Consequences

What happened when I decided to stop being a virgin.

                We'd been talking all summer. My boyfriend had left me under a cloud of mystery. I met him for lunch one day, and he said 'it was a mistake, I didn't mean to sleep with her, but now that I've done it I think it's only fair I'm faithful to her, and you know, even my grandad has been telling me to move on so you know'. I always picture him in a shopping trolley at this moment. A shopping trolley was involved somehow. For a while I wondered if she used it to seduce him. Most probably it was just lying around somewhere, abandoned and glinting in the May sunshine. I was unable to cry, and instead sat there on the scrubby bit of grass down the road from my sixth form, feeling numb, and trying fruitlessly to make him kiss me. 'I'm with her now. You just have to accept it'. He did kiss me, chastely, once. I still love you, he said. I love you so much. But my parents think I'm with her now, and they never liked you much anyway. Perhaps I'm imagining that last part, but the fact was that they never liked me much at all. 'She's very well spoken, son, thinks she's above you'. They mistrusted me when I told them I wanted to go to Oxford, something they saw as far beyond the reaches of my social station, this person whose grandad was a postman and a window cleaner. The working-classes should stay working class but yet I wanted to better their son, clearly. Girls ought to devote themselves to the family. I was at their house one day when they were  away refereeing a sports event, and a phone call came in to tell my boyfriend to 'get that s**t out of our home now'. I was put out onto the street like a wounded puppy, and never really trusted that he would stand up for me to his parents. At Christmas they dangled seafood in front of my nose 'go on, eat it, we won't tell your mum'. I'd never liked them much either. The lack of doors on any of the upstairs rooms, including the bathroom, implied that his parents never had sex. His mother was an odd, odd, woman, who seemed to have modelled herself on Nurse Ratchett, of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' fame. Her obsession with her sons verged on sexual, and she didn't allow them to sleep with their girlfriends, unless, in the case of the 22-year old, they did it in a tent in the garden.

                After his revelation I lay on the school field and felt that I had been glued to the grass, peering down over a vast expanse of sky into something I couldn't understand. The world had flipped upside-down. The one truth of my teenage life, the one thing I could understand, was that he loved me and I in turn loved him. Perhaps it was a little boring, stifling, unbearable, but I'd agreed to stick with it. We had vague plans to get engaged after university, the same one, where we would live in a flat together and share everything. I didn’t much like this idea, but he did, and I was trying to ignore the episodes of panic which were slowly creeping up on  me, becoming more frequent, and casting a nasty purple shadow, a bruise on the face of a life which was otherwise going well.

                After the episode of 'the virginity loss part one', as I came to think of it, I lost also the vast majority of my friends. Girls, it seems, will always go where boys are. I was a necessary loss in order that their social lives could continue as normal.

                It was at this point that I realised the only method of getting even was that I too lose my virginity to someone, preferably someone I loved (but that didn’t seem likely), or just someone I hardly knew, an almost-stranger, someone who was good at sex. I imagined meeting somebody in a hotel in London for a night of passion.

                I settled upon an unsuitable candidate. He was sexually and socially inexperienced, a virgin, he had terrible dress sense (when I met him for the first time he was wearing a shirt evidently made from old curtains), he was rude, uninterested in me, and (the biggest problem) living in China.

                I chose him only because he was the sole single, straight man I knew who was in no way connected with my ex. I decided that I would wait for him to return from China. Five months wasn't too long to make my ex-boyfriend jealous, and besides, it would give me time to work up to this thing I really didn't much want to do.

                So for five months we emailed. His hostility became flirtation, and I gradually begain to realise how lonely we both must be to be spending so much time talking to one another, thousands of miles apart.

                I began to 'commune' with myself late at night, once staying up for 50  hours, eventually beginning to feel the elated high that comes from sleep deprivation. My work colleagues asked me about my odd facebook statuses, and I laughed it off.

                I no longer needed sleep. I stopped eating, I started walking everywhere and lost weight, I pretended to everybody and nobody that I was fine, happy and looking forward to university. I doubted that I would get even an extremely low pass grade in my exams. I began to imagine my future working in a supermarket, and tried to content myself with it.

                There were several low points, but my personal favourite is the day I spent a couple of hours pondering whether the phrase 'I like mangoes, but there are many sweeter fruits' meant that my new friend in China (a couple of months now passed) was trying to confess his love. At the time it seemed certain - now I think I needed to sleep a bit more. Or perhaps the time I thought he might have fallen down a ravine. Or maybe the time I realised he was either on drugs or totally insane. The second one, as it turns out, medically, certifiably insane, which didn't stop me sleeping with him, but more on that later.

                The one good thing which came from our conversations was my vastly enhanced social and intellectual confidence. I'd reached a point  where I was quite simply unable to speak in front of even a small group of people. Instead, I would whisper in the ear of the person closest to me, and they would relay my thoughts. Like a human loud-speaker. Now I realised I could speak. I rediscovered my lost voice, which had long ago fallen down the ravine he hadn't.

                The night when I first slept with him, he'd been out of the psychiatric hospital for three days. He still thought he was a werewolf. 'I don't need this pyschosis medicine', he insisted, 'I don’t need to sleep more, the only problem is that I'm half Jewish. You know, my mother is Jewish. I was circumcised for medical reasons, you know she's a doctor, but on the eighth day of my life and so maybe who knows, but the point is I'm half Jewish and this medicine is what you give to me to make me normal because when the full moon comes out I turn into a werewolf and that's why, I'm not insane'.

                I'd like to point out that he most definitely was insane a couple of weeks earlier. His mother arrived to rescue him, where he was wandering around, seemingly lost and drunk, outside his hostel in China, and he greeted her with 'ah, you are the being that created me'. He proceeded to believe himself Jesus, Jesus' murderer, and then, to crown it all, God. I'm glad he'd got over that part before we had sex. Can you imagine? Trying to refuse the sexual whims of the Omnipotent?

                I don't know if my virginity loss would have been as horrible had he been sane. i suspect not. It couldn’t have hurt more had he really been a werewolf, and his vampiric delight in the unhealthy amount of neon-lit, fake-red blood produced scared me. I felt like Frankenstein's monster, being experimented upon by a mad scientist, his bedroom full of books and a phallic pot-plant by the window.

                After the event he slept a drug-induced slumber, and I lay awake, ashamed and finally able to cry not tears but a last few shocked drops of blood. I had lied to my parents and told them I was staying with a friend, rather than two hours from home in the bed of an almost stranger. They noticed a change in me, we both sensed it, but nothing was mentioned.

                I had finally achieved what I had set out five months ago to do, but I told nobody. A painful, secret, sour victory.

The next morning I watched him eat a pineapple, including the skin, whole.

 

 

  

 

                                  

 

 

 

Reviews

[Trigorin]

Not bad. You've kept the narrative flowing very well and the sort of conversational tone you've used in this works very well, I think. I don't much like the content, as it seems a little pointless, but this is undeniably well-written. Good work.