by Emlyn Rees
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Really,’ I add. ‘I mean it,’ I emphasise.
But none of these denials stops Amy from searching the depths of my eyes like someone staring into a well and making a wish.
Which leaves me with no option, but to take the coward’s way out of the spotlight, by quickly turning it back on her.
‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Is there stuff you miss?’
‘No,’ she says straightaway.
This time it’s me searching her eyes. She doesn’t even blink.
‘Well, that’s good then,’ I conclude.
‘Yes,’ she says, turning away from me once more, ‘it is.’
As we lapse into silence, I gaze down at the top of her head and wonder what she’s thinking.
I also wonder why the answer I gave her just now suddenly feels like such a big, fat lie.
The Furry Altar Of Amy Crosbie
Do I miss anything about being single?
When Amy and I got married, I wouldn’t even have had to think about this.
Back then, I was a strict adherent to a neat mathematical theory:
2 tits + 1 Ass = 4 Ever.
It was one of the many things I signed up for on my wedding day. (Not in so many words during my actual church vows, of course, but in theory, at least.)
And it was easy. Monogamy has many advantages. There’s the emotional fulfilment, the guaranteed receipt of at least one really good birthday present per year, the thrill of trusting and admiring someone enough to want them to have your kids, the comfort of a warm bed during the winter, and, of course, the clinchers: blowjobs by the dozen; someone who’ll kiss you even when you’ve got flu; and last, but greatest of all, love . . .
But monogamy has its disadvantages too.
The chief one being that you only get to have sex with one woman.
And man is, by nature, as all men know, a fickle creature, a libertine, a pervert, if you will . . .
The urge to propagate as widely as possible is an intrinsic part of our genetic make-up, but it’s an urge I’ve successfully tamed throughout my marriage.
This has been largely down to the facts that I love and respect Amy, but it’s also partly a result of my increasing awareness – thanks to a combination of personal observation and my daily perusal of the Sun – that shagging around, and adultery in particular, tends to lead to no good.
It comes down to this. Sexual promiscuity is all about the thrill of crossing boundaries – but the problem with boundaries is that the more of them you cross, the more of them you want to cross, just as surely as first base leads inexorably on towards fourth . . .
If you’re unfaithful once, chances are, you’ll do it again. If you try a threesome, you’ll want an orgy. Then, the next thing you know, you’re down in a dungeon club, watching your wife peeing on a dwarf, while a tax accountant from Hull called Clive, in a black leather gimp suit, slowly drips candle wax on to your balls . . .
Or so I’ve read.
Playing around, in other words, can seriously damage both your marriage and your health.
Which is why Fidelity’s a road block halfway down Temptation Alley that this particular married man has never broken through.
I prize what I already have too much to risk tearing it apart. I still fancy Amy and, emotionally, nobody comes close. There’s no one I’d rather talk to than her, and no one I’d rather confide in (apart from over these current doubts, obviously). She’s the only one I love, and the only one I ever will love. She’s therefore the only person I’m ever going to have sex with. Full stop.
Where my cock was previously an intrepid explorer, an adventurer, a kind of phallic Phineas Fogg, or Phalius Fogg, seemingly destined to travel the world in eighty lays . . . it has become a monk, devoted to one furry altar and one furry altar alone . . .
The Furry Altar of Amy Crosbie.
In spite of this seemingly irrevocable spiritual conversion, however, my worry now is that Phalius never really went away at all. Instead he’s simply been biding his time, lurking beneath the monk’s austere habit . . .
And now he’s started itching to get out.
It’s because of this itch, this Seven Year Itch, that when Amy asked me if there was anything I missed about being single, I was unable to tell her the truth.
Because the truth is this:
What I currently miss most about being single is . . . all the other women I could be having sex with . . .
This is clearly not a good answer, either to say or to think.
It’s the kind of answer that might even merit a slap.
