When Girls Read online

  The second time was a girl at a club when I was nineteen. She had black hair cut like on the posters in hairdressers’ windows and was wearing a fucking tuxedo, and her facial structure was just other worldly, like you’d cut yourself if you sat on her face. I was young and drunk enough to walk up to someone who was clearly a professional model and ask her out to breakfast - in front of about eighty of her friends - and when she replied, ‘No thanks,’ I was enough of a sad twat to ask if she was sure.

  Third was my postwoman, on her last day before she left to start college to train as a blacksmith. This time I wasn’t drunk, and it was a considered enquiry. Her name was Rachael and she wore shorts all year round and always waved or stopped to chat and she had tattoos on her fingers so all things considered I think it was fair of me to assume she was gay and might be interested in going for a drink. Anyway, I asked, and Rachael said thank you but no.

  So, if Anna blew me off she’d only be the fourth, and I could always tell myself that someone who pays money for ironing water wasn’t that great of a loss. And it wasn’t like I couldn’t just go home and have a wank for goodness sake. I am a user of porn, albeit a very careful one. I stick closely to amateur categories where everything’s under ten minutes long and shot on a DSLR (at best) or more likely a mobile phone, and in which the couple’s discarded clothes are on the bed and the aesthetic is yellow shawl over the headboard and sports bottles on the bedside table half-filled with orange liquid, and both of them have lushly drooping tits and there’s an uncooperative strap-on which they discuss only you can’t quite hear what they say, and my favourite bit is when the stocky blonde with the ponytail puts her brown-haired lover’s plump left nipple in her mouth and looks up at her, to see as much of her face as she can.

  If Anna declined, I promised myself, I would go home, get into bed with my Chromebook and a pint of Green & Black’s ice cream, open incognito mode and find something titled Hot Lesbian Gets Ass Eaten First Time Very Vocal, watch that, watch a few other recommended videos, finish the ice cream, turn the laptop off and turn over so I was lying on my hand, and commence a 45 minute to one-hour fantasy in which every single moment of the rampant, sodden and outrageous hook-up I had with Anna in some parallel universe is examined in full. How she invited me back for cheese and tuna sweet potato wraps, and how she had something weird going on like a mountain bike repair station in her spare room, and how she had a bookcase filled with about five grand’s worth of graphic novels, and how she put a ton of chilli sauce in the wraps without asking if I liked chilli sauce, then how she tried to find the local news on TV because her friend had found half a Roman urn while digging a barbeque pit in her cousin’s garden and she thought it might be on, and how we’d sat together on a dark blue sofa which kind of felt like corduroy and while I was wondering whether corduroy was a material that people used for sofas she had given up on the local news, put the remote down and kissed me, and

  Then I’d have to rewind, because I’d suddenly realise that in the fantasy I still had my coat on, and this would be unlikely given that we’d come in and she’d shown me round her place and we’d had lunch in the kitchen already. I’d have to rewind to getting in and unbuttoning my coat and Anna remarking on my jeans - ‘They’re really nice!’ she’d say, as if they really were - and given that this was a masturbatory fantasy and Anna was close enough to take my coat she’d have probably kissed me right then rather than waiting until after lunch. She’d have kissed me and I’d have felt weird and thrilled, and I’d have been thinking that since she liked me enough to pick me up and trusted me enough to bring me home I’d better show her a pretty gosh darned good time. So however hard she kissed me I’d have kissed her harder in return. My hands would have held her back and her waist and the back of her neck and the back of her head and I’d have only stopped to look at her beautiful eyes and to smooth her hair, and I’d have lifted her black top up and over her head. Underneath her top, her breasts - white with freckles, small and pretty and perfect to kiss - and she’d have been wearing a dark blue bra in some thin cotton that let me pluck it down so her nipples could overspill. They’d be the colour of tropical sand with big areolae and Anna would have watched me brush them with my thumbs, then she would have held her breath as I bent down and kissed them both in turn. Then she’d have taken my hand and led me to her room and yeah, it would have been totally Hollywood, exactly like the movies, except that she’d have been a little shy, and she’d have apologised for something along the way - probably for there being a knotted bag of rubbish in the hall that she’d forgotten to take out earlier - and in her room she’d have fluffed up the pillows before we laid down, and thrown a blanket off the bed because it was old and tatty and kinda embarrassing. ‘That’s kinda embarrassing,’ she’d have said, reaching over to drop it down onto the floor and out of my sight. Then she’d have turned over from her knees and reached behind her to unclip her bra, and all our four hands would cooperate in taking it off down her arms, and I’d have kissed her, and she’d have stopped to take her glasses off and put them securely on the side, next to a Snoopy mug which would have had an inch of black tea and the teabag in the bottom, and Anna would have told me that had been her breakfast because she was in such an incredible rush at 8 a.m., then she’d have laid down and shuffled down the bed and put her arms around my neck and I’d have been on all fours, over her, down on top of her, one leg between her legs and she’d have locked her legs around it.

