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Three. Not since eleven o’clock on the night of July 25th last year (and even then it wasn’t easy. She was an ex-girlfriend. I got us both drunk. I cried when she said she wouldn’t: she was so appalled by this that she said she would) have I managed to get anyone to go to bed with me.

That was six months ago.

What is it with you fucking girls all of a sudden?

Or what is it with me?

I’ve never minded much about the way I look (Gregory, I know, is unprepared to think about anything else). I look ordinary. Apart from my rather gingery hair — I was in fact called ‘Ginge’ for a short time at school — I look ordinary, I look like educated lower-class middle-management, the sort of person you walk past in the street every day and never glance at or notice or recognize again. (You don’t gaze my way. But who cares?) I’ve always perfunctorily assumed that I looked, well, not bad — not actually
bad
. In my life I’ve had an average amount of girls with an average amount of anxiety, embarrassment and gratitude.

Now it’s changed. Why and how is that? They’ll talk to me, they’ll agree to go out with me, they’ll eat with me, they’ll drink with me, they’ll neck with me, they’ll even get into the same bed with me. But will they fuck me? Oh no, not them. Not them —
oh
no. (Who the fuck are they, anyway, that they won’t do that?) This would merely gall and confuse me if I’d ever thought of myself as
attractive
. But I’ve never thought of myself as that. What made them fuck me then? Charm I once had, kinder girls, cleverer ploys, good nature, luck. It seems that I’ve lost all the things that used to be nice about me.

I’m still trying to laugh it off, really (I think), which is probably why I sound this way … It’s got so bad now that I’ve more or less exhausted my stock of old girlfriends, taken them all out again — all the ones that weren’t married or pregnant or dead — and tried to
make them fuck me. None of them wanted to. I’ve rung up girls I haven’t seen for three or four years. I take trains all over England to visit girls who can’t remember a single thing about me. I stop neurotic and disadvantaged girls in the street. I court especially plain secretaries at work. I proposition the old and the ailing. I try to get them to fuck me. They don’t want to.

Won’t someone tell me what’s going
on
? What’s the gimmick? What’s the angle? My breath’s okay, I think — or at any rate it hasn’t radically deteriorated (if my ceaseless reinhalation tests are anything to go by). Nothing recent has gone wrong with my face. My nasty hair falls out no faster than it did before. (Mark you, I’m going to have a problem with my ass in later life. But they’re not to know that, are they?) I take a bath every thirty-six hours, except in winter, and groom alertly for these horrific dates I sometimes have. I’m putting on a bit of weight, yes, but that’s only because I’m drinking a lot these days. Wouldn’t you be?

(I think I’m losing my bottle. I think I’m going
tonto
.)

Gregory must never find me out. He doesn’t suspect the truth, for all my plebeian banter. I’ve told him I’ve got someone in Islington. I sit in pubs and coffee-bars pretending I’m there. I stumble in late and tell him lies. Gregory must never know. He must never know that I sit up in bed at night in my room like a fiend, hating everything there is. (The daytime is different, of course. With its tramp-dread and street-sadness, the day has special terrors.)

What am I doing here? My job, I think, is to make
you
hate him also. It shouldn’t be difficult. All I’ve got to do is keep my eyes open. So long as you keep yours open too.

Will she?

‘Will she?’ I asked him. ‘How do we swing it? When’s she coming, for instance?’

‘Any minute. Are you ready?’

Gregory stood by the window; he twirled a silver-topped
cane. I’m not sure I can bear to describe what he was wearing: that vampiric crimson-lined black opera cape, a waistcoat of his father’s, harem trousers — were they? — apparently clasped at the ankles by costly bicycle clips. His almost sickly good looks were, as always, very much in evidence; he looked clever, delicate and incredibly queer.

‘How are we going to do it?’

Gregory gestured wristlessly. He stood by the window; he twirled his cane.

‘You told me it was going to be easy,’ I said, quite startled by the note of crude complaint that had entered my voice. (Sometimes I say things which sound like insults from other people. They leave me wounded and speechless.)

‘Well it will be, Terry. Let’s just think what’s best to do.’

After a few minutes we had mounted a plan, and a fairly rudimentary one. Greg was to be appreciably crappier to Miranda than he was currently in the habit of being, reduce her to tears, then flounce out, at which point I was supposed to cruise on in — having alerted her to my gingery presence in the flat by answering the door when she arrived.

