A Fucked Up Life in Books

by AnonYMous

  After many, many delicious beers, a little dance and a little kiss, I was feeling a bit horny and asked if he wanted to go back to his. He did, so we left.

  I didn’t know what to expect from his flat. I knew that he lived with another boy, so I had decided that it probably smelt a bit. I also knew that he hadn’t lived there that long, so I thought that it would probably be a bit of a mess. It wasn’t a mess but it did smell of boy.

  He flicked on the light in his bedroom and I stepped in and had a look around. A bed, a chest of drawers, a clothes rail, a desk with a computer on it and a printer underneath, and over there was a bookcase.

  All the playfulness and talking that we’d had on the way back stopped and I silently strode over to the bookshelf. Let’s see what kind of person he was.

  I started at the top and worked my way down. He stood behind me, started at the top and worked his way down.

  Martin Amis, JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Dostoevsky; I can take them or leave them.

  He moved my hair and kissed my neck.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald; it’s looking a bit better.

  He unzipped my dress and put his hands on my back, sliding them around to hold me at the front.

  Arthur Golding.

  His hands were firmer now, and he tried to turn me around. I pulled away and took the book from the shelf.

  ‘This. This book, have you read it?’ I asked, waving Memoirs of a Geisha in the air.

  ‘I have,’ he said, trying once again to pull me round and kiss my lips. I pulled away, harder. His hands let go.

  ‘I fucking love this book,’ I said. ‘I watched the film recently. Have you seen the film? Massive disappointment. Look …’ I flicked the book open. ‘Here, and here, and … here and here and here. It says how blue her eyes were. Do you remember? All the way through, it’s really smacking you in the brain with it, her eyes are SO BLUE. Striking, frightening almost. She’s beautiful, and her eyes are the kind of blue that shocked people, that made her mysterious. No one else had eyes like that. Now …’ I snapped the book closed and pointed it at him. ‘In the film, her eyes are blue, but they’re not that blue. For all the fucking wanking over how bloody blue her bloody eyes were, I was expecting to be dazzled. I wasn’t. Massive let down. Secondly …’

  He stood back, arms folded across his chest, watching me as I stood with my dress slipping off my shoulders flicking back through the book.

  ‘This guy. He’s so ugly, look. It says it fucking loads. FUCKING loads! Remember? Remember when you were reading, did you think of him and think his face must be, like, really really fucked? WELL. He’s not that ugly in the film. Not ugly enough. And her sister? Not nearly enough of a cunt. Not by a long shot. I was so fucking angry after I watched that film. What a piece of shit. Don’t watch it, for the love of God, you’ll end up wanting to kill yourself, like I do.’

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  ‘I don’t want to kill myself,’ I said.

  He came closer towards me, put his hand on the book, and after the second or third tug I allowed him to take it away from me and place it carefully back in the gap on the shelf so that he could finish taking my dress off.

  I fucked him for the first time that night, and once I’d got into bed with him I didn’t care about looking through the rest of the books on the shelf until the morning after when he’d got into the shower.

  You can go along with the quote at the top and not fuck people who don’t have books, if you like. But, for me, I’d have fucked him whether there were books there or not. I just would have fucked him a lot sooner without those books there to distract me.

  A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian

  For a fucking brilliant couple of months my Sunday routine was to get up around mid-morning, drive into town, pop into a couple of charity shops to look for books, read a bit of whatever I’d bought, and then go and have some coffee and cake with a couple of friends.

  This day I’d got up a bit earlier, found a copy of A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian in my favourite charity shop, and gone to wait at the coffee shop for my friends.

  I was there perhaps twenty minutes when the first friend showed up. She sat down with her coffee and told me that our other friend was bringing her sister. Brilliant. Her sister was a complete knob.

  We chatted for a few minutes before the third friend and her sister showed up. They came upstairs and sat down with us and straight away her sister started loudly complaining about everything in her life. This is why I didn’t like her, she was fucking whiney.

  ‘Oh my God, you guys, he went out again last night and he didn’t get back until two in the morning and wouldn’t say where he’d been. I am, like, so sick of it. And, to make everything worse, at four in the morning we got woken up by someone trying to break the door down next door, the door to X’s flat, and she was SO drunk and SO annoying and I went outside and screamed at all of them. I’m SO tired. Oh my God, it’s so disrespectful, do you know what I mean?’

  Second friend and I muttered something about it being shit and then turned our chairs slightly towards each other to try and block this mad, whiney bitch out. She continued.

  ‘She was with some guy, yeah, never seen him before. He was so dodgy. He just stood rolling a cigarette and nodding while I shouted at him and told me to relax. RELAX? He’d woken me up! Some people. God.’

  ‘Well, to be fair,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t him that woke you up, was it? It was your sister-in-law, X, who woke you up by coming in drunk and forgetting her key and then asking someone to kick her door in.’

  ‘Well, no,’ she replied. ‘It was him because X is so not like that normally.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. I recognise a fucking idiot when I see one and so I decided not to bother having an opinion on any of the other stuff that she was talking about. We all sat in silence while she continued to tell us how terrible her life was, but that she couldn’t possibly change anything herself, because nothing was her fault. It was tedious and bollocks.

