Husband Swap

Husband Swap by Neil McCall

We didn't mean to become swingers, it was more or less thrust upon us,
for we've never been ones for tossing our car keys into the pot pourri
bowl and letting matters take their course, and you'll probably be glad
to know we were well and truly punished for it on our first and only
episode.

Veronica's father had warned us against buying the modern house, and he
was right in many ways; we had been seduced by the mock-Georgian bay
windows, the neat sliver of grass bordered by a few low-maintenance
marigolds and, most of all, the integral garage. This meant that we
wouldn't have to worry about the car standing in the street all night,
but it also meant that it was taking up half our downstairs living
space without paying us any rent. Still, we now had three bedrooms
instead of the two in the stone-built mid-terrace we'd just vacated,
except that we didn't, because we had to use one and a half rooms to
store all the lumber which formerly sat in the cellar of the old house,
out of sight and out of mind.

And we had Kevin and Hattie as neighbours inhabiting the mirror-image
semi adjoining ours; not that they were bad neighbours as such, at
least to begin with, just that they were perhaps more aspirational than
us and had some very strange friends. For instance, they invited us
round to a party soon after we moved in - our idea of going to a party
means that you take a bottle of Liebfraumilch and an empty stomach to
be filled with Asda sausage rolls, but theirs was weird - their
friends, all of whom seemed young and svelte and did the kind of jobs
where you have to be "in" something, meandered around in the variegated
glow of lava lamps and the acrid dope fumes, talking drivel and
occasionally casting off an extraneous garment and sticking their
tongues down the throats of complete strangers. We didn't stay long,
and didn't get invited again.

But the real problem came with Kevin and Hattie's sex life; their
master bedroom clearly adjoined ours and the jerry-built walls were so
thin you could hear a suspender drop in the next room. Studies have
shown that in urban areas you're never more than ten feet or so from a
rat, well, we were never more than six feet from an orgasm, except it
was rarely ours. To be honest, Veronica and I are both a bit on the
lazy, podgy side, going to seed, you might say, whilst Kevin and Hattie
are as fit and lean as Ethiopian marathon runners, and could copulate
like hamsters on speed, but much more noisily.

So we never thought they'd want to get physical with us two - but
that's precisely what they suggested in the garden one day, that I
should go round to Hattie's for the evening whilst Kevin came across to
our place and they could each give us some very personal (and, in their
opinion, much needed) fitness instruction with an erotic slant. I
didn't take it seriously, and took my leave to go watch the rugby on
the telly, but the two women stayed chatting across the garden fence
whilst Kevin went for his run.

"You'd be expected to stay the night ... with Hattie," explained
Veronica, who'd begun to set the whole thing up and was looking for my
seal of approval. To be honest, Hattie wasn't my cup of Horlicks, but
swinging scenarios are supposed to be every red-blooded male's fantasy,
and if I went all Victorian on them Veronica might follow her fantasies
and just go and shag Kevin on the quiet anyway - I was feeling like the
old stag in the wildlife films who's been challenged by a fitter rival
and just hopes he can bellow his way out of trouble.

"No probs then - I'm up for it if you are," I loudly reassured
her.

We set our appointment for the following Wednesday, which suited Kevin
and Hattie as neither of them had gym or sports on that evening, and us
because it was a poor night on the telly. Veronica and I managed to
make love genuinely on two occasions over the next eight days, along
with three faked, and loud, multiple orgasms just to keep the
neighbours on their toes, and at six o'clock precisely on Wednesday
evening I kissed Veronica goodbye, ignored the heavenly aroma of
sizzling beef and strode manfully down the drive, greeting my rival
courteously as he came in at the gate towards the meatfest which should
have rightfully been mine.

Hattie had also prepared a special meal - a huge mound of strange
leaves which was her idea of a salad, on top of which she sprinkled a
few walnuts like silver nuggets and served three small squares of tofu
each as though they were bars of gold bullion. Dessert was half a
pomegranate, and the whole thing was washed down by a refreshing pint
of carrot smoothie.

After we had washed up, I looked for Hattie to give some kind of a
lead, to put on some romantic music, or maybe wrestle me down on to the
sofa. But what she said was simply "Let's go upstairs," and I trotted
compliantly up the stairs behind her. When, at the head of the stairs,
she turned aside from the master bedroom and opened the door of the
small bedroom - the only one which did not adjoin our house - I
supposed that she had something kinky in mind, perhaps something she
didn't want Kevin and Veronica to hear. The small bedroom, unlike ours,
was completely devoid of lumber, and in the centre of the room sat a
trampoline, above which the ceiling had been removed and the roof
timbers could be seen.

"Tantric trampoline foreplay," she explained. "New one on you?"

I swallowed; it certainly was.

"Take your clothes off and we'll begin," she instructed.

I watched as Hattie stripped in a matter-of-fact way; her sports bra
concealed gentle nut-brown swellings, like the South Downs in a drought
season, each rise topped by what appeared to be a frost-seared purpled
blackberry. Down below, her thatch had been shaved to expose her
wrinkled-walnut genitals as she gently bounced on the edge of the
trampoline. I wasn't aroused.

"We start at the edge, slowly and easily, then higher as we come
together in the centre," she explained.

I began bouncing, and found that my head soon rose above the ceiling
space on the rise, which meant that my waggling rude bits would be at a
height to be very visible to anyone passing along the side street. I
glanced out of the window on the return, and spied Veronica in a
tracksuit wobbling painfully along the street with Kevin urging her on.
I kept looking out of the window until I felt a sickening wrench in my
ankle and a searing pain along my calf as I crashed screaming to the
floor; I had strayed too close to the edge, missed my footing and
landed on the springs of the trampoline.

