Signs of a Struggle

by Tony Kaplan

  Later, when I confess that I have no plans for the weekend, she invites me to stay at her place in Amsterdam. “I have a spare couch,” she says. That beguiling smile of hers. I find it difficult to read her. Is she actually flirting with me? She operates on two levels, not quite a contradiction, Something else. But I'm prepared to make allowances - she is spectacularly beautiful.

  We leave soon after and get back to Amsterdam by three. Her place is a war zone. With a flourish, she clears a space on the couch where I am to sleep, dislodging open magazines, an assortment of wrinkled clothes and a collection of wire connectors and a string of LED lights. In amongst the tangle of clothes, I notice a bra intertwined with a collection of highly-coloured G-string panties. My heart gives a lurch. She sees my uncensored perusal and grins. Then, we are out of the door and straight to a rally to protest a march of the far-Right LPF. Lucy is fired up, talking at double speed. We are late. She walks with rapid steps, red hair bobbing like a torch. Getting ahead of me, she stops to give her commentary, before racing ahead again. “Mad as a bag of rats, fucking fascists, and just as easy to bait!” she shouts over her shoulder at me gleefully at one point. What am I getting myself into? I don’t care. I’m with Lucy and I feel exhilarated.

  When we get to the protest, it’s already hotted up, with lots of noise and pushing up against the police cordons. Lucy hustles her way to the front, dragging me into the crowd after her. She’s yelling creative scatological epithets right into the brutish baby faces of the fascists, taunting them, eyes flashing. I hear in their chanting, their fear and fury; I see the pride and shame in their faces, their need for revenge. I am chickenshit scared when it comes to violence and when I see Lucy goading the men of violence, I think, hey, you’re clearly identifiable with all that flaming red hair – you’re setting yourself up. But the danger of it is such a turn-on. Lucy is enjoying herself. Bravery or madness? Hero or fool?

  That night, we go with some of her friends to the Melkweg to debrief and celebrate. It’s Amsterdam. Inevitably there’s a lot of dope on offer. I tell Lucy I don’t smoke. Lucy lights up, and says, “Wait,” as she inhales. “Open,” she says, pointing at my mouth. I oblige. She takes a deeper drag, then slowly blows her smoke into me. I get high. I drink tequila shots with her garrulous friends who insist on buying a round each. I can hardly refuse. At two a.m., we stumbled into the night with Lucy clutching my arm. We giggle our way home and in the hallway outside her flat, as she rummages in her cloth bag for her key, I lunge at her and kiss her. She recoils in surprise, but then smiles, a twinkling smile, leans forward and puts her lips on mine, as her eyes close. Her tongue is slippery and inquisitive. We stumble inside, kick off our shoes and discard our clothes in a rush.

  Her body is lit transversely by the slatted streetlight coming through the blinds, her small breasts, perfectly formed, her nipples taut and deep red against her ivory white skin, the smooth taper of her tummy plunging to her groin, her angel-toned shoulders and sensuous long neck, her lustrous auburn hair. Oh, such a picture of beauty. I just want to stand here and look at her, take her in, to be in the moment. She wants more than that - she grabs my hand and pulls me to her bedroom, and as she falls back onto the bed, she places my hand on the softness between her legs.

  God, she is vigorous, her hips rising to meet mine, desperate even, relentless. I am so aroused - beautiful and sexy Lucy wants me! I want to be at my best for her, to pleasure her – oh, it is so pornographic, looking down and seeing my cock entering her, and… I come! I bloody well come!- in a blinding flash, a gush which fills my whole body with warm light. Oh, the pleasure of it. And oh, so frustrating! I have lasted less than a minute! I wanted to be her perfect lover, to attend to her every desire, I wanted her to come. She lets me finger-fuck her and tongue her clit, but my cock has gone to sleep and my efforts to pleasure her are clearly an apology for the real thing. Eventually she pushes me away and masturbates until, with a whimper and soft exhalation, she comes. Ordinarily that would be a huge turn-on, but, in the event, it is just humiliating.

