All That Mullarkey

by Sue Moorcroft

  ‘I may be out of practice,’ she murmured, rotating her bottom gently in his lap. ‘But that was outrageously good sex.’

  He trailed an idle fingertip in and out of her belly button. ‘Mmmm. The best.’

  A fresh rash of goosebumps fled across her. ‘And however special celibacy is meant to be, I find it vastly overrated.’

  He laughed, his breath brushing her shoulder. ‘Maybe it suits some better than others.’

  It certainly didn’t suit her. Being sex-starved had its advantages because whenever he’d touched her she’d felt the earth move, seen flames and fireworks. Next time she read in a magazine that women deprived of sex ceased to want it, she’d write and complain.

  He pushed still closer. She sighed, drowsily.

  He lifted his head from the pillow. ‘That’s not your mobile ringing, is it?’

  ‘This early?’ Cleo dragged herself up onto wobbly legs and over to where she’d abandoned her bag halfway up the hall to extract her phone. And the bubble burst.

  She hurtled back into the bedroom to where he still lay curled in the duvet. ‘Have you seen the time? Liza’s going bananas, she’s supposed to be with Adam’s family for Sunday dinner. And I haven’t even given Shona a thought. Where’s my dress?’ Into the bathroom to clean her teeth with his toothpaste and her finger, then she raced back out. ‘Can you zip me up?’ She halted. Justin looked … tense.

  After a struggle she managed the zip herself. ‘Um, I’ve left my car at my sister’s flat …’

  He lay perfectly still for several moments before unfolding himself with a sigh of resignation. ‘Cleo, this gives me the most fucking appalling feeling of déjà vu.’

  He pulled up behind Cleo’s car, outside her sister’s flat. She’d been clock-watching all the way, jiggling in her seat, worrying aloud that Liza would be frantically furious and Shona would feel abandoned, and scrabbled for the door handle the instant they arrived.

  Brilliant.

  But then she paused and turned, clasping his forearm with both her hands. She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Thanks. Thanks for taking me out.’ Her eyes crinkled. ‘Thanks for the sackful of sex.’ Her smile faded. ‘And don’t worry, I do know the score.’

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  Holding his gaze she said, carefully, ‘Like you said, it was just sex. I’m not expecting anything. Nothing’s altered since you said all that stuff – you don’t trust me, you think I behaved unforgivably. Don’t feel you have to go through some charade of “cooling it” with me now. We’re adults. You don’t have to wish you hadn’t done it. It was just once.’ She brushed his lips with hers and touched his cheek with her fingertips.

  Then she was gone.

  He drove home in a black cloud. One-night stands were a bad idea, sometimes. Full of misunderstandings and crap. And crap. Crap!

  He slammed into his flat.

  If that was ‘just’ sex, he’d never had sex before. And if it was just sex, it was just the best sex. It should’ve been on the ten o’clock news. Eleven out of ten, six gold stars, top of the premier league.

  It had to be more than sex.

  He couldn’t get her out of his mind; her warmth, her, um, active participation – OK, she’d been as horny as a cat – and … just everything.

  The phone rang, and he snatched it up. ‘Hello?’ But the caller replaced the receiver without speaking. ‘Oh piss off, you saddo.’ He got really tired of this nuisance campaign.

  Adam had whisked away a Liza in a whirl of self-righteous indignation that she hadn’t been the unreliable, unpunctual one for a change. Shona was already down for her post-lunch nap.

  Cleo flopped into her chair with an icy beer and the end of the EastEnders omnibus.

  She was beginning to realise she shouldn’t have done it.

  Bad, bad idea. B-a-d. Why had Justin made such a preposterous suggestion and why, why, why had she agreed?

  And why did it have to be so great? She closed her eyes against a heavily significant conversation across the bar of The Queen Vic and remembered Justin’s mouth. His hands. His body. She shuddered. Must be chemistry. Or sorcery.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ‘If you’re pregnant this time, we get married!’ Justin paced over the quarry-tiled floor.

  Cleo kept calm, because one of them had to. ‘For all the wrong reasons?’

  ‘You wouldn’t know the right reasons if they sprang up and bit your behind.’

