Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

by Portnoy, Suzanne

  The cocktail became our tradition, a kind of liquid foreplay that always led to a long night in bed. That second night together, we fucked for four hours. Once again Karume was impressively tantric and masterful – taking his time, seemingly indifferent to his own orgasm. Over breakfast the following morning, I told him about Jahnet and my tantric lessons. ‘She wants me to find three tantric partners. I already have one, but I need another two. Would you like to be one of them and practise tantric with me?’

  ‘Tantric?’ he said. ‘That’s funny. My last partner and I were really into that.’ He said he once went two weeks without coming, despite fucking every night. It was to conserve his male energy, he explained; the more he waited to come, the more alert his senses seemed to become. ‘But why three partners?’ he continued. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to have just one? A master? My name means "master" in Kenyan, you know. This is a role I was born to play.’

  ‘Jahnet says I’m not ready for a boyfriend, that it’s too soon to settle down with any one man.’

  ‘Well, I’m a one-woman man,’ Karume said, frowning. He sounded like he meant it.

  I contemplated what he was telling me. ‘You mean you want an exclusive thing? With me?’

  He arched his eyebrows and smirked. I replayed highlights of our two nights together in my head. I thought about his going two weeks without coming, devoting his male energy, like a true tantric master, to his partner’s pleasure. That sold me. ‘Well, I suppose I could bend the rules.’

  He laughed. ‘I’d like that. Let’s see how it goes.’

  Karume and I started seeing each other regularly soon afterwards. He’d leave sweet love notes on my pillow in the morning. And our evening Golden Angels became a bonding potion. As for the sex, it continued to be exceptional. Very quickly I found myself growing fonder and fonder of Karume and thinking about him when he wasn’t around. And, when he was around, I enjoyed seeing how comfortable he was with my boys. They took to him immediately. He treated them like friends, not like children.

  I soon discovered that, although Karume often left little love notes on my pillow, he wasn’t the best communicator, so it was hard to predict when I’d see him next. Just scheduling get-togethers was a frustration from the start. His phone always seemed to be switched off. ‘I can never get a signal,’ he said. ‘I can’t be bothered.’

  Karume and I soon settled into a pattern. Three or four nights a week he would stay over at my place and, once he was at the house, I knew he’d be there for a few days and I wouldn’t have to think about chasing him down. But, rather than stay in for the evening, he would go cycling along the Embankment after the boys went to bed. He would not return until after midnight. In the first weeks under this arrangement, I slept very little. Still, I looked forward to his returning and joining me in bed, because I loved having him inside me. His cock filled me up. And his body and mine fitted perfectly – he was neither so tiny that I’d overwhelm him nor so bulky that he’d overwhelm me. He turned me on, my dappled lover. And he knew how to make me come.

  At first I thought my biggest problem would be preventing myself from coming too soon. We were tantric partners, after all; our spiritual connection came first; the orgasm was supposed to be secondary. But sex with Karume was so good I had to force myself not to come. A few weeks into our arrangement, however, Karume’s late-night wake-up calls began taking their toll. I found it disappointing not being able to enjoy his company before going to bed. But the real complication was that, the morning after a marathon sex session, I would be exhausted when I woke to take my boys to school. The pleasantly groggy afterglow of our first weeks together soon became an unwelcome energy drain. But I put up with it. He was the master.

  Karume’s schedule quickly changed my clock. I would wake up after midnight and wonder where my lover was. Some nights he didn’t return at all, explaining, when I called the next day, that he’d stayed in Brixton. Or in Ladbroke Grove. Or with a friend. He seemed to have no set residence. When I asked about Brixton, he said he had a friend there who let him stay in a spare room in exchange for running errands and performing maintenance tasks on the property. I imagined a wealthy elderly woman, tiny and weak and grateful for a guy’s help with the chores. I never met her, nor did I see his room in her house. Never saw his flat in Ladbroke Grove either. ‘I’m doing it up real nice, Suzanne,’ he said, ‘but it’s an unspeakable mess at the moment, really just a building site.’ He promised to have me over for a romantic candlelit dinner when it was finished.

