Sex with Strangers

by Lindsay Gordon

  ‘Himself,’ continued the third. ‘Himself and fuck-all else. Same as everyone.’

  There was a bubble of admiring laughter. See? Smart middle-class sixth formers.

  A number 25 pulled in, tyres slushing through the wet, and I got on, then got off a stop later. They didn’t know anything. There was no point me staying.

  On Queen Street, I hurried into the Stationmaster’s Arms, a place of seedy theatricality and pickled eggs. Men drank there; a thin crowd of commuters, dealers and pimps, as desperate and shabby as the pub’s lost grandeur. Clenched and alone, they stood by the bar or sat at tables, eyes flinching from the deep dim mirrors.

  I sipped a glass of red, head in a book, waiting for the shower to pass. I had no plan except to wander the streets in search of Michael Angelo. Or perhaps, given the email I’d received, he’d be out there searching for me. ‘I’ll find you in the darkest place,’ he wrote.

  I didn’t know where that was, although the Stationmaster’s Arms seemed as good a place as any.

  I’m a journalist but, strictly speaking, this investigative stuff was way beyond my remit. I’m an agony aunt, writing the problem pages for a local property mag called On The Up! Problem pages, TV listings, lifestyle and other articles. That week, for example, I’d been writing a piece entitled ‘A Day in the Life of an Estate Agent’. I’d been struggling with it, to be honest, because estate agents don’t actually have lives.

  But my problem page, oh boy, does that have life. And if it’s ever flagging (because even problem pages have problems) then Mike and Aaron in design will offer me material. I never use it but it cheers me up. ‘Dear Janie, What’s the best way to remove hair from private parts?’ or ‘Dear Janie, My penis is too big. Please help.’

  I wondered what letters the men in the Stationmaster’s Arms might write, scribbling for help in the dark lonely hours. An old guy in a beige raincoat had been watching me, drinking steadily and offering an occasional smashed smile. His lank hair was nicotine yellow. I wondered if he could even write.

  I confess I’m not cut out to be an agony aunt. I lack empathy and practicality, two attributes I’d say are fairly fundamental. Take the drunk in the raincoat, for example. Shouldn’t I be wondering what damaged him and whether he might benefit from the twelve-step programme and some basic adult education? But, no. Instead I think: Sleazebag, get your eyes off me.

  I only got lumbered with the problem page after Moira, our regular columnist, quit. She fell apart when her husband discovered she’d been having it away with his younger brother. ‘Haven’t I got enough problems of my own?’ she used to yell, sobbing in front of her Mac, and I’m sure she’d have chucked letters around the office if all the stuff didn’t come by email.

  I inherited her desk. It’s littered with self-help aphorisms: ‘A ship is safest in harbour but that’s not why ships are built’. Or ‘A strong relationship is made not of two halves, but two wholes’. I crossed out the ‘w’ on that last word. Sometimes I think I inherited Moira’s slump towards disenchantment. ‘Haven’t I got enough problems of my own?’ I want to shout.

  My problems, however, aren’t as specific as hers. It’s more formless stuff that goes on inside me, you know, at my edges and underneath. ‘Dear Janie’, I might begin, but then I’m pretty much stumped.

  There’s something I can’t reach, a fluttery unsettled part I wish I could tame. Sometimes I feel I have it. It’s almost there. For a moment it comes to rest, usually when I’m far from the city, and I’ll be struck by, say, the light in a high golden barn or over a white wintry field where mist drapes the stubble. When that happens, I’m fooled by a fleeting sense into thinking everything’s all right, now and forever.

  But it isn’t, is it? It’s never all right. The days keep on coming and I can’t get out of them. There’s nothing I can pin down. There are no sentences such as: ‘I’ve got the blues’ or ‘My dog died’ or ‘I wish to God he’d leave me.’

  Like I say, I’m not really up to agony-aunting.

  Recently though, some of the letters have started to get to me. I’m puzzled and unsettled by them, and I know the usual platitudes I dish out won’t suffice.

