Success Read Free

them? Why? Well — that’s your lot, bitch: you get no more of me.
    In fact, of course, there hadn’t been much difficulty. That fool Terence was in the kitchen when I got home from work. He isn’t really allowed in this part of my flat — hence his furtive air, his look of hunted gratitude when I asked him to stay upstairs and talk.
    ‘Gita won’t fuck me any more,’ he explained.
    I asked, with real interest, why he thought this to be the case.
    ‘I don’t know. Gita doesn’t know either.’
    I straightened a finger at him. ‘Which one is Gita?’
    ‘The small one who wears those ear-rings.’
    ‘Ah.’
All
Terence’s girls are, perforce, tiny, and their ears are among the things I try very hard not to think about. ‘Didn’t she spend Tuesday night here?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘I tried to fuck her.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘She didn’t want me to.’
    I thought this extremely odd, Gita being the sort of girl — surely — that you can do whatever the hell you like to. What would be the point of her otherwise? But I said, out of politeness, ‘Curious — in my experience it’s usually the other way round.’
    A fatuous digression ensued, during which Terence made great play with his sexual insecurities at the imagined expense of my own. Gauche stuff — this dread he has of his own homosexuality can get quite alarming when so candidly displayed. ‘Nothing in that line, as it happens,’ I said coolly: ‘It’s this Miranda.’
    ‘Oh?’ he said with attention.
    ‘Miranda, and her demands.’
    Miranda’s robust physical appetites, my own sloth and lassitude, Terence’s more stolid gifts in this department, the ease with which the delegation could be made …
    The work of a moment. And now, tonight, while Terence gamely grunts, while Miranda cracks him in her dappled thighs: I’ll be up here chuckling about the things I didn’t tell him, about her raw-liver kisses and her sweet-sherry tongue, about the ghostly smells that issue from her pouches and vents, about the underworld effluvia she leaves glistening on your sheets.
    What’s happening to you girls these days?
    After spending the night with a neurotic girl — and so many of them
are
neurotic now — I feel more than my natural repugnance at the prospect of examining the bedclothes once I’ve shooed them from the flat. There will of course be the usual grim femininia — a dollop of make-up on the pillowslips, the school of pubic hairs on the sheets, that patch of hell somewhere further down: so much one expects. But these days I twitch back the blankets with a premonition of wonder, of dread; they’re all in pieces, these girls — they could have left almost anything behind … I can see it now: Gregory stands in the middle of the floor, the room still shimmering with the girl’s demented exit; gingerly he approaches, face halfaverted, gathers the heavy quilt in a muscular fist, breathes deeply, throws back the blankets — and finds an entire leg marooned on the sheets! I wouldn’t put it past them.
    Did you know, for instance, that girls now go to the lavatory? Shaking news, I agree, but they do. Oh yes. And not just to pee, either. I once nursed a fond dream — silly really — that they left all that sort of thing to the menfolk — except when they’re in hospitals or other suitably equipped establishments. Indeed, whenever I heard an ambulance siren, or saw one of the white vats whizz past, I was always cheered to imagine that it contained a few fortunate females being rushed to the wardsfor just this purpose. What a romantic I was … They do it all the time these days. They even talk about it. They even try to do it in front of you! But they’re like chaps, these days, like fellas, like blokes.
    It’s their nerves which really drive me mad. When did they start thinking they had to be nervous all the time? Who told them? Why, fidgety fingers I find hardly less repulsive than warty knuckles and rank nails. Agitated