‘Like that—I want to know what that thought was,’ he says, brushing the side of my face with his fingers. I open my mouth but he speaks before I do. ‘And if you say nothing I swear to all that is holy that I will throw you over my shoulder and carry you out of this pub.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘What was that thought?’
‘Nothing,’ I say, raising my eyebrows at him, and in one swift move he lifts me up out of my chair and flings me over his shoulder. I squeal as he pats my butt and walks me outside, up the alleyway next to the pub where it is cold and dark. He puts me down and leans me against the brick wall.
‘My coat’s inside.’
He presses his body against mine and kisses me. When he pulls away he whispers in my ear. ‘I want to kiss you, Noni. I want to kiss you all the time. I want to kiss you, and I don’t want to stop kissing you.’
My insides flutter and I feel adored, turned on. I wrap my hands around his neck and kiss him back. I feel his hand fiddling with the top button of my jeans and undoing the zip, and then slipping his hand inside. I don’t care that we’re in public. I don’t care that it’s freezing. I don’t care that anyone could walk up this alley in any moment. In fact, that adds electricity to how urgent my need feels. I want more. Now. I grab at his jeans.
‘God, woman!’ he moans and I laugh, looking at him. ‘So fucking sexy,’ he says, before leading my hands away from him. ‘This is all about you.’ I kiss him and lean into his hand, rocking my hips.
‘You’re very good at that.’ I gasp with every breath, the closer I get. We kiss and he reads my body and breath. Close. Close. Close. I orgasm softly.
‘I like making you feel good.’ He kisses my forehead. ‘Now, let’s go back in before we freeze.’
People look at us as we enter the bar again. The beautiful tattooed woman and her equally angular friend smile at me, and I smile back. I sit down and Beau pulls his chair close into mine, so his thigh is back between my legs, his shoulders square with mine, face-to-face. There’s a skinny tattooed guy with a floppy haircut playing guitar in the corner. But it doesn’t matter. Fuck meditation apps and mindfulness practice—what they should tell you to do is have a Viking make you cum in an alley, because I’ve never been more present in my life. In my body. In this moment. With this human.
A guy with a small orange beanie perched on the crown of his head comes over. ‘Quite the barbaric display,’ he says with a brilliant Australian accent. He raises his eyebrows, his thin black moustache twitching. ‘We all get it, she’s yours. Did you leave your club at home tonight, Beau?’
‘Noni, this is Archer. Archer, this is Noni.’
‘G’day,’ he says.
‘Hello.’ I pause. ‘Can I ask you something?’ Archer nods. ‘Did you ever say g’day at home? Or only now that you live here? Because I’ve never dreamed of saying it, but now I’m only ever half a beer away from sounding like Alf Stewart.’
‘Fuckin strewth. I know, right?’ He laughs. ‘Wine? Whiskey?’
‘Both,’ Beau says and Archer nods and leaves.
‘He’s very handsome. Why don’t you go,’ Beau says, mocking me, ‘and fuck him?’
‘Is that a thing?’ I ask, taking the opportunity. ‘That you are doing? That we are doing?’
‘Fucking other people?’
‘Yeah. Just want to know what you’re—’ I wince from the awkward that’s encroaching on my insides.
‘I’m not fucking anyone else right now, Noni, if that’s what you’re asking. Are you?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Do you want to be able to?’ he says. I shrug my shoulders, searching for the words, but he continues. ‘I don’t want to limit your quest or anything, Noni, by placing some unrealistic expectation, or some unnecessary boundary, you know?’
‘Yeah, of course, likewise,’ I say.
‘Let’s just agree to keep talking about what we want, yeah?’ he says and I nod. Of course, this is a simple conversation to him. Why must I overthink everything? Archer comes back with drinks.
‘When is Zep back up?’ he asks.
‘Half term. In a couple of weeks.’
‘He can do some glassy shifts if he needs the cash.’
‘I’ll let him know.’ Archer walks off.
‘Zeppelin is coming up?’ I ask.
‘Yeah. I am pumped.’
‘Brilliant.’ I squeeze his leg.
