Learning the wrist

Fiction, about two adults over 18. He asked her for something she did not know how to give, and she was not going to be bad at it in front of him.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

I said yes on a Tuesday and spent the next twelve days quietly panicking, which is not how he thinks it went and which I have never corrected.

We had been together fourteen months. Long enough that he could ask, not long enough that I could say "give me a minute" without him hearing "no". So I said yes with my whole face, the way you do, and then went into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath and thought: I have no idea what I have just agreed to do with my hands.

Because that is the bit nobody mentions. Everyone talks as though the hard part is the wanting. The wanting was easy. The wanting had been sitting in me since about the second month, in the specific form of noticing that he went slightly still whenever I told him what to do about anything, even the boiler.

The hard part was that I am a woman who does not like being bad at things in front of people, and I had just volunteered to be bad at something in front of him, naked, holding an object.

The internet was no help at all. I want that recorded.

Two evenings of searching produced either pornography, which taught me absolutely nothing about angles and a great deal about camera work, or forum posts written by men in a register that made me want to shut the laptop and go and stand in the garden. There was one video that seemed promising for about forty seconds and then a man with a ponytail started talking about energy.

Eventually I found a page that was mostly anatomy, with a diagram, which frightened me more than anything else had, because it turns out there are places you genuinely must not hit and I had not known that. Kidneys. The base of the spine. That was the evening I stopped being nervous in a shy way and started being nervous in a serious way, which was an improvement.

I made notes. Actual notes, in the pad I use for work, between a shopping list and a phone number for the man about the gutters.

The cushion phase began on the Thursday.

You want to picture this properly. A woman of thirty-eight, in a dressing gown, at eleven at night, in her own kitchen, with the good sofa cushion on the table and a wooden spoon in her hand. The blind was down. I checked twice. I have lived in that house six years and I have never once cared whether the blind was down.

The first thing I learned is that a wooden spoon makes a noise like a starting pistol and I nearly dropped it in fright. The second is that a cushion tells you nothing whatsoever about where you have hit it, so I put a folded tea towel on it as a target, which helped, and then I felt ridiculous for a full minute about the fact that I had invented a training aid.

I practised keeping the strike in one small area, over and over, which was harder than I expected and boring in the way that useful things are boring. I practised from the elbow rather than the shoulder. I practised the thing I had read about not letting the wrist snap at the end, which is apparently how the tip of anything ends up somewhere it should not be.

Then the cat came in and looked at me.

I would like to say I laughed. What actually happened is that I put the spoon down and sat at my own kitchen table at ten past eleven and thought: what am I doing. What is this. Who is this woman. And under that, quieter and worse: what if I do it and I feel nothing, or I do it and I like it too much, and either way I have to know that about myself by Sunday.

Then I picked the spoon up again, because the alternative was going upstairs with the question still open.

Six nights, all told. I got quite good.

Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed that the practising had stopped being about the spoon. My hand knew what to do by the third night. What I was actually rehearsing, over and over, was something else entirely, and it took me until the Saturday to work out what.

I was rehearsing not stopping.

Because in every version I ran in my head, the thing that went wrong was the same thing: he made a sound, and I lost my nerve, and I put the spoon down and said sorry, and the whole arrangement collapsed in a heap of my own anxiety and he had to comfort me about a thing he had asked me for. That was the fear. Not hurting him. Failing him in the specific way of turning his request into my crisis.

You cannot practise that on a cushion. A cushion never makes a sound.

So the last two nights I practised something odder. I stood in the kitchen and said things out loud in a level voice. "That is four." "Stay where you are." "You are all right." Just the sentences, to a cushion, in a dressing gown, checking that my voice did not go up at the end and turn every one of them into a question. It went up for the first twenty minutes. Then it stopped going up.

That was the whole thing, in the end. Not the wrist. The voice.

Sunday came. He was so nervous he cleaned the bathroom, which he does not do.

We had agreed everything the week before, in daylight, with tea, in the unromantic way that turns out to be the only way that works. A number. A word he could say that would stop everything. Where I would be, and where he would be, and that I would put my hand on his back between, because he had said, going slightly red, that he thought he would want that.

It went fine. That is the honest report. Not transcendent, not a disaster. Fine.

I got most of them where I meant to. Two went low and I adjusted. He was quiet in a way I had never heard from him, and at about the twelfth his hands, which had been in fists, opened out flat on the duvet, and I did not know then what that meant but I knew it meant something and I slowed down without deciding to.

And when he made the sound I had been dreading for twelve days, I did not stop. I waited. I put my hand flat between his shoulder blades and said, "You are all right," in the voice I had practised at a cushion, and it came out level.

He said afterwards, lying with his head on my leg and my hand in his hair, "How did you know how to do that?"

And I said, "I read a bit," because I was not ready then to tell him about the six nights and the tea towel and the cat.

I told him eventually. About a year later, in a hotel in Whitby, because he had said something about how naturally it had come to me and I could not let it stand.

He put his drink down. He was quiet for a bit. Then he said, "You practised. For me. In the kitchen."

"With a spoon," I said. "And the good cushion."

He did not say anything else for a while, and when I looked at him properly his eyes were wet, which is not a thing that happens often, and he said, "Nobody has ever prepared for me."

That is what I think about now, when people talk about this as though the person holding the spoon is doing something to the other one. Six nights in a kitchen with the blind down. It was the most careful I have ever been about anybody in my life, and he was asleep upstairs for all of it.