Dale's Porno Blog

CHARLIE GARRICK

I was reading a magazine the other day – one of those colour supplements you get with the Sunday papers – and they had an article about pin-up pictures from the nineteen fifties and sixties. It wasn’t much of an article, really - it was more of an excuse to print a few photos of pretty girls who must be grannies now - but it brought back memories, because that’s the era I grew up in. And actually those pin-ups meant a bit more to me than that, as well, because they reminded me straight off of my Aunt Susie.

I’d better introduce myself. My name’s Charlie Garrick, and I was born in Poplar, in the East End of London, not long after the war - in 1950, to be precise. Of course, there’ve been a lot of wars since then, but when people said ‘before the war’ or ‘after the war’ in those days, they always meant the Second World War - because it was fresh in their minds, of course, and you could still see the evidence of that war all round you: bombsites in the streets and half-demolished houses and so on.

If you don’t know what a bombsite was, it was a great big heap of rubbish and old rubble that the kids round our way used to go and play on – throwing bricks at each other and that sort of thing. If you looked carefully, you’d probably find an air-raid shelter buried under it somewhere - a smelly, narrow, concrete chamber with a corrugated iron roof, full of stinking water and probably rats as well - though I don’t remember actually seeing any rats. There was at least one bombsite in almost every street in our area – and it wasn’t ’til years later that I realised that a bombsite was a place where a bomb had fallen and destroyed a house. To me, when I was about eight or nine, they were just natural features of the landscape. I thought all cities had bombsites for the kids to play on.

Of course, by the mid-sixties, they’d got rid of most of them. They’d rebuilt on the land – single houses and blocks of flats, mostly – so they had to start putting up ‘adventure playgrounds’ for the kids, to make up for it. So that’s what a bombsite was to me, circa 1958 – an adventure playground.

But I seem to be getting off the point.

The myth about the East End around that time is that everybody lived in a great big extended family, with whole clans living within a few streets of each other – grandparents and parents, aunties and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces - all popping into each other’s houses for a cup of tea or a family row every minute of the day. I suppose it may have been like that for some people, but it wasn’t for us. My family came from the East End originally – on my mother’s side, anyway – but there was just my Mum and Dad, my Grandma (my Mum’s mum), my Aunt Susie and me when I was growing up. Susie was Mum’s younger sister. She was still at home in the fifties, living with her mother, my Grandma. They had another sister, but she’d got married and moved away before I was born, so I never knew her. My Dad was from up north somewhere (Derby, I think), and he seemed to have lost touch with his family. We never saw them, anyway. I think most of them emigrated to South Africa just after the war.

I’ve already told you that those pin-ups in the colour magazine got me thinking about my Aunt Susie, so I’d better make something clear. She was my aunt – because she was my Mum’s sister – but I never called her ‘auntie’ or anything. She was much too young. I always called her ‘Susie’, like everyone else did. She was only seven years older than me – so when I was five, which is about the earliest I can remember back to, Susie would have been twelve. And you can’t think of a twelve-year-old as an aunt, can you?

When I was a little kid, Susie was fun. My Mum and Dad and I lived in two rooms over a grocer’s shop in the high street, and Susie came round with my Grandma a lot to visit. Whenever she came, it was always tickles and giggles and silly games for me. I think Susie must have been really good with kids. She always had me in stitches, and I was always asking ‘When’s Susie coming round again?’ When I got a bit older, around seven or eight, we used to play cards a lot – kids’ games like Snap and Beggar-My-Neighbour. There was always a lot of noise in the house when Susie and I got together. She was, as my Mum used to say, ‘a regular ray of sunshine’.

I’ve been trying to remember what Susie looked like in those days, but I haven’t got a clear picture. (It’s funny how memories fade. Perhaps they just get covered up by things that happened later, so you can’t get to them.) I do remember she had a ponytail around that time. I pulled it once and she got angry. That was about the only time she ever got annoyed with me, I think. And I remember her as tall and a bit gawky – but that was when I was little myself, of course. What I remember most, though, is the way she was always moving about. She could never sit still. Two minutes after she’d arrived and sat down in our kitchen, she’d be jumping up and down about something, or rummaging around trying to find a game for us to play. Basically, she had an overabundance of energy. And nobody minded, of course. That was just Susie.

When I was twelve we had the Cuban missile crisis. It didn’t actually mean that much to me, except that it was the Cuban missile crisis that got me seriously interested in sex, in a roundabout way. I’d better explain.

