A Certain Chemistry (18 page)

“So,” said Adams, “in your autobiography,
Growing
—out tomorrow—you’re quite dismissive of Klaus Theweleit’s so-called ‘feminist’ interpretations . . .”

Shite.
He’d read the book
. The chances of being interviewed about your book on television by someone who’s actually
read the thing
are incalculably small; no one could have predicted that Adams would be so hysterically fastidious in his preparation as to have done this. Moreover, even if the interviewer
had
read your book (accidents happen), it would take a sick mind indeed to imagine that he would be so deranged and graceless as to ask questions about it based on this, rather than sticking to the prepared list. George was stunned into what I can only call “an episode of dual audiovisual ventriloquism”—her mouth moved and the word “Yes” came out, but simultaneously her eyes shouted, “Fuck!”

It was quite clear to me: Adams might have read her book, but
she
hadn’t.

Well,
of course
she hadn’t. Why should she? Reading books takes ages, and she had an agent to check that I hadn’t sneakily slipped in that she enjoyed kicking homeless children or something. If the person you’re ghosting for reads the book you’ve written for them, it’s very nearly insulting—like they don’t trust you not to have made a pig’s ear of it. George had been dropped into this through no fault of her own, but
Adams,
well . . . I was trembling with rage. Surely he couldn’t believe the country’s top soap star had written her own autobiography? No one could be that stupid. So, this could only be malicious: he was trying to make himself look clever at George’s expense.

However, being a pro and a trouper, George had reset her face in an instant. Quite possibly, I may even have been the only one who’d noticed her brief flicker of astounded fright. She smiled and shook her head gently. “Ah, Klaus, Klaus, Klaus . . .” The impression was that the old rascal being mentioned amused her, but I could tell that really, inside her head, she was racing around like a maniac to try to find any clue to who on earth the man was. An actor she’d worked with, perhaps? A minor clothes designer given to sociological contemplation?

“What was it you said?” continued Adams. “That you found his ‘magpie blend of literary, historical, and psychoanalytical interpretation too selective to be persuasive and, in any case, too analytically subterranean to be of use to the woman in the street’?”

George leaned forward, picked up a glass of water from the table, took a long drink from it, and then placed it back down again. She turned back to face Adams.

“Yes.”

Adams nodded thoughtfully.

“Something else that struck me,” he began, “was your reference to Sandra Gilbert as”—but here he cut off abruptly and grabbed at the side of his head, wincing. It didn’t take a genius to guess that this was because the show’s director was screaming into his earpiece. Screaming so loud, in fact, that it actually picked up on his mike as a scratchy, high-pitched squeal—like the sound of a terrified mouse being cast into hell. You couldn’t distinguish the actual words, but it was precisely long enough to have accommodated, for example, the set of phonemes:
“Just ask the prepared questions, you cunt!”
Adams, still clutching his ear and his eyes watering slightly, squinted at George and said, “But what I’d
really
like to know is whether you think of the cast of
The Firth
as your family now?”

“Oh . . .” replied George, surprised and needing to consider the question for a moment. “You know . . .” and she set off into the answer she’d prepared.

Adams had been defeated and the rest of the show went off without additional scariness. His questions were delivered very carefully, with a sort of timorous apprehensiveness, and he sat mute and perfectly still while George gave her replies. It was almost as though someone, somewhere, had hissed to him that they’d called in an electrician to make behind-the-scene modifications and, if he went off ad-libbing just once more, then the flick of a switch would send 240 volts, via his earpiece, directly into his head. I was still nervous, though, the whole time willing Adams to keep to the script using only the power of my clenched buttocks. It was therefore a fantastic relief for me when the show finished. The house band started to play the title music and, exhaling for the first time in about forty minutes, I hurried over to pour myself yet another glass of wine. I hurled it down and was just about to do the same with a second when George, rubbing makeup off her face with a handful of wet wipes, burst into the room and grabbed me by the arm. She was laughing in the kind of breathless, manic, release-of-tension way you see people doing as they’re scrambling out of the cars at the end of a particularly terrifying theme-park ride.

“Quick!” she said. “Let’s get
out
of here!” She dragged me hastily through the building and out of a back door, where a cab was waiting. “You know the hotel, yeah?” she called to the driver as we fell inside. He nodded, and we pulled away almost the instant we’d hit the seats.

“My
God
!” George shrieked, burying herself in my chest. “Can you
believe
that?” She lifted her head up to face me again. Her hands were clapped to her cheeks and she was grinning and flushed and her eyes were wide lights shining fright and thrill and amazement at me.

