Bound to You (34 page)

The fact of the matter was that I was never, ever going to look like a woman Sebastian could love. A conversation we’d had months ago now came to me. I’d been complaining about the roundness of my face, and wondering whether it was possible to have surgery to ‘suck it out a bit’. It was the kind of remark that I would have recoiled from the moment I said it, and that Christos would have shot down as soon as it had left my lips. But Sebastian just smiled sympathetically as I contemplated whether surgery was a step too far.

Even Tim, my personal trainer, had noticed my malaise. ‘Come on, Nichi, why are you so down on yourself all of a sudden? You’re getting so strong now, so fit. You look great!’

I had been considering running a marathon but without eating properly I couldn’t even think about running.

Gina called me every few days to check up on me. ‘If I think you’re not eating, Nichi, I’m coming over there to make you a packed lunch every day.’

‘What’s the point, Gina?’ I would sob at her over the phone. ‘I needed to lose half a stone anyway.’

‘Nichi, don’t even go there! This is not the way and you know it. Don’t let this man make you ill and spoil all the good things you’ve worked so hard to create for yourself.’

During all the days and nights that suggested it might actually be very possible to die of a broken heart, it was thinking back to my split from Christos that reminded me that, however much of a cliché it was, in time, all things healed. If I’d recovered from losing the man who had loved me more deeply than I knew love could run, I could surely get over someone who seemed to have no idea what love was.

I had started to refer to Sebastian as the Tin Man, to myself and to anyone I discussed him with. I still found it impossible to believe that he could not love and wondered if it was just that he was too much of a coward to admit that he couldn’t love me. I fantasised that if I’d only got to him before Lana had broken him down, the Sebastian I had thought I was getting to know would have been the one I ended up with. But I hadn’t, and he wasn’t. And I needed to move on.

So instead I planned a last-minute working holiday to Japan. A friend of a friend was organising the PR for the inaugural Rainbow Pride festival in Tokyo, and asked if I could help her find media outlets in Britain to cover the event. Finally, the journalist in me that had been sedated into miserable inaction stirred from her lovelorn stupor. Thank God nothing could kill my ambition. ‘Well, I could probably do it, actually.’ And so I decided to go and speculatively cover the festival myself, pitching to numerous magazines and papers in the hope that I might get a commission or two. If not, then I would at least have had a reviving trip. I asked Gina to come with me.

‘Um, hell yes! This would be amazing! Look at you, all big-timing it. I’ve always wanted to go to Japan and I’d love to travel with you,’ Gina gabbled at me excitedly.

‘Well, I’m not exactly big-timing – no one’s actually given me a commission yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m hopeful I can get a bit of work out of it. It’s exciting to do it this way around. And there’ll be time to do other things, too, although even the work will be fun – you’re up for testing out some bars with me for a travel piece, aren’t you? We should have a day or two at the end to go to some of the local temples.’

‘I’m sold, Nichi. You know, I’m proud of you for deciding to do this. It’s just what you need right now. Forget Sebastian. Fuck him! Or not any more, as the case may be!’

Just before we left, Sebastian sent me an email. A long email. A significant email.

The first feeling I had when I read it was one of relief. So I wasn’t crazy. So I hadn’t imagined Sebastian had had feelings for me, after all. The second was anger. Why couldn’t he have expressed any of this properly that last time we met? Or even before that? And then, the third feeling, of discontent, told me it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. There was still no advance on the no-love, no-monogamy offer. But it was a gesture. ‘You’ve touched my life.’ Wasn’t that the best any of us could ever hope to do?

I told Sebastian that I was just about to go to Japan and that I’d reply on my return. ‘But thank you for sending that.’

A few days later, as Gina and I waited for our flight to Tokyo, I told her about the email. She wasn’t touched the way I had been, even though she recognised that it sounded as though Sebastian was genuinely contrite.

‘Nichi, look, I’ve no doubt that the man has some good qualities, and probably a lot of good intentions. But he hasn’t had to watch you tear yourself apart ever since you met him. He hasn’t watched you come home after a date with him, morose until he texts you again. He hasn’t heard you cry yourself to sleep for being born the way you are. He hasn’t had to worry that you were going to start starving yourself again . . .’ Gina broke off. There were actually tears in her eyes.

‘Oh Gina, God, you’re an incredible friend, there’s nothing to cry over!’ Her declaration of care made me feel like crying too. ‘Please don’t worry. I’m not going to start starving myself again; I can’t go back there. And, I can’t go back to Sebastian either. It’s just, a tiny part of me can’t help wondering whether this could be the start of something else. Maybe a genuine, platonic friendship could redeem some of the awfulness that has passed between us.”

Gina wiped her eyes and gave a laugh. ‘Jesus, I’m getting sentimental in my old age. Let’s just get on this plane to Tokyo, shall we? Go have some fun and see how you feel when you get back.’

‘You’re on.’

Thankfully, from the moment we got to Japan I had no time to dwell on any of this. Having bombarded every national news desk and features editor with email pitches, I secured three article commissions and did radio interviews in the early hours, staring out at the neon glitter of Tokyo’s skyline as I shared my newly acquired cultural insights with listeners from Malvern to Macclesfield. I wrote late into the night to meet London teatime deadlines. Finally, my mind was free to focus on the one thing that could truly distract me from the complications of my own life – meeting other people and listening to their stories, then passing them on. No solace like someone else’s story I had once said to Sebastian, when, dismayed by losing funding for a major project, he had asked me to recommend some diverting reading material. It was time I took my own advice.

