Sixteen, Sixty-One

I mulled over this for a moment, and then asked, ‘How many?’

‘Excuse me?’ He raised one caterpillar eyebrow.

‘Sorry, you don’t have to tell me,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m just curious how many women you’ve “needed”?’

‘In my whole life?’ he chuckled. ‘Annabelle asked me that once and made me count. I think it was sixty-three.’

‘You’re lying!’ I choked. ‘That’s ridiculous. It’s probably impossible.’

‘I wish it was,’ he sighed. ‘Sadly, there have only been a few I really cared about. For some, I can’t even remember their names.’

Over the coming weeks, in between philosophical discussions about art and Uncles and gossipy chats about next-door’s decision to cut down the oak tree, Matthew told me about the women in his life.

‘I used to have to sneak girls past the witch I lodged with. We tried every trick in the book. As far as she knew, I had seven sisters who would each visit me on a different night of the week. Stupid old bag!’

I knew it was weird being told these stories, but I enjoyed them. I imagined them as scenes from black-and-white movies flickering through my mind and tried to work out what my silver-haired friend must have been like as a young man.

‘Sometimes, if I liked a girl, I’d treat her to a hotel room. But in those days they wouldn’t let just anyone into hotels, so you had to pretend to have just got married or, if the manager had a heart, you could make up some sob story about her dad being out to get you but you just being a nice lad after all.’

‘My friend Thomas had this plan to put a mattress in the back of his van, but I think it got him more slaps than shags.’

‘I once kissed three generations of the same family. I was in love with Mrs Shelby when I was six and she gave me a kiss after the school play, then later I dated her daughter Jenny, and when she got too old and grey, I took out her daughter Rose.’

‘Jocelyn was an actress. She never had a penny, but her breasts were magnificent.’

‘Linda was a secretary and used to steal office supplies for me, so I could work from my flat. I hated going into Fleet Street; drinking was the only thing that made it bearable.’

‘Amy was fun; she didn’t mind doing it outside or in the car.’

‘Julie almost killed me. She came to pick me up from work so we could go to the pictures, but what I didn’t know was that she’d found out I was going with her flatmate too. Everything seemed normal and she stayed quiet as I chatted about my day, until she turned onto the motorway and just kept accelerating until we were going 120mph and I was clutching the door handle for dear life.’

‘Kate was beautiful, but she peed herself when she had an orgasm. I could never get into that.’

‘Elizabeth and I used to eat at the best restaurants, and then run out without paying. It put us on such a high. But she always fancied my friend more than me.’

‘Lucy wanted to marry me.’

‘Irene did marry me: trapped me into it by getting pregnant. I was still in Norfolk in those days and you couldn’t run out on a girl in farm country. It was different in the city. I liked the city.’

‘Marie – Annabelle’s friend whom I was seeing before her – was utterly neurotic. The stupid cow used to cry after sex and then insist on cooking me bacon and eggs, even in the middle of the night.’

After hearing these tales, when the teapot was cold or empty and Annabelle was making quiet fumbling noises in the hall – indicating she wanted some attention now – I would stumble onto the street and stare bewilderedly at the pavement I had plodded so many times before. I imagined the seven-year-old me, clad in a gingham dress and kicking stones with sensible shoes, and I wondered how she and I were still in the same place, how I could know so much now, yet still have to pretend to be the same little girl living the same little life in the same little town.

One day Matthew played me a Leonard Cohen album and began speaking in a much more serious tone.

‘Of course, what I was looking for yet was afraid to find all those years was what I had right at the beginning. When I went to university, my family made a big deal about it because I was the first one of us not to work on the farm. I wanted to go to Oxford, of course, but I failed my Latin, so Exeter it was. I was reading English Literature and rushed to join the department paper, to set up a John Donne society and to establish the best way to sneak books past the librarians. I was so innocent then, hardly thinking about girls.

‘Suzanne was in one of my lectures. She was from Paris and wore only black. All the boys were in love with her, but for some reason she came over to speak to me. I bought her a hot chocolate at a café and she took me back to meet her flatmate Marie-Anne.’

