Ralph's Party

by Lisa Jewell

  In contrast, Jem was tiny and quirkily pretty. She had good taste in music and she kept a picture of her dog by her bed. She was also nice and polite and gave the impression that she’d be a pleasure to be with. Not Ralph’s type at all.

  He bit into a biscuit and a large chunk fell to the floor. As he stooped to pick it up he noticed a pile of books under the table, worn and battered looking, with various years inscribed down their spines in gold blocking, or handwritten in pen and marker. They were diaries – and, by the look of them, not impersonal desk diaries but proper, from-the-heart, highly personal girls’ diaries. They stretched from 1986 to 1995. He wondered what had happened to 1996, the current diary, and then he saw it just peeping out from under Jem’s dressing-gown.

  It was open but obscured by the gown; he could see the date – it was last Thursday’s – and snatches of handwriting, small and curly like Jem herself: ‘ … beautiful flat … might be shy – I’m sure they’re not … this be my destiny – I’m so excited … Smith could be him but seems a bit … Ralph … ‘Ralph stopped abruptly. What the hell did he think he was doing, snooping around in this poor girl’s room looking at her fucking diary, of all things? This really was very, very sad indeed. He almost left at that point, but his interest had been stimulated to boiling-point.

  His heart was racing as he pulled the dressing-gown out of the way and his jaw dropped as he read the entry in full. It seemed Jem thought she was here because of some dream or other, she was following her destiny, she was excited because she thought that either Smith or himself would be the man of her dreams – literally. Ralph was inclined to think that Jem was some sort of fruitcake, but as he read on he found himself warming to her dream, her destiny. Not only was he in the running, he had the advantage. Look, she’d written it: ‘Smith seems a bit uptight, and he’s not really my type to be honest. Ralph seems more likely – very lean and sexy and sort of dangerous looking’ – Ralph’s stomach tingled pleasantly as he absorbed the compliment – ‘he seems like he’d be more fun to be with. The problem is, he’s got a girlfriend.’

  This was all true, thought Ralph – apart from the bit about Claudia being a problem. He was more fun to be with than Smith these days. That hadn’t always been the way, but over the last few years, since his obsession with Cheri had taken over his life, Smith had lost some of his old sparkle and self-confidence.

  There was no entry after that. Ralph put down the book and took a deep breath, resisting the urge to turn back the page, to read more. He placed the diary on the bed at the same angle he’d found it, painstakingly rearranging the blue gown over it and hoping she hadn’t left a hair draped across it, to trap sad, snooping diary-readers.

  He sat on her crumpled bed now, so unlike Claudia’s, which took ten minutes to make, with new bedsheets every day and complicated throw and cushion arrangements that had to be just so, otherwise she’d complain. One of Jem’s bras was folded into the sheets. It was black and plain and old looking. He picked it up and examined the label – little Jem was not so little: 34D. Where the hell had she been hiding those? Claudia had breasts that complemented her willowy stick-insect frame, small and pointy and incapable of forming a cleavage even when pushed firmly together from both sides. Ralph realized that he missed breasts, he missed that projection of soft voluminous womanliness that moved when it was touched and was always warm and welcoming. Other bits of women’s bodies sometimes felt like they might bite or strangle or constrict, but never the breasts – they were friendly and relaxed.

  Ralph was disturbed to find himself running the strap of Jem’s bra across his top lip and smelling the thin strip of worn black elastic. He removed it quickly and placed it on his lap, turning his hand into a fist, which he inserted into the cup. It fitted easily, leaving plenty of room for a second fist. My God, he thought, Jem is what Claudia would describe as a ‘clever dresser’. Whenever Ralph disagreed with Claudia’s assessment of another woman as fat she would explain that he had been fooled by clever dressing – underneath that strategically placed scarf or sweater the woman was really a vast rolling mound of fat, he just couldn’t see it because he was a man and oblivious to the tricks that women played. Maybe she was right, he thought now, admiring the capacity of Jem’s bra. He certainly hadn’t noticed those before.

