Chapter Nineteen: Monster Love of the Most Monstrous Kind

And the next day, I knew I needed to sit down with George, invest time and energy in our relationship, nurture him, lend him support through this challenging time and give him guidance through what was going to be one of the most challenging events in his life. But instead, for some reason, I decided to head into town with Simon and get drunk.

It was only after we’d started on our second bottle, that Simon finally thawed. The first forty minutes felt distinctly awkward like we were on a blind date but neither one of us matched up to the others expectations. Then once he’d thawed, Simon went on and on about all the challenges of being a one-man- bookshop-manager-mogul. A small pay rise and a bit more responsibility had made him forget all about how much he hated working for the evil, global, book-selling monster. The 3-for-1’s had now become - ‘an excellent cross-selling opportunity,’ and the latest celebrity book signing session (some bimbo from Emmerdale) had resulted in ‘an incredible uptake - volume sales up at least 16%’. I found it hard to reconcile myself with this new Simon. I wanted to trip him up, unzip the skin of this impostor so I tried slagging off a reality TV star’s latest diet book but the slick, marketing persona remained intact. I listened intently and tried to focus on what he was saying. On the one hand it was one less thing to feel guilty about – our dual enterprise looked like it would never happen now but I also felt disappointed because owning our own bookshop had been more than a pipe dream. Okay I’d never really thought it would actually happen but it gave you a nice, fuzzy feeling like when you come out of the cinema and know you’ve got a Three-Cheese Pizza to look forward to before you go home. On a positive note, at least I was out of the house and that was good for my spirit. I’d spent much too long locked in that wretched ratatouille fest with crows and pregnant women the size of Sumo wrestlers. This was more glamorous - dazzling chandeliers hanging over the tables, sweetie-coloured, vodka bottles glinting behind the bar, robots on shiny Blackberries texting one other from across the table and men who looked like they hadn’t just wandered into their bedroom, sniffed the crotch of their underpants, turned them inside out and then recycled them for another day.

‘Cheers,’ I said clinking glasses with Simon and sighing.
Sometimes all you need is a change of perspective, a new location and something that takes you away from the fact that you’ve been a horrible cretin and spoilt everything for your beloved brother.
‘How’s George?’ Simon said as if he could read my mind.
‘Oh he’s fine. You know usual jibber-jabber nerves. It can’t be easy.’
Yes the usual – you know - writing letters to your dead father, drawing man-eating birds, - all part and parcel of a serious, impending psychosis. But tomorrow I would deal with George. In fact as soon as I got home I would deal with him. I would more than deal with him. I would tell him I loved him and I’d tell him everything was going to be okay. But for now, there was DRINK, FUN, LAUGHTER and my favourite friend whose sense of humour had been hijacked by a ton of marketing spiel from ‘Effective Bookshop Managers Weekly’.

