Friday 11 September 2009

The final denouement of humiliating awfulness Part 1

I woke the next morning to Tina Turner screaming ‘You’re simply the best!’ outside my window. Suddenly a big lightbulb flashed on in my head. It was all about sex! I needed to unleash my inner slut! I took some more aspirin to kill my sleep-deprivation headache (I barely slept or ate a single morsel the whole time I was there. This is partly because all the hotel food tasted of vinegar and partly because I spent the entire holiday in a state of sheer, edge-of-cliff terror. By the end of the week I looked like I should be hanging out in an alley waiting to rob grandmas for crack, but my hipbones looked fantastic!). Then I eagerly typed a new Facebook status:

‘Audrey was woken at half-ten by Tina Turner (I fucking hate Tina Turner) and in my sleep-deprived state have managed to splatter suntan lotion all over my bikini top so must walk along the beach with suspicious white stains all over my tits.’

I logged out smiling smugly at my powers of suggestion, the phrase ‘all over my tits’ fluttering on the breeze. Then I spent the whole day swimming in the sea and visualising living in The Spanish Resort, sitting on my little balcony in a black sheath dress among my chili plants and bougainvillea, drinking a bottle of lovely white wine with my new boyfriend The Irishman.

That night everything changed.
My mother and her boyfriend agreed to come along with me for one drink. As we walked in the band was already playing. Then something unfathomable happened. The Irishman looked over, smiled and waved at me.
Hm.
They played one more tune. He seemed in a hurry to get off stage. Then he came straight over.
‘Come outside and talk to me for a while’. It didn’t occur to him for one minute that I might say no. ‘Wait...hold this a minute.’
He thrust his guitar into my hands and walked off. I sat feeling ridiculously pleased, like some pathetic WAG type. I held the guitar on my lap and strummed a few chords (as if to say, I can actually fucking play). The Irishman’s bandmate and friend (a cute-looking little guy in a cap whom I shall call Ratface) strolled by and laughed, giving me the thumbs up. The stars were shining upon me! Suddenly the world was my friend!

Then he was back. ‘Come outside and talk to me.’ I followed him out to a balcony outside the club. There was just me, him and the drunken morons down below. He regarded me with his smouldering black eyes.
‘If you’re ever here and I’m not in the club, this is where I’ll be,’ he said.

We chatted for a bit about London, which is where I live. I knew through Facebook stalking that he’d spent some of the winter in London with his girlfriend. She was a worrying choice of girlfriend and made me wonder about him. She had bleached hair and massive bleached teeth and a perma-tan and wore clingy voile dresses and worked as a ‘dancer’. She was, in fact, the total antithesis of me. I called her Porno Miss Piggy, which I know was a little uncharitable.
‘You know, I spent some time in London over the winter with Porno Miss Piggy, the girl I was going out with,’ he said meaningfully, as if to say: I’m now single!
‘Really?’ I asked in faux surprise.
‘So...who do you live with, then?’ he asked, giving me another meaningful look. He knew from his own Facebook stalking that I had a boyfriend.
‘Oh...well, I’m living in a house-share with some other people,’ I said, which is true. One of them just happens to be my boyfriend. ‘There’s a mad Russian girl who lives downstairs and plays Abba at 3 in the morning. But mostly it’s okay. I’ve got my own kitchen, at least. I used to have to share a kitchen with an Italian prostitute.’
‘I used to share a house with a prostitute, back in Ireland,’ he said, and then he told me a lovely story:

‘I was living in this total shithole and there was a prostitute who lived right below me. She used to entertain her clients there all day and play that Cher song –‘Do You Believe in Love After Love?’ – over and over while she was doing it...’
‘Why? Did it enhance her performance?’
‘No, I think it was to drown out the noise. Anyway, one day I was off work with flu and I just lay there hallucinating, listening to that fucking song over and over again until I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed my hurley stick and went down there, stripped to the waist, and banged the door and said, If you don’t turn that song off I’m going to smash the fucking place in.’
‘Hahaha!’ I laughed, imagining him swinging his hurley stick around, semi-naked. Hmmm. It was on the tip of my tongue to mention that my boyfriend had actually done the same thing minus the hurley stick a few weeks before when Russian girl and her boyfriend were having a late night Abba session, but I managed to not to.

