Anyway, she’d had a lot to drink. Way too much. I was sat chatting to someone on my left when she came up and started dancing around me, giggling a lot. Then she moved herself so that thighs were straddling my knee. My hand was on my thigh. As I talked and I felt her slide herself along my leg, I realised to my shock that she wasn’t wearing knickers.

I could feel the wet heat on the back of my hand. I carried on talking, try to affect on air of cool that I didn’t feel. My cock was twisted in the material of my jeans and was pulsing with blood.

I pushed a knuckle into her cunt as I casually chatted. Feeling her juices and her muscles contracting as she worked her hips.

Later that night, I committed adultery with her. I fucked her in the gents’ toilets. Her sat on my lap, my trousers around my ankle, rocking backwards and forwards. Her eyes and mine were inches apart. I can feel my cock twitching even now when I think about it.

What would we give to feel that care-dispelling sun once more

To be small and perilous and without burden
When every day was boundless with possibility, fecund with chance

To be plucked up from the earth with strong arms
And held to the sky with helpless laughter

Nontheless, caught in a throng of jeering blokes, clammily straining to get the best viewing angle of some botox bloated bint getting sperm in her eyes I found myself feeling a bit depressed and headed out for some fresh air. The Ramblas was a seething mass of hedonists. Short-sleeved, sun-crisped Brits mingling with locals in those slightly billowy shirts. A hen party of feather boas and shocking pink, drunkenly navigating the street from staging post to staging post, a constant ringing of voices, checking locations and statuses.

And then – a tug on my elbow. A wide-eyed African girl, dressed in a demure black coat: “You want sex, yes? 40 euro.”

Even now I couldn’t tell you what catapulted me into saying ‘yes.’ Of course I have a history of being easily gulled by suggestion. I’m the roadside carpet-seller’s wet dream, because a bit of direct eye-contact and a friendly ‘hello’ and I may as well be handing over my wallet. Of course, there is – you will contend – a degree of difference between agreeing to buy a watch or tourist nick-nack, and agreeing to buy sexual congress. And of course you’re right. But tonight the logic of the moment – perhaps allied to longstanding secret desires – conspired to compel me to say ‘yes’ without anything so redeeming as even a pause.

So: back to a hotel, where a dead-eyed woman at the desk blithely took payment for a room. A room, of course, of everyday function for my new Nigerian friend but for me a cell of iniquity.

The mechanics of these things are, sadly, as far from eroticism as it is far to get. You are engaging in a transaction no more meaningful than buying a donkey ride at the beach. Of course, this is tale that we philanderers tell ourselves. Sex is invested with emotional meaning that far outweighs the gooey realities of the act, but in the final analysis it’s two bodies generating friction to an end point.

I stood there stupidly, like a boy being dressed by his mother, as she took down my trousers and coaxed my cock reluctantly to life with a hand. I swear she was whistling under her breath and gazing out of the window as she did so. And then, when at last it was hard (no man can ever prevent it indefinitely under such attentions!) she pulled a condom over my cock and got on her knees to suck it.

There’s something so dreadfully wrong about getting a blowjob whilst wearing a condom. With your penis in someone else’s mouth, all you can normally think is “I wish I had an admiring audience for this moment” but wearing a condom all you – or I, at least – could think was: “that’s got to taste horrible.” For all the satisfied noises she was making, in the end she was sucking on cold, lubricated, spermicided rubber. I’m sure that’s a fetishistic totem for some minority group out there on the internet, but I just felt ridiculous.

The sex itself was, I think, a little better. I’d discovered something of the libido that must have impelled me to make the decision to say ‘yes’ to this whole thing in the first place and a faint note of pride made me want to show her that I wasn’t just another sex-starved tourist who couldn’t get it at home. So, I spiritedly ground away for a few minutes while she assured me in breathless whispers about how big I was and how good I was and other fibs that must come, one assumes, naturally to the seasoned dissembler. She had a brief spell on top, where I thrust my cock into her and grabbed her backside for purchase and it was at this moment that she decided to tell me that any longer would cost more.

