It’s quite surreal to see my wife put on some rap song to make our new 2 month old daughter fall asleep, which she does, while she sings along to it.
She literally knows the words to just about any song that comes on. Then she modifies them for the new circumstances.
Tom Jones’ Sex Bomb becomes:
Wet Bum, Wet Bum,
You gotta wet bum,
And you-can-count-on-mummy-when-you-need to-clean-it-up
Wet bum, wet bum,
You got a wet bum,
But your mama’s gonna clean it up
If you know the words to the original and the tune, you’ll see it works.
N.E.R.D. ‘S Lapdance becomes:
Oh baby you want me?
Oh baby you want me?
Oh baby you want me, well you can get this boobie juice here for free!
And Fuck the Pain Away by Peaches is almost unchanged:
Sucking on my titties like you wanted me, wanted me, wanted me all the time.
Check out my chrissy behind
And here she is rapping away to Vanilla Ice, which, astonishingly makes the baby fall asleep.
I mean, she did work as a Promo Girl for a nightclub in Spain and again in London, where the basic idea was to entice people into the club, and/or get them to spend thousands on the same crappy drinks you could buy at literally less than a twentieth the price at an off licence (you’d think men only, but you’d be surprised).
It was a classy affair, not like she danced on the bar in skimpy clothes the club sold, and that she also customised herself with scissors so the customers wanted not just the same club logo shirts and hot pants they sold, but the ones that looked like hers.
Tequila shots and fast moving scissors with strobe lights and the club’s theme song playing at deafening level:
It’s gettin’ hot in here (So hot)
So take off all your clothes (Ayy)
I am gettin’ so hot (Uh, uh, uh, uh)
I wanna take my clothes off (Oh)
It’s gettin’ hot in here (So hot)
You probably wouldn’t immediately assume this is where you’d find the right girl to get baptised as a hardcore Sedevacantist Catholic with. Then get confirmed, married, and make three children in 5 years with her. It would have been four but she miscarried the first. Finding myself doing a baptism on her belly at home, when she thought something was wrong, and holding her hand and later holding her, in the hospital, when it was clear the baby was gone, thankfully after only about 6 weeks of pregnancy, is not a feeling I’d wish on anyone, but we found out after it happened that it’s quite common, even if people don’t talk about it much.
From party girl things, to changing nappies, making play-dough, taking them to the park, reading them stories, teaching them the alphabet and how to count, and playing them music and teaching them nursery rhymes, cooking for us all and feeding us and packing all their toys for the beach or worrying about them all having the things they need to run around like the little savages they are outside, even though she’s given up on making them wear shoes. I still harbour hope on that score, but then I do tend to take on impossible projects.
It’s not for everyone, the path that she and I took. As wild as she was, it’s probably inevitable that she could only be with someone like me, that surpassed her own transgressions and wildness, though, opposite to her, always clear-headed, which in a way might be worse.
But the fact is, that the first day I met her, I had a surreal experience that cannot be explained to others, but remains true nonetheless.
She was working as an estate agent by then, still wild every weekend, and it was in fact a Friday when I met her. I’d arranged with an estate agent to see some apartments and taken half a day off work. I had called the guy a few days before to make sure he had a good selection of places. He had assured me he would get keys for all the suitable properties.
I was earning decent money now and wanted to move to a nicer place and leave behind the small apartment I had lived in with my Italian wife, briefly, before we split up a couple of years earlier, and eventually divorced. I called the guy again just before I left work to make sure he had the keys, since, as a freelancer any time off I took I didn’t get paid. He assured me he had all the keys and he would meet me outside the Wapping tube station. So I went. Got there… no one. I called the guy up to see if maybe he was running late. In a bored voice he told me he wouldn’t be coming today because he didn’t have the keys. I told him where he could put his keys and hung up. Directly across the station was another estate agency. I could see through the window that the only guy in the office was playing solitaire on his desktop. I could actually see his screen.
I went in and said hello and that I wanted to view some properties.
“Oh I’m sorry, I’m too busy right now, could you come back later.” It wasn’t a question and his glazed-over eyes returned to the screen.
“Yeah, I can see. Real busy.”
