Читать книгу Sixteen, Sixty-One - Natalie Lucas - Страница 12

There were other times I doubted our relationship too. When Simon Shaw asked me out in the common room and an image of a normal teenage relationship involving cinema dates and second and third base flashed before my mind; when my English teacher asked what I wanted to be when I was older and which universities I was looking at; when the kids in my Philosophy class finally learnt about existentialism but moved on to Foucault and post-structuralism the following week; when I tried to imagine myself in ten or twenty years’ time; and when I turned up at his house and his unshaved jaw, tatty slippers and complaints about sciatica made me imagine Matthew’s death. One way or another, though, he always brought me back to my safe places between the pages of books and the sheets of his bed.

From: Matthew Wright <theoutsider@worldopen.co.uk>

To: Natalie Lucas <sexy_chocolate69@sweetmail.com>

Sent: 4 November 2001, 08:27:31

Subject: O me! O Life!

I hear you, my darling. Why, if we are built to feel, do we construct a society that cuts off feeling? Why, if our loins ache with longing, do we instil in children guilt and fear of intimacy? Why, if we value learning, are we afraid of those with knowledge? Why, if your teachers want you to think philosophically, do they punish you when you ask questions to which they know no answers? Why, if truth and honesty are the highest virtues, is it necessary to lie to those who are close to you? Why, if humans are taught generosity, do thousands die in poverty? Why, if we are taught to be individuals, are those who raise their heads above the parapet shot down? Why, if love is pure in all forms, are those who feel it outside the heterosexual, mono-generational, singularly racial norms punished? Why, if you feel passion in your veins when holding a book or mouthing a verse, do others pierce your reverie with mundane expectations? Why is the world so sad? Why does your Ma not understand love? Why does your Pa run away from commitment? Why does your brother turn everything into a mathematical equation? Why does Annabelle want only a hand to hold? Why do people discuss the weather when Shakespeare lies on the shelves? Why, Why, Why, what good amid these sad questions? O me, O Life?

The Answer:

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Yet, throughout my bizarre yo-yoing of passion and guilt, happiness and misery, I maintained some element of teenage normalcy. Despite my devotion to Matthew, alongside sitting exams and applying to universities, I flirted with boys at school and wove myself into such difficult situations with Nathan, David, Stephen and Pete that I was branded a cock-tease. Sometimes I felt guilty about Matthew or about the boys themselves, but my actions were not deliberate, just gestures of self-preservation to keep me from going insane in my unreality. I felt the only part of school and the teenage Nat I pretended to be that connected to the real me, the one only Matthew knew, was my continued attempt to drunkenly seduce sixth-form girls.

Though Matthew hadn’t made me come, I enjoyed sex with him and adored the secret eroticism of my life and the power I felt it endowed me with. But there was an ache. A hole beneath my intestines that throbbed when I watched pop stars gyrate in music videos. I’d lie for hours on Matthew’s couch, demanding deep tissue massages while I channel-hopped through Britney, Beyoncé and B*Witched. My fantasies were fed by Matthew’s stories of threesomes in his past, our mutual appreciation of Helmut Newton and his promises to find me a girl so he could watch me enjoy her. I ached from the beginning to the end of the school day, barely able to check my desire to ogle the popular girls in their skin-tight jeans and navel-rising tees. I wondered if they could see into my head and blushed when a male friend jokingly sought my opinion on Suzie’s behind. My one saviour was the regularity of house parties. I rarely got very far, but alcohol and a lack of parental supervision made everyone more open and I managed to content myself throughout Years 12 and 13 with periodic lesbianism.

After the parties, of course, I heard whispers in the common room like, ‘Hey, that’s the “keeno” girl who gets drunk and becomes a lesbian.’ But, thinking of Matthew and how all these people were just plebs watching the wall of the cave from their chains, I shrugged off their ridicule. I tried not to be discouraged by the popular girls who avoided me and regularly punched my male friends with whom conversations about my fantasies always ended: ‘But of course you’re bi, though.’ I attempted to develop a collection of witty responses behind which to hide my feelings of isolation. When Steve slouched beside me in the common room as I was eating a granola bar and asked, ‘Is that a dyke bar?’ I responded calmly, ‘Yes, and I’m about to shove it up my cunt.’ He ran out of the room in shocked disgust and I laughed to myself on my lonely couch.

