Sexy Beast: The Intimate Adventures of an Ugly Man

I smirked back.

Avril was still in feisty mood when she whirred up to the table. Stu introduced us. Avril immediately picked up on my dithering over whether or not to shake her hand—she was used to it. I had already stood up and was wondering whether even that might be construed as a rather insensitive move. She held out her right arm. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Shake my tiny hand.’ I laughed and did so, and even then it crossed my mind, the old adage about men liking women with small hands. But I thought better of sharing it. Instead I said, ‘Pleased to meet you. That reminds me of the E. E. Cummings poem.’ Then I immediately felt like such an obnoxious, idiotic, ham-fisted oaf. I blushed. But I’d started, so I had to finish. ‘Nobody,’ I quoted, ‘not even the rain,’ I continued, ‘has such small hands.’

Avril pulled a face. ‘What are you saying?’

I blushed some more. ‘I don’t know really. It’s a poem.’

‘I’ve got absolutely no idea what that means,’ she said.

‘Now play nice,’ said Carolyn.

Avril laughed. ‘No, I’m not being mean. I genuinely don’t understand. The rain doesn’t have hands. Or am I missing something?’ She looked at Stu, who shrugged unhelpfully. I wondered whether ‘Am I missing something?’ was a joke.

‘I don’t think it was meant to be taken literally,’ I offered.

‘You don’t think he wrote the poem about a deformed girl then?’ asked Avril.

I shook my head, then changed my mind. ‘Actually I think he did,’ I replied. ‘Yeah, I remember now. He definitely did. He wrote it about a girl with really tiny hands.’

Avril laughed again. ‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘That’s marvellous.’ I drank some more wine, relieved.

At the end of the evening Avril and I were left alone. Stu and Carolyn were tidying up in the kitchen and making coffee.

‘You know the worst thing about my disability?’ Avril asked me, apropos of nothing.

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me think.’

I thought. The answer that occurred to me was ‘Not getting enough sex?’, but I didn’t voice it, because I didn’t want to offend. So instead I said, ‘Swimming in circles?’, which was just unbelievably, unconscionably, excruciatingly dumb. But she laughed anyway, which was nice of her. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The worst thing about being in this chair, and having these fucked-up limbs…’—she had quite a fruity vocabulary, Avril—‘…is that most men tend not to think of me in terms of someone they might like to fuck.’

Perhaps over-enthusiastically I responded, ‘I know! That’s what I thought, I just didn’t like to say! But I do know exactly what you mean. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but I’m—well, I’m quite an ugly bloke.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ she replied. ‘You’re no Tom Cruise, but you know, you’re not…’ She ran out.

‘That was a valiant effort,’ I said. ‘And it’s appreciated, really it is. But the fact is, I am a frighteningly ugly bloke, and I don’t mean to demean your condition when I say this, but ugliness, to this extent, is actually a kind of disability.’

‘Oh, come on,’ she said.

‘It is!’ I squeaked.

‘How so?’ she asked.

‘In a way,’ I continued, ‘it’s actually worse. Because at least you have an excuse.’ She raised an eyebrow. Perhaps ‘excuse’ wasn’t the right word. Well, too late now. I moved on. ‘Let me explain. People look at me and their reaction is probably similar to the reaction they have when they look at you. They think, you’re just not in the running. No pun intended. You’re not someone they’d consider—whether for sex, for a job or, nine times out of ten, even for conversation…One of the reasons I work as a copywriter is because I can get a lot of work without having to turn up for an interview. Most of the jobs I get are on the strength of my writing. I don’t have to impress in person.’ I was getting into my stride now, the alcohol filling my mouth with words. ‘I’m pretty much good at everything I do—no arrogance intended—but I’ve never got a job I had to interview in person for. Even if I’ve been perfect for the job. And this is because I’m butt-fuck ugly.’

Avril laughed.

‘Yeah, laugh it up. At least you’ve got rights groups and laws looking out for you. Do you know it’s not even illegal to discriminate against ugly people?’

‘That’s a disgrace,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should start a campaign,’ she said.

‘Maybe I should,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’

I didn’t.

‘It’d be a complete waste of time though,’ she countered. ‘You’d still be discriminated against. Trust me. So where did you say you lived?’

The question took me by surprise. I hadn’t said any such thing. ‘Herne Hill,’ I told her. ‘Why?’

