Straws

By Joy Mutter

Straws is book 3 in The Mug Trilogy of third-person memoirs. It can be enjoyed without having to read A Slice Of The Seventies or The Lying Scotsman, the first two books of the series.

Straws describes the aftermath of Mug's turbulent time being whirled in the vortex caused by her entanglement with the eponymous lying Scotsman. This third-person standalone autobiography describes Mug's struggles in later life to achieve positive outcomes in her fraught relationships with men, family, friends, work, health, and life in general. Who will be Mug’s final straw? What prompted her in her sixties to write and publish more than twenty books?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joy Mutter
• Release date: Sep 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215257609

Joy Mutter

I was born in Jersey and lived there for eighteen years. I worked in Kent as a professional graphic designer for over twenty years after gaining a Graphic Design Degree at Coventry University. I moved to Oldham in 2012 and have been writing books full-time up north ever since.I’ve written, designed, and published more than twenty books since 2007. The first three, A Slice of the Seventies, The Lying Scotsman, and Straws are third-person memoirs that form The Mug Trilogy.My fourth book, Potholes and Magic Carpets is contemporary, character-led fiction. I’ve also published one illustrated nonfiction book called Living with Postcards.Random Bullets was published in 2015. It is a contemporary crime thriller with a paranormal twist.Her Demonic Angel contains fourteen of my best short stories in different genres. Between 2016 and 2017, I published The Hostile Series of four contemporary paranormal thrillers. They consist of The Hostile, Holiday for The Hostile, The Hostile Game, and Confronting The Hostile. The Hostile Series Box Set contains all four books in The Hostile series.In 2018, I published a psychological thriller called The Trouble with Liam. The Trouble with Trouble, Trouble in Cornwall, and Troubled, all explicit standalone erotic thrillers in The Trouble series, were published in 2020 and 2021.Novellas The Brothers Grimshaw and A Sunny Day in Oldham were published in 2022.Between 2021 and 2023, I published the Nuru and his Crows Series consisting of Nuru and his Crows, The Storms of Padstow, and Punishing the Innocent.Nine of my books are also available as audiobooks.

Book preview

Straws

Book Three of The Mug Trilogy

Joy Mutter

Straws

Copyright: Joy Mutter

Published: November 2015

Publisher: Joy Mutter at Smashwords

The right of Joy Mutter to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without prior written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

Contents

Contents

Chapter 1. Five Years After Her World Imploded

Chapter 2. Many Changes, All At Once

Chapter 3. Redheads

Chapter 4. Searching For Everything

Chapter 5. Avan, The Creative Whirlwind

Chapter 6. Two Go Wild In The Woods

Chapter 7. Sex, Sex, And Yet More Sex

Chapter 8. Pond Life

Chapter 9. Accusations

Chapter 10. Paul, The Final Straw

Chapter 11. Unwanted Internet Interference

Chapter 12. Bowing Out

Chapter 13. Fakes

Chapter 14. Yet Another New Life

Books By Joy Mutter

About The Author

Chapter 1. Five Years After Her World Imploded

Almost five years had passed since Mug last set her large blue-grey eyes on Michael’s toffee-brown tiger’s eyes. As a tall but slowly shrinking fifty-seven-year-old woman with bobbed blonde hair, she was plumper than when they’d last met. Her ageing body was rebelling against her, causing her job at the call centre to hang in the balance.

To defend herself, she’d kept well away from Michael, the eponymous Lying Scotsman, ever since their passionate affair had ended. As much as she missed his tall, pale, exciting body, ten years younger than hers, and his wicked humour, she knew it would be too dangerous to allow him back into her life.

The best way to describe Michael’s looks was as a mix between Joe Hart, a goalkeeper for England, and Paul O’Grady, Lily Savage’s creator. Unlike Mug, he could expertly hide his emotions, which came in handy when he’d needed to hide his endless lies. The painful task of writing The Lying Scotsman, that laid bare their bizarre relationship, had been completed but had yet to be published. It was residing with a literary agent, its future perilous and uncertain.

