It’s not just The Hair that stops me being enthusiastic about undressing in front of someone else or having sex. The thought of sleeping with someone new conjures up a whole gallery of unappetising pictures: harsh morning light showing my cellulite; the retainers I wear every night (I spent a fortune on having my teeth straightened, I’m not going to let them drift back to their previous snaggled state). At least I don’t snore or cough in the mornings (only because I use an inhaler). An older person coughing isn’t the same as a young person coughing. In an older person it sounds like impending death. If you don’t want the older-coughing-person to die, it’s even more irritating. I hated it when Mum coughed deeply. It frightened me and made me irritable with her, even though she was healthy most of the time. All she did to keep fit was cut a page out of an old Woman’s Own magazine illustrated with Canadian Air Force exercises, paste it onto the back of a cornflakes packet and prop it on top of the fridge. She touched her toes and windmilled her arms around in the kitchen occasionally, and in her eighties she joined a local indoor bowls club – she said the women who were still on HRT looked twenty years younger than everyone else. No spinning bicycles, Zumba, yoga, jogging, cross-training or weights for her. She also smoked roll-ups and ate hardly any vegetables, didn’t eat sugar and never used soap on her face. She was smooth-skinned and slim and lived to ninety-five with all her marbles intact.
When I was at art school I used to go to keep-fit classes at the local church hall on Tuesday evenings. After the Slits, I went to a beginner’s ballet class. That’s all there was back then. Girls didn’t jog past you in the street wearing track pants and trainers, not until the mid-1980s. Apart from the fact that it just wasn’t done, women didn’t exercise in public then, you couldn’t walk past a group of builders without being verbally assaulted. Women weren’t allowed to run marathons until 1967. It was thought to be physically impossible for a woman to run that far. Bobbi Gibb and Kathrine Switzer were the first women I heard of who ran long distances. I was thirteen by then. I never saw a woman play sports, miss a goal, fall over, fail, get dirty, look stupid, then jump up and get on with the game when I was young, not on television or anywhere else once I’d left school and stopped doing PE. Girls’ and women’s role in sport was to watch the men or make the sandwiches. The occasional sportswoman who did make it onto TV (during the Olympics) was derided for looking ‘like a man’. There was no British culture or industry to support women being physically fit when I started attending aerobics classes in the early eighties. I couldn’t believe the sense of power and release that I and the other women in the classes experienced from strengthening our bodies. Before long I was teaching aerobics myself. Exercise teaching for women was unregulated in the 1980s, it was so new. Everyone laughs when they hear that – Haha, a punk teaching aerobics – but it was liberating, getting sweaty and red in the face, building muscles and feeling them working when I walked home at night. Maybe now I had a chance if I was attacked. Maybe now I was strong enough to fight back. I felt empowered. Building muscle and getting fit felt like a radical act.
* Peter Blegvad, ‘Daughter’, sung by Loudon Wainwright III on Strange Weirdos, 2007
16 The cab belted along, jumping red lights, careering round corners, and for a couple of seconds I felt as if I wasn’t in it. I was up in the sky looking down at the wet road, the tops of glistening umbrellas and the streetlights streaking across the shiny black taxi roof. Then I was back, holding Vida’s hand and watching her face. Her pupils were deep pools of black liquid pouring over me. Here we were, the two of us facing death together, again. Fifteen years old and she’s always with me when I go through these things. These adult things. Never taken aside and looked after. Never shielded from the shock or the pain. Single mother, single child, that’s how it is. I want to protect her more than anything in the world, but life crashes on around us and all I can do is hold her until it’s passed.
Sex
Before I was married I wanted to kiss every boy or man I thought was attractive (part of the conquering thing). Sometimes the kissing turned into sex because I didn’t know how to stop it, or I felt I’d led them on, or because we ran out of conversation. I didn’t think feeling pressurised into sex was a big deal in my teens and twenties. I wasn’t informed about consent, and the general opinion in those days was that if you’d aroused a man, even accidentally – or he told you that you’d aroused him, or you were badgered for long enough – it was your fault and you owed it to him to give in.
