Sugarcoated

by Catherine Forde

  I don’t know whether to be scared or excited, I realised, deciding, actually, I’m both: kinda turned on by a guy who likes rough.

  Stefan had my upper arms pinned against my sides in the vice-grip of his hands. When he ground his mouth against mine in a flat, closed-lip kiss, I tasted my own blood.

  ‘Get into my car now, babes,’ Stefan muttered, his lips still pressed to mine. Then he let me go. Reaching above my head he flicked a switch. Bright, yellow light exploded the darkness away.

  I was so dazzled I had to cover my face. Black floaters bopped about beneath my eyelids while my vision tried to adapt to the strip-lights. At first, the floaters moved formlessly; sea-monkey-sized dots behind my fingers like interference on a telly with the brightness too high. But just before I took my hands away and opened my eyes properly, something very strange happened. The floaters started to move together, gathering to combine into a single image. Now all this happened in the space of … oh, no more than a couple of seconds, and I didn’t have a clue how this bizarre still came to be stored in my head like a mental photo I couldn’t recall taking. I mean if I could have chosen a pin-up for my Subconscious Mind, I’d’ve had Stefan’s smiling babyface pixelated to the inside of my eyelids, or maybe Johnny Depp in his Captain Jack Sparrow get-up.

  Certainly something sexier and less chav than two gold-ringed hands gripping a steering wheel. But that was the picture that flashed up in my head when the floaters stopped floating: a pair of ugly sovereign-bedecked hands, complete with tattooed letters inked across their kunckles. How tacky! Quickly I closed my eyes, shaking my head to clear away the image. The steering wheel faded immediately. But not the fingers. That was really weird. They hung in my mind’s eye, their middle joints showing white as if they were gripping on to something. Pulling it …

  Stefan was opening the passenger door of his car for me – ‘Hop in, babes’ – when I remembered what these fingers reminded me of, and where I’d seen them before.

  ‘Make yourself comfortable.’ Stefan clicked his tongue the way you catch the attention of a pet dog when you want it to obey. I did, slipping my low-slung backside on to the low-slung seat beside Stefan like a zombie. All I could think about was how the ringed hands of whoever had driven Stefan into his garage five minutes ago gripped a steering wheel exactly like I’d seen a hairline gripped two days earlier. Roughly. Cruelly. Before these fingers had pulled back a man’s head. Slamming it into …

  Nah. Behave yourself, Claudia. You’re getting one of those flashbacks about the hammer attack. Just like Stefan said might happen … I decided, on the brink of blurting out how Stefan was right about his subconscious mind theory: I had seen something useful I could tell Starsky and Hutch. And hey, what a coincidence: the driver of the jeepy that’s just left made me remember something about one of those bampots outside Dad’s shop …

  But the echoey roar of Stefan’s engine, accelerating from the gloom of the underground garage into the sunshine of a Monday no-school morning, drowned anything I could have said. Left me blinking my head clear of everything but daylight.

  Besides which, Stefan had his music blaring … Actually, deary me, it wasn’t music. It was Westlife. One of their heinous ballads about flying or wings or soaring roses or something: drivel. Though from the look on Stefan’s face as he sang along I could see he was right into it. Word perfect, totally flat, he belted out the lyric like Ray Charles himself was speaking to his soul.

  ‘Isn’t this amazing, babes?’ Stefan interrupted himself just before that essential and completely gut-turning chord change section you have in every boyband slow number where the pretty laddios get cheered for standing up off their stools in synch without falling over.

  ‘What’s amazing? That CD? I think it’s a pile of –’ Slunk down in the passenger seat in case anyone I knew saw me and thought this was my kind of muzac too, I was about to let rip about the crapness of soppy pop but Stefan pressed a button on his dashboard that made the car roof bzzz open up. He flung his arm around my shoulder and took his eyes off the road to smack a kiss on my cheek.

  ‘Everything!’ he shouted, putting his foot down to accelerate on to the Clydeside Expressway.

  ‘You and me, babes –’

  Stefan drove too fast for either of us to hear another note or word over the roar of his engine, although I did try to shout he’d been flashed by a speed camera so maybe he should slow down. But my stupid hair kept blowing into my mouth whenever I opened it. Made it impossible to talk. During the journey I couldn’t ask where Stefan had been during the night while I thought he was in the flat with me.

