Written on the Body Read Online Free

floor of the Pimlico Women’s Institute. I don’t feel a great deal about the Women’s Institute either way, they were the first to campaign against aerosols that contain CFCs andthey make a mean Victoria sponge but I don’t really care. The point was that their attic faced roughly in the direction of Amsterdam.
    I can tell by now that you are wondering whether I can be trusted as a narrator. Why didn’t I dump Inge and head for a Singles Bar? The answer is her breasts.
    They were not marvellously upright, the kind women wear as epaulettes, as a mark of rank. Neither were they pubescent playboy fantasies. They had done their share of time and begun to submit to gravity’s insistence. The flesh was brown, the aureoles browner still, nipples bead black. My gypsy sisters I called them, though not to her. I had idolised them simply and unequivocally, not as a mother substitute nor a womb trauma, but for themselves. Freud didn’t always get it right. Sometimes a breast is a breast is a breast.
    Half a dozen times I picked up the phone. Six times I put it down again. Probably she wouldn’t have answered. She would have had it disconnected but for her mother in Rotterdam. She never did explain how she would know it was her mother and not a Receptionist. How she would know it was a Receptionist and not me. I wanted to talk to her.
    The pigeons, Adam, Eve and Kissmequick, couldn’t manage Holland. Eve got as far as Folkestone. Adam dropped out and went to live in Trafalgar Square, another victory to Nelson. Kissmequick was scared of heights, a drawback for a bird, but the WI took him in as their mascot and rechristened him Boadicea. If he has not died yet he is still living. I don’t know what happened to Inge’s birds. They never came to me.
    Then I met Jacqueline.
    I had to lay a carpet in my new flat so a couple of friends came over to help. They brought Jacqueline. She was the mistress of one of them confidante of both. A sort of household pet. She traded sex and sympathy for £50 to tide her over the weekend and a square meal on Sunday. It was a civilised if brutal arrangement.
    I had bought a new flat to start again from a nasty love affair that had given me the clap. Nothing wrong with my organs, this was emotional clap. I had to keep my heart to myself in case I infected somebody. The flat was large and derelict. I hoped I might rebuild it and myself at the same time. The clap-giver was still with her husband in their tasteful house but she’d slipped me £10,000 to help finance my purchase. Give/Lend was how she put it. Blood money was how I put it. She was buying off what conscience she had. I intended never to see her again. Unfortunately she was my dentist.
    Jacqueline worked at the Zoo. She worked with small furry things that wouldn’t be nice to visitors. Visitors who have paid £5 don’t have a lot of patience for small furry things who are frightened and want to hide. It was Jacqueline’s job to make everything bright and shiny again. She was good with parents, good with children, good with animals, good with disturbed things of every kind. She was good with me.
    When she arrived, smart but not trendy, made-up but not conspicuously, her voice flat, her spectacles clownish, I thought, I have nothing to say to this woman. After Inge, and my brief addictive return to Bathsheba the dentist, I could not foresee pleasure in any woman, especially not one who had been victimised by her hairdresser. I thought, You can make the tea and I’ll joke with my old friends about the perils of a broken heart and then you shall allthree go home together happy in your good deed while I open a can of lentils and listen to ‘Science Now’ on the wireless.
    Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there? Wallowing is sex for depressives. I should remember my grandmother’s motto offered to the suffering as pastoral care. Not for her the painful dilemma, the agonised choice, ‘Either shit or get off the