Hush Hush

by Mullarkey, Gabrielle

  As Kate became herself to him, he braved the stumbling block of sex as a matter of concern between best friends. He suggested that he start off by inserting his little finger, then build up to two fingers, ‘the width of your average love truncheon’, according to Tommo. But, however hard she tried, Kate tensed up when the moment came.

  Patiently shelving the two-fingered entry approach, Conor had then posited starting with a pencil and working up to a cucumber ‒ one of the smaller, less prickly varieties. He showed her how to put a condom on a cucumber she had shrivelling in the bottom of her fridge.

  This had left Kate unimpressed. ‘I think the correlation of vegetables to sexual organs is deeply unsatisfying,’ she’d said, with an art student’s sense of the aesthetically valid.

  She’d convinced herself she was a freak of humanity ‒ until she read something on a problem page.

  ‘I’ve got vaginismus,’ she proudly informed a disheartened Conor. ‘It’s all because Daddy’s bullied Mummy all her life, and I associate sex with the brute force of men, taking and despoiling, trampling the female will underfoot.’

  ‘That’s bollocks,’ Tommo told Conor. ‘I bet she still wears jam rags so her hymen’s still intact, that’s all. Sex is bound to hurt a bit at first, Julia says, if you’ve never put a tampon up there.’

  There came a night, however, when he and Kate decided to go for it. The chain-smoking medical student was away for the weekend, the telly on the blink, and London shimmered in an evening heat haze, heavy with portents and expectation.

  Conor returned from the cash-and-carry on the corner, laden with condoms and a six-pack of potent beer. He and Kate sat on adjoining bean bags, gulping down beer with fear and determination. They made a pact. ‘What about if we try it,’ said Conor, ‘and I ignore you when the screaming starts, but if you scream “Stop, stop!” more than twice, then I really will stop?’

  He undressed her slowly on top of her bed, massaging her with something rich and oily from her dressing table and investing in a lot of stroking foreplay that immediately made Kate tense up because, she said, she couldn’t bear to disappoint him after so much effort. ‘If it took this long every time, the bloke would nod off before he got round to it,’ she gasped into Conor’s broad shoulder.

  ‘Sssh,’ he murmured, ‘here I come, ready or not. Geronimo!’

  Kate didn’t scream too loudly and never more than twice. She was determined, she said afterwards, to see it out to the bitter end. Like Columbus sailing on to prove that he wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world, she wanted proof of her girl friends’ insistence that the eye-watering pain slid eventually into seamless ecstasy.

  Ecstasy didn’t come into it for either of them, but the elation of having done it was orgasmic in itself.

  Afterwards, Conor lay in her arms and fell sleep from sheer relief.

  Kate, fastidious as a cat, slipped out of bed without disturbing him and took a shower, then returned to bed. When he awoke, he realised that she smelt different. The warm, musky, after-sex smell had been replaced by ashes of roses bath oil. He’d felt a twinge of disappointment.

  After that, they got better at it. Kate never got out of her tree with ecstasy, but on the third occasion, she felt a definite ping, she said, a small explosion of delight that had to be the much-vaunted orgasm. They were best friends having sex. Life was good.

  That December, he and Kate sped northwards by train to announce their engagement to her parents.

  ‘Best to get it over with!’ Kate had said, hugging her plastic cup of coffee in the packed, sunny compartment. ‘I’ve only said over the phone that I’m bringing a friend for the weekend. We’ll lull them into a false sense of security with the pressies we’ve brought, then hit them for six with our news.’

  Conor felt a growing doubt. ‘They’re not that bad, are they? I know your dad’s a bit fierce and you hate his guts. But he’ll come round at this news, surely? And your mum …?’

  ‘His bark’s worse than his bite!’ sang Kate, almost glowing. She gripped Conor’s knee, then inched her hand along his thigh and towards his balls, in full view of other travellers. Conor grinned. He came from a normal family with its normal complement of bust-ups and shameful secrets. He’d be able to handle Kate’s da.

  Kate must’ve known what was coming, though, because she told the taxi to wait while they picked their way over frozen puddles and knocked on the prissy little door of the prissy little house. Kate’s mother had answered.

  Kate beamed, said nothing, and prodded Conor forward.