  How come he’d changed his clothes.

  And I couldn’t ask him about the Double Dutch message on his mobile.

  Who exactly was the guy with the rings in the jeepy?

  And why had this same guy zoomed away so fast?

  But I knew all these questions, not to mention what really happened on my First Date, should be asked. And answered. Before you hang about with this Stefan fella any longer. That’s what Mum and Dad and Georgina would be advising.

  All of them right too. So I’m definitely going to grill Stefan over breakfast.

  That’s what I instructed myself at the start of our ride into town.

  But ten minutes later, when Stefan pulled up and parked on a double yellow outside Strut, the most expensive clothes shop in Glasgow, I could barely remember my own name let alone the topics I needed to discuss with my mystery date. Talk about blowing away the cobwebs? I think Stefan’s driving blew my sense out the back of my head.

  Far too fast. Crazy. Not even funny crazy. This guy’s reckless – I was aware of a breathless voice of reason niggling at me as Stefan came round to my passenger door and opened it. But I was too windswept to do anything but take his hand and let him steer my wobbly legs to the threshold of a non-Clod world.

  15

  personal shopping

  Strut was one of those shops with a bell outside. Not exactly Glasgow, that.

  ‘Needs to get over itself,’ Georgina – who only ever bought clothes from One World or Save the Children – used to say whenever we passed it. One Saturday afternoon we swanned up and rang Strut’s bell. No one let us in, although this arseless, spray-tanned blonde sneered out at us both as if she was Glaswegian aristocracy and me and Georgina were turds in matching Fair Trade T-shirts

  ‘Torn-faced tart,’ Georgina had opined in her debating club voice as the Torn-Faced Tart turned her back to attend to some essential folding. When Georgina pressed the bell again, keeping her finger on it this time, the TFT swanned over to the door and flipped the sign on it to CLOSED. Me and Georgina had mooned her then.

  I wonder if she recognises me, I gulped when same blonde was flipping the CLOSED sign on me again. This however was once I was inside Strut. And after she’d greeted Stefan with a triple kiss and not a glance in my direction.

  ‘Hi-yaaa. So fantastic to see you. Your Versace just looks great on you,’ she shrilled at him in this Lorraine Kelly-esque voice that soooo didn’t match the filthy head-to-toe dart of scorn she threw me when Stefan said, ‘This is Clau-’

  ‘Listen: Oh. My. God, Stephen,’ without bothering to catch my name this shop assistant lunged for Stefan’s arm, whirlwinding him through the shop. Although I couldn’t see another soul in the place, she was gushing at him in a secretive whisper.

  ‘I know you spent a fortune last week but I’m telling you, Stephen, these shirts that’ve just come in, I am not joking: you have to check them out and you’ll want one in every colour because see with your white suit? They’re just so made for it and, I swear to God, you’ll be the only guy in Scotland wearing one coz they’re straight off the catwalk in Milan. Quick, quick –’

  Still just in the shop and no more, I watched this no-longer-quite-so-torn-faced stick insect hoiking Stefan through to men’s clothing as if all these shirts she was raving about were ready to fly back to Milan without him. She seemed to know Stefan better than I did, T
hough why d’you keep calling him Stephen, you snooty bint? I wondered while I stood abandoned near the entrance of the shop. I felt as welcome as a pimple on the tip of Angelina Jolie’s nose in the company of the various anorexic mannequins posed around the shop floor, with their cinched-in waists and their pert pointy boobs and their bored, blank faces. Oh dear, they’d be the templates for the clientele Strut expected, I sighed, wandering over to the nearest sparse rail of ladies’ clothing. As you do when you’re hanging about in normal clothes shops waiting for someone else, I began to browse, checking the price label first, of course. Holy Moley! Every single garment had a triple figure tag, and the prices seemed to rise inversely with the amount of fabric your money bought you.

  What a steal, I snorted, examining this bra-top contraption. Looked like it was run up from one of the Woolworth’s hankies I give Dad every Christmas.

  POINT. SHOOT. Shoddy red stitching on each bra cup instructed. £425 dangled the price.

  ‘Made of tat,’ I spluttered aloud.

