by Rick Gekoski
When I challenged her about this afterwards, she laughed. ‘Northerners,’ she said, ‘are not only crass and ugly, they’re as insensitive as Germans. You can say anything to them – they do it to each other all the time, as long as you add “lass” or “lad”, any old insult will do – they hardly even notice.’
‘I thought he was rather hurt.’
‘Was he? Good. Maybe he’ll leave me alone now.’
He never asked for another further knock-up. I, on the other hand, found her callous aggression surprisingly exciting.
I was still a virgin. Luckily. A number of my fellow school-boys had lost their cherries, both active and passive – the former rather admired, the latter scorned – pursuing in-house activities that frightened and rather disgusted me. There was something of a vogue, amongst these boys, for reading novels with lashings of buggery. Apparently these were serious literature: the Edmund White sort of books. I looked into one or two of them to see what the fuss was about, but the more Vaseline there is in a novel, the less gripping it is.
I’d have my furtive wanks, hurried and embarrassed, as a way of letting off steam, but I’d never developed that frenzied enthusiasm for orgasms that defines the average schoolboy. No, my sexual life was solitary, silent in the lavatory stall, clandestine, flushed.
I knew that Suzy’s slut remark referred to her untidiness, but perhaps not only that? She was cheerful, free, physically luxuriant, and wore her body with an ease and grace that rather astonished me, straight-backed and stiff-shouldered as I was.
I’ve always found running an uncomfortably conscious act, and appear – I have, alas, seen a videotape of myself at a trot – as if I had learned to do it from a manual. Lift foot, bend knee, lean forwards, plant foot at same time as raising following foot, establish momentum, repeat until perfected. It never was. I ran as if comprised of metallic bits. Whereas Suzy had nothing self-conscious in her carriage, she loped, as great a pleasure to watch as a leopard.
Not that I’d ever seen a leopard. Or a girl, either. I knew – even I, unconscious though I was, untutored, diffident, gawky and constrained – that it was only a matter of time until that body and mine were entwined on or under that Indian bedspread, in the dinky single bed in her college room. It was a fearful prospect.
What bits of porn were available in the slink-to-Soho magazines and videos had hardly entered my field of vision. Of course some of the boys had bits and pieces of portable naughtiness, which were passed about until the pages fell out, and a few videos were said to be available around the school, though there was precious little time to watch them, with the constant fear of being found out, humiliated and rusticated, and exposed to one’s parents as a pervert.
Nowadays, eight-year-olds with access to the internet might offer tutorials on deviant sexual practices to Stekel and Krafft-Ebing, and are presumably overheated in some unthinkable pre-pubescent way, rubbing their immature stiffening willies, lubricating and throbbing in their front bottoms.
Vaginas. I was – I still am – unclear what the best word is. Suzy used ‘pussy’, which was a bit cute, as if in conscious denial of the perils that lie below. Anyhow, it is hard to make a relationship with a cat. I don’t like them. At school Boylston called their nethers – and girls in general – ‘gash’, with a leering flourish that suggested he knew and loved how archaic and improper the term was.
‘For fuck’s sake, Boylston,’ I said, ‘you make it sound like a wound.’
‘It is. Why’s it bleeding all the fucking time?’
Cunts. I settled upon the Old English term, as having some historical and linguistic gravitas: Chaucer used it, and it is still fresh, racy and modern. I’d seen the occasional picture of one, but knew it would be inadequate preparation for the real thing. I was full of awe and fear and longing at the prospect.
I knew the general idea. It was like a car. It wouldn’t run properly if it was cold. But if you warmed it up slowly – no zoom-zoom pedal to the metal, just a thoughtful and unhurried transition from first to fourth with a smooth forward motion – then the internal oils would warm up, lubrication would spread through the system, and you would get a satisfying ride. If it was a Ferrari, you might hope for more than that, but I could never afford one of those.
