(c) 2016 Stevie White

London, 1996.

"No, mate, I won't be drinking tonight—I can guarantee it," I told Solomon. "Anyway, I've done with all that, now. You know I have."

It was 10pm on a pitch-black night; dark and bullied by the cold. No bigbrother Moon to stick up for it. It'd stopped raining, but the world was still groping black and oilywet.

Bring someone, Susie had said. So I'd brought blind Solomon, even though he'd taken some coaxing and he'd expressed his determination to definitely not enjoy himself. We climbed Susie's steps and I leaned the big wrapped-up canvas against the my leg, swapped the roses to the other arm, and rang the doorbell.

"You brought flowers," Solomon said. He could smell them.

"So what? For her birthday."

"And the painting."

"Yeah, painted with her paints on her paper. Didn't cost me anything, did it?"

"And she's not a project?"

"I've told you mate. No."

It wasn't Susie who answered the door. A girl in her twenties did. In her twenties but baby-faced and dressed in smart, functional, black-and-white. And an uncompromisingly South London girl when she opened her mouth.

"Er, hi?" she said and frowned at us out of the corner of her eyes. This girl could answer the door of Buckingham Palace to the Queen and make her feel that she had the wrong address.

"Is, er, Susie in?"

"You 'ere for the party? You're a bit early, it's not supposed to start till after closing-time. Everyone's round the Mulberry Bush."

A couple of beats later I was up to speed. I'd better explain. "No, I'm working for Susie tonight. She asked me to come early."

"Oh. I think she left a note for you. Is your name Everiss?"

I said it was and the girl, in her twenties, let us into the hall where Solomon managed not to knock over the video camera that was standing there pointing at the doorway. It wasn't running, just lurking in the corner.

"An' who's this gentleman, then?" the girl said, shutting the door and regarding Solomon who was doing his best to get his eyes pointing in her direction. "Is 'e Everiss as well?"

"Er... Susie said I could—"

"I'm only windin' yer up!" she laughed all over her soft-focus face. "Go on, read yer note."

It was at the bottom of a page of handwritten instructions about the catering and it said: Everiss, have a shower and get into your suit (back of the door in my bedroom, Clare will show you where). Remember. You, and only you, are to answer the door—don't let the girls answer it, even if you're busy. Let it ring; they'll wait. We'll be there after eleven. Kisses, Susie.

"Clare's me," the girl said when I looked up from the note. "Bedroom? The one next to the kitchen. On your right. The bathroom's just here, see? Me and Dionne'll be upstairs in the big room, okay?"

I felt a bit dead-on-arrival getting into that bedroom, and I bunged the painting down on her bed, all swaddled up in carrier-bags and a bit of newspaper taped on with Happy Birthday Susie on it. Another camera in here, too; mounted on the wall, this one. It'd kind of pissed on my bonfire, Susie's not being there. What'd happen is—I knew it—she'd get back from the pub and assume I'd taken a shower here and then she'd never know I'd already made the effort to be scrubbed-up and clean-behind-the-ears for her. On top of that, my big yellow roses would be limp as Methuselah's dick if I left them on the kitchen table in their plastic and paper, and they'd be glanced at and forgotten if I bunged them in a vase. And I never got to say, when she answered the door, you shouldn't be answering the door yourself, Susie; what you need is a butler like some kind of off-the-cuff coolpatter that'd melt her. Mind you, why beat myself up? Like I told Solomon, she's not a project. No, sir.

So: Susie's bedroom. It's a big one, for sure. There's one huge window, curtainless, looking out over the backs of the houses. It had its own en-suite. Seriously cool gaff, this. Course we hadn't seen upstairs by then, but wait for that.

Anyway I got on and checked out the glad rags Susie had hired for me; tails, black pants and a totally mad waistcoat. It didn't turn me into the peacock my Army dress uniform had done way back, but it was kind of cool to be a penguin instead. In its own way. Except the trousers were too big and I had to hunt in the wardrobes for a black belt. Rows of suits, piles of trousers but there, at last, a black belt that pulled the too-big waistband tight over my skinny belly shrunken for want of the attention of food.

I had a shufti at the man-of-the-house's jackets, too, and a good job it was that Susie hadn't depended on stretching them over my skeleton, because the one I tried didn't. I hadn't kept my weight since Belfast, and I'd lost even more since being on the skids, but these togs were like Woolworth's Ladybird range on me. The swish hired clawhammer didn't hang at all bad, though and, once I was all set and smart, Solomon and me sloped off to join the other domestics. We found them upstairs in a room you couldn't miss; it was like discovering a new continent.

Solomon walked into the living-room beside me and said, "Shit, are we still indoors?"

True, you could land an airplane in the room, but I wanted to know how he knew that; so I asked him.

"Echoes," he said. "You prob'ly cain't hear 'em. What's in here? I know there's a lot o' glass dead ahead but a long ways off."

"Yeah, that's the windows all along the front looking out onto the road."

"Is there a table? Real big table?"

"Yep. Up against the wall on your left with enough grub on it to sink a ship."

"Don't belong there, anyhow. They usually have it in the centre of the room."

He was right. There were the marks to prove it. Just like the ones on my grey rug and here, making it look even more like a movie set, was another of Huban's cameras.

"Over there to your right's a fireplace," I told Solomon. "Sofa and two armchairs in front of it about ten feet back. But here in the middle's plenty of room." I turned to complete the scan of the room. "And that must be where I'm supposed to be working: they've got a bar back near the door piled with liquor. You're gonna have fun, mate."

"Do you want to help yourselves?" Clare said. She was right beside us, flash, like a genie. "They won't be back for another half hour, and she said you can go ahead and 'elp yourself if you like."

"You wanna get some practice pouring beer, then, Frank?" Solomon said. "I gotta cotton mouth here."

About half-eleven, the doorbell rang itself five-square loud and clear and slapped a full-stop on the room. I looked at Dionne and Clare who reminded me I was supposed to be answering the door but when I did go down and answer it, I just let more questions in.

Everyone fell indoors all at once and woke up the hallway with a living art stampede of jackets and ties and cocktail dresses and high-heels and chatter-laughter whiffing of Dolce & Gabbana and stinky-breath Fosters. And it talked to me as it filed past "Whoops-a-daisy! (giggles) Hello! Are we late?" "Is this right? Is this Susie's house?" "Hello, who are you?" "No, Ben, it's Hu's house" "Look, Susie's got an admirable Crichton!" "Where is the dizzy cow, anyway, is she behind us?" "It's her fancy man!" "Where do we go? Upstairs?" "Alison, there's even one here, look, I told you there's no hiding from Hu's cameras." "Get a bloody wiggle on everyone, the zinfandel's losing its chill!"

Whatever it was I'd let in it looked like money. And up the stairs it migrated, the cash-caravan, and I was about to shut the door because that looked like the lot when Susie and Marcia came through the gate with the dog stretching the leash ahead of them as if it wanted to chew my pants and the job really couldn't wait. I didn't notice what the microscopic Marcia looked like, but Susie came like a dream in long legs and a short black slip dress, flimsy as a nymph's gauze; God, and transparent or was it the fumes of my lust making me hallucinate? And a knobbly, black rubber handbag an accessory to the crime. The girl. Pretty. Her face so delightful to look at, and yet what other mysteries are whispered by her, by those forms under her clothes, by her tastes in the air?

"Hello, Everiss. Reg! Stoppit, Reg, for God's sake!"—she smacked the dog hard on its arse and it quit tugging right away and sulked around Susie's legs instead. "Everiss, you look smart, doesn't he Marsh?"

I looked down at myself. "Just standard butler issue, you know."

"Well, go on upstairs for now, Everiss. There are more to come, though. People. Lots more."

Back in the party room, the catering girls had dimmed the lights and I was about to make a bee-line for my bar to serve the Liberace-likes with liquor when I clocked Dionne already there cracking open the tinnies and pulling bungs out of the zinfandel. Behind the long food table stood Clare as wooden as a cigar-store Indian, face stiff as her starched blouse, ready to sling out the canapés to anyone who came close enough.

And the dog found Solomon before I did. Sol was lurking within falling-over distance of the bar, and the woofer started to pick on him big-time, leaping up and pawing him and tasting his face with its licky tongue probably before trying to eat him. Susie was on it with a smack—"Reg, you bloody beast! Come here you stupid animal!"—and she hauled the mutt back by the saggy, skinny scruff of its neck. "He's always like this until he settles down."

It was incredible the way she manhandled that dog, cos it must have weighed twice what she did.

"Who's this, Everiss," she said. "Is this the friend you've brought?"

"Susie, this is Solomon. A very good friend of mine."

"His name's what? Simon?"

Solomon chuckled deeply. "Close," he grinned, "but no cigar. Solomon, Ma'am. Glad to meet you."

She practiced the sound: "Solomon. Hello, Solomon. You're American."

