‘Si, I think I need the loo.’
‘Come on, baby, you’re all right, you just need to breathe and think of the positive!’ He started to stroke my back. ‘You are brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant at acting, at the accent. And you’re brilliant at blow jobs.’
I punched him in the stomach at the mention of blow jobs. It was becoming an unfortunately long-running gag. Excuse the pun. When I got together with Simon, I had been single for a long, long time and I hadn’t had sex for over a year. Our sex was a little bit odd at first. The first time we undressed each other we were quite uncomfortable. I’d say I behaved the same as I did when I entered a sex shop for the first time. I kept giggling and making bad jokes. It was such a shame because I so wanted to be demure.
I wanted to give him a blow job that would eclipse all others. But when I felt the girth of his penis, I found myself tapping the top of it and saying, ‘Testing, testing, one, two, three.’ Then I sang a verse of ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’. Including the guitar bits. It was the nerves, you see. I don’t even like Guns N’ Roses.
‘Now then, I want to give you this.’ Simon took a wad of dollars from his back pocket. ‘So you don’t have to worry about money and can get a cab at the airport.’
‘Baby, you don’t have to give me money.’
‘Come on, Sare, take the money.’
‘I’m fine. I don’t need it.’
‘Buy something nice for yourself.’
‘You sound like a boss who’s boffing his secretary.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, sounding bizarrely pleased. ‘Treat yourself, sweet-cheeks.’
‘Si, put it away! You look like you’re trying to solicit me.’
‘How much for one of those amazing blow jobs?’
‘Si!’
‘I don’t want them. Filthy fifties, look at them.’ He tossed the money onto the floor.
‘I’m not getting it,’ I said. But it’s not nice to see good money go to waste, so within about two and a quarter seconds I was on my hands and knees. I had to apologize to the petite girl behind me. She was holding a crucifix and murmuring something.
I stood upright, clutching the money. Simon was waiting for me. He was holding his Filofax and a biro.
‘Babe, just put your hotel address down in here for me, will you?’
‘Hmmm,’ I said, taking them. But he looked so gorgeous that I just had to give him a little kiss on the lips first. ‘You’re the most wonderful man in the entire world,’ I told him.
‘I’m the luckiest man in the entire world,’ he said. He put his arms around my waist and gave me a kiss on the lips with a cheeky bit of tongue.
‘I am so going to miss you.’
‘Ohhh, baby.’
We were talking in baby voices because that’s what you do when you’re in love.
I took the Filofax and pen from him and flicked to the back page. There was a photo there. It was lying face-down.
‘Do you keep a photo of me in your Filofax?’ I squeaked, using my baby voice.
I turned the photo over and stared at it.
‘What the fuck’s this?’ I whispered. I definitely wasn’t using the baby voice then.
‘Just a photo,’ he shrugged. I still can’t believe he said that.
‘Just a photo!’ I repeated.
The photo in Simon’s Filofax wasn’t of me. It wasn’t of his mum. It wasn’t a still of Kylie from the ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ video. It was a photograph of a girl called Ruth. She was in her underwear, demonstrating a suggestive yoga move.
Simon may have claimed he waited patiently for me to wake up to the fact that the love of my life had been sleeping in the next room. He forgot to mention that he whiled away most of that time having mind-blowing sex with a flexible girl called Ruth. And she wasn’t just any woman. She was a woman with no visible cellulite who could touch her toes. And it wasn’t just any old mind-blowing sex, it was sex that I heard because we were flatmates and she howled and the walls were thin. They went out together for a year and they only split up a month or two before Simon and I got together. Up until that moment I had barely thought of her. It was about to become impossible for me to forget her.
Finding that photo affected me badly. To put it plainly, finding that photo made me go a bit mental. All right, quite a lot mental. If I had to pinpoint the moment I began to turn into a nightmare nutter woman, it was probably then. Not that it happened straight away. It wasn’t an instant Superman-like transformation. It was a slow metamorphosis.