  ‘Mrs Stanton?’ Conor held out a large, firm hand. ‘I’m Conor McG…’

  ‘Oh dear, no!’ quivered tiny Mrs Stanton, fixing pale dormouse eyes on her daughter. ‘What were you thinking of, our Katrina, bringing a lad? You’d better go straight away before there’s any trouble. There’s a love.’

  The door was suddenly flung open and a preposterously small, scrawny-necked man, a turkey cock no less, shoved Kate’s mother aside.

  Kate’s beam almost split her face. ‘Daddy! I’ve brought my boyfriend, Conor, from Dublin. He’s a Catholic!’

  ‘Get off my doorstep!’ yelled the turkey-cock. Conor leapt off the step. But his mind, snapping in several directions at once, was already thinking, I can take you, you auld bastard. You’d better not lay a finger on Kate.

  Turkey-cock slammed the front door. Unfazed, Kate lifted the letterbox. ‘Yes, a Papist, and there’s nothing you can do about it. We’re getting married! I’m pregnant with his Papist offspring, and I’m going to have a football team for the Pope and have them all serving Mass with bells and burning handbags and candles lit to Mary and ‒’

  A rifle muzzle poked through the letterbox. Kate withdrew just in time.

  ‘I’m going to count to three,’ snarled the malevolent voice inside.

  They were back in the taxi by two-and-a-half. Kate was laughing. ‘Don’t worry, it was just for show. It’s a blunderbuss from Cromwell’s day or something. Can’t fire birdseed.’

  Conor was shaking with rage and shock. ‘You did tell them about me! Beforehand, I mean.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Turning up unannounced with any member of the male species who wasn’t a pre-picked member of the brethren, was a red rag. I was hoping he’d die of apoplexy on the spot.’

  ‘You said you were pregnant!’

  ‘I’m not, so chill out. Just gilding the lily a bit. Might as well be a pregnant fornicator if I’m going all out to be the whore of Babylon.’

  Conor’s mind was atangle with more questions. But the least relevant one burst out. ‘What’s a burning handbag?’

  She sat back as the taxi swung away. ‘That incense thing you lot swing on the end of a rope. Exactly where I wish he was.’ She jabbed her head back at the house. Her red-gold hair was braided with the dewy fretwork of damp vapour from the cold December air. Her eyes danced with Jack Frost merriment. Conor thought she looked mad. And wonderful. Only later ‒ a whole week later ‒came the realisation that women could use men. He’d assumed it only worked one way. And with that realisation came the first fissure in their friendship.

  Angela woke up, assailed by bird-song. She jolted upright. It was mini-market Sunday. Sadie would meet Shane. And Conor would finally meet Rachel.

  Angela felt the familiar surge of insecurity.

  Was it wise to have a stunning friend? Even though Rachel’s affections were currently accounted for, the object of them, a businessman called Marshall, was abroad. Angela suddenly wished she was running a stall. She longed to look capable and sweetly magnanimous, marking down designer cast-offs for wary Wilmesbury matrons in the name of charity.

  Although it was well out of her way, she presented herself at Sadie’s at ten-thirty, in time for the ten-forty-two bus that stopped outside St Anselm’s.

  ‘We could have just met there,’ grumbled Sadie, locking her front door. ‘I can still hobble to the bus-stop without a Zimmer frame.’

  ‘I know,’ said Angela, instantl
y nettled by such ingratitude. ‘Shall we go? Best foot forward.’ She set off at a smart pace, leaving Sadie puffing in her wake.

  Conor and Shane were waiting, as instructed, in the church vestibule. Conor looked sleek and uncomfortable in his dark linen suit. Shane, complete with new glasses, was picking papier-mâché splinters off the giant thermometer that dominated the vestibule, a felt-tipped line of red nudging upwards towards the total sought for the roof repair fund.

  ‘Half the mini-market proceeds this year are for the roof,’ said Angela, stepping protectively in front of her mother. ‘Hi there, Shane.’

  Sadie took Shane unawares, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him gently but firmly in a top-to-toe appraisal. ‘Give us a twirl, young feller, and let’s see if you’re as tall as your dad. Almost! Must be the growth hormones they put in beef-burgers these days.’

  ‘Don’t eat beef-burgers,’ muttered a truculent Shane. He looked miserably press-ganged into the outing.

  ‘How are you keeping, Sadie?’ asked Conor, avoiding eye contact with Angela.

