Will Harris on a fantasy bus ride

When Helen was a little girl, she and her little friends would play a game which they called ‘Riding The Bus To Coventry’. The premise of the game was simple: one child, the bus driver, would say: “Good morning, and where are we going today?” Then the rest of them would take it in turns to shout out fantastical destinations like The Far Moons of Neptune or The Dragon’s Lair.

Except, that is, for Helen, who in a clear foreshadowing of the literalism that would become her trademark in later life, would invariably reply, “Kwik Fit.” On the grounds that she liked the advert.

So when, at the grand old age of 28 and lying entangled in a post-coital fug with a girl she’s been seeing for a couple of months, Helen hears the words: “Where are we going?” being whispered into her one good ear, can you guess the two words that spring instantly to mind? This is not ideal. After all, hardly anything will dampen a lesbian’s ardour faster than the prospect of an oil change and a burly man in overalls tightening her rims. It’s with real relief, then, she hears her own voice issuing the slightly more succinct: “Yerwhat?”

“The real answer, the answer she doesn’t want to give, is that she and this girl are going nowhere”

Helen is buying time. The real answer, the answer she doesn’t want to give, is that she and this girl are going nowhere. She’s been quite frank about that, ever since she first realised the girl’s immature outlook and tendency to oink when she laughs would make any long-term coupling unworkable. They’d agreed (admittedly at her insistence) that it was going to be just a bit of fun, with no commitment, no emotion, and certainly no whispering of sweet nothings while she was hampered from making a swift exit by a severe lack of trousers.

There is a word for this kind of arrangement. I’m not allowed to print it here, so instead you’ll have to suppress your cringes as I invent the phrase ‘fun buddy’. Fun buddies, in my experience, do not work. If they did, we’d all have one. In fact, we’d have lots of them. Our public spaces would come to resemble last orders at Caligula’s villa, or Berlusconi’s for that matter, and no one would ever get anything done. What Helen is starting to realise is that ‘just a bit of fun’ will only work for precisely that: just a bit.

Humans are programmed to mate for life, or attempt to at any rate. Once we start seeing someone on a regular basis – no matter how much we drill ourselves to not become emotionally involved – all those clever little sex hormones we generate have a way of conspiring against us. Whispering in our ear. Helen, if she’s not careful, might be stuck with this one for life. And there’s no Kwik fix for that.

Illustration: Paul Lewis www.pointlessrhino.com