The room in the attic was sparse, an old B&B offering with an en-suite shower room and two twin beds under the eaves. One was always unmade, a chiropractic pillow resting beside striped pyjamas and thick reading glasses. The other had just a navy fleece blanket and one pillow. This one was for me. At the foot of the second bed sat a desk piled with hardbacks overflowing from the two bookcases: evidence, should anyone ask, that I belonged up here ‘sorting books’. Matthew would drape a piece of gauzy fabric from two nails either side of the window as a makeshift curtain, then unlace his shoes and remove his socks. We were usually in a hurry, I suppose, but I’d still hesitate until Matthew asked if I was being coy, then I’d remove my jeans to reveal an expensive thong he’d bought me or Primark hold-ups or nothing at all. He’d make love to me on his side, always looking for the ‘love-light’. He’d try to make me come and tell me what his friend in the ‘industry’ had said about the percentage of women who can’t reach orgasm, but we’d inevitably end with a stickiness between my thighs and his penis shrivelled contentedly back into place. He’d disappear into the bathroom and return smelling of baby powder, then I’d go to pee and clean myself. We’d lie together for a few minutes, speaking of love and poetry, but soon grow restless and pull on our clothes, anxious to be back playing cards before Annabelle returned. Sometimes we’d hear her key before our underwear was in place and he’d hurry down in his dressing gown to tell her he’d suddenly ‘felt funny’ and I’d gone home, before ushering me silently out the door while she put the shopping away downstairs.
Back on the street, I’d breathe the daylight air or skulk into the starry shadows and wonder if my cheeks were flushed. I’d miss him instantly and suddenly want to cry. Sneaking back past my mother’s house, I’d take a detour via the empty park, sit on a swing and reach in my bag for my diary. I’d scrawl about how life was unfair and the bitter irony of true beauty. Eventually, I’d return home and begin boiling pasta, chat to my dad if he was home and absently make up a lie about doing homework with Claire. He’d only half listen while watching Stargate anyway, and I’d lock myself in my room with Tori Amos and the latest book Matthew had instructed me to read.
5
On 20th October 2001, I walked to Matthew’s after school as usual. My dad was still at work so it was easy to sneak away and I left a note saying I’d be out for dinner. Annabelle was visiting her mother for the evening, so Matthew wrapped his arms around me as soon as the door was closed. We kissed as if we hadn’t seen each other yesterday and the day before. With hours before us, there was no hurry. Matthew was making shepherd’s pie and there was an Eccles cake waiting for me with a pot of tea ready to be poured. We played cards and talked about books until my foot beneath the table aroused enough interest for Matthew to pull me from my chair and shoo me upstairs.
In the attic, we fucked. I don’t remember how. Perhaps that was the day he bent me over the bed and I cried as his cock dug painful holes in my abdomen. Or perhaps it was the time I knelt to suck his dick and guided my hand behind his balls only to find shit on my finger when I was done. Or perhaps I enjoyed it, despite not orgasming. Either way, we finished and dressed and padded downstairs to shovel potatoes and gravy onto our tongues. Annabelle came home at some point and we divided a bottle of wine before retiring to the living room. When Friends ended, Annabelle made a show of yawning and said she was going to bed. I scurried to the other sofa and folded myself into Matthew’s arms, flicking to the music channels hoping to find the Britney Spears video that turned me on. As Matthew was slipping his hand beneath my T-shirt and fingering the fabric of my bra, knuckles rapped at the front door.
Matthew snapped his hand away and stood up in one motion, then strode into the hall, smoothing his hair.
‘John!’ I heard from the other room.
‘Um, hello Matthew. Is Natalie here?’
‘She is. Would you like to come in?’ Matthew’s voice was liquid, subtly patronising yet unquestionably friendly.
I moved into the hallway. My dad looked distracted, annoyed even.
‘Nat, I’ve been trying your phone for hours.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ I muttered, realising my bag was in the kitchen and I probably hadn’t turned my profile off silent since school.
‘Your mum called. Nana’s in hospital—’
‘What?!’ I shrilled, as if shoving all the concern I should have felt in the past few hours into one short sentence.
‘She seems to have collapsed in the supermarket. Your mother says it’s possibly a stroke. I’ve been trying to get hold of you.’
‘I’m sorry, I left a note. My phone’s on vibrate,’ I muttered guiltily. ‘Is she going to be okay?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think it’s looking good.’ My dad looked apologetic. ‘James is at ours, will you come home?’
‘Of course.’
I darted along the hall to get my coat and bag, and then left with only the briefest of waves to Matthew, hovering helplessly in his study doorway.
As we walked back to the house, I begged my dad to drive us to the hospital immediately. I imagined my mother all alone in some waiting room as blue-suited nurses rushed in and out of an operating room, my nana lying on her back, her face as pale as her permed hair and today’s carefully selected jewellery gleaming rudely against a dishevelled hospital gown.
Trying to calm me, my dad explained it would take thirty minutes to get to the hospital and that my mum had said there might not be that much time, that we should wait for news; that it didn’t bear thinking about, but there was no point making the trip if she was going to die in the next half hour.
