Free Fools for Lust by Maxim Jakubowski Page A

previously unfelt depths. Trying to grow old gracefully. I enjoyed an affair with one of our new operatives, Lucy, a small curvaceous auburn-haired young woman who broached no sentimentality and preferred a no-strings-attached relationship. She was good for me, uncomplicated, defiantly cheerful. What she didn’t know was that most times I had to conjure up the ghost of Callie to stay hard when making love to her. But I suppose you wouldn’t call that being unfaithful, technically speaking. Just a sex aid. Even took a holiday with her. Rented a white stucco villa in Southern Portugal where we shared our time fucking nonchalantly and eating too much. Which only served to remind me that I had never managed to go anywhere with Callie further than a few coastal furtive dirty weekend uninspiring hotels, and hadn’t seen her on a beach, by the pool or even in a swimming costume.
    Time, like a slow, slow river.
    August 1999. Waiting for a train at Paddington Station, I was browsing through the newsstand and spotted a Paul Klee postcard. The second anniversary of our first time together was just a few days away, evoking balmy sensations of my fingers slipping through her curls and the oh-so tender softness of her uncovered, shivering breasts. I bought the card. Wrote “I miss you still” on the back, and then lacking an address as usual buried it in my pocket, there to gather oblivion again, until the next absurd celebration of her continuing absence.
    Missing her was an understatement.
    Every day and every night.
    Still.
    Always.
    The station’s loudspeaker system announced a 15-minute delay on the arrival of the Cardiff train. I had to sign for some documents a junior clerk was bringing up to London from a Bristol solicitor. I backtracked to the newsstand, searching for a magazine to kill the time, but none caught my attention. Moved over to the book racks.
    At first, it was the cover illustration that I noticed. A photographic close-up of a woman’s leg (thigh?), the constricted flesh bursting through the fishnet patterns of a stocking. An image that struck a responsive chord inside my dormant libido.
    The Man Who Didn’t Understand Women by Katherine Blackheath.
    I seldom read women’s fiction, but the back cover blurb intrigued me. Something about a man and a woman, London, anonymous hotel rooms, three months of forbidden passion.
    Standing at the centre of the station concourse, I began reading.
    I finished the book at two the following morning. I’d cancelled an evening with Lucy earlier.
    It was all there.
    Our story.
    With subtle changes: did I really never smile? I was no longer a private eye but merely an insurance investigator. But then I had never revealed my occupation to Callie; I had indicated I was a freelance journalist. It wasn’t Eastbourne, but Brighton, and there was no mention of a husband but I now had two children ... Wholesale chunks of conversations we had had, in our usual pub, in bed, were accurately evoked. The fateful letter I had written. She even described the sounds I would make when I came, the words I would say, those she would herself whisper. The rituals of undressing and kissing. And the woman in the book was also called Callie.
    I can’t say I was shocked. Surprised, maybe. It was strange to see myself in print like that. Or at any rate a character who I could recognise as me. Possibly angry that she should steal our story in this way.
    Towards the end of the novel after the two lovers had badly betrayed each other, they both travelled a lot, enjoying rather sordid adventures. Mine, I didn’t mind. Hers, I winced at the thought that she might actually have fucked all these other men, it was so realistic. Difficult to know where the fiction and the reality took divergent paths. She wrote well, Callie, or was it Katherine did. I could sense the emotions, the feelings oozing from the pages as the narrative developed.
    But nowhere was there an