In at the Deep End
Page 15
Next time I woke up, it was getting dark outside. A doctor was standing next to my bed.
‘I want to talk to you about drug and alcohol counselling,’ he said.
‘I really don’t need that,’ I said, pushing myself up, trying to make myself look respectable.
‘You ended up in hospital on a drip after a night out.’
‘It was completely out of character,’ I said.
‘I promise it was,’ said Sam, standing up. ‘She’s not going to do it again. Are you?’ She looked at me.
I shook my head.
‘I’ll make sure she doesn’t,’ Sam said, her hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ll look after her.’
‘Who are you?’ said the doctor.
‘I’m her girlfriend.’ She smiled down at me, her hair glowing in the strip lighting like an unusual lesbian saint.
I’m sure other people have more romantic ‘becoming official’ stories, but ours felt pretty bloody romantic to me. Sam was willing to take me covered in vomit, in hospital because I had a bloody headache and had taken a few too many drugs. This was me at my absolute worst, and she wanted me.
They let me go at about 11 p.m. Sam took me to her flat and tucked me up in her delicious white sheets. She brought me fish and chips in bed, and when she left me to clear our plates away I cried with gratitude. She was everything I had always wanted in a partner. Apart from the fact that she wanted to have sex with other people.
I slept most of Sunday and called in sick on Monday. I was still in bed when Sam came home. She’d been at her studio and smelled of turpentine. I wondered whom she’d been painting.
‘How are you, babes?’ she asked.
‘Better.’
‘Better enough to eat? Jasper and Polly were going to come over. But I can meet them somewhere if you can’t face getting up.’
‘Oh, no,’ I said, sitting up. ‘I’ll get up. I’ll get out of the way.’
‘I don’t want you out of the way,’ she said, sitting on the end of the bed. ‘I want you to meet my friends.’
‘Well, thank you. I want to meet them,’ I said, trying not to show how pleased I was. ‘As long as I can borrow some clothes.’
Sam was much taller than me, and skinnier. The best I could do was a pair of baggy jeans that weren’t that baggy on me, and an old Bangles T-shirt. ‘There might be some make-up in one of the bathroom cupboards if you need any.’
Luckily I still felt rough enough that I didn’t care what I looked like, because under other circumstances I’d have felt sick with nerves over meeting her friends.
‘So who are Jasper and Polly?’ I asked, dabbing on a bit of too-dark concealer, probably left behind by one of Sam’s past conquests.
‘My oldest friends. Jasper I know from going out when I was a teenager. Polly’s a friend from art school. They’re a couple now. Met at my birthday about eight years ago and never looked back.’
The doorbell rang and Sam went to let her friends in.
I could hear a deep, quiet voice saying hello and another voice booming, ‘Come here! Let me squeeze that gorgeous arse of yours! You are looking fine today! Now, where’s this woman who has kept you away from us for so long?’
I flushed the toilet.
‘There’s our answer!’ said the booming voice.
‘Hello!’ I said, opening the bathroom door. Sam and her friends were squeezed onto a couple of sofas. Polly stood up to shake my hand. She wore red lipstick and had a kind smile. I thought I might like her.
Jasper seemed the most excited to meet me. She was wearing red trousers and DMs and managed to look like a toddler and a middle-aged man at the same time, with white-blond curls and ruddy cheeks. She looked me up and down, lingering on my legs and breasts. ‘I can see why you’ve been busy, Sam,’ she said in the booming voice. ‘She is one hot mamma.’
I smiled, pleased to be referred to as a hot mamma – though a bit disturbed too, what with Jasper looking an awful lot like a 3-year-old – and then I frowned, because I don’t approve of objectification.
‘Don’t take any notice of Jasper,’ said Polly. ‘She’s overexcited. Sam doesn’t often introduce us to her dates.’
Jasper sat back down on the sofa with an ‘Oof!’ that told me she was in her late thirties at least. ‘Come and sit next to me and tell me all about yourself,’ she said, patting the seat beside her, so I did. ‘Sam’s hot, isn’t she?’
