Fortune Cookie #6

These posts are words of wisdom that have got me through life reasonably happy and sexually satisfied. If you want to pass these words of wisdom onto friends or younger members of your family, cut out the sayings one by one, there will be about one fortune cookie each week - and buy a cheap packet of fortune cookies from your local Asian supermarket. Using tweezers, remove the existing naff saying from each cookie and replace it with one of Krissy's words of wisdom. Throw a party. Distribute the cookies. Everybody happy.

Fortune Cookie #6

Don't regret anything you do. Don't pretend you haven't done anything you've done. Transparency in sex is always the best policy. If someone accuses you of having done something with them and you can't remember doing it, then just say you did it. It is cleaner and easier that way.

The First Chapter

Sex addiction

She names it and I laugh. It sounds so clinical, as if she has transposed a disease onto my personality. I have climbed inside the novelty suit at the theatre. I am the joke act now, the sex-addict character in the play. I picture an ape, furiously masturbating in its enclosure. We see them at the zoo and we are certain that their behaviour has come from some place of damage.

“But I’m not a sex addict.”

She raises an eyebrow. I have known her since I was 18. She is the friend who has stuck by me longest. I look at her gorgeous luminous face, and I wonder why we have never slept together, not once in all these years. She sips at her coffee and watches me and I feel myself unpicked and when I am seamless there is nothing left of me but sex. I am my behaviour. I have been pathologised.

A sex addict.

I can feel the ugly monkey suit itching against my skin and for a brief moment I am repelled and also aroused by the image. I am used to this sudden rush of desire, the narcotic effect of the idea of sex, a prickly spread of it like heroin trickling through my body.

I am made of sex, I feed on the thought of it. I call myself Queer because there is no other word I know to describe this state of being indiscriminately sexual. Now she has made new words for me to worry over. Sex addict. An addiction.

I would like to tell her that I’m not addicted, that I could stop any time. It would be a joke and it would also be untrue. I can’t stop and I would not want to stop.

A young Asian man walks into the café and I glance at him and register his feminine beauty. Again the rush of pleasure. That comforting settling low in my belly. There was a time when I would have made some kind of contact with this man, smiled slipped over to his table, engaged in some light flirtation, heavier if he responded. There was a time when we might have ended up in bed together.

“If I am an addict then I have got it under control.”

“How many times a day do you think about sex?”

Almost constantly.

“How often do you masturbate?”

No more than twice a day, three times if I am bored, rarely more, unless I have to stay cooped up in the house all day.

I don’t need to answer her at all. She knows me almost as well as I know myself. She is perhaps my oldest friend.

“Heaps of people think about sex as much as I do. Men. I am just a man trapped inside a woman’s body.” A flippant throw away line and she laughs.

“Teenage boys, perhaps, but you are going to be 40 this year.”

I shrug.

“How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb?”

“One,” she says, “but the light bulb has to want to change.”

I hold her delicately fingered hand and smile and I think about how deeply she could reach inside me with those elegant fingers. A wriggling fish of thought, fleeting, gone in a second, but there will be another and another, whole schools of thoughts flashing across my consciousness. The constant distractions of a sexual world wonderful and varied as the ocean, a world I could drown myself in and still die happily.

“I don’t think I’m a sex addict.”

I check my watch. Just enough time to catch a bus to work.

We stand and hug and there is her willowy body pressed against mine for just a moment. I rarely hug. Touching a stranger seems too intimate. Hugs are an open doorway to a flaring in my body and therefore I remove myself from these kinds of intimate gestures. No hugging, no kisses on the cheek, no holding hands unless I feel safe enough with the person I am touching. I feel that somehow they may feel the heat of my desire climbing up from my skin, that I may burn them with it.

My friend and I hug, my oldest friend. My safe and wonderful friend who has just now pinned me with her observation.

“You take care,” she tells me, and she means it. She always wishes well for me, my beautiful friend. I watch her walking away from me, graceful, slender, the tight line of her perfect breasts under a snug sweater and that liquid surge pumps through my brain. I am, of course, not a sex addict but as I watch her walk away from me I slip a lozenge of lust under my tongue as if it were a Lindt ball dissolving and vibrating in my veins.

