Games Makers: A London Satire

by Andrew Calcutt

My son and daughter are bickering over what to watch on TV. One of them grabs the remote and the other groans in protest. Any second now, I’m going to yell at them to stop. My voice at the back of my throat

  – I can feel it, about to come out shouting; but I manage to gag it down.

  Palms out, hands slightly splayed, as if pushing my own children away, I walk quickly from the room.

  This is Pete in the kitchen of his South London home (Edwardian terrace, red brick). Standing still.

  Head bowed, holding on to a chair. Holding on.

  A few deep breaths. Yep, just stick to the breathing for now, Pete.

  This evening he’s on his own with the kids and just as well. If wife Carol were here she’d worry (needlessly) that he was ill.

  Only a hangover. Not the head-busting dehydration frenzy that frequently followed the drinking bouts of his youth. Now he knows (always did know, really) to drink lots of water and take two paracetamol before getting into bed; lots more water and two ibroprufen when getting up to pee two hours later.

  2x2x2 is Pete’s time-honoured formula for avoiding the dread head of a hangover. But it does nothing to prevent that feeling of alcohol-induced weakness, as if your limbs are repeatedly on the point of going numb before tipping back into a semblance of normality.

  That and the slowing of the brain.

  Pete keeps thinking of what he’s thinking a split second after having thought it. Intimations of mortality, he says to himself, his mind enunciating the words laboriously (there you go, it’s happening again).

  All day like this. To work. On campus. Back home.

  The hours dragging on, walking across his mind as slowly as Clint Eastwood.

  In the attempt to get back up to speed, the trick learned from previous experience is to keep talking.

  Find any excuse to carry on conversations with colleagues, students, the woman at the coffee shop, cleaners, DLR ‘train attendants’ – anyone will do.

  Once you’ve struck up a conversation, their expectations of you – Dr Fercoughsey, rock musician (ret’d), former journalist, university lecturer –

  will carry you through. Keep you on the straight and narrow. From which you strayed last night with your old mate Tony bloody Skance.

   Last night. Only one night in God knows how long. So that’s all right, then, right?

  No, not at all, all right. Here you are, Dr Nobody, not only physically fragile but feeling low and dispirited, too. Hankering after a life you haven’t got. Wanting the attention, the limelight you yourself turned off, that day 20 years ago when you walked out of the band.

  Punched your own lights out, Pete. Can’t complain now about the dark.

  Pete’s daughter Lily (13) comes into the kitchen because she wants a Coke. She knows her father will ask her to make do with juice or water. The two of them are bound to have a tinsy-winsy tussle over this. That’s what they do, these two. But Lily starts with a different question:

  ‘You all right, Dad?’, spoken quickly because she doesn’t want him to open up and say he’s not. Then she leans over and just touches the nape of his neck, resting her hand there for a moment, as if she were his mother. ‘Am now’, replies Pete, turning round to give his daughter a fatherly hug.

  ‘Aaah, so that’s who I am’, thinks Pete.

  No more thinking needed. That’s enough thought for the day.

  (3) Dinky goes for interview 

  Shut the front door behind me. Do not stop. No, do not stop to check if it is shut. Four, five, six paces down this street of terraced houses, a neat row like ships of the line, pause to light cigarette, shoulders hunching, bunching to keep the wind away. Zippo, heavy in my hand; a lighter not a logo. My thumb flicks the lid, fires wheel.

  Almost gag on the first drag. Exhale and walk on.

  First cigarette of the day. This summer’s day so crisp and sunny that the air itself is blue with brightness.

  In Central Park, East Ham, on my way to Canary Wharf.

  The day of my interview with Tony Skance.

  Managing to forget his deserting-a-demonstration debacle, Dinky has been basking in his small success (in this age of grade inflation, what else to call a first class degree from a mid-ranking university?); and also in his father’s largesse.

  Dad already paid for the whole family’s Easter holiday in Malta, shelling out extra for Dinky and girlfriend Rupa to have their own room at the resort (hewn out of red and yellow cliff in aptly named Golden Bay); and paid again for Dinky to throw a graduation party, back at the parental home in Essex.

  Dad’s a banker. Rhyme it how you like.

   Party night included a special highlight: Dinky and his best friend from way back when taking it strictly in turns to smack each other in the face.

  Of course, not exactly Fight Club. Simply, how many punches can you stand and take without flinching?

