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It was half past one on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was already on my way to being drunk. I’d been circulating around this room for a few hours now, buying drinks, inviting confidences, like the tipsy hostess of a dour, exclusively male cocktail party. These three men, I thought, could be ranked in order of hostility. The first found my presence an imposition, and wished I would go. His friend, who had just come back from the bar with four Southern Comforts and lemonade, apparently taking the Welsh boy at his word when he told him to “get anything,” didn’t care either way. And the Welsh boy, who was, as far as I could tell, the dominant force at the table, wanted me to stay.
The nature of this work was making me see what it must be like for them. Going up to groups, identifying the most receptive, inveigling your way in, uncaring of what the majority wants. Girls are taught to respond to the subtlest social cues, to beat a retreat at the first hint of furrowed brow or crossed arms; boys to develop a benign tone-deafness for the very same signals. They learn to brazen it out and keep talking, like a salesman on a doorstep sensing a soft no. In order to do work like this—to latch on to strangers and coax conversation from them—I had to become a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.
[...] “Don’t worry about your missus,” they’d say to each other. “She’s not worrying about you. She’s busy getting nailed by Leroy.”
Leroy is to oil workers as Jody is to marines. A folk figure; the indolent civilian who hangs about on dry land, taking advantage of their absence. An expression of generalized anxiety, a means of hardening the heart towards home. Notably (or not), Leroy, like Jody, appears to be black, though most North Sea workers come from postindustrial towns that are, for the most part, white. Leroy, one man said, was name-checked all over the world. He’d worked in Brazil, Greenland, the United States, the Falklands. Wherever he went, the men made jokes about Leroy. Why is he black? I asked the man. Why do you think? he replied.
AT THE FLAT, WE LEFT THE WINDOWS OPEN. AS THE LIGHT FADED, his looks took on a generic, mutable quality. Stripped of his tracksuit in the semidarkness, he could have been any one of my teenage boyfriends. I had definitely reverted to type with him, though it was a type so old, I’d almost forgotten it was mine. And the sex had a teenage flavor too, in that it was clumsy and disorganized, and I couldn’t articulate what was wrong, or how to fix it. Twenty years since I’d dumped my virginity at the edge of a field, with all the ceremony of someone fly-tipping an old fridge, and my sexual responses were still a mystery to me.
I couldn’t say what I wanted, because what I wanted resided deep down, in a place under language, a register that lost everything in translation. Words failed me here as they’d never failed me before, so I resorted to a cryptic system of shrugs and peeved silences, which he tried to decode, and could not. Away from him, I turned into a furtive, inveterate masturbator, an obsessed and needy correspondent. When we were together, I found myself scheming, trying to get out of having sex. Except there was no getting out of it. Sex was part of the compact we struck, the day he left, when he called to debrief me and said in a quavering voice: “You better love me, after all of this.” And I did love him, so took some pleasure in his, in watching his white beauty in the mirrored wardrobe, and itemizing what later, I’d try to recall. Sweat-stiffened hair. Double-textured skin. Narrow gap between his teeth, visible as his mouth fell open.
“Your pussy. It’s so tight.”
I used to like hearing him say this. Lately, it depressed me. It made me consider the impossible, Escheresque arc of male desire, the built-in obsolescence of the female body. If a man loved a woman, he’d want her to have his child. And when she gave him that child, he’d thank her by fucking a newer woman, with an unspent vagina, a cervix still intact. Some of this showed on my face. I knew this because I could see myself. He liked to watch us in the mirror. I was less keen. Something about the surface of the glass distorted our reflections.
Caden flicked disconsolately among channels. It pained him to know there were people in the world who thought him imperfect. I’d taken him for an adult because he earned a lot of money, but he was like me. Critique gave him heartburn. Credit checks, tax returns, medicals, appraisal in any form. In giving the grown-ups the slip, we’d created a power vacuum. In the afternoons, we went back to bed, as if we lived in a Latin country rather than a chill Presbyterian port. And in the mornings, I woke up feeling guilty. We consumed endless trashy television, with special account given to the lower-tier reality shows, where teak-colored men in peg trousers buttonholed interchangeable women for stilted “chats.” ITV2 was a Möbius strip of mindless content. Cousins of the TOWIE cast, people affiliated with the Kardashians, spinoffs of spinoffs.
By then, I’d picked up a smattering of the language, as an expat picks up a few phrases after six months in the new country. My ex is crazy: I treat women poorly. My ex is controlling: I am a cheat. My ex is bitter: I am incapable of linking cause and effect. My ex took me for everything I had: she received an amount commensurate with her contribution to our marriage. My ex won’t let me see the kids, though I pay through the nose: I think maintenance payments ought to work like a VIP concert ticket, where you buy access to the performer, irrespective of my failings as a parent. You’re different to other birds: I believe women are more or less interchangeable. I’d sit there, thinking that mothers who tell their girls they’re special send them out into the world with a flank exposed. Occasionally, I asked these men why they got married in the first place. I got the same answer every time: No man ever wants to get married. It’s always for they girlfriends.
When I saw them, I felt loneliness of a different grade. I missed my friends, I thought, as I watched them move onto the dance floor. How carelessly I’d thrown them away when I moved here. It takes years to know a person, for those connections to bed down and mature, and I’d discarded mine, as if friendships of similar quality could be struck up in the space of six months.
And then I felt the fury every woman feels, on learning that the man who broke her still breathes. Why was Caden even alive? What purpose could he serve? And why was he still going out, having a nice time, when he ought to be sitting on the floor of a featureless garret, weeping over my old text messages? There was something impudent, something hard-necked about his vitality, his insistence on just being, exactly as he was before. He was thriving; I was altered at a cellular level. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. He had killed something in me. He ought to atone for it by killing himself.
“I have to write them up, before anything else. Which will take weeks. I wish I had a slave to do all my transcribing. Maybe not a slave. An indentured servant.”
“What’s this book going to be, then? A thriller?”
“More of a mystery. I wanted to see what men were like with no women around.”
“But you were around.”
“Yes, it was a bit flawed. Schrödinger’s offshore worker.”
“Is it going to be dead racy? Like Fifty Shades of Grey?”
“I hope not. Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey?”
“My bird has.”
“Figures.”
“You got a name for it?”
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.”
“Bit harsh.”
“Sorry. Bad joke. That one’s taken, anyway.”
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