When Girls Page 4

  We kept our pyjama bottoms on. This was fine. My cunt was hot and wet and I was fine with Jules not fully knowing how hot and wet it was, and I was fine with how she was using two then four then two then four then two fingers to rub me through the cloth. I pushed against her and kissed her and sometimes I made her squeak, and one time she broke away which I think was to properly breathe. I kissed her face instead, tenderly, stupidly, not having seen anyone kiss anyone’s face that much but feeling from somewhere in the low dark core of me that kissing her face was precisely the right thing to do. Meanwhile my cunt felt swollen and creamy, itchy where its juice had spread between my thighs.

  ‘Are we fucking?’ Jules suddenly said. I went to reply without knowing what to say and choked on my spit instead. Now I was coughing. I sat up and Jules smacked me on the back.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ She sounded distraught.

  I recovered and kissed her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘Shush.’

  ‘Are we fucking, though?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess so?’

  ‘I don’t know either.’ She slid her hand back between my legs.

  ‘Are you tired? We can stop if you want.’

  ‘I don’t feel tired. I mean, I probably am, but…’

  Jules’ arm had gone a little limp. My fault, interrupting something fun to remind the other party that she wasn’t obliged to keep doing the fun thing. I wanted to correct myself, to tell her how much I was loving her touch and how high I felt with this new intimacy. Failing that I wanted to say something - anything - better than ‘we can stop if you want.’ But I didn’t. I was too new, words didn’t make themselves in the way they usually did, with only nanoseconds of thought, and now it seemed I had no words to reach for. Instead I took Jules by the wrist and moved her hand onto me again in the place it had been before, and to save myself searching all those empty shelves in my mind I kissed her instead. Maybe they’d restock themselves and I could articulate myself again after making love. Or fucking. Or whatever it was we were doing now.

  ****

  I was talking about Anna, wasn’t I.

  At home I unbelted and unbuttoned my coat and took it off, then hung it up on a coathanger with awe and reverence, about 38% glad she hadn’t been picking me up for sex since underneath I’d been wearing a six year-old top which actually rather resembled hers, except for being visibly six years old and probably much shitter even when it was new. Then I checked my phone for maybe the fifth time since we parted. Then I went to get a bowl of cereal in case Anna was eating too and it was spiritually symbiotic. Then I decided I’d better make plans myself, because Anna was going out do something proper with people and noise and if she did text and did want to see me first thing the very next day, she’d have a ton to talk about and I’d have sweet fuck all.

  I wondered what I should do. It was approximately lunch time. I am not much of a drinker and I didn’t want to try and pull a big night out of a hat, because something disastrous would inevitably happen like I’d fall off a building or Cloverfield would go down and I’d never see her again unless she texted to say she was trapped under a wall in her building, then I’d try crossing town to rescue her but get scared off a third of the way over and run away. Then I’d have to live the rest of my life not only in loneliness but also shame, which would be exacerbated because any monsters-surfacing-from-the-English-Channel scenario would definitely be top of the BBC for years to come, thereby rubbing my face in my failure over and over again.

  I ate my cereal standing in the kitchen because that seemed a perky thing to do. More perky than sitting with my knees up at my favourite end of the sofa under three mismatched blankets, picking my scalp and watching YouTube on a tablet and looking like one of those cats they call chonkers who doesn’t like to move and who their owner posts videos of when they’re being particularly immobile, with their owner laughing behind the camera and saying their name in a faux bewildered, gently chastising tone while the cat stares at them completely unaware there is a category called chonkers and they are in it.

  Then my phone buzzed in my pocket. I nearly tore my own jeans in my haste to pull it out and it wasn’t Anna. It was Charlotte, Also Gay But Just a Friend™. (Charlotte was so Episcopalian she was training for the ministry, and told me the church was a great place to meet other gay women. ‘It is for you,’ I retorted, ‘you’re brave enough to wear a smock and stand in a pulpit and talk about your soul.’)

  Charlotte had texted Day off, then a second message came through, which was just a question mark.