I pause, then, and I wonder.

Free Drinks Free Food and the Ocean

There was no use struggling. The rip had caught me. If this was my last hour then it was a good one. She was on the beach, tired from her struggle. She had somehow found an edge to it and she stood naked on the shore. She would perhaps be cold now, caught by the storm, the adrenalin subsiding. She might be shivering or numb. Either way she would be beautiful with her salt slicked hair and her pale skin turning a bluish tinge.

The ocean was taking me away from her. I was glad of this. I had been gliding along in her wake for far too long. I had become pruned by my moist desire for her. I had lost pieces of myself to the nip of fish. I let the water take me gently out into the thud of heavy rain. The sky lit up, a sudden realisation catching the edge of clouds. Below me there would be sharks. All of this, and me relaxing into it.

Eventually she would return to the tent, and the man with his muscles. The man who put up the tent. We barely knew him, but he was here, sleeping beside us, carrying our bags. He was here for the tent. She needed someone to put up the tent. I bobbed into the dark and the memory of me trying to take one of the bags.

"No." she told me, "that's what he's here for." To carry our bags. To put up our tent, to buy us drinks at the marina. I look at men differently through her eyes, but I am uncomfortable in this new incarnation of myself.

Let me tell you about the time she went to the supermarket. I have remembered this story so often I wonder if I might be repeating myself. No money for food. We have both whittled away our savings. There is nothing left. There is a packet of lentils in the cupboard that my grandmother has sent to us. She lies on the couch listening to The Cocteaux Twins. She rolls her eyes at my concern.

"I will get us some food. Write me a list."

She writes the list for me because I imagine that she will prowl the supermarket in a big coat, slipping cans and packets into the various pockets. I have seen her take things before, not often, but I have seen it. I suppose there will be some leniency if we are only stealing a loaf of bread. Okay. Bread then, but she writes Camembert and polenta and marinated olives. She makes a note for coffee and for milk and for cream. Cake, she writes. She has a sweet tooth, chocolate, and because she knows that it is my favourite she writes LINDT in capital letters beside this. She creates a feast of eggplant and haloumi cheese and extra virgin olive oil.

I slump onto the couch just as she bounces out of it.

She changes, a short silk skirt, her best bra with white flowers embroidered onto it, a low cut shirt that shows off the bouquet in the places where it rests on the delicate curve of her breast. She wears lipstick and she smells like an ornamental garden in spring. Beautiful.

She returns. She returns with a man driving a red sports car - are you sure I haven't told you this already? The scene is tattooed onto the tip of my tongue. He is attractive, dressed in a casual but expensive suit. He is rich. I can smell it on him. He is holding four shopping bags in each hand. I suppose he is not used to lifting such a weight. I notice his fingers trembling, but it is probably because she is standing in front of him in that short skirt and an obvious lack of underwear.

Groceries. Brie, olives, a nice white box for a desert, proper cake from a proper baker.

Her lipstick is perfect. She hasn't even kissed him. She doesn't kiss him goodbye. She giggles. She allows him to leave the bags on the front step and she waves as if he were already a long way away. I suppose he was.

I remember this as I drift out into the wild night. Storm, rain, her standing exhausted on the beach. If this is my last hour then I am fine with it. I see her raise her fingers a little, a tiny anemone wave, but I am already quite far away.

Balloons

She holds my head in her lap and tells me to breathe deeply. People are running inside my chest, big men, hurdling, running and jumping and thumping down on my ribs. I am filled with athletes and my arms are locked and rigid over my chest. She tells me "breathe", and I take a halting breath that is half a sob and I smell her secret musky odour under the sweet floral perfume, and it makes me even more agitated.

I am the gnarled and gnomic Rumpelstiltskin from the fairytale. I am all spit and struggle. She is a part of the problem offering a solution. She is the vessel for my lust and I fill her up. She kisses my tears and I could love her or I could hit her and I am bouncing from one state to the next like someone leaping from rock to rock in an ice-capped stream.

"Imagine," she tells me, "that for every breath there is a balloon filling."