‘Are you sure you can manage that?’ I asked lightly, not wishing to spook him.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Nothing simpler. She cries almost all the time now anyway, as far as I can see.’

‘Why’s that?’ Sounds good, I thought. She really might do all those things if she’s fucked up too, like me. (I’d do them, to anyone.)

‘I don’t know,’ said Gregory, ‘I’m always too embarrassed to ask. She’s just mad, I expect. Most girls are these days.’

‘Where are you going? That queer’s place?’

‘It’s not a queer’s place. There are lots of girls there too.’

‘That bisexual’s place then.’

‘Yes. Now look here — how are you off for wine and so forth? You might as well get her drunk.’

‘I’ve got lots.’

He looked me up and down with plummy distaste. ‘She goes totally to pieces when she’s drunk. She’ll do anything.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly. There really isn’t anything she won’t do.’

‘Well, I’ll give it a go.’

‘Give it a go? Listen, I bet she’ll hardly have her foot through the door before she does something quite revolting to you. I bet she’ll get her — ’

The bell rang.

‘Let’s go,’ said Gregory.

Having opened the door to the girl — white jumper and jeans, shy eyes I didn’t dare meet, the taste of milk in my mouth — and directed her up the stairs, I swam back to my dark room. I took whisky until I heard Greg’s imperious footsteps.

‘Go on then,’ he whispered to me in the hall. ‘Go
on
then.’

I was hoping that Miranda would be in tears or hysterical or — best of all — unconscious by the time I ascended the stairs. But she stood small and calm by the high window. And a bit fat and very pretty, I thought. I saw with pain that her denim satchel still hung on her poor shoulders.

‘Has he gone?’ she asked, without turning round.

Turn round when you talk to me. ‘I’m afraid he has,’ I said.

She turned now.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling the air buzz. ‘I’m sorry if you’re upset.’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said without emphasis.

‘He’s like that.’

‘Has he always been?’

‘No, he hasn’t. Come downstairs. He was nice once. Do you want to take a drink down? When he was young. Go on, I’m having one. He’s changed more than most
people change. There you go, girl. I don’t know why. Come downstairs and talk. About things, about Gregory and me.’

‘Gregory speaking,’ I said with a voice that rustled.

‘Oh,’ said the telephone. ‘Gregory, it’s me. Miranda.’

‘Well?’

‘… How are you then?’

I examined my fingernails against the light — shiny almonds.

‘… Gregory?’

‘Speaking.’

‘Why are you being like this to me?’ she asked. ‘What’s gone wrong? Is it something I’ve done?’

‘Must I listen to sentences such as those?’

In expectation of hearing the usual wet sob or fat gulp, I pressed my ear so much the closer to the telephone. It came — a warm swallowing sound.

‘We’ve got to meet,’ she said.

‘Absolutely.’

‘You’ve got to see me.’

‘I certainly shall.’

‘… Can I come round then?’

‘Do,’ I said, replacing the receiver, my long fingers lingering on the dial.

And so I considered how to invest this cool deliverance of an evening, this sudden cargo of hours, standing at my penthouse window, gazing at a winter roofscape that seemed once more to be crowded with secrets and friends.

All day at work the anxiety had been quite frightful. Home to another evening
à la
Miranda — why do we put up with it? — another evening of my epic coldness
and her clumsy awe, of my nauseous small talk and her snatched panicky kisses, another night of sculptured sleep, her large lips hot with tears at my side. Why do we let them put us through these ordeals? Why are we so tender with them? Why? Well — that’s your lot, bitch: you get no more of me.

In fact, of course, there hadn’t been much difficulty. That fool Terence was in the kitchen when I got home from work. He isn’t really allowed in this part of my flat — hence his furtive air, his look of hunted gratitude when I asked him to stay upstairs and talk.

‘Gita won’t fuck me any more,’ he explained.

I asked, with real interest, why he thought this to be the case.

‘I don’t know. Gita doesn’t know either.’

I straightened a finger at him. ‘Which one is Gita?’

‘The small one who wears those ear-rings.’

‘Ah.’
All
Terence’s girls are, perforce, tiny, and their ears are among the things I try very hard not to think about. ‘Didn’t she spend Tuesday night here?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘I tried to fuck her.’

‘And?’

‘She didn’t want me to.’

I thought this extremely odd, Gita being the sort of girl — surely — that you can do whatever the hell you like to. What would be the point of her otherwise? But I said, out of politeness, ‘Curious — in my experience it’s usually the other way round.’