I noticed with something approaching panic that a tear had dribbled from Matthew’s eyeball.

‘We had from November to June together and it was perfect. The three of us lived in harmony: Marie-Anne and I both totally in love with Suzanne and loving each other for our mutual predicament. I would watch Suzanne spread out on the bed on spring afternoons, reading poetry aloud as Marie-Anne ran a razor ever so gently over her pubic bone, then softly kissed the raw skin.

‘But that upstart Mickey Robinson decided to publish something in the campus paper about our ménage à trois as he called it. It was the biggest scandal of the term and I was hauled into the Dean’s office. He was so embarrassed he couldn’t even look me in the face when he told me I was being sent down. Suzanne’s parents were informed and she was summoned back to France before any of us could say goodbye. But it was Marie-Anne who took it the worst.’

He was crying fully now and, borrowing a gesture learnt from films rather than life, I walked over to his chair and wrapped my skinny arms over his shoulders.

‘What happened to Marie-Anne?’ I asked softly.

‘She hanged herself in our flat. The landlady found her. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the funeral.’

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I learnt about Suzanne and the others, before I’d committed too fully to my second life, Matthew and I had to organise my Bunbury.

‘It’s regrettable, but I think it would be safest if we offered your mother a reason for you to come here so often.’

‘What sort of reason?’

‘Well, perhaps you could work for me. I’ll employ you to sort my books and maybe put my horseracing accounts on the computer. How about that?’

I’d never thought about what Matthew ‘did’. I knew he’d once been a journalist and was vaguely aware he now made money offering betting tips to a mysterious collection of ‘clients’, but generally I imagined he spent his days reading poetry and waiting for my visits. In contrast to my workaholic parents, Matthew’s life was so theoretical and luxurious that the concept of him sat in front of a computer concentrating on paid employment was almost laughable.

‘I really could do with sorting through my books – both the horsing ones, and these,’ he said, brushing his hand over an old edition of To the Lighthouse. ‘I’d like them in order throughout the house. We could do it together and drink cups of tea and discuss the dead poets as we go. As far as your mother’s concerned, you’d just be earning a bit of pocket money helping out a scatterbrained old gambler.’

Thus I began ‘working’ for Matthew. The legitimacy of this work was never clear; sometimes he would thrust a small amount of money into my hand as a kind of payment ‘to show Mummy’, but most of the time I just spent my Saturday and Sunday afternoons reclining on his chaise longue reading scraps of verse from the anthologies we were meant to be alphabetising.

Sometimes I felt a pang of guilt when I returned home and my mum asked me how the afternoon had gone, if we’d got much done. But mostly I rationalised that it wasn’t a lie as such and, anyway, such measures were only necessary because she and everyone else who thought it odd for a teenager to spend so much time with a sexagenarian were so steeped in the dismal unreality of the world they couldn’t see the true beauty of friendship. Besides, Matthew was adept at sensing my angst and, whenever I began to slip too far into the vicinity of guilt and shame, I would find an email waiting in my inbox, pulling me back to the beautiful world of literature and poetry:

From: Matthew Wright

To: Natalie Lucas

Sent: 12 July 2000, 08:27:31

Subject: Your worries

I know you struggle with the lies, but never forget what is real. You feel guilty about your Ma, who herself feels guilty about you and her Ma and all of the world, simply because she’s trying too hard. She can’t see the beauty.

But you, my angel (my Uncle), can. And that is a gift (for me as well as you).

Edmond Rostand said: ‘The dream alone is of interest.’

So, my darling, let us dream.

MW

*

About halfway through the summer, just after my sixteenth birthday, we began discussing love. We read the Romantics, then moved on to Whitman and finally picked up some collections by Leonard Cohen. I liked the singsong neatness of Blake and the hallmark sentiments of Burns, but Matthew would always reach for Leaves of Grass or mumble the lyrics to ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’.

