Sixteen, Sixty-One
Page 3
I don’t think I live in either, though. Half the time I seem to be daydreaming: thinking, scheming, planning. And then when I wake up it all hits me again and I get a great wave of depression at the sorry facts of my life.
You probably want to slap me right now. I would. I mean, there are starving kids in Africa and I’m complaining that I have no friends! Not really comparable, I know. My mum says I’m self-indulgent. She cries a lot of the time too, though. I just have issues, you could call it paranoia (is it ‘io’?). I mean, I always find I don’t trust people. Why should I? I don’t trust myself even. I’m two-faced and I lie, so how can I expect all the other girls not to be bitching behind my back? I can’t stand myself. I cringe as I say things and I hate being shy. I hate the way I go red and my eyes fill up with water at the slightest things. I hate biting my nails, I hate how people intimidate me just because they don’t hate themselves. I don’t hate the way I look all the time, but I’m forever wishing I was someone else.
*
By the time Matthew got his hands on my diary, there were many pages of similar complaints about my mother, school, nobody understanding me and the black bags under my eyes. But there were a couple of other things that made me hesitate when he gently asked to read my thoughts.
‘I want to know you inside out.’
‘I know you’re writing it because you want to be read, so why not let me?’
‘It would be the most intimate act imaginable.’
Firstly, of course, I worried because by this time he featured quite extensively. There was probably nothing in there I wouldn’t say to his face given we’d developed such an open form of conversation, but still, what would it be like to have him see things like this in ink:
14/08/00
The only Uncle I have is Matthew, who is four times my age. It scares me because I’ve become quite dependent on him but he’s going to leave me. Be it death or moving to Bournemouth like Annabelle’s always talking about or me going off to university, he’s not always going to be here and that makes me want to weep.
22/08/00
Of course, I wouldn’t go there. Yuk. I can’t believe my mind just came up with that. He’s just my best friend and I’m looking for a father figure. It must be all those French films we’re watching.
29/08/00
I can’t help it. I was in the chemist’s the other day and the woman in front looked ancient. She had a prescription three pages long. I looked over her shoulder and read her date of birth. 1926. She was 74. All I could think was that, when I’m thirty, that’ll be Matthew. He’ll turn seventy the same year I’m twenty-six.
The second thing that I worried would set my diary apart from any other sixteen-year-old’s Matthew happened to read was the confession that had made one of my ex-boyfriends, Todd, exclaim, ‘Oh God, you’re just confused. Every girl I’ve ever met says that. Get over it, you’re not a lesbian!’ I didn’t know if I was a lesbian or not, but after the incident with Todd I stopped admitting seriously to friends that I thought I might like girls. I did, however, scrawl lines and lines about my concerns and ventured tentative explorations behind the mask of alcohol.
22/03/00
I figured out why I’m writing a diary. It’s because I watched Girl, Interrupted (my favourite film, along with American Beauty and The Virgin Suicides) and she writes a diary in that. I guess I thought it might help me figure out some of my feelings. Watching that film again was really scary. It’s about a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder and the scary bit is I could relate to everything she said: all about not fitting in, not being listened to, not being able to just accept life and finding it easier to live in a fantasy land. The only thing I didn’t really relate to was the whole promiscuous thing – still being a virgin and all. But even that’s quite shady because I think that if I had the confidence, I may be promiscuous. I keep thinking about shagging some random girl. I don’t even know how it would work but I look at Jenna and Claire and Becky in class and I just want to press my lips onto theirs. Sometimes I worry they can see my thoughts, so I tell them I was thinking about Juan, this fit new Spanish guy in my tutor group. But, truth is, I’m far more interested in the lesbian thing. I heard some girls in the year below got really drunk last Saturday and all took each other’s tops off and had an orgy. All the girls in the toilets squealed with horror and said to keep away from them in PE in case they perved on us, but I just wanted to ask who they were and how I could make friends. Am I a freak?
*
Matthew had asked me ages ago whether I kept a diary and what security measures I had to prevent my brother and parents from reading it. He’d also asked in a teasing tone what secrets I recorded there and whether I kept secrets from him. For a few weeks I’d been entertaining the idea of letting him see it, of allowing another person to read me. I’d read and reread my own hand, wondering what Matthew might make of it: would he be shocked by my curiosities about my sexuality? Would he laugh at my immaturity? Would he think I was a bad daughter because I wrote angrily about my mother? Would he realise I was a loser with no friends at school and not want to spend time with me any more? Would he be offended by my thoughts about him? Would he still like me?
Eventually these doubts were outweighed by the heavy desire to be known: for a single person in the world to understand all that was in my head and help me work it out. One Sunday, after we’d had tea and chatted about Emily Dickinson, I removed the tatty book from my backpack and, with a trembling hand, offered it to Matthew. I paced miserably home and woke a dozen times in the night wondering if I had an email from him.