What had started as a gift of love to Michael had ended up being so much more than that. To set the scene for events next in line to occur in her life, there follows a shortened version of what took place during those three tumultuous years of her sexual and emotional involvement with Michael.

As she sat in her modest terraced house in Pembury in Kent, she knew Michael would have agreed to continue with their wild, sexually experimental trysts if she’d chosen to encourage him. But, despite everything her heart was screaming at her, Mug’s brain insisted there was no longer any point in meeting him.

They’d first spontaneously met eight years before, after enjoying a forty-five minute, sexually-charged online conversation. On the telephone, he’d given her the impression he was single by saying in his sexy, deep Glaswegian voice, ‘I haven’t slept with anybody for a year.’ Despite allegedly being single, he still instructed her, ‘Don’t ever fall in love with me.’ To illustrate the point, he told Mug a tale of how he’d run from a black girl, called Patricia. He’d been driving home to Scotland when she’d phoned him to admit she loved him. ‘I decided to never see her again. I’m not interested in love.’

After hearing how badly he reacted to love, Mug agreed to keep their relationship casual, despite knowing she’d fallen in love with him on their first meeting. It was the first and last time she’d ever lied to him. Oddly, he knew she was lying, but Michael continued to visit her, despite his disdain for love.

Two weeks into their torrid, intense, yet casual, connection, he conned Mug out of five thousand pounds. He spun a yarn, saying the money was needed to repay his nephew’s ten-thousand pounds gambling debt. He claimed to have repaid five thousand pounds of the debt, yet five thousand pounds was still outstanding. She was naturally alarmed when he told her he’d be battered by heavies if he failed to hand over the cash in two days.

Mug stupidly said, ‘I trust you to repay me,’ without anything in writing. The next day, she withdrew five thousand pounds in cash from her bank account, lovingly watching as he paid her money into his bank across the road from her bank. They returned to her home to have sex, then he disappeared for a week. His mysterious disappearance alarmed her, making her fear she’d been scammed by him.

Weeks passed, then, despite at first resisting her offer to become his landlady to repay the loan as rent, he sent her a text. ‘Put the kettle on. I’m outside your house.’ He moved into her spare room that night. Before moving in, he insisted she must arrange to lay on a separate landline for him in his room. The reason he gave her was that he had friends in America with whom he must keep in contact.

He kept mostly to his room, pushing her away emotionally and physically, except whenever he was in the mood for sex. She suffered horribly from unrequited love, having plummeted head-first into the fires of burning desire from the first day they’d met, naively believing him to be single, truthful, and exciting; everything she could ever want in a lover.

Two weeks after renting her spare room, he dropped the first of many bombshells onto her as they sat in their usual places in the living room, he on the dark-brown, leather sofa, Mug on her matching recliner. Michael made sure cuddling on the sofa never took place.

‘I have something important to tell you,’ he said in his deep, rough, Scottish drawl, that always sent shivers of delight through her body.

The words he then came out with far from delighted her. She was stunned when he admitted his love for an allegedly dying American woman, called Monica. He told her she was too ill to travel to England, due to suffering from a degenerative neurological disease. He’d been banned from re-entering America, due to a visa violation after overstaying his visit to Monica, where they’d lived together in her Pennsylvanian home for several months.

Mug was understandably distraught to have her dreams shattered. She felt so sad for him that she wailed like a wounded animal, devastated that he could not be with the woman he yearned to marry. Resolving to be his support when Monica eventually died, Mug even offered to join with Michael in adopting Ryan, Monica’s teenage son.

Mug suffered horribly as Michael constantly denied he had feelings for her, apart from sexual desire. Sexually, they were both becoming addicted to each other. As her drug of choice, he’d become the controlling force of her life. Her pain was intense, because she believed he loved Monica, yet Mug refused to give up believing he might end up loving her, Mug. Her hopes of a future with him were despite him swearing all he felt for her, his landlady was lust. It would never amount to love, according to him.

