The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl (26 page)

Dear Belle,

Last week when I was sleeping with my girlfriend she fell asleep while I was on the job. Now she’s says it’s nothing, she was just very, very tired. I don’t believe her. How can I make sure she stays awake?

Dear Night Shift,

Start fucking her earlier, or be faster about it.

vendredi, le 1 juillet

I’m abnormal, I know it. I don’t love Dirty Dancing.

It was buried deep at the bottom of J’s video collection. What the hell? I thought. Maybe the passing of fifteen-odd years has lent this film some magic that I, as a world-weary preadolescent, missed.

The girls at school were besotted with Johnny and driven to raptures by his dance numbers with Baby. I am probably horrified by the condition of being human on a daily basis, but this stood out as one of the highlights of the wretchedness that was school. When it comes to sentimental education I’ll have de Sade over Swayze any day.

Did teenagers really bring themselves to first orgasm thinking about Johnny’s manly mullet? I can’t remember what I first masturbated to – correction, yes I can remember, and it was a cartoon, and I’ll thank you never to mention it again – but it certainly wasn’t pap like Dirty Dancing. Unfortunately I was of the generation old enough to know who Duran Duran were, but too young to get backstage and jump on them. All the young gods of the eighties had long gone by the time I felt a stirring in my knickers. It was a long, long time until Take That wooed the girls of this nation with their homoerotic routines and tanning-bed charm. We were hard up for first-time fantasy material. I can sympathise.

But perhaps I’d been wrong and judged the film too harshly. Adulthood has a way of showing your childhood attitudes and fears to be unfounded. So I settled in with a brew and the phone on silent.

Enm … is this film for real? Did anyone really think those capris looked good? Is this why men of a certain age still unbutton their shirts to the waist?

No. No. And again, no. That’s two hours of my life I’ll never have back.

samedi, le 2 juillet

If there is anyone who pays most dearly as a result of globalised media, it is women. Once upon a time we could count on men to be men: either slimy and disposable or lumpish and loyal. Now, with the shelves of every bookshop in the land heaving under the weight of female empowerment tomes, there arises a new – and far more dangerous – type in the male species.

This abomination is the man who tells you exactly what you want to hear, and possibly even means it. Having attuned my ear over a decade-plus of dating to the sweet nothings of lying charmers, I find my gut response to such talk is immediate distrust. Anyone who says he wants to spend the rest of his life with me must, by definition, be a cheater who is about to break my heart. And the only man a girl can really rely on is her daddy.

It’s an alarming trend which does nothing whatsoever to preserve either masculine or feminine mystique. If I had wanted an equitable relationship, I would have arranged to be born a penguin.

dimanche, le 3 juillet

Somewhere in the nether regions of my brain lie the remnants of school biology lessons. The difference between water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins, how you need to replace one every day but the other is held in your body’s fat stores until needed.

Is there such a thing as fat-soluble sunshine? Because if I’m to go home soon, I need to start gathering it up in preparation.

mardi, le 5 juillet

It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? Somewhere between early spring (the wedding season) and late summer (the everyone copping off on holiday season). The exes-writing-letters season.

My previous amours are divided into two camps, those who stay friends, and those who disappear. Every year around this time a few of the disappeared make themselves known again with the casual ‘Oh, I just thought I’d drop you a note’ email. It’s not my policy to respond, though it is interesting to see who sends them.

So far I have heard from the Asian fellow who was raised on a farm, the odd quiet guy with the cool tattoo, and the long drink of water one of my university housemates wrote short stories about.

The surprise this year? All the exes are writing to let me know they’re married. Do they expect gifts or something?

On a hunch I go and check the Boy’s email. Yep, the fever has struck him, too: two sent letters.

To Susie he writes a bunch of sappy crap:

Hello, a bit out of the blue I suppose. If ever you are sitting round yours on a sunny day or warm evening with nothing to do, please call me, lass. I would love to take you out to a country pub on the moors and treat you just once. Or even just to the cinema?! I do know that you have completely moved on, but I would really like to very much. We spent most of our time together hundreds of miles apart, and now ironically we are not together but only 500 metres apart! It’s all very frustrating but beautifully ironic. Sigh. Take care, lass, and thank you for all the happy memories.

