It’s wonderful to sleep alone – or at least with dogs, not clients. These last three weeks I’ve been sharing bed and bath. I let some jokers stay the night, because despite the squash and horror of it, I was charging them an hourly rate, so it made financial sense. Actually, it all seems rather pointless now. Okay, I bought the pictures, but I couldn’t buy John-Paul.
I say his name aloud and very slowly, repeat it like a lullaby or mantra, but it doesn’t resurrect him, nor help me get to sleep. He feels very faint and far away, even with his dogs here. I wonder what their names are, try out several likely ones, then realise they’re the names of my new clients – Barry, Richard, Warren, Spencer, Mike.
They weren’t much cock, those blokes, and I mean that literally. If I confiscated all limp pricks, my cupboards would be full. I’m not that keen on penises. They aren’t exactly beautiful, never smell or taste that good; are always strictly limited in the sense of skills and repertoire, yet still persist in seeing themselves as VIPs, big guns. Perhaps I’m simply jealous, a basic case of John-Paul’s penis-envy, but I honestly don’t think so. I suspect Freud dreamed the phrase up to distract attention from men’s own obvious envy of the womb. It’s women who give birth and life and suck – normal women, anyway. To produce an eight-pound baby with intellect and brains, maybe even genius, from one tiny pinhead egg-cell seems to me miraculous. I envy that myself, far more than penises. If there is a God, then He made men very badly. If they ejaculated Grand Marnier in decent double measures instead of dribs of sperm, far more women would be rushing to fellate them.
The only prick I envy is John-Paul’s, but then I envy all his organs – his liver, spleen and kidneys, his lungs and heart and brain – just because they’re close to him. I can see his liver clearly, its shape, its size, its texture; imagine his appendix, his tonsils or his pancreas, but somehow not his prick. It must be some taboo thing. (Though I did once have a fantasy where he died and was cremated, and I stuffed his still-warm ashes in a dildo and thrust it up my cunt. I suppose it was the only way of having him inside me.)
I try to shift my mind from sex; think of God instead, but I can only see His genitals, His womb. I allow Him to make love to me, slowly, very slowly, with all my favourite (non-existent) words: tenderness, devotion, mercy, loving kindness. It doesn’t last that long. Seton barges in instead, rams me from behind. Or perhaps it’s just his brutish boat and he’s too busy to be bothered. Its prow feels very hard and stiff, splitting me apart. I lie in muddy water while it judders back and forth; climaxes, at last, in a spume of dirty jetsam.
Then the clients trickle back again – Warren, Mike and Spencer (whose name is really Joe); Richard in his shirt-tails, Barry with his doll. Amazing how I’m wanted, how everyone desires me; grown men queuing, jostling, fighting for an opening, even hirsute Wilhelm challenging a rival. ‘Wait your turn,’ I tell them, but nobody can hear. There’s too much noise – the crash of waves, of tempers, a shrill and strident barking. Yes, the dogs are joining in now, the male erect and mounting me, as I crouch down on all fours, like his trembling bitch on heat. I am on heat – feverish and sweating, all the pulses in my body throbbing far too fast. The dog’s coarse pelt is prickling my bare back, his wild claws clutching, tearing. ‘Stop!’ I shout. ‘Lie down.’ I wish I knew his name. It would make it less impersonal. I can only think of saints’ names, the four Evangelists.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Bless this bed I lie upon.
Someone used to croon that, long ago, long ago, when I was in my cot. Or perhaps they didn’t croon it, but I just hoped or wished they had; invented it myself, called it Truth, like Uncle Jack. I try to coax them back, those four Evangelists – Uncle Matthew, Uncle Mark, Uncles Luke and John – to bless my dirty-carpet-bed, send the mortal men away, leave me pure and solitary.
Four white angels round my bed,
Two at the foot and two at the head,
One to watch and one to pray
And two to bear my soul away.
Oh, yes, I beg – yes, that.
