by Louise Kean
SEVEN
Sermon on how to mount
I sit on a train on Monday, heading towards La Sainte Union Convent School for girls with a box of vibrators and Two-Fingered Fondlers. I’m not nervous, largely because I haven’t really thought about what it is I am going to do. I’m sure a white light of panic will grip me soon enough, as the train bounces me and my sex toys ever closer to Sutton.
I get a cab from the station to the school. I am early, lunchtime is drawing to a close, and teenagers in personalised uniforms amble back towards the school from the town centre, picking fries out of cartons and sucking off their salt greedily before hoovering them up.
I clearly remember an afternoon free period in my second year of sixth form college. The only jeans I could fit into were from the Marks & Spencer’s men’s department. This was before everybody got fat and women’s shops realised there was money to be made. At seventeen I was a size twenty, but Dorothy Perkins weren’t bothered back then. On a blustery November day, with my friends Anna and Lisa, I walked over the flyover that linked my college to the newsagent’s. At seventeen Anna was a brunette with shiny swinging bobbed hair and utterly symmetrical eyebrows, with a beauty spot just above and to the left of a cupid’s bow that was too perfect to be real. But it was real. Her skin was a caramel cream, and although she had heavy legs and ankles that she bemoaned daily, she also had a tiny waist that she accentuated with well-fitted T-shirts. Nobody ever knew about Anna’s ankles. Her teeth were gloriously straight. She was naturally beautiful, and she polished herself daily. She had been my best friend on and off, the way that girls are, for fourteen years.
Lisa was as blonde and athletic then as she is now, tall and toned, with long naturally curly hair and watery blue eyes. She had a handsome face, attractive where Anna’s was beautiful. But Lisa spent her life smiling. If she wasn’t smiling, she was laughing. A big smile, long blonde curly hair, and a gifted sprinter for the county. Five feet eight inches and not an ounce of fat. These were my best friends, who wore their trendy Levi jeans and Lacoste sweaters as we walked to the newsagent’s, and I wore my M&S men’s jeans, and a sweatshirt from BhS in size XL.
We walked together, in a line, down the road. Anna shared secrets of her date the night before with her new boyfriend, David, a tall handsome third-year student at our college with a Roger Ramjet chin and a good line in sarcasm, who made me blush whenever he turned his full attention on me.
A red mark four Escort whizzed past us, filled with boys from the technical college, boys that all of us had seen but none of us quite knew. They were thrashing their first car into submission, and as they flew past us, they leant on their horn and one of them cried out of the window, ‘You’re gorgeous!’
We all laughed, excited by the fact that these were good-looking boys from the technical college, and they had, by screaming out of their window, declared to the world that one of us would be going out with one of them very soon, in a smallish suburban town such as ours, with its limited pubs and bars.
I turned to my right to say something to Anna, and realised that she and Lisa had dropped a step behind me, as they held on to each other’s arms to stop themselves from falling as they laughed, flushed with girlish pride.
‘He was shouting at you!’ Lisa said through laughter.
‘No, he was shouting at you!’ Anna said back, glorious fun-filled tears in her eyes.
‘He wasn’t! It was you!’ Lisa said back, taking a breath, trying to regain control.
It was only then that I remembered … there was no way he was shouting at me.
