I was terrified, but titillated.
His plan was to create a profile on a dating website using our combined details to attract someone to join not just me but us.
In April, we discovered Gaydargirls.com. The profile we made featured just me, as did the picture. ‘You can’t say you’re a couple because then they don’t trust you. You’ll have to meet them first and convince them I’m not a sex fiend,’ Matthew winked.
‘You’ll also need another name. You should have one anyway, for other things,’ he added vaguely.
We spent three hours perfecting the description of me (us) and what I (we) wanted to find. By the evening, we were ready to make it live and Harriet Moore, the ‘sexy Literature student looking for fun’, became a reality.
‘Harry Moore. I like it: both androgynous and greedy.’ Matthew kissed me excitedly and I felt the familiar anticipatory ache between my legs.
In June, I received an email from I<[email protected]. She described her interests as shopping, flirting and playing football; Tori Amos and Aimee Mann were listed under her musical favourites; and her profile picture showed a roundish face with a choppy blonde bob, pink highlights and startling blue eyes. I imagined love.
Her email asked me if I wanted to ‘chat’ and offered her MSN Messenger addy. Sitting at my dad’s PC in the downstairs study, I keyed her into the Add New Friend box. When the sand-timer had finished rotating, a little green figure appeared beside her name, indicating she was online.
Chat with I<3ellen16
Harriet_Moore101: Hey
I<3ellen16: Hey, u found me!!
Harriet_Moore101: Yep
I<3ellen16: Howz uz 2day?
Harriet_Moore101: I’m good. How about u?
I<3ellen16: OK. I had a REALLY boring day at school, but apart from that everyfins peachy
Harriet_Moore101: Tell me about it, I can’t wait for the weekend!!
I<3ellen16: Me either. Wot u up 2?
Harriet_Moore101: Not much, it’s pretty boring where I live.
I<3ellen16: Me too. Tunbridge Wells’s so lame. There’s like one gay night at one club, and they’ve started getting pretty tight about ID.
Harriet_Moore101: That’s one more night than where I live. Quite seriously, I’m the only gay in the village!!
I<3ellen16: Lol! You’re hilarious. You should come see me sometime.
Harriet_Moore101: That’d be cool. Would you show me around?
I<3ellen16: Sure.
Harriet_Moore101: Cool
I<3ellen16: g2g, chat 2 u l8rz
Harriet_Moore101: Oh, ok. Bye.
I<3ellen16: bye sweets xxx
*
On the third day after the end of my last ever term at school, I set out to begin my destiny as an enlightened Uncle lesbian by making up an overly complicated story about going shopping with Claire in Hastings because she needed to find something to wear to her third-cousin’s wedding as her sister had already claimed the colour blue and all of Claire’s favourite clothes were blue, plus it was her boyfriend’s birthday and she needed to buy him a present and he’d seen everything in the shops around us so she had to go somewhere else and needed my opinion because she was rubbish at making decisions. The intention was to bore and confuse my dad so much that he wouldn’t notice that I’d asked for a lift to the wrong station to get to Hastings.
One of the first rules of Bunburying is to keep your story as close to the truth as possible – i.e. never change the place you are going to. You have to think about eventualities: What if a bomb goes off and your parents try to contact you? What if someone tries to rob a bank while you’re in it and you end up on national TV, proving you’re in London rather than Liverpool? What if a car breaks down and you can’t get home, but you’ve said you’re just down the road? What if Hastings turns out to be closed due to freak flooding and you don’t see the news until you’ve waltzed through the door and said you had a fantastic day’s shopping there?
I knew all of this and pondered the possibilities nervously as I plonked into my firm window seat in an empty carriage. There was no excuse; I should have been more careful, and, considering the complex duplicity I’d successfully woven into my life over the past two years, I really should have been able to pull off a simple blind date. But I was nervous. I’d changed six times this morning and had another panic about my casual jeans and T-shirt decision as I left the house. I’d put my hair up, then brushed it over my shoulders, then tried pigtails and half-up, half-down, finally settling back on a ponytail with a few loose strands that I now began to worry. I’d tried no make-up, then just eyeliner, then full face, then scrubbed it all off and stencilled a thick kohl line beneath each of my eyes and dabbed green mascara on my lashes.
