Dave made us roast beef that Wednesday night. As he was cooking, I sat on the sofa imagining myself fucking him – something I swear I’d never done before – and I found my heart speeding up a bit. Dave is objectively a very good-looking man, despite his massive beard. I found myself staring at the beard, wondering whether it got in the way during oral sex, and looking at his knuckles, imagining what they’d feel like inside me. I couldn’t look him in the eye for a little while after that. I didn’t really want Dave’s fingers inside me, honestly. But I did want something inside me. Something live and warm and moving and not made of pink latex.
I was more awkward than usual during dinner that night, which isn’t that surprising, really. Dave did most of the heavy lifting, conversation-wise, asking me lots of questions about work in his lovely northern accent and pretending to be interested in my answers, even though I was a civil servant at the Department of Health and Social Care, answering letters from members of the public about foster care and NHS waiting times and other things I’d rather not think about, and he was a graphic designer, which is both cooler and less depressing.
He passed me the horseradish and asked, ‘Get any good letters this week?’
People don’t usually send letters to the government unless they are very angry and very old. But there are exceptions.
‘Got another one from Eric,’ I said.
‘The Bomber Command vet?’
I nodded. ‘He’s upset about the cuts to social care.’
‘Didn’t he write to you about that last month?’ Alice asked, through a mouthful of beef.
‘Last month it was the standard of hospital meals.’
‘Getting old’s a bastard, isn’t it?’ Dave said, but his eyes were fixed on Alice, and I could tell he was playing footsie with her under the table. I stared down and concentrated on the steam curling up from my potatoes, but the footsie continued.
There was a pause in the foot fondling while Alice cleared the table and served our dessert (Ben & Jerry’s), but then it started up again, and it put me off my ice cream – no easy feat. So I ate it as quickly as I could, then pushed my chair back.
‘Thanks for cooking, Dave,’ I said.
‘No worries,’ he said, smiling at Alice.
Alice looked up at me. ‘Stay and hang out with us,’ she said. ‘There’s that Benedict Cumberbatch thing on tonight.’
‘I’m not really into Cumberbatch,’ I said. ‘And I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
I went to my room and switched on my TV. I tried to watch a cooking show, but Alice and Dave were soon snogging so loudly that I could hear them above the shouty presenter. So I opened my laptop and put my headphones on, and then I switched on private browsing and searched for real couples on Pornhub.
There’s something comforting about watching ordinary people having sex; I always think I’d probably do it better than them. Maybe that’s not the point of porn, but I don’t care – their incompetence turns me on. I clicked on a video and watched a thin, pale man adjust his shaky video camera and walk over to the bed where an overweight woman was waiting for him. I pulled my trousers down to my ankles and started to wank as the pale man slapped himself arrhythmically into his partner. That’ll show the patriarchy, I thought. I’m going to give myself an amazing orgasm in about two minutes, because I know how to push my own buttons – I don’t need a man to do it for me.
But then it was over, and I felt hollow and desperate to come again. The video ended, and an ad for Hot local sluts popped up. I flinched and clicked on it to make it go away, but I accidentally clicked on the ad instead, and a woman with huge, spherical breasts filled my screen, panting and rubbing her nipples. I tried to shut it down, but hundreds of windows had popped up, each one filled with hot blondes, or dirty Russians, or naughty teens, like endless mirrors reflected in mirrors. Looking at them turned me on, and that made me feel sordid again, so I slapped down the lid of my laptop and hugged my pillow. It didn’t hug me back.
I told Nicky about my unsatisfying wank. Bringing it up was a bit awkward; it was only my third session and I wasn’t that comfortable with her yet. I wasn’t that comfortable with the idea of being in therapy at all; I never thought I’d have a shrink at 26, even a semi-amateur one. A therapist feels like the sort of thing only glamorous New Yorkers should have, the kind who can afford to buy olives from Dean & DeLuca and who say things like ‘My ob-gyn told me to eat less wheat.’ This is how it happened: I’d been suffering from constant, low-level anxiety, the sort of feeling you get when you realize you’ve forgotten to turn the hob off, but all the time. Then one day I had a panic attack in the middle of a team meeting about letterheads at work, probably triggered by the fact that I have a job which involves team meetings about letterheads. Nobody noticed – it was a subtle panic attack – but that evening I burst into tears in the middle of the Sainsbury’s frozen-food aisle, holding a packet of fishcakes. So I went to the GP.
‘Would you say that you’ve been excessively worried, more days than not, for over six months?’ the GP asked, looking down at a checklist.
‘I don’t know if I’d say excessively worried.’
‘What sort of things are you worried about?’
‘Just – everything, really.’
‘Probably excessive then.’ She smiled at me. ‘Do you think the world is an innately good or evil place?’
‘Definitely good,’ I said, pleased, because I knew that was the correct answer.
‘And you haven’t thought about hurting yourself? You don’t have suicidal thoughts?’
‘Never.’
‘Do you feel like you can’t cope with everyday things?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have trouble making decisions?’
‘Not really.’
‘And do you often find yourself crying for no reason?’
‘No. I mean – I cry quite a lot, but I usually have a reason.’
‘OK,’ said the GP. ‘It’s unlikely that you have clinical depression.’
‘Hooray!’ I said, giving myself a little cheer.
The GP smiled again – a patient smile, I now realize, looking back on it. ‘You appear to have what we call Generalized Anxiety Disorder,’ she told me.
I was very excited to have an actual disorder.
‘I’ll refer you for talking therapy,’ she said. ‘But it might be better to go private – the NHS waiting list is nine months long.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘The Department of Health and Social Care gets a lot of letters complaining about that.’
I felt calmer than I had in ages. I went home and Googled cheap counsellor north London anxiety, and Nicky’s name came up. She was still training to be a therapist, which is why I could afford her, and she had an un-therapist-like way of voicing her very strong opinions on almost every topic. When I told her about the anxiety, and about feeling lost and directionless in life, she said it was no wonder I was anxious, and that my job sounded so dull they should ‘prescribe it to insomniacs’.
Anyway, I told Nicky about the wank. I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into the armchair as I spoke, as though it was recoiling from me. She didn’t recoil, though. She wanted to know all about it.
‘What did the couple look like?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘I don’t know until you tell me.’
‘She