Solomon couldn't see Susie's hand, but he held forward one of his own, and Susie obliged by making for it and grasping it as briefly as good taste allowed.

"Clare—" Susie said, waving the sultry baby-girl over and grabbing me by the nearest arm. "Clare, I want you to remember that only Everiss is to answer the door, okay? Even if he's busy serving drinks or something, don't answer it—let the buggers wait. Thank you, Possum, carry on what you were doing. I'm going to lock Reg in the kitchen, Everiss, I don't think he wants to leave your friend alone. He likes you," she told Solomon. "If, erm... what is it? Solomon. If Solomon is hungry give him some food, and give him a drink, anyway. Everiss, that spot on your nose has gone!"

And that was it. She was gone, leaving Solomon and me in charge of the wildlife that came charging at the watering-hole every few minutes. "Could I have... do you think...? and one of... Cheers, old chap, jolly good of you" Then they'd try to go off carrying armfuls of wine glasses or beers. Or they'd come in pairs chattering endlessly "No—probation, isn't it—she's a probation officer I could swear it—what are you having? red?—yes I will, too, could we have two glasses of red?—oh, I do know, yes, West Ealing and you ought to see the size of it: couldn't swing a gerbil, and miles to the tube."

Susie came back with a big grin, dangling my painting of the dog from one arm, and she kissed my cheek.

"You darling! I love it. Come on!" she grabbed my arm again. "I'm going to show you off to everyone."

And so she did, giggling to all her mates and telling them that this butler was her birthday present to herself, like I was some new pet. I had to behave myself, too, or else I'd end up in the kitchen with King Reg. So I was taken on the rounds from backbench MP to BBC radio producer; from fashion models' agent to architect; from barrister to hack (both a Farringdon Road and a Wapping one). Then there was a proper writer, too, and a psychiatrist, and a juggler, and this one:

"Everiss, this is my stand-up comedienne friend, aren't you, Alison?"

"No, I fucking well am not your friend if you keep calling me a comedienne, you bag, and I don't care if it is your birthday!"

"Oh, sorry, Ally, I mean comic. Do I?"

"Yes you bloody do."

"That's Alison," a little guy with nose-hair said. "She'd only be nice if there was a law."

"Make the most of it, buster," she said. "I'm not usually even this charming."

"Now look at this, everyone!" Susie told them and stood the painting up over the fireplace. She told them that Everiss was, believe it or not, talented. He painted. And this was what he'd painted for her birthday.

"It's King Reg!" Marcia noticed.

"Isn't it sweet?" Susie gushed.

And everyone gushed along with her. It was sweet alright. It was better than that. It was super. So, I'd done my bit, I'd performed for her like a good monkey and before she set me free again she whispered to me and slipped forty quid into my hand.

"Wages. Is that enough? Forty?"

I said (trying to catch my breath) it was plenty and I thanked her energetically. "Do you like the flowers?" I asked.

"The yellow roses? Were they from you?"

So I got another kiss on the cheek before I slipped back behind the bar and watched Susie, the only one I could see, floating about bright like a spirit among the pale others. Watched her brilliant green eyes in a head bobbing in conversation with some painted and preened girlfriend. I remembered her eyes, even after that first meeting. I could've told you then what color they were. Someone once said, after the first date turn your back and ask what color are my eyes. If they don't know, they aren't the one. Well, there she was—green-peepered, gorgeous, happy, and out of reach. And all the while I worked, I thought fond thoughts of her.

While I served, I observed the herd of guests orbiting the room, drinking and grazing, and they made me hungry so I sent Solomon to bring me a plate of food back to the bar. Maybe I've done wiser things than send a blind man to the buffet table, but I relaxed when I saw he wasn't bringing me twenty sausage rolls. And I think it must've been serving that jug of sangria that was to blame for the circus that followed.

The party spread out beyond the flung-open balcony doors and the dog came back on the scene and bunged its face in Solomon's right away. But it was hardly less well-behaved than the guests; they were up and down the stairs, in and out of the front door, and leaning on the doorbell every two minutes. They were driving me nuts, and I persuaded myself there wasn't any harm in the odd sip of punch for myself even if I was on duty. And in the Albert Hall living room, the pillowsoft, narcotic Sade and Enya came off the stereo and the barbiturates went on. Bowie, Soundgarden, Sugar Bullet, Oasis, and briefly Erasure before someone indignantly changed it for Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison and Johnny wouldn't be pushed off the stage for the rest of the evening. And there was juggling, joketelling, sangria-guzzling, arm and tongue-wrestling, man-to-man tangoing and woman-to-woman also and thrown in with it all, the dog, the big wrinkly, slobbery hound-dog King Reg. But nothing like in the photos of Marcia's party.

I was in front of the bar by now, no longer so obviously a skivvy, and I couldn't believe how many women were coming up and clocking me and hanging until I spoke to them. Some of them Susie'd introduced me to, but not all. Had I metamorphosed into something beautiful, or what? No, the fact was this was a different night from the ones in Belfast and Bayswater, in pubs or clubs all over the city where you can't even approach a girl to talk to without her reaching for her rape alarm. Girl kids are told not to speak to strangers and some of 'em have long memories. But the blokes at that party were vetted and guaranteed safe. Otherwise they wouldn't be there, would they? And guess what? Some girls really do say fax me. Craziest thing was, their boyfriends or husbands or whatever were right there, close enough to hit with a bread roll, and these birds were simpering and flirting and bunging me phone numbers on cards all over the gaff.

They were a casual, libertine kind of bunch were Susie's mates. So Sixties-revival-Nineties, you know what I mean? All of them identical, factory-produced, shrink-wrapped fashionable unconventionals. The sort of people who mummify their razor-blades and seal the cat in a cardboard pyramid overnight if the Sunday supplements say it's the latest thing. If I showed them Solomon, they'd build a cemetery in the extension and sit cross-legged to watch Sky Sports. If only they'd known how easily I could've outdone the lot of 'em for sheer bloody-minded bohemianism had the smelly, derelict, street-tramping truth be told.

It was warm in there, though; it was heaven. Better than being frozen bollockless in the wide outside, or being shot at in Newry. This was a safe, cosy womb and around me, pressing in on all sides, were the most gorgeous wombs West Eleven had to offer. This is it, I remember thinking at the time through the beer-giggle haze. A middle-class adventure playground. I'm definitely at it. This is the party for Susie's thirty-third birthday and no mistake.

Marcia was getting chatted up by the little guy with nose-hair who'd been standing next to the charming comic Alison earlier. What a little wreck, though, with thin hair on his fat head. And yep, he sure could've used a few sessions of electrolysis up his hooter. What chance did he stand with her, mmm? Bugger all. They came within spitting distance of the bar and he was asking Marcia what her poison was.

"Oh, go on, why not. I think I need another drink, I've had such a stressful day. This morning I poured orange juice on the top of my fridge and in the supermarket I smashed a big bottle of passata on the floor. Talk about theatre of the absurd!"

I felt sorry for the guy, choosing his two glasses of red from the table. He looked like Homer Simpson, too, like the guy on the tube that time with Biddy. In his probably late forties, he was, real academic type, glasses on.

"Hi, I'm Cour de Comte."

I was dead impressed. "You're what?" I said.

"My name. Cour de Comte."

This little jerk was either someone important or he thought he was.

"Right," I nodded.

"And you're Everiss. The fellow Susie has put up in her artist's garret? She's trying to turn you into the next Francis Bacon, eh?"

"Frank Everiss, actually. And tonight I'm the butler."

He found this hugely funny. "Are you?" he said. "Jolly good. Well, we'll leave you to it."

He had loose, flappy lips that preferred to reveal the lower teeth rather than the upper ones when he smiled. I hate mouths like that. At least I do since I met that one. A skull-toothy grin, it was; not a grin, really, no humor in that mouth nor any to be found in the rest of the face and staring miserable little eyes. That was one dull guy. He had a dullness that made me reappraise my opinion of dishwater.

"What did you make of him?" I asked Solomon.

"Didn't get anything. Wasn't trying."

Anyway it was gonna be party of the absurd for Marcia the rest of the night cos she was ushered off by the little guy with nose-hair to sit on the couch with him till daybreak. And my own absurdity was just beginning. I let Susie and Alison the stand-up comic drag me off to the big bathroom (there was another loo across the hall and, with Susie's en-suite, that made three bogs) where they practiced their make-up on me till I looked dafter than Eddie Izzard. Susie was so good she nearly bunged as much eyeshadow around my eyes as she bunged in them, and she cursed my streaming eyes while I cursed her fumblethumb cack-handedness.

