by Kate Davies
‘Feeling rough?’ she said cheerfully.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do we have any Haribo, or crisps or anything?’ I took a sip of tea. It seemed to curdle in my mouth.
‘I’ll get you some later. Tell me about the guy you snogged!’ Her arms were crossed. She was far too excited about it.
‘I don’t really remember …’
‘He had great hair. Reddish.’
‘Did he?’ I said, putting my tea down and delicately lowering myself onto my back again.
‘Yes! I couldn’t really see his face, though, the angle you were at.’
‘He definitely smelled quite masculine,’ I said, closing my eyes. I could hear birds singing and the pounding of the blood in my head.
Alice took the hint. She padded out of the room, ostentatiously quietly, and returned clutching a pack of Haribo Starmix.
‘Thank you,’ I said, and she sat there, smiling at me indulgently, as I piled the sweets into my mouth, one after the other.
I had a mouth full of cola bottles when my phone started to ring. I reached out for it, swallowing hastily and narrowing my eyes against the glare of the screen.
It was Finn.
I waved Alice out of the room. She went as slowly as she could, clearly trying to overhear as much of our conversation as possible.
‘I feel like shit this morning,’ said Finn. His voice was deeper than I remembered, a lazy drawl.
‘I literally think I’m about to die,’ I said.
‘Not because of me, I hope,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, trying to ignore Alice, who was standing in the doorway, grinning at me.
‘Cool,’ he said. ‘So, like – do you want to go for a drink sometime then?’ He sounded like he wasn’t arsed either way, and yet he obviously was arsed, because here he was calling me the morning after we’d met. ‘Next Friday maybe?’
‘Sounds good,’ I said. He must actually like me, I thought. This could genuinely lead to sex. I wasn’t sure I could remember how to do it. What if I couldn’t – what’s the female equivalent of ‘get it up’?
4. UNSEXY SEX
I thought about sex on Sunday and did an emergency underwear wash. I hung my black bra to dry on the radiator in my bedroom, so that it would be ready for my date. I thought about sex on Monday on the packed Piccadilly line, my face pressed up against someone else’s armpit, and then I stopped thinking about sex because I had a sudden vision of what it would be like to shag the owner of the armpit and started to feel queasy. As I walked to the Victoria line platform, I allowed myself to check out the other commuters. I hadn’t done that in years – it felt pointless and liable to lead to disappointment, like window shopping in Knightsbridge. That man has hands, I thought to myself. What a lovely smile. (I was a bit out of practice.)
Once I arrived at the office, all thoughts of sex fled from my mind, as if they’d been chased away by a very unsexy person. In a way, I suppose, they had; Tom followed me into the lift.
‘Ready?’ he asked, looking straight ahead, as the lift carried us up to our floor.
‘For what?’
‘Smriti. It’s her first day.’
There was an atmosphere in the office. I’d never known there to be an atmosphere in the office before, apart from a general sense of ennui. Owen was wearing a tie. Uzo was sitting up straighter at her desk than usual and, worryingly, wasn’t checking her mobile phone every five minutes. In fact, her phone seemed to be in her bag.
The lift opened with an ominous bing! and there, all of a sudden, was Smriti Laghari, our new Grade Six.
We pretended to work for about ten minutes, our attention very much focused on where Smriti was in the office, our bodies turning slightly to face her, like sunflowers following the sun. Smriti was a little bit like the sun – she was shiny, or at least her teeth were. Her hair too. Looking at her made me feel a bit unwashed, though I’d had a shower that morning and shampooed my hair twice by accident.
After about a quarter of an hour, Smriti walked into the middle of the office – next to the cupboard where we keep our biscuits – and said, ‘Hey guys!’ Even her voice was sunny. Everyone swivelled towards her. ‘I just wanted to introduce myself.’
‘She shouldn’t have said “just”,’ I whispered to Owen. ‘It weakens her message.’
‘This is my first role outside private office, so I hope you’ll be patient with me as I get up to speed. I’m psyched to be working with you guys!’
