Chapter 2
Then
It’s the year 2000 and summer here in London is almost over. I’m fourteen. I’m trying really hard to be a grunger right now but I look like an uncooked meatball in a Foo Fighters t-shirt and a spiked choker. Probably because I’m addicted to Dairylea Dunkers and those waxy orange rolls of Bavarian smoked cheese. (I’m also trying really hard to grow out of my lip-sniff habit and everything has to be an even number otherwise we die, but that’s by the by.) My soft little universe is meant to be opening up, only just getting started and yet, because of the millennium, there are rumours that the world is going to end (in which case my lip-sniff habit really isn’t that big a deal). It hasn’t as of yet but I still have reasons to believe it’s true.
We’ve spent the weeks not on a beach in Spain or camping in the New Forest like the other girls in my school but packing up our life into boxes. We’ve just left our cosy cocoon ground-floor Brixton flat, where we were all ‘living in each other’s pockets’ happily, or so I thought. Apparently, it wasn’t big enough for three kids. Violet, Sonny and I have outgrown the overflowing cupboards and beaten down, Biro-doodled sofa, frame buckled from being tickled, performing shows and playing dens. It was noisy and restless. But it was ours. Now it’s time to break free and become butterflies but I miss the flat, terribly. I don’t like change at all.
My parents decided to take a gamble on a doer-upper, only without any money to doer-up: 251 Palace Road. The house looks like Count Olaf’s (only, the series of unfortunate events is now my life.) My mum, Antonia – as if carved from stone, with the physique of a shot putter, almost tall enough to block an entire doorframe, loves the three of us fiercely – is a practical person in need of a project. My dad, Rod – a two-pints-after-work mechanic, who listens to Motown all day long and never asked for this (meaning how his life has panned out) – just wants an easy time. Up until 251 Palace Road, they were a team, a force against the world – Bonnie and Clyde, Barbie and Ken, Kermit and Miss Piggy – though maybe now Mr and Mrs Twit would be a more accurate comparison.
But let’s not make things depressing. It’s actually quite a good time to find me because I have a boyfriend. Or that’s what I’ll tell anyone who will listen on our first day back at least.
‘Hey, guys, so, if you’ve been wondering why I’ve been quiet this summer holiday, well, I’m not exactly sure how to say this without making you seethe with jealousy but I now have a boyfriend. So if you notice any elevations of maturity in me, that’ll be why.’
The reason I can say I, Ella Cole, have a boyfriend is because I now have ‘proof’, in the form of a photograph, AKA gold dust. Said photograph was found – hear me out – in the bottom drawer of a rickety old dresser that Mum picked up on the roadside saying TAKE ME. The photo is of a teenage boy – maybe seventeen – I KNOW! – with blond curtains. The photo is of a total stranger but he’ll do. I stuff the photo into my hoodie pocket. In the photo he’s sleeping, almost like I took the photo with my own disposable camera one lazy morning in bed and got the photos developed at Woolworths, paying extra for the twenty-four-hour service. Even on the grainy matte Kodak print I can see how juicily surfaced and poppable his spots are – like heads of seals emerging from the ocean. But imperfections are good; they make my boyfriend obtainable, realistic. The brutal reality that I’ve not even had one snog in real life is quite irrelevant. I guess what I’m saying is: he’s a lie. I suppose it’s quite sad if you look at it like that, so let’s not look at it like that.
My journey to the local girls’ school is a lonely half-hour walk down the Brixton back roads, ample time to fixate on my phantom boyfriend (his name is Jason now) and invent our summer love story in preparation for this morning’s recital.
Me and Jase. Jase and me. We are so in love. Yes, I know I never mentioned him before but that’s because I met him on MSN messenger, silly billies, and he lives in Slough. His great-grandad owns the Cadbury chocolate factory so when we get married I’ll get unlimited Crunchies. He’s going to get me a gold Argos ring with our initials engraved. We go to Thorpe Park and queue up for the teacups and people are jealous of our young love as we inch along in our spotless matching shell toes. Tongues tied in a red-hot lasso of Dr Pepper, Carmex and sour pineapple gum. He wins me one of those massive teddy-bears holding a heart in its paws with the words stitched I LOVE YOU. We plunge down the log flume together and I sit in-between his open legs, leaning back, casual, as we splash down the ride, blinded by the flash of the camera – but still posing – so we can get it printed onto a keyring so I can tell everyone that’s my boyfriend, Jase. We go to the cinema and I get fingered. Pretty easily actually because in the fantasy I am wearing those Adidas tracksuit bottoms with the poppers that Mum won’t buy for me. We celebrate in KFC. After that great day, I get to lose my virginity to K-Ci JoJo’s ‘All My Life’.