I suppose I learned to read at about the same age as everyone else does – and by the time I was eleven or twelve I was trotting off to the local library every week to get some new books – kids’ stories, ‘Swallows and Amazons’, that kind of thing. So I was a reader, but I never read the newspaper and I didn’t pay much attention to the news on the radio, either. So it was a bit of a shock for me one afternoon when my Mum said to me:

“The missile crisis is over. We’re lucky. I thought there was going to be another war!”

And she looked very relieved – so I realised that she must have something to be relieved about, and I’d missed something important by not reading the news. So I decided to start reading the paper from then on.

In our house, ‘the paper’ meant ‘The Daily Mirror’. It’s still around, of course. I don’t know if it was actually the first tabloid, but it was certainly the most successful one around that time. It was the working man’s paper - and his wife’s. I don’t think people round our way would have thought of buying anything else, unless they were snobs – in which case they probably read the ‘Express’ or the ‘Mail’ – or unless they were doctors or teachers or something – in which case they’d read ‘The Manchester Guardian’.

In our house, we got ‘The Daily Mirror’ delivered every day except Sunday, and my Mum and Dad both used to read it, so it was always lying around. But as soon as I started looking at it properly, I discovered that you didn’t have to be interested in the news to read the ‘Mirror’. To start with, there was always half a page of comic strips just after the middle page – I remember ‘Garth’ and ‘The Perishers’, but there were others as well. And then, if you went towards the back of the paper, on one of the pages before the sport, near the bottom, there was ‘Jane’.

I was shocked by ‘Jane’. My Mum and Dad both used to read it, and they both laughed at it. I thought it was rude. It was a four-panel comic strip about a sexy, accident-prone woman called Jane, very realistically drawn, who was always falling over and showing her stocking tops, or getting locked out of her flat in just her underwear. In theory, there was some kind of story running through all this from day to day, but I never bothered with the story. I just read it to get a look up Jane’s dress. And I was very furtive about it. I never looked at that page when there was anybody else around - and if my Mum or Dad did happen to come in when I was looking at ‘Jane’, I’d turn the page hurriedly, as if I was looking for something serious to read. But they both used to read ‘Jane’ and smile, as if there was nothing wrong with it. They said it was a ‘national institution’, because it had been one of the most popular comic strips during the war. They never said it was sexy, though. To them, it was just a bit of a giggle.

I date my sexual development from the time I discovered ‘Jane’.

By this time, we’d moved to a slightly bigger place, a council flat, still in Poplar, with two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. (You may laugh, but having a bathroom was a new thing in those days. Back at the old place over the grocer’s shop we’d all had baths in a tin bathtub in the kitchen – pouring scalding water in that had been boiled up in a kettle on the kitchen stove. So having a bathroom was a luxury.) Anyway, it may have been because of our move, or because she was a bit older now, or because she had a job – she was working at Woolworth’s - that we saw much less of Susie. She still came round to see us occasionally, but now my Grandma normally came by herself.

Susie had left school a couple of years before, of course. At the time I’m thinking of, she’d have been eighteen or nineteen. I remember my Mum saying to my Grandma once:

“We don’t see much of Susie, now. Is she getting on all right?”

And my Grandma, who was one of those tough, sour old ladies that you used to see a lot in those days, narrowed her eyes and said:

“Oh, Susie. It’s all boys with her! That’s all she ever thinks about!”

My Dad, who was sitting quietly in the corner, chimed in:

“Not Teddy Boys, I hope,” – though by my reckoning he must have been at least five years out of date by then, because the Teddy Boy thing was over.

And my Grandma said: “I don’t know what kind of boys they are, but she won’t keep that job of hers long if she goes on the way she is. Out ’til all hours she is sometimes. And she takes days off just when it suits her.”

And there was one of those moments when the whole family looks down at their hands before they change the subject.

There are a lot of different ways of thinking about history, aren’t there? I mean, there’s the official way of dating things by the big global events – the Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, for example – but, for most people, there are far more important, private milestones that turn their lives into history. Well, for me, those milestones were sex. I don’t just mean my own sexual experiences – though they were important when they came, of course – but sex in the news. Scandals. The big sex stories of the day. And from about 1962 onwards, there were a lot of them, because sex was the real story of the decade.

