Raven (16 page)

And isn't that the way of the world? While Charles, with whom I had been dying to go to bed, had gone all impotent, I knew full well that this wizard from Oz would have happily bounced away on top of me all night.

Every so often I went indoors for some reason and on one of my trips I checked my mobile and found a new message. With a delicious frisson I saw that it was from gorgeous sexy Jake.

Jake: Hey how are you? Up to much tonight?

Me: I'm on a ‘date'! But would love to see you very soon. [And wasn't
that
the truth.]

Jake: Well if the ‘date' doesn't go well you're welcome to come round to mine and we could have a nice night in. [Oh the agony! Tonight of all nights!]

Me: Sounds bliss. I'd love to have a romp with you again.

Jake: Come to mine later and you can have me anyway you want me. I'm in bed naked, wanting you here.

Me, attempting to eat my fist: Arghhh!

Jake: Enjoy the rest of your date.

I staggered back out to the garden, my equilibrium off by a few notches. When I got to the table, Bob's chair was empty. I looked around. He was sitting on the steps leading up to the pergola, doing something in the dark. As I approached I saw that he was barefoot and wringing out his socks.

‘What happened?' I looked down at him, slightly alarmed. Even after numerous glasses of wine, the late hour and Jake's disorientating booty call, this struck me as a bizarre sight.

But Bob was as unruffled as before. He explained with a mild smile: ‘Just having a stroll around the garden and forgot about the pond. I stepped right in, up to the knees. Hope the fish are all right.'

I put his socks in the dryer, thinking: that'll be another half-hour, then. No way will I make it to Jake's tonight. I sighed with resignation.

We moved into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa for more conversation. I glanced down at Bob's feet. As a rule I try not to look at people's bare feet because they are such unappealing things. (It beggars belief, to my mind, that there are actual foot fetishists in the world.) As I expected, his feet were really off-putting. Not the kind of feet I like to picture being intertwined with mine. Another reason not to go to bed with him.

It was getting on for 11 o'clock and I was tired. Bob was still lively, though, still full of stories and little asides (mainly sex-related), but well-behaved. To my relief, I realised that he was not the pouncing type. From time to time my mind darted to Jake and what I was missing, but the more tired I grew the less it seemed to matter. And still the socks tumbled on.

Bob left sometime after 1 a.m., giving my backside a playful squeeze in parting. He drove off in his Mercedes wearing his now-dry socks, carrying his soaked shoes in a plastic bag. He also borrowed one of my own books, thereby exhibiting a commendable interest in my writing career.

But it had not been the best night for the man from Down Under. He had missed out on dinner, fallen into a pond and failed to get any action, as it were, ‘down under'.

But I hoped to see him again, if only as a social contact, because it's good to have raconteurs and clever people in one's life. But something told me he would not be content sticking to such a platonic role. As he might have put it, where's the cum in that?

*

I decided one day to send a conciliatory text to SuperA, my very first internet date. (Obviously I didn't count NiceMan, who still emailed occasionally to ask how my dating was going. But I thought it unwise to tell him about my capers. Why torment the poor man?) SuperA and I had been out of touch since our bust-up over his presence on the dating site on a day when he was supposedly hard at work. (To think I had actually been jealous. It seemed so ridiculous now.) A few months on, in my new, jealousy-free persona, I recalled that we'd had a good time together at our first – and so far only – meeting and I thought I'd try to reignite matters between us.

Me: Hello. Been thinking about you. You're not still cross with me are you? Why don't we give it another whirl?

SuperA: Hey. Funnily enough, I did think of you the other day.

Me: Was it a nice thought?

SuperA: Yes, I had a nice memory of waking up beside you with the sunlight streaming through your curtains on to your hair.

Blimey. He was waxing lyrical.

Me: Mm. And I have nice memories of you being on top and letting me have it with both barrels. Ha ha.

SuperA: You were very irate with me, without reason. Why the change of heart?

Me: I wasn't all that cross.

SuperA: You were beside yourself with rage!

Now he was overstating his case.

Me: I was just being a bit girly. I'm sorry. I'm so much wiser now in the ways of online dating!

SuperA: Ah, I see.

Then he called me and we had a long chat. It was apparent that he too was in favour of giving us another go. He said he was very busy at work (of course) but would be in touch soon to arrange something.