Heather, aka I<3ellen16, was to meet me outside the station. She hadn’t been impressed that I didn’t know where her favourite coffee shop was and that I wouldn’t be able to make my own way to the town centre (she’d typed ‘omg, wtf, wot planet r u from?!’), but she’d seemed quite jovial (she’d typed ‘lol’) when she’d finally offered to just pick me up from my train and show me around.
She was late. I fingered a hole in the sleeve of my jacket with annoyance. When a girl vaguely resembling the photo I’d studied sauntered nonchalantly up to me, though, I of course replied: ‘No, I just arrived.’
‘Cool,’ she muttered, making no effort to hide the fact that she was eyeing me up and down. ‘So, you want to go shopping?’
‘Sure,’ I smiled, realising I must have blinked and missed the ‘Hi, hello, how are you? How was your journey? It’s good to finally meet you. Hey, we might even hug at this juncture’-part because Heather was already waiting by the traffic lights at the end of the road.
Still, her distance gave me a chance to subtly assess her in person. She was shorter than I’d imagined, but still about an inch taller than me so that was okay. Her hair had been cut since the picture I’d seen and she seemed to have a sort of natural sourness to her face that had not shown in the soft, posed smile of the photograph. I was a little repelled, but my nervous, desperate excitement won out and I began to picture us meeting like this throughout the holidays, going on picnics, holding hands and kissing by lakes.
The first stop was Gap.
‘You know, I go shopping all the time, so I don’t really need anything. What do you want to buy?’ Heather stood by the security gates at the door with her shoulders slumped and her hands in her pockets.
‘Uh, I don’t know. Whatever I see I guess. I don’t think I’ll spend forty quid on a cardigan, though.’ I fingered the item on the rail in front of me and attempted a light smile.
Heather sneered and muttered something along the lines of, ‘Whatevs.’
Next stop, Fat Face.
‘Like, what do you wear if you don’t wear designer stuff?’ I glanced down at Heather’s baggy jeans and it dawned on me that she’d bought them with those rips already in place, that someone somewhere had artistically torn that denim just so she could look like the sort of person who wears out her clothes but still looks cool.
Don’t get me wrong, I was a seventeen-year-old with an allowance. I bought masses of crap myself. When I think of the money I wasted on shoes I never wore and a collection of forty-six handbags in my teens, I wonder if I could have halved my student loan. But I shopped at New Look and Primark and Mark One. I even snuck into charity shops if I thought nobody from school would see me. I’d kicked up a fuss in primary school when I hadn’t been allowed Adidas tracksuit bottoms for PE, but ever since I’d agreed with my mum that paying five times the price for a logo measuring less than an inch was not just stupid, but actively insane.
We abandoned shopping and tried lunch.
‘I won’t eat anything with olives and I can’t touch the salad garnish,’ Heather explained in the queue. ‘But I’m really good at counting calories – you’re not really thinking about chocolate cake, are you? You know that has like twenty grams of fat in it?!’
Te
n minutes of diet discussion later, I tried to change the subject. ‘So, are you looking forward to getting your results?’ I asked as I tore my mozzarella and olive-stuffed panini and eyed the chocolate cake beside it excitedly.
‘Whatever, I don’t really care. I didn’t try very hard because it’s not like I need A-Levels to do what I want to do.’
‘Oh, what do you want to do?’ I asked, angling for something Heather might be enthusiastic about.
‘Well, like, work with abused teenagers and, you know, on like Pride things.’
‘Oh, cool,’ I smiled. ‘That sounds so much more useful than anything I’m heading for. I’m really excited about going to university, but I feel a bit guilty with my subject choice – like the world needs another English graduate.’
‘Yeah, exactly. And I’ve, like, experienced homophobia and stuff, and it’s something I feel really passionate about,’ she deadpanned.
‘Good for you.’