But there’s no denying it, because the evidence is here. First, in my mistaking the babysitter for Amy . . . then, in my eyeing up of the girl in The Greyhound . . . next came that charge of eroticism that leapt up inside me like an electric eel as Jessie stripped off my shirt . . . and last night, the Urban Wall girls and all those what ifs that started running through my mind . . .
Now I don’t for a second believe that The Seven Year Itch is in any way a real phenomenon – or think that the current length of my marriage is anything but coincidentally linked to my recent wandering eye – but an itch of some sort is undoubtedly upon me.
And I should therefore be wary.
Because what an itch wants most of all is to be scratched.
And that’s the one thing I mustn’t do.
I must be on my guard. I must wait for this itch to pass. And, in the meantime, I must be careful to see my cock for what it is: a beast which wants to sow its seed on foreign fields, a beast which will betray me if it can.
Or, to put it more eloquently:
The Fifth Column
between my legs,
the mauve toad
with hairy eggs,
garlic sausage
with an appetite,
my magic wand
of dynamite
Which is part of a poem that Matt once e-mailed me, by a prize-winning poet called Duncan Forbes, who clearly knows a thing or two about the trials of manhood.
Strictly On A Professional Basis
It’s Sunday night and Amy and I are lying on our bed, drinking hot chocolate out of the Desperate Housewives mugs I gave her for Christmas. Our old Toshiba laptop is booting up on the bedside table and we’ve got an Amazon.com DVD at the ready to put in.
We’re in here because Kate and some new chap are in the sitting room, alternating between channel hopping and sticking their tongues down each other’s throats. (‘Like a couple of ENT surgeons performing simultaneous biopsies,’ as Amy succinctly put it.)
It comes to something, I suppose, that Amy and I have been driven into using our bedroom as our main living space, in addition to sharing it with Ben, who’s currently softly snoring in his cot at the foot of the bed.
In fact, I think I had more personal space when I was a child myself.
In spite of our cramped conditions, Amy and I are at least both in reasonable moods. We’re getting on, and being polite to each other, albeit in a fake kind of way, like a couple in a 1950s public information film. I haven’t made the error of going out with Kate & Co again, and we haven’t fought since our chat up on Primrose Hill. In theory, then, things are getting better between us, not worse.
Even so, there’s still a level of tension between us that’s never been here before. It’s like we both know that all we’ve done is wallpaper over the cracks in our relationship, without actually filling them in.
Which makes me feel like I’m on probation, like any second now, it could all kick off again.
‘What time do you think you’ll get home tomorrow?’ Amy whispers, not wanting to wake Ben. She rolls back the duvet and slips underneath. ‘Only if you’re going to be late,’ she warns me, ‘then I’ll probably take Ben over to Sophie’s for tea.’
‘The usual,’ I whisper back. ‘Five.’ But then it hits me. ‘Oh, no. Seven. I’ve got a couple of hours of work to do at Jessie’s.’
‘Oh. I didn’t think you were seei
ng her till Wednesday . . .’
‘I’m not. Just her garden. She gave me a key,’ I explain.
‘You’re quite the honoured employee.’
There’s no suspicion in Amy’s voice when she says this, and why should there be? I’ve been careful to keep my relationship with Jessie strictly on a professional basis. Not that Jessie’s actually been at the house on the two occasions I’ve been back, but my good intentions are there, all the same.
It’s all part of the new leaf I’ve turned over.
It’s all part of my determination to ignore The Itch.
Nevertheless, I do now find myself shifting uncomfortably as I sprawl here, with Jessie suddenly a subject up for debate.
Because I’ve not exactly been honest with Amy about her.
For starters, I lied about how I got the cut on my lip, the one that I actually sustained during my ruck with Roland in the atrium – or ‘The Rumble in the Jungle’, as I now can’t help thinking about it.
I lied to Amy about the T-shirt Jessie lent me, too.
But at least these lies were selfless, insofar as they were for us.
