Cyber Cinderella (16 page)

“But you could do. Really, I know plenty of people who’d love this. We could do incredible things with them at our launches.”

“I don’t want to. It’s mine. I’ve done things for other people, but not for money, only for people who are important to me.”

I wondered then what his sexual backlist was, and whether it was as dismal as mine.

I watched one of the colors pop. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Years. I was the only kid in school to do double maths, chemistry, physics and art A levels. I like to prove to myself that computers don’t mean soulless.”

“I really think you’re mad not to do something commercially.”

“Why? I’m happy and fulfilled by my day job and it would only ruin my pleasure to turn this into my source of income. It’s the mistake that people make these days. They think their job is going to be creatively fulfilling when it’s not. All jobs are admin, more or less, so you should go for the one that pays best and gives you the most freedom. People used to have hobbies, but now they don’t have time. Do you know anyone with a hobby?”

I was about to say something about film and socializing.

“Apart from going to the cinema and meeting friends?” he interjected.

I shook my head. I didn’t think George’s drinking could really count as an interest, interesting though he seemed to find it.

“I think people in the media are especially sad.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I mean sad in the old-fashioned sense of the word. They go into jobs like yours and television research and location-scouting because they think it will be creative and then they find out that it isn’t and they’d have been better off getting a so-called boring job with regular hours so that they could fulfill this creative urge after work.”

He had described my life and that of most of my friends. I went into PR because I thought it would be inspiring.

“An accountant will almost always be more interesting than a TV producer,” he continued. “Because a TV producer thinks it’s acceptable to talk about his work and the celebrities he’s dealt with and the hilarious thing that happened in the hospitality room, while an accountant will always have to find some other topic of conversation when out with people. Why did you go into PR, Izobel?”

“Because I thought it would be interesting and because I wanted to help the world.”

“Help the world?”

“I started out doing press for a charity. I thought I might go into politics. Instead I just got into office politics. I’m not sure how I arrived at where I am. You know how it is, you leave university and you don’t know anything about work so you get a job that sounds like it might be interesting and then forty years later you retire and you never really made a proper choice about it.”

“To paraphrase William Morris, don’t do any job unless you believe it to be interesting or know it to be useful.”

“And what if you can’t think of a job that is either?” I asked.

“Do something really well paid.”

I laughed. “You’re right. People who talk about work are boring, so let’s not. Let’s talk about food. Shall we have some?”

“Do you want to go out?”

“There was a place just downstairs.”

“No way. It’s the worst food in Britain. It’s like culinary time travel. The prawn cocktail is frozen prawns with ketchup and may-onnaise, the bread is sliced white and the carrots come from a tin.”

“Can we stay here then? It’s so lovely. Can we get a takeaway?”

“You do surprise me. I thought you wouldn’t approve of takeaway food.”

“Well, of course, you can get fabulous bento sushi boxes and carb-free meals based on the Zone diet these days.” He looked aghast. “Joking. I want a curry and I want it now.”

He ordered, we ate. Nothing too strong; his choice of creamy and mild was spot on. A cheap curry and a couple of expensive bottles of wine, it was a heavenly combination. We banned two topics of conversation: izobelbrannigan.com and work. I found out that he was brought up in the suburbs, that his parents still held each other’s hands and that he had three sisters. He learned that I grew up close enough to London to yearn for it, but too far away ever to visit on my own, that it was a rainbow to me. He discovered that my parents, too, were still together, but had a disconcerting habit of communicating entirely through their springer spaniels: “I think Snickers doesn’t approve of the Labour Government at all, do you, Snickers?” my father would say. “Wispa is not at all sure about genetically modified crops, but he does think it’s time for supper,” my mother would reply.

We were swapping childhoods. We were talking about family pets. We were confessing how insecure and unattractive we felt as teenagers. This could only mean one thing: we were on our way to a fumble.

No, no, I thought. No, we’re not. I’ve got a boyfriend. I’m living with George. Lovely George, sexy George, fantastic-in-bed George, fashionable journalist George. I can’t get off with Ivan. Ivan, techie Ivan, systems-guy Ivan, sometimes-wears-a-fleece Ivan.

