Rose locked her phone: 10.47 a.m. She had around eleven hours to get through before reaching a somewhat reasonable bedtime for a twenty-six-year-old woman. There were a lot of things she could achieve in that time, like launching a website. Or baking banana bread. Twice. She could learn to juggle, or speak French. She could read an entire book from start to finish, something she’d feel too embarrassed to take out in public. Like Politics for Dummies – did they even make one? – or one of the Twilights. She could learn about taxes. Pensions. Credit ratings. All the things she should have probably learned about before becoming an adult. She could volunteer. Make soup for the day at a homeless shelter. Talk to people in her local old people’s home. Walk someone’s dog. Talk to someone’s dog.
First, Rose had to shower; she could still feel Dr Smith’s breath lingering on her clothes. No one was going to let her walk their dog if she smelled like a pub basement. When she returned to her bedroom, hair just about held together on top of her head in another towel, the one that had been wrapped tightly around her fell to the floor, revealing her naked body in the standing mirror by her desk. There she was, all oddly proportioned limbs. Her arms dangled limply either side of her torso, which was too short and shapely in the wrong places. Usually, Rose felt indifferent to her body. It wasn’t something she hated nor was it something she adored and cherished in the way people on social media told her she should. It was just there, existing. Today, though, at that moment, she found herself completely fixated on it. Stepping closer to the mirror, Rose pivoted so that she was facing it front-on. She gently touched parts of herself, observing the way her skin reddened when she pushed too hard, or pinched for too long. Something about it felt foreign to her. Like the flesh was no longer hers. She looked at other areas of her body, pushing both hands against herself as she moved up her legs and on to her thighs. She grabbed at the meat of them, digging her nails in. Feeling nothing, she dug in harder, waiting for something to happen. A signal of ownership. She waited a little longer until her skin was vibrating with pain. But Rose ignored the alarm and continued to push until eventually her fingers couldn’t bear the pressure anymore and they collapsed onto her legs, her breath expelling in a single, forceful exhale that brought her to the floor.
THREE
It seemed like as good a time as any to go for a run. Rose was hardly athletic but she had always been a runner of sorts. Not the kind that ran quickly, of course – her legs were not long enough to move at a rapid pace without making her feel like she’d punctured an internal organ – but she would regularly do a few laps around Wandsworth Common, pausing to stretch, absorb the beauty of the natural-ish world and look at her phone. She had made some key edits to her soundtrack, removing Milo’s song, ‘Brush It Off’, feeling a sense of achievement as she tapped ‘remove from this playlist’.
It was also when she was running that Rose found she had her clearest thoughts. She would depart with questions and return with answers. This time, though, as she darted around dogs and padded past pedestrians, she couldn’t find the right path. There were too many obstacles filling her head, each one of them a different anamorphic version of Milo’s face. Sometimes it resembled someone familiar and cheery, like the first time she saw him. Other times, his face was beneath her, an unrecognisable thing with alien features. It was when the face appeared above her, though, that stirred the most unease. Rose turned the volume up on her iPhone, the sounds of Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ now reverberating through every neuron in her brain. This was objectively a very happy, very good song. Nothing bad could happen to Rose as long as she was listening to this song. The second it finished, she dragged the timebar back to the start to play it again. Then she played it again and again for the twenty minutes it took her to get home.
Later that afternoon, after several naps and telling Netflix that yes, she was still watching America’s Next Top Model, Rose decided to delete her conversation with Milo. He still hadn’t read her message, and now even the sight of his name in her inbox made her want to vomit. Like she needed to expel the words entirely from her body and mind. There would be no memories to recall if she never had any memories in the first place. It was easier just to erase it all.
Rose deleted the conversation with a firm swipe and tap of her thumb. Once his name had gone, she went onto his profile and unfollowed him. Another firm tap, this time with her index finger. Blocking him would give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d affected her. So she refrained. Then Rose opened her laptop, went to her search history, typed ‘Milo’, and deleted all 337 results, grimacing. It was confronting to see how much time she’d spent googling him. Now, though, all of it had vanished. Rose had been digitally and spiritually cleansed. There was a newfound feeling of lightness. She was in total control. This was easy.
It was at that moment Rose decided to download a dating app. She’d never used one before, apart from briefly signing up to Tinder at uni because all her housemates had done it and, well, she was curious. But she’d deleted it after waking up to seven photographs of a flaccid penis. Her friends told her this was abnormal; the penis was supposed to be erect.