Recently I asked a sixty-year-old schoolfriend who was thinking of leaving her marriage of twenty-five years, ‘Will you mind if you don’t meet someone else and never have sex again?’ She closed her eyes and winced as if she were remembering something bad. ‘I’ve had enough sex to last me the rest of my life,’ she said. I knew what she meant. Starting at fifteen, we had both been having sex with men for forty-five years. Society can’t sell it to us in any shape or form any more.
After my marriage was over I had a fling with an odd man the same age as me, which for some reason made me think it was fine not to use any protection. He’s so weird he can’t have slept with anyone for years. I’m sure it’ll be fine, I thought. Stupid to risk it. I got myself tested for everything at a clinic afterwards. On my way out I asked a doctor if it was OK to have a cock in your mouth after it’s been up your backside – asking for a friend. He gulped and said, ‘Yes, it’s fine.’ This friend had done it with no obvious ill effects, but still I can’t believe it’s fine to have a poo-flecked cock in your mouth. Perhaps the doctor said it was OK because he was startled by such a direct question from a middle-aged woman, or my friend wasn’t unwell because she had a very clean arse, or maybe he wasn’t a doctor at all, maybe he was a porter or some random guy in the corridor. I don’t know, I wasn’t wearing my glasses.
I had to retrain my eyes and brain to find older men attractive when I started dating again in my fifties. The last time I was single the men I was looking at were in their thirties and I still had that youthful image fixed in my head. It was depressing at first, choosing from a pool that’s not regarded as desirable or vital in your society. I was paddling around in that same pool myself. I’d walk down Oxford Street looking at bald men and men with grey hair and paunches and say to myself, He’s about my age, that’s the demographic I should be looking at. I realised I had a very small group to choose from: men over fifty who’d kept themselves vaguely together physically, were single, mentally stable, solvent and not gay were rare creatures. I managed to re-educate myself eventually. Now I’m only attracted to people my age. A young face looks like a blank page to me.
Most middle-aged men want a younger woman as a partner. (In my teens I was upset that I was too young to even dream of going out with any of the boys in my favourite bands, like the Stones or the Beatles. Now they’re all with women who weren’t even born when I had that thought.) Men could train their eyes to appreciate the beauty in older faces and bodies like I did – it would help if we saw more older women in the media, your sense of beauty adjusts with constant exposure – but I don’t think men are willing to put in that kind of effort. You have to make a conscious choice, like deciding to eat healthily or give up alcohol, and stick with it.
I could have dated younger men during the last five years, but lovely as some of them were, I didn’t want to keep wincing inwardly whenever I referred to something that called attention to my age. Or not be able to share the difficulties of growing older, or have to keep explaining references. I’d like to be with someone kind who can hold a conversation and is in my age group. If that’s too much to ask, I’ll do without.
A large part of wanting someone to love and look after you is to do with the instinct for survival. I’m sure every person over fifty has thought about getting ill, becoming incapacitated and dying alone. I’ve weighed up men with that thought in the back of my mind. If a guy coughs his lungs up every time he laughs, I can’t help but think, I ain’t going to be stuck looking after th
is one, wheeling him about and clearing up his poo whilst he grumbles at me until one of us dies. Caring for someone you’ve been with for thirty years is understandable, but when it comes to someone you’ve only known for one, it’s not an appealing prospect. When you’re young, death and a long, serene old age together is a romantic haze on the horizon. When you’re older, it’s right up in your grill. Getting on and off buses slowly, borrowing each other’s glasses to read the small print, hospital visits, indigestion, insomnia, hearing loss, whistling noses (sounds quite sweet actually), irascibility and impatience is the reality of a twilight romance.
Worse than being stuck with someone ill or being alone forever is the thought that I’ll grow to love a person very much and won’t have them for very long. Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.
17 I asked the cabbie if I could pay in advance. ‘Just give us twenty, love,’ he said. I felt a surge of gratitude but it didn’t occur to me to thank him. Vida and I lunged out of the cab onto the driveway and ran across the gravel clutching our belongings. The glass doors were open and a nurse was stationed on either side of the entrance. They had understood my request and taken it seriously. Gravel turned to carpet underfoot and we were in the entrance hall, passing the signing-in book, a bowl of plastic flowers, a portrait of the Queen. I pushed open the Georgian-wired inner doors and we rounded the corner – like a scene in a Scorsese gangster film, all shot in one take – raced up the mottled brown linoleum stairs with black rubber non-slip edgings and onto Mum’s floor. As I ran I chanted to myself, Please hang on, please hang on.
