Charlie is My Darling
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: Too long together, a couple find a dream holiday has become a nightmare.
_____________________________________________________________________
I want to go home! This is the first day and I’m ready to scream with bored misery.
It’s my own fault, of course. I should never have allowed myself to be talked into this ‘holiday of a lifetime’, but you can’t just toss away twenty-three years of marriage without giving things a last try, can you?
The sun is too hot – don’t remind me that I am a devoted sun-worshipper: a hundred degrees before lunchtime is simply gruelling. With my fair skin and blonde hair you can hear me sizzle when I put on the sun-lotion.
It’s not really about the sun and heat: the fact is that he disgusts me. I used to quiver when he touched me but now I have to hide a shudder. He keeps calling this holiday a ‘second honeymoon’ and, bless his heart, he is making a bit of an effort to be romantic and considerate – pity it is all years too late!
Last night I was able to plead tiredness but what I will do tonight I cannot imagine – bite my lip and endure, I suppose. Even the sight of his puny prick, half-mast when fully engorged, turns my stomach. When I think of Charlie’s silky smooth black skin and his wonderful cock pointing straight to the ceiling like a prayer to Eros …. but I mustn’t think of Charlie for the next week: that way madness lies.
OK, breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth three times. There, I’m calm again. Charlie taught me that way to release tension – he taught me an even better way as well: there I go again! I really must get a grip of myself.
When I was a girl – before I even met Bill – a man in a pub showed me a picture of Nefertiti and told me I was her spitting image. She was a queen of Egypt and a famous beauty so I was flattered, of course, but not flattered enough to let the guy into my knickers!
Since then, I have wanted to visit Egypt. I suggested it for our honeymoon but Bill wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, Rome was more romantic although I don’t know where he thought the romance lay in humid heat and a bum (mine, not his) black and blue from multiple pinches. He did offer to kiss it better, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad!
We came home and settled down. I continued to work and Bill started to put in extra hours to win promotion. Just when things were starting to get a bit tedious, the kids arrived, James first, then Helen eighteen months later. Bill insisted that I give up work to look after them and I was happy to agree. It was a wonderful time for me: there were plenty of other young mums for company and the evenings were hardly long enough for me to tell Bill all that the kids had said and done during the day.
It was difficult financially since I had been a buyer for a chain of twenty fashion shops and Bill was only a driver on the underground, but he worked lots of extra shifts so we managed to keep afloat. He had been taking night-school classes when I met him and that paid off when he was given a promotion into management just as James turned two. These were wonderfully happy times – we both got tired but we never snapped at each other. Bill was great with the children and I was so proud to show off my beautiful babies and handsome husband.
Once Helen reached six and was in school from nine until three, the gilt began to flake off the gingerbread. The truth is that I didn’t have enough to do all day. Many of the other mums went back to work at that point but Bill had been promoted again and we no longer needed my income. He was keen that I should have an easy life after the exhausting years of nappies, sudden temperatures or coughs and frequent spats between James and Helen, but I think he also wanted to be the provider, the alpha male – him Tarzan, me Jane.
Before I could become bored, we moved home to a better area with schools that had a good reputation nationally. The house was large with a decent sized garden but, although structurally sound, it was badly in need of some TLC. I set-to and learned decorating. At first Bill would help out with a bit of plastering or carpentry but he was working longer and harder than ever so I soon took on all aspects of interior decorating, even making curtains and blinds.
You don’t notice yourself change. The kids called me ‘Mum’, of course, but Bill started to do it as well! He had been promoted again to a very senior, well-paid, post and I suppose that I had gradually added him to my motherly chores. Sex on Saturday night, if we hadn’t been anywhere too strenuous with the children, hardly constituted high romance. The truth is that we had settled into a routine – that is spelled R-U-T, by the way!
My epiphany came one morning when I was standing at the kitchen window drinking a cup of coffee and looking out at the garden. I noticed the windows in the garden shed and I found myself wondering whether I should make curtains for them. It was a lovely sunny morning in May. James was due home in a week from his first year at University and Helen had gone into school to discuss a problem with her tutor before an A-level exam. Bill had gone to a conference that morning and I found that I couldn’t remember where or even what it was about.
