Fools for Lust by Maxim Jakubowski Read Free Book Online

neither Eddie nor I had realised that the annual Labour political conference was opening in Brighton the Monday following our fated weekend of unbridled lust.
    We soon realised, of course, what with television crews setting up all over the place, and gaffer tape and chalk marks dotted across the hotel lobby and the sea front to indicate where the cameras were to be set up.
    Innocently, we didn’t give it much of a thought.
    Lovers live in a private world all of their own, don’t they?
    How could we know that we (she?) would be recognised in Brighton by a couple of BBC journalists on assignment who had once seen Eddie and her husband at a regional radio Christmas party in Elstree, and assuredly knew I was not her husband, this scruffy man holding her hand and always touching her rather intimately as we supped our pasta in that damn trattoria. Or, to compound our fate, that we would be observed checking out of the hotel, both carrying incriminating overnight bags, by an activist from her local party.
    Of course, neither of us was supposed to be in Brighton that weekend.
    And people have big mouths. Bastards!
    My final memory of Brighton is the delay at the railway station as we prepared to take the train back to London where we had arranged another assignment four nights later, where we hoped to reach a final decision as to where the affair was going. I had high hopes, of course. Brighton had been good. As we disembarked from the cab, there was an unholy affray outside the station. Tony Blair and his retinue were arriving in town.
    Eddie had smiled. ‘Our future leader,’ she had said.
    I can’t remember what my mumbled answer was.
    We were just a few yards away from him as he trooped past.
    We never did meet again in London four days later. I got a tearful phone call from Eddie the day before, telling me that her husband had found out about us.
    My heart dropped. So what? I pointed out. Then, how?
    She haltingly explained. The Party conference. Blair.
    Shit.
    Her husband wanted her to stay. He’d forgiven her. Had sworn he would devote more time to her from now on, things would be different. She had to give him a chance. Just couldn’t throw away eight years of marriage that way. I must understand. This was it. It was over. I must promise never to try and contact her again. She was sorry. So sorry.
    I cried.
    Initially felt sorry for myself.
    Wrote her crazy letters. Which she never even acknowledged.
    That’s it. See. What an ordinary story, eh? Man meets woman. Man and woman sleep together. Think they’re in love. Labour Party political conference pulls them apart.
    So now you know why I did it.
    All his bloody fucking fault. Tony Blair, with his insincere smile, his smarmy holier-than-thou pronouncements.
    The bastard.
    Why couldn’t he have chosen Blackpool or Scarborough or anywhere else than Brighton?
    I’ll do my time.
    He got what he deserved.

Utterly Nude
    He’d always been attracted, sometimes fascinated by the smooth pudenda of women. Not just the fact that some women wished to shave their sexual parts, or more likely in the pursuit of fashion, wax them. What also exercised his imagination were the deep set motivations behind the decision to reveal their cunts so openly, to regress to a state of far from innocent childhood, unprotected by a bush of curls or a minor forest of imitation barbed wire in all shades of colours and textures. Quite often, he had convinced a lover to allow him to trim her pubic hair and, one occasion, to actually allow him to shave her fully. The experience itself had proven most erotic and the ensuing fucking had acquired an extra dimension. It was summer and the South of France and, the next day, he had half jokingly suggested she refrain from wearing her thing under her short skirt when they went out dining and she had playfully agreed. A memory then lingered with him much longer than the intensity of their love-making. But she had drawn the