One of our star new columnists recalls a memorable encounter.
I remember how he stood when I answered the door in Primrose Hill. Shoulders and arms fixed tightly at his sides, as stiff as the drummer boy ornament from The Nutcracker that dangled from our Christmas tree. Later on I would discover this was because he’d lied about his height on the app, though unfortunately for him, I’d gained a couple of inches too, in the shiny black heels that I’d put on over sheer stockings. Even though I was at home on Gloucester Avenue and not going anywhere.
(Two people, both five feet seven inches tall, projecting into a fantasy zone that apparently lived somewhere just above our heads.)
When he’d asked if he should bring red or white or sparkling, I’d been impressed. I’d been even more impressed when I’d simply typed back, ‘Yes.’ He said he was on it and would not let me down – which is how I became convinced he’d bring Champagne.
The Champagne became the proof, in my mind, that it was alright to do something that might not otherwise be alright. If he turned up at my house with Champagne, like I’d always dreamed of a man turning up at my house with Champagne, it would render the moral accuracy of this whole shebang undeniable. Because without it, I was a 48-year-old woman arranging to have sex with a 22-year-old man while my 13-year-old daughter was on a sleepover, and there was some maths in this that might just require some crisis management PR.
We were renting a basement flat in one of the grand old terraces from an octogenarian landlady, Dora, who lived upstairs. She had bought the whole house in the 1980s for a sum of money so small as to be homeopathic. It was now, of course, worth millions, though neither of us said that second part out loud. She was one of those posh old English birds with a jolly-hockey-sticks manner that I tend to fall for, forged in the fires of boarding school and VE Day and the imperative to get up and crack on no matter what. But after a while, I could feel her peering down at my downstairs life both figuratively and literally. The text messages would announce horror and disgust – her exact words – because I had not, for example, swept the basement steps hard enough.
As we had a December move-in, there was also the annual Christmas fair, at which craft stalls lined the high street and locals entered their prize pups in the dog show. The host took delight in announcing the most sought-after category, ‘the prettiest bitch in Primrose Hill’, saying it over and over again into the loudspeaker, before adding, with underlying hints of fury in her voice, that ‘there are a LOT of people around here who think THEY deserve this title’. The TV news journalist Jon Snow was then passed the microphone for a minute, excited to announce the winner. ‘I’ve never been allowed to broadcast the word bitch before,’ he beamed.
It was my daughter who’d helped me choose my photos for the dating app, not that I let her see when it started trying to match me up with men who, like her, probably lived with their parents. Men aged 19 or 21 or 23, whose profiles usually showed them in a gym, listening to rap music or with their face obscured by weed smoke.
This changed as the users of the app got older, with 40- and 50-year-old divorcés posting photos of themselves with their children or cradling a puppy. They were looking for women old enough that they would likely have developed a healthy distrust of men, but not so much distrust that they couldn’t be thrown into hormonal vulnerability by the sight of a cavapoo. Even if these men had wanted to meet a 48-year-old, which they didn’t seem to, they all looked exactly like the husbands my friends had recently split up from. And for good reason – many of them were the husbands my friends had recently split up from. Hi Dan. Hi Dave. Hi Dean.
So when Joseph’s profile appeared – 22 but clever, a graduate of a particularly interesting degree, and with the sort of international background that tended to make people grow up quickly – I lingered. He didn’t have any annoying pictures. He was cute, and said that all he was looking for was ‘someone to watch Nick Cage films with’. So I messaged him: ‘Moonstruck or the deal’s off.’ He wrote back: ‘The deal is so on.’ And now, Champagne.
Except, when I got him into my kitchen he proudly produced a bottle of five-quid corner-shop pisswine. I poured us some: it tasted of vinegar and tax returns, but at least had the redeeming quality of being the only alcohol ever to have a sobering effect on me.
Still, one of the blessings of getting to my age is that I did not say any of this out loud. Men, I have quite recently learned, have feelings too, and many of them are still little boys on the inside, with feelings that are easily hurt. In this case, it wasn’t hard to imagine the little boy inside the man – in fact, it was harder to imagine the man outside of the little boy, but I kept trying, valiantly.
We settled onto the sofa to watch Moonstruck, a film he’d never seen. Of course he hadn’t – it’s a love story for poetic old fools, made in the 80s, starring Cher, who was the other side of 40 at the time, and Nick Cage, who played her lover at the age of 23.
There’s also a much older character in it who knows her husband is cheating on her with a younger woman. She keeps asking people why men do it – is it to avoid death? Finally, someone confirms to her that yes, it’s to avoid death. So when the husband comes home she says to him: ‘I just want you to know; no matter what you do, you’re going to die just like everybody else.’
All of this was going on when Joe took my hand and held it. The first move. Usually I’m unable to concentrate if sex is buzzing around the room like a mosquito waiting to land – but I was intent that we’d finish Moonstruck. Yet what I remember is that his hand was as confident as my resolve. He held it firm, not wondering, not asking a question. Making a statement of fact.
Oh but I wanted him. I wanted him like I wanted a cigarette, like I wanted a nice drink. I wanted him like dumb luck, like a puppy, like a Christmas stocking I was too old for. Like I wanted an excuse, like I wanted a distraction. I wanted him like I wanted a firework to create a small explosion at the back of my life and then set the whole thing on fire.
But then I came back from the toilet and his brow was furrowed. His eyes were on my phone that I’d left on the table. ‘You keep getting texts,’ he said, ‘from Liz Truss.’
Ah.
Liz Truss had been Prime Minister of our country in the past couple of years, a job that she’d managed to hold onto for a whole six weeks before crashing the economy and being pushed out in disgrace. Joseph, meanwhile, had come to this country to study politics, moved into a student flatshare in Walthamstow, hooked up with some older MILF from a dating app, arrived at her house to find out that she’d written a book, had columns in various newspapers, lived on a fancy street (it is possible that I hadn’t told him it was rented) and now had Liz Truss on the phone. He looked stressed.
So I showed him the texts. A bunch of misspelled demands for money, a row of emojis too dense to decipher without squinting and a question about what time she should be home from her sleepover in the morning. ‘My daughter is in my phone as Liz Truss,’ I explained, ‘because she put me in hers as Boris Johnson when she first got a smartphone. Well actually it was Joris Bohnson. And for the first week we just texted each other abuse about lettuce and that joke’s worn off but, yeah, the names have stuck.’
‘I knew you couldn’t be friends with Liz Truss!’ he said, in the American accent of the international school kid who is from three continents, none of which are America.
‘That was fucking crazy,’ he said, looking really quite relieved. And then somehow the film was over and it was time for us to have sex, before which Joseph wanted to have a quick chat about a) consent and b) contraception. Apparently this is what they do now, the young? Which was awkward, as I for one certainly wasn’t ready for a man to behave in the exact way that feminists like me have spent decades demanding men to behave in. Fuck’s sake.
‘Worst comes to the worst,’ I muttered, ‘I can’t get pregnant anyway.’
He looked even more confused than when Liz Truss had been texting me.
‘But you have a kid?’ he said.
‘Well, yes I got pregnant nearly 15 years ago,’ I said, ‘in my mid-30s. But I can’t now.’
The recent graduate from one of London’s finest academic establishments looked even more puzzled.
‘I mean I still have periods,’ I said, ‘I’m not technically menopausal.’
This was getting worse.
‘I’m just too old,’ I finally blurted out.
And as I said those words, I felt them fall like the first snow to be seen by someone from a hot country. Someone who had not yet found out that, no matter what he did, he was one day going to die, just like everybody else.