But alas, my fantasy takes an unexpected turn. I fall pregnant and have to quit school, but I’m happy at first because I hate school anyway. I work in Shoe Express, which is a dream because it is my favourite shop of all time, but it’s not easy with our baby – Topanga – strapped to my chest, which is especially annoying when it comes to sizing people’s feet and eventually the novelty of employee discounts on sexy-ish school shoes wears off once I realize all the shoes at Shoe Express are made in the back room with a glue gun by a man called Keith and I have no reason to wear school shoes because – oh yeah – I don’t go to school any more so Jase could follow his dreams of just going to the Go-Kart track all day long until one day a girl with a push-up bra is having her eighteenth birthday party there and he fancies that girl instead and I’m left alone with Baby Topanga.
Eugh. I hate it when a fantasy goes off-piste.
I scrunch the photograph up and throw it in the bin. Those are minutes I’ll never get back. I hate Jason. I feel so used and dirty. Like I’m wearing someone else’s knickers. That’s the thing about lies – annoyingly, you just can’t lie to yourself.
I look at my mood ring to access my feelings. It glistens a yellowy amber, which can 100% only mean absolutely one sure fire thing … mixed emotions.
Oh.
The symptoms: uncertainty and nervousness.
Classic.
At this highly academic girls’ school I am in bottom set for everything from English to Science, which does absolutely nothing for my self-esteem. I know I only really got a place because Mum wrote some convincing sob story letter about how good I was at creative writing and stapled some of my scruffy handwritten poems to the admission form. One was about a fading beauty queen with feet like dead dormice. The other was about imagining if I had cancer.
I am exhausted by the teachers not giving me extra time, not making me their passion project or being excited by my potential. For all they know, I could be the expert they never knew they had who fosters a particular skill for finding rare fossils or accurately counting how many sweets there were in a jar just by glancing at it. Turns out, nobody wants to see my doodles and drawings and letters. My – don’t laugh – designs. One, a skin-tight white boob tube dress with a barcode down the side reading 2 XPEN5IV3 4 U. Cool, right? Or if somebody invested the time to teach me the guitar, I could turn my poems into songs for my band, ‘Skipped Disk’ (which is a hilarious and clever pun on the spine-injury slipped disc, and on the CD itself will be an X-ray image and of course the disc will inevitably skip – as all CDs do – and then the joke will really pay off. It’s really fucking cool actually).
‘We cultivate talent,’ they say. Only they don’t mean talent-show talent; they mean please be a genius at stone-cold maths or create something ‘outstanding’ like an entire grandfather clock or a 3-D printer you designed on your lunch break that goes on to make a chamber to slot inside somebody’s dying heart. Being great at chemistry, cricket, gymnastics, classics, choir or painting a still life of fruit tumbling out of a goblet also counts as talent – not, spending all of double science giving the girls a manicure with a pot of Tipp-Ex. Well, they’ll be sorry when I start my ‘collective’ and earn critical acclaim by creating gigantic, distressed canvasses with progressive art upon them, which will basically be a blank canvas with a word like BITCH scratched in massive letters and I can charge twenty grand for that one. No doubt they’ll be begging me back to give a motivational talk on Careers Evening and I’ll say no.
Aoife, my best friend, is the smartest person I know and for Aoife there is no telling where school stops and home begins. Living is education. Her interest for life is infectious and inspiring. All lethally supplied in heaped unfiltered doses by her South London hippy parents, who hide nothing from her. This level of honesty is refreshing and I appreciate it, as my own parents seem to be in on some hilarious in-joke of despising each other for the past year whilst plummeting us into debt and despair and not uttering a single word about it. I reckon the only reason they’ve got the bigger house is so they don’t need to be near each other. My dad always scuttling off to sleep on the spare bed in his hideout. Separate from Mum.
