The Woman Who Pretended to Love Men

by Anna Ferrara

  Once I was sure the hidden cameras would have gone out of battery, I let myself go wild. I seduced Milla in all the ways my mind would conjure and made love to her in all sorts of positions to figure out which would feel the best for both of us. Milla was just as curious as me. She taught me everything she knew about pleasuring the female body, I showed her what I knew and we figured everything else out together. As the days went by, we became increasingly cuddly. I got familiar with her scent, the texture of her skin and the way her lips always felt against mine. I learned how to turn her on in an instant—describing how I wanted her to feel in whispers in her ear while illustrating my descriptions with figurative moans usually did the trick—and so did she. I found out she loved french toast and hams and that she hated beef brisket noodles and anything made of beans. She got to know how much I needed coffee in the mornings and I soon found myself waking up to the smell of a piping hot brew every single morning.

  In those magical fourteen days, I felt as if I were in paradise. We didn’t need anything else to keep us smiling; not money, not jobs, not missions, or any of those material things. All we needed was absolute privacy and each other; that was enough. Up till that point, I had never been happier or more sexually fulfilled. I began to understand my experience with Jackson hadn’t been love; it had been simply a convenient way of fitting in, just so I could look and talk like everyone else my age. I had liked him because of who his presence allowed me to be but I hadn’t loved him; not in the way I loved Milla. Milla was inconvenient; with her I would never fit in or have anything to say to anybody else my age, yet I couldn’t get myself away from her. That, I came to see, was what love really was.

  Had it been truly up to me, I would have liked to live as we did in those fourteen days forever. Unfortunately, on the night of the fourteenth day, my sense of responsibility reared its ugly head again. I realised I hadn’t spoken to my office in fourteen days and started worrying I might be fired if I kept it up, if I hadn’t been fired already.

  I really liked my job, you see. I didn’t want to lose it.

  The day I was supposed to go back to my ‘journalist job’, I woke and found myself all alone in Milla’s bed for the first time in over three hundred and thirty-six hours.

  I called out to her and searched the entire apartment with only her quilt around my body for cover but I never found her. She simply wasn’t there.

  Not in the kitchen or yard or living room. Not in the room I now knew was to be her baby’s bedroom. There wasn’t any piping hot coffee on the dining table either.

  I waited on the living room sofa for half an hour before deciding to go to work anyway.

  Downstairs, I checked if the security guard had seen her leave the lobby. He couldn’t say. I checked out the area around her apartment building but didn’t see anyone who looked remotely Caucasian.

  I ended up right outside my old apartment, the one across the street from Milla’s, and figured I might as well go right in. I had lots to do that day: I needed to get my Nokia charged to find out if I missed any calls from my office; I needed to check my StarTAC to see if my mother had gone crazy from not having been able to contact me in two weeks, though I doubted so since I had already vanished on her a few times before and she seemed to have already gotten the idea I would be doing so every now and then; I needed to check if my office had sent me an email in the past twenty-four hours and drop them one to let them know I was still at their service, eager to keep my job. I was so preoccupied with all I had to do, and with punching in the access code to my apartment building’s front gate, that I didn’t notice the blonde figure appear behind me until she said—

  “Sandra?”

  I got the shock of my life, turned with dread in my gut and did everything I could to stay calm when I saw Milla right in front of me, staring at the keypad I had been punching an access code into. She had a plastic bag full of takeout in one hand and two styrofoam cups dangling from plastic holders in the other.

  A beep sounded and I heard the gate to my apartment come open as it always did every time I keyed in its access code correctly.

  I saw her see it open. She frowned at the gate and then at me. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  I swung my arms around her and embraced her at once. “Where did you go?” I said. I pulled away the moment I realised how violently my heart was thumping; I was afraid she would be able to feel it thumping if we remained with our chests touching.

  “To get you breakfast,” she said. “And something else. And you?”

  “An ex-colleague lives here,” I said quickly. “I woke up and couldn’t find you so I thought I’d borrow a phone charger from her in case you left me a voice message or something. She has a Nokia too. The same one I have.” I nodded. For a while.

  Milla narrowed her beautiful eyes. “Are you sure? Because you look like you’re freaking out right now.”

  I realised I was; my palms were getting all clammy and my cheeks were starting to feel as if all the blood in them had already been gone for some time. I took a deep breath and tried to look as if I wasn’t. “I was so worried. I thought you left me or something.”

  “Why would I leave you? Are you not telling me something?”

  I shook my head at once, aware that I was all hot in the face and also all jittery inside.

  She could tell. Her eyes became even narrower. “This friend of yours... were you... close? In any way?”

  “No,” I said, then, I got an idea. “Well... okay, fine. We were a teensy bit close. But she’s... married now and has children and a husband so really, all I wanted to do was borrow a charger to make sure you hadn’t gone and left me for good.” I gazed into her eyes and smiled as warmly as I could, which wasn’t really all that warm since I was just about imploding with chills inside.