  When I plucked the hankie bra off the rail and held its tiny triangles of fabric against my substantial boobs I knew I’d have to describe this ridiculous outfit to Georgina in my next email. To make sure I didn’t miss out any details I checked around for the nearest mirror and walked towards it. But as soon as I was a few inches from the rail, the stupid bra in my hands started to shrill:

  Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

  Muggins hadn’t noticed that – unlike Primark – everything in Strut was attached to a wire. I’d remember next time I popped in, all right! That way I might avoid the attentions of this complete tank of a security guard who appeared from nowhere. Slammed me to the floor. Bloody hell! I’m no pushover but before I could say ‘I was only looking,’ he’d my arm racked up my back and his sturdy beam of a knee rammed into my coccyx.

  ‘Please don’t move a muscle,’ this bloke requested, squeezing my throat till my eyes bulged. ‘Otherwise I’ll have to hurt you.’

  The white-hot fury in my own squashed voice probably surprised me more than it did the guy spread-eagled across me.

  ‘Comedian. I’ll hurt you if you don’t get off me. I said GET OFF!’

  Adrenalin surged through me, pumping up my volume, filling me with fight. Every last stone of me heaved against the security guard as I put into practice the dying-fish-on-a-deck wriggle-move good old ex-wrestler Uncle Super Mike had taught with the guarantee that it would always see me out of trouble if I was jumped. Unfortunately, and despite a snapping back-thrust with my head catching the guard a cracker to his nose – blood everywhere – my grunted efforts were essentially as sorry as a dying fish. I’d met my match. Just couldn’t throw this big guy off. Still, my panted unladylike war-cry of, ‘Bloody let me up, ya dope. I wouldn’t thieve this crap if you paid me,’ was loud enough to bring a topless Stefan to the rescue.

  ‘Babes? Problem?’

  Stefan’s response wasn’t exactly a textbook damsel rescue. He didn’t even lay a finger on the bloke who’d laid into me: How dare you assault my lady-friend, you bounder! However, he didn’t seem to need to get physical.

  ‘Oi! Have you a deathwish, pal?’ Stefan enquired of the security guard. Not even loudly. And by the time I was free and exhaling and scrabbling to my feet, the tank who’d flattened me was up against the nearest wall looking like he wanted to be molecularly absorbed into it. There was blood pumping out his nose, down his chin.

  Give the guy a tissue, I felt like saying to Stefan. He was standing in front of the guard now, just watching him bleed. And as I watched Stefan eyeballing this guy, this snake tattooed across Stefan’s bare back watched me. The thickest part of it lay in the space between his jutting shoulder-blades, tail tapering to rest along Stefan’s flank, its tip curling up and over his left bicep. The snake’s head twisted round on itself so it appeared to be striking outwards. Mouth open, fangs bared, like a toxic warning:

  Keep back.

  Nice, I winced, wondering why the heck Stefan would want to wear something so vicious underneath his classy designer threads. It wasn’t like bodywise he needed to embellish anything. His upper torso was preeeeetty buff, all hard, corded muscle, not a spare inch of fat. And his untattooed skin was flawless.

  Apart from this ugly great blemish. I wrinkled my nose, watching the snake slither along the skin on Stefan’s back, rippling the hump of Stefan’s vertebrae when he folded his arms. If the snake hadn’t had the same tongue of flame as the little one I’d noticed on Stefan’s wrist the day we met, I’d have sworn it was real.

  ‘You blind there, pal?’ Stefan tutted at the security guard. ‘Not paying attention, then. Because she –’ he cocked his head at me as casually as if I was a sack of spuds, ‘walked in here with me.’ Me was pronounced particularly low and harsh. Anything but casual, I noticed, watching the security guard’s reaction.

  Shaven-headed and with a neck on him as thick as me at maths, he was a good four inches taller than Stefan. When Stefan leaned in and spoke to him, his tilted chin was only level with the guard’s impressively broad chest. But despite this physical inferiority, Stefan’s flat mumble was undiluted menace.

  ‘Look I’m so sorry ‘bout this, Mr Josef,’ the security guard burbled through a mouthful of blood. He was softly-spoken, his voice a mismatch to his thuggish outward appearance. And you’re not bad-looking either, in a beefed-up, gentle giant way, I decided.

  ‘I didn’t realise you were both … and when the alarm went off –’ the security guard shrugged, his arm moving from Stefan to me. ‘When your friend set off the alarm, I automatically –’ He sighed, trying to staunch his nose with the side of his hand. With all the fight out of his shoulders he just looked like a bloke desperate to keep his lousy job.