I had meant it when I told him I was wiser. It had taken me a few months but I finally twigged how the virtual dating system worked, and why it was that dates and would-be dates would emerge out of the ether only to disappear mysteriously back into it. As the site members spent so much of their time online, there was a ceaseless ebb and flow of connections being created in varying degrees of looseness, and as new ones formed, earlier ones dissolved, whether consciously or unconsciously, it was never possible to know for certain. The hapless were dropped or forgotten or put on hold, whilst other options were explored.

Everything was built on shifting sand, nothing was solid or reliable or entirely real. A promise one day generally meant nothing the next. And the more you wanted to believe in the value of a particular connection, in its possibilities for the future and its potential for genuine emotion, the more likely it was to be merely a mirage.

In an environment such as this, there was no point in taking any individual or his words seriously, jealousy was negated and normal responses to other human beings – involving sentiments such as hope and trust – were deactivated. If you couldn't play this pitiless game, you were in the wrong place and had better get out before it hammered you into the ground.

My worry wasn't that it might hammer me. My worry was that I was learning to play it too well and might not know how to stop once I had returned to the real world, offline.

*

SuperA was appearing at a media event in town, had booked into a swanky hotel for the night, and invited me to go there and spend it with him. He wouldn't be able to get there before 11.30 p.m., but the plan was to meet in the lobby and he would then take me up to his room, which was on a high-up floor and looked out over the Thames. A late night tryst with a romantic air about it! I relished the idea of getting on the tube and gallivanting into town for hot sex at an hour when women of my age were more commonly tucked up in bed with cocoa and a copy of House and Home.

‘Don't keep me waiting, though,' I told him. ‘I don't want to hang about in the lobby like some Russian hooker.'

‘Are you complaining already?'

At about 10 p.m. that evening I had just finished a languid soak in the bath and was applying copious amounts of body lotion to my limbs, when my mobile sprang to life with the merry chime of a text. I expected it to be from SuperA, and was startled to see that it was from Jock, the bearded Scot with whom I had spent the night in the Docklands, being hump-hump-humped into exhaustion. A blast from what now felt like the distant past in these dating chronicles. We had been out of touch for many weeks and I had assumed he and I were done.

‘Fancy a shag?' Typically, Jock did not stand on ceremony.

‘Yeah I do, actually, and luckily I'm about to have one.'

‘Knock yourself out. You're a scream.' And he added one of those tiresome smiley faces.

You can wait a long time for an exchange like that. I smiled to myself and carried on with my toilette.

SuperA was only a few minutes late arriving at his hotel, looking smart in an Armani suit. I had forgotten how swish he was. He gave me a nonchalant peck on the cheek with his scratchy, short-cropped beard, as though we had only been apart a day or two and not a matter of months.

As promised, his room had a marvellous view of the skyline. But this was no time to be admiring views. It was late. So we got down to business on the deluxe, five-star bed.

It was all right but a bit mechanical, and for my part, an almost desultory affair. Not so much hot as lukewarm. Partly this was because I realised I no longer fancied him that much. I was fussier now. The slightly wonky teeth, those tufts of hair along his shoulders, the paunch I hadn't noticed first time around…these things stacked up and put me off. I couldn't just ignore them, much as I would have liked to.

But it was more than that. As before, SuperA didn't appear to have much interest in me beyond the sex. No curiosity about my life. I sensed once again that he didn't see the point in engaging me in that way, as our connection was only intended to be loose and non-committal. He was interested in one aspect of my life, though: my dating escapades. He inquired about them and when I recounted some of my more notable tales, he was all ears. He claimed to have been too busy working for any such shenanigans himself, and I felt maybe he got a vicarious thrill from my anecdotes.

Early in the morning, before there could be any chance of a replay, I got out of bed and got dressed.

‘Leaving already?'

‘Yeah, lots to do.'

We said our farewells but I paused for a moment by the door, turned back and called out, ‘Don't be a stranger! Text me sometime.'

He was still lying under the duvet, expressionless, hands behind his head. ‘I will.'

But he had undoubtedly picked up on my mood and I suspected he wouldn't be in touch again.

