The following weeks passed in a lonely blur. I signed up for a LOVEFiLM account and became a member of the independent cinema in town. My days tumbled into a routine of watching half a foreign language film over breakfast while agonising over what to wear and wishing I could pull off French chic like Eva Green and Emmanuelle Béart, followed by hiding in the back of a lecture hall and absently scribbling angrily atomic doodles resembling the EUR tower from Antonioni’s L’Eclisse beside my illegible notes, wandering through the streets alongside an imaginary Jules and Jim to watch an afternoon film in an empty cinema, then returning to college to cook pasta for a non-existent extended family of boxers called Rocco, finishing my film from earlier while my dream-world brother and lover waited for me in the bath, scanning the books for tomorrow’s seminar while sipping wine and imagining myself an academic version of la femme Nikita, and maybe watching some TV in Tim’s room while we swapped stories from our days, muttering fantasies of less mundane lives spent with more sophisticated peers.
This monotonous but artistically stimulating existence was broken by an email from my childhood boyfriend Todd. The son of one of my dad’s flatmates from college, we’d played together since we were kids and ‘gone out’ for a month when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. He’d lived in Northampton, though, and we’d soon decided a long-distance relationship consisting of little more than pecks on the lips even when we saw each other was rather pointless. We’d stayed friends and he’d often email me saying something reminded him of me. Usually these messages plunged me into guilty feelings towards Matthew and drove me to send frosty replies. But now my fingers hovered over the keyboard. Todd was studying German in Birmingham. His message said it’d be fun to meet up. My head was forming excuses and brush-offs before it had even processed the request. I paused. Why not? I was free now. And a normal teenager. A normal university student. What could be more normal than a weekend trip to see an old flame? He might not even be single, of course. Perhaps he just wanted to see me as a friend. But even if he was and even if he wanted more, what was wrong with that? It might even be fun.
A week later, Todd met me at Birmingham New Street and carried my bag for me as we took two buses to the messy terraced house he shared with three other pot-smoking students. I saw little of Birmingham that weekend or in fact much of Todd’s house beyond his bedroom. It was not the sexy booty-call I’d been picturing, nor was it the usual awkward disaster I’d come to expect of my life. There was an issue with Todd being unable to use a condom and, blotting out the voices of school nurses, sex-ed teachers and responsible friends, I gave in to his moans about ‘loss of sensation’ and ‘so much more intense’. Even after that, we had problems manoeuvring into all the positions he’d ‘always wanted to try’ and mostly settled for short bursts of missionary. But Todd made me feel good about myself and I realised it was something I’d been missing since Matthew. He told me I was the sexiest girl he’d seen, whispered about my ‘tight pussy’ and ‘amazing arse’. When he kissed me goodbye at the station on Sunday, he looked sheepish and apologised for some unnamed thing. I smiled and pressed my lips to his cheek before saying ‘Thank you’ and squeezing my way onto the too-crowded carriage.
Returning to college, I found a series of emails from Matthew with the subject heading ‘Urgent’, and one from someone called Rose.
I’d heard of Rose before. She may have been Suzanne’s daughter. Or possibly niece. Or had Matthew boasted of having kissed three generations of her family? Or did I remember that having to do with his being in love with his primary-school teacher?
Actual blood ties and familial relations were easily confused in the world of Uncles. Rose may not have been an Uncle, though. I did remember that the jury had been out for some time, deciding whether this psychology-trained porn star could be admitted to the secret club.
Either way, she knew about Uncles, and she was writing to me because Matthew had a problem. Matthew’s preceding emails explained this problem by telling me I needed to visit a clinic. He’d sent me two pages of dense, single-spaced prose about what to tell the nurse, about the painful bend that had developed in his cock shortly after I left, and about the probable herpes diagnosis that would mean I could only safely have sex with other carriers for the rest of my life.
I read Rose’s email alone in my gross mint-green bedroom, crying to myself after calling the University Health Centre and being told, ‘We don’t deal with that. You have to try the GUM clinic.’