  Dear Janie,

  I don’t know who else to turn to. I met a man recently and can’t stop thinking about him. I know this sounds stupid but it was a one-night stand and he didn’t ask for my number. We hardly spoke but I felt as if he truly understood me …

  Dear Janie,

  I’ve been going out with my boyfriend for eight months but I cheated on him at the weekend and now I don’t know what to do. You see, I’ve fallen in love with this other guy though I know I’ll never see him again …

  Dear Janie,

  I’ve been walking the streets at night, looking for a man I once had sex with. I know it’s dangerous but I can’t stop myself. I need to see his face. I didn’t see it the first time and now I’m desperate to know him. It’s like an addiction, an obsession, driving me on …

  Dear Janie,

  A man approached me on Queen Street after I got off the bus and before I knew it, he’d seduced me up against a wall. I thought about going to the authorities but didn’t because he means everything to me, even though he’s a total stranger …

  Idiots! Get a grip, get a hobby, get a life.

  I haven’t published these letters though I’ve read them so often I practically know them off by heart. One line haunts me. It’s there in every letter, an unvarying refrain: ‘With him, I found another side to myself.’

  I sipped my wine, aware I was still being ogled by nicotine-hair. Perhaps he thought I was a whore and that gave him the right. But what kind of whore, I wondered, wears knee-length skirts and flat-heeled boots, and sits with a glass of Merlot, reading Barbara Vine? Not one he could afford, that’s for sure. It was time I left.

  The rain had stopped and I headed up Queen Street. It was early autumn and mild, the kerbs stuck with wet golden leaves. Few people were about. A couple of times I checked over my shoulder but as far as I could tell, I wasn’t being followed.

  I’ll find you in the darkest place.

  Was that a threat? Or the first sweet sting of seduction? Either way, as I strode past glass-fronted shops, the thought made me hot and loose. He wanted me and I was scared to imagine the possibilities of his wanting and the state I might be in when he was through.

  In a recent half-page article for On The Up! I’d written: ‘Michael Angelo might think he’s an artist, but to many he’s just a yob with a spray can. From boarded-up shops to newly painted buildings, no wall is safe from his defacement. The city is his canvas and we, the taxpayers, are footing the bill.’

  I didn’t actually believe what I’d written. Much of it was paranoia and sensationalism but I’m a hack, unschooled in truth and moderation. Anyway, these days people want a lot more than truth for their buck, especially in a property listings mag.

  And the truth is, Michael’s graffiti is beautiful. It has an astonishing luminosity, a softness that belies its weird jarring colours, and the first piece I saw of his brought tears to my eyes. (‘Undoubtedly, his daubs have merit,’ I wrote.) I was walking into work, crossing a dead-end street called Jubilee Gate and, when I glanced right, instead of the usual hoardings concealing the NCP car park, I saw a vista of paradise which briefly stopped my heart.

  In a silvery sky, an olive-green sun shone over meadows of purple grass. Unearthly woodland clustered the hills, red-leaved canopies above cobalt-blue trunks. Snaking through the foreground was a river of molten copper, its shimmering bronze tones rippling with pink, and nodding in the breeze were fleshy daffodils of coral, apricot, vanilla and rose.

  And yet how could there be a breeze? How could the river ripple? It was a painting, a mural perhaps, although mural is too flat a noun to describe the world I saw. It gleamed as if it were still wet. Perhaps it was. I walked towards it, feeling its dazzle of light on my cheeks. In its presence, I grew radiant, mesmerised by fierce magical colour, convinced I w
as on the brink of entering an altered, Photoshopped world where normality was oh so slightly out of whack.

  There was a smell around me, a half-remembered scent. What was it? The closer I got, the stronger the odour until I felt quite engulfed by it. I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs, and my entire body tingled in response. Ah God, yes! Scents of sweat, skin and warm genitals unfurled in my brain. Sex! This world smelt of sex! I breathed in female arousal, strong and musky, and was embarrassed to think it might be me.

  Worried, I glanced back. At the top of the street a man was gawping at the wall just as I was. I could smell cock and hair, so potent there might have been an erection by my lips, a jewel of pre-come quivering on its tip. My body answered, my groin its sudden centre of gravity, thrumming with an deep internal weight.

