i The Poisonous Prawn

In the spring of 1998 Martin Remnant called and offered me lunch at a restaurant of my choice. I imagined that he wanted to tell me to keep away from his wife. I was confident I could deal with whatever he had in mind so I accepted and suggested the dining room upstairs at the French House for no other reason than I liked the food. The chef was an Englishman who had lived and cooked all over Europe. He and I both liked offal.

As it turned out Martin Remnant had a far more intractable problem than a wandering wife. He had three refrigerated containers of unpasteurised prawns he couldn’t unload. The prawns were long past their sell by date. If he defrosted them anywhere in Western Europe they would be declared unfit for human consumption and converted to fertiliser. Keeping the prawns frozen was costing him money and the process of defrosting and having the prawns condemned would cost him more money.

Martin Remnant was the fifth-generation scion of one of the smaller commodity trading houses. Remnant and Remnant bought and sold tea and coffee, pepper and ginger, chilli and asafoetida, cashews and nutmeg in the great trading ports from east Africa to the South China Sea by way of Hamburg, Cochin and Singapore.

Remnant was the husband of Samantha Bright. I had been at Roslyn School with Samantha’s brother Marcus. Marcus and I were good friends. He was dim but charming. I loved him for his beauty and he loved me because I made him laugh and for the war of attrition I waged against the Roslyn School authorities. Our relationship never got more physical than a chaste hug but in every other way it was a love affair.

Sam was tiny with wrists like sparrow’s ankles. She had been neglected as a baby. Her mother was described by the family as neurotic but in fact she was barking mad. I had been a half-term guest at the Bright’s house in Putney a couple of times and when we left school Marcus and I kept up our friendship. In the summer I was nineteen he invited me for Sunday lunch. Nina Bright, the mother, did not appear though a place had been laid at the table. No one commented on her absence.

I drank a couple of beers before the meal and managed to be quite funny at the lunch table. Sam laughed at my jokes and blushed when I spoke to her. I was flattered. She had thick brown curls and a few large freckles across the bridge of her nose. But she was sixteen and I was a nineteen year old oaf, all grown up and already complicating my life with extra-mural activity, plus she was Marcus’s sister. I honestly didn’t give it a second thought.

A decade slipped by. From time-to-time Marcus and I would meet for a drink and once a year we went walking with a handful of old friends in the Lake District. Sam married Martin Remnant. I was invited to the wedding but I was busy somewhere else. Then Marcus was killed while driving his car too fast on a twisting road in North Oxfordshire. Officially it was an accident though we all knew that he had taken his own life.

I was asked to “say a few words” at the funeral which took place in the Putney Vale Crematorium. The chapel was packed. I told a couple of mildly funny stories about Marcus at school and everyone laughed in relief. Then I recounted how, a couple of years before, Marcus and I had gone for a walking weekend staying in The Three Shires in Little Langdale. It was January and the high fells were thick with snow. Whichever way you turned the views were extraordinary.

On the Saturday we walked to Cathedral Cave, along the stream to the Slater’s Bridge, past the Tarn and up onto the Wrynose road. It was already getting dark and the temperature was plummeting. We stood for a moment catching our breath. We were standing in deep shadow but the tops of Swirl Howe, Wetherlam and Coniston Old Man were catching the last of the sun from the west. The light reflecting off the snow on the Coniston fells was bathing the tops of Great Gable and the shoulders of Scafell Pike in an earie luminescence.

“Would you look at that.” Marcus said.

The lights were already on in the Slater’s bar when we got back to the Three Shires. We had the narrow room and the fire to ourselves. I went to get a couple of pints. When I returned Marcus had fallen asleep. I put the drinks on the table and sat down. He showed no sign of waking. I reached forward and taking his nose between my thumb and forefinger pinched gently until his snoring stopped. After a moment his eyes opened and he said

“Much as I love you bastard, you had better have a fucking good reason for waking me up.”

“ Your beer is getting cold”

“ Fair enough” he said.

I had pinched my nose to imitate Marcus. A long silence greeted the end of my tale. I began to fear that I had completely misjudged the moment. My heart sank. I cursed my own stupidity. I should have cut the bad language. I should have cut the story all together. Then someone began to laugh. Soon half the congregation were laughing while the other half wept. I went back to my seat. My shirt was so soaked with sweat it had stuck to my back.