  I knew little of his life beyond the experiences we shared when we were together. When we had sex, he pounded any doubts out of my mind, at least temporarily. Karume was a tantric master, just as he’d boasted at our first meeting, and we had fun fucking and taking wagers on how many days he could go without coming. He had profound stores of energy and always stayed hard for hours. Despite sleeping very little – three hours per night was typical for him – he always looked great the next morning. I did not. Eventually, Karume’s odd hours, plus the hours spent fucking rather than sleeping, frayed me. If I don’t have seven hours’ sleep, I’m knackered; if I have a couple of rough nights like that in a row, I’m destroyed. So, though I loved the sex, I put a moratorium on sleeplessness. ‘All this no sleep is really doing my head in,’ I told him a couple of months after I’d begun feeling we were a real couple. ‘I love the sex, love having you here, but I love my sleep, too. You can’t keep coming back at one or two in the morning, Karume.’ I told him that, if he couldn’t make it home by eleven, he should spend the night elsewhere.

  We saw each other less frequently thereafter, as, apparently, he couldn’t seem to make it back by curfew. It didn’t matter to me. We had a great connection, and I appreciated catching up on my sleep on those nights off. I got used to him just turning up when he felt like it. He seemed increasingly comfortable with the arrangement as well, gradually moving more of his things into the house. Every week I found a new pile of his clothes in my wardrobe or a new bag in the hallway. I didn’t protest because, when he was there, he was great with my boys and good to me. They really liked him, and I liked the adult company. Karume was a good cook, too, and like Daniel would fix the boys after-school snacks before I got home and do the laundry and tend the garden.

  One day when I returned home from work I found him washing the kitchen floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Didn’t Gabriela come today?’ Gabriela was my Slovakian cleaner. A no-show one week out of every four, she wasn’t very dependable. She wasn’t an exceptional cleaner, either, but she wasn’t so bad that replacing her was worth the effort. Besides, she was the one person with whom my Slovakian au pair, adorable Josef, could really communicate.

  ‘Yes, she came today,’ said Karume, ‘and mostly sat around drinking coffee and chatting with friends on her mobile. She’s a useless cow.’

  I suggested that next time he politely tell her to get back to work.

  ‘It’s not really my place, Suzanne. You should just get a new cleaner. Or let me do it.’ I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.

  ‘I am not letting you clean my house. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent cleaner in London? I’ve been through five in five years. And, when you tire of me, master, I’ve lost both my lover and my cleaner. Forget it.’

  So Karume continued to pick up after the maid and watch over my boys and fuck me and become a part-time husband. And a full-time financial drain as well. He never had any money and, I soon discovered, this was his lifestyle, not a phase. He’d said he was a guest art lecturer, but I later learnt that gig ended three months before we met. He said buyers and gallery owners showed interest in his work, yet he never showed me his art; I never saw him creating art; and the art sales and exhibitions never came to pass. He said he had worked as a sound engineer but that there wasn’t much work at the studios any more. This surprised me, given London’s lively music scene, but I figured he knew the production end of the industry better than me. He said he wa
s an aspring writer, too. He once showed me the outline for a book he wanted to write, but the project never got past the outline stage.

  Ultimately, it was lots of ideas but not lots of money. I didn’t know how he paid for his life in London. Certainly, he never carried any money with him. He never took me out, never brought a bottle of wine to the house, never offered to put petrol in the car, never picked up the tab in restaurants. I realised there were many ‘nevers’ attached to any thoughts related to Karume and his finances. And, after enduring Daniel’s destitution for more than two years and going into debt to subsidise him, I was wary of hitching my tits to another impoverished guy.

