How to Build a Girl

  Al doesn’t move. He’s gone.

  I don’t feel sleepy at all. What I feel like, is having some more sex. Better sex. Sex with more of me in it. Indeed, with a smaller penis – one that doesn’t live in two separate postcodes at once – I can see how I would like to have sex pretty much all day, to be honest. The idea of sex only taking, like, forty minutes seems odd – like those people who only watch television for an hour each day. You just keep the telly on in the background, all the time, surely? IT’S TELLY.

  ‘Women,’ I think, ‘can keep the sex-telly on all day.’

  But Al’s asleep, and so the only sex I’m going to have is with me. I chat myself up for ten minutes, and then come – hard, like a car-crash, trying to be silent – next to him.

  I wonder how many dead men I’m going to come next to, in the next ten years, I think. How many times I will come alone, next to a still not-friend, whilst the pale ghost moon watches, through the window, and sighs.

  By the time Al wakes up, I’ve been an utter dick and tidied up his whole flat. I’ve put throws over his grimy sofa, emptied his ashtrays, and dusted his mantelpiece. I’ve also made a bread and butter pudding, out of all his stale bread – in three half-empty bags – and fashioned rudimentary air-freshener by boiling up a couple of half-lemons in a pan (as recommended in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management), to boot. What am I trying to do? Prove I’m useful, I guess, and friendly, and practical. That I know how to do things other than gracefully and consistently edge away from a massive penis.

  ‘Alright, love?’ Al says, wandering into the room – face and pyjama bottoms rumpled from sleep, and lighting a fag.

  ‘Fairies came!’ I say, gesturing around the flat with an expansive hand. I am sitting at the table, eating the bread-and-butter pudding. I hand him a spoon.

  ‘Fucking hell – amazing! Gonna finish this fag first,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, give us one – I’m dying,’ I say.

  I don’t want a fag at all – but you always smoke a fag when someone else is smoking a fag, even if you find the idea a bit repulsive. That’s how cigarettes work. The smokers all have to clock in together. There is an agreement.

  He gives me a fag. I light it, inhale, and go a bit light-headed.

  ‘That was … amazing,’ Al says, gesturing towards the bedroom with his head.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I never had any formal sex education. I’m entirely self-taught. From the … School of Hard Cocks.’

  I put my head on the table.

  ‘You alright?’ he asks, sitting at the table. ‘You’ve gone a bit … pale.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, woozily. ‘Just – having a little table-nap. It’s okay. Carry on.’

  Al goes over to the stereo, and fiddles around.

  ‘Here,’ he says, eagerly. ‘Do you want to hear our new stuff? I’ve got some demos.’

  Normally, the idea of hearing music that is still-forming – new music, music still hot from being inside someone’s head – would thrill me. I make that part of me say, ‘Fuck yes!’, whilst the rest of me goes, ‘No. I would actually not like to hear your new music. I feel very odd, and have one ear resting on your table. I am transmitting Signs of Unwellness. You might as well ask me if I want to have a go in your new rowing boat, and sail away across the Sea of Ink.’

  Al puts a cassette in the player, and I get to listen to my first ever rough demo of a band.

  I quickly realise why rough demos are never released. If I were reviewing this, my review would consist of the phrase ‘Bitty, muffled, half-formed bollocks’. This is a magic-ruiner – like being shown the tubes magicians’ rabbits escape down.

  ‘Wow, it’s so … thrillingly nascent,’ I say, which is a phrase Krissi once used when I asked his opinion of my dance style.

  The demo keeps on playing. Al stares at me, straight on, throughout – pausing only to close his eyes in dreamy appreciation during various, particularly awful bits.

  ‘Gonna have some backwards clarinets there!’ Al shouts out, at one point. Or: ‘Gotta fix that balance in the mix – Steve’s keyboard sounds a bit prickish.’

  With my head on the table, I feel increasingly odd.

  Up inside me, there is a bad feeling.

  At first it just feels a bit ‘tetchy’ – understandable, given the definitive, pounding workout it’s just been given. It’s been a hard day’s night, up my wedge. I have managed at least half a mile of cock in the last three hours. I’ve basically fucked all the way to the train station and back. Half a bus route.

