Kiss Me First

by Lottie Moggach

What are you wearing?

  Unusually, there was no kiss me first in his sign off, but I presume he had forgotten because it was late and he was tired.

  By then I was feeling confident enough to reply as myself, rather than in the guise of Tess, so I gave him an honest description of my outfit.

  Navy blue tracksuit bottoms. Slippers. A Red Dwarf sweatshirt with the slogan ‘Smoke me a Kipper’.

  Very funny. Spoilsport, was his perplexing reply.

  From the start of our correspondence there had been hours when I had no messages from him, sometimes up to half a day, when he told me he was seeing his children. These hadn’t really bothered me at first; besides, I had had lots of other work to do for Tess. Now, though, I was finding these stretches of no contact increasingly difficult; the minutes dragged by, and I was starting to develop a twinge in my right hand from constantly refreshing Tess’s email account. I had no details to fix on during these hours; although he had once said he’d send me photos of his children, he never had. I tried to imagine him in his flat in Kensal Green but, as I had never been inside a flat in Kensal Green, my mind came up blank. I couldn’t see further than his black leather bag in the hall, his stripy scarf draped over a banister. Beyond that, there was nothing.

  It was during one of these no-contact periods – a Saturday, I remember – that I started to wonder whether, now that I had actually met and spoken to Connor, I could upgrade from being ‘in limerance’ to being ‘in love’. Furthermore, I had become interested in investigating the concept of ‘soulmates’. I thought of what Tess had said about Tevi the DJ, who she claimed was hers.

  ‘I wanted to tell him everything. He got me. I felt lost without him. The world was colourless when we weren’t together.’

  At the time I had thought this typically whimsical and overdramatic of her. Recently, however, I had been remembering her words, because they described exactly the way I felt about Connor. Yet, surely the notion that there was just one person out there for each of us was nonsensical?

  I decided to do what I had done in the past when wrestling with an idea: put it to the forum on Red Pill.

  In retrospect, I can see that it was perhaps not a wise move, not least because starting a whole thread was out of keeping with my recent pattern of posting. Since starting Project Tess my contributions to the forum had dwindled dramatically: although I still logged on every day, as requested by Adrian, it was usually just to make a token, banal comment or to agree with what someone else had said, rather than putting in any real effort or thought.

  Of course, I hadn’t forgotten how oddly Adrian had behaved when I met him in Westfield but, as I said before, I had come to what seemed like the only rational explanation – that he was distracted by an unconnected personal matter. Besides, it had seemed as if things had gone back to normal between us. After sending Marion the email, I had mentioned it in my next report to ‘Ava’ and he had replied with his usual ‘Good work!’. Neither of us had mentioned our awkward meeting, and we had exchanged a couple more amicable messages since then.

  It certainly didn’t cross my mind that he would object to me starting a thread on ‘soulmates’. I thought, if anything, he would be pleased to see me engaging more fully with the site than I had done in recent weeks.

  I logged in to find most of the Elite Thinkers already present, in the middle of a discussion about Adrian’s latest podcast, which I hadn’t listened to. For form’s sake I probably should have joined that debate for a while before launching my own thread, but I didn’t have the time or patience. So I started a new thread with just a single line question, Do soulmates exist?

  My first response came two minutes later, from lordandmaster.

  Shadowfax, are you going soft in your old age? There is no fate. Everything is a choice.

  I replied, But isn’t it possible, if not probable, that on a planet of seven billion people, there is one who exactly satisfies your needs and desires? Who ‘gets you’?

  I knew, as I pressed send, that that gets you was a mistake. Jonas3 weighed in.

  ‘Gets you’? Yes, I recall Socrates using that phrase … NOT. No, there is no such thing as soulmates, it’s just humans needing certain things from each other to bring up a new set of genes. ‘Love’ is a mere concept to sustain life.

  I have two replies to that, I wrote. Firstly, in The Symposium, Plato advocates the notion of soulmates, so to imply that no ‘great thinker’ believes in them is erroneous. Secondly, what if you have no desire for children?