Thankfully, most dating apps had since deleted the picture feature. Rose recalled overhearing some of the MODE staff talking about an app called Mix in the Firehouse cafe; it was marketing itself as an empowering feminist platform. The idea was that women had to be the ones to message the men they matched with first: a reversal of traditional power dynamics. Rose concluded that the good men would be on an app like this. The kind of men that read novels and called their mothers every Sunday. A good man would help. It would be validating to feel wanted by someone. And it would distract her, though from what she still wasn’t sure. How hard could it be? She had just slept with one of the most famous men on the planet, hadn’t she? That meant she was on a par with all of the other women he’d been with, logically speaking. Women who were at the upper echelons of attractiveness. Supermodels. Actresses. Heiresses. Rose now knew the list off by heart; looking at it several times a day had become a strange source of comfort and reassurance. Technically, she belonged there too.
For her profile, Rose could choose six photographs. She decided to upload three. There was one of her and Luce at a fashion and film party for MODE that Rose had got Luce into – Luce went home with a Radio 1 DJ that night – where they were arm in arm and smiling at the camera. Rose couldn’t remember who took the photo but it was taken far enough away from her face to reduce the villainy of her nose. Then there was a picture Lola had taken of her rifling through rails at a stall in Portobello Market. It must have been summer; she was wearing a yellow linen sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Again, you could hardly see her because it had been taken from across the road. Finally, Rose chose a selfie she’d taken at her first red carpet event with her earpiece visible. Minnie had sent her to get a blow-dry that morning.
The written prompts were trickier. Rose knew she wasn’t supposed to answer these earnestly. But trying too hard to poke fun at them was equally embarrassing, like you were somehow above it all. She tried to keep things light. ‘Dating me is like … going to the supermarket. Mildly thrilling’ was her first one. ‘I’m a regular at … my supermarket’ was the second, and for the third, she went for ‘a fact that surprises people about me’ and put something about being obsessed with sharks because it’s a widely known fact that all straight men love sharks.
The ‘Virtues’ section was trickier. The app wanted definitive short answers to things Rose had spent years trying to ascertain, like her religious beliefs (none) and her politics (too uninformed to be armed with anything she’d feel comfortable discussing on dates). On top of that, there were questions about her family plans and her views on having children. Major life choices and views had been reduced to a matter of ticking one box over another. Rose declined to answer them all, doing the same for the ‘Vices’ section, which asked for her habits around drinking, smoking and drugs. Potential dates didn’t need to know about any of that before they’d even met her; they could work it out along the way.
Once her profile was complete, Rose went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet, swiping through her options. It was astonishing to her how many men got this so terribly wrong. There was an inordinate number of the kind of people Luce would fawn over – i.e. indie hipsters who won’t eat meat because it’s bad for the environment but happily inhale dangerous amounts of cocaine at the weekend. They weren’t even ashamed about it either, literally calling themselves vegans on their profiles and then putting a ‘yes’ next to the pill symbol to indicate they did, in fact, consume narcotics.
Everyone else was either far too earnest, declaring their love for travel, wine and animals as if that made them unique, or making way too much of an effort to show they weren’t taking it seriously (‘I hate it here’), which only made it seem like they were the ones taking it very seriously.
Rose swiped left on the majority of profiles,g getting through fifty or so in the first few minutes alone. There were a handful that she swiped right for. One, Mick, twenty-nine, was because he had green eyes and worked in advertising, which had become a sexy industry thanks to Mad Men. Another, Jimmy, twenty-six, was because he was 6'3'' and had a cat in the back of one of his photos (‘cat people are good people,’ Lola always said). And another because he was a filmmaker with long dark hair, and Rose liked the idea of dating a filmmaker with long dark hair. She decided he’d be the kind of man that used a Nokia 3210 and spent Sunday afternoons in a darkroom developing photos he’d taken on a vintage Nikon camera.
Just downloaded a dating app, Rose told Luce over WhatsApp.
About time, she replied immediately.
Are people always this awful?
If they’re men, generally, yes.
Luce always said the sex she’d had was better with women and yet still only ever seemed to turn to men for relationships. Rose found her own vagina intimidating enough, let alone anyone else’s.
Her first time was with a boy at Central Saint Martins who was in her first-year sculpture seminars. Timmy Gray. They were friends first and would often end up watching Marvel films together in bed at 4 a.m. after nights out, sharing bowls of pasta they’d miraculously cooked in the microwave and smothered in cheddar.
