‘Um, hell yes! This would be amazing! Look at you, all big-timing it. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan and I’d love to travel with you,’ Gina gabbled at me excitedly.
‘Well, I’m not exactly big-timing – no one’s actually given me a commission yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m hopeful I can get a bit of work out of it. It’s exciting to do it this way around. And there’ll be time to do other things, too, although even the work will be fun – you’re up for testing out some bars with me for a travel piece, aren’t you? We should have a day or two at the end to go to some of the local temples.’
‘I’m sold, Nichi. You know, I’m proud of you for deciding to do this. It’s just what you need right now. Forget Sebastian. Fuck him! Or not any more, as the case may be!’
Just before we left, Sebastian sent me an email. A long email. A significant email.
Hello,
I don’t want you to feel pestered, so please put me on ignore if you feel the need. There’s a bit of a Catch-22 involved in giving you space yet caring, so I’ll risk it.
I feel like things got very intense in a way that slipped into some painful territory for both of us. At the moment it feels like some kind of lingering dream that gets even less clear in the passing days. Some beauty, and some really raw, gut-level rending. Joy, lust, fear, and then a puff of smoke. There are pleasant memories, veiled threats. Some paranoia on both our parts. I don’t really know what to make of it.
But that’s not really what I wanted to say. I suppose the most important thing for me to express is that I feel my life would be less rich without you in it, in whatever capacity that is, and that I’m glad we met. For me, our connection has been very real, sometimes delirious and out of control, but always significant to me. I can’t deal with you thinking I don’t care about you.
Perhaps our expectations and emotions regarding each other are different, but that does not change the fact that it has all been very consequential to me, our meeting. I don’t meet someone like you every day. You’ve touched my life.
I can understand your regrets, if you feel them towards having met me. I hope very much they change in time.
I’m happy to give you space, and quite frankly, I might need it, too. But not for too long, if it’s at all up to me.
Sx
The first feeling I had when I read it was one of relief. So I wasn’t crazy. So I hadn’t imagined Sebastian had had feelings for me, after all. The second was anger. Why couldn’t he have expressed any of this properly that last time we met? Or even before that? And then, the third feeling, of discontent, told me it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. There was still no advance on the no-love, no-monogamy offer. But it was a gesture. ‘You’ve touched my life.’ Wasn’t that the best any of us could ever hope to do?
I told Sebastian that I was just about to go to Japan and that I’d reply on my return. ‘But thank you for sending that.’
A few days later, as Gina and I waited for our flight to Tokyo, I told her about the email. She wasn’t touched the way I had been, even though she recognised that it sounded as though Sebastian was genuinely contrite.
‘Nichi, look, I’ve no doubt that the man has some good qualities, and probably a lot of good intentions. But he hasn’t had to watch you tear yourself apart ever since you met him. He hasn’t watched you come home after a date with him, morose until he texts you again. He hasn’t heard you cry yourself to sleep for being born the way you are. He hasn’t had to worry that you were going to start starving yourself again . . .’ Gina broke off. There were actually tears in her eyes.
‘Oh Gina, God, you’re an incredible friend, there’s nothing to cry over!’ Her declaration of care made me feel like crying too. ‘Please don’t worry. I’m not going to start starving myself again; I can’t go back there. And, I can’t go back to Sebastian either. It’s just, a tiny part of me can’t help wondering whether this could be the start of something else. Maybe a genuine, platonic friendship could redeem some of the awfulness that has passed between us.”
Gina wiped her eyes and gave a laugh. ‘Jesus, I’m getting sentimental in my old age. Let’s just get on this plane to Tokyo, shall we? Go have some fun and see how you feel when you get back.’
‘You’re on.’