‘I can’t wait.’ He sips from his glass. ‘What about you? Is kids something you’ve thought about?’
I can tell by the way he asks that he thinks this is a light topic. He’s expecting a yes or no answer. He’s expecting this to be easy. But nothing about my response to this question is easy. I could lie. Or say ambiguous things, or just say ‘I don’t know’ and then change the subject. But that doesn’t feel right. I want to be honest with him. I want to tell him things. I want to show him my deck. I exhale loudly. Here we go.
‘Joan and I, well, we tried,’ I say. ‘IVF. We did a few cycles.’ Beau slowly puts his glass down and looks me in the eye. Just talk, Noni. Just talk. ‘It’s really fucking brutal. Fertility bullshit is…’ I make a disgusted groan. ‘Needles and hormones and disappointment.’ I swallow and feel every muscle required to make the action possible. ‘And then we fell pregnant.’ I slug wine into my mouth in a big gulp. ‘Got to fifteen weeks and—’ I stop.
‘Oh, Noni, I’m so sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ I nod. It’s a grief that is wild, angry and always present, and it’s right there in my gut at the mention of it. ‘And, we weren’t right before we started trying, but then we were trying and we were in too deep, you know?’
‘Yeah. Of course.’
‘Then you can’t be the asshole who pulls the pin amid the worst thing that you’ve ever had to deal with.’ My voice cracks. ‘So we persevered with our relationship for a whole extra year.’ Beau is nodding, his face pained, but he stays silent. ‘Look, Joan is a good person, she’s amazing, an amazing person, she’s just not my person. But she was. I really legitimately thought that she was. For a long time. And yeah.’
Beau nods. ‘That’s really, really shit.’
‘That’s the perfect summation of it all,’ I say, and I try to stay on top of these feelings. I breathe in deep and look at him. ‘Daisy.’
‘What?’
‘That’s her name. My daughter.’
Realisation floods his face. ‘Ahh, the daisies.’ And he touches my stomach, my tattoo.
I nod and tears spring. I grit my teeth to try and stop them, scrunching my nose, not because I feel uncomfortable crying in front of Beau, but because tears like this tend not to stop once they start. ‘It took me a really long time to feel okay calling her that. It felt wrong. I felt like a bit of a parental fraud.’ The tears keep coming, and the downlights in my peripheral vision cast bright gold patterns in the corners of my eyes. ‘Like, somehow I hadn’t earned the right to call her that, because she wasn’t full term.’
‘Oh, that’s so wrong,’ he says quietly, wrapping his hands around mine.
‘Yeah. I know. I know that now. I spent a lot of money with a very funny therapist, Dr Lalit, who helped me work that out.’
‘Good.’
‘But it smashed me. Completely. Like, heartbreak and rejection on crack. Not that I’ve ever tried crack, but I assume it’s intense,’ I try and joke, and Beau smiles slightly. ‘It’s really fucking difficult to feel those things about your own body. Normally you can tell the wanker that makes you feel those things to fuck off, but—’
‘It’s really hard to get away from yourself,’ he says.
‘Yeah, and now I’m trying really hard to work out who I am. Because so many of the bits pre-her seem so pointless, or useless, but there’s so much shit that’s just ingrained, you know?’
‘Yeah. Absolutely. It’s all patterns,’ he says and I wipe my eyes. ‘A lot of the self-work I’ve done these last few years has been about owning my shit and leaning into
my vulnerability,’ he says, looking at me, and I nod, so in awe of this man who talks so openly about himself. ‘We really fuck men over, and believe me, I’m fully aware of the epic proportion of fuckery that women have endured since, well, the beginning of time.’ He stops smiling and I laugh, nodding. ‘Fuck the patriarchy etcetera,’ he says, matter of fact, swigging his drink. ‘And because of this, and a few other things, I had so many dumb ideas about what I deserved, and I was a real dickhead in my twenties.’
‘I think that’s a prerequisite to being in your twenties,’ I say.
Beau smiles. ‘Yeah. I was jealous and angry. I’d drink too much and never talk about my feelings. Use sex and drugs as really good avoidance strategies.’