‘Yeah, anyway, I’ve gotta like meet my mate at four, so I should, like, get going.’ Heather stood up, grating her chair against the floor.
‘Oh,’ I said, standing too, surprised by her sudden departure.
‘You can make your way back to the station from here, can’t you?’
‘Sure. Look, it was great meeting you; I’ve had a really nice time.’
‘Yeah, ditto.’
I took a step around the table, hoping for a goodbye hug, but Heather instead clasped my bicep in her hand and sort of patted me like I’d seen American fathers do to their softball-playing sons in crappy Hollywood films.
Then she turned and yanked the café door, making the bells on top jangle excitedly, and stalked down the street with her hands in her pockets.
I sat back down and stared without enthusiasm at my chocolate cake.
Before I left Tunbridge Wells, I returned to Gap and paid £40 for a cardigan. On the train, I mulled over everything that had been said. I recalled Heather’s eyes and lips, arms and legs. I even thought about the Billabong bag she’d been carrying and wondered if I should use next month’s allowance to buy one like it.
By the time I’d reached my stop and called my dad for a lift home, muttered some rubbish about Claire finding the perfect maroon halter-neck in Hastings and scuttled to check my email, I’d convinced myself that, though the day had been a little awkward, that was natural for a first date and Heather and I still had a sweet Sapphic summer before us.
So I emailed her.
And when she hadn’t replied after two days, I emailed her again.
Then I tried to IM her. But her status seemed permanently set to busy.
So I emailed her again.
A week later, I emailed her once more, just in case the others had been sent to junk.
Then, finally, I think I got the message.
And I cried, alone into my pillow, for a girl with a sour expression and a stick up her bum who’d bored me for half a day and not had the courtesy to hug me goodbye.
Matthew told me not to worry. Gaydar was impersonal. A meat-market. I would find someone – a beautiful girlfriend for us both to share – at university. He was sure of it. I smiled through my tears and wondered if a girlfriend to share was what I wanted; wondered where this wrinkled old man would slot in to my student life.
7
My mum drove me to Durham. She hates driving in traffic, so we left at four in the morning. The journey was fine, though I can’t imagine what we talked about for six hours. When I take long car rides with her now, in my third life, we tend to discuss Matthew, my most recent counselling sessions and whether I’m still writing about him (of which she disapproves). But back then we must have nattered less freely, at least on my part. I had a mountain of secrets hidden from her, yet still managed to play the best friend and hard-working daughter.
We probably sang along to Annie Lennox and Tina Turner, neither of us thinking much about the lyrics ‘I’ve got a wall around me’, then perhaps we talked about people, psychoanalysed her group of friends, laughed about the woman she knew who began sentences with things like, ‘When I was an airline pilot …’, and most likely we moved on to Matthew and Annabelle. My mum often admired their separate sleeping arrangements, commenting: ‘I think it’s much healthier for a couple to be able to choose when to sleep together.’ In most ways, she said, she thought they were the ideal couple.
Depending on my mood, I would gossip with her about them, criticising Matthew’s bad breath if we’d had a spat the day before, or defending his bizarre behaviour as ‘artistic temperament’ if I felt she was being overly cruel. In this way, we conducted mother–daughter bonding sessions, slowly repairing the jagged holes I’d ripped in our friendship by sewing a new patchwork of lies, moderate untruths and blatant deceptions. Such things tripped off my tongue by now and I hardly registered as my lips structured stories about visiting a friend last night when I was lying in Matthew’s arms and enjoying camping in the New Forest last week when Matthew and I had been sharing a hotel room in Brighton.
While I burbled to my mum about insignificant and unreal things, I thought about the previous evening’s complicated goodbye. As had become usual since the beginning of summer, I’d had dinner at Matthew’s. Annabelle had left us alone after washing the plates, muttering about wanting to watch a programme on TV and giving Matthew a look that he later explained meant he’d promised to take her to Pevensey Bay this weekend if she’d give us some privacy tonight. I played with my table mat and mouthed the words to the Leonard Cohen CD, wondering what I’d be doing this time tomorrow, who I’d be speaking to and how I would feel about the grey-haired man before me.
