock you?” half mocking. “We're feeling a bit fragile today, are we?' with a momentary hint of quarrelsomeness in her voice, the slightest of threats. But then – “Don't you forget to call me when you want anything. Sister is off this afternoon, so I can make a fuss of you all today.” And she bustled off seemingly satisfied with settling him. But he felt very unsettled.The pain in his back was largely forgotten.  But sometimes it caught him off-guard as he turned, and then his head whizzed in a daze of wincing surprise. They had looked at his blood had told him it was "Myeloma".  Duncan had to explain.  But why should his blood hurt his back?  It did not stand to reason. 

In a stir, the air moved apart and the long ward was cleft by the speeding arrow of time as the Doctor, at last the Doctor, came straight towards him.  He homed like a missile towards his bed.  The Doctor made it no clearer; he said very little, and prodded his back as if it were hardly to do with Graham.  He was a stranger, and young and perhaps he was new.

In fact, the young doctor seemed more interested in the little nurse who was moving around him, fetching things, the blood pressure pump, or the tray with special instruments.  He told Graham there had to be more tests to look into his breastbone. Or his hipbone. He talked quickly and Graham felt inpatient.

He was proud of a long life he had lived.  Yet his two brothers, for ever his comparisons, and who he had outstripped all his life in all the achievements that meant anything, were both hale and hearty. What an irony if he, when he had done so well compared with them, should perish first.  The thought leapt darkly across his mind.  The thing to do was to wait until the consultant came round next.  Then he could know how long it would take them to get him better.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

“Your wife's here, Mr D,” the nurse said hardly bothering to put her head round the partition into the alcove.  Graham glanced back at his newspaper and then turned towards the opening into the alcove.  He put his pen down beside the bed and raised his hand carefully to take off his glasses. 

As Grace came into view he gave her a dignified smile, she pecked him on the cheek, “Hallo, dear.  You’ve got a paper, have you? I brought one in for you just in case. How are you?” she purred.  She made herself natural and at home beside his bed. “So, so,” he said noncommittally.

Graham looked at the basket she had brought and watched her bringing things out.  “It's very good of you,” he said warmly, familiarly. “There's a young chap along the corridor went down for papers.  A lot of the men in here smoke,”

I brought your dressing gown in,” she explained unnecessarily, “and your slippers.”  Grace's homeliness was infectious.  He remembered the separations from her in the wartime, coming home to quiet domestic routines, little Duncan always very serious, and the baby Tony who took up so much of Grace's time in those early days.  She would say the same then – “How are you dear?” 

And he would reply, “So, so,” never liking to tell her how he hated being away from home. 

And she would continue, straightaway “I've done some baked potatoes.  Come along Duncan, clear the table for me.  Daddy is ready to eat.  We'll all eat together today, shall we?”  Her quiet formal organizing never let out how relieved she was to have him back, perhaps she did not let herself know it exactly.  It had been a question of carrying on as normal for all of them in those days; the whole country did.  Grace had played her part, was be an exemplary model of the stoical spirit of wartime. 

Once, he had shown Duncan the gun out of his kitbag, and the small boy had looked carefully at it, not sure if it was a toy his Daddy had brought. It seemed his parents were anxious with it, “Be careful now”, his father had said.  Duncan had taken it thoughtfully as if a little overwhelmed.  Grace had looked out of the corner of her eye as she poured the tea into the cups. 

As soon as he had put it down on the tablecloth, she had said swiftly, “Drink up your tea, Duncan, there's a good boy. Let's show Daddy how grown up you are.” And Duncan had drunk his tea in small swallows, putting the cup down with a slight gasp for breath. His mother had said previously there was something important to talk about now he was five. He had started school and he could do many more things for himself, and could help with little Tony, and did not need to shout and cry anymore.

Graham had been proud of his eldest son.  Yet he sometimes felt a little uneasy about Grace’s way of talking to him.  He never knew exactly what it was about, Grace and Duncan being serious with each other, but he felt uncomfortable.  He had often told her to be more disciplining with the boy. Yet proud he was. And how glad that their oldest had in the end been a boy.  But that was another thought that had to be controlled. Grace would have thought of first baby, the dead one, them little girl. Grace would have been hurt by his thought.

Grace interrupted these reminiscences. She had sat in the robust hospital armchair, “Are they looking after you all right, dear?'” 

“Well enough,” he replied, “can’t grumble.  The food isn’t up to much.  But they're trying hard.” 

“Oh,” she replied. “They're trying hard, of course they are.  Dr Rees was so chatty wasn't he, in the clinic.  He took so much time with us.  To tell the truth,” Grace smirked, “I think the out-patient Sister got a bit fed up with the amount of time he was taking with us.”  Then she continued without a change in her voice, “Has he been round to see you yet?”

“No,” said Graham, “I only came in…” he thought “yesterday, wasn't it?”  He was suddenly slightly puzzled.  He felt he had been lying here for weeks.  “A young lady came round and took a lot of blood from my arm.” He said it partly to calm himself. “She used several syringes. I said to her ‘What are you going to do with it?’  She was from the pathological laboratory.  Anyway it’s someone else's blood isn't it; can't be mine after all those transfusions.”

“It's the pathology department,” Grace corrected him.  “Dr Rees said they would have to test your blood while your here. I don't see what it’s got to do with my back.”  Graham drew in his breath, “It's your bone marrow.”  Grace, still patient, “They have to test that, as well.  How is your back, dear?”  She could ride out his tetchiness by ministering her care. She looked down sadly to her lap where she was still holding the slippers.  She looked up again at Graham's face. “I thought I should ring Duncan last night, too.” 

 That would have been difficult for Grace.  He was grateful.  She always did the phoning, and he was glad she had dealt with Duncan.  He wished, for a reason that escaped him, that he had been able to speak to Duncan. Her eyes were slightly watery. “He seemed very touched,” she said, “He wanted to ring Dr Rees. Sort of doctor to doctor, isn't it?” She continued, somewhat coolly, “I expect he will.” There was a pause. “He said he will come to see you on Sunday, in the afternoon.” And she added, coyly, “I thought you wouldn't mind.”

Graham felt the knot in his stomach tighten.  What would he say to Duncan?  There was nothing to say. Yet there was everything.

Grace was looking at Graham in a plaintive. and slightly accusing way, “Don't get onto...,” she fumbled with her words, “don’t get into any arguments.” He knew he should not lose his temper. 

“He's too full of himself,” he snapped. “You would have thought he could control himself.  He’s 45 and still treats us like…” 

“Lesley said the grandchildren are fine.”  Grace blatantly stepped in, and Graham could see that she was trying to control his outburst before it happened.

But he wasn’t going to be controlled, and he turned up the pressure, “He has become too big for his boots. Doctor’s think they are tin gods,” he said crushingly. “I don’t mind who he is. If he wants to come and see me, he can. If he wants money, he can ask for it,” he raced on grandly. 

“Ooh,” Grace interrupted, “I am sure he only wants to see how you are”.  She tried to soothe the conflagration as if with an inflammable fire-beater.  Graham snorted as if nobody could add a worthwhile word to the crescendo of his implied accusations.  And then he stopped himself, as if realising that Duncan was not present, and no use if he was not present to hear it. 

Suddenly he found in himself how much he really wanted to talk to Duncan about all sorts of things. What changed in that instant? 

Later Grace was beginning to gather her things. He would be on his own. Always loneliness took him back to that moment… 

After she had gone, his thoughts turned naturally to being alone those years ago, away from home, his family trying to get away from bombed London. And when that secret had happened. That moment with Rose. He did his best never to think of it. But then, he had to tell Duncan something of how he understood what had happened, what Duncan had done.

He wanted more than anything to tell Duncan about it, to tell someone about it.  Duncan seemed the only one who could now listen.  But then….  Could he be as bad as Duncan?  He turned his thoughts away and that night he asked the nurse for something to sleep.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

The day was bright.  The pale grey clouds were wisps in a clear blue sky. He ran his fingers through his hair.  It was greasy.  His heart ached now for those times which were surely gone.

            He wanted a bath, but simple amenities in the ward were difficult to arrange. His hair had always tended towards greasiness.  Normally, he would ply his hair with liquid paraffin to absorb the dandruff.  It was an old-fashioned remedy, but still the best perhaps. It always looked sleek, fashionable in those days  Grace used to complain of the smell. Somehow that had not mattered.  The smell soon went.  Rose had once suggested he should go to the doctor about his dandruff. That had been a long, long time ago, way back in the wartime.  He had looked at her, and she was not joking; she was worried for him.  He reassured her in the way that had always satisfied her. He used to smile, run his hand through his hair, then frown slightly as if he had it all in hand and had been thinking about the problem. She would smile, hold the bundles of letters or files in her hand, the robust skin of her working hands looked very capable.  He liked the practical no-nonsense style about her.  It reminded him of his mother. 

            The sun was progressing steadily round the corner of the far wing of the hospital building, like a ship rounding into the mouth of a harbour, like the fishing boats returning that time that he and Rose had walked down to the docks, in the evening after work.  They had both been shaken by the news of the plane that had gone missing on its way to the Orkneys.  He should have been on that plane and but for his flu he would have disappeared too.

            Somehow, they had gone for a stroll together outside the offices in Aberdeen. He had been transferred from Belfast, and there were two girls in office for the typing. Rose had a strong highland accent. He had decided to go to the shop downstairs for cigarettes. It happened that she had also been just going to the shops for something. So, in her bright manner, she suggested they wander outside. They found themselves at the waterfront and she had leant on the rail while he went for his cigarettes. Then he returned to her and they gazed in silence over the calm cool water. It was summer, even in the north here. She put her hand on his bare forearm for a moment. They had stood in silence watching the boats against the sky.  Then she smoothed his hair that was ruffled by the mild breeze off the sea in that calm summer dusk.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

After a couple of days, he had resigned himself to the routines of the ward. It was Tuesday. Duncan would be coming down on Sunday evening, all the way from London. Just to see an old man like this; it was surely not necessary.  What would he say to his son? Would he tell him? 

If only he had, on that previous occasion, when was it – five years ago, no seven, it must be – he considered when Duncan and Lesley had split up.  That previous time when Duncan had come down for the evening to talk together. It had been the right time. Duncan had been late on that occasion. Actually, it turned out he had not been coming at all until Graham had rung to ask what was happening.  Grace was away, giving her counsel to Lesley. The meal Graham cooked, was in the oven. And he did not arrive.  When Graham had rung, Duncan was as off-hand as ever. He never did give credit for what had been done for him all his life. Right from the start, he demanded and was given.  He simply took what was given from the word go. He did not even wash properly and had ended up with acne all over his face.

Graham had told him all these things. And look at what he had done with his marriage. Still just taking what he wanted, even in his forties. Graham was just coming home from the war when he was forty.  Their house had been destroyed by a bomb.  Even with the young family, Grace had just got a new house; done it all herself, she had been a wonder, and he had merely come home, ‘demobbed’ to meet his family safe and sound, perhaps the most wondrous moment of his life, or very nearly so. Apart from that other moment. Perhaps she had decided to go shopping just because she saw him leaving and wante to walk with him. He turned his mind away as usual. 

Duncan knew nothing of what they had been through all those years ago.  His life had been protected and so he always thought little difficulties were big ones.  When would he learn.  He would go back to Lesley. Grace was sure. But Graham felt that Duncan had to be put to rights about his weak character. It seemed at the time that he had listened to all that.  He had seemed chastened. And opening up a crack, he told Graham about his unhappiness.  He thought that Lesley did give him a decent life, or rather, what was it….  Graham turned the other way in his chair.  But… Sister Timpton was standing over him. She put him into bed in her formal manner. 

But, when he was settled again, and she has moved on to the next bed, his mind returned to that weekend. When Duncan had arrived for the talk, they went on till two in the morning.  Duncan could have gone on talking.  They had never really talked together like that, not before, not since. 

            But even that long might had done nothing to get him back to Lesley.  It seemed he did not want to go back.  It seemed he wanted it easy. For the first time, Graham had a doubt in his mind about whether Grace was right.  Duncan wouldn’t go back, and Graham knew it. It felt conspiratorial. It had been a precious moment, for both of them.

            Perhaps he knew more of what Duncan felt than he had realised.  There was that time, so long ago now, the touch of skin. They both knew it perhaps. So different from everything else. Rose had wakened his own skin too.  Could he tell Duncan some time.  That would weld their link.  It would be the first time he had told it to anyone.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sister Timpton was on duty again.  He felt his inside grinding with scorn. “Now we are not going to get in the way of the nurses, are we?” she growled. 

“No”, piped Graham in an acquiescing manner which he would never have allowed himself to deliver, except that it quite automatically came out of him.  He felt all that way back to being a little boy again when his mother demanded to know what he had learned at school.  “Nothing”, he had often whispered, because it had been the easiest way of finishing the conversation without receiving the full voltage blast that seemed to be pent up in her waiting for him.

            He felt foolish, and he wandered grumpily to the stairs. A cleaner was scrubbing them equally joylessly and he slunk over her cleaned patch leaving the inevitable footprint tracks in his wake, without a word of apology that he might normally have given her.  She was, he thought to himself, a foreigner and not, therefore, like himself and his kin. Black people should know their place, he thought ungenerously. The problem is that these days people do not know how to be satisfied.

He was always argumentative as a lad, aggressive and argumentative.  Duncan is the same. There had been those scenes, abusing his mother, never a word to his father about any of this business, and now scarring the children for the rest of their lives.  Well, it was some years ago, but he kept it up even now. 

            How did he turn out like this? Graham pictured Duncan as a baby gurgling and chuckling when he was tickled, and what a concentration he had as soon as one put something interesting  into his hand, his teddy bear or a shiny teaspoon or whatever. Surely that was a sign of his intelligence. Why couldn’t he see how things had to be?  What a waste he had made of his life!

            In the morning. the air carried plumes of people’s breath outside the entrance doors of the hospital. Inside the foyer, turned and approached the shop. Grace had told him to get some paper handkerchiefs.  They were more practical than using his own and sending them home with her for washing and ironing.  How could he ever approach Duncan?  He had always shown contempt for his father – Graham sighed again, and he felt for the coins in his dressing-gown pocket.  Grace always said to him not to talk to Duncan; it never did any good. What had all his efforts to talk to Duncan achieved?  His old hands held the coins for the young lady in the shop as if he were a child spending his precious pocket money.  He let her take it, and silently took the newspaper and the tissues, holding them to his chest like part of his body.  He began to climb the stairs again.  It gave him exercise, he told himself, and it passed the time. 

            He looked down at his gnarled old hands carrying his things.  His thoughts flicked to Rose, when she had touched his arm. He thought whether she had touched his hand too.  Not then gnarled, old, and frail. She had touched a man’s hands that had then moved and felt different.  She had told him not to get so fretted and ruffled by the sergeant in charge.  Her face burned indelibly into his memory, her touch.  She had smoothed his hair for him.  Duncan had once said that loving and touching were the same. It touched a chord. Remembering his words somehow helped. It touched the link that they had had. When Duncan came at the weekend, there would be an opportunity to complete one of the unfinished scenes of his life, a scene that had been properly sentenced to abortion, and never properly carried out, and now perhaps he could honour his memory and Rose too, just before it might be too late.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Sunday afternoon arrived and Duncan walked in, in a relaxed manner down the floor to Graham’s bed.  The large plate glass windows were darkening as the day outside dimmed.  The evenings were drawing in.  They shook hands warmly and firmly and Graham pointed him to the chair, but Duncan insisted on sitting on the bed, awkwardly; the invalid should sit in the comfort of the chair, They ended up both perched on the bed, one on either side. Duncan looked strained and enquired about his father’s health and comfort.  He had contacted Dr Rees by phone in the week  who said only the things that Graham already knew.

            Father and son found they could talk to each other.  It became fairly relaxed, but conversation rambled around Graham’s illness, the life on the ward, Duncan’s work, the journey down from London. “The doctors say I may go home on tomorrow – or Tuesday.  But the nurses don’t know.  They never say anything.  I don’t think they know very much”. 

“Ma will be glad to have you back again. She’s always worried.  She’s looking for a local gardener, someone to keep the garden going, she said? There must be plenty of people around. If she can find the right one.”

“I’ve lost a bit of height.  Have you noticed. 

“You’re shorter because the vertebrae of your back have got a bit squashed.”  Duncan demonstrated a squashing motion between the palms of his hands Graham took little notice.  Duncan always knew something; he was always telling you something.  But how did he know what was happening.  No-one around the hospital seemed to. Duncan looked blank in his eyes. He probably did not know quite what to say. Perhaps he thought the illness was a serious one and did not like to go on describing it.

            Graham changed the subject, going back to the garden. “We had some wonderful lettuces this year. The wet weather came at the right time.  I suppose you don’t take a lot of interest in gardening.”

“No.  We don’t have a garden in London. Lesley was keen on growing things in pots.  We had back extensions to the house, and terraces on various levels.  She grows lots of flowers in spring and summer.” Duncan seemed pleased to tell him. But now he lived in another house, in another part of London; how long had he been there?  Graham had never visited.  There was a silence.  Both knew that what he said about Lesley was now in the past, a dark boundary separating from the present. A sad moment crossed his heart.  And such a distance from his son, too; such a gap to bridge. 

He searched for something to say.  “How is the little girl?  Milly? 

“She’s three and a half, now.” 

“Is she really,” Graham was surprised. The little girl would see so many things he would not, and he had seen so many things that would mean nothing to her.  Where would there be any common interest? There was some strain between them. What did Duncan want to talk about? – not ordinary things. How could he recreate that precious link, step across that gap – could he do it again? He turned his head and a mass of tumbled and panicky thoughts sped away into a vacuum unexpressed and inexpressible between them.

            He turned his mind to the present, again, “Did you speak to Dr Rees?  He’s a very nice chap.  He does explain things to us.” 

“Yes, I did,”  Duncan nodded. “I think they know what they are doing. 

“Yes,” Graham responded doubtfully “I don’t know if they know what is wrong with me.”  He started off in his lecturing style. “The body is such a complicated thing.  They are so pressed with so much going on.  The young lad here - he’s a registrar to Dr Rees, a young Indian chappy. He is around till ten o’clock some nights  He told me yesterday that there was no room for me now.  I should be leaving. I said that Dr Rees expected me to stay till Monday.  I haven’t got my clothes.  Your mother will have to come in with my things.  It was late in the afternoon yesterday by then. The young chap didn’t look pleased. There seems to be some mix up about whose bed I’m in. Apparently, this is Dr Stephen’s bed. He laughed at the incompetence.

“I expect they have a pressure on beds at the moment.” 

“Well,” Graham continued in a slightly triumphant way, “This is Dr Stephen’s bed.  So, I’m told,” and he shrugged his shoulders in a dismissive way. He looked disconsolate too, as if heavily resigned to some sort of defeat which he had somehow deserved. Duncan said no more about it and looked either puzzled or uninterested. 

            He looked at his watch and said that he had to drive back to London, Graham felt he had lived through his moment that was special without it being that moment at all.  A sadness surprised him, but he left it aside. Duncan discussed the journey times. He hesitated and said, “Dad, I wanted to know how you feel.  That’s why I came down today.”  He hesitated, “I suppose I wanted to know if you find yourself thinking about what is happening - you know what I mean – with your illness.” 

Graham replied almost automatically, “It’s best not to think about these things.  I don’t want to worry Grace. You know.” He began again, in his pompous style, ‘We are all getting older. One could depress oneself if one let oneself think about it.”  Duncan waited for him to finish. Then he began making his farewells though they did not know if they would see each other again. They said goodbye as if there had never been an estrangement, and as if this was a regular weekly visit between father and son. He walked with Duncan slowly down the ward.  They were affable.  Graham felt relieved, embarrassed now by the thought of his self-revelation which thankfully had not materialised. It felt strangely like a release from a pressure in him to confess something to someone.

            He watched Duncan walk towards the stairs whilst he remained standing at the door of the ward. He felt so pleased and proud that his son had been to see him, his son a successful doctor in London.  As he turned away a peculiar dark colour spread across his mood like a filter removing part of the day’s light.  He did not know what this meant.  He tried to turn his thoughts to more sensible things.  He hoped he had advised Duncan best on the route back to London. Tomorrow, Grace would come in the afternoon.  There would be no need to buy a Sunday paper.

In the morning he crawled stiffly to the bathroom and washed and shaved slowly.  When he came back, he asked Nurse James what he could do to help.  It had become a routine in the morning to help with simple things so that the ward could get going early in the day.  Nurse James looked harassed.  He straightened the blankets with her like a child helping mother.  She thanked him as a mother would whose child is more trouble helping then if he was playing by himself.  She bustled off.  He returned to his bed.  It was Sunday. 

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

 “Bad mood this morning?” she chirped in a manner that was not a question but a dismissal. 

“Night was a bit disturbed.” He conceded. 

“Did you take your night sedation?” The flirty nurse asked. 

They were still waiting for the pathology tests.  The last one would be done today.  The doctor said he would come and do a marrow biopsy.  It meant boring into his hip bone.  He tried not to think about it.  He would be coming to the end of his stay. He felt a sort of glow.

The ward was quiet for a moment. Time was dragging. He slid off his bed again and sauntered along the ward looking for someone to have a word with.  One of them perked up a bit when he approached.  “The wife was saying last night she recognised you, Graham – from the dancing, isn’t it?” 

Graham nodded. “Well,” Graham began modestly, “we’ve been going for years.  It is good for you, keeps you fit.”  He did not mention the nostalgia he and Grace always felt for their youth when they had been so keen on dancing.  The times when they had been courting, in fact, they had met originally at a dance. The civil service rowing club had a Christmas dance way back.  He could not remember exactly whilst he was talking to this man. It must have been 1930, say. Graham was reticent about the memories.  “Times have changed.  Things are not he same”, he offered, wanly. The man went into a rush of eager details, and a wish to prolong the contact.  Graham felt imposed upon, a garrulous old man, he thought, and began to pull away.

            “Did you hear what happened in the night to Frank?  Frank, in the bed just here.”  The man gestured to the next bed.  Graham felt annoyed at being held on to, but also, he was curious in a fearful way.  If he had avoided talking about the past too much because he was afraid of being drawn into his own thoughts and feelings, he was also fascinated in a repelled sort of way about the future, and what might be happening to him – like the others here.  One day someone would look at the bed he had been sleeping. Until that moment when he wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t think, He knew the man was going to say something dreadful about what had happened to Frank in the night. 

Graham had not known Frank, but he knew he would be affected by anything that happened to any of them in his ward.  The man continued in detail.  “It must have been after midnight.  There was a bit of a commotion.  I hadn’t properly got to sleep.”  It came tumbling out.  “Frank looked blue.  He dropped his glass of water on the floor.  There wasn’t that much in it, because I had checked it for him before lights out.”  He seemed jittery as he spoke. Graham did not take any notice. He was waiting of an impending horror, looking at the now empty bed.  “I got hold of the alarm bell and pushed and pushed, because I thought – ‘This is it for Frank’.  The nurse came, the black girl, at the double.  I’ll give her her due.   She was here in a flash, took one look and rang for the trolley team.  She was back in an instant, and we got him flat on the bed and the curtains pulled around.  I held his wrist for her while she rushed off to the clinical room and came back with a trolley full of all the things they use.  I’m surprised you didn’t hear it.”

            Graham made a consoling nodding movement of his head; he knew it had been the sleeping pill.  And he had already anticipated the end of the story and supposed that Frank was dead. There was no stopping the flow of anxious talk that masqueraded as brave assistance to the nurse.  Graham was relieved that at that moment another man strolled up to them, to see what was being talked about in this tense way.  Graham looked up as if help had arrived in the nick of time.  The anxious old man was rattling on and Graham could now fade away, and slide off.  When he had heard enough to be sure of Frank’s final outcome, he extricated himself and left the other two to swap disaster stories.

            He remembered those dead men. They had never been found. There had been a suspicious incident in the Orkneys.  It was suspected that some enemy parachute troops had landed to keep an eye on the navy’s movements.  Six men from the office had been detailed to go up there to support the police investigation, but the plane had disappeared in a storm just off the coast. There had been a lot of speculation. It had prayed on his mind. There had been a quiet man who Graham had begun to feel friendly towards. They had been going together – until Graham’s flu.

            The plane was missing, and there was a strange silence for a day or so. People spoke in hushed tones.  The typewriters clacked away inhumanly.  They had all seemed to come together in spirit, like the coming together of a congregation at the communion service. Rose did most of his work, and she reported to him all the news that there was – very little – or rather she reported to him the lack of news.  After a couple of days, people began openly to talk of the death of their colleagues. They talked of the deaths in war in general.  Rose had lost her father in the First World War, when she had been a very little girl. They would sometimes go for drinks all together after that when the work finished for the day, and the duty office could be on call from the bar.  It was just one evening when most of the people were off for the weekend, and the duty officer had been called back that he and Rose found themselves together again. She had moved along the pub bench to him, “Let’s go down to look at the harbour,” she had said.  Then he too had wanted to get away from the tense atmosphere. It was no good thinking about these morbid things.  So, she had taken him to look at the harbour at night. Quickly he was compelled to excuse himelf.

 

…..ooooo00000ooooo…..

 

Eighteen months later, Graham died after a considerable period of great pain.  Rose who had not thought of him for many, many years knew nothing of that timid, blustering man the war had thrown across her path momentarily, who had brushed her arm with such an electric signal to both of them, and who had blushed every day thereafter when they had been in the office together on their own.  She knew nothing of the thoughts he had harboured and puzzled over down the years, the thoughts that had been rekindled by his son’s own unblushing passions.  She knew nothing of the unadmitted wistful longings that the frail glance of her skin against his had coloured his years in between.  She did not know that they had finally been snuffed out in the midst of pain, during which she had been most thought about.  And even if she had known, she would not have remembered that tiny moment that had seemed so natural to her and which had seemed so unnatural to him.  She never knew she had created that moment so that it had lasted in the darkness of his shame for so long.  She would have marvelled at the prolonged memory it had lived in him for so long like an exotic butterfly confined forever to its chrysalis. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dolmades again

 

They remembered their wedding anniversary every year. Her greying hair was given a special sheen.

 

The young girl could pout her cleavage in an unself-conscious way.  She dressed glamorously, and to the point, for all her customers. But it was not her beauty, or not only.  She had an open naivety that charmed without being loud. He later told himself he had fallen in love that first moment she shyly met him.  It was in the manner of frightened modesty, and it plucked his heart right out and gave it to her.  Such a contrast with the wilful demands of his wife.

            The young girl offered massage, that was all. If he asked for more, she made it seem it was her choice.  Her customers adored it.  Probably she was very much younger than his 50 years.  She could have been anything from, say, 17 to 34.  She would never tell him.  He knew it was, in a way, her calculated ploy.  But it worked and he knew it did so.  She did not mind him spending money on her extravagantly.

 

Stuffed vine leaves, four small turds lying tidily next to each other in the supermarket pack.  She transferred them to an equally neat line-up on a plate for the microwave.  ‘A tin of ratatouille,' she called out and he rose on the other side of the kitchen table to inspect the wall cupboard for the required tin.  Obedient and predictable, the lives of these two married 50-year-olds had plaited themselves into one.  'Good,' he called back, as if he anticipated her cuisine with relish. The television buzzed away like a flock of insects, inhabiting the next room; he slouched through and flopped onto the couch agile for his age.  He was slim and well-kept for his 51 years.  She, lithe and elegantly tinted and carefully casual in her dress, she likewise considered herself to be keeping pace with a distinguished ageing. Her use of face cream, highlights in her coiffure, and comfortably tensioned bra reassured her.

            His desultory attention took in the item on black-holes.  Ostensibly it was matter for advertising copy - to be stored in the back of his mind ready for the required moment.

            But he felt momentarily unnerved.  Sucked through into that alternative universe of perfect images he created, he would live dangerously - kindly and predictably supplied on the supermarket shelves.  It was his work to sell, till such shelves emptied, raided by millions of suburban wives, just like his own.  'How about this, he called to her in the kitchen, ' "Sucked through the black hole into a world without caries".  Or, how about, "Sample the world of odour-free breathers" '.

            She went to the hairdressers once a week and was trim beyond belief, she turned heads in their local Tandoori.  There, sexuality was clean and orderly and regulated carefully by her diary.  She disapproved of the libertarian television and had campaigned herself against the drift towards nudity and explicit swearing.  She enjoyed the news, sipping the last part of her single glass of Chianti, because she could tense the corners of her mouth and press her lips into each other at the antics of various criminals, perverts and politicians; at the contradictions they got themselves into, at the low tricks of sportsmen; at the greedy salaries of possessed businessmen.  She lived as if already transposed into that world of oral hygiene and perfectly formed bosoms, without the need to admit to the methods used. Because she believed their income to be suitably modest, she tutted her tongue at the ostentatious Japanese cars of the neighbours.  She could glance at the netted windows of the pseudo-gothic 'villas' and tell simply by her expert intuition where their holidays were booked this year.

            'Darling,' he said, as she pushed the dolmades delicately around her plate, 'where do you want to go this year?  I heard about Delos.  Do you know, nobody is supposed to spend a night there, its a superstition from the ancient world?'  She concentrated on her plate and the screen - 'No point in booking there then,' she replied seriously.  'No,' he said impatiently.  'When I was in Athens on that trip, I heard about it.  You stay on the next island and take trips.'  She responded, simply, 'Oh!' as if in receipt of religious wisdom. Her lips had pursed at the memory of his trip.  He had gone on his own, about his business; and given her a sense of something moving out of her control.

            It was a moral universe she moved in, and expense-account trips, even without his secretary (oh, the thought!) were beyond the pale.  The thought, in fact, was that the male is the weaker sex, easily bent and broken by scheming young women.  In her heart of hearts, she knew he was not that sort of man.  He was loyal to her till the end of time, she knew.

 

When he met the young girl, she was just a tart.  Probably 25 years younger than him.  He was aware of his narrowing shoulders, the wrinkles in his skin like a plastic bag, though being proud he had remained moderately fat-free where these things matter.  He was up in London, the bad city.  The place where money dazzled and corrupted.  He no longer told his wife his earnings; she would have thought him the equivalent of a muscle-bound athlete who took steroids instead of sufficient exercise. Money sloshed around his bank account, like fish in a trawler's hold.  He bought the young girl a flat - for her work!  She had been enthusiastic, she was the best in the business.  She was straight, she had sworn so.  It was massage, the relaxation businessmen needed. There was nothing suspicious, there was good business to be had.  They would be partners.  Her skill, their fees, his investment.  He had allowed himself to be led in.

 

Because it was his own firm, he could pay himself anything, anything at all. He never told her.  The tightly curled and hair-dressed crown was her only luxury she told herself. She scraped for the maid to clean, to do the supermarket shop, to pay for the catering for their social occasions.  She complained at the expense of everything, of profligate comrade shoppers who spent money like water, at extravagant neighbours with their gadgets for gardens and new-registration cars.  She heard these stories of monetary extravagance each week in the hairdresser's, and each week she reported to him, when she had his listening ear.

