by Neil Cross
'All the local kids know it. You know about it way before you get to come down here. It's like lovers' lane or something. In the summer, anyway.'
'Cool,' said Bob. 'So, you've been here before?'
'Once or twice.' She glanced at Nathan. 'Except the big kids, they tell the younger ones that, you know, it's haunted. By a lady in white.'
Bob grinned in the rear-view mirror. 'Is there a river close by?'
'There's kind of a stream. A brook or something.'
'There's always running water. Near haunted lanes. Supposedly haunted.'
'Why's that?'
'Who knows? Geothermic forces or whatever.'
Nathan said, 'Don't get him started.'
Bob pulled the car to the side of the road. Its nearside tyres were caked in leaf mould and humus. He turned on the CD player. Charlie Parker.
Nathan fished out the remaining cocaine. Bob turned on the interior light. They were bathed in its sickly, intimate glow. Nathan cut out some squat, fat lines on the CD case. He snorted first and passed the CD case to Elise. As she brought it to her nose, Bob and Nathan looked at her, then at each other. She passed the CD case to Bob, who propped it on the steering wheel.
Elise wiped at her nose. The action caused her T-shirt to lift above her navel. She'd left the overcoat back at the party.
Bob pressed himself deep into the driver's seat.
'Christ.'
He turned off the interior light. For a few seconds the darkness was absolute. A voice in the blackness, Elise said, 'I like nights like this. When you don't plan anything, but it all seems to happen.'
Bob swivelled in the driving seat, to face them. He said, 'Look. You two. I feel bad. I feel like I'm ruining the night for you - walking in on you. Y'know. The way I did.'
Elise made a slapping motion at him and said, 'No, your timing wasn't great.' Then she drawled his name in a bad American accent: Bahb.
Nathan tried to laugh, and Bob grinned, resting his big jaw on the headrest.
'So why don't you go ahead and finish what you started ?'
Elise slapped at him again. 'What are you like'
Bob met her eyes and held them.
'If it was possible, I'd go for a walk. But the lane is dark and cold and, I have to say, a bit creepy. And even if I were to go out there, you'd be so tense about me coming back at the wrong time, you wouldn't relax. But you might never see each other again. It seems such a shame. So listen. I'll sit back and close my eyes and I'll turn up the music. And you two can . . . you know.'
She laughed again, loud in the darkness, and said, 'You're sick.'
Elise looked at Nathan. Then she looked at Bob.
'You'd watch!
'I'll try not to.'
'You'll listen!
'Then keep the noise down.'
"I can't.
'Can't? Or won't? Are you having bourgeois reservations?'
She went to speak, but then she guffawed and slapped Bob's shoulder again. She turned to Nathan. 'Do you want to?'
'Do you ?'
'Doyou? Do you have a problem with it?'
'With what?'
'With Bob. Being here.'
'No.'
Suddenly nobody was smiling.
Elise took off her T-shirt.
'Bob, you're looking.'
'I'll stop in a moment.'
'You'd better.'
Nathan leaned forward. Her tongue was slower this time. She seemed very aroused. He knew it was the booze and cocaine and the evening's sense of adventure. She tasted of wine and cigarettes. Her hand tugged at his shirt, found flesh. He kissed her long neck. He struggled from his jacket. She kissed his throat, his chest, helped him from his shirt. In his rush, he lost a couple of buttons. She fumbled at his fly. His cock, when she freed it, was springy as a cosh but cold to the core. She popped it into her mouth. The warmth was so abrupt that he jerked back, as if about to fall. Then he forced himself away from her and fumbled with her skirt. She lifted her arse to help him, wriggling at the waist, and when she muttered 'Bob, you're still watching' there was no real protest left in it.
Nathan was transfixed by the imprint of elastic in her bare flesh, and the shadow cast by her sharp hips, by the movement of her small, white breasts as she prepared herself for him. She bit his shoulder when he entered, and gasped. She pressed her feet, still in Adidas trainers, against the back of the front passenger seat. She was so warm. She wrapped her ankles around him and murmured something in his ear, he didn't know what. Her eyes were open.