  Yep I replied.

  Just write yes.

  Guess what? I wrote.

  What.

  Made a friend xoxoxox

  Really? Who?

  No need to sound surprised.

  I’m not. Who is it?

  Anna.

  Not Anna Hardie? She’s not for you, L.

  ‘She’s not for you’ is the Christian way of saying that someone is a massive cunt. I didn’t know who Anna Hardie was. Who dat. I wrote.

  Charlotte sent an eye-rolling emoji then explained that Anna Hardie had borrowed her mountain bike, dropped it down the side of a hill, left it there for two nights and said she wouldn’t go and get it unless Charlotte drove her there and helped - which she did - then a couple of weeks later started a big crying scene in Charlotte’s favourite bar, in front of Charlotte’s favourite bartenders, calling Charlotte all kinds of epithets that didn’t fit, which ended up with Anna Hardie standing there with multiple people’s hands on her shoulders while Charlotte stood really quite far away with only one of their friends and eventually being asked to ‘maybe take this into the back room?’ by Miranda, her very favourite bartender of all.

  Sounded like dramarama to me and well below the operating specs of a stunning bespectacled maths genius who could probably fold tuna wraps properly and not even need to hold them together with cocktail sticks like me.

  Is Anna Hardie hot AF? I wrote.

  Yes, actually, Charlotte replied.

  I panicked very slightly. Long red hair. Long-ish. Dark red. She’s shorter than me. Freckels. Immaculate.

  *Freckles Charlotte replied, then, No, not her. Phew.

  What do you want anyway.

  Nice. Just seeing if you were free. What happened with the new friend? Is she there now?

  Nope.

  Charlotte rolled her eyes again.

  We chatted each other up in a SUPERMARKET.

  You did not.

  We did I’m afraid.

  CCTV or it didn’t happen.

  I’ll try to get it.

  When are you going out?

  Don’t know.

  Did you ask her?

  Hmm not really. Kind of but she was busy.

  Text her now and ask her out.

  She’s busy and I don’t have her number.

  So how are you going to see her again?

  She’s got mine.

  Why didn’t you get hers?

  Because I’m not a lesbian missionary like you.

  Lol. God loves a tryer.

  I did try.

  Try harder next time and God will love you more.

  We kept chatting, me pushing the conversation rather more than Charlotte, because as long as we were texting I had my mobile in my hand. Which felt less sad than moving to random places around my flat and keeping the phone within my peripheral vision at all times then pretending I wasn’t looking at it twenty-two times a minute. We chatted, my mobile continued to buzz, and every time it did it wasn’t Anna. I told Charlotte as much about her as I knew, focusing hard on the maths angle, and very sweetly Charlotte replied that she’d always imagined me getting together with someone academic; a thoughtful, grounded woman with a curious intellect. Someone with gravitas, she added. I told Charlotte that actually Anna wasn’t eighty-five years old like she was making out, and didn’t look like Ruth Bader-Ginsberg, and was probably just a jobbing maths geek who taught witless undeserving kids
for an insufficient wage and would likely end up working as an actuary because she’d get sick of the thanklessness of it all even though she’d always dreamt of an Ivy League career and picking up women over sherry in other academics’ studies after dark. Which left a lot of room for a relationship with me, and even the potential it could be her salvation.

  Charlotte snorted (via text). Then said she understood if I was staying in/waiting by the phone but if I wanted to she’d be free to have pizza. It crossed my mind that if Anna did get in touch to say that her professor had withdrawn her decision to retire and she wanted to meet up for mad sex and falling in love I shouldn’t have eaten beforehand, especially not pizza which always gives me the bloat. On the other hand...if she texted - just for a chat - and asked what I was up to, it would be fucking perfect to say I’d met up with a good friend, and we’d gone for a walk and a talk and something to eat, and that I’d told her all about the new range of beautiful redheads that Tesco just got in.

