Journey XVI – Down to the Seaside

Come evening a boat arrived down at the quay and moored just beyond the turbulence. Marvin arrived soon after. I told him about the ‘children’ and he said it confirmed what he’d been told. ‘So nothing to worry about after all’ he said, slapping my back. I went up to get my things and we got ourselves on board. It was neat little boat, with a canopy and broad couches. I got myself settled into a sleeping bag and Marvin produced a bottle of Calvados and some cups.
‘This could take a while’ he said. ‘Chin chin.’

It took all the night and most of the next day to reach the other side of the lake where, in a pretty and busy little Alpine town we picked up fresh horses and headed down to the coast. That took another couple of weeks and we stayed at other small establishments along the way whenever we could. The landscape became increasingly rocky and dry as we descended, and the temperature rose steadily, at least during the daytime. At night we froze if we were in the open. We passed through pines, then tall evergreens, then tussock grass and aromatic scrub, every so often catching a glimpse of the river rushing along in a gorge some way below us. The scenery was magnificent. The peace gave me time to think about what had happened since the we all got off the ship, and about what happened on the ship too, for that matter.
I wanted to talk about Sophie and Andrea, but I didn’t feel comfortable raising the subject with Marvin. We weren’t on those kind of terms. I still find it hard to accept that, given my lamentable record with women in life, here I’d actually done rather well with the ladies. It all seemed a bit implausible. My old, homeless self (or worse, my middle aged loser self, still living with his parents) insisted I must have been imagining it. They were just being nice or something. But I couldn’t deny it. For the first time ever I’d felt genuinely at least as desirable as other, normal people. What had made the difference? Actually the answer was obvious, but depended on a new insight – to wit – I was actually alright, just as Andrea had said I was. It was my life that had made me mad – all the chaos of trying to make a living that didn’t feel totally humiliating and abusive, and then failing, and trying to get by somehow without giving in to dependence and to violence and ultimately to a sordid death. I didn’t have any of that to contend with here. Previously I’d have thought there was something intrinsic to my character that would always make me a failure and an outsider, but here I discover that’s not true. Instead of being astonished that at least a couple of women here found me attractive, I found myself wondering how I’d come to be so very unattractive in life.

Maybe then, I think, I should stay but it feels like a cop-out. I have to go in again, knowing what I know now. Like Sophie said – I need to use this experience.
I was also worried about what had happened to all the people I had met along the way, and in particular, about what would happen to Sophie – whether she chose to stay or to somehow make a break for it. It wasn’t a happy thought. I really wanted to ask Marvin about what had happened to us in the town but for some reason I was reluctant to broach the subject. I suppose it was guilt – survivor’s guilt. It was preying on my mind though. It was a very long time ago now, but just occasionally a shadow would move in the twilight and it was all I could do not to scream and run. One evening he was watching me when this happened. I grinned apologetically and he nodded as if he knew what was going on. We were camping that night and he threw a twig on the fire. He looked like he was thinking about it.
‘What do you think they were?’ he said.
‘I was hoping you could tell me.’
He shakes his head. ‘All I know is there’s a lot of things here we don’t know about.’
‘I thought we couldn’t be hurt here’ I said, my voice breaking a little. I’ve been bottling this up a long time.
He shrugs. ‘The ship is a kind of a safe house, but otherwise... That’s why they usually recommend you travel with a guide – gives you a measure of protection. I’m truly sorry you had to go without that.’
We sit and look at the fire a bit more. I glance at him. He seems nearly as upset as I am.
‘Did you get a good look at them at all?’ he says after a while. The view down into that basement comes to mind. It’s so horrible. Ian is gone too. Did they get him?
It takes me a while to say something. ‘I saw something. It looked like a man, pale, tall...’
‘Did you see the face?’
‘You know, at first I thought not...’ I look at him quizzically, hoping for something. ‘I don’t know...’
But I do know. I try to think how to describe what I saw. I say something about the thin shell of a gourd I found once in a bucket of rainwater and which I thought at first was a reptile egg, or a baby’s skull – brittle and wet and full of black rotten stuff and tiny white worms.
He purses his lips and nods his head. ‘Nice imagery’ he says.
I want to ask him the stupid question that’s been nagging at me.
‘Is it because of what we did?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The sex, the partying, the drugs, I mean, not me so much, with the drugs, but the drinking... Is it our fault? Was it the price we paid, because if it was...’
‘The Wages of Sin?’
‘But it’s not death is it? We’re already dead. It really is a fate worse than death.’
‘Whoa. I don’t think so. First up – sex ain’t a sin, none of that is, not here. It’s a pure simple pleasure, doubly so since you can’t get sick or pregnant. All that living in sin’s just dreary scriptural trash from the days when men felt the overpowering need to know exactly who their sons were. But sex is a good thing. You don’t appear to be convinced.’ He takes a long swig from the bottle and looks out into the night. ‘The evil is in the abuse of it – the lies and the betrayal, the brutality, the exploitation, the unloved children – and the disease of course. Some abuse it but then, there’s always someone’ll abuse anything. Don’t make it intrinsically wrong...’
‘But...’
‘What?’
‘Oh I don’t know...’
Something about this man makes me feel small and naïve once again. It’s an odd feeling, long lost. I think I’m regressing. He nods and goes on.
‘Anyway, second – it don’t work like that here. I don’t know what we’re here for, but so far I have no sense that it’s to be judged or punished, and I have seen no evidence of anybody or anything here in a position to enforce a penalty. So far as I can tell we’re here to learn, but at bottom, it’s probably just something we go through and it may have no meaning at all.’
‘But all that pain and horror...’
‘Just creatures doing what creatures do. My guess is you were just easy pickings. Hell, I’ve seen it – people always on the move, coming and going, nobody knowing from one day to the next who’s staying, who’s leaving... If there’s a moral to the story it’s that ideally, people should keep a proper look out for one another.’
‘But they didn’t deserve to be... treated like that.’
‘It’s not about deserving Gabriel. It’s like a disease, or a predator. It’s not about what’s fair or just. It’s just bad luck, probably. It’s not justice. It just is, so to speak.’
‘Hmm’ I say, doubtfully, lying down on my sleeping bag. It’s getting cold. Maybe I should get into it. He lies down too, tipping his hat over his eyes. I still feel like we should have maybe tried to do something – tried to rescue at least someone. I don’t know. I still feel like we must have done something very wrong. I feel in need of absolution or something.
‘What about Sophie?’ I say, almost inaudibly. Her name catches in my throat. I've not said it out loud in a while.
He looks over at me and there’s a trace of a smile that tells me he’s been waiting for this.
‘Tell me about Sophie’ he says.

