by Lisa Jewell
‘God,’ she said, ‘you look so different. And who’s the girl?’
‘That’s Phoebe – my teenage sweetheart.’
Joy studied the girl closely, subconsciously trying to validate her own unexpected presence in George’s life with the existence of other women who’d taken the same path.
‘She’s very pretty.’
‘Yes,’ he said, peering over her shoulder at the picture, ‘she was. I’m afraid I’m terribly shallow. I only date very pretty women.’ He smiled at her and lit the spliff, and Joy suddenly realized that this whole physical attraction thing was totally relative. Compared to other men she’d dated, George wasn’t especially good-looking. But in his own estimation he was ‘handsome’ and therefore attractive enough to be able to stipulate that he would date only pretty women. And hence, in his mind, there was nothing incongruous about Joy agreeing to a second date and sitting here now drinking champagne in his flat. And if he thought that they made a good match and Phoebe thought that he was a good catch, then maybe she was the one with the problem.
And just then, as if to compound this train of thought, the phone rang and George tutted. Oh, God,’ he said, ‘that’ll be Tara.’
‘Tara?’
‘Yes. The psycho ex, remember? I’ll get rid of her.’
Joy sat and listened in wonder as George fended off what sounded from her point of view like a barrage of hysteria and tears from the other end of the line before finally hanging up with a terse, ‘Please don’t call here again.’
‘Woah,’ said Joy, all agog with the drama of it, ‘what was that all about?’
‘Oh, God,’ he said, flopping down on the sofa and running his fingers through his hair, ‘she’s heard through the grapevine that I’m seeing someone and she’s freaking out about it. I knew this would happen.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘so she’s not over it yet?’
‘Sadly not. She’s convinced herself that we’re going to get back together, and I suppose the fact that I’ve been single for so long just added fuel to her conviction. And now she’s finally having to accept that it’s over. And if I sounded a litde cruel just then, it was very much to be kind, I can assure you. She’s been deluding herself for too long now and it’s not healthy. She needs to move on… ‘ He shook his head sadly as he considered the mental state of his poor, lovesick ex-girlfriend, and Joy felt her suspicion growing that maybe there was nothing wrong with George at all and that her resistance towards him was entirely a matter of a bad first impression and her own narrow-mindedness.
So when George finally made a move and kissed Joy on the lips, she’d already decided that she was going to go with the flow and see what happened. And when it came fifteen minutes later to the practicality of getting Joy back to Finsbury Park at nearly one in the morning, it was inevitable that the option of Joy staying the night was going to arise.
‘You take the bed,’ he said. I can curl up here on the sofa.’
But Joy had already decided that even though she didn’t have any overwhelming desire to have sex with him right now, that if she could accept the possibility of sex with George at some point in the near future, then she wasn’t putting herself in a particularly hazardous position by agreeing to share a bed with him. And so she found herself ten minutes later, wearing one of George’s T-shirts and huddled under a rather damp duvet in George’s ice-cold bedroom watching him getting undressed and realizing with a start that he actually had a very nice body – well-formed pecs, a smattering of chest hair, lovely skin with a lingering hint of summer tan.
‘I thought you said you had an “unimpressive” physique,’ she teased. ‘You’ve got a lovely body’
‘Thank you,’ he said, beaming with delight, ‘I’ve been going to the gym quite regularly since I’ve been single. You’re the first person to see the results, so I suppose I didn’t want to comment without objectivity. Now, would it make you feel more comfortable if I were to wear a T-shirt to bed, too?’
Joy shrugged. ‘What would you normally wear?’
‘Well, that would be nothing.’
Joy eyed him in his boxer shorts and decided she wasn’t quite ready for that. ‘Shorts are fine,’ she said.
He hopped under the duvet with her and turned his head to face her.
