Kitabı oku: «In at the Deep End», sayfa 5

8. WELCOME TO THE FAMILY

‘But are you sure you’re a lesbian?’

Alice and I were shopping for vintage clothes in Stoke Newington. She was looking for a fake-fur coat. I was hoping to find some tweed trousers that didn’t smell of funerals. I wanted to wear more tweed, now that I was gay.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You’d understand if you’d been there during the sex.’

‘I’m very glad I wasn’t.’

‘So am I.’

‘Maybe Jane was just really good at sex, though,’ said Alice. ‘That doesn’t mean you should rule men out altogether.’

‘I think it does,’ I said. Since my night with Jane, I had thought back to every sexual experience I’d had with a man – to the grunting, and the chest hair, and the noises I’d feigned. I used to think I just wasn’t very expressive during sex, and I’d always made a conscious effort to look like I was having fun, because staying silent when someone’s fucking you is a bit like not laughing during a stand-up set (very bad for the performer’s morale). But I hadn’t needed to make an effort with Jane. Now that I had something to compare it to, sex with a man seemed like a dodgy imitation of the real thing, like instant coffee, or frozen yoghurt, or the Miley Cyrus cover of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Since I’d realized I was probably a lesbian, I had started seeing attractive women everywhere, a bit like the way you see a word everywhere as soon as you’ve learned what it means.

Alice picked up a pair of gold clip-on earrings and said, ‘I promise I won’t make fun of you if you start dating men again.’

‘I’m not going to,’ I said.

‘Did you know an ex-lesbian is called a “hasbian”?’

‘Stop it.’

I turned up to my next session with Nicky with an uncharacteristic smile on my face. Nicky had dyed her hair black since I’d last seen her. She was wearing bright-red lipstick, too – essentially, she was one bowler hat away from being Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.

‘So you’re officially a dyke,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I prefer the word lesbian, though.’

‘You have problems with the word dyke.’

‘It just sounds a bit weird, hearing you say it.’

‘How do you feel about homosexual?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Or queer?’

‘That’s fine too.’

‘Gay?’

‘Any of those words are completely fine,’ I said.

‘But not dyke,’ she said. ‘Does the word dyke have bad connotations for you?’

‘It’s not the sort of word you expect your therapist to use. It’s pretty pejorative.’

‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Pejorative. Nice big word.’ She wrote it down. ‘You’re wrong, though. Dyke isn’t a pejorative word any more. It’s been reappropriated.’

‘It’s been reappropriated by lesbians. So only lesbians can use it, surely.’

‘You’re making assumptions about me,’ said Nicky, wagging her pen at me.

‘What,’ I said, ‘are you gay?’

Nicky shook her head. ‘I keep telling you, Julia. These sessions are about you, not me. So. Why the need to label yourself?’

‘Because I’ve figured out who I am, and I’m not ashamed about it.’

‘Are you seeing Jane again, then?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Are you seeing anyone else?’

‘Not right now.’

‘OK, so, off the record? Just go on Tinder, or whatever. The Internet. That’s where all the dykes meet each other now. Even the cool ones.’

‘Right.’

‘That’s what I’ve heard.’

‘OK.’ I shifted in my seat. ‘I’ve been wondering about telling my parents,’ I said. ‘I’m going to see them for my dad’s birthday on Wednesday.’

‘I feel as though you’re rushing things a bit,’ said Nicky. ‘Are you coming out so soon to stop yourself chickening out of dating women?’

‘No …’

She tilted her head on one side.

‘… maybe.’

‘Would you like to role-play coming out to your parents?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Come on. I’ll be your mother.’

‘It’s OK, I’ll be fine.’

But Nicky was already saying, ‘Hello, Julia!’ in a snooty accent.

‘She’s not that posh,’ I said.

‘Just go with it,’ Nicky said.

‘OK.’ I tried to get comfortable in the chair. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘I have something to tell you.’

‘Can’t you think of a more original opener?’

‘I don’t want to be original – I want her to know what’s coming,’ I said. ‘It’s like saying, “We need to talk” to your boyfriend.’

‘Or girlfriend,’ said Nicky.

‘Or girlfriend,’ I agreed.

‘OK,’ said Nicky. ‘Give me your line again.’

‘Mum, I have something to tell you,’ I said.

‘Oh God, darling!’ said Nicky, in the snooty voice. ‘What is it? Are you dying?’

