do you want special sauce with that?

It's the summer of 1999 and to make ends meet I go back to the language school and they give me the job of being the Director of Studies at a young learners' residential course centre. It's not the job I wanted from them. It means driving the ten miles or so in each direction. But they really need someone with a Diploma to be there as DoS so I have some leverage. So I am able to insist on not being there round the clock. Unlike the Centre Director, who has to take care of all the admin and welfare stuff, I get to go home at night and treat it as a day job.

The courses take place in a girls' school in the centre of the town. I've never really spent any time inside a private school. I expected it to be better kept. But the place seems almost as run down as the boys' grammar school I attended. There is disrepair. Parts of it are kind of seedy.

The whole thing is a nightmare. Many of the kids are there to have English classes in the morning and golf lessons in the afternoon. These kids are from Spain, Germany, Belgium and Holland. They arrive in ones and twos in nice cars, their very pleasant parents heading off to do something else in England. I don't know why the Dutch ones bother with English lessons. They speak the language better than the young golf coordinators, who really are fucking arseholes. Cocky little bastards. They resent it when they're asked to do basic things like not throw their cigarette ends on the ground in front of the students. I pass by the room where they keep their kit and have their meetings. I hear them talking about me and about Rachel, the Centre Director. I get so angry that I kick the small safe where petty cash is kept in our makeshift office. I hurt my toe quite badly. Impotent rage. Only damages the self. I know that. I do it anyway. Over and over again, never learning.

We don't have the right materials for the students. The head office keeps sending me terrible teachers. The lessons I observe are horrible. No structure. No outcome. A waste of everybody's time. When I try to give one young blond guy my feedback on his observation, he looks at me as if I am insane. These people think Rachel and I are crazy for trying to get things done the right way.

So I go to the office on my way home one evening to make my feelings known. I've tried going into it on the phone, but nobody listens. My messages are not returned. 

I try to find the owner. I know he is really in his office when I'm told that he isn't. I know that he hides in a blind spot that can't be seen from the doorway when somebody comes looking for him, for money, for help. So I make do with a visit to the Courses Coordinator. I vent my spleen a little and she sympathises. She promises she'll find some better people and send me some more stuff.

"Give me some books to take away now. I've got the car outside."

"I can't do that," she says.

There's a young blonde woman in her office. I wonder who she is. She's sort of cute. When she stands up, I see she's very short, even on the quite high platform sandals she has on her little feet. She is very pale skinned, with flinty grey eyes that keep looking steadily at me as I'm trying to get some better books for the classes. She looks unhappy. Her gaze is uncomfortably intense.

"This is Eleanor," I'm told.

"Hi, Eleanor."

Eleanor follows me out to the car, helping to move some of the materials I eventually manage to procure. Her accent is Scottish.

"So you're working here full time?"

"Just for the summer," she tells me. "I've been studying up at the university. But I'm going to transfer."

"You don't like it?"

"Not really. I need somewhere bigger. More interesting."

"Fair enough. This is not an exciting town to be a student, I guess."

"It isn't."

"I'll find out myself soon. I'm taking a masters here, starting in the autumn. I'll be teaching in the English Language Unit up there to get by. Helping foreign undergrads cheat in their essays and stuff like that."

She doesn't seem to get the joke.

"So, do you want to get a drink or something?" she asks me.

"OK. You don't mean now?"

"No, but soon."

"OK."

So I meet her at the Parrot and it's a strange conversation. Her voice is very quiet. She rarely smiles and she seems uncomfortable the whole time. But in other ways she's encouraging me to be interested in her. She asks me what I like doing. I don't like doing much more than taking drugs, reading books and trying to get laid. So I focus on the books when I answer. She asks me which authors I like, and each time I name one she tells me that she likes him too. I can feel her small foot resting on my shin under the table. It moves a little. She wants me to feel that. She is wearing a shiny dark-coloured blouse which is tight on her chest. The uppermost buttons are parted and the others strain to contain her. She is a small person, but she has fat, round, pale tits and she wants me to notice them. I do. I like them. She's a strange girl. I can't work her out. But I like the tits and the way she seems to be making her availability very obvious. I don't believe I am going to get along well with her because she seems so humourless. Her answers are short and tell me nothing. She's secretive. I wonder how badly damaged she is and who has damaged her.