 

He could pay the girl for her lost earnings, to travel with him - to Rome, to Florence, to Nice.  The girl would always demur, would hesitate and protest, and then come.  She did not worry about being paid to come, like a common courtesan, but it was his intentions that worried her.  She sought her independence; she would take care to keep it intact.  She had her massage business, and paid her bills.  But she had ambitions to wealth, and a life all to herself.  She had perfect features, a slightly enhanced bust, which contrasted with her slender hips.  Massage demanded as much skin exposure as possible.  If her customers wanted to pay for a little extra satisfaction, then she merely thought of her savings at the building society.

 

He was always amazed at the practicality that was involved in intimacy: his wife's careful hygiene, this girl's pecuniary ambitions.  The girl sought fame and money as a squirrel its winter harvest.

 

He sought intimacy with beauty.  He had the money to buy it, but he lacked the glamour to inspire the girl away from her pedestrian ambitions.

            The girl came on a couple of trips with him. Florence - his wife had said she had seen it before; there were the children too (though grown-up now) to look after.  The girl by contrast was impressed.  The hotel overlooked the fiume Arno, it was beside the Uffizi gallery.  But she enjoyed the shops.  Already in her mind she was getting rich on importing to London, the fabulous leather goods - buying there and selling in London.  Her own trips to Florence.  She gave him his pleasure in bed for the cost of the expenses, and she believed then her debts were paid.  Without wishing it, her unmoved independence inflamed his devotion to her perfect beauty.  Though he knew she did not feel the same - perhaps because of it - the whole relationship was much less complicated than with his wife.  It was simply wants and needs.  Guilt and obligations faded out.  That's why he pursued it.  And pursue it he did.  His wife's practical concentration on house and garden, above all garden, allowed him to dream his dreams of a new life, a new world, a new universe - a passage through the looking-glass, the universe beyond.

 

He spent most of his time with his wife.  They gardened sometimes at weekends.  She enjoyed friends on Saturday evenings, the flourish of supermarket bottles of wine, the fashionable book of recipes, the cut-glass candelabra for the table which they had bought on their honeymoon in Venice twenty years ago.  He liked the fuss around him of housekeeping, the regularity of the chores with the washing-machine, putting out the bin-bags, watering the geraniums.  They talked forever about why the exuberant wisteria never flowered.

            Like all designers he believed his job to be a creative one, yet a hazy satisfaction always clouded his thoughts about his job as he rushed hurriedly to complete everything. Without knowing it, he sensed the looking-glass world beyond the darkened edges of his routines. 

 

Is that why the young girl had been hastened into his life?  The need to stop for relaxation, her insistent line to allow himself to be 'treated like a king', the obvious good sense of entrusting his tensioned body to massage.

            She was an 'ingenue', unread, and deferential; and also a planning and determined woman in business.  It was the contradiction of her near-perfect beauty, her musical laugh, and her spontaneous pleasure in the complements she was always getting, together with the gut-clenching despair of her situation. It was when, as is familiar, a recession came, spare money disappeared, and novelty became a premium in her profession, her profits slipped away.  Her contribution to their expenses began to slip away too, at first without telling him. He was suddenly faced with covering bills that were late, responding to a letter threatening the court.  He was jolted by her lack of response.  She became clogged and not innovatory.  He had always relied on imagination, a flair for the new - and indeed the young girl might herself have been just such a venture for him.  She on the other hand relied on perseverance, sticking to what she knew and had always done. 

      Her customers faded to a trickle.  Money, her route to perfect independence and acclaim, was closing itself off, into an abject reliance on him.  She became depressed, though her beauty never suffered.  She inhabited great expanses of silence; her features seemed to waste away, like a torn artery.  Her indebtedness mounted, a growing obstacle to her cherished aloneness.

            Here, it seemed, was a man in love with a girl like a dream; but he was tied to the dull loyalty to his wife and her morality. There, she seemed, the young girl, her independence of spirit cruelly broken; and he could set her going only heaping her with the one thing she wished to avoid - her reliance on his money. Could he abandon domestic loyalty and reach through the looking-glass reflection - beyond that black-hole and grasp his true love?  Could she, the young girl, abandon her dreams, and greet the obligations of being supplied by the money she needed to use?

            Little by little he edged towards this crux-of-the-matter.  It was a one-way tug-of-war, as she said so little, week after week.  He nudged forwards.  Where he was aimong, in slow motion, was that he and she both gave up something.  It is symmetry, his dependence - on his wife, suburbia, regularity; hers on independence, her talents turned to gold.  In exchange he would have the girl he loved and she the money.  Her morose posture, sank in an inelegant, crumpled armchair, spoke indifferently.  Her delicate perfect mouth never moved, the shock of black luxuriant hair was as soft and untouchable as a wig.  If she could slump more, without movement, she did so.  Then gathering her energy into her long legs, she would suddenly rise out of the chair, and clack her way across the parquet floor, to return to him with a cheap brown envelope.  “It's all I've got for you,” she said in an expert bland apology and indifference.  “But,” he spluttered, as she put it into his hand and he glanced inside at a then wadge of notes, “but you can't afford it, can you?” She was suddenly sitting down again, and she answered flatly, “No.”  She resumed her dejection, “It's only two.”

            Two hundred pounds - he checked.  It was awkward.  The sum meant nothing to him, hardly noticeable.  Yet it was a huge generosity for her.  He imagined her foregoing meals, walking the miles home.... He pocketed the envelope, “You're a good person.”  He tried to match the generosity.  “Well. I've got to pay my debts.  Try to....” and tailed off in a kind of hopeless struggle - not so much the generosity, he saw more of her determined self-reliance.  He wanted to gather her up in his arms, a helpless doll, and reassure her that it was alright, he could take care of everything.  Yet, he knew, that was just what she did not want to happen to her. She preferred her miserable independence to comfort and a worry-free life tied to him.  He felt momentarily frantic about how to help.  Then he looked at her prominent cleavage she always arranged for those stay-away customers she waited for - you tart, he thought.  It made him feel less responsible.

 

In the night, he changed his view.  His prim and wooden wife sleeping silently next to him never moved.  The girl could be won around, he was sure.  If he gave her enough freedom whilst possessing her; if they lived in their flat whilst she went wherever she wanted with whoever she wanted, to do whatever they wanted.  She would probably say, yes.  Wouldn't she?

            He was driven. Always to her.

            After weeks of regular visits, talking to her fractured spirit, but it brought no answer.  Sometimes for distraction, she put on the TV, a tale from the sensational press.  Sometimes an occasional small repayment of debt.

            This young beauty needed to be told, not asked, given instructions on her part to play - selling the flat, handling the business issues for him, whilst he tied up the loose ends of marriage career, friendships.  He would tell his wife last of all, when the air-tickets were bought, when the apartment became ready in Rome (where all the most elegant women are taken and celebrated, he said).

            Compliantly she did as she was told.  But her indifference, her lack of curiosity remained an impenetrable screen, a looking glass painted over with no reflection, no response.  It was simply the case that as she had subsided into anguished inertia, he must make the moves and bring her along to salvation.  She had not even been to see the rather spacious apartment he had found in the Via Sardegna, near the Villa Borghese.  She knew nothing of the lucrative way he had wound up his affairs, even though he used their flat as his accommodation address.  There were multiple copyrights to assign internationally, he had to sustain his portfolio, or sell the sub-interest.  Instead, she had insisted on manning her own station to the end.  In fact, she had never once, categorically, in so many words, said she would be coming on this rescue plan.  It was only late on that he even heard about her young child.

 

Up to the day in question, he had not told his wife.  The secret acts of making-ready had - perhaps unfortunately - been too successfully secret. So far as he could tell, she knew nothing of his fevered and methodical planning.  On the day in question, he rose earlier than usual.  He had to be awake and prepared and seize hold of the opportunity over breakfast.  He waited, normally he would have left home before 8 for work, but he waited on till 9. She had still not left her bedroom. He realised that he had no idea when she normally got up.  At 11, he had arranged to pick up the young girl, and her baggage, including the daughter. To his surprise when his wife came down the stairs and into the breakfast room, she was red faced, her nose dribbled and she was carrying a half-empty bottle of vodka.  She was equally surprised to see him still in the house.  Despite being already drunk, she reacted with guilt and embarrassment.  But that quickly changed to a defiant fury, and she told him to get out of the house.  He retorted in his discomposure by rattily shouting that he was going away anyway, triumphantly as if winning some argument.

            'Go - for good!' she flung at his back.  And he went, his two remaining suitcases stowed already in the boot of his car.  They had never exploded in such a row before.

            It was not the parting he had imagined.

            He drove slowly, depositing the keys of their flat at the agents for a sale when they had done their work.  And then he got lost on his way to the anonymous district where the young girl lived.  He was late when he eventually approached the spot she had told him to pick her up. There she stood, a huge floppy grip on the pavement beside her.  He had known she would come.  A curious sense of completion overcame him.  He felt a kind of paralysis.  As she had never ridden in his car, she did not recognise it edging down the High Street amidst the traffic.  There was nowhere he could possibly have stopped where she had said.  And he glided by with a frozen stare, in his suddenly blank and automatic eyes.  But the child beside her noticed.  The little daughter, perhaps 6, had never seen her mother's friend, so she did not understand this man's stare.  Her small blue eyes merely stared back at the wooden expression in the unknown car.

            His car carried him on the flow of traffic, leaving behind the impossible choice he thought he had made.

 

The vodka bottle was empty when he arrived back; his wife incoherent.

Not bloody dolmades again.  Ever since that Greek restaurant they had gone to with Chuck and Babs, she had thought it chic and aspired to go continental.  The supermarket packet called them 'stuffed vine-leaves'.  For those who did not know the Greek word.  And the packet announced a 'meal for two' - that is, for each one of them, there were two thready black fingers looking cold and unspeakable in their plastic tray.  She asked him for a tin of ratatouille from the cupboard above his head. She liked him sitting in the kitchen watching him work away at the supper for them both.  That way she could feel in charge, and also rather generous, feeding and providing.  Then she told him to go and watch the television.  Because he was a designer, in advertising, she knew he liked to watch the commercials and pinch their ideas for his work.

            There was a slick documentary, sliding in between announcing sensations, and giving information.  Through a black hole, and out the other side is a new universe, a looking-glass image, where light is rays of darkness, and energy is weight.

            He could use such images.  Sucked through the hole, a bit like a tunnel, into the intimate perfection of the glossy world he sold.  His was the job of an interstellar travel agent pushing people through their tunnel of love to paradise.  “How about this?” he called to her distant bustling in the kitchen, “Sucked through the hole into the world without caries.”  He felt satisfied with his idea, hopeful of her polite admiration.  "Graphics - I think black-and-white graphics of a mouth with teeth, and a hole in one of them.  You see.  The mouth sucks, and you are squeezed through the slithery hole into a glitzy world of colour.  Toothbrushes going in and out of mouths just like the hole.”

            It seemed so easy.  Another storyboard to write up tomorrow.  But right now, he was beamed through into his housewifely wife's dream world.  Dolmades and chips. Her trimness of body, her purity of mind, her weekly visit to the hairdresser, who trimmed her and purified her tints.  She turned women's heads in the local Tandoori Indian.  The expense of her bloomed hair made her careful in bed, and planned by her calendar to be trim.  Often she would go happily from an explicit programme on television, to wipe away the perfume and powder from her shocked cheeks, and turn her stern back towards her husband.  The evidence that sex was a national habit made her do her bit in defiance. He was deferential.  Without disagreeing with her, he knew that he would have a harder job if adverts did without body-parts.  One step even worse for her was the evidence day after day of money and greed that sickened her, she said.  She watched the news, her sensitive nostrils alert for the cupidity of businessmen lining their offshore pockets, a category of human that she associated with criminals and assassins, the dishonesty of politicians and the unsportsmanship of sportsmen.  All for personal gain and unworthy worldly riches.  She aspired, and claimed. a higher moral universe sharply outlined by oral hygiene, starched styles of dresses, a hairdresser’s curlers and not too up-to-date technology. 

            She could never have guessed the income he made. She could never have done so as it would have shamed her; and restricted all those sharp comments about the neighbours for flaunting incomes in their garden furniture, cars and ready-to-erect house extensions.  But they flaunted only a tiny version of what he could if he had wanted, and she had known. 'Darling,' he asked her, as she sat next to him whilst they watched the adverts over their individual plastic trays, 'we could go to Barbados this year.'  Her body managed to freeze at this suggestion without actually moving. She had remembered a trip of his, something to do with bathing costumes.  He had to write a line 'a one-piece sunshine' - though in the end it had not been used.  He had gone on his own - as if out of the grip of her control.  She had imagined hot brown tropical girls in Barbados getting in and out of bathing costumes in front of him.  Despite this gripe and disapproval, which she felt in the bottom of her abdomen, she knew he was in fact a faithful husband.  “Here, I am,” he would say, “my heart full of love. Feel it.” And he stroked her back prominently placed facing him on the other side of the bed   He would always make it humorous – “What do I get - a boney backbone in my face!!”  She might roll over and look witheringly at him, in the dark.  Sometimes she would clutch her pale winceyette nightie to her throat and let him kiss her on the cheek, perhaps on the side of her neck.  “Good job I'm turned on by that backbone.  Not many chaps have a thing about backbones.” She liked to be kissed below her ear, happily turning back wrapped in  safety inside her winceyette.  He was a good man, she believed, he never demanded more than he should.  He however would thank her, and inwardly curse - either her, his wife, or the tingling in his loins.

Thinking as he did, about his generation, when they were young.  Death seemed a faraway intruder, one that came as an unnecessary misfortune to those who did not take care.  His own carelessness, with car-driving, diet, sport and drugs, did not come into his calculations then.  It was satisfactorily beyond so many intervening milestones it could to all intents and purposes be discounted.

But his generation reached middle-age, though no-one quite said so. No-one got up one morning and said: This is it; middle-age today.  Birthdays simply came and went without stopping, like an inter-city train passing through featureless country halts without a glance.  Little noticeable signs: worries about the children's schooling, creaking joints, grandchildren, snapshots of forgotten holidays; were nonvocal messages, straws that were not yet the last one, nor even quite the penultimate. Early retirements came and, as everyone says, life got busier.  Everyone says so to prove that life's energy is getting stronger - not weaker.

            Now weaker, the buffers at the terminus are reaching forward for the express train.  It is no longer his generation, the wise pundits on TV, the politicians, the psycho-journalists are now a new generation.  There are those few of us still left, and who can still move our limbs, who now and again meet, almost irrelevant to the jungle of new life going on around us.  There is a new friend for each of us, death itself.  We find, at last, that it has been an old friend for as long as any of us can remember.  It reaches out to us, generously.  It feels like a mother's embrace.

            Oh.  The long trail of life behind.  It is never the same.  As we advance, we change perspective and the world glows differently from beyond.  The cold world gets warmer, the further we advance to look back.  Or, the warm patches merge.  The past glows in an unexpected satisfaction now.  That time of the missed turning, has become a curiosity about the unknown, a what-might-have-been luxury; no longer a regret. 

 

I wonder how she sees it still.

Perhaps being younger, maybe 20 years and more, I never knew her actual age.  That coyness contributed to her miraculousness.  Perhaps being younger she has not reached that mellow glow where all of the past is interesting and everything that happened was, at worst, a novelty, at best a deep profundity.

            All the men around her adored her.  Pat - what an ordinary name for such an out of the ordinary girl.  Entirely wrapped up in her own beauty she was staggeringly oblivious to all that adoration: “Men, I could have them all week, she would say”.  It was true.  What did she want?  What did she think she wanted?  I knew the answer to both.  And I knew - I alone knew they were different.  What she wanted and what she thought she wanted did not match - and that was her problem indeed.  I knew this cleft in her, and that is why I had my opportunity.  The dividing of the ways in my life.  I plunged for it, straight through to the other universe that stood as if in darkness inside her waiting for me.  Because of my knowledge, my study of her, I could have married her. She never fully understood why I had that power - nor why I never in the end did ask her, why I left her to the other one - the property dealer who offered her the money she wanted, she thought she did.  He was a nice well-meaning chap, who she never understood.  Just as I too, was a mystery for her - why I adored her.

            Those questions: she thought she wanted money. That was the key she sought to make her life free.  Poor, voluptuously Mediterranean, largely unschooled intelligence she sought her freedom in material advantages - and her graciously magnetic body was the means to winning her entry into her other universe.  The world of money her universe, her body was the means.  That was what she wanted.  Her customers the vehicles that would journey her through the stars to the other world.  But I knew something different; I knew it was the very adoration, the hugs, consoling - and that meant the attentions of devoted people.  Without her understanding it, I could use my knowledge, play on the neediness she forbade.  What rotten trick I played!  Don't you think so?

            I had met her in the street. Literally.  It was at the Notting Hill carnival.  She had got separated from the others in her party.  I was looking for ideas, for faces to match that I could buy and transform.  She was mildly anxious, asking strangers.  So, I had taken her, in my fatherly style, on a protective search.

 

I had been so afraid that there would be nowhere to stop to pick her up that day. But sunshine shone, and she stepped into my car with her soft grip full of her beauty-instruments, and like the sunshine she smiled brighter than she had ever done. Rome beckoned. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Three – Kinky Sorts

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Never too old

 

It was not exactly being and feeling old that made me self-conscious or even embarrassed. It was different. I could quite easily accept a seat in a bus given up by someone younger, or I could sit happily in my rocking chair watching television for an evening. What made me self-conscious was that I had sometimes, quite often, the feelings that went way back to my adolescent years. I still had those feelings that were difficult to control then, and difficult to control even now. When I walk down the street there were, sometimes, even quite often, young women who looked nice, who made a point of looking nice. They were not in my view tarts, but merely women who liked to look nice and who liked to be noticed – discretely of course. And I would notice them, discretely; and I would wonder if they noticed me. And did they think it was nice to be noticed by me? Or would they think I was a lecher, or that they should be aware of me as a creepy old man, a potential abuser? Did they think that they had to be careful about looking nice and who they looked nice for? I knew there was nothing to be afraid of in myself. I had not had a physical fight with anyone since I was about age ten at my junior school. But strangers suspect the worst, don’t they?

            There was little I could do. I knew the women who I noticed were in the thirty to forty age range and quite out of my reach being twice their age, or whatever. I thought that having money and being generous with it, might counteract some of the reaction to my age. And indeed, I was in a position to be quite generous. I had a bit of wealth and very little to spend it on. But in a brief passing in the street, those advantages could not be made manifest in a moment. I sighed. I knew what I was tempted to do. And I knew I could disgrace myself. I had remained all my life impelled to surrender to my lesser and adolescent self.

            No, I did not accost the women I noticed in the street. I knew that would get nowhere. In the present time, there were always ways of finding playmates, even for grand old oldies. But no-one these days plays the desperate adolescent; they are all so free about sex. None of them pant with unfulfilled fantasies that fill the occasional nights of insomnia. My days now in retirement from a medical practice seem to be endless and I spend my time trying to keep fit by walking the dog and treading up and down stairs and by doing kitchen duty for the untidy wife. I had always read a lot and visited the library a fair bit. I sometimes took my laptop there to compose letters to the national newspapers about current affairs. I had quite a line on all those prejudices that liked to separate good from bad into groups staring each other down. I rarely found my letters actually published. In fact, over the years there was only one which was accepted, and which I had cut out and stuck on the fridge door with a small magnet. It was about the narrowness of aeroplane seats when the person next to you is twenty-five stone. You see the prosaic panorama of my life. 

But one day I was sitting at a desk in the library, musing on those newspaper outrages of the day, when I noticed one of the lady assistants at the check-out booth. She was not one of those women who tripped along the pavement in her high-heels inviting the notice of young men. In fact, rather the opposite. She was probably nearer fifty, or perhaps more, and wearing a dull cotton blouse and baggy dark trousers. Not particularly noticeable, not for a raw adolescent mind like mine. But I did notice her. She had lost a button on the front of her blouse and frequently and embarrassingly she pulled the gap in the blouse together. But occasionally it showed a hint of a black lace brassiere, before her shy hand concealed it again. I was intrigued, partly because the bra looked a lot more interesting than the ordinariness of the outer clothing. It was also intrusively intimate to catch a glimpse even only now and again. I tried not to look as though I were staring at her embarrassment. But I had become intrigued.

A few days later when I was again sitting in the library, I noticed the same woman with a different blouse, slightly different colour but not so different as to be noticeable. I decided. When there was nobody in the queue to take out books I went across with a query.

“Do you have any books in the library by P. Reage,” I asked innocently.

“She smiled politely at my request and enquired, “What was the name again. Ray Arge, did you say?” And she turned to the computer ready to type in the name.

“Reage,” I said, and spelled it out. “It’s a French name.

She turned to me again and smiled. “I don’t think we would have anything in French here.” She seemed to feel she was disappointing me and smiled again to make up for it.

“No. I am sure the book has been translated into English.”

“Do you know the title of the book?” And she turned back to the computer ready to check the title in the catalogue.

“The Story of O,” I said innocently.

She was about to type it in, but she stopped and clearly she had heard of it. “You mean that book which is….” She stopped and her face went a little tense, not smiling. And a revealing blush came.

“Yes,” I said, not needing to say more.

“Oh, I don’t think we would have a book like that.” And she added rather incongruously, “You mean like that ‘shades of grey’ book?” I knew I’d embarrassed her. Which was just as I had intended, It’s a public library,” she added.

I went back to my laptop on the desk trying to look downcast and disappointed. But I was secretly pleased to have had such an interesting impact on her. When I looked up she was staring at me, and as she saw me look, the blush came back. I thought that she is someone who will remember me. When I had done my musing for the morning, I left the library, passing her station, and on an impulse I went towards her and said, “I don’t suppose you would care to come and have lunch with me one day?”

She looked up surprised and seeing me, gave one of her smiles. When she realised a moment later the embarrassing book I had asked for, she suddenly looked surprised and her smile changed from professional to a much warmer one. And then she said, “Lunch one day?” She then looked completely confused and in a major conflict whether to say yes or no.

I said, adding my own smile, “I think I’ll take that as a yes.”

She stared blankly, and I found her shyness quite charming. It seemed good to have an impact on someone, even someone unprepossessing. “But I don’t have a lunch break here.” And then she corrected herself. “I mean I only work mornings. I go home at one.”

“OK, Come for lunch, then.”

She seemed to be getting her surprise and confusion under control. “Just for lunch,” she enquired.

“Well, I said, cheekily, “what else?”

She shook her head, “Can’t be too careful, these days.” She was beginning to join me in my light-heartedness. And I had the immediate feeling she would agree to a lunch together. In fact, we arranged it for the next week.

Strangely and foolishly, I felt nervous before we met. But on the dot when we both arrived at the restaurant at exactly the same time, I felt very calm, and resigned in a hopeful sort of way about what would happen. Firstly, to say, the meal was not very good. But that did not matter because the conversation was. And I left satiated. I was pretty sure she did too. She gave me smiles most of the time, in all the varieties possible, from happily complemented to cheekily teasing. I opened the proceedings by telling her to choose whatever she wanted from the menu. And she did, though the menu was not very extensive or thrilling. I then began to start our purpose of getting to know each other. “Do you often pick up men and get them to take you to lunch.”

She then smiled ruefully, “Not often enough.”

“I wonder what would be enough?” 

She shook her head, and said, bluntly, “I don’t mind if you tease me. It could be quite nice. But let’s just do the normal things to get to know each other. I’ll start. I work mornings at the library, and then fetch a couple of grandchildren from their nurseries in the afternoons. I used to be a schoolteacher. For twenty-five years.” I was nodding my head with interest. “I think I was burned out. So I went to the Open University to do a degree in psychology. I am wondering whether to do a doctorate, now.”

I was impressed. There was a lot more inside the rather dowdy external experience she dressed in – as I had spotted. “I retired from being a doctor some years ago, Fiona,” I said as we had just exchanged names.”

“Really, Alan.” She looked impressed.

But I quickly added. “I’ve more or less forgotten about all that. I enjoyed it. But the learning and the routines, they all seemed like a continuation of doing exams when I was kid.”

She was nodding just as I had done. “What did you want to do when you retired?”

“I didn’t know then. I wanted to grow up, I suppose. But I also told myself I had made a good contribution to the world by looking after people. I treated skin diseases. A specialist in dermatology, it is called.” She nodded, but her question about my retirement was a good one. And I had never had to formulate a clear answer to someone else. “I retired simply because my pension became due. Why would I go on? But I didn’t know what would come next.” I went on to tell her where I lived in our town, and that I had been married. “But although we live in the same house sleep in the same bed, we aren’t really married.” I looked her in the eye, “Sexually, I mean.” I kept looking, and she looked back into mine.

She opened her mouth to say something and then paused, but eventually said, “Is that what you want from me?” But she changed the subject – back to matter-of-fact things, where she lived, the problem with her car which might have made her late for our ‘date’. But she kept looking at me in a curious way as if she was trying to say something that wouldn’t come out. Then she told me, “I am married too. Also, our sex is good.” She looked enquiringly at me. And then shook her hair out of her face and looked across the restaurant as if dismissing what she’d said. “Well it’s good for him. I know about good sex for men.” And she stopped as if there was a lot unspoken that would be obvious.

“It looks, Ginny, as if we might converge in some ways.”

She nodded, “I am a fantasist, Alan.”

This struck a question I wanted to ask, and I thought about putting it carefully, and at last said, “Is that why you blushed when I mentioned The Story of O?” Perhaps I was not careful enough because she blushed again, bright and all across her cheeks and neck. “I am sorry. You are blushing again. I shouldn’t poke my nose in so deep, should I?”

“It’s OK, don’t worry about that. It is just that I wonder what you will think of me. I never know what to think of myself.”

I paused a moment to question myself on what I did think. The Story of O is extremely erotic. This woman had already brought up sex. Could she be as frantically adolescent as me? What a thought! “I’m OK with all that. I read the book when I had just left school. It has stuck in my mind all the time ever since. It is very sexy isn’t it.” She nodded at me, but looked at her plate on the table. I continued, “Perhaps we’re both fantasists.” 

“I may regret what I am going to say,” she spoke carefully and slowly. “We don’t always have to be fantasists, Alan.” And she put her hand out and laid it gently on my arm which was leaning on the table between us. Now I wondered if it was me who might be blushing. She wasn’t, she was quite pale. Her lips were fixed in a sort of dead smile now. I wished we were somewhere I could have taken her tightly in my arms and crushed her with a passionate hug. But we were not in such a place. So, instead, I took her hand and pressed it against my lips with affection and held it there longer than was needed and I didn’t want to let it go. It looked as if there might be a tear coming into her eyes. Eventually she pulled her hand away and we moved back as the waitress took away our plates in an unceremonious gesture. A second waiter brought our two glasses of wine, and the main course came. We neither of us spoke for ten minutes or more as we silently ate our meals. When mine was finished I emptied my wine-glass quickly in a nervous gulp. She sipped slowly but continuously and looked steadily at me. Then she mouthed, with a faint whisper, “Not Alan, but René.”

I felt awkward at her provocatively casting me in the role of René who I knew had been the lover of O and had enslaved O in the story. “You flatter me.”

“Maybe not.”

“Did you enjoy O being hurt?”

She looked steadily at me, “I don’t know,” and then with a flick of her head again so that her short hair waved as in a breeze. “I’d have to be in love.” There was a pause. She was obviously thinking things over. Then she went back to the safety of being a librarian. “It’s a much better book than that ‘Fifty shades,”

“I haven’t read it. You can read it to me.” But I wasn’t going to be distracted into that diversion. “We can take it gently.” She nodded again and looked down at her plate, smiling, as if occupied with some thoughts about the topic. I was looking at her now-sad guileless expression. “I’m sorry we hardly know each other, do we?”

“I have to get to the nursery, for the little ones.” 

“Yes, you do. I’ll take you.”

“No I need to take the car to fetch them.”

I was disappointed it was over, and wondered about suggesting another date, “Well, Ginny, I will pursue you. Until you change your mind.”

She looked up, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Good.” I got up and went over to the bar to pay. We were silent as we left. It seemed a bad note to part on. In the street, I put my hand on her shoulder and as she turned towards me, I kissed her passionately on her mouth, tongue and all. In that moment something had changed in the world; the world had changed. In a minute or two, I pulled back to six inches away from her face, and to my own surprise I said. “You are mine. The kiss has sealed it.” But I felt like a fifteen year old, snatching his first kiss with a girl.

“I’m yours,” she whispered, and sank her head on my shoulder. “Don’t hurt me too much.”

“I’ll be able to judge how far you can go.” I said, and she shivered. That was a better note to part on.

Three days later it was the weekend. She was in the library for the morning. I sat at the same  desk gazing at her. She rarely looked in my direction. Saturday was a busy day. She left at 1 pm as usual. I followed her out of the door, and she kept her back to me. She mumbled, “I don’t want to be seen together by the others.” She meant her colleagues in the library. So I crossed the road and began to walk slowly to the corner. I saw she was following me on the other side of the road. After I turned the corner, she crossed the road and came up to me. I did not stop, but said, “You don’t have to get to the nursery today,” as if it was a decision of mine. “Ring your husband and tell him you have to work this afternoon as it is busy in the library.”

We stopped walking and without a word she did what I had said. When she had done, I said, “I know exactly what we will do.” She did not say a word but walked with me. I wanted to put my arm on her shoulder to make her feel safe. But I also wanted her to feel slightly unsafe. When we got to my car, I told her to get in. As I started off, I said, “There’s a sex shop in the next town. Have you ever been there?” 

She shook her head and then looked at me. “Are we going to get something.”

“I’m going to get something.”

She seemed nervous. “What is it. Is it a cane?”

I looked at her and smiled as if she had guessed right. But actually, I said, “No. Not this time.” She did not smile. She was not enjoying this. So I stopped the car and told her to get out whilst I got out too. I walked around and gave her a very enveloping hug. “You are lovely. I will never harm what we are developing here.” I could feel her body relax.

“Sorry.” And she hesitated but went on. “I hardly know you. I hardly know what you want to do with me.”

“I know. It is what you like, right? But it is frightening. I’m sure. I won’t say ‘don’t worry’. But we will build up a most wonderful relationship together. I think I know that. You are right, you don’t know me, and fantasies are one thing, but this is not fantasy anymore.” Her head was on my shoulder. My lips were in her hair. “From today, I want you to let your hair grow. For as long as it will.”

She looked up into my face, and asked rather unnecessarily, “You like long hair?”

“I like your hair long for me. For me.”

“OK.” And then, “I feel better now.”

“If you want, we can stop for a cup of tea and get to know each other a little better.”

“It’s OK,” she said seriously, “I’m getting to know you. I like being hugged when I’m nervous.”

I got back into the car. She hesitated and then got in too. I explained we have a cottage in the country, but only I use it. When I want to get away from the old house and the old marriage for a day or two. I said we’d go there when we’ve been to the shop. 

When we entered, I went over to the shop assistant to ask where they kept what I wanted. I saw Ginny was looking distractedly at the hooks and shelves with the crops and whips. I asked her if she wanted one of them.

She said, “If you do.”

“Pick which one you’d like,” and I saw she’d taken one made of wicked bamboo. 

She looked at me and said with a cruel look, “Actually it might be me that gives you a few with this.”