  Cleo counted to ten as she sliced the crusts off Shona’s sandwich. An hour, one poxy, measly, tiny hour since Liza had leapt into Adam’s car – and now Justin was here shouting the odds, making her regret over the night deepen with every step he took around the kitchen.

  ‘We’d better talk about that condom, Cleo.’

  Slowly, she shut her eyes.

  He slapped his hands on the table. ‘You would’ve thought we’d learnt our lesson. Neither of us is safe to be let out!’

  … eight, nine, ten. She settled Shona into her high chair and began more sandwiches for herself. ‘I’ll get the morning-after pill.’ Counting slices of ham, she decided she had plenty. ‘Hungry? I can make you …’

  The ham packet shot out of her hand and across the worktop and she almost suffered whiplash as Justin swung her around to face him.

  ‘Those pills don’t always work. Stop dodging the issue – if you’re pregnant this time, we get married. Right?’

  She pulled free, pointedly smoothing back her hair. What an idea! Life would never be the same. ‘All that shotgun stuff went out decades ago.’

  For a brief moment she was scorched by his glare. Then he turned away and began to make tea, silently dropping tea bags into cups, slopping in the milk. He refilled Shona’s drink and sat down at the kitchen table. It was almost as if they were back in those weeks when he’d lived there, when they’d readied meals together and eaten them together with Shona yelling and singing from her chair.

  He remained silent while Cleo and Shona ate, while Cleo cleaned up Shona’s sticky fingers, unclipped her plastic bib and set her free. But she was aware of his gaze and that he hadn’t finished yet.

  He waited until she settled down to her cooling drink, Shona playing with a wooden spoon and a brown paper bag on the floor. ‘Are your parents together?’

  Cleo sipped, nodded. She couldn’t imagine them, rigid and conformist as they were, doing anything but staying completely married.

  ‘Mine, too.’ He’d finished his tea. His eyes were steady now, and calm. ‘And that’s what I want for my kids. A traditional family, mother and father living together, married if possible.’

  ‘Not everyone does that any more.’ But what a wonderful antidote to her loneliness. She flicked her hair out of her eyes. ‘And, anyway, your argument’s illogical. Why get married if I’m pregnant? We have a child, we aren’t married.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He nodded slowly. ‘You’d better marry me anyway.’

  She stood suddenly, clattering the plates together and whisking them into the sink. ‘Such a romantic, old-fashioned proposal! But no thanks. You don’t marry for expediency in this day and age, Justin, you marry for love and togetherness. When nobody else will do.’ Steam rose as she ran water into the sink, making her eyes smart.

  His voice was just behind her. ‘Aren’t you tempted? Someone to come home to, to share worries with, a proper sex life …’

  She swung on him suddenly, voice brutal with anger, eyes boiling. ‘Don’t make me sound like a lonely, desperate old slapper! I’m not needy and I’m not pitiful. I’m fine alone.’

  Stoically, he stood his ground. ‘I said that very badly.’

  She forced out a laugh, raucous and artificial. ‘Have you ever thought how many people used to be trapped in loveless, pointless marriages, because they married to legitimise children?’

  He relapsed into silence.

  Later, when he was leaving, she muttered, ‘And anyway, what about when one of us meets the Nobody-Else-Will-Do person? The
expedient marriage would dissolve faster than Oxo.’

  He stared into the garden, at the enormous feathers of pampas grass nodding and lifting in afternoon light that brightened and faded as thin clouds raced across the sun. ‘Possibly. In a marriage of only expediency. Probably. Yes.’

  She wasn’t pregnant. Her period arrived even before she could see a doctor on Monday morning and she told Justin when he came to visit Shona. ‘You’re off the hook, scare over,’ she breezed. ‘I’ll be at The Three Fishes if you want me, I’m meeting Dora.’ Then to Shona, ‘Be a good girl for Justin,’ kiss, kiss, ‘I’ll be home soon.’ Back to Justin, ‘So that’s great, isn’t it?’

  He accepted the pink and blue sock Shona had just pulled off to deposit in his hand. ‘Lovely.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Muggie’s was jumping, as it did every Friday night. Not that Justin was particularly in a nightclub frame of mind. He was annoyed to catch himself scanning the crowd in case Cleo was there with her dippy sister; but there was no sign of her glossy dark hair in the crush. She was probably sitting at home alone while Shona slept upstairs. He tried to push the image away.

