by India Knight
‘Nurse,’ said Cooper. ‘Nurse?’
‘What?’ Why was he speaking without verbs? ‘No, actually, I mainly bottle-fed. Anyway – thank you for, you know, having me, ha ha, and, er, see you.’
‘Nurse, Mrs Midhurst is ready for her exam now,’ Cooper leered, addressing his imaginary colleague. ‘The full physical, I think.’ He whinnied again, his hand fumbling horribly under the sheet.
Oh, stupid, stupid moron me. Why did I mention playing doctors? Suddenly, the idea filled me with something not a million miles away from disgust.
‘I’ll just get my instruments,’ Cooper continued, getting out of bed now, still addressing the invisible attendant.
‘I really have to go,’ I said, standing up and following him out of the bedroom. ‘But it was very nice to meet you. No, really,’ I had to add, as he started rustling about in his doctor’s case and re-emerged triumphantly clutching a stethoscope and a pair of latex gloves. ‘I really, really have to go. So, um, goodbye.’
‘Come by next week for your examination,’ Cooper said, standing by the door naked except for the pair of rubber gloves, which he’d snapped on. ‘I’ll ring to confirm,’ he winked.
‘Bye,’ I said, and ran all the way down the stairs.
‘Raaaa,’ he called at my back. ‘Raaaaaaah!’
Standing in Marylebone High Street looking for a black cab, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
‘Well?’ says Frank, the following morning. ‘I thought I’d let you lie in. Mary’s here and she’s taken Honey to the zoo, by the way. Some special owl thing, apparently. What happened?’
‘You got her up? That’s incredibly kind of you.’ I haven’t had a hangover for months, and also – though this may be psychosomatic – my pelvis hurts slightly: I feel like I should be walking with my legs in the shape of a Y.
‘No problem. Anyway, so?’
‘Hang on, I’m just making myself some tea. Was everything OK last night?’
‘Absolutely fine. She went to bed at seven thirty and she didn’t budge. I read her two Angelina Ballerina stories. She really loves them, doesn’t she?’
‘Yes, more than life itself. I looked in on her when I came in, about two-ish.’
‘I didn’t hear you. Come on, Stella, for God’s sake: so? What happened? Who’s the doctor? Some sexy locum?’
‘Oh, Frank.’
‘You look knackered, actually.’
‘Shagged out,’ we both say at the same time.
‘Not quite sexy locum,’ I explain. ‘A sexy-ish plastic surgeon. Name of Cooper. Was at Isabella’s. Dyes his hair and has very white teeth. Also, orange skin.’
‘Stella!’ Frank says, half-horrified, half-thinking I’m making it up. ‘You went to bed with an orange plastic surgeon? Tell me you’re joking, love.’
‘Alas, Frank. No. I’m not.’ I take a sip of tea. All my head feels hot. ‘He roared like this: raaah,’ I tell Frank.
‘What?’
‘Naked. On the bed. He roared. Raah. Also satin sheets, natch. Chocolate brown.’
‘Christ,’ Frank says, sitting down next to me. ‘Why did he roar?’
‘Because he thought it was animal and passionate, I expect, Frankie. Why, is the roar not in your seduction repertoire?’
‘Nah,’ says Frank.
‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘I suppose I’d have heard by now. One must be grateful for small mercies.’
‘Whatever,’ said Frank, giving me a long look.
‘He also made this really funny horse noise,’ I tell him.
‘For God’s sake, Stella. He sounds like Dr bloody Dolittle. Anything else?’
‘Yes, actually. He called me hot lady.’
Frankie spits out his coffee. I am trying to butter my toast casually, but it’s too much. Before I know it, tears of laughter (at least I think it’s laughter; I very much hope so, at any rate) are pouring down my face; Frank appears close to hyperventilation.
‘Raah,’ says Frank, beside himself. ‘Hey, hot lady.’ He leaps up and starts parading about the kitchen absurdly, throwing imaginary paws about, thrusting wildly, growling like Eartha Kitt, winking at me ‘hotly’ and, of course, roaring.
‘Don’t,’ I sob, practically choking with laughter. ‘Don’t make fun of my love.’
‘Sorry.’ Frank comes up to me, licks a finger and presses it against my face. ‘Ssssss,’ he says, making a sizzling noise. ‘Wooh! Hot lady!’ And then he collapses again.
