His picture shows thick, dark hair and a lean face partly concealed by his raised arm, his middle finger pointing upwards to whoever took the photograph.
        ‘Why are you giving me the finger?’ is my chat up line.
        ‘Because I like to put it in careful places,’ his immediate reply.
        ‘Carefully I hope,’ is my response, which catapults me into my very first cybersex session.
        I gently open his belt and unbutton his shirt.
        He rips off my clothes.
        I tenderly pull down his trousers.
        He pushes me into the office toilet cubicle with pure male force.
        I touch his cheeks and wipe away a stray eyelash.
        He sucks my breasts until I scream.
        I lovingly spread my legs.
        He fucks me with my face against the wall.
        He types faster than I and still manages to spell more words correctly.
        I leave work early and go shopping for stockings and lacy underwear.

When I get home I find this in my inbox:
        Hey PP!
        Do not worry that I am one of the sick creatures hell bent on using this peculiar medium as a means of procuring their own needs and ends without ever making it a convergence of mutual desires! I do not fall into the category of the sexual terrorist or predator. I am much more and much less than that and merely wish to seduce you with my combined wit, charm, intelligence, seductive eyes and the extensions that I am proud of.
        I most certainly would like to offer myself verbally as your embedder and long to immerse myself into your highways and byways of language and logic, emotion and sentiment, engender further brightness of spirit and begin an absorbing dialogue/intersection of selves.
        I hope this protracted piece of meandering nonsense seeps and slinks though your bloodstream, wends its way from page to eyes through the nerves and infiltrates every little nerve, cell, pore and fiber so that the words find purchase in your inner self. Along with the depth of sentiment and sincerity that surely flows around through them!
        Hope to catch you, in many respects, some time soon!
        Humphrey

On the phone he quotes Shakespeare and Freud and promises to analyse my dreams and show me his collection of fountain pens. He interviews movie stars for newspapers and magazines and has a bizarre story about every single one of them. His voice is low and sexy and each sentence is an innuendo or a play on words. He has an endless number of names for my intimate body parts and meticulously describes the various aggregate states of his super hard hard on, a lush well of semen he successfully wanks up to six times an hour. Whenever I wonder if he is a freak, he distracts me with a joke. I giggle so much I don’t mind I hardly get a word in.

The night he wants to meet I have a ticket for the National Theatre. As always with Shakespeare the dialogue might as well be spoken under water and by the time I start to understand a word all characters are dead.
        The interval I spend in the lady’s toilet, piling on make-up and putting on the short skirt and low cut top he thought appropriate.
        ‘Meet me at Cleopatra’s Needle,’ he texts. ‘I’m in a brown corduroy suit.’
        Brown Corduroy? I almost change back into my old, sweaty sweater.
        He’s going to explain Shakespeare to me, I remind myself. He is going to analyze my dreams and tell me more about the movie stars.
        While I walk across Hungerford Bridge he calls.
        ‘I’m in my car in a side street. Lift your hand when you reach the phallic Needle.’
        I like the thought of him watching me walk through the night as I follow his voice into a side road, ready for an adventure and maybe more, oh hopefully so much more.
        ‘I’m right here in the car,’ he whispers in my ear. ‘I’m getting out. Here I am.’
        The door of a puny red Fiat opens, and a matchstick man dressed in puke brown steps out.
        He bows and scrapes and looks at me expectantly.
        I struggle to pick up my face from the floor.
        This is the ugliest man I’ve seen in my life.
        And we’re not talking plain ugly here. We’re talking children screaming, milk souring, police marching in with facemasks ugly.
        His head is a bald greyhound snout. It consists of a long nose, paper-thin lips and watery pinhead eyes filled with apologetic devotion.
        Shakespeare, Freud, pen-collection, movie-stars, my soul mate, are the thoughts I cling to while I shake his soft, moist spider hand.
        The second we sit in the pub he reaches underneath my skirt. He hits a spot way off the important one. I find it easier to leave his fingers where they do no harm than push him away. We talk Anaïs Nin, Philip Roth and Woody Allen. He shows me his golden fountain pen and I show him my pink and purple ones. He promises to make me a tape of his favourite songs while underneath the table his fingers stumble through nowhere land.
        Back on the street the big, wet mouth behind his razor sharp lips plants watery kisses on my lips in a surprise attack.
        I lose my balance and we almost both fall over. He drags me into a dark doorway, where he continues to slobber over me.
        I stop him and look into his milky blue eyes trying to find something attractive in them.
        He watches me with panting anticipation.
        I rest my head on his shoulder and let him hold me, because holding on to someone is what I’ve been missing most. My nose picks up his smell, the smell of old soap that sits in folds of dirty skin and never gets rinsed off by a hot shower, and I back away.
        ‘If you only want to talk, that’s ok,’ he says.
        We walk back to his car.
        ‘What do YOU want?’ I ask once we sit inside.
        He is too busy to reply.
        Shakespeare, Freud, dreams, pens – my soul mate is arching his back over his wanking hand, moaning like a horny monkey walking on hot coals.

