by Clare Naylor
Amy unpacked her bag and showered away her dusty taxi ride and still there was no sign of Benjy and Luanda. They’d probably gone sightseeing or to the beach or something, she imagined. She pulled on her bikini and, finding traces of sand in it, thought of Orlando with that kittens-drowning-in-her-stomach feeling, nerves and regret and nostalgia in a handful of sand. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and headed down to the swimming pool area; she could maybe have a swim and a drink and then catch up with the others later. It was very sweet of them to think of her, she thought, albeit briefly. Amy stretched out on a sun lounger and decided that the pool was not going to be the place to be. It was deserted save for a couple of remarkably mahogany Swedish girls and an old man doing laps of the pool. But Amy wasn’t too concerned about being in the right place right now, she’d had rather enough of that and much preferred reading Virginia Woolf by the pool without a Hermès handbag or television personality in sight. It was like being able to breathe again, she thought. She meandered around Bloomsbury in the early part of the century, walking through St. James’s Park and watching ladies with hats and rooms with fluttering gauze curtains, then she drifted from Virginia Woolf into a light doze, the bright sun grazing her skin and turning her face and chest pink.
“You’ll need something cool on that later,” a voice traced fingers over her burning chest. Amy shivered awake.
“Orlando,” she said softly, half believing the voice to be in her head, but the fingertips were cooling and she turned her head to see him, crouched down beside her sun lounger, an iced glass in his hand. “Oh my God, Orlando, I’m so, so sorry, darling. What are you doing here?”
“Someone has to keep you out of trouble,” he said, leaning over to kiss her on the lips. With the other hand he teased an ice cube out of his glass and, dripping freezing beads of moisture onto her skin, ran the ice cube slowly over her lips. She shivered, and her lips parted instinctively; he ran it along her inner lip and let it flicker on her tongue. All the while drops fell from his hand onto her scalding chest.
“Someone has to teach you to keep your cool, darling.” He wore just shorts and his chest was bare and lightly covered in blonding hairs. He took the ice cube and, never moving his eyes from her lips, let it glide down her neck, trickling into each crease and the hollow of her breastbone; Amy was silent except for a slow gasp as he pulled down the strap of her bikini and took the now much smaller piece of ice along her ribs, over them one by one, slowly until his fingertips reached into her bikini and lightly rubbed the freezing cold hard nub over her nipple, again and again. Then he kissed her again, his tongue warming her chilled lips. Oh my God, she thought. She wondered if the bronzed Swedes were still there and she could certainly hear the splash, lap lap of the old man in the pool. Orlando’s cool hands trailed across her burning stomach and down to her tiny bikini bottoms. He can’t be going to do this here, she thought, not moving or even breathing, but his hand remained, firm on the front of her bikini. He flicked the elastic with two fingers and let it snap gently back, taking her hand instead. They kissed and Amy was burning up inside and out. Stretching his palm out to match hers, he folded his fingers through hers and eased Amy to standing position.
“My room, do you think, before the others find us?”
“Orlando, I don’t really understand,” she said, reeling from one of the most erotic experiences she’d ever had, well, by a swimming pool and in public. “Do Benjy and Lucinda know you’re here then?”
“Why do you think you’re here, if not for me?” he asked, picking up her drink and placing it in the hollow of her back.
“Orlando, that’s cold,” she said, skipping away from the shock.
“Just call it punishment,” he said.
“For what, you bastard? As I remember, you were the one who did the throwing out.” But she didn’t really care. She was here, Orlando was here, and they were going to his room, it’s what one might call a lucky day. As they walked into what was a mirror image of her room he locked the door and just as she was about to take her usual spin around checking out soaps and minibars he slid his finger down the back of her bikini bottoms, letting the elastic flip back again. She froze and turned around.
“Ow,” she said without a flicker of pain in her voice, but looking up just saw his eyes and beard. In her mind she could already feel it scratching her face, longed for it to graze against her stomach and be buried in every crevice.
