Comfort and Joy Read Online Free Page A

pointless, if exceedingly hot.
But this isn’t normal lust. This is … filmic. Surreal. Another thing altogether.
    I go back to the loo. They have armchairs in there, and I plonk myself down on one. Am I drunk? Surely not from one cocktail
     and a quarter.
    Other hand: maybe I’ve got completely the wrong end of the stick. Maybe this man is smiling and looking at me like that because
     he feels sorry for me, all alone in a bar two days before Christmas, clutching my scrappy little piece of paper and wittering
     on about pigeons, with a face so red it looks like it’s been boiled. His heart goes out to my speech impediment. He’s just
     being kind. Christ! He’s probably waiting for someone. His former-supermodel wife and nine exquisite children, I expect. I
     need to get a grip. ‘Get a grip, Clara,’ I say to myself out loud. I am in a bar, someone has sat down at my table, they are
     incredibly, amazingly, inhumanly attractive, and that’s that. So what? I am an adult, and quite a responsible one. I have
     self-control. I am also a biped, who can – and will – stand up and leave whenever I like, using my two stout feet to propel
     me homewards. The world is full of attractive people: there’s no need to flip out like a weirdo because one talks to you.
     Deep breaths. Wash hands. Be normal. That stab in the stomach isn’t necessarily desire: it could be hunger. Go back, eat the
     nuts, finish the drink, say thank you, go home. Not rocket science, by a long chalk.
    The problem is, I wasn’t always a person of the flesh-coloured pants variety. There was a time, many centuries ago, when triceratopses
     frolicked playfully across the plains with diplodocuses, when I was acquainted with the woman in the stockings. Well, not
     the actual stockings – they’re so ooh-saucy, someone’s-feeling-lucky – but the general ‘Here we are: anything could happen’
     thing. But it was a very, very long time ago. Happily for me, I don’t find that many people attractive,
plus my propensity for bad behaviour has been napalmed into extinction by years and years of marriage, children, supermarkets,
     laundry, bills, school, work, all of that stuff. And, I tell myself again, I have probably got the absolutely wrong end of
     the stick.
    But I know, when I sit down again. The air is heavy, like syrup. Even the molecules in the air seem charged. And I smile back
     at him and lean forward in my chair.
    No, we didn’t do it against the bins. But, all the same, there exists, it turns out, an accelerated and dizzying kind of intimacy
     that is so intense and overwhelming, it feels not a million – or even a hundred – miles from infidelity: while you could certainly
     state that ‘nothing happened’, this would only be true if you were an emotional imbecile and your heart was dead. What I learned
     tonight is that it is possible for nothing and everything to happen in the same breath. I push the thought – confusing, exciting,
     disabling, impossible – out of my head and try to calm myself, and in the taxi home I make myself think about Sam. Sam, Sam,
     only Sam.
    To be perfectly honest with you, and if I’m to be
completely realistic
, Sam and I are no longer at the passionately romantic stage. Not by any means. It pains me to say this. It actually makes
     me feel prickly in my armpits, that sort of shame-guilt prickle you get. And it makes me feel sad. Because, why? Some people
     go on for ever, happy as two happy clams at the bottom of the happy sea, for decades and decades until death do them part,
     and even then they probably fly around heaven chastely kissing each other and having joint hobbies. I see them in Sainsbury’s
     sometimes, ancient old couples holding hands. They make me want to cry. I’m not just saying that: they literally make my eyes
     fill with tears. Sometimes I follow them around for a couple of aisles, until I can’t bear it any more.
    What’s so wrong with me and Sam, with us – well, with me