I love your paradoxes and i’m connected on msn 4 u

I’m in a GCSE Physics practical, not long after the turn of the millennium. Today, we’re testing the resistance of a wire. I press open a crocodile clip, offering it the tip of my finger, watching as its teeth sink painfully into my nail. Looking around the classroom, it seems as though everyone but me has got their circuit going. No more fitting a metaphor, I think, for my life at fifteen years old.

I’ve tried all the stale, lame stuff that generally schematises early teenage-hood. I had a boyfriend, but he didn’t make me feel much. Objectively, I’m told, he was hot. He was tall, dark-haired, with sunken, shiny blue eyes that spoke to his penchant for indie films with a deep message. It’s always with a kind of loathing that I would retire my PlayStation controller to have him fool around with me for half an hour. At other times, I’ve fallen in and out of friendship groups to whom I’ve felt no particular tie.

In the spaces between it all, I like to read and watch things that at my age I probably shouldn’t do. On Fridays we make our family trip to Blockbuster, and I’ll pore over the foreign cinema section to carefully select a film about mother-son incest, sadomasochism or drug abuse that ends in catastrophe. I tell mum that I’m practising my French – she doesn’t look at the DVD anyway. 

That’s the strange and handy thing, I find, about the veil of a foreign language. How the extraneity of it can magically elevate even the crudest subject matter to something more refined, something more than what it is. In the gap between my native tongue, and that of another, I’m drawn to what presents itself as a highly seductive void. A void that harbours exquisite things, yet undeciphered; beautiful secrets I imagine would only be lost to translation.

When the film or book is over, I flip up my laptop in bed and go online. I connect to the French equivalent of Habbo Hotel, enter the public lobby or lido, then start mass-adding anyone with a boy avatar. I sup at a half-pint glass of schnapps I acquire from the cabinet, left over and forgotten from a family barbecue. In the public chat, I ask who’s horny. In French, again, it feels far less crass than it otherwise would. I find a boy and we migrate over to MSN. I sit under my duvet and watch him wank himself off, furtively looking over his shoulder, now and again, to see if his mum’s coming. I tell him my camera’s broken, and silently pity the burden of his erection.

Recently I set up an account on Skyrock – France’s answer to MySpace. Very similar to the latter, the one variation on the concept being that you have the opportunity each day to cast a number of votes on your favourite profile. Daily, anonymous French men grace me with their vote and private message me especially to tell me so. Alain51fr has been my top voter for the past week.

Alain51fr: 
i feel like a necessity imperative to vote for you, to check if you continued or not your blog
and to check if u added new pics : yes !!! i will stole it of course... :) to dream

Alain51fr:
Im becoming addicted i dont know how many times i voted for you today ? around 10 times and i always check if there is a new article on your blog or new pics of you

To have this old French man message me makes me feel a bit I’m living in one of those transgressive cinematic works I love so much. In that sense, I’m inclined to encourage and continue our interaction, carry it on over to MSN. On the other hand, some of what he comes out with is just a bit too cringe-worthy, a bit too off-narrative as per the one I have plotted out in my head.

Alain51fr:
Tell me dear who is your favourite writer ? Mine is Vladimir Nabokov , i think i read all his books 
and my favourite book of all time is Ada or ardor

That’s better, I think to myself. I place hope in that which is lost in translation. I continue to entertain Alain.

In real-life, in Physics, I sit next to Sam. She intrigues me only in so far as her older brother’s in the sixth-form, and part of the group of edgy, mysterious boys who smoke Pall Malls round the back of the car park. Sam’s all about herself, and oblivious to my existence other than in so much it validates her own. I find it easy to humour her and endear her to me. We plan a sleepover at hers, and as I’m doing her makeup her hand accidentally brushes the inside of my thigh. She leaps back as though I’ve given her an electric shock.

“Oh my god, I didn’t mean that, I’m not a weirdo,” she assures me, frantically.

Later, we creep into the grounds of the village pub via its back entrance. Sam spots her brother and everyone else smoking round one of its damp wooden benches. They make a little room for us as we slot ourselves into opposite ends of the bench. Sam nicks her brother’s pack of cigarettes, and leans over to feed me one of my own. I drink my snakebites through a straw – Sam’s brother tells me I’ll get more fucked up that way. The eighties mega-hits compilation on the jukebox begins to sound like slowed-down funfair music. I’m feeling quite breathless.

Alone, outside the front of the pub, I cross the road to sit and cry on a park bench. The source of my despair is unclear. A little while later, I see Sam’s brother jaywalking towards me, arms held out, aloofly commanding the oncoming traffic.

