Anna Maxted, “Being Committed”

Hannah thinks you have to be absolutely nuts to want to get married. She’s quite content with her life thank you very much – her job as a private investigator (albeit not a very successful one) for Hound Dog investigations, Jason (her boyfriend of five years standing), and her relationship with her wonderful dad (pity her mum is such a disaster). Besides which, she’s tried it once but she and Jack ended up divorced before she was 21: well really, it’s a bit much to ask a girl to stay faithful when she’s scarcely out of her teens and the world is full of such wonderful men- So when the long-suffering Jason proposes Hannah doesn’t think twice about turning him down. But would she have said no quite so quickly had she known that only a month later he’d have gotten engaged to another person? Is she really the emotional retard that Jason thinks she is? Hannah’s family is acting like she blew the one fluky chance she had of hooking a permanent man , and maybe – just maybe – there’s something in Jason’s theory that being committed means first coming to terms with your past.

um pequeno excerto… (depilação à lá Brazilian)

“She ended the call and grinned at me. I grinned back. Brazil, St Tropez, these were nice places… I was actually looking forward to this.

   …

   “Lovely, now can you pull your cheeks apart for me?”

   I can’t speak for the rest of society but it’s not often I find myself pantless on all fours on a table, spreading my buttocks so that a glamorous blond can rip out the hairs obscuring my anus. Maybe other, harder women get used to this. But me personally, call me a wuss, I couldn’t get over the unusual fact that my anus was in her face. She was staring right at it -O, there it was, my bottom hole inches from her ski-jump nose. I couldn’t believe people voluntarily did this. And I’m not talking about sexual sadists. Normal women. I mean, it isn’t right.

   I blushed right the way through the back of my head. At the least, I blushed on all four cheeks. When she was tearing the hair off my legs, I’d managed to bluster through my embarassment. But this? Nothing! No words could cover this!.

   I shut up. The Brazilian silenced me as effectively as a bullet. I couldn’t have spoken even if I’d wanted to. This was a social situation that gunned down etiquette and left it bleeding. There was no form of words on earth, no correct behaviour available to the human race that would normalise this and make it comfortable. Monstrous mortification dwarfed the pain which, experienced in isolation – an Iraqi prison, say – would have been excruciating.

   I supposed if there was a God and He was looking down on me (I hope not) He’d have said I was being punished for my sins.”