Chapter Nine: Monster Love Takes Control

It’s a cliché but the harder you try not to think about certain people, the more difficult it becomes not to think about them. So that week all I could think about was Medium Brown - Medium Brown on the sofa looking uncomfortable, his brown hair ruffled at the back where it had rubbed up against the corduroy sofa (as he tried to squirm through the divide between the two seat cushions). Medium Brown, eyes wide in panic as I looked up at him from underneath the duvet. Medium Brown dropping his matches all over the floor then spending ten minutes hunched underneath the table, trying to pick up each individual match and get it back inside the box facing the right way round. Buying more time- that was obvious now. Then at night he gambolled into my dreams, his outfits sometimes bizarre but his behaviour always pretty much consistent. Here was Medium Brown dressed like King Charles II with embroidered codpiece and three quarter length purple, velvet tailcoat. In one hand he held a wicker basket full of eggs which he dangled in front of me, letting the basket sway from side to side - literally three feet away from my nose - then picking one egg and another and chucking them up into the sky. In slow motion I watched in horror as they landed on the pavement in front of me – my future reduced to a yellow puddle. Then both of us inside a huge bedroom, an ornate mahogany four-poster bed at the centre. This time Medium Brown was wearing nothing but a pair of tight orange knickerbockers as I chased him around the bedroom. Now I was King Charles and he was my manservant. I was going to punish him for breaking those eggs (and wearing my clothes). And after the punishment, would come something else. But then just when I got close enough to smell the fear rising up from his knickerbockers - POOF! - He disappeared in a cloud of smoke leaving nothing but a pile of talcum powder gathered at the foot of the bed. I didn’t need Freud to interpret these dreams.
Medium Brown was seriously messing with my plan.

‘You’ve met someone,’ Mum said one evening as I sat in front of the TV.
I was watching a period drama and in this particular scene Medium Brown’s head was superimposed on the leading character- a dashing Edwardian Earl with a ruffle-necked shirt and yes...knickerbockers. He climbed onto the back of a horse and daringly galloped off into the forest. As he disappeared into the trees, he could just be heard shouting into the wind: ‘Sorry but I have a big day tomorrow.’
‘You’ve met someone,’ Simon said as I sat in the self-help section hunched over a book entitled ‘How To Seduce the Difficult Man.’
‘You’ve met someone,’ George said as we sat in the same god-awful pub and I stared into my pint, not showing a flicker of interest towards any of the hopeless sperm donors dotted about the place.

On a more positive note, I had at least managed to get George a part-time job at the bookshop. I don’t know whether Clara had softened because of the crying in the toilet incident but a small door in her soul had opened up, allowing a sliver of light inside. She agreed to George working three days a week on a trial basis (‘He’ll have a big challenge on his hands. It’s not easy to impress me,’ she’d said in her characteristically pessimist tone). And whilst working in the shop wouldn’t solve all of George’s problems, at least he was standing on two legs rather than hunched up over his laptop, his body twitching as he blew imaginary things up. Yet even with the additional stress of having George in my workplace - filing science fiction in the chick lit section and slapping special offer labels on the limited edition hardbacks, I couldn’t stop thinking about Medium Brown. He was quickly infiltrating my brain, taking each cell, mutating it, then tossing any remaining ones out and replacing them with his eyes, his shoulders, his soft, brown hair and complete indifference.

Then I got my period which of course wasn’t a surprise because I’d completely failed to get tanked up with sperm. But funnily enough instead of the usual hair – tugging and dismay, I didn’t care. In fact the constant ache in my stomach distracted me from the sick feeling I got replaying the events of that night and the way Medium Brown’d turned me down and the desperation I’d exuded from every pore. And for a brief moment, for about the time that it took to tear a new Tampax from its plastic wrapping, I actually considered abandoning the pregnancy mission. My desperation that night was just a reflection of my desperate search for meaning. The baby was the only way to find something to get me up in the morning (and at night obviously), something beyond working in a book shop, hating all the books written by people who had a purpose in life, who’d discovered something they were good at. The self-same people who weren’t left holding a pencil in one hand and a screwed up drawing of a man with octopuses for hands.

Was a baby going to fill the void? For nine months I’d be full of hope and expectation but what about afterwards…then what? The nappies full of green ectoplasm and the vomit and the crying. The breasts that leaked milk, the flabby, uncooperative stomach - these were only SOME of the side-effects friends had told me about. And George had cried non - stop. In fact one evening, Mum and Dad had gone out and left me baby sitting. The minute they’d disappeared, he’d started wailing and the noise was so painful and I’d became so overcome with anxiety - it was like he could feel the tension palpitating through the tips of my fingers and he wailed louder and louder. Because babies always know what you’re thinking. So would my baby be wondering why I’d used it to create some purpose in my life?

