by Danny King
Eighteen months was his longest stint without sex. Can you imagine that? Eighteen months?
In those last few months he became really quite hopelessly pathetic; a cross between a manic depressive and a strung out junkie.
Lesser men would’ve given up, cut it off and turned gay/serial killer/train spotter if they’d had to go through what Tom had gone through, but not Tom. No he stuck it out, determined they weren’t going to get the better of him and kept banging his head against a brick wall until he finally manage to con some poor naïve 24-year-old into taking her bra off in front of him. Tina was her name, and an equally hapless and hopeless specimen of insecurity you couldn’t wish to take advantage of. Tom dated her at arm’s length for about four months before leapfrogging into the bed of another girl and dumping Tina 21st Century style, ie. with an email. The email had been short, sweet and to the point. Here’s what it had said:
Hi Tina,
Sorry for not calling back this weekend but I’ve been really busy. Also, I’ve been thinking and I don’t think it’s working out. Hope you understand but I think it’s best if we cooled it for a while. Take care, and good luck at the dentists, I’m sure it’ll be fine so don’t keep worrying.
T
ps. I posted you back your Greatest Love Songs CD but I think I sent it to the wrong address.
I printed this off and showed it to Sally simply because I couldn’t believe it.
I also couldn’t understand why he’d done this to Tina, especially after all he’d gone through himself, but Tom just said that it was his turn to be a bastard.
Well, from that day onwards it seemed permanently Tom’s turn to be a bastard, because the next girl went the same way, as did the girl after that and the girl after that.
Tom’s confidence grew with every weekend and he even started winking at people whenever he said something clever and suddenly he was the bee’s knees as far as girls went. He still didn’t have any luck finding any sort of long-term soul mate but as far as [Tom’s words] “old bikes up against bus shelters” went, he had it all sewn up.
Naturally, not every girl fell for his charms, an awful lot actively despised his guts in fact, but he laughed at his failures as well as his successes, so I reasoned a lot of what he told me had to be true.
“You dumped Su Li?” I said, Tom having told me this while I was telling you about him. “Why?”
“Well, she weren’t all that to be honest. Too many teeth and not enough tits, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t.
“Why did you go out with her then?”
“What d’you mean, you saw her. Why wouldn’t I?” he said.
“Well I don’t know. Perhaps if you didn’t actually like her or couldn’t see a future in it,” I argued.
“Yeah well, I’m not like you, am I? I just like sex.”
“What are you talking about, I like sex,” I objected, loud enough to draw a shout of, “get a room” from the back of the pub.
“No, you don’t like sex, you like having sex with Sally and there’s a difference. I’m talking about sex; sex for the sake of sex. A big pair of tits and a neatly cropped fanny and some bird who’s name I can’t remember lying there and letting me do whatever I want alongside her. That’s what I’m talking about. Just tits and fannies.”
“And they say romance is dead.”
“No it’s not dead, it just has nothing to do with sex, that’s all,” Tom said, taking a puff on his fag and blowing several smoke rings across the bar. “Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re the luckiest bloke in the world. You’ve got a cracker of a wife you’re in love with, a happy and stable marriage and a couple of kids limbering up in her ovaries. I reckon you’ve got the lot.”
“And so will you if you keep on shagging around like this,” I told him.
“Oh no, don’t worry, I’m always safe. I mean, you have to be really these days, don’t you? Not fair on the bird,” he said, with uncharacteristic consideration. “Besides, if you get some disease, you know you have to contact all your old partners and get them to go for a check-up as well. Can you imagine? Christ, there’s fifty-seven phone calls I wouldn’t want to have to make.”
“Fifty-seven!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, give or take. I lost count around about thirty but I think it’s sort of around that mark,” Tom pondered.
“Fuck me Tom!”
“Make that fifty-eight,” he winked.
“That’s loads,” I pointed out.
“Not really,” he disputed. “Higher than average I suppose, but most blokes have had about twenty birds or so they say.” I didn’t offer up anything more to this as my total fell well short of twenty and left Tom to consider this one for himself.
“Fifty-seven. Is that a lot? I don’t know, maybe. Still, there weren’t exactly a lot of quality in there.”
“That’s incredibly generous of you to say so,” I told him.
“I know this one bloke, Martin is his name, drinks in the Duke of York – you met him that one time – he reckons he’s shagged over two hundred birds. Can you imagine that?”
“And has he?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be surprised as he is one of these blokes who’s annoyingly natural when it comes to women. You should see him at closing time, they’re practically hanging off of him, I tell you.” Two hundred? Jesus, that was fifty times the women I’d had and one of my total would’ve been subject to a steward’s enquiry.
“I expect this Martin would think I’m the luckiest bloke in the world too,” I said.
“I doubt it. He’s married an’all,” Tom reckoned.
“So when’s he had time to shag all these girls then?” I asked.
“What are you talking about, he’s still shagging them! Bit bad to be honest. I mean not phoning some bird after you’ve chucked her pants out of the window, or bullshitting that you’re an airline pilot in order to chuck her pants out of the window is one thing, but shagging another hundred and eighty birds after you’ve walked Miss Number Twenty Five down the aisle is a bit above and beyond if you know what I mean,” Tom frowned.
