The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  The thing about love is that it is just too large to fuck off in a hurry, if at all.

  I understand how much love you feel right now.

  Not many people are so foolish that they will say this wise thing. It’s a great humiliation to admit that we can sometimes feel this big.

  To say he understood how much love I felt, even with nothing to love, was to utter the sort of secret that is kept for very good reasons. As I’d been doing quite a lot of that myself lately, I felt exonerated. Someone else was doing the blurting for a change. He reminded me that our love is not something created for a special person. A special person is created by our love.

  My special person had gone. But the love remained and had become unmanageable. In pointing this out, Hayden became my higher power. He said that he understood; having fallen into oceanic silence, I said nothing.

  As I am not much of a drinker, there are few moments of mutually desired sexual activity in my life that have not been preceded by prattle. ‘Would you mind if I kissed you?’ or ‘Could I possibly touch you there?’ are the sorts of things I am wont to say, not only because I am a championship league talker but because I went to university in the nineties where it was very standard to utter contracts of sexual consent. ‘Is it okay if I penetrate you gently?’ became a routine first acquired from manuals prepared by the Women’s Collective, and later maintained for my general love of talking.

  On this occasion, however, there was no sex preamble and it might seem that I am the sort of cock about to tell you some malarkey like ‘no words were necessary’. But words weren’t actually necessary at all.

  But before you begin, and not before time, to despise me, ‘no words were necessary’ does not necessarily describe a good thing. It doesn’t mean that the desire was so intense and pure it transcends all attempts to describe it.

  I can describe it. The stuff that was going on here wasn’t very magical.

  The fact was that Hayden A, impressive and independent as he was in speech, was just as susceptible to flattery as anyone. The sight of his own wisdom reflected in an older face really got to him. My face, acting as a mirror, compensated momentarily for my lack of a dick. What he saw was evidence of his own youthful force.

  I think what I might have been guilty of here was confusing Hayden’s youth for hope—even if he had been talking about the death of meaning. Perhaps that was my misapprehension. I’m not sure. It could have been the case that I was simply sick of masturbating. Also, he was a gorgeous little twink.

  None of what I did with Hayden is terrible. Nor is it pathetic. It just happened to unfold next to a council rubbish bin. With a gay dude who was maybe twenty, twenty-one . . .

  We led each other to the bin and gave ourselves over to vanity, rushing hope and silence.

  Being well under 30, he had a very agile thumb and played me like an Xbox. Being well over 30, I had a great deal of gratitude so I played him like a horn. It was, in fact, the best and most thorough blozzer I had at that time ever offered to a gentleman and he thanked me for my end-to-end service. I did swallow after all.

  After I had disposed of my pamphlet, bought one packet of sugar-free mints and one of moist towelettes from the 7-Eleven, we said a cordial goodbye.

  Fifteen down. Eighty-five dates remaining.

  I never returned to Al-Anon. This was partially due to my everyday pessimism, which had returned in full force when I was on my knees, post-climax, by a bin. It was also out of fear that I’d bump into Hayden, who probably felt bad not only for finger-banging an old dyke but that he’d done what they call in the program the ‘thirteenth step’, that is, getting off with a vulnerable newbie. He needn’t have, though. His actions, in my view, were those of pure love, even if largely for the love of himself. Which was not a bad thing at all. He was very lovable.

  But I mainly did not return to Al-Anon because I had got what I came for. It was not really the sex, which was adequate, that slightly improved me. It was that the entire evening was at once so foul and so sublime.

  It was, and remains, very funny to think of myself being fingered by a precocious twink half my age, and at least one dress size smaller. It was very instructive to learn that a room full of strangers can produce real and mutual love for an hour at a time. It remains very moving to think that we can occasionally coincide with someone in our grief.

  Hayden knew that my love was leaking all over the shop. That someone, or even a group of someones, was prepared, even for a bit, to absorb my love made the terrible fact of it seem much more manageable.

