The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

  With the help of a friendly Dutch family, they found their pitch, conveniently situated between the portaloos and the Kids’ Big Top. Nor was there any shortage of advice when it came to erecting Carol’s conspicuously up-market tent. Seeing them struggling, a young woman who introduced herself as Twink, left her partner breast-feeding their burly toddler on the step of their camper van, and came bounding over to lend a hand. With impressive dexterity she assembled the extendable poles, explained what went where, and returned, twenty minutes later, with reinforcements, to help them haul it aloft – the end result standing out like a butler at a barbecue. Again, however, nobody seemed to mind much, for the normal rules of society were here reversed – kudos accruing to the homespun and ramshackle, rather than the sleek and luxurious.

  All that remained was to open a celebratory beer and wait for Lou and Gavin to show.

  “I hope they’re okay,” Neil said, “the way Gav was driving…”

  “They’ll be fine,” Sara said, “they always are.”

  Neil nodded and took a swig from his bottle. He looked younger and more carefree already, Sara noticed. His stubble was coming in nicely. His hair had got past its newly-shorn “executive” look and had a bit of boyish curl to it. She didn’t even mind that he was wearing his hideous Hawaiian shirt – there were tragic dad-rockers as far as the eye could see – so for once, he had pitched it exactly right. She leaned across and kissed him on the lips, prompting an outbreak of faux-puking from Patrick and Caleb.

  “Why don’t you go and explore, guys?” said Neil. “Here,” he fished in his pocket and handed Caleb a ten-pound note, “Go get yourselves a lentil burger or something.” They set off across the field, Patrick at a skip, Caleb scuffing reluctantly behind.

  “Fancy giving Carol’s lilo a road test?” Neil jerked his head towards the open tent flap.

  “What… now?” Sara didn’t know whether to be pleased or appalled, but decided that a bit of spontaneity couldn’t hurt, and followed him inside.

  The lilo was off-puttingly bouncy and smelled strongly of rubber. She wished she had had a second beer. Although it was gloomy in their makeshift boudoir, it was still light outside and she could hear all the comings and goings of the families around them – Daisy being congratulated on the contents of her potty, Elijah refusing to eat wholewheat pasta. She raised her arms above her head, and allowed Neil to peel off her tee shirt, attempting a sultry look as he unhooked her bra and lowered it reverently on to the bed.

  “Nice tits,” he said, cupping one of them and looking her in the eye. This was weird. She leaned forward to kiss him, but before she could, he had lowered his head to her left breast and licked it with a long, wet sweep of his tongue. She gasped, more in surprise than pleasure. He paused, without looking up, and then licked the other side, as if evening up an ice cream. Soon he was licking it all over, with great thoroughness and apparent enjoyment. She closed her eyes and tried to surrender herself to the sensation. It felt quite sexy to be topless, in her jeans and hiking boots, but she was conscious that Neil was still fully dressed and that she ought perhaps to move things along. She made to unfasten his shirt, but he gently removed her hand and continued, not forcefully, but insistently, with his licking project. He switched to the other breast and she started to relax into it. Round and round he went, licking, licking, giving a wide berth, she started to notice, to the whole nipple area. It was nice now, very nice, but his refusal to take her nipple in his mouth was beginning to torment her and she realised that he was withholding this pleasure on purpose. She groaned and he broke off and looked into her face, smirking in acknowledgement of her need. Her nipple was stiff now, a gorgeous pagoda of nerve endings; larger than she had ever seen it. She thrust it towards his mouth, but he veered off towards its very edge, deliberately denying her. Now it was a game. He slowed down when she wanted him to speed up, pulled back when she wanted him to go all-out and every so often checked her expression to make sure his sadism was having the desired effect. Gone was his equal-opportunities policy on his ’n’ hers orgasm, in its place, this pervy open-ended, teenage lick-fest which seemed to be doing the job for both of them. By the time he moved on top of her, she was in a frenzy and he had to put his hand over her mouth to quieten the pleading whimpers which she was barely even aware she was making. She had heard of women coming just from having their breasts stimulated, but had not believed it possible. And in fact, if the tip of his cock hadn’t nudged her clitoris so decisively on the way in, she still might not have got there, but it did and she did.

