The Widow's Tale by Mick Jackson

Perhaps simply to prevent one’s bed becoming fixed in one’s mind as the place where one fails to sleep.
    But there’s not a lot for me to do round here. The TV’s out of action. So it would just be more sitting around reading or staring into the fire. Writing these notes always feels like more of a daytime occupation. And, despite all the evidence to the contrary, as I lie in the dark I maintain a sort of deluded optimism that having just missed sleep’s bus ten minutes earlier, another one will be along in no time at all.
    I wouldn’t particularly mind if lying there didn’t inevitably seem to lead to me picking over all my anxieties, which then has a habit of slipping into an all-out panic attack. In my darkest hours I begin to think that nothing is connected. That every single thing on this planet is cold and blank and utterly disparate.
    Last night, as I tossed and turned in my tiny bedroom, I remembered that odd little bedsit I had for my first couple of terms at college. It was on the first floor of a rather decrepit town house, with another two floors above it. And one night, when it was still warm enough to have my window open and the lights were out, I heard this odd noise come drifting in from one of the other flats.
    It took me quite a while to work out what that sound was. Oh, innocent, innocent child! At first I thought it might be some animal, trapped or injured somewhere out in the garden. Or someone hurting somebody else. But it slowly dawned on me what was going on in one of the rooms above me. And, I won’t lie, I thought it was just about the most thrilling thing I’d ever heard. I could hear the girl puffing and panting. Her little squeals of delight. And as the two of them carried on at it I could hear them talking – just the odd few words, about how much they loved each other. But, I mean, Hell’s teeth. When was the last time I exchanged any sort of pleasantry whilst having sex?
    Anyway, I was utterly spellbound. In fact, I was so entranced by the whole thing that I made the mistake of trying to open the window another couple of inches to get an even better earful. But the window must have squeaked as I tried to lift it. And all of a sudden the sound of the couple fucking ground to a halt.
    I could hear them listening. There were one or two dark mutterings. Then I heard a window being firmly closed somewhere else in the building. And that was the end of that.
    Sometimes, marooned in the middle of the night, I remember some of the men I slept with before John and I got married. Not that there were that many. Just a handful of encounters which took place a long, long time ago now. It’s my own little archive of first-person erotica. And sometimes that’s enough to get me off to sleep.

I really can’t imagine anything worse than
    I really can’t imagine anything worse than having a bunch of complete bloody strangers wandering round my home. And yet every year, in dozens of towns up and down the country, people throw open their doors and willingly surrender themselves to precisely such an intrusion when they have those dreadful Open Houses, and every Tom, Dick and Harry can come shambling in and admire the artistic endeavours of the home-owner who’s half a term into an evening class in Watercolour at the local Tech. What really gets my goat is the way the weekend bohemians who host these things swan around the place as if they’re bloody Velázquez, when the actual stuff that’s up on the walls is about as sophisticated as a potato print. And it’s perfectly clear that the only reason anyone’s calling in is not to admire their gnarled lumps of pottery or home-made hats, but to have a gander at the size of the garden, or see what things look like with the sitting-room wall knocked through.
    Perhaps I’m just plain antisocial. Certainly, I like to have some say over who comes and goes. All I know is that for those first few days after John’s death it