Before the man on the train had begun to watch pornography he had been reading a debut collection of poetry which Claire had been intending to buy for herself. Before he started to watch pornography on his phone she had imagined beginning a conversation with him; she had taught for six hours that day, the last of term, and the idea of reading for pleasure that afternoon, or ever again, was implausible; she wanted to talk and to drink with other bitter adults, to hear her own voice becoming improper, for hours and hours, until she was dead. Perhaps the man watching pornography had been teaching too, and what he was doing now was only a practical wind-down routine to get him back in the mood for reading poetry. To concentrate on anything these days required constant improvisation. After each orgasm he could probably read for another hour before he was tempted to look at more pornography. You could read a poetry collection in that hour. Perhaps she should be watching pornography too, her own female-friendly pornography, sensitive gangbangs, sympathetic ravagings at the hands of men dressed as soldiers, which she could monitor with her own single ear phone and ineffective discretion. Perhaps we could all court each other in this way now, revealing our trespasses in reflections which we were only pretending were accidental. This is my niche. Is it tolerable? We need never acknowledge the part of me that isn’t.
He looked up at her and away as though the sun was in his eyes. Then he looked back and smiled. She was wearing a new dress and no tights; it was a hot Friday in May, and he had not been the first man to look in the direction of her legs that day. His bag was on the seat next to him, artfully obscuring his crotch. The girl on the screen stood to turn away from the camera, and pull down her—
‘Is it good?’ she asked him, surprising them both.
It was good. The man flinched backwards.
‘The collection,’ she said. ‘I’ve been meaning to buy a copy.’
He had turned his screen off immediately and was blinking at her. ‘Yes, it is,’ he said.
‘You didn’t look like you lasted long before you put it down.’
The man gripped his bag and pulled it further over onto his lap. ‘Oh, you know. Social media. Twitter. I’m one of the great distracted morons of the present.’
His smile was actually rather nice. You couldn’t write off a man for looking at pornography: not unless pornography had completely turned you off from being heterosexual. You couldn’t write off a man just for enjoying the degradation of women.
‘You too?’ she said. ‘I seem to have forgotten how to read today.’
He put his bag on the floor and turned his knee to point to her.
She said, ‘I suppose I should just download some pornography and have done with it.’
‘Ha ha!’ And then he said ‘Ha ha!’ again. He had scruffy hair and a big beard, was only a few years younger than her.
‘Do you know any good sites?’ she asked.
He did his best to put his smile back on. ‘I mean, I don’t know what you’re into.’
She had kept her promise and tried not to judge David on what it was that turned him on, though it was difficult from then on not to think about the extent to which the other image he presented to the world was fraudulent, this man who was always judging other men, the sensitive NGO executive who had worn with complicated irony a ‘This Is What a Feminist Looks Like’ T-shirt on a stag do, who had read Irigaray and Butler, who had ‘done the work’, who cooked and cleaned, more than she did, and who liked to see women in their late teens as they were groomed by devious predators.
And then why shouldn’t a man unzip his principles then zip them straight back up again? Surely that was what the zip was invented for, to have one’s trousers on and off at the same time? Claire had tried to convince herself that the videos were probably staged in any case. That’s how she had watched the videos, with David that night and afterwards one time on her own: forensically, analytically. The women were too pretty. Too pliable. But the optimistic tattoos some of them possessed – the cursive profundities so difficult to read, along one side of the ribs or underneath a breast, the cute little animals’ faces, was that a squirrel? – they felt like the pointless blemish, the detail for the sake of detail, which conferred the presence of the real. She didn’t think the pornographers had read Barthes. And the actors were very good if they were only acting pensively.
To try to neutralise the mood that watching these videos with David had established, Claire had acted out a role herself that night. She played the corruptee, going to her bedroom to get changed and coming back in an old tartan mini skirt she had kept for emergencies from her dressing-up days as an undergraduate. She was a sexy student who had been missing his classes. David had tried to get into it, tried to spank her, but he was too embarrassed. The id made its prompts and so did his knowledge of workplace harassment. He was worried he was failing another test.
Claire looked back up at the man on the train. ‘I’m into, er, never mind,’ she said.
He smiled, put his phone in his pocket and picked up his collection again. ‘Thanks for reminding me I was enjoying reading this before I got stuck on Twitter.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said, and she waited to see if he would become distracted by Twitter again. 2
Before David she was meeting Patrick in a club in Soho, one of the famous ones, which his work paid for, he said, when he suggested meeting there, as though he had forgotten that the last time they met
