I got the text from Jenny on Tuesday.
You probably want some background. She’s five foot something
with fairish hair, and she works as a photographer.
We’ve never met. Okay, I’m lying, we have met. I lie a lot.
I don’t mean to. Well, I do mean to. If I tell you I’m unemployed and don’t
have any money, you probably wouldn’t want to know me. If I tell you I’m a poor
student doctor and don’t have any money, you probably would. That’s why people
lie. There are lots of reasons to lie and all of them are good reasons. This
story’s true though.
I met Jenny five years ago. We fucked for two weeks twice a
day and then I grew bored, bought her a webcam, and sent her home. I prefer it
that way. You don’t have to talk or pretend you’re interested afterwards with a
web cam. You just lean over and switch it off.
Sometimes she gets bored with the arrangement and disappears
for a few months. She always says the same thing in her farewell email: you
don’t respect me; you’re just using me; you’re a robot; you need to seek urgent
professional help.
About four weeks later I get a follow up email that says
she’s in Geneva, Brussels, New York, Sydney or somewhere else with her new
boyfriend. They’re very happy together and she hopes there are no hard
feelings. She also hopes that I find someone soon who’ll brighten up my life
the way Mark, Stephen, Brad, or Phillip has brightened up hers.
Between two and four weeks after that I get a view-webcam
invite.
I like the way her brain works. It’s mathematical. It’s
numerical. It’s arithmetically sexual in that she likes onesomes, twosomes,
threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes. She has a good head for numbers I would
say. I’ve watched these combinations from the comfort of my swivel chair.
Sometimes I direct the action because I have a microphone. I’m a very good
director.
Anyway, Tuesday I got a text saying that she was back in
Glasgow for the weekend but would be travelling to London next day and did I
fancy meeting her before she went.
I paced up and down for many minutes thinking. I surprised
myself by texting back that I did want to meet her. I immediately regretted it
but by then it was too late. The idea of her in my flat in the flesh was
freaking me out. It felt like I would be messing with reality or bending the
space time continuum like they do in sci-fi shows from the sixties.
I don’t know what was going through my head but when she
texted back with an address I picked up my car keys and drove down to the fancy
flats that overlook the river at Partick. My car’s an old car and it makes a
groaning noise when I apply the brakes. People always turn round and point when
I come to a stop. Sometimes it doesn’t really stop but overshoots a bit at the
lights. Children always look scared when this happens—these children
wearing their mother’s faces. I look at the mum and the two children and
they’re all wearing the same face and then I become freaked out too and drive
off.
It’s a Japanese car. My mum’s debt collector was a Japanese
prisoner of war and he hated them. He told her he would never buy a Japanese
car as he took her money and put it in a cash pouch.
They were building a great warship in the dock yards across
the way and while I waited for Jenny I could see the welders working with
sparks flying in the dark. When it was finished the Queen would come, hit a
bottle of champagne off its bow, and say “God bless H.M.S. Mark, Stephen, Brad,
or Phillip and all who sail on her.”
When Jenny climbed into the car it lurched to one side. Both
our heads tilted to the left then righted. The rain lashed off the windscreen
and she smelled damp. I turned on the heater then began our journey through the
tenement town.
“You still taking photographs?”
She sighed and lit a cigarette.
“No, I gave that up; remember I told you?”
I shook my head and then she shook hers.
“I’m now working as a carer, pushing a wheelchair bound lady
around for money and cleaning her backside.”
I put on the indicator and turned right up Crow Road. I
couldn’t imagine having to clean the shit from someone’s backside for money. It
would start to dominate my life. Days later I’d be walking down the street
smelling my fingers. I’d start to hate the person and maybe even hit them
whenever it happened. I don’t have the patience of a saint. I don’t even have
the patience of a sinner.
It made me wonder about human dignity and whether there was
any point hanging onto a life that had hung you out to dry so spectacularly.
“I remember now,” I said, “Last time we spoke you told me
you were in Sweden with her.”
“That’s right, she was dancing in Sweden.”
I took the cigarette from her fingers and threw it out of
the window. Cigarettes led to infirmity and ass wiping.
“How can someone in a wheelchair dance?”
“She goes onto the floor with the other dancers and moves
her head a little.”
We moved through the junction at Anniesland Cross and past
the solitary high rise. In the solitary high rise people led solitary lives
staring out of windows from behind net curtains. They sighed a lot and sat on
worn out sofas. I wondered if they sat down on different seats like I did to
give the impression there were other people in the room. Sometimes I made up my
own people and sat them on seats with jackets and hats and a broomstick for a
spine. I’ve never told anyone that before.
We went up Bearsden Road, and then right past the canal
towards Maryhill which is where I live. It’s dark and empty on this stretch of
road and I thought how easy it would be to do something stupid—not
because it was right or wrong, or because she deserved it or not, or because I
even wanted to, but because it would be easy.
“I’ve got a boyfriend called Mark now. I was going to tell
you.”
I won’t bore you with the turning keys bit, or the interior
of the tenement I call home or what she said when she looked inside my flat.
All that shit is inconsequential. She liked my teas, though. I bought myself a
big box of world teas for Christmas and she liked those. She took a long time
to decide which one she was going to have. Then she chose Assam.
I’m very good at small talk and was going to tell her that
even though Assam is Indian it was a Scottish explorer called Robert Bruce who
discovered it. I suppose the Indians had discovered it first but then it
depended which side of the looking glass you were on. Just like when Columbus
discovered America and the other Indians might have said we already knew it was
here. I reckoned when we finally found alien life on another planet they’d be
called Indians, too.
It was obvious we’d dominate these new Indian Aliens as I
read in a book once that because Earth was a small planet, with small
gravitational pull, it meant that we grew big. Most other planets were larger,
so other life forms would be shrunken specimens in comparison. This made me
happy as I am short and therefore wanted to be a giant somewhere in the
universe.
When she’d finished her tea, she put the cup down and said
she’d best go get ready. Fourteen minutes and twelve seconds later she came out
topless wearing suspenders and a short skirt. She was holding a laptop. I
nodded and headed into my computer room.