  I can’t say this exchange gave me much hope. I can say that it offered relief. I slept relatively well. I wouldn’t have even bothered bathing before I blundered into bed, but did so as Eleven was so fascinated by my bin-smell I knew he would interrogate me with his snout all night.

  If I could ever again face Kay, on whom I had bled so profusely, I would buy her a fifty-dollar entrée and tell her the story of how Al-Anon changed my life in just one evening.

  If brief mutual love was possible, then perhaps a more sustained sort was, too. Al-Anon gave me faith that Helen One Hundred was not a totally shit idea.

  20

  Three weeks, incalculable texts

  By the next Sunday, I saw that the Helen One Hundred was a totally shit idea.

  First, that callous, narcissistic, faithless tit John hadn’t contacted me in days. Or, perhaps, a day. Yes, I had told him some malarkey about how I was ‘busy’ with ‘work’ ‘all month’. But this should not have prevented him from ignoring me and claiming all my time for himself. That he had not been driven for almost an entire day to contact my Very Fucking Special self in a colossal fit of passion was a sure sign of masculine weakness. I hoped he was enduring a wholesome menu and dreary sacred sex with Arachnia, the baby-killing doula.

  Second, I had online dating interaction that morning of a quality typified by a chap called 9_2_make_u_cum.

  ‘hi ladies,’ he wrote, ‘i got 9 2 make u cum.’

  On the Lord’s day!

  My concerns about this message, and its author, were several. After spending three days on the sex internet, I had learned to forgive many errors of expression, including a lack of capitalisation (although I still wasn’t tolerant of unnecessary capitalisation, particularly when applied to any Lesbian who was not Sappho herself). However, the fact that I had been pluralised was a worry, in both a grammatical and a psychological sense. Ladies.

  An introductory message that simply restated the obvious promise of its author’s username also seemed a bit bonkers. Furthermore, I have a fairly shallow vagina and no real capacity for ‘9’.

  With no notion how to proceed after such an introduction I simply typed: ‘Really?’

  ‘Fo sho,’ came the reply. This claim was supported by a picture of the 9, alongside a subscription-television remote control, whose length it slightly exceeded.

  9_2_make_u_cum: yo check ur foxtel remote im bigga

  MidLifeISIS: I thank you for your interest in (a) my multiple selves and (b) the eager promotion of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment distribution empire. He surely needs the boost. I, or we, regret that as I have the option of banging myself up the arse with a napkin ring—and it is one of fairly good quality that I bought from a reputable online vendor—I am not at current liberty to meet a fine fellow like you. If things don’t work out with the dinnerware or a catastrophic event befalls the earth and we have the only two sets of intact mammal genitals within it *and* I’ve misplaced this napkin ring and all those others in my collection, I’ll certainly be in touch. Otherwise, I wish you all the best with your television viewing, whose wireless operation I hope is not clogged by semen. Can’t have you missing Downton.

  Then I texted Celine, whom I knew was a Foxtel subscriber, to make sure that the for-scale remote was around nine inches. I also wanted to let her know there was an online person called 9_2_make_u_cum, which I knew she’d find funny.

  Celine: Nine to make you come!!!!!!
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  Celine: Could I possibly get his phone number?

  A few minutes later, my friend replied again with a picture of her own Foxtel remote device set next to a tape measure. It was 20.5 centimetres, which, upon consulting Google, we learned was just over eight inches in the old money, thereby legitimising the claims made by 9_2_make_u_cum.

  Australia has long been a very metric nation. Yet the inch unit had persisted with my age-mates for the measurement of cock. I asked Celine, who is more than a decade younger than me, if imperial was still used to evaluate those penises in her age-range.

  Celine: Yep. Dudes my age use inches as well. Not sure why. Perhaps it makes it easier for them to extend the truth?

  Celine: Nobody even sends me dick pics anymore. How do I even live?

  And then she called, which Millennials rarely do. She had an idea that she found Very Exciting.

  At a library not too far from my home, there was that night to be an event known as Literary Speed Dating. This was bound by the rules of regular nineties speed dating: basically a case of matchmaking musical chairs but with added intellectual elitism.

