The Perfect 10 (24 page)

‘Mate!’

‘Rough!’

‘It’s fuckin’ huge!’

‘Is she a fuckin’ lezza?’

‘She must be a dyke!’

‘That’s just wrong.’

Silence falls suddenly, and they look at me expectantly.

‘What?’ I ask.

‘Are you a dyke, miss?’ An explosion of Argos gold and eyeliner in the second row tosses the question at me.

‘It shouldn’t matter whether I am or not …’

The classroom erupts.

‘Yuk!’

‘That’s fucking rough!’

‘Pervert!’

‘But I’m not!’ I state firmly, horribly ashamed of it as soon as the words leave my mouth.

‘Whatever!’

‘Is she going to show us how to use it?’

‘I am fuckin’ leaving if she does!’

‘I ain’t staying for no lezza class!’

‘Look!’ I shout above the disgusted din. ‘Nobody is going to show you how to use anything. Mr Taggart asked me to talk to you today about my business. I run a website called shewantsshegets.com that sells these toys,’ I gesture with my hand, ‘and it is ostensibly for women. I brought a selection of the vibrators along to show you, but we also sell underwear, lubrication, light S&M materials, silk eye masks, erotic poetry and literature, flavoured body paints, et cetera. Click on the site for a full list. But my best seller is the Two-Fingered Fondler, which I own the exclusive licence to distribute in this country, for the moment at least, and it’s proving very popular. It’s the puff of air, apparently. As you can see …’ I pick up the Fondler and half the class erupts.

‘Rough!’

‘I think it’s been used!’

‘Turn it on!’

‘Does its ears twitch?’

Peals of laughter follow.

‘For Christ’s sake, it’s just a vibrator!’ I shout.

Most of the class shut up, apart from a group of knowing beauties, who mimic me – it’s just a vibrator – in a strange Home Counties accent, and laugh loudly at the back.

‘Does anybody have any questions?’ I ask, checking my watch. I can catch the next train if I rush.

A young black girl with flawless creamy skin and an afro ponytail puts her hand in the air.

‘Yes?’ I ask, mildly irritated. Why is there always one who has to ask a question?

‘I know what a vibrator is, right, but they’s for old women, right, or married women. Who can’t get good sex no more. We don’t need nothing. I get mine!’ She laughs loudly and high-fives her neighbour.

‘OK,’ I say, ‘any other questions?’

‘Do they give you an automatic orgasm?’

I don’t know who has shouted it from the back, so I answer the class generally. ‘Not automatic, no.’ I turn round to start to pack up.

‘But they are for women who can’t get men, right?’

‘Maybe they are for women who don’t want men,’ I say, with my back to them.

‘Lesbians!’ two of them shout simultaneously.

I turn round to face them. ‘Why are you all so obsessed with lesbians?’ I ask, and the girls at the back mimic me again, and I sigh exasperated.

‘Why do we need to learn how to fuck ourselves, miss? That’s the man’s job, right?’

‘In an ideal world, yes. But sometimes finding a man that you like, and respect, and who makes you laugh, and who
also makes you orgasm, is harder than you think it might be. This –’ I wave the Fondler at them – ‘is in case you take conversation over coming.’

I look down at it with a fond smile. It has served me well, put food on my table, indulged me my therapist, and yet I have never thanked it properly. Why haven’t I tried one of these things? What am I waiting for, a note from my mother saying it’s OK? Why is using a Fondler any different from using my own hand?

‘Are you married?’ one of the girls shouts.

‘No,’ I answer.

‘How old are you?’ another girl shouts.

‘Twenty-eight,’ I say.

‘When was the last time you had sex?’ the same voice asks.

‘Friday night, against a wall in my kitchen,’ I say.

The room quietens down.

‘Are you in love?’ somebody asks.

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. The answer to that wasn’t on the back of the Fondler box. I’m stumped.

I am woken in the middle of the night by a strange and unsettling feeling. Not having experienced a panic attack I can’t be certain that’s what it is, but it feels the way a panic attack should feel, I think. My heart is racing, my mind is whirring, and I feel cold and awake and taut.

