At work the following day I scoured the back issues and found four different sets of Gemma in four different magazines and these too made their way home with me that night. In one of the mags, Ace, Gemma was the centre spread girl and I was half-tempted to pin her up on my wall until I remembered that my elderly landlady often let herself into my room while I was out to empty the coin-operated electric and gas meters. I doubted whether she would’ve approved. Instead, an unofficial Gemma shrine was set up in the linen drawer under my bed and rapidly grew as the week went by.
On Friday night, I had a couple of beers with the lads after work and bought two bottles of Bulgarian red on the way home, along with a small £10 bag of grass, 20 fags and a take-away chicken Madras. It had all the makings of a famous night in.
By 10 o’clock, Gemma was out of her drawer and laying all around me in a crescent of best pages. I studied her pictures and fantasised that she was in the room with me right now, begging me to do her just the way she liked it. She really was the quintessential sex object for me at that moment and I wanted to bone her so badly that it hurt. In fact, I had to. I simply had no choice. My life wouldn’t ever be complete if I didn’t. And I knew it.
I pondered this as I relit my joint and took a big dirty drag.
‘So why don’t you?’ said the little red demon sitting on my left shoulder.
‘Why don’t I what?’ I asked him.
‘Fuck her. Come on, you actually know her, it’s not like you’re just some reader. You’re in the business. Besides, you know what she’s like, she told you herself. She loves it. You’d have no bother there.’
‘But she’s all the way up there in Manchester,’ I told him.
‘So? Give her a ring, you’ve got her number in your wallet, we all saw you slip it in there. Give her a bell and tell her you want to go up and pay her a visit. Then just drill her. She’d be well up for it. Maybe not tonight but you could jump on a train first thing in the morning and be up there before lunchtime tomorrow. A fucking porn model man, and look at her. Imagine that.’
‘She is something else isn’t she?’ I said, staring at her centre spread and taking another big toke.
‘And she’s already as good as laid it on a plate for you, you’d have to be bent not to give her one. Go on, give her a ring. You know what they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. You only live once and all that old bollocks.’
‘That’s all very true,’ I told the demon. ‘You’ve made some excellent points there. But hey, what do you think?’ I said turning to the angel on my other shoulder.
‘Count me in, I’m with you lads,’ he said, tossing away his halo.
I dug my mobile out and tapped in Gemma’s number. My pay-as-you-go credit was pretty low but I had enough for probably a couple of minutes. I pressed the green button and held the phone to my ear.
As horny and focused as I was, I was still a bit apprehensive about calling a porn model out of the blue and inviting myself up for a sex session. I mean, how the hell was I going to phrase that one? I assured myself that Gemma would remember our call from earlier in the week and know what I was ringing about. I mean, she’d been chuffed to bits to hear from me last time I’d rang and she hadn’t even known me then. Now that we’d shared a little telephone intimacy she was bound to be even more forthcoming. I took a couple of big swigs from my wine to steady my nerves and another big drag on my joint. My fingers were shaking as I held phone and drugs to my face and my heart pounded violently when the ringing tone started. This, however, was compared to nothing when the phone was finally answered.
‘Hello?’ I heard her shout.
‘Hi Gemma?’
‘Yes?’
‘Hi, it’s Godfrey from Bling, we spoke the other day.’
‘Huh? Oh right, yeah, hi.’ There was a bit of a pause as she passed this information onto someone with her, then asked me, ‘What’s up?’
‘Oh nothing, I just wanted to give you a quick ring, if that’s alright?’
‘Er... what about?’ she shouted again.
‘Well, just to say hello and all that, and follow up something we were talking about the other day.’
‘I can’t hear you, you’ll have to speak up a bit,’ she yelled. ‘Hang on a minute, I’m going outside so I can hear you.’
There was a lull in the conversation as she made her way through a background of laughter and music and emerged out into the relative quiet of a street.
‘That’s better, I can hear you now. Okay, sorry but what was you saying?’
‘Oh, er well, nothing important,’ I told her and squirmed as I struggled to find the right words. ‘Well, you know when you said the other day that it was a shame I wasn’t up there in Manchester?’ I said, trying to introduce the subject in a roundabout way. In my mind, when I’d planned this call, she’d remembered our conversation immediately and extended an instant invitation for me to come up and stay with her. This didn’t happen quite like this in reality and I felt my heart sink a little when she replied:
‘Er, no but go on.’
Not the recognition I was hoping for. I decided I’d better double check I was talking to the right person.
‘This is Gemma, isn’t it? The model, who I spoke to on Tuesday afternoon?’
‘Yes. Sorry, who is this again?’
‘Godfrey Bishop. I work on Bling, I spoke to you the other day.’
‘Okay. Yeah?’
‘Well, you said the other day that Manchester was a long way to go just to interview someone,’ I said, not getting any closer to the point and finding it extremely hard to find the right words.
‘Look, can this wait until Monday because I’m freezing my tits off here?’ Gemma said and I pictured her pert little tits all goosepimply and pert. My phone started beeping to signal that my credit was disappearing fast so I realised I’d better get to the point and quick, but this wasn’t easy. Why wasn’t it easy? She’d seemed right up for it the other day.
‘Well, when I spoke to you last you said that it was a shame I wasn’t up there in Manchester and that I should think of you next time I... er... you know....’ I tailed off as more beeps punctuated my train of thought. Get to the point! Get to the fucking point, I told myself, but my heart was going like the clappers and my voice was starting to croak. ‘Anyway, er, tomorrow I was thinking of coming up to Manchester to see you in person, if that’s alright, you know?’
‘To see me? What for?’
‘Well, it was what you was saying the other day, you know, when I spoke to you then? About me? Thinking of you?’
‘Thinking of me, what?’ she said, failing to make any sort of connection at all. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘About...’ I whined, then quickly concluded I’d misread the signals and was in the process of making a beauty of a mistake that would have me cringing for years. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told her all urgently but she wouldn’t let it go.
‘What? Hello?’
‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Look, I’m with my boyfriend and his family at the moment and I don’t work at the weekends anyway.’
‘No, really, it’s alright,’ I tried to reassure her.
‘What are you coming to Manchester for?’ I heard her ask, but then there was a second voice in the background demanding to know what was going on.
‘No, no, really, it’s alright. Honestly, it’s alright, don’t worry...’ I tried to tell her but it was too late, my phone suddenly died.
That hadn’t gone as well as I’d hoped.
I looked at it for a moment, buried my head in my hands and didn’t move for about twenty minutes. I stayed in this position, shaking my head and grimacing so hard that I’m surprised my cheeks didn’t tear before deciding the best way forwards was a big drink.