  But, after half an hour, this tetchiness is definitely morphing into a palpable anger – it’s starting to feel like there’s a war going on up my fnuh.

  I think of pictures I have seen, in history books, of castles, at siege. That’s how it feels up there, now. Like something is attacking me from within, and the defences are failing, fast. Scared peasants tipping boiling oil over the ramparts. Livestock panicking. Horses rearing up, and neighing. Princesses hastily trying to leave, via a secret back-way – their tall, pointy hats jamming in my urethra. Lots of screaming.

  Al notices that I’m phasing in and out of the conversation – increasingly distracted by the urgent telegrams from my toilet-parts.

  ‘You okay?’ he asks, finally – turning the demo down.

  ‘Ah. Hmmmm,’ I reply, dashingly. ‘Just going to the loo.’

  I sit on the loo. There’s a mirror opposite – making this the first time I’ve ever seen what I look like on the toilet. Although I’m glad of the fresh and novel information, I have to admit, it’s not very sensual. I get the chance to observe my natural ‘hunching’ posture, and send a note to myself: ‘Note for future: unlikely to pull whilst on toilet. Would have fared badly in the days of communal toilets, in Rome.’

  I begin my tinkle, and have the exciting chance to watch my face contort in sudden and total agony. HELLO. This piss is apparently made of boiling poison. Boiling poison, a billion Lilliputian arrows, and a wildly rotating whirligig, made of Satan’s pin-like teeth. What’s going on? What is this malfunction?

  I haven’t had enough sex to know. Perhaps this is what ‘post-coital’ actually means. I’d always thought it meant ‘being a bit sleepy’ – but perhaps it actually means ‘feeling like someone has lit a bonfire made of swords in your vagina’ instead. Perhaps that.

  I come back into the kitchen, and sit down on the chair, carefully. I have been thinking hard.

  ‘I believe,’ I say, slowly, but in what I hope is also a statesmanlike manner, ‘that I have cystitis.’

  ‘Christ!’ Al says, alarmed. ‘Shit! Fuck!’

  Pause.

  ‘What is that, then?’

  ‘My mum gets it,’ I sigh. ‘She told me all about it.’

  I feel as teenage werewolves must, the first time they explain the hereditary nature of lycanthropy to their adolescent peers, the night after something awful happened with the full moon, and a friend’s cat.

  ‘It’s passed down from my mother’s side,’ they would say, apologetically – collar still hanging from their mouth, displaying a small bell, and a disc bearing the legend, ‘Tibbles’.

  But now: ‘It means it really hurts when you go to the toilet.’

  Al’s expression is that of a man trying to get a handle on wild, unfamiliar, oddly alarming information.

  ‘Well, that’s not too bad?’ he tries – clearly adding up how many times a day he urinates, and coming up with ‘less than ten minutes of commitment’.

  ‘Except, you need to go to the toilet all the time,’ I clarify. ‘Indeed – excuse me,’ and I go back into that cold, cold room, and sit back down again.

  Despite the desperate, bearing-down pressure in my bladder, I manage to squeeze out less than a teaspoon of what appears to be mulberry jam, heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius. The mirror allows me, once again, to see what I look like pissing out jam heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius. The answer is ‘red-faced and unhappy’.

  I hear Al’s voice, ou
tside the door.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asks.

  ‘You can come in,’ I say. ‘Three hours ago, you were bumming me sideways off a futon. The time for coyness is at an end.’

  He opens the door, and hovers, uncertainly, on the threshold. As the mirror swings away, I see my teary eyes above the hand-towel I am biting on, as if in the early stages of labour.

  ‘Shit,’ he says, helplessly.

  ‘No – piss,’ I say, like Oscar fucking Wilde.

  ‘Er, this sounds bad,’ Al said, fiddling with the door-handle, ‘but, erm … have I got it, too, now? Can you … catch cystitis? Is it like crabs or something? I don’t mind, like – I’ve had them before.’

  Oh God. Tiny crabs in this toilet. This is a bad day.

  ‘No, Al,’ I say. ‘You can’t catch cystitis. It’s an infection triggered by tissue trauma.’ I feel like Dr Chris on This Morning. So wise.

  Although he tries not to make it obvious, Al breathes a sigh of relief. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he asks – looking much happier.

  I try to remember what my mother does.