I was still unaccountably unable to speak, so I just grinned back, rolled my eyes skywards, and made that noise small boys use when they need to imitate the sound of a depth charge going off:
“Pchhhhhhhhhhhffff!”

“I nearly wet myself when he started making up the questions at the beginning. My God. My
God
. Live TV, Tom, eh? There I am, supposed to be talking about my autobiography, and I can’t think because my whole life is flashing before my eyes—how ironic is
that
? My
God
!”

She laughed again, looked into my eyes, and drew a breath, waiting for me to respond with my feelings and thoughts on the matter.

“Pchhhhhhhhhhhfff!”

Taking this on board, she nodded in agreement and then peered down at her hands. “Look,” she said. “Look at my hands. Can you believe it? I’m shaking. I’m actually
shaking
.” She lifted them up and placed them against my face so I could feel them tremble. But I couldn’t feel them tremble, because I was trembling a hundred times worse than they were. The skin on my cheeks where they touched was fizzing.

And then she stopped laughing.

Just like that. Abruptly, almost within a breath; it was as though her excitement-fueled emotional train had suddenly jumped the tracks and she was now heading in a different direction
entirely
. Her expression changed and her movements stilled. All sound left the area around us. Well, I’m sure it didn’t—the cab driver’s radio probably hissed and popped with fares waiting for collection, the engine surely thrummed, and I have no doubt that my breathing must have sounded like a set of bellows being operated by a hyperactive child. But none of this made it to my ears. As far as my ears were concerned, there had been something akin to explosive decompression, except instead of it being air that had been lost, it was noise. George, her hands still on my face, paused for a moment. She looked right into my eyes—and I mean precisely that. She didn’t “make eye contact” or “look
at
my eyes”—she looked right
into
them. It felt as though she saw down far, far beyond the transparent lid of the irises and the pupils, could peer deep behind them and see where I was standing, exposed. She searched me for a while—sitting motionless in this serious silence. Then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth to mine. The instant her lips touched, a shock wave of goose bumps swept out across my skin from an epicenter somewhere at the back of my neck. My head was a fog of buzzing through which no coherent thoughts were visible and, muscles instantly losing all power, I fell back deeper into the corner of the cab under George’s delicious weight.

Now—and I must make this clear—I’m very much a critic of society’s expectations of gender roles. I’m no supporter of a view of the world in which men are decisive and powerful and proactive while women wait and hope and respond. Not only is that picture demonstrably forged, but, more important, neither do I secretly harbor any ugly little longing for it to be genuine. It’s not that I reluctantly accept that things aren’t like they were when wives had fourteen children, husbands died down in the mines, and there was none of this nonsense about polysaccharides, but rather that I cheer it along. You sense a “but” is arriving any second now, don’t you? Yes, well, though I don’t—I swear—go in for any of this ludicrous stereotyping, I couldn’t help but have the vague feeling that I was being a little . . . well—you know? I mean, look at it: I’d sat there, meek, while George had
cupped my face in her hands,
and then advanced upon me with her lips—to which it would be disingenuous to say I did anything else but “surrendered” . . . Then I dropped over—
swooned
wouldn’t be far off—onto my back against the door of the cab . . . under her. Not a great deal to be proud of there, I think you’ll agree. Christ—why didn’t I just flop my head over, fan my face with my hand, and breathe, “Oh, Miss Nye—my heart is beating like the wings of a tiny, frightened bird”?

In the next moment, in fact, I as good as did that. George was maneuvering my face in her grasp so that it sort of danced against her own. Her lips slid and pressed and drew mine between them; the intensity of this grew and grew, and then stopped. Her lips withdrew, the movement ceased, and I felt her tongue move forward. Slowly, carefully,
immaculately,
its tip traced around the edge of my mouth. It circled my lips, then moved like a dare against the sharpness of my teeth and finally paused—just for an instant, but with calculated teasing—before sliding inside. It was at this point that I squeaked. A little, high-pitched, nasal “Mmmm . . .” of yielding ecstasy. If I’d had a shred of self-esteem left, simple shame could justifiably have been expected to have incinerated me right then, leaving nothing but a fine ash. However, as I lay there giving a pretty passable impression of Meg fucking Ryan, two factors saved me from such a fate. The first was that my objective analytical capacity was, at this juncture, “a little fuzzy”—I was, frankly, rendered pretty much insensible by euphoria. The second thing was that, though in many ways I was not entirely broadcasting my masculinity (and I was
also,
it must be acknowledged, happily “putting out” in the back of a cab. Ah, well, like Lisa Stansfield says, “I may not be a lady, but I’m all woman”), I was certain that George could be in little doubt about where I really stood. She was pressed against me, and there was simply
no way
she could have failed to notice that my trousers were now home to something easily rigid enough to have been used to lever up a manhole cover.

