by Anna Roberts
Chapter fourteen takes this to its illogical conclusion and has Edward/Dickfacehead curled up happily in a metaphorical Dutch Oven of his own making. In case we’re not clear that this is supposed to be a distressing turn of events, Ana is on hand to help out.
I inhale sharply from the shock. No. No, this is wrong, so wrong and so disturbing.
Of course, Dickfacehead is almost certainly doing this on purpose, because he’s been a manipulative piece of shit from the get-go, but E.L. probably thinks it’s a symptom of his psychological complexity. To the rest of us, he’s just shut down in a tantrum because Ana threatened to ‘leave him’ – you know, like she did before when they broke up for five whole days. Also, they’ve been back together for about that length of time – maybe less.
At this point a sensible woman would shrug her shoulders, recycle him as a doorstop and go away and do something else until he’d decided to stop behaving like a toddler. Of course, this is Ana, who is sensible only in the 19th Century sense of the word, and to a degree that would cause even Marianne Dashwood to give her the sideeye. Ana’s solution to the problem of her catatonic boyfriend?
She sits down on the floor beside him and proceeds to talk about herself and how her life has no meaning without him.
God, these books are just so feminist.
“This is about me not being good enough for you. It was an insight into your life, and I am so scared you’ll get bored with me, and then you’ll go...and I’ll end up like Leila...a shadow. Because I love you, Christian, and if you leave me it will be like a world without light. I’ll be in darkness. I don’t want to run. I’m just so frightened you’ll leave me...”
This dialogue is hugely improved when you remember that our heroine is currently drunk off her pointy little tits. It’s also the only way the ellipses make sense – they’re there to fill in the pauses where she hiccups up a tiny bit of sick or forgets what she was going to say next. Becaush...urgh...caush...no, s’alright it’s gone back down...becaush I really really fucking love you, Christian. An’...rrp...I’m not just saying that. I really fucking do.
Once he’s absolutely sure she’s not going to break up with him, or perhaps because he’s just really fucking bored of listening to her blether, Dickfacehead comes out of his trance, starts crying and says he has a terrible secret. Because God forbid these muttonheads talk to each other like sensible adults. No, there has to be guns and drinking and lunatics and catatonic bullshit, because that’s what makes them sexy and exciting. Apparently.
Yeah, long story short:
“I’m a sadist, Ana. I like to whip little brown-haired girls like you because you all look like the crack whore – my birth mother. I’m sure you can guess why.”
Would this be because you have an Oedipus Complex so facepalmingly obvious that even Sigmund Freud would shoo you off the couch to make room for yet another woman who has dreams about cucumbers?
Anyway, they cry some more and he asks her to marry him. Ain’t love grand?
Then they eat some food, talk about Leila and he tries to explain that she’s nucking futs and needs rounds the clock psychiatric care. Ana is still convinced he got up to some kind of hanky panky with the crazy lady and demonstrates that while they’ve talked and cried and wailed and gone catatonic and got drunk and laughed cathartically, nothing has actually been resolved.
I hate them both so much – you have no idea. No wonder these books are always talking about ‘charged atmospheres’ and ‘electricity’. If these characters were any more static small dogs would stick to them.
So he admits that he gave poor mad filthy Leila a bath and lent her some of Ana’s clothes and Ana reacts pretty much as you’d expect.
Bathing her, for fuck’s sake – naked. A harsh, painful shudder wracks my body.
“Ana.”
“What?”
“Don’t. It doesn’t mean anything. It was like caring for a child, a broken, shattered, child,” he mutters.
What the hell would he know about caring for a child? This was a woman who he had a very full on, deviant sexual relationship with.
Oh, this hurts.
No comment.
Then she cries and goes to bed. Then in the night wolves got into the apartment and ate them both. The End.
Chapter Fifteen
Shit.
Yep, there’s more. She wakes up in the night, goes to get a drink and goes back to bed to find him having a loud, thrashy nightmare because she’s not in the bed beside him.
“You left, you left, you must have left,” he mumbles – his wide eyed stare becoming accusatory – and he looks so lost, it wrenches my heart. Poor Fifty.
At this point I would normally say he was playing her like a Stradivarius, but let’s face it, the tune he’s playing isn’t exactly Paganini, is it? It’s more like Baa Baa Black Sheep and luckily for him she’s dense enough to ‘yes sir’ and ‘three bags full’ every single fucking time.
Then it’s FUCK O’CLOCK and I’m kind of pleased for once, because I don’t have to read the next few pages. There’s never anything interesting about the sex scenes, although occasionally there is something horrible, like this one, where she says no and he says yes and carries on anyway.
No, really – what the fuck, Random House?
He still wants her to marry him, which is hilarious, then says they can have kids if she wants.
No. Please no. Can you imagine how fucked in the head their poor children would be? Speaking of fucked in the head, she wants to see his psychiatrist. Oh good. More whining.