The period pains were even worse than usual. Like someone had a fork and was pressing it into my abdomen, pushing and scratching and pushing again. I remember a Snoopy cartoon- there’d been this one character who’d always had a cloud suspended over his head; wherever he went, it was always raining. And that’s how I felt as I lay on my back, staring straight ahead, tracking the progress of a Daddy Long Legs as it flexed one spindly leg in the air and then scurried off towards the floorboards. Without Medium Brown, my head was grey and empty - like I’d regressed back to baby-hood and all I could do was stare at things and make superficial observations.

That Daddy Long Legs only has six legs.
I wonder if Medium Brown likes Daddy Long Legs?
The crack in the wall looks like it needs plastering.
Maybe Medium Brown could mix me some.

And I applied the same cool rationality when I thought about the eggs, all clustered together in their bed of slime. It was my duty to fertilise them. That was why I’d been given a vagina and fallopian tubes and all the other bits of equipment which we’d learnt about at school but I couldn’t quite remember the names of. ‘It is my duty to breed,’ I repeated to myself. Each cramp making me more determined not to lose sight of the goal. And every single advert on the TV contained a baby. A baby laughing with no teeth, a baby crying with no teeth, a baby (with teeth stumps) standing on its legs for the first time and staggering about. HOW I WANTED ONE OF THOSE NO TEETH! But that wasn’t why I was doing it. This wasn’t pure selfishness. No I was Dick Turpin. I was Batman. I was Florence Nightingale. I was giving up something for the good of others. Noble and pure. I was surrendering my body and all my (unlocked) potential. Once it finally happened, I would put everything into this child. It would write a bestseller. It would start up a charity. It would stop racism. It would discover a technology to stop global warming. It would create a sanctuary for polar bears in our back garden. And I would be the perfect parent. I would be a complete natural. I would be like the ones in the ads – always smiling. I wouldn’t retch when I opened up a dirty nappy. I’d never sigh when they asked me for the thousandth time why dogs pant. I would take a little bit of Mum (the intuitiveness), a bit of Simon (the down to earth-ness combined with optimism) and even a little bit of George (the talent with technology). All of these bits would help me patch together the best mothering technique. And a bit of Dad of course - I’d add in some of his level-headedness and his casual sense of heroism when facing the worst thing imaginable.

And so the plan was back in action and the counting began. And of course, when it came to the next Attempt, it needed to be someone who was a sure fire performer, someone who wouldn’t back down at the last minute or run from the room crying. So when I got it into my head to try again with Medium Brown, well it made no sense. In fact he represented the guaranteed demise of another perfectly good egg - he had absolutely no intention of getting anywhere near me. I’d have to expend so much energy trying to seduce him that I’d deplete my body, maybe even render myself infertile. But the problem was at this stage it hadn’t yet become completely transparent that I was lying to myself and it wasn’t about being the noble Florence and in fact was actually all about ME - the selfish me, the one who drank, watched Jeremy Kyle and pushed her cleavage out whenever a member of the opposite sex walked past. It was a battle for supremacy - Monster versus Florence. And the monster was bigger, hairier and had more self-belief to back it up - stoked up on a diet of Skips, alcohol, fags and a poor education with no real spiritual guidance. My parents had given me a skeletal moral code (I’d cherry picked the bits I liked) but they’d never believed in God. So I only had the tiniest inkling that there was something bigger than books, babies and sex. The same size of inkling that made me think that toys talk to one another once you’ve left the room. So Monster had the upper hand when Florence tried to tell me about duty. And so it came to pass that it was Monster not Florence that asked Simon for the phone number which started the whole disaster rolling again.
‘I have to get him out of my system,’ I said.
The Monster was chewing the cud, salivating; it wasn’t just thinking about baby making. No it was thinking about LOVE. It hadn’t actually said the word yet but the L was just about forming on its lips.
‘I hate to say this but I don’t think he wants to hear from you,’ Simon said, his mouth turned down at the corners, ‘Listen - he thinks you’re strange. He told my friend Jamie that you kept staring at him- he thought you were on drugs! And he said you wouldn’t take no for an answer.’
The Monster was thinking about taking Simon by the throat, lifting him two feet into the air and shaking some sense into him. NOBODY GETS IN THE WAY OF MONSTER! NO ONE!
‘I DON’T CARE WHAT HE THINKS!’ I said, then quickly realised I was shouting and we were right in the middle of the shop floor and Carla had looked up from pricing up ‘3 for the price of 2’ offers and had a thunderous look in her eyes.
‘Please Simon, please get me his number - PLEASE!’
Something about the way I said it, the shakiness and vulnerability in my voice must have worked because at the end of the day, as George and I were walking to the bus stop, my phone went and Simon had texted me.
‘HUBBA HUBBA HUBBA!’ the Monster screamed.