I cried of course. I could hardly see the tiles on the floor as we stepped into the house. My brother was a smudge as he offered a shy hello and asked if I wanted a glass of water.
The phone rang at 11.46.
‘Sweetie, Nana’s passed away … No, it’s okay, there was nothing you could have done anyway. It would have happened before you got here … I’m fine … I have to sort some things out here and go back to her house, but then I’ll come home … Don’t wait up … Honestly, I’ll be okay … Goodnight darling … I love you too.’
I crawled into bed and saw a strobe of images in the dark. I saw my nana falling in the bread aisle, reaching out for the handle of her trolley and crashing into a display of muffins. My mum struggling for breath as the paramedics wheeled her mother into the ambulance. The blinking of a sad coffee machine opposite plastic chairs in the relatives’ room. A man in a paper suit and white shoes telling my mum they did everything they could. Her hand wrapped around the payphone, the dial tone buzzing from the receiver after I’d hung up. The walk back to her car, seeing Nana’s coat on the passenger seat, entering the house where the afternoon teacup still bore lipstick, the fridge still hummed and the VCR had kicked in to record Midsomer Murders. I saw my mum pacing around the house, flicking switches off and trying to avoid looking at knick-knacks. Locking the door behind her and sitting in her car, resting her head upon the steering wheel and wondering how she could drive down the dual carriageway with so many tears in her eyes. Finally getting home at almost two in the morning and looking in on my brother, tangled in his sheets and snoring lightly. Glancing at my old room and wondering if I too was sound asleep at my father’s house. Turning to her own bed and sobbing quietly into her pillow because her mummy was gone and nobody was there to hold her. Then I saw myself, writhing in Matthew’s sheets and laughing at a sordid suggestion. My foot sliding up his trouser leg as we ate and his lips nibbling my ear while I selected a CD. I saw my phone vibrating furiously in an empty room and my tongue forming a lie for my father about playing cards.
As I slept, my sheets turned to chains; I felt my lies wrap themselves around my limbs and imagined my nana in a sterile room, watching me on a projected screen, seeing my thoughts and knowing my crudest acts. I woke in a sweat and cried as I stared into the bathroom mirror.
I called my mum as soon as it was light and offered to
help her sort everything out, but she told me to go to school, she’d be fine. I ignored his emails and didn’t return to Matthew’s for a fortnight.
6
There were other times I doubted our relationship too. When Simon Shaw asked me out in the common room and an image of a normal teenage relationship involving cinema dates and second and third base flashed before my mind; when my English teacher asked what I wanted to be when I was older and which universities I was looking at; when the kids in my Philosophy class finally learnt about existentialism but moved on to Foucault and post-structuralism the following week; when I tried to imagine myself in ten or twenty years’ time; and when I turned up at his house and his unshaved jaw, tatty slippers and complaints about sciatica made me imagine Matthew’s death. One way or another, though, he always brought me back to my safe places between the pages of books and the sheets of his bed.
From: Matthew Wright
To: Natalie Lucas
Sent: 4 November 2001, 08:27:31
Subject: O me! O Life!
I hear you, my darling. Why, if we are built to feel, do we construct a society that cuts off feeling? Why, if our loins ache with longing, do we instil in children guilt and fear of intimacy? Why, if we value learning, are we afraid of those with knowledge? Why, if your teachers want you to think philosophically, do they punish you when you ask questions to which they know no answers? Why, if truth and honesty are the highest virtues, is it necessary to lie to those who are close to you? Why, if humans are taught generosity, do thousands die in poverty? Why, if we are taught to be individuals, are those who raise their heads above the parapet shot down? Why, if love is pure in all forms, are those who feel it outside the heterosexual, mono-generational, singularly racial norms punished? Why, if you feel passion in your veins when holding a book or mouthing a verse, do others pierce your reverie with mundane expectations? Why is the world so sad? Why does your Ma not understand love? Why does your Pa run away from commitment? Why does your brother turn everything into a mathematical equation? Why does Annabelle want only a hand to hold? Why do people discuss the weather when Shakespeare lies on the shelves? Why, Why, Why, what good amid these sad questions? O me, O Life?
The Answer:
That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
Yet, throughout my bizarre yo-yoing of passion and guilt, happiness and misery, I maintained some element of teenage normalcy. Despite my devotion to Matthew, alongside sitting exams and applying to universities, I flirted with boys at school and wove myself into such difficult situations with Nathan, David, Stephen and Pete that I was branded a cock-tease. Sometimes I felt guilty about Matthew or about the boys themselves, but my actions were not deliberate, just gestures of self-preservation to keep me from going insane in my unreality. I felt the only part of school and the teenage Nat I pretended to be that connected to the real me, the one only Matthew knew, was my continued attempt to drunkenly seduce sixth-form girls.