“Not unless I say so.” We laughed quietly in the silent shop. And then I pointed to the racks of garments and told her which to choose, and get the right size for her.

We drove on, not saying much. But she did say in an amused voice, “So you like those shiny kinky clothes?”

“If you wear them for me.” She smiled as if to herself, as if she was learning about me. 

When we arrived at the little cottage, she hesitated to get out, wondering what was going to happen to her. “Just tell me,” she asked, “will we be staying long? Overnight?”

“No. It will be a little play. A gentle play.” 

She nodded, “Thanks.” I unlocked and we went in. She looked around at the cosy small room, as if she had expected it to be fitted out like a prison. 

I told her to sit in one of the comfortable chairs, and I sat in the other opposite her. “I have not brought any milk for a cap of tea.”

She looked mischievous, as if going to tell me off, but thought better and remained silent.

“Please stand up.” She looked surprised and curious as I had only just told her to sit. But she did stand. “Please take all your clothes off.” She stood for a moment before taking her clothes off slowly. She was very practical and showed no sensuality or erotism in her emerging nudity. She stood naked in front of me. I felt very moved. No woman had ever obeyed me like that. 

And there she stood. I felt like a fifteen-year-old who couldn’t believe his girl-friend really wanted to give herself. “You have got the most fantastic curves, there,” I said. She didn’t move; she remained expressionless. Her hands were clutched in front of her crotch. I said with huge emphasis, “You are beautiful. I can’t believe how beautiful you are, Ginny.” She hardly moved but I thought there was a tear or two coming to her eyes, Tears of thanks and pleasure. Her hands unclutched and she spread her arms away from her body as if inviting me in. I gazed; and she stood enjoying being gazed at. Perhaps she had never been seen as a goddess of beauty before.

I leaned forward and stretched out my hand to touch the smooth skin of her thigh with the knuckle of my forefinger. She watched my touch. “Beautiful,” I mumbled, more to myself now, shocked and confused. 

“Now,” I said when I was a little recovered, Put on the black garment we bought.

“Where is it?” And she looked at me enquiring. I did not move but stared at her. My finger moved away from her thigh back to my lap. She kept looking at me. “It’s not still in the car, is it?” I said nothing. “I’ll have to put some clothes on.” She remained looking at me as if requesting permission. But I did not move. “You don’t want me to go out into the road like this?” And she stared challengingly at me. 

I said one word, “Obedience.” She looked away from me, as if in defeat. Slowly she moved towards the door of the cottage. She really would do that for me. She opened the door and was about to take her nakedness out into the bright afternoon sunshine. “Come here,” I suddenly said. And she came back across the room and stood in front of me as I sat in my chair still leaning forward. She was so close. This time I put the tip of my finger on the soft curve of her tummy, feeling the wondrous touch of it. I slid the finger down towards the hairs above her thighs. She let me do so without moving. “Go and shut the door.” She did as I told her, slowly but without hesitation. She knew I had wanted to test her obedience, and she had passed  the test. “I brought it in. It is in the packet behind the chair you were sitting in.” She looked across the room. Her relief was so palpable. “Put it on.”

She went over to find the garment, the slick black catsuit. It was difficult to put on with only a small zip in the back. I watched her slender limbs struggling. Her curves looked irresistible, the soft flesh almost edible. I knew that in a moment I could stroke every inch of that incomparable vision I was watching. She was finding it difficult and began to feel defeated. She looked over at me to see if I would come and help. I did not move. “Obedience,” I said, as before. So she continued her struggle. Finally, when she had arranged herself in it, and had managed the zipper at the back, she came and stood in front of me again. So close. I let my amazement shine from my face. She smiled, the first smile since she had been in the cottage.

“So you are pleased with yourself, “I said.

After a moment, she said, “Yes,”

“I am pleased with you too. I can’t describe how very pleased with you.” Her smile stayed on her lips. The black material was tight over all her body to her neck, and down to her wrists and ankles. “It is a fetish for me.” I had never seen a woman so blended with such a strokable material. And here she was, inches near to me. I pointed to a door in the corner of the room and told her it was a staircase to the bedroom above. “There is a long mirror in the bedroom. Look at yourself and admire what you see. And look at the image with my eyes that can only see wonder. When you have seen that wonder you have created, that wonder that you are, go and lie on the bed and wait for me. She moved barefoot with grace. I Think she felt herself the image of grace as I saw her; and disappeared up to the bedroom. After a few minutes I heard the bed creak. I lay back in the chair and sighed. It almost felt like a lifetime’s satisfaction compressed into the afternoon. 

I waited for her to compose herself  and relax. And me too. I waited some twenty minutes for her to consider what came next. I left her to think what an image she created, what an amazement she was for me, what a silly old fool I was. Whatever…. 

Eventually when I felt sufficiently relaxed, my eagerness undiluted but sufficiently controlled, I trod slowly up the stairs. She was indeed lying sprawled on the bed. Her head turned, and she watched me. Was she curious what I would want? Was she frightened? Did she know which? “One day, Ginny, you must teach me how to describe this wondrous moment you have given me.” I lay down on the bed beside her. She didn’t know whether to stroke me with the soft vinyl of her body or let me stroke her. I told her to come on top of my body, her legs on my legs, her arms on mine, her lips on my lips. We kissed softly. The passion grew in her, but I kept mine still restrained. Nevertheless, I placed my arms around her silken body slowly feeling the warmth of her curves and her softness. I stroked and stroked her sides as she writhed with excitement. I felt the strong urges inside her, inside her tight garment. She smoothed herself all over me. I told her to find me inside my flies, and she unzipped and her kind hand felt for me there. She drew out my penis and then my balls. I told her to put me in her mouth. As she slid down my body she said she had never done this before. I said it was easy if she followed my instructions. She was eager to do so. And so was I.

I was excited but, as expected, my old-man equipment was slow to work. And I knew what I’d do anyway. I told her that now is the big moment. “Undo the belt of my trousers and pull it free. She was clearly unaccustomed to men’s clothing, but she managed it in the end. She looked serious as she handed it to me. She lay back on my body and looking into my face a few inches below hers. I said a little unkindly, “This is the moment you’ve dreamed about.” She dropped her face on my chest in a resigned manner. “Look at me.” I ordered.

She looked up, and our eyes locked. “No,” she said quietly, knowing what I was about to do. She knew I’d take no notice of her ‘no’. With my hands behind her back, I doubled the belt over, and feeling her gorgeous round buttocks with my left hand, I swung the doubled belt at them. I couldn’t see but it landed somewhere in the right pace on her backside. Her face took on an urgent surprised look and her mouth opened. No cry came out. In fact, her breath had stopped momentarily. She gasped, and her head flailed up and down on my chest a couple of times as a tide of pain swept over her.

“Look at me.” She looked back into my eyes. “Not so bad?” I asked. She shook her head as if I could not possibly know. I felt for the other buttock, and I thrashed the belt down on it. Her head flew back and forth and her eyes seemed as though they couldn’t see for a moment as the feeling charged through her body and took all her attention. A short cry came from her mouth. “You are beautiful,” I said. “Never forget it.” And then I said, “Kiss me.” She had to slide up my body a little to get her lips onto mine. She held on to the kiss. Perhaps she thought that I would delay the next stroke. But I felt for the first buttock and thrashed it. Her mouth jerked off mine. Her faced grimaced. And quickly I did the second buttock. Her whole body writhed a little on top of me. The feeling of her tense body and the tension of the silky, shiny garment was wondrous and knowing the pain that must be in her seemed the opposite, an agony for me too. I was torn. Why did I need to do this to her. And to myself. Because I enjoy the agony in her face, and she’ll enjoy the memory, over and over again.

I thrashed again, and she still refused to cry out. “That’s five.”

She was rigid with tension and the anticipation of another one. I stroked her tightly-clad body and felt it soft beneath the surface. I stroked every part of her I could reach, and even between her thighs. I said, “You know there is only one thing more exciting than stroking this fantastic garment, and that will be when it is off and I can stroke the beautiful soft curves of your real skin. That is what I will be doing soon.”

“Don’t hurt me anymore,” she said quietly. I took no notice and told her to stand beside the bed. But she buried her head in my chest as if it was her only safe place. “Obedience.” Slowly she moved off me and stood by the bed looking down at me. I took two little blue pills out of the breast pocket of my shirt. “Go downstairs and get me a sip of water in a glass so I can take them.” She knew what they were, and why an oldie like me needed them.

“Yes,” she said. I watched the beautiful proportions of the shining goddess move around the bed and disappear downstairs. I took a deep breath and gave out a sigh of satisfaction. I believed I was at a peak moment in my life. I watched as her head of gloriously flourishing blonde hair came back in sight as she mounted the stairs. Then the stunning curves of the body and her limbs. 

She came around the bed with the glass of water, and I took my pills. She stood attendant at the side of the bed. “I shall love it when your lovely hair grows to its full length down you back. I shall want to glorify every inch it grows. Shall I give you money for every inch?”

“What?” It seemed a sudden change of direction for her.

“It’s how to measure the value of it.” I did not know why I had introduced money.

“I thought all this,” she indicated her garment, “was all about sex?”

“It’s about love and preciousness. It’s about uncountable value.” I waffled with my delirious kind of excitement. “Come and lie back on my body – with your body.” She did as required, her face coming close to mine.

“There is only one thing more perfect than stroking the beautiful curves of this sexy garment, and that would be to stroke the beautiful curves of your completely naked skin.” I repeated, pointlessly, and she said nothing. My face was buried in her gorgeous hair. So I continued in my delirium. “You are my heaven.” And then, “I am King of Heaven-land.” She chuckled with a deep sense of satisfaction. We were two rather elderly adolescents making each other happy. “I am your King.” At that her smile broadened and continued. I asked quietly, “What am I?”

“You are my King.”

“Correct. Don’t forget it. Don’t call me anything else.” She still smiled happily. “Your King, my dear Ginny.”

“My King.” My hand went to the belt that was lying beside me on the bed. “Kiss me.”

She kissed me with some passion, and I landed a stroke of the belt on her buttock quite unexpectedly – for her. Her head shot back in surprise and pain. There was no sound. Then she clamped her lips back on mine and pressed hard to endure what was rushing through the nerves of her body. She was tense from top to toe, and then relaxed a bit as the pulse began to subside. She lifted her head, and said without emphasis, “Ouch.” And shook her head sadly, “I didn’t like that one.”

“I know,” I said kindly. And then I landed another one. Her breath gasped. She shook her head with pain. And then, with force, pressed her lips against mine again.

Then, she lifted her head a little, “You bastard.”

“I know,” I said with the same kindly tone. It was as if there were different people; two people beginning a passionate love, and a torture victim with her torturer.

“I’ve dreamed of all this. But, René…. never with so much love from you.” She looked earnestly into my face. “I have done something to your heart, haven’t I?”

“You have,” I said. “It has brought my passion alive. My passion for you.”

“ I love you. You are my dream of….” She stopped because I delivered another thrashing stroke. She couldn’t speak. Her body was tight with the pain. Eventually she said, “Thank you. You bastard.” And laughed.

I laughed too and delivered the next on her sore buttock. She bit her lip and everything in her went tense again.

“Bastard. I can’t….” But she stopped herself from begging me to stop. “Oh, bastard, bastard, bastard.” And she flopped down as if exhausted on top of my body. So I lashed her again. She writhed from side to side on top of me. Her shiny garment sliding sensuous and graciously over me.

“That’s ten of them.” She looked me in the eyes propping herself on her elbows.

“I know,” I said with kindness again, smiling back at her. “You’ve done well.”

“Thank you, sir. My King.” And she added, with a sort of hopeful relief, “ Is that my punishment?”

“Some of it.” And her face clouded with a slight frown as she had thought that the belting might have been completed.

“You mean there’s more.”

“I’ll decide that.”

“I’m asking you to decide,” she said slightly impatiently.

“And I’ll decide when I’ll let you know.”

She sank back onto me. I was very conscious of my penis snug between her thighs. “You bastard. How can I cope?” She snuggled herself onto me, wondering perhaps if another lash would come. “Do you mind me calling you a bastard.”

“You know what I am for you. Tell me.”

“My King.”

“Remember that.”

“I will. My King.” 

Then I told her to stand by the bed. Slowly she relaxed her embrace of me and got up. She stood. “Get down on your knees.” And she did. “On all fours,” which she did. I decided not to comment on her obedience as if taking it for granted. Now get down on the carpet. Press that tummy into it. Press those breasts into it.” She did, perhaps a bit reluctantly. “I want you to crawl over to that wall. Don’t let your tummy stop touching the carpet, nor the breasts. Squirm. You are a worm, at my feet.” And I sat up at the end of the bed to watch her slide.

“Yes, My King.” And she slid herself slowly across the floor, some two or three metres.

“Stand up and face the wall.” She did. 

“Yes, My King.” 

“Put your hands up high on the wall.” 

“Yes, My King.” And she did. 

“Press that tummy and those breasts into the wall.” She moved right up against the wall.

“My King.”

“Reach higher.” And she stretched her hands an inch or so higher.

“Higher, higher.” I said commandingly. “And keep yourself completely still.”

She realised she had to go on tip toe. “That’s right. Now higher still.” She reached very high. Then I was quiet, and looking at that irresistible body, pinned against the wall. “Hmm. That’ll do,” I said as if reluctantly. “We’ll wait a while for the pills to work.” And I sat still and silent just gazing at her back. She was as still as she could be. Which actually was very still. She remained on tip toe, as ordered.

Eventually when I thought that things might be getting ready in my loins. I told her to get back on the floor, tummy and tits never to leave the carpet. “Now climb out of that garment. And don’t let yourself rise off the carpet. 

She struggled with the zip in the back. It seemed perversely out of reach but eventually she managed it and slowly the black thing was rolled down her body, till her pure skin lay waiting for me. I went to crouch down next to her on the floor. I looked at some vaguely pink patches on her buttocks. I had my unkind doubled-up belt in my hand. “Now. Another ten, shall we say.”

She turned her head to look at me. “No,” she said shocked “I can’t”. She hadn’t expected it. “I can’t, Al. Alan. I can’t.” I saw a tear emerge from one eye. 

“Yes, your poor buttocks won’t have the protection of that plastic skin over them. It might feel a lot worse.”

Slowly she began to sob a little. Just gently, and as if she was trying not to. I put out my hand to touch her cheek with a comforting stroke, but she turned her face away. With the back of her head towards me she said, “Do it. If you must.”

“But it is not a question of ‘must’. It is a question of want-to, and of obedience.” She was now sobbing harder. I stroked her tender buttocks.

“I have now made a decision,” I announced rather formally. “We shall leave the next thrashing till next time.” And I dropped the belt on the floor next to me. She turned her face toward me with a new expression. Some hope at last. I said, “I love you, Ginny.”

Her tears ran again. I put out my hand to touch them. “I love you too, Al. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. It is your disobedience.”

“I’m sorry, Alan Sorry, Sorry.”

“Perhaps your disobedience is as painful as my belt on you lovely backside.”

“Yes,” her tears had stopped. “I think it is. I’m sorry. Next time perhaps.”

“Come to the bed with me.” And we stood up and went to the bed, leaving the belt behind, and the pile of the crumpled garment, I lay on the bed. “You, undress me.”

She looked at me and my clothes and did begin to undress me. I moved as she needed to remove them.

“As before, stretch your body over mine, on top of me”. My member was a little erect as it touched her thigh. It stiffened as her thighs parted to let it stand up. I stroked her skin, every single part of it. “It is, as I said, so much better even than stroking that catsuit.”

“Good. It is all yours. Every bit.” 

I rolled her over and knelt over her. I was nearly ready to come into her. “Put my penis into you. It wants to love you.”

She looked a bit hesitant. Maybe worried, “Is that what you want?” And then she relaxed. And she fumbled with my genitals to open her hole and invite me in. It really didn’t take me long, and I was completely unable to pace myself. My thrusting gained speed and furthered its reach inside her. “I love this,” she panted, staring sightless at the ceiling. “I love….” And I came like the volcano I always had been on all my last occasions. I collapsed on her, staying inside as long as I could. She said, “You’re still a man, a fantastic man.”

I had often been told my climaxes were of the best. “It is all your doing, Ginny, the goddess of beauty.”

She buried her face in my neck. “I’m sorry, Alannie.”

“It is not me you have cheated, my dear. I have been to heaven and back.” She chuckled sadly as it were. “It is your fantasies you’ve cheated, your own fantasies.”

“Yes,” she said, and held me round the waist pulling me into her as I was slipping out and comforting me as well as herself. “Next time, Alannie.”

“Next time, I shall thrash you naked. Your buttocks will bruise.”

“Yes, Alan, thrash me. Make me scream. I deserve it. I want it.”

“OK, Ginny. No mercy.” I felt her shiver a little under me.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“But right now. It is your climax. Let us do it.”

“It’s alright. I don’t need it.”

Listen, Ginny. I wasn’t asking you. I was deciding; we will proceed as I just said.” And I moved off her to her side and put my hand gently between her thighs. It was moist. I spread her legs. She was completely inert, passive, compliant. “Let me taste you.” She said nothing, and I put my lips to hers and my tongue slowly slipped into the soft tissue and its moisture. I sensed when I had found the spot as her body gave a slight shudder. I knew where to apply my skills and with a slow rhythm I flicked that spot with my tongue, getting faster and remaining gentle but persistent. She made no more sound until when I was going at speed with her sensitive love-place, there was a terrific shout and her breath seemed to fill the room. She convulsed so I lost my place. With my strength I forced her down on the bed and replaced my tongue with my fingers and very, very gently but with speed, I continued the stimulus on that special part of her. Till there was another short cry, and she held her breath again. And then the third shout. Her body relaxed and she turned away from me. She was done. She turned back to me and hugged me with her arms around my shoulders and waist. She pulled me until my penis was nearly back home in her again. But I had been spent.

We lay a long time in silence. I pounded my brains with how precious this moment was, would always be. I was coming back to reality. How could it fit into my life today? I imagine she was thinking the same.

We lay a long time as if we had found the answer to all appetites till the end of our lives. We clung to a being-together for some hours. When we emerged, it was as if into a new epoch in history. How would it be on Monday morning if I sat there in the library, gazing in her direction whilst she did her work trying not to look at me? Would I accompany her out at 1 pm? When I checked out a book, would she call me her King? Would we tell out spouses and then move together to the pretty little cottage? Would we read The Story of O to each other at bedtime? Finally, would her beautiful buttocks graciously accept a full-scale, naked thrashing next time? “I know you a bit better, Ginny.” 

She nodded, and we decided to go home. Until next time.

 

 

 

 

Men are not much

 

I don't think much of men.  They are all right.  They are all right I suppose when giving me the right excitement, but not much more. Girls give you a better conversation, girls are more interesting, they are more interested.  They ask questions. They give you more reassurance, make you feel good, tell you your hairdresser is wonderful, are envious of the clothes you wear, the shops you buy them at. They want to know where you got your wonderful recipe and will you give it to them.  These are things that make the world go round.

Men - I've had quite a few of them. In fact. as many as I have wanted.  It doesn't take a lot to make yourself the kind of woman a man will take out, spend money on, will buy an expensive shaver for, make me feel good.  But what you ask me about is what I do with my body. And that's what I'm going to tell you about.  It's going to be about what I do with his body.  I have had a lot.  I know what their orgasms are like.  I know how to get them in position for my orgasms.  Right?

Despite my background I’d been to University, and I could give any man an argument that’d make him think. I could simper and then cut his silly conclusions to pieces. It left them truncated and embittered with me. It felt like victory. I was not just pussy. 

Since I'm not too bothered about them, it puts me in a powerful position, doesn't it.  Right? And that's what I live for. Mostly they shy off pretty quick. When I've got a period, I expect them to lick me clean.  Not many are keen on that.  They usually pack their condoms and say bye-bye.  They think they have the mastery of me.  It doesn't bother me much.  But one or two have taken another line.  In fact, I should say three, two have cleaned me up when I've told them to. They filled the bill when required. Like the intelligent handsome boy who had creative ideas about making my blood into cocktails which he could bottle. A new idea for a bloody Mary!  I liked that, it showed imagination.  But he went off the rails by making money out of his advertising, rather than pleasing me.  Another one liked using special apparatus and he often spent a couple of days building it before we used it, and then he'd get on it and I'd have my fun.  But the one I wanted to tell you about was into something altogether more serious. And that is why I want to tell you about him.

I knew there was something that would add zest.  All I knew was somehow men were there to serve. Men were there to pay the price, the price I was interested in asking.  How we got into it was like this.  He showed me those adverts that they have for Sunday leisure wear.  I knew that shiny garments kicked men in the guts.  I sometimes walked down the street and men salivated on the pavement when they walked past my mackintosh.  What I was keen to learn more of was the way men wanted to be treated.  So I asked him what did this word mean - 'dominatrix'.  He told me that this was a woman who had special tricks for getting a man's balls down to size.  I said I could think up some tricks.  He said that was very likely. 

The only request he made which I granted was that I put a gag in his mouth so that he was utterly speechless.  Otherwise, he had no say whatever in what happened to him.  I liked those leisure garments.  I chose them for the ones I liked.  I chose them for me.  I thought my cleavage might drive him bananas, I thought my crotch showing a suggestion of my hairs could drive him crazier still.  Over the red shiny gear, I wore a long silken dressing gown, glamorous in its own way, but concealing the intense casing of my body, my gleaming curves.  His gag was unpleasantly uncomfortable.  It kept his mouth wide with his tongue pushed to the back.  He could breathe, but not swallow.  Most of the time he dribbled.  It looked degrading, and he felt it.  He knelt when I told him to kneel.  He felt the shape of my buttocks and of my thigh as his hands slid round the shape of my dressing gown.  He could tell the slippery surface of the latex beneath.  I told him to crawl, and he went down on all fours.  'Not good enough,' I said.  He looked up at me.  'On your belly,' I demanded.  Reluctantly he lowered himself till he was flat on the floor.  I told him he should not raise his stomach or his chin from the pile of my bedroom carpet.  I told him to undress.  There on the floor he wriggled, worm-like, out of his expensive lawyer’s suit.  And while he did so I got from my locked cupboard a rather cruel willow cane that, I had been told, had the most vicious sting – it was especially long, and a heavier duty than most.  While he writhed his way out of the clothes he had worked in today, his skin came slowly into visibility and those clothes were reduced to a rumpled degenerate mess.

I stood above him, the tip of my cane ruffling his hair, pinning the small of his back into the floor, following the curve of his buttock into his thigh.  He never protested but silently obeyed.  I never questioned whether he was enjoying it.  I was exploring my feelings, my feelings of power.

Power meant that I should have no truck with the feelings of my victim.  That is not true.  Power meant that I was fascinated to know his feelings of humiliation and soon it would be pain.  And finally, when he was naked the tip of my cane scored across the skin of his shoulder blades.  I told him that whilst keeping his chin to the floor, he should raise his buttocks and kneel with them in the air.  This was my moment of curiosity.  I couched down slightly at his side; and then I brought down the cane with maximum force on the soft rounds of his bottom.  He collapsed to the floor instantly.  The gag reduced his squawk to a gurgle.  And he tried to breathe heavily, but only through the spittle in his nostrils. He writhed from side to side, still pressing his chin obediently into the carpet.  I told him to resume the position with his bottom in the air, and the next time he should remain totally without movement. He shook his head vigorously.  I took it that he was telling me he couldn't bear the pain.

He was a coward.

Should I have been disappointed?  I am not sure if I was.  The prospect of pain he could not bear, gave me the knowledge that I had power to destroy him.  I told him to stand up.  The cane could wait until later.  He reached the upright position.  There was an angry red line across his buttocks.  Even at that stage there were red beads beginning to ooze from the welts. I told him to stand on his toes, to reach his arms above his head, and to remain there as I wished.  He did so, my man had relinquished all appearance of willpower and initiative.  He was obedience itself.  If you could grovel on tip-toe, he was doing it. He was reduced really to the animal in him. I told him, and his head drooped. It was not so much shame as acknowledgement of the truth.  He was not so steady on his balance.  I threatened him that if he came down off his toes I would cut him three more times on his buttocks.  He nodded gently with understanding.  And he thought he was going to be spared. 

I was standing behind him fascinated by the red weal on his white skin.  I told him that my blackness would never reveal its shame as his white skin was now doing.  I let the dressing gown slip from my shoulders.  I threw it on the bed in front of him.  I told him he would not see me in the garments I had chosen until I decided to reveal myself. He stared straight ahead at the bed as if he no longer had a mind that knew what he was waiting for.  I realised I must restore his capacity to know and to expect, and above all to fear.  I told him to imagine my body, to describe its curves.  For this I reached up and loosened the gag till he could mumble. He started to imagine the clothes that I had tightly encased myself in.  His mind worked weakly, and he told me of the shining red plastic, the smooth tight curves glistening as saliva and smooth as silk.  He remained on his toes avoiding more punishment, at least for the time being.  I admired him for his efforts.  I reached for a pair of long latex gloves from the dressing table.  I closed my inviting body slowly against his back. The parts of my body touching gently the surfaces of his back.  My long arms moved around his waist.  I clutched the shining black gloves in front of him and slowly smoothed the gloves up my hands and my arms above my elbows.  I touched his cheeks on either side with the pure sweetness of their glistening surface.  I told him to smell their smell.   I clutched his belly to me with a firmness of my hands as they smoothed down over his chest and his abdomen.  He trembled with the ecstasy of it.  I was giving him pleasure. I was giving myself pleasure.  I was giving him pleasure without pain, and therefore my pleasure was only half pleasure.  I retrieved from my cleavage a fine steel chain linked with a long leather thong. The chain had a hook at one end. I resumed my position with my hands around his waist.  Now I felt for his balls.  He twitched and shivered when I found them.  I passed the chain twice around the neck of the sack.  The hook was fastened tightly into a link.  He did not murmur but the trembling with ecstasy was now mixed with the tremble of fear.  He did not know what would come next.  The leather thong hung down to his toes.  I released my grip around his body.  He wished to turn and look but I forbade him in order to preserve his blindness to the beauty of my body and the erotism of my clothing. He remained on tip-toe, and was understandably wobbly now. 

I fetched from the cupboard where my cane had been, a blindfold that would keep him from that awareness. He began to be appalled and he hesitated to acquiesce.  Fortunately, the determination in my voice and the determination in the movements of my hand quelled that moment of resistance.  I completed the severance of his senses.

I told him to reach to the floor.  I told him to go down on his knees.  I told him to find the cane where I had dropped it. With relief he crouched on all fours. I watched as his hands in his blindness swept the carpet.  He reached my feet and I told him to caress them.  I allowed him to put my toes to his cheek and then to resume his search for the cane.  I told him I would count to 20 and any number beyond that would be the number of strokes his buttocks would receive.  I said I was not talking idly.  I did not joke.

He searched on with vigour.  Fortunately, for him, he found the cane before the numbers I was counting ran out.  I told him it was the cane that had cruelly hurt him, and he should hug it to his bosom as a loved one. Still kneeling on all fours he did this, and then offered it to me as a sacrament.  But I did not use the cane to strike him.  Instead, I found a way into him with its tip.  The pouted mouth of his back passage accepted the the cane almost without noticing.  Gently I moved it forward into the cavity of his insides.  He did not murmur.  He did not move.  I knew he wondered at this intrusion, relieved that I had spared his skin from further strokes with that cane.  I told him that if I wished it the cane would be used later, but that I would decide. What I wished at this moment was to feel the smell of his fear drifting into my nostrils and on the surface of my skin. I twisted the cane around causing disturbance deep inside his body.  He remained with a kind of awful pleasure.  I withdrew the cane slowly from his anus.

The tip and a few inches of my cane were no longer pristinely new and clean.  I told him to kneel up his head held high in the air, his hands clutched behind the small of his back, his knees remained painfully widely spread.  He did as he was told.  I wiped the soiled cane on the lip beneath his nostrils.  'Filthy,' I said, 'Filth. Do you smell it?'  He nodded obediently.  'This must be cleaned,' I warned.  Lifting one corner of his mouth away from the gag I pushed the tip of my cane in and wiped it carefully on the inside of his mouth. Lifting carefully the corner on the other side of his mouth I wiped a second time to ensure the cleanliness of my cane.  I suggested this might nauseate him, that this might make him vomit.  But, I warned, this was dangerous with the gag in his mouth since he may merely fill his lungs with his own vomit. I told him this was a moment of extreme self-control.  I asked, did he understand.  He nodded his head slightly.  I told him he must control himself like a house-trained animal.  That is what he is.  I told him that now blind, speechless, penetrated and soiled he was in such a state that an animal, even, would be disgusted with itself.  He remained silently impressed by the accuracy of my insults.  I then told him to get himself on the bed.  I have a small divan upon which many men have performed beneath me while I have sucked my pleasure from them.  By this time, blindfolded, he had no notion of where the bed was, and I watched. Carefully and cautiously, he collided with the furniture, and then fell on his back on the bed.  I told him to turn around with his head hanging over the end. I told him to find the chain that held his balls and to reach for the leather thong attached to it.  I told him to serve it to me like a slave offering his monarch a gift.  He did this. From my cupboard at the end of the bed, I drew a small pulley that hooked in the ceiling and ran the leather thong through this.  I could tighten it with a ratcheted wheel and pull his flesh.  It tightened to a point where he began to groan.  I told him to lift his pelvis from the bed to ease himself, which he did.  I wound the thong still tighter till he groaned again.  I told him to reach still higher to save his organs.  And he did.  I wound it further.  I think he could no longer keep this arched position any higher.  So, I relented and left the ratcheted wheel.  I asked if he was in pain.  He nodded.  “It is only in pain”, I said, “that I will give you pleasure, because”, I stressed, “that is my pleasure.” 

“You may touch now if you wish - but only while you suffer,” I said.  His body was arched nine inches from the bed.  His legs strained to keep him there.  He turned his head to the side as I sat on the bed beside him, his hands reached for my voluptuousness.  He began to moan at the exquisite predicament he was in, but I silenced him.  “I will have no sounds from you,” I said.  “No animal can speak or have words.”  He obeyed and felt with a joy in his hands in the midst of a strained body that was beginning to ache and throb in the congested organs which were so tightly bagged.  Despite his abject suffering, I could see a bead of moisture at the tip of his prick.  “There,” I said touching its shaft with my latex hand, 'there is my precious pleasure stick.  Shall I beat it with my cane?” I asked him, touching the blindfold, challenging him to answer, yes.  I noticed that the eager organ stirred slightly in my fingers.  “I shall have to climb upon you,” I said and he looked with some apprehension.  My weight would probably collapse his arched body and tear those isolated balls from him. Astride, I put my slithery hands beneath his buttocks to ease the strain.  I could let go suddenly. I told him and his whole racked body jerked with terror as the tension drew agony from his balls and he thrust in the air to save them.  His mouth gaped and he mumbled some swear words unpleasantly.  I was angry.  I told him that no man had ever abused me in that way.  I lifted myself from his body and stood looking down on his animal form on the bed, and I informed him that he could either remove himself from my house and never return, or he could take a punishment from me of my choosing.  He shut his eyes in an agony of indecision. His body arched with strain and tension and in addition his humiliation changing from a voluntary acquiescence to the beginnings of a terrified helplessness.  He knew the punishment that I would choose, and he had a terror he could not bear it.