On the bus home I receive twenty-three texts.
        There are seven messages on my home phone.
        The next morning he sends this e-mail:
        Oh Pink. Thanks for an evening that was a mixture of delights. Nowhere and never before have lips as soft or kisses as spirited been tasted. Your charms and your assets of self are grand. You have a delicacy and silken texture that must reflect the purity of your soul or the unassailable decency of spirit that flits through your veins. It is like the finest fur, the sweetest rose, the lightest feathers, the quintessence of beauty. To travel over and around your body, to run my lips and fingers around your specialty soft and smooth beyond smoothness skin is a joy to behold and beseech again and again.
        The contrast between the simple politeness and intellectual refinement of our dialogue in the restaurant and my view of your partially exposed knees and legs pumped my affirmative desire to make contact physically and to send my hand along your legs. The need to further the symphony of serious touching and probing awoke a need to ferry you out and when we crashed into each other walking down the road I sensed the need for your lips and thought an unseen, unpredicted kiss would be all the more effective in arousing you and determining your state of desire. When you all but crumpled into my arms, lost your moorings I first thought that my kissing was so lousy that I had wrong footed you and then it struck me that I had found the “gateway” to you soul as the Chinese suggest kissing achieves this. And boy, what a kisser you turned out to be. What a delightful infusion of senses and sensations you stimulated and created and then … The rest is history.
        Just this for now: I am not a here today gone tomorrow fly by night feckless and ferocious fucker. When I encounter someone whose outlook, sense of humor, spirit and energy, not to mention their other charms make me enthralled and delighted then I resolve never to surrender their involvement in life if possible. I make few promises because I am aware how promises become encrusted with sinister, insidious daggers of disappointment, but, I make this one to you, provided we are both honest, open and wittily sincere with each other I doubt that this association will dissolve that easily.
        I touch you in all the places that move and still you. I move myself towards you and relish the day when our naked bodies can cleave together and that your lips pleasant music can be heard through mine, chiming merrily together. I plant a plantation of kisses upon, inside and around you.
        Humphrey

I read his words again and again and again.
        No man has desired or even acknowledged me as a sexual being for so long.
        It is an almost forgotten but not totally unpleasant sensation.
        Shakespeare, Freud, movies, pens, dreams and a tape only for me.
        Maybe we didn’t lose our balance when he kissed me? Maybe it was the earth shaking?

