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THIS IS A BOOK THAT WAS SERIALIASED IN ITS FULL FORM ON A SERIES OF BLOGS ON THE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE MYSPACE.

It is now available as a paperback book. At £9-20 it's not so expensive when you consider that it's printed as you want it, and in addition yopu can download the whole thing from Lulu for a mere £1-25. Don't forget you'll be expected to pay post and packaging for the book, though.

Here's the first chapter as a taster. Enjoy!

ONE WEEK IN SEPTEMBER

CHAPTER ONE

I’m a persistent devil. If I get an idea that appeals to me then I don’t like to let it go. It doesn’t get rejected but rather is compartmentalised at the back of my brain, labelled for future reference. And over the past forty-odd years I’ve had one particular idea in that compartment, one that has persistently niggled me due to its many attractions.

But first for the original idea, the romantic notion, the seed from which all else grew. I remember telling Louise all about a persistent notion that had plagued me since childhood. I told her many times, I suppose, over the years of our marriage, though I doubt she ever really listened. But the idea, the scheme, had hovered around the fringes of my brain forever, and I suggested it to the light of my life for the first time not so long before we got married.

I was making tiny little rings with the tip of one finger round her left nipple under the impression I was giving her pleasure: I thought it must be fun for her because it was for me, though being young I was also foolish and like in so many things back then (and subsequently, it must be admitted) I was mistaken, which fact she told me irritably the day after we pledged our joint troth in the Dingleford Registry Office less than a year later.

“I’d like to roam around,” I said as I strove to make contact with her Forbidden Parts, “I’d really like to go round places one lazy summer, mosey around the country, get lost in weird places, watch cricket on village greens as the sun slowly sets and sip myself to Heaven in creaky village pubs with higgledy-piggledy floors and oak-beamed ceilings, that sort of thing.”

I can remember the moment as if it had happened only yesterday. We were on the back seat of my 1953 Ford Popular, which made for easy conversation due to the sit-up-and-beg posture it forced us to adopt, but awkward for anything else, and it was the anything else I spent most of my time trying to achieve. This time we’d contrived to entwine our various bodily parts into as intimate a oneness as we could manage bearing in mind the limitations of both the seat of my already geriatric motor car and my lady’s shining-white virginal morality, but she held my physical ardour in check and fixed me with her lovely eyes.

“Wouldn’t that be pointless?” she asked, all logic and beauty. Today, all these years later, she’s just about managed to rid herself of the encumbrance of a great deal of that beauty but has retained all of the logic, which doesn’t make for the most harmonious of relationships. Sometimes I find myself looking at her as if she was a stranger to me, and wondering what she’s doing in my life and when in the name of Goodness she’s going to get out of it.

“That’s the whole point. Pointlessness,” I smirked, and then sighed as a kind of encouragement because the pincers made by two fingers of her right hand were tugging at the zip fastener on my trousers, her one concession to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. How she ever contrived to tug that zip open with just the two delicate fingers I never quite managed to work out, but once in a blue moon she did, and then those fingers were presented with a complex voyage into my y-fronts and the eventual contact with skin. It was that contact I yearned for, lived for almost, was the reason she was in that car with me, though even then there were handicaps because invariably the only part of her long sensuous fingers that made any kind of contact at all were the tips of her well-polished nails, which made me quiver with anticipation and then sigh with exasperation because almost immediately they withdrew back to the other side of the zip and proceeded to tug it back up again.

“I think things are better like this, going where we know, not getting lost for silly reasons and generally being quite sure where we are,” she whispered, and for the next five or so minutes I agreed with the kind of totality that was the offspring of the attention she was giving to my quivering flesh.

I was in luck. It was more than the finger nails this time. Maybe she perceived I suffered from a wayward wanderlust and wanted to make the here and now more desirable lest I wander off into the big wide world and get lost, permanently, in some unknown tomorrow. I ached to reciprocate with my own digits but knew better. Permission to go anywhere remotely interesting would be withheld. It always was on the presumption that such things are best left to the married status, which holy estate would herald the opening of the gates of Paradise with many a fanfare and blast of brazen trumpets. It was her way of ensuring she followed her mother’s dictates on the subject of carnality, found a “nice young man”, and had children.

Even so the thought, the notion, the idea, the dream, had been stirred back into a kind of life after a period of hibernation as my hormones had done what hormones do and banished childish desires to where they properly belonged. To me, though, an odyssey into the backwaters and dead-ends of being was the stuff of life, of reality, of what must really spring into existence some day when hopes and dreams had been finally sucked out of life by the day-to-day grind. And maybe my route would be littered with the flirtatious remnants of oversexed gypsy queens and nymphomaniac temptresses with charcoal skin that wandered fleetingly into my better fantasies. But that was a kind of afterthought, a brighter highlight with which to contrast my pastel dreams.

