Case Histories - Страница 35

Perhaps more curious than the fact that there was no one who wanted Amelia was that she, in turn, wanted no one – apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of "unattainable." Even Sylvia wasn't a virgin. She slept with dozens of boys before her "conversion." And if Sylvia could find boyfriends – Sylvia, who had grown into an ugly duck, not a swan – then why couldn't Amelia? For the longest time Amelia waited for someone to appear who would make her heart race and her brain fog and her intellect crumble and when it didn't happen she thought perhaps she had been intended by nature to be celibate, that she should rejoice (privately anyway) in this vestal state and rather than fretting about her unbroken hymen she should see it as a trophy unattainable to mere mortal men. (A dubious kind of prize, admittedly.)

She would die a noble virgin queen, a new Gloriana. This was during a period when she was having a kind of breakdown – mostly to do with the impossibility of "communicating" with the brickies and slaters and hairdressers and partly to do with the utter futility of life (although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time) – and then, just when she was at her weakest and most vulnerable, Andrew Vardy said to her, "You know, Amelia, if you ever want to have sex, I'd be happy to oblige." Just like that – as if she were a cow that needed servicing, or a virgin who needed deflowering. Could he tell she was intact by looking at her, that her maidenhead was unbroken? How much nicer all those old terms were. What would the slaters say? "Popping your cherry." They probably didn't even know any virgins. And they didn't have any decent terms for sex, all they did was "shag" (every hour God gave them, from the sound of it). And the girls just the same.

She had taken a maidenhead fern in to college, to brighten the godless gloom of the staff room, a cutting she had taken from a plant belonging to Philip, the downstairs neighbor with the Pekingese. Someone, some sleazy old duffer who behaved as if the staff room were the library of a London gentleman's club, said, "Ah, some of these old English terms for plants, wonderfully venereal, maidenhead fern, a virgin's pubes – what could be more delicious?" which elicited sniggering from several people (including women, for heaven's sake, didn't they know any better?). Amelia would have liked to break the plant pot over his head. "And the cuckoopint," he persisted, "sounds innocent, doesn't it, but 'pint' is short for 'pintle' or 'penis'!" How would he feel if she chopped his off? That would shut him up. She busied herself with books as if she had a class to teach, which she didn't, and tried to pretend that her face wasn't the deep crimson shade of shame and humiliation. Thankfully, the plant soon withered and died and Amelia refused to see that as metaphorical in any way but when Andrew Vardy made his overture a few weeks later she surprised herself with her response.

Nowadays, when she viewed Andrew Vardy across the jaded. Cup-A-Soup scented air of the staff room, she felt completely baffled as to why she would ever have – vile to remember – got naked with him, let alone conjoin intimate, delicate parts of her anatomy with his ugly, goosefleshed ones. The only man she'd ever had and he wasn't even remotely good looking. His skin was pitted and pinched by ancient acne and he had a little gay mustache that his wife should have told him to get rid of. He wasn't gay, not at all, he was a Catholic and had five children and he was on the short side, in fact he was slightly shorter than Amelia, but he could be funny, and, dear God, that was something, and for two years they had shared cynical little exchanges over coffee and the occasional longer, more philosophical conversation during one of the college cafeteria's atrocious lunches. Andrew was a skinflint (he had five children, after all, he said) and only offered to pay for Amelia on the days when the first-year hotel management students had to cook and serve a three-course lunch at half the normal price (because the risk of dying from food poisoning was twice as high).

Amelia was flattered by the fact that Andrew Vardy enjoyed her company, because no one else seemed to, and so it was that when, at the fag end of a wearisome day, when they were the last two people left in the staff room, and he spoke his honeyed words of seduction (to recap – "You know, Amelia, if you ever want to have sex, I'd be happy to oblige"), she had thought, yes, why not?

Not right away of course, not there in the staff room – how awful would that have been, if he'd ravished her among the crum-pled newspapers and the old mugs with their dregs of Nescafe while she wondered if the janitor was going to put his head round the door. But, no, he simply picked up his rucksack and said, "Good-bye, then, see you tomorrow," as if nothing of any significance had passed between them.