  The reply: Plato used the analogy of a person with four legs and arms, split in half by Zeus and scattered around the world, who then roam the world looking for their other half. Do you believe in Zeus, too? Even ‘great thinkers’ can make mistakes, Shadowfax.

  Before I could reply, someone else joined the discussion. Adrian.

  Jonas3 is right, Shadowfax, he wrote. Even Elite Thinkers can make mistakes. I suggest you remind yourself of your moral duties as a rationalist, and don’t let yourself get swayed by woolly thoughts like this.

  To say I was taken aback by this intervention would be an understatement. I knew, of course, that it was possible that Adrian was monitoring our exchange: after all, it was his site. But he rarely interjected in such a manner. He would answer a question if it was put to him, but on the whole he took the position of a silent presence, overseeing the conversation and adjudicating only if called upon.

  My initial reaction to this public rebuke was embarrassment. My wrist had been slapped. As the shame began to fade, however, I started to wonder whether it was possible Adrian had found out about Connor. But how could he have?

  I concluded that the most likely explanation for the reprimand was this: he thought that my ‘soulmate’ enquiry wasn’t in connection with the Tess project, but referred to something else that had happened in my personal life. A boy I had met. And Adrian was scared that this new interest was going to distract me from my job.

  Now that thought was seeded, I felt annoyance rising. How dare he suggest I was being unprofessional? I had been fulfilling my duties; I had given months of my life to the project, at a degree of risk to myself. And the thought – even unproven, even in theory – that someone might want to stop me talking to Connor made an unfamiliar, powerful sensation rise up in me: the desire to protect against this happening at all costs, and to strike out at the threat.

  Adrian’s accusation of ‘woolly thinking’ stung, too – this from a man who couldn’t even remember where he met Tess, who confidently stated it was in New York when I knew that to be wrong.

  I’m not trying to justify what I did next, just explain it. I concede it was a childish, impulsive move.

  I was still logged onto the forum. No one had added anything after Adrian’s rebuke to me – it was as if they were all holding their breath to see what was going to happen. I started typing:

  By the way, Adrian, you didn’t meet her in New York. She’s never been there.

  Despite my anger, I was still careful not to say anything that would make any sense to anyone else. I just wanted to give him a jab, to let him know that, when it came to Connor, at least, he couldn’t push me around.

  My comment was met with more silence from the other members – this time stemming from confusion, I suspected. Riven with adrenalin, I waited to see how Adrian would react to my posting.

  The forum stayed exactly as it was for a minute, and then two, then three. After three and a half minutes the lack of any action started to feel odd and unnatural. I thought that perhaps my screen had frozen, so pressed the ‘refresh’ key. The next screen that came up was a facsimile of the Red Pill homepage, overlaid with a red circle with a line through it and the phrase You do not have permission to access this site.

  At a stroke, my anger was replaced by incredulity. He had banished me? As I stared at the screen, trying to process what had just happened, there was a sudden smash of glass from the street outside – a pint glass kicked over outside the pub, most likely – and
I flinched violently, as if it had shattered an inch from my face.

  As the shock wore off, however, I began to think more reasonably, and before long I had concluded that this turn of events was not so terrible; in fact, it was a blessing in disguise. For some time now, my heart had not been in the site; I wouldn’t miss it. And if Adrian was going to be critical and unpleasant, I wouldn’t miss him either. As long as I could still have Connor – and Tess – I’d be OK.

  Tuesday, 23rd August 2011

  After the initial sting of my banishment from Red Pill, I found it easy to push Adrian from my mind, because there was so much else going on. The email I had sent Marion had been successful, in that she had heeded my request not to speak on the phone and the ‘Who are you?’ was never mentioned again.

