by Kathy Lette
‘My nostrils flare and now my climax, with contractions at consistent 0.8-second intervals, will put me into an orgasmic spasm. Faster! Faster!! Harder!! HARDER!! FASTERRRR . . .’
Rory’s fingers were flying in and out and up and down the plastic pudenda. And then Bianca moaned so loudly it shook the cheap walnut panelling.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooohhhhohohohohoh . . .”
As Bianca’s purrs subsided into silence, the only sound was the pinging of men’s fly buttons popping across the room.
‘Very good. Note how a warm glow envelops my waist and chest. Even my toes relax. At my sexual summit, a total paroxysm of pleasure was reached. Well done, Rory.’ Then she pulled the plug on her inflatable woman. ‘This week’s revision is for you all to try these techniques at home.’
I looked at the plastic woman who was crumpling in on herself with a sad sigh. But we were amateurs! Wasn’t it dangerous? We didn’t have a licence to operate such heavy machinery.
But at Bianca’s insistence, that was how Rory and I spent the next week, just the two of us, cosied up on the bed – a searchlight trained up my fanny, Karma Sutra open on page 362, studying diagrams and consulting the text. What, you ask, could be better? Well, from my point of view, just about bloody anything.
‘Just about anything’ was also starting to sum up Jazz’s recreational sexual activities. She had dyed her hair blonder, no doubt so that men could find her more easily in the dark. First came her plumber. ‘He really has sorted out my pipes,’ she chirruped gleefully.
‘I need a man who is good at DIY too – so he can fix my pelvic floor.’ I crossed my legs, needing the loo, and glanced around Sotheby’s auction room. Sotheby’s is like an orphanage for heirlooms. Hannah was bidding on a bulging commode, which looked like a chest of drawers that had over-eaten.
‘And he’s such a man. A real man, you know?’ Jazz added dreamily.
‘Man? He’s not a man,’ Hannah scoffed. ‘He’s a marital aid. Getting yourself secretly serviced by a bit of rough is not a fulfilling alternative to a more intellectual relationship.’
‘Maybe not. But by God it’s fun! Look, you can smell him in my hair.’ Jazz leaned towards us. ‘Here, take a whiff.’
‘Ugh! Get away! Can’t you just use hairspray, like any normal woman?’ I asked her, appalled. But had to admit to a twinge of jealousy. Fun? What a long-forgotten F word that was.
Her next conquest was an alternative comic.
‘Alternative to what? Being funny?’ I asked, peering at the ‘windswept and interesting’ photo on his flyer. We were making our monthly sortie up the motorway to Costco, the wholesale warehouse on the North Circular, in Jazz’s Volvo estate.
‘Let me guess. He performs a one-man show . . . and there are more people on the stage than in the audience?’ Hannah chortled, crumpling the pamphlet. ‘What on earth attracted you to a putz like that?’
‘Because his opening line was to ask me did I know which two fingers are the most effective for women to use during masturbation. Then held up his own hand and said, “Mine.”
Hannah barked out another derisive laugh. ‘I cannot believe you fell for that.’
‘Yes, Jazz. If only laughter really were the best medicine, we’d be so healthy now!’ I added. But why did I feel sick with envy?
The next man on her menu was her car mechanic, a biker named Jism. ‘Apparently he changed his name to get back into the pubs which have banned him.’
‘Really?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘Now that’s what I call Alcoholics Anonymous.’
It was a Saturday afternoon and I’d brought my kids around for a swim in Jazz’s basement pool while she waited for a man Studz had organised to evaluate the property for insurance purposes.
‘He’s mad about me,’ Jazz giggled. ‘My bikie.’
‘Must be a condition of his probation,’ Hannah retorted.
‘When he wants sex he says that it’s time to “unleash the meat sabre”. Isn’t that adorable? And he’s not kidding. One night he wore a fluorescent-coloured condom. When I turned off the light, I thought I was going to bed with Darth Vader!’
‘Okay, okay, enough already,’ Hannah huffed, thin-lipped. ‘The baroque ecstasy, the grotesque compulsion of your conquests is, frankly, disgusting.’
‘Oh well,’ I rationalized to Hannah. ‘At least with a man with tattoos, if the sex gets dull there is always something to read.’
