by Emma Morgan
‘That sounds both unpleasant and old-fashioned.’
‘Now that you say that …’
‘Well, I’m not going to do that.’
And Violet felt relief. She put her hand out and touched the woman’s face in gratitude.
‘You’re pretty,’ Violet said.
‘Not as pretty as you,’ said the woman and leaned forward and kissed her again. They slipped down until they were lying on the sofa together side by side and she held one of Violet’s hands and kept the other one on Violet’s cheek. To Violet it felt adolescent because it was on a sofa not in a bed, like the time she had gone babysitting with Thomas Green when she was fifteen and they had lain just like this, pausing only to eat peanuts and to half watch an old episode of Baywatch. It didn’t have the sense that things might change any minute as it had with him, as if some urgency might start in him and he would move on top of her, although he never did. She waited for the woman to prove that she had been lying and try to do something more but she didn’t. Instead they kissed for what seemed to Violet like a long time and she got lost in it so that it became not many kisses but just one that went on and on. The woman didn’t try and put her hand on Violet’s breast again and it made Violet trust her. She began to entertain a half dream that butterflies were landing on her lips. It was different, the lack of stubble or beard. She put her hand on the woman’s smooth cheek again and stroked it. Then the woman stopped kissing her and reached up to the back of the sofa and pulled down a red blanket.
‘Are you tired?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to go home? Or you could sleep here?’
‘Here,’ said Violet, realizing that the energy required to call a cab and get all the way home was too much. The night air would be such an assault and nothing more alarming seemed about to happen. The woman pulled the blanket up over them. There was just enough room on the sofa for them to lie next to each other. She put her arm around Violet’s waist and her nose against Violet’s hair.
‘Night night then,’ she said and soon she fell asleep.
Violet lay in the dark thinking, this was a stupid idea, I’ll never go to sleep here, she could feel the woman’s body so close to hers it should have been uncomfortable but it wasn’t, it was drowsy and soft. She suddenly felt sleepy and she yawned and when she closed her eyes soon she was dreaming about her hair growing and growing, so that she became Rapunzel and the woman was standing far below her window being the prince wearing chainmail calling up to her.
When she woke up on the sofa the woman’s arm was still around her and her body was curled around Violet’s and Violet felt safe, as if she was still in her dream. Carefully she manoeuvred her mobile out of her pocket. She switched it back on. It was seven ten. She had a headache. She thought of Annie and how she hadn’t told her anything more than that she was going away with this woman. Annie was going to be angry. Annie was probably going to be furious. There were eight missed calls on her phone and one text. She opened it. ‘WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?’ She’d better go, although she didn’t want to. It was warm here and quiet. She crawled out of the woman’s arms and stood up. The woman opened her eyes.
‘Are you going then?’ she asked without moving.
‘I think so.’
‘Bye then. Nice to meet you, Violet.’
‘You too. Bye.’
She closed her eyes again. Violet stood there to see if anything else would happen but nothing else did. The woman seemed to go back to sleep. Violet let herself out of the flat quietly and walked home. Another one-night stand, she thought, another stranger. Except even stranger than normal. She realized that she felt tired but remarkably OK. ‘The fear’ was not following her home and that could only be a good thing. She saw a miniature poodle with a pink ribbon in its topknot and she smiled. Maybe when she got home she would try to draw it from memory. Or the woman’s mouth. Maybe she would try to draw her mouth.
This is when Annie goes ballistic (from the Greek – scrotum)
‘So?’ asked Annie. She had been sitting on the sofa, waiting for the flat door to open for what felt like hours, although it was only just past 8 a.m. She had slept on the sofa and had a crick in her neck. That wasn’t helping her mood.
‘So,’ said Violet, edging into the room.
‘Come and sit right here. You’re not getting away with it that easily. What happened?’ said Annie in what she knew to be her best reasonable lawyer’s voice, the one that came out automatically in stressful situations. She had always prided herself on it.
‘Are you angry?’
‘Angry? Why should I be angry?’ said Annie.
