All the Rage (3 page)

And after that I wound up in another shop and began to make a moderate mistake.

I'm not ashamed.

I'd say that now.

It was something I walked into and couldn't control. Like the weather. It was like an unexpected stroll in snow.

If I'd been, I'll suggest this again, some other person with other likes and dislikes and not myself, then what was, in this case, unique for me might have been an already long-established and fond habit and no sweat. In someone only a little removed from myself, that could have been the case.

It must have been cold in the street. I believe that my hands were hurting in my pockets. They scolded. That memory's inflexible. So I can assume that I dodged indoors quite blindly to borrow a touch of warmth. I've been known to do such things before, particularly lately. I no longer concentrate as I once did.

The shop assistant was immediately –
Can I help you?
– right close at my elbow and her tone weird as she continued –
You were looking for something particular?
– which I wasn't – and she was asking me as if she was somehow a caring professional: not a doctor, or a nurse exactly, but maybe a dental hygienist, or a top-price hairdresser. She was dragging along this atmosphere of support and expertise which she leaned against me like a rolled-up carpet – second-hand, dusty – and there was a top note she put across most of her words to imply she was a friend I should confide in, girls together and ice cream this evening with crying and new lip gloss.

Lip gloss makes me feel constricted. As did she.

And wearing mascara's like peering through a fence. Make-up is what one does for others, isn't it? One goes to trouble.

One says things, if only to one's self, like
I have gone to trouble for you
.

As if it's a trip to be made on somebody's behalf.

I have gone to trouble for you, so you don't have to. I brought you back this souvenir, it's a small box of difficulties. You needn't unwrap them at once.

The gist of this was there in my head at the time – ideas being held – and there were other matters present, too, forming contours underneath the thinking, like knees underneath a bedspread. The knees have implications, but you don't have to deal with them, or not at once.

The assistant continued – insistent assistant –
For a special occasion?
– and I was, it must have seemed, drifting in an exploratory way along racks and shelves and display stands packed with choice. The lighting was unsubtle, so I found my surroundings rich in detail.

I was somewhere like a very big grocer's –
For yourself?
– a supermarket – times change and why be furtive, I suppose – a supermarket full of sex. Not sex. Devices engineered – there was a lot of engineering – to mimic the effects of sex. Only devices –
For yourself?
– not costumes, or DVDs, or magazines, or books, or most of the things I'd expect to be in a sex shop, in as far as I'd never had expectations in that field and couldn't be sure, but must have surmised at some point. I surmise a great deal and at random. I did not intend to be there and yet there I was, nonetheless –
For yourself?
– and I had no answer. I'd halted in front of a bank of what were probably – definitely, now that I looked – fake vaginas and I couldn't answer – who would? – that, no, I intended to buy such a thing for someone else. Who? For whom? A female friend to whom I would suggest that their own was unhelpful? Or would I give one to a straight man as if he'd no chance of access to a real one? I'm sorry his girlfriend left him, never mind and here's this, which boils her down to her essentials? I'd want to imply that he felt these
were
her essentials and no wonder she left? Or would I foist one on a gay man? As what, a novelty letter box? Or I should deliver one to a lesbian as a hint she was sexually hopeless and ought to make do. This is –
For yourself?
– an impossible enquiry. Yes, for myself and I will give it to my partner because I want a rest? Or am I lacking? Or am I supposed to be gay and irreversibly solitary? Or have I discovered that mine doesn't work any more?

I attempted a smile that intended to seem well informed and relaxed. The assistant wore a name badge which called her Mandy, although I couldn't accept that as likely.

I adjusted my smile, broadened its dimensions.

I didn't want Mandy, or whoever she was, to imagine that I had no sense of fun.

Fun is important.

I constructed a small and intentionally visible idea of myself as someone with numerous options and a wide-ranging social circle. I folded my arms and moved on with purpose and as if I had no need of guidance –
Oh, then these
– Mandy wouldn't let me be –
These are wonderful
– I rounded the end of the aisle with her in tow and announcing –
They really are
– as she reached for a favoured item, being factual, not salacious –
Things have moved on
– and she offers me what things have moved on to from among the gathered ranks of more and less sci-fi imitation penises.

It didn't look –
thank you
– very much like a penis at all. Mandy had judged me –
thanks
– over to my left were obsessively anatomical offerings –
thanks
– Mandy had judged I would favour something impressionistic. Vague. Elegant lines. Inhuman.

I had the air, then, of someone who might wish to redesign their partner.

Thank you.

To love and despise simultaneously – Mandy assumed I was capable of that.

Thanks.

Clever Mandy.

Thank you
– trying to –
really, thanks
– get rid of her with gratitude and taking the package – mainly a clear plastic bubble for ease of inspection –
thanks now, yes
– and my aim was to shift off to the back of the place, ditch the thing and leave.

Actually, not-so-clever Mandy.

I don't love and despise. That wouldn't be clear in my face, not to someone who knew me, because it isn't factual.

Mandy is a bad judge of character.

I love and resent.

Everyone does that, it's impossible to avoid. The real experience of love is of having unreasonably lost all shelter. There are wonderful additional elements in love apart from that, factors and truths which demand more than affection, which require worship of sorts, but there is, there really is, that initial loss. Sudden. And you cling to whoever is with you for sheer safety, beyond anything else. You cling to whoever has robbed you and they cling back because they are equally naked – you have stripped them to their blood. They are your responsibility, frail and skinless. It can't be helped.

I hurried from Mandy.

I rushed to the extent that I could rush without suggesting unseemly desire to acquire some further contraption with which to astonish my privacy.

