911
Linda (full version)
It's been bothering me for months that I had lost contact with Linda. She's met some Swedish professor of Economics now so my always remote chances are dashed permanently. I could still fall in love with Linda like that. When we're together people think we're boyfriend and girlfriend. I want to touch her all the time but she doesn't fancy me and I stop myself from raking my splayed fingers through her hair, just to say "that was fucking funny and you're so beautiful, and the two go together." Once, we bumped into each other on a blank Sunday morning, surprised to see each other. A car drew up and a man with a German accent stopped to asked us directions to the police station. As the car moved off, Linda said "Why, are you going to apologise for the Holocaust?"
We haven't been in touch since a night when I turned up, already drunk, to a post-work drink with her and Naomi. Naomi, like Linda, is a university lecturer. I spent most of the hour we were together letting forth a volley of disdain for the course in psychotherapy upon which Naomi was about to embark. I was aware of the bigotry in my voice, and how unreining myself overuled in the moment my sense of the damage it would cause to our friendships. I left for somewhere else, where the jovial ease of the chat was insufficient to obliterate the regret I felt at having ripped up a more valuable conversation with my own words.
This was March, I think. Tonight, reading Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road in the pub, struck repeatedly with the virtuosity of the language, jotting down sentences, trying to learn from it, I started mouthing words to myself as a substitute for someone coming up and saying "Hello looby," or "Revolutionary Road, what a great novel." I half wrote a text to Denise, presenting my sober self rather than the night-time one of her arse, my cock, her white underwear, her long ginger hair disarrayed by sex over the curve of her back, the imagined deliciousness of her cunt made slippery for fucking with the slow repeated stroking of my middle finger and my tongue. But I didn't want sex, I wanted to resolve the estrangement from Linda that has been nagging me for months.
"Linda I know I was a bit of a twat when we were last out but I was just wondering whether you were at a loose end tonight."
To my surprise she replied straight away. She's usually in Helsinki or Melbourne or somewhere. She's out for dinner tonight in Lancaster with the fucking Swedish bastard and an unnamed colleague and will alert me if they're going for a drink later. I feel taut, glancing at my phone, wanting to go to bed, wanting to wank thinking of having sex with a compliant cock-sucking Denise, waiting for Linda to ring, not knowing how it will work with someone I envy present, who will no doubt have expert bilingual manners.
Linda
Just to warn people who might be visiting for the first time, the post which begins after the picture contains a small amount of sexually explicit detail, so depending on where you are, your own sensitivities, and what company you're keeping, you might wish to exercise your judgement at this point.
Just for now though, here's one of my favourite things.
It's been bothering me for months that I had lost contact with Linda. She's met some Swedish professor of Economics now so my always remote chances are dashed permanently. I could still fall in love with Linda like that. When we're together people think we're boyfriend and girlfriend. I want to touch her all the time but she doesn't fancy me and I stop myself from raking my splayed fingers through her hair, just to say "that was fucking funny and you're so beautiful, and the two go together." Once, we bumped into each other on a blank Sunday morning, surprised to see each other. A car drew up and a man with a German accent stopped to asked us directions to the police station. As the car moved off, Linda said "Why, are you going to apologise for the Holocaust?"
We haven't been in touch since a night when I turned up, already drunk, to a post-work drink with her and Naomi. Naomi, like Linda, is a university lecturer. I spent most of the hour we were together letting forth a volley of disdain for the course in psychotherapy upon which Naomi was about to embark. I was aware of the bigotry in my voice, and how unreining myself overuled in the moment my sense of the damage it would cause to our friendships. I left for somewhere else, where the jovial ease of the chat was insufficient to obliterate the regret I felt at having ripped up a more valuable conversation with my own words.
This was March, I think. Tonight, reading Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road in the pub, struck repeatedly with the virtuosity of the language, jotting down sentences, trying to learn from it, I started mouthing words to myself as a substitute for someone coming up and saying "Hello looby," or "Revolutionary Road, what a great novel." I half wrote a text to Denise, presenting my sober self rather than the night-time one of her arse, my cock, her white underwear, her long ginger hair disarrayed by sex over the curve of her back, the imagined deliciousness of her cunt made slippery for fucking with the slow repeated stroking of my middle finger and my tongue. But I didn't want sex, I wanted to resolve the estrangement from Linda that has been nagging me for months.
"Linda I know I was a bit of a twat when we were last out but I was just wondering whether you were at a loose end tonight."
To my surprise she replied straight away. She's usually in Helsinki or Melbourne or somewhere. She's out for dinner tonight in Lancaster with the fucking Swedish bastard Professor and an unnamed colleague, and will alert me if they're going for a drink later. I feel taut, glancing at my phone, wanting to go to bed, wanting to wank thinking of having sex with a compliant Denise, waiting for Linda to ring, not knowing how it will work with someone I envy present, who will no doubt have expert bilingual manners.
My kind of woman wears a minidress and drinks pints
I checked my charity shop chic in the mirror. Shirt (British Heart Foundation, Middlesbrough), £3.99; jacket (Tatty Bon, Glasgow), £5.00; trousers (Save The Children, Kendal), 4.99. Shoes, model's own. I stylishly caught the train to Glasgow, to meet The Architect.
