The Perfect 10

by Louise Kean

  Cagney smiles, in spite of himself. Christian knows him well. ‘The chat used to be the thing, you know. And I used to get them with a look. I shall speak whole silent volumes with one raised eyebrow …’

  ‘What are you throwing at me now?’ Christian smiles back.

  ‘Ovid.’

  ‘Well, at least there’s still something erotic in you, Cagney, even if it is just poetry. But it’s a different ball game now. Love calls for guts … and … initiative. You can’t keep yourself back, hidden away.’

  ‘Well, that poses a problem for me, Christian, because I can’t think of anything worse than jumping into somebody’s character like a goddamn plunge pool. It’s fucking uncivilised.’

  ‘It’s liberating!’ Christian throws his hands in the air, and upsets an overgrown hibiscus, causing a small sweet lavender storm around them.

  ‘It’s repellent.’ Cagney swipes at a wasp.

  They stop walking outside an expensive yet noticeably shabby three-storey house behind Kew Green. Just from the paint that peels lazily at the window frames, and the crooked number on the door, Cagney knows that the man of the house is a thinker and not a doer. Any previous attempts at DIY have left him with bloodied fingers and a bruised ego, so much so that he gave up years ago. And yet they never quite get round to getting somebody in, to fix all the things that need fixing, in an oversized family home. It is in middle-class disarray. Cagney knows it well. Half the houses on these streets are the same, bursting with money and intellect, but not enough common sense among them to change a tyre.

  Neither Cagney nor Christian makes an effort to push a crooked gate, to walk up a garden path littered with flowering weeds between its expensive paving.

  ‘You’d rather fuck them than talk to them, Cagney, and these days you don’t get one without the other, in your world at least.’

  ‘I don’t expect to …’ Cagney lowers his voice, which has risen to an angry level. ‘That is absolute rubbish. I waited a year for Lydia.’

  ‘So you told me – and all that time wasted. Stop talking, Cagney. We have to go in.’

  But now he has found his voice Cagney can’t keep quiet. And he really doesn’t want to go in.

  ‘It wasn’t wasted! My mum and dad stayed together for fifty years, precisely because they kept themselves back. They danced around each other with words and smiles and learnt a little something every year. But I bet you a thousand pounds that the day my mother died my father couldn’t have told you what her star sign was, and rightly so! It’s all a load of rubbish.’

  ‘Cagney, I know you’ve put yourself out there before, and got trampled on, but we both know that they weren’t the right ones for you. We have to go in.’

  Christian pushes the gate open, but Cagney grabs his arm.

  ‘Trampled on? That’s putting it bloody mildly.’

  ‘Fine, you got hurt. Look, there are kids staring at the window, Cagney. We have to go in …’

  Christian gestures with his head towards a large sash window, where two little faces have popped up beneath layers of muslin and are watching two strange tall men at the end of their garden having an argument.

  ‘Fuck the kids! I have been divorced three times! Three different women, completely different women with nothing in common other than me, chose to leave me within one year of marriage! Alice walked after three weeks, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Which is unfortunate …’ Christian turns towards the children with a fixed grin and mouths, ‘We’re just coming,’ and then pokes out his tongue.

  ‘Unfortunate? It’s madness! No, going back for more would be real madness.’

  ‘No, Cagney. Madness is only caring about yourself.’

  ‘I’m not a fool, Christian,’ Cagney says through gritted teeth.

  ‘No, but let’s face facts, Cagney. You always go for the same type. Gracie, Lydia, Alice – they were all the same woman, I’ve seen the pictures. They all used the same hair colourant for Christ’s sake: arctic blonde! If you would just pick somebody nice, and lovely, and available, who isn’t just using you, and who won’t bore you or leave you after five minutes, who has a bit of substance, rather than some bloody ice queen! A bit of personality! Now take Sunny Weston –’

  ‘Enough about that bloody girl! I don’t go for shrews – can you blame me? I like them blonde, and I like them beautiful – again, can you blame me?’

