A World in Us Read online

  It was Elena’s turn next. She opened her package and drew out a rusted antique yellow tin sign advertising 1950s products. “Oh my God, Elena. It’s old and dirty,” Morten said.

  She bristled slightly. And then dazzled us with a smile, speaking to Gilles in lieu of a response to her husband.

  “Gilles, darling. It’s the sign we saw together in Paris. You remembered. I love it.”

  I looked at the dirty rusted tin and wondered where on earth it would be at home in Elena’s sparkling Victorian terrace.

  Morten looked on, agreeably surprised, and put his wine down, missing the coaster. A sign of rebellion. I looked at Elena, but she was too busy looking at Gilles.

  And last but not least.

  “Your present is in your email,” I said to Morten.

  We all rushed upstairs to the computer and an in­termin­able log-in of five seconds. When he had found the relevant mail, Morten jumped up from his twirly office chair, sending it spinning, and hugged me so hard that my breath came in little pants.

  “What is it?” asked Elena and Gilles in unison. They were puzzled and saw nothing on the screen to pique their interest.

  “It’s two tickets to see Girls Aloud in May,” said Morten. “I finally have someone to go with.”

  Holidays were about love, presents, laughter and fine dining. Which meant for me Michelin-starred restaurants and exotic yet tiny portions. Have a beetroot crisp drizzled in some gloopy balsamic syrup decorated with half a chive. That’ll be £15, please.

  Fine dining for our poly-partners meant that every piece of food was organic, fair trade, and contained as many vitamins and minerals as possible. Oh, and it would probably also be free of gluten, dairy and red meat. Fish was OK…as long as it didn’t taste particularly strong and fishlike. Elena quizzed the waiter in the restaurant about exactly what it was we would be putting in our bodies.

  “And is the chicken stock used in the sweet potato soup organic?”

  Morten’s face told me that this was a perfectly normal and reasonable question to ask. Gilles’s face told me that he was almost bursting from wanting to laugh. The waiter’s face told me that he was paid £6.50 an hour and wouldn’t know what organic stock was if it came up and bit him on the bum. My face told everyone that I was English and thus would carry on regardless. And expressionless.

  “This is one of our favourite restaurants,” said Morten, munching on some line-caught, chargrilled wild yellowfin tuna with locally sourced, seasonal roasted vegetables and sipping some organic elderflower wine. I concentrated on bal­an­cing some corn-fed, free-range chicken from my Caesar salad on my fork whilst nibbling my highland oatcake.

  “Do you go out to any organic restaurants in Paris?” asked Elena.

  Gilles and I looked at each other.

  “Well, our favourite pub has green things growing in it,” I said, coughing on a couple of oatcake crumbs.

  “Mainly mould in the toilet,” added Gilles.

  I had joined Gilles after he had spent interminable nights in his grandmother’s flat eating chocolate cookies and salade piémontaise from a plastic tub in front of a networked computer game of Age of Empires. I had brought cooked dinners to his life. Some of them even included vegetables.

  A couple years on we had done Carol Vorderman’s detox diets together. He had introduced me to the concept of exercise (although this was sporadic at best). My drinking was within the bounds of normality. We were relatively healthy. But compared to Morten and Elena, the ethically-and-organically-conscious-recycling warriors, we were ignorant, delinquent proletarians who may as well have lived off deep-fried battered Mars bars. My conscience jabbed me painfully about animal cruelty as I recalled the wafer-thin reconstituted turkey breast that I had enjoyed with my wheat-packed supermarket-brand loaf and lactose-full butter.

  This was a new world in more ways than one.

  That evening, after we returned home hand in hand with our poly-partners, I ventured a statement that seemed rude and ungracious to my ears.

  Especially after they had been the ones to settle the bill.

  “Some of the nights this holiday I would like to sleep with my husband.” I coloured as I spoke. “I mean, I would like to spend some nights in the same bed as Gilles.” Surely it was no one’s business if I would have sex with my husband or not. Even though they wouldn’t be able to help hearing us.

