Kelly lived in a tiny converted chapel on the outskirts of a village called Yoxwell. She’d been more than ready to walk out on her last disastrous live-in boyfriend, and when someone told her there was a chapel available to rent cheap she’d hurried along there expecting lofty spaces, high ceilings and huge expanses of stained glass. But the reality had been a plain building not much bigger than a one-bedroomed cottage. The religious faith that had required such tiny premises must have been simple indeed. It could only have accommodated the most minute congregation, and the God that had been worshipped there must have been a strictly meat and potatoes kind of deity.
If there had ever been ecclesiastical fittings or furnishings they were long gone when Kelly arrived. She’d done some things to give the place a renewed faintly churchy feel. She’d bought one or two pieces of old stained glass, and hung them in front of the windows but they’d come from demolished pubs rather than churches. One showed a Victorian cricketer, one showed Shakespeare. She’d also found a couple of garish plaster Virgin Marys and decked them out with fairy lights.
Inside there was just one big room, a continuous space with a tall narrow window, but an open mezzanine had been constructed halfway up one of the walls to create a bed platform. There had been no room up there for a proper bed, but Kelly’s woodwork skills had allowed her to make one in situ, created out of reclaimed wood that had once been part of a fishing boat. It was possible to lie on the mattress, on the bed platform and look out of the top of the main window and see the road and houses and people outside. Kelly had discovered you could even do that while having sex if you used the right position.
Kelly had read in an interior decor magazine that ‘you can’t wreck a wreck’, and had used this as her mantra while decorating the chapel. Everything had been painted in garish, clashing, ungodly colours: two walls purple, two walls burnt sienna, window frames in pillar-box red, doors in lime green, the ladder that led up to the bed platform a sunny yellow.
The furniture was strictly from junk shops but she’d sprayed much of it silver and gold, and where the items were still too ugly to look at she’d draped them in swathes of fabric, mostly old velvets and chenille, but there were one or two lengths of fun fur and nylon animal prints.
All the decorating had been done in a flurry of early enthusiasm the month she’d moved in, and everything had looked new and pristine for a short while. It had been impressive enough to feature in a magazine. She’d been roped into it by a friend of a friend who worked on one of those minor interior decor mags for people who dream of living in the country but will never quite get round to doing it. The headline on the article had read, ‘Country doesn’t mean conventional’.
She’d had reservations about appearing in the magazine at all, but she was quite pleased by what she’d managed to do with such limited resources and the place looked even better in the magazine than it did in life. But the experience hadn’t been entirely simple or easy. For one thing, some of the neighbours began treating her as though she was some sort of celebrity, a minor celebrity certainly, but appearing in print put a little distance between them and her, not least because they suddenly assumed she must be rich. The fact that the chapel was so small, the fact that she worked as a taxi driver made no difference to the way she was perceived. To be featured in a crummy magazine set her apart.
Maybe that was what killed her enthusiasm for further work on the chapel. After the initial burst of activity and creativity she had stopped completely and done nothing more. That had been some years ago. The paint, she told herself, now looked interestingly distressed. Damp and decay had reclaimed the ceiling, streaking it with new milky ways of mould.
There were paintings on the walls, a collection that had required an intense though brief scouring of charity shops. The living room and kitchen contained what she called ‘bad pet art’; bad art featuring pets, rather than art featuring bad pets. With some it was a matter of technical incompetence, but more often it was a question of subject matter. There were cute puppies, Yorkshire terriers with ribbons in their hair, melancholy spaniels, comical dachshunds.
Upstairs, around the bed platform, was the collection of ‘bad sex art’, and here the distinction between bad technique and bad subject matter was harder to separate. There were female nudes that had obviously been copied from photographs in girlie magazines; not very well copied since the paintings showed weird lengthening and foreshortening of limbs, and anatomically impossible poses. But just as often the artist had painted from his imagination, and revealed how unfamiliar he was with the subject. One or two paintings showed couples in intense but inexplicit poses, and in these the artist had tried to instil a spiritual dimension. The couples were on beaches, or posed in front of abstract sunsets or just floating in the clouds.
Taking men up there was always a challenge. Some just saw sex and nakedness and that was enough for them. They were tremendously encouraged and felt Kelly must be a bit of a goer, which wasn’t entirely untrue. Others sensed there was irony afoot and wondered if perhaps Kelly didn’t take sex quite seriously enough, quite as seriously as they did. By the time they’d made it to the bed, however, they weren’t usually deterred by a little thing like irony; although there had been at least two who’d run away thinking that Kelly was only interested in getting them up there to take the piss out of them.
A few, a very few, responded exactly the way she wanted them to. They saw that sex was complicated, serious, funny, a matter of technique, passion, untutoredness and hilarity all at once. It had been a long time since a man like that had graced her bed.
Some people came into the chapel and found it a hellish place, a torture chamber of misdirected kitsch. Others found it sort of amusing, a fun house. But neither group understood how anybody could actually live with it all. For Kelly, however, the decoration had now become more or less invisible. She didn’t think about it, was hardly even aware of its eccentricity, and that being the case, she had no incentive to change it. She knew this was not the instinct of the true interior designer, for whom change was everything; redefining volumes, creating fresh looks, finding the latest colours and the coolest new accessories. She wondered what her father would have made of all this mess.
The only clearly unironic item on display was a photograph above the fridge. It showed Kelly, aged ten, with her father. They had their arms around each other, golf putters in their hands, and they were standing on a crazy golf course. The colours in the picture had faded and the outlines had lost their sharpness. It seemed a good deal more innocent that anything else in the house.
Sometimes Kelly lay on her bed looking up at the dark, mottled ceiling and wondered exactly how many other ceilings she’d slept under. How many men had been on top of her, covering her while she looked up at the cracked plaster of strange ceilings?
She thought of sex outdoors, on the beach at Walberswick, on a gravestone in Wangford churchyard, on her back looking up at the wide, cold sky and not experiencing lofty intimations, just wondering how many others were out there, feeling alone and unloved, doing the same as her. And when the man rolled over, pulled her on top, and she felt all that openness behind her, all that vacuity, that scope for mayhem and threat and exposure, then she felt infinitely naked, infinitely vulnerable, poised ready for some cosmic stab in the back.
She wanted sex with someone but not with just anyone. Her standards were high, but not impossible to meet. It saddened her to be alone but not as much as sleeping with the wrong person saddened her. There were so many wrong people, wrong in so many terrible and varied ways and, as she lay there in her bed, she felt herself again assessing Dexter, thinking about him as a sexual partner. Perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all. She started to get depressed. Surely it was possible to look at men, to meet them, talk to them, spend time with them without weighing them up sexually. The fact that she found it so impossible proved she was too hungry, too desperate. The extent of her needs guaranteed that her needs would not be met. She got out of bed, got ready for the day ahead.