  ‘And you kid yourself that there’s something beneath those looks and icy stares. You kid yourself they are Grace Kelly, but when you realise there’s nothing there it’s too late, and then you get bored, and you hate yourself for having picked them just because they are beautiful, and then you stop talking … and then they leave!’

  ‘Exactly – they left me! They all walked away! I am off the market now. I am stable. I may be alone, but that is my choice, and I like it that way.’

  Christian sighs, and walks towards the house. Cagney follows. They stand side by side in front of the door. Neither makes an effort to bang the large brass knocker.

  ‘I will not be made a fool of again,’ Cagney whispers.

  ‘Are you talking to me, or trying to convince yourself?’

  ‘I won’t put myself through that again, Christian.’

  ‘Then you’ll never fall in love again. And to know that, with certainty, is a glimpse into hell,’ Christian states matter-of-factly.

  ‘Well then, Satan, here I come, because I’ve had that impulse ripped out of me, thank Christ.’

  Christian grabs the knocker and bangs it twice. It sounds, to Cagney, like a whole heap of trouble.

  Somebody shouts, ‘Just coming!’ from behind the door, and the two little heads disappear from beneath the curtains.

  Christian and Cagney stare at their shoes, waiting. They hear the sound of feet running quickly down wooden stairs.

  Christian turns to Cagney. ‘Be nice,’ he says, and smiles.

  Cagney takes a deep breath. ‘I’ll try to try.’

  I have spent so long living through my imagination, creating the romances that elude me in my head, that I sometimes find it hard to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t. It is difficult to know if I am actually feeling something, or whether I am still just wishing it, dreaming it true. I have longed for an intimacy that allowed somebody to dent my emotional armour. I have pictured lovers leaving me early in the morning to go abroad with work and never come back. I tried my hardest to cry, when there was no one to cry for. I rented Dirty Dancing, and An Officer and a Gentleman, and Pretty Woman, over and over again from the video shop. I watched the shy girl, and the poor angry girl, and the slut, all fall in love, because love comes and finds you and carries you away. Nobody puts Baby in the corner, Go Paula Go, and Cinder-fuckin-rella. I was Baby, and Paula, and Vivian, just bigger. I was waiting for my prince to come and get me. I was waiting for my fairy tale to finish, the way that they do, the way that they should. Because if my life wasn’t a fairy tale, and there was no prince to wait for, what had I been doing for all of that time, except dreaming?

  I should have stopped my life, my fairy tale, when I opened the door to Adrian at two minutes to six. He smiled, my heart raced, my make-up was flawless, and we kissed. If the world had only held its breath at that moment, and forgotten to exhale, it would have been a happy ending.

  I look at the clock. It is five past six. So it has taken him seven minutes to tell me. Three weeks, and seven minutes.

  ‘Say it again?’ I ask him, confused.

  ‘I’m still engaged.’ Adrian nods his head, so I know it’s the truth.

  ‘I don’t understand. How can you be? We’ve been seeing each other for three weeks …’

  ‘Well, we’ve only really seen each other a few times … I mean, we’ve spoken more than that, but that’s mobile phones …’

  ‘And what do you mean, “still”? You weren’t engaged when I saw you last year, when I last saw you …’

  ‘I know. I met up with Jane about six weeks after you le
ft, I think … and we just kind of re-clicked.’

  ‘Jane? The PE teacher?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Adrian’s head is bobbing again, like a plastic nodding dog in the back of a car being driven too slowly by an old man in thick brown plastic glasses, who sits too close to the steering wheel. But that car will eventually turn right or left, and with it the nodding will stop, and it won’t be annoying any more. And if not you can ram into the back of the old man’s car, hurtling him through the windscreen, shredding him to a gory glassy death, just so that you can see the rear window cave in and rip the dog’s head off …

  ‘Don’t you want to see me any more, Adrian? Is this a lie?’

  ‘Yeah, of course I’m lying.’ His tone is bitter but his sarcasm, at this moment, makes me feel so sick I want to scream.

  ‘I thought that she wasn’t right for you …’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know! I’m confused …’ Adrian drops his head, and I think he wants me to feel sorry for him.

