My instincts prove right and sex with Ryan turns out to be dreadful. I don’t even get time to do my usual thinking, about who was the first person to ever think of giving a blowjob, or who was even the first person to ever say the word ‘no’ and the specific set of circumstances they said that word in, because this sex is hard work. Ryan and I are not at all in synch, choreography-wise. I feel like I’m trying to do a tango while balancing on an oil drum. I am trying to learn the rhythms as I go, but then Ryan moves around this way and that, switching up positions after about forty-five seconds. He switches the tempo without warning, and does this with the confidence of a man who invented sex all on his own. Whoever told him this sort ofvarietyamounted to good sex needs an almighty thump, I think. I push the thoughts of Johnny’s sweetly sleepy sex away. Instead, I tellmyself that this is a good thing. I find myself performing too, throwing porny screams at him for encouragement. I kind of hate myself for it. I never thought I’d see the moment where I think longingly of the single bed back in Naomi’s house, desperate to be in among the hockey trophies and the lip-gloss pots.
Afterwards, I don’t feel like a cool sexual libertine at all. I feel as though I’ve given a gift to someone who has taken one glance at it and decided it looks better in the bin. Thoughts of being in companionable, cosy silence in the flat with Johnny– maybe it wasn’t that damp or cold, after all– start to form out of shadows. I push them right away. The guilt is like sweat on my upper lip.
On the tram back into town, I check my mails, and find one from Violet, which is short and to the point.
‘Ted reported Maxi to the cops for harassing him,’ she writes. ‘She got hauled into her local police station and they talked to her for two hours, but they eventually let her go with a caution. She emailed me right afterwards. She told me that she has sent him like 700 emails, none of which he has responded to.’
‘What has she been writing to him?’ I reply. I’m genuinely curious.
‘Dunno,’ Violet replies. ‘Just some emails and texts and things like that. But nothing too harmful. She wasn’t abusive to him or anything.’
‘She has his NUMBER?’ I am incredulous, incensed.
‘I know! And she never said!’
I’ve kept it from Violet and everyone else that I’ve met Alice. It’s need-to-know-basis information, and somehow I suspect that if it got into the wrong hands, it would work out to be a problem.
25
September 2000
That first year of living in London: my heavenly God, the loneliness. After the easy sorority of Dublin, it’s like being on an unending cabbage soup diet. Months and months of it. I ring home, reversing the charges, and even the sound of the Irish phone operator’s voice makes my eyes sting with tears.
‘I can’t do this any more!’ I wail at my mother.
‘Come home so!’ my mother yells back.
‘But sure I can’t!’
I can’t, because I have scored an internship at a production company, and it’s meant to be the first leg of a promising and illustrious path in media, possibly in TV, maybe as a writer. It feels like my nose is pressed up against the glass, waiting to be let in. The company, based in Soho, provides evidence for Darwinism at its very finest. I envy the more senior production assistants with their effortlessly cool clothes, flat stomachs and sushi lunches. ‘I’m just popping out for a massage,’ they tell each other at lunch. Massages at lunchtime! Theirs is a language I can never get a grip on. Every day feels like wearing a left shoe on my right foot.
When the other interns leave, there are whip-rounds, cake and beers. On my last day, I walk out of the door at lunchtime without saying a word to anyone and never go back, certain I won’t be missed and the whip-round will have never happened.
But eventually there is one gilded lining, and that’s Johnny. He is fine-boned, gangly and hairless, and something in his boyishness makes me think of fresh starts.
When Johnny and I meet in some evening’s small hours at an insufferably trendy bar in Shoreditch, we are riotously drunk yet both somehow hungry for connection amid the din. Unlike other guys, who seem to put up a front and treat the rigmarole of getting to know someone better as an inconvenience, Johnny is striking in his openness. He has an absolute lack of pretension that side-swipes me for a split second. He was a man utterly without agenda.
‘Like your hair,’ Johnny says faux-coyly, referring to my excessively severe micro-fringe.
‘Like your jeans,’ I reply. We carry on with this sporadically through the evening.
‘Love your wallet chain.’ Immediately, we had our own private joke.
‘Love your travelcard,’ and on it goes until we kiss, and then we have a whole new adhesive for whatever this is.
We seem to link into step right away. We fit snugly on top of each other. ‘Dating is hard,’ my only friend Carrie says as she hunkers down for yet more mind games and manoeuvring as she pans for even a smidgen of decent gold on MySpace and Plenty of Fish. ‘But you’ve made it look easy.’
Johnny brings me back to his house-share off Edgware Road. There is so much space compared to my studio flat, where you can effectively fry sausages while on the toilet.
He has a wrought-iron bed, the type they sell in the back pages of Sunday supplements. It’s the most grown-up thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Best of all, it’s not even the nicest thing about him.
In the salon at Kensington Market, the picture of Alice feels radioactive in my pocket. I’m self-conscious as I present it to the stylist, casually instructing her that I would like something ‘a little bit like this’. By which I mean, exactly like this.
‘Wow,’ she notes, threading her fingers through my hair and eyeballing the image on my phone. ‘That is quite the transformation. I will say that…’ She searches for a nice way to put it. ‘You see how her skin tone is a little more olive?’ she says, trailing a little finger around the photo of Alice. ‘Yours is a lot cooler, and you might benefit from something a little different to this, maybe with more platinum or ashy tones…’
I cut her off. ‘I definitely want it this colour,’ I say firmly. ‘And I also like her fringe.’
‘Are you gonna blow-dry that fringe every single morning? Because with your hair texture, it will just spring back into curls if you don’t,’ the stylist warns. ‘It might look a bit weird, you know?’