  ‘Honestly, I can’t apologise enough,’ this time the security guard spoke to me. ‘And I hope I didn’t hurt you as much as you hurt me –’ With a half-smile he made a reaching gesture towards me. His eyes – brown, warm – were brimming with sorry. And fear, I sensed. Of Stefan. A guy he could mince in one hand. Isn’t that weird?

  So I tried to clear the air. ‘No bother –’ I shrugged. But a slicing motion from Stefan’s hand silenced me. ‘You’re right there: you can’t apologise enough – what’s your name?’ Stefan moved in so close I couldn’t see the security guard’s face any more. Just heard him murmur, ‘Dave Griffen,’ before Stefan went on, ‘Dave Griffen, yeah? Well, Dave Griffen. You can’t apologise enough. Not now. Not ever. Can he, babes?’

  Though Stefan had raised his voice, he didn’t turn round immediately. That’s why I assumed I was the ‘babes’ he was talking to.

  ‘But he has apologised.’ I was half-laughing. ‘And I got him good on the nose. So it’s OK. Are we having breakfast now?’ I went on.

  Then I realised Stefan wasn’t speaking to me at all. The babes he meant was the spray-tanned shop assistant. I’d been half-aware of her whispering into a phone at the cash desk when Stefan first rushed over to me. Now she was by his side, flicking invisible smuts from the stupid hankie bra that had caused this horrible scene. While I watched her hanging it back on the clothes-rail like it was a priceless work of art, I was tempted to snatch it. Dab it against poor Dave Griffen’s nose.

  ‘Stephen, you’re so right,’ babes-who-wasn’t-me gushed. ‘I’ve just told the boss what’s happened and he says Strut won’t employ security that can’t tell criminals from customers. Especially personal customers –’

  ‘Like the ones I bring in, huh?’ Stefan finished the sentence. While he spoke he planted both hands either side of poor Dave Griffen, trapping him against the wall.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Stefan said.

  ‘Do you?’ he repeated in the softest voice I’d heard him use yet.

  I watched the gulp in Dave Griffen’s Adam’s apple when he nodded at Stefan.

  Or Mr Josef, as Dave Griffen was calling him:

  ‘I do, Mr Josef.’

  Well maybe you can fill me in, I’d so loved to have
freeze-framed this whole nasty scene and whipped Dave Griffen off into one of the changing rooms to ask, because right now this shirtless Mr Stefan/Stephen/Josef whateverhisname was didn’t seem anything like the sweet-talking guy I’d met in the newsagent’s. My fellow-Minstrels fan. The bloke who was so upset at what I might have seen outside Dad’s shop. Right now Stefan was hard as nails. With a calm, dangerous power to him. Something I’d never seen in anyone who wasn’t a hard-man on the telly.

  Who are you? I watched Stefan thumb Dave Griffen from his sight. He was telling the ex-security guard, ‘Count yourself lucky to be walking out this shop. Right, babes? All settled that he’s slinging his hook?’ Stefan asked the Babes Who Wasn’t Me. Though he wasn’t really asking her at all. He was telling her. The way Ray Winstone would give an order. Vinnie Jones. Wee hard man Robert Carlyle. Or Robert De Niro, sleepwalking through one of his bad-guy roles.

  Babes, nodding at Stefan, flicked an arm towards Dave Griffen in dismissal.

  ‘Oh, no please, Lynne. Gonna give us another chance.’

  Instead of moving away, Dave Griffen tried to plead. ‘I’ve worked here two years. No hassles –’ he said, addressing me when both Stefan and the shop assistant ignored him.

  And, hey, I’d have spoken up for Dave Griffen if Stefan hadn’t planked himself in front of the guy again.

  ‘Mate, what don’t you understand?’ Stefan’s voice was low, his tone as warm and friendly as his smile. ‘You’ve assaulted my friend but I’m letting you walk out in one piece. If I were you, I’d split while the going’s good.’

  Stefan was still smiling when he jabbed his finger at his own face. I had to strain to catch the final advice he gave Dave Griffen. It might have been spoken quietly, but I heard it loud and clear:

  ‘Underneath this babyface of mine beats the heart of a psychopath.’

  16

  ducking and diving