The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2 Read online

  So when I unexpectedly started having more money, the only real evidence of my new-found wealth was in the increase of my book and CD collections. My cinema habits remained unchanged: there are, after all, only so many films you can see in a day. But although it was fun to fill out my literature and music libraries, after a while I realized there was little pleasure in buying music or books by bands or authors you didn’t like. After that, I confined myself to only buying new books or CDs, or the back catalogues of bands I knew I loved. Even that got tiresome after a while (as much as I love Neil Young and Lou Reed, there’s really no reason to own copies of Landing on Water or Minstrel). This meant I needed to find some new way of enjoying my money. At first I considered developing an interest in pornography. There seemed to be hundreds of adult videos, and it seemed likely that collecting these sorts of films would give me pleasure. But after I had ten or so, I realized I didn’t really enjoy pornography, and was also embarrassed about having the tapes around the house.

  The same morning I chucked the cassettes away, I got a letter from an ex-girlfriend. When we’d broken up I’d been quite stern with her, telling her not to try to get in contact with me. It was over two years since we’d last seen each other, and she was writing to ask whether I would now be prepared to meet her for dinner. She made no mention of her own romantic situation, although she did say in one line that she just knew I would have a girlfriend and if I wanted I could bring her along. I hadn’t thought about this ex-girlfriend that much, mainly because I had been so upset when she’d broken up with me that I’d experienced a mini-breakdown that I didn’t want anyone to know about. The main reason why I had told her not to get in contact with me was because I knew she had a habit of falling back in love with her boyfriends after she’d broken up with them and I thought it was probably safer to stay away from her until I’d made a fresh start. Once I’d got back on my feet, I’d always intended to contact her, but for one reason or another I didn’t get round to it, and as I’ve never been one for nostalgia, not having her in my life didn’t really worry me.

  I wrote back to her a few hours later, telling her that I didn’t have a girlfriend and hadn’t been involved with anyone since we split up. As I wrote this I remembered reading somewhere about how when writing love-letters you should always forget about yourself and concentrate only on arousing pleasure in the person you’re addressing. I couldn’t remember if the passage came from Freud or Barthes (it sounded like something from A Lover’s Discourse, but when I checked my library this volume was missing) or someone else entirely, but I realized that this was what I was doing now, and wondered whether it was such a good idea for me to meet up with Tracey again. I had always composed my letters to please her, and felt wounded every time a reply arrived. Not because they were deliberately hurtful, but because they seemed written with no awareness of the emotions they would arouse in me, which was fine when we saw each other all the time, but more difficult during the year we spent a continent apart. The address on the top of her letter was from somewhere in Chalk Farm, so I suggested we go for dinner at the Lavender in Primrose Hill. Three days later, her reply arrived. She would be happy to meet me in the location I’d suggested.

  The reason why I had been single for so long was because of a random act of kindness I had committed two years earlier. A friend of a friend had died of a heart attack at an unexpectedly early age. His girlfriend, Marianne, needed someone to look after her and, having the space and the time, I invited her to move in with me. I had expected her mourning period to last three or four months, but it showed no sign of coming to an end. Over the previous two years she had become increasingly dependent on me and, although there had been nothing sexual between us, I felt too guilty to indulge in anything other than the odd one-night stand.

  I arrived at the restaurant just before eight. Tracey was already waiting. She was wearing a short black dress. Smiling warmly as I entered the restaurant, she got up to embrace me.

  “Tracey,” I said as she hugged me, “it’s so good to see you.”

  “You too.” She looked down. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

  “So,” I said, “tell me everything. Do you have a job?”

  She laughed. “You’re not going to believe what I do.”

  “Should I guess?”

  “Not just yet. I have to give you some background details first.”

  “OK, start from the beginning. The last time I saw you, you were about to start drama school.”

  Tracey smiled with her head slightly tilted to one side and leaned back in her chair. It was more exciting to see her than I’d anticipated, and I was already trying to calculate how I would feel if we ended up going to bed together. The candle-light in the Lavender was doing an incredible job of bringing out all of my ex-girlfriend’s most alluring features, from the small, springy, brown mole just above her soft upper lip to the exact colour of her curly brown hair. As always I was drawn in by her guilty-looking blue eyes, getting a sudden flashback of how her expression would harden when I trapped her into an argument.

  “Drama school was great for the first term,” she told me, “because there were so many new people and you can remember how lonely I was before we split up.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Sorry, why?” she asked, sounding as if her question was genuine.

  “Gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready to get into this.”

  “Get into what?”

  “I had a breakdown just after you left me. And although initially when it happened I wasn’t able to do anything or see anyone, eventually I managed to get myself together enough to start having therapy. And through the sessions I worked out why I treated you the way I did.”

  I noticed from the direction Tracey’s eyes were pointing that a waitress had come across to our table. I felt glad of the interruption, amazed that I’d started talking about this stuff so quickly. Then I remembered how my therapist had spent our final session trying to convince me that I wouldn’t feel properly healed until I’d seen Tracey again, and how adamant I’d been that that wasn’t a good idea.