  (No blood on Mum’s carpet, OK, so please remove rings and avoid nose and mouth.) Here goes another one: bang! Dinky’s schoolmate Stephen even said ‘bang’ each time he left fly.

  Obligingly. At the receiving end, it felt more like a heavy thud, then the first throb of a headache that was over almost before it started. Except after four or five of these, the headache didn’t go. Lingered like an old friend should. Then someone told Rupa and she made them stop it, ‘before you really hurt yourselves.’ They did, but only to please her.

  That night they were on top of the world, nothing could harm them, don’t you see?

  Now the party’s over. Back in London, Dinky is waiting for the 101 bus to the Docklands Light Railway station in Beckton. He’s been waiting nearly 20 minutes. He should have walked.

  At last, there’s a bus turning right at the old town hall (Edwardian architecture evokes the British Raj), snaking down High Street South towards Dinky’s stop. Eventually.

   Old woman gets on in front of me. Fluttery, bird-like. Pecked at since the day she was born. Are you all right, hen? No, that’s Glasgow, doesn’t translate round here.

  ‘Maybe she even chose to be small and thin,’ Dinky thinks, ‘so that no one could accuse her of taking up too much room. She looks so frail, it makes me want to do something to re-assure her, let her know we’re not all red in tooth and claw.’

  I’d carry her shopping but the bags she’s holding are still folded up and empty -

  she’s on her way to Asda right now. I’d put my arms around her and hug her, only it would scare her even more. But I don’t want her to live another moment in fear. She’d be better off dead than a leading a fearful life. Take her to the death camp. There’s nothing else to be done with her.

  No, course not. I never said that. Don’t know where it came from.

  I get off the bus at Beckton. I’m walking up the steps onto the DLR platform. Glance towards Arshad behind the counter at the coffee stall. Know him from my course. We were in a band together in my first year. No time to stop: train indicator says 1min; but as I catch his eye his head tips back towards the pretty girl he’s serving and he smiles, leers even, but not so she can see. Beep, my Oyster card. Beep, beep, beep, the doors closing right behind me. Just in time. ‘This train is bound for Tower Gateway’. Not me, though. I’ll be getting off at Poplar and taking the tradesmen’s entrance into Canary Wharf. Past the dingy bit that’s still boarded up – what have they been doing in there all this time?

  In a few minutes I’ll be threading my way between gleaming towers that are just about as old as I am.

  I’m 23 this year. One of Thatcher’s children (born just in time to qualify). And today I’ll be revisiting scenes from my childhood. For instance, me and my sister Shani were the first kids ever to try the children’s menu at Carluccio’s in Canary Wharf. How about that? (Between you and me, it’s McDonald’s for the middle classes.) We grew up in this part of the world. Coming to see Dad, going to a restaurant together – it was a treat for us. The Wharf, you s
ee, is where my dad does the business I’d rather not talk about. Also where Tony Skance has his office, courtesy of the London Committee for the Implementation of the Olympic Games.

  A couple more stations to go before get off.

  Gallion’s Reach (no, the spelling is correct), then Cyprus, where the Docklands university campus looks out at the surrounding district like the bridge of a ship going nowhere. Another station and we’re in sight of ExCel. Is it a verb? No, an enormous conference and exhibition centre, so big it dominates the landscape from Beckon Gas Works to Canary Wharf. Just before that, though, there’s my favourite.

  Next to the flat plane of water in Royal Albert Dock (blue water today; when there are clouds above it can be milky white), the office block made only of plate glass. Of course it isn’t really, but it’s made to look as if it is. When I started my course, it was totally empty – no occupants.

  See right through it. Sheer emptiness, boxed up.

  Emptiness squared. Now occupied by Newhamlet Council, they’ve even called it ‘Newhamlet Dockside’. There’s lots of signage which spoils the overall effect. Or is it even better for the contrast, those hoardings and transparent meeting rooms, and little black figures set against all that white space?

  Don’t know what they are doing in there. Is it the council’s IT people, or something to do with the Olympics? That’s what I’ve heard. Or perhaps a bit of each: computer geeks working for the council on the Olympics Legacy? You never know, maybe everything adds up after all.

  Jackpot for me would be all that glass, breaking. I love the sound of breaking glass. Cliché alert, I know and I’m sorry, but it happens to be true. Even better without sound, though. Shards like arrows, piercing walls and clothes and flesh alike, puncturing veins and arteries so that blood pumps out like rich, red oil; or sprays everywhere like racing drivers’ champagne. But no soundtrack: movie without music, ballet without a band, just the pitter-patter of dancers’ feet, not necessarily attached to the torso they started out with.