I actually think I’m going to pee, I’m laughing so hard. ‘Do men do this?’ I ask him when I’ve calmed down. ‘I mean, have hysterics the next morning?’
‘Sometimes,’ says Frank, who is still wheezing. ‘Not this badly, though. Oh, Stella. Stella, Stella – what did you think you were doing?’
‘The thing is, the actual shag was fine,’ I tell him. ‘The preliminaries …’
‘Ssss,’ says Frank.
‘The preliminaries were on the comical side, I’ll grant you …’
‘Raah,’ he adds unhelpfully.
‘But the actual doing it was OK.’
‘I should hope so,’ Frank says. ‘I should bloody well hope so, Stella.’
‘And yet I feel the whole thing left something to be desired, really. Why’s that, do you think? You told me – promised me – that doing it after a long while was easy and not at all stressful, remember?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t mean for you to go out and knob men with satin sheets who think they’re tigers. Apart from anything else, it seems an awful lot of palaver to go through if you just wanted a shag. I mean, you could just go to a party and pick up someone, you know, normal. What’s that mark on your chest, by the way?’
‘He is normal. Where? Oh, that. Hair dye, I think. I think he dyes his chest.’
‘Sexy,’ says Frank. ‘Bloody right horny, that.’
‘Enough now,’ I say. Because I don’t want my new sex life to be hysterically funny; I momentarily feel rather annoyed, actually: it’s true, Frankie did promise, and I should be sitting here looking sated and replete with sex and mysterious, not giggling like a loon with him. ‘At least he’s not covered in ginger fur. You might like to take a leaf out of his book, Frankie. Nothing wrong with hair dye, you know.’
‘Well, back in the knife drawer, Miss Sharp,’ Frank says, somewhat camply. ‘Don’t be cross. I was only teasing. Anyway, I have to get to the studio now. Are you about tonight?’ I nod. ‘I’ll see you later, then. Have a good day. Don’t overheat.’
‘Just go,’ I say, feeling a giggling fit coming on again. ‘Just leave. Now. Go.’
I don’t really know what I was expecting: not quite to strut about the house feeling pleased with myself, bellowing ‘We are the Champions’ for emphasis, but close. After all, it is quite a feat to have sex again after nearly a year, and not with one’s husband. So I really should be feeling a little more delighted, and a little less sickened. Well, not sickened, quite, but somehow grubby, like a teenage girl who’s let someone Go Too Far in an alley behind the school disco. Oh, arse. I wouldn’t be feeling like this if I were a man: I’d be down the pub boasting about my giant member, and about how women cried hot tears of gratitude every time they were allowed to glimpse it.
Still, at least that’s that over and done with. I am back in the saddle. Yee-hah and giddy-up and good for me.
Today, of all days, is the day Rupert, my first – and, on paper, only – husband decides to phone me. As I think I’ve mentioned, Rupe gave up the west London playboy life to go and live on a remote Scottish island and hang out with birds ‘of the feathered variety’, as that strange man next door would probably put it. Because we were so young when we married, I sort of feel like Rupert is one of those boys you knew at school who’s really more like a girlfriend: I don’t speak to him very often (although he does regularly send sweet postcards with pictures of seals or puffins), but when we do speak it’s easy, and giggly, and you can more or less say anything that comes into your head with
out worrying about the consequences.
So really, who better to share my happy news with? After asking him the usual questions about wildlife, I drop my hot gossip.
‘I had sex with a man last night, Rupe,’ I tell him.
‘Oh, well done,’ he drawls in his funny posh voice – half Harrow, half Ladbroke Grove.
‘Thank you. I’m quite pleased with myself.’
‘I rather assumed you weren’t living the life of a nun.’
‘I was, actually, Rupe. I was nunnish. Getting none. But no longer.’
‘Very good. Who was he?’
‘Doctor called William Cooper.’
‘Plastic surgeon? My mother goes to him.’
‘Does she? What for?’ Why does everyone go to the plastic surgeon except me?
‘Don’t know. Stells, he’s, er, quite old, isn’t he?’
‘I don’t think so, darling. He’s about our age – maybe a bit older.’
‘Actually Mummy went to his sixtieth, if I remember rightly, and that must have been a couple of years ago, at least. Er, rather fiercely tanned chap. Rooms near Harley Street. Huge teeth.’
‘Nooooo!’ I wail. ‘Nooooo! Noooo! Rupert, that can’t be right. I can’t have wasted my first shag in ages on someone old enough to be my dad. Oh, God. Oh, no. No fucking wonder it was so dark at his flat.’