  ‘Don’t you dare say that,’ Charlotte said when I suggested this line later. In truth I’d thought of a lot of lines in the five or so hours that had passed between leaving Anna at the end of her street and meeting Charlotte in the park. ‘I’m going to marry you one day,’ wasn’t so strong either, apparently, nor anything based on jokes about times tables, long division, algebraic equations, etc etc.

  I’d thought the Tesco one was pretty good but Charlotte vetoed it on the grounds it referenced Anna’s hair. ‘Redheads get fetishized and creeped on all the time, so even when you’re not doing that it sounds like you are doing that,’ she said. We walked a circuit of the park then queued at the pizza van for two giant slices each.

  ‘You don’t speak for all the redheads in the world,’ I argued. ‘In fact you don’t speak for any of them, because you’re blonde.’

  Charlotte shrugged. ‘I’m not speaking for them, I’m speaking about them. It’s just some friendly advice. You can ignore it if you want.’

  My phone was snug in my back pocket, and silent. My jeans were so tight and the combined ring and vibrate setting set so much to the max there was no way I could miss a notification. Maybe I’ve accidentally uninstalled all my text and messaging applications, I pondered. But I hadn’t. It was five or so hours later and Anna was nowhere to be read.

  We paid for our food then Charlotte changed the subject. She was delivering the sermon at Evensong the following Sunday and invited me to go. I replied that I might or I might not. Then we talked about public speaking, then about her plans to visit China, then we spent about half an hour sat on a bench both searching photos of Shanghai on Instagram and showing them to each other. Then Charlotte showed me a harmonica she’d bought earlier. ‘I want to do a lot more camping this year and I’ve just got this thing about what it feels like to sit by a fire and play a harmonica.’

  ‘Noisy, I expect.’ It was early evening and I was beginning to sound dry.

  ‘She’ll call you, you dope,’ Charlotte said. She patted my knee in a jolly aunty sort of way. ‘Listen. Whatever note comes out of this is the theme note of you and Anna.’

  She put the harmonica to her mouth, inhaled lightly then blew through it. A few coordinated notes settled into one broad hum. It was low and fulsome, and maybe unhappy.

  ‘What note was that then?’ I asked.

  ‘Not got a clue.’

  ‘You’re a lot of use.’

  ‘That’s not the point. You’re meant to listen to the sound and hear a meaning.’

  ‘It sounded unhappy.’

  ‘Did it? I thought it sounded...questioning.’

  ‘Alrighty,’ I said.

  ‘It was a minor key. Doesn’t mean it’s sad though. It can be contemplative, meditative, sensitive.’

  ‘All the ‘-ives’, in other words.’

  ‘I prefer minor key anyway.’

  ‘You know fuck all about music, Chas,’ I said.

  We walked back through the southside, went in a few charity shops. Charlotte bought two hardback Nigella Lawson cookbooks for £1.50 each and a hat from a basket of hats. I considered telling her about my second promise to myself but decided against it in the end; while I didn’t know anyone as conscientiously into self-improvement at Charlotte, my second promise basically boiled down to buying a bunch of new clothes. Did that even count? The last shop we went into was British Heart Foundation and when I looked in their cabinet by the till they had an ivory-coloured ring in the shape of a rose, made of some material I couldn’t identify. Could have been plastic, could have been eighteenth-century whalebone. Anyway, I hadn’t bought or worn a ring since around the time I was pseudo-dating Jules, and this caught my eye so I bought it.

  It cost me five pounds and I felt too daft to wear it. I put it in my pocket. My other pocket. Not the one with the phone.

  ****

  To prove to myself that I wasn’t fatally obsessed with some random I knew nothing about yet had casually given my number to, I left my mobile in the lounge when I went to bed.

  I was disappointed, though. It’s so unlikely to stumble upon a new lesbian anyway (that is, one you haven’t already met) that I felt - if it had been me - I would have texted straight away. I’d have gone indoors and sent something friendly, like, This is my number, from Lauren. If Anna didn’t instantly want to marry me that was fine, and if she didn’t want to date that was fine as well. But surely we as lesbians need to make connections any chance we get? Sure enough there are groups: meet in a pub on a Wednesday night, shake hands or wave at each other and talk about where you live and what you do for a job over terrible lemonade then sign up for a hike on the solstice. Groups are OK and I won’t pretend I’ve never made out with someone in their car for forty minutes afterwards. But the accidental, serendipitous meeting in the wild is rare and special and joyful and should be nurtured like an imported plant.

