The Goddess Workshop

by Margaret K Johnson

  Sometimes, in moments too lonely to share even with Ted, Reenie wondered whether the after-effect of her son’s reckless behaviour would ever go away. Whether she would ever get an answer to the constant ‘why?’ she lived with night and day.

  And whether she’d ever be able to forgive him.

  ‘It’s not your fault, love,’ she said. ‘None of it.’ Then she gave her daughter a quick hug. ‘Come on,’ she said, with a big sniff. ‘Let’s go into Norwich to do some shopping. Cheer ourselves up a bit.’

  It worked, up to a point, even though finances dictated that they keep to the market stalls and bargain shops. At least there was a smile on Marcia’s face for a while anyway, and when they passed the seafood stall on the market, Reenie smiled too, remembering Jade going on about seafood in the workshop.

  ‘Something amusing about my crabs, lady?’ the stallholder asked her, which had the effect of tickling Reenie even more.

  ‘Mum!’ Marcia hissed with embarrassment, dragging her giggling mother away. ‘What is the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Reenie, her laughter abruptly tailing off. Nothing. Everything. Because something had to be wrong when beautiful, favoured Craig had been wiped out from the world just as if he’d never existed at all, while his mother was still here to laugh at the thought that her private parts might look like some of the more exotic items on display on a Norwich fish stall.

  Marcia looked at her. ‘Mum? Are you all right?’

  Reenie made herself smile. ‘Of course I am!’ Today was about Marcia. About making sure her vulnerable daughter never again, not for one moment, was allowed to think ‘it should have been me, not him.’

  ‘Come on,’ Reenie said, linking her arm in Marcia’s. ‘Time for something to eat. Shopping’s hungry work!’

  * * * * *

  Back in Shelthorpe on Sea, Janet was examining a large conch shell that was part of the bathroom display at Carol De Ville Interiors. The shell was many shades of pink – the scroll of its inside a deep rose graduating down to almost white, its lumpy outside a deep shade of peach.

  Cradling the shell in one hand Janet flicked the feather duster over it with gentle strokes. ‘What colour am I?’ she thought as she looked at the shell. Ray knew, presumably, but he had never told her. No doubt her doctor knew too. But at the age of forty-four, Janet still didn’t.

  Strange.

  * * * * *

  In the town centre, Kate was thinking about seafood too. At the fish shop, she splashed out on a pint of unpeeled prawns. Jade’s class had given her the idea.

  Coming out of the fish shop, she opened the bag and smiled. The prawns did not make her think of her ‘secret body.’ They made her think of revenge. Prawns stuffed into an ex-lover’s hollow curtain rail were an urban myth. Well, she couldn’t easily get access to Ian’s curtain rails, but his police car, which she had seen parked around the corner with its window slightly open, was a sitting duck.

  Nobody was in sight. Carefully posting the prawns through the gap, Kate watched with satisfaction as they slithered down the window and down the side of the seat where they were likely to remain undetected for some time.

  Small revenge for someone who had so totally broken her heart, but hey, any revenge was good.

  Ten

  It was like déjà vu, only this time Estelle was the one at the sandwich shop counter buying a baguette.

  Hovering in the doorway, Janet wished she were the type of person to make wisecracks. Then she could casually wait in line until Estelle had finished paying, stick her foot out and say ‘Go on then, get your own back, why don’t you?’ Or something similar. Some-thing wittier, preferably. But as it was, she just wanted to turn and run. Would have, except that Estelle finished paying and headed towards her.

  Once again she was on her phone, but this time she interrupted the conversation to call out to Janet. ‘Can you hold on a sec, Maria? Janet! Wait a minute.’

  Janet waited. Estelle smiled at her. Janet was surprised, both by the smile, and by how much prettier smiling made Estelle look.

  ‘Have you got time for a coffee?’ Estelle asked, and Janet was so astonished, she found herself saying yes. And then had to hover like a spare part for a minute or so, while Estelle finished her call.

  ‘Right, sorry about that,’ Estelle said at last. ‘Shall we?’