My husband was an important man, my son was at University and my daughter had a place booked for the autumn. Then there was me: a whizz with a paint brush and sewing machine but otherwise a relic, a dinosaur left behind in a dead end with no ambition but to curtain the garden shed! I very carefully put the cup into the sink, although what I really wanted to do was to throw it against the wall - hard.
I think the only thing that stopped me was the thought of explaining my outburst to the family.
“You have it made, Mum. You don’t have to sit impossible exams (Helen)/ master a whole new environment (James)/deal with totally obstructive contractors (Bill).”
At this point you will be expecting me to come up with a plan for the rest of my life – enrolment in the Open University or volunteering to go to some trouble spot as a nurse or teacher. Get real! What I actually did was to clear out my wardrobe! Onto the bed I put the good clothes in muted colours suitable for a middle-aged mother of two with an executive husband. Just the right sort of wardrobe for a woman who seriously contemplated dressing the windows of a hut full of garden tools and a lawnmower!
Then, tucked into a back corner, I found a box inside which, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, was the dress I got married in and a blouse and skirt I used to wear to work. The dress didn’t look too bad when I held it up against me and I still liked the design: it was one that I had bought for the shops against the advice of the senior buyer and it had sold hundreds. I should have stopped at reminiscences in front of the cheval mirror but I decided to try on the work clothes. What a shock!
The blouse went on and fastened but it was so tight on my arms that I could hardly bend them enough to do up the buttons that strained across my bust and belly. When I tried on the skirt, I was so ashamed that I blushed all over – I could not get it past my hips!
Two days later, James was home and we made that an occasion for a rare family Sunday dinner: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast spuds, three veg and lashings of gravy! Bill and James, typical men, noticed nothing but Helen spotted that I had helped myself to one thin slice of lean beef and a solitary potato. Her own plate was well-filled and emptying fast (she is a big girl who takes after her father and there is no way she could have got my skirt past her knees! – even her adoring dad calls her ‘thunder thighs’).
I said that I was slimming because I planned to go back to work, trying to make it sound as if it was a matter of no importance. Three faces turned horrified looks on me and there was a short pause before they attacked.
In the calm atmosphere of family discussion that followed, I burst into tears, Bill shouted at everyone and even threatened to punch James who left the house in a furious temper and didn’t come back until he ran out of money three days later. Helen was so upset that she had another heaped plateful of roast dinner then scoffed the entire strawberry cheesecake I had made for dessert!
The argument raged, intermittently, for more than a week with Bill flatly refusing to countenance my return to paid employment.
“Join a gym,” was his mantra,”like all the other menopausal women around here!”
That did it! I said nothing at the time – in fact I refused to speak to him at all for more than a week!
The next day I started job-hunting. I had followed the fortunes of my old company over the years and I knew that many of the people I had worked with were now in very senior positions. When I left there were twenty shops but they had now expanded to over a hundred so I reckoned that they would be glad to find a place for me – welcome me back into the fold, so to speak. They had, moreover, just bought up a company providing fashion clothes for what their advertising identified as ‘the more mature figure’.
When Helen was two, my old boss had bombarded me with phone calls trying to entice me back. I had refused her then but I had left the door open for a later return to the 9-to-5. OK, I admit that sixteen years is quite a lot later but I had learned a great deal in that time so I reasoned that I could be even more useful to the company.
I spent most of the next morning deciding what to wear, and then I took more than an hour to fix my hair and put on quite a lot more make-up than I had in years. By noon I was ready to stun their head office with an offer they would be mad to refuse.
To settle my nerves, I made a cup of coffee and picked up the paper from the doormat. The headlines screamed at me: the firm had gone bust! It had expanded too fast and had run into cash-flow problems. Administrators had been appointed who hoped to save some of the business and a few jobs. There was more, lots more, ranging from pundits being wise after the event to optimistic claptrap about a rosy future. Did I take their failure personally? You bet I did!
If finding I was three sizes bigger than my image of myself was a reality check then finding that my certainty about getting a job was a foolish pipe-dream devastated me. My self-esteem dropped through the floor to a sub-basement level I had never even known was there.
I took off my best suit – too young a style for me anyway – and put cold cream on my face – I looked like a tart with all that slap – and gave in to despair.
Next day I succumbed and joined the gym. I fixed an appointment with a personal trainer who, the receptionist assured me, would restore my figure and boost my self-confidence.
That night I made the best of a bad job by telling Bill I was joining the gym.
