trying to figure out the provenance of these tears. And whether they were happy or sad.
Cosima was fed orange food, entertained, fed more orange food, played with, bathed, given some bosom, sung to, cuddled, cuddled some more and placed gently in her cot where she’d promptly fallen into a blissful sleep with the revolving night light and an Elvis for Babies CD playing softly.
‘Perfect perfect baby,’ Fen thought to herself as she padded out of the room. ‘Bloody awful day.’
She went to the bathroom and tidied up, catching sight of herself in the mirror.
‘Yuk. You haggard old bag.’
With a rubber duck in one hand and a Miffy flannel in the other, she peered closer at her reflection. Sallow and saggy, limp and lacklustre, hollow and haggard, she thought. Then she thought, poor old Matt. Fancy coming home to this every evening. Not much to fancy at all. So she rummaged around in her long-forsaken make-up bag and turned to her faithful Clarins mainstays for assistance. Just closing her eyes and slowly, properly, cleansing her face felt as heavenly as a spa facial. Exfoliate. Moisturize. A careful dab of concealer under the eyes, a swipe of mascara, a lick of lippy for the hell of it. Lastly, a few pinches to her cheeks which made her eyes smart a little but gave her cheek-bones a comely emphasis. Matt’s key in the door. Hear Matt sigh. A dormant butterfly taking wing in her stomach. Here, Matt, this’ll make you feel better.
‘Hullo,’ Fen said, walking downstairs, carefully tucking her hair behind her ears.
‘Hiya,’ Matt replied. ‘You look – have you got make-up on?’
‘Yup.’
‘Why?’
Fen frowned and wondered which way to take this. She felt helpless not to opt for the wrong way. ‘Because I feel a frump and I feel I look worse than I feel,’ she snapped.
‘Are you fishing for compliments and craving attention?’ Matt teased her. Fen felt embarrassed.
‘Well, I think you look very pretty,’ said Matt, ‘and it’s a nice distraction from the baby puke on your top.’
Fen didn’t know which to take off first, the make-up or her messy top.
By the end of a rerun episode of Taggart, Fen was chanting to herself, I will instigate sex; I will, I will. But by the end of News at Ten half an hour later, she was willing herself to simply stay awake.
‘Tired?’ Matt asked.
Ruefully, Fen nodded.
‘Go to bed,’ he suggested with a friendly pat to her knee.
And therein lay the calamity. As much as Fen feared the platonic mundanity of Matt’s knee-patting, she loved his suggestion that she go to bed. She still wanted Matt to desire her, she thought she wanted to desire him, but actually her strongest inclination at the moment was to go to sleep. She sat beside him, torn between what her body was shouting at her and what her conscience was whispering and what her partner was sweetly telling her.
‘I was trying to be all vampy for you,’ she confessed, ‘like the girl you fell for. But I’m just a tired old frump.’
‘Fen,’ Matt said, ‘don’t worry about it. Just go to bed.’
Fen had looked nice. Matt thought about it as he zapped TV channels. The messy top didn’t matter. He felt a little badly for her – she’d made an effort but an effort it had obviously been. There was nothing on television. Matt looked around the living-room. A soft towelling rabbit on the armchair, one tiny sock under it. A muslin square, scrunched up, on top of yesterday’s Evening Standard. A glob of something orange just above the skirting board. The all-pervasive scent of laundry washed in hypo-allergenic powder. But suddenly, Matt didn’t want to smell drying babygros. He snapped his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see any of these accoutrements of fatherhood. Actually, all he wanted to see was tits and arse. Quietly, he tiptoed up to the bedroom. It was dark, Fen was sleeping. Could he wake her? Would she mind? Dare he risk it? But realistically, was there really much point trying? He went instead to the cupboard, eased open the door, waited a moment to see if she’d woken. She hadn’t. By feel, he differentiated between the suits that were hanging there, found the Paul Smith one according to its superior cloth. He slipped his hand into the pocket and tiptoed his fingers along the edges of some discs. One would do. It didn’t matter which. Though Fen slept on oblivious, Matt still felt obliged to tuck the DVD up his jumper and hurry from the room as noiselessly as he’d entered.
Porn. Odd stuff, really. In reality, pneumatic women had never been Matt’s type, let alone the stuff harboured in secret fantasies. He’d never pursued a situation of sharing a girl with another bloke, exotic underwear had never really turned him on and he could take or leave the thought of getting down with a pair of rampant twin sisters. But Matt had always enjoyed porn. He’d been sustained by top-shelf supplies as a teenager, even wondering if sex for real could ever match up to the thunderous wanks he indulged in. And then in his early twenties, purchasing hardcore videos by mail order became a rite of passage. Did he dare? Yes he did. Matt Holden became Mr M. Smith and Mr M. Smith shared his consignments amongst the lads with whom he lived. By his mid-twenties, Matt was a serial monogamist and there were rarely fallow periods long enough between girlfriends to warrant the purchase of new porn. But then his girlfriend had become the mother of his child, their sex life had dwindled and porn had progressed to DVD.
Tiptoeing back downstairs, he didn’t check which disc he’d pulled out. He’d never been one for the stories; he never had to start a scene from the beginning. He wanted cunts and cocks to fill his screen just as soon as he pressed play; fast forward any kissing or slinky foreplay, just delve in deep to the fucking and sucking. Matt loaded a disc and, with the sitting-room door ajar and the TV volume low, skipped forward until a mêlée of bodies was having sex in his face. Fantastic, he commented under his breath, as a variously pierced woman with a shorn head and spiked dog-collar was simultaneously being double penetrated, wanked upon, and orally stuffed from an incongruously orderly queue of erections.
Matt masturbated frantically and synchronized his orgasm with a generalized spurting from the remainder of his onscreen cohorts who were not yet spent. Their spunk was gobbled up; Matt had to mop up his from his belly. He didn’t realize until he’d done it that he’d used the muslin square his daughter nustled up to, not the sheets of kitchen paper he’d prepared in advance. He was aghast. He put the soiled muslin into a plastic bag, knotted it and then threw it away in the dustbin outside. He wouldn’t even want it washed on the hottest cycle. He took his DVD and made his way quietly upstairs, putting it back in the pocket of his Paul Smith suit before going in to check on Cosima. He slipped into bed and lay in the dark, staring at an approximation of the ceiling. He felt utterly empty.
I’ve always thought a wank to porn is similar to a curry. The sort of thing one craves, one hungers for. You’re absolutely in the mood, so looking forward to it, ravenous to the point of visible drool – poppadams or a smooth little blow-job scene to whet the appetite and get you started, then straight for the glut of hot and spicy. Stuff it in. Gorge. But like a curry, once you’ve had your fill you really don’t want to look at what’s left on your plate; so it is with hardcore – once you’re done you just don’t want to see any more.
I feel grubby and not nice. I wanked into my baby’s muslin. Fen’s asleep upstairs while downstairs I’m shooting my load with a bunch of blokes over some really quite ugly woman. Physically I’m relieved, sated. But I feel a bit, I don’t know – sad.
He