‘I really don’t think she’s going to say that.’

Nicky shrugged. ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’

So far, being a lesbian was pretty much the same as not being a lesbian. My alarm clock went off at 7.30 a.m. just like it always did. I snoozed it till 8 a.m., as usual. I put on the same tights with the holes in the toe, spooned down a bowl of Alpen and felt out of breath running for the bus just as I had before. I’d have thought I’d imagined the whole thing if I didn’t still feel bruised and sore between my legs.

I called Cat to tell her my big news, but she didn’t seem particularly surprised. ‘You made me go and see Les Misérables three times because that girl Louise was in it,’ she pointed out. ‘By the third time I couldn’t wait for her to get shot.’

‘She wasn’t exactly a triple threat, was she?’

‘She was shit,’ said Cat. And then: ‘Hey! This means we’re both minorities! You’re a bit less privileged now!’

‘You’re right!’ I said. I looked forward to being a lot more self-righteous on social media, now that I was a lesbian.

I felt a secret sense of achievement that helped me stand a little taller as I walked into the Department of Health and Social Care building and swiped my pass on the security gate. I felt like I belonged, at last, in the world of the sexually fulfilled. Now I had a sense of purpose. I was going to find someone to be a lesbian with – a girlfriend, someone I respected and who respected me, someone I could fall completely in love with. She’d be funny and creative; she’d have a better job than me, probably, and she’d inspire me to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. She’d identify as a feminist and drink at least as much as me and we would go on dates to immersive theatre shows and classical concerts. She would be my best friend. We would have a truly equal relationship. I wasn’t going to be lonely any more. I couldn’t wait.

Tom, Smriti and the other managers were out at an all-day meeting, so I took the opportunity to look for lesbians on the Internet. I couldn’t bring myself to go back on Tinder; I knew there was a much lower chance of dick pics, now that I was dating women, but I hated the idea of swiping past thousands of nameless people, knowing they were doing the same to me. I thought it might be nice to meet someone in real life. I found gay vegan meet-ups and a lesbian volleyball team and a stressful-sounding lesbian architecture appreciation society, none of which really appealed to me. And then I saw an ad for something called Stepping Out:

QUEER SWING DANCE CLASSES Fun, friendly, suitable for beginners and more experienced dancers. All LGBTQ+ people welcome. Sundays, Upstairs at the Kings, £7 a class.

I felt Owen walk up behind me. I minimized the screen.

‘Are you going to go to that?’ he asked.

‘Might do,’ I said, glancing back at him to gauge his reaction.

Owen raised his eyebrows and nodded. ‘Cool,’ he said. And then, ‘My sister’s gay.’

‘Good for her,’ I said, and I turned back to my screen and started clicking through my emails.

‘Are you gay?’ he asked.

‘Shh.’ I nodded across to Uzo; I didn’t want her to know – not yet, anyway. She had a habit of ‘whispering’ secrets extremely loudly in the kitchen, for everyone to hear. Plus I’d heard her say ‘What a waste’ once, when we were talking about Sir Ian McKellen being gay (she had a thing for white-haired white men). I wasn’t sure she’d react brilliantly to my news.

‘Sorry,’ Owen said, crouching by my desk. ‘Are you, though?’

‘Might be.’ I felt like a bit of a fraud, to be honest. I wasn’t sure one (highly enjoyable) episode of lesbian sex was enough to qualify me.

‘That’s cool,’ he said again. ‘So’s Catwoman.’

‘As in – the comic-book character?’

Owen nodded. ‘She’s thinking of having a baby with her girlfriend,’ he said.

‘Catwoman?’

‘No, Carys. My sister.’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘I’m not at that stage yet.’ I went back to my emails.

Owen didn’t. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘To what?’

‘To the gay dance thing.’

A thought struck me, and I looked up at him. ‘Are you gay, Owen?’

‘No! No. No. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.’

‘Right.’

‘I’m going out with Laura, remember?’

‘Of course.’

‘I just like gay people,’ he said.

‘All of them?’

‘No, you know. Like Cara Delevingne. And Ellen Page.’

‘You mean, you fancy lesbians.’

‘No! Well – only the hot ones.’