  ‘Well now, I’m just fine, thank you. Not quite ready to chuck in the towel, despite well-meaning attempts to brick me into a corner with a knitting pattern and a jar of joint liniment for company.’

  ‘Mum!’ muttered Angela, looking exactly like Shane.

  Sadie cocked her head mischievously. ‘Seeing as we’re all here and all Catholics, I thought we could say a little prayer in the church before we go to market.’

  Shane shrugged. ‘Dad’s lapsed as anything. He never makes me go.’

  ‘Shane! That’s not quite true, Sadie. I have been remiss some Sundays, due to work and whatnot.’

  ‘Huh!’ said Shane.

  ‘Mum knows full well that I’m lapsed too,’ shrugged Angela. ‘But I’ve no objection. Probably do us all a world of good.’

  She met Sadie’s eye, refusing to be embarrassed by her mother’s rampant display of practising Catholicism.

  ‘Robert was a great churchgoer,’ Sadie told Conor. ‘He really showed my daughter up, I’m afraid. Since he left us, she’s only been to his funeral and midnight Mass at Christmas.’

  Conor said politely, ‘I’ve no excuse, as a former altar boy. Mind you, they say we’re the first to fall by the wayside. The ones who had it shoved down our necks from the word go.’

  Sadie nodded at Shane. ‘In that case, he should be up for Pope. I don’t believe in all this “I was force-fed” nonsense. How else do you learn the basics, except through your catechism? He’s not likely to grow up and choose religion, is he, if he’s never been grounded in the basics? Letting people find out for themselves ‒ that’s just a woolly-minded cop-out.’

  Conor watched Sadie and Shane bob into a pew. Shane genuflected and blessed himself on automatic pilot.

  Conor slumped into the pew behind, leaving room for Angela beside him.

  He was assailed by inadequacy on all counts; as a father, an ex-husband and as a prospective lover of funny, sweet, good-natured Angela.

  Angela knelt beside him and prayed for selfish things. For Sadie’s decrepitude to stabilise, for Shane to admire her as a feisty big sister, for Conor to kiss her again.

  She cast him a sidelong glance from beneath lowered lashes. He was staring at the back of Shane’s head, mentally burrowing under the tufted brown hair on his son’s scrawny neck. Angela couldn’t be sure of anything about him ‒ least of all, that he was thinking about her.

  When Sadie signalled an end to quiet reflection by rising on creaky hips, they spilled out into brittle sunshine like prisoners released from solitary confinement.

  Cars now filled every corner of the car-park. The Wilmesbury faithful and bargain-hunters streamed towards the primary school playground at the rear of the church, followed by the quartet emerging from the church porch, walking in couples.

  Sadie strolled with Shane, pointing out ancient dog turds encrusting the grass verge and asking nosy questions about school. Shane replied in a flat, unemotional monotone. Angela couldn’t hear his answers, but he didn’t seem annoyed.

  ‘Ange?’

  She looked up in surprise. Conor had been silent so long ‒ without quite ignoring her ‒ that she’d fallen back on her own thoughts for some time now.

  ‘Look, is my name still mud after last Saturday? I couldn’t avoid buggering off. Some big cheese engineer flew in unexpectedly and I had to meet him at the airport.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ Relief warmed her veins at this simple explanation ‒ though he could’ve told her when he rang to apologise. ‘No harm done,’ she said bravely. ‘I got the chance to bond with Shane at the Nuremberg rally that passes for a school sports day. We both belong to the fellowship of wimps ‒ or deep thinkers, as I prefer to call it.’

  Conor grunted. ‘Let me buy you something to make up for it.’

  They rounded a corner and hit a sea of humanity flowing between haphazardly arranged stalls. Shane and Sadie vanished under a wave.

  Conor stepped back and stubbed his toe against a trestle table he hadn’t seen, heaped with old thrillers and sports annuals. The table wobbled dangerously. ‘Watch it!’ said a man behind teetering Mills & Boons novels.

  Conor reddened and picked up a dog-eared Alistair MacLean, studying it closely.

  Angela felt a wave of affection for him. For all his money and his smart house and everything, he’d never be Mr Cool. He couldn’t handle the simplest social challenge ‒ thank God.

  She saw Rachel waving at them and grabbed Conor’s arm. ‘Time to meet and mingle, I’m afraid. Don’t worry, Rache is harmless compared to my mother.’

