by Chris Killen
‘You can’t have always been like that,’ she says, squeezing my fingers.
‘I wasn’t,’ I lie.
‘So what happened?’
I can’t tell her the truth – that I’ve never really had a girlfriend before; that every person I’ve got involved with, I’ve scared away through jealousy and paranoia and the fear that I’ll screw things up. I’m determined to make this work. I will reconstruct myself as a steady, stable and rational human being. I will be whatever she wants me to be. Alice, I’m yours if you want me.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
‘Sometimes, if you want to do something, you should just do it,’ she says, letting the lights above our table settle and glint in her eyes.
She sighs. She shuffles slightly. The receipt is in my wallet and my wallet is in the back pocket of my jeans and my jeans are hanging over the chair next to the bed. I move my hand from her hip and put it between her legs from behind. I push my middle finger slowly inside her.
She doesn’t wake up.
She doesn’t mind.
In fact, she probably likes it quite a lot.
We are laughing at the neighbours.
‘Does this happen every night?’ Alice says.
‘Most nights,’ I say. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
The woman neighbour is making a squealing sound.
The man neighbour is making a grunting sound.
‘Help me,’ the woman neighbour is saying. ‘Help me. Help me.’
‘How can I help you?’ the man neighbour is saying.
Then more squealing, more grunting.
‘It sounds like they’re arguing and having sex at the same time,’ I say. ‘A sex argument.’
This makes Alice laugh. She curls up against me, puts her mouth on my chest and bites softly. I tickle her under the arms and she squeals. She blows a raspberry on my stomach.
‘We should have a sex argument sometime,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Help me.’
‘How can I help you?’ she says.
I make a squealing sound and she puts her hand over my mouth.
‘Shh,’ she says, ‘they’ll hear you.’
Then she makes a loud grunting sound.
‘When I was little,’ she says, ‘when my parents were still in the country, there was this couple next door who argued all the time.’
She’s never spoken about her parents before. Or her childhood.
‘But that was horrible. It sounded like the man was killing the woman every night. Like he was bouncing her head off the walls. I’d lie in bed and wait for the sound of police cars.’
‘Where are your parents now?’ I say.
As soon as I’ve said it, it feels like the wrong thing to say. Something changes in her. Something freezes. Something snaps off. She shuffles in the bed, so we aren’t touching as much any more. She turns to face the wall. I want to tell her that she doesn’t have to answer if she doesn’t want to. That she doesn’t have to tell me anything at all.
‘Not in England,’ she says, and I leave it at that.
She was on the phone again. She takes her mobile into the bathroom and locks the door. She talks to somebody in a low whisper.
After she finishes work she comes back with boxes. Slowly the house is filling with her things. In the daytime I go through it all; books, clothes, hair products, CDs. No letters, diaries or photos.
It’s not much to go on. I now know she likes Joy Division, Tom Waits and Erasure. I know she reads Albert Camus, Jane Austen and Anaïs Nin. I know she shops at Topshop, H&M and Dorothy Perkins.
I know nothing about her.
I sit there in my room – ‘our room’ – with her boxes around me, trying to find some sort of connection or piece of her in all this stuff. There are perfumes and three new kinds of soap in the bathroom. (What do her parents do?) There’s a purple scrubbing-thing hanging from the shower. (Am I imagining it or does she somehow manage to steer any conversation away from ‘her past’?) Her underwear comes mostly from Marks & Spencer. (Why did she suddenly start crying, that time last night when we were in bed?) She has about one hundred pairs of tights.
It’s coming from her ex’s place. It must be.
Darren.
He’s bigger than me. He has short dark hair and wears a rugby shirt with his name written on the back. DARREN. The number 69. He is bullish and surly, his face perpetually in shadow.
(He is the man from the club that first night.)
Alice is still in love with him. She goes round to his house after work. Darren lives in a two-bed terrace, a kid’s bike rusting in the grass out front. She rings the bell. The door opens. She goes inside.
‘What do you want, then?’ he says in the hall, his bottom lip flopping heavily as he speaks.
Darren reads FHM, cover to cover.
‘I’ve come for the rest of my stuff,’ she says, not making eye contact. She’s afraid to. Instead she looks down at her shoes and then at his. Black boots next to chunky bright-white trainers.
Darren smells of aftershave. His skin is red and smooth and babyish. He backs against the wall, letting her pass.
Darren touches her arm.
Her skin remembers him.
Her skin sends something like a text message to her brain, which reads:
Fuck Darren 1 last time. Make sure u arent making a mistake.
Alice is in the bedroom now, putting things in a shoebox. Little things, all that’s left; a bottle of perfume and a pen.
(Maybe she left them here on purpose.)
Darren stands in the doorway, watching.
His thoughts sound like gangsta rap, blunt and violent. His thoughts say things like bitch and ass in his head. They say fuck that bitch’s ass one last time. There is an obvious beat behind his thoughts. It is Darren’s heart.
‘So this is really it, huh?’ he says to her back.