Balloons. She has learned this trick in one of her self-help sessions. I feel my chest tightening at the use of this ridiculous self-delusion. I have lived with her affirmations pinned to the wall in the toilet, tolerating her silent platitudes for the sake of her extraordinary beauty. Now she hugs me and I struggle away from her.

"Release the balloons," she tells me, "one by one." Someone elses words from her ripe, over-blown mouth. Her mouth that I have bitten. Her mouth that I have pressed my nipple against, a mouth that has never sullied itself against my vagina. Her perfect mouth.

The balloons slip from my fingers one by one.

When they are gone, floating off into the angry pale of the sky. There is nothing left for me to hold on to.

I roll out of her empty hug and I am gone. I have already left the room.

"That's right," she tells me, "let go of the balloons, one by one by one."

One by one by one and it is all gone. I am gone. She is gone. There is nothing left to hold onto and my chest eases out of the vice that has gripped it. I leave the room. I leave the house. I leave that life. And I am gone.

Judgement day

I wrote a blog post and two thirds of my audience tuned out. One fell swoop. I lost them. I know this because of my stats counter, the little button at the bottom of the page that opens to a Pandora's box of wonder and terror. We check it obsessively, we, the bloggers. We watch the number of return visitors climbing, falling, little flurries of excitement at particular times for no reason, little slumps on fine days when our audiences would rather be at the beach.

My hit rate had reached a climax. There were hundreds of people who stumbled upon Furiousvaginas using key words that make me laugh - 'cheesy penis fug', 'fatslap', 'horse vagina','watch I am furious yellow'. These people wouldn't stay. They would stumble upon my site and click away again without reading a word. The ones I care about are the returning visitors. The people who seek me out, read a post or two before turning back to their daily grind. These are the people I am conversing with. They are you.

You were a weighty congregation. You were tuning in, in the hundreds, day after day after day. I was buoyed up by the force of you. I wrote for myself but I knew that you would be there with me. It made me less alone with it.

Then there was that night. That post. That clinging on to the world with my fingertips, all wakeful pacing, a surrealists nightmare of spiral staircases, whirlpools, the merry-go-round of a thousand disparate ideas. I wrote that blog post on that night, and, what's worse, I posted it. A line had been crossed. I knew it. 150 return viewers clicked in to read about my secret world. 125 of them found themselves taken aback, challenged, confronted. They left and they were never seen again.

One true and awful thing. But still a thing of beauty in its own way. It is perhaps my favourite post, the one that I come back to. My dark secret, flung into the spotlight.

Now there are fewer of you, no more than 26 a night, a solid group of readers who are not afraid to wade out into water beyond their depth.

"You should learn from this," my husband says, "why are you always pushing people away? That's why you never get published. You write stuff that no one wants to hear. It's all one big 'fuck you'."

But all I have ever wanted is to write one true and beautiful thing. One true and awful thing that can be beautiful. I watch Michael Haneke films and there it is, that true and beautiful and awful thing, again and again and again.

I watch my stats counter less often now.

Haneke's new version of 'Funny Games' opened to less than enthusiastic audiences in America. Gerard Donovan's 'Julius Winsome' should have won the Booker but instead it has been rejacketed in B format as if it were a cheap crime novel. Cormac McCarthy's 'Child of God' is a book that all my years of bookselling has not helped me to sell. Readers prefer Jeffrey Eugenides' 'Middlesex' to 'The Virgin Suicides' because 'Middlesex' makes them smile.

Krissy Kneen will write what Krissy Kneen writes and not everyone will sit comfortably with that. I could change and learn from my mistakes and write something that the publishers will like, something fine and interesting and funny and sexy. I could become the person that you want me to become. But I am not.

I sit down each day and there is just me and the blank box on my screen and I am answerable to myself alone. Myself, and the 15 people who tuned in to Furiousvaginas yesterday and the 15 people from the night before. It is just you and me really. We are alone with this, and I will continue to dig through my history in search of the handful of true and beautiful things that lie beneath the surface of my skin.