I looked at the Stepping Out website when I got home. There was a video of the Friends of Dorothy, their Solo Jazz group, competing at the London Swing Dance Festival in sequinned hot pants (surprisingly flattering). They had won first prize. Watching the video, I felt the potent combination of nostalgia, envy and self-pity that comes whenever I watch people perform. I had gone cold turkey on dance after my ballet career ended. I thought it would be too painful to teach, or to try contemporary, or move into administration or anything; I even found Zumba classes a bit triggering. Maybe going to a swing dance class would be like opening an old wound. Maybe it wouldn’t, though. Avoiding dance hadn’t made me miss it any less. I decided to give it a go.

I made the most of the time before the first class by practising telling people I was gay. I announced it via WhatsApp to my school friends, none of whom seemed particularly surprised, and when I got my legs waxed, I told the beauty therapist that I was going to a queer dance class. ‘So I’ll be dancing with other women, because I’m gay, which means I fancy women, because of being gay,’ I told her.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Can you turn over for me?’

I also did a fair bit of lesbian Internet research. I discovered that the toaster thing was a hilarious lesbian in-joke – when a woman ‘converts’ another woman to lesbianism, she’s supposedly given a toaster as a thank-you from the lesbian community.

One click led to another, and I found myself reading a dictionary of lesbian slang. Apparently if I noticed a fellow lesbian walking down the street, say, I was supposed to say ‘She’s family’ to whomever I was with. It seemed there was a whole lesbian language I knew nothing about, but I liked that; I felt I was being invited to join a secret club. I liked the idea of being part of a family.

I found a wikiHow article called How to be a lesbian, illustrated with pictures of women in pastel clothes, smiling at each other like the couples in the erectile dysfunction ads you see on the Tube. ‘You can’t make yourself a lesbian if you aren’t one already,’ it told me. You can’t make yourself a straight, either, I thought. Yes, I’d had the odd Jarvis Cocker fantasy. I’d enjoyed the occasional fumble on a single bed. But I’d never really got the point of sex till now. Touch your partner like you touch yourself, said wikiHow. A come-hither motion always works. All right, I thought, I’ll give that a try. When I’ve found someone to be a lesbian with.

I took my time over getting ready. I changed into my best jeans and flossed my teeth, and I tried to ignore my stomach, which was making all sorts of unsociable noises.

‘I think you’re really brave,’ said Alice, standing in my doorway, watching as I put my make-up on.

‘Don’t be patronizing,’ I said. I looked in the mirror. ‘Do I look like a lesbian?’

Alice considered the question. ‘Now you mention it, yes. It’s your hair.’

‘No – it’s my shirt.’ A tartan one, buttoned to the very top.

‘Do you want to borrow one of Dave’s ties, too? You know, ram the point home?’

‘No thanks,’ I said. I stood with both hands on my hips, which makes you feel more confident apparently, according to a TED Talk I’d seen. It didn’t really work. ‘I’m off. See you later.’

‘Unless you get lucky!’ said Alice, as I edged past her to the front door. Now she’d got used to the idea, she really was very excited about the prospect of my new lesbian sex life. Come to think of it, I hadn’t heard so much of her and Dave recently.

‘At a dance class? I think everyone will be able to contain themselves.’

‘You never know.’ She gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Promise you won’t make any friends you like better than me?’

‘Promise,’ I said.

The class was in a pub just off Clerkenwell Green, in a pretty, Dickensian corner of the city. I felt immediately at home, as the walls were the same shade of dark red that I’d painted my teenage bedroom. The tables were crowded with thirty-something men drinking pints. There wasn’t a queer dancer to be seen. The barman saw me looking around and jerked his head towards the stairs. ‘They’re up there.’

‘Right!’ I said cheerily, pleased to have been identified as a lesbian, and walked up the creaking staircase, wondering what I’d find at the top.

I hesitated in the doorway of a large, loft-like room. Women and a few men were standing around, some chatting in twos and threes, some on their own, leaning against the radiators for warmth, arms and legs crossed for comfort. A woman wearing purple lipstick was sitting on a table at the front of the room, swinging her legs back and forth. ‘Can everyone pay me now, please!’ she called. ‘There are labels here for you to write your name on.’ I wrote JULIA on a label in thick black marker, stuck it to my shirt and walked to the edge of the room, next to a woman with short brown hair, who was wearing bright-red braces and, amazingly, a bow tie. Her clothes were intimidatingly trendy, but she moved awkwardly, as though she didn’t realize how long her arms and legs were, and that made her seem more approachable.

