Un Amour de Rugger: Part Five

So, then: immejiately upon our (Jimmy's and my) ejection from the 3 Oceans, I staggered home to give my guarded kiss-&-make-up ring to Esmeralda. Actually, now that I look at that last sentence, I'm having second thoughts about the word staggered (committed to the editing window by way of a handy keyboard shortcut [ALT + STRRRR] especially engineered long ago by YFCT for the greater ease of recounting post-bender shenanigans in near-real time), inasmuch as, our service at the TM having been the showroom model of piss-poorness that it had been, I was imamically sober for the entire journey back to the maisonette; thus (and, moreover, in view of my unflagging eagerness and antsiness en route), such preterite verb forms as skipped, pranced and (worst of all) jogged, for all of their connotations of unregenerate ponciness, spring to mind as more apt designations of my mode or style of homeward ambulation in this case. Indeed, so keyed up was I on a heady schlongtail of anxiety and hope by the time I got home, that, immejiately upon stepping into the front room, I repaired not straight to the phone, but straight to the fridge for a strong dose of Flemish courage--i.e., two full bottles of Hoegaarden. Only after shogunning both those bottles within the slenderest pie slices of clock-phizzage did I feel secure against succumbage to both of two possible conversational extremes--the one, an outright proposal of marriage; the other, a gynophobic tongue-lashing; or did it occur to me to plot out a plan of action in advance of uncradling the phone. That plan, which materialised over the chomping away of another, equally minuscule, slice of time, was as follows: First, that as she, in her endeavour to re-establish contact with me, had dialled my land phone rather than my mobile, I would respond in kind, and ring up her land-phonic counterpart. Second, that in reply to her v-mail greeting, I would do no more than the most de-bollocked form of mirror civility demanded; which istersay, announce that I was returning her call, thank her for her commendation of my bravery and ask her to give me a ring 'when you get a chance' (that there when clause to be pitched as an exact tonal or attichudinal echo of her 'if you're up to it' [an exact verbal echo of that there if clause having been ruled out on grounds that it would inevitably come across tonally as so much alkaline piss-taking].) As for Plan B, a plan dealing with the second possible contingency that she might actually be home and willing to uncradle the blower...well, to my shame, I gots to admit that it didn't even occur to me to formulate such a plan. Such that when she did pick up after the third or fourth ring and say Hullo in ye olde viva voce, I was rather flummoxed as to how to handle myself (in a strictly non-onanistic sense, natch):

'It's me.' (So much for my vow against echoic inadvertent piss-taking, what what?)

'I know. And..?'

'Well, I'm just, you know, returning your call and...lah di dah!'

'That's it? Lah di dah?'

'Well, no: I suppose I also wanted to thank you for the kind words you left me in your message and--'

'--Look Nigel, dear, I know this bound to make me seem jolly rotten, seeing that it was I asked you to ring me, and not the other way round: but could we possibly discuss all this in person in the super-near-term future, say...Friday night?'

'Friday night? As in the night after tomorrow?'

'Yes, or as in tomorrow night if you care to be pedantic about it.' (It was by now getting on half-past twelve in the AM.)

'Are you sure you're free?' (Implied postscript: i.e., that you haven't found another bloke by now? [cf. my first phone conversation with her, recorded in my post of 24 May].)

'Of course I'm sure. I wouldn't have suggested our meeting up then otherwise.' (Implied postscript: That's not to say, this time round, that you should assume I haven't found another bloke). 'Are you sure you are?' (IPS: i.e, that you haven't got any Arsenal-Basherly presidential duties to attend to on that night?).

'Of course. Where shall we meet?'

'Where?' (IPS, you git!) 'Why, here at my place, of course. Don't you want to see Lucy? She really misses you, you know. Shall we say 8:30?' (IPS: i.e., after I've taken Lucy for her walk.)

'Sure.' (No postscript implied, unless it be I trust my laconicism speaks volumes of disappointment as to my having been deposed from the unofficial court post of Master of the Poo-Scoop.)

