by Judy Astley
Serena brought over the drinks, and the band came on to the tiny stage and started flicking at their guitars. Alan looked around the room; he wasn’t the only ageing rocker in the place, which wasn’t surprising, seeing as the band had been in business 25 years. He caught the eye of a balding man, about his own age and they exchanged half smiles, acknowledging each other’s long service as rock aficionados. Was he another refugee from an over-cultured home, Alan wondered? Just then the band, the tweaking and tuning satisfactorily completed, slammed heavily into their first number, and he felt the music, hard as a gut-punch, with just the same thrill as at his first Yardbirds gig back in 1963. Back then, he had suspected that not even sex would come close to this, and, if pressed thirty years on, would have to acknowledge that he had suspected right.
Jenny had never had an obscene phone call before. You certainly didn’t expect it in the middle of supper. The awfulness of it, she thought, could only potentially be rivalled by a call from any woman hoping to get Alan and then pretending she’d got a wrong number. The man had been very specific about what he wanted, though how she was supposed to provide that kind of service down the phone she had no idea – perhaps he, like Polly, also thought oral sex was some kind of conversation. Back at the table, Jenny pushed the remains of her chicken round her plate, bereft of appetite.
‘But what did he actually say?’ Polly demanded eagerly, wondering if oral sex, after all, actually involved talking on the telephone. This would be something to tell Harriet, as far away as possible of course from Mrs Spencer and any other schoolteacher busybodies.
‘Yeah Mum, what did he say?’ Daisy asked, wishing she had taken the call. It was so rarely that she let anyone else answer the phone too, reasoning accurately that most calls were usually for her.
‘He wanted, er, well, wanted me to do things. Offered money too,’ Jenny said, brightening slightly and giving a weak grin. Perhaps it would be best to make light of it, especially in front of Polly. Lucky that Polly hadn’t picked up the phone, she’d have kept the man there for hours, talking pornography and acquiring new depths of knowledge.
Ben, trying to stay calm and wishing some woman would call him and offer to pay him for rendering obscene services, reached across and spooned up too many potatoes from the dish, messily dropping some of them onto the pine table. ‘Isn’t that the sort of thing you’re supposed to tell your vigilante group about?’ he asked. ‘Won’t you have to report the crime to your leader?’
Jenny shuddered at the thought of repeating the details of the call to Paul. He’d write them all down, verbatim, and file them away in one of the folders Carol said he kept neatly shelved in his attic den. She could just see him, licking the tip of his biro and saying, ‘Now can we just go over that again, make sure I’ve got it right. What was it exactly he wanted you to do?’
‘No, because it’s no threat to anyone else in the road. I won’t be telling anyone else. Definitely not.’ Except Sue, she thought privately, who could be relied on to lighten the sordidness of it. Then she grinned at him. ‘Oh and Ben, don’t call them vigilantes, it’s only Neighbourhood Watch. Can you see Paul and Harvey and old Mrs Fingell wandering round with cricket bats, defending the Close and beating up suspected villains?’
‘I can,’ said Daisy, ‘especially Mrs Fingell, and Carol even more. I think she’d like a uniformed man with a barrier across the end of the Close, letting in no-one but people like her in sequined Italian tracksuits, oh and perhaps the postman and the John Lewis van. None of my friends would get near the place, not ever.’
‘You still haven’t told me what he said,’ Polly grumbled into her cauliflower. ‘If I don’t know what a dirty phone call sounds like, how am I going to know if I ever get one?’
‘You’ll know, Polly, believe me. And let’s hope it never happens.’
Polly hoped for no such thing, and was determined to spend the rest of the evening hanging around as close to the telephone as she possibly could, even if it meant missing EastEnders.
Even though it was after midnight when Alan came home, Jenny was still awake. Eager to get on to the next day and hope it turned out better than this, she had gone off to bed early, tried to sleep but couldn’t. Daisy’s music, essential accompaniment to homework, was still thump-thumping from her room. Jenny wondered if it might be better to ask her to turn it up till it was identifiable, rather than having to lie there trying to guess what she was playing from the heavy bass rhythm. Then there were her thoughts: two odd phone calls in one day, the first one about the flute lessons, where she and the caller seemed to be talking at bizarre cross-purposes, and then the blatantly obscene one. She wondered about the postcard in the newsagent’s window; perhaps there were pervs out there who simply wrote down a few numbers at random and gave them a call, on the off-chance. Did that happen to the people trying to sell old sofas, or their wedding dress? Perhaps her handwriting had looked too distinctly feminine; next time she’d type her advert. She had at least, thank God, not put her name and address on it.