Instead of passive-aggressively slamming the door off the hinges, Aoife’s parents discuss everything from politics to psychology, the economy to engineering, sex, drugs, to the plot of Eraserhead, over reheated sweet potato at the dinner table, where Aoife’s point of view is regarded and valued. Her parents actually listen to her as she holds the floor, debating, laughing at in-jokes about politicians and passing around a witty short story in the Guardian she’d scissored out over the weekend. Even The Lodger joins in, pulls up at the table to throw in their twopence and I watch on in awe as it all sails over my head and wonder why my potato was ‘sweet’ and orange and not white. I stay the night, brain beating, absorbing, learning about Mad Cow Disease and the Labour party and Flat Feet. And in the morning Aoife and her whole family (+ Lodger) are off on the 159 bus with a packed lunch (including two-litre bottles of carbonated water), to visit some free exhibition at an art gallery on Human Rights, eat a slice of vegan gluten-free cake at the Buddhist café, swing by a feminist protest outside the library and make it home in time to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But was Aoife our school’s kind of smart? Probably not.
Ronks is book smart; often we need her to explain to us in slow-motion what the teacher just said. She’s clever enough to go Cambridge but she brushes me off and says, ‘Ella, don’t be mad.’
Bianca is the most rebellious of us. She’s the oldest and third tallest in our year group; I’m not sure if this fact is related but she also started her period a year before everyone else – so, like in a cavewoman sense, she’s the leader of the pack. And her surname starts with the letter ‘A’ so she’s first in alphabetical order for everything at school, and because of this, she gets whatever she wants. However, Bianca’s a bit too weird for her own good and rather than being the boss of everyone, she chooses to only micromanage a small group: us. And we let her because we are scared and weak. Bianca is constantly in detention for dying her hair different colours and getting extensions, wearing her skirt too short, not covering her nose piercing with a plaster and smoking the cigarettes she steals from her dad’s duty-free cartons, whilst the rest of us are eating Flumps. Bianca lives with her dad, who will always buy us a takeaway if we annoy him enough – but he’s also the strictest of our parents. Then again, I would be strict too if my daughter was Bianca. But Bianca says it’s the other way round; he makes her act out because he’s strict.
Then there’s Shreya, who says her insides are glow-in-the-dark because when she was a baby she drank a glow stick. Sometimes she has to run out of class crying – mostly during tests – because her parents died tragically in a car crash. But I saw her parents at her fourteenth birthday and they looked perfectly fine. She then said the car crash was just a premonition.
And The Twins. Who are, you know, posh and twins.
And apart from each other, we are ignored.
The girls at school really aren’t our species anyway.
On the plus side, there are no boys, which, at fourteen, is probably a good thing for us because we really fancy them. So that means we can sit back with our skirt buttons undone and eat as many KitKat Chunkies as we like.
The art of ‘self-defence’ is very much a part of our curriculum, taught in the sports hall by a teacher called Miss Eugenie who presents herself as a handsome fairy-tale prince. Basically, she is lanky with a Leonardo DiCaprio jawline, razor-sharp blonde haircut, piercing green eyes and a love for Eighties rollnecks.
Miss Eugenie tells us not to walk down alleyways alone, not to sit on the top deck of a bus alone, reminds us that perverts could even look like old women, so now on top of being scared of every passing person we must also not discriminate or underestimate our abusers. Must trust no one.
She says, if we’re ever threatened in public, we are to stand up like a Girl Guide and shout at the top of our lungs, ‘EXCUSE ME THIS PERSON IS BOTHERING ME!’ Or better still, ‘FIRE!’
‘Passers-by might ignore a girl crying out for help, but they won’t ignore the threat of a fire!’ She holds her finger up and looks at us powerfully. ‘Trust me.’ She winks, like she’s had to shout ‘FIRE!’ more than once in her lifetime.
One time, there is a man who flashes at us. He sprints manically across the field, letting his liberated willy flap from side to side, wagging and spirited like an Alsatian’s tongue out of the window of a back seat of a car speeding down the M23. And we are instructed to get inside, girls! and the doors are bolted. Despite the squealing, we are not really scared of this man, because he is just one quite small naked man, and we are 700 girls in bottle-green uniforms with facts about the periodic table that would bore an erection to smooshed banana quicker than one could say titanium. Instead, we are kind of thrilled by the experience, excited to be out of maths. We wait in the hall to quieten down, where the view is of a different organ altogether – that being … an … actual organ.
The whole thing feels very olden days, like nuns flocking inside some church hall, waiting for Dracula to pass. The organ makes that visual really pop.
