What Rhymes with Bastard?

He couldn’t work out what was going on. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked, ‘but do you have a boyfriend?’

Adrenalin rushed through me – was I going to be sick? Here was the gigantic, earth-smashing moment I’d been waiting for: at last, something was going to happen! ‘Um, no,’ I replied, looking intently at my knee.

‘Right.’ He nodded.

Sharing a fondness for playgrounds, we’d go on moonlit walks in search of swings. Our favourite park not only had an on-site chip shop but a slide with a wooden Wendy house at the top. We’d climb up and shelter from the rain, chips steaming in our laps. He’d give me ‘blowbacks’ from his joints, bringing his lips perilously close to mine and stunning me into silence for moments at a time. I wasn’t into drugs, except on prescription, but it seemed the friendly thing to do. Maybe I’d learn to like them.

Finally he asked if he could kiss me.

Here was the man I would love for ever. And yet I was furious if he was still there when I woke up in daylight because I didn’t like being looked at. I thought he would notice my face and realize he’d made a mistake. But the days went by and he continued to reappear. He often came to my bed after using drugs, going to sleep at dawn and refusing to budge until well into the afternoon. The college cleaner would come in at eleven a. m and roll Jack on to the floor where he’d lie, snoring, then crawl back between clean sheets. I did my best to keep our relationship a secret, but in such circumstances it wasn’t possible.

That was about all we did for the first three weeks until, during a heavy-petting session, he asked politely to move things forward. I consented – I’d already gone on the pill. Physically, the experience was no more stimulating than my annual date with a speculum, and certainly didn’t match up to the relief and pure joy of being able to say without blushing, at long, long last, that I was a Virgo. For the entire minute and a half, all I was thinking was ‘OH, MY GOD! I’M HAVING SEX WITH A BOY!’ Next, I went to a one-on-one tutorial in which my poor professor enthused about Richard Martin’s crazed heavenly scenes.4 I couldn’t hear a word because my mind was ablaze. An internal voice shouted, ‘OH, MY GOD! I JUST FUCKED A BOY! I JUST FUCKED A BOY!’ I was so excited I almost told him.

I had a boyfriend. I had a fucking boyfriend! He was adorable, strange and polite, and delighted to have me, too. He laughed at my jokes and looked after me when I was ill. I’d set my alarm in the middle of the night so I could wake up and think, There he is. This is my boyfriend. He’s in bed with me. With me!

The sex had novelty value, but that didn’t last – we were always the same people, doing the same things in the same place. A few times Jack struggled to make things more interesting, but he was fighting a losing battle: I didn’t want anal, I liked lying down – and I wanted my home comforts, too. After a couple of scratchy incidents in North Wales and the New Forest, I vetoed outdoor sex.

Heavy Petting

You made me give you a blow-job in a field.I didn’t really want to but to ave a fuss, I kneeled.You wanted me to finish you ithout using my hands – I had to scrunch my lips up tight just like a rubber band.

As I laboured on I felt my knees get damp.Fifteen minutes into it my cheeks began to cramp. You cried out, ‘My God! Don’t stop! I’m nearly there!’ I knew the worst was coming when you grabbed hold of my hair.

OH! Heavy petting in the great outdoors, Caterpillars, ladybirds and dandelion spores, Cold and wet, no privacy, Doesn’t sound like fun to me!

You made me fuck you in among the trees, I didn’t really want to but you kept on saying, ‘Please’, Lying on a prickly patch alive with ants, I was cold and petulant without my pants.

It was over quickly but then, oh, my cries When I saw that I’d attracted half a dozen flies. Leaping up, I grabbed my clothes and drove back home, And that’s where I’ve had sex since then; preferably alone .

OH! Heavy petting in the great outdoors, Caterpillars, ladybirds and dandelion spores, Cold and wet, no privacy, Doesn’t seem like fun to me!

Hmmm, sex. I quite liked it when it was going on, but I’d always need a drink to get remotely worked up, which insulted Jack and pissed me off. I thought he was totally gorgeous, so why didn’t my body react? I put it down to inhibition and my old standby: something was wrong with me. Also, now that I was ensconced in a relationship, all the longing faded away, and sex never crossed my mind unless it was happening. It was like the jam in a doughnut – the sticky, messy bit that came wrapped in lovely sweet dough. A typical post-coital scene looked something like this:

‘Chief, where did you put my knickers?’

