Kissing Through a Pane of Glass (2 page)

My motives have not been purely altruistic; of course not. Love is a heavy burden. If I can bring happiness into someone’s life by loving them, then so much the better. But they have to want it, they have to be able to accept it, or else I remain weighed down. And I don’t want to feel weighed down. I want to feel light, I want to feel good.

Liana believes none of this, of course. She thinks that I have no idea what love is, and she sees this as a problem. It isn’t a problem, because it simply isn’t true. But try telling Liana that.

We were sitting in the living room watching television last night - one of those film review programmes - when Liana started to fidget. I don’t know but I guess I must be getting tired or careless or perhaps prematurely senile, because I know that when she gets that way, Something is going to Happen.

There’s all manner of things I can do if I catch this early enough; walking out of the room is a good one. Alternatively, I can prepare myself for the inevitable onslaught, and either parry and thrust in self- defence, or just ignore it and let myself be stabbed to pieces. I can even launch a pre-emptive strike and immobilise her before she gets into her stride. Whatever, if I’m tuned in, I can deal with it.

Last night, however, I was feeling too relaxed, and I just didn’t see it coming.

‘Your problem,’ said Liana in a manner which suggested that someone in the room had actually asked her opinion, ‘is that you are pathologically incapable of distinguishing between love and sex.’

Liana loves saying “pathological”, even though she doesn’t know what it means. She thinks it adds credence to an otherwise meaningless statement, as if long words conferred official sanction, transforming ill-informed opinion into irrefutable fact.

Now I’ve been hearing this accusation a fair bit lately, so I’m well aware that there’s more to come, a little exposition, perhaps even a suggestion as to what action might be taken to “cure” my “problem”. So I said nothing at the time and allowed Liana to carry on with her potentially poisonous little discourse.

‘The root of all your anxieties,’ she continued, sitting straight-backed in a chair that was designed for lounging in, manufactured for people who like to slouch, ‘is your refusal to accept the simple fact that you are over-sexed. You meet a pretty girl, she gives you the come-on, and hey-presto, you’re “in love”. It’s not only absurd, it’s pathetic. A chronic case of self-delusion.’

There she goes again. Of course, neither of us know if there is such a thing as “a chronic case of self-delusion”, but this is the sort of pretentious psychobabble that Liana thinks will impress me.

It doesn’t, of course. It just aggravates me.

Where Liana gets these ideas from is anyone’s guess. She seemed calm enough while she was telling me all this, so it was safe to assume that there would be no tantrums, no tears. I noted that there was even the hint of a smile on her lips as she was saying all these daft things. It wasn’t typical behaviour, but at least I knew it was safe.

‘You’re a sick man, Michael. You need professional help.’

I don’t mind Liana being pretentious, offensive, even plain wrong. I’ve had to put up with all those things, and worse, for a long time now. But when she becomes condescending I tend to hit back.

‘Liana, do me a favour. Fuck off.’ Water off a duck’s back. She was in one of her indestructible modes.

‘Your aggression doesn’t bother me, Michael. It’s just further proof of your hatred of women. You think you love women, don’t you Michael. You think you’re just overflowing with love for them. But that’s a lie. You hate women. All you want to do is use them, fuck them, fool them into thinking they’re in love with you, and then, when you’ve caught them, when they’ve become dependent, when they’ve burnt their bridges, you leave them. You’re a disgrace Michael. You should be locked up. You should be castrated.’

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Liana, my best friend.

***

‘Define love,’ said Liana this morning, as we sat together in the Café Flores. I cannot begin to tell you how many times Liana has asked me this same question lately. She’s always been obsessed with love and all that, but this is beyond a joke. The annoying thing is, she knows how I feel. She’s known for years. Liana is trying to bait me, and the only thing I don’t know is why.

I ignored her question and continued stirring sugar into the thick black coffee that Julio, the owner of the café, brews to perfection. Café Flores is like a second home to me when I’m in London; I feel safe here, I can relax. It’s cosy, with its red-and- white chequered table cloths, the polished wooden floors, the white net curtains, the voice of Pavarotti - just audible above the hissing and spluttering of the gleaming silver espresso machine - singing popular arias. And that wonderful coffee.

This morning my hand was shaking; the legacy of the previous night’s altercation with a bottle of Scotch. Johnny Walker and I went the full fifteen rounds. It was a close thing, and the judges were, I feel, undecided until the last few minutes. Alas, J.W. floored me in the final round; an undisputed K.O. I should have known better; it was hardly the first time. The hangover and the trembling limbs were part of the price I had to pay for being so indulgent, for having such a lousy memory. I am living proof that behaviourism is a fallacy.

‘Go on, define love,” said my hectoring companion, beaming at me, bright-eyed. Something’s come over Liana lately; she’s become afflicted with an acute case of the “holier-than-thous”. I have my suspicions. I think she may have become possessed. The Spirit of Smugness lurks uncomfortably in the air around her. It is an ugly demon.

I wanted to say all this to her and more, but I couldn’t face an argument so I said nothing. And as a result, as well as not wanting the conversation to falter, Liana, ever-prescient, decided to answer for me. She’s thoughtful like that.

‘I’ll tell you what your definition of love is. Love is when some starry-eyed bimbo with big tits and long legs says she’ll let you come in her mouth . . .’

I sprayed coffee all over the table. ‘Jesus, Liana. Do you have to be so gross?’

‘Tell me it’s not true.’

‘It’s not true.’

‘Liar.’

See what I’m up against?