Nina Bright was present at the service but not at the wake which was at a pub in Putney. I collected Pinchbeck on the way from the Church to the Pub. Jim was at home caring for our children. The Pinch and I climbed a staircase to a large upstairs room where Marcus’ father, Maxwell Bright, and the priest who had taken the service ~ who was a family friend ~ welcomed us.

Maxwell Bright made a starkly lonely and tragic figure. He had a large, hooked patrician nose and a great head of silver-grey hair. His facial hair, his eyebrows and moustache were still black. He took my right hand in his while sweeping his hair up and out of his eyes with his left. His hand was large and warm.

“Joe, thank you for your kind words.” he said. Sam was nowhere to be seen.

“I’m so sorry sir” I said and introduced Pinchbeck.

“Thank you so much for coming” he said, “I have heard a lot about you”

“ I’m sad about Marcus, Mr Bright” she said and we went to the bar and started to get drunk.

“ What has he heard about me?” Pinchbeck said.

“Who?”

“Marcus’ father.”

“Oh nothing. He thinks you’re Jim, he’s never met her.”

After half-an-hour Sam appeared and introduced us to Martin Remnant. I introduced Pinchbeck and the two women embraced. Sam, who seemed to be hardly present, prolonged the embrace. Pinchbeck is small and slim but of the two women resting in each other’s arms she was the most substantial.

Martin Remnant seemed angry. It was as though he begrudged the time and the money spent on the funeral and the neediness of his wife. I couldn’t work him out. His background interested me. I had been looking forward to meeting him, though obviously not in these circumstances.

For now I excused his behaviour. I supposed that the loss of Marcus accounted for the aura of impatience and annoyance that followed him around. Later I would have plenty of opportunity to discuss Martin with Sam. Almost everything about me annoyed him, Sam said. I didn’t seem to work but I never seemed to be short of money. He was wrong on both counts, I worked very hard but I spent the money I earned without much thought for the future and never had quite enough to be comfortable.

Martin thought that something had happened between me and Sam, a long time ago. He was wrong. He had a strong suspicion that Sam had been underage when the imagined events took place. The visions of an underage Sam having sex with another man inflamed both his lust and his anger equally and to an unbearable intensity. He was sick with an uncontrollable sexual envy that made him hard and the all too rare adamantine endurance of his erection mocked him cruelly.

Sam had little to say on the subject of Martin’s sexual confusion. She spoke at length, however, about what she called his “delusions of grandeur”. Life and most of the people he encountered, she said, rarely treated him with the “respect” he imagined was his by right. He had neither the intellect nor the emotional intelligence to cope with life outside the boardrooms of forelock-tugging commodity traders who had lived off Remnant and Remnant’s patronage for generations. Martin was always “away on Business’ when he didn’t need to be, Sam said. He needed the reassurance and affirmation to be found only in countries that had yet to grow out of centuries of colonial deference.

You mean he’s am arsehole. I suggested.

-:-

At the wake Sam thanked me for speaking for Marcus. She addressed me as though I was a stranger who had helped her to lift a heavy suitcase onto a train. Then with a rush she started to cry and pushed herself into my arms. Martin could have offered to comfort her and I would happily have handed her over. But he remained sullenly unengaged.

Sam had not wept at all during the funeral service. Now she sobbed and clung to me. Her body shook with squalls of grief. I felt my dick stirring in my shorts. I wasn’t surprised. I tried to pull away from her but the more I retreated the tighter she held on seemingly unaware of my arousal as she pushed her pelvis into my groin.

Maxwell Bright caught my eye and walked swiftly over holding out his arms to receive his daughter. I gently pushed her in his direction. He led her away and when I turned back Martin Remnant had disappeared.

ii TALKING DIRTY

A little over a year after Marcus crashed into the bridge I received a printed invitation to “a party for Marcus” to be held at the Remnant’s house in Highbury. Sam had written please come across the bottom of the invitation. I phoned Pinchbeck. She knew I had unfinished business with Sam. Now I asked her to come to the party as The Beard.

“It’ll be fun, this party” she said. “Will there be wailing and weeping and all that stuff, and rending of clothes as one might expect at a wake in a civilised country?”

“This is England” I said. “We don’t really do wakes. It’s a party. Everyone will get drunk, some will cry, discretely in a corner, but no more than at any other party. The booze will be of middling to poor quality but there will be lots of it. The food will have cost a fortune, it will have been catered; it will be OK but there won’t be enough of it. It’s the way the English middle-classes do these things. Don’t feed your guests too well or they will stay all fucking night. My advice is eat early, avoid the booze and bring your own drugs.”

