The mysterious tree mystery

I woke up before sunrise today, and full of the joys of life. It was an extraordinary feeling, something I haven’t experienced in years.

I opened the curtains and lay in bed watching the sun kiss the sky with violets, pinks and reds. I made a deliberate attempt to notice things, like Amber did: the different types of birds that whizzed hither and thither past the window, the colour and style of the plants on view, the gentle sway of the trees in the breeze.

Yes, from now on, I'll take care to notice the wonders of the world around me.

I messed about on my laptop for an hour or so answering long neglected emails. There was one from an old school friend of mine who’d moved out to Australia a couple of years previously. Clearly he hasn’t remembered that Mimi and I are nae moowah.

G’day mate. Please wish your good lady a very happy birthday for tomorrow from me and mine. Hope she passes a splendid day and enjoys everything, especially any shagging you get up to. Although with you manning the controls on that one, she might not. Funnily enough, I know a guy called Alan Shagger here in Sydney. Make quite a cool stage name.

It isn’t even Mimi’s birthday tomorrow.

I wrote a quick email back, all the while Amber right at the forefront of my thoughts.

I tried to play it cool and not call her too early. I lasted out until 11.30am.

Amber answered, she sounded a little hoarse (a Shetland Pony?). A cold, she said, which had caught on overnight.

All that whizzing about in the cold in an open top sardine can, I said.

Whatever, she said...I said, she said, we said, they said. It meant she wasn't up for doing anything today. Sorry. She'll call me when she's feeling better.

I wished her a speedy recovery.

I called Tom. He was genuinely pissed off. Why hadn’t I replied to any of his calls and text messages? What had happened to me these last few days?

"Er...I haven't received any calls or messages from you," I said.

"Oh...well forget it, then."

We hooked up down The Fox for a lunchtime beer. I asked Tom if he believed in love at first sight.

He didn’t know, it’d never happened to him.

“Well, it’s fucking happened to me,” I assured him. “Big fucking time.”

I explained everything about Amber, from meeting her at Jed's party to lying in a field in Somerset. I described her extraordinary beauty, her wit and her intellect, the aura of eccentricity that surrounds her, the magical chemistry between us, the way she’d made me feel. Her magnificent bosom.

I told Tom she’d made me feel alive for the first time in years, that I was convinced she was sent my way for a reason, that she was definitely the one for me, no question.

Tom muttered something about how he'd heard that one before.

I told him the next time Amber and I meet, I was going to tell her that loved her.

Tom sucked air through his teeth. “So soon?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmn, don’t know about that, man.”

“Why not? It’s true. Unbelievable, I know. But true.”

“Yeah, but the things is, man, women are insane. Absolutely no logic to their behaviour at all. In my experience, when it comes to telling them you love them, it’s imperative to get the timing just right. Tell them too soon and you’re dead in the water. Even if they like you, it puts them right off. They start seeing you as some sort of lovesick puppy-type figure that just becomes...annoying. It’s most unmanly. They like a challenge.” He drank some beer. “I’d hold on, man, at least until you’ve spent some more time together.”

Weighing all that up in my mind I've decided I'll hold on, not say anything too soon, until I can be reasonably sure she feels something for me too. I can't imagine anything worse that plucking up the courage to go for it, choosing an appropriate moment, looking into Amber's astounding blue eyes and saying...

“Listen, Amber. There’s something you should know. I know we’ve only just met and it’s probably rather sudden, but I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with you.”

She’ll stand there staring back at me, a look of profound shock on her face. “But that’s...that's.... How can you possibly say that? We don’t know each other at all. You’re being stupid. I like you and everything but, well, we’ve only just met. We're just having fun...aren’t we? I don’t want to get involved in anything too heavy so soon.”

And she’ll smile at me after saying it, almost pleadingly.

And in that instant, I'll know she doesn't feel the same.

And I'll kneel down and gather the shattered pieces of my broken heart about me. Then Amber would playfully punch me on the arm and tell me to 'cheer up mate'. “It’s not the end of the world is it?”

But yeah, it will be. For me. Of course, things would keep going for a bit, but feel decidedly strange from then on. And slowly but surely Amber would cool off until one day, bam, she’ll just come out with it.

“It’s all getting a bit too intense for me,” she’'ll explain gently. “I don’t feel comfortable. Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t see so much of each other for a while?”

Then, the next time I see her, she’ll be out and about enjoying herself with another less intense more fun kind of bloke and I'll be torn to bits emotionally.

Tom is right.

Saying something so soon is just too risky.

I'll hold my time and bide my tongue.

Pounding the pavement with feet

Around mid-morning, I smoked a hefty joint for good luck and to calm the old nerves and set off on foot and bus for Amber's house, her address scribbled down on a tatty bit of paper gripped in my sweaty palm.

I tell you, I was as edgy as a teenager before his first kiss. How would Amber react at seeing me?
Would she be happy? Would she be mad?

Of course. She'd slam the door in my face, for walking out on her, surely.

As I neared her street, my heart began beating like a fucked clock. I turned a corner. Maddox Road. This was it.

And all of sudden there she was, walking up the pavement towards me.

"Hi!" she said brightly. "How's it going, stranger?"

