Free Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes Page A

need to take their clothes off? Or was there some connection between being extremely beautiful and
wanting
to take your clothes off? Most likely, the connection was between being extremely beautiful and being offered helpful sums of money to take your clothes off. He expected that was it.
    He took a deep breath, looked down at what he used to call his penis but now wasn’t so sure, grasped it in his right hand, and turned the cover of
Rapier
with his left. Another contents page, illustrated this time by a photograph of adeep, pink ravine, topped with a tropical rain forest. It had been raining in the ravine too, by the look of it. Graham was fascinated and slightly appalled. Next came a few pages of readers’ letters, also illustrated with topographical shots, then an eight-page photo-spread of another extremely beautiful girl. On the first page she was sitting in a wicker chair wearing only a pair of knickers; then she was naked and playing with her nipple; then with her … down there anyway; until by the eighth page she appeared to be trying to turn her … thing inside out, as if it were a trouser pocket. On this last page, while Graham’s brain gawped, his semen (as he used to think of it, but now also wasn’t quite sure) came spurting out, quite unexpectedly. It sprayed over the left arm of his sweater, over the linen box, and over the girl contortionist.
    In a panic, as if he had a maximum of two seconds in which to do it, Graham seized some lavatory paper and began swabbing down his sleeve, his magazine, his for want of a better word penis, and the linen box. To his dismay he saw that the cork top of the box now bore several damp, rather slimy marks. He flushed the soggy paper down the lavatory and wondered what to do. The stains somehow didn’t look like simple water stains. What could he say he’d spilt—aftershave? shampoo? He thought of dribbling a few drops of shampoo on to the linen box as well, so that when Ann asked (as when his father had asked) he could at least not lie to her. But what if the shampoo made a different sort of mark? Then he’d have to say he’d spilt some shampoo
and
some aftershave. That didn’t sound very likely. Then he realized he’d been in the bathroom for barely five minutes. Ann still wouldn’t be back for ages. He could sit it out and see what happened to the stains.
    It hadn’t been a particularly good … wank, as he supposed he’d better start calling it. Too short, too sudden, and too alarming at the end to be consciously enjoyed. But then he’d been more than surprised by his material. He leaned backagainst the lavatory cistern and opened
Penthouse
. He read the list of contents and turned to the drink column. Sound enough; if rather jocosely written. Then the motoring column, a fashion feature, and a science fiction story about what would happen to men when robots could be built which were not only better lovers than their fleshly rivals, but were also capable of impregnating women. Then he read the letters column, and the editorial replies, which struck him as full of sound advice.
    By this time he noticed two occurrences: his cock, as he now thought he would call it, was beginning to get hard again while he read a letter from a Surrey housewife gratified by the number of dildoid-shaped objects available to the dedicated self-pleasurer; and his semen (he didn’t feel ready for spunk yet) seemed to have quite dried out. In for a penny, he said to himself jollily, and began to wank again, only this time with more care, interest and pleasure, at the beginning, and in the middle, and at the end.

FIVE
Sawn-Offs and Four-Eyes
    ‘Well, well, well, my little birdy. Now this is what the poet calls a surprise.’
    ‘Jack, are you busy? I won’t stay long.’
    ‘Well, it’s not the greatest come-on I’ve heard, but it’ll do.’
    Jack squashed himself none too efficiently against the wall, and felt Ann brush him slightly as she went past. She walked quickly