by Louise Kean
My feelings for him are old, and forgotten. I am having sex with him simply because I can. We are not in love, and never will be. He is a sweet man, but he doesn’t know how to hold my hand or stroke my hair in a way that will move me. It is all mechanical, insertion and lubrication and squeezing and pulling. We make random impersonal sex noises, both of us lost in our own worlds, trying to please ourselves. We are not a couple, having sex. We are two individuals using each other to get off. I think this should be the last time we have sex, but I doubt it will be.
The first time, three weeks and four days ago, we met for a drink on a Thursday to catch up, and he had been astounded at how different I looked. Men often dish out ‘compliments’ lazily, and Adrian is no exception. His words were, ‘You look about two hundred per cent more attractive than the last time I saw you!’ I could have cried. Men don’t seem to realise that I have just lost weight, and not become a whole new person, and thus an insulting remark about my appearance last year is still an insulting remark about me, even if they are cushioning it with some current nicety. ‘You look good’ or, ‘You look great’ would have done nicely, but Adrian messed it up. I had to ignore it, if I was going to stay in my seat. Even the smallest reprimand for his choice of words would have made things uncomfortable. Plus Adrian isn’t the kind of man who thinks about things like that. He is ‘easy-going’. Intellectual effort is a fun time wasted.
He didn’t see the need to be subtle in his advances, because that would require thought. It didn’t occur to him to tread softly, or try to mask the fact that he now found me attractive, simply because my body shape had changed. My face was and is still the same, just thinner. My eyes are still my own. I haven’t had surgery. Yet. The words coming out of my mouth are exactly the same, the only difference being that Adrian seems to find them more interesting now, or is going to the effort of pretending to, at least. We had a few drinks and got a cab to go home, and he kissed me. Despite the two hours leading up to it, and how obvious it would have been to any onlooker, I was still surprised when he did it. He had rejected me, albeit unknowingly, for four years, but his kiss wasn’t hard to earn. I just had to be thin enough. This confused me. Now, instead of being ‘Sunny’ I was ‘Sunny who he would like to have sex with’. Nothing groundbreaking had been said during the evening, no pivotal conversation had. It’s a depressing thought. I had been good enough all along, just not thin enough. We had both exited at my house, and we had the first night of sex. At the time it didn’t feel as rushed as it sounds – I didn’t feel like a slut – I’d been waiting for four years, after all.
We had sex twice that night, but not in the morning. He had promised to call me when he left for work the next day, and sure enough he did … two weeks later, last Friday, drunk in a cab and en route to my house but he couldn’t remember the number.
Foolishly I reminded him.
This evening, Monday, thirty-five hours after the ‘incident’ – I’ve almost forgotten all about it – we at least arranged to meet when we were both sober. We went for a coffee, but that turned into wine, and we ended up back at mine, and now we are having sex again. I am afraid that we have become fuck buddies, but I don’t want to confront him because I have nothing to say. Adrian is a nice but average thirty-year-old bloke, with a big laugh and good hair and trendy trainers. He works in IT. I know what I am getting, I know that his favourite film is Rocky IV, I know he prefers Indian to Chinese, I know he reads his horoscope, and is mildly left wing.
Adrian is still somebody’s dream man, if such a thing exists, but I am starting to wonder whether he is still mine, now that I am learning to differentiate between liking somebody and being attracted to somebody. I realise that I have to feel something deeper: he can’t just be funny, or bright, or look right. There has to be something that makes him right for me, even though I admit that I don’t know what that something is. Maybe it will be something small. Maybe we will both like film quizzes, and sit late into the night on his battered old leather sofa making our way through two bottles of wine and a bar of dark chocolate, and quizzing each other, until we decide to go to bed … It could be that small, I think, but it will matter, of course.
Adrian rolls off me onto the bed. This time I made the necessary pleasurable noises without going to the effort of actually faking an orgasm in its entirety. I don’t have the energy or the inclination. He doesn’t seem bothered.
Adrian mumbles something into the pillow.
‘Sorry?’ I ask.
He raises himself up on to his elbows and looks at me seriously. ‘Who would have thought it, eh?’
