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but the joke was it always made you more depressed. The same with birds like Eileen; female masturbation machines that were obsolete and boring the minute you came. And like masturbation the more Eileens I had the less they satisfied. The initial excitement was always the same, always as good, the thinking, mind’s-eye wanking, but when it came to the moment of too-real truth, after the ball play was over, then the fall, then the let down, then the desperation and the unnamed (unmanned?) fear.
    So devices had had to be manufactured, introduced into my seductions for the purposes of enhancing the excitement and shielding me from the depressions and the realities of hard flesh. Gauzes and veils and wisps of fantasy had to drift between my eyes and my mind in order to keep my activities enjoyable. The sex act itself was the final necessary stopper to an ever increasing bag of tricks, all equally exciting and, like masturbation, self-defeating, evolving without any direction except perhaps towards some kind of madness.
    I was like an addict. Girls were a habit I couldn’t shake. It was as if there was an empty space in my make-up that needed filling with some sexual experience. It wasn’t as if I was loveless. My wife and I didn’t get on but that was my fault, not hers: she still loved me, whatever I felt for her, whatever I got up to. And even if she stopped loving me, past experience told me I wouldn’t exactly have a job finding someone to take over where she left off. I’d always been someone who’d got their own way with people, male or female, although these days I no longer considered the fact with pleasure. These days it was just a fact. It had ceased to have meaning since I’d recognised it and admitted it to myself. I’d always wanted to be liked and I’d schemed and plotted in the subtlest of ways to achieve popularity but I’d only recently realised it and to think of it made me feel sick.
    Neither was it night-starvation, my hang up. My wife was good in that department too. (In fact, she was the best screw I’d ever had. And she went along with my games and embellishments, not just for my sake but because she enjoyed them too, that is after she’d been persuaded that what we did was neither debasing nor purely carnal or indicative of any feelings I might have—or not have— for her personally.) And, wife apart, there were plenty of Eileens, a species of female that under normal circumstances I disliked intensely --- shallow, coy, faux-naif, deliberately petulant, the complete suburban, ushered into puberty to the strains of Telstar, sprung into a background where the myth figures of Bernie the Bolt and Robin Richmond entered the common consciousness and steered it along the paths of rightfulness. But it was the very awfulness of their environment that attracted me to girls like Eileen. It gave my intrigues an extra dimension; the thought that I was disturbing the bland subconscious of the great catalogue market, the audience I touched with the gloss of my own photographs.
    But, as usual, no answer, no reply. I wondered if the knowledge would solve the problem, remove the addiction. I knew plenty of people with big sexual appetites who considered themselves perfectly healthy; why did I suspect my own? Was it the refinement of the appetite that caused me to be suspicious?
    I turned the car into the White Lion car park. It was early yet and I could pick my spot. Not that the White Lion had much of a carriage track. The trawlermen that did the real spending moved from spot to spot in taxis, so as not to let anything like a fatal accident interfere with their drinking.
    I pulled on the hand brake and Eileen said, “What, are we going for another drink?”
    “No,” I said. “At least, not here. We may have one in the studio. This is where I park the car. I have an arrangement with the pub.”
    We got out of the Mercedes and splashed our way across the car park’s reflected neon. We rounded the pub