But I decide I'm going to take up the apparent offer. She'll be leaving for her new university in the north within a month. It's a bloody awful summer. I hate the job and it rains every second or third day. Eleanor could offer some respite.

She's been living in a little flat not far from where I'm staying. So I walk over there on the Sunday afternoon. She admits me into the place wordlessly and, again, conversation is not easy. 

"What do you like a woman to wear?" she asks me out of the blue. 

I've never been asked this question so I don't really know what to say.

"Do you like high heels? Sexy underwear?"

"Sure," I say. "Why not?"

"Come and look at this."

She leads me to her bedroom and shows me a lot of tiny high heeled shoes. She slides her feet into one pair. Her sturdy little calves change shape as she enters them and begins to walk around, wiggling her fat little bottom. Of course I'm aroused. We kiss and she takes off her clothes. She keeps her high heels on and lies on the bedroom floor. She opens her legs more lewdly than I've ever seen it done. 

There is something desperate and aggressive about the hurried blowjob she forces on me. It's not comfortable. She grips too tightly with her small hand and her teeth are too involved in it. I lose patience and push her onto her back. I am between her short thighs. She doesn't want any gentleness. Her nails are in my back, pulling me close to her, trying to crush me into her, like she wants us to merge. Her round breasts are an obstruction, the embrace so tight I am pushing them into strange new shapes. She doesn't make eye contact and resists kisses to her mouth. All she says to me is to go faster and harder. It should be exciting. But it isn't.

I get dressed and I notice for the first time what look like a lot of old bruises on her pale legs.

Three days later I'm standing in the dark outside the school's indoor swimming pool. Rachel passes me a joint and we talk quietly. I'm telling her about Eleanor.

"She sounds a little strange," says Rachel.
"She is. I thought I liked that. But I'm not sure with this one."
"So what are you going to do?"
"I don't know."

We really skimp on entertainment. The kids that don't play golf must be so bored in the afternoons. The farcical 'project-based learning' has been abandoned. The students knew it was nonsense. Just a way of keeping them occupied without our spending any money. Two very bright Russian girls confronted me with exactly that accusation. They knew from how I avoided a straight answer that they were right. The rainy days are the worst.

Eleanor is given a strange job to do on one of those rainy days. Somehow, somebody at the head office has persuaded her to come down to Ashford and lead an embarrassing afternoon activity. With her quiet voice and her restrained manner, she is not well suited to the difficult task of getting a group of very pissed off European teenagers involved in her display of Scottish folk dancing. She looks ridiculous, carrying on despite their mocking laughter and hostile stares. I'm at the back of the room, looking at her little feet making pointy shapes. I can't stand it. I leave for the office and hide there, constantly checking my watch to ensure I will not be around when the dancing stops.

"Eleanor was looking for you," says Rachel.
"I bet."
"She seemed  annoyed that you weren't around."
"OK."
"If you're not into her you should say something."
"You're right."

I'm watching the TV several days after that and I hear the letterbox banging shut. There's a handwritten note from Eleanor:

You bastard: you think you can just fuck me and leave me? You're not a man.

I put it in the bin and go back to the television.

The summer ends and life changes a little. The university is OK. Everything is clean and works well. The campus is green and spacious. I don't find the study or the work to be too hard. Some of it is interesting. I know what I have to do and I do it.

The undergraduates seem to be very dull. They have come here to pass the time and to learn the sense of entitlement they will carry around during their working lives in offices in London. On Friday and Saturday nights I just go to the home of a married couple who are friends of mine. I've known Mark since we were kids. He has a proper house and a wife and he's talking about having a child. He makes good money. We drink a lot of vodka and red wine and most weekends we do coke in his living room. Sometimes we weave out as far the the fried chicken place on the high street. We've nearly had fights in there at least half a dozen times. He speaks incautiously to drunk and stupid people. It never goes well. The Turkish guy in there always asks if we want special sauce.

