When Girls Read online

  My birthday’s in November, which as we all know is a shitty time of year. More specifically, my birthday’s in very late November, just when everyone’s realised how close Christmas is, that 1) they haven’t started Christmas shopping, and 2) they haven’t got any spare money to start Christmas shopping with. Also, November’s pretty cold, and if it’s not cold it’s wet, and if it’s not wet it’s dark. No-one’s ever much interested in my poor, miserable, weatherbeaten birthday, and most years that includes me.

  This year, however, things are going to be different.

  My story starts back in March, so please bear with me a while.

  As we all also know, November is not the only shitty time of year, because there’s January, February on top of those first three weeks of December. But after February along comes March, the month after which, in the ancient past, the people of my tribe were named. March has a big spring glow, all wholesome and optimistic. Being invariably imbued with post-Christmas ennui I’ve always skipped New Year’s resolutions, telling my heavy ass and overloaded gut I’ll get back to them some other time. But by March I’m usually up for something new. To be fair this doesn’t usually materialise into much more than subscribing to a new podcast, but this March I was up for a bit more of a radical change, life and conduct kind of change. Me being a March myself surely makes me genetically wholesome and optimistic myself, so what could be a better time?

  I brainstormed some ideas and picked some good and useful stuff and promised five things to myself. To emphasise: these were not resolutions; I have very weak resolve. These were promises, because whereas I might fail in resolution, I do not break promises even when I am the only person involved.

  Itemised, these were them:

  initiate (pleasant) conversation with at least one stranger every day;

  stop wearing clothes which have ten billion exact duplicates around the world;

  go to at least one cerebral event per week;

  date anyone who’s interested;

  indulge myself.

  I’m not going to lie: at least four of these promises were made with the intent of getting laid and/or finding the love of my life. By March I’d been single for nearly nineteen months and had even stumbled into describing myself as ‘involuntarily celibate’ while making small talk with a friend of a friend. (Friend, for the record, stared at me as if I had literal shit oozing from my mouth.) I was also spending way too much time watching documentary interviews with life-term criminals, which had mutated into fantasies about having one as a penpal and writing epic letters about my day-to-day which would eventually - long after my death - be recognised as a critical written account of early 21st century urban lesbianism and subsequently collected, published, and studied, with pages from my Kate Middleton Fan Diary included as an addendum to the second edition.

  Let’s start with number 1. Is it a cliché yet to say that talking is hard? Of course it is...but still. It’s hard to talk to your mother because all she wants to discuss is how much Pamela must have spent on those flowers or about the new machines in the car park in the town centre which ask for your number plate and the absolute effrontery of it all. It’s hard to talk to your boss because you still haven’t done the fire safety training module; it’s not out of malice, you just keep forgetting, but if you talk to her she’s going to look at your face and your face will remind her that you’re still not registered as unlikely to get burned to death on her watch. It’s hard to talk to the checkout girl at Asda because she’s beautiful and posh and looks at you with such sincerity and because once she used the phrase ‘very niche’ while you were lightly chatting, even though by rights it should be physically impossible to say ‘very niche’ so perfectly and hotly while rolling apples to my waiting hands, and you just know that when she finishes at Asda she’s going off to study Engineering or Architecture for seven years and that she’ll be absolutely pristine her whole life, and that she’ll end up marrying a woman who works from home, not having any children, and visiting lavender fields while on holiday in France.

  And it’s even harder to speak to a stranger. I adopted as my guru the unknown woman who tapped my arm in the queue for a film just to comment on how lovely my perfume was and how much it suited me. I felt about ten feet tall even while I blustered trying to remember its name. ‘It’s something by Anna Sui; it’s in a pink bottle shaped like a human head,’ was all I could definitively say. I told myself at the time that compliments in the wild are surely the ripest and loveliest compliments there are, and that I should try handing some out myself. But I never did, even though I thought of it a lot. Walking behind someone: Bloody nice coat. Queuing behind someone at a different checkout to the Asda debutante: Great taste in beef jerky. But one of my problems is saying things out loud. Not only wrong things - like describing myself as a lesbian incel - but right things, such as, Would you like to go out sometime? With me, I mean. Kind of like a date.