The far wall of the shop offered objects that weren't coat hooks, that wouldn't enable arthritic hands to open tricky jars, that couldn't be used for games of hoopla, even though they were unwieldy, even though they were unlikely, even though the human pelvis could never accommodate them as an internal feature and they were therefore unfit for their stated purpose.

All these wild attempts at satisfaction, these declarations of absurd need.

Chocolate-flavoured condoms. They had chocolate-flavoured condoms.

You like penises, you like chocolate, why not both?

There were many
whys
for
not both
. For many reasons, my opinion was in favour of
not both
.

If I like penises, might I not be assumed to hope the flavour of a penis will be penis, which is to say not too much of a flavour, ideally just this subtle, unflavoured pleasantness and that isn't a problem, how could that be a problem? I don't feel my experience of oral sex is intended to be primarily culinary.

Unless is it? Have I got this wrong? Is it not about love, about knowing and being known? Is it – I can get confused – perfectly reasonable in that, or any other, context to insist, to appear to insist, to act in such a way that I'd be insisting
your penis is inadequate and ought at least to taste of chocolate to compensate, so here you go and roll on one of these?

Am I being over-sensitive? Am I mistaken in thinking that when I touch the man I love, no matter where I touch the man I love, in no matter what way I touch the man I love, then the point is that I'm touching him and it's love and the whole of him is him and I am happy with the whole of him and my aim is to produce an increase of happiness in both parties and where he is tender I will be tender because that would be only right and the best and finest thing and sweet to my soul and lips in tender places can be tender. Even in the rush and stroke of the moment, it's only simple, only tenderness.

Nothing else would be required.

Something else would be an insult.

I wanted to explain this, because it was important, but nobody I'd want to hear me was there to listen.

I peered from behind the hoopla section until Mandy had pounced on another woman and led her away. They were chatting back and forth as I supposed they were intended to, taking advantage of a female-friendly emporium and an informative and unembarrassed ethos and I didn't care about my position per se, but it still made me angry, nevertheless.

Although this was a setting unsuitable for rage.

And anger is always the second emotion, something else having always been there first.

I wish I'd never learned that.

Fear and pain being the most usual precursors.

I would rather not notice the signals that prove I've been hurt or frightened.

Nothing else for you today?
– I couldn't quite understand how Mandy had ambushed me again. I'd been heading to the penis area to abandon mine – it was not mine, but was burdensome enough by then to be taken personally – and I'd hoped to be free soon, but there she was –
Ready?
– the pert and relentlessly outgoing and dreadfully helpful Mandy.
I'll take you across to the cash desk.
As if I was an invalid, imbecile, had never visited a shop.

I could see the cash desk. I did not wish to visit the cash desk. I did very much wish to leave.

The easiest option was simply to buy the thing.

Buy it and get out.

We're a Canadian company.
I don't know why I had to be told this.
We do things the Canadian Way.
Inexplicable. The young man at the till – I am now of an age, apparently, when the men at tills in sex shops will seem perceptibly young – created some kind of merry personal tension with Mandy. His name badge announced
John
. Mandy and John eyed each other across me as if they were a remarkably blasé couple, looking forward to an evening of not sex.

John –
We like you to be happy
– dextrously unpacked the penis and –
I'll pop these in
– did indeed pop batteries – several – inside it before scooping one of my hands off the counter and setting the already-thrumming thing across my palm. Mandy smiled and took over –
There we go
– adjusted the settings up up up and down down down. This being of no use to me.

I had not intended to stand in public holding an electric penis while it performed keenly, then gently, then sluggishly, then not.

This way you know it works and is what you want.

John repacked it –
More batteries?
– Mandy was meanwhile incredibly – in the sense of being unbelievably – pleased by this whole turn of events –
We have a deal on batteries.

I threw everything away once I got outside.

And the entire palaver didn't matter, was unimportant.

I know.

There may be no Canadian Way and perhaps they were only a couple with a kink working through it together in a ludicrously ideal location. Or they were making a joke of me. I don't care about them.

Except that they were more strangers intruding and I am tired of that.

I am so tired. Contributing factor.

I go to bed and hope for fifteen hours uninterrupted and they don't arrive in the same way that there is no snow, or no fun in snow, or no miracle about it.

I get so angry.

Uninterrupted fury is a constant.

It flickers near and far, but stays with me beneath superficial variations.

Which is why this preposterous shop – this preposterous story about this preposterous shop, preposterous strangers – it's why I hold them tight.

I hold them until I sweat with holding and I can have faith there is something in my arms, against my arms.

I hold on until I have confidence again in the truth of sweet and voluntary touch.

Even in its absence I can believe. That's what belief is all about – it cannot exist without absence.

Honestly.

I need no substitutes or replacements.

I am lost, but not that lost.

I can subsist on faith.

It seals me away from remembering the afternoon not so far before the shop. Hospital trip – latest hospital trip – mild outside, but the corridors snowy, as if filled with bruised snow – past the doorways and in and undress and smell wrong and like a stranger and wait in the bedroom – wear the gown provided and get into the bed – they wheel me onwards using the bed once I am dressed as someone other than myself – the wide elevator yawning and sluicing me down to the theatre level – chat with the orderly – politeness – I'm paying – shame the public system doesn't work – I pay for that, too – but I pay more for this because then I'm less frightened, then I can think I'm doing something. I am my priority and contain the sum total of my hope. There are smiles as I go, propelled under the lights, and then come the intrusions and I am brave – just looking around to check the theatre, the monitor, the other equipment – I produce jokes, things that have moved on from jokes – and I'd rather not have the sedative and so get discomfort instead, not pain precisely – severe to moderate discomfort – I am very brave – I say this to myself – there being nobody about who is better informed.