I felt light and free, walking down the empty hotel corridor to the lift. And on my way to the tube I stopped at a coffee shop for a takeaway cappuccino. Another day was beginning and as I strolled along the streets of the city I loved, the thought of it, for some mysterious reason, made me almost dizzily happy.

That evening, whilst lying on the sofa watching a cheesy old western, I got a text from Charles. Just seeing his name on my phone again made me ridiculously excited.

The message was short: ‘I'm thinking of you.'

My reply was even shorter: ‘Me too.' I hadn't wanted to say that – shouldn't I play it cool? – but it burst out of me.

‘Am going to the US tomorrow for a week but can we catch up after I return?'

‘I'd love to!'

And despite myself, I let the hope creep back in.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I'm lunching with my younger son at a restaurant near his office in Marylebone. It's a beautiful day and we occupy an outdoor table, enjoying the warming sun, and if it weren't for the po-faced Nigerian traffic warden sulking nearby, hoping to catch out some wretched motorist, we could be on holiday in a cheery Mediterranean town.

It is always a pleasure to spend time in my son's company. With his wry sense of humour, quick wit and tendency to shoot from the hip, he is great entertainment value. In fact that is also an accurate description of my older son, although the two brothers are strikingly dissimilar in other ways, namely their motivations and ambitions. The younger is in the world of international high finance; the elder is a social worker struggling to turn dysfunctional members of society into useful citizens. I adore both equally, it just means that when it comes to eating in West End restaurants, one is better placed to pick up the tab.

So we are having our light and healthy (if not cheap) meal in Marylebone and I'm sipping my refreshing spritzer, and not unexpectedly my son asks what I've been ‘up to'. For a moment I ponder on what to divulge, what to leave out. Naturally I always give my offspring heavily edited versions of my dating life. I decide to relate the story of a date I went on the previous week, as it carries a U Certificate, ‘suitable for all'.

‘The guy had a terribly corny user-name which nearly put me off,' I say. In a mocking tone I tell him it is ‘
SpecialOneForYou
'.

My son rolls his eyes. ‘Jesus.'

‘I can't say his pictures set my heart aflutter. But he was passable. So in the end I thought I'd give him a chance and we arranged to have a drink in the 5
^th
floor bar at Waterstones in Piccadilly. And when I saw him I was really taken aback. He was so much better–looking in real life.'

A tad warily: ‘Yeah? How old?'

‘Not much younger than me, he's 55.'

‘Right,' my son takes a mouthful of food, relieved.

‘We got on really well, talking about all sorts of things and laughing a lot. He was a very nice, bright, amusing guy. He said he was glad I didn't present myself on the site in a disingenuous way, like the last woman he'd met, who was pretty and youthful on her photos but in reality looked like a prune. At that point I admitted that, actually, I
was
a teeny bit disingenuous because I was older than it said on my profile, but he said he didn't mind, because at our age a few years more or less didn't matter.

‘So anyway, drinks turned into dinner and we were there for three hours and there wasn't a single lull in the conversation. At the end he was a perfect gent, wouldn't let me pay for anything, and as we were saying good-bye out on the street – he was going in one direction and I in the other – I gave him a big kiss, then he said “next time maybe we'll go to a show” and I said I would love that. He said he'd call me soon. And I went home feeling very good about the whole thing.'

‘The “but” coming up is deafening, Mum.'

I take a large swig of spritzer in preparation for the denouement. ‘Well, two days later he leaves a message on my voicemail, saying that while he enjoyed meeting me and he'd had a lovely time, blah, blah, blah, he has decided he does not wish to “take things further”. So he's saying, basically, good-bye and good luck.'

‘Huh!' My son raises his eyebrows.

‘Naturally I was stunned and disappointed. He was the first guy I'd liked in ages who was eminently suitable, or so I'd thought. Well, I didn't think I could just leave it at that. I had to know what it was that had changed his mind so abruptly, before we'd even been out again, before he'd give me a bloody
chance
. So I texted him to say it was such a shame, as I'd been hoping to see him again. And I said, maybe you can tell me where I went wrong, for future reference. And you know what he replied? He said, “You did nothing wrong, it's just that the
je ne sais quoi
wasn't there for me.”
Je ne sais quoi
? Pretentious twat. Well, you know what? [I feel an abrupt surge of anger] He can just fuck off and take his
je ne sais quoi
with him!'