  He placed the bra back into its crevice in the bedsheets. He was beginning to feel a bit seedy and uncomfortable with himself and was relieved to note that he didn’t have an erection.

  Ralph was tempted to stay in Jem’s room; he was enjoying its snugness and femininity. He wanted to see what she kept in the drawers, take the top off her deodorant and smell the ball, read all her diaries and find out what she was doing on specific days years ago, he wanted to climb into her bedclothes, under her duvet and between her sheets, his head on her aquamarine-cased pillows, to smell her and feel the echo of her warmth.

  Instead, he stood up slowly and ruffled the duvet back into shape, checked there were no traces of his visit, left the door ajar as he’d found it and stepped back into the hall. Tonight could be quite interesting.

  As he sat back down at his desk, trying to think of something constructive to do which didn’t involve leaving the flat, using the phone or expending too much energy, his thoughts kept returning to the tantalizing snippets he’d read in Jem’s diary, and he felt an overwhelming wave of intrigue and curiosity. What was all this about dreams and destiny? What else had she written about them? And more to the point, what else had she written about him? He couldn’t quite explain it, but for some reason Ralph suddenly had the feeling that life was about to become very complicated.

  Chapter Four

  It seemed to Siobhan that her body was just one big hair-sprouting machine. She’d expected to wrinkle as she aged, she’d expected her hair to lose its pigment, her skin to lose its tautness, but she hadn’t been expecting the slow but insistent arrival of so much bloody body hair.

  Starting from the bottom up, she had developed little lawns of mousy hair on the fleshy bits on her big toes. Then of course there were the legs, but she’d always had hair there – that was socially acceptable. Even supermodels had hairy legs, and there were aisles full of products in Boots that you could buy without shame or embarrassment.

  It was what happened at the top of her legs that bothered Siobhan the most, the dense jungle of coarse hair that seemed more and more intent as the years went by to find its way out of her underwear and join the party taking place on her thighs and creep up her stomach in a thin arrow pointing to her belly button. The line looked particularly unpleasant in the winter, standing out starkly against the now-spongey white expanse of her stomach.

  But it didn’t stop there. She had noticed lately, among the pale soft down that slept between her breasts, a few renegade hairs growing longer, darker and thicker than the rest. Why? And nipple hair, spidery legs forcing their way through the otherwise unblemished surface of her breasts to spoil the aesthetics and make her feel ugly. Hair on her upper lip, too, that made her self-conscious when people stood too close to her, and even the odd whisker growing quietly but determinedly from cheeks and chin.

  The soul-destroying, time-consuming rituals to rid herself of so much unwanted hair were almost daily now. Bleach for her moustache, a razor for her legs and under her arms, rancid-smelling cream for her pubic hair, and tweezers for her toes, nipples, chin and eyebrows. Did men have even the vaguest idea how much work went into women keeping themselves smooth and childlike, into removing anything from their bodies that might even begin to be described as masculine? Would men themselves be prepared to do it if fashion and society had decreed that they, too, should be alabaster-smooth?

  And how come in other countries it was acceptable? How come a million Italian women could walk shamelessly and proudly along beaches every year, a veritable bearskin of black hair cascading from their bikinis and lush pelts of foliage dangling from their armpits? How come in France they had a special and affectionate word to describe the fem
ale moustache, yet an English woman would be embarrassed to walk down the street with more than a quarter-millimetre of stubble on her legs in case she were branded a dyke?

  How high would it be, if she were to pile up the last ten years’ worth of hateful hair? It was all so thankless. Like housework. From the very second it was done it was getting worse again, closer to needing to be done again. Hair was so insidiously persistent and never ending – it just grew and grew and grew, relentlessly. It never went on holiday or had a day off and it didn’t care how fond you were of a particular part of your anatomy, it just decided to grow there anyway, like weeds on a smooth stone wall.

  Siobhan had once tried to cultivate an interest in gardening, thinking herself the type, but it had quickly become clear to her that it was just like housework and unwanted hair – frustrating and for ever. Hair, weeds and dust – Siobhan hated them.