Or was he artist Ivan? Ivan with the lovely flat, kind Ivan, sympathetic Ivan, handsome Ivan, piss-taking Ivan. Have you met Ivan? He’s a systems administrator. No, don’t like that. Have you met Ivan? He’s an information consultant. Better, much better. He’s a creative solutioneer. Possibly.

The angel and devil in my head scrapped. I wasn’t sure which one was which though. The red wine made me think that maybe the angel wanted me to kiss Ivan. I was hypnotized by the slow blooms of his installation, the art one I mean. Flicking that switch to turn it on had been the equivalent of putting on a Barry White CD and dimming the lights.

He got up to open another bottle of wine and to make us some mint tea. Real mint tea, not bags, but leaves. It cleaned my palate, expunging the trash taste of curry and leaving my mouth icy and white. It made my mouth kissable. We chatted all the while; I wasn’t sure what we were saying anymore. It wasn’t important. It was just the adverts before your favorite television program, just background. The words coming out of our mouths were out of focus, our mouths themselves were sharp. He filled my bulb of a glass and his, too. He sat down beside me on the chocolate-colored sofa, looking edible himself. The sofa was so big that he wasn’t anywhere near touching me. I wanted him to touch me.

“Big glass of wine,” I said. So fatuous, I feared and hoped that it would destroy the moment. I put down the glass. So did he. We looked at each other. I could see his flushed cheeks. I could see mine, equally flushed, reflected in his eyes. They were dark.

I did a history of art module at university and remembered how Velazquez’s brilliance lay in painting the space between people as much as the people themselves. I never quite understood what that meant, but at that moment I knew that he would be the artist to capture the hard glass ball of nothingness between our lips. That space, that distance of ten inches, was of a different density to normal air. It was more solid than we were.

It was like standing on a high board at the swimming pool. I knew that only a millisecond stood between me and it being too late to turn back. I wasn’t ten inches away from kissing him, I was just a millimeter, for if I moved forward just a little bit then that would be it.

And I did and it was.

Chapter Eleven

B
abe, do you want a coffee or what?” Mimi asked.

Today was the first day of probation following Tracy’s verbal warning about my performance and yet I wasn’t in the office. I was floating above it looking at myself operating the computer keyboard.

Snog-struck, kiss-tipsy, smooch-woozy, caress-crazy; I was all of these.

Sandpapered, sandblasted. My chin had been rubbed raw by a stubbly muzzle. I touched it. How to explain stubble burn? Why would just your chin and maybe your nose be rubbed raw, popping out in tiny red abrasions? How could something so beautiful as kissing leave so ugly a mark? George hadn’t seemed to notice when I wobbled in late last night nor Mimi when I entered the office in a similar whoosh, but it scorched, I was branded by it. Could I say that I had fallen down? Or overused a new exfoliating product that had caused an extreme allergic reaction? On just my chin and nowhere else?

Stubble burn. It was more a mark of a new relationship than a packet of condoms in the pocket. Why is it that you only get stubble burn the first or second time you kiss someone? Because you kiss them so much harder and longer than you ever will do when kissing is replaced by sex? Or do you just get used to a person’s skin, so that at first it’s like an allergic reaction to their newness but repeated exposure takes away one person’s skin’s power to rip and make raw?

“Coffee would be fantastic, Mims, ta. I’m knackered.”

I was tired. I was exhausted from hours of kissing, and of legs being wrapped around one another, of rubbing, of stroking. No clothes were removed, no penetration occurred. How I had wanted it to and how much I had not wanted it to.

“Morning, Tracy,” I said in as gung-ho a fashion as I could muster, while cupping my chin in the manner of the by-line photo of a journalist known for his musing and thoughtful investigations. Or a silly PR girl with stubble burn.

Kissing, snogging, spit-swapping. How I’d missed that in the two years I’d been going out with George. It was the preserve of the recently met and the pre-penetrative sexual. Kissing is best when it’s everything, both the journey and the point of arrival. Settled-down couples never snog anymore; they lightly kiss and hug, but they never snog for hours on sofas and get to that trance-like state that only snogging can arouse.