‘She is.’ I smiled over at Sam, who was making salad dressing and pretending not to listen to our conversation.
‘I only had sex with her once, when she was a teenager and I was in my twenties—’
‘That’s a bit cradle snatchy, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘What? No! She snatched me! She was very precocious for a 16-year-old. I didn’t have much of a say in the matter.’
I was unusually quiet during dinner, shovelling food quickly and taking second helpings to give myself something to do other than talk. I could feel Sam looking at me, checking I was OK. I wasn’t massively OK – the conversation seemed to mostly centre around times everyone had fucked each other in various combinations that always involved Sam.
‘Do you remember that sex party we went to in Clapham?’
‘God, it was so awful. Everyone in their suits, not knowing how to use a strap-on.’
‘Sam got off with the only hot women there, as usual.’
I laughed along with my mouth full of bread.
‘I can’t wait to take you to your first sex party,’ Sam said, squeezing my hand.
I nodded.
‘Have you never been to one before?’ asked Jasper.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’ll be fine,’ said Polly, smiling at me. ‘I was terrified at my first one, but once you get used to having sex in front of other people it’s actually really fun.’
‘Are you going to let us play with her?’ Jasper asked Sam. She gasped and turned back to me. ‘How do you feel about feet? I’d like to do some feet stuff with you.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said, trying to look enigmatic.
‘Don’t go near Jasper’s feet,’ said Polly. ‘She doesn’t know what a pumice stone is.’
‘Oi!’ said Jasper. ‘I’d get a pedicure for Julia.’ She raised her eyebrows at me.
Sam took my hand. ‘It’ll just be the two of us the first time.’
‘You are a changed woman,’ said Jasper. ‘Julia’s got you under the thumb already!’
Even after everyone left, I was quiet. Sam asked me what was wrong, and I told her I hadn’t liked the way Jasper had spoken about me at dinner.
‘It’s just banter,’ she said.
‘It’s not very feminist.’
‘We’re all feminists. We’re lesbians, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Jasper’s a bit of a chauvinist.’
‘That’s just Jasper. None of us take her seriously.’
I sat down on the sofa. Sam came to sit next to me. ‘Are all your friends non-monogamous?’ I asked.
‘Pretty much.’ She put her arm around me. ‘This lifestyle takes some getting used to, but I swear you’ll be so much happier when you let go of all that heteronormative bullshit. Do you really think you’ll never meet anyone you want to have sex with apart from me, ever again?’
‘No …’
‘Right. Exactly. But the most important thing is us. Isn’t it incredible that we found each other? I feel like we have this connection – don’t we?’ There was worry in her eyes now, which I found reassuring.
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t feel like that very often.’
‘I don’t either.’ I turned and kissed her. I couldn’t get over how wonderful it felt to kiss her.
She took my hands. ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for a while now. I’ve been telling myself it’s too soon. Is it too soon?’ She looked at me meaningfully.
I looked back, trying to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about, willing her to back out.
/> ‘Shall I say it?’ she said.
I didn’t say anything.
‘I won’t say it if you don’t want me to.’
‘You can say it.’
‘You’re not ready.’
I smiled.
‘That’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll say it in another way.’ She kissed me, and the kiss turned into the most amazing sex, right there on the sofa – really intense sex, the kind where you stare into each other’s eyes while you’re fingering and then fist each other without gloves and lie there, hugging, for about half an hour afterwards.
I decided to call in sick on Tuesday, too. I still didn’t feel stable enough to face the world, stomach-wise. I woke up to find Sam’s side of the bed empty, the radio on, the shower hissing.
I walked into the bathroom. Sam was a hazy golden shape behind the shower curtain, humming tunelessly to herself.
‘Morning,’ I said.
‘Go back to bed, babes,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘Want to stay here today? I like the idea of coming home to you.’
‘Or I could come to the studio?’
