The sound of the spin dryer starts up. It’s part of an old twin-tub in the back yard, in the shade of the bedroom extension upstairs. This is a Caribbean island where everything is a bit rough and ready. So the back yard is part grass and part natural, bumpy stone, a bit like the coral reefs that fringe the beaches. I look out the back door through the mosquito screen and see Tamika. She’s the twenty-five-year-old who liv...

An email announced itself as I was sitting at my desk with Reedie, the mature advertising girl, standing next to me, her supremely feminine pheromones floating from her body into my nostrils, making it hard to concentrate. I opened the mailbox discreetly and saw it was from Jane. “Excuse me, you wonderful woman,” I said with a blend of sincerity and jocularity. “I’ve really got to get on with this.” “Oh, okay,” Reedie sai...

I met Hannah in a supermarket. The fruit and vegetables section. We were both looking at cucumbers. “Raita,” she said. “I made a curry so fookin’ fierce you can’t get near it so I need something to calm it down.” She had an Irish accent and a dry delivery that made her sound as if she didn’t care what anybody thought of her bad language. "Gazpacho,” I replied. “The tomatoes aren’t ripe enough so I’ll use V8, but that’s ac...

Reedie was older than the rest of the advertising girls. She must have been about forty and was regarded as a bit of a mother figure. In addition to her age was the fact that she had traveled a lot, spending time in Europe and Israel before going the whole hog with a long stay in India, just absorbing the cultures of the world and working when she needed to. Back in Guernsey she had married a man twenty years older and, w...

So, it was the night of our summer trip across the water to Herm, and my friend Jane had set me up with Maria, a seemingly innocent advertising girl at our magazine. And Maria had sucked me off on the beach and then Jane had brought her and Shazza back to my flat, and Maria and I had sneaked off and had sex in my bedroom on the pretext of going out to get some food. Now we’re back and everyone’s had their bag of chips and...

The office Christmas party is the traditional occasion for out-of-control, unwise couplings. But it doesn't have to be Christmas. We used to have a summer event when we would take the twenty-minute ferry ride to a small neighbouring island. This was in Guernsey and the little island was called Herm. You can walk around it in an hour. It's like a Robinson Crusoe place, but with a pub and a hotel and beach kiosks. Beautiful...

Elsa was a customer of mine, or rather she worked for one of my customers. This was on a Caribbean island where everything was imported, mainly from Holland. Many such islands don't grow their own produce, but there is no real reason why not; you just have to spend a bit of money on water and make sure your soil is rich enough. I had set up a little business growing tomatoes and cucumbers and herbs, firstly selling it at...

Juana was Mexican but lived in the same English town as me. Her husband was a bigwig restaurateur who wanted to set up a chain of quality restaurants, as opposed to the usual melted-cheese-and-Doritos joints that gave his country’s cuisine a bad name. I was a teacher of English as a foreign language (TEFL) and Juana had answered my small ad in the local paper. We would meet three mornings a week at my house and spend nine...

If you have read The Women of St Barney's you will know about this highly irregular church I was a member of on the outskirts of Georgetown, Guyana. The women were wonderful: it was an almost unbearably tempting buffet of luscious, dark-skinned prime specimens of human femaleness. There was Mollie, with whom I was falling in love, but she was ultra-respectable and private, so our relationship was growing slowly in the sha...

“Okay, Mr Clark, you can go in now.” Sandy was Karen Robertson’s secretary. The head teacher’s sentry, who protected her from a world of urgent, concerned parents, pushy salesmen and so on. You got nowhere without Sandy’s permission, but I was lucky: she seemed to like me. When I turned up just as she was leaving – in this case, it was lunchtime – she didn’t give me a grilling, as I had seen her do to other people. I coul...

“You must be the gamekeeper.” The words were spoken by a thin, pale woman of about thirty-five, wrapped in a red waterproof jacket, jeans and walking boots. She was standing at the foot of the treacherous, mossy concrete steps that led down from my holiday apartment, Gamekeeper’s Cottage. It was on an estate in deepest Cornwall, former home of some lord of the manor who had made his fortune from the tin mines that used to...

I had been chatting with a woman named Karen on an "adult" dating site for a few days. Total number of messages: about five each. Progress: coming along, I suppose you'd say. On such sites, I tend to take it fairly slowly, even if everyone knows what you're there for. You don't want to frighten anyone off, because if she's just a bit slower than you, and it's taken all her courage to actually put a profile on there, she m...

“Damn this narrow road,” Jaz thought as he hit the brakes on his rackety old Terios. He always seemed to meet somebody at this corner, and with one side a virtual cliff, both had to stop and silently negotiate who was going to back up or pull over. The area was the back of beyond on this little Caribbean island. That doesn’t mean it was a charming little sandy track; it was a proper road topped with asphalt or, to his Bri...

Men like me don't get together with women like Aster very often. And that's because on paper it's all wrong. I was twenty years older than her. She was black and I was white. She was gorgeous and I was… well, I had done all right with women over the years but I had never considered myself to be handsome. Now that the age battle was getting the better of me, I was looking at a different area of the spectrum as regards wome...

“Goodnight, darlin’,’’ said the old man as he strolled past, admiring the shape of a woman in a crouch, her bottom extended and her crotch stretched invitingly. What fun they could have if she were doing this naked, in the splendid privacy of his little flat. Life is so tedious, Jackie thought to herself as she stooped to put the padlock on the bottom of the rolling shutter. Why did they even have this shutter? Although t...