For the first time she begins to feel ashamed and the sensation courses through her like high tide at the Thames Barrier. She sees her expression collapse into familiar knackered patterns. But she gets a grip on herself and somehow transforms the feeling into one of intoxication. I will not be ashamed, she thinks. I'm past shame, I'm too old for shame, I know too much for shame.
She takes Tariq's bathrobe off the back of the door and wraps herself up in it. She ties it at the waist and looks at herself in the mirror again. It hangs off her like ill-fitting fancy dress. Very sexy. She undoes the knot, takes off the robe and drops it in a crumpled heap on the floor. Although she doesn't care about being sexy, she does want to be naked. The mid-afternoon hasn't seen her fanny since Tommy was born and that day she'd had a midwife gazing up her and Tariq squeezing her hand and trying not to look like he was trying not to look. She shrugs for her own benefit. Fuck it, she thinks and the thought catches her. She hardly ever uses that word, not even in her head. ‘Fuck it,’ she murmurs aloud.
She goes back into the bedroom. Murray is sitting on the edge of the bed but he isn't looking at her. He's craning his neck all the way round over his left shoulder. He looks like he's trying to see his own bum. Side on, his expression looks like one of pained concentration.
She stares at him dispassionately and absorbs all the details she'd had no time for during their frenzied sex. He is lean and his muscles are well-defined in a young-man sort of way. Young man. Yes, that's it. Looking at his bare chest and the smooth contours of his stomach, you'd never put him around thirty. More like a decade younger; twenty-one or twenty-two. He's definitely buff, if you like that sort of thing. But Emma never has. She's always been into something a bit more solid (physically anyway) with manly imperfections and unlikely tufts of hair and an imposing bulk.
She is studying Murray's complexion. She realizes that, apart from Tariq, this is the first naked man she's seen for years and years. There is something strange about Murray's colouring. She knows that he's probably some confused racial mixture but, in this light, he looks more grey than anything else; so different from Tariq's burnished copper. Stranger still is the remarkable consistency of his skin tone. Every inch of him looks exactly the same grey as every other with no blotches, blemishes, scars or shadows. He looks like he's been lovingly painted with an undercoat and never quite finished off.
Her gaze moves to his penis, which is limp between his legs. For a moment she remembers her orgasm and she shivers like a sapling in the breeze, like a recently cured virgin. But she is not a virgin but a married woman with a kid. And besides, it had been fun but nothing special and she'd never been the type of woman who had to struggle to climax. Not with Tariq anyway. Not when they'd been having sex anyway.
She considers for a moment. Certainly she's never felt so detached from her body during sex as she did today. It was a ‘push the right button, tweak the right knob’ kind of fuck. Fuck. There's that word again. Fuck it.
She is smiling. She is staring at Murray's penis and smiling and she tries not to but she can't help herself. She decides there should be a rule for women; that they should not be allowed to look at a dick unless 1.) They're horny; 2.) It's hard.
There's something ridiculous about a flaccid dick, she thinks. It looks cumbersome, awkward and slightly dishevelled. Like an old man. Isn't that what some blokes call it? Their old man? She has never thought so before but right now she can't entertain a better description. Her imagination is running wild. She pictures Murray's father or grandfather, say, passing on his penis in a bizarre initiation ritual: ‘Here you are, my son. This dick has served me well and I expect you to treat it with the respect it deserves. Wash it daily, stick it nowhere you wouldn't stick your tongue and indulge no more than once a week off the wrist.’
She remembers Tariq telling her that nobody even knew if Murray had a family and she finds herself wondering where his dick came from then. Christ. Her imagination really is running wild. Fuck. It must be this bizarre elation she's feeling, this liberation that seems to have everything and nothing to do with what she's just done with one of her husband's oldest friends. Again she giggles and, finally, Murray turns to look up at her.
His expression isn't far from a wince but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with her amusement. ‘What's so funny?’
‘Your penis.’
‘Right,’ Murray nods. ‘Thanks.’
‘Was it your father's or your grandfather's?’
He takes this in his stride. ‘Neither. This is one I picked up on the ashram. Swapped it for a pair of trainers.’
Emma is laughing now and she feels slightly stoned, like she used to get when she smoked weed with Tariq when they first met, six years ago. Six years ago? It feels like another lifetime. She'd love some weed now. Fuck yeah.
She stops laughing when she sees that shadow of pain return to Murray's face. He cocks his neck first one way and then the other and he rolls his shoulders a couple of times.
‘What's the matter?’
‘It's my back,’ he says. ‘Think you scratched me, china. Hurts like shit.’
‘Really? Let me have a look.’
Emma approaches him and he turns round and flops on to the bed on his front. She looks at his back. ‘Jesus Christ!’
‘What?’
‘How did that happen?’
There is a single laceration on Murray's back, about three inches long, just below the left shoulderblade. But it looks nothing like a passion scar, more like he's been impaled upon something. It is deep and wide, raised a little on each side, with fresh blood bubbling in the canyon. Worst of all, it looks septic. The flesh around it is an angry red and there are traces of grey pus at the top end.