Thankfully, from the moment we got to Japan I had no time to dwell on any of this. Having bombarded every national news desk and features editor with email pitches, I secured three article commissions and did radio interviews in the early hours, staring out at the neon glitter of Tokyo’s skyline as I shared my newly acquired cultural insights with listeners from Malvern to Macclesfield. I wrote late into the night to meet London teatime deadlines. Finally, my mind was free to focus on the one thing that could truly distract me from the complications of my own life – meeting other people and listening to their stories, then passing them on. No solace like someone else’s story I had once said to Sebastian, when, dismayed by losing funding for a major project, he had asked me to recommend some diverting reading material. It was time I took my own advice.
And Japan, especially Japan in Gina’s company, really was the best place to soothe me back to strength. I didn’t need time to dwell any more. I needed to be reminded that life was full of wonders. Tokyo, with its rainbow-painted taxis, Sunday dress-up rituals and relentless nightlife was just the job, and Gina and I created a hundred more colourful anecdotes for ourselves. I worked as hard during the day as Gina and I partied at night, and our genial Japanese hosts were only too happy to show us around the city’s carnivalesque nightspots. We drank delicious blackcurrant cocktails, danced to Japanese teeny-bopper pop and filmed one another singing the entire Abba back catalogue in private karaoke booth after private karaoke booth. Everywhere we went I had my English cleavage eyed up and my hair fondled. It was a full week before I saw another blonde. For once, I was ‘exotic’.
On Rainbow Pride parade day I had to be up at the crack of dawn to decorate myself before I went off to report on the proceedings. Just because I was working didn’t mean I couldn’t look the part, too. In fact, dressing up might be a good ruse for getting a better story, I decided. Nobody likes a po-faced, khaki-clad journalist bounding up to report on his or her kookiness.
Before long, Gina and I were perfectly kitted out. We had spent far too much time in the Harajuku district, where the lissom manga-eyed sales assistants sold us all manner of over-the-top accoutrements, telling us ‘No wig, no life!’ in between high-pitched giggles. I wore the French maid-style pinafore dress I had worn the night I met Sapphire, accessorised with fishnet polka dot tights, lurid orange and blue nails and candy-coloured make-up to match my ice-cream sundae wig. Gina, meanwhile, had a romper suit, lace-trimmed ankle socks and a Disney princess-style brunette wig. She even very sweetly set her alarm so that she could attend to my false eyelashes for me before I left the hotel.
‘I’m going to meet you at 12.00 by the press tent. Don’t run off with any hot Japanese akusas without me, OK?’ she warned me.
‘Akusas?’
‘You know, the Japanese mafia men with full-body tattoos. I know what you’re like when you see men with tattoos.’
I shook my head and laughed. ‘Dressed like this?’
‘Definitely like that! You look like an anime dream!’
On the way to the park a handsome American tourist stopped me. ‘Ohayo gozimas! Picture?’ He gestured to his camera.
‘Oh sure,’ I replied, slightly incredulous.
‘You make such a good Harajuku girl!’
I laughed him off, hurrying on to begin my work. At the press tent I had been assigned a translator who would help me to ask the Japanese gay, bi, lesbian, trans and omnisexual revellers questions about their political beliefs and sex lives. In among the stories of prejudice, misery, love and joy, there were also some pretty hilarious lost in translation moments. As the day went on, I met bloggers and campaigners and even Japan’s Minister for Equality. Overwhelmed by the proximity to such a dignitary, I barely
managed a bow, caught as I was between not wanting to offend by not stooping low enough and not wanting to offend by my boobs escaping my bodice. I then committed the heinous social faux pas of not returning her business card with one of my own. Between the low-cut pinafore and the confectionary wig, the Swedish drag-ghoul I’d interviewed and a troop of gay Pokemon I’d posed for pictures with, there hadn’t been much time to worry about how to carry business cards about my person.
Gina joined me an hour or two later, with some newly acquired Japanese friends in tow and after the march, there were rousing political speeches and dancing in the decorated square. In a country without legal rights for gay couples, it was poignant to see so many people of all sexual orientations and genders celebrating the right to love.