‘Do you know something?’ he said, smiling at her like a small boy. ‘I’ve had this fantasy ever since I was a teenager…’
‘Oh, yes…’
‘No – not that sort of fantasy. A chaste fantasy. A fantasy about the girl I’d end up with. And I know this probably sounds terribly asinine, but I knew that she would have black hair and a one-syllable name. And ever since I got your letter I’ve just had this feeling, quite overwhelming, that you’re her…’
And for some reason the idea of living up to the exacting adolescent fantasies of a teenage George struck her as an enormous compliment, so when he looked at her with his soft green eyes and asked her for a hug – ’Purely platonic, I promise.’ – she acquiesced. And the hug, inevitably, turned into a kiss, and the kiss tuned into a passionate embrace and, before she knew it, she was staring at the back of George’s neck while he rifled frantically through his bedside cabinet for a condom.
Joy didn’t regret sleeping with George when they awoke the following morning. Joy never regretted sleeping with anyone. The only sort of sex you should regret, she believed, was the sort you’d given to someone who didn’t deserve it.
He brought the death-trap blow heater into the bedroom and made her a cup of tea in an attempt to warm her up, but even under a thick duvet she was still too cold to even contemplate getting out of bed.
‘Look,’ she said, making an oval of her mouth and breathing out, ‘you can see my breath.’
Oh, God,’ George said, dropping his head into his hands, ‘this is dreadful. Here I am with the most radi-andy beautiful woman in the whole world lying naked in my bed and I can’t even give her the basic luxury of bodily warmth. Here!’ he exclaimed, brightening. ‘How about a nice hot bath? The boiler here churns out gallons of hot water. You could just lie there and keep topping it up until your bones get warm.’
‘But what about getting there?’
‘I’ll get you a blanket.’
He returned and wrapped her chivalrously in a rather scratchy blanket, then ushered her into a steamy bathroom.
‘No bubbles?’
‘Oh, God.’ He slapped his head. ‘I’m such a disaster. I can’t believe I didn’t think of bubbles.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she smiled, hopping into the steaming hot bath and feeling her bones melt with relief.
‘Now, I’ve put a towel in the tumble dryer to warm up,’ he said. ‘Just let me know when you want to get out and I’ll fetch it for you.’ He stopped and folded his arms, a smile spreading across his face as he stared at her.’ You really are quite exquisite,’ he said. ‘The most perfect, perfect thing I’ve ever seen.’ He smiled at her for a bit longer, before snapping out of his reverie. ‘Now. Can I get you another cup of tea?’
Joy lay in the bath for nearly an hour while George brought her cups of tea, slices of toast and a steady stream of compliments. They then spent the rest of the day in bed where they talked and had sex and talked and had sex until the streetlights outside the window flickered on at four o’clock and threw amber shadows over the bedclothes.
The world had shrunk over the course of the past twenty-four hours. Where once there had been a thriving city heaving with millions of bodies, there were now just two people huddled together under a duvet in a small, dark room in the corner of a flat, floating alone in the blackness of the cosmos.
Everything had lost its context, and Joy no longer knew where she was going. And it wasn’t until their stomachs started growling at eight o’clock and Joy found her way back into the clothes she’d discarded the previous night in order to leave the confines of the flat and find something to eat that any semblance of objectivity returned to her, and she suddenly remembered that, e
ven though she’d now been on two dates with George, spent twelve hours in bed with him and had sex with him four times, she still didn’t find him in the least bit attractive.
Twenty
Julia’s strange friend Bella was round again on Saturday night when Joy got back from George’s. There were many strange things about Bella, but by far the strangest was the fact that he was a man.
Joy had first encountered Bella (apparently his given name was Barry) the day after she moved in. He’d been sitting on the sofa watching Songs of Praise when she walked through the living room on her way to the kitchen to get her morning cup of tea, an emaciated little creature in black leggings and a huge black jumper that nearly swallowed him whole. He had thin brown hair worn in a blunt shoulder-length bob, eyebrows plucked to the point of almost nonexistence and the scrub-faced, exposed look of a man who was often to be found in full make-up.
