Who was I and where did I belong?
I had no interest in ornamenting myself and knew girls who had been inked as a dare and then regretted it. My abrupt desire to have a tattoo wasn't to show that I belonged, but to remind myself that I didn't want to belong. The tattoo would be an aide memoire, a metaphor. To quote JG Ballard, another writer who belongs on my list of greats, I was living life as a bourgeois, but was secretly an anarchist.
My eyes ran over the designs on the wall and one of them jumped out at me like a dancer in a club picked out by a spotlight. The shape was like a dancer, a continuous swirling line a little over three centimetres wide at the base and vanishing to the point of an inverted spiral of the type calligraphers placed at the end of hand-written manuscripts.
I sat and watched the rain until Alice and the tattooist appeared, the job done, her hand nursing her hip through her skirt.
'Do you have time to do another?' I asked.
Alice looked at once shocked, then pleased. She wasn't alone. The tattooist was a Rastafarian, with dreadlocks down to his waist and the face of a saint. He smiled his laser-whitened teeth.
'I am so happy, and it will make you happy,' he said. 'You have chosen?'
'That one,' I said, pointing.
'Bit small,' Alice remarked.
'Small is beautiful,' I responded.
We went through to the clinic. I laid on a leather-topped massage bench, lifted my hair above my head and indicated the back on my neck at the point immediately below the hairline.
'There,' I said.
'No one will see it.'
'Yes, I know.'
'You won't be able to see it.'
'But it will be there.'
'You, you crazy girl...'
'Thank you,' I said.
Like my friends, I immediately regretted having the tattoo and it hurt for weeks. There were scabs, the skin was bright red and I laid in bed at night having imaginary discussions with my mother about life being a journey and if you take a wrong turn you can never get back on track again.
Then the scabs fell off, the red faded and in the three-way mirror I stared at the reflected spiral and changed my mind. I had at the time been reading a book about geishas in ancient Japan and discovered that these devotees of passion covered their bodies in heavy kimonos exposing only their hands, face and the nape of the neck, an intensely sensitive spot for women and one of those zones that can drive men into paroxysms of desire. It had not entered my mind when I had the tattoo inked into my skin that rainy day, but I had, in my first year at university, placed an extended foot on the road to the erotic.
3
Dressing & Undressing
Getting dressed is a daily battle in a war we are doomed to lose. That's why we keep buying new things. I run pictures from magazines through my mind, while I stand before the bathroom window applying Aloe Vera Gel to my arid skin, over and under my breasts, a bit small, although the stranger didn't think so. I stretch like a cat, pinch my nipples to shift the pain from my finger and smooth my palms down my sides, my legs, into the crease of my bottom.
My gaze passes over the alchemist's stash of unguents and creams, bottles and tubes, enough make-up to repaint my apartment when smart girls know that less is more and the artifice is to appear as if you aren't wearing any at all. Except lipstick, of course. I use repairwear under my eyes, some blush to plant winter roses in sallow cheeks, and a puff of powder, all from Clinique. If you pop into Harvey Nicks at tea time, svelte blondes from Eastern Europe hand the stuff out like it's Christmas every day. The whites of my eyes are bloodshot, but the green of the pupils are bright with...with what, exactly?
I'm not sure. No, I am sure. But not entirely sure. He'll be here in under an hour and I feel prickly with nerves, which isn't like me at all.
Or is it? I feel schizophrenic today, uncertain, hung over, the codeine making my teeth ache.
Wandering on tip toes to the bedroom, the word 'pink' slipped into my head and it is always a good idea to act on your intuitions, to leap before you look. We live at a time when we shield our eyes and gaze so deeply into the future we lose sight of the present. Mother, when I gave up my job describing interiors for the magazine, told me not to 'burn my bridges.' But is that really sound advice? Once burnt, there is no way back. You have crossed the Rubicon, the Styx, the Thames, for that matter. The landscape is new, terrifying. The only way is forward.
