Page 64 of The Elements
It’s the seventh time that George has shown up at my apartment, but at least he no longer arrives unannounced.
Instead, he texts when he wants sex, and I’ve learned that I can only get away with saying no twice in a row before he becomes threatening, leaving me with no choice but to invite him over.
I take no pleasure in our encounters and have grown to despise both his smug little face and the tawdry remarks he makes, thinking they might put me in the mood.
I have no idea how much porn the boy watches—quite a lot, I imagine, if his words and actions are anything to go by—but he clearly hasn’t the first clue how women in the real world behave or what we want from our sexual encounters.
We don’t, for example, want our hair pulled.
Nor do we want to be choked. It’s not a turn-on to be called by the names that men have historically called women in their attempts to demean them.
We would prefer that our partners ejaculated into condoms rather than onto our faces.
Rape fantasies are not an actual thing, although rapes themselves are.
We’re not interested in filming our encounters and subsequently uploading them to the internet, nor do we particularly enjoy watching the erotic encounters of others.
Thanks to unfettered access to Wi-Fi since before he even reached puberty, however, these are clearly the things that George believes are the fastest way to a girl’s heart.
And to think: people used to say it with flowers.
Today, he turns fifteen, which is the final nail in the coffin in terms of any interest I might ever have displayed in him, and to my dismay he insists on spending his birthday with me, making it clear in advance that he expects me to do something special to mark the occasion.
I thought this meant a cake and a present, but no, he sent me a link for a High Neck Halter Lace Bodysuit from Victoria’s Secret and said that he wanted me to wear it on what he called his “special night.” I did as instructed.
For the time being, at least, I have no choice.
He’s confided in me a few times about his home life, apparently believing that I care about his regular arguments with his father and his nonexistent relationship with his mother, who left when he was four years old and moved to Jersey, starting a new family there that didn’t involve him.
He visits every summer for a month, just as I did with Beth when I was a child, but he tells me that she barely tolerates his presence, while his stepfather and step-siblings actively resent him.
“Maybe we could go together sometime?” he asks, and I glance across the room from where I’m preparing his birthday dinner, his favorite and a gourmand’s delight: chicken nuggets, chips, and beans.
“Go where?” I ask.
“To Jersey,” he says. “To my mum’s.”
I stare at him in disbelief.
“Why on earth would we do that?”
“Because I’d like you to meet her. You’re my girlfriend, after all, and she’s my mum. You’ll need to get to know each other sooner or later.”
It takes all my self-control not to burst out laughing.
“George,” I say, keeping my tone steady as I can’t risk provoking him. “I’m not your girlfriend.”
“Of course you are,” he replies, looking genuinely surprised, even wounded. “We’re sleeping together, aren’t we?”
“That’s just a physical act,” I tell him. “And a private one. But we’re not actually dating. We’ve never even been outside this flat together.”
“I was thinking about that too,” he says, coming over and taking my right hand in his sweaty little fist. The urge to pull it away and wipe it on my trousers is overwhelming. “Don’t you think we should do something other than just, you know, have sex?”
“I’d be very happy not to have sex with you, George.”
He frowns. Perhaps I’m being too subtle for him.
“Like, we could go to a film together some night. The new Transformers movie comes out next week.”
“The what?” I ask.
“You’re kidding, right?”
I shrug.
“Oh my God,” he shouts, growing animated now. “It’s a series of movies about these machines that—”
“How many are there?” I ask.
“Machines?”
“No, movies.”
“I don’t know. A bunch. We could watch all the old ones here across a few nights—I could stay over—and then go to the IMAX to see the new one. What do you think?”
I think that I’d rather dig a hole to the center of the earth with my tongue.
“Sure,” I say. “Sounds like a plan.”
“Great. Sorted.”
He then starts talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has apparently spawned dozens of films, and says that we can start on them once our triumphant journey through the world of Transformers has come to an end.
“I can’t believe you haven’t seen any of them,” he says, looking genuinely baffled. “Like, I thought people your age were really into cinema?”
“I like Almodóvar,” I tell him. “And Woody Allen. And Jane Campion.”
He stares at me in complete bewilderment, as if I’ve just started speaking Latin.
I shake my head. There’s no point explaining.
To my ennui, he begins a long and erudite analysis of the virtues of Ironman, Thor, and Captain America, and it takes all my willpower to stop myself from telling him that I would rather have my eyeballs prized out with nail scissors than subject myself to any of these celluloid atrocities.
“And if we plan on going to my mum’s at some point,” he continues, bringing the conversation back to where it started, but sounding a little more cautious now, “then, before that, maybe I could introduce you to some of my friends.”
I open the fridge door to hide my face from him as I let out a silent scream. “George,” I say. “You haven’t told anyone about us, have you?”
“No,” he says. “I swear I haven’t. You told me not to.”
“You know how much trouble I could get into if any of this got out, right?”
“I do,” he says, smiling now, knowing the power he has over me. “You could go to jail.”
He’s too young to be a good liar, and I’m reasonably confident that he’s telling the truth, but at the same time, I’m also conscious that a teenage boy having regular sex with a thirty-six-year-old woman will, at some point, brag about it to his friends.
He’d probably enjoy the kudos just as much as the sex itself, if not more, and it would only take a single party, two or three beers, or a joint, before he let it slip, and then word would spread from boy to boy before it found its way back to me in the form of two members of His Majesty’s constabulary knocking on my front door, wanting a word.
But my confidence does not equate to certainty, which is why I brought some sleeping tablets back from the hospital this evening, crushed them, and dropped them into the bottle of beer that he always drinks when he arrives.
I’m standing in the doorway of my bedroom now, watching him while he sleeps.
