Misdirected Emotions

I knew where Geoffrey was at every minute. At least I thought I did.
I would look up from my vodka or my coffee or whatever, and think, he will be riding home from the city, or, he will be listening to that band he likes in the Valley.

Sometimes I’d test myself on it and turn up at the place he would be. He was always there. I had a kind of sixth sense for him. I knew it was creepy to be hooked in to his every movement as if I’’d inserted a tracking device when we were having sex, but there was nothing to be done. I was plugged in to him. My radar was always poised and waiting for some weird signal to arrive.

I thought that Geoffrey was me. We were similar in many ways. We were both playful as monkeys, food fights, chases, games of backgammon, some of which ended in strange illegal moves that left us breathless with laughter. We were odd, awkward in company, prone to leaving a room in a sudden panic for no reason. We were both a little mad, we made nests in other people’s houses but we never seemed to settle anywhere ourselves. I once threw all his clothes out of the window of a third storey flat, and then he threw all mine, and then we were naked in the night, daring each other to run off into the park.

I loved him, but he didn’t love me. He said he would love a girl who was homely and smelled of bread dough and cake. He wanted a girl who hung her clothes up on hangers, a girl who ironed and who didn’t put up with any of his nonsense. He told me this when we were in bed together and he wasn’t the first one to mention my lack of feminine wiles and so I shrugged and kept at it, hoping that the delirium we shared in bed would make up for my lack of skills in the ironing department.

We fucked so hard that we tore the sheets off the bed.

“‘I’d love a girl who knows how to make hospital corners,”’ he said.

***

Publication Details

Affection: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Intimacy is published by TEXT and is available at all good bookshops.

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