  ****

  ‘Well,’ I began, in the style of ten gazillion awkward segues into romantic water-testing across the aeons, ‘this has been more fun than my usual walk home from shopping for stuff I forgot yesterday.’

  Anna smiled. ‘It has been, I agree.’

  I wanted to ask how far away her place was but didn’t want it to sound like I was angling for an address.

  Then she asked the question herself. ‘Do you live round here?’

  I opened my mouth to reply.

  ‘And I’m not being stalkery or anything,’ she added.

  ‘I’m just off Chippenham Road,’ I said. ‘One of the new builds. Well, I say new builds -’

  ‘The ones with the cladding?’ she asked.

  ‘Cladding?’

  ‘Is your building kind of painted white? I was worried about the cladding.’

  ‘It’s off-white now, but yeah, I think so.’

  We walked further, talked more, I could look at her while she talked, which was mostly for the benefit of watching her hair. It was dark red and hung in messy waves with a kink about halfway down its length presumably where she’d had it tied back.

  ‘What was your meeting?’ I suddenly asked. This wasn’t the best of my options as far as questions went. I should have asked about her, what she was doing for the rest of the day, the week, the month. Whether postgraduate maths students get their summers off and want to move across town to lounge around in white vests and white panties taking care of their girlfriends’ fish while their girlfriends are at work. Or, I should have just asked for her number, as I’d thought was my intent.

  Anna shrugged. Her rucksack bounced a little. ‘Oh, nothing much,’ she said. ‘Just a teaching project we might have coming up.’

  Asking what her meeting was might have been too much of a personal question. I decided to backtrack.

  ‘Tuna wraps for lunch, then?’

  She glanced at me and grinned. ‘Yep.’

  Ask me to join you. Ask me to join you.

  She didn’t ask me to join her. Someone was standing with their bike crosswise across the pavement, blocking us, and Anna strode in front of me and stepped into the road to get past. Clitblocked by a fucking cyclist, I thought.

  Anna slowed and turned around and doubtless saw me frowning. But like the girl of my dreams she ignored it.

  ‘I’ve got to shower and eat and get ready to go out,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said limply. ‘It’s a ‘do’.’

  ‘Wh
at’s a ‘do’? A party?’

  ‘Party’s probably a little strong.’

  ‘Is it compulsory?’ I said, ‘or could you skip it in favour of hanging out with your long lost bleach twin?’

  Yeah. I said that. I still don’t know if it made me look smooth or made me look like a dweeb. Either way it meant I had (sort of) asked her out. Anna looked at me, only for about 0.7 seconds longer than would have been considered straight, but nonetheless. Once that 0.7 seconds was up I knew for sure that Anna was gay.

  I can’t explain how I knew but at the same time I more or less can. Anna looked intrigued and flattered and anxious all at the same time, and she looked like she was checking I’d actually meant it. Specifically, how I’d meant it. She’d registered I wanted to hang out, that I wanted her to duck out of a prior engagement and give that time to me instead, not because I was lonely or socially odd but because I was a lesbian and wanted to get to know her in a lesbian kind of way.

