by Limey Lady
Chapter Twenty-One
(Thursday 21st August 2008)
Trevor Lockwood reversed his luxurious, financed-to-the-hilt Audi into the road then drove away from his house. It was a relief to escape Judith's endless nagging. She was worse than a stuck record: nag, nag, nag, money, money, money, nag, nag, nag. He was prepared to bet she didn't even stop when he wasn't there. She was certainly already going every time he got home. God knew what she would have been like if she'd been in earlier, when those unexpected visitors called by.
Swanny. That little visit had scared the crap out of him. It hadn't been the unease in Swanny's eyes, or the sinister presence of the two gorillas he’d brought with him, nor had it been the image of that Dwyer head case, lurking in the background. No, it had been the simple act of having to admit he had mortgage debts of three hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.
Three hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds!
Judith would drop dead if she found out. It had come as a shock even to him, and he thought he had been keeping track of everything. Thank fuck Swanny hadn't thought to ask about all his other loans and credit cards.
Lockwood didn't know the reason for the loan shark’s visit but guessed his prospects of borrowing more had evaporated. Another sure thing turned to shit. Why did it always happen to him? Why couldn't something actually work out right for once?
Surely he deserved just once?
Over the years Lockwood had gambled and lost on a million dead certs, both business opportunities and sporting ones. Okay, a handful had paid off gloriously, but the vast majority had crashed and burned. Somehow he’d always pulled through, though. Somehow he had always managed to have one last card up his sleeve, one saving ace to drag him out of the baddest bad beat. But not this time; this time all he could think of was to draw what little cash he could on his maxed out plastic, and use that to . . .
Well, to gamble on something. Might as well go red/black at the casino and pray. If that didn't work (and assuming no sucker materialized to buy those fucking apartments), he'd have to kill Judith and claim on the insurance. In fact he'd better kill Judith before she found out about the debts and killed him first.
What did you get for murder nowadays anyway? Ten years at most? He could always plead mental cruelty, probably be out in three. By then all the repossessions would be over and done with and he'd be retrained as a jewel thief or something.
Job sorted.
As for tonight, he was going for a drink. The hole in the wall had refused his bank card fifty quid this morning. At the time he'd panicked and not checked his balance. He’d now been on-line and knew he had credit available of forty-seven pounds eighty-one. So he was on his way to draw forty, then he was going to stop in some strange pub to get hammered. After that he was going to drive home and, if he got pulled by the Pigs . . .
So fucking what? At least a night in the cells would spare him a few hours of nagging.
He stopped outside a mini Tesco and waited in the queue to get his forty notes. When he turned back he saw an enormous guy sitting on the bonnet of his Audi, crushing the suspension. The guy gave him a malevolent grin but didn't shift as Lockwood marched back from ATM.
‘Hey,’ said Lockwood, ‘that’s my motor.’
‘Let's find somewhere to talk,’ the enormous guy replied.
*****
Heather spent most of the afternoon in two minds. That is to say she sped through her daily duties with all the usual diligence but was constantly trying to decide whether or not to call in the Kings after work.
The argument in favour was quite simple. Following the example of Olympic ice skating, she marked her male lovers in distinct categories . . . although, of course, her categories were a little different to those of the IOC.
And, even though she’d not had much use for them of late, her categories were all firmly engraved in her memory.
Required Elements: Size and shape of willy and readiness to keep going down on her.
Technical Merit: Actual use of willy, fingers and tongue.
Presentation: How good he looked, felt, smelt and tasted.
And last but not least: Staying Power.
Marked on a scale of one to ten, her friend, surrogate brother and neighbour Graham always scored sixes and sevens. Seeing as Mr Average would score straight fives, this meant Graham was very reliable in bed; a lover she could safely go back to, time after time.
Last night Sean had scored five, five, seven and a staggering ten. This compared favourably with his efforts a few years ago, when he’d scored five, five, seven and seven. More to the point, nobody had ever scored better than eight in any category before. She was keen to see if he could reproduce and maintain the dramatic improvement.
Afraid of men . . .
Moi . . .
Arguing against an immediate rematch, she probably should catch some sleep and didn't want to seem too hot for him. Sean was a big-headed so-and-so at the best of times. It wouldn't do to give him ideas above his station. After all, all he’d really done was to provide the permanent hard-on and regular ejaculations. She'd done most of the work and a hundred per cent of the creative stuff.
He’d also been flagging when she finally let him take a nap. He didn’t think she’d noticed, but she had an unfailing instinct when it came to things like that. To be fair, he’d still had been hard (and he had been hard again first thing this morning, needing minimal encouragement from her), but back in the early hours he’d been rocking and reeling. If she hadn’t stopped he might have flaked out on her.
