No Future Ch. 71

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2075: Mark has an affair in Oxford.
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Part 71 of the 92 part series

Updated 11/01/2022
Created 10/18/2012
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LXXI
Ivory Towers
Mark & Molly
2075

There was much that was making Mark feel guilty. Here he was—a married man with a devoted wife with whom he'd lived for fourteen years and a delightful nine-year old daughter—now living every day of the week in Oxford: a two hour train journey from Islington. And this was all because his employer, Sig Mu Inc., Korea, needed a representative in the university town and Mark was aware that he'd been considered to be the best man for the job. He also knew that if he showed any reluctance, his employer would soon conclude that he was no longer the best man for the job he currently held in Central London.

Not only did Mark feel guilt that he was abandoning his familial duties for reasons of economic necessity but, worse, that he'd allowed himself to succumb to sexual temptation. And this was something he'd sworn never to do. He was weak and fallible and terrified that his wife might find out about it. Mark didn't deserve Molly. He'd failed her. And he continued to fail her every moment that he spent with Salma.

It wasn't that Mark had gone out of his way to be unfaithful. Indeed, nothing could have been further from his mind. Salma was just the woman who worked next door to SM Incorporated's skeleton office of two men and one young secretary. The company that employed her had something vaguely to do with the manufacture of nanocarbon polymers. Salma was a scientist by profession with qualifications from Harvard and Shanghai and she was working in Oxford for reasons rather more of necessity than choice.

"My home in Damascus was a place where one of the Israeli missiles struck. My parents, my grandparents, my aunts, my young son: they all died that day. Damascus still hasn't recovered. Syria continues to suffer from the Israeli invasion and the puppet dictator they put on the throne. My country was once one of the most democratic and liberal republics in the Arab world and now it's nothing more than a vassal to the Jewish state."

Mark knew very little about Middle Eastern politics. It was all very confusing. He knew there were countries in that part of the world that were now nothing more than a nuclear wasteland such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan, although he wasn't sure whether they were strictly speaking even in the Middle East.

"Theyaremostly Muslim," Salma told him. "But if you come from Syria or any of its neighbours you don't think of yourself asMiddle East. That's a sort of Western view of the world. But Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, like Syria, are definitely what you might call Middle East."

"And Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and all those others?"

"I guess anywhere within easy reach of Israeli missiles is in the Middle East."

"It's certainly hotting up over there, isn't it?" Mark remarked.

"It's always been bad," said Salma. "There's been a hundred and thirty years of Israeli threat, but now since all that's left of American support for Israel is rhetoric and evangelical volunteers rather than hard cash, there's a chance that the balance of power might swing elsewhere. It's not the only nation with nuclear weapons. Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and the Democratic Republics of Arabia could pack a punch if needed. Not to mention Turkey, Iran and Iraq."

"You don't think therewillbe another nuclear war, do you? Surely the last two were bad enough."

"They say things always come in threes," said Salma reflectively. "But I hope not. What hope would there be for Syria under the missile flight paths? My hope is that democracy will return to Israel and that the Israeli people will vote for peace."

"Is that likely?"

"There's not been a proper democracy in Israel for over fifty years," said Salma. "But stranger things have happened. Remember North Korea. Or for that matter, how things turned out in the Congo."

Mark nodded sagely. Things quite often didn't happen the way people expected, however much it sometimes seemed that history was playing itself out in a sort of pre-ordained way. The Anglo-Saxon economies were in disarray. The climate was getting steadily more unstable. And every day more and more things that were once affordable were becoming prohibitively expensive.

And that included accommodation.

Mark was now a tenant in two properties. He was paying rent for the two-bedroom flat near Holloway that he shared with his wife and daughter. That wasn't cheap, though Molly's job with Hackney Borough Council did help pay the bills. His other home where he slept five nights a week was a single room in a large house that he shared with a mixture of mostly young people who kept nothing like the same hours as he did. They never did the washing up and left the kitchen in a shocking state. The bathroom constantly stank as a result of the antique plumbing. And Mark didn't feel comfortable when he sat in the living room with the other housemates while they smoked dope, snorted lines and watched moronic quiz shows. After having lived as a husband and father for so long, he hated having to share a house. The only retreat his bedroom afforded him was when he pushed his ear-plugs as deep into his ears as he could and pulled a duvet over his shoulders to keep out the draught that whistled through the poorly-fitting windows.

Mark soon found that Salma's small bedsit was much more comfortable than either his Oxford or his Islington home. Her ex-husband had left her a regular stipend that was enough to supplement her income and to allow her to live relatively comfortably. Although her bedsit wasn't situated in the best part of Oxford, it was near enough to the city centre that she could walk to work and not have to squeeze into the crowded buses. Her neighbours were quiet, the flat was tastefully decorated and the bed was gloriously inviting.

Mark stood by the window of her apartment through which he could glimpse the city walls that kept gown and town apart. After all these months in Oxford, he'd not once ventured within the walls but he could see from Salma's window that there was much that would be worth visiting if he should purchase a tourist pass for the day. Perhaps that was something he could do together with Molly and Monica if they ever came to spend the weekend in Oxford.