  She looked down at the pavement as she walked. ‘I wish I could,’ she mused, ‘but I never skip out on stuff.’

  ‘Is it something important?’

  She shrugged and nodded and shook her head. Then she nodded again. ‘No...I mean yeah, yeah it is.’ She sighed. ‘It’s a retirement bash. Wine and canapés and maybe we’ll go to Monroe’s...the jazz bar, do you know it?’

  I told her I did not.

  ‘Well; maths and jazz in the more...’ she took a breath, ‘...the more ‘vintage’ echelons of my department, they’re like peas and carrots. If there’s a ‘do’ to be done they do it at Monroe’s.’

  ‘It’s a shame you’re tied up,’ I said, ‘but if you’re into the idea of meeting up…’

  ‘Oh I am! Definitely, I am.’

  Anna had turned towards me again and was walking half sideways, holding on to both straps of her rucksack. She looked girlish and ruinable and I wanted nothing more than to see her in an ivory satin wedding gown of the sort that Courtney Love used to wear in the nineties only not torn completely to shit and reeking of cigarettes.

  We’ll get married in a garden, I thought.

  ‘Do you have a phone?’ I said.

  Anna nodded, dropped one shoulder and shifted her rucksack round to the front. Her mobile was in the front pocket. We stopped walking.

  ‘Lauren…’ she muttered. ‘I have two other Laurens in here already…’

  ‘Call me Tesco Lauren,’ I said, folding my arms and puffing out my chest like I imagined was on some meme somewhere about womanly swagger.

  Anna seemed to get it: she grinned and winked at me again. I told her my number and she repeated it back as she added it to her Contacts, then we started walking again and she said it was a shame she wasn’t free because she had more than enough wrap stuff for two people but this was the woman who supervised her PhD so she couldn’t not go.

  ‘No worries,’ I said. ‘You’ve got my number now. Use it with reckless abandon.’

  ‘OK then.’ Anna had stopped. We were at one end of a one-way street. ‘This is me,’ she said, making a wide and approximate gesture with her arm.

  All the things I could do with you, I thought. Make sourdough bread. Go horse-riding. Set up a blog to talk about our investigations of cold case crimes which we will do in our shared study which has a whole wall of sash and case windows overlooking neighbouring farmland.

  I put my hand out for the second time since we met.

  ‘You are a hand-shaker, for sure,’ Anna laughed. It wasn’t a horrible laugh. It was sweet and warm and I wanted to take her to have her wedding dress fitted in an independent atelier which would probably be in Edinburgh or Bath or someplace Georgian with tearooms and I’d have to drop her off because she wouldn’t want me to see, and her mum would be there who would adore me, then I’d come and pick them up and Anna would be mopping tears off her nose with a tissue because her mum had been crying at how beautiful she looked which had set her off as well, and I’d give them both a hug which would be easy because they’re both short and I’m nearly five foot ten.

  ‘Really, really nice meeting you, Anna,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Really, really nice meeting you too.’

  ****

  I was now somewhere around a mile and a half out of my way, so I crossed the road, continued walking until I got to the little pedestrian throughway which would take me onto the main road where I could double back. This is the real start to my year! I thought, and, How fucking box office smash am I now?! This was surely as romantic as 21st century urban lesbian life could get.

  Now all I had to do was wait. You’ll have noted I hadn’t asked for Anna’s number. That was a calculated risk: I felt I’d come over as maybe a bit try-hard (what with all the jokes, then making her go into the peanut shop, then walking her almost to her door, then asking her to skive her thing), plus I’m not ignorant of the fact I’m tall and fairly broad and unless I’m at home in some sort of reclining position wearing my barn owl onesie I can come across as a bit full on. The kind of person you’re not sure about saying no to (unless you’re a model with eighty friends, or a retiring postwoman) in case I don’t hear it, in case I don’t leave you alone.

