Nice try

On Sunday night I was walking home at about 10pm when Wendy rang. We chatted as far as my door before she asked me if I had any wine in. I had -- so got the two bottles and took them round. Wendy is strikingly attractive, witty, and clever, and has excellent dress sense -- I mean generally, and literally, in that she almost always wears dresses, secondhand, close-fitting dresses. Her good-natured rebuttal of my advances came in the form of my Christmas card which depicted the front cover of a 60s novel.

"I'm not entirely sure where I stand with her," I told the taxi driver. "What do you think a woman means," he said, "when she invites you round at ten o'clock?" "Yes," I thought, "but not Wendy. It really is a friendly invite to take fully-clothed advantage of the fact that she's not at work for a few days."

We sat up until half past four, assisted by a couple of games of "Whose line is it anyway" and talking with uninhibited openness about everything except the one taboo subject: how I want her. She's got a gratefully affectionate dog, which she rescued, mid-pregnancy, from the streets of Blackburn, onto which she'd been abandoned by its previous owner in the middle of winter. It snuggled down on an old quilt in front of the gas fire. Wendy put a blanket over her, and after a bit of stroking, the dog started snoring.

Meanwhile, upstairs, things were more tense. As if sensing the repressed desire and cross-species domestic harmony going on downstairs, Wendy's nine-year-old daughter started crying. "She never does this," said Wendy. When Wendy came down she said that her daughter had been wailing, asking who she was talking to downstairs. No doubt her daughter's anxious over her Dad leaving.

At the end, Wendy left herself in my arms for a long time, I sloped my hands along her back and down onto her beautiful waist and back up; the ridge of her bra strap. Silently, I so wanted to fuck kiss her. It was a new year's resolution of mine to stop sending her the sex-tinged texts I've been wont to send, so all I sent at 5am was "Lovely evening Wendy. Please could you wear that dress again? That would be much appreciated." She replied "Night night petal. Yes I will x".

---

Me and Trina stayed in Southport for a couple of days whilst she was working nearby, a harmonious period of drinking, drugs and sex. We resided in my favourite sort of hotel -- creaky and scratched, the calm of the lounge broken only by the occasional clattering to the floor of those tick-tick metal sticks that announce a lopsided elderly person.

Back in Lancaster, I cooked us a tortilla. "Why are you chopping apples?" she asked, leaning over. They were red potatoes. We went upstairs and put some music on. Trina, for some reason, took her trousers and knickers off.

Whilst she danced about in this state -- a sense of distaste arising in me -- I was curious about the contents of a letter that had arrived in my absence. "What's that?" she asked. "I'm not sure. It could be Refreshers or Sherbet Dip." "You mean you don't know?" I have in the past ordered both, but I was confused by the foreign postmark, a land with which I have little commerce.

I poked about a bit on the internet, and eventually found out that they were Sherbet Dips. I haven't had them before but it is Try January. (I can't be bothered with footnotes, but Try January is a practical riposte to Dry January, the imaginary invalid's version of dieting -- ineffectually staying off what you fancy for a month, ostentatiously cutting la bella figura before the relief of recidivism on 1st February). "I am blessed with the lack of any desire for self-improvement," I told Wendy the other night.

She began to berate me for my ignorance. "So you're prepared to take something and you don't even know what it is?" "I'm clarifying that ambiguity now. Now stop nagging. It's like having my mother breathing down my neck." "I can't believe that you're so immature to take something so dangerous." "Trina, you've got a glass of one of the most dangerous drugs in the world in your hand right now."

This juvenile, chav-level argument went on for a while. I might have told her to shut up or fuck off. She went to sleep downstairs. In the morning she came back into my bed, stayed there for fifteen minutes, then did a stage whispered "Alright then, I'll go and get ignored somewhere else."

An hour later, she came back in with some coffee. "A peace offering," she said. I thanked her, drank it, and came down into the kitchen. I said I don't want to have any more nights like that. "It's beneath us both, and it happens over and over again."

She gathered up her things, handed me the front door key and said "Thanks, it's been a blast."

At 1640 she texted "...and tell Viv she was right all along. What was I doing with someone like you? And end of contact now please. Bye x"

At 2139 she was back. "Just to make it real this time I've told people (i.e., your friends) that it's the end of us. No going back this time. I'm really sad but I never want today to be repeated, as I know you don't either. Today was awful. Not needed on the journey. Thanks anyway.

2229: "It's going to be hard x", to which I replied "Well, not any more! :)"

0018: "Now I'm in a comfy bed it's actually OK, phew x"

0135: "It just wasn't quite enough, was it? Sending me flowers and forgiving me my failures and weaknesses was well on the way to learning how to care. But you couldn't quite break through your wall of self, could you? Such a shame. Music is your substitute for caring. Good luck. Be lucky. Be happy."

Tomorrow dinnertime, I'm going for a drink with Wendy.