The Helen 100 Page 3

  Still. Indifference is a great internet sex tactic for ladies. Take an attitude of ‘Yeah, whatever’ for some time before revealing only very mild arousal, which should never approach the ‘horny bitch’ level explicitly demanded but implicitly rejected by many men of the internet.

  I would suggest that the words usually appended to internet pictures advertising fictional Russian sluts are a good style guide. See, ‘Hi. I’m Natasha and I’m so bored.’ Act as if you made a wrong turn on the internet. You fell into a XXX app by mistake while actually looking for a gingham pinafore to wear on Sundays. You’re a naïf with no interest in penises at all and, oops-a-daisy, how did my tiny little church dress come off while I was making a chain of paper dolls and strolling through this meadow grass? Oh, Mister Man, please don’t break me, etc., etc.

  The innocent unconcern of women is best in most heterosexual cases, save for those that follow the cougar convention—just a simple reversal in which the younger man must pretend to be reluctant and the older woman must pretend to be predatory. This, of course, is another compromise to libido. But it was one I was prepared to make if it meant a chance at meeting the user Datagasm. ‘Nice pic,’ as they say on the internet.

  Late that night, I chatted with the young man happily until he described himself to me as ‘cougar pray’. His picture depicted a handsome, nerdish sort and, being partial to a hottie with hints of a neurodevelopmental disorder, I might have overlooked this spelling error had he not repeated it.

  Datagasm: Let me be your pray.

  Which annoyed me, not just because it was such an awful misspelling, but because I felt about as physically forceful as poached lettuce that night. The thought of preying on anyone, even a young C++ coder who looked quite a bit like Nikola Tesla, was exhausting.

  ‘That’s a homophone mistake,’ I wrote.

  He replied, ‘But I am fine with gay people.’

  I became critically weary of such errors by sun-up. And not just because I am a vile cow with unrealised literary pretensions, but because errors of typing and understanding made masturbation very difficult.

  A sex chat full of mistakes is as distracting as a pornographic video whose stars are wearing Christmas antlers; or, for the posher reader, a ballet whose principal dancer can’t stop passing gas.

  An early-riser wrote to me, ‘I want to pond your as.’ At first I thought this chap might be writing poetry in some new transcendentalist style, but as I came to realise that he wanted to ‘pound’ my ‘arse’, I began to misplace all my hopes and dreams. This was not Walden.

  To be clear, I have no particular interest in defending Thoreau, in whose verse I am no expert, and none in maligning sodomy whatsoever. I am an inexpert fan of sodomy. But sodomy is a reasonably delicate act and, in my view, demands to be spelled correctly. So I told Henry David this arse pounding could only be arranged with notice for those days when my haemorrhoids were not acting up.

  When he said that I was ‘disgusting’, I pasted some notes on colorectal surgery into the dating app. Et, tu, Brute? I wasn’t the one who demanded misspelled anal. But, this is really my problem, not his, and probably not yours. However, I will say that you should probably turn off notifications for your XXX app for several hours even on your most sex-starved day because you too, whether male or female, may find yourself talking about proctology from sheer frustration. Or, doing even dumber stuff, such as that which follows.

  By seven in the morning, a man sent me my first dick pic. This may seem shocking to those over thirty and/or unfamiliar with adult online dating, but it is a customary trade, particularly when offered to a woman who posted a picture of her tits. How a lady should respond here is, ‘Oo, gee, that’s a nice big one. I hope it doesn’t break me,’ and perhaps provide a picture of her muff. You do not do as I did.