Darren speaks like television; something American, with advert breaks and sponsorship.
Alice is leaning over the small mirrored dresser, catching his eye in the glass. She watches him walk around the bed, come up behind her and put his hands on her. He pushes her skirt up around her hips.
She doesn’t stop him.
She just closes her eyes and breathes him in.
I am outside Darren’s house, hiding behind a car. I’ve been here too long. It’s getting cold. I can see nothing through the windows of Darren’s house; they are icy black and unyielding.
I followed her out of work and onto the tram.
(When they come out, when they stand on the doorstep and have their tearful ‘final goodbye’ scene, I’ll stand up and make my presence known. I’ll go over to them, say something cutting and then somehow knock Darren’s fucking teeth out.)
We rode the tram out of the city and into the winding redbrick residential area. Kids on bikes. Cornershops. King Size cigarettes. Bent old women. Shopping trolleys. I sat one carriage down, watching her through the little tram window.
(Once I’ve somehow knocked Darren’s fucking teeth out, Alice will smile. She’ll fall in love with me. Miraculously it will stop raining and someone in the distance will cheer. This will become the story we tell our grandchildren at Christmas, everyone laughing when they hear it and clinking their sherry glasses and clapping me on the back. ‘Oh you!’ they’ll say encouragingly, finding me roguish but endearing.)
Then the door opens.
The door to Darren’s house opens.
Alice steps onto the path.
A woman comes out, not Darren but a woman in a long ill-fitting jumper. The jumper has a bad likeness of Michael Bolton knitted into it. The woman has copper-red hair. It’s Alice’s mum, it has to be. They have the same black eyes, the same pale skin, the same slight crookedness to them. Their necks bend like flowers stood in bottles of vodka.
This is Alice’s parents’ house and Alice’s mum is handing her a shoebox.
Why did she lie?
Her mum is standing in the
doorway in a Michael Bolton jumper.
Her parents are not abroad.
I want to jump and wave and scream. I want her to know I’ve followed her here, that I don’t trust her and I still think there’s a bloke called Darren somewhere who she used to live with and who she’s screwing on the side.
But instead I just stay crouched behind the car.
I feel awful enough to buy some cheap supermarket flowers on the way back home.
In time she’ll tell me everything; about her mum, her ex-boyfriends, her life before me. She will open up slowly, like time-lapse photography. She will begin to feel safe and comfortable and start telling the truth. She will start to need me.
But for this to happen, I must give her space.
I must be quiet and calm; not jealous or possessive or judging.
Most of all, I mustn’t scare her away.
(I know it’s not been long but I don’t know what I’d do if she left.)
When Alice comes she pulls me tight against her, so I can feel the trembling of her body, her arms and legs wrapped around me, her hair in my face, her chin digging hard into my shoulder. This is what turns me on the most. It makes me come too. I’m not like Will, probably turned on by some kind of out-of-body sex image; a graphic full-on porno vision of himself ‘slamming it into some girl’. What I want isn’t visual. What I want is cloudy and indistinct. It exists somewhere at the centre of her. It is the part of her that wants me too.
She stays lying on top of me afterwards, with her head resting against my head.
I feel safe, buried underneath her. If we could somehow just continue to stay like this – if we could find a way to never have to eat or drink or leave the room, and if this was a goal we could realistically work towards and achieve, like we could somehow write off and apply for it, a kind of ‘sex bursary’ or something – I think I’d be happy.
We don’t talk for a long time.
It’s Sunday. Early afternoon.
‘I’m going to ask you something,’ she says.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘And I want you to think about it really hard and then answer truthfully.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
A pause.
‘Do you love me?’ she says.
Christ.
We’ve only been together two weeks.
We’ve not used the word before. I’d be scared to, but it sounds, when she says it, not strange or cheap or like something off the television. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have to speak very loudly and her head is so close to mine and about 90 per cent of her speech is just soft warm breath in my ear.
‘Yeah,’ I say.
I want to say the word ‘love’, too. I want to really, really badly, but I can’t.
‘How about you?’ I say, instead.
I feel the muscles clench in her back.
I feel something change inside her.
I wait for her to answer.
‘I don’t know,’ she says, finally.
Everything seems suddenly not-moving and very far away.
‘Okay,’ I say.
My voice has gone quiet and strange-sounding, like I’m speaking long-distance.
‘God,’ she says, ‘I’m joking.’
But she feels about four hundred miles away from me.
I can’t see her face. I can’t see if she’s smiling when she says this.
‘Bloody hell. Of course I do.’
She lifts her head up and looks me in the eyes. Her eyes are so clear and large and black, it feels as if my whole face could disappear into them. She props herself up on her elbow and brushes my hair with her hand.
‘Come here,’ she says and kisses me. ‘It was a crap joke. I think I saw it in some film or something. Christ. Lighten up.’
Now she only feels about four hundred metres away from me, like we’re standing at opposite ends of an empty field and waving at each other.
She starts to walk across the field by kissing me and biting my neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers occasionally on the way. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘They’re big,’ she says with the toothbrush in her mouth. ‘They don’t go hard.’