I apologised for disappearing the other day. Explained the confusion over where she lived.

Amber said she'd guessed something like that had happened. She asked if I wanted to get out of there, take a ride.

“A ride? Where?”

"I know this cool place.”

She had a battered old Citroen 2CV waiting at the curb down the street. Being stoned and edgy, I asked if she was okay to drive.

“Yeah, I only have a problem controlling the car when I’m straight.”

Amber’s 2CV was parked up at the end of the street. Painted a sun-bleached Sky Blue, it had once been blessed with a soft-top convertible roof, now conspicuous by its absence.

Patches of rust punctuated the bodywork. Both driver and passenger door windows were missing and I could clearly see metal springs through the seat covers.

The vehicle looked remarkably unsafe. I said as much.

“Get in, stop moaning.”

I did as I was told.

It took a few goes to get the engine running and when it finally did an ominous cloud of black carbon monoxide burst from the exhaust.

“Has this thing got an M.O.T?”

Amber gave me a sardonic sideways look, pulled on a brightly coloured woolly hat replete with earflaps almost like she was donning a crash helmet, and took off.
She drove at pace through the North London streets. There’s nothing quite like sitting in a rickety old car, stoned and whizzing through the capital in the middle of a cold winter morning with a freak of a girl at the wheel with the wind rushing through your hair.

It was all so magical, so surreal, so beautiful, so dangerous.

At some traffic lights somewhere in Islington we stopped and observed a bloke by the curb on the opposite side of the street taking a photo of some road kill with his mobile.

Later, as we raced west heading out of the city, I stole a quick glance at Amber. She was checking me out too, not looking where she was going, wisps of hair poking out from her hat, whipping her face in the wind.

She smiled and shouted, “You’ve got nice eyes.”

Accepting complements graciously had always been a problem of mine, especially travelling in a sardine can at speed in a built-up inner city zone.

“Well, thanks.” I smiled modestly, trying not to think of the consequences of an accident at such a high speed. “Your arse ain’t too shabby either.”

Amber laughed. “I say you’ve got nice eyes and you jump right in with a comment about my arse?”

“Oh, eyes. I thought you said arse…sorry”

With her strange accent, the roof missing, the windows open, the sound of the wind rushing by and the whine of the tiny engine and everything, well, you know how it is.

Amber was still focused on me, frowning. I gripped the edge of my seat harder and instructed her to please keep her eyes on the road, before she killed us both.

“Am I scaring you?”

“Yes.”

She swerved violently side to side for a laugh and I let out a little yelp. I grinned nervously, staring straight ahead thinking, is this really happening? Have I really been stolen away from a party by a delicious, but wasted and quite possibly unhinged girl? Where was she taking me, if indeed we would make it anywhere? What treats were in store for me when we got there, if any? But then I thought, what the fuck, you know? Wherever we were going, whatever we were about to do, was fine by me because I was with Amber.

I was dreaming, can’t remember what about, when I startled myself wide-eyed awake sometime later. I’d fucking fallen asleep in the car. A habit of mine, I’m afraid. Planes, trains, automobiles, doesn’t matter what form of transport it is, if it’s moving and I’m on it, sooner or later, I’ll fall asleep.

Things tend to be a tad confusing when you come to, sprawled out on the front passenger seat of a 2CV parked at a crazy angle on a grass verge in a country lane somewhere, the front passenger side deeply imbedded in a hedge. Especially when you’re still stoned with no idea where the fuck you are or how you got there, full consciousness coming up to fast for the bends and all that.

Only the busy chirp-chirp-chirping of birds, the names of which I couldn’t begin to guess at, broke the silence around me.

Gradually vague memories of what I’d been up to pre-snooze came gate crashing through my fuggy mind until - hey, Amber, that crazy bewitching girl with the dazzling eyes who stole me away from London in a rickety old sardine tin.

Just thinking about her, my heart momentarily skipped out of its groove.

The colourful woolly hat she’d worn in the car lay draped across the steering wheel. But where was she?

I sat up and checked around. 

Nowhere in sight, that’s where.

I got out of the car, stretching my aching muscles out in all directions, doing a bizarre but hugely satisfying spasmodic walk for a few omni-directional paces.

I stuck a hand in my pocket and pulled out my mobile to check the time. Sweet Jesus, ten to one. A cursory check of my surroundings revealed very little, apart from a hedge-lined lane disappearing in two unfamiliar directions and a crystal clear blue sky overhead.

A little way further along the lane, in a break in the hedge line there was a wooden stile.

I set off to investigate, get some perspective on my whereabouts.

The stile opened on to a grassy field at the top of a steep hill. A mighty fine view actually, the full glory of the English countryside set out below me in all its patchwork quilt summer splendour.

It had been raining. The air had a certain freezing bite to it.

Off to my right about half a mile away at the bottom of the hill a few cows milled about in a field, chewing grass, doing cow type things apparently without much effort.

Further over there was a farmhouse and a cluster of farm buildings with a smattering of hens strutting their stuff. A derelict white caravan sat abandoned to its fate round the back, but that was about it.

Why do so many British farms have a derelict old white caravan and/or a broken down old coach parked on them?

I spied Amber, sitting with her back to me on the grass about three hundred yards dead ahead down the hill.