She heard Alan at about 12.30, pulling up into the driveway, the handbrake giving its characteristic whine. Something else that would need expensive fixing, she thought. Snug under the duvet with a novel, she knew she should really go downstairs and talk to Alan, explain about the demolished wall, tell him about the phone call, and about Polly and the Playboy magazine. If it hadn’t been for that damned florist’s receipt, she would have looked forward to sharing the day’s disasters with him, lightening the drama by laughing and having a late glass of wine together while he picked at the cold chicken at the kitchen table. Jenny lay wide awake, propped up like a glamorous invalid on the big blue-and-white-striped square pillows, wondering where on earth he’d been till this time, with whom and doing what. I never used to give it a thought, she realized, having assumed that when he said he had a client to audit who could only by seen during the evening, and thirty miles away, that he would have no reason to be telling anything but the truth. Now she could feel herself turning into the kind of wife she had always loathed, the sort who sniffs the air, cat-like, for unfamiliar perfumes, inspects jackets for stray other-woman hairs. She could hear small noises of Alan creeping about downstairs, obviously hoping not to disturb anyone. Every floorboard in the kitchen seemed to have been reawakened, and Jenny could track his progress by the creaking as he walked from door to fridge, to the sink, to the table, and back to the warmth of the Aga.
As sleep wasn’t possible and curiosity grew, Jenny pulled her dressing-gown from the back of the door, wrapped herself cosily into it and went downstairs. Alan was drinking tea, chewing a chicken leg and looking lonely, she thought, sitting on the wooden rocking chair by the Aga, Biggles curled up on his lap. He smelt of pubs, and she tried not to think who he might have been to one with. Was it marginally better, she wondered, than smelling of expensive restaurants? Or was She the type (rather like Sue, much as Jenny loved her) who was anyone’s for a half of lager and a bag of pork scratchings?
‘You’re late; too much work?’ she asked as lightly as she could manage, switching on the kettle and reaching into the cupboard for a mug.
‘Yeah sorry about that, though I did find time to grab a sandwich and a pint later on. This chicken’s good,’ he said, making Jenny immediately suspicious. Usually he would comment that just a little more tarragon would have been a good idea, or irritate her by asking if she’d crushed the garlic before she’d chopped it.
‘You saw the wall?’ she asked. Alan nodded, looking sorrowful. Jenny grinned at him. ‘I’m afraid it was our Neighbourhood Watch being over zealous. Mrs Fingell and Paul thought Daisy’s Walkman was a bomb and the police blew it up. It was quite dramatic. I got £35 off Paul for it. I’m not sure what to do about the wall.’
Alan’s chicken leg stopped half-way to his mouth and he gave a blast of incredulous laughter. Biggles stretched his ginger face up towards the chicken, in hope. ‘You’re not serious! Stupid buggers! Actually I thought you’d backed your car
into it or something, hardly dared mention it in case you got all upset.’
Jenny leaned on the Aga, cupping her hands round the mug and warming her back. Alan was looking tired but affectionate. Was that guilt, or was he becoming horribly adept at running two lives? Earlier in bed, brooding on the possible depths of his deception, she had started him off having a one-nighter with some stranger at the Bournemouth conference, and had progressed in the space of thirty seconds to having him set up in somewhere, say, St Albans, with an entire extra family.
He was still giving her a fond and familiar look. ‘You know we could take this tea up to bed, in fact I think we should, don’t you Pudding?’ He got up slowly, nudging the cat gently to the floor.
‘Why Pudding?’ Jenny asked suddenly, switching off the kitchen lights behind her as they made for the stairs. ‘And what sort of Pudding? A Roux Brothers special, say a difficult millefeuille aux framboises avec crème fraîche? A solid sticky toffee pudding? Delia Smith’s wholesome apple pie? Or something fiery and exotic by Marco Pierre White?’
