The farcical world of the Sharon’s Ex-Boyfriends Club

Sharon told me once that the best sex she’d ever had was with Tom in the town public conveniences, bathed in that mauve light some town councils install to inconvenience junkies. Which was typical of Sharon’s unsnobbishness and of Tom’s work ethic.

I’d met Tom through Sharon. In a list of boyfriends that year that would have taken as long to read aloud as the football results, Tom came after me and I came after Trevor. After Trevor had beaten Tom up a couple of times — my brief contribution to his estrangement from his former long-term girlfriend hadn’t counted for some reason — the three of us formed a sort of Sharon’s Ex-Servicemen’s Association, which met occasionally around a pub table.

And after Tom there was this army bloke with a bad leg and an enviable disability pension. He drank in the pub too. Unfortunately for him he lacked humour and was determined to be her one and only. Retrospectively jealous, he was violently hostile to Sharon’s Ex-Servicemen’s Association. We scarred veterans shook our heads in sorrow at such a public exhibition of delusive hope.

In truth, I too was still desperately in love with Sharon and remained so for years afterwards. Trevor, on the other hand, maintained that he was glad to be out of it. Their relationship had been a long, complicated and warlike affair over many years and he had learned to hide his true feelings behind a poker face. But Tom had come out of his intimate brush with the town’s carnival queen not only mentally unscathed but thrilled to have been introduced to this new and farcical world of which Sharon was the centre. He was glad too because of the incalculable bonus of having met me.