  Then the orchestra of alarms and phones and muffled voices and the most blood-curdling screams you will ever hear.

  Didn’t choose to think those thoughts, so don’t look at me like that. Anyhow you can’t see what I’m thinking. You can’t, can you? Off the train fast, just in case.

  Fleeting feeling of vertigo as I glance up towards the Peeping Tower – that’s what we used to call it because of the warning light on top that goes peep, peep, peep. Then down the steps, avoid the clotted spit (‘Hunslet oysters’, my Dad says when he goes all Yorkshire, talking about Bradford and how his father met Ted Moult – farmer, broadcaster, professional Plain Man – on the train North out of King’s Cross). Walking quickly away from places the plebs live in (the problem with Poplar is it’s popular), towards the land of marble floors and Security, where light can be warm and pin-sharp at the same time.

  (4) Dinky and Tony: only connect 

  Fuck you, missus. No, of course I don’t say it aloud. But I would if I could. Fuck her. She would be standing in front of her desk, as she is now. I would come up close, looking her over, up and down, then swing her round. Squeezing her right buttock in one hand, I would use my left hand to push her, face down, over the desk, then pull her skirt up and pants down so that her sweet fanny is smiling up at me. Meanwhile my cock is smiling back. Wye-aye! I might just dip my finger in her, and rest it there, savouring the moment before shoving in. And of course she wants me to do her like this.

  ‘I’ll show you in to Tony’s office,’ she purrs.

  No she doesn’t, but Dinky has been watching Mad Men and he wants to think that she does.

  ‘Mr Skance is expecting you.’

  Can I go through with this? How can I not? Dinky Dutta, prize winning graduate from a low-score university, dark brown eyes, caramel skin, whippet thin. Here to ask Mr Fairly Big for a nearly-job in his something office for the not quite Olympics, and why the fuck should I be asking to join this shit, except if not this shit what else?

  Big space, minimal decoration. I notice two gold discs on the wall above Tony’s desk. Take a step towards the meeting area (is that what it said on the blueprint?): three leather seats that look like they’re from an E-type Jag; coffee table in between.

  But Tony waves me back towards his desk. I’m to occupy the single chair in front of it.

  What do young people really want?, Tony asks himself as Dinky is delivered unto him. What’s this one looking for, really? He is sharp and neat and really quite elegant; and he says he wants to work for me.

  Like fuck.

  ‘Let’s skip the pleasantries, shall we?’ Tony begins. ‘Tell me about yourself, Mr Dutta. What is your ambition?’

  Dinky has his answer down pat: ‘I hope to be a revolutionary writer but I fear it’s too early to tell.’

  ‘Noted as a small but beautifully formed response,’

  replies Tony. ‘Very much in character.’

  Touché! Got you in one, didn’t I? Dinky’s downcast eyes concede the point.

  ‘But of course,’ Tony continues, ‘it only prompts another question. How does the Cultural Olympiad come into this? It’s not going to make you a revolutionary, is it?’

  Dinky hesitates, then decides – too strong a word, perhaps – that he has nothing to lose. If Skance doesn’t get what he’s about to say to him, he won’t get the job. But anyway it isn’t a proper job and Dinky won’t starve even if he doesn’t get it.

  There’s Dad; there’s always Dad. So here goes:

  ‘If it works, if it’s done right’...Head cocked at an angle, Dinky is looking at Tony in a pantomime of consideration, evaluation, appraisal. It could almost be Tony looking at Pete; it could very nearly be Pete looking at Tony. Either way, Tony is hooked.

  ‘...if it’s done right, Games Time – that’s what you call it, isn’t it? Games Time will be the moment when the people of London get back together. London will start to feel young again. But from where I am, looks like no one knows how to get the party started. There’s your kind of people on the inside and then all the other people outside... and there’s not much connection between them. No lively, dynamic connection, anyway.

  ‘Next problem’, continues Dinky. ‘How do you drag them out of their coma? Both sides are like brain dead. Do you shock ’em out of it or can you kiss ’em into life again? I bet you don’t know. As soon as I walked in here I could tell you really don’t know.’

  Pause, nicely timed.

  ‘But maybe I can help,’ he concludes.

  Dinky sits back: there it is, daddio, that’s how it is. At least, that’s how he’s played it, like he’s one of those street kids who really knows the score, Man.