Instead, we talk, we rehearse the ‘Macarena’, try to master the CrazySexyCool of TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’, braid each other’s hair, take turns to try on Zeniyah’s new Baby-G watch. We learn that a sneeze is one eighth of an orgasm and then try to make ourselves sneeze by pinching and sniffing the dust under the stage curtains. We scrounge, like gulls, smoky bacon Wheat Crunchies and gulps of Apple Tango and squabble over which of us the man was looking at, flattered (wait… annoyed? Confused? Sickened?) that any man ever even recognized us as girls.
‘Apparently,’ says Cherise, ‘the flasher left a porno mag in the school field with a yellow Post-it note attached to it saying if any girl wanted to “show themselves” to him, he’d give them ten pounds.’ The magazine was a ‘brief’. Stage directions – this is what he had in mind. I never get to see the magazine or the note but I do wonder how the transaction would work, in a practical sense.
Would he really just hand a ￡10 note over?
Miss Eugenie ups the self-defence classes after The Flasher. She does spontaneous routes of the school, working her way down the corridors like a hound, pressing down on the metal handle without a ‘come in’ from whichever teacher is teaching, and begins instructing an impromptu combat class to catch us off-guard. She is always hovering, switched on, like an avatar on stand-by in a computer game. Chest heaving, blood pumping, on the look-out for danger …
‘Girls, a fox has regrettably sniffed out the henhouse and it is only a matter of time before he strikes.’
We shriek and flap about on cue like the flustered hens we are.
Oh, she can’t wait for this fox of a man to strike so that battle can commence. But he never returns again.
Once, a boy called Maximilien, a name meaning The Greatest, is brave enough to take part in an exchange programme and comes all the way from classy France to be a student at our girls’ school. For two whole weeks a real-life actual boy takes RE with us. Geography, History, Science. Even PE with us. One boy versus hundreds of us. It dawns on me that if Maximilien tried hard enough, he could possibly potentially get ALL of us pregnant and we could recreate a whole community without ever needing another man ever again and that is both a startlingly scary and powerful thought. How far can sperm stretch?
Maximilien is just a boy, any boy, and we perve the absolute life out of him: gawping, winking, pecking, poking, frothing at the mouth. All every girl in our whole entire school cares about is which one of us Maximilien will choose to be his bride. We aren’t sophisticated enough at this point to understand that attraction comes into it, that actual consent comes into it. That girls might not even be his preference whatsoever. Because for us, this isn’t about Maximilien; it’s a case of: whoever gets chosen to be the wife of the exchange student is, by default, Queen of the Fucking School. All hail.
It’s easy for me. One of the perks about not being pretty is that Life Olympics such as these seem to simply pass me by. I don’t have to enter them. Like, there is just NO point. I can hold my hands up from the start and say, I’m out and just write about the chaos I witness in my notebook instead.
Total pandemonium ensues. The popular girls start wearing gloss on their lips as thick as mayonnaise, rolling up their skirts, stuffing their bras with balled socks and pads of tissue. This Maximilien must think he’s died and this is his heaven – if angels all wore bogey green and had greasy fringes and retainers they had to take out before they ate their tuna melts. At first he rocks it. For a minute Maximilien, the boy with the name like a new chocolate bar, lives up to his namesake – he must really feel like The Greatest. But then the pressure, prowling and, let’s be honest, harassment clearly overwhelms him. His once almost-starched popped collars begin to droop, his shoulders to cower. Towards the end of week one Maximilien lunches by himself or with teachers who shield him and his panini like bodyguards. Maximilien is a trophy. A sword in the stone. And the girls are on odysseys driven by throbbing hormones and hysteria. He begins to creep, sheepishly, around the corridors like a quivering lamb, avoiding the growls of hungry lions (I am an alpaca) to the safety of the accessibility toilet – the only toilet he can use without fear of being spied on and terrorized. The door pounds, the handle jiggles, perverted whispers smoke him out through the gap in the door, or a girl just bursts out from behind the hand-drier with a ‘gotcha’.
I mean this is not OK. This is fucked up.
He counts down the days before his release and then he RUNS out of that school, boy, probably not breathing a single sigh of relief until his plane zooms off into the sky and the drinks trolley is coming round.
