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“You’re a lifesaver,” A4 said. He’s the one my father still asks after, as if we’re still an item. He’s the one I have the most pictures of. There is one of him in the mountains in a silver frame on my bookshelves. He’s looking up at the camera, at me, a hand out to steady himself, and smiling. Sweet creature. Smiles often.

“You’ll pay me back another time.” mercredi, le 24 decembre

I miss living in the North. The stories are all true. People really are friendlier up here. The chips really are better. Everything really is cheaper. The women really do go out in midwinter wearing less.

I miss getting pissed for less than a fiver. jeudi, le 25 decembre

Right, I have been waiting absolutely weeks to say this.

Happy Christmas, ho ho ho!

(It made me laugh anyway. It’s Hanukkah, and I am eating white chocolate gelt at the moment, which is cooler than cool. And no sign of a gift from the Boy, which is somewhat less than cool.) vendredi, le 26 decembre

My first diary was a seventh-birthday gift. Fortunately, most of the intervening volumes have been lost. This morning, bored to death, I set about cleaning out a desk and found some old ones from a few years back. They were written in softcover exercise books with flowers drawn on the covers. They date from the time N and I met.

We met a few years ago and hit it off immediately. “Hit it off” being a coy way of saying “grabbed a room in the first hotel we could find.” A couple of days later, when we came up for air, he mentioned his female friend J and the possibility of a threesome. He’d had threesomes with her several times before and vouched for her beauty and overwhelming sexuality.

We were sitting in his car, looking at the river near Hammersmith. “Sure,” I said. I hadn’t been with many women, but considering all the ground he and I had covered in a weekend, it seemed impossible to refuse. He rang her to arrange a meeting, and this is how the diary entry continued:

We met J at her place and went for brunch. Food was nice, talked about sex and underwater archaeology.

Back at hers I made hot cocoa for N and me. When he went out of the room, she kissed me and asked how many women I’d been with. Lied and said eight or nine.

We drank the cocoa in the front room and N said he might have a nap. J took me to her bedroom, which held a big white bed and pillowcases that spelled “La Nuit” in a serif font.

We kissed and touched. J seemed tiny until I took off my shoes-in fact we are the same height. Her bum looked so good in the cream striped trousers, but even better naked. The night before, N had said I had the best arse he’d ever seen, but J’s, I think, is better. Her neck, skin, and hair all smelled so nice I was suddenly aware of my own sweat. “Did N do that?” she asked of the deep scratches on my shoulder. I showed her the dark bruises on my thighs and the faint marks from his cock on my face. She told me to lie down and blindfolded me and tied my hands.

She dragged a soft, multistranded whip across me. “Do you know what this is?” “Yes.” “Do you want it?” She saved the hardest lashes for my breasts and fucked me with a double-headed dildo. When I pressed my face in her crotch, she untied me and took the mask off. I licked her through the knickers and then took them off-J was shaven down below.

It was easy to get her off with my fingers. After which I noticed N watching from the open door. Asked how long he’d been there. “Since the mask went on,” he said. “I could smell the two of you before I even got to the door.”

At this point J’s boyfriend turned up and the diary gets a little vague. To make a long story short, he had a problem with N-namely, he didn’t want N to touch J. Out of frustration N blurted that if that was so, J’s man couldn’t touch me either. Instead, N tried unsuccessfully to fist me. I was so distracted I couldn’t come. J sucked her partner off, we all showered seperately, exchanged numbers, and N and I left. He dropped me at King’s Cross.

He asked if I needed anything before the journey. Something meaningful to live for, I quipped. Food and sex, he said immediately, and I laughed. I’ve reminded him of this flash of philosophy several times since, but he never remembers saying it. Walking through the station, I felt lighter than air, dazed. Happy.

“Well,” he said just before the train doors closed, “I guess four in a bed is too many.”

I remember masturbating on the ride north. It wasn’t easy; the carriage was crowded and people kept sitting next to me. I didn’t want to do it in the toilet. But I had hours to do it in and unbuttoned my trousers as slowly as needed for perfect silence. It happened with an Asian girl sitting next to me, turned talking to her friend a few rows back. I had a coat thrown over my lap and pretended to be asleep. Afterward I rang N to let him know. It was somewhere around Grantham, I believe. samedi, le 27 decembre

I have never been the sort of girl to make New Year’s resolutions. Such things are bound to lead to teetotaler parties, ill-advised marriages, or worse. Once I resolved to use floss and mouthwash before brushing every day for an entire year. This was before I realized (some 1.4 milliseconds later) that maintaining such a level of dental hygiene was not only unlikely to last an entire week, but also massively unattractive. Would you want to wake up to a full-on Broadway musical starring your beloved’s tonsils every morning? I think not.

Another year, I planned to keep a handwritten diary without giving up out of boredom or forgetfulness. Miraculously, I made it to the six-month mark, spurred on by simultaneous reading of the diaries of those vastly superior journalists Kenneth Tynan and Pepys. By comparison my own suffered from a lack of tales of having my wig deloused or all-night drinking sessions with Tennessee Williams. Nevertheless, even the most reluctant leopard may exchange her stole, and I have given some thought to what good deeds and resolutions I could enact in the next twelve months.

It is hereby resolved that I will never buy an own-brand bottle of lube again. Never.

I believe there is some chance of keeping this one. dimanche, le 28 decembre

Ah, the bosom of home. So comforting. So convivial.

So stiflingly the same as it is every year. I’m off down south again, before Mum notices the dent in the side of the car. lundi, le 29 decembre

(Phone rings) Me: “Hello?”

Manager (for it is she): “Darling, are you asleep?”

“Um, no?”

“Oh riiiight. You just sound so relaxed. I think to myself, I am so relaxed, but you are always much more relaxed than me. Do you read a lot?”

“Um, yes?”

“That would be why then. People who read are so relaxed. Anyway, I have a booking for you right away. I don’t know what it is all of a sudden, but everyone has gone mad for you.” They say that madames are known to play favorites with the girls, promoting some more heavily than others according to personal whim, but I have not yet noticed this. The business seems to have up weeks where I’m turning down offers and down weeks when I wonder if there’ll be anyone at all. But the manager always seems uniformly businesslike.

“Um, good?”

“Verrrrrry good, darling. I will text you the details. Enjoy your book.”

I had to take a different minicab from usual. The new driver did not endear himself-first he started going east, then seemed to be making a very elaborate loop that took in most of Islington. I was on the phone to A4 and only paying scant attention to the road. Twenty minutes later, when we turned back onto a road three blocks south of my house, I exploded. “I could have walked here faster!”

“Yes, well, traffic, this time of night,” he said.