One of Gina’s new friends, Aiko, offered to take us for dinner in Shinjuku. Outside the station, a gaggle of Japanese people of all ages started to laugh and point at me, gasping as if they’d never seen a small white girl wearing an ice cream-sundae wig. ‘I thought this was the land of costume?’ I asked Aiko. ‘It can’t just be the ladder in my tights, surely?’
Aiko was laughing fit to burst. ‘I think they think you’re Lady Gaga!’
The one thing still weighing heavily on my mind was the matter of love, or rather Sebastian’s inability to feel it. One day towards the end of my trip, I had sat in a deserted side-chamber of Tokyo’s famous Senso-ji temple for twenty minutes in front of a statue of Buddha and contemplated what love might mean to Sebastian. Did Sebastian love his family? His friends? Did he merely not fall into it any more? Did he never experience pinpricks of it? And if he didn’t love did that mean he didn’t experience real connection with someone else? Or longing for them?
I wanted to know. I wanted to ask him. But what would I do with the answers? He couldn’t love me and that’s all that mattered. So instead I lit a candle for Sebastian, there in the temple and prayed that one day his heart might thaw, that eventually he might find love with someone else.
And then I prayed for peace for the both of us.
On our last night in Tokyo, I was determined to revel in this newly recovered sense of what it felt like to be myself, and to feel good about it.
Gina and I had been invited by our hosts to an all-night end of season party at Tokyo’s most notorious gay club, a resplendent theatre of decadent dreams built over three floors with drag queen go-go dancers and an outdoor rooftop swimming pool that sprayed water across the sweaty al fresco dancers. Gina and I were fast running out of money, with only one vodka and coke and two caffeine tablets between us. But I can’t remember dancing a whole night away with more verve and enthusiasm than the way we did there.
As the evening wore on, I noticed a sexy mixed-race guy with a shaved head and the most incredible smile executing some inspired dance moves. I pointed him out to Gina. ‘Classic! Hottest guy for ages, and he’s gay!’
‘Well, you must have known our chances of pulling were pretty low here, love!’
Gina and I carried on dancing, and as we danced, the man in question seemed to edge nearer to us, until quite suddenly he was unmistakably dancing with me.
‘I’m Joel,’ he said in a polite, Mid-Western US accent, giving a mock bow as he doffed his cap with a deep flourish and flashed his perfect teeth at me, all without missing a beat.
We danced together for two hours, weaving in and out of one another’s movements as we got to know one another. It turned out that Joel was actually a professional dancer, just finishing a tour of Tokyo and bound for New York the following morning, ‘so I figured I’d stay up all night and sleep on the plane.’
‘Likewise!’ I laughed.
‘Well then, we’d better make the most of it!’ And with that he leaned towards me and had me whipped about in his arms before I could even pretend that I was about to venture off in the other direction. We danced like this for another hour or so, before Gina reappeared, exhausted and pointing to her wrist. We needed to catch the first train back to the hotel if we were to make our flight.
‘What’s your email address?’ he asked me. I told him. But how the hell was he going to remember it? I know. I pulled out my fuschia lipstick and scrawled my email address down his arm.
He grinned and held his arm out from his body awkwardly. ‘I’m not going to bend, I’m not going to dance, I’m not going to sweat, I’m just going to preserve your email address for as long as I possibly can on my arm here!’
It worked. He’d added me to Facebook by the time Gina and I had reached our hotel an hour later.
But before we left, Joel and I had kissed.
When I arrived back from Tokyo two days later I felt as though my internal circuit board had finally sparked back to life. I was reenergised, full of new ideas for similar travel-writing based ventures, and thinking seriously about taking the plunge to becoming a full-time freelance journalist.
Most importantly of all, finally, I felt free of Sebastian. What Japan had given me was the space to realise how toxic our relationship was, and always would be. For months he had made me feel as though I needed his affections and his attentions to feel whole, when really, I had been whole all along. It was he who had been lacking, taking advantage of my capacity to offer care and love, knowing full well he could never reciprocate.
