The ABCs of Love (12 page)

He stopped talking then. He was breathing oddly, so I patted his shoulder and said it was okay, that I didn’t mind. He looked a bit surprised, but when we made love later, I didn’t move. Just lay there on my back like a virgin. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I was curled up in a fetal position and I had a sick feeling in my stomach that I didn’t recognize for a while. Then I remembered. It was jealousy.

Falling in love can happen to anyone. It is very different from lusting after an unknown woman.

See also Glenda G-spot; Jealousy; Lesbians; Vexed

S

sculpture

Sally has taken up lots of different hobbies so she won’t get too preoccupied with Colin. She is studying the Spanish language and desktop publishing, and she’s taking two exercise classes at the local sports club. What she likes best, though, is the sculpture course she takes at night school.

She’s making lots of little nude figures out of clay. She makes them for Colin, but of course he can’t take them home, so they litter their flat. She says she is making their very own orgy.

Sally told me that one of the models who came into the studio had worn a wig and that this had made all the students feel more comfortable, as if they weren’t looking at a real nude body after all. Apparently, they mold their pieces of clay on stands that are set up in a circle around the model, and after ten minutes, they move on to the next place, like a clock. You are allowed to sculpt only exactly what you see, and Sally started at the back. She said it was a big shock when she came round to the front and realized that her sculpture had a big hole there. Although it had a perfectly formed back.

Sally thought that was a metaphor for her life. She said that it was the same for me, too, and that we should both think hard about what we were doing. All I could think about was what color the model’s wig was and how I’d never really asked John whether he preferred blondes or brunettes.

See also Hair; Sex; Worst-Case Scenario; Zzzz

sex

After she’d spent the hours looking at the nude model, Sally cut off some of her pubic hair and sent it to Colin through the post so he would think of her at work. She pretends she’s so independent, but I can tell she’s worried about him. He’s not been around to the flat for a week.

She told me that she’s been meeting up with the girls again and that they’ve been talking about me.

“Let them,” I said.

“They’re worried about you,” she said. “Trust me. You can’t ignore your friends. Learn from my experience if nothing else.”

I can’t tell her the truth. That my experience could not be more completely different from hers if we tried.

“John’s the real thing,” I pointed out, and she touched my arm sympathetically.

“No man can be enough on his own. You have to make your own life,” she said.

I didn’t ask her how sending Colin perverted things like pubic hair is being independent. But when I got home, I started thinking. Would it work with John? I thought I’d give it a go, but as soon as I cut some off, tied the hairs in red ribbon, and put them in an envelope, I felt so dirty that I wanted to be physically sick.

Sally will never understand how different we are.

See also Friends; The Queen II; True Romance

sounds

There are now some nights when John can stay over with me. He tells Kate that he works at the main factory in Birmingham those days. When we lie in bed before dawn, we sometimes hear a bird outside. The bird never sings when John’s not there. Then all I hear are cars and the running footsteps of commuters and, in the distance, the sound of the station announcers and the trains going to London.

I found a list of the “Sounds of Earth” from the two
Voyager
spacecraft, which were sent into space in 1977, the year I was born. I e-mailed them to John:

If I were to make a record of John and me, I would include that bird singing in the morning. I’d put in the sound of him pouring boiling water into coffee mugs while I just lie in bed waiting for him to come back, the little hum John makes in his sleep, the way he laughs out loud sometimes, shocking even himself, and the gasp he makes every time I touch him down there.

See also Ears; Property; Utopia

stalking

Sally told me the other day that she hadn’t seen Colin for a while. She said she didn’t really mind because she’s so busy, but it got me thinking. I hadn’t walked up his road for a while, so I did last night.

The lights in his house were off, and when I looked into his garden, there were no toys or swings or anything. I think Colin must be a very cold person. Perhaps they are on holiday and he hadn’t told her.

The funny thing is that it isn’t that far from Colin’s house to John’s, but I couldn’t bring myself to go down his road this time. I normally go later at night, when no one’s on the streets and there’s no chance he will see me. Once, it was terrible. I was standing there trying to work out which room was which when I heard Kate come home. She was with a friend, and they were laughing, holding on to each other. I had to run onto their front lawn and hide in their hedge to avoid being seen. Luckily, it was pitch black. Kate kept saying what a good night she’d had and how good it had been to talk, and then they’d start laughing all over again. It took her a long time to get in the house. And then when she did, she started shouting that she was home. She must have woken up everyone.

I couldn’t sleep that night for thinking of John and his children, waiting for Kate to come back. Their house had a very lonely atmosphere, but Kate seemed so happy. She was singing when she was looking for her keys, when she was yelling out that she was home.

See also Colin; Lesbians; Yard; Youth

star quality

Brian has developed a habit of holding up his hands at cross angles to each other and looking at me through them as if he was making a frame.

It’s annoying, but of course I eventually had to ask him what he was doing. He said he thought I might be of film-star material. Although I’d need a lot of work on my accent to make it appealing to the ear. Flat vowels apparently don’t do it for men.

I wasn’t taken in. I knew from looking at his computer that he has been writing a film script. It is about a man from Yorkshire who is not appreciated by his family but who makes friends with a little Vietnamese orphan who lives with a rich and beautiful widow in the village. This orphan is initially the only one to see the man’s true qualities, but when the little girl introduces him to the widow, they fall in love with each other. The film ends with the three of them living out the rest of their days in luxury in a big house with a large wall around it to keep out everyone who has been scared of their “otherness.”

Brian leaves copies of the screenplay lying around because he wants me to ask him about it. He writes notes in the margins in large red type, saying things like
More sex?
and
God, how true!!!

See also Mistaken Identity; Unfit

start-rite sandals

John can’t understand why I need so many shoes. I have just bought a pair of loafers made of turquoise leather that looks like snakeskin. I wish I could show them to Sally. They’d make her laugh. Or they would if she could manage to stop talking about John and how I’m best rid of him for two minutes.

I still feel cheated when I buy shoes now because it’s almost too easy. When I was a child, it was such a procedure to buy shoes for kids that the store would give us a lollipop afterward. Just for surviving it. There was a special machine, and we had to stick our feet into black boxes to have X rays taken of how the bones were growing. It worries me how it really seemed to matter when you were a child whether you were a C or an E fitting, and now all shoes come in the same width. You just take them down from the shelf and squeeze into them somehow.