You may have noticed my semi-absence this week. All events do conspire against me. I haven't had the time to breathe, let alone write any blog posts (or read any of yours - sorry!). I did manage to write a quick Thoughtballoons script - this week's character is Lara Croft, Tomb Raider. Not originally a comic character, though comics have been written about her. My story focuses more on her original incarnation, pre-Angelina Jolie. Should you be so inclined, you can read it here.
But for those of you who have been enjoying my Friday Flash stories - more than I expected when I started posting these - I didn't want to leave you without weekend reading. So, for your consideration, I re-present another old Elephant Words story I wrote three years ago. This one's for anyone who ever tried to pick up more than a paperback in their local bookshop...
I Can Read You Like A Book
If a colleague left their pay cheque lying on their desk, and you were bored, and there was nobody else around: would you take a look? Just to see how much they’re on, just to make sure you’re being paid an equivalent and not getting short-changed by management after all your long and devoted years of servitude?
Of course you would. You’re no different to me. Unless you’re the sort who’d do it, but wouldn’t ever admit to it. In which case: at least I’m honest.
***
Her name is Karlie. She stands with a soft drink strawed to her mouth like a nutrient drip. She considers The Little Friend because The Secret History rocked her world. She’s going to be disappointed, but she’s used to that.
The nipple on Karlie’s left breast is inverted, and as a result: so is her self-confidence. She won’t ever take off her bra during lovemaking, except in the blackout curtain night (no streetlight gets into Karlie’s bedroom), and only then for a lover she feels entirely at ease with. She rarely feels entirely at ease with anyone.
***
OK then, let’s try this one. If you were single, and on the look-out, and you met a potential partner – whatever your preference – and during that first conversation, when you’re sizing each other up for compatibility and the odds of mutual attraction… if, during that very first conversation, you could see them naked – I’m not talking schoolboy fantasy X-ray specs here, not actual physical nudity, but shorn of all the pretence and show and fakery we wear in public… If you could peek through their dead-bolted shutters and see the secrets they only reveal to their most intimate acquaintances, and maybe not even to them… would you do that?
It’s all right, I know the answer. That doesn’t mean it’s right.
***
Gemma is a Sagittarius. This is the first information she gives to any budding suitor, because it’s important he knows she’s a free spirit. She does not like to be pinned down. Chained up, yes. Whenever you feel like it. Gemma’s got a predilection for kinky that leads her to bite, scratch, slap and pummel; it’s also led to the sudden cessation of her past four relationships. And the one before that was with a real sicko.
She plucks a tatty old Anaïs Nin off the shelf and reads the back. She’s been single almost five months now and really wants to hit something.
***
This all started in the summer of ’99, a month or so after my big break-up with Diane. For a while there, I’d thought maybe Diane was the one. But as is so often the case, it was the little things that did us in.
Diane was a ‘see you soon’ person; I’m a ‘see you later’. There’s a difference, apparently. The former indicates a desire for the time apart to be minimal, an eagerness to resume, an appetite for togetherness. The latter, Diane would patiently impart, suggests a relationship of convenience, broadly translating to ‘once I’ve taken care of all the other, more important aspects of my life’.
Besides that, she hated the way I crunched Polos.
“Why can’t you suck them – like normal people?”
But the final crunch came one afternoon when we were driving to her sister’s, late as usual because Diane had insisted on stopping to check her lottery numbers at the off-license. It was a rollover week, and the fact that she hadn’t won so much as a tenner in three years, despite doing five lines a week: to Diane this indicated an increased probability of one day scooping the big one. That to me it indicated she was blowing a fiver a week on a big fat sky pie should go without remark.
So while Diane bit into her consolatory Twix, I was aiming to make up lost time by taking a back route, and not stopping for anything. Not even for the old man at the pelican crossing – the old man who’d just come out of Dust Jackets, weighed down with Ed McBains and Wilbur Smiths – the old man who would end it all.
“Why didn’t you let him cross?”
“We’re already late.”
“How long would it have taken?
“A lot longer than it took to just carry on. Besides, it was a pelican – not a zebra. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Highway Code, but—“
“I’m familiar with the humanitarian code. What would it have cost you, thirty seconds, to stop and let that sweet old fella—?“
“For a start, you’ve no way of knowing he was a sweet old fella. He might just as well have been a dirty old paedo, on his way to the local playground to feel up…” She gave me a look like I’d chomped through a whole packet, but by now I was committed. “It might have been a lot more humanitarian to mow the old bastard down. If I’d stopped, I could well have been aiding and abetting a… a… besmirchment!”