Dead Flower Water
My second attempt at dating after Pig (but before Eryk) was with a wiry, vulpine-faced man I met at an open-mic session in Hastings. I’ll call him Fox. I went along to the pub to play a couple of songs and saw him leaping around the room, drumming on the optics, the top of the bar and the brass foot rail. He smacked a bloke on his arse, scraped a chair on the floor, clapped his hands and it all added up to an exciting rhythm. Fox was the compère for the evening and just before I went on stage he whispered in my ear, ‘You’d better be good.’ I wasn’t worried. I strapped on my guitar, started up with the intro to ‘Confessions of a MILF’ and thrashed my way through to the end of the song as if nobody was in the room.
Fox had a tense energy about him. Some people, whatever their age, look like they’ve given up. Their body language is soft, crumpled; that’s not my kind of energy, not that I like the nervous foot-twitchers either. A certain tautness and alertness, even in your eighties and nineties, is good. My mother had that kind of energy.
I met a new crowd at the Hastings pub, very different to the parents at my daughter’s school. My best friends there were two trans women: a tall, elegant, harmonica-playing blonde and a sharp-witted guitarist with a chic Louise Brooks bob. Sometimes we played together as a trio. It was a wonderful, liberating new world, a lot like my old world of the 1970s. One night a group of us danced until three in the morning to 1960s soul, the scent of sadness clinging to us like the whiff of dirty water from a vase of dead flowers. As I danced, I pictured my husband and young daughter tucked up in their beds. I knew how wrong I looked, jerking my body around with strangers in an attic room on the edge of a blowy seaside town.
Crap Date
Six months after our first meeting, I asked Fox if I could go back to his flat with him after we’d all played our songs at the open mic. He’d been flirting with me for months but had never taken it any further and asked me out. The old-timers in the pub glanced at me with dubious expressions as we left together. Fox lived in a large square room in a Regency house by the sea. We sat side by side on his mattress, no bed, while he smoked weed and played the bongos. Then he invited his father, who owned the house and lived downstairs, to come up and drink beer with us. After an hour I signalled to Fox with my eyes that it was time for Dad to go. After Dad left, Fox opened a cardboard box, placed it on his lap and spent an hour showing me photographs of his childhood. I got the feeling he was putting off a physical encounter. When we were at the pub and there were lots of people around us he couldn’t keep his hands off me, always touching me and trying to push my face into his sweaty armpit, growling and making sexual comments, full-on stuff like that. Now we were alone the tension in his body, all that wild-man flirtiness and pent-up sexuality, had evaporated. He was a completely different person without an audience. This was disconcerting, but not as disconcerting as when he hugged me and exclaimed, ‘Oh! You’re soft. Like a woman.’ (Here we go. I’d forgotten about this part of dating, the part where a man makes thoughtless comments about your body which you never forget. It started at thirteen and has never stopped: classic English pear shape, big hips, flat chest; huge jugs; little tits; high arse; low arse; big arse; did you know the end of your nose dips when you smile; you’ve got a moustache; you’re quite plump down there, I thought you’d be more bony; you’ve got a double chin; hairy legs; long toes; thin mouth; a back like a boy; a grey hair; when you smile you look like Jack Nicholson as the Joker (this classic from Pig). They won’t remember saying those things, and even if they did the comeback would be ‘I was only joking.’ If I had a quid for every time a man said that to me …)
I have no idea what Fox meant when he said I felt ‘like a woman’. He could have been bi and my body felt different to a man’s, or maybe he usually only went with very young girls, but most likely he was trying to undermine me in some way.
After a couple of hours I commented on his changed persona. ‘What? You want me to take you to bits? Is that it?’ he said, as if I was a nymphomaniac or something. Well, yes. That’s what your behaviour has been promising. That’s what everyone back at the pub thinks you’re like. That’s what you’ve projected for the last three months.