Special sauce is just a mixture of ketchup and mayonnaise. It's not very special.

One day I need to move from one level of the university library to another. I use the stairs. Two blandly handsome students are on the stairs ahead of me. They have stopped to talk. Rugby shirts. Hair styled to look like it's not been styled. Tall.

"So, he was like I left my fleece at your place, I want it back and I'm like fuck off, mate."
"You're hilarious, mate."

The stairwell is not very wide. They are stationary, blocking the way. They see me advancing up towards them and they don't move. I stand there. Nothing happens.

"Excuse me," I say.

Very reluctantly, they move a little closer to the walls, creating a marginally smaller space through which I might be able to pass. I squeeze through. The record bag I use to carry folders and books touches one of them on the way past. I hear one of the voices behind me say the word "twat". I keep going. I am a twat for wanting to use the stairs for getting from one storey to another. They own the stairs. It's their stairway. It's their library. They own it. They own the world. You are nothing. You're just an object. They notice you for a moment when you cause some inconvenience. Get used to them.

I get up to the third floor. The queue to use a computer is shorter there. After less than ten minutes of waiting for a free terminal, I get one and sit down. I remember to turn off my Philips mobile phone. I'm glad to move the weight and bulk of it out of my pocket and onto the desk.

I use Netscape Navigator and Alta Vista to surf the web for a little while and then hit the Usenet newsgroups. At alt.books.bukowski, I had initially expected to find people with whom I might discuss the dirty old man of San Pedro and all his works. The lunatics there have all read Bukowski, but they are more interested in trolls and flame wars. A year ago, I barely knew what the internet was. Now I'm living online in lieu of the life I can't seem to build at the university or in the town.

I see that Googolpex, the bull moose of alt.books.bukowski has replied to every one of the messages I wrote on my last visit. Googolplex owns a light bulb store in Chicago. I didn't even know you could get a store that stocked only light bulbs. It seems overly specialised. He never answers when I ask about that.  He calls me gay just about every time I write something. Yet he's always asking me to blow him for a nickel. I can't work out why a straight man accusing another straight man of being a homosexual would ask for oral sex. It kind of undermines the allegation.

I write a few long replies to Googolplex and to some others. Then I mess around with the layout of the Bukowski tribute website I built to practise using html. I see that a few more messages have been posted at the messageboard attached to the site. One of them interests me more than the others. Because it's written by Caitlin.

My email inbox contains many long messages from Caitlin. To read them back is to see a kind of courtship unfold. She loves Bukowski. That's how she found me - via this website. I only know one person in the real world who loves Bukowski - the friend who sent me Buk's novel Post Office when I was working abroad. In the virtual world of alt.books.bukowski I 'know' a whole gang of his fans. None of them are women.

Caitlin says she's Irish but living in Glasgow. She has some office job. She has a Geocities page with a few wounded poems. I don't like them. But I tell her that I do. We exchange several emails a day. She knows versions of the stories of my failed relationships. She knows what I think of the people around me and of the existence I have. She understands. She feels the same. It has become flirtatious. I know she has big tits. I know she likes leather and poetry and spanking. I get a hard on each time I open her latest message. It is beyond flirtatious now. She keeps saying very dirty  things and then, in the next email, saying she can't believe she's writing this stuff to me. She's never written like this to anyone ever. She loves my mind, she says. She feels close to me, but she knows that's crazy.

Caitlin and I are nervous because in a week's time I will be in Scotland to attend the wedding of a guy I used to work with. I'm really only going up there to meet her.

I want to give you my cunt, she writes. I want you to hurt me with your big cock. She doesn't know that my cock isn't all that big.

We have discussed what will happen if there is no physical attraction at all. We have discussed what will happen if only one of us is attracted to the other. We will walk away as friends and with no hard feelings.