A friend of mine, who paints abstracts, lost all of her work in a fire. For months she walked around in a funk. Then, she rented a new studio. She started again and her paintings were fresher, freer, more layered, more interesting. I have files of unfinished short stories, notebooks of ideas, character descriptions. I keep going back to them, as if in the past we might find the future. But I have a feeling, a deeper instinct, that only when I find the courage to burn all these scribbled notes, will the universe reach down and lift me like a fiery phoenix from the ashes. You get trapped into repeating yourself, you plagiarise yourself, you become all those things you condemn in others. Sometimes, I pass a shop window and see my mother in the reflection.
I am naked still, the central heating pumping away, the sun through the leaded windows weak as a dying hand. My clothes are crammed so closely on the rail in the closet I start to sweat dragging things out and laying them in combinations on the bed. My underwear is packed like boneless fish in four wide drawers bursting with soft fabrics, fragile as spider thread, the latex and leather in the bottom drawer garlanded with rings that connect to buckles and straps. A mask, like an eyeless face, lays beside Louis Vuitton handcuffs and I recall Chekhov's law on foreshadowing that decrees if a gun is shown on stage in an early scene of a play, it must be fired in a later scene, or it should not be there at all. I run my fingers over the short chain connecting the black bracelets, and wonder, just wonder.
I dip now into the top drawer where the pink satin knickers and matching bra give headachy girls a bit of a lift. Next, skinny jeans, so tight under the crotch it's painful, that's the price we pay, and lace-up boots with two-inch heels of the poor little match girl variety. Tom must be six foot in bare feet and I thought by conceding a couple of inches we would both feel secure.
That's the bottom done. Tops are never as easy, not in winter. It is the clothes that cover us that stir desire for what lies beneath. The fig leaves Eve wore in the Garden of Eden were not designed to conceal, but to draw Adam's eye to what Eve had artfully hidden. Just as flowers come in infinite colours and put out sweet scents to attract the birds and butterflies that pollinate them, we paint our lips pink as an allusion to the moist flush of our sex and perfume our pulses to arouse the hunger in every stranger. A girl in primitive times was the victim of male lust and the guile required to survive and flourish is the mask she subconsciously wears today. Love is war and clothes are our armour.
Half-dressed, as if posing for Helmut Newton, I stand before the open closet as if it is a sanctuary. Sometimes, when I am depressed, or facing a wall of silence, I creep inside and pull the doors closed behind me. I meditate in this dark silky womb. I tell myself to be positive. Writing is hard. Persevere. After each word, the next word has already burst from its cast and grown wings. All you have to do is catch it and pin it to the page. You find inspiration by writing, not by thinking about what you are going to write. For me, writing and dressing have become analogous. You select words as if picking glass from an injury with tweezers and each piece of clothing so that the ensemble makes an unequivocal statement.
I rifle through a field of blouses and tops before lighting on an ivory cashmere rollneck and a brown leather belt with a snake's head clasp. I reached for a military style jacket with two rows of brass buttons rising at an angle to wide shoulders with epaulettes. The jacket is cerulean, my favourite shade of blue, neither warm nor cold, the colour of the kingfisher. Most of my clothes are a pinch too small and I dress with the vague sense that someone else may later be undressing me. This doesn't happen very often. I am not
that promiscuous. But a girl should always be ready, just in case.
As a painter stands back from the canvas, I stood back from the mirror to study the result. I looked serious, a shade severe, eyes puffy still, but it would have to do. I heard the buzzer, two short sharp presses. He was on time. I walked through to the narrow hall and waited for the third buzz before answering.
'Yes, yes, I'm here. Come up. The door's open. I'm not ready,' I said huffily.
I returned to the bedroom and bound my bad finger to its companion with three layers of surgical blue tape that matched the jacket, pure coincidence, and hooked dangly blue stone earrings to my ears. I played with my hair, killing time. I clipped it up with stray strands escaping the clip, tied a ponytail that would reveal the tattoo, which doesn't suit me, then brushed it straight down to my shoulders, which looks best. Hair. In the end, it's all about hair. I removed my jacket with the lines of buttons and tried on a tweedy thing from Zara with red lapels and red elbow patches. No, no, no. What was I thinking? I put the other one back on, fixed a smile on my lips and whispered into the mirror.