Though Matthew hadn’t made me come, I enjoyed sex with him and adored the secret eroticism of my life and the power I felt it endowed me with. But there was an ache. A hole beneath my intestines that throbbed when I watched pop stars gyrate in music videos. I’d lie for hours on Matthew’s couch, demanding deep tissue massages while I channel-hopped through Britney, Beyoncé and B*Witched. My fantasies were fed by Matthew’s stories of threesomes in his past, our mutual appreciation of Helmut Newton and his promises to find me a girl so he could watch me enjoy her. I ached from the beginning to the end of the school day, barely able to check my desire to ogle the popular girls in their skin-tight jeans and navel-rising tees. I wondered if they could see into my head and blushed when a male friend jokingly sought my opinion on Suzie’s behind. My one saviour was the regularity of house parties. I rarely got very far, but alcohol and a lack of parental supervision made everyone more open and I managed to content myself throughout Years 12 and 13 with periodic lesbianism.
After the parties, of course, I heard whispers in the common room like, ‘Hey, that’s the “keeno” girl who gets drunk and becomes a lesbian.’ But, thinking of Matthew and how all these people were just plebs watching the wall of the cave from their chains, I shrugged off their ridicule. I tried not to be discouraged by the popular girls who avoided me and regularly punched my male friends with whom conversations about my fantasies always ended: ‘But of course you’re bi, though.’ I attempted to develop a collection of witty responses behind which to hide my feelings of isolation. When Steve slouched beside me in the common room as I was eating a granola bar and asked, ‘Is that a dyke bar?’ I responded calmly, ‘Yes, and I’m about to shove it up my cunt.’ He ran out of the room in shocked disgust and I laughed to myself on my lonely couch.
I tried to live on the glory of each drunken party for as long as possible, but was always looking for another opportunity. Kissing Jenna before she passed out at my birthday bash saw me through the summer. Spin-the-bottle at Ruth’s house party made September bearable. In October, at Holly’s Hallowe’en do and with my best friend Claire’s encouragement, I whirled around the Lambrusco-littered rooms in search of a girl called Leah. She was the year below and only slightly pretty, but I’d heard she’d properly come out as bi and I was totally in awe. I found her downing Becks and we kissed with tongues on the couch until she deserted me for a rugby player. Sipping more fruity alcohol, I returned a skinny ginger girl’s gaze and idled up to her with what I thought was a flirtatious line about getting another drink. She admitted that I was the first girl she’d kissed and I cracked lame jokes about popping her lesbian cherry, feeling almost experienced. On the way home with Scott, the boy who gave me flowers for my birthday and would eventually be my platonic date for the sixth-form ball, I invented a story about dating a secret older woman that I couldn’t tell anyone about. I elaborated on my lie, making Matthew younger, female and a supremely attractive teacher stuck in a loveless marriage, until I began to believe it myself. I fell asleep with my clothes on, dreaming about Radclyffe Hall.
When, some months later, I had become so disheartened by the heteronormativity of my small town surroundings that I decided lesbians were just a myth, I contented myself with reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and writing imaginary love letters about ‘unrecognised social conditioning’ to Claire. Matthew and I spoke of Virginia Woolf and Marlene Dietrich, and while my friends at school laughed that my latent lesbianism was a harmless quirk, I privately lamented the plight of the outcast in society as if it were still Victorian England. After rereading Tipping the Velvet, I came to the conclusion it would actually have been easier to be gay then than it was now.
At a New Year’s Eve party in Year 13, I drank disgusting cocktails and teamed up with Toby to form a terribly clever club called ‘Ibs’. With an air of superiority, we perused the party declaring ourselves Ibs, until someone politely informed us that it was pretty obvious what we meant, and were we aware that we’d just announced our dubious desires to the entire sixth form?
Frustrated and with nothing more to lose, I focused my hopes on the one girl who might have been desperate enough: Kate. Kate was the sort of outsider of the group who imagined she had her own fashion sense and turned up to school in a mixture of checked lumberjack shirts and fishnet tights. Tonight, she had arrived with a new haircut that made her look like a member of a bad eighties girl-group.
Toby and I found Kate throwing up in the bath because someone had dared her to down half a bottle of vodka. We cleaned her up and asked if she would like to join our club. We sat on the kitchen tiles and attempted a three-way kiss, before I shamelessly stole Kate’s lips for myself and spent the rest of the night bouncing between my friends’ hysterical laughter and Kate’s vomit-tinged breath.
When Matthew read about this episode in my diary, he said something had to be done. We had never spoken in detail about the
se teenage parties where I pretended to be normal. I’d never asked his permission, but I felt free to do what I liked at them. Still, I never told him our games of spin-the-bottle involved me locking lips with boys as well as girls, that some nights I tasted the saliva of up to ten of my peers and that James Huntwood had managed to thrust his hand into my jeans as I lay almost passed out on Ruth’s kitchen floor. I only told him about the girls because he smiled and talked of ‘tight little pussies’, whispered in my ear during sex that if any of them were here right now we could change their stubborn little minds, tease them until they creamed and begged for more. He seemed to enjoy these things as much as I did, so I continued attending my promiscuous parties and never worried too much about issues of fidelity.
But, though he brought mention of her into our bed once or twice, Matthew was decidedly unimpressed by the idea of Kate.
‘You need a real woman. You deserve something far more sophisticated than these drunk idiots. It’s probably the answer to your orgasm problem too. We will have to find you someone.’
Sixteen, Sixty-One Page 6
