(1998) Denial

by Peter James

  The song that had kept coming into his head over the past few days, was back again now, ‘Georgia On My Mind’, and suddenly he realised why: a neighbour – or maybe a car out on the street – was playing it on a stereo.

  Their eyes met. A midge hovered into view then fell back into the night. There was an intensity in her eyes that drew his own to them: they were shimmering with life, spangles of light like a burst of fireflies glittered in the dark of the pupils. They continued to stare at each other, locked in a slow, easy moment that stretched effortlessly longer and longer, dancing with their eyes to their own private, silent rhythm.

  Tiny muscles quivered in Amanda’s face. Her expression narrowed a fraction, then widened again, bearing the hint of a smile that was warmth, not mockery. Such incredible eyes. Michael longed to reach across the table and take her hand. He wanted to touch her, but this wasn’t the moment, not yet.

  The night was warm on his face. It carried her perfume to him. Here, in his garden, surrounded by exotic plants, they were alone in a dark, secret world, and he felt a growing tightness of excitement inside him, a sense of adventure, the start of some extraordinary, magical journey.

  She blinked, and still she was staring at him. A slight frown now, as if there was something she was seeing that was denied to him, then she swung away her eyes and picked up her glass.

  But instead of raising it towards him she pulled it into her chest and cradled it in her hands. Strands of her hair lay in a soft arc over her forehead. The thin gold chain around her neck glinted in the candlelight. She gave him an uneasy smile then raised a hand and, in a nervous gesture, flicked a few stray strands of hair back into place.

  Then she curled her fingers around her glass and he saw her bitten nails. Amanda, what is worrying you, you beautiful creature?

  Amanda was grateful to the darkness for hiding the deep flush in her cheeks, the guilt that she had carried here with her tonight and now wanted to exorcise. There wasn’t going to be a good moment to do it and she wanted to get it over with.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I –’

  An aircraft thundered low overhead on a flight path down into Heathrow. She waited for the roar to subside.

  Michael felt a flash of fear at the change in her tone. Was she going to break the news that she was in love with someone else? Or tell him she had been turned off by his anger with her for looking at Katy’s photograph? Was the whole evening about to go south?

  ‘I haven’t been honest with you, Michael.’ She continued to clutch the glass to her chest, like a child’s comforter.

  He didn’t like the way she said Michael.

  ‘I –’ She smiled awkwardly, held the glass out a few inches in front of her with both hands. ‘I have to tell you that . . .’ She hesitated then ploughed on. ‘That my original reason for coming to see you was –’ She bit her lip, then found the confidence to go on. ‘To trash you.’

  Michael’s face showed his surprise.

  ‘You can throw me out now, if you want,’ she said.

  He looked hurt and puzzled. ‘Why did you want to trash me?’

  ‘Because that’s the angle we’re going for with the show. We’re doing an attack on the whole therapy culture of our society. I didn’t tell you this when I first came to see you.’ She looked down at the table, evasively.

  ‘Why not?’

  She peeped guiltily up at him from beneath her flopped hair, put her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her hands. ‘Because you wouldn’t have agreed to take part in the programme. I was going to make a meal of your radio show – showing the absurdity of ten-minute-per-punter sound-bite therapy.’ Looking at him imploringly, she said, ‘Please don’t be angry.’ She reached down under her chair and pulled up her handbag. ‘Do you mind if I have a cigarette?’

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t, I quit six months ago.’ She opened the bag with trembling hands and took out a pack of Silk Cut. ‘These are for emergencies. This is an emergency.’ She lit a cigarette with a smart gold lighter.

  As the smoke wafted across his face, Michael breathed in deeply. He had given up five years ago and had managed to stay off them even in the aftermath of Katy’s death, but he still loved the smell. ‘Use the shrubbery as an ashtray,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’ She drew nervously on the cigarette, then exhaled as she spoke. ‘I’m telling you this because in the short time I’ve spent with you, at the theatre, then at dinner on Tuesday and now tonight, I realise I was wrong about you. You are a sincerely caring man.’ She stared intently at him. ‘You’re a really good man. If you want me to leave, tell me and I’ll go.’

  ‘Do you want to go?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a long silence. She drew again on the cigarette, then tilted her head and blew the smoke up at the sky. ‘The only redeeming thing I can say is that if I hadn’t come to trash you, I wouldn’t have met you, and then I would have really missed something. I think you’re incredible,’ she said. ‘I really mean that. You’re a very special human being.’

  Their eyes locked, but after a few seconds Michael looked away, embarrassed by the depth of feeling in her words.