Things went on like this for a while until one night Rose stumbled back to Timmy’s room at 2 a.m. and crawled into bed with him. He stirred and turned around, holding her against his warm bare chest, which smelled like expensive fabric softener. The sex was as good as you’d expect given the circumstances. Rose was mortified when he asked halfway through if she was ‘a virgin’. Obviously, she said that she wasn’t. But this was a bad lie to tell: Timmy had to literally guide her hips down onto him because she hadn’t quite worked out the physical logistics required to have sex. The whole thing was so humiliating Rose stopped going to the sculpture seminars altogether.
The second man was Ed. Sex with Ed always felt like she was doing him a favour. Sure, he went down on her and attempted to pleasure her in the way most men are told they ought to by older brothers or boys in the year above. But after a while, it became clear that this wasn’t something he was doing for her. Not once did he ask if what he was doing felt good, or what she wanted him to do to make it feel better. And because he didn’t, Rose never felt comfortable enough to direct him. To this day, the only person that had ever made her orgasm was herself. It was lazy to fake it, sure, and probably terrible for feminism. But she’d long ago accepted that it was also easier and less time consuming for all involved.
The third man was Milo.
How are you holding up? Rose typed out to Luce.
Not good.
Luce’s name immediately flashed up on Rose’s phone.
‘Hey,’ she whispered.
‘Hey.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘I miss George. I can’t sleep. And when I do sleep all that happens is I have sex dreams about George.’
Rose sighed and listened as Luce continued to regurgitate the same statements she returned to after every George break-up. Yes, they’ve both been awful to each other. But they both still loved each other. Can love be enough? It’s enough for Posh and Becks. Isn’t it supposed to be enough? He’s the only man that is good at sex. Squirter Gun was good but he had the baby voice. Why do men use baby voices in bed? Do they think we want to mother them while they fuck us? God, George is so good. But Luce could never trust him. And how can you have a relationship without trust? But God, the sex.
Usually, Rose had the patience for it. Tonight, she wanted to get back on the dating app.
‘Can we plan a girls’ night soon?’ asked Luce, her voice all pleading whines like it was when she’d ask her mum to make them chicken nuggets as kids. ‘Just you and me like we used to before I met stupid George.’
‘That sounds great,’ Rose replied. They set a date in a few weeks’ time when Luce would be back home.
Within seconds of hanging up, Rose had returned to swiping through strangers. Seven people had liked her and there was one match: Jake, twenty-seven. He was 6'1'', had a sandy blond mop of curls, and worked in accounting. Looking at his profile now, Rose couldn’t remember why she’d liked him. He was attractive enough, but the photographs were fairly standard: in a pub with some friends, a team football photo and one marginally pretentious shot of him sitting on a balcony covered in expensive-looking plants, gazing pensively down towards the floor in the way people do when their friends yell, ‘Give us a candid one!’ Still, he had a good face – and she could just about make out his abs through the football shirt, which was damp and clinging to his body. Mystery solved.
She scrolled down to look at the rest of his profile. Liberal views, sure. Occasionally takes drugs, of course. Agnostic, whatever you say. Rather than just liking her, though, Jake had gone to the extra effort of replying to one of Rose’s prompts. Of course, it was the one about sharks. Did you also know there are nine different types of hammerheads? Wild, he wrote.
Rose shuffled herself down, deeper under the covers. She’d got so used to the feeling of having no sheets on her bed now, it was as if she’d never slept with sheets on her bed at all. While googling ‘fun shark facts’ on her phone, Rose opened a page titled ‘12 Shark Facts That May Surprise You’ that had been created specifically for Shark Week in 2016. She could tell Jake how sharks have no bones, or how the earliest species date back to roughly 450 million years ago. But that probably wasn’t going to turn him on.
Ever seen one in real life? she replied. Jake messaged back within minutes to inform her that, yes, he had seen a shark in real life. A hammerhead, no less. Even if it was a lie, Rose didn’t care. He had replied quickly, which was an excellent sign, she thought, considering how Luce was always lamenting how long people took to reply on apps.
Conversation moved from sharks to other ‘beasts of the sea’, as he called them, to places they wanted to travel to and films they’d enjoyed. Rose avoided any subjects surrounding music; it wasn’t worth taking the risk. They chatted without stopping until 2 a.m., flirting in the manner that only strangers can, exchanging bits of banal information that somehow become tantalising in those early stages, when things like ‘rank your favourite supermarket sandwiches’ and ‘what posters did you have in your childhood bedroom’ can feel thrillingly erotic. Sleep well, Rose, Jake wrote, when they had both resigned to their mutual exhaustion.
