Temptation

I came up with the best solution to the problem of temptation some years ago. Rather than waste any more energy resisting it while attempting to enjoy the dreary ersatz-satisfaction of having proved the strength of my willpower, I decided to simply announce to all potential witnesses and affected parties my express intention of indulging myself in whatever form of debauchery took my fancy. And then, of course, I consistently followed through on those promises, frequently even exceeding myself.

Not only is this solution ingenious in its simplicity, it has also produced an unforeseen side-effect: I am now renowned for my enviable willpower.

When the Cuckoo Clock Strikes Two

A shudder ran through me as I read the message. I sat in my office yesterday afternoon at 4.43 pm, shaking. My phone still rested in my half-open hand but I had temporarily lost the power to focus on it. I had lost the power to do anything other than sit there and will myself to exhibit what I hoped was an adequate semblance of mild interest in the words I had just read - for my colleague had chosen that precise moment to step through the door. I forced myself to remain motionless and expressionless, but I felt as though a handful of goosepimple seeds had been cast over my flesh and instantaneously begun to germinate there. My body was tingling.

"My cock is hot and aching to pierce you. I need to feel your perfect breasts in my mouth again. I'm burning for you. Where are you? I need to fuck you over and over, now and all afternoon."

It was from my Uncle Jeffrey.

Now before you all immediately start compiling an image of some jovial, chuckling character with a moustache like Freud's pan scrubber and a hand puppet that can conjure coins from your ear, let me at least put you right...

Uncle Jeffrey doesn't have a moustache.

Yes, yes, ok, so there is still that astounding thing he can do with the hand puppet and the coins. But let us disregard that minor detail. Let us focus instead on the momentous fact that he has no moustache - and no inclination to grow one at any time in the foreseeable future, either. I think that's an important point - a very salient consideration - when judging the merits of an uncle/niece hanky-panky situation.

Another point I would kindly ask you to bear in mind is the fact that I am not some pigtailed virgin in white anklesocks, but a fully developed woman of some experience. Yes, I wear pigtails sometimes, yes. But I was not wearing any on the particular Sunday I am about to tell you about, and I do not possess such things as anklesocks. Or indeed hymens.

So you see, dear Reader, it is not all quite as dreadful as it may have sounded at first.

Oh dear. I'll begin again. This is a hard one to write. I am in danger of losing myself in self-justifications. But let us be practical now. Let me give you some background: I met my Uncle Jeffrey for the first time in my life last weekend. I'd never set eyes on him - nor had any sort of direct contact with him - before then, because he grew up in New Zealand and because my mother's large and sprawling family are an amiable but distant lot who only ever clap eyes on each other at funerals - if at all. Indeed, funerals in my mother's family tend to be quite sociable affairs, at which very close blood relatives are first informed of each other's existence. (What? My father had a sister? I have an Aunt Binkie? And two extra grandparents and a cousin called Dwane? Good heavens, how do you do!) So Uncle Jeffrey was a stranger to me. I knew of him by name only. Then there is the fact that he's four years younger than I am. This makes it impossible to take his avuncularity the least bit seriously. He feels more like a brother. Oh dear, that's not good either, is it? Let me change that: he feels more like... a cousin. Yes. That's it exactly: he feels like the nearest possible blood relative the police will let you fuck.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I fucked Uncle Jeffrey. I had sex with a man who emerged from the same womb as my own mother. If we had a child, it would be its father's great niece or nephew and its mother's cousin and have clusters of extra eyeballs up its armpits; hair would grow in the wrong direction along its fingers and it would have toenails on the roof of its mouth; it would intermittently bark and shout the word "nifkins" and two perpetual rivulets of snot would join in a y-shape beneath its chin. Oh bad Zora. Bad, bad Zora. Where is my rolled-up newspaper? It is time for me to beat myself about the nose and use that horrid growly voice.