‘Hello!’ I said, waving at close range, the way I do when I’m nervous. I pointed to my name tag and said, ‘Julia.’

‘Hello!’ she said back, and pointed at her name tag. ‘Ella!’ She grinned at me, like she was delighted to see me. I liked her immediately.

The woman wearing purple lipstick clapped her hands and walked to the middle of the room. ‘I’m Zhu,’ she said. ‘Great to see so many new faces here today! Obviously, this is a queer dance class, so we’re gender neutral – it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman or outside the binary. If you want to try leading, you lead, if you want to follow, you follow.’

I decided to lead. I hadn’t been leading enough in my life lately. Ella, it turned out, was a follower.

‘Shall we?’ I said, holding out my hands, and we learned to do a rock step.

From the moment Zhu turned on the music – Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Tain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It)’ – I was in heaven. I hadn’t danced for so long, and when I had danced it had been my job, tied up with my self-esteem and my body image and whether Cat was going to get picked for a solo over me. I had forgotten what it was like to dance for fun, to be in sync with your partner, with the music. I’d forgotten how free it made me feel. Everyone had their own way of dancing – we switched partners every time we learned a new part of the routine, and I danced with a girl named Annie, who was quite stiff and awkward, and a guy named Ollie, whose arms were loose, like skipping ropes – but everyone, everyone had broad smiles across their faces. You couldn’t not smile when you were swing dancing, it seemed. I hadn’t been so purely happy in years.

‘You’re really good at this,’ said Ella when we came full circle and danced together again at the end of the class. Ella was my favourite partner. She flailed her arms and kept kicking with her left leg instead of her right, but she seemed so delighted to be dancing that none of that mattered.

Some of us went downstairs for a drink after the lesson. I sat with Zhu and Ella and a woman named Rebecca – dark brown hair, a lot of earnest opinions on almost every subject – who had her arm around Bo, very smiley, round glasses, wearing a badge reading They/Them. In fact, all of my new swing dance friends smiled a lot, which was relaxing. I had been worried I’d have to hang out with intimidating people like Jane, now that I was a lesbian.

‘Rebecca’s my girlfriend,’ said Bo, unnecessarily. I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to have someone who was that proud of going out with you.

Bo, it turned out, was a freelance coder, which was appropriate, because they moved in a slightly robotic way. Rebecca worked in social media for Greenpeace.

‘She met Gillian Anderson for work the other week,’ Bo said, hand on Rebecca’s knee.

‘Such a waste,’ Zhu said. ‘She doesn’t even fancy her.’

‘She’s a bit too femme for me,’ Rebecca said, shrugging.

It was wonderful to be surrounded by queer people, casually throwing words like ‘femme’ into the conversation.

‘What do you do?’ I asked Ella.

‘I’m a dentist.’ She fiddled with her bow tie.

I stared at her for a moment. ‘Wow.’

‘I know.’

‘Was that like … a vocation?’

‘Not really,’ said Ella. ‘But the money’s good, and I have lots of time to do fun things outside work.’

‘Look at her teeth,’ said Bo.

Ella opened her mouth for me to inspect them, like a horse. They were flawless.

I started gabbling away about the class, talking too fast and too loudly, about how much I had loved it.

‘Own up,’ Zhu said in her teacherly voice. ‘You’ve done swing before.’

‘I haven’t,’ I said, but I explained how I used to be a dancer.

Rebecca leaned towards me. ‘How did you feel about that? Working in such a heteronormative world?’

‘I didn’t really think about it at the time,’ I shrugged. ‘I wasn’t a lesbian then.’

‘Are you a new recruit?’ asked Zhu.

‘Very new,’ I said, because I’d had some beer.

‘So,’ said Zhu, ‘does that mean you’re single?’

‘Zhu,’ said Ella, shaking her head at me, apologizing silently.

‘What?’ said Zhu. ‘Fresh meat!’

I swapped numbers with everyone before I left. Ella hugged me – a really tight hug – and said, ‘Welcome to the family!’

I felt the loveliest, warmest feeling of belonging.

As I was walking home from the Tube, I got a message from Ella. Great hanging out with you! Are you coming next week? I was about to text her back to say yes, I was definitely coming next week, when my phone buzzed with another message.

Come at seven next Friday. Dad’s joined a wine club so there’ll be lots of booze. Don’t tease him about being nearly sixty or about his thread veins, belly, liver spots etc. He’s feeling a bit delicate.