  Very Serious and Quite Long Public Service Announcement for Horny Bitches, Bucks and Those of Liquid Gender Looking For Sex on the Internet: Any person of any sort considering publication of a urogenital self-portrait must remember to edit. Your pink bits should be displayed in the strictest isolation from distinguishing features such as face, tattoo or greaseproof chicken bag. Your identifying data should be digitally removed. And I know this sounds difficult, but there’s an app for that and for fuck’s sake, look it up if you don’t want hard_4_ ewe learning your address and popping over with a pair of rusted shears. Life, especially the post-dumped one, is difficult enough without courting impatient perverts and/or future revenge porn, so let’s learn to use a little thrift in the dirty-picture-sharing economy, shall we? I cannot believe how much data people leak online. A street address might very well be embedded on that picture of your thing. If an irresponsible tool like me can remember to remove all identifying information from a crotch-shot, then you can, too. Sure, I may have since had unprotected sex with several unwholesome persons, and at least one who quite urgently needed a bath. But I never once accidentally published my GPS coordinates. True, this was due less to caution, of which at the time I had none, than it was to a habit derived from workplace familiarity with graphics software—due to their habit of copyright theft, the Daily Deals people had been as serious about file data purging as they were about the need for fun. Anyhow. Whatever your profession, you must wear a digital prophylactic.

  I didn’t respond with a picture of my muff because I had now completely lost my lolly. Instead I Photoshopped the image of his penis onto the forehead of a cartoon unicorn in place of its mythical horn, and set this as my profile picture.

  I was mean and tired and apparently determined to spurn sex, however much I wanted it.

  Obviously, this lack of immediate sex was chiefly my doing. My arrogance and my broken capacity for fantasy—I could never dare to dream—were largely at fault. But it wasn’t all my fault. The repertoire of online hetero-sexy-talk is extraordinarily limited and would drive many fair-minded persons to rudeness. And, finally, to sleep with Eleven on the floor.

  4

  Eighteen hours and one terabyte of shame since she left

  ‘You are restricting my right to freely communicate,’ she said.

  ‘I must not be subject to exile,’ she said.

  The phone had tipped me from a shallow morning of sleep and into a now familiar lecture. This was the way she had come to speak to me when incensed: like the International Charter for Human Rights. When she was angry, she was also very official.

  A few months back, I recalled, she’d been cross with my careless tidying of her collage materials from the dinner table. ‘You need to understand that this is a violation,’ she had said. ‘We all have the right to creative expression.’

  Now this may well be a general truth, but, in this case, elevated a trivial domestic mistake to a global war crime. It had also, in my view then, overlooked my own ‘right’ to creative expression, which was violated daily by the work of writing discount beauty coupons. After all, I had grumbled only to myself, their tiresome production funded all those unprofitable afternoons of collage.

  When I’d been censured so officially for moving old magazines to make way for the night’s meal, I had very much wanted to say, ‘Oh, fuck off, Bono. Go and write a song about your pain,’ but refrained. Especially as she had just prepared the German Dish, which always hit the spot on even the coldest days we spent together.

  But I did say it now, over the phone, and this set her off on a very long Nuremberg statement full of ‘freedom’ and ‘inalienable’ and ‘abnegation of my right to freely and creatively correspond’.

  You see, before I’d gone to sleep with Eleven on the chicken that previous night, I’d thought to call the phone company and asked them to bar her calls to international or 1900 numbers.

  Certainly this was mean of me, but it wasn’t totally Reich Ministry. I did it in part, of course, because I was a spiteful dumped person whose chief pleasure had quickly become the creation of inconvenience for the absconded. But I did it mostly because the phone was billed to me. If she had used th
e phone to make a five-hundred-dollar international or 1900 call, I, a now un-waged person, would soon have been flat broke.

  I hadn’t supposed that she did harbour any particular plans to make a five-hundred-dollar international or 1900 call. However, I now knew firsthand that emotionally exhausted persons could be rash with their mobile devices. They may find themselves Skyping a shamanic psychic in Reykjavik (I really can’t bear to talk about it and so omit this moment of expensive spiritualism from my account; but I will say that I have found no use in knowing the identity of my spirit animal) or, perhaps, publishing pictures of penis-unicorns—uniporns?—on the internet at 7 a.m. So I barred the phone (and, okay, lowered the credit card limit), but not entirely out of kneejerk fascism. I did it chiefly to safeguard against expensive mistakes which, following my fun farewell note to Brynlee, I knew I could no longer afford to correct.