  Even though I’m nothing like that at all. My first girlfriend I’d known since I was fourteen. Her name was Juliette (Jules for short), and after two years bunking off school together every Thursday afternoon in favour of catching the bus to the next town so we could get a particular type of hard-shelled taco at the food court in the mall, holding hands all the way there and all the way back and never ever talking about boys, one afternoon I just threw my arms around her and pressed my lips against her cheek in the utmost smooch with absolutely no context at all. And she let me. She was a bit wide-eyed after, and her cheek was smeared with lipstick and my spit. ‘What was that for?’ Jules asked, and I cocked my head and replied, ‘Just cuz I luvs ya.’ ‘OK then,’ Jules replied, and although I wasn’t completely sure I was maybe 88% sure that she looked disappointed. Disappointed that I had used casual slang instead of actual words and that I was grinning like a cartoon instead of breathlessly aware of my own confession, which she would have reciprocated, and we would have lived happily ever after in some West Country cottage which no-one who visited could ever understand how we could afford.

  That was just before Christmas, which I recall because I’d just turned sixteen and Jules the poor cow had her birthday on Boxing Day, for which I loved and pitied her and felt it was our destiny to be joined as one. But how? How was a heavy question for a young lesbian like me. Even when another girl knows you better than anyone else in the world (and says the same vice versa about you), how do you turn your entire friendship upside down when you have no idea if it will even function as something more, let alone transmute into an altogether better thing? Maybe what it already was was in fact the best it could ever be, and even if I told Jules that I wanted to put my mouth on her mouth (and other parts in addition to her mouth) I didn’t know how to actually do that, or whether I could do it in a way that she liked, or - if she liked it - what I should do next after that. When, for example, should I stroke her tits? Should I stroke them after kissing her, or at the same time? Would we keep going out for Thursday tacos or would we have to start planning multi-level dates like mini golf followed by a film followed by drinking fruit cider on a bench in the park and kissing until people walked close to us then stopping then kissing again when the people are gone? And if we break up, what then? Would we just go back to being friends? Can you even be friends with someone if you’ve touched their vagina? Would Jules let me touch her vagina? Maybe she wouldn’t like her vagina being touched and maybe that’s normal and maybe I’ve got some kind of hormonal imbalance that makes me vagina-obsessed and not like a normal lesbian at all.

  The big cheek kiss did not become a thing, at least not for a while. We both ignored it, and I was trying to put it out of my mind. Then on her birthday - 26 December - Jules handed me a card. I’d got her a giant African land snail as a
gift and Jules’s mum had gone out to walk their dog in disgust, so we had been left by ourselves. Now we were in the lounge watching Clarice slime her way across the top of the walnut bureau.

  ‘Watch her for a sec,’ Jules said, and hurried out of the room. I was feeling proud because Jules loved her snail and loved that her mum had gagged when she saw it, and now I was going to be Clarice’s favourite aunt, and Christmas was over, and Jules was sixteen which felt like more of a milestone than it was. I heard her pounding upstairs then back down a minute later and she blasted back into the lounge and shoved a card at me. The envelope was purple, I recall.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Just open it,’ Jules said. She unstuck Clarice from the bureau and told me they were going to get a drink.

  She’d sealed the envelope then stuck it down with tape as well. Inside was a card with a goldfish on the front, and bubbles of air coming out of its mouth, and inside the biggest bubble were the words Just so you don’t forget… So I opened the card and both interior halves were filled with Jules’ scrawl which was round and fat (she dotted her ‘i’s with circles, sometimes even clouds), and she’d written Don’t forget you’re my best friend and don’t forget how much I love you, then another seventy or a hundred words I guess, I wish I could remember them all. Anyway, in a roundabout way Jules was saying she was worried I was going to stop hanging out because she hadn’t kissed me back, which would be stupid because she wanted to kiss me back but she didn’t and there hadn’t been a good time since, so maybe we should do something else rather than go to the food court on Thursdays and the garden centre at weekends to look at molluscs and fish.