  Milla frowned. She gazed and me and then up at my apartment building. “I will buy you an extra charger if you need one,” she said when she turned back to me, to my relief. “I don’t want you seeing her ever again. Can you do that?”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. I shrugged, then nodded, then smiled and said I could.

  She liked my response. Next thing I knew, she was locking arms with me and dragging me across the road. “Let’s go home,” she said.

  “Home?”

  “Yup. I want you to move in with me. I wanted to surprise you with your own key the moment you got up but I didn’t realise the locksmith would take so long.”

  She pulled us into her building and greeted the security guard with a smile as if it was just a regular day, like any other day. We entered the lift with our arms locked, as if we were nothing more than really, really good friends.

  Once the lift doors closed though, I let out the gasp I could no longer contain. “Seriously? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I would have asked you to marry me if I could but since I can’t, this is the best I can do. So will you? Move in with me?”

  I couldn’t get my mouth closed. “What do you think,” I said with a huge, unstoppable grin.

  She didn’t reply, but from the way she grinned in return, I could tell she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  Chapter 23

  24 Jul 1999, Saturday

  One weekend, I took Milla to the gynaecologist my boss recommended. She said she wanted an English-speaking gynaecologist and I only knew one—Carla—so I gave her the card my boss had given me instead. I told Milla it had been given to me by ‘my colleague’s neighbour’ and she was more than happy to try her out.

  The card said my boss’ wife’s gynaecologist’s name was ‘Dr Jessica Jones’; ‘Senior Obstetrician-Gynaecologist’ at the MDYM Hospital—a relatively new private hospital at the southernmost side of Kowloon.

  I knew of that hospital; I read about it in the papers when it opened a couple of months back. The papers praised its state-of-the-art interiors and the view it had of the cityscape of Hong Kong Island from its south-facing windows. The papers a
lso praised the quality of its staff: the best doctors in East Asia—hand-picked from the WDYW chain of hospitals in Taiwan, which had already won awards for their services, and also many of the best from other hospitals in Hong Kong. WDYW and MDYM belonged to the same company. In Chinese characters, their names were the same; in English however, due to the difference in anglicised pronunciation of Cantonese and Mandarin, I presume, their initials differed. MDYM is short for ‘maan daat yuk mat’ which, directly translated from Cantonese, literally means The Innumerable Attainment of Medicinal Items. I don’t speak Mandarin so I can’t say what WDYW is short for.

  The moment we got to MDYM, I was very impressed. Milla was too. MDYM Hospital was everything King George Hospital was not. It was covered in glass instead of shabby, stained concrete, for one, but it went way further with luxuries like sun-lit spaces, soothing scents in the air and calming classical music you could actually hear. Walking through MDYM was not unpleasant. At King George Hospital, I was always certain I would contract something really bad at some point but at MDYM, that thought never once crossed my mind. At MDYM, you could walk without worrying about crashing into another person; you walked on thick, soft carpet that was a gentle green colour and thus easy on the eyes. The nurses would smile at you if you got within five metres of them which made them look more like staff members of a high-end hotel than of a hospital really. Everywhere you went, you would see healthy luscious plants and small waterfalls that made soothing flowing sounds too. If you came upon a wall, it would be made of light-coloured wood—also very easy to look at—and it would most certainly have a nice painting of a flower or plant on it.

  The gynaecologist’s office looked more like a tea room than it did a doctor’s office too. There was a chandelier right in the middle of the ceiling and its lighting was soft and layered in a way that made you feel like you would after a warm glass of milk. The examination table on which Milla was asked to lie on was upholstered in a pink, leathery sort of fabric and surrounded by paintings of tiny pink flowers. For me, there were two grand upholstered chairs on the opposite side of the room to choose from and a fine selection of the latest English and Chinese magazines on the side table between them. A nurse even brought in two teacups of burning hot, rose-scented tea. Milla was beyond pleased. She loved the place and even the doctor, she said afterwards.

  The doctor turned out to be an English woman in her early forties—or at least that was what Milla and I concluded from her appearance and British accent. We couldn’t be sure though because although she looked Caucasian—with extremely pale skin and an exceptionally prominent nose—she had also black eyes and shoulder-length black hair like almost everybody else in Hong Kong. I wondered if she was like me—a ‘mixed-blood kid’—but didn’t ask because it felt highly inappropriate. Dr Jones wore a white lab coat after all, over a warm pink shirt and a tight black skirt that went all the way past her knees. Although she wore no glasses, had pearl earrings on her ears and also a light smattering of makeup over her eyes and lips, she had also a serious albeit polite manner and way of speaking that made you feel like you had to be formal with her at all times because she was likely highly intelligent and very particular about decorum.

  When she told us, as she did an ultrasound scan of Milla’s belly, that it was a healthy girl and that everything was normal, we both smiled politely at her. When she turned the ultrasound monitor towards us to show us what she had been looking at, we both felt obliged to look.

  I didn’t see any baby, just the vague shape of a giant peanut in the middle of the fuzzy black and white image that was full of static. Milla, on the other hand, saw it—“One side was the head and the other was the body, there were tiny limbs connected to it!” Milla explained afterwards; she let out a squeal and beamed at the monitor with twinkly eyes as if she had only just fallen in love.