Actually, it was thousands of miles apart, not hundreds, but then he’s never been especially good at maths. And to the stick insect Lena, who I caught him in bed with the first time we were dating, some really quite unbelievable statements:

I know I really ruined my chances with you and I want you to know that your man is very lucky. You are by far one of the sexiest, cleverest and all-round stunning girls I have ever met, lass. If you ever change your mind, I live in hope.

Now, maybe I live on a deluded island of self-belief here, but I own a mirror. I’ve seen this girl. I’ve met her. I know that I’m prettier, smarter and certainly a better all-rounder than she is. If that’s what he finds valuable, if that’s what he thinks stunning, why do I bother?

mercredi, le 6 juillet

So far no replies to the Boy’s two desperation letters. Good. I pray they don’t write back, but I don’t hold out hope.

When I was young and my mother was in one of her moods (of which there were three: premenstrual tension, post-menstrual tension, and present menstrual tension), she said to me that women often hope that an old flame may be revived – but men know there is nothing so dead as dead love.

I beg to differ. Men, in my experience, are the worst of the worst for drunk dialling. Many even go the step further to the probably sober, entirely premeditated desperate email-out-of-the-blue. I’m very sorry, but what part of not having seen me naked in the last decade did you not understand? One-off hook-ups are one thing – everyone has a moment of weakness – but the concept of bleating your desperation out into the ether, year on year, in hope of a pity fuck, is horrific. For one thing, if there is no friendship to speak of, how can you possibly expect benefits?

And yet it seems – if the women’s magazines are to be believed – other women are willing to open their beds to these rakes long past what I would consider an appropriate expiry date. Something, I believe, about a repeat affair meaning not having to increase the total of men one has slept with. Puh-leese. As if a lady would reveal the real number, anyway.

Through the miracle of the internet men have come to expect that behind every park bench is a lady awaiting a shag. That every phone call is a gate to a date. That one has only to put together the most rudimentary, smiley-studded text before the mount of Venus is attained.

So you let him into your house and your bed. And then the next morning you go all Bridget Jones on him and start obsessing about whether the wedding should be in May or June. What are we left with? The realisation that the wags are correct: there really aren’t many women in this world who can take sex as lightly as a man can. Perhaps my mother was right after all.

Fellow girls: please stop giving it away. You can not handle the consequences, and more to the point, you’re putting the working girls out of business. Exercise your feminist right to say no.

jeudi, le 7 juillet

Tomás came over first thing and woke me up. That was how I found out about the attacks in London. We woke J and his girlfriend, put the television on the news and sat for hours, stunned. The news here is less protective, shows more blood, more screaming; throws more suspicion and rumours around than the news at home would dare do. Tomás made strong coffee and hot milk. I thought about ringing home but knew there was no chance of the lines being free.

After several hours, names of the victims started to come through. The first name I saw made my heart stop. It was my mother’s.

It wasn’t her, it couldn’t be, I knew that. J squeezed my shoulder – we didn’t say it out loud so the others wouldn’t worry, but I knew we were thinking the same thing. Mum isn’t dead. She is at home hundreds of miles away, watching the news, just as I am; or she is out with her new boyfriend, or trying to ring relatives elsewhere in the country; maybe talking to my father, I don’t know. I knew she was nowhere near London today but seeing her name shook me, just the same.

I have never felt so far from home in my entire life.

vendredi, le 8 juillet

It wasn’t Mum; she’s fine. But I’m still shaken. I want to hide; I don’t want to fly home, I don’t want to be standing at the airport, on the Tube platform, eyeing everyone else and wondering, just as they all will be, Who’s armed here? Who might be carrying a bomb? If it was a month earlier, maybe I wouldn’t go back. But my ticket is booked. I’ve rung the airline just to be certain, surely everyone is trying to fly home today. My seat is booked, my reservation will be honoured. There’s little I can do.

The night before I am due to leave, David comes along to say goodbye. In thirty-six hours’ time I will be in the arms of my boyfriend and he will be in the arms of his girlfriend. Meanwhile, everything back in London seems complete chaos. It’s difficult to make any conversation that doesn’t revolve around those subjects. So we talk about sex. The things we like, don’t like, and would do if there wasn’t this damned business about being committed to other people. I’m almost painfully turned on.

