1. SEX NOISES

      One Saturday morning last January, Alice pointed out that I hadn’t had sex in three years. I knew I’d been going through a dry patch – I’d been getting through vibrator batteries incredibly fast, and a few days previously I’d Googled penis just to remind myself what one looked like – but the full force of how much time I’d wasted not having sex hadn’t hit me till then.

      The last time I’d had sex was nothing to write home about either, let me tell you. He was a twenty-one-year-old editorial assistant from Alice’s office with an unusually large forehead, and it happened after a terrible house party that left our flat stinking of pastis. I tried to take him to my room, but a couple were already in there, dry-humping on top of the duvet, so we did it on the fake leather sofa in the living room. I kept getting stuck to the sofa, sweat pooling in the gap beneath my lower back. I don’t think he’d ever fucked anyone before, so it was a bit awkward and thrusty, and he cried and hugged me for too long afterwards. It comes back to me in flashes all the time – I could be boarding a bus, washing my hair, or sitting on a particularly squeaky sofa when suddenly I see his clenched red face or his sweaty pubic hair and flinch involuntarily. Enough to put anyone off sex for, say, three years.

      To be honest, I’d always preferred the idea of sex to sex itself. In my imagination, I was experimental, confident, uninhibited, a biter of shoulders, a user of words like ‘pussy’. I could think about sex in the filthiest terms and speak frankly about it to friends – but when it came to actually doing it, or talking to someone I might do it with, I clammed up. I struggled to think of myself as sexy when I was with another person. I struggled to say sexy things with a straight face. It all felt performative to me, ridiculous, too far removed from the way I behaved in a non-sexy context, like I was playing a part in a porn film, and playing it badly. I couldn’t even flirt convincingly, certainly not when I was sober. Which might go some way towards explaining why it had been so long since I’d fucked anyone.

      Alice and Dave, on the other hand, did have sex. A surprising amount of it, actually, considering they’d been going out for five years. The Friday night before that Saturday morning, I was alone in the living room, trying to ignore the sex noises coming from their bedroom. Our flat had incredibly thin walls, so it was almost as if I were there with them. How can something that is so much fun when you’re doing it (though not always – see previous note about sweaty sofa sex) be so repulsive when overheard? I didn’t mind living with a couple; having three people in the flat brought the rent down. Also, Dave had several Ottolenghi cookbooks and some very tasteful mid-century furniture, so we were better fed and more stylish than we would have been without him. But sex-noise-wise, I’d had enough.

      The next morning, I heard Alice walk Dave to the door. They whispered to each other revoltingly and kissed wetly. I sat on my bed, picking the dry skin on my fingers, practising my speech in my head.

      Alice walked into my room without knocking; people tend to do that when there’s no risk you’ll be shagging. She sat on my bed, her hair rumpled, a post-coital smile on her face. ‘Do you fancy brunch?’ she said. ‘I’m starving.’

      ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said, which wasn’t how I’d intended to broach the subject.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Nothing.’

      ‘Why aren’t you surprised? What do you mean?’

      ‘Well – you and Dave sounded like you had fun last night.’

      ‘You listened to us having sex?’

      ‘I didn’t listen. I heard. It wasn’t an active choice.’

      ‘We weren’t that loud,’ said Alice, as though asking for reassurance.

      ‘You asked him to—’

      ‘To what?’

      I looked away. ‘You know what you asked him to do.’

      ‘How do I know if you won’t say?’

      ‘Fine. You asked him to stick a finger up your arse.’

      ‘Julia!’

      ‘You’re the one that said it!’

      ‘That’s private!’

      ‘So keep your voices down!’

      Alice’s cheeks were pink.

      There was an unpleasant silence.

      ‘Did you really hear us?’

      ‘Yes! I always hear you!’

      ‘You can’t always hear us. We don’t even have sex that often any more—’

      ‘Three times a week isn’t often?’

      ‘Not for us.’

      ‘Well. I’m very happy for you.’

      Another silence.

      ‘You wouldn’t care so much if you had a boyfriend too.’

      ‘I don’t want a boyfriend, thank you.’

      ‘Sex, then.’

      ‘I have sex.’

      ‘No, you don’t,’ she said. And that’s when she pointed it out, about the three years.

      I went back to bed after that, and stayed there for most of the day, eating cheese and trying to remember what sex was like. I’d never had really, really good sex, the kind that resulted in the sort of noises I heard Alice and Dave making. Oral always felt a bit like someone was wiping a wet flannel over my nether regions, and having a man on top of me made me feel quite claustrophobic.

      The thing is, sex had never been particularly high on my list of priorities. In my teens, I was too obsessed with becoming a dancer to worry about having a relationship. I did manage to lose my virginity after my first year at ballet school, though; my friend Cat took me to Jamaica to stay with her grandparents, and I did it on the beach with a boy named Derrick, who had terrible acne and a bottle of cheap rum, which is what led to the sex. We didn’t use a condom; the sheer terror I’d felt afterwards at the prospect of being pregnant and the mechanics of trying to procure a morning after pill without Cat’s grandparents finding out had put me off sex for years after that. I still can’t drink daiquiris. But I was pleased to have got it over with – I felt more sophisticated than the other girls in my year, enjoyed muttering wisely, ‘Don’t do what I did. Wait until you’re ready,’ whenever we talked about sex at sleepovers.

      Then there was Leon. I met him during a Freshers’ Week toga party at Warwick. He’d looked very fetching in his white sheet, and it was only later that I realized he wore corduroy trousers every day. Nevertheless, we stayed together, right up until he dumped me just after graduation because he wanted to ‘travel the world’ and be ‘free of ties’. He moved to Peckham three months later and started a graduate training scheme in management consultancy.

      Leon and I had quite fun sex in the early days – we tried out the reverse cowgirl, did it standing up in the shower, things like that – but by the end of the relationship he could only get in the mood by listening to the ‘Late Night Love’ playlist on Spotify, and I knew exactly where his hands would be at which point in each track, so it was a bit like an obscene, horizontal line dance. The boring sex was bad for both of us, self-esteem-wise, I think. After we broke up I decided to have a bit of a sex break, and the longer I left it, the scarier sex seemed, like crossing a big, naked Rubicon. I had a couple of drunken one-night stands – including the sofa sex – but most of the time going home alone seemed like a much more sensible,