  The next day, when I wake, she is on one elbow next to me in the bed. She is grinning. “You snore,” she says and laughs, as if that’s the cutest thing! She says nothing about my failure, but the frustration of it, the shame, sits heavily with me, and settles into an unattractive gloominess. Apparently in good humour, she makes us tea and French toast for breakfast, and says we are off to the flea market. “I go every Sunday. It’s surprizing what bits and pieces you can pick up,” she says. At a haphazardly-organised stall run by a woman in an abundant turban, I buy Lucy (as an apology) an Ethiopian necklace with a large lapis lazuli stone at its centre. It matches her eyes. The African woman says the piece is silver, but I doubt it. But so what? - Lucy is inordinately pleased with it and plants a big fat kiss on my lips. Either I didn't need forgiveness or she gave it very lightly. It's good either way. My mood lifts. She lets me put my arm around her, but after a short while, it begins to feel awkward and she manages, without any sign of intention, to free herself.

  After a plate of Indian street food eaten standing up, she informs me that she is taking me to shoplift. “I take stuff from multi-national chains, Tom – it’s my way of getting the buggers to pay their taxes!” she says firmly, clearly persuaded by her nifty ethical recalibration. I’m from out of town, I’m with a beautiful young woman who lives here, we're having fun, I am forgiven... Who am I to refuse? So I go along with it.

  We nearly get caught in Zara and have to outrun the burly and, it turns out, unfit, security guard at the mall. Enough distance away, we duck into an alley, and laugh and hug and kiss as we catch our breath. “Oh, God, I get so turned on by doing dangerous things!” she says. Her look says she wants me. She grabs my hand. “Come.” She has a plan. We get the train to some smart suburb on the edge of the city. It’s all trees and gardens and big houses when we emerge from the station, but if I think we are there for nice scenery, I am mistaken. Disguised only by the beanies we’ve stolen from Zara, we are there to smash up a BMW belonging to a rich lawyer she knows who’d got Shell off the hook in some exploration and spillage off the West coast of Africa. Hiding behind hedges, running away down a wide street, my photo will probably be held on CCTV footage of the crime scene down at police head-quarters in Amsterdam for the foreseeable future. Will I even get out of the country? Shit, I think, this is getting too complicated for me, even as I imagine the sex to come.

  She is onto me as soon as we get home, peeling my jacket off me, her lips pressed to mine, she thrusts against me. She disengages only to get her clothes off in two or three movements, standing on one leg, then the other to get her tights off. Her pale skin is mottled in places by the cold, but the inside of her thigh and her tummy are pink with heat. Her nipples are erect. I could fuck her right away, but this time, I want to show her how considerate I am as a lover; I want to go slow.

  She doesn’t. I try to slow her down with gentle stoking, but I am too self-conscious, too timid. Lucy is impatient, eager - she pulls at me, she bites me, her nails dig into me, she folds my thigh between her legs and rubs her cunt against me. Okay, if she wants more passion... I throw her onto the bed and spread her legs and tongue her. I put a finger a little way into her anus and she goes wild, bucking, pressing her cunt onto my willing lips. But then I shift up through the gears too quickly. I am too rough. I pull at and twist her nipple, she slaps my hand and grimaces. I grab her tit again and she squirms under me. Then I'm inside her, her arse is so soft, I mustn’t... I mustn’t... Oh, God, I mustn’t... I come. In spite of my best efforts, I come before her again. I am mortified. I have lasted less than three minutes!

  This time she doesn’t even bother to masturbate. I think from her sigh as she flops back over to her side of the bed, that she must have given up on me.

  After a pause, she says, “When are you going back to London?”

  ****

  Back in London, to counteract my shame, I tell myself that Lucy is a head-case; that I g
ot off lightly. But I find it hard to get images of her out of my mind – her humorous, taunting eyes, the hollow under her clavicle, the soft bonelessness of her slim thighs. She had wanted me. She had. If only…

  I almost contact her again, but my poor self-esteem comes to my aid and I rein myself in just in time – she’s probably relieved to be rid of me. She needs a big reckless bloke with lots of muscles, not some pale North London journalist who’s let his gym membership lapse and can’t keep his powder dry. If she wants to get in touch, if she’s had second thoughts, she knows where to reach me. I can wait. Experience tells me I should wait. So I wait.

