‘Are you enjoying the job?’ I ask, at the same time as he decides to ask for my number.
We stop outside the tube and look at each other uncomfortably.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say, and he looks down at his smart City shoes, embarrassed.
I lean forward and catch him with a kiss, and he is surprisingly quick to react and kiss me back. As we stand on the street, kissing, I feel his tongue and his breath, and let it drag me back five years, out of London, into the country, onto a campus, surrounded by friends. It is a young kiss, not cynical, not dirty, but the kind of kiss you got at the end of the night back in the days of lectures, of drinking all day on a Wednesday, and taking your washing home to your mum.
‘That’s just because of the sun,’ I say, as I pull back and smile, remembering I have grown up since then. He smiles back.
‘Are you sure?’ he says, all of a sudden the confident young City thing, stepping into a new world of arrogance fuelled by an ever-growing bank account. He will turn out like Charlie, they can’t help themselves – it’s a breeding ground, almost a social experiment.
‘Yep, I’ve got … Charlie.’ The words ‘relationship’ and ‘boyfriend’ stick in my throat and refuse to come out. Neither my head nor my heart will let them.
I sit on the tube home, drunk, and try not to get upset. I only ever let myself get really upset when I’m drunk. My head flops from side to side, and the heads of all the other drunk people around me, opposite me, do the same. The middle-aged couple who came up to town to see a show squirm in their seats in the corner, and pray they won’t get leaned on, making mental notes not to come again until at least Christmas. It’s our city now, us drunk young things on the tube late at night, it stopped being their’s years ago, when people started to ignore the beggars instead of acknowledging them with a turned-up nose or an incensed disgusted remark. Nobody says anything any more. They are as much a part of life as Switch and internet shopping.
I phone Nim as I get off the train, staggering in the dark towards my flat.
‘Why are you crying?’ she asks straight away.
‘I’m just being stupid,’ I say as I wipe the tears away from my face, and try to stop them reappearing immediately in the corners of my eyes.
‘It must be something,’ she says, and I can’t help myself saying something stupid.
‘I’m alone, aren’t I!’
I hear Nim laugh slightly.
‘How melodramatic, Miss Ellis. Besides, you have Charlie.’
‘I don’t “have” Charlie at all. We just keep going, like the Queen Mum. But even she died in the end.’
‘Well, then do something,’ she says.
‘I will, thanks, hon, I’ll speak to you at the weekend.’
I fall through my front door, and into bed.
I should do something.
When I was sixteen a kiss was a wonderful thing. The mere idea of pressing my open lips to some boy’s mouth lit a fuse of excitement within me that sizzled its way through my bloodstream, and I could only imagine the joyride that would follow when I realized what to do with my hands. A kiss was a great step forward into the world of people who drove cars and owned their own houses and had babies. I was still learning, still believed I could somehow ‘do it wrong’. A kiss was enough for me then. It was the world.
At twenty-eight, a kiss just never seems to be enough. Today it’s all about sex. I have sex because I can, I am allowed, I have that house, I drive a car. I know that nice girls only kiss on the first date, but the whole notion of being a ‘nice girl’ is relegated to my teens, when it passed out of my consciousness, and I realized I was perfectly within my rights to go further than that without stigma, because stigma was just sexism, and I am a liberated woman. That’s my excuse at least.
Sex can be many things, and about many things. It can be animal, fatal, it is political, natural, it is a weapon, it is illegal in some countries, it is about control: there is even some particularly vicious propaganda out there that says it is something to do with love. It is easy to become obsessed with it, and its emotional effects, and the physical realities it can leave behind. I live in a world obsessed with something it still finds it hard to talk about. Religion stamps its ugly muddied footprints all over the sex act for so many of us, and it is this notion that true love waits that muddles my subconscious time and time again. The very fact that I should postpone some random physical act for three weeks because then I will know that it is ‘right’ makes a rebel of me. Do anything too soon and you are cheating yourself, you have low self esteem, you are desperate, you are, in a word, a ‘slag’. I don’t want those rules to apply to me, but still I feel them hanging over my head like the ‘snood’ my grandmother knitted me when I was fourteen.
I’ve realized recently, as you’ve probably already guessed, that a good Catholic schooling has affected me more than I previously thought. I never labelled my hang-ups before, but now I do and I name them ‘convent school’. Guilt is like a sperm stain on a suede skirt – it shouldn’t be there, you want to get rid of it, but even dry cleaning won’t get it out – basically, if you want to keep wearing the skirt, you’re stuck with it. You can try to ignore it, but accept that it is always going to be there, making everything not quite perfect.
I feel guilty about everything – about the big things and the small things, the things I haven’t done, the things I should have done. Rationally, I know I should really focus on the actions of my hooded teenage tormentors rather than their words.
The nuns mostly seemed angry, and I seriously believe it was due to their ‘lifestyle choice’. Their major release of emotion, as far as I could see, was belting out a good hymn. Now I can only manage to hit a high ‘C’ with a little help from the man of my choice, and yet they manage it most days in church, but I honestly doubt we’re feeling quite as good when it happens. Although it’s very possible that there are ‘nun exercises’ that compensate for their chastity and produce the same ‘reaction’ – you can probably even buy the video in Woolworth’s – it’s why they are always so keen to sing everything an octave too high. Bless ’em for trying, I suppose. You’ve got to get your kicks somewhere, and one bonus is that they don’t get itching diseases their way, or mild concussion from an unforgiving headboard.
But their frustration, or restraint, or choice, or whatever it is, has had a knock-on effect. They managed to get to me at a particularly vulnerable stage in my mental and emotional development, and even though I personally have chosen to pursue a life where sex is allowed, I still feel guilty about doing it the first time, the next time, too many times with too many people, not loving the one I’m with. I can’t help feeling that if only somebody had p-p-picked up these penguins once or twice, I’d have a much healthier sexual mindset now.
And even though I can admit that, with regard to this particular incident, the incident in question, the sex itself isn’t the only thing I have to feel guilty about, and that there are feelings and emotional repercussions that weigh just as heavily on my mind, it is still a big part of my guilt. No need to hide the truth from everybody, including my mother, but most importantly, Charlie. I could have been so much happier. But I can’t change it now. This is me.
You wouldn’t know to look at me that I am so terribly mixed-up – my hair is long, my eyes are brown. I burn first, then tan. I stand five feet seven in bare feet. I look perfectly normal, perfectly average. I don’t know my vital statistics. This is the measure of me, I suppose.
I