I liked that story. I would have liked to have told him a flirtatious story that made me look sexy and feminine, but I don’t have any. I’ve never invented any and I’m no good at making stuff up on the spot. The Irishman and I spent ages on the balcony chatting, and on the surface of it we had lots to say and got along, but underneath it all everything was quietly going wrong. I forgot to flirt with him. I got all excited about actually talking. Perhaps this is the problem: I relate to men like they’re human beings. I’d had far too much of his spliff (again) and wasn’t thinking straight. At one point he said: ‘You babble as much shit as I do!’ Which isn’t a good sign, is it?

Other bad things that happened:

He said to me: ‘I’m sorry it’s so uncomfortable out here – there used to be chairs, but they took them away.’ I replied in a happy voice: ‘Oh it’s okay – I can stand!’
‘You can stand...huhuhuh,’ he repeated slowly and derisively.

I told him that I wanted to move away from London and have ‘a new, exciting life!’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘But Audrey, you can’t leave yourself behind.’
‘But why would you want to?’ I retorted.
‘That’s a good point,’ he said, which it was. Though of course, he was right.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that what he’d said was the exact same thing a therapist had said to me when I told him I wanted to move to The Spanish Resort, but I didn’t. See, when I think of all the terrible things I could have said to him, maybe I didn’t do too badly…

When he asked me what kinds of books I liked to read, I said: Books about penniless alcoholics.

He brought up the subject of cooking. ‘Do you like to cook?’ he asked.
‘I do, actually...I know it sounds sad...’
‘Why does it sound sad?’ He asked. ‘It sounds like you’re the sort of person who worries too much about what other people think of you. If you like cooking, you should say you like cooking.’
‘No, it’s called having a self-deprecating sense of humour, you pseudo-Freud wanker! This gherkin is your father’s penis! This peanut is your fucking brain!’ I nearly said. But didn’t.
‘I like cooking as well,’ he said.
‘What do you cook?’ I asked.
‘Oh...bits and pieces,’ he said vaguely. ‘What about you?’
‘Mostly I just make the same thing over and over again.’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he replied, in a disapproving voice.

We talked about playing guitar.
‘I can teach you how to play guitar, if you want,’ he said, enthusiastically.
Perhaps I should have batted my eyelids like the Caramel bunny from the creepy 1970s adverts and said: ‘Ooh, I’d love it if you could teach me...’ But I’ve always got this crappy idea that men will like me because I’m clever and good at doing stuff.
‘But I can already play a bit,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a good ear for music, it’s just that I can’t hold the strings down hard enough and my strumming pattern’s all wrong, so it just goes drang, drang.’ I did a little strumming gesture with my hand to illustrate.
The Irishman gave a small, folded-in smile. ‘It looks like there’s lots of stuff you want to do at the moment.’
‘There is!’ I said happily.
I didn’t realise that this was a bad thing, and why, until the next morning.

Eventually a bandmate of his came out and told him it was time to play.
‘Entramos’ he said, as we went inside. ‘That means ‘Walk with me.’
‘No it doesn’t,’ I thought.
We stood by the bar. A random woman was gyrating around a pole next to the stage. The Irishman was sneakily watching her.
Suddenly he turned to me and said: ‘Do you like Pink Floyd?’ He gave a wicked smile and said ‘You know, it might just be the end of our friendship if you say no...’
‘We-ell...’ I laughed. I hate Pink Floyd. Their music makes me think of stoned students lying in a rubble of takeaway cartons talking total shit. ‘Well...I like ‘Wish You Were Here’ and the mad Syd Barrett stuff...’
‘Ah, no,’ he said in genuine disgust. Then he said:
‘Shall we meet up for lunch tomorrow – there’s this nice Italian place not far from my flat. We’ll meet up about three.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
That was the point at which I should have left.

Monday 7 September 2009

The awful tale...part 3.

I am back in Britain. It is cold and raining. Is it possible to find one’s inner sex goddess in a country where as soon as you step out of the door your hair turns into a giant fuzzy cloud?

