A Fucked Up Life in Books (15 page)

Actually no, I was far too drunk. We left and sat in a quiet bar where I drank lemonade and she told me about one of our mutual friends and a bit of a predicament they were in and then I started drinking wine and told her how fucking horny I was and she started drinking vodka and told me yeah, she was fucking horny too. Let’s go to a club and find some men.

When I say ‘find some men’, what I actually mean is just gaze at some men from a distance with our mouths hanging open with both of us wishing that we had the balls to go and speak to one.

We went outside for a cigarette. We came back in and went to the bar. We went for a piss. And another cigarette. Back to the bar. Then we walked through to the room where all the beautiful men were, and as I gazed off to the left where they were dancing, she ran forward to two that she’d found.

She must be absolutely smashed, I thought. There is no fucking way on Earth she would go and speak to two men like that. For fuck’s sake. I don’t know the way home. Will she remember the way home? Jesus Christ, I’m fucked.

I walked up to her talking to these two men. She turned to me and told me that one of them was a friend of a mutual friend. She’s not battered! We’ll make it home tonight!

She turned round to him and carried on chatting. I was left with the spare man. He did some talking at me. I’m not good with new people talking at me. I did some talking back. He said to me:

‘You frighten and intrigue me in equal measures.’

I said to him, ‘I get that a lot. I’m going for a cigarette.’

He followed me out and watched me while I smoked. After a few minutes my friend came out with the other man, and we all stood together. We could hear the music from inside. My friend turned to matey that I’d been lumbered with and started a conversation. I turned to the other man. Friend of our mutual friend. What do we have in common? Fuck all. No, wait! Mutual friend. Excellent.

‘Why haven’t I met you before if you know ___, then?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied

‘Right. He wrote an essay on
Beowulf
the other week. He sent it to me. Did he send it to you?’ I said.

‘No, he didn’t,’ he replied.

‘Oh right. Well I suppose he probably sent it to me because I asked for it. You didn’t ask for it, there’s your problem. It was very good. I like
Beowulf
. Do you like
Beowulf
?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I can read it to you, if you like.’

‘Okay.’

Silence. Smoking.

‘You frighten me and intrigue me in equal measures.’

‘Oh fuck OFF. Your man’s just said that. God. I’m not FRIGHTENING, for fuck’s SAKE. Arghh. Dickheads.’

‘You’re right, you’re not frightening.’

‘Exactly.’

At that moment
Paint it, Black
came pouring out of the open doors. I chucked my fag on the floor, ground it out and turned to the other three.

‘I’m going to dance to
Paint it, Black
, because I love it.’

‘I don’t like
Paint it, Black
,’ said the first man, not the mutual friend.

‘YOU
WHAT
?’ we all shouted at him. He jumped a little bit.

We all glared at him for some time. He didn’t say anything. We all went inside and danced silently, shooting daggers at the man who hated
Paint it, Black
. He didn’t last long, and went to the toilet. My friend went to the bar. Mutual friend and I did our best moves to The Rolling Stones, and had a little, secret kiss.

The others came back, and shortly after that we left. We were all walking the same way home, my friend and the other man still arguing about
Paint it, Black
, and mutual friend and I walking just behind them. He asked me if I’d like to go for a drink tomorrow, and because I’m a cool cunt I told him, ‘If you like.’

And that’s the story of my first couple of hours with The Boyfriend. After that we met for a drink and didn’t talk about our mutual friend. Turned out there were lots of things that I could have spoken to him about, one being that he was almost as much of a cunt as me.

This was the third time I’d met up with The Boyfriend since meeting him. We’d arranged to meet in town and go to one of the grotty little bars that I love, with a cellar and hundreds of exotic beers and lagers on tap and in paper-and-foil-covered bottles in the fridge.

After many, many delicious beers, a little dance and a little kiss, I was feeling a bit horny and asked if he wanted to go back to his. He did, so we left.