He kissed me a few times, touched me here and there in a lacklustre way, couldn’t get an erection, then fell asleep and snored. Lying next to him on the bare mattress under a moth-holed, rancid-smelling old coat, I thought back to how he’d hyped me up, hiding his impotence behind bluster and showmanship. He was forty-five, drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of spliff, but it hadn’t occurred to me that this would affect him physically. The last time I dated men who drank and took drugs they were young enough for it not to affect their virility. Not one man I’ve dated since my divorce who’s had erectile dysfunction (ED) – and there have been quite a few, it happens when men get older, especially if they drink a lot – has admitted they have a problem, no matter how carefully I’ve approached the subject. Even when I confess my own shortfalls – insecure about my body, damage from chemotherapy, no good in bed, The Hair – they say nothing. Every time this happens I end up questioning my sanity and attractiveness, my confidence spirals downwards and I find myself pondering buying new underwear. I was such a confident woman when I first spoke to them.
These guys would prefer you went out and hanged yourself on the nearest lamp post than admit to having ED. They intend to carry it with them to their graves. They’d rather not have a girlfriend for the rest of their lives, let you be emotionally scarred and insecure, kill yourself even, but whatever happens, they ain’t tellin’. And they think you haven’t noticed, that they’ve got away with the deception, like children who think you can’t see them when they put their hands over their eyes. The tragic thing about all this is that if men spoke about their shortcomings, they’d discover that loads of women don’t mind. I don’t mind if I have sex or not, or how proficient a person is in bed. Other things are more important to me than sex, like having a laugh together, affection, shared interests and kindness.
Anyway, there I was, wide awake, lying next to a stoned, snoring man, new to all this dating malarkey, feeling stupid, guilty, disappointed and ugly – time to leave. I slid out from under Fox’s arm, put my boots on and let myself out.
Driving home along the deserted coast, light-grey sky, dark grey sea, I locked my elbows to keep the wind from buffeting the car onto the wrong side of the
road.
18 We pelted down the corridor. A nurse looked up from her station and I had to stifle my automatic response to smile. I glanced into the rooms as we ran. There was the woman with the budgies, and the man with a nice wife who popped into Mum’s room once and gave her an ice lolly. At the end of the corridor I saw a cluster of nurses in white coats and ambulance staff in green overalls. I tried to gauge from their faces if Mum was dead or not, but I couldn’t tell. Then we were inside her room. Nurse Mia was in the corner and Pascale was sitting on the mattress next to Mum’s head. Vida and I rushed towards the bed with so much force that we almost fell over each other like Laurel and Hardy. I was aware of how frivolous we looked, arriving all red-faced and overdressed. I wanted to explain, We’re not the sort of people who go to parties and get emergency phone calls that someone’s dying and turn up at the deathbed all breathless and in our finery like characters in The Great Gatsby or a Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant film. Please don’t think we’re those kinds of people.
Drive
I was sitting on a chair in the phone shop waiting to be served when I heard a man talking to a sales assistant, and something about his voice made me look up. Motorbike boots, jeans, leather jacket, holding a crash helmet, slightly greying hair tucked behind his ears. Not bad, I thought, and looked back down at my pamphlet. ‘Viv!’ he shouted across the shop floor. ‘I was just thinking, that’s a beautiful woman! And it’s you.’ (Because I’d driven I was dressed in an old jumper and jeans, no make-up, hair all over the place.) Richard-from-the-past, he turned out to be. Dangerous, these creatures. The fact that you have a shared history makes them seem trustworthy, but shared history doesn’t necessarily equate with ‘good person’. I often forget this when I haven’t seen someone for years. Richard pursued me when I worked with him about twenty years ago – I can’t believe there’s such a thing as twenty years ago – but I rebuffed him because he was married and had two young children. He was extremely handsome back then, with longish light-brown hair and bright blue eyes. After we talked in the phone shop, Richard asked if he could take me out and gave me his number. I couldn’t believe it, asked on a date by a guy I met in the phone shop – who needs dating apps? I took a while to contact him and he came straight back with where and when. Very good, no games.
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