“You’ll meet someone,” her friends tell her. “The right guy’s out there I just don’t know where!” They say this exasperated. Some old fuddy duddy searching for their glasses.
She notices less invitations. Her iCal yawns blank. She wonders what she ever did before. How the hell did she spend her time? She runs into people. Into her old gangs. “Oh, you’re all here!” she says, hurrying out like a diseased thing, her gaze darting around the spaces at the sides of the walls.
She resolves to do dating websites. Dating websites are something she does now. She doesn’t like them. The romantic ones anyhow. The ones with cupid or soulmates in the URL. Those are not the ones for her. But the fish one she likes. She enjoys its willful cynicism. All just fish we are. Sling enough shit at the wall and something’s got to stick.
A few days in she starts to get messages. Men message her. All kinds of men! Though mainly tights fetishists, role-players and one time a Tory. It is hard to imagine which is worse. “How are you?” they begin. They can’t help but notice she likes Murakami. Has she heard of This American Life? They bet she’d get a real kick out of that. And what about tights? Does she wear tights? What about fishnet tights? What about two pairs of tights? Has she got any photographs of herself wearing tights or could she perhaps take some? She did not realize there were so many sub-genres to tights fetishism. If nothing else she has gained this.
“Hey,” says some guy, fringe flopping in front of his eyes. He seems promising. Better looking than the others. Hey yourself she thinks, tilting back her head, angling forward her laptop, concluding what she likes about him is how he stands. She looks at his photos like they are a really nice meal.
They meet ostensibly for coffee knowing they’ll have sex if the opportunity arises. But they do have coffee. Icelandic coffee! They also have cake. The cake makes her feel sick but then a lot of things do.
“You wouldn’t believe the weirdos I have messaging me,” she tells him, cutting through the sponge and buttercream with the side of her fork. He is flattered. He is flattered not to be one of the weirdos. She gets drunk and laughs a lot. She laughs the sort of laugh that gets away from you. One that needs to be lassoed back.
They go back to hers. She has an HDMI cable and Netflix and two thirds of a bottle of wine. She fixes him a drink. They sit on opposite ends of the sofa. Neither turns on the television. They inch closer and he rests his head on her shoulder. It is a bit awkward but aside from anything it is without grace and logistically uncomfortable. She lifts his head and turns it round like the prop skull from Hamlet, kissing him with a straightforward matter-of-factness while he pushes his hand up her skirt. After, he fetches tissue paper from the bathroom, wiping her stomach like he is nursing a wound.
He meets her friends. He is polite. He places a hand on her shoulder when they make fun of her for having never seen Chinatown. He buys them a round of drinks. He talks to Kate about the guy she is seeing. “That guy’s a jerk,” she hears him say. She smiles. Lying in bed she thinks: he likes me. She rests her head on his chest, listening to his heart contract and expand, pumping out what was left, making room for her. In the morning they have sex. He looks like he wants to say something. “What?” she asks.
“Nothing,” he says. Red-faced. Breathless.
“What?” she asks again. “Am I doing something wrong? Would you like me to do something else?”
He kisses her forehead, untangles her hair. “Everything you’re doing is fine.”
They go to an art gallery. She wears a backpack and jeans. She looks at him. He is wearing a backpack and jeans. She looks at the other couples in the art gallery. They are all wearing backpacks and jeans.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s get a drink.”
One night he prods her shoulder. “I love you,” he says, like he is polishing off a truth. Just saying what he sees. Handing her a heart-shaped box and now she has to figure out its compartments, learn how to flip the lid. A house she has to furnish, to keep clean. “I love you too,” she says, regretting adding too. A cop out. A disgrace.
“Would you like to meet my parents?” he asks. “And we should go away.” There is a long inventory of things to do. They dine with other couples, touring their friends. They take turns to make food. A lot of being in a relationship, she realizes, is negotiating what you are going to have for tea.
“I have something to ask you,” he tells her, one night, sat on the settee. They eat curry with coconut rice. Couple of posh yogurts waiting for afters. She nods and chews.