I didn’t know what to expect from his flat. I knew that he lived with another boy, so I had decided that it probably smelt a bit. I also knew that he hadn’t lived there that long, so I thought that it would probably be a bit of a mess. It wasn’t a mess but it did smell of boy.

He flicked on the light in his bedroom and I stepped in and had a look around. A bed, a chest of drawers, a clothes rail, a desk with a computer on it and a printer underneath, and over there was a bookcase.

All the playfulness and talking that we’d had on the way back stopped and I silently strode over to the bookshelf. Let’s see what kind of person he was.

I started at the top and worked my way down. He stood behind me, started at the top and worked his way down.

Martin Amis, JG Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Dostoevsky; I can take them or leave them.

He moved my hair and kissed my neck.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald; it’s looking a bit better.

He unzipped my dress and put his hands on my back, sliding them around to hold me at the front.

Arthur Golding.

His hands were firmer now, and he tried to turn me around. I pulled away and took the book from the shelf.

‘This. This book, have you read it?’ I asked, waving
Memoirs of a Geisha
in the air.

‘I have,’ he said, trying once again to pull me round and kiss my lips. I pulled away, harder. His hands let go.

‘I fucking love this book,’ I said. ‘I watched the film recently. Have you seen the film? Massive disappointment. Look …’ I flicked the book open. ‘Here, and here, and … here and here and here. It says how blue her eyes were. Do you remember? All the way through, it’s really smacking you in the brain with it, her eyes are SO BLUE. Striking, frightening almost. She’s beautiful, and her eyes are the kind of blue that shocked people, that made her mysterious. No one else had eyes like that. Now …’ I snapped the book closed and pointed it at him. ‘In the film, her eyes are blue, but they’re not
that
blue. For all the fucking wanking over how bloody blue her bloody eyes were, I was expecting to be dazzled. I wasn’t. Massive let down. Secondly …’

He stood back, arms folded across his chest, watching me as I stood with my dress slipping off my shoulders flicking back through the book.

‘This guy. He’s so ugly, look. It says it fucking loads. FUCKING
loads
! Remember? Remember when you were reading, did you think of him and think his face must be, like, really
really
fucked? WELL. He’s not that ugly in the film. Not ugly enough. And her sister? Not nearly enough of a cunt. Not by a long shot. I was so fucking angry after I watched that film. What a piece of shit. Don’t watch it, for the love of God, you’ll end up wanting to kill yourself, like I do.’

He raised an eyebrow at me.

‘I don’t want to kill myself,’ I said.

He came closer towards me, put his hand on the book, and after the second or third tug I allowed him to take it away from me and place it carefully back in the gap on the shelf so that he could finish taking my dress off.

I fucked him for the first time that night, and once I’d got into bed with him I didn’t care about looking through the rest of the books on the shelf until the morning after when he’d got into the shower.

You can go along with the quote at the top and not fuck people who don’t have books, if you like. But, for me, I’d have fucked him whether there were books there or not. I just would have fucked him a lot sooner without those books there to distract me.

For a fucking brilliant couple of months my Sunday routine was to get up around mid-morning, drive into town, pop into a couple of charity shops to look for books, read a bit of whatever I’d bought, and then go and have some coffee and cake with a couple of friends.

This day I’d got up a bit earlier, found a copy of
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian
in my favourite charity shop, and gone to wait at the coffee shop for my friends.

I was there perhaps twenty minutes when the first friend showed up. She sat down with her coffee and told me that our other friend was bringing her sister. Brilliant. Her sister was a complete knob.

We chatted for a few minutes before the third friend and her sister showed up. They came upstairs and sat down with us and straight away her sister started loudly complaining about everything in her life. This is why I didn’t like her, she was fucking whiney.

‘Oh my God, you guys, he went out again last night and he didn’t get back until two in the morning and wouldn’t say where he’d been. I am, like, so sick of it. And, to make everything worse, at four in the morning we got woken up by someone trying to break the door down next door, the door to X’s flat, and she was SO drunk and SO annoying and I went outside and screamed at all of them. I’m SO tired. Oh my God, it’s so disrespectful, do you know what I mean?’

