When, some months later, I had become so disheartened by the heteronormativity of my small town surroundings that I decided lesbians were just a myth, I contented myself with reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and writing imaginary love letters about ‘unrecognised social conditioning’ to Claire. Matthew and I spoke of Virginia Woolf and Marlene Dietrich, and while my friends at school laughed that my latent lesbianism was a harmless quirk, I privately lamented the plight of the outcast in society as if it were still Victorian England. After rereading Tipping the Velvet, I came to the conclusion it would actually have been easier to be gay then than it was now.
At a New Year’s Eve party in Year 13, I drank disgusting cocktails and teamed up with Toby to form a terribly clever club called ‘Ibs’. With an air of superiority, we perused the party declaring ourselves Ibs, until someone politely informed us that it was pretty obvious what we meant, and were we aware that we’d just announced our dubious desires to the entire sixth form?
Frustrated and with nothing more to lose, I focused my hopes on the one girl who might have been desperate enough: Kate. Kate was the sort of outsider of the group who imagined she had her own fashion sense and turned up to school in a mixture of checked lumberjack shirts and fishnet tights. Tonight, she had arrived with a new haircut that made her look like a member of a bad eighties girl-group.
Toby and I found Kate throwing up in the bath because someone had dared her to down half a bottle of vodka. We cleaned her up and asked if she would like to join our club. We sat on the kitchen tiles and attempted a three-way kiss, before I shamelessly stole Kate’s lips for myself and spent the rest of the night bouncing between my friends’ hysterical laughter and Kate’s vomit-tinged breath.
When Matthew read about this episode in my diary, he said something had to be done. We had never spoken in detail about these teenage parties where I pretended to be normal. I’d never asked his permission, but I felt free to do what I liked at them. Still, I never told him our games of spin-the-bottle involved me locking lips with boys as well as girls, that some nights I tasted the saliva of up to ten of my peers and that James Huntwood had managed to thrust his hand into my jeans as I lay almost passed out on Ruth’s kitchen floor. I only told him about the girls because he smiled and talked of ‘tight little pussies’, whispered in my ear during sex that if any of them were here right now we could change their stubborn little minds, tease them until they creamed and begged for more. He seemed to enjoy these things as much as I did, so I continued attending my promiscuous parties and never worried too much about issues of fidelity.
But, though he brought mention of her into our bed once or twice, Matthew was decidedly unimpressed by the idea of Kate.
‘You need a real woman. You deserve something far more sophisticated than these drunk idiots. It’s probably the answer to your orgasm problem too. We will have to find you someone.’
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