‘Actually, I prefer to work alone,’ she said. ‘I’d feel self-conscious if you watched me paint. Is that OK?’
‘Of course.’
She turned off the shower and pulled back the curtain to give me a hot, damp kiss. She shook her hair, flicking water around the bathroom. ‘Make yourself breakfast,’ she said. ‘Watch TV or whatever. I’ll be back about seven.’
The flat hummed with silence after she left.
So many blank cupboard doors and drawers. So many notebooks on the crammed bookshelves. But I shouldn’t look at them. I shouldn’t open them. No good would come of it.
I climbed back into bed and picked up Sam’s laptop from the floor. Five Google Chrome tabs were open: a blog, Women Painting Women, about female figurative painters; her Gmail home page, which I shut straight away; and my Twitter page, my Facebook page and my Instagram. I felt a strange little thrill: I put everything about my life up there for people to see – stupid selfies and symmetrical photos of Moroccan floor tiles and inane comments about Saturday-night television – but I’d never considered that someone might actively choose to look at any of it. Sam had been looking through my Facebook photos, back to when I’d started university: me and Alice drinking pints at the Dirty Duck, me with my ex-boyfriend Leon, me in a bikini in Croatia … She really did love me. Here was the proof.
19. ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET
I was hoping that Sam and I would go on a romantic mini-break over Easter, possibly to Whitstable or Margate – I don’t think a relationship is official until you’ve stayed in an Airbnb together and picked dubious hairs out of a stranger’s double bed – but it turned out Sam already had plans.
‘I’m going home to see my dad,’ she told me a couple of weekends before, as we strolled through London Fields hand in hand, sidestepping cyclists and dogs.
‘Oh!’ I said, trying and probably failing to keep the disappointment out of my voice. ‘Where does he live, then?’
Sam rarely talked about her father. I knew all about Polly’s mum and Jasper’s brother who lived in St Ives and the MFA crew that Sam visited in New York whenever she got the chance, but nothing about her family, other than that her mother was dead and that her father was rich. ‘Dubai,’ she said.
‘Very nice!’ I said.
‘Apart from the fact that homosexuality is illegal.’
‘Do you have any friends out there?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Sam said. ‘He moved there after my mum died, and I was away at school.’ And then, ‘Fuck.’ She had stepped in a puddle. There was a tiny smudge of mud on her right trainer. She knelt down to wipe it clean with a leaf.
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said.
She stood up and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘I’ll miss you too,’ she said, and she pulled me towards her and kissed me.
A teenage boy wolf whistled at us. Sam put her finger up at him and kept kissing me. That felt great, kissing someone and making a political statement at the same time.
I didn’t fancy rattling about in the flat alone, eating Easter eggs and worrying about my future while Alice and Dave had loud four-day-weekend sex, so I decided to go home to see my parents.
‘Lovely!’ Mum had said when I’d called to check it was OK with her. ‘And good news: next door’s builders are all away for Easter. I suppose it’s more of a big deal in Eastern Europe. Thank God! Literally!’
Mum opened the front door before I rang the bell.
‘Look,’ she said, hands on hips, nodding towards next door. ‘They could have cleared the rubble away before they buggered off for a week!’
‘Nice to see you too, Mum,’ I said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.
Dad was in the kitchen, watching something on his laptop. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem to be enjoying it. I walked up behind him. He looked round and smiled at me briefly before going back to frowning.
‘Bloody Geoff,’ he said, nodding at the screen. Dad was, unbelievably, watching YouTube. ‘He’s started putting his lectures on the Internet. He has thousands of followers.’
‘His face looks even more weirdly smooth on camera, though,’ I said, patting Dad’s shoulder.
‘And the worst thing is he talks such crap,’ said Dad. ‘It’s like he’s never read Silas Marner.’