After living at her house for a turbulent, intense, sexually charged five months, Michael mysteriously took the opportunity to flee while she was out of the house they shared. She was devastated to discover he’d left his unwanted belongings in his old room, unable to fit it all into his old, dark-green car. That night was almost her last night on earth. Only thoughts of her recently graduated daughter, Chloe, prevented her from swallowing the large bottle of painkillers he’d left on his bedside table in his deserted room.

The pills seemed to be calling ‘Take us! Take us! You know you want to,’ to Mug as she lay sweating in her bedroom across the hallway.

She arose and crossed the landing into his abandoned room. As she knew it was useless to try sleeping, she started to rummage in the storage space under his bed. Amongst her daughter’s stored random objects, she discovered that, when he’d fled, he’d neglected to take his landline phone with him to wherever he’d run to. It contained all his important phone numbers.

Desperate to know what had happened to him, she waited until the morning, then telephoned his brother, Brandon, in Scotland. She’d learned nothing important from him, because he was fairly monosyllabic, and probably confused by all she was telling him.

Her mobile phone rang as soon as she’d finished her talk with Brandon. When she answered the phone, an angry, but sad sounding, Michael informed her, ‘I’m never coming back to your house. Furthermore, don’t ever contact my family again!’

‘It may sound odd to you after what you’ve done to me, but I still love you,’ she said.

‘You’re mad,’ he said.

Mug agreed and then he was gone, she knew not where. Believing she’d never see him again, she was clueless what was happening in his life.

Her mind and heart had been ripped to shreds. She retreated into the world of the internet again. Many broken-hearted do, to try to distract from their emotional pain. She sought solace in an online friendship with a bearded, lonely man. Howard lived in Bradford with his large, boisterous red setter. After two months of talking platonically to Howard, she travelled hundreds of miles north to Bradford to meet him. They entered into a relationship, despite the distance, travelling to stay with each other for a week at a time.

Trying and failing to eradicate Michael from her brain, she tried to convince herself it would be a good idea to start a new life with him. Howard had fallen in love with her, and she hoped her love for him would materialise. Sadly, her love for Michael was still far too overpowering, and there were many shortcomings, especially sexually, in her relationship with Howard. At least she’d tried to make it work, but it just didn’t. It never would. When the sale of her house fell through, she decided to phone him that evening to end their relationship. Howard was distraught and tearful and her guilt was immense, but she had to make the break to prevent them from being miserable in the future.

She sent a text to Michael to tell him her move north was no longer happening. She never expected him to respond the way he did. Michael immediately phoned her mobile. Their sexual selves took over, and he visited her that night. After their sexual urges had been sated, he sat on the sofa he’d not sat on for six months and divulged the brain-scrambling reason why he’d run from her house without a word.

Without a scrap of emotion, Michael said, ‘I was contacted by Patricia, the black girl I briefly dated, the girl I told you about. I was floored when she told me she’d given birth to our baby girl a year or so before. She originally wanted to see if she could cope on her own with the baby, but her family convinced her to call me. That’s why I ran from your place, so I could travel to see her, so we could work out what we should do. I’m now living with them both in Hove, forty-five minutes away from your place.’

During their conversation, he also told Mug, ‘I still need you to be in my life.’ She was so in love with him, wildly ecstatic to be able to continue seeing the man she adored.

Such was Michael’s skill at lying, Mug believed his cock and bull story for a year. He would drive to her house every week or so at any hour of the day or night for another session of the wonderfully addictive sex they both enjoyed. During that time, Mug was sad to receive a text from his friend, Mark. He said that Michael was in the hospital after injuring his knee while falling downstairs at his house. During their text conversation, Mark, who Mug had never heard Michael mention before, dropped the sad news that Monica had died over in America. This news depressed and concerned Mug hugely, as she’d oddly always felt a strong connection with the woman Michael had said he loved.