‘Be honest, Michael. All you ever think about is sex.’

‘Liana, it strikes me that if anyone has become obsessed with sex lately, it’s you.’

Liana raised her eyebrows, too deliberately to be convincing. She gave a little sniff. She paused.

‘Attack,’ intoned my beloved, ‘is the best form of defence.’ She was right. I wanted to punch her right on her pert little stuck-up nose.

I didn’t, of course. And in case you’re wondering why I’m prepared to put up with all this abuse, the answer is, I’m afraid, both simple and dreadfully predictable.

I love her.

I was just twenty-one when I met Liana. I had graduated from one of the “radical” new universities with a good degree in a thoroughly useless subject and, having worked during the vacations, had saved enough money for my first trip to Asia. Travelling to India was still considered something of a real adventure in those days, and I had spent most of my final year reading anything and everything about the sub-Continent in preparation for the trip.

I was not only young and inexperienced, but also possessed of a rare naiveté for one who had spent three years at Sussex. I must have numbered among just a handful of students who had not experimented with soft drugs, had not defied his tutors, had not got into trouble with the police/local authorities, and had not slept around.

That is, I had not slept around much. I had already completed my first year of study before I lost my virginity. In fact, it wasn’t so much a loss as an exchange. Joanne, eighteen, petite, pretty and even more ingenuous than I, gave herself willingly (after three months) to me and I, claiming no more experience than she, gladly accepted. It was not, of course, as easy as I had anticipated.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I was not a particularly handsome young man. As a child, it might be said, I was downright ugly. More bluntly, improvements that one might have hoped for in adolescence had not materialised, and in my late teens I had a face that, whilst not exactly repulsive, was no competition for either Messrs Redford or Newman, at that time joint equal heart-throbs on the big screen. Diplomatically, people would say I had a characterful face, and would add - lest this seem ungracious - that I had a lovely smile.

When I met Joanne I was in the process of growing a beard for the first time in an attempt to disguise my weaker-than-average chin, and draw attention away from my larger-than-average nose. Prior to this time, I had had just one girlfriend, a shy, rather nervous girl called Diane, who screamed every time I attempted to feel her breasts or thighs. Consequently, my familiarity with the female anatomy was severely limited, restricted to the information gleaned from a few biology text books and a rather tatty copy of
Health and Efficiency
.

During that first year at Sussex I made several attempts to “have it off”, but I fear my looks did not drive women crazy with desire, unlike my best friend Richard, who only had to look at women in a certain way and they’d be dropping their knickers before names even had been exchanged. I, however, had to resort to other tactics: the smooth chat-up (hopeless), the cool, uninterested observer (disastrous), even bribery (fatal). All my efforts were to no avail.

I was eighteen years old, away from home for the first time, nobody looking over my shoulder, surrounded by young, nubile, beautiful women, most of them eager to “experiment”, and all I could do was wander around campus with a desperate expression and a permanent erection.

And then I grew the beard.

It worked wonders. Sporting no more than five days straggly growth, I went to yet another party, met Joanne, and fell in love. When, after three months of sleeping in the same bed, having made only the briefest and most tentative explorations of each other’s bodies, we finally decided to do it, I was somewhat distressed to find the focus of my attention in such an inaccessible location. The biology books had made no mention of this. Don’t get me wrong; I knew what I had to do and where I had to do it; I just hadn’t expected it to be so tricky.

After three or four breathless attempts, and just before I was about to give up for good, what I later discovered was termed “intromission” was achieved. You’d have thought, from the look on my face for the next two weeks, that like some great, intrepid explorer delving into unmapped territory, I had single-handedly discovered sex.

It was the start, as they say, of something big.

Joanne remained my sole partner during the next two years, and when we finally split up just before gradua- tion, it was not with any great sadness. Although we were still only children, we had outgrown each other. Joanne had chosen a profession to follow, whilst I had set my sights on conquering the world, or at least, travelling all over it. Our two paths diverged at that point, and would never again cross over.

***

I was, therefore, unattached when I arrived in New Delhi, eager for new experience and, having not had sex for several months, horny as hell.

I arrived at Sunny’s Guest House, a perfectly acceptable dive in New Delhi, booked into a room and fell into a comatose collapse for five hours. Revived thereafter by an invigorating cold shower and precarious excursion to the squat bog, I sat in the open rooftop courtyard and soon found myself deep in conversation with fellow travellers.

This was what it was all about: the “where have you been, where are you going” exchanges, the shared horror stories of life on the road. I drank tea, chatted amiably, tried to remember snippets of advice as they were thrown around the rooftop like volleyballs and thought: that didn’t take long; already I feel at home.

I was wrong, of course.

Two hours later, wanting to soak up a little atmosphere, I made my way to the old city. How was I to know that this was asking for trouble? Old Delhi was to be my first experience of the real Asia. Jetlagged, excited, I was not suitably prepared.

Dusk fell. I found myself walking nervously down the claustrophobically crowded alleyways side-stepping rickshaws, goats, cows, filth, dirt and chaos, carcasses crawling with flies, rotten fruit, rancid butter, red-streaked bones on splintered wooden trestles, green parrots crammed into rusted cages. And wall-to-wall people: crying, running, screaming.

Thick clouds of steam billowed into the twilight shadows, the over-powering odours of spices, meat, shit and piss suffocated me, my vision assaulted by excess, my conscience stabbed by the sight of scabrous lepers and limbless beggars. No space, no freedom, no release, a seething mass living a life of unimaginable squalor.