Male order

I've distanced myself from Hayley over the last few weeks. There's little in it for me. But she sent me pictures of a large diptych she's had commissioned and has executed for a posh restaurant in Cambridgeshire. She painted directly onto its concrete walls using yacht varnish. It was impressive, and I thought that maybe she was on her way to a more enjoyable life where she could enjoy things outside of her crackhead. So, after many calls and texts, I agreed to go round to hers (it's never to mine) after work.

It was a grim night; the wind throwing rain in my face. At hers it was freezing. All the windows were wide open, and my change of clothes remained unchanged into in my bag. I sat in my coat on and my hands thrust between my thighs. She showed me various marks on her legs and neck which she described as bruises, although they were more small red circular eruptions which didn't look like bruises to me.

She doesn't talk in complete sentences, let alone paragraphs. The very disjointed story was that the windows were open because her boyfriend had come into her flat -- presumably wearing a gas mask -- and wiped all the surfaces down with chloroform, before shutting it up and waiting for her to faint on returning home. The marks on her body, she claimed, were the results of a rape or an assault.

I sat there shivering, disappointed that despite such a significant and well-executed commission, nothing has changed.

It is Mel's birthday.

We meet outside a dull but central pub mid-afternoon. She's in my favourite dress and I surge with smiling delight as I walk up to her. She's sitting cross-legged in my favourite dress of hers, which shows her sexy figure off, and is taut against her blackly-tighted thighs.

The Japanese restaurant was on the harbour side and is one of a series of foodie places housed in former shipping containers. The waiter took a photo, which gives me pleasure every time I look at it, magnifying it to look at Mel. I send it to Kitty, Wendy, Kim, and my eldest. The compliments roll in for her. Every man likes having a trophy wife.

Kitty: "Oh wow! What a gorgeous pic. Mel is bloody beautiful. Truly. Gorgeous. That warms the cockles of my heart, looby. You look so happy together... This is fab. Keep the pics coming."

Wendy: "Mel is very attractive," and both my eldest and Kim repeated the bit about us looking happy together.

Back at hers, I achieve my highest ever score at Scrabble, 254, still not enough to defeat her.

I'm not sure how it started, but I tell her about when I used to take my mum's catalogue to my bedroom and wank looking at the bra models. Talking about the Grattan catalogue circa 1980 gets my cock hard. "Do you want me to...?" she says, and we stay on the sofa. "I could see all those images passing in front of your eyes, so I thought I'd better do something about it."

I tell her about sitting in my local and getting talking to groups of girls up from Wigan or Preston, one of whom will eventually pat my hand, saying "well it's been lovely chatting to you, you're so nice to talk to and I hope your daughter gets on OK in Moscow" before perking up and twiddling their hair when someone more with a more masculine carriage walks in.

I never felt more than momentarily disappointed to lose the Wigan girls. I just accepted my market value, which was somewhere between a flat cap and a pint of bitter. But it gives me a calm, not to be part of that economy.

At work, we have this godawful radio station playing 70s hits in the kitchen. I turn it off when the boss leaves, but the songs persist in auditory hallucinations from the noise of the machinery, and it sounds as though the Stylistics have locked themselves in the fridge.