I called out but she couldn’t hear, so I scaled the stile and set off to join her, skidding across the uneven wet grass, soaking my shoes, slipping frequently, trying hard to avoid the impressively large crusty cowpats that marked the way.

Amber was sitting on a red and yellow tartan blanket spread out on the wet grass, bent forward studying a magazine, smoking the last of a joint, listening to tunes on an iPod.

An impressive looking camera, a half empty litre bottle of water, a chunk of Clingfilm wrapped hash and some skins lay on the blanket at her feet.

She looked up, smiled a megawatt smile and pulled out her earphones.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

“How’s it going, sleepy head?”

I stroked my stubbly head self-consciously, a little embarrassed at having fallen asleep on the journey and mumbled something about feeling a tad rough.

Amber pointed out (in a husky but sexy kind of voice that I’d zonked before we’d even passed Reading. It it was most boring of me.

I apologised, blaming my performance squarely on my inability to stay awake as a passenger on any form of moving transport, but most of all on getting old.

“You’re not old,” Amber insisted. She offered me up the joint. I asked her whether I’d been snoring.

Well, maybe a little.

A diplomatic answer for sure. Mimi used to liken the sound of my snoring to the sound of an articulated lorry idling at traffic lights.

I mentioned how beautiful I thought the whole scene was. Where were we?

Amber gave our location as about twenty-five miles south of Bristol, on the Mendip Hills above Cheddar.

Blimey, I’d imagined we were in the countryside somewhere just outside London. I couldn’t believe Amber had driven so far. How long had it taken in that rusty old sardine can?

Amber shrugged. A little over three hours, including a brief wee stop at the services on the M5, but hey, it was worth it. This place was amazing.

I asked her what was so amazing about it that she’d driven three hours from London in a fucked up old car to see.

Amber just shifted over, patting a vacant bum space for me on the blanket and ordered me to sit. She threw the dead joint away into the damp grass.

“I just like being here.”

Amber stretched out the full length of her delicious body. So this was what she’d driven him away from London to see? Fabulous countryside.

I sat down next to her and there we remained in perfect silence for a bit. One of her legs rested gently against mine.

We remained like that for a while, until Amber suddenly raised both her legs in the air, pointing at the sky with her toes to show me her nails, which were painted bright pink with delicate silver rings round each one. The rings were studded with little sparkly beads that glinted in the sun.

My eyes followed the length of her long legs down towards her body. Unfortunately, she’d tucked her skirt between her thighs, preventing any intimate sightings of her undercrackers.

Amber turned onto her side to face me, propping her head up with her hand, elbow on the blanket.

She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?”

I dipped into my pocket to check the time on his mobile. It was twenty-five to four.

“You know how when you’re really tired you sort of black out every now and again for, like, just a split second and you get that warm, clicky, peaceful feeling all over?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s me now. I was up all night and now I’m…slowing down.”

I stretched myself out on the blanket, resting back on both elbows. “Hey, if you want to grab some sleep,” I suggested, with ulterior (sexual) motives a forethought. “We could always find a hotel...”

Amber didn’t reply. She was already asleep.

She slept for nearly three hours straight without moving a muscle, curled up on her right side in the foetal position facing me. I listened to a random and rather eclectic selection of tunes on her iPod - Iggy and The Stooges, The Killers, Blind Willie Johnson, Babyshambles, Folk Implosion, Velvet Underground, The Staple Singers, The Kills, Kilo Riley, Charlotte Gainsbourg, The Kooks, Maria Callas, Hot Chip, some jazzy trumpety stuff I didn’t recognize at all and a trippy techno band singing in what I think was Spanish.

But it was hard to concentrate on anything with Amber lying so close.

I spent an indecent amount of time just staring at her. The sweet curve of her hips, the shape of her nose, those delicate shoulders. The rise and fall of her breasts with each breath. She was perfect, at least in my eyes.

And I could’ve just stayed there observing her secretly all afternoon quite happily, except I was getting seriously hungry. There was nothing for it but to wake her as gently as he could.

Amber was more a little disorientated at first when she came to, but soon got a handle on where she was and whom she was with.

I apologised for disturbing her, but I needed nourishment.

She sat up, necked the remainder of her water, whilst telling me in barely a whisper about the strange dream she’d had involving a bloke with a frog drawn on his tummy who was chasing her through Camden Lock.

She picked up her blanket and all her shit and staggered up the hill with me to the car. Even half-asleep, she pointed out things I’ve grown depressingly blind to on the way; a beautiful patch of violet and yellow wild flowers, an oddly shaped dead elm tree, a Common Buzzard hovering high over the next field.

Once in the car, it took a while to get the engine running and when she finally did, another huge plume of black smoke billowed out of the exhaust.

“You should really get that fixed,” I suggested.

She gave me an energy-free sardonic look, pulled the woolly hat down over her hair, extricated the car from the hedge and set off in search of Cheddar, the town a few miles away renowned for its gorge, caves and world famous cheese.

As we descended the impressive gorge, me staring up through the missing roof at the sheerness of the rock faces, I wondered aloud whether ‘Gorge yourself on Cheddar’ might be a suitable tourist-attracting marketing slogan for the town to adopt.