Over the coming months, Michael’s lack of consideration and inconsistent contact by text or phone with Mug angered her to distraction. She lashed out every time he disappeared without a word for days on end. She naturally feared he could disappear again, as happened the night he fled her home for six months. He grew as exasperated by Mug’s angry reaction as she was by his lack of consideration.

Shockingly, he eventually ended up admitting to having fled her home to fetch the ill, but still very much alive, Monica, and her teenage son from America. He admitted to fabricating his story about Patricia and the baby.

‘I’m living with Monica and Ryan in Hove,’ he said.

Shocked to the core, Mug continued to see him sporadically at her house for increasingly experimental sex, occasions when they both pushing their sexual boundaries to the limit.

Over two years into their clandestine relationship, he even admitted to being bisexual, with an interest in cross-dressing. Neither of these admissions disturbed her or switched off her desire for him. He even honoured her by emailing her several pages containing his own revealing life story, as she had sent to him. The revelation that he’d been raped as a teenager by an older, trusted married male friend was a clue as to why he hankered after men.

Although he’d originally been understandably traumatised by his friend raping him, Michael life story told how he’d begun to enjoy sex with him, although he’d hated to admit it. When Michael’s first marriage hit problems, he secretly cheated on his wife with other men, telling himself it was less of a betrayal than if he’d cheated with another woman. The marriage ended anyway, without his wife ever finding out about his infidelity with other men. Ironically, his wife had suspected he’d been cheating with a female neighbour, which wasn’t the case, although he admitted in his story that he’d been tempted.

Mug was so relaxed about her lover’s bisexuality, she even occasionally had sex with him while he was dressed like a tart, wearing full makeup, and a long, blonde wig, corset, stockings and suspenders, all supplied by her. The fact he’d even allowed her to photograph him as he lay on her bed dressed so outrageously came in handy when she later discovered, on the 192.com website, that Michael was living in Essex, not Hove, with Stacey, a short, tanned, brown-eyed woman.

Stacey was four years older than Michael, and her teenage daughter, Scarlet, was from a previous marriage to a waste of space. Mug had previously discovered sentimental cards from Stacey in Michael’s room during his five-month stay at her home.

When Mug had angrily challenged him about the secreted cards, his explanation was, ‘She meant nothing to me. I only casually dated Stacey for two weeks. It was no big deal.’

This proved to be far from the truth. On a hot Easter weekend, she unexpectedly discovered his Essex address on 192.com, thanks to the electoral roll. It showed where he’d been living for some time, and with whom. The woman he lived with was Stacey, not Monica or Patricia. From the first day that Mug had met him, Michael had created multiple layers of lies to fool her. The website gave his landline number, which she eagerly rang. A surprised and guilty sounding Scotsman answered the call, brazenly denying he was Michael.

Although certain it was him, Mug said, ‘Oh… I must’ve dialled the wrong number.’

A few minutes later, Michael popped up on MSN.

‘I think we have something to discuss, don’t you?’ Mug typed, for once feeling in control of the situation, and was understandably furious at his seemingly endless deception.

‘Yes, I guess we do,’ he typed back.

‘Get outside now and ring me,’ she insisted.

Knowing he had no option, he phoned her. Sounding worried, he said, ‘Monica and I had been quarrelling during the last months I lived at yours. I ran from your place after she and I finally ended. I needed to escape to Scotland to get my head together. I’d been talking to Stacey for years online, just as I’d been chatting with Monica. After we’d dated a couple of times, when I left your place, Stacey traced me to my flat in Scotland. It’s the same flat I showed you photographs of, where I’d originally planned to live with Monica and Ryan. Stacey found me at that flat and stayed with me there for a while. We drew close together, and I introduced her to my parents after telling them Monica and I had ended. They didn’t like me much for a while, because they all loved Monica, but they’re getting used to the idea.’