So, barring the decidedly businesslike, smooch-free bye-byes, went the chinwag in its entirety. ATC, I thought, on recralding the blower, I should be feeling somewhat chipper if not downright elated; for the call had eventuated in the scheduling of a prime-time weekend-night rendezvous, and at her place no less. No bloke looking to ditch his temporary digs in the bachelors' doss-house, as I was, could have asked for anything more or better. Why then, in the wake of the convo, could I not help feeling more dejected on the Esmeraldan score than I had felt in, well, ever? Well, for starters, there had been all of those implied postscripts; each of which, in shaw nuff by virtue of standing in starkly burka'd contrast to some explicit counterpart in our first phone convo as a prospective couple, could not but impart its own little anti-scintilla to the pall of decidedly un-copular guardedness or reserve that cast its gloom over my remembrance of the whole conversation. But on their own they (the Eye-Pee-Esses) didn't explain much: a bloke and his girl who'd fallen out of the daily bump-and-grind pattern courtesy of the most neutral of causes (say, a lengthy business trip overseas, or a stint of military service) might have been every bit as close-gobbed during their first chinwag in a round fortnight. Only on my ninth or tenth mental playback of the convo did I finally put my finger on or in the main source or nub of all the drag on my hopes for our big date: to wit, the this in Esmeralda's mooting of her proposal to discuss all of this in the super-near-term future, which then finally showed itself up for the non sequitur, the dummy pronoun, that it in fact was. For there could be no question of its referring to anything so puny, so all of-unconjoinable, as the kind words alluded to by YFCT immejiately in advance of its introduction; it needs must have referred to something much bigger, and perforce, much more ominous. What that something was, was, of course, anybloke's guess--and that unguessability having been conceded, what harm could there be, if only for security's sake, in stepping into the changing room to try on the guess of the most paranoid, the most so-called high-maintenance of blokes, and in thus conjecturing that the sole, express and pre-scripted purpose of the meeting might very well be the demarcation of an official and final severence of all quasi or pseudo or actual conjugal ties between us; which istersay, the extirpation, once for all, of any illusions on my part that we were still, in fact, a couple; and, prophylactically, the eradication of any myparterly spores of hope towards our re-attainment of the copular entity? And the longer I kept myself togged out in this madbloke's guess, the better fit to my actual circumstances did it come to seem. TBS, your average blokess wouldn't have invited her bloke round to her place for such a guillotining, let alone have worked the promise of a reunion with her cherished pet into the invitation--at her least cuntish extreme, YAB would have proposed a neutral spot, say, some restaurant new to both her and the bloke; at the other cuntish extremity, she would have done it right then and there, over the phone--but Esmeralda, for better or for worse (and for all of the emetic mawkishness the phrase fairly dripped with) was not your average blokess: she did not believe, I reminded myself, in surgically removing people from the living tissue of your lifeworld as though they had never existed, or did not continue to exist. By slumbertime on Wednesday night, I had more or less fully acclimatised myself to the conclusion that from her povey, the aim of our meeting on Friday was to ensure that--as far as she was concerned--we were to stay in touch without staying in touching, if you know what I mean.

'Indeed I do.'

That was just a rhetorical if clause, there, DGR, meaning your assent to it was taken for granted. What do you take me fer, some kind of bloody holy-rolling preacher or MP?

'Indeed not: but a chap has to make do with such meagre scraps of interlocutionary invitation as he is thrown, if he is ever to say his piece on meatier matters.'

'All right. What is it this time?'

'Well, then: a goodly portion of your last post was devoted to a retailing of the full odyssesy of psychic tumult you underwent, vis-a-vis the security of your situation at Proctologitex, whilst awaiting your boss's final word on the so-called Tampan's Anisettes report. Yet even as you were penning this very account, you knew full well that the fears disclosed therein had long ago been proved groundless, that your situation at the company had been more or less secure all along. Now, in the present post, you regale us with a parallel account of the psychic tumult you underwent roughly a week later on the score of the security of your attachment to Esmeralda, and from a parallel perspective of au courance vis-a-vis the well-or-ill-foundedness of the anxieties in question.'

'And I suppose what you're driving at is that you'd prefer this time round to know up front whether those anxieties were well-founded or not; whether, that istersay, Esmeralda did or did not ultimately declare her knickers to be off-limits to YFCT on that Friday night of the last month but one.'

'In slightly more genteel language, yes. As for the alternative, being subjected to all of this unmanly hand-wringing in the interval--well, it's rather like sitting through a documentary film about all those chaps in the late nineteenth century who tried fly by coating themselves in feathers or strapping artificial wings on to their shoulders, when one knows, after all, that the Wright brothers eventually pitched upon the sure-fire solution to the problem at Kittyhawk in 1903.'

'And I don't suppose the notion of plumbing the depths of an indiwidual human psyche, as an end in itself, cuts any ice with you?'

'Not a snowflake's worth.'

'I didn't think so. Same here.' 'I didn't think so. Same here. But as that phoney depth-plumbing rationale hoovers up considerably less pixellage than the actual one, I thought I might as well have a go at baiting you with it, for your patience's sake (if at the expense of my conscience's).'

'Tut-Tut. What a pity that I, for my part, didn't falsely aver that psychic-depth-plumbing made snow-mountains out of icebergs with me; if I had done, then the debits to our respect consciences should have cancelled each other out, and we should both doubtlessly have been spared many butcher's-dozen minutes of tedium.'

'But alas! You didn't do, and now we shall both have to settle for the whole insufferably tejious truth. You may recall, DGR, a certain pledge I made in these here pages way back last November, a pledge to "record [i.e., ITHPs] no more than I will want to remember".'

'I'm a frayed knot, as your friend Mr Phipps would say. That was a bit before my time.'

