Post-Coital Bliss - Extract from my novel "A,B and E"

On the day that The Literary review announce their shortlist for the Bad Sex In Literature Award, I thought I'd dust off a sample from my debut novel "A,B &E", which is post-coital, but racks up the sexual tension no less.

*

Simon his name was. One of the few pre-coital words tossed beathlessly in my direction. Now, no longer one flesh, our torsos cloven apart. Our legs however were still intertwined. He, head slumped against my shoulder, legs splayed out at the diagonal. Me, stiff backed against the headboard, my left leg threaded under his right and over his left. My right leg bent at the knee, arching over his ankles. Hand propped on it, fingers buttressing a lit cigarette overhanging the sheet beyond my foot. I’ve no intention of bringing it to my lips. It measures out time for him, embers in place of grains of sand. The span of two such kindlings will determine whether he is reignited, or rolls over to sleep. I have found this chronometry unfailingly meters the male metabolism.


I glance over towards him, unable to determine whether the look in his eye expresses confusion as to why I am not putting it to my mouth, or suppressed concern as to the impulse of the hot ash. The modern day version of barefoot and blindfold. He tilts his torpid head as a prelude to inquiry, but I nimbly raise the index finger of my right hand and gently transect his lips. Uh-uh, if we no longer are able to retain the disarticulations of earlier, the reflexively unreflected babble, the sonorous squalls coitally quarried from our deepest seams of self, then better we are held together under silence’s shroud. It is paramount that we become alalial allies. It is the very heart of the matter. I shake my head for added emphasis and already I detect his purpose is lost in the undulations of my tresses against his exposed cheek.


Suffused in my ruminations, I was unaware that my murmuring Medusa’s locks had ceased their stroke. He was unconsciously rubbing his delicately flayed cheek and I ventured some sort of vocalisation would follow. Again I placed my finger across his lips and spiked their unsheathing. Tentatively he edged the tip of his tongue out against my tapered digit and hastily withdrew it again. He had tasted my resolve. Through the conduit of his lips, I felt his whole body flinch as he gathered himself up towards defiance of my circumvention of speech. I unfurled my middle finger and laid it with great deliberation next to her sister, across the crevice of his mouth. The muscles at the corners of his lips, measuredly retracted their charges into a crooked grin. My two fingers now like twin colonnades, bracing open his stupid wide aperture. I lent forward and mutely kissed the extended knuckles of my own fingers. That threw him somewhat. For as his startled lips were about to clamp down reflexively on them, I withdrew my fingers but maintained their sentinel trajectory. He was seemingly transfixed by the sight of two caryatids rigidly posted just beyond his orifice. He was beyond coherence right now. Veritably speechless. He jutted his chin forward and slithered out his tongue to reel my goading digits into his teeming maw. They waggled out of range. He extended further forward. My fingers spun away. He was shaping to cast again, when my left foot snakes across and presses him back down across his chest. He is about to protest verbally, when my twin fingers reassert their superintendence across his portals of locution. His body sags and crumples back to the mattress, though I can tell his mind has been wracked by a bolt of delicious tautness.


After a circumspect period, I detach both my leg and my fingers. He does not stir. I light my second cigarette and resume my vaulting of him. Leadenly, he rolls on to his side and scrabbles for something on the floor. He resurfaces with a burgundy towelling robe, (brought with him from home, since this is not the class of hotel which runs to provisioning them for guests, though the guests would be of the class happily to snaffle them), before reclining back towards the headboard. Half self-pinioned, awkwardly he shrugs himself into the robe. He gropes around his back for something, with clumsy, sightless digits. I surmise that he seeks the belt of the robe, but it is not there. He submits and his head slowly sinks back down the surface of the headboard. His long locks pincered by his crown, momentarily maintain their station like creeping ivy, before they descend to unseam his now less than immaculate coiffure. I fix him there, framed unflatteringly by the knobbly towelling. At the angle he lies, his glorious sixpack is almost completely submerged by the flesh collected under gravity. There is even the hint of a rucking of flabby skin just above his hips. Why on earth has he donned this garment and broken the spell ? I deflect my gaze and peer through the rising cigarette smoke as if for augury. I must have sensed something in the corner of my eye and snapped my focus back, to intercept him about to tumble words into the air. This time it’s my cigarette-cradling fingers that drape themselves over his mouth. His eyes start to water, from the proximity of the smoke, or from more internal fusillades I cannot be sure. I know the prosaic reason for the robe of course. The poor lamb’s cold. His lips are quivering. He manoeuvres them to siphon some superficial heat from my cigarette, his irises scuttling to their extreme margins scanning for any repercussion. Good boy, maybe we’re getting somewhere after all. I cant my face away so that my jagged smokey laughter does not exhale over him.


