She’s heavy and soft-hipped underneath me. The large breasts have a look of fatigue. She’s away to one side watching but occasionally returns to within herself, looks out at me with what seems genuine unanalytical imprisonment in the moment. God knows whether it’s doing anything for her down there. Her getting-pleasure face–slight frown, flared nostrils–is like a little girl’s you’ve-offended-me face, but I’ve seen the expression on other women’s faces before, that hurt look as if the pleasure’s an affront or a perplexing betrayal. It’s another while before we are, actually, fucking. But eventually, if she’s to be believed, we get into a rhythm.
Not that she’s going to come like this, I can tell. (When you’ve seen as many lasses as I have nowhere near comin’, I’ve told Vince, in the northern stand-up voice we use for such things, you get to recognize the luke.) ‘Do you want to be on top?’ I ask, depressed by the sound of my voice. Her nod is revealingly urgent. We manoeuvre carefully so I don’t slip out. Now that she can use her hands on herself she releases the remaining inhibitions, incrementally, until after a few minutes I might as well be a waxwork. Her chin goes up, shows me otherwise private horizontal creases in the soft white meat of her throat, and she does, with a modest quartet of shudders, come. Followed sixty seconds later, after a heavy roll back into our original position, by me.
After several minutes she says: ‘Well.’
I’ve rolled off her on to my back, arms out, muscles unstrung, post delicious crucifixion. The thing, both of us know, would be for her to turn towards me, rest one hand on my chest and her head on my shoulder or in the crook of my arm the way couples in films do. But it would connote a tenderness we’re not going anywhere near. I’m divided between the reflex to get her up, dressed, out of here so I can sit in peace with a drink and a fag and think about it, and the novelty of having someone–anyone–to share a night with.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
She laughs, once, with contented dog-tiredness. ‘You’re welcome. And thank you.’
‘You’re losing your voice.’
‘I’ve been talking all day. All year it feels like.’
‘Do you want something for it? We’ve probably got something.’
She swallows. ‘Don’t bother. You like it at first, anyway, sounding not yourself.’
These are the first notes in an improvisation, seeing where it’ll go. The rain’s hurried static says stay indoors, leave outside to the night’s cold, rough gods. I think again of Vince and all the other poor bastards still with Friday’s black hollows and small hours to deal with. If we were twenty years younger I’d ask her what she was thinking and she’d say you want me gone, which would either start something or stop it starting. I can, however, feel her thinking that I want her to go. I can feel her lazily in her new freedom thinking gently, Oh, well, fuck him, just give me a few minutes.
‘I’m starving,’ I say. ‘You must be, too.’
She smiles, closes her eyes. This not getting up and going is like ignoring the clock in the morning, the moments of denial melting on contact like snowflakes you’ve put out your hand to catch. Then I remember she’s done with all that for a while, having to get up and go somewhere. I wonder how much the Americans paid for her company.
‘I’m starving and exhausted,’ she says.
‘In which case food and rest,’ I say, balking at saying food and sleep, though the thought of us passing the night in my bed excites me, sharing the tossed journey through dreams. Surely after everything that’s happened there’ll be dreams? ‘What would you like?’ I ask.
‘Tea and toast.’
‘Well, that’s available.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘It’s on its way.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Nothing. Lie there and don’t get dressed.’
She swallows again, enjoying the soreness. Thinks about it. ‘Okay,’ she says.
‘Promise you won’t put your clothes on.’
‘I promise I won’t put my clothes on.’
After the tea and toast we have sex again. I come before her and have to get her off first with my hand, then with my mouth. She can have three or four or five one after the other, it transpires. ‘This is why you didn’t want me to put my clothes on, I now see,’ she says, which makes me like her. The tiredness and having arrived late at her freedom make her sound wise. I get up again and make, since I can, farfalle with smoked salmon, lemon, cream and fresh dill. There’s a bottle of Jacob’s Creek chardonnay in the fridge that’s been there for God knows how long, since Vince and I only ever drink red, but now it’s just the thing. We eat in bed.
‘I don’t do this very often,’ she says.
