Alphabet by Kathy Page

weekends she had taken with her mum and dad, Mr and Mrs Brooks, and brother, Alan, all the friends she’d ever played with in the street and the park, what game they’d played, individual programmes and episodes she’d seen on TV, toys and pets she’s had, towns she’d visited, the location of the shops where she’d bought everything she’d ever bought and how much it’d cost. It’s all there. So I get her talking.
    Or sometimes I turn the TV on. We talk or she watches TV, and meanwhile, I watch her doing the things I’ve told her to do: take your top off, pull your skirt up a bit while you talk to me, put your hand in your pants. A big part of it is that she has to try and keep talking properly while she does it, though she can’t really manage it of course. I sit there and watch her, she’s right on the verge and breathing hard, beginning to sweat, looking back at me through her thick specs . . . and it gets me high as a kite, her too though sometimes it gets her laughing instead. She’s good at that too: watching her watching a movie, you’d know from the set of her face almost exactly what was on the screen – grim, heartwarming, boring, difficult, funny. If it’s even the smallest bit funny, she laughs out loud, no holding back, no being critical. She crumples up, shaking like a four-year-old. I like that too, but I don’t always want her doing it, I talk her back until she’s serious again, her faced flushed, her eyes deep.
    â€˜Aren’t you going to do anything?’ she asked me at the beginning, holding her tits, the way I’d told her to.
    â€˜This is the way I do it,’ I said.
    So I tell her: ‘Take your things off, everything.’ She’s waiting for this. Looking forward to it, you could say.
    She goes to the bathroom. I’m supposing it’s just for a pee and I sit there, pleased with myself and the world, in the fancy reclining chair I got hold of shortly after we met. It and the lava lamp and the stereo and the TV are fine things in the otherwise pretty sordid bedsit, brown carpet, torn two-seater sofa, limp curtains blowing in a gritty bit of city breeze, sagging shelves and units with their doors long gone, whoosh, whoosh of the traffic on the New Cross Road. I flick through a couple of channels. She’s gone a fair while.
It’s when she comes out that I realise things are going wrong. She’s already completely naked as I’ve never seen her before. I notice that the hair on her is fairish, like her head hair was when she was a child, in the photo on the dresser in her parents’ house. I notice how pink her skin is, I notice that the curves of her look better, more dignified somehow with absolutely nothing on. But I meant for her to undress in front of me, talking like usual. I had it planned.
I’d have her put something in herself while I watched.
Maybe she’d beg to have me in her instead, but I wouldn’t, not yet, though don’t get me wrong, I’m fully functional down there, I can prove it, but if the deal’s not financial, if it’s a ‘relationship’, then I think you need to be careful and know what you are getting into and who’s in charge and be sure that it won’t get out of hand. All the same, looking back, I’m the first to admit it could only have gone on so long like this. Perhaps I would’ve ditched her. Or her me, or maybe it would have been all right, somehow turned into a normal relationship. There’s a chance. I think about it sometimes, that chance, that needle’s eye that could have been gone through, if only she had kept on doing what she was told.
    She’s standing in front of me. I’m rattled, I can tell something is going wrong and going to get worse, actually, I’m shit scared.
    We’re getting to The End. She says my name: ‘Simon’, very softly, it makes the hairs stand up on my