Chapter Seventeen
Bryan lounged back on the scarlet vinyl banquette, a pint of Carling Black Label in one triumphant hand. He was not just in the King’s Arms, but in Mary’s arms – or nearly. He felt a king himself. The pub was spacious, tasteful, with pillars, mirrors, framed paintings of the British monarchs from Ethelred the Unready to Edward VII – who looked more than ready and was brandishing a sceptre-cigar which John-Paul would call a phallus. The carpet was imperial-purple, patterned with impressive gold medallions (and several spills of beer). The tables looked antique, with lion-claw legs and crinkled pie-crust rims. He’d bagged the most secluded one, in an alcove on its own, though with a stately potted palm rearing up behind them like a chaperone. He wished the fire was real, or even warm, but then you couldn’t have everything, and those pretend coal fires looked really quite convincing from a distance.
He glanced across at Mary, still couldn’t quite believe it: she was not only alive (and back in both science and society), but she had actually suggested a drink after the class – not coffee in a paper cup in that shabby old canteen, but a private drink in a royal tavern where he had her to himself. He hardly knew how he’d stuttered out his ‘Yes’, tried to make it casual, as if drinks in bars with blonde attractive women were simply part of his routine – perhaps followed by a nightclub, and then a midnight saunter along the romantic River Thames, even a lingering embrace beside the throbbing star-kissed water.
‘Same again?’ he murmured, pointing to her empty glass, its damply swollen cherry looking so inviting, its lemon slice smiling with wide lips.
‘D’you really think we should, Bryan?’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’ He needed courage, Dutch or otherwise, to quash the image of his Mother limping up and down in hairnet and beige dressing gown, ticking like a clock herself as she watched the minute-hand’s slow circling and realised her cruelly selfish son had missed the twenty-four and was probably going to miss the fifty-two. Her leg would be much worse of course – always was the evening he was out. He cursed that damaged leg, which crippled him as well, made him swell and fester with a curdled mix of pity, guilt, resentment.
He hobbled to the bar, casting anxious looks behind him, to make sure Mary wasn’t kidnapped, raped, abducted, the minute that his back was turned. He’d been trying to keep a check on every male aged seventeen to seventy who came into the pub, or dared to pass their table, especially all the handsome hunky ones. He didn’t trust the barman, a brashly jovial type with a roving eye (and an eye more darkly blatant than his own wishy-washy hazel ones), who might inveigle himself dangerously close to Mary, or even proposition her, by simply using the expedient of wiping down their table or collecting up the empties. How mean the fellow seemed as he measured her Dubonnet – two grudging paltry inches, when she deserved at least a firkinful, a hundredweight of cherries, a whole lemon grove in sunny Taormina.
He wheeled round again, quite suddenly, to catch out any rivals. Mary was alone still, but some brazen blue-jeaned upstart was just swaggering slowly up to her, enquiring if the seat were free. He tossed a fiver on the counter, streaked back to the alcove so fast he spilled his beer. He rarely drank Black Label – rarely drank at all, in fact – but last night’s TV commercial had showed a macho man with a hearth-rug chest and shoulders like the Admiralty Arch crumpling up a car with one bare hand, after imbibing just half a bottle of Carling. He was on his fourth bottle – already felt much stronger, even dared ask Mary why she’d missed the last two classes.
‘But you missed three yourself,’ she parried, smiling quite disarmingly. ‘Before that. I was looking out for you, even saved you a seat.’
He gulped down froth and ecstasy together. He must find that seat, rip it from the row, heave it home and preserve it as a monument, inscribe it in gold letters: ‘SAVED FOR BRYAN BY MARY’, with the date in Roman numerals. ‘I was … er … abroad again,’ he said, gesturing so n
ervously his fingers caught the foliage of the watching potted palm. It was plastic, like the chandeliers, he noted with a twinge of disappointment. ‘Busy month, November.’ He tried to put jet-lag in his voice; appointments, meetings, conferences, product-launches, working-lunches, frantic daily phone calls to check the progress of his shares. ‘D’you know, I sometimes barely find the time to clean my teeth?’ He cleaned them four times daily, twice at home and twice at work, a full five minutes by the clock, and following a formula which included every surface, angle, crevice, plane and cutting-edge.
