The Old Woman

I moved in with help from my Dad (he didn't approve, because my mother didn't approve; he told me to call my mother every day). Then he was gone, and my new life began. Evelyn worked out arrangements for my official bed and board, how much I supposedly paid her and so on. I had few thousand in the bank, though in reality she didn't want any money from me.

These new living arrangement brought back my mother's suspicions, bigtime. In my first week at Evelyn's she made three unannounced visits. Evelyn played it perfectly. She said she needed a boarder, and called me the devil you know: that, at least, made sense my mother. Evelyn also told her very sharply that there would be no young women staying over in her house -- or in my bedroom at any time of day, unless my door was wide open; she displayed a poor opinion of girls in general. It made sense to my mother that her selfish son wanted someone to cook and clean for him. Her suspicion shaded over into embarrassment: I was just being strange, as usual.

Evelyn handled visits from my sisters pretty well too -- and my father, but he was a pushover. My mother was the only danger. She warned me not go round telling people you're living with a random old woman.

Actually I lived far better than I ever had at my family home. Evelyn wouldn't hear of me doing any cooking or cleaning. She asked what I liked to eat, and served it. Each morning toast, crispy bacon and fried eggs appeared before me at the kitchen table. After I'd eaten, a frail old arm would silently take the plate away and then she brought me coffee. She never ate with me, but just hovered nearby or stood right by my chair, in case I wanted anything. In fact I never saw her sit down to eat: she'd just snatch a morsel here and there as she moved about working.

She didn't mention anything about herself; she seemed content to be my oral sex slave and household slave, which was hard to say no to. But in the end I demanded to know more about her. And this was partly for my own good: what if some relative of hers barged in? But Evelyn's own family had all died, she said, she was the last one left. There was just one second cousin on the far side of Australia, in Perth: a woman who she had no time for.

Evelyn was friends with two other old women in the street, but privately she scorned them. I was her king, her god. I was everything. Her oral servitude went on without a day's break, and that's what I wanted and needed. She laughed at herself when she had to pick my pubes out of her mouth, something other females might have complained of.

When we watched TV she was unsparing in her contempt for fat or even slightly plump females. Even when a woman had the most perfect breasts or ass she'd say to me, "you know it's just blobs of fat, don't you?" as though expecting me to be disabused of my foolishness on the spot. "Males are just programmed to like them," I suggested, which she grudgingly accepted.

Now that I was with her all the time I noticed more than ever her deadness when I tried giving her physical affection. My gestures always led straight to sex, that is, to her sexual service to me, which naturally I enjoyed, in an intense but narrow way. But at the same time I began to feel rejected. It was, I reflected, a role reversal, because usually it was the female wanting the hugs and kisses and so on.

"You never talk about the men you had before me," I said one day, while she was shelling peas on a kitchen bench.

"They don't matter. It's all about you now."

"When was your first?"

She paused so long I thought she wasn't going to answer. Then she talked about working at the Cross. Sydney's King's Cross, she meant: working as a prostitute. That was her life, she said, until she got too old for it. Then she assisted a Madam. But after a while she fell out with the woman so badly and nastily that she got herself blacklisted -- this woman's tentacles spread not only through the brothel network but well into the police etc. From then on all she had were cleaning jobs, until finally the old age pension kicked in. And that was her life. Romance? None. The "Mrs" was a fiction.

"What age did you start at the Cross?"

"Let's not talk about it dear. Now dear, do you want tonight's potatoes mashed or fried?"