Still, he seemed to enjoy doing it and it also seemed to
work too, so I stopped pulling him up on it whenever I caught him smoking out
of the corner of his mouth or winking when he thought he’d said something
clever, and let him just get on with it these days.
“So what’s Sally’s problem?”
“Oh, I don’t know. You know her, she’s always upset about
something. I can’t seem to do anything right these days.” I took a big gulp of
my new pint, wiped the bubbles from my top lip and let that sentiment have some
time by itself.
“Probably her period or something I suspect. That’s usually
what’s the matter,” Tom guessed, making the barman roll his eyes.
“No, I don’t know. Maybe it was all a bit stupid but it
wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Ah, women they don’t understand these things. It’s just
easier to blame stuff on their blokes because they’re the ones at hand. Try
doing something to a bird that they don’t like and see how much they like it,”
Tom winked.
I met Tom at University. In fact, that’s where I’d met Sally
too. She’d been in the year below us both, but we’d all worked on, or at least
contributed to, the University paper, so we’d ended up getting to know each
other. This was also how me and Tom had started in journalism and how I’d ended
up on
Caravan Enthusiast
and Tom had
ended up on
Camper Van Magazine
(Sally saw mine and Tom’s dreadful career fates and immediately took the
decision to do something useful with her life, sparing herself forty-odd years
of media tedium).
Oddly, if a little unsettlingly, Sally had dated Tom before
me for about a week or so before realising [Sally’s words] “what a dreadful
mistake I was making” and [Tom’s words] “dropping me like a hot turd.” I’ve
never understood how a woman can like a bloke enough to go out with them, see
them two or three times and even sleep with them (as happened on this
occasion), only to then realise what an utter dork they are and chuck them?
I’ve never understood this.
“Come on, you have to admit, he is a bit of a knob,” she
once said.
“Well you fucked him darling,” I unwisely retorted.
I’ve often wondered what went on the night Sally realised
her “dreadful mistake” because it was one specific particular night, but
neither of them have ever talked about it so I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.
I’m certainly never going to ask. The curiosity did occasionally grip me, but
what if I found out they’d worn each other’s pants or spanked each other with
hair brushes?
Then again perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps it was nothing at
all. After all they were both young, naïve and inexperienced at the time, so
how deranged could’ve things got? Perhaps Sally just woke up the next morning,
rolled over and thought, “So this is what hitting rock bottom feels like is
it?” or perhaps she just figured she could do better. I like to believe the
latter as it flatters me at the same time, though I reckon the real reason’s
probably something a bit more embarrassing because Tom’s never talked about it
either.
“So, is she in a big sulk with you then is she?” Tom asked,
taking three attempts to flick a fag into his mouth before finally succeeding.
“No, it’s nothing. I’ll just keep my head down and it’ll be
fine in a day or so. It’s just annoying that everything’s always my fault. I
just wish one day she’d support me, I mean, I thought that was what marriage
was all about – two people supporting each other.”
“Really? Who gave you that idea, Ghandi?” he winked.
“Stop doing that.”
“Despite everything everyone says these days, women actually
just want to be looked after. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the
way it’ll always be. The blokes do the giving, the women do the needing,” Tom
sermonised.
“You don’t half talk a load of rubbish sometimes.”
“Believe what you like, but you tell me this; you’re always
going on about this argument with Sally or that argument with Sally but when
was the last time she admitted she was wrong about something and said sorry?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, doing a quick Ctrl + F on my
memory but coming up short.
“So when was the last time you did it?” he then asked.
“Well, tonight obviously,” I admitted.
“And the time before that?”
“I don’t know, just before Christmas, I guess.”
“And the time before that?”
“A few weeks earlier probably.”
“And the time before that?”
“Is your record stuck?”
“I’m just making a point here,” Tom said.
“Which is?”
