little did I know that Mark’s obviously lived in damp conditions because the bloody thing kept going out again. While my sex drive was once again motoring along like a Formula One car with no brakes, Mark’s was spluttering to life once every week or two, going out for a quick spin then crawling back into the pit lanes for a refuel and a rest. Over the following weeks, months and years, and much to my general discontent (although to the pleasure of Ashif, who ran the grocer’s at the end of the street where I bought batteries for a certain adult toy on a far too frequent basis) our sex life was reduced to the occasional mildly satisfying romp. Whenever I broached the subject with Mark, it was always the same–he was tired, he was under pressure, he worked long hours, he loved me, it would get better, now cuddle in, go to sleep, and cross my heart I’ll make it up to you at the weekend.
Occasionally he did. But more often than not life, kids, bills, work and sleep took over. Still, it could be worse. We still laughed. We had the family we always wanted. We genuinely loved each other. And Ashif was now able to send the wife and kids to Center Parcs for a fortnight. In the grand scheme of things, surely a less than perfect sex life was a small price to pay for all the other great things in our lives.
Definitely. Absolutely. It was.
‘CARLY!’ I snapped my head up, spilling my coffee on my tracky bottoms. It didn’t matter. They were washable at 40 degrees and dryable on a radiator. Well, if he wasn’t going to sustain the effort then neither was I.
Carol was laughing. ‘What are you thinking about–you were on another planet there.’
Which was ironic, since Kate was now doing something that required bending her spine into an unnatural position and sticking her arse in the air. I decided I was far too refined to make a joke about Uranus.
‘Sex,’ I replied truthfully.
Of course, what goes on between Mark and me, in the privacy of our own home and within the sanctity of our marriage is sacrosanct, and I would never, ever divulge the intimacies of our lives with anyone.
‘Mark still not putting out?’ asked Kate.
Busted.
‘He’d need a satellite navigation system to find my clitoris these days,’ I admitted.
‘So that’s why you’re looking so pissed off today then,’ Carol interjected.
But no, I was sure she was wrong. After all, my sex life had been crap for years–why would it suddenly upset me now?
‘Nah, I don’t think so. I’m just having a down day. No idea why.’
‘PMT?’ Kate asked.
‘No, that was last week–remember the whole dry-cleaners weeping over a ketchup stain/threatening a traffic warden expedition,’ I said ruefully.
‘Work?’ asked Carol, with a wary look on her face. Carol had the same reaction as most men when faced with an emotional woman–she donned a crash helmet and checked out the nearest exits. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It’s just that when God was giving out empathy and sympathy she was down in the ‘superficial aesthetics’ department picking out the best face, the best body and getting a manicure, pedicure and permanent teeth whitening.
‘Work’s work,’ I replied with a shrug.
‘See what I mean?’ grinned Kate, talking to Carol but gesticulating to me. ‘I just told her that with her acutely incisive powers of descriptive narrative she should really be a writer.’
There’s nothing worse than a pal with a gift for irony. Except a pal with a gift for irony who now had her legs spread like an acrobatic porn star.
‘Will you stop with that bloody yoga?’ I demanded petulantly. Carol had just put a chocolate éclair in front of me and Kate’s bendy stuff was putting me right off. She looked at me, took on board my distress, considered our lifelong bond, evoked the emotion of all we’d been through together, then carried on regardless.
I took another gulp of cold coffee. Work. Well, I suppose on a scale of phenomenal excitement to turgid banality it was somewhere in the middle. I was gutted that my books hadn’t propelled me directly onto the world stage and my bank manager’s Christmas card list. I always thought that the minute my novels hit the shelves my adoring public would form an orderly queue that would stretch for miles. I’d be the new big thing. I’d be windswept and interesting, Richard and Judy would be my new best friends, and newspapers and magazines would clamour for my opinion on the really important issues.
Crisis in the Middle East? Let’s ask Carly Cooper for her informed opinion as to the path to resolution.
Are ‘new’ men really just ‘old’ men with cosmetics? Carly Cooper will know.
Is a daily orgasm essential for great mental and physical health? Actually, for obvious reasons I’d probably have to pass that one on to Jilly Cooper.
Obviously, my stellar rise to hot author of the year and ‘she with the finger on the zeitgeist of modern social culture’ hadn’t quite happened. But then, I suppose that, like the whole sex thing, I’d been too busy with babies, house and banalities to notice.
I was under contract to write one more book for the publisher who’d purchased my first two, but I had to admit I was struggling to conjure up the motivation.
I really liked the people who worked at my publisher’s–all six of them. One of the factors contributing to my pitiful income and my definite non-arrival as a literary force was probably that I was signed to a small independent publisher who did minuscule print runs and had the advertising budget of the average office Christmas kitty.
With both books I’d already released, the first issues sold out within a few weeks–not difficult when most shops held a grand stock of about four–never to be replenished, because the publisher had already moved on to the following month’s titles.
If book deals were like recording contracts then I was the second runner-up on a past season of the X Factor who had a couple of tiny hits and was looking forward to a career on the cruise ships.
Still, I was grateful for the heady excitement of actually seeing my name in print, and following the old adage that as one door closes, a crow bar and a bit of brute force opens another, I did get my weekly column out of it. It might not be much, but it paid for the weekly jaunt around Sainsbury’s, with a bit left over for the holiday fund.
Was I disappointed? Sure I was. But then, I hadn’t quite given up yet. I still had nine months left before my deadline for the next book, so I’d work at that, submit it, and fulfil my contract. Then I’d decide what I really wanted to do when I grew up.
Writing had seemed like a great idea when I thought it was a step on the journey to fame, riches and my biological mother, but the harsh reality was that it actually involved endless hours of solitude spent sitting in a room making up imaginary friends. In some countries they locked people up for that. I was convinced all that solitude and angst was detrimental to one’s mental health and I already had the proof that it had fairly detrimental physical effects–all the pondering inevitably caused boredom-fuelled comfort eating which, unchecked, could lead to a mightily fat arse.
I squirmed as I registered that my waistband was just a tad tighter than comfort demanded. Perhaps I’d skip the chocolate éclair.
I