I hope so.

Back to my story. After the previous night’s debacle I’d decide to affect a Greta Garbo air of unattainability and NEVER go to the club again. I imagined The Irishman pushing his long dark curls out of his eyes and scanning the room night after night in mounting anxiety while I sat in a cocktail bar in a black sheath dress that I don’t actually own, drinking a dirty martini and looking out at the sea with an inscrutable expression.
But alas, it was not to be. When I checked Facebook that afternoon I found that he’d left me a message:

Dramatic....call up to the club when the fiddler is finished, its open till 6...

Hmm.
I also had a bossy message from my older, seductress, advice-giving friend telling me off for my utter gormlessness in leaving on the first night and ORDERING me to go there again that evening. So I had no choice.

My mother and her boyfriend refused to go with me, saying that they had no desire to sit in a cloud of 80s dry ice watching fat, greasy, semi-naked men slip around in each other’s sick to the same five turgid indie tracks in rotation (but whyever not??) so I had to go alone. This is how it went.

The Irishman was looking particularly fucking Heathcliff that night – he was swaggering around the bar with those big shoulders and that dark, brooding look, and was wearing a grey checked shirt open to reveal black chest hair (ahhh! I know that makes him sound like Tom Jones or Mr. Porno, but when you’ve been going out with someone blonde for eleven years a glimpse of black chest hair is like the Second Coming). I sat near the exit by the second bar, far away from Psycho Barmaid. He walked straight off-stage and disappeared outside for a spliff. For about half an hour.

Meanwhile the droopy-moustached Spanish barman had taken a shine to me. As I stared into the distance with a look of smouldering sophistication he threaded straws into my hair and then whistled a busy tune when I turned around. I tried to sneak one back while he was pouring someone a drink, but he was too quick. This went on for some time. Eventually I was pelting him with handfuls of straws across the bar when The Irishman turned up.

‘Ah, hullo there,’he said, with a flash of a smile, while I straightened my skirt. ‘What did you do today?’
‘I went for a walk...’ I started, and then stopped. What else could I tell him about? ‘Ooh well, I stalked you for a bit on Facebook and then I hung around in bed for too long fantasising that you were an artist who was painting me naked and you kept touching me until I was on the point of screaming then walking back to finish off another bit of your painting.’
Perhaps not.
‘You went for a walk...’ he repeated slowly, like I was five. Then he scanned the bar around him.
‘I’ve got to play now. Catch you later.’

I sat feeling like Baby in Dirty Dancing when she says to Patrick Swayze: ‘I carried a watermelon!’ And that was that. He went back to the DJ’s box. I ordered another drink and realised that Droopy Moustache Barman now hated me. He glowered at me and shoved a handful of straws into another woman’s hair. For the remainder of the night I sat listening to the music and getting hit on by a succession of random men (some in their very early twenties – ooh!), all of whom went on about how oh so sophisticated and world-weary I am. Ha! From this I learned two things:

1) I’m good at cultivating an ‘air of mystique’. In Spanish holiday resorts, at least.
2) As soon as I open my mouth and speak my air of mystique is fucked.

It’s very sad. Is it because I’m too nice? Is it because I’m pathologically avoidant about rejecting anyone? (When I was a student a creepy old Pakistani taxi-driver once asked me to kiss him goodbye and I did because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He tried to slip me the tongue and then said, like he was doing me a massive favour: ‘If you want, you know...we could have intercourse’ To which I answered ‘No thank you!’ in a nice polite voice, like he’d just offered me a cucumber sandwich. I was brought up all wrong). I think men are a little disappointed when they find out that I’m actually an affable pisshead. Perhaps with men you like you are meant to act like a sulky monosyllabic Polish barmaid. But who wants to act with a monosyllabic Polish barmaid with a man that you really like and get along with?

Anyway, despite my rejection avoidance I managed to beat off my hordes of admirers, but had no luck with The Irishman. The DJ played The Specials so I got up to dance. I got back to my seat and discovered that Droopy Moustache Barman had thrown away my drink. The Irishman was talking to a girl with massive tits. Then a big fat man fell on me. It was time to go.

To be continued...