“You alright?” He asks, putting his arm around me. “Come on, let’s go for a walk” he insists. I can barely walk as he guides me by the waist through the graveyard. We end up in a muddy clearing where we lay and kiss on the floor. I curl up foetal-like to try and make obvious that I don’t want to do it anymore. But then fuck it, I tell myself. I pull myself together and set to doing what seems most appropriate to this situation. I bend over him and start sucking his cock. It feels like a rubbery resistor in my mouth. After a minute I give up. He wanks himself off, there in front of me, calling my name again and again. I feel sorry for the boy. As he’s about to come, he grabs my head without warning and shoves my mouth around him. I swallow the cum in droves, and it tastes like battery acid.

I stay home the next weekend and go back to talking to Alain51fr. I ask him why he likes me so much.

Alain51fr:
You have the chance to be beautiful AND to have a total charm.
You are intelligent and interesting
You are sexy and desirable
You are romantic and you have passion in your vain
You look like a little girl and a mature woman
You are enchanting with your words when you write
You are rare and have your personality
You can be a heart dream and a sexual attraction
you are calm and crazy
I love your paradoxes and I m connected on msn 4 u

Not quite Nabokov, I think, disappointedly, but I’m bored and alone, and so I add him on MSN.

I shudder when Alain’s voice first buzzes, deep and guttural through the foamy pad of my plastic headphones. Each sentence registers like an unwelcome caress, but as the night wears on and I drink more of my mum’s Bacardi, I begin to mind it less – to enjoy it, even. I refuse turn my webcam on. This, the geographical distance plus the slight language barrier, create just enough dissonance to keep me comfortable in the situation. I tell him how awful my experiences with boys at school have been. I tell him about Sam’s brother. 

Somehow, Alain coaxes me into drunkenly singing him a song. I sing Unchained Melody, turning on my camera for just the length of the song. Alain is overjoyed, and writes me a poem the next day to express his gratitude.

Alain51fr:
The music fills my heart of a nostalgic.
The souvenirs draw a smile on my face
how wet were my eyes when I felt how shy she was
This fragile princess offering her song to a stranger
I imagine she layed by me and continued to whisper this diamond song to my ears 
And she brought me up in a never explored sky.
Yes! i can hear the caress of her voice deep in my heart.
She will always sing in my heart.

Back at school, it seems I’ve established quite a reputation after how I got on at the village pub.

“Heard about you in the graveyard, you filthy bitch!” Dominic teases me with a sly smile across the table in Technology. Dominic interests me in that he’s the only openly gay student at our school. I’d never trust him, but imagine we could have some fun together. He invites me out that Halloween weekend – we get in to all the gay bars underage because he’s sucked off most of the bouncers. I dress as Alice in Wonderland and him as Zorro.

The night remains with me in glittering snapshots. We’re swigging bottles of rancid Chardonnay and burning our outer nostrils on poppers. On the rainbow dance floor, we’re riding the waves of the latest dance-pop one-hit-wonder. Something ripples in me, radiating in time with the song – swelling hopefully along with the bridge and then dissipating softly after the coming of its chorus. Next, I’m straddling a redheaded stranger. I tell her her hair is beautiful as I’m pawing it gently with both hands. I tremble with the static of her frizzy, auburn curls.

Alain messages me in the morning:

Alain51fr:
Last night I do not sleep and I go to sleep late and I think of you , I adore your personality ! this morning I look and copy the new pics and it was strange to see a costume from Alice when i was little she was my dream, my fantasy even when i went to disneyland and met her ...it was strange to feel i could.. hahahhahahahah i m really actually laughing at myself when i type :) can u imagine the perversion : dreaming to make love with Alice hahhahh. Such beautiful Alice !!! There is so many beautiful sibliance, delicious Alice, also so sensuelle …

Still hungover, my stomach churning, I connect to MSN that night. Alain tells me he has a present to send me, a token of his appreciation for the song and the pictures. I double-click to open the .wmv file.

Alain’s there, his cock directly addressing the camera. He rubs it in time to the gentle lulls of a love song. I listen carefully until I can decipher it. It’s a recording of Unchained Melody, of me, crooning like a sad songbird in the background. 

Any of the imagined gaps between that which is foreign and that which is known, any space left open for the tantalisingly ideal – all of that is plugged up now, covered over by his gloopy fifty-year-old spunk. I slam down my laptop screen and pull the plug from its socket.

The next day, before I block him forever, Alain leaves me with this parting message:

Alain51fr:
Sarah

I am a strange old man, watching you too but i care for you and i don't stop to watch you and to watch him I am ready, ready to be your hero ready to protect you against all the bad things of life Sarah because i had the chance to see a very beautiful light a little fire in you little heart and i trust in the magical treasure i could find in it.
Don't be scared when i’m here
here for you
All my tender to you

xxx

Alain …