But that bathroom was something else. There was a corner bath and shower with the curtain rail sweeping around it and full-length mirrors up the wall behind so Susie could admire herself, or herself and any number of other people in there while they soaped up. I liked the taps. RED HOT it said on one and ICE COLD on the other. There was even a camera in here. High up on the wall like security cameras in stores. I went to it.
"What's with the cameras, Susie? Who are you—Chuck Berry?"

"No no no no no," she tutted as if I was the offender. Maybe I was. "They're all Huban's. Huban's—nothing to do with me. I just have to put up with them."

"Can't I at least switch that one off while you make me look an arsehole? Where's the stop button?"

"That one's part of the closed-circuit," Susie said. "The tape machine's in the lounge, do you want me to go and stop it?"

I laughed. "No, don't bother."

"You look like Lily Savage," Alison said when they'd finished.

I examined myself long and hard in the mirror before making my decision. "I actually look less attractive than Lily Savage. Can we take it off now?"

"You must be joking! Come on, we're taking you back to the party now you look beautiful!"

So I had no choice in the matter. The only person I looked no more or less attractive to than usual was Solomon. So I tried to slip into the dark with him. But Susie immediately found King Reg curled up on the floor beside us, and paying an extraordinary amount of attention to his nuts. She bent down and said he liked having his balls tickled and she demonstrated as much and even offered me a go.

"I think he likes Solomon better than me," I said. "Let him have a go."

But she was gone, waltzing through clouds of her mates asking them where she ought to put her gorgeous new painting of her big darling dog.

"Take down some of your skinny nudes, Susie," one bloke said. "And put it there."

"What's the matter with my nudes, Merv? I've seen you drooling over them."

"No way. I'm not into skinny women, you just don't get the tits on them."

"You don't get the tits on them?"

"That's right."

"Merv, I know the type you fancy. You like them big, you'd like a few big-arsed Fragonard ladies around the place wouldn't you?"

"Are you kidding? The bigger the better, ask any bloke. Vanessa Feltz, now that's sexy."

"Oh, God," Susie despaired and looked away. Then she came back: "You know that's always seemed rather suspect to me. I mean what's your earliest image of a woman larger, heavier and stronger then yourself? Your mother! Maybe artists who paint such strong women do it because they're in love with their mothers, and maybe you like them because you're in love with yours. I don't know why you don't just be honest about it."

The confessions weren't immediately forthcoming, though. Susie looked from one bloke's face to another and got nothing but laughter where she wanted sense.

"But you're all men," she said. "You wouldn't back me up anyhow. Come on, Everiss! Solomon, what do you say?"

"I gotta admit," Solomon piped up from behind her, "Weren't only Sigmund Freud, it was Plato too taught us every man wants to horse his Momma, and if he don't then there's somethin' not right 'bout him." Then he added, logically: "Or somethin' not right 'bout his Momma."

Solomon. A genius of conversation and rhetoric. He could traffic good sense from his one remaining lung by way of his mouth when he wanted to. But sometimes, and this was one of them, what he needed was a good editor. Course, after that Susie followed King Reg's initiative and decided to like Solomon too.

And I put up with my faceful of Max Factor for as long as I could stand it and took my mind off it with the liquor I'd promised not to touch. Then I looked round for Susie but she wasn't where I looked first, so I went for a piss. When I came out of the little bog there she was, walking past, so I collared her.

"Susie, I've had enough of this," I said, pointing at my face. The joke had worn off but not the make-up. "Can you spare me two minutes to help me get rid of it?"

She just giggled at me. "Oh, Everiss, don't! You look gorgeous."

By the time she saw I wasn't kidding and took my hand to lead me into the big bathroom again for my scrubdown, we were beaten to the door by a girl.

"Oh, Emma, wait!" Susie said. "Let me just get something from there." She came out smiling, with a handful of bottles—"In you go," she said to Emma, and pushed me back into the little bog I'd just come out of.

I picked up the soap from the basin.

"No, don't use soap. Here take this... cleanser... and cotton-wool. Let me show you."

"You don't mind?" I mumbled. "Using up your stuff on me?"

"Keep your mouth still. Now close your eyes."

So I got cleaned up. And I was still dressed smart, I remembered. I was getting attention from a wonderful-looking woman still so, maybe, I was even a little desirable. Susie was by the mirror looking at me and I took a step back; that was all the steps back I could take before my backside hit the doorhandle. I looked in the mirror; a little puffed and red from booze and make-up but not really so bad. Not bad at all.

"Christ, I look like shit," I said.

"No you don't," Susie said in a way that made you believe her.

But then, just like her mouth could do nothing but smile, maybe the tone of her words knew only how to persuade. I wanted a pen so I could scribble obscene messages to her on the wall like the ones I read in Paddington Gents. I wanted to leave her a little something and maybe when I checked again she'd have written back a reply. But I couldn't wait for that, I wanted the answer now. So I chanced my arm; I chanced my arm right then and there without hesitation by moving close and kissing this tall, slim, beautiful, little black-dressed, Thirty-Three-Year-Old-Today, long-legged adult woman. And her smiling mouth was at first like an uncertain friend. Then it closed over mine, warm and wet, and it decided on a hungry and desperate recognition.

Ooh, yeah, I like this. I'll have another mouthful of that, she thought. And she turned the key and locked us in with just a basin and a toilet pot cramming in upon us from all sides, and our arms coiled and crushed with all our strength and her hug made me believe (and other things she said about me) that, although we'd have to release our grip before the night was out, we'd have at least by then pressed into each of our hearts something of the other that we'd never let go.

It was ridiculous. She had the run of this whole house and here we were in this tiny room like naughty cousins kissing in the cupboard under the stairs. So we broke for a gasp of air and I got chance to remember something that it might be a lot of people's opinion I should've remembered earlier. But there it is. I remembered the husband and it cleared my head faster than a faceful of cold tap at six am. Susie was being naughty and I suddenly wanted to know how she felt about it.

"So, where's your husband tonight? What's-his-name?"

"Huban? He's in the lounge."

What! I couldn't believe it. He's where? Not: he's in Aberdeen, but, he's in the frigging lounge. The hairs jumped up on my neck like they'd heard the fire-bell.

"He's here! In the house?"

"Of course," she laughed. "Why shouldn't he be, it's his house."

"He's just out there? And you're doing this!"

"It certainly looks like it, doesn't it?" She hugged me round the neck and kissed me again.

"So which one is he?" I said. "Did I talk to him?"

"Did you talk to anyone named Huban?"

"Er... no."

"Didn't you? Huban Cour de Comte?"

"What?" I was in shock. "No way. Him? You're joking! Christ, that guy! So, what, does he know where you are?" I was still understaffed in the grasping-the-situation department.

"Everiss, I don't know."

"Are you pissed?"

She giggled again. "Do girls usually have to be pissed to get off with you, Everiss. That's a shame."

Yeah, she might laugh it off but what the hell was going on, anyway? Didn't she mind getting off with someone while her husband was in the next room? Didn't she think he'd mind? Oh, God, here come those babyfat kissy lips again. It really wasn't the thing to think about right then and there. So I didn't; I just put it under my chair for later.

I'll tell you what was the thing to think about right then and there, though. That little bog might have been the only private place in the house, but outside was a whole world we could hide and snog in. So we opened the door a crack and made a break for it, agreeing to rendezvous in front of the house in five. There were some manic performances going on in the big room; some of them were pretending to give the dog blow-jobs. And Huban Cour de Comte was still wrapped up on the sofa in his little victim. He had his iron in another fire.

I wanted to slip out with no fuss, but that Emma bird was at the top of the stairs with a tall, smart-looking bloke, and she nabbed me.

"Deserting your post?" she said.

"Eh?"

"Aren't you supposed to be on duty?"

"Just getting a bit of air, you know."

"You'd be surprised the people who're popping out for some air at the moment," she grinned as if she knew so much about me she could write an encyclopaedia article on it. "Or maybe you wouldn't. Go on, you'd better go, she won't wait for ever." And she held out something and put it in my hand. It was a Durex Elite.

What were these people doing? Renting out their mate, their married mate, to all-comers? I got an image of the ladies of the harem washing and perfuming the new, beautiful wife ready for her big night. But Christ, if there was any new wife here it was me.

The moon, I could see once I got out in the fresh air, was also new, or soon after at any rate. It was thin and crescent and near it, at the ten o'clock position, was Venus: a burst out of the blackness like a poke in a closed eye. I hadn't see that before—was it an illusion or was it really shining like a torch on the moon's bald dusty darkness?

Susie was out there, no-one else. Another Venus under the moon. So we headed out, walking round the corner to the Grove. My Grove, and smoking all the way from Susie's pack. Right up over Notting Hill we went, and as far as the tube station and Susie dragged me into a kebab shop 'cause she was thirsty for mineral water, she said. But Diet Pepsi was all they had so that's what we got.

We strolled on and I told her these were the streets I walked lonely before she found me and put me up in her flat. She was glad. She crooned The Streets of London in tribute to my vagrancy while we walked, and she cuddled herself close and sang it softly in my ear and gave me a hard-on.