We discussed unrequited, inexpressible and forbidden love; we talked about communities running people out of town, countries stoning women for infidelity and religions turning their backs on faithful worshippers. We watched The Wicker Man and flicked through the writings of the Marquis de Sade. We reread extracts from Brave New World and talked about the concept of everyone ‘belonging’ to one another. He told me monogamy was just as abstract an idea as polygamy and we discussed his relationship with Annabelle once more. We talked about the line between friendship and love, about why the world has to be so blind to the possibilities of their overlap. Sometime in late August, Matthew told me he loved me and I wrote in my diary that he was not being improper.

A lingering hug became our ritual goodbye. Back in my bedroom I would miss his arms and want the safe feeling of being enveloped by a true friend. We swapped ‘I love you’s in emails and notes through the letterbox. We knew the others wouldn’t understand, but we also knew that it was true and innocent.

My Bunbury evolved so that once I returned to school to begin the sixth form I had permanent employment archiving Matthew’s racing tips at the weekends. I never went near his computer, but sometimes he’d tell me about reading the form and calculating probabilities so I could blag my way through knowing about gambling. Through a slow accumulation of half-truths and almost-lies, Matthew and I constructed a wall around our friendship that allowed us to spend intense afternoons discussing Uncles, love and poetry. The neighbours, my parents and his in-laws ceased raising their eyebrows and gradually came to expect us to sit together at parties, to dawdle behind or step out ahead on Sunday afternoon walks and to be found together when we were nowhere else.

My diary during that time was a scruffy composition book I’d covered with an angsty painting on squared graph paper. I’d bought it as I walked through the town one Thursday in Year 11 after Josephine Cuthbert had taunted me about my crush on Adam Hound and my brother had poked me in the arm for the duration of our bus ride.

Arriving home, I’d slammed the front door and ran up to my room at the top of my house. I’d spread my paints and brushes over the floor and began making crude, angry marks. After a while, my mum had knocked tentatively at the door. She asked what was wrong and listened sympathetically for a while as I sobbed and tried to describe the hideous impossibility of school and life and myself.

When I paused to hiccup my breath, she glanced towards the window, sighed, and said, ‘Well, I’m sure it will get better. It could be a lot worse – at least you have food on your plate. Dinner will be at seven.’

She left and I grabbed a pen. My first entry looked like this:

21/03/2000

‘Maybe it’s not the school,’ she said. ‘It’s happened before.’ Does she think I don’t know that? Does she think that every day I don’t wish I could fit in, just lazily walk into school and be greeted by a few proper friends instead of worrying who I’m going to burden myself with next?! I hate it. I hate school. I know I’ve never really been able to settle down with good friends, not at primary school either, but I just think that if I reinvent myself one more time then maybe someone will like me. And sixth form is different. If I could just switch schools one more time I shouldn’t get so much of the ‘keen bean’ stuff. It’s only a week until the end of term, thank God. Maybe I’ll make it.

Why the hell am I writing this crap? I hate diaries. They’re pointless and I always write in them for a month or two and then stop. It’ll probably be the way of this one. I just don’t get the point of writing something no one is ever going to read. But then it scares me to rely on memories. I don’t want to forget things, especially not the bad stuff, because that’s what reminds you not to live in the past but the present.

I don’t think I live in either, though. Half the time I seem to be daydreaming: thinking, scheming, planning. And then when I wake up it all hits me again and I get a great wave of depression at the sorry facts of my life.

You probably want to slap me right now. I would. I mean, there are starving kids in Africa and I’m complaining that I have no friends! Not really comparable, I know. My mum says I’m self-indulgent. She cries a lot of the time too, though. I just have issues, you could call it paranoia (is it ‘io’?). I mean, I always find I don’t trust people. Why should I? I don’t trust myself even. I’m two-faced and I lie, so how can I expect all the other girls not to be bitching behind my back? I can’t stand myself. I cringe as I say things and I hate being shy. I hate the way I go red and my eyes fill up with water at the slightest things. I hate biting my nails, I hate how people intimidate me just because they don’t hate themselves. I don’t hate the way I look all the time, but I’m forever wishing I was someone else.

