by Swan, Tarn
It was with some dismay that I twisted around to inspect the situation. I did not fancy trundling down to the hospital casualty department with a pair of pink rubber gloves adhered firmly to my bottom. It would cause uproar, but nor did I fancy spending the rest of my life trailing around with a pair of rubber hands lewdly groping my arse. Twinkles suggested I try a warm bath with plenty of bath oil to see if it would help soak them off. Thank goodness it did the trick. The oil softened the rubber and I was able to carefully peel the gloves away from my tender skin without too much trouble. They left a couple of friction bruises, but no skin loss. My relief was profound.
Twinkles hugged me and I noted with concern that he was shaking…with laughter as it turned out, the little toad. His eyes sparkling with amusement he said that he’d always known we were stuck on each other, but that was ridiculous. We both ended up indulging in a fit of the giggles, then we got dressed and had coffee and biscuits. He sat on my lap as we drank our coffee and chatted. The sun streamed through the window casting sparkles of light around the kitchen. I was happy, he was happy. Life was good. It suddenly struck me that I was in the midst of an indelible memory moment. At some point in the future I knew I would remember this morning’s events with clarity, perhaps just after he died, or just before I died. I didn’t want to think about it too closely, as it would turn joy to sadness. Instead I wrapped my arms around his waist and told him how much I loved him.
I suppose the moral to this tale is twofold, first…never have frenetic sex with someone wearing rubber gloves, and second…always tell the one you love how much you love them while you are yet able to hold and kiss them.
We’re both on holiday from work this week. I’m not sure what we’re going to do with it yet, apart from laze around and have sex while not wearing any kind of rubber garments. We had been toying with going on one of those last minute bargain holiday breaks to Italy or Greece, but it’s no longer an option, not since my doctor advised against going abroad this year. We’ll probably just head out for day trips or overnight stays somewhere.
17th August 2005:
The Selfishness Of Hamsters
Terrible screams issued from the bathroom at two this morning. Twinkles got up to obey a call of Nature only to become embroiled in a drama with a fearsome creature of the night. In other words a big moth had flown at him when he put the bathroom light on. It got in between him and the escape route of the bathroom door and he was effectively trapped until I went to his rescue. Twinks hates insects in general and moths in particular. I must admit it was a big one. It was a tiger moth with a thick body and furry wings; even I shuddered when I saw it. Despite his revulsion and fear, and it is a genuine fear, he exhorted me not to kill it. He has this notion that moths are the collectors and carriers of dead people’s souls and if you kill one you prevent a soul getting to Heaven. He has no idea where he got the notion from, whether he read a story or someone told him, but his resulting fear of the insect has been with him since he was a boy. If he knew there was a moth in the bedroom at night, he would be too afraid to go to sleep in case it meant he was going to die and it was waiting to take his soul away. I managed to capture and release this particular specimen unharmed into the night air, closing the window so it couldn’t get back in.
Poor Twinks, he was quite shaken and upset by the encounter. We went back to bed and I cuddled him, telling him he was not to see it as a premonition. The moth had not been on the prowl looking for a soul and neither he nor I were going to die in the night. He kept insisting that he had a bad feeling, a really bad feeling. I told him that if he persisted in working himself up into a doom laden frenzy then there would indeed be a bad feeling…on his backside when I spanked it. I was not going to permit him to carry on like a Roman Soothsayer, scaring himself half to death in the process. He can make a three-act drama out of a grocery list when he has a mind to.
I allowed him to inspect my scar and check me for signs of any other suspect blemishes and then called a halt. Fears and phobias are neither silly nor a sign of weakness. They’re very potent and they’re rooted in some fundamental part of our psyche. They’re often symbols of something important and if we could crack their code then we would come to a greater understanding of ourselves. I have suggested that we seek out a phobia expert to see if we can get to the core of his fear and discover where the image of the moth as a portent of death came from. He refused. No way on earth was he was going to visit some so called expert who would tell him that his fear of moths stemmed from a subjugated desire to have sex with his dead granny, and it could be cured by sitting in a bathtub full of the horrific creatures. He soon fell asleep again and snored solidly for the remainder of the night.
