Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) Read Free

distant? She asked me to bring in the recently written ending to
what I kept referring to as my book. I couldn’t see how any
of it related to our therapy sessions but because I hadn’t shown it
to anyone else I thought I might as well get some feedback since
she was already on my payroll and so in our next session after
reading the last thirty pages of what would eventually become the
ending of Diary Of An Oxygen Thief my therapist confidently
proclaimed I was suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder.
    At least she didn’t say it
was badly written.
    Yvette opened the door to
her apartment before I got the key in it.
    ” I look like
shit” she said
    The idea being, that
because she knew she looked like shit she was relieved of any
responsibility for it. If anything it became my problem since I was
now expected to make her feel better about it. Whenever she kissed
me her hand would automatically stray to my dick to monitor my
affection for her. She hated when I got hard without her knowledge.
And that night for some reason maybe because I’d spent the previous
hour being investigated or perhaps it was because she did indeed
look like shit there was nothing stirring.
    “ You’re not
affectionate.”
    "It’s because your stomach
is hurting. I didn’t want to…"
    “ You’re
distant.”
    It was a question of
theft. There was no hard-on where a hard-on should be. Ordinarily
it wouldn’t have been a problem. If anything, I was just as
surprised as she was. The long silence that followed, was
punctuated by the sighs of a martyr and the whipping back and forth
of glossy magazine pages until at last she slipped wordlessly away
to bed. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket and made for the
couch.
    The next morning I was
woken by the sound of spigots being turned on and off until finally
she appeared in the living room in her uptight formal bank attire
looking pinched-face, unfucked and even uglier than the night
before.
    Pausing at the door she
turned to look at me on the couch
    "You can go back to bed
now”
    I was lying on a
smouldering hard-on.
     
    *****
    Paedophile priests,
punishment-beatings, mental and physical abuse, domestic violence,
two near-drownings and the recurring nightmares of the little boy I
saw mangled in a farm accident.
    “ You had a
brutal childhood.”
    Dr Susie looked directly
into my eyes making sure I heard her. There, it was official. But
none of it felt like it had happened to me. I was detached from
these events. Had she confused my case with someone else? Maybe she
was exaggerating my trauma so I‘d keep coming every week. I was
after all, her misery-mortgage. And yet I began to enjoy our
sessions mostly because it was becoming clear I wouldn’t be
expected to marry Yvette. That I wasn’t so much in love with her,
as terrified of letting her down. I was about to marry her out of
politeness. Why do that to myself? Or to her? She had her own
agenda and her own time-frame. At thirty- three her body-clock was
sounding the alarm. I told Dr Susie about an unusually calm stretch
of water on the Niagra River called The Deadline. Once passed there
was no way to avoid the pull of the falls three miles ahead.
Without looking up from her lap Dr Susie asked a seemingly
unrelated question.
    “ Have you
ever tried online dating?”
     
    *****
    Yvette’s recently becalmed
hell-raising father, was separated but not yet divorced from her
artist-mother who for some reason, liked to argue in airports. Her
ridiculously handsome brother was a geologist and in a way, so was
her privately-educated sister, being as she was, a professional
gold-digger. The grandfather on her mother’s side made a fortune
producing champagne bottles and lived in a small compact stone
edifice that could without irony be referred to as a castle. The
other grandfather was a retired admiral in the French Navy with a
Parisian street named after him; Rue Du Admiral Gumont- Sutre. He
owned a summer-house in Belle Ille where they