I told him I would choose, and I released the leather thong from the wheel and the pulley.  He thought I was about to let him go.  He called my name as if from a very great distance, announcing amorous platitudes which sounded pathetic in his helplessness.  “You will not get away so simply, my friend,” I told him.  I produced some handcuffs from my well-provided cupboard, and restrained his hands stretched out beyond his head.  I then told him to roll over and this he did. I told him to bring his knees beneath his tummy.  This he did though he knew where this would lead.  The strong red wheal had smudged flecks of blood.  He was crouched submissive, even more an animal.  I found once more, the cane as it lay on the floor beside the bed. I sat beside him and placed it before his face.  “This,” I told him “will give you more pain than you could ever imagine.  This has penetrated you with ignominy, your anus and your mind.  You may now kiss it as if it were your betrothed.  Your love for it will be second only to your love for me”'  I told him I commanded it, and I wished to see the passion of his kiss on it.  Looking foolish he tried to display a passionate flurry of kisses upon the inert stick, as the gag got in the way and his saliva dribbled from his chin.  I told him how abject he looked and how it pleased me that I could force him into such subjugation.  He stopped his kissing and I thought for a moment that there was a spark of fury within him, but he suppressed it.  “Yes,” I said, “don't say it.  Total control under the most extreme conditions.  That is what is required of you.  You have a punishment to suffer.”  I spoke quietly like a teacher patiently instructing a pupil with his lesson. “I require you to know it will be my extreme pleasure at the pain that I will inflict”.  He said nothing but I knew that terror was in him and mounting still. I needed now to fasten him more tightly. I laid him out face-down, flat. There were chains from the small legs of the divan which bound his shoulders and ankles.  Once again, I attached the thong from his balls. Sliding it between his thighs and attaching it to the pulley.  I ratcheted up his round buttocks.  His bottom was free to wave in the air, and that was the only gesture he could make.  I told him it would not save him.  He mumbled that he had to warn me -- that he might make a noise, and I confirmed that he certainly would.  I would see to it.  I told him he had voluntarily placed himself in my hands and he had done it for the love of me.  I told him he would pay to the extreme for that love, and I added we would soon start.

Do I need to explain the extreme agony of the cane? Do I need to explain how the agony is multiplied by his helplessness, being unable to effect any influence on me whatsoever?  Do I need to explain that the agony was multiplied by his knowing that he had given me everything for love of me and knowing even that I would only give, in exchange, cruelty and take pleasure?  Do I need to explain not only the agony of the body but the anguish of his spirit, that his love would not be returned with love, but with ruthlessness, with humiliation, and by extracting an abject dribbling scream?  Do I need to explain the torture of learning that a world of love can only transform, for him, into unfairness, degradation and a world of insane agony.  I told him all this as my cane descended on his buttocks.  Again and again, it descended on him, and again and again I told him he has put his love in treacherous hands.  Again and again, my cane beat him.  And again and again I told him of the ecstasy of my pleasure. 

As my orgasm came, my blows on his buttocks became wild and inaccurate.  He believed me to be out of control and he feared extreme danger from me.  Then came my orgasm beyond any means I have to describe it to you.  Then I had finished.  I lay beside him, the sleek texture of my latex garments snugly against his soft white skin.  His white form was a mound that rose to a blood-red peak suspended painfully from my pulley.  I had destroyed a significant area of skin.  I told him at that moment that I was proud of him beyond belief.  I said as I relaxed out of the tension that I would be beneficent, and I would release him if he wished.  He could satisfy himself in any way he wished. He told me no, for the time being at least he would remain in his posture of bonded submission beside me.  And I lay too, half-sleeping for a time that was without measure.  When I looked again his buttocks were encrusted with dried blood. I felt for his scrotum and it was a little swollen.  I released the chain and his balls became loose.  I felt for his penis and held it with my latex hands and for another undefined period we dozed silently, obliviously together, his degraded manhood in my appreciative hands.

After a while, it must have been a long while, I noticed it had begun to stiffen.  He told me to climb between him and the bed beneath, between the restraining chains and draw his needing member into my womanly cleft and with vigour to bring him to his climax.  And this I carefully did in honour of his suffering and by the time he had come, I had relieved many times more.  When he had finished, he remained in his chained bonds and I lay beneath him unusually, unaccustomed, as a woman, in a womanly position.

We dozed a little more.  I believed at that moment that he would never consort with the evil in me again and that the body that I had broken in pain would become a stranger I would never again see.

Shall I tell you what happened thereafter.  Was it as I had suspected, a beginning and a final ending all in the one occasion.  Shall I tell you we became man and wife?  Shall I confide that we embarked from that day, on an ever-more elaborate chorus of refinements to our joint passion?

Or shall I leave you to believe the ending that is happiest for you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 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 remembered a dream she was having; one that was regular every few nights she realised one day. In the dream she saw an eye. A very large eye. She was close up to it and it pressed itself in on her in 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, appeared now 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 became 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? How could he, you might exclaim. 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 to others, 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 - before 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 decisions 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 his own ordeal; 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 Joh 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 the English teacher. 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 himself already been mutilated pointlessly. 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 – till 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 in all. 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. Only one was physical.

            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 on his taste, 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, too, 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, amongst the 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. It spoke as it were in the idiom of the city. She would give herself, 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 was 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 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 polished door-knobs rescued her from the devouring poison of her own humiliation. His echoing scream went on unheard. He could believe in a triumph, as of old. Possibly better than of old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was not from looking at him

 

It was not from looking at him. Her love came instead from looking inside herself at what he made her feel.  He was lanky and had a good physique not yet turned to fat. Perhaps he looked after his body. She imagined him in the gym, weights in his hands, or running on that relentless conveyor belt thing with music pounding a rhythm in his ear buds. But he was not hunky handsome. It was two weeks ago when he had come down from his office he shared with one of those power-dressing executive chickens. The junior office girls called them that, and were jealous and confident that they could out-preen those female executives. Sylvia looked at the young man in his trim suit and genuine leather shoes tapping briskly on the stairs as he descended. 

In the reception area there were a number of girls at their computers, maybe as many as twenty and he looked around. Sylvia looked up at him and he noticed, so he came over immediately, to ask her help to locate an ancient cardboard file. Nice to be distracted away from the boringly unamusing keyboard she had as a companion all day. She led him briskly down the corridor to the old file store, the files she and the girls had not yet copied onto hard-discs. As she inserted her key, she turned to him, “What is your name, love?” He did not answer. But he came to an abrupt halt as she had suddenly stood in front of the locked door. With her sudden stop, his hand went out to touch her shoulder as he stopped himself. She felt herself shiver. And yet she thought immediately that his hand was not cold. Nor was he one of the more creepy executives. The door opened outwards, and she moved back against his body. She almost gasped at the contact as she looked in his eyes and excused herself. His apologetic smile had its impact, too. Oh, she thought, was she going to get slapped into another of those cheap romances in some impossible role as an office tart, again. He was new, and probably had not heard about the pathetic little drama that Bernhard had dragged her through last year. This one was new since then and office gossip replenished itself quickly.

But perhaps he had heard and might try something in this dark quiet space, shrouded by ancient files. He seemed confident but efficient and directed. Yet his smile said something. She moved into the filing room, and again asked his name. He told her, Jonathon, but modified it to Jon as he looked around at the surprisingly large array of shelves and boxes and folders. “So, you are all getting this lot typed in, are you?” he said impressed by the task. 

            “Can I help you find something, Jon?” And added, “I’m Sylvie.”

            “I know,” he said, “you’re Sylvie. “And, no; I’ll have to dig out what I need. It is a letter from a long-ago author. Someone who’s just died and they want to write an obituary about him.” He was looking round the shelves and seemed to be locating what he wanted. “The more they write about him, the more books we sell.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Sounds a bit commercial, doesn’t it?” He seemed a bit apologetic and smiled at her again, and looked towards her in the shadowy room. He gave her his engaging smile. She was leaning against the doorpost looking at him, wondering how he knew her name. What did he know about her. And her indiscretions, if that is what you would call them. And, of course, the gossip would have made something out of her indiscretion last year. As he turned his smile on her, he hesitated, “No, I don’t know much about you.” And then added surprisingly shyly, “I have just noticed you behind your computer screen, sometimes.” She felt embarrassed; or was she a bit anxious in this dark room with a young man who had been noticing her?

He turned back to a shelf that he seemed to have quickly located and in a moment took down a box. Turned back towards the door and towards Sylvie, he passed close as he left the room. “I’ll take this to the canteen and look through it,” he said. She nodded, locking the door. “Come and have a cup of tea,” he invited.

            She looked down embarrassed at her shoes, “OK.” It was not actually the time for her tea break, but she could be excused for granting the wishes of an executive of the company. Oh, she thought, is this another discretion coming up.

            There was no one serving tea in the canteen, only a line of four machines along part of one wall - coffee, tea, snacks. They sat together at a table, with no-one else in the large room. He rummaged through the box of papers seeking the facts about the deceased author and sipped his tea. She looked at his calm, quiet, well-dressed presence. What was she doing here with him? Was he just being friendly, or polite; were there vibrations between them? She excused herself to go to the toilet, and he grunted an acknowledgement.

            She locked the door. And she took some deep breathes.  She began to tell herself that this means nothing. She could go down to the disco and find some stranger to make friends with for the evening. But somehow this seemed different. It was their workplace, so, was there a different and more serious bond to be established. Actually, she told herself, this means nothing; what was she looking for.  She must, she thought, be a lonely woman and searching. It wasn’t the way she saw herself. She wandered back to the table. “Do you need me anymore? Shall I go back to my jolly computer,” she said, sightly cheekily. 

            “If you need to.” He seemed to be stashing the papers back in the box, “I think I’ve got as much as is necessary.” So, she sat down again, opposite him. “How long have you been here, in this place.” And he looked at the wall and the ceiling as if he needed to indicate the building and the company they worked for.

            “Oh, since I left school,” she said, almost as if she were in an interview. Was he awkward with her, she wondered. She was feeling awkward with him. “And that was quite a while ago,” she added.

            He was looking at the floor on the other side of the canteen. “Here’s the office cat,” he pointed out inconsequentially, and there it was stalking elegantly and slowly across the room, taking no notice of them.

            “Do you like cats,” she asked inanely. It was not an exciting conversation. So far.

            He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I live alone and I’ve been told to get a cat to keep me company.”

            “Well, that’s an option.” And then she said cheekily, as there was nothing to lose, and as he was moving his chair back to go. “Why don’t you get a girl-friend to keep you company?”

            His chair stopped moving back. But he stayed with his head looking down and his arms on the table.  Then he looked up and said, equally cheekily “Is this an offer.” And he gave her his winning smile again as he began to stand up.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

She went home wondering about Jon. He certainly dressed well, but his conversation was dire. But at least there was no feverish and sweaty indiscretion for the office to laugh about. He made no appearance for a week or two, and she had to assume that all her anxious wondering for those twenty minutes or so, had been completely made up in her mind. Good, at least there were decent blokes about.  Good that there were even decent executives around, who didn’t assume they owned you.

She didn’t often go to the disco to pick up strangers, and certainly not on her own. But on the Saturday three days later she seriously wondered if she was a lonely girl. A sad thought that. In the end she did not go. On the Monday a letter came. She had enquired about a course at the Open University, in philosophy. She wondered, ironically, which would make her less lonely – a stranger at the disco or a course on philosophy. That is, if she was lonely. She would have a talk with Amelia. Sylvie had known Amelia since school. They were those best of friends who listened well to each other, but always thought the other one was getting a better deal in life. Amelia was certainly not lonely. She had boyfriends all the time, though a different one every time Sylvie heard about them. Perhaps, that was just as lonely. They needed to chat about what they each wanted in their not-so-young lives now.

So, they arranged for a pub drink later in the week. Amelia had always been against that ‘indiscretion’ last year. Even before it became one. But to Sylvie’s surprise she was all for Jon. It was impossible to convince Amelia that there was absolutely and completely nothing there; they’d had tea together, that’s all, and he had not said a word, just looked at the papers in his box, and pointed out the cat. And of course, when it came to discussing the purpose of life, Amelia was all for forgetting about university and philosophy – and to go for Jon. “Much better for the hormones,” she advised. And she stuck to it.

Philosophy had been her father’s interest, besides his union activities. He had died five years ago, and she had heard about Emmanuel Kant, and Freud, and Wittgenstein drove her father mad with incomprehension. She had been good at arty things, she liked pottery. But she had also begun to notice that if she saw a young baby in a pram in the street, she found herself looking longingly. Her Mum had always been adamant – do... not... be… a… one… parent… family. And she could not agree more.

            Amelia had said she would take Sylvie out shopping. The important thing is to wear something striking, “What you must wear are clothes that make men want you to take them off. So, they don’t have to be beautiful clothes in themselves. They just need to hint at what is underneath.” Amelia, no doubt, knew exactly what sort of clothes they were. From what she always related, she was always taking her clothes off. Do, I want to go through all that, Sylvie wondered, just to get a baby perhaps. She thought that, really, she wanted someone who wanted her for what she was. And to be fair, for all Amelia’s adventurous dress-sense and clothes stripping, she had not got much further than Sylvie.

            It was weeks and weeks, literally weeks before she even caught a glimpse of Jon again. And he had obviously not been snooping around looking over the girls typing all day. He just was not around. It was not exactly that he was a good-dresser, nor that he was an executive, he was only an average good-looker; nor even that she knew he had his sex organs, just as she herself did; they had only had tea-time fun momentarily cheeking each other, and that was… fun, it counted for something. It was his honest decent smile she kept seeing in her mind. And that could win anyone, and it probably did. He lived alone and with, or without a cat, but she bet in her sinking heart he had an address book of girls he could choose from. Her mind was becoming silly; perhaps she should take to drink. And she bought herself a bottle of wine for a Saturday evening. It became weekly, but not more. She knew how her brother had got into that for a year or so in his teens. She did sign up for a course at the University, distance-learning and part-time. It was on business studies, and the first thing she learned on the course was its boredom. But quickly a tutor got her interested in co-operative ownership structures. She didn’t know what they were till she was enthused about such co-ownership. Just right for the daughter of a philosophical Union man!

Such an enthusiasm tweaked a lot of hormones in her. But then what? One Friday midday, Jon came wandering into the digitising room of girls. He was looking around. He sauntered over casually and stopped by Brenda, patted her on the shoulder and gave her one of his very-decent-bloke smiles. It was exactly what she had not wanted, as all that from a couple of months ago was fading fast. Now, it leapt again, a captive animal trapped inside her, leaping about with eager frustration. Lucky Brenda, but she said she didn’t care, and may have even said it out loud to herself. Astonishingly, more than astonishingly, he moved on from Brenda and headed for Sylvie. It was exactly what she didn’t want to have to deal with again. There was just nothing about him really…

            But he stopped by her desk as she insisted on finishing the sentence she was keying in.  There was nothing she could do. And she just looked up at him. It seemed the whole room must be looking at her.  This was seriously bad, and she choked back her will to live. And said, “Do you want the filing room again?  Someone else died?” She thought it might have been amusing.  But he was not smiling and in fact looked tense. 

            “No,” he said, “come up to the canteen for a cup of tea.”

            After the last wordless teatime with him, this did not seem a particularly thrilling invitation. But she found herself getting up from her keyboard and saying, “Yes.”

            She was feeling nervous but telling herself she was not. On the way to the door. she managed to trip on someone’s litter bin, and he had to put out his hand to hold her steady. Now, definitely, all the girls must be looking at them.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

They sat down opposite each other. And she looked at him silently. “What can I do for you?”

            “I don’t know. Perhaps quite a lot.” He looked awkward. “It is not really about work. I wondered if we would like to be…. Friends.”

            “Friends, “she spluttered without thinking. “I need to know what you are thinking of.”

            “I just thought we might get to know each other better.”

            Sylvie was finding it hard to process this.  It was not like the approach of a stranger at the disco! She sat back and took a deep breath which calmed her – a little. “Look, Jon. I might like to be friends with you,” she started, but shook her head, “No, I’d like to be more than friends.” It seemed, rightly or wrongly, that something straight needed to be laid out between them. “I need to get clear what you are suggesting or thinking. You know, this is a standard company, executives often thinking the admin girls on the computers are there to play with.” He winced slightly. “Sorry, but I’m nervous and not being good at this. It is not that I am suspicious of you. Definitely not you Jon. You are as decent a man as I have come across, I think. And that may be why I am nervous, simply that you are decent that makes me want more than friendship.”

            He put out his hand as if to say that she did not need to say all this. But she did need to, which is why it came out all in a rush and clumsily. She tried to explain all this. He looked her in the eye. There had been no smile from him yet, “I am nervous, too. Perhaps what we both want could mean a lot to us both. A great deal to us both.” There was a question in his eyes, and in his tone of voice.” She sat back. Was she reassured. She left her hand where he had put his hand on hers. There were people on another table watching them. Perhaps listening in. 

She said more quietly, almost without thinking at all, “If you are free perhaps you could come back to my place and we could talk about this. We need to be more relaxed.”

“Yes, we do,”  he squeezed her hand very, very gently. “I am a cautious man, perhaps. I think we need to learn more about each other. I will be working till six…”

She quickly said, “I will wait behind till you are free.” Without saying any more, she stood up to go back to her station. She looked at the couple of women on the other table. One of them smiled at her.

 

....o.000000.o….

 

She stayed on after her usual time of 5 pm. She had her arrangement with him. It could be important, massive. But he is cautious. It is not, she knew, a question of making him like me, but of whether he will like me as I am. When they left at 6, it was raining. Neither had umbrellas. He decided they should take a taxi. She knew she should have said ‘no’. She did not trust her judgement. Despite her knowing he was a decent man, she could not trust her judgement. 

            But true to her judgement, he got the taxi to take them straight to the address she gave. Her conflict though had not relaxed, but still she let him in and they settled in her flat. He expected her to offer him some coffee, tea, perhaps something more relaxing. They were silent for two or three minutes. “We have to relax,” she said, feeling her turmoil. 

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “I can go round the corner to that convenience store and get a bottle of wine. Would you like that?” 

“No,” she said abruptly. “Let’s be cautious, as you say. No alcohol tonight.” She felt she was being pedantic, perhaps tedious.

“OK, that’s fine. This is the getting-to-know-each-other phase, Right? And he took off his expensive jacket.

            “If you say so.” She agreed, wondering how she could explain the things she had to.

            “I don’t know how to say this. People talk, don’t they, and I heard about some story from last year that involved you.”

            “So you know about me? Is that what you meant about getting to know each other.”

            “No, not at all,” and he stopped, “Well yes. I can see it must take a while to get over it.”

            “Is that why it took so long for you to come back to speak to me? I have been churning inside for months, Jon.” She was protesting.

            “As I say, I am a cautious…” But she suddenly interrupted.

Something was building up inside her - Oh, stop being cautious; stop being cautious – she silently screamed to herself. And suddenly tears began to spill. “I’m sorry but let’s get on and talk about this.”

            “Yes, let’s get that over with if you can talk to me about it. I have some things to say as well.” He leaned forward and seemed earnest and sympathetic. “The chap who did it was sacked, Wasn’t he?”

            There was then a long pause. Her tears flowed silently and she had her hand over her mouth, as if she could not bear to speak it out. Eventually, she blurted out, “But it was all my fault.”

            He looked surprised, and he sat back in the armchair.  “But, he should not have done it?”

            “I don’t know, don’t know. I was drunk. If you want to know. I touched him, we were in a taxi and he was supposed to be taking me home. But I wouldn’t tell him my address. And he couldn’t take me home to his wife and family. I touched him, you know I was drunk and I worked him up in the taxi.so he told the driver to take us to a road by some woods. I was thinking it would be fun. I was so drink. He took me into the woods…. It had been a beautiful summer evening” She was sobbing. “Do you want to know all this?” But as he was going to speak she went on. “He took me into the woods and…  he was brutal to me.  You know… raped me.”

            “Yes, that’s what I heard, Sylvie. I am so sorry, sorry. What an experience.”

            “I didn’t cry out, I should have yelled. Everyone says so. I should have. But I was the one… who started it. In the taxi I was kind of raping him. You know.” She was calming as she could see he was listening, was interested.

            “I can see you could be too desirable to resist, but it didn’t have to be rape did it. Not brutal.”

            “No, he shouldn’t have been brutal, of course not. But when I started pushing him away, he couldn’t hold back and he forced me and hit me. So it was me, you see. I keep thinking how I worked him up, I thought it would be fun, then I changed my mind and he couldn’t stop.” 

            “No, Sylvie. Whatever you did, he should have kept enough control of himself.”

She quite quickly began to recover herself. “I should never have got so drunk. That is what started it. But yes, however other people behave we always have to control ourselves. I know. Everyone has told me that.” And she looked down shamefacedly. He wanted to comfort her, hold her, but she was on the other side of the room. He got up slowly, not to frighten her, perched on the arm of her chair and put his arm around her. He felt fatherly, a long way from being a lover.

“What a way to get to know each other, Jon. I’m sorry. My brother overused drink, for a while. I too was just getting back to it a little in the last few weeks.”

            He stroked her back to comfort her. But wanted to clasp her to his chest. He wanted to unite his sadness for her with her own sadness. “Do you want to lie on your bed and let me cuddle and hold you?”

            “Do you want to? To go to bed with me?”

“No, I am not saying sex. Though sex with you has been on my mind for a long time. No, I mean there are other things partners need from each other.”

“Hmm,” she looked at him curiously, “You don’t want sex with me – a man of caution and control, eh?” She smiled for the first time since he had wandered past Brenda to her station in the office.

He did not smile; he was feeling perplexed. “If we decide it, we can have many years of sex together. We can take it cautiously.” 

She laughed at this point, “Don’t you see, I am someone who will charge in. I would go for sex when my hormones are high.”

“Oh, I do indeed, I see it. But I think for tonight we will not jump without looking. Tonight, we have the powerful experience of last year. I think I should stay with you tonight. I think I should lie with you in bed. I think we should see tomorrow how we feel.”

“Oh, now you worry me. By tomorrow you may have decided - on what you know of me – that we will not become lovers.”

“We both do want it. We are charging in that direction.”

“So, you are teaching me caution! Looks like we could have plenty of clashes on that score, maybe?”

And, at that moment he smiled his cautious male, decent smile. In that moment she knew he was in love. Properly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loving together

 

A bloke came on this chat to me. He was red in the face with rage, Well, I didn't see the redness – on the chat, obviously. But I could tell. "You," he said are chatting with that bitch from White City." I had been looking for a date; my previous girl-friend had found someone else, I had been angry at the humiliation rather than disappointed at the loss. And I replied to this stranger, "No bitch from White City. I know a beauty there, someone I adore." He spluttered (if you can in a chat), "She's a bitch. I divorced her!" So I said, "Oh you were her husband? You must have loved her once. She is easy to love, isn't she." He didn't reply to that, not immediately. I was curious how he knew, but she must have told him; to enrage him presumably. 

Later that evening he sent a cartoon character with a puzzled face, wrinkled brow, staring eyes and open mouth. The next day he wrote, “OK. Maybe you’re right. Once we loved, were in love. Perhaps we could all meet up?” I replied immediately, “Perhaps we could.” So I arranged with you when I’d be round next. And then I arranged with him so to meet up, so we would arrive together. I told him that when we arrived at your house, he must put on the loveliest smile he had ever made.  He did not say anything.

When we did arrive, of course you were flabbergasted to see him, and he did pull a very friendly smile. You looked a mixture of tears and fury. So I held you tight in my arms till you relaxed a little.  Then you looked into my face, and said with a sort of outrage, “With him?” and waved a hand at him. I nodded and you nodded as if obeying. “You are good,” I said. “You are beautiful, Thank you.” You sank limply onto the bed. I said gently, “I am  going to undress you.”

You seemed like you would let anything happen to you. But then you looked up and said, “OK,” as if it was a game. Which it was. When you were undressed, I lay you back on the bed. I tied your hands to the bedposts at its head. And he tied your feet to the bottom posts. We both looked at your wonderful body lying for us on the bed. He said, “She is a bit of stuff, isn’t she, mate.” And I said “More than a bit. A load of stuff.” He nodded and we both smiled.

“OK.” I said to him, “you take her first.” Which he did. He was efficient. He slid in and did the job and slid out again. He was breathing heavily. “Good?” I asked. 

“Good. Mate,” he replied. You looked confused as you lay there helpless. Perhaps hating giving him pleasure, but also you seemed to get something from the penis inside – whoever it was. Then it was my turn. I did it differently. I kissed you. On the lips, the neck, preciously on each breast, each nipple. I felt ecstatic. Slowly, my tongue slid downwards.

Then I entered. It was slippery with his juices, with your juices, and soon would be my juices. I told you that you were perfection. Which you were. You were. And I tried to delay till you came. And you did. You convulsed with your whole body and it set me off – completely. And we reached our peaks together. And we stayed there together for a moment. A moment and a half together. I slowly slid away from you. But kissed you on the lips and kissed you between the thighs. 

He had been sitting on the chair looking on. I untied one of your hands, He untied the other one, and you sat up, your feet still tied. It looked uncomfortable, so I put my arm behind your back for you to lean on. I asked if you two thought you could ever get back together. He stared at you and then shook his head. You were looking at the bed between your thighs. It was messy, and you gave a slight shake of the head. I breathed a sigh of relief, “So, I am the lucky one; the very, very lucky one.” We untied your feet.

We all got dressed in silence. I told him I thought that you and I might need to have a quick word together. It took him a moment to realise he was not needed. He thanked me (not you). And I thanked him. It was a tense moment as he left. He obviously felt excluded suddenly, but seemed to be telling himself he didn’t care about being kicked out. To me, it seemed, we were the most beautiful combination. You let me hug you. “That was perfection,” I said. “You must have had so many men wanting you like that.”

I wondered if you would let all that happen to you again. But I was sure he was gone for good. I told you I would pick you up next week and take you somewhere. You asked, “Where?” But I did not tell you. You asked what you should do till next week, as if you were helpless. I knew you were not, just dazed with the surprise. With being used. With the deep satisfied pleasure that warmed you at that moment, and that you could not understand. “You must dream of what has happened this evening. You must dream of how it could have been better for you.”

Next week I called for you and told you as always how beautiful you are in my eyes. You touched my arm and smiled, as if the compliment was mutual. When we arrived, the door was opened by my wife. She stared. You stared. There was some sort of comprehension on both sides. My wife said to me immediately, “I knew you were up to something.” She turned to you and invited you in as if she were taking charge of the hospitality for a guest. 

Before you entered, I stopped you and made proper introductions. Then I let you enter the house first and stepped in after you. The wife offered you a cup of tea. And I said, “We might like to go to the bedroom straightaway. But you asked for the tea, so we went into the living room. When she brought the tea, she said so this is about being randy is it. You said, “Your husband and I agreed on a threesome.” I was enjoying this dizzying uncertainty in both of you. She said, “Maybe you should have asked for my agreement.” And I said not necessarily.

She looked at you as if appealing to your good nature. She obviously liked you but seemed unsure how much she felt jealous or threatened. I reassured her that it would not affect the marriage and we were bound to each other. You nodded. But she didn’t seem reassured. As she said nothing, I went on. “So, it is consensual, then.”. I added that you two were the most beautiful women in the world – which for me you were. She asked, “What’s going to happen then?” No-one had drunk any of their tea. I sipped mine.

I explained what would happen. My wife was aghast. You looked at me because it was the first time you heard what I was proposing. I said we should go up to the bedroom. You stood up. But she stayed in her chair till I took her arm and as if a puppet she stood and came with me. I suggested we take our clothes off, and you undid your blouse. But she stood still. It was another tense moment. I coaxed her and began to undress her. When you were naked you took over undressing her.

“Will I get a fuck as well?” she asked. I said we would see. I put a chair by the bed and drew her towards it, so that she sat down. I clipped the handcuffs on quickly and bound her to the chair with rope, her feet, her stomach, and around her chest. It was very secure though not too uncomfortably tight. You watched without expression. Perhaps you were enjoying her helplessness, perhaps you remembered the week before. I had not told her about the gag so there was some resistance to putting it tightly into her mouth.

When she was secure and more or less silent beside the bed, I invited you to get on it. You looked at her as you did so. I wondered if you felt sorry for her. I put my hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead and said to her, “You are the most precious one.” You watched. Maybe you were jealous, perhaps you were relieved at my loyalty to my wife. I lay on the bed with you, and we embraced with some passion and kisses and vigorous hugs. We soon forgot her noisy movements.

I was very passionate with you, and you seemed to want to show equally loving affection for me. We took our time slowly and bit by bit we worked each other into the sexual frenzy and lift-off. It was actually very intense indeed. We lay back to relax. She had remained in her chair, bound and gagged, watching our entanglement so intensely. She was coughing and dribbling, and making what noise she could. You and I took no notice at first. Then I got off the bed and released the gag. She glared.

After the glare came one single word from her pained mouth, “Bastards.” One single word, but it filled the room with hate and revenge. Both you and I chuckled briefly. That venom contrasted completely with her total inability to do anything. I touched her soft skin – on her shoulder, her breast, and told her again how precious she was. Then there were two words, “Fuck. Off.” I decided it best not to release her from her bonds. So I got back into bed with you and we slept a bit of the night.

Later in the dark I sat on the edge of the bed and held my wife’s two hands. She was quite motionless. I undid the handcuffs and threw them on the floor. She did not move. If I took away her bonds, I was still, unsure if she would fly into murderous activity, or would she remain inert. I was looking into her face and holding the once cuffed hands. She murmured something. I asked her to repeat it. “Thank you for taking off those cuffs.” I repeated how precious she was and kept repeating. 

She seemed spent and exhausted as if she too had been through the equivalent of a sexual climax. I asked if she would like me to release her, so she could come into the bed with us. She nodded, and I wondered if she would become aggressive as soon as released. But she was limp. With those bonds undone she docilely came into bed. She lay between us, but it was you and she who hugged tightly for the rest of the night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                    The ring

 

My head is as thick as lead - that is my excuse.

            When I shut my eyes just now there was a flash as tight as electricity and slowly floating out into my eyes there came this image; a white hopeless body, a beautiful woman, ravished and dead.

            At the beginning I was alone in the womb, but I soon emerged and stood on my feet. And I grew and I grew, among all the ogres and sentinels which watched me.  I know oppression, I know sick envy; like all children I know the confusion of innocence.

            Later…. I can see shining in her eyes, her white hair which falls down all over my trembled hands and lingers around the tenseness of my loins.

            I can't remember the first time I saw her but I can remember right from the beginning the ends of her hair and the slope of her shoulder against me.

            It is the first time we are alone together.  I walk so gingerly, I walk like fragile glass; in the street beside her, by her firm body at so great distance that the air sags between. Inside me I carry many months of unsure longing and the perfect image of her step touching the ground.  I can see without my eyes her graceful twist and the pull of her hips, swaying her bosom and her silent face so straight white in the dark.  When I turn to look at the tumble of softness in her body a sudden shock has broken in my pelvis and there is all power in my arms to scatter the stars in space.