  Even if she didn’t like me, I mean. Even if she’d outright lied when she said it was really really nice to meet me. I mean for God’s sake it might be her destiny to marry Charlotte or Jules or Louise or another lesbian I knew and my destiny to be the conduit to their togetherness. And here she was, not texting, throwing it all to the wall.

  I went to sleep and dreamt about feeding chalk to a lion, and the lion was white, and it was standing in a very very green meadow. In my dream I decided that the grass was only so vividly coloured because of the contrast with the lion’s whiteness. I felt powerful because I was feeding the lion chalk thereby making it more white, until it occurred to me that the lion might notice it was not the usual lionish gold and get angry and attack me. Now I had to keep relentlessly feeding it chalk because if I stopped it might look at itself - in a convenient mirror, I suppose - and discover what I had done.

  I know that’s what I dreamt because I woke up at half past five a.m. and wrote it down. Jungian self-analysis wasn’t on my list of stuff to do, but I suspected that this might be a critical time in my life and that I should act accordingly by taking notes.

  Now it was Wednesday, the second of my two days off. I lay on my back listening to a blustery March wind and the sound of the washing machine spinning in the flat upstairs and the downstairs neighbour’s back door creaking open as they let out their cat. My plan was to get up, check my phone, shower, check my phone - charge my phone by that point, probably - eat something/watch Frasier, check my emails on my phone, then go out. The rest of my plan was to powerwalk past all the places I usually bought my clothes without even glancing in their windows.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to change myself but rather rediscover who I used to be. I hadn’t changed much physically in the last ten years: my hair was its natural colour and my nails more typically matte grey than glossy purple or red; perhaps I was a stone heavier, maybe a stone and a half; and having a job meant abiding by a dress code for eight or so hours each day. But beyond those qualifications I didn’t know what had happened to me or where I had gone. Early on in March I had stood in front of my wardrobe looking for something
- anything - that was specifically me, and couldn’t find a single thing at all. I could remember things I used to have: the brown silk 1940s-ish dress I wore to see a two and a half hour local theatre production of Wind in the Willows, and to a date where we sat on the restaurant’s veranda drinking caipirinhas; the skinny tee that said Donkey Basketball on the front that someone enquired about on the subway in Naples; the grey corduroy skirt I bought for fifty pence at a church jumble sale which I wore to interview for the best job I ever had; the army surplus boots with wrinkly leather which I polished like a fiend; and cardigans, so many hairy cardigans. Gradually I had bundled these all up and deposited them in various recycling bins across town and as I replaced them with work-friendly basics I simultaneously replaced being fun with being indistinguishable from anyone else. All my tops were either cheap and plain or better quality and plain I had found in blue cross sales and all I wore them with outside work were jeans, leggings or joggers. And I wore the same two pairs of trainers day in, day out, unless it was bad weather, for which I had a pair of Chelsea boots. One leather jacket, , one smart coat for trying to look smart. Eight hoodies. I owned eight hoodies and not a single Korean vest top with a picture of a fig tree on the front that I found in the third-last minute of a zero bid auction on eBay, like in the days of yore.

  Anything to say in my defence? Well, for a good couple of years my go-to third date lingerie set was big pants and all-covering bra in a weird kind of grey green trimmed with beige lace. It came from M&S and looked antique, which was fine, because I never usually bought antique-looking underwear from M&S and neither did anyone I knew. Now the idea of wearing underwear like that made me think of words like commemorative porcelain and corn plasters and if I wore it I would be just another woman who owns a particular set of third-date knickers and bra and will wear the same set for the same purpose for the rest of her life. In my defence I became aware of that and made a promise to stop.