“It’s about. Um. Sex.” She begins to worry. She is not as limber as she once was. What she likes now is when it’s over soon.
“Okay,” he says. “Here goes.
“I would like you to dress up like a penguin and incubate some eggs.”
She recalls something she read about improv. Yes. And. That was the ethos. She realizes how heavily this has informed her worldview.
“Yes,” she says. “And let us eat this yogurt.”
She researches. Obviously, she researches. “You know it is typically the male penguin who incubates the egg though they often take turns,” she tells him at the self-checkout in Asda.
“Jesus,” he says. “Can this not wait until we’re outside?”
“Okay,” she replies, adding quietly under her breath, “Do you want me to be the male penguin or the female one?” He pretends not to hear. She wonders if it is just the one egg that needs incubating or multiple eggs. She watches him walk out the shop door.
“I love you!” she yells, the automatic doors snapping shut. She has a lot of questions.
At his flat they wash the dishes and he tells her it is more of an abstract fantasy. The detail is not of importance. She disagrees. In this situation perhaps more so than in any other situation she has ever encountered in her life the detail seems to be of absolute importance.
“Let’s just drop it,” he says. “Let’s pretend I never brought it up.” He is wearing marigolds. They are not attractive.
At work she obsessively Googles penguins. She tries to find them erotic. They are handsome, she supposes, though handsome like a smart drinks cabinet as opposed to a really strong jaw. She wonders if the whole world has lost its mind.
She pulls on her pajamas while he scrolls through his phone. “What if I paint my face?” she suggests. “What if I paint my face black? Or would that be too racial?” This sort of thing, she believes, is about compromise. He exhales loudly leaving the room. He does not say no.
Walking through town she watches a teenager spit at a middle-aged man outside Argos.
“Did you see that?” she asks, fingernails digging into his arms, face urgently over his shoulder.
“People are absolutely awful to each other. To a person they are horrible twats.”
“You,” he says, rolling his eyes. “You can be so cynical.”
“It’s not being cynical,” she replies, “if you’re constantly being proven right.”
In the evenings they watch documentaries. Music documentaries. Serial killer documentaries. Documentaries about the state of the automobile industry in Detroit. They make Thai food. They make Mexican. They take it in turns to stir the soup. Gradually, they stop mentioning the penguins.
The lease runs out on his flat and so they move in. It makes sense. Her flat is much bigger than his and it’s cheaper that way. He has a lot more stuff than she does. She throws out all her CDs and most of her books. Makes room in her drawers. Empties her cupboards. When she looks through her wardrobe for something to wear his pressed and dry-cleaned tuxedo stares at her like a joke.
She starts going to bed earlier than him. She needs more sleep than he does. At night, in bed, she takes to wondering things. Why it is the male penguin that incubates the eggs. Why a teenager would spit at a man. Why he even owns a tuxedo. Why every time she says I love you it is with an upward inflection.
Toxic Shock Syndrome
Jennifer had been to a hospital only once before. Age
fourteen. Her first use of a tampon. Toxic Shock Syndrome.
She committed to using a tampon from her first ever period. It was at that same time she got big. Puberty kicked in and her metabolism conked out; and she grew and grew, spilling into the space around her. Since then people were always telling her she was big; big heart, big smile, big personality, big the lot. Just generally, abstractly big. There was no reference to her body though it was implicit. Skated around like a pivot. Something that needed acknowledging or pointing at, though indirectly so. Her period congenitally, inexorably linked. That big heart of hers pumping blood around and out of her body; leaking it like an excess, like stuff to spare. There was something more uncomfortable about big women menstruating. Something presumed to ooze. It felt shameful and as she stared at the rich red blood pooling in her sanitary napkin she acquiesced to stop the slop at the source; forcing a super plus tampon into her (likely) large vagina.