My son smiles. ‘Oh dear. Someone's not taking rejection very well.'

‘Listen, if he'd told me I was too old for him, or I shouldn't have smooched him on the first date, or he couldn't possibly go out with someone who wrote for the Daily Mail…well, perhaps I could understand. But
je ne sais quoi
? What's that supposed to mean? I don't know what that is.'

‘Mum, that's
just
what that is.'

I pause and look at him. ‘Oh, yeah. True.' We laugh.

‘Mum, you're priceless.'

There is one other thing about SpecialOneForYou, which I do not mention to my son, but it is something that suggests I should be glad he decided not to
take things further
. During our dinner he told me about a woman he had met through the dating site and with whom he became seriously involved. They were together for a year. ‘We had some wonderful times,' he said. ‘She was a lovely person. Attractive, intelligent, fun.' He added,
sotto voce
: ‘The sex was great.' I asked him what, in that case, had gone wrong and it turned out that what had gone ‘wrong' was that the poor woman had committed the crime of falling in love with him. And it was not reciprocated. So he ended their relationship. Here was a woman with everything to offer, including the holy grail of the whole god-dammed dating business: lasting love. By the sound of it, she really had been the
special one for him
. But after leading her on a merry dance for a year he dumped her in the shit.

Je ne sais quoi
? Oh no, I
do
know what. It's called being a bastard who can't commit.

*

I hadn't seen Pup in several weeks. First he had been away on holiday with his parents (so sweet!) and then he was studying hard for some professional exams he was taking. And if it wasn't that, then he was busy with his friends and his football. But at last we were in touch again and made a plan to meet. He was to come over on Saturday afternoon and stay until Sunday. Knowing we would be together again was a warming feeling.

On Friday evening I texted him to confirm the time of his arrival. As we exchanged a few racy messages in anticipation of our forthcoming shenanigans, I realised how much I had missed him and told him so. That was when, out of the blue, he revealed his secret.

‘I have something to tell you.'

‘How intriguing. What is it?'

‘Um…I'm a cross-dresser. Sorry, I couldn't keep it in much longer.'

I stared at the words in the little yellow speech bubble on my mobile screen. Not possible.
My
Little Pup? My muscular, football-playing lover who was so indisputably, so confidently heterosexual in bed?

After five minutes of ruminating on this revelation, I texted back. ‘What, you mean like you wear women's clothes and put on make-up?'

‘Pretty much spot on.'

‘I don't get it. I thought that was what gay or bisexual guys did. You're so great in bed!'

‘Oh I'm 100% straight.'

‘But then why do it?'

‘I just like the feel of it and I guess it's my form of art. It's not really an issue between me and you.'

An art form? I considered this. Well, it was true that Grayson Perry was a cross-dresser and he was an artist. He was famous. No one seemed to mind him dressing up as a woman. Perry wasn't my cup of tea, a bit too freakish, and he didn't make a particularly fetching woman. Pup was bound to be prettier…But no, no, no. Where was I going with this? Pup was a
boy
. Not meant to be pretty. Meant to look like a boy. Besides, he wasn't an artist but an
accountant
, for God's sake.

After a few minutes, when he had received no reply, he texted again: ‘Is it an issue?'

By now I knew the answer. ‘I love being with you, Pup. You mean a lot to me. What you do at other times is your own affair.'

‘You mean so much to me too! And I don't want to let you go.'

‘Well I'm glad you trust me enough to confide in me. Not sure I really understand the whole thing but then maybe that isn't important. As Hamlet said, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' But as Pup had never heard of Neil Diamond, perhaps he didn't know who Hamlet was either.

‘Thank you. My biggest flaw is a lack of trust. But your acceptance is a form of trust and I will be eternally grateful.'

The following morning he texted again to ask whether I still wanted to see him that day. Clearly he thought I might have had an overnight change of heart. But I said of course I wanted him to come, ‘more than once'. Oh how I tittered.

