I hold my knife in the air as I take a few more chews. Swallowing is a bit of a struggle.
‘Because we are going to make love tonight,’ I say.
Jordana puts down her fork and places her hand on my wrist like a nurse to an old person.
‘No, Olly, we’re not.’
‘Where shall we go?’ I ask.
‘Oliver.’ She looks into my eyes as if she means it. ‘No.’
She moves her left hand towards the candle and passes her forefinger slowly through the flame. It blinks and ducks. I think she’s lying.
‘We could use the coffee table,’ I suggest.
The underside of her forefinger starts to darken; she pulls her finger back from the flame.
‘The airing cupboard?’ I suggest. ‘We can snuggle in among the beach towels.’
Jordana picks up a limp asparagus spear with her fingers.
‘Beneath the apple tree in the garden, like Adam and Eve?’
‘Oliver – fuck off.’ It suits Jordana to swear.
She dips the asparagus tip in a little egg yolk and simulates oral sex with it. She bites off the end and smiles.
‘Stay here,’ she says and as she speaks I can see a film of egg yolk on her teeth. She scrapes her chair back from the table, stands up and leaves the room.
She returns, holding my diary and my pen.
‘You need to get the beginning right,’ she says.
I cannot speak; I have just put a large glob of gelatinous mash in my mouth; I look slapped.
She pushes my plate out of the way and places my diary open at a blank page.
‘Tomorrow’s date,’ she says, handing me the pen.
I write the date in the top right-hand corner, while swallowing.
‘Go on,’ she says, standing over me.
‘What?’ I say, looking up at her.
‘Pretend that it’s the day after you lost your virginity,’ she says.
I write:
Word of the day: parthenologist – a specialist in the study of virgins or virginity.
Dear Diary,
Chips lost his in the toilets of Riley’s Snooker Club.
‘Cross that out,’ she says. ‘This is supposed to be about me.’
I put a line through.
‘Let me start things off for you,’ she says. ‘Jordana is…’ She stops.
Jordana is…
‘Go for it,’ she says.
… fully symmetrical. I can confirm that now.
‘Never,’ she says. ‘You got one more chance.’
I tear out the page and throw it at the wicker bin next to the dresser. It slips straight in. I take that as a good sign.
I have read that sometimes it is sexy if a man expresses his emotions:
20.5.97
Word of the day: Jordana
Oh Diary,
I love her. I love her. I love her so much. Jordana is the most amazing person I have ever met. I could eat her. I could drink her blood. She’s the only person I would allow to be shrunk to microscopic size and explore my body in a tiny submersible machine. She is wonderful and beautiful and sensitive and funny and sexy. She’s too good for me, she’s too good for anyone!
I stop for a moment, expecting her to interrupt me, tell me that she doesn’t buy it. But she stays silently watching. I carry on:
All I could do was let her know. I said: ‘I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words.’ This was a cheesy thing to say but being in love with Jordana, I have discovered, tends to make me cheesy. I told her: ‘I will happily wait for ever for you.’
(I confess that I did think, if only for a moment, that waiting for ever would be a bit of a waste of our lithe and supple bodies but, nevertheless, I was willing to hold out.)
By some mad, intergalactic fortune, she said that she was ready. We made perfect, flawless love. We were no longer virgins. But it wasn’t like losing anything.
‘Okay, stop. Stop there.’
I look up at Jordana. She blinks. A moment passes where I’m wondering what she is thinking about and she’s wondering what I’m thinking about.
‘Alright,’ she says, slowly raising her index finger and pointing at the ceiling. ‘Your parents’ room.’
*
Jordana looks through a small drawer on top of my parents’ dressing table.
I am trying not to think about the food I prepared going cold and, in particular, the congealing egg yolk. I tell myself that if sex lives up to its reputation then food – not to mention breathing, talking, sleeping and so on – will seem like nothing more than a tedious interlude between ruts.
Jordana finds a pair of Mum’s earrings kept on black felt in a box. They are turquoise. She lifts one up to her ear and bats her eyelids. I am so ready.