  ‘I need codeine, and cranberry juice, please,’ I say. ‘These are the medicines of cystitis. Codeine, and cranberry juice.’

  He immediately takes his keys and wallet off the chest of drawers.

  ‘Righty tighty hold on to your nightie – back in ten minutes,’ he says, slamming the door behind him.

  I pass another seven drops – each feeling like a burning coal slag – and allow myself, now alone in the house, to go, ‘AHHHHHHHH,’ in pain.

  There is a very particular noise women make when they have a pain in their reproductive chutes, caused by something unhappily trying to negotiate its way out. Years later, during childbirth, I recognise the self-same noises. I’m sure a musicologist could pin-point the exact pitching of ‘vaginal immolation’. Perhaps they could play it on a church organ, whilst a room full of women wince.

  Piqued by the noise, Al’s cat comes into the room, and sits – a few feet away – staring at me. Its eyes are like plates of pale jade. Its fur is a very beautiful tortoise-shell. I both appreciate it as an animal, and would also dearly like to wear it as mittens, tippet or hat. I would use the eyes as buttons. I want to wear this cat. This cat could be my best thing ever.

  ‘Male cats have spikes on their penises – so, beware,’ I tell the cat, leaning my head against the wall. ‘I read it in Your Guide to Cats and Kittens. One night on a hot tin roof, and you’ll be like this, too.’

  I stare at the cat. The cat stares back at me.

  ‘Or maybe you are a man-cat,’ I continue. ‘In which case – fuck you. Fuck you, you vagina-ruiner.’

  Al’s bathroom is in old, green-and-white tiles – probably Victorian, or Edwardian. The floor is cold, black lino. The air is ‘crisp’ – the radiator is stone cold. It has the feeling of a well-run butcher’s shop, or a larder. I feel like a truckle of cheese, on a shelf. I will not mould here.

  The bath tub is similarly old fashioned – a huge, cast-iron ship, with rust marks where the taps have dripped, for, perhaps, centuries. I start running the bath – water coughing out of cranky pipes. I feel warm water will make this all so much better.

  As soon as there’s one inch in the bottom of the tub, I take everything off, and sit next to the taps, swooshing the water over my poor, unhappy cunt, shivering. The relief is immediate. It doesn’t cure me – but the pain-relief is significant enough for me to stop fearing that I might actually start screaming. I know, instantly, that I must stay in this bath for many hours. This is the sole and only place for me now. There is no way I will be able to leave this bath, ever. How will I get back to Wolverhampton? Eventually, they’ll have to put me in one of those transportation tanks they use to relocate dolphins, from SeaWorld, and take me on a massive flatbed truck, up the M1.

  ‘A massive flatbed truck up the M1,’ I think. ‘That is a good euphemism for what has caused this pain. I’ve had a massive flatbed truck up the M1.’

  When Al comes back, half an hour later, with codeine and Ocean Spray cranberry juice, I’m up to my neck in water, listening to Screamdelica by Primal Scream, reading an old jumble-sale copy of Adrian Mole that I’ve found in his bedroom, and crying.

  These are not tears of sadness at all – just sheer agony.

  ‘Here!’ he says, handing me pills and juice, still looking quite awkward. I don’t know why. Yes, he’s broken a woman with his penis who’s now weeping in agony in his bathroom, but, you know. Surely this is what sexy grown-ups who have sex do? I presume this kind of thing happens all the time.

  I take the pills, and drink the juice straight from the carton, and continue to cry.

  ‘This is what the Manic Street Preachers’ song “Slash ’N’ Burn” is about,’ I say. ‘Also, possibly what Dire Straits were trying to warn us about in “Tunnel Of Love”.’

  ‘Do you want anything to eat?’ Al asks, still looking mortified.

  ‘Nah. I’ve drunk nine pints of water,’ I say. ‘I’m good. Full.’

  ‘Thing is,’ Al says, looking even more awkward. ‘Thing is, I’ve got that gig tonight.’

  ‘I know!’ I say. ‘IT’S WHY I’M HERE.’

  ‘And, erm, well. I said the support band could sleep here tonight. They’ve come down from Ayrshire, and I don’t think they’ve got anywhere else to go, and …’

  ‘Al,’ I say, putting an imperious hand up. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure that this will all be over in an hour and, when you return, triumphant, from your gig, I shall be sitting in the front room, wholly cured, bright as a button, mixing cocktails, for the aftershow.’

