What had the chambermaid made of my penis vacuum pump?

Fumbling outside my door in dripping swimming trunks for my room key, I was hailed cheerily by the maid from a doorway further along the corridor. I hadn’t met her, but her greeting was not without a touch of familiarity, if not intimacy, I thought. The latter, I guessed, must be predicated on the fact of her coming into my junior suite when I was out and restoring it to a holiday-brochure photograph, then arranging my tawdry collection of toiletries into little islands on the marble counter. What she made of my penis vacuum pump, I couldn’t guess. I rather think that while she could only speculate as to its function, she probably imagined it to be the latest Western bourgeois ‘must-have’ gadget. This patronising thought was based on the way she polished the Perspex tube and deified it and the heavy motor unit by arranging them side by side and centrally on a glass shelf lit by four spotlights.

‘Tense,’ she cried, beaming at me. ‘Well, yes, I suppose I am a bit,’ I said.

I attributed her extrasensory powers of perception to having only very recently joined the proletariat as a form of relaxation after previously working her fingers to the bone as a peasant. ‘Tense,’ she repeated, this time fixing me with a meaningful stare. I re-examined myself more closely in order to satisfy her with the more honest answer that she seemed to be demanding. I’ve had a tough few weeks, it’s true. A tough year. In fact, there is only one thing left to me now — absolute humility. And then there were the 800 words I would have eventually to produce describing my four days at this brand-new five star all-inclusive beach resort when the novella was far and away the most suitable medium.