“Do you good, Old Girl! Don’t get too skinny though, I like my women with a bit of meat on them!”
I felt at that moment that all I lacked was an apple in my mouth!
So that is when Charlie came into my life. Tall, black and looking about twenty years old, although he is actually twenty-nine and is married with two kids! He is my trainer and it took less than three sessions to make it personal – very personal.
You don’t need to tell me that I am not the only one he is fucking to peak fitness. I do not care – believe me: I DO NOT CARE! I might draw the line at him servicing another frustrated, middle-aged woman actually in my presence but I cannot be sure; I cannot even be sure that I would not join them!
Bill was so pleased that I had given up all idea of working and would remain a proper wife to a rising executive, shuttling between the kitchen and the bedroom, with a few excursions to the gym to satisfy some inexplicable urge afflicting menopausal women.
Searching his heart and memory he proposed that we go on the ‘trip of a lifetime’.
“You always wanted to visit Egypt, I have three weeks’ leave owing and the kids will be glad to get rid of us so I booked us a cruise on the Nile.
“It’s to celebrate you coming to your senses, Old Thing,” as he less than tactfully put it. I was feeling so guilty about Charlie and what he and I were doing that I would have agreed to a two week holiday visiting football grounds in the north of England!
Bill handed me his credit card and sent me off to re-float the sinking retail sector single-handed. I bought underclothes, bikinis and make-up in styles that I hoped would excite Charlie, then I bought more muted colours in one piece bathing suits suitable for an aging matron with a husband going places!
So here we are, Darby and Joan, on a Nile cruise in a luxury cabin for six days and six dismal nights. Over the years, Bill has come to fancy that he is a Don Juan so he will use me during the days to get him close to another woman, preferably blonde and buxom, but he is no longer very fussy. I will keep my alcohol level topped up with cocktails while he flirts away the hours gently sailing up the Nile.
The problem is that he will come back to our cabin imagining that he is a mighty stallion and I will be expected to submit to a minute or two of sweaty thrusting: it will be a bit easier to tolerate if I am well and truly smashed. So I will lie there, seemingly passive, wishing, hoping – praying – that the father of my children will overexert himself and die!
Swearwords: A couple of strong ones.
Description: Too long together, a couple find a dream holiday has become a nightmare.
_____________________________________________________________________
I want to go home! This is the first day and I’m ready to scream with bored misery.
It’s my own fault, of course. I should never have allowed myself to be talked into this ‘holiday of a lifetime’, but you can’t just toss away twenty-three years of marriage without giving things a last try, can you?
The sun is too hot – don’t remind me that I am a devoted sun-worshipper: a hundred degrees before lunchtime is simply gruelling. With my fair skin and blonde hair you can hear me sizzle when I put on the sun-lotion.
It’s not really about the sun and heat: the fact is that he disgusts me. I used to quiver when he touched me but now I have to hide a shudder. He keeps calling this holiday a ‘second honeymoon’ and, bless his heart, he is making a bit of an effort to be romantic and considerate – pity it is all years too late!
Last night I was able to plead tiredness but what I will do tonight I cannot imagine – bite my lip and endure, I suppose. Even the sight of his puny prick, half-mast when fully engorged, turns my stomach. When I think of Charlie’s silky smooth black skin and his wonderful cock pointing straight to the ceiling like a prayer to Eros …. but I mustn’t think of Charlie for the next week: that way madness lies.
OK, breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth three times. There, I’m calm again. Charlie taught me that way to release tension – he taught me an even better way as well: there I go again! I really must get a grip of myself.
When I was a girl – before I even met Bill – a man in a pub showed me a picture of Nefertiti and told me I was her spitting image. She was a queen of Egypt and a famous beauty so I was flattered, of course, but not flattered enough to let the guy into my knickers!
Since then, I have wanted to visit Egypt. I suggested it for our honeymoon but Bill wouldn’t hear of it. According to him, Rome was more romantic although I don’t know where he thought the romance lay in humid heat and a bum (mine, not his) black and blue from multiple pinches. He did offer to kiss it better, so I suppose it wasn’t all bad!
We came home and settled down. I continued to work and Bill started to put in extra hours to win promotion. Just when things were starting to get a bit tedious, the kids arrived, James first, then Helen eighteen months later. Bill insisted that I give up work to look after them and I was happy to agree. It was a wonderful time for me: there were plenty of other young mums for company and the evenings were hardly long enough for me to tell Bill all that the kids had said and done during the day.