Dead Lovers

There was that one who drowned himself. There was the one who overdosed on pills. There was the one who was incautious with his needles and lax with his medication. There was the multiple stabbings, a near miss. There was the one who didn't do it but who said it would be my fault if he did. There was the one who slept with me on his resurrection, a broken beam, and rope buns and a second chance. Where is he now? We wonder, but we don't hold out much hope.

There are the corpses of them bobbing up through my dreams and banging against the underside of my eyelids. There was that time drunk on the motorcyle without a helmet, there was that other time, and the next and the next and I would hold my breath waiting for yet another turn for the worse, but I have never been into auto-asphyxiation.

Death and sex. I tip my hat to George Batailles. Death is so close, a thin pale membrane like a hymen. Once broken it could never be repaired.

Goodbye

Where is the line between flirting and falling? Who will be the object of my next affectionate moment? When does the moment become a long, interminable series of moments? When do I become inexorably entwined, flinging my self-respect on the pyre of passion? Patterns. Maps. I am decoding. I am identifying the warning signs. I am saving myself from the possibility of uncontrollable passions. Fatal attractions.

I saw one of those fatal attractions today. The hardest one. The one I have found most difficult to extract myself from. He walked into the bookshop. He recognised me, which was a positive development. We had ended in a screaming match which cleared the whole building. The residents of several flats evacuating as if a fire alarm had been sounded. I had had six months of silence, hoping that my easy going nature would win his heart. I had already wrestled his body from his clothing and climbed it from all angles, a mountain to conquer. I had conquered. His heart was another complication, and one that was too difficult for me to locate.

We had struggled through a period of time cohabiting. His only rule was that we would not have sex while we slept under the one roof. I agreed to this, thinking he would succumb to lonely sexless evenings. He proved to be a master of abstinence. My flat had no doors, and my furtive masturbation had to be played out late at night, after he had settled, curled up against the belly of his guitar, warm from music.

Now we faced each other after all these years.

"Hello." He didn't' remember my name. I said his into the silence that came after.

"So what are you doing?" He was half here, half gone. Nothing had changed.

"Working here, writing." I handed him a card with this address. The key to my innermost secrets, my furiousvaginas, my crazy head-long shout into the dark emptiness of cyberspace. He is the repetition of a theme. There are moments of our time together glaring defiantly out from amongst the flotsum and jetsum of a my online rant. He might recognise himself, or perhaps he will find himself transformed beyond recognition by my affections.

I considered myself to be in love with him. I never said the word but I was bitten by the idea of his disdain for me. Mauled by it. Ravaged.

The night after I met my husband I sought him out and laid it all flat in the night. Pieces of a puzzle, none of them connecting. Was there any chance that this might change? This terrible holding pattern, this ridiculous to-ing and fro-ing with me on the advance and him on the retreat. I would have abandoned my potential future, a turning point. I wanted him to tell me to turn back but he refused. He told me I had nice eyes. He stroked my hair away from them and let me go.

So then the slow hiss of our daily grind and him in the flat next door and me, distracted from the potential for something long and enduring right there in the bed beside me, listening for the plucking of strings and the voice that sounded like a broken heart. Then the day when the hiss became a shriek. Boiling over. Everybody left their respective flats and congregated on the front lawn of the tumble-down house, looking up, shading their eyes, as if to catch the rare moments of a solar eclipse. All those things I said. All those true things shouted. And him pinned by the force of it, saying, 'now I respect you. now'.

Now.

"OK then," I said, and, "Bye."

A farewell to things long gone. A farewell to madness and the kind of passion that could kill a girl. A farewell to youth and what little beauty I had once laid claim to. Farewell then. Farewell.

So I sit at the end of a week of farewells and I am emptied out. I am solid with love and support and the scaffolding of a life unfolding day by day. I have friends I love and I spend my spare time punching down the possibility of loving them too much, too fiercely. I am exhausted by the effort.

"You look flat," she tells me as we share a lift later in the afternoon.

Flat. Emptied. Hollow. Sad.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye. I have said it so often this week that the word rolls off my tongue.

"Really? I'm OK." I tell her.

And really, truly, I am OK.

I am.