  As she continued with the rousing ‘rights’ speech in which I was cast as Goebbels—‘This is an assault not only against my freedom but my safety’—it occurred to me that she had tried to make a five-hundred-dollar international or 1900 call and was now Security Council-level angry that she’d failed. She was much angrier than I had heard in some time. She was so angry she even eventually forgot to be tedious. She left the United Nations altogether and became a rogue state. ‘YOU ARE A DEVIL HEGEMON! DEATH TO YOU! I WILL WIPE YOU OFF THE MAP’ style of thing.

  ‘You have always been such a fucking controlling bitch,’ is what I believe she said.

  Excluding the possibility of her absolute batshit madness, I deduced just two explanations for the force of her rage. The first and most probable was that she’d developed an internet crush on some poetry trollop from Shittington Falls, Vermont, or wherever, and found herself without wi-fi and in urgent want of a dirty international phone call. The second was that she had an emotional need to be angry with me and had selected this handy cause after failing to find a truly notable one. Which, to be honest, seemed pretty unlikely as I had long provided quite notable cause.

  It’s not as though I had done a single terrible thing as a spouse. I had, however, been a pretty terrible thing. She had lived with my tiresome depression, my tiresome anxiety and my tiresome face, which had done a particularly poor job of concealing its distaste for her, most television news commentators and everything that wasn’t Eleven the cat for months. Possibly even a year or two.

  So if she felt like making me responsible for the end of our relationship, she could have easily done it.

  She could have mentioned my undisciplined weeping or farting or the many months writing discount beauty coupons in elasticised pants shrieking ‘I am so much better than this! I could be writing trenchant analysis for The Times! Prizewinning literary nonfiction! Fucking, I don’t know, acrostic poems!’ I was not a model of quiet selflessness; my sacrifice had long been, like my flatulence, fairly audible.

  She, on the other hand, had always been rather good at concealing her rage. She rarely tried to gain loudly what could be more fully won by measured speech. She knew as all the modern world’s most effective parents and leaders do: the best way to strip someone of their will is to delude them into thinking they retain it.

  The brutal father who beats his son for failing to excel in football is likely to be disappointed. The liberal father who convinces his son that excellence in football was the kid’s own idea sees results. The boss who tells her workers they are worthless will not easily extract extra profit from their bodies. The boss who tells her workers they are ‘empowered’ to work unpaid overtime will succeed. This work is fun! FUN!

  ‘If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face.’ Nah. If you really want a vision of the future, don’t listen to old George Orwell. Instead consider the possibility that, one day, you’ll be buying your own fashionable boot from a Daily Deals email and stamping your own damn face with it. Just as I had been for several of these fifteen years.

  Real power learns to hide itself behind stylish boots and moderate phrases—a war is a ‘dispute’, a firing is a ‘negotiated departure’ and a relationship breakdown is an ‘uncoupling’ or, worse, an ‘opportunity to grow’.

  Orwell wasn’t right about the character of the boot, but he was certainly right about the mild language that would emerge to underplay its force.

  I was completely habituated to polite fascist newspeak at home, even if it had long since begun to give me the shits at work. The ex had always known how to impose her will through the appearance of quiet reason and, as conscious as I had become of this tactic, I was by no means immune to its power. Her expensively educated, reasonable voice would bend me to its domestic will every time. That voice always set the tone and terms for our life. It had led us to a particular suburb, me to particular work and miseries. I did as I was told by that voice. So long as I permitted myself to believe I had volition, I would do exactly as it uttered.

  I wanted to write sales tripe and forgo creative indulgence. I longed to live miles from the nearest tram. Honestly, I adored a life spent in tears, elastic and resentment.