  He is sitting at the table in my kitchen, playing with the grapes in my fruit bowl, picking them up and letting them fall through his fingers. I don’t want him to touch them any more, so I slap his hand away, and he looks up at me with the expression of a baby, smacked for the first time, not quite understanding what he has done, but knowing that it hurts.

  ‘Is this just an excuse not to come tonight?’ I ask quietly, as I sit down opposite him at the table. A lot of men have shot me through with a lot of excuses in the past. I am ready for them. Daniel, at my final year primary school disco, who said he had to go to the toilet when I plucked up the courage to ask him to dance, then saw him slow dancing with Michelle two minutes later. Or Adam, the boy that I worked with in Boots on a Saturday while I was in college, who I laughed with in the car when he picked me up in the morning. Adam, who told me that his girlfriend wouldn’t be very happy if we went out for a drink after work when I suggested it, red-faced and stuttering one evening after two years of working together. He wasn’t seeing her when he asked out Sarah Jane in Film Processing a week later. Or Stuart, my philosophy study partner for February in my second year at university, who said he never got involved with study partners, when we sat together in his dorm room preparing a presentation on Socrates one night at 2 a.m. I heard later that he’d slept with March and April and May. They were too embarrassed to say no to me, because I was fat, so they masked it in ‘but we are friends’ or ‘I’m already seeing somebody’ or even ‘I’m going to the toilet’ when I knew they weren’t. And the fact that they lied hurts more than the truth would have, because at the time I took it as a rejection of all of me – my mind, my eyes, my laugh, my manner. Not just my size. I wish they had just said, if they thought it, ‘I don’t find you physically attractive, sorry.’ There is no real difference between thinking it and articulating it. It won’t feel any less shallow, saying it out loud.

  Adrian looks up at me through his long dark shaggy fringe. He is wearing a good grey shirt and dark trousers. He has made an effort for tonight.

  ‘It’s not an excuse. I proposed seven months ago. I really am engaged.’

  ‘Then why are you here? Why did you sleep with me?’ My voice is barely audible, a whisper.

  ‘Because I’m not happy. I’m confused … I don’t know if Jane is necessarily the right one for me …’

  ‘Don’t you think it might have been fairer, on both of us, on all of us, if you had made a decision about that before getting into bed with me?’

  ‘I know, I know!’ Adrian throws his hands in the air and they land heavily on the kitchen table, jolting the tall pepper grinder in the corner, and I reach out and catch it before it falls.

  I know that what I am feeling now must be real because, even though I desperately don’t want to, I start to cry.

  Adrian looks up and reaches across the table for my hand, but then changes his mind at the last minute, and instead holds out his fingers to me.

  ‘Take my hand,’ he says.

  I don’t move.

  ‘Sunny,’ he says, with some force.

  ‘What?’ I demand, and glare at him.

  ‘Take my hand. Tell me that you feel the way I do.’

  ‘I don’t have a clue how you feel,’ I say.

  He squeezes my hand again, as he says, ‘I am just really, really, confused,’ like it’s a revelation, and light should be shining from behind his head, and an invisible force should take him and lift him up on high, so he can float above me like the martyr to his feelings that he thinks he is.

  He smiles at me, and his eyes sparkle from beneath his fringe. He winks. I slap him, with the palm of my hand, across his right cheek. I slap him with such force that my fingers sting as they whip through and leave imprints in his face. He jumps up, alarmed. His chair falls backwards on to the floor with a bang. I feel strange, my hand feels strange as I shake it. I don’t know why I hit him. I could have stopped myself; it certainly wasn’t an overwhelming impulse. I knew exactly what I was doing; I wasn’t momentarily out of my mind. I just did it because I thought that I could. In this situation it was allowed, and I have never slapped a man before – I have never had cause to. I suppose I wanted to see what it felt like …

  ‘What the hell was that for? I still want to be with you, Sunny!’

  I cough a laugh and raise my eyes, as if it were obvious what the slap was for, and so I don’t have to think of an explanation, other than ‘you winked, and it irritated me’, or ‘I think you are being flippant with both our feelings’.

  ‘I’m sorry, all right! I just wanted you to know where I am at the moment, where my head’s at, if I seem distant … and if I have to take a call from her, if she rings … I might need you to be quiet.’