And it all started so innocently, too. He is travelling around the world and he happened to be passing through my city, so he got hold of my e-mail address and suggested that we both went off on a picnic, which he would provide. It sounded delightful. I even baked a special cake to take along as pudding the day before - as a good niece might well do for a long-lost uncle on a Saturday afternoon. And I planned a route for us to take - into Austria and up into the Alps. But on the Sunday, it rained and rained; we were driving around in my Mini for miles, peering through the little round portholes we had wiped in the steamy windows, listening to the disasterous-caravan-holiday sound of the rain pattering against my softtop, watching my flimsy windscreen wipers going slapity-slap like some silly clockwork device - making no impact whatsoever on the torrents of water that were streaming down the glass.

So Uncle Jeffrey very sensibly suggested that we got ourselves some strange old-fashioned Austrian hotel room and ate our picnic in there. Some place we could feel dry in; some place that looked exactly like the inside of a cuckoo clock, he said. Well, you all know about my hotel room fetish. Not to mention my cuckoo clock fetish. And what with my rampant sex fetish, too, the events that ultimately ensued are hardly surprising.

It was just that we were getting along so well. I felt a deep affinity towards him right from the start. It felt like meeting my male counterpart - or discovering an element of myself that had been separated from me at birth and I had been missing all my life without realising it. I was astounded that such an incredible person existed in the world and that nobody had ever told me about it. He even looked a bit like me. The family resemblance was striking: fair-skinned, compact, wiry and attractively proportioned, a warm, copper glow upon his thick and unruly crop of wavy shoulder-length hair, fine features, blue eyes that seemed to hold intriguing never-ending layers of innocence upon shrewdness upon innocence; layers that tunnelled like a self-reflecting mirror, far beyond his physical outline, reaching all the way back to infinity; eyes that somehow seemed shaped into the lines of a question that had never been asked. And though looking at him felt like gazing at myself in a self-reflecting mirror, at the same time, I was finding him inexhaustibly surprising. Our sense of the ridiculous seemed to perfectly overlap. As we talked, things kept falling into place. We had to keep bursting out laughing and clapping our hands together as one or other of us suddenly came out with something we whole-heartedly agreed with but had never put in quite that way before. I was captivated. My gaze was continually widening in awe and amusement at his delightfully warped astuteness. I watched his face while he spoke, and I thought that his eyes looked like two almond-shaped moons hidden behind storm clouds, and then I saw him looking very intently at me, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and fascination, and I wondered if he was thinking the same about me.

Before long, our gestures were ending in hot, tingling touches. And meanwhile our picnic lay forgotten at the other end of the wooden bed. We had become far too excited to eat and we wanted this exhilaration to go on and on. We wanted to leap off a precipice and plummet into it, tumbling further and further down until we lost ourselves entirely in this topsy-turvy cuckoo clock world. And I suppose that's exactly what we did.

There, in a tiny panelled room that could easily have housed Hansel and Gretel, words stopped abruptly when he slid over to me and pressed his thigh against mine. Sitting next to him on that quaint, hand-painted bed, listening to the unrelenting electric fizzle of rain against the window, I became aware of the throb and the incredible heat of him. Hot waves of energy seemed to be radiating towards me through his trousers. I tried to pick up my sentence and carry on talking but I was feeling suddenly hot and very flustered and the glowing breadcrumb trail of words I had been following began to dim and peter out. His hand shifted the hem of my dress and stole stealthily up my bare leg. As the last bright crumb of meaning waned into everlasting obscurity, he tore down the shoulder of my little dress and bent over to lick one of my nipples.

"Shit! You're my uncle!" I said with a gasp.

"Shut up," he said, "I'm your uncle and I command you to shut up."

"Don't you dare cheek your elders and betters!" I said, "I'm the eldest. I have the authority here."

He stood up before me and opened his trousers to show me how big he was. He was hard, fully erect and straining. He was hard for me - hard just from sitting beside me and watching me move and hearing me speak. Perfectly silhouetted against a twee wardrobe, he held his cock in his hand and tossed it lightly up and down in a confident gesture of understated power, as if he was secretly showing me a loaded pistol. Then he said, "Nobody must know. What happens inside the cuckoo clock must stay our secret. Do you promise to keep it a secret? Do you promise never to tell mummy and daddy, little Zora?"