An immediate rematch might kill him, she thought with a grin. Particularly now I’ve relocated all my old yearnings.
And she really had relocated them. Any willy block she might have harboured was gone for good. The local supply of shaggable men suddenly didn’t seem so limited after all. Not that she intended to launch a major manhunt straightaway. Maybe this time next week . . .
Unless Sean proves to be even better over the weekend, she added, grinning more wickedly. That might persuade me to stick with him a little longer.
To be or not to be: that had been the sixty-four thousand dollar question. And she’d certainly given it sixty-four thousand dollars’ worth of consideration.
In the end she’d gone straight home and wallowed in one of her infrequent baths. By nature a shower person, she liked just the occasional wallow. Wallowing for an hour or so made her feel clean everywhere in a way spraying water could never match. It also relaxed her, easing away all the aches and pains and tensions.
She climbed out when her fingers started to wrinkle, examining her body in the mirror before grabbing a towel. Not too shabby, and still tanned all-over, even if it did seem half a lifetime since her gap year. Not that she'd given her appearance much chance to deteriorate. As well as regularly working out she shaved every day and always had at least three sunbeds a week.
And sod skin cancer.
She smiled, liking the look of herself. Sean had still liked the look of her too, especially when the red dress came off and he saw her in all her glory. Stamina inspiring or what!
Now she laughed. She didn’t for one second believe that his stamina was solely inspired by her black stockings and suspenders. Oh no, his stamina was a gift from the gods.
And he knows it, the cocky so-and-so.
*****
Heather kept on laughing at her reflection. Cocky was a more than appropriate word for Sean. Even if his staying power was anything but typical, his ego was as inflated as all the others’.
Not that you had to be male to have an inflated ego, of course . . .
Although at least her own was founded on actual facts.
Heather had always prided herself on strength and endurance. Until she’d reached her teens she had been fitter and stronger than every boy she knew. Even afterwards, when the boys had all benefited from their growth spurts, she was still faster and more durable than most. And, sex-wise, males couldn’t begin to compete. However supe
rior they thought they were.
Who needed recovery time? Not her . . . and not so many of her girlfriends, either.
‘I have conclusive evidence,’ Mary Rose had once told her. ‘God is a woman.’
They’d been in bed together at the time. Mary Rose had just been made-love-to non-stop for over four hours without a single break. Normally they shared the workload, more or less, but it was Mare’s birthday so Heather had insisted (Mare was, of course, due to return the favour two days later, when Heather took her turn to be the birthday girl).
‘Go on then, Professor Archer,’ she’d prompted. ‘Hit me with the evidence.’
‘When it came to sex God had a big problem,’ said Mary Rose. ‘Back in the really early days, I mean. She’d already decided that females would carry the babies, because they were more intelligent and much more trustworthy. And she had decided on the basic method of fertilization. The problem was efficiency. Getting the females preggers was essential to the survival of the species. Death by sabre-toothed tiger was not uncommon. As soon as our prototype female came in heat, God wanted her straight up the duff.’
Heather had seen parallels with her dad’s views on farming but said nothing, letting her marginally older friend have her say. Knowing she’d get to the point . . . eventually.
‘She’d already created her male, because he pushed to the front of the queue. She generously gave him a joystick because it suited his personality and made him feel important. But then she realized the big design fault. Her male was so inefficient he needed to fire out ten squillion individual seeds to fertilize one single female egg; or rather, to try to fertilize one single female egg. To do it properly, he had to fire loads and loads of times. And the seed factories just weren’t large enough. The best solution she could come up with was to give him half an hour to make extra supplies.’
‘She could have given him more willies.’ Heather had said, giggling (yes, they were twenty-year-olds at the time, but still giggling like schoolgirls). ‘And she could have given him more testes, too.’
‘Men are just about tolerable with one joystick,’ Mare said dismissively. ‘The idea of two or more didn’t bear thinking about. No, God in her wisdom decided to solve the problem by making women even better-designed than they already were. Women only need one egg, so that bit was easy. Waiting half an hour in-between fucks though . . .’
‘Mare, do you have to swear?’
‘Sorry. Waiting half an hour between loving efforts to make babies just wasn’t good enough; nor was relying on one man’s inefficient sperm supply. It was survival back then. There wasn’t medical assistance or any room for manoeuvre, so she came up with her masterstroke. While men think they can screw just about anywhere, anytime, she made women so they really can. One after another if needs be. I bet those early cavewomen shagged the whole tribe when they were in heat. Stuff finding themselves a soul-mate and letting things take their course.’
‘You make it sound so . . . so . . .’
‘Primitive?’ Mary Rose had laughed. ‘Man-sex is primitive. That’s why I like it so much. Hell, if I’d been a cavewoman I’d have been in heat all the time.’