‘She’ll come when she’s ready’ he says when I’ve finished my account. I’ve tried to be even-handed, but between being mortified at my own cowardice and my fury at her stubbornness, my explanation is not very fair on either of us. I guess I look pretty hopeless.
‘I mean it’ he says, more insistently. ‘She’ll be there. If she really wants to, she’ll be there.’
If she really wants to... I’ve heard this before. What happens in this place is supposedly all about wanting things badly enough. But how can you tell? James had seemed the most keen of all of us to get out, and Liam too, and look what happened to them. How could anyone say that they were any less ready than, say, Diane, who just seemed to be there because she fancied Nick? All anyone can say is she must have wanted it more because look, here she is – a self-fulfilling thingummy if ever I saw one. I don’t know. Who can fathom people’s true motives? I feel as sure of Sophie as I have ever felt of anything, and yet here we are, apart. There’s nothing anyone can say.

Then, as I lie there I remember that tomorrow is the big day. I muse vaguely on what that means and instantly feel the kind of sick anxiety I used to get all the time in life but which I haven’t felt very much at all since I’ve been here, despite everything. I've tried to think constructively about how I will change my life but it all just seems like a massive sooty grey tangle, like trying to find a needle in a stack of jagged and rusting metal. All I know is that on midsummer’s day in the year 2000 I will go to the Palace Pier and try to find Sophie. That’s it. Everything else is just noise. I hope she’s there. I don’t know what I’ll do if she’s not.

When we finally reached the further shore there were grey sand beaches alternating with rocky headlands as far as the eye could see in both directions. It was overcast and coming on to drizzle. I’d expected something different. I didn’t know what. Marvin lobbed a rock manfully into the surf and said ‘As good a place as any...’ under his breath and we began to climb down closer to the edge.

Beyond the rocks below us the sea crashes in in the usual way but then I notice, some hundred yards or so out, there seems to be a horizon, except it is way too close. The sea seems to just cease. The sky beyond has a peculiar pink hue. I look at Marvin for reassurance.
‘You ready to do this?’ he shouts over the crashing waves. There’s no particular concern in his voice. He just wants to be sure.
‘Might as well’ I say. And he tells me a little of what to expect – the strange sensation of losing ones body and dissolving away. Funny I never thought to ask what would come next.
My last memory was Marvin and I sitting on the sand drinking the last of the Calvados.
‘Any last requests?’ he said.
‘A long and happy life?’
‘I’ll drink to that’ he said and we raise our glasses to what ever is out there.

