Authors: Lisa Jewell
'Ninety-nine per cent of the people in this city wander around in a little bubble. Like you, Jem. I see you at least twice a week and we have a little chat, and I can tel you're a realy nice girl and that you've got a bit of spirit, like, a bit of adventure, but you were stil too scared to take it any further, weren't you? We'd reached our little London point of contact, you were comfortable with that and if it hadn't been for tonight we would have gone on like that for eternity.
'Nah — life's too short to live in Beckenham and lock your door every night when you get off the six-fifteen, not to let strangers into your flat. See you two, tonight, I bet you never thought you'd end up on an eight-foot water-bed watching some butcher getting tarted up for the night. I bet you're glad you did though, arntcha?' He laughed.
'Ever seen that film
After Hours
about that straight guy who folows Rosanna Arquette into downtown New York and ends up stranded in the middle of the night with no money and meets al these weirdos and freaks? Now, some people might have watched that film and thought, Oh, God, what a nightmare, I hope nothing like that ever happens to me. Not me. That's what I want my life to be like, every
day-After Hours.
I always think of it like this: You're walking down the street and you pass a phone booth. The phone's ringing. Now, there are two kinds of people, people who think, Don't want to get involved, and walk on by, and people who are curious, nosy, and want to answer it. Chances are it's a wrong number. But there's always a chance you could be getting involved in some mysterious rendezvous, a lover's tryst, anything. A phone ringing on the street -
it could be anything. It could be the start of a film, like, or a book'
— he paused for effect — 'I love it!' He looked at his watch and slapped his thighs. 'Anyway, enough of me philosophizing, I've got some partying to do.'
They folowed him down the dreary stairwel and back into the bright, multicoloured mayhem of Chinatown.
'If I don't see you before, Happy Christmas and al that — have a good one,' said Pete, shivering a little in the icy midnight air.
He gave Jem a kiss on the cheek. He leant into Ralph's ear as they shook hands.
'Lucky man, Ralph,' he whispered, Very lucky man.'
Ralph almost corrected him, almost said, 'Oh no, she's not my girlfriend,' but stopped himself. He wanted Pete to think he was a lucky man; he wanted Pete to think he had something special.
And then he went. Jem and Ralph stood where they were, not quite sure what to do next that wouldn't feel like an anticlimax after their rather peculiar experience and Pete's closing inspirational philosophy.
'Gosh,' said Jem.
'Indeed,' said Ralph.
'Food, then?' said Jem.
'Guess so,' said Ralph.
Jem's face suddenly lit up with a wicked smile. 'Come on,' she grabbed his hand, 'can we just do something before we eat - there's something I've always wanted to do.'
Ralph shrugged, smiled and folowed her.
A fat Mexican in a sombrero played panpipes by the pagoda phone boxes, watched and appreciated by no one. Restaurants closed down for the night, scrawny men in grubby overals wheeled large bins of leftovers into the street. Two drunk transvestites in feather boas and Baby Jane make-up passed them noisily and disappeared into a bar above the Chinese barbers' with red velvet curtains at the window and fairy lights around the door. A couple stood outside the Dive Bar lost in a neverending kiss.
They crossed Shaftesbury Avenue, weaving through the perpetual traffic jam and crowds of coated, scarved and hatted people.
'Where're we going?' asked Ralph.
'Just you wait!' smirked Jem.
They turned left from Greek Street into Old Compton Street, Ralph peering as inconspicuously as possible into the steamed windows of chrome-and-glass gay bars, into a world he had no place in, an exclusive world. Funny, he thought, how the word 'exclusive' had come to mean chic, fashionable, private, select, when what it realy meant was that you weren't alowed in, you were excluded. It was quite a horrible word realy.
Right and left into Brewer Street.
'Here,' said Jem, stopping outside a darkened shop with beaded curtains at the doorway and an amateur
window display filed with sun-bleached packaging and nasty nylon underwear. A sign in the window proclaimed WE SELL
POPPERS. A grotesque mannequin with chipped skin like a horrific burns victim sported a leather basque and brandished a whip in arthritic fingers. Unfeasible dildos stood side by side on a shelf, like suspects in a police line-up.
'Here?' asked Ralph, his voice betraying a little middle-class disapproval. 'What for?'
'Just for the hel of it, of course, I've never been in a sex shop before.' She was excited, a bit nervous. 'Come on,' she urged.