‘Old Cooper. He’d have been twenty-four when he sired you, by my reckoning,’ Rupert says, like an irritating bloody mathmo. ‘Terribly well preserved, though – by his own hand, I gather. Although a bit on the smooth side for you, one would have thought. Still, there must be benefits. Was he awfully experienced?’ He’s laughing to himself, I can tell. No, he’s about to keel over laughing.
‘I suppose so. Tricks, you know.’
‘How ghastly.’
‘Not really. There’s a lot to be said for a trick. English men don’t know enough. They think it’s OK to just sort of prod you for two and a half minutes and pant in your face.’
‘Do they?’ says Rupert, sounding interested. ‘Where does one acquire knowledge of these marvellous tricks, then? I must learn some.’
‘I don’t know. Books, maybe. Or prostitutes. Ideally, very wide sexual experience, or an innate talent for raw sex. Speaking of which, Rupert, how’s your love life?’
‘Don’t be sarky and horrible and defensive. You’re the one who slept with the grandad.’
‘As I was saying, your love life, stud?’
‘It’s looking up, actually – that’s sort of why I’m ringing.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was wondering whether you could put me up for a night or two next week. I’ve sort of got a date.’
‘Of course. Seems an awfully long way to come for a date, though. Couldn’t you meet somewhere in Scotland? And who is she?’
‘Well, she lives in London. She’s called Cressida, works in nannying. Met her at a cousin’s wedding – Harry, remember him? Anyway, seems a bit much to ask her to schlep across Britain for dinner with me.’
‘Oh, but Rupert – I’ve just remembered. My dad’s coming to stay from Friday night. Is that OK? There’s plenty of room for you both, but you don’t mind him being here, do you?’
Rupert has always viewed my father with extreme suspicion; he is convinced that Papa fancies him. As far as I know, there is no evidence of this whatsoever.
‘No, that’s fine. Could probably teach me a trick or two, old Jean Mary.’
‘He’s not called Jean Mary, you arse. He is my dad, Rupe, so, you know, a little respect. You might at least get his name right.’
‘Sorry. Old habits, etc. Really kind of you, Stells. I’ll make my way there, probably tea time-ish on Friday. Just don’t leave me alone with him.’
‘I’m out Friday night, actually, so you will be. Which serves you right. See you then. Don’t forget to wash.’ (English men of his class – he’s quite posh – are always a bit flannel-shy in my experience. I was always telling Rupert to wash when we were married, and he never did; he smelt of dog and wet wool, which isn’t as romantic or easy on the nose as it sounds.)
‘Oh, God. Will I really be alone with him? Well, needs must, I suppose. I’ll keep my back to the wall. Bye, darling – don’t be cross. And well done on pulling Cooper.’
I could swear there’s the faintest snort of laughter just before the line goes dead.
Three days later, Meals on Wheels telephone, thanking me for my application and telling me that there are indeed people in Camden who need my help; would I like to come in for a chat with my Area Supervisor? I am nonplussed, until, when the post arrives, I find a card from Rupert: ‘Thought of a really nifty way for you to combine your two favourite things, darling – eating and old men. See you on Friday, much love, R.’
I am very stressed. Back to the drawing board, I think, sex-wise. Because while it’s all very well being sexually active, I have no desire to become ridiculous.
7
Tuesday already, which means only one thing.
‘Oi bunny,’ says Honey.
Yup, it’s playgroup. But it’s not all grim: we’re going round to Louisa’s afterwards, for lunch – a silver lining, but one surrounding an exceptionally large cloud. Since all the women at playgroup seem to dress in a manner that is deliberately hideous, I aim to do the same, in the hope that perhaps we’ll warm to each other more if we’re all wearing equally disgusting clothes. I feel a bit mean Louisa-wise, since she, brave thing, was wearing rather a pretty pale pink cashmere twinset last time, but needs must: I can’t spend two or three mornings a week hating every single second of my time. I must try and blend in.
And so here I am. The outfit I am wearing actually hurts my eyes (sharp stabbing pains just behind the corneas). I am wearing a tie-dye T-shirt, which some grubby friend of Dominic’s left behind years ago and which, laundered, has been lining the bottom of my tights drawer for ages. The T-shirt is brown. Brown like poo, rather than brown like conkers or chocolate. Brown like diarrhoea, actually. In the centre of the T-shirt are concentric gingery-orange swirls with creamy-beige smears dotted about. These last look like guano. It is an amazingly ugly garment, as though created by blind Aborigines while a lot of pigeons were flying overhead.