The sheen of sweat from our earlier endeavours, (which so sublimely varnished his sixpack all throughout) still sits atop his skin. But it has fulfilled its function and cooled him down, to the extent where his follicles currently stood to attention in an attempt to reinsulate him. They no longer glistened like the limbs of an insect dappled with pollen. Now such droplets threaten his tonicity. Indolent, mutinous beads with no sustained interdependence. They subvert him. He trusts to the robe to absorb and dismiss them. To tamp him back down and regather. My perspiration went west long ago. Evaporated, since my temperature’s still rising with the afterglow. I take pity on him and place my two unburdened fingers on his lips again. He is surprised, since he was not attempting to challenge me. But this time they do not crest the vertex, but bow in supplication at the lower ridge. They wait a while, before he hesitantly lifts the labium and gently skims the pads of my fingers. Emboldened, he grazes them with his gums, before eventually, he throws off his shackles and engulfs them. He laps at them with bulbous slurps and satisfied tiny suction pops. So I flick his teeth with one of them as scourge. He responds obediently and laps at them regularly, up and down in a spiral. First one, then his tongue nudges them apart so he can acquire the second. Like he’s chamoising minature mullions. Sure enough, he soon slots into a mechanical, albeit arrhythmic, insipid servicing. His thoughts off elsewhere, because he’s too blunted to assert what he wants. Wordlessly that is.


His problem, like so many of his kind, is he will not just live in the timeless moment. He’s all sweaty, He’s cold. He’s lying in a viscous, cloying pool (of his own making and one in which I am happy to cleave to me, to adhere me to the sheet. To anoint us together). And, he wants to prate about it. Ask asinine questions towards self-aggrandizement. Or to record and log proceedings. To minute them. To compare with the past and to carry forward amendments into the future. Where he has already projected himself. It was as if he was narrating the entire event. The circumstance. An episode. He is keen to march me back into the mundane and I am not at that double quick pace. He wants to return us to the formally structured relations, of speaker and listener. Addresser and addressee. Subject and object. Chatterer up and chatted up. The one inside and the one outside, of intent. He cannot wait for the sperm pellicle to mark out time by receding to a light, dried crust. There’s premature ejaculation and then there’s premature post-ejaculation. Cos intimacy ought not have departed with consummation. Our bodies had spoken, but they were still communing with one another in mute elation. Interwoven, flesh blended with flesh. Who knew or cared where you ended and I began ? So what of your slight edge on me in hirsuiteness, or my darker pigmentation ? It was all awash in the sensual maelstrom, the perceptual overload. Our fallible vessels, cause of so much anxiety in the workaday consciousness, had been temporarily uplifted, so we could quaff of mutual veneration and adoration. And we should seek to prolong those feelings for as long as possible. For eternity. To remain conjoined, even in stillness. Indeterminate and undifferentiated. Equals.


Until that is, you clad yourself in your burgundy fleece. Now our separateness is clear. Our demarcation evident against the hues of the sheet pointing up our contrast. A chasm between us, yawning in your case, yearning in mine. Me beached on dry land, you still shivering in the shallows. Conspicuously other. Another species almost. A reimposition of the way of things. You satisfied. Content. And me ? Trying to hold the moment. The feeling. But now solely dependent on my own creative resources. And yet far too aware of this reliance, so it slips from my grasp all the while. In closing the aperture of his reporting mouth, I have sealed the portal of our connection as if rolling a huge dolmen across the exposed fissure of his self. Occluded any and all light of disclosure from emanating from his hollow being. God damnit ! A role reversal yields the same futile outcome. My eyes hold all the unstinting power that Damon’s held, yet it prospers me in no wany, shape or form.


