Well, never mind, that was only the first ten. It looked like the spam filter must have been turned off, for some reason. But there were bound to be some proper messages in there somewhere. What was next?The friend in your pants will be dancing like at a partyHere to help you leave the pain of smallnessYour gun stands to attention – everybody shocked!Wind joystick round leg!You can renew and restore your youth conditionThe truth behind 9 inchesNever disappoint her again!Make your stick voluminousYou’ll call it Peter the GreatTake part in a sexual marathon with our qualified helpThe hard friend in your pants will look up into the skyUpgrade your apparatusGive your rocket best fuel
Oh God. There couldn’t be many more of these – could there?Life with a small tool is pathetic and miserable
That was a bit harsh, surely. Amidst all the other problems in my life, it had never really occurred to me that I might have a ‘small tool’ before. I’d always considered myself pretty average in that department, I suppose. And yet now, in the face of this onslaught, my ‘male friend’ – as I would henceforth think of it – was beginning to feel as puny and wizened as a button mushroom.Tired of your little friend staring at the floor?Tired of ending the night with just a kiss?Fornicate like a macho!Now you don’t have to turn off the lights when you take off your pantsWomen will give you stars from the sky to sleep with youKnow her from the sexual side how is she inside completelyWomen want to be penetrated hardOnly huge boners can reach g-spotYou must be The Real Man with huge dignityGet the longest bananaHelp her find happiness! Rid her of pain!
Rid her of pain…? That was an interesting one. As these headers scrolled by in a kind of blur, as it became obvious that these were the only messages anyone had sent me in the last three weeks, my mind began to wander and I started wondering if these really were strangers writing to me, if I really was just the random recipient of advertising from drug companies and porn sites. Some of these phrases were beginning to sound quite philosophical, almost. I found myself wondering if there might even be a kind of wisdom buried within them – a wisdom intended for me, personally.Recapture a bit of your youth again
Yes, I would certainly like to do that.What else do you need to be a perfect man?
That was a question I had also asked myself, many times. Did these people have the answer?Learn how to be really inside her
That was something I’d never learned, with Caroline. How true. How much better if I’d learned to be really inside her.Give her concrete firmness
Again, was that where I’d gone wrong? Was that why I’d allowed her to walk away from me? Not enough concrete firmness?
I was up to about a hundred, now. And still they kept coming.Your rigid friend will keep his head straight upWomen will be singing odes to the majestic monster in your pantsFinally get the attention you deserve!Forget the past and focus on the future – get bigger todayNo woman will dare turn her back on youNobody can be blamed for your pitiful member but you can change itHello MaxFlaccidity won’t be your rod’s troubleEnlarging your male tool means winning a warSize matters in this real world
Wait a moment, though – ‘Hello Max’? That didn’t sound like spam.
Frantically I scrolled back up to the rogue message and looked at it again. It was from Trevor – Trevor Paige. It was a real email, from a real person. I clicked on it and with a surge of relief and happiness read the words which, to me, at that moment, seemed as eloquent, as moving, as pregnant with grace and meaning as anything that Shakespeare or any other poet had ever written.hi max will be in watford this wed how about a beer regards trev
And after reading this message over and over until it was burned on to my memory, I laid my arms across the computer keyboard, rested my head on them and sighed with heartfelt gratitude.
8
A few minutes later, I went to bed. I’d been planning to fight the jet lag, if I could, but I was way too tired. I fell asleep straight away but the sleep itself was fitful, disturbed.
Do you know the kind of dream that is halfway between being a dream and being something else? As if your waking mind refuses to lie still, and despite being exhausted it won’t quite allow your unconscious to take over. Well, it was like that at first. I kept seeing images of my old schoolfriend, Chris Byrne, and his sister, Alison, but I couldn’t tell if these images were from a dream or a memory. We were teenagers, and I was with them both in a place I didn’t recognize, somewhere in the country, surrounded by woodland. Chris had long hair, 1970s-style, and looked as though he had already reached shaving age: there were the beginnings of a beard growing in wisps around his face. He was sitting cross-legged on a carpet of leaves, playing his guitar and not taking any notice of Alison or me. There was an expanse of sparkling water at the edge of the wood and Alison was walking towards it. As she walked, with her back towards me, she took hold of the bottom of her T-shirt and pulled it off over her head slowly, seductively, with a teasing glance back in my direction. Underneath she was wearing an orange bikini top. Her skin was smooth, flawless and tawny brown.
My next-door neighbour took some rubbish out to her dustbin and the clanging of the lid woke me up sharply. I sat up in bed and looked at the clock: two-thirty in the afternoon. I sank down against the pillows and gazed at the ceiling, feeling suddenly wakeful. Why had I been dreaming – or thinking – about Chris and Alison? Presumably it was because for the last three weeks, along with all the other annoying things he had been doing, my father had kept asking me how Chris was doing and whether I was seeing much of him these days. How typical of him to insist upon this; how typical of him to seize (unknowingly?) on one of my sorest points and tweak it until I was on the verge of losing my temper every time he mentioned it. By the way, I should have explained this before now, but Chris was my oldest friend, from way back in our days at primary school in Birmingham. I’d kept in touch with him pretty consistently ever since then, until five years ago, when Caroline, Lucy and I had gone on holiday with Chris and his family to Cahirciveen, in County Kerry. It had been a disastrous holiday – disastrous because of an accident that happened to his son, Joe, who had ended up with quite nasty injuries. A lot of blame was flung around in the wake of this accident, in various directions, a lot of things were said that shouldn’t have been said, and the upshot had been that Chris and his family had left early, and flown back to England. Since then, he hadn’t contacted me once. Presumably he was waiting for me to contact him, but I didn’t feel able to do that, because … well, now is probably not the time to explain. It all gets very complicated. As for why the ins and outs of my friendship with Chris should be of any interest to my father (‘How is he?’ he kept asking, ‘When did you last see him? Who did he get married to?’), it seemed that this would remain one of life’s unsolved mysteries.