"If you start messing about with my wife, I will kill you," said New Business Colleague.
Erica (last Saturday's bride) sends me a message. "What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?" "Getting pissed with you, what else would I do?" We chat for a couple of hours. Her husband of one week comes in. I like his solid handshake, his hand white with plaster. He's a rare and admirable man, totally trusting in Erica; there is love between them. Though he did leave Kirsty's bedroom in a fucking state when he did her ceiling.
New Business Colleague and his wife, my old classmate, whom I fancy a bit walk in. I do the introductions, comfortable that they'll all get on. "So when are we going to get to meet this Trina?" Erica said. "I don't think she exists." NBC went on a riff about her being a blow-up doll and did a good Welsh accent, since he knows Trina's half Welsh. "'Oh dear, have you got a puncture repair kit?'"
Erica's husband has got chattier with me since he saw me snogging Vicky at the Northern Soul do, which perhaps allayed his suspicions over why Erica and I are out so often. While the girls were chatting about something he was being pleasantly laddish about Vicky. Who is, very much, A-list, fuckable, single, Lancaster totty.
NBC's wife was a bit exasperated with him as he necked a bottle of cider. "Why are you drinking so quickly? Do you know, when you're working next week, I'm going to go out with Cl*f*ord (she always calls me by the elongated version of my actual name), and I bet he'll still be sober at the end of the afternoon." He was getting tired, a long week of perilous, technical, physical work behind him. I felt sympathetic towards him whilst looking forward to him leaving me alone with her. "When you're sober," I said, "we need to have a commercial conversation," hoping to remind him that he needs me as much as I need him. "Don't sleep on the big settee. Use the small one. Go to bed," she said, to his back.
She and I exhaled. Her cerise nails, the crease of her tits; black bra. "Do you know how much I was earning when I had my own salon?" I shake my head with a refusal to reply, as you can only disappoint in any answer. "Four thousand a week. I had a tin, full of twenty quid notes. I was minted". "Yeah, well," I say, the only people who say money doesn't matter..." "Are the rich," she enjoined, completing my sentence as I would have.
She got up to leave. The exquisite pleasure of holding her a fraction too long, of kissing her a little too sensually for friendship. Mutual, desired, never to be acted on.
