What do you do if you think you’ve wasted fifteen years of your life?
She’d had no reply, as yet, possibly because of the domestic turmoil he’d hinted at the last time he’d written, so she’d had to address the problem on her own. She was currently working on the assumption that time was money. What would she do if she’d just lost fifteen thousand pounds? It seemed to her that there were two alternatives: you could either write it off or try to get it back. And you could try to get it back either from the person who took it from you in the first place or by trying to compensate for the loss in other ways—by selling stuff, or betting on a horse, or doing lots of overtime.
This analogy was only helpful up to a point, obviously. Time wasn’t money. Or rather, the time she was talking about couldn’t be converted into cash, like the services of a lawyer, or a prostitute. Or rather (one last “or rather,” otherwise she’d have to concede that this whole way of thinking about time wasn’t working) it could, theoretically, but nobody was going to pay her. She could knock on Duncan’s—Gina’s!—door and demand compensation for the time she’d wasted on him, but the value would be difficult to calculate, and anyway, Duncan was cheap. She didn’t want money, though. She wanted the time back, to spend on something else. She wanted to be twenty-five again.
If she hadn’t wasted so much time with Duncan, she might be better equipped to work out where it had gone; she had never been very good at algebra, and algebra was, it seemed to her, what was needed for the kind of thinking she wanted to do. One of the traps she kept falling into—and she couldn’t help it, even though she was aware of it—was to equate time with Duncan as time generally. T = D, when of course T really equaled D + W + S + F&F + C, where W is work, S is sleep, F&F is family and friends, C is culture and so on. In other words, she’d wasted only her romantic time on Duncan, whereas life consisted of more than that. In her own defense, though, she would like to point out that D was more than just one element to rack up alongside the others. She saw his F&F, for example, as well as her own, although admittedly he had fewer of both. Who knows whether W would have been different if D hadn’t been living in the same town? She was guessing it might have been. They stayed put, doing jobs that satisfied neither of them, because finding new work in the same place at the same time would have been almost impossible. And whose C was it anyway? He was the one who bought the music and the DVDs, he was the one who didn’t like going to the theater (or to other towns to see it)… She couldn’t do equations, really, but she thought it was probably more like
T = W + S + F&F + C D
And there was another part of the equation that she didn’t like thinking about: her own stupidity and torpor (OST). She had played a part in all this. She had allowed her life to drift. She would have to multiply the whole bloody lot by OST, thus ending up with a number greater than the one she’d first thought of. And if it turned out she’d wasted twenty or fifty or a hundred years, then whose fault was that?
The fifteen years were gone, anyway. And what had gone with them? Children, almost certainly, and if she ever did take Duncan to court, that’s what she would sue him for. But what else? What hadn’t she done because she’d spent too much time with a boring, faithless nerd, apart from live the kind of life she’d wanted when she was twenty-five? She kept coming back to sex. It was reductive and unimaginative, she knew that, but it was also unarguable: Duncan had kept her from having sex with other people, and quite often with him. (They had never been the most highly sexed couple, but whoever kept score of these things would say he’d turned down her overtures more often than she’d turned down his.) How could she make up for fifteen years of missed opportunity, aged thirty-nine? And how much sex was that anyway? Suppose she’d met somebody she loved passionately fifteen years ago, and the relationship had endured? Then it would be fifteen years of sex with Other Man (OM) minus fifteen years of sex with Duncan. To include quality (Q) in the calculation would require a mathematical sophistication that was beyond her capabilities, even though it was probably necessary to give an accurate final figure.
In other words: she wanted to see if anyone would want to have sex with her. Where to start, in Gooleness?
She asked Ros, first of all, on the grounds that Ros was younger, and that younger people were closer to sex than she was.
“I can tell you how to meet gay women in London,” Ros said.
“Right. Thanks. I’m going to aim at straight men in Gooleness first, but I might get back to you if it doesn’t work out.”
“What is it you’re actually after? A one-night stand?”
“Maybe. If it stretched into a second night, I wouldn’t complain. Unless, of course, the first night was horrific. Don’t you know any single men?”
“Ummm… no. I’m not sure there are any. Not the kind you’re looking for.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Well, Gooleness has clubs, and lads, and… but…”
“I know the next four words you’re going to say.”
“What?”
“‘With all due respect.’”
Ros laughed.
“We could go out,” she said. “If you want.”
“But you’re…”
“Gay? Or married?”
“Both.”
“Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t be looking. I’d be helping you to look. We, in the meantime, would be having a night out. And if it looks as though you’re in luck, I will make my excuses and leave. Unless you need me for anything.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“Don’t be prudish. Things have changed since you last slept with somebody for the first time. Unless there’s been someone you haven’t told me about.”
“No. Duncan. In 1993.”
“Blimey. You’re in for a shock.”
“That’s what worries me. What sort of shock am I in for?”
“I just imagine a world of pornography and sex toys. And I’m presuming that there is always a minimum of three people involved.”
“Oh, God.”
“And then five minutes after you’ve finished doing it with a minimum of two other people, explicit images of your thirty-nine-year-old body will start appearing on your friends’ mobile phones. And all over the Internet, of course, but that goes without saying.”
“Right. Well. If that’s what you have to do.”
“Ideally, you’d want someone like you, wouldn’t you? I don’t mean, you know, a female museum curator. I mean someone who’s just come out of a long relationship and is similarly perplexed by what happens now.”
“I suppose.”
“Let me think. What are you doing Friday night?”
Annie looked at her.
“Yes. Right. Sorry. Let’s meet in the Rose and Crown at seven, and I’ll bring a plan with me.”
“A sex plan?”
“A sex plan.”
The Rose and Crown, halfway between the museum and the college, was their usual meeting place. It was an unexceptional downtown pub, usually half-full of shop assistants and office workers too intimidated to drink in some of the seaside bars, all of which seemed to employ DJs, even on Sunday at lunchtime. Annie wondered whether there was, anywhere in the country, a DJ wondering how to break into the business. It seemed unlikely,