Despite setting up home in Essex with Stacey and her teenage daughter, Michael proved to be unable to resist still meeting up with Mug.

On her insistence, she and Michael spoke again on the phone the day after she’d forced him to reveal the truth. She was delighted when he said, ‘After you phoned me on my landline, I threw up all over our bedroom floor at 4 am during a sleepless night. Stacey’s wondering what the hell’s wrong with me.’

She knew his vomiting was due to him being terrified at the thought of what Mug might do next, and the devastation it might cause. She could easily tell Stacey exactly what he and Mug had been up to throughout his relationship with Stacey. Mug possessed photographs, emails, and hundreds of texts to prove it all, plus the revealing photographs of him posing on her bed, plastered in make-up, dressed in her corset, stockings, and high heels.

The only thing preventing Mug from revealing Michael’s deception to an oblivious Stacey was the desire not to hurt Scarlet, Stacey’s teenage daughter. Mug didn’t want the girl’s world to be ripped apart as hers had been; the girl had done nothing to deserve such treatment. Michael deserved to be severely punished, but, having a daughter herself, Mug would hate some unknown woman to do the same to her child.

She was only too aware of the unhappiness she’d unintentionally inflicted on her daughter by leaving Chloe’s father several years previously. She’d had no option except to leave him after twenty-three years of having felt rejected by him, due to his crippling shyness, lack of emotional connection and sex drive.

After a couple of years of Chloe hating Mug, they later became as close as any mother and daughter should be. The best thing Mug ever did in her life was to give birth to Chloe. She swelled with maternal pride now that her only child was a self-driven, highly talented photojournalist who worked for several high-end, much-respected magazines and journals.

Even after discovering the shocking truth, Mug had still pluckily met Michael for another ten months. She still adored him, despite being aware of all the appalling lies he’d spewed over her for three years. She met him every few weeks after discovering his big secret on 192.com.

In one way, Michael seemed more relaxed after Mug had unearthed the truth about him because there was no longer any need to lie to her. However, he was also terrified she would tell Stacey how he’d spectacularly cheated on her with Mug for over three long years. He knew she had the evidence to prove it.

Michael had always pleaded poverty and continued to do so, but Mug insisted that he must repay fifty pounds a month into her bank account. She deserved to be repaid more each month but figured it was better to demand a sum he could reasonably afford. She didn’t want to raise Stacey’s suspicions as to why large amounts of money were disappearing from their bank account each month.

Irritatingly, he still managed to make up excuses not to pay even fifty pounds to her, provoking her to angrily text or email him whenever he missed a payment. He talked reasonably openly about his life with Stacey and her daughter, but admitted he tried not to, as he knew it upset Mug, who was upset enough already.

Mug and Michael continued with their imaginative sex life, sometimes with her dominating him, or with him dominating her. They mostly met for an hour or two, just like the lovers they’d always been. As far as Mug was concerned, they’d always talk for too short a time after they’d exhausted themselves sexually before he was forced to zoom off on his motorbike back to Essex.

One evening, he seemed more preoccupied and concerned by his lack of money than usual. Being blindly besotted, she offered to lend him five hundred pounds to go bankrupt, so he could clear his mounting debts. A few months after handing the cash over to him, she realised Michael had no intention of going bankrupt. He’d scammed her yet again. They also talked about how Stacey wanted to marry him, but he said he wasn’t keen on the idea, for obvious reasons.

He motor-biked over to see Mug on her birthday. They enjoyed a few wonderful hours of sex, laughter, and chat. It had made her deeply happy to have him to herself on her special day. He also returned ten days following her birthday. Mug was lying on the bed upstairs in her corset and stockings. As usual, the front door had been left slightly ajar, her heart beating painfully hard as she heard his motorbike roaring up the cul-de-sac, followed by the pound of his footsteps coming up the stairs to her bedroom. These two meetings were particularly relevant in the couple’s history.

