Chapter Six

An hour after our first encounter, I was back in the office across the street, drinking my coffee and feeling queasy at the thought of all that caffeine, and wondering whether maybe she, too, drank too much coffee – secretly. When no one was looking. Then I realised that what I was really wondering was what she looked like naked.

In order to distract myself, I went to visit the guys in admin, whose porn collection was second to none: seriously raunchy shit that – God knows how – they managed to tap into at least a couple times a day. It was probably why they never got anything done: who would, with such an abundance of material to hand? And it was undoubtedly the reason behind the perennial air of seedy ill health that pervaded the entire department.

Wank often enough and it starts to show.

You begin to look like someone whose skin has turned grey from lack of sunlight – the stereotypical pasty bloke who spends his time hunched over his desk, intent on concealing the perpetual hard-on in his trousers and the enlarged images of shaved pussy on his computer screen while not having enough willpower to ‘simply delete the images and get some goddamn work done, for chrissakes…’ which is what his super-ego is telling him he should be doing.

I should know: I’ve been that guy, off and on, since I was about 14. Anthony, Gary, Alex – the admin guys might as well have been mirror images of me, so close was the sickly hue of their faces to mine.

Which is why my visits to the department – and I’m not overdramatising – so often felt like a homecoming of sorts. ‘These are my people,’ I would find myself musing. ‘This is where I belong: here, among the scum of the earth. Nerve endings, throbbing membranes, liquid conduits: that’s all we are. The only difference is that I can see it and they can’t.’

Not that that was strictly true. Because wank too much, and you start to lose perspective, no matter how self-aware you claim to be.

They weren’t so very far off, our forefathers, in claiming that playing around down there makes you blind. Fumble enough in the dark and your eyes grow small and squinty: you begin to grow feelers, and to rely on internal instinct to guide you forward. You get used to closing your eyes to better focus on your fantasies. You become impervious to outside influences.

You turn into a mole, and down you burrow.

And it wasn’t true that the admin guys were oblivious, or at least impervious, to the wickedness of their ways. Both Gary and Alex, you could tell – if you bothered to look, that is – were vaguely ashamed of the sickness that permeated their work space.

Gary’s bowed back and rounded shoulders veritably screamed self-loathing. And the fact that Alex never met anyone’s gaze for more than a brief instant, and even then succeeded in looking distant and disengaged, said it all: ‘I’ve never touched a woman before’ or ‘I’m a slave to fake pussy’ or ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman if I saw one’ – take your pick.

But I see all of this in hindsight.

Hindsight: backward sight, looking back. On the surface, perhaps, the view one sees when directing one’s gaze backward might appear less limited – or rather, less limiting – than that which one sees when looking inward – but the difference between the two is minimal, really. Both imply a reluctance to move: both can be equated to wearing blinkers.

Say ‘What if…’ ‘I now see…’ ‘If only I had…’ often enough and you might as well be masturbating. It’d be a helluva lot more honest. But then, I’m not a very honest person.

As for Anthony, I would like to think that his ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude and quasi-paedophilic approach to sex – namely, sleeping with his sister’s sixteen-year-old friends every other weekend when they came up to London and crashed at his flat – was just a thin veneer disguising a deep sense of self-disgust. Surely, at some remote level, even the most primitive and heedless of depraved men must be aware of his depravity?

Of course, what really distinguished me from the three of them – not that I realised the significance of this at the time – was that I had Janette.

Which meant that wanking wasn’t so very indispensable – not really. And that I was a superior being to the other three: a statement to which I returned whenever I needed to assuage the guilt following an unplanned-for afternoon session.

If you have a girlfriend – if you have a Janette – you can’t be that hopeless. ‘Thank God for Janette and her lacy ensembles,’ I thought. And, more to the point, ‘Thank god I’m normal.’

Thank God, essentially, that one could ‘come home’ for short stints, initially taking comfort from being among one’s own kind, but in the end congratulating one’s self for being different, and taking flight again to be where one really belonged: with one’s face buried in Janette’s tits.

The fact that the word ‘one’ might needn’t necessarily refer to me, at least not forever and ever amen, managed to escape me.

Like I already said: oh, how blind I was.

Like I already said: I’m not a very honest person.

And, unfortunately, dishonest people lie to themselves better than anyone else.