Anonymous Pornographer

With Heston away for three weeks, Margie had assumed that she would have a number of sexual encounters to fill in the empty nights.

But no males called, and she called no males. She met two old flames during this period of abstention but during the fairly brief conversations, nothing seemed to spark and her interest evaporated.

Soon, she was amazed at herself. She'd gone two weeks without intercourse and felt absolutely no ill-effect. It had been reasonable to expect, she thought, to experience withdrawal systems of some sort perhaps related to starvation.

Arriving at the book shop at 10.30 after getting her hair and nails done, she worked on invoices for a couple of hours and then went to lunch alone, because Irma was waiting for a salesperson to arrive to take her to the French Café.

Margie went to the closest eatery where reasonably priced and reasonably quality food was served.

Standing just inside the entrance, she could see the room was full. When about to turn to leave she saw somebody stand and wave to her. She focused: it was Paddy Llewellyn.

Great, she thought. A charming man to lunch with. Perhaps this was destiny, the opportunity to finally roll him into bed. You slut, she admonished herself cheerfully.

He kissed her on the cheek and in the confined space carelessly allowed his left-hand to drag over her right breast as he moved away, causing her nipples to stir.

Why hadn't he allowed his hand to linger? She knew that he had a likening for younger women. Well, he was fifty-two and she was four years younger. No, make that six, she lied. Obviously, she was not his type.

A few minutes of idle chat followed. Then she made a direct move.

"Are you presently seeing anyone, darling?"

"Yes, the accountant from Lepper Trucking."

"A female accountant, surely?"

"Surely."

Well, that was explicit; currently he was otherwise engaged.

"Look Paddy," she said, wrinkling her nose, a cultivated mannerism that some people, men of course, had told her was cute.

A university lecturer who specialised in linguistics had told her, resting up in her bed, that it may well provoke people into listening to what she was about to say.

Paddy looked at her probably thinking she really was lovely, although a fading rose and these days was carrying far too much weight.

He may even have been thinking why was she engaging in that mouse-like twitching with her nose. Was she about to sneeze?

Margie was pleased to have his undivided attention, despite Paddy having loaded a piece of braised steak on to his fork, ready to lift upwards.

"You and I have been close pals for years, right?"

"Right," he nodded.

"Well, may I ask exactly what is you type of woman you take to bed? But don't answer that if it's something that you would prefer not to discuss with an old pal."

Margie cringed when she realised, she'd used that forbidden word, old.

Paddy focused on her intently. First, she'd asked if he was having it off with someone and then she was attempting to get the specification of his A-type bed companion. He wondered if she had someone lined up for him.

He was obliged to play ball.

"If you think I like them to be young, juicy, athletic and preferably to be currently unattached, then you'd be right.

"But there are other very important requirements?"

"They must not be too intellectual, otherwise they tend to yak, yak and recite sonnets. Nor do I want anyone prone to weeping, loaded and ready to spout recriminations or wanting to be spanked or insisting I call them Daddy's Girl.

"Good gracious, are there women like that?"

Paddy nodded.

"Perhaps more than what you could imagine. But the two really big no-nos are women who mess up the bathroom or between sessions want to get on to the phone and talk."

Margie realised that she was a non-qualifier on several counts.

"Oh," said Paddy. "I don't want screamers. They deflate me."

"Really, it has that effect? I guess I'm a big of a screamer at times."

"I guessed that."

"Really?

"Tell me, how do you narrow down the selection?

"Gosh, Margie. Getting me to tell you all this makes me sound like a dirty old man. My preferred type of woman to bed is rather quite common, statistically speaking."

"She will be aged between twenty and thirty-five, reasonably quiet with the appearance of being somewhat dignified, ripe and juicy, fit looking, clean and well-dressed and, as I mentioned earlier, preferably currently unattached."

Margie fired her next question.

"How do you find these women."

"I no longer have to try. Many of my friends, especially women, often attempt to match me up with someone."

"To get you remarried and settled down."

"Hell no, almost without exception these women I am being introduced to, or asked if I wish to meet them, are looking for the same thing as me, a few lusty sessions in bed. Believe it or not, this city is full of promiscuous women."