Amber just gave me another sardonic look and mimed vomiting.

“Look out for a parking spot sideways on to the hill.”

“Why sideways?”

“No handbrake.”

Ah, waking up earlier to find the car lodged in a hedge now made perfect sense. I kept my mince pies peeled for a suitable car spot and spied one in a dirt area otherwise full of coaches. Amber parked up between two of them, wedged a big stone under the back wheels and set off for the town on foot with me trailing slightly behind.

I’d never been to Cheddar before. I found it a reasonably pleasant spot. That afternoon it was still rammed to the rafters with day-trippers milling about in their happy bland supermarket summer clothes, studying tourist maps, eating ice creams, carrying children on their shoulders and mostly speaking in Black Country accents.

Amber and I settled on Ye Olde Cheddar Tea Rooms near the foot of the gorge, which offered such edible fare washed down with watery coffee and fresh orange juice from a carton.

Marvellous.

Conversation at the table was limited. Amber stared off out of the window most of the time. I asked if she was okay. Yeah, just not fully awake that was all. It would take at least two hours to get her brain functioning properly. Didn’t matter what time of the day or night she went to sleep or how long she slept or what time she woke up, the recovery time was always the same.

I was advised to ignore her until about nine of the clock, when she assured me she would be back to her normal charming self.

I fell asleep in the care again on the drive back to London. Amber woke me as we approached the city to ask where exactly in town she should drop me.

Drop me?

That sounded horribly like us not spending the night together. “I thought maybe we could head for your place…or mine. I don’t mind, as long as we end up doing rude things to each others soft parts.”

Amber smiled, but appeared strangely ambivalent. Probably still tired, I thought.

I decided to impress her by guiding her to Haringay via my favourite scenic route, if you can call any routes within London ‘scenic’.

On the way I pointed out a few buildings I thought were quite interesting, well actually just the one – the new Wembley stadium. Amber mentioned something about how the idea of attending any large public event filled her with dread, crowds made her feel claustrophobic.

We turned into a steep side-street off Green Lanes near to my place, meant as a clever short cut, but we encountered a removals van blocking the road ahead. With no handbrake, Amber had difficulty keeping the car stationary on the hill.

“Listen,” she said. “Do you mind if we give it a miss tonight? I’m really very tired.”

“No, not at all…”

“It’s been a long day.” She smiled wearily.

“Of course, yeah.”

“Maybe tomorrow, you know, we could do something?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

The removals van wasn’t shifting. I suggested Amber turn around and go back up the hill, otherwise we´d be there all night. I could walk home from there anyway. She should reverse back up the street and head off.

Before getting out of the car, I scribbled down my mobile number on a torn up scrap of Rizla packet and her number on my hand.

"Right," I said, hading her my number. "As they say in the films, it’s been real.”

“They say that in films?”

“Yeah. The ones I’ve seen, anyway.”

“Right.”

“Listen, I’ve had a great time and thanks, you know, for everything. I shall remember this day ‘til, well...‘til the end of the day.”

Amber smiled. “Well, I’m glad you had a good time.”

“I suppose I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“I suppose you will.”

“Excellent. I'll call you.”

"Okay."

I opened the passenger door and swung one leg out. Then, unsure whether to plant a smackeroo on Amber’s cheek or on her lips, I ended up kissing the flap of her hat. But hey, that was good enough for me.

She smiled beautifically at me as I got out of the car and stuck the car into reverse with a grinding of gears while I walked the short distance back to the top of the street to guide her safely back.

The main road was free of cars so I waved her out.

Amber reversed round the corner slowly, and was gone with a cloud of exhaust fumes and wave through the open roof.

And I was left alone with, you know, a distinct hard-on.

I walked the short distance to my flat (hands in pockets, obviously, to shield the unyielding erection) and let myself in to find Weird Bob at the end of the hallway.

Sorry, he said. He couldn’t stop and shoot the shit, he was off to eat some sushi from a barbershop floor.

Inside, I had a shower, did Amber’s stiff willy toilet roll test and failed. I fixed a bong, grabbed a beer from the fridge, got my acoustic guitar out of its case and strummed it wistfully, staring up at the ceiling (still sporting an erection) and wrote another set of lyrics.

Miscreant acting meanly

Tom finally called me today. I berated him for not answering my messages sooner. He claims he's been ill in bed all week, phone switched off. A furious cold, the intesity of which he hasn't known since pre-puberty.

"Anyway," he continued grumpily. "What's all the fuss about this Amber bird, then?"

I explained the fabulous events of Saturday night. The meeting of Jed's spectacularly gorgeous cousin Amber, my instantly falling for her charming insanity, our wildly erotic coupling and subsequent two day bed-in, how our best laid breakfast-in-bed plans went awfully awry, how I left her to hit the local cornershop for eggs, bacons and sausages, but couldnae find my way back to her gaff.

Tom thought it an amusing tale, but apologised, he had no fucking clue as to the name of the street where Jed and his gorgeous cousin lives, nor the number of their house.
He did, however, say he'd give Jed a buzz and find out for me, though.

Hallelujah!

I promised Tom I'd suck his cock dry every Sunday for three months if he could facilitate a reunion with Amber.