  How much sharing was necessary in our new poly-world? How possessive could I be of my husband without it seeming ungenerous? Should he choose how many nights he spent with me and how many with Elena? Or did I as his wife have any more rights than his girlfriend? Did our new relationships take priority over the old or vice versa?

  “Look what it says here,” Gilles had said, laughingly reading a thread on one discussion forum. “This poly-family apparently keeps a timetable tacked to the fridge to keep track of who is sleeping with whom.”

  Our lives had been individually lived in parallel for the last year. Side by side we had watched television series, each tapping on a laptop, half-engrossed in a different task. But suddenly we were together again. Reading together. Talking together. Loving together. Preparing ourselves to love elsewhere. But together.

  Practically, however, loving elsewhere would be done separately. And this necessitated a choice. Ranking and rejection. One would be chosen. One would be rejected. It was as simple as that. So…who was better in bed?

  I wanted to be with my new love. But I didn’t want my old love to feel hurt. So instead I made no decision at all.

  “I don’t mind really,” I said. Wanting to sleep with Morten.

  “Well, neither do I,” added Morten, a little too quickly. Damn.

  “I’m easy!” said Gilles.

  “So I have to pick?” said Elena. She was better equipped to shoulder the burden of responsibility than we were. She was free to be honest no matter whether that made others uncomfortable or not. Because she knew it wasn’t her responsibility. And I was envious.

  “I pick Gilles,” she said.

  No surprise there, then.

  “I guess you’re stuck with me, then!” Morten said to me, sounding, well, rejected. It was ridiculous. We had got the solu­tion we wanted and both ended up feeling miserable about it. As I watched Gilles go upstairs with Elena, I felt like shouting out that I had changed my mind. I certainly didn’t want to be anyone’s reject. Most fortuitously, I had one of those multiple orgasms. It did wonders for my self-esteem.

  The next night, we went through the same rigmarole. New loves had not been able to keep their hands off each other all day. Quite literally, they had been seen slinking off to the bedroom at various intervals during which time Amy Macdonald had been played very loudly on the lounge stereo. We sighed, blasé in our new languid polyamorous personas. And giggled at the sheer outrageousness of what we were doing.

  But when the evening came, we all guiltily opted for a second night with our new partners. Guilt because polyamory was about respect and love, which to our minds meant treating each other fairly. We should have taken turns. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

  The third night, we couldn’t put off our duty anymore. Back to our couples. Swing your partner, do-si-do. Apart from that, we were so tired from the constant frolicking with our new partners that no “swinging,” as it were, took place. Amy Macdonald was silent. And she had never seemed so deafening.

  I was having trouble swallowing the omega-3, vitamin C, barley grass powder and Wellwoman capsules that had been assiduously placed next to my placemat when Elena brought it up. Over our breakfast of homemade pomegranate and blueberry fruit salad and fair trade detox ginseng tea, she confided, “I don’t understand. I love Morten so much, but I’m intoxicated by Gilles and want to be with him. I want to be with Morten too, but right now I am more sexual with Gilles.”

  Whoosh. The oppressive thundercloud moved on. I bre
athed out and said, “Me too. I mean with Morten.” Not only more sexual. Better sex.

  Morten chewed speculatively on a corn cracker laden with homemade hummus and goat’s cheese topped with alfalfa sprouts.

  “Well we’re all in the honeymoon phase of the relationship. Isn’t it normal?”

  “But what if we are just monogamous?” said Elena, starting to panic.

  We were all silent for a little while until I said, “I don’t believe monogamy is an inclination. It’s a choice. And polyamory covers every configuration you can think of. You want your relationship with Morten. It will change. You want a relationship with Gilles. We shouldn’t be using the benchmark of what a monogamous relationship is like. Neither of your relationships will be the same as the ones you knew before. You are with two different men. They should be treated differently.”