'Touché, my friend, touché. I'd quite forgotten the pledge antedated the inception of the DGR; that it hailed from a Pre-Cambrian micro-micro-epoch when my imagined (or imaginary) readership was as yet an undifferentiated porridge of "you lot". And on second thought (a thought that will, needles to say, add yet another butcher's-dozen lines to this here rationale-'splication), it seems to me that this contrast between the pre-and-post-DGR periods of The Angry Londoner is very much in point here. For the particular future "I" that I pictured to myself in making my pledge was perforce a connoiseur of the well-spun yarn; thatistersay, an "I" who would appreciate a re-visiting of the events of his own past only insofar as they added up in the aggregate to a narrative that some utterly disinterested party--'

'--Namely, or especially Your Dashed Front Bottom's Truly--'

'--exactly, DGR, that someone such as yourself might likewise enjoy. In the meantime, however, whilst my lifeworld has by sheer accident become entangled in more yarnworthy episodes than I can keep up with in these here pages, it has supernumerarily thrown up, perhaps in virtue of the sheer amount of attention I have been obliged to devote to it for yarnspinning's sake, an equally hefty cargo of episodes that, whilst being unworthy of inclusion in any self-respecting, self-contained blog-post-length yarn, have nonetheless turned out to be eminently worthy of remembrance by YFCT according to an entirely different criterion, or perhaps (the jury's still out on this second question) according to a much more capacious standard of yarnworthiness. Hence the eventual, full-fledged haemmerhoidal irruption of the DGR into the rectal tissue of these here pages, i.e., qua symptom of the costively slow progress of these sorts of episodes in contrast to their relatively-roughage-rich, yarn-typical counterparts--and, BTW, lest you should take umbrage at the comparison of MFCT to a haemmerhoid, DGR, rest assured that I would never presume to liken you to anything to which I had not already, a thousand times before, seen fit to liken myself.'

'Quite. And you may rest assured, for your part, that qua figment of your imagination, I am hardly in a position to take such umbrage. But to revert to the matter of these so-called unyarnworthy episodes: I'm assuming, MDF, without atoll understanding the pertinence of the allusion, that by their way you are referring to such circumstances as occasioned the penning of your post entitled--ahem--Yarnrogerer's Bank Holiday.'

'No, YBH was a one-offer intended to accommodate an exercise in a genre intrinsically foreign to the art of yarn-spinning (viz. that of static scene-painting); the entities we're chinwagging about right cheer and now are, after all, episodes; i.e., events, things that, inasmuch as they happened somewhere at a certain point in time (albeit merely in such a humble locale as the synapses of my gourdita) are constituted of the same strain of sheep's wool as go into the spinning of a yarn. Now, as it so happens, Esmeralda did not dump me on that ultimately unfateful final Friday of last May. As it moreover so happens, as of the date of this writing (17/7/06) the two of us are, to all outward and inward appearances, stably re-hitched. Indeed, even as I type these very words she's recumbently snoozing not five feet away from me very elbows, on my woefully narrow twin-sized bed (which reminds me: it's high time I swallowed my pride and rang my brother up to see about getting a fraternal discount on a queen-or-king-sized mattress from Just Beds back in Norfolk). But who knows what baleful tidings tomorrow, or the next hour, or the next minute might bring? Why a minute hence Esmeralda might, for aught I know (and the ASD forbid!), wake up, stretch her arms and resolutely (if languidly) declare to me, "You know, Nigel, I've been thinking a lot about us lately" by way of prelude to a chinwag whose sequel would consist in her grabbing her car-cum-house keys, dashing downstairs and exiting the maisonette, never again to cross its threshold. And it that event I should be mighty glad that I had, a coupla paragraphs back, made those notes on my state of mind on that final (and retroactively potentially fateful) Wednesday of last May. For out of that sheaf of paragraphage that would then be ready to hand and weepy okie, I might hope to fashion a trail of evidence that would, by however circuitous and lengthy a path, lead me to that miserable jerkwater dorflet known as Where It All Went Wrong.'

'I see. So you're saying that whilst these episodes of inner deliberation may furnish no entertainment for the disinterested reader, in compensation they at any rate serve an autodidactic purpose for you.'

'Exactly. Or, rather inexactly. For, to take a quick tube jaunt back from the counterfactual to the actual, at present these episodes point towards an even more miserable, more jerkwaterly dorflet known as Where It All Might Go Wrong, a precinct that I would not wish to include in the itinerary of the most exhaustive package tour of my lifeworld. But should things eventually and actually all go wrong, on any frontier of my lifeworld, be it the Esmeraldan, the Proctologitexical, or the Arsenal-stroke-Kenophobic; well, then, in that case, some one or bunch of these episodes will miraculously, retroactively morph into a chunk of yarn-spinnerly golden fleece, as an indispensable contributor to the logic of the whole tale. How do you like them there apologetic apples?'

[MFCT, with weary resignation]: 'In the words of my plebian stand-in: You do what you gotta do.'

'Ha! Luckily for you I pretty much already had done when you interrupted me; such that I can now, without further ado, traipse straight on into my account of the rendezvous chaise Esmeralda itself. Mind you, DGR, if you'd rather I rounded off the post RH&N, seeing as how you've already been apprised of the most significant non-jizzerly outcome of the meeting...'

'...The devil I'd rather you did! For if there's one thing that might just save this post from perpetual consignment to the Index Postium Masturbosorum, it's a further smattering of conversation with some party other than YFBT.'

