The Bride Stripped Bare Set: The Bride Stripped Bare / With My Body. Nikki Gemmell

reach for your handbag, hope you’re not ringing too soon, don’t even know what to say, just hello, will that do, and I wanted to say thanks for the other day; you’ve rehearsed it, the lightness in your voice. You’re living more boldly, you’re beginning, and Theo’s words sound in your head: it’s no use waiting for the light to appear at the end of the tunnel, you just have to stride down and light the bloody thing yourself. There’s nothing wrong with a new friend for there seem to be less and less as the years roll over in your narrowing life.

      Ten a.m. and your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

      The slip of paper isn’t there.

      You’re scrabbling through your wallet and searching the floor and the steps and the ground outside but it’s gone and your fingers are dragging through your hair and your teeth are tearing at your nails, there’s no phone number under directory enquiries and you have no address, of course, and then you sit on the hallway floor, your head thrown back against the wall, for a very long time, very still, in the flat, with its silence like a skull.

      He’s gone.

      As if chunks have been ripped from the book of your future.

      

      You can’t move, your whole life feels slumped: you don’t know what to do next. You sit there for so long, your hand tucked into your knickers, against your bare flesh. When you withdraw your fingers you stare at the glutinous shine on them, the shout of it. You gasp, your hand trembles; a teenager all over again, so abruptly.

      But you have no number, no address. And he doesn’t have yours. He is gone.

      You feel drained. It took so much effort to get to this point, to overcome the nausea and nerves, to resolve to pick up the phone. You didn’t realise how much you were counting on the possibility of him, a new something to fill your life, until he was lost.

       Lesson 41

       remember to walk briskly and not saunter about or be forever peering into shop windows

      You return to the café in Soho, alone, through September, through October, and he never comes back.

      On a Monday of cold sunshine a young woman is beside you. She’s reading the sex issue of The Face magazine; she’s strongly by herself, as if this cafe is her office and she’s been this at ease in her skin her whole life. You wish you could be that. You buy The Face on the way home, flushing as the newsagent takes your money. You’ll never go back to his shop, you’re not that young woman.

      That night, alone, in the bedroom, words you’ve never heard before:

      Californicate: copulating shamelessly in every possible position. Chili dog: defecating on a woman’s chest, then masturbating with her breasts. Daisy chaining: a number of people connecting through oral sex. Flooding the cave: urinating into a partner’s vagina. Hum job: oral sex given to a man while humming a tune. On and on and you close the magazine and smooth the cover down, you place it in the bottom of your bedside drawer, you check it’s well tucked.

      Repelled. Horrified. Wet.

      Thinking of the woman in the cafe, and the man who never came back. Thinking of anonymous, uncomplicated sex. Arousing yourself with it all, now, rather than sedating yourself into sleep; wanting it in your life.

       Lesson 42

       every girl her own dressmaker

      The next day at the café you’re like an anemone unfurling within the silky coaxing of the water because you’ve decided that for the next six months you’ll live your life differently from the way you’ve ever lived it before: indulgently, selfishly, wilfully, before marriage and motherhood close over you. You dream of no commitment to anything but your own pleasure, you dream, with renewed vigour, of finding a satisfying fuck. If you’d ever have the courage for that.

      You were a serial sleeper once, during your final year of university, propelled by the thought of launching yourself into the world without any experience of men, a virgin at twenty-two and full of shame and self-loathing at the fact.

      You had an innocence then, in your early twenties. You could pass as sixteen, as still needing to be taught, your face hadn’t yet settled. So one Saturday night at a friend’s you became drunk and emboldened, you had to get it done. There was a man next to you in the doorway; he was taller than you, had clear skin, he’d do. Everyone else was deep into a double episode of The Young Ones, they’d never notice you’d gone.

      You took a deep breath: do you want to go upstairs, you asked.

      What, he said, leaning close.

      Let’s go upstairs, come on.

      You took his hand; he had no idea of your pounding heart. You never saw him again, didn’t want to, his name was quickly lost. There were many after that. They were always snatching the bait, thinking it was you, in fact, who’d fallen prey and not realising that the girl with the face who needed to be taught had become a collector, an archivist of sexual experiences. All disappointing; too dry, painful, anticlimactic, fumbling, bleak.

      So you tried something else. An older man. Your neighbour, a graphic designer who’d never settled down. The age difference was nineteen years. It was worse. He was from an era when sex was purely for the man’s satisfaction; he thought a good fuck was just hammering away vigorously while you lay there and thought of England; he thought condoms were a joke. He told you afterwards as he rubbed your flat belly that he could never sleep with a woman over thirty, he didn’t like them enough: the sagging skin on their necks, the lines on their faces, the bodies thickening out. But you know another reason, now; because by then women have lost their docility, they have awareness, they know too much.

      And they want things themselves.

      So, nothing sparked. Theo, meanwhile, seemed to be sailing her way through men and through life. For you the best moment was always the anticipation, the thrill of giving the men what they wanted and as soon as the clothes were off something was lost. It always seemed to be two people connecting but utterly failing at it, too, and there was a gulf of loneliness in that, and after several years you gave up and slipped into your dream world every single night. So your twenties passed.

      Whenever you did make love it was your thoughts that stirred you more than the touch of the man. He never knew that he wasn’t at the centre of your focus while he was on you, that he was merely kick-starting the film in your head. As he pushed inside you’d slip into concentrating on a scenario that would trigger your pleasure. It all had little to do with the person making love to you. You never found the sex sexy; maybe it would come with the next man or the next but it never combusted for you. What was all the fuss about?

      You were much better at it by yourself, in your head.

       Lesson 43

       the law for everyone is duty first, pleasure next

      What you want:

      The lights turned off. A touch that’s gentle, slow, provocative, that builds you up, that makes you want it too much. An orgasm; it doesn’t have to be at the same time as the man, just one orgasm so that you know what everyone’s talking about. Eye contact. A quick coming that’s not on your breasts or your face. Holding afterwards, skin to skin. Oral sex, precisely where you ask, for as long and as soft and as slow as you’d like. Sex that’s uncomplicated, with no ties, where the man will do exactly what you want. Claiming happiness for yourself: you’re so used to focusing on your partner’s pleasure at the expense of your own.

      

      What you do not want:

      To