Up till we were actually on the train, I was convinced that I wouldn't be going out dancing all night in Manchester with Wendy. On the day, she rang me saying she could spare an hour or so to go for a drink at dinnertime. I was convinced this was a sweetener to break it to me that she couldn't come, something to do with either the dog or the daughter.
But no. She said that her new dress that she'd bought for the occasion "isn't exactly a shrinking violet dress." "Oh no," I thought, and my mind ran through how it would fold and touch and line her. I wanted her to dance again and pull it up with one hand and watch me looking at her taut hemline across her lovely legs, as happened a while ago at hers.
I told her about my mystery shopping, supposedly interested in buying a diamond engagement ring at a low-end jeweller, in which, not expecting any questions about the "lady", I had to think on my feet, so invented a story about us getting married. "Yes, if I'd known which jeweller it was I was going to come in and cause a scene." A little I love you tinged in my head.
She said that her ex had again been pestering her about what she was up to, "so I just told him: 'I'm going to a techno might with looby'." I wanted to send him a postcard. "Fucking hell, your ex is a goer! One of my favourite positions is the reverse cowgirl and she's great at that and what a fabulous feeling it to be right inside her and looking at her lovely arse. You always seem very curious about us, so I'll keep you informed."
She came round to mine in the evening, and as we were sorting the optical brighteners out she noticed a blue pill fall from my pocket. "What's that?" she asked. "Well, er..." I said, trying to avoid answering. "It's V---." The depth of my self-delusion is so profound, my hopes so incommensurate with what will actually happen, that I thought that there might be a possibility that we would end up fucking, and my refreshments of choice have a dampening effect on one's ardour, which means that the mechanism needs a bit of chemical assistance.
Her dress was superb, fitting over her body as though it were hand-made. We looked as colourful as the event's poster, her irregularly-patterned dress in greens and purples and yellows, me in a shirt with thin orange and yellow stripes and my best powder-blue Italian trousers.
Mdma can creep up unexpectedly and at one point I found it impossible to stop myself "dancing" with my back arched almost painfully concave, striking a ridiculous figure before I fell over onto the floor. As I get older the imperative to conduct oneself with decorum in the presence of younger people becomes more pressing; I abhor the figure of the old crazy. The security man was helpful and low-key. When he came over I thought I was being chucked out, but he just told me to get a bit of fresh air outside for a while. When I got back in, everyone in the club -- well, warehouse -- had reached that sweet spot of shared ecstasy, literally. I started dancing properly again, and a girl came up to me and said "you've recovered well!"
At Piccadilly station, Sainsbury's was opening just in time for me to get a bottle of wine for the journey home. I'm reading Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, and on the train, we had a boundaried intimacy; the impossibility of touch. We were living out Paglia's title: cheap red wine at 6.30am in those squashy plastic cups that require a delicacy of holding to prevent you from blurting the contents over oneself, to fulfil the decadence bit; me, charged with my fifties sex drive which courses in me now in a way it never did in what should have been my rutting years; and then remembering her telling me in the pub a few hours previously "I'm celibate now" -- driving home the sad gulf between our sexual personae.
I was pleased that we got talking to two lesbians. They said that Canal St (the fraying centre of the Gay Quarter in Manchester) is getting a bit pervy now with hetero tourists. The quieter one was either very tired or on something, or both, and her eyes kept rolling so that there was nothing but white.
I've had thirty-five years of drug comedowns. Sometimes I hardly notice them; sometimes they make me sad, the way they strip away the facades upon which life depends; most of the time I enjoy them. I'm unsure of the one I'm in now, but I wrote a postcard to Kim.
I don't want this. I wish I could be her friend without all the longing. I don't want to wank myself to sleep with my endlessly elaborated imaginings of unzipping her -- a poor translation of the sex and closeness I want with her. Every day I live is all about me, and I am sick of it. I want every day to be about being kind to her. I want her to be the first and last concern I have every day.
But I can't. I can't move. My love for her is stuck, stoppered-up. It is the the worst form of unhappiness, because it comes from something I can't change. It's so upsetting. It's turning something that should be giving, and caring, constantly developed and renewed, into something I've got to bear; love deformed into a burden.