  She was doing something that she seemed to spend more and more of her time doing lately – hating her body. Not only was she getting hairier by the day but she was also getting fatter, and it was now no longer a case of having put on a few pounds and her clothes being a bit tight – she had reached a size that meant people who didn’t know her might refer to her as the ‘fat woman’. Most of her clothes now hung redundant in her wardrobe, while she lived in the same pair of leggings and a small selection of shapeless tunic tops and jumpers. If she bought anything new it would mean having to go to shops she’d never been to before and buying clothes in sizes that screamed to the world ‘I am fat.’

  Karl never said anything about it – and it remained unspoken. He still touched her and stroked her and hugged her, still held her hand in public and told her he loved her. He’d never really been a compliment man anyway. Siobhan wondered what he really thought. She certainly didn’t undress in front of him now or walk around the flat naked, and their habit of taking baths together had petered out unnoticed and, again, unremarked upon. She could always ask him straight out like other women would, ‘Karl, do you think I’ve got fat?’, but she knew that he wouldn’t lie like other men would, he was the most honest man she’d ever known, and he would say, ‘Yes, Shuv, you have,’ and then where would the conversation go? What would happen next? It might emerge that he found her repulsive, that he hated her for letting herself go, for not loving him enough any more to care what she looked like.

  The truth was that Karl didn’t find her repulsive. He actually quite liked the shape of Siobhan’s body now. She’d always been a bit out of proportion, with skinny legs, a too-wide back and a flat bottom, and now she was more balanced, her breasts looking less incongruous, her bottom more rounded and feminine. She felt nice, especially in the dark, firm and ripe and plump, her arms solid and corpulent, her thighs smooth and soft. It was almost as if the extra layers of fat had given her body a new lease of life, put the bounce back into her thirty-six-year-old skin – she felt like a chubby young schoolgirl, and Karl had never slept with a chubby young schoolgirl, even when he was a chubby young schoolboy.

  Siobhan still had the most beautiful hair he’d ever seen, thick swags of summer corn down to her waist, always shiny and clean and smelling of good things. So much of the early romance and attraction in their relationship had revolved around her magnificent hair. He would see it everywhere he went around campus, either swinging freely to her waist, catching the light even on a cloudy day, or tantalizingly folded and pinned up like lustrous puckered gold. That hair tormented his soul for six months. His heart would miss a beat and then pump uncontrollably whenever he saw it; it was like a deafening siren signifying the faint possibility that he might have to walk past Siobhan and display his blush, his desire, his embarrassment. He fantasized about removing those tortoiseshell combs and clips, seeing her hair spread thickly like freshly churned butter over his pillowcase, or spilling over the back of the passenger seat of his 2CV. He wanted to wash it for her, comb and look after it for her, almost like it was a pet, an animate part of her – something living and breathing that encapsulated everything he wanted in a woman and everything that was wonderful about Siobhan.

  Siobhan had been unaware of any of this. As far as she was concerned, Karl was the good-looking Student Union guy, the one with the Russian name and the Irish accent, the one she saw pinning posters up on noticeboards, the one who seemed to know everyone on campus, the one with the 2C V and the rockabilly quiff, and the one who had been quite conspicuously going out with Angel, a bleached-blonde, gamine-cropped, baby-faced wet dream of a girl from the first year, since for ever. Siobhan found him charming and attractive, loved his Irish accent, his sunny disposition, his well-formed bottom but, as far as she was concerned, there was a certain level of inevitability when a couple were as attractive and popular as Angel and Karl, and it was hard to imagine them enjoying anything less than a flawless, companionable and highly sexually charged relationship. She imagined the two of them sometimes, legs entwined on sun-drenched pure-white sheets, biting and digging their fingernails into each other, or laughing together in a pub with friends, their chemistry overwhelming and infectious. She smiled at him from time to time, and he smiled back, but that was as far as she imagined it would ever go.

  Siobhan’s hopes and her heart were hydraulically lifted one day by a conversation with a friend who was on the Student Union with Karl.

