7 Ridiculous Journeys (3)

 

She started coming round daily to his room in the Rewinnes. He had no idea why, though he was glad she did. Years later, he would have been stumped if asked what they got up to during her extended visits. The litany of things they didn't get up to, by contrast, remained etched and hung devotionally in his memory, Stations of the Cross of a Sacred Dick Ill-uséd. As he would recall it, the two manqué lovers spent those hours liturgically pretending this peevish, problematic and faintly aromatic organ wasn't there, refusing to talk about it, distracting from its importunate presence with music and desultory conversation, while wordlessly negotiating the small print of what it might be allowed to rub up against, and for how many seconds, through the layers of polyester and denim. There were, he vaguely recalled, a lot of awkward, fully-clothed recumbencies and clinging adjacencies (bed, floor), and hands straining against the tight leashes of faltering willpower, and there might have been some discreet, deniable grinding of pelvises in amongst all of that, had it been possible for bones so swaddled to grind. She generally appeared in his doorway dressed in the style of a cosmonaut or Arctic explorer, her modesty even in summer underwritten by multiple layers of wool, cotton, steel and tungsten, over reinforced concrete underwear: he assumed this was standard pioneering gear for the sex, and thought nothing of it, other than that it was amazing how the contours of femininity could still contrive to remain movingly perceptible through so many layers.

"Politics?" she gasped.

"Labour," he mumbled into the back of her neck, hoping it might be the right answer: after all, neither of them had been to Eton.

"Conservative," she crowed triumphantly, pushing his hand away from the escarpment of her lower ribcage. It seemed to please her to prove him wrong. "I'm Treasurer of the Northolt Conservative Party. Or anyway I was."

"Oh. Well, conservatives are all right too," he panicked, as if to reassure her it was only the unmentioned third option that he was dead set against. "Yes, of course. You know, I've always liked the way they... disapprove of everything. And it’s true when you think about it, too many people these days have jobs. It's good that Maggie's doing something about that."

"Abortion?" she enquired as if offering a plate of her own home-made.

"Anti," he replied confidently, and followed up with that big march in London he’d gone on with his church, and a bit of a nuzzle. She was Irish, after all. And Catholic. And Conservative.

"Correct. If a man enters a woman, he must expect a baby. And be prepared to support one long term. If not, no deal." He wondered if this was directed at him. He found babies, from a distance, resembled nothing so much as giant radioactive maggots, but paying for one in perpetuity seemed a reasonable price for being allowed to slide a hand under a loosened bra. That would be a memory you could treasure for as long as it took for you to shrivel up, and go grey, and get eaten up by lymph nodes. Moreover, it seemed right and fitting that people should reproduce.

Or that some people should, anyway. Her, he wasn't sure about. Him neither, if he considered it. Having babies didn't seem to be the obvious vocation of either one of them. It didn't seem to suit them. This was the late twentieth century, anyway: no century for young babies.

"Perhaps," he wondered vaguely, as she inscrutably guided his hand west of her chest again, "this means I'm not in love."