My cigarette had burned away to nothing. On the stroke of its expunction, he rolled over on to his side and curled into himself slightly. Somehow, his unsecured robe, his vinculum to life, had managed to adhere to him throughout his quarter revolution, his waning crescent, and still mantled his immodesty. I was now fully excised from his being, tossed into his moat of oblivion as the drawbridge of sleep was raised. I took a pinch of the robe between my fingers and lightly peeled it from his skin. I had a clear view of his ribs gently rising and falling with his quieted breath. The upswing seemed to take an eternity, as they manfully bore aloft their own weight against gravity. The downswing seemed to presage a relieving collapse, but each time caught itself from shuddering and instead coursed down in modulated repose. How does he sleep so easily ? I bent down to softly kiss them in salute. My lips left a glistening imprint upon them, which I watched undulate for a couple of cycles. Insufficient moisture to model a tidal effect with his zephyr breath. Then I leant over and smashed my balled fist into the centre of my mark and was rewarded with a satisfying crack. I took my reappropriated rib back from him...

To buy on Kindle 

What's in A Name?

I write under a pseudonym. I have always sought to distance my writing life from my domestic one and psychologically that seemed an important facet of that compartmentalisation.

But I have always been fascinated by people operating under different names and have written about it in several of my novels. In my debut novel "A,B&E" a gangster's moll faked her own death to try and avoid the contract he'd put on her head, and needed a fake identity sharpish. 

For she simply cannot afford to be tracked down by her name. She can't appear on any bureaucratic lists. She has no driving licence, no social security paperwork, no health insurance records and no credit card in her (assumed) name. She has nothing to her name, not even her real name. 

"My assigned identity was forged for me by someone I’ve never even met. Karen Dash. My new moniker. A bit of a giggle. An in-joke on my way out the country." 

Karen's new identity is that bestowed on her by way of a counterfeit passport. The name 'dashed' off the top of the counterfeiter's head. Referring back to the high quality Swiss colouring pencils of my and maybe his childhood. Where he first had his interest pricked in visual reproduction. Do you remember Caran D'Ache colouring pencils? At the time they were as ubiquitous as the Swiss Army knife and gave the lie to Harry Lime's contention that Switzerland had only ever produced the "cuckoo clock". Now they brand themselves as "Maison de Haute Ecriture" (maybe Harry Lime had a point after all).

Karen Dash never existed, despite her larger than life presence on the pages of the novel. It is a name wrought to prevent her true identity being revealed, found and then expunged. It is a dead end of a name.

In my novel "Not In My Name" a homegrown terrorist stalks the internet looking for a patsy and necessarily adopting whatever name he requires for his task. The world of the internet is populated by soubriquets and people hiding their identity. Yet he is able to track down one specific person's true identity for he needs to groom her for his purposes....

In my new novel "Three Dreams in the Key Of G" I've taken the opposite tack. the three central female voices all have the same name in terms of the sound of their name.

First is the mother of two young daughters in post peace-agreement Northern Ireland

My name is Jean Ome. Phonetically speaking. And in actuality too, though I have no passport to prove this (denied me since now they bear the EC’s {Papist} impress). Nor do my other personalised permits and financial enablers bear this out, since my maiden name has never been supplanted (not because I’m an independent career woman, instead just too much of a put-upon mother to have gotten round to it). So in all my transactions outside the house promising to the bearer, I am still Jean Malcolm. She of a whole lifetime ago. Who gleefully mocks and taunts me for my divergence from her.

The family name really should be Home as in ‘home sweet home’, ‘home is where the heart is’ or ‘home and dry’. As in arid. Home is a very important concept where I come from. A closed, reinforced door, buttressing the street, the neighbourhood, the community, the town, the county and the province. Home is the be-all and end-all of who you are. It’s what you stand for, rather than it standing for you. Bricks and mortar proprietary, or bricks and mortar projectiles. Indeed, how we do hail from our unwelcoming streets.