‘Just making conversation,’ she said. ‘Do you live alone?’ When I said that I did, she said, ‘Maybe you should invite me round for dinner this weekend then? I promise I won’t discriminate against you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe I will.’

I did.

So. That weekend, in an act of mutual desperation, I lost my virginity. Actually, that sounds terrible. It was an act of mutual attraction as much as anything. And, as I found out later, Avril wasn’t remotely desperate. It was just me. I had waited an awful long time for this moment, and when it finally happened, it was fun, and it was passionate, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, it was actually rather kinky. We got up to all kinds of shenanigans, and I’m not just talking flipper-play. Then, at half past midnight, she asked me to call her a cab.

‘Don’t you want to stay?’ I asked. ‘You’re welcome to stay.’

‘I’d like to,’ she said, ‘but my husband likes me home.’

‘Your…You’re married?’

‘Did I not mention that? I thought you knew.’

I didn’t know.

Avril had been married for six years. She and her husband had an open relationship. He was also, as she put it, ‘a spaz’, and he liked her to go off and have sex with other men. They would relive it together. It turned them both on. He knew she loved him. She knew he loved her.

Avril asked me if she thought it was weird, but before I could answer, she told me, ‘It’s not as weird as able-bodied men getting off on sleeping with disabled women, or blokes who can only get an erection if a woman has a stump or a flipper. Or wheels.’

I ended up seeing Avril once every couple of months or so for around two and a half years. Then I started to want more. I wanted a proper relationship. Not that a long-term affair with a lady in a wheelchair is somehow improper, but rather, I wanted to be in love.

Five years later, that’s still what I want. Now, however—thanks in part to my faithful companion, Pablo—I’m finally determined to do something about it.

CHAPTER TWO WHISKERS OF IMMORALITY (#ulink_ee70b172-30c7-5274-abad-54acddceef11)

Pablo’s ears prick irritably as, across the street from my house, a woman screams. It’s not an ugly scream, however, but a scream with laughter oozing out of the cracks. It’s like she senses something, something magnificent and formidable stirring nearby. I drag myself to my feet and limp magnificently to the window, twitching back the curtain like a man twice my age.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and a few minutes to midnight. The Festive Season is almost at an end. Thank God for that.

I’ve never been a fan of the Festive Season. Especially as a child. It started well enough, with the slightly forced excitement of the last school day, but it was all pretty much downhill from there. The Festive Season was like dead air. It was slow, tense time between the predictable uproar of the special days, when the banks were closed and television was relentless. I spent this time in my bedroom, in hiding, or else playing darts at my best friend’s house, and if there was a rumpus of some description at home, I kept out of it as much as I possibly could, blocking out the bickering to the best of my ability, ignoring the tantrums, and suffering whatever contact sports Father was mad enough to insist upon with mute disdain and very occasional outbursts of my own.

The Festive Season was fraught.

Christmas was hateful enough, charged as it was with instinctive, seasonal self-pity, but New Year’s Eve always had something particularly ominous and dreadful about it. Unlike Christmas, New Year’s Eve was neither a time for family, nor for God. Rather, New Year’s Eve was a time for drinking heavily, going berserk and breaking things.

By the age of six or seven, I had already begun to associate the end of the year with scenes of extraordinary domestic ugliness. Many of these scenes came to me in eavesdroppings as I lay plastered to my bedroom floor with my ear cupped to the carpet, or else crouched at the top of the stairs like a cat, coiled and holding my breath. Others I witnessed firsthand as I was summoned to make an appearance and coerced into shaking the nicotined hands of the drove of drunken buffoons whom Father had corralled home from the pub. Inevitably, one or more of these soused strangers would leave a pool of urine on the canvas floor of the toilet, awaiting my bare feet in the early hours of the morning.

From the age of eight or nine, if I was at home, Father made a point of pestering me to join him and his friends in ‘drinking in the New Year’. The first time it happened I knew no better. He called me over and bent down beside me with a beaker of cheap whiskey. I was afraid, but warmed by the gesture. I sipped at the lip of the warm glass slowly, excited and grateful. Then the whiskey hit my tongue and I felt like I’d been poisoned. Worse still, I felt tricked and humiliated. Instinctively, I spat out the poison and fled from the kitchen, coughing and wheezing, pushing through bodies and heading for the stairs, where Mother grabbed hold of my arm and laughed smoke and Bucks Fizz into my burning face. I wriggled free and made a dash for it, slamming my bedroom door behind me. Father was laughing and shouting something up the stairs. I never accepted a drink from him again.