A Fucked Up Life in Books (16 page)

‘Do you have any of them already?’ he asked.

I did not.

‘Good.’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like them.’ He put his arms around me. ‘Happy birthday.’

The rest of the evening we sat together quietly, as he let me read my book. And when I was done he asked about the dragons; their colours and their names, whether they were good or bad, whether they talked or not, whether they were trained and captive or free. And when I answered him he listened to what I said, and didn’t call me a cunt or an idiot for believing the things that I did. He just smiled and let me be myself.

And it was probably that day, sat there reading through that book as he held on to me, that I realised just how much I adored him.

If you are a woman, once you hit 25 you have to have a smear test to check for any signs of cervical cancer. Depending on what kind of woman you are, you’re either counting down to the day of your first smear test with dread, or you completely forget that it is coming up and have to be reminded by the doctor when you go in to get your next supply of the contraceptive pill or repeat prescription for hydrocortisone cream or whatever it is that you go to the doctor for.

I fall into the latter category (and I was there for my pill, I don’t suffer from eczema), and was sat in the doctor’s reception reading
Brick Lane
waiting to be called through to go through the usual million questions, weighing and rigmarole that you have to do to get a prescription. As we plodded through the questions and I answers she stopped at the one asking about a smear test and asked my age. I was 25.

‘Right, so you’ll need to have a smear test. Did you get a letter about it? We usually send a letter out.’

I did not get a letter.

‘Okay, well that’s alright. Sometimes they don’t get sent out for various reasons, and I see you’ve been a patient at another surgery for a while before coming here, so it’s possible you just got a bit lost in the system there for a while. On your way out, just book in with the receptionist to come in for the smear test as soon as you can. Alright? Okay.’

I left the office and went to queue at reception. As the person in front of me left and I stepped forward the receptionist disappeared. I waited for a couple of minutes and then had a look behind me.

Three people waiting. The person directly behind me was an old woman, behind her an old man, and behind him a teenage boy and his Mum. I let a couple more minutes pass and then I rang the bell. The receptionist appeared.

‘Yes?’ she barked at me.

I recognised her as the least helpful and most rude receptionist. Most doctors have one. They’re everywhere, obviously, but if you’ve ever had to deal with one for whatever reason then you will feel my pain.

‘Hi, I’ve been to see the doctor and she’s asked me to come to you to make an appointment for a smear test as soon as possible please.’

Now, as far as I am aware, receptionists at doctor’s surgeries have to have a basic bit of knowledge about how the surgery works, and how people work. For example, she should know that an internal examination will probably take more than ten minutes, and so a double appointment slot should be booked to accommodate it, and that various medications affect various people in different ways, and also that as a patient just trying to book an appointment, I was not trying to mug her off.

She sighed and looked irritated at me and clicked on the mouse a few times before asking me my name and date of birth. The queue behind me had another person join it.

‘You smear test needs to be mid cycle, so two weeks after your period,’ she shouted through the glass at me, ‘so when will that be?’

‘I don’t bleed,’ I said.

‘What?’ she shouted.

‘My contraceptive pill is Cerazette, I don’t have periods at all. So anytime is fine. This week, maybe?’

She sighed again and looked at me like I was a fucking idiot. She placed both of her hands on the desk in front of her and leaned towards the glass, looking into my eyes.

‘WHEN. WAS. YOUR. LAST. PERIOD.’

Fuck this for a game of soldiers.

‘I. DON’T. BLEED.’ I shouted back.

‘LOOK,’ she shouted, and began to talk slowly as if I were misunderstanding her, ‘IT HAS TO BE MID. CYCLE. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? WHEN. WAS. YOUR. LAST. PERIOD.’

The queue behind me had gained another member. Five people now waiting behind me looking at me with a mixture of anger and intrigue. This woman on reception is clearly an arsehole, and with an arsehole there is just no talking to them.

‘Please get the doctor,’ I said to the woman, ‘she can explain to you.’