The second is a seventy year old English woman domiciled in Florida, where she runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence. If only it was that simple...  

My name is Jean Ohm and I’ve encountered major amplitudes of resistance in my time. In fact, I’m generating some right now, through this little social experiment I’m currently conducting. We’ve got FBI, DEA, ATF and all manner of sect-obsessed acronyms and cult-crazed codons pointing their telescopic, turned-up snouts, to tune in to our drop-out community...

My name, as conferred upon me by my parents. Marking me for life. Or rather expunging me, as it now appears. Draped around me like the orange garb of the death row prisoner. The name embodies me, even as I enflesh it. But it was ever thus. The ‘H’ kept apart the feuding factions of my parents. The capital ‘O’ I take from my father, buffeting the stout, lower-case maternal ‘m’. Each seeking my allegiance against the other. Pressed in upon from both sides, until I lose consciousness and slip under. Thus is my feminised ‘h’ silenced and rendered inferior. A typographical error. The ‘O’ and ‘m’ too hellbent on knocking seven bells out of each other, to let anything come between them.

The third character, the human genome itself. Complaining at its assigned nomenclature, at our febrile assaults to decode its life-giving (and removing) mysteries.

My name – My name in full, apparently, by your latest dead reckoning, contains three billion characters. It is not the book itself that you are after reading, all two hundred volumes; more the thirty-odd thousand letters in the appellation which should adorn the book’s spine. Yet I remain innominate.


The historical practise of a wife taking her husband's surname, as with Jean Malcolm/ Jean Ome above, is still extant, as a woman is stripped of her identity which she grew up with and has a patrilineal name conferred upon her. 

All three of the female character in this novel fight back against such impositions upon them, in order to preserve their sense of self. And just what is the psychic link that unites all three of these characters?

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

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Id Parade (A,B &E 8)

The suit was exclusively his, since I could never figure why he should alight on me, a married, wrung-out, college-suburban housewife. He took my listlessness for disinclination. And a brow pursed by baffled pensiveness, he misconstrued as derisive nonchalance. Early on, we were having a quiet cream tea at some chintzy French café in London. Just the pair of us, necessitating, as I was later to discover, him somehow giving his entourage and confederate cronies the slip. All of a sudden, the police thunder in and arrest him. He stood up and offered his wrists behind him, all the time unperturbably looking me in the eye, so as to allay my terror and confusion. In a soft voice, he told me to return to my hotel suite, wait for Lawrence and the ‘Brief’ to pick me up in the Merc and go with them. This was all too abbreviated for me. As he was frogmarched toward the exit, he turned his head and said also to ensure there was some champagne on ice. These were the first and only orders Damon ever uttered to me (the death sentence currently conferred notwithstanding, since it was never issued to my face). And even though I hadn’t the foggiest idea what was happening (whatever became of the cream tea bill for example ?), I did exactly as I was enjoined.


Sure enough, I was soon sat in the back seat of a large, sleek Mercedes saloon, gazing out at a wet West London afternoon. Tracing the lines of descent of the speckled raindrops on the outside of my window. Dying stars rather than shooting ones. There was only the rubbery suction of windscreen wipers conducting their Sisyphean labours for company, amidst these two complete strangers in the car. The ‘Brief’, a corpulent man named Burrows, breached the bated solemnity, to inform me that we were making for a ‘line-up’. An identity parade, where Damon would be on show with some other men behind glass, so that some deluded witness could pick him out, as tenuous proof ‘apropos nothing’. ‘Plod’ had been trying to nail Damon for ages apparently. They were always at it, pulling some stunt or other in public. The eyewitness was always the potential achilles heel of any case. It was his own task to douse this suckling pig, so that any prizefighter silk, would be able to render him a sow’s ear. In other words to roast him on a spit. Or her for that matter I thought silently.


