Free Fools for Lust by Maxim Jakubowski

true,’ I admitted. I didn’t have the energy to argue or fight.
    My whole world had just been shattered into lots of small, desolate pieces and I just had no answers.
    In the days that followed I could not summon the will to lie or apologise and my marriage collapsed, while I still desperately followed every conceivable lead that might lead me to the invisible Callie, her motives and her warm body again. I was in denial. Couldn’t accept the unexpected and puzzling rejection. Hitchcock stories surely didn’t happen to real people. I tried to recall every conversation we ever had, to remember any name that might have been mentioned by her in passing, any clue to her identity or someone who might be aware of her or even her whereabouts. And all these memories could not help invoking back every little thing we had done, the curve of her breasts, the colour of her lips, the feel of her tongue on my trembling skin, how her throat turned pink as pleasure took hold of her senses, her moans, her sighs, her soft, gentle, almost shy voice when she whispered my name with such awful delicacy as we lay entwined in bed. Constant torture it was. But it got me nowhere.
    Not only had she disappeared from the face of London, but there was no evidence she had even existed.
    Apart from the deep tattoo she had carved in my errant soul.
    Visions of her kept me awake at night for months on end. Fleeting visions of other women in the street recalled a lock of hair, a swish of material, the simile of a smile, but of course it was never her. Just a pale imitation, a fuzzy piece of the overall puzzle that Callie had become.
    Time passed.
    I still couldn’t forget her. Kept on wondering whether she would have disappeared if I had not posted the damn letter. But I knew, deep inside, that the scenario had already been written the moment I met her, and nothing I had done would have changed the outcome.
    I was a mess.
    Single life didn’t suit me and there was no way my wife would have me back; she sensed that I had given my heart to Callie and would not tolerate its absence if we resumed our relationship.
    For months I haunted the places we had been together. The pubs, the restaurants, I even stayed a few times in the same hotels for a night, always insisting on the room we had originally occupied. And invariably jerked off, screaming her name out loud as I came over the starched sheets or the bed cover, evoking mental images of her body, her sex, her royal rump.
    I tracked the real Callie down, once Mark’s wife. She now lived in Brixton with an Irish loft extension builder. She had long, straight, brown hair and round glasses, prettyish face but bad legs. There was no resemblance. But then I had to try every possibility.
    By now – I still kept watching him on a regular basis – Mark was shacked up in the South London mews semidetached with a small redhead, who also worked in Canary Wharf. I had actually witnessed their meeting over the lunch break in a sandwich bar. Mr Cupid, that’s me.
    The windfall tax was passed and the official side of the Callie case came to an end. By then, Office A had found out about Office B’s plans and I was called in and my services dispensed with, with minor apologies and a reasonable cheque for my efforts.
    My nights were still empty with the despair of longing and the image of her face at rest on a shared pillow began to lose its intensity, its focus. But still I grieved inside. Badly. On the anniversary of our first fuck, I wrote her a postcard I never sent. Another on the next Valentine’s Day. On what she had told me was her birthday. There were still people out there looking for traces of her, who had her description, paid by me. But nothing ever came up. I lost myself in work. Expanded the agency, and finally agreed we should now take on adultery cases. Why have scruples any longer? Business boomed.
    Two years had gone by. The pain still buried like a tumour in my