But what was I supposed to say when I saw it? ‘Oh lovely, darling, you’ve got a picture of your semi-naked ex-girlfriend in your Filofax. Those are pretty pants, aren’t they? Why don’t we frame it and put it up in the lounge!’
As it was, I didn’t say anything at all.
‘Sare, what’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘It’s a beautiful picture. You’re not jealous, are you?’
I just shook my head and, luckily, the heavily made-up woman at the flight desk nodded me over to her at that moment.
ten
I was understandably very perplexed before take-off. Aside from the hideous photo I had just seen, and the embarrassing incident at the luggage screening when a lady held up my Canesten cream and Imodium and asked me to put them in a clear plastic bag, I had also discovered another problem with flying to LA to do a movie: the flying.
Am I the only person who’s noticed it’s not right? An aeroplane weighs eight hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. (Why do I Wikepedia these facts?) Eight hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds is quite heavy. In my experience heavy things don’t stay in the air. I find they tend to plummet downwards at great speed before landing with a thud. I rest my case.
The flying angle of the whole LA job felt like a massive spanner in the works or, more realistically, a pigeon in the engine. This actually happens. Wikepedia told me. Pigeons do sometimes fly into the engine. And when they do, the engine breaks down. The intoxicated pilot doesn’t realize. He’s drunkenly squinting into the fog. The air stewardesses are trying to put out the small cigarette-started-fire in the toilets. The passengers are sneezing, having picked up swine flu. Then the hijackers stand up.
I probably should have done a Simon and thought of the positive, rather than sat on an aeroplane, before take-off, worrying about the logistics of commercial aviation. But I was so furious with him about the photo that I was refusing to look on the bloody bright side out of spite for him. I had a lot of time to stew because our flight was delayed taking off. We had to wait for a passenger who had checked in but gone AWOL. Now, buses don’t wait. They rarely even stop. Trains don’t just hold on for a few minutes while you get a Costa coffee to take on board. Yet there we were, waiting for someone to finish his or her duty-free shopping! The praying girl from the queue was sat in the seat next to me. She looked terrified too. She had been clutching that little crucifix round her neck since we boarded. She probably knew about the pigeons.
At least I was in First Class with a glass of champagne. I love champagne. I can’t imagine meeting a sane woman who doesn’t. It makes me feel giddy and light and lovely, like I’ve been put through a Soda Stream. Although on that occasion the effects were taking longer than usual to manifest. I valiantly believed they would come eventually, so I kept knocking it back. After a big gassy gulp I put down my glass. It was a glass-glass as opposed to a plastic-glass. I pinged it with my fingernail just to check. As I did, the good-looking air steward sprinted up the aisle towards me, holding an open bottle of champagne. ‘State of emergency,’ he panted when he got to me.
I glanced at the girl with the crucifix. She looked like she might wet herself.
‘You need a top-up.’ He smiled and filled up my glass.
‘I love First Class,’ I sang, to the tune of ‘I Love Paris’.
‘I’m Brian,’ he told me. He was tall with dark hair, a huge, unrestrainable grin and very nice teeth.
‘Sarah.’
I turned to smile a
t the girl next to me but she’d resumed the fervent praying. I would have been better suited to sit next to someone with man-hating and alcoholic tendencies. This girl was a funny little thing. She had a beautiful face, tiny features and sparkling blue eyes but she was wearing a French pleat and a high-necked white blouse. An interesting look to go for. Very Church of Latter-day Saints, especially with the praying.
I picked up my digital camera and flicked through the photos we had taken the previous night. They were basically a tangle of limbs. But there was one where my legs were round Simon’s neck. That was one of my favourites. Simon looked gorgeous and my legs looked almost thin from that angle. Then there was the one of Simon standing naked with a banana covering his bits. And one of Simon eating the banana and showing his bits. I had been so excited about my digital camera. I lay there deleting everything until it looked like I had only one chin. Digital cameras had gone straight in between support tights and crackling on my list of favourite things. But now it just reminded me of that disgusting picture, which he probably took with it.