  “Well,” she said afterwards.

  “Well.”

  He dredged a screwed-up tissue from the pocket of his jeans and handed it to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, manoeuvring it between her legs. It wouldn’t do to return Carol’s airbed with an unsavoury stain.

  “Go, you,” she said, stretching out complacently, arms folded above her head.

  “Go, me,” he agreed, leaning out of the compartment to pull a toilet roll from the nearby rucksack.

  “Should’ve got you to a festival sooner.”

  “Yep.” He seemed a little sheepish, now, about the scale of his achievement.

  He clambered out of the sleeping area and let the flap fall back across the opening.

  “Going for a slash,” he said. She heard him fasten his belt and put on his shoes. She knew those shoes – the lace on the left one had snapped and would only do up halfway. She listened now, as he shush-slap, shush-slapped away.

  Sara lay in her cubicle, in a state of post-coital languor, her head turned sideways on the too-bouncy pillow. She plucked at a loose rubberised thread on the lilo’s edge and eavesdropped on the conversations going on outside, adults and children teasing one another, remonstrating, negotiating. All happy families were alike, someone had said, and by implication, boring. Not hers though, not this weekend. How good it was it to be out of their comfort zone, out of their rut. Getting it on under canvas – in broad daylight, if you please. For this, and much else, they had Gavin and Lou to thank. She remembered how small she had felt at their housewarming party, how peripheral. It was different now. It was OK that the Humber had left them for dead on a country lane. It was OK that Lou and Gav had still not arrived, nor sent any word. It was even OK (just about) that Lou had dumped the kids on her and breezed off to France last month. It was OK, because Lou admired Sara’s writing and Gavin just “got” her. It was OK because they had both taken Neil to their hearts. It was OK because the four of them could riff off each other until two a.m. on a weeknight, and still have a spring in their step the next day. For the first time, on this May afternoon, with her husband’s semen coagulating on her inner thigh and the scent of cannabis drifting in the air, she felt that their friendship was where she wanted it to be.

  18

  It was a child’s voice in Sara’s dream.

  “There it is, Mummy, the blue one.”

  She was in a school cloakroom. A mother and child were looking for a coat on the other side of the rails. She could only see their legs – she wanted to tell the mother that they were making a mistake. The coat didn’t belong to the little girl, it belonged to her but when she opened her mouth to speak, no sound came out. The impotent croak of her own voice woke her and she realised that the girl in her dream was Zuley. It was Zuley’s voice she could hear now; their tent that was blue. She scrambled out of her sleeping compartment.

  “Bloody hell, that’s not a tent, it’s a palace!” Gav bellowed. She had one leg in and one out of her jeans, when the outer zip whizzed open. She clamped an arm across her bosoms and froze, but it was Lou’s face that loomed through the gap.

  “Oops, sorry!” Sara felt Lou’s gaze travel quickly over her naked torso before making eye contact again.

  “’S okay,” said Sara, “I was having a nap. Must be the country air.”

  “Not what I heard,” smirked Lou. She was wearing vermilion lipstick and a kerchief around her hair – a look, Sara thou
ght wistfully, that only Lou could really pull off.

  “Take your time,” said Lou, “Neil’s just giving us a hand with the tent. We’re way up at the back, near that telegraph pole. Come join us for a beer when you’re ready.”

  Sara scooped up her bra from where Neil had thrown it, and put it back on. At first, she thought it must have attracted some shreds of leaf matter from the floor of the tent because as soon as she fastened it, it began to chafe her already overstimulated breasts. But then she realised that her jeans felt tight and starchy too, as if fresh from the wash, which they weren’t. She wriggled and flexed, but couldn’t quite rid herself of the sensation, which, in any case, had a certain masochistic pleasure to it. She’d have put it down to hormones, except that Neil’s idiosyncratic foreplay had made her think he, too, must be subject to some atmospheric juju – a nearby ley line, perhaps or an alignment of the stars. Smiling to herself at the recollection, she perched a magnifying mirror on the extendable flap of Carol’s camping stove and squatted down in front of it with her make-up bag. She traced a little lip-gloss over her mouth with her third finger and gazed pensively at her reflection. The half-light of the tent was flattering. Gone was the suburban frau who could only meet the world from behind a protective layer of Laura Mercier. In her place, a dryad, lit from within by the spirit of the woods. She had been about to apply some mascara, but liking what she saw, she replaced the wand in its tube, tossed it back in the bag and zipped it up. There was such a thing as gilding the lily.