Next in Jazz’s game of relationship roulette was the lead singer of the ‘Suicide Bombers’.
‘A rock star? Ugh,’ I cringed. ‘How can you put him in your mouth? I mean, you never know where he’s been!’
‘Hey, don’t knock unhygienic until you’ve tried it. He won’t let me shower before he goes down on me,’ Jazz divulged, with sassy insouciance. ‘Actually he prefers me not to shower for a few days!’
‘Bravo,’ Hannah countered, with equal cool. ‘You must send away for the Germaine Greer Feminist gift pack.’
We were lurking up the back of our Pilates class.
‘Don’t pretend you aren’t jealous. That man has made masturbation pleasurable for millions of women. He says he loves my ass.’
To be honest, I could understand her excitement. To have your bottom admired by a famous rock star, who not only counts them to get to sleep at night, but has also had more bottoms than hot dinners, often simultaneously, is a compliment indeed. I felt an unsettling twinge of chagrin.
‘It’s sooo exciting, sweetie, don’t you think?’
‘What I think is that you should be put on some register and shunned by polite society,’ Hannah decried.
‘You’re so bland, Hannah, you could dilute water, do you know that?’ Jazz told our mutual friend affectionately. ‘Have you any idea how lovely it is to feel desired again?’ There was a trace of grief in her voice, which she quickly extinguished. Jazz was like one of those 3-D cards you buy in a gift shop which change depending on how you tilt them. Sometimes she was a femme fatale, other times I could see the wounded wife in her. ‘Feeling desired is my new hobby,’ she said, leaving for the changing room. ‘And so much more fun than Pilates.’
And a lot more fun than couples’ counselling, I mused. Jazz may have a rock star, but I was beginning to think that I had rocks too . . . in my head.
Last and most definitely least, was a performance poet she picked up at Tate Modern. The reason he didn’t last was that he lost her keys. When I received Jazz’s SOS phone call to come and pick her up from the Marriott Hotel, I thought she meant he had lost the keys to her car.
‘No. To the handcuffs.’
‘Jazz, handcuffs are only acceptable if you’re an undercover cop with Scotland Yard,’ I chided.
When Hannah and I collected her from the side entrance of the hotel in Swiss Cottage to drive her to the locksmiths, a coat flung around her negligéed shoulders, her hands shackled before her, Hannah shook her head disapprovingly.
‘Dah-ling, aren’t you afraid you’re going to lose your amateur status?’
‘Amateur’ just about summed up my feelings about my counsellor too. By the end of June I had enough advice to see me through several husbands. I also had a hunch that if I told my therapist I had suicidal feelings, she would have asked me to pay in advance. So far, she had talked me into buying a state-of-theart vibrator which was ‘totally realistic’. ‘Oh, so it cums, coughs, farts, goes limp then switches off?’ I asked bleakly. When I saw the size of the cheque Rory wrote her, I was tempted to insert her slide projector, pointer and maybe even a beanbag into an intensely private part of her own anatomy.
Next, she pressured me into buying testosterone patches to cure my ‘Desire Disorder.’
‘Testosterone?’ I looked at her in disbelief. ‘Oh yes. That’s bound to make me more attractive. To gay men!’
She also tried to book me in for Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation, a mere snip, literally, at £3,000. ‘A little labial trimming would give you a designer vagina. An Armani Punani would solve all of
your sexual inhibitions,’ she purred.
The only inhibition I had now was Baggy Fanny Phobia. I could never again have sex with my husband for fear of losing him in that aircraft hangar between my legs.
Just when I felt that it was pretty well impossible for my counsellor to be able to counsel me into feeling any worse about myself, she decided that what I lacked was experimentation. I tried to develop kinks, I really did. I wore Rory’s underwear. I even went commando. But, believe me, as a mother of two with no pelvic floor, one must be cautious about not wearing any knickers. On one occasion, one of the Benwah balls Bianca had made me buy, fell out in a staff meeting. I had to pretend to be a player of miniature bowling.
When I complained, Bianca insisted on a one-on-one session during which she pursed her lips before crisply placing crosses in boxes on her questionnaire. ‘Do you like the lights on or the lights off?’ she grilled me.
‘I like to have the lights on,’ Bianca’s eyes lit up for a moment, until I added, ‘so I can read.’
