TheRapist (5 page)

Devon

Devon was browsing in the soft fruit section of Whole Foods when she decided that she needed to fuck a woman. Everything she had ever done with men had left her dissatisfied, apart from when she was in complete control. Their hairy, soggy dicks invariably left her with an aftertaste of repulsion and lately she had begun imagining she was with a woman again
, with Mary,
when she was with a man. Whether she was making love with a man or fucking a total shitty guy, the only way she could come was to imagine He was a She. It was possibly the only thing in her life she had fought against feeling and had tried to hold back for as long as she could. The trouble was since her one time experience, the one she dare not let herself think about too often, the women in her mind were completely fictitious. Which caused a problem, because she couldn’t have sex indefinitely with her mind. Could she?

It was a hot night and the cool of the store felt good beneath her vivid red silk sheath. She idly threw kiwi fruit and persimmons in her basket, which due to increasing heaviness, she was beginning to resent. Devon had chosen 2% milk, chai tea and four packets of cookies….some with chocolate cream, some with raspberry jam. She grabbed a box of sourdough pretzels and a tin of anchovies and headed to the hot counter for a takeout chicken, stuffed with garlic and chili peppers,

then sauntered to the checkout and waited in line. Hated it. She dumped her stuff on the conveyor belt and grabbed a copy of Family Circle magazine. Those magazines at the check-out got you every time. Bagged her shopping in a green turtle bag she had stuffed in the side pocket of her Prada. Paid. Headed home to watch The Bachelor on ABC and eat
pre-roasted
chicken and creme cookies. Devon was an oxymoron within her own existence. If only they knew.

*

Someone
and

TheRapist

‘First of all I must tell you that I hate my name. I have always wanted to change it but I’ve always been too scared, because what if I changed it and then began to hate what I had changed it to? Could I change it back again? Revert to the original? You have to pay every time to do that. I can’t be doing with that. My mom always called me Stuie. All my life I felt like a fucking duck. One girl I knew, she shortened it to Art. She just totally dropped the Stu part! She was crazy like that. We used to have some wild times. Her name was Maria, but I used to call her Ma. Ma and Art. We thought we sounded like some sort of drug store or something. Like we could rule the world. That was years ago. Minnie, my fiancée now, she calls me Stuart. My whole real name. Even when we’re in bed she calls me Stuart. Stuart she yells! It’s not the kind of name that a girl can groan is it? I wish she’d call me something else, something romantic or even whisper it maybe. But it’s the whole thing. There I am, trying my hardest to make her come, spending hours fiddling with her pussy, but then she calls out Stuart! in her high, tinny voice and it just breaks my concentration. Then she says things like, ‘Twiddle my thingy Stuart!’ and it puts me off. Thingy? What the fuck kind of name is that? It’s even worse than Stuart. I love her though. She’s got a good job with the postal service. She’s a postal worker. She comes up for promotion soon too. Sometimes she comes home with stuff like Christmas stamps with frayed edges or grubby Easter stamps. It’s OK though, we can use all that stuff. Once she came home with hundreds of air mail letters, those ones that you fold three times and then stick down. Remember those, you had to kind of turn the letter to read the last flap. They pretty much became exempt when e mailing took over. I bet you can’t remember the last time you even saw an aerogram. Then we realized we didn’t know anyone abroad we could write to, so Minnie found a website, a sort of regressive Facebook thing, and we got ourselves a few pen pals each and wrote and wrote every night until our arms felt like they were dangling off and the aerograms ran out. We made some great friends. Yeah, we thought they were friends for life but we haven’t heard from them since. When we get married and she takes my name, her name will change and then she’ll be called Mrs Wrecktom. She’ll be Minnie Wrecktom. Do you think she’ll get the piss taken with that name? Maybe I should forget about changing Stuart and just change Wrecktom. I don’t know what to do. I just got a good new job myself. I drive this gal around. I don’t know what she does, but she spends a lot of time with different men. She’s super thin. Not like Minnie. I’ll bet her pussy doesn’t droop the way Minnie’s does either. Do you think I should change my name to something simple, like Reeves or Sutherland or something?’

