For the first time in my life, I became interesting to other people—and I did not enjoy it at all. At home, in the shopping centre, the sportsfields, at work, everywhere I had the sense of people whispering to each other behind my back as I passed by them. I actually never caught anyone at it, but I was sure it was so. I was some kind of hero but since I hadn’t actually done anything yet, it was impossible to say what kind. Everyone looked at me strangely, the women with unrestrained pity, the men with some sort of secret pride, but it was the girls who offered the most startling reaction. From being of not the slightest interest to them, all of a sudden I became fascinating, and no more so than in the case of The Vixens.
    It was the reading of books with their inevitable sex scenes, still tailing off to the…, that first sowed in my vagrant mind the idea that I was twenty years old, and had never had sex, and that maybe it was time to do something about that. It wasn’t that there weren’t girls around—the office was full of them, there were pouting cousins everywhere, hussies lived up and down the street and latent lovers often nodded and smiled at me on the public transport. Whole legions of them in mini-skirts and with jiggling breasts paraded at lunchtime in the city streets. But they were all destined to vent their passions upon someone else. I buried my frustration in sporting endeavours. Books taught me that the world was full of fallen women—why didn’t any of them fall on me?

I can’t believe that I read Forever Amber, by Kathleen Winsor, a very long tale of a fallen woman who makes good at the time of the Great Fire of London. But not only did I read it, I also remembered it. And worse, saw the very average movie they made from it. And remembered that too! How do I know so certainly? Because, late one night, thirty years later, Channel 7 showed the movie and since they were running behind their schedule, they lopped the ending. They simply picked a good moment—being that when the lover deserts the heroine for the last time—and as the music swelled, over her tearful face, they edited in The End title. It might have been a quite credible ending, especially for someone like me who had just arrived home a few minutes earlier and only caught the scene by accident. But I knew, somehow, that they had deleted the sequences when she is betrayed by everyone else and therefore heads off to cross the Atlantic, chasing him. As she stands at the rigging, looking toward her future, that is the true ending of the film, and the book.
    Now the point of all this is, they didn’t fool me! Horror of horrors. You’ve really got to worry about yourself when you discover that you know something like that.