‘Do you like S and M?’ she persevered, pen-wielding.
‘Certainly not! I don’t like to be beaten. Not even at Monopoly.’
‘Well, what about talking dirty?’ Bianca asked exasperatedly.
‘Talking dirty for me is “James, wash your face. Jenny, your room is a pigsty!”’
‘Do you talk in bed at all?’ she asked, in despair.
‘Oh yes – usually about whose turn it is to do the school run and when the plumber’s coming to repair the leaky loo.’
‘Well, do you have any questions for me?’ the therapist asked tetchily, smacking her clipboard down onto the table.
‘Well, yes, my most burning question is . . .’
‘Yes?’ Bianca leaned forward expectantly.
‘Can you use flavoured yoghurt for thrush or not? It’s all I’ve got in the fridge.’
Bianca was not amused. ‘You need to develop an erotic portfolio,’ she announced curtly. ‘I understand that you are not that comfortable with or good at oral sex. You should start by practising fellatio on a phallically shaped organic vegetable.’
I reeled back. ‘My husband told you that?’
‘Well, that’s what he implied.’
‘Did he now? Well, I’d just like to imply that I’m not that comfortable with premature ejaculation either.’
‘Really?’ Bianca, eyes glinting, made a note. ‘I’ll be back in a mo.’ She swept out to the waiting room.
‘It is not premature ejaculation! It’s what’s termed in the popular vernacular as a “quickie”,’ Rory said defensively, surfing into Bianca’s office on a wave of self-justification.
‘Ha! You’re so premature, Rory, that last night I wasn’t even in the room! Who were you fantasizing about, by the way, when I walked in?’ I demanded.
‘Perdita Pendal, if you must know.’
‘Perdita?’ It was his turn to score a direct hit.
‘Yes. In her prissy little pinstriped suit.’
‘Ugh!’ I recoiled. ‘I can’t believe you’d let that woman have sex in my bedroom!’
‘There’s only one way to deal with a premature ejaculator,’ began Bianca, trying to regain control.
‘Have your orgasm first?’ I suggested crossly. ‘And anyway, isn’t it too early in the therapy course to be having this conversation?’ I said to really annoy her.
Bianca shook her head at her wayward pupil, before insisting that I help Rory master the art of the slow build. What this meant, apparently, was logging on to the London School of Striptease Website of Empowerment. My heart sank. Funny, isn’t it? How one woman’s empowerment is another woman’s sleazy degradation.
Trying new things sexually is not my favourite pastime. For one thing, it creates terrible eye wrinkles caused by puckering up into a squint and shouting, ‘You want me to do WHAT?’
This feeling was reinforced when Bianca demonstrated the Peek-a-boo home pole-dancing kit which she suggested we purchase from her, complete with choreography manual, fake dance money and a garter to tuck it into. ‘The Peek-aboo dance pole goes up or down in sixty seconds,’ Bianca assured us.
Story of my life, I sighed dismally.
I’d pushed so hard for Rory to come to marriage therapy and now, as I watched women gyrating on Bianca’s computer screen, all I felt was a profound sense of desolation. Bianca was adamant that she could lay us down beside the still waters – all we had to do was be more patient with each other’s desires. And she was right. Any slight irritation I had from then on was soothed by simply burying my face in the pillow for a few hours and screaming and screaming and screaming.
I was beginning to think that the only tip a marriage counsellor should give is: NOT TO HAVE ANY MARRIAGE COUNSELLING UNDER ANY BLOODY CIRCUMSTANCES WHAT-SO-BLOODY-EVER.
13. Unhappily Ever After
Part of my job as Head of Year Six was to create a ‘happy work climate’. Unfortunately, in most staffrooms the work climate is damp with high wind approaching. Having to check the teacher roster first thing didn’t do much to brighten the day. If there were any absences I had to assign the duties to other disgruntled staff members. Teachers break into two groups – the Sneerers and the Okayers. The Chalk and Talk teachers nearly always fall into the sighing and sneering ‘I suppose so’ category.