‘At me going off like that.’
‘Well, one minute you’ve gone to the loo, and the next you come over, say you’re going, and then this Amazonian lesbian drags you out of the club. I was gobsmacked. I’ve hardly slept waiting for you to come home. I’ve kipped on the sofa. Why didn’t you answer your bloody phone? Why didn’t you answer my text?’ Annie heard her voice start to rise in an unappealing fashion.
‘I switched my phone off.’
‘Typical. And what happened with that woman then?’
‘I slept with her. Well, sort of.’
‘I knew you would. I knew it.’
Annie turned away from Violet. She felt an urge to lie down again under her duvet and stay there for some time. All night long, as she tossed and turned, an internal version of her mother had been haranguing her. ‘Well, it doesn’t surprise me she’s a lesbian. I’ve always thought she was you know, unusual. Not like other people. Not that I mind them. Lesbians that is. That’s fine by me. Whatever takes your fancy,’ and Annie was so exhausted by that damned voice.
‘Do you mind?’ asked Violet.
‘No, why should I mind?’ said Annie.
‘You seem strange.’
‘Strange?’
‘Strange,’ said Violet.
‘Well, let me put it this way,’ said Annie, getting right back on track and going for the jugular, ‘as far as I know, my best friend who I’ve known for ten years is heterosexual. How do I know this? Because she’s told me about every useless man she’s ever had. Of which there have been far too many. Then one day we go to a club, she cops a girl, and goes home with her. It’s like I know nothing about you. Nothing. Who are you?’
‘I’m Violet Amelia Mayweather.’
‘I should have known you’d say that! Well, you can take your stupid name and shove it where the sun don’t shine!’
And with that Annie got up and left the room. She slammed her bedroom door to drive the point across. Then she opened it again and came back for her duvet, which she pulled off the back of the sofa, the end of it missing the vase on the coffee table by inches. And that would have been Violet’s fault. Then Annie stamped back to her room, slamming the door so hard this time that it bounced. She threw off her dressing gown and got into bed. She had done the door-slamming for effect mostly, since she felt less angry now; instead she felt a sense of satisfaction at having expressed herself so clearly, even if it had been partly non-verbally. In her family what might have been called ‘theatrics’ had been openly encouraged. She had made her point, let that be the end to it. Maybe her mother would shut up now. She sighed and closed her eyes. Her heartbeat, which had been jacked up on rage, slowed. She heard her door open and felt Violet lie down on the bed next to her and decided not to push her on to the floor. She had only been worried and confused, it was only natural, why could Violet never see how much it bothered her when she went home with strangers? And why would she go home with a woman stranger? What was going on? She found herself too tired for this right now.
‘You can stay here if you’re quiet. I want to go to sleep.’
‘Annie,’ Violet said, ‘don’t be cross with me. I hate it when you’re cross with me. You go all operatic. We kissed and it was, weird, and then she said stay anyway, so we had a cuddle on the sofa and then we fell asleep. I didn’t sleep with her, sleep with her. We didn’t you know do whatever it is lesbia
ns do. It was like sleeping next to you.’
‘Since when did I try to stick my tongue down your throat?’ Annie said.
‘You once tried to manually force me to eat asparagus. Annie. Annie. Annie. I love you, Annie. I love you more than I love …’
‘What?’
‘I love you more than you love Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Cary Grant and margaritas put together. I love you more than the word “diplodocus” and much, much more than whirligig washing lines. You are my bestest bestest best best best best …’
‘Are you still drunk?’
‘Perhaps a bit.’
‘Shut up and go to bloody sleep.’
‘OK.’
‘And don’t snore,’ said Annie.
