in the direction of a particular young man. Her own boyfriend had stayed at home. lundi, le 3 mai
The first girl I ever slept with was a friend’s girlfriend.
One of my close mates at university was a shortish, thinnish, good-looking ginger boy who loved Doctor Who and was a complete sex bomb with the ladies. I can’t explain why. He just was, and we loved him.
We called him “the Jew Boy with the Moves,” because this guy could cut up your brother’s bar-mitzvah-party dance floor like a hot knife through butter. He was all slinky hips and sultry looks, and by Jove, I had an almighty crush on him. I’d never had a go, though in the first year he made his way through every single one of the women in our group. It just seemed a boundary destined never to be crossed.
Eventually he settled down with one girl. And I couldn’t resent losing out, because his girlfriend, Jessica, was an uber-desirable petite vixen with caramel-colored shoulders and dark blonde hair that was always in perfect curls.
One night JB and Jessica invited me and my then-boyfriend to a club. It was a place I didn’t know in a part of town I didn’t go to. I didn’t know what to wear, and met the other three at a pub in jeans, flip-flops, and a thin black satin shirt, no bra. Jessica and I stood in the middle of the room while the men fetched our drinks, and I was suddenly aware that everyone was looking at us.
We sank pints and moved on to our destination. The club was a gay club. My first. It was a mixed crowd, being a Saturday night in a medium-sized city where the staff couldn’t be too picky with the door policy. There were boy couples and girl couples, gangs of students, old single boys looking hangdog at the bar and men dressed like women dressing like men’s fantasies of women. There were gold-painted cages, but no one dancing in them. I didn’t know where to look. My boyfriend, alas, did-at his feet. All night.
The music was not good, but it was frantic and loud, like all club music was then. JB and Jessica spun me out on the dance floor. They were, together, an incredible couple to watch. Just too tiny and cool for words. Her slightly bony shoulders wriggled suggestively-her back was bare in a sleeveless tie-on shirt. I’d been attracted to girls before, but never felt so free to just stare at one. It wasn’t out of place here.
JB took me to one side. “You know, she wants you,” he said. Was he kidding? This wee goddess? But as soon as he said it, I knew it was true, and it was like a switch had been flipped. I could imagine taking her to the toilets, tonguing her as she laughed and sat atop the cistern. I could imagine putting things in her, my fingers, the end of a beer bottle.
“She’s your girlfriend,” I said, aware as the words came out how whiny and awful they sounded.
He shrugged. He said he’d take care of my boyfriend. He said he did this for her a lot-picked up girls for her. I was stunned.
JB drove us all home. My boyfriend lived closest, thank goodness. Then we went around to Jessica’s house. Her parents were away somewhere, or asleep, or didn’t care, I never knew. She held my hand and we walked through her door, plain as anything. Her boyfriend waited until she waved back to him from the doorway, then drove away. Her neck was the most slender, tenderest I’d ever seen. Her lips were softer than any I’d ever kissed. mardi, le 4 mai
I walked into a shop in the late morning. The Sicilian sun was already high, driving people to seek out shady spots.
Colorfully wrapped Easter cakes sat on a shelf. I reached up to take one down, but even on tiptoe the sweet was just out of my reach. A man came up behind me. “May I help you?”
“Can I have one of these?” I asked him.
“It depends,” he replied. “Can I have one of you?” jeudi, le 6 mai
We sailed on to Croatia and I bought a paper for the first time in a fortnight. They are full of disturbing images, the sort that lead one to think about politics, war, and the politics of war, and how these acts have always happened except we could never see them before. How righteous indignation and backlash sometimes seem products of ignorance, because who could not have guessed this would happen? Did we really need pictures in order to know? Are we truly angry at governments for doing what we knew they would do?
And you think, perhaps, there is one guarantee in life (that it ends) and one fairly safe bet as well (that it is painful), and freedom and property are illusions that can only exist in the mind. And that cleverer people have already thought these thoughts and discarded them and why don’t I stop this rubbish philosophizing already? Oh, look, a woman in a stripey hat walking a champagne poodle.
I don’t mean to make light of these events, but I’m hoping for a little pickup in the terror-sex department at work when I get home. It would do me the world of good. vendredi, le 7 mai
It’s a chalk-bright afternoon and I’ve been walking, listening to music all day the last few days. This helps-no one assumes you can hear them, with the headphones on, so no one speaks to you. This is good. I don’t understand the language very well. When I want to hear the sounds around me, I switch the player off but leave the headphones on. I smile a lot. People smile back. Are people happier everywhere else in the world? Sure seems so.
But I know it’s not the truth. I was in a bar, talking to a man my age. He’d been through three wars before he was twenty-one. Why are men so horrible to each other?” I asked, naive.
“In my experience all people are horrible.”
“So why are we this way?”
“We don’t know how else to be.” And we were quiet. He finished a drink, smiled at my guidebook. It was a smile that said, “Where do you want to go? You know you won’t find it in there.” Not that I’ve used it very much anyway-I like to choose a direction and keep going. In this way I found the Jewish quarter, decimated and abandoned forever ago, like a forgotten film set, and the edge of the water, which I hadn’t figured as being quite so close. His smile, it was so understanding, so accepting, I could feel the waves of goodwill just pouring off him, mixed with a little pity for me.
That, or he may have just been trying to pick me up. We girls have an absolutely appalling reputation abroad. Was there a pamphlet distributed in the last decade to men in foreign countries saying that the small islanders are simply gagging for it?
(I mean, I am, but yo, I’m on holiday, creep. So lay off.) samedi, le 8 mai
Holiday sex is always the best sex. I’ve had it everywhere-Poole, Blackpool, swimming pools.
Someone else makes the bed afterward, empties the bin of spent condoms, even picks up your wet and smelly towels from the floor. If the people below are kept up all night with the noises above, odds are they either won’t know which people were responsible, or they’ll be away the next morning anyway, or you can get away with a mild blush and a sheepish giggle, because you’re on holiday, and only the sourest of pusses could deny anyone a healthy and vigorous bit of holiday exercise.
A1 always took me to the beach when my spirits were flagging. He didn’t enjoy the experience at all-sand gets everywhere, which is anathema to a man as fastidious as he is, and he burns easily, which meant most of the outing would be spent reapplying sun cream to the parts of his back he couldn’t reach. One time we went away and he forgot to put sunblock on his feet, and they burned. For the entire week afterward he couldn’t wear socks or shoes.
But he did it for me, so I could recharge my batteries, he always said. And because he knew he’d be rewarded with an almighty screw in whatever bed-and-breakfast we were staying in that evening.
A2 loved the act of getting to his destination better than the holiday itself. He would drive and drive, and we would cover the entire country in a week, making stops wherever the spirit took us. If we spent the night in the Highlands, you could almost lay money on the fact that within twenty-four hours we’d be holed up in a shabby guesthouse in Devon. He also liked taking pictures out the window of a moving car, which always made me laugh and dive for the steering wheel as he did so.
We stopped and posed by abandoned buildings, funny road signs, and large trees. We laid blankets in stands of trees and had sex as the mosquitoes attacked his backside. I sucked him off in Friday-afternoon bank-holiday traffic going north.
I thought in all our trips we probably never stayed in the same place twice. Until we booked into a hotel one night in the back end of nowhere, attracted by its slightly antique signs. The woman at registration greeted us familiarly. We’d stayed there only three nights before and completely forgotten it.
A3 and I took a trip together once, to look at caves. In the complete dark of underground, in the complete silence in the middle of the earth, he held my hand for the first time. It is difficult to think of a time before or since when I’ve been so thrilled.