“There’ll be no impunity, I hope you realize?” He smiled tantalizingly.
“Vice versa, darling. I believe in the crime fitting the punishment,” she retorted swiftly and as huskily as she could manage.
“So.”
“So?” she asked. So he took a step toward her and, bending to kiss her, bit her lip.
“Ow,” she yelped, digging her nails into his arm. They stepped back toward the bed, a tug of her hair for him, a pinch on his leg for her, until they fell onto the bed and swallowed one another’s ouches, exchanging them for sighs and gasps and ahs, and Orlando pulled down her bikini and she slipped off her top and eased his shorts down. They were drawn together in two short thrusts. There they were, reunited in bed and in love, Amy supposed, if she had time to suppose, as he pulled her smooth thighs apart and she slid them up his legs to join behind his back, locked in a pact of pleasure, of pain. Orlando was scratched and Amy was bruised, small pink marks on her arms, which would turn the pale lilac of his discarded shorts later on. His lip bled and they collapsed postbattle on the top of the bed in exhaustion.
“Welcome back, darling,” Orlando said.
“Glad I could make it.”
They dozed as the sun filtered in through the slats in the blind, naked and moist with the sweat and scratches and tiny drops of blood. Delicious, she thought. Polarity is a divine thing; there can be no pleasure without just a touch of pain, and touching a mark on her upper arm, fell back into sleep.
“Orlando, are you there?” A knock followed by Lily’s voice.
“Mmmm, I’m here,” he shouted gruffly.
“Olly, we can’t find Amy. I think she’s here ’cause she left a note, have you seen her?”
Orlando got up and, pulling on his shorts, walked to the door. Amy could just hear the exchange in whispers but not make out the words, then the door closed and Orlando came back and sat on the bed.
“Is it OK if we meet them all in a couple of hours downstairs?” he asked, running his fingers over her sunburn.
“Yeah, sure, but what shall we do till then?” Disingenuous does it, Amy, you should know by now, nothing gets a man quicker than letting him think it was his idea, his seduction. Well, it worked with Orlando as he pulled off his shorts and buried his head in Amy’s pink chest, worked a treat.
. .
Amy was seen by one of the admirers, leaving Orlando Rock’s room in his white Armani shirt and nothing else. She padded down the corridor like a furtive pervert in one of her beloved Carry On films and Orlando tapped her bare bottom as he saw her out of the door.
“Don’t! Someone might see,” she panicked. After the swimming pool it was rather academic but this was not a university entrance exam and Amy’s brain was scrambled by morality and hormones again. She skipped barefoot through the corridors and by the time she was back in her room showering and applying balm to her sunburn but not her battle scars (let everyone see my trophies, she thought proudly), the word was out on the hotel grapevine that a scrappy, sunburned, mousy hairdo, very badly dressed, probably English girl had been seen leaving Orlando’s room. The hotel was alive with the sound of hopes dashing like broken plates on stone floors. But still the makeup was applied and the sarongs slung slinkily and the hair blow-dried carefully and still a chink of optimism remained in their minds, based on the fact that Amy didn’t seem to possess a hairbrush, let alone a hair dryer and mousse and that she may have cellulite-free thighs but that didn’t constitute international style, which they had and she didn’t.
But Amy was oblivious to the sneer
s as she came down the swirling staircase into the lounge with parrots and huge palm trees framing her entrance, free of her labels and Hello! accessories and wearing just Orlando’s shirt and a pair of loose cotton trousers. Orlando stood up from the white leatherette sofa and kissed her gently on the lips.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said. “Drink?”
