At 1:30 in the morning a weary-eyed writer sat at the keyboard of his computer contemplating of the crap he'd written over past months – well, not altogether crap as some of it was meritoriously written, even if he'd say that himself. But then he was a professional journalist quite capable of exercising critical judgment.
The journalist was comfortable knowing he'd produced from his heart and mind to the best of his ability and to hell with the critics, though the constructive ones served a useful purpose for which he was thankful.
He thought about themes and characters in those forty-nine short stories and was aware he'd written to appeal to readers who apparently like firm-breasted women and broad chest males who can ejaculate in unison. That's fine, but surely one of those stories should have projected the life of an everyday character trying to cope with life and her changed circumstances.
This, then, is the story of Mavis Jones and hopefully it will touch a responsive cord of someone.
ONE
Fifty three years old Mavis Jones was too young to be a widow, but with Rex dying with a massive heart attack the decision of whether widowhood was timely was taken out of her hands.
Rex was buried with due ceremony. Relations came out of the woodwork and Mavis's three children flew in to be with her in this time of grief; they then flew back to their new homelands leaving her to vegetate in loneliness.
Mavis thought that was her fate, too. But fate does tricky things.
'Gentlemen' began calling – old Mr Collins the proprietor of the West City Antique Shop, Fred the plumber, Bishop the secretary of the West City Golf Club, her lecherous neighbor Mr Fowler and her filthy accountant Mr West who was already married!
Three months later Mavis had decided none of those men were suitable as a suitor and concluded she really wasn't interested in having a strange man or even a familiar man in her bed.
So her social life revolved around women and she simply assumed her previously much-used sexual organs would fossilize in due course through non-use.
Then one day Mavis was backing out of her park at the supermarket and ran straight into the rear of a reversing vehicle.
The two drivers shouted and waved arms, blaming each other for the damage to their vehicles but in the end decided to be responsible for their own repairs. A week later Mavis received a letter:
Dear Mrs Jones. I was so impressed at the way in which you initiated us to put hot-heated emotions aside and agree to be responsible for our own repairs to our vehicles. I would like to celebrate your leadership by inviting you to lunch with me next Wednesdays at noon at Briscoe's Waterfront Restaurant. If the time and place is unsuitable or other reasons prevent you from accepting this invitation, I shall understand. I am quite used to eating alone.
Mavis's pulse rate rose as she re-read the letter, the nearest she'd had to a love letter in a great many years. It wasn't a love letter of course, but nor was it a bill. It had been twenty years or more since a man who was not a member of her family or a professional adviser had written a letter to her.
She put the letter under her pillow and slept on it.
The next morning she withdrew from her golf match on Wednesday, forfeiting her chance of making the final of the bronze championship. Mavis was aware she could play golf every day, but at her time in life the opportunity to lunch with a dark handsome man were decidedly in ascendancy if not off the agenda completely.
Miles Wilson rose from his chair as Mavis approached his smile completely open. Mavis could see his hair was more greyer than dark and weather ravages on his facial skin strained credibility to term him as being handsome. But she had no reason to be finicky.
"I thought it was a fifty-one chance to forty-nine that you would come, and thank God that some women are opportunists, though I mean that in the nicest possible way – perhaps I should have said - oh, I don't know what I am saying, I'm making a right cock-up of this."
"Perhaps you should order me a drink." said Mavis, trying not to take charge.
"Oh yes, of course. What may I order you?"
"A gin and tonic please."
The waitress came and Miles ordered two champagne cocktails, telling Mavis that she ought to live a little.