'I agree.' So, to drop the inverted commas against their imminent re-appropriation in that very flesh-and-blood, tongue-and-gobberly setting, I pitched up at the doorstep of the appointed place, albeit a hefty pie-wedge behind the appointed time. Doubtless I would have arrived at least a slender pie-wedge early, had it not been for the fact that, just as I was negotiating the top end of the fork of the High Road on to Ballard's Lane, I'd got a distinctly unhomely feeling that something was missing, that I was in some signal respect unprepared for the impending date. Eventually, after a summary interrogation and dismissal of the full roster of usual suspects (unbuttoned collar-buttons, unfastened flies, undeodorised armpits &c.), the true culprit had stepped forward, a poncey bloke name of Flowerlessness. Small wonder he'd taken so long in making himself known, for by no means would I have it assumed that the procurement of flowers has ever been an integral step in my pre-date routine, an automatic and obligatory PS (or, rather, PF) to the four esses. Indeed, quite the cuntrary (steel yourself, DGR of faint heart, conscience or stomach, against your imminent acquaintance with a bloke whose crimes put to shame the worst enormities of Shitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot): as of that date and timestamp, I had yet to present any blokess I had ever bedded or wished to bed with so much as a petal or cactus spine of vegetation on any occasion, be it however allegedly special--not on a single birthday; or on a single Valentines Day or Christmas or Ramadan or Yom Kippur; and certainly not on any of your sodding hemisemianniversaries so dear to the sex (six-month, five-month, 36 hours, &c.). Whence then issued this untoward impulsion to break with my time-honoured-and-tested policy? Out of a sense that some sort of gesture of conciliation on my part was in order, you say? Possibly, but not too bloody likely, I'd say; inasmuch as, from what I can recall of my general mood that night, I still very much considered myself the aggrieved party vis-a-vis the perforation of our (E & YFCT's) togetherness. If I had to wage five quid on the matter--as I wouldn't dare wage a penny more than this long after the moment to hand--I'd say that it had something to do with the combination of the jubious status of our liason and the location of the meeting, that it originated out of an intuition that in these combinatorial circumstances, a certain note of formality had to be struck by way of setting off this particular upshowing chez elle from an otherwise outwardly identical upshowing of, say, a month earlier, and thereby signalling from the get-go that I took nothing for granted on her end of the transaction. I think I must have been aiming, in other words, for the same sort of effect that a bloke in a more ritualistic age might have achieved, on entering his lady's bedchamber, by awaiting her permission to remove his top-hat or codpiece in loo of automatically chucking the thing on to the hat rack or codpiece caddy behind the front door. Anyway, whatever the reason or cause of the impulse may have been, I felt it with sufficient urgency to execute a quick, illegal and tyre-screeching yooey via the east-west bus lane and head back on up the High Road to Sainsbury's, where I grabbed a pre-wrapped florist's-dozen bunch of roses together with, as an afterthought, for Lucy, a rawhide chomping bone that I happened to espy amongst the sweets and tabloids whilst standing in the checkout queue.

So, then, back to my originally intended destination. At the risk of Play-Do-ing your by-now-doubtlessly-adamantine pornophile's 'don, DGR, I have to confess that the very first thing that struck my sensorium upon the front door of Esmeralda's residence being flung open at 8:17 in the PM was not the sight of my beloved's radiant phiz but rather the smell of a peculiar and far-from-inviting odor wooshed towards my nostrils in the slipstream of the aforesaid opening, a distinctively musty smell that I can, for all of its distinctiveness, only approximately liken to that of a poorly-ventilated-and-maintained public bog; for whereas the aforementioned bog pong bespeaks months if not years of germination, whereas--as our schnozzes plainly testify--the organisms that selflessly exude the stench thereof can proudly boast a ten-thousand-generation-long lineage extending all the way back to that first lonely spore that drifted into the pissoir hard upon the end of the last cleaning cycle, in this case the whole sodding colony seemed to have sprung into existence over the course of the last hour or so at the latest. But this was, after all and TBT only the very first thing that gave me sensorial notice then and there; the second, third and fourth things, which followed the first in such quick succession that they really are entitled to honorary degrees in first-thinginess, were as follows: the aforesaid sight of Esmeralda's radiant phiz (and I'm not just using radiant here to fill out a line like one of your sodding epic poets: she really did seem to be positively radioactive with joy at my appearance), the taste of her gob locking with mine and the touch of her arms wrapping round my neck, her nipples making near-ballistically-accurate contact with mine own complementary pair, her so-called golden area brushing against my schlong---all before I'd properly got round to responding in kind, as I dare say I would have done (schlong and all), had it not been for the immejiate supervention of my senses of smell and hearing, the one conveying to me an odor both more fragrant and pungent than those of the mystery stench and girl sweat combined, the other a sound of dry vegetative crackling that urgently impelled me to announce, via my otherwise pre-occupied gob:

'MMV BRRRV YV FMM FLMMM!'

'What's that?' she asks, abruptly disjoining her gob from mine, stepping back and leaving me standing there like a mummy, with arms still crossed stiffly athwart me tits, and me right hand still clutching the compressed bouquet.
'I've brought you some flowers,' I repeat, availing myself of my newly-restored full-gobberly resources.