It didn't last long. When Nathan tensed in orgasm, teeth gritted and neck corded, she hissed a single word through her teeth.
Bob's gaze, solemn and amused, was heavy on Nathan's back as Elise eased him from inside her. Nathan flopped, gasping, on the seat next to her. He was naked from the waist up and his trousers were gathered round his ankles. He was beginning to detumesce. Naked except for her Adidas, Elise sat laughing and gasping. Beads of Nathan's jism glinted on her pubic hair.
She said 'Oh, God' and brushed at her naked thighs as if they itched.
She and Nathan made eye contact. She squeezed his softening dick with affectionate good humour.
He said, 'I know. I'm sorry. Give me a minute.'
'But first -- more drugs, I think.'
'But what about Bob?' said Bob.
Elise leaned forward and slapped his shoulder again.
'Don't be such an old perv.'
'But I'm very aroused.'
'Bob,' she said.
On her knees, leaning on the front seats, she brushed back her fringe.
'Look, I like you. I really do. But I can't.'
'Can't? Won't?'
'Don't!
'Aha. Don't. Don't implies that class values are struggling with more basic desires. Did you come, just now?'
Elise laughed at Bob's audacity.
'No.'
'Would you like to?'
Quick as a fish, Bob's hand darted between her legs. He slipped two fingers inside her. Elise flinched.
'You cheeky bastard.'
She said it three times. Each time it sounded more like a compliment.
She moved her narrow hips in a figure of eight.
Nathan met Bob's eye. Bob's eyes were blank.
'Nathan won't mind, will you, Nathan?'
Nathan was becoming aroused again. But he pulled up his trousers and said, 'Of course not.'
Bob said, 'Mate. I think we'd better swap places.'
Elise lay back in the seat.
'I'm going to regret this in the morning.'
'I promise you,' said Bob. 'You won't.'
Nathan gathered his clothes, his jacket and shirt. They were damp.
Big and intent, Bob began to climb on to the back seat. Nathan opened the door and edged out, his shirt and jacket bundled in his arms.
Elise reached out for him as he left. She grabbed his wrist and squeezed, as one might at the apex of a rollercoaster. He squeezed back, he hoped encouragingly, and let go.
There was a blast of cold, December air. Nathan hurried into his clothes. His hands fumbled at the buttons.
Inside the car, Elise said, 'Oh my God..'
The Volvo lurched on its springs.
Nathan decided to get in the front seat and watch. But first he needed to piss. He walked behind the car. It was difficult to piss in the freezing cold, especially with a growing erection -- and the noises she made, the grunts and yelps. It took a long time and when it came, the wind whipped at the pale stream and scattered it over the rear windscreen of the Volvo.
Accompanying the car's increasingly violent movement, he could hear muffled, profane voices. Elise's voice rising in pitch and urgency, calling alternately on God and Jesus. A kind of bitten-back scream.
Nathan wanted to make her scream like that. Bob's voice was lower and insistent. Nathan wondered what she looked like, locking her white legs around his broad back. He stopped pissing and zipped himself up, not without difficulty. He opened the fr
ont passenger door and got inside. It was warm, and musky like a bedroom, undercut with cigarettes and leather upholstery.
By then, the car must have stopped rocking on its springs. Because when Nathan slammed the door and turned in his seat, Elise was already dead.
Nathan never seen a dead person before, but he knew it immediately.
Something had left her - whatever it was that a few moments before had made this fresh cadaver a girl named Elise.
A flock of starlings erupted in Nathan's chest.
Bob was sitting on the back seat - shirt-tails askew, naked from the waist down. His horse's cock hung thick and wet and glinting. Elise lay naked and almost face down, her feet on his lap.
Nathan stared at her.
There was only the sound of Bob's breathing. Elise's feet twitched.
An old joke, filthy, rose unbidden and popped on the surface of Nathan's mind - Now you're fucked. He shook it away.
He said: 'What the fuck have you done?'
His voice was girlish, and hearing it -- hearing the rise of panic made him still more afraid.