            We walk in the darkness, the air parting around us pressing us in.  We are together alone.  I wonder what it is a boy’s body must do.

            Perhaps it is the stern and bone hard lines of her body, almost yielding which caught him in the middle of his breath.  That night like fear they approached and engulfed each other and as clouds rode by above them, they sank with each other into the mouth of their desire, alone together.

            Perhaps whenever they are touching the broad space around absorbs into them. And beside them there are only slender paths.

            

I know her body.  It is stern and her love soaked in steel and yet I have felt her sway into my touch.  All around I have bent vast caves of air to monuments that strain over us.  In our turmoils, there is light from the surface of our skin, it breaks and blesses between us and it is as if contentment floats out all desires.

            In the air the black silk scarf as she wrapped it, I caught it.  Her hair falls.  And mouth, my mouth, hers, breasts, in the belly-to-belly, the belly-to-belly, the belly-to-belly.  In my mouth I always suck her warmth.  I always drink her eye-joy.

            I have sworn it to her.  If she stoops to her feet, there are some small pieces amongst the dust that will fill with beauty as she touches.  She has held my yearning tightly to her breast.  I walk with my pride a carpet underfoot.  There are no prayers I cannot ask from her.  In our union I feel the whole of her body caressing all mine -- I have sworn it to her, and from her.

            In the daylight her body is blue and light, so fragile it will crack in the hands. At night it is her eyes that fix, they are bridges across the sunset.  And intense.  And in the night, all night, intense.

            I sat - an ecstasy that grew.

            I stopped.  That was it. Real.  I stuck.  There. Her and him - who.  Where was I, where the sky? 

            After about three months he saw them -- her and the other.  After three months he knew, then he saw.  Three months he was part of her body, her mind; part of her gesture, part of her path.  And after three months a paralysis, a meteor crater.  And a split in his spine, he crumbles.

            She had complained of a headache.  It could have been her period.  I believed.  We turned back.  Sadly, a hand on her shoulder.  At her home she sulked, I stayed.  I didn't want to go, to leave her, to let go -- so early, only just the evening.  She sulked, told me to go: walked too far in the afternoon.  Too hot -- she had a headache.  I didn't want to go - I wanted to help her out of it.  I went.  I walked in the street.  For an evening I watched the river and then went back to her.  A light in the window.  I rang.

            He rings the bell.  The light switched out in the window.  There is someone at the window, two at the window, two.  Vanished.

            Two.

            There was no answer to the ring.  I went.  I walked in the street, I walked.  My ring had been unanswerable.

            At times, night is coloured purple and spots start, and the water is in my hair and in my eyes.  At times a dead stone starts a mirage, and flights of freed hope wander.  Delicate hands.  In my skin is a pink greed which stretches and clutches.  Am I walking?  I walk, I walked.  A crust of salt on the skin peels around my eyes.  I walked all night -- numb-purple, cracked bones and a pungent taste of blood in my belly, blood burned with shock.  Belly torn in two, in three cracks, with bones exposed.  A shrine in the belly of two deaths.  A broken harvest of pain.  In the night, at times, I sag, I stay without hope of waiting.  I rang, the jangle; lied and the light switched out.  A stop.

            At times I remember.

            It is silence, the fullness of age.  A day which repeats cycles, drenched in dull magenta brine.  Black is the fullness of oldness, a trench of absences.

            There are days which repeat.

            There are days.  There is never; and it is always now.  There are days which repeat a pattern of silences.

            I have touched ice.  I walk with a crucifix of precious metals in my hands.  There is a glow for ever in the wound where the great pain was removed. Life froze in cascades, a shield now protecting my desires and warming.  I am spread out over my own soft skin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                  Sex and love with Beryl Smith

 

As we were returning from the weekend, we picked up a lonely hitch-hiker that my wife had spotted on the road.  She was a youngish woman, a girl, with a cheeky look.  She had a pronounced bosom and long legs.  My wife was also taken with her and engaged the girl with animated chatter as she often does with attractive women, I sometimes wonder, to bind them in a female loyalty; not that she has ever had cause previously to worry about my fidelity. We had a frank and easy relationship, and we could explain fantasies to each other, so long as they remained fantasies only. 

            When we got near to our home my wife, in an excess of friendliness which she had worked herself into, invited the busty young girl to have supper with us.  She helped us vigorously to unload the car and settle our things back in the flat in the centre of town.  My wife went off to the kitchen to put together the simple meal she had planned. This left me with the young lady who was certainly someone any older woman might want to keep in bounds.  I was more able to look at her now in the light, and out of the car.  Her blonde hair, curled up in a bun at the back of her head, had begun to loosen towards the end of the day and one or two strands curled down by the side of her face, over her shoulder and ended in a little twist on her left breast.  Her sandy-coloured cotton sweat-shirt was quite tight and had the words "University of Life" printed across it with two red hearts on either side of her bosom.  She had tight leather trousers of a brilliant dark blue that finished short of her ankles.  With a thick yellow belt she looked like the trite colours of a Mediterranean beach. I poured her a drink before supper. Her name ws Beryl, she told me. She didn't speak much.  But her lack of words was compensated by the impact of those she did utter.  She suggested I might like to sleep with her for the night instead of with my wife.  A change, they say, is as good as a rest but this girl, whose name I still cannot remember, was offering a challenge not a rest.  I looked at her as she coolly sipped her drink.  I took a glass of sherry through to my wife in the kitchen, before I replied.  Eventually, I said, "There may be some opposition to that".  She struggled with her hair; another blond strand began to unwind.  "She's nice, your wife" she said without much interest, "but a bit of a cow".  And after a moment she added "She talks a lot doesn't she!... don't you want to stop her sometimes?"  At this point my wife came into the room.  "What are you two talking about?" she asked brightly, disguising any suspicion she might have in her mind.  Then she turned to the young girl, and started to tell her about my passion for music, Mozart...  She rattled on about this and was drinking her sherry and asking me to go and lay the table, all at the same time.  I finished my drink in a slow gulp and put the glass down to go and do my duty with the cutlery.

            Beryl wandered into the kitchen when I was laying out the kitchen table for us. She too gulped down her drink and put the glass on the table. She touched my arm and said, ‘She me round the flat. So I paused my duties, and showed her where the toilet was. She just looked and seemed to expect me to show her the rest. There was only our one bedroom, into which she wandered and looked around. I waited as she hesitated till she moved back to the doorway. But she did not walk through. Instead, she closed the door, turned the key, leaned back against the shut door and looked at me suggestively. I was about to say, ‘oh come on, now’ or something when she quietly said, “I need you to show me something.” I go the gist of her meaning and was wondering how to gently dissuade this eager teenager. She was quite pink and in general she was like a ripe plum on a tree waiting to be picked. 

            She undid the button at the top of her blouse. Foolishly I said, trying to be amusing, “It looks as though you want to show me something.”

            “I need you to show me what a man does to a woman.” And, unashamedly, she undid another button. I looked at the soft pink and enticing flesh. The shape of her small breast and its pert  nipple was obvious to see. I wanted to touch it. She was looking steadily into my eyes.

            “I think you’ve probably found out about what men can do.”

            “No,” she said, “We have had a few classes at school.” While still gazing into my face she put one hand into the top of my trousers. 

            “You don’t get to it that way,” I said, still foolishly trying to be jokey about what she obvious desired at that moment. So she began to feel for my flies and found the zip which she pulled down. I began to think this was getting too far  from safety. But my body didn’t think so. It began to stir between in the loins. She really was desirable. And she found quite easily my now rather eager member. She pulled it out of the trousers, and then the balls.

            “Please, will you get onto the bed, sir,” she asked as if addressing her teacher. You can guess I was a bot torn. I did not imagine this could really be a proper seduction. She seemed to be making it into a school lesson. My body, without my permission, really did want to lie on the bed with her. Quickly she took off her clothes and then sat astride me, quite naked. She touched by member and pressed it against the skin of her slender tummy. It felt, of course, like heaven. 

            At that point, my wife called from the other side of the door, to say the meal was ready and what were we doing. Neither Beryl nor I spoke, but Beryl whispered to me, “I want to hug your… er, thing, in my hugging tunnel.” I didn’t say a thing. My wife called again and banged on the door. Beryl lifted herself up and then very slowly lowered her tunnel, as she called it, onto my ‘thing’. She fumbled to get our two parts to marry together, and I entered her very tight love-tunnel to be hugged. I found my body’s thrusting impulses difficult to suppress. She was biting her lip as she brought us together, and the banging on the door it stringer and my wife’s shouting got louder. And then I lost it….  I grabbed her around the waist and rolled over on the bed to complete a very quick intercourse. Beryl gasped a few times quite loudly and then smiled at me. I notice that the banging on the door had stopped.

            Beryl put her lips on mine, and whilst we were sort of kissing she said, “Now, I know what to do.” And she asked, “Did you like it?” I was only just coming out of the mists of my ecstatic sensations, but I whispered back to her lips, “Yes.” It was, unfortunately, the truth.

            When we came out of the bedroom, Beryl with her clothes on again, and me with my trousers in order, there was no sign of my wife. There was a saucepan of pasta on the stove, dried out and beginning to burn, and a now-cooling bowl of Bolognese sauce on the table. It didn’t take long to check that my wife had run out of the flat and left us to it. I knew where she would have gone. I told Beryl, “You’ve had tour lesson. Now you have to go.” She looked a little disappointed, so I said, “You did well; you’ll get a good mark in your exams.”

            She looked  mischievously at me, “I know.”

 

 

                                                                          II

 

When I had finished writing the story you have just read, I looked up and across the hearth at my wife who was reading. She had her large owl-like glasses on her nose.  She was distracted by my stopping the writing and looked up too, an enquiring look.  I had never written anything like that before. Mostly my work was contributing to the business pages on a couple of national newspapers, dry stuff.  I said, with a mischievous grin at her "I've written something different.  Have a look at that while I do the supper.  She looked put out as she put down her book and took the sheets of paper, I passed to her.  I went into the kitchen.  My wife is a handsome woman, but we rarely look at each other nowadays, in our early forties, starting towards the ‘one-day-we-will-be-middle-aged’ horizon.

            When the supper was done, I came out of the kitchen and she was just returning through the front door, a few drops of rain on her mac.  I had heard a noise whilst I was cooking, like the front door latch.  I asked, puzzled, "Where have you been?" - "Just to post a letter." she said idly.  She looked a little flushed.  We sat down to eat supper together.  "So what wicked little fantasies you've got inside that statistical little brain of yours." She twisted her mouth with a mischievous grin as she spoke.  I felt embarrassed; I suddenly didn't know what she was thinking.  After so many years of marriage, so many years of knowing her reactions, so predictably, of being so predictable myself.  I remembered that mischievous grin, from long ago, right back at the beginning when I had begun to accept that we would be getting married; we had been at a party and I had seen that grin when she was dancing with someone else, a handsome fellow we all knew had a lot of women. She was looking lovely then; with her very dark hair; her full round face looked open and wide and honest.  I had been so drawn by her steady eyes that had looked so lovingly at me.  It had been after that party that I had felt suddenly unsure of her; I had insisted we got married quickly, immediately.  Now I felt the same - unsure of her.  What had I done?  What had my fantasies done?  I looked at her now and saw the beautiful and handsome woman I had fallen in love with. I could see the shape of her body I knew so well through the casual relaxed clothes she was wearing this Sunday evening, the tight belt drew the loose dress under the shape of her bust which was large enough to pull lines of tension in the cloth.  I suddenly felt I had spoilt a world of security and contentment. "What did you think of it?" I asked casually but really I was anxious.  She obviously realised already my uncertainty.  I looked around the room, rather nervously. "What," I asked abruptly "have you done with it?"

            "I haven't got it." she said.  I felt aghast.  Had she torn it up - thrown it away in disgust?  I looked at her blankly.  This handsome woman I knew so well.  Had my frank moment of pornography sickened her so much?  It was not like her; she often liked sexual jokes, she was always free about such things.  She was a social worker even, she would not be shocked - or condemning.  She had often told me stories from the child guidance clinic, the violence, the neglect, the child abuse in the families. I almost knew the lives of those young kids she worked with. She had always told me with a shock that was full of compassion and concern.  She was an honest human woman.  But did she think I was like that story I had written?  She had a full sense of life and love of people, a humour and no condemnation.  I loved her very much at that moment. "What have you done with it?" I said in a kind way; but I must have looked disappointed too.  "Have you destroyed it?"  Well, perhaps no harm if she had.

            "No."  She looked yet more mischievous and as if it was a great joke to keep me guessing.  I began to relax as my worst fears of her condemnation receded. 

            "But, it's not here.  You haven't got it.  Where is it?"  I suddenly remembered her going to post a letter ten minutes before. 

            "I've posted it" she said, and stopped as if it was all the explanation needed. 

            "What do you mean?  Where to?  Who too?" I spluttered.  I began again to feel alarm and dismay. A new kind of fear gripped me.  I had never known my wife to betray a faith like this. I thought of the other chaps in the copy room where I sent my articles in.  They would hand it round the room, a page each, and read it out with hoots of laughter as they did with copy they didn't like.  The city editors were their worst victims; they would embroider their slushy prose in a cruel fashion - but they would not need to with mine, "Who have you posted it to?"

            "Your mother." she said.  I went pale.  I could feel it in my face, an icy pallor.  It seeped slowly right down through my guts.  I could no longer eat the meal I had cooked.  Nor could I say anything. “My Mother." I repeated senselessly.  My mother had become a catholic about ten years ago after my father died.  She even went on pilgrimages and gave money to convent homes for pregnant teenagers.  She lectures me every time I go to see her, on the sexual evils of the modern world, about the temptations, about the tarts with whose profession she seemed remarkably familiar, like a doctor researching a cure for cancer.  My mother would have a fit, or worse.  She makes me promise every time I go to see her that my marital relations should be secure and never enjoyable.  Otherwise, she would certainly write a will to leave her estate to the dreadful Church and cut us out, and then die straightaway from grief over her only son.  My head whizzed round in trivial details.  "My Mother." I said stupidly.

            "Well, it will be posted to her on Tuesday, I expect. I put your little story in an envelope and addressed it to her."  She explained this calmly, and continued eating the meal on her own, mine now abandoned.  I wondered if, after all, there was a chance to rescue it before Tuesday, get my story back. 

            "Where is it now?" I prodded her to continue, I begged.  It was dragging each feather from a chicken, one by one; but it was me that was feeling raw and exposed. 

            "I've sent it to a friend and asked her to post it for me. On Tuesday."

            "But," I could not explain this, "whatever for? You know she'd die of the shock. You know what she expects of me. You know she thinks I'm as celibate as all those padres and curates of hers.  It would kill her." 

            But my wife waved her fork in the air and said, when she had carefully swallowed her mouthful, "Nonsense, she's a tough old bird.  She'll put you through the mill for a while, squeeze your overdraft guarantee, that sort of thing."  And she still continued eating.

            "But," I exploded "it will hurt her terribly. You can't do that to her, can you?" She looked sadly at her plate as if mildly protesting that it was now empty and had failed her by remaining empty. 

            And then straight into my eyes, "Why not! She hates me.  You know how she behaved after we married."  I did know how she behaved after we married.  She had pestered me with her ‘illnesses’; she'd taken to her bed and demanded I live at home for days on end.  She had crashed our car, gently but effectively, into the side wall of our house.  My wife continued quietly, and reflectively, "She'll only be like that again, that's all. She hates me and won't even see me except if I dress in black and approach her on my knees as if going to the shrine of a saint." 

            I didn't argue with this exaggeration because I knew what she meant.  "It just seems like revenge."  My wife was just not like that. I could not believe she was doing this to me.  To my mother. I couldn't believe it was happening.

            "It could be revenge," she said. "Unless..." and she blew me a kiss across the table without finishing her sentence.  Then she continued straightened her knife and fork on her plate as if engrossed in being tidy. The same smile played in her eyes, the mischief on her lips. "Eat up your food, it's really very good.  It will get cold." 

            I began to get a grip on myself.  "I don't want to.  I just don't know what's got into you" I said. 

            She pushed her plate a little way in front of her - "Well,," she started, "you seem to think you are the only one who can have a fantasy.  Maybe I do too.  Have you thought of that?"  I had not; but I conceded it was possible. 

            "So, what is your fantasy, then?"

            Perhaps," she whispered drily "perhaps this is one of them.  Something not short of an earthquake is about to shake your life, my dear; unless... And I am completely in command of whether it will or not.  I can ring my friend tomorrow and stop her sending on that envelope; or I may not. This is cat and mouse.  The quality of the next few months of your life are entirely in my hands.  I can unleash the Furies or not". 

            "I hope not." I said emphatically. 

            "Well," she trumped, "that depends." 

            I was shaken.  The whole stability, the basis of my life, of my marriage, seemed to be changing.  "But, what does it depend on?"  I asked at last.

            "It depends on my whim.  And that depends on whether you please me, my dear." She sat back looking at me, as if waiting for me to do something. 

            "How do you want me to please you?" - I thought I had always been willing to do so.  She was being so enormously annoying in not coming to the point; "How do you want to be pleased?". 

            She looked enigmatic again "By satisfying my fantasy."  I now felt impatient "What fantasy?  She smiled sweetly "That you will have to find out. You will have to explore my body until you can find the trigger.  You've got until tomorrow night, haven't you?  After that it may be too late, and my friend may have posted your little masterpiece on to your Mother.  It is up to you and what you can do."

            "But," I replied, still trying to catch up with her, "we do that every weekend.  We do it every Friday night or Saturday night, or both sometimes." 

            She looked down her nose "Well we do - yes, we do that.  But you like it in the dark, you like it under the bedclothes.  It takes you about five minutes and then you climb back into your pyjamas and into your bed.  My fantasy is that you will do something different, something you have never done before." 

            I felt somewhat belittled by this. "You're a bitch right now." I flung out. 

            “That" she said "is not a very good start. I do not feel especially turned on by that.  And anyway you have often flung that sort of thing at me before.  It is not new.  You have to realise that time is not on your side.  You have only until tomorrow evening, remember.  I simply have to do nothing, and the hurricane will break over your head all on its own now.  And I at least will be at work during the day tomorrow.  You had better take stock of your position."

            I was silent for a while, doing what she said – taking stock.  Whatever her fantasy she was having, it didn't excite me.  I thought about it.  She wanted me to take her to bed and to do things to her body that I had never done before.  We were, as she had said, in a bot of a routine. We had never been very explorative. Now, I had no choice.  But perhaps it would be alright anyway; I had never been against going to bed with her. I stood up.  "Okay." I mumbled.  I took her gently up the stairs to our bedroom, and carefully unclothed her body, which I had never really done before.  The sight of her smoothness and roundness nearly made me weep with love for her.  I lay her gently on the bed and I literally explored every part of her body.  And when I found the part of her body she wanted, and when I found what she wanted me to do with it, I knelt on the floor at the end of the bed, and she lay on her back, her knees drawn up and her legs wide apart.  I pressed my tongue against her clitoris and began to regularly massage her there with my saliva.

            And as I began to do this, she lay back with a great sigh, her arms stretched wide to either side of her body and she began to tell the story of her fantasy.  As I went on licking her there till my jaw ached and stroking her labia on either side till the juices ran, slowly her breathing increased, her sentences got shorter. Her juices and my saliva mingled and ran slowly down my chin; and I was not nauseated as I had expected, and I could feel my penis getting warm and stiffer.  After a long time, her story neared its climax; she began to slowly moan and when she came she rubbed her clitoris with great arching movements of her pelvis against my chin and my tongue and my face.  It went on for a long time.  I had never felt her body consumed with such urgency.  Then when she had finished, she clasped my head tightly between her thighs in gratitude, her fingers entwined within my hair. Suddenly she let go and turned on her side and. I swear that in seconds she was asleep. I pulled the bedclothes over her body and nursed my very stiff penis in my hand.  I climbed into my bed, and I lay a long, lonely time trying not to touch it and aggravate the burning feeling in my loins.  As I dozed into sleep I thought of the story of her fantasy and a rich sickness of rage pounded in the pit of my stomach.

 

 

                                                                          III

 

The story of her fantasy was:  She said with her head back and her eyes shut - "One day, about a year ago, I took it into my head to change my life in a special way.  I cut down the number of hours I was working, so that it gave me two hours a day to do something else.  In my mind, I had the idea, which I never told you about, of having fun.  You know, the way women do.  It was a corny idea, earning money working with their bodies.  I knew a good deal about it, in theory, from the mother of one of our children at the clinic; and there were other clients, young school leavers who wanted to prove something to me about themselves.  They told me what fun they were having.  Anyway, the mother who was desperate about feeding her child, told me most.  She found her way into it easily enough. And she enjoyed telling me about the craft of it. She thought it was impressing me. Well, perhaps it was.  So, I took myself into a pub in Deptford at lunchtimes and spent a while there each day.  And from time to time a man would take me off to his living room in a high-rise block.  I did not charge them much - and they did not seem to want very much.  They were mostly lonely, unemployed and separated.  They needed their egos soothed quite as much as their genitals.  They were mostly middle-aged but they wanted consoling, like little boys.  I found it quite pleasant but a bit like social work. They groped around my body and under my clothes.  They admired my breasts, my titties, because they are still nice and firm and I told them I am ten years younger than I am.  Maybe they believed me; they wanted to, I suppose.  Only a few wanted to push their penises into me, and only about two managed to get themselves stiff enough to do so.  Most were relieved that I did not expect a top performance.  It was all desperately anxious and adolescent. I got a reputation for being rather motherly and inexpensive; and when I began to be in demand, I became of more interest to the professional tarts there who had previously avoided me as if alien.  They had not known what to make of me.  One of them, a very skinny woman, who had breasts that had been built up surgically, seemed to know the others and to be a kind of foreman.  She began to acknowledge me.  Eventually she made me a proposition.  I could see I had become type cast and occupied a particular niche - for the impotent and depressed.  So, for a change, I accepted.  Madame Skinny, as I called her, then took me, on a regular basis, after the pubs shut in the afternoon to a large house in a rather derelict street. In the house the rooms were interlaced with spy-holes and one-way mirrors that gave me the opportunity to watch a number of lanky twenty-year-olds doing a professional job on equally lanky but nervous young men with rather well-to-do appearances. In between their customers, the girls talked to me about their work, about men's bodies, their erections and their astonishing variety of tastes.  There were various rooms in the house that catered for various kinds of pleasures - and pains; various kinds of restraint, bondage and punishment.  There were various classes of wardrobes catering for fetishists and transvestites and for those seeking their dreams of governesses, or nurses, or the military.  But mostly my experience had been to cultivate erections and trigger climaxes from elderly boys who had never grown up.  I was fascinated by the craft that these dispassionate girls took seriously. They like I were often unsuccessful with their anxious distracted clients, no matter what complicated accessories were demanded.  Often the more intricate the procedure the more limp was the finale.

 

Clearly I would be expected to work in this household when the time came; and after about ten days, my skinny-loined friend, who I still could not like, explained in a confidential interview that I would now begin to take my turn in operating their elaborate make-believe apparatus called the rack, binding languid limbs to a crucifix and sucking the limp member, or whacking flat buttocks till the wheals glowed in the dark.  My first customer - always the most remembered they said - was a blond and podgy young man, , I dressed up in tight leather, and he grovelled under the flick of my crop across his thighs or his ribs as I stood astride his pale body lying in the bath.  He worked himself to a climax while I peed on the blonde hairs on his chest.  He paid a great deal of money for this.  He never touched my body.  I did this every afternoon for a month; and never once did you suspect, did you?  You knew nothing of my new career.  The rates of pay were not good despite the fees the sad youngsters paid.  But then, I did not want the money.  I never asked for more than twenty pounds for the afternoon, and then I always gave it away to a good charity.  I saw each customer for an hour or less. 

            Usually, each girl took the next one to arrive. There were four girls and me, and ten rooms to choose from.  I can tell you the exact details if it interests you.  Sometimes there were slow times, and if more than one girl was free, the next customer could choose.  They almost never chose me, whatever I picked from the wardrobes to wear; I suppose it was my age, being mostly twice the age of the other girls.  But mostly the ones that got me, acquiesced; and all of them were satisfied and claimed I was exciting.  And in fact, I can say I liked nearly all of them.  Though hardly any excited me.

            After a month when I began to wonder what I would do next, one of the girls suggested to me that we went independent.  She had extraordinary red hair and wore a lipstick that clashed.  I called her Scarlette.  She seemed to know what we would do and how we would work.  We had to buy our way out of the house, and we paid unhesitatingly. The girls were all frightened of the Madame.  She was believed to have violent friends who would scar our faces with razors or burn out our beauty with acid or blow-lamps, if we did not conform and obey. So, my companion and I paid our release money, and promised the same amount in six month’s time.  And you still have not noticed that one of our savings accounts has been closed.  We began to work in the West End in hotels.  This was different altogether.  They were different men, older, assured and no longer frightened of women.  It was then a continual physiology of erections and ejaculations.  Often the men were Arabs and they demanded strenuous activity.  My clothes became more elaborate, more sensuous, tighter and ever more vivid.  I worked in the afternoon only and was strict about leaving for the evening.  Occasionally you were away at a Conference or some other financial jamboree and about three times I made a night of it.  The men here were proud of themselves and of their performances and I realised they looked to me as an assistant to keep their performance at its peak.  I became good, and then even better.  I learned with these men how to remain icy and tender at the same time.  The more unmoved by them I was the more they performed at me.  They were much less interested in unusual equipment and phantasies; they wanted sustained and continuing achievement.  I never once employed my new skills with you.  I now know how to make your body into your heaven, but you have never once suspected.  Often those men's juices ran out of me and warmed my thighs as I walked home to you. But you never knew.

            We were pretty obvious in the bars of the Hilton and other hotels we had to be quick to catch our prey; or else we were moved on.  But sometimes the barman would take me into the stock cellar, and take down his trousers for me to quickly grope and grab what I could find.  Then he would not call the security, and we could wait for a while.  There was a lot of money in this, and you never noticed when the savings account replenished itself.  But again, the fun began to die when the novelty wore off.  I began to think I was coming to the end of this life.  I can actually say that I never thought of those men when I was with you; and also I never once thought of you when I was out in the afternoon looking for them.  Then about three months ago, whatever it was that I had been looking for in this adventure suddenly arrived.  He was not an Arab, but was very dark, a Greek, in tankers, I believe.  Maybe he was sixty-ish, strong, fatherly and still very lithe, a lifetime of money and women behind him. For the first time I felt glamourous - and so much glamour my insides melted, my heart had a job keeping up its thumping.  I knew I glowed with a wonderful blush when he came up to me because his eyes followed my blush right down to the rounded parts of my bosom that were exposed.  I knew he would be gentle with me.  He knew it was his gentleness and strength that captured me.  Suddenly there were only two people left in the world.  We drew together like magnets and the barman must have thought we had expected to meet.  From that day on I followed him like a yacht on the flood of the stream.  That was the night I was unexpectedly ‘delayed at work’, do you remember?  You thought it was my suicidal client; but it was me that had died in a special way, a delicious way, a death delivered by the kind hand of love.  After that first occasion, I knew he would come for me regularly. I was always in the same place waiting for him. I never went with anyone else. The girls had told me this was the biggest risk of the profession, and I did not care.  I forgot you.  Twice or three times in a week he would be there.  My heart would jump into my mouth, and my new life came to me for the afternoon.  And those afternoons when he was not there, I died in a kind of apathy.  Yet he knew of my agony, and a month ago he told me of the new arrangement.  I changed my hours at work, and one day a week he had me for the full day.  It started two weeks ago.  He calls for me at the office in his very large Bentley. We sit together in the back and look hungrily at each other, while his chauffeur drives us to Harrods.  We shop in the morning for the clothes he wants to see me in; and I tell him to buy the shirts and the shoes I like.  Then we take our clothes to the little Knightsbridge flat that he has bought for our meetings.  We change into our clothes, and look in the mirror, and look at each other. Then I embrace his strong wiry body, his crisp new shirt gathered into the belt of his trousers; his smart sleek shoes standing firmly on the floor as his frame supports my swooning love.  Arm in arm we go for lunch, a small aperitif, and omelette; and return to the flat, he, holding in one hand a bottle of his favourite champagne, and in the other my craving body.  Last week he swung me through the door and closed it with a flourish. His free hand caressed my cheek, a look of wonder and passion in his eyes.  I did not move for fear of melting into a pool on the floor.  He gestured to the bedroom and I went obediently, held by the elbow. He reached into the kitchen for two glasses.  "Please, your clothes", and he patted a chair. I obediently undressed, the whispering slither of silk on my skin, the soft clunk of the metal buckle of my belt as it freed my waist and my skirt.  He opened our bottle of champagne as my body gradually presented its smooth, creamy freshness to him.  I pressed my naked body against his expensive suit.  The soft flannel soothed my high-pointed nipples.  My well-used vagina gaped inside me.  He lay me back on the bed and came down beside me.  I undid the buttons of his trousers. I pulled up his shirt.  I kissed the soft skin of his tummy, the wiry hairs over his pubis.  Some of my hair caressed his genitals.  He sighed.  He removed his clothes. I looked at the long dark length of him from the steady eyes gazing into mine, to the pink tip of his penis waiting for me, to the strong sinews of his thighs and calves.  He pressed a glass of champagne to my lips.  I drank it, not taking my eyes off him.  He stroked my aching skin many times, from my shoulder, to my breast, to my waist, to my buttocks. He stroked me.  I saw his penis begin to stir, to waken and straighten.  I put my fingers to touch it, but he moved them away as if it were in agony "Not yet" he breathed.  He lay me back on the bed again, and his lips moved over my skin where his hands had been before.  I breathed heavily on him.  When his mouth came lower, my thighs opened involuntarily.  My body breathed him in.  He pressed my thighs apart and he looked there into the very centre of my being. His fingertips traced the outline of what he saw there.  The tender touch was excruciating.  It was electrical.  My knees drew up, my body opening itself, to give to him.  He poured the drips of icy wine from his glass into my heated crevice. The cold heightened the longing. Then his warm tongue drank from me. I groaned.  He worked on my agony.  My climax hovered.  He poured the wine, he drank it from me.  I burned, he poured, I came, he drank.  I clasped him to me with great tension in an enduring embrace that would not let time come in; and in spite of my iron need, he lifted himself gently into place upon me. His lovely penis slid.  And very carefully and slowly he made me come again with his climax.  In that moment I clutched in my arms all the blossoming love the universe had ever known.

            At the end of the afternoon he paid me well; the chauffer returned me.  I shall meet him again this week, tomorrow.

 

 

                                                                         IV

 

Even my wife's wild fantasy, frenetically impossible as it was, caused my excitement to be saturated with jealousy.  I took heart that it was to me that she told such an intimate web of her mind. The mixture of my unfulfilled excitement, the jealousy and the abased service to her, was a violent new cocktail, like discovering a new colour in the rainbow that no-one had seen before. I felt privileged.  I felt I had never been so close to her.  In the morning I woke late and had to hurry to reach an appointment.

