In at the Deep End. Kate Davies

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘Hey! This means we’re both minorities! You’re a bit less privileged now!’

      ‘You’re right!’ I said. I looked forward to being a lot more self-righteous on social media, now that I was a lesbian.

      I felt a secret sense of achievement that helped me stand a little taller as I walked into the Department of Health and Social Care building and swiped my pass on the security gate. I felt like I belonged, at last, in the world of the sexually fulfilled. Now I had a sense of purpose. I was going to find someone to be a lesbian with – a girlfriend, someone I respected and who respected me, someone I could fall completely in love with. She’d be funny and creative; she’d have a better job than me, probably, and she’d inspire me to figure out what I really wanted to do with my life. She’d identify as a feminist and drink at least as much as me and we would go on dates to immersive theatre shows and classical concerts. She would be my best friend. We would have a truly equal relationship. I wasn’t going to be lonely any more. I couldn’t wait.

      Tom, Smriti and the other managers were out at an all-day meeting, so I took the opportunity to look for lesbians on the Internet. I couldn’t bring myself to go back on Tinder; I knew there was a much lower chance of dick pics, now that I was dating women, but I hated the idea of swiping past thousands of nameless people, knowing they were doing the same to me. I thought it might be nice to meet someone in real life. I found gay vegan meet-ups and a lesbian volleyball team and a stressful-sounding lesbian architecture appreciation society, none of which really appealed to me. And then I saw an ad for something called Stepping Out:

       QUEER SWING DANCE CLASSES Fun, friendly, suitable for beginners and more experienced dancers. All LGBTQ+ people welcome. Sundays, Upstairs at the Kings, £7 a class.

      I felt Owen walk up behind me. I minimized the screen.

      ‘Are you going to go to that?’ he asked.

      ‘Might do,’ I said, glancing back at him to gauge his reaction.

      Owen raised his eyebrows and nodded. ‘Cool,’ he said. And then, ‘My sister’s gay.’

      ‘Good for her,’ I said, and I turned back to my screen and started clicking through my emails.

      ‘Are you gay?’ he asked.

      ‘Shh.’ I nodded across to Uzo; I didn’t want her to know – not yet, anyway. She had a habit of ‘whispering’ secrets extremely loudly in the kitchen, for everyone to hear. Plus I’d heard her say ‘What a waste’ once, when we were talking about Sir Ian McKellen being gay (she had a thing for white-haired white men). I wasn’t sure she’d react brilliantly to my news.

      ‘Sorry,’ Owen said, crouching by my desk. ‘Are you, though?’

      ‘Might be.’ I felt like a bit of a fraud, to be honest. I wasn’t sure one (highly enjoyable) episode of lesbian sex was enough to qualify me.

      ‘That’s cool,’ he said again. ‘So’s Catwoman.’

      ‘As in – the comic-book character?’

      Owen nodded. ‘She’s thinking of having a baby with her girlfriend,’ he said.

      ‘Catwoman?’

      ‘No, Carys. My sister.’

      ‘Oh, right,’ I said. ‘I’m not at that stage yet.’ I went back to my emails.

      Owen didn’t. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

      ‘To what?’

      ‘To the gay dance thing.’

      A thought struck me, and I looked up at him. ‘Are you gay, Owen?’

      ‘No! No. No. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.’

      ‘Right.’

      ‘I’m going out with Laura, remember?’

      ‘Of course.’

      ‘I just like gay people,’ he said.

      ‘All of them?’

      ‘No, you know. Like Cara Delevingne. And Ellen Page.’

      ‘You mean, you fancy lesbians.’

      ‘No! Well – only the hot ones.’

      I looked at the Stepping Out website when I got home. There was a video of the Friends of Dorothy, their Solo Jazz group, competing at the London Swing Dance Festival in sequinned hot pants (surprisingly flattering). They had won first prize. Watching the video, I felt the potent combination of nostalgia, envy and self-pity that comes whenever I watch people perform. I had gone cold turkey on dance after my ballet career ended. I thought it would be too painful to teach, or to try contemporary, or move into administration or anything; I even found Zumba classes a bit triggering. Maybe going to a swing dance class would be like opening an old wound. Maybe it wouldn’t, though. Avoiding dance hadn’t made me miss it any less. I decided to give it a go.

      I made the most of the time before the first class by practising telling people I was gay. I announced it via WhatsApp to my school friends, none of whom seemed particularly surprised, and when I got my legs waxed, I told the beauty therapist that I was going to a queer dance class. ‘So I’ll be dancing with other women, because I’m gay, which means I fancy women, because of being gay,’ I told her.

      ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Can you turn over for me?’

      I also did a fair bit of lesbian Internet research. I discovered that the toaster thing was a hilarious lesbian in-joke – when a woman ‘converts’ another woman to lesbianism, she’s supposedly given a toaster as a thank-you from the lesbian community.

      One click led to another, and I found myself reading a dictionary of lesbian slang. Apparently if I noticed a fellow lesbian walking down the street, say, I was supposed to say ‘She’s family’ to whomever I was with. It seemed there was a whole lesbian language I knew nothing about, but I liked that; I felt I was being invited to join a secret club. I liked the idea of being part of a family.

      I found a wikiHow article called How to be a lesbian, illustrated with pictures of women in pastel clothes, smiling at each other like the couples in the erectile dysfunction ads you see on the Tube. ‘You can’t make yourself a lesbian if you aren’t one already,’ it told me. You can’t make yourself a straight, either, I thought. Yes, I’d had the odd Jarvis Cocker fantasy. I’d enjoyed the occasional fumble on a single bed. But I’d never really got the point of sex till now. Touch your partner like you touch yourself, said wikiHow. A come-hither motion always works. All right, I thought, I’ll give that a try. When I’ve found someone to be a lesbian with.

      I took my time over getting ready. I changed into my best jeans and flossed my teeth, and I tried to ignore my stomach, which was making all sorts of unsociable noises.

      ‘I think you’re really brave,’ said Alice, standing in my doorway, watching as I put my make-up on.

      ‘Don’t be patronizing,’ I said. I looked in the mirror. ‘Do I look like a lesbian?’

      Alice considered the question. ‘Now you mention it, yes. It’s your СКАЧАТЬ