  ‘I know you’re usually too much of a snob to deign to mix it with other snobs,’ said Celine. ‘But considering that all you’ve got so far is a few big words from some shadowy manboy, possible syphilis of the throat and a huge library of dick pics, you might want to give it a try.’

  Literary Speed Dating demands that each participant brings their favourite novel. Few of those people sufficiently insecure to attend an event with the word ‘literary’ in its title, of course, would bring their favourite novel. We’d all bring our most self-verifying novel; the thing with which we wanted to be identified, not necessarily the thing that we loved.

  My favourite novel, or at least the one that has brought me the most pleasure, is Carry on, Jeeves. It’s hilarious. I would not, however, want it put about that valet Jeeves is my fictional hero or, by Jove, that I secretly adore Wooster, who is such an oofy cove. People might think me a protector of cruel class structures, which is not the case. If I was in favour of any kind of hierarchy, it was only that of literary taste. Which, as it turned out, P.G. Wodehouse was too. ‘There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature,’ he is alleged to have once said.

  This quote, with which I agreed despite knowing that I should not, was written on the Facebook event page. So, in this case, anything by Wodehouse was definitely too obvious.

  I wondered about a subtler title.

  The terrible truth was that I had given up on novels a few years back—about the time I started being conscientiously miserable. Fiction is a pleasure obtainable only by those who do not hate their own lives so much they are unable to consume idealised accounts of others’. As such, I had long been on an unhappy diet of Marxist nonfiction or senseless marketing briefs.

  The only novel I had read in about a decade was Fifty Shades of Grey. Which I have read often as I really liked taking the piss out of it, particularly with Celine, who attributed to E.L. James a partial cure for her major depressive illness on account of this author being so very, very funny.

  Over a year, Celine and I must have texted each other all of the sentences from that unintentionally camp book at least twice. A few months after the book’s publication, and days after I had attempted to use it for wanking, I began sending Celine passages from it and she began to send them right back. We had both been unhappy for different reasons and became mutually dependent on this exchange for some time. So when she didn’t send me at least one per day, I knew that she was suffering a serious depressive episode and would immediately call her sister. Otherwise, it was a regular trade of:

  He’s my very own Christian Grey popsicle.

  Or:

  My inner goddess is doing the dance of the seven veils.

  Or, my favourite:

  His voice is warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel . . . or something.

  This last one always buoyed my confidence as a writer.

  I supposed that I could take Fifty Shades, cock my head, bite my lip (‘I’d like to bite that lip, Anastasia Steele!’) and talk about my Inner Goddess all evening until someone got the joke that Celine and I had so ardently overworked. But piss-taking wasn’t likely to be a good romantic tactic outside of my currently paused ‘relationship’ with manboy John. If I wanted to progress beyond being mouth-fucked by a gay teenager next to a bin, I probably needed to play nice.

  I needed a novel that said something clear and palatable about me to fifteen male persons with whom I’d endure two minutes of ‘literary’ conversation.

  ‘I am trying to find a novel on my shelf that represents me, HALP!’ I texted Celine about as soon as I’d hung up.

  She replied, ‘Don’t you dare bring The Bell Jar.’ Which is good general advice, but was no immediate help at all.

  ‘Just find some writing that means almost nothing to anyone,’ she wrote next. Which is actually the advice that brings success to the best commercial copywriters. Before she had an epiphany/serious depressive episode, Celine was paid much more handsomely than I ever was to do this sort of work. She was, when she was unwell, good at saying nothing. She had said to me once or twice that she wished, now that she was well, that everything wasn’t so meaningful.

  Writing without meaning is a tall order. Unfortunately, the newly dumped infer every meaning from every word. Thanks to John, I had recently discovered about 70 new meanings for the phrase ‘Hi Helen’. So, given that there was nothing I would not find meaningful, I considered bringing an actual favourite from the shelf.