‘Oh, at least you got the fun ones. I picked carbohydrates, so you win.’
Beau laughs. ‘This thing between us, Noni, it’s not what I thought it was going to be.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘We might be in a spot of trouble, hey?’
‘Potentially.’
‘Well, can we agree to just enjoy it, enjoy each other, till you go? Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ I say.
And that’s all he says about it, so that’s all I say about it.
Enjoy it, Noni.
27
‘Your butt looks amazing amidst the flowers, darling,’ Lil tells Stef, the woman we’re shooting today in a bright field of yellow flowers.
‘That’s something I don’t normally hear when I’m at work,’ I say, and Lil chuckles. I’m absolutely loving working with her, and watching as she praises and compliments the people she’s shooting. I love the way she sees and acknowledges their insecurities but gently cajoles them to step out of their comfort zone.
‘Stef, what’s the best compliment you’ve ever received?’ she asks.
Stef, a woman in her fifties with a silver-grey quiff and a single mastectomy scar, bites her lip and ponders.
‘Come on, what was it?’ Lil asks.
‘Ironically, it used to always be “great rack”,’ Stef says with a smirk.
‘Not a physical compliment, something about you, who you are,’ Lil says.
Stef pauses and then she smiles with her whole face and Lil snaps away. ‘Someone once said I was like living glitter.’
‘That’s a fucking brilliant compliment,’ I say.
‘Sparkling. Radiant. Golden. Bold. Fearless,’ Lil says and there it is, that special moment that happens in every one of Lil’s shoots. It’s like you can actually see when something physiologically shifts inside her subjects, even just for a moment, and they believe her, they believe in their power and their beauty. It has made me tear up every time, and today is no different. Stef looks like a goddess, standing naked in the fields with her glittering soul and scarred body.
‘You’re stunning, Stef,’ I say without thinking.
‘Thank you,’ she says with an ease and comfort that makes me smile wide and take a big deep breath.
The photos Lil takes are magnificent, and spending time with her is having a really profound impact on me. I’m enamoured by making beautiful things in beautiful spaces with beautiful people, and Lil loves her job. Like, love loves her job. It makes me envious and reflective, because I don’t think I’ve felt that way about my job in a long time. I took the behaviour support promotion a few years ago because I wanted the challenge, but it’s not what I thought it would be. I hate dealing with teachers who aren’t willing to try new strategies and meet kids where they’re at. I hate working in a system that fails to actually meet the needs of kids, and I absolutely hate that I have to pretend that I care about uniform policies and mobile phone policies, and standardised testing data, because I just don’t. I feel like I’ve lost my mojo. I’ve started to realise that in my work, like most things in my life before now, I was just going through the motions. I haven’t missed it at all while I’ve been away.
For as long as I can remember I thought I’d work my way up to one day be a principal, but I’ve come to understand that’s not what I want at all. It’s scary when you realise that you don’t really have a backup plan, that you’ve been striving for one thing for so long you haven’t considered any alternatives. I’ve been pushing that niggling feeling that things weren’t right further and further back, and telling myself that everything was fine. But now, thanks to the pleasure quest, I have the bar set way, way above ‘fine’. Hanging around people like Lil and Beau, and even Naz and Tom, people who love their jobs, has reminded me that ‘fine’ isn’t good enough anymore. I’ve realised the people I’ve welcomed into my life lately are a supremely self-motivated group who are committed to going deep with the self-work. And I want to be one of them too. Truly.
‘I’m really loving working with you, Lil,’ I tell her when we get back to her studio.
‘Oh, darling thank you, that’s lovely. I’m loving working with you too,’ she says.
‘I think you’ve made me realise I hate my job,’ I tell her.
Lil laughs loudly and from her belly. ‘Is that a good or bad realisation?’
‘Good.’
‘Well, what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet.’ I pause. ‘And for the first time ever that thought doesn’t freak me out.’
‘And so what does that mean?’ Lindell ponders on the phone as I walk through the supermarket, popping pre-cut vegetables into my basket.
‘It means we’re enjoying each other until I leave,’ I tell him.