‘You’re very cute, you know that?’

Take me, please, here, now. On the suitcases. ‘Thank you. So are you.’

‘Your eyes are gorgeous.’

Yes, and they’d like to see a bit more of you. ‘Thank you. So are yours.’

‘And your eyelashes.’

Have I ever wanted to touch someone this badly in my life? ‘Yours, too.’ Apparently there’s a phenomenon known colloquially as terror sex, where people after a traumatic event on the scale of what just happened in London have extraordinary sex. Something about the urge to seek an attachment. I know it exists. Two weeks after the World Trade Center was attacked I met A2 in the US and had what I still remember as my biggest orgasm ever.

‘Out of curiosity, do you have any condoms?’

If I could orgasm without being touched – an unlikely occurrence, but let us say for the sake of argument it was a possible outcome – it would have happened just then. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I should take them back and demand a refund. I don’t know what sort of spell the chemist put on these, but I haven’t had sex since buying them.’

‘That is a waste.’ I don’t ask if he means a waste of me or of the prophylactics.

But we can’t do it. We don’t. Neither of us is brave enough to move from the realm of the desired to the realm of the definite, where we may be disappointed, or never see each other again, or never want to be parted. I see him in his underwear, he sees me out of my bra (‘How did such a small girl get such boobies?’ he says, and we both laugh), and painful though it is, we stop. We are good. Our reward will be in heaven, except I don’t believe in heaven. There is no reward.

samedi, le 9 juillet

‘Don’t you fucking cry,’ J says, crushing me to his shoulder. Over my head I hear him sniffling. He holds me at arm’s length, looks at my face. ‘You’re gonna be okay, right?’

‘Yes,’ I say. Tomás hands me an envelope. He’s made a card, drawn a picture of our houses next to each other. Inside, in Spanish, a wish for safe travel and luck; a photocopy of something by Mother Teresa he’s always had taped to the top of his bathroom mirror. That’s when I really start bawling.

‘I’ll call, I promise.’ J puts a finger to my lips. ‘Shut up,’ he says. ‘You live your life, we’ll live ours, everything will be fine. I’ll see you,’ he says, as if I’m going round the corner, not thousands of miles away.

L picks me up in an unfeasibly large people carrier. ‘This ride, darling, is ever so pimped,’ she says and laughs. The room is packed up, two suitcases, two boxes. A lamp and a throw that I give to her. There’s enough time to hit a café for breakfast and I tell her all about David. She shrugs. ‘Hard breaks, kid,’ she says. ‘Rejection kills, but disappointment only maims. You’ll get through.’

‘What if I’m making a mistake, though, going back?’ I don’t have to get on that plane. I don’t have to leave here, now or ever. We could live in a little beach shack, raise children, grow old brown and happy together, and never have to wear winter coats again.

She looks at me with her patented special-kid look, as if I’m a particularly dense twelve-year-old in need of a smack round the head. ‘What if we’re all making mistakes? What if staying would be a mistake? You think anyone else gets a preview of the rest of their lives? You make a choice and you fucking go with it because otherwise nothing would get done.’ She finishes her coffee. ‘Just let me know how it all works out, sweetie.’

‘Okay.’

‘And whatever you do, don’t for fuck’s sake ring him from the airport. Either of them.’

‘Okay.’ I’m lying; we both know it.

At the terminal she flags down a man to help with the luggage. He doesn’t seem interested. In fact, no one does. We drag the boxes along the ground, panting theatrically the whole way. She waits in the queue with me and gives me a hug when the check-in is complete. ‘Look after yourself, honey.’

‘You too,’ I say. But I know she’ll have less trouble than I will.

dimanche, le 10 juillet

The Boy is standing just the other side of the arrivals barrier, between crowds of families and drivers holding signs with names on. He looks different from the person I remember – tired, maybe, a bit dumpy and unshaven.

Then again, it is six in the morning and I hardly look catwalk-ready. There’s an odd, faraway look in his eyes, as if I don’t quite match his memory, either.