  My favourite novel at university had been Shelley’s Frankenstein. Probably not a good idea. This book, reasonably considered the foundational work of science fiction, could send a beckoning signal to an Arthur C. Clarke nerd—no diss to the sci-fi faithful, but I just wasn’t up to any person who believed in the future.

  Frankenstein might also cause persons to think me dark. Not dark like the desire pooled in the sexy loins of Anastasia Steele, but, you know, darkly depressed.

  I didn’t need any help on that count. I was already darker than the dark shadow of a miserable Promethean monster drowned in a cup of Starbucks’ darkest roast. One with no milk, served during a midnight power failure in Christian Grey’s dungeon at a moment of lunar eclipse. So, it was a no to Mary Shelley, who would either illuminate or darken me falsely.

  I remembered that the last novelist I’d gone truly mad for was Jeanette Winterson, but as this was not a lesbian event, such a declaration could only advance my loneliness. Or, possibly, set me up with the lady librarian. Which was a thought.

  I’ve always fancied lady librarians.

  Who hasn’t?

  I’m sure that lady librarians, who are universally suspected of exquisite perversion, are all already taken. Probably taken polyamorously. Whatever the case, no easy bet like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit would tempt these hotties from their sexually and textually rich lifestyles.

  I still didn’t know what to bring, and Eleven, never a keen student of literature, was unhelpful on this count.

  It was a bit of a shock, as a former serious scholar of English, to find that I had lost the knack for literary criticism. I just didn’t know what would fly. I decided to make a list of books from my shelf not to bring. I started with Sylvia Plath, as per Celine’s advice, and moved on to Jodi Picoult.

  I hadn’t purchased this Picoult book but had stolen it in a moment of literary activism. I had come across it when a client had dispatched me to a health retreat for five days; I was there to write some uplifting detox copy. If I overlooked all the yin, yang and Healing Power of Herbs, I had a decent time. I lost three kilos and enjoyed two colonic treatments.

  Now I am a fan of both losing weight and sticking things in my arse, but I wasn’t a fan of the fat-farm library, which was dreadful. As there was no ‘toxifying’ television in the resort, I was forced to read a Jodi Picoult novel. (It was e
ither that or a book on shamanism.) I had liked it only slightly more than Fifty Shades of Grey and even a little less than my teleconference with an ‘actual’ shaman. Which is still not an incident I can talk about.

  Anyhow, I had stolen the book to prevent others from reading it. Don’t ask me why I found it so offensive. It’s probably just because I am vile and I dislike women who can feel things.

  Eventually, I went with Anna Karenina. Don’t hate me. Or do. In either case, please know I will continue to hate myself so consummately, you needn’t even bother. And in news that will be unsurprising to anyone who can spell the word ‘book’, I was not the only chick holding Anna that night. She’s the literary equivalent of a white button-down shirt. Everyone believes they will look good with this staple. Hardly anybody does.

  But it could have been worse. I could have gone with Catch 22, which about half the chaps had. What is this supposed to say about a suitor? Either, ‘I’m a complex and self-consciously disturbed person who believes he can see the true nature of things better than you’, or ‘I haven’t heard that intellectually conceited white boys are supposed to carry ’round Infinite Jest yet.’

  This was the first library I’d visited in years. The cheap nature of my work had rarely led me to them, and even though I had enjoyed libraries at one time, I had long since given up doing anything that I enjoyed. But I had, in extreme youth, spent enough time in libraries to feel comfortable in one again now.

  Libraries hadn’t changed much. Even though there were fewer shelves and many more PC terminals and children’s discovery areas than in those libraries of my memory, this one smelled just the same. You know that smell. That not entirely unpleasant flesh-mildew smell with top notes of compost. Whatever that library smell is, apparently technology hadn’t yet delivered its antidote.

  There was a lady at a central table who looked very much like BDSM Odette. Same lavish silhouette, same snarl and similar magenta-coloured hair. It made perfect sense that this was the style of the modern librarian: a sexy, curvy dom with a good ’do and little patience.