Chapter 17
Dear Adam
I’ve read a load of stuff online recently (okay, mostly seen it on social media, if I’m honest) about vaginal gummies. Ever come across them? Apparently Gwynneth Paltrow is a fan. But when I suggested to my girlfriend that we might give them a go (because, let’s face it it, girls don’t always taste that great down there), she went absolutely mental at me. She says if I don’t like the way she tastes I can damn well forget about going down on her ever again.
What’s your verdict on this? Surely Ms Paltrow and a million Tiktok influencers can’t be wrong? How can I persuade my girlfriend that this would be a great way to spice (or rather sweeten) up our sex life?
Billy, Cumbria
Dear Billy
Well, where to begin. Your credulous assumption that paid influencers know more about your sex life than your own partner does? The misogyny that absolutely oozes from your letter? Your basic ignorance of the fact that there’s no need for women to go shoving anything up their vaginas unless they actively choose to? The simple truth that fannies should smell and taste of fanny and if they don’t, there’s probably a medical reason why and your girlfriend might want to get checked out by her GP? A suggestion that you a. Pause a moment and make a note in your gratitude journal for the fact that she allows you anywhere near her bits and b. Maybe try shoving a jelly tot down your penis and see how you like it?
No. On balance, Billy, I have just one simple, succinct piece of advice for you: don’t be a dick – of any flavour.
Yours truly, Adam
I stopped typing, my fingers weary from the speed at which I’d bashed out the reply and my heart actually racing, like it did on the frequent occasions when I walked up the stairs to the office rather than risk sharing the lift with Ross. How dare he, I fumed silently. How dare this Billy try and shame his poor girlfriend into experimenting with something she didn’t want to do? How dare he have the utter cheek to suggest that some sugar-laden thrush-bomb was the only way to make her perfectly normal vagina acceptable to his hyper-sensitive man mouth?
‘Jeez,’ I muttered, shaking my head.
‘You all right there, Lucy?’ Marco asked. ‘You’ve gone all red in the face. And Ross isn’t even he?—’
Then he looked at me a bit more closely, and shut up. There must have been something in my eyes that warned him now was not the time to share his observations on either the state of my complexion or the way I sometimes – rarely, hardly ever, these days, since I’d got Amelie’s mate Miranda to give me a crash course in concealer application – reacted to our mutual colleague.
‘You know what, Marco?’ I said. ‘I’ve been doing this job for three months now and men still amaze me.’
‘We’re pretty cool, aren’t we?’ Marco said, breathing on his nails and buffing them on the collar of his shirt.
‘Cool?’ I squeaked. ‘You’ve got the brass neck to think that after reading hundreds of letters about erectile dysfunction and cheating and refusing to talk about your feelings, the conclusion I’ve reached is that men are cool?’
Marco grinned. To his credit, he looked a bit abashed. ‘Well, you’d be a bit stuck without us, wouldn’t you? I mean, the survival of the human race depends?—‘
‘What’s going on here?’ Ross, returning late after his lunchtime Crossfit session, swung into his chair. ‘Are you okay, Lucy?’
I closed my eyes for a second and breathed deeply. In for five, hold for five, out for five, lungs empty for five. Then opened them again and said, ‘It’s just as well I want to keep this job. Otherwise I might be tempted to tell some of the men who write in to Adam what I really, actually think of them.’
Marco and Ross exchanged looks that I hoped meant, Don’t mess with her when she’s in this kind of mood. I gave them a look back that I knew said, Yeah, don’t even go there.
And then I did the breathing thing again and turned back to my screen.
The thing was, over the past months of being Adam, I’d noticed a bit of a shift in my attitude towards his correspondents. At first, I’d viewed them a bit like I imagine scientists must have viewed the Covid virus once they got its genome sequenced, or whatever they did. So this is what the enemy looks like, up close and personal. Now let’s figure out how to beat it.
