Alex George - Working It Out

Johnathan sat back and sighed. He stared up at the ceiling and considered the weekend that lay ahead. His fridge was presently home to a half-empty jar of mayonnaise and an onion. His entire week’s washing lay crumpled at the foot of his bed.

He decided to slip out to do his weekend shop at the local store. Gently he pushed Schroedinger’s head off his lap and stood up. Schroedinger wagged the stump where his tail should have been, and yawned at Johnathan’s disappearing back.

When Johnathan returned home, having bought some fantastically expensive baked beans and a pre-sealed pack of bacon, his answer-phone was winking at him. Chloe, he thought. He put down his shopping and debated whether or not he was feeling sufficiently robust of spirit to listen to the message. Finally he pressed the little red button. The tape whizzed back and crackled into action. There was a beep.

‘Hi, it’s Topaz. Could you give me a ring as soon as you get in, if you’re back today? You could just be a life saver. OK. Hope to hear from you later. Ciao.’

Johnathan’s heart leaped, and then sank again. He knew at once what Topaz wanted. Someone must have turned down her dinner party invitation, and she was one short for the night. Few things were as important to Johnathan’s friends as getting the boy-girl-boy-girl seating arrangements just so at their dinner parties. Absences were not tolerated kindly. Johnathan had, by accident rather than design, carved a niche amongst his circle of acquaintances as a last-minute social substitute extraordinaire. He rarely had any social engagements of his own and so was always available to turn up on short notice and make up numbers. Unfortunately he had proved himself so reliable in this capacity that people had stopped inviting him to dinner parties at all, just in case anybody dropped out. His social life therefore depended upon other people falling ill, breaking promises, or suffering unforeseen mishaps. When things went according to plan, Johnathan was redundant. When things went wrong, he was a hero. Johnathan knew how members of the medical profession felt.

Still, he told himself, it was Topaz. At least she was thinking of him, if only as a last resort.

Topaz was the sort of girl Johnathan had dreamed about meeting for years. Now that he had, he found himself awake in the middle of a nightmare. They had met some years previously at the birthday party of a mutual friend whom Johnathan had known at university. It had been a fancy dress party. The theme had been ‘The Empire’. Johnathan had, rather wittily he thought, gone as a mint imperial. He first met Topaz, who was dressed as Princess Leia from Star Wars, as he was coming out of the downstairs toilet. When she came out a few minutes later, Johnathan was still standing there, trying to reach a zip at the back of his costume. Topaz took pity on him, and helped. Fuelled by embarrassment and alcohol, Johnathan had misinterpreted this act of kindness as a clear indication that Topaz wished to go to bed with him, and later on the same evening he had clumsily propositioned her. Topaz, crushingly amused, had politely declined his offer. Instead she had kissed him lightly on the cheek and told him he was sweet. Despite the ‘sweet’ comment, they had remained friends.

She worked as a subeditor for a home furnishings and interior decorating magazine. She was independently wealthy, intelligent, and impossibly gorgeous. She was also not the slightest bit interested in Johnathan in a sexual context. Johnathan, on the other hand, was extremely interested in Topaz in a sexual context. She appeared to him in his dreams, usually either sitting naked in his kitchen slicing up cucumbers or emerging from the sea in a low-cut rubber wetsuit holding a large harpoon that had already shot its bolt. This unhealthy obsession had continued unabated throughout Johnathan’s other recent relationships. If anything, it had become worse. Topaz was a useful means of distracting Johnathan from Chloe’s relentless barrage of inanities, and he would frequently drift off into a lustful reverie while she jabbered on, which had on one occasion been awkward as he had been unable to explain why Chloe’s discourse on parachutes, and their colours, had produced a rather obvious erection. Chloe had begun to suspect that he was actually turned on by that stuff.

Johnathan had by now resigned himself to the fact that he would never summon up enough courage to ask Topaz whether she might consider taking their relationship beyond the merely platonic. He thought that perhaps initially there had been a flicker of interest from her, but now, nothing. Things were strictly platonic. Indeed, things were so platonic that Topaz felt able to regale Johnathan with stories of her sexual adventures with such attention to detail that it made him weep; not with sympathy or jealousy, but from the pain of his erection straining against his trousers.

It was a difficult position. He didn’t love her, or anything complicated like that. He was just desperate to go to bed with her. As he became more and more obsessed, her company became less and less bearable. Now, of course, with Chloe out of the way, there was no reason why he shouldn’t just ask her, but he knew that he was too much of a coward. He decided that he would rather suffer the priapic indignities of being her principal sexual confessor than run the risk of scaring her off completely. This sort of agonising pain was better than that sort of agonising pain.

Why? Johnathan asked himself as he picked up the phone. Why do I do this?

Johnathan arrived at Topaz’s house late, sweating a bit and clutching a plastic bag with a bottle of red wine in it.

Topaz opened the door. She wore a mustard yellow velvet trouser suit and no make-up. Her hair fell around her bare neck in dark ringlets. She looked fabulous, wonderful, perfect, an angel.

‘Hello. You look nice,’ said Johnathan.

Topaz nodded, the compliment expected. ‘Thanks for coming at such short notice.’ She leaned forward and made smacking noises with her mouth about four inches from both sides of Johnathan’s head. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. Come in.’

Johnathan proffered the bag. ‘A little something.’

‘Oh, how lovely. Thanks. You really shouldn’t have,’ said Topaz, examining the bottle. ‘Terrific,’ she said after a while, thrusting it back into the bag. ‘Well, we can’t stand here and chat all night. Come and join the party.’

She turned and walked slinkily down the corridor towards the kitchen. Johnathan shut the front door behind him and watched Topaz’s buttocks rise and fall delectably as she moved. There was something about velvet, something excessively sensual, that made Johnathan’s mind fuse with desire. He sighed, deeply, and followed the buttocks down the corridor.

Topaz’s kitchen was large for London. It was about the same size as Johnathan’s entire flat. Sitting around a chrome and glass table were six impossibly glamorous people. The scene looked like a Vogue promotional shoot.

‘Everyone,’ said Topaz. ‘This is Johnathan Burlip.’

The impossibly glamorous people eyed Johnathan dispassionately from behind a veil of cigarette smoke.

‘Johnathan,’ said Topaz, ‘this is Jonny, Mark, Gavin, Sibby, Kibby, and Libby.’ The names came out in rapid staccato, as Topaz jabbed the air vaguely with a manicured fingertip. ‘Drink?’

‘Thanks.’ Johnathan shifted uneasily from one foot to the other and plunged his hands into his pockets. One of the girls, Libby or Sibby, regarded him silently as a thin coil of smoke trickled out of her left nostril and spiralled gracefully upwards. She was dressed in what looked like a chiffon nightie. Her skin was almost white, apart from some dark, brutally applied make-up around her huge, doe-like eyes. She was unquestionably beautiful, if rather corpse-like. She was also tiny. Her waist was about the same size as Johnathan’s wrist.