She laughed and for a while we talked about Kyoto in 1975, the year we had met. She stilled lived in Kyoto, but now she was staying in my flat in Goswell Road. She had been in England for over a month. She was supposed to be finishing her DPhil but had stalled and was always out partying whenever I was in town or called to suggest a drink or a meal. She had met a woman in a jazz club in a basement in Hoxton Square. I had taken her there to see an all women band called That Time of The Month.

“Hello Hoxton! It’s That Time of The Month again”

There was no regular line up and they did not announce in advance who was playing. One night they were a trio and the next there would be half-a-dozen of them. I liked them a lot even though the regular Alto Sax was clinically dead. They usually did two sets starting with Bebop standards with-a-twist and then, as the evening wore on, all dues paid, they would discover Funk and rip the place apart.

I took Pinchbeck to the club, bought her an expensive beer, she started to attract a crowd so I left her to it. I couldn’t find her when it was time to go home. I didn’t see her for a week.

Sandy Forster, the woman Pinchbeck met in Hoxton, was the daughter of three lawyers. She was blond, plump, entitled, and puzzled when she didn’t get her own way. She was amusing and sweet natured except when she “wasn’t herself” which was most of the time. I felt sorry for her. Her mother, a high-court judge, was a monster.

Pinchbeck claimed that Forster had couplets of Persian love poetry tattooed inside her labia majora. I demanded photographic evidence. Pinchbeck said she didn’t know Sandy well enough to ask her to pose.

“You know her well enough to know what she has tattooed up her fanny! How much more is there to know?”

“That’s a very good point” she said giggling like a twelve-year-old, “but it’s going to be really difficult to light the shot.”

“You could wear a miner’s helmet, with a little Davy lamp on the front.” I said and she slapped me hard on the hand in delight.

Pinchbeck was supposed to have gone home to Kyoto to finish her doctorate. She lived in Murasakino close to the Daitoku-ji temple where she shared a wonderful house with Hisako Matsuda, a portrait artist who was nationally famous for doing unflattering portraits of celebrities and wealthy Japanese women.

Hisako quietly worshiped the ground that Pinchbeck hovered above and tolerated her frequently terrible behaviour. The three of us had spent the night together on four or five occasions. I could tell that Hisako wasn’t really interested in me or even in observing me and the Pinch going through our moves and that when she was making room on the tatami for me it was as a gift to Pinchbeck. I liked her for that.

Instead of going back to Kyoto, however, Pinchbeck set up home with Sandy Forster in Stoke Newington.

Sandy is a successful and celebrated author of Young Person’s Fiction. Surprisingly, to me if no one else, YPF is a thing. I have yet to meet anyone who can satisfactorily explain what YPF is in less than a thousand words. When I was 15 I read Brideshead Revisited on the recomendation of Steve Jones my English teacher. Brideshead is hardly young person’s fiction. It’s just a book. YPF has been invented by publishers and writers agents building a totally fake market sector.

I have nothing against Sandy, I think her writing stinks but she can be amusing taken in small quantities. When, however, she heard that I was writing this book, she got her lawyers, Brown-Nose and Fiddleabout, who are building a reputation as street-fighting hardcases, to threaten to fuck me over if I named her in the book. So I won’t.

On the night of the party I met Pinchbeck in the Alwyne Castle. I bought an extra-large G&T for me and a triple Vodka Bloody Mary for her. We drank in silence for a couple of minutes.

“How’s Sandy.” I asked

“Tiring!”

“Does she keep you awake at nights? Chase you round the bed? ”

“No not really, she’s…ummm…… she’s clumsy”

“Clumsy? What do you mean clumsy? I said.”

“You know. Clumsy. ‘Kisses so amateur, they’re like an early form of printing.’ ”

“Fuck me that’s good” I said. “Is it yours?”

“No” she laughed. “I stole it from Laurence Durrell years ago.”

“That’s what I want” I said, “readers who admire my writing so much they steal my best lines.”

“Be careful what you wish for darling” she said, and leaning forward she lifted my hand from the table turned it over and peered into my palm.

“You lead a double life”, she said.

“I know, only two, pathetic isn’t it. I was born lazy”

“You’re a bad boy”, she said.

“Well I try.”

After a moment she licked the centre of my palm with her small pointy tongue. Now she worked in circles, outwards from the centre, outward to the tip of my thumb. Her breath was hot and she forced her tongue between my fingers. I took her bottom lip between my thumb and forefinger and held it for a moment.