‘Thought what?’ I stroke the hair out of his eyes.
‘You and me.’ He smiles at me, and kisses my forehead.
‘It’s not the strangest thing that’s ever happened.’
‘No, I know. Not now. It just shows …’
‘Shows what?’ I ask.
‘You know,’ he closes his eyes and hugs me, drifting into sleep, ‘what a difference a year can make.’
‘Well, people’s feelings change all the time,’ I say, nervously trying to stop him before he goes too far.
‘Hmmm?’ His eyes are still closed, and he presses his face into my neck. ‘You’ve done so well …’ And he falls asleep.
Three hours later I am still awake, while Adrian snores loudly on the other side of the bed. Yep, I’ve done so well.
THREE
The monkey nut miracle marvel man
Cagney B. James cracks a nut in his right hand. His father, Tudor B. James, is the only other person alive who knows what the ‘B’ stands for. His mother knew as well, but she died twenty years ago, so Cagney isn’t as worried about her letting it slip. The sign on his door neglects the ‘B’, and merely reads,
The Agency
C. James Proprietor
Tarnished silver lettering on heavy oak, and a window. It could be the door to a funeral parlour, or a gambling den, or any number of things, and that’s the point. The shell crumbles in his palm. Like a hooker giving a hand job, it’s a well-practised technique, just without the constant AIDS testing. Maybe the odd splinter, but hell, that won’t shut down his immune system. He kicks the pieces towards the bin.
Leaning back in his chair, Cagney places both feet up on the desk in front of him, and listens to the noises outside his window, with eyes closed. The bottle bank swallows ten green Merlots, fed by a ruddy old major in wellingtons and a tweed jacket with elbow patches as red as the veins in his cheeks. You can’t sleep in Kew for the sound of recycling. ‘Luxury’ family saloons purr up, and uniform beige court shoes and black city loafers dive out of passenger seats and hit the ground running, as a tube lazes graciously into the station.
The butchers fire up the rotisserie chicken at 9 o’clock every morning, and the smell drifts through Cagney’s window with the warm air, mixed with the plastic croissant and coffee smells seeping out of Starbucks. Just the thought of hot food before midday makes him retch. He forces himself to stomach it for five seconds, before spinning round and slamming the window shut with a force that makes the flower seller across the road drop his bucket of tulips and exclaim, ‘Prick!’
Cagney hears it.
The flower seller used to be big-boned, voluptuous, heavy on the eye: a fat, fat man. He was reassuringly huge, pleasantly swollen, with a stomach that children could bounce on, and flesh concertinas where his neck should have been. Cagney hasn’t spoken to him in the ten years he’s sold his flowers opposite the office. The flower seller had obviously stopped eating sometime last year, and Cagney noted the slow but steady loosening of his shirt buttons, and his neck suddenly appeared one day, unexpectedly, like a highland fling from an old set of bagpipes that you thought were broken. It was then that he lost Cagney’s respect, and just when Cagney had been working up to saying ‘good morning’. If he liked his food – and he obviously had liked Ethiopia’s share of food and never mind about the famine – why deny it? He had been sturdy before, big and fat and happ
y – and that made him worth something, in the Cagney James pamphlet on life. A kindred spirit that almost got a hello. The fat flower seller of Kew, as much a part of the village as the gardens themselves, and the ever-increasing quota of camera jockeys from April to October. American tourists felt they knew him on sight, from the slide shows back home entitled ‘Our Trip to Europe’. Now the man’s friends have trouble recognising him from three feet. Cagney is pretty sure it has hurt his pocket as well. Japs don’t feel the need to stop and chat to him, his new slimmer frame and loose skin so much less charming, or snapshot friendly. He is threatening now; he looks so average that you have to wonder what nastiness is on his mind instead of sausage and chips. It suggests to Cagney that although the body may now be ‘healthy’, he has lost another friend to the new century. Yes, he was a friend. If Cagney had ever actually needed to buy flowers, that’s where he would have got them, but not now. And all for what? For a woman, probably.
‘Poor bastard.’ He swears loudly, alone in his office.
