The mid-morning sun creeps through the curtains, rays of light dapple across the floor, the bed and our bodies. We lie on opposite sides of the bed, spent and exhausted and sweaty. It’s too hot to cuddle, which is a good thing, as I’m not sure if it would be appropriate or not.

“Aargh urgh,” he groans.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“I’m in pain.”
“Did I break you?”
We both start laughing, just like we always do when we’re together. True, we have been having sex, and lots of it, in the last twenty-four hours, so it’s a relief to know that nothing has changed – or at least not too much.
That I’m lying here in his bed is not a remarkable event in itself. We are, after all, friends – good friends – and are physically intimate. We snuggle under duvets together watching movies, hold hands walking down the street, and have on several occasions shared a bed when one or the other was too tired or lazy to bother returning home. The only thing is that sex has not been a part of the equation; or at least it hasn’t been until now.
I realise that the platonic nature of our relationship is more my doing than his. In the time that I’ve known him he has, on occasion, suggested that perhaps we might be more, and yes, there have been a few kisses, and I have been tempted, but I have always resisted the idea. Not that I don’t like him or find him attractive – I do – but I felt that were we to get together the end result would be disastrous.
He is a ladies’ man par excellence and I am commitment-phobic. In practise this means we are both looking for some sort of great, life-changing, romance but are more than happy with flirtations and flings until it comes along. This similarity is perfect for friendship, but not exactly a winning combination for anything more. Why ruin a beautiful thing for what’s bound to be a catastrophic mess?
With this in mind I had, or so I thought, good reasons for keeping our relationship a strictly hands-off affair. Laying on the bed I realised that that was pretty much in ruins now, and that this, too, was more my doing than his. After all, there is nothing like a brush with your own mortality to change your mind.
I am a hypochondriac and an optimist, which I admit is a bit of a contradictory combination since it means that while I fear the worst, at the same time I don’t really think the worst is ever going to happen. Off I went to see the doctor, one of my regular routine check-ups, just to be sure, to be sure, worried about fatal illnesses on the one hand, and fully expecting the results to be all clear on the other. This time they weren’t.
“Well, what exactly is wrong with me?” I asked the doctor.
“Well, I’m not sure,” he replied. “Probably not cancer, but we’ll need to do some more tests.”
Damn that word – ‘probably’! It was ‘probably’ that caused all the problems – it’s not the word you want to hear in relation to ‘not cancer’ or many other phrases either. ‘I love you’; ‘I’ll pay you back’; ‘I won’t let you down’; ‘You can trust me’ and ‘not cancer’ are all good, perfect, wonderful, but stick the qualifier ‘probably’ in there and it muddies the waters, offering hope but refusing certainty; it’s sneaky, it has wriggle room.
I felt as if the world had been pulled out from under me. The hypochondriac in me was imagining hospitals, chemotherapy, my hair falling out, the stress and heartache it would cause my family and loved ones, an early death; the optimist reasoned I was too young to die, too healthy in general, that even if it turned out to be cancer I would survive, at least ‘probably’.
Luckily, ‘probably not cancer’ turned out to be ‘not cancer’ and I’m fine, thanks very much for asking, but facing up to the inevitability of one’s own demise leaves its mark.
The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, believed that human beings were conflicted between two opposing drives – the life and death drives. The life drive is concerned with survival and satisfying our needs for food, water, the continuation of the species and sex; the death drive represents Freud’s idea that all life has an opposite wish to return to a state of non-being or death. These he saw essentially as two sides of the same coin.
While many of Freud’s theories have since been discredited, the idea that sex and death are somehow related has always struck me as having the ring of truth. One of the most remarkable, yet rarely discussed aspects of life in London during the Blitz was the amount of casual sexual encounters taking place while bombs rained down on the city. Guardians of public decency were outraged, complaining that young women would ‘accost’ soldiers on the streets and that this behaviour would populate the country with all manner of illegitimate babies.
Sex is almost always written out of war histories, but battles and bloodshed are always accompanied by the loosening of morals, drawers and breeches, a fact acknowledged by new books about both world wars, the American Civil War, and of course the war in Iraq. When confronted with the very real possibility of death, we do the most life-affirming action we can – we have sex.
Ironically, the French term orgasm la petite mort – the little death – presumably because at the point of sexual release, with waves of pleasure radiating across the body you do, in a sense, cease to exist, because the conscious mind is no longer aware of itself or capable of anything like rational thought.
Unfortunately I can’t claim to have been thinking rationally up until the point of orgasm. If I had been I probably wouldn’t have ended up here, wondering if this friendship was in tatters or how the hell we were supposed to proceed from here.
He leaned over and stroked my arm. “Hey, Sexton!”
“Ugh,” I replied.
“Don’t die on me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.
“Good. C’mon let’s have a shower.” He grinned at me. “If you’re nice, I’ll let you scrub my back.”
“Ooh lucky me,” I replied.
We both started to laugh, and the optimist in me knew that things would be just fine, better than fine, really – everything was going to be great.