From: Rose Shaw <ladyred@sweetmail.com>
To: Harriet Moore <harry_moore@sweetmail.com>
Sent: 13 November 2002, 09:47:32
Subject: A message from a friend
Dear Harriet
You do not know me, but I am a friend of Albert’s. I fear you might see that and delete this email immediately, but please read on. I am a friend of Uncles. I have known Albert my whole life and I have seen him struggle against the world for all of that time. But in the last couple of years I have seen something different emerge in him. He has told me about you. He rang me when he first made love to you, worried you did not bleed. Do you remember getting cross about that? He says you have always been feisty. He has contacted me every time you have fought and every time you have told him you’d prefer a ‘normal’ life. He has worried he’s done the wrong thing by you and is always asking me whether he should block his own fears and allow you to fly away.
He asked me the same last night. I told him it’s out of his hands. You will fly if you need to. But, if you’re a real Uncle, as he has told me you are, you will return with love in your heart.
He’s asked me to give you some advice about getting tested at a clinic. He fears if he tries to help you himself you will say he is meddling, but given my line of work I might be able to help. I’m a sex worker, by the way. I trained as a psychologist, then got bored and got into porn. I’m a bit old for it these days (36, groan!), so I only do a bit and am trying to redefine myself as a sex therapist. My manager Damien is helping me out with that – he has contacts in Hollywood, so with any luck I’ll soon be listening to the likes of Tom Cruise moan on my couch.
But anyway, you need to get yourself checked out and I’ve attached a document with a list of questions you need to ask the nurse. There’s also a bit of information there about herpes and the like. Don’t be scared baby, it’s not the end of the world. Even if you’re positive, there’s no reason you can’t have a healthy sex life with Albert.
He’s told me so much about you and I’m desperate to meet you. Have you found any girls yet on your little hiatus from Albert? I hope so, though I’ll also be jealous. Albert makes it sound like you’re totally ripe for a girly encounter. I keep telling him I’m more than happy to hop in a car and oblige, but he refuses to let me. Jealous you’ll fall for me instead if you ask me!
If you need anything: if you want to talk about Albert or girls or ask about the tests or just say hi, I’m always around.
Take care, babycakes
Rose xx
Rose’s attachment calmed me with medical facts and instructions about who to see and what tests to ask for, but I was confused by the rest of her email. A friend of Uncles? A healthy sex life with Albert? What about without him? What if I didn’t want to be an Uncle any more?
I walked to the clinic across town the next day, only to be told I needed to go away and phone to make an appointment. I returned to halls and ran into my housemate Tim as I came through the front door. Seeing I was upset, he put his arm around me, boiled the kettle and began distracting me with impressions of our other housemates. I hiccupped giggles through my trembling lips and considered Tim. He wasn’t an Uncle, that I knew: he studied plants and wasted his free time on computer games. But he was kind, he noticed when I wasn’t okay, and, more importantly, he was my friend. Perhaps my only one.
Later, holding my hand, he escorted me back to the clinic. After my tests; after bursting into tears in front of the unsympathetic nurse, after entirely omitting Todd from my sexual history because I thought she might force me to phone him from the premises once I had my results; after I dithered about writing the name of my real doctor because he was a family friend and might put two and two together if he saw both mine and Matthew’s results; after they forgot about me for an hour and broke three needles trying to take blood for the procedural HIV test; after they gave me the all clear on everything and told me to be more careful in the future; and after Tim took me for fish and chips and I cried into my mushy peas, I stumbled back into my bedroom and replied to the mysterious Rose.
From: Rose Shaw <ladyred@sweetmail.com>
To: Harriet Moore <harry_moore@sweetmail.com>
Sent: 16 November 2002, 11:22:13
Subject: RE: A message from a friend
Harry, I’m soooo glad you replied.
I know it’s difficult working out what to do with Albert. I hear your cries for a normal life – that’s natural – but take a look around, babe, do you see any of those kids leading normal lives that are happy? You and Albert have a beautiful thing, something most people never EVER find. And you’re going to give it all up because you want to kiss boys and girls that won’t call you back and only care about the price of the next beer they’re going to buy? Remember the poetry, babycakes.
