Father Figures

(PS: I have a new book out)

This is a disconcerting essay in which to tell you that I have a novel out this week and that I hope you will either pre-order it today or walk into a U.K store on July 3rd and buy it. It is, like my other books, a coming of age story. It is, unlike my previous books, also a literary thriller.

Weidenfeld and Nicolson put a girl on the cover so readers would understand, though the title is Father Figure, the protagonist/anti-hero is female. The other reason there’s a girl on the cover is as an act of acceptance that whilst women buy books by men, men don’t buy books by women, bar a very occasional break out like Hilary Mantel or Zadie Smith. But I love my cover, I respect the red on pink, am grateful beyond measure for the blurbs. I appreciate that the designer agreed to superimpose the rays behind the model’s head, so, dawdling in a book shop, you’d understand this is a character so hypnotic to the Father Figure of the title, if he bathes in her presence too long, she will block out his sun.

I wanted to show that, despite being an alluring and in some ways vulnerable young woman, she is also a figure of power and even danger. He might think, being older and moneyed, he has the upper hand in their flirtation. But he will come to fear her. I was thinking about this a lot, after watching young women this weekend who seemed to represent the opposite.

This is one of those very hot weeks in the U.K for which we are ill prepared. The Santa Ana winds - which blow through California from the desert come September - bring a particular heat that has been linked to a rise in homicides over there. London hosts a different kind of dangerous weather in a country that has no home air conditioning. You could go to a movie marathon to beat the heat. But those who can find a way go to hotels for a night or two, where aircon is available, or, even better, they stay at one of the few hotels with an outdoor pool.

Working my contacts, my pre-teen daughter and I found ourselves at such a place and though we were grateful for the hospitality, we were confronted by the London version of the Santa Ana homicide rate: at a roof top pool, scores of very young bikini’d women under the watchful eyes of much older men.

The hotel had warned me all children had to be out of the pool at 7pm. We splashed around contendedly. Approaching 7pm was like a terrible spell descending. At 6pm there was an influx of female statement bodies, of hard work and surgical intervention: no discernible body fat but jutting breasts and buttocks, filled with what? I know it’s either injectable filler or transferred fat but, from the blank submissive air with which the women carried themselves, I imagined their buttocks and breasts filled out with rage.

The only audible thing the various young women said to their male counterparts was “Take my picture take my picture!” It took the wind out of my daughter’s sails, for she had been trilling until then, her own “Take my picture!” as, in her plain black one piece, she’d executed somersaults and handstands. By 6.30 there were bikinis held together by strings of glitter. By 6.45 couples were openly dry humping. Throughout it, none of the couples spoke to each other.

At five to the hour there descended, into the water, a woman so young I hoped against hope the man she was with was her grandfather. My daughter was agog. “Shall we go back to the room?” I chirped. Back in our space, we attempted to process it together.

“Mum. Are there women who have sex for money?” Sure, I said, and tried to explain that in a non-judgmental way (which is how I feel). It is the less clear cut exchange, the grey area of hotel suites and handbags I find dispiriting, the relentless grind of the female body as a business that is exhausting to be near.

The next morning she lay in bed finishing a movie and I sat beside a newly arrived couple at the pool. Both middle aged, he was overweight. She had all the things our culture dictates you’re not “supposed” to have in a transactional female body - a flat bum and big belly and stretch marks. Neither of them would have meant anything in a monetary exchange by the standards we’d witnessed the night before (well he would if he were wealthy). They had totally different accents - his cockney, hers Home Counties - and they were just warm, happy, having a good time, talking constantly with each other. It gave me the chance to catch my breath. I tried to stay in the shade of their overflowing bodies and conversation.

There was one wonderful, very old woman with short hair and a sensible bathing suit, who’d checked in by herself and was struggling to drag over a sun lounger. Me and the cockney dragged her the lounger together. She settled in, then came around and offered each of us asparagus and iceberg lettuce. I noticed faint numbers on her arm and realised she was a survivor in all of the senses. She had survived and then stayed alive, forever. Now she was out in the sun by herself, feeling the warmth on her skin and the pleasurable sinking into cool water with the view of a city beyond you. “Can you spray this lotion on my back?” she asked in her still thickly accented English. “I would love to,” I smiled.

The day before we checked in, I’d had lunch with an old (young) boyfriend who’d often complained when women he was attracted to visibly aged or went up dress sizes. To be clear, I care about him him, he’s a good person, but, as we ate together, I was so relieved not to be in a sexual relationship with him, to not have any physical demands on my body, real or projected to meet, beyond just feeling that it worked.

The worst most skin crawling moment on the hotel rooftop pool had been when a Dad got into the water with his baby in its swim diaper. You couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. But the very old man (the one I’d mistaken for a Grandpa) with his very young girlfriend, started chatting to them. “She’ll always be Daddy’s girl” he said to the man with the baby, as his young girlfriend smiled. Shuddering, I attempted to lean into the shadow of the positive energy emitted from the round bellies of my deck mates.

Unfortunately, this kind of behaviour and thinking is not just the domain of roof top pools. As I write this at a local cafe, I am trying to stop my skin turning inside out as a very old man speaks to a little girl sitting across from her Father at the next table from him. “I am waiting for my friend,” he leans over and tells the little girl, “Wait ‘til you see her! She’s so pretty. You must tell me if you agree that she’s very pretty”.

This poor little girl, no more than five, and her Dad trying to navigate the inappropriate weirdness wrapped in harmless chat. They were trying to have healthy Father-daughter time, when the old man had chimed in. “How old are you” the elderly fellow asked the little girl and she was hesitant to answer, almost as if knowing age could be used against her one day.

“Speak up so the man can hear you” her father said.

I wanted to spit: She shouldn’t have to humour him. This isn’t okay. Your child’s skin is instinctively crawling. The generosity I would feel towards an old person who is perhaps just lonely is negated by the fear of what can happen to women and girls because we are being polite. There’s been an outcry over the many T-shirts for girls that say “BE KIND” across them. Being kind requires more nuance than can be conveyed in a slogan. Girls should be kind to their friends, and be even kinder to the ones without friends. And at other times, rare but real times, it will be incumbent upon young women to be the sort of difficult, challenging nightmare of a girl that won’t fit on a T-shirt but people like me write whole books about.