Alan, his hand fondling her bottom as they climbed the stairs, laughed. ‘You’ve got nothing on under this. Delicious. I’d say that makes you right this minute, a highly appetizing crème brûlée. Sweet, with a deceptively crisp surface and deliciously creamy inside.’ Jenny giggled quietly. At the top of the stairs he gently bit the back of her neck. ‘But of course,’ he went on, ‘I’ll have to taste you and see.’
He can’t have been doing it this evening, then, Jenny concluded with relief as she cleaned her teeth, brushed her hair and splashed on some Diorella, because if he had he’d never have the energy to do it again, not these days. She climbed back into bed and Alan wandered around the bedroom, off to the bathroom and back and shed the trappings of the day, till all that was left was a pale, slightly flabby, vulnerable body confidently expecting to sample the pleasure of his wife’s. Alan got into bed beside Jenny, smiling happily, snuggling up to her like a guilt-free child and laying a heavy arm across her breasts. God I hope he hasn’t caught anything dangerous, Jenny thought, feeling suddenly chilled. With her highly efficient contraceptive coil she could hardly ask him to start using condoms without giving a very good reason. She wished she’d been quick-witted enough to pretend that along with the other disasters of the day, the thing had unexpectedly dropped out, but it was too late now, his hand was rediscovering its familiar map-references on her body, so, praying silently, Jenny crossed her fingers and prepared to risk her life.
Chapter Five
‘I can’t miss Sophie’s party, I just can’t bear to. What am I going to do?’ Daisy, freezing cold on the games field, kicked the goalpost and thrashed at the grass with her hockey stick, complaining to Emma from the depths of despair.
Emma tried sympathetically to think of past tactics that, with her highly exacting parents, had usually worked. ‘Have you tried reasoning with them? Say you’ve learned your lesson and swear you’ll never do it again? Have you tried cleaning your room and promising to keep it all horribly tidy for ever and ever? That kind of thing even works with my mother, and you know what a stroppy cow she is.’
‘No. No point. This time they’re outraged, they feel “disappointed” as Mum put it. She has this “how could you let us down like this” expression whenever she looks at me, as if she regrets being so understanding all these years. She looks really miserable and it can’t be all my fault. I can’t help it if all her pupils suddenly don’t like playing flutes any more.’ Daisy gave a deep sigh. ‘I’ll have to come up with some mega plan by the end of the week. Perhaps she’ll relent and let me stay the night with you, if I swear we’re going to stay in and revise physics.’
‘Got to be worth a try,’ said Emma. ‘You can’t miss a good party, it isn’t healthy. All those boys from your brother’s school are going, so we should be there. Getting off with them is good for us, with all our adolescent hormones rushing about. I’m sure they’ll give up and disappear for ever if we don’t give them something to do. Hormones I mean, not the boys. Think of it, back in the olden days, girls were having babies and amazing orgasms by our age. It can’t be right to suppress all that.’
Emma had a slightly off-the-wall grasp of biology, Daisy felt, but she probably had vaguely the right idea: if nature made you feel like mucking about in a sexual way, then who were they to argue with that? They could leave out the having babies bit of course. She could try putting that one to Jenny, that being grounded was getting in the way of her essential sexual development – though on second thoughts perhaps she couldn’t. Jenny, when Daisy was younger, would occasionally let slip that she herself had had a wild time in her own youth, and that it was no bad thing either. Just lately, though, she had been careful not to talk about it, as if she rather regretted mentioning it. Daisy blamed AIDS.
From up at the far end of the pitch, Emma and Daisy could hear the rest of the hockey match shrieking its way to a finish. Daisy always managed to get picked to play left back for the better team on games day, along with Emma in goal, both of them perfectly content that all the squalid, muddy battling for the ball would take place at the opposite end of the field and they would be left in peace to shiver and gossip.
‘Where are all the blokes then?’ Emma said, folding over the top of her games skirt so its hem was up to the bottom of her navy blue school games knickers. ‘There’s usually at least six over by the gap in the fence.’
Daisy swivelled round to look. ‘Not one,’ she said. ‘We must be losing our appeal. Probably too old. I expect they turn up in droves to watch year eight, all those twelve and thirteen-year-olds, just on the turn. We’re cooked, finished, and obviously of no interest to the pervs.’