I left and decided my afternoon was shot anyway, so I may as well enjoy a walk. The area had a certain organic charm that is not too common in London, and despite it being early November the sun was out. As I walked along the cobbles I saw another estate agency in a pale yellow face brick building with the entrance being a diagonal that cut off the corner of the building. As I approached it I could see through the big glass window most estate agencies have a young woman sitting at her desk. She was stunning even at this distance, but I purposely looked away. I was here to find an apartment. I wanted to move. I didn’t want to be distracted by yet another pretty girl. It’s not like I was short of them anyway. But this one, she would be hard to ignore, so I looked away. Inside were other people. I’d just go the the blond man I could see sitting at another desk, and not even glance at the pretty woman. I’d not taken three steps into the place and realised the guy was as gay as a pink flamingo in a chicken coop. As I approached him he did that whole, look at you up and down thing in an obvious and obvioulsy gay way. I gritted my teeth and said “Hi, I’d like to see some apartments”. That’s how badly I wanted to avoid the girl. I hadn’t even snuck a peek to my right. He gave me the once over again, then waved in the direction of the same young woman, “She’ll look after you.”
Dammit. I tried. Really tried. Well, ok. Never mind. I can focus on the apartment, no matter how hot she looks.
“Hi, I wanted to see some apartments.”
She looks up, her eyes are brilliant blue, transfixing if I was a weaker man. That slightly bored, slightly dismissive, slightly lazy look that Estate Agents worldwide seem to have crosses her pretty face, and she says:
“What… now?”
Fuck this! Must have crossed my face in that instant.
“Yes, now.”
Without batting an eyelid her demeanour changes, she springs up, she has on a white blouse and faded jeans with black high heel shoes.
“Oh, okay, I think we have a place here, close by, let me get the keys and I’ll show you.”
She walks us across the road and leads the way up a flight of stairs. I can’t remember if it was already inside the apartment or on the way to some internal door to it. She opens doors, shows me rooms. Says what they are. I don’t speak. When we are done she leads the way back down the stairs. I am not trying to see it. I just do, she has a frilly white edge on her knickers. They are so close to the edge of the jeans waist I see it.
We step back outside in the sunlight and she asks, “So, what do you think?”
“I have no idea, I don’t even know how many rooms it has.”
She turns to look at me, but calm.
“You’re quite distracting.”
She doesn’t flinch. “Oh. Thanks.”
She keeps quiet a bit, as we walk back towards her office, then she says, “I think there is another place you’d like, but I am not sure if I can get the keys.”
I stay quiet again.
“We can try.” She poses it as a question with her eyes, so I nod.
She makes a call, she can’t get the keys, because they are from another agency that they sometimes work with, but she drives us on to the place anyway, then speaks to the security guys at the concierge desk. The poor bastards don’t stand a chance. She smiles, shakes her head, comes up with some story about how she had the keys but someone else at the office hasn’t returned yet and could she borrow the spare set to show her client the property. They happily hand the keys over, managing not to drool when they both smile like small children just being shown a huge candy.
She shows me this apartment that has a view over the Thames. It’s good. I like it. I say ok. but I want to get away from her now. She is distracting and I want to put my mind on other things. I don’t want to be doing that dance again with yet another pretty woman, plus she’s English, she looks beautiful, it’s true, but that’s probably it. I mean she’s smart, fast on her feet, but no, I want to stop doing this pussy-hunter thing, at least for today. I just want to move apartment and get a kind of clean slate. So I move away from her, heading for the door, I want to get out of here and away. She doesn’t follow. She stays looking out the big window at the river below us. Forcing me to turn and wait for her by the door.
“Seeing this,” she says, without turning to look at me, “doesn’t it make want to leave?”
I am taken slightly aback by her unusual and unprompted question.
“…Leave…London?”
Now she turns and looks at me. “Leave everything.”
And in that moment, when she turned to look at me, in one fraction of a second I got a flash-forward. I had flash-forwards a few times before, at least twice it saved my life. The image of a snake coming at me from behind, to bite me, and another time of someone at a concert running up behind me with a knife in-hand to stab me with. Both things would have happened if I had not acted on this image, premonition, flash-forward, call it what you want. But this was different.
I saw her in the now, but also in the far future, the same, the same distance between us, but old now, and with a hat on I think, and yet, her. Always her. The brilliant blue eyes, and smiling at me, which she wasn’t doing right now, not that way at least. A smile complicit of many years together, a love between us that encompassed all the insane, strange, beautiful, ugly, scary, things of our life and the ones we had lived through together, and between us, four lights, each a child, I could not say if male or female or what they would look like, just a kind of floating light, like disembodied souls to come. Her face, both beautiful as the here and now and also as the old and wrinkly. Like my own would be in that time, but still her. Always her, and beautiful even then, in old age.
It all happened in a tiny sliver of time, but it had within it, as if compressed into a laser bolt of information, years, decades, a lifetime. It was like a sledgehammer to my entire nervous system.