I accept his invitation to dinner at Jo Allen’s two days later.
        We are supposed to meet at eight. At seven, seven fifteen, seven twenty, seven thirty, seven forty four and seven fifty two he texts to let me know he is already there.
        He is as ugly as I remember, with the added attraction of a perfect purple, pus pimple on top of his nose.
        I learn all about the pain of growing up without a father, the confusion of having his surrogate parent neighbors lure him into their bed when he was fourteen and the strains of squeezing into two condoms to please the last girl he fucked.
        He frequently mentions an ex but I don’t ask him to elaborate. Ex is ex, right?
        Twice we get interrupted because his mobile rings. The words he uses are grades, teachers, time tables, homework and books– which reminds me:
        ‘I googled your name but none of your articles came up.’
        He shows me his ID where it says profession: ‘writer’ but admits that at the moment he works mostly as an English tutor.
        I shrug. Judging from his mails I’m sure he could be a writer if he wanted to.
        His fingers slide underneath my skirt.
        ‘We should take our profiles off Matchnet and make this relationship work,’ he says.
        At the table next to us a dozen gay men with pumped up bodies, perfectly groomed hair and stylish clothes laugh and chat. The Muppet next to me moves his dried prune head up and down and chews his food with an open mouth grin.
        Don’t be stuck up on looks, I tell myself. Beauty is nothing.
        Shakespeare, Freud, my dreams, he is going to make me a tape.
        ‘Ok, let’s take our profiles off,’ I say.

I invite him to a performance of ‘The Rape of Lucretia’ at the Linbury Studio. He is wearing his brown corduroy suit and a green shirt. The spot on his nose has turned into a crater the size of Vesuvius. I pray I don’t run into anybody I know. As soon as the lights go out his hands are underneath my skirt. He never once looks at the stage.
        ‘This is our third date,’ he says after the show and hands me a bottle of champagne.
        We have lots in common, is still my mantra. His looks are god’s punishment for my obsession with handsome men. I need to give him a chance.
        Why oh why do I think that?
        Temporary insanity is my best guess.

Although I know the way home he stops several times to check the map. He runs two red lights. Whenever he changes lanes somebody toots.
        In my house he pours the champagne. He takes one glass and knocks the other to the floor with his elbow.
        ‘Leave it, leave it,’ he grunts and kisses me and spits a mixture of stale champagne and acidic saliva into my mouth.
        Then he makes me kneel down and pushes my upper body onto the coffee table.
        It is an ideal position. I don’t have to look at him, cannot smell him, and barely feel him. I close my eyes and pretend he’s a man and not a caricature – until he tries to open my bra. His beetle fingers contort around the simple clipping mechanism – an unsolvable mystery to him.
        I get up with a sigh and drag him into my bedroom to get this over with.
        ‘Can you shut the windows?’ he asks.
        ‘Why?’
        ‘Why burglars of course.’
        While I do him the favor I hear the soft hurried sounds of undressing behind my back.
        I turn around and watch him take off his green shirt, a white undershirt, a tiny gray tank top, the brown trousers, two pairs of striped boxers, tight white underpants and two pairs of socks.
        All that is left when he has finished is a white skeleton, a heap of ramshackle bones with a nose and a penis.
        ‘See, I’m not the most attractive man in the world,’ he says.
        No kidding.
        ‘But if somebody asked me what my most beautiful body part was I would say my cock.’
        He strokes it with a happy smile.
        Don’t be superficial, I tell myself. Don’t be shallow. You’ve only slept with one man in your life before. You need to accept that not everybody is a 6-foot former hockey player with a butt of steel. Keep your eyes closed. Don’t breathe.
        We fumble around under the sheets and I wish I was far, far away where people procreate by cell division.
        He pokes his thingy against my tummy and it occurs to me that he never made me a tape, never showed me his pen collection, never read Shakespeare to me and the one dream I told him about he interpreted as a sign that a skinny, intelligent Jew will change my life.
        ‘I forgot to bring condoms,’ he mumbles. ‘Do you mind if I just …’
        I push him away.
        ‘No way you stupid …’
        I don’t finish the sentence.
        His own hand is doing the job.
        His dick whizzes around like a water hose on full power the gardener has lost control over. It sprays mashed potato sauce against my pink bedroom wall until it looks like a Pollock painting.
        His mobile rings.
        ‘My ex,’ he says and disappears into my bathroom.
        As he retreats I notice a big hairy mole on his back.
        Is there really not one single bit on him that is not repulsive?
        While I hear subdued mobile talk from outside I stare at the ceiling.
        Does sex with a soul mate have to be like that? Wouldn’t I be better off with a friendly rubber doll?
        He returns.
        ‘I think you should know – ,’ he says. ‘I think you should know we sort of – my ex and I – erm – she is my wife and – we actually still live together.’
        He pauses and studies my face but I have no energy to react.
        I’m not shocked that he lied – I’m shocked that –
        Somebody out there was willing to marry Dogface.
        ‘We're separated of course. Totally separated.’
        Quasimodo managed to get married.
        ‘You know how it is in London. She doesn’t have a place to stay and – .’
        A woman promised to spend the rest of her days with Pus-nose.
        ‘We are legally separated and we are in the process of getting a divorce. To save money we are doing it without a lawyer and have been rejected several times. It’s a lengthy process. I don’t want to lie to you but …’
        Who one earth? Who on earth? Who on earth said yes to this creepy creature?
        ‘Anyway, she meets men on Matchnet all the time and now she is in love and it pisses me off and …’
        He got married to someone who is capable of finding somebody else.
        ‘I thought you would be more appreciative of me being honest.’
         Dogface found a wife.
        ‘I need to go.’
        In the bathroom he somehow managed to completely unroll the toilet paper, drop the soap into the bin and dunk the towel into the toilet.
        I take a hot shower, put the sheets in the washing machine with a triple load of detergent and disinfect kitchen and bath.
        The sperm on the wall washes off without leaving a trace.
        I cry with relief.