"Oh, shit, I forgot my keys!" I said. "The keys to the studio—we could have gone up there."

"You idiot," she said and she pressed herself against the ache in my trousers that those cold keys could've eased. If I'd brought them. Bollocks!

"What do you do, Susie?"

"What do I do? I go to the Scottish Tourist Board on Cockspur Street every day and try to resurrect ma wee accent to impress the punters."

"Do you? God, I thought you might be Scottish. Whereabouts are you from?"

"Edinburgh."

"Midlothian?"

"Lothian."

"Yeah, but Lothian's split up into parts, isn't it?"

"Oh don't, Everiss, I'm not at work now. I have to explain this sort of thing to dopey Italians day in and day out."

"Well for a change you can explain it to a dopey Londoner, can't you?"

"It's split into counties, but mostly you just call it Lothian, alright?"

"But Edinburgh must be in one of the counties."

She laughed. "Yes, it's in Mid Lothian I suppose. But you'd only differentiate between the Lothians when you're... er, talking about a small village like Dunbar in East Lothian."

"Is that one of the rules at the Scottish Tourist Board? You're not allowed to differentiate between the Lothians..."

"Oh, yes," she giggled at me. "They discourage us from differentiating between the Lothians unless it's absolutely necessary."

"So where would you recommend me to go in Scotland?"

"Brighton. I'd recommend you to go to Brighton, Everiss, not Scotland at all. And if you do, I'll come with you because I love Brighton. I was there for three weeks in the summer at Devil's Dyke, have you heard of it? Staying with my friend. And I took my mountain bike, it was so joyous! Shall we go—when are you free?"

Before I could say "I'll check my diary," she grabbed me around the middle and steered us back homeward so we could check on the guests and the rest of the animals. But when we got as far as the gardens in the middle of Ladbroke Square I tried to carry her over the railings and make love in there but all we got was vandal-proof paint all over us. Lover-proof paint in this case. And we went back indoors to wash it off, but this time into Susie's warm, private, locked en-suite bathroom without having to go upstairs.

I told her, breathing between snoggy clinches, that I was gonna chase her forever until she was mine. She said even as far as Brighton? She said I was beautiful. I said no, you're beautiful, I'm ugly and used the mirror to demonstrate my point. She said I was delicious, sexy, she scratched up my tee-shirt from out of my belt and caressed my chest and stomach. She had such a shape, such a body—slim up and down with the hips wider, but only subtly wider. The whole body made subtlety a religion. It was the subtlety that smashed you in the face like a sledgehammer. It was blatant. And I fell to my knees and wrapped my arms around her arse and put my head to her belly. She laughed and cuffed my ear till I got up.

I don't know for how long we were away from the rest of the party altogether but it seemed, you know, a bit of a suspiciously long time. So I asked Susie if Huban might be asking himself where she was. He's probably guessed, she said, but he's okay about it.

"Okay about what?" I said. "He'd hardly be okay about us being here like this if he knew, would he?"

She was amused by my ingenuousness. "Everiss, we don't have rules like that. Huban is fine about what I do as long as I don't make it too obvious. He just doesn't like to be inconvenienced."

This was the most honest kind of dishonesty. It was so unlike the creeping about and lying sort of infidelity that was my style. Anyway it was a funny old situation but all I had to do was adapt. Just get used to it, it was easier. So that's what I did. If things were this more-or-less-nicely arranged then who was I to throw a wrench in? You know, if I could have my place in their system then why try to screw it up?

I closed my senses off so there were no more signs to see and no more forbidding to hear, and explored the back of her thighs, shifting the dress up by inches to waist-height with my hands all over the moons of her arse. And all of it naked to the touch and I wondered where her knickers were cos my fingers couldn't find them. Well, if mortals will handle gods. I must've conducted something to earth cos I was struck standing there unmoving, unmovable, with rivers of lightning; grasped by the middle and spun dizzily. Then held fast head and foot and punched breathless with desire. My eyes came open and I looked down and saw white knickers—so that's where they were.

Susie sat down on the toilet lid and I knelt in front of her while she hugged me into her tits. Her bare knees were apart around me and I took her arse and slid her so she pressed into me and there was only one way we could be closer. I wanted it. Bad. And God, I wanted her; I just wanted all of her. I wanted to wear her proudly like a busted eye. Except a busted eye is a symbol of pain already suffered, isn't it? And I wanted to wear this woman like a symbol of the pain I knew she'd make me suffer someday. I knew it. I knew she would.

Three-thirty in the morning. Let me go check something, she said and she came back saying there was hardly anyone left in the house. I should go, I said. She didn't argue. And back in the bedroom Susie wiped a finger of dust off the top of the tripod-mounted camera.

"Look at that," she said. "Is that good for them? He never looks after things."

"There isn't one in...?" I said, pointing behind me into the en-suite.

She came close to me and whispered, "Don't worry, we didn't leave any evidence." Then she stepped back and laughed. "No, there's no camera in there. Or in the other loo; anyway all the tapes have stopped now, I checked."

So, comforted, I got changed out of my glad rags and into my scruffy civvies while she watched.

I said, "I want to take you to dinner. Can I? Next week?"

She cuddled and kissed me. "Make it early. Early next week. Call me, I didn't give you my number did I? Hang on while I write it down. There you go." And she left me.

But I don't know where she went. I found Solomon in the big room upstairs with a pair of shades sitting on his nose, surrounded by empty cans and bottles. There were pools of beer and liquor on his table and scraps of food on plates. It was quiet in there and none of the few remaining bodies were standing. The only noise was Huban still there muttering in the dark, but now chatting-up Clare the caterer.

When I asked him about the glasses Solomon told me Susie had put him in my place on the bar and, "Here," she'd ordered, putting a pair of tortoise-shell Wayfarers on him, "wear these, we don't want you staring at everyone with those eyes."

"Cheeky bitch," I said.

Solomon shook his head. "Didn't bother me none. So can we go now?"

I said okay, and downstairs I had another quick look for Susie. But in the end we just left, and outside I said to Solomon I wished I'd had the chance to say goodbye to her.

"What for?" he said. "Didn't you have time to tell her goodbye all the time you were with her tonight?"

"How do you know?"

"Man, do you think I stood there servin' drinks all night and not knowin' what I was doin' it for?"

In fact he'd done a remarkably good job, he said, and he hadn't spilt many drinks on his customers. "Least, they didn't holler out any if I did."

Cold and sober on the streets, I realised I was back in my old clothes again; in rags after the Cinderella togs. I felt like Mr Benn, back in his normal suit after being an astronaut or a cowboy or a knight-in-armor and walking back down Festive Road, or wherever he lived, all deflated and ordinary. But Mr Benn always had his memento of his adventure. And I had mine. My scrap of notepaper—scribbled with a phone number and 'Susie X', a lipstick bow kissed onto the back and a spray of Jean-Paul Gaultier, which I held to my face and breathed.

"You sure screwed up big time tonight," Solomon said.

"Eh? Why?"

"Boy, you're stickin' your neck out so far I might cut it off myself."

"What do you mean?"

"I thought you said this woman wasn't a project."

"Yeah, I know. I did."

"Big mistake."

"I know," I said with a grin. "So, er, don't you think I should've gotten off with her then?"

"I think you're an asshole, you know that? After all the work you did this year, this summer, and every test you get, you bomb out like that."

"I haven't bombed out!"

"I give you money and you blow it on liquor. You meet a woman and you're all over her like a rash. That ain't bombing out? You know what bombing out is, Frank: you're gonna be screwing her if you ain't already!"

That was bombing out? He shakes his head and says I'll be screwing her as if it's a bad thing! Thing is, Solomon doesn't think people have any more control over themselves than cockroaches when it comes to love. When a roach feels randy he keeps backing into things until he backs into a female and then they go at it. That was me in Solomon's eyes. Course, he had me pegged as the last hope for the species, too, so Christ if I fell on my arse that was it for humankind.

"You oughta take a lesson from that goddamn key club in there," Solomon said, thumbing over his shoulder at the house. "Them swingers got their ego under better control than you do, you know that?"

"Eh? How do you make that out?"

"Them bed-hoppers ain't got no jealousy. You can't have jealousy if you know some other guy's ballin' your wife in the next room. If you got no jealousy, you got no ego—don't matter if they've worked for it or it comes natural. Either way it gives 'em more in common with the Buddha than you, Frank, and that's the truth."
"Oh, fuck that!"

"They got it, Frank. They already got what you oughta be bustin' ass to get."

"Come on, Sol, I'm not going to take people like that guy Huban for my role model. He looks like a fucking spider monkey. Susie, maybe, yeah. I think she's got a lot of what you're talking about. Total control you know what I mean?"

