I am offering this titbit up for sacrifice. I have some idea where it would go, but a comment or two would help me decide whether to push it further. Now on Kindle

CHAPTER 1
I don’t drive. I have a licence, but I have never felt the need to own a car. This has brought all sorts of odd questions into my life, from friends, relatives, employers, passing drivers keen to share their wisdom and advice as to the desirability of my using the cycle path.

It seems I am a freak of some kind because the only engine I employ is my heart. Of course, I am a freak, but that’s simply a matter of viewpoint. I like to think of a point of view as deriving from a metaphorical viewpoint, the sort of thing marked on maps.

Where you are standing defines what you can see.

My life has changed often, and each change has led to that new viewpoint, that altered field of vision. Three years ago it was the physical fact of being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, at a particular time, which brought new sights. The sight in question was my wife’s heels locked behind the arse of a police liaison officer she knew through her work. He was obviously very effective with his liaising, he was liaising in and out like a good’un.

“I’ll be in the living room when you finish” brought a certain number of gasps and swear words, but as that was what they had been doing when I arrived I couldn’t really be sure if it was aimed at me.

Jane was alone when she joined me. I hadn’t heard the front door, so I assumed he was still in the bedroom. Our bedroom. My bedroom. This was not the way things were supposed to go. In the ordinary script, he grabbed his clothes, dressed hurriedly, and rushed off red-faced. He didn’t lie there, still naked, smelling of her and...I sniffed.

Having a cigarette. In my house.

“So, Jane, how long?”

“As long as I have known about your lady friend. I tried, you know, but you were so careless I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t see things, or smell her on you. It’s me that does the laundry, you know…”

Oh shit.

“Every time I visited my mother, there would be traces left when I got back. I tried, you know, I really tried, but the more you continued the more I realised how little you cared for me. Mark was there, and I just decided to have some sauce of my own.

“Who is she, John? One of your students?”

Oh double shit. The viewpoint now was of a deep, deep hole, and Jane waiting with a shovel at the top. I went into literary analysis mode, finding refuge in my academic life. There were schemata being played out here, but the one I thought I had walked into was rapidly being replaced by another. Which is a complicated way of saying that the person in deep shit was not who I had assumed it to be when I walked in on their little pair-bonding session.
Schemata are the literary equivalent of a kata in karate, little set-pieces that everyone knows that feature in every piece of literature, even the weirdest. I had walked in on “cheating wife”, and she had turned it into “cheating husband” and “wife’s revenge”

Unfortunately for me, her analysis was rather wide of the mark. I was now faced with a truly lovely choice, which of two hells to open up for my private use. Do I invent some smooth-thighed nymph who hoped to shag some good marks out of me for her BA, take the divorce and the nastiness, and keep my life otherwise intact, or do I tell her the truth and watch my whole world end? I needed time.

You have to try hard to visualise this. I am sitting on my own sofa in lycra, drinking tea. My wife is standing at the door in another man’s shirt and holding a tissue she had clearly used to wipe her privates clean of his semen as he lay naked on my bed smoking. I didn’t need my eyes for that, I could smell most of it. And there i am, trying to come to some sort of decision. Do I invent some girl, promise it is all over, and try to rebuild my marriage, or tell the truth and definitely see everything go. Job, wife, reputation… I couldn’t do it. Not just like that. I had been planning on bringing it up at some point, as it was hardly something I could continue to hide indefinitely, but not without preparation and a choice of ground.

If I told her now, I would have two people to laugh at me. My courage failed me, as it always does, and I simply rose, put my gloves back on and rode off to my mother’s. What a big man I was.

She was not surprised in the least.

“I told you not to marry her, but would you listen? Too strong-willed, says I, but no, you knew better, and now there she is in the house with him and probably changing the locks as we speak. You need to get a solicitor ASAP, and make sure you get what you put n that house.

“So what was it in the end, John? Did she find your clothes? Don’t look at me like that, I’m your mother, of course I knew.”

My mother had the shovel now. This really was the end of everything.

“Oh for God’s sake, John, nobody’s dead. Not yet, anyway. Put the kettle on and stop crying”

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I slept in my old room that night, smells as familiar as my skin, and of course “slept” is not a good description. I really, really did not know which lie to choose. The rest of the conversation with my mother had revealed that no, she did not know, despite her maternal standpoint. She knew something, and because of where and who she was she assumed the answer. I suppose that as it had taken me 31 years to come to some sort of understanding in my own right, I shouldn’t expect others to do any better.

The clothes in question lived in the attic, of course, in an old suitcase tucked out of sight behind the cold water header tank. We are back in schema territory here, the private vice only indulged in when the wife s away, the guilt, the alternating binge buying and clearing out, the sneaky indulgence and hasty climaxes.

Wrong again.

Good literature has to surprise. There s a market for the predictable, even n the weird stuff I mentioned earlier. Boy meets zzssxx from Planet Z, boy falls for zzssxx, boy loses zzssxx, and gets him/her/it/them back. Reader is happy, all preconceptions and patterns happily reinforced, which is another little literary analysis term. Well, here’s another one, pattern reformation, where a bum note drops in as in Beethoven’s 8th, and then turns out to have been the right one all along.

Yes, I am a culture nerd, I see everything in terms of literary or other forms of artistic pattern, and that is me. A pattern about to be reformed. And I witter on and on. Rather useful as a lecturer, I suppose, but stupefyingly useless as a husband or any other type of social human being. My psychiatrist (yes, it goes with the territory) suggested I was borderline Asperger’s in my behaviour, but then she would, she has her own schemata to work to and things must fit neatly or her world will end.

Well, mine was making a pretty fair attempt at doing so. I mean, how do you tell your wife that you are your very own “other woman”?

Yes, I know you have all worked that one out, probably from line one, just like my mother. The sneaky indulgence and hasty climaxes thing.

No, not me. No arousal, no sweatiness. Just peace. And an acceptance that at some point I would have to foreground it. More literary terms, no wonder she got bored.

I would have to come out into the light and actually talk to somebody about what my problem was in all its simple complexity, and I supposed I would have to do it in English.

I’m a whizz at analysing it. I just can’t speak it that well when there are others involved.

Bugger.