My Policeman

by Bethan Roberts

and of course the sea, always different, always the same.

I could see him swallowing it all down in great gulps.

Oh yeah

And each day, a little of the memory of our evening together hardens into something lost.

I could not be the one to touch him first. We were finally married, but I had no right, I felt, to make any demands. As far as I knew, physical demands could not be made by wives. Women who pleaded for sexual contact were abhorrent, unnatural.

I still couldn’t bear to see how easily you provoked his passion, how obviously he cared about what you thought of him.

she even employed a particular Indian boy, to whom she became very close, as a personal secretary,

Abdul!

I felt as though I were a suspect facing a cross-examination.

Marion & Patrick describing the same feeling when Tom gets angry.

“For God’s sake. I lost him once already.”