  Despite the inherent difficulties I made it a promise to myself. With my Netflix and YouTube commitments I don't run into a lot of strangers, so this was quite the effort. I decided to start small - high street supermarket small - and decided that a weekday morning around brunch-time would be a good time to begin.

  Tesco Express on a Tuesday at 11:10 a.m. and not a single terrifyingly beautiful checkout girl in sight. I had washed my hair and it had dried looking like actual hair rather than the curse of a bad fairy godmother; I had buttoned and belted my coat so that it would seem I organised my life well enough to have the time to regularly do things like buttoning and belting my coat; and I had trimmed and filed my nails so it would be clear I was ready to dyke. Also I actually had things I needed to buy, like jumbo porridge oats, more apples, and bleach. I put these in my basket and wondered where the best place would be to initiate a pleasant conversation with someone I’d never met.

  While wondering this I was loitering next to the rack of gluten-free. Which is when Anna approached. She came right up to the gluten-free and stood right next to me, close to me, as close as if we were in a two-seat truck on a roller coaster. Anna was looking at wraps.

  ‘Gluten-free sweet potato wraps,’ she said as if unaware she was speaking aloud. Then she turned the packet over. ‘Sweet potato content: seventeen per cent.’

  She sighed heavily. I wasn’t sure I understood but peered at the wraps anyway and made an empathetic noise.

  ‘Two pounds seventy-nine,’ she went on, then dropped the packet back on the shelf. ‘I could make these myself.'

  'I’m not sure I could,' I said.

  She turned slightly, looked up at me and snorted. ‘Oh, you bloody could!’ She was short, red-headed, with small but pretty eyes behind silver wire-framed glasses. ‘It's like, flour and water. Just mix it then mash it out flat.’

  She had initiated this conversation but I was going to count it nonetheless.

  ‘Not sure I could measure out seventeen per cent sweet potato,’ I said.

  ‘You could make better than this guff.’ She picked up a different packet. ‘Corn’s really bad for you as well.’

  Part of me wanted to choose the sensible route and enquire how and why corn is a terrible thing, but the more robust clownish part of me took the wheel instead.

  ‘I'm Lauren,’ I said, holding out my hand, ‘and you must be the head of the International Anti-Sweet Potato Wrap Campaign.’

  She laughed then shook my hand. ‘Anna,’ she said, ‘and I'm not really. Just in search of perfection, I guess.’

  I almost said, You won’t find that here, mate, but then I remembered I was out and about trying to change my life and stopped myself. Also: why the self-denigration? Maybe Anna was a horny femme and maybe she had spotted me from the other end of the store, and maybe she had sidled over (not walked,
browsing, but sidled, with intent) thinking that I looked like perfection. And she was wearing her glasses, so there was no doubting the acuity of her sight.

  ‘Have you tried Nariko’s at the west end?’ I asked. ‘It’s Japanese. They do amazing wraps.’

  ‘I have, actually,’ Anna said. ‘They put us by the door and it was freezing, but yeah, the food was fab.’

  I considered saying that they put us by the door as well, in order to make that elusive connection. Then I decided not to lie.

  ‘I sound like I complain a lot, don’t I?’ Anna added.

  I deadpanned. ‘Yes.’

  Her nose wrinkled and she laughed. ‘I don’t have to be gluten-free anyway. It’s just a preference.’ She bent down and picked up the sweet potato wraps again. ‘On second thoughts, I do like it that they’re kind of pink.’

  ‘I mean, if you can afford to eat at Nariko’s…’

  She shrugged. ‘It was a pre-graduation lunch with my sister, because she had to catch a plane and couldn't come to the actual thing.’

  Anna didn’t have a student vibe. She was in black trousers and a black scoop-neck top, and without properly thinking about it I got the impression that perhaps she was out on her break from one of the many-windowed office buildings hereabouts.

  ‘Are you a student?’ I asked.

  Bit clumsy there, Laur. You’ve made her laugh twice in under two minutes, don’t drop the flame-haired-Irish-looking-beauty-with-freckles-on-her-chest ball now.