Margie felt herself blush and was glad to see Paddy was head-down cutting his next piece of steak.

He looked up.

"Why are you asking me all these questions?"

"Just to get an idea of what attracts certain men to certain women. I really had no idea of the forces into play. I simply thought if you wanted to hump, you went out and found someone who'd want to hump you."

"That's a rather simplistic or indeed animalistic approach to the mating game."

She pressed on.

"Do you ever take on older women?"

Paddy stared at her while finishing chewing.

"Do you mean yourself in particular?"

Margie turned scarlet, and was glad that would be obvious to him. She desired to portray herself as being sensitive rather than someone who'd been around the block a few too many times.

"Well, since you personalised my question, I must say that it's been some years since the thought of you and me coming together one day has crossed my mind. I never thought of the possibility as being objectionable."

Paddy looked at his plate, choosing his words carefully.

"To be honest with you Margie, there's always been far too much competition around for me to lust after you and besides, a casual romp may well spoil the special relationship we seem to have. We are real friends, Margie. I don't really have many of those."

"Now, has the interrogation about my mating preferences concluded?"

Margie nodded feeling a little disappointed that she'd just lost something. She supposed it was Paddy's heartless rejection of her sexually. He'd taken from her a piece of her very being, her sense of womanhood.

Why should she care? After all, she'd suspected as much.

Although right down at that moment, within a few hours Margie would realise that her long relationship with Paddy truly had been on the basis of real friendship. She had occasionally thought about him sexually, though never desired him as she had some other men.

She knew that she must rebuild her confidence with positive thinking.

She thought she'd continue to find enjoyment with men who liked a slightly plump, talkative woman who messed up the bathroom and sometimes screamed into orgasms with the right incentives, provoking normally unemotional bedfellows to lay there gasping, "Oh, you are awesome."

Stupid Paddy would never realise what he was missing.

Those moments of reflection ended as she watched Paddy clean up the gravy on his plate with a piece of bread.

"This always is the best bit," he grinned.

The familiar friendliness of that grin made her feel better.

Their eyes locked, and he spoke.

"Look, after we finish coffee would you like to walk with me down to the waterfront? I've been mulling over something in recent days that I'd like to talk to you about."

"Sure, that's the sort of thing good friends do," replied Margie, cheerfully.

Chapter 6

The second son of a small-town house builder, Paddy Llewellyn was a journalist of the old school, joining a provincial newspaper as a cadet report in the days before specialist tertiary training was available for aspiring journalists. At that time, he was four months short of turning eighteen.

His principal tutor was supposed to be the chief reporter, a worn-out elderly man whose liking for liquor and other men's wives sullied his reputation. Actually, he was a brilliant scribe as good reporters were called in those days, but his tutoring skills were virtually non-existent.

Fortunately for Paddy, his name appealed to the crusty chief subeditor, a hard-bitten short, thickset woman who seemed to have two delights in life - trying to drown her smoker's cough in whisky and virtually overwhelming earnest young reporters with jewels of learning information amid lashings of biting sarcasm related to incompetence.

Not surprisingly, those cadet and junior-grade reporters who survived her frontal abuse and occasional kick in the butt or cuff across the ear, went forth and prospered in journalism wherever they went in the world.

The reason for that was because she was a damn good tutor despite her unorthodox teaching style. Those who ignored the abuse, or at least pushed the embarrassment and hurt aside, engaged in an indelible learning process offered to them by a unassuming and gifted teacher.

Rosemary, as the crusty old dame was christened but Ros she became as soon as she left the family nest, married late in life and her reproductive organs may already had become dysfunctional through excessive alcohol, at least that was the supposition in the newsroom because no off-spring eventuated after the 43-year-old married.

It seems fair to assume that she would have wanted children, but she never spoke about it, even when being escorted out of necessity from the pub to her apartment burbling away, absolutely intoxicated. Years later, Paddy learned he'd been 'intellectually adopted' by Ros Weavers, when she burst into tears twice on his final day on the newspaper, the final and public outburst amazing old-timers on the staff.