We caught up with some housework this morning, and then went out for lunch, after which we went shopping for yet another replacement television. Alas we fell out over it. I wanted to buy the same model that we’d just had, the one we’d barely worked out how to operate before he despatched it. He wanted to buy one of the fancy plasma screen models that cost an absolute fortune. Teddy and Maurice have one and it’s wonderful. I didn’t care what Teddy and Maurice had. We were not spending a fortune, especially given his recent track record with television sets. He claimed I was being unreasonable and said he contributed his fair share to the household budget and he had a right to have a say in what purchases were made with it. I told him that I didn’t dispute his contribution, or his rights. However, the fact remained that we could not afford to spend that amount of money on a television and as I had the final say, I was saying no. He went into sulk mode and refused to take an interest in proceedings after that. I cut short the shopping excursion.
He didn’t say a word to me all the way home. I was seriously considering having a discussion about bad attitude as soon as we got in. However, we arrived back to find Gabby, our neighbour’s little girl, sitting on the doorstep with her skipping rope. She looked sad. Forgetting his own bad mood Twinks gently asked her what was wrong and her big blue eyes overflowed, as she explained that Nancy, her beloved pet hamster, had died in the night. We headed for the kitchen where I made tea and poured out cola, which Gabby drank while waiting patiently for Twinks to stop crying. She offered comfort. ‘Nancy was an old hamster, Mr Twinkles, she’s in Heaven now.’ She then trotted out into the garden. He blew his nose and said self-righteously, ‘I told you that moth was on the hunt for a soul to carry away.’ I handed him his skips and sent him out into the garden to play to take his mind off it. I’m not sure that hamsters have souls, not ones that qualify them for a place in Heaven, but I would never voice such doubts to Gabby or even Twinks. I was sad for Gabby’s loss, but to be honest I wished Nancy had hung on for another day or two, just so that Twinkles couldn’t associate her demise with the moth incident. It would do nothing to dispel his phobia about them being harbingers of doom. Hamsters can be so selfish!
20th August 2005:
Torture By Shopping
We spent much of yesterday shopping at the MetroCentre in Gateshead. I would have preferred a trip to Lincoln to see if we could catch sight of Tom Hanks filming shots for his new movie The Da Vinci Code around Lincoln Cathedral. Twinks said that we’d have more chance of catching sight of God than catching sight of Tom Hanks because he’d be surrounded by a ton of bodyguards and anyway, he gave me an appealing pout, it was the end of the summer sale season and if he didn’t hit the shops soon he’d miss out on all the bargains. So my fate was sealed. I was subjected to the dreaded shopping torture.
There are three hundred shops or more at the MetroCentre and he dragged me in all of them, or at least it felt like he did. I hate clothes shopping with Twinkles. He makes me hold things against myself so he can judge what they might look like on him, women’s things, dresses and skirts and blouses and lingerie, even fashion jewellery. Debenhams have quite recently adopted a transvestite friendly attitude and it allows men to try on women’s clothing if the changing rooms aren’t too busy. Debenhams is also one of the fe
w stores that still sell what might be termed traditional evening attire i.e. glamorous ball gowns, and a lot of them were in the sale. Twinks was obviously interested.