The next morning:
        Pink: I will be brief, for a change! I will try to condense rather than put this into a flabby, flatulent and florid piece of prose. I had begun our dialogue with the intention of fucking you and nothing more. I was impressed with your mind and impressed with your cultured antennae. The more I knew, the more I wanted to know. When we met I wanted to fuck you but you pushed me back and craved tenderness instead. Your searchlight eyes gave you away, the wish for a hug suggested the depth that our erotic encounter sidestepped. I never entered Maximum Nutters’ Lounge looking for a relationship and did not want one especially. It's not the right time. I pretended that perhaps it is and perhaps you are. But now I realize that it is not. I would be betraying a truth that circumstances seemed to be creating. I wonder if you are assuming a romantic bridge is being created. The clues in your demeanor suggest that it is romance and depth you search. Whereas I want fucking and nothing further. I like you enormously, fancy you and would love to fuck you. But I want nothing else but fucking with dialogues. If you are happy with this, let me know because I would love to fuck you. The sooner the better!
        Humphrey

After a week of silence he giggles onto my answer phone that while we both took off our Matchnet profiles he remained on Jdate where he met this wonderful French girl he has deep and precious feelings for.
        ‘I think if would be healthy for both of us to meet again,’ he says. ‘I do like our dialogues and would love to stay good friends with you.’

He sends so many e-mails my laptop clogs up and calls so many times my mobile breaks down.
        Finally, I feel sorry for him.
        Maybe as friends we will be able to read Shakespeare and Freud and my dreams and …
        He cancels our first date as friends because he is flying to Cologne to see a nineteen-year-old German girl he fell madly in love with online.
        He cancels our second date because he is taking his wife out for dinner to discuss plans of possibly getting back together.
        He cancels our third date because the new love of his life is flying in from Rome.
        I cancel our fourth date because I admit to myself that I positively loathe the rat.
        ‘I understand that you are jealous,’ he tells my answering machine. ‘You’re jealous because I never loved you and now found true love with that woman from Liverpool but I really think it would be healthy for us to …’
        I rip the plug of my phone out of the wall.

Lesson learned: No matter how many times you kiss a frog, he will always remain Dogface.