But I digress. So it was that on that particular afternoon Louise dutifully toyed with me in a lazy sort of way, doing a great deal more to my quivering flesh than she’d done for ages, and as a reward for my tolerance in such matters she let me suck her mouth then her breasts with a dangerous fervour before announcing she must get home before her dad took his belt to her for being late (which he would never have done, but I didn’t know that then because I’d hardly met him).

I sighed again, this time as a kind of discouragement as she tried to push what she called her own special toy back into my trousers, and do it predominantly with the razor-sharp tips to her nails, and then zip me up again with the same pincer movement as she had employed those all-too-few minutes earlier.

I muttered something about how nice it would be if she showed a concentrated interest in her own special toy on a more regular basis because it would be sure to concentrate my interest on her and away from Amanda Wharmby (whom she hated because Amanda Wharmby was too nice for words, nicer than even she tried to be) and she giggled and told me not to be greedy, all that was good and wise and wonderful in the world would surely come to me in the fullness of time if I was patient, and anyway, didn’t I want to go off into the wide blue yonder doing boring things? And then, cattily, she suggested that Amanda Wharmby would do no such thing to me anyway because everyone knew that innocent little Amanda really preferred girls.

That suggestion made me look upon Amanda Wharmby with even more interest than I’d ever shown her before. I knew very little about so-called normal sexuality and absolutely nothing about tendencies that fell outside those parameters. But I said nothing. It would be pointless. Louise wasn’t the sort to get jealous of her peers because she knew she would always get what she wanted because hadn’t she always?

“It would be a delicious kind of holiday,” I murmured, dragging my mind back to my imaginary Odyssey.

“What would?” she asked, because she hadn’t paid enough attention to me to get more than the headlines, and at the same time she needed to avoid a second burst of little circles round the nipples that I was contriving to entertain her with, which unbeknown to me she hated. I have discovered since then that she’d much prefer the sucking, which she really liked, and consequently dropped hints about, but for some reason the hints always flew undetected over my head. Louise and I didn’t communicate particularly well even back then.

“Wandering from here to there. Going around the countryside. Finding interesting places and doing … well, nearly nothing for a few lazy days,” I reminded her.

“Pointless, if you ask me,” her logic replied, but her smile in the half-light from the ill-lit street was special and melted my heart anyway. I was always putty in her hands whenever she lit the world up with that smile.

“Then marry me,” I asked, not knowing I was going to, the words just forming themselves in my mouth without consulting my brain first, though I had thought about the matter of course, had worked out like it was a mathematical equation that I was unlikely to find a more beautiful wife, especially one so endowed with the disciplinary virtue of logic. But back then I’d been in a cloud-cuckoo land of my own making. And in that land strange things happened as my sleeping mind explored a wide and fascinating range of exotic fantasies in which she chastised my naked buttocks with a wide range of fascinating implements if I chanced to displease her, a scenario that never got close to translating itself into reality.

“Andrew Greenleigh!” she gasped, “Of all the things to come out with, and now of all times when I’d been wondering…”

“Wondering?” I asked, my heart unaccountably and very suddenly doing somersaults. After all, I’d never proposed to anyone before, especially unintentionally, and suddenly I became uncomfortably aware of the possibility of rejection.

“I was wondering if there was any future for us. Marcia Haverforth got engaged last week. She showed me her ring. All gold and opals and garnets, shining and happy like her eyes.”

“Bloodshot?” I ventured wittily, needing to lighten the atmosphere that I had unwittingly created, and I’d never thought much of Marcia Haverforth’s reputed good looks because to my eyes and when she looked straight at me she had the general appearance of something off the fishmonger’s slab.

“Don’t be so awful, Andrew!” she shrieked, but there was enough mirth in her words for me to sigh for a third time.

“We’re nearly back at your place,” I pointed out as I turned slowly into the cul-de-sac where her parents lived. They’d both worked hard and had reached their ultimate goal in life, having saved for half their time together for the deposit on a brick box with storage heaters, three beds and a garage. Everything was storage heaters back in those days, but I never met one that worked adequately.

“I will, Andrew, of course I’ll marry you,” she’d smiled, radiantly. “And to plight our troth I’ll let you drive past to the end and we’ll have another little kiss.”

The little kiss was a longish affair, her pincers did more undoing and I did a great deal of sucking, which I discovered there and then that she adored. And as a special treat she withdrew her claws and gripped me with the fleshy parts of her fingers, which action released a host of butterflies into my stomach.