  Janet followed Estelle to one of the two tables in the window of the sandwich shop and watched as she ordered coffee for them both. Everything about Estelle was confident and, she had to admit it, intimidating. Estelle’s clothes were immaculate – a severe, tailored grey suit with a hint of lace at the neck to soften it, perfect make-up, cheekbones to die for, and sexily chopped blonde hair. Estelle was classy – from the tip of her manicured fingernails to the shine of her new designer shoes.

  ‘Did you ever manage to clean up your other shoes?’ Janet found herself asking, the full horror of their last meeting in the sandwich shop returning to her, but Estelle just waved a hand.

  ‘Didn’t try,’ she said. ‘Binned them.’

  Janet felt herself flush. ‘Oh, gosh, I am so– ’

  ‘Sorry,’ Estelle finished for her. ‘I know. Forget it. I have.’

  Janet opened her mouth to say something more on the subject then closed it again. ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But remind me not to sit next to you if we ever go out for a meal together,’ Estelle ruined it by saying, but a quick glance showed Janet that the surprising smile was in evidence once again. ‘Just joking,’ Estelle said. ‘Anyway, I should apologise to you. I was a rude, stuck-up bitch.’

  ‘No,’ said Janet, ‘that’s all right. I should have thought you wouldn’t want me to mention the workshops in public.’

  The waitress arrived with their coffees at that moment. Of course the waitress arrived with their coffees at the very moment when Janet was, yet again, mentioning the workshops in public, but, happily, Estelle didn’t seem to be bothered by it this time.

  ‘My lover would be totally astonished if he knew about the classes,’ she told Janet when they were alone again. ‘I fake it.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Estelle nodded. ‘Mmm hmmm.’

  ‘And he can’t tell?’ Janet asked.

  Estelle shook her head. ‘No. RT thinks he’s stud of the century, so he’s not hard to fool.’

  Janet tried, and failed, to imagine faking an orgasm with Ray. ‘So, what do you do?’ she asked, adding hastily, ‘if that’s not too personal a question?’

  Estelle thought about it. ‘Plenty of groaning,’ she said. ‘And I sort of make my muscles quiver inside.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Janet, absorbing this information thoughtfully.

  Estelle laughed. ‘Are you trying it out now?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’ asked Janet, bemused.

  ‘The quivering thing!’

  Janet flushed scarlet. ‘No!’

  ‘You should. Jade would definitely approve.’

  Janet’s head was whirling. It was a bit too much to absorb somehow, this sudden difference in Estelle’s attitude towards her. And yet…and yet, she was enjoying herself. A lot.

  ‘By the way,’ Estelle was saying now, ‘I’ve been doing a spot of research. Guess what our Jade’s name means?’

  ‘Isn’t it just Jade as in the precious stone?’ Janet asked, confused.

  Estelle shook her head smugly. ‘Nope. It’s Chinese. Jade Gate, Honey Pot, Valley of Joy… Get it?’

  ‘You don’t mean…?’

  Estelle nodded. ‘Yes. The woman’s named herself after a vagina! She’s got some nerve, I’ll give her that. Her real name’s probably Nancy Harbottle or something.’

  ‘Or…Jane Smith!’ Janet suggested, entering into the spirit of it.

  Estelle laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Jane Orgasmatron Smith.’

  Janet sipped at her coffee, shaking her head. ‘I’m afraid the course might prove to be a little adventurous for me,’
she said, but Estelle kept on smiling.

  ‘You never know what might happen if you– ’ Estelle broke off to do a perfect imitation of Jade – ‘speak the same language as your inner sex goddess…’

  Janet laughed, but sobered quickly, thinking of the reality of making love with Ray. ‘My husband says I think about shopping lists when we’re…you know.’ And she blushed at her temerity of stating such a thing not only out loud, but also in the High Street coffee shop.

  ‘And do you?’ Estelle asked her.

  ‘Sometimes, yes. Not always though. Sometimes it’s recipes. Or crossword clues.’ As an honest answer, it was somewhat sad, but somehow it made both her and Estelle laugh out loud – great snorts of irrepressible schoolgirl mirth that made people look their way.

  When they finally sobered, Estelle looked Janet in the face. ‘I had a bitch of a mother too,’ she told her.

  ‘Did you?’ Janet said, wondering whether this was the reason behind Estelle’s changed attitude towards her.

