Dolly

Chapter 3

Everyone's got this secret life that goes on inside their heads, but what happens when it gets out? You take my little Dolly. A right old Looking For Mr Goodbar - but who'd have thought, who'd have guessed?
I found it fantastically sexual - find it or found it? - even if it was really quite strange. But that perversity was part of the thrill. There I was, taking the kids to Queen's Park playground, helping LouLou to have a wee - "Do you want a wee or a poo? Are you sure?" - while at the same time my hand was slipping inside Dolly's black thong and gently rubbing her wet, expectant… yeah well, you know. And Elly and LouLou had no idea what I was doing to Dolly and Dolly had no idea what I was doing with Elly or LouLou.
Harmful or harmless? At this stage of the game, I really don't know. Pleasurable, certainly. I can't tell you how I was turned on by yesterday's game obviously it was a kind of tantric non-ejaculatory orgasm - but I kinda like them, I kinda like the blend of release and discipline. Did she get anything out of it? I don't know. I guess I'll get a feel for that later. But given the chance, I'll get better at this. I'll learn.
Its strange how you can get a feeling for someone just through this most unsatisfactory method of contact. Really, text messaging doesn't work for me because you can't rabbit, you can't allow your thoughts to flow, everything gets abbreviated. The structure of your words the abbreviated and then, to accommodate them, the structure of your thoughts get abbreviated. But it's an exploratory process. Maybe how it works is this. Maybe because your thoughts are so uncluttered it leaves more room for the imagination and maybe that's where the soul lies.
Dolly has now taken on almost completely new persona. She's almost completely detached from the person I originally wrote to.

Blew it. Like a kid with a new toy, I broke it just as I was getting to understand how it worked. It was such a long shot - such a long shot - and I didn't play the percentages. I don't know why I didn't - I usually do - but this time I didn't. It's so funny. If I'd have only given it a minutes thought, if I'd have only taken a step outside my bulging underpants and looked at the reality.
She's almost completely detached from the person I originally wrote to. But that's it. That's what happened. You - you dickhead - got confused between the reality and the fantasy. The reality was that she's a nice Jewish girl who's maybe feeling like she's in a rut and is playing with the idea of breaking out but would never actually do anything about it - and rightly so. Why on earth should she? With so much to lose and so little (actually nothing) to gain, why should she? And you, you've got exactly the same to lose and exactly the same to gain - precisely nothing.
Here's another question. Is the erotic fantasy heightened or diminished by the reality? Diminished is the obvious answer, but is it the true answer? I think so but there's a side of me that is drawn to what she represents. Why? I don't know. It's what I ran from all the time I was near it but... It's too bloody simple to start talking about fucking the past, but maybe it's a control thing. Wanting to get some sense of retrospective control. Listen, just because its tin pot fortune cookie psychology doesn't mean it's not true.



And now? Now I don't know. That was part male stupidity, part stupid dick-thinking, part sabotage. It's interesting that all that chat I had with Gill and Helen the other night about flirting and what men want... what they said is exactly true. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have been so blind? What do you think? That you're so bloody attractive, so bloody clever that rules fall in front of you like dominoes? Just a little bit arrogant, no? For someone with as many hang-ups as you, you don't half push it sometimes. And now you're paying the price.
But never mind. Don't be so hard on yourself.
That's the other interesting thing. That you think you're such an individual but you do just the same things as everyone else, fall into the same traps, do the same idiot things as everyone else. Maybe it's all a delusion, maybe it's just an illusion. What is it about this age that makes us open, so open to chance? The chance that we might throw it all away, the chance that everything we've worked for... gone. And for what? A momentary grasp for some strange confirmation that we're not old and not grey and not boring. That we can all still be young and vibrant even though we know we're probably not.