My teenage years are littered with incidents like that, some worse. Jibes and comments scattered like broken glass across the years that pricked my ego until it bled to death. The loud boy at college, the joker, the little guy who got popular from picking on others around him, who could use me as an easy jibe if I walked past at the wrong time. It stung so hard and fresh, every time he made his fat comments, his ‘look at the state of that today’ comments, that it would always make me cry, just a little, especially if I had tried hard that day, with my hair, with my clothes. It didn’t matter to him, of course. When I found out that he was adopted, I plotted and twisted in my head all the comebacks I could hurl in his direction the next time he lashed out at me, how I could turn and say, ‘Well, at least I don’t have strangers cooking my tea! My parents loved me enough to keep me!’ That’s how much it hurt, that awful much. I never said it, thank goodness, but the fact that I thought it is still a source of shame. There are boys, now men, including little popular adopted guy, who I can still muster some hatred for today, a peculiar vitriol reserved only for that select band who made me hate myself for the way I looked at a time when I was learning who I was. I learnt that I was a joke, because I was fat. I learnt that some people, especially men, wouldn’t like me, wouldn’t even want to talk to me, because I was fat. I learnt that my girlfriends could bond over their latest crush, but there was no point me ‘crushing’ anybody, because that is all it would ever be. I locked my romantic feelings away then, for the first time, to save some young pride. But if I want to be happy, and being loved is what I think will make me happy, I’m going to have to unlock them again and let them out, and risk some oaf with big clumsy hands dropping them and smashing them on the floor. Love is the stuff of all my dreams, and I’ve decided that those dreams aren’t too big for me, even if my Marks & Spencer’s jeans now are.
The taxi driver offers to drop me at the top of the school drive, but I insist on being let out by the gates so that I can carry my heavy box up the long tarmac drive, and therefore start to burn off the bowl of cereal I ate for lunch before I left my flat. The kids eye me suspiciously as I stride past them, but they are almost instantly bored by me, and look away to be bored by something else. How exhausting it must be, to be constantly on the look out for something to hold your attention, disappointed by the ninety-nine per cent of the world that doesn’t involve computer game slaughters. There are significantly more overweight kids than there used to be, too many contenders for the prize of ‘class fatty’ these days. I see a girl, eleven maybe twelve, in a navy V-neck school jumper that is uncomfortably tight, the seams digging at the tops of her arms, and fat where breasts will be one day soon, giving her childish boobs that she doesn’t want, that she hates. Her face is big and pale like an uncut brie. Her arms don’t swing elegantly at her sides, but instead sit at stiff angles from her torso, where fat meets fat. I can tell from the way that she walks that her thighs are rubbing against each other under her navy blue polyester skirt with a button missing at the waistband that her mother has got tired of sewing back on. She’ll inspect her thighs later, alone and behind a locked door in the family bathroom, the only place that she doesn’t mind being naked. She’ll sit heavily on the floor, the soles of her feet pressed together, studying the red-rashed pimply flesh, and applying E45 cream, praying the livid patch will go down before PE next Tuesday.
She walks too quickly, my little fat friend, on purpose, to prove that she can, but the truth is she really can’t, comfortably at least. She is quite out of breath, and she lets her friend, a small Chinese girl in an oversized uniform that was still the smallest in the shop, do most of the talking, nodding or shaking her head instead of answering if she can get away with it, unable to catch her breath.
A group of five skinny girls catch them up gradually from behind. Their uniform is gold hooped Argos earrings, and poker-straight one-length hair that falls to exactly the same point on their backs – regulation length, McDonald’s length, New Look length. They strop past the Chinese girl and deliberately knock into the violin case that swings heavily at her side, and it falls on to the tarmac. A couple of the girls cough a snigger and carry on walking, until a few paces further on, one swings her hair to turn back and spits over her shoulder, ‘And no staring at my tits again in PE, Marie, you fat leso bitch …’
Marie pretends to ignore her but her face turns strawberry red, and she looks down at h
er feet, scowling, but saying nothing. I want to run after this little teenage pregnancy in the making and ask her why she is so filled with hate, so spiteful, so ready to lash out at another woman’s expense. I want to make a thousand arguments that confound her in her youth and stupidity into a shamed silence, mouth agape, chewing gum falling to the floor. I am fast approaching the group of girls, and another sensation grips me – fear. Fear that I won’t say anything, that I won’t fight back, for Marie, for all the other little fat kids, for the ones who hate themselves too much to answer back. There are so many things I could say, ways of making her eat her words, apologise, or at the very least point her in the direction of a new enemy, if an enemy is what she needs. I am a woman now, I’m nearly thirty for Christ’s sake, I can win her over with my cohesive arguments and make her understand that being fat isn’t easy, and her outbursts could push poor Marie over the edge. Then how would she feel? With sticky, sugar-saturated blood all over her hands?