  Tony is taken aback; tries not to gasp in amazement.

  If you’re seen to be shocked, Tony, it’ll mean total victory for the young. You’ll be Bill Grundy the rest of your life. But Tony’s not gasping because of the generation gap between Dinky and himself; he’s amazed how close they are.

  The kid knows, this kid really knows. There is a sensation, familiar but rarely felt in recent years, half-way down Tony’s spine, half-way between shivering and tingling: it works its way up, spreads across his shoulder blades and further up past his neck, pricking him (tiny, little needles) on the back of his head. Might even burst into tears, Tony is so relieved to feel excited about someone again.

  ‘And just how do you know all this?’ he asks, stonewalling.

  No response. Does Dinky have anything else to say?

  Maybe. Maybe not, since he’s just made a do-ordie, all-or-nothing statement. Either way, he says nothing. Nothing is said. Doesn’t do anything, either, except for the tiniest, repetitive twitch of his right leg, Tony notices. But what he’s really noticed is Dinky’s nervous appetite, the hunger for something to do; something real. Dinky’s so eaten up by it, he may have handed himself to Tony on a plate.

  Mr Skance leans back t
o consider the menu.

  Let,s pick our way through him. Let,s see how much of him can be consumed. The boy (he,s not much more than that) is looking away, but Tony stares into his eyes and dares Dinky not to look back at him. He speaks only when Dinky has met his gaze.

  'Are you prepared to do something about it, then?' Tony demands.

  ‘Of course, that’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean the usual stuff, Dinky. I’m not talking about a bit of Facebook and some Tweeting that’ll make it look like we’re in with the social media generation. Of course, I’m sure you could do that for us. If that’s all you can do, I’m happy to arrange for you to do it. But I’m really thinking about something exceptional, that only an exceptional kind of person could do. You are that kind of person, aren’t you?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘You’re right. Absolutely right, old darling.

  Absolutely fucking right, my sweet.’

  Ttcch! Even a camp version of intimacy

  - hamming up ‘the seducer’ in order to seduce - is coming on too strong. Tony has to remind himself to slow down: sober syllables; precise enunciation. Still sounds too much like John Gielgud and not enough Alec Guinness.

  ‘How right you are, Mr Dutta. There is a lot depending on it. More or less as you describe, London could come together again in the next few weeks, the same way it did over Princess Di, or during the Blitz, or on 7/7.’

  Where’s he going with this? Dinky is starting to look askance at Tony.

  Don’t pause there, but don’t be in too much of a hurry, either, Tony says to himself.

  ‘But if that doesn’t happen,’ he continues, ‘if London doesn’t take the opportunity to be what only London can be, it could lose its own identity. It might turn into one of those has-been cities that used to be important.

  ‘Venice, Vienna, Genoa...

  No, mate, don’t even think of saying it.

  Not ‘Jamaica’, either.

  ‘...cities that gripped the world until they fell into the grip of their own, personal Alzheimer’s.

  And that’s what could happen to London if we don’t fire it up this time.’

  ‘You mean you want London to burn, Mr Skance?’

  Dinky’s turn to play up the formalities. He cocks his head another 20 degrees to the right, looks up at Tony with his cat’s eyes and a simpering mouth.’

  Dinky, are you asking for a smack, or what?

  ‘It’s the Olympic Games we’re talking about,’ Dinky insists. ‘Not Towering Inferno.’

  Siamese cat meets lumbering bulldog; Tony has never felt so British, or so cumbersome. Knows it, but he just gets more pompous.

  ‘Partly a metaphor, my dear Mr Dutta. And partly not. Have you read James Baldwin, by the way?’ Not that Tony waits for the answer. ‘The point is, even the best buildings and the best run facilities in the world, won’t make the Games a success if London doesn’t have any atmosphere.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like here in Docklands on Saturdays? When the big money’s gone away for the weekend and the hotels take in poor provincials on short breaks, who eat too much of the breakfast buffet because they’ve already paid for it. Never mind the architecture or the décor, every Saturday afternoon, it all looks tawdry, desultory, sad.

  Saturday morning’s OK because there’s a hangover from last night. Sunday evening, it starts gearing up for tomorrow. But round here, Saturday night and Sunday morning are a foretaste of London losing it. The whole place dies a little. It’s London’s petit mort.

  ‘OK, you’re too young to know what that feels like. I bet you can do it and get hard again straightaway... But I digress. Just think about the day in the last decade when London came most alive.