And Japan, especially Japan in Gina’s company, really was the best place to soothe me back to strength. I didn’t need time to dwell any more. I needed to be reminded that life was full of wonders. Tokyo, with its rainbow-painted taxis, Sunday dress-up rituals and relentless nightlife was just the job, and Gina and I created a hundred more colourful anecdotes for ourselves. I worked as hard during the day as Gina and I partied at night, and our genial Japanese hosts were only too happy to show us around the city’s carnivalesque nightspots. We drank delicious blackcurrant cocktails, danced to Japanese teeny-bopper pop and filmed one another singing the entire Abba back catalogue in private karaoke booth after private karaoke booth. Everywhere we went I had my English cleavage eyed up and my hair fondled. It was a full week before I saw another blonde. For once, I was ‘exotic’.

On Rainbow Pride parade day I had to be up at the crack of dawn to decorate myself before I went off to report on the proceedings. Just because I was working didn’t mean I couldn’t look the part, too. In fact, dressing up might be a good ruse for getting a better story, I decided. Nobody likes a po-faced, khaki-clad journalist bounding up to report on his or her kookiness.

Before long, Gina and I were perfectly kitted out. We had spent far too much time in the Harajuku district, where the lissom manga-eyed sales assistants sold us all manner of over-the-top accoutrements, telling us ‘No wig, no life!’ in between high-pitched giggles. I wore the French maid-style pinafore dress I had worn the night I met Sapphire, accessorised with fishnet polka dot tights, lurid orange and blue nails and candy-coloured make-up to match my ice-cream sundae wig. Gina, meanwhile, had a romper suit, lace-trimmed ankle socks and a Disney princess-style brunette wig. She even very sweetly set her alarm so that she could attend to my false eyelashes for me before I left the hotel.

‘I’m going to meet you at 12.00 by the press tent. Don’t run off with any hot Japanese
akusas
without me, OK?’ she warned me.

‘
Akusas
?’

‘You know, the Japanese mafia men with full-body tattoos. I know what you’re like when you see men with tattoos.’

I shook my head and laughed. ‘Dressed like this?’

‘Definitely like that! You look like an anime dream!’

On the way to the park a handsome American tourist stopped me. ‘
Ohayo gozimas
! Picture?’ He gestured to his camera.

‘Oh sure,’ I replied, slightly incredulous.

‘You make such a good Harajuku girl!’

I laughed him off, hurrying on to begin my work. At the press tent I had been assigned a translator who would help me to ask the Japanese gay, bi, lesbian, trans and omnisexual revellers questions about their political beliefs and sex lives. In among the stories of prejudice, misery, love and joy, there were also some pretty hilarious lost in translation moments. As the day went on, I met bloggers and campaigners and even Japan’s Minister for Equality. Overwhelmed by the proximity to such a dignitary, I barely managed a bow, caught as I was between not wanting to offend by not stooping low enough and not wanting to offend by my boobs escaping my bodice. I then committed the heinous social faux pas of not returning her business card with one of my own. Between the low-cut pinafore and the confectionary wig, the Swedish drag-ghoul I’d interviewed and a troop of gay Pokemon I’d posed for pictures with, there hadn’t been much time to worry about how to carry business cards about my person.

Gina joined me an hour or two later, with some newly acquired Japanese friends in tow and after the march, there were rousing political speeches and dancing in the decorated square. In a country without legal rights for gay couples, it was poignant to see so many people of all sexual orientations and genders celebrating the right to love.

One of Gina’s new friends, Aiko, offered to take us for dinner in Shinjuku. Outside the station, a gaggle of Japanese people of all ages started to laugh and point at me, gasping as if they’d never seen a small white girl wearing an ice cream-sundae wig. ‘I thought this was the land of costume?’ I asked Aiko. ‘It can’t just be the ladder in my tights, surely?’

Aiko was laughing fit to burst. ‘I think they think you’re Lady Gaga!’

The one thing still weighing heavily on my mind was the matter of love, or rather Sebastian’s inability to feel it. One day towards the end of my trip, I had sat in a deserted side-chamber of Tokyo’s famous Senso-ji temple for twenty minutes in front of a statue of Buddha and contemplated what love might mean to Sebastian. Did Sebastian love his family? His friends? Did he merely not fall into it any more? Did he never experience pinpricks of it? And if he didn’t love did that mean he didn’t experience real connection with someone else? Or longing for them?

I wanted to know. I wanted to ask him. But what would I do with the answers? He couldn’t love me and that’s all that mattered. So instead I lit a candle for Sebastian, there in the temple and prayed that one day his heart might thaw, that eventually he might find love with someone else.

And then I prayed for peace for the both of us.

On our last night in Tokyo, I was determined to revel in this newly recovered sense of what it felt like to be myself, and to feel good about it.

Gina and I had been invited by our hosts to an all-night end of season party at Tokyo’s most notorious gay club, a resplendent theatre of decadent dreams built over three floors with drag queen go-go dancers and an outdoor rooftop swimming pool that sprayed water across the sweaty al fresco dancers. Gina and I were fast running out of money, with only one vodka and coke and two caffeine tablets between us. But I can’t remember dancing a whole night away with more verve and enthusiasm than the way we did there.

As the evening wore on, I noticed a sexy mixed-race guy with a shaved head and the most incredible smile executing some inspired dance moves. I pointed him out to Gina. ‘Classic! Hottest guy for ages, and he’s gay!’

‘Well, you must have known our chances of pulling were pretty low here, love!’

Gina and I carried on dancing, and as we danced, the man in question seemed to edge nearer to us, until quite suddenly he was unmistakably dancing with me.

‘I’m Joel,’ he said in a polite, Mid-Western US accent, giving a mock bow as he doffed his cap with a deep flourish and flashed his perfect teeth at me, all without missing a beat.