Some girls have boyfriends who hang around outside the school on bikes. Or even inside cars. The teachers do not like this. Boys are a DISTRACTION. And girls like Aoife and me, The Unchosen, walk past Boyfriends like they’re a road accident, minding our own business, but craning our heads to steal a look. The Chosen girls look at us with screw-faces like we are after their parking space or table by the window at Pizza Express.
Some of the girls aren’t interested in boys. Yet or at all. Some hold hands freely with other girls. Sometimes, I hold Aoife’s hand too, but I don’t get any fanny tingles.
As I walk out of the school drive towards the gates and I see the boys, I can almost trick myself into thinking that maybe the boys are waiting for me. It’s a sad fantasy daydream game that occasionally my dad wakes me out of with the horrible honk of his battered old Saab.
Or worse – The Vespa.
Nothing wilts my heart at much as Dad arriving to pick me up from school with his Vespa. It means having to lift my actual leg up, flashing my bobbly knickers enveloped with potentially a sticky sanitary pad, wings spread to the entire world, my heavy book bag digging into my bum, a badly fitted helmet rattling on my head and quivering all the way back home with Dad ordering me to ‘lean in’ with him at the corners.
You mean lean in to death, Dad. To having my face shaved off by a pavement.And he wonders why he has a hernia.
I come home, leg hair windswept, muscles taut and tense, eyes streaking, freezing cold and needing a hug.
On Fridays I walk home, taking my time winding down the back roads, sometimes with Aoife; then, in my freezing cold attic bedroom, we talk about boyfriends.
Aoife thinks boys are terrific. We say terrific because it’s the one word my little sister Violet’s Barbie doll says when you push the button in her spine: ‘terrific’. It’s terrific that Ken has cheated on her with the Pocahontas doll, that she’s been trapped in the shoe cupboard or dragged around by her hair by Sonny. ‘Terrific, terrific, terrific,’ she announces like a psychopath.
‘Something in the Way’ plays on repeat and Aoife lies on her back staring up at my DIY wallpaper: cut-outs from magazines, printed song lyrics and photographs. Her glasses steam up and she sighs, ‘Ohhh, Elbow,’ her nickname for me because once a teacher asked me what Ella was short for and Aoife said, Elbow and now it’s stuck. ‘I just really want a boyfriend BADLY. Don’t you?’
‘So bad,’ I say to fit in, but secretly I’m frigid as hell. I miss Hibjul, my boyfriend from nursery. He was such a decent bloke.
In truth, I don’t think a man or intimacy is what I’m after right now, given that my idea of great physical pleasure is diving into the massive rolls of oversized carpets that hang like a giant’s mangle at Carpetright (because obviously an entire pixie universe is to be found back there). That’s the kind of out-of-body utopia I’m trying to get to but I’m worried that if I don’t at least meet a boy up close and personal any time soon that I’ll be like this forever. Rolling into carpets whilst my mates are getting married.
‘How the hell do we get one?’
‘Maybe our blood isn’t sweet enough?’ I offer.
‘Go on … ’ Aoife takes it like I’ve only gone and cracked it.
‘Mum says the reason mosquitos don’t bite me as much as Violet is because I don’t have “sweet blood”. Maybe it’s the same with fit boys? We repel them? Maybe my blood’s just too – you know – savoury from eating all that smoked cheese and turkey wafers?’
‘True. So, what you’re saying is that we just need to eat more chocolate biscuits?’ Aoife takes on the Old Wives’ hack, until she remembers: ‘Oh no wait, I always get bitten by mosquitos.’
I won’t lie, my heart wilts at the thought of Aoife’s blood being all Snapple sweet. I bet mine’s all briny like the gross juice they put around tinned tuna.
‘Where are all the boys?’
Where is the boy zone?
Boys cut from the metre rolls of Boyfriend Material are scarce.
They hang out by the ice rink. By the Odeon Cinema. By the chicken shop. By the bus stop. Sometimes by the train station. A lot in the park.
Usually in packs. Unapproachable. Eating. Smoking. Riding. Skating. Laughing. Walking. Talking. Breathing.
So how does one go about catching a boy? Hmmm. This is tough.
All of the suitable boys ignore us. It’s like they think we don’t exist. They don’t even acknowledge us – their eyes glide over our heads like they’re looking for their train on a timetable behind my face. Like we’re getting in their way.