Once I got over my initial apprehension, and learned to delay the onset of orgasm by the repetition of a few judicious internal mantras, our love-making became increasingly active and satisfying. Suzy took me through the rudiments, introducing me to this, demonstrating that. Nipples got erections too! Even mine. This was a clitoris. Bit like a dick. But for the first few weeks it was a simple enough missionary matter, and it was up to her – she admitted to four previous lovers, though she may have been swanking it – to lead the way.
What really alarmed me, even after the loss of my virginity, was how different cunts were to what I was used to, how much more dangerous and complex. A multi-tasking sort of organ. When it wasn’t peeing, it was bleeding, dicks went in – careful! – or babies came out. Like the sea, it was deep and dangerous, unfathomable.
One evening, back in her room after our afternoon seminar, we finished off a bottle of Spanish red wine – £1.99 at our local, better suited to vinaigrette dressing than drinking – and Suzy said ‘let’s fuck!’ She was libidinous. Girls were. Autonomously. They did not have to fall in love, or have a reason, or be drunk. They were not sluts, they just liked – some of them anyway – to have lots of sex. It was news to me, and like most men of my generation I never entirely took it in. Lust was something that men felt and women responded to, that was the natural course of things.
Once we had our clothes off and were in the bed, it appeared that she had something geographically new in mind. First she turned herself round, and started nibbling at my cock. And as soon as I had registered the unexpected delight of this, she had flipped about and there was her cunt in my face. A second before there’d been a ceiling, the top half of a window, some faded damask curtains. Then – a cunt. It was baptismally wet, and I was obviously expected to immerse myself in its waters and be saved. Oh Jesus God, oh God Jesus.
I was shocked, about to drown in a marine world of tiny pink crustaceans newly escaped from their shells, swimmingly alive, briny, edible. I took a deep breath. You can do it, I thought. Sink or swim. Sink and swim. I stuck out my tongue. ‘Higher up,’ she urged, adjusting her body. I found just the right sea creature and licked it as instructed. It worked a treat. I slurped away blissfully, as she reciprocated below, and my cock was engulfed. I was sucked in, enfolded by her arms, her legs rounded my head, she had improbably multiple limbs, suction valves, watery depths: chaos, an octopus, a biological process.
When I opened my eyes once more, I was staring directly at – virtually into – her arsehole. I closed my eyes. I opened them again. It was still there, it was not going to go away. To my surprise it was less alarming, once I managed to isolate form from function, than the roiling seascape below: simpler, and less alien. Ineluctable, moving and beautiful, with its concentric folds of lightly pleated shell pink, what one might later have described as a silken organic garment by Issey Miyake.
Following this rite de back passage, my dick now slick and plump as an oyster, full of the most profound satisfaction and gratitude, I pushed myself up on my elbow and dared to kiss her nose, gently.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘I think I adore you.’
‘Oh. Don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Adoration is for the gods and the magi. I’m not having it. I’m no angel.’
‘Thank God for that!’ I said.
‘I’d be quite happy just to be loved,’ she said quietly.
I didn’t answer.
A shocking image of the devastated landscape of her dying body interceded. Like coal fields seen from above, that green and pleasant land transformed into slag heaps, dark and burning encrustations, the smell of the undergrowth, the nostril-clogging stench of decay. H
er poor breasts, the ruined seascape of her genitals – depleted, scabrous, stinking, encrusted, riddled with bedsores, weeping.
O Dark dark dark. Irrecoverably dark.
For a time the image obliterated the light and I reeled at the insistence of it – the memory. An effort of will pushed it forcibly aside, still potently on the margins of consciousness, lurking and threatening to reappear, and recovered for a few moments my poor dear young Suzy, my girl, my wife, my first and only love.
For, after all, what do I have now but a heap of mutually informing and obliterating images? Time, now, is neither forwards nor back, it swirls and eddies and carries in its occasional tumultuous currents all that I have been, and intimations of what is to come. I see Suzy young and old, vibrantly alive and incontrovertibly, memorably, indelibly dead. I see myself as well. My devoted, hopeful, ignorant young self, my soon-to-be discarded body, my remains.