‘Huh?’

‘You know, sex is like violin practice: I have a hard time getting started. I can’t be bothered, and then afterwards I feel like it was worth the effort, and I’m, like, “Hmm. I should really do that more often …” So I’m sorry … Jack?’

He’d already be asleep. This kind of activity took a lot out of him, and a twenty-four-hour post-coital depression would inevitably descend.

And so, things pootled pleasantly along until he went mad. When he stopped being mad we ended up in London, like everybody else, living first in a vicarage, then on a council estate and, finally, in our own flat in a mansion block infested with homeless drug addicts. We got easy, silly jobs writing nonsense, and hung out with my friends after work. About five years on, everything was trundling along nicely, but there wasn’t much magic in the air. I was a freelance recruitment copywriter, stuck in the armpit of the advertising industry. I used my wits for the powers of evil, luring people into unappealing jobs. And, for some reason, I felt sad as soon as I had any free time. Our flat was infested with mould, insects scurried through the gaps, the electrician said we’d die if we used the shower, but the sports centre had only one hot one and that was marked ‘disabled’. The day a disabled person banged on the door, I realized I’d had it with London. I walked back through the frost, marched into the bedroom and shoved Jack’s toe.

‘Chief,’ I said, ‘wake up. I want to get married.’

I had a plan: we’d go to San Francisco and ride the dot-com boom with our friends Tim and Tina (T&T). My friend Ben handled fish-fingers and sanitary towels at a fancy product agency in Soho: if I wanted a sexy job like that, I knew I had to move to where the economy was exploding. The Great Move would also salve my travel complex. The Brontës had done OK stuck in Yorkshire; my grandparents would never have left Scotland even if they’d had the chance; my parents thought going to France was an adventure. But expectations had changed, and my lack of international experience had become a source of embarrassment. By the time my thirtieth birthday was just visible with the naked eye, if you squinted hard at the horizon, it seemed I’d missed the boat, the bus and the plane. I was surrounded by well-travelled friends with great photo collections, and all I’d notched up were several trips to Europe, mostly gloom-laden, including a waterlogged French hitch-hiking trip that tor salesman – had taken to waking me up by stroking my forearm. He followed me to Boston airport and sent love-letters for months, culmintriggered my worst cold sores ever. I’d also spent three weeks with a youth orchestra in New England, where my host – a forty-seven-year-old refrigeraating in an offer to leave his wife. ‘Abroad’ seemed a dangerous place. I didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wished I’d already been.

But if I lived abroad, it wouldn’t be ‘abroad’ any more. What I needed was a Significant Change of Address.

Jack agreed to my proposal. I would now be officially, legally secure. ‘Chief,’ I said, ‘I really like belonging to someone, don’t you? Chief?’

‘Mmmm.’

I was surprised that the M-word tasted so delicious. We were being very pragmatic about it, but we did love each other, and … well, I glowed when I thought about it. It would have been nice if Jack had asked me, but I felt honoured to be licensed to reproduce with a man of such noble bearing: with his perfect skin, vision and teeth, and no allergies, he was in the fast lane of the gene pool.

We visited my parents to break the good news. They were delighted by the M-word. ‘Marriage is a promotion for any woman!’ beamed Dad, who wrote a cheque for a thousand pounds on the spot.

Mum was equally unequivocal: ‘Congratulations!’

I was glad that she wasn’t upset – but why the hell wasn’t she upset? Her only daughter, her closest friend and confidante, the only person she could argue with properly, was moving to the other side of the world. ‘Congratulations’?

The next day, I found her weeping in the downstairs loo. I put my arm round her shoulders. ‘What’s wrong, Mum?’

‘Nothing, darling.’ She sniffed. ‘Mother’s all right.’

‘Are you upset about me going away?’

‘Oh, my darling, I didn’t want you to see me like this. I’m going to miss you, of course, but this is a marvellous opportunity for you both and Mother wants the very best for you. You go for it, my darling!’ Sniff.

