All the Rage Read Online Free

close at my elbow and her tone weird as she continued – You were looking for something particular? – which I wasn’t – and she was asking me as if she was somehow a caring professional: not a doctor, or a nurse exactly, but maybe a dental hygienist, or a top-price hairdresser. She was dragging along this atmosphere of support and expertise which she leaned against me like a rolled-up carpet – second-hand, dusty – and there was a top note she put across most of her words to imply she was a friend I should confide in, girls together and ice cream this evening with crying and new lip gloss.
    Lip gloss makes me feel constricted. As did she.
    And wearing mascara’s like peering through a fence. Make-up is what one does for others, isn’t it? One goes to trouble.
    One says things, if only to one’s self, like
I have gone to trouble for you
.
    As if it’s a trip to be made on somebody’s behalf.
    I have gone to trouble for you, so you don’t have to. I brought you back this souvenir, it’s a small box of difficulties. You needn’t unwrap them at once.
    The gist of this was there in my head at the time – ideas being held – and there were other matters present, too, forming contours underneath the thinking, like knees underneath a bedspread. The knees have implications, but you don’t have to deal with them, or not at once.
    The assistant continued – insistent assistant – For a special occasion? – and I was, it must have seemed, drifting in an exploratory way along racks and shelves and display stands packed with choice. The lighting was unsubtle, so I found my surroundings rich in detail.
    I was somewhere like a very big grocer’s – For yourself? – a supermarket – times change and why be furtive, I suppose – a supermarket full of sex. Not sex. Devices engineered – there was a lot of engineering – to mimic the effects of sex. Only devices – For yourself? – not costumes, or DVDs, or magazines, or books, or most of the things I’d expect to be in a sex shop, in as far as I’d never had expectations in that field and couldn’t be sure, but must have surmised at some point. I surmise a great deal and at random. I did not intend to be there and yet there I was, nonetheless – For yourself? – and I had no answer. I’d halted in front of a bank of what were probably – definitely, now that I looked – fake vaginas and I couldn’t answer – who would? – that, no, I intended to buy such a thing for someone else. Who? For whom? A female friend to whom I would suggest that their own was unhelpful? Or would I give one to a straight man as if he’d no chance of access to a real one? I’m sorry his girlfriend left him, never mind and here’s this, which boils her down to her essentials? I’d want to imply that he felt these
were
her essentials and no wonder she left? Or would I foist one on a gay man? As what, a novelty letter box? Or I should deliver one to a lesbian as a hint she was sexually hopeless and ought to make do. This is – For yourself? – an impossible enquiry. Yes, for myself and I will give it to my partner because I want a rest? Or am I lacking? Or am I supposed to be gay and irreversibly solitary? Or have I discovered that mine doesn’t work any more?
    I attempted a smile that intended to seem well informed and relaxed. The assistant wore a name badge which called her Mandy, although I couldn’t accept that as likely.
    I adjusted my smile, broadened its dimensions.
    I didn’t want Mandy, or whoever she was, to imagine that I had no sense of fun.
    Fun is important.
    I constructed a small and intentionally visible idea of myself as someone with numerous options and a wide-ranging social circle. I folded my arms and moved on with purpose and as if I had no need of guidance – Oh, then these – Mandy wouldn’t