***
Phoebe is ashamed of her body hair. She hesitates over Sue Grafton: has she read this one? D is for depilatory. T is for tweezing. She’s heard that some men prefer hairy women. Eastern European brides are all the vogue with a certain kind of gent. But that wouldn’t work for Phoebe, who puts a hand to her mouth whenever she’s talking to anyone she likes in case they’re not down with the down. B is for bleaching. E is for electrolysis. She wants a man who will trim her, nightly, and never consider it a chore. A man who won’t ever use the words: ‘granny ‘tash’, not even in jest. She doubts such a man exists, particularly one who would also stay smooth for her (she shudders at stubble). Sometimes she finds herself staring at young boys, spring teens who haven’t yet started to shave, and she loathes herself for doing it. Part of her thinks she’ll remain a hairy virgin forever.
***
“You always see the worst in people,” was the last thing Diane said before handing back my keys.
She should see me now.
***
Tina wears a long skirt that badly needs hitching up over her hips, and a lumpy bra beneath her Peter Pan blouse. She’s pretending interest in a Fielding, Henry – though in her heart she’d rather Helen. And if this were the actual Tom Jones… but she winces, because Tom – Tom was the name of her ex. The ex she let take those photos, all those photos. He still has them on his computer. And she knows, though she stands around the corner from the truth, she knows the sort of websites Tom visits. He showed her. He showed her and he laughed.
“You ever go with another man,” Tom used to say, “I’ll kick his cock off.”
All those photos. Tom still has all those photos.
***
So I’d been single for a month, and had started hanging out in bookshops again, because there really is nowhere better to meet intelligent, available women. My favourite haunt was Dust Jackets, that little place off the Oxford Road. You could always find something to wrap your attention in there… and they had a café too, which is always a bonus.
Let me explain something to you about lonely girls: lonely girls read. A lot. I bet if somebody did a survey of book-buying habits against significant other statistics, they’d find a good sixty, seventy per cent, probably more, of all paperbacks sold are bought by single women aged between twenty-five and fifty-five. (They already did the survey about libraries, but libraries are for your older maids, obviously – who the hell else borrows all those Catherine Cooksons?) Lonely women read… because what else are they going to do with their evenings? And if you think I’m being sexist, then consider this: the same would also be true of lonely men had some debaser not invented computer games and porn, thwarting and grubbying an entire gender.
Me, when I’m single, I fight the temptations. I prefer to read, broaden my mind, and hang around places like Dust Jackets. Do I think that makes me better than most? I’m not sure…
***
Persephone has weirdly disproportionate features, like a chinchilla. That’s not to say she’s unattractive. She skims the first chapter of a Jackie Collins and thinks about Julian, her former boyfriend. Julian liked to role-play. He’d have her dress up as a policewoman and arrest him, or a female barrister (wig and suspenders) and prosecute him, or a prison warder (Cell Block H variety) and punish him. Then he left her for a Religious Studies teacher and started volunteering for the Sally Army on weekends. Cunt.
Sometimes she sits outside his house, listening to the rain on the roof of her car, thinking about opening his garden gate, walking up the path, knocking on his door and throwing off her raincoat as he opens it… but so far, she’s just driven home and poured herself another White Lady, to help her sleep. She knows she won’t be able to connect with another man until she gets Julian out of her system, but it’s not that easy. What they had was special.
***
We read to know we are not alone. Best thing CS Lewis ever wrote – forget Aslan and the beavers. So if bookshops are where we go to seek kindred thoughts, maybe they’re also a place our subconscious bubbles most conspicuously to the surface. Especially for lonely people, who naturally dwell on themselves more than others. And maybe there are people: people like me, who can tune into that exposition – read it. I’m only speculating here, in case you’re the sort who needs a neat little bow tying on this kind of thing, but I will tell you this only ever happened in Dust Jackets: never in Waterstones or Borders, certainly never in WH Smiths. Make of that what you will.
The other good thing about bookshops, of course, is that not only will you invariably find single women there, wiling away a solitary afternoon with one eye on the shelves and the other out for forlorn possibility, but also that they provide wonderful opportunities for conversational gambits. I’ve always detested chat up lines, and think inter-gender small talk should be compulsory over French and Mandarin on every high school curriculum, but a bookshop remains one of the few places you won’t need either. All you require is a bluffer’s knowledge of classic and contemporary literature, and the willingness to step off the ledge every now and then.