He looks ridiculously young and innocent, his mouth a little open, his fringe falling in his eyes.
No one looking at him would suspect that he’s a blackmailer.
They’d think he was a perfectly nice kid.
I pick up his jeans from the bedroom floor and take his phone from his back pocket, switching it to mute, and hold it in front of his face to unlock the home screen. When it opens, I take it into the living room and begin a forensic examination of its contents.
He has the same phone as me—albeit a much earlier incarnation—which makes things simple as I’m familiar with the operating system, but while I keep a very ordered home screen, collecting all my apps in neatly organized folders, his is utter chaos, a Jackson Pollock painting splashed across dozens of pages in no conceivable order.
I’ve no idea what most of them do, but I start with the basic Messages app, which is empty.
I suppose that’s too old-school for him.
I try WhatsApp next, and only three conversations are saved, a back-and-forth with his father, another with someone called Steven, who, when I scroll through them, seems to be his uncle.
Neither contains anything incriminating.
His third communicant is someone called GF, which turns out to be me, and is a complete log of every message we’ve shared, from my initial message on the day we first met outside the hospital to the one he sent me earlier tonight telling me what time he’d be arriving.
I’m pleased that he hasn’t entered me on his contacts list by name, and it doesn’t take me long to figure out what GF means.
Girlfriend.
His social media doesn’t include Facebook or Twitter—even his parents have probably given up on them—but he has Instagram, although he hasn’t posted many pictures and doesn’t seem to reply to any of the messages he receives, which tend to be a series of indecipherable emojis rather than actual words.
I’ve heard of Snapchat but have never used it, and the fact that it’s the first app on his home screen and has a bubble saying he has fifty-four unopened messages makes me realize that this is where most of his communications take place.
I open it and try to understand how it works.
The people he communicates with on there seem to have normal names, and within the messages themselves, things aren’t much more literate.
Thankfully, when I eventually translate them into English, none of the gibberish seems to refer to me.
Until I open one directed to HarryCull2010 .
George has already admitted to me that he’s told his friend Harry that he’s sleeping with someone, but swore that he hasn’t said who it is.
To reassure myself of this, in recent weeks I’ve used the hospital’s internal computer system to keep a close eye on the boy’s progress.
He’s an outpatient now and is doing better than he was a few months ago, but he’s still awaiting a second kidney transplant.
Shortly after George started blackmailing me, I went down to his room one afternoon wearing my doctor’s coat so he’d assume I had a reason to be there, and found him engrossed in an Agatha Christie novel.
In other circumstances, I might have talked to him about how obsessed I’d been by her books when I was his age, but instead, I made small talk with him as I scanned his chart and asked how he found his dialysis.
“It’s OK,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.”
“You’re very brave,” I told him. “Do you have many visitors? When you stay in, I mean.”
“My mum and dad and my sisters,” he told me. “And some friends.”
“They must be worried about you.”
“I guess,” he said. “Most of them seem frightened.”
“Why?”
“Because I might die.” His tone was remarkably calm, and I rather admired his stoicism. “They don’t know how to deal with what I’m going through.”
I sat down next to him and placed a hand on the outline of his knee beneath the blanket. He stared at it for a moment, but I left it there, even when he tried to move away. “Life and death aren’t things a boy your age should have to worry about.”
“I don’t have much choice,” he said. “My best mate though, he’s been really good.”
“Oh yes?” I asked. This was what I had come here for. “What’s his name?”
“George. George Eliot.”
“Like the writer.”
“Like the writer,” he agreed, smiling.
“And how long have you known each other?” I asked.
“Me and George? Forever. We live three doors apart and our mums are besties. We basically grew up together.”
“So he’s like a brother?”
“I guess,” he said.
“He cares about you?”
He looked away then, perhaps embarrassed by the question. I shouldn’t have expected a child his age to be able to cope with such an emotional remark, and when one of the nurses appeared to check on him, I said goodbye and returned upstairs.
And here is his name now on George’s Snapchat.
HarryCull2010
The messages go back a long way—George must save them all—and most of them are utter nonsense, barely comprehensible to someone my age, but then I come across an exchange that frightens me:
made her cum twyce 2nite , writes George.
u gotta let me know who she is
cant shed kill me
she hot?
fuk yeh
pix or it dint hapn
And then, to my horror, there is a picture.
Of me. Not, thankfully, of my face, but of my body.
He’d asked for one before, of course, but I’d refused him.
I must have fallen asleep after some encounter, however, and he took a photo of my breasts with his own face directed to the camera, offering a wide smile and the thumbs-up sign.
u lucky cunt
hahaha
like wtf
i no
howd u even
hoes be hoes
ledge
It goes back and forth with more drivel, but as obnoxious as the conversation becomes, I’m at least relieved that he never names me and there are no pictures that could identify me.
Still, it’s only a matter of time.
Eventually, a sound from the bedroom makes me hide the phone down the side of my sofa and George wanders naked into the living room, looking a little disoriented after the effects of the pills I gave him.
“Do you have some water, bae?” he asks, making me cringe inside.
“Fridge,” I say.
When he makes his way toward it, I go into the bedroom and return his phone to the pocket of his jeans, glancing toward the bedsheets, which are in total disarray after our fifteen minutes of passion.
A moment later, he’s behind me, his arms wrapped around my waist, and I know that he’s about sixty seconds away from insisting that we have sex again. I turn around and smile.
“You’re insatiable,” I say.
“You love it, you filthy bitch,” he tells me, pushing me down onto the bed, and I do exactly what he wants, offering no complaint, because I would prefer to comply with his wishes than find myself spending the next ten years in jail.
But really. This can’t go on forever. I refuse to be a victim any longer. It’s time to act.