Phil and I were working on my dining table at a new bid. Phil had copied the Email from JCN's Marketing Director to a dozen lesser supermarkets, and some of them wanted to put their website management in our hands - simple fools!

I sighed at Phil. "Enough?" Now that Chrissy had raised the topic, work on the bids was going to be distracting.

"I've got enough to take to the review board in the morning. We can tidy up tomorrow afternoon." Phil closed his laptop.

"OK, Chrissy, we're all ears." I curled up against Phil on the settee, tugging his tie free and unbuttoning the top few buttons of his shirt.

"The general consensus seems to be that you hacked too much narrative out."

"I told you that!" As usual, Phil was wise after the event. "You should never have tried to cut the story down to three and a half thousand words."

"OK. OK. I really can't manage anything under ten thousand." I bowed my head.

"So why didn't you develop the other characters - Lorna and Ramila- they hardly got a look in." Chrissy was interested.

"Where are they?" Phil was nervous because Lorna had cancelled their Friday night dinner date.

"It's Ramila's last night before she flies out to join her husband." Chrissy looked sympathetically at Phil. "I think Lorna wanted an opportunity for a quiet goodbye. What's her husband's name?"

"Daljit." I suggested.

"You've used that name before." Phil was critical.

"Mmm," said Chrissy. "Daljit's gorgeous."

"Not your type," I told her hopefully. The real Daljit was indeed gorgeous - six feet odd, with wonderful curly hair.

"Ramila's husband's name isn't a problem. I'm not going to develop him as a character, and Lorna's out of the story for tonight. So, Phil - whatever your wife and Ramila are doing, you're going to have to put up with it. You'll have to take comfort from Chrissy and me."

"This story. My story!" Chrissy was possessive. "If you don't get it right, I'll just disappear back into limbo."

"Don't panic. Ramila's got photographs to prove you exist, hasn't she."

Chrissy spotted the trap. "Maybe. There might be videos too."

"Where are they?" It wasn't clear whether Phil wanted to watch them or destroy the evidence.

"I'm not sure." Chrissy was back in control. "This story ..."

"Minx," I muttered. "OK. If you agree with Mat, Annaliese and Dick that I've pruned too much out of this, I'm going to have to give it up as an entry for Desdmona's Short Story Competition. There's no way I can fill in the narrative without going way over the word limit."

"Good. We weren't going to get anything out of the competition anyway. You were ruining a perfectly good story about us by trying to force it under the word count." Chrissy was determined to be constructive. "The first section seems to be the most in need of some narrative development. Phil and I can work on that. We know what goes on in the office."

"Details!" Phil couldn't forget he'd been a project manager for years. "What about Mat's concerns."

"He wrote, 'Frustrating. But it might just be my slow head.'" Chrissy read. "Do you think he wanted to be given head faster?"

"Behave yourself!" I told her. "We can't have characters interacting with the authors. It would end in tears."

"Mat talked of a second reading - did he mean 'coming'," Chrissy had pushed beyond the boundary of teasing and Phil's belt struck home a second before my hand.

"Ah!" Chrissy curled up on the floor.

"If anyone's an Internet weirdo, it's you," I shouted at her. "W-E-I-R-D-O! A person who is weird and causes trouble by pointless vandalism. They keep people like me in business."

I glared at Chrissy.

Phil's trousers wouldn't stay up without his belt. He'd lost a lot of weight on his honeymoon.

"Phil," I cupped his penis, sensing that we needed a change of direction, "I thought you were going to be of some use to we poor women. But you've gone flop."

Phil rubbed a hand across his brow. "There's a point where you bloody women reduce we men to the state of being detumescent. It's from the present participle of 'tumescere', to swell up, inchoative of tumEre 'to swell'. As a joke, I might accuse you of being 'detumescing'."

"I think," Chrissy gurgled as she took Phil's penis halfway down her throat, "you're tumescing wonderfully."

...

"If you split my loins in two twice ..." Chrissy was sleepy after love. "Would they be quarters - like a horse?"

We were all in my big bed. "Clever dick!" I drowsed, remembering Annaliese' comment.

"Dick's fast asleep." Chrissy touched Phil's penis.

"Turn him over or he'll snore."

...

"Marion!" Chrissy whispered in my ear. "We need to talk." I could smell coffee and the morning sunshine was too good to waste.

Phil was into a sleep marathon and Chrissy and I could be alone together in intimate delight, snuggled into dressing gowns, sitting opposite each other across the kitchen table with mugs of coffee.

Chrissy read from the website printout, "Annaliese wrote 'I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the way you introduced the dildo. I thought maybe this was an oversight - something you wanted to expound on and forgot.'"

She was puzzled. "How else could you have introduced a dildo? You poked it up my - sorry, you don't like me to use rude words - vagina. It certainly wasn't comfortable.'" Chrissy grinned. "But it was very, very exciting - just imagining what you could see! Let alone what I felt! Where's it gone, by the way?"

"I expect Lorna and Ramila took it. I'll buy you another one." I shook my head. "I'm not quite sure what Annaliese meant."

"Were you really worried about the paint on the car?" Chrissy read on.

"No," I admitted. "That was interpolation. I wasn't really thinking about anything at all, once you started coming."

"And the scene with Phil?"