I’d got about one word in three of the parlance. I’m sure that wasn’t how the Law Lecturers back home went about their instruction. Yet his phrase ‘on show’ rattled around my abstracted ruminations. Dragging my focus away from the rain pointillism of London scenery, as I tried to bore a hole through Burrows’ briefcase to manifest its contents. I fathomed our presence was required there to be Damon’s what - ? His stalwarts, yes indubitably. His defenders, certainly. His friends at court, is that why I had been brought along, for some upstanding suburban respectability ? His accessories, God Forbid (does he?). My mind was deluged with a volley of notions. ‘On show’ he had said. And ‘Plod’, er The Police, have been after him ‘for ages’. (Rusty) nails and crucifixes. Without question, we were about to enter the amphitheatre, with every local bobby craning for a gander at Public Enemy Number One. Before witness-Caesar upends his thumb and sends him, what to Purgatory ? Now my febrile imagination entertained visions of me being hoisted up and over some burly Constable’s shoulder, as I reach out with my hand to touch the glass behind which Damon stood condemned. I had been summoned, not by Damon, but by the Police. Solely in order for the purpose of consummate humiliation. I was being warned away from associating with such a baleful influence. I too, was indeed to be a witness. To a mirror revealing me a path of such tribulation, from which I must make every effort to abscond. This was a premonition of the police standing up in Church, or at whatever equivalent License application hearing and raising their objections.


My mind was in such tumult, that I did not regard the length of our journey. It was only when I clambered out of the car, barely able to swing my tremulous legs out on to the pavement, that I saw a sign announcing Kilburn Police station. Kill and burn ? “Why are we here ?” I asked Burrows. He adumbrated how there were only four stations in London with the necessary identification suite and Kilburn was the cardinal point for our quarter of London. Lawrence remained in the car, as Burrows sagged down toward his window, squelched pudgy knuckles against the glass and waited what seemed like an eternity for the tinted window to be cracked open an inch. “Don’t forget to get Terry on the blower about the champers !” (Who’s Terry ?) Burrows turned and chivalrously gestured me with his arm, to move off towards the door. I cross-hugged my shoulders, as if I was about to be fitted for a straitjacket. Burrows moved to put a shepherding hand against the small of my back, but caught himself and just kept it hovering in adjacent space. We were met by a WPC, whose features are a total blank to me, since I was transfixed by her legwear, which while not exactly sheer, neither were they as dowdy as I had presumed. That may make me sound somewhat shallow, but it wasn’t exactly as if I’d been devoting hours to anticipate the likely apparel of a policewoman, on the off chance I’d get to meet one in her official capacity. In a maelstrom (male-strom ?), a girl has to reorient herself to terra firma, by whatever means she can.


We were ushered into the darkened suite, (politely or offhandedly, again I cannot recall) and stood in the gloom facing a large window that gave way on to nothing. An empty, bare white room, barring the measuring stripes across the far wall, spaced at one inch intervals. For some perverse reason, the notion of it being a piece of modern art insinuated its way into my head. I snorted it back out again, which made both Burrows, and the lone duty officer glance at me. I affected fanning the air at my breast and looked back through the glass. Even a cocksure estate agent would be hard pressed to talk this one up. A room without a view. Unless you were on the outside, looking in. Like prying neighbours, twitching their nets. Like us, stood here. Vacant with possession.


Reflective privacy guaranteed for those this side of the glass. Just the three of us to date. Apparently there was to be no teeming congregation in attendance. So how notorious could Damon have been ? Some of my apprehension exhaled itself like a bled radiator. “I’m not supposed to be in here am I ?” I whispered to Burrows. “True, it is contrary to the normal rules” he snickered back at me. The glass was suddenly displaced and filled with bustle, as nine figures filed in like a ragged floor show taking their under-rehearsed stations. Among the flux, I couldn’t spot Damon, I, his would-be intimate. That was a good portent wasn’t it ? Ah, there he was, stood stock still, the only one of them not fidgeting and preening in the mirror. He was holding a card bearing the number ‘5’. I didn’t know if that was his lucky number or not. Our suit hadn’t yet attained such a level of petty disclosure. I knew it wasn’t mine though. The torsion of his carriage seemed evident beneath the fabric of his suit, though the aspect of his face was set firm. The thick line at 5’ 6” scorched right through his skull and passed out the other side. His head clamped like the jaws of an animal before the vivisectionist’s probe. Others pates either towered or crested the line, their crowns beaded by the narrower plaits of interceding markings. Hey, that’s not fair ! They’ve done that deliberately. It’s like they’ve put an arrow over (or through) him, to point him out. They’ve underlined and overscored him. Now I found myself rooting for him, despite my car-borne misgivings.