‘I can't have done that.’
‘Done what?’
‘This. It's huge. Deep, too.’
She sits astride Murray's buttocks and examines it gingerly but he recoils from her touch. In spite of herself, she's disgusted. She can't understand why. She's never been squeamish. Then she realizes that it's not the wound that's disgusting her at all but the position she's in with the insides of her calves pressing against Murray's thighs and her crotch, still damp, pressing into the small of his back. Forget infidelity, there's an intimacy to this that is utterly inappropriate and makes her feel uncomfortable. Sex can just be sex (not always, but it can be). But this kind of easy nakedness? It feels intrusive, disrespectful to Tariq (and that, she tells herself, was never the intention).
She gets off Murray and stands back. She pushes her hair off her face and she's sure it feels thicker. Yes. Thicker and softer.
‘What's the diagnosis, Dr Emma?’ Murray has his face turned to one side and his eyes are closed.
‘You stay there,’ she says. ‘I'm just going to find some antiseptic and cotton wool.’
She leaves the bedroom door open to allow the air to circulate and heads down to the kitchen, where the medical supplies are kept. She takes out the Tupperware box from the cupboard to the left of the hob and, as she begins to rummage through it, sitting at the table, she suddenly finds herself enveloped by a soft blanket of nostalgia. She can remember putting this first-aid kit together a couple of weeks before Tommy was born. She can remember how she'd felt at the time: bored and frustrated and overripe like a plum that's about to split. So she'd decided to do useful things and this was one of them and she'd gone to Boots to buy swabs and bandages and plasters and safety pins and antiseptic and witch-hazel and things like that. She'd drawn a red cross on the lid in thick marker pen. Because a proper family should have a proper first-aid kit, she'd thought.
She smiles to herself. She can't remember touching this box since the day she assembled it. So the Khan family's first-aid kit is making its debut treating Mummy's first infidelity. She holds the smile. She refuses to feel ashamed because that's a single step from feeling disappointed in herself which is itself neighbourly to disappointment with her lot. And she knows she's had quite enough of that.
When your marriage is stretched to breaking point by forces beyond its participants, you have to take extreme measures. This is what she tells herself. And since her marriage had been stripped of sex and passion and value and valuing, she'd needed to find those things elsewhere. She admits that, before sleeping with Murray, she'd had no idea how she would feel afterwards. But now that she's done it, she is unsurprised by her reaction. She sees now that she wasn't looking for love or affection or anything so nebulous. She sees now that she can still get all that from her husband. She sees now that this was just an itch that needed to be scratched. It was, she thinks, like a bungee jump; one of those things that a sane person will do once but only the reckless repeat. She sees now with astonishing clarity how Tariq has been emasculated by the twin burdens of fatherhood and the collapse of his business and she sees the subsequent vicious circles of drink and bills and her own frustrations. She sees now how she's been defeminized in the past year.
Until now, any intuition of these things has been drowned out by recriminations and hidden behind accusing fingers. But the visceral nature of the sex she's just had seems to have objectified the facts beyond the selfish reach of her or Tariq's opinion. How could she restore her husband's manhood when she felt like less than a woman? She couldn't. So she has been unfaithful with one of his oldest friends but she did it for Tariq. Her smile is wide and knowing. She'll never be able to tell him, of course, but she has no regrets.
She is idly peeling price stickers off the bandages and cotton wool. She sticks them to the tips of her fingers until she has five sticky talons on her left hand. She splays her fingers and examines them like a woman in a beauty salon.
If she were to regret anything (which she won't), it would be the amount she confided in Murray before the act. She's not sure why she did this. It's not like he pushed her so she assumes she must have felt some kind of compulsion to justify herself.
She told him how she met Tariq, working at Phillips some six years before; how she was a personal assistant in business development and he was the bright spark among the graduate trainees. She recalled proudly how the top brass had talked about him, how she'd overheard the grey suits pointing him out to each other across the canteen and saying things like, ‘See that young chap? Typical Asian: ambitious and capable. He's the future. Have your job before you know it.’ Things like that.
She told Murray how they'd got together after works drinks on a Friday in a wine bar off Tottenham Court Road.
She told him how the other PAs had got drunk on lime-topped pints, flirted with the middle-aged middle management and danced to seventies disco before skidding into sticky heaps of laddered tights, lager spills and lechery. But she'd had eyes only for Tariq, blown away by his confidence and drive. She said he'd been one of those guys who'd make it, no two ways about it, and it wasn't just her who thought so.
Tariq had been making plans even then, looking around for opportunities and investigating the ins and outs of financing. The future of new technologies? He'd seen it right from the start. It wasn't like he'd been interested in the developments themselves, just the business potential they offered. ‘It's like the Wild West,’ he used to say. ‘It's like the gold rush and the fastest off the blocks is going to get very rich.’
She told this to Murray and he smiled so she protested, ‘But he was right, you know? He knew what he was talking about.’