The alarm clock on the bedside table claims that the time is four minutes past eight. The room is lit by my mother’s bedside lamp. The curtains are open but, unless we end up making love directly against the window, nobody will be able to see us.
I stand next to Jordana in front of the dressing table. We are framed by the oval mirror. I’m about to kiss her when she kisses me first. She tastes of egg yolk, not milk. After a while I stop noticing the taste or I get used to it: synthesis. Our teeth knock together.
My hands move to her sides, she puts her hands on my neck. It is very passionate. Her eyes are closed, mine are open. In the mirror it looks as though she loves me more than I love her.
We sit on the bed and kiss for a long time; my lips feel swollen, as though I’ve eaten tomatoes. She lifts up my T-shirt and puts her hand on my stomach, which has bunched into four small rolls of flesh like a fat lady’s neck.
She rubs her hand over my chest, brushing against my nipples. I have hardly any underarm hair and no chest hair but I have an erection. That is something that has happened.
I kiss her neck; this reciprocates an earlier action. One of her hands rests on my inner thigh. Next to her hand, under the blue denim of my jeans and my black boxers, lives my penis.
An unopened jar of Bonne Maman Strawberry Jam.
She lifts the hem of my T-shirt up with both hands. I put my arms up in the air and feel like a six-year-old as she pulls the shirt over my head.
Holding the collar of her red zip-up top with one hand, I unzip with the other. She shrugs her shoulders and the top falls down her back and off her arms as if she has done this many, many times before. Her shoulders are freckled; I want to grab her collarbones as if they were handlebars.
Roasted, stuffed, red and yellow peppers.
She hugs me with her skin and we fall backwards on to the bed. She sits up momentarily on her knees, straddling my waist, and pulls off her vest. Her black, frilly bra reminds me of the net curtains at number thirteen. She reaches behind her back as if she’s going to ask me which hand the surprise is in. There are two surprises: her bra falls off towards me.
I still have an erection. She has three striations on her stomach. I have seen these before. She says these lines appear when you overuse hydrocortisone cream. They look like the marks left on the skin of a leg of pork when it’s been tied up with string in the oven.
I touch her left jubbly and then the right.
She rests herself on top of me; her breasts feel warm.
Yvana Sfetlova.
She unbuttons and unzips my trousers. It surprises me that she has not noticed that I am hard. She looks at me with what I take to be admiration.
‘Lift up,’ she says, nodding to my trousers, which she holds by two belt loops. I raise my crotch into the air and she yanks my trousers down to the knee.
‘Off,’ she says and I shuffle my jeans down my calves and kick them off my feet. Nice to still be wearing socks.
She takes a moment to unbutton her skirt at the side, then she whisks it off, matador-style.
St Ives Exfoliating Apricot Scrub.
Her knickers are green. A couple of spider-leg black hairs poke through the cotton. It is common knowledge that every h
uman eats six spiders a year while asleep. I still have a stiffy; her hands squeeze it through the material of my boxer shorts.
I put both my hands on to her breasts, her tits. I caress them as you would the presents in a lucky-dip box at the school Christmas fete. She makes a sound which can only mean arousal.
She places my right hand between her legs. I hope she knows what she’s doing. I try and relax, it being vital that I remain spiritually involved. Her hands dip inside my boxer shorts, she strokes my lingam. She skips chapters of sexual etiquette, but I forgive her.
Lamb shank.
My arm starts to ache as I hold my hand between her legs. I can feel the heat of her yoni but she is not sopping yet. Words from Razzle: sopping, juicing, dripping. Jordana is none of these.
On the bedside table I notice a book entitled A Guide to Daily Practice of Ohm Yoga. Jordana thinks that I am lost in the moment. She laughs.
‘What are you doing?’ She looks down at my hand in between her thighs. She makes judgements with no frame of reference.
Falling down on the bed next to me, still laughing a little, she pulls off her knickers. Her pubes are longer than I imagined, and smoother.