But Perdita, her smile cement-rendered onto her face, now had a permanent excuse. ‘I would, but I’m just soooo busy going over your work,’ she said today, in answer to my request to cover playground duty at break. ‘I know it’s a little embarrassing to have your classwork checked by a fellow member of staff, but Claude – Mr Scroope – did insist we make it inspection-proof. And it’s best to keep the old boy happy. As I’m a people person, I’m willing to help you out.’ She gave a long-suffering sigh.
The minging staffroom, with its rusting chrome sink and threadbare armchairs, is situated directly behind the children’s dining hall. Positioned as it is at the back of the cafeteria, it’s nicknamed ‘the Bacteria’. Well, the Bacteria was now buzzing with activity as teachers milled about making last-minute cups of tea and coffee before the bell rang. Perdita’s reply had been loud enough to ensure maximum overhearing. The graveyard of apple cores in the cluttered ashtrays, the grape-cluster skeletons, the glove of banana peel on the floor and being belittled in front of my colleagues – this must be why I became a teacher. I just couldn’t resist the glamour of it all.
I drank in air languid with kids’ wet shoes and marmite sandwiches, feigned a shrug, then diverted the curiosity of the other teachers by sharing my latest batch of biology homework. ‘Benign is what you can’t wait to be when you’re eight,’ I read aloud, to mild tittering.
But inside I was seething. I had begged Mr Scroope to reconsider, but obsessed with the impending inspection, he just kept repeating his order, like a Dalek. ‘The Inspectors are coming. Perdita must supervise your lessons. The Inspectors are coming.’
And so my free time after school was spent in my rival’s classroom which she had cluttered with cuddly toys, gonks, ornamental flowers and ‘amusing’ signs of the type sold in shops called Bitz or Nick nacks. Red pen in hand and dotting all her I’s with smiley faces, she excised all the frivolity from my class notes, replacing fun phrases with obfuscatory jargon about ‘building team commitment to action’ and ‘clarifying individual roles and responsibilities’. How deftly this Hackademic turned my simply worded educational aims ‘meeting yesterday’s challenges tomorrow’ into meaningless drivel about aiming to ‘grow skills in speedy problem-solving ideas’ and ‘barrier breakdowns’. Whatever the hell that meant. The woman’s course notes were so convoluted that I would just grasp the end of one sentence, when the other end would wriggle away like a slippery leg of an octopus.
Fed up, I tried to get out of going over my science notes. ‘Don’t worry,’ I told Perdita gaily. ‘I’m planning a more practical than theoretical approach. I’m taking my class on an excursion to the Science Museum.’
Per
dita’s professional manner cooled a few degrees. ‘But the Science Museum told me all their school slots are taken. I rang last week.’
‘Oh, well, I booked up a year ago.’ And with a perky flutter of my fingers, I was gone. As to the work climate? Let’s just say I felt a distinct frost in the air.
But half an hour later, things got very hot indeed. Mainly under my collar.
‘I’m afraid I’m declining your request for the Science Museum excursion,’ the Headmaster told me, his large lips slapping together in a wet percussion of rebukes. I’d been summoned yet again to his office.
‘It’s been brought to my attention that during the last school trip you organized to London Zoo, as the children were leaving for the bus, you suggested they sprint towards the parking lot yelling, “Run for your lives! They’re loose!” It has been reported to me that this so startled the tourists that it started a small stampede. Is this an accurate description of said incident, Ms O’Carroll?’
My Headmaster’s manner is so severe that he causes the people around him to squirm and blurt things nervously.
‘Um, well, um . . .’ Come on, I told myself. Even a turtle has to stick its neck out to get anywhere. ‘The kids were really tired and I was just trying to wake them up.’ I tried to keep calm by listing all the jobs that would be worse. A judge in Baghdad, say. An official car-starter for a Mafia boss. Animal faecal identification expert. Defroster of Walt Disney’s head. Food taster for Kim Jong-un. ‘It was funny at the time,’ I concluded, timidly.
‘And do you find it funny, how badly this reflects on my school?’
All it reflected on was the sneaky nature of my fellow teacher. Perdita had been the only other staff member on the zoo excursion that day.
‘Oh, hello. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?’ came her lilting voice from the doorway. She placed a cup of strong tea on the boss’s desk. ‘Thought you might need a little pick-me-up.’ Honestly, this woman could network at a funeral. ‘Can I get you anything, Cassie?’ All this was said through the most courteous of smiles.