He’d made a big show of jumping when Joy walked into the room, clutching his heart and exclaiming about what a fright she’d given him. Then he’d uncoiled himself from the sofa like a little grass snake and introduced himself. I’m Bella – Julia’s little sister’ Joy had been at a loss to know what to say. I know,’ he’d said, we don’t look anything alike’
It turned out of course that he was neither Julia’s sister nor her brother, but was, in fact, her Very best friend in all the world’.
Julia absolutely adored him, but as far as Joy could make out he was vain, neurotic and totally fucked up. In his head he was a captivating, glamorous but ever-so-slightly tragic queen living the urban homosexual dream. In reality he spent all his time hanging out with Julia eating Hobnobs on her sofa and bitching about everyone on the telly. Apparently he had a drag act – Bella Bella – but he’d fallen out with the management at the club where he had his spot and nobody else had seen fit to book him since. He’d never had a boyfriend because, according to Julia, he hated gay men, and he struck Joy as one of the most inherently unhappy people she’d ever met in her life.
‘Well, well, well,’ he purred over a can of Strongbow when Joy walked in that night, look what the cat dragged in’ That was another thing about Bella – he was incapable of saying anything even vaguely original.
‘Darling!’ Julia leaped from the sofa. ‘Thank God! I was starting to think you’d been abducted. You should have phoned!’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pulling off her coat and flopping down on to the sofa. I didn’t think’
‘I bet you didn’t… ‘ Bella pursed his lips in mock disgust.
‘Darling,’ Julia said as she perched herself on the edge of the sofa and lit a powder-blue cigarette, I want you to tell me everything. I want to hear every last gruesome detail…
‘Oh, please,’ Bella tutted and looked away, letting it be known that the mere concept of heterosexual sex was too much for him to stomach.
Joy started at the beginning, with the huge flowers and the posh pizza, and as she retold the story she began to see it through the eyes of her audience and it suddenly didn’t seem so strange and off-centre any more. A lovely man whom she’d met in unconventional circumstances had taken her for dinner and treated her like a queen. They’d enjoyed each other’s company so much that they’d gone back to the lovely man’s flat, drunk champagne and had sex. It looked great on paper, sounded wonderful in relation, but the reality? Well, she still wasn’t entirely sure about that.
‘Looks aren’t everything,’ said Bella, slapping Julia’s hand away from a spot on her chin she was fiddling with. ‘It’s what’s inside that counts’
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Joy, thinking that not only was he trite, but also he was wrong. Looks weren’t everything, but they were definitely, significantly, something.‘But it’s not just his looks, it’s just… it all just feels, I don’t know…’
‘Oh, invite him over,’ said Julia. ‘Let’s have him over for dinner and have a look at him. We’ll tell you whether he’s good-looking or not.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ muttered Joy.’ I mean, I haven’t even decided if I want to see him again or not’
‘Er, sorry?’ Bella clasped his hand to his chest and let his jaw drop. ‘You’ve just spent twenty-four hours shagging this poor bloke to within an inch of his life and you’re not sure you want to see him again? There’s a name for girls like you, you know…’
Joy was too tired and too disoriented to want to find out exactly what name he was thinking of and decided to play it a bit more positive. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘it’s all to do with expectations. You know, maybe if he’d said in his letter that he looked like a dog’s arse, then I would have been pleasantly surprised when I saw him and my whole perception of him would have been different. Maybe it’s the fact that I was expecting “handsome” and I had a very particular image in my mind of what “handsome” looked like and, when he wasn’t it, it just cast a negative vibe over the whole thing’
‘Yes,’ soothed Julia, whose whole being was openly consumed with the desire for Joy’s romantic liaison to work out. ‘That’ll be it. You just need to look at him afresh. I mean, he can’t be that bad if you had sex with him four times, can he?’
Joy nodded, but then thought back to the two years she spent being fondled in Kieran’s bedroom and wearing his engagement ring as a teenager and the two months she spent kissing Miranda and fiddling with her nipples in the sixth form. And then she thought of that bloke, the one who’d stood her up outside the Swiss Centre on a Wednesday night – she hadn’t fancied him at all, but she’d accepted a date with him because he’d asked her so nicely. She thought of pretty much every man she’d ever slept with or been out with and realized that, with the exception of Vince and Ally, she had a long and painful history of being intimate with people she wasn’t sexually attracted to. The fact that she’d slept with George – more than once – was no indicator of sexual attraction. It was an indicator of the fact that she was a complete moron with an apparently pathological inability to say no.