“Hmn..." Tom seemed decidedly unmoved. "By the way, how's it going with the wedding shit? If you need material for your Best Man speech, I can tell you about the time I took two central American hookers out to dinner in Mexico City…”

“Nah, I think I’ll be okay.”

“…the waiter gave us the best table in the place, but the food took a fucking age. While we were waiting, for a giggle I bet one of the ladies I couldn’t eat a whole handful of hot chilli peppers. I tipped out a handful and knocked them back with a fuck you grin. Of course, there was instant pain. Sweat pouring off my hair and everything. So I gets up, staggers off to the loo and throws up, then takes a massive piss. Got chili pepper all over me cock from the old fingers. Couldn’t walk with pain. It was fucking funny...”

Tom called back around nine-ish. He'd spoken to Jed. Explained the scene with Amber, the farcical eggs and bacon incident.

Jed knew nothing of it, but gave Tom his address.

I now know I'm going to see Amber again.

I got filthy stoned and drunk and wrote two whole songs this evening to celebrate.

Cranial levers

And so the hours drifted into days and the days drifted into months. Winter turned to spring, then to summer, then to autumn, back to winter and on to spring, and summer again. (Summer liked the limelight so much, it remained on stage for an indecently long time after the matinee final curtain, clinging with desperate fingertips to the last moments of glory, while autumn stood impatiently in the wings, drumming fingertips on a tressle table, waiting to get the evening show underway...

And still there was no contact from Amber or Tom.

I've pretty much given up all hope of ever seeing her beautiful face again.

Well, maybe that´s me just being a bit melodramatic.

Despite that, I'm feeling the best I've felt in, ooh, more than ten years.

I joined a gym yesterday and, against all the odds, was there first thing this morning for a two-hour work out.

I'm determined the kind of muscle defininition I enjoyed in my early twenties will miraculously reappear. My flabby gut will become flabby no more, my flaccid man boobs replaced by reasonably well-defined pectorals.

I’ll cut down on the weed, rationing myself to a couple of joints each night. And I’ll quit drinking, at least during the week. Fridays and Saturdays to be set aside as my ‘getting off my face’ days, and even then most of the time I'll restrict myself to a couple of beers and a spliff or two.

I've even started to take care of my flat as well, you know, just on on the wild off chance that Amber might turn up.

At lunchtime, I made a conscious effort to tidy up after myself. This weekend I think I shall even paint the place from top to bottom. Weed the garden, plant a few shrubs, maybe some flowers, that sort of shit.

And my lonesome Amber-based pining inspired me to write several lines of lyrics for the new Bo Molasses songs.

Even if I never see Amber again, she’s provided the spark I needed to get myself back on track mentally, physically and certainly musically.

Oh, but I do want to see her again, so damn much.

Noose alergy

I read in the paper about a curious murder trial going on in Spain at the mo'.

Some dude with a wife and two young kids went out to lunch with his work colleagues, which turned into an all afternoon drinking binge.

Witnesses say the accused had always been known as a bit of a 'square', he hardly ever drank, never really partied, was a big family man, into sports, went to church every week etc, yet he and his chums continued the drinking binge and ended up in some early evening watering hole, where he admits he took cocaine for the very first time (and in huge amounts), and possibly other substances too, all supplied by his work colleagues - who've all been fired and now face various charges too.

Then around 10 of the clock, with the accused apparently 'flying high', they decided to go to a 'strip' club, but not before the gang all stopped off at the accused's gaff so he could change his clothes. His colleagues waited for him outside.

The accused apparently then went upstairs to his apartment, found his wife and both kids in bed reading a story, killed them all with a wooden mallet, before showering off the blood, changing and coming back downstairs.

His work colleagues had no idea what had happened and continued partying.

It was only when a colleague brought him home in the wee-wee hours that the atrocity was discovered. The accused himself called the police, distraught, thinking someone had broken in and killed them all.

Forensic evidence quickly proved the accused did it, and he's accepted that, yet claims no memory of the incident whatsoever, due to being completely off his fucking face. The prosecution can offer no motive for the killing, other than he must have just 'snapped' over something.

He's now trying to be aquitted on the basis of temporary incapacitation, is seeking solace in religion, and wants to be set free to become a monk.

Hmn...

Still can't get hold of Tom, the fucker.

Bimbo quartet

Today came and went with no contact whatsoever from Amber.

Well, why would there be? She doesn’t have my phone number, or my address and besides, as far as she's concerned, I shagged her senseless over a 36 hour period, whispered sweet nothings in her ear, promised to make her a breakfast fit for a queen, left her house for the shops and never came back.

She’ll probably never want to speak to me again.

Despite that, I kept my mobile switched on and close at hand all day just in case she did manage to get my number somehow and call, but, well…she didn’t.

Neither did Tom, the elusive fucker.

Where is he when I need him most?

I tried his phone several times during the day, but to no avail.
I even went down The Fox this evening to see if Spanish John could shed any light on where Amber lived, in which house we’d partied at on Saturday.

He was more clueless than me.

Despite that, I determined to stay positive, you know, for when she does call at some unspecified point in the future. And if she doesn’t, well fuck it, one young strumpet found me sexy, there are plenty more out there that will as well.

