It had been after another one of their awful arguments last spring, when he was preparing for the head teacher interview. He’d opened his laptop to watch porn but, at the last minute, clicked on an advert for another adult site. He felt like some kind of beast that had been starving for hundreds of years finally being fed. He’d gone back again and again when the hunger to feel something with this body of his overwhelmed him. First at home in the early hours of the morning. Then at work, and then whenever he started to feel angry or afraid or unlovable, which he did, most of the time. He scrolled through thousands of pouting, beautiful women. More and more. Some pushing their breasts up, some with their arses aimed at the camera, some dressed up in corsets, some naked, some tall, some white, some Black, some strong, some thin; the array was dizzying. All of them told him through their plump, moist lips the same thing, the thing he needed to hear more than anything. The thing that Rosie wouldn’t – or couldn’t – seem to ever tell him. They told him that they wanted him. When he looked at them, he stopped worrying about Rosie. They wanted him, day or night, and whatever he wanted, they wanted. Whenever he wanted them, they wanted him too and, for a few short minutes, Seb felt less alone.
They were better than porn, these women; there was a realness to them, knowing they were just a train ride away. Some of them urged him to pay them to dance for him. They wanted him to pass over his card details so they could tell him all the stuff they longed to do to him, but Rosie tracked their credit card statement online and always asked Seb if there was a payment she didn’t recognize. It was enough, for a while at least, knowing that he could pick up the phone and just call one of them.
Until the night that Rosie told him she’d cancelled the counsellor he’d booked for the second time. They’d argued, ugly and loud, and Rosie had told him again that she didn’t care, didn’t fucking care what he wanted, what he did, and had disappeared into the bathroom. Seb had taken his laptop downstairs, his entire body electric with rage, and he’d opened the websites to scroll, to lose himself in flesh, to disappear for a while in the aching fantasy of being with one of them. But that night, they stopped working. Where usually they’d move him from anger to desire, he just felt numb. He was still hungry. They all felt too fake suddenly, the screen of his computer and his limp dick in his hand too real. Shame flooded him, Rosie’s words ringing like a bell in his ears.
Rosie had made it clear again and again that she didn’t want him, and now these women online weren’t working either. He felt the great maw of loneliness opening for him, but he wouldn’t, he couldn’t turn towards it. So instead he picked up his phone as he opened the website for one of his favourites – a Brazilian in West London. Moving faster than his doubt, he called her, but the line was dead. He tried another favourite, and another, until finally one of the women who’d only existed in the abstract opened her mouth and said, ‘Hello, Emma speaking.’
Back at Eva’s he goes straight to his room like a moody teenager and hardly sleeps. He walks back to Rosie and the kids as the sun comes up. The morning is the usual combination of routine and frantic rushing; Seb’s the last to leave as he pulls the front door closed behind him and steps out into the bright morning. The kind of morning that makes the promise of winter seem like a bad joke. Martin is there again, across the road, standing on the pavement, his two girls on their bikes staring back at their dad impatiently, while Martin pats himself down like he’s lost something.
‘Morning, Martin. Hi, girls.’ Seb waves as he crosses the road towards his neighbour. ‘You all right, need some help?’
‘Seb,’ Martin responds.
‘What have you lost?’ Seb asks but Martin looks away and says, ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Daddy left his phone at home,’ says the older girl, bored by her dad’s prevaricating.
‘I can keep an eye on these two if you want to run home and get it?’ Seb offers.
Martin’s eyes widen, like Seb’s just suggested they run away together. ‘No thanks, Seb, that’s fine.’
‘Really, Martin, I’m not in a rush, I don’t …’
‘I said no, Seb. OK?’ Martin pushes past Seb and, waving his hands, calls, ‘Come on, girls, let’s get going.’
The younger girl narrows her eyes at Seb, her mouth open.
‘Is he the man you and …?’
But Martin, flustered, interrupts her, ‘Come on, I said let’s go!’
He grabs her bike between the handlebars, pushing her forward, leaving Seb standing alone on the pavement.