Andrea XIII – Parting

Our final session. It’s rather early and I’ve come along with an orange for breakfast. I just fancied it but now I don’t know what to do with it. It’s going to get messy and I don’t have a knife on me. I fiddle with it for a while and she looks at it irritably. I notice she has a glass of the freshly squeezed. Why didn’t I think of that?

Andrea is trying to avoid politics by injecting some levity into the proceedings. She’s trying to get me to tell her some more about my pathetic attempts at chatting women up. I don’t want to talk about politics but I don’t want to go over all this either. I’m telling her about a date I had. How to describe the scene?
‘I made a complete twat of myself’ I say.
‘What happened?’
‘It was just stupid. I see that now. I knew it was supposed to be just a one night stand...’
‘What did you do?’ she says, obviously preparing herself for something unspeakable.
I can hardly bring myself to say it. ‘I made breakfast’ I mumble.
‘What?’ she says, trying not to laugh. ‘You did what?’
‘I wanted it to be nice... not like those other... blokes she knew.’
‘So you made her breakfast?’
‘I know, I know... She was absolutely livid, like I’d asked her to marry me or something.’
Andrea shakes her head slowly at me. ‘How old was she?’ she says at length.
‘I don’t know. Early twenties?’
‘And you were what, thirty something?’ I nod. She sits in disbelief for a while, just looking at me, giggling slightly to herself. I suppose it is funny but I’m not in the mood. She sees my serious face and pulls herself together. ‘What’s wrong Gabriel?’ she says.
‘I’m sorry Andrea’ I say abruptly, ‘I know this stuff is maybe important but really... I’m going to be going back into the world soon.’
‘Ok.’
‘And I don’t want to be out on the streets again.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘I don’t want to be in and out of hospitals and helping the police with their enquiries or dossing down at my parent’s because nobody else will have me.’
‘Well, good.’
‘I’ve got to do better this time.’
‘And I’m sure you will Gabriel. I do understand.’
‘I’m not sure you do. Sorry babe but I think we’re missing the point. I’m still not entirely convinced I don’t need some help with the whole getting a job and making a living thing. Surely it’s what gives people their purpose in life and self-respect and dignity and so forth. All this stuff about chatting women up and having sex is fun but I don’t really know if it’s doing much good. I’m sorry Andrea. I know you’re trying to help.’
‘Do you believe that?’ she says, at length.
‘Well...’
‘You believe your sense of self worth would be best served by getting yourself a career? I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a career but... I just don’t think that’s where your heart is. I don’t think that’s what you missed most. Really...’
‘Well, I take your point about there being someone for everyone, but I’ve seen the kinds of ladies my fellow travellers consorted with and quite frankly I was not envious.’
‘Have you noticed how you go into this pedantic polysyllabic way of expressing yourself when you’re unhappy? It’s quite off-putting.’
That shuts me up. But I know what she means.
‘It makes you sound like a pompous old fart. It’s not attractive.’
‘Thanks’ I say quietly and sit and think for a while. Maybe I’m pushing myself away, trying to make leaving easier somehow. Or maybe I’m trying to string it out a bit. It reminds me of when Justine died. I was the last of our family. I watched them all go one by one, me shuffling inexorably to the head of the queue. Today I remember what it is to be an old man again. It’s a perfect place for the addled and arthritic, this. You don’t have to get up and eat if you don’t want to, and nobody fails to get to the loo in time because there’s no need to go to the loo at all if you don’t want to. Paul pointed out with some amusement that some still seem to visit the toilet regularly, even though their body no longer has the physiological need to excrete, but then I honour meal times even though my body has no physiological need for sustenance. I suppose some people saw their time on the bog as quality time. I didn’t. I saw it as a waste of time – a time of waste. I thought I had better things to do.
I didn’t know what to do when Justine was dying. The hospital was too far away to visit regularly, with the NHS ‘restructuring’ and so on – and I hated myself for not having learned to drive and not being able to afford the train as often as I’d have liked. Justine’s sons would have nothing to do with me so I was stuck. I wasn’t there when she died. No one was.