  ‘I’m not special,’ he said. ‘I just believe that all of us – all human beings who are lucky enough to be sane and healthy – should do something useful with our lives. We should try to make a difference in the world. We should try to leave it, in some small way, a better place when we die than when we arrived. That’s all I try to do.’ He added, ‘I don’t have the time to see everyone, and I do my best for my radio phone-in patients. I think you’re wrong, we do give comfort to some of them.’

  Amanda drew on her cigarette again. ‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’ She crushed out her butt into the soil beneath a bush. There was another silence between them, then she said, ‘I’m not putting you in the programme. That’s a promise.’

  He smiled, wistfully. She was too lovely, it was impossible to be angry with her.

  ‘Are you going to forgive me for deceiving you, Michael?’

  For an answer, he took her hands. They slipped easily into his own. He had been expecting them to be delicate but the palms were coarse, as if she had worked a lot with them. It excited him, as if there was the promise of some other coarseness about Amanda that he had not yet discovered.

  Moments later they were standing. His hands had slipped inside her jacket and were on her waist, and she was holding his shoulders, looking into his eyes.

  He was intoxicated by her perfume, by the smell of her hair, by other faint, wonderful scents that were rising up from her. He squeezed her a little harder, brought her even closer, caressing the skin of her waist through the soft folds of her halter top. Their lips barely touched. Just a fleeting caress like the touch of silk in a breeze.

  Then a second kiss, just as fleeting. Michael slipped his hands up from her waist and cupped her face. He felt he was holding the most precious thing on earth. Her eyes were on him, total trust in them. Then a smile. She put her hands around the back of his neck and pushed her fingers through his hair.

  Then Michael was pulling her head back, running his tongue down her chin, down her throat, and she was fumbling with his shirt, pulling open buttons, sliding her hands inside against his bare skin.

  His whole body quivered with pleasure. Their mouths locked, he felt her tongue slip up and around his teeth, while her fingers had found his nipples and were teasing them, tickling with a sensuousness so intense it was almost unbearable.

  He fumbled with her top, then slipped his hands below it and, for the first time, touched her bare skin. She squirmed into him with a sigh. He found her bra strap, undid it and now he had her breasts in his hands, cool, large, heavy.

  She was crazing him with the teasing of his nipples. He lowered his face, took her right nipple in his mouth.

  Then, quite suddenly, she eased him away, took a step back, and looked up at the sky. ‘Something I have to do,’ she said. ‘Take two mi
nutes!’ She hurried into the house.

  Puzzled, he followed her but before he could ask her anything, she had reached the front door.

  Noël Coward! The fag playwright. Thomas Lamark had been trying to think of his name for an hour, and finally it had come. It was Noël Coward who had written the line, ‘the potency of cheap music.’

  Gloria Lamark had liked opera. Grand opera. Thomas understood the potency of great music, of opera, choirs, chants. He reckoned Wagner was more potent than Ray Charles. And so were Berlioz, Verdi, Pergolesi, Strauss, Gounod, Mahler, Tchaikovsky.

  The tape of ‘Georgia On My Mind’ was still sticking out of the cassette on the dashboard of Dr Goel’s Ford Mondeo. He ejected it, put it on the seat beside him and pushed the tape of Dr Michael Tennent’s voice on his mother’s answering-machine back into the slot.

  You like cheap music, Dr Michael Tennent. Does cheap music give you an erection? Can it send you into someone’s arms? Does cheap music short out your brain, Dr Tennent? I’ll play you cheap music. You can have all the cheap music in the world. But you won’t have Georgia on your mind. You’ll have me.

  Dr Tennent’s front door was opening. Thomas froze into a sculpture of himself. The woman – Dr Tennent’s bit of fluff – was coming out, she looked dishevelled, she was in a hurry. Thomas wondered what had been going on.

  He watched her reach her car, deactivate the alarm, climb in. She left the door open and he could see her, clearly illuminated by the interior light. She was fumbling to push her key into the ignition. Now she was reaching for another button. The roof raised. Even through the closed windows of the Mondeo he could hear the whine of the electric motors at work. Then the thud. He saw her raise her hand inside the car and close the manual catch. Then, to his surprise, she got out of the car and locked it.

  Dr Tennent appeared in the doorway: his shirt was untucked, most of the buttons undone. She walked back towards him, he took her in his arms, and they kissed, right there, with the front door wide open.

  Thomas felt something wrench inside him. A lump rose in his throat. He swallowed, crushing his eyes shut against the tears that were welling.