‘I WILL NOT GET THE DOCTOR THE DOCTOR IS BUSY NOW LISTEN …’

‘FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE, PLEASE GET THE DOCTOR. NOW.’

The receptionist gasped at me as I stared angrily through the glass at her, and then mumbled and grumbled away. I turned to the people behind me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but she is an idiot.’

A couple of them nodded. The woman with the teenage son turned him round to face her so that he wasn’t staring at me. The receptionist came back with the doctor in tow and I caught the end of what she was telling the doctor: ‘… a very angry and rude young lady, she is not listening to a word I am saying …’

The doctor got to the glass and looked at me.

‘I’m on Cerazette,’ I said. ‘I don’t bleed.’

The doctor turned to the receptionist.

‘She doesn’t have periods, which I presume she has told you. Now, will you book her in for the test?’ The doctor turned to me. ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ she said.

The receptionist went a bright pink colour and mumbled an apology to the doctor before sulkily arranging my appointment with me. By the time that I left, the seven people in the queue behind me all knew that I’d be back in a couple of days for a smear test, which must have been exciting for them.

On the plus side to this hoohah, I hope that that cunt of a receptionist didn’t give any of the other poor fuckers in the queue any shit. On the minus side, three years on, I bet that receptionist probably isn’t any less of a cunt.

So I’d been seeing this boy for a while now, and he’d become my boyfriend. Every single weekend I would make the six hour round trip from my home to Brighton to go and visit him, because although I didn’t love
him
yet, I bloody loved his penis.

Because we lived so far apart and saw each other so little, there were a couple of things that were standard when we were together:

1. We would have sex at every opportunity
   
2. We could not be without each other for more than about five minutes at a time – I only really left his side to either piss or shit.
   

Which is why after one particularly vigorous shagfest I went with him to his appointment at the hairdresser.

If you’ve ever been to Brighton, you will know that everyone who lives or works there is a bit cool.

We walked in to the hairdressers where my boyfriend was greeted by a man holding a dog and a woman with purple hair before being carted off for a hair wash, and I was shown to a little sofa to wait.

I always carry a book in my bag, whatever I’m reading at the time. On this day it happened to be
Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi. So, I settled down on to the sofa and began to read.

Remember the dog from earlier? Well, he was a friendly little twat and came running up to me for attention. Never one to ignore a happy animal, I stood up to give him some fuss. And then I felt it. Something in my pants.

Women readers may know that feeling that you get when you are in a public place and you feel some movement downstairs. For the fannyconscious among you it is probably that month’s period, and you are probably ready for it. However,
I don’t bleed
and so it could only be one thing – a gusset full of jizz.

It was at this point that the purple-haired lady approached me and decided to talk about
Persepolis
, and because I’m a cunt in a hairdressers in Brighton of
course
she wants to fucking talk about
Persepolis
, because she’s a bit cool, isn’t she, and I’m stood there with a dog sniffing at my crotch and jizz dripping down my leg and a woman wanting to have a political debate about Iran and I have to FUCKING SIT THERE BECAUSE I HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO AND MY TWATTING BOYFRIEND IS ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH HIS HAIRCUT.

To my relief, after about ten minutes purple-haired lady fucked off to put on an Ian Brown CD and left me to continue reading my book.

And there I sat for half an hour, with a cold and sticky cunt trying desperately to concentrate on the story I was reading but worrying whether I was going to leave a semen stain on the sofa when I got up.

(I didn’t, but I never went back to the hairdresser with him again after that. That dog definitely knew my secret.)

And what did I learn from this lesson? Douche your cunt out after a shag? No.

Never, ever read an illustrated book anywhere in public in Brighton. People will be all over you like white on rice. Bastards.

The day that I found out that The Boyfriend had never read
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
and then promptly found out that I didn’t actually own a copy of my own, I marched him down to Waterstones chattering all the way there about how it was probably the best book in the world.

I don’t like fucking about in shops, and within about half an hour of finding out that he’s not read the book, we’d gone out and bought the book, and got home and put the kettle on.

