Page 27 of Has Anyone Seen My Sex Life?
‘I’m sorry. There’s no one else. I promise you. I wouldn’t do that. I thought you would know me well enough to know that.’ His voice is wobbly and emotional. The revelation makes my breath stick in my throat.
I pause. ‘I hacked into your Love Shack account.’
‘Oh.’ He takes his hand off mine.
‘You should also know me well enough to know that I wouldn’t let the appearance of a monster dildo lie.’ That may have come out a bit wrong but instinctively I knew he had lied to me, which was probably the worst feeling of all. He looks into space. Is he trying to come up with more excuses? ‘Danny, something’s going on and you just need to tell me what this is. I don’t care at this point what you’re up to but just be honest.’
Do I need his confession to be made here? Maybe not. But if the past day has taught me anything it’s that I don’t do well with not knowing. If there are things to be said, secrets to be revealed, then I need full disclosure. Right here, right now. He’s using the sex toys on himself? He has his own shop? He’s moonlighting as some sort of customer reviewer? He’s a bigamist? All those business trips overseas sourcing paper and he has a whole different family over in Hong Kong? My inquisitive mind is not helpful here.
He sits there for a moment, gearing himself up. He reaches down to the rucksack and pulls out two hardback notebooks. He places them on my lap. ‘Open these. I also went home to get these, to explain.’
I don’t say a word. This is it? What’s in these notebooks? Letters from a lover? Names and addresses of all he has lain with? Notes on a scandal?
‘Just open them already,’ he pleads.
I do as I’m told. Nothing can quite prepare me for what I find. It’s a vagina. Or not. It’s the outer bit, the vulva, I guess. A lady’s parts, hand-drawn on sketchbook quality paper. In quite good detail, truth be told. It’s in ink with some realistic hatch shading and a commitment to including some pubic hair. The picture is signed by someone called CM and dated eighteen months ago. I exhale loudly. I don’t understand. I shut the book hoping no one’s seen anything.
‘So, who is it?’
He gives me a quizzical look.
‘Well, it’s you, innit?’
‘I don’t remember posing for this? Was I asleep?’
He laughs. ‘It were from memory. An artist’s impression?’
‘Back when my vagina looked like this?’
‘You seem to have this impression that your vagina looks like a windsock since childbirth. I’ll have you know, it looks and feels pretty much the same as it did when we first met.’
I think that was a compliment.
‘Bar all the undergrowth, of course,’ he adds.
Negated in mere seconds.
I re-open the book and turn the page. Wow, that’s a penis. This one is in charcoal. It’s quite large and veiny. I thumb through the pictures with more speed. A fine display of skill and detail but mostly consisting of genitalia.
‘I don’t get the signature. CM?’
‘It’s my username initials.’
‘Username? So,youdrew all of these?’
‘Yes.’
‘They are very good.’
It’s like a bad improvisational comedy as we try and eke reactions and dialogue from each other. I don’t know what to say. He doesn’t look as flattered as I thought he might but I think he’s trying to gauge if I think he’s a complete pervert.
‘I draw sex things, nudes… which is why I order sex toys in. To draw from life. It’s hard to draw from images sometimes and I wanted to draw more than just my own appendage.’
This makes me laugh more than it should, to think of Danny curled up downstairs, legs akimbo and trying to find the right angles to draw his own cock. He laughs back nervously, our voices still in hushed tones so no one else can hear. Danny had always been an artist. When we first met, he was involved in graphic design and he had a real eye for art. He’d studied fine art in college and was always a sketcher, a doodler. His career fell by the wayside once he moved up North and went into the glamorous world of paper production but every year, he’d hand draw a card for his girls on their birthdays, and he was the one in charge of the art-based homework projects. I flick through the pictures, the doodles, the penises that have been practised and crossed out, the girl-on-girl action, the accurate conceiving of every sexual position that I know of, and one where I have to angle my head slightly to understand how the gentleman is actually achieving penetration. There are many questions. How he had the time is one of them.
‘I guess the overriding question is… Why?’
‘I don’t really know. It just happened.’