‘I don’t want you to be sad, Mum.’ I knew she would be, though. I was about to embark upon a grand, transatlantic guilt trip.

Sadly, Jack wasn’t so keen on the sentimentality. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, one day, ‘this wedding, it’s sort of lying.’

‘S’pose so,’ I muttered.

‘Isn’t it, Lins?’

I staunched the hurt with practicalities. ‘Do you want to return all the cheques, then?’

Two months later, Jack and I flew out to see if we liked San Francisco. We stayed with T&T, my dot-com friends. The sun was shining, and there was an English grocery opposite, so we gave it the thumbs-up and booked a wedding for Friday afternoon. Though Mum had initially been upset about me getting married overseas, threatening to book flights for the whole family, 5,500 miles proved an effective deterrent. I couldn’t see myself playing the princess in a family drama: I didn’t look the part, and we hated being together, so what was the point of all that razzmatazz and expense? My dad wasn’t arguing. So, the day after I turned twenty-seven, Jack and I tied the knot in a sweet and minimal way, witnessed by T&T, plus a party of Japanese schoolchildren on a guided tour about seismic retro-fitting. You don’t get City Hall to yourself for nineteen dollars.

We dressed up for the occasion: I wore Miss New Zealand’s dress from the finals of Miss Universe 19895 and Jack teamed a suit with a partridge tie. And the glamour didn’t end there: our wedding night was spent in the luxury suite of the Santa Cruz Econolodge (eighty-three dollars, plus tax), with our two friends. After dinner, we smuggled three bottles of champagne into the hotel pool, splashing ourselves silly then weaving back to the suite, where Jack fell headlong into the master bedroom. I climbed on to the couch with T&T, who had switched on the Shopping Channel. ‘What are you doing, Lins?’ Tim grinned. ‘You should be getting in there!’

‘He was talking about consummation,’ I muttered, and Tina passed me a cushion. Soon the peaceful snores of my new/old husband were wafting through the plasterboard partition and I left my friends to their fat-busting machines and limited-edition hand-painted porcelain dolls.

‘Goodnight.’

A couple of days later Jack and I flew back to London and started the visa-application process. After nine months of tedium, the US Embassy told us that, while our massive stack of paperwork was in order, I couldn’t have a Green Card unless Jack had a US address and a job that paid more than $22,000 a year. While he sorted that out, I had to stay in the UK.

Separation was a daunting prospect, but I was determined not to give up. I told Jack when to resign from his London job, booked his flight, gave notice on the flat, and made plans to stay with friends for a couple of weeks while he picked up a job in the US.

Then he had flown away to become my stars-and-stripes-crossed lover. Every few days he’d call me. Our conversations were always the same.

‘I miss you, Bun.’

‘I miss you, too.’

‘I wish you were here, Bun.’

‘I wish I was, too.’

‘I miss making love with you, Bun.’

‘I miss, um, you, too.’

1 High Barnet police are notorious for their poor taste in literature.

2 I have calculated that, over the years, I have spent around 250 hours waiting for Jack in similar circumstances.

3 Stages 2 and 3 were facilitated by constant marijuana use, which left no money for food – hence the kitchen ‘borrowing’.

4 Richard Martin painted bizarre bombastic biblical epics full of clouds, angels, devils and ecstatic ascents to heaven.

5 I had inadvertently befriended a beauty queen.

2: Them and Us

‘There are a lot of idiots in this world.’

Mum

‘Hi, Linda …’s Jack! ’S OK… I’ve prob’ly godda place …’s OK, m’Bun. Carn talkboudit now …’s OK, luv you!’

Jack had been in San Francisco for three months when he found a place. It was a depressing shit-hole full of annoying clowns, but it was his. That filthy den was to be the perfect backdrop to our decaying love.

When, after a long and increasingly desperate search, he got a job, I was legally able to join him. I had to have three vaccinations, an AIDS test and a TB X-ray; I got the all-clear. I got on the plane, off the plane, on another plane, and seventeen hours later, stumbled into San Francisco airport, laden with musical instruments and ready for my new life in the sun.