‘Now then, another glass of fizz? Or perhaps you’d like to move on to something stronger? A gin and tonic or a Bloody Mary?’ Brian asked, kneeling on the floor beside me.
‘Oooh.’ Not an easy question. I pulled my ‘thinking’ face.
‘Well, I’ll top you up with champagne for now, then I’ll do you a nice Bloody Mary before dinn . . . ’ He trailed off here. It was obvious that his attention had been stolen by the arrival of the late passenger.
‘Oh, they’ve finally finished their shopping, have they?’ I trilled to Brian.
I had meant to be conspiratorial but it came out quite loud. All right, very loud. So loud the Christian girl looked up from her praying and giggled. I mentioned that champagne made me giddy, light and lovely. I forgot the word ‘loud’. In fact the word ‘loud’ should have gone before the other three. In capitals. With a hazard sign. I fought the urge to apologize to everyone. I was overwrought. First Class is unnerving for the first-timer. I kept thinking that someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Get back to your own seat.’
I was secretly hoping that, after all the waiting, the new arrival would be Anne Robinson or Simon Cowell. The only disappointment with First Class was that it appeared to be bereft of famous people but bursting with buxom balding businessmen.
I leant into the aisle hoping to get a close-up view of reality TV cosmetic dentistry and surgery. But as soon as I saw who the late arrival was I threw my head back against my seat and noticed I had started to breathe more quickly. He was gorgeous. I wasn’t surprised the plane waited for him. I bet the airport staff were saying, ‘Take your time, why don’t you get a croque-monsieur and chill out before you have a look round Ted Baker?’
He was the best-looking person I’d seen in the flesh. This guy had to be a model. Or a surfer. Or an actor whose ideal casting was Greek God. He was at least six foot. His shoulders were wide and his legs were long. He had a big dishevelled mass of blond, unbrushed hair that nearly reached his shoulders and a real not-out-of-a-squeezy-tube tan. He was wearing a faded tight T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘suck’ and to this day I’ve never seen a pair of jeans worn so well. He looked familiar but I suspected that was because I recognized him from fantasies I had in puberty. He might have been gorgeous but I wasn’t happy about the situation. I had wanted a famous person. Not a beautiful person. I hate being around good-looking people. I’m crap at it. I always act like a pillock.
I looked at Brian, the air steward. He was no help. He was frozen. I had suspected that he was too lovely to be straight. The Greek God lifted the overhead locker above me. His groin was slightly above my eye level. I quickly diverted my gaze and looked down at the in-flight entertainment guide on my lap. However, I was still very much aware of his groin, as it didn’t seem to be moving and it really was very close to my head. I snuck a look up to see what his problem was. He was reaching into the overhead compartment but he had stopped, was stood statue-still and was staring at me. It looked like there was a ripe orange of muscle under the skin on his upper arm. I tried to peel my eyes off it. I looked back down at my lap. I could sense that he was still looking at me though. Quite a few people had stared at me at the airport. I think it was because I was wearing pyjamas. I seemed to be the only person in the whole of Heathrow who had realized the comfort and flexibility afforded by wearing pyjamas on a flight. After years of trying to look smart in the hope of being able to wangle an upgrade I had been elated that I didn’t need to bother. So I was travelling in the comfiest clothes that Primark provided.
I heard him say, ‘Hey.’ He had a deep, masculine, slow American drawl. I assumed he was talking to Brian. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him again so I studied my lap hard. The in-flight entertainment magazine was riveting.
‘Hey,’ he said, louder this time. ‘What’s your name?’
Now obviously I knew that he wouldn’t be talking to me but I decided to look up anyway, in a very casual manner though. I lifted my head and flicked my hair back, cunningly using the hair flick to look at him. He was staring at me! He was talking to me! He was waiting for an answer. Bugger! What was my name? There was a bemused smile at the corner of his mouth and his eyes were looking straight into mine.