  Ahead of me, paradise glimmered while behind me two people – the man and now a woman – glided towards the wall, equally dumbstruck. The three of us stared, steeped in that maddening air of lust. Did they smell it too? It was inconceivable we might speak, and yet the enchantment was such I could imagine us dropping to the floor and making mad crazy love, all three of us right there on the dead-end street that is Jubilee Gate.

  Obviously, I didn’t write this in my piece on Michael Angelo.

  I stayed staring for several minutes while slowly, imperceptibly, the image and scent began to fade. By the time I walked away, it was just another example of very good graffiti, Michael Angelo’s tag in the bottom right-hand corner. Perhaps good graffiti was all it ever had been.

  And yet it left me in a state of desire so acute I felt demented. I could barely move. My vulval lips were exquisitely tender, so plump and soft that simply walking roused me further. Pavement to pussy, pavement to pussy; the rhythm drummed in my veins. I was all groin and longing. Each step cranked me higher until, aching for release, I had to nip into the ladies’ in Starbucks to have a little wank. Or perhaps, given the locale, I should call it a regular and upgrade my normal fare to a grande.

  That didn’t go in the article either.

  I only wrote the piece in the hope he would respond. ‘Perhaps someday,’ I declared, ‘Michael Angelo will show us all another side to himself.’ It was a weak bit of rhetoric and I wasn’t happy with the sentence flow either. But I let it pass. The point of it was to try to prove my hunch that the letters and graffiti were connected.

  Several days after the article appeared (I guess he’s not a regular reader), I received his email: ‘I’ll find you in the darkest place.’

  I’d trembled at the sight of his name in my inbox.

  Michael Angelo.

  The man. The mystery. Artist, vandal and demon lover.

  I’d brought him closer. He’d come to me. He who did things to women, changing them utterly. The two men were one and the same, I was sure.

  Despite my journalistic impulse to try to tempt him into disclosure, I didn’t reply.

  A couple of weeks later, he got in touch again: ‘Won’t you come out to play tonight?’

  By then, the rumours were really starting to spread. Michael Angelo was no ordinary street artist. His pictures were alive; they breathed; they touched people in unspoken ways. He sprayed his walls in about five minutes flat; his tiny stencils sprayed themselves; those paintings of shadows might not even be his. He was a ghost, an angel, a con artist. He didn’t even exist. It was a stunt dreamt up by a record company.

  Then there were the rumours about him and women. He preyed on them. They preyed on him. You could feel the pull. Women loved him. Women hated him. He stole their shadows. Six were having his baby. He was actually Jesus Christ come to save us from ourselves.

  And he’d asked me to come out to play.

  I’d been feeling kind of spacey ever since I’d first seen that wall. It was as if there was a newness in the world, a place of sensual tranquillity waiting to be explored. Desire and hunger spun me around, and I swirled in the midst of it, losing myself in daydreams where I floated among fingers or drowned in a sea of kisses.

  Why, of course I’ll come out to play.

  I started off at Jubilee Gate but there was nothing to see now except the hoardings of the NCP car park, drab and ugly in the feeble streetlight. I visited other sites, looking out for broad canvases and small botanical stencils. I love his stencils. He sprays pictures of weeds, replacing the real groundsel, ragwort and valerian, removed by the council using deadly colourless sprays, with his own unnatural depictions. His counterfeit weeds grow from cracks in the pavement, and why not? Weeds have as much right to be in cities as they do in the countryside where they’re known more prettily as wild flowers.

  Michael’s bigger pictures, the weird gaudy landscapes, usually vanish within days but the weeds last longer. There are hundreds of them, vibrant splashes of fake flora springing up across the city, ignored by passing feet. I’m not even sure if they’re all his any more. It’s as if the images are self-seeding.

  I’d become something of a Michael Angelo fan, hurrying across town when I heard a new one had been spotted. Though I’d marvelled at the artistry, even getting down on my knees to sniff some weeds, none had affected me as much as the first one. That was the real start of my journey.

  I’d been walking for about an hour, eyeing all men suspiciously, when the rain came on. At first, I considered quitting but, after lurking in the bus station, I decided to keep going. My guess was, if he was going to reveal himself, I’d need to be in a place considerably darker than those I’d checked out so far.