I stared at the throbbing cock that was slanting towards me across his palm. I wanted to fall to my knees and take it in my mouth. I was yearning to suck it - to show him what else his little niece could do. I wanted to make the little birdie come out. So I slid off the bed and kneeled in front of him, resting my hands against his thighs, but he grasped my head and held me away at arm's length.

"Do you promise Uncle Jeffrey?" he asked.

"Certainly not," I replied, with a pert smile, "Let me suck your cock this instant, young fellow-me-lad, or I shan't let you have any pudding."

Two seconds later, as my eager mouth enclosed him, I heard him say, "Of course, a blowjob isn't really incestuous, is it?"

"It's no worse than drinking your parent's bath water," I reassured him, corroborating my statement with a voracious, flat-tongued lick. He looked down at me and shuddered.

An hour or so later, as I was straddling him and bouncing up and down on his ecstatic body, he reached up for my breasts and pulled them to his face, saying, "Of course, it's not really incest unless you don't use a condom, is it?"

"That's quite correct Uncle Jeffrey," I panted, circling my hips and grinding him as his hot mouth closed around its captive target, "Strictly speaking, for this to be incest, the skin of your cock would have to physically touch the inside walls of my pussy as I slide up and down on it. As it is, this thing we're doing here falls into the same category as, say, wanking into one of your mother's rubber gloves."

"While it's up her fanny."

"Well, obviously - if we're going to be pendantic about it - then yes, ideally, the hypothetical glove should be up one's mother's fanny at the time."

Reader, my phone just rang again. Just now as I was writing that. It must have been telepathy.

"The thought of my naked heat deep inside you, condomless, shatters my remaining sanity."

Has quite a literary streak, does Uncle J - wouldn't you say? I wonder if he writes.

(Guard! Guard! Take this phone away now! Bring me my rolled-up newspaper, quick! Guard...! Please... Guard... Oh bugger.)

From the Ashes

The look did it all. Did it in less than half a second. He was there. I had him caught like a squirming fly in my sticky little eye. As I held his gaze, it was as if an unseen hand was reaching over to steal from his body a single glowing spark. Damn. He was beautiful. Damn. He liked me too. Damn, I was free. I had made my decision. I had done it. I was out.

I didn't even know this man. I knew he was incredibly talented, I knew his music moved and fascinated me, but I didn't know what he was like. But I picked him. Or rather, something inside me picked him and I endorsed its decision, knowing I had no political power to question it anyway.

I had a feeling. I was bored with losing people; bored with the relentless drabness of my mourning garb; bored with peering disconsolately into the oblong pit. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. All the romance had been drained from the feeling now. There was no more lashing hillside rain in my heart. No more trampled roses or thunder clouds. No more burnt-down candles, dying forests or cold breakfast plates; no more songs heard behind black glass on long winding night roads. All that was left was the silence of concrete and the paralysing iron-clad chill of a lesson being learned. I felt that I was encased within a thin metal eggshell; brittle, inflexible, perfectly formed and somehow protective.

"Stay in here," said a voice, "Learn your lesson," it promised, "And you can find peace. You will never feel that pain again."

"Move now" said another, "And you can break free. You can escape. You can live. You can taste those pleasures all over again."

There was only one answer. I had to get out. And the thing that would entice me out must be the thing that had put me there in the first place. And the thing that had put me there in the first place was reckless stupidity. Or passion, as I liked to call it. And so I picked him. A new lover. Let's see if I can get him, I thought. And I felt a stir in the molten heat at my core. I felt the iron around me beginning, not to crack, but to soften.

The man I chose was another musician. I'd only ever seen him on stage. I would go to his gig and he would see me and be stunned by my fascinations. I would get him.