Sorry, I don’t mean to lecture you. All of these are your decisions to make. I just find it hard to sit back and watch two beautiful Uncles who could be so happy together throw it all away. I’m not an Uncle, you know. Albert said I could have been once, but I chose porn and all that rough sex stuff instead. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but you have to switch yourself off. It’s not like you and Albert. You guys can have the mucky sex stuff, but it’s infused with the purest of love. God, you two could go so far. Has he spanked you yet? I used to beg him to spank me, he’s so good at it, but the bastard was stingy. I wish he’d let me meet you. I get wet just thinking about the fun the three of us could have. Not that you’d probably be interested in an old bag like me. Get Albert to show you some of my pictures and we’ll see. If you’re only half as amazing as he makes out, you’d have us both as your slaves. And we could get you other little girls if you liked, do your bidding … Uhm, I must stop. Sorry if you’re shocked. I’d like to tell you everything I want to do to you, but I don’t want to scare you off. Perhaps you don’t like reading about this stuff. I just can’t help it. I’ve never met you, yet I think I’ve already fallen for you.
I’ll leave you to your studies babycakes.
Rose xxx
And, lonely the following night, I found myself pausing Manon des Sources and replying again.
From: Rose Shaw <ladyred@sweetmail.com>
To: Harriet Moore <harry_moore@sweetmail.com>
Sent: 17 November 2002, 21:06:51
Subject: RE: A message from a friend
Wow! You really are as amazing as Albert says. And ripe as plums in August for a girl by the sounds of it. He should have found you one by now. If you were mine, I would have done your bidding a long time ago.
I’m glad my email made you horny. There’s much more of where that came from. And, no, I don’t think it’s too weird that you and I are emailing like this while you and Albert are on a ‘break’. I won’t tell him if you don’t. ;) In all seriousness, maybe a friendship with me could help you work out your feelings for him. And if not.. well, we can have fun trying! I know, I’m wicked, aren’t I?
Soooooooooooo, you and Albert haven’t tried proper spanking yet? Well, babycakes, you are missing out. Perhaps I’ll have to introduce you to it instead. There’s nothing better than a good raw hiding to get your pussy juicing. We’ll have to start gently to build you up to it. Perhaps just a playful bend over a kitchen counter and some light palm contact. Three or four strokes, then some feathery kisses over your pink flesh, trailing a tongue down between your thighs to lap up the sweet nectar of your peach … Later, we could try a paddle, or a leg divider, to get your butt nice and taut. I’m not sure I want Albert to do this at all; I want you all to myself. Or maybe I’ll do the spanking and watch you juice with longing while I make Albert sit on the other side of the room. Then, when you’re nearly screaming with desire, I’ll allow him to slip his cock in you from behind and feel you spasm around him. Well, maybe, or maybe I’ll just be incredibly selfish and rut you myself with a strap-on.
Oooh, do you know about frotting? I want to teach you everything.
Your slave
Rose xxx
*
Rose emailed a couple of times a day, usually once about all the things she wanted to do to me and once to tell me how much I was hurting Matthew, how ill he was getting, and how much of a saint he was to still be willing to take me back. I replied hungrily to the former, my mind swirling with all the things I felt I couldn’t admit to my peers and revelling in the idea that one person in the world didn’t think I was a freak because I reached for my vibrator every night and found good literature erotic. The latter emails, however, froze me to my cheap desk chair, turned my skin ashen and made me want to smash my third-floor window and scream into the night. I was not functioning. I looked like a regular student from the outside: I drank cheap cider with my housemates, learnt how to burp the alphabet and even helped Tim steal an entire footpath sign, post and all. But, behind my bedroom door, Matthew and I had nightly rows on the phone, followed by ‘I still love you’ or ‘I need you’ texts each morning.
After almost a month of this rubber-banding, he booked a night at a nearby Travelodge. It was late November and he’d told Annabelle he was visiting his mother. We cried together in the cheery blue-and-yellow room before having sex. I apologised for being a child and for hurting him, telling him I’d never leave him again, and he wrapped me in his arms, promising to protect me from the dead-eyed plebs I lived amongst. If I remember correctly, that was also the first night I presented my new digital camera and allowed him to photograph me.
After the reconciliation, Rose continued to email. She told me about her experience as a sex worker and her new job as a sex therapist in LA. I told her about growing up in Sussex and how disappointing everyone in Durham was. I moaned that Tim never wanted to do anything but watch football and that people in my seminar groups didn’t even bother to read the books. She told me her regrets and how special I was. Soon, she was ending emails with ‘I love you, babygirl.’ We swapped up to a dozen messages a day: some loving, some horny, some explicit. She told me about the sex woes of the casts of HBO series and impressed me with Hollywood rumours days before they hit the newspapers.