Before Andrew Vardy, Amelia imagined that sex would be (somehow, God knows how) an amalgam of the mystical and the coarsely animalistic, a warm and blurry experience that would transcend the mechanics. What she hadn't imagined was that it would be banal and rather tiresome. Although, unfortunately, still vaguely disgusting.

"Be bold," she thought and invited him round for "a cup of coffee, one evening," she was pretty sure that both of them knew what that meant but if it turned out to be just that – a cup of coffee – then she wouldn't look too stupid. She bought a woman's magazine that had a sealed book on the cover announcing that it contained "Sex Tips to Drive Him Wild" and tried (and failed) to learn some of them off by heart. She felt as if she were preparing for an exam that she was bound to fail. And why would anyone want hot candle wax dripped on their nipples anyway? Would he do that to her? Surely not. "Undress slowly," the book advised.

"All men appreciate a sexy striptease." Amelia had rather hoped that they might keep their clothes on throughout the whole process. Nonetheless, she shaved her legs and armpits, although for the life of her she couldn't see what was wrong with body hair, and painted (rather badly) her toenails, and showered and perfumed herself with something French that Julia had left behind after a visit. She felt as if she were preparing herself for a sacrifice. She kept ready a very good bottle of Bordeaux and bought stuffed olives and peanuts as if she were readying herself for a Tupperware party. She had been to a Tupperware party once, at the invitation of a woman who was a tutor in the beauty and hairdressing department, and had bought a very useful cereal dispenser. It was the only party of any description that she had been to in five years.

The olives and peanuts were not a sex tip, although the book did suggest doing something with popcorn that Amelia considered belonged in a blue movie, not a front-of-counter woman's magazine. You would never think that sex was meant for procreation of the species, that it was simply about male and female organs accommodating each other for a biological purpose. Certainly not according to the authors of "Sex Tips to Drive Him Wild," for whom it seemed to be a case of stuffing every orifice with anything that came to hand.

For five nights in a row, she waited. By the sixth night Amelia began to wonder if she had misheard him, if he had offered to "oblige" her with something else, the loan of a book or a computer program. In the staff room, no mention was made between them of coffee or sex, the only conversation of any kind they had was about how you had to pretend that the slaters had fulfilled all their criteria-based topics of learning in order to get them through the course and off your hands. She stopped preparing herself every night, her legs grew bristles, and she had forgotten all the sex tips, so, of course, Sod's Law, Andrew Vardy turned up at the door when she was in her oldest clothes, painting a little bedside table she had bought in an auction.

No flowers, no chocolates, no wooing – she had rather expected some wooing – and when she said, "Would you like a cup ofcoffee?" he actually smirked and she offered the good wine only because she knew she couldn't go through with the experience in acold-stone-sober state. She emptied the peanuts and the olives into glass dishes and put them on the coffee table. Is this what other people did? Other women, preparing for a lover? Didn't they rub themselves with perfumed oils and unguents and comb out their hair, lie down on silken sheets, and present their pomegranate breasts for their lover's kisses? Not put out hors d'oeuvres, surely?

As soon as they sat on the sofa he started kissing her and she could feel how dry and chapped his lips were. He was wearing the same clothes he'd worn into college that day and he smelled stale. Then he was tugging at her paint-stained T-shirt and pawing at her breasts, kneading them as if they were lumps of plasticine, at the same time as he was undoing his trousers so that she wondered what had been the point of mugging up on all that foreplay. Squashed into the sofa cushions, she couldn't really see what he was doing and when she realized he was putting on a condom she felt incredibly embarrassed (which was ridiculous) although part of her wanted to tell him to stop right there so that they could have a discussion about Catholicism and the ethics of contraception – he had five children, after all, was it one rule for his wife and one for his mistress (there was definitely a certain frisson in applying that word to herself)? And, in general, did he really believe in pa-pal infallibility because she had often wondered how an intelligent person (Sylvia, for example) could believe such nonsense, but the moment for an argument over dogma had already passed because he was fitting himself inside her (so much smoother and colder than she'd expected) and she had to stifle the instinct to push him off because it felt so uncomfortable and unnatural. Then they rolled about awkwardly for a bit, scattering the peanuts everywhere and knocking over the wine (which was incredibly careless of him) and then suddenly he let out a low animal sound like a cow giving birth and the next second, his limp thing had slid out of her and flopped like a small dead goldfish on her thigh.