ONE LAST TIME

What makes us happy? That's a hard one!!!

When Pamela Lustful closed her eyes for that one last time she saw the whole lot. All at the same time, like a three-dimensional movie in which the start and the finish overlap in some jigsaw puzzle of time, and all the middle bits come and go in a confusion of memory.

She was being born.

“Come on down, little Pammie,” cooed the midwife, and Pamela felt like spitting into her face with that twisted smile and those huge yellow teeth. That was it. The very first things her eyes had seen were gigantic yellow teeth.

Somehow she knew that her name was Pamela, so why did this gross creature call her Pammie? And why should she slurp down the chute from her mother’s womb and breathe the cigarette-stale air of her parents’ bedroom, with her dad hovering near the fire with a cigarette between two yellow fingers and her mum screeching fit to waken the dead?

But slide down she did, and glared at the midwife who mindlessly chortled and said we’ve got a right one here, misses, a right little tearaway and her mother pulled up her blood-stained nightie and revealed those awful breasts.

“Take a look at these, my little sweet love...” cooed her mother, and the milk had been okay despite the things it came out of.

She had been her mother’s little sweet love...

And at exactly the same moment in time she pulled up her own (perfectly clean without a trace of anything resembling her own body fluids impregnated in it) nightie and let Pamela Junior get her first glimpse of the world’s most perfect breasts. Hers, with their silicon implants and practically perfect contour and texture. Her (expensive) pride and joy.

She knew it was the world’s most perfect bosom because he, the randy old father with his six-pack and jet-black quiff decorating his Mediterranean face, was always telling her.

And at precisely the same instant she watched herself swooning into his arms as he took her with those mighty muscles and dumped her unceremoniously onto the sofa in a living room somewhere in her life.

“Now for the moment of your life,” he’d grated at her, and somehow had miserably failed to put his good intentions into practice.

She was just starting to call him a numbskull and really he shouldn’t boast about that silly thing he kept in his underpants because, I mean, just look at it, when she became aware that at that precise moment she was sitting in her Amsterdam window with the cosy rosy glow of a subdued light just behind and all around her and that gorgeous and very mischievous basque she’d bought for a fortune highlighting all of her best features including that bosom, with its details picked out in red and black lace.

And she was just about to grin about those being the days when the door at the side but out of sight of her display window opened and he came in. He was all smarmy smiles and a big fat wallet, so she smiled (less smarmily) back at him and was just bidding him welcome whilst fondling a pile of paper bills when the dull light of a barbecue on the back garden flickered with sausage and beefburger smells, and yet another poser, in shorts this time, too-short shorts, as he grinned like an oaf and poured a pint of lager into his mouth whilst gyrating so that she could tell he might have something worth waiting for in his pants, especially for her. But what really mattered had more to do with his bank account than his pants….

And he was gone the instant he arrived because Jerry was there.

Ah, Jerry!

A pity he’d been so much older. A pity he’d been truthful when he’d told her he was a policeman working with the vice squad, a pity she’d fallen for him lock, stock and bloody stupid barrel. But she had, despite the age difference, and he recently widowed.

It’s not that I don’t find you damned attractive, but Laura’s only been buried a fortnight and I still… She knew he wanted to say love her, but he wasn’t a sissy boy with emotions. None of that! No, he was a hard, tough copper with a reputation for fairness and a love of the rules. And none-too fond of her kind of woman. He’d told her as much more than once.

And then, at the instant he had arrived, he was gone.

In the maelstrom of the moment there were other men. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, thin ones, and all with wallets. All wafting paper money in front of her with their absurd bodies all naked and pudgy or tanned and lithe, it didn’t really matter which, it was the money that mattered.

And she saw herself. Older now, a middle-aged daughter in the wings waiting to take her place in society, a husband she hated because she’d picked him up out of desperation and he thought he was god’s gift and she, with all that experience behind her, knowing full well that he was no gift at all.

And all that life she’d lived, every last moment of it, was swirling in a confusion of chaos all around her. Wallets, notes, credit cards….

Somewhere, in that mess, she’d taken a wrong turn and couldn’t for the life of her fathom where it was. But she suddenly saw how none of the fragmented images of her life had made her happy, and that was something she wanted more than anything else, more, maybe, than the money. Happiness.

Because deep down she knew she wasn’t happy. Not happy in the way she knew happiness could be because she’d seen her mother with her chain-smoking father, and they’d been happy until he’d smoked himself to death.

Even that damned midwife had been happy, Pammie, Pammie come on down…

But she herself hadn’t ever been properly happy. And she didn’t know why. Anyway, what was happiness? Was it more than a fixed smile on a maternal face? Was it in the heart? She didn’t know and now it was too late to find out.

She’d just closed her eyes for that one last time….

© Peter Rogerson 18.06.17