‘Go to bed with strangers?’
‘Eat in bed. With or without strangers. This is delicious, by the way.’
After this second meal we make each other come again, with a meandering self-involved slowness that borders on the meditative. No more, our bodies agree. We’ve tasted the sweet fruits that grow in that narrow margin between satiation and disgust. Besides, my cock’s starting to smart.
‘I’m taking it for granted that you’re not planning on going anywhere,’ I say. My head rests just below her navel. Her pubic thatch is thin, almost a mohican, damp-darkened but in any case not quite the blonde of her head. The marshy odour of our excess wafts up from her flattish cunt, a hint of brine, tinned pears, wet peat, just the right side of unpleasant.
‘Eh?’
‘I mean, I’d like it if–assuming you don’t have to be anywhere else–you stayed here tonight.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well, I suppose I could. I can’t drive, anyway.’
All the drinks, of course. That must have registered. ‘Thank God it’s Saturday tomorrow,’ I say.
‘Every day’s going to be Saturday for me for a while.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know. Not get up till noon. Have long baths. Go on holidays. Lose some weight.’
I’m not keen on this line. My own fault, bringing up the Future in the shape of tomorrow. It pulls the shadow of our context over us, how we met, my letter, her father. My father. The fucking Cheechee Papers.
‘What’s your thing about, really?’ she asks. She means, since her radar’s live, too, the mythical PhD thesis.
‘Do you really want to know? It’s pretty boring.’
‘Go on, I’ll stop you when I’m bored.’
‘It’s about…the way popular culture–in this case, pulp fiction–presents the foreign or the exotic as a frame within which moral behaviour excusably changes.’
‘Okay, I’m bored.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘I don’t have brain,’ she croaks. ‘Not that kind.’
‘No, you have the kind that enables you to retire by the time you’re however old you are.’
‘I’m forty-two and it’s easiest if you just say nothing because if you’re lying I’ll know and if you’re not I won’t believe you.’
I think about that for a while, unpack it, then say: ‘Okay.’ It didn’t pass me by that she chose the Winnie-the-Pooh idiom of ‘having brain’. A little invitation to intimacy which made me, since I can’t help myself with such things, suddenly think we might be able to have a relationship. Then immediately think, No, we couldn’t. I wouldn’t be enough for her. And the baggy body would get me down in about two weeks.
‘And you work at that bar?’
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to teach?’
‘Actually, I like working there. I like the staff. Obviously they come and go, but there are periods when it feels like a little family.’ I’m not helping myself with any of this. Winnie-the-Pooh notwithstanding, Janet Marsh will, I suspect, tolerate only so much namby-pambyism. In the end she wants a man who can change a tyre and punch some other fucker’s lights out. I don’t blame her. If I was a woman I’d want one like that myself. All this cooking and having brain is going
to be of limited use here. There was a time back in the Eighties when you got into the pants of educated girls by being sardonically unmasculine but those days are gone, and in any case Janet doesn’t have that kind of education. I nearly blurt out that I write porn as Millicent Nash for Sheer Pleasure, but that’s more namby-pambyish than cooking. Besides which, my Sheer Pleasure career is over. There was a message on the phone from Louisa Wexford: ‘I can’t believe you’re choosing to let it be like this, Owen, but I’m afraid if you look at paragraph 7.2 in the contract…’ I keep asking myself why I stopped halfway through Bound to Please (the last, truncated utterance of which was, appositely enough, ‘Jacqui felt her anus yawning’) but I’m not coming up with much. Boredom, I tell myself (and note for the first time in my life that boredom is an anagram of bedroom), though I know there’s more to it than that.
‘D’you think he’s wearing his wire again?’ Janet Marsh rasps. Her wrecked larynx is making me feel fond of her, but also, if I follow the fondness, aware that there would come a time in the not-too-distant future when it wouldn’t have that effect, would be an annoyance; time lets the air out whether we like it or not. For the past couple of hours we’ve been lying side by side alternating between twitchy sleep and surreal wakefulness. She said she liked to fall asleep to the telly so I put the portable on. BBC News Twenty-four. The clip is of George W. Bush ‘debating’ with John Kerry. This is the second of the three scheduled encounters between incumbent and challenger. After the first, more than a week ago, there was a big fuss because it appeared in photographs from a certain angle that the president was wearing a wire, presumably as a conduit for instructions on what to say. Instructions from Satan, Vince said.
