I Have a Complaint to Make by Guy Bellamy

Author:Guy Bellamy [Bellamy, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2021-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

“I don’t think you want me,” she had said as they lay naked on his bed. His lack of enthusiasm wasn’t something that she could miss.

The curtains were drawn against the bright July sun and there seemed to be something deliciously decadent about a mid-afternoon rendezvous, with Camilla sprawled across his bed, while the world outside rolled up its sleeves and worked. But how could he explain his failure to react?

“Have you found somebody else?”

“Obviously, no.”

“I don’t see what’s obvious about it.”

She leaned over towards him, pressing her breasts against his face.

“Don’t you fancy me any more?”

For a moment Fred thought that it was going to work—a hint of a movement, floodgates opening—but the moment passed.

“Rigid, it ain’t,” she said.

Mental illness, physical illness, impotence, thought Fred. I’m ripe for religion.

She ran her hand up and down his thigh, just missing the area of inactivity.

“What’s the matter, pudding?” she asked. “How can your body possibly reject my body?”

“Perhaps I’m past it. A lot of people have died, you know, by the time they reached my age. According to the gerontologists, the longest active life-span goes to intelligent, optimistic, happily married aristocrats. That gives me a life expectancy of about two minutes.”

“Ganda women excite their husbands by tickling their armpits,” she said.

“Not quite what I need.”

“What is the matter? You’ve been strange since you came home. Is something worrying you?” She pulled herself back and looked at him.

Is something worrying me? he thought. Surely not. I have very little money left and further supplies of it are going to be harder to find than a foreskin in a synagogue. I lack the qualifications for work that might interest me, and seem to have become psychologically incapable of work that doesn’t. I have committed the supreme folly of losing you in a game of poker, and the egregious Mr Oswald is about to make my life intolerable if I don’t persuade you to sleep with him. The past is painful, the present purgatory, and the future, which extends no further than tomorrow, is problematical, and nothing less than a frontal lobotomy is going to cope with my boundless pessimism. I lack faith and hope, and charity is beyond my resources. I can’t get a job, I can’t even get an erection, and, as a cosy, all-embracing bonus, one of the most distinguished psychiatrists in Britain is convinced that I shouldn’t even be allowed out.

He said: “I’m fine.”

“Parts of you aren’t.”

“Appetite comes with eating, as Rabelais said. Only he said it in French.”

“Do you want me to eat you?”

“I meant that the sexual appetite is very like the appetite for food. The more you have, the more you want. You work your way up to six women or twelve meals a day. On the other hand, if you eat very little your stomach shrinks to the size of a walnut and soon you want very little.”

“It’s not your stomach that has shrunk.”

“Metaphorically it is.”

But he knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t the sexless life that he had led for three months that had curbed his desire.

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