It is a week and a half since the incident, and as I lay on my own in the dark, the memory of running down that alley screams through my mind, and I close my eyes, and scrunch them up tight to try to make the image go away. I am not going to cry. Adrian has been trying to talk all weekend, and I’ve been dumping the calls. I am starting to realise that there is nothing that sparks a common interest in us both, that sizzles down the line and connects us. But I feel a little
lonely, in this big old bed by myself, which is strange, given how many years I spent sleeping on my own. Now I feel smaller and the bed feels bigger, but maybe Adrian would be the wrong man to have next to me now. I don’t think I want any affection he might choose to lazily fling my way, and I wouldn’t be able to muster the enthusiasm to sling any back. I don’t think we care about each other at all. I am a holiday for him. He is a tour guide for me. Maybe he’ll go home soon, safe in the knowledge that it is ultimately more comfortable there, and I’ll be savvy to a few things I wasn’t. Maybe we are just doing each other a favour. I hope he agrees when I explain it. But I don’t think I want Christmas with him now, or trips to the Lake District, or any of those things I was so desperate for last week. I can hardly even bear to think of him, and it is because of my mistake. I dressed him up in a suit of ‘perfect for me’ when it has never fitted him, and never will. He doesn’t laugh at my jokes. He refuses to go anywhere near a kitchen, and makes comments like ‘Woah there!’ if I happen to mention either my mum or my dad, as if I might suddenly wolf-whistle and they’ll walk in from the room next door, where they’ve been hiding all along with a vicar and a marriage licence with our names on it.

In my defence I will admit that it is very easy to pin the right dreams on the wrong man, if only because they look the way you thought your partner would. I may be ready for somebody to love me, and to love them in return, but I don’t feel that with Adrian. We aren’t even walking in the same direction.

I roll over in bed, hook my leg around and over the duvet, and hug a pillow … and think of Cagney. I hate myself for even picturing him anywhere near me. I hate the little part of me that prays he might picture me sometimes as well. I hate that we don’t seem able to have a conversation
that doesn’t dissolve into a war. I hate that the image that bursts open in my head and spills out like a dream right now is of this bed, and him in it, with a long strong arm around me, and my head resting on the salt-and-pepper hairs on his chest. I hate that I think he could protect me if I was in trouble. In fact he already has. But what I really hate is that now I have got what I thought I wanted, namely Adrian, I realise that I don’t want him at all. What I seem to want, now that I have opened myself up to a little more choice, is hard to admit, even to myself. I am scared to acknowledge that, after all that has happened, all that I’ve dreamt of and wished for, my heart and my head seem to be screaming in unison, that I want an angry loner with grey hair and a drink problem. But I don’t think he is ever going to want me, so despite all my efforts I am back to square one. I kick off the duvet, angry with Cagney, but angrier with myself.

My cold feet wake me up four hours later, as they poke out of the end of my duvet, neglected. I’ve overslept, which is unlike me these days. I stretch long and hard, pushing my hands up into the wall, pointing my toes out over the end of the bed. I should get up. I check the clock – it reads twenty minutes past eight, so I should definitely get out of bed. I am wide awake, but I lie on my back with my head nestled in a soft duck-down pillow, encased in a body heat bubble I have made for myself, languishing in the warmth of the duvet. I tentatively stick out my arm, and reach down to the side of my bed, grabbing around on the carpet, instead of rolling over and looking for what I know is there. My fingers locate the cardboard of the box, and I pull it up and hold it aloft in front of me. The Two-Fingered Fondler.