“Which is, we’re the ones who have to do all the supporting,
not women. We support them, we look after them, and we’re the ones who have to
shoulder all the blame whenever anything goes wrong. That’s what being a man is
all about. That’s where the expression comes from, being a man,” Tom nodded
knowingly, pausing to take a man-sized swig of his pint before continuing. “Men
have to hold their hands up, take it on the chin and not grumble. If I said to
you, my dad went to the doctors, was told he had three weeks to live and took
it like a big woman, you’d know exactly what I meant, wouldn’t you?”
Images of Tom’s dad bawling on the doctor’s carpet, begging
and offering sexual favours for medicine filled my head, so I said, “yeah,
sure”.
“Now, if I told you he went to the doctors, was told he had
three weeks to live and took it like a man, what would you say to that?”
Tom’s dad got up from the carpet, wiped his eyes and laughed
manfully.
“Three weeks to live
you say? Why that’s just grand. Gives me time to play golf every day and blow
Tom’s inheritance on hookers. Fancy a sneaky pint before I tee off?”
“Hence, being a man calls for certain characteristics and
being a woman calls for other characteristics. That’s just the way it is,” Tom
concluded.
“You know, the scary thing is you really believe all of
this, don’t you?” I said, finishing my next pint before I even knew about it.
“I’m sure I won’t win any awards at the next PC rally, but
everything I’ve said is true. Men are men. Women are women. You just have to
decide which you want to be.”
Tom didn’t wink, although he looked as though he wanted to,
but three winks in as many minutes would’ve seriously devalued the gesture, so
he settled for nodding sagely and saving his next wink for something
spectacular.
“And what’s all this ‘we’ and ‘us’ bit? Last time I checked
you were still single. If you know so much about it, how comes you haven’t got
a girlfriend?”
“For precisely that reason, because I know so much about
it,” he winked, unable to resist the lure of that one. “Besides, I do all
right.”
This was annoyingly true. Tom did, indeed, do all right.
Every few Mondays he’d have some tawdry tale of bedroom bingo to share with me
and it wasn’t all bullshit either. Some of it obviously was, but not all of it.
Take for example his last conquest – Su Li is the name
on her birth certificate but she’s since become better known as “that little
Chinese bird I’m banging”. Tom showed me a picture of her a little while ago
(clothes on, obviously) and she looked absolutely fantastic: as pale as a drop
of snow and just as palm-meltingly delicate.
“Dirty as fuck, she is too. Wanked me off in the taxi and
let me do it all up her face when we got home.”
Now, I have no doubt he was bedding this “little Chinese
bird” but I couldn’t believe the details because they simply didn’t tie in with
my experience of girls.
I mean, sure, yeah, there were probably some girls out there
who did these sorts of things, but let’s be honest, they were going to be
pretty few and far between. And I’m not talking just about sex on a first date
here either; that would be refreshingly restrained if only I were. No, I’m
talking about nasty porno-type dirty things that you only read about in the
sleaziest (ie. the best) sex magazines – bondage, threesomes, lesbianism,
doing it in public, doing it up the bottom, all that sort of thing. If Tom were
to be believed, practically every girl in the world (or at least in Britain and
China) was an insatiable dirty nymphomaniac who’s only concern in life was
getting it as hard as she humanly could.
Now, like I say, obviously some of this was bullshit but not
all of it.
See, the reason I believed most of what Tom told me was
because Tom used to be hopeless as far as girls were concerned, absolutely
hopeless. And this is something he freely admits. He didn’t have a clue. Every
Friday and Saturday night he’d polish his glasses and head out with his best
Ben Sherman on, but the only thing he’d ever pull would be a kebab on the way
home. And that’s the way it went for Tom. That’s the way it went for him for a
very long time in fact.
Eighteen months was his longest stint without sex. Can you
imagine that? Eighteen months?
In those last few months he became really quite hopelessly
pathetic; a cross between a manic depressive and a strung out junkie.