Matthew was sad. I think he cried. I suspect I did too. I was much more upset than I thought I’d be. This was what I’d wanted after all. Matthew was weeping because I’d imposed this artificial ending, forced it upon him; but my tears were tinged with the contradictory knowledge that I had the ability to make it all better. I imagined my lips curling around an apology, a ‘let’s give it a go’ or ‘I can’t do this without you.’ Part of me wanted them to and longed to fall into his arms and talk of for ever. But another part had already floated miles from my sadness and was dancing on an imaginary plane, cartwheeling with nervous glee that in just a few hours I would be free.
I’d told Matthew in mid-July, just after my meeting with Heather in Tunbridge Wells, that I wanted to go to university without him. It had been two years and we’d had a fantastic time. I had no regrets, I told him. But living a secret life and maintaining such intensity was driving me crazy. I wanted to see if I could be normal. Perhaps he was right and the world of Uncles would be the only place in which I could exist, but I needed to find out for myself. I would go to Durham and try to be a regular teenager, perhaps get it out of my system, or perhaps find some sense of harmony. A little part of me hoped university would be different. Matthew said Uncles were scarce, that they lived in the shadows and had to stick together; but I wanted to believe there were more of us. I thought maybe I’d find other passionate Literature students, other kindred spirits ready to see beauty in the world, other people I could share myself with, and this time of my own age.
Either way, I said, I’d still be his best friend, and we’d see where we stood in three years. But I didn’t want him to wait for me. I no longer wanted to be responsible for his ‘needs’; and he needn’t be for mine.
We hadn’t spoken about it much through the summer. Perhaps he thought I would change my mind. I almost had as we’d touched salty lips behind the curtain by his front door. But I’d stepped onto the concrete outside and looked back only once to see him hesitating to slam the latch, then swung the gate, breathed the autumn air and tripped along the pavement to finish packing.
‘Uh, hi.’ I stepped tentatively through the heavy blue fire door into the sterile kitchen. ‘I’m Nat – 112 I suppose.’
Three teenagers and two adults looked up from the circular table. The tall guy with a mini afro who was standing nearest to m
e put his mug down and offered me his hand.
‘Tim,’ he said with some kind of accent. ‘19 – I think that’s below you, or below you but one. I’m not sure how they managed to number sixteen rooms on three floors between seven and a hundred and twenty-two, but hey.’ His spotty cheeks stretched into a shy smile and immediately I wanted him to like me.
‘Dave, but everyone calls me Horse – long story!’ said a shorter boy with a stockier build and a sort-of cheeky flirt in his eyes. ‘I’m opposite Tim. This is my girlfriend Jade; just helping me move in.’
‘These are my parents,’ added Tim and I stretched across the table to shake hands politely with two nervous-looking adults, trying to give them my best I’m-responsible-and-a-good-influence-on-your-child smile.
We chatted awkwardly about what subjects we were doing, where we were from and how long it had taken us to drive here, wincing each time someone’s chair scraped on the tiled floor. I found out Tim was from Liverpool and studying Biology, but he also really liked cars and football. ‘Horse’ got caught up in a conversation about Manchester City, but finally explained he was from Leeds and taking Chemistry. His girlfriend told me she was taking a gap year and doing something or other, but I didn’t listen because she’d only be staying one night and I’d already decided I didn’t like her. She and Horse disappeared up to his room after half an hour or so and were replaced by a heavily made-up girl with highlights named Jane, who demanded we choose and label shelves in the fridge and gushed that she was from Surrey, studying Psychology and couldn’t wait to join the netball and hockey teams – wasn’t it great our college was right next to the gym?
Another Dave arrived, this one with a deep voice and a receding hairline that made him seem twice as old as the rest of us. He was from Hull and studying PPE, hoping to become a Labour politician. Next was Anna, a giggly, mousy-haired girl from Skegness who was taking Chemistry like Horse, but was really just looking forward to going clubbing every night: ‘Nobody can party like us Skeggy slappas!’
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