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‘Julia!’
‘You’re the one that said it!’
‘That’s private!’
‘So keep your voices down!’
Alice’s cheeks were pink.
There was an unpleasant silence.
‘Did you really hear us?’
‘Yes! I always hear you!’
‘You can’t always hear us. We don’t even have sex that often any more—’
‘Three times a week isn’t often?’
‘Not for us.’
‘Well. I’m very happy for you.’
Another silence.
‘You wouldn’t care so much if you had a boyfriend too.’
‘I don’t want a boyfriend, thank you.’
‘Sex, then.’
‘I have sex.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she said. And that’s when she pointed it out, about the three years.
I went back to bed after that, and stayed there for most of the day, eating cheese and trying to remember what sex was like. I’d never had really, really good sex, the kind that resulted in the sort of noises I heard Alice and Dave making. Oral always felt a bit like someone was wiping a wet flannel over my nether regions, and having a man on top of me made me feel quite claustrophobic.
The thing is, sex had never been particularly high on my list of priorities. In my teens, I was too obsessed with becoming a dancer to worry about having a relationship. I did manage to lose my virginity after my first year at ballet school, though; my friend Cat took me to Jamaica to stay with her grandparents, and I did it on the beach with a boy named Derrick, who had terrible acne and a bottle of cheap rum, which is what led to the sex. We didn’t use a condom; the sheer terror I’d felt afterwards at the prospect of being pregnant and the mechanics of trying to procure a morning after pill without Cat’s grandparents finding out had put me off sex for years after that. I still can’t drink daiquiris. But I was pleased to have got it over with – I felt more sophisticated than the other girls in my year, enjoyed muttering wisely, ‘Don’t do what I did. Wait until you’re ready,’ whenever we talked about sex at sleepovers.
Then there was Leon. I met him during a Freshers’ Week toga party at Warwick. He’d looked very fetching in his white sheet, and it was only later that I realized he wore corduroy trousers every day. Nevertheless, we stayed together, right up until he dumped me just after graduation because he wanted to ‘travel the world’ and be ‘free of ties’. He moved to Peckham three months later and started a graduate training scheme in management consultancy.
Leon and I had quite fun sex in the early days – we tried out the reverse cowgirl, did it standing up in the shower, things like that – but by the end of the relationship he could only get in the mood by listening to the ‘Late Night Love’ playlist on Spotify, and I knew exactly where his hands would be at which point in each track, so it was a bit like an obscene, horizontal line dance. The boring sex was bad for both of us, self-esteem-wise, I think. After we broke up I decided to have a bit of a sex break, and the longer I left it, the scarier sex seemed, like crossing a big, naked Rubicon. I had a couple of drunken one-night stands – including the sofa sex – but most of the time going home alone seemed like a much more sensible, less humiliating option, and far less likely to lead to stubble rash.
I masturbated, though – I had a couple of reliable vibrators, a Rampant Rabbit and a small bullet-shaped one that I took on holiday with me. The only thing I didn’t have was someone to grab my breasts. I tried to do it to myself sometimes, but it wasn’t the same.
Dave made us roast beef that Wednesday night. As he was cooking, I sat on the sofa imagining myself fucking him – something I swear I’d never done before – and I found my heart speeding up a bit. Dave is objectively a very good-looking man, despite his massive beard. I found myself staring at the beard, wondering whether it got in the way during oral sex, and looking at his knuckles, imagining what they’d feel like inside me. I couldn’t look him in the eye for a little while after that. I didn’t really want Dave’s fingers inside me, honestly. But I did want something inside me. Something live and warm and moving and not made of pink latex.
I was more awkward than usual during dinner that night, which isn’t that surprising, really. Dave did most of the heavy lifting, conversation-wise, asking me lots of questions about work in his lovely northern accent and pretending to be interested in my answers, even though I was a civil servant at the Department of Health and Social Care, answering letters from members of the public about foster care and NHS waiting times and other things I’d rather not think about, and he was a graphic designer, which is both cooler and less depressing.