  All signs pointed to the exit. Yet I was always horny around Karume. And, when we got into bed at night, I wanted to feel him inside me, to suck his beautiful brown cock. I no longer needed to conjure sexual fantasies in order to come. It was just me and Karume and the thought of his big hard cock inside one of my orifices – that was enough to get me there. I’d given plenty of blowjobs before, fucked many dozens of men, but not since Frank had I felt such intensity of emotion and energy with a sexual partner. Just being around Karume made me feel happy and relaxed and, after a long day at the office and an evening spent looking after my two boys, it was a battery recharge to open my mouth and legs and let someone take control in bed.

  One Friday night a few months after we met, Karume said he needed to go to a meeting in Waterloo for a couple of hours. ‘I have to wrap up some business with a woman who wants to talk about my sound installation,’ he said. ‘She wants to bring it to Paris.’ We had been drinking Golden Angel martinis, so this came as a surprise. I had assumed his next destination was my bed.

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘The second one is on me.’

  I smiled at the joke. We were at my place, drinking my vodka.

  Karume put on his cycling gear and went outside. He returned a minute later, saying his lock had jammed and his bike was chained to my railings. ‘Take Alfred’s bike,’ I said. ‘He’s your co-dependent anyway.’ Karume had been using my son’s mobile for weeks, as Alfred never used it and Karume’s own had run out of credit.

  ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours – promise,’ he said. ‘I want to spend the weekend fucking you sore. Starting tonight.’

  ‘Sounds naughty,’ I said. ‘Hurry back.’ It was eleven p.m. Factoring in the trip across town and back, I figured it would be two a.m. before I saw Karume again. I took a hot relaxing bath in preparation for the long night ahead.

  By noon the next day Karume still hadn’t turned up. I began worrying that something might have happened to him. I rang the A&E departments at St Thomas’ and the Royal Free but he wasn’t in either. Then I remembered Karume’s discarded mobile phone was still in my house. I hoped I’d find someone on his call list who might know where he was. There was a message in his inbox from the night before, so I listened to that first. It was from a woman named Cheryl, telling Karume when to meet her at the Social in Waterloo. He’d never mentioned a Cheryl before. I rang Cheryl’s number and went straight into her answer machine.

  ‘This is Suzanne, Karume’s girlfriend,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to know when you saw him last. He didn’t come home last night and I’m just making sure he’s OK.’

  I returned to the call list. There had been four calls, one after another, from someone named Rula – another unfamiliar name. I rang the number and a woman with a Scandanavian accent answered the phone. ‘He came by in someone’s car on Thursday to pick up some of his stuff,’ she said. ‘Sorry, who is this?’

  ‘Suzanne,’ I said. ‘Karume’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’ She laughed. ‘How weird. He’s been trying to get back with me for the past three months, pestering me to take him back.’

  ‘But . . .’ There was no point in forming sentences.

  ‘Anyway, he finally came by and got his stuff, because I ended it,’ she continued. ‘I got sick of his always playing around. For good reason, as you can imagine. Sorry, Susan.’

  ‘Suzanne.’

  I felt like an idiot. On Thursday night I’d gone to Liverpool with a colleague to help with a screening for a movie I was publicising. Karume must have taken my car while I was gone and driven to Rula’s. He didn’t have a licence or insurance. But he did have an alibi. When I returned home on Friday morning, he had asked if I’d noticed he’d moved my car. ‘I saw a space right in front of the house and thought I’d move the car closer for you.’

  I had noticed more of his clothes hanging in my wardrobe later that afternoon (‘I spend half the week here, so it seemed to make sense’), as well as a new stereo (‘I thought of you when I picked this up; thought maybe you could use it somewhere’) and more clothes in bags in the basement (‘In case the weather changes’). My trip, I now realised, had given him the opportunity to retrieve his things from Rula’s and store them at what I’d come to think of as ‘our’ place.

  Rula and I compared schedules and stories and alibis. We discovered we each saw him on the days the other didn’t, such as the previous Tuesday, when he’d stayed at Rula’s but told me he was working on his flat. Like me, Rula had never seen it. Like me, she had been promised a romantic candlelit dinner when the rehab on the flat was complete.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘he was with me on Tuesday. Was he with you on Wednesday?’