  However, the conciliatory nature of my email had also provoked an unexpected outpouring of emotion and reminiscence on her part. In subsequent emails came a gush of words, thousands at a time, in which Marion gave her account of the relationship and to which Tess was clearly expected to respond. She dredged up incidents from the past, many details of which did not tally with my notes, and asked lots of awkward questions – How exactly was I a narcissist? What more could I have done for you as a child? Were you jealous of Nicholas? I decided the safest bet was to ignore her questions altogether, replying instead with tales of Sointula life told in a light, chatty manner, in the hope that she would give up asking.

  I was also thinking about sex. I had, you see, decided to meet Connor again, and make another attempt to further our relationship. I hasten to add that I wasn’t planning on having sex with him the next time I saw him. I was just aware that, were my plan to be successful, the matter would have to be addressed at some stage. It started to occupy my mind.

  I had thought about sex before; quite a lot, in fact. When I was seventeen, I watched things on the net and saw how it worked. I even attempted to try it once, in the summer of 2006. To meet an appropriate partner, I joined an Internet dating site and spent a long time crafting a profile, which was ridiculous. You had to answer the question Which Six Things Can’t You Live Without?, for which I wrote Oxygen, water, food, heart, lungs and then, because I felt I had made my point, Internet. I only got one reply, from a forty-six-year-old man with a shaven head who stated he was an animal-rights activist and an extremist in all aspects of life. He said I could come over to his flat in New Cross but didn’t give a time or an address, and then he stopped replying to my emails.

  So I abandoned that route, and instead got talking to a fellow player, Necromancer3000, in the game I was involved with before World of Warcraft. His real name was Marcus. He said we could meet at a pub in Edgware, where he lived, so I told mum I was going to a party with people from school and got on the Northern Line to meet him. On the tube I realized that I didn’t know what he looked like, but it didn’t matter because he stood out amongst the crowd in the pub garden: it was summer, and he was the only person in the pub garden wearing a long black overcoat. He was my age and so tall that even when I craned my neck my eyes only reached his Adam’s apple, and so skinny that no trace of his body was visible under his black T-shirt and jeans. He had long dark hair, quite similar to mine, and a series of leather bands on his thin, hairy wrist.

  We sat at a table, surrounded by young people drunkenly laughing and vomiting cigarette smoke. Marcus talked about his job at the Virgin Media helpdesk and his website, Cui Bono, which was dedicated to exposing the Bilderberg Group. He seemed nervous and angry at the same time, and kept on looking at the silly, laughing girls in their flimsy clothes and calling them ‘sheeple’. I didn’t want to talk, I just wanted to go back to his house and get on with it. But then we got into a silly argument about eating meat – I told him it was a morally indefensible position – and after forty minutes he decided to go home without inviting me to join him. And that was the end of that.

  So, it was not as if I had never considered the prospect before. The difference was that in the past I could contemplate having sex with strangers but not with people I cared about.

  Also, there was the question of what one actually did. As I say, I had seen things on the net and was aware of the basic idea, the thrusting and the rolling. But as I may have mentioned, Tess was a very sexually active person, and from the things she said it seemed that there was more to it than that. There were many references to the act in her emails, and she talked about it without embarrassment, in the same way she enthused about certain books or whatever new age fad she was interested in that month. Some of the messages exchanged between her and her boyfriends – Connor included – were really rather explicit. I won’t go into details, but it was clear that she went beyond what I suspected was ‘normal’ practice.

  In 2002, for instance, she wrote to her friend Jen about how, the previous evening, she had got dressed up like a Romanian whore and gone to a hotel bar. Her boyfriend at the time, Raj, had then come over and ‘chatted her up’ as if they didn’t know each other. She pretended to be a prostitute, and kept in character all evening.

  In the emails between Tess and Connor back when they were seeing each other, the references were not so intimidating, but there was still some cause for thought. For instance, he would request that when they saw each other that evening she did what you did to me last time. Of course, I didn’t have a clue what these things were, and that would be a problem if they were expected from Connor.