If Amber isn’t to be, I’ll just find someone else, someone far more beautiful and interesting. Failing that I could always swallow my pride and have a crack at, well…WHO???

Oh, who am I trying to fool? Amber is constantly in my thoughts. In fact, she's quickly becoming an obsession.

I want to see her again so much I physically ache.

That's not healthy...is it?

Winking at hedges

Amber and I stayed in bed or near the bed all day yesterday and all night last night.

My cock is now red raw with the action.

This morning dawned hazy, lazy, sunlight shining in rays through the weed smoke in her room.

Amber announced she was starvin’ Marvin. Fancied eggs and bacon and a cup of tea in bed. A breakfast fit for a queen.

As I lay there next to her, she suggested a slap up breakfast, only she didn’t have anything in the house. There a corner shop open nearby. Would I be an absolute angel and fetch some supplies?

Of course I would.

I got up and got dressed and made my way out in to the real world for the first time in a couple of days, but I didn’t really want to leave her. Not in a million years. I wanted to stay for as long as possible contented in bed with her. I wanted to look at her face, drink in her beauty some more, let her soothe my troubled soul with her gentle ways and fuzzy logic, but she insisted.

On the walk to the corner shop my mind reeled. There was suddenly so much I wanted to say to Amber, words tripping and stumbling and tumbling over and over themselves in my mind desperate to escape from my mouth to the freedom and sanctuary of her delicate little half-Italian ears.

I purchased bacons, eggs, bread and fresh orange juice returned with a skip in my step to Amber's street, only...I couldn't remember which fucking house it was she lived in. I'd only seen the outside of it in the dark, when I was pissed and stoned. I certainly had no fucking clue which number it was. There were no landmarks I'd noticed on the way up to the shops (my mind had been full of Amber and all the wild possibilities that stretched out before us). The houses all looked the bloody same.

I tried a few doors, rang a few bells, even called out Amber's name at the top of my loudness, but...nothing.

I called Tom's mobile to see if he knew which house it was, but it was switched off. I left a desperate message on his voicemail

After half an hour or so of fruitless searching, I was forced to abandon all attempts and return home to wait for Tom's call back.

How stupid.

Still, I had a big fry up, which was a plus.

We could be heroes, just for Juande

Last night, I crashed at Amber's.

Sometime near sunrise, she got out of bed and grabbed an acoustic guitar which I hadn't noticed propped up in the far corner of her bedroom. She came back and sat on the bed naked and sang me a selection of Elvis songs ever so gently.

"I thought you said you couldn't be arsed to learn an instrument."

"Did I?"

"Yeah."

"I lied."

After the singing, she lit a few candles about the room while I skinned up. We smoked a numbah and sat chatting.

Amber lay her head on my chest, twiddling my single chest hair as I ran my fingers through her wild dark locks.

She fell asleep as the sun came up.

Not me. I felt too euphoric, too wired.

I've decided that being with Amber is what I want to do for the rest of my natural born days.

Due to the bliss I was feeling, I forgot to watch the Carling Cup final, in which my beloved Spurs beat Chelsea 2-1 after extra time.

Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

Cupid draw back your bow

Today's post is gonna be huge, because something HUGE happened to me last night.

I went to a birthday party, at this bloke Jed's house in Finsbury Park. I went with Tom and Spanish John. (I've just about forgiven him for blabbling to Zosia about my liaison with Tallulah).

Anyway, the party was pretty dull and I was about to leave when an extraordinarily pretty girl appeared out of nowhere.

She was young, maybe sixteen, seventeen, I guessed.

A river’s rush of long dark straggly gypsy hair tumbled down her back. I watched, transfixed.

It was hard to look away.

After a bit, she turned and caught me staring with startling, high-voltage blues eyes. She smiled beatifically back at me.

I half-smiled back, the old face burning so intensely it could have set the carpet alight.

The girl began swaying gently about to the music, fully aware that I was watching her. I swigged my beer, observing her body move in lithe, liquid rhythm to the beat. Quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, more so when she turned and flashed me another smoldering look.

I swear, my ticker jumped right out of its groove.

Before I could compose myself, the girl came over and introduced herself. She was Amber, she said, Jed’s girlfriend’s cousin.

We got chatting. Amber explained how she was just crashing at the house for a few months. In October, she was planning to go university, to study art.

She wanted to know what I did. I told her I played in a band. Amber said she’d like to play in a band too, but she couldn’t be arsed to learn an instrument.

She had a question for me. When I played songs live, how did I remember all the chords?

I explained I had a memory like an elephant, Indian not African.

“You’ve got a funny accent. Where’re you from?” quizzed I.

“Funny accent?” she replied, head to one side.

“Yeah, sort of country bumpkinish mixed with, um, something strange. I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s quite appealing.”

“Well, I’m half-Italian. I was born in a small town just outside Verona, but brought up in Suffolk.”

“Half-Italian, eh?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I suppose that explains the smouldering dark looks and the, um, tache.”

Long silence.

“So, um, whereabouts in Suffolk did you say you grew up?”

“A small town, you won’t have heard of it.”

“I might’ve done.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Try me. I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the small towns in Great Britain.”

