Ralph's Party (4 page)

The soul-destroying, time-consuming rituals to rid herself of so much unwanted hair were almost daily now. Bleach for her moustache, a razor for her legs and under her arms, rancid-smeling cream for her pubic hair, and tweezers for her toes, nipples, chin and eyebrows. Did men have even the vaguest idea how much work went into women keeping themselves smooth and childlike, into removing anything from their bodies that might even begin to be described as masculine? Would men themselves be prepared to do it if fashion and society had decreed that they, too, should be alabaster-smooth?

And how come in other countries it was acceptable? How come a milion Italian women could walk shamelessly and proudly along beaches every year, a veritable bearskin of black hair cascading from their bikinis and lush pelts of foliage dangling from their armpits? How come in France they had a special and affectionate word to describe the female moustache, yet an English woman would be embarrassed to walk down the street with more than a quarter-milimetre of stubble on her legs in case she were branded a dyke?

How high would it be, if she were to pile up the last ten years' worth of hateful hair? It was al so thankless. Like housework. From the very second it was done it was getting worse again, closer to needing to be done again. Hair was so insidiously persistent and never

ending — it just grew and grew and grew, relentlessly. It never went on holiday or had a day off and it didn't care how fond you were of a particular part of your anatomy, it just decided to grow there anyway, like weeds on a smooth stone wal.

Siobhan had once tried to cultivate an interest in gardening, thinking herself the type, but it had quickly become clear to her that it was just like housework and unwanted hair — frustrating and for ever.

Hair, weeds and dust — Siobhan hated them.

She was doing something that she seemed to spend more and more of her time doing lately — hating her body. Not only was she getting hairier by the day but she was also getting fatter, and it was now no longer a case of having put on a few pounds and her clothes being a bit tight — she had reached a size that meant people who didn't know her might refer to her as the 'fat woman'. Most of her clothes now hung redundant in her wardrobe, while she lived in the same pair of leggings and a smal selection of shapeless tunic tops and jumpers. If she bought anything new it would mean having to go to shops she'd never been to before and buying clothes in sizes that screamed to the world 'I am fat.'

Karl never said anything about it - and it remained unspoken. He stil touched her and stroked her and hugged her, stil held her hand in public and told her he loved her. He'd never realy been a compliment man anyway. Siobhan wondered what he realy thought. She certainly didn't undress in front of him now or walk around the flat naked, and their habit of taking baths together had petered out unnoticed and, again, unremarked upon. She could always ask him straight out

like other women would, 'Karl, do you think I've got fat?', but she knew that he wouldn't lie like other men would, he was the most honest man she'd ever known, and he would say, 'Yes, Shuv, you have,' and then where would the conversation go? What would happen next? It might emerge that he found her repulsive, that he hated her for letting herself go, for not loving him enough any more to care what she looked like.

The truth was that Karl didn't find her repulsive. He actualy quite liked the shape of Siobhan's body now. She'd always been a bit out of proportion, with skinny legs, a too-wide back and a flat bottom, and now she was more balanced, her breasts looking less incongruous, her bottom more rounded and feminine. She felt nice, especialy in the dark, firm and ripe and plump, her arms solid and corpulent, her thighs smooth and soft. It was almost as if the extra layers of fat had given her body a new lease of life, put the bounce back into her thirty-six-year-old skin - she felt like a chubby young schoolgirl, and Karl had never slept with a chubby young schoolgirl, even when he was a chubby young schoolboy.

Siobhan stil had the most beautiful hair he'd ever seen, thick swags of summer corn down to her waist, always shiny and clean and smeling of good things. So much of the early romance and attraction in their relationship had revolved around her magnificent hair. He would see it everywhere he went around campus, either swinging freely to her waist, catching the light even on a cloudy day, or tantalizingly folded and pinned up like lustrous puckered gold.