"I can't actually remember the details. I was getting a bit flustered by that stage. Annaliese is right, though. It would be better if the conversation didn't distract the reader from the action. I'll see what I can do."

Chrissy read on for a few minutes. "Annaliese wants more meat on the bones and Kenda wants more meat with the potatoes." She giggled. "Do you think that's a hint?"

"What? That you should eat more? Some kind of Freudian reference?"

Chrissy nodded, her eyes bright.

"I like you skinny," I told her, and the softening of her gaze told me I'd answered right. "But, I think they wanted more words."

"What will you do?"

"There's not a lot I can do. The story is at the limit for Des' contest. There are a few passages that can come out and I can put a bit more description in the first section - you and Phil offered to do that."

"Buster Bear, John and Juan seemed to be voting for the skinny version - Rane seems content too." Chrissy scoured the printout.

"OK," I said. "I'll have a look. I really don't like writing to a word limit, but I suppose it's a good discipline. What else?"

"What about dog's mercury?"

"I think there might be some in the woods by Fleam Dyke. There aren't many sheep round here though."

"We could go for a walk and see. The sun's shining." Chrissy was as fresh as the morning.

...

"Marion, you ought to have these veins seen to." Chrissy was massaging my legs as I lay on the rug by the fire, savouring a large whisky. We'd walked beyond Haverhill and back, and I knew about it.

"I hate doctors - and knives." Her small hands were easing the pain in my calves, unembarrassed by my disfigured legs.

"Mum had hers done two years ago. It cheered her up no end."

"Your mother!" How could Chrissy have a mother?

"You'll have to meet her if we go on living together."

"Chrissy! You don't have a mother. Or a father. I never wrote you any parents."

Her fingers had strayed far beyond the limits of my puffy veins.

"Nice?" she asked.

"Don't rush," I told her as the tingling spread.

...

"Dad was an accountant," Chrissy murmured against my shoulder, as I stroked her nakedness. "In Halifax. I grew up there."

"I knew that from the way you talk, and the file Phil has on you. But the page about your next of kin was fuzzy - I never bothered to flesh it out."

She reared up to look at me. "You talk as though I'm just a character in one of your stories."

"You are. Based on the girl with fuzzy arms. She's real, but you're just based on her. A character."

Chrissy grinned wickedly. "You really had better meet mum then. Once she gets over the shock of me being shacked up with a dyke ... Ow!"

...

"Look," I told her after we'd recovered from our ecstasy. "There are authors - people like me who write stories. And there are characters - figments of author's imagination - like you and Phil. John was hinting at the difference when he spoke of incest."

"I'm not sure he meant 'incest'. It's more like a literary equivalent of mathematical recursion. But I don't understand the difference between authors and characters. I seem real enough to me and I'm telling you things about my father that you didn't know."

"Proper characters don't do that. Phil never does anything unexpected."

"Well," Chrissy observed with cynicism beyond her years. "Men never do."

"I'm beginning to suspect that you're one of those characters who's escaped from the plot. It happens from time to time. They take on a life of their own - totally useless from a literary point of view. They won't conform to the script. And if you try to get rid of them with 'And she died of tuberculo...', you find a small hand gripping the pencil and amending it to 'And she lived to be a hundred-and...'."

"But what about Phil."

I had a sudden qualm. "Where is Phil?"

"In bed, still." Chrissy sat up.

"No he's not. The bed was empty when I went up to change. Chrissy! What's wrong? What have you done?"

I beat her to the laptop only because I was already standing. I read with mounting horror... My fingers stumbled over each other as I tried to recover the story off the website.

"Do you realise what you've done!" I yelled.

"Hit me! Hit me!" Chrissy cowered.

"It's far too bad for that. You wrote a story about Phil, didn't you?"

"I thought it was what he wanted." Tears rolled down her cheeks. "I wrote a story about him in a dormitory with fourteen schoolgirl nymphomaniacs."

"Even if his heart holds out," I hissed, "the girls are probably underage. And you published the story in the Piranha Pool. The moderators will just delete it. What do you think will happen to Phil then?"

Chrissy looked unrepentant. "He'll die?"

The doorbell rang. "I managed to withdraw the story in time. Go and let him in," I told her.

...

Phil was naked and trembling as Chrissy followed him in. "I was just about to get past her hymen. I've never had a virgin. She was begging, and so beautiful - all voluptuous curves and golden hair and gymslip and cotton knickers. I had an erection that was going to last all night and the other girls were waiting for me. Then the dream ended and I was crouching naked beside the post box while a terrier peed on my ankle and an old woman poked me with her umbrella."

Phil looked piteously at me. I sighed, dispirited. If the survival of the species depended on men, then it was time the scientists started working on parthenogenesis. "I'm going to bed," I told him.

Ten minutes later, Chrissy slipped in beside me, snuggling her skinny legs against my thigh.

"Sorted?" I asked.

"I got the story out of the Recycle Bin and posted it on ASSM. They're not fussy about underage sex. Just for once, the moderators were awake. Phil went wavery and disappeared. I suppose he's back in the school dormitory."

"Are you jealous of Phil, you little minx?" I murmured. The walk had made me very sleepy.

"I want you all for myself," Chrissy kissed my shoulder. "I suppose Ramila and Lorna are in a hotel room somewhere, doomed to make love forever," she wondered, on the edge of sleep.

"There are worse fates."

"The Piranha Pool for one."