2.01 Earthly Delights

It was the first Thursday of the month, the sixth of July, and things couldn’t have been better.

Money was flowing in steadily, and, with a little luck, I calculated that I'd be able to clear 700,000 yen before month's end. That was more money than I had managed to earn in a dear long time. It wasn’t as good as the Golden Years before and after the millennium when I could pull in a million yen a month, tax-free, but a respectable pile of cash all the same. And now that my ex-wife, Yuko, had recently become another man's headache and no longer needed to be supported by my largesse, I had whittled my monthly bills and expenses down to about a third of my income.

"Meaning," I said to myself as I crunched the numbers on the dining room table, "I should be able to plunk a good two, no, make that three, hundred fifty thousand yen into savings this month . . . leaving me with more than enough dough to play with. Knock on wood.”

The night before when I was counting the day’s proceeds, I called my girlfriend Azami with the good news: "Habibi, things are finally looking up!" 

I knew Azami would be relieved to hear it. After dating me off and on for years and suffering through the hardest of times--my divorce and the alimony hell that followed--she could, at long last, now hear the not so distant peal of wedding bells.

Go ahead: call me an arsehole, but, however much I loved Azami, those bells still sounded like a death knell to me. I was as eager to get hitched again as Lazarus of Bethany must have been about stepping back into his tomb. It was inevitable, though, that we would one day marry: we were made for each other. And, when my immaturity yielded to honesty, I had to admit that I needed her in my life. Just not yet. Now all I wanted was a little bit of self-indulgent, self-exploratory lotus-eating to salve the burns inflicted from that frying pan of a first marriage before leaping into the fire with Azami. After what I had just been through with Yuko, could you blame me?

“Things are going so well,” I told Azami over the phone the night before, “I might just have the money to take you to Beirut for Christmas after all.”

Then, came the knock at the door that meant business.

© Aonghas Crowe, 2010. All rights reserved. No unauthorized duplication of any kind.

注意：この作品はフィクションです。登場人物、団体等、実在のモノとは一切関係ありません。

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No. 6 is now available on Kindle.