Sixty-one

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Her knee will not do half of it, her skin marks from almost nothing, and she has entirely run out of the ability to be embarrassed.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I was sixty-one the first time anybody spanked me, which I mention up front because when I was looking for anything to read about this, every single person writing it seemed to be about thirty-four.

The marriage ended when I was fifty-nine and there is not much of a story in it. Thirty-four years, no villain. Colin is a perfectly kind man who I stopped being able to hear, and he would say something similar about me and he would be right.

There is no point pretending I spent those years pining. I thought about it in the way you think about a country you are never going to visit. It came up two or three times a year, usually somewhere between eleven at night and one in the morning, and then Monday happened.

What changed was not the divorce. It was clearing out my mother's flat the following spring and finding, in a shoebox, every birthday card I had sent her in forty years, and realising that she had kept all of it and shown none of it and I had never once known what she actually wanted from a single day of her life.

I came home from that and did not sleep, and at about four in the morning I booked a train to a pub in Derby.

Going to a munch on your own at sixty is a specific kind of nerve.

I had a reason ready for the barman in case anybody asked me why I was there, which nobody did, because it was a function room with a laminated sign on the door and eleven people around two tables pushed together, and a man called Dennis had brought his dog.

Nobody looked at me in any way at all, which I had been dreading and which turned out to be the entire gift of the afternoon. Somebody moved a chair for me. A woman about my age asked whether I wanted tea and then asked what I did before I retired, and we talked about her old job and mine for twenty minutes.

I went four times before I said a word about myself.

Bill is sixty-four and used to fit kitchens and now does almost nothing with great enthusiasm. He has a bad shoulder, an allotment and a caravan I have refused twice to go in.

We did the whole thing properly, which at our age looks fairly comic from the outside. Two people in their sixties at a Wetherspoons table with a notebook, both wearing reading glasses, working out in writing what was going to happen. He wrote it in capitals because his handwriting has gone. I asked him twice to read a bit back to me because I had left my distance pair in the car.

Nobody tells you that the negotiation is the part you will find funny for the rest of your life.

Now the body, since nobody writes this bit down either.

My left knee has arthritis and will not kneel, which took two positions off the table immediately. Over anybody's lap is out. Kneeling on a dining chair, which I gather is what people with bad backs are told to use, is a lovely idea and lasted me about forty seconds before I had to be helped off it.

So it is the arm of the sofa with two cushions, and it turns out that is fine. Better than fine. I can stay there comfortably for as long as anybody wants, which is more than I can say for most chairs in this country.

My skin is a different proposition to the skin I had at forty. It marks from almost nothing and it takes its time going. A hand that would have left me pink for an hour at thirty leaves me with something I can still see on the Thursday. Bill worked this out faster than I did and adjusted without making a speech about it, which I noticed and did not mention.

I asked my GP about bruising, in a roundabout way, and she asked whether I was on anything that would explain it, and I said no, and she said some people just do at our age and offered me a blood test I did not need. That was the entire ordeal I had spent two weeks dreading.

The first time itself was on an ordinary Sunday afternoon with the football on in the next room, which he turned off, and I said he did not have to and he said he rather thought he did.

It was his hand and it was not very hard and it went on for about ten minutes.

I laughed at the start, which I had been warned about and had not believed would happen. Then somewhere in the middle I stopped, and something in my chest that has been holding on since roughly 1987 put itself down for a bit.

Afterwards I cried for four minutes and was extremely cross about it, and Bill said nothing at all and put the kettle on, which was exactly right.

Here is the advantage nobody mentions.

At twenty-five I would have died. Genuinely died, of self-consciousness, of being looked at, of the noise I might make, of what my body was doing while somebody else was in the room.

At sixty-one I have had a hysterectomy, a colonoscopy and both of my parents' funerals. I have been undressed in front of a whole ward round. I have washed my mother. The part of me that could be mortified by being seen has been quietly used up over about four decades, and what is left is a woman who would simply like to know what this is before she stops being able to do it.

That is not resignation. It is the best deal I have ever been offered.

The other thing that changes at this age is the arithmetic.

I have perhaps fifteen years of being able to do this, if I am fortunate and the knee holds and nothing else turns up. That looks bleak written down and it does not feel bleak in the slightest.

It feels like being handed a timetable. At thirty you behave as though there is an unlimited supply of Thursdays. At sixty-one you know precisely what you are spending, and it makes you very much less patient with anything that is not the thing you actually wanted.

If you are sixty-one and you have got this far down the page, which is a very specific thing to be doing on a weekday, then the only useful thing I have is this.

The wanting does not go. Mine did not go for forty years and it did not have the decency to fade when everything else did. And there is nobody left to disappoint, and your knees are not going to improve, and there was a woman with a shoebox full of birthday cards who never once said what she wanted out loud.

Book the train.