"I ain't sure 'bout Susie. There's a lotta distress inside that woman. Lotta unhappiness."

"Yeah, but if you want me to model myself on these people then I ought to hang around them, didn't I? Bit of training and I can get just like them!"

"Frank, if you can keep from wanting Susie for your own then sure, go ahead."

"For God's sake, she's hardly gonna prefer that spider monkey to me from now on, is she?"

"You've gotta not want her!" he snapped at me.

"Okay, okay, I don't, do I? I can do it—this is a test and this time I'll do better. Anyway you said she'd teach me."

"That was a long time ago and I made a mistake. You won't learn nothin' but bad lessons from her, Frank, trust me. Stick with your practice or forget the whole thing. Ain't no sense in gamblin' like this."

"Hmm. I know I'm taking a risk."

"No, Frank. Taking a risk is different than a gamble. A risk means takin' a risk things'll go belly-up. Gambling means takin' a risk you might win! You're gamblin', and you ain't gonna win."

"Come back to the flat?" I asked just to change a subject I'd had enough of talking about.

He grumbled something. So that must've been a yes cos when Solomon says no you can hear it in the next street.

"So, er, what—you think they're all at it then do you, with each other?"

"Hmm?"

"What is it you called 'em? Swingers. Think they are?"

"Sure they are. Some of 'em prob'ly ain't bothered who it is in the dark, neither. Boy or a girl's all the same."

"Christ."

Solomon doesn't strike me as a bloke who's done much swinging. Not knocking him, but he doesn't strike me as a bloke who's had much sex at all, really. Probably the classiest thing he's ever had his balls tickled by is the last of the bathwater running out. Well, maybe he was the only innocent man in a whole world that was cheating. Me, Susie, even Biddy cheated her way out of life. Those weird bastards at that party, though. With their twisted social, emotional games. Or is it them who're normal and it's me, with my needs and insecurities and possessiveness, who's screwy. What Solomon said had a grain of truth.

At the flat I told Solomon I'd sit up with him till it was light and warm. Then he'd go off and get some sleep. I relaxed on my mattress and sat for a bit quietly, just thinking. Thinking about the day and just things lately and then about things long ago. I remember that night really clearly. I just felt so totally alone. Thought of and said a prayer to Biddy wherever she was. But I must have nodded off myself and when I woke up, hours later, Solomon was gone.

When I woke up I felt very different. I woke up bright and chatty and I might have proved it had there been anyone there to be bright and chatty to. Yeah, I woke up like that. But seeing that my emotions weren't exactly subject to the laws that govern an exact science, it was impossible to conclude what waking up bright and chatty implied.

I might have thought about a lot of things that morning. There were a lot of things I could've thought about. There were a lot of things I knew. But as it happened I only thought about one. A child of six knows, what, nearly three thousand words and can structure more ideas than could be thought in the lifetime of a universe. But there I was, grown man, and all I could think about was Susie. I put the kettle and the radio on and I wanted to phone her. Cooked up some rice and stuffed myself with it for breakfast then I went out.

Wasps outside. There were wasps around the bins and I was surprised it was warm enough for them. And clouds of pigeons racing around in unison as if they were all tied together, turning at the same time like flocks of fish. And all I could think about was Susie. I could phone her but no, it was too soon. And what would I say? Maybe I'll write. Hello, Beautiful, I'm missing you already! No. I couldn't write either. All I could do was to rave and ramble to her in my head. That way I could make all the mistakes I liked. Isn't that right, Susie?

Anyway, what the hell happened to you last nite, Suze? You buggered off when I was clowning with Solomon, didn't you, and you never came back to squeeze my hand goodbye and confirm our fortnight honeymoon on the Riviera. You never came back to settle with me which county of Lothian (East, West or Mid-) we were going to build the family castle in (see, I was listening to your pearls of wisdom) and how many wee bairns we were going to spawn. What a great word spawn is. So sordid and pond-like and expressive. No, you never came back to croon Ralph McTell songs in my shell-like just one last time before whisking yourself away from my busting heart and back to the Scottish Tourist Board to sell bonny heather and sporrans and haggis to the Italians. You never came back to show me your bike. Next time you're on it, pop down to the Grove and I'll run behind you to Brighton to freewheel down the 'Lanes' and see the wee bijou boutique-type shops and Habitat (where we can be morally outraged at the prices) and HMV (where we can argue about who's better: Simon & Garfunkel or Black Grape) and Burger King (where we can decide to go veggie halfway thru a bacondoublecheeseburger) and Boots (where we can ride the escalators up and down and be speechless at their range of water filters) and the Pavilion (whose gardens we can ride round and round and play catch on the bike) and down to the pebbly beach (where we can chuck stones in the sea and try to skim 'em) and go on the rides or in the loud, blaring, laser-booming arcades. And lots of other things that only imagination limits. Anyway, thanks for helping me remove my make-up last night for two minutes. I really, honestly, thought that's what would happen. How was I to know you'd sing to me and tell me about Brighton and Dunbar in East Lothian and the dog's balls and fat-arsed paintings. So look—let me just lay my cards on the table right now. I don't want you to go off without knowing (if you hadn't already guessed as much by all this toe-licking) that I'm mighty knocked out by yer. You're Frank's Susie and you're Dante's Beatrice, you're Sartre's Simone, you're Flaubert's Parrot, you're, you're the stuff that books are written of, that poems are knitted of, that music is arranged of, that cities are built of, that wars are fought over. And you're not only good to look at—Man, I'd rather listen to you than listen to Jonathan Miller, than Dr Ruth, than Noam Chomsky, than Marvin Minsky, than Amelia Earhart, than Marco Polo, than any thinker or adventurer in any century. Basically, it was warm, and cuddly and reassuring and delicious to be with you last night and I'm glad the music was so loud because it meant YOU (your wonderful self) had to lean in close to speak with your heartbreakin' voice right into my soul. Ooh. And I bathed in your scent, and imagined your soft skin on my cheek and I measured each word you gave me and tasted it and savoured its shape and the shape of your mouth and your eyes—the darkandsoterrifying power of your mince pies, I mean your eyes. Even your atrocious phone-number handwriting is, under the circumstances and with your virtues taken into account, forgivable. And then what happened?—you were gone; I was distracted, the spell was broken, too much time passed, I looked around and then I became frantic, dashing from room to room in that goddamned maze like Sean Connery in the labyrinthine library of the monastery in The Name Of The Rose, but I couldn't find the rose I'd been admiring; the rose I'd fallen for and whose thorn had cut me with that holy, that blessed, that sublime injury I can't say I'm sorry for. Still, I did have her name at least (and her phone number). I had the name of the rose, which was more than young Adso had. Well, take care of yourself, Susie, wontcha? Keep cycling and singing Ralph McTell songs about down-and-outs.

In the cemetery that evening, trying to hold my mind steady on my breathing, it broke away time and time again to contemplate Susie, my stinging heart, Solomon's nonsense advice, Susie again—her beautiful smile, all mouth and eyes. And between each distraction my breathing deep and regular and slow and another rip in my paper. What did I see Susie as? I remembered my library books. She was the materialist worldling full of desire for me as a mortal; she was playing the typical sensualist man to my maiden married already to the Lord of the Meeting Rivers. I belonged now to the spirit beyond matter yet I was still an exile bound to the World's wheeling lives.

I opened my eyes, blurry with tears, to see a tree's fat coat of ivy shake where a squirrel had zoomed. I wished them peace, the little vermin possessed of the dead here, and I didn't blame them one bit for steering clear of this ragged loony. The fate of my sanity truly was uncertain; my head was (well and truly) in the lap of the gods.

I wanked a lot over the next day or two, she'd turned me on so much. It was the old out-of-controlness back again and the yoga got neglected, too. I definitely had to keep out of Solomon's way and his preaching and disappointment—I just didn't need the headache.

"Can I take you to dinner?" I'd asked her, hadn't I?

I don't know what I'd been thinking. I don't know who I'd thought I was, asking a girl to dinner. I didn't have any money. Except, hang on, I did. I had my butler wages. And I was prepared to go another month shrunken-rumble-bellied if it meant I could treat this woman to dinner. You bet I was. What was it she'd said? Call me next week. Early next week.

I tried her on the Monday from the payphone downstairs but no-one was at home; the answer-machine cut in, but I didn't leave a message. I hung up and got my ten-pence back.

The following day I tried again. I called her and she answered, not Huban.

"Hi. It's Frank Everiss."

She sounded delighted. Like it was the most wonderful, most joyous thing that could've ever happened to her, like she'd been waiting for my call, waiting to breathe again, waiting to enjoy life once more, waiting to kill herself if I didn't. And I fell for it cos I wanted to. "Hello, Frank Everiss! How are you?"