As I rolled my luggage cart through the double doors, I saw my long-lost husband leaning against a pillar, wearing a familiar brown shirt and a gentle smile. ‘Hello!’ he said. We shared a hug and lots of little kisses, and he steered us to the taxi rank, one arm round me, the other on my luggage mountain.

I’d played out this moment endlessly in my mind, complete with trumpet fanfare and fireworks, but now that it was real, it felt strangely normal to see him. I checked, and he felt the same way. How could it be so prosaic? I plumped for an answer that felt good: ‘I think we’re back where we belong, Chief, so why should it be exciting to come home?’

He tightened his grip on my shoulders. ‘That’s right, Bun.’

I was in our bedroom, unpacking my accordion. ‘Listen to this!’ I launched into a halting rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’.

‘That’s great, Bun! Can we have sex now?’

‘Don’t you want to hear “Over the Waves”? I can almost do it without stopping.’

‘I’ve got vodka in the freezer!’ He ran off to get me a shot, then proffered it across my heaving bellows. I stopped playing, unstrapped myself and drank up. It felt good to be held again. Oh, yes! I thought. Sex is nice, isn’t it? Why did I always forget?

‘Oh, my Bun,’ sighed Jack afterwards, drifting into a sleepy miasma. ‘It’s so great to have you back. I can’t wait to show you off to everyone tomorrow.’

I lay beside him in the dark, wide awake. Fuck. I was here. I’d made it all happen. The car engine had stopped, but this time the melancholy of arrival was tinged with wicked relief, as if I’d avoided cleaning up after a wild party by running away at dawn. Now I couldn’t look after Mum.

The next morning I began to meet my new housemates. Let’s start at the front of the house and work our way back.

Main bedroom

In the bed

Name: Kyle

Age: 25

Appearance: pulled-up knee socks with shorts

Philosophy: evangelical Christian

Source: Texas

Occupation: art student

Manner: silent but creepy

Liked:

 picking up short women and throwing them on to soft surfaces.

 lube samples.

 painting dark splodges evocative of unbearable suffering.

 tinned pears.

 sniggering about boobs after dark

On the floor

Name: Mike

Age: 42

Appearance: short, fat and hairy

Philosophy: evangelical Christian (same church)

Source: Texas (same town)

Occupation: sound engineer for touring production of Les Misérables

Manner: jovial

Liked:

 curry.

 snoring.

 large boobs

Back bedroom (back half of the double parlour. In auditory terms, the same room)

Name: Jack

Age: 25

Appearance: tall, handsome, etc.

Philosophy: BA/it rains for a reason

Source: Wales and America

Occupation: copywriter/misanthropic poet

Manner: plodding, well-intentioned

Liked:

 dogs

 British punk music 1978–83.

 anal sex (aspirationally).

 vodka (liberally).

 cigarettes (nostalgically).

 me (emphatically)

Bathroom

Well-established conurbations of four billion-plus, devastated by surprise attack of UK origin

Hallway

Name: Tova

Age: 24

Appearance: travelling girl

Philosophy: I want therefore I get

Source: Canada

Occupation: boat-hand/self-promoter

Manner: upfront and annoying

Liked:

 sex.

 travelling.

 talking about sex and travelling.

 rice.

 yoga.

 shouting in Spanish to her boyfriend, (who emerged, cockroach-style, as soon as she’d secured the ‘room’)

Name: Chico

Age: 34

Appearance: small, brown, hardened

Philosophy: Tova wants, therefore I get it for her

Source: Chile

Occupation: boat-hand and burger-flipper

Manner: benign or confused, maybe both

Liked:

 sex.

 travelling.

 rice.

 yoga.

 his sister (they’d recently ended a long-term, live-in relationship)

Kitchen

Name: The miserable boy who lives in the kitchen

Age: c. 20

Appearance: lank

Philosophy: why?

Source: America

Occupation: lying on the couch reading academic books about torture, death, prostitution

Manner: limp

Liked:

 fraternizing with the landlord’s arch enemy, which led to him being punched in the face, thrown out of the kitchen and chased up the street by the landlord, who was driving a truck

Utility nook

Name: Richard

Age: 28

Appearance: fuzz-headed loon with too many teeth

Philosophy: whatever, dude!