  The waitress told us the specials and we looked up to the blackboard to decide what we wanted. I guessed from Tracey’s small order that she was having money problems. While not wanting to embarrass her, I attempted to persuade her to have more than just a starter by letting her know that I’d pay.

  “It’s OK,” she told me, “I’m really not that hungry. But if you order a nice bottle of wine I’d be happy to drink it.”

  I ordered the wine and my food, then said, “I feel terrible now, isolating you like that. But it wasn’t jealousy. I always thought it was jealousy, but my therapist made me realize it wasn’t that at all. I just needed to get something from you, something secret, something from inside, something you probably couldn’t give. That’s why I took us away from everyone else.”

  She nodded. “I do understand, and that’s kind of why I wanted to see you. You see, like I said, drama school was great for the first term, but then I started missing you. And I looked back on our time together with a fondness you’d never believe. Every day I thanked God that we’d had those two whole years together so I had something from every season to remind me of you. Like, pick a day . . .”

  “Hallowe’en.”

  “Scary badger.”

  “What?”

  “You remember.”

  I thought about it and realized that I did. We’d gone to the cinema together and on the way back we’d seen two liberal-type parents trick-or-treating with a small child wearing a cardboard badger mask. And we’d joked with each other about how the parents would’ve convinced their child he didn’t want to be anything as horrible as a hobgoblin or Freddy Krueger. “No,” we imagined the two well-meaning parents saying to their child, “what you want to be is a scary . . . badger.”

  I smiled. “I find it hard to remember stuff.”

  “I know. When we broke up you said you’d n
ever think of me again.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You did.”

  “Well, it wasn’t true. So, are you going to tell me what your job is?”

  “Phone-sex.”

  “Huh?”

  “I knew you’d like that. Can I tell you about my audition?”

  “For the job?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’d been working for TicketMaster for a while and it just wasn’t working out. The rest of the people in the office didn’t like me because every now and again I’d have an audition for an advert and they’d all get really upset because I had a life outside work. So, anyway, there was one woman there who I became work-friends with, and one day she told me she was leaving. She’d got a job working for a sex-line and it was five times as much money for nowhere near as much work. I was a bit sceptical, but she told me that, although there were a few dodgy men at the company, the main people in charge were all women, and by that time the little pound signs were dancing in front of my eyes and I’d agreed to go in for an interview.”

  The waitress reappeared at my elbow with the wine and the squid salad I’d ordered for a starter. I asked her what had happened to Tracey’s food and she said she’d thought it would be better to bring it at the same time as my main course. Tracey nodded and said that was fine. I still felt guilty about ordering so much food when she was having hardly anything and tried to make up for it by overfilling her glass with wine.

  Tracey continued. “So I went in for my interview and found myself in this windowless room with two women and one man. Although the man did most of the talking, it was obvious from the outset that the women were in charge. Anyway, my audition consisted of three exercises. The first two exercises were pieces I had to read from a script. This is quite a long anecdote, but the punchline’s in the middle instead of the end so get ready to laugh. The script I was reading from was supposed to be as if I was talking from the perspective of a woman who had been led into sexual ruin. I had to go through this catalogue of things that my boyfriend had made me do and the twist at the end was that I had to tell the caller that I was now completely cock-crazy and even just knowing there was a man on the other end listening to my past exploits got me off. The script was kind of torturous and confused and I was trying to understand it as well as read it so I kept stumbling over my words, and I got to this bit where I said my boyfriend introduced me to swimming and just as I was thinking that was odd and waiting for some sub-aqua exploits, the man stood up and shouted at me, ‘It’s swinging, not swimming. My boyfriend introduced me to swinging.’ ”

  It wasn’t that great a line – she knew that – but the delivery was so perfectly Tracey that it made me laugh, identify with her and feel horny all at the same time. I knew one day lots of men would share this feeling, and it was this knowledge that made me certain that, in spite of Tracey’s considerable fragility, she would one day achieve success as an actress.

  She went on. “The second script was less interesting. Standard sexy housewife, naughty knickers stuff. But then the final exercise was an improvization. It’d been a while since I’d been to a proper audition and you know how much I like that sort of thing anyway so I got all overexcited and started acting as if I was auditioning for a movie instead of a job on a sex-line. You would have liked the scenario though. It was a bit close to home and I could tell they’d come up with this idea for an audition piece deliberately to make me feel uncomfortable so I decided to take it to a real extreme. I was supposed to be an actress who’d come for an audition for a part in a film and then when I’d arrived I’d found out it was actually a porno instead of a normal movie.”

  I popped a large piece of squid into my mouth and started chewing. Tracey brushed a strand of stray hair out of her face and carefully lifted her overfilled wine glass to her lips. As she did so, I noticed her lipstick was completely the wrong shade for her, making it look as if she’d been sucking gob-stoppers all day long.