It was difficult financially since I had been a buyer for a chain of twenty fashion shops and Bill was only a driver on the underground, but he worked lots of extra shifts so we managed to keep afloat. He had been taking night-school classes when I met him and that paid off when he was given a promotion into management just as James turned two. These were wonderfully happy times – we both got tired but we never snapped at each other. Bill was great with the children and I was so proud to show off my beautiful babies and handsome husband.
Once Helen reached six and was in school from nine until three, the gilt began to flake off the gingerbread. The truth is that I didn’t have enough to do all day. Many of the other mums went back to work at that point but Bill had been promoted again and we no longer needed my income. He was keen that I should have an easy life after the exhausting years of nappies, sudden temperatures or coughs and frequent spats between James and Helen, but I think he also wanted to be the provider, the alpha male – him Tarzan, me Jane.
Before I could become bored, we moved home to a better area with schools that had a good reputation nationally. The house was large with a decent sized garden but, although structurally sound, it was badly in need of some TLC. I set-to and learned decorating. At first Bill would help out with a bit of plastering or carpentry but he was working longer and harder than ever so I soon took on all aspects of interior decorating, even making curtains and blinds.
You don’t notice yourself change. The kids called me ‘Mum’, of course, but Bill started to do it as well! He had been promoted again to a very senior, well-paid, post and I suppose that I had gradually added him to my motherly chores. Sex on Saturday night, if we hadn’t been anywhere too strenuous with the children, hardly constituted high romance. The truth is that we had settled into a routine – that is spelled R-U-T, by the way!
My epiphany came one morning when I was standing at the kitchen window drinking a cup of coffee and looking out at the garden. I noticed the windows in the garden shed and I found myself wondering whether I should make curtains for them. It was a lovely sunny morning in May. James was due home in a week from his first year at University and Helen had gone into school to discuss a problem with her tutor before an A-level exam. Bill had gone to a conference that morning and I found that I couldn’t remember where or even what it was about.
My husband was an important man, my son was at University and my daughter had a place booked for the autumn. Then there was me: a whizz with a paint brush and sewing machine but otherwise a relic, a dinosaur left behind in a dead end with no ambition but to curtain the garden shed! I very carefully put the cup into the sink, although what I really wanted to do was to throw it against the wall - hard.
I think the only thing that stopped me was the thought of explaining my outburst to the family.
“You have it made, Mum. You don’t have to sit impossible exams (Helen)/ master a whole new environment (James)/deal with totally obstructive contractors (Bill).”
At this point you will be expecting me to come up with a plan for the rest of my life – enrolment in the Open University or volunteering to go to some trouble spot as a nurse or teacher. Get real! What I actually did was to clear out my wardrobe! Onto the bed I put the good clothes in muted colours suitable for a middle-aged mother of two with an executive husband. Just the right sort of wardrobe for a woman who seriously contemplated dressing the windows of a hut full of garden tools and a lawnmower!
Then, tucked into a back corner, I found a box inside which, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, was the dress I got married in and a blouse and skirt I used to wear to work. The dress didn’t look too bad when I held it up against me and I still liked the design: it was one that I had bought for the shops against the advice of the senior buyer and it had sold hundreds. I should have stopped at reminiscences in front of the cheval mirror but I decided to try on the work clothes. What a shock!
The blouse went on and fastened but it was so tight on my arms that I could hardly bend them enough to do up the buttons that strained across my bust and belly. When I tried on the skirt, I was so ashamed that I blushed all over – I could not get it past my hips!
Two days later, James was home and we made that an occasion for a rare family Sunday dinner: roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast spuds, three veg and lashings of gravy! Bill and James, typical men, noticed nothing but Helen spotted that I had helped myself to one thin slice of lean beef and a solitary potato. Her own plate was well-filled and emptying fast (she is a big girl who takes after her father and there is no way she could have got my skirt past her knees! – even her adoring dad calls her ‘thunder thighs’).
I said that I was slimming because I planned to go back to work, trying to make it sound as if it was a matter of no importance. Three faces turned horrified looks on me and there was a short pause before they attacked.