I’ll skip the bit that contains the details of the rest of the cab journey through Edinburgh’s sometimes tricky road layout, the paying of the fare, getting the key from hotel reception, and going up to George’s room—I’ll be buggered if I can remember it very well, and anyway, I’m sure you want to get up into the hotel room now only a little less keenly than George and I did then.

It was surprising how we didn’t talk, though. Well, I couldn’t talk, as you know, but George was almost completely wordless too. Things were assumed: George, when we arrived at the hotel, didn’t ask me whether I’d like to come up to her room, for example; she just walked ahead and assumed I’d follow her. . . . Okay,
yes
—not the greatest intuitive leap ever on her part, but you get the idea. There was a kind of pact of silence. When we got into George’s room and closed the door, making ourselves secret, it was even more apparent. I think it was because any words at this precarious point would have shattered the moment and the momentum, which felt like it was—which I
wanted
it to feel like it was—a momentum so heavy as to be inevitable. The likelihood was that (out of tension) one of us would say something overconversationally ludicrous—“Oh, they have this carpet at my bank,” or something equally tragic—or, even worse, give voice to the thing that must surely have been on both our minds: “God, what are we
doing
?” More than anything else in the world at this instant I didn’t want George to ask me, “Oh, Tom—is this wise? Should we be doing this?” I knew there was no way I could possibly have brought myself to give any reply that would have brought it to a halt: “Yes, you’re right. I’ll go now. Let’s put a stop to this before it’s too late.” There was
utterly
no way I could have wrestled such a sensible thing out of my mouth. But at the same time, I didn’t want to be made incontrovertibly complicit by
explicitly
brushing aside even the most cosmetic and shallow expression of doubt. I wanted this to be madness or, rather, to appear to be madness. And I think George also wanted to keep the icy clarity of words out of it. We were both far more comfortable with the conceit that we were temporarily insane, and our silence allowed us to maintain it.

George, kissing all over my face, backed towards the sofa and lay down on it, pulling me over on top of her. I cracked my shin on the corner of the table as I went past it; it really, really hurt, and I couldn’t have cared less. I lay on her, spread my fingers through her endless, overflowing, sin-black hair, and plucked at her ear with my lips. She arched her head over and began doing some seriously thrilling mouth work along my neck, sinking her teeth in beyond the point of affection but just short of the point of pain—precisely hard enough to bite through some neural tie and allow a nest of shivers to fall tumbling down my back. Then she reached downwards with both hands and pulled at the button on the front of my trousers. Her fingers slipped and fumbled and failed. . . . I decided to step in and help her out—after politely waiting (for the look of the thing) for about three eighths of a second.

I jumped up and began having a bad-tempered scuffle with my own clothes. Every button and zip seemed to be in favor of abstinence—I was, apparently, wearing celibate clothing. (Get
off
me, you fucker! Loosen! Undo! Tomorrow—I’m telling you now—it’s Velcro for the bastard
lot
of you!) Men, if they have their wits about them, should always take their socks off
first
—it’s an aesthetic thing. Socks, then top, then bottom. It goes without saying that
I
started with my trousers—pulling them down, then realizing that they wouldn’t come off over my shoes (which were now stuck three inches up inside my trouser legs), then trying to tug the whole shoe-trouser-underpants tangle off together. Finally (after moments when I scaled the heights of fury and moments when I plumbed the depths of despair) succeeding, I stood there, near exhausted but triumphant, with my trousers a crumpled ball in my hand, my shirt dangling too high for modesty yet too low for flamboyance, and one sock on. George, thankfully, didn’t really notice, as she had her own trousers to battle. She’d kicked her shoes away into two opposite corners of the room and whipped off her T-shirt with the easy, assured skill of a duchess, but her jeans were giving her a bit of trouble. They were pretty tight around the . . . well, around the everything, and she was having to lie on her back on the sofa and pull and wriggle herself out of them using quite a degree of effort. She was like a butterfly frantically trying to struggle out of its chrysalis. I stood, completely naked by now, and watched her finally pull the last ankle free: she hurled the jeans right across the room, like the limp corpse of a defeated monster, looked up at me, and smiled. She was naked, I was naked—we really ought to get closer together before we caught a chill.