“Don’t start” I said. She pretended to be sulky.

“You never visit me in my bed anymore.”

“How the fuck would you know you’re never there.”

She sucked my fingers one by one, taking my thumb into her mouth and sucking before giving my hand back to me.

“Is this party going to be difficult?” she asked.

“Why should it be difficult?”

“Well the hostess will be busy looking after her guests and trying to orchestrate the eulogies for her dead brother while you are busy trying to get into her pants.” 

“I can’t wait” I said, “drink-up.”

We were late to the party. We thought it best to stop in the middle of Highbury Fields to smoke a joint. When we arrived the serious drinking was already well underway and the buffet was long gone. The Remnant’s house ~ three bays on four floors plus a full basement with a separate entrance in a generously proportioned lightwell at the front ~ faced onto Highbury Fields.

Most of the houses looking onto the Fields had been converted into apartments years before, but the houses in The Terrace were each still occupied by a single family. Many had an aged relative parked in the basement “garden” flat waiting to keep their appointment in Samara. Four generations of Remnants had lived in the house. The singer Sade lived a couple of doors down and Michael Ignatieff ~ who would soon go back to Canada to fail in his bid to become Prime Minister while trashing the Canadian Liberal Party in the process ~ lived close by. Pinchbeck woke up when I mentioned his name

“Will he be there?”

“No idea” I said, “why? He’s hardly your type.”

“I met him once at some sort of designer’s hand-relief in Bedford Square”

“I’m told he’s a bit dull…

“Well, yeah, he does tend to talk endlessly about himself in seven languages. Who does that remind you of?”

The house was huge and there seemed to be hundreds of guests. I had a few drinks and started to enjoy myself. I lost Pinchbeck early. I saw her talking to Sade in a corner at one point. Sade was wearing a little black matador jacket. The Pinch had her hand inside the jacket out of sight and was leaning in to whisper. Sade was laughing which was a good sign. I floated around the party making up identities and talking dirty.

Eventually I found myself in a large room where people were attempting to dance. Martin Remnant said hello. I hadn’t seen him since the funeral. He looked miserable. I tried my best to cheer him up. I still hoped that some sort of friendship might be possible and that if not I would at least get a chance to quiz him for stories. I congratulated him on the party and then, trying to be funny, I asked him if the loading limits for the floors of the house would support the dancers. He snapped at me then turned on his heel and marched away unintentionally stamping his little feet in time with the music.

Then Sam found me. In the crush it was easy to press our bodies together.

“Please excuse my erection” I said.

“Oh is that what it is” she said, “I was beginning to wonder if you had a peanut in your pocket.” She reached down and gave my dick an encouraging squeeze. “Do you know,  I think I may have met your erection once before.”

“Ah yes” I said, “I’m err…I’m….”

“Don’t you fucking apologise or I’ll never talk to you again.”

“She tried to pull down my zip and for a moment was confused by finding fly buttons instead of a zipper. Eventually she succeeded and slipped her hand inside. It all felt utterly natural as though we had done it many times before. Her hand was cool and dry, slightly rough, a tiny monkey’s tiny paw.

Within seconds I was on the point of coming but I didn’t dare. I foresaw a prodigious orgasm, delayed as it had been for many years, the results of which might be difficult to conceal. I pulled her hand out of my pants and stopped moving altogether as things threatened to became critical. I asked her if I could call her the next day. Immediately the sheer silliness of my seeking permission to ‘phone her, while she fumbled enthusiastically in my underpants, hit us both and we laughed until Sam had to run upstairs to pee.

I followed her up to the first-floor bathroom but couldn’t find her. The upper floors were quiet and smelled of family life. Sweet and sour children, fugitive echoes, long gone afternoons, one hundred years of solitude. 

I stood for a moment breathing it all in. I had made a terrible mistake. Sam had made everything clear years ago and I was too indolent and too keen for other conquests and, truth be told, too fucking lazy and repressed to take the single step that would have brought us together. 

On the landing I listened trying to locate her but I couldn’t. The tempo downstairs picked up a beat and people started to call out. Not so unlike Pinchbeck’s description of wakes in “civilised” countries I thought.

I climbed higher in the house. There was another bathroom. The towels were damp and the basin decorated with red and white smudges of toothpaste. I searched through the family’s dirty washing and finding a pair of lightly soiled pants I buried my face in them and breathed in deeply through my nose.

Finally I took my problem in hand and came copiously into the gusset of the LSPs. I folded them carefully in-order to ensure the contents remained intact and identifiable. I put them back on top of the pile of washing in the basket and went home alone.

