Bumping Uglies

Chapter Eight

You know, just like everyone else who ever dropped gooey and screaming into this world, I've done my share of things that I'm not proud of. I've added the odd thing here and there that I'm actively ashamed of.

My mother would sometimes wish me farewell as I departed for a night of attempted teenage debauchery with a suggestion to make sure that anything I got up to wouldn't be thought of disapprovingly by my grandmother.

As chastity and probity suggestions go, it might have seemed like good advice at the time.

However, my nan's world view was narrower than a gnat's dick and there was little of teen Satchmo's sweaty dancefloor gyrations in the glittering fleshpots of Wolverhampton that she would have approved of.

Mostly, she would have been concerned that I was not wearing a waistcoat.

In a similar vein, I didn't like to think what old Flossie Turner would have made of her now old-enough-to-know-better grandson flipping through the catalogue of women in The Tunnel of Love.

None of them were wearing waistcoats either.

I could not shake the nagging certainty that everything about where I was, and what I was doing, was wrong. A weight had descended upon my shoulders like a double-fat Jiminy Cricket who seemed to shout that this was not Satchmo Turner, that I was better than this.

But for all of that, I sat and I flipped. Page-after-page of photos of women stared back at me. Not some anonymous character performing for a camera in a studio thousands of miles away, the women in these photos were here, now, available.

For a fee.

I cursed my weakness. I cursed Priya for suggesting this. I cursed my gullibility for allowing myself to be persuaded and I cursed the fact that the only parts of me that seemed to have left The Tunnel of Love were my backbone and the morals I thought I had.

"See anything you like?" Madam Poon asked, her beady little eyes piercing me from nose to wallet.

I didn't answer but continued turning the pages.

To say that The Tunnel of Love had catered for all tastes would be an exaggeration. The racial balance of the women in the photos didn't closely match the demographics of the Black Country. There was a single Asian woman with a black bobbed haircut and areola like chocolate digestives, and a lone black woman who was tall and toned but with a somehow improbably curvaceous behind. The remainder of the photo profiles depicted Caucasian women of varying heights and attributes, though many of them were blonde, slightly tanned or swarthy and erred ever-so-slightly on the side of too thin, for my taste at least.

I supressed more feelings of self-revulsion at the way I was comparing the women on the basest physical level, even as I was squinting at the pictures of the Asian woman and wondering if I might convince myself that she resembled Priya in some way other than her ethnicity.

That last thought dropped into my mind without conscious bidding and with all the welcome of a cat turd in a kid's lunchbox. As I recognised that, yes, that was what I was thinking; it sent a little jolt of electricity through me.

There was that shame.

I placed the ring binder back on the table spine first and took a long, deep pull from the beer that had been placed there. I felt beads of sweat break out on my brow.

The folder fell open and I could not tear my gaze away.

Facing me, tall and lean, naked as the day she was born, was a photo of the woman who had approached me in the car park and first given me the card for The Tunnel of Love.