            When she returned from work in the evening, the atmosphere had changed between us.  Sunday evening seemed a vast journey away, the other side of the moon.  She seemed strained and full of something. After supper she brought out of her brief case a sheaf of papers.  At first, I thought it was my story she had retrieved, but I saw it was not, so I asked, "Have you got my story back?".

            "Before we go into that," she commanded, "read what I have here."  She sounded suddenly displeased.  "I think it is self-explanatory.  It is a long letter from a fifteen-year-old girl who I have just started working with at the office."  The letter was indeed a long one.  I read it all through, as I sat opposite my impassive wife.  My anxiety mounted, as you will see, as I went along.  My wife waited for me to finish as if time would not be merciful.  The letter was as follows:

 

Dear Mrs Social Worker,

                                                   I have a lot to say to you and it is a nuisance to wait all the week round till I see you next week.  I've got something on my mind I haven't told you, and I don't know how to tell you. It didn't seem to come out last week.  I've got to tell someone.  There's so much nobody knows.  My Dad used to strap us a lot when we were kids.  I don't expect you know what it's like, but I was frightened of his coming home every day.  My Mum tried to stop him, but she was frightened of him too, so it just meant he strapped us harder.  He thought it was teaching us what's what.  He said we were kids without morals.  I didn't know what those things were then.  I thought they might have been those things which adults used with each other in bed.  But he said we had to keep to our morals, but after Mum died, he had a lot to do with women, lots of them.  People used to tell us it wasn't right.  It all seemed disgusting.  I told myself I wanted to stay a virgin, not to do like he did, not with anyone.  And I did stay a virgin for a long time - really and truly.  Lots of my friends didn't stay virgins quite a long time ago.  They muck around with boys.  Well, I've known a few boys too, now.  I've seen a cock, and I've seen it stand out, and I touched it.  But something different happened last weekend. I never do anything with boys. They want to do it but I don't think they know how.  Nothing ever happened in the past, not even with the man who got me and my brother on the railway cuttings.  He wanted me to suck his prick but my brother got hold of his wallet and ran off with it, so he chased after it and I could get away and get the neighbours on to him. I didn't know him.  So, I kept myself clean, you see.  So that's why I wanted to talk about last weekend because I don't know if I did right.  Well, I know I'm not a virgin now, so I suppose it was wrong, but it seemed so nice., really nice.  He was nice, because he said I was nice.  It's funny isn't it; I suppose you only like people if they like you.  He said he was over forty and that's nearly three times my age.  He said what difference did it make - so I suppose it doesn't matter.  But he wasn't like the boys at school.  And he wasn't like my Dad either. I suppose he's what Dad should have been.  Anyway, I was hitchhiking back from Hull - my Dad didn't want to see me, I think, and I didn't want to see him, but we have to do it because the court says so. That's what you say isn't it.  And my brother is away at the school they put him in.  So, I have to go and see my Dad sometimes.  It still makes me think of my Mum - not the foster one I had, my real one.  I've never talked about all these things.  My Gran always said you have got to forget about the things that upset you.  But there's lots of things you can't sort of forget.  This man stopped in his big car to give me a lift.  He took me all the way right down from near York to London. I’ve had lots of lifts before, but he was different.  He didn't look at me like some of the men, and he didn't put his hand on my leg.  My Gran would have called him a Gentleman. He just said nice things.  He liked what I was wearing.  It was that T-shirt I usually wear, and my yellow belt, you’ve seen them, haven't you; and I got some really nice trousers, my Dad had just given me. He said I looked really nice like he was on holiday in the pacific or somewhere.  He said it was very nice, and I wrote it down afterwards because it was a pretty thing to say.  He told me he was a writer, short-stories for magazines and things.  So, I suppose he thinks these things up all the time. When he got me to where my room is in London I asked him to stay.  I couldn't tell you about it when I came last time.  He came into my room, it's very small, and he stayed all evening.  We went to bed and he made love to me.  He put his hands on my shirt and felt me nipples; and he said he liked my tits.  It makes you feel good doesn't it.  He called my tits my ‘sticking out bits’.  He said he had a sticking out bit and he asked if I wanted to feel it.  I felt like a happy kid with him.  So, I said yes.  He undid the front of his trousers and put my hand inside, between his legs.  I said, it isn't sticking out much.  And he said, we'll see about that then.  He undressed me and I undressed him.  Then he put out the light and we got under the bed clothes on my bed, and his sticking out bit started to stick out properly.  He told me lots of things about me, all sorts of crazy things.  He wanted to lick all my parts he said.  He said if his wife knew he'd have to tie her up and put a gag in her mouth. She would have hysterics.  I don't think he liked his wife.  She must be quite bossy.  After a bit he put his cock between my legs and I could feel it go right into my hole.  I said it was a bit tight, but that’s how he liked it.  It hurt a bit, but I didn't mind because he made me feel warm and nice. His thing was warm somehow and it moved. It was like being on a boat when there's a storm, as he jerked up and down.  But I loved it really.  I don't know if it’s right.  But I want to see him again.  He never told me where he lives or anything.  I don't even l know his name.  Mrs Social Worker, what do I do?  I've got to see him, will you help me to find him.

                                                Love from Beryl Smith

 

 

                                                                          V

 

I sat back when I had read it.  My wife looked thunderous.  She was normally so very even-tempered.  I felt bad about the hitch-hiking girl.  Was my wife angry about what I had done -- to my wife, or what I had done to the girl? It frightened me a bit.  I was still concerned to get back the story I had shown her, I felt in her power still.  I asked if she had retrieved it - "It's quite safe" she said threateningly.  "It was waiting at the Knightsbridge flat when we got there today.  He thought it was a laugh when he read it.  But he said it might be important for us. He sent the chauffeur out to get some photocopies made - `Just in case', he told me."

 

I felt everything slipping away.  A cold fear sucked me from inside.  How many people were going to know about my secret fantasies.  Was she going to take revenge on me?  "You were a shit to that girl" my wife spat at me, “I knew you had been up to something when you had been to Yorkshire and hadn’t got back till so late at night”.  I knew why the revenge was coming.  The professional social worker outraged for her client was going to degrade me as an abuser, and shame me to everyone we knew.  For once I regretted something; I wished I had not written that letter she supposed had come from her client Beryl, and she showed me in the belief it was a genuine description.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Four – All dark

 

 

 

 

 

Love for the husband

 

She was standing there almost as still as the lamppost behind her, almost as slim as the lamppost. As he got out of the taxi and it shot away out of this street, the lady opened the long woollen coat she had hugged around her. Under its folds she revealed the glittering catsuit that she showed to the passing men in cars. Most cars slowed to look. However, he had got a taxi so that he could exit and meet her. 

            “Like what you see, young man?”

            He was in fact quite elderly and unimpressed by her compliment. “Very drawn to you, Mrs Latex.” She closed her coat to avoid disturbing the traffic as it was passing. “Where will you take me, young lady? Have you got a place for the night?”

            “The night? I hope you can afford me all night.” He was tall but casually dressed in a rather ancient looking anorak that did not suit his silver hair. “All right. It is around the corner. Not far. But the first thing….” She stopped talking as he took from his pocket a bundle of notes. “Count them out into my hand.”

            He got to six hundred, “That will do for half. I’ll take the other half when we’ve finished. If you like me, that is.” He put his hand back in his pocket and withdrew another bundle just to show he could afford whatever she wanted. “I could like you, sir. Quite a lot!” She had not moved from her spot, and he expected her to lead the way, but she stayed put and looked into his eyes. “Let’s be clear. I want you to know that I have various bits and pieces for defending myself if you’re the type to get aggressive with a woman like me.”

            “I’ve never been aggressive with a woman. Never hit one. Except when she wanted it for sex. There was one who liked a thick leather belt across her buttocks.” They looked from  a distance like a couple of friends having an innocent chat. “Would your buttocks care for a leather strap?”

            “Not likely,” And an observer would notice her smile for the first time. “But I could tickle up your nice backside if that’s what you’re looking for.” She turned, “Come. And remember I can defend myself. Just so as you know.”

            “Nope. I am looking for love. With a beauty like you. And I should say you are more than a beauty.”

            “I am. I can make your eyes water with beauty. You wait.”

            “I could wait a long time for you.”

            “Well, you won’t have to. It’s just two houses along.”

            “I’m staying the night you know. So we have plenty of time – and slowly does it. Right?”

            “I have some experience, you know. Different gentlemen like it different ways. I’m open to them all.” They were entering the house. Just to let you know, there are hidden cameras, here and there.”

            “I’m not going to hurt you. To be honest, you seem like perfection to me.

”I probably am.” Again she smiled as if she was thinking that she had hit the jackpot with this one. “Take that grubby jacket off.” She had taken him straight to the bedroom. It was large with quite a lot of furniture and a handsome wardrobe opposite the wide bed. He took off the jacket as if obliging her. You might as well take off the rest. I’ll make you a cup of tea. Or would you like a whiskey?” The setting sun was shining through the window, and he pulled the heavy, lush curtains across. 

“Whiskey would do,” He did not remove his clothes but sat down on one of a pair of armchairs. When she returned, she was still wearing her overcoat. “You can take your coat off.” But she sat in the other chair next to him. He turned to look at her, with a thoughtful expression. “I like your catsuit.” Her legs were showing black and scintillating all the way down to her ankles. “It’s latex. Fine stuff. I think I’ll call you Tex, maybe Lady Tex.”

She smiled as if she didn’t mind. “Go ahead. Touch it. It’s nice to touch.”

He put his hand on her calf and slowly, very slowly moved it up her leg exposing her thigh. When he got to her groin she moved and took a gadget from one of the pocket’s. “That’s the pepper-spray. Just in case.” 

From the other pocket she took a spear-like knife. She put both on the table. “That doesn’t look very safe, Lady Tex. I could snap that up as quick as you could.”

“I’ve got other equipment that I won’t show you.” She laughed at that. Then she wriggled her arms out of her coat and sat back in her glittering garment. He stared fascinated at her, from top to toe. “I think you like it.”

“More than. You’re just what I’m looking for. I had seen you before and wondered what you’d be like, what you could do for me.”

“More or less whatever you’d like. But no penetration. Got it? I don’t like diseases.”

“Nor do I.” His hand was still at her groin and he gradually, as slow as he could, stroked her up and down her body. Right down to her ankles again. “Kiss me.” So she leant across the arms of the chairs and gave him a peck on the cheek, and then a full mouth-to-mouth. He sighed. “Perfection. What’s it like to be perfection?”

“It’s OK,” she laughed again. “So long as someone notices.”

“Let’me be clear – I have noticed.”

“You have, I can see.” She put her hand on his which was slowly stroking up and down. She pressed it to her breasts. “I never had implants. I like then slender. What do you think?”

“Perfection.” He looked intently into her face. “Didn’t you get what I think? Perfection.”

“I know. You’ve told me. Sometimes, I’m hard to convince. What’ll you do to convince me?” He hesitated for a moment, then opened the zip on his trousers and brought out the tip of his stirring member. It pushed forwards as if greeting her. She looked down at it. “If I get on the bed, will you undress and then stroke me all over with that thing of yours. It looks as if it might like latex too!”

He stood up and undressed slowly folding his clothes and putting them on the armchair he’d been sitting on. She looked at him silently, and then stood to go to the bed. But first she impulsively put her hand on his back and with energy pulled him close to her in a fervent hug. He put his arms around her with an equal fervency. Then he lifted her slender weight and dropped her gently on the bed. She lay back, shut her eyes, “Massage me with your cock.”

It grew steadily as he softly worshipped the latex. After a long while of longing and slowly enhanced breathing he gasped and offered his organ to her lips. “It’s yours.”

“Not so fast. I think my mouth would like to decide for itself when it is ready. Now, Lord Tex. Tell me. Will you spare me your outflow into my mouth? Or will I swallow it?”

“Swallow.”

“OK. But we’ll keep this going for a bit. Till you are desperate. I like it when the desperation builds up. I like to see all that urging for my perfection. You’ve done this with lots of others who have been perfect for you. Haven’t you?”

“None so perfect as you.”

“Really, that’s perfect, too.” She wriggled her catsuit between his legs. “Come close down on me. Feel the latex with your body. Let that hard thing lie between us for a moment. No stroking or it might take you over, it’ll take the initiative. Feel me, just me – inside this slippery coating. It is sex all over me. Just for you. Because you call me perfect.” 

“Lady Tex, you could possibly be even more perfect than the catsuit, that I’ve admired out there in the street for weeks.” He softly moved his body over its inviting, shiny surface. “Now, why don’t you take it off, and I could feel the even more wonderful skin which is underneath.

She put her mouth on his lips again, with an energy that seemed like passion. “No, I don’t think so. It is of course, as you suspect, just as perfectly smooth and slippery. And just as longing for your skin as yours is longing for mine. Now then, put that cock of yours on my lips. I won’t take you in yet. I will keep….” But she stopped as her lips were closed by the gentle pressure from him. Her tongue slipped out and slithered and tickled him. He groaned.

 

It was another twenty minutes before she allowed him his release. And it was a release; it over-showered her mouth and dribbled across her cheek. He used his finger to slip the escaped juice back into her mouth. He was gasping. And she smiled.

            “Good for you, Lord Tex?

            He took an enormous breath, “Better than.”

            “Now you’re staying the night are you.” There was a command in her voice.

            “That’s the plan, Mrs Perfection.”

            “Lady Perfection, please.”

            “OK, Lady Tex Perfection. Are you keeping that catsuit on?”

            “Well, I’m not taking it off, not even for Mr Tex. Come on and lie next to me. We’ll sleep. You’ve had your pleasure from me, and it was certainly a pleasure and a half, it looked like. And, you’ve got that extra payment for me haven’t you. Go and get it, have your goodnight pee, and get back in for the night.” She turned over as if she had arranged everything.

            They woke early, very early. She offered him tea in bed, switched on the light and hopped out of bed still in her shiny uniform. “This is so bloody hot.” There was some aggression and impatience in her voice as she walked across the room towards the door to get the tea for them. But she stopped halfway. “Look at this.” She was just passing the handsome old wardrobe, and she swung open its two doors. Inside there was a trussed-up man. His wrists tied to his ankles, his knees to his neck, and his neck on a lead to a hook high up on the back wall, a gagged mouth. “Look,” she said indicating the specimen.

            “Christ. Has he been there all night?”

            “Course he has.”

            “So he was here listening in, last night?”

            “Yeah. He’d have been taking it all in.”

“Who the hell is he? What’s he been paying you?”

            “He’s my hubby. 

            “Whaaat?”

“He’s Jake; I call him jerk. I’ll get our tea.”

So the astonished bedfellow sat and looked at the tied up piece of litter hidden in the cupboard for the thrills. He wondered if he should go and untie the wretch. But then it was probably all to show his love for his wife.

When she came back with two cups of tea, “Doesn’t he get to be with you too. Do you have it with your husband.”

“Course I do. But not when I’ve got a customer. He loves to hear me. Drink your tea and we’ll have another go.” He stared at her. “With the doors open. What do you think?”

“I’m up for another go with you, but only with the doors shut. Or we could go to another room.”

“No, we’ll do it here. He will love it. He likes to hear me in passion with another man.” When she finished her tea, she put it on the side and told him to undo the zip down the back of her catsuit.

“Why are you taking it off? I thought I wasn’t supposed to have the pleasure.”

“Well we’re going to have a new pleasure. Just for him.”

The wretched husband with his neck straining upwards could only turn his eyeballs to the left. But he could hear every word they said, every movement they made.

“Well, Lady Perfection, what’s going to happen now?”

“We’re going to have a bloody good fuck together. Properly. In front of him.”

He put his cup down too and turned to her now naked body. “Your body’s got talc all over it.”

“We’ll get in  the shower afterwards. And wash each other down. Don’t worry about a thing. If he doesn’t like it, he can tell me afterwards. When I take the gag out.”

            “Doesn’t he want you too.”

            “Course he does, lover. He’s my husband. We’re good together.”

            “Glad to hear that.”

            “He’s the one that got me into all this. My pimp as it were.”

            “Doesn’t look much like a pimp.”

            “Not at the moment. Now, if you sit on the end of the bed near to him. Get yourself stiff and I’ll get on you lap for a good old fuck. I want the best one I’ve ever had. Got it.”        

“I’ll do my best.”

“Not good enough – I want the perfection you’re always talking about.”

So, in a quick moment they were ready, and she had the greatest of orgasms. Her screeching sounded as if it would bring the neighbours. 

“That’s fine. When I’ve got you out of here, he’ll do me over again. I’m a lucky girl today. And I’ll take the balance off you; the balance of the money.”

He handed it over, got dressed and began to leave. “That’s it,” she said as he moved to kiss her goodbye. “No more. I won’t see you again. Whatever you pay. I’ve been fucked into heaven.” 

“Don’t you want a fuck like that again?

“Not from you. I’ve had you, and that’s good.  You’re good. I am not unappreciative. But…. well, that’s it.”

“But why?”

But she put her finger on her own lips to indicate there was no more to be said. And he left without her accepting the kiss he had offered.

 

 

 

 

 

Down in the underground

 

He was standing at the door of the underground train in London waiting for it to open. He’d done it for decades; it was tedious. There was a handsome middle-aged woman next to him. So he turned towards her and told her she was attractive. She was slim and agile, but nicely curved, and with a pretty face and a wide mouth with sensuous lips. She was perhaps not as well-dressed as she should be, as if she was not aware of how attractive she could be. It was some kind of mischievousness that provoked him; it relieved the boredom. He did not usually do such things at his age. She looked at him and immediately slapped his face. He looked back at her, smiled and thought to himself, well she has spirit, how attractive! He picked his glasses up off the floor and followed her out of the carriage keeping a few metres behind. After about twenty steps she looked back to see where he was, and saw he was following. He was grey-haired but in good shape, well-dressed. After all, she thought, he did say she was attractive. She stopped and turned. She stared at him till he came up to her.

            “What do you want?” she said sternly. He looked at her with amusement in his eyes. His hair was well-cut and he had a fashionable dark stubble around his chin. She actually thought he was quite alluring with his cheeky amusement. She wondered if she’d like to match it and banter with him. “What do you want with me?” she asked again impatiently.”

He replied, “It would be nice to have a quick drink with you.”

            She stared back. People walking along the platform were having to navigate around them as they stood facing each other. She looked at her watch, “I’ll have about twenty minutes.” And she turned to exit with him.

            Sitting face to face across a small table in the pub, she decided to be blunt, no charming seductiveness. She was not going to make it easy for him. “I’m the CEO of a small finance company. We fund art exhibitions and art books. What do you do?” She took a sip from her glass of wine. “I mean what do you do apart from lust after strangers on the underground?”

            His amused expression remained on his face, “No,” he said, “only one stranger on the underground.” He chuckled.

            In spite of herself, she felt a little flattered. She found herself smiling back at him. He was, she thought, just a cheap gigolo. Just trying to prove he was so masculine.  Did she want to put him down, or did she want to be seduced? She felt a little uncomfortable. She put her hand unselfconsciously under her left breast to adjust the cup of her bra. He watched the movement and she suddenly felt embarrassed as if she was deliberate drawing his attention to her ‘assets’. “So, tell me what you do.”

            “Oh, I am just retired.”

            “Well,” she said slightly impatiently, wanting to adjust her bra again to get comfortable, but resisting the temptation, “What did you do?”

            “I was the lead of a team of doctors in a hospital. Orthopaedics.” He spoke in a factual way.

            “And now you’re retired and don’t know what to do.” She was looking equally amused. “So you look for lonely women – to examine their bone-structure, perhaps?” There was a slight sarcasm in her voice.

            “No. Not really.” He looked reflective and she waited. “I have heard the expression, ‘sex after sixty’. It just came to mind when I noticed you. That’s all. Hasn’t happened before.” Again she felt flattered, and she thought, ‘dammit’; something could be fluttering in her tummy. “Are you a lonely woman in the underground?” He asked. This conversation was getting deep quite quickly. She looked at her watch, wondering if she should go, but wanting to stay. 

“Oh, you know. The children have all just left home. And, you know, when the children leave, the husband often does as well.” He looked at her with some sympathy and reached out his hand to touch her on the wrist. She suddenly felt there could be tears in her eyes and she thought, ‘Christ, I didn’t know I still wanted a man. At my age!’ But she just looked down at the hand on her wrist wondering whether to respond to it. Instead, she turned her wrist over to look at her watch. “I’ve got to go,” she said briskly and stood up. “If you want to contact me, here’s my card.” And she fumbled in the bag at her side. “And,” more hesitant, “if you want a date, I’ll consider it.” She turned away from the table to leave, but stopped, “Are you married?”

            He looked seriously at her, the amused expression had left his face, “Yes.” She raced for the door though he was about to add something. As she got out of the pub, she screamed silently inside her head, ‘Fuck. Him’. It echoed around her skull all afternoon.

            When she left work in the evening, she was careful to go to the ladies and redo her make up. And on the train, she looked around from time to time to see who might be noticing her. But she noticed nobody noticing. She wanted to be beautiful again, as she was when she was twenty-five. She’d spend the evening working on the papers she had taken with her from the office.

            However, when she was at home, after a stale-bread sandwich, she noticed there was a message on her phone. She didn’t dare think who it might be from. She felt like a gawky teenager of fifteen, lost and insecure. The message said: ‘My wife and I are not intimate anymore. The children have all gone.’  And then he had placed one single capital X. 

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

She, Margret, refused to let herself think about anything but work the next day. though her daughter emailed to ask for some money, and her son wanted to talk about something his father wouldn’t because he was too busy having another family.

            But in the early evening, her stale sandwich had the same accompaniment. His message this time said, ‘If you want sex with an after-sixty, you’ll have to kink it.’ This time she decided to reply. But she spent an hour to get it right: ‘You know I’m CEO of my company, I’ll be CEO of our sex. Maggie.’

            He didn’t reply and she wondered if he was put off by her email. Or if he was leaving her to worry about it. That would be quite cruel. Her husband before he split up from her had called her cruel. And he had described how most CEOs are really bullies, licenced bullies. She had hated being called cruel, but from time to time since she had wondered, and had come to accommodate the thought. It could even be called sexy she thought at times. And now, had some kinkster fallen into her lap? But he was sixty! Or was she falling into the hands of a cruelster, like her stern father had been? Before she went to bed, she texted: ‘Rule number one is when you get a message from me you answer within five minutes. Got it?’ She switched off her phone for the night.

            In the morning when she switched on again, the message app indicated messages. One was from him, Paul. She left it till last as if she was indifferent. Which she was not. She was cross with herself. It said, “Well, indeed I get it, but you will have to create a system to enforce your rules.” 

She sighed to herself, Oh, for god’s sake, Maggie, he’s willing to play! Her fingers trembled with excitement as she started to reply. So she stopped and made herself her breakfast coffee. She’d make him wait all day. Nothing as erotic as this had happened for years. She decided to make the most of it before it went bad. What could be erotic electricity about a sixty-year-old grey-head? But she knew she would be determined to find out.

Looking at her computer furtively during the morning in between meetings she found a site which described sexual bullying. Is that what he needed? She told herself she didn’t care, it is what she might like. At a relaxed moment for lunch with her deputy, Sheila, she asked if she had ever heard of erotic kinds of dominance. Ella looked surprised, “Of course, Mags. Everyone knows about that these days. It’s BDSM. Maggie looked at her plate as if interested in the food she was eating. But she knew what she would be spending her spare moments on during the afternoon. She had already decided she would give him a rule to take her for a drink when she wanted. And she wanted one this evening. With him.

            She finished her lunch quickly and told her friend she had work to finish before her committee this afternoon and hurried off. Then when she got down to it, her computer told her masses of info about a whole amazing world, she never knew about and equally a whole rainbow of emotions inside her she had hardly known about. Lucky Paul, if he turned up for the drink this evening, he’d find himself the fortunate object she’d practice on. It was so easy to distil the essence of dominance and submission from all the bits and pieces around the websites, but there really are people who get themselves excited by quite cruel assaults. Some people really looked for and asked for it. And even paid money for it! Would she, Maggie, pay money? She corrected herself; would she, Maggie, take money for it? 

            She was eager when she got home, and sent her text message requiring his attendance upon her in a pub she had chosen. He did not reply within five minutes. So she sent a further text to alarm him; a warning she could be harsh about the rules she made. This time he did reply acknowledging her invitation to a drink with her. And he accepted it, kindly. He made no reference to the second message she had sent. 

            From what she’d read on the websites, disobeying her rule (by not answering an email, and by taking more than 5 minutes to answer another), demanded quite a severe punishment. Things began to turn in her mind. Would he really be the type that would love her to hurt him – with the emphasis on ‘love’ and on ‘hurt’. She’d have to find out slowly. Was he as new to this as she was? She replied telling him the time and the pub she’d meet him, and he should not be late. But he decided she herself would be late.

            When she arrived half-a-hour after the time she’d told him, he was not there. She stepped out of the pub, the phone in her hand. And rang the number she’d been texting. He answered quickly.

            She said, in a tone that she hoped sounded commanding, “You’re not here.”

            “Oh, I waited a quarter of an hour. I assumed you had second thoughts. You did say don’t be late.”

            “No, I said you don’t be late.” She heard him chuckle as if it pleased him to be talked to like this. “So, come back. I’m here. How long will you be.”

            “I’m only a few minutes away.” But it took him a quarter of an hour. She was sitting at a table with a drink. 

When he sat down next to her, she started straightaway, “I slapped you hard once, across the face. You deserve a few more. I tell you what you have done Paul.” And she told him his sins regarding the emails. Then she went on, “And now you have kept me waiting more than a few minutes, haven’t you. And in addition, I’ve had to buy my own drink. That adds up to four transgressions, doesn’t it?” And it was almost to her own surprise as well as his, that she gave him a good slap again. His spectacles went spinning off behind him. Two people at the next table rescued them from under their feet and handed them back with curious and intrigued looks on their faces. He examined the glasses before he placed them back on his nose. “So,” she said, “you’re into all this BDSM stuff, are you? How long have you been playing around with it?”

“Quite a long time. Quite a time.”

“Does your wife know?”

“No, absolutely not at all.”

And after a moment, she asked, “So you like being punished? 

He looked slightly uncertain, but replied with a definite nod of his head, “Yes.” And after a moment, “And I like to dominate. I switch.” She was about to ask what ‘switch’; meant but didn’t want to show her ignorance, and then realised it meant he likes to be dominant as well as dominated. And that made her think about being submissive. Another new thought; it might be interesting too, and could tickle her fancy as the rude saying goes. 

Before he could continue, she asked, “And, Paul, what’s the worst punishment you’ve ever had?”

“Ah,” he said looking out of the window as if remembering some special times, “Well I have had some hard punishments. Mostly with the cane,” he said frankly. “One woman tied me up and caned me as much as she wanted and I could not stop it. I had bruises for nearly ten days. She was cruel; and I thought she was the most beautiful goddess I had ever met. She didn’t want to do it again with me because I didn’t shout loud enough with the pain.” He looked back at Maggie, “Tell me your own worst, or best experience.”

She did not answer that; she did not want to reveal her ignorance. “Are you inviting us to play together?”

He was looking at her, studying her expression. “Maybe. I think you are a very beautiful women. You could be a goddess for many men. But I am not sure you understand any of this stuff we are talking about.”

 She felt a little flustered, and said, “But it was you that said we should get kinky.” And she stopped, not wanting to reveal any more of her sudden fascination.

“If you’ve never done any serious caning, do you think you’d want to learn>”

“I am a quick learner,” she replied quickly more or less admitting her inexperience.

            “OK,” he looked pleased. I have on the off-chance rented someone’s dungeon for the evening.” And then he added, “You know what a dungeon is?” She nodded. “We can go there now,” and he stood up. She stood up too, now feeling not in command. When they were outside and he was waiting to hail a taxi, he said. “You know, the best dominants always say that to use the cane well, you have to have felt it on your own skin, to have been caned properly. So you know what it is you are doing to the person who have entrusted themselves.” She certainly felt that although out of her depth, she was really desperate to swim in this exciting tide. When they had got into the taxi that had just drawn up, he asked, “You know what I’m saying?”

            “That you have to feel it in order to do it?” she queried, “But it is not quite what I’d expected when we set up this evening together.”

            He turned to her and said, “You look completely gorgeous when you’re excited.” She glowed inside with his complement, but also concerned about what was going to happen to her.

            “Will your friend, who you’ve rented this dungeon from, will he be there?”

            “No, I had not arranged that. It is a woman by the way, Alice, who I have got to know. Would you prefer it if we asked her to come? Would that feel safer?”

            Maggie no longer knew what she wanted. But she did manage to see, through her confused excitement, that it might be sensible to have a neutral person there as well, to make sure no-one got out of control. She nodded her head. “Is Alice the goddess who beat you to pulp?”

            He laughed, “No, it isn’t, actually. I never saw that goddess again. But Alice is quite up to that standard. She is perfection.” Maggie wondered what perfection in giving pain would actually mean. She felt a little girl having to dive off the top board in the school swimming pool. Paul got his phone out of his pocket. He found that Alice had not left her work yet.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

When the taxi dropped them outside the premises where the dungeon was, Alice greeted them from her door. They all shook hands with the greatest formality, an irony, Maggie thought, as they were about to sink into the greatest depths of twisted kink.

            And indeed, Maggie thought that Alice was really the goddess to sink all other goddesses. She really was a beauty, and graceful the way she moved as if trained as a ballet-dancer. But not only did Maggie approve, Alice herself approved. too, and enjoyed helping others onto her pedestal. Maggie was fascinated to see the dungeon of a professional. Alice gave her a sincere hug, woman to woman. But with Paul she just stood in front of him with her all-in latex body-suit in order that he could gaze till his eyeballs burst. “Now,” said Alice quietly but taking command , “he told me you want to learn some of the tricks of the trade. Some of my tricks.”

            “I know what he told you, as I was with him when he rang you.”

            “Quite,” Alice continued unruffled by Maggie’s sharp comment, “There are no tricks really. It just helps to have a strong arm for swinging up and down. And she went over to a table to pick up a thin cane. As she flexed it in her hands she had her back to them, and said, “Bend over.” It was not clear who she was giving the instruction to, so they both bent over, and she gave them both a good whack, roughly equal on each set of buttocks. Paul gasped and his feet moved a few inches forward as he tried not to struggle. But Maggie screeched in high pitch, and her back leapt up as she exclaimed in aghast surprise, “I can’t… “ But she didn’t finish what she couldn’t do, and moved around in a few circles holding her buttocks. It seemed outrageous to reduce a mature, middle-aged woman to the desperate inarticulateness of a baby. As Paul was still bent over, Alice gave him another one. He gave the same gasp and gurgled through gritted teeth. Alice put her arm round Maggie’s shoulders and put the cane in Maggie’s hand. She pointed to Paul’s still bent-over buttocks, and said, “Hard as you can.” Paul held still, and Maggie contemplated the task, getting herself into a mindset that could deliver that kind of cruelty to someone else’s back-side. She composed herself, stepped over to Paul, swung right back and did deliver quite a resounding whack. Paul again jumped forwards a little, gasping several times. And through his gritted teeth he gurgled the same as Maggie, “I can’t.” And then, “If you want to carry on, you’ll have to tie me. “

            Alice turned to Maggie, “What do you think? Shall we tie him up and he takes what we decide to give him?” Maggie looked doubtful, knowing she had to learn what to do with this moment of compassion. She nodded. Alice said, I think we’ll just keep it to six strokes from each of us. What do you think?”

