Voyeurism: the practice of gaining sexual gratification from watching others when they are naked or engaged in sexual activity. That cod-psychiatric definition (lifted from an internet site) was good enough for me. My reclusive middle-aged neighbour, Madeline, I’d decided, was most certainly a voyeur.
I’d been fascinated by the Peeping Tom phenomenon ever since seeing Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ back in the 1950s: a rather over-rated movie in which the wheelchair-bound James Stewart thinks he’s witnessed a murder being committed in the apartment building opposite. The French artist Fragonard’s painting The Swing is another example where sexual exhibitionism and voyeurism meet head-on. This 18th-century painting depicts a girl on a swing, lifting her legs high in the air to expose her petticoats to a young buck lying in the grass. I’ve always assumed she was wearing no knickers.
A European heatwave was raging, with temperatures climbing into the 30s and my wife Cynthia had taken our twelve-year-old twins off to Scotland to stay with their grandparents.
On my first weekend alone, I got heavily into some gardening tasks, but decided to call it a day at around 2 o’clock. Stretching out on the sun lounger on the patio, I slid off my denim shorts and lay playing with myself through my cotton briefs. I had soon stroked myself into a nice ‘semi’ and was contemplating its conclusion when my phone signalled an incoming text message. I guessed it was probably Cynthia to say that she and the girls had arrived safely. But the message read: Why don’t you have a lovely wank while I watch? M
Who was ‘M’ and where was he or she watching me from? Intrigued, I stroked on and concluded that my ‘secret watcher’ was probably my reclusive neighbour Madeline. I decided to give this poor old biddy ‘a show’. I pulled down the front of my briefs and a couple of minutes later, four lovely thick ropes of semen criss-crossed my chest. Then I nodded off to sleep in the sunshine.
Sadly, Cynthia had failed to leave me a well-stocked larder and by late afternoon I was getting peckish. I decided to see if my next-door neighbour could help me out.
“Err…sorry to trouble you,” I began with a rather unconvincing stutter, standing holding an empty bowl, like Oliver Twist, on my neighbour’s doorstep. “Would you, by any chance, have any dried pasta?”
Barefooted and stocking-less, rangy and unkempt, Madeline was wearing a loosely-fitting floral-print housecoat, which barely covered her breasts. She shook her head. “Hate anything Italian. Have done since World War Two. Good job they strung up Mussolini from a lamp post, that’s all I can say,” she barked. Never before had I heard such a virulent condemnation of cooking with pasta. I was about to beat a hasty retreat when she added: “I’ve got a home-made cottage pie you can have. But its tofu, not beef.”
“Thank you. That would be wonderful.” Supper sorted, I accepted my neighbour’s invitation to share a drink in her kitchen, ‘A drink’ turned out to be two half-pint goblets of a fiendishly strong Hungarian burgundy, with a kick like a mule. In no time at all, we’d seen off the bottle. She slumped back in her chair, casually splaying her legs open. She was wearing no panties, revealing a magnificent pubic forest surrounding her quim. She made no attempt to pull her garment closed when she saw me gazing at her ‘forest’.