I tried to live on the glory of each drunken party for as long as possible, but was always looking for another opportunity. Kissing Jenna before she passed out at my birthday bash saw me through the summer. Spin-the-bottle at Ruth’s house party made September bearable. In October, at Holly’s Hallowe’en do and with my best friend Claire’s encouragement, I whirled around the Lambrusco-littered rooms in search of a girl called Leah. She was the year below and only slightly pretty, but I’d heard she’d properly come out as bi and I was totally in awe. I found her downing Becks and we kissed with tongues on the couch until she deserted me for a rugby player. Sipping more fruity alcohol, I returned a skinny ginger girl’s gaze and idled up to her with what I thought was a flirtatious line about getting another drink. She admitted that I was the first girl she’d kissed and I cracked lame jokes about popping her lesbian cherry, feeling almost experienced. On the way home with Scott, the boy who gave me flowers for my birthday and would eventually be my platonic date for the sixth-form ball, I invented a story about dating a secret older woman that I couldn’t tell anyone about. I elaborated on my lie, making Matthew younger, female and a supremely attractive teacher stuck in a loveless marriage, until I began to believe it myself. I fell asleep with my clothes on, dreaming about Radclyffe Hall.

When, some months later, I had become so disheartened by the heteronormativity of my small town surroundings that I decided lesbians were just a myth, I contented myself with reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and writing imaginary love letters about ‘unrecognised social conditioning’ to Claire. Matthew and I spoke of Virginia Woolf and Marlene Dietrich, and while my friends at school laughed that my latent lesbianism was a harmless quirk, I privately lamented the plight of the outcast in society as if it were still Victorian England. After rereading Tipping the Velvet, I came to the conclusion it would actually have been easier to be gay then than it was now.

At a New Year’s Eve party in Year 13, I drank disgusting cocktails and teamed up with Toby to form a terribly clever club called ‘Ibs’. With an air of superiority, we perused the party declaring ourselves Ibs, until someone politely informed us that it was pretty obvious what we meant, and were we aware that we’d just announced our dubious desires to the entire sixth form?

Frustrated and with nothing more to lose, I focused my hopes on the one girl who might have been desperate enough: Kate. Kate was the sort of outsider of the group who imagined she had her own fashion sense and turned up to school in a mixture of checked lumberjack shirts and fishnet tights. Tonight, she had arrived with a new haircut that made her look like a member of a bad eighties girl-group.

Toby and I found Kate throwing up in the bath because someone had dared her to down half a bottle of vodka. We cleaned her up and asked if she would like to join our club. We sat on the kitchen tiles and attempted a three-way kiss, before I shamelessly stole Kate’s lips for myself and spent the rest of the night bouncing between my friends’ hysterical laughter and Kate’s vomit-tinged breath.

When Matthew read about this episode in my diary, he said something had to be done. We had never spoken in detail about these teenage parties where I pretended to be normal. I’d never asked his permission, but I felt free to do what I liked at them. Still, I never told him our games of spin-the-bottle involved me locking lips with boys as well as girls, that some nights I tasted the saliva of up to ten of my peers and that James Huntwood had managed to thrust his hand into my jeans as I lay almost passed out on Ruth’s kitchen floor. I only told him about the girls because he smiled and talked of ‘tight little pussies’, whispered in my ear during sex that if any of them were here right now we could change their stubborn little minds, tease them until they creamed and begged for more. He seemed to enjoy these things as much as I did, so I continued attending my promiscuous parties and never worried too much about issues of fidelity.

But, though he brought mention of her into our bed once or twice, Matthew was decidedly unimpressed by the idea of Kate.

‘You need a real woman. You deserve something far more sophisticated than these drunk idiots. It’s probably the answer to your orgasm problem too. We will have to find you someone.’

I was terrified, but titillated.

His plan was to create a profile on a dating website using our combined details to attract someone to join not just me but us.

In April, we discovered Gaydargirls.com. The profile we made featured just me, as did the picture. ‘You can’t say you’re a couple because then they don’t trust you. You’ll have to meet them first and convince them I’m not a sex fiend,’ Matthew winked.

‘You’ll also need another name. You should have one anyway, for other things,’ he added vaguely.

We spent three hours perfecting the description of me (us) and what I (we) wanted to find. By the evening, we were ready to make it live and Harriet Moore, the ‘sexy Literature student looking for fun’, became a reality.

‘Harry Moore. I like it: both androgynous and greedy.’ Matthew kissed me excitedly and I felt the familiar anticipatory ache between my legs.

In June, I received an email from I<3ellen16@sweetmail.com. She described her interests as shopping, flirting and playing football; Tori Amos and Aimee Mann were listed under her musical favourites; and her profile picture showed a roundish face with a choppy blonde bob, pink highlights and startling blue eyes. I imagined love.