  Anna nodded. ‘Postgraduate now, in maths.’

  What’s the highest you’ve ever counted? I wanted to ask. Don’t you dare, I warned myself inside my head.

  Anna hitched her basket up into the crook of her elbow. It looked like we were done.

  So: it turns out I have no problem chatting to strangers if they start the conversation and I am therefore morally compelled, but what do I do next? All of a sudden it seemed very Hollywood American to jump straight into asking for a woman’s number. OK, so people do it in films; they do it in films because a film is under two hours long and the process of moving from meeting to friendship to dating needs to be expedited. Because they can’t credibly relate what it’s like to chat to someone for three minutes in a supermarket, then awkwardly go your separate ways, or how the rest of the day you worry that the universe dropped a unicorn into your lap and you didn’t take the hint. Or how you go back to the supermarket at the same time for the next three days in case it was her regular break and you might find her there again, then search Instagram for women named Anna who use #maths, then three weeks later have the autistic Scandinavian detective-level idea to check on the university website whereabouts their postgraduate maths place is, then go up there and buy a coffee from a hatch in the side of a three-wheeled van and drink it outdoors, rather near the steps of the postgraduate maths place, then take a week off to fully ascertain the level of creep you may have reached, then decide it’s not creepy it’s romantic and you would pay probably two hundred and fifty pounds to know that a normal, clean, reasonably intelligent, achingly funny woman with a respectable job and one smart coat and parents who love her is thinking about you and hoping to see you again for just one more chance to chat.

  If I was to say ‘Cool’ or ‘Bye, then’ we would definitely be done. The promise I’d made to myself grew fuller and brighter in my head, because the-talking-to-strangers thing had a point; it was a means to an end. It wasn’t just to practice social interaction and it wasn’t just to be nice. It was to interact and more critically to actually connect.

  And it was, maybe, to get laid.

  Not for the first time the vague and very distant potential for sex shoved me hard in the middle of my back. So heavily prompted by that shove I said something that was more than just ‘Goodbye.’

  I said, ‘Really nice meeting you, by the way.’

  It reads like nothing on the page but sounded pretty hot in real life. I thought I’d nailed it, too. I had faced towards Anna rather than towards the pasta made out of lentils. I had put a solid emphasis on ‘really’ - not too much, or it would have sounded sarcastic - and I had held such strident eye contact it almost hurt.

  And Anna had smiled in return. ‘Yeah, definitely,’ she said, and she paused, then she looked at the shelf. ‘Are you getting anything? Here at the wrap shelf, I mean?’

  I had my porridge oats, my apples and my bleach. ‘I think I’m done, actually. I was just loitering, sort of, you know.’

  We both turned and walked towards the tills.

  ‘Are you maths-ing today, then?’ (Lauren you fucking DOPE.)

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you doing something maths-y today, I meant.’

  ‘Oh,’ (at least she smiled). ‘Not really. I had a meeting earlier. That was a little bit maths-y, but not totally.’

  The self-service aisle was almost deserted. We went to adjoining tills. It wasn’t over yet but it nearly was, and I knew I had to say something radically lesbian within the next three minutes or lose Anna forever. It felt like I had a tiny idiot inside my brain manically rifling through piles of tatty papers hunting for my gay CV, and when she pulled it out it was just a torn single-sided page of A4 stained with tea rings and jam.

  ‘It’s my day off,’ I said, in a tone that I hoped conveyed the great and unknown potential of the coming afternoon.

  Maybe that’s enough, I thought. She might be like that woman in ‘Nymphomaniac’ except only for girls. Knowing it’s my day off might be enough for her to take me home and do completely mental stuff to me until I feel exhausted and repulsed and want to go home. Or until I fall in love. Whatever. I don’t even mind.

  Anna didn’t respond to the day off remark. The fucking checkout had interrupted and was telling her to move her bag and now some kid in a fleece was coming over to help.

  ‘I pay for my stuff first then pack afterwards,’ I said. The kid glanced at me. It was a stupid thing to say. It sounded corrective. It sounded like if Anna took me home and fucked me I’d finish with some watery pissant kind of climax then describe how I’d have fucked me if I was her.