  Harmless wasn’t the right epithet for Rachel, in Conor’s opinion. She left a rail of floaty, diaphanous dresses to ignore his outstretched hand and kiss him warmly on the cheek. He reddened again.

  ‘I’m Rachel, famous for leading Ange astray,’ she smiled, managing to charm without sounding coquettish. ‘We must all get together when the madding crowds subside, go for a drink or whatever.’

  Rachel wore a creamy, hip-hugging dress of gold-embroidered lace, her only concession to March a matching shawl looped over both shoulders. The fringe canopied tastefully exposed cleavage.

  Conor looked determinedly into Rachel’s eyes. Angela pulled at the seams of her navy-blue jumper and asked Rachel, ‘How long is Marshall away?’

  ‘Too long,’ replied Rachel mildly. ‘When you’ve only just met someone and they zoom off into the sunset again, it’s hard on the old libido. Still, he’s hinted at an April weekend in Paris to make up for things.’

  ‘Marshall is Rachel’s current …’ began Angela.

  ‘Project? Experiment?’ laughed Rachel. She lifted her brows at Conor. ‘Angela disapproves, however silently, of changing men like wallpaper, simply because they’ve gone a bit tatty and blend into the background.’ She held a deep green sari against a silent Conor. ‘You could never be colourless, Conor. Ange, be an angel and run and get me a coffee from Mrs Thomsett’s stall, will you? Conor and I want to discuss you in your absence.’

  ‘Hah!’ said Angela, with a sisterly solidarity she didn’t feel. Never until this day had she realised how dangerous Rachel was. Talking about libidos, dazzling Conor with her chic sophistication. And boy, was he dazzled. He had that rabbit-trapped-in-car-headlights look.

  Angela stomped off to get coffee and bumped into Sadie. ‘Oh, hello. Where’s the kid?’

  ‘I’ve lost him,’ reported Sadie, already weighed down with a pot of chutney the colour of snot and cut-price Tupperware that still reeked of school lunches.

  ‘Lost him?’ squeaked Angela. ‘Was that wise?’

  ‘It’s not exactly a Moroccan bazaar, lovey. He can’t come to much harm.’

  Famous last words. When Angela returned to Rachel’s stall with a scalding cup of coffee, she found father and son engaged in A Scene.

  ‘Christ, what have you done now?’ Conor was demanding of Shane, watched passively by Rachel. ‘I give you a few quid, I tell you to spend
it on what you like, and you use it as down-payment on a bloody useless heap of junk!’

  ‘What’s up?’ demanded Angela unwarily.

  Conor groaned. ‘He’s just bought a games console that probably doesn’t work, and promised the shyster selling it that I’ll cough up ninety quid for it!’

  ‘Yeah, well, if I waited for you to buy me a proper one, I’d be drawing my pension. An Xbox is like an arsehole.’

  ‘Eh?’ goggled Conor.

  ‘Everyone’s got one.’

  ‘I told you to wait until Christmas, when I would’ve bought you a decent one.’

  ‘Arsehole or Xbox 360?’

  ‘I’m coming to the end of a fraying rope here.’

  ‘This is a bargain. It just needs a bit of tinkering.’

  ‘Who by?’ yelled Conor. ‘You and I can’t even set the Sky+ thing.’

  Angela folded her arms. Yet again, Problem Child was monopolising Conor and claiming all his attention. Perhaps Kate had left because she’d grown sick of being ignored.

  ‘Anyway, you’ll have to buy it now, cos I promised,’ sulked Shane. ‘An Englishman’s word is his bond.’

  ‘Lucky I’m not an Englishman,’ snorted Conor. He caught Angela’s eye. ‘You should see it, Angela. It’s scrap without the scrap metal value.’

  Angela went and saw it. ‘I’m no expert,’ she told father and son, ‘but Robert had an Xbox ‒ briefly, and it looked very much like this. Think it might be OK.’

  After she’d helped Conor carry the purchase to his car, she joined him on the patch of grass outside the church. Sadie and Shane had adjourned to the cake stall to guess the weight of the large pound cake on display. Shane had prophesied that any weight resulting from edible ingredients would be supplemented with ball bearings.

  ‘You were a bit harsh on him,’ said Angela.

  Conor scowled. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like, raising a stroppy teenager.’