Stockholm Syndrome

I just think she’s a big young, you say out of the corner of your mouth as I lean in towards you at the bar. Are you fucking kidding? I say, or something to that effect. I bunch my long hair up in a ponytail on top of my head and let it drop. When are you getting your hair cut? You ask. I’m growing it. I like you with short hair. I like growing it. That’s university for you, you reply in your wise old sage voice. Experimentation. If only you knew how much experimentation. Since I moved to a halls of residence across the Thames six months ago it’s been one nonstop drink, drugs and sex and me and you have split up and gotten back together about twenty times. Ironic as you are still with your wife, so I guess we aren’t really breaking up and getting back together at all. We aren’t doing anything. We’re just fucking with less and less passion in single beds when I’m not fucking someone else. Sometimes I don’t even want to have sex with you anymore. It’s a marriage within a marriage. I still think she is a bit young though, you say again. I glance over my shoulder at the girl, who is about 22 and accompanying a friend of yours to this gig. She looks about 22, I say blank faced. And he’s 30 odd! You exclaim. I proffer a tenner to the barman and say, stinging words in my mouth, well I’m 19. You shake your head. Not the same, you say gulping down your lager. This is a love job.

If it ever was a love job it has stopped feeling like one, to be frank. You’re the boyfriend from back home with none of the benefits that insinuates. We hang out in dingy boozers, I cry when I sit in my room and listen to Marillion and I get high before I ring you because talking to you sober just highlights that we have nothing to say to one another. This isn’t really working out for me. This isn’t really working out for me. I practice saying it in my head, I fantasise and worry about saying it to you. I give myself deadlines that come and go: after that thing we’ve got tickets to, after your birthday. I have lost all hope for the future. I kind of want to say all this as we walk from the bar, but no point. It’s a grubby routine for both of us now and I don’t know how to get out of it. Your mate, a new one, another teacher at your new school, leans in to say something to you and you smirk. I find out later that what he said was basically that he’d have a go on me if you ever got bored. Thanks for the offer there, but I think I’m okay. The girl, the 22 year old, is called Katy and seems quite nice but we aren’t going to be friends. She’s all piercings and black hair dye and I’m more Lolita-slut-English-Student than that. We talk unis and plans for after degrees and I am bored witless until the band come on and do The Riverboat Song.

Luckily the rest of the night is a bit of a blur, albeit a boring one. At one point they’re playing some new material and I tell you I’m going to the loo, when in fact I am going to the bar. I spend 20 minutes in the foyer area where the bar is, drink three double Vodka and lemonades and suddenly feel a lot more positive about going back to you, your dull mate and dull slut-goth. You shoot me a quizzical look when I find you in the crowd, and I shrug. There was a queue. No there wasn’t. You reply. You’re hammered. I shrug again and then ignore you in favour of what’s going on, on stage. Just for a second I remember the grungy excitement of that gig in the Astoria two years ago where we snogged in secret and giggled before Pete came back from the bar. Those days seem far behind us now, it seems hard to believe that was even me. Maybe it was just because it was all new to me. The lyrics to a song, I can’t remember which one though echo in my head: the thrill of touching and being touched. Was that all it was? It wasn’t about you at all? It was just animal, just endorphins.

I feel Fucked Up with everything, with the tissue of lies, with the lack of respect either of us have for each other or your wife. The harder the alcohol hits my blood and organs and the more I am thinking to hell with all of this, let’s just end this tonight, put a fucking rocket under it. But the truth is that I don’t know how to exist without you now and not in the nice way you aren’t supposed to know how to live without someone you love, but in a horrible Stockholm Syndrome way, of being a prisoner and so shackled by your lies that I can’t find a way to escape.

We don’t touch once throughout the gig, although dull mate and Katy are all over one another. You are standing just behind me and I can see your hairy arm from the corner of my eye and I shudder at the idea that I might have to have sex with you later. Officially we are, I think, not fucking at the moment. Things have got “too complicated” you say and so we are “easing off” but to be honest it’s been off again and on again so much lately that I can’t remember where we are. And we probably will have sex either tonight or in the morning because the wife’s away and we both see that time as money in the bank that needs spending quickly. Besides I definitely think on some level that if I fuck you tonight or in the morning it will make you love me somehow. I don’t say it out loud, Jesus, I don’t even think it aloud in my head, but I know really that this is now my motivation for copulation with you. Besides, you’re the only man I have sex with and don’t use condoms, so who says romance is dead?