Because if I had told Amy the truth about the fight, she’d only have worried about me, and tried to get me to stop working there, and that’s something I can’t afford to do. Or she’d have quit her spots on Jessie’s show, and that would be crazy, especially as Amy thinks they might possibly lead to something more regular, maybe even something that pays . . .
No, I don’t regret those white lies one bit. The lie that’s bothering me is this:
I lied to Amy about Jessie’s appearance. I made out she was a moose.
And I did it instinctively, without thinking.
Why would my subconscious make me do that?
There’s only one possible answer. I did it to hide the truth from Amy: that I don’t actually think that Jessie’s a moose at all.
I did it to hide the truth from Amy: that I actually think that Jessie’s a babe.
No sooner have I thought this, than – flash! – in the blink of an eye, I find myself picturing Jessie – and it’s not the kind of picture you’d find in a Sunday newspaper supplement. It’s more like one you might find in a magazine hidden under a teenage boy’s bed. With the pages stuck together.
But a blink is only a second. Then she’s gone again.
I’m glad, because when I open my eyes, Amy fills them once more. My Amy, right here, right now, not in any private fantasy space, but one hundred per cent real . . .
I quickly hug her.
‘What’s that for?’ she asks.
I run my hand through her hair. ‘Just because.’
She settles back against the pillows. ‘Do you think Jessie’ll recommend you to anyone? I bet she’s got loads of rich mates with whopping gardens.’
‘Anything’s possible, I suppose,’ I say, putting in the DVD and hitting Play.
She doesn’t answer and I stare across at our two dressing gowns, which are lying in a heap by the door, with their arms intertwined. They’re ancient thefts, stolen from our honeymoon suite in Bangkok. They used to be fluffy and pristine white, but now they’re threadbare and stained. This sight depresses me more than it should.
I get in under the duvet and we lean back and press our heads up close together, so that we can each use an earpiece of the single pair of earphones that are plugged into the computer.
I switch out the bedside light.
The film’s called Contact and stars Jodie Foster. It’s about a scientist sending electronic signals out into space, hoping to make contact with someone else from another lonely planet.
An hour and a half later, I’m watching the end credits roll with tears in my eyes, while Amy’s beside me, fast asleep and softly snoring.
Like A Bull In A Field At The Side Of The Motorway
‘Have you got time for one more?’ Jessie asks.
She’s crouched like a tigress in the open doorway of her kitchen fridge, with two bottles of Asahi in her hands, and she’s dressed in what she informed me (after I casually remarked on how well it suited her) was a Diane von Furstenberg dress, D&G sunglasses and a vintage Hermès headscarf from Rellik.
‘I’d better not,’ I say, nodding at the two empty bottles already on the table. ‘It’ll put me over the limit.’
This is a good answer, an answer I can be proud of, particularly in the light of the blue images of Jessie that have been popping up unsummoned into my mind these last few days.
This is exactly the kind of answer a man resisting The Itch should, in fact, give.
‘But I thought you said you were meeting your friend in the Portobello Gold?’ Jessie says.
‘I did.’
‘Well, that’s only a five-minute walk. So why not leave your car out in the driveway and collect it in the morning?’ She smiles at me slyly. ‘Go on, it’ll give my nosy neighbours something to gossip about.’
Without waiting for a reply, Jessie stands and closes the fridge door behind her with a practised swing of her hips. Instead of being annoyed at her, for subverting my attempt to leave, I find myself smiling instead, thinking how girlish she suddenly looks.
‘What?’ she asks, catching me staring. She does the hip swing thing again, to check the fridge is properly closed. ‘Oh, that?’ She blushes slightly. ‘I know, it’s a childhood habit I should grow out of, but that’s one of the problems about moving back here into Mum and Dad’s house. It’s such a time trap that it makes me feel like I’m a teenager all over again.’ She smiles across at me. ‘And makes me want to act like one too.’