“Margaret Atwood? That’s her best – I couldn’t put it down.”
“Ooh, Julian Barnes – have you read Before She Met Me?”
“Excuse me, I couldn’t help noticing you were buying One Hundred Years Of Solitude… have you read anything else by Marquez? There’s one I read years ago, on a backpacking holiday round Europe. I’ve been looking for it ever since, but I can’t remember the title. It’s about…”
I’d perfected the technique years ago, long before Diane, when I used to float around the university bookshop winter afternoons, keeping warm between seminars. Back then it was always scuzzy-haired girls with backpacks shaped like cuddly sheep, and bespectacled waifs with a penchant for Emily Dickinson. But though the basics remained the same, I soon came to realise that everything else had changed. Particularly the consequences.
***
The first time was Nancy. We bonded quickly over Coupland and Murakami, and surprised each other with a mutual sensitivity for Wuthering Heights (really, it’s all about knowing your audience), before I suggested a coffee – if she wasn’t in a hurry…
It was in the café, as I watched her pick a stray raisin from her chocolate chip cookie, that the pages began to turn.
“Am I your ickle girl?” she said, though it wasn’t the Nancy before me speaking now, not the one with the cappuccino-foamed top lip and a second-hand Mansfield Park paper-bagged for later – it was Nancy of another time, another place.
“Am I your pretty ickle girl?” Her voice was helium-high, cartoon, and to me: a bucket of ice. “Does daddy want to spank his pretty ickle chickinton—?“
Back in the café, I jumped – have you ever touched an electric fence? – and spilled my espresso into its itsy-bitsy saucer. Grown-up Nancy tightened her eyebrows, and leaned ever so slightly across the table towards me.
“Are you all right?”
Behind us, a middle-aged woman raised her voice to ask her elderly father, “Do you want tea or coffee?”
“Eh?”
“TEA – OR – COFFEE?” the woman megaphoned, emphasising the words with her lips.
“Oh,” the old man replied, after giving it a good long think. “Yes, please.”
Nancy laughed, and, grateful for the distraction, I made my excuses and left. Without her phone number. I’ve always found baby-talk a humongous turn-off.
***
Three weeks after we split, I get a call from Diane out of the blue. I reckon she’s remembered I still have all her Harry Potters, but it’s not that at all.
“Did you see last night’s Post?”
“I’m not a regular subscriber.” This is what I’m like with exes. There’s no going back.
When she’s stopped swearing at me, she tells me what she thinks, reading the headline from the paper. Local Sex Offender Jailed For Life. Seventy Three Year Old Ronald Herbert…
“It was him. The old man we saw outside Dust Jackets. I’m sure of it. The one you…”
I stop her there, ask her why she’s doing this. Sarcasm doesn’t become you, I tell her. Why is she still so bitter? Let it go, get on with your life…
It’s only later I think… shit.
***
Lisa’s in the magazine section, flicking through a Chat. ‘Slashed by my boyfriend,’ shouts one of the blurbs, ‘but he blamed Shakin’ Stevens!’ ‘Killer boobs,’ bawls another, ‘fighting for my life after my new breasts went boom!’ She’s wearing three different coloured T-shirts on top of each other, like Russian dolls. ‘I fetched him a kebab and watched him die!’ By the time I realise I’m staring, it’s too late to back out.
“It’s garbage, isn’t it?” she says, smiling as she slips the mag back onto the rack. It catches me off guard, because women never start the process themselves – who can blame them, when the world’s so full of predatory worms? Men, I mean. It’s why I’d hate to be a woman. The enemy never stops advancing.
“I don’t know,” I smile back, “there’s part of me thinks it’s like some kind of poetry of the grotesque, some dark Swiftian…” It’s one I’ve been rehearsing, but really, my heart’s not in it. Because all the time, I’m thinking: I like her style; thinking: I saw her earlier, with an Ali Smith and an Italo Calvino; thinking: come on, let’s get this over with.
***
And that’s why I’ve decided to stop scouting women in Dust Jackets. Because though at first it held a sly, voyeuristic thrill – after a while, it just became self-defeating. It’s like when you’re a kid and someone in the playground hands round a copy of the latest James Herbert in which they’ve marked all the mucky bits: where’s your incentive to read the whole thing? And it might just be, if you’d started at the beginning, you’d love it. But now you’ll never know.
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