Then she’s going to be late for work, and Jack is pissed off again. More e-mail filler. Can’t these morons leave one another alone for five minutes? Not a moment goes by when they’re not in each other’s pockets, all up their business and up each other’s bums. They’d never last – they have no concept of personal space or private time. I would say they probably follow one another into the lavatory but since we’re forced to watch their every single waking moment and nobody has ever left the room for a bathroom break, I’m guessing they don’t piss. And they only have anuses for handy buttplug storage.
Then José calls and says he’s looking for a place to crash. Ana already knows how Dickfacehead will respond to this and also finds out that Dickfacehead bought the creeper photos José took of her with various facial expressions. (Horny, Weepy, Dopey, Greedy, Bitchy, Needy and Dumb – Ana and the Seven Mental Midgets.)
Boss Jack has just about had enough, since she is not only taking personal calls on company time and e-mails her boyfriend every five minutes, she is also apparently a really crappy typist. No wonder E.L. had to make Jack a sleazy creep – it was the only way to destroy any kind of sympathy for the man.
“Jack, is there something wrong?”
He glances up, his blue eyes darkening as his gaze runs up and down my body. My blood chills.
“No.” His answer is concise, rude and dismissive. I stand there like the idiot I professed not to be and then shuffle back out of his office. Perhaps he, too, suffers from a personality disorder. Sheesh, I’m surrounded by them.
That’s because you have one, you solipsistic little shitnut.
Then when she gets back to her desk, Ethan phones and it’s more happy personal chatter on company time.
“Hi, Ana. How’d it go last night?”
Well, the good news is that he didn’t get shot by his gun-wielding crazy ex-girlfriend, but the bad news is that I think he might have touched her woo-woo while she was in the bath. So I decided to break up with him, then he went catatonic and I had to tell him how great he was and how much I loved him and that I wasn’t going to break up with him until he decided to talk to me again. And when he did he told me he was a sexual sadist and he liked to beat me and fuck me because I looked like his Mom. Sorry - did I mention I was quite drunk this whole time? Because I was. So yeah - then he asked me to marry him and we ate macaroni and cheese, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his crazy ex-girlfriend so I tu
rned my back on him in bed and cried myself to sleep. Then when I woke up in the middle of the night he was having a ‘nightmare’ because he thought I’d moved out – oh, did I mention I moved in with him after being back with him for two days? Yeah, well I did. Then we fucked even though I didn’t want to and it was all better. Somehow. Does that sound stupid?
Just a little.
What she actually said was “Er...fine.”
Then Dickfacehead phones because she didn’t reply to her e-mail RIGHT AWAY. Is everyone in this book fourteen years old?
Jack, for some inexplicable reason, is still not very happy with Ana. He gives her forty-five minutes for lunch and tells her she can make up the time she lost this morning, and she asks him if she’s done something to offend him.
You want a list?
Of course, because Ana has the plot-warping attributes of all Mary Sues, Jack’s hatred of her is because she won’t fuck him, not because she’s so lazy she baulks at the thought of reading four first chapters in a morning, can’t type, comes in late, spends all day e-mailing her boyfriend and phoning her friends and thinks every single fucking thing in the world is all about her.
Anyway, Ana goes out, puts on her iPod, finds a sunny spot and settles down to have a banal, cliché-riddled personal revelation.
Looking back on my life before Christian, it was as if everything was in black and white, like José’s pictures. Now my whole world is in rich, bright, saturated colour.
Give me a break. The only thing saturated around here is your knickers. And maybe the author’s brain. Incidentally if the music Ana has chosen as the soundtrack to this revelation is Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors then somebody is going to get hurt.
Can I give him up? Do I want to give him up? It’s as if he’s flipped a switch and lit me up from within. It’s been an education knowing him. I’ve discovered more about myself in the last few weeks than ever before.
And yet somehow you managed to miss the fact that you are judgemental, pretentious, selfish, misogynistic and downright comically self-absorbed. It’s also testament to your innate curiosity and Dickfacehead’s magical abilities as a lover that you’re a sexually active woman of twenty-one who still doesn’t know how to masturbate.
Seriously – this whole series could have been avoided if only she had a decent vibrator.
Okay, strap yourself in. Are you ready? Ana’s about to have her epiphany.
And it strikes me like a thunderbolt...
If only.
... - that’s what he needs from me, what he’s entitled to – unconditional love. He never recieved it from the crack-whore – it’s what he needs. Can I love him unconditionally?
Nobody is entitled to unconditional love, you nitwit. And the last thing an overgrown tantrum monster like Dickfacehead needs is another person pandering to his sense of entitlement – it’s four times the size of Seattle as it is. Also don’t you just love that she’s taken to calling his birth mother ‘the crack whore’ and has absolutely no sympathy for this abused, drug-addicted woman. Nothing like a little sisterhood, huh Ana? You smug, pin-titted cardboard fuckpuppet.
Ana toddles off back to work, congratulating herself on her self-perception and depth, then that afternoon Mia phones her. Yep – that’s the third personal phone call today. Oh, and Mia wonders what Ana wants to do for Dickfacehead’s birthday.
Birthday?
Yep. That was Ana’s reaction.
She didn’t know when his birthday was.