We talked some. It was cheerful, natural talk like two people have who're intensely interested in one another. I felt like it was that, anyway. And I hoped that my believing there was magic there didn't somehow break the spell. What a fine, beautiful voice—I bathed in it. I let it flow through me and wash all the pain and filth out of my soul. Did my back, behind my ears, and everywhere.

"You were so good at the party," she said. "The way you talked to my friends. You were fine, weren't you? So polite."

And then I told her we were going out. Told her. "Right, dinner," I said. "When am I taking you to dinner?"

Thursday suited her so we fixed it for Thursday. Meet at eight, was the plan, and then on to a restaurant not far from Portobello Road, I didn't know which, but Susie mentioned some place she knew. My favourite restaurant, she said. But she didn't know its name. Anyhow it'd have to be a more civilised conversational setting than our first date in the karsi had been.

I was restless Wednesday. So maybe just for the exercise, maybe from old-times habit, I went out and started walking just in any old direction. And I kept on going. I followed Bayswater Road and Oxford Street into Town, then Charing Cross Road down to Trafalgar Square.

In that little street of restaurants leading down from the Strand to Embankment tube station, a Chinese string quartet was playing. The cellist was plucking her strings pizzicato, two men and a girl cradling the babies of the fiddle family to their cheeks.

I came to them, met by measures of Mozart strung in festoons down that dismal lane like Christmas, like whirls Viennese. I came to them and saw the cello kneeling between the girl's thighs like I had between Susie's in the jockhouse. It was riding her dress up over bare legs, caressed with fingers all over its back and neck just like I'd been, and she was stroking from it the same slow, deep, bass voice of contentment. Yeah, I came to them, met by kiss-signed love-notes: andante, attenuated to dramatic length and at the source of them all were the indifferent musicians with the wideopen faces of children.

There, in front, a viola case lay open on the ground as a wishing-well to scatter with coins. I didn't join the small crowd to listen. Suited and booted, they were. Civilised types. Instead I sat back on the wall by the gardens and got with the programme under the open-air black sky (a cold wall making it through the jeans to my arse and hands in pockets) until they'd thumbed right through the Köchel catalogue and were packing up. Mmm. Sitting with her in that little en-suite. I remember. I'll bet she's paid me some mind. Some dirty mind, since then.

So, itchy, and haunted by Susie, I got up again. Well, haunted at least by a Susie-shaped ghost in the place she should've been here beside me. How she'd have enjoyed this. And maybe we could've gotten our bottle of water here and then home by tube somewhere—but where? To my chilly electric-fired room and no bed; or to her place and hope to catch Huban out?

Anyway I took to my lonely feet and trod the Embankment and crossed at Blackfriars to the South Bank beside the dark, high tide of the river. And there I took to the end of Gabriel's Wharf and saw a vision of myself that night in the early precious late midevening: my platform sweeping me out, piercing the tide into the centre of the black Thames and exposing me like a conductor above an orchestra. Cold-windswept I crouched, flinching from the inescapable elements and trembling, alone, hand-in-my-own-hand, while the city crowded around me from afar. I felt that night some magic that Susie had warmed into me. Some dazed quality of—I dunno—you know: possibilities. Hope. Faith. I'd forgotten it could feel... so beautiful, so frightening.

I saw a vision of myself with Susie, snuggled toasty like Kay in the Snow Queen's furs; whirling on her big sled through a City of warm wine-bars and the Christmassy bright lights in Selfridges and John Lewis. Anything but the biting windy streets, freezing my bollocks off. No, I laughed, no more of that! I thought that night of possibilities after I left the wharf and came slowly home. Maybe, like Solomon, I could see a future. A future forming for me.

I was in Nansen & Gowrie's Bistro Wine Bar on Pembridge Road fifteen minutes before Susie arrived. And it wasn't because I was early, either. I had time for a fucking awful espresso and then a delicious still water. Expensive, too. Suppose it wasn't the cleverest place for a bum to drink.

Then she came. Still mercilessly pointing that smile at me with no regard for my feelings. And when I stood up, she kissed me; too long and soft to be called a peck and a smear of something like bright red passion melted onto me from the mouth of an angel. Yes, this had to be an angel: in tightly-tailored brown trousers, corduroy jacket and a mini-rucksack for wings. Susie had a Becks and told me she was so looking forward to eating in her favourite restaurant, whatever its name was. But she knew where it was so we jumped in the car, where I found King Reg waiting to lick my ear and slobber over my shoulder the whole journey.

We parked up outside a dark shop front with clouds of Windolene all over the glass and a poster. I got out to read it and came back.

"It's closed down," I told Susie.

She laughed delightedly. "Never mind. Let's try another."

So we did. Near the market road, too, and in there Susie put away two glasses of white wine and a water to my two waters. She noticed something when I linked my fingers in front of me after we'd ordered.

"You've got such sensitive hands."

"How can you tell they're sensitive?" I said. "They're not connected to your nervous system."

"No, Everiss, darling. Don't get scientific on me," with the most delightful loving smile.

I didn't like the batter on my skate; I don't know what was wrong with it but something wasn't right. Or was it me? The only good thing I remember about the batter on my skate is that while I was chewing it Susie got onto the subject of her and Huban having been distant with one another for some time. It didn't sound like they were really lovers, or something, I don't know, but I wondered if she was trying to make it clear they were able to be split up if it was necessary. If I so desired it. Is that what she was on about?

Anyway, I was distracted cos I had bad gut ache probably on account of that batter and a too tight belt. So I popped off a couple of holes and popped off a couple of times to the loo then after one of Susie's cigarettes and a third trip to the jock-house I shot buckets of diarrhoea. So that was better after that. And then teas for after; camomile for she and peppermint for me at the waitress's recommendation to calm my guts. I didn't have enough money, as it happened, so I had to scab a fiver off Susie. Which she gave willingly, highly amused at me trying to chuck money about when I didn't have any. So I blew the forty quid and dumped the food before I could digest it, anyway.

Outside, before we drove off, Susie let King Reg out to piss and crap and dash about some before pushing him back inside and allowing me a brief embrace that felt like goodbye. But I wanted to stay and walk with her in the dark before we had to drive back and part, and I should have said something. She wasn't to know. And, disappointed, I let her urge me back into the passenger seat. Eager as the dog, and just as pushed-about.

I sat by her, in the car, sad. Her arms were bent and hands close on the wheel in prayer and as we drove she asked if I wanted to come back to Ladbroke Square with her.

"Will you come back with me?"

"What for?" I asked guardedly, making as hostile a face as I could manage.

"For me," she purred, and she said that Huban wasn't there tonight and wouldn't be back till the weekend. For me! Christ what a bitter gift she was offering! Did she realise it?

That hopeless, deadinside feeling I had in the car for the short ride home was because I had no choice in this gamble. Knowing I wanted this woman so much and that I could in no way stop myself screwing her whether it'd hurt me or not. There was a terrible cold bit in my stomach. Or maybe I was hungry again.

Bitter or whatever, though, what a gift! After more than a year of starvation I got served a three-course feast of fucking, sucking, licking, cuddling, kissing, caressing, talking, laughing, shouting, moaning, and Susie telling me "I'm coming!" like I thought women only did inside the sheets of Men Only. Well, Susie said it. Bit different than Biddy's vivid silence wasn't it? And maybe not twenty-three positions in a one-night stand, but more than five anyway and it included the floor and hanging off the edge of the bed, but not the kitchen sink yet. And then dessert. Christ she sucked me like she'd sink without my gametes swimming inside her belly and when I came I almost shook the life out of myself. Maybe I really hadn't figured out what my cock was for till then. Never knew it could do that to me, anyway.

And she fucked on top of me professionally with her professionally beautiful ass piling hard into my professionally Army-drilled thighs, juicing up and down my rubbered shaft and calling out all kinds of wonderful precision-engineered things. Yes, rubbered shaft. Oh, Lord, what worse crime in our magickal sex act? She reached out her Mates from a bedside drawer and had me try most of them on. Yeah, made us—made us commit spermicide. And all thanks to Huban's consideration in going away this weekend. What a top guy. He was my hero. I was gonna name my first son after the bloke.
But let me rewind a bit, I'm getting ahead of myself. We got out of the car and, in the big room, the dog had gone for his bowl after our run around the square (two laps of the gardens of earthly delights, me and the dog while Susie observed, amused) and licked and splashed and spluttered while I just breathed heavily while my heart slowed down and Susie disappeared and came back and asked me if I wanted any tea or coffee or water or anything. Oh, put on a CD, she said. I found the Joshua Tree. Wine? Yes, wine. And between bloodlipstick kisses she poured me Pinot Noir with cigarettes.

I sat on the arm of the sofa and she came and put her knees either side of my thigh and sat on me, pussypressing herself and kissing me all wet with that big mouth and plump lips.

"Let me ask you something." I said.

"Uh-huh?"

"Are the cameras off?"

