Voyage XVI – Fantasies

I go back to my cabin and get out my drawing things. It’s getting dark now but the lighting in here is really good – like one of those daylight bulbs you can get. I lean back and look at what I’ve been doing lately. The fact is they’re mostly of Lucy, but not from life obviously – from my imagination.
Back home, when I was about thirteen I suppose, I started making my own pornography. I just started one day when I didn’t know what to do next and I was doodling and the lines of a woman’s body just emerged from the pen like magic. I suppose I’d spent so much time looking at the magazines they’d just got printed on my brain. So, I never could get hold of enough real porn, and most of it was pretty dreary to be honest, so I started making my own.
I didn’t have a type – I drew redheads with freckles and olive skinned women with black hair, slender women and voluptuous women, mature women and teenage girls, shaved women and hairy women, women undressing, women masturbating, women together. After a while I didn’t draw anything much else, and I think I got quite good at it, considering I’d never actually seen a real live naked woman in my life (and certainly not an actual vagina) and still haven’t to be honest.
God knows what would have happened if mum had found any of it.

I’ve been thinking about what Joe said, about being gay. It’s funny but I never really thought about it before. Freud said that everyone naturally has homosexual tendencies (and other tendencies too). I never really wanted to put men in my drawings at all. I’m not really sure why. I tried once or twice but it felt sort of, I don’t know, sort of ugly. If I think of men having sex it just seems sort of clumsy and a bit disgusting to be honest. I don’t know where that idea comes from. I try to think of Joe like that, sexually I mean. He’s a nice enough looking bloke I suppose. If I was going to handle someone else’s penis I suppose his’d be as good as anyone’s. I just don’t really fancy it. I suppose I should be a bit more broad-minded, in a ‘don’t knock it until you’ve tried it’ sort of way but I think I’d have some sort of sense even without trying it, that I’d like it, but I don’t. Margaret Mead said that extreme heterosexuality is actually a sort of perversion. Anyway, I just like looking at women. I think they’re absolutely fantastic, and if that makes me a pervert, well, so be it.

Sometimes I spent almost all night in the Wendy house, looking at porn, thinking about women. It was really dark and a bit dingey in there, damp and dusty, with the ivy coming in and the spiders and such like, but it did feel very peaceful, especially if the rain was really battering down outside and the trees were whipping about on the railway embankment or the fog-horn down at the harbour was going. I usually went down there in just my dressing gown and wellies so I could cover up immediately if anyone came, and I kept the drawings and photos in a sketchpad so I could close that up quickly too. Nobody ever did. My mum used to wonder why I was exhausted in the morning. Sometimes I couldn’t get up in the morning at all.
I used to think about women I knew – the one who ran the pet shop for example – she was a little weird looking (quite a long nose and big googly eyes) but you could tell she would be a good shape under her clothes, and then there was Amelia’s friend Katrina. She was fucking amazing. Really tight jeans – you could see the outline of her vagina when she sat down. And then there were some of the girls at school – Camille especially, and then later on there was Gill of course. She was the best. I used to imagine coming across her while I was out walking on the Downs in the wind and rain – her in just a plastic mac and boots after she’d been out riding. I imagined seeing her sit down on the wet grass, open her coat, letting the rain wash over her pale breasts and belly (not caring if anyone was looking), watching her slip her knickers down over her boots and throw them aside and then begin to touch herself. Or else I imagined her walking up the hill ahead of me – seeing her bare arse under her coat and watching those two fleshy folds between her legs squeeze and slip together as she walked. I don’t know why but it was always cold and drizzling, or else snowing in these fantasies. I always liked the feel of the cold air on my skin and the wet grass. I don’t know why.

Of course the actual girls at school thought I was a joke. I don’t think I ever actually made an appearance in my own fantasies – that would have been just too ridiculous. I was just forced to watch them, but that was ok.

Actually though, don’t laugh, but I don’t think it was just about sex. I really wanted more than that. I suppose I’m a bit of a romantic too. Honestly, I really wanted to sit on a balcony by the sea with a girl and watch the sun go down and sip champagne or something, and pick flowers for her, and make her sloppy compilation tapes with people like Dusty Springfield and The Walker Brothers. I wanted to slow dance with her to Body Talk. I know, I know. It’s a ridiculous record. I can’t even remember who recorded it now, but every time I hear it I despair. I just wanted that, to do that – to hold onto her (whoever she was), moving together, lost in each other, oblivious, going round and round on the dance floor, breathing into her hair, my hands on her hips at the end of the evening, and her not embarrassed and wanting to get away but there with me, as relieved and amazed as I’d be. And when they turn the music off and the lights go on, to look shyly into each other’s eyes and hope that this was not all.
Jesus Christ I wanted that. I never asked any of them to dance, I admit. If they weren’t going to say yes in private they certainly weren’t going to say it in public.