He passed me the horseradish and asked, ‘Get any good letters this week?’
People don’t usually send letters to the government unless they are very angry and very old. But there are exceptions.
‘Got another one from Eric,’ I said.
‘The Bomber Command vet?’
I nodded. ‘He’s upset about the cuts to social care.’
‘Didn’t he write to you about that last month?’ Alice asked, through a mouthful of beef.
‘Last month it was the standard of hospital meals.’
‘Getting old’s a bastard, isn’t it?’ Dave said, but his eyes were fixed on Alice, and I could tell he was playing footsie with her under the table. I stared down and concentrated on the steam curling up from my potatoes, but the footsie continued.
There was a pause in the foot fondling while Alice cleared the table and served our dessert (Ben & Jerry’s), but then it started up again, and it put me off my ice cream – no easy feat. So I ate it as quickly as I could, then pushed my chair back.
‘Thanks for cooking, Dave,’ I said.
‘No worries,’ he said, smiling at Alice.
Alice looked up at me. ‘Stay and hang out with us,’ she said. ‘There’s that Benedict Cumberbatch thing on tonight.’
‘I’m not really into Cumberbatch,’ I said. ‘And I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
I went to my room and switched on my TV. I tried to watch a cooking show, but Alice and Dave were soon snogging so loudly that I could hear them above the shouty presenter. So I opened my laptop and put my headphones on, and then I switched on private browsing and searched for real couples on Pornhub.
There’s something comforting about watching ordinary people having sex; I always think I’d probably do it better than them. Maybe that’s not the point of porn, but I don’t care – their incompetence turns me on. I clicked on a video and watched a thin, pale man adjust his shaky video camera and walk over to the bed where an overweight woman was waiting for him. I pulled my trousers down to my ankles and started to wank as the pale man slapped himself arrhythmically into his partner. That’ll show the patriarchy, I thought. I’m going to give myself an amazing orgasm in about two minutes, because I know how to push my own buttons – I don’t need a man to do it for me.
But then it was over, and I felt hollow and desperate to come again. The video ended, and an ad for Hot local sluts popped up. I flinched and clicked on it to make it go away, but I accidentally clicked on the ad instead, and a woman with huge, spherical breasts filled my screen, panting and rubbing her nipples. I tried to shut it down, but hundreds of windows had popped up, each one filled with hot blondes, or dirty Russians, or naughty teens, like endless mirrors reflected in mirrors. Looking at them turned me on, and that made me feel sordid again, so I slapped down the lid of my laptop and hugged my pillow. It didn’t hug me back.
I told Nicky about my unsatisfying wank. Bringing it up was a bit awkward; it was only my third session and I wasn’t that comfortable with her yet. I wasn’t that comfortable with the idea of being in therapy at all; I never thought I’d have a shrink at 26, even a semi-amateur one. A therapist feels like the sort of thing only glamorous New Yorkers should have, the kind who can afford to buy olives from Dean & DeLuca and who say things like ‘My ob-gyn told me to eat less wheat.’ This is how it happened: I’d been suffering from constant, low-level anxiety, the sort of feeling you get when you realize you’ve forgotten to turn the hob off, but all the time. Then one day I had a panic attack in the middle of a team meeting about letterheads at work, probably triggered by the fact that I have a job which involves team meetings about letterheads. Nobody noticed – it was a subtle panic attack – but that evening I burst into tears in the middle of the Sainsbury’s frozen-food aisle, holding a packet of fishcakes. So I went to the GP.
‘Would you say that you’ve been excessively worried, more days than not, for over six months?’ the GP asked, looking down at a checklist.
‘I don’t know if I’d say excessively worried.’
‘What sort of things are you worried about?’
‘Just – everything, really.’
‘Probably excessive then.’ She smiled at me. ‘Do you think the world is an innately good or evil place?’
‘Definitely good,’ I said, pleased, because I knew that was the correct answer.
‘And you haven’t thought about hurting yourself? You don’t have suicidal thoughts?’
‘Never.’
