Gone...

Henry and Clarissa’s wedding was a lavish affair, held at a Kent hop farm in amongst the heady smell of old English ale. I believe this was Henry’s idea, I think so that he wasn’t too far away from copious amounts of freely available alcohol.
It all went off without a hitch. The bride and groom looked resplendent, as they say, and all was milk and honey on that perfectly balmy English summer’s day. They drove off in Henry’s open-topped Porsche, waving delightedly to us all, and we knew they were embarking on a carefree, mortgage-free, stress-free life. God, it was annoying.
The thing was this. Clarissa married Henry because he was rich, owned a brewery, drove a Porsche 911 and water-skied, and her rationale was in that order. I know this because before they married she said to me, “I’m worried that I might be marrying him because he’s rich, owns a brewery and drives a Porsche.”
“Hmm,” I said, “have you anything in common?”
“Well,” she said, biting her lip, “we both like water skiing. Is that a good reason to get married?”
“Well,” I said, “at least you’ve got that in common.”
“Oh well then,” she said, brightening up, “that’s okay.”
Of course it wasn’t okay at all.
They went off on a super honeymoon - where exactly I can’t remember, but surely it must have been somewhere truly exotic where the warm waters of one ocean or another gently lapped pristine white sands and where the lazy lifting of a finger was enough to summon a scantily clad man - for her - and a scantily clad woman - for him - laden with ‘free’ drinks, plus delicacies plucked from the surrounding silky-watered ocean, and a menu for that evening’s grand meal. After that they would retire to their individual bungalow where the only sounds would be the wind softly moaning in the palm trees and Clarissa softly moaning as Henry had his rather large way with her.
See, Henry and his school friends each had nicknames. There was Toad, Blodger, Binko, Buffo and...Henry. He was known as Donkey Boy.
Now, Clarissa’s least favourite pastime happened to be sex. I think it had something to do with her favourite pastime, which was horse-riding, a sport she spent all her waking hours indulging in (well, when she wasn’t drinking or smoking).
Now, I have never understood the joy of horse riding. I’ve been on horses and to me riding a horse is like travelling on the hard steel roof of a car, with no suspension, across a rutted field in winter...except that in a car you have some control over where you end up. A horse does what it wants to do and that means at any moment during your ride without warning you may be thrown through the air and land on your arse, or your head, and usually the horse will then land on you too. This can happen for any number of reasons, none of which are good reasons: the horse does not like the look of that fence coming up, or the ditch, or there’s a small mouse crossing the road up ahead. To me horses are really stupid. If they weren’t why would they let someone an eighth of their size climb on their back, hit them with a whip and then tell them where to go, come rain or shine? Doesn’t make sense when you think about it. Also, they tend to step on your foot and sometimes they bite you and if you’ve seen the size of their hooves and their chompers you just know this is not an animal you want biting you or stamping on you.
Now, Clarissa, well she didn’t mind a big horse, in fact the bigger the better, but she just couldn’t take Donkey Boy. Oh not at all.
The upshot of this was that once married and ensconced in the new family home, a sprawling manor of a house at the end of a long and winding private road, Clarissa tried to avoid spending too much time alone with Donkey because if she did it would have meant having sex, however occasionally, and it would also have meant discussing their lives. Neither of these things could she face. Like a lot of English people Clarissa thought that if something wasn’t talked about then it just went away. Of course it never does, it just becomes a massive unspoken problem that grows and grows and becomes as big as the empty house next door; it’s silent but it’s definitely there, and you can’t avoid it.
In a roundabout way this is where I came in.
Now, I’d reached pretty much rock bottom. I didn’t have any money. Not a penny rattled in my pocket, and the rustle of a crisp fiver was fast becoming a distant memory. I owed the taxman, the VAT man, the milkman, you name it, I owed everybody in England something, and probably a few in Wales and Scotland too, not to mention the Isle of Man.
Clarissa said I should come and stay with them for a while so I could sort out what I was going to do. She said they had plenty of room. She said that Henry wouldn’t mind. This is also what she’d said to all of the other people who were staying there...
There was Julie, a wayward 14-year-old girl. With her long wavy auburn hair, dark, beguiling brown eyes and a figure to complement it all, she could, and often did, pass for 17. Julie also had a passion for our four-legged friends and simply appeared one day and asked if she could help out in the stables. Now, Clarissa’s only real manual work was engaging the Range Rover’s four wheel drive so she could climb the kerb outside Harrods, so getting Julie in seemed like a good idea. She could do all the mucking-out and other horsey stuff.
Kids grow up quicker these days, at least that’s what Julie said, and that must have been why she applied lipstick like a woman, smoked cigarettes and drank copious quantities of wine. Julie’s parents lived down in the village and they’d given up. They had three other daughters and to my mind it was only a matter of time before they too were moving in at Clarissa’s and behaving like women.
Along with Julie, many of her friends often came to visit and they were similarly vivacious, similarly flirtatious and far too young to be let out alone.
Then there were the adults.
There was Rude Jude. She was married, in her mid-forties, blonde, had a small but perfectly formed figure, and a big, loud mouth. She had this habit of coming up to you - this was people she didn’t know, mind you - grabbing your head with both hands (actually your ears, so you couldn’t get away) - and plonking her lips on your lips and giving you a great noisy sucking kiss that pulled all of the air right out of your body. The first time it happened I thought it was some surgical procedure. I figured maybe she’d seen something on my face that needed removing quickly and this was the only way she could do it. But no, this was her standard greeting. If she really liked you her tongue soon joined yours too and wrapped around it so tight it wrung the saliva out.
