What Would Beyoncé Do?! Read online

  Dan and I would talk about how we were going to be rich and famous. But for now we needed a game plan, a business idea, something that could help us make fast cash here on this beautiful island. Speculate to accumulate, remember? Loads of other people were doing it, why couldn’t we? We just had to be creative, think outside the box, get edgy, get current. The locals were walking around flogging tours, ice cream, shots and sunglasses; there must be something we could sell. Everything is for sale in Greece. (INSERT GREAT POLITICAL JOKE ABOUT 2015. Oops, how did we miss this before it went to print? Shame. Would have been a great joke, I’m sure. Lols.)

  One afternoon, tired of being broke, I was lying flat on my back in the street while Daniel sang his ‘cruise around the island’ jingle. He decided to step over me, which I found hilarious, so I lifted my feet in the air and touched my toes with my hands and said if he wanted to step over me again, he needed to ‘open my bridge’. I don’t know what I was doing, but he got it. He would walk towards me, I would open up like a bridge and he would step over me. This quickly escalated into ‘Step over lady 50 euro, step over lady for euro.’ It was without doubt one of the funniest things I have ever done. I think we made 10 cents once, that was a great day. Admittedly you probably had to be there. But if you ever see me lying on the street, just whisper ‘Step over lady 50 euro’, and like magic, a bridge of legs will appear and the pathway to your enlightening future will be lying right in front of you.

  A mini parable entitled ‘The Night I Stole’

  So we were feeling particularly poor one day, more so than usual. ‘Step over lady’ wasn’t taking off and my €15 a night was quickly absorbed by apple sours and 5 a.m. burgers. The lack of funds was getting frustrating and must have been playing on my mind. One particular shift at Ghetto Club, I welcomed in a group of lads and got them all inside with the offer of a free shot. As they took their seats, I went and grabbed their watered-down peach schnapps and brought them over. One of the guys turned around and gave me a couple of euros for the drink, but instead of saying ‘No, it’s free’ and returning his cash, I sneakily hid it inside my miniskirt pocket, ignoring my pang of guilt. As I turned around, though, I saw my manager staring at me. He had seen the whole exchange.

  Oh shit. I felt so guilty but also kinda relieved that he had seen me, as my Catholic upbringing kicked in. Maybe I was hoping for absolution. He gestured with one hand, like a Mafia don, and called me over. He told me how disappointed he was, as we got on well, but I’d stolen from him and was no longer trustworthy. I tried to explain that it wasn’t stealing, I just saw the donation as a tip, and anyway it was only two euros! He said that wasn’t the point, it was still technically stealing and he didn’t want thieves on his property. He told me to get my stuff and leave.

  I felt awful because I am trustworthy, and I loved this job. I was gutted. As I started to leave, one of the bar guys shouted ‘Luisa, table four’ and put two cocktails on the tray. I didn’t know how to say ‘Sorry, I have just been fired’ so I collected the tray and took it over to table four.

  As I put the drinks down, they said ‘Oh, can we order two more please’, and I still didn’t know how to say ‘Er sorry I have just been fired’ so I went back to the bar and ordered two more cocktails, all the time unable to look up as all I could feel was my manager’s eyes burning holes into me. Then a group of lads outside the bar were deliberating whether or not to come in, and I couldn’t just stand there and say ‘Sorry, I’ve just been fired’ so I said all I could say in that situation, no not step over lady 50 euro but, ‘Hey guys, you wanna come in and get a free shot, lots of sexy ladies indoors?’

  Essentially I just kept working; I ended up staying the whole shift. At the end of the night, my manager put €13 in my hands and told me he would see me tomorrow. He never mentioned it again and I continued to work at Ghetto Club for the rest of the season. Without stealing.

  So what have we learnt from this parable?

  Beyoncé would never steal two euros.

  Beyoncé doesn’t have to.

  If she did and got fired for it, I think she would do what I did and just keep working.

  4.

  NASTY PUT SOME CLOTHES ON

  After I’d been in Greece a few weeks, my friend Zana came to stay. You remember her from chapter 1 – she is one of the funniest people I have ever known, and the only person I knew in Farnborough who understood my Beyoncé struggle. Everyone I went to school with seemed so settled and happy with their cool jobs living in the big local city of Southampton, getting on the property ladder, having boyfriends, and being maid of honour at each other’s weddings. Whereas me and Zana just wanted to be really fucking rich and famous.