  ‘Are you going to leave her?’ I ask quietly. Suddenly I feel I know what Adrian means to me, and it’s everything. Suddenly I see Christmas, decorating the tree, him cooking lunch and me chopping vegetables – opening presents at my parents’ house, with and without him: I see my birthday, an extravagant meal in a gorgeous Thai Fusion restaurant with all of my friends, with and without him. I see a holiday in Italy, driving down bends on coastal roads in Amalfi, staying in a fragrant concern that overlooks the sea, run by an old Italian mamma who makes us mountains of pasta … with and without him. I see myself in a four-poster bed in an old pub in the Lake District as the rain drenches ramblers outside, and a fire burns in the corner of the room, as I pull on jeans to run downstairs and get another bottle of red wine and two bags of Mini Cheddars for lunch … with or without him. I see a future with him, and I want it so desperately that I think in that moment I might say anything to get it. I’ve just started to feel things. I don’t want it to stop yet.

  He picks up his chair, places it upright at the table and sits down. ‘I don’t know if I can leave her,’ he says.

  ‘Why not, if you aren’t happy?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t be naïve, Sunny. I owe her more than that.’ He has made me feel like a child.

  ‘So … what are you offering me?’ I gulp back tears, and pray.

  ‘I didn’t know I was “offering” anything.’ He takes my hand, and laces his fingers through mine. ‘Let’s just angle our faces to the sun, feel the wind in our backs, and see what happens?’ He smiles at me as he says it and squeezes my hand.

  I look up into his eyes, and I hear myself saying, ‘OK,’ and nodding, like the dog in the back of the car, waiting for its head to be ripped off.

  I am instantly terrified of how it will feel when he leaves. Of how my heart will bruise and bleed when he decides that it is easier to hurt me and stay with her, than hurt her and be with me. When he actually makes the decision that my feelings don’t matter as much, that I don’t matter as much. When he admits that he’d rather I was sad than she was. And maybe he won’t even picture me, sitting on my own somewhere, fighting off tears, because he won’t like the thought that he caused it. But it doesn’t mean I won’t sit on my own, and I won’t cry, because I will, when his
actions turn my life on its axis and dump all the plotted points in a mess on the floor. I can already feel it coming. But for some reason I feel that it is good for me to stay in this, and wait with morbid curiosity. I need to know that it won’t kill me.

  I glance up at the clock. ‘It’s quarter to seven, we have to go.’ I unlock my hand from his, and wipe my eyes, standing up and brushing myself down.

  ‘Or …’ Adrian kicks back his chair, and walks slowly round the table towards me, and puts his hands around my waist.

  ‘Or?’ I ask, incredulous. But he doesn’t get it, because he starts to hitch up my dress carefully, tickling my thighs with his fingers as he lifts it slowly higher, and tickling my neck with his lips and his breath. Crouching down slightly, silky material in his hands rising inch by inch, he massages his thumbs upwards on the inside of my thighs, pushing me gently back against the kitchen wall. I am waiting for the right moment to stop him, as he pulls my knickers down with one hand, and squeezes my breasts through my dress with the other, leaving wrinkles and creases where his hand has been. I wait to say no, as he kisses me gently, his tongue slowly circling the inside of my lips. But then he pulls back, and looks me straight in the eye, so near to me that I feel it can only be honesty that I see, he is too close to lie. Then he drops to his knees, and lifts my dress, and pushes my legs a little further apart. I run my hands through the long dark hair on the back of his head as his tongue teases me gently, before he kisses me long and hard, alternating his mouth with his fingers, until I am digging my nails into his neck. He knows instinctively when to stop, and stands, unzipping his trousers quickly with his left hand, while the fingers on his right keep me ready. Suddenly I feel him graze me with his cock, which is the hardest I have felt it, not softened by drink … I can’t believe he makes me wait, and just lingers there, watching my face, tracing a line with himself, up and down me. But then he pushes forward, and this time it is slow, and it is hard, and he watches my reactions, and knows exactly what to do, and it feels as if it is only about me …