  Not even the day we were awarded the Games, was it?

  ‘Of course you remember the camera panning round to the multicultural schoolkids jumping for joy.

  Whoosh! They came up off their chairs like chubby little rockets. Happiness missiles plus puppy fat.

  “Momentous day”, said Seb. Lord Coe, to you. But we both know what topped it, don’t we? The biggest hit wasn’t the sixth of July 2005, it was the day after that when the bombers struck. Death and destruction on the streets of London, and the Cockneys came together like their grandparents in 1940.

  ‘It was a golden moment. The oldies would have been proud.’

  Tony is at full stride now. There ain’t no stopping him:

  ‘The question is: how can we make our people proud of the London Olympics? As you so astutely put it:

  “do we shock ‘em or kiss ’em?” The answer is that we shock them into kissing each other, we frighten them into feeling like a community. And, yes, I know it’s as daft as a Jimmy Savile tracksuit. But nothing else can fix it.’

  Can’t decide whether to get up and leave.

  Did I hear him right? Have I got it right, what he’s getting at? Dinky has that feeling of being there and observing the whole scene from the outside, of being on stage and in the audience at the same time. He doesn’t move. Thinks he should, knows he should, thinks about saying

  ‘I must be going now’. But nobody moves.

  The seconds are clocking up. There’s a phone ringing, unanswered, in the outer office. That PA person must have gone to the loo, or she’s having a cigarette, or having a shag in the loo and then a fag, afterwards. Suddenly – it seemed sudden but it probably wasn’t, Tony has walked round from behind his desk, now he’s squatting down directly in front of Dinky. Hand on his knee, even; and he’s close enough to kiss him.

  Of course he’s not going to push his tongue in Dinky’s mouth. Then again, it couldn’t be any less absurd than the speech he’s just made. A stolen kiss between interviewer and interviewee - what’s that compared to talking mass murder? But that can’t be what he really meant, can it?

  No let up from Tony: ‘You know the story of Orson Welles, don’t you, Dinky? You know what made his name? The spoof radio broadcast of the Martians attacking America. Imagine something as dramatic as that, but before anyone gets to know it’s fake, the story goes out that the bombs have been defused, in the nick of time. And our hearts go out to the guy who breaks the story – you. “The terrorists may have managed to escape but London can breathe a collective sigh of relief that their murderous scheme has been thwarted”, reports citizen journalist Dinky Dutta. You’ll be a household...

  ‘Now you want me to be a Martian’, Dinky interjects.

  Tony is unruffled, though a lock of hair falls down over his forehead, so that his face forms a perfect oval. The effect is less Michael Heseltine and more, well, Christ-like.

  So which of them will be lamb to the slaughter? Tony or Dinky?

  ‘Nobody will know that the terrorist plot against the Games was just a work of imaginative fiction,’

  Tony insists. ‘And when the story is released, it will be the shared experience that London really needs. As soon as it is aired, this city will get its mojo working again.

  ‘This is how it’ll work: the people of London come together to search for the bombers. After the manhunt has been going on for a day or so, we have confirmation that the plot is foiled, the bombers have escaped to Pakistan or the Yemen or somewhere. But London is safe. Saved by the collective efforts of its population. Proof at last: there is such a thing as society. It’s Orson Welles, it’s Metropolis, it’s 7/7 all rolled into one. Tell me, honestly, can you come up with a sexier storyline than that?’

  Dinky’s not buying. For a moment he was almost sold on Tony’s iconic appearance. And the chance to be in the middle of such a dense compound of truth and lies and, y’know, there’s not really much difference nowadays, is there? He runs the scene through his mind for a couple of seconds and it sounds almost all right; and then the whole thing loses height, comes crashing down to an ageing pop singer turned unsuccessful cultural policy wonk and perhaps a bit pervy as
well.

  Don’t think you can play me so easily, Tony So-and-So. You’re rank, Mr Skank.

  Dinky is still sitting in the same chair, the strait-backed office chair that he was invited to sit in when he came here for interview – must have been a million years ago. He shakes, shakes, shakes his head. But Tony’s not quite finished.