I can’t believe we’ve wasted all this time here, farting about, talking about girls when there’s this chasm of utter incompetence in the middle of my life. Oh there’s someone for everyone alright. I have a sudden memory of Ned’s girlfriend, running down Trafalgar Street with her legs together, the back of her pink leggings already translucent with piss. I got on ok with Ned – he fancied himself as a bit of a philosopher – used to get into some amazing discussions but he was a total alkie. They all were.
I look at Andrea. She looks at me.
‘I can’t go back, not the way I was’ I say. ‘I couldn’t stand it.’
‘Do you think that’s likely?’ she says, impassively.
‘I don’t see why not’ I say, reproachfully. She knows what I’m getting at. I dig my nails into the orange. Who cares if I get sticky hands?
‘What do you want me to say Gabriel?’ she says – another phrase I hate. It means she thinks she’s told me all I need to hear, and if I can’t handle it, well... But I don’t think she has. Now I have all these ideas that a lovely woman could really love me back and of having a life with her and a place of our own and holidays and all the stuff I never dared realistically hope for in my life and...
And suddenly I can see what she’s done. The cow has done it again.

It never felt realistic before, all that stuff. I still don’t know the details but it does actually feel like it could happen. I could make it happen. A smile spreads across my face. I can’t help it. She knows what it means too.
‘It will feel worse, at first’ she says gently ‘but it will get better. I promise.’
I separate the orange segments and share them with her. I can feel the sticky dried juice on my hands but the orange came apart easier than I expected. There’s a metaphor here. I can’t think what it is right now.
‘Will I see you again?’ I ask.
‘Here or in life?’ she says, smiling now. We’ve both relaxed. It’s over. It’s time to go now and it’ll be ok. I can do this.
‘Either’ I say. ‘I think Paul wants an End of Voyage party. You could come... I’ll buy you a martini.’
She smiles, a little sadly I think. ‘We’ll see’ she says.
‘And then there’s always the festies – I’ll come and find you in The Healing Space.’
‘I’d like that’ she says, and means it I think. ‘I’ll look out for you.’ and we stand and hug briefly and I kiss her cheek and leave the room. I don’t expect to see her again.

Journey VIII – Soul mates

The next few weeks were baffling but extraordinarily pleasurable. Mostly I just wanted as much sex as possible, and luckily Sophie was more than happy to oblige. We were both making up for lost time it turned out. As I looked around at this community of perpetual adolescent ennui and excess, our deliberate and intense sexuality stood in stark contrast to their absent-minded and passionless fornication. Whereas they just seemed to do it because they could and there didn’t seem to be anything better to do, we went at it with glee and gusto. I came to pity them, if this was what eternity was going to be like for them. I even felt smug.
A lot of the time I couldn’t understand why a sexy woman like Sophie would want to spend so much time with a sad old git like me. I was reassured when she told me she’d been very old when she died too (she wouldn’t tell me exactly how old) and I tried to remind myself what Andrea had said about not presuming to know what women want in a man but I couldn’t help being jealous and possessive sometimes – particularly when she insisted on chatting up absolutely everyone wherever we went and her natural manner was intimate and flirtatious. In truth, in the whole time we were together she never gave me one reason to doubt her and she accepted my insecurities as a compliment and was always reassuring. I know sometimes I was somewhat clingy and suspicious and frankly a bit of a drama queen, but in retrospect I think she must have genuinely liked me or she wouldn’t have put up with it.

‘I was married to the same man all my life’ she told me one morning. It was early that spring. We were in my room letting our coffees cool. I was sitting leaning against the window, feeling the cool glass on my skin. She had her head on my leg. ‘How boring is that?’ she added.
‘High school romance?’
‘Hardly. I went to a convent school, so no. We met at a family thing when I was about thirteen, started dating, and then as soon as we were eighteen we got married. We were big on going to church in our family.’
‘This place must seem a bit...wrong – if you believe in all that.’
‘Totally wrong. Oh everything was wrong.’ She gets up abruptly and wraps a sarong around herself. ‘Shan’t be a sec’ she says and heads along to the bathroom. When she gets back she hands me a plate with a jammy muffin on it. ‘They were doing them in the kitchen’ she says, licking her fingers. I think of her trotting along there with nothing but this thin piece of material around her – everyone eyeing her up. I feel proud and uncomfortable at the same time. Thankfully the discomfort is somehow erotic too and just makes me need to stake my claim again, which is always good.
After we’ve done that (just a quickie) I ask her about her married life.
‘Five kids would you believe...’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Big house in Southampton – in jolly old Shirley – what a tip.’
‘Why did you stick with it? For the kids?’
‘Partly, but no, it was ok. He was good man. Not terribly bright...’
‘What did he do?’
‘Estate agent.’
‘Wow’ I say, surprised, but she thinks I’m impressed.
‘Don’t. It wasn’t me. I swear, if I ever go back my house will be a mass of random furniture and non-matching crockery and there’ll be stuff everywhere. And there will be one sweet child, and I shall dress like this...’ (She flashes her bottom.) ‘...all the time.’
‘Excellent. Where shall we meet?’
‘On the Palace Pier in Brighton. Midsummer’s day 2000, three in the afternoon.’
‘It’s a date. I’ll buy you a doughnut.’