'Oh, Nigel!' she ejaculates, cupping a mitt to her mouth in a gesture whose significance I can suss out all too fully by now. 'You really shouldn't have done!--or, at least needn't have. But hang on a bit while I find something to put them in.'

So she snatches up the flowers and dashes into the kitchen; and thereupon ensues a lonesome minute or so, during which the rosey-cum-girl-schwitzerly aroma yields to the bog-noisome stench (together with the comparatively remote and affectively neutral din of running tap water) and my sole purposive gesture consists in closing and locking the front door behind me. Then she re-appears, bearing in one hand the denuded bunch of flowers, in the other a bulbous, low-slung transclucent brown urn that with mingled delight and cuntsternation I identify as a de-labelled Marmite jar (with delight on account of its signalisation of her need to extemporise a typically feminine knick-knack; with cuntsternation on account of its signalisation of a high tolerance, if not an outright craving, for Marmite). How charming, how positively enchanting, it was to watch her in profile crooking her head now to the left, now to the right, as she pinkie-brushed out of okies' way her shoulder-blade-length straight locks after setting the jar and the flowers down on the low-slung bookshelfy-looking thing in the middle of the left wall of the front room; to take in the tit-like curvature of her newly-exposed left ear and the, erm, finger-like delicacy and dexterity of her wee diggits as she placed the flowers in the jar and did her level soddingest to to re-set the stems of the florist's-quarter-dozen of them that had been fractured in the pressure of our salutationary embrace. Round about the second half-minute or so of my spectatorship, a faint tickling in the vicinity of my flies apprised me of my schlong's judiful assumption of his second place in the zombie queue of enchantment; and round about the three-quarter-minute mark a decidedly more robust tickling in the vicinity of one of my socks apprised me of fuckonly-knew-what, as I hadn't sprouted a second schlong down there last time I'd checked. So I glanced downwards to discover, of-all-things-stroke-predictably-enough, Lucy applying her canine jaws with main force to the corresponding trouser-cuff. Next thing I know, and naturally enough, I'm down on me haunches with one hand tousling the bristles of her wee-head-cum-big-ol' floppy ears, and the other reaching for the chomping bone in me trouser pocket.

'Now, there, my girl,' I says to her, waggishly brandishing the bone at human chin level, 'Why make do with tatty old cotton wool when you can have certified grade-A cow-skin instead?'

Well, of course, the second next thing I know, she's disengaged herself from my trouser cuff and, squarely reared upon her own haunches, is yapping and begging like there's no tomorrow for the bone, which for sport's sake I keep dangling before her at just-beyond-jaw's reach. And just I'm about to give in--i.e., to incline my forearm by the micro-degree required to place the bone in jaw-attainable position--I feel a kung-fu-grip-like pressure on my wrist that forces me involuntarily, in a spasm of pain, to slacken my hold on the bone and render it unto the left mitt of Esmeralda, who, having apparently left off tending the flowers at the sound of the first yap, I now discover kneeling alongside me in an attitude of alarm, grief, cuntsternation or what have you.

'You shouldn't have done, Nigel,' she says, handing the bone back to me for repocketing (and, gorblesser for her nick-of-time-ness, eventual refund). 'I mean, in this case, you really shouldn't have. Not that, I suppose, you could have known.'

'Known what?' I say, unsteadily un-squatting in tandem with her.

'Known that one of these rawhide bones plus a half a cup of dog spit equals a 200-quid dry-cleaning bill. The drool, you see, leaves a horrible white residue on everything it touches. I had to find out the hard way myself.

'But,' she continues, whilst rummaging round in a familiar wicker hamper next to the couch, 'that's enough about Lucy for now.' And still further, after having retrieved some unidentifiable bit of raggage from the hamper and tossed it to a remote corner of the room (whither Lucy conveniently repairs in search of it), and taken her seat, with legs tucked up underneath, on the right side of the couch, 'What's new with you?'

I take my place next to her on the couch, breathe in a deep draught of air and inwardly count to one by way of forestalling the least soup's son of a betrayal of anything to the effect of You mean, besides the bloody obvious, you harpie!, and reply:

'Oh, nothing much. Encountered a bit of a rough patch at work last week. Otherwise, all quiet on the Rr--the Nigelian front.'

'Do tell me more about this rough patch, Nigel,' she says, seizing my left hand and with her thumb massaging my wrist as if by way of atoning for the trauma lately inflicted upon it.

So I tell her the whole story of my late run-in with Mike vis-a-vis the Tampan's Anisttes report, of the anxieties and humiliations elicited and engendered thereby etc. She receives my account with all apparent attentiveness, and with an ever-crescent appearance of sympathy and outrage that culminates in her declaring, at tale's end:

'The more I hear about this Mike Ayhern fellow, the more of a right incorrigible bastard he comes to seem. Look, Nigel, I know by this point I'm beginning to sound like a bit of a broken record, but have you lately, since I last brought it up, given any serious consideration to the idea of applying to a position at Occuvision? ['Occuvision' being, of course, the name of her firm (I might have mentioned that earlier; but then again, why should I have bothered?).]