‘So, are you together?’
I bite my lip, and catch my reflection in the mirror above the produce. ‘I don’t know. Yes. No. I guess. It’s a fling. That’s what it is. I’m trying my best to not overthink it, and just be in the moment.’
‘Is he seeing other people?’
‘No, he’s not. He would tell me. He says what he thinks. And he’s all about communication.’
Lindell scoffs through the phone. ‘God. How are you coping with this?’
‘Because I have to. Pleasure Quest Noni has flings and is fine with it, Lindell,’ I tell him, throwing chocolate biscuits into my basket. I hear him laugh loudly. ‘I’m trying to be as cool as he is.’ ‘You shouldn’t have to try to be anything, my darling.’ I can hear the ice machine in his fridge rumbling loudly. I picture him in his kitchen, fixing a drink.
‘No, that’s not what I mean, I’m just going with the flow and I’m not forcing anything.’
‘Yeah, but you know what else goes with the flow? Sewage. Dead fish. Lost balloons.’
‘Fucking hell, Lindell.’ I laugh as I walk mindlessly up the aisles, not really paying attention.
‘I’m sorry, not what you want to hear?’
‘No. What I’m saying is, I’m happy with what’s happening, it’s exactly what I want, it’s all on my terms, my pleasure, it’s good. This self-indulgent moment in my life is good, Lindell. I promise. I’m happy, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. That is all that matters, but I also don’t want you to think you can’t tell him what you want under some illusion of cool.’
I sense some underlying tension in his voice. ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘I got into another fight with sour-face at work and it’s really rattled me. She’s so lazy and it drives me insane and I said to her today, I said, Merilyn, if you make one more fucking passive aggressive comment about Queer studies, I will choke you with a fucking rainbow flag. And apparently that was threatening, so it’s now a whole thing.’
I start laughing loudly, and an old woman with a walker stares at me. ‘Oh my god, Lindell.’
‘She’s actually void of all pleasure in her life, I think, and I’m trying to be zen, I’m trying to think—what if being an underhanded, lazy piece of shit is her doing her best? But it’s not working.’ He pauses. ‘They want me to apologise. And I will. And I will hate every second of it. But I wish I was on a pleasure quest with you and not stuck in stupid HR meetings. So I’m thrilled everything is going so wel
l for you. Lil sounds amazing. The Viking sounds amazing. You sound amazing.’
‘Oh, babe, you do not sound amazing,’ I tell him, a pang of worry stopping me still in the cereal aisle.
‘I’m fine, darling. It’s fine. I’m just maybe living vicariously through you right now, so can you please just go all in on all of the pleasure, please? Because this isn’t just about you now.’
‘I miss you.’
‘I know. I miss you.’ Neither of us says anything for a moment, we just sit in our longing for each other. ‘What about Fuck Face, have you heard from her?’
Fuck Face is what we’re calling Molly now. ‘I blocked her number and I deleted her from my socials. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know anything.’
‘Fuck Face Molly and Sour Tits Merilyn should date. They deserve each other.’
I laugh loudly. ‘I wonder if her and her girlfriend sorted it out?’ I say, before I realise I have.
‘Do you care?’ Lindell asks.
‘No.’
‘Liar.’
‘I just still can’t believe she did it, you know? It just makes me feel so gross when I think about it.’
‘Fuck Molly. Fuck Merilyn. Fuck these pleasure-sapping assholes. That’s my new motto,’ he says.
‘I love you,’ I tell him. We hang up, and I tell myself to not give Molly another thought.
28
I look across the room at Lil, who smiles wide, touching her heart with her hand and nodding at me. Then she drops her robe off her shoulders and swings it around enthusiastically, laughing. She is the first in the room to get naked, and the fifteen or so other women cheer.
I feel my stomach twist with nerves and excitement. I agreed to come to Nude Yoga because Lil had sold it to me as a revolution in vulnerability and bravery.
‘You will let go of all the bullshit, Noni. It’s amazing. Please come with me,’ she’d asked. As if I wasn’t going to agree to that.
It's Been a Pleasure, Noni Blake Page 21
