Free As Far as You Can Go by Julian Mitchell

boredom.
    “Good God,” he said afterwards, as they lay in the dark. “You don’t put much into it, do you, Helen?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You don’t like it, do you?”
    “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”
    “Well, you don’t enjoy it, then.”
    She turned over restlessly and said, “Why don’t you go to sleep, sweet?”
    “Because I want to know why you don’t enjoy it. Am I an inadequate lover for you?”
    “How would I know?” she said, more tartly than usual. “You’re the only one I’ve ever had.”
    “Well. Go on.”
    “Go on where?”
    “Say it. Say, Thank God.”
    “Now listen, Harold,” said Helen, sitting up. “I do everything you ask, and then you nag at me. What more do you want? What’s the matter with you?”
    “There’s nothing wrong with me. It’s you. You don’t enjoy it. I can tell.”
    “If you’re not satisfied——” She stopped, then lay down again and said, “Do let’s go to sleep.”
    I’m a bastard, thought Harold, nuzzling himself closely against her, a real bastard. The kindest thing would be to end it all. But I can’t. I’m too lazy. Or else I fundamentally enjoy being dissatisfied. God, what a thought.
    Next morning he had a bath while Helen and Brenda gossiped in the kitchen over the remains of breakfast. He looked at himself in the mirror with what he liked to think was critical detachment: fair hair, grey eyes, nondescript. But the crinkle at the corner of his eyes was coming on nicely. He practised it for a moment or two, then squeezed a bump of stomach between finger and thumb, rolling it as though it was a piece of curtain material. He was a little plump, perhaps, but the flesh felt springy and knotty and good, with little nubbles of criss-crossing veins just detectable. Too much spring, perhaps, not enough bumps, but basically all right. Not like his father, who had given up altogether and was beginning to wobble as he walked. But there was a danger, a definite danger: corpulence could almost certainly be inherited , and Harold had much of his father’s physique. To be five feet eight inches and fat was not merely a misfortune: it was a disgrace. Harold didn’t, though, inherit his father’sexcessively hairy chest. It was really rather disgusting, Mr Barlow’s chest, the thick black mess spreading all over his shoulders and upper arms, like broken and rotting wheat. Once it had seemed rather admirable to be so hirsute, so distinctly masculine. But one day, when Harold was fifteen and passionately in love with a girl called Anne Killian, he had seen Anne turn white as she stood on the diving-board of the Killians’ swimming-pool. Following her gaze he saw she was staring with horror at Mr Barlow in his bathing-trunks . The romance had never been quite the same after this shock, and Harold had changed his views about body-hair as a result.
    His own chest was all right, though, in fact if there was a criticism to be made of it, it was that it could, perhaps, have done with a little of his father’s protective camouflage. There were three or four long and repulsively pubic-looking hairs around each nipple, but that was all. They looked as if they had stopped off at the two pink and rubbery oases on their way from chin to groin, or vice versa. Harold had cut them off once with a pair of nail-scissors, not because he didn’t want to appear masculine, but because their lack of numbers and excessive length in such an isolated position made him feel ridiculous. But they had only grown again, longer and more idiosyncratic than ever. He gave them a friendly rub, and they responded by curling round his fingers. An example of the very purest Narcissism, he thought.
    His body was always rather a problem. Stark naked he really looked rather good, he considered, but one didn’t want to strip in front of everyone, and Helen was very boring about making him wear pyjamas. So only bits and pieces ever showed, and they didn’t do him justice. His