Our relationship lasted a week. This is how we met. She was standing outside the pub at kicking-out time. Could I do her a favour? Would I go back inside, into the gents, and buy her a packet of condoms from the machine. They weren’t for her. They were for her teenage son, who has recently become sexually active. In the gents, at the machine, I pulled out the wrong drawer and obtained by mistake a capsule of herbal aphrodisiac, the last thing he needed probably, and had to return armed with more pound coins. Before we parted I put my mobile number in hers.
We met the next evening. She gave me a Reiki massage. She gives them for a living. She gave it at her place of work, on the floor. Before starting, she said did I have any current health concerns. Mucus, I said, clearing my throat to demonstrate. She thought this might be an allergy to dairy products. As she worked on me, I noticed that her lungs were thick with catarrh. She was in a worse condition than I was. Was she a heavy smoker? Or a toker, perhaps, I said? Both she said. However, she was thinking of giving up tobacco and moving on to a hash pipe. It was a question of finding a pipe she liked.
Then we went to a pizza restaurant. I thought I was a fast eater. She’d polished off hers and was ransacking her handbag for her tobacco pouch before I’d finished my first segment. She loved sex, she said, when she came back. Adored it. But starting with me, she said, she’d decided she wasn’t going to take it lightly any more. She was tired of being used by men. She’d decided, she said, nodding downwards, to treat it as something precious. I was going to have to wait, maybe for weeks.
After that we each drove our own cars and met at the pub. She’d smoked a joint on the way, she said, as we sat down with our drinks. I couldn’t detect any difference in her. She seemed exactly the same as before. There was an angry drunk woman in the pub, a leftover from Happy Hour. A lunar eclipse of the sun had occurred that morning, and, advancing on my dinner date, the drunk accused her of acting as if she were unaffected by it. How dare she behave in such a sacrilegious and complacent manner!
The good humoured aplomb with which my pizza partner defused this woman’s crazy accusation, and even managed to make her smile through her rage, was surprising and impressive. Something about the Earth Mother not requiring her obeisance. Then turning to me she continued her riff about how precious it was and about how she had decided, at 30, to start treasuring it. I’d been staring at the drunk woman with exaggerated horror. Now I swung this expression, unaltered, from the drunk woman to her.
We met the next evening at the home of a couple who she said were good friends of hers. They couldn’t have been more friendly, easygoing people, yet I felt like a garland ox.
I’d bought a bottle of absinthe and we drank it mixed with elderflower champagne out of Spanish wine tumblers. But the main business of the evening was the elaborate construction and ceremonial smoking of joints. The way all three of them had their heads down over their little trays of makings reminded me of light factory assembly work. When the results of their skill and labour began circulating, I surprised everybody by refusing them. Sorry, I said, but I adhered to the rule of ABC— Anything But Cannabis. In that case, I must massage her feet, said my friend.
A few days later we ended like this. She rang early. She and six other women had sat up all night on a remote beach, she said, to celebrate the summer solstice. Something I should know was that a more magical, feminine era was coming up fast, she said. An odd thing that happened to them seemed to confirm this. All six of them found to their amazement that their menstrual cycles had come into alignment. They had come away from their beach vigil empowered as women, she said. Unfortunately her car wouldn’t start, so could I drive over to this remote beach and fetch her?
So over I went and picked her up. Never again would she treat her sex as anything less than precious, she said, as soon as she got in the car. She seemed to be in a state of mystical exaltation. And before she even considered letting me anywhere near it, she said, I would have to have an Aids test.
I dropped her at her place of work in time for her first appointment. Since then we’ve sort of left it at that.
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