It had been four years before Tariq found a project that suited. A nineteen-year-old wunderkind at Redhill Research approached him with a clunky prototype application that predicted the movement of crowds outside a football stadium. Tariq had seen the possibilities at once and it was less than three months before he'd struck the necessary deal to quit Phillips and set up TEK Systems from offices on Charlotte Street, the up-and-coming area north of Soho where the bright sparks of IT wore ironic T-shirts and baggy jeans and lunched on hummus and tabbuleh in cheap Moroccan cafés.
Tariq had borrowed heavily against the house and Emma had queried that. But he just laughed and shook his head and said, ‘The less outside investment, the more money we'll make. As simple as that. TEK Systems. Tariq and Emma Khan. Think about it.’ He was so sure of himself.
When Emma told Murray this, he hardly seemed to listen and she became quite strident. ‘You don't understand. We had all the major players knocking on our door to buy in to our product. Even up to, like, a year ago. It was so exciting. We were going to be rich. I mean, it's not like it matters. But that's the truth of it. Definitely.’
‘And then?’
‘And then tech stocks went into freefall.’
Murray shrugged. ‘Guess that's life, china,’ he said.
What kind of an attitude was that? Hadn't he understood?
She began to harangue him and it was then that she let slip all the little intimacies that now made her blush at the memory. It probably wasn't stuff he hadn't known or couldn't have guessed but that was hardly the point. She told him how Tariq had been so overworked and having a baby hadn't helped, had it? She told him about the drinking. She told him about the lack of sex. She told him how Tariq's fatalism was now as immutable as his confidence had once been. ‘It's not about money,’ she said. ‘It's about who he is, how he thinks about himself. With a bit of cash, we could buy our way out of the personal debts at least and he could find another job, start again. But we can't even afford that so he has to keep going. We could lose the house but even that's not the point. Think about what it would do to him. He's broken, Murray. Broken.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘We…’ she began and she smiled at Murray coyly; sexily, perhaps. ‘We're going to rob a bank, aren't we?’
‘Yeah?’
‘That's what you said. The one in Putney. It was your idea.’
‘No.’ Murray shook his head and his eyes were narrow; calculating, she thought. ‘No. It was your idea.’
They moved to the bedroom soon after that.
Emma stands up. She's no longer smiling. She picks up the sticky bandage, cotton wool and antiseptic and heads for the door. At the bottom of the stairs, she pauses and heaves a deep breath. So I'd fuck another man for Tariq, she thinks. I'd even rob a fucking bank for him. Rob a fucking bank for him. The words sound ridiculous, even in her head, and the muscles in her cheeks begin to quiver and there are goosebumps on her neck. She'll need to repeat them again and again to make them sound plausible. For him. She's strong enough to be honest with herself and she knows that might not be the truth of it. She shakes her head. She's not sure. But does the truth actually matter as long as the story works?
In the bedroom, she finds Murray still lying on his front and his eyes are still closed. But she smiles anyway. She doesn't understand why. Maybe she can't help herself or maybe she just feels like she should.
He says, ‘I wondered where you'd got to, china.’
But she just chuckles, bends over him and begins to softly rub the antiseptic cream around the fringes of the wound. She still doesn't know how on earth she could have cut him like this. Without the price stickers, her nails are short and neat. Murray must have skin like tissue.
As she works, the muscles of his back tense beneath her touch. ‘Be a brave boy,’ she says. She cuts a length of cotton wool and then fastens it across the wound with four strips of sticky bandage. ‘There you go.’
Murray turns to
face her and she immediately looks away. She doesn't want to see his nakedness any more but she can't help glancing back at him. His expression is blank. Or unreadable at least. ‘Again, china?’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Do you want to go again?’
‘I don't understand.’
‘Sex.’
‘No,’ she says sharply. And then, ‘I mean, do you?’
Murray has started laughing. She's not sure what he's laughing at – it could be her or it could be himself – but she joins in anyway. He reaches for his boxers and jeans. When he pulls on his sweatshirt, his expression twists as the material tugs at her makeshift bandage.
‘You all right?’ she asks.
‘Fine. Yeah. Fine.’
The baby monitor crackles into life again. This time Tommy's definitely woken up and Emma instinctively gets to her feet. She realizes she's still naked. She likes that.
‘I guess I'd better go,’ he says.
‘Right.’
He kisses her on the forehead and, just for a moment, she wishes he would stay and she finds herself asking him, ‘Have you ever done this before?’ Just to keep him close.
‘Done what?’
‘You know… with one of your friends'…’
Murray steps back and examines her, his expression a mixture of hurt and curiosity. ‘What kind of man do you think I am?’ he asks.
‘I don't know.’ She shakes her head. ‘Sorry.’
Tommy is crying insistently now and Emma finds herself looking towards the door. But she knows she has to ask him one more question, to make sure they understand each other. It's sticking in her throat. ‘We are going to…’
‘Going to what?’
‘Do the bank, aren't we? I mean, we've got to.’
‘Why are you asking me?’
The London Pigeon Wars Page 16