“How the hell’s he get away with it?” That’s what I wanted to know.
“Fuck knows. Maybe his wife don’t mind. Maybe she turns a blind eye. I mean, he might be banging every old boiler in Camberley but she’s the one he comes home to every night, or at least most nights, that sort of madness,” Tom figured. “And besides, they’ve got a kiddy too and women always go off sex after they have kids.”
“Do they?”
“Oh yeah, that’s well known that is. They’ve done studies on it and everything,” he said, presumably to show me he was now talking facts here – not just pub bollocks.
I thought about this when I went to the toilet and concluded it was a load of codswallop. I mean, women not wanting sex after they’d had kids? Dirty birds on every street corner? A twenty girl national average? And Martin from the Duke of York up to his nuts in sluts?
How could any of this be true?
I definitely wasn’t sure about the twenty-girl average. In order for that to make mathematical sense girls had to have a twenty bloke average too then, unless of course it was all down to a handful of old boilers with incalculable totals and broken beds?
Sally hadn’t had twenty blokes and none of her friends had either. I knew this as we’d discussed it a few months before our wedding.
Sally had slept with only five guys in total, annoyingly two more than me. I’d only slept with three (girls not guys – and this included Sally herself) though I’d once enjoyed a spot of foreplay with a French girl on a campsite and had quickly drafted her into my total when Sally told me she’d had five.
So Sally was well below the national average too.
At least, she was if she’d told me the truth and I can only assume she’d told me the truth as she’d never lied to me about this sort of thing before, but it was possible, I suppose. Everything was possible.
Maybe she’
d had more than five men. Maybe she’d even had ten. Or twenty. Or thirty.
If she had’ve done, it probably wouldn’t have been the sort of thing she would’ve shared with her eager young husband-to-be, especially when that poor near-virgin still had two fingers and a whole other hand free after totting up his total.
Maybe she was still at it. Maybe she was like Martin from the Duke of York and had been getting pummelled senseless by two hundred guys while I’d been at work.
I doubted it, because Sally wasn’t the type, but then again who was? You read about these sorts of thing in the Sunday papers all the time and I’m sure these women’s husbands didn’t think they were the type either, but it goes on.
Hmm.
Elenor?
Now she most definitely the type.
I wondered how many guys she’d slept with and concluded it was more likely to be nearer Martin’s total than mine. I thought about her for a while and inadvertently ended up picturing her buffeting and bashing, moaning and thrashing, sweaty, crying, yelping, sighing, stroking, coaxing and sucking her way through an army of hairy-backed gorillas.
Loving it she was. Absolutely loving it.
When the last of them was done, she lay there puffing and panting and doodling her fingers all over her sweat-streaked skin before suddenly noticing me.
“Enjoy the show?” she asked, making no attempt to cover herself up.
I looked down before zipping myself up and realised I had – a little too much if I’m honest.
Sally’s Diary: December 31st
It’s New Year’s Eve, out with the old and in with the new. I’m going to make a real conscious effort to stop bickering with Andrew and just get on with him. I don’t think it’s me a lot of the time, but it takes two to argue, just as it takes two to do most things in life, so I’m going to redouble my efforts and hope this inspires Andrew to redouble his. To be honest we’re not at each other’s throats the whole time. Reading back through my diary you might think we are, but actually most of the time we’re perfectly happy. Well, maybe happy’s putting it a bit strong. We’re together and we’re content. To be happy would probably require something else, so I’ll start with content and see where I can take it.
Other resolutions: to cut out the chocolate for the whole of January, and to stop watching so much nonsense on the television.
Naturally Andrews talking up the gym again but for once I’ve decided not to fall for it. Sure it would be lovely to go to the gym three times a week, take a couple of years off my butt and fit into my old jeans again (I still have them somewhere for motivational purposes) but I think it’s time we stopped kidding ourselves. This isn’t going to happen. For either of us. Why? Okay, I’ll admit it even if Andrew won’t. The gym is soooooooo boring. I can’t even begin to describe it. I’ve come to dread January because every January means another two or three weeks of huffing and puffing on a tread mill or a bike or a step machine before we’re ready to admit defeat and put ourselves through the ritual humiliation of cancelling our membership again.
Well I’ve had it. I’m going to finally throw my old jeans away and accept once and for all that this is the shape God intends me to be.
Hey, you know what, I think I’ve just taken that first step towards that happiness I was talking about.
Chapter 6. New Year, Same Old Story
The crowd was on its feet. They could scarcely believe what they were seeing. This unknown, unseeded, last minute qualifier had made it all the way through to the final and he was matching the undefeated six-times world champion application for application.
“Quiet please, ladies and gentlemen. Quiet!” the umpire insisted and an expectant hush descended upon the hundred-thousand-strong crowd that had literally (or do I mean metaphorically?) shoehorned itself into the new Wembley Stadium for this showpiece final.
“Mr Nolan, you may proceed.”
I took a few deep breaths to calm my nerves, wiped some of the sweat from my fingertips and gripped the mouse. On screen the cursor hovered over StuffIt Expander and I moved it micrometers to the left and right before finding the exact perfect spot.