But wait, we’re not done quite yet: over my T-shirt, I am wearing a pair of enormous Seventies-style dungarees. These used to belong to Frank – he wore them to paint in – but even he discarded them on grounds of taste. The dungas (there’s a dung sort of theme to my clothing, come to think of it) are enormous, so I have to roll them up; they’re also smeared with cow-coloured paint, so that it looks just like I’ve been rolling happily in russet-coloured pats. I finish off the look with a pair of battered Birkenstocks I keep by the garden door: gnarled, muddy, brown, of course. I scruff up my hair, smear some Vaseline into my lips, forgo scent and race downstairs.
‘Ee,’ says a wide-eyed Honey, which is her own peculiar brand of yokel-speak for ‘oh look, a really horrible sight’.
‘I know,’ I whisper, smoothing down her little curls. ‘I’m in disguise. Shall we go, then?’
‘Oi go,’ says Honey, so we do.
It’s not better the second time, I am sorry to report. It’s not better at all: it’s so worse. By break time, I can’t stop swearing to myself, deep in the throes of internal Tourette’s, and I feel a sort of murderous rage boiling up inside me: I want to kill the Happy Bunnies mummies in a very slow and painful way – roasting on a spit, perhaps, followed by tearing limb from limb.
What’s the matter with them? Freaks, all of them – fucking freaks. Is there anything worse than feeling like the odd one out when all the ones that are ‘in’ are the bloody geeks, the gimps, the abnormalities-on-legs? You know how you occasionally get that I-wish-they’d-pick-me-for-the-netball-team feeling in adulthood – that lonely, abandoned, I-can-do-it-really-I-can-just-give-me-a-chance feeling? Well, this was the same thing, but in reverse. I’m the cheerleader being ignored by the nerds. They should have been begging
me to pick them: I’m the normal one here, the non-tonto one, the one who washes her bloody armpits every once in a while and has non-loopy opinions about child-rearing. But no: despite my cunning disguise, I could still feel the air thickening with disapproval every time I wiped a nose, told some little brat to be quiet at story time or wondered out loud whether four wasn’t quite old to still be in nappies. It’s not, apparently. Apparently, at Happy Bunnies, ‘we’ let the child decide when it’s had enough of nappies, Marjorie tells me. Potty-training forces our principles of what constitutes acceptable behaviour upon children in a way that ‘we’ find reprehensible. It isn’t fair on the child, apparently. (I’ll tell you what isn’t fair: expecting me to deal with strangers’ children’s shit, that’s what. Actually. Since you ask. Not that any of them did.)
The morning went on and on. And on. I got told off every time I behaved like a normal human being: not only for wiping noses, but also for separating squabbling kiddies, or for cleaning sticky surfaces up with squirty Domestos (bleach, apparently, is dangerous, and dirt isn’t), or for choosing The Elves and the Shoe Maker at story time rather than some bien-pensant volume about, say, handicapped children – sorry, differently abled – having two mummies. I thought this kind of thing had gone out in the Eighties, but no: if it’s a slim little volume about siblings with no arms you’re after, or a ploddily written account of life as a five-year-old in the Kalahari, you’ll be overwhelmed by choice (both books, of course, written by white middle-class women who live around here).
Bloody Ichabod got slap-happy again at the Painting Station (that’s another thing: every crappy bit of dirty, broken second-hand equipment has a grand-sounding name: Book Corner is a pair of grubby beanbags, the Kitchen is a chipped table with grey Play-Doh on it, the Play Area is a splintery old climbing frame, the Treasure Chest is a box full of toys I’d feel embarrassed about giving to Oxfam. Mystery heaps upon mystery: the women in this room all live in houses or flats that cost upwards of £300,000. What’s the problem? Why can’t we buy some new fucking toys and a bit of decent equipment? Why do we have to pretend we’re poor? I must ask Louisa. I’ve noticed this before, with the English middle class: they’re the ones who buy second-hand clothes for their children and pride themselves on wheeling around rusty, disintegrating pushchairs. At the park, working-class children are the ones swathed in goose-down, being wheeled in Land Rover buggies; the middle-class children are the thin, pale ones – the ones who look abused. Why?).