Starting a novel is the hardest part of the process, Suzy said, except for finding the right voice, honing the language, establishing a point of view, getting to know the characters, developing the narrative, and finding the right ending. Though she plucked her First in English with the facility of a gamekeeper, when she took to fiction her ease deserted her. ‘As well it should,’ she claimed. Being an undergraduate was easy, and fun, being a novelist wasn’t: Joyce and Nabokov weren’t fooling around. Or, actually they were, but they were playing in earnest: they were Professors of Fooling Around.
She drafted The Gristmill in her last year at Oxford, and rewrote and revised it obsessively over the next two, before it was published to considerable but not universal praise when she was twenty-four. Most critics – she got five reviews, two of them in the broadsheets – looked forward to her next work, suggesting that this one was promising, but not quite satisfying.
Suzy agreed. Indeed, she thought it less good than that.
‘But it is the best I can do,’ she said. ‘Alas.’
She was as serious as a novelist as she had been airily clever as an undergraduate. If you wish to do justice to the comic awfulness of life, she maintained, you have to concentrate, which was her favourite word at the time. To concentrate is both to focus and to distil, and that is – isn’t it? – what a novelist is supposed to do. She’d never done so before, things having come too easily for her, but she found she rather liked it. It was to be her undoing.
The Gristmill was a densely written but modestly readable roman-à-clef, as is predictable and allowable with first novels, and her father found it an uncomfortable experience. He wasn’t used to discomfort. He disapproved of it. He was moved, Sir Henry, by the praise his daughter was garnering, for it redounded to his credit, having fathered such a clever – and pretty! – girl. But her portrait of a pompous mock-country squire, too bloated to know that he is a figure of fun, rather discomfited him.
‘Not based on me, of course!’ he maintained at dinner parties, when someone brought up the subject. Which they did. It became, for a few months, a Dorset dinner-party game, to provoke him in this way.
‘Well, dear Henry, you must admit he looks like you, and he sounds like you, and he has many of your attributes.’
‘Attributes? Nonsense! He has none of my drive and integrity, nor my sense of fun,’ he boomed. ‘No, what my clever little one has done is use my shell and filled it with someone else’s sand.’
The metaphor rather confirmed the description his little one had made of him: that he had both a loud voice and a tin ear, as if the forcefulness of his delivery had impaired his capacity to hear what he was actually saying. That was all right, though, as no one listened to him anyhow.
Suzy never worried that her old man would be more than temporarily slighted by the portrait: ‘he’s way too self-absorbed for that. What he will remember is that he is in my novel, not what it says about him.’ This was prescient, and The Gristmill was rarely mentioned again between them. Instead, her father hoped that she was at work on another novel? Perhaps one set in India? What a splendid idea!
Unlike her parents, I was unambiguously proud of my brilliant – and pretty! – girl, and pleased to be able to support her. To become a novelist at such an early age, you needed either an indomitable capacity to write while you were also making a living, or a reliable source of external funding to allow you guilt-free days in your study, struggling to make something out of nothing.
Following the death of my grandparents when I was a child – I had few memories of them, just those old photos from which to construct some meagre, moving but inert stories – I’d inherited some money. It was rather a lot, though I never told Suzy how much, nor did she ask. The sum was put in a trust fund, conservatively invested by Coutts for both income and capital growth, and it ensured that neither of us would have to make life-choices based on the need to make a living wage. We would never be wealthy, but we’d have a cushion against any fall.
But we wanted to work: I to teach, she to write. To embark on lives – it seemed rather noble to us – of reading and writing, transported by what we found in the world of books. Literature was our passion and guide. In our careers, we congratulated ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between work and pleasure. Which is, surely, the desideratum of happiness?
Suzy set to work on a second novel, and found herself drawn, to her consternation, back to Oxford. She was cross about it.