‘Look at it this way,’ said Julia, ‘when I first came to see this flat my gut reaction was that it wasn’t the place for me. I’d always said that when I found the right flat I’d know immediately – that I’d just walk in and fall in love with it. But then I got an offer on my place in Cambridge and I needed to move quickly so I thought, fuck it, just buy the fucking flat and worry about it later. And it took me a few months, just putting my mark on it bit by bit, and now I adore it – couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. And that’s what you need to do with poor old George. Put your mark on him. Personalize him. Men are very impressionable when it comes to clothes and stuff, you know – they’re just gagging for some woman to come along and tell them how to dress and how to do their hair.’
It’s true,’ nodded Bella. ‘Straight men are missing a gene. The style gene. Poor lambs. It’s tragic’
Joy looked at Bella, who was wearing red denim bell-bottom jeans, a skintight grey jersey polo neck that showed every rib in his chest and a red bandana with a skull and crossbones on it. She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again.
‘And I guarantee you, darling, once you’ve got him exactly how you want him you’ll fall instantly in love with him and marry him. I mean, he sounds divine!
And he was. He was gentle and polite and old-fashioned. He was funny and eccentric and clever. He was chivalrous and interesting and made her feel like not only the girl of his dreams, but of the dreams of every living man.
And after months of feeling herself fading away like an old Polaroid left in a shoebox in the loft, George’s fulsome, fervent and soft-focused attentions were exactly what she needed.
Twenty-One
Over the course of the next two weeks, George took Joy to a stupidly posh restaurant in a Chelsea back street where they were the youngest couple by about twenty years, to the Renoir to see a Czechoslovakian film with subtitles, to the RNT to see Arcadia and to the Café Royal for afternoon tea.
He bought her two pairs of vintage diama
nté earrings, an art deco marcasite bracelet and a silver Edwardian pendant in the shape of an angel, and he sent her flowers at work on three separate occasions.
After their second official date they went back to George’s flat and Joy discovered that he’d bought her a brand-new blow heater which he insisted she have switched on wherever and whenever she wanted it. ‘I don’t care about the cost – I just can’t bear the idea of you being cold,’ he said when she commented on the effect that this might have on his electricity bill.
On their third date he’d brought along a huge pile of Dulux colour cards and told her she could redesign the flat to her own specifications, even if that meant pink polka dots and leopard skin. ‘It is quite clear that you have a surfeit of good taste, whilst I, unfortunately, have none. I trust you implicitly.’
And on their fourth date the subject of clothes shopping had arisen and he’d handed himself over to her on a plate. ‘I’ve bought no new clothes in four years. I haven’t had any awareness of fashion since I was a punk. You, on the other hand, are hugely stylish, so if at any point you were to feel like steering me in the direction of a particular shirt or pair of trousers, I would not take the slightest offence.’
George claimed that he’d started looking at life completely differently since he’d met Joy. ‘My aesthetic sense has been completely transformed,’ he’d said. ‘I just have to look at you and I suddenly want to buy new curtains!’
In the three weeks that they’d been seeing each other George had swiftly and effectively eliminated the source of every single one of Joy’s misgivings about him. The only misgiving that now remained was the not insignificant fact that Joy wasn’t physically attracted to him, but they were having so much fun together that Joy had kind of forgotten about that little impediment and was going with the flow.
Everyone at work knew about George now.
Joy had told one of her regular customers, a chatty girl called Mimi who worked across the road at Sony, and within two days everyone at ColourPro knew that Joy had met a man through a personal ad who was now completely sweeping her off her feet. Not that she minded everyone knowing her business – she wasn’t a particularly secretive or mysterious person – but it was just that the more people knew about it, the more real it became.