  Estelle nodded. ‘Oh, yes. In fact, neither of my parents were exactly overjoyed when I came along.’

  They shared a moment of sympathetic silence.

  ‘There was only Mum and me,’ Janet said. ‘Dad left when I was little.’

  ‘And I bet she blamed you for that,’ Estelle said.

  Janet nodded. ‘Yes, I think probably she did.’

  Estelle sighed, finishing off her coffee. ‘Oh well, I should be grateful to my parents really I suppose,’ she said. ‘Needing to prove something to them has probably got me where I am today.’

  Once again they shared an easy silence, and then suddenly Janet noticed the time. ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘I’d better get back to work, or I’ll be seriously late.’

  Estelle pulled a face. ‘Don’t let Cruella boss you around,’ she said.

  Janet frowned. ‘Cruella?’

  ‘Cruella De Ville. That’s my name for her. I know her from the local Businesswomen’s Guild. A prize bitch. Useless businesswoman too. Sorry, but I only give that shop of hers six months tops.’

  But Estelle was only confirming Janet’s already established opinions. ‘I’ve always dreamed of running my own interior design business actually,’ she told Estelle dreamily. She laughed. ‘Silly, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Estelle. ‘Go for it! We’ll talk sometime.’ Estelle pushed her chair back. ‘Who knows?’ she said with a twinkle in her eye. ‘I might even have to join forces with you if Jade keeps spreading the word about the benefits of not wearing knickers and my business goes down the pan!’

  Janet looked at her blankly.

  Estelle laughed. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You lot don’t even know what I do for a living, do you? Janet, you are looking at the lingerie queen of East Anglia!’

  * * * * *

  ‘Now, which of you would like to go first? Get those bad experiences of sex out there in the open so you’re free to move on with a completely clean slate?’

  At the next workshop, Estelle was aware, without even looking, that Janet and the others were, just like her, studiously avoiding making eye contact with Jade. Somehow, today, Estelle didn’t even feel like making the sarcastic quips she would have made the previous week. Because the truth was that it would take weeks for her to talk about all her bad sexual experiences, there had been so many.

  ‘Come on, now,’ Jade urged them. ‘It won’t be so difficult once you start.’

  Even though Estelle still didn’t accept the challenge of being the first to bare her soul, she knew something had changed within her since the last workshop. She had taken herself by surprise when she had invited Janet to have coffee with her, and the even bigger surprise had been how much she had enjoyed it.

  Why had she done it? She wasn’t entirely sure. It had been an impulse. Janet had been looking at her like a kicked dog, and for some reason Estelle suddenly hadn’t wanted her to look at her that way.

  It was strange. On the face of it, Janet was her complete opposite – their worlds were poles apart. She owned her own successful business, and Janet was just a housewife with a part-time job. And yet… Estelle hadn’t just been saying it when she had mentioned to Janet a connection between them because of the shared coldness of their mothers. Maybe people reacted differently to similar childhood traumas. Or maybe Janet just showed on the outside what Estelle kept hidden away inside. Whatever. Strange as it seemed, there was a connection between them now, and that connection seemed to be making Estelle want to try to take the workshops more seriously.

  ‘Well, all right then,’ Jade said, ‘let me start.’

  With the danger of being in the spotlight temporarily averted, Estelle and the others looked up. Jade smiled at them all.

  ‘I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen to a boy I didn’t even like.’

  ‘Ditto,’ thought Estelle, but kept quiet.

  ‘Why didn’t I say “no”?’ Jade’s gaze scoured along the row as she asked the question. ‘Because I didn’t like myself enough to say no, that’s why.’

  Ditto again. Except that presumably Jade had stopped doing such things now, unlike Estelle.

  ‘I had sex quite often after that,’ Jade went on. ‘But I didn’t actually have my first orgasm until I was twenty-five years old. That’s a lot of non-orgasmic and sometimes, I have to say, downright unpleasant sex.’

  ‘So, what made the difference in the end, Jade?’ In the end it was plump, blousy Reenie who finally got the courage to speak. Although actually Reenie looked a lot better this week. She’d toned down the frills and flounces, and there seemed to be less tension between her and Kate, thank God.