Cagney indulges his demons. He gives them their head, and lets them breathe. He smokes Marlboro Reds, but without passion. They are a habit, not a crutch. He drinks whiskey, mostly Jack Daniel’s, but he doesn’t mind which brand if it’s on sale. Straight, no ice. There is no desire he feels the need to suppress. He doesn’t feel lust any more, trickling its fingers down his spine.
He’s not hurting anybody but himself. And that used to be allowed.
He read in the paper that you shouldn’t skip breakfast, and loath as he is to ignore the sound advice of a ‘celebrity doctor’, he now takes a shot of whiskey each morning, sharp and decent, harsh but so honest it borders on the poetic. What great advice it had been.
Of course, he’d absolutely love a muesli bar instead, or a carrot juice, or a live yoghurt, or a vitamin garlic essential fucking fatty acid pill, or better still a month in a glorified country prison with nothing but rice cakes and fizzy water on the menu, or another lecture from another expert who knows better.
He just hasn’t found the time.
As much as he really wants to pay some overpriced, long-haired, four-eyed Freudian Jungian Cantian freak to tell him he really wanted to screw his mother and kill his father at the age of two but if he looked away they wouldn’t actually exist, his income just won’t stretch to that and the whiskey, and what a goddamn tragedy it is. Everybody’s life had become everybody’s business, and what a loss to society that Cagney refuses to play along.
Want Nothing – that is the title of Cagney’s Pamphlet on Life. Subtitle: Live with your lot.
There are so many headlines, every day so many new headlines that litter what used to be ‘news’ papers, saying exactly what they said yesterday: some new way of preaching ‘open up’. Somebody has redefined ‘emotionally healthy’ for the nation, but Cagney’s in-built dictionary doesn’t agree.
A man, a MAN, should have basic needs that can be paid for with a twenty. Only then will they always be met. A MAN should never let his weaknesses wear him, or expose himself to the ridiculous banality of ‘self-improvement’. A MAN is a MAN at birth, and that should be good enough. Most importantly, a MAN should know when to shut up.
Cagney’s only weakness is monkey nuts. He likes the routine, the crack between his fingers, the bits that fall away. Everywhere he goes he leaves a trail of shells. It drives people crazy, and although he thinks about giving them up, that’s as good a reason not to as any.
He searches the internet occasionally for the nutritional value of the monkey nut, hasn’t found it yet thank God, but is afraid he might stop ageing at forty, live to one hundred, and become the Monkey Nut Miracle Marvel Man.
The sound of footsteps on the solitary flight of stairs that lead to his office signal the arrival of somebody with size twelve feet. Hopefully his secretary will stop them coming into his office. He’ll have to hire a secretary first, of course.
‘For fuck’s sake …’ he swears, under his breath this time. He just can’t find a man to take on the job, and a woman would end up crying if he didn’t bring her muffins on a Friday, or throw a party every time she had her roots done.
The door swings open and a human Labrador bursts in.
‘Boss!’
Cagney stares blankly at the smile that greets him, and says nothing. The new arrival continues to smile. He is wearing communist khakis and a polo shirt, a jumper is tied around his shoulders in a Fabulous Five idiotic let’s-grab-a-dog-and-a-picnic-and-find-ourselves-a-dead-body way, and he stands, arms outstretched in greeting, as if years have passed since last they met. His name is Howard. They spend far too much time together for Cagney’s liking.
‘You call, I come running!’
‘You’d think I’d learn not to call.’
‘I got your nuts!’ Howard winks, and slings a bag on the desk.
‘Does that explain your erection?’ Cagney brushes the bag straight into his desk drawer, as Howard looks down at his crotch to double-check Cagney is joking. Satisfied that he is not actually sporting wood, he grins and props himself, full of beans and life and marrow, on the edge of Cagney’s desk.
‘Did I ask for a lap dance?’
‘Invading your space, boss, duly noted.’ But Howard doesn’t move.
‘I won’t pay you for it, even if you strip. Especially if you strip.’