Witnessing Ros crying had astounded them, shattering the accepted belief that she was incapable of display emotion apart from contempt and hatred.

Men often become jittery when a woman cries. Those hardened newspapermen seeing Ros cry that late afternoon had a reaction closer to dismay. To find that Ros had a streak of humanity unnerved most of them and thereafter she was understandably regarded with increased respect.

It had been long recognised that she was probably the best all-round journalist that the newspaper company had ever employed.

This strange relationship between the cub reporter and crusty subeditor began on Paddy's second day when the cadet reporter held elevated by his arrival from the bottom rung of the ladder in the reporter's room, was teaching him how to do the Shipping Column.

"Patrick!" came the call from the subediting room.

Paddy remained concentrating on his tutorial.

Smack!

An editorial style-book thrown by the chief subeditor across the hallway stuck him on the corner of its spine behind his right ear. He dropped like a stone.

"Throw a bucket of water on to him and when he comes around tell him I want him double-quick," rasped Ros not bothering to leave her chair to inspect her handiwork.

Fortunately, the motherly women's page and art's editor was in the reporter's room and she cradled the stirring youngster against her massive chest and called for a cloth and a glass of water.

Paddy struggled to break free because although he was eighteen, he was still uncomfortable about becoming too close to older females but Joan held him tightly.

"Don't be in a hurry to be abused by that bitch," she soothed. "She'll accuse you of getting in the way of her missile."

The five male reporters standing around them quickly moved away as Ros stomped into the room.

"Get back to work you lazy pricks," she snarled. "We're waiting for your copy.

"Where's your boss, out drinking or fornicating, probably both, I guess," she smirked.

"Leave him, Joan. If he can't take a crack over the lug he'll not survive as a reporter."

Joan prepared to argue but caught the maverick expression of the much smaller woman. She made a dignified withdrawal, leaving the victim sitting on the floor holding a hand over his sore ear.

"Silly boy," Ros said. "When I throw things, everyone knows to duck. You must have been told that during your induction."

"Now, when I call Patrick, you come running. Understand?"

She began walking away before he replied.

"All right Rosemary."

Nobody gasped. Everyone in the reporting room and the subeditors at the doorway to their room privy to that suicidal comment was too stunned to gasp.

The comment had frozen Ros in her tracks. Her shoulders hunched, her jaw jutted out. She turned and icily said in a low voice, "What did you call me?"

All eyes turned on to Paddy, who was now standing. Most of them felt pity for this new youngster faced with making a major backdown on only his second day on the job.

"You call me Patrick and I'll call you Rosemary."

A collective gasp swept through the room.

All eyes were on Ros.

She turned and walk out, calling as she went, "Take five to wash up and get back in here pronto, Paddy.

That little cameo immediately became an office legend.

Thereafter, Ros's strident call of Paddy became part of office routine. He ran copy to her, went out to buy her lunch order and even took out and collected her dry cleaning and paid her rates, gas and electricity bills, standing beside her as she examined the receipts and counted any change involved in the monetary transactions.

A new cadet joined, automatically stepping Paddy one step up the seniority ladder.

Paddy taught the newcomer his duties while carrying out his own induction as a real reporter. Within three days he was free of his former tasks, except one.

The newcomer had been told to go to Ros precisely at 11.50 to collect her written order for lunch and pick up the money.

The poor girl, the newspaper's first female cadet reporter since Ros and later Joan, went confidently into Ros's Den as the sub-editing room was known to everyone but the editor.

The uncoordinated click-clacking of typewriters and noisy telephone conversations in the reporters' room momentarily froze in time as Ros' rasping voice vented the air, "Fuck off, Paddy gets my lunch."

The 18-year-old burst into the reporters' room crying and fell straight into Paddy's arms.

"Don't worry, her bark is worse than her bite. She's really quite a character, you know."

The cadet looked at him mortified.

"Liar," she shouted, and fell into Joan's comforting arms.

Three things eventuated from that horrible little incident.

From that day, the new cadet stood up to Ros and acquired a transfer of knowledge that eventually led her to a senior editor's post on a large newspaper in the USA.

