Not That Easy. Radhika Sanghani
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I’ve had to buy double the amount I normally buy. I thought I just had really … knotty hair lately,’ I finished lamely.
He rolled his eyes at me. ‘I’ll go and ask Emma.’ His Noddy boxers retreated down the hallway until he paused to face me.
‘Hey, were you crying?’ he asked.
‘No, ‘course not,’ I cried. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘You have Facebook open on your computer and Instagram on your phone. You only do that when you’re miserable, Ellie.’
‘Will, you’ve lived with me for less than a week and only known me for a few months. That doesn’t mean anything,’ I replied tartly.
‘How about the fact you have mascara running down your face, then?’
Bugger.
‘Oh, fuck off, Will,’ I yelled, as he laughed and walked off.
I pulled the duvet over me. I felt as single as my bed. It wasn’t that I wanted a boyfriend per se, it was more that everyone else was so ahead of me in the romantic—well, sexual—stages of life. Hell, they were shagging with conditioner while I was watching them on Instagram.
The problem was that everyone I’d grown up with had lost their virginities aged fifteen to seventeen. At school, all my girlfriends had gone out with the boys at the school next door, and after a year of climbing up the bases, they’d eventually ‘done it’.
But because I was the frizzy-haired Greek girl with thick eyebrows and ill-fitting jeans, no one had been particularly interested. My only sexual encounter during my school years happened when I was seventeen and it was so bad that my friends nicknamed it a ‘bite job’. So, while I was still recovering from the humiliation of biting James Martell’s penis, they were sharing sex stories in the sixth-form common room. Even my best and oldest friend, Lara, had got involved.
It was worse at uni. By then, everyone had already had a couple of relationships, peppering the gaps with drunken one-night stands and the odd inappropriate fling. They carried on shagging throughout uni, boasting about it in drinking games. Only, as always, I either had to listen with a fake smile on my face or—the less awkward option—make up a sexual past of my own. Because I’d been a virgin until the ripe old age of twenty-one.
It wasn’t out of choice. All I’d wanted to do was break my hymen, but no one vaguely attractive had offered. In my final year of uni, I’d been so desperate to lose my V-plates that when freckly, twenty-six-year-old graphic designer Jack Brown asked me out, I practically threw myself at him. He didn’t protest, and after a few dates, he deflowered me. I thought my happiness would never end.
Until a week later, when he abandoned me on the streets of Shoreditch with chlamydia.
It had been a shit end to a shit year, but I’d spent the summer getting pissed and taking my anti-chlamydia pills, so I was now well and truly over my STD and Jack Brown. The only problem was that he was still the only person I’d had sex with, and I hadn’t even orgasmed the one time we’d shagged. The only orgasms I’d ever had happened solo in my bedroom with my £14.99 bullet vibrator.
No one really played sex drinking games any more, but I still couldn’t join in when Emma and Lara discussed anal and sixty-nines. It just meant I felt left out. I’d spent all summer batting my eyelids at every average-looking male—aged under thirty, naturally—in sight, but none of them had done anything but snog me. I had become officially unfuckable. Now being shoved into this single room and labelled the sexually inactive housemate was just like being a virgin again. No matter what I did to try to keep up, everyone was always ten steps ahead of me. It wasn’t even for want of trying.
I lowered my head into my hands and let out a pathetic moan. I was twenty per cent of my way through my twenties. I had only eighty per cent left before I’d be at a child-bearing age and seriously in want of a husband. I should be out having wild, passionate no-strings-attached sex with dreadlocked men on motorbikes before meeting The One, but instead I was lying alone in my mouldy bedroom.
It wasn’t fair. Emma had slept with about thirty people. Lara had shagged about nine. Why hadn’t I managed to get anywhere near that? I was average-looking and just as fun as them. I’d always thought that my virginity was the obstacle and, as soon as I lost it, it would be easy and I could start having casual sex.
But that hadn’t happened. Maybe it was because I hadn’t tried hard enough. Or because I was just doomed to be different—the podgy girl with dark body hair destined to have below-average sex and bite jobs. I’d always felt like the awkward teenage Greek girl who didn’t really fit in anywhere.
I wasn’t anything like my cousins or family friends—the thought of getting married to someone ‘from the community’ made my skin crawl. I’d die of claustrophobia and boredom, and that’s if any guy ever agreed. I wasn’t exactly the pretty, tanned girl they dreamt of. All my cousins loved dressing up and wearing lip gloss, while I’d rather kick about in Chucks and old leggings. Dream daughter I was not.
And I wasn’t like anyone at school either. I didn’t have the natural confidence that the girls had—that came from knowing they were beautiful, privileged and loved. I hadn’t exactly had a tough background, but I never saw my dad and my mum was pretty overbearing. She was always different to the other mums as well—she still spoke with a thick Greek accent and it would never occur to her to watch The OC with us as Lara’s mum did.
Maybe it’s why I was always so much more insecure than the others, and maybe my mum’s strictness about boys was why I didn’t get involved with them for so long.
Or maybe there was just something wrong with me.
Even now that I’d figured out eyebrow threading and finally made some amazing friends, I still felt like little Ellie Kolstakis, aged fourteen, the girl no one wanted to dance with at the school disco. I knew it was stupid. I was twenty-two now, with a cool internship, living in an East London flatshare. But when all my flatmates were going on dates, bringing people home and sharing a lifestyle that eluded me no matter how hard I tried? Yeah, sometimes I still felt pretty fucking shit.
Emma and I had met Will and Ollie in the last week of uni. I was still recovering from the joint shock of losing my V-card to a wanker and getting an STI. Emma had taken me out to the Student Union to drown my sorrows in £1 vodka shots. We were £10 in when we met Will and Ollie.
I fell head over heels in love with Ollie. He was half-black, with impossibly blue eyes, and his short hair was dyed peroxide blond. He looked like an Urban Outfitters model. In my vodka-fuelled haze, I realised he was the only man I had ever wanted, the one I was destined to meet after being betrayed by the de-virginiser, and … he was talking to Emma about his girlfriend. The romantic music scratched to a halt in my head as I realised he was firmly out of bounds.
‘Ellie?’ called out Emma, as she waved her hand in front of my face. ‘This is Ollie, he just graduated in Philosophy from SOAS, and Will, who’s studying accountancy at King’s. They were in the same halls as Amelia.’
I put on a fake smile and we spent the rest of the night getting drunk together. Emma charmed the group with funny stories while I subtly tried to take selfies with Ollie so I could sigh over them in the morning. When Will saw what I was doing, he dragged me to my feet and made me dance to music with no words. The DJ was just about to switch from the drum and bass to music I actually knew when Will started snogging the hottest guy in the club. I went to the loo and starting throwing up the ‘vodka’, which was rumoured to be paint stripper. When Emma and I tottered onto the night bus at 4 a.m. with Ollie, Will and Cheng in tow, we realised we’d found our new housemates.
Four months later, we were all living in our Haggerston home with paper-thin walls and rent we couldn’t afford. I was still partly in love with Ollie, but resigned to his love for the beautiful but intimidating Yomi, and semi-scared