But, so gradually I’d barely even been conscious of happening, my attitude had changed. It had started with the letter from the widower worried about his relationship with his teenage daughter. It had continued with the insights Chiraag had given me into Mark from Sheffield”s possible reasons for spending so much time on his sport, at the expense of his family life. Even the first problem I’d given GenBot 2.0 to answer, from the man who was uncertain whether he woman he was seeing was right for him, had given me pause for thought.
They weren’t specimens from the man blob, I found myself realising. They were people. People with problems, and complex inner lives, and feelings of insecurity and self-doubt just like my own.
And then someone like Billy came along and proved that, actually, some of them were just dicks, plain and simple.
Of course, I didn’t publish the trenchant reply I’d composed to Billy. I read his letter again and considered toning it down it down a bit, but the second reading made me every bit as cross as the first had, so I couldn’t bring myself to come up with any soothing, understanding words for him.
Instead, I posted a precis of his letter into the screen of the AI program (Adam, AI – the irony of the juxtaposition wasn’t lost on me) and let the bot compose a reply. Within about five seconds, it had come up with five paragraphs about the importance of not disrupting the vaginal microbiome, the wisdom of consulting a healthcare professional if either Billy or his partner suspected she might be suffering from some kind of infection, and the non-negotiable nature of holding a calm discussion, ideally outside the bedroom, when either partner wished to introduce any new sexual shenanigans.
Not that it used the word shenanigans, obviously; it hadn’t been trained to. I added that in myself afterwards, together with a gentle prod to Billy away from the course of dickishness. GenBot, I reflected, wasn’t too bad at relationship advice – but it had a lot to learn. If it was going to be any kind of valuable assistant to Adam, it would need to become a bit less moderate in its responses.
Still mildly seething, I saved the document on to the Max! server for the subs to look at, took a sip from my water bottle and checked my phone.
In spite of all the excitement at work, Amelie hadn’t been far from my thoughts. According to my diary and her Instagram, her honeymoon was well and truly over and she and Zack had flown (first class, natch) to New York, where they were installed in a fancy apartment in the Meatpacking District, provided by Zack’s work.
It was all there on my sister’s stories: the champagne on the flight, the yellow taxi, the view over Manhattan, the squashy cream sofa, cousin no doubt to the one in Zack’s London flat. As usual, exclamation marks and emojis were studded throughout her posts.
But still, I felt that something was… not necessarily wrong, but not completely right either. I’d messaged her several times suggesting a chat, and been left on read. She hadn’t responded as she usually did to the numerous comments on her social media posts. And in all the videos of the skyline and the front-row seats at Hamilton and the speakeasy cocktail bar and the rest of it, Amelie’s own face was conspicuously absent.
So when I saw that I had three new messages on WhatsApp, my heart gave a little skip of home – then lurched again when I saw that they were all from Nush.
Hey Lucy! How are you?! Hope work is good!
Nush was one of those people who can’t resist an exclamation mark.
Have you heard from Amelie?! We haven’t! We’re starting to get worried!
Her words brought my own concern back to the forefront of my mind. Although I’d never stopped thinking of my sister, my preoccupation with what had been going on in my own life – my feelings fro Ross, unrequited and mostly unspoken, even to myself; Greg’s bombshell about Adam’s future; the unceasing flow of men’s problems landing in my inbox – had all but drowned out thoughts of my sister.
You know what, I haven’t, I typed. I’m going to FaceTime her! Tonight!
Nush’s exclamation mark habit was contagious, I realised.
So, that evening, I made sure to leave the office on time. And, at home, instead of firing up my laptop to see what Adam’s readers had in store for me or switching on my PS4 for a bit of soothing monster-murdering, I made sure my phone was fully charged and settled Astro on my lap.
On my first attempt, Amelie didn’t pick up. So I tried again five minutes later, and then again straight after that.
And the third time, she answered – only without her video switched on.
‘Lucy?’ Her voice was as clear as if she was right there in the room with me instead of thousands of miles and multiple time zones away, but she didn’t sound like herself. ‘What’s up? Are you okay?’