‘No you’re wrong,’ Emma said, suddenly perking up and running her fingers through her wind-ravaged yellow hair. ‘Look, there’s that one from Ben’s lot, the one who looks more like someone’s dad.’
Daisy recognized the description before she actually saw Oliver, and immediately started arranging her long legs in a decorative pose, leaning, seductively she hoped, against the goalpost with her skirt ‘accidentally’ hiked up and showing her gym knickers. They were baggy and truly horrible, and always referred to as ‘bloody bloomers’, but nevertheless, Daisy reasoned, they were knickers, and from what she heard Ben saying, that was what boys all wanted to have access to, visually or manually.
Daisy had a soft spot for Oliver; there was an Italian look about him, very dark and knowing. Holidaying at Lake Como when she was thirteen, Daisy had been thrilled by the attention she had attracted from waiters, cab drivers and strangers in the street – a constant stream of exotic, appreciative noises, hissings through dangerous white teeth, low, sly whistles, deliciously rude-sounding foreign words, then the covert squeezes and prods. ‘Don’t take any notice,’ Jenny had instructed her, appalled that her baby daughter was already being treated as a sex object. ‘Don’t meet their eyes and they’ll leave you alone.’
But Daisy had gazed brazenly into every passing velvet-dark eye, so different from those of cold, gawky English boys, who blushed to the roots of their acne if she so much as blinked at them. Two years later, on a chill English hockey pitch, Daisy could feel the glint in Oliver’s eyes from a hundred yards and suddenly sensed ice-cream and sunshine.
‘Don’t hog it, Ben,’ Oliver ordered, reaching out his hand. Ben inhaled deeply and passed the loosely rolled spliff over to Oliver, who took a well-practised toke. ‘Not bad, this stuff. Usual supplier?’ he asked Ben.
‘Yeah. But they’re putting the price up for next time. Unless we order more, that is.’
‘Don’t really need it do we?’ Oliver leaned contentedly on the fence. ‘Not when we can get off on watching totty like your little sister. I like a girl who hitches her skirt up instead of down when she knows a bloke is looking. It’s a very promising sign.’
Ben was watching Emma who was jogging up and down on the spot to keep warm, her games skirt flashing her navy blue underwear at him. It wa
s amazing, he thought, how those awful regulation knickers, so unappealing when left drying stiffly on the laundry room radiator at home, could actually become quite sexy when they were on a non-family bottom.
A laugh rumbled from Oliver. ‘Another time, we should bring binoculars, pretend we’re doing a survey on the incidence of black-headed gulls in London’s open spaces or something. A good way of combining A-level biology with, well, A-level biology.’
‘I’m spending my life spying on sporty women,’ Ben muttered. ‘I’m getting a taste for it. God what will I be like when I’m sixty?’ Emma’s legs were even firmer than Carol Mathieson’s, but under those awful knickers he knew there would be a barbed wire fence of deceptively flimsy frills from Knickerbox.
‘By sixty you’ll probably have been arrested for it,’ Oliver concluded, stubbing out the remains of the joint and making a private bet with himself that he would personally dispose of Daisy Collins’s virginity before the end of the school year.
‘Do say if you’d rather not, won’t you?’ Laura Benstone’s pretty, ski-tanned face was peering anxiously at Jenny round the lilac tree by the front gate.
Jenny, stiff from thinning out the dead bits of lavender in the hope that it would last through the coming summer, stood up and tried to straighten her back. ‘Rather not what?’ she asked Laura warily. Why did Laura always do this, she wondered, start talking to her as if they’d already had half the conversation?
‘Your house of course!’ Laura said, with a smile as if she was about to give Jenny a huge present. Jenny flicked earth from her gardening gloves and waited, smiling encouragingly. ‘The people filming, they can’t use mine because I’ve booked it out for a fashion catalogue, all stills. So they said could they possibly use yours, as it’s almost identical?’ Laura looked worried, as if it had suddenly occurred to her that Jenny might not want two tons of film equipment and thirty total strangers taking over her home. But then she cleverly pulled the plum from the pie: ‘You do get an awful lot of money for it,’ and then she whispered, as if Neighbourhood Watch might be all-hearing, as well as all-seeing, ‘cash, if you prefer.’
