Wendy likes it

A couple of Sundays ago I cooked the girls a Pakistani recipe from the Guardian, a dish of herbed cream cheese in chapattis. Kirsty and boyf turned up, all unfocused eyes, and garrulous of their hedonistic weekend, of which they reveal precisely enough.

Chapatti dough takes some rolling out, and I was going at it with the rolling pin. "Look at him," said Kirsty's boyf. "He's really determined to impress us." "Fucking Pakis," I said back. "Why can't they eat ordinary bread?"

My girls asked them about their weekend. They'd been to Clitheroe, and had a trawl round the charity shops. "She got this great top that you can see her nipples through," said boyf, and we all laughed.

Later the same evening, there was half an hour when it was just me and Kirsty. Somehow the conversation got onto the way that all three of our daughters are constantly policing themselves into bisexuality. They comment all the time on the physical attractiveness of women athletes, TV presenters, and so on. I said that I thought that for their generation toying with bisexualism was perhaps a substitute for the lack of subcultures.

"Has Fiona ever told you she's gay?" I asked.

"Yes, well, that's what's she's said to me, although how you can say that without having had a sexual experience that involves someone else I don't know."

"Well, we'll see. It's a bit fluid, isn't it, all your life."

---

We were altogether again on Easter Sunday. The hopeful-looking cat had her usual gelatinated suspension but the rest of us had a vegetarian roast.

Afterwards, the girls drifted off to giggle online and exclusively, and me and Kirsty took the second bottle into the kitchen. She asked me about the house I rent.

In a slightly more censored form than what follows, I told her: I am behind with my rent; I don't like the confounding of the financial and the emotional that has arisen because Seriouscrush, a woman for whom I had an involuntary overwhelming passion, is now my landlady. I dislike never knowing who is in when I get back, and lodgers shitting and pissing and flushing and stair-clomping on a schedule that doesn't match mine. I don't like being interpellated into an overseer, the rentier. And I don't like living on a mainly Muslim street, with its nice apartheid.

Kirsty nodded through all this with her customary patience. What followed was a great surprise.

She said that her and boyf have long wished to live together, and suggested that I could rent the house in which the girls have been brought up and still live, for the now small mortgage and the bills, and as well it being my home, we could keep it on as a permanent homely refuge for my daughters.

The idea of regaining some more practical and fatherly link with my daughters, and perhaps also have a closer friendship with Kirsty, is a most attractive one. I would love -- even that strong word is too weak -- to be more a part of my family again, rather than having to cope with the necessary distance of social relations involved in sharing a house with strangers.

I discussed all this excitedly with Trina, who said I could live on her narrowboat in the meantime if I wished. It's looking a bit unloved at the moment and in a state of cold, slow decay from being uninhabited. Its upkeep would be cheap and it would preserve an asset for her.

I spent a long time composing an email to Seriouscrush about this. Putting the computer and myself to bed, I immediately felt a happy relief that my days here are numbered.

---

Wendy and Kitty took me out for my birthday to the yoghurt-knitters' cafe. We had a couple of Wendy's spacecakes and were feeling that unstable borderline delirium that that produces. Kitty went to the loo and Wendy and I were alone for a couple of minutes. "The problem with this stuff is," she said, "is that it makes you quite randy."

"It does me too. Especially in certain circumstances." I looked at her and she understood.

"You were keeping yourself busy last night as well," she said, which is a reference to a sex-laden text I sent her in the small hours.

"You know Wendy, you've only got to say a word and they'll stop immediately. "Looby. You know I like it."

We went back to hers, put some music on and had a dance, her putting her arms around me at times. Why can't we be lovers, Wendy?