That hair tormented his soul for six months. His heart would miss a beat and then pump uncontrolably whenever he saw it; it was like a deafening siren signifying the faint possibility that he might have to walk past Siobhan and display his blush, his desire, his embarrassment. He fantasized about removing those tortoiseshel combs and clips, seeing her hair spread thickly like freshly churned butter over his pilowcase, or spiling over the back of the passenger seat of his 2CV. He wanted to wash it for her, comb and look after it for her, almost like it was a pet, an animate part of her —

something living and breathing that encapsulated everything he wanted in a woman and everything that was wonderful about Siobhan.

Siobhan had been unaware of any of this. As far as she was concerned, Karl was the good-looking Student Union guy, the one with the Russian name and the Irish accent, the one she saw pinning posters up on noticeboards, the one who seemed to know everyone on campus, the one with the 2C V and the rockabily quiff, and the one who had been quite conspicuously going out with Angel, a bleached-blonde, gamine-cropped, baby-faced wet dream of a girl from the first year, since for ever. Siobhan found him charming and attractive, loved his Irish accent, his sunny disposition, his wel-formed bottom but, as far as she was concerned, there was a certain level of inevitability when a couple were as attractive and popular as Angel and Karl, and it was hard to imagine them enjoying anything less than a flawless, companionable and highly sexualy charged relationship. She imagined the two of them sometimes, legs entwined on sun-drenched pure-white sheets, biting and digging their fingernails into each other, or laughing together in a pub with friends, their chemistry overwhelming and infectious. She smiled at him from

time to time, and he smiled back, but that was as far as she imagined it would ever go.

Siobhan's hopes and her heart were hydraulicaly lifted one day by a conversation with a friend who was on the Student Union with Karl.

'She's a little cow,' he said, unprompted, of Angel.

Zing! Hope Alert!

'Realy? I always presumed she'd be nice, you know, going out with Karl and everything. They seem like a perfect couple.'

'The man has the patience of a saint. I don't know how he puts up with her, I realy don't. They row nonstop, and she gives him such a hard time. Karl's a great bloke, he could do much better than her, and between you and me, I don't think it's going to last much longer anyway. I reckon she's seeing someone else -but I didn't tel you that.' He tapped the side of his nose and winked at her.

Siobhan didn't need to hear anything else. The passing smiles turned into passing chats, which evolved into long, animated lunches in the park when Angel was in lectures. And, when Karl told her one night after they'd officialy been going out together for six weeks that their mutual friend had been so sick of Angel and so tired of hearing Karl going on and on about Siobhan that he'd taken it upon himself to set the wheels of romance in forward motion, it had filed Siobhan with such a deep glow of warmth that she hadn't needed to wear her coat home.

Her hair had lived up to his expectations, and even up until a few months ago when they stopped sharing baths, he had shampooed it for her occasionaly, gently and meticulously, marveling at its quality and length

and the fact that it was in his hands and he was alowed to touch it whenever he wanted.

Some men were breast men, some were leg men and some were bottom men. Karl was a hair man. It was hair that turned his head and made mincemeat of his senses.

Cheri had lovely hair too - not impressive, imposing hair like Siobhan's, but it was silky and long and a pretty shade of vanila.

He'd noticed her hair before he'd noticed her, last summer; it shone with streaks of sunshine-bleached blonde. It hadn't been too long before he'd also noticed her long brown legs dangling from tiny summer dresses and short cotton skirts, her elegant shoulders, tanned and angular, and her finely featured face with those wonderful cheekbones and perfect teeth.

He admired Cheri's hair now, in an aesthetic, casual sort of way, over the top of his
Evening Standard,
as he sat behind a large window in a Covent Garden dance studio and watched her in a crop top and Lycra knickers high-kicking her way through the last five minutes of her Acid Jazz class.

While Siobhan sat naked on the side of the bath ruefuly grabbing handfuls of wretched, hateful flesh, three miles across town Karl stood up, folded his paper, greeted Cheri with a kiss and a stroke of her firm, neat buttocks and took her out for lunch to her favourite Modern European restaurant.

It was just starting to get dark as Jem walked from her office in Leicester Square to Gerrard Street to buy ingredients for the moving-in meal she had promised to cook for Smith and Ralph.

