LITMIR.BIZ

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a couple of chapters, and they were filled with the most hideously embarrassing teenage wish-fulfilment imaginable.

      The cover on my card, however, was a thing of great beauty. It featured a brooding, saturnine version of me surrounded by what can only be described as a bevy of buxom beauties, fawning all over me, groping me, licking me, breathing me in. It was magnificent. Scantily clad they were. All adoring, imploring, and swooning. I was blown away by it, and I showed my gratitude by a) never writing the novel, and b) eventually ruining the card entirely with half a bottle of red wine. What an unbelievable klutz I am. Stupid clumsy sausage-fingered motherfucker. I hated myself for some time for that. But Keith forgave me.

      Five weeks ago, he bought me a bunch of sex toys and condoms and various other sexual accessories for my birthday. He knew about my quest to change my life and find the Woman of My Dreams, and this was his way of wishing me luck. In an accompanying card, he wrote: ‘You’ll notice there is no fleshlight here. That’s because you won’t be needing one. Go get ‘em, tiger.’ I was actually very pleased at the lack of a fleshlight, because if there’d been one, I would have had to try it, and the idea of making sweet love to what is essentially a synthetic vagina in a plastic tube is singularly depressing.

      A week after that, Keith invited me to spend Christmas with him at his girlfriend Patricia’s house—just him, her, and—stopping me feeling like a giant Christmas gooseberry—her two kids, Ben and Dina. I’m sure Patricia had a hand in the invitation too, of course, but the point is, in these and in countless other ways, Keith has shown me consistently that he cares for me, that he loves me, more than any other person I’ve ever known. This is why, at the weekend, it was a pleasure for me to help him paint the walls of the house he’s just moved into. Actually, ‘pleasure’ is maybe gilding the lily somewhat, but I was happy to do it.

      Keith’s new place is in Peckham, which I’ve always rather imagined as the armpit of London, if not the scrotum or even the anus of London, and for most of my life studiously avoided. The time I have spent there recently has done little to disabuse me of this, but yes, OK, I suppose I must confess—despite the gobbing teens, the astonishing amount of crap in the streets and the intoxicating, God-awful stench—it does have a certain charm of which I was hitherto unaware. Exotic fruit and veg stalls, for example, a preponderance of large African men singing religious songs in the street, and yesterday I saw a Christian steel-drum trio, just playing outside a mobile-phone shop seemingly for the sheer hell of it. I guess Peckham is kind of like Brixton, but without the overweening drugginess and concomitant sense of impending violence. Oh, and without the nice places to eat and drink.

      Keith’s new flat is in a state of some squalor and disrepair, a little like the entire area. It needs a lot of work, which is why we spent the weekend repainting his living room. Occasionally Keith would have to stop because of pins and needles in his right hand. Every twenty minutes or so, in fact. ‘Look,’ he’d say. I’d look but see nothing. Just a hand, not working. ‘It’s spazzing out,’ he’d say. ‘Something’s wrong with it.’ I’d shake my head. It would pass. He’d roll another joint.

      I tried to make the painting into a fitness thing, so that I’d feel less bad about the tobacco intake that came hand in hand with the joints, but I failed. I felt worse still on Sunday afternoon when I woke up with a cough like a canary in a coal mine. In order to assuage some of the guilt, I fell back on childhood rituals and for old time’s sake said half a dozen Hail Marys, three Apollo Creeds, and a handful of How’s Your Fathers. But it was useless. On Sunday I hated myself. And so I regressed, albeit briefly, and lay stagnant, unstable, like a veritable sack of couch potatoes, neither use nor ornament, propped up in front of the telly, and the last thing I wanted was to speak to anyone, so when the phone rang, I let it go to answer machine. Which is when I received the following voice message from Keith:

      ‘All right, mate. I’ve just got this terrible feeling that you’re sitting at home moping and feeling sorry for yourself and pissed off that you pigged out yesterday. If I’m wrong and you’re right as rain and off out celebrating your joy, then I’m happy to be so wrong. But if I’m right, then…I dunno. Cheer up, mate! You’re allowed to treat yourself once in a while, for God’s sake. It might not be good for your diet but it’s good for your soul. Your soul! Anyway, take care and speak soon…Oh, and everybody here loves you.’

      At which point, in the background, Patricia and her precocious children, Ben and Dina, all shouted, ‘We love you, Stanley!’ and laughed. ‘You see?’ said Keith. ‘Seeya later, mate. Give us a bell. Bye!’

      At the time, hearing the message made me feel even more pathetic than I already felt. The idea that someone knew me well enough to know that I’d be sitting at home in a nauseating heap, too miserable to even sob, let alone pick up the phone, upset me. Am I so predictable? Is my pathetic personality so widely acknowledged?

      But then, listening to the message again a few hours later made me shudder and shake with dirty great tears of something approaching joy. I think I may be slightly emotionally unstable. I think I may have to take that possibility on board.

      Then, before those tears had a chance to dry, Ange called and asked me if I fancied a healthy dinner some time. I said that I most certainly did and, immediately, I got back on track with the diet—apples and lettuce and grapes, oh my—and as my weight began once again to crawl in the right direction, I began to cheer up. I started whistling again. By the time dinner at Ange’s rolled around, less than a week later, I was positively chipper, not only at the prospect of a healthy meal, but also at the prospect of spending a little more time with Ange.

      I felt nervous as I was getting ready to leave the house. I shouldn’t have felt nervous. My belly was shifting around. It shouldn’t have been doing that. I couldn’t, I can’t stop thinking about how much I want Ange naked, on a bed, savaging me with her body, her cavities. I feel like I’m fourteen again, like I love her.

      Halfway through the meal, the conversation turned, as conversations often do, to sex. Ange couldn’t get over the fact that I’ve only slept with two people. I couldn’t get over the fact that she’s slept with over fifty, and none of them were me.

      ‘It must be worse to have slept with two than with none at all,’ she said sensitively. ‘Because you know what you’re missing, don’t you?’

      ‘Hmm, yes. That’s very true,’ I replied. ‘Thanks for ramming that home.’

      ‘But how do you cope with the frustration?’ she wanted to know.

      ‘What makes you think I cope with it?’ I replied.

      We talked about Ange’s sexual partners, her predatory maneating ways. I asked her what kind of men she liked best. She asked me what I meant. I said, ‘For example, short men or tall men?’ She told me tall men. ‘Small men or large men, cockwise?’ Large men. ‘Black men or white men?’ In response to which Ange informed me that she didn’t think she could ever sleep with a black man. Naturally, I called her on this. Specifically, I called her racist. Naturally, she denied it. ‘I just don’t find them attractive,’ she said.

      ‘But that’s idiotic,’ I replied. ‘It’s like saying, “I don’t find Taureans attractive” or “I don’t find lawyers attractive.” There are as many different types of black men, as many different black “looks”, as there are fish in the sea.’

      ‘I don’t fancy fish either,’ she said, stupidly.

      ‘Fair enough,’ I countered cleverly. ‘But to say you don’t fancy black men is like saying you don’t fancy freshwater fish, or you don’t fancy bream, whereas with other fish you have no problems. Or, in other words: you’re a racist.’

      ‘I can’t believe you’re calling me that,’ she said at this point, seemingly on the verge of becoming quite upset.

      ‘I can’t believe you’re being so overtly racist!’ I cried. ‘OK, let’s calm down here,’ I suggested, more to myself than to Ange. I poured some more wine. I drank some more wine. ‘What would you think,’ I said, ‘if a black man said that he refused to sleep with white women, that he just didn’t fancy white

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