I went to the toilet and had that lovely, tipsy feeling when you actually feel quite fond of the reflection staring back at you even though your teeth have gone black and you look like a vampire bat.
When I got back to the table I rubbed my mouth with a napkin.
‘You won’t believe it,’ Simon said.
‘What?’
He leant forward so our noses were practically brushing together. I could smell the red wine on his breath. Or perhaps it was mine. And then I turned to look up and there was Medium. Everything just seemed to slot into place - perfect serendipity. Here I was, not falling off a stool or lying bleeding on the floor or faking an orgasm to Sky Sports and there he was and he wasn’t dropping any matches or reaching for his mobile pretending to get an emergency call from his dead Aunt or whatever. Medium! He was a real, breathing person and not the figure that haunted my dreams, dressed as Charles II and smashing my eggs all over the place.
‘Hey,’ he said.
He hadn’t changed. He still had two arms, two legs and an extremely attractive head with brown hair that I now noticed was highlighted with the faintest wisps of blonde. I didn’t really know what to say.
‘Well…Bye then,’ he said and was gone.
A whiff of fragrant fertility hung in the air.
‘That went well,’ Simon said.
‘I must get him,’ I said.
Of course I didn’t mean - ‘GET HIM’, not in that sense but then again perhaps I did. I meant EXACTLY that. And I’d thought that the Monster had died, simply rolled over and buried himself in some other poor, desperate woman’s psyche but in fact, all this time, he’d only been resting. Now he’d awoken from his sad, solitary slumber and was ambling around inside my chest, doing warm up exercises, stretching his neck from side to side and readying himself for more HUBBA HUBBA. I threw my handbag into Simon’s lap and dashed out of the bar, almost knocking a flurry of Black-berrying imbeciles off their barstools.
‘Wait Wait!’ I cried.
GET HIM! GET HIM!
I could see the back of Medium Blondie-Brown's head bobbing down Wardour Street.
‘Wait!’
There were two options. Either he couldn’t hear or was ignoring me and acting like he was just about to receive an important call that couldn’t be interrupted. I speeded up but then felt my ankle twist as my foot stayed on the pavement and my heel got stuck in a hole in the curb. I contemplated leaving my shoe stuck there – perhaps eventually it would become a memorial and other women would leave their shoes there –a shrine to romantic humiliation. Instead I bent down and managed to work the shoe out of the hole and carried it in one hand whilst I limped like a wooden-legged pirate (why take the other shoe off and make life easy?). My ankle was hurting. It was the same ankle that had got the stitches. God was throwing great big objects in my path to stop me getting my hands on Medium. If I pursued him I’d probably end up in casualty with tyre marks down my back. The problem was Monster was truly warmed up now - had done at least ten seconds of high jumps and was rattling his cage which sat somewhere underneath my ribs. One minute, he was screeching with passion and the next rigid with expectation. CATCH HIM. CATCH HIM. I could no longer see the back of Medium’s head and had turned into Old Compton Street with a multitude of Tuk-Tuks swimming before my eyes and hundreds of men walking this way and that. At least I now had a cloak of relative invisibility and I wobbled and hobbled, growing more out of breath with every step. Just like in nature, my poor tired biology was guiding me and just like in nature God was screwing up my chances - trying to kill me before I accomplished my true purpose.

Then I spotted him - he was staring into the window of ‘Metal-Morphosis’ – was he considering getting a love tattoo? Was he in love with me? Was he secretly in love with me and waiting for me to catch him so he could pretend he was completely powerless and had played no role in the seduction? Did he want to be pursued? I licked my lips and took a deep breath, trying to subdue Monster who was bashing his meaty paws on my chest and gyrating his pelvis in an extremely lascivious and distressing manner.
‘Hi,’ he said.
What did ‘Hi’ mean? Was it friendlier than ‘Hey’? Was it more meaningful than ‘Hello’? I was over analysing - my brain was about to leap out of my mouth and end it all by dashing itself against the shop window. I pictured it sliding down the window, a bloody pulp, then shivering on the pavement - one pulse and then a final shudder.
It’s last words would be: Did you mean ‘Hi’ as in, ‘Happy to see you’? Or did you mean ‘Hi’ as in, ‘I can’t stand you’?

Medium looked up from the walls of tattoo art (was he really going to get a recreation of Merlin with a giant silver sabre?).
‘I’ve been trying to decide for ages,’ he said.
‘Don’t do it,’ I said, ‘Just think what’ll it be like in forty years. Your skin will be all saggy and leathery and you’ll have this wrinkled up memory of something you thought was cool but now is complete crap.’
I was breathless and I could feel a bubble of snot trying to escape out of my nostril. I looked at the ground and used my little finger to try and despatch it onto the pavement.
‘My brother’s got a tattoo. He really regrets it,’ I continued, ‘He’s going to be a Dad. Can you believe it? He’s only nineteen- almost twenty but still. Imagine that.’
‘What did your brother get?’ Medium asked turning to face me head on so the Monster was basically ejaculating all over my insides with excitement.
‘He got someone’s initials,’ I said.
‘That’s not so bad. It depends. Whose initials were they? A girlfriend?’
‘No our Dad’s - he got Dad’s. My Dad… I mean our Dad died.’
I was shivering from the cold, having left my jacket in the bar and no doubt Simon was trying to contact me but I’d left my mobile there as well. I rubbed my ankle and tried to slip my shoe back onto my foot but when I stood upright my ankle just bent like a piece of melted plastic and I had to grab Medium’s arm to steady myself.
‘You are always falling over,’ he said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said looking down at my bendy ankle.
The Monster had suddenly gone quiet – having got its end away, it was tired and had curled up and begun snoring quietly like a dormouse.
‘Will you come back to the bar for a drink?’ I asked.
Medium looked at his mobile and I couldn’t tell whether he wanted it to ring and rescue him or he was seriously considering coming for a drink. My brain looked up from its pulpy mash on the pavement and sighed because it wasn’t actually dead at all. ‘Stop over-thinking everything. Just see what happens,’ it said as it clambered up the back of my legs, pulling itself up and under my shirt like a slippery, red slug. I felt it settle back into position and everything slotted into place - the ankle and the cold all irrelevant. Medium put his mobile back in his pocket and I was tempted to throw it under the wheels of a Tuk-Tuk so he couldn’t use it later to plot his escape.
‘I won’t attack you this time,’ I said.
The fresh air had done my brain some good. I felt much more confident- much more straight-talking. Perhaps I would ask him to come back to mine later. Perhaps I really would. We walked back to the bar and Simon looked completely unsurprised at the turn of events. He’d polished off the second bottle and had ordered another. I almost felt he had co-ordinated everything so we would ‘bump’ into one another but also knew this was impossible. There were bigger forces at play. The magic of hundreds of eggs using all their collective strength, their entire cell potential to mould events so the two of us followed a distinct path. God and Nature were now on my side. The glass in the ankle and the stuck shoe were just tests to see how fit I was. Was I finally ready to throw everything into the pursuit? I tried not to count out loud as I thought about how many days till maximum fertility. Tick tock. Tick tock.

