to That
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 like ordinary things: red wine, whisky goes down smoothly, Martinis the most. Lychee Martinis are my favourite – swollen with vodka like a juicy alcohol eyeball.
I like to go dancing, any kind. I have a few drinks and do stupid things. Once at a summer barbecue in the garden of one of my friend’s houses, as we all fought the chill and the need to go inside at nine p.m., I tried to do a front roll over a piece of plastic cord that had been hung between a tree branch and some guttering as a makeshift washing line. We had been drinking since three. It was positioned over paving stones nearly two metres off the ground. I got halfway over and the cord snapped. I fell face down onto the paving, and chipped my front tooth. I still have a lump on the back of my head from that one, which I should probably get checked out. The tooth got fixed the next day obviously; you can see that.
I wake up early the next day, another wild warm day when you feel like big things are supposed to happen. The sky is bright blue, even at eight in the morning, dusted with fairy-tale clouds, and the air already smells of cut grass – the community servicers have been out early – and I fight the urge to have ice cream for breakfast.
I wake up on my own. I spend the first twenty minutes breathing in the heat and the sun and the silence. The phone doesn’t ring, I am left alone, the way it should be on a day like this. Everybody is praying for something to happen to their lives, to whisk them away on the sunshine express to a much better time.
Instead of ice cream, I light a cigarette, and hang over my balcony which overlooks the communal gardens that nobody uses, in case they have to sit twenty feet from somebody they don’t know. A breeze creeps up, and everything sways, including me. A spider stuck in the middle of its cobweb rocks to and fro, and seems to enjoy it, and the hairs on my arms search up for the sun. I feel it, where I always feel it, in the small of my back, and the heat closes my eyes, and I dream, standing. I breathe warm air, think I hear music somewhere, not here. It is a small bliss. It is a beautiful day. I know something should happen today. It makes me feel giddy. I should do something. This thought snaps me back to reality, and the moment is gone.
‘I don’t want to go to fucking work,’ I complain to myself, in a staccato voice, accentuating every word, as if somebody, God, maybe, might hear me and say ‘that’s ok, you don’t have to – take your passport and run away!’ It doesn’t happen, nobody says anything to me, and I sigh, facing the inevitable, and move back into my flat to get dressed.
The doorbell buzzes while I am pulling on yesterday’s jeans, having the age-old footwear debate in my head as I look at my strappy sandals sitting prettily next to my starting-to-reek trainers: longer legs, or still being able to walk by lunchtime?
‘Package for you,’ my intercom says.
‘I’m coming down.’
I button up my shirt as I run down the stairs. The delivery boy is waiting by the door – a kid really, maybe five years younger than me, but a world away. He looks like he has fun in the evenings. He likes his job in that it gives him no hassle, but it is the evenings that are his. A