'Be cool. Don't talk too much.'
He was staring out the window and turned, smiling. He looked different in daylight, deeply tanned, for one thing, a red and blue scarf wrapped around his neck, blue jeans, a reefer jacket with the collar turned up like a sailor home on leave. He was freshly shaved and his brown eyes were mischievous and vital. We brushed cheeks like old friends.
'Hi, you look different in the day time,' he said.
'I was just thinking the same about you – you're darker and I'm paler.'
'No, you look great...'
'Flatterer.'
His smiled broadened. 'I love this room,' he said, staring about. 'It's so you.'
'How would you know?'
He thought for a moment. 'You're dressed like your room,' he replied. 'Carefully careless.'
I wasn't sure how to respond. I followed his gaze and tried to see it all through his eyes. I had assembled things I liked, without trying to match anything together. The decor wasn't minimalist, but edited, a few bare adjectives like surf on a sea of simple nouns. My bedroom was a junk store, the closets brim-full, the plastic bags below the bed, ready for the charity shop. But my living area was my writing area and that was uncluttered, dust-free from regular passes of the wet wipes. My walls were pale cream, bare except for the print of the Maja Nude, which he approached for a closer look. The painting, thought to be the first by a European to show pubic hair, was a souvenir from a school trip to The Prado in Madrid. I had chosen it because I knew it would annoy Sister Theresa when it appeared in the dorm.
'Goya?' he asked, glancing back, and I felt ripples roll over my brow, something I was trying to stop doing.
'Ten out of ten,' I replied. 'Now, I thought you were going to take me out to lunch. I'm starving.'
'Me, too. Where shall we go?'
'I have no idea.'
'Isn't this your neck of the woods?'
I grabbed my coat from the back of the door. 'It is now,' I replied, and he glanced back as if I had given away a secret.
'I thought you were more Knightsbridge than Tower Bridge,' he said, like a line from a play, as he held my coat for me to shuffle into.
'Here.' I gave him his iPhone.
'Oh, great, thanks, my whole life's in there.'
'I know.'
Having devoted as much time as it takes to read a chapter of a book on dressing, my padded coat was like rusty scaffolding over an architecturally-pleasing building. I pulled on gloves and we descended the stairs into a crisp bitter day with fewer cars than usual. There was frost on the rooftops and a pair of plastic bags danced on the wind.
The grass crackled as we crossed Shoreditch Park. Birds had left arrow prints in lines across yesterday's snow. We watched men in black jackets exercising pugs and pit-bulls, and it suddenly occurred to me why they chose those particular breeds, it was not because they are tough and dangerous, but because those men and their dogs had a certain similarity in gait and manner. One of the men was yelling at a white dog with a long head and a pirate patch over one eye: 'Oi, you, get your arse over 'ere. You heard me. Get your arse over 'ere.'
I sneezed to muffle my laughter. No one laughs in this park. Laughter makes people think you are laughing at them, and, anyway, what's there to laugh about? I grabbed Tom's arm.
We passed another man with a pit-bull on a leather harness that strapped over its back and under its belly. The animal slobbered and strained at the leash. The man, head-shaved, tattoos on his knuckles and neck, was with a little girl of about five. She was wearing a pink sheepskin coat and matching boots, her blonde hair pulled back and her ears decorated with hoop earrings like wagon wheels on the carriage of her narrow face. She was breaking the ice on the puddles and her dad was alternatively dragging back the dog and shouting at his little girl.
'Come 'ere. Come 'ere. Oi, don't do that. Come 'ere. You listening to me, darlin'? You'll get all filthy.'
The dog kept pulling at the lead, trying to go for a run, the girl in her Christmas clothes kept jumping on the ice, and the man, who clearly adored his daughter, kept shouting, trying to prevent his dog from being a dog, his little girl from being a little girl. I glanced at Tom, but he was looking the other way. Pigeons scurried about our feet like a grey tide.
'Do you like pigeons?' I asked, trying to get his attention.