The first big sex story I remember was a trial – not the ‘Lady Chatterley’ trial but the strip club trial. I’m not sure what year it was, but it was in the early sixties. As far as I remember, one of the Soho strip clubs was prosecuted for running a lewd show. I think it was to do with some antique law about theatre censorship, administered by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Apparently, you could put nude girls on a public stage, but they weren’t allowed to move. So some enterprising entrepreneur had found a way round the law. He’d opened a club – you had to join one day and go back the next day to get in – and since it was a private club, he said his show wasn’t a public exhibition, so the rules about the girls not moving didn’t apply. And he laid on proper striptease shows. The police disagreed of course. They said anything that was dirty in public was dirty in private as well, so they prosecuted him. And this was a goldmine for the papers, of course, because they just needed to publish the testimony from the trial every day and they had the best sex story of the decade - up to then, anyway. I can’t actually remember many of the details, but I think it used to go something like this:

‘Yesterday, in court, Mr. Augustus Summers, QC, Counsel for the Prosecution, asked Miss Anne Briggs (22), of Putney, South West London, if she had been working as a dancer at the such-and-such club in June and July of last year, under the stage name of ‘Candy’. Miss Briggs replied that she had. He then asked her if, in the course of her ‘dance’ routine, she had removed her brassiere and waved it in the faces of the customers in the front row. Again, she answered that she had …’

And so on.

Of course, I don’t remember all the details now. I just remember that reading about it was almost unbearably sexy. That must seem strange nowadays – to be unbearably excited just by the idea of a girl getting up on stage and taking her bra off – but you have to remember how innocent we were. I don’t know if it’s really true that Victorian men got turned on by seeing a naked table leg (I can’t really believe that one myself), but I do know that all the boys at my school, including me, got a delicious erotic thrill from the news that Marilyn Monroe slept ‘in the nude’. Those words, ‘in the nude’, had an amazing erotic charge at the time that you just can’t imagine now. Nobody slept ‘in the nude’. It was unheard of – by us, at any rate. And words like ‘nude’, ‘bare’ and ‘naked’, were sex words in their own right.

So the Soho striptease trial, with all its titillating disclosures, was like high explosive to me – and it also led to my noticing for the first time that Susie had a sexual side to her.

In retrospect, it wasn’t much – but it’s always the little things that have the most effect in sex, isn’t it? As I said earlier, Susie hadn’t been coming round to our place very often, and I think it’s fair to say that, when she did come round, she and I didn’t have as much in common as we used to. It wasn’t that we disliked each other, or anything like that. It was just that she was grown-up now (she was probably twenty at the time) and I was a thirteen-year-old. So we didn’t have much to say to each other.

Anyway, one day she did turn up – a bit after I’d got home from school. I was in the living room with the ‘Mirror’ and my Mum was in the kitchen. When Susie arrived, Mum let her in and they went back to the kitchen for a natter. Mum shouted to me: “Charlie, Susie’s here. Come and say hello”, - but I’d just started on the report of the day’s strip trial proceedings, so I just yelled: “Hello, Susie”, and she yelled back: “Hello, Charlie”, so I thought I was safe to read the paper in peace for a bit.

I think the case must have been coming towards the close. It was probably getting a bit boring from the journalistic smut point of view, because they’d started to put in a side box to the main story, titled: ‘In the Strip Clubs Last Night’ – and that’s what I remember, vividly, from that particular day. It said something like:

‘In a strip club last night, a beautiful brunette slowly removed all her clothes and then sat in a transparent glass bath full of warm perfumed water. After soaping her entire body, she stood up and stepped out of the bath, and began to dry herself with a tiny, rose pink towel, that was much too small to cover her modesty …’

As I remember it, there was a picture, too, showing a girl in a bath with lots of bubbles – which probably meant that the whole thing was set up by the paper, of course. That didn’t bother me, though. It didn’t even cross my mind. I was reading the story and trembling all over, and I had that very tight feeling in my crotch that means you just can’t stand up quickly unless you’re prepared to let everybody see what’s going on down there. Anyway, at that moment, Susie strolled in.

She came in behind me - because I was sitting with my back to the door –, ruffled my hair, and said:

“Hello, Titch. Wotcha reading?”

(She’d started calling me ‘Titch’ when I’d got taller than her. I was still growing, but I was going to be big.)

When somebody is standing behind you and they ask what you’re reading, they don’t need an answer, of course. She was already looking at the newspaper over my shoulder as she spoke, and she giggled and said:

“Ooh! Striptease!”

