Queenie

by Candice Carty-Williams

  “That’s cool. As long as the cakes aren’t them little ones that you pick up with two fingers and inhale. I want value for my money.” Kyazike put her arm through mine as we all walked. “Did you see that dickhead today?” she asked.

  “Which one? There are lots of dickheads in my building. You need to be more specific,” I said.

  “That married one. The biggest one,” Kyazike sneered. “The one you need to not let even look at you.”

  “No,” I said quietly, hoping that what I was saying wasn’t a lie. “I won’t.”

  And for the next two hours, I remembered what it was like to be normal again. Then remembered Janet saying that there was no such thing as normal, and was finally grateful that she hadn’t let me walk away after one session.

  * * *

  As the week went on, I grew more exhausted. I was coping, but I had never been so tired in my life. Halfway through the week, I e-mailed Janet to let her know that I was probably on the edge of a relapse, but she replied saying: “. . . the more tired you are, the more likely your defenses are to be down. Doesn’t mean relapse, means you’re adjusting to working again. Rest at the weekend.”

  I was determined to fill in my time sheet for the week, so battled through the intrusive thoughts that popped into my head every other second. By Friday, I was hanging on by a thread. My stomach’s movements were incredibly dramatic and my head refused to stop buzzing. I had to work slower than I did when I first started, and when Gina sent me an e-mail asking me to go into her office at four, by three o’clock the contents of my desk were in my rucksack.

  “I understand,” I said, walking into her office.

  “You understand what?” Gina said, putting a pair of glasses on.

  “Didn’t know you wore glasses.” I sat in the chair opposite her.

  “They’re new. Contacts getting a bit too fiddly for me. Nice, though, aren’t they?” She looked up at me and smiled.

  “Yeah, they’re nice,” I said. “Where are they—”

  “We’re not here to talk eyewear,” Gina said. “Well done.”

  “Pardon?” I asked.

  “For this week, Queenie,” Gina explained. “It must have been hard, but you did it. And you did it well.”

  “I was slow, though,” I reminded her.

  “Well, it’s not a race. You’ve only just got back, and you’ll get quicker. You were at your desk, doing the work, and that’s what I want from you.” Gina turned back to her computer.

  “Okay?” I said, suspicious. “Thanks, Gina.”

  “Word of warning,” Gina said, standing up. “Ted is back from holiday on Monday. Avoid.”

  “You don’t need to tell me twice.” I nodded.

  “I’ve signed off your time sheet for the week and sent it to HR. You can go home now. You look absolutely shattered. See you on Monday.”

  * * *

  Two weeks of full work passed. Two weeks of completed time sheets, two weeks of to-the-brink-of-death exhaustion, two weeks of deep breathing in the loo, and two weeks of avoiding Ted.

  The less I thought of him, the better; but still, I was doing a lot of ducking and diving around the office in an attempt not to bump into him. I could cross that bridge when I came to it, even though I was doing everything in my power to ensure that I was taking every alternative route that I could in order to avoid bridges.

  It was a Friday night, and I was bored with my grandmother asking when I was going to get a pay rise as we watched the news.

  In an attempt to actively move myself away from married men, and from men who just want to have sex with my body as and when it suits them (admittedly, the two are not mutually exclusive), this time when I go on OkCupid I am going to talk to somebody who is normal and nice-looking, and who talks to me in a normal and nice way.

  As I brushed my teeth, I thought about the men I would avoid even messaging, let alone meeting, on OkCupid this time around:

  • The ones who mention my “black curves” as though I’ll be flattered by the suggestion that curves are in this case only acceptable because I’m non-white.

  • The ones who completely bypass any of the varied films, TV, and music I have listed on my profile. Not acknowledging that I might have interests beyond your dick is a real red flag.

  • The ones who want to migrate to WhatsApp a little too soon after starting to chat. It’s obviously because you want to send and receive X-rated pictures.