They entered the shop together, trying to look blase, as if they often browsed around Soho sex shops on a Friday night. An Amazonian woman with backcombed black nylon hair down to her thighs, wearing more black eyeliner than the average woman would apply in a lifetime and a tight leather dress that must have required the removal of at least a couple of ribs glanced up at them with a look of practised disinterest and then continued to read the vintage comic she had spread open on the counter in front of her. Her skin was a dead, matt white which appeared to have been sprayed on with an aerosol can. She looked like she might have fangs.
A large black guy in a T-shirt and jeans stood silently by the door, his hands clasped in front of him, his legs a couple of feet apart.
Security. At the far end of the shop an unlikely couple browsed through a rail of French-maid outfits and Miss Whiplash leather ensembles. She was tal, young, perfectly blonde, expensively dressed; she would have looked fantastic on a large black horse in a pair of jodhpurs and a hairnet.
He
was smal, old, powerfuly bald, expensively dressed he would have looked intimidating at the head of a huge corporate boardroom table. Maybe not such an unlikely couple. They'd done this before. There was no humour between them as they quietly discussed the preposter ous pieces of shoddy nylon and PVC
which hung like oversized dols' clothes from cheap plastic hangers -
this was a business transaction. What were they? Boss and secretary, client and high-class whore, husband and second wife?
Maybe she was his daughter's best friend at boarding school?
Another couple stood and examined the video racks. He was fat and unkempt. So was she. Again no humour. They might have been browsing through the reference section of the local library.
The shop was silent, there was no music, no television, just the reverent, businesslike hum of muted embarrass ment. This was not what Jem had expected. j
She wandered towards the video display and the fat couple moved a little to the left to give her some space, She picked up a box. A shocked-looking peroxide blonde with a mouth like a vagina squeezed her dome-like breasts together while a faceless, torsoless, armless man pinned beneath her penetrated her analy and another man who appeared to have only a two-foot penis and a fabulous head of hair impaled her from the front. No wonder she looked shocked. Jem put the box down. She surveyed the display of extraordinary leather and chrome bondage accessories that hung from the ceiling like carcasses in a butcher's window. Masks, hoods, cuffs, straps, whips and chains, implements for hanging someone from the ceiling, tying them to the bed, gagging them, constraining them, contorting them, whipping them. An al-in-one, head-to-toe PVC bodysuit with a
barely sufficient mouth-slit straddled the wal. It looked uncomfortable, sweaty.
Jem walked towards Ralph, who was flicking through a magazine filed with badly photographed images of men and women looking uncomfortable and sweaty in similar erotic garb.
Tm going to buy a vibrator,' she whispered to him, cupping his ear with her hand.
'What?!' he exclaimed, almost silently.
The vibrators were located in the glass-fronted cabinet which served as a counter to the vampire woman with the comic. Jem felt a little uncomfortable as she eyed the selection, trying to look expert, trying not to look self-conscious under the stagnant aura of the bizarre shop assistant. She wasn't sure what she was looking for. Did she want a sixteen-inch shiny black one or a discreet, cream, handbag-sized model? She beckoned to Ralph, who put back his copy of
House of Correction
monthly and crouched down next to her in front of the cabinet.
What d'you think?' she whispered.
Ralph shrugged. He felt like the unwiling boyfriend in a clothes shop on a Saturday afternoon. This was girl's stuff — how was he supposed to know? He was feeling awkward. He'd been inside a sex shop before, of course he had. With his mates, when he was younger, for a laugh, to buy poppers, leer over dirty magazines. But this was different, very different. Now his head was ful of images
— Jem on her unmade bed, lying on her Chinese-dragon dressing-gown, her knickers around her ankles, her skirt hitched up, knees apart, applying her new vibrator to herself. Oh, God, it was fantastic. But he didn't want to think those things about her; as erotic and exciting as the image was, he didn't want it in his head.
He wanted the hug in Pete's bedroom in his head. He wanted the subtly erotic image of Jem's bare toes smeared with mustard in his head, the barely there glimpse of her soft white bottom. He wanted her face, open, smiling, bright and joyful. He wanted to imagine them together, in the future, in love, laughing, making love, taking their dog for a walk.
He looked down at her smiling face, the tip of her nose pink and pinched, her eyes looking brightly and fondly at him, and the unwanted image disappeared. This was Jem, gorgeous, lovely, wonderful, angelic Jem. He didn't want to be like Smith. He didn't want to be a fusty old stick-in-the-mud. She was asking him to be open-minded, to go with the flow. He smiled and turned to eye the display.