She laughed and took me round, showing the little red lights were dark and that the closed-circuit VCRs were off, too. And would stay off.

"It's only Huban who switches them on. And when the tapes run out, if he doesn't change them, they switch off. It's not one of these automatic jobbies."

We got back to the big room, the Albert Hall, and when I dropped down with a big half-bottle-sized glass of wine, black in the darkness, to pay attention to the dog she knocked me over onto the Aztec rug (and the glass went spilling—"Oh, don't worry about that!") and she was on top of me, undoing my shirt, quickly with deft buttonfingers, right down to the belly. And she kissed me and the dog was going mad and when she drew away, the dog took over at my face with its wet-slavery lips and licky tongue. My God, where does the licky woman end and the licky dog begin? This, I thought, is great except for the dog. She caressed my chest; my big, hard, ruggy, shaggy chest with her long lovely hands.

"Do you want to go to bed?" she said.

What I didn't want was asking twice. I took her and carried her down the stairs and, in the dark, into her room. Except that it's their room, not just hers. And he was there somewhere my God I could feel him, watching us with that dead, wet expression.

I got the last of the mineral water from the kitchen and when I came back and shut the dog out we kissed and stripped one another, quickly, and when the last undergarment hit the carpet she lay still and I knelt back on the bed, naked, in the light from outside. Watched her shape in just the shine from a waning gibbous Moon and the far, faint room lights from across the backs of the houses. Did she know I could kneel like that for days no problem?

There was something unusually naked about this woman. I was convinced I'd never seen anyone naked before; not like this anyway. Or had she never been so naked? Had I had cut into an orange and exposed rich, dripping flesh that had never been exposed before? And while I gazed and gasped, she had the nerve to tell me I'm beautiful and that I have a fantastic body. She had the nerve to say that when all I could do was stare and almost weep for want of any way of expressing my delight in her.

Her pubic hair was trimmed—freshly, I wondered—down to about a bristly number two between slim thighs, her breasts no bigger than fat babies' cheeks and in the middle red as babies' mouths. This was a form restrained in build and in curves; no waste—a woman's body and nothing extra. No Vanessa Feltz, this. I tried to take it all in; to look at it all at once. I arranged her some ways on the bed and kneeled back by the window taking it all in by the light of outside.

If the shared, found, stolen, coveted, glossy pages of flesh are a boy's first experience of sex then that scopophilic method of worship never leaves him. The words and pictures have touched him more than any other holy book. But it was too moving, some injustice here—she was too good for me, too good a creation to fuck. She noticed and touched my scars, the mess of scars on my side and stomach where I was shot and sewn up. And she showed me the tiger-shark bite on her left arm (which is worlds cooler than my scar) and after she'd finished her attack, I had bites all over me, too; the sweetest girl bites. She is truly the sweetest, most erotic, fascinating thing I ever had and I never even had her. I never will. She had to travel to Edinburgh that weekend but she promised she'd phone me the minute she got back on Monday afternoon. She actually said that. Later I wondered if she would. But not yet: hang on.

First thing I did was to eat her. I went to the bed to kiss her, her neck, listened to her sounds, attended to her breasts, stopped off at the belly then kissed inside her thighs, near her pussy, either side, blowing gently on the lips as I passed and then softly touching my tongue to her. Started eating gently, and just went on doing it.

U2's In God's Country was echoing loud like crystal in the huge room upstairs and I looked from where I was planted down below her belly up at those goldmine hills thinking my God what a view. This is where I will build my home. My hips were right down on the edge at the foot of the bed, right leg stretched out on the floor and, to stop it sliding away and taking me with it, I bent up my left leg and put my foot against the little bedside cabinet against the wall to brace myself.

"Did you do this?" she said after she'd been to the loo.

I could see by the flattened carpet I'd pushed the cabinet out of place an inch or two so I straightened it.

She laughed while I explained I must have pushed it with my foot. "Well, that's your job afterwards, every time you eat me," she said. "Be sure and put my table back where you found it!"

The blowjob was unbelievable. There was some seriously violent toking going on down there, as if she was trying to light the biggest joint you ever saw. Except I couldn't decide which end the fire was at. And she crawled up to kiss me. She'd tried to swallow it all but a thin smear of my warm seasalty spunk was on her lips and more inside, on her big wet strong tongue that she put in my mouth. And you know what? I didn't mind. I'd just come and I was still crazy about her.

See, a bloke thinks best when his mind clears of madness right after climax. The sex urge no longer leads him with its fingers through his nose like a bull's. It's about the only time he's truly himself and it doesn't last long, the clear-thinking. I reckon Einstein must have just choked his chicken right before realising that gravitational fields are equivalent to accelerations of the frame of reference. Know what I mean? It's the opposite for a woman; when she comes the world looks artificially rosier than ever and warm. When a man comes whatever he says or feels is straight from the head and not from the balls. A bloke's heart never speaks, though, even if his balls can do a pretty good impression of it.

Me and Susie alternated foreplay and fucking till our muscles and joints ached, but we never got sore. I used to get sore at University fucking Belledéesse because we fucked so hard and so long, but not with Biddy cos we didn't. I fucked Susie long and hard but I didn't get sore cos, even stubbly-shaven, she's cotton-wool soft.

You spoil me, she said after the umpteenth orgasm I'd licked out of her and by the end I'd been down on her so much in the dark I said she ought to install landing lights down the inside of her thighs, make my job easier. And we got tired and we probably slept briefly but it seemed such a waste of our talents. She rolled away from me and I kept looking after she'd turned away from me and her face and body'd gone dark-side. But it never gets entirely dark during a night spent with Susie. I noticed that.

"Oh, I've got to have a squashy pillow," she said. "Can I have that one?"

"This is a squashy one, is it?"

"Mmm."

"All pillows are squashy, aren't they?"

She murmured sleepily, "This one stays squashed."

"Oh, right. You don't like them when they bounce back? So you mean you want a pillow with plastic rather than elastic qualities?"

She turned to me one last time to smack me and pull a face. "I told you not to get scientific on me."

About a minute later, it seemed, we woke up and she kissed me good morning—true, Sun-up morning I mean—and said, "What's the day like?"

I looked at the window. "It's kind of big and bright."

She rolled on up to me and took my hand and kissed a finger or two then moved it down over that puff of fur that signals the nest where her little sexual bruise lurks.

"I'm glad you're here. You can help me with something I like to do sometimes in the morning."

I put my fingers apart on her stubble-furry integument and opened her a little, just so I could get my middle one to the pricey pearl in her folds of wet and sticky oyster-flesh. And I shuffled and tried to get my right shoulder-joint where hers is, which required some contortion, so I could rest the heel of my palm on her mons Veneris. My first touch was so gentle she couldn't have felt it. I tickled my finger over her and then again and again until I knew she could feel it. Cos I could hear her feeling it.

"Is this how girls masturbate?" I asked her.

"Something like it," she said. "Something very like it."

A noise shocked both of us and Susie jerked her head around like a deer scenting something on the wind. King Reg had started barking, too, and we could hear him padding around at the bottom of the stairs.

"That was your doorbell," I told her.

"I know," she said with her eyes wide. "Hang on."

She threw on jeans and a dark grey woollen M&S cardigan and went out to answer the door. I heard voices, both women's, then the front door shut and Susie was making a fuss of the dog and she was in the kitchen with him for a long time, probably feeding him. Then she came back in the bedroom.

"Just Marcia," she said, disappearing into the en-suite and going to the loo.

"Thank God for that," I said.

I could picture her, from the sounds, seated, jetting the hot stuff, made gorgeous by coming from her. All that association with her sex and I was in the mood for eating her. Could've lapped her up better than seven sheets of Andrex. The toilet flushed.

"She just popped round," Susie said, coming out with her jeans undone and flapping. "She wanted to drag me out shopping but I said I was ill."

I was there next to her in a leap and off came the cardie and the jeans peeled down to her feet and she stepped out of them. I fell to my knees in front of the standing Susie and pressed her belly against my head as if perhaps listening for a rival breathing—some child of hers to take my tenuous place. I told her she was naked, that it was beautiful and rare from being clothed so much of the time. I called her a naked young primate and she hauled me to my feet and shut up my raving with a frantic and long kiss.

"Coffee please," I said. "Black." God, I was knackered. My head felt light, spaced-out from no sleep. I'd just cranked up the stereo again and we stood in the kitchen, both naked.

"You won't have milk in it?" Susie moaned.

"No."

"Go on, have milk,"—she tried to pour some into my mug but I gently stopped her.

"Who are you—Mrs Doyle?"

"You always have it black?"

"Milk spoils the taste," I said.

"It changes the taste," Susie admitted. "But it doesn't ruin it."

It made me smile just to look at her that morning. I was happy. I'd forgotten how delightfully soul-soothing it is to spend a night with a beautiful, bare-arsed woman. I asked her about the lump in her breast that Marcia was talking about the day I cleaned her flat. Oh, that was nothing. It's gone. It went when my period did.