  ‘Yeah. We stayed in, had dinner at home.’

  ‘Prick. He told me he was staying with his agent. What was I thinking? Who stays with their agent? They sell your stuff; they don’t put you up for the night. I had a feeling someone was in the background.’

  ‘We’re both idiots,’ I said.

  ‘Let me guess. He left little love notes on your pillow all the time?’ She described the paper he wrote notes on; it came from my kitchen pad.

  ‘Prick’ I said. ‘So tell me: you live in Brixton, right?’

  She did.

  I packed his stuff in bags and put everything outside my door. Then I phoned Anthony, who came round, changed my locks and, using his stern policeman voice, rang Karume to tell him his bags were on the street and demand they be collected within the hour.

  ‘Cheers, Anthony,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to get in the middle of this, Suzanne, and I realise you’re upset, but all the guy did was cheat, right? It’s not actually a crime.’

  To me, deceiving me was the crime. Honesty, like big cocks, is high on my list.

  Anthony left after making sure Karume picked up his things without causing a scene. Then I called Pat to have a bitch.

  ‘Why is everyone so judgemental about my lifestyle, about my fucking so many guys? I’m honest, at least. We all know the score. No one gets conned. It’s simple.’ Then I started crying. ‘Karume lied to me.’

  ‘He’s a complete fucker,’ she said, adding that she’d never liked him anyway. ‘That’s why I haven’t been ringing you, actually. I’m glad he’s gone.’

  I’d been dumped before by girlfriends who disapproved of my choice in men or because they feared my promiscuous behaviour reflected badly on them. I’d got used to the negative comments.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I continued. ‘I’d asked him if he wanted to be one of my tantric guys and just get together once in a while. He could have seen me and kept his other girlfriend. Instead, he made me drop my harem while keeping his own. Bastard!’

  ‘It may sound simple to you, Suzanne,’ she said. ‘But most guys don’t want to be part of a harem. It’s the old double standard.’

  While I raged over his deception, I pondered whether I still loved the guy. I loved his cooking, loved having a man around for the kids, loved the romantic cocktail hours. As for the man himself, well, Karume played tennis with my boys every Saturday morning and video games with them most evenings, and he was often around to help them with the homework. I knew that money was always going to be a problem, as it had been with Daniel, but he had seemed an improvement over Daniel, somehow, if only becaus
e he didn’t fall asleep in front of the telly every night. Special bonus: he didn’t have addiction problems. And he could fuck for Britain.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to knock Karume out of my life forever, but I knew I didn’t want a boyfriend whom I couldn’t trust. So, as with Jack and Oliver, I recompartmentalised. A week after I changed the locks on the doors, I found myself driving through Karume’s neighbourhood while returning home after cocktails at the Electric with Hannah. He was now living in a spare room in a flat in Lancaster Gate.

  I rang his mobile. ‘Hi, Karume,’ I said. ‘I’m just around the corner. Fancy a nightcap?’

  ‘I’ll be right down,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said as he got in the car. ‘I was dumb.’

  ‘Yes, you were,’ I said. ‘You could have kept Rula and me. That’s what I don’t get. I’ve got to be the most open-minded woman on the planet, and still you played me.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ he agreed. ‘Listen, I’d really like to make it up to you. I was wondering, do you still have that useless cleaner?’

  ‘No. I took your advice and sacked her – and replaced her with a klepto. Last time the new one cleaned the house, my topaz earrings went home with her.’

  ‘Let me clean your house,’ he said.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes, I’m serious,’ he said. ‘You know I like cleaning, and those girls only work a couple of hours.’

  ‘And charge me for six,’ I said. ‘Well, if you’re serious, it’s cool with me – if you’re talking about doing it every week, like a regular job. I’m not interested in a one-off atonement cleaning job.’

  Finding a boyfriend is easy, but scoring a top cleaner is not. Particularly one with benefits, who’ll stay at the house after going off duty and, in exchange for dinner and a Golden Angel martini, help me dirty up my bed. I drove home – with Karume – a content woman.