  ‘What made you, you know…have an orgasm?’

  ‘It wasn’t just one thing, Reenie,’ Jade said. ‘It was a combination of several things, the most important being, I think, that I learnt to love myself. I know it’s a cliché, but learning to love yourself really is the greatest love of all.’

  Estelle wriggled in her seat, holding on to her new spirit of co-operation with difficulty. But Kate supplied the cynical words she was trying to hold back herself.

  ‘That is one hundred percent Whitney Houston,’ she said. ‘Didn’t do her much good, did it, poor cow?’ she said.

  Jade ignored the comment, her smile refusing to falter. ‘Why, thank you, Kate,’ she said. ‘I love that song. There’s so much truth in it isn’t there?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kate said cynically, arms folded defensively across her breasts. ‘Except for the bit where she says it’s easy, but I expect that’s just put in to make the song sound right.’

  ‘All love takes work,’ Jade told them. ‘And loving yourself is no different. So,’ and she smiled again, ‘that’s why we need to clear out all the negativity that might be getting in your way; dump all those depressing experiences of sex right here and start afresh with a completely clean slate. Reenie, why don’t you start? It doesn’t have to be anything in-depth, a short statement will do. Just something, anything that’s had a negative impact on your sexual confidence.’

  Reenie was silent for a while. ‘Well, I was a virgin when I met Ted, and a virgin when we got married,’ she said at last, taking the plunge. ‘A complete innocent, in fact. Which wasn’t what you’d call a good start to our sex life. Girls these days, they know it all really young, don’t they? Take my three, at it almost as soon as they got breasts, they were. Well, they are, aren’t they, youngsters today?’

  ‘My mother told me sex was a joyless duty,’ Janet said shyly into the pause that followed this statement.

  ‘Mine too!’ Reenie said, and then they were off, the stories tumbling out.

  Well, Janet’s and Reenie’s stories were. Kate just sat there with that cynical arms folded body language as if she were bored or above it all, and as for Estelle, a part of her wanted to join in, but another part of her felt too embarrassed to do so. Janet’s and Reenie’s tales of marriage bed disappointments just didn’t seem in the same league as her own stories.

>   ‘I was eleven years old when a boy first thrust his cock into my face, demanding oral sex,’ she could have said. Or, ‘once I had sex with twin brothers, but even being pleasured by two gorgeous men at the same time didn’t make me come.’ Or, ‘once my father caught me screwing a boy in the stables and horse-whipped us both.’

  ‘I’ve tried pretty much everything at least once,’ was all she said. ‘Nothing makes any difference.’ And suddenly it seemed to Estelle that her words joined Janet’s and Reenie’s sob stories and all the things she hadn’t said to hang in the air like a great big, depressing cloud in the room.

  Eleven

  Despite the blank, hostile expression, there was actually a lot going on in Kate Mitchell’s head as Janet and Reenie spouted on about painful losing of virginities, shock at first seeing an erect penis, the discomfort of sex post-childbirth etc., etc.

  She wasn’t really sure why she kept returning for another dose of Jade’s evangelism. If she’d refused to come back after week one, Geoff would have made her life a misery for a little while, but she could have lived with that. In fact, Kate was fairly sure he’d expected her to drop out. So what was she doing here? Was she really so deluded to think there was a chance that Ian would turn up to ask her to take him back? Was she really trying to increase her allure for that two-timing toerag?

  And the truth was, hearing the others yacking on about their bad experiences wasn’t doing Kate any good at all. It was making her relive her own worst ever experience connected to sex. Making her picture herself a year previously, on her way home unexpectedly early from work due to a cancelled meeting, with beer and fish and chips for a treat. As carefree and as waggy-tailed as a dog on its way home to its master.

  Kate Mitchell didn’t do sunsets or wrapped up à deux in cosy blankets watching shooting stars all night. She did impromptu fish and chips and paying attention to dull accounts of the minutiae of arrests. And so she had trotted with the fish and chips back to her marital home with that waggy-tailed walk. Very probably she had been humming a little tune to herself as she made her way up the garden path. Maybe even Whitney Houston, who knew? At the front door, she had reached into her bag for her door key, shifting her warm kitchen-papered burden into the crook of her left arm.