*

By the time Matthew got his hands on my diary, there were many pages of similar complaints about my mother, school, nobody understanding me and the black bags under my eyes. But there were a couple of other things that made me hesitate when he gently asked to read my thoughts.

‘I want to know you inside out.’

‘I know you’re writing it because you want to be read, so why not let me?’

‘It would be the most intimate act imaginable.’

Firstly, of course, I worried because by this time he featured quite extensively. There was probably nothing in there I wouldn’t say to his face given we’d developed such an open form of conversation, but still, what would it be like to have him see things like this in ink:

14/08/00

The only Uncle I have is Matthew, who is four times my age. It scares me because I’ve become quite dependent on him but he’s going to leave me. Be it death or moving to Bournemouth like Annabelle’s always talking about or me going off to university, he’s not always going to be here and that makes me want to weep.

22/08/00

Of course, I wouldn’t go there. Yuk. I can’t believe my mind just came up with that. He’s just my best friend and I’m looking for a father figure. It must be all those French films we’re watching.

29/08/00

I can’t help it. I was in the chemist’s the other day and the woman in front looked ancient. She had a prescription three pages long. I looked over her shoulder and read her date of birth. 1926. She was 74. All I could think was that, when I’m thirty, that’ll be Matthew. He’ll turn seventy the same year I’m twenty-six.

The second thing that I worried would set my diary apart from any other sixteen-year-old’s Matthew happened to read was the confession that had made one of my ex-boyfriends, Todd, exclaim, ‘Oh God, you’re just confused. Every girl I’ve ever met says that. Get over it, you’re not a lesbian!’ I didn’t know if I was a lesbian or not, but after the incident with Todd I stopped admitting seriously to friends that I thought I might like girls. I did, however, scrawl lines and lines about my concerns and ventured tentative explorations behind the mask of alcohol.

22/03/00

I figured out why I’m writing a diary. It’s because I watched Girl, Interrupted (my favourite film, along with American Beauty and The Virgin Suicides) and she writes a diary in that. I guess I thought it might help me figure out some of my feelings. Watching that film again was really scary. It’s about a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder and the scary bit is I could relate to everything she said: all about not fitting in, not being listened to, not being able to just accept life and finding it easier to live in a fantasy land. The only thing I didn’t really relate to was the whole promiscuous thing – still being a virgin and all. But even that’s quite shady because I think that if I had the confidence, I may be promiscuous. I keep thinking about shagging some random girl. I don’t even know how it would work but I look at Jenna and Claire and Becky in class and I just want to press my lips onto theirs. Sometimes I worry they can see my thoughts, so I tell them I was thinking about Juan, this fit new Spanish guy in my tutor group. But, truth is, I’m far more interested in the lesbian thing. I heard some girls in the year below got really drunk last Saturday and all took each other’s tops off and had an orgy. All the girls in the toilets squealed with horror and said to keep away from them in PE in case they perved on us, but I just wanted to ask who they were and how I could make friends. Am I a freak?

*

Matthew had asked me ages ago whether I kept a diary and what security measures I had to prevent my brother and parents from reading it. He’d also asked in a teasing tone what secrets I recorded there and whether I kept secrets from him. For a few weeks I’d been entertaining the idea of letting him see it, of allowing another person to read me. I’d read and reread my own hand, wondering what Matthew might make of it: would he be shocked by my curiosities about my sexuality? Would he laugh at my immaturity? Would he think I was a bad daughter because I wrote angrily about my mother? Would he realise I was a loser with no friends at school and not want to spend time with me any more? Would he be offended by my thoughts about him? Would he still like me?

Eventually these doubts were outweighed by the heavy desire to be known: for a single person in the world to understand all that was in my head and help me work it out. One Sunday, after we’d had tea and chatted about Emily Dickinson, I removed the tatty book from my backpack and, with a trembling hand, offered it to Matthew. I paced miserably home and woke a dozen times in the night wondering if I had an email from him.

