Chapter 10
In which Lizzie and Kev develop their post-betrayal sex life and their understanding of some hitherto unappreciated facets of the depilatory process...
I tell Kev I’m going for a soak in the bath but, once shut in the bedroom, search feverishly for two boxes of wax strips left over from last summer’s depilation process (legs only).
It should be easy. Just start at outer edges and work in. Here we go - don’t seem to have a problem putting up with the excruciating pain, it’s all just too engrossing, though I do notice a marked increase in perspiration, perhaps stress induced. After ten minutes pressing and pulling however, a certain unfortunate asymmetry appears to be developing. In an attempt to even things up, I apply a very large wax strip to the right side of my pubic area, removing approximately 4 square inches of fuzz with one, stupendously agonizing, flick of the wrist. Coping badly with the resultant crippling burning sensation, I am forced to close my legs, sit up and consider what effect I’m actually aiming for. This would be one hell of a lot easier to work out if I had a mirror at a sensible height. Sneaking naked and almost hairless across the landing to the second bathroom, I pinch the small mirror off wall. Thankfully Youngest is fully occupied in the living room pestering dad to take him snowboarding in the dark, so no embarrassing encounters.
Back in the bedroom, I place the small mirror on a chair and sit on the edge of the bed to appraise the situation. Oh Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Pubic area resembles the pelt of very elderly animal suffering patchy hair loss due to chronic ill-health. Certain parts are quite red and sore, others just bald - and pale as only skin which has been kept in the dark for a very, very long time can be. Worst of all, my undercarriage still has plenty of hair and it’s LONG. Shit!! What a horror story.
Think Lizzie. You can’t let a small experiment like this defeat you!
Yes! I have a brainwave. It’s easy - soap everything up in the shower and get the razor out.
It takes a couple of minutes to render my patchy pubes baby’s - bottom smooth. Quite overwhelmed with relief, I pat myself tentatively dry and moisturize. Thank God! Although it all feels a bit strange to the touch - sort of clammy - once the knickers resembling a loose collection of tiny snowflakes are on, the effect is a vast, alluring improvement. Why have I let him make me wear boots, jeans and off-white, nearly up-to-the-waist cotton briefs all these years? And why did I believe him when he said spending on staying attractive was a waste of money? Twisting and turning in the small, waist-high mirror like an aspirant glamour model, phrases such as ‘possible re-growth’, ‘five-o’clock-shadow’ and ‘jet black, razor-sharp stubble’ don’t even enter my mind. Neither does the puzzle of why, if this feels and looks so good, every woman on the planet doesn’t do it every day?
“For fuck’s sake! What happened to your pussy?” “I sort of shaved it. What d’you think?”
“Oh my God! Why did you do that? Is it my fault? It is my fault, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, although, maybe I’m trying to find the new me… and, well, I bought a lot of new underwear…”
“How much?”
“About forty quid’s worth…” (Small lie here. We’ve all done it, haven’t we?)
“Bloody hell.”
“And, well, it’s all a bit skimpier than I’m used to so I decided to give myself a bikini wax and then, it went… I mean I got…a bit carried away.”
“Too right you did!”
“So, thinking about it, yes I suppose it is your fault. I bought the underwear because I don’t feel very womanly at the moment…”
This is not the sort of thing I would normally say, yet I suppose it is still the truth. Feels like a terrible admission of frailty, or the kind of confession which gives the other side (i.e. Kev) an insight into your weak spots so they can maltreat you the more effectively. He takes me in his arms and at the same time his hand strays down towards naked pussy.
“Lizzie,” he says. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t remember you ever not being a woman, or womanly or any other bloody thing…” he pauses. “Except for now, that is,” he says. “Right now you’re making me think you’re not old enough to have pubic hair and that really freaks me out.” So maybe he isn’t that into it? Kind of a relief really. But my hairlessness has rendered me super-sensitive. The sensations generated by his finger tips cause me to breathe heavily into his good ear. “How freaked out are you?” I whisper hoarsely. “Too freaked for sex?”
“I don’t know, we haven’t resolved anything…” he sounds scared, but I’m intrigued by the novel pulsations emanating from a bald crotch and not at all in the mood to debate the rights and wrongs of continuing our sexual intimacy within an oppressive fog of mistrust. No, I just want to goddam-well know what this is going to feel like.
I decide after my second orgasm in fifteen minutes that every woman ought to be encouraged to experience hairless sex.
Something else Jackie Magazine never told us.
“Fucking hell! It’s like razor blades against my balls!”
“Yes! Really! Isn’t it uncomfortable for you?”
“Em… well, to tell you the truth, it’s been a bit scratchy in my pants today…”
“A bit scratchy! Lizzie I think I’ve torn the end off my knob. Put the light on – I’m telling you, my bloody foreskin’s in tatters…”
I reach over and flick on the lamp closest to him.
“God Kev, it looks really raw…”
“Raw? Fucking hell! Fetch the nappy rash cream and Lizzie…”
“Don’t ever – I mean EVER – do that to your pussy again!”
He tentatively applies cream to the red raw parts beneath his foreskin while I wince for him.
“How long’s it gonna take to grow back?” he asks, and there’s a catch in his voice like he might cry.
“What if you have to wait for all the cut hairs to grow long and fall out? You know, the one’s whose ends you’ve sharpened. They’re gonna stay that sharp till they fall out, aren’t they?”
“God Kev, I don’t know! I’ll put VO5 intensive hair repair conditioning treatment or squashed avocado or something on them! Must be something I can do…”
“Bloody hope so or I’m not gonna be able to shag you till its all grown back, fallen out and re-grown again.”