  Not that I have much experience to draw on. I had not been one of the ‘popular’ boys at school. I was, I suppose, a bit nerdy, often referred to as ‘gay’ – not as in homosexual, but as in uncool and pretentious. I read a lot. I thought about girls a considerable amount of my waking time and of my dreamtime, but in the presence of a girl who was even vaguely attractive, I was paralytically shy, my tongue a lugubrious frog in my mouth. Oh, yes, I found big words to hide my embarrassment, behind a screen of pomposity and erudition. My disability with girls was compounded by my alcoholic mother being intermittently over-indulgent and more often, completely unaware of my presence, and by the absence of my father who thought to die of a cerebral aneurysm just before I entered the cauldron of puberty.

  I did get a scholarship to Warrick to read History and Politics, where my peculiarity was more favourably regarded by the opposite sex, especially, I found, by big girls who more-or-less literally took me under their wing. Gradually, through their tutelage, or perhaps in spite of it, I became more acceptable, even regarded as good-looking in a rakish sort of way (if the light was advantageously angled). I had my first sexual encounter – my first fuck – in second year. Not a work of art, but I was pleased to get it under my belt so-to-speak.

  I got my first job as a journalist straight out of Uni, through a “friend” of my mother, who had been a colleague of my father’s and fellow member of the Socialist Worker’s Party. I turned other people’s turgid prose into readable copy for a publication that went tits-up two months after I started. But I did meet Marsha Galpin, my editor, there, so I suppose I can say I was “headhunted” to work for New World Order, working until recently as an investigative journalist in the field (although, since the crisis in publication a few months back, I’ve returned to the same desk job I did when I started my career).

  ****

  And working at New World Order is how I got to meet Lucy again. What were the chances? A gorgeous girl like her fancying a guy like me?! I should think not! She is beautiful, intelligent, although younger than me by several years, several steps up the ladder of sexual experience, therefore, well… it is difficult to just let her go. Both my shame and sober judgement urge me to move on, but my tenuous, testosterone-fuelled ambition whispers, “Wait… maybe… who knows?”

  For my self-preservation I suppose, when I do think about Lucy (quite often and at surprising times), I have to suppress bubbles of ridiculous hope that effervesce to the surface by forcing myself to remember the things I hadn’t liked about her, to the point of getting irritated, angry, self-righteous. Her impetuousness, her arrogance, her bluntness… And yet…

  Then, gradually… well, life happens, and, like the zen master I am (sometimes… in my head), I let her go. I stop obsessing about her. Start dating the amorous Amanda, who, I convince myself, is more my type. We like the same movies, the same books… It lasts six weeks and ends abruptly when she overhears my supercharged drunken dinner-party rant against “those pretentious, entitled middle-class Earth-mother fascists” I think I called them, who think that people who don’t want kids are lesser beings. Amanda, it turns out, is one of them. I was already far-gone, but I think her earnest rebuttal provoked me to overstate my case emphatically, and the reasons I put forward (having kids gets in the way of having fun, having a career and being politically relevant) were probably objectionable to an intelligent, fertile young woman I admit. It’s not that I don’t want kids ever, but the example my parents set (one dying, one going missing in action), made me think I would make a shit parent. I don’t tell her that. Amanda returns only one call after that – to tell me I am immature and not what she is after. At least it gets me over Lucy.

  Until Lucy calls. I have had to wait quite a bit longer than I’d anticipated – six months in fact, before business brings her to London. She’s arranged to hook up with Irini and we agree to meet for a drink near Old Street. In spite of my definitely being over her, I change the sheets, air the bedroom, put out fresh towels, buy flowers for the dining table and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc for the fridge. I try on three changes of clothing before I settle on what to wear to meet Lucy again. Definitely over her. Yeah, right! On the bus down to Shoreditch, I realise from people’s looks that I have probably overdone it with the after-shave.

  Lucy, who unusually for her, has make-up on and is looking even more beautiful than I remembered her, is at a table with Irini, sitting too close I think, with a dagger-thrust of jealousy, to the hunky Wim Mueller, a war reporter of some repute. I’ve met him briefly before and didn’t like his smug balefulness at the state of the world. Lucy tells me straight-off, to remove any ambiguity, that she is staying at Irini’s that night. (Damn, am I that obvious?) Shit, I have rehearsed her coming back to my place so meticulously that I’ve assumed her acquiescence – fuck it, she practically owes me! Why had she called me otherwise?

