Read by Ben Crystal
First, there was Kate. We got married in the playground. Mrs Fletcher married us. She was friends with Martyn Eliot. Every day I flicked Martyn Eliot’s left earlobe, until there was a scar. But one day Kate stuck up for Martyn and I said that I hated her and that was the end of that. When I next saw her, twelve years later, she had breasts and was kissing a boy. The boy was Martyn Eliot. I felt a brief pang of jealousy but looked at her laddered tights and the legs they contained, which were over-muscular and curved like the brackets in an algebra question, and soon got over it.
Second, there was Brandy, from Dagenham. I was thirteen years old then. I caught sight of her through the window of the newsagent. After walking past the shop several times to make sure it was empty, I went inside, fumbled for change, bought the magazine without making eye contact and went home. In the magazine, Brandy was getting undressed. Then she was taking a long, soapy bath. Then she was applying baby oil. For a long time, she lived between the slats of the bed and the mattress, until my mother found her.
After that there was a series of girls. I sometimes didn’t know their names. There was the one on the bus in the morning, who had smiled at me once. There was the shy one who went to a nearby school, who wore glasses and blushed. There was a tall blonde, two years older, who rolled up her school skirt. She looked at me imperiously, like a queen. Years later, I’d see the same girls, except that they were women now, with thread veins, children, shopping bags, tired eyes, and wonder what I had once seen in them.
At around this time, I met Sarah at a friend’s birthday party. She was enormously fat. When she slipped her sweaty hand in mine and led me outside, I was repulsed but excited all at once. She placed my hands on her fat buttocks. Her tongue, which felt surprisingly muscular and smooth, lapped away inside my mouth. She pulled me towards her. My friends watched from the window and laughed. When she called my house the next day I told my sister to say I was out.
It felt like the start of something. I laughed with my friends about banged teeth and fumbled bra straps. Then I met Jessica, who had glossy hair and bright, enthusiastic eyes, like a healthy Labrador. She was friendly but didn’t seem interested in boys. I asked her to the cinema one Saturday anyway and on the way home pulled her towards me and we kissed.
We were a couple after that. I enjoyed sitting in her back garden that summer, drinking Coca Cola and watching the evening light playing through the sprinklers on the lawn and the way her breasts moved when she ran. At school, a little clump of her friends would giggle at me from the other side of the lunch hall. I ignored them. We were still together in the autumn. She wore longer skirts than the other girls and I thought of the way her calves swelled underneath them. Sometimes I saw the lace of her bra through her blouse but she politely moved my hand away when I tried to investigate further. I went to her house on Sunday afternoons to watch the little television in her room and thanked her mother when she brought us biscuits.
In the spring and early summer I got tired of waiting. She said she wasn’t sure but eventually gave in. Afterwards, she curled up against me. I was surprised at how big she looked, naked.
Some time later, we went to different universities. She would come to visit me sometimes and sometimes I would visit her. She complained that I never called. I said I had things to do. We spent uncomfortable nights on each other’s single beds. She said that she had put on weight. It was true that she had.
Then we lived in London. We both had jobs but I was more successful. She had grown heavier and her eyes were duller. I had never lived with her for any length of time and found some of her habits disgusting. I hated seeing her on a Sunday morning when she wore no make up and her hair was greasy and pulled back. I thought that her face was puffier than it had been, her skin sallow.
Then I met Laura. She was an actress and very beautiful. I liked the self-assured way she spoke and her slim, long limbs. That night I stayed with her and told Jessica I’d been with a friend. I thought that perhaps she didn’t believe me but she didn’t say anything, and I didn’t care.
After that I saw Laura every few days. We’d meet somewhere and then go back to her flat. I liked watching her undress and the coldness of her body when she slipped into bed. One evening she asked me about Jessica and I told her the truth. She said I had to choose between them and the next day I moved out of the place I shared with Jessica.
After that things were good for a while. I liked the care Laura took with her clothes and her appearance. But one night she put on a pair of pyjamas, which were ugly and baggy, the kind of thing a girl would wear at Guide Camp, and wouldn’t let me take them off. This happened the night afterwards and the night after that, too. I asked her if anything was wrong. She said no. But after that she wore the pyjamas more and more often and I said we should split up, and we did.
After that I knew for certain that people who said they were in love were only fooling themselves. Women didn’t stay beautiful forever. And if you left one woman for another you were as stupid as the dog which looks in the lake and envies the bone he sees his reflection carrying. The bone doesn’t exist and the next woman will be no better than the last.
One late summer evening I walked in the park near my house and saw Martyn Eliot, the boy whose ear I flicked at school. He was sitting with Kate, with the bracket legs. Kate was now his wife. They were eating a picnic on a rug. They had a baby who was pointing at a bird. They thought they were happy but I knew better. I hawked a greenie, spat on the ground, shook my head and smiled to myself and walked on.
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Girls, Girls, Girls by Jack Fox was read by Ben Crystal at the Liars’ League Brains & Beauty event on Tuesday 14 September 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London
Jack Fox was born in 1978 and works as a secondary school teacher. He attended the Royal Court Theatre’s Young Writers’ Programme and has had short plays performed at the Warehouse Theatre in Croydon and in various fringe theatre venues including the King’s Head Theatre in Islington. Bunbury Banter has also produced several of his short radio plays.
Ben Crystal is an actor, writer, and producer. He works in TV, film and theatre, and is a narrator for RNIB Talking Books, Channel 4 and the BBC. He writes about Shakespeare, while living in London and online at www.bencrystal.com
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