‘She shouldn’t have said “psyched”, either,’ muttered Owen. ‘No one should say “psyched”.’
There was an awkward silence – people didn’t usually make speeches on their first day in a new job – and then a half-hearted round of applause, because she seemed to expect one. I could see people on other teams looking round to see if it was a birthday or a leaving party, and whether there might be cake.
‘She didn’t mention restructuring,’ said Owen.
‘Would have been a bit bold to lead with that, wouldn’t it?’ I said.
‘She didn’t even say “streamlining”. I think we’re going to be OK.’
We watched Smriti walk, smiling at everyone she passed, into her new glass-walled office, followed by Tom. Uzo gave Tom a thumbs up. Tom looked straight ahead, like a child in a school play pretending not to see his parents.
Once Smriti’s office door was shut, the rest of us relaxed a little. Uzo took her phone out and started texting. Owen offered to make a tea round. Across the office, I saw Stan open a bag of ready salted.
‘I already wish it was Friday,’ said Uzo, eyes on her phone.
‘Me too,’ I said.
‘Doing anything exciting this weekend?’ Uzo asked.
‘Not really,’ I said, casual as anything. ‘Just going on a date.’
‘A DATE?’ boomed Uzo. ‘Owen. Owen, man. Did you hear that?’
Owen put the mugs down in a hurry, spilling a little tea on the pile of correspondence on my desk. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What have you heard?’
‘Nothing about work,’ I said. ‘Uzo’s just excited because I’m going on a date on Friday night.’
‘Oh! Who with?’ asked Owen.
‘No one,’ I said. ‘Just a guy I met at a party.’
I sipped my tea and logged the latest letters and emails in the system. I had to draft replies to several urgent emails from the Treasury, but I had another letter from Eric, the Bomber Command vet, so I read that first.
I’ll always remember the day I met Eve – 9 October 1943, in the sergeants’ mess at RAF White Waltham. She was a First Officer in the Air Transport Auxiliary and she could fly a Spitfire like the best of them! I liked the look of her, so I went to say hello, and she smiled at me, and that was that. She had beautiful blue eyes – right up until she died, they were the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. We were married for seventy years. I’ve got the telegram from the Queen framed here in my room at the home; I’m looking at it now, as I write to you. I don’t know why she had to die first. But I’m very lucky to have had her as long as I did, I suppose. Here’s a photo of us on our wedding day. (I photocopied it at my local library. Aren’t libraries smashing?)
I’ll let you go now, my dear. I’m sure you have much better things to do than read any more of my drivel!
Yours (as ever),
Eric Beecham
P.S. – Are you married? Or do you have a fellow?
Not yet, Eric, I thought. The ‘yet’ shows you how optimistic I was about my date. I looked at the grainy black-and-white picture of the young couple outside a church, squinting in the sunlight. They were arm in arm, beaming, Eve in a white dress and Eric in his RAF uniform, his ears sticking out beneath his Brylcreemed hair. They looked so young and happy. I tucked the picture into my wallet, so I could look at it when I needed a dose of Forties optimism.
My impending date was the talk of the correspondence team for the rest of the week. On Wednesday, Uzo sent me a link to an article about depilation and advised me not to use expensive new face produ
cts in the run-up to the date in case they irritated my skin. ‘I’m not going to make that much of an effort,’ I told her. ‘I’m not desperate.’ Uzo gave me a look that clearly meant, ‘You should be.’
And as I was getting ready to leave on Friday, Owen decided to give me some first date advice. ‘Ask him which three bands sum up his taste in music,’ he said. ‘Or what his childhood nickname was. If you get him to talk about himself, he’ll think you’re a good listener.’
‘You Googled “conversation starters” before your first date with Laura, didn’t you?’ I asked.
‘No!’ he said. ‘I just happened to read an article about them in Men’s Health.’
The idea of Owen reading Men’s Health made Uzo snort so loudly that Smriti came out of her office to see if anything was wrong.
‘Text us and let us know how it’s going, yeah?’ said Uzo, as I shut down my computer.