  All these blows were struck by me—and, to be honest, even relished by me so long as I was loved. But, even though I had inflicted them, they had always been prompted by her expensive, reasonable voice.

  ‘I would like us to move together graciously towards a shift in our intimacy and in view of that, I ask that you redeem my access to international and 1900 calls’ is exactly the sort of expensive thing I might have predicted she’d have said. And the sort of thing I’d heed. Not something just a little short of, ‘Fuck you, devil. I want you to pay for all my international phone sex.’

  Well. What she actually said was, ‘You have always controlled our fucking finances. You are a fascist.’

  While it was certainly true that I had always controlled our finances, it was not at all true that I fascistically relished this chore. This ‘control’ had been imposed by and certainly not wrested from someone who showed any interest in regulating the movement of money. She and I had been, in fact, given to joke about her unconcern for cash and sometimes hypothesised warmly that she suffered a form of fiscal dyslexia. ‘Did you earn a bajillion dollars today?’ she might say, and we’d laugh.

  Like a lot of people who went to nice schools, she just never learned how to understand value. Sometimes, she would be shocked by the price of baked beans and sometimes, she would think little before approving the cost of a business class airfare. Two dollars could be outrageous and four thousand could be a bargain.

  For years, I had admired her freedom from value. More lately, I had begun to see it as the product of her freedom from labour and my slavery to a wage. She created whatever she fancied for fun; I made terrible things for money. I had started to offer her short reports on value when she spent. And she spent. ‘That’s four days’ of my labour,’ I said before she sent out nine of her unprofitable artworks for quality framing. ‘I have the right to creative expression,’ she said in her very best envoy’s voice when I received the Visa statement.

  Her rightful creative expression was very expensively framed.

  That expensive voice almost always worked. Even now it would have swayed me to reverse the phone bar. It would have prompted me to pack her things into boxes, agree that this entire break-up was for the best and ask if she would like some help selecting a new Indonesian throw rug that might accommodate the global tastes of her glitter-feral whore from Shittington Falls.

  If the ex had remonstrated with me reasonably, told me my company had lately been about as vital and productive as a conference call with Brynlee, I would have listened. I would have complied. I would have restored the Visa to its previous unmanageable limit. I would not have become immediately suspicious and we’d have parted in proper UN style.

  But her diplomacy had failed her, and I saw a rare opportunity for control. I said, ‘Restraint could serve us better now than a tantrum,’ which made me sound if less than a diplomat, then at least like a rep
utable headmistress. I thought a headmistress might mollify a private schoolgirl.

  But she responded like a rebel teen who believes with every ascending decibel that she distances herself from guilt. She reached a falsely virtuous crescendo and screamed, ‘I have my rights to speech! This is unconscionable! Jihad against Helen! Devil Helen must die!’ or similar.

  I was now certain that she had fallen in with some free-verse glow-stick harlot with turquoise hair and a clit ring. I knew it. I knew her uncharacteristic fit was borne of shame or guilt. And possibly a bit of punishing horniness, which, as I had lately discovered, can tend to send one mad.

  She was almost certainly cheating on me, I realised.

  In fact, now I think about it, she’d adhered to a fairly textbook execution of The Ten Signs He’s Cheating That Women Ignore. What follows is an incomplete account of these Signs—I’m very emotional recounting the ignominy, so you can’t expect me to remember all ten.

  In recent months, she had taken a keen and unprecedented interest in both physical fitness and grooming. She had even asked for advance details of the dozen discount beauty deals I uploaded each day. She had got herself dolphined.

  There had been unexplained or poorly explained absences.

  There had been great shifts of affection. There were morning hymns to my excellence followed by afternoons that keened for the death of my goodness. She hated me or she feted me in the few minutes a day that we actually met.

  She spent the rest of her time affixed to social media and she always, always jumped when her phone sounded an alert.