‘Now,’ I told him, ‘sit down.’

He sat and I opened the book up.

I did a fucking ace job on the first chapter. Reading it with a passion and enthusiasm that I have never since matched in any area of my life, including in work, relationships and friendships. But when it got to chapter two I was feeling a bit tired, and in my infinite wisdom decided that the best possible solution to this was to make The Boyfriend read the next chapter.

For those who don’t know, the second chapter is where the characters start talking a bit, specifically, it’s where Grandpa Joe tells Charlie about Willy Wonka and his factory. So, we settled down and he began to read.

It was going pretty well until we got to the first bit of speech. Charlie asking a question. After three words I stopped The Boyfriend dead in his tracks.

‘The thing is with Charlie,’ I said, ‘is that he’s a little, weedy boy. You’re just reading it like you. You just sound like you.

‘I have to do the voices?’ he asked.

‘You do,’ I confirmed.

He continued, right up until the part where Charlie finished speaking and the Grandparents kicked in. I stopped him again.

‘They are all so old! They’ve been bedridden for fuck knows how long and they are just
old
. You’re doing a kind of half-you, half-Charlie voice. Sort it out.’

He sorted it out and rasped out a generic old person voice to cover those of the four grandparents exclaiming at Charlie from their bed. It was much better. I was pleased.

Next came Grandpa Joe speaking alone. It was wrong. All wrong.

‘Grandpa Joe is this mad old cunt,’ I explained to him. ‘You don’t sound enough like a mad old cunt. He’s so excited to be talking about this to Charlie. You need to do a proper mad old bastard’s voice.’

‘Fucking hell, why don’t
you
do a mad old bastard’s voice? This is exhausting.’

‘FINE,’ I shouted. ‘Give the fucker here, I’ll show you.’

And off I went, whizzing through the words and doing the voices of the characters exactly how I heard them in my head, while The Boyfriend sat looking bemused, listening, as I stopped every so often to explain just why the characters sounded like they did.

Eventually I felt like I’d managed to teach him how important it was that everyone sounded
exactly like they did in my head
. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a fucking crime to bollocks up a Roald Dahl story by not blowing each character into a massive parody of a human.

I let him try again. He read the bit by Grandpa Joe and put on a most spectacular mad old cunt’s voice. When he read that ‘
no one ever goes in, and no one ever goes out
…’ I got shivers down my spine. It was fucking brilliant.

It was the first time since I’d been in primary school that I’d had a story read to me. After
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
we went on to read manymore books together, usually at bedtime, and usually cuddled up sharing the book so that we could see the pictures. None of them were as exciting as
Charlie
though. That was our first love.

I’d stayed at The Boyfriend’s parents’ one evening shortly after he’d moved home for a while. His parents were alright, but a bit too much for me. I quite like being on my own and having my own space, so to have a mother in my face (particularly after having sacked off my own mother many years earlier) was pretty fucking stressful.

In the morning, after going down the high street for some lunch, we arrived back at the house and his Mum started talking to him about going to visit his Grandad who was in hospital. I had to leave soon and so thought I’d better pipe up.

‘I have to leave sort of nowish, so I’ll get my things together I think.’

He looked at me and said that he’d walk me to the train station, before his Mum ushered him upstairs to get ready and I stood waiting for him to come back.

As soon as he came back down the stairs she wanted him out of the door to get to the hospital. She turned to me.

‘You can just wait here,’ she said.

‘Oh, but, I have to …’

‘We won’t be long,’ she said. ‘We’ll be an hour.’ She called back behind her, leaving the house with The Boyfriend.

It was all a bit rushed and weird, and now I was locked in their house, needing to go home. Oh well, I thought. I’ll just go upstairs and read my book. I was reading
Glamorama
by Bret Easton Ellis, and had about half left to go.

THREE HOURS LATER I had finished the book just as they walked in, both cheery having seen the Grandad. The Boyfriend came upstairs.