Chapter 2

When I met Duncan, he had been just one of the other guys on the creative writing course I'd taken. At the time I didn't plan to be an author. It was just a course that was going; it was free and it took up a couple of evenings during the week. Back in those days most folks would have considered me a geek. I was nothing to write home about in the looks department and I'd never had much luck with girls.

Consequently I'd gotten into the habit of spending too much time sitting in pubs drinking alone. One evening I'd sat and watched some geezer drink himself into oblivion and realised that if I didn't pull my socks up, I could be watching myself in a few years time. I decided I needed to find something to do other than pour alcohol down my throat every night.

So from the perspective of someone looking for something other to do than sitting in a pub drinking myself silly, the writing course had looked like a good idea. There'd obviously be plenty of homework that would take up even more of my free time and would be a good excuse not to drink.

Duncan and I hit it off together right away. Although already a pretty accomplished writer he was another geek, and he didn't fit in that well with the rest of the class either; so we kind-a teamed up. We got on so well in fact that before very long we were hanging around together quite a lot of the time outside of the writing class.

I soon learnt that he had a twin sister; he talked about her quite a lot really, although I wasn't to meet her until the funeral. Actually sometimes I thought that Duncan's only knowledge of girls came from his life with Aileen. Truthfully Duncan appeared to be even shyer around females than I was at the time.

Over the next year or so, Duncan and I became great friends. I went back to his hometown with him and met his parents, and he got to know my family as well. I'd always been a bit of a loner and as time went by I gathered that so had Duncan.

About the only real difference between the two of us was that Duncan rode around on a little motorbike, whereas I'd always driven a car.

I'll explain. My elder brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident when I was very young, and my parents — especially my mother — were paranoid that the same thing would happen to me. So I only rode a motorcycle long enough to get a full licence. Then at eighteen and with my father's help, I'd bought my first car.

Duncan and I had been friends for maybe two years when it happened. I went round to his digs one evening to pick him up and discovered that he hadn't arrived home from work that evening. I'm not sure if it was a premonition or not, but I knew that something disastrous had happened.

Backtracking the route Duncan would have taken home from work, I came across the policemen measuring up the scene of the accident. Duncan had not stood a chance, when some prat had pulled out of a side road without seeing him coming on his motorcycle.

It fell to me to read the eulogy at Duncan's funeral. I think I said all the right things and I tried to explain how much I was going to miss his company, probably for the rest of my life. By the time of his death, Duncan had become the closest friend that I have ever had, except maybe for Aileen.

The first time Aileen and I spoke to each other was at the wake that was held at her and Duncan's parents' house. I'd never met Aileen before because she had been away studying at Edinburgh University. She missed her twin brother very much and we spent most of the wake sitting together talking about him.

For weeks afterwards we'd call each other on the telephone regularly, ostensibly just to talk about Duncan and console each other on our mutual loss. But as time went by we began to talk less about Duncan and how we missed him, and more about ourselves. For almost a year that was our relationship. Having actually met just once, we talked on the telephone several times a week.

During that year an uncle of mine passed away without issue and he left me his dilapidated little cottage in his will. The place needed some updating, so I spent a lot of my free time working on the place. Latterly Aileen even came down to help me during some of her holidays.

Funny how things just kind of happen sometimes, isn't it? On one of Aileen's visits she made some comment about how she'd have liked the kitchen to be laid out and before I realised what was happening that's the way that I eventually remodelled the kitchen.

I know this might sound strange to most people but somehow it had become a done deal that Aileen was going to move into the cottage with me after she'd finished her education. You must remember that was before we'd even kissed each other for the first time, or expressed any emotional commitment to each other openly at all. Somehow we both knew that it was all a done deal, without discussion.

That first kiss was to come during the next Easter holiday. Aileen had popped down for a few days before she took her finals. She really should have spent that holiday studying, not that the time she did take out damaged her exam results any. Aileen graduated with honours.

We were out in the garden trying to persuade an old millstone that I found buried in the yard, to stand up where we wanted it. As we struggled with the monstrous lump of stone, our heads came close together and the next thing you know we were kissing. I think we spent the most of the rest of Aileen's stay kissing and cuddling. But that was about as far as it went.

Although I will add, that from that time on the master bedroom — what there was of it, at the time it was only a small cottage - became known as our bedroom. But I'll also explain that we weren't to share it or the double bed that was squeezed into it until after the following Christmas, when we became formally engaged.

The next two years that we spent together were the best years of my life. Aileen found a job in some government research establishment. God alone knows what she did there. Outwardly the place was steeped in secrecy. Consequently I was discouraged from enquiring too deeply what she did. But I gathered that after the first few months Aileen got on quite well with some of the other girls in her office.

I - well, we really - learnt all about sex together, and it was a lot of fun experimenting. I think neither of us had much experience with the opposite sex and ... well, let's put it this way: I can tell you that we did a hell of a lot of reading in those two years in the form of sexual research. And what's more I think that reading helped me a lot in my writing. By the time we had got together I had sent some of my short stories off to various magazines and a couple had actually been accepted and published.

From the day I'd met her, Aileen had always shown enthusiasm for my writing. She encouraged me much as - I suspect - she'd encouraged her brother Duncan in his writing efforts. She loved to read the drafts of my tales of woe and would often offer suggestions on how to improve them, usually by adding more romance to please the female readers.