  He felt as if he was going through the motions: drinking, talent spotting with Martin and Drew. As he didn’t feel drawn to any of the talent, he was glad of the distraction when Gez and Jaz turned up. ‘Hey! Nice to see you. Gez, you’ve become a bit of a pipe-and-slippers man since Jaz moved in.’

  Jaz laughed. ‘Don’t wind him up, you know he’ll only try and keep up with the big boys.’ She was drinking a pint, golden in the lights. It made Justin think of Cleo.

  ‘He’ll be fine.’

  ‘Two hours,’ predicted Jaz, pragmatically. And, sure enough, Gez insisted on matching Martin and Drew drink for drink and swamped his personal alcohol limit just about in line with her prediction. Jaz dragged him into a taxi and set off home, which left Justin adrift; Martin and Drew had already homed in on the women they’d selected as their targets for the night, not betraying how much they’d drunk by so much as a wobble. Justin, head spinning, envied them their capacity and decided to go and take a leak and then make for the taxi rank and home.

  But his dad had always warned him that it was dangerous to be drunk and on your own.

  One moment Justin was weaving out of the Gents, pleasantly hazy. The next, he felt as if a charging buffalo had slammed him against the wall and was stamping on his ribs and stomach with well-placed hooves, each blow crashing into him with such force that he could utter no more than ‘Whoof!’ as he bounced off the wall.

  Doubled over and crowing for breath, he was vaguely aware that the buffalo had vanished. Then some other bloke, large and loud, dragged him to his feet, whisked him round and slammed his arms behind his back. ‘Steady on, mate. Had one too many, have we?’

  Another, equally large, crowded against him. ‘Calm down, calm down. There’s no need for that – animal!’

  Before he could crow sufficient air into his lungs to demand to know what the hell they were talking about, the bouncers arrived, resplendent in dinner jackets. They hustled him into a back room, along with the two gorillas who had ‘restrained’ him.

  ‘Just hang about to tell the police what happened,’ said the biggest bouncer to the two gorillas. ‘And you, mate, you were the one involved, were you?’ He was addressing a wiry man with a geometric goatee and a brown jacket. This, by elimination, should be the buffalo.

  Justin blinked. No, that couldn’t be right. Him? He was just some ordinary geezer, not tall, not broad, not muscly. Surely he hadn’t inflicted the stabbing pain in Justin’s ribcage and made his stomach feel as if it might heave out its contents at any minute?

  Dizzily, he shook his head as he was hustled into a dusty little office and his arms released. He tried to frame truculent challenges. ‘What’s going on? Are you on something, mate?’ But his lips felt like rubber, refusing to form the words, and his brain kept telling his body that he was falling violently sideways, making him stagger.

  The police response time was impressive. They were two well-built, close-cropped men who seemed as if Friday night aggro was all too familiar to them. The instant they rolled in, the buffalo sprang up, clamouring, ‘Look at my arm! This bloody animal just went for me, he had a little knife. Like a razor it is.’ He was clutching his forearm and blood was oozing through the brown jacket and between his fingers.

  Justin wished he could sober up. Then he’d be able to sort out whatever was going on. But he was beginning to feel real alarm. He’d never carried a knife in his life. He tried to snort, ‘As if!’ It came out as ‘Zff!’

  Then the gorillas began their support act. ‘We had to pull him off. He’s obviously rat-arsed.’

  And, ‘It took two of us to calm him down. “Calm down, mate”, I said. But it still took two of us.’

  Justin tried to organise his mouth to exclaim just as emphatically that he hadn’t even swung a blow. But with the buffalo maintaining, ‘He’s some piss-head, look what he’s done to my arm! Search him, he’s got a blade’, the officers had to search him. And, sure enough. Would you look at that? A small, red-handled craft knife had appeared in Justin’s side jacket pocket.

  He was promptly nicked and escorted to a police car with his hands cuffed in front of him, just like in an episode of The Bill, and driven through the night-time streets under sodium-orange lights before turning into a gated yard behind the police station. From there he was taken to a holding area, the benches already populated by other arresting officers and Friday night naughty boys and girls.

