Girl 99 Page 3

  Which is not how I felt when I woke the following morning. What had felt, eight hours previously, like nothing more than a harmless, festive faux pas, now lurked like a threatening silhouette in a dark corner of my mind. Say Holly developed a crush, pursued me, phoned drunk at midnight, sent texts, posted an indiscreet Christmas card . . . how then to explain it all away as a trivial indiscretion? No, the truth would set me free. Sadie would appreciate my honesty; if anything, it would reassure her of my fidelity. I mean, I turned down no-strings Christmas sex, for God’s sake. If you can’t trust a guy like that, then who can you trust?

  Sadie returned from Stockholm on the Sunday. I kissed her like she’d been gone a year not a week, carried her bags up from the taxi, opened a bottle of wine. And the opportunity to offhandedly mention my amusing but harmless Holly encounter didn’t present itself. Sadie gave me a hideous woolly jumper as an ironic early Christmas present. I cooked, and we opened a second bottle and caught up on what we’d each been doing for the past six days. Most of it, anyway, because this too seemed a less than ideal time to drop ‘funny thing happened at the Christmas party’ into the conversation. We finished our wine in front of the TV and, well, you know how people hate it when you talk over a good movie. We brushed our teeth, went to bed, had sex, and at no point during the proceedings did the perfect moment present itself for me to inform Sadie that I’d kissed the company receptionist on her first shoot as a runner. I was still half asleep when Sadie left for the office early on Monday morning.

  So I emailed my confession just before lunchtime.

  I clicked send, shuffled through to the kitchen, and had barely filled the kettle before Sadie called. And whether or not she appreciated my honesty didn’t come up. She was more concerned about the fact that I couldn’t be trusted to keep my hands to myself for one week while my live-in girlfriend was working sixteen-hour days in Stockholm: ‘And you tell me this by email!’ and ‘Were you thinking of her when you screwed me last night?’

  With regards to this last point, I decided, further candour was an inadvisable strategy. I explained that it was ‘just a kiss’, but this cut me little slack. My protestation that ‘it wasn’t as if I shagged her’ did nothing to dampen Sadie’s anger. I tried explaining the Jekyll and Hulk theorem I’d been working on over the weekend.

  In a nutshell: The ‘potion’ or ‘gamma rays’ represent your lager or tequila or your large glass of Chardonnay. Now, in some individuals the potion releases pre-existing, but hitherto repressed, malevolent tendencies. In others, the gamma rays create an out-of-control creature that is completely incongruous with the hero’s true and trustworthy persona. I, of course, fell into the latter camp. Sadie pointed out they were the same thing, and I magnanimously admitted that I hadn’t thoroughly worked out all the finer philosophical details. Undeterred, I went on to assert that the main point still stood – neither Doctor Henry Jekyll nor Doctor Bruce Banner could be held entirely responsible for their temporary lapses. It was the potion, the gamma rays, the large goddamned glass of Chardonnay.

  Also, Sadie contended, they’re fictional fucking stories, this is the real fucking world, and a monster’s still a fucking monster.

  And, in a nutshell, I slept in the spare fucking room.

  The mattress isn’t as comfy in the spare room, and in the last six months I’d become used to the presence of another body beside me. I found it difficult to sleep, which gave me plenty of time to think. The major conclusion I kept coming back to was that it’s surprisingly bloody hard to unpick what you want from what you don’t want and what you think you should want.

  On the Saturday we went for a meal to talk things through.

  We both admitted our relationship had become somewhat rote, but I denied this was the impetus behind the kiss. ‘So what exactly was the impetus?’ ‘Maybe it was the drink?’ ‘So that’s an excuse?’ ‘No, just a reason.’ ‘Not a very good one.’ Et cetera. No, I didn’t regret asking Sadie to move in; yes, I still found her attractive; absolutely I still loved her. The meal was (predictably) a tearful affair, during which (inevitably) my various shortcomings were aired rather more loudly than I thought absolutely necessary. But we seemed to be making progress and I was looking forward to, if not energetic dirty-talking sex, then at least a kiss and a cuddle in a bed with a soft mattress.