Then she started to hum ‘The Stripper’ – Di-di-di-dee, Di-di-di-dee - and did a shuffly little dance step round my chair and out in front of me.

I hadn’t seen her for some time, so I was a bit surprised by her new look. She was wearing a tight, serpent-green dress that looked as if it actually had scales on it, and she had one of those tall bee-hive hairdos that were in fashion at the time. I’m sure the bee-hive didn’t suit her, and the dress was probably about fifteen years too old for her, but I wasn’t feeling critical at that particular moment. When she got in front of me, she went on humming and dancing – well, shuffling about on the spot, anyway. Then she twirled round slowly, so her back was towards me, and began to mime undoing the zip that ran down the back of her dress. She didn’t really undo it, and the moment only lasted a few seconds before she stopped with a giggle and turned round again. But my erotic temperature had just been pumped up by about a thousand degrees. Then she just grinned at me and walked out. And I suddenly realised – incredulously – that Susie was sexy.

Time passed and the strip club trial went off the front page. The next big milestone in my life, in the line of smutty history, was the Christine Keeler affair, otherwise known as the Profumo Scandal.

Christine Keeler was a beautiful showgirl who took her clothes off in a West End ‘gentlemen’s club’. She lived with a bloke called Stephen Ward - who may or may not have been her pimp. (She always said he wasn’t.) Ward had a lot of very posh friends, including politicians and aristocrats, and he used to introduce them to Christine and his other girlfriends. Christine said he did this to gain social influence, not for money. Either way, a lot of Stephen’s girlfriends were being knobbed by posh, rich, important people – often in Ward’s flat, with him watching sometimes through a two-way mirror. Apparently Ward didn’t do anything with the girls himself. Although Keeler shared his flat, she said they lived together ‘like brother and sister’.

One of the posh people Ward introduced Keeler to was John Profumo, who was a cabinet minister in the government. He was the Secretary of State for War. And another bloke she met through Ward was a Russian intelligence agent called Ivanov. So a very dodgy connection was set up: the British War Minister’s mistress was also going to bed with a Russian spy.

There was some kind of question in the House of Commons, which boiled down to: was Profumo sleeping with Keeler and if so, wasn’t this a security risk? And he lied and said no, of course not – wherever did they get a silly idea like that? So when it emerged a few months later that he really had been having it off with her on a regular basis, he had to resign, and it was an enormous embarrassment for the government.

There was a big fuss, of course, and eventually Stephen Ward was put on trial, accused of living off immoral earnings. But the trial never finished because he killed himself before the jury reached a verdict. And Christine Keeler was banged up in Holloway Prison for about six months for perjury – I forget why exactly. At the time, people thought that putting Ward on trial and sending Keeler to jail was just a way for the establishment to get its revenge for what they’d both ‘done’ to good old John Profumo– and it probably was.

What I’ve just told you here is the official history, of course. But it wasn’t the way I actually experienced it as the story unfolded. To start with, I didn’t give a monkey’s about all the politics and the spy stuff. For me it was just a story about sex – about this sexy bird called Christine Keeler and her sexy mates. And the reason I knew that Christine Keeler was so sexy was the photograph that was plastered all over the middle pages of the paper one day – the one where she’s stark naked and straddling a chair turned round backwards, so that, although you can’t actually see any ‘naughty bits’ because of the chair back, you know she’s facing the camera with her legs apart, with only about a third of an inch of plywood between the viewer and her naked crotch.

We started kissing again. He rolled me on to my back and slid his hand between my legs. He rubbed my clit and I opened my legs for him then he moved between my legs.

I could feel his cock on my thigh. He then stopped kissing me so he could move up to slide his cock in. He rubbed the head on my pussy and the put the head on my love hole. I was taken it slow trying to get it in. I open my legs as far apart as I could and I felt the head starting to slide in. His cock is just so big. Then he pushed a little harder and the head was in all the way. So he started pumping it in and out of me. But it was very tight.

“Here lets try this. You lay on your back and let me try.”

I rolled him over and I over top of him. With one foot on each side I slowly squatted over him. He held his cock up and I pulled my lip apart. I got the head in and I started bouncing on his cock and slowly I worked it all in. It was the fullest I have ever been.

Markus then put his hands on my hips and rolled the two of us over so he was on top. He fucked me hard and fast. There was no love making to it. Just long hard fucking. I thought he was going to hammer my inside out and then he started to cum so much that with every thrust it started running down my but I could feel it pooling under my but. He stopped and held very still and he relaxed and laid down next to me.