This is Grace head over heels
Grace doodled on her pad as she sat in work, drawing hearts around Sam’s name as though she was a teenager. She thought about how it was a funny thing that Sam looked a little like Barbie. Tomboy Barbie; she looked like the Swedish au pair/porn star/exchange student that boys dream about. And girls too. And yet she had had some very ugly girlfriends. Ones with thick glasses and big ones with acne and ones with odd hair and terrible teeth and all the other things we are supposed not to like. Grace got to see some of their photos by accident. Well, not by accident. She had a constant urge to go through Sam’s things that she’d never had with anyone else before. When she was out of the room Grace looked in her coat pockets but never found anything. She couldn’t say that she enjoyed this, and Sam would have gone mad if she’d found her doing it; Grace thought that she would have herself. Or would she? Grace couldn’t imagine Sam going mad about anything. It was one of the many things she liked about Sam. The list grew all the time.
One day, Grace was looking in a kitchen cupboard at Sam’s and when Sam surprised her, a box fell out on her head from the cupboard above. Grace said that she had been looking for egg cups which, ridiculous as it was, was the first thing that came to mind. Sam didn’t seem annoyed and didn’t question her. Grace added that to her list – a trusting nature. She wasn’t sure that she had one. The box had spilled out photos all over the floor and Grace started to pick them up; there were women in every single one.
‘Who are they?’ Grace asked.
‘Friends,’ Sam said, but Grace didn’t believe her. Some of them at least had to be exes. Grace sneaked glimpses at the photos as she put them back in the box. Not that bad, she thought, as she pawed one after another, I’m not that bad-looking at least. The photos seemed to prove that Sam was attracted to the oddness of ordinary people. It was yet another character asset not to be so hung up about looks, especially when you were so beautiful yourself.
How was it going? It was going well, Grace thought. All right, the sex was great, and yes, it was better than it had ever been before. All right, she had more orgasms in the first months than she had had in years. They stayed in bed for days at a time, whole weekends, having sex, talking, drinking cold tea they had forgotten about and eating jam sandwiches for sustenance. It had never occurred to Grace that sex was fun, it had always seemed like such a serious business, such an uphill struggle to a higher goal. But it didn’t feel like that with Sam, it felt like an adventure where anything might happen – Grace’s toes might fall off, her skin might set on fire. She was entranced by Sam’s body, which she could touch any part of without having to ask permission first. She could kiss the mole on the nape of her neck whenever she wanted, she could stroke her hair, interlace her fingers with her own, tweak her nipples, run her fingers bump by bump down her spine, she could do anything she felt like doing and Sam, it seemed, enjoyed this. Grace even liked Sam’s feet, and she normally found other people’s feet disgusting. All the physical boundaries that Grace had arranged around herself were crossed, and she hadn’t even known how many there had been. How reticent she had been with other women, how afraid of touching them wrong or being too invasive. And in turn she could let Sam do whatever she liked to her, and she loved this more than she thought she ever would, she realized that she had longed to be touched in such an intimate way. It felt so good to be wanted, to be properly wanted, and she lost a shyness that she wasn’t aware she had had. They had baths together. They shared cups and combs and clothes. One of them weed while the other one brushed their teeth. What made her separate from the world, her edges, were slipping away as she blurred into Sam’s body. And the mental walls she had had too. She had thought that she was a relaxed person but this turned out not to be the case, at least not in comparison to Sam. Sam did it all so easily.
The first time that Sam went to Grace’s house for tea, Grace was on edge. She wasn’t that into housework, but she’d even mopped the kitchen floor with a mop she’d had to buy specially. She feared Sam criticizing the house but of course she didn’t, instead she plonked herself down on the floor next to a bookshelf and began to pull books out. Grace left her to it and made them cups of tea. She dropped milk all over the kitchen floor and had to use the mop again.
‘I’ve never read any of this stuff,’ said Sam. ‘It looks interesting. What’s Jung like?’
‘Difficult to explain. A lot of it is very off the wall. I’ll lend you that book if you like,’ said Grace and smiled despite herself, remembering Sam’s first offer to her.
Sam crawled across the floor to Grace, who was perched nervously on the edge of the sofa. She knelt in front of her.
‘Do you have a nice bed?’ she asked.
Grace’s legs twitched.
‘It’s soft,’ Grace said.
