you all right? you mean. What’s the matter with you?’
At last she touches me but it is only a restraining arm, no doubt intended to prevent me from getting my football boots on. I am a fool. I should never have got myself into this situation. I ought to have got out while I had the chance.
‘Take the rest of your clothes off,’ barks Mrs J. She might be saying ‘Come in, number nine, your time’s up,’ for all the romantic feeling she can get into her voice.
I peel off my shirt and, without looking, ease down my Y-fronts. Maybe they are the trouble. All those tight jeans and athletes’ briefs have suffocated the poor basket. Still, you can’t wander about in bloomers, can you? Nobody would ever want to be exposed to the lustre of your cluster.
Mrs J. takes a deep breath and lies back expectantly. ‘We’ve got three and a half hours,’ she says.
‘Three and a half hours!’ Flipping heck! What does she think I am? At this rate I’ll be reading her nursery rhymes for the last three and a quarter. I look down at the faint moustache above her upper lip and wonder why I can suddenly smell Sloan’s Linament.
‘Why are you sniffing?’
‘I thought I smelt something.’
‘It must be my perfume. It’s very unusual. I once had this Persian boyfriend. It used to drive him out of his mind. He used to say that he could catch a whiff of it at the bottom of the stairs. I always knew it was him when I heard the footsteps pounding along the corridor. I’d hardly have time to open the door before he’d burst through like some great animal and snatch me up into his arms.’
‘Very strong bio–’
‘And then he’d carry me through the flat and throw me down on the bed and–’
‘It must have been very–’
‘–on and on and on.’
Blimey! By the time she has stopped rabbiting Percy has got about as much backbone as a homeless whelk. I do wish she wouldn’t go on like that – on and on and on.
‘What’s the matter?’ she says.
‘Nothing. I was just thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh, nothing, really.’
‘It must get rather boring?’
‘I’m used to it.’
It’s not vintage Noel Coward, is it? And Mrs Jones is not slow to realise that something is wrong. Nudging me with a shapely knocker, she raises herself on one elbow and sends her fingers down to reconnoitre the disaster area.
‘Don’t you find me attractive?’ she says accusingly, having discovered less action than at an old age pensioners’ jitterbugging contest.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ I say weakly.
‘I’m not certain that I do,’ says Mrs J. unkindly, releasing her hold on my wilting willy. ‘You’re not queer, are you?’
Those must be, without doubt, the cruellest words my lugholes have ever cringed before. That I, Timothy Lea, Clapham’s most exciting male animal, should be so accused and unable to stand up for himself. It does not bear thinking about, especially if – no, it can’t be. Not me. Surely not. I mean–
‘Are you? I don’t mind. I’ve never been to bed with a queer.’
‘Neither have I!’ I say, indignantly. ‘Do you mind? Every bloke who doesn’t fancy you isn’t a raving poofter, you know.’
‘If you’re not queer, you’re something very like it,’ sniffs Mrs J. ‘Coming in here playing football. Most men who come in here have got something better to do.’
‘I’m not queer,’ I repeat.
‘Prove it.’ Mrs J. leans across and kisses me hard on the mouth. It is nice of her to bother but I need gentler treatment.
‘That was like a man’s kiss!’ I chide her.
‘Ah! So you’ve been kissed by men?’
‘No! Of course I haven’t. I just imagined it would feel like that.’
‘Do you think about it a lot?’ Mrs J. sounds quite interested.
‘I never bleeding think about it! I tell you: I’m not queer.’ I swing my feet off the bed and grab my Y-fronts.
‘Running away, are you?’ mocks Mrs J. ‘It just shows how wrong you can be about people. I thought you looked quite sexy when I saw you in The Highwayman.’
‘I felt the same about you,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry but I think I’d better go.’
‘Maybe you’re not eating enough,’ she says as I pull on my jeans. I look at her wriggling into her panties and for a moment I experience a twinge of lust. It is not worth pursuing, though. This bird and I are never going to be able to make it in a million years. I will probably never be able to make it again with any bird.
‘I’ve got a book somewhere that might help you,’ she says as we walk towards the door. ‘Sexual impotence, the beginning of the end. My husband found it very useful.’
‘Thanks a lot, but I’m not much of a reader. I’ll have to work it out for myself.’
Right up to the moment when the door closes behind me I have a feeling that some miracle is going to occur. That something will spark us off into a knicker-ripping assault on the carpet pile. But nothing does happen. I find myself standing outside the building and I still have all my clothes and the forty thousand million sperm cells I went in with. At least, that is what I used to carry. I probably have about half a dozen now and them barely able to travel the length of my tonk without a wheelchair. It is all very, very disturbing.
When I walk away from the flats my spirits are lower than the balls on a kneeling dachshund. I still cannot believe that it happened – or rather that it didn’t happen. How could I, the answer to the secret love dreams of twenty-five million British birds, make such a hopeless cock up of it? ‘Cock up’! I permit myself a wry smile. What a bleeding marvellous choice of words. And after three months Sellotape – or celibate, or whatever it is. I might as well knot myself. Twenty-two and on the way to the knacker’s yard. It wasn’t as if I was pissed or anything. I have absolutely no excuse. I look down at the smooth, unruckled front of my brushed denim jeans and feel like bursting into tears.
There is only one thing for it: get pissed. Fortunately, Mum has slipped me a few quid and the pubs are still open. I go into the nearest boozer and order a double scotch. I get in a couple more and then buy a half bottle to take on the common when the pub closes. The more I think about things the more depressed I get. Not just about sex but about my life as a whole – or as a hole, more like. The nick was pretty bad but I relish living at home less than being a chalet maid at an eskimo nudist camp. I have had half a dozen different careers and I would have made more cash if I had become a yak sexer and signed on for unemployment benefit. Nothing seems to go right for me. And one of the main reasons for that is bleeding Sidney. He is always messing me about. What I need is a complete change of scene. I must get away from the suffocating pressures of home life.
I turn my back on the couple who are practically having it away in the shelter in the under-sixes playground and consider what to do next. Two old birds wander past and one of them shakes her head as she looks at me. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ she murmurs to her companion as they both stare at my half-empty bottle.
She is dead right, of course. Fifty years later I could still be sitting here, only with a bottle of meths. I must do something to change my aimless, self-indulgent life. Pausing only to swig down the rest of