Fanny

‘Nooooooo, stop it,’ she shouts, nearly screams in fact.

I’m unrepentant, laugh, and say - like a mechanical tin clown on a pier someone fed 2p into in a Hammer House of Horror film - ‘I am Velcro man, and you shall obey.’

‘You’re a raving loony,’ she answers when I let her go. She rubs her red-raw-face, and says, ‘I’ll have a bloody rash now.’

‘I suppose, some passionate kissing, followed by rigorous, sweaty, and prolonged sex is out of the question then,’ I say lifting the daily paper I've had to search under twenty-five cushions for.

‘Phaaa,’ she chortles.

It was noted she didn’t say ‘no,’ and I'm trying to remember if I have any razor blades left, or if she's blunted them all on her Desperate-Dan-legs. (blunted = bad word choice. I know, it even made me cringe.)

I take a seat, and begin to read the back page. Nothing sensational is happening. The lead story revolves around how farcical the SFA are. Hello, this might be many things, I’m thinking, but it isn’t news. I don’t recall anyone saying the SFA were anything other than farcical.

‘It’s a dirty business love,’ I say while folding the paper so I can begin to pretend I know some answers to the crossword. She’s busy watching some program, it's about women who buy realistic life-like looking dolls. One of them is buying an outfit, baby clothes, get this, from Harrods, and she’s pushing the doll around the shop in a pram. Worse still, her man is with her, and he’s paying a couple of hundred pound’s.

I’m trying my best to be sympathetic, and I'm honestly trying to understand what would drive a woman to have such a strange hobby. I hope they say at the end it is mental problems, and some bearded psychiatrist wearing a tweed second hand jacket explains, and explains in minute detail why people do such things, but I wont hold my breath.

‘What is?’ she says, annoyed, but at the same time, she's imprudently nosy enough that she has to know what I mean by, a dirty business.

‘What’s what,’ I say, then chew my favourite biro. I tried not to say it of course, but it just came out.

‘A dirty business,’ she says.

‘Working down a mine,’ I say, rather proud I kept a straight face.

‘Fanny,’ she says, and folds her arms under her boobs when she decides I’m obviously being childish.

‘You’re sitting there engrossed in a program about dolls, and I’m a fanny,’ I say.

‘Shush,’ she says.

So I make as much noise with the paper as I can, and contemplate making a cup of tea, just so I can make slurping noises; always a winner that one