'I mean, I don't suppose it realy matters how big it is, as long as it vibrates — unless you want to stick it inside you, of course,' he offered helpfuly.
That's true,' whispered Jem thoughtfuly. 'I don't think I want a black one, or one with veins. They're a bit vulgar, aren't they?'
Yeah,' agreed Ralph. 'I think you should just go for a cheapo one.
There's no point in spending a lot of money.'
'Hmm. What about attachments?' she asked, gesturing to the pop-up tongues, cactus-like probosces, alien plastic ringers and fierce nodulated rubber bals.
'Nah,' said Ralph, warming to the subject now that he was no longer embarrassed, 'just gimmicks, waste of money. That's a good one,' he said, pointing to an innocuous slim cream model with no veins, helmet, tongue, bals or inadequate pulsing movement, 'and it's only £7.99. I'd go for that one.'
'OK,' said Jem, getting to her feet, wishing suddenly that they were available in boxes on shelves, like in a supermarket, so she wouldn't have to ask the frightening androidal creature above her to get her one. She took a deep breath and forced herself to be brave. This was like having a smear test. Unpleasant for the recipient but al in a day's work for the administerer. Old Morticia must have seen al sorts — a nice middle-class girl buying an inoffensive vibrator on a Friday night would be nothing to her. The girl looked like she'd had a frontal lobotomy anyway.
'Can I have one of those, please?' she asked, as confidently as she could in such a low voice.
Morticia leant down to see where Jem was pointing, unlocked a cabinet behind her, took out a box, opened it, showed the contents to Jem, waited for her to nod approval, put it back in the box, put the box in a white plastic bag, took the ten-pound note from Jem's hand, handed her two pounds and a penny and a receipt and carried on reading her comic. The whole transaction took place in deathly silence.
'Thank you very much,' said Jem, reeling as she heard her nice home counties voice and good manners resonate inappropriately around the hushed shop.
The black security guard remained waxwork-stil as they passed him at the door. Ralph held back the clacking beads for Jem and they stepped out into the street, relieved that it hadn't suddenly turned into a strange, uninhabited ghost town, that there were stil normal-looking people miling around the streets, queuing for night-clubs, waiting on corners for non-existent cabs to take them home.
They walked back towards Lisle Street and enjoyed an MSG-rich meal of crispy beef and chili, chicken in chili-and-black-bean sauce and Rung Po chili pork in a near-empty restaurant, under the watchful gaze of a bored young waitress who had appeared thoroughly confused by their request for their food to be 'extra spicy and was now observing them curiously for signs of spontaneous combustion or insanity while they chat ted about Pete and the sex shop and their strange evening.
'What Pete said just now, before we left—it realy made me think you know,' Jem said, pouring the remains of a Tsingtao lager into her glass, 'about adventure, and trusting people and everything. He's right, you know. I like to think of myself as a bit of a "free spirit"' —
she fashioned the quote marks out of the air with her fingers - 'I like to think I'm up for anything, open to adventure, But Pete was right.
Everyone in this city is scared, aren't they? There are lots of weirdos out there, but I don't suppose many of them are likely to kil you or kidnap you, are they?
'It's like, d'you ever walk past people in a train station, say, or walking down the street, a group of friends meeting up, talking about their other friends — "Oh, how's so and so?" - talking about their lives, and you can tel they're quite close, known each other for a while, shared experiences? D'you ever get a twinge like maybe you're missing out on something? Like, how come their paths crossed and ours didn't, maybe they're great people but I'l never get to know them? I'm just a stranger on the street to them, I've got my own friends, my own shared experiences with other people who
they'll
never know. And it just seems sort of sad. D'you know what I mean? So many people in this world and the law of averages says that you can only ever get to know such a tiny percentage of them. And fear means that you'l get to know even less. Why are we so scared of each other? Someone at work invites you over for dinner and you're filed with horror, you bump into an old friend on the train, they suggest going out for a drink, you swap numbers and then pray they won't cal you, you've got your nice safe circle of friends, your Tuesday friend, your Thursday friend, your weekend friends, you've got your night in on a Monday, your gym night on a Wednesday, and al of a sudden you haven't got any room left for anyone new. Is that what God intended? Is that right? Surely we're al living point nought nought nought nought one per cent of our potential lives. I'm only twenty-seven — what am I going to be like when I'm fifty? Don't you think it's sad?'