  It was quite a trek to find Gavin and Lou. Sara had automatically assumed that the two families would have adjacent pitches and struggled now to quell a pang of annoyance that their friends’ late arrival had resulted in this less than ideal outcome. She had been pleased, initially, that she and Neil were close to the hub of the festival – a short walk from the main stage, handy for the toilets. But she couldn’t help thinking now that Gav and Lou’s pitch, with its elevated position and panoramic views, far from the hurly-burly and the food smells, was in many ways more desirable. There was more shade – oak trees dotted the gently sloping hillside – and the grass up here was still verdant and thick with clover, not trodden and muddy as it was down below. She stopped for a moment, and shading her eyes with her hand, surveyed the valley. A faint evening mist had turned the sky milky and given a slightly sinister purple cast to the motley colony of tents below. Penants fluttered, smoke drifted on the breeze, lanterns were starting to be lit. Somewhere, a Celtic folk band was tuning up. It was as though some elvish tribe with a taste for posh burgers and inflatables had crept up from middle earth to stake its claim on this idyllic corner of Devon.

  She’d have picked Gavin and Lou’s tent from yards away, for its flamboyant style and dubious practicality, even if the three of them had not been lolling on the rug in front of it, surrounded by empty beer bottles.

  “Whoa!” she said. “Party Central.”

  “Hi.” Lou managed a lazy smile, Neil moved over and made space for her on the rug. It was left to Gav to scramble to his feet and greet her properly with an enthusiastic bear hug. Breathing in his scent of beer and tobacco and sweat, she felt as if someone had gathered up her internal organs and pitched them off a cliff. She sat down cross-legged and Neil handed her a beer.

  “Where are the kids?” she asked.

  “The boys took Zuley to play on the trampolines,” Lou replied.

  “Oh that’s nice,” Sara said, worriedly scanning the horizon.

  “Relax,” Lou said, patting her hand, “this festival’s one big kibbutz. They literally cannot come to any harm. Aren’t you hot?” she added, eyeing Sara’s outfit.

  “It was supposed to rain,” said Sara, defensively. She cast a sideways glance at Lou – her vintage floral tea dress, her slender ankles, her turquoise toenails. Everyone, Sara now saw, had made a sartorial nod to the festival spirit – Gav in his satirical Stetson, even Neil, in his silly shirt. Only she, in jeans, T-shirt and stout footwear, her face scrubbed free of make-up, looked like a conscript to a feminist boot camp.

  Sara took a swig of beer and looked around. To their right, an innocuous dome tent, to their left a teepee from which could now be heard a flurry of muffled thumps, accompanied by a series of squeals, ascending in pitch.

  “I think Pocahontas is getting some,” said Gavin drolly, jerking his head towards it.

  “Oh God,” Lou said, rolling her eyes, “I hope they’re not going to be at it all night.”

  “Upstaging you two, you mean?” Neil smirked.

  “Oh…. aha…” objected Lou in mock outrage, “you can talk!”

  Sara felt the beginnings of a blush prickle her neck. “Some of us are capable of restraint, aren’t we, Gav?” Lou went on, with mock sanctimony.

  “Going to have to be, aren’t we, with the kids in the next compartment?” Gav said. “Mind you,” he added, walking two fingers up the hem of Lou’s dress, “I always fancied myself as a bit of a stealth bomber.” Lou stopped his progress with a school ma’am-ish slap and Sara looked away, her face stained a vivid red with envy and arousal.

  “So,” she said, when she felt enough time had elapsed, “anyone fancy catching the Jeremiahs later?”

  “Oh God,” said Gavin, frowning, “I suppose we should.”

  “They’re pretty good, aren’t they?” said Neil.

