NOTHING TO DO WITH ME

The Galapagos Islands are moving – in a South Westerly direction. Luckily they are moving at a rate of 1 inch per year, so they won’t reach the end of our street for a while yet.


Carole’s head on the mascara streaked pillow. (Mrs Wincey won’t like that). Have you ever really studied a head? A big knob of bone with skin stretched over it.

Ah, but in the middle of that lump of bone, lying there like a big dollop of cold porridge, is your brain. That’s where it’s all happening, even when you are asleep. When it is offline your brain is sorting, sifting, hypothesising, testing, deleting, reordering –
Oh look. Carole is coming back online. Her eyelids twitch. Of course that could mean she is dreaming – but it is not that sort of twitch, not the REM beloved of dream researchers Also she is sort of wrinkling her nose. She is definitely coming back online.

Suddenly she turns over onto her stomach, and farts. It is more like a sigh than a fart. A gentle sigh. Even so, I see the cotton sheet ripple slightly.

I wonder if, when you are asleep and someone stands watching you, you are somehow aware of their presence. Is Carole aware of me? She wrinkled her nose. Can she smell me! I remove myself to the en suite.

8.32am. I open the curtains. Cars crouch by the kerb, waiting. A heavy sky presses down on the rooftops. I go back to bed.

"Sometimes I'm happy.

Sometimes I'm blue -

My dispostion depends on on you..."

- No it doesn't. You have a mental illness. It's called Manic Depression.

- Really? I thought it was just a phase I was going through.

- Oh, very droll.

- Well shut up! And pass me the lithium salts.

(cheers RJ)

There wasn’t another room available at The Limes so Carole agreed to share with me, and sleep in the single bed. It would have been possible to have found her another hotel, but she was afraid I might abscond if let out of her sight for any length of time.

As it happened, Mrs Wincey did not appear to give a toss as to whether Carole was my partner, my sister, or my transvestite brother for that matter – as long as the room was now charged as a ‘full double’.

The Limes did not serve evening meals so we had dinner at a little café called Butterfingers. I had dined there, alone, the past two nights and I knew the fare to be modest, but more than adequate, in both taste and presentation. The place was licensed so Carole was able to have two pints of her favourite lager, whilst a glass of red wine was all I would risk, on account of the old Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

It was just after ten pm when we retired to ‘our’ room.

It feels so odd when you share a room with someone who used to be your lover but no longer is – or says she isn’t.
We were both extremely polite: After you…. No after you… That sort of thing. If we accidentally touched whilst passing each other we would both say sorry – a little too quickly. I decided to be the gentleman and let Carole use the bathroom first. She used to sleep naked in our old ‘Council Estate’ days, but I noticed she took a bag into the bathroom, and when she came out she was wearing a nightdress - and a very ‘modest’ one at that: not one inch of cleavage to be seen. She was obviously determined not to put temptation in my way.

Well, I have always been one to take things as they come, and so I accepted the inevitable. But I decided to be a bit coy myself. I don’t have any pyjamas (can’t stand them in bed – they’re so restrictive) so I came out of the bathroom with a towel around my waist, which I removed, in what I hoped was a swift, yet graceful movement as I slid between the sheets. I needn’t have bothered. Carole was reading, and never took her eyes off the page during my whole complicated manoeuvre.

I switched off my bedside lamp and closed my eyes.