Ahhh, so it is here, as I knew it would be. The end. It has been a glorious affair for the last 8 months. I have been kept in his thrall by his cool, calculating grey-blue eyes, his daring-do, his romanticism that let me look past the harshness that would sometimes surface and jar against my sensibilities. Breathless in anticipation, I have looked forward to those stolen moments away from my family, to be just with him, well actually, both of them. Behind the debonair man with the black comma of hair falling onto his forehead in that endearing, little boy lost way that lured me into thinking that he needed me, there was his partner. Deadlier, more devastating, yet completely out of reach. The intrigue to find the threads of commonality that we all seek to enable us to understand another’s take on the world, bound me completely to these two men. But, like all things, I knew it would end and I would feel incomplete for a while until the hole they left in my life begins to become filled with other passions, interests. So now I remain. Quiet, contemplative, joyous for their unexpected intrusion into my life … hmmmm … all our lives really, for when I was with them, I was not with my family.
This selfish diversion started just after Christmas and the New Year when I decided that it was time to treat myself to a little something of what I would like most – a little time to myself! I had just surfaced from 6 months of pneumonia, pleurisy and secondary chest infections and the sun was shining rather pleasantly – not too hot but still deceptively dangerous for my fair, Northern hemisphere skin. Oh! for some ozone so that I can run around in shorts and Ts and not worry about being eaten alive by the sun, ravished for my audacity for just being there on the ground out in the open! And then I saw him. Fleetingly as I thumbed through a local newsrag. Ahah! Now here was something I desired. Unattainable. Mysterious. Yet where would I find him? It was a few days later as I strolled along Lygon St in Carlton that I saw him again. Just there in the window of Readings, one of Melbourne’s more famous book shops. He was looking at me, beckoning, taunting me to go within and be with him.
I stepped over the threshold … and the addiction began.
I was hooked – well and truly – hook, line and sinker as they say.
So, who are these men that I write brazenly about now? That I would publish openly to have had time away from my family to be with them? With whom I have blatantly had an affair – for that was what it was after all, to exclude my family and all others to private time with them. To think about them, muse over their latest actions – although I did share some of those thoughts with my other half to such an extent that he too became intrigued! Hahah! Yes, now you have twigged. My love affair has been with an author. My present to myself was a book.
“The Man with the Golden Typewriter”
Letters from Ian Fleming to his publishers, loved ones and fans of his James Bond series.
GM Cochrane Author 