‘If you’d get another buggering chair in here, Cag, I wouldn’t have to sit on the desk! Nope, that came out wrong – I don’t want a buggering chair, just a chair would be great – preferably one without straps to hold me down or a hole in the back for anal penetration.’
Howard slaps the desk and laughs loudly, but stands up as Cagney winces at the air of stupidity that fills the room like cheap heavy aftershave so much it gives him a headache. He almost manages to ignore his name’s abbreviation.
‘So, what’s up, Mo’ Fo’?’ Howard crosses his arms, hugging himself, and leans back slightly, chin in the air.
‘Howard, you’re from Fulham. It’s not the hood.’
‘I’m still trying it out, seeing how it hangs on me … my nizza.’
‘Will you be singing “Mammy” later?’ Cagney mumbles, but Howard doesn’t hear, as he raps quietly to himself. Cagney catches the odd ‘fuck’, the odd ‘whore’, and something about being ‘straight out of Compton’. Cagney thinks hard to remember how old Howard is, and when he realises it is twenty-four, he closes his eyes. Was he this foolish fifteen years ago, this blind, stupid, idiotic and pointless? This impressionable, dull, random, inane? This vulnerable? Cagney can’t remember a time when he felt differently from the way he feels now, and although he is the last person to claim his life has any kind of point, he has surely never been as disposable as Howard. He remembers the days of polite conversation, of small talk, of respect and integrity. He has never tried to ‘rap’. Making swear words rhyme has apparently become an art form. He racks his brain, searching for something, anything pure. He finds the Indian Ocean lapping at a secluded beach, and he clutches on … the swell of rage subsides. Cagney opens his eyes half a minute later: a grinning Howard stares back at him.
‘Finding your happy place again, boss?’ Howard winks for the second time in five minutes.
‘Fetching as it is, Howard, I think you might like to know that you have a brush sticking out of the back of your head.’
‘I couldn’t get a comb to stay.’
Cagney stares at him, incredulous. He actually pays this boy, pays him to live, to eat, to house himself. He employs him when what he should really do is have him put down. But work is work, and Cagney can’t do the younger ones himself; he is old enough to be their father. He glances at his calendar, a subconscious habit that has crept up on him over the last year. September 28 – three months to go. To death or freedom, he doesn’t care which. To forty. Countdown officially commenced nine months ago, but he’s had one eye on that calendar for ten years.
Cagney visualises the half-empty bottle of Jack in his drawer, and the beake
r he stole from a hotel in Brighton ten years ago that has never known water. He controls the urge to lunge for it.
What he knows is this: in the thirties, in the forties, a guy like him was permitted his idiosyncrasies, with no pressure to air dirty laundry or bandage over neurosis, or cure it somehow. The world deserved – no, it needed – its share of alcoholics and depressives, not that Cagney sees himself as either. But if he were a member of one of these underground clubs, he wouldn’t feel ashamed. He lives in a dirty world, full of vicious tricks, and at some point you accept it. He doesn’t greet the mornings with a smile any more. And so what? He’s no daddy to a doting toddler, no strong husband to a soft sweet-smelling feminine bundle. He’s nobody’s hero.
Howard fidgets, and Cagney looks up to see him adjusting the brush that sticks out precariously from his short bushy blond hair, admiring himself and using Cagney’s frame as a mirror. It is one of the only things that sits permanently on his desk, propped against an old coffee cup that has stuck itself spitefully to the wood. A roughly framed quote from a newspaper he’d read on a train nearly ten years ago, as the clock struck midnight, and he had turned thirty: ‘Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.’
‘Put that down, and lose the brush, Basil.’
‘It’s Howard. Oh, Basil, Basil Brush! Boom boom! You’re unusually sunny today, boss, and I think I know why! Stop me if I’m wrong, but could it have something to do with a new hero in town? Eh?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, how have you heard about that already?’
‘The waitress I shagged in Starbucks told me.’
‘Is she a waitress in Starbucks, or did you shag her in Starbucks?’
‘Both. Anyway, boss! I knew you had it in you! I wish I’d been with you, we could have caught him quicker. Now tell me everything that happened. Julie … Jenny said you went running off after this guy, and –’