  Zana decided to come out and join me in Zante. ZANA IN ZANTE!!!! And LUISA ALSO IN ZANTE we would sing. We promised ourselves that we would have the summer of dreams, suck a lot of dick, drink, dance, be really hot and hair-flick out of every bar we walked into. Even though by this point I had only ever sucked one dick and I didn’t even know how to do that. I remember reading somewhere you should do it like you’re eating an ice cream, but the problem is I bite ice cream, so I guess my analogy would be eat it like it’s crispy aromatic duck, i.e. devour it slowly and don’t let anyone interrupt you whilst doing so.

  But don’t forget at this point at age 19 I hadn’t been introduced to the art form that is crispy aromatic duck and so was still sucking dick like biting ice cream.

  So Zana got a job in a bar down the road from me and became part of mine and Dan’s gang, though she refused to play ‘Step over lady 50 euro’. I know, what a killjoy. Killjoy Zana as she became known.

  One afternoon, myself, Dan and Killjoy Zana were out trying to pick up boys. Now ladies, this is a tip I will pass on to you if you’re looking for the best place to meet men in the middle of the afternoon. Er, in the summer of the World Cup, my friends, rock up to a bar with all the hope, body and dreams of a 19-year-old wearing nothing but a bikini and a feigned interest in football. Bam, you’re welcome.

  Our lack of funds had made us very resourceful and we’d become friends with some bar workers on the strip. They would serve us cheap drinks at their place, and we would return the favour at ours. So there we are, the three of us sharing a cosmo out of a pint glass, when we spot these two guys walking into the bar eating sausage rolls, though who eats sausage rolls in Zante, I don’t know.

  The boys started chatting to us and buying us drinks; we kept pretending to offer to pay but they were having none of it. Thank God they didn’t call our bluff. Roll on a few hours, Zana and the white guy, Mike, are getting on like a house on fire, which is great, but I was sat with Egor. And he is still eating a sausage roll. Egor was this beefcake of a man with tattooed arms, grey string vest, fat sunglasses and a big head. He was ugly, but you would notice him because of his body alone, built like a brick shithouse. He was confident in a way that only ugly men can be when they know they’ve got something to offer that is not overtly visual. He had that ‘I’ve got a big dick’ aura.

  So Mike and Zana are flirting and Zana turns to me and is like, I really fancy this guy Mike, and I’m like, well good for you Zana but I don’t fancy Egor. Zana is like, don’t be so frigid Luisa, come on we are 19 and in Greece, I’m not asking you to marry the guy, just be normal, stop spoiling your own holiday and step up.

  It’s now 4 p.m. and me and Zana are slowly getting pretty drunk. I say slowly; it hits me really fast and hard, but she is hard-core and gives me water every other drink to keep up. Both of us have a three-hour shift at seven. We rock up at work steaming, the boys follow, we give them lots of free shots and all keep drinking. We dance badly, laugh loudly, and then they invite us back to their hotel. On the way they stop at the shop, and ask if we want anything. We’re brass broke, so we ask for washing-up liquid, toilet roll, shower gel and some sun screen. It’s not quite the packet of gum they were thinking, but we get some of that too.

  At their hotel, shopping bags in hand, Zana and Mike start
getting it on. Meanwhile Egor is talking to me about puff pastry and I’m really not into the conversation. I have been drunk since four and kinda just want to sleep, but Zana, who has consumed four times as much alcohol as I have, says that we have to keep partying and that it’s my first holiday and I should relax my crack. Also she whispers to me that she has always wanted to have sex in a swimming pool, so she goes outside and leaves me alone with Egor.

  I wanted to leave but she is very clear that I am 19 and in Zante and this is supposed to be the time of my life. I go to the balcony overlooking the pool, just to make sure Zana doesn’t drown or anything. I can see them fucking in the pool, Mike’s weeny white body causing ripples in the water. Egor sees this as an opportunity to take his pants off and start walking around the hotel room butt naked. I’m disgusted and think ‘How dare you?’ but at the same time, oh my God, look at the size of his penis. Admittedly I had only ever seen like two, apart from my brothers’, but that was as a child in the bath, and this looked very different.