After spending half the day with the groom and his friends, I slip away to meet Caitlin. I still haven't heard her voice. 

She is waiting in the pub. She is, as described online, a tiny but voluptuous person: tits, hips and all that on an otherwise small frame. Her hair is black, with purple dye here and there. It goes quite well with an outfit of black satin, lace and leather. Sort of gothic. Not usually my thing. But she has constructed an intense module of erotic pressure from the intersection of her pale flesh and the dark materials. Her eyes are sad, steady and grey. My brain spins. The hair is different. The clothes are different. But this is Eleanor.

I sit down, and then I'm not sure this is Eleanor. I never took a picture of her. This girl is the same size and shape. Her eyes are the same colour, I think. But nothing about her expression or how she greets me suggests that she has met me in person before.

"Wow," she says. "It's amazing to meet you finally. I've been so nervous."

Her accent is Scottish.

"I thought," I say carefully, "that you were Irish. Your accent doesn't sound Irish."

I hope the remark sounds innocent.

"Well, I was born in Ireland, but I've lived here since I was about ten years old."

I try to remember if this is what she's told me online. I can't find that part of the story anywhere in my head.

We drink, then walk and talk. Her dagger sharp high heels clatter on the pavements. She takes my hand.

"Here goes," she says. She stands on tiptoes to kiss me. It feels good and I return it.
"This might work," I tell her. But I can't decide if I'm kissing Caitlin or Eleanor.

A week later she comes all the way down the length of the country by bus to see me. I walk up to the bus station to meet her. Her hair now has more purple in it. It doesn't look as good. She's wearing an alarmingly short skirt and her pale blue sweater is horrible. She looks like a barmaid in a bad pub. I decide I can't take her to Mark and Sarah's place as planned. I'll have to tell her that they have gone away at short notice. I know that if she turns up at their house looking like this, Mark will say something when the mix of drink and coke makes him even less diplomatic than usual. So she doesn't look presentable. But she looks fuckable.

I can't go down on her. The smell between her legs isn't good. So I just stick it in and fuck her. Her eyes are blank and her nails dig in. Her tits are fat and her hard little heels press my flesh. I'm almost certain that I'm fucking Eleanor. I'm almost sure that Caitlin is a construction of Eleanor's mind.

When I roll away, I see traces of menstrual blood on my cock and on the sheets. I'm disgusted. Why the fuck did she come down here at her time of the month? Why wasn't I warned?

But I don't say anything and I know I'll do it again to avoid having to talk about why I don't want to do it again.

She takes a shower and I search her bag and her purse. All her ID says Caitlin Collins. Not Eleanor Burns.

So Eleanor and Caitlin are two different people. I must be losing my mind faster than I'd thought. I need to ease up on the cocaine. I need to get out of myself and into the world.

Unless Caitlin Collins is the real person and Eleanor Burns was a made-up character. No, that's stupid. How could she have got a job at the language school's head office by using a false name? They would need to see her bank details and her national insurance information.

I am losing it. It's just a coincidence that the last two women I've had sex with are both short, with large breasts, grey eyes, Scottish accents and a blank, detached manner. That could happen. That has happened.

I tell her by email that it just didn't feel right. That although our minds met online, something didn't click for me. She expresses disappointment but no hostility.

The emails become less frequent and less interesting. I start to forget about her.

One day, months later, she crosses my mind. I enter her email address into Alta Vista's search box. The first result is for her poetry page on Geocities. I check it. She hasn't written any more poems.

The second result takes me to an online petition. Something to do with some feminist cause. I find her brief message of support. Then I notice the name of the petition entry immediately below hers: Eleanor Burns. The email address associated with the name is not visible.

I write to Caitlin. I put it all down. It's a long email which concludes with me asking her she is the same person as Eleanor Burns.

The next day I get the reply:

I'm not Eleanor Burns. I've never heard of Eleanor Burns. I don't know what you're talking about. You sound paranoid. 

I decide to take it no further.

I still don't know what to think.