            “OK.” Maggie found it easier, in her ignorance, simply to follow what Alice was deciding. Alice told her to get him undressed. “Paul, stand up straight,” Maggie commanded, and he did so keeping his back to the women. Maggie moved round to front him face-to-face, while Alice went to check her bondage frame and its leather straps. “Get those clothes off, Paul. Quick.” She watched his body come into view. He was in reasonably good shape for his age. She put her hand on his hair and ruffled it like a schoolboy’s. She took his spectacles off and suddenly gave him a terrific slap on the face. “Just for fun,” she said.

            He recovered from the surprise and smiled. “Good, I’d like it to be fun for you.” And he repeated. “You are absolutely gorgeous.” Though she knew it was not true – at her age – but she knew he wanted to please her with his compliments, and that indicated that she meant a lot to him already. And perhaps she was indeed a beauty to him – after all beauty is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it. Alice led him to the bondage frame, and as he stood with his arms outstretched, she tightened all the bonds around his four limbs. Maggie was watching how everything was done.

            Maggie then asked, “Do we do the six alternately or each in one batch? And who goes first?”

Alice said, “I’ll do mine, and you watch and try to follow exactly and with as much strength. Listen to the noises he makes. It tells you what power you have over him. And enjoy that.” Maggie said nothing and waited for Alice to start. She picked up the cane and handed it to Alice who stood at the side of the frame, took aim and delivered the first blow. Very hard. Paul roared and jiggled around helplessly in his bonds. Alice stroked her hand across the four stripes on his  buttocks. This last one, without his trousers was a real stinger. She poised herself, took aim and struck again. Paul tried to hold his breath but gasped and groaned. He did mumble, “No,”. But maybe he was commanding himself to control his reactions. The third one, was just as hard, and though he did control a lot of the sound it was still twenty seconds before he could relax, come down off his tip-toes, and the sinews in his arms and legs became less visible.

There were three more left, and Alice cruelly decided to deliver them quickly one after the other so that he had no time to recover from one before the next arrived on his assaulted body. At the end he was limply hanging from the frame and only gradually righted himself. In his own mind that was it. And only when Alice invited Maggie to follow on, did he realise he had to go through it all again. “Christ,” he said. He wanted to say ‘fucking bitches’. But he actually said, “You are my angels, my idols.” And at that moment he suddenly meant it. 

Maggie took the cane and stood, as Alice had done. After the second stroke with Paul now shouting at each, she couldn’t go on. Then she told herself, he actually wanted it, Alice commanded it, and she needed it. So one more, very hard. Paul was beginning to screech as loudly as Maggie had. Then, without mercy, the three quick ones. But also very hard. By the third Paul was out of screeches and hung helpless and completely finished.

Alice came forward to Maggie, “Not bad. Well done, And not bad for him, too, a sixty-year old, or whatever he is.” She smiled with success. Maggie was breathing hard but felt a little infected with Alice’s success. It had been an emotional roller-coaster for her.

The two women undid his bonds. His hands dropped to his sides, and he stood immobile recovering, and feeling both a relief it was over, and indeed a pleasure that he had given the women what they wanted. Indeed. a real pleasure. Alice then looked at Maggie and with her head slightly on one side in sympathy, she said “Now, it’s your turn.” 

Maggie suddenly looked aghast. “What? Tied to that thing?”

“I’m afraid so. It is what we are all here for. You have seen what it has done for him,” and Paul drooped his head as if in apology, “Now you need to go through it for yourself, don’t you.” Maggie took a couple of steps back, as if she could escape. She could not find words. She let Alice lead her back to the frame; she undressed Maggie who passively allowed it, allowed whatever. Alice adjusted the bonds to Maggie, and moved back leaving Maggie feeling alone and completely helpless. A CEO of all people, she said to herself, and now a helpless victim of incredible cruelty she can’t stop. Why has she let herself do this?

Alice took up the cane and stood beside the frame with Maggie looking on at the cane. “Sorry, Maggie. You have to know if this is really your passion.” And delivered the first stroke – as hard as them all. Maggie shrieked and stretched up as if for a saviour to come and rescue her. But there was no saviour. As she relaxed down, Alice took aim and delivered the next. It destroyed any relaxation and shot Maggie as if through the ceiling with a cry that ended in a whooshing wail of agony. Waiting a moment for Maggie to relax again, Alice imperturbably watched to assess when the next one should land. The moment came and Maggie shot out of her skin, her brain thumping against her skull, almost senseless from the surprise, the intensity, the unendingness of the echoing agony through every part of her body. And then, she realised, the last three when there would be no recovery between strokes. She screamed, “No. No more. No don’t go on.” Alice waited till the screams stopped, and then applied the strokes, with unstoppable screaming till after the second, Maggie seemed almost unconscious for the last one. Maggie sagged, thinking only that it was the last. It was over.

Paul came forward and clutched her body with his arms in sympathetic warmth and care. “Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, and buried his face in her luxuriant hair. His naked body showed his excoriated skin over his buttocks and Alice admired all their work. She and Paul undid Maggie’s bond and she fell into their arms as if she could not hold herself up. Slowly she turned and almost with a kind of defiance moved herself away from their supportive arms. 

Grasping desperately at her own command and her CEO presence, she said to Paul. “Now is it Alice’s turn?”

Paul looked at Alice, and said, “Well we rather think it is.” He smiled with an almost gleeful smile. Maggie looked on, and noticed how Alice was taking this suggestion. As the proponent of this exercise with Maggie and Paul, she had no grounds for refusing to have the experience they all needed. “Oh,” she said, “I was whipped  at the start of my career in this business. I know it already.”

“But nothing like a regular top-up. Is there,” Paul said. “And a good caning will give you something more than a whipping. You need to learn the cane too, Alice, my love.”

So, Alice had to take the role of the experienced professional. Experienced in all these aspects of her trade. She was strung up on the frame, her beautiful body filling Paul with astonishing desire – even at his age, as the women might have said. Alice demanded that she have something in her mouth that she could bite on as the pain came. And so Alice too joined the trilogy of cane-fiends. She of course made less noise, but her form writhed in pulsing jerks as the strokes came on her unprotected flesh. 

After the last strokes, Maggie and Paul clasped each other in a satisfied triumph. And almost oblivious of Alice, with her stripes too.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

They tidied up, and then looked at each other as if they wanted to stick together. It was now well into evening. Maggie with her commanding voice took them both home to hers, only a short walk as it happened. Obviously, they could not have gone to Paul’s with his wife innocently unknowing – and sexless. Maggie was up for the new, always. They were all exhausted so they all undressed and got into Maggie’s double bed and were each fitfully sleeping till morning.

Maggie made conventional tea-in-bed for the three of them. Alice and Paul emerged from their half-slumbers as she put down the three mugs. There seemed so much to talk about that no-one new where to start. Maggie, again as a CEO managing a committee meeting, tried to capture something of the amazing atmosphere of three experimentalists in bed together. It felt like they were a hush-hush and underground secret society, bonded together with no-one else in the know. They all agreed and held hands in a circle like kids discovering new friendships. 

Paul announced that he would like to celebrate by have a profoundly satisfying intercourse with his new companion Maggie. She, surprising herself, declined although she would also have surprised herself if she had said yes. So, he then immediately asked Alice. Alice the professional was never in need of such consummation with her subjects, but to her own surprise she accepted. Maggie sat in a chair beside the bed and watched as the two worked up each other’s passions. She watched Paul’s striped bum flailing up and down as he thrashed himself into her. Maggie was fascinated by the scene, that is if she had not been a trifle… what was it, could be a little bit of jealousy. Why had she said no then? After all she, Maggie, had been his first choice. Perhaps she was cautious as she did not know where Paul had been with his organ. Indeed she did not know. But she was watching where it was going now. And so, would he come back to her? After they finished and the post-coital remains of passion died, they drank the now chilled mugs of tea. 

Paul got off the bed asking where the toilet was. At the same time, Alice got off the bed and stood in front of him, close to him, touching again. She put her arms tightly round his neck and lifted her feet off the ground to put them round his hips. He put his hands under her buttocks to support her there. He could feel the firm wheals on her buttocks from the night before. She looked into his face only an inch or two from his, “I enjoyed that fuck. I haven’t had a fuck that enjoyable for a long time.” He smiled into her face, and then kissed her on her two eyelids in an affectionate and grateful way, as if agreeing with her. When he let her down and they came apart from each other. Maggie jumped up and came over to him, as if to claim ‘her man’. She put her hand on his penis and held it, then told him to follow as she led him, penis-first out of the room. Alice, as she was putting her clothes on, waved and said to Paul, “Enjoy,” and arranged her bra comfortably around her, “and don’t forget I could be a fan of yours. If you wanted one.”

When Maggie had Paul in the next room, she pushed him back against the shut door. She also pushed her naked body against his, her breasts into his chest, their genital areas pressed together, and her hand still holding his vital part. “So, was that fuck with her the best you’ve ever had?” she asked with her face an inch from his.

“No,” he said, trying to collect his thoughts. “You are going to  be the best fuck I’ve ever had.” He smiled,

She smiled. “The right answer. And she pulled a little way away. And slapped his face. Hard. Not wearing his glasses they did not fly away. He looked at her. And she smiled again. “I think I can feel I’ve made your prick come hot. It’s swelled a little.” And she looked knowingly into his eyes. He wondered if she would expect him to perform again on her – at his age! “I might just squeeze out of you what she has left.”

Alice at that moment knocked on the door and called out that she was leaving. They did not reply because their mouths were engaged in kissing each other.

 

.....ooooo00000ooooo.....

 

Only a couple of days later, he called on her in her office. Secretly they went together, unseen, to a staff toilet and examined each other’s backside bruises. He loved the touch of her skin, and where its smoothness had been brutally interrupted.

            “Now we have some privacy,” he said with amusement in his eyes, “let’s agree to get married.”

            “OK. For ever.”

            “That’s the idea,”

            “And,” she added, “I know what I am planning for the honeymoon.” He looked quizzically at her, wondering what she had thought up. “For the first night of the honeymoon we’ll have sex. But starting with six of the best on each other’s backsides. It makes me randy just thinking about what we did.”

            He wasn’t surprised. “Or we could invite Alice to the wedding. She could contribute something!”

            “No,” Maggie turned away, “that won’t be necessary.” And she flushed the toilet.

                                                                                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stiff and loose

 

I looked at him and imagined his smart trim buttocks.  With my hands on them.  He was a little stiff in manner and it might be fun to loosen him a bit.  He wore a dark suit, a tie.  A white shirt, and a slightly supercilious frown.  Tall, he looked down at me a bit.  He had no idea I was looking back at him with eyes full of schemes.  I smiled to myself.  I smiled to him, and he seemed to warm.  Judging by his dark skin I assumed he had slavery in his ancestry.  I wondered if he had one of those large genitals that some Caribbean blokes have?  Would I find out, I wondered?

He was looking at me.  Wondering, I think, if I would be a good conquest.  He would find out, if he wanted to.

I asked him if he would like me to get him another drink.  He looked impressed that I had noticed he was standing in the reception room with an empty glass.  He politely agreed.  A quite plummy English accent.  Being black myself, he obviously thought I knew my place.  I like blokes whose looks imply they have money, because sometimes they do – lots of it.  And with it, a reputation that could be damaged by someone like me.  I’m not above a little blackmail, only a little! But then – it depends how he played. I could like this one, quite a bit.

            As I fetched his drink and waited while our hostess poured a couple of glasses of rum-and-coke, I looked at the wealth in this black community. None had got their money from this country but had come here to bank it, launder it even (perhaps). When I brought our drinks back to him, he took his as if not noticing me who had fetched it. He was talking to a superior man with a lighter skin but obviously more exalted in the riches league. I stood quite close to the darker one, a little closer to him than the conventional social distance.  But he seemed unaware of my insignificant presence. So, after a few minutes I shifted my stance and edged closer to the superior one, again giving a message as if I were suggesting something with my proximity. The paler man – I now heard him called Jackson – glanced aside at me as if unsure whether he’d want this irrelevant woman.  His glance obviously told him I was worth considering as he edged slightly closer till our sleeves were touching. To this the darker man – now known to be called Rex – responded by glancing at this woman he had neglected and who had now shifted some inches away from him. He too noted something that it seemed he might have missed, because he looked directly at me and with elegant white teeth, he smiled how grateful he was that I had gone to get him a drink. More appealing as it had come from such a gracious hand, he told me. His attention transferred from his senior colleague to this willing temptress he thought I could become. As his attention turned to me and I to him, the older superior one moved away to find attention elsewhere. For a moment I wondered if I was really here to advance my position in the rich niche, perhaps I should have attended to Jackson instead. But the moment had gone, and Rex looked a lot easier.

            I raised my glass to his, “To your good fortune, Rex.” I shone my teeth at him too. “My gracious hand is always at your service,” and, I added, “if I may.”

            “You may,” he quickly said, as if we were discussing intimacies. He looked into my eyes, and touched my shoulder, finding a little bare skin there. I had made an impression after all. I knew how the evening would progress, if I wanted it to.  And I did. And he could see I did. And after a quick look at me, he asked, “Tell me the name of this delightful person I am just making the acquaintance of?”

            “I’m Cora-Anne Lewis.” And I shook my head waving the longish hair from my eyes in demonstration of my grace and beauty. I too added, “I think I know who you are; you are so well-thought of, aren’t you.” I smiled winningly and appeared to be greatly affected by being in his company.

            He grinned like a boy. With a hesitancy, he then said, regaining his aplomb, If you would excuse me for a few minutes, I have to speak to one or two people. Then perhaps you would accompany me, we could find somewhere to get more acquainted. His hand was still acquainting itself with the skin of my shoulder.

            I nodded of course and took his empty glass from him. He moved away as if I was a dealt-with piece of business, but I knew I had enticed him and if I wanted he would take me to bed. It was not so much the bed that was on my mind though he was a good enough ‘catch’.

            I liked to think I was a good enough catch. But sadly not for the likes of him who would have me for an evening a few times till we tired. My best asset was my hair which flowed and waved a little more freely than most of my kind and could be induced to wave further for evenings such as these. I had a good score for getting myself taken home by someone rich. It could pay for my beauty salon, and more than. I wandered back to the bar, and decided no more for me, as I wanted to keep my wits aworking. I found a place to stand inconspicuously to watch who he spoke to. But I also looked at his body which would be an enjoyment added to the business I was on.

            I saw Jennifer the woman I came with. She had a nearly white skin, always an asset, and with her spirited talk she had several young men around her. She worked in a very different way. She had been brought up in Jamaica, unlike me with my Englishness. My Rex, and he was ‘mine’, for the evening at least, circulated and I noted all those he spoke to who I knew, and starting of course with the senior slave-driver, Jackson. Eventually Rex finished his rounds and was saying his farewells. He glanced over and with an imperceptible nod of his head he indicated for me to come to the door. I too imperceptibly made sure Jennifer knew I was leaving, and with whom.

Because my adopting parents had been in this financial business, I could feel at home in such soirees, but also they sent me to one of those English elite schools to better me from my humble beginnings as the lost off-spring of an immigrant woman from Nigeria. I could swim in this particular niche of black bankers. They all traced their ancestry (often hopefully) to exploited Caribbean slaves. But I suspected my ancestors in Benin were the ones who had traded their ancestors with the English to send off as cargo to the New World. It was not that I especially disapproved of slavery as such; the evening and night I was facing would be little different perhaps, though I might get a bit of excitement from it. And my body would not actually be sold by a trader but would be sold by me.

            I followed him down the stairs at the correct distance so no one observing would connect us. I heard Jennifer tripping down the stairs behind me. But out on the street, I closed up on him and held his arm till he had hailed a taxi to take us to his place. Once the taxi moved off, I suggested he might like to stop at a cash-machine, just in case he liked the way that I kissed him. He looked at me surprised at my organised approach to such practicalities. He assured me it would be alright, he was well-prepared. I snuggled up comfortably again to him. Jennifer, I knew would have taken the taxi number – just in case. She would be getting half of the takings.

            He proudly boasted he had two flats in London, as well as half-a-dozen more round the world. But I could guess that. Nevertheless, I put on a surprised and impressed expression. I always begin as a somewhat simpering innocent who is slightly overwhelmed by the grandeur of these imposing men. The flat was certainly impressive though as impersonal as a hotel room and not a home. He showed me each room. I lingered in the bedroom and told him to bring me a drink. He told me to come back to the living room. So I did. I looked at a small photograph in a frame, obviously his wife and young daughter. I asked if he was divorced. He gestured with his hand as if they were in process with difficulties.  But it really indicated he didn’t care what I thought. I sat myself in an armchair making sure it would be difficult for him to sit down beside me in any comfortable way. I didn’t want a long drawn-out romantic drama. He handed me a drink and then stood beside me as if wondering what conversation to make. Clearly, he was not interested in me. And he began talking to me about money he was making. And then about what he could buy with all the money he was making. I listened to him conveying with my expression how spell-bound I was. It must have been obvious to him, that I was not. But he needed to go through these rituals. His potency was being confirmed by both of us in this socially acceptable fashion, and to be confirmed shortly in a bodily fashion. After a while, I suggested to him, that I’d like to get to the bed and start exploring his amazing person more deeply.

He smiled - the first time. And he led the way. My drink was not drunk, but I left it. Standing at the end of the bed, he asked me to undress. I asked, more provocatively if he would undress me. He declined. But when I was naked, he touched my skin, starting at the shoulder he had touched at our cocktail party. I knelt and he fondled my luxurious hair, and I found my way in through the zip of his flies. We didn’t say much but I did a little gasping as I thought he’d like me to be impressed. And indeed, the stroking of my skin did excite my hormones, more than I cared. The concern was whether he’d be bothered about my hormones as well as his. In fact, when I pulled his erect member gently out of his trousers, he did ask me to undress him.  Which I did with great care, making him feel precious, I hoped. But I didn’t find it difficult actually, and I wondered why he had all evening begun to feel precious to me. When I had done the undressing job we stood facing each other. He put his hands in my hair and pulled my face to his, and he kissed me full on the lips without asking. There was passion in that, and I was surprised. My breath was coming a little faster than I anticipated. I drew back pulling him gently with me till I sat on the end of the bed, and he leaned over me, gradually coming down on top of me. His chest slightly rough with the hairs rubbed gently over my breasts, over my nipples. He was definitely trying to arouse me as well as himself. He was more of a gentleman than I had expected. I was pleased I enthused him. He entered me quickly and came quickly and modestly. He withdrew and held his still erect penis. It remained stiff in his hand. He then advised me that he could keep an erection for as long as I needed if I wanted him to give me an orgasm. It all seemed so practical it was almost deflating, except it was not and it seemed I could be of real interest to him. He also advised me that if he came again, it would make no difference, he would continue with whatever I asked till I was satisfied. I said, yes, and felt I had freedom to ask for anything.

            “Well,” I started, feeling carefree with this now unusual man, “If you let me up to get my bag, I have some cord there to tie you to the bed so I can ravish you.” 

He looked momentarily uncertain and then exclaimed, “By all means. I have never come across such a one!”

            I smiled, pleased with myself, as I think I had pleased him, jolted him out of a regular evening routine. He let me up and I did the business with his hands and wrists at the four corners of the bed. “Now,” I said putting one foot on the bed beside his prostrate and immobilised body. I was rather triumphant and domineering in manner, “you are mine. Taken over in a way never known before.” I put out my hand to take his still erect penis in my fingers as if it were the holy sacrament. “I am in charge.” I knelt across the bed with his loins beneath me. His pleasured stiffness slipped easily between my lower lips; his tip met my bud, and in a special way they kissed each other.  He gasped a little, and I a lot. This was not just a quick fuck for an evening. This was something special. I gasped more, and quickly had several orgasms. I don’t know how many, and I think he may have had one more. I fell forward, kissed his lips with passion and gratitude, and thanked him. And thanked him. He remained still in his bonds and as I raised my head a little, he smiled (the second time that evening).

            I said, “You’re smiling again.” I looked him in the eyes. “it seems to me that you don’t often smile. Perhaps people don’t often please you.”

            He looked back at my eyes but said nothing. Nevertheless, I think I had pleased him, which was a relief because, unusually, he had pleased me.

            I stayed looking down at him. “Now, shall we untie you?”

            “Please.”

            “Hmm, perhaps I won’t. Perhaps, I like you under my control.” He looked sharply at me. 

            “Oh, you look surprised. Perhaps with me in control you can promise me things. Things I deserve.”

            “Oh,” he relaxed, “you mean money.”

            “No, I don’t want your money,” I said enigmatically. “Maybe I want something else.” And I was thinking of something else. But I said, “Well, yes of course, if you want to give me money. And it would be nice to know what I am worth. We could bargain a little. But no, it is not so important.  I can earn as much money as I could want from all you rich guys. I have half-a-dozen of you on my books. But, if I wanted to bargain for something else, you might be just the person for me.” He looked puzzled. “Perhaps I should leave you to guess,” I said teasingly. “Perhaps I will keep you in the ropes till you guess right.” I cocked my head as if I were enquiring if this would be fun. He showed no reaction.

            I was still sitting astride him. My orgasms a range of mountain peaks still within vivid memory. And as far as I could tell his erect member was still remembering my peaks and his. He was still swollen up inside me. Stiff as a slug of whiskey. I tweaked a muscle or two in my bottom and squeezed him there. A few twinges of electric feelings crossed his face. But he wasn’t talking to me.

            “You’ve got no guesses, what I want from you?” But he wasn’t talking to me. He lay there passive and unmoving. He looked as if there might be something he was thinking of. I knew what it was. So, I started moving up and down. Thrusting his erection yet again into me and out. It took quite a while this time. But I was in no hurry.  This time I watched the moving expressions on his face.  I stoked his cheek as if he were the softest and loveliest doll I had ever had.  All those men I had satisfied were like dolls to me.  I could play with them and stroke them and give them house-room inside me. Or not, just as I wanted. But of course, this one, he was more than a doll. More a play-mate. I could play his mind. He was human. Just about - and more than. I slowed down my rhythm a little. But he began to move himself; he did not want me to slow it. So, I stopped. And I sat with all my weight down on his hips so he could hardly thrust himself in and out. 

            So he stopped trying. “What is it you want?”.

            I looked straight in his face as if he were a little boy who could not please teacher at school. Then I laughed, “I only want to give you another cum, up my sex-hole. It is what you want, and it’s what I want.” I laughed. And I started my rhythm again. This time his climax was an explosion. The Big Bang. He nearly tossed me off him. But I hung on and kept him going till it subsided. “Not bad, boy. You’re good. Right?” And I looked at him admiringly. “And I’m good. Right?” He didn’t respond; he was recovering from the big one. I stroked his face, his chest, And I felt for the root of his penis at the entrance to my pussy. There was so much juice about; his and mine. Slowly, he came back to me. His swelling inside didn’t seem to be subsiding much. When he had opened his eyes and he was back with me, I simply said, “Well done, champion.” He heaved a great breath and shut his eyes again.

            I lay my body down on his chest, my cheek against his chin, my nipples feeling the hairs on his chest. And I put my hand between us to feel my pleasure bulb at my entrance and began to soothe it with the tip of my finger. It responded, and so did I, and so did my cavity, squeezing softly on his swelling. He lay back, and more than ever, more than even previously, he left me to take charge of our satisfactions. He was a little boy, a baby breathing beside me, leaving life and the future to me entirely. My orgasm this time was slow, and his thrusting tool twitched along with my pleasure strokes as if I could do us both together. And miraculously we came together, softly and gently and in a happy clutch of tiny, subtle jerking. We had spent each other. Surely.

            I think we dozed briefly. I became aware of his erection shrinking out of me. I asked if he had completed, but I got no confirmation. I knew though that he was done.  For today. It was no fun keeping him tied, now. So, I moved off him and he grunted and shifted a little.  I untied him, feeling something special had happened. “I know now that this profession I have chosen, has been the right one for me.” He did not open his eyes. But as I released his arms, he brought them back on the bed. “And pretty good for you, Rex, as well.” I got off his body and went to release his ankles. He lay, looking played out. “I think you like me in charge, Rex” and then, “I’ll do it again for you.”.

            He shook his head slightly as if he did not want to think about it.

He got off the bed. He seemed tight in his body and started to dress himself, wiping himself down with some tissues. He did not look at me. He seemed to be expressing an indifference as if he were simply getting off a train at his station. I wondered if I had really made an impression.  Of course, I had; I knew I had.

He knew I had too. But he didn’t want to know. He didn’t look at me. Some men are stiff and unyielding, just like their erections. He asked if he should call me a taxi. I did not answer. But he called one. I wiped myself on his tissues and went to his bathroom and flushed and wiped and came back to get dressed. It was now late. He was at his desk listening to his voicemails on his mobile cell-phone. I looked over to find a piece of paper and wrote down my phone number on it.

When the taxi honked in the road outside, he walked me to the door, courteous, holding my arm, a gentleman, recovered. As he opened the door, I turned to him and said, “Use my phone number to leave a message. Tell me, what I would have been worth if you had decided to pay me.” He smiled. Again. He touched my cheek and I left for home. I got in the taxi and the driver started off. I wondered whether I would offer to pay the fare with my body as I normally would`. But, it seemed the body had done its work that evening. 

Rex was on my mind for a while. I don’t think I had managed to loosen him up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thing that goes in mouths

 

It was around the age of 10 and my mother told me what to expect.  It wasn’t very reassuring.  I had an older brother and he crashed his bike and had a nasty wound on his leg that slashed an artery.  They said he was lucky not lose a lot more blood, but a passer-by was a nurse who knew what to do and improvised a tourniquet.  So, when Mum told me I would soon start bleeding I remember asking if it would be like Jimmy.  She smiled and said it was just a nuisance, it happened with all women.  I asked if men had that as well.  She said, no of course not, they had different bodies.  I knew that, because Dad did not always shut the lavatory door when he went to pee, and I knew he stood up to do it, with a thing that could shoot the urine a bit like a hose pipe.  At the time, my curiosity shot up.  And I asked what it was that Dad had between his legs.  But Mum was too embarrassed to tell me, and so I had to ask my brother later.  I found I had to know about these things, so I asked Mum a week or two later, why Dad had a different thing to me and her, and she merely said that they did things together.  What things? She didn’t want to tell me, so I asked if I could come and watch.

My brother didn’t tell me either, but then he didn’t tell me anything in those days.  One of the teachers at school liked me.  I sort of knew I was teacher’s favourite in the class, and sometimes we would chat after a lesson.  So, I decided to ask her about what Dads and Mums did together.  She looked at me with a soft gleam in her eye.  She said it was difficult to explain, but maybe I’d like to come and see her with her husband.  So, I did.

They were very friendly to me.  I had told Mum I was going to see a friend after school.  But I hung around till it was evening and went to the teacher’s house.  The Dad, who was called Jimmy like my brother, gave me a little hug.  Hanna, my teacher gave me a hug too.  I felt special and they took me into their bedroom. Jimmy asked me what I knew about the thing they were going to do.  I said, “Nothing”.  He seemed very friendly to me, they took their clothes off and asked me if I wanted to as well.  I didn’t want to, so they didn’t mind.  “You see we have different things between our legs,” he said.  I looked at his, because I knew what she had – the same as me and my Mum.  I looked at Jimmy’s waggly things and wondered what he did with them.  I knew he peed with them.  And I said to him, “You pee with that, don’t you.” And he agreed.

“Do you want to touch it?” he asked.  Of course I did, and I put out my had gingerly and put my finger on it. 

“Go on hold it,” my teacher said.  So I put my fingers around the longish thing.  He told me that was nice to feel, and the thing began to get bigger, or fatter at least.  She said hold on to it and stroke it.  So I did with my other hand.  It seemed strange.  But they were so nice I felt quite happy with them.  And he said I was making him feel good, which was nice for me too.  She said, “Do you know what he really likes. He would like you to put the end in your mouth.  Would you like to do that?” I really didn’t and I shook my head. I knew what came out of it, his pee.  I think she realised what I was thinking and said “That thing – we call it a penis – gets longer and bigger and it pushes out some white stuff.  It is called semen.  It is not his pee at all.”  Then she knelt down, and pushing me a little away from his thing, she put it in her mouth and sucked on it.  It was what I do with an iced lolly.  He made some noises as if he was agreeing with her and wanted what she was doing. “She turned to me and took the thing out of her mouth, “You see how he likes this.”  And it was growing bigger, but also stiff.  It was so interesting for me to watch.  But then I said, “Can I try, too,” and she moved away to let me put the penis in my mouth.  It didn’t taste of anything.  It felt very big in my mouth and I didn’t want to bite it.  It might hurt him. So, I just left it in and he sort of pushed and pulled so it went into my mouth and slipped back again.  I didn’t see what the point of it was.  Then she pulled me away from him gently and as she sat down on the bed, she opened her legs and said “I have a kind of mouth here for him.” And she showed me the folds between her legs a bit like mine only much bigger than me.  “We call it a vagina,” she said, “And he puts his penis in it, like he put it in my mouth and in your mouth.” It was all so new to me, and I wondered why they would want to do all that.

Then, he said, “Shall I show you how I put my penis in her vagina?”  I know I had my hand between my legs, wondering what would happen if he, or someone, went there.

“Yes please” I said as if it was all being done for me.  So he knelt in front of her and she opened her legs further. And his slippery penis covered in my saliva slid into her.  I couldn’t really see exactly.  But then something took them over.  I watched as her back jerked and she leant back on her arms.  And he pushed and pushed into her.  They both made noises which weren’t words.  But sometimes she said, ‘yes’ with a kind of pant.  It went on for a while and it was obvious they were enjoying it.  But I couldn’t understand what was enjoyable.  I tried to ask what they were feeling, but they took no notice of me. I felt alone suddenly and wondered if I should run home.  But I stayed watching.  They seemed so, er… silly.  I wondered if my Mum and Dad did that.  But it was getting frantic for them, I thought and suddenly it was as if he burst, and he fell on top of her on the bed, and she let out a cry and said, “I love you.  Do me please, do me”.  She seemed to me to be lost and maybe gone mad.  And she gave a quiet screech.  And they lay still with Jimmy on top of her.  I waited and didn’t know what to do. 

Then my teacher said to me, “Penny, that’s what happens.  Come here.” And she held out a hand from under him as if she wanted to hold mine.  So I came near to them and held her hand.  He rolled off her and seemed to be exhausted.  She said to me, “Would you like to do that?”  And I replied that I didn’t know.  And I didn’t.  It seemed so strange and not at all grown up.  I had seen boys fighting in the playground, lying on top of each other. But this seemed quite different. She put her hand between my legs and stroked where my folds are.  “Do you feel anything nice there?”  And I shook my head.  “Well,” she said kindly, that’s what men and women do.  One day you will know how it feels.  And then you will keep wanting the feeling.”