  I didn’t fancy him at all, but something about the heat and his penis size and the fear that I was in Zante and should be living it up and having fun meant that I fucked him. I fucked Egor. And I can say hand on heart it was some of the best sex of my life. Because I didn’t fancy him, I had no emotional tie to him (if anything I found him repulsive; he had pastry down his chin FFS); it was just the gratuitous act of sex for sex’s sake. Animalistic almost. I saw his hard dick and I wanted to sit on it.

  I loved it, it was so liberating to have sex and not second-guess his emotions or feel like I was being judged. It was sex how I wanted it. I had never experienced it like that before, and because I had no feeling for him, I didn’t care, I was brutally honest. He was on top of me pounding away and I was like ‘Oh you disgust me Egor, you can’t even fuck me properly, call yourself a man, this is boring.’

  He would reply, ‘Sorry Luisa, I’m trying my best.’

  ‘Well try harder.’

  ‘Yes, oh my God, you are amazing.’

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Amazing and what, Egor?’

  ‘Amazing and beautiful, Luisa.’

  ‘Damn right, you are shit and I hate you.’

  And here is when I learnt a very valuable lesson about the male ego. You criticise a woman when she’s having sex with you, she will probably start crying and you won’t hear from her again. You criticise a man when he is having sex with you, the fucker works harder.

  5.

  UPGRADE YOURSELF

  I love sucking dick; teabagging is one of my favourite pastimes! Love playing the D, too much d fun. Yay to the D time, what time is it? Oh it’s D time! The aubergine is my favourite emoji.

  Here is a narrative that I am so bored of, women getting slut-shamed. I like sucking dick, dudes love getting their dick sucked; why am I called a whore? A while back there was a story in the national press about a young woman who went on holiday to Magaluf and sucked off more than 20 men on a nightclub floor. She was annihilated in the press and on social media, people calling her a slag, a slut, a whore. I found the whole story really uncomfortable; it was like a modern-day witch hunt.

  It should never have made the national press; they vilified her, named and shamed her and posted her picture for everyone to judge. Not once were any of the men whose dicks she sucked held accountable or pictured, and there were more than 20 of them, you would have thought they could find a picture somewhere. Not once was the venue manager or the proprietor of the bar held accountable for not looking after people on their premises; these are the men that encouraged the behaviour, offering alcohol as a prize, these venue owners were profiting, cashing in on the publicity at the girl’s expense.

  Now I am not saying the girl was blameless. But she was 19 and an idiot, and who hasn’t done messed-up shit when they were young and on holiday? I know I have. OK, admittedly I didn’t suck off 20 dudes in a nightclub to win a free holiday – I was too busy playing step over lady with my BFF – but I have done other embarrassing things.

  What I’m trying to say is that I hate how women are subjected to and vilified at the expense of their sexual attitudes, desires and behaviour. This was a vulnerable 19-year-old. I hated that this was front-page news, that it was all over social media. A lot of my guy friends were sharing the story on Facebook, and they were posting it with updates like ‘Check out this dirty slag,’ ‘Check out this dirty whore.’ And I’m thinking, this is so repressive, because I can’t imagine one of these dudes being put in the same situation and having the decency and self-respect to go ‘Excuse me, excuse me, let me be the first to put my dick away, here, have some flowers.’

  So why is it that men are so quick to call women slags, sluts and whores? If you want your woman to be good at sucking dick, well that takes practice. And it’s not just men, it’s women, we call each other these names. It’s exhausting and damaging.

  A woman can be sexual if it’s for the pleasure of a man, be that in porn or in advertising, but the second it’s natural – e.g. breastfeeding in public – it’s inappropriate. Or worse, the second a woman’s sexuality is for her own pleasure and satisfaction, she is vilified. Why? What is the world so scared of?

  I appreciate we need a way to understand our world, and so I think it’s just a case of upgrading the terminology. In the same way you don’t call a nightclub toilet cleaner that any more, you call them like a hygiene attendant or a sanitation consultant, I suggest we do the same with slags, sluts and whores; let’s upgrade the terminology.

  ‘Hi, this is Mary, she is a pleasure angel.’

  ‘Hi, this is Suzi and she is a climax fairy.’