  11.48pm.

  I hear voices in the corridor, and then Al’s key in the lock. They are back, finally.

  I have had an interesting afternoon, and evening. By which I mean fucking terrible.

  When the codeine kicked in, I felt well enough to finally get out of the bath – as pale and wrinkled as ET, when Eliot and Drew Barrymore find him dead, in the stream.

  I lie around weakly for half an hour – pain is enormously draining – and then slowly get dressed, and prepare to leave the house. I should go home, really – although Al invited me to stay the night, things still feel pretty weird down below, and, besides, it’s fairly basic common sense to quarantine myself from his penis for the foreseeable future. It would be an insanity to live through the pain I’ve just lived through – and then fuck him again. Like Luke effortfully blowing up the Death Star – then rebuilding the Death Star, then stuffing it back up his vagina.

  No – I’m going back to my parents’ house, and my bed, and I’m not going to put anything up inside me again until at least after Christmas. This whole area – and I pass my hand over my pants – is closed for maintenance.

  I make it out of Al’s flat and as far as the shop on the corner before the pain kicks back in. Whatever the small, brave codeine pills have managed to do, they have now, clearly, been overwhelmed. I go very, very hot and then very, very cold, and go into the shop for a minute, to buy crisps, because I am somehow convinced they will make it better.

  Three minutes later I am hobbling back to Al’s house again with three bags of Ready Salted McCoy’s – thankful that I know he keeps the key under the mat. I, clearly, will not be going anywhere for a while. As I put the key in the door I do a bit of agonised wee in my pants, much like mice do. Would do. If they wore pants. Apparently mice constantly piss themselves. I’m scoping out a bit. I must stop thinking about mice.

  By the time Al comes home, at 11.48pm, I have been able to make some preparations for his arrival. Between 3pm–6pm, I simply wept, exhaustedly, in the bath, feeling very, very scopey. Then at 6pm, I sat in the bath and ate the crisps, as my tea – a useful tea, as it turned out, as, by then, I’d drunk so much water my salt levels were dangerously low, hence my confusion.

  After the bath crisp-picnic, I felt a bit more together, and finished The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and then The Growing Pains of Adr
ian Mole. Bored, I then found an extension cable, and dragged Al’s TV and video out onto the landing, and angled them so that I could watch his video of Withnail & I from the bath. I’d always wanted to see it, and, in the circumstances, found it inspiring – they were both taking so many drugs that I felt confident in my decision to take twice the recommended amount of codeine. I hauled the huge sash window open, and looked out over the rainy rooftops of Brighton, as I sat in the boiling bath, hair piled on top of my head and held with a knitting needle I’d found in the kitchen.

  Withnail and his I were fantastic company for the afternoon. Indeed, if it weren’t for the racking agony, I’d put that afternoon up there as one of the best of my life so far. By the time Withnail was reciting Hamlet in the rain to the uncomprehending wolves in Regent’s Park Zoo – broken, under his umbrella, with love – I was crying my eyes out, off my chanks on codeine, and smoking a fag.

  Hence, by the time Al returned, my fantastic plan. I was still definitely in too much pain to leave the analgesic effects of the hot bath – but, on the other hand, I acknowledged that Al’s guests – and, indeed, Al himself – would need to use the toilet, and would find a naked woman in the tub somewhat disconcerting.

  ‘Al!’ I cried – cheerfully, and woozily, from the tub. ‘Al’s friends! Come and say hello!’

  I heard them coming down the corridor – uncertainly – and Al saying ‘… not very well …’

  Al appeared at the door with the entire line-up of a band I later found out were called Plume – all in black, all looking quite worried.

  ‘Hello!’ I said, expansively – cigarette in hand. I felt so very warm and fuzzy.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ I said, ‘but I am temporarily confined to this bath, due to a woman’s agony. However, as this is, clearly, massively inconvenient to anyone who wishes to use the toilet, I am attired in my petticoat –’ I gestured to myself, sitting, in the hot bath, in my soaking wet petticoat ‘– and will temporarily vacate the bathroom, to stand on the landing, whenever anyone needs to use these facilities.’