Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  Eve sat at the other end of the dining table spooning the last of her muesli into her mouth, proud that she smothered the instinct to flinch. She truly thought Richard would defend her family. She would defend his family if he ever said anything about them. If he ever complained that his mum wore too much foundation or his dad had a habit of cutting people off mid-sentence, she would let it go. It was just harmless family stuff. Her mum and dad thought they had climbed Mount Everest because they bought a second chemist shop in Muswellbrook. Rubbing her fingers across the thick lacquer of the dining table, Eve looked at Richard and remembered how it was she, as a girl, who had boasted to friends about the second chemist shop. She didn’t have a clue.

  ‘What are you wearing tonight, to the Fletchers’?’

  ‘I thought my black pants, that pale blue blouse and heels.’

  ‘Why not wear a dress?’ Richard asked, before shutting his laptop. It clicked neatly. ‘Show off your legs.’

  ‘But it’s Sunday night. I thought a dress might be too much.’

  Richard pushed his laptop away and moved up the table towards Eve. He bent over her, pulled the hair away from her ear and whispered, ‘Wear that dress I bought you last week. Don’t wear anything underneath.’

  ‘Yeah, Richard, that’s a nice look at a fortieth in Kensington. The tart from Australia.’

  ‘It’s your choice, Eve,’ Richard said, letting Eve’s hair fall out of his hands and turning towards the bedroom. Eve was doing it again, confusing slut with anything that wasn’t the missionary position.

  ‘I know. I know,’ Eve said, grabbing his hand and pulling him towards her, then putting his hand down her cloud pyjama top onto her breast.

  ‘I’ll be the only one who knows. No one else,’ Richard said, looking straight down at Eve before picking her up under the arms and sitting her on the edge of the table. It made Eve shiver how he picked her up and put her where he wanted her.

  Eve opened her legs, and Richard stood between them kissing and biting her neck, his left hand squeezing her breast. At first, his hand cupped and squeezed her entire breast, then his fingers moved to her nipple and began pinching the pink stiffness before sweet relief was felt as he traced around it delicately with the tips of his fingers. Eve groaned and pulled Richard in closer. They kissed as Eve lay back on the table in a fluid motion spoiled only by knocking her bowl of muesli over across the rich maple wood. Richard pulled down Eve’s pyjama bottoms and began expertly rubbing her clitoris with his fingers. Eve’s hips started pushing back and forth on the table until Richard pulled her towards him and entered her as he stood with his grey flannel pants not daring to fall off his thighs. As Richard came, he collapsed into Eve’s shoulder, still, eyes closed, for one moment at her mercy. Eve rubbed his hair and the back of his neck, taking in Richard on her, around her, in her. Then Richard kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘I love watching men watch you, Eve.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Berwick Street, Soho, was long and littered with cigarette butts, used white napkins, the occasional broken bottle and, every now and then, a shoe. The shops lining the street were a mixed bag: there were dusty Christian charity shops and plumbing-supplies stores, sex shops and sari sellers; there were vinyl record stores, organic tea houses, pastel-coloured delis and slick cafes with crooked tables on the footpath. The decay attracted some of the cleanest and most hard-working inhabitants of London. They could sip their wheatgrass shots on the way to their desks while sidestepping old men selling fruit and veg at the market or pretending they were unfazed by the neon signs for adult live sex shows when they went out to get takeaway salads for lunch.

  Emerging from Tottenham Court Tube, Eve wound her way through a handful of backstreets and pubs, through the always unexpected aroma of ancient piss emanating from somewhere under the ground, towards Richard’s office.

  This was Eve’s favourite time of year, the two months before June. April and May even sounded beautiful, so much nicer than July and October. It was the time of year before the mass of tourists arrived, before too much white skin and then sunburnt pink flesh filled the streets. Some days were still crisp and chilly, and that was perfect.

  There was a man leaning against the doorway of a jewellery store eating a banana, with a motorbike helmet under one arm and a bundle of sheet music from the fifties under the other. Eve wondered was he coming or was he going. She tried to read the song names upside down as she walked past. She could only make out ‘I’m Walkin” by Fats Domino.

