How did I end up in bed with the veterinarian’s brother, I suppose only the veterinarian knows, in any case I am now embracing his lean body on my blue sofa bed and wishing I had curtains that could be drawn (I imagine that the veterinarian is not far away). It had to be either the leader of The Green Fingers or the veterinarian’s brother, the one fat the other skinny, from one extreme to the other, nothing in between, out here in the country.
‘What is that?’ he asks and winces and sticks his hand under the sheet.
‘I’m afraid it’s a chew toy.’
And then the dog that has until now stayed in the garden arrives. It wants to join us.
‘No, I won’t have that,’ he says.
‘It normally lies under the duvet, otherwise it starts howling’ (it’s tilting its head back).
‘Well, then it will get angry.’
‘It is hot,’ I say, ‘we can let it have the duvet. Otherwise we probably won’t get any peace.’
I pull the duvet off him and pat the bed, it jumps up and disappears under the duvet. And so it did not see how we got our bodies up and running. Everything that there had been, rested in the body, it was difficult to become light and free. Like being thawed after a long winter.
‘Do you feel your unassailability shaken?’ he asks.
But it is not love, it is kindness. So no, I don’t.
A little later a honk is heard from the road, I sit up and grab the duvet, ‘that’s my sister,’ he says and jumps out of the bed, in a cloud of feathers (there is a hole in the duvet), along with the dog which the car makes furious. I must be happy, because I start to sing (a couple of verses of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, if anyone wants to know).