When I got home Dawn was mealy-mouthed and mocking. She had days like that, sometimes whole weeks.
‘It’s fun!’ I told her, almost tearful at her lack of enthusiasm. ‘We can go for rides! We can whiz out to the country for picnics! The kids are gone now so we can be ourselves again.’
‘That’s never who we were, Rob,’ she said, shaking her head as if I’d lost the plot. ‘If you want to be who we were before, then get yourself a little white van.’
A week later Dawn’s mother came over for dinner. ‘I’dloveto go for a ride on your motorbike,’ she said when Dawn mockingly told her about the bike.
‘Now we’ve had the sports car, the leather jacket and the motorbike, I’m assuming the next step will be the mistress,’ Dawn said.
‘I’m up for that too,’ Tracey said, with a wink.
‘You see,’ I told Dawn. ‘At least your mum still fancies me.’
* * *
Her name was Cheryl, and she was the secretary in our failing Maidstone branch. And yes, I do know that’s another cliché. At least she wasn’tmysecretary.
I rode over there one sunny July day on the Yamaha and, when I left, Cheryl, who’d already commented on my new leather jacket, came out to see.
‘Lovely bike,’ she said. ‘My ex had a big Kawasaki. A Z900 or something. Start it up, then. I love to hear a throbbing engine.’ And when I did, ‘Ooh, that sounds meaty. Will you take me for a ride sometime?’
And what can I say? Dawn wouldn’t go near it.
I was as careful as a husband can be. I even bought another crash helmet so that Dawn wouldn’t realise ‘her’ still unused one was missing.
Cheryl was the exact opposite of Dawn in every imaginable way, and I suppose that was the point. She liked rap music and pizza and perfume. She dyed her hair platinum blond and had glossy-red lips; she wore heels that made her bum stick out; she smoked until her voice went husky and laughed until her boobs wobbled. In many ways she reminded me of Dawn’s mum and that made me realise that I’d expected Dawn to become more and more like her mum as she aged. It had been an idea that suited me fine, but instead – and this is no doubt as much my fault as it is hers – Dawn had become middle class. She’d become a well-read, feminist, anti-make-up, anti-heels fan of Fay Weldon, Sandi Toksvig and Patti Smith. Cheryl seemed to fulfil some part of the bargain I’d missed out on.
Though there were multiple occasions for sex, I resisted for almost a year.
I told Dawn I had to work one Saturday a month but instead I’d pick Cheryl up, either in the TT or on the bike, and we’d drive or ride out into the Kent countryside.
Cheryl had a boyfriend when I met her – though that didn’t last for long. She insisted he wouldn’t mind. ‘It’s not like we’re doing anything anyway,’ she said, and that was true, wasn’t it? So we had pub lunches and picnics on the River Medway. We swam on Sheerness beach and ate Magnums.
For the most part, I managed to not feel guilty. Because other than the fact I never once mentioned Cheryl to Dawn, other than the fact I told Dawn I was working, other than the fact I wore sunblock so I wouldn’t go home looking too brown, and washed it off before I went home so that I wouldn’t go home smelling of sunblock – so basically, other than the almost constant deception, what was there to feel guilty about?
But then one day, Cheryl said, ‘Pull over.’
We were halfway back to Maidstone after a day on Whitstable beach, and I assumed that she wanted to pee. ‘There,’ she said, pointing to a lay-by beneath some trees. ‘There’s perfect.’
‘So I have something to ask you,’ she said, once I’d turned off the ignition.
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
‘D’you like blow jobs?’ Cheryl asked, one finger raised to her pouty, glossy lips.
I sensed myself blush, but admitted that, as far as I could remember, I did.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Because I really want to give you a blow job. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.’
Believe it or not, I said ‘no’.
I said, ‘Can I think about it for a bit? It’s just, you know…’
‘No problem,’ Cheryl said. ‘Things are complicated because of your wife, I know that, and it’s fine.’ But her expression suggested otherwise – that it wasn’t fine at all.
I also thought about it for weeks, in fact it would be fair to say I got obsessed.
I wondered if Cheryl was good at it (something Dawn, who wasn’t a fan, had not been). If someone, say Cheryl, was a blow jobexpert, then what would thatfeellike?