I called Sam after a couple of days and thanked her for the party. She was cool and controlled and I felt breathless.

“I didn’t leave anything behind did I? I asked.

“I don’t know”, she said “did you?”

“I just had a feeling I came away leaving something behind” Her voice tightened, and I thought perhaps she was swallowing a laugh.

“Well, if you’re passing, do drop in and we can have a good poke about” Now it was my turn to smother a laugh. I imagined being in bed with her. I was thirty-five and she was five years younger.

In the three or four years that Sam and I were happy fuckbuddies I only saw Martin Remnant once and that was after the event. It was 1990, we bumped into each other in the Deloitte & Touche suite at the Arms Park where the Barbarians were in the process of thrashing Wales. It was halftime and the score was twenty-one all. It looked like it was going to be a classic. Remnant was sober and I was drunk. We were forced together by the scrum in front of the bar.

He did not offer to shake hands. I was drunk and angry. Very angry, with him. I stuck my hand out and when he ignored it I prodded him in the stomach. He gave me his hand and just as quickly withdrew it. It was too slow. I tightened my grip and pressed my thumb into the back of his hand. He flinched and the colour drained from his face.

“Martin Remnant” I said, “What are you doing here? I don’t suppose Matron knows that you’re out drinking with the big boys?”

He laughed. “Matron is at home in bed doing whatever it is that Matron does in bed.”

“ Martin, I like you better when you talk dirty.” I said. We spared for a while. I was just getting into my stride when I had to go to the Gents to throw-up. The hospitality suite lavatory had a queue so I wobbled out into the public areas.

“Feel better?” said the man waiting outside the lavatory-stall when I had finished heaving my guts up. I gave him the look but he was too pissed to notice. He was tall and slim. So well dressed that I can’t remember enough to describe what he wore. He spoke in an upperclass drawl. I didn’t like him.

“Thank you, yes” I said, “I should avoid the pork pies if I was you”.

“I should avoid eating altogether if I was you” he said pushing past me. “it’s a fucking Rugby-ground not a restaurant.”

I turned round, he had his back to me. He was concentrating on getting his plonker out of his fly. I rarely lost my temper. Now my anger boiled over. I liked the feeling.

“Suck my dick” I said and pushed him hard in the middle of his back. I had been taught this move but going through the moves with some big Irish instructor with a soft voice and hard hands was different to doing it for real.

The man’s head snapped backwards and then snapped forwards so that he head-butted the lavatory wall, hard. I had not removed my hand from between his shoulder blades and when his head rebounded from the wall I pushed again but harder and he repeated the head-butt exactly as before. I pulled the door closed as he went down among the piss and soiled lavatory paper on the floor.

“Bad man” a voice said in my ear and I felt a great surge of pride and pleasure. When I got back to the Deloitte bar, Remnant was nowhere to be seen.

iii THE PRAWNS

I got to the French House early and stopped for an insulator in the downstairs bar. I ordered a large glass of some nondescript but perfectly acceptable red and wedged myself in the far corner. I saw Remnant pass the bar doorway on his way upstairs. He was a few minutes early. I let him wait for fifteen minutes. He was quite terse when I joined him in the tiny dining room.

“You can recommend this place can you Joe?”

“Surely you must have been here before Martin.”

“Can’t say I have.”

I ordered the Lamb’s Liver with a mustard sauce, mushrooms in cream and garlic and mashed potatoes. Remnant had Devilled Kidneys on toasted Brioche with a salad that cost almost as much as the kidneys.

“Here, my treat, you choose” he handed me the wine list.

I ordered a Bruno Clair 1983 Clos du Fonteny 1er Cru. It cost as much as my drinks bill for two or three months.

While we waited for the food he proposed that he would loan me fifteen hundred pounds so that I could buy the prawns from him, and they would be delivered still frozen, to a pasteurising plant in South Africa.

In Cape Town the prawns would be defrosted and pasteurised by being passed through super-heated steam. If there was anything wrong with the prawns, which in all likelihood there was not, the pasteurising would render them utterly sterile and no one would be any the wiser, certainly not “the blacks” who would end up buying and eating them. We would put another nought on the figures, selling the prawns for fifteen thousand and we would split the money fifty-fifty after I had paid back the fifteen hundred.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the racism nor the easy assumption that he and I thought the same way on such matters. He clearly had not bothered to listen to a single thing I had said. I don’t suppose he listened to anyone. He was a Remnant after all.