Of course, none of this pain and heartbreak had anything to do with the BDSM aspect of our relationship. I thought about that conversation Christos and I had once had about it, my presumption and prejudice that all women that enjoyed submitting to men were damaged. I didn’t regret the sex for one moment, well, except the scissor sex. But that was so toxic precisely because of the dynamic between Sebastian and me. Besides, once you’d crossed over to kinkdom there was no going back to straight vanilla sex. In time, perhaps not too long a period of time, I’d be ready to start over with someone who relished all the pleasures it could bring, but who also understood the meaning of love and respect. I had never met anybody who had me feel so disrespected, nor so emotionally depleted. And nor inadvertently, so optimistic about the future, a future that did not contain him.
Sebastian and I were done.
CHAPTER 21
Tokyo had rewired me; now I needed to make sure there was no danger of slipping back into recently acquired bad habits. Finally, I snapped out of my self-obsessed narcissism. ‘As the soul is far more worthy than the body, it deserves to be all the more cultivated and adorned.’
It was my favourite quote, ironically from the Renaissance courtier’s manual I’d sat reading the night all those moons ago when Christos had commented on my red lips. Even a book advising men on the best way to seduce women several hundred years ago, knew that real allure came from the inside. Ever since, I’d had it stuck to a small sliver of card above my desk at home, so that if I was letting petty, destructive thoughts about my appearance (or now, Sebastian) distract me from writing about rape, or the persecution of gay, bi or transgender people in Russia, or how the US government restricted safe access to abortion, I would remember what really mattered. I returned to it now. Work on your soul, I thought.
I went back to yoga. It was the practice that had taught me to appreciate my body for all it could do, not all that it couldn’t or wasn’t after I’d recovered from anorexia, and I knew it was the practice that would help me to heal now. It helped me foster a peace which permeated every other area of my life, allowed me to work under pressure more easily, reminded me to check up on my friends, to look out for the old man with the drinking problem who lived in my flat block, to ring my family and to be grateful for all my many blessings.
And then I got a cat. Ever since I’d moved to London I’d been pining for a pet. In a rare twist of serendipity, Violet sent an email around saying that an escort friend of hers had had to bring her old cat to work because it didn’t get on with her new dog. Did anyone know of someone that might re-home Brothel Kitty?
I went to meet him. He was rangily handsome, a too-white tabby with very pale green eyes, a brick
-coloured nose and a striped brown chin that made him look as though he were sporting a goatee. Immediately he jumped into my lap. And so it was that I acquired Snap, the most wilful and demanding of cats.
Once re-homed with me, he was like the neediest of submissives, an expert in topping from the bottom, and would head-butt my fingers off the keyboard as I typed or scratch ferociously at the bedroom door in the middle of the night to be let in for a pet. If I’d been out all day, he would aggressively miaow when I opened the door and jump up at me, placing a white paw on my leg until he got the caresses he craved.
Gina came round to see him once he was installed. ‘Trust you to acquire a cuddle monster cat, Nichi!’
‘I know, I know,’ I laughed. ‘He got too used to being petted by lots of nice naked ladies in the brothel. But it’s a delight. Not the being woken up every night, but everything else. Although he did try to get down my top the other day . . .’
‘Please, you are not being molested by your cat!’ laughed Gina. ‘Anyway, other VIP matters – how’s the job-hunting going?’
Just as my personal life had been radically shaken up, so, on my return from Japan, was my professional one. I had come back to London to find out that, due to a lack of funds, I was being let go from my current job with immediate effect. job within a few days of arriving back in London. And yet I had quickly begun to view it as a blessing in disguise. I had no money saved and only the smallest amount of writing work lined up, but my modest successes in Tokyo had convinced me that I could make it as a freelancer if I put my mind to it.
Bound to You Page 27