‘Frightening to watch, isn’t it?’ I ask.
‘Do you follow it all? This stuff?’
‘No. This guy though…’
‘We all thought there was weapons there, Robin,’ the president says, in response to an audience question. ‘My opponent thought there was weapons there. That’s why he called him a grave threat. I wasn’t happy when I found out there wasn’t weapons, and we’ve got an intelligence group together to figure out why.’
‘Wasn’t weapons?’ Janet Marsh says.
‘Don’t get me started.’ My hand rests on her belly. Unbra’d, her breasts roll away from each other as if each is in a huff; they’re broad rather than pendulous and even when she’s upright spread rather than droop.
‘It’s one thirty,’ the newsreader says. ‘The top stories tonight. Unconfirmed reports on Abu Dhabi television say that Ken Bigley, the Briton taken hostage twenty-two days ago, was killed on Thursday after a failed escape attempt. The second of the US presidential election debates took place tonight…’
‘That poor chap,’ she says.
‘Yeah, it’s a mess out there.’ I use the remote to turn the volume down to a murmur. The in and out of sleep has sobered both of us up. I’m considering a trip to the kitchen where, for no good reason, the fruit bowl has become the place Vince and I keep our weed. It gives her palpitations, fine, but she won’t mind if I go ahead. On the other hand, I don’t want to spoil what we’ve got. It’s precariously good to lie here and stroke her thighs, midriff, flanks. If we were out in public as a couple I’d wish she was slimmer and better-looking–wish she were Tara Kilcoyne, in fact–but here in private I’m filthy rich. Every time I think along those lines I become aware of another thought running underneath it like a culvert, that everyone and everything, Janet and these moments included, is just me killing time until Scarlet comes back into my life.
‘I don’t know how they do it,’ she says. The footage now is of a small anti-war demonstration somewhere that doesn’t look like London. People with faces pink from the cold, the wind lifting their hair. Lots of them smiling. ‘Get out there with banners and shouting and whatnot.’ Her voice is getting worse with every utterance. The thought of entering her again, the big body with its hot cunt and tired throat, futilely tugs a thread of blood in my cock. She was so strong and undulant when I got on top of her that I kept thinking that never before had I really been given, as the slang has it, a ride.
‘They care, I suppose.’
She rolls over on to her side facing away from me, but still touching. Spoons is on offer but for the moment I stay where I am with my hand on her right buttock. ‘That’s what I mean,’ she says, yawning. ‘I don’t know how they manage to care. I couldn’t give a fuck, really.’
‘It’s difficult,’ I say. ‘We’re all lazy.’
‘I’m not lazy,’ she says. ‘Just selfish.’
I don’t like any of this but at the same time it feels inevitable. I imagine a snapshot taken looking down at the two of us lying here, our telly-lit bodies with their bones and blood and nerves and consciousness. Then imagine the shot magnified times ten. Then times ten again, and so on, the way I’ve seen them go from atom to cosmos. Sooner or later you see the city, the country, the continent, the planet. A leaflet handed to me on Charing Cross Road a while back said: ‘It’s your world. What are you letting them do to it?’
‘I see all this stuff and I keep thinking I should be bothered about it,’ she says. ‘But I’m not. All I’ve had in my head for the last year is this bloody deal, the company.’
‘We’ve all got our excuses,’ I say, thinking not just of Scarlet and the day at St Thomas’s but of an Amnesty International insert in Vince’s Guardian a while back which fell out of the paper when I picked it up (as it was no doubt intended to) and said, in big black letters on its front: ‘WHAT’S YOUR EXCUSE?’