‘Oh, Sarah Sarah, Sarah, S-S-S-S-Sarah Sargeant,’ I replied. I was trying to sound cool, which obviously meant I sounded like a young-looking twelve-year-old boy whose voice hadn’t dropped, trying to buy fags.
‘Hi,’ he nodded. ‘I’m Leo. Leo Clement.’
I didn’t say, ‘Fuck me, that’s a cool name,’ which I think was impressive under the circumstances. Not that saying, ‘Excuse me, I just need to go the loo,’ and running away was a reaction I was proud of.
I was almost at the toilet when I heard him drawl, ‘Sarah Sargeant, you dropped this.’
‘Oh, what’s that?’ I turned round. I was much cooler now. I had finally got the hang of it.
He was proffering something in his outstretched hand. I squinted at it. It was a tube of Canesten. It must have fallen out of my handbag. I snatched it and forgot about needing the toilet and rushed back to my seat. ‘The whole of First Class thinks I’ve got thrush!’ was all I could think. Somehow it wouldn’t have felt so bad in Economy.
There was a very hot feeling in my cheeks when I sat down. Christian Girl reached over to me and gently touched my arm.
‘Did you say your name was Sarah Sargeant?’ she said, in another American accent.
‘Yes,’ I smiled, hoping she wouldn’t ask me about the thrush. I was shaking with embarrassment.
‘We’ll be working together. My name’s Erin Schneider. I’m in the film too.’
‘No way! It’s so nice to meet you! Are you excited?’
‘Well, yes, and a little nervous.’
‘Oh my God, me too. I’m proper like shit-scared about being in an Eamonn Nigels film!’ I realized I was gushing, but we were about to share a big adventure together.
‘I’ve got that camera too.’ She smiled, nodding towards my poisonous Panasonic. ‘Great camera.’
‘Hmmm. Well, I’m not so sure about that at the moment . . .’
Finally the plane started gliding across the runway. Erin took a deep breath and grabbed her cross again.
‘Oh sorry, sweetheart, I’m wittering. You get back to your pessary,’ I said with what I hoped was a kind, understanding smile and turned around.
‘Rosary, Erin, is what I meant!’
Brian took my champagne away for take-off. It was very upsetting. I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes and tried to tell myself I was on a very safe train. I’m not sure how long I’d been tensely sitting there like that, when I heard, ‘Hey.’ I knew it was Leo Clement because I recognized his deep, cowboy voice. I opened one eye. He was leaning over the back of his seat, which was very naughty because the seatbelt light was still on.
‘We’re in the clouds,’ he said, and took his gaze towards the aerop
lane window. We were. We were just entering the clouds.
‘People tell me I’m always in the clouds,’ I said and smiled.
We didn’t say anything else. Brian told him to sit down.
eleven
When I have a bad thought, my mind has always been able to take that one bad thought and give it an intense course of rampant IVF until it has bred a thousand bad-thought offspring.
For example, I might think, Shit, I’m skint. In roughly four and half seconds other thoughts will also have appeared in my head. I can’t pay my rent, I’ll get evicted, I’ll have to get a proper job to get me out of debt, I have no skills, I’ll end up in King’s Cross giving blow jobs for money, I’m not even very good at those. Then I will start to cry.
I learned an important lesson on that flight. Alcohol makes bad thoughts breed quicker. Much as I bonded with Brian, I shouldn’t have had the dessert wine with the chocolate ambrosia. And I really hadn’t needed the port he’d insisted on fetching me to go with my cheese and biscuits. I was desperately trying not to let my mind get horny with Simon and Ruth thoughts. They were too awful.
‘Here we go, angel,’ Brian said as he put my fourth or possibly fifth course in front of me. ‘Oh ho ho, what’s with the face ache, petal?’
‘Nothing,’ I smiled. ‘Thanks.’
‘Tell me, darling, tell all. A problem shared.’
‘No, you’re all right, Brian. You don’t want me to bore you.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! You won’t bore me. Now, get it off your chest.’
I sighed and looked at him.
‘No, it’s too awful.’
‘Man trouble?’
‘Hmmm.’
The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend Page 4