Low life | 2 July 2011

Our relationship lasted a week. This is how we met. She was standing outside the pub at kicking-out time. Could I do her a favour? Would I go back inside, into the gents, and buy her a packet of condoms from the machine. They weren’t for her. They were for her teenage son, who has recently become sexually active. In the gents, at the machine, I pulled out the wrong drawer and obtained by mistake a capsule of herbal aphrodisiac, the last thing he needed probably, and had to return armed with more pound coins. Before we parted I put my mobile number in hers.

We met the next evening. She gave me a Reiki massage. She gives them for a living. She gave it at her place of work, on the floor. Before starting, she said did I have any current health concerns. Mucus, I said, clearing my throat to demonstrate. She thought this might be an allergy to dairy products. As she worked on me, I noticed that her lungs were thick with catarrh. She was in a worse condition than I was. Was she a heavy smoker? Or a toker, perhaps, I said? Both she said. However, she was thinking of giving up tobacco and moving on to a hash pipe. It was a question of finding a pipe she liked.

Then we went to a pizza restaurant. I thought I was a fast eater. She’d polished off hers and was ransacking her handbag for her tobacco pouch before I’d finished my first segment. She loved sex, she said, when she came back. Adored it. But starting with me, she said, she’d decided she wasn’t going to take it lightly any more. She was tired of being used by men. She’d decided, she said, nodding downwards, to treat it as something precious.