‘It’s supposed to be up to me, isn’t it? I don’t want to write a fucking undergraduate novel! How boring is that? But they keep on at me, scenes and memories and characters – Mrs Bed’s tutorials, afternoons trying to punt, worrying about Schools, all the boring old Oxford tropes – and when I try to turn them off, to stop up my ears and close my eyes, all I get is static.’
‘Am I in it?’ I knew myself a better man than her father, and though I had no doubt – or not too much doubt – that she loved me, Suzy had that chip of ice in her budding novelist’s soul, a sharp eye and sharper tongue, and I had no desire to see my adolescent fumblings memorialised in print.
‘Of course not, darling. Don’t worry, you’re quite safe . . .’
‘That’s a relief!’
‘. . . I don’t have anything to say about you. I don’t want to write about you, or Oxford, or – how boring is that? – myself. I want to move on, only my subconscious won’t let me.’
It was not the first time I had heard her say so, nor would it be the last. Novelists do go on and on. I’d found myself ceasing even to listen – she rarely spotted it when I went onto automatic pilot – when a wisp of memory drifted into consciousness. I pushed my chair back from the table and went to find the right book.
‘Hey, am I boring you that much? Sorry! Where are you going?’
I returned with a biography of D.H. Lawrence and began to leaf through the index.
‘How do you spell “asinorum”?’
‘What?’
‘As in pons asinorum.’
‘How the fuck would I know? I presume pons is just p-o-n-s – ’
‘Never mind, I just found it! Listen to this! It’s something Lawrence said to Jessie Chambers after he published The White Peacock. “Publishers take no notice of a first novel. They know that nearly anybody can write a novel, if he can write at all, because it’s about himself. A second novel’s a step further. It’s the third that counts though. That’s the pons asinorum of the novelist. If he can get over that ass’s bridge, he’s a writer, he can go on.”’
‘What a pompous arsehole,’ said Suzy. ‘Put him away.’
‘Never mind that. What he’s doing is giving you permission to write your Oxford novel.’
‘Hooray! I have Lorenzo’s permission. Now I can get it off my chest, if novelists are allowed to have tits.’
New Oxford Blues was published three years later, and like its predecessor was written in haste and re-penned at leisure. If Texas University were one day to acquire Suzy’s archive, there would be boxes full of material relating to the book, from its initial incarnation – wri
tten in only eleven weeks – through the multiple drafts and stylistic revisions that made up the final product.
But even in its final iteration, New Oxford Blues betrayed – to some of its critics, but most of all to Suzy herself – the fact that her heart was not in it, that she had reverted to her old undergraduate facility, however much she strove to disguise it. She was meticulously, obsessionally observant, and would sit stand for hours in front of my college (‘St Anne’s has no soul compared to Merton,’ she would say ruefully) or in its gardens, observing the changing colours of the stone, the effects of rain and light on the gargoyles on the Chapel, the gradual growth of the mulberries. She had a dozen different ways to distinguish gradations of sunlight. When you read her prose, you had the illusion that you were seeing real things, because she had looked so carefully.
I found this acuity obsessional, though I did not say so, for ours was a marriage based on the necessity, and virtue, of withholding. Or perhaps I mean learning when to shut up? The business of living together was, in most respects, easily accommodated: the bathroom smells and morning breath, the different ways in which we went to sleep, woke up, breathed, snored, farted, all the organic stuff that drives many young couples into disarray. No worries. I had more money, and shared it, she more libido, freely dispensed.
But there was one area that took years, if not to resolve, then at least to accommodate. She was, by her first wry admission, a slut. She spread herself heedlessly across every available surface and floor, did not straighten up, clean up, even look up as she created a swathe of devastation in the flat. I found this intolerable, and said so repeatedly, and she was happy to reciprocate by labelling me as an obsessional control freak, and worse. The problem – which took years to resolve – was that we were both right, but incompatible.