  ‘I wasn’t doing anything!’ he protested. But it was a waste of breath insisting that he had only been indulging in the innocent pastime of getting pleasantly pissed with his mates at a nightclub. Most of the other clientele seemed fuelled by alcohol or worse; and it was obviously all in a night’s work for the arresting officers, whose navy-blue presence contrasted stolidly with the colourful, often raucous, sometimes nervous, occasionally nauseous miscreants.

  ‘Bit of a queue,’ Justin’s arresting officer observed, philosophically. ‘We’ll get you through as soon as possible, mate.’ As if he was in any particular hurry to explore the rest of the police station. Though he would have liked to be rid of the handcuffs with the bloody uncomfortable flat hinge between his wrists. The officer joined a discussion on the other side of him as to whether Man United’s dominance could last forever and kept trying to draw Justin in. Justin wished he and the constant crackle of police radios would just shut up.

  By the time it was Justin’s turn before the custody sergeant, speech of a sort was returning. He was booked in as if in some kind of outlandish hotel, read his rights and offered a phone call. He had to empty his pockets and then they took his watch, ring and tie. As if he was going to hang himself. ‘I’m not suicidal,’ he protested angrily.

  The custody sergeant was unmoved. ‘Just procedure, mate. You’ll get it all back.’

  A custody assistant escorted him to a big cupboard where he was handed a bright blue vinyl mattress to cart under his arm through a grey metal door.

  He was left alone to gaze at his claustrophobic cell of white tiled walls, a bed, a door with a sliding aperture, a steel toilet and a horrid tracing-paper loo roll balanced on the dwarf wall alongside it.

  Sobriety was dawning, with panic chasing. This was all too scarily real. No one had charged in to rescue him or roared with laughter at the joke.

  This was him. Justin Mullarkey. Sitting alone in a locked police cell on a Friday night, repelled by the pong of body odour, vomit and disinfectant, the constant racket of shouting against a background of unlikely piped music.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  ‘Sorry mate, there’s no taxi expected at this address.’ Justin slammed down the handset of the entry phone system. He squinted at the clock: 06.30. No point trying to get back to sleep, although his eyes felt sandy with the lack of it.

  During the night his phone had rung – according to his phone log – at 12.01,
12.56 and 1.30, at which point he’d admitted defeat and turned it off. The evening before, a pizza boy had been very hacked off when Justin had refused delivery of four double-topped extra large pizzas that he hadn’t ordered. After that had come a shipping order of Thai food and his entry phone had almost melted from the vocal fury of the thwarted delivery guy.

  He trudged off to the shower, totally, absolutely and dreadfully pissed off at the lunatic ex-tenants who were, evidently, making good their threat to ‘get’ him. Yesterday, he’d seen the long face of the man glaring across the road and up at his windows.

  He wasn’t scared of such a loser, he thought, standing under the water, as hot as he could stand it – but he was kind of worried about what the loser would do next.

  It wasn’t hard to get to work on time when he was awake an hour early. Armed with a giant cup of coffee, he pressed the button to set the big monitor of the Apple Macintosh computer humming into life and opened the file he’d been working with on Friday afternoon.

  Yet another ladies’ razor; yet another set of packaging. The customer’s name had to appear in Pantone 185. Everyone went for Pantone 185, widely accepted as the standard ‘I’m bright red – look at me!’ colour. He yawned and began to mess around with the background blue to make it greyer … better. Then added turquoise around the image of the razor to fizz it up a bit …

  His desk phone rang. ‘Studio,’ he answered, economically.

  ‘It’s Neil, can I see you, please, Justin?’

  ‘On way.’ Justin groaned inwardly as he replaced the handset. That was all he needed the moment he got down to work. Neil wasn’t a bad bloke, OK for a manager, and a better manager than he’d been a graphic artist; but every ‘Can I see you, please?’ call was a potential elephant trap. Neil was only a couple of years older than Justin, but seemed to have embraced middle age with thinning hair, a thickening waistline and a diminishing sense of humour. Especially Justin’s brand of humour.