The kissing and the art at Ivan’s had dizzied me. I had seen the clock flash on his video recorder and it had been past one. On a school night. It took me a further hour to extricate myself and find a taxi. I was drunk on so many things that I didn’t care.

Perhaps I was still drunk. Then the coffee had the adverse effect of sobering me up. My hand moved from chin to forehead. What had I done?

I had coiled myself around Ivan. I was going out with George. I was living with George. I loved George. Did I want to go out with Ivan? Did I want to stop going out with George? These choices shouldn’t be connected to one another, should they? Did I just want to be alone? Oh no, I didn’t want to be alone, I didn’t want to ever not have a body to press against, a body like Ivan’s, hard and soft and without a gut that could envelop a fist such as George had.

Stop. I’m with George. Don’t compare George and Ivan. Separate issues. Keep them separate.

Work. Must work. Calls to make, important press releases to draft and to send out as e-mail attachments. Attached. I was attached to George. I wished I were unattached. I wished I were attached to Ivan as I had been last night, Velcroed to one another, an almost audible ripping sound when we un-suckered ourselves.

You should never get off with people you’re unsure of. Once you’ve got off with them you’re lost, you can’t make a rational decision anymore. I get drunk and get off and then find myself going out with people, spending more time alone with them than with any of my friends and yet not liking them half so much. Did I like Ivan? Or even fancy him? Could I love him? These were questions I should have asked myself before I’d sunk the wine. Now I could never know what my true answers would have been.

Ivan had fancied me for a while. He seemed quite sure of me despite the many ways in which he found me awful: my job, my shallowness, my solipsism.

I made that fatal lean forward and then our mouths met. I moved a millimeter and moved so much more. Normally lips lock clumsily and quickly in these situations, in a bid to get it out of the way, but this time it was slow and our mouths flirted with each other before unifying. Then I had pulled away; I couldn’t carry on kissing because I was smiling too much. What bad design that we can’t kiss and smile at the same time.

Smiling, kissing, laughing, eating, drinking. Mouths are marvelous things. Sweet words too. Like our post-first-snog conversation, the when-did-you-first-fancy-me one. He said for months, he’d noticed me in the office, he’d created spurious reasons to check out the PR O’Create systems in order to stake me. Why else should he have been spending time in the offices of one of his most impecunious clients? He’d dragged his heels about investigating the izobelbrannigan.com domain name as it was a way of drawing out being close to me. He had been horrified by the site and yet grateful for it.

He asked me how long I’d fancied him. I said for about five minutes and he looked hurt so I kissed him some more and the disparity between our crushes didn’t seem to matter. I’m sure I fancied him just as much even if it hadn’t been for just as long.

Could I leave it at that? At a perfect night of kissing and understanding? Maybe he’s rubbish in bed. Maybe I would be rubbish in bed with him too. He could be like one of those restaurants where the starters are so much better than the mains. Maybe we’d decide to sleep with one another and he’d come too quickly. Actually I don’t mind that. The alternatives are so much worse. He can’t get it up and I don’t laugh at him but blame myself and think it’s because of my cellulite or some such irrelevancy. There is nothing more depressing than the coiled-up soft button mushroom of the impotent cock. It feels so slippery and insubstantial to the touch, the touch that’s supposed to rouse it but just makes you both blush from embarrassment and frustration. You feel like every time you touch it, you diminish it still further and it retreats snail-like into its shell.

Or maybe Ivan is one of those who do manage to get it hard and then just won’t come but keeps on and on, sawing away at your soreness with his blocked ducts, giving away nothing. That’s only drug users though, in my experience, like dear William, who used to make me feel so bad about his lack of release and I’d be too embarrassed to tell him just to stop, to put it away.

Ivan wasn’t a drug taker, as far as I knew. But then I hardly knew him.

Or maybe he’s like Elliot and I’ll have to talk constantly throughout in order to maintain his pleasure and bore myself with the sound of my own inanities and ensure that I never felt any joy of my own: “Oh Ivan, give it to me, oh your big hard cock, your hardware is the latest version, upgrade me to your systems, administer your love.”