I don't normally go for good looks and the musician was not pretty in that sense. His head was clean-shaven and he looked like a devil; stood like a Frenchman - that strangely exaggerated posture that makes them look like circus acts; like men in white tights, balancing on a running elephant, getting ready to grab a trapeeze; not quite masculine yet very far from feminine and at moments teetering on the brink of an exotic repulsiveness, like the scented, offal-like albino slither of a lychee in your mouth when you were already feeling sick. And yet, inexplicably, still devastating. How can I explain my response to him? I liked him in the same slightly hair-raising, slightly distasteful, slightly shameful way that I liked licking batteries or copper coins. I liked him in a stupid way; a don't-do-that-or-you'll-be-sick way. He was the perfect enticement from my iron egg. I would kindle a fire in him and throw myself onto it and I would rise from the ashes in miraculous innocence and hope; ready to start a new life and to wilfully waste it making the same mistakes.

The moment of the kindling went like this: he had to walk right past my seat to get to the dressing room. I was sitting at my table and at the precise moment when I thought he would be likely to catch sight of an eye movement of mine out of the corner of his own eye, I shifted my gaze up to his face and gave him a bold, challenging look. It worked. My timing was perfect. One minute he was trotting off the stage and walking through a faceless mass, just enjoying his applause and minding his own business, the next minute he was suddenly brought up short and looking back at me, full of that alertness that comes with a sudden blaze of mutual attraction. Meanwhile, his feet kept on moving him forwards and all at once, he was gone with the momentarily alarmed, flickering back-glance of a passenger spying you from another train.

I knew then that he would be back. And surprisingly, it almost didn't matter now, because the small spark I stole while his devil's eyes were floundering in mine had done it all.

The Inexcusables

Does anyone else have an "Inexcusables List"? This is mine:

- Dipping mum's toothbrush in the toilet (revenge for severe beating with tennis racket).

- Gleefully depositing incredible monster bogie in Joey's Aunt Cecilia's cut glass vase (revenge for trivial offence).

- Spitting into chalice at holy communion (pact with Satan).

- Feeding former boss a) various kinds of rotting food b) carefully prepared slices of cake with very long hairs wrapped around them c) coke spiked with entire pack of Sweetex d) items discovered on kitchen floor (unorthodox but highly successful technique for restoration of sanity).

- Cheerfully making date with man in park, who said he wanted to cook a three-course meal for me at his flat, writing down address, listening attentively to directions to flat, waving goodbye and calling "See you later" while fully aware that I was never going to turn up (weariness).

- Telling all of Jan's friends that Jan's sweet but tame girlfriend had only moved from Hungary to Sweden because "Hungary wasn't pervy enough for her" thereby creating interminable running joke that was eventually publicly related to Jan and his girlfriend in my presence at a party attended by his friends, parents and potential customers (flippancy).

- On being visited by ex-boyfriend with drippy new girlfriend in tow, secretly retrieving cat's fork from open tin of cat food in fridge, giving it cursory rinse under cold tap, presenting it to her as an ordinary piece of cutlery and then gleefully watching her eat with it and attempting to disguise continual fits of uncontrollable giggling as a naturally bubbly and friendly nature (punishment for always leaving a pointless token leftover amount on every plate, no matter how measly you make her portions).

My First Embarrassing Orgasm

As a girl, it's exceedingly difficult to have an embarrassing orgasm - and heaven knows I've tried. Now obviously, I've frequently found myself throbbing at my desk at the precise moment that a customer calls; or when performing a "Jedi wank" on a plane, I have found myself falling into a euphoric swoon, just as the stewardess is attempting to ascertain whether I want Worchestershire Sauce in that. But somehow, that never feels inappropriate enough to count. In many ways, I merely feel immensely proud of my ability to maintain such an impeccable professional front. (Although, in moments of self-doubt, it sometimes crosses my mind that I could be quite mistaken about this. Perhaps it is flagrantly obvious that I am mid-climax. I mean, just say that someone did notice - what exactly could they possibly say? "Excuse me - sorry for asking this - but did you just orgasm at the precise moment I said "Worchestershire Sauce?")