Thinking of his wife brought a fresh spasm of guilt to Mark. He glanced back at Salma. She and Molly were both women in their thirties, although Salma was somewhat closer to the end of that decade than Molly. She was also a larger woman. Although not exactly fat or obese, she could best be described as chunky. She was taller, rounder and, in places, rather flabbier. But she was also, Mark had to shamefacedly admit, a rather more passionate lover than Molly who often seemed distracted during their lovemaking.

Especially in recent months.

"We shouldn't," said Mark ineffectually as Salma dragged him down to lie beside her on the luxurious bed in a room that had none of the icy chill that permeated Mark's own room. "It's not right. What would my wife think?"

"Shut up about your wife already," said Salma in a voice that sometimes betrayed the Jewish influence of one half of her complex lines of ancestry. "You're with me now. Or would you rather be somewhere else?"

Mark had to admit he'd much rather not.

And after a lovemaking where Mark's face was sometimes pressed to Salma's voluptuous bosom and where his penis was lodged deep inside her vagina's warm liquid grip, the couple lay beside each other gasping from the exhaustion that was inevitable for two people who never did nearly enough exercise: especially not Mark since he'd had to abandon his bicycle in London.

"You'll stay the night won't you?" asked Salma.

"Of course," said Mark who didn't want to face the perilous journey back home after dark to the outer suburbs of Oxford. He was also more than happy to stay where he was on the firm mattress under a warm duvet pressed against a cuddly woman in a draught-free bedroom. It was bliss of a kind that he'd come to appreciate ever more every time when he returned to his noisy, chilly flat where he had to roll around the mattress to avoid a loose spring pronging into his arse.

However, when he settled back into Salma's arms under her all-embracing duvet he was suddenly awoken by a loud commotion from the street below that was still audible through the windows' double glazing. It was the sound of shouts and yells, accompanied by rather unsettling thuds. Salma immediately jumped out of bed and rushed to the window.

"What is it?" asked Mark who expected Salma to blame it on drunks returning from the many pubs outside Oxford city's walls where the prostitutes and drug-peddlers who were banned from within could ply their trade more freely.

"I don't know," said Salma. "There seems to be a kind of attack on the house opposite."

"An attack?"

"Well, it's difficult to tell from here. But it looks like people breaking and entering the house and there seems to have been some looting."

"Shall I call the police?" asked Mark who rolled over the bed to the small cabinet where his mobile phone was lying with his glasses and wristwatch.

Salma nodded. "It's number 16," she said. "Tell them to come quickly."

It was actually over half an hour until the police finally arrived and then it was just two of them on their bicycles. They were fully armed and they immediately ran into the house, but they were too late. The people who'd broken into the house had left a long time before and had shown no sign of haste as they did so. They carried the more portable loot away with them such as television screens and computers, but as they were also carrying baseball bats and other improvised weapons neither Mark nor anyone else were inclined to offer them any resistance.

"House robbery," said Mark, as if it summed it all up. "That's not very nice. And right under our noses."

"It might be a little more than that," said Salma thoughtfully. "Oxford's got a sizeable Muslim population and a lot of them are Arabs. I guess their parents or grandparents came to the country when there was plenty of oil money sloshing around the Arabian Peninsula. And I sort of know the people opposite. They were an old Jewish couple who were active in Oxford's Jewish community. The man always wore a skull-cap. His wife wore one of those weird wigs. They weren't exactly circumspect about their religion. Not that they'd ever felt the need to be."

"You think that them being Jewish and there being so many Muslims in Oxford is why their house was attacked?"

"It does seem a reasonable hypothesis, doesn't it?" said Salma. "Every time the Israelis perpetrate an atrocity of one kind of another in their undeclared war against their neighbours there's some kind of retaliation by steamed-up Arabs somewhere else. You saw on the news the other day about what happened in Petra, didn't you? Thousands of years of history went up in smoke along with those cowering Palestinian guerrilla fighters."

Mark didn't really have an opinion on the matter and he was more eager to burrow under the duvet than discuss the robbery. Several more police arrived on their bicycles, all well-armed and fully protected. Half an hour later, an ambulance leisurely pulled up into the road and paramedics ran into the house. It was only when stretchers were brought out with sheets covering the faces that Mark felt he could at last return to bed without appearing to be insufficiently concerned about the welfare of Salma's neighbours.

"Do you think they were murdered?" Mark wondered.

"I don't think we'll ever know," said Salma. "The news media doesn't bother itself with incidents like that anymore."

Mark remained troubled the following morning when he and Salma left for work. His pleasure at not having had to catch a bus and having rested in bed an extra hour was compromised when the couple crossed the road to see what had happened the night before.

Most of the windows were smashed and through the shattered glass Mark could see a degree of reckless vandalism that was far beyond what was necessary. The door to the house had been pulled off its hinges with a metal bar. And through the open doorway Mark could see peculiar symbols spray-painted over the hallway walls.

"Is that Arabic?" Mark asked Salma whom he'd reckoned would know.

She nodded. "I can't read it all from here," she said. "But it's not a quotation from the Koran."

"What does it say?"

"It doesn't appear to be especially complimentary towards Israel," she commented.

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No Future Ch. 70 Previous Part
No Future Series Info

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