She hadn’t always been big. As a child she was delicate, nimble, quick on her feet. She had an ethereal quality. She could get into small spaces. For a long time she still felt like that same slip of a thing; running her hands over where her hipbones used to be, sitting with the elegance of the impossibly tiny. But gradually she came to accept her new size; the knowledge sitting inside her like a foreign object. Unwelcome, though very much there.
But she did not feel sprawling or vast, she felt composed; as perfectly contained as palms pressed together. She gave nothing away. There were no leakages, no ooze. You saw of her only what she wanted and she was judicious about that. And yet lying in bed feeling the weight of herself push down into the mattress there was no denying it; she’d occupied more mass than that to which she was entitled and she’d never even been given a choice.
“Jenny,” her doctor told her. “Jenn.” People were always sawing off bits of her name, reducing it, making it neat and pretty where she liked its entirety. Its needless sprawl. Its somewhat awkward prosody. Jennifer, she would correct them. JENNIFER. She’d wanted some Valium for a flight. Not because of nerves or fear, just something to knock herself out, to get it over with. “Is this because of your size?” her GP inquired. “Wear flight socks. You can get them in Asda.”
Her size recurred again and again as cause over effect. The supposed route of all her pain. When she fell over at work, slapping her spine against the dense marble of the office reception, peeling back her jumper to reveal the flesh, pink and bruised, her resultant back problems were denoted by the GP as “more to do with your size.” When she began feeling lightheaded, lacking in energy, before her blood tests revealed an acute B12 deficiency, she was told she “probably just needed to lose some weight.”
People, she realized, liked women small. Something to be dangled from their wrist. Slipped neatly inside their pocket. And as she boarded the plane, noticing with some reservation she’d been given the middle seat, she sat down, feeling her thighs squeeze beneath the armrests at her side, her bottom packed in and oppressed. Though flipping through the in-flight magazine she thought about the cool egalitarianism of the sky. Up in the air everyone was weightless as a cloud. A man in a smart suit stopped and took the window seat beside her. She stood up to tell him to pass, subjected to the ludicrous rigmarole again. He was a businessman, she supposed, a salient salt and pepper type, all blow-dried hair and Michael Douglas gesticulations. He caught her looking over at him. He looked pleased.
She was glad he was sat next to her. He made her feel safe. There was something loaded about the person you were sat next to on a flight. Tipping on the precipice of reason and stupidity, the profound and the perfunctory. Floating in a big metal juggernaut on only thin air. The numbers just don’t add up! If you were going down, you were going down together. Looking around the fuselage, she hated the pomp and gesture that accompanied flying. The romcoms and crackers, the wet wipes and cheap perfume; all of it, all a distraction, smoke and mirrors eclipsing the fact—just watch to whom you say smoke. After take-off she ordered a large gin and tonic, sinking her Valium, the only sensible course of action, her body soupy and relaxed, dozing in her seat.
She woke a few hours later, to the white noise of the engine, the syncopated giggle of the passengers, plugged in and tuned out. She noticed the hand of the man next to her, pressed idly against her knee. She looked over seeing he was fast asleep. She wondered whether she should move his hand, or her legs, place them to one side, though found his touch comfortable, a little thrilling, really. She pulled out her novel from the seatback and began reading, sensing the slightest movement—the back of his palm splayed out and moving with the faintest pressure against her. She looked at him again. He seemed still to be sleeping. She continued reading, her leg remained in situ. Then she felt a slow, deliberate graze, his fingers moving pleasurably against her skin, moving up and down, circling round and round. If he began to slow, she nudged him a faint twitch of encouragement. He continued moving his hand again, his fingers creeping beneath her thighs, so she was essentially sitting on his hand. He pushed further beneath her. Her underwear was damp. She looked around, at the flight attendants, the passengers, enjoying her own audacity. She didn’t care. She felt wonderful, some gorgeous creature to be pleasured, his arm moving rhythmically beneath her. She bit her lip feeling sensual and desired, rocking gently in her seat, matching his rhythm. She was close. She was halfway there when he suddenly stopped. She looked over at him, he was gasping for air, his chin thrust forward, his face reddening by the moment. She called for help.
