Cow girl, my first encounter on the dating website, said she wanted to see me again, so the next weekend we met at the same hotel for another portion of the same. During the week she sent an email saying she couldn’t eat, and I’d assumed she was joking. But when she sprang out of her VW Golf to greet me she was visibly thinner, which was surprising, as she hadn’t had an ounce of fat on her to speak of to start with. She’d lost 5lbs, she said. Even more surprising was the admission that she’d been off her grub because she’d been in an emotional turmoil over the future of our relationship.
The email about her not eating also included a link to a YouTube comedy clip taken from the TV series Green Wing. A lady doctor was canvassing male colleagues about the top five attributes they look for in a woman. Nice male doctor number one said, ‘lovely eyes’, ‘emotionally intelligent’ — that kind of stuff. But horrid doctor number two, speaking on behalf of unrepentant Neanderthals the world over, revoltingly itemised his top five as, ‘Bendy, shaved, about 5 per cent lesbian, slightly anorexic and fragrant downstairs.’ She sent it primarily to amuse me. But also, I think, because she knows that she racks up an effortless 5/5 on the horrid doctor’s wish list.
Around nine o’clock in the evening, having consumed nothing since breakfast apart from three glasses of Chilean red and a Snickers bar from the vending machine in the lobby, and panting like a coursing greyhound outrun by a strong hare, I cautiously raised the subject of eating. We’ve got to eat something, I said. She agreed to try to do something about her hair, put some clothes on and come with me down to the restaurant.
I wished I hadn’t suggested it. Everything was wrong. The table was wrong: she wanted an alcove. The wine glasses were too thick. The waitress was too thick and she slopped too much wine into our thick glasses. And why was she putting bread on the table when we didn’t order any? Oldest trick in the book, that one, she said. They arrange four slices of supermarket brown bread in an oval dish, shove it on the table and the customers think it’s free. At the end of the night £4.95 for four slices of bread appears on the bill, by which time the customers are too drunk to read it properly, let alone complain. In a year the restaurant owner has educated one of his horrible kids on the proceeds. She’s seen it happen so many times. Robbers, that’s all they are, these restaurateurs. Robbers.
The light on the table was too bright. The music was too jazzy. The chicken was too salty. And I looked like an idiot in that jumper. And if I was going to see her again I was going to have to lose the Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe print pants. She couldn’t believe that anyone in their right mind would wear anything so ludicrous. I wasn’t a teenager, was I? Perhaps I was and she’d made a big mistake.
Folding a slice of supermarket brown bread in half and cramming it into my mouth, I studied her face and wondered why it was that every highly sexed woman I have known has been like that: they are either in a state of total surrender or spoiling for a fight. Maybe Gandhi was right about sexual excess being an engine of violence, I thought, trying and failing to swallow the bread without having chewed it enough.
After the meal we went through to the champagne bar for a drink. The X Factor was being shown on a big screen with the volume turned up loud. With her face set, she complained first to the yobbish barman, and, getting some mealy-mouthed excuses why he couldn’t alter the volume, she left the room with her face set. She returned with an anxious-looking desk manager, who ordered the sound down.
We ordered Harvey Wallbangers. Her choice. Harvey Wallbangers were what she and her ex-businessman boyfriend, and whoever they had picked up during the evening, traditionally drank before the businessman boyfriend started filming. Unlike those, these Harvey Wallbangers were pathetic, she said, but she decided to let it go as she had something to tell me.
Had she told me about the time she was interviewed for a job as a sex worker in a brothel? She hadn’t? She leant forward on her stool and caressed the inside of my ear with the tip of her tongue, then tipped her glass against mine and sucked saucily on the pair of black straws. I’d been reinstated.
‘The Queen,’ I said, raising my glass.
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