Another day – an evening a few weeks later – we are in my room and she’s got out one of my magazines and is lying on her stomach, reading. I look at her back and wonder if Paul would have thought she was fat. Probably – she’s no stick insect. She has a very womanly belly and a nice plump bottom. I love looking at it. At the moment it’s got the pattern of the bedspread imprinted on it.
‘You’re in good shape for a mother of five’ I say, slapping her bum. It wobbles most satisfyingly.
‘Gardening’ she says and tenses and relaxes her buttocks at me a few times, making them wobble some more – tempting me to smack them again. ‘This is me just before I got married’ she adds, turning on her back, as if showing me a photograph from her family album. ‘Pretty wasn’t I?’
‘I think you’re very beautiful’ I say, stroking her belly.
‘Hmm...’ she says, smiling coyly and turning over again, but then adds, ‘I wasn’t very pretty later on.’
‘Well who ever is?’
‘Oh come of it. I bet you were quite a chiselled old dude in your later years.’
My turn to be bashful.

‘So... was he any good in bed?’ I enquire nonchalantly.
‘Who?’
‘Hubby.’
‘Why?’ she says, grinning at me. ‘Do you think I’m comparing?’
‘Of course. You know me.’
‘I don’t know... He smelt funny. I never got used to that. I don’t think he washed enough really. I don’t know, he had that soapy sweaty Old Spice smell, you know?’
‘Didn’t you say anything?’
She turns and sits up in front of me, then picks up a pillow and hugs it to herself. We’ve got some chocolates from somewhere and she reaches over to get one. I hold the box for her. She sits and chews for a while.
‘What you’ve got to understand’ she says, ‘is that I didn’t know any different. When you marry that young, you’ve just got nothing to compare it with. It’s all just the way it is.’ And she shrugs and lies back, still covering herself with the pillow. I don’t think I’ve seen her want to cover herself before. It bothers me slightly. We sit silently for some time – me wondering what to say next.
‘I’m sorry’ I say eventually, ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘It’s ok, really. It’s sad more than anything. I did love him.’ and she chucks the pillow away and reaches out and pulls me to her and kisses me and we fuck ferociously again.
‘For the record, he was nowhere near as good in bed as you are’ she tells me afterwards but I can’t help feeling there’s something like regret in her voice.

Over the next few months she tells me a little more about her life.
‘I was the eldest of six would you believe.’
‘Didn’t they believe in contraception?’
She shakes her head and looks away. ‘Sex is for making babies’ she says. ‘Contraception is irrelevant. That’s what they said. I don’t know. I was home-schooled until I was eleven then they sent me to the church school. I didn’t really know anything else.’
‘Didn’t the other girls tell you anything?’
‘A bit. It was pretty shocking. They had pictures from a men’s magazine. I didn’t know what to make of it. I was a bit of an outsider to be honest.’
‘I can sympathise.’
She smiles and rolls over and lays her head on my leg. I stroke her hair away from her face. She takes a bite out of a plum and says. ‘It was pretty crazy. I went straight from looking after my brothers and sisters, straight into looking after Doug and then our kids. I never did anything else.’
‘Didn’t you want to get out, do something different, get a job, travel?’
It seems impossible to believe that she wouldn’t have, the way she is now.
‘Honestly it just didn’t seem realistic to me. I couldn’t imagine it. It’s just not the sort of thing people like us did.’
‘But you’re bright, independent...’
‘Now I am. I wasn’t then. You wouldn’t have known me back then. I failed all my exams, left school at sixteen... I don’t know.’
‘But you weren’t thick, surely?’
‘No. I just didn’t think that way. Oh look can we talk about something else?’
‘Sure. Sorry.’
‘What do you make of Gina and Aaron?’

