Free Ménage by Ewan Morrison

acts of pure folly.
    How could she, I or anyone argue with such reasoning?
    As was agreed, we went to Save the Children and I was to record it. I considered this a dead giveaway but Dot, in miraculous ways, played it to advantage. She went straight up to the old dear and asked: — Is it OK, to film ourselves? We’re doing an art project for college.
    The old fossil seemed thrilled to bits. I was both dumbfounded and perplexed but followed Dot’s direction. To the hilarity of the old dear, Dot play-acted looking at clothes, then put them on one layer on top of the other. From beyond the eyepiece I could see Saul twitching by the doorway.
    — Keep filming, Dot winked at me.
    She pulled on a nice Armani-looking number and then a raincoat, all the time pulling funny faces for the old dear. Then with a nod at the camera, she paraded herself to the doorway as if on the catwalk. I kept on filming and could hear the old dear’s giggles. As soon as Dot was outside, she paused, then without warning broke into a run. Saul and I shot each other a terrified glance. We looked at the old dear and saw the truth dawn on her face. We ran like fucking hell, as the screaming started.
    After three breathless staggering blocks we finally found her in the alleyway by Lucky’s Chinese. A siren screamed towards us, and we froze. It turned out to be an ambulance.
    — That wasn’t what I taught you! Saul shouted at her. Then smiled. — But it was bloody good nonetheless! Much to learn, you have, my apprentice, Saul grinned, — much to learn, as he shook his head, invoking Confucius or perhaps Yoda.
    So she was his apprentice. Who was I then? Perhaps she would take my place and I would become the femme de ménage for them both. As if she sensed my insecurity, she turned and kissed me, then made a show of kissing him too as she wrapped her arms round our shoulders and jumped into a puddle, splashing us both.
    Because we were not competing for her affections, not each trying to seduce her, due to our vow of amorous abstinence, because neither Saul nor I was trying to win her over to one side, the simplest, most banal of daily domestic tasks crackled with the electric static of sublimated desire. We found an old pot of paint in the street and danced around as we painted the kitchen bright orange. She made up names for us both. I was called ‘O’ as in ‘Oh’, which often came out ‘Oh-Oh’. And she called him Zarathustra after the Nietzsche he was trying to teach her.
    — There’s nuthin’ Neetcha can’t teach ya!
    Typically of an evening they would be in his room watching TV cuddled up together under the duvet, laughing at the so-called intellectuals on
Newsnight
debating for the nth time Fukuyama’s predicted victory of Western capitalism. The End of History and this is as good as it gets and the biggest shopping mall in the world has just opened. And I would pine to be in there with them as I sensed if I missed out on a single moment then she would be drawn more to him, but I fought the impulse to possess.
    The desire to kiss her was at times unbearable. I saw it on Saul’s face too but our gentleman’s agreement kept us from crossing that line. She was neither mine nor his. Every time she hugged one of us she would hug the other. We were as chaste as children, living without ownership or envy.
    Was this what life was like a hundred years ago? When lovers had chaperones and could not kiss in public? My God, I thought then, if I never have sex again, if I could just live like this in this constant repression of the urge, in which it grows and finds its way out, blossoming, not in acts of selfish possessiveness but in generosity, to two not one. If I could live like this, forever seeing the struggle in Saul’s face, to resist possessing her, to not betray me.
    The way she became then, in those weeks, some subtle liberation growing within her. She walked around in various states of un- and re-dressing, completely without