  ‘Society is spectacle, Dinky. You know that as much as I do. Today we live on the spectacular, and if we can’t produce it, we’re dead. Beijing was spectacular because of the stadium. Because there was that stadium in 2008, after less then 30 years’

  spectacular economic growth. But London sold itself as the spectacular example of people coming together in a multicultural city. The city is the stadium, Dinky, and right now there is nothing spectacular about it. Nothing going on out there that the rest of the world needs to see. We have to turn that around. Détournement, kiddo – they did teach you some political theory, didn’t they? Your Johnny Rotten to my Malcolm McLaren, by any means necessary. Or there’s no future for any of us in this burg.’

  ‘Burg’? You crazy, Tony? Nobody reads Dashiell Hammett no more. Anyhow, to carry that one off, you would need a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a blood-flecked, TB-infected handkerchief in the other. Naaah, you’re just too pink and fat to get away with it.

  Tony’s voice falls way, the last phrase already a climb down. As he falters, so Dinky firms up, finally finding the courage to get up and walk out of Tony’s office.

  Not looking back, not mouthing any of those end-of-meeting niceties, Dinky leaves Tony’s PA open-mouthed. For a moment, clocking his derrière, she almost fancies him.

  Going down in the lift, handing back his visitor’s badge, Dinky has time to think about how his exit must have looked. He catches himself wondering whether he really ought to have wiggled his bum a bit more. To get the full sashay.

  (5) Dinky and Rupa: home sweet home 

  Thud of the car door as I smooth my silk dress under my bottom, the way Mum taught me to. Thud, thud, thud – heavy rain drops on to the roof of the car as the driver walks round the back, gets in and starts the engine.

  So this is how it would be all the time, if I hadn’t messed up my last performance and got myself voted off the show. There would have been cars to studios, cars to clubs, ‘car’s ready when you are, Miss.’ If I hadn’t lost tonight, if I hadn’t lost it.

  Now this is a death ride and a ride home, all in one.

  The one and only. Back to reality and no going back.

  Where did our love go? That first night, I knew the camera wanted me so much. I wasn’t wrong about you, was I? It really did feel that way. But today is tomorrow and, no, you don’t love me still.

  Bastard.

  Dear Reader, you shouldn’t feel too sorry for Rupa. Being a popstar wouldn’t really have suited her, despite her despair as she goes wearily home in a taxi, through the summer rain to the East End terraced house she shares with Dinky.

  Her slender, snake-hipped boy will be there to console her.

  ‘Shahid,’ Rupa calls out, as she puts the key in the door. By the time it’s open he is there, arms akimbo and ready to encircle her in a comforting embrace.

  That’s not what Rupa wants. She strides over and kisses him, pushing her tongue through his lips, pulling his body onto her breasts and against her belly.

  He knows not to speak. Instead he turns her around and unzips her silk dress at the back, planting a line of kisses all the way down her spine and up again to her neck. With just one more touch from Dinky, the sleeveless dress slides down Rupa’s body to the floor, and she steps gracefully out of it.

  Sweet Jesus. She is naked. Must have squirmed her way out of her knickers in the back of the car. Maybe the driver got a flash in the mirror. O Lucky Man. Lucky Dink.

  Lucked in, tonight’s the night – he can’t keep the schoolboy phrases out of his head. But what’s making him extra hard is not her body or how much he wants it. The sexiest thing is her needing him.

  Standing naked in front of him, saying nothing, Rupa is light brown and blue black and her nipples are hard. He is kissing, nibbling one of them now, as he parts the pinky purple flesh of her fanny with his forefinger, feeling for the luscious wetness inside.

  With his other hand he is fiddling with his fly (come on, come on), and now he’s got it out, he’s lifting her onto the end of his cock and holding her there.

  She’s feeling she wants more of him in her, but then she’s thinking of herself thinking this and the

  ‘him’ becomes an ‘it’; and then she’s even thinking about thinking of ‘it’ not ‘him’. All of which is too many steps removed from a feeling which was all too fleeting in the first place.

  Dinky ain’t daft. He can feel it going, ebbing out of her. Looks at her eyes, checks her expression, and instead of carrying on, trying to recapture the momentum of her desire, he stops, thank God, and pulls out. Holds her very tight. Doesn’t let her say ‘Sorry, I thought I wanted to’. Well he can’t stop her, but it’s only a sort of mumble into his neck. Then, face to face, hand in hand, they go upstairs to the bedroom. As they lie down, they smile at each other: a warm smile, a tender smile.

  A few minutes later, despite Dinky’s stiffy that hasn’t gone down yet, they are both asleep in each other’s arms.

  And if perchance they wake in the middle of the night and do it anyway - well, that’s for you to imagine.

  (6) Domestic Tension