And so it was. We left it at that, for the time being at any rate. Later I learned more, by little clues and hints. I felt she wanted to talk about it but wasn’t ready, or didn’t want to bore me, or put me off her perhaps. I have this image of her in a frock that would not have looked out of place in The Depression – grey and shapeless and with varying quantities of insulating and obscuring layers beneath, depending on the season. Her parents were not insanely religious but very old and extremely traditional – hard and judgemental and anti everything about the sixties. As with my parents, there would have been no point in making a fuss. You just had to put up with it. Sophie never went to work or took any courses but at the same time it was quite obvious that she was very well read (much more so than me.) She told me she used to go to the public library during shopping trips, hide the books under the baby’s things and then sneak them out to the allotment shed. Like me she’d gone down to the shed for her illicit pleasures, but hers were coffee and literature. The allotment was her haven. She took the children down there to play in the mud while she tended the vegetables and read her book. Doug apparently didn’t like his shoes getting dirty so never found out. He came over as being a fairly harmless but obsessive individual.
‘Couldn’t you see what you were missing?’ I asked on more than one occasion. She just shrugged.

She was good for me though. We mucked about and laughed a lot. She even laughed at my anxieties, but in a generous way, not in a cruel way and I didn’t mind. She told me I was gorgeous, and when we were alone, I almost believed her. She seemed to understand why I didn’t quite believe this could be happening to me.
‘I chose you, remember?’ she reminded me. ‘Don’t imagine I give that sort of performance every night. I knew you’d be worth it’.
I wondered sometimes how often she did ‘perform’ like that before she met me, but I sensed that it would not be a good thing to ask. She was with me, I told myself, and that’s what counted.

The spring slowly unfolds and the streets begin to wear the first tentative tendrils of their summer exuberance. The weather is still chilly but she comes with me on my explorations – usually dressed in jeans and tops like normal people but sometimes she surprises me – on one memorable occasion coming out in just a plastic mac and wellies. She loves to do it then and there, on the wet grass or bent over a wall. We’re not very discreet about it and we got caught a couple of times. But we never go into any of the houses. Sometimes I swear I see faces at the windows but I don’t let on.

We still go to quite a lot of parties too and, as I say, I spend a lot of time watching her. They’re a different sort of party to the ones I went to early on – more classy I suppose, more mature perhaps, and she wears somewhat more than she did the night we got together (underwear, for example), but there’s still a sense that she’s not really decent. I watch her being charming – everybody loves her and I can tell that when people talk to her she has a way of making them feel fascinating, and, as a result, they are. Plus they perhaps think they have a chance with her. I’m never entirely at ease at times like these, but then, from the middle of a conversation she’ll turn a little and, without directly looking at me or giving any obvious sign, she’ll let me know she is looking forward to coming over to me. Sometimes I go over and she introduces me and I join in the conversation. When they see we’re together you can see their disappointment, but it is always brief because she is just too lovely to be upset with and I feel very proud.
I ask her about the way she behaves one night in someone’s lounge. It’s been a session rather like that first time, except the lights are dimmed and nobody else in the room seems to be very awake. In retrospect our behaviour sounds appallingly decadent but we were far from being the only ones. Sometimes it seemed like no one was doing anything much else. In fact our monogamy came to be seen as rather sweet and old-fashioned.

She is still straddling my lap – I am softening inside her and, as usual, sitting in a puddle. She has no top on at all and her neat breasts catch the green light from the stereo. I ask her how she comes to be such an exhibitionist after such a blameless God-fearing life like hers.
‘Well, I just don’t have anything to worry about here do I? I mean – I can’t get pregnant. I can’t get AIDS. I can’t die of pneumonia from not wearing enough’ she adds with a wicked grin. ‘It’s just such a release. You weren’t married were you?’
‘No.’
She nods ‘I don’t blame you’ she says, pulling a shawl over her shoulders. ‘Oh don’t get me wrong’ she adds. ‘I’m glad I did it – got married I mean. I wouldn’t appreciate this half as much if I hadn’t, but I wouldn’t do it again. Been there, done that’ she says, and gets up to rearrange her skirt. She goes and gets us a drink to share, still topless, and then we snuggle down for the night on a huge cushion and covered in other people’s coats and things.
She tells me that her behaviour probably has something to do with the frustrations of sleeping with no one but the same boyish control freak all that time.
Later on I did get around to telling her that my single status had not been a matter of choice and that led on to me telling her a lot of other dreary crap about my life. I knew it was a risk but I wanted to be honest with her as much as possible. I was afraid perhaps her idea of me would be diminished by knowing about my failures but she just hugged me and kissed me and told me how impressed she was with how far I’d come since then and how great I was going to be next time around.