At the end of the day, the secret of a good sex confession, in my mind, was plausibility and a bit of a twist: the goody-goody-two-shoes girlie fresher who’s so besotted with the senior lecturer that she lets him do her up the arse, only to find out that he’s actually the janitor. The irate woman who discovers her boyfriend’s been cheating on her so she makes a porno video with three squaddies plastering her from head to foot and leaves it behind after packing her bags and scarpering. The female journalist who’s never swallowed a load in her life but has to write an article all about it for Cosmopolitan in order to get her dream job there. Aren’t these a bit more interesting than ‘to cut a long story short’?
The overnight conference, the female boss, the recent divorce and the connecting doors...
... the missing stripper, the desperate club owner, the skint barmaid and the impatient stag party of rowdy firemen...
... the stranded female driver, the AA man, the lapsed breakdown cover and the roadside service...
... the dashing young cat-burglar, the female dormitory, the citizen’s arrest and the on-the-spot penal punishment...
... the outrageous bet, the football team’s showers, the manager’s wife and the whole team pulled off at half-time...
... the Ann Summer’s party, the new girl to the neighbourhood, the suitcase full of products and the tube of lube...
... the odious boss, his naive secretary, her pay review and an unfortunate case for the tribunal...
... the middle-aged former beauty, the dried-out complexion, the bob-a-job Adventure Scouts and the interesting new moisturiser...
... the bored housewife, her insatiable lust for rough, the Parcel Force driver and the large packet leant up against her back door...
... the girls’ night in, Basic Instinct on the telly, three bottles of wine too many and the itch neither friend can ignore...
... the unworldly shop girl, the teasing co-workers, the quest to find out what she’s been missing and the rubber ring on the checkout seat the next day...
... the train home, the stunning brunette, the bag full of shopping and... oh, hang on a minute.
Well, anyway, I could bang on about this all night but I can’t be bothered. I guess what I’m trying to say is yes, most of the letters were real, it’s just what happened in them was a load of old bollocks.
But then, you probably knew that already.
5. Talking dirty
Of course, it took me a good year and a couple of hundred letters before I worked all this out for myself. In those first few of weeks I was more preoccupied with a more immediate question.
‘Where the fuck is Stuart?’ I asked Roger.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied without turning around. ‘Doesn’t give a fuck does he...’ he started muttering to himself before his muttering became a mumbling and I was no longer able to make out what he was saying.
I phoned Wendy on reception and she told me she hadn’t got anything written in the book and that Stuart hadn’t phoned in. I replaced the receiver and wondered what I could do. Bling was late by about three weeks and we’d only got a couple of the features done: one about jet-skiing and one about one ‘crazy’ night on the Ibiza clubbing scene. Both were extremely dull and wouldn’t be read by anyone except the PR girl who’d taken Stuart jet-skiing two months ago and Stuart’s ‘crazy’ mate, Gerard, who’d paid for half his holiday in Ibiza by writing about his ‘mad antics’ in Manumission. Not that they were that ‘mad’, all he’d done was drop a couple of tabs and get up on some stage with the in-crowd and dance around like a cunt in front of several thousand people all doing exactly the same thing. Gerard had tried to convey the ‘craziness’ of it all though by tagging on the end of each sentence, ‘it was mad’ or ‘it was wild’ or ‘it was unbelievable’ all of which were deleted from the feature in a charitable attempt to make him sound like less of a wanker.
Anyway, that was all by the by. I’d subbed the letters for this month and reviewed a couple of movies and was now stuck and bored. I twiddled my thumbs a bit more, picked up a copy of Ace, flicked through it for a few minutes but soon became bored again.
How bizarre! Only six weeks ago, before I’d started working here, I would’ve been poring over the pictures and fantasising about the girls until my trousers needed loosening. Only five weeks ago, I would’ve been sitting here surreptitiously stealing glances and shoving the magazines away the moment anyone looked over in my direction. But now, Hazel came up and asked me if I’d picked a loupe (a little magnifying eye-piece for looking at slides) up off her desk and I didn’t even put the magazine down. She stood in front of me and complained about people nicking stuff off her desk all the time and how this was her third loupe to go missing this year and I just carried on flicking through the mag and looking at the naked girls bending over and spreading their arses without the slightest twinge of embarrassment. Well why shouldn’t I? They were only arses, after all. We all had them.
Paddy had been right. In my first week he’d told me that when he’d started he’d always known that the novelty of looking at naked girls would wear off. What had surprised him was just how fast it had worn off.
‘Haven’t you had her in your mag recently?’ I asked Hazel, showing her a picture of one girl resting her head against another girl’s beaver.
‘Gabrielle? She’s our regular girl, she’s in every month. I don’t know what Ace are doing running her. Anyway, if you see my loupe let me know because I don’t want to go ordering another one because it makes it look as if I’m stealing them.’
‘You should scratch your name on it, that way everyone knows it’s yours and no one can nick it.’
‘I bloody will next time,’ she fumed and marched back to her desk.
‘I’ll let you know if I find it,’ I assure her as I scratched my name into Hazel’s loupe. Well, it saved ordering one for myself, didn’t it?
*
It was halfway through the afternoon and a bit sleepy after a couple of lunchtime pints when Stuart rang.
‘Did you manage to speak to any of them?’ he asked.
‘Any of who?’
‘The girls, did you phone them up?’
‘Er...’ I said, wondering if I’d nodded off during a briefing. ‘What girls? Sorry, who do you mean?’
‘Did Roger not give you those sets?’ he asked, his voice now tinged with irritation.
‘Er...’ I said again, not wanting to get anyone into trouble.
‘Let me talk to Roger, put Roger on.’
‘Roger, it’s for you. It’s Stuart.’
Roger’s shoulders sagged at the unfairness of it all and took the phone off me without turning around.
‘Yeah?’ he grunted. There was a pause then I listened to one half of a sulky, petulant Q&A, then Roger handed me the phone and turned back to friendsreunited.co.uk.
‘I left some stuff for you with Roger, he’ll explain what needs to be done. I’ll speak to you in the morning.’ And with that Stuart was gone again.