It was true that I'd spent some time picturing Pup's boyish face fully made up, like a drag queen's, and those chunky thighs sheathed in some slinky, sequined number. And did he wear a wig? High heels and jewellery? It was all weird and somewhat discomfiting. But not for long. When he arrived at my door a few hours later and we hugged and everything felt just as it had before, I forgot all about the cross-dressing. It didn't enter my head again, not while we made love, not later on over dinner, as we chatted easily, the way we always did, and it grew dark outside. And not afterwards when, back in bed again as Saturday turned into Sunday, we enjoyed each other's bodies once more, doing things we hadn't got around to earlier in the day.

I don't know why Pup's revelation didn't disturb me unduly. Maybe because I'm a bit kinky myself. Or maybe I am just the consummate libertarian.
Leben und leben lassen
– that's me. But as I have stated here once already, nothing could make me think the less of him. He had said that my acceptance was a form of trust and I guess that summed it up. I just accepted. And I trusted that whatever he was doing was all right, really.

I was always a touch sad after Pup left to go home, and I never knew why, exactly. It obviously wasn't because I would have liked him to be with me all the time, a ludicrous notion. We inhabited different worlds in every way. The fact that every once in a while we could come together and meld our lives so joyously into one, however briefly, seemed to me nothing short of miraculous. Life is always teasing us with some enigma or other.

Perhaps the reason for the sadness was that each time I watched him stroll off towards the tube, I knew I was letting go, for weeks or maybe months, a little piece of unadulterated happiness. And those little pieces are so hard to find.

*

Charles's week away in America came and went, as did the following week, and the week after that. He didn't contact me for the promised catch-up. And so, once again I consigned him to the dating dustbin. But this time, I told myself, he would stay there. If he ever texted me again I would ignore it. Months earlier, when Charles first appeared on the scene, Vanessa had said she felt there was something ‘dubious' about him. It seemed her instinct was right.

I noticed that, every two or three days, Charles went online on the dating site. You didn't have to be a stalker, the site flagged up everyone's status – whether logged on or not, how many days since they last ‘surfaced' – and it was hard to miss. I wondered how the sexless-ness thing was working out for him, the self-imposed impotency caused by his hang-up about his ex-wife. Or had that been merely (so to speak) a cock and bull story? Presumably Charles was doing what everyone else was doing on the site: checking out the talent, winking and messaging and flirting and lining up their ‘dates' like ducks in a row.

I understood what it was like, getting caught up in that. What I couldn't fathom was how anyone ever pulled the plug on all that swirling activity. How did you decide when you had met someone with whom you might wish to form an exclusive relationship and that it was time to turn away from all those other tempting prospects twinkling away in cyberspace? How did you ever reach the point of saying okay, I've seen enough, thank you, I've found this lovely person, we're a good match, now let's give it a chance and see where it goes? So long to all the rest, no matter how hot they are. And didn't that point have to be synchronised between both halves of the match? It wouldn't work if only one of you called it a day, while the other remained online and on the hunt.

To break the addiction a person might have to go into rehab and attend months of supervised meetings. Date-aholics Anonymous. Or you could just go cold turkey, leave the site when the subscription ran out and return to the old system of trying to meet someone in a bar or at a social event or by bumping into them at the supermarket. A heart-sinking option, to be sure.

There was one upside to virtual dating, though, which hadn't been lost on me. It took the sting out of rejection. You were rejected so often – by those whom you contacted in hope, who in turn studiously ignored you, or by others who seemed genuinely keen before dropping you into oblivion – that it became something easy to shrug off. After all, didn't you do the same thing yourself to plenty of hapless contenders? And every lucky strike – the date that came off, the connection that produced something good and worthwhile, whether sexual or not, whether lasting or not – was a laugh in the face of those rejections.

I sometimes wondered what my ex-partner, with whom I had spent thirteen long and taxing, but faithful years – I'd been monogamous to a fault – would make of my current lifestyle. The romps with twenty-somethings, the dicey assignations, the unknown, untested men off the internet turning up late at night. The devil-may-care wantonness, the appetite for sex, sex, sex which at times seemed to be, in a word, Raven(ous). Naturally, I told him very little about my doings. And I reckoned that if he had known the direction my life had taken since our parting, the shock might have resulted in his spontaneous combustion. When he had last known me at close quarters I was fairly nonchalant about physical contact with him. As far as he was aware, I was ‘past it', more interested in reading a book or cooking a meal, or anything really, than a roll in the hay.