Source: Oregon

Occupation: skateboarder, thief

Manner: insane

Liked:

 skateboarding

 TV

 pizza.

 a sixteen-year-old girl whom he had to return – drunk, unconscious and splattered with her own vomit – to her grandmother.

 yelling inanities

Our ‘landlord’ was also an official resident, and the most interesting of the lot. He was one of many parasitical entrepreneurs shot to power by the dot-com boom. As people fought for space and rents tripled, he moved in with his girlfriend and illegally sublet his dingy flat to the drifters, thieves and unemployed copywriters no one else wanted. It was a sort of for-profit charity. To ward off the usual avalanche of responses, he posted vacancy ads like this:

Small hallway available No Christians

The place was full of his crap, and every so often he popped ‘home’ to fuss about bills and pick up a volume of intellectual erotica. He’d caused a scandal at the art college with a performance piece involving an enema – a quick Google told me he’d found a student volunteer, got him to sign a waiver, tied him up, extracted shit from the volunteer’s backside, and then from his own, exchanged the faecal matter using an enema, fellated the volunteer and exited to a smattering of polite applause. Next he was expelled, and six months later he was still recoiling from the shock.

‘Honestly, Linda,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘he was into it at the time!’

I put down my sandwich. ‘Who was?’

‘That bastard kid!’

‘You mean the one you did the enema stuff to?’

‘Yeah! But when the story went national, they all changed their tune. He lodged a formal complaint against me, coz he was afraid of lookin’ like a pervert! Some sponsor got antsy so they used me as a scapegoat. They banned me from campus! I feel kind of betrayed, you know?’

The affair had turned him to drink, but it was hard to tell, as he claimed to be a professional wine-taster. Surrounded by charts of Italian grape regions, empty wine crates and magazine racks bulging with copies of Connoisseur, he liked to shoogle a huge wine glass, saying, ‘Mmmm …’ In fact, his experience was limited to two months on the till at Quoit Liquors, and he was currently unemployed. His identity in crisis, he made a big deal of his friendship with Steve Labash, a performance artist and high priest in the Church of Satan, whose best-known protest piece involved him being naked with a bottle of whisky:

1 Smash the neck off a whisky bottle.

2 Slash your skin with the raw edge.

3 Pour the rest of the whisky over your wounds.

But all the enemas, devil-worship and lit-porn in the world couldn’t conceal his darkest secret: he was nice.

A card had already arrived from home.

Dear Linda, just your old mum writing to say hello. I found

this postcard from when we were in the Isle of Wight – Dadtripped up in the mud, remember? Look after yourself, mydarling; I’ve got to run to catch the post, lots of love,Mum XXX

Back in the present, things weren’t so sweet. Jack would leave for work every morning, and I’d have a lonely day to fill. By late afternoon, I might have visited the ironmonger’s three times – it’s amazing how many things you don’t realize you need until you’re really bored. I was becoming a familiar face to the strange man behind the counter. ‘Your total is sixteen-oh-nine!’ He beamed. ‘I love your accent. Australia, right?’

I reached for my rubber-footed cheese-grater. ‘England.’

‘Well, close, eh?’

‘Not really.’

‘English, eh? There are some great Irish bars around here. We should go out for a drink some time.’

‘Mm … yeah.’ I looked down into my purse. I wasn’t used to this kind of talk. I’d never been on a date.

‘Yeah,’ he pressed on, ‘like Jimmy Foley’s and the Green Giant. You know them?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, see you!’

As soon as I was out of the door, I broke into a run. This meant I couldn’t go into the hardware shop any more. Damn it. I was so bored it seemed like a loss. This wasn’t how I’d envisaged the Golden State. The laws of gravity still applied: it was just plain old reality, minus my friends. Admittedly, the weather was better, and I found all kinds of reasons to go outside. I walked up and down perilously tilted pavements, each block affording me another fabulous sea-andsky-filled view, buildings tumbling together, nestling in valleys and skimming hilltops as though they were on the crest of a wave. The air was warm and breezy, rich with ions, and its touch on my skin was a pleasure. On cloudy days the locals moaned, while I gasped at the mist – chunks of cloud suspended in the air like scenery in a divine school play. But however beautiful my surroundings, I didn’t belong there.