  She was packing her rucksack with the wraps and cheese and a four-pack of tins of tuna and fresh spinach and peppercorns and aluminium foil and mouthwash and

  BLEACH.

  ‘Bleach twins!’ I said, with more glee than anyone has ever had in the mentioning of bleach in the history of the entire world.

  Anna looked at me. I was holding up my turquoise bottle of bleach and jigging it by its shoulders as if it were a happy doll.

  She laughed. Held up her turquoise bottle to match.

  ‘Scented bleach is very First World,’ I said.

  Anna switched bottles. ‘I raise you this. Perfumed water for ironing,’ she said, and then she winked.

  ****

  I didn’t share with Anna that I thought anyone who spends money on perfumed water for ironing is literally insane. We walked out of the store together and she turned left which was my direction too, so now we were walking together and I relaxed a little, because if two people walk together then at some point there has to be a definitive goodbye and not just a wandering away.

  Anna told me she’d meant to get a bag of peanuts because she had this thing called Project Crow, whereby she’d sit in the square for lunch and feed peanuts to the crows with the long term plan that they would come to recognise her face, because corvids are super bright and can do that (or so she said). Anyway, she’d forgotten to buy peanuts, so I apologised for distracting her. Implicit in that apology, of course, was the notion that 1) Anna was a lesbian therefore distractible by a woman flirting badly over gluten-free wraps, and 2) that I was interesting enough to be distracting, despite shit like ‘Bleach twins!’ Then I suggested we pop into the health food shop for peanuts, which Anna said was probably ‘way more expensive’, but it was almost on our route so we went in to look and the peanuts weren’t that pricey after all. Anna bought two bags as I stood beside her feeli
ng horny and helpful and smug.

  By that time I felt I’d been as overtly gay as I could be. I’m not enormously gay to look at (my friend Megan said she was ‘only sixty per cent sure’ when we met, and still only eighty per cent even after I told her I once fractured an elbow playing baseball on a women’s team who ran their own tab at a particular sports bar that kept a rainbow flag pinned permanently above the front door). If I had to describe my style it’s somewhere between anxious butch and lazy femme: I wear jeans with trainers or flats, and I like a good jumper. I have that one smart coat (*insert sunglasses emoji here*) and one leather jacket which makes me feel sexy A.F., maybe because I bought it when I couldn’t remotely afford a leather jacket which is an inherently sexy thing to do. I don’t own a personal rainbow flag, or wear rainbow pins, or have labrys keyrings dangling from my bag, and I gave up baseball after sixteen months and a ravaging break-up with TGGiTW* whom I shall describe to you soon enough. (*Claudia, The Gorgeousest Girl in The World.)

  And anyway, I had kept my promise, done the thing: I spoke pleasant words to a pleasant stranger. Anna might have started it but I had responded, and clearly I hadn’t come across as too much of a twat since we were now probably half a mile away from where we met and still walking together, still easily talking. Admittedly I was now a few hundred metres out of my way, since wherever Anna was headed appeared to be towards the north-west. I hoped she wouldn’t ask where I was going, because the words ‘home with you’ were top of my mind.

  The small talk - on warmer weather, favourite places for lunch - was going fine, so I decided to try for her number. Maybe thus far I’ve given the impression that all this was really no big deal, when actually it felt like I’d been sponsored by Red Bull to engage in something death-defyingly pointless, and now here I was falling through space with thousands of people watching online hoping my parachute would fail.

  I am a wary lesbian: wary of rejection, wary of failure, wary of causing offence. I had asked a woman out exactly thrice in my life. My first time was an extremely fat girl who was getting bullied at school. She used to sit on a wall all through lunch break every day, so one time I went and sat next to her, and she looked at me sideways, kind of like my parents’ dog does when I go visit and sit next to him on the couch holding his toy monkey in my mouth. I thought it might cheer her up to be asked out on a date without really pausing to question whether she was actually gay, so I suggested going to the cinema one weekend then for cheeseburgers afterwards. She said no. Apparently she didn’t like cheeseburgers and only watched films at home.