  Fortified by that glass of red, I walked away from the centre, brain trying to convince gut I should head for the city’s edge. It was desolate and lawless on the outskirts, an urban wasteland of burnt-out cars, 60s tower blocks and cold grey concrete, all newly animated by layers of graffiti, a palimpsest of rage and disaffection. The thought of going there scared me, especially since I’d written an article slating Michael Angelo. Perhaps he, or his fans, would want to take revenge.

  Thankfully, as I was passing Upper Marlow Street, an area famed for its international cuisine, I had a sudden change of heart. It might have been the sight of people dawdling in front of menus and cosy windows, the smell of garlic or coloured lights on wet pavements. Either way, a buzz of excitement made me linger and, before long, I found myself gazing down Lower Marlow Street, a dark narrow road running behind the restaurants.

  It felt like a place he might lurk. It felt right. The back ends of kitchens cluttered one side, a jumble of sloping roofs, bricks, stucco, extractor fans, thick silver pipes and stern, blank fire doors. Wheelie bins and crates lined the wonky pavement and, seeing no one else around, I walked forwards, nervous and alert. A few feet in, the solid hum of ventilation enveloped me, muffling the world. Small windows obscured by grids, grilles or frosted glass glowed softly, and I caught only snatches of kitchen life: a UV fly-zapper, shelves of packaged noodles, a corner of stainless steel; small, still images at odds with the feverish industry of scouring, clanging and sudden sizzles of fat.

  It was like being in the cab of a steam train, seeing the furnace that fuels the city. Upper Marlow Street was civilisation; a place where appetites were whetted and quenched amidst tasselled menus, chopsticks, pepper-mills and candlelight. Here, behind the scenes, was the dark grubby truth of it.

  The road was little more than a gap between old rickety buildings, street lamps along its length offering a faint white haze, as muzzy as gas lanterns in Sherlock Holmes’ day.

  ‘I’ll find you in the darkest place.’

  It was here. I could feel it in my bones. And yet, having arrived, I wasn’t sure I could go on. What did he mean by finding me? And did I even want to be found? My heart was hammering and I almost turned back. Not so tough, after all. I could go home, put the telly on, rustle up an Ovaltine. But I was always doing that, wasn’t I?

  So I continued, walking along the pavement opposite the kitchens and bins, glints of mica on the ground sparkling in the half-light. The steady tap-tap of my footsteps reassured,
a noise to pierce the dead murmur of ventilation. I passed walled backyards, doors, gates and alleys, the former tradesmen’s entrances to once elegant townhouses. There wasn’t a soul around, and I wondered if I’d been mistaken. Maybe this wasn’t the place after all.

  And then I saw him. Or I saw a man, menacingly still. Several yards ahead, he stood within a doorway, a slim youthful figure, a pale hoodie concealing his face like the cowl of a ghostly monk.

  My heart skipped a beat. He didn’t move a muscle though he must have heard me. I kept walking, anxiety tightening my throat. Head bowed, hands in his pockets, he stood beyond a pool of lamplight, faceless, hunched and furtive.

  Afraid of him, I considered crossing the road but didn’t, my main reason being a ridiculously British one: it might appear rude. I wondered how many die from politeness. I wondered too, what his pockets contained. Blood roared in my ears, matching the roar of ventilation as I dared myself to continue. Was I brave enough to walk past him? Stupid enough? And what if he wouldn’t let me pass?

  He was wearing trainers. His feet were quite large. The laces were tatty. His jeans were frayed. And then the feet moved, off the step, and he was out of the doorway, swaggering ahead, his stride quick and shifty.

  I followed without a thought. His footsteps barely sounded while, behind him, mine clipped to keep pace. My mood soared, pulse drumming as I watched him walk, a touch of arrogance in his stride, droopy jeans and a neat little arse. Oh, he could lead me a merry dance around the city and I’d happily focus on that.

  Seconds later, he threw a glance over his shoulder then darted into a narrow opening. Gone. In a heartbeat, I was with him, my breath coming in quick shallow gulps. He was there waiting for me. We stood in a shadowed entrance leading to a courtyard cluttered with fire escapes, stucco crumbling from its walls. He kept his head dipped, face concealed by his hooded top, and I simply stared, breathing hard.

  Neither of us moved.

  Then, ‘Michael Angelo,’ I pronounced.