TAG by Stephen May

Author:Stephen May [May, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-909077-07-2
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
Published: 2012-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

I've had a lot less sex since becoming sober. The drunk's smile can be a beguiling thing; particularly for other drunks. Two drunks together aren't so much fucking as mixing a cocktail. One drunk nearly always has the ingredients that other drunks need. And let's not forget that even people who aren't drunks by vocation or training tend to get wasted before embarking on any kind of love affair. Other cultures may have careful and protracted negotiations before any kind of union can be contemplated, but the British have getting arse-holed and tumbling sloppily onto a stranger's mattress.

Of course even drunks can't stay drunk for twenty-four hours so there are a lot of terrible surprises for the drunken lover. There are girls who wake in the night and start beating you up. Girls who weep disconsolate for hours. Girls who are sick in the head or in the bed. Girls who aren't girls, but women far older than you thought. There are the scarred and the scared. But the worst is the girl who thinks she can change you. Pour yourself into the warm and hopeful bed of the woman who thinks she can help and you are turning the self-loathing meter from merely high to unbearable. And these nice girls are so high maintenance. You have to stay trashed just to give them a purpose. They don't really want you to change. It's about the journey for these girls.

And since I've been sober? Well, there was Beth the primary school teacher. Kath the travel agent. And Angela the librarian. That's it. All of the liaisons starting with shy glances, building up to frenzied sex on a carpet somewhere, settling down to coupling four or five nights a week after a film or a play, before finally fading away amid a low level guerrilla war of bickering about chores, of which sex was soon just another. Beth, Carol-Anne and Angela. They came within the first two or three years of sobriety and since then I have found it easier not to bother.

Every so often I scan the soul mates sections of the Guardian, but it's invariably depressing. A directory of opinionated professional women every one of whom is into 'the usual Guardian interests'. By which I think they mean a large glass of half-decent Shiraz at around six o' clock. Perhaps I should have pursued the racier alternatives in the Singles Out section of the local rag: Buxom, broad-minded single mum, 26, size 16 seeks older man to spoil her.

Seems both more honest and more enticing.

The year leading up to Cefn Coch had been entirely and happily fallow. I liked to think that the quiet phone and unexciting credit card bills were signs of long delayed maturity.

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