“Whatever you’re having,” she said, sitting down a little painfully, for was an intense stint in bed not as physically taxing and muscle-ache inducing as a hefty workout in a spartanly sadistic gym? Amy looked around as Orlando went over to the bar and was surprised to find about twenty pairs of eyes flick away from her own. Wow, they all fancy him, she clicked in a nanosecond, well, who wouldn’t with that edible little bottom, she thought. But more importantly she wasn’t thinking anything at all. We’ve just witnessed a seminal moment in Amy’s development: she watched Orlando, not everyone watching her watching Orlando. A slight difference but it means everything, and it would have meant everything to Orlando had he known. But it was fleeting and it didn’t stop her, on realizing she was the envy of each woman in the room, from flashing lustrous eyes at her beau and then self-consciously running her fingers over her lightly bruised arms. She wanted them to detect the pain and detect the precursor to the pain, namely tempestuous sex in his room upstairs, oh, how they’d hate her, she thought with perverse pleasure. But her daydream and status as a vamp were interrupted by three burnished figures crashing down beside her on the sofa and ruffling her froideur.
“Hi, you old trollop, are you better now?” said Luanda, loudly hugging her.
“What do you mean?” Amy pretended not to know she’d been a royal pain in the bum for several weeks.
“The Hello! piece was horrid, wasn’t it?” said Lily with genuine sympathy, as though it was a mistake we could all make at the drop of our bra straps.
“Hiya, Ames,” said Benjy, kissing her on both cheeks. Their exuberance was exhausting, and as they bounded around like puppies, she abandoned all pretense and slurped down the seabreeze Orlando had just brought her, and snorting with laughter, put paid to her image as a glamour-puss. And good riddance, she thought, as she showed her friends and inadvertently the rest of the bar her dramatic white bikini marks branded into her lobster skin.
“Gruesome, isn’t it?” she giggled as the Orlando admirers looked on in horror and renewed hope for their own chances with the god.
But none of them got him that night, nor for the next week, because Amy was on fine form. She was her funniest and liveliest and it became her mission to shock her fellow hotel guests. She and Lily snogged over the breakfast table as Orlando looked on and smiled. She and Orlando replicated a fair few ice cubes and other love aids scenes by the pool, and she and Lucinda made the rest of the holiday a fashion show of high camp and vulgarity. All of this was watched with bewilderment and contempt by the tastefully Guccied set in the hotel and would be related at European cocktail parties and county shires horse trials for months to come.
“Orlando Rock was terribly charming whenever he talked to me, but the people he was with, no better than louts, no idea what he was doing with them.”
CHAPTER 33
So the stories traveled and Amy and Orlando were separated again, more tears in airports but not so hideous. As filming was over and he was just helping Bill with the postproduction bits in LA, he’d soon be home and they’d be able to get around to some serious dating back in London. Alleluia, thought Amy, we can be together and cook dinners for friends and go for walks in the park and I can meet his parents and we’ll have beautiful children. It’s early days so we won’t worry too much about all that silly talk, she’ll get over it, but still Lucinda teased her as they had lunch one day in a quiet noodle bar in Knightsbridge.
“Do you remember that day when you said you wanted glamour and hair-free legs in your life, not monotony and Sunday roasts?”
“It’s not the same though, Luce, I really love Orlando. And he’s very handsome.”
“But he’s very ordinary, you know he’ll never go to casinos in Monte Carlo or buy a boat.”
“So?”
“So just pointing out that fact.”
“It doesn’t matter, I love him.” Amy was adamant.
“So the fact that he’s as famous as cornflakes has nothing to do with it?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve had my brush with glamour and couldn’t give a damn about it, had my fingers burned. Anyway, why are you asking?”
“No reason, only that we got a postcard from Orlando this morning saying that he was coming back next week—”
“I know that,” Amy interrupted.
“And that it’s the premiere of his film, and would we like to come.”
“Who, me and you?”
“No, me and Benjy.”
“What?” Amy shrieked, letting her noodle drop back into her miso soup and splash her clean shirt. “Why didn’t he ask me?”
“Presumably because you’ve done such a great job of convincing him that you’re now limelight-shy.”
“Yes, but I’m not Lord Lucan, I do intend to be seen again.”
“But the press will be there.”
“Yes, but I don’t care, I’ll just wear jeans or something and then they won’t want to take pictures.”
“And Tiffany Swann.” There’s nothing like a bit of competition to heighten one’s sense of occasion.
