‘Do you think he was really testing himself or just being kinky?’ Mireille had asked, making conversation.

‘He was an ascetic, and for the ascetic there is no greater triumph than resisting the irresistible,’ Mikey had said – or something equally facetious.

That was when Mireille gave him a strange look, standing there in her underwear, smiling her godless smile.

‘Do you want to play Gandhi with me?’ she asked.

Did he say yes with his eyes, did he nod, or did he stare at her with the wonderment of a child?

‘Well, get undressed,’ she said in her commanding tone, and slipped off her underwear. She lay down next to him, took his hand in hers. ‘Is this how Gandhi did it?’

Mikey was no longer sure whether Gandhi actually asked the girls to undress or whether he touched them, even if only to hold their hands. But he wanted to test the ascetic side of himself. He breathed in Mireille's perfume, her sweat, imagined with his closed eyes the pulsation in her vagina, where her other hand rested. She giggled, fought to suppress her laughter. She did all she could not to laugh at the rigid way he held himself, his one free fist clenched, trying to ignore his erect penis, those vivid veins, the tremulous enormity. She laughed inwardly, he felt the tremors of her enjoyment, sensed that she was not mocking his Gandhi-like heroism. He had to detach his mind from the throbbing beast between his legs. She was celebrating that struggle.

Heaven knows, it took all his will-power, all the summoned-up tyranny of mind over body, not to rise up and plunge his tongue into Mireille's beautiful mouth, his penis into the mound exposed between her flung-back legs. He knows now that she would not have resisted, that they might well have satisfied an unspoken lust, quickly. And then, ashamed of their ‘incest’, realizing the sinfulness of this word, instilled in them by the family, the Church, their upbringing, the whole thing would have ended. They would never have done it again, or spoken about it, or even thought about it, for that matter.

Instead, they resisted. Maybe that's why they continued to ‘play Gandhi’ many times after that day. At first, Mireille was irritated by the ‘mental masturbation’ she said he was asking her to participate in.

‘Either we fuck or we don't, but let's get it over with!’

But he convinced her that ‘fucking’ would destroy the true beauty of their relationship, that it was better to lie side by side, naked, bathed in sweat, moist all over, their love centred in their minds (yes, he had started using expressions like that, learned from books, from discussions with that solitary voice in his head he thought of as God – yes, blame Him too!). After a while, Mireille took part because, as she put it, this ‘mind sex’ really ‘wound her up’ and made sleeping with her boyfriend something unbelievable. Soon she went further, started craving those afternoons in the heat – his house mostly, there was never anyone home – as a substitute for fucking with her boyfriend. This wonderful ‘nothingness’, she said, gave her a sense of satisfaction greater than any penis. Fucking, she said, was like eating a rich meal, it made her feel bloated and nauseous. They often fell asleep, side by side, their faces empty, their minds serene.