To explain my absences, Matthew and I revived the pretence that I worked for him, and I began talking casually and a little proudly about ‘my gambler’ and ‘my porn star’. Some of my housemates gave me odd looks and a wide berth, but Tim, especially, seemed impressed.
‘Is that her?’ he asked, pointing with his toe at the TV screen where some big-busted blonde was welcoming a beefed-up plumber into her home.
‘No!’ I scoffed in disgust, thinking, I hope not, anyway. It was a Tuesday and Tim and I were sat on his bed drinking Lambrini and watching the bonus extras of the Paris Hilton sex tape. A week or two ago I’d plucked up the courage to tell him I liked girls, to which he’d shrugged and said, ‘Me too.’ Since then, we’d spent each evening locked in Tim’s room, shutting out our bitchy housemates and grumbling about our mutual disappointment with university. Tim’s parents had announced they were getting divorced less than a month after we’d got to Durham, but so far I was the only person he’d told. Even with me, he sidestepped the subject and turned our conversations back to my worries. Sex, porn and innuendo became our go-to modes of communication, providing cathartic escapism from the heavy thoughts plaguing each of our brains.
‘What’s her name again?’ Tim asked as the camera focused on the blonde’s left nipple.
‘Her professional name’s Lady Red,’ I replied importantly.
‘So she’s a ginge!’ Tim stopped watching the screen to grin in my face. ‘Does she have ginger pubes as well?’
I elbowed him violently back to his side of the bed and stuck out my tongue. ‘I’ll have to let you know,’ I said coyly.
I was supposed to meet her on a couple of occasions. She was flying back from LA for a conference and could see me for a few hours at a private airport, or she would be in Newcastle that same weekend Matthew was coming to visit me, so we could all go out for a meal or something. One way or another, though, each plan fell through and all I had to connect the mass of emails I received to a real person were an ancient magazine with a woman in a blonde wig and an old grainy video cassette with a brunette being eaten out by a red-head with freckled shoulders. I tried not to think too hard about how unsexy these out of fashion porn clips were and how many years it must be since she looked like that, and instead imagined a sophisticated woman wearing black and smoking cigarettes; a woman who would take control and teach me about myself, who would be able to do what she promised and what Matthew, Rupert and Todd hadn’t: make me come.
In November, a gender performer came to Durham to run a drag-king workshop. Though too shy to bring my own prosthetic and join in, I went to the performative lecture that followed and left buzzing with gender-bending excitement. I rushed back to my bedroom to email Rose about how inspiring the speaker was and how I wanted to move to New York and make superbly queer performance art on street corners and discuss Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick in bohemian cafés.
Within a couple of hours, Rose wrote back. The message was short and lacked her usual flirty warmth:
God, so you’ve met that bitch. What she doesn’t tell anyone is that she was born a hermaphrodite, the crazy freak. I tried to write about it in the Village Voice once and she slapped a law suit on me.
For some absurd reason that perhaps only keen little freshers from small towns who find themselves in big cities asking homeless people with Rottweilers and gangs of hoodies for directions can understand, what I did next was hunt through Google for an email address.
Dear Ms P---
I attended your lecture in Durham today and wanted to tell you how thoroughly I enjoyed it. Also, I spoke to a woman I know as Rose or ‘Lady Red’ and she says she had some dealings with you in the Village Voice, but I can find no records in my library’s archives, so I was wondering if you have any idea what she’s talking about.
Once again, thank you for a hugely inspirational lecture today.
Yours
Natalie
From my university email no less. I had no response for a few days and, just when I was beginning to chew the inside of my cheek with recognition of the sordidness of emailing a public figure about a porn star you’ve never met and wondering whether I would now be blacklisted by the whole international gender-performing community, I found a reply.
Natalie
I do not know and never have known anyone by the name of Rose or Lady Red and cannot help you with your line of enquiry.
P---
Okay, so no obvious anger and perhaps no blacklisting, but what did this mean? Was Rose lying? Or P--- covering up? Why did it matter? Because something outside of the world of Matthew, intergenerational love and endless strings of lies had made me feel passionate and had been instantly tainted by someone related to that very world.