I didn’t like the tradesman’s parsimony of the fifteen hundred quid paid back off the top and I didn’t like his assumption that I was too stupid to see that the only reason he needed me in this transparent scam was to stand patsy if something went wrong.

In fact he so clearly did not need a partner I thought it must be a trap laid to exact revenge for one or other of the very real offences I had done him. I was a fool but Remnant quintus was just plain fucking stupid.

On top of everything I didn’t like his assumption that I didn’t have fifteen hundred pounds of my own to risk in a little, highly profitable if morally reprehensible crime. I particularly didn’t like this last one because it was true. 

I could have got angry with him there and then. It might have been better if I had. In stead I thanked him for thinking of me and told him I would give the proposal due consideration and be in touch. Then I suggested a second bottle of the Bruno Clair.

He looked slightly fazed as though he had expected an immediate acceptance larded with thanks. When the wine came I order a plate French cheeses and told him about my planned trip to south India and my book on Indo-Saracenic Architecture. The food had been excellent, the wine spectacular, but the coffee wasn’t very good.

The next day I sent him a fax, which I deliberately sent to his office hoping that it might get into the company paper trail. I thanked him for lunch and for his offer before explaining that my other commitments meant that I would be unable to take up the opportunity he was promoting.

About a week after the lunch at The French House, Remnant called me. He made light of the rebuff I had dealt him.

Oh no it was a small thing…something he thought he might put me in the way of …. a nice little earner… keep it in the family as it were…. And I was family…after all ...Sam was very fond of me after that tragedy with Marcus (neat touch that) No! I needn’t worry about the prawns….he had passed the whole thing on to one of his junior staff to sort out….…on the other hand, it was great to catch up and he had been fascinated by what I had to say about south India and he wondered if I would like an introduction to Phillip Montgomery-Smyth, a tea and spice planter he knew in the deep south who was worth a book all to himself ……..

And so I got a letter of introduction to Monty Smyth and Martin Remnant let me know that his influence stretched far and wide and that he might be of use to me at any moment and that he was onto me and the Bright family had suffered enough already and that he trusted that even I was not a big enough shit to cause them further grief by continuing to fuck his wife or worse still crying scandal and unpacking the truth about the poisonous prawns.

It didn’t make any difference. I carried on visiting his wife but I knew that an end of some sort was in the pipeline.

iv THE OPPOSABLE THUMB

After the party for Marcus and the phone call that followed, I had accepted Sam’s invitation to call in “for a good poke about”. Remnant, it turned out, spent a lot of time abroad. The boys were at boarding school. So every month or so I would go round to The Terrace for supper and a bottle of wine and a night of what I will call “making love” for that is exactly what it was.

I parked the car a mile from the house, in the streets that soon would be overwhelmed by the new Emirates Stadium and walked quickly to the house trying not to break into a trot. Sometimes I took a different route or walked straight past the gate trying to see of there were any twitching curtains. I noted the gaps in the security camera coverage. Sometimes I stood in the shadows watching. I couldn’t tell you what I was looking for but the treeline comforted me and old habits die hard.

I let myself into the garden by the rear gate with a key that Sam had thoughtfully provided and then into the Granny Flat - presently without a Granny in residence - and so up into the house proper. At the bottom of the stairs up from the basement flat, I paused to listen. Sometimes I could hear Sam singing in the kitchen.

I eased my shoes off by the front-door and tip-toed into the sitting room. Dog Daze ~ the Remnant’s white and tan Bull Terrier bitch ~ was on the sofa. When I appeared she sat up and shuffled over making room for me to sit down beside her. It had become a ritual, every time I visited I would pay my respects to mistress of the house with five minutes of heavy petting. I stuck my head around the kitchen door said hello to Sam and went to sit with my bitch on the sofa.

I laid my arm and hand along her back and scratched behind her ears and the bump on the back of her skull. She sat with her front legs splayed wide- apart the better to resist the downward pressure of my hand. As I worked the muscles in her neck between my thumb and forefinger the resistance would go out of her and finally, with a loud sigh like a weary labourer sinking into a hot bath, she slumped forward onto the sofa cushions.  

We lay there together like spent lovers until Sam came in from the kitchen carrying the wine and teased me for cheating on her with a dog. 