I may be an unfaithful, dissolute bastard but I, when all is said an done, a Yorkshireman and therefore my values lie in thrift and uncompromise. Between gasps of breath as I tried to find climax, I said “no way… you never mentioned that… you said… unnh… forty…. ahhh… euros…”

Something in the ludicrousness of this exchange began to make me laugh and the realisation came to me that regardless how many minutes – or hours – I would grind away here, I could never cum with this woman. Aware of my giggling, she smiled – perhaps this was as unsingular for her as it was singular for me – and rolled me onto my back, where she continued to manipulate me manually, but if sex is friction, climax itself isn’t just friction. I told her to stop and she herself finally found the laughter she must have been storing throughout the whole sorry episode spilled out.

It was the nicest part of the whole experience, sharing laughter with an absolute stranger in a dingy bedroom over my failure to orgasm. People, as if it needed saying, are the strangest things.

It was The Wife’s mother. Another everyday tale of hospitals and sudden death. Things escalated from “kidney infection” to “treatable cancer” to “we’d like to turn off the machines” in the space of a couple of spring weeks. Within a days of visiting her, post-op, laughing with her about the remote control bed, it was Game Over and Goodnight. Phone calls at 1 in the morning are rarely portents of good news and even before we took it we knew what it meant. While my wife ran downstairs to get the phone, I lay in bed in the dark, not even needing to hear the conversation to know where it was leading.

And then it was the end time. A halting gathering of family (and they’re not a close, functioning family) in a characterless room that couldn’t smell more of ‘impending death’ if they painted it black and played the suicide song over the tannoy. Of course, no-one knows what to say to each other. The men stay strong for the red-eyed women, offering staccato commentary and even a joke or two that breaks the tension and pulls a momentary, sobbing laugh from the women. And then it’s back to the clock-watching and the occasional imposition of the doctor – who takes the eldest brother aside for urgent conference.

Eventually, we were all allowed into the room to share her last few hours. Slowly they were removing the drugs and machinary that were stoking her bodily functions, letting her fall into unconsciousness and – ultimately – death. I took a spot on the kind of cheap plastic chair you used to sit on school assemblies. It was placed right next to the machine that was measuring life signs and whatever.

There was something monitoring her breathing. Two lights, “assisted” and “unassisted”, marked the moments where she breathed for herself and the moments where the machine breathed on her behalf. Over the next few hours, I had a weird compulsion to stay where I was. Curiousity seems like a massively inappropriate word, but there’s little doubt that that was there somewhere in my motivation, callous as that seems. So I sat in my corner, watching the lights blink as the unassisted breaths got further and further apart.

As I did so, people came into the room to say their goodbyes. Like a grotesque fly on the wall, I stayed to hear these private partings. Friends… family… none could bear to stay more than a minute or two. They would shuffle in, sometimes with a supporting arm around their shoulder, and mumble a goodbye – perhaps venturing to squeeze her hand as they did so.

For some minutes at a time I was alone with her, in the ante-chamber to death. I ventured my own farewell. In life, I had frequently despised her. I had watched her bully and mentally dismember The Wife, divide the family, treat people with callous disrepect whenever it suited her whims. But over this, the final year of her life, there had been a softening. And during the brief months of her illness, she’d been a guest at our house and we’d shared jokes over dinner before I’d drive her home. So in these moments – not knowing whether the words would register with her – I forgave her. But not for the way she had been, that would have been too personal, and if she could have heard what a cruel thing to do – to deny her the right to reply! To unveil to her in the last hours of her life that I had often expressed hatred and contempt for her! So instead, to lighten the mood, I forgave her for spoiling my bolognaise recipe by adding curry powder and gravy granules to it. I don’t really do sombre.

I hope somewhere, that reached her and she smiled. My wife’s family still recall that and it brings a laugh to their lips, so hopefully it wasn’t a quip too far.