‘Do you feel like you can’t cope with everyday things?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have trouble making decisions?’
‘Not really.’
‘And do you often find yourself crying for no reason?’
‘No. I mean – I cry quite a lot, but I usually have a reason.’
‘OK,’ said the GP. ‘It’s unlikely that you have clinical depression.’
‘Hooray!’ I said, giving myself a little cheer.
The GP smiled again – a patient smile, I now realize, looking back on it. ‘You appear to have what we call Generalized Anxiety Disorder,’ she told me.
I was very excited to have an actual disorder.
‘I’ll refer you for talking therapy,’ she said. ‘But it might be better to go private – the NHS waiting list is nine months long.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘The Department of Health and Social Care gets a lot of letters complaining about that.’
I felt calmer than I had in ages. I went home and Googled cheap counsellor north London anxiety, and Nicky’s name came up. She was still training to be a therapist, which is why I could afford her, and she had an un-therapist-like way of voicing her very strong opinions on almost every topic. When I told her about the anxiety, and about feeling lost and directionless in life, she said it was no wonder I was anxious, and that my job sounded so dull they should ‘prescribe it to insomniacs’.
Anyway, I told Nicky about the wank. I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into the armchair as I spoke, as though it was recoiling from me. She didn’t recoil, though. She wanted to know all about it.
‘What did the couple look like?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘I don’t know until you tell me.’
‘She was overweight and black. He was skinny and white.’
‘Aha.’ She nodded in a therapist-like way.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She scribbled something in her notebook and underlined it several times.
‘Do you often masturbate thinking about Alice?’ she continued.
‘I wasn’t thinking about her!’
‘But you said you were wanking out of resentment.’
‘I was pissed off with them for having such loud sex, that’s all.’
‘Because you’re not getting any?’ She gazed at me, unblinking.
‘Look, I’m not repressed, all right? I’d have sex if anyone wanted to have sex with me, but no one has for ages.’
‘So you’re just waiting for someone to offer it to you on a plate.’
‘Well, no—’
‘That’s what it sounds like to me. It’s just like your career. You’ve just decided to sit back and stay in this dead-end temp job—’
‘I’m a contractor, actually, not a temp. And I might apply for the Fast Stream this year,’ I said.
‘Why didn’t you apply last year?’
I hadn’t applied because that would mean saying ‘I’m a civil servant’ when people at parties asked, ‘What do you do?’ and then having to answer a lot of questions about NHS funding and whether I approve of the government. I hate it when people ask, ‘What do you do?’ I assume everyone does, even if the answer is ‘I’m a novelist,’ or ‘I’m a surgeon specialising in babies’ hands,’ because even then you know someone will say, ‘Will you show my book to your agent?’ or ‘Can you look at this lump on my finger?’ I missed being able to say, ‘I’m a dancer.’
I looked at the floor. There was some sort of stain on the carpet – ketchup, possibly.
‘You need to make an effort with your career,’ Nicky said. ‘It’s the same as your love life. You’re not prepared to put yourself out there.’
‘I’m not going to go looking for a relationship. I don’t need one to make me complete. I’m independent.’
She put down her notebook. ‘Are you independent?’ she asked. ‘Or are you really, really sad?’
I maintained a dignified silence.
‘It’s OK to cry,’ she said.
‘I’m not that sad,’ I said.
‘Just let it out.’
‘I’m not crying,’ I said, which wasn’t strictly true.
She handed me the tissue box triumphantly.
I called Cat on my way home from Nicky’s. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, and I could always rely on Cat to tell me an anecdote about her terrible career to put my problems in perspective.
‘Do you fancy a drink?’ I asked, when she picked up the phone.
‘I wish,’ she said. ‘I’m in Birmingham. Doing the life cycle of the frog again.’ She sounded a little out of breath. She’d probably been having energetic sex too.
‘When are you back?’ I asked, sidestepping a puddle.
‘Not for ages,’ she said. ‘It’s a UK tour.’
‘Ooh!’
‘Of primary schools.’