We return to silence but I know she’s still awake. I’m beginning to wonder what the morning is going to be like. We’ll fuck again, I daresay, which will be a mistake because we’ll both look a lot worse than we do now, which won’t matter for the sex but will matter immediately afterwards, my burgeoning pot belly and putative bubs, her thick ankles and that suggestion of flab on her upper arms. The general cosmetic of night will have been rubbed off. The weight of all our lives’ failures and approximations will be upon us. Will we sit at the dining table over a pot of tea? Will we have to deal with Vince, who’ll be elaborately hung over, slippered and dressing-gowned, grumpily full of his night’s escapades or hurt in his heart by his night’s emptiness? Hard to imagine she’ll want to stick around. The more I think about it the more I imagine she’ll want to be up and gone. I picture her at home (a large, high-ceilinged flat), moving slowly, drawing and with much sorrow for herself gingerly stepping into a deep, hot bath. The first adventure in her new freedom will have depressed her, if she’s honest. And all she has to look forward to is more of it.
‘Do you believe in God?’ I ask her. The rain’s erratic now, by turns stirring itself and fading. The wet night’s into its tough hours for the West End’s lonely, the lights shimmering in the gutter streams. I wonder where Scarlet is. What she’s doing. If she’s with someone.
‘No,’ Janet says. ‘Not really.’
‘If you don’t believe in God you’ve got to come up with some other reason for doing the right thing. People, maybe.’
She doesn’t answer straight away, but eventually says, in a threadbare, sleepy voice: ‘Yeah.’
‘I try to think of whether my parents would think something was honourable,’ I say.
Again there’s a long pause before the fading ‘Yeah.’ Then after a while, barely audibly: ‘I’m going.’
I turn the television off and slot in behind her. The darkness is balm on our eyelids.
I’m not prepared for it when it comes. I never am.
‘What is it?’ she says, unable to disguise the fear in her wrecked voice. ‘What’s the matter?’
A gap in the curtains reveals a sliver of magic-hour light; the night’s first concession to the idea of dawn, enough to show the wet of her eyes and the mirror’s glimmer; the rest of the room’s bits and pieces are lumps of shadow. It takes me a moment to remember who she is, how she got here, what we did.
‘Sorry,
’ I say. ‘This is embarrassing.’
I’ve woken myself with a terrible falsetto inhalation. If I give in to what’s going on in my chest I’ll sit there and sob. Her wide-awake force field crackles with the checked reflex to get the fuck away from me. A woman goes to bed with a man she’s never met before, she goes to bed with his potential psychopathy, never mind tolerable sex and Winnie-the-Pooh.
‘It’s all right,’ I tell her. ‘I have nightmares. It’s nothing.’
Hardly. She can see, or rather feel, the state I’m in.
‘It’s really okay,’ I say. ‘Honestly. I’m sorry.’
A pause. Her inner deliberation might as well be audible. Get up, get dressed, get out. Don’t panic. Think. Stay. He’s not crazy. Her hand comes up through the dark behind me and its touch between my shoulder blades gives a glimpse of how unsatisfactory it would be if we had a relationship, the precise degree to which it wouldn’t be enough.
‘Christ,’ she says. ‘What were you dreaming?’
I don’t know what to tell her. It’s not the dreams but the feeling they leave in the moments after I’ve woken myself up. The future’s promise of loneliness. The overwhelming dull certainty of my death. The melodramatic absurdity of getting worked up about it, a man of my age and education.
‘It won’t sound like much,’ I say.
Actually, there is comforting heat coming from her hand. Tears, whether I like it or not, are trickling down my cheeks, all my childhood still there, as confirmed earlier by the Rathbone Place pavement. That’s one of the things that hurt, how much I remember, and that all that will, when I die, be lost.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Lie down. You’re all right.’
I could turn on my side and press my face into her breasts. They’re available. But the mother-and-childness of it puts me off. I wonder (inconclusive stretch marks) if she and the ex have kids. Somehow I don’t think so. There’s been that slight inquisitive lift to her chin the whole time, the world-curiosity motherhood generally kills. Also, in the movement of her hips when we were fucking the ambivalent admission that this was still what defined her cunt, that there was something anachronistic about its not having gone on to the higher calling.