(Loosely based on Andersen’s The Butterfly)
As a young man, Tom Bowler was naturally keen to find himself a girlfriend. Progressing through his teenage years he committed all of the usual fumbling faux pas and awkward lunges that boys the world over are obliged to do before they become men. His chat up lines developed from monosyllabic grunting into the crudely embarrassing hope of youth before finally passing into the hopelessly threatening swagger of the seventeen year old. By the time that he was twenty, however, his urgent desire for a shag, for any shag, was growing and maturing into a desire to find a partner. Of course, if a willing young lady fluttered her come-to-bed eyes at him he was still game, but on the whole his thoughts were crystallising into shapes that combined the simplicity of out and out lust with the complexities of mutual respect and life-long friendship.
Tom had a system. He spent most Friday and Saturday nights in the pub and then went to his local nightclub. Whether stood at the bar or on the balcony overlooking the dance floor, he believed that he could classify girls into a number of different types. Depending on the state of their dress, their general fashion sense, their hairstyle and the amount of cleavage on show, Tom could calculate their “Naughty” ratio.
He was, as is only natural at his age, most attracted to those girls that hedeemed to be pretty, and would watch girls huddle together in groups, gazing at them as they lost themselves in the rhythm of the dance, and he fell in love at least once every half an hour. Tom’s trouble was that there were just too many lovely young girls for him to choose from. As soon as he spied his next great love and started to work out how he would introduce himself to her his attention would wander and be caught by another girl’s smiling eyes. Girls seemed to like him and Tom was as convinced of his own beauty as he was certain that every pretty girl in the room really wanted to be on his arm.
After another engaging but ultimately unsuccessful foray into the beating heart of Saturday night, Tom spent a quiet Sunday afternoon lazing in the summer sun in a local park. He lay on his back under the drowsy influence of the heat haze and pondered his future, concluding that he really must think about settling down. He rolled over onto his left side and looked into the gentle eye of a simple little daisy. Tom vaguely remembered that the French called daisies by a woman’s name, and he ran his finger along the plant’s stem while he tried to recall what that name might be. He settled on Deirdre and asked her very quietly if she could really tell the future. She did not deign to reply. Rather than picking her petals off one by one in the time honoured fashion of lovers everywhere, Tom elected, being in a romantic mood and disinclined to do harm to such a simple little bloom, to kiss each petal in turn.
With each kiss he asked, “Loves me? Loves me not? Loves me loads? Just a teeny bit? Not at all? Oh, sweet little Deirdre, oh wise little flower, tell me your secret, who am I to marry? If you let me in on the secret I’ll go over to her right now and propose”.
But Deirdre had no answer for the boy, knowing in her sap that boys were made up of many things but rarely of a constant heart. Tom grew impatient with her dallying and, placing his soft lips upon her petals, he bit off her head and spat it out onto the grass.
Over the next few months Tom worked overtime on his project. He met and dated young women of all shapes, sizes and temperaments. Some were still at school or college, some were working and some even had a child or two of their own, but Tom had an open heart and an open mind and he always tried to see the good in the person rather than the difficulty in the circumstance of their lives. His conquests ranged through prim and proper young misses all the way up, or down, to the most brazen of womankind. He tried girls who said yes and girls who said no and girls who answered his inevitable question in every shade of grey imaginable, but none of these relationships lasted. Like the daisy, they were too young and too green.
Tom’s next revelation came one Thursday night at a music bar in town. He didn’t usually go out on a Thursday, preferring instead to drop by the gym to work on his muscular definition, but he fancied a change that night. When he saw the “Grab-A-Granny” sign posted on the door of the bar he felt a gobbet of quiet revulsion rising from the pit of his stomach and was about to turn on his heel and head for home when the command centre in his brain kicked in and flashed the words, “Older Woman” before his eyes.
Like many young men Tom felt the excitement inherent in the imminent promise of resting his head in the arms and on the bosom of an older and more experienced woman. There was no shortage of interest in the bar and Tom found himself at the centre of a veritable storm of hormonal posturing and pouting. It was great. He’d never had so much fun in public before and by the time that dawn’s hopeful head rose above the far horizon of the duvet he was thoroughly and utterly shagged out.
Throughout his twenties and into his early thirties Tom played the part of a very willing Casanova, flitting from one bed to another, living for the moment and for the beauty of every freshly explored country. He tried on for size the role of lover, of the other man, of concubine and of predator, all of which thrilled and excited. He looked for many things in his partners, varying their age, their hair colour, their breast size and the length of their legs as if he were a dictator’s wife in a shoe shop. There was, however, one significant drawback with the whole process. The girls and ladies who he really liked were invariably unwilling or unavailable to him for long. On the other hand he found that the women who wanted something more permanent from him were just too tart and cloying for his palette. Nonetheless, Tom swept into his mid-thirties with the absolute confidence of someone who knows that the chosen one is waiting for him just around the corner.