Frankie

Frankie Bruce stood at the school gates on a dull, grey afternoon. Nothing unusual for London, but people would comment nonetheless, or rather the few people who were born and raised in the city would make mundane, civil conversation.

‘Enjoying the weather, that’s England for you isn’t it?!’ A rhetorical question from one born and bred Londoner to another, spoken with a thimbleful of jest, an occasional snigger or duplicitous snort, as if the weather were a conspiratorial and interesting statement. Frankie grimaced, slightly hiding it beneath the fake fur collar of her padded coat
and pushing wind
s
wept tendrils of pale brown hair behind her ears
. Made in China, even though she had paid what seemed like a small fortune for her outerwear. Her ‘Nanny’ pay was good and she liked to buy herself nice things. Sometimes she felt as though her years at Leeds
were all for nothing. She had
gained a first in Media Studies, but had grown to think that soft degrees were a waste of time so had temped as a nanny while she looked for a more rewarding position. It was two years on and she was still with the same family. The money was great though and this coat she wore, this thing from an Italian designer was Made in China and didn’t even keep her warm. Her hips were slight and her ribcage jutted through her jumper. The mothers and other nannies stood in little groups, buzzing around each other like a temperamental flock of seagulls which had diverted en route to warmer climes. Their clothing combinations were strangely odd, combinations of designer items that possibly only a fool with money would purchase. Heliotrope, knitted coats with flecks of gold thread running through them. Boots adorned with so many Swarovski crystals that to wear them in the glare of sunlight could cause road rage. Elaborate bags that were entirely unnecessary. They nudged and twitched, gossiped and guffawed, moaned and griped. They made Frankie sick. But deep within the pit of her stomach, she had the stirrings of an adventure. Having found socializing exhausting and tired of the bar and club scene, she had decided to try out online dating sites. After months of endless twenty minute trysts in Starbucks or Costa and global virtual meetings, Frankie had met a man she liked. There really wasn’t any embarrassment attached because everybody was doing it, even though nobody admitted it, which she supposed meant that intern
et dating did still hold a soupç
on of stigma. She had even met some of the fathers from school online, making them huge promises that she wouldn’t breathe a word of her discoveries at the school gates! This was her secret. But the man she had met, or rather e mailed and IM’d a million times, the one that she thought she liked (she dreamt about him!), this one she really wanted to meet. And she felt sure that she would. The only hindrance was that he lived practically on the other side of the world and she would have to wait for the school holidays because she couldn’t go off and let Sid down in the middle of a term. She loved the feeling of checking her e mail every morning looking for something from him! When she saw his name in her inbox or a red asterisk glinting at her from her Blackberry, her heart leapt. She sometimes felt a little like a story from The People’s Friend, that sweet, ancient, innocent weekly magazine containing pure, open-hearted romances between sweet women and respectable men, where nothing dastardly ever occurred. A weekly magazine from a
nother time,
that she sometimes bought and secretly read between the pages of Marie-Claire or Cosmo. Frankie wrote to her virtual man last thing at night and the feeling of going to bed with him on her mind was one that made her feel warm inside.

The sky began to spit and within a minute it was pouring. Her coat was incapable of keeping out the rain and Frankie could feel the wetness trickling through her clothes. The shower was swift and over by the time the kids were spilling out of school. They dragged themselves across the courtyard towards the gates, pulling gym bags behind them, laden down by the weight of their backpacks. Bunches were flying everywhere, caps at half mast. Grubby socks either up and down, but never equal. Hems undone. Coats akimbo. Buttonholes void of buttons. Little faces grubby and tired and stomachs growling. The rumbles could be heard across the courtyard as the huddle of very small people made their weary way to their delegated person. Their mums or nannies or friends mums or grandmas
or occasional anachronistic dad-at-the-gates
. A little light visible in their small faces as they alighted upon their own person. Sandwiches or cakes or rubbishy sweets were brought out of pockets or bags and thrust upon the kids, turning them into tiny vultures. Food at last. Sid lunged towards her. Her
pale blue eyes smiled at the sight of him and their
hand
s
met
as she held out
the offering of a slightly mushy tuna and salad cream bagel. Tearing off the greaseproof wrapper, Sid sank his assortment of big and baby teeth, some wobbly, others firm, into the soggy bread. Feeling better immediately, he smiled at Frankie. She took his backpack. He took her hand. They walked off together without a word, only the silent understanding between a child and the one who cares.