This is it. It’s a watershed, an important moment, a turning point. This is about openly and honestly and soberly, in a daylight hour, admitting that I would like something sexual
to happen with a man whose name I know and whose face I can picture. I have never fantasised sexually about anybody real, not even Adrian, scared of where it might lead, of how much more upset his rejection of me would be if I allowed myself to orgasm while picturing us having sex. It was too intimate. So I daydreamed conversations with Adrian, and kept my fantasies to lords of the manor, or lecturers, or prison guards, or any of the other fairy tales that have childishly entertained me for so long. And in all of those fantasies I was a serving wench, or a student, or a prisoner. I was never just me. I have never allowed myself to picture a potential reality, because I have always known that as soon as I do that fantasy will have a life of its own. It will float up and out of my head like a balloon filled with big wishes, spurred on by my own electricity, and it will hang above my head as if it were tied around my neck wherever I go. And if ever I see him, he will know, somehow, that it was the thought of him, coupled with my bestselling piece of merchandise, that made me sweat, that made my breathing erratic, that caused a catch in the back of my throat, that caused a creeping anticipatory feeling on the top insides of my thighs. That made me shift my legs apart and wish for the weight of a particular somebody on me. He’ll know I lost my Two-Fingered Fondler virginity to him somehow.

I inspect the box. I turn it over three or four times before I even begin to make an effort to prise it open. The familiar fist with two strange saluting fingers drops out attached to the white plastic protective casing with little wire holders. I sit up. I flick the red switch at the bottom, and a whirring sound, like a very weak vacuum cleaner, starts. I turn it off straight away. It is too loud. People will hear … my neighbours might hear … Cagney James might hear …

I throw it to the side and flick the radio on, as some barking spaniel of a DJ announces that the songs we have
all been listening to are from last year. They don’t play music from the fifties on this station, or the sixties, or the seventies, or even the eighties. They figure it’s depressing, the kids don’t like it. If they stopped and listened hard enough they might realise that the kids don’t like anything any more, at least not with the same abandon reserved for old idols. There is just too much damn choice, everything can be improved upon, and they can probably do it better themselves with a PC and a loan from The Prince’s Trust.

I flick off the radio and pick up the Fondler again. It isn’t such a big deal. I pull off the white plastic casing and chuck it on the floor, placing the Fondler itself on the duvet in my lap. I put a cushion over it, and flick the switch that turns it on. I can hear a muffled whirring, as I suffocate my Fondler in the name of shame. I picture somebody watching me, in a Big Brother scenario, my bedroom filled with cameras, and I am more embarrassed by the fact that I am trying to muffle a vibrator in an empty flat, than if I were using it.

‘For God’s sake, woman, just do it!’ I say aloud, remove the cushion, scoot down in the bed, and thrust the Fondler beneath the covers.

Five seconds later my mother calls. She knew …

‘Are you hoovering?’ she asks, as I desperately try to locate the off switch. The switch I flicked as I answered the phone, the switch I thought would turn it off, in fact just made it faster and noisier.

‘Yes, I’m just turning it off.’

‘It sounds very weak, Sunny. I think the bag might need changing.’

‘It’s a Duster Buster,’ I say quickly. My ability to lie to my mother at speed and without guilt is impressive. I used to lie about the food that I ate all the time. I used to sneak out into the kitchen and butter a slice of bread and eat it secretly, trying noiselessly to open and close the fridge. After
dinner, when leftover spaghetti Bolognese or macaroni cheese sat proudly on the work top in casserole dishes covered in cling film, it was my secret trick to unpeel one side, dip in my hand, scoop up some food, eat it, make it appear that the food had not been touched by redistributing the top layer of pasta or sauce, and then reattach the cling film so nobody would ever know.

At that point my mother would shout from her armchair in the living room, ‘What are you doing out there? Are you at that fridge?’

‘I’m just chucking something in the bin,’ or, ‘I’m getting a glass of water,’ were my standard responses. We both knew it was a lie, but neither one of us ever said anything.

Occasionally my mother would sigh and look angry, and venture, ‘You don’t need that,’ as I picked up another roast potato after my plate was cleared. And I think, for whatever reason, it made me want it more. I did need it, I just didn’t know why. I still don’t, despite all the therapy. Why did I always need another potato? The irony being, of course, that the Sunday roasts that I once shovelled up in secret now make me throw my guts up, my stomach refusing to digest them. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased. I might still want to eat them, but I can’t, and if I do succumb, I just throw it all back up the next day, my stomach now unable to digest the gravy, we finally deduced, and I shiver in bed for twelve hours with dehydration and fatigue, and then bounce out of bed the following day a few pounds the lighter.