  “And remember, fair doesn’t mean equal,” added Gilles.

  And so we started to do what felt right. Instead of putting quantitative measures on what we did, we put qualitative meas­ures on the time we spent together — whatever that meant in terms of time. After a while, each couple no longer needed to regroup. A look or a touch was enough to be reassured that we still all loved each other. And where different people felt differently, we recognised the needs and desires on a case-by-case basis. We were a panel of three for the complainant.

  “It’s aboot democracy,” said Gilles, quoting South Park.

  During the ten days we spent there, Gilles and I had fallen even deeper head over heels in love, with them and with the lifestyle. It was the closest thing to family that we’d ever had. In such close quarters as their Victorian terrace, it was difficult to preserve any modesty, even though I had tried. But I was proud that at least no one had ever seen my bottom. In fact, I wasn’t sure even whether I had one. Whilst my Britishness appreciated that some activities were better kept in the bedroom, one bed had been in the living room, which was also the passageway to the toilet. The other bedroom was far from soundproof. I had acted according to my upbringing, however, and been deaf, dumb and blind when appropriate.

  When I explained what our relationship was like to my friends, their first thought was about the sex.

  “Do you enjoy sex more with Morten than you do with Gilles?”

  I refused to be drawn. It was none of their business.

  “It’s different,” I said. Just because Hollywood dictated that you should marry the person you had the best sex with didn’t mean it was true. I’d already thrown out enough paradigms to know that nothing was certain.

  “Do you have sex more often with Morten than with Gilles?”

  “Not in comparison to where we are in the relationship. Gilles and I are comfortable with our rhythm. Morten and I have a different rhythm, but it’s normal — we are in the throes of passion.”

  I could see the words formed in their minds as clearly as if they had spoken them. Divorce. Denial.

  They thought the fact I had a husband and a boyfriend meant that the former was ranked above the latter. Husband, after all, implies commitment and celebration in front of my family and friends. Certainly it had…back in the day when I had believed in monogamy. It was a stage-gate process we went through from dating to boyfriend to husband. Now that I had come to know my own nature better, I realised that I had used marriage predominantly to assuage my fear of losing my boyfriend. I loved him and he loved me. Once we had the marriage certificate, the eggshells were less likely to break —and even if they did, the French authorities had made staying married that much more attractive with a tax rebate. The marriage certificate was proof that we were permanently joined. Until divorce do us part.

  Gilles and I were considering divorce, it was true. But no longer because we wanted to split up. No, the opposite. Because we wanted to stay together, love together and be together. Permanently joined. Until choice did us part.

  13

  In my old configuration, we had had one relationship. It was called Gilles & Louisa. Or sometimes Louisa & Gilles, depending on who was writing the Christmas cards. But in my new configuration, there was:

  1.Gilles & Louisa

  2.Gilles & Elena

  3.Louisa & Morten

  4.Elena & Morten

  5.Gilles & Morten

  6.Louisa & Elena

  And then there was also:

  7.Gilles & Louisa & Elena

  8.Gilles & Louisa & Morten

  9.Gilles & Elena & Morten

  10.Louisa & Morten & Elena

  And finally of course:

  11.Gilles & Louisa & Morten & Elena

  “This one goes to eleven!” quoted Gilles from Spinal Tap.

  The fluid nature of each relationship and dynamic was difficult to get a grip on. Each combination had a different behaviour, and the individual elements had been known to achieve either high reactivity or good stability.

  The molecule Gilles & Morten was rare, predominantly passive and could often be found where pizza boxes and PS2s were also present.

  The molecule Gilles & Elena had high energy and was often visible during early mornings in the gym. It also absorbed large quantities of organic food and had evolved into a highly effective cleaning agent.

  The molecule Gilles & Elena & Morten could be regularly found outdoors power walking, whilst Gilles & Louisa & Morten could only be found indoors, usually on a sofa, laughing and drinking coffee.