The next day, Matthew hung my diary from our doorknob in a plastic Safeway’s bag, along with two other items. The first was a new, spiral-bound, orange-flowered notebook; the second, a palm-sized engraved metal shape that Google later informed me was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for immortality. My immediate concern, though, was the printed page wrapped around the object:
Extract from The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler
The ordinary mortal in our urban civilisation moves virtually all his life on the Trivial Plane.
You are not ordinary, Natalie.
I saw Matthew a few hours later and all seemed normal, but as he poured me a cup of tea he asked nonchalantly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were wondering about such things?’
I looked at him blankly.
‘It’s perfectly natural. In fact, it’s essential for Uncles to be open to love in any possible form. Most people go through their lives too afraid to admit their desires; they lock them up and only let out what their mummies say is okay, then end up in dead-end marriages having sex twice a year and finding their wives have been having an affair with the gardener.’
I giggled at his wild, angry gesticulations.
‘Your friends at school are just threatened by your insight. They probably go home and masturbate over you, wishing they had the guts to follow through.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I smiled. ‘But is it okay then? Is it normal?’
‘Why on earth would you want to be normal?’ he chided. ‘But of course it’s okay for you, it’s what you feel. It’s exciting.’
There wasn’t a day that innocence turned to deception and friendship to seduction. The declarations of love and the poetry we were reading lent themselves to hypothetical discussions about erotic possibilities, but they began in the abstract.
‘If society is so wrong that it forbids a perfectly healthy friendship between an old man and a young girl,’ I’d ask, ‘how can we be sure that everything else it deems “wrong” isn’t just as natural?’
‘Exactly,’ Matthew would grin. ‘The machine is there to perpetuate itself, not to protect us. You must find your own rules.’
‘But it’s absurd that a society it doesn’t affect in the slightest condemns it so forcefully. What difference does it make to Mrs Roberts and my mum and Pat down the road whether you’re my best friend and I want to tell you I love you?’
‘None.’
‘And obviously I don’t, but what difference would it make if I wanted that to be romantic love? As long as it made you and me happy and Annabelle was not hurt by it, who else could it possibly affect?’
‘No one.’
‘And it makes you wonder what else we’re being conditioned to disapprove of. Why is euthanasia banned? Why is bigamy illegal? Why can’t tribes live as they want? Homosexuals get married? Lesbians adopt? Prostitutes work in the open and couples swing?’
‘Because true freedom is too much for most people. Only Uncles realise the true possibilities of love and life. And sadly it means they must spend their lives fighting against society just to stay alive.’
By mid-September, we’d all but given up on sorting books. Instead, we’d carry a tray of tea and Eccles cakes into his study and close the door. We’d sit sideways on the chaise and I’d snuggle into his arm while cradling a cup in two hands. Being cuddled by Matthew was my favourite thing and I conveniently ignored the occasional slip of his hand or sniff of my hair.
Sometimes, if we were having an impassioned debate about literature or the world, our faces would get close, our eyes locked together in intensity. One day, his argument trailed off and I thought I must have won my point, but his face remained close and my eyes couldn’t turn away. I felt something tingle in my throat and shoulders. I had a sensation like pressing a bruise and became strangely aware of my sandalled toes. Was it my imagination, or was his face inching closer, were his eyelids drooping closed?
I pulled away and straightened my T-shirt.
Matthew reached for his mug and sat back, smiling.
‘You almost let me kiss you then.’
‘No I didn’t!’ I blurted out, then blushed.
Matthew sipped his tea and muttered, ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’ before replacing his cup and asking what time I’d be able to come tomorrow.
The scene of the almost-kiss was repeated a few days later on the couch in the living room and again over the table in the kitchen. Each time, I allowed myself to indulge that dizzying feeling for a moment longer; smelling his musky cologne and studying his wrinkled lips; tasting and enjoying the unknown before being plunged into the confusing rapids of shame and regret.
I wrote pages in my diary each night, convinced this elastic band of emotions was true passion and I was the only person ever to have felt it so potently. And every second or third weekend, Matthew read my angst-ridden thoughts and told me my soul was beautiful, my life would be incredible.
On 28th September, Matthew succeeded. I wrote in my diary it was ‘Nothing huge, but special all the same.’
That evening, he sent me an email:
From: Matthew Wright
To: Natalie Lucas
Sent: 28 September 2000, 22:37:31
Subject: Thank you
Your mind was beautiful today, your body pure bliss. I belong to you.
Ancient Person of thy heart
*
You can probably see where this is going now. It wasn’t quite as clear-cut and sordid as it might appear. Naive as I may have seemed thus far, I realised there were certain lines that required more consideration than others before crossing.
While the kissing gradually led to ‘sorting books’ in a horizontal position in the top room, I was quite insistent that whatever his hands and mouth did to please me, his belt-buckle was not going to budge. And though we sent emails most evenings telling the other of our desire, dreaming of total abandonment from the safety of separate bedrooms and discussing the orgasmic meeting of my ‘baby kitten’ and his ‘throbbing doppelgänger’, I was certain of one thing: I didn’t want him to be my first.