Years of karate in a hard dojo, other martial arts, and living and working with a gun for over a decade, meant my face didn’t show anything, but inside, it was as if I had taken a punch. One of those that makes you see blinking lights.
“Do you want me to show you the gardens?”
I nodded. Didn’t trust myself to speak for a second or two.
What the hell was that? Who is she?
We go outside and we look at the gardens laid out like a simple but tasteful patchwork of paths and trimmed hedges and reddish-brown face brick. And I get another flash. This one a memory. From about ten years earlier. I dreamt of this place. It makes no sense, but occasionally I have had dreams of something that eventually happens in the future. Sometimes I also have very vivid dreams with a really complicated plot that end, and then years later I have another dream that picks up where that one left off, like a kind of part II to a film. And being here, in this place, now I remembered the dream. This place, which I had never been to before, ever, for certain, was exactly as the dream I had. And I remembered that in the dream there was a statue of some old man, or Troll type thing, that said Old Father Thames on it. It was in the corner of the garden, you couldn’t see it from here. I asked her if she would just wait for me for a second, as I had to go and check something.
She said ok and I ran off. I went to that corner, and there it was.
I knew enough about myself, because I had had premonitory dreams before, and flash-forwards —though usually only in life and death situations— that I knew I wasn’t crazy. Well, probably not anyway. I walked back. Calm now. Not even curious, just surprised. And she was waiting for me. Brown jacket zipped up now as the sun was going down and it was getting colder. A white scarf framed her smiling face with her impossibly blue eyes. And then I knew.
Oh. Ok. She’s the one.
And she was. Though it would be more than ten years later before we got together properly.
We had a very brief, half-drunk, half-night stand, a few months later, then invariably her, or me would end up with some person or other. She’d come close then pull away again and I told her repeatedly to either get in and find out or leave me be. But over the years she would always eventually get in touch again. Then I had a daughter, and I forgot about her. That marriage ended in spectacularly dramatic and ugly fashion. Then she had a daughter.
In 2016 I moved from London and was working in Venice and Kazakhstan, and flying all over the place, and we started to text each other on Telegram. Just philosophy and life stuff. I was on my own mostly, with an off and on again quasi-relationship with a woman that was probably possessed, and her own relationship was basically collapsing.
In 2017 I moved back to London and she helped me pick out furniture for the new apartment I was renting. She was on her own again.
We went to dinner. We kissed.
Then she disappeared for three days, as she usually did. I didn’t call or text her, I kind of knew how she was and I was tired of the ten year old dance.
She called after midnight one night.
“I tried to not think about you.” She said.
“How’s that going?” I asked. I was sitting at my dining room glass table, it was round and not very big, on the 16th floor, the view of the Thames and the lights below me. I had a tired hint of a smile on me. I wasn’t tired because of the late hour.
“Not good.” She paused a while. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“So? What you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know…”
“How long have you been doing this? You come close, then you pull away, then I tell you to get lost, then some weeks, or months, or years pass, then you get in touch and we do it all again. Aren’t you tired of it? I am.”
“Well? So what am I supposed to do? Just move in tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
She laughed.
“What you got to loose? Do it. Let’s find out once and for all if this thing is something or nothing. At least we’ll know.”
“Ok then.”
“You’re moving in tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
We both laughed. I told her I’d get a roast for lunch.
I expected her to just come for lunch, maybe spend some time. Talk. Maybe more. Maybe not. It was fine. I liked time with her, I was never bored talking with her. And she was easy to look at.
I got the roast, started it late because I knew she was always late. But today she wasn’t. She called me from downstairs, asked if I could help her bring some stuff up. I said sure and went down.
She had brought her daughter, her travel cot and a bag of clothes and toiletries.
I laughed.
We both assumed she would leave after a couple of days of hanging out together.
She never did.
Like I said, it’s not for everyone. Our story sort of reminds me of the film Payback, with Mel Gibson. In the last scene, he’s missing a couple of toes, killed all the bad guys, got his money and as she’s driving them away, he says:
“We were going for breakfast. In Canada. We made a deal. If she’d stop hooking, I’d stop shooting people. Maybe we were aiming high.”
And yet, here we are, and it works for us.
Tags: Party gitl, PUA, relationships
Sounds like you have a plot for a successful romance novel there.
You’ve been blessed, thank you for sharing. It’s nice to hear good news sometimes, all to often, all we hear are tragedies.
Thanks. We all have tragedy in our lives. But it literally makes no logical sense to focus on them.
This is why I say that people with just enough Aspergers are an evolutionary step forward.
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