“Okay. It’s a place called Swefling. Very small town. Lots of windmills. I know you haven’t have heard of it so don’t pretend you have.”

“Swefling... Swefling... Swefling. Hmn, sounds more like the gunk you’d find under a tramp’s foreskin that a place name.”

“Wow, you’re a real charmer.”

Long silence.

“It’s funny,” she began again wistfully. “I was dreaming this morning just before I woke up, but the dream was so vivid I actually convinced myself I was

already awake. And I got up, yeah? And I looked back and I could see my own body, like, still there in the bed, all sweaty and shaking, you know, like how junkies get in a heroin coma?”

Amber stared down at the floor for a while. I just marvelled at her, wondering who the hell she was, which alien planet she’d come down from.

Then she asked me right out if I had a girlfriend. After an uncertain pause, he told her no, I’d split up with my last one a while ago.

“What was her name?”

I found myself discounting my relationship with Zosia entirely and saying Mimi.

“Why did you split up?”

Ooh, she was a nosey so and so this one, but I still answered. “Basically, she struggled with the concept of monogamy.”

“She cheated on you?”

“Yep.”

“Just the once?”

“Well, once was enough for me. She ran off with her yoga instructor.”

“And you really loved her?”

I thought before answering. “Bit of a sore subject so can we change it, please?””

Amber observed me for a bit with those blinding eyes of hers.

“You’re still fucked up about her, aren’t you?”

I didn’t answer, confirming her suspicions.

She dragged me away to her temporary bedroom up on the top floor to show me some collages she’d recently made. She thought they might lighten my mood.

Her temporary bedroom was in the loft and resembled a war zone. Piles of books, art supplies, CDs, clothes (including some positively colourful and flimsy underwear) were strewn about everywhere. Drawings of anorexic girls with huge eyes on large coffee stained sketchpads, poems scrawled in deranged handwriting on scraps of paper haphazardly pinned to the walls. She brought out a wrap. Asked if me if he fancied a toot.

“Does the Pope shit on a bear in the woods…?”

Amber chopped out some lines on a wooden dressing table and handed me a rolled up tenner. I bent down and hovered up a few snorks. The fine white powder hit the inside of my brain like tiny crystal buckshot from a twelve bore.

Amber polished off the rest.

The collage she wanted to show me hung on the wall over an unmade cherry-wood sleigh bed covered in a mountain of pillows. She climbed aboard with her boots still on and insisted I do the same. She wanted me to stand next to her and study the collage up close.

I reluctantly did as I was told.

The collage featured a band she was into called The Dawlish Fungus Infection and was made up of dozens of photographs that she’d taken of the band member’s ugly faces mixed with images of lions, show girls, birds of paradise, a mule, some eye wateringly explicit gay porn, various jumbled images that she seemed to want me to ‘understand’ in all their symbolic complexity.

“I don’t like being judged and I don’t like defining things by placing them in categories or putting labels on them,” she explained. “But, if you were to ask me, I’d say my work is post-modernist retro-futuristic.”

“But isn’t that just a contradiction in terms?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, retro-futuristic. It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“…why?”

“...Because it is.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe it is. But then maybe that’s the point, you know? Art has no rules. Maybe my work is just that, a contradiction in terms.”

She drifted away mentally for a second or two.

As the coke kicked in, Amber became more animated, telling me about the many diverse and emotionally torturous elements that had made up her life, which, she explained, were clearly manifested in her work.

I nodded and agreed to everything she said, but really had no idea what the fuck I was nodding and agreeing to.

As she spoke seemingly without pause for breath, she began to bob up and down on the bed like a little girl on a trampoline, slowly at first, but then with increasing gusto.

She encouraged me to join in.

I worried the bed might collapse under our combined weight. And I felt foolish. I stepped down off the bed.

Amber kept on bouncing enthusiastically for a while longer. I was unable to look at anything but her magnificently pert bobbing tits.

She claimed the bed was probably one of the strongest in the world. It had been made in Norway. She kept right on bouncing. I asked her to stop and chill out for a bit, she was making me edgy.

Amber's final bounce was so big, she flew off the bed and crash-landed on a pile of her stuff over by the far side of the room.

I was sure she’d hurt herself and went to her, but she just lay crumpled up on the floor laughing hysterically.

I helped her to her feet genuinely concerned she’d done herself some harm.

When Amber stopped laughing, we sat together on the edge of her bed. She suggested we smoke a joint to take the edge of the gathering cocaine frenzy.

She put on a CD of some very strange plinky-plonky avant-garde electronic music (The Dawlish Fungus Infection) and located a pre-prepared joint from a tin box high on her shelf.

She sparked up. Within minutes she was fearfully ragged, twisting three different strands of long dark hair round and round her delicate fingers, toking on the joint, talking more absolute shite, a rambling semi-coherent stream of conscious pouring from her sensuously pouty mouth.

I listened as she drew me further into her strange little world.

“I had a bad nightmare last night,” she said.

“Yeah? Was that before or after the one about being in a heroin coma?”

“Before. I was high on peyote playing a nose flute in Leicester Square. And there were all these freaked out little animals tugging at my sleeves complaining at the noise. There was a midget of Peruvian extraction who juggled piping hot cups of tea while I played. Most disturbing.”

