Boy Parts(33)

So now the rule’s more like ‘Don’t shit where you eat’ with ‘No touching’ applied at my discretion. I probably shouldn’t touch Eddie from Tesco, because I clearly want to, and if I can’t obey my only vague guideline I’m fucked, aren’t I?

I sit, for a moment, with my hand wedged between my thighs. I’m wet, and uncomfortable, and the lace of my bra is irritating my hard nipples. My cunt flexes.

I decide to have a cold shower. I decide to ignore the yawning, drooling hole, the way I ignore my treacherous growling stomach or my aching thighs a mile into a run. I catch a glimpse of my naked body in the mirror, and look away like I’ve made eye contact with a stranger in a gym’s changing room.

I quite often take cold showers – they’re better for your skin. I don’t often spray icy water straight onto my crotch, though. I cringe, but I feel better, colder, cleaner. More human. More than human.

But when I get out of the shower, I’m still thinking about him. I slap my face. I imagine the two of us fucking. I try to bash the thought out of my skull, but it comes in intrusive flashes, almost violent. I try to change the thought, squash it, kill it. I imagine my hands around his neck but that tangles with the thoughts from before. His neck flexes beneath my palms in the daydream, and my insides flex along with it.

I can only ever ignore my stomach rumbling for so long before I have to eat something. I might want bread, grease, red meat, but I can ease that off with bag salad, and a teaspoon of olive oil, half a tin of tuna. So, if my twat is my stomach, and Eddie from Tesco is a cheeseburger, I’ll go get a salad. If Eddie from Tesco is shitting where I eat, I’ll go shit somewhere else.

I get dressed to go out. I curate an outfit that’s sexy but not desperate. A short, white wrap dress, cute and kind of sixties looking. A daytime dress, to match the light summer sky, the long warm evenings. Light makeup, date makeup: a gentle, sparkly eyeshadow, and baby pink lip gloss; the kind that irritates your lips, makes them swell a little for that just-sucked look.

I go to BeerHaus, where I consider taking home the manager, the one who’s fully given up charging me for drinks. I tell him I’m meeting someone, but they’re late.

‘Who could ever stand you up?’ he asks. I shrug.

I’m casting a wide net on my phone, sending the slightly more sophisticated equivalent of a ‘U up?’ text to a few ex-models I have no intention of photographing again. To Henson, too, who replies, but doesn’t seem to pick up the vibe I’m putting down. We end up chatting about Raw over text, and that’s fine. I’m always happy to chat shite about films, and I refuse to ask for sex. They ask me. They beg. That’s how it works.

I get chatting to this suit. He’s patronising. I forget his name as soon as he tells me, so let’s call him John. He’s broken away from work drinks to tell me about his job. A plastic surgeon, from London, talking about merging practices with someone up here. I’m supposed to be impressed.

He tells me: if I ever came in to get work done, he’d send me away.

‘Some girls are just born lucky,’ he says. ‘You’re one of them.’ I bet he says that to every cunt; I bet he says that to girls with tiny tits and bent noses. My mam actually had my ears pinned back when I was twelve – and then there’s my teeth. While I always had a good waist-to-hip ratio, what I have now is the product of years of dedicated waist training and exercise. My hair is dyed, and I have extensions. I smile, with my teeth, and he tells me my veneers look very natural. I tell him another girl knocked my tooth out, but in this version of the story, I was playing hockey, not getting lippy with a rough lass in a takeaway.

‘Has anyone ever told you you look just like Priscilla Presley?’ he asks.

‘They have,’ I say.

‘When she was young. Before all the bad work.’ He snorts. ‘Obviously.’ Then, with a squint. ‘You know, if you ever want anything done in the future… Those fuck-ups almost never happen, now. That Meg Ryan shit.’

I keep my hair over my ears.

We talk a little more about that Meg Ryan shit. About how everyone has lip fillers nowadays, and they always take it too far. We talk about the Kardashians – our theories. I think Kim’s had her nose done and her hairline taken back, maybe some lipo around her jaw to get it sharp.

We talk about her arse, at length, and I’m arguing in her favour. It was always big, and she’s had kids, you know? Kids, waist training, squats, illusions. She had it X-rayed. In season six of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She had it X-rayed, and she didn’t have implants.

‘Fat transfer,’ he says. ‘She wouldn’t have injections. They’re risky. Fat transfer, and maintenance. Corsetry, squats. Tits are done as well.’

‘I know the tits are done. She’s had two kids; the tits are obviously done. The arse is more of a mystery, though, isn’t it?’

John disagrees. Fat transfer. He buys me another drink.

It gets a little blurry. I’m drunk enough that moving from point to point feels like teleporting. We’re in the alley outside, by the bins. I can hear a rat. I can hear John breathing.

He touches me surgically. I feel him weighing my breast in his palm, searching for resistance, or something. He slips his hand under my dress, and squeezes my arse, seemingly satisfied when his fingers find a dimple on my left cheek. And he pulls away from me, with a satisfied hum. It’s all natural, I think to say. I don’t. It isn’t, really. It’s yoga and corsets and salads and hours of my time, to wake up in the morning and wake up like this.