I speed up to pass the group, who are swearing at each other as conversation, discussing ‘cheeky fuckin’ Brett Davies’ and ‘Jamie fuckin’ Sparrow, the prick, he tried to touch me up at the bus stop …’
They don’t say anything to me, barely even notice me. I remind myself that I’m not fat any more. Scared of what they might say, I feel eight years old again. But they have no spite to hurl my way – it would take far too much imagination. I wish they would say something, anything, because the diatribe that I was planning on delivering to them sticks in my throat, and my lips are dry, my tongue rigid. And then one of them speaks.
‘I like your boots, miss.’
She thinks I am a teacher, and her words are sincere. I am wearing knee-high camel-coloured Kurt Geiger leather boots with a thin three-inch heel. I know she is not lying, because they are great boots. They don’t start to hurt my feet until their fourth hour of wear. I am worthy of their admiration, I fit in now, the skinny girl from the skinny club wants my boots.
I glance back over my shoulder and smile, and say quietly, ‘Bitch.’
‘Wha?’ the girl asks, confused that a substitute teacher may have just said ‘thanks’ to her, but it sounded like ‘bitch’. I don’t look back, and am relieved when I shut the staffroom door behind me. It didn’t feel nice, being spiteful to a stranger. I wonder why so many people find it so effortlessly easy.
Rob Taggart is nervous and overexcited. He speaks too quickly, his tongue falling over his words and jumping up again at speed. His eyelids are mostly closed as he speaks, but flicker quickly as if rapid eye movement were a disease, and he has it, and it may yet be fatal.
He is thin, and pale. His shirt is blue, his trousers are grey. His glasses are wire-framed and may even be designer, but it’s too little too late. Even his hair is pointless, soft and flat. He looks as though he doesn’t dream at night. He looks as though he would come in forty seconds if a woman stood opposite him and took her knickers off. He gets drunk on three pints of lager and plays quiz machines with his mates, all huddled around in a corner of the pub shouting, ‘Not yet, not yet! Peter Shilton! The Adriatic! Rob, you muppet, I told you it was Marie Curie!’
I have no doubt he’ll be married by the time he is thirty. He is the kind of guy things work out fine for; he has had the luck to be born into the ‘easily pleased’ classes. He doesn’t think too much about the emotional stuff, or dream too much, or want to escape his life or his head or his skin. He likes his life and who he is, and if he didn’t he’d just change it. He laughs at gross-out films, and supports a football team that always comes eleventh in the Premiership, but as long as it’s eleventh, he is happy. Eleventh, consistently, is the kind of guy Rob Taggart is. I wish it had been love at first sight. How wonderful and comfortable that would have been.
Thankfully I don’t recognise any of the girls sitting in the classroom Rob Taggart and I are peering into through a small round window in an old heavy school door. The bitch I called bitch isn’t in there.
‘They’re really excited!’ Rob Taggart says, catching the worried look on my face. We both look back through the window at the girls, bunched in groups around certain desks, young and nubile and bored. They are fifteen going on thirty. At least half of them have probably had more sex than me, know more about sex than me, tried a hundred more positions. But I am pretty sure I know more about sex aids. At least I hope I do …
I walk in with my box of sexual tricks and stand in front of the class, who pay me no attention and carry on talking. I put the box down and line up the vibrators in height order along the front edge of Rob Taggart’s desk: an intimidating black length of veined rubber direct from a Robert Mapplethorpe photo: a rabbit in pink with rounded nonthreatening ears and balls that rotate and buzz at the base, that look like they’d be fine to use in a kids’ ball pool – dive in! – a whole different kind of fun admittedly.
I place a Two-Fingered Fondler on the corner of the desk. I know the directions on the back of the box by heart. ‘How does it work?’ is a question I can answer.
‘Excuse me?’ I say loudly. Rob Taggart declined even to introduce me. I’ve been thrown to lip-glossed lions. They glance at me, and prowl nonchalantly back to their individual desks, not quite chewing gum, not quite throwing me insolent looks, not quite being stroppy teenagers, but on the brink of all of that.