I can remember that snatched adventure even now, clear as clear like it was yesterday. Why, she’d even let me put my hand all the way up her knee-length tight skirt to brush against forbidden territories for a magical first-ever time. There were unexplored kingdoms up there, I’d frequently thought, terrains where I’d probably never be allowed to go even though the very thought of even the tip of one finger almost (but not quite) moving through that fragrant but unknown territory turned my stomach and its entire contents into a mass of leapfrogging marmosets.

So I sucked for a while and she rejected my fingers before they quite reached their distant goal and it must have been half an hour later that I reversed back to her parents’ place, all of a dither and a nervous sweat, and she climbed out of the car.

“Don’t tell a soul about … us,” she whispered. “I’ll tell mummy and daddy some other time, when it’s right.”

I didn’t understand about it being right, but over the years she’d said quite a few things in the same tone of voice as she used when she said that, and I didn’t understand any of them. I put it down to the infinite barrier between the sexes that everyone acknowledged but nobody tried to work out. One day I’ll try. One day I’ll make history being the first man to put forward a hypothesis on the subject, one that covers all know facts.

I watched her as she half-ran up to the front door, pushed it open, glanced back at me and waved, and closed it swiftly behind her. Assuring myself that I was entitled to a fourth sigh I exhaled deeply, started the engine and reversed all the way back to the main road.

My parents were both in bed, which was usual for them. They both got up early, dad for work and mum for him.

Then I searched out my diary were I hid it, at the back of the bottom drawer in the kitchen cupboard where nobody was supposed to go on account of the fact that dad said it blocked up a mouse-hole when it was shut and most definitely mustn’t ever be opened by anyone or we’d be overrun by the rodent beasties. I didn’t believe that a wooden drawer would be any obstacle to a determined mouse with teeth and kept my diary behind a drawer-full of rags that had been there for as long as dad had made his decision about mice. My diary never got chewed and dad never knew of its existence, which was a victory as far as I was concerned.

I sat at the kitchen table and sucked the end of my pencil. This was going to be a special moment because now that I was on the verge of getting married I was grown up, and everyone knows grownups don’t keep kiddie diaries.

This is my last ever entry, I wrote. I asked Louise to marry me today, and it looks like she wants to. I never knew I was going to until the words popped out, so that probably means that deep down I mean it. Anyway, she said Yes and let me almost feel her anywhere I wanted, which was magic. It’s a moment in my life, tonight is. A seminal moment, as they say. So I’m going to hide you, old diary, up in the attic in my old school satchel, along with my English book and it’s essay that got ten out of ten, the marbles I won off Grumpy Botham the day before he got killed in the fire and all my other treasures from when I was a kid. When a man’s going to get married and things he doesn’t need his little black book of memories any more, like he doesn’t want Grumpy’s marbles or old school essays or anything like that. He’s got to make a whole new start without hanging onto trivia from the past. So goodbye, old diary, goodbye.

P.S. I hope I’m not making a terrible mistake. Louise is all right as girls go, and everyone says how pretty she is. But sometimes, like now, I just can’t imagine spending all the long future with her. Maybe I’m just nervous and it’ll be okay. And to think that once upon a time I dreamed of marrying Amanda Wharmby. I wonder where she is these days and what she’s doing? I’d love to bump into her again – and in more ways than one! But it might not be such a good idea. Bumping into Amanda might make me regret Louise, and that would be too complicated to be true! Best for me to stick with what I’ve got or I’ll start wondering about Mary Skegworth or Snooty Jonners and I will get confused, and anyway I reckon I’ll get to feel Louise a lot more times now she knows I’m serious about her.

Then I made some cocoa, sat for a longish time and sipped it, and finally went to bed. I’d asked an important question, on the spur of the moment at that, and was consequently thoroughly exhausted because I’d got an answer that may, in the future, either transport me to Heaven or commit me to a wretched eternity in Hell.

That had all been years ago, back in the good old sixties when Ford Populars still ploughed through towns, girls wore miniskirts that made the eyes boggle if you were a lad (though Louise didn’t very often), folks kept diaries and getting engaged was a serious matter. And feeling girls, that didn’t happen so often back then, even though everyone went on about how permissive things had become. The sixties! How I sometimes dream of going back to then, if only to make changes to the things I’d done, things that had a bearing on all the subsequent years of my life, even on the here and now.

Now it’s the noughties, I’m edging past middle age, Louise is a lot older (in attitude, that is; we’re the same in years), and Vanessa and Richard have been born, have grown up and eventually left home to have families of their own. So I have grandchildren, and it doesn’t seem more than a day or so since I’d wondered in a strange naive innocence I shared with many of my peers how you went about to actually get to have children! It has, in fact, been the best part of a lifetime since then, but it came back to me just the other day as if it had been only yesterday. It’s funny how memories mess a fellow about when he’s least expecting it.

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