So much for knowing him better than anybody else.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I think ‘I like to hurt you during sex because you look like my crack-whore Mom’ should come after things like ‘I’m a Gemini’. I don’t set much store by astrology but I kind of think one is an easier conversation opener than the other. Start with something small like ‘My favourite colour is blue and my birthday is in June,’ then work up to ‘I like to be restrained with spreader bars and a gimp mask. Then after a light paddling with a rolled up copy of BBC Gardener’s World Magazine, I like to be anally violated with a series of large root vegetables, to the soothing sound of The Wurzels classic hit I’ve Got A Brand New Combine Harvester.’
Like I say, I’m old-fashioned.
And she’s fucking e-mailing him AGAIN. Do either of these people do any work?
And then it’s 6pm, she’s alone in the office and Jack is going to try and rape her.
Chapter Sixteen
“You know I had to fight with Elizabeth to give you this job...”
Bet you’re regretting that, Jack.
Jack has a ‘despotic fuck-you smile’, in case you weren’t clear that he was evil. He accuses her of being a spy for Dickfacehead so that Dickfacehead could find out what was what before he bought the company, then blackmails Ana for sex – because he’s a rapist. Because if he wasn’t he would just look like someone with an actually valid list of grievances against our neurasthenic drip of a heroine.
She knees him in the nads and runs downstairs, where Dickfacehead is waiting to yell at her for almost getting raped. Aw. It’s like old times, back when she was merrily throwing up in car parks and he was just a handsome kidnapper.
Apparently Jack has Ana’s e-mails to Dickfacehead, which constitute blackmail material somehow. Because the world would be stunned cold to know that Dickfacehead engages in banal e-mail exchanges with his shallow, boring girlfriend. I don’t care anymore.
Then they have an argument about her not e-mailing on her Blackberry where it couldn’t be monitored and further yowling about her being almost raped and how she keeps ‘putting herself in danger’. Yes, because sexual harassment is her fault. He really is a prize, isn’t he? Then when they’ve finished squealing and are having dinner she mentions going out for a drink with José so that they can start squealing again.
Yay.
Then nothing much happens and then we have final, concrete proof that Ana is the dumbest fucking woman in human history.
Yes, she goes to peer at the toys in his executive sex dungeon and he shows her buttplugs and anal beads and nipple clamps, then there’s this;
He grins. “Next drawer down holds a selection of vibrators.”
I shut the drawer quickly.
“And the next?” I whisper, ashen once more, but this time with embarrassment.
See what I mean? It’s one thing to have reached the age of twenty-one without ever having learned to masturbate, but to clutch your pearls at the mere mention of a Rampant Rabbit? This is just straight up bizarre.
And it’s FUCK O’CLOCK once more. Thank God.
He needs me...needs me...and as I finally slip into the darkness, my last thought is of a small boy with grey eyes and dirty, messy copper-coloured hair smiling shyly at me.
Considering that he fucks you because you look like his mother, those are some creepy-ass thoughts. Good job, Ana. Also his hair is smiling at you. Have you been at the funny mushrooms?
Chapter Seventeen
TIME TO WAKE UP PEOPLE.
The only time there isn’t a constant narration is when they’re actually unconscious, and even then, we’re not entirely safe from dreams. Every single minute of every single day is recorded. Sometimes days sprout whole new hours so that we might be privy to even more meaningless minutiae. These people never poo.
Morning is FUCK O’CLOCK because well, I think they only did it once in the last chapter. Ana has granola for breakfast and appears to be calmly going into work like nothing has happened. Incidentally, did anyone think to call the police about the attempted rape and blackmail in the last chapter?
No, wait – silly me. Of course they didn’t, any more than they thought to alert the authorities about the mentally unstable gun-wielding stalker in the previous chapters. Christian Grey has his own private security, and yes, I know they’re a bit crap but if they knew what they were doing this book would have even less of a plot than it does already.
“I hope they take on a woman as my new boss.�
�
“Why?”
“Well, you’re less likely to object to me going away with her,” I tease him.
His lips twitch and he starts on his omelet.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“You are.”
Oh Ana – such a feminist. And why am I not surprised that Dickfacehead is exactly the kind of dirtbag who believes that all women are about five drinks and a giggly pillow-fight away from the altar of St. Ellen? However, I think Ana is strictly dickly, so all you lesbians who were terrified by the last paragraph can breathe a sigh of relief.
Her new car has arrived and now she’s allowed to drive it because Golumette is currently curled up on the floor of a padded-cell. Jack is apparently unaccounted for but never mind – they’re saving his stalker plot for book three. They’re seeing the therapist this evening and Dickfacehead wants to know why she hasn’t said yes to his marriage proposal yet.
Dunno – maybe it’s because you are two hideously shallow people who know nothing about one another and take no time to find out because you would much prefer to be inserting things into each other. Also the fact that you’ve known each other for less than a month and the fact that you like to fuck her because she reminds you of your Mum. Little bit of a red flag there. Oh, and she’s twenty-one years old, you’re the only man she’s ever had and she has no idea that you’re a terrible, unimaginative lover.