  “The weird thing about this last exercise was that they wanted me to do it over the phone. I suppose it wasn’t that weird, given that I was meant to be proving I could do a sex-line job, but the way they handled it was odd. First off the women came across and hooked me up to a headset, then the guy went off into another room on his own.

  “Like I said, from the moment I was told what the exercise was I felt really irritated and wanted to embarrass them, so I tried to make what I was saying as disturbing as possible, telling him that I was only taking this job to support my baby, and that I came from a really religious background, and had wanted to be an actress my whole life, grown up on The Kids From Fame, stuff like that . . .”

  “How did he respond?”

  “Well, that was it, after I’d been talking a couple of minutes or so he stopped asking me questions and just kept saying ‘go on, go on,’ and I could hear the clink of his belt and, y’know, I knew what he was doing.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I kept talking, but I tried to make it sound as unsexy as possible, just praying he would stop. But he kept going and I kept going until he came.

  “Ugh.”

  “I know. And the worst thing was he didn’t even try to hide it. I think I probably could’ve handled the situation if he was just some pervert doing this job as a sneaky way of getting his rocks off, but he came back into the main room with his fly undone, shirt-tail still sticking out, and the two women looked at him and made another mark on their clipboards as if this was just another test I’d passed.”

  “Tracey,” I said gently.

  “Yes?”

  “How long have you had this job?”

  “Only a couple of months. It’s all right once you get used to it. And I make it fun, playing little games with myself like working out which words will make them . . .” She looked at me. “Oh, dear. When I imagined telling you about this I thought it would make me sound glamorous and sexy.”

  Not wanting her to worry, I smiled at Tracey and let my fork drop back on my plate.

  We stayed in the restaurant until eleven. By that time we were both a little drunk and I was reluctant for the evening to end. I felt more aroused than I had in months and didn’t want to go back to the sexless friendship waiting for me at home. So I persuaded Tracey to walk down to a nearby pub for one final drink. The front of the pub was crowded so we went through to the back bar, which was empty except for an old man and a fruit machine. I bought us both Stellas and sat opposite Tracey. Her legs were crossed at the ankles and I found myself staring at the line where the hem of her dress pulled tightly around her toned thighs. She was telling me about a friend’s play but I had long stopped listening to her words. Taking a large gulp from my drink, I swooped in on her, sliding my hand up under her skirt.

  My fingers stopped as they reached the soft crotch of her knickers. My lips stopped as I realized they were pressing against a resistant mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, with tears in her eyes, “I don’t want to do this.”

  When I was sixteen I went on a school-organized trip to Keele University. The trip was designed to introduce potential students to college life and, given the excesses of this weekend away, I think the organizers managed an accurate distillation of most people’s three-year experience. I was the only one my school expected to make it to university, so I went alone, although by the end of the coach journey up I had befriended a sizeable number of sixth-formers sent by other schools in the city. As my school was ridiculously suburban, a haven of bubble perms and teenage pregnancies, I had always been an outsider, so much so that the first years started a rumour that I slept in a coffin. I didn’t go into school that much, spending most of my time in my bedroom listening to the Pixies and those first three Ride EPs. This was considered so outré in my neighbourhood that I was amazed to find that my tastes were shared not only by the sixthformers I’d befriended on the bus, but also the students who organized the last night’s disco.

  Those
two days at Keele were, to that point, the best of my life. But as I returned to my isolation, I saw no likelihood of them ever being repeated. My parents were both intensely anti-social people, ashamed of their marriage and quick to discourage me from forming friendships with others. But my new-found comrades were reluctant to let me disappear back to my previous existence, bombarding me with calls until I agreed to come with them to a Primal Scream concert. I went with them and, over the next few weeks, found myself with my first ever social circle.

  And after friendship came the inevitable romantic infatuation. Among my new gang was a beautiful redhead with goth tendencies and a tart sense of humour. The rest of my friends were dubious about some of her more extreme tastes, and I was the only one willing to accompany her to a Cranes concert at a local polytechnic. The show was terrible but the night was transcendental, and in the taxi home I tried to kiss her. She stiffened, pushed me away, and said she wasn’t interested. As far as I could remember, I’d never told Tracey about this, but it was definitely a formative moment, making me overcautious in the opening stages of any subsequent relationship. If I got any sense that the woman I wanted didn’t want me, I immediately backed off, even if their reluctance was only part of an elaborate flirtation. In some ways, I’d never really got over that first rejection, and now the same thing was happening to me again, I felt a fresh desperation. But that doesn’t explain what I said next.

  “Tracey?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll give you five hundred pounds to fuck me.”

  During the taxi ride home, I wondered whether I regretted making my offer. There was no question that Tracey had been horrified, turning me down immediately and remaining upset until we said goodbye, but when I thought back to my sessions with my therapist, I realized the fact that Tracey would never want to see me again was probably a positive thing. My therapist had never accepted my excuse that I couldn’t start another relationship because I was giving house-space to Marianne, trying to make me believe it was really because I held out hope that Tracey and I would get back together. Now that definitely wouldn’t happen, I was free to get on with my new life.