  On the table we’d sat on, I was facing the stairs. To my delight, my brother appeared at the bottom of the stairs holding a coffee and began to walk up.

  ‘Hey,’ I waved at him. ‘You can come and sit over here if you like.’

  He came over and sat down. He’d met my two friends before, but not the sister of friend number two. He said hello to the ones he knew and turned to the sister and introduced himself.

  Her eyes screwed up as she looked him up and down.

  She said, ‘do you know X?’

  He said, ‘yeah, I know X.’

  She said, ‘and were you with her last night?’

  He said, ‘Yeah, I was with her last night.’

  She glared at him and shouted, ‘Yeah. I know you were. I live next door to her. I shouted at all of you this morning when you noisy bastards got me out of bed.’

  He said, ‘Bye.’

  And picked up his coffee and left.

  The sister turned to me. ‘Your brother is fucking disgusting.’

  Now. I’m not a violent or aggressive person. And as a general rule any kind of confrontation. The one exception to the rule is if anyone says anything nasty about my brother. Say anything you like about my friends, family, boyfriend, whoever, but anything about him and something clicks in my head. I feel hot and angry and passionate and I’m not scared of anyone.

  ‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t you dare say a bad word about him. He’s disgusting? You’re disgusting. You sit here and moan about things that you think aren’t you fault. Well I’ve got news for you, they ARE your fault. You’re fucking useless. And as for my brother, have a fucking word with your sister-in-law and call her a cunt before you ever dare go passing the blame on to someone else just because you are so desperately trying to cling onto your arsehole of a husband. Fuck you.’

  I left and phoned my brother and told him what had happened. And he told me about what had happened the night before.


  And since then, he’s written about it. It’s been maybe a couple of years since he made a song about what had happened, which overlaps with my story. The bolded bits here are the bits that both stories share, and if you ever find it, I hope that you’ll listen to it and laugh.

  Dragon’s Gold

  How much can you learn about a person in one month? Well, it depends on who they are to you and how you’ve met them. In my experience, it all depends on how passionate that person is about the things that they love.

  I’d only been seeing The Boyfriend for a month when it was my birthday. Like all brilliant beginnings of relationships, we’d spent that time fucking and talking. There’s not a lot to me really, and so I felt like he knew me pretty well pretty quickly. The main things to remember are that I fucking despise milk, and that I believe, passionately and unconditionally, in dragons.

  He’d invited me to spend the weekend with him, so I travelled down on the train and we did a lot more fucking and talking, as well as eating and laughing and other things that just feel better on your birthday.

  At midnight, when it was my birthday, he leaned under the bed and took out a package. It was wrapped in paper with juicy red apples printed on the front.

  I opened it and inside were three books, all about, or including mentions of dragons. The one that leapt out at me was Dragon’s Gold by Piers Anthony. I’d started reading the Xanth books a couple of years before hand and thought that Piers was a fucking legend.

  ‘Do you have any of them already?’ he asked.

  I did not.

  ‘Good.’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like them.’ He put his arms around me. ‘Happy birthday.’

  The rest of the evening we sat together quietly, as he let me read my book. And when I was done he asked about the dragons; their colours and their names, whether they were good or bad, whether they talked or not, whether they were trained and captive or free. And when I answered him he listened to what I said, and didn’t call me a cunt or an idiot for believing the things that I did. He just smiled and let me be myself.

  And it was probably that day, sat there reading through that book as he held on to me, that I realised just how much I adored him.

  Brick Lane

  If you are a woman, once you hit 25 you have to have a smear test to check for any signs of cervical cancer. Depending on what kind of woman you are, you’re either counting down to the day of your first smear test with dread, or you completely forget that it is coming up and have to be reminded by the doctor when you go in to get your next supply of the contraceptive pill or repeat prescription for hydrocortisone cream or whatever it is that you go to the doctor for.

  I fall into the latter category (and I was there for my pill, I don’t suffer from eczema), and was sat in the doctor’s reception reading Brick Lane waiting to be called through to go through the usual million questions, weighing and rigmarole that you have to do to get a prescription. As we plodded through the questions and I answers she stopped at the one asking about a smear test and asked my age. I was 25.

  ‘Right, so you’ll need to have a smear test. Did you get a letter about it? We usually send a letter out.’

  I did not get a letter.

  ‘Okay, well that’s alright. Sometimes they don’t get sent out for various reasons, and I see you’ve been a patient at another surgery for a while before coming here, so it’s possible you just got a bit lost in the system there for a while. On your way out, just book in with the receptionist to come in for the smear test as soon as you can. Alright? Okay.’

  I left the office and went to queue at reception. As the person in front of me left and I stepped forward the receptionist disappeared. I waited for a couple of minutes and then had a look behind me.

  Three people waiting. The person directly behind me was an old woman, behind her an old man, and behind him a teenage boy and his Mum. I let a couple more minutes pass and then I rang the bell. The receptionist appeared.

  ‘Yes?’ she barked at me.