But let us put such thoughts aside and move on to my happy news. Readers, it gives me great pleasure to announce that yesterday afternoon, I finally made my first serious foray into the world of cringeworthy orgasms. At last I know what it is to plunge from ecstasy to a clammy feeling of sheepishness. Hurrah!

And so, here it is for your delight: Zora's First Embarrasing Orgasm. I was lying on the sofa under a blanket. A video was on. I realised that I needed sexual relief - and fast. Four or five minutes later, I was pulsating inside. As the convulsions commenced, my eye focussed on the screen before me and, to my misfortune, I registered what it was that I was looking at. It was Petunia Clarke. She was standing next to an upright piano. Her hand was outstretched and between her thumb and forefinger dangled a small silver fish. To my chagrin, my orgasm ignored all these warning signs and continued to hurtle me upwards and onwards towards the giddiest heights of bliss. As my pleasure peaked, so too did the cringe factor, for it was just then that I heard Petunia say, "Rolf! What's this fish doing in your piano?" And then, moments later, as my body was shuddering and the delicious twitches were slowly starting to subside, Rolf the Dog said, "Oh, that's the piano tuna", clapped his mouth wide open and swung his head around to the audience for a long "Aaaaaaaah-aaaaaaah" Muppet laugh.

I wonder, can any of my readers beat that?

Close Your Eyes...

Santa is cümming.

(I have just deleted a whole series of revoltingly lewd double entendres at this point, you'll be pleased to know. I feel rather proud of myself.)

Here's wishing you all a creamy white Christmas. (Yes, I left that one in. Believe me, it was the most innocuous. Anyway, this beard is a little more slimming than the other one, don't you think?)

Ahem. I digress. I shall be away on Christmas travels until next year and will not be blogging again until January. So have a lovely time. And remember: be good, or be bad and write about it.

Zanta Claus, Terror of the Skies

To John Thomas From Lady Jane

You may think it a joke but it's true: my first love, John, was a ditch digger. That was his job. He lived on a farm outside the hamlet where I grew up. The day he asked me out at the village show, he was an exotically grown-up 21 and I had just turned a demure 17. I say demure, but if truth be told, I was only outwardly so, and if you'd ever seen the glint in my eye, you'd have known that for all my coyness, underneath I was as rampant a vixen as ever ruined a country lad. At my school, I was the only 'A' level student from “up the valley” and I still remember the shrieks and giggles of outrage when I announced the liaison to my fellow sixth-formers in town. To them, he was "a simple country lad" and hence an object of titillated amusement. He could hardly read or write, he signed his name in block capitals and dirt was ingrained in his hands like the markings on the skin of a panther. Inevitably, the entire school proceeded to rechristen me "Lady Chatterley" and as I walked through the gates each morning, I would be hailed with cries of "Thou looks right rosy this mornin'! Appen Milady paid a visit to John Thomas last night?" As I made my way to lessons, I was often greeted by rounds of inexpertly choreographed groin thrusting accompanied by an intermittent touching of forelocks and the odd obsequious bow.

"Have you even read the book?" I would demand, "Or did you just jizz off to your dad's porn version?"

"Aye Milady."

I, for my part, quickly shrugged off my demure image, instead adopting the charming custom of cursing my fellow students as "a bunch of childish fuckers" and sticking my fingers up at them in a manner that owed precious little to my well-bred literary namesake. In the canteen, one girl made it a popular tradition to relate fantastically lyrical tales of Milady’s imagined adventures in a breathless, throaty voice, lingering on the rough feel of those filthy workman's hands upon her soft, quivering ladyflesh and unfolding tales of passionate romps in cowsheds, hencoops, silage pits and other such deeply romantic settings. But I didn't really mind the teasing; the truth was, I took a secret pleasure in it. The eroticised deference my presence now commanded was far from unpleasant and the sight of fine young men spontaneously thrusting, caressing their groins and genuflecting as I passed through the corridors was not without its appeal. And, apart from anything else, I was amused; they were so very close to the truth.