  A weak sun tapped on her back. She took off her long green cardigan and threw it over her arm. She noticed a mark on the sleeve of the cardigan from when she dropped some tomato sauce on it after pulling in to a glossy, red fast-food joint on the side of the road while on holidays with her parents. Everyone had been starving, and they’d believed, at the time, it was near impossible to mess up hot chips. It was a family bonding moment when they had discovered they were wrong. Six weeks and she still hadn’t cleaned the stain off. Her parents had already sent her photos of the holiday arranged in chronological order in a little flip book. She turned the cardigan the other way and tucked in the arms to hide the stain. She pushed her hair back with her sunglasses and gave it a quick fluff at the back for volume, then licked her teeth to make sure they were free of lipstick.

  ‘Hi, excuse me,’ someone said in a heavy American accent close by.

  Eve turned, and a couple – close to her parents’ age, she thought, their legs like stubby tree trunks in sensible matching chinos – thrust a folded map in her direction.

  ‘We’re looking for Kingly Street,’ the man said.

  Eve turned the map around so it was facing the way she was facing. ‘You’re close. You just have to go up here and take the second left and it’s …’ Eve counted on the map. ‘The third left.’

  ‘Your town can sure get confusing with these tiny laneways everywhere,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ Eve handed the map back and spent a moment watching the sensible couple head off in the right direction.

  Eve couldn’t help but notice the lurch she had in her chest when he said ‘your town’. He hadn’t picked up on her accent. She had lived in London for close to a decade now and shed much of her Australian accent. She was glad. She had also shed many of her Australian friends and replaced them with locals or Germans, Italians, Croatians, who believed they were more local than her. At first, the Australians stuck together: groups of people she knew through a friend of a friend, or an aunt’s school friend, or someone who once knew her brother. The rough and chewed tentacles didn’t matter. What mattered was where they came from. There were people who slept on her living-room floor for three weeks because she had spoken to them once, for five minutes, when she was nineteen, about Blade Runner at a Tuesday night cheap pasta dinner in East Sydney.

  At first, they stuck together. A few of them slept with each other, some made it more permanent, most went back to Australia after the obligatory three years. There were the regular pubs, cricket matches in Reading, picnics in the summer in Hyde Park, rolling eyes at women rubbing cooking oil into their pale skin. With each passing year, though, either the numbers began fading away or Eve began fading away – she didn’t know which. She stopped returning calls that started with, ‘Hey, Eve, I have a friend coming to London next month.’ She stopped meeting people in pubs and ordering a burger and discussing for half an hour how bad the food was in London or how you couldn’t find a decent apple. None of them would talk about walking around every corner and standing on history, looking at history, touching history; they would order another beer and talk endlessly about how nothing was fresh, the short days in winter, their latest delay on the Tube.

  Eve’s circle came from everywhere now. She had chosen these people, and she liked being in a room and listening to all the different accents, their harmony, and feeling so much a part of the strange sounds they all made together. She knew, from her first day in London, it meant something if you made it here
. That’s why anyone who was anyone left Australia.

  Eve turned left past two girls with plastic shopping bags and was standing outside Richard’s office, one floor above an Indian restaurant, getting ready to collect him on this Friday afternoon for their first weekend away together as a couple. It had taken Eve weeks to wrangle a weekend off work.

  Eve hesitated at the door and reached into her bag to double-check the address. A worn set of steps stopped at a floor-to-ceiling frosted-glass door. Eve walked up the steps through the mingled scents of rogan josh and her Marc Jacobs perfume and stopped to read: hades technology investment, all in lower case, all in stainless steel. She did one last check of her navy shirt dress, undid the top button, opened the door and walked onto the moon.

  Richard’s office was white, and dotted across the expanse were pods of grey desks grouped in fours. A handful of people clutching folders crossed the office and disappeared behind a red door. Glass windows from floor to ceiling framed the rooftops behind. Eve could see lots of roof tiles and lots of people behind lots of computers, a blue-tinged glow across their faces.