'They curry them in Sri Lanka.'
'They remind me of people...'
'Really?'
I'd got myself all worked up. 'They're greedy, aggressive, cowardly, all pumped up and pleased with themselves. Look, that one's too fat to fly.' I pointed. 'What happened to all the blackbirds and wrens and robins?'
'Posing on your Christmas cards,' he said.
'You shouldn't have looked, they're private.'
'I had to find out your name somehow.' He grinned. 'Is it Kate or Katie?'
'Catherine, I replied. 'Kate if I'm late and Katie if you're feeling affectionate.'
'Then it shall always be Katie,' he said, and I made an effort not to squeeze his arm any tighter.
'I get the feeling you are a spy, Dr Bridge!' I exclaimed, and he pulled his mobile from his pocket.
'Me a spy?'
'Touché,' I said and we laughed, breaking the convention, and I thought how rare it is to laugh. We smile, we grin, we smirk. But laughter is as rare as the robins. 'What do you do in Sri Lanka?'
'Doctoring, mainly. And other things.'
'Other things?'
'We run an orphanage. You know there was a civil war?' I nodded. 'A lot of Tamils died in the last months, the fighting was terrible. There are thousands of orphans getting older every day. We try to place them with families, but it's not easy.'
'I don't think it's very easy here, either, in England.'
'It's not the same. The Tamils are poor. They only take a child if they can make a contribution to the household expenses, if not straight away, at least in time,' he explained. 'What we have started doing is bringing volunteers from Europe and America to teach trades, carpentry, basket weaving, tailoring, pottery, English...'
'I could do that.'
'I bet you'd be good at it.'
I slowed again. It's not always easy to walk and think at the same time. Our breath made icy streams.
'You're a volunteer?'
'Not exactly. I get paid, I get expenses...'
'You're really doing something; something real. How does that happen?'
He shrugged. 'I was an intern in a hospital for a couple of years, in Southampton, then I was a locum for various GPs. Then, I was bored. Now, I'm not.'
We exited into Old Street. I led the way into Pinchitos, a tapas bar, and ordered in Spanish. I was showing off. I wasn't sure why, and felt ashamed worrying about words and pigeons when Tom worried about lives, about orphans.
'And two beers,' he said to the waiter.
Our knees touched below the table. He raised his glass w
hen the drinks came and we clipped the rims.
'Happy New Year.'
'Yes, we live in hope,' I replied.
There was a lot to say and suddenly we were silent. We sipped our beers. His eyes were the same colour as the lager, golden in the dim light. He slipped his jacket on to the back of his chair and unwound his scarf. He was wearing an old-fashioned white fisherman's sweater, a checked shirt. He leaned forward and I knew before he spoke that he had spent that silent moment thinking about what he was going to say.
'So, do you, you know...have a boyfriend?'
'Now you ask?'
'Well...'
'I gave him the sack. I wouldn't have been on my own for New Year's if I hadn't.'
The food came and his face lit up as he stared at the dishes.
'Looks delicious. What are those?' He pointed at the deep-fried squid.
'Calamares,' I replied, and pointed in turn. 'Chorizo, croquetas, those are spinach, they're chicken. The patatas bravas are like chips, but they cook them in olive oil and slather them with big dollops of ketchup and mayonnaise.' I gave a little shake. 'Finally, the meatballs are called albóndigas, my favourite word in Spanish.'
He speared one of the albóndigas and held it to my lips. The restaurant appeared to go silent and I wondered if everyone had stopped to look. Our eyes were locked together and my instinct wasn't to take it from his fork, but then, as if I had lost my will, my head dipped forward, my mouth gaped open and I gobbled up the meatball whole. He wiped the corners of my lips with a paper napkin.
'Thank you, doctor.'
As I grazed over the dishes, he ate quickly, hungrily, with the nervous energy that sheds calories. He swigged his drink and I felt a certain tenderness when a splash of tomato from the patatas bravas landed on his fisherman's sweater. The waiter returned to the table with a basket of bread. Tom asked for another two beers.
'No, just a jug of tap water, please,' I said.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 3