After supper we took the bottle of wine upstairs and took turns at playing the hammer and the anvil. Gone thirty and two kids down, Sam had a washboard ribcage decorated with a deflated bosom. Most of her secondary sex characteristics were sketched-in or missing altogether. She had no hips, no waist, no buttocks and hardly any pubic hair. In contrast her nipples were large and brown. At the slightest touch they hardened and her back arched and stiffened.

I was intensely moved and aroused by the courage and candour with which she stood naked to let me look at her body. A body no longer “sexy” but a body made transcendently beautiful by the careless usages of time and motherhood.

Sometimes I would catch her front and back, working my thumb and middle finger hard. She would buck and twist and plead for more. Sometimes she would start to weep and I would whisper words of encouragement and love in her ear until she was finished and I would take her in my arms and we would rest, half asleep, before resuming normal service.

One night we were asleep in the guest bedroom on the third floor when Martin Remnant came home unexpectedly and without warning. Talking about it afterwards we were sure that we had both heard the Perkins Diesel taxi engine rattling outside while Martin paid the fare. We were up and half out of bed by the time the front door opened and Sam was by the foot of the bed when Remnant called loudly from the bottom of the stairs

“Sam, are you up there, it’s me, I’m home.”

There was a full-length, vintage, Chinese silk housecoat hanging on the back of the guest bedroom door. It was blue-black, the colour of a bruise. It had silk covered buttons from the throat to the ankle. The buttons were held by golden loops of plaited silk thread, so many that they were never undone.

I watched now as Sam stood naked, preparing to pull the housecoat over her head. She raised her arms to lift the bundled-up gown above her and paused for a second while she positioned her hands like a diver then let the silk fall floorward in a rush. A deep and skin-tight scabbard accepting the service of a bone-white sword. For a moment I saw her, watching me, watching her.

She was out of the bedroom and on the stairs when there came a terrible growling and barking from below followed by a piercing shriek and a lot more shouting and growling and then some yelping from a dog that has been hit hard.

Dog Daze had, I would later find out, come trotting out of the sitting room to find who was making all the noise in the hall and found Martin Remnant fizzing and popping with anger. The dog growled and the man went to pat her and she got him by the right hand, taking the thumb into her mouth and burying her teeth in the Mount of Venus, the fleshy ball of muscle that roots the thumb into the palm.

It seems to me, and I cannot think how this might be proved or disproved, that animals without opposable thumbs, faced in a fight by an opponent with the opposable thumb advantage will go first for the thumbs in a pre-emptive attempt to level the playing field. The thumb, the most important of the five digits is half of the hand and without it we are nothing.

Dog Daze had bitten deep and then hung on, her grip getting deeper and tighter the more Martin Remnant tried to shake her off. Whenever the dog’s feet could find a purchase she would jerk her head from side to side as though she was killing a rat. Martin was contributing to the destructive forces by shaking his hand about trying to dislodge the dog by main force. The dog’s teeth started to “de-glove” the major muscles from the thumb bones as a man might strip the meat from a fried chicken drumstick. At which point Remnant found his metal briefcase and began to beat the dog about the head and body.

Sam saw much of this from the bottom of the stairs. When the dog let go, she said, Martin Remnant fainted though only for a moment. He was sitting on the tile floor of the entrance hall holding the wounded hand and bleeding like a stuck pig.

“Stay there! Don’t move!”  I heard Sam say. “I’ll take you to the hospital. Are you all right?

“Of course I’m not all right, you stupid bitch, the fucking dog has torn half my thumb off.” He sounded as though he was about to faint again.

“Look at all this blood for fucks sake. Look what you’ve made me do now!”.

Upstairs I was struggling to put on my trousers. Silently cursing my choice of fly buttons.

“No don’t move!” I heard Sam say again in an annoyed tone. “I don’t want you bleeding all over the house. I can’t bear the thought of having to deal with those awful people from the upholstery company.  Here, use these, you need to keep the pressure on. I’m going to get the car keys and a jacket. Don’t worry. You’ll survive. “

I heard her running up the stairs and stood up. She came into the bedroom and found me at the foot of the bed one sock on and the other in my hand. She pulled a face, kissed me on the lips, suppressed what was either a sob or a snort of laughter and was gone. I gave them a couple of minutes and then began working swiftly to remove all evidence that I had ever been there. But first I went downstairs to check on my dog.