I am cross. I’ve made a mess of things, I’ve been silly and now I’m not going to get any sex for ages. I go on the offensive. “Well lately,” I snap. “You haven’t been convinced you can keep it up without the stimulation of sneaking around behind my back to do it anyway! I suppose this is as good an excuse as any to lay off for a while as any. I know! Let’s rule it out completely! Let’s say we’re absolutely not going to have any sex at all. Touching, holding, massaging but not sex. For, er, three months. Yes, three, long, doing completely without it months…”
He has the duvet raised and is staring, meditatively. “Jesus,” he says quietly. “I could cut my cock to ribbons on that…”
I subside onto my pillows. The smell of nappy rash cream is a bit of a passion-killer. One of many at the moment. While he toys with the injured tip of his anointed penis, I decide to make matters worse.
“I’m worried that you have so much on your mind it’s affecting our love-making,” I tell him. He looks at me like I just said the fact that the moon is made of Swiss Cheese really disturbs me. Then he sighs.
“I suppose I can understand your thinking like that,” he says. “But then, you see, I’m worried that when we make love you’re worried about what, or who even, I have on my mind. Lizzie, when we make love it’s you I have on my mind – nothing else would work. I’ve never stopped loving you. You’re the great love of my life.”
I have to think about this for a moment. It sounds really fantastic at first, then, when it sinks in, and particularly under the circumstances, you have to wonder whether he’s trying to say he has lots of other smaller ones on the go.
“Kev,” I begin, after a short pause during which it feels like he’s thinking deeply himself. “You do realize I need to be the only love in your life. That’s the only thing that’ll work for me. Tell me, is this the first time you’ve done something like this – or have you done it before?” My heart jumps against the wall of my chest while I wait for a reply.
“I’ve never done it before,” he says slowly and then he ruins it all with: “But I have had offers.”
The ‘Haven’t we all?’ is just too obvious. I’m not seriously supposed to cut him a little slack on the basis of that remark, am I? I manage to speak – but very slowly on account of having to squash a large amount of exasperation.
“If we’re gonna get back together, I want you back body and soul, Kev. Body and soul, complete, feet firmly on the ground, everything. You understand?”
He’s getting irritated now. Shuts his eyes. I can tell he would really rather I accepted his capacity to take it elsewhere, accepted it as natural, inevitable, oh God, wholesome even. Yeah right. As if that’s ever, in nine million light years, going to happen.
“You do have me body and soul,” he sighs with his eyes still shut. “But, like, 97 per cent…”
97 percent? It echoes round the inside of my head like a loud-hailer announcement.
“97 percent? 97 percent? Kev, will you stop talking bollocks?”
“It’s bollocks is it?” and he says it in a particular tone, as though I am so wrong to challenge him on the point.
“Yes. It’s bollocks and I’m seriously fed up with it! Fuck 97 percent – I need a hundred to even consider making a life with you, a hundred and ten if I have to live in a tree surgery depot, iron your work jeans and take total responsibility for the kids!”
I wish I could tell him the rest of the stuff that’s pumping round my brain but it would come out like a lecture. Lecturing never works on the kids. The thing is, any intelligent man knows that when he takes a conversation down this sort of cul-de-sac he’s liable to unleash that swarm of female petty grievances that lurks just under the surface in all of us. Unleash it and get cornered and stung – possibly to death. I recognize however, that listing the many and various domestic tasks he doesn’t do, the many and various strands of our domestic existence he refuses to engage with that mean he has to repeatedly convince me he loves me via the 100 percent exclusive intimacy of the bedroom, would be a time consuming and possibly fruitless diversion from the important matter to hand. So I plump for a potted lecture on some of the more obvious facets of the fidelity issue which must have sailed right past him as he was growing up in that all-too permissive moral atmosphere of the Gates home.
“Listen Kev, as far as I can see, some people have bad relationships and they stray in an effort to get out of them – it’s not about the person they ‘fall’ for, it’s about escape. Some people, already in relationships that are important to them, meet someone else they’re attracted to and keep it under wraps forever because they know it would be foolish to wreck lives (and that includes their own). Other people make mistakes out of weakness at vulnerable times but they know, sooner or later, that they’ve made a mistake, usually confess it (tearfully), ask for forgiveness and, if afforded it, gratefully get on with the lives they genuinely cherish. Nobody, Kev, nobody announces they think they can hive off a small percentage of themselves for the purposes of extra-marital sexual adventuring and expects their other half to recognize this as a sensible, positive, honest, trust-building suggestion.” The kind of cold silence I’d anticipated descends.
“So what’re we going to do?” I ask after we’ve spent several minutes listening to wet snow flakes plopping gently onto the Velux.
“What?” he says quietly. “What are we going to do now that I’ve got to stop talking bollocks you mean?”
I turn to face him, interested. “Have you stopped talking bollocks?”
“It looks like I’ll have to if I’m going to stay with you.”
I’m a little surprised by the U –turn. Something close to hope jumps up inside me and starts to do warm-up exercises ready for the trials ahead.
“Yep. Yes, you will.” I tell him. “And what about the other stuff?”
“Sex Kev. Our sex life at this difficult time. I don’t really want to have to stop but I seem to have made rather a mess of things down there.”
Now he turns towards me. “Well, I don’t want to stop either. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than listening to you tell me what a shit I am. How about blow-jobs? Nothing but blow-jobs until it’s all grown back.”
“Fuck no! There’s no way I’m going near that with my tongue. My dick’s already a mass of lacerations – I don’t want to lose the use of my mouth as well. I’ve got a site meeting next week. Obvious serious facial abrasion would take some explaining. Just as well you ordered a vibrator, isn’t it?”
Is a vibrator the only answer? Is a vibrator any answer at all? Can Kev really stop talking bollocks that easily or will Lizzie still reach a point where she is required to administer firmer reprimands?
More answers - and more questions in Chapter 11...