  Sadie allowed me to hold her hand as we walked home; she didn’t protest when I stroked the back of her hand with my thumb. My attempt at a kiss went less well. Sadie stepped away from me, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, ran crying to the bedroom and slammed the door. I slunk off to the spare room and the lumpy mattress.

  Fast-forward to the following Thursday and Sadie’s office Christmas party.

  Where she gave one her colleagues a hand job.

  She tells me this at two-something a.m. after clattering through the front door and lurching into the spare room, where I’m trying to improvise a weapon out of a shoe because I think there’s a home invasion in progress. Sadie plonks herself on the edge of the bed and asks am I awake. And although I’m not entirely lucid, I smile welcomingly and throw back a corner of duvet. ‘Awake enough,’ I tell her.

  And Sadie smiles, savours the moment, then hits me with it. Not literally. She didn’t give a colleague a hand job and then use the same warm palm to smack me across the face – although the effect could have been only slightly more shocking than this bald blurting out of the horrible facts.

  ‘I’ve just given a colleague a hand job,’ she says, as if this were akin to giving him a novelty mug in her capacity as his secret Santa.

  I try to say something but it’s as if the part of my brain where I store my vocabulary has been burgled, so I sit with my mouth hanging open and try not to visualise anything. Sadie’s hair is a mess and her eyes are unfocused and her lipstick is smudged.

  ‘Do you want to kiss me now?’ Sadie asks matter-of-factly, and leans towards me.

  I brace my hands against her shoulders, angling my face away from hers. ‘Don’t be—’

  ‘Don’t be what?’ she says, slapping my hands aside and moving in again. ‘What, Tom? What shouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Sadie,’ I say, holding her off with one hand and trying to pull on my boxer shorts with the other. ‘Listen, it’s late, you’re drunk—’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pissed off my fucking face. It’s my Doctor Hyde alter-id that did it. Don’t blame me, blame the gamma rays.’

  ‘I understand,’ I say, getting up and backing out of the room. ‘Can we just . . . Let me get you some water.’

  Sadie follows me through the living room and into the kitchen. ‘Why would I want water? Where’s the fun in boring water?’

  I fill a pint glass, nevertheless, and hand it to Sadie. Which, with hindsight, and now soaking wet in my boxer shorts at two-God-knows-what in the morning in the middle of December with no heating on, clearly wasn’t too clever.

  ‘Jesus, Sadie, will you just go to bed and pass out, please.’

  ‘What? Wassamatter? Did I upset you? Have I let you down?’

  I am teeth-chatteringly cold now, and my immediate priority is to do something about it before I die, but Sadie blocks the door as I attempt to walk past her. And when I try to manhandle her out of the way, she shouts, ‘Don’t you touch me! Don’t you put your fucking hands on me.’ And now the neighbours think I’m a wife beater.

  I back away, raise one hand in a gesture of appeasement and attempt to dry myself with an already damp tea towel.

  ‘Well,’ Sadie says, ‘I suppose that makes us even, doesn’t it?’

  I should be glad that Sadie appears to be calming down, and I really should keep my mouth shut. But ‘even’?

  ‘Even! How is a hand job the same as a kiss? On what planet does you wa— does what you did make us even, Sadie?’

  ‘What you did was worse,’ she says, and all the fight has drained out of her. ‘You started it.’

  ‘And you’ve finished it, hey?’

  Sadie
puts her fingers to her eyes and drags the tears across her cheeks in twin streaks of mascara. She shrugs. ‘It’s not as if I shagged him.’

  I nod with a mixture of acknowledgement and resignation. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say, and I just want to go to bed.

  Sadie bats her eyelids. ‘Can I have another pint of water, please?’ she says in a little-girl voice.

  Despite myself, I laugh. Sadie laughs too; she laughs so much that snot bubbles out of her nose, which makes her laugh even harder and she collapses onto a chair, clutching her stomach. And then she bursts into tears.