As an experiment, I try crushing on Mr Paul – the IT teacher, who we all think is hot because he’s not ancient like the others and lets us call him Mr Paul. If you squint, he looks like Beppe di Marco off EastEnders. But Grace says she once saw him lift up his balls and dollop them over the back of Angelica’s chair like two tinned plum tomatoes. So it’s a no go.
It’s bothering me now; it’s grinding my gears that since leaving primary school – other than my baby brother Sonny (who’s six), Kurt Cobain and AJ McLean from Backstreet Boys fame – two of whom I have only met in my dreams, both of whom I reckon live in America and would definitely know that, if they were to ever fall for my unobvious beauty, they would instantly be pinned as paedophiles, and one of whom is sadly dead – I know NO boys, not even to test the water with.
My view becomes skewered; I try to broaden my mind. Why do I have such a block? Really try. I kiss Bianca in her bed but feel only that same warm satisfying gooey feeling as sharing a whole tub of strawberry cheesecake ice cream with her. The girls’ school has left me with a warped unrealistic altered view of the world. I no longer know what is attractive to me. I’m underdeveloped, like a half-baked brownie. I don’t know who is handsome or who isn’t. I don’t know who to fancy or even how to do it. How to go about measuring my desire in appropriate doses so it doesn’t come out in one big pour. I don’t trust my love compass or radar. I start to fancy everybody – Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Sonic the Hedgehog. Help me, I fancy a hedgehog! The tiger from the Frosties box – yeah, Tony. The rabbit from the Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel advert. Rufio from Hook. I fancy one of my Barbies. At one point I fancy a member of Slipknot. A mask. No, not the willy-nosed one, but still. A mask. Great – now I fancy a horrible scary mask.
At one point I fancy Moe, the grey-haired barman from The Simpsons.
Do I fancy Outlaw, the shiny black horse at the stables at the top of our road?
He’s so muscly. Rebellious. Commanding. Is he sexy? Do I fancy Outlaw the horse now?
A touring Theatre Company visits our school. I whisper to Mia Bennett, a girl in my form who I mistook for a comrade, that I a bit fancy the woman playing Peter Pan. But ‘like as Peter Pan though’, I make clear, even though it isn’t entirely true: I like everything about her, especially that she is a woman playing Peter Pan with her shimmery tights. But it’s too late; Mia’s face fires up like a fruit machine, oh for fu— She’s hit the jackpot with this one and before I know it a lazy unoriginal rumour is spreading that I’m ‘lesbians with Aoife’.
Oh, of course I’m ‘lesbians with Aoife’, Mia. There has been a rumour going around that I’m ‘lesbians with Aoife’ since I was about seven years old. Plus none of us, Mia included, is very popular so nobody really bats an eyelid.
Anyway, that boat sails, and I watch the Peter Pan tour bus fly away to the next lucky school on tour for Peter to break more hearts.
I need to realign my standards if I am ever going to get lucky in love. And that means: get realistic.
Even when practising the art of fancying in hypothetical scenarios – in fantasy – I focus on keeping it achievable, even when I’m pretending, to avoid disappointment. I never set my sights on a lead singer or main character. I leave the heart-throbs to the pretty, popular girls. Perhaps it’s also a snobbery of mine about not wanting to go with the crowd and to be alternative. A self-conscious way of carving my own lane. My subject of desire has to be the underdog, the odd one out, the weird cute one, the dark horse. (Or, failing that, an actual horse.)
It doesn’t take the smartest cookie in the cookie jar to know this all stems from a fear of rejection. A fear of humiliation. I have this quite cool way of switching off my attraction and attention to anybody if they aren’t interested. I can make myself immune to boys if I choose, like a puppy without a scent. It’s a way of protecting myself whilst keeping up with the pack.
There’s a new thing going around at school where an attractive person, instead of ‘fit’, is described as ‘spicy’. It’s gone one step further where there now seems to be a grading system, where good-looking-ness gets ranked. ‘Saffron’ means the most smoking, because saffron is the most expensive luxurious spice of all.
‘They are so saffron.’
Well, if this is the case, label me ‘mixed herbs’. I pretty much decide that, for the time being, it’s probably safest if I just forget that I own a fanny at all. And so that’s what I do. I try to pretend my vagina doesn’t exist, in the hope that, if ignored and neglected long enough, the flesh down there will politely sort of seal up completely, scab over, with fresh skin, in its own time, like a doll’s, with just a simple small round ‘O’-shaped hole for wees.