As we clambered up the steps to my flat, I felt weightless like tiny hands were holding my sore ankle up and supporting my legs and back and true enough it wasn’t quite harp music playing in the background (there had been an accident outside and police sirens and ambulances kept arriving- then a fight broke out and the police returned), but I felt higher than I had in years. My brain had stopped fretting and the Monster had transformed into a Dormouse so I wasn’t a complete sex–pest and in fact we didn’t do anything when we climbed into bed. We didn’t even go into the bedroom right away. Instead we listened to some music. I took deep breaths and tried not to make any mistakes. Then much later, we sat on the bed but we kept our clothes on. Medium talked about his job (he worked in a 'design consultancy' whatever that meant) and how he felt strangely absent most of the time - like he had a doppelganger that went into the office and did all the work for him and I pointed out that I wished I had the same thing because it would mean I could do what I really wanted (whilst my double got on with the daily drudge). Then Medium asked what it was that I really wanted and I told him I didn’t know - that was the problem. I even mentioned the book shop idea which was the first time, I’d discussed it with anyone (apart from Simon of course) and rather than laughing at the stupidity of opening a book shop that sold cakes but didn’t stock any popular fiction, Medium nodded and looked interested (and not just the interest blokes feign whilst they’re trying to figure out when to dive down the front of your shirt).

Later I got up and made some coffee and we drank that sitting up in bed like we were an eighty year old couple and I asked him whether he wanted to wear my dressing gown and then laughed when he came out of the bathroom wearing it because it was too small and flowery and actually rather frightening. It surprised me that he didn’t mind me seeing him like that and then I started worrying that perhaps he didn’t care if I found him attractive or not but I tried to stop that thought. Now and then the brain rebelled and tried to escape but I fought to keep things on an even keel. Several times, I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t called and why he didn’t want a blow job but I knew this would be a disaster. And it was the first time (in a long time) that I was talking to someone and not just weighing up their physical attributes, mentally pulling their lips back to check their teeth, counting the defects- the giant Adams Apples or the hairy backs or peering at their tackle trying to decide on its sperm-manufacturing efficacy.

And I didn’t want to have sex with Medium. I didn’t want to ruin the feeling - the two of us so delicate and respectful.

But the Monster wouldn’t sleep forever. And just before we nodded off, I thought I heard it stirring- lifting its furry arms in the air and yawning, readying itself for activity and more rubbing itself up against the bars of my rib cage. But I fell asleep nuzzled up against Medium Brown and nothing happened. And I slept through my alarm and forgot I was supposed to go to work. I also forgot I was supposed to call George and tell him I loved him. And then the phone kept ringing but I kept switching it off, thinking it was work trying to get hold of me. I would open my eyes just a sliver and see Medium, mouth slightly open, his eyelashes damp and clinging to his cheeks. And eventually I had to go to the toilet and I forced myself up and the phone started up again and it must have been about eleven. I picked it up on my way to the bathroom- I couldn’t help myself looking back at the bed to check Medium was still there and it wasn’t just my weird Charles II dream but on a whole new level. As I raised the phone to my ear, Mum’s voice was shaky. She could barely get the words out.

She’d found George in his bedroom.
He’d cut both wrists with a penknife and was in hospital in critical condition.