  I take advantage of the diversion to find a dry towel and throw on a jumper and a pair of jogging bottoms. Three minutes later, I find Sadie passed out on the sofa in the living room; she’s tall but thin, and carrying her through to the bedroom requires no major heroics. Removing Sadie’s shoes and jewellery feels acceptable, but I leave her clothes. I kiss her (on the forehead) and slink back to the spare room.

  We had it all planned. Christmas with my family, Boxing Day with hers, then New Year’s Eve up a mountain. Probably the most expensive time of year for a ski trip, but it fitted around work and the idea of champagne in the snow was too romantic to resist.

  So much for romantic. With us unable even to sleep in the same bed, the idea of a week together in a cold cabin seemed more like an ordeal than an escape, but the chalet was booked and, Sadie insisted, at least one of us ought to go. I didn’t know anyone who could join me at such short notice, but Sadie had a sister who needed a holiday. Not the holiday we had planned, but it would give us both some ‘space to think’.

  After all, Christmas Eve is a lousy time to admit you’re breaking up.

  We said our goodbyes on Christmas Eve morning, me carrying presents down to the Mini, Sadie packing her salopettes into her suitcase. A hug, a kiss on the cheek, Happy Christmas, Happy New Year.

  Back at my flat on Boxing Day afternoon, the non-drop Norwegian spruce has shed most of its needles onto the floorboards, but I turn on the fairy lights, nevertheless. Well, it’s Christmas, innit? The main bedroom looks like it’s been burgled – the wardrobe doors hang agape and all of Sadie’s shoes and bags and suits and coats and dresses are gone. The chest of drawers I bought for Sadie six months ago, they loll open and empty, her various items of underwear disappeared out of our communality. Sheets, pillows and duvet are piled high and scattered wide. The white oak trunk that moved in with Sadie has vanished, leaving a square of clean in the dust at the foot of the bed. She hasn’t even left a card.

  My first thought is Good for her, and to my surprise I find myself smiling. It’s not that I’m happy; I’m quite the opposite in fact. I really did like Sadie, and I’m sad that things have ended the way they have – we’d have made good friends. But the reality is, we weren’t destined to be together forever. Probably not even for thirteen months, and while her leaving isn’t a cause for celebration, it was right and inevitable and now it’s done.

  From beneath the bed I retrieve a shoebox, in which I store a collection of photos, letters and cards. I archive this year’s Christmas cards from Dad and Bianca and go to replace the box. The lid, though, now sits an annoying two millimetres too high for the box to slide beneath the bed, and it looks like I’m at that stage in my life where I need to start a second shoebox. Fleetingly, I consider tipping the whole lot into the wastebasket, but you can bet your inheritance someone will die within five minutes of the bin men driving off. And isn’t that the real reason we hoard this semi-sentimental junk – out of guilt and fear and superstition?

  And so, instead of emptying the whole shoebox into a bin bag, I root through the concert and theatre stubs and foreign maps and currency and postcards and football medals to see if there are any items I can safely dispose of. At the bottom of the box is a red leatherette diary with the year’s date embossed across the top in gold. My parents’ idea of an exciting Christmas present for a teenage boy. It makes me smile nevertheless – a mixture of affection, embarrassment and nostalgia. The December 25th entry details my haul for that year: New Liverpool kit, Umbro goalie gloves. Batman and Robin DVD (shit film but Uma is smoking hot). Oasis, Radiohead, Björk (definitely would) CDs. Catcher in the Rye (whatever). Lynx Africa body wash and D.O.

  Boxing Day’s entry informs me that the Bond movie was Goldfinger and that Dad let me drink two cans of Foster’s lager. There is no entry for December 27th. In fact, there is only one more entry and I know exactly when it is. Friday, July 19th.

  Lost my V!!! No. 1, Trudi R. Everything × 2. 8/10.

  Not the most ingenious code, admittedly. If Mum or Dad had ever discovered my diary (hidden in the attic under a roll of fibreglass loft insulation) they would hardly have needed an Enigma machine to ascertain that I’d had sex with Trudi Roberts, twice, and that I’d given her a higher mark than my mother ever did for her English homework.