She said, "I think we'll go round the corner and have a pizza for lunch, do you think?"

I thought that sounded just dandy.

"Soon, okay?"

Soon, I agreed.

We took our coffees back to the bedroom and got in again, warm and toasty in the bodyhot duvet.

"Pass me a pillow."

"Do you want a plastic one or an elastic one?" I said.

"I want a squashy one, Everiss. Okay?"

I saw something, some trail of a thought tracking across her face, through her eyes, bending her mouth then leaving it and I wanted to know what. Talk to me. It was about the night in the rain when a strange, dripping man under a brolly had stridden, tall and strong out of the dark and into the light of Brewster's.

"I thought you were lovely," she said. "I thought you had lovely blue eyes. Right from when I first saw you I could feel your energy all over me. All over me! I panicked." She giggled. "But I had to talk to you."

"You panicked? Why?"

"Oh, I do sometimes. If it's important enough." More giggles.

I must've been important enough. I felt it. She told me that the first time she'd seen me, the first second she saw me standing there by the awning in the street under the umbrella, she knew she was going to end up sleeping with me. It wasn't fancying or anything like that, nor conceit, just a calm knowledge. It was what Belledéesse said to me.

I said, "This doesn't seem real. Does it to you?"

She said no. I laughed. Just a laugh of being totally overwhelmed and she soothed me with a long kiss. A kiss that, after more talk and kisses, turned into a warm belly and legs around my waist and I pushed into her; our first bareback fuck of paranoid spread-legged risk-disease sex the sequlae of which I didn't want to imagine.

The drinks got forgotten and cold while we kissed and fucked a beautiful long, frantic missionary: gorgeous. The Joshua Tree was sounding out from the big room trying to outdo my pulsing, insistent, breathing bass and Susie's contralto. And it was during that fuck I found out I could do press-ups all the way through With Or Without You after all.

Susie talked to me, she talked to me for every moment I moved, and for all of the time I was still, and I looked at her eyes and watched her mouth cutting the words when she could get the breath:

"Do you know something? No-one else in the whole world can share what we share... can experience this sex between the two of us. Oh God... I love you pushing yourself inside when I'm still tight. I love it when you've got me so wet and horny and you... put my knees aside and kneel there and... I know what's coming. I know you'll shove inside me and I'll get so excited I'll feel so dirty and I'll go mad... with you shagging me and I'll just think of all the places we can fuck. God you turn me on so much... you're... you're getting bigger and harder inside me—I want to spread my legs so wide for you!"

One hand was right round her back to her arse and underneath where my fingers were stroked by my ever-moving shaft; wet like her whole arse seemed to be with her love, with her desire.

"I can't believe how wet you are," I said, and as if with her last breath she managed: "It's what you do to me."

But I wanted more of her words. I said are we fucking she said yes. I said tell me we're fucking. She did. I said tell me to fuck you. She said it. I stopped. I said say fuck me. She said—she begged—fuck me. I fucked her. I told her how wonderful it was to be inside her. I said tell me to fuck you and to come in you. She gasped fuck me. Fuck me and come inside me, come in me. I did.

She said, recovering, with her arms tight round my neck, "Oh my God what have we started here...?" I grinned at her. She said, "We'll never be able to keep our hands off one another." That didn't sound so bad.

"Is it time to go for our pizza?" I wondered.

"I think so. Are you hungry? I could eat a horse."

I said I could eat a whole three-day event so she went off and got a shower in the en-suite. I found the Second Sex Susie was reading, big as a bible, down on the floor beside the bed and I sat it like a baby on my lap and thumbed the pages over. God, look at this. Isn't this Biddy all over? De Beauvoir says that for women to get in the mood, the whole scene had to be right, you know what I mean? Sex pleasure, she says, is: a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.

The tight-lipped Biddy wouldn't have dreamed of breaking the spell like that. Never mind that Susie yells like a tom-cat with a crocodile-clip on its balls and doesn't break any spells, if our French existentialist feminist guru says that's impossible, then it's impossible. Magic fucking spell my arse! I must've been right, too. After all, a man thinks clearest right after orgasm, doesn't he?

Shit, Biddy, what is wrong with me now? I don't believe what I just said—I love you; every bit of you, whether you're quiet or bawling at the top of your lungs, I don't care. I don't want a woman just for crying out loud; I'm not Meatloaf. I wanted Biddy back, just exactly like she was. Point is, my girl will never have orgasms again, and when I thought about that it hurt me to my belly.

Susie came still cuddled up in a towel and I hated her for a moment just like I hated Spuggy that day. She put on her makeup and tried out her look in the mirror. Tried out different expressions: bug-eyes, pout, look from under her eyebrows, look down her nose. Yep, everything on the checklist checked. Then a squirt of Jean-Paul Gaultier perfume out of the frosted-lingerie bottle; sweet and rich and chocolatey like the sex with her. And it reminded me that girls like anything that pleases any and all of the senses. Which is why she came close to me again and knelt on the bed, still in her towel and I pulled her to me.

"Don't muss me," she warned. Shit, would that break the spell?

Still irritated and rememberful I gazed out the window. "Who did you think it was when the doorbell went?"

She didn't answer so I looked at her.

"You mean I should have thought it was Huban?"

"Well, that's woulda been the obvious fear, wouldn't it?"

"I don't think you wholly approve of me, do you Everiss?"

"Why do you say that?"

"I get the feeling you want to preach to me because I'm here like this with you."

"Preach? Am I a preacher now?"

"I think you'd like to be."

You spoil me, she'd said the night before. And I decided it was time to spoil her some more. I spoiled her so much that just before we left the room—she was at the door—and I looked round to check one last time, I saw the little knee-high cabinet was staggered again. So I made sure it was back in place and everything looked ship-shape before we left.

It was six in the evening before we got out of bed. And seven-thirty before we got our pizza. We sat, exhausted, happy, looking at one another and giggling, probably from lack of sleep or low blood sugar or something. Hysterical, the pair of us. The night, the day, had been like nothing I'd ever known. But, sadly, the festivities couldn't extend to that night because Huban the sad fucker'd be back maybe in the night, maybe tomorrow. By which time Susie would be speeding her bonnie boat to Edinburgh to see her folks.

My treat, Susie said after we'd scraped our plates and slurped our cokes. She opened her purse and dug out a lottery ticket and some old Travelcards until she found her Visa. When she picked up the lottery ticket to put it away, "Look at my numbers; they might be the ones," she said. "That's the great thing about the lottery, isn't it, you've got just as much chance of winning as anyone else."

"I thought that was the bad thing about the lottery."

But before I left her I had to mention Huban again, hoping Susie would throw herself into my arms and say forget Huban, he's history now she's found the true reason she was born: to love me, etc, etc. In fact it didn't come out quite like that.

"Where did Huban go this weekend?" I wondered. "Anywhere nice?"

"No," she laughed. "Birmingham."

"What, has he got family up there or something?"

"No, he's working."

"Is he? What does he do, anyway?"
"He makes TV programmes. Mostly for cable channels but he's sold some stuff to Channel Four, you've might even have seen some of his things."

"What is it, interviews and that."

"He does all sorts. Huban'll make a programme about anything, he doesn't care. But he's filming inside some hip-hop or hardcore club or something this weekend."

"In Birmingham?"

"Uh-huh."

"Will you be okay when he gets back?"

"What do you mean okay?"

"Will he ask questions?"

"Huban never pries into my private life." My God. I was her private life now! Is that good? Her private life. Is that all? Well I knew our bodies, at least, were madly in love with one another. I knew that. Jesus. Her private life!

"He never interrogates me," she said. "I don't think he wants to know."

"Uh-huh," I nodded.

"And I don't want to know what he's up to, either," she added. "Huban is in the way, that's all."

"No, I just wondered if you'd give us away. By acting guilty or something."

She laughed. "I won't act guiltily because I won't be guilty. I never feel guilty."

What—she shags people regularly but never feels guilty, or she never feels guilty about anything? Isn't it normal to feel guilty when you hurt someone you love? Has she never hurt someone she loves, or never loved anyone? And there I was just too afraid to ask. Because I didn't want to know the terrible answer to the Susie problem.

But when I got home I remembered that phrase. Huban is in the way, that's all, she'd said. In the way of her happiness with me, I assumed, so was it like Solomon said the first time in my flat when he touched her painting? A dog chained up and kicked and no way to escape. Maybe Susie was a little like that, maybe she'd be happier once I'd freed her. So I scolded myself for my doubts and resolved not to have them anymore. The girl gave me last night her mouth to die for and her time to share with me and her body to love. And she would again. Huban was in the way, that was all. The woman I'd made love to so much already was—and it was all that mattered—beautiful.