“Well then, maybe they’ll be silk jeans or something.” Amy smiled wickedly. “And maybe they’ll be fitted and I might just go to the hairdressers first.”
“And get a seaweed wrap,” added Lucinda.
“And a pedicure. God, I can’t go out without a pedicure.”
“And maybe a tiny weeny collagen injection in your lips, just to even them out.”
“God, yes, and whip out a couple of ribs, just to emphasize my minute waistline.” The girls exploded with laughter and their noodles plopped and splashed and a piece of sushi was knocked onto the floor in the fracas. The waiter looked disapproving and they laughed even more.
But whatever Amy said she had meant. As she wandered down King’s Road looking for a pair of shoes worthy of a premiere, she didn’t think I must look nice for the cameras, she thought I want to look nice for Orlando, I want him to think my feet look so unutterably perfect in these shoes that he just has to kiss my toes one by one and then work his way up, I want him to lose concentration talking to all those famous people because I’m there and he can’t take his eyes off me. I want him to love me more than anyone or anything, more than beer, she smiled wistfully. So he was an actor of Olivier proportions, so he was possibly the most handsome man she’d ever set eyes on, he was also in love with her and no amount of public adoration or designer freebies could match that for her. It was a buzz and a head-fry and it was the first time she’d felt like this. She hadn’t told him that she loved him yet, but she would, when the time was right.
The car would be arriving at seven so she had two hours. There hadn’t been time for the rib removal but she gave herself a homemade face pack and fluffed around in a cloud of Chanel No. 5. She lay in the bath and remembered a trick where if you hypnotized yourself and imagined your breasts were growing, they actually would. She didn’t want to be outdone by Tiffany “Tits and Bum” Swann, so she thought swelling breasts for all of three minutes until she got bored and decided she’d have to be content with what God had given her. If they were good enough for the Sun, they couldn’t be the small bee stings her mind’s eye perceived them as. She put heavenly smelling soap in places she didn’t know she had and, wiping the steam from the bathroom mirror, looked at herself in her new underwear, white and bright against her now pale caramel-colored skin. She thought it most becoming, and indeed herself most becoming. Tiffany Swann may have the assets but Amy could go as au naturel as women ever did and shine with wit and charm instead.
Yes, there was no knocking her confidence tonight. In the wake of the Hello! fiasco, she’d learned that she was
not a hallowed babe. She would never be. Elegant? Yes. Well dressed? Yes. Lithe? Yes. She could think of a million adjectives but babe wasn’t one. To be a babe you had to have tiny plucked eyebrows and pneumatic boobs, tiny T-shirts and high heels. Amy was too tall for high heels for a start and she couldn’t laugh at men’s jokes if she didn’t find them funny. No matter how rich or gorgeous the man. So long, babe. Hello, Amy, she thought, winking in the mirror at herself. Tiffany Swann would have to do the gin-and-limelight party-queen bit tonight. Amy just wanted to see her man act his socks off and then take him home and get his kit off. Why couldn’t things have been this simple from the start, she thought, burying the buttock-clenchingly cringy moments of the last three months beneath her excitement at seeing Orlando again. She wondered if he’d shaved his beard off. She also wondered what Bill would think of her. He was coming in the car with them, Orlando had told her on the phone from LA, and was dying to meet her. She’d have preferred to have him in the car by herself, limousines were practically an invitation to licentious behavior on the backseat, and now she’d have to shake hands and make do with air kisses. Should she practice her vehicular exit, she wondered, thinking of all those terrible actressy pictures of exposed knickers and spilling breasts. The last thing she wanted was to be on the front of the newspapers in a crise d’underwear. Finally she was ready. She sat on the stairs of her flat and checked her toenail polish one more time, wondering what Orlando would wear and say tonight.
“Heaven, I’m in heaven,” she sang quietly until the doorbell rang and she pattered down to find the sleek ridiculously long limousine blocking her road. God, how embarrassing and naff, she thought, locking her door and trotting to the car. It’s obscene.
