Driving Big Davie (Dan Starkey) Read Free

your mouth, tasting warm cider and burgeoning lust — definitely, this is the business — like squeezing your fingers under bra wires, expecting a mouse trap but getting warm skin, getting pulled close safe in the knowledge that she was as young and naïve and absolutely up for it as you, lying in snow but it could be on a beach, you're as hard as a rock, you're going to do it, you're really going to . . .
    Ejaculate.
    And I did.
    There and then in the snow.
    And there and then in the room.
    'Fuck,' I said then, as she said, 'What? What's wrong?'
    'Someone's coming.'
    There was, and I had. But she never knew.
    And now I'd come again, thinking back twenty-four years and it was wonderful then and it was wonderful now.
    And then I remembered the cup.
    I remembered that I'd forgotten the cup.
    That I'd made a fucking mess everywhere and I'd forgotten the god-damn cup. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
    Jesus Christ.
    What sort of a bloody idiot . . .
    God . . . Christ . . . I hobbled in my half-mast trousers to the bathroom and soaked a towel. I rubbed at my trousers, I rubbed at the seat, I rubbed at the floor. Christ. I looked at my watch — twenty-five minutes. I was getting into 'we'd better check on him, he might have had a coronary' territory. I rubbed and I rubbed and I rubbed until no one but a crack police forensics team or a moron could tell the difference. Thirty-two minutes.
    What the hell was I supposed to do now?
    I was forty years old.
    I couldn't just produce another cupful like that.
    It would take at least thirty-seven minutes, and probably a doze, then a bit of a walk and a ham sandwich.
    I wasn't fucking Superman.
    And even if I did produce another dribble, they'd be weak and tired, barely interested, forced out under sufferance, not the Gold Medal swimmers we needed to progress with the surrogacy. I'd be humiliated. My sperm count would hardly register. They'd fail their O-levels. They'd get a must try harder stamp from the nurse. The pretty nurse would be grinning so hard she'd split the top of her head off.
    Bloody hell.
    What was I going to tell Trish? Here for possibly the most important, relationship-defining day of our lives, when all I had to do was concentrate for five minutes, and look what I'd done, and look where I'd done it.
    Christ.
    Thirty-seven minutes.
    Soon the SAS would come swinging through the windows to rescue me.
    I would have to think of something.
    Something now.
    A migraine.
    A stroke.
    The nurse grinning.
    Christ.
    I pulled up my trousers and hurried to the door. I unlocked it and peered into the corridor. It was empty. Directly across from me there was a shelf with a small door behind it where I was supposed to leave my sample. I heard footsteps and ducked back into the room, leaving the door open just enough to see a nurse — a different nurse — hurry past.
    Patricia — I have good news, and I have bad news.
    The good news is, ejaculation was no problem.
    The bad news is, if you want to count it, you'll have to get down on your hands and knees.
    What was I like?
    I had always brought shame on my family — through no fault of my own, of course, except in cases of extreme stupidity — but this brought it to an entirely new level.
    I had sworn on our most recent reconciliation to be honest with Patricia at all times.
    That if I strayed, or put our house on a horse, or gave her tacky ornaments to Oxfam with instructions to smash them, then I could and would be brutally honest. But this? How could I tell her this without utterly humiliating myself? I wouldn't be able to hold my head up even in my last refuge, my own house. And even if she stuck with me, even if she swore never to tell a soul, it would get out there. These things always came out. She'd get drunk and tell my friends. And they'd all snigger into their cocktails and they'd tell their friends and it would soon evolve into an urban myth.
    I peered out into the corridor again.
    This time a male nurse was coming