Therapy

work than me, but I hadn’t come all this way to sit in a bar and watch golden oldies from The People Next Door. There seemed to be only one thing to do, so I did it. I tossed back my g & t and ordered another one, a double. Laurence had another beer, and we shared a microwaved pizza, and then we had a brandy each with our coffee. Laurence suggested that we go back to the hotel for a siesta. In the taxi on the way back he put his arm round my shoulder, so I guessed what kind of a siesta he had in mind. Oh, is it time already? Till tomorrow then. Yes, of course I’ve heard of Scheherazade, what about her... ?
     
    Well, it was lucky I was half-pissed, otherwise it would have been just too embarrassing for words. I mean, one either had to laugh or cry, and having a few drinks inside me, I laughed. I got the giggles as soon as I saw Laurence putting on his knee-support when we were preparing for our siesta. It’s made of some spongy stretch fabric, like they use to make wet-suits, and it’s bright red, with a hole in it for his kneecap to poke through. It looked particularly funny when he had nothing else on. He seemed rather surprised by my reaction. Apparently he always wears it when he and Sally have sex. When he put on an elasticated elbow bandage as well I nearly had hysterics. He explained that he’d had a recurrence of tennis elbow lately and didn’t want to take any chances. I wondered if he was going to put on anything else, a pair of shin-pads perhaps, or a cycling helmet. Actually that wouldn’t have been a bad idea, because the bed was so narrow he was in some danger of falling on the floor during foreplay. This involved a lot of licking and nuzzling on his part. I just closed my eyes and let him browse. It was quite nice, though ticklish, and I kept giggling when I think I was supposed to moan. Then it appeared he wanted me to straddle him while he lay on his back, because of his knee, and that he expected me to handle the trickiest bit of the proceedings myself, so to speak. I knew an actress once who told me that she had a recurrent dream of being on stage without knowing the play she was in, having to guess her lines and moves from what the other actors were saying and doing. I felt as if I was understudying Sally under a similar handicap. I don’t know what she makes of the part, but I felt like a cross between a hooker and an orthopaedic nurse. However, I went through with it gamely, and jigged up and down a bit on top of him until he gave a groan and I rolled off. But it turned out that he was groaning because he couldn’t come. “Perhaps you had a little too much to drink at lunch, darling,” I said. “Perhaps,” he said gloomily. “Was it all right for you?” Of course I said it was wonderful, though to be honest I’ve had more pleasure from a nice hot bath at the end of a long day, or a really top-class Belgian chocolate with a cup of freshly-ground Colombian coffee. Frankly.
    Well, we slept for an hour or so after that, and then we showered and had a cup of tea on our balcony, which was in the shade by now, and read our books until it was time to go down and have a drink in the bar before dinner. We weren’t talking to each other much because everything that came into our heads, my head anyway, was something we dared not say, about how awful the place was and what a disaster the whole trip was turning out to be, knowing there were three days still to go. We were on demi-pension terms at the hotel. They gave us little coupons when we checked in that you had to surrender as you went into the dining-room, a vast barrack of a place with about four hundred people shovelling food into themselves for all they were worth as if they were eating against the clock in some kind of TV gameshow. You helped yourself to hors d’oeuvres and desserts and they brought the main course to your table. There was a choice of chicken chasseur and fish fried in breadcrumbs. It was about BBC canteen standard, edible but dull. We had a bottle of red wine but I drank most of it because Laurence was girding himself to perform later. It didn’t make for a very relaxing evening. We went out for a stroll and walked down to the shore again to watch the waves churning the wet cinders. Then there seemed nothing else to do except go to bed. It was either that or go back into town and what the Veronicas was like at night was all too easy to imagine. So we made love again and the same thing happened. He had an