  • The ones who I can tell are using pictures from at least three years ago. Unless you can send me a picture of you holding a newspaper from the day we chat, I’m going to assume that the ones you’ve posted are from Fresher’s Week.

  • The ones with x’s in their profile. Cutesy doesn’t tend to equal somebody who is going to want to have a discussion about intersectional feminism.

  • The couples who want someone for a threesome. Obviously. Though I’m not ruling that out for the future when I’m a bit more stable. Life should be about experiences, after all.

  I washed my face, put my headscarf on, the usual ritual, and got into bed. It was 7 p.m.

  I reinstalled the app and logged in, lying on my back in the reclining butterfly pose (knees apart, feet together), a yoga move I’d seen on the Internet that guaranteed opening some sort of chakras. I woke up an hour later, phone in hand and hips as stiff as boards. I turned the lamp off and crawled under the duvet. Three hours later, I was still awake.

  Courtney86: Hello, how are you? My name is Courtney, nice to meet you. Having a good night?

  NJ234: You’ve got a really nice smile. Hope you’re having a good evening.

  Maybe God has been listening to me, even though I haven’t attempted prayer since midnight mass? Maybe she sees that I am on the path to recovery and am ready for a nice person who’ll treat me like I’m more than an orifice.

  I replied to both, being very well-behaved and not saying anything remotely sexy to either of them. Maybe I was a changed woman? It was hard to be so restrained, yes, but the smut can come later once they’ve proved that they’re able to talk to me for a day without telling me that they’re wanking over the pictures on my profile.

  Two days later and many messages from NJ234 telling me that his “cock’s big enough to split a girl’s cunt in two” or thereabouts, I blocked him, and arranged to go on an actual date with Courtney86 (aptly named, as he is called Courtney and was born in 1986). I so desperately wanted to feel like a normal girl again, and it was worth it, even though I had to do lots of seeding with my grandmother by telling her that I’d be working a bit late on a new project and that Darcy would be with me in case I had some sort of episode.

  * * *

  I was nervous about this date because we hadn’t spoken about anything rude at all. I was trying to move away from the belief that my only conversational currency with men was sexting, was why.

  So far, Courtney86 is unlike anyone I’ve experienced before in that he’s thirty-two, owns two houses, is bald, and has a beard, but, crucially, asks normal questions about normal things.

  He seems polite, and quite possibly somebody that I could spend nonsexual time with. He’s passed the Darcy test—she was at first apprehensive because he’s bald, but when Leigh came to meet us for lunch and referred to him as a “Balding Alpha,” she laughed so much that she came round to the idea.

  Come Thursday, I was toying with the idea of canceling because surely an actual adult handsome man with two houses wouldn’t want to spend any time with me, a weird flailing baby who had basically just had a nervous breakdown. I went to a quiet area of the cafeteria and called Kyazike for some help and support.

  “Help me. What if he’s one of those white guys who likes black girls who are properly put together, and not ones like me who are a bit ‘alternative’?”

  “What?” Kyazike asked. “What do you mean, fam?”

  “You know, like what if he expects me to turn up wearing Louboutins and a bodycon dress and have, like, contour on my face? And fake eyel
ashes? And a lace-front wig?”

  “You don’t need to go, you know,” Kyazike said. “You’re stressing about this when you could just go home after work.”

  “I know! But I need to prove to myself that I can do this. That I can be a normal girl and go on a normal date, and maybe that normal date will help to cancel out all of the very, very bad dates,” I explained.

  “There are ways of being normal that aren’t dating,” Kyazike told me.

  “Please can we get back onto the topic of me not being black enough, please?”

  “Fine.” Kyazike refocused. “So, you started chatting on OkCupid, yeah?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed.

  “And on this app, you have pictures of yourself?”

  “Yes. Five of them.”

  “And in these pictures, are you standing on one leg showing off the red sole of your Louboutins and wearing a bodycon dress the way I do on Snapchat?” Kyazike continued with her line of questioning.

  “No.”