  No molecule was quite the same as another. Nine out of eleven were new. Four out of eleven were sexual…although three had tried it out just for the hell of it. Our one foursome experience had been really rather awkward. We all had such different ways of relating to each other that swapping partners midway meant different rhythms and different preferences. No orgasms. Certainly not multiple. In the end Elena had said, “Shall I put on the kettle?”

  Morten lifted his head out of her breasts and said, “Yeah, it’s not really working, is it.”

  And that was that.

  One out of eleven of these molecules was outside the realms of this world. That would be Louisa & Morten. Its formation was quite spectacular.

  And finally, there was Louisa & Elena, which had an affinity for gold and wine, and generally occurred in expensive restaurants and overpriced shops in London. It was also pot­en­tial­ly unstable and explosive.

  When we first tried to find a label for Elena’s and my relationship, which only had its parallel in polygamous societies, the term we found was “sisterwife.” My sisterwife was called Elena. The origins of her name supposedly meant “shine” or “torch.” And, I would say, that was just about right. Any one of us could have been considered the odd one out, depending on what was under debate. I was the only one with what could be termed as a business career. I could walk the walk and talk the talk. Morten was the only one who came from a real, stable family life. He was very Zen and could cope with any amount of baggage. Gilles was a genius at language and was also the comedian of the family. We all shone at our individual strengths. But none of us shone quite as quirkily as Elena. She was different. She stood out.

  For one thing, she expected nothing less than the truth. Always. Which was a hard pill to swallow in this world of half lies, overzealous tact and pretences. In The Matrix, Elena represented the red pill. The truth in the world of illusions. She was, through her own particular circumstances, someone who lived outside the frivolous foibles of our society. She was extremely self-aware. But she too had her own set of demons. One of which seemed to be a complete obliviousness to how hard the red pill was for others to take.

  She and I were together by default, and yet we spent more time together than bosom buddies. We were not sisters, and yet we shared the same family, the same concerns and sometimes the same households. We were not lesbian or bisexual, and yet we had seen each other naked in compromising positions.

  We had some wildly
opposing views about societal norms, and our communication styles were very different. Above all, I saw the world (more or less) as relative, and she saw it (more or less) in polar opposites: good and bad, right and wrong. I found it difficult to state an opinion unless I was fully aware of the context, whereas she could give a definitive opinion and was fully prepared to take the consequences. She was the proton to my electron. I grew through internally imprinting my experiences, and she grew from projecting herself and her experiences outwards to the world.

  Proof, if any were needed, that there was not just one Mr. or Mrs. Right was the fact that the two Mrs. Rights in our equation were very different. And rightly so. For polyamory was not about replacing your partners. As Gilles so often reminded me when I got insecure, it was about complementing. My sisterwife and I even had differing opinions about polyamory — what it was or wasn’t. She believed that people “were” polyamorous or they “were” monogamous, just as they “were” homosexual or heterosexual. I believed that unlike sexual inclination, polyamory was a choice of lifestyle that was more suited to our basic loving natures.

  We were short on answers…but big on love and hope. Most of the time.

  14

  “How are we ever going to manage the separation?” my sisterwife asked despairingly. She had a Latin temper and emotions. “I can’t even survive one week without Gilles!” She started crying at the thought.

  We had quickly realised, towards the end of our Christmas holiday, that our relationship would never survive the distance between two countries. Lacking in society support structures, we needed each other geographically close if our new-found love was to last.

  It was the night before our departure after Christmas, and I felt the weight of decision-making power on my shoulders. Morten couldn’t speak French. He would have terrible difficulty getting a job in Paris. Gilles didn’t have regular work. And nor did Elena; as an actress and a singer, her best bet was to stay near London. It would be up to me whether we made a go of it or not. No one looked at me directly. The pressure was unspoken and yet immense.