Written on the Body Read Online Free Page A

pot.’ That’s right. At least I was between turds.
    Jacqueline made me a sandwich and asked if I had any washing-up I’d like done. She came the next day and the day after that. She told me all about the problems facing lemurs in the Zoo. She brought her own mop. She worked nine to five Monday to Friday, drove a Mini and got her reading from book clubs. She exhibited no fetishes, foibles, freak-outs or fuck-ups. Above all she was single and she had always been single. No children and no husband.
    I considered her. I didn’t love her and I didn’t want to love her. I didn’t desire her and I could not imagine desiring her. These were all points in her favour. I had lately learned that another way of writing FALL IN LOVE is WALK THE PLANK . I was tired of balancing blindfold on a slender beam, one slip and into the unplumbed sea. I wanted the clichés, the armchair. I wanted the broad road and twenty-twenty vision. What’s wrong with that? It’s called growing up. Maybe most people gloss their comforts with a patina of romance but it soon wears off. They’re in it for the long haul; the expanding waistline and the little semi in the suburbs. What’s wrong with that? Late-night TV and snoring side by side into the millennium. Till death us do part. Anniversary darling? What’s wrong with that?
    I considered her. She had no expensive tastes, knewnothing about wine, never wanted to be taken to the opera and had fallen in love with me. I had no money and no morale. It was a marriage made in heaven.
    We agreed that we were good for each other whilst sitting in her Mini eating a Chinese take-away. It was a cloudy night so we couldn’t look at the stars and besides, she had to be up for work at half past seven. I don’t think we even slept together that night. It was the next night, freezing cold in November and I’d lit the fire. I’d arranged a few flowers because I like to do that anyway but when it came to getting out the tablecloth and finding the good glasses I couldn’t be bothered. ‘We’re not like that,’ I told myself. ‘What we have is simple and ordinary. That’s why I like it. It’s worth lies in its neatness. No more sprawling life for me. This is container gardening.’
    Over the months that followed my mind healed and I no longer moped and groaned over lost love and impossible choices. I had survived shipwreck and I liked my new island with hot and cold running water and regular visits from the milkman. I became an apostle of ordinariness. I lectured my friends on the virtues of the humdrum, praised the gentle bands of my existence and felt that for the first time I had come to know what everyone told me I would know; that passion is for holidays, not homecoming.
    My friends were more circumspect than me. They regarded Jacqueline with a wary approval, regarding me as one might a mental patient who has been behaving for a few months. A few months? More like a year. I was rigorous, hard working and … and … what was that word beginning with B?
    ‘You’re bored,’ my friend said.
    I protested with all the fervour of a teetotaller caught glancing at the bottle. I was content. I had settled down.
    ‘Still having sex?’
    ‘Not much. It doesn’t matter you know. We do now and then. When we both feel like it. We work hard. We don’t have a lot of time.’
    ‘Do you look at her and want her? Do you look at her and notice her?’
    I lost my temper. Why was my happily settled, happily happy Heidi house coming under fire from a friend who had put up with all my broken hearts without a word of reproach? I struggled in my mind with all kinds of defences. Should I be hurt? Surprised? Should I laugh it off? I wanted to say something cruel to expiate my anger and to justify myself. But it’s difficult with old friends; difficult because it’s so easy. You know one another as well as lovers do and you have had less to pretend about. I poured myself a drink and shrugged.
    ‘Nothing’s