  “And in any of these pictures, do you have contour on your face, or fake eyelashes?”

  “No. And no,” I told her.

  “Are you rocking a lace-front wig?”

  “I’m not, no.”

  “So you see my point, yeah?” she checked. “Or do I have to keep on?”

  “I do. You don’t.”

  “And you don’t have to dress like the black girls you see on Insta to be bla—” I looked up from my seat and saw Ted standing in front of me. As we locked eyes, guilt settled on his face. In direct response, my throat seized up and I dropped the phone on the floor. It clattered by my feet, and he walked over, reaching down to pick it up.

  I grabbed at it and looked at him, shaking my head. I put the phone back to my ear and walked away, my legs working very hard to carry me off in a straight line.

  “. . . wear what makes you comfortable, innit. Just do you,” Kyazike said. “Remember that time in the playground in year nine, when Tia asked me in front of everyone why I was friends with you when you were white on the inside and black on the outside like a coconut?”

  “Why are you bringing that up, Kyazike?” I asked, letting myself into the first-aid room and sitting on a pile of blankets in the corner.

  “What did I say to Tia then?”

  “. . . You said that I could be any type of black girl that I wanted to be.”

  * * *

  By the time Friday came around, I was so nervous that all I could eat were two tiny fruits for breakfast and half a carton of soup, sip by sip, at lunch.

  Although Balding Alpha and I were meant to go to dinner, I panicked at 4 p.m. and asked if we could go for a drink instead. I still wasn’t great at eating, and a first date didn’t seem like the setting to accommodate that.

  Darcy had to escort me to Brixton after work and sit with me in the pub opposite the bar he’d suggested until it was time for the date.

  “But why are you so nervous? Balding Alpha seems like a nice guy!” she said, sitting down at the table.

  “Exactly that, Darcy,” I said. “This one is nice. Plus, it’s been a long time since I went on a date! Don’t forget that since Tom, despite me wanting them to be nice and romantic, all of my dates have been sex appointments. What if my chat is all rubbish, and so he hates me and just thinks I’m annoying?” I groaned, suddenly regretting everything.

  “I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” Darcy said, opening a bag of crisps.

  “No, please don’t do this! I’m not fishing, my self-esteem is legitimately so low that I actually feel like he’s going to walk in, take one look at me, and then walk out.”

  “Queenie,” she said sternly, offering me a crisp.

  “No. I don’t know how you can eat at a time like this.” I pushed the bag away. “Anyway, just as importantly, in the unlikely event that he does fancy me, I’m not going to have sex with him.”

  “I think that’s wise,” Darcy said, chewing carefully. “You’ve been through a lot, and I think that if you are going to have sex again, it should possibly be with someone who is not an arsehole—”

  “I’m not, I mean it,” I promised. “I’m trying to turn over a new leaf with this sort of thing.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “One question, though. If by some fluke he is blind and so is attracted to my personality, can I go home with hi—”

  “No.” Darcy shook her head quickly, her dark hair flashing across her face.

  “But just to kiss him?” I asked.

  “Do you want to go back to how you were before?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Put bluntly, when you were just going along with what men did or didn’t want from you.”

  “All right, all ri—” I started.

  “Queenie,” Darcy interrupted, impatient. “If you’re serious about prolonging anything, and I absolutely hate to say this, but you should at least wait until date two. Women should be free to have sex on date one, two, fifteen, without being judged or cast aside, but sadly, men aren’t as evolved as women.”

  “Okay. Fine. Anyway, all pointless, and yes, I’m being repetitive, but it won’t even come to that,” I predicted.

  “Let me look at the messages?” Darcy asked, reaching for my phone. “There’s one in particular that proves that he isn’t going to see you and recoil, and also suggests that you are the one who won’t like him. It made me cringe so much, Queenie.”

  I watched my hands tremble slightly as I slid the phone over. Darcy opened WhatsApp and scrolled up through the dozens of messages we’d exchanged in the last few days.