A few weeks later, something made her ask Michael if he had, in fact, married Stacey. He denied it, but she asked a few more times, feeling in her gut that he had.

Worn down by her persistence, he eventually admitted, ‘Yes, we did marry, and you’ll maybe guess the exact date of the wedding.’

She remembered him once telling her that the date of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was a significant date for him, because of a dream that had come to him when he was involved with Monica.

Mug said, ‘The eleventh of November this year?’ She knew the answer even before he nodded.

Mug turned solemnly towards him, shaking her head. ‘Oh, Michael, you bloody fool.’

He merely sat there on her bed, with a hangdog look on his face, saying nothing.

She said, ‘What on earth were you thinking, seeing me eight days before your wedding day, and then a week after it?’

He could give her no answer. She thought it was probably just because he’d wanted to. Michael always was a law unto himself.

‘The wedding was a pretty low-key affair,’ he said. ‘My first wife turned up unannounced and uninvited at the church. She caused a scene, and had to be removed from the ceremony.’

A few years later, Mug caught sight of photographs of his wedding day on Facebook. Michael looked resplendent in a kilt, and Stacey was wearing a beautiful white dress, stepping into a limo with a smug smile on her tanned face. The wedding looked a more expensive affair than he’d led Mug to believe.

‘It was probably the five hundred pounds I lent him to go bankrupt that helped him out with the wedding costs,’ she told her best friend, Fiona. ‘My gullibility strikes again!’

Something strange happened deep inside her the moment he’d admitted to having married Stacey. A huge section of her heart withered and died. It was now too late for Michael and Mug.

During one of their last meetings at her house, he told her, ‘If things had been different, and if you, not Stacey had contacted me after Monica and I’d split up, things might have been different.’

Even then, she knew she’d doubtless had a lucky escape, despite knowing it would be unlikely she would ever find such excitement in any new relationship.

All Mug knew was that she didn’t want to see him again, and she never did. They occasionally spoke on the phone over the following couple of years, but only rarely. She would be forced to text him if he ever failed to repay the fifty pounds each month into her bank account like he’d promised to do. This happened more regularly. He would apologise, invent some excuse, and eventually pay her the money. Ensuring he repaid her, on principle, was a long and tortuous process.

When Mug was fifty-eight, Michael did once ask to meet her again, but, miracle of miracles, she turned him down. It was the first time she’d ever turned him down. She trusted neither of them, knowing if she set eyes on him again, the spark would reignite. Their lust would flare up yet again, and they would pick up from where they’d left off. It was safer to keep well away from him, as he’d proved himself to be an extremely dangerous man to know.

She recalled how he’d told her, towards the end of them being sexually involved with each other, ‘I can see us both remaining great friends when we’re both old and grey. You’ll still be wild at ninety, ha!’

At the time he said it, she believed he might be right, but as the years ticked by, she doubted it.

Mug believed she would be fine with maintaining a long-distance friendship, so long as they never met again. If they were ever to meet, by accident or design, there was a danger the craziness would recommence, and she would be lost all over again.

Chapter 2. Many Changes, All At Once

It was shortly after she lost the battle to keep Michael in her life that she lost her job in the fashion department of a large department store in Tunbridge Wells. It had been her workplace for four days a week for eighteen months. If she wanted to be vain, it could be said that it lost her. The sale’s assistant job had been a million miles away from her sedentary creative work as a graphic designer that she’d been accustomed to during the twenty-three years she’d known her ex-husband, Simon.

Simon had never said he loved her, nor instigated sex with her during the entire time they’d been together, from when they’d met as illustrators in a large studio in London when she was twenty-four and more sexually experienced than him; this wasn’t difficult because when they met he was a twenty-eight-year-old virgin, living with his mother.

He was a shy, pleasant, artistically talented, unromantic man, who’d ended up irritating Mug to