  Why are you doing this in front of me, Dr Michael Tennent? Why are you tormenting me like this? Do you have any idea how this makes me feel?

  Do you have any bloody idea at all?

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Amanda suddenly broke off, nuzzled up to Michael’s ear and whispered, ‘Someone’s looking at us – across the road.’

  Michael shot a glance: he saw lights on in some of the neighbours’ houses, but no face at any window. He barely knew any of his neighbours and he wasn’t bothered who was looking at them. Right at this moment he couldn’t have cared if an entire flotilla of alien starship battlecruisers was hovering overhead with binoculars. He was zeroed on this woman, he wanted her, he was burning up inside for her. Nothing else in the entire universe mattered.

  He steered her indoors; somehow they made it over the front step, still entwined, and he kicked the door shut. ‘Need to be the man with X-ray eyes to see us now,’ he said.

  She tugged undone the last two buttons of his shirt, amazed at how hairy his chest was. Brian’s body was so smooth and hairy men had always been a turn-off in the past, but this was different. She pulled him to her, kissed him savagely – this was how he was making her feel, savage, wild. A furnace was roaring in her belly. His lips were soft yet he was kissing her with an extraordinary feral strength.

  She was being swept away by him. He was sending currents of electricity through her soul.

  ‘Make love to me, Michael,’ she whispered.

  A maelstrom of thoughts swirled in Michael’s head. It was so long since he had made love to a woman. He craved Amanda so desperately, but he was scared of failing, of messing this up. He looked into her eyes and he saw trust, an incredible, beautiful look of trust.

  With trembling fingers he fumbled for her bra, forgetting he had already freed it earlier; it snagged on his fingers, then fell away. He cupped her breasts in his hands and she let out a tiny gasp. He wanted to get her clothes off, to feel her naked in his arms, he was raging with desire. She was pressing up against him, lunging against his erection, he could enter her now, here, right where they were standing, but he held back. He wanted to really make love to this woman. He wanted this first time to be sensational, he wanted to wake up with her in his arms, in bed.

  They stared at each other. Time stood still. Her eyes were filled with bald, wanton desire.

  He was anxious now how long he could hold back. Slow it down. Just slow it down.

  There was an incredible silence as if the two of them were alone in a vacuum, in some other world, where nothing else existed, just each other and the magic of the feelings that were driving them. The softness of her mouth, the warmth of her flesh, the scents of her soap, perfume, shampoo, skin, the sounds of her breathing, the shimmering disks of blue that were her eyes, the haze of blonde hairs. There was a lump in his throat as he kissed her again. Nothing, nothing had ever been this beautiful, this perfect, this natural.

  He lowered his hands down her body, slipped them inside her knickers and, kneeling down, levered them gently over her buttocks, over her knees and let then fall around her ankles.

  The blonde fuzz of her pubic hair was right in front of him. He pressed his face into it, gently at first and then more firmly, and the prickle against his skin was soft as a caress. He buried his face in deeper, probing his tongue between the soft flesh of her thighs, becoming intoxicated on the raw musky tang. He found the moist folds of the entrance, and slowly, gently worked his tongue inside them.

  Amanda threw back her head with a gasp.

  Michael burrowed harder, the exquisite private taste of her in his mouth, the smell in his nostrils, these flavours, they were beyond the end of the Universe, they came from some other place, some other galaxy in some other universe in some other dimension, there was nothing, nothing on earth that was this good. He was trembling. He was gorging on her, praying for time to stop, to freeze over and for this moment never, ever to end.

  Gently she lifted his face up and kissed him on the lips, tasting herself on his mouth. She unbuckled his belt and slipped her hands down inside his underpants and she felt the curls of his pubic hair. She loved the way he breathed as she played her tongue around his nipple.

  And then she felt the rock.

  It startled her; she recoiled as if it had given her an electric shock, then returned to it, unable to believe how hard it was, and its size! It was daunting, and wonderful, unreal. It was his. It was Michael. She held it and she was holding Michael. She wanted him desperately and yet she, she wasn’t – wasn’t, just no way wasn’t – going to fit this inside her!

  She felt a blowtorch heat of excitement.

  Still holding him, she sank down. She kissed his navel, traced the contours of his belly button with her tongue. His hands were pushing in long deep strokes through her hair. She went on down and the smell was incredible, warmth, animal perspiration, hot skin, she pulled down his underpants, white boxer shorts, then slowly, treasuring it, savouring it, brought his vast, incredible rock up to her lips. The top was moist, she licked it, then again, pushing her tongue deep into the crevasse, the fluid was sweet