Sometimes, after a night out, John and I would take a detour over the fields in his old Land Rover. He used to let me drive, although I was nowhere near getting a licence. I remember there was a collection of tweedy caps in the back, and I used to like putting one on and imitating a selection of toothless old codgers from our village as I drove along. I loved the almost helpless way he laughed and I think he loved the playful way I provoked him. Then we'd find a dark, deserted spot next to a dry stone wall or a little wood, spread out a blanket and fuck with the wordless concentration of wild animals. It was always damp and freezing cold at nights and the air was swarming with bloodthirsty insects, so we never fully undressed. Our eager hands would rove over the goose-pimpled landscapes of our bodies, searching out secret folds of flesh beneath each other's clothes, panting and fondling, teasing and grasping in the throbbing blackness of the chill, grass-scented night.

Unfortunately, there was one major drawback to our night-time al fresco trysts. It was the sheep – those ubiquitous, dumb observers of our outdoor lives. So lumbering and stupid by day, they seemed to take on a new, surprisingly unsettling guise by night. There we would be, quite happily rolling about in a state of frothing carnal ecstasy on an old green blanket in the dark, contracting a perplexing profusion of cuts, bruises and severe grass burns in the process, when one of us would look up and discover, quite by chance, that at some unspecified point we had become enclosed within a tight ring of luminous greenish eyeballs, all gazing blankly down at us like pairs of weirdly floating peeled eggs that had - for reasons yet to be explained - been vigorously boiled in phosphor and then festooned about us in the manner of fairylights. Straining to focus in the blackness, we would eventually realise that motionless sheep must have somehow materialised noiselessly around us from every corner of the field with the precise objective of staring impassively at our writhing entwined figures. This was slightly off-putting, to say the least. The suspicion flitted through my mind that they could well be in the employ of my father; woolly white chastity guardians – his own personal army of sheepbots. I wouldn’t put it past him, even now.

The first time it happened, I believe I may have emitted the very, very briefest imaginable of bloodcurdling screams; not that I’m generally the screaming type, but when an erect male is present, one so often finds oneself obeying the traditional niceties of courtship. And yet, I cannot stress how deeply scary the phenomenon was, the first time it occurred. It was all just a teensy bit too reminiscent of a scene from a zombie film – but with sheep. The strange thing was, as we soon discovered, if you made the tiniest movement by day the sheep would bolt away bleating, but at night nothing we did seemed to faze them. We could clap, flap our arms around, run at them shouting "Shoo!" and "Mint sauce!" and "Oh God, just fuck off, you fluffy perverts!", fling hand grenades, turn fire hoses on them, pump lead into them with machine guns whilst cackling like maniacs and screaming “Die, die, you woolly bastards, die!”; never once did I see one of those buggers flinch. They just stood there obdurately, like stiff palace guards, frozen into position while tourists waft leaflets and burgers and Union Jacks in their faces.

But youthful ardour must needs prevail and, in the end, we learned to ignore the soundless apparition of their bulky forms and the horrible unblinking eyes that hovered in the air around us. Yet, try as I might, I could never rid myself of the continual sense that they were watching and waiting. As soon as our backs were turned, I feared they might leap on us from behind, wrestle us to the ground and suck out our soft, liquefied brains. It must be said, much as I adored country life, teenage sex could be a rather grisly business.

Daytime al fresco couplings didn't present the same disadvantages. The sheep remained picturesque, docile and were mostly quite well-behaved. We would seek out a wild, beautiful spot right up the valley, next to a tiny bubbling stream, with the hills rising up around us and buzzards whirling in the sky above. The only hitch with these rendezvous was that I always had to take the dogs with me as an alibi for my father, who seemed to be labouring under a totally unfounded impression that I was incapable of performing lewd acts in front of animals. Regrettably, though, despite my carefully laid plans, the dogs proved more troublesome in their way than the sheep. They used to go splashing around in the stream as we were getting down to the business of hyperventilating and roughly tearing each other's clothes off. But just as things were getting interesting, they'd come bounding back up to us and one would start shaking itself, showering our naked bodies in icy, dog-flavoured stream water, meanwhile the other would absolutely insist on joyously ramming a cold wet nose up the most conveniently located unprotected arsehole with the unerring accuracy of a guided missile.

