NICOLE HAS A NICE LITTLE FLAT. The kids envy her but it's just what they'd hoped for.
Perfectly at home Tracy picked up a small yellow figurine: you've got some nice things here she goes and pretended she was going to slip it in her pocket. Nicole smiled: take it if you like, it's cool. I got it in Morocco. Her home was their home already.
Nicole put on some arab music and sat and breast-fed Freddy. They watched, drinking wine. The child seemed so content, in a kind of rapture. Nicole's own face glowed. As for them all three lived in the lining of another life which time unfolded like music trapped on a page. Nicole wanted the situation to blurr its meanings and let them live more gracefully, dangerously, yet content as her sucking baby. How to tell them? Tell them what? She wanted something violent to happen. Lustily, her slender little body ached for it.
I like watching you feed your baby Tracy went. You have nice breasts. Like it was made of rubber, Nicole pulls and stretches the nipple on her other breast. Milk spurts out. Tracy takes some on her finger and licks it. She does it again and offers it to Luke. Milk and wine. Nicole gives them a funny look reproachful yet all hot and lubricious. Freddy keeps sucking. It seemed today that something was promised that might come out like an anteater, poke around, go back in not interested after all in the iron-blue chamber of the afternoon. But already there were enormous compensations promised. There was always the possibility, the promise even, of violence. And Nicole was aware of cracks appearing of her poise beginning to totter. This was where she lived with her child but she felt suddenly she didn't belong here. This is not what I want to do she thought. I just want to go home to mum and paint. She felt she belonged not where she was but where she was going.
It began to rain. Suddenly it seemed not right that Tracy was sucking on her left breast while Freddy was still dining off her right. She removed her nipples from their mouths, got up and took Fred into the bedroom. When she came back alone into the lounge the two kids were on the sofa enjoying tongue sushi. They broke briefly to let Nicole squeeze in between them. Nicole had tarted herself up in a pale turquoise dress with a huge face of a woman on it with great big droopy eyelids like Warhol's Marilyn, high heels and fishnets. The woman's forehead had been stamped with the legend Use Once And Destroy in great big letters across it. Tracy put her tongue in Nicole's mouth and let it lie there like a sea creature in another sea creature. Anemones. This was not at all the violence Nicole had expected but she liked the teasing gentleness of it. It was like living in a forbidden poem a total stranger was uttering in a low filthy whisper over a telephone. Through their clothes she could feel Luke's rock hard cock pressed against the base of her spine. She felt a pressure building in her head as if a map of their three interentwined bodies was being drawn in acid on it. The possibilities were now endless. The two kids were navigating her being. She wondered if the boy would come in her and then they could all three hold hands and run laughing through the rainy streets while his sperm leaked out of her cunt into her pants, ran down her leg.
Fucking around is something I want to do mercilessly, Nicole told them. But I have to be so careful because of my baby...Fred you know. If I don't behave and act responsibly, his father will get the court to take him away from me. He already tells everyone I've got beetles in my arcade. If I get too wild and dark I'll lose Freddy. Also I'm not very strong. I'm a diabetic you see and often feel fragile.
With his free hand Luke picked up the remote and switched on the tele. The sexy girl on the screen tells them the weather, her mouth making slow fellating motions. Freddy wakes up alone next door and begins to cry.

The above is a random extract from my novel "Windowshopping" to be published by Oyster Press this winter.