Human Remains

person next to you.
    It has crossed my mind that I could find a prostitute, but in all honesty I object to paying for something that countless filthy, vapid idiots up and down the country are managing to get for free. Not to mention the possibility of contracting some dreadful disease. But, despite my reluctance, going to a prostitute remains my fantasy of choice. I imagine going along the London Road, driving slowly into the darkness between the orange pools of light, seeing the shapes moving, women standing back, a woman leaning against a wall, maybe, or strolling along the pavement, impossibly high heels making her hips swing. I pull over behind a figure – I can’t see her clearly, not at all in fact, but somehow I’ve chosen her. She comes into the light and leans through the open window of the car.
    Some nights she’s old, in her fifties if she’s a day, with curly black hair that must surely be a wig. She smiles at me and gets into the car, and we go back to a filthy flat she thinks is tastefully decorated with pink nylon and polyester, a carpet with the same psychedelic pattern as the one my parents’ living room had in the Seventies; I lie back on the bed that smells of damp and sex, and watch her undressing, laying all of that PVC and stretch nylon lace out on a frayed chintz settee. Her body is old and used, her skin slack against bone, her hair under the wig grey and coarse. I try to fuck her but I can’t even feel the sides of her vast hole against me, so she ends up taking out her teeth and gumming me vigorously until I can finally orgasm. Of course the fantasy can’t end until I’ve paid out some nauseatingly overinflated sum of money and been let out into the street, hot and smelling of her, filthy with her various bodily fluids all over my face, my hands, my body and my clothes.
    Sometimes I can actually manage to change it around so that when the figure leans into my open window she’s breathtakingly beautiful, an angel, soft blonde hair falling in waves over her ample breasts; she gets in and takes me to a hotel, straight to the penthouse suite, where she undresses me against plate-glass windows looking out over some city skyline. Her body is voluptuous and soft, her skin glowing as she lies back against the dazzling white bed sheets. And yet when I go to fuck her I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to look at her and I can’t even maintain my pathetic erection.
    What is it in me that can’t even imagine happiness?
    So I go back to fucking the old pro in her grimy council flat, who by now is dead or maybe just asleep, and while she lies motionless beneath me, all sharp bones and loose skin, I permit myself an unhappy release, then I go and have a long wash in the shower and think about what sort of a man I am.
    Last night after I got back into bed, towelled dry and smelling of shower gel, I thought about Janice. I’ve thought about her a lot recently, reliving the day they told us at work about her body being found.
    I wonder if she would ever have let me fuck her.
     
     
    I’m still thinking about Janice when I get to the gym at seven. Thirty minutes on the bike, thirty minutes rowing, thirty minutes on the treadmill. Feels like hard work this evening, but for most of the ninety minutes the thought of her keeps me occupied.
    I remember when Janice first spoke to me. She must have been working at the council for years upon years, a figure who was as much a part of the scenery as the photocopier or the pile of ten-year-old telephone directories, and I’d never heard her speak.
    That day she brought the mail up from the post room, and instead of just leaving it in a pile in the tray by the door she brought an envelope over to my desk, cleared her throat and said, ‘This one’s for you.’
    I looked up in astonishment.
    She would have been in her late thirties by then, the same age I am now, but she looked nearer fifty, hair scraped back into a lanky ponytail, dull brown and greying at the temples, pale eyes hooded in a lined face. She had the sort of face that would have benefited from make-up, and that’s not the sort of thing I would say often. In fact I could have imagined her on one of those ghastly makeover shows, going in as a frumpy old maid and coming out as a beautiful, poised mature woman.
    As if she could read my mind she smiled, and her whole face changed. She was almost beautiful – the old hag to the angel.
    After that I spoke to her quite a few times.