‘That’s OK,’ said Sam, and ran her hand up Grace’s legs and pushed herself between them. ‘Don’t mind soft.’
Grace believed that what she was feeling was that thing called joy. She hadn’t felt it, she realized, since she was a child when she and her sisters galloped the horses after the lurchers across the stubbled fields. She felt like this all the time now – a feeling that came from being almost, but not quite, out of control, like she was going too fast downhill to catch her breath. And yet strangely for her, work, which had always been such a motivating force in her life, was becoming less so. She was, although she hated to admit it, almost irritated by some of her clients. Perhaps it was because now she was fulfilled by something else, somebody else, that work had faded into the background. Perhaps this was normal, this relative disinterest. Yes, that was it, she was too busy thinking about Sam to think about anything else with any degree of seriousness. She was pretty sure her clients hadn’t noticed, however. Soon she and Sam would be out of this intoxicating stage, she imagined, and into something less overwhelming; she would steady herself and then she would be able to concentrate again.
‘Mary, I’m afraid time is almost up,’ she said now in her understanding therapist’s voice after she’d finished doodling. She hadn’t been listening properly. Something about the husband. Her therapist’s voice was one of calm and interest and so she doubted whether Mary was able to tell that she was so distracted.
‘Oh no,’ said Mary, looking genuinely upset, as though the session was a lifeboat she was desperately clinging on to. Tears had carved a path into her thick foundation like car tyres through slush.
‘Yes. What do you think you’ve got out of today’s session?’
It wasn’t a real question, it was Grace’s signal that the hour was coming to an end and that Mary needed to leave. How often do I not ask real questions, Grace wondered?
‘Well. I don’t know. Um. I think I feel a tiny bit better?’
Mary’s hands were still gripping the sides of the chair and it seemed doubtful that she could be detached without the aid of force. Her nails had been industrially chewed.
‘Mmm hmm.’
Grace was good at the non-committed hum.
‘I feel calmer. I think so. I’ve got things clearer in my head now. Not so worried. I hope I can go to sleep tonight. I haven’t been sleeping well. Yes, I think I’ll sleep better now. I’m glad that I came today.’
Mary tried a p
inched half-smile and Grace rewarded her with one of her special therapist half-smiles in return. She reserved the full ones for major breakthroughs. She had only once, as she remembered it, clapped her hands, but that was a mistake as the client was back on the whisky two weeks later. But was this smile therefore an artifice? Before she had thought of it as professional.
‘Yes, much better. Thank you so much. Can I come back next week?’
‘Of course,’ said Grace, half leaning out of her chair to encourage Mary to move, but realizing that she looked like an elderly person trying to rise she sat back down again. ‘Make an appointment with Lesley as you leave.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Mary, still attached to her chair. ‘Thanks a lot. Thanks for being so kind and listening to me rabbiting on and on. You must get so bored with it all.’
Yes, is what Grace could have said, I do a little. I didn’t ever use to but now I do. Sometimes what I hear is still as involving as it ever was, but now some of the time at least it’s the same old self-hatred and general disgruntlement that I’ve heard so often and you are no exception to this. You’re not the worst client I’ve had by many miles, not least because you wash, but you’re not exactly the most riveting, are you? No wonder … but there Grace stopped herself before she thought something that she was ashamed of.
‘See you next week,’ she said.
‘OK. Bye then,’ said Mary.
‘Goodbye.’
Mary finally stood up, and Grace stood up after her and ushered her out of the door without touching her. Grace did not touch her clients although she knew they wanted her to. They wanted a hug, a kiss on the cheek, a pat on the back, an everything is going to be all right, a strong cup of tea, and possibly a biscuit. But she wasn’t like that. The only person she liked physical contact with was Sam. Is that what they used to call a character failing, Grace wondered? Now they call it an attachment issue. Perhaps, now she thought about it, she was only so distracted today because she was going to Dolores’s house for her supper with Sam. It was official now. They were ‘dating’. Sam was her ‘girlfriend’. It was real.