  Three tequila shots in, her casual destruction of my preferred storyline for her and me still seems so numbingly heartless, that I do nothing to stop my slide into behaviour which is at best awkward, and at least, to use the description of the sainted Amanda, immature. I lay into the witless Wim Mueller. I call him self-indulgent and masochistic – all that death and degradation. Shit, I tell him, there’s more to life than that. Lighten up, Wim! (I think I call him Wimp, supposedly inadvertently.) The world-weary award-winning documentarist takes it all in his melancholic brooding stride and I suppose that makes him more sexually appealing to Lucy. Lucy, for her part, laughs in a faux-conspiratorial way and is friendly and chatty, but clearly not desperate to go to bed with me. Obviously. Jesus, had sex with me been such a let-down?! Good move that I hadn’t called her after all.

  So much for my romantic notions about Lucy. But now we are back in touch, we keep in touch professionally. She sends me stories which she thinks will be of interest to New World Order and I get some of them published (with a bit of judicious editing, it must be said – she is a bit loose in her writing – too conversational); I keep track of the good work she is doing via her blog and facebook, and occasionally send her articles of mutual interest. Purely professional interest. Or is it?

  Then, on a warm Saturday in the middle of July, she turns up on my doorstep at eight in the morning, pushes me inside, unpeels me from my towelling gown, finds my lips and my cock, and staggers me back into my bedroom. With no over-thinking, our love making – I call it that, because it is – is delicious, unhurried and luxurious. She comes, her thighs, clasped around my hips, quivering, her gasp of pleasure drawing into a low growl, her cunt pulsing like hungry tongues.

  Afterwards, she lies on her back, eyes closed, smiling. I notice she is wearing the Ethiopian necklace I bought in Amsterdam. The silver has not tarnished. I trace the furrow in her taut belly with my finger. She is a thing of wonder.

  “I’ve thought about you a lot,” she says.

  “Me too,” I say.

  “What? You’ve thought about yourself a lot?” She sits up and grins at me.

  “That too,” I say, laughing.

  We get out of bed at midday and have breakfast at my local greasy spoon café, then go to my place, get back into bed and make love again. We order a take-away later, and, from the comfort of my bed, we watch a movie on the telly. “When Harry met Sally.” I’ve seen it before - Lucy hasn’t, and loves it. It is a fortuitous choice.

  “Move
in with me,” I say. “You’ll find a job in London.”

  Lucy looks straight ahead. She smiles and squeezes my hand. She doesn’t say no.

  The next day, a Sunday filled with light, we take the train to Broxbourne and walk along the canal, her hand in mine. We have lunch at a pub looking out onto the Lee. “This is nice,” she says, “I do miss it.” After lunch, Lucy takes pictures of the narrowboats and the reflections of the silvered clouds on the verdant water. “That’s what Heaven looks like,” she muses, one eye pressed to the view-finder. “I want a picture of us,” she says suddenly, and importunes a passing couple with her request for a photo of us, her arm in mine, smiling, in heaven. The man (I think he is Japanese) obliges, getting down on one knee to get the perspective just right. A real pro.

  Later, when we get back to Islington, we shop in Tesco for delicacies for supper, on condition she doesn’t shoplift. She giggles. “I don’t do that anymore,” she says, and squeezes herself close to me, savouring the memory. Lucy loves cooking too, I’m surprised to find. She is a judicious shopper, choosing her vegetables carefully. Together we make a dinner of vichyssoise with fresh dill (her contribution) and poached cod with capers and wine (mine). The bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc lasts only as long as the evening. I light candles. It’s all very domesticated. Very adult. Like we are man and wife. Later she sleeps in the fold of my embrace. It is all so perfect.

  In the middle of the night, something rouses me from the soft cushion of a dream. Lucy is in the other room, speaking in a hushed voice to someone on her Blackberry. I drift back to sleep.

  When I wake on the Monday morning, she is gone.