  ‘She’s a little cow,’ he said, unprompted, of Angel.

  Zing! Hope Alert!

  ‘Really? I always presumed she’d be nice, you know, going out with Karl and everything. They seem like a perfect couple.’

  ‘The man has the patience of a saint. I don’t know how he puts up with her, I really don’t. They row nonstop, and she gives him such a hard time. Karl’s a great bloke, he could do much better than her, and between you and me, I don’t think it’s going to last much longer anyway. I reckon she’s seeing someone else – but I didn’t tell you that.’ He tapped the side of his nose and winked at her.

  Siobhan didn’t need to hear anything else. The passing smiles turned into passing chats, which evolved into long, animated lunches in the park when Angel was in lectures. And, when Karl told her one night after they’d officially been going out together for six weeks that their mutual friend had been so sick of Angel and so tired of hearing Karl going on and on about Siobhan that he’d taken it upon himself to set the wheels of romance in forward motion, it had filled Siobhan with such a deep glow of warmth that she hadn’t needed to wear her coat home.

  Her hair had lived up to his expectations, and even up until a few months ago when they stopped sharing baths, he had shampooed it for her occasionally, gently and meticulously, marvelling at its quality and length and the fact that it was in his hands and he was allowed to touch it whenever he wanted.

  Some men were breast men, some were leg men and some were bottom men. Karl was a hair man. It was hair that turned his head and made mincemeat of his senses.

  Cheri had lovely hair too – not impressive, imposing hair like Siobhan’s, but it was silky and long and a pretty shade of vanilla. He’d noticed her hair before he’d noticed her, last summer; it shone with streaks of sunshine-bleached blonde. It hadn’t been too long before he’d also noticed her long brown legs dangling from tiny summer dresses and short cotton skirts, her elegant shoulders, tanned and angular, and her finely featured face with those wonderful cheekbones and perfect teeth.

  He admired Cheri’s hair now, in an aesthetic, casual sort of way, over the top of his Evening Standard, as he sat behind a large window in a Covent Garden dance studio and watched her in a crop top and Lycra knickers high-kicking her way through the last five minutes of her Acid Jazz class.

  While Siobhan sat naked on the side of the bath ruefully grabbing handfuls of wretched, hateful flesh, three miles across town Karl stood up, folded his paper, greeted Cheri with a kiss and a stroke of her firm, neat buttocks and took her out for lunch to her favourite Modern European restaurant.

  Chapter Five

  It was just starting to g
et dark as Jem walked from her office in Leicester Square to Gerrard Street to buy ingredients for the moving-in meal she had promised to cook for Smith and Ralph. She’d been living with them for just over a week now and she still knew absolutely nothing about them. She’d been out a lot and spent the rest of the time in her room, giving them their space, but now it was time to make friends.

  On the day she’d moved in they had chivalrously although unenthusiastically helped her transport her boxed and bagged belongings from her dirty, French-mustard-coloured Austin Allegro to her room, the three of them processing quietly and industriously up and down the concrete steps like some sort of modern day chain-gang. They had then left her to her own devices for the remainder of the evening while she unpacked in the now somewhat cramped confines of her tiny room, popping their heads around the door every now and then, proffering tea and coffee and asking her politely how it was going.

  Funny, this modern day thing of sharing homes with strangers, Jem had thought. Strangers had always lived together, of course – domestic staff and their employers, lodgers and their landlords – but not like today. Today people were expected to share an equal footing in their homes with strangers; there was no hierarchy. You watched the same television in the same living room, you used the same toilet and bath, shared the fridge, cooked on the same cooker and had some sort of obligation to treat this new person in your home as a friend, not an employee, not a lodger. Jem had moved around a lot from flatshare to flatshare and always found the first few nights strange and lonely. She had felt Smith and Ralph’s awkwardness as they tried to go about their normal business but she knew that they didn’t feel as relaxed as they would usually as they watched the Australian Grand Prix or Topless Darts. Even though she wasn’t in the room with them, the fact that there was a third person in their home had thrown the dynamics of their nightly routines slightly out of kilter.