In Bed With Lord Byron

Prologue
    Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I lie in bed and pose the question:
if you could spend one night with any man in the world – just one man – who would it
be?
It’s certainly a good deal more interesting than counting sheep.
    That night – before everything changed – I woke up at 3.30 a.m. and lay staring at the amber streetlamp streaks patterned on my wall. I yawned, feeling heavy and irritated. My full
bladder pulsed but I couldn’t be bothered to get up. I rolled over on to my left side. Then my right side. Then my back. Then my front again. None of them helped. I thought of a Sylvia Plath
poem I had learnt and loved at school:
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness / Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions
. How horrible this is, I thought. I’d never
suffered from insomnia before, so why did I seem to be making a habit of it over the last few weeks? It wasn’t as though I had anything to worry about. I had a good job working as a PA for a
scientist who was mad enough not to notice I could only type at a speed of eight words per two fingers per minute. I had a pleasant boyfriend, a nice flat in Primrose Hill, a playful cat, wonderful
friends, all my limbs and teeth still intact, etc. Maybe that was the problem. My mother used to say, ‘You’re not happy unless you have something to worry about in life, Lucy.’
Maybe I was just bored.
    At the bottom of my bed, my cat stretched out in a mottled arch of pleasure, utterly smug in her deep sleep.
    OK, I thought, time to play the going-to-bed game.
    I composed a short-list in my head . . .
    1. Lord Byron
    2. George Clooney
    3. The gorgeous guy in the newsagent who I buy my
Daily Telegraph
from every morning
    I mulled over the possibilities with my cat, Lyra. ‘Lord Byron is obvious. He was the best poet of all time. He was handsome. And – the most important thing in a man
– he was brainy. I must have a man who can make me think, who in postcoital chats can discuss politics alongside positions, Ovid alongside orgasms.’
    Eight times out of ten, Byron would win the game. But tonight I felt like a change. Byron was too unattainable.
    Mind you, the same went for George Clooney. And he had a pet pig whom he was reputed to share his bed with. I liked animals, so the pig might be fun – but how would the pig get on with my
cat? What if I woke up one morning to find Clooney’s pig with a porky smile on its face and a frayed white tail hanging out of the corner of its mouth? Then again, my cat was fairly psychotic
. . . but I had a feeling Clooney might kick me out of bed if I was responsible for the death of Mr Pig.
    ‘So,
not
Clooney,’ I mused to Lyra, who stretched languidly and curled her head under her paw. ‘How about the gorgeous guy I buy my
Daily Telegraph
from?’
    I smiled deliciously. Every morning the dull routine of getting out at Embankment Tube station and surging up the escalators in a flow and flood of commuters into a ragged, grey dawn is
brightened considerably by him: six feet tall, slender, chocolate-brown eyes that crinkle into wings as I pass him my money. I always worry that my lust will leave an invisible imprint on the
coins, too warm and damp from being curled in my hand, caressed and flipped by my fingers for much of my journey. Over a six-month period, we’ve progressed from shy ‘hi’s to
‘How are you doing today?’. He knows my job and I know his age, but that’s about it so far. There is something so sexy about his down-to-earthness, his cheery
‘Cheers!’ when I pass him the coins (perhaps because I spend much of the day with my scientist boss posing questions such as ‘Surely there is nothing in the world more
thrilling
than imaginary numbers – don’t you agree?’). But the one detail about him that
really
gets me is the grubby black smudges on his hands. His fingers are as
fragile as a violinist’s and the incongruous smudges look dirty and sexy. Sometimes I even fantasise about making love to him not on a bed of roses but on a bundle of newspaper sheets, the
print smearing our bodies so that we become, literally, yesterday’s news.
    That night I fantasised about buying the paper from him and being drawn into a back alley, shutting London and the commuters out. I pictured him pushing me up against a graffiti-covered wall and
sharing hot kisses, his hands delving into my blouse . . .
    That is the trouble with my game. If you play with too much enthusiasm, it