Markus started kissing me. “I really do love you.”

“I know.” I kissed him back. “I think I could be very happy here with you.

I got up and walked over to the tub. I got the rage and took it back to the bed. I washed him off and then myself.

I got back in to bed. I was crawling on my hands and knees to get back up next to Markus. When he grabbed me.

“Stay just like that.”

Then Markus got behind me and started rubbing his cock head on my love hole and working it in. it went in easier because it wasn”t as big. But it still filled me up. I could feel it get harder and big with ever thrust.

Markus was holding my hips and just going right at it. My big boobs where swaying under me. He then slowed down and reached under me and rubbed my clit as he was thrusting in to me. He then reached under with the other hand too and grabbed both my boobs. He was rolling my nipples between his thump and first finger. I started cumming. I was shaking from cumming. My pussy was gripping his cock so hard I could feel the vanes in it. Then he started cumming too. He let go of my boobs and grabbed on to my hips again. He was pounding me hard and cum was running down my legs. He stopped but stayed in till he was done cumming.

Markus laid down next to me then wrapped his arms around me and we fell fast to sleep.

Am I dreaming or not? I don”t know and right now I don”t care.

“Are you recovered yet?” asked Kirith.

Sharmoon nodded, clearing long strands of hair off her face. She saw the dwarf smearing the slim phallus with oil and wondered why such lubrication was necessary.

“No need for oil,” she pointed out. “My cunt is dripping like a honeycomb!”

“This isn’t for your cunt,” said Kirith, chuckling to herself. “Turn over, please.”

“No!” Sharmoon protested. “I’m not having that wooden spike shoved up my ass!”

“Remember our bargain!” hissed the dwarf. “Now, turn onto your belly!”

Cursing under her breath, Sharmoon twisted around to lie face down on the blankets, folding her arms on a cushion and resting her chin on her hands. Another cushion, placed by Kirith under her hips, lifted her hindquarters so that her bare ass was raised and exposed. She groaned, still grumbling, and received a playful slap on her right buttock.

“Ouch! That hurt!”

“Well, stop complaining! And make sure you relax.”

Sharmoon giggled when she felt an oily fingertip prodding her asshole.

“Hey! Stop tickling!”

“Hush!” said Kirith, as her forefinger eased into the puckering hole. She felt the warrior woman’s flesh tighten around the finger as it wormed its way deeper. When she heard a soft moan she smiled, wiggling her finger to lubricate the passage. Intuition told her that Sharmoon was no stranger to this kind of intimacy.

Sharmoon gave a long slow moan and heard what sounded like a faint echo of it. She paused, listening, hearing at first only the squelching noises from her asshole. But then she heard it again: a sigh of pleasure that was not her own. Twisting her head, she peered behind and saw the dwarf woman’s left hand moving beneath the leather apron. A dreamlike expression glimmered in Kirith’s deep-set eyes and her wide mouth hung half-open. Sharmoon grinned when the dwarf gave another sigh.

“Enjoying yourself, Moriksdaughter?”

Kirith nodded, continuing to masturbate while probing Sharmoon’s asshole with the wooden phallus. The barbarian turned away, resting her face on her hands and smiling when she heard a low grunting noise. She knew Kirith had climaxed and she herself soon followed suit, the pleasant tingling in her rear passage suddenly welling through her abdomen to pulse through her entire body. A few moments of mutual peace ensued, in which the only sound was of slowly intaken breath.

“Turn over!” Kirith ordered, her voice shaky and hoarse. “Lie on your back.”

Sharmoon obeyed, but wondered how many more objects she would be required to test. Kirith noticed the sweat glistening on her guest’s brow and answered the unspoken question.

“Just one more experiment. Then you can go back to your warband.”

Sharmoon eyed the dwarf suspiciously as she pulled from the box a small bundle wrapped in a stained rag. Kirith unwrapped it carefully, smiling when she saw Sharmoon gape in horror at the object thus revealed: an iron phallus, its tip fashioned in the likeness of a dragon’s head with ravening jaws and sharp fangs. The dwarf grinned as she squeezed the base of the metal shaft, for it made a clicking noise and the dragon’s jaws opened and closed.

“Devilry!” hissed Sharmoon. “Surely you’re not thinking of …?”