When they have slammed themselves into seats with built-in desks and flipped their hair a few more times, they allow their eyes to focus on me. And finally they spot the vibrators …
‘Mate!’
‘Rough!’
‘It’s fuckin’ huge!’
‘Is she a fuckin’ lezza?’
‘She must be a dyke!’
‘That’s just wrong.’
Silence falls suddenly, and they look at me expectantly.
‘What?’ I ask.
‘Are you a dyke, miss?’ An explosion of Argos gold and eyeliner in the second row tosses the question at me.
‘It shouldn’t matter whether I am or not …’
The classroom erupts.
‘Yuk!’
‘That’s fucking rough!’
‘Pervert!’
‘But I’m not!’ I state firmly, horribly ashamed of it as soon as the words leave my mouth.
‘Whatever!’
‘Is she going to show us how to use it?’
‘I am fuckin’ leaving if she does!’
‘I ain’t staying for no lezza class!’
‘Look!’ I shout above the disgusted din. ‘Nobody is going to show you how to use anything. Mr Taggart asked me to talk to you today about my business. I run a website called shewantsshegets.com that sells these toys,’ I gesture with my hand, ‘and it is ostensibly for women. I brought a selection of the vibrators along to show you, but we also sell underwear, lubrication, light S&M materials, silk eye masks, erotic poetry and literature, flavoured body paints, et cetera. Click on the site for a full list. But my best seller is the Two-Fingered Fondler, which I own the exclusive licence to distribute in this country, for the moment at least, and it’s proving very popular. It’s the puff of air, apparently. As you can see …’ I pick up the Fondler and half the class erupts.
‘Rough!’
‘I think it’s been used!’
‘Turn it on!’
‘Does its ears twitch?’
Peals of laughter follow.
‘For Christ’s sake, it’s just a vibrator!’ I shout.
Most of the class shut up, apart from a group of knowing beauties, who mimic me – it’s just a vibrator – in a strange Home Counties accent, and laugh loudly at the back.
‘Does anybody have any questions?’ I ask, checking my watch. I can catch the next train if I rush.
A young black girl with flawless creamy skin and an afro ponytail puts her hand in the air.
‘Yes?’ I ask, mildly irritated. Why is there always one who has to ask a question?
‘I know what a vibrator is, right, but they’s for old women, right, or married women.
Who can’t get good sex no more. We don’t need nothing. I get mine!’ She laughs loudly and high-fives her neighbour.
‘OK,’ I say, ‘any other questions?’
‘Do they give you an automatic orgasm?’
I don’t know who has shouted it from the back, so I answer the class generally. ‘Not automatic, no.’ I turn round to start to pack up.
‘But they are for women who can’t get men, right?’
‘Maybe they are for women who don’t want men,’ I say, with my back to them.
‘Lesbians!’ two of them shout simultaneously.
I turn round to face them. ‘Why are you all so obsessed with lesbians?’ I ask, and the girls at the back mimic me again, and I sigh exasperated.
‘Why do we need to learn how to fuck ourselves, miss? That’s the man’s job, right?’
‘In an ideal world, yes. But sometimes finding a man that you like, and respect, and who makes you laugh, and who also makes you orgasm, is harder than you think it might be. This –’ I wave the Fondler at them – ‘is in case you take conversation over coming.’
I look down at it with a fond smile. It has served me well, put food on my table, indulged me my therapist, and yet I have never thanked it properly. Why haven’t I tried one of these things? What am I waiting for, a note from my mother saying it’s OK? Why is using a Fondler any different from using my own hand?
‘Are you married?’ one of the girls shouts.
‘No,’ I answer.
‘How old are you?’ another girl shouts.
‘Twenty-eight,’ I say.
‘When was the last time you had sex?’ the same voice asks.
‘Friday night, against a wall in my kitchen,’ I say.
The room quietens down.
‘Are you in love?’ somebody asks.