The Secret Breakfast

In my dressing room I drink peppermint tea and wonder about him touching my knee again. Like yesterday. Just a light tickle, or brush, as he stretched across for The Telegraph. I looked dead on camera one and flushed. The tap of his wedding band rodgered around my bone marrow. Fanny pulsed, live on breakfast television. It really did.

Cookie

All the boys called me ‘spunky biscuit’ after that party. This soon got truncated to just ‘biscuit’ and then became ‘cookie’. My mother, unaware of the name’s salty origin, took to calling me ‘cookie’ after Jez and Randolph joined us on a camping trip in the New Forest.
‘Cookie!’ she’d shout up the stairs when dinner was ready.
‘Come and get it!’
Downstairs, I would protest,
‘Mum, can’t you just call me David?’
‘Oh Cookie, you are silly.’

Top Shelf

I sat in the corner as they cupped the barmaid who filled a tankard with shots of green and blue, but mostly amber. Had to down it. Down in one. Down it, down it, down it.
When I came to, a man stood over me brandishing his Johnson, a smile as deep as a scuzz starlet's wounds. Our eyes met and it dawned on me that I, to that point, had never felt true love. And I never would.