Now was one hundred per cent not the time to burden my sister with my problems – or rather Adam’s.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘But what about you? I can’t see you.’
‘That’s because I look like shit. I’m in bed.’
‘In bed?’ I glanced at my watch and rapidly counted backwards in my head. It was two o’clock in the afternoon in New York – Amelie should have been shopping, or at a hot yoga class or finishing off a buddha bowl with a new friend. ‘Are you sick?’
There was a pause, then my sister’s face appeared on my screen. The lighting was dim; I could see shadowy pillows behind her head, and drawn blinds behind that. The soft furnishings looked like they were white or cream, and her skin was pale too, her hair a dark smudge.
‘I’m not great,’ she replied forlornly. ‘I’ve got a stomach bug. Ever since we got back from honeymoon I’ve been puking. I think it’s some sort of rare tropical disease and I’m going to die horribly, miles from home.’
I felt surprisingly encouraged by her words. Amelie had always been the most over-dramatic of hypochondriacs – when she’d caught chicken pox at uni, she’d called our mum in tears and said she was going to scratch her own skin off and be scarred for life.
‘Am, don’t be daft. You won’t die. But you should see a doctor, right?’
‘I guess. I’ll be all right. I need to get up in a bit, anyway, and sort out something for Zack’s and my dinner.’
Now I worried. Amelie never cooked. Ever. Not even when she was feeling one hundred per cent great. I recalled the time, not long after she moved into her first flat share, when my sister had invited me and our mum and dad over for a celebration dinner to mark the occasion. She’d decked the whole place out with flowers and balloons, insisted that Mum take the place of honour on the only comfortable chair, made champagne cocktails with Angostura-soaked sugar cubes in the bottom- and then, when seven thirty came, proudly produced a platter of wraps and sandwiches from Pret left over from a work meeting.
‘What? I thought you said the whole point about living in Manhattan was that no one ever cooked and you’d live on smoked salmon bagels and ramen and cupcakes like in Sex and the City.’
Amelie laughed – a faint, breathy sound, but a laugh nonetheless.
‘Yeah, right. But Zack’s working long hours and I’m not working at all, so it kind of feels like the least I can do.’
‘Who are you and what have you done with my sister?’ I demanded. ‘Have we gone back in time to the nineteen fifties? Are you living in Stepford or Manhattan?’
She giggled again. ‘You do make me feel better, Luce.’
‘Then why haven’t you been answering calls?’ I asked. ‘I’ve messaged, Nush has rang. Last time I spoke to Mum she said she was about to call the police, until I talked her down.’
‘I texted Mum,’ Amelie said. ‘I told her I’m fine. I am fine. I’ve just not been well, and I’m missing home.’
‘You could come home,’ I suggested. ‘Fly back for a weekend. We could all go out for cocktails. You could see Astro.’
I angled my phone so she could see him now, even though he was fast asleep.
‘Awww, look at him,’ she cooed, with a smile that looked more like herself. ‘But I can’t. Not now, anyway. I can’t leave Zack.’
I felt a flare of annoyance. Where was Zack? At work, obviously. But hadn’t he realised that Amelie was ill, lonely and homesick? And if he had, why wasn’t he doing something about it?
‘Zack’s a big boy,’ I said. ‘He can look after himself. You need to look after yourself, okay?’
‘I am. Honestly. Don’t worry about me. I should get up now – I’ve been in bed for hours and I absolutely stink. I need to get these sheets off and wash them, and wash my hair.’
‘Am? Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes. At least, I will be. Stop worrying, Luce. That’s an order.’
‘But I— Okay. Love you.’
‘Love you more.’
Reluctantly, I ended the call. But despite Amelie’s command, I didn’t stop worrying. I remembered the cloud of her hair against her pillow, and wondered if she was still using the same violet-scented shampoo. I wished she wasn’t miles and miles too far away to hug. I missed her so much it hurt.