And then it began. The witness shuffles his way in on our side of the glass, eyes cast down the whole time at the floor. Damon canted his head, tracking for something. Burrows softly cleared his throat as the poor sap passed in front of us. The escorting plain clothes policeman shot him a glower. Burrows didn’t blink. Corpulent, but not gelatinous. Despite outward appearances, hewn from the same stuff as Damon. Naturally he would be. I returned my attention to Damon, to discover his gaze had locked on to me ! Couldn’t be, it had to be a coincidence. Instinctively I groped behind me, for the feel of the incongruous looking plastic bucket chair (on remand from somebody’s patio ?). I dipped down into it, anything to escape the purview of Damon’s infelicitous line of sight. This time none of our company were distracted by my rupture. I chanced peering up, to descry an almost imperceptible tilting downward of Damon’s irises in their sockets. What the hell was he playing at ? And then it hit me. What a charge ! And all the while they were attempting to press charges against him ?


Assembled, nay on show here, was a beauty pageant. All tenors, hues and heights were represented. In fact, we pretty much had the entire male gene pool clustered within these specimens. And there was Damon, outstanding among all this rank parade of manhood. Observe how he shone like a cynosure alongside these others. While they all blithely beam, safe in the knowledge they couldn’t get picked out, yet still they are unable to quell their edginess. Mark number three there, perspiring like a sow. Since, line any man with his back to this and his mind can’t help but fall prey to working overtime. His lack of conviction, so that anything, anything at all in his whole life, that makes him feel ashamed, out it comes and is displayed here. Guilty by dint of being hard up against this tidemark. First formed and then reinforced, by row upon row of unwashed, sweaty necks. A plimsoll line beneath which they all sink into the mire. But not Damon, head held unabashedly high and proud. His whole body tensed with rippling self-assurance. Now I gleaned why the 5 &1/2 foot stripe, uniquely defined his stature. Human in scale, but his power could barely be contained.


It was incumbent upon me, as witness, as adjudicator, to take a long lingering look. After all, he’d sought and located me behind this dividing wall of invisibility. Made it two-way again. Somehow he’d distilled my superannuated pheromones of desire and condensed them against the glass, so that he could pinpoint me exactly. It was as if we were both putting on a private peep-show for one another. The other punters just didn’t register. Our own exclusive id parade. Teasing one another inscrutably. Playing footsie without flexing a muscle. Come in number 5, your time is up. He could say it with flowers, or how much more exciting to say it with handcuffs. In the guise of Cupid, the Police gave him a pull, in order for him to pull me.


By now, the witness himself had heaved to in front of our number 5. He looked long, but not hard in the field of Damon, (who was staring unseeing at him, but straight at me). It was not so much an examination, more a pause. A rest stop. A caesura. Thinking back on it, I don’t think the poor wretch was weighing up his options, neither any scruple. I think he just felt defeated and was wondering how sufficiently to collect himself, in order to pull off feigning passable diligence toward the last four. He shambled on, acceding me an untrammelled line of vision once again. Damon, all of a piece. Not like viewing in an art gallery, where you gained perspective from afar, but move in closer and you could see all the brushstrokes, or the grain of the worked stone.


Any distinguishing marks that lay beneath the province of clothing, go unnoticed at these surveys. Yet, in my mind, I intuitively roll up Damon’s sleeve, to caress the tiny, undeclared scar on his elbow, from when, I discern, he took a tumble off a childhood bike. A childhood I am aware, standing there behind the screen, I know nothing of in reality. Mentally, I’m now licking the slight pigmentation at the back of his leg, currently enclosed in trousers and pressed against the wall of splinters. There I imbibe a sliver of his toddler-training, trying to impress his mother by demonstrating that he could make her a tea. Dribbling a constant trickle of boiling water down bare flesh exposed by treacherous dungarees, as he drags the hefty kettle over to her. She, wholly unaware of the mishap, since even then, he staunchly refused to cry out with pain.