The next day, Matthew hung my diary from our doorknob in a plastic Safeway’s bag, along with two other items. The first was a new, spiral-bound, orange-flowered notebook; the second, a palm-sized engraved metal shape that Google later informed me was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol for immortality. My immediate concern, though, was the printed page wrapped around the object:

Extract from The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

The ordinary mortal in our urban civilisation moves virtually all his life on the Trivial Plane.

You are not ordinary, Natalie.

I saw Matthew a few hours later and all seemed normal, but as he poured me a cup of tea he asked nonchalantly, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were wondering about such things?’

I looked at him blankly.

‘It’s perfectly natural. In fact, it’s essential for Uncles to be open to love in any possible form. Most people go through their lives too afraid to admit their desires; they lock them up and only let out what their mummies say is okay, then end up in dead-end marriages having sex twice a year and finding their wives have been having an affair with the gardener.’

I giggled at his wild, angry gesticulations.

‘Your friends at school are just threatened by your insight. They probably go home and masturbate over you, wishing they had the guts to follow through.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ I smiled. ‘But is it okay then? Is it normal?’

‘Why on earth would you want to be normal?’ he chided. ‘But of course it’s okay for you, it’s what you feel. It’s exciting.’

There wasn’t a day that innocence turned to deception and friendship to seduction. The declarations of love and the poetry we were reading lent themselves to hypothetical discussions about erotic possibilities, but they began in the abstract.

‘If society is so wrong that it forbids a perfectly healthy friendship between an old man and a young girl,’ I’d ask, ‘how can we be sure that everything else it deems “wrong” isn’t just as natural?’

‘Exactly,’ Matthew would grin. ‘The machine is there to perpetuate itself, not to protect us. You must find your own rules.’

‘But it’s absurd that a society it doesn’t affect in the slightest condemns it so forcefully. What difference does it make to Mrs Roberts and my mum and Pat down the road whether you’re my best friend and I want to tell you I love you?’

‘None.’

‘And obviously I don’t, but what difference would it make if I wanted that to be romantic love? As long as it made you and me happy and Annabelle was not hurt by it, who else could it possibly affect?’

‘No one.’

‘And it makes you wonder what else we’re being conditioned to disapprove of. Why is euthanasia banned? Why is bigamy illegal? Why can’t tribes live as they want? Homosexuals get married? Lesbians adopt? Prostitutes work in the open and couples swing?’

‘Because true freedom is too much for most people. Only Uncles realise the true possibilities of love and life. And sadly it means they must spend their lives fighting against society just to stay alive.’

By mid-September, we’d all but given up on sorting books. Instead, we’d carry a tray of tea and Eccles cakes into his study and close the door. We’d sit sideways on the chaise and I’d snuggle into his arm while cradling a cup in two hands. Being cuddled by Matthew was my favourite thing and I conveniently ignored the occasional slip of his hand or sniff of my hair.

Sometimes, if we were having an impassioned debate about literature or the world, our faces would get close, our eyes locked together in intensity. One day, his argument trailed off and I thought I must have won my point, but his face remained close and my eyes couldn’t turn away. I felt something tingle in my throat and shoulders. I had a sensation like pressing a bruise and became strangely aware of my sandalled toes. Was it my imagination, or was his face inching closer, were his eyelids drooping closed?

I pulled away and straightened my T-shirt.

Matthew reached for his mug and sat back, smiling.

‘You almost let me kiss you then.’

‘No I didn’t!’ I blurted out, then blushed.

Matthew sipped his tea and muttered, ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’ before replacing his cup and asking what time I’d be able to come tomorrow.

The scene of the almost-kiss was repeated a few days later on the couch in the living room and again over the table in the kitchen. Each time, I allowed myself to indulge that dizzying feeling for a moment longer; smelling his musky cologne and studying his wrinkled lips; tasting and enjoying the unknown before being plunged into the confusing rapids of shame and regret.