*

Meringue

Meringue sat at the bay window of her charming little apartment just south of Sunset, bored out of her skull. Today the sun was out (big deal in LA), the sky vibrantly blue(!) and she did not have a morsel of energy for anything. She had got in late by LA standards, almost midnight and she was shattered and fed up. She hadn’t heard from her agent in weeks, despite her constant ‘casual’ calls to him. ‘Hi Bruce, just checking in, anything going on, any calls, did you ever hear back from that casting director, oh you know the one, what’s his name again? The one who thought how terrific I…….’ To which Bruce would interrupt, hitting her with yet another charming response along the lines of, ‘Fuck off Meringue, I’ll call you when someone gives a shit.’

This town was downright nasty she thought to herself, gazing at the red tiled roof below and the tree with huge orange flowers that just reached to the edge of her balcony. She hated it here. Hated LA and everybody in it. Of course she would never say that aloud. Who knew who might hear her tirade? Disappointingly, Los Angeles was an insidious city. It drew you in and spat you out time after time. Like a cow with two stomachs; chewing you up; sucking you down; regurgitating you and swallowing you all over again. It took a very strong and stable girl to get up and get out and never come back. Meringue was unsure that she could do that, although she so much wanted to. She so much wanted to run back to Florida, into her mother’s arms, sit at her mother’s tiny kitchen table and be fed proper food. But that was impossible, at least partly. Just another six months she would tell herself. Just one more pilot season. Just until the leaves begin to change. But there were no seasons in Los Angeles. The leaves, devoid of color change, just stayed green and envious, like the people. Mindless, endless weeks that turned into months that turned into years. And here she was. Still here. Just like that waitress in IHOP, the one on the cusp of La Cienega and Santa Monica. The wrecked old girl with dusty, crispy, iodine tinted hair. Lipstick that began at the edges of her creased mouth, losing itself somewhere in the furrows of her rouged cheeks. The young, pretty thing who had come to LA some fifty years earlier, bringing big dreams from a small town and still hoping for her big break. Her biggest role to date was asking if you wanted syrup or sugar with your pancakes? Little did Meringue know that unless she found a bale of inner strength, that waitress was
going to be her in a few decades
.

*

Jezzy and Adrian

Jezzy's heart was pounding on the entire flight from New York to London. She felt like she was in a Danielle Steel novel. Nobody ever gave those books their due. I mean come on, rugged handsome men who sweep women off their feet into Happy Ever After Land? That was exactly how a woman wants a man to make her feel! Then she felt like a schlemiel, a total fool for being so stupidly and awkwardly overly romantic. She had learnt a few Yiddish phrases from her maternal Grandmother, Eve.
Jezzy
’s middle name was Eve. She had loved her so much. Now she was getting choked up, as tears threatened to trickle down from the back of her eyes. This was most definitely not a time to be getting emotional. But here she was, sitting beside an unfinished love on a seven hour flight. Adrian leaned in and stroked her cheek. She felt sick. In a good way, if there were such a thing. She knew that she had to take him home. Or go somewhere with him. Or get under a blanket here and now. This was not like her. Was it? Jezzy Wanted Adrian. Again. She studied his baggy cheeks as he spoke to her. He had furrows in them and was a little jowly. He still looked at her that way though, the way he always had. Into her. As if he could see right into her depths.
She suddenly had a fleeting vision of them in bed together, six, seven years before.
His head was between her legs, his tongue lost somewhere inside of her
and
his long, dark shiny hair was draped across her stomach. She remembered feeling close to explosion.
Then and now. OK, this was not such a fleeting vision anymore. This mustn’t happen here, on a plane, in the front row! A lost longing fought its way back from jailed depths to the front of her heart. Hating the feeling due to its potency and control
over her, Jezzy
realized that she was lost to Adrian. Again.