The Stalker

"Yes, it's fine." Danni replied.

"Will someone light a candle so that I can see what's going on around here?"

"Danny," Danni began, "I'd like for you to meet my mother."

"Hi Danny. Long time no see."

Someone had put my brain into first gear and let the clutch out. "Christ, you? What the hell happened to you?"

"It's a long story." She came to me and kissed me, softly, gently, on the lips. My brain had just short-shifted into top gear. "I have plenty of time. Have a seat and tell me all."

She sat and looked, firstly at Danni and then at me. "Danni here is your daughter."

Fuck! What an opening line. It was my turn to look, this time from Danni to her mother. Recognition had completed its entrance. "I think that an explanation is in order. Sandi, (I have just recalled her name) how is this possible? I can remember the four days that we spent together before you disappeared without a word. I was frantic, racing around like a chook with its head off trying to find you. I even contacted your family only to be told, in no uncertain terms that if I didn't stop I'd find myself in a lot of trouble. It was hinted that drugs might be conveniently found on my person, enough drugs to see me put away for too many years."

"I'm sorry about that, but there was nothing that I could do about it. My father threatened that he would have you killed unless I forgot all about you, and had the magazine me ship off to its London office on the pretext of covering the UK music scene. You should have seen the look on his face when I arrived home five years later with Danni. He almost ahd a heart attack, especially when I told him who her father was."

"Why didn't you try to contact me?"

"Because I was told that you and Suzie were married."

"What lying bastard told you that?"

"My father. It wasn't until Danni rang this morning and told me your story that I found out that he had lied to me."

"So this is the reason that you have been interviewing me, not for some article, but to find out about me."

"Yes, I'm sorry to trick you like this, but Mum told me ages ago that you were my father, my real father, not the bastard that she was forced to marry by her parents. I had to find out the real story, and what you were like now, because Mum has been in love with you for the past thirty years. She went through those years thinking that you were happily married to Suzie and had kids and all."

"I have to admit that I don't often think about you," I told Sandi, "Every now and then, when I'm feeling particularly lonely, your image appears and I remember that you came the closest to being the one that I would give up my lifestyle for. Then I would remember the hurt that I felt when I came home from that gig to find you gone. Each time I pushed the memory back into its pigeon hole again."

"I'm sorry about that. I never stopped thinking about you, and those memories kept me sane whenever my so-called husband cheated on me, or did something totally selfish that told me that he didn't love me, that he'd never loved me. He even told me that the only reason that he married me was to keep in my father's good books. That hurt, let me tell you. When Danni rang me this morning and told me what she had done, and what she had found out about you, I just had to come and see you."

"Did you hear that?" I said.

"Hear what?" They both said.

"That loud clanging noise was the sound of the penny dropping." They both had a puzzled look on their faces. "Last night when I said that I was old enough to be your father you said, and I quote, 'you are', that wasn't a question was it?"

"No. But I couldn't say anything until I had spoken to Mum."

"The big question now is, what do we do now?"

"I know what I want to happen." Danni said. "I want the two of you to get your shit together and enjoy the rest of your lives. That will of course mean that Mum will have to get rid of the bastard so that she can marry you."

"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself?" I asked.

"Well someone has to. If I left it to either of you to make the first move nothing will get done."

"Danny." Sandi said to me. "If I may make a suggestion. What would you say, before we do anything that we might live to regret, that you agree to me moving in with you to see if we can live together?"

"Are you sure that you can live in my hovel? It's nothing like what you are used to."

"If you live there then I'm willing to try it, no matter how grungey it is. Danni tells me that it's functional and comfortable, that's enough for me."

We did a lot of talking, first over lunch, and then in breaks in my schedule of things to do to keep my business afloat, and then over dinner. By the time we got to my place we were pretty much talked out.

"If it's alright with the two of you, I'd like to stay the night here with you. I'll take the sofa."

"You're only doing that so your mother can't claim it so that she doesn't have to sleep with me."

"There was no way that I would sleep on that think, I enjoy a certain level of creature comforts." So it was that I found myself sharing my bed with the mother of my daughter. "Sandi." I whispered to her, sometime after we had made love.

"Yes my love." She whispered to me.

"How is it that you fell pregnant, I was meticulous in wearing a condom whenever I made love to a girl, and I can't remember any of them breaking."

"It didn't. I was in love with you, had been for ages although you weren't to know that, and one night after you had gone to sleep I picked up the condom, untied the knot you'd made in the end, and emptied the contents into my pussy. I pushed it in by shoving my finger into the tip and turning it inside out and making sure that it was wiped clean inside me. It's not a lot different to you jerking off into a cup at a sperm bank. It worked. I was ovulating at the time and it took. I was going to have your baby, and I was happy. That was until my father tracked me down and arrived with his usual bunch of heavies and dragged me away. I didn't know that I was actually pregnant until a couple of months after that, but by that time I was in London."

"Your father, what is he going to say about this?"

"Not a lot, his lifestyle got him in the end and he died a couple of months ago from liver failure."

"What about your husband?"

"I'll make him a token payment in exchange for not dragging his indiscretions through the media, these include fraud and extortion on the orders of my wonderful father. He'll take the money and run if I know him."

"I guess then that the plan is coming together nicely." My hand had been working on her and she was responding. We took no precautions, because none were necessary, she had, after all, passed through menopause some years ago.

"You two were going at it like a couple of randy rabbits." Danni said as we arrived to enjoy the breakfast that she had prepared for us. "When you two have removed all traces of your debauched lifestyle from your person, we need to get to work. The three of us are going to run your business from now on."

"But there's not enough work or income to keep us." I said lamely.

"Weren't you paying attention last night? Granpa is dead and has left Mum with more money than she knows what to do with. We can expand the business to a viable concern with the help of some of her money. We take on more bands, sign up more venues and before you know it we have a thriving agency. If you're lucky I'll even run it for you so that you can take it easy. Retire, go on tours and holidays, enjoy the rest of your lives, because God knows you deserve it, both of you."