Trouserlessness

I always take my trousers off when I visit – why is that? On one level, the answer is quite obvious: I am growing too fat for them, their waistband cutting uncomfortably into the vastness of my belly. But then I never take them off elsewhere, my trousers, W. has noticed. Only with him, with him and Sal. Only in his front room, whether the shutters are open or closed.

Once, when a friend of theirs called round unexpectedly, I leapt up, frantically looking for my trousers, before she entered the room. Too late! He always takes his trousers off when he visits, W. told her. I feel some sense of shame, at least, W. says. He didn't think I did, but there it was: shame over my trouserlessness. My public trouserlessness.

Ought he to take it as a complement, my taking off my trousers in his front room, every time I visit? Is it a tribute to intimacy, to my trust of him, of Sal? Is it a kind of gift?, he wonders. 

Nestled in these questions is a much broader one, of course, W. says: that of his significance for me as a whole. Who is he, for me? What does he permit? He likes to think of me as free and wild, W. says. As a roaming idiot on the wind. Sal thinks the same. That Lars …, she says, and lets her sentence trail off. Sometimes I allow him, too to become a roaming idiot. Sometimes we roam insouciantly together.

But then he leaves me, then we return to our homes on the opposite edges of the country, I to the northeast, he to the southwest. Then he leaves me, he imagines, to roam on my own on the gusts of idiocy. He has to retire from idiocy! It's too much for him! He holes up with Sal. They close the shutters and eat dinner. And where am I?

Circumambulating my town, looking for my 75p dinners. Circumambulating it, drinking pint after pint on the way. Circumambulating my town and then taking my trousers off my in my flat, then all my clothes. He can imagine me, naked and bloated in my flat. Naked, bloated, half-drunk, bleary eyed amidst the plaster dust and squalor, and then rising next morning to do it all again.

Is that how I live? I can't live that way, can I? No one could, not even me. I must hole up, too, closing my curtains. I must sit alone the dark to restore my energy, whispering to the potatoes that are the only foodstuff in my flat. I, too, must be exhausted from my idiocy, taking solace in my potatoes, W. says, my potato friends.

'You talk to them, don't you?' He sees me talking to them in his mind's eye, W. says. He sees me sharing my adventures. Yes, that's who I go home to, when I'm done with our adventures, and head to the airport. I'm thinking only of my potatoes, my potato friends, with whom I will recover in darkness.