  The party was at Georgina Hollingsworth’s parents’ house, the fifth form started in a month, and I suppose we all felt pretty grown up. In less than a year we could legally buy cigarettes, have sex, sign on. In two years we could drive; in three, drink. We could hardly wait. And, like most fifteen-year-olds, we had no intention of doing so. Drinking no-frills vodka neat from the bottle and sharing a step on the hallway stairs, Trudi and I were discussing our plans for life after GCSEs. I was going to stay on for A levels, and Trudi had secured a hairdressing apprenticeship at her auntie’s salon in Chester. She said I had nice hair (which made a pleasant change from ‘Coppertop’), we discussed a few styling possibilities, and before you could say ‘flat-top’ our mouths were full of each other’s tongues. From the stairs we adjourned to a bedroom and started getting adventurous on top of a mountain of coats. Before we were able to venture too far, Trudi succumbed to altitude sickness and vomited, very coolly, into a bedside drawer. I escorted her outside for fresh air and, arms tight around each other’s waists, we strolled around the block waiting for Trudi’s nausea to subside. My inexperience and associated awkwardness seemed to swell outside the confining walls of Georgina’s house and, not knowing how to proceed but suspecting that marvellous things might occur if I did, I steered myself and Trudi towards the nearby playing fields where teenage couples grew in pairs.

  After I’ve weeded out a selection of ticket stubs and decades-old Christmas cards, I replace my diary in the shoebox and the shoebox beneath my bed. I tidy the bedroom, change the sheets, wash the dishes, vacuum the pine needles, shower, make coffee, take down the decorations and throw out the Christmas tree.

  I’ve just disposed of the Norwegian spruce when Douglas, my seventy-one-year-old downstairs neighbour, comes to his door and invites me in for a cup of tea. An Ulster Scot with a dry sense of humour and a rare vernacular, Douglas is a good man to live above. Before working as a gas engineer, he spent eight years in the army, so I’m well covered in the event of domestic emergencies involving plumbing or intruders. Plus he’s fastidious about making tea and only buys biscuits that are coated in chocolate. As we’re sipping our lapsang souchong, the old traitor casually informs me that he helped Sadie load her things into a black cab approximately fifteen minutes after I left on Christmas Eve. Suggesting she didn’t need that much space in which to think, after all. Douglas gives me a card and hot-water bottle for Christmas. ‘Well, I thought you might need it now as you’re on yer ain.’ And if it’s a joke, he tells it with a very straight face. After we finish our tea, Doug opens the Laphroaig I gave him two days ago, and we drink a toast to good health and old friends.

  Back in my own flat, warmed now by the peaty whisky, I’ve still got over an hour before I’m due to meet El.

  With nothing better to do, I slide out the shoebox from its hiding place.

  Lost my V!!! No. 1, Trudi R. Everything × 2. 8/10.

  I find a biro and beneath ‘Trudi R.’ write: No. 2, Lisa McSomething. I feel a little guilty and ever so slightly roguish that I can’t remember the full name of only my second sexual conquest. Althoug
h I have less trouble recalling the name of Number 3, Samantha Fawcett.

  And this is how I while away the remainder of Boxing Day afternoon. There are memories fond, fearful and vague. Several times I lose the thread, but certain landmarks guide me back on track. I know, for example, that my second year at university was one of my most prolific, and that during those three terms I slept with eleven women. This isn’t an achievement for which I was awarded a certificate, nor did I record the statistic in any diary. I simply know the number. I also know that I slept with fifteen women during thirteen months travelling Asia and the Antipodes, and that I scored my half-century in the room that came with the bar manager’s job at the Old Oak in Islington. And so on. And while I knew roughly how many women I’d slept with, I didn’t know exactly. Until now. Now I have a diary full of names, numbers and question marks – the sexual history of Thomas William Ferguson, aged thirty years eleven months and one week old.

  What would you think if I told you I was a virgin? Unusual for a man of my age, no? You’d probably want to know why. Was something wrong? Broken? Was I religious, or a member of some other weird cult?