OHM

 I needed a new circuit in my mansion. Oh, by the way, my name is Francis, spelt in the male way – ‘is’ not ‘es’. I requisitioned, therefore, a specialist electrician as the circuit had lost the efficiency of its ohm resistor and thus required a new connection. I loved connections, even accidental ones, and when you were summoned to my call as electrician, you told me you were called Francis, too. This sort of thing boded well. All seemed right and destined to be even better. You took one look at the old ohm resistor, then tickled its inner wires gingerly like a bomb disposal expert.

“Ah, Francis,” said Francis (we had already struck up a first name relationship). “This part of your circuit needs replacing altogether and a new connection installed, what we in the trade call the Foreign Connection. We don’t often have to use a Foreign Connection, but here we most definitely do.”

I stared at you and nodded like a hypnotised puppet. I am a version of a flâneur and live most of the time in an inherited mansion near Oats Lane. And I knew very little about electric currents. You looked into your cavernous bag with many compartments and pulled out a device like a far eastern letter of the alphabet then, eventually, a series of such letters joined together, an intricate pattern of intersecting lines, curves and dots forming a complex piece of equipment in a language that we did not need to speak as we had ourselves achieved an unspoken connection, a telepathic communication that only potential lovers seem able to master.

This was the first time for me with a tradesman. Most of my previous connections were with artists or writers of a sophisticated persuasion. Sometimes with similar individuals of wilder or more anarchic charms. I felt defiled by loving an electrician after only a few minutes of connections and intervening shocks. And as you worked on my circuit, fitting the Foreign Connection precisely by touching tab with tab, lead to lead, plug to plug, most of these appendages seemed unimaginably small. No wonder you boasted of bomb disposal skills at the coalface of death.

I could no longer resist you. A complex circuit, one to the other, both of us with the same name, a name spelt with line, curve and dot with a line through it rather than the same configuration but with two dots instead of one. In electrical or electronic terms only, we were a male and female socket and plug in a perfect inscrutability of discipline, joining each to each, a ruthless work ethic from the opposite curve of the world’s circuit to our own curve of existence. A force or source of concupiscent current to expunge wars of whatever blame or cause. I hoped later to dispose carefully of the bomb you left. But, too late, when I suddenly realised what the anagram of the unconnected letters of ‘mansion’ was!