I took my life in my hands by suggesting he might have more than enough femme clothes already and what he ought to be looking for in the sales, if anything at all, was a new suit for work. It was not a popular comment. It gave rise to a question from my beloved. Was I trying to spoil his day and bring him down? Certainly not! I was just trying to make him look at the wider picture. He had dozens of femme clothes, but only two suits. He could also do with some new work shirts. I’d noticed that his shirt collars and cuffs were starting to fray when I was ironing them. Another question fell from my loved one’s lips. Was I forbidding him to buy new dresses then? No! He wasn’t under restriction and therefore he could spend his money as he wished, but surely he could consider my point of view, and my view was that he had enough dresses. A chilly statement was issued. ‘A queen can never have enough dresses, a queen cannot wear the same dress over and over again, one only had to observe Her Regal Majesty to see the truth of that. There’d be trouble in the kingdom if Queen Lizzie turned up at the Royal Variety Performance wearing the same rag for two consecutive years. Queens, all queens of whatever sex be they man, woman, actress, pop princess or drag artiste were in the business of entertainment and glamour, and glamour demands variety. Would anyone watch the Oscars if all the actresses dragged out the same old frock year after year, would they admire her frugality? He thought not! They would simply call her cheap! People did not care about the actress as such, people cared about the dress the actress wore. An actress was only as successful as her ensemble. If it flopped, the actress flopped. He (lavishly gestures at self) when dressed up was an actress. He was in showbiz. His role was to impress his audience. The PP was both his stage and his Oscar ceremony. Was I clear on that now, had he enlightened me?’
Right palm tingling I looked evenly at Mr hiss and spit and said yes I was clear, but I still thought he should apportion some of his budget for work clothes. He immediately launched into his long-suffering martyr act and marched over to the men’s department. Sorting through the racks of suits he gave heaving sighs and made disparaging comments about all of them before rummaging aggressively through the shirts and doing the same. The tingling in my palm intensified into a powerful urge to bend him over and smack his backside until his eyes watered. However, doubting that Debenhams had a friendly attitude towards people spanking their partners in public, I decided to take time out. I told him I was heading for the coffee shop and he could join me there when he’d finished his brand of sulking.
He eventually joined me carrying a small bag which contained his concession to work wear, a new tie, which he claimed would serve the dual purpose of brightening up both his existing work suits and shirts. He then finished my coffee, ate the last bit of my chocolate cake and dragged me back to the ladies department where he spent a happy hour trying on a variety of designer gowns. He insisted on coming out of the dressing room to give me a twirl and seek my opinion on every single one of them: was it too tight, did the colour suit him, did it make his bum look big, would it expose too much cleavage and why hadn’t I thought to remind him to bring his falsies with him? We inevitably ended up with a small audience, waiting with baited breath to see what he’d appear in next.
A black tie front ruffle hem dress with diamante brooch by Ben de Lisi was a favourite with the onlookers, as was the beaded pink strapless gown by Pearce II Fionda. Of course, being the little exhibitionist that he is, he absolutely adored being the centre of attention. One of the assistants said she’d seen a pair of gorgeous, rhinestone encrusted pink shoes that would go a treat with the latter gown and did Miss Stardust (by then he’d given the impression that he was a professional stage performer) want her to go get them from the shoe department? Of course ‘Miss Stardust’ did. Fortunately they didn’t have the shoes in his size. I say fortunately because despite being in the sale they were still over fifty pounds and I was already alarmed by how much he was spending. Besides he has more shoes in his closet than Charles Clinkard has in his entire chain of shops. He didn’t need anymore, not that I said so. I didn’t want a repeat of the dress speech. We came home loaded with bags, or at least he did. My purchases ran to two pairs of new socks and a deodorant freshener spray for my trainers. The last of the big spenders, that’s me.
By the time we got home I was shattered and developing a migraine headache that demanded rest in a darkened room. I went for a lie down and fell asleep, only to awaken a couple of hours later to find a crowd around me. Twinkles, who was in floods of tears, had called an ambulance because he couldn’t wake me up. He thought I’d slipped into a coma or had meningitis or something. I sleep very heavily when I have a migraine and he knows that, so I was puzzled as to why he’d panicked so much. He confessed that he’d seen a moth in the bedroom and when his shrieks had failed to wake me up he had feared the worst. Trapping the moth under a drinking glass so it couldn’t go anywhere with my soul, he had then dialled 999.
