Doc Bob says the reason I still think about a dead woman is I've got unresolved issues concerning her. Apparently I'm a textbook case.

For instance, I'm still aware that I never took charge of Denny in the primal sense. The nearest I got was the night after she slept with one of the painters. Come to think of it, maybe he was a joiner. He attended to her plumbing anyway. I was mad with jealousy; but on the plus side, in a way it was energising to experience insanely homicidal feelings.

The next night, we all went to the pub after work as usual. At that time I had only slept with her once myself, but I must have reckoned that gave me rights over her. I took her aside roughly, and told her I'd heard about the painter, and she'd better not do it again. She picked up her bag and stormed out of the pub without saying anything to anyone.

Recently, Doc Bob asked me if I ever did the traditional things like buying her jewellery or clothes. Well, the nearest I got was sending away to the Sun for some sexy black underwear with quick-release Velcro. She wore it once, I tore it open, and then we split up.

They say regrets are futile. They can say what they like, I'm sorry I never stared at her and drank in her beauty. Except furtively. I never told her which bits I loved (all of them). In those days you never said anything like that because it was considered sleazy, creepy, poncey. Also, feminism had taught us we'd better enjoy a woman's mind, or else! To be frank, nobody would have wanted Denny for her mind.

For the same reasons, I was too inhibited ever to speak to her during sex. I never vocalized at all. In those days you didn't.

I've been getting on so well with my partner, we're actually sharing the same kettle, for the first time ever. We used to have two kettles to avoid arguments over who had stolen the other person's tea water.

In our house, it's always been everyone for themselves, but nowadays I often cook dinner and make cups of tea for both of us. Though I still have to make different food and different kinds of tea for her.

Sometimes I envy couples who share everything, but I suppose that can get claustrophobic. It all balances up.

There's an old holiday snap of Denny emerging from a kitchen, in a diaphanous wrap, holding two cups of tea. Thus combining two things she was good at: sharing, and looking wonderful to my eyes.






The relationship, if I can call it that, between Denny and me was built around shared addictions. Tea. Fags. Dope.

But the prime addiction was to beer. The deal was that if I accompanied her for the whole evening in the pub under her flat, I would get into her pants at closing time. The trick was to avoid getting too drunk to take advantage.

She could drink me under the table, and it was the same with the other addictions. I remember she once said "I shouldn't keep abusing my body". That would have been my cue to say "because that's my job", but I was far too inhibited in those days. It was a job I could have done for life. If we had been different people, not so effed up.

There were also unshared addictions. I didn't share her love of cats, for example.

And she didn't reciprocate my biological addiction to her, at least not in the first year or two. To compensate her, it was only fair that the bedroom would be filled with most of the other addictions, especially dope, cigarettes and her cats.

On the nights when I stayed over at her place I would wake before dawn, hung over, with a cat on my face. I'm resisting all possible pussy double-entendres here, just as I had to resist the urge to batter the cat.

Thanks to Denny, I was to learn an enduring fondness for some of her healthier obsessions: The Eagles and Bowie. And even, eventually, cats, but that's another (horror) story.

Please note - the sexist attitudes in this post are provided purely for historical authenticity.

Sometimes you find yourself involved with someone you shouldn't. But people have their reasons for persevering, which in my case included enjoying other men's admiration of this lass (e.g. "you realise she looks just like Wonder Woman?"), and the usual fear of being single.




This blog is supposed to be in praise of people, so I'll try to confine myself to her good points.

• Well, she could be endearingly brash. Ten years younger than me, she said she had already had over 40 men (beating by a factor of 10 my score with women). But there was one new experience she wanted to try. "Up the bum!" she would cry. Hard to believe, I never obliged. You had to be there to understand.


• When she accompanied me to a graduation party, one of the lecturers took me aside to comment on her beauty. I said "you want her? You can have her". I was only half serious, but he must have remembered me, because a week later he rang me to offer me a three-year research grant to study jazz tape labelling, and my career path was set. To his credit, he never asked for payment in kind.


• She and her friends showed me how to blow research funds in night clubs and cocktail bars

Anyway, one day I sat her down to have a serious chat so I could finish with her.

After I allowed myself to be talked out of it, we carried on for about another year. Wasted time for both of us, I expect she sees it that way too.

After university I got a job in a Dunedin government department. Hopelessly overqualfied, I was adrift amongst real people - working class mums (salt of the earth in my experience) and loutish young folk.

One day I was busy pushing bits of paper around my desk as usual when Denny, the most gorgeous person there, walked up and asked if I wanted to contribute to the booze fund for the Xmas party. When I explained that it wasn't my scene (I would be spending Christmas at home drinking home brew with Mary Hopkin), she said "well suit yourself then" and flounced off.

After that, I would occasionally notice her deep in concentration, bending over someone's desk. I had to look away.




When I asked around, I found out she had a boyfriend, a rugby player who mistreated her. If she was mine, I'd treat her properly. A few years later I would find out just how hard it was to get her to accept being treated well. And after she was dead I found out why.