  And by all means you can still keep it real.

  ‘This is my friend Katerina. Katerina had sex with my ex-boyfriend a week after we broke up and she is a spunk bucket, a cock guzzler, an anal-gaping princess.’

  6.

  YES!

  So Zante is over, I have since enrolled at Salford, two years speed by and it gets to the year I have been waiting for. It’s September 2005, I am 22 years old, a size 10, and it’s day one of stand-up comedy class. I have spent the previous two years in classical acting training and women in media studies, as well as masturbating furiously over Mark Bishop, who I still found sexually irresistible and could do absolutely nothing about it.

  On my first day of uni, the first person I spoke to was Zoe. Zoe became my best friend. I saw her waiting in the corridor and thought ‘Ahh, she’s pretty’ again, a brilliant basis for a lifelong friendship. Zoe was from Stretford, Mancunian born and bred. Her dad is Pakistani and her mum is white from London. Zoe is fucking beautiful. She introduced me to Luzia, who was from Angola and the funniest, most beautiful person I had ever met. Luzia would call me her little African queen and I would call her my Polish princess. Zoe was our Pakistani prince. These two women became my royal family for the next three years.

  So it’s day one of stand-up class. Zoe is in the class with me; Luzia was too chicken to sign up and was having too much fun dating a Lebanese guy who worked in the local salsa club. There are ten of us in the class, two men and eight women; my lecturer keeps saying how refreshing this is. I don’t understand, as to me those stats are obvious. The lecturer (not the sexy one – sorry Lloyd) tells everyone to go outside, you have ten minutes to think of your first stand-up routine, I want you to think of a funny story or a joke, and then I want you to come back into class and perform it for everyone like it’s your first gig.

  All the girls ran to the loo and were trying to think of what to talk about whilst the hand-dryer was going off. We all went back into class. The boys were more nervous than the girls, one of the lads, Larry, said he spewed in the toilet a little bit. I was nervous but also excited; it was something I had wanted to do for years. It was really important to me that I get this right. I didn’t know what I wanted to say, or how I wanted to say it, but for that moment I wasn’t worried about anything other than the sheer pani
c and excitement of getting up in front of people and performing.

  I got up and told a story, a simple story, an obvious story; it was a sex story about me wanking. My punchline was ‘Oooh, Mark Bishop!’ Aka I told my class a ‘joke’ about me wanking over my lecturer (the sexy one). It got lots of big laughs, and the joy was contagious. Apart from Lloyd, who I think was a bit jealous that no one wanked over him (sorry Lloyd . . . though I’m sure Zoe said she did once).

  I sat down and Zoe turned to me and said, ‘You are a natural, it’s like you have been doing it your entire life.’ It felt so right and so good and so on point to hear. After all the auditions and failed dance classes, the awkward am dram meetings, the massage machines and the vodka shots in Greece, finally here I am. Here in this classroom, a room with no windows, a broken television in the corner, a room in the middle of Salford, with paint stripping off the walls, I felt like I had finally showcased my voice, that out of my whole life, this one day meant something. It was one of those moments where you feel like, yes, finally I’m alive. This is living. Today I matter, I am making a contribution and I can see a glimpse of what a good, real life should feel like.

  7.

  I WAS HERE

  I genuinely believe that if you have a vocation or a calling or a dream, something that keeps you up at night, something that leaves you restless for daydreaming about it, something that the universe and life keeps drawing you back to – whether it be performing and you find yourself walking past a sign for drama classes; or maybe it’s painting and drawing and you realise that out of your group of friends, it’s you they always ask to do their hair and make-up or customise their old dresser; or maybe it’s working on bikes and feeling passionate about riders or languages and you study abroad and always feel an affinity with foreigners – whatever it is, you will do it in your spare time, where you are not getting paid, you will do it when you are broke, you will do it when you are sick, you will do it when you are tired. Maybe it’s cooking, maybe it’s design, maybe it’s medicine. Maybe it’s motherhood or fatherhood (yes, I am aware there is no spare time in parenthood). But that thing that you do, that you keep coming back to, that you are naturally good at, that thing, whatever it is, is part of your being. It’s part of your core genetic make-up, it is what makes you the beautiful unique individual that you are. It is your gift to the world.