Then she spits, runs the tap.
My fingers are pinching her nipples. Her eyes look into mine in the mirror. We’re going to bed next. We’ve washed our faces and in the morning she’ll have to get up and go to work, and I will hang around all day in the house, missing her and looking at the clock.
The cold tap rattles. I put my fingers under the water and touch some more against her nipple; against the oval chocolate-red aureole and large puckered teat. She shivers but doesn’t pull away.
‘Told you,’ she says, a fleck of toothpaste foam on her lower lip. ‘I’m not that pretty. Sometimes I don’t even know why you like me.’
I don’t reply. I’m not here. I’m watching this on TV.
I’m watching my fingers touch the drips of water to her skin in the mirror.
This is someone else’s hand, I think, not mine. This hand is acting out the mirror of my actions and her nipple is doing the opposite of hardening.
How in love we were.
One night in bed she tells me how an ex-boyfriend talked her into doing porn. He had this mate who worked for a website. It would all be completely anonymous.
‘It was a few years ago.’
She’s whispering.
It’s so dark I can hardly see her face, so quiet I can hear empty crisp packets wisping along the street outside our house. Two in the morning. Her breath smells acidic. My hand is on her hip.
‘I hardly knew him, really. We were only together for a couple of months.’
I want to know and I don’t want to know.
‘What did you do?’ I ask.
‘Just sex,’ she says. ‘His mate lent him a camera and one night he filmed me, you know … as he fucked me. It was for this amateurs’ site. All he had to do was make sure he held the camera steady. It wasn’t art. I didn’t talk.’
I want to know the specifics. I want to know if she went down on him first. I want to know what positions they used. I want to know if he came inside her or if, like in most porn I’d seen, he came on her face or her tits. But I can’t ask. Her voice is small and shaky. My hand moves from her hip.
‘Did you watch the tape afterwards?’
‘No. He did. He asked me if I wanted to see it and I said no. So he gave it to his mate and it got used, apparently.’
How about her? Did she get used? Did she get paid?
(Where is my hand going?)
More than anything, I want to ask what the site’s called. Is the film still there? Is someone watching it as we speak?
‘Why did you do it?’
My heart is hammering. I can see stills, freeze-frames, flashes of her in graphic sexual positions. I can see her body splintered into a lurid sequence of thumbnail photographs. The images burn. They do not go away. I’m disgusted and aroused.
(My hand’s between her legs.)
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she kisses me and I taste the acid on her tongue. We don’t mention it again.
She chooses the time and place for these admissions, not me.
She chooses how much or how little she tells me.
This is not her first whispered, two-in-the-morning confession.
In the morning I lie in bed and listen to the sound of her getting ready for work. Just before she leaves, she comes back into the room, leans over the bed and kisses me on the forehead.
‘I think you’re prime rib,’ she whispers in my ear.
Then she’s gone.
I get out of bed and put on my dressing gown. I go into the second bedroom, the empty one. I redraw the curtains and sit down at the computer and log onto the internet.
The clip is out there, somewhere.
A thousand grubby old men are clicking on it right now.
It’s just a process of elimination.
I will find that clip if it kills
me.
I will not give up.
It will be my new job.
I will find the clip.
I want to watch it. I want to see Alice’s face. I want to see if she looks different with someone else, if she enjoys it more. I want to see her without her seeing me. Then I’ll destroy it; somehow I’ll remove her from the internet. She should just be with me now, not me and anyone else who accidentally clicks on her.
So I begin to Google my way through hundreds of amateur porn sites.
Babes movies – real amateur babes!
young british amateur first timer girls – webcams – videos – this is the real deal! These girls are young and …
www.britamateursexmovie.com – 33k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Hot British Fuck Movies
Free Preview Pictures and Movies of British couples in amateur sex situations. Couple on bench – Couple in the woods – Couple …
www.uksexsituations.com/preview.html – 18k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Hardcore Amateur SEX!
I filmed my ex! 100% real amateur footage, submitted by bitter ex-boyfriends! These girls are horny and wild! No credit card needed …
www.ex-sex-frenzy.com/Alice.html – 44k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
Red Hot Action With British Amateur Babes
These young beauties will do anything … Helen, 16 pics, 5 vids (mpg) –
Chloe, 22pics, 2 vids (mpg) – Alice, 0 pics, 1 vid …
www.babes-amateurs-xxx.com – 21k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this
I go through page after page, finding nothing, as a thousand other men around the world stumble unwittingly across her image. They hover their cursors over her thumbnail and double-click. They download her. Sat in dark musty rooms, they squirm in their seats as she pants and pouts for the camera.
Alice stares out of the screen; not at them, not at anything. Her eyes are wide and black and blank.
She throws back her head and yelps with pleasure.
I meet her after work at this vodka bar just off Market Square. Walking into town, I feel as delicate and raw as new skin after a plaster is removed. I can still see images from websites, hundreds of girls staring out blindly from my computer screen.
