On my last day at work my colleague Ralph gave me a book of French porn. The porn – which was about a couple who liked to bathe their bottoms in saucers of milk – was a high point for us, sexually. We had been having a torrid affair via the office’s instant messaging service for the past year and a half, but we touched each other only once a week. On Tuesdays, Ralph would make a pot of coffee for the editorial team at the magazine where we worked, and as he walked behind my chair on his way to the kitchen he would pinch my left shoulder.
Our skin-on-skin contact would last about three seconds and while it was happening I would make my body go completely still, like a cat. Ralph had been living in Tottenham with his girlfriend for the past eight years, and I liked to think of his weekly pinch as a communication of everything he felt but was too noble to say out loud: “I hate her”/ “I love you”/ “I would like to bathe with you in a saucer of milk”.
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