Spontaneous removal of clothes on the living-room floor is a thing of the past. To make love now, Pete and I require Procedures.
First we must wait until nightfall. Then, before he comes into my black room, Pete switches off the lights in the rest of the house, closes curtains, shuts doors, banishes any stray photons that might fall on naked flesh. Then he must find his way to my lair. He has become better at this, less likely to end up in the airing cupboard, or bash into the bookcase as he comes through the door.
I reach out to touch him once he is inside the room. I wriggle past him to lay the sheep along the bottom of the door. Then I wriggle back, stand up with my body against his, and take him in my arms.
Now we can get down to business. “James Bond never had these difficulties,” grumbles Pete, as he struggles to grasp the operating principle of an unfamiliar fastening by touch alone.
“Hmm,” I say, having unbuttoned him, “I thought I was getting somewhere, but you appear to be wearing a vest.”
Once, in the early days, we knocked our heads together so hard that we both saw stars. Pete has ground his elbow into my eye; on another occasion, I punched him on the jaw and his head hit the wall beside the bed. It is a single bed, and we have also fallen out of it, both jointly and severally.
At Pete’s place of work, there is a big campaign to eliminate “lost time accidents.” Employees are showered with leaflets exhorting them not to run on the stairs, and to look both ways before they cross the road. Pete and I wonder what a risk assessor would make of our activities. Would he ban them outright, perhaps, or insist on the wearing of hard hats? The trick, we have discovered, is to make sure the other person always knows where your head is. So we talk more, or make sounds. This also helps to make up for the absence of facial expressions indicating ecstasy, boredom, delight, etc.
I worry less now about noise; with the window shrouded in layers of blackout, it is unlikely that anyone will be able to hear.