Rude Jude rode horses and, so rumour had it, many a man, hence the moniker. I’d see her through the window, skin-tight jodhpurs on, mounting Clarissa’s big brown horse and I’d draw a sharp breath which when I let it go, as her arse slapped the saddle, fogged the window pane.
Rude Jude wasted no time telling you her husband was having an affair and that she was going to kill him. It didn’t happen when I was there, but it probably has by now.
Rude Jude had a vivacious friend called Dawn who came to the house to dust and sweep. For some reason she preferred to do this in her underwear, which was nothing if not scanty. I heard that she also liked to whip her boyfriends and liked to be watched when she had sex – the bigger the crowd the better, apparently. I could believe all this because the way she handled a feather duster down on her hands and knees certainly made many a man’s heart beat dangerously fast. It was even rumoured that Henry had a copy of a very incriminating video shot in the back of a horsebox. That was probably the only one of his voluminous pornography collection that I never got to see. But that was all right, there were lots of others to keep every man, woman, and his dog busy (busy watching, I mean).
At first I found it somewhat disconcerting that whenever I walked into a room on Tuesdays there was Dawn with her tight silk-knickered arse pointing in my direction, bobbing up and down like an actress in one of Henry’s porno films. After a while, of course, it simply became normal.  “Morning, Dawn,” I’d say without even looking at her tightly encased buttocks swaying back and forth as she hoovered and I sat and read The Telegraph (out of choice I’d have had The Guardian but, you know, no money and all that - so I had to read Henry’s newspaper. He never read it himself of course because he thought all journalists were the lowest form of life, though he hastened to add that he didn’t mind me, and in any case, he said, I wasn’t earning any money from writing so I didn’t really count. Hmm.)
Then there was Kristy, an old school friend of Clarissa’s. A natural blonde with flawless golden skin, cornflower blue eyes and breasts which announced her arrival with the aural equivalent of a lustily yanked train hooter. When I first met her she was working at a real estate agents. Apparently she’d worked her way through every man there, and several of the customers too. It was said that interest rates climbed steeply when Kristy was showing someone round a house for sale. And when she walked around Clarissa’s in her skin-tight riding jodhpurs, well even the birds stopped twittering.
Of course, Mr Henry soon saw her potential and offered her the job as Marketing Manager at the Brewery. As you do.
One day we were all at some boring horse trials thing – Jackie and several of her school friends, Rude Jude, Dawn (fully clothed, just this once) and Jack and Nina, (whom I’ll mention in a moment) – and by lunchtime Clarissa had only been thrown off her steed twice, so it was judged to be a good day indeed.
Henry and I were leaning on a wooden fence railing watching Kristy warming up her own mount and Henry said, looking at her with squinted eyes, “You know what? She reminds me very much of Kinky Stuff. You know the one with –”.
“Yes I do, What is it?” I said. “Is it her eyes?”
Henry looked at me. “You know I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kinky’s face at all. Huh. Maybe once in that film they shot in Tenerife, the one with the guy and the two enchiladas.”
“Wasn’t that Mexican Inferno?”
“No, no, no. Not at all. Definitely Topless Tenerife Tearaways, the one where they all tore their clothes off and had bumpy sex as they rode motorbikes across the sand dunes.”
“Ah yes, you’re right,” I said, bowing, as always, to his superior porn knowledge.
“Anyway,” said Henry, squinting, “it’s not her eyes, it’s something else. Something to do with the way she holds herself, methinks.”
“Yes,” I said as we both turned back to watch Kristy’s backside move up and down at an ever increasing pace as her horse started to gallop across the field, “you could be right”.
The thing was, Kristy wanted nothing more than to be Mrs Henry. Not that she wanted to take Donkey on in all his braying glory (everyone knew about Donkey thanks to Clarissa’s inability to keep anything to herself; short of a photograph of the offending part I reckoned I and everyone else had a pretty clear idea of size, appearance and even ability, plus knowledge of several unique and “difficult moments”. These were events when Clarissa had refused to accept the beast into her inner lair and an argument had ensued, usually resulting in Donkey Boy storming off, presumably nevertheless being careful not to step on or trip over his pride and joy as he left the room.... Anyway, Kristy wanted the money, the brewery, the cars, the horses, the house and Mr Henry’s name - probably in that order.
And finally, Jack and Nina. Jack worked for Mr Henry but because he drank as much as his boss they’d become firm friends. Presumably they helped each other stand up when the booze made them want to fall over and kiss the floor.
Jack was the opposite of Mr Henry - if you follow. He was nicknamed Pencil, by his wife. Nina was gloriously, most definitely sexy, in a smouldering Sophia Loren type of way. And she had Sophia’s body too. No, not the one the actress has now, the curvy one you could hold onto, the one she had when she was 22. The thing was, Nina just didn’t know it. Nina had only ever been out with Pencil so she thought that a slim sexual organ was normal and this not unnaturally frustrated her immensely.
This often came up at the dinner table, as it were, where all of these people were frequent guests and where copious amounts of beer and wine loosened tongues and inhibitions. Whenever Nina talked about Pencil’s lack of sexual prowess, sighing her disappointment that he could never satisfy her, and really were all men this pitifully arrayed and yes she would have another glass of wine and, “oh please do fill it right to the brim because it’s the only thing I’ll have tonight that is full to the brim, that you can be sure of,” and the room would become quiet save for the clinking of wine glasses, the gulping of their contents and the exhalation of clouds of cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, under the table, I fancied I could hear Donkey Boy stirring.

to be continued...