Now the twinkle in his eyes addresses me directly once again. He is indicating the tram lines behind him. Drawing down my eyeline with that of his own, he is projecting on to my retinas the image of him squatting down lower against the wall. I follow faithfully, but cannot infer his intent. He repeats the process, his eyes shouting voicelessly. Wildly gesticulating without motion. Ah, now I get it, he is supplicating me. For all the power, his power, is now condensed my side of the glass. Crouched at four foot tall now. ‘How low do I want him to go ?’ Why, on one knee of course. ‘Here I am, right off the scale now !’ My obeisant pheromones, reconfigure into the phosphorescent imprint of a kiss on his side of the glass. I frame him in my mind’s eye and start calibrating as to where my head will nuzzle in his throat hair (the at-a glance wall chart does have some application after all). Is he right or left handed ? I hadn’t even noticed up to now. If he leaned his head down against the back of mine, I’ll be able to feel his breath in hot little pants on my neck. Heh. Heh. Heh. My Ex-propriated liked to do that too. Made all the fine hairs of sensation there stand up diatropically. Exposing the nerve endings, which eventually he severed with his sequiturs of disdain. Making me a dead zone. An arid wasteland, where nothing stirred. Until now. Damon, what say we make the desert bloom again ?


Needless to say Damon got off that evening. Like every evening. Damon always got off. On life itself. Discharged from custody, he scooped me up into an enormous bear hug and swung me round. Then he sparred at doing the same with Burrows, whose mutton chops arched with a ‘I’m late for dinner just for that ?’ smirk. We sauntered to the car. The tinted front passenger window buzzed smoothly down, from which emerged a champagne flute held with fingertips barely brushing its stem. “Cheers Tel !” enunciated Damon to anyone in earshot, which seemed to be about half the night shift arriving for duty. An insouciant arm cupped in an expensive silk sleeve, lodged on the vacated passenger window frame and dispensed a regal wave. The car interior was so dark, I couldn’t see anything beyond that. “Yeah, bottoms up Damon !” burred a softly sibilant, lisping voice from within. A leering Damon opened a rear door for me and took my glass. I was about to tunnel in, when (Terry’s ?) barely audible words seared my body, as I realised indeed I would be deporting my upthrusted posterior through such a manoeuvre, presenting red knicks like an oestrus monkey (the female greeting of choice out here in tourist Greece). Act like a lady I steeled myself and demurely curtsied down into the upholstery and slicked along its length. Terry gave me a tight little nod, before beaming at Damon as he barrelled in after me, reacquainting me with my flute. Once we were all ensconced inside, Lawrence started the engine, but he merely let it purr contentedly. Just so the Cops could see that crime did indeed pay. All was right with the world again, including my newfound congruence in it.


On the journey back, I was a bit inebriated what with the unaccustomed sparkling wine and repeatedly turned to whisper-shout in his ear, like an overexcited schoolgirl meeting one of her pop idols. He didn’t flinch. I suggested we might hold our wedding (!) in that selfsame viewing suite. Where I should join him on his side of the reflective glass, staring into the endless mirrors within each other’s eyes. Just the two of us there alone. All the guests would behind the viewing window, acting as the witnesses. The priest could intone his stuff over the intercom and when it came to the moment when anyone can challenge the validity of the marriage - well, let them just try and reveal themselves ! Damon cough-laughed into his bubbly and nearly choked. I had joined the game. Signed on for the ride. Of a lifetime, and for one. I had ineffably cast my lot, Damon having unobtrusively picked the lock of my psyche and sorted out my sortilege. So much for my premonition on the journey down. I was to smash that scolding mirror, but you know what, any bad luck only kicked in after seven blistering years. The Met wrote back a pro faced letter, saying that as they had never applied for a license for their venue to conduct weddings, regretfully they would have to decline my petition. Despite not being a member, Damon then wrote to the Grand Masonic Lodge Temple Guild HQ or whatever it was, with the same request. But he never even obtained the curt-easy of a reply.