Lesser men would’ve given up,
cut it off and turned gay/serial killer/train spotter if they’d had to go
through what Tom had gone through, but not Tom. No he stuck it out, determined
they weren’t going to get the better of him and kept banging his head against a
brick wall until he finally manage to con some poor naïve 24-year-old into
taking her bra off in front of him. Tina was her name, and an equally hapless
and hopeless specimen of insecurity you couldn’t wish to take advantage of. Tom
dated her at arm’s length for about four months before leapfrogging into the
bed of another girl and dumping Tina 21st Century style, ie. with an email. The
email had been short, sweet and to the point. Here’s what it had said:
Hi Tina,
Sorry for not calling back this weekend but I’ve been really busy.
Also, I’ve been thinking and I don’t think it’s working out. Hope you
understand but I think it’s best if we cooled it for a while. Take care, and
good luck at the dentists, I’m sure it’ll be fine so don’t keep worrying.
T
ps. I
posted you back your Greatest Love Songs CD but I think I sent it to the wrong
address.
I printed this off and showed it to Sally simply because I
couldn’t believe it.
I also couldn’t understand why he’d done this to Tina,
especially after all he’d gone through himself, but Tom just said that it was
his turn to be a bastard.
Well, from that day onwards it seemed permanently Tom’s turn
to be a bastard, because the next girl went the same way, as did the girl after
that and the girl after that.
Tom’s confidence grew with every weekend and he even started
winking at people whenever he said something clever and suddenly he was the
bee’s knees as far as girls went. He still didn’t have any luck finding any
sort of long-term soul mate but as far as [Tom’s words] “old bikes up against
bus shelters” went, he had it all sewn up.
Naturally, not every girl fell for his charms, an awful lot
actively despised his guts in fact, but he laughed at his failures as well as
his successes, so I reasoned a lot of what he told me had to be true.
“You dumped Su Li?” I said, Tom having told me this while I
was telling you about him. “Why?”
“Well, she weren’t all that to be honest. Too many teeth and
not enough tits, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t.
“Why did you go out with her then?”
“What d’you mean, you saw her. Why wouldn’t I?” he said.
“Well I don’t know. Perhaps if you didn’t actually like her
or couldn’t see a future in it,” I argued.
“Yeah well, I’m not like you, am I? I just like sex.”
“What are you talking about, I like sex,” I objected, loud
enough to draw a shout of, “get a room” from the back of the pub.
“No, you don’t like sex, you like having sex with Sally and
there’s a difference. I’m talking about sex; sex for the sake of sex. A big
pair of tits and a neatly cropped fanny and some bird who’s name I can’t
remember lying there and letting me do whatever I want alongside her. That’s
what I’m talking about. Just tits and fannies.”
“And they say romance is dead.”
“No it’s not dead, it just has nothing to do with sex,
that’s all,” Tom said, taking a puff on his fag and blowing several smoke rings
across the bar. “Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re the luckiest bloke in the
world. You’ve got a cracker of a wife you’re in love with, a happy and stable
marriage and a couple of kids limbering up in her ovaries. I reckon you’ve got
the lot.”
“And so will you if you keep on shagging around like this,”
I told him.
“Oh no, don’t worry, I’m always safe. I mean, you have to be
really these days, don’t you? Not fair on the bird,” he said, with
uncharacteristic consideration. “Besides, if you get some disease, you know you
have to contact all your old partners and get them to go for a check-up as
well. Can you imagine? Christ, there’s fifty-seven phone calls I wouldn’t want
to have to make.”
“Fifty-seven!” I exclaimed.
“Yeah, give or take. I lost count around about thirty but I
think it’s sort of around that mark,” Tom pondered.
“Fuck me Tom!”
“Make that fifty-eight,” he winked.
“That’s loads,” I pointed out.
“Not really,” he disputed. “Higher than average I suppose, but
most blokes have had about twenty birds or so they say.” I didn’t offer up
anything more to this as my total fell well short of twenty and left Tom to
consider this one for himself.
“Fifty-seven. Is that a lot? I don’t know, maybe. Still,
there weren’t exactly a lot of quality in there.”
“That’s incredibly generous of you to say so,” I told him.
“I know this one bloke, Martin is his name, drinks in the
Duke of York – you met him that one time – he reckons he’s shagged
over two hundred birds. Can you imagine that?”
“And has he?” I asked.