I texted her from my seat in The Horseshoe pub. "I don't have much of an idea what you look like Hazel, so we might be in for a slightly surreal chase round the pub." "I'm mainly in black and I've got a large bronze bag." A large bronze bag? Was I about to make an appearance in Scotland's most stylish city in the company of a woman who carries a chav-bag?
Her blonde hair was in a bob, and she was dressed in a black and grey wool minidress which distractingly stretched across her thighs when she sat down, a wide black belt, tan coloured tights and black boots to just below the knee. Her bag was a relief, muted and with nothing metallic about it. She was a pleasure to look at. All afternoon I was searching for a way to convey this to her, failing every time to find words with which I was happy.
The conversation inevitably started with architecture. Handily, I have recently read Lynsey Hanley's Estates: An Intimate History and I once went to an exhibition about the history of the architectural practice which built the Barbican, which she studied for her dissertation. "I'd love to live in the Barbican. You can rent one of the smaller flats for about three hundred pounds a week, which isn't too much." Isn't it?
As we got pleasantly lost trying to find the notable Alexander Thomson villa we were looking for, we started exchanging dating stories. "I think you can tell within five minutes if it's going to work romantically," she said, which made me feel a bit uneasy. Why would you say that unless it's understood that it isn't going to work romantically?
Walking back through the Merchant City she spotted a wine bar and suggested another drink. Just as I was wondering if it would be overdoing it to suggest we have a bottle, she ordered one. It turned out to be a dreadful Barbera with initial notes of jam and a long finish of Vimto. It was served by two self-conscious, incompetent twentysomething girls who made a pretentious palaver of giving the wine to Hazel to try first and who seemed to hang around the table for ages before finally taking their ridiculous painted faces away with them.
We chatted about the tyranny of having to declare your age on dating sites and how it makes sense for women to deduct a few years, given that many men are as prejudiced about wanting someone younger than themselves as many women are about wanting someone taller. I like older women, an impression reinforced recently having spent a year or so being fucked to the point of almost excruciating pleasure by someone ten years older than myself, although I spared her that detail.
It was getting a little chilly on the terrace so I suggested a final drink in the Blackfriars. Hazel was knowledgeable about whisky and spent some time in its rituals. At Glasgow Central, we found that she'd got the train times wrong and we'd have to wait another forty minutes; we went next door for another final drink. "I wish I'd met you earlier," she said, without the slightest romantic implication. Back in the station, we parted with her saying "Let's keep in touch. Send me drunken emails!"
She's inconsiderately landed a job in New York with a well-known architectural firm. She's clever. She's a good drinker. And she's fit.
Whilst I am a man who drinks perry, I am not a Lambrini girl
Lambrini: |
Every year the butcher in the bleak precinct where my mum and dad do their shopping gives my teetotal parents a bottle of what he calls "wine". It's actually Lambrini, a foul perry with an image that could hardly get lower. Its makers ran a campaign a couple of years ago to market it to young women as a "fun" drink, to be enjoyed round a dinner table rather than in a bus shelter. You can see a young Lambrini-drinking woman empowering herself in a confident expression of modern female sexuality by having pissed-up British male holidaymakers gorping at her crotch, on the left.
The advertisers' efforts were derided in the Guardian, which opined that "the chances of it being enjoyed by doctors and gym bunnies is about as likely as a 14-year-old truant developing a taste for Châteauneuf-du-Pape". You can't use the word "chav" in the Guardian but everyone gets the hint. However, the owner of the company that makes it pocketed ten million pounds last year, suggesting that my friend who many years ago said that "the way to make money is to sell shit to stupid people", was correct.
My parents, bless them, saved it for eight months to give to me, as they have me marked, not unreasonably, as The Drinker in the family. I put it on our local Freecycle list last night and it went in twenty minutes, to a mountebank therapist I know.
Time at my parents' house grinds reluctantly forward as I fence away my Dad's anti-semitism and his ignorant comments about immigration. "Wouldn't it be nice if we all lived near each other?" mused my sister. "Hmmm," I parried. I can't stand these family get-togethers where we're rounded up into a room and sealed in with uPvC to make a poor imitation of conversation in ever thinning air. We can't talk about anything interesting because Dad will chime in with a comment that yanks a promising thread back to the simple world articulated by the Daily Express. "Is Carol Vorderman dressing too young for her age?" it asked on the front page. Neither can we go down the pub. No-one likes proper food. Television, television, television.
The best bit of three long days was being taken back to my sister's boyfriend's house where I was to stay on the last night. Tim asked me if I'd like to take a diversion to see the filmic, steaming, pipelined terrain of a part of the Northeast scoured black by its industries. He drove us through a landscape horizon-deep in bell-bottomed concrete chimneys and eerie neon-lit metal chemistry sets, approachable only on narrow ladders and holed grids of walkway. A tall thin chimney hissed continuously. "You might hear that from your bedroom tonight I'm afraid."
We turned down a road and suburbia began with an abruptness that can only have been decided by a planner's pencil. A sweet but artificial smell invisibly scents the area. "It's a lot better than it was twenty years ago." You don't notice it after a while, but I wondered what I was breathing in all night.
The Architect emails whilst I'm writing this, sending her mobile number and confirming our rendezvous tomorrow.
Will romance blossom for looby and Hazel
'twixt the wheelie bins and the CCTV cameras?
