Me and Erica arranged to meet down the pub "for an hour or two" in the afternoon. That was the plan anyway.
I've never had any sexual attraction to Erica, but as she sat down, in a tight cerise top and crossed her legs in tight black jeans, her angled hair just long enough to point over the top of her tits, and all her gestures, I had to suppress an illegal impulse. I wondered why such a fine difference in her appearance could provoke such unwonted feelings.
I used to be Erica's lodger. Life in her suburb has the characteristic shared by self-segregating working- and middle-class areas: the inhabitants can't handle situations and people with which they're not already familiar.
And now there's been a murder down there. Erica knows both the families and the people involved. She thought there might have been an element of self-defence. She's seen the murdered man standing over the murderer punching his fists together in front of the former's face. I said that perhaps he felt like the small man at the bottom of the hierarchy, year after year, and that you can't bottle that up for ever.
She said that they both used to drink at the murderer's house, which was a place "where drinkers used to go. It was really, drinker-y, not just people who drink a bit and do coke and speed, like the rest of us." I laughed out loud at the liberating idea that people like me and Erica don't pass the high bar of "really drinker-y people".
"Everyone's saying [the murdered] wasn't a bad lad. Well, he was. He was a nasty piece of work." The daughter of the murderer has been sacked from her job at a hairdresser's because it was all going round on Fackbook. Her employers found out about it and sacked her.
Such seriousness over, we proceeded to swap the bag of fairydust between us for another ten hours or so. Left the pub and went to another and saw a pretty good local jazz-funk band. I like that genre in any case, but they were good musicians, and I was nodding with my head and feet, and then there was the speed, but it disconcerted me that the bassist turned his bass a little way towards me and looked at me as though he was playing for me, or looking for my approval.
Walking home, I stopped in the car park to sext Wendy. Turned my phone off, went to sleep. In the morning I got a message. "One day that dick of yours is going to detach itself and make its own way in the world. Petal, can we concentrate on what's really important -- true friendship and comrardery. I only have that with you and Kitty. It's precious. Xx."
I felt tolerated, misjudging. I knew it was too good to last. I've got her a postcard of Marc Chagall's Lovers In Blue to give her tomorrow when we take her dog for a walk round the park before meeting Kitty for a drink. Why has it suddenly changed?
Wendy,
I would never do anything to damage one of the most precious relationships in my life, and for my over-sexed efforts to do that I abjectly apologise. See you soon I hope.
She values the static ecology of how me and her and Kitty function. Me and Wendy having a sexual relationship wouldn't damage our threesome in the slightest, but she's probably been brought up in an old-fashioned world where men claim women rather than love them, and put themselves as the controlling first person. I really am not like that. In my head, the most irritating voice of my shadow-self: Don't overreach yourself.
