Deference

Well, I did accept Marty's invitation. I thought I better. When I got to his place, Marty and his moll greeted me together at the door. Both were only wearing gowns - exquisite, ornately embroidered Oriental-style silken dressing-gowns. Apart from the colours, they were matching designs: his, a blue one hanging loosely from his puny frame; hers, a red one barely managing to wrap around her muscularly pneumatic form. Marty then threw me a small tied-up green bundle which I realised was another such gown and invited me to kick back and join them "Parmy-fashion".

I shuffled off to one of the bathrooms to change and, putting on the gown, realised that it was alarmingly short in the hem. My boxers actually hung down underneath, which looked stupid, so I figured it would be better to go the whole hog and just make sure not to bend over. As I opened the door to leave the bathroom, I looked in the vast gold-rimmed mirror, my reflection casting a shameful, accusatory glance back at me - a ridiculous figure obsessively primping at the hem of a comically short dressing gown. I stared and I pondered gloomily on quite what I'd become in order to sell 'Badge'.

So thus I ventured out to the lounge in a series of careful, short steps, continually tugging down on the hem of my gown, in a nervous tic-like way. Marty's lounge is a huge open-plan affair, with two complete walls looking out on the lights of London below. One section is raised with a huge marble jacuzzi set in it and a drinks bar along the side. I remember the cream, ludicrously deep shagpile carpet running down the stairs to a polar-bear-skin rug. The whole thing reminded me of an 'Imperial Leather' advert from the 'Seventies.

Marty and his woman stood at the bar, watching me with a wordless, almost prurient, intensity. It was then that I realised that we were the only three people at this 'party'.

"Is anybody else coming?" I asked, self-consciously pulling down at the hem of my gown again, my legs feeling cold and exposed.

"We don't need no one else to have fun, party-style - not when we all get a little bit Marty-style!" Marty said, hitting a button on the bar which triggered the jacuzzi noisily into life, the lights dimming and piped groove music also starting in unison.

Defensively, I sat down in the only single chair, my knees clamped together and my hands trying to stretch out the gown over my lap. Marty went to the bar in that manner that people do when they half-walk, half-dance to the dance floor in a disco - sort of locomoting along with elbows pumping round in circles like they just can't resist the rhythm. His girlfriend strode over to where I sat and silently offered me a plate. As she bent down, I could hear the fabric of her silk gown stretch and crack as it strained tautly across her wide, muscular back.

"Smokey bacon crisp?" Marty said from behind the bar, "they're the best there are - I get them imported specially. Oy - not so kosher, my boy!" Recently Marty has dropped the contrived Brooklyn accent a little and has gone a bit 'Jewish'.

With one hand firmly clutching my dressing gown over my crotch, I carefully took a crisp from the pile, unable to help noticing as I glanced over the plate, that, though my hostess' silk gown freely hung down to reveal the cavernous cleavage below as she leaned over, her massive immalleable breasts retained their upright configuration, apparently impervious to the force of gravity. "Drink?" Marty's voice offered from behind the bar and, without waiting for an answer from me, a large coconut suddenly sailed through the air from Marty's position and was caught, with one hand, by his girlfriend. She handed me the plate of crisps and took the coconut back up to the bar where she took an empty ice bucket, placed it on the floor, squatted over it, placed the coconut between her legs and, with a slight perfunctory grunt, cracked open the shell with her vice-like thighs, letting the cloudy milk flush into the bucket below. She handed the ice bucket back over to Marty who started mixing and shaking.

"You want pureed banana in your daiquiri?" Marty asked. I glanced back at his girlfriend, my eyes drawn to the thin rivulets of coconut milk running down the bulging muscles of her huge, long legs. For a moment, I was caught in indecision, impelled by curiosity to see quite how it would be contrived to effect such an ingredient but also scared, scared to witness a sight which I knew would be seared in to my consciousness forever.

"N-No thanks Marty, no banana puree. None. Ever."

Marty just shrugged and came over to me with a couple of turbid pus-yellow cocktails in huge bulbous glasses with red foil parasols. He offered me one, for which I instinctively started to reach out, before realising that I needed one hand for the plate of crisps and the other for my gown. Momentarily nonplussed, I twitched back and forward a couple of times before converging on the solution of balancing the plate of crisps strategically on my lap while then freeing the other hand for the cocktail. Man, that plate was cold.

It was once we started on the booze that the pain really started.