I apologised profusely to the paramedics for wasting their time. They kindly told me not to worry and gave me a couple of strong pain relief pills for my headache. They said that it hadn’t been a waste of time anyway as Twinkles was in the midst of a full blown panic attack when they arrived and had needed an NHS brown paper bag to help him get his breathing back to normal. They released the moth and shut the window before leaving. They’re excellent people.
Twinkles was mortified by the way he’d overreacted to the situation and apologised for being a silly dramatist. I told him not to worry about it. He has heightened emotions and reactions; they’re a genuine aspect of his personality. I couldn’t be cross with him. He was white faced and red eyed and the only thing I wanted to do was comfort him.
21st August 2005:
Paying Up
Twinks woke up in a rotten mood this morning claiming that he hated Sundays. They were boring-boring-boring. He was staying in bed and he didn’t want any breakfast or lunch or anything at all. I left him stewing under the sheets and went to make a pot of Darjeeling (he didn’t want a cup of tea, but I left one on his bedside cabinet anyway) It was a beautiful morning so I took my tea and toast outside enjoying the morning air, mindful of the fact that summer was heading towards closure and there wouldn’t be too many more opportunities to enjoy clement weather.
I knew why Twinks was in a mood. He hadn’t had a very happy Saturday night and was still brooding on it. I can’t say that I enjoyed it much either. We went to the PP as per norm and Twinkles wore one of his new gowns, the beaded pink one along with a shoulder length blonde wig that got him many compliments about his legally blonde Miss Witherspoon look. He was delighted, claiming that was the look he’d intended to create. Natalie was there for the first time since the red wine incident. Her other half Kevin had been working away and had just got back. I reminded Twinkles that he still owed Nat an apology. He said it was ancient history and best left alone. I didn’t consider a week to be ancient history. So at my insistence he offered his apology, which Natalie, who was obviously jealous of the compliments he had got over his Reese creation, refused to accept. Twinks immediately retracted it and said he wasn’t sorry anyway. Natalie then said that Twinks owed her one hundred and eighty quid because the dress hadn’t cleaned well and that’s how much it had cost. Twinkles accused her of being a purveyor of untruths (i.e. a lying, conniving bitch) and he wasn’t giving her that much money for a frigging mangy dress that Oxfam would reject. He bet it had cleaned okay and she was just trying to embezzle money out of him. Natalie said she had a receipt that would prove how much she had paid for the dress and she could also show him the dress and the cleaner’s ticket that stated it had been treated without success. Lulu stepped in on the side of Natalie and said that Twinkles was honour bound to pay up as he had ruined the dress in a fit of bad temper.
I took Natalie to one side and quietly said that Twinkles had v
ery much regretted the red wine incident and that he had every intention of reimbursing the cost of the dress. He would arrange payment just as soon as he could and the subject was now closed. I also said that I was disappointed at her lack of grace in accepting the apology. She pulled a ‘ooh, hark at him’ face and flounced off to the bar. Lulu, in an effort to make amends for siding with the enemy, asked Twinkles if he’d like a glass of wine and Twinks told him that he didn’t drink with disloyal, two faced backstabbers, or (he gave me a dark look) treacherous people in general. Taking a leaf from Natalie’s book, he also flounced away. Lulu was upset and said surely Twinks could see it was only fair to pay for the dress. He would expect Natalie to cough up if the situation had been reversed. I patted his shoulder and told him not to worry, then went in search of my sulky mate.
He was nowhere to be found in the club. I even ventured down into the leather basement. Twinks often went down there to talk to a couple of friends and wind up some of the Daddy figures with his antics. He wasn’t there and I left as quickly as I could, especially when I spotted Beardaddy heading purposefully in my direction. Rumour has it that he’s looking for a new boy and I didn’t fancy being commandeered for the role. Twinks reckons he has a bit of an eye for me. He has a thing for blue-eyed fair-haired men who look in need of a firm hand. I don’t consider myself to be in need of a firm hand, especially not where Beardaddy would put it. There are whispers about a hard-core porno site featuring orifices and fists, one of which was reputed to belong to the man himself.