She'd been living with them for just over a week now and she stil knew absolutely nothing about them. She'd been out a lot and spent the rest of the time in her room, giving them their space, but now it was time to make friends.

On the day she'd moved in they had chivalrously although unenthusiasticaly helped her transport her boxed and bagged belongings from her dirty, French-mustard-coloured Austin Alegro to her room, the three of them processing quietly and industriously up and down the concrete steps like some .sort of modern day chain-gang. They had then left her to her own devices for the remainder of the evening while she unpacked in the now somewhat cramped confines of her tiny room, popping their heads around the door every now and then, proffering tea and coffee and asking her politely how it was going.

Funny, this modern day thing of sharing homes with strangers, Jem had thought. Strangers had always lived together, of course -

domestic staff and their employers, lodgers and their landlords —

but not like today. Today people were expected to share an equal footing in their homes with strangers; there was no hierarchy. You watched the same television in the same living room, you used the same toilet and bath, shared the fridge, cooked on the same cooker and had some sort of obligation to treat this new person in your home as a friend, not an employee, not a lodger. Jem had moved around a lot from flatshare to flatshare and always found the first few nights strange and lonely. She had felt Smith and Ralph's awkwardness as they tried to go about their normal business but she knew that they didn't feel as relaxed as they would usualy as they watched the Australian Grand Prix or Topless Darts. Even though she wasn't in the room with them, the fact that there was a third person in their home had thrown the dynamics of their nightly routines slightly out of kilter.

She thought about them now as she crossed over Lisle Street and remembered with a thril that one of these two awkward but seemingly likeable men might be her destiny. It sounded daft, she was wel aware of that, but fate had always made itself very plain to Jem and she had learned to trust in it unquestioningly. The only cloudy issue that fate had left her to deal with this time (and it was a very cloudy issue indeed) was which of the two men it was. Since it wasn't about to hit her between the eyes, she'd spent the last week looking for signs.

She couldn't go on looks, although they were both good-looking men, in very different ways. Smith had the public-school, floppy-haired, wel-structured sort of look that she would have swooned over when she was eighteen. He was tal and nicely but unathleticaly built, with soft brown eyes, handfuls of thick ninky hair and a fine nose with the most perfect nostrils. But he was a bit

'grown up' for her tastes, a bit too mannered, a bit restrained, too much the gentleman. She got the

impression he'd be taken aback if she ordered a pint in the pub and that his idea of romance would involve long-stemmed roses and surprise trips to the theatre -yuck. She liked her men quite rough and ready, men who didn't treat women like 'ladies'.

Jem sorted through a box of shiny red and green chilies, long, thin and beautifuly misshapen, feeling for firmness, while she contemplated her destiny. She placed the chosen ones into a clear plastic bag torn with some effort from one of those useless bag-dispensing contraptions and moved her pale hands to a box of baby aubergines, smal and apply-green with waxy skin.

Jem found this sort of shopping therapeutic. A packet of M&S

picked, peeled, topped and tailed, polished and prepacked vegetables just couldn't compare. How much nicer to wade with your hands through boxes of colourful and-excitingly exotic produce, fresh from Thailand, China, India that morning, the scent of distant sunshine stil clinging to their skins.

Ralph was probably more what she would have caled 'her type'.

He had the lean, slightly undernourished look that she liked, emphasized by his shorn hair and too-large clothes. His face was sharp but the angles were wel-defined and his round blue eyes were set inscrutably deep into his face, giving him a streetwise but somehow sweet look. And he had one of those wonderful lazy, lop-sided smiles that started on one side of his face before the other side caught up. Sexy. He had the traces of a South London accent, which she loved, and he would
definitely
not expect her to drink dry white wine when they went to the pub or be impressed by expensive meals for two in trendy restaurants.

She reached the butcher's counter.

'Helo, Jem!' The butcher smiled widely as she approached. He was wrapping a large slab of pork bely for the elderly Chinese customer in front of her. 'What'l it be today?' he asked in a soft Mancunian accent. She'd always wanted to ask him how he'd ended up being the only English person workingin a Chinatown supermarket.