Later on the day of that incident, the young lady apologised to Paddy for calling him a liar and took him to a milkbar when she shouted him afternoon tea. They went to the pictures, as cinema was called in those days, the next evening. Afterwards they went down to the beach, it was a lovely night with a half-moon hanging above them when they had sex, a first for both of them.

But the really significant disclosure was Paddy's summary of Ros: 'Don't worry, her barks worse than her bite. She really quite a character, you know'. Everyone else had a personal tag for Ros, such as 'Viper', 'grumpy nasty old bitch' and perhaps the most creative one, 'an indiscriminate character assassin who ought to be jailed'.

In all probability, Paddy was the only one who accurately saw her for what she was and that ability to assess people and then relate to them to draw information out of them became one of his trademarks as a journalist. Conversely, Ros recognised he had talent and in her feisty manner coaxed him to release and develop those talents.

Five years later Paddy left for London to acquire overseas experience in newspaper journalism.

The evening before his farewell Ros and her husband took him out to dinner, and for a while Paddy found himself in the company of very outgoing and conversationally a very sophisticated woman.

Her knowledge of the arts was impressive, though he managed to make some sound contributions.

"Have you ever thought to upping your reading and visits to galleries and talking to the right people in preparation to becoming an arts reporter," she asked.

"No, I've a feeling that I've either become a foreign correspondent or a subeditor," laughed Paddy.

At the door when they were leaving, Ros's husband having already gone outside to their waiting taxi, the old Ros returned.

She thrust an envelope into his hand.

"Tell anyone I've done this and I'll have your balls for breakfast," she growled.

Paddy waved them goodbye. He then looked into the envelope which contain a cheque and a letter.

He read the note:

I sailed to London on a ship in the fifties to try to make my name internationally as a newspaper journalist. I had a hard time winning acceptance because I was female, a short and grumpy one,

trying to break into a man's world.

That was bad enough, but the worse thing was being under-funded. That first winter was the worse time in my entire life as I'd lost my first job, had not found a replacement job and I sat in my bed-sit hungry and freezing.

I don't want you to have that same experience.

Good Luck.

Rosemary

So, his feisty little tutor had decided to give him some pocket money, thought Paddy. A generous amount, he hoped.

He pulled out the cheque and read the amount in disbelief. It was for five thousand pounds, not dollars. He was overwhelmed and then over the moon.

The next morning, on his final day at work, he went to the office early and berated Ros for being, in his words, 'obscenely extravagant'.

She looked at him balefully. At first, he thought he was going to be told to take a hike.

But she smiled and said, "I've never had a son, and then you came along."

She turned away from him and said, "Now, piss off. I've busy."

She cried again at the office farewell.

Paddy loved life in Britain, though he never managed to get a job in Fleet Street where most of the big dailies were still located.

He secured a reporting job in a thriving provincial paper in a small university city, did some book and theatre reviews when no one else wanted the opportunities and the art's editor one day slapped an review he'd written about a Christmas pantomime.

Paddy thought his copy was being rejected.

"Who wrote this for you, laddie?" asked the gruff Scotsman, brushing his stained moustache with a finger.

"Nobody."

"Well, it beats the stuffing out of any panto review we've published in the years I've been arts editor. It's bloody brilliant, laddie, and the Editor-in-Chief agrees with me.

"I want you on my team, and he's approved that subject to your agreement.

"Say yes, my boy. I'll help to make you a star."

Paddy married an actress, a darling of the social set, and a year later their daughter was born.

Six months later mother and daughter disappeared and a solicitor's letter arrived for Paddy.

The divorce was covered in the social pages of the newspapers and magazines, with innocent Paddy being written up as the villain of the piece. When it was all over, despite the offer of arts editorship by his newspaper, Paddy left for New Zealand, driving through to India where he shipped his Land Rover home before continuing on to Singpore and Hong Kong and then touring South America.

Nobody knew when he would be returning home yet there was a pile of well-wishing letters waiting for him at his parent's home. He suspected these former acquaintances had been primed by Ros, now retired. He wrote to her once and sometimes twice a month, a practice he continued until her death.