Heather had frowned. ‘I thought your theory proved that God is a woman.’
‘It does. God obviously favoured females. It stands to reason she made woman in her image.’
*****
Penny had to stop herself from throwing the laptop against the wall. She couldn't remember ever being so furious before in her whole life. Carefully putting the computer on the coffee table she stood and clasped her hands together. Counting to ten in her head didn't help, so she tried letting off steam aloud.
‘Fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks,’ she muttered.
That seemed a little better so she tried it again, a little louder: ‘Fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks.’
And again, almost shouting: ‘Fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks, fucking FIDDLESTICKS!’
She went into the kitchen, splashed chilled wine into a glass and downed it in one. She wouldn't drink like that normally, just as normally she would never swear. But right now she didn't feel at all normal.
Right now she felt like fastening her fingers around Geoff's scrawny throat and squeezing as tight as tight could be.
She poured more wine and took a more measured sip before lifting the glass straight back to her mouth and draining the rest of it. She really, really, really had never been nearly this mad; not ever.
On Dr Strohl's advice she hadn't previously looked at too many sites on the Internet. The doctor had said a lot of the sites (particularly ones based in the USA) had inexact, scary information designed to sell quack products. So she’d previously had a glance at half a dozen UK GBS sites, seen information which tallied with the descriptions she’d been given, and left it at that. When the diagnosis had changed to CIDP she hadn't bothered looking again; she knew what “chronic” meant as compared to “acute”, so what else could be new?
Tonight had been different. Tonight, after Geoff's close shave and ever-so slight improvement, she’d been searching for renewed hope. One of those GBS sites she had scanned had included about a dozen accounts of sufferers who’d recovered to lead normal lives again. Over the weeks and months, as Geoff steadily went in the wrong direction, she’d concluded those accounts were just fairy stories . . .
Or were they? She honestly wasn’t sure anymore.
Tonight she’d decided she hadn’t been thorough enough and needed to start over; and worldwide, not just UK. She could filter out “quack” in her head as she went along.
She’d begun by searching for CIDP and scanning through the first few suggested sites. And, to begin with, everything she had seen had matched her expectations.
Often mistaken for the more common GBS; usually much slower in onset and recovery; varies from case to case; no two instances the same; research restricted because of the rarity of the condition . . .
No wonder it wasn't possible to give a prognosis!
Dr Strohl’s proposed “last ditch treatment” seemed to cover all the medical bases. The only thing that Penny could see missing was the physiotherapy. Every site she looked at recommended intense physio to improve muscle strength and minimize shrinkage. She knew Geoff's muscle shrinkage had made him too weak to exercise, but surely there must be something they could do? It was Catch-22 at the moment: he couldn't exercise to make himself stronger because he wasn't strong enough to exercise.
She had made a mental note to speak to Dr Strohl about identifying some form of physio and pressed on, wanting to find accounts from people who had recovered from CIDP. This proved to be harder than it had been with GBS; a lot harder. With CIDP there seemed to be mostly accounts about how hard it was to get diagnosed in the first place. But she did find some and, although a lot were only partial recoveries, they all sounded like winning the pools compared to where Geoff was at the moment.
Penny had been about to call it a day when something in one of the more heartening accounts caught her eye. The contributor was an Australian who was back playing Sheffield Shield cricket. After thanking God, the doctors, “all those beautiful nurses” and the New South Wales Cricket Association, he finished by wondering what had kicked CIDP off in him in the first place. Swatting away bog-standard infections and excluding himself from food poisoning (he was a professional sportsman and would have recognized either immediately), he said he had to accept the only other alternative: “Me, the easiest going guy on the planet . . . I'd been stressed out and hadn't even known it!”
Stress; the word waved at Penny like a red rag to a bull.
She went back and rechecked some other sites without finding any mention of stress. Clicking to the search engine, she entered CIDP CAUSED BY STRESS.
A hundred and ninety-four thousand hits. A hundred and ninety-four thousand! There hadn't been so many more hits for CIDP, full stop.
Quickly running through the first sites she found that stress was nearly always a major facto
r in many autoimmune conditions and was considered by some experts to be a trigger for CIDP. She was starting to fume and entered the next search as much to keep her hands busy as anything else.
GBS CAUSED BY STRESS.
There were six and a half million hits.
That was when the laptop nearly went against the wall. Geoff hadn't had any sort of infection before all this began, even though the doctor said he must have done. He also hadn't had food poisoning. The silly, silly, silly man had brought this on himself by stubbornly refusing to see his GP. Surely he must have known from all of Old Faithful's strikes over the years? How many times had she begged him to visit Dr Brown? If he had have had STRESSED OUT tattooed on his forehead, he would still have pretended it wasn't there.