It’s odd, but I find myself often writing in the character of a woman. That would of course confirm every prediction made by my (Welsh, in case its relevant) games master at school, who probably thought I would end up as a kind of Mr Humphries character, looking after the hankies probably, in a shop like the one referred to below.
All I can say is that I like women. I like their company and this story is about two strong-willed characters, one of whom lets things get out of hand, for reasons which… well, you’ll see.
Dead and Alive
He had cancer. It was terminal. The doctors said he had weeks to live. Why he chose now to write love notes to Nancy was a mystery to her, and to Richard, who was her husband.
Nancy showed the notes to Richard when she came off duty. She was a nurse at the hospital.
At first, the notes had been unsigned and sporadic. Now, with death hovering close over him, he had become brazen.
“I long to drown in your silken hair, to trace the line of your moist lips with my finger, to have you sigh in my arms.” The spidery writing straggled across the scented page.
“Does he write these things himself?” Richard asked.
“He’d hardly dictate them to his wife,” Nancy said. “She’s his only visitor.” His wife sat with him for hours each day.
Richard suggested increasing his pain relief. “Nothing fatal. Just something to reduce him to a quiet painless coma.”
Nancy disagreed. “This fantasy is keeping him alive,” she told him.
She didn’t tell Richard that she was writing back.
“I can almost feel your hot breath on my body,” she wrote, confident in the knowledge that he would be dead in days.
Instead, one of the nurses found that he had limped to the toilet with a copy of Playboy magazine.
Slowly, the colour returned to his skin.
The notes continued. “When we awake in darkness, I will taste your hungry mouth, and you…”
She wanted to encourage his recovery. She wore more makeup than normal. She found excuses to visit his room, to wipe his brow, straighten his sheets. Sometimes, as she stretched across him, her breast grazed his forehead.
She wondered how he would look if he recovered. She imagined him tanned and healthy, on an exercise bicycle in the gym.
But the next morning when she entered his room, she found his wife leaning over him with a pillow. They looked at each other without comment. The monitor was flat-lining, making its dull, lifeless warning sound.
Nancy couldn’t help but notice, as she pressed the button which would alert the recovery team, that one of her notes was on the floor beneath the bed.