I didn’t ring immediately. I still had plenty of time until the next egg took its place in the corridor of opportunity. So three days passed with my eggs just complaining away to themselves - no doubt hysterical that another sucker was going to end up down the pan with no suitable donor in sight. Then on the fourth day, the phone rang and for some reason I thought it was Medium Brown - I really thought that he’d somehow magically got hold of my number and when he’d seen me on the bus, he’d realised he was actually really keen and sorry for the terrible, indifference he’d shown so far. But it wasn’t him.

It was Tiny Penis.

Unfortunately I didn’t recognise his number when it came up and because of the Medium Brown fantasy, I picked up and then had to spend five minutes talking to him and all I wanted to shout down the phone was; ‘YOU HAVE THE TINIEST PENIS IN THE WORLD! I CAN NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN! GO AWAY AND USE A PUMP, USE AN EXTENDER, GO TO HOLLYWOOD AND STRETCH YOURSELF SILLY BUT NEVER EVER CALL ME AGAIN!’ But of course that would have been cruel so I made some excuse about how I’d met someone else which was sort of true except that person didn’t know anything about it. But at least it gave me some sort of confidence in my mission. When I thought about seeing Tiny Penis again, even the idea that I could get pregnant by such a man, seemed anathema to everything good in the world. Tiny Penis was a test. But the problem was I didn’t want to analyse my choices too much because it threatened to disprove the selflessness of my mission – the truth was if I’d pursued the opportunity with Tiny Penis, I really would have been Florence Nightingale - sacrificing sex and pleasure, purely to get myself up the duff. But then again, perhaps Tiny Penis’s sperm weren’t right. Perhaps it was a physical impossibility to guarantee fertilisation with an appendage the size of a wine cork.

But when I actually made the call to Medium Brown or when Monster made me do it, things didn’t go well. In my mind, we were already in a long-term relationship so it came as quite a shock that he didn’t even remember seeing me on top of the bus in Honor Oak Park (or was he just pretending? The bloody mating game made fools of us all!) And immediately he started to make excuses about not being able to meet up. I was forced to remind him I hadn’t actually suggested a date yet. Then I told him I’d been feeling feverish the night that’d we’d met, that I’d been on antibiotics and shouldn’t have combined them with alcohol (I thought this was a rather good excuse - it sounded highly plausible and it didn’t necessarily infer that I had a raging STD). I then invited him to a safe environment (cinema) because I knew he would be worried (based on my highly eroticised performance last time) about anything that involved just the two of us alone with no members of the public to hear his cries for assistance. But the call was made all the more stressful by the Monster who tried to assert its will and shouted things like ‘I’M COMING TO GET YOU!’ and ‘ I WILL EAT YOU UP!’ at every opportunity. Luckily it was not loud enough for Medium Brown to hear. It wasn’t that the Monster was hateful or anything- if anything it represented the marrying of two objectives - love and babies. It was trying to help me realise there was more to life than Hot, Warm and Cold. In fact his long-term objective was maybe the same as Florence’s but he didn’t see the harm in frisky, romantic opportunities along the way. And maybe we’d end up having LOT’S OF BABIES. We’d all live together in an Amish wooden caravan. I’d pick flowers and wear long flannel dresses and a bonnet, grow my hair. Then we’d both become celibate (so we could channel our energies on the children - not because we no longer fancied one another in our long dresses and with our excessive hairiness). Medium Brown and I would spend our days chalking up algebra problems on the wooden walls of our caravan so our loving brood could learn. Medium Brown would be much better at algebra than I’d been at school. He would not get blurry vision or a thick fug in his head that made him draw pictures of Dangermouse in the margins of his exercise book. Then eventually, our offspring would leave our wooden sanctuary to invent the cure for everything bad. In fact now it was obvious; the mahogany bed in my dreams had been a symbol of our future together (and I wasn’t sure what the Charles II stuff was all about or the knickerbockers).

But by the time we’d said goodbye, my voice high and joyous, his hesitant and anxious, Medium Brown still hadn’t agreed to a date. In fact he’d told me he was going away for a week (to visit the same sick imaginary friend he’d invented last time). I knew it was a lie but I let him get away with it. There was little I could do; I needed to let him lead this time – so from now on it would be HIS timing and days that fitted around HIS schedule. So what if I only had eights days until the stars aligned and the ancient corn dollies danced in a circle worshipping Mother Earth? And so what if I wanted to have sex with him on day thirteen, fourteen and maybe fifteen as well? I needed to adapt my lascivious behaviour. Invest time and energy in getting to know this man. What did I know, beyond the fact that he got nervous around matches and had hair as soft as candyfloss? I would need to sacrifice at least one more egg, maybe two before Medium Brown was ready with his appointment with destiny. So first came a movie, then a dinner, then maybe a weekend away.
Then things would speed up and I’d get pregnant, get married, have twins and move far away from Croydon. The Monster would be satisfied and Florence would come out of hiding.

A couple more frazzled eggs didn’t really matter in the great scheme of things.