Page 25 of Sex Ed

Spotify Playlist: Ed’s Music

Oh, my deary me. I scroll through the playlist that Ed has sent me and scrunch up my face at the choices on there. What on earth? It feels like the playlist of a fifty-year-old man who listens to Magic and likes a trip to the supermarket to see what’s new in cheese. There are some soul classics in there, I would never query the presence of Fleetwood Mac, but otherwise, it is not sexy. I’m on the Tube and actually hide my phone from Beth, next to me, and her sister Lucy, who’s standing beside us and has a dangerously good vantage point. I can’t have her think this is mine.

What is this? What have you just sent me?

It’s my work and car compilation.

It’s like you want my ears to bleed. You like Taylor Swift?

She’s a quality songwriter. She’s won Grammys.

Are you a twenty-year-old woman in a floaty dress holding an oat milk latte?

No, I am not, and you know this.

Ed sends me a GIF of Taylor Swift that I hope he doesn’t have saved to his phone. Whilst I don’t want to change who he is, I am trying to research the man behind the virgin. What is he into? Why is he possibly still a virgin? His music choices give me some insight into this.

Like what do you dance to? This is all very pedestrian.

I don’t dance.

Everyone dances. When you’re in the kitchen on your own or when you’re happy, you must dance.

I don’t dance. When I am happy, I smile, like most humans. You use any opportunity to dance.

Because it’s a form of emotional release and expression. I am going to send you one of my playlists and I want you to dance. To reconnect to your body, to let go. Dancing is pretty much sex standing up.

Well, that’s a biological impossibility for a start. You can’t get pregnant from dancing.

You’ve obviously never watched videos of Prince. I want you to try and dance.

Or not. People don’t need to see that.

Or come out with me now. I’m with Beth, we’re going dancing.

No. But say hello to Beth for me.

You’re not a very good student, are you? Sharing my playlist now, you boring sod. That’s your homework before next Wednesday.

He doesn’t reply. Before next Wednesday, when, to set his mind at ease, we’ve agreed to have sex. I say agree, Ed’s put it in his calendar and linked it to mine just in case I forget. He originally named the event ‘Dinner with Mia’ but then gets angry when I keep editing it to a line of cherry emojis.

‘New boyfriend?’ Beth asks me, trying to see my conversation as the Tube pulls to a stop at Covent Garden. I pull my phone away. I like outside-of-work-Beth. She likes a big earring and a bright trainer, and she also has some contact in the music business so always has concert/event tickets and, because she sees me most days, I’m the one that gets asked to come along.

‘Nosy… No, just Ed. He says hello. I asked him to come along tonight.’

Beth laughs so hard, a man opposite crumples up his newspaper. She puts a hand to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t laugh.’

‘What are we laughing about?’ asks Lucy, hanging onto the handrails. I’ve never met Lucy before tonight but there’s an audacity there in the length of her skirt and the size of her bucket hat. Beth comes from some long line of sisters that have been introduced to me via staffroom anecdotes. I don’t think this one is the divorced heart surgeon or the widowed accountant so she must be the one who does children’s parties dressed as Elsa fromFrozen.

‘This teacher we both know. Mia was going to invite him along. Let’s just say he’d stick out like a sore thumb.’

He would but I do feel compelled to defend my well-ironed, Taylor Swift-loving Ed. ‘He’s a nice bloke, he just… He’s very buttoned up, right to the top, you know?’ I add.

Lucy looks intrigued. ‘He doesn’t have an alter ego? He might have a serious work face but could be into different shit when he’s at home. I once did night shifts in a supermarket and there was a bloke who liked a spreadsheet but turns out he would go home and let his wife walk him round the front room on a leash…’

The man with the newspaper opposite looks up. No article will now compare with our conversation. I smile, knowing that Ed wouldn’t know what to do with a leash. He’d be calling out for the dog he thought it belonged to.

‘No, just a bit vanilla. Not even vanilla. What’s one level below vanilla?’

---