‘Come on,’ she says and tugs at my boxer shorts. I pull them down, wriggling like a worm and kick them off. Just my Wilson sports socks remain. My own pubic hair, sparse and dry, looks more like a beard.
She smiles as if to say wow.
‘Socks?’ she says.
I lift my knees up and pull both socks off. We lie naked together.
I repeat Chips’s rule of thumb: one finger’s an insult, two’s a courtesy, three’s a pleasure and four’s a challenge.
I slide my hand down her chest and into the space between her legs which she has opened slightly. I touch her yoni; it has the tacky texture of a Powerball. I find her clitoris with ease. I know I’ve found the clitoris because she tenses up and looks away.
She takes hold of my hand and moves it in a vaguely circular motion. Then she leans back again. Dad owns more pairs of shoes than I realize. Eight pairs sit on a shoe rack in the corner. The Cork ferry is going outwards, not docking, I can see that now. This also means time has passed. Seven minutes in.
Jordana itches her wrist. My fingers feel slightly damp. I can smell her. She must be ready.
She pulls me on top of her but doesn’t spread her legs. My cock wags a little.
Collins Pocket English Dictionary.
‘You haven’t got any condoms, have you?’ she says. I notice remnants of egg yolk yellowing her lips.
‘I’ve got eleven,’ I say. ‘They are in my room, beneath my Super Nintendo.’
She pushes me up by my chest.
‘Bye then.’
She’ll be fine while I’m gone. I swagger down the landing and into my bedroom. It is difficult to manoeuvre myself under the bed. Having an erection is sometimes like being in a wheelchair.
I still have a rock on when I get back to the room. Jordana lies on her side, facing away from me, her hands in her lap. Her chest is rising and falling. She is in the throes of something. I can see patches, like slap marks, of eczema on the backs of her knees. She doesn’t notice me at first. She nuzzles her mouth into the duvet and makes an ‘nngh’ sound.
I rip open a condom packet. The smell of no child support. I pull back my foreskin, which I have a lot of – Vienetta wrinkles – and place the condom on the end. I roll it down the shaft of my manhood. My penis wears its condom like a bank robber wears tights.
Jordana turns over to face me. She looks as though someone has told her a wonderful secret. She covers up her yoni, no, her pussy, with her hands. Perhaps she is embarrassed in my presence.
‘Ready?’ she says.
She pulls me on top of her. I touch her exactly on the clit – she is suddenly sodden. She pulls me in towards her, my hotrod touches her vag. It is thirteen minutes past. The national average is eight minutes. My father took ten. I watch as she slowly guides me inside as though feeding a crumpled note into a change machine.
Marie Claire had an article on how to make your man better in bed. It said that one of the best ways to prolong ejaculation was to think of strange, unsexual things:
Senile maculation – dark skin patches found upon old people.
Jordana makes the same sound that she made when I saw her brushing her knotted hair after swimming.
I could get used to this. Jordana holds me at the waist, occasionally digging her nails into my side. There is no pop sound like the seal being broken on a jam jar. Chips lied.
Salmagundi – a dish of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs and seasoning.
The clock flashes twenty-two minutes past eight. That’s nine minutes. I am man. I have a dong. She is woman. Her pussy is wet. I must remember this moment – I will write a letter to Razzle. I start to really fuck her and my diction changes, hardens. I have a dong, a wang, a cock of rock. I stuff her, I pump her. I laugh at the faces she makes. She hardly even knows what she is doing. I’m going to come right up inside her. Spray my gunk all over her. She writhes now and we both know it doesn’t matter that we have stayed in the missionary position. Next time we screw, I will spin her around like a wheel; the Kama Sutra calls this position ‘the top’.
She sounds less and less like Chips’s impression of a girl getting fucked.
I feel like a water balloon being filled up under the tap. I try and think of smokers’ lungs or insect pupae or an endoscope but the balloon is still filling, pregnant, so I try and visualize a shadoof, an Egyptian irrigation device of a bucket on a pole, or a Hydra, the many-headed snake, but suddenly the water rushes upwards so I stop thinking
The condom is specked with blood the consistency of mucus. I pull the condom off my dong, which is still a dong, and throw it on the floor of my parents’ room.