I suppose I should describe Aileen to the reader or they might not understand what was to happen later. Aileen was - much like her brother and myself - rather shy by nature; as I said earlier most folks would have described us all as geeks. At that time, Aileen was not what most folks would refer to as a looker either. Not that that bothered me, because beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

About five six tall, I think most folks would describe Aileen's body as being slight, or maybe even fashionably slim. But I can't in all honesty say that her choice of dress and hairstyle back then was the best in the world or that they did her any favours. Her choice in clothes, I'm sure most folks would agree with me, could only be described as dowdy. And she tended to wear her long auburn hair tied back some how; not in a ponytail or anything, but it was pulled back from her face and made her face look quite severe.

Aileen always did have what I considered a beautiful face — even more beautiful when she smiled - and she had the most gorgeous green eyes that I've ever seen in my life; even if they were hidden from most people's view behind her slightly tinted spectacles most of the time.

There was one part of Aileen's anatomy that I was to quickly learn that she wasn't happy with, and that was her breasts. Personally by the time I got to know them intimately I was very happy with the buggers; I thought that they were just about perfect and exactly the right size for my liking, with almost perfect little nipples that I loved to see standing proud after I'd been slobbering away on them.

But for some inexplicable reason I soon learnt that Aileen was extremely conscious of their size and she was totally convinced that nature short-changed her in the breast department.

Her slim legs and pert bottom were absolutely perfect to my way of thinking. And when I eventually persuaded her to pour herself into a pair of tight Levis that I bought her - well, as the song goes, my "baby made those blue jeans talk" when she walked around the house and garden in them. I could never persuade her to wear them when we went out though; well, not until after the change anyway and that was a long time away.

Looking back now, the day that I did persuade Aileen to wear those tight jeans for the first time could possibly have been the beginning of things going wrong for us. Maybe I'm being selfish there and should say going wrong for me. I suppose I should say that what was to happen over the next couple of years, worked out as advantageous for Aileen.

Anyway I didn't realise it at the time, but those tight jeans were the first step in the change that was eventually to see Aileen metamorphose into a different person completely.

When I told her how sexy she looked in those jeans, I'm damn sure that she didn't believe me at first. But the more I enthused over the way she looked in them, the more she appeared to enjoy the praise I'd heaped upon her. Slowly her reaction went from sort of embarrassment to satisfaction when I told her how sexy and attractive she looked. It could well be that I inadvertently hoisted the sword of Damocles over our relationship myself.

Although she refused to wear them in public, over the following weeks Aileen did buy a couple more pairs of those jeans and for some time afterwards she would habitually change into them the moment she got home from work in the evenings. Those tight jeans were the first sign of the change that was to come over the love of my life.

Change number two we both made to our appearances at almost the same time. Well, it was at my optician's suggestion that I make the change to contact lenses and Aileen, once she saw that I was managing to get along with them, followed suite almost immediately.

Change number three was made at the suggestion of Christina, a girl Aileen had teamed up with at her place of employment. They'd got into the habit of having lunch together almost everyday and sometimes met up for shopping trips on the weekends. Under Christina's influence Aileen had bought some quite risqué clothing - well, risqué from Aileen's narrow point of view anyway. Probably quite chaste when viewed from most people's perspective. For a long time Aileen would only wear those clothes around the house.

I really thought that she was trying to please me, so I made a point of always telling her how good — and sexy - she looked when she did her dressing up thing. However she would always look down at her breasts and say how disappointed she was that they weren't larger.

Maybe because Aileen would always let her hair down when she changed into whatever she'd chosen to wear in the evenings, I didn't take too much notice of how she normally wore her hair when she went to work or out shopping. Maybe I thought that the Aileen away from me was someone different to the beautiful woman that I then found myself living with.

Whatever it was Christina's wedding that was to change a lot of things. Chris had asked Aileen to be one of her bridesmaids, even if it did call for the bridesmaid dresses to be redesigned.

As I understood it at the time, the original bridesmaids dresses were cut to show a generous amount of cleavage and Aileen insisted that she didn't have the right attributes to wear one of them successfully. I was well aware that when we went out and Aileen went to work everyday, she wore a padded bra, although at my insistence she never wore one at home. I thought that Aileen had an almost perfect body and that it didn't need any false enhancements.

A week or two before Christina's wedding, all three bridesmaids and the bride met up to make final plans for the wedding. I suppose it was at that meeting that between them they decided the three bridesmaids would all have matching hairstyles. By chance, they all had long hair of roughly the same colour and the hairstylist in question, with the help of a little colouring, made a very good job of making all three girls look almost identical.

I suppose I should have pointed out earlier that when I first met Aileen, she wasn't a drinker. As a matter of fact, I doubted that she'd been inside a public house more than once or twice in her whole life when we'd started going together. We'd first started frequenting our local pub for a quick meal, on her visits to help me at the cottage. Over time Aileen had started with the odd glass of wine and eventually progressed to drinking beer or the odd short or two; whatever you could never call her a drinker and I'd never seen her drunk or even slightly merry for the drink. Relaxed was about how Aileen reacted to alcohol.

So I was totally unprepared for a completely inebriated Aileen who literally fell out of the taxi that brought her home around ten-thirty on the night of Christina's hen party. I had to carry her indoors and put her to bed.