‘I am not going to text you in the middle of my date,’ I said. ‘Unless it’s really bad and I need someone to come and rescue me.’
‘I hope you don’t,’ said Owen.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Me too.’
I met Finn outside the BFI. It was my idea to go there; if he turned out to be incredibly unattractive or boring, at least I’d have seen one more Derek Jarman film, which would give me something to talk to my dad about.
I stood at the entrance, eavesdropping on a conversation between two women smoking at an outdoor table, coats clutched close against the cold.
‘Michelle did it with Joe last night.’
‘She never!’
‘I know! Apparently he asked her to piss on him.’
I felt a bit sick all of a sudden. Maybe the rules of sex had changed since my encounter with the twenty-one-year-old. What if Finn wanted me to piss on him, but I had performance anxiety or an empty bladder?
I took out my book, a collection of essays by Nora Ephron, but I couldn’t concentrate. I read the same sentence three or four times: Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from.
I glanced up, looking for Finn. Would he recognize me? I was pretty certain I’d have no idea who he was. I tried to remember if he had any distinguishing characteristics. Nice reddish hair, according to Alice. Abrasive stubble. A distinctive unwashed smell.
I looked back down at my book. Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from, I read again. I was getting a bit ahead of myself.
And then there he was, calling to me.
‘Julia!’
It felt like he was giving me a compliment just by saying my name in his malty, barrel-aged voice. He walked towards me, hands in his pockets, hips thrust forward, smiling. He leaned in to kiss me; he was wearing cologne. He’d made an effort. This was promising.
‘How are you, then?’ I said.
‘Not bad, not bad,’ he said, looking at me and smiling. ‘I’ve been thinking about you all week.’
‘Me too. You, I mean.’ I really was very bad at this.
He didn’t reply. He just grabbed my hand and led me into the cinema. It was so nice to feel that I belonged to someone.
We sat right at the back with our knees pressed up against the seats in front, like teenagers on the bus to school. I’d smuggled in a bag of Maltesers and he had a hip flask full of whisky – a delicious combination.
The film seemed to go on forever. I couldn’t follow the plot, which might have been because there wasn’t one, but I’m going to give Jarman the benefit of the doubt here. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the fact that I was on a date with a man, a man who was sitting next to me, a man who had his actual hand on my actual knee. I’ve never been much good at mindfulness but I was fully present in that moment. I remember the way the seat fabric felt through my trousers; the sound of Finn’s breathing, so close to me; the musty, sweet smell of popcorn and other people’s perfume. My body seemed to be one throbbing nerve ending.
After about an hour, Finn looked across at me and said, ‘Is it me, like, or is this film a load of shite?’
‘I don’t think it’s you,’ I said. I smiled to myself: we agreed about something. We had something in common already.
Finn put his arm around me and pulled me closer. I put my head on his shoulder as an experiment. He put his head on mine. I began to get a crick in my neck. The film wasn’t any better from a ninety- degree angle.
On the screen, some punks were getting beaten up by the police, which was probably the most exciting bit of the whole film. I’m not sure, though, because by this point I was looking into Finn’s eyes, and he was staring into mine. His eyes were green when the light from the screen flashed bright across them, then brown. And then he closed them and I closed mine and we were all over each other, hands up each other’s T-shirts, leaning over the armrests to get closer, ignoring stares and disapproving tuts from the other cinemagoers.
We pulled apart and grinned at each other. ‘Want to get out of here?’ Finn said.
We practically ran back to the Tube station and stood all the way to Leyton, kissing messily. I felt reckless for the first time in ages – reckless, at least, in a way that didn’t just involve spending the last of my overdraft on two bottles of corner-shop wine and drinking them both myself.
The teenagers opposite us laughed at us openly. ‘Ooooh, you’re going to fuck. You haven’t fucked yet, have you?’
The youth of today are very observant, I thought. And yes, I fucking well hope I’m fucking going to fuck. I felt like I might explode. Nothing seemed to matter any more except coming, coming in the presence of another human being, being made to come by someone else.