Her email asked me if I wanted to ‘chat’ and offered her MSN Messenger addy. Sitting at my dad’s PC in the downstairs study, I keyed her into the Add New Friend box. When the sand-timer had finished rotating, a little green figure appeared beside her name, indicating she was online.

Chat with I<3ellen16

Harriet_Moore101: Hey

I<3ellen16: Hey, u found me!!

Harriet_Moore101: Yep

I<3ellen16: Howz uz 2day?

Harriet_Moore101: I’m good. How about u?

I<3ellen16: OK. I had a REALLY boring day at school, but apart from that everyfins peachy

Harriet_Moore101: Tell me about it, I can’t wait for the weekend!!

I<3ellen16: Me either. Wot u up 2?

Harriet_Moore101: Not much, it’s pretty boring where I live.

I<3ellen16: Me too. Tunbridge Wells’s so lame. There’s like one gay night at one club, and they’ve started getting pretty tight about ID.

Harriet_Moore101: That’s one more night than where I live. Quite seriously, I’m the only gay in the village!!

I<3ellen16: Lol! You’re hilarious. You should come see me sometime.

Harriet_Moore101: That’d be cool. Would you show me around?

I<3ellen16: Sure.

Harriet_Moore101: Cool

I<3ellen16: g2g, chat 2 u l8rz

Harriet_Moore101: Oh, ok. Bye.

I<3ellen16: bye sweets xxx

*

On the third day after the end of my last ever term at school, I set out to begin my destiny as an enlightened Uncle lesbian by making up an overly complicated story about going shopping with Claire in Hastings because she needed to find something to wear to her third-cousin’s wedding as her sister had already claimed the colour blue and all of Claire’s favourite clothes were blue, plus it was her boyfriend’s birthday and she needed to buy him a present and he’d seen everything in the shops around us so she had to go somewhere else and needed my opinion because she was rubbish at making decisions. The intention was to bore and confuse my dad so much that he wouldn’t notice that I’d asked for a lift to the wrong station to get to Hastings.

One of the first rules of Bunburying is to keep your story as close to the truth as possible – i.e. never change the place you are going to. You have to think about eventualities: What if a bomb goes off and your parents try to contact you? What if someone tries to rob a bank while you’re in it and you end up on national TV, proving you’re in London rather than Liverpool? What if a car breaks down and you can’t get home, but you’ve said you’re just down the road? What if Hastings turns out to be closed due to freak flooding and you don’t see the news until you’ve waltzed through the door and said you had a fantastic day’s shopping there?

I knew all of this and pondered the possibilities nervously as I plonked into my firm window seat in an empty carriage. There was no excuse; I should have been more careful, and, considering the complex duplicity I’d successfully woven into my life over the past two years, I really should have been able to pull off a simple blind date. But I was nervous. I’d changed six times this morning and had another panic about my casual jeans and T-shirt decision as I left the house. I’d put my hair up, then brushed it over my shoulders, then tried pigtails and half-up, half-down, finally settling back on a ponytail with a few loose strands that I now began to worry. I’d tried no make-up, then just eyeliner, then full face, then scrubbed it all off and stencilled a thick kohl line beneath each of my eyes and dabbed green mascara on my lashes.

Heather, aka I<3ellen16, was to meet me outside the station. She hadn’t been impressed that I didn’t know where her favourite coffee shop was and that I wouldn’t be able to make my own way to the town centre (she’d typed ‘omg, wtf, wot planet r u from?!’), but she’d seemed quite jovial (she’d typed ‘lol’) when she’d finally offered to just pick me up from my train and show me around.

She was late. I fingered a hole in the sleeve of my jacket with annoyance. When a girl vaguely resembling the photo I’d studied sauntered nonchalantly up to me, though, I of course replied: ‘No, I just arrived.’

‘Cool,’ she muttered, making no effort to hide the fact that she was eyeing me up and down. ‘So, you want to go shopping?’

‘Sure,’ I smiled, realising I must have blinked and missed the ‘Hi, hello, how are you? How was your journey? It’s good to finally meet you. Hey, we might even hug at this juncture’-part because Heather was already waiting by the traffic lights at the end of the road.

Still, her distance gave me a chance to subtly assess her in person. She was shorter than I’d imagined, but still about an inch taller than me so that was okay. Her hair had been cut since the picture I’d seen and she seemed to have a sort of natural sourness to her face that had not shown in the soft, posed smile of the photograph. I was a little repelled, but my nervous, desperate excitement won out and I began to picture us meeting like this throughout the holidays, going on picnics, holding hands and kissing by lakes.