More often than not, we'd be hurtling towards a glorious crescendo when both dogs would come scampering up and collapse onto us, pressing their clammy, stinking fur onto our exposed skin and bestowing a well-intentioned but toe-curling lick on the nearest crevice. Many was the time I'd be lying on my back, tentatively approaching what promised to be an exquisite climax and the happy muzzle of one of the dogs would loom into view as it playfully attempted to drop a truncated sheep's head or a decomposing squirrel onto my face. If I ever tried to push them off, they'd look so sad and hurt that my annoyance would melt into guilt and pity. All in all, I probably used to have more laughing fits about the dogs than orgasms. But we still loved it. It was an intoxicating feeling, fornicating completely naked in broad daylight, totally exposed within the vast expanse of a breathtaking landscape, with nothing – no walls, ceilings or barriers of any kind – to hem you in or protect you. Only sky and land. And rotting sheep cadavers. And dead squirrels – let’s not forget them.

But in spite of the danger of putrefying animal remains descending onto my face, the sensation felt primal and somehow timeless, and I remember that it made me feel very small and vulnerable, too. Sometimes I lost all sense of orientation. Like when you stand on your head for too long and you begin to feel as if you might drop off the floor and plummet towards the ceiling at any moment; I would feel as if I was clinging to some remote, topsy-turvy tangent of the planet, and I could see nothing at all that was preventing me from falling off the side and spiralling away into space.

I left John when I left the village to go to university. It was a terrible wrench for us both and he did all he could to persuade me to stay: he tried to give me the little Austin Morris he'd been restoring ever since I knew him; he proposed marriage; he offered me a life in the prettiest little cottage on his farm. But I had to go. He had to stay. I had paused for one summer on the brink of adulthood, but now the time of parting had arrived. Like a hothouse flower and a bramble, we could not have shared the same soil for long.

John stayed single for what seemed like years and years and then eventually married my childhood foe, Michelle – one of the most evil freckle-faced bitches who ever commandeered a public toilet, but that’s just my opinion. All I know is, she never let him have any fun and she wouldn't let him speak to me anymore. But if ever he was out on his own and he saw me, back on a visit, we'd sneak away to the village pub, get wrecked together, talk nonsense and fall off our stools laughing, as if no time had passed at all. Sometimes it took all my willpower not to reach out and hug him, but I knew that I couldn't, because I was the one who broke his heart and it was wrong to think I could mend it with a hug.

I last saw him two years ago, just before my parents moved away. It was to be my last night in the village, and, feeling lost and fiercely fragile, I made my way to the pub. I needed to feel that sense of belonging one final time, before I could say goodbye. He arrived, as if by arrangement, and I took the chance to steal another evening from his life. When the pub closed, we staggered out, arm-in-arm, crooning some ancient jukebox melody, pretending to be drunker than we were. Then we stood for a moment on the dirt track that led through the village, joining it, to the right with distant civilised worlds, to the left with the wind-lashed hills of our home. As our merriment died, the air seemed to resonate with the memory of our voices, like the vibrant hush that follows the lullaby. I could hear the trees and the bats chirping. The air was damp with drizzle and wild winds whipped my hair so that I could hardly see him in the darkness. He turned to me, pushed me gently back onto the gritty wet sandstone of the wall and, pulling the dripping hair from my face, he pressed himself against me and gave me a sad, slow kiss. It had been so long. I'd forgotten how soft his lips were and the clean smell of dirt and tractor oil. But now I can remember it. Then he took one road and I the other. I have never seen him since.