A fatuous digression ensued, during which Terence made great play with his sexual insecurities at the imagined expense of my own. Gauche stuff — this dread he has of his own homosexuality can get quite alarming when so candidly displayed. ‘Nothing in that line, as it happens,’ I said coolly: ‘It’s this Miranda.’

‘Oh?’ he said with attention.

‘Miranda, and her demands.’

Miranda’s robust physical appetites, my own sloth and lassitude, Terence’s more stolid gifts in this department, the ease with which the delegation could be made …

The work of a moment. And now, tonight, while Terence gamely grunts, while Miranda cracks him in her dappled thighs: I’ll be up here chuckling about the things I didn’t tell him, about her raw-liver kisses and her sweet-sherry tongue, about the ghostly smells that issue from her pouches and vents, about the underworld effluvia she leaves glistening on your sheets.

What’s happening to you girls these days?

After spending the night with a neurotic girl — and so many of them
are
neurotic now — I feel more than my natural repugnance at the prospect of examining the bedclothes once I’ve shooed them from the flat. There will of course be the usual grim femininia — a dollop of make-up on the pillowslips, the school of pubic hairs on the sheets, that patch of hell somewhere further down: so much one expects. But these days I twitch back the blankets with a premonition of wonder, of dread; they’re all in pieces, these girls — they could have left almost anything behind … I can see it now: Gregory stands in the middle of the floor, the room still shimmering with the girl’s demented exit; gingerly he approaches, face halfaverted, gathers the heavy quilt in a muscular fist, breathes deeply, throws back the blankets — and finds an entire leg marooned on the sheets! I wouldn’t put it past them.

Did you know, for instance, that girls now go to the lavatory? Shaking news, I agree, but they do. Oh yes. And not just to pee, either. I once nursed a fond dream — silly really — that they left all that sort of thing to the menfolk — except when they’re in hospitals or other suitably equipped establishments. Indeed, whenever I heard an ambulance siren, or saw one of the white vats whizz past, I was always cheered to imagine that it contained a few fortunate females being rushed to the wards
for just this purpose. What a romantic I was … They do it all the time these days. They even talk about it. They even try to do it in front of you! But they’re like chaps, these days, like fellas, like blokes.

It’s their nerves which really drive me mad. When did they start thinking they had to be nervous all the time? Who told them? Why, fidgety fingers I find hardly less repulsive than warty knuckles and rank nails. Agitated gestures seem to me a negligible improvement on misshapen or ill-assorted limbs. I see little to choose between subsultory mastication (or twitchy mealtime banter) and rotten teeth (or scum-lined lips). Post-coital tears disgust me as thoroughly as do pre-menstrual pimples. And the dreadful things they
say
. They keep trying to understand you; they keep wanting to talk about proper things; they keep trying to be people. We take it, we talk to them back. We’re not supposed to let on that, for all their many charms, they just aren’t very interesting.

Has Terence said anything about my sexual dispositions? No doubt he has. Well, I won’t deny it. If it’s a ‘sexual equal’ I want — i.e. a boy, and a boy’s unyielding musculature — then it’s a sexual equal I go ahead and have, rather than a thing with breasts that happens to urinate sitting down. (Terence will stick up for them, of course. The pungent witches whom he tends to squire are, expectably, among the heroines of this unhappy genre.) What I like are moneyed chasubles of silence, soft topography of flesh, the trickle of retreating satin and the white avenues of underwear, the mute secrets of dew and down.

Imagine, then, my incredulous horror on discovering the true colours of this Miranda, this jumpy little idiot whose immediate transfer I have gulled Terence into accepting (a tedious mode of dismissal, you may think, but a relatively painless one. I detest scenes). It was at a noisy after-dinner party in the flat of my fashionable friend Torka that I incautiously made her acquaintance. Tired, stifled, and almost completely exasperated by
Adrian’s vulgar rot, I was at first perfectly willing to give some of my time to a young, deferential and — I concede — reasonably pretty girl who seemed to be prepared to refill my glass and to take an intelligent interest in my work and opinions. She stood there; she listened; her teeth were clean. Only when I offered to drive her home in my powerful green car did the nightmare truly begin. She stuck with a kind of dumb immobility to my side throughout the entire course of the party — even when the famous Torka tried to pry me loose for a chat — kissed me with repulsive candour on the stairs, and then blandly announced, as my handsome sports car roared into life, that she had missed the last train back to the provinces and had nowhere in London to stay! I’m never, ever, going to fall for that one again.