Second friend and I muttered something about it being shit and then turned our chairs slightly towards each other to try and block this mad, whiney bitch out. She continued.

‘She was with some guy, yeah, never seen him before. He was so dodgy. He just stood rolling a cigarette and nodding while I shouted at him and told me to relax. RELAX? He’d woken me up! Some people. God.’

‘Well, to be fair,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t him that woke you up, was it? It was your sister-in-law, X, who woke you up by coming in drunk and forgetting her key and then asking someone to kick her door in.’

‘Well, no,’ she replied. ‘It was him because X is so not like that normally.’

‘Right,’ I said. I recognise a fucking idiot when I see one and so I decided not to bother having an opinion on any of the other stuff that she was talking about. We all sat in silence while she continued to tell us how terrible her life was, but that she couldn’t possibly change anything herself, because nothing was her fault. It was tedious and bollocks.

On the table we’d sat on, I was facing the stairs. To my delight, my brother appeared at the bottom of the stairs holding a coffee and began to walk up.

‘Hey,’ I waved at him. ‘
You can come and sit over here if you like
.’

He came over and sat down. He’d met my two friends before, but not the sister of friend number two. He said hello to the ones he knew and turned to the sister and introduced himself.

Her eyes screwed up as she looked him up and down.

She said, ‘
do you know X?
’

He said, ‘
yeah, I know X.
’

She said, ‘
and were you with her last night?
’

He said, ‘
Yeah, I was with her last night.
’

She glared at him and shouted, ‘Yeah.
I know you were. I live next door to her. I shouted at all of you this morning when you noisy bastards got me out of bed.
’

He said, ‘
Bye.
’

And picked up his coffee and left.

The sister turned to me. ‘Your brother is fucking disgusting.’

Now. I’m not a violent or aggressive person. And as a general rule any kind of confrontation. The one exception to the rule is if anyone says anything nasty about my brother. Say anything you like about my friends, family, boyfriend, whoever, but anything about him and something clicks in my head. I feel hot and angry and passionate and I’m not scared of anyone.

‘Don’t you fucking dare,’ I said to her. ‘Don’t you dare say a bad word about him. He’s disgusting? You’re disgusting. You sit here and moan about things that you think aren’t you fault. Well I’ve got news for you, they ARE your fault. You’re fucking useless. And as for my brother, have a fucking word with your sister-in-law and call her a cunt before you ever dare go passing the blame on to someone else just because you are so desperately trying to cling onto your arsehole of a husband. Fuck you.’

I left and phoned my brother and told him what had happened. And he told me about what had happened the night before.

And since then, he’s written about it. It’s been maybe a couple of years since he made a song about what had happened, which overlaps with my story. The bolded bits here are the bits that both stories share, and if you ever find it, I hope that you’ll listen to it and laugh.

How much can you learn about a person in one month? Well, it depends on who they are to you and how you’ve met them. In my experience, it all depends on how passionate that person is about the things that they love.

I’d only been seeing The Boyfriend for a month when it was my birthday. Like all brilliant beginnings of relationships, we’d spent that time fucking and talking. There’s not a lot to me really, and so I felt like he knew me pretty well pretty quickly. The main things to remember are that I fucking despise milk, and that I believe, passionately and unconditionally, in dragons.

He’d invited me to spend the weekend with him, so I travelled down on the train and we did a lot more fucking and talking, as well as eating and laughing and other things that just feel better on your birthday.

At midnight, when it was my birthday, he leaned under the bed and took out a package. It was wrapped in paper with juicy red apples printed on the front.

I opened it and inside were three books, all about, or including mentions of dragons. The one that leapt out at me was
Dragon’s Gold
by Piers Anthony. I’d started reading the
Xanth
books a couple of years before hand and thought that Piers was a fucking legend.