elbows: What, really? No, I wasn’t even touching myself. Were you? Did you come?
wicked.grace: No, not quite. I’m going to go and finish myself off now. You should send a photo.
elbows: I’ll try.
wicked.grace: Try hard. x
So this morning I wrote an email to Grace. I attached a photo.
At the time of writing, I’ve yet to hear back. I’ll give her till the end of January, then that’s it. She’s dumped.
CHAPTER FIVE BEING IS OTHER PEOPLE
I hate January. It’s such a dark and dreary downer of a month. Perpetually cold, dully predictable, a constant reminder that life is all just little bits of history repeating.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the last couple of weeks have been marked by great swathes of languorous self-pity. After an exciting start, things have slowed down, dramatically.
I’m currently working on a website for a city council in the north of England writing words about Local Finance, Multiple-Occupancy Homes, Sheltered Housing, and Health & Social Care. I wish I could say it’s as interesting as it sounds, but it really isn’t. Not by a long chalk. This month is going so slowly…
The last couple of weeks have staggered by like a frozen hare tied to a dispirited tortoise, and my coccyx steadfastly refuses to heal. I want to run! Stretch! Play tennis! Dance!—but all I can manage is to sit here on a large disc made out of sponge, the kind favoured by old men with haemorrhoids. I think I might be getting haemorrhoids. The ailment of stretched mothers and desiccated old men. I have an itch. A terrible itch. Added to which, this dieting lark is deeply, shockingly tedious. I miss the quick-fix fun of fat, sugar, and cholesterol. I miss eating whenever I feel like it, blithe as a billygoat.
I bought a set of digital scales and now, every morning when I rise, every evening when I set, and seven or eight times in between, I hoist myself upon this instrument of despair and stare at the pithy display. Invariably I shake my head. My weight has started to fluctuate wildly, up and down like the lift in a kangaroo’s whorehouse. Last week I ate nothing but carrots, peas, apples, bananas, and wine, and on Friday I was seven pounds lighter than at the start of the week. Then at the weekend I pigged out on pizza, beer, and exotically flavoured crisps, and as a direct consequence, five of those seven pounds are right back where they started. What can it all mean?
And what’s it all about? Why am I making my life so much harder? I ask myself that question and for a moment I do not know the answer. Then it comes flooding back. I am pursuing a healthy lifestyle, so that I can transform myself into a healthier human being, and somewhere along the way, find myself a lady. A lovely lady at that. One with silken skin and leathery skirts. Or vice versa. One who would make me giddy with adoration and fill my nether regions with hot sticky blood and fizz-gristle. A lady to laugh with and love with, to have and to hold, to tickle and tether from this day forth, as long as we both shall live. Or at least for a couple of months, till the inevitable withering and/or betrayal. A lady, in fact, like Ange. Ange is my inspiration. My first love. They never die, you know. And Ange is making great efforts to keep in touch. She has pledged to help me all she can to stick to my various regimes. She has pledged her support. ‘Day or night,’ she said, ‘if you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you. Don’t…why are you looking at me like that?’
I blushed, smiling. ‘Like what? I just…’
‘I’m not going to have sex with you, Stan. Sorry if that’s not what you were thinking, but that’s what it looked like.’
That was what I was thinking.
‘That’s not what I was thinking,’ I said. ‘I’m just glad we could finally be friends is all.’
I once wrote a poem about Ange’s breasts. It was called ‘Two-Headed Love God’.
Ange is adorable and vivacious and dangerous and, I’m hoping, just mad enough to get really drunk one night and sleep with me. She was mad enough, after all, to lick her lips at me, moaning that she wanted me, that time after assembly, while her friends screeched their ghastly passerine approval and I let out an audible cry of terror.
Aaah, how many times have I permitted my hands to seduce myself to generous, wilfully erotic adaptations of that painful memory? I don’t know. Twelve or so.
The last time was on Sunday night, when I bottomed out after having spent the day before with Keith, boozing and smoking weed like know-nothing losers with nothing but time. Then I’d fallen into a feeding frenzy. Most of Sunday I’d spent in bed, beached and buried in shame. Then I got up, weighed myself, and fell face first into a bubbling well of despair. I would like to blame Keith, but I can’t bring myself to do it. In truth, Keith is blameless. Perennially so.
Keith is my oldest friend, my dearest friend. I’m not so sure how mature it sounds to still cling to the concept of a ‘best friend’, but maybe that’s because most adults are not so sure if they have them any more. I am sure. Keith is my best friend.
I’ve known him since I was just a few months old. Our parents’ back gardens bordered for a while and Keith and I became fast friends and grew up together. Because I was a hideous eczematic little freak, I was often picked on and bullied by clear-skinned Nazi kids, and I have lost count of the number of times that Keith stepped in and stopped the violence. Or tried to. He did take the occasional beating alongside me too, which produced in me such profound feelings of love that I suppose it’s fair to say that over the years I developed a bit of a crush on him. But it passed, it passed.
When we were about twelve or thirteen, Keith and I were enjoying a day out on the beach at Southend with a couple of distant schoolfriends, ‘Dirty’ Dean Curtis and Kevin ‘Hodge’ Hodge. Hodge found a giant flatfish washed up on the sand, dead. When he picked it up and threatened me with it, I ran. Hodge ran after me. I got away, though, because somehow I was faster than him. Then, in the same way that gunmen in films shoot at cars speeding off in the distance, more last-ditch desperation than genuine attempt to find their target, Hodge threw the fish after me, and by utter fluke, it landed with a slap on my bare back, where it stuck fast, suckered to my skin. It was funny. I can see now that it was funny, but at the time it was a) humiliating, as my friends all fell about laughing, and b) somehow terrifying. I started screaming and flapping about trying to get it off my back, but it was properly stuck. This was probably the nearest I’d ever come at the time to a panic attack.
Despite my shrieks and shouts and tears, Hodge and Dirty Curty found it increasingly hilarious. Keith, however, seeing that I was genuinely upset, came up to me, peeled the fish off my back and calmed me down. I was embarrassed and I had to go off to be alone, but I was touched too, and I’ve never forgotten it.
When I was fifteen, there was violence at home. Tempers were lost and blood was spilt and suddenly there was the possibility that I was going to be taken into care. Keith at this point persuaded his parents to take me in and look after me, essentially to foster me. Again, it brings tears to my eyes to think how much that meant to me and what a selfless, genuinely heartfelt gesture it was.
A year and a bit later, Keith and I moved into a flat together in Dartford, and without putting too fine a point on it, Keith basically mothered me for the next two years. I was in and out of college, in and out of work and often struggling to pay the rent, but Keith never failed to help me out, even when it meant leaving himself short. I wouldn’t say he always did so uncomplainingly, but that’s because he wasn’t a feckless pussy. On occasion I needed nothing more than a healthy, hefty kick in the pants, and Keith was always on hand to give it.
For my eighteenth birthday, Keith drew me a card. He had always been a very talented artist, and up until his early twenties, he drew a lot. Then he fell into a career in art direction, via set design, and kind of stopped. Which is a shame. The card he made for my eighteenth was an ink and