  It also appeared that they engaged in ‘sexting’, and used a webcam on at least one occasion. You looked fucking hot last night, Connor wrote, on a day my records showed that Tess was away in Copenhagen visiting a friend. I couldn’t help but think of Tess as I had seen her on Skype, lying back on her bed in her white vest, with those thin legs that she kept repositioning, not caring that I could see her knickers. She would lean her head back against the wall behind her bed and look down into the camera, as if I was there on the bed with her, and I imagined her doing the same to Connor. I wondered whether I should practise, to try and gain the same physical ease about myself as she had. If only she was here to give me some guidance, I thought.

  This may sound odd, considering everything, but sometimes I felt very sorry that Tess was no longer around. It wasn’t just at moments like this, when I wanted to know something only she could tell me, but at unexpected times – like when I was in Tesco and reminded how many plain, ordinary people were still living. It was as if a rare bird had been shot, rather than one of an endless supply of pigeons.

  Anyway, in lieu of Tess’s advice about sex, I had no choice but to turn to Google, something I almost immediately regretted. There was a vast amount of material on there, but none of it seemed to answer my very simple questions. I was reminded of a customer who once came into Caffè Nero and shouted at Lucy when she ran him through the list of options for his drink. ‘I just want a plain, ordinary coffee!’ he had shouted. ‘Is that too much to ask?’

  So, there was that to think about. I had also decided to change my appearance somewhat, in the form of new clothes. As you might imagine, the prospect of a third meeting with Connor had thrown up a dilemma. Considering that he had thought he recognized me after giving me twelve pence in a sandwich shop, he would almost certainly remember offering to buy me a drink in the Dragon Bar, touching my memory stick, etc. Should I, then, disguise myself so he didn’t spot me, or go looking as I did before and risk him feeling disconcerted at the ‘coincidence’ of us bumping into each other again?

  I decided on a compromise. There was little point in disguising myself as an entirely different person, since if our meeting was a success and our relationship developed, it would be impossible to keep up the deception. However, I decided it would be a good idea to change my ‘look’ and wear clothes more like the ones Tess would have worn; my thinking being that the more I looked like her, the more Connor would be able to imagine me as her replacement.

  So went the reasoning, but the practicalities were less straightforward. The few clothes I had boug
ht in the past had either been from the Internet, like my Red Dwarf hoody, or from Evans in Brent Cross or, when mum was alive, from Bluston’s, using her staff discount. Bluston’s was aimed at the more mature woman, its curved window displaying items such as beige raincoats and twinsets that mum said were old fashioned even for her generation, but when we went in the ladies would all cluck around me, saying they would get the ‘trendy’ clothes out. When these emerged from the long wooden drawers they were not noticeably different from the others on display, but I didn’t mind: clothes were clothes, after all, and I liked being in the shop, which was dark and cool and smelt of new cotton.

  But none of these would do for ‘Tess’: her clothes were small and tight and fashionable. I remembered the girls at school talking about Topshop on Oxford Street – they seemed to go every weekend – so, one afternoon, I headed there.

  It was not a successful experience. The shop was confusingly vast – I felt like I had done in Westfield – and the music as deafening as that in a bar. The automatic doors kept opening and admitting wave after wave of identical-looking young women, streaming in like orcs going into battle. We were then sucked down an escalator lined with mirrors – in unison, the girls turned to inspect their reflections – and disgorged into a huge underground pit. There the girls immediately dispersed and started plucking at clothes, dismissing them in milliseconds according to some private criteria. They were as focused and ruthless as the Terminator, pushing aside obstacles in their path – me – to get to the rails. The pumping music forbade standing still, insisting on a continuous forward velocity. The shop seemed limitless and clothes were everywhere, but in no discernible pattern. I stopped a woman wearing an earpiece and asked her where the skirts were, and she waved her hand around the store as if to say, ‘everywhere’.

  Eventually I found some skirts, but they were horrible: short and made from orange leather with holes punched in it, and cost £80. Also, they didn’t have size 16. So I escaped back up the escalator and out to freedom. I’ve never been so pleased to be on Oxford Street.