In the calm atmosphere of family discussion that followed, I burst into tears, Bill shouted at everyone and even threatened to punch James who left the house in a furious temper and didn’t come back until he ran out of money three days later. Helen was so upset that she had another heaped plateful of roast dinner then scoffed the entire strawberry cheesecake I had made for dessert!
The argument raged, intermittently, for more than a week with Bill flatly refusing to countenance my return to paid employment.
“Join a gym,” was his mantra,”like all the other menopausal women around here!”
That did it! I said nothing at the time – in fact I refused to speak to him at all for more than a week!
The next day I started job-hunting. I had followed the fortunes of my old company over the years and I knew that many of the people I had worked with were now in very senior positions. When I left there were twenty shops but they had now expanded to over a hundred so I reckoned that they would be glad to find a place for me – welcome me back into the fold, so to speak. They had, moreover, just bought up a company providing fashion clothes for what their advertising identified as ‘the more mature figure’.
When Helen was two, my old boss had bombarded me with phone calls trying to entice me back. I had refused her then but I had left the door open for a later return to the 9-to-5. OK, I admit that sixteen years is quite a lot later but I had learned a great deal in that time so I reasoned that I could be even more useful to the company.
I spent most of the next morning deciding what to wear, and then I took more than an hour to fix my hair and put on quite a lot more make-up than I had in years. By noon I was ready to stun their head office with an offer they would be mad to refuse.
To settle my nerves, I made a cup of coffee and picked up the paper from the doormat. The headlines screamed at me: the firm had gone bust! It had expanded too fast and had run into cash-flow problems. Administrators had been appointed who hoped to save some of the business and a few jobs. There was more, lots more, ranging from pundits being wise after the event to optimistic claptrap about a rosy future. Did I take their failure personally? You bet I did!
If finding I was three sizes bigger than my image of myself was a reality check then finding that my certainty about getting a job was a foolish pipe-dream devastated me. My self-esteem dropped through the floor to a sub-basement level I had never even known was there.
I took off my best suit – too young a style for me anyway – and put cold cream on my face – I looked like a tart with all that slap – and gave in to despair.
Next day I succumbed and joined the gym. I fixed an appointment with a personal trainer who, the receptionist assured me, would restore my figure and boost my self-confidence.
That night I made the best of a bad job by telling Bill I was joining the gym.
“Do you good, Old Girl! Don’t get too skinny though, I like my women with a bit of meat on them!”
I felt at that moment that all I lacked was an apple in my mouth!
So that is when Charlie came into my life. Tall, black and looking about twenty years old, although he is actually twenty-nine and is married with two kids! He is my trainer and it took less than three sessions to make it personal – very personal.
You don’t need to tell me that I am not the only one he is fucking to peak fitness. I do not care – believe me: I DO NOT CARE! I might draw the line at him servicing another frustrated, middle-aged woman actually in my presence but I cannot be sure; I cannot even be sure that I would not join them!
Bill was so pleased that I had given up all idea of working and would remain a proper wife to a rising executive, shuttling between the kitchen and the bedroom, with a few excursions to the gym to satisfy some inexplicable urge afflicting menopausal women.
Searching his heart and memory he proposed that we go on the ‘trip of a lifetime’.
“You always wanted to visit Egypt, I have three weeks’ leave owing and the kids will be glad to get rid of us so I booked us a cruise on the Nile.
“It’s to celebrate you coming to your senses, Old Thing,” as he less than tactfully put it. I was feeling so guilty about Charlie and what he and I were doing that I would have agreed to a two week holiday visiting football grounds in the north of England!
Bill handed me his credit card and sent me off to re-float the sinking retail sector single-handed. I bought underclothes, bikinis and make-up in styles that I hoped would excite Charlie, then I bought more muted colours in one piece bathing suits suitable for an aging matron with a husband going places!
So here we are, Darby and Joan, on a Nile cruise in a luxury cabin for six days and six dismal nights. Over the years, Bill has come to fancy that he is a Don Juan so he will use me during the days to get him close to another woman, preferably blonde and buxom, but he is no longer very fussy. I will keep my alcohol level topped up with cocktails while he flirts away the hours gently sailing up the Nile.
The problem is that he will come back to our cabin imagining that he is a mighty stallion and I will be expected to submit to a minute or two of sweaty thrusting: it will be a bit easier to tolerate if I am well and truly smashed. So I will lie there, seemingly passive, wishing, hoping – praying – that the father of my children will overexert himself and die!
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.