  A young woman in black wide-leg pants and ripped singlet top with a yellow and gold Hermès scarf in an Ascot around her neck greeted Eve at reception. ‘Hello. May I help you?’

  ‘I’m here to see Richard. Richard Baker.’

  ‘Who may I say …?’ she began.

  ‘It’s Eve. Eve Hardy.’

  Eve took a seat on a white moulded-plastic sofa and flicked through a magazine she’d never heard of before that she’d plucked from the glass coffee table. She kept an eye out for Richard but couldn’t see him among the pods of people with their heads down, behind computer screens. Maybe they were sales and marketing; maybe they were creatives or techs. She didn’t have a clue. She just remembered the words Richard used. She stared at an ad for a revolutionary new face cream and realised she didn’t have a clue what the word Viatrozene meant either. A voice fell from above.

  ‘Eve. Hello, beautiful.’

  Richard grabbed Eve’s hand, pulled her to a standing position and kissed her on the mouth. Eve kissed back, aware the girl at reception was twirling her pen on her fingertips, watching.

  ‘Come on.’

  Richard guided Eve through the maze of desks. She followed him until they came to the rear of the office and a yellow long stairwell with painted yellow walls. She could feel all eyes on her as she entered and nearly tripped up the stairs. It was like walking into a canary’s bum.

  ‘This is amazing, Richard, amazing,’ she said, halfway up the yellow enclosure.

  They turned down a corridor and stopped at an electric-blue door.

  ‘This is me.’

  In a corner of Richard’s office – a cave where black had replaced white – sat their two weekend bags. On Tuesday, Eve had dashed out to buy a brown leather weekend bag. She had never owned a decent one. Whenever she travelled, she just made do with a backpack.

  ‘So you get an office and everyone else can’t get away from each other.’

  ‘It’s so they can say what an arsehole I am without feeling the need to whisper,’ Richard said, perching on the arm of his sofa. ‘I have to make phone calls, fuck my secretary on my couch, that sort of thing.’

  ‘I can see why an office with a door comes in handy then,’ Eve said, ignoring her goosebumps from the way he said ‘fuck’. ‘It’s so much more sanitary than the bathroom.’

  Richard patted his thigh. ‘Will you be my secretary?’

  As soon as Eve moved into range, he pulled her towards him and kissed her hard. Eve felt like she was at school, not thirty-two. All this kissing. Looking forward to the kissing. A red mark circling her lips from the force of the kissing. Nearly five months they had been dating, and they still loved to kiss.

  ‘I’m looking forward to this,’ Richard said. ‘Long lunches, sleep-ins, riding. They’re a great couple. You’ll love them, Eve. I’ve known William since school and Annie is … intriguing. She surprises me every time I see her.’

  Eve moved to Richard’s desk and leant against the black. ‘You sound bewitched.’ Eve felt a twinge of jealousy, knowing she would never be described by anyone as intriguing. Nice? Yes. Intriguing? No.

  ‘Yes, yes I am. I like liking my friends’ partners. Sometimes, it doesn’t work out that way, and then it becomes this vicious cycle where you end up spending less time with your friend because you always have to see both of them when you catch up and she irritates you and you think he can do better. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I do.’ Eve thought about Elise’s last boyfriend and how he could never shut up. He knew everything and, for some reason, whenever they went out as a group, she was ushered into the seat next to him and had to listen to his in-depth discussions about plumbing in London, conspiracies in Iraq, how to fold a five-pound note so it wouldn’t be rejected by the automatic ticket machine at the Tube station.

  ‘They are going to love you, Eve. How could they not?’

  Eve circled with her index finger the rim of a cup on Richard’s desk holding three pens. She still struggled with accepting compliments and began a discussion about the ups and downs of Richard’s day.

  ‘Before we get going, I just wanted to pick something up from around the corner.’

  ‘We can’t pick it up on the way?’ Eve asked. ‘Let’s just get going.’

  ‘C’mon.’