Elise's Adidas quivered at Bob's thigh. Bob stared at it, then shoved her legs from his naked lap. She let out an extended exhalation, like a post-coital sigh.
Nathan's sphincter loosened.
Bob said, 'She cramped. Down there. You know. I couldn't. I couldn't get it out.'
Nathan vomited into his mouth. He threw open the passenger door and let the vomit slap on to the road. He hacked up for a long time.
Then he ran away.
He ran and ran. His arms pumped. He felt no friction or resistance.
His breath came in hot and cold rasps. There were only the slow-shifting trees to the side of him, twisted oak and silvery ash, the twinkling sky above him, the pounding of his feet, a white cloud of breath.
He slowed to a wavering jog and then to a halt. The exertion caught him and he vomited again. He stood holding his knees.
Branches shifted in his peripheral vision. He leaned against a tree. He spat.
He didn't know if he'd run towards the road or away from it. But now he imagined himself, breathless and drunk and hopelessly wired - mad-eyed, unkempt - somehow managing to flag down a passing car. What would he say?
What would he say to Sara?
He stood there, getting his breath back. Then he trudged back towards Bob's car.
It took a while. He began to wonder if Bob had gone. Perhaps he'd dumped Elise by the side of the lane and had left Nathan alone with her, here in the woods. Then the white Volvo began to emerge from the night.
Nathan walked up to it. He opened the door and sat down.
Bob was still there, on the back seat. He didn't seem to have
moved, except to have pulled his trousers up. His belt lay unbuckled in his lap and his flies were unzipped.
He said, 'I think she had a fit.'
Nathan wanted to kill him: to cave in his skull with a tyre lever.
Then he'd make his way back to the party. He'd find Sara: he'd tell her everything was all right, and they'd go home. And in the pearly grey, late-winter dawn he'd immerse himself in the cotton-fresh duvet and wake late in the bright December morning and he'd go and get the newspapers, and a bacon sandwich for them both. And they'd eat the sandwiches and read the newspapers and drink tea and watch the EastEnders omnibus, and everything would be all right. He wished so ferociously never to have come to this dark lane with this man and this girl, that it seemed impossible the wish would not come true.
He said, 'We have to call an ambulance. Right now. Or they'll think--'
Bob pushed aside the hair which overhung his bloated cherub's face. 'They'll think what?'
'Christ. Surely not. She had a fit!
'While I was fucking her. I don't know what happened. Maybe she had a weak heart. Maybe it was the cocaine.'
Nathan gagged, and this time brought up only stomach acid. 'I can't believe this is happening.'
'We weren't to know.'
'But it wasn't my fault.'
'We don't know that. Not for sure. What if it was the drugs? What if you supplied her with the drugs that killed her?'
'Oh, Christ. What are we going to do?'
'We put her in the boot. Then we go back to the party.'
Nathan put his head in his hands and began to groan.
'I'll say I found you,' said Bob, looking up now. 'I'll say I found you by the side of the road. You'd seen Sara dancing with what's his name, Mark. Flirting with him, whatever. You were drunk and pissed off. You were trying to walk into the village, to catch a minicab home. You didn't realize how far it was, or how cold. I'm on my way home. I see you, I pull over. We're parked at the side of the road, talking about Sara, love and the meaning of life. All right? I talk you into going back, saying sorry to her. So now we go back. We stay at the party for half an hour, and then you have to make sure absolutely make sure -- that you have an argument with Sara, because you're going to storm out and everyone is going to see you. I'll follow on. I'll say I'm driving you home. And then we'll drive back here.
And get rid of her.'
Nathan rode a swell of panic, a surge like surf, and he rode it down again.
'I can't do that.'
'You have to.'
"I can't.
'Do you have any better ideas?'
'I'm not thinking straight. I'm fucked. I've had too much coke.'
'You haven't got time to think straight. We have to get back to the party. We have to confuse the timeline.'
'What timeline?'
'What time we were at the party, and what time she was. Nobody saw you go in there together, nobody saw her leave with you. So we need to be back at that party. And we need to be seen at that party.