‘Gosh! It must be awful.’ Mary shook her head. ‘I was busy too, in fact, but nothing on that scale. Just … domestic matters. I seem to have so much to do – just recently, I mean. The chores keep piling up the way they never did before, and I haven’t got the energy, not now, not since …’
He wondered why she’d broken off so suddenly, why she was blushing, looking down, fiddling with her handbag. Cancer, obviously. She must still be having treatment, but be too distressed to spell it out by name. That would explain her lack of zest, her feeling of fatigue. He laid his hand down on the table between their two stained beer-mats, as if to say: ‘It’s there if you require it – a helping hand, a steady hand. I care. I understand.’ He longed to touch her own hand, to demonstrate that care, but dared not risk repulse, or, worse still, laughter.
‘I know you’ve not been well, Mary. You told me so the first time that we met. I must admit I have been rather anxious. In fact, when I didn’t see you at the last two classes, I actually thought you’d …’ He took a long draught of Black Label to help him get the word out. It still hurt extremely badly, had cost him two weeks’ sleep. ‘Died,’ he said, half-choking on the lager.
‘Died?’
‘Well, the treatment isn’t always that successful. I mean, my aunt was in and out for six whole months, but still they couldn’t save her.’
‘What treatment? What d’you mean?’
‘The … er …’ He couldn’t spell it out himself, tried a more circuitous route. ‘You said you were going to a place right near our class.’
‘Oh, I see – oh, that.’ Mary seemed confused again, embarrassed, then suddenly broke into a giggle, took a slow bite of her cherry, relishing the mouthful almost blatantly, as if she, too, had been watching those commercials, copying the models who sold lipsticks or ice cream. Bryan kept glancing up at her, relieved, yet somehow jealous. She must be better, surely, if she could laugh like that, flirt with shameless cherries. A month ago, she’d been so very different, tense and almost tragic. And those burn marks on her hands were fully healed – he’d noticed that the instant he first saw her, noticed she looked sparkling, very nearly smug.
‘The treatment worked then, Mary?’
‘Yes, it did – extremely well, in fact – better than I dared to hope.’ She was giggling still, quite girlish. ‘I’m completely cured, you could say. My … doctor’s very pleased with me.’
‘Wonderful!’ Bryan offered thanks to any God who’d managed to survive the quantum revolution, or co-exist with Chaos. ‘Let’s have another drink.’
‘No, really, Bryan, I …’
‘This calls for a celebration. And anyway, we ought to drink to Skerwin, since he’s recovered, too.’
‘Who?’
‘Our tutor.’ He didn’t say ‘my Father’. He’d get to that eventually; maybe over dinner in what people called an ‘intimate’ little bistro, with softly nickering candles, sweet seductive music. The pub was getting noisy – a muffled roar of overlapping voices rising all around them, the slap and clink of glasses, even a tactless jukebox churning out a song called ‘When You Left’. Dare he risk a meal? Even if they gobbled it, or ordered just one course, it would still mean missing five or six more trains. His Mother left his dinner out on Fridays – cold Reproach on Toast, or a shop-bought Cornish pasty, all air and cold potato. Could he force a pasty down after fillet steak with Mary – or afford fillet steak at all? (John-Paul had warned him of his annual rise in fees, only a month or so away now.) Perhaps Mary liked Chinese, and he could toy with a few bean sprouts and still leave room for his Mother’s guilt-and-penance salad or how-could-you-leave-me sandwich.
‘Has Mr Skerwin been unwell, then?’ Mary looked concerned, pushed her empty glass away, still refusing to accept another drink.
‘No. He had an accident – fell down a step which wasn’t there. He told the class two weeks ago, limped up to the lectern all swathed in bandages and with his right hand in a sling.’
‘How brave of him to come at all. Most tutors would have cancelled.’
Bryan said nothing. It wasn’t done to boast, but of course his Father was exceptionally courageous. Clumsy, too, alas, but then geniuses were often absent-minded. He’d been half-horrified, half-worshipping, as he’d watched the doughty figure struggling to his desk, still loaded down with shopping, textbooks, outerwear, despite his hors de combat arm and all too obvious bruises. It had ruined his weekend – that and Mary’s absence. He’d hoped to get some help on Monday, at the session, but John-Paul had made things worse, in fact; insisted it was Oedipal – again – an unconscious but quite clear desire to lame and cripple his hated Father-rival.