The picture of Denny was taken a few years before I first met her. Just look at that wonderful defiant stare. Magnificent! I think the thumb-prints around her bazookas were already there when I inherited the photo. I wonder whose they are?

I was aged 16 when I had my first second proper kiss. I know how old I must have been, because the music on the record player at the time was the Stones' We Love You.

It was only a few months after our family had moved from the burbs to the fringes of a scheme in Dumbarton, so I would still have been in schock. These days you could probably get counselling for it, but back then there was only booze, fags, and other forms of stress reduction.

If you wanted to go out at the weekend, you had to walk past the public bog to get to the bus stop, and brave the cat calls from the ruffians who hung out there.

One weekend, the man next door sent his daughter Mary Hopkin round to ask if I wanted to go to a party up the hill. She didn't really know I existed, so I reckoned her old man must have put her up to it, out of neighbourliness. But I already knew she existed alright - I had often watched her from the bathroom window, taking care to duck down whenever she looked up. What a shape she had! Little did I know then that one day ... but I digress.

The people at the party were mostly her schoolmates, good working class people who were into the same things as me - smoking, under-age drinking, and records. The life and soul of the party was a moderately threatening guy who called himself Swingin' Billy. One of these guys who operates by being very chummy but then occasionally flying into a rage. That's all I remember, except that at one point there was a game, and I had to go and sit on the stairs with someone called Gail. I was a speccy nerd in a sports jacket, and I had never been alone with a filled-out female before. She had mousey hair and we talked about nothing while I fretted about whether I could kiss her. When the kiss eventually happened, I can't remember whether it was her doing or mine (probably not mine). Eventually the embarrassment must have forced us to rejoin the party, and I never saw her again but I heard about her occasionally. She settled down with a reliable chap. That could have been me. I wonder if she realises what a narrow escape she had, and that I've been a sucker for mousey hair since then.





At about 10 in the evening, Mary Hopkin's dad came to the door of the house and said his daughter had to come home, and I walked back with them. It would be years before I would bring myself to speak to Mary again.

At age 3 or 4, I befriended a wee girl at sunday school called, say, Pippy, and we became sweethearts. Before Pippy I had only known Alice next door, who was just a mate, good for sharing ice creams with. Pippy was something else - I was nuts about her. (I discovered, many years later, that she had felt the same way)

We used to go on trips to the seaside together. Presumably with somebody's parents, though there are no adults in any of the photos.




I was 4 or 5 when my old dear went away for a month or two. In those days fathers couldn't look after kids, so I was sent to live with Pippy. Bliss! She lived in the great big house on the hill. They had a maid, who used to bath us before bed, and we were completely at ease being naked. I learned that girls don't have willies.

At night I slept in the spare bed in Pippy's bedroom. One night the babysitter gave us each a liquorice allsort to eat before bedtime, and I fell asleep sucking mine. When Pippy's mother came home late and kissed us goodnight, I woke with a fright. My face was stuck to the pillow by the half-eaten liquorice sweet, and there was a black sticky mess everywhere.

Pippy had her own playroom, a large glass room built on the end of the house. I suppose it must have doubled as a sort of conservatory, because it was filled with houseplants.

She and I played there happily every day, until one day the girl from next door came to play. Her name was something like Monica, and she wanted to join in with our doctors and nurses game. Well I wasn't too keen on that. For one thing why would I want to share Pippy, and besides I was much too young for threesomes.

Monica was too coy to take her own clothes off but she was happy to watch us. After Pippy had shown off her bottom it was my turn. I remember bending over while they both had a good look. What I couldn't see was that Monica had picked up one of the cactuses from the window ledge. I felt a sudden pain as she jabbed the cactus into my backside. To this day I have never liked women named Monica, but I don't mind cactuses.

The day eventually came for me to go back to live the bread and water life with my own parents. I could just about recognise my old man when he arrived after work to take me home. He chatted with Pippy's parents over a drink or two, and then he drove me home. I can still remember him explaining to me in the car that when we got home he was going to have to give me a beating because of the unmentionable thing I had done with Pippy.

Me: What thing?

Him: You know!

When we got home, on my way up to my bedroom for the beating I recognised my mother so I said hello.

I was made to take my trousers off (the very thing I was being punished for!) and lie on my bed, while my old man whacked my arse, 6 times I think. Surely the cactus was punishment enough. When it was over, I said the most hateful thing I could think of to him:

Me: You're silly!

Him: So I'm silly, am I?

And he resumed whacking me, until I apologised and said he wasn't silly.

When I went downstairs later to meet my mother, I burst into tears again.

Me: he hit me!

Her: Well, you shouldn't have done what you did.

Nobody ever referred again to the terrible thing I had done, but from then on Pippy and I were finished. The parents must have decided it was too dangerous to let us be friends. How Shakespearian!

Of course now I was hooked on naked girls, and a few months later I was caught with my trousers down, in the garage with Alice next door.

When the old man came home that night I feared another beating, but he just said:

Don't do it again!

Why no punishment for the second offence? It was only when I was an adult that I understood that Pippy's parents were the folks who lived on the hill, while Alice was just the girl next door, no better than us.

It was another 25 years before I saw Pippy again, but that's another story.