Linda

Just to warn people who might be visiting for the first time, the post which begins after the picture contains a small amount of sexually explicit detail, so depending on where you are, your own sensitivities, and what company you're keeping, you might wish to exercise your judgement at this point.

Just for now though, here's one of my favourite things.

It's been bothering me for months that I had lost contact with Linda. She's met some Swedish professor of Economics now so my always remote chances are dashed permanently. I could still fall in love with Linda like that. When we're together people think we're boyfriend and girlfriend. I want to touch her all the time but she doesn't fancy me and I stop myself from raking my splayed fingers through her hair, just to say "that was fucking funny and you're so beautiful, and the two go together." Once, we bumped into each other on a blank Sunday morning, surprised to see each other. A car drew up and a man with a German accent stopped to asked us directions to the police station. As the car moved off, Linda said "Why, are you going to apologise for the Holocaust?"

We haven't been in touch since a night when I turned up, already drunk, to a post-work drink with her and Naomi. Naomi, like Linda, is a university lecturer. I spent most of the hour we were together letting forth a volley of disdain for the course in psychotherapy upon which Naomi was about to embark. I was aware of the bigotry in my voice, and how unreining myself overuled in the moment my sense of the damage it would cause to our friendships. I left for somewhere else, where the jovial ease of the chat was insufficient to obliterate the regret I felt at having ripped up a more valuable conversation with my own words.

This was March, I think. Tonight, reading Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road in the pub, struck repeatedly with the virtuosity of the language, jotting down sentences, trying to learn from it, I started mouthing words to myself as a substitute for someone coming up and saying "Hello looby," or "Revolutionary Road, what a great novel." I half wrote a text to Denise, presenting my sober self rather than the night-time one of her arse, my cock, her white underwear, her long ginger hair disarrayed by sex over the curve of her back, the imagined deliciousness of her cunt made slippery for fucking with the slow repeated stroking of my middle finger and my tongue. But I didn't want sex, I wanted to resolve the estrangement from Linda that has been nagging me for months.

"Linda I know I was a bit of a twat when we were last out but I was just wondering whether you were at a loose end tonight."

To my surprise she replied straight away. She's usually in Helsinki or Melbourne or somewhere. She's out for dinner tonight in Lancaster with the fucking Swedish bastard Professor and an unnamed colleague, and will alert me if they're going for a drink later. I feel taut, glancing at my phone, wanting to go to bed, wanting to wank thinking of having sex with a compliant Denise, waiting for Linda to ring, not knowing how it will work with someone I envy present, who will no doubt have expert bilingual manners.