We nearly missed our stop. We lurched out of the Tube carriage onto the platform and the abrupt change from warmth to cold made me self-conscious all of a sudden. It felt like coming down from MDMA and realizing you’re sitting in a cat basket, stroking a stranger’s face.
‘How far is it to yours?’ I asked, as we tapped our Oyster cards on the exit gates.
‘About fifteen minutes,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Cool,’ I said.
He nodded back.
As we walked, I became increasingly aware of the echoing of our feet on the pavement and of Finn’s hand in mine, large, dry, unfamiliar. Increasingly aware that I knew nothing about this man other than his first name and that he had unpredictable grooming habits. I considered texting Alice to let her know where the police should look for me if I didn’t arrive home the next day, but I didn’t want to break what remained of the pre-sex atmosphere with the light from the screen. At last he slowed, stopping in front of an unremarkable Victorian terraced house.
‘This is it,’ he said, fumbling with the key. ‘I think my flatmates are in, so be quiet, yeah?’
The flat smelled of mildew. There were T-shirts drying on the radiators and a curling Clockwork Orange poster Blu-Tacked to the wallpaper. ‘My room’s up here,’ he said, running up the stairs two at a time.
He opened his bedroom door and ushered me through. ‘Welcome to my spacious abode,’ he said, shutting the door behind us and leaning against it.
‘Great,’ I said.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘You need the toilet or anything?’
‘No, it’s OK.’
There was a silence.
‘Nice room,’ I said.
‘No, it’s not,’ he said.
‘Yeah, all right, it’s not.’ The room was barely big enough for both of us to stand in. It was entirely taken up with a single bed and a clothes rail, crammed with jumpers and jeans in shades of brown, green and grey. The only attempts at decoration were a few moody photos of arm creases, knees and foreheads pinned to the walls.
He sat on the bed, grabbed my hand and pulled me down next to him.
‘Did you take those photos?’ I said.
He nodded, looking me in the eye now, still holding my hand.
I looked away, back at the photos again. ‘So is that what you are, then? A photographer?’
And then he li
cked his lips, which made them look sausagey and wet all of a sudden, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be there any more.
‘Julia,’ he said, stroking my face. ‘You’re beautiful.’
I felt the urge to push him away; I was fully sober now and very aware of him entering my personal space. But I managed to pull myself together and stared meaningfully back at him. He leaned in slowly and kissed me. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy the sensation, but kissing felt ridiculous all of a sudden; someone breathing all over your face, licking the inside of your mouth. Why do we do it?
I’m kissing a man, I thought to myself. He is kissing me. This is sexy.
He drew back and looked at me in a way that made me feel very aware of my own face, not necessarily in a good way.
Then he started to kiss my neck and leaned in to pull my cardigan off. I had to shrug to help him. Neither of us spoke. I became aware of some kind of gurgling noise coming from the pipes. I wished he’d put some mood music on; I was nostalgic now for the ‘Late Night Love’ playlist my ex-boyfriend used to play. At least that had helped me get into character as a person who enjoyed sex.
He started with my bra, and then pushed me back on the single duvet and pulled off my jeans, then my underpants. I was naked. Do not cross your arms, I said to myself. It is not sexy to cross your arms. It was really cold in his flat, though. At least that meant my nipples were erect.
Help, I thought – am I supposed to undress him now? I’ve never been good with buckles.
I knelt up and pulled his T-shirt over his head. It got stuck for a bit, and then when he pulled his head free, his face was slightly purple.
He clearly decided I was no clothes removal expert, because he hurriedly took off his own jeans while I lay back on the duvet, the colour and stiffness of a corpse at this point, probably.
He wasn’t wearing boxers. His penis was there, erect, waving from side to side as though it was greeting me. I’d forgotten how hideous-looking penises are. Penis is not a sexy word, I thought. But was cock better? I didn’t know. I had been out of the game too long. I prayed I wouldn’t have to say either word, or, in fact, anything else.
He was lying on top of me now, rubbing himself against me. ‘Talk dirty to me,’ he said.