Chapter 5

I didn’t want to move here. It was Ange’s idea. The whole area’s full of sales reps and nobs with their bloody BMWs and their dinner parties. I think Ange saw it as a move up. Something on the way to fulfilling an ambition she’d probably never admitted to before.

I met her outside Gran’s house. Walking down the long, drab rows of scruffy Victorian terraced houses like a flower floating down a gutter. All long legs and cleavage, tossing her hair and smiling at me. I’d seen her before down the local on darts night but she always seemed to be with someone else.

Anyway, I should’ve known she lived locally. Turned out she rented a room in the house next door but one to Gran’s. Taken a job at Ford’s and moved in a month ago.

Two days after seeing her walking down the road, I was stood outside Gran’s house having a fag. Late afternoon in a drab street on a drab November day. Streetlights throwing regular pools of yellow and a fine drizzle giving a sheen to everything. A still, penetrating cold made my legs ache.  Mimicking my life. A drab, cold one way street to fuck all it seemed. What was I doing still standing here having a fag as I’d been doing off and on for the last eight years. School half a mile that way, work half a mile in the other.

The soft click of a door closing discreetly drew my attention and there stood Ange, lighting up. She was still wearing that minute and oh so thought provoking skirt. Must have been freezing. She glanced over and so, as much to avoid an awkward silence, I wandered over to her, not sure what to say.

Well, to cut a long story short, we hit it off.  This time on darts night, it was me strutting about like a dog with two dicks. Looking back I don’t understand how I could have failed to wonder why no one was surprised. Ange had been round the whole pub by then it seemed. I was the only one left.

Perhaps I knew this really, but didn’t want to acknowledge it. Perhaps I harboured some daft, romantic idea about ‘rescuing’ her. Whatever. She was gorgeous, incredibly sexy, tactile, warm and affectionate. I’d never known anything like it before. And we could talk somehow. Like we shared a common view of life. She understood me and I her. Or I thought I did. I don’t know if it was love or lust that pulled my feet out from under me but whatever it was, I was smitten.

We got married that following summer, pooled resources and went house hunting. I was doing well at work, in charge of the workshop now and earning good money.  I wanted a house on a new estate that had just been built a couple of miles away. But Ange hit on this bay windowed semi in suburbia and wouldn’t let it go. One of those places with a little driveway and a hedge, and net curtains that let you peek at the neighbours without them seeing, as they mowed their lawn or washed their bloody company car. There wasn’t a pub for miles around.

Anyway, we ended up buying it and I worked my bollocks off trying to pay for it. Ange took a part time job and became all full of herself. Had to have the best of everything and forever saying ‘do this’ and do that’ and ‘don’t do whatever that way, do it this way’. The sex dried up and we started to argue.  I was knackered, broke and pissed off. I don’t know what her problem was.

Next thing you know she’s up and gone with one of these bloody BMW driving nobs. A Sales Manager or something. Lived two streets away. Doubtless throwing dinner parties and thinking she’s come a long way from darts night. And she wants half the house. As it happens, poor old Gran died that year and left me her house so I was able to buy Ange out. But she did well. Earned a hundred and fifty grand for spending four years with a devoted husband.

I see her sometimes, driving around in that damn car with her nose in the air. Silly bitch.

But life hasn’t turned out too bad really. Although I think I’m going to flog this house and push off somewhere else. Somewhere a bit more real. But being single has its advantages. Sex with different women is much more interesting than sticking with one. And there’s loads of it about if you know where to look. Intimacy, sex and affection with none of the ties or costs. Highly recommended, let me tell you. And I take particular pleasure in shagging the wives of the local nobs. Most of them are at home all day, bored out of their brains and yearning for a little flattery.

I have a new life and it’s a lot more fun than the old one. And right now I’m off to work and now I get to keep al the earnings. Or I would be off to work, but one of the nobs has parked his bloody car across my driveway.  I went next door and knocked them up. Some scrawny bloke with a green face and red eyes answered. Looked like death.  Wearing nothing but socks and pink and blue striped boxer shorts. Perhaps there was more to these dinner parties than I realised.

Anyway, he disappeared back into the house to get his keys and I wandered back to my car. Next thing I know, there’s a string of verbal coming from next door and I turn to see this nob standing there, still in his socks and boxers, waving his arms in the air and standing in a pool of blood.

I walked back over to him. He was yelling something about the wrong keys and no key and God. And he was crying. And the pool of blood round his feet was getting bigger by the minute. So what was I to do? I mean, he was the enemy right? One of the nobs. And I have to admit, I was starting to find the whole thing quite funny. Basically, he’d gone back indoors, picked up the wrong set of keys and cut his foot on the way out, closing the front door behind him. So now he was stuck out in the street in his underwear with absolutely no way of being able to do anything about it. His BMW stood there so near yet so far, like an unattainable goal. Excellent.

His foot was a bit of a concern though. I didn’t want him dying on me, and anyway, I needed to get to work. So I grabbed a tea towel and a box of plasters from my kitchen, and tossed them to him, suggesting that he tie the towel around his leg to slow the bleeding. But there was still the problem of how to shift his car. Clearly, we were going to have to break into the house. Well, it’s here that I have to admit to a bit of a leery childhood. I do, as it happens, know my way round most windows. It didn’t take me long to prise one of his open and climb in, to then open the front door for him.

He was in quite a state. Limping about in his stripy kecks and socks with a tea towel tied round his leg, bawling his bloody eyes out. The first thing he did was go for his mobile and make a call. Which pissed me off because I wanted his car moved before anything else. So whilst he was yelling into his phone, I found his trousers and pulled his keys out of one of the pockets. With them came his wallet which fell open on the floor. And in that moment events took a completely new and even more interesting turn because there, in his wallet, staring up at me with those great big eyes that I knew so well, was a photo of Emma, the best local nob’s shag bunny of the lot.

By David