“He can’t breathe!” she yelled. “He can’t breathe!”
A stewardess hurried over, forcing Jennifer out of her seat. She stood up leaving his hand limp and white in the seat beneath her. “Were you sitting on his hand?” the stewardess cried.
“Why were you sitting on his hand?!”
There was a ruckus. Things move quickly when a person might die. There were no whiskey sours or ham paninis, now; just the gooey throb of your own heartbeat, the beast roaring beneath the soles of your feet. Jennifer studied the little graphic of the plane pulsing across the screen. They made an emergency landing in Madrid. A flight attendant asked if she knew him, if she’d like to travel with him to the hospital. The notion was a lunatic one, but also, a strange necessity. She trailed some time after the ambulance in a taxi. All that desire left looping in the sky.
At the hospital she bought a National Geographic and a packet of Doritos. She thought about the one other time she’d sat in a hospital waiting room, her temperature soaring over a hundred before they’d check her in. How she’d felt light as a feather doped up on something or other, a million miles away in her hospital bed, though knowing, like a knife to a balloon, she’d been vindicated. She finished her Doritos wondering if she could get the airline to pay for her dinner. She fancied a steak. It was the first meal she’d had back from hospital last time. Steak with creamed peas and mash. She’d savored every bite.
One of the flight staff approached her, a clipboard clutched to her chest, her body slim and efficient in a pencil skirt and heels. They’d booked her a taxi, a hotel and a flight early the next morning. It was time for Jennifer to leave.
She switched on her phone and texted her boyfriend letting him know the situation. You didn’t think she had a boyfriend? She did. She always remembered to let him know she’d taken off, always forgot to tell him when she’d landed. She got on her feet. This was her only struggle. She felt like she was forever reaching though her body remained settled and rooted to the ground.
She wondered about the business man. She’d once read that 80% of illnesses don’t have a cure. Could a heart run on fumes? Could old lungs forget how to breathe? She took a final look around the hospital waiting room. The doctors and nurses, husbands and wives. She was, she suspected, the most attractive person in the room, in most rooms. She picked up her suitcase and felt a pang in her belly and an ache at her groin. Her period had begun. She waited outside for a long while.
Here’s to You
&
nbsp; A house seems bigger with nothing in it though nobody mentions the filth.
The dry matter curled in the corners, the sludge below the sink. Without the television and cabinets, the requisite trinkets and knick-knacks, there was little to distract. They had been living like pigs.
Aahna scanned the skirting boards feeling sick, a retch poised in her throat like a synchronized swimmer, present since the day she was handed her notice.
The kitchenware packed up and shipped off, the DVDs and paperbacks binned. Aahna used to gather and disseminate these things across the local charity shops only to re-accumulate the same old crap over again, her materialism plumping and shedding like the lining of her womb; this, an essential hysterectomy, easy on the hysterics.
She slipped her hand down the side of the couch, the doughy, lumpen mass; once the heaving pivot of their love, the anchor of their alliance, now pushed to the peripheries to gather dust. Grazing the tips of her fingers, she found her bracelet, a tiny gift from her boyfriend, Joyce. She clipped it around her wrist.
He had been alright—he had!—skittish and flapping, a certain buffoon lumber. She remembered when he gave her the bracelet, how he had presented her with it before tea one night, impossibly happy to be sat on the sofa giving her this.
She locked up and posted the keys, heading to the car to move back home. Had things come to this?
They had.
* * *
The drive home was tedious. It took twice as long as expected. Everything seemed to take twice as long as expected. It was as if the whole area were swarming in sleeping sickness.
Hampered with roadworks and the traffic moving sluggishly along. The radiator blasted hot air, a chatty hum emanated from the radio, Aahna started to feel cozy. She yawned and yawned. The little hinges of her jaw chomping up and down. Noticing the last service stop before her turn she pulled in thinking to sink an espresso to nudge her along. She wasn’t far now.
A Selfie as Big as the Ritz Page 6
