All stories

Joyce crabbed her way through the downstairs hall with the shopping, winding her way through towers of boxes to reach the kitchen. Alan was digging around in a crate trying to find the tin opener.

“Hiya love. Shops ok?”

“Yeah - I took a wrong turn on the way, but I got there eventually.”

She dumped the shopping on the fraction of clear surface by the sink and sighed with relief, rolling her shoulders.

The kitchen - the whole house - was a disaster, but it didn’t matter. After so many months they were finally here, ready to live their country village dream.

“Everything ok was it?” asked Alan, still rummaging.

“Yes it was lovely - it’s exactly what we imagined - a nice little high street. Lots of independent shops - bakers, greengrocers, you know. And the Tescos is very discreet - all built in the same stone as the rest of the street. It’s quite charming.”

“Good love, good,” but Joyce could tell Alan wasn’t really listening.

“Actually there was this one dreadful man there. He was rude and loud and - well revolting, actually. He was behind me in the queue and he kept standing too close to me. I think he was trying to see down my blouse!”

Alan straightened and shot Joyce a grin “Can’t say I blame the fella.”

“Alan - I’m serious. Honestly, I nearly had a breakdown, right there in the supermarket. He was dirty too. His trousers were those elasticated joggers that some people wear - they were bright purple and had stains on them. And he had this dreadful beer belly that kept poking out of the bottom of his t-shirt, which, by the way, had Al Capone on it - you know, that one from that violent film about gangs...”

“You mean Al Pacino, love”

But Joyce didn’t hear. She shuddered and tried to push the revolting individual to the back of her mind. She had thought that those sorts of people would be a thing of the past now they had scraped it together to become happy Middle-Englanders in a pretty Midsummer-esque village.

But, she supposed with a magnanimous sigh, they had to shop somewhere, didn’t they? Popping to the pretty little high street to get his oven chips or his four pack of strong lager was probably the highlight of his week. And he had to go back to some horrible squalid little flat somewhere, while she, Joyce, got to enjoy the magnificence of Rose Cottage...

She left Alan to his pottering and went upstairs. The light streamed in through the back bedroom windows. She would keep the quirky hot air balloon print paper the last owners had left. It was pretty. This could be my sewing room, thought Joyce, swept away in her country idyll, quite forgetting that she didn’t even know how to sew on a button.

As she started out the window across the back garden of her neighbours, admiring their trellises and pergolas, something in the garden of the big house opposite her caught her eye.

In the middle of a perfectly manicured lawn, stretched out fast asleep on a sun lounger and clutching a can of strong lager was a flabby, beer-bellied man snoring belligerently in a pair of stained purple joggers.

‘Appalling,’ muttered George as he ran his red pen liberally across the paper. His cheeks wobbled on their bones.

‘Not good, dear?’ Louise called from the hallway, where she looked at herself in the mirror.

‘That’s the understatement of the century,’ George offered back distractedly. ‘Who became King of England in 1066? William Hague, apparently!’

Louise smiled to herself. She took a long breath and checked the ribbon around her waist. She pulled the collar of her robe out slightly and looked down. ‘Not bad for fifty,’ she thought.

‘Who was Bill Clinton’s vice president?’ George announced into the air. ‘Al bloody Capone! Well, I suppose there’s some satirical merit in that, if only it were intended.’

Louise chose to react in silence as she carried the tumbler and its yellow contents into the room and lay them on the table by her husband. It was from a fresh bottle of the whisky her father had given to George as a wedding gift, bought earlier that week. Next to the glass, she dropped a bowl of roast peanuts, George’s favourite combination.

‘There you go,’ she smiled.

‘Thank you,’ George mumbled, looking up only enough to see the gifts and not the giver.

Louise took a few steps back and perched herself on the edge of the table. She waited for her husband to see her.

‘Just… appalling,’ he repeated after moving to a new sheet of paper. ‘This one has described the Hindenburg as a damn hot air balloon! I swear these kids are going to drive me to a breakdown.

Louise giggled warmly before letting out a long low sigh. She leant forward to the point she knew her robe would hang enough to give George a direct view inside, she let her hand run across the top of her bare thigh as she did.

George grabbed a handful of nuts. He managed to get some into his mouth but wasn’t paying enough attention and several fell to the floor. He reached for the whisky, trying to feel for it rather than look up from his work. Louise gently nudged it into his reach, making sure to lightly brush his fingers where they met the glass. He swigged and swallowed, sending himself into a cough. Louise was sure she heard him wheeze the word ‘appalling’ again as his eyes continued to run over the words in front of him.

After waiting for him to settle, Louise lifted herself into a standing position.

‘Perhaps you should call it a night?’ Louise pulled at her ribbon as she spoke in breathy tones,. The knot fell away and her robe tumbled to the floor, leaving her naked in the lamplight of the room.

George tutted to himself and scratched another mark into the paper with the pen she’d bought him for their last anniversary. Louise waited a few moments before offering a faint cough.

‘What was that?’ George reacted half-alert.

‘Come to bed?’

‘Uh? Yes, yes. Don’t let me keep you up.’

The naked woman waited.

‘It’s absolutely appalling…’ he mumbled a final time, shaking his head.

‘Yes,’ Louise said to the space between them as she gathered her robe and left the room. Passing through the kitchen, she grabbed a bottle of red as she headed to the bedroom alone. ‘Appalling.’

William edged his head around the door to the bathroom a sneaked a peak at the house that backed on to his. His tongue quivered in anticipation – it was showtime. There she was, the lovely lady sitting at her desk facing directly into his bathroom. William took a moment to gaze upon his muse, sat in front of her laptop clicking away the mouse, as if that’s what she really was up to.

He returned to his dark bedroom and dropped to the floor behind the bed to perform a quick serious of exercises - pushups, crunches, and squats, anything to get the blood flowing and plump up his muscles a touch. Once this was done he left the bedroom, walked down the stairs to calm himself a little and then returned to the bedroom.

This time he switched on the light. Slowly, so carefully, like Al Capone filling out his tax return, he unbuttoned his shirt. He folded it and laid it on the bed. He removed his shoes and set them down neatly together. He removed his socks and rolled them up. He paused for a moment, his back to the naked window. He shuffled a pace or two to his left to line up the mirror on his bedside table, and there she was, framed inside the circle of glass, his willing audience staring straight into his bedroom window.

Off with the belt, loop by loop. He sucked in to shrink his paunch from hot air balloon to down to dad bod and popped the top button of his trousers. The feel of the zip sliding over the tight bulge inside his underpants made his legs feel weak. He teased her for a while, standing there bare assed and proud, and still she remained at the window, framed inside that circle of mirror.

For today’s show he used copious amounts of baby oil, slathering his one hundred and eighty-five pounds of grade A manflesh into a slippery sheen before kneeling bolt upright on his bed, his penis pointed proudly at the bedroom window for the money shot.

And always followed the shame.

William rolled from his bed and went into his bathroom without once looking out of his window across to the audience beyond, to his muse who was still staring, staring so hard.

And now, for the breakdown – here it is. What William didn’t know was that she was a blind woman, and what he had taken to be a tendency towards voyeurism was simply the rapt face of someone using a screen reader and a braille keyboard. And here was something else that William did not know – thanks to the full-length mirror that he had bought but decided it might be too overbearing in his live shows, and thanks to a similar full-length mirror two doors along from his blind muse, he was now the star of Mrs Grange’s young man virility dance shows, daily at three, tell your friends, and bring sherry.