But all the time, the machine ticked down to death. At some point, it registered with me that there hadn’t been an ‘unassisted’ breath for some time, and that coincided with the re-entry of the main corpus of the family – the sons and daughters who were about to lose their mother. A nurse came in and as a few last whispered goodbyes and muffled sobs were being shared quietly began to turn switches and dials. Now, even the ‘assisted’ breath light stopped. I think just I and the nurse knew this for a minute or two as everyone kind of hung around in numbness until she announced that it was over. I can’t even remember the words she used, but that broke the silence properly and the tears finally came freely. I remember holding The Wife tightly to me, feeling her tears hot against my neck, my own tears running into her hair.

It’s all still clear in my head. That operating room where it all took place – so swift and routine for the medical staff, so precious, bizarre, epoch-defining for us. The J Unit went from being a hypothetical question mark to a definite exclamation mark in a few short minutes, briskly delivered by guys in green gowns and rubber boots who see this sort of thing day in day out.

What I remember best was how peaceful he was. He was delivered into my arms, wrapped in a blanket, a couple of square inches of soft pink flesh, punctuated by two large inquisitive eyes. I tried to hold him up to The Wife, but she was barely conscious – somehow falling asleep despite the six guys buried up to their elbows in her abdomen (an ability that has undoubtably served her well through the last 3 years!) So while the doctors fussed and sewed, and The Wife nodded contentedly in her sleep, me and the boy sat in the corner.

No-one does (or can?) tell you how to behave in that kind of situation. It’s intensely personal and private, but yet you’re in a room of strangers who are sewing up your wife’s vagina – an odd dislocation. I found myself slipping into my ‘avuncular idiot’ persona – and began explaining to the J Unit what was happening.

“This,” I proclaimed “is a hospital. And on the table over there is your mum, getting sewn up. You see, you’ve been inside her belly….” All daft, but a way to keep myself amused if no-one else. All the while, the J Unit just looked up – perky and alert and lovingly soft and pliable. I shed a couple of tears while no-one was looking. After all – I’m a bloke.

We’re on a path coming back from the steep road that leads down to The Springs, heading home through the woods, and crossing the wide expanse of meadows that lies between the two. I still remember the buggy. White and green stripes of a fabric that I will always remember as “deckchair material” – that strange, plastic fabric that you could imaging unpicking given half an hour and a sharp nail. Today’s kids, cossetted in soft fibres will never remember the feel of that stuff, oddly prickly under your naked legs as they peeked out of your shorts.

In the field off to our left, a combined harvester is churning through the ranks of hay, spitting its load into the trailer of a following tractor. Excitedly, I point and yell out: “twactor!” And my dad laughs and hugs me and lets me know he’s proud of me for knowing that word and what it means. And I’m happy. Under the achingly blue sky of my memory with my dad and that tractor, I’m truly happy.

It seems odd that in this, my overriding memory of you, you aren’t doing anything. Just sleeping. Chances are that mum and dad put us to bed to get a well deserved rest from our noise and chatter, but it might be that you were bedridden in the last stages of the illness that will kill you within a few months, years at best. Either way, I’m on the top bunk and you’re on the bottom and I think you’re asleep. It’s hot in here… the air has that peculiar stillness you only get in hot rooms, where every whispered breeze promises blessed relief, and where you dangle bare legs outside your sheets to capture every faint breath.

The curtains are made of some seventies weave. Heavy and dark brown, but in the glare of the afternoon sun they only offer partial darkness. The flock wallpaper, which I will spend so much of my childhood absently picking apart or wiping my bogies on, is dappled with regular light that sneaks through the weave, waving in response to every small promise of wind.

I know that if I climb out of bed and pull back the curtains, the old barn will still be there. One building still standing, reeking of musty hay, motes of straw dancing in the beams that reach through the roof. The other building, away to the right a more exciting tangle of broken beams and masonry – forbidden, of course, but dangerously attractive to inquisitive boys.

I don’t climb out of bed, of course. I lay there in the heat and the sound of our breathing and the everyday moise of mum and dad going about their business downstairs. And all the time, you are dying, and I don’t even know.