On his thirty-ninth birthday the stars crossed and the finger of fate wagged in Tom’s general direction. He met a lovely woman called Rose, who was, in every sense, a true and natural beauty. Her smile was crisp and bright, her eyes shone with a wicked sparkle, and she knew her way around the bedroom, the living room and the kitchen. Much to Tom’s delight, Rose even had a pretty good idea where the garage was. Tom dated Rose on an exclusive basis for nearly two months and was seriously considering the ring thing when disaster struck. Rose asked Tom to meet her parents and her older sister one Sunday afternoon and he willingly agreed to go along. After all, if he was going to pop the question he really ought to buy into the whole family kit and caboodle.
As soon as he walked through the door of her parent’s modest semi-detached, Tom knew that it had all gone terribly wrong, there being something about paisley carpet that he just couldn’t stand. Worse still was the fact that Rose’s mother was four foot two inches high and at least six feet wide. The final nail in the coffin lid was the sight of Rose’s older sister. She was clearly of the same breeding stock as her sister, although she was, being in her early forties, some seven years older, and those years had not been kind to her. Tom saw in her faded looks and in her dimming eyes a future that he was not inclined to embrace. Shortly after this visit the relationship with Rose foundered on a sea of unreturned telephone calls and ignored emails.
After his experience with Rose, Tom drifted through a series of ever more desperate relationships. He found that his disappointment in the collapse of his hopes and dreams for Rose carried through into each new liaison. He came to see the women that he met in pastel shades, as if the strong and vibrant colours that had once filled their lives had been bleached by the time they’d spent being weathered and beaten down by life. He tried to recapture some of the spirit and verve of his younger days by dating women in their twenties, but the effort of it all was rarely rewarded. More often than not he just got annoyed with these younger conquests because after sex, and even before it on some occasions, there was nothing that he wanted to say to them.
By the time that he reached his mid forties, Tom’s good looks and the firmness of his buttocks were on that inevitable, gravitational slide southwards. In his mind’s eye, of course, he was still the young buck about town, but the invitations to cuddle and schmooze on a Thursday night at the music bar were becoming increasingly rare and when they did arrive, it wasn’t uncommon for the lady in question to resemble Tom’s own mother. Of course, he knew that wasn’t really the case, but once the thought had thrown its grappling hook and caught on the battlements of Tom’s mental castle, there was nothing he could do about the waves of nausea that battered at the door of his mental redoubt.
In the autumn of his years Tom still watched the girls in pubs and at clubs. He watched them in the town’s marble halled shopping mall of a Saturday afternoon and at work during the week. He still found the beauty of fresh skin and bright, expectant eyes utterly compelling, but his flesh was weak and he was tired. That fresh, fragrant lightness of being that had once filled his heart was somehow lacking. Fragrance is what the heart needs to remain young and the sundry, intermittent associations that Tom engaged in were based on the satisfying of dull need rather than on the delicate perfume of hope and future expectations.
Not long after Tom had chalked up half a century of summers in the flower garden, he did meet a woman who he thought it might be possible to establish contact with. She was a divorcee with two grown up sons and while she might not be in raging bloom, she was, nonetheless, strong of stem and full of the subtle aromas of experience and a life lived well. Unfortunately for Tom, her history was the undoing of his hopes. She recognised in him a man of shallow roots falling into decline as the breath of winter touched his leaves, and she had no time and no inclination, now that she was free of encumbrance, to add Tom to her list of permanent worries.
She offered him friendship and an occasional night in by the fire, but nothing more. The simple truth was that Tom had searched for too long. The blooms of spring and summer were long gone from his garden and faced with the late flowering of honeysuckle women, Tom found that he was too set in his ways to flap his wings and fly up into the Indian Summer skies to greet them. He was a died-in-the-wool bachelor.
Winter set in as it always does. Tom settled for the comfort of a roaring fire in the snug of his local pub rather than the bright lights and the thump of whatever music the kids listened to these days. A pint of beer and a whisky chaser represented a little slice of heaven. Life was just about perfect if he could manage the price of a small cigar to accompany his drink.
Women still featured in his life, but only via the electronic highway of his one true indulgence. He found the plasticised, superficiality of staged Internet sex far more satisfying than having to deal with the real thing. Not that he actually did anything like that anymore. As he dwindled though his sixties and settled into his final decade, it was enough now to look. To be honest, he preferred to watch the big match on the television on a Saturday night if he could stay awake long enough.
Towards the end of Tom’s days on this earth he became a little forgetful. He was wrapped in blankets and given a new place to live in a municipal home, where forgetful people of all kinds and classes waited for the snows to fall and cover their heads. Sitting in a high-backed chair in front of daytime television soap operas, Tom would stare out at the world through glass eyes as a reel of film ticked rapidly as it spooled through the projector in his head. Tom flitted and flew across the silver screen of his mind’s eye like a butterfly flapping its wings against a window pain.
His beautiful, his lovely, thorny, darling Rose stood there in her faded winter finery in the middle of the flower bed with her head lifted up to a pale noon sun. Around her the images of his summer garden were there for him to see in all of their wonderful glory but old Tom couldn’t break through the glass. He raised a sallow skinned hand to his eye to wipe away a solitary tear because he understood now that he would never reach out to kiss the daisies again.