Free Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes

you. That was how Ann had described him. Graham thought of him as the prick with the tic.
    It made him sad. It made him feel aggressive in an unfocused way, and it made him feel self-pitying; but mostly it made him feel straight sad. Perhaps now was the right time to try one of Jack’s solutions. Not that he’d gone to Jack for solutions; not really. But it was a harmless thing to try. Well,he thought harmless. And Ann wouldn’t be home for at least an hour and a half.
    Graham went to his study with a certain feeling of self-mockery. Apart from anything else, it was silly that his study was the only safe hiding-place. He pulled out a drawer of his filing cabinet; the drawer marked 1915–19. The manila files all presented their open sides to the eye, except for one. This he took out, turned the right way up, and extracted from it a pink, candy-striped paper-bag. Where to go? Not downstairs, in case Ann came back unexpectedly. Not in the bedroom—that would be far too much like adultery. Stay here? But where? Not at his desk; that would feel all wrong. He decided reluctantly on the bathroom.
    Graham hadn’t masturbated since he was eighteen, since the evening before the morning when he’d asked Alison, his first girlfriend, for a date. That decision had increased his confidence about asking her out, and so afterwards, in pious gratitude, he’d made his renunciation final. Besides, he hadn’t been happy about the guilt. He’d always masturbated in the lavatory at home; either before or immediately after his colonic activities, so that if he was quizzed about where he’d been, he wouldn’t actually be lying. This reduced the guilt a little, but it still hung around sycophantically.
    He also hadn’t masturbated, he realized, since the days when people thought about it as ‘masturbation’: that cool, frowning medico-Biblical word. There’d been other words around, no doubt, but ‘masturbation’ was what it always felt like. Masturbation, fornication, defecation: serious words from his childhood, representing activities to be pondered before being indulged in. Nowadays it was all wanking and fucking and shitting, and no one thought twice about any of them. Well, he used shitting himself; a bit, privately. Jack, of course, talked about wanking quite casually, and fucking as well. Graham was still a little tentative about both usages. ‘Wanking’, after all, was such a quiet, domestic, guiltless sort of word: it made it sound like a home craft.
    Twenty-two years since he had last masturbated. Wanked. And several different flats and houses where he hadn’t. He sat on the lavatory seat and looked around; then got up and pulled the cork-topped linen box over towards him. Where it had come from there were four sharp depressions in the carpet, one at each corner of a rectangle of dust. Graham settled back on the lavatory seat, pulled the linen box in closer and put his paper bag on top of it. Then he lowered his trousers and pants to his ankles.
    That didn’t feel very comfortable. He stood up, closed the lid of the lavatory, and laid a towel across the top. Then he settled back. He took a breath, reached into the bag and pulled out the two magazines he had hastily bought from an Indian newsagent on his way back from a distant cinema. He’d tried to look puzzled when he bought them, as if they were really for someone else; but he expected he had only managed to look furtive.
    One was
Penthouse
, which he’d heard of; the other
Rapier
, which he hadn’t. He laid them side by side on the linen box and read the contents lists on the covers. He wondered about the title of
Rapier
. Was it meant to indicate a world of buccaneering sexuality, where Errol Flynn was king? Or was it merely, perhaps, the comparative form of the adjective ‘rapy’? Rapier than thou?
    The two girls on the covers, each, by some magazine publishers’ convention, exposing only one nipple, struck Graham as extremely beautiful. Why did such girls