I was aware mine was an unorthodox adolescence. I realised I could grow to regret it, despite my enlightened knowledge that this was the real world. So, for the sake of damage limitation, I wanted to lose my virginity to someone else. Matthew and I discussed the situation via email only, never referring to it between declarations of love in person.
From: Matthew Wright
To: Natalie Lucas
Sent: 4 October 2000, 09:20:12
Subject: Two roads in a wood
I see you worrying about what the world will think and whether you will be able to take things back, whether you’ll regret our friendship in later life or discover you chose the wrong yellow-brick path. I see you struggling to find the answers and I wish I could take your pain away, because this time for me is beautiful and relaxed. As you grow, you will understand the world has its reason and things will happen as they please. Our decisions always seem more significant before we have made them.
So, if in your deliberations you ever worry about me, please don’t. I am a happy voyeur of your beautiful mind and the conclusions I know it will eventually reach. I cannot, of course, give you advice, but perhaps if you have your A* mathematician’s hat on today, you will appreciate the words of Mr Einstein: ‘Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty of reality.’1
Follow your heart, my love. I will await.
Your very parfait gentle knight
MW
Every night I’d retreat to my room and attack my diary. Matthew told me the decision was in my hands, but our mutual stumbling block was my virginity. He said he couldn’t ‘take the lid off’ that side of me because the first time would inevitably be disappointing and he didn’t want to ruin what we had. I agreed. Everyone said it hurt and I was sure I’d end up hating him. But how could I take the lid off with someone else knowing I was in love with Matthew?
What I needed was a boy my own age who wouldn’t mind being used and whom I trusted enough not to tell the rest of the sixth form about my proposition.
Richard was my target. We had been girlfriend and boyfriend for a short while in Year 10 and had remained flirty friends since. Our ‘relationship’ had ended when Richard had told me, quite seriously, that he had important and dangerous things he had to concentrate on to fulfil his destiny and he couldn’t be distracted by the usual trappings of teenage life. The gossip tree soon filtered to me that Richard had confided in his best friend Andy that he had been approached by an old homeless man while on holiday in Greece who had told him he was the Second Messiah and dark powers were approaching that only he could battle. Ever since, Richard had been bidding for Samurai swords on eBay.
To sum it up, in Richard’s favour:
Single
Too focused to want a girlfriend
Too self-absorbed to bother caring about my motives for such a deed
And, against him:
Possibly slightly unhinged.
I told Matthew I had decided on a person. I suggested the thing to Richard via MSN Messenger. And Richard agreed. The how and where were a little more complicated, so, though it was only October, we decided on New Year’s Eve, knowing somebody would have a party. It was settled. I would pop my cherry as I was meant to: drunk and in someone’s parents’ bed with an acne-ridden boy I found only mildly attractive, and thus I would be free to explore the world of Uncles with one less worry.
Then came the green candle.
On 4th November, I received the lyrics to a Leonard Cohen song via email. The first line was blown up in bigger font and some words made bold:
I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me.
Attached was an extract from Matthew’s diary:
November 2000
So, old man, what are you going to do?
About what? And who are you calling old? I thought we were only as young as we feel.
Fool. I suppose you’re telling me she’s the elixir of life?
Natalie? Yes, she might be.
So, what will you do?
I
can’t hurry her. Her beauty and charm is in her innocence – she needs to find her own way.
But what about you? What about your needs?
My needs are less important than hers.
Less important, perhaps, but no less pressing. Every man has needs; it’s foolish to deny them.
Yes, yes, we’ve been down this path before. I know I must do something.
So?
Well, Suzie keeps pestering me.
The PhD student who snaps at you if you bring her flowers and doesn’t care if you don’t call? Sounds perfect.
Yes, and she tells me she’s spent the past six months in the gym.
But..
But every time I see her she tells me she wants my child.
Yikes.
Indeed. She says I won’t have to be involved, but I’m not so sure.
You think she’s tricking you?
Not deliberately, but women are irrational, they change their minds, especially when children are involved. I’ve had enough of that for a lifetime.
So, what’s the alternative?
Becky’s eager.
The one with the nice bum?
Yes, you perv, the one with the nice bum. But she’s not much older than Natalie. Eighteen, and nowhere near as mature.
Could be fun, though.
Yes, perhaps.
But..
But my heart’s not in it, I suppose. Even though I know I need something and Natalie’s talking about experimenting with some boy from school..
Wait! You’re talking about living like a monk while she goes around with spotty teenagers? You’re even more of a fool than I thought.
Perhaps. A fool for love?
Pah. It doesn’t seem fair at all.
No, but she’s a child, I can’t expect her to understand. I can’t make demands on her.