  I recognised her as the least helpful and most rude receptionist. Most doctors have one. They’re everywhere, obviously, but if you’ve ever had to deal with one for whatever reason then you will feel my pain.

  ‘Hi, I’ve been to see the doctor and she’s asked me to come to you to make an appointment for a smear test as soon as possible please.’

  Now, as far as I am aware, receptionists at doctor’s surgeries have to have a basic bit of knowledge about how the surgery works, and how people work. For example, she should know that an internal examination will probably take more than ten minutes, and so a double appointment slot should be booked to accommodate it, and that various medications affect various people in different ways, and also that as a patient just trying to book an appointment, I was not trying to mug her off.

  She sighed and looked irritated at me and clicked on the mouse a few times before asking me my name and date of birth. The queue behind me had another person join it.

  ‘You smear test needs to be mid cycle, so two weeks after your period,’ she shouted through the glass at me, ‘so when will that be?’

  ‘I don’t bleed,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she shouted.

  ‘My contraceptive pill is Cerazette, I don’t have periods at all. So anytime is fine. This week, maybe?’

  She sighed again and looked at me like I was a fucking idiot. She placed both of her hands on the desk in front of her and leaned towards the glass, looking into my eyes.

  ‘WHEN. WAS. YOUR. LAST. PERIOD.’

  Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

  ‘I. DON’T. BLEED.’ I shouted back.

  ‘LOOK,’ she shouted, and began to talk slowly as if I were misunderstanding her, ‘IT HAS TO BE MID. CYCLE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? WHEN. WAS. YOUR. LAST. PERIOD.’

  The queue behind me had gained another member. Five people now waiting behind me looking at me with a mixture of anger and intrigue. This woman on reception is clearly an arsehole, and with an arsehole there is just no talking to them.

  ‘Please get the doctor,’ I said to the woman, ‘she can explain to you.’

  ‘I WILL NOT GET THE DOCTOR THE DOCTOR IS BUSY NOW LISTEN …’

  ‘FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE, PLEASE GET THE DOCTOR. NOW.’

  The receptionist gasped at me as I stared angrily through the glass at her, and then mumbled and grumbled away. I turned to the people behind me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but she is an idiot.’

  A couple of them nodded. The woman with the teenage son turned him round to face her so that he wasn’t staring at me. The receptionist came back with the doctor in tow and I caught the end of what she was telling the doctor: ‘… a very angry and rude young lady, she is not listening to a word I am saying …’

  The doctor got to the glass and looked at me.

  ‘I’m on Cerazette,’ I said. ‘I don’t bleed.’

  The doctor turned to the receptionist.

  ‘She doesn’t have periods, which I presume she has told you. Now, will you book her in for the test?’ The doctor turned to me. ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ she said.

  The receptionist went a bright pink colour and mumbled an apology to the doctor before sulkily arranging my appointment with me. By the time that I left, the seven people in the queue behind me all knew that I’d be back in a couple of days for a smear test, which must have been exciting for them.

  On the plus side to this hoohah, I hope that that cunt of a receptionist didn’t give any of the other poor fuckers in the queue any shit. On the minus side, three years on, I bet that receptionist probably isn’t any less of a cunt.

  Persepolis

  So I’d been seeing this boy for a while now, and he’d become my boyfriend. Every single weekend I would make the six hour round trip from my home to Brighton to go and visit him, because although I didn’t love him yet, I bloody loved his penis.

  Because we lived so far apart and saw each other so little, there were a couple of things tha
t were standard when we were together:

  We would have sex at every opportunity

  We could not be without each other for more than about five minutes at a time – I only really left his side to either piss or shit.

  Which is why after one particularly vigorous shagfest I went with him to his appointment at the hairdresser.

  If you’ve ever been to Brighton, you will know that everyone who lives or works there is a bit cool.

  We walked in to the hairdressers where my boyfriend was greeted by a man holding a dog and a woman with purple hair before being carted off for a hair wash, and I was shown to a little sofa to wait.

  I always carry a book in my bag, whatever I’m reading at the time. On this day it happened to be Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. So, I settled down on to the sofa and began to read.

  Remember the dog from earlier? Well, he was a friendly little twat and came running up to me for attention. Never one to ignore a happy animal, I stood up to give him some fuss. And then I felt it. Something in my pants.

  Women readers may know that feeling that you get when you are in a public place and you feel some movement downstairs. For the fannyconscious among you it is probably that month’s period, and you are probably ready for it. However, I don’t bleed and so it could only be one thing – a gusset full of jizz.

  It was at this point that the purple-haired lady approached me and decided to talk about Persepolis, and because I’m a cunt in a hairdressers in Brighton of course she wants to fucking talk about Persepolis, because she’s a bit cool, isn’t she, and I’m stood there with a dog sniffing at my crotch and jizz dripping down my leg and a woman wanting to have a political debate about Iran and I have to FUCKING SIT THERE BECAUSE I HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO AND MY TWATTING BOYFRIEND IS ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH HIS HAIRCUT.

  To my relief, after about ten minutes purple-haired lady fucked off to put on an Ian Brown CD and left me to continue reading my book.