I wandered home slowly, and tried to make sense of what I had seen.  I wondered if my brother and I could try out something like that.  There must be some special feeling but I could not imagine it.  I decided to explore more what I had between my thighs.  When it came to it, my brother did not want to play around with me and seemed as embarrassed as our Mum.  I think I never felt comfortable in maths classes after that with Hanna, the teacher.

 

…..ooooo0ooooo…..

 

Of course. there were other boys at school.  And I came to be known as someone who would experiment with them.  I had learned how to say ‘I love you’ at the right moment, but not one of them seemed to be interested. Some took a very short time and got up and went away.  Mostly they took no notice of me, but I did learn what the feeling was like.  I could see how Hanna wanted to show me.  My folds soon started bleeding, and all in all I felt very grown-up suddenly.  It was not difficult to realise that I could give myself the feeling if I rubbed myself in the right way on the right place.  And what happened was that if I could go on longer than any of the boys when they were inside me, I could get a real thrill out of it.  It was like a satellite going into orbit.  I wondered why it didn’t happen when the boys were stiff inside me. They didn’t gasp or scream, just stopped when they got tired.

Eventually, when I was 16, I suppose, there was one special boy who was not so pre-occupied with his sex feelings, but who was interested in mine. That was something new.  Not quite all men were self-obsessed with sex. This one was kind, he was called Alan. I think he sometimes thought I looked a mess.  It didn’t put him off but made him concerned.  I have not really known that men could be concerned.  I told him we were poor.  By then Dad had been sacked – some 6 months before his enquiry. And Dad had hardly got out of bed since. Often, he would not get out even to have a pee.  So Alan thought I needed things.  He gave me a handbag one day when we went across the fields on a warm day to do it in the open.  I was surprised and said it was kind, and in fact I needed it.  He said he had stolen it from his sister who had got it from a friend (probably a boy).  The next time we had sex, he gave me some money; not much, five pounds.  I gave it to Mum and told her I had found it in the street.  I said to Alan again, that he was kind.  We agreed he would give me money for the family every time we did sex.  We both knew what sex for money meant.  And rather worried, he asked if that was the only reason I would keep having sex.  I said, of course not.  And it was true I wanted that stunning satisfaction from him.  It was just nice to have a bit of money for my Mum too.  I don’t know if he believed me.  But soon he went away to university, and we lost touch.

I realised it didn’t much matter who the boy was, or now, who the adult blokes were, as I was emerging from school, and I had decided my path.  The man who put me onto it was quite a bit older. We used to talk about the difference between love and sex.  I said love did not exist.  He was shocked and told me he would show me it did.  I said that all he loved was my titties and that I’d go to bed with him whenever he wanted.  Yes, he said, “That helps”. And he laughed.  But I had already told him about my arrangement with Alan.  And he agreed to something similar.  It was a significantly bigger income than the one from Alan, and I could rent a tiny flat just a room really.  He didn’t like it much and took me to hotels.  He had a wife he had to keep secrets from.  He was called Josh.  And he had a good job.  So I was a looked-after mistress.  I didn’t mind.

When I had met him the first time, he asked my name, and I told him – Penelope (Penny), and so when we had set the arrangement he told me Penny was a good name.  I said to him, “Well, if you look after the pennies, the pounds look after themselves.” And this put an idea in my head – though perhaps it had been there a long time.  Because I did not see him all the time, I wondered if I could employ the rest of my time, in a similar money operation! 

On the internet, I found a website designer who worked for girls like me. I wrote the text, and he did the design and programming.  It was not out of the ordinary, but I did write for it quite well.  He was paid, as you can imagine in the currency I was beginning to trade in.  I really didn’t mind who used my body, they were all satisfying.  Most such girls don’t think that, and they called me an egalitarian.  Interestingly, I got much less abuse than most working girls.  My webby man liked me and told me I was the best of all the girls he worked for.  I think he would have taken me on for some more permanent relationship – a wife for instance.  But at the time I was enjoying my freedom.  My Dad had died, and my Mum was working all hours, and I seemed to find it easy enough to get my kind of work, so I could give her things of one kind or another, though I think she liked cash best.  I toyed with the idea of telling her how I earned my money, just as a revenge for her leaving me in the dark when I was so curious.

 

…..ooooo0ooooo…..

 

Actually, my curiosity remained with me, and as I got more requests from some of my clients that seemed a bit kinky, I got more inventive with what I could offer and do with them.

            I told my Mum that I was freelance; doing advertising. Not entirely false. And she didn’t ask much about it. She was more worried about my brother; he was into drugs. And she told me, in a shocked whisper, that he went with prostitutes! I had nodded wisely as if understanding her shock and sympathising. 

            My website called it ‘creative living with your body’. These euphemisms were often misunderstood, and I often got into difficulty with the server. So I had to change from one to another quite often. Clearly, it was not going to last for ever and I wondered what I should do. Perhaps go to university and get a career. Maybe mathematics. What is trigonometry? And it was then I thought of Hanna who had been so unexpectedly kind. I was still amazed at how she had handled my innocent childish questions. Was she the reason, I had sometimes wondered, why sex had never seemed more unusual than any other kind of shopping. I found out from that primary school that she was still there, now Head of the school. So I went to see her, and turned up one day. She did not recognise me when I was taken through by the secretary to her office. When I explained who I was, she seemed rather confused. She seemed really excited to see me, and also as if I was an interruption. I suppose I was, so she told me she would meet me later, after work. For her, the Head, work went on till the evening.

            I met her outside the school, and we went to a local pub for a drink. Hanna was thrilled to see me. “And what are you doing with your life, Penny, my dear?” Her hand was around her glass of wine as it stood on the little pub table.

            I shrugged my shoulders, wondering if she would care to hear what direction my life had actually gone in. But then what else had I gone to see her for. “Oh, I have an easy life. In the sex industry, as it is called.” 

“How interesting.” She looked politely interested and concealed any shock she might have felt. 

“I can give you the address of my website if you want.”

She nodded in a considered way, as if she might take a polite interest. “You were always curious, weren’t you. When you were young.” And she smiled at the memory emerging in her mind.

I didn’t want to say she and her husband had probably put me on to it. She might have felt I had come to meet her in order to blame them. And I absolutely didn’t see any blame. “I asked how her husband was.

She did not answer immediately, “He died,” she said in a quiet voice. And I wished I had not asked. “Quite young.” I didn’t know what to say. I was still young, probably still younger than when she had been my teacher at age ten. And in addition, it seemed to me death was more unspeakable than sex – much more in fact, as I could speak easily about sex. “It was about two years ago. He had a bad cancer of his prostate gland.”

“I am sorry to hear that. You must have been sad,” I said conventionally. “I met him once.” 

“I know,” she muttered with a thoughtful look in her eye. “I loved him. We had a good marriage.” She sounded as if she might want to talk on about her loss.

“I put his penis in my mouth.” I chuckled, but she did not move. “Do you remember? And I think you shouted out ‘I love you’ at him.”

“Yes, I did, Penny.” She was still looking thoughtful. “We always wondered what happened to you after that.”

“Oh, I went on to big school and I got interested in the boys there. And learnt a lot. More from them than from the lessons.” And I chuckled again. But I felt I had spoiled her beginning talk about her husband. I had interrupted as I did not want to go into whatever it meant, sadness, grief and so on. My life had been more with people seeking excitement.

But she spared me more details, and said, “We often wondered what effect it had on you. We were anxious we may have given you too much to think about at your age.”

“Oh no. It made me what I am. And I am not ashamed of that.” And after a little reflection, I added, “But there are some who think I am a disgrace. My Mum doesn’t know anything about it. She would feel disgraced. “But…” and I lost words for what I wanted to say.

“Sex is part of life, isn’t it. No-one can escape that. It is a peculiarity that we get so bothered about the morals of sex.”

“There are no morals about sex, Hanna. No more than there are morals about shaking hands.” She did smile then. 

“You’ve got a mind that works in interesting ways, Penny.”

“That may be why I came to find you. I think I am moving on. I wanted to talk to you about what I might do next. You were always the best teacher when I was young, and I thought that you might know what’s best for me now.”

She raised her eye-brows in surprise. “I’ll see what I can do. What about marriage and a family? Have you got any children.”

I exhaled and shrugged my shoulders as if her suggestion was inconceivable, “Nah. Never really thought about it. Have you got children, Hanna?”

“I have two. Thank God. I feel he still lives – Brendon lives. Through them.”

“I see. Yes, he does still live. I’m sure. You are lucky to have found someone who wants you fertile. Men want us for so many things – for love, for sex, for children. You were fortunate you had someone who wanted you for all those.”

I thought her eyes may have got a bit moist then, “Yes. He did.”

“ I have not been so lucky. They only want sex from me. Not the rest.”

“I was very careful in choosing. I went in search and chose carefully. Maybe you have not been so careful in searching, Penny.”

I almost never feel chastised – ever. But for a moment I thought that might have been a criticism. I think it was. And it was true indeed. I had not done any particular searching. I had a website and they searched for me, for what they wanted. I went inside myself for a moment then as we sat together. My old teacher telling me off.

            There as a silence. We were now both a bit tense; she because of her lost husband, and me because she put her finger on my failure. Eventually I said, “Mmm, perhaps that is what I need from you, Hanna.” I liked using my teacher’s first name. It made us equal. “How does one make a search? And is it what I want to search for.”

            She finished a drop in the bottom of her wine glass and shifted her chair as if getting up to go. “Come and see me for Sunday lunch. I’d like to get to know more about you. I will tell you my address.”

            So she left the pub having told me the address. It is hard to describe what I felt. It seemed a bit like what people call depressed. I felt unusually lacking in curiosity or excitement. I looked round the pub for what sort of men were there. It was a habit; indeed a professional habit, perhaps. And when I thought of it like that, I stopped. I had better do something about what to do with the next phase of my life, and really who will I actually be in the next phase. She had begun to make me think I did not know who I was properly. Just a sex machine, without the dimensions of being human?

            Over Sunday lunch, just her and me in her small living room, plates on our laps, she started (after all the pleasantries of arrival and serving the meal). “Two years ago, he died. So, now, is the time when I too start the next phase of my life as well, Penny. Shall we do it together? That’s my question – on the dinner plate today! To put it bluntly, Penny, sex has always been a force in my life as well. I have shrouded it in privacy, and you have waved it like a flag. Maybe we need to learn something from each other. Teach each other something.” This left a long silence while we ate the meal. She was a good cook. And I had second helpings of desert. Later she said, “You called it the thing that goes in mouths. We were always amused by that; Brendon and I were amused. We met at school when we were eleven. We were close friends, and had sex first when we were fourteen. I had another boy when I was eighteen for 6 months. Then Brendon and I came back together. We had both missed each other so much we knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. Now he has gone, and I won’t spend the rest of my life with him.” She smiled dolefully at me, and I shamefully froze as the sadness hit me.

            I didn’t want to hear about her grief. But then it struck me that she was making an overture to me. Should we come together in this love-bind, a sex-bond too maybe. Having thought this through, I then said, rather coldly, “That would work between us, if you were telling me I should be thinking of having children.”

            She looked a bit perplexed, but gradually saw what I had made of her speech. “I didn’t really mean that, but it could I suppose be a possibility. Is that why you tracked me done?” she asked with a sincere curiosity. It was almost as if she felt I was proposing to her. I wondered if I really had looked for her, for that reason. I could say I had been sort of in love with her when we had had the intimacy in my childhood.

            I eventually said, “I’m not sure if I was really looking for that. I am quite happy to sleep with you sometimes, Penny, if you want. To be honest, I am not short of sex. So it would be more for your satisfaction than mine. I think it was the need I have for the love of a friend. When you took me seriously those years ago you became the best friend I have had all my life. Perhaps the only real friend who has not wanted to take something from me all the time.”

            She smiled, “Interesting. As I said, your mind works in miraculously unusual ways.” She smiled as before. “Let’s leave the sex aside for the time being,” she said, sounding more like a teacher, now. 

            “Yes, I am a bot obsessed, aren’t I?”

“Maybe.”

            “And not very good at the sad things. I guess you have noticed.”

            “I had noticed; you are right. And I am sorry to burden you.”

“No, don’t be sorry on my behalf. I probably need to listen to these things. It is just as much life as my professional expertise is.”

She looked carefully at me, as if trying to decide something about me. “OK, I need the best friend I have ever had, as well. When I was five years old my mother died. In a car accident. I survived it. So when Brendon died it brought all that back again. But in a new way, I suppose. Tell me if you don’t want to hear this, Penny.”

“Well, I don’t, but it will be good for me. That is what you have been indicating. I should get away from all this sex-obsession. I know I should, and that’s why I came to see you – to get beyond it.”

“Perhaps no one gets beyond it – only hides it like I do.”

“Go on Hanna, you must tell me what you need to say. I shall be a good friend to you.”

She smiled and looked increasingly tearful. So she decided to use my invitation. “I can’t get it out of my head. I know prostate cancer is very common, Apparently most men get it, at least in a benign form. I was…” she hesitated awkwardly. “I was sex mad with Brendon since I was fourteen, and before. It always felt it was abnormal in me. It is why I took you seriously when you were so young. I can’t get it out of my head. Did all that sex Brendon and I had result in it becoming his killer-cancer. Do you know, Penny,” and she looked searchingly at me, “I feel a kind of guilt that I caused it, I killed him. I know it is crazy, but feelings can be crazy can’t they?”

“I have never felt guilty, ever in my life, Hanna.” Her head dropped and she looked into her lap. I realised how unsympathetic I must have sounded. “I know that’s a bit mad too, isn’t it. I need to learn about this. What is it you did? Tell me what it is like to be guilty of killing even when you aren’t.”

“Aren’t I? I don’t know. It is the feeling. It is not what I did. Well, I imagine what I did. I just wanted his body all the time. I wanted him beside me, holding me, inside me, all the time. And it must have been too much.”

“Didn’t he want it too?”

She was in tears now, “He did. And he demanded it. I know. I know. But perhaps I should have held back, or rationed or something, “She was waving her hands around wildly in desperation.” I tried to imagine what I would want if I were in that state. So I got up and I put my arms around her body and its vigorous movements. “You don’t need this, You don’t need this, Penny.”

“I think I probably do. You can’t possibly be responsible. But somehow you feel it.”

She calmed a bit, but only a little. “But the next thing Penny is even crazier.” She. shook her head in exasperation at herself. “I think of my mother. In the car. Driving off the road. I think I caused her to drive off the road.” And her tears came back.

“How could you have done that? You were only five, you said.”

“I was only five,” she started and there was a long pause. “It wasn’t me that caused it. I had been cross with her because she insisted on the seat belt and it was uncomfortable. In the end it is what saved me. But she died as we came off the road. I know it wasn’t me that caused it. It was some other driver my father told me much later. But I feel guilty as if being cross with her had made her careless or something or other – I don’t know.” She was talking as much to herself now, to her tears. I was for a moment no more than a recording machine. But she slowly calmed herself, having spoken all this in her rushed sentences.

And she eventually looked at me, “Oh god, I am a mess. I shouldn’t have said all that.”

“Of course, you should,” I said reassuringly, but not knowing what to say. “ I guess it is a problem that you don’t have Brendon to talk to. When you lose someone so close you don’t have them you can talk to about losing them.”

“There you go,” she said, almost smiling, “your weird and wonderful mind can say it all.” She looked straight at me. “I need a new Brendon. And I’ll never find another one. I know….”

I was a bit shaken that after all these twenty years or so, when we had not seen each other, not really thought of each other perhaps, I was the only friend she could let all this out to. But I said, “Who else have you talked to about this?”

“Not like this, no-one.” It felt like a big responsibility and so far out of my field of operation. But as I had said earlier, perhaps I should be learning some if this from her. “Thank you Penny, you are actually a good friend even though we have been so apart for so long. I hope we will grow close perhaps.” It was as if she was winding up this outburst. She was recovering herself. Was I being dismissed?

But no,  she started anew, “I looked up your website. It is all very cryptic. What would you do for me, if I applied for some service?”

I was taken aback. Her mind too was capable of mischievously intricate twists. Just like mine as she had perhaps said. “You’d have to be interviewed and we do that online, doubly encrypted for secrecy, to find out what your private world of fantasy is, and we’d try to find a way of playing it out.”

            “I might give it a try.”

            “Oh, come on Hanna, you don’t have to go through the site. We’re friends, we can talk. We’ve just talked, with intimacy about private thoughts.”

            “Not my fantasies though.”

            “Oh, I doubt if they’re as upsetting as what you’ve just told me.”

            “That’s true.” And she became silent.

            Eventually she looked up and as if she were about to say goodbye and finish our discussion. She said, “Tell me when you’d like a little session in bed, one night.”

            I was a little startled by the abruptness of the dismissal. “Tell me too, when you want to be interviewed about you fantasies and satisfactions.”

            We then took our farewells, and she parted by saying, “Let’s meet again soon, good friend.” I nodded and she suddenly embraced me with passion. Our mouths joined and her tongue reached into my mouth. I thought of that time when I had held Brendon’s thing in my mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

With Grace: Without her

 

As he reached his climax, it burst out of him how much he loved her.  He had not ever meant to say such a thing.  It had never happened before.  Her mouth being full of him, she made no response, but completed the job.

            Later, he apologised.  She shrugged her shoulders as if it did not matter.  He was familiar with her indifference.  Even after his climax, her beauty almost tortured him to look at her.

 

* * *

 

They had met on the ferry just out of Boulogne. She was sitting on deck in the full sun but huddled as if cold - but perhaps in loneliness.  He sat down beside her, purely because her beauty touched him.

            At Folkestone he offered to drive her back to London.  They stood, discussing it on the pavement.  Two passing youths spat at them and walked on, but then turning, one said, “Fuck her white, mister”.  “Then fuck yourself,” the other joined in.  She stared at them as if accustomed to abuse.

            Her black skin was as pure as it was at puberty.  He had white distinguished looks.  “C’mon,” she said to him quietly, accepting his lift, “let’s go”. They turned from the retreating youths.  “You whites are trash,” she added, with hardness and indifference.  He pointed out where one of the youths had landed a small gob of beery saliva on her leather jacket, on the round of her breast. He offered to wipe it off for her. She ignored such gallantry and found a tissue in her bag.  She spent the journey redoing her nail-varnish

 

.* * *

 

That had been three years ago.  Suddenly, entranced for the first time in middle-age, he had bought her a flat.  He had persuaded her that it would be a good investment - could be sold in three years, and they would share the profits.  She contributed to the mortgage. In their brief meetings, she often talked to him incessantly about her independence, about paying her own way. He took her out sometimes and gave her expensive presents of clothes and perfumes and sometimes money.  She graciously accepted these on the grounds that she would be repaying the debt with services.  His wife never knew of this liaison; might even have approved that he was being catered for in the “groin-department” as she loftily called it.

            She served his needs immaculately and expertly with the whole of her lythe, perfect body, and the careful reserve of her quiet mind.  It was a return-payment; as it were, she was the gift, but one that he could never possess.  Sometimes he arrived at their flat for tea, sometimes at coffee-time, sometimes for drinks before supper.  Often, she would be sitting huddled in her loneliness as he had first seen her.  Sometimes she would not answer the bell, and he would return later when he could. Often, she would take him into the back, her carefully kept boudoir, and provide the momentary and expected gift of her soul, and recompense him for what he had given her, and she restored her own sense of independence,

            At first, he had wanted to tell her of her beauty, of her purity, of how his breath had been taken away that first time he had sat down beside her, and her presence had somehow, indelibly, soaked into him.  Of how it had never changed for him since that first moment. Often, he would start words of admiration.  And she would walk away, or flick the television on, or hunt in her bag for the things to work on her fingernails of her eye-lines.

            Sometimes she would mention men who hassled her for marriage, and who offered her the earth or more.  He heard about the man she had been in love with who always promised, but never left his wife.

            Often, he heard of her resolve, ever after that break-up, that she would fend for herself; truly unburdened with emotions and dependence.  No-one would do anything for her that she could not do for herself - and had already done.  He heard the bitterness in her tone that offers of marriage, of everything else too, undermined her heroic self-support.  He sensed very quickly that his love for her would hassle her into an obligation she would never accept.

 

* * *

 

When they arrested her, she caused a fuss.  He arrived in the middle of it; the small basement door was open and out of it flowed screeches, interrupted by gruff, controlled threats.   He rushed in to help.  She ignored his entry, taken up as she was with her screaming justifications. A policewoman on either side of her, she faced a ruddy-faced young PC who took her torrents of self-defence and abuse with an old-fashioned fortitude, reminding her of her rights and of the number of potential charges she was steadily clocking up.

            He sized up the situation as he entered, walking between them, he took her beautiful delicate face in both his hands, and whilst she aimed her pointed shoes at his shins violently, he kissed her full and passionately on her spluttering mouth.  Her words became muffled and stopped as if choked off in a suffocation.  “And, who are you, sir?” the dignified young policeman demanded.

            But he took no notice, brought out his handkerchief to dab the tears and smudges from her face.  He put an arm around her shoulders and pressed her towards the privacy of her bedroom. Such was his command that the police let him do it.  And she too allowed herself to be helped into shape.

            The same happened in court.  Her explosion of denigrating protests resulted in her being sent down for contempt. Two days of white racists in the women’s prison convinced her it was less humiliating to return to the court to apologise to the magistrate.  When he escorted her from the building to take her home, she was ready to spit fury at anything that moved.  She sat in the taxi briskly filing her nails, defying him to speak to her.  Back in their flat, she huddled into her familiar chair seeking the withdrawal into her lonely posture to calm her indignity - the indignity of the court and indeed at her own of being helped by him.

            He went out immediately to shop for a simple meal, which he then cooked for her. Immediately afterwards, she invited him to leave.  Which he did.

            The charge against her - running a disorderly house - was more of a potential disaster for him.  He, after all, owned the flat - had so much to lose from public knowledge of his link with her and her business.

            She refused to talk to him about what had happened, about what had brought the police in, about the details of her business.  Her sole communication about it was to turn her mouth down in a sour expression, shrug her shoulders and say, “It will only be a fine,” as if he would be the one to pay it.  She could not enlighten him on the further investigations the police were conducting into her - their flat - and him.

            So far as he knew, she continued her business there.

 

.* * *

When her body was found, one of her clients had practised extreme cruelty upon it, before mutilating and disembowelling her. The final cause of death was by suffocation due to her breast implants, torn from their site, and thrust deep into her throat.

He was quickly convicted. His coiffured wife never attended his trial.  He began the long years of his sentence at the bottom of the pile in the prison, the perverse sex offender being the just object of everyone else’s violence.  He demanded solitary confinement and was given it. What else could these long days of loneliness be filled with but his haunting memories of her - the devoted expertness of her body, those momentary gifts of hers to him.  Despite dedicating those unending hours to recollections of love for her, his degraded situation continually forced him to wonder if the verdict on him had been right, if he had entered some blacked out moment of sadistic murder, as if some dark unknown passion had demanded an end to her indifference and in revenge he had torn her apart to look for her responding love that never came.  Was there some monstrous evil that had lurked in him and shown itself momentarily - even unknown in its showing itself?  And if it was so, such a monstrousness must be in him still.  He searched for it in his dark sadness, in his loneliness, in his indignation and rage, guided only by the proclamations of the court and of the tabloid press, which together told of his ‘true’ character.  He kept these cuttings, and added to them when he found occasional further reports.  He searched for details, which he could find in himself.  He reviewed his life, the angry rivalries as a child with his brothers, his fights in school playgrounds and dormitories with boy comrades.  His arguments with his father when a teenager. His sad annoyance with his stiff and stately wife, and the enduring aggrieved resentment at their childlessness. His rather ruthless ambition in the law firm.  And finally, his success as a writer of those damning murder/thriller novels.  Had all this culminated in a paroxysm of blind forgotten sadism towards the object of his purist, most generous and tolerant love?

A year later a similar murder of a black prostitute occurred in a wealthy part of London.  The police reviewed his case.  The court released him.  The media reported the fact.  He left prison without interest.

            His shamed wife never replied to his letters.

            He turned his writer’s mind to an autobiography.  He became very rich.

 

* * *

When I first saw her body - because, yes, it was in fact me who had found her, and in fact called the police who regarded me as ‘red-handed’, and in fact I was literally so red-handed, with the blush of her life-blood on me from touching her - I saw her and stood still.  In that moment I was no longer present, staring at the window, perhaps for 20 minutes, whilst the corner of my eye concentrated hard upon the sculpted form on the bed.  It was a huge rose-bloom, a fulsome bud opened by a knife. It blew the careful space of her tidy bedroom into an eternal memory for me.  My thoughts shrank down into the single minimal dimension of a straight line that stretched from my eye to the featureless plane of her recently cleaned window.  I could not look, yet I saw. No doubting I saw. I shrank too into an unthinking blot, a stain which I would never clean.

            The white insistence of her still eyes stared more starkly as if they were varnish, like un-skied mountain slopes at night, simply waiting.  They invited real life to grow there.  Those whites were the only unsullied - not sullied with blood - surface she still had.  It was the blooded surfaces that the whites contrasted with, they did not compare to her brownness.  Those whitenesses were an invitation into the messages from her dead soul.  They said nothing, both quietly and loudly; like the white of an envelope creates a curiosity and a communication, all at once. The whites of those wide sad eyes spoke of her poor dead soul within.  I looked at those dead eyes then, as they spoke horror to me, and there was no longer an indifference in her.  They spoke to me of a cold magic, a charm that I could hope to meet again only when dead.

Cautiously with darting motions, my eyes, also deadened, glanced upon what he had done to her. Just above the black shrubbery of her lower hairs there was a vertical cut of, say, one-and-a-half inches, running northwards up her tummy.  Its edges were slightly parted as if in shy invitation. Subsequently more semen was believed to be inside that hole.  Smears of blood, shaded streaks against the dark skin, surrounded that slit; a fulgent expressive energy, a pulse of some explosive slaughtering passion, caught in a sublime moment of art on her abdomen.

Further up was the dramatic swipe from hip-crest to hip-crest, a line that seemed to cut her in half, slicing only millimetres below her belly button.  It formed a grand smile that had opened, and slowly I saw a blind satisfied grin, releasing a disordered tumble of in-things to the world outside.  As if the gates of a crowded playground had swung wide to let the active play of uncounted children spill uncontained into the world.  They were dark, bloodshot and distended bubbles of bowel, or short, wrinkled pearl-grey strings, or stretched sheets of fanned-out veins.  All were markers of her inner life come outwards.

Her face was strewn with red-streaks as elsewhere in a ghastly tattoo.  They darkened her perfect skin patchily and shaded into the lean hopeful curves of her dear cheeks.  Streaks bled from her mouth like flames licking up from a grate.  Their still fire pictured the horror-passion, a struggle between mouth and intruder, between despair and defeat.  It was a poem of life and death, and it played round her mouth like children on the common.  The wide stretched mouth, sliced either side and so no longer hers, poured with distress, with openness and fullness.  Its sour turns and sudden glittering smiles for me had gone in the stretching he had forced on its willing cavity.  There, it contained now, a retching fullness of foreign matter that gave out a blue-grey glimpse between the frozen clots of red around those once white teeth.  It was a fine full fit that pretended well-enough to be a lover in her loved mouth. It had become the centre of a completed poem, lyrical, tragic, quiet - a night without dream in there. Her lungs had pleaded for air in those final moments, and were left unfilled.

            Across her chest were thin stripes on the dark and smudged skin, lines where the dark colour had been forced to give way and slender furrows of red beads had grown.  They were the light touch of a wire in cheese.  Her bosom had born its nakedness and had celebrated, as if with streaks of fire, an obsessive attention to those pure curved mounds. A long time ago, a rhythmic, purifying flagellation was a solemn hymn to god.  Now, its pain still rang out echoes in that room that made me put my hands to my ears even then.  Her breasts were the altar and the flesh together.  Each one of the pair had then been torn open as if an envelope with frantic news, as if they contained messages of forgiveness.  Each breast had yielded, not a milk - no, never that - each had born a soft gelatinous package, weighty and malleable - like fluid mercury, the liquid jewel.  Each package had been torn out as if scooped with a sharp curette, leaving its breast like a robbed purse, as if the devout Inca, ripping the heart from the victim of worship, could praise the sun with blood, but had failed to cast a glance backwards at the bud from which the sun had risen.  Each breast had slumped in the sadness of loss, shapeless.  How her breath must have heaved under them. Beauty continued to roam upon her, like the rays around the horizon of the new-day’s sun.  Those breasts had become relics of light and the world. Their nature had flown and light and the world were thereby intensified.

            Her limbs were stretched out to the far corners of the bed, a web, a net to catch stars.  Her sinews were tracks of light in, as it were, the sky at dusk, a sign as much of welcome to the day as of passive good-night.  A greeting with open arms and legs to all experiences, a zest, in the stillness, like sipping iced water with a hot Mediterranean view, inviting the weary traveller to come and rest in silent inward contemplation.  She lay vainly and hideously stretched and prepared.

 

All in a moment’s flash when I looked, she in disorder in the soft boudoir where she kept her things tidily and ready for her. My eyes centred in on the knife, his knife.  Its handle only visible, whilst its blade he had plunged fully into the top of her thigh. The polished shine of its brass and wood hovered erect above the crest of her pubis, as if a snake charmed, risen from within and stuck petrified in its deadly climax.

            It was mercy that made me feel its handle and draw its stained blade from her deep flesh.  I hesitated and drew a faint scratch across my own abdomen from hip-crest to hip-crest, in a twinned climax of death.

 

* * *

 

In my solitary confinement what else did I have to do but rehearse in my memory - as if still real - the love I had felt for her. Often, I would stretch myself on that undignified prison bed, stretch each limb to one corner and call up a vision of her – bending, stretching, dancing for me.

 

What else might I do in my empty hours but twin my body to hers as I had in that last moment?  I thought I might live a twinned death in those moments.  A starfish, stranded and tortured in pain as if the drying sun had been too quick to let it reach the sea again.  For hours, in that sill prison-cell I might wait for death to come.

 

As I had when I had found her.  I had endured then moments that lasted forever like death.

 

Lying there in my posture of remembrance, I would find my body responding in ritual.  I recalled it was the energy that had astonished me.  As I had cast away that knife of his, I had knelt over, then lain upon her ruin.  Just as I now lie matching the direction of her limbs with my own stretched out.  I had pressed mine to hers as if the life in mine would do for us both.  The weight on her freed bowels brought more to the surface in a sensuous caressing slither under me, accompanied by a strained gurgling sound.  Her opened being had propelled me in a paroxysm that came because she had never strayed from an independence she proclaimed every moment in her separated way.  I could not alter the impulsion of my own body as it subsided in murmurings of how I had loved her which she could never hear.  Her bowels churned when I rose from her body and became still again.  I wept for many minutes.  Her eyes maintained her familiar indifference.

 

She had been all through this alone, as she would have wanted.  Now I, on my own, was destroyed by it.  I called the police as the only others in the whole world who might now know what to do.

 

In this way I managed, whilst in prison, to spend my time with Grace.  But then, it was when they let me out.... The dark days came.