  She paused, furrowing her brow as she skimmed volumes of getting-to-know-you chat. “This.” She pushed the phone back toward me and spun it around.

  I have always felt grateful that I never wanted to pigeonhole myself into having “a type,” I never felt that way. I think any kind of woman can be attractive, but I do not find all women attractive.

  For example, and I hope this comes across well, but I’ve got white mates who are honest and say they don’t find nonwhite women attractive. They aren’t racist, I wouldn’t be friends with them if they were, it’s just a preference for them I guess. I have a black mate who says the same about white women. I got a mate who only likes big women. Some of them only seem to go out with petite women. Or some tall and thin women (we’ll come to the size zero thing, I have a bit of a problem with that) and some only like blondes. You hear this all the time from men and women; having a type.

  I just think it’s a shame to be made that way. Not their fault or even anything they can do about it. I’m just grateful that I can see beauty in any variety.

  “What’s wrong with that? I thought that it’s literally the most normal thing a man has said to me in the last year?”

  “Firstly, Queenie, he obviously likes the sound of his own voice a lot, so you’ll have to get on board with that tonight. You don’t need to know all of that stuff!” Darcy said. “Nobody does. You didn’t even ask what his type was, but he’s written a small thesis on it.”

  “I think it’s quite nice, it’s just him explaining that he doesn’t always like traditionally good-looking girls, and that he can see beyond that and fancy girls like me,” I said, trying to bat off years of negative reinforcement and failing.

  “But you are traditionally good-looking!” Darcy spluttered. “I don’t know why you have it in your head that you aren’t! It makes me so sad that you can’t see what I do.”

  I looked down at the table and moved so that I sat on my shaking hands.

  “Anyway, look, you’ve got two minutes until he gets here. You’ll be fine. And you can leave anytime you want to.”

  * * *

  I left the pub and crossed the road, shifting my weight from one foot to the other as I waited outside.

  I could see Darcy watching me through the pub window, and laughed when I saw her giving me a thumbs-up that emerged from behind the curtain.

  “What’s so funny?
Come here, give us a kiss, then.” A man that I hoped was Balding Alpha in real life descended upon me from nowhere, kissed me on both cheeks, and slipped a hand down so that it rested on my bum. I hadn’t expected him to be this forward; big disconnect between his messages and his actions.

  I stepped back and took him in. He looked like his pictures. Slightly older, but it was definitely him, even though he was wearing a flat cap to cover his bald head.

  “Hello!” I hugged him and did a thumbs-up behind his back for Darcy’s benefit.

  “Shall we?” he said, holding open the door of the busy bar I’d been looking at nervously for the last hour.

  Balding Alpha ordered a bottle of wine and we drank it quickly, speaking nonstop. We laughed about our families, moaned about living in London, compared dream holidays, our hands occasionally touching and our legs constantly pressed together under the table. He ordered another bottle, and before I could realize how much I was drinking, we’d made our way through a glass of it each, when he leaned over the table and said, “How about I ask them to cork this and we walk back to mine?”

  “Maybe,” I said, standing up to go to the loo. I had to hold on to a stool to steady myself as it hit me how much I’d had to drink, and in such a short amount of time. I made it to the bathroom and opened my bag, retrieving my phone with unusually clumsy hands.

  I called Darcy with some difficulty, looking in the mirror above the sink, staring at myself in some weak attempt to sober up purely through focusing my eyes on my own reflection.

  “Are you okay? Are you safe? Is he a psycho? Are you having a wobble? Do you need me to come and get you?” Darcy asked, her voice high. “Simon, get my coat!”

  “No! But shall I go home with him, Darc? I’ve, I’ve had I think the equivalent of, like, a bottle of wine and so, Darcyyyyy, I am feeling quite loose and free!” I leaned on the sink to balance myself. “Fuck it. Did you see that he snogged me when he saw me? He is so confident. It’s ’mazin’. And his bald head is quite sexy.”