I lie back.
Jordana is here. She looks terrible.
‘How many orgasms?’ I ask.
She looks at the ceiling and itches her arm, a plume of dead skin like a puff on a cigarette – post-coital.
‘How many?’ I say, but I think she lost count.
Epistolary
20.5.97
Word of the day: eugenics
Yes Diary. Yes.
All that training had paid off: fingertip pull-ups on the dado rail, strengthening my pelvic floor by clenching and unclenching on all bus journeys (thank you, Marie Claire) plus hours of research with the Kama Sutra and the internet.
I’m glad that Chips, my personal trainer, prepared me visually by recommending a strict sex-shaped diet: clams, kebab, wet lettuce.
We didn’t even get under the covers.
As Marie predicted, we were discovering each other’s bodies. I feel like I uncovered a new species.
We made Siamese semaphore. We were a cappuccino milk-frother.
Just as I was about to let rip, I remember thinking – Shiiit! – and – God! – and then suddenly, nothing, no words, except something vaguely Cymraeg at the back of my throat. I feel certain that, one day, the sound I made as I came inside a condom which, in turn, was inside Jordana, will come to mean ‘winner’ in some distant future language.
Jordana did make some of the sounds I’d been expecting. There was something that approximated an ‘oooh’. Except with less vowels. More of an ‘uh’. But mostly she made sounds like ‘nh’.
Since we had sex – and with such results – I am drawn to ask the question: when will we do it again? Is there any point? Could we possibly hope to improve?
And now that I smell the way I do, I will not be washing again. My fingertips have the kick of permanent markers.
On that note I leave you,
O
PS Afterwards, I was ravenous. I finished off my plate of food, then started in on Jordana’s.
When I hear the Mazda pull up outside, I am reading the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology. It is a book the size of a telephone directory. I rest it in my lap. I am focusing on the following sentence: ‘One morni
ng Thor woke up to find that his hammer was missing.’
‘Hello?’ My mother calls from the porch. She sounds like someone entering a haunted house.
I am in the wicker chair by the bookcase in the front room. As my parents enter, I look up and then clap the book closed.
‘How was your evening?’ I ask, nonchalant.
They are wearing their coats: Dad in a navy trench coat, Mum in an orange cagoule.
‘Excellent,’ Dad says. ‘It was a good production, wasn’t it?’
‘Your gran would have liked it.’ She lowers her voice to a whisper. ‘Lots of naked people.’ My gran gets the Edinburgh Festival brochure and circles the performances that have warnings about nudity. She says she likes the human form.
Mum is looking around the room for something to tidy.
‘And where’s m’ lady?’ Dad says.
‘Jordana went home.’
Mum flicks the TV off stand-by.
‘Always rushing off. She can’t have been here very long,’ he says.
If only my father knew.
‘I hope you walked her home,’ Dad says.
I shrug and say: ‘I put her in a taxi.’
My mother straightens out the arm covers on the sofa. My dad smiles. He has his hand up on top of the open door, leaning on it.
‘I hope you gave her enough money,’ Dad says, looking at the back of Mum’s head. She picks up the remote control and puts it on top of the TV.
‘I gave her three quid.’
‘Good. And how was the romantic meal?’ My dad is grinning, waiting for my mother to look at him. She doesn’t.
‘It was fine. She liked her asparagi.’
They do not even suspect that their bed was an accomplice. Jordana is two months older than me and, as such, she is the criminal mastermind.
I go upstairs. The first piss of my sex life twirls like the corkscrew rollercoaster at Alton Towers. And it stinks. Like acid and bins and homeless people. I begin to think I have done something truly terrible for which I am being punished and my insides are turning to mulch, but then I remember that we had asparagus for dinner.
Afterwards, I retire to my bedroom and write a letter to Razzle. It contains the metaphor: ‘I spread her legs as you might the centre pages of a porn magazine.’
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