There was only so much I could do, in the circumstances, with a question like this one. It amounted to such an egregious instance of cart-before-the-horse-ism that the only honest reply warranted by it was one to the effect of, 'Yeah, I have considered that notion; and, indeed, I did consider it during the very throes of the crisis just-now related, only there was a certain material obstacle that stood in the way of my full exploitation of the aforesaid notion, namely the fact that Y&MFCT were not, so far as I could tell, exactly on speaking terms at the time.' Indeed, the only gentleblokish-yet-arse-saving means of parrying the question that I could improvise on the spot consisted in framing my reply to it, AFF, as an enquiry into her well-being (and even that had to be de-snarkified with a conciliatory [albeit muttered and vauguely stroppy] intermejiate buffer of Yeah, erm, well, of course I've thought about it, and I'm still thinking about it):

'So, seeing as how you're still pretty gung-ho for me to come on board there at Occuvision, I gather that things have been at least bearable work-wise on your end over the past coupla weeks.'

'Yeah, more or less. Can't complain on the whole. Of course,' she adds, gesturing towards a veritable Dagwood sandwich of papers stacked on the dining-room table, 'the sheer volume of work has become a bit maddening of late, but at least my boss is consistently clear about what she expects from me and exempts me from humiliating lectures on my supposed linguistic incompetence and the like.'

I have to confess, DGR, that, although I'd sought nothing of the kind from it, this last spot of dialogue of hers rendered, for the first time, the prospect of working at Occuvision a decisive positive improvement on my situation at Proctologitex in my okies, as against the last desperate saving throw that it had, at best, previously represented thereunto. TBS, the ascription of a precise hue-cum-saturation-cum-brightness formula to the comparative rosiness of the Occuvis-ual situation all rather hinged on the question of whether this maddening amount of take-home work was prevailingly self-imposed rather than consistently mandated from on-high; and, having switched into full-on Machiavelli-mode, I was just on the point of sussing out a sufficiently underhanded stratagem for answering this very question, when the full-on-Romeo-moded revelation hit me that a certain material point had yet to be settled, a point synthetically linked to the master-point of the whole evening, viz. whether she was offering me this counsel in the character of a so-called lover or life partner, or in that of a mere friend. And bethrixt the decidedly schphincter-trying efforts to hide, in succession, my cynical calculations, my guilt at having been so cynically calculating and my panic at being confronted anew with a mighty, half-litre-sized, fortnight-old open tin of worms, I must have presented a right pitiful spectacle, for by and by Esmeralda moved her hand downwards a couple or so of inches, and whilst proceeding to massage the pit or groin (aka the palm) of my hand with the big-toe (47 the thumb) of hers, asked soothingly:

'What ever is the matter, Nigel, darling? Do tell.'

My schlong and schphincter alike taking heart (if that makes sense) from the exercise of her digital wiles on this most underrated of so-called erogenous zones, I reply:

'Since you ask, and if--and only if--you really want to know...'

'...Of course I do.'

'Mind you, this is bound to appear a bit of a non-sequitur, after what we've just been discussing....'

'...sequitur, schmequitur. Press on.'

[Yo, through an obligatory sigh of resignation]: 'Very well. [Then--and only then--mirroring her by taking her free hand in its YFCT-side complement (but omitting, in a concession to blokish stoicism, the massaging module of the mirrorage)] I'm afraid I can't keep sitting here without knowing at least more or less how things stand between us. Now, I realise that we last parted, in person, on less than, shall we say...not friendly, but some other word, one that's less harsh, more bookish-sounding...'

'...equable?'

'Yes, perfect: equable. I realise we parted on less than equable terms, or in a less than equable mood, or what have you. Now, when you left the pub that night Saturday before last, it seemed to me you were in a right huff--and please correct me if that's an overstatement--'

'No.'

'OK, so you were in a right huff when you left the pub that night. Please understand, then, that whilst I am entirely appreciative of and sympathetic to the motive or efficient cause of that there huff--namely, your discovery of a certain facet of my ethos or worldview that shall for the moment remain nameless--that whilst so far from being disposed to any need to overlook, let alone forgive that selfsame huff, I positively embrace it--'

[At my enunciation of the word embrace, our respective mitt-pairs advance up to their corresponding elbows (yesyesyes, DGR, as if on cue).]

'--Yes?' she interjects, in desperate anticipation.

'--You must understand that, notwithstanding a certain cosmetic shake-up of my social world that you have avowedly already got wind of, my ethos and worldview survive intact; as, to all appearances, they shall remain, pass what may, through whatever mejium, between you and me.'

'It's most generous of you, Nigel, to spare me your forgiveness of that dreadful performance, that perfectly horrible scene I made in walking out on you the other weekend. [NB, DGR (and Mr James Phipps), the well-nigh-overweeningly commendable degree of feminine self-awareness evinced by the words performance and scene.] I could hardly blame you for not forgiving me for it. That was why I cut short our phone conversation the other night, you see: I was ever so desperately afraid that, if the subject should have come up in such a faceless setting, you'd have finished up swearing that you never wanted to see me again, and that I should have lost you for ever.'