She expertly pops both beer bottle tops on a magnetic opener on the fridge door, then grins.
I smile back. She looks good and she knows it. In the same way I used to know it when I was single, and the same way Amy did when I met her. Not that Amy doesn’t look good now. Of course she does. It’s just a different kind of good, that’s all. It’s more a comfy kind of good, instead of the look-at-how-cool-I-am good that Jessie’s working right now.
Weird, now I come to think of it, that in spite of Jessie being older than Amy, she somehow strikes me as seeming much younger as well. Her remarkably wrinkle-free brow has something to do with it, but it’s also because she laughs more than Amy, and she stresses less. She’s fun to be around.
‘Cheers,’ she says, perching on the edge of the old teak inlay table I’m sitting at, and pushing a bottle of beer into my hand.
Today is Thursday and it’s a week now since I picnicked with Amy up on Primrose Hill. This is my fifth visit to Jessie’s house, but only the second time we’ve met.
She was already here when I arrived this afternoon, sunning herself on a deckchair in the garden. It’s now seven and we’ve been sitting in the kitchen for the last quarter of an hour, ever since the sky clouded over and I finished my work. The radio’s on (noticeably it’s not Radio CapitalChat, but instead its altogether raunchier rival Emotion FM).
I follow Jessie’s gaze as she looks around the kitchen. It’s a large L-shaped room, leading out into the garden in one direction and off towards the drawing room and atrium in the other. It’s not hard to see what Jessie means about it being a time trap.
The units are clean, but dated, with 1980s farmhouse-style wooden doors. There’s a black Aga in one corner and not a single piece of stainless steel in sight. Even the calendar on the wall above the wilting aspidistra in the corner is three years out of date and flipped over to December, like someone just stopped caring about the passing of time.
Jessie notices me staring. ‘Dad died before Mum. She slowly shut down after that. They were really in love. Right to the end.’
‘They’re lucky.’
Jessie looks horrified. ‘To be dead?’
‘No . . .’ I start to protest, but then I realise that she’s teasing me. ‘I mean they’re lucky to have been in love for so long.’
‘I thought that was the whole point about marriage,’ she says.
‘It is.’
&n
bsp; ‘Is that how it is for you?’
The directness of this question throws me for a second.
‘You mean with Amy?’
She nods. ‘Unless you’ve got more than one wife . . .’
‘Er, no. Yeah. Things between us are great.’
‘So where is she now?’
‘You mean right now?’
Again, that nod.
‘I don’t know.’ I check the time on my phone. ‘At home. Probably bathing Ben.’
‘Your son . . .’
‘Well, I don’t mean the lodger,’ I joke. ‘She really enjoys doing her spots on your show, by the way,’ I quickly add. Since this is the first time either of us has even mentioned Amy, I figure that the least I can do is give her a plug.
‘Yeah, my producer likes to get normal people on from time to time. He thinks it keeps it real.’
Normal people? Is that how Jessie sees Amy? As somehow less than her? Is that how she sees me? Is that why she’s talking to me now, because she’s keeping it real, because she’s got me down as a piece of rough, on account of the fact that there’s dirt under my fingernails?
Then she diffuses my suspicions by saying, ‘And I think he’s right. It’s good to have someone with a bit of life experience on. There are already far too many media luvvies like me hogging the airwaves.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Were you there with Amy?’ she then asks. ‘When she gave birth?’
‘Yeah. Why do you ask?’
‘She was talking about it the other day . . . on the show . . .’
This comes as news to me. Quite how childbirth could have featured into Amy’s high-street fashion slot is beyond me. She must have been talking about maternity clothes, I suppose . . .
‘What was it like?’ Jessie asks. ‘I mean, from your point of view.’
Vietnam, I’m thinking. The November Revolution. Waterloo. ‘Amazing,’ I say out loud.
She stares at me over the top of her beer. ‘And what about after you got home? How were things then?’