  “You’ll get to keep this on video tape as well,” Dr Jones said when she turned the monitor back towards herself and ran her ultrasound scanner over Milla’s gel-covered belly a couple more times. “How many tapes would you need? Three? One for your parents and one for your husband’s parents? Most couples take three.”

  “We just need one,” Milla said. “There’s no father involved. It’s just the both of us.”

  My cheeks went hot the instant Milla said those words and became way hotter when Dr Jones turned to me with one raised eyebrow and gave me a look that suggested fascination.

  I shrugged at her. That was all I knew to do; shrug and pray she would just turn away and keep her opinions of the matter, whatever they might be, to herself.

  To my relief, she did just that. She went about doing the other physical tests Milla needed at that stage of her pregnancy without saying a word about it. Before we left her office, she gave us her mobile phone number and told us to call her if Milla showed any signs of complications or being about to deliver. She also reminded us to return to her office for monthly check-ups.

  Because of that, I decided I liked her.

  I decided I would like any person who accepted Milla and I as we were. Mainly because the odds of us running into people like that seemed so low.

  Chapter 24

  Jul – Dec 1999

  Days passed in a flash and it soon began to feel as if Milla and I had been in a relationship for a really long time. We lived like a married couple: shared a bed and one bathroom, stayed home with the curtains drawn without wearing much clothes, got accustomed to seeing each other with bad hair and unbrushed teeth, and became comfortable enough to be letting out farts, if the need arose, without flinching.

  My days of instant food ended the day I moved into Milla’s home—just as well for there was a rumour going around my mother’s circle that a Japanese man had died from eating nothing but instant noodles for years. I was startled, but I didn’t worry because from that day on, instead of instant coffee, pre-packaged buns and Cup Noodles, I got machine-brewed roast coffee, fried eggs on toast for breakfast and Italian home-cooked dishes for dinner. Because Milla took the role of loving home-maker, I decided I would be the breadwinner. I paid for everything—all the pricey Dr Jones’ visits; our dates out; all the books on pregnancy and babies she wanted—and I gave her a wad of cash at the beginning of every month for groceries and sundries. She didn’t need my money, she said, she had a million dollars in savings. I insisted. I wanted to look after her for the rest of my life, I said, because she had saved me—and my ears!—from 81M, and also because I was utterly smitten with her. She never attempted to pay for anything again after I told her that.

  To make it look as if I was actually going to work at the East Asian Morning Post’s headquarters in Kowloon, I rented a small office unit in the tower right behind it. Every morning, I walked into the East Asian Morning Post’s headquarters and right out the back door. I would cross a small back alley to get to the back door of the tower I rented the unit in and I would cross it again at the end of the work day, enter the East Asian Morning Post’s headquarters through the back and go out the front.

  I moved out of the apartment building opposite Milla’s and never went back there because I didn’t want to risk being seen by Milla again. My computer, cardboard boxes, my StarTAC—I told my mother to call me only after 10am from then on—and treadmill ended up in the middle of the office, on the floor again because the place was unfurnished and I didn’t see the point in decorating when nobody but me would actually get to see it.

  The unit was typical of office units in Hong Kong at that time: vertical fabric blinds in white over the windows that looked out at the East Asian Morning Post’s headquarters; a dull grey carpet full of suspicious-looking stains; grey doors with metal handles you wouldn’t want to touch; white walls disrupted only by off-white sockets and light switches in some parts; and headache-inducing florescent lighting overhead. I didn’t like being there one bit—I thought it smelled bad and was not in the least inspiring—but it had to do. I put the computer on the least stained part of the ca
rpet, lined my boxes up next to it and sat only there most of the time.

  To make Milla believe I actually had a job at the East Asian Morning Post, I got a subscription delivered to my office and brought home a copy of the day’s paper every night. When I found out there really was a reporter by the name of Sandra Sum writing articles in there, I told Milla I had written those articles. I hacked into the real Sandra Sum’s work email account so I could know what she was working on and talk about the issues at dinner as if I really were working on them. Milla didn’t suspect otherwise. She was convinced I was Sandra Sum, the journalist and I was, as a result, convinced I was born to be a Security Agent.

  Once a week, I would sit down and write the weekly report my boss wanted—a watered-down version of every single activity Milla did in the previous seven days—and compile the video clips from Milla’s apartment. My boss had been right when he said it would be a piece of cake; as far as I could see, there was nothing of real interest to report. Angelo went back to the U.S. after I told Milla about the government’s involvement and she never contacted the 81M men again. Milla told her family about her pregnancy and preference for women and they reprimanded her severely for it—they were Catholic after all—so she refused to call them or pick up their calls ever again. Most of the time, all she did was cook, clean, hang out with me at home or in some country park where nobody would see us kissing or cuddling, decorate the spare room in preparation for the baby and read books on pregnancy and childcare. That was it; I could write a whole week’s report in less than an hour and compile the week’s footage for posting in less than ten minutes.