  “Caleb certainly thinks so,” said Sara. This was an understatement. They were the only act at Lush in whom he’d shown any interest at all. If she couldn’t get Caleb to The Jeremiahs’ set, she might as well abandon any pretence at all of this weekend being about the kids.

  “Yeah, Dash likes them too,” Gavin reached for his dope, “but people, we’re grown-ups.”

  “They’re great musicians,” said Neil, defensively. He had just downloaded their second album.

  “Oh sure,” agreed Gav, “but a bit folk-lite, don’t you think? I mean, if you like that vibe, why wouldn’t you go for the real thing – Jeff Buckley, Tim Hardin; Flatt and Scruggs, for that matter?”

  “Aren’t they all dead?” said Neil.

  “Yeah, good point,” Gav laughed. “Only thing is, if we go, I’ll feel like we have to go backstage…” He pulled a world-weary face.

  “Do you know them?” Sara pricked up her ears.

  “Their manager,” said Lou, “lovely guy, lived upstairs when we were in Soho. Bit of a waster, in those days.”

  “Even more of a waster now, I bet,” said Gav, “all that money sloshing around. You know their first album went platinum?”

  Sara watched Gavin’s nicotine-stained fingers crumble a generous portion of hash onto a wodge of tobacco and tamp it expertly along the length of a Rizla.

  “I don’t mind, either way,” she lied, feeling like Judas – Caleb would kill for a chance to meet the band. She scratched unhappily at the label on her bottle of beer.

  “Let’s keep our options open anyway,” said Neil, standing up. “I’ll make a start on the barbie. Did you guys remember the briquettes?”

  Lou winced and rolled her eyes. “Still in the boot,” she said.

  “Here you go, big man,” said Gavin, chucking Neil his car keys. Neil caught them nonchalantly and started to shamble away.

  “Gav!” protested Lou, laughing.

  “What?” Gav seemed bewildered.

  Lou gave him an exasperated frown and scrambled to her feet.

  “Hang on, Neil,” she called, “I’ll come with you.”

  Any sense of grievance Sara may have felt on her husband’s behalf was more than made up for by the unexpected bonus of time alone with Gavin.

  “Slacker!” she said when Neil and Lou had gone, her tone more admiring than reproachful.

  He slid a roach expertly into the end of the joint, smoothed his fingers lovingly along its length and then handed it to her.

  “I’ll be wrecked,” she warned him, raising it to her lips.

  “You only live once,” he countered, touching a match to its end. She gave it a tentat
ive toke. It was too early in the evening, and things were getting too interesting to jeopardise it all by getting off her tits. Turning her head away, she pretended to take a second draw, then, nodding in tacit appreciation, handed it back. Gavin had no such qualms, whittling the joint down to half its length, with one practised inhalation. He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, then, when Sara thought it had gone forever, exhaled the smoke in an insolent plume. They sat quietly for a while, Gav smoking, Sara studying the festival programme. At his request, she listed the other bands she was looking forward to seeing, and he disparaged them gently until she handed him the leaflet and demanded to know if there was a single act that was cool enough for him. He studied the line-up, and shook his head. Laughing exasperatedly, she wrenched up a handful of grass and threw it at him, but he ducked and it showered the back of his neck.

  “Oh, shit!” she said, trying to flick it away, but succeeding only in driving it further down the back of his shirt. She knelt up and fished around for a bit, withdrawing her hand with an awkward laugh when she realised that her incursion had become a little too intimate.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” he replied. Her hand was damp with his sweat. She sat back on her haunches. A new silence fell.

  Drawing his knees into the crooks of his arms, Gavin sat forward like an eager boy scout and regarded her with interest.

  “You’re a funny one, Sara,” he said. His eyes were glazed, but he seemed sincere.

  “Am I?” Sara said warily. He didn’t expand on this assertion, but continued to stare at her in a manner which was as flattering as it was disconcerting. For something to do, she upended her beer bottle onto her tongue, liberating the last trickle. She was aware that he was watching her do this and that it was having the desired effect.

  “You’ve grown on me.” His voice was quiet, even a little hoarse.

  “Ha!” she said.

  “Oh, no, don’t get me wrong. I always liked you.” He jabbed her knee, reproachfully. “I just didn’t see you.”