  Outside, the crisp blue sky had turned a dirty metallic colour, and Eve’s cardigan went back on. She slipped her hand into Richard’s, and they turned a corner past small groups of workmates heading out for Friday-night drinks. She heard someone laugh like a horse, and then Richard opened a black door and they were inside a lingerie store that was so cool there was no name on the door, no window display at the front. Eve had read about it. Tasteful yet risqué bras and teddies and see-through nighties for women who weren’t afraid of their sexuality. Celebrities shopped here all the time.

  ‘I thought you might need some pyjamas to replace that old T-shirt with the horns from Norway.’

  ‘I like that T-shirt,’ Eve replied with mock indignation. ‘I happen to think I am from Viking stock – somewhere down the line, sometime long ago, somebody made people quiver in my family. Makes me feel powerful.’

  ‘Did you get it at the airport shop going into Norway or coming out?’ Richard asked dryly.

  A woman with bright-red lips, fifties ponytail and milky breasts heaving out of a corset dress asked if they needed any assistance. For a second, Eve couldn’t decide whether it was her fake eyelashes or her breasts speaking.

  ‘Just looking, thanks.’

  ‘We’re after a nightie,’ Richard countered.

  ‘Fabulous,’ said the eyelashes or the breasts. ‘We have these.’ A hand drifted over long silk pyjamas and another darted towards a black see-through teddy. The assistant pulled the teddy away from its see-through friends and held it in the air, letting it fall against her breasts.

  ‘You can also use our slips,’ the assistant said, registering Eve’s hesitation. ‘They feel like you’re wearing nothing.’

  ‘I’m fine. Really I am.’

  ‘C’mon, Eve. I want to buy you something nice. You need pyjamas, a nightie.’

  Eve’s eyes swept across the rows of bras and underpants that progressed from colourful and playful to animal print to adult sex shop to Richard standing next to a pair of long black leather gloves and a riding crop.

  ‘Okay, but I’m not wearing a see-through teddy.’

  ‘Well, let’s get a slip then.’

  The woman showed them a variety of slips, pulled out the right sizes and laid them on a dark wooden table where fresh polish mingled with the scent from a vanilla candle. Eve glanced down and said no to the ‘Tarantula’ slip and yes to a long ‘Marilyn’ slip in baby blue. As the woman wrapped the purchase over a glass cabinet displaying thousand-pound vibrators and made small talk with Richard regarding bestsellers and expansion plans, Eve’s hand brushed a black cors
et and lingered on the harsh, boned waist. So delicate, so potent.

  ‘Thank you, Richard, it’s beautiful,’ Eve said on the walk back to his office. By now, corner pubs were full, torsos were spilling over open windows and Friday-night drinkers were ordering nachos and hot chips to keep them going. ‘And now we have a whole weekend together away from London.’

  ‘Before we go, I want to ask you one thing,’ Richard said, just as someone walked past, pushing him in the back by accident.

  ‘Yes, I promise to throw out my Viking T-shirt. I will bin it tonight, at the house in Wiltshire.’ Eve said this with a fake English flourish. ‘If I can find a bin there. A Viking beaten by an Englishman. What a sad day.’ Eve was beginning to ramble, and Richard cut her off.

  ‘Eve, I want to know if you want to move in with me. You hardly stay at your flat any more. I can only imagine it’s getting annoying waking up and realising you’ve left your shoes or whatever it is you want at home and carting things to my place all the time. There’s plenty of room for you and Percy.’

  Another person bumped into Richard’s back. ‘Sorry,’ the stranger said and kept on walking. Eve rolled her eyes at Richard in a sign of solidarity and moved to the side of the footpath near a costume jeweller’s window. The two of them leant against the window. Eve put her finger in the shopping bag and touched the silk. It felt magical. ‘Percy and I would love to accept your offer.’

  ‘Brilliant. It will be brilliant, Eve. You are going to love living with me.’

  Richard kissed her. A woman stopped in her tracks to take a better look at the couple by the window and then moved on.

  Her first slip and saying yes to moving in with a boyfriend. Eve felt something close to maturity. ‘I’ll have to ring my parents on Sunday night and tell them. Warn them I am going to live in sin.’

  ‘You’re thirty-two, Eve. They’re not going to have an issue with it, are they?’