'Oh, Esmerlda, darling--heaven forbid!'

'I appreciate how strange it seems to you now, but I was taking no chances then. I mean, just put yourself in your shoes, by way of mine: how might you have felt if your girlfriend, on learning of some trivial, inoccuous little hobby of yours which she regarded as being utterly puerile, petty, anorakish and gratuitously time-hoovering, had, on the basis of that discovery, assumed that this hobby constituted the very essence of your being, and acted accordingly?'

Well, DGR, the bald-beaver'd truth was that I could not have blamed such a blokess either for assuming the first thing or for acting in the second fashion; and that I likewise could not have blamed such a supposedly misprised bloke for simultaneously acknowledging the assumption and welcoming the action; and that, indeed, at her unfurling of the adjectival catalogue of puerile, petty, anorakish &c, my right hand began making a discreet beeline from her right elbow towards the gravitational centre of my top shirt-button. But as by that point my nose and gob were buried deep in her upper tresses and within sniffing-stroke-nibbling distance of one of those coveted ears of hers, the Arr-Haitch's progress was but feeble; and, indeed, no sooner had he got free of the Esmeraldan mitt than he found himself gravitating downwards and backwards towards the small of the Esmeraldan back. And by the time he'd reached this intermejiate destination and was working his way speedily downwards and frontwards towards the Esmeraldan trouser-button, my teeth had already nibbled their way round the full arc of the ear and were working their way, likewise speedily downwards and frontwards towards the Esmeraldan gob; Esmeralda, for her part, executing all the while a roughly complementary set of manouevres vis-a-vis the Ruggerian person-cum-togs. In short, at that point, the stage was firmly set for our enactment of the two-backed-bestial routine--the whole nine schlong-yards of it--right then and there on the couch. If only my stomach had seen fit to co-operate with his uro-genital neighbours during that ever-so-brief so-called window of opportunity! I dare say, had he done so, his long-term interests would have been better served, and he would have thanked me in the end for having put their short-term interests ahead of his. Your stomach? you interject uncomprehendingly, DGR. That's right: my stomach. For you see, DGR, just as I was getting a trembly-diggited purchase on the zip-fastener of Esmeralda's flies, my stomach let out a mighty rumble that in point of amplitude transcended the limits of ordinary tummerly decorum by leaps and dips. I heard it, she heard it--for Chrissakes, even Lucy heard it, and registered her audition with a menacing growl of her own from her corner, as though she intuited in it the approach of an intruder. Needles to say, it broke the erotic spell as efficaciously as (albeit less malodorously than) a full-on arse-trumpet fanfare would have done. TBS, I had only myself to blame for this untoward instance spell-breaking; for, having forseen long beforehand that one way or another the approaching evening was bound to eventuate in a big meal of some sort (be it an a-deux affair with Esmeralda or a solitary maisonette-bound pizza chow-down sopped up with liberal lashings of Hoegaarden [the only spiritually endurable alternative to the latter being a gin-and-tonic swill-down eventuating prospectively in a fatal case of alcohol poisoning]), I had taken only a Coke and packet of crisps at lunchtime.

'Feeling a bit peckish, are we?' she says, pulling away from me, rearing up on her knees and buttoning her trousers.

'Yeah, erm, I suppose so,' I says, remaining supine whilst crooking my left arm over my shoulder and feeling round for the blower-receiver that I know to be cradled on an endtable just back of the arm-rest cradling my head. 'I assume you'll be having your usual, erm, imam baldy [i.e., from the Divan]?'

'No, I won't,' she says, leaning over to arrest my hand mid-search, and to arm-wrestle it safely back couchside. 'Nor will you be having your usual doner. In fact, the very keynote of tonight's feast is going to be unusuality.'

And with that, she's off the couch and bounding into the kitchen, to which I creep my wary way in turn a hefty half-minute later. I discover her standing at the cooker, and stirring with a wooden spoon a gigantic steaming pasta vat full of...Ken only knew what, but to judge by its smell--yes, that smell, DGR, the muggy bog smell, amplified to a nearly-retch-inducing pungency at this proximity to its source--well, the preceding em-dash-offset parenthesis speaks volumes of conjectural culinary analysis, I trust. But I do my best to put on a game phiz, and ask her, with feigned gratitude and inquisitiveness:

'So you've, erm, decided to rustle up something of your own for our dining pleasure?'

[She, continuing with the stirrage, natch]: 'Yessir. All part of my diabolical scheme to trap you here. Why risk spoiling the mood with all of that over-the-phone and in-person haggling with the takeaway staff? I thought. Besides, this is a recipe I've been wanting to try for donkey's months now, ever since I saw it in finished form on The Jackbooted Viscountess, you know, the cooking show?'

'Uh-huh,' I acknowledge untruthfully, without adding so much as a toking guilt-cough (for, these TV cooking shows being, on average, more ephemeral entities even than those nano-second-lived, laboratory-concocted chemical elements named after unpronounceable Russians and US states, any self-respecting bloke practically owes it to himself to boast of his oblivion of any one of them). 'So, may I ask what name this, erm, savoury preparation answers to?'