Everybody has to see us. Acting normal.'
Things were shifting in Nathan's peripheral vision. He was scared to look.
He couldn't remember a time before this hateful old Volvo, a time before Charlie Parker on the CD player, a time before Elise.
'I can't come back here.'
'We have to. Because only a local would know it.'
All this time, they hadn't made eye contact. Now Nathan swivelled in his seat.
'We're going to get caught.'
'No, we're not. We just have to get through the next few hours.
There will never be a time as bad as right now. I promise you that.
This is the worst of it.'
Bob opened the door and squeezed himself out into the cold night air. He stood there for a while, his breath steaming, looking at the stars.
Soon, Nathan had joined him.
8
Nathan expected Mark Derbyshire's house to have changed. It would be antiqued, as if an age had passed. The guests would be slumbering and ivy-wrapped, ready to stir when he located Sara and woke her with a chaste kiss.
But the house had not changed and time had not slipped. The same party was taking place, with the same people in it.
Bob parked the Volvo on the gravel drive and they walked to the front door. The same hired butler took their coats. Nathan felt soiled, as if his clothes and hair and eyes and ears were caked with mud and shit and blood and semen -- but he looked merely dishevelled and blank-eyed, as if he'd fallen asleep on the back seat.
Passing his car coat to the doorman, he caught a whiff of Elise's perfume; something young and clean, the smell of sleepy sunny afternoons, the smell of laughing on English seafronts.
Bob followed him to the ballroom, where Nathan expected the guests to form a slow, chanting ring around him. But no mob formed.
They were too busy dancing to 'Waterloo'.
He got himself a drink. He had to order it three times; his voice had gone. He drained the glass and asked for another. No tonic this time.
He followed the bleach stink to the swimming pool. Several girls were in there, all of them wearing swimming costumes and bikinis, having come prepared to be spontaneous. There were several men in there, too -- in Speedo trun
ks and board shorts, their underwater bellies pale and rippling, their tuber-pale legs diminishing to points.
There was some modest screaming and splashing.
Wearied by the din of the main room, many guests had retreated to gather round the edges of the pool; they stood in discreet, sedate clumps. In one of those clumps stood Sara. Her group was comprised of several women and a few men. Among the men were Mark Derbyshire and Howard.
Sara was as flawless as the retreating cliffs of Dover, her purity a trick of distance and light. Nathan joined the group, which grew quiet in a way that implied he'd been the topic of conversation.
Pretending not to look at him, everyone looked at him.
Sara said, 'And where have you been?'
He had no name for it.
'I'm sorry. I had too much to drink. I went for a walk. To clear my head.'
'You went for a walk where?'
'I don't know.'
'Because there's not really anywhere to go, is there?'
'Well, obviously I know that now.'
'I don't know what's wrong with you.'
This was quite enough for the other members of the group, each of whom had now found somewhere else to look. 'Waterloo' ended.
'Ant Music' came on. Screeching and splashing in the pool behind him. Perfume on his lapel. Semen in his underwear. And Bob behind him, casting a violet shadow.
Mark Derbyshire was grimacing, perhaps trying not to smirk.
Howard was staring into the depths of his drink, a grey lock fallen across his brow.
'Look,' said Nathan, 'I had too much to drink. I'm sorry.'
'You had too much of something.'
'Too much of you.'
He had a little time to wonder where that had come from --before Mark Derbyshire grabbed his elbow and said, 'Right, sunshine.'
Nathan
struggled, but Mark Derbyshire's hairy grip was absurdly powerful.
A flush rose from between Sara's breasts and spread over her sternum.
Nathan
pulled at Mark Derbyshire's hand, shouting, 'Fuck off!"
Mark Derbyshire was implacable. 'Mate, you had way too much of whatever you've had. Now let's all calm down a bit.'
Nathan tried to punch him. But he drew his fist back too far, too fast, and lost his balance. He fell. The ground slammed the wind from him. He struck his head on the wet edge of the swimming pool.