“Orcs made it,” Kirith interrupted, chuckling at the terror in the barbarian’s dark eyes. “They use it as a torture device. But fear not, Skinnnyleg. This evil tool is not part of our bargain!”

To Sharmoon’s relief she put the gruesome implement on the floor and rummaged in the box, eventually picking out an imitation of the dragon phallus. It was in fact a perfect replica in wood, with jaws that similarly opened and closed, and rows of tiny fangs.

“Three days I spent in the making of it,” Kirith explained, admiring her handiwork. “My instinct tells me that it might become a popular plaything for my regular customers. Are you brave enough to test it?”

Sharmoon gave a hesitant nod. “I’m brave enough, yes. But if you hurt me with it, Moriksdaughter, I’ll test my sword on your skull!”

“Agreed!” replied the dwarf, chuckling as she greased the wooden dragon with oil.

The hidden mechanism at the base of the shaft clicked and the jaws closed. Sharmoon held her breath as the strange device approached her slit and her teeth clenched when the dragon’s muzzle entered her body. Her glistening slit opened to receive the head of the carven beast and soon it was burrowing inside her cunt, its ears and gaping nostrils pressing her secret places as it passed along the tunnel. Then, to her astonishment and delight, the jaws slowly opened, deep inside her body, producing a sensation unlike anything she had known before.

Kirith listened carefully to the warrior’s sighs and moans, using them to guide her manipulation of the device. If she twisted the head too much, Sharmoon’s appreciative noises ceased and her limbs tensed. If the jaws opened too quickly, they prompted a groan of displeasure.

Eventually, Kirith partly withdrew the dragon to allow its tiny wooden fangs to close upon Sharmoon’s stiffening clit. The barbarian cursed loudly and clenched her teeth, feeling a myriad of familiar sensations curiously intensified. Coaxed by Kirith’s skilful handling of the dragon, she experienced a third climax that rivalled the sum of the other two in its potency. The dragon’s teeth nibbled her clit until she felt certain that the fleshy nubbin would be completely devoured. Blood pounded in her head, subsiding slowly as the waves of pleasure gradually lessened, but for a full minute afterwards she lay breathless and panting, her legs twitching whenever she tried to move.

“Good! Very good!” commented the dwarf, rising creakily to her feet and shoving the box of carvings into a corner. She straightened her apron and tunic, offering Sharmoon a helping hand when the barbarian finally felt able to sit upright.

“Ignore my earlier complaint,” said Kirith. “I hereby rescind it, for you are not as weak as other Skinnyleg females. True, you climax too quickly, but you possess a good measure of stamina, and that is an admirable trait.”

With considerable effort Sharmoon struggled to her feet and tidied her hair and clothing. Looking down at the dwarf she noticed a twinkle in the deep-set eyes and a wide toothsome grin.

“I like you, my tall friend!” said Kirith. “Maybe one day you’ll find me again, and we’ll share a jug of ale in a tavern?”

Sharmoon smiled, reaching out to ruffle the dwarf woman’s hair. “Maybe so, Moriksdaughter. Maybe we’ll do that. But now I must hurry back to the camp.”

Kirith bowed and led her out of the wagon. Outside, the sunlight seemed very bright and they shielded their eyes against it.

“Thank you for sharpening my sword,” said Sharmoon. “I trust that you consider my debt paid?”

“Paid in full, dark lady! Indeed, so enthusiastically did you test my new carvings that I now feel deeply indebted to you.”

The warrior woman turned to leave, making for the crossroads, but Kirith called after her: “Which of them was best, do you think?”

Sharmoon spun on her heels, looking back at the dwarf. “The dragon, of course! That’s why you kept it to the last, is it not?”

Kirith laughed and gave a parting wave as Sharmoon strode away, watching as the barbarian broke into a run before a distant dip of the road hid her from sight.

I returned, and was in bed, a mere ten minutes before my partner arrived in a burst of V-twin noise and the joyous greeting howls of her dogs. I explained my bone-deep lethargy on feeling sick, and she poured vitamin C tablets and cranberry juice into me and made dinner that I could barely touch.

The next day I had to cancel my two clients, but the day after that I felt able to return to work, and the day after that I felt affectionate again as we lay cuddling in bed at night.

I didn’t return to that mountain-top for more than a month, and even then we just drove straight through on our way to the other side, but I often stared hard at its misty head in the distance as I lay on the couch on that side of our verandah, wondering just what the fay folk I didn’t believe in had needed me for.