On Reading a Mills and Boon

His fingers ran down its spine tentatively,

a surprising sensitivity contained

within those powerful, muscular digits.

‘Read me,’ it gasped.

Preliminary material was dispensed with.

Plunging in, his hands reached firmly

beneath the covers, spreading its pages wide,

as he sought out its hot inky centre,

and buried himself deep within it.

It was all over before you could say

‘our love became a burning mist’.

They lay in silence, limp and ashamed.

We found Gérard Depardieu’s left ear after all, alongside the racing car and the boot in the Scrabble box. But we were unable to find a section of the submersible’s on-board computer, which as the jigsaw box informed us, can automatically maintain a fixed depth as far down as 610 metres for up to ten hours. We also have a piece left over: it is blue with three nobbly bits.

By the evening, the rain had abated but not soon enough to prevent me from making inroads on A Surgeon in her Stocking. It was the last thing that beautiful but feisty midwife Ellie Forbes wanted, but when brooding Italian surgeon Alessandro Montieri walked into the obstetrics ward that December and back into her life, she couldn’t help but think that all her Christmases had come at once.

I read sections of it out loud to Dylan; we haven’t laughed so much in ages.

Wednesday August 15th

O do not ask if I am beach body ready

O do not ask

if I am beach body ready.

Observe how the folds

of my stomach ripple

like the wind-pulled waves.

Rub your hands

over these pale buttocks,

sand-smoothed by time.

Note my milk-white limbs

like washed-up whalebones,

stranded and useless.

Consider these tufts of hair

on my back and shoulders

which sprout like sea-grass.

And listen to the lapping

of my socks

at the shores of my sandals.

And still you ask me

if I am beach body ready?

We made it to the beach and laid out our towels in the drizzle. We bit into our hard-boiled eggs and gazed out at the grey sea.

‘Why did you and Mum split up?’ asked Dylan, still staring off into the distance.

I paused while I considered this.

‘I think she thought me to be something of a disappointment.’

‘A disappointment? In what way?’

‘Not in any specific way. Just generally. A general disappointment. Like a film you’ve looked forward to watching for ages, and then you see it, and you realise it wasn’t worth the wait. The plot makes no sense, the dialogue is stilted, the casting’s all wrong. A bit like Babe: Pig in the City.’

He smiled. This time, it was his turn to pause and reflect.

‘Did you used to write her poems?’

‘Your mother was the reason I started writing poems. I’d write her one every day.’

‘Then what happened?’