Nor, for all the time we spent together was I able to discern any blemishes on his skin. Indeed, I was never able to match s single one of my fanciful speculations on his upbringing, with any tendered episodes. Simply as none were ever forthcoming. Save for that night’s journey back in the car, when he chose to confide, no issue, just a single bulletin from his childhood. That which denoted his inception into the life of crime, (“cards on the table time” as he put it). That which simultaneously battened down all further inspection into his past life. Sealing his childhood in an unmarked tomb, which I was never able to disinter. Securing his parthogenesis. The man which directly issued whole from inside the boy, like the flowing sculpture from the gelid marble. He remarked that he had been overcome with an urge to swap around the nine numbers and take different ones from those the police had determined. For, being lined up against the wall, had bumped him back to his schooldays. Outside the headmaster’s study. “Why were you outside the headmaster’s study ? What had naughty little boy Damon done ?” I interrogated him scabrously. “I’ll get to that. All in good time” he purred easily. He conjoined our flutes with a chiming resonance, that seemed to ignite all the air around us into an oscillation mirroring the sparkling bubbles.


His French class had been assigned a new female teacher. She sat them in alphabetical order, so as to help hasten her recall of their names. Inevitably, boys being boys, when the first opportunity was forthcoming, they all swapped places. Handing back homework according to the name on the cover, yet no book gets back to its rightful owner and each member of the class seems to be demonstrating an alarmingly erratic level of performance from week to week. She’s looking at one kid straight in his face, expecting him to put his hand out to take the book, when some other voice pipes out from behind her and makes her jump out of her skin. (I don’t know why, put it down to the alcohol, but I wasn’t sharing much female solidarity with this benighted teacher). And so it evolved.


One day soon, she appears in class with a riding crop. Proclaiming she knew how to use it and wouldn’t be averse either, demonstrating with a fricative airborne flourish. In response, four boys, Damon pointedly not being one of them, then exhibit commendable alacrity to get to the next day’s lesson early, where they implement covering the floor entirely with centrefolds culled from top shelf magazines. Wall to wall, airbrushed flesh carpeting it was. Damon reported that he was just stupefied as to where they so readily came by such a welter of material. The schoolmistress marches in and realises straight away, but plumps for a strategy of ignoring it. Only, in the course of trying to conduct a normal lesson, she can’t help walking on them wherever she moves. And then it begins. The four likely lads are all knocking things to the floor. ‘Miss, Miss, I think I dropped me rubber’. And ‘Please Miss, can you get my twelve inches up for me ?’ They collapse to the floor hooting and proceed to roll around over the pictures. And she’s in tears, still gripping her crop. “Because they knew see. Knew she was holding it the wrong way up, by the thong, after she’d swore she knew how to use it”. They saw her off alright. Had a nervous breakdown and wheeled away out of teaching. Even I cavilled at this point, but Damon just shrugged. “She weren’t hot like you Babe. Normally a foreign language teacher, you’d expect ...”


Other than as an interested spectator, he’d had no involvement, nor had he precipitated any of the anarchy. He just got swept up in the dragnet. Waiting with the four perpetrators to see the headmaster. Last in line. Though Damon actually was innocent, by the time the Head came to him, he had wearied of the cull and perhaps wanted to show magnanimity (or weakness in Damon’s eyes). Damon was the only one that day of the five, (his lucky number after all ?), not expelled. “Not me Headmaster. I want nothing to do with that bunch of nut jobs ... Too far I agree ... Must have discipline, yes Sir. Maintain authority, couldn’t agree more ... ... No Sir, I have no idea what fate befell all the, er corrupting and depraved material ...” Other than it went on to form the seed merchandise of Damon’s incipient business empire (hallmarked with authentic stiletto heel imprint). Trading in people’s rapacious needs. Damon knows what folk want. Ravenous people. And he certainly grasps one end of a scourge from the other. See, Damon was not only alive to people’s appetites, but he apperceived the sensibilities they coated them in. And me ? I believe my blunted appetites, to have always been thus. Just now I can’t even affect to drape them up in anything resembling judgement.