‘I keep telling your father, YouTube is the future,’ said Mum, arranging sprigs of rosemary around the lamb. ‘You could get Harry next door to help you, Martin, seeing as you’re so chummy with his mother.’ She looked at me. ‘Harry does make-up tutorials,’ she said. ‘I watched one the other day, and it explained how to apply base and how to contour. I would need different products, of course, because I don’t have stubble.’
Dad looked at me, a pained look. ‘Are you listening to this nonsense?’ he said.
‘I think you’d be very popular on YouTube,’ I said. ‘You could call yourself The Grumpy Professor.’
‘Oh!’ said Mum, looking up from the lamb. ‘That’s good!’
‘I’m not grumpy,’ Dad said grumpily. He clicked another video. ‘Now this chap,’ he said, ‘this chap knows how to make a YouTube video.’
I looked over his shoulder. A bearded man was standing at the top of a mountain, shouting about how warm he was in his new anorak.
‘He reviews mountaineering gear,’ Dad said.
‘You’ve never been mountaineering,’ I said. ‘Has he?’ I asked Mum.
‘Of course he hasn’t,’ she said.
‘But if I wanted to, I’d know exactly what gear to get,’ Dad said.
My exciting new sexuality didn’t come up once during lunch, but as I was about to go to bed, Dad said to me, ‘Did you enjoy Nightingale Wood?’ And I said, ‘Yes, thanks,’ and he nodded stiffly.
I had left my phone in my room and when I went back to find it I had a missed call from Sam. I called her back straight away. The phone rang with a distant, international monotone, which made me feel even further away from her.
‘You didn’t answer your phone,’ she said when she picked up, her voice sulky.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was with my parents.’
She sighed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, babes. I hate being here with my dad. He doesn’t know who I am most of the time, and then he has lucid moments and that’s even worse because he’s so fucking miserable.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Why doesn’t he—’
‘Early onset dementia.’
‘Oh,’ I said again, stupidly. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘Of course you didn’t. I only just told you. Anyway, it’s the depression that’s the worst. He’s been depressed since my mum died. That’s what monogamy does to you – you tie your happiness up with one person and they leave you or die, and then you’re fucked forever.’
‘That’s a cheerful way of looking at it.’
As I lay in bed that night, I thought about what she’d said. We had only just become official, and already I felt her absence like a physical pain, an uneasy, unhealthy kind of missing. I wondered how much more I’d miss her when she was away with Virginie, having tantric sex in a gîte. Maybe I need a Virginie of my own, I thought. An Irish one, perhaps. A Siobhan. We’d have great sexy craic and then drink post-coital whisky together and eat those nice Lily O’Brien’s chocolates people always bring back from Dublin. But everything in me rebelled against the idea of being with someone else. I wanted Sam, Sam, Sam. I would do whatever I had to do to keep her.
‘You’re adorable,’ Nicky said in our next session.
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. You’re so sweet.’
‘Shut up. I’m not sweet.’
‘You think she’s your girlfriend.’
‘She is. And I met her friends.’
‘Her friends who she sleeps with?’ Nicky said in a gentle, sympathetic voice that made me want to maim her.
‘She’s not sleeping with anyone but me at the moment. Plus she called from Dubai over Easter, because she missed me. And she’s been looking back through all my Facebook photos. I saw, when I was at her flat.’
‘And that’s relevant why?’
‘Because you only do that if you’re genuinely interested in someone.’
‘So you think Internet stalking is a sign of commitment.’
‘It’s definitely a sign of interest.’
‘And you’re already looking at her Internet history.’
‘Not on purpose.’
She shrugged, tapped her pen on her notebook a few times, and asked, ‘Have you tried BDSM yet?’
‘No. But we will soon. Next week, actually, I think.’
‘Right.’
She stared at me. I stared back. A fly buzzed between us, distractingly. I refused to blink. Nicky swatted it, which I took as a victory.
20. MR LOVER LOVER
Sam called me as I was walking to work from Victoria station one Friday in early May, umbrella up against the rain, part of a stream of blue mackintoshes and white shirts heading towards the Department of Health and Social Care.