Well anyway... I don’t know if any of the other blokes felt the same way – we never talked about it, but that was what I wanted – I wanted to be in love. I still do, more than anything in the world. I want a girl who will come to parties, and come for walks in the country, and most of all I want her to share my bed. I want someone to sleep with, and that’s not a euphemism. Ok, I admit I want her to be sitting there on the balcony watching the sunset with no knickers on, but I also want to bring her croissants and orange juice in the morning.
That’s what all this is really about. All that stuff Joe talks about – about careers and so on. I can’t tell him all this. Of course I’d love to earn a living doing something I like, and rent a nice room in Brighton or out in the country, go to university, maybe travel a bit. I’d love to do those things, for myself. But really, the main thing is, when I do those things, maybe I’ll meet her, and what’s more, maybe she’ll want to get to know me and I’ll have a proper relationship. I don’t feel very manly for admitting it, but that’s what I want.
And then we have the reality, as mum would have said.
I don’t know where all this comes from, this hope. Mostly my life has been fairly useless, but somewhere, part of me has always had this idea that, if only I could meet a girl and she got to know me properly, without all this shit about money and living with my parents in the way, that it would be alright, and I’d stand a chance.
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Voyage X – Fancy foreign muck

After dark I have need of food. I want something filling, meaty, tasty, home cooked. I never looked forward to casseroles before but tonight it’s just what I want. I know my body doesn’t actually need it, but my mind does. I choose a bowl of chicken cooked in garlic and wine and cream and as I take it to my table by the window I have the clearest memory of a hotel we stayed at on a school trip to Normandy when I was about twelve.
None of the other kids would eat the French food. Some of them cried. They lived on bread the whole week as far as I could tell (and complained about that too – too much chewing I suppose). There was just me and Jessica. I hardly knew Jessica otherwise, and she sat the other side of the dining room with Donna and Matilda. Donna and Matilda complained louder than anyone about the food, about the beds, about pretty much everything that trip, but me and Jessica lapped it up, in silent fellowship (for there was no way we could actually get up and speak to each other under the circumstances) over the bounty of all this, well, foreignness. Our eyes met the second morning over our chocolat chaud. I could see by the way her eyelids fluttered over the brim of her cup that we understood each other. It was magical. Never would we settle for Ovaltine again. And the croissants! We grinned openly at each other across the room with flaky crumbs in our teeth as havoc broke out and children shed real tears for their coco-pops.
But I did talk to her later on that trip, and when we were back at school too. I can’t remember what we said, but I do remember that it wasn’t at all difficult. I wonder what happened to Jessica? I have no idea. And why was I actually besotted with stupid Donna? It seems inexplicable now.

Anyway Harry came past as I was eating and asked me what was wrong with British food? He stood with his knuckles on my table and leaned over me, like a badly shaved, pink gorilla. I moved my plate slightly, aware that he tended to spit when he talked. He noticed the movement and leaned closer. I could see the broken veins in his cheeks. In the seconds this encounter took I couldn’t help thinking that if this was the best face his life had had to offer, what the hell had the rest been like?
‘Hey?’ he said, leaning even closer.
‘What?’ I said, leaning back.
‘All this namby-pamby foreign crap. Don’t fucking deserve to... I said “What’s wrong with some good old British, or English I should say, roast beef?”’ and he pointed to the food counter and grabbed me under the arm, tried to lift me up. I twisted and stayed sat down, defiant anger at last coming to the surface. He turned and glared at me. ‘Fucking ponce’ he said and shoved my plate from me, getting his his fingers in the gravy in the process.
For a moment he stood there, with his hand raised, looking at the gravy, his lip curled in disgust, like it was vomit rather than food on his fingers. ‘Give me that’ he said indicating a serviette. I took my time handing it to him, looking into his face the whole time. I think my expression was of cool surprise. I hope so. I wanted him to understand that it was him that was bizarre, not me. I managed to keep calm anyway.
After he’d gone I went up and got a fresh plate of the casserole, although I didn’t feel much like eating. I knew I hadn’t won. He’d just get worse.

After he’s gone I find myself thinking some more about that trip to France and Jessica and the rest of it. I really miss her. Isn’t that weird? It’s been years now and I have absolutely no idea what happened to her. She turned up by chance once when I was at the shops and was very chatty and it still didn’t occur to me until later that she maybe liked me. I can’t believe how dense I was. I suppose it just didn’t seem very likely – she being really lovely and everything, and me being, well, me. God, I was stupid. I remember when I got back from that trip I was really full of it, or so my mum said anyway – really ‘difficult’ apparently.
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