Simon George knew he was one of the luckiest 33-year-old Englishmen alive.
He knew it well, that day on ferry-cum-cruise liner, the SS Toksvig, as it ploughed the North Sea on its way back from Esbjerg to Harwich.
Simon, after a few false career starts, had found himself writing travel features for a regional newspaper group based in the east of England. This was why he was right now enjoying the free hospitality in the "elite" bar of the SS Toksvig, well away from the rampaging packs of college students who were on variants of the Scandinavian art history cruise.
Yes, he had done rather well for someone written off as a failure at 17. He had never made it as an athlete, a singer, nor as a photographer. All three had seemed like possible careers until his drug-addled early 20s, and all three proved to be way beyond his abilities, or his ability to push others out of his way.
But now, he was flying. He hardly even thought about the not so lucky aspects of his life. Like his almost complete lack of success with women.
In fact , that was his chief unlucky aspect: that he had never had any success with women. It puzzled him slightly, because, or so he felt, he had so much to offer.
In fact, he had even more to offer than he knew himself - but he was about to find this out in the most pleasurable of ways.
Yeah, it was true, Simon had a bit too much time for himself. He believed he was a loving person. Trouble was no girl seemed the slightest bit inclined to give him the chance to prove this. They definitely avoided him. Was it written on his forehead - this guy is bad news? No, it seemed to say something more off-putting: "Look at me, admire me, but don't get close to me".
Yes. Like Cain's birth-mark, Peter's lack of sexual confidence was there for all too see in his body language, in his propensity to blush and stammer whenever anyone he fancied came within a hundred yards. He was quite bright, could be funny, had a few male friends, but they all had "partners" now. And beneath the apparent insouciance and arrogance there was actually a frustrated little boy who hated himself profoundly.
He was over 6ft 2, lean and athletic looking (although it was over a decade since he'd run more than the length of a bar-room), good skin, dark hair, big wide-set dark brown eyes with long, quite girly lashes. Yes, he was a touch perhaps on the effeminate side. He also had hardly any body hair, and could not grow a beard.
Maybe that was the problem. He remembered that year when he stayed at his sister's whilst she was in hospital giving birth, and the neighbours really thought the brother in law was having a week of passion with his "bit on the side". Because back then, when he had his Charles II locks, and wore tight short t-shirts and crazy hippy pants, he could easily pass for a tall, skinny but rather strikingly pretty girl. He had a waist and slender hips, snake-hips he liked to think. Chick-hips, everyone else thought.
Yes, well, fuck the lot of them, he thought to himself, as the lovely Latvian waitress cleared the crockery from his singleton's table. Watching her, absorbing her wide smile, he felt a slight stirring of the soft little worm that nested uncomfortably in his too-brief briefs.
Simon sighed, inwardly. The waitress must have known he was writing an article about this voyage, and that she had to be extra-nice and extra efficient. He only had to say a few well-chosen words and who knows...but no, he couldn't. No point trying really. He'd already found out she had a hunk of a Swedish boyfriend back in - of all places - Ipswich.
His proposed article was the usual rubbish. The paper liked his proposal of a "cut-price away-three-days" hop over from the suffolk coast of England to what he liked to call the "sex capital of Europe", Copenhagen - and then on to Oslo, the "capital of gloom". He got no sex at all in wonderful Copenhagen. He could have but it would have cost more than his expenses ran to.
His brief from the features editor was "750 words, facts and figures, a list of famous Danes and famous Norwegians, a list of good places to eat and drink - smutty jokes and double entendres, bring them on, but no filth, pur-lease! "
The editor need not have worried, for Simon was a past master at delivering precisely what they wanted: the right mix of hinted sex, pickled herrings, and a few lousy jokes at the expense of all those funny old foreigners.
A drag to write, but it meant he had as much booze and food as he needed for three days, for nothing, and that mattered. And it got him out of his ludicrously expensive pad in a new-build block near the railway station, sold to yuppies because it was "only 45 minutes to King's Cross".
He thought he'd go back to his "luxury" cabin, have a shower, change and then try all the bars, one after the next, and drink himself to sleep. First he went back on deck. It was a lovely evening, the North Sea for once was almost smooth, golden. Small groups of teenagers were smoking and canoodling and larking around, plump middle aged couples were gawping at the sunset.
Simon turned his back on them and headed down to his deck, finding it hard to remember which corridor to take. The boat was like a floating shopping mall, but all the shops looked the same. When he hit the home straight, he realised that what - on the outward journey - had been his private domain was now choc-a-bloc. He had a four-berth cabin all to himself, but now all the other cabins on this corridor were full - full, it seemed to him, of very noisy, mainly female students, Danish he supposed, but pretty multi-cultural.
In fact he had to squeeze past many hot and sweaty young women and climb over their giant backpacks, as the new passengers compared each other's cabin facilities, chattering and laughing the length of the passageway.
He took refuge in his cabin, slammed the door, and began undressing for the long-awaited shower. He turned it on so that it would run good and hot before he got in. It was almost a point of honour that he should use up all the free shampoos and lotions provided. Just as he was about to apply the cocoa-butter skin-cream, there was a loud rapping on his door.
"Hang on, hang on, coming, coming," he sang. The fluffy white towel around his skinny midriff, he opened the door an inch: "Yes?"
"Oh sorry, you have towels? They no put towels in our cabin?" The short, plump dark-skinned girl pushed her cheerful face around the door, as if casing the joint. She took an eyeful of Simon's towel-clad, gothic statue of a body and added, giggling: "Wow, you are pretty damn emaciated!"
Then she added: "Hey really sorry, if I'd known you were a guy I'd've left ya in peace, just assumed it was all chicks on this floor!"
"No, really, I'm fine, and look, if you really need towels, there's a couple of extras here."
"Wow thanks, look I 'm Irma, we're all from Toronto Uni? Just loved the Scandi tour, now heading back to London for the best two weeks of the tour - we hope! - then back home and stuff and yeah, drop by for a chat later if you like."
It struck Simon that this Irma was completely stoned.
"Oh thanks, Irma, well I thought I'd go for a drink or two...the Bar Havana looked, well, OK. If any of you fancied a drink..."
Simon had astonished himself. He was getting flirty with a plump stoned Canadian girl of about 21 - but, if he were to be honest about it, it was not Irma he was after, but the taller, slimmer, shyer girl he noticed her talking with earlier in the corridor. He assumed she was also in the next cabin, and already his active imagination was racing ahead of itself.
It's fair to say Simon was a bit on the vain side - again, this paradoxical mixture of extreme self-loathing and narcissism was evident in his choice of body-hugging, almost camp outfits. His evening out fit for this trip comprised skin-tight black trousers, with a narrow, orange leather belt, an indigo silk shirt and a rather skimpy, body-contoured black leather bomber jacket. Slightly pointy black suede boots completed his soft-punk professor look.
As he strolled in Bar Havana - which looked very much like the other three bars on this floating car park - he immediately saw three of his neighbours a corner alcove, and they saw him and beckoned energetically.
"Hi!" said Irma. "Meet Francesca, meet Thalia, the two most beautiful art history majors in Toronto, you're real lucky to be with us I tell you, ain't he guys?"
Francesca certainly was very well put together, thought Simon as he introduced himself. And as for Thalia, another stunner: he was able to compare and contrast the relative merits of Italian and Greek female beauty right here, via Toronto and Denmark, in the middle of the North Sea.
However, Simon noticed sadly that "his" girl was not there.
His thought seemed to be the cue: "Where's Leila got to?"