She was nowhere to be found. I called a few times and eventually she came slinking up the stairs from the granny flat below. She looked at me, her ears were down, she lay down on the rug in front of the fire. I ran my hands over her body, felt her legs and her ribs, ran my hands down her spine and then cradling her head in my hands gently tested the flexibility of her neck and shoulders. She did not protest at this examination and so, I thought, she must be OK. She seemed fine. Chastened but undamaged

Sam and I had been on the third floor. In the guest bedroom. There was a damp patch in the bed and on one of the pillows which I had rammed under Sam’s skinny hips. I re-made the bed with fresh sheets and pillowcases. I hid the soiled evidence deep in the same dirty washing basket I had so sullied on the night of the party. It seemed like a lifetime ago. I opened the window allowing the smells of sex and happiness to disperse. I backed out of the room carrying Sam’s clothes, the wine glasses and the empty wine bottle. 

I disturbed the bed in the master bedroom in the way one might expect a bed to be disturbed if a single occupant, woken in the middle of the night by an unexpected noise from downstairs, had leaped up to investigate. I laid Sam’s trousers and blouse on the chair in the bedroom.

I dropped Sam’s pants and her teenager’s training-bra that I had collected from the floor of the third-floor bedroom, on the top of the clothes in the dirty washing basket in the second-floor bathroom. I used Sam’s toothbrush to clean my teeth then failed to put it back in the toothbrush holder and left a smudge of white and red toothpaste in the basin.

On the third floor one last time I stood at the door of the bedroom trying to spot any tell-tale evidence we had left in the room but seeing instead a scene from a movie I was making.

A soon-to-be-middle-aged couple are lying naked on the bed. The man is two stone overweight and the woman two stone under. They are together for the first time. The man puts his hand between the woman’s legs and she flinches and cries out. I think maybe I stole this scene from the Tin Drum.

In the kitchen I put the food away. The remains of the supper, some potatoes and some green beans, I put in a plastic box and put it in the fridge. I noted how the boxes already in the fridge were arranged, long axis front to back, stacked by size, largest on the bottom and fitted my additional box into the pattern.

I washed the dishes. Two of everything. Then I dried one of everything on my handkerchief and put the dry things away in cupboards and drawers.

I left the lights on as Sam had left them on and went back upstairs switching on all the lights I had erroneously switched off as I retreated slowly down the house. In the master bedroom I turned on the bedside light on Sam’s side of the bed. I turned on the light on the stairs.

I went back down to the hall. My shoes, the shoes that I had left near the front door when I arrived, were nowhere to be seen. There was blood on the hall tiles drying in toffee dark puddles. The shoes were gone. I felt defeated. Then I noticed Sam’s gardening jacket which normally was hung on a hook in the hall. It was lying on the floor. I picked it up, and there were my shoes. I put them on, threw the coat back on the floor where Sam had thrown it and opened the door to the basement stairs.

Turning one last time I saw Dog Daze standing in the doorway of the sitting-room looking at me and wagging her tail. I gave her a thumbs-up and left the way I had arrived.

Sam phoned me as soon as she got home from the hospital to tell me that she and Martin and the dog were all OK. She was alone. My clean-up had been unnecessary.

She told me what Martin had said about the attack. At the hospital a surgeon, called from his bed, had stitched Martin Remnant’s thumb back together, striving to mend some of the severed ropework. Before he started stitching he asked Sam to describe what had happened. He said Martin had been very lucky. They had given him two pints of blood, put him on a drip and kept him in for observation.

“I miss you” Sam said. We talked about how we might meet in future.

“How about the weekend in Paris?” Sam asked. 

“He knows.” I said.

“Yes. He knows. In the past he has always called to tell me when to expect him. And….. he never shouts when he comes home. He was in Jogjakarta. He had hours, plenty of time to send me a message.”

We talked on. I said that I would sell the flat in Goswell Road and buy somewhere bigger and we could meet there.

“What about Pinchbeck?”

“Oh she’ll be all right, she’s hardly ever there, anyway she makes her own arrangements, she’ll try to get into your pants of course but you can take a view on how you want to respond when the subject comes up.”

“Would you mind?”

 “ What? You and the Pinch fooling around together?”

“Yes”

“Only if you won’t let me watch.”

She laughed. “You’re a dirty bugger.”

“True, but you seem to like it, even the buggery part…. especially the buggery part”

Martin Remnant came home from the hospital after two days. Sam brokered a meeting between the man and his best friend. The dog seemed to have completely forgotten the events of the previous forty-eight hours and the master seemed satisfied that the dog was not really to blame.

On the first Saturday afternoon after the event, while Sam was playing a tennis match, two dog handlers called at the house and took Dog Daze to the vet to be “put down”. Sam and I never met in private again.