“Go for it,” I told myself, said a little prayer and double-clicked.
The computer blinked a couple of times then the cursor turned into a tiny clock. The second hand of the clock spun around and around and the crowd rippled with apprehension.
“Quiet please ladies and gentlemen. Quiet!” the umpire urged them again, but it was no use, the tension was just too great.
All at once the menu bar of my Mac went white and StuffIt Expander appeared. I could scarcely believe it but my machine continued to click, whirl and crunch and eventually StuffIt Expander moved across to the right hand corner of the menu bar and offered me a choice of File, iSupport and Help.
The crowd went mental.
The cheering and screaming was almost ear-splitting and it took a good couple of minutes for the umpire to get on top of them again, and when he did, he totted up the number of applications I had opened and found I held the new world record.
Thirty-three applications.
Unbelievable.
The application menu bar almost stretched all the way down the screen and I held it open to admire my accomplishment, as the judges declared me the new Application Opening World Champion.
QuarkExpress, Word, QuickTime, PictureViewer, Outlook, Internet Explorer, iTunes, Adobe, Acrobat, Netscape, RealPlayer, FlashPlayer and so on and so on thirty-three times. They were all open and active. What an accomplishment! Of course, a number of the applications were admittedly pretty small; Stickies and Mac Solitaire, for example, were only around about 100k each, but then that was what made Application Opening such a tactical sport.
“Morning Andrew, I wondered if you had a moment?” Norman said behind me, shitting the life out of me.
I knocked several stacks of papers flying as I tried to click the applications menu closed again but the cursor just turned into a little clock and froze halfway round.
“What’s the matter, crashed again? Hmm, yeah, looks like you’ve probably got too many applications open,” he pointed out.
“Er yeah, yeah, I reckon,” I agreed, quickly reaching behind my computer and pressing the restart button.
“I know it’s the first day back after Christmas and everything so I don’t want to rock your boat, but I just wondered if you’d had a chance to do that report,” he asked, draining me to my very soul.
That report? Jesus, was he still going on about that? It had hardly been mentioned at all during December so I’d figured I’d got away with it, but suddenly he wanted it again? This was unbelievable. Of course he didn’t really want it. He was only asking for it to put me on the spot because I hadn’t done it when everyone else had.
For fuck’s sake!
This was beyond unbelievable. It was just plain petty and it immediately ruined what I’d hoped was going be a nice easy day.
“Oh, er, no, I’m afraid not, Norman. I took all the erm… files home and everything, to take a look at, you know, over Christmas, but, er…” I clicked, whirled and crunched as my iExcuses application opened up behind my eyes. “But, the thing was…”
Norman frowned and watched the little clocks spinning in my eyes as he resigned himself to hearing what the thing was.
Here were my options.
I took the wrong set of files home?
We got a dog for Christmas and he ate my report?
I left it on the bus?
A dog ate it, possibly on the bus?
What report?
I couldn’t be arsed?
Why don’t you just fuck off?
Sally’s been ill?
Shit, yeah, that was a good one.
“Sally’s been ill,”
“Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. Nothing serious I hope.”
“No, no,” I reassured him then quickly amended that before he asked me why I hadn’t done my report then. “Well yeah actually. On and off, yo
u know. I’ve been run off my feet and pretty worried, to be honest.”
“Oh no, she’s all right isn’t she?” Norman fretted.
“Oh, yeah, fine. She’s okay now. Just pretty ill then,” I told him, as I tried to express as much unspoken manly concern as I could without inviting too many awkward and unanswerable questions.
“What was the matter with her?”
Like that one.
“The doctors weren’t sure. They think it was just a virus, but it pretty much laid her out for the whole of Christmas,” I said, desperately trying to shake him off the scent. I didn’t want to go into specifics and start talking about symptoms and rashes and lumps and that sort of thing as I didn’t feel particularly comfortable steering my excuse through these sorts of waters but fortunately Norman didn’t press.
“Is she okay now?”
“As a daisy. I think we both just need some exercise. We’re joining the gym on Friday so that should sort us both out,” I reassured him.
“Well, please pass on my best and tell her to take care. These things can sometimes reoccur,” he said, handing me repeat rights for this particular excuse on a silver platter.
*
The rest of the day ticked along quietly, as work days have a tendency to do, and most people spent it trying to remember what they’d been doing when they’d tossed their files over their shoulders twelve care-free days earlier. Godfrey put himself fairly and squarely in charge of clearing away every last residue of Christmas and even used a wet paper towel to clean the fake snow off the corners of our windows that Rosemary had sprayed last year.
“Oh leave it, it looks nice,” Rosemary said when she wandered around and saw him wiping away her handiwork.
“… mumble mumble fucking Christmas mumble…” was all I could make out of his reply and to be honest I had to agree. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand it was a never-ending Christmas. I liked there to be a definite cut-off point, a “that’s it, all over, unplug the fairy lights and chuck away the cards,” followed by a nice quiet, drab January to help straighten out the routine. Consequently, I wasn’t looking forward to next week’s office Christmas party.