“Too much cheese before bedtime, me thinks.”

“Well, don’t think so. I’m allergic to cheese.

“Are you?”

“Um...” Amber giggled to herself. “Actually, I don’t know why I just said that. I’m not allergic to cheese at all.”

“You just made up a cheese allergy?”

“Hmn.”

“Why would you make up a cheese allergy?”

“Not sure. To sound more interesting?”

“And having an allergy to cheese is interesting?”

“Probably not.”

I gazed at her. “I don’t think you don’t need to lie to make yourself more interesting. You’re interesting enough anyway.”

“Really? It’s my subconscious mind. Uncharted territory.”

She took a bang on the joint. “Normally, once I’ve gone to sleep at night, I find it impossible to wake up again the next day before it gets dark.”

A brief pause while we both reflected on that statement.

“Remember that hurricane in Mexico a couple of years ago?”

I didn’t, but nodded and shrugged at the same time anyway, a difficult manoeuvre under the circumstances.

“Well, I was staying at this hotel right near the beach in Cancún when it came ashore and a metal dustbin got blown clean through my bedroom window when I was sleeping. But did it wake me up?”

A long pause while I waited for an answer that didn’t come. “Dunno. Did it?”

“Yep.”

I watched Amber's lips as she placed the business end of the doobie in her mouth for a another long suck and lost myself in thought for a mo’ imagining the joint was the business end of my Long John Silver being tugged on instead.

“I was there on holiday my sister. We met this bizarre half-Polish half-German guy,” Amber continued, breaking my reverie. “God knows why we hung out with him. He was insane. He stuck to us like poo to porcelain for the whole holiday. He was bisexual. Had all these pretty Mexican boys and girls running around everywhere. I remember him explaining it to me once. ‘Mein dear zveet Tallulah, vun hole iz pretty much ze same az any uzzer’. Urgh. Horrible. There was this farm thing near the beach with a bunch of goats grazing in it? He used to stand at the fence staring at them, grunting with desire. He was so out there, you know?”

She stared wistfully up at the ceiling, the tips of her joint-free hand brushing the exposed skin above her breasts by her tattoo. She took another bang on the joint, drifted off in to space.

I decided to stick my neck out, pay her a direct compliment to let her know I fancied her. I asked if, you know, apart from being incredibly beautiful and charmingly insane, was there anything else I should know about her?

Amber frowned, thinking about it.

“Okay,” she began. “Well, I have trouble acting normal when I’m nervous. I have a theory that insects are really aliens that some how settled on Earth millions of years ago and are steadily building their empire until they can take over the world.”

“Okay...”

“I know it's not a very good theory, but it's the only one I’ve got. Oh and I once got recorded on a video entry phone outside a very exclusive restaurant doing a bizarre jig kneeling on my shoes trying to look like a dwarf whilst playing a pretend didgeridoo fashioned from the centre of a toilet roll.” She cringed. “And I only sleep with blokes who can’t fit their stiff willies through the middle of a toilet roll.”

Apart from all that, she assured me, there wasn’t much else to tell.

I considered the matter of the stiff willy toilet roll test. Would I pass a test like that? I knew not, but resolved to find out as soon as possible.

“It’s good shit, isn’t it?” Amber said, nodding at the joint.

“Very.”

“It’s Mexican. I get it from this amazingly black dude down Green Lanes.”

“What, Goliath?”

“Yeah, he is. Fucking huge.”

“That’s the same guy I buy my shit off.”

Amber didn’t respond. She drifted off in thought for a moment. “I love it when I’m stoned. Don’t you?”

“Hmn.”

“Everything seems, I don’t know, so much more real, you know? Art, music, films, sex...”

She stretched out lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and sighed deeply. A few moments of silence passed between us before Amber shifted closer and found my back with the tips her fingers just above the belt.

“We can fuck if you want to, you know.”

I coughed. “You’re not shy, are you?”

“Nope.”

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Well, I’d hazard a guess, but my guessing powers are not what they once were. Last week I took a guess at the outcome of a fight between a monkey and another monkey, and I guessed the wrong monkey.”

“Well, I’m old enough.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Looks can be deceptive, everybody knows that.”

She came closer, slipping her hands further round my waist and up inside my t-shirt, her fingers creeping, crawling, scratching upwards towards my chest.

“Anyway,” she whispered. “How old are you?”

“Ah, you don’t want to know.”

“I do.”

“Thirty and counting.”

“That’s not old.”

“Well, it feels old.”

Amber said something about age being only a state of mind.

“Depends which state of mind you’re in,” I replied.

She stopped fiddling with me.

“Listen, you wanna fuck or not?”

It was a direct question and one that I struggled to find an immediate answer to. So in lieu of an answer and with a sly twinkle in her electric blue eyes, Amber moved her hands down over my stomach to undo the belt and buttons on my trooze. Her fingers delved down through the fly, scrabbling about inside my boxers looking for a way in.

They found my old chap, generating a sharp intake of breath and a few gently whispered swear words.

We kissed for the first time. It was like throwing a match into a pool of petrol and in the subsequent white heat of lust, Tallulah tore desperately at my clothes, a fire blazing in her cocaine crystal blue eyes.

I think I'm in love.