'It's one of the Viscountess's 24-hour-flight recipes, a kimchee-peanut jambalaya. And,' she adds, turning off the gas and leaving off the stirrage, 'to judge by the consistency, I think it's just about ready. But, of course, the proof of the jambalaya is in the eating.'

So saying, she spoons a dollup of the stuff into her gob, and, after shutting her okies and fluttering their lids in an uncannily and unpleasantly evocative manner, lets out a low moan that spells the worst as far as my stroppy tummy is concerned.

And I, cannibalising my reply out of the untimely-ly evoked moment, say:

'Is it TDAHYCDAQAF?'

'Mmm,' she at first speechlessly intones, okies still shuttered, whilst shaking her head in the negative and jerking her free thumb upwards a few shakes, as if to say, Higher-stroke-better. Then, after finally swallowing: 'It's TDAHYCSBAPOSWDAF.'

'I see. Which spelt out must be...hang on, I think I can guess it: To Die And Have Your Corpse...Sodomised By A Pack of...Rabid--'

'--The word begins with an Arr, not an Ess.'

'Right, so then: To Die And Have Your Corpse Sodomised By A Pack Of...Syphilitic...?'

'Mmm-hmm!' she nods and smiles through a second spoonful of the dreck.

'...of Syphilitic...Wild Dogs Afterwards For?'

'Spot on!' she exclaims, applauding and jubilantly grinning . But then she resumes, with a mien of demented solemnity worthy of Rotwang or Dr Frankenstein, whilst commencing to dredge up a sample for YFCT's gob only: 'So, would you care to try it?'

'Try it?' I sputter with hammy disingenuousness. Then, after sucking in two lungfuls of (relatively) clean dining-room air, stepping across the kitchen threshold and drawing up directly behind her, schlong-against-back-bottom, I pre-empt her dredging by reaching round her tits, plunging a finger directly into the pot (ouch!), and, with dripping diggit held aloft the range, whisper the following words into her ear, devoting only the absolute minimum quantum of air pressure to each syllable, so as to get to the end of the whole speech without being obliged to inhale anew: 'Why, of course I'll try it. But why dawdle over such pro formica preliminaries? What's TDAHYCSBAPOSWDAF for the goose needs must be TDAHYCSBAPOSWDAF-squared for the gander. Fetch forth a pair of trenchers, Mademoiselle, and bear them hence--each a-brimful of the Viscoutness's justly celebrated kimchee-peanut jambalaya--to the table.'

You see, it was all part of my diabolical scheme to squeeze in a few moments of independent consultation with my on-site, corporeal second wheel against the clearly inevitable administration of the inverted KPJ emema. So, the paean concluded, I march blue-faced back into the dining room and up to Lucy's doggy-bed, and rouse her with the all-purpose head-towsle.

'Are you hungry, Lucy?' I asks her, keeping the non-towsling-hand safely sequestered on the arse-side.

She stirs and obligingly gets herself into begging position: front body-half upright, back half still sedentary, snout pointed nearly skyward.

'I thought so. Well, here's a sample of tonight's menu.' Thereupon I whip the hidden arm out and thrust its stinky finger directly athwart her schnozz.
Letting out a heart-wringingly pathetic yelp, she collapses prone on to her bed, and remains there with both front paws clasped over her snout and both okies rolled imploringly--or was it reproachfully?--upwards towards mine.

'Sorry to let you down like that, old girl,' I says to her, whilst taking my place at the table so as to have a clear view of her, and wiping my finger clean discreetly with the underside of the tablecloth. 'But look at it this way: with any luck, between the two of us your mistress and I will polish off this lot and save you from the leftovers.'

Yeah, so, DGR, all-told-stroke-in-toto: it was something of a mixed bag, this initial patching-up rendezvous with Esmeralda. But perhaps I'm rather selling it short in calling it a 'mixed bag,' for even some of the most decidedly shitty bits of the mix had their golden obverses. Take the jambalaya feast itself, for example: TBS, at first-gob acquaintance, the concoction proved to be more than fully worthy of its noxious airbourne reputation; and the waves of nausea it injuiced on its way down that night were answered twofold by the spasms of pain it injuiced on its way out the next day. And yet the sight of that wee pair of okies shining back at me through the romantic candlelit semi-darkness from the far end of the room in ineffable commiseration--a sight taken in however fleetingly and blearily at the start of bowl number three or four or six (!), through face-cheek-searing paprikaic tears, in contradiction of such perfidious YFCT-side interjections as Delicious!, Perfetto! and An absolute triumph, I guar-rawwn-tee!; the sight of those selfsame okies, I say, during the gustatory ordeal itself, together with the remembrance thereof during the excretory ordeal of the next day--well, if I can't in good faith say they made the whole thing worthwhile, I can at least say they made me feel very much at home, both in a way and to a degree I had not felt since...well, the first post-match minutes of UEFA Championship night at the latest.