‘But it wasn’t me who did it,’ he’d complained. ‘He went crashing down a step.’
‘Which wasn’t there,’ John-Paul said, lighting up. (Eight kingsize in thirty-seven minutes.)
‘No, but he thought it was there.’
‘Just as you thought he was there – your father at the class.’
‘He was there.’
‘Bryan, you appear to have a need today not to understand.’
‘Blast!’ he said out loud.
‘What’s the matter?’
Not John-Paul, but Mary, sounding worried. He’d lose her if he wasn’t careful, allowed John-Paul to bedevil him again. He marched his doctor to the door, shooed him from the pub. He had quite enough rivals there already – not just the gold-framed monarchs who were all squinting at her breasts, Edward VII leering almost pruriently, but the two men sitting opposite who’d actually inched forward to get a better view. He moved his chair to form a screen, glared at any other male in view, then tried to force his mind back, resume their conversation. ‘Such a shame you couldn’t make last Friday. It was really fascinating – we did antiparticles.’
‘Anti-what?’
‘Particles. For every particle, there’s apparently an antiparticle, so Skerwin said there could in fact be whole antiworlds and antipeoples. He warned us not to shake hands with our antiself, told us we’d both vanish in a huge great flash of light.’ He tried to laugh, to prove it was a joke, though he hadn’t felt like laughing that particular Friday night; had kept fretting about antitrains as he rushed to catch the thirty-two, or imagined slaying antiMothers as his all too solid present Mother regaled him with the story of her almost-heart-attack. (She had heart attacks each Friday, when she wasn’t being burgled, raped or mugged.)
‘Gosh!’ said Mary. ‘Antiselves. I wish I hadn’t missed it, but last Friday was my youngest son’s eighth birthday. He’s away at school in Sussex, but they let us go and see him – well, just from two to four. James took the afternoon off, which is a rare event itself. I was terribly excited, but it turned out rather badly, I’m afraid. He didn’t have a party or any proper celebration, just the cake I’d brought him, and we were on our way back home again by shortly after three. He seemed – you know – on edge, as if he didn’t want us there. It’s that headmaster’s fault, I’m sure. He seems to hate all parents, probably tells the boys we’re …’
Bryan stared down at the carpet, loathed it when she used that ‘we’, talked about her sons, or worse still, James. He could just imagine James – a combination of John-Paul in the brain department, and last night’s Carling commercial hulk, as far as looks and prowess were concerned. He was Mary’s husband – not James, but Bryan Payne-Hampton – her youngest son, as well; the one she dandled on her lap, so his head
was resting right against those breasts. She was wearing several layers today, so her curves were rather blurred, alas, despite the tempting cleavage. If he took her to a really stifling restaurant, she’d be forced to take her jacket off, and perhaps that woolly white thing, and he might even glimpse her brassiere through the flimsy floral blouse. But would he ever find a restaurant cheap enough and hot enough, yet also intimate, romantic, and with really speedy service, and close to Fenchurch Street, so he could dash there for his train – oh, and also totally empty so that nobody would see them?
‘Well, I offered him a party as soon as he broke up, said we’d make it up to him, invite all his local Walton friends and maybe hire a conjuror and …’
‘I’m hot,’ said Bryan. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘No, I’m rather chilly, actually. Though compared with Jonathan’s dormitory, this place is like a greenhouse. It’s arctic, that whole school. No wonder they get colds and things. Jon looked really peaky when …’
‘Yes, there is a draught, isn’t there, with all these people barging in and out? Look, why don’t we make a move, find ourselves a cosy little …?’
‘In fact, I think he must have been sickening for a virus. It’s the only way I can account for how he was. D’you realise, Bryan, he didn’t want a party, said he was far too old for conjurors, and party-games were just for weeds and wets. I cried, you know, I really did, once we’d left him at the gates. I know it may sound stupid, but he is my baby – too old, at eight, for games.’
Fifty-Minute Hour Page 19