Hattie stopped bouncing, threw on her clothes then helped me into my
shirt and underpants, whilst trying to stem the flow of blood with a
towel.

"We'd better get you to casualty, that ankle looks sprained to me" she
declared and shepherded me downstairs and into her car, then collected
the rest of my clothes.

The A and E department at the local hospital was busy with the usual
flotsam and jetsam of human stupidity, although it was still early
evening; my bleeding had slowed to a trickle, so I wasn't considered a
priority, and the minutes ticked by painfully. After half an hour, two
ambulancemen came in with a stretcher on which lay a body, horribly
contorted into grotesque angles. Pity turned to horror as I turned and
saw the glum face of Kevin alongside; the body on the stretcher must be
that of my dear wife!

The ambulancemen pulled three chairs together and unceremoniously
decanted the body from the stretcher to the chairs, causing it to utter
an agonised groan; Veronica was still alive!

"Dunno how she got like that, but we can't feel any breaks," said the
first ambulanceman.

"Psychosomatic, I reckon," said his partner, who had obviously been
reading medical text books.

"Anyhow, we can't hang around," the first ambulanceman said to Kevin,
"going to be busier still soon, whoever scheduled an Alanis Morrissette
concert for the same night as the Millwall match wants shooting."

I hobbled over to where Veronica lay.

"What on earth happened?" I asked.

She grimaced with pain and began to speak in rapid bursts:

"I made him a full roast dinner ? pudding and custard ? he got out a
little book to count the calories ? said we'd have to do five miles at
least ? just to work off the Yorkshire Pudding ? then we did this
exercise in a picture book - The Jacana On The Lotus Leaf ?and I just
went into spasm and couldn't get straight again."

Hattie came across to listen, and Veronica swivelled her pain-washed
eyes, the only part of her which appeared capable of swivelling.

"All because you wanted to try a man with a bit of meat on him!" she
accused.

So Hattie had actually set this up because she fancied me! This was the
best thing I had heard all evening, and Kevin's face darkened very
nicely. But Hattie recovered quickly.

"Well, he's more fat than meat; in fact the pair of you are such couch
potatoes I'm surprised the whole street hasn't subsided!"

I needed a quick retort, and rounded on Kevin, putting recent naked
trampolining out of mind for a minute.

"And what pervy stuff have you been doing to my poor wife, Jacana and
Lotus Leaf indeed, you look like a bloody jacana yourself with that
beak and those long stringy legs, and so does your wife for that
matter!"

Kevin bunched his knobbly fists.

"I'd do you an injury, if you hadn't done yourself one already!" he
threatened. "And as for your wife, it was like riding a jelly
speedboat!"

But then Hattie turned on him too:

"You did the Jacana? You bloody fool, you don't do advanced routines
with someone off the street!"

I opened my mouth to object to Veronica being called "someone off the
street", as well as for the jelly speedboat jibe, but Hattie hadn't
finished with him yet.

"And I thought we'd agreed, the Jacana was our special exercise we only
do on our anniversary; why couldn't you have just given the fat bitch
the normal?"

She raised her hand to slap him, but at the last moment curled her
fingers inwards, and hit him on the nose with a bunched fist, causing a
gush of blood. Kevin replied with a back-handed swipe which sent Hattie
crashing over a row of chairs, but she soon got back up with a rivulet
of blood in the corner of her mouth and a murderous fire in her
eyes.

"Fight!" called a bearded, ginger-haired man sitting behind us who
looked like an extra from "Braveheart", especially as his left shoulder
blade had been split by an axe.

It was indeed a fight; Hattie dropped to a crouch and closed in on
Kevin, her hands twitching like the claws of a killer crab. Kevin
adopted the stance of a fencing master, sideways on with one hand
extended ready to chop and stab, the other hanging in reserve. Then
they were on to each other, kicking and punching and stabbing and
chopping and hacking, several times round the perimeter of A and E
until two burly security men grabbed them and hustled them out of the
waiting area and into the arms of the police, who'd just arrived.

"Good fight!" approved the bearded man.

The medical staff de-axed him, then eventually bandaged my ankle,
stemmed the last of the blood - I had to explain that most of the red
stuff on the floor now belonged to Hattie and Kevin - and managed to
massage and manoeuvre Veronica into a position in which she could move,
albeit with a hunched shuffle, and discharged us into the night. We had
to get a taxi home, and help each other upstairs to bed, which was
mercifully quiet as Hattie and Kevin were otherwise occupied at the
police station. We both rang in sick the next morning, and spent most
of the next week in bed; deprived through injury of the ability to have
even a mundane sex life, Veronica and I teased each other about tantric
trampolines and Kama Sutra positions, and laughed together until it
hurt. Call it a honeymoon for the soul.

Kevin and Hattie suddenly sold the house a few weeks later, and so far
we've never seen them again, and don't particularly want to. Their
replacements are a cheerful, harassed-looking couple in their thirties
with three junior-school age boys, and their house resounds to childish
arguments, TV cartoons and the thud of footballs against interior
walls. But we don't mind; the important thing is that the new couple -
according to the lack of lustful sounds seeping through the dividing
wall - seem so knackered all day long that they get far less sex than
even we do.

Which, suddenly, is a very erotic thought indeed.