Fast coloureds

"Hi," begins the spam text, instantly annoying me. "If you're still looking for a tenant, try listing on http://spamflats.co.uk/ you might fill your room quicker. I hope it helps, have a good day, Chloe :)"

"Chloe" has farmed my mobile number from the site on which I advertise the spare rooms here at Acacia Avenue. I ignore it. But Chloe is not so easily dissuaded, and pops up again a week later.

"Hi, did you have any luck with http://spamflats.co.uk/ Chloe :)"

It's bad timing for Chloe, as I am both pissed, and pissed off. I sent two texts, in succession.

"No. Ignored your text as I assumed you'd harvested it from [the other site] and therefore treated it as spam. I don't know anyone called Chloe, unless you're the Chloe I had crap sex with when we both used to work at the flower shop. If it's you, let's have a drink! x!

Sorry, I don't mean to be crude and I apologise for harsh tone there. We weren't meant for each other but I still like you. Are you free any day next day? Maybe Sun Hotel? Or anywhere you fancy? x

---

I met Trev and his then wife in my first year. We were all doing Philosphy (and me, a Joint Major with Music). I took a liking to his wife. She and I didn't become lovers through thrilled discoveries of Nietzsche and subcultural music, but by chatting about day-to-day things in the college cafeteria, during which days the longing to touch her became intense, and I would calculate how to see her on her own. I used to go round to their house and the three of us talked into the night, drinking her powerful homemade cider.

I am quite good at breaking up marriages; or rather, acting as the catalyst to widen the cracks in a marriage into irreparable chasms. I have always been attracted to--in every way--women older than myself (Trina has ten years on me), and I acted as the crowbar in Kerry and Trev's marriage. Trev and I swapped rooms; I went to live with his wife and he moved into my room a couple of streets away.

Kerry and I went to rent a tiny one-bed house in a village a couple of miles from Lancaster. One day I came back from The Ontological Argument or something, and walked into the house to see her bent over the washing machine, feeding clothes into the washing machine. I stopped, looked at her skirt taut across her arse, and was taken, for the thousandth time, with desire for her. I walked up to her; she said hello, and went to stand up and turn round, but I told her not to do so.

I unzipped her skirt and dragged her knickers down and she stepped out of them. She took hold of the washing machine and we fucked, closed eyes avoiding looking into the front-loader as I pulled her arse hard onto my cock. It was one of the loveliest fucks of my life, the kind of fuck that only can happen with the very rare women who can arouse you from nothing at all; I don't need romance. She stood up and clicked the program button round to set the washer going.

She eventually went off with a yoghurt-knitting man in a baggy rainbow-coloured jumper who works in the local mung bean co-operative. We all still knock about in the same city, and whenever I see her I still find her attractive and fuckable. She knows I do.

Trev is one of the most intelligent men I've ever met. He's happily settled down with someone from Yorkshire's professional literary circles--although we will politely pretend to ignore the large inheritance she had in order to fund this, as money is a taboo subject in the conversation of the middle classes. As soon as people start earning more than about £15,000, they become secretive about it.

In their house, I want to curl up like a cat, under its yards of poetry and literature, their cosy contentedness; and his forgiveness, when, in a long life of hurting others, I struck with Trev, a unique nadir of selfishness.

He's just gone home after a cracking weekend. I like someone who can start insistently tapping the table telling me to read Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self, then get pissed down the pub listening to some cracking Hammond organ-led Mod music from Get Carter--"a band in the Booker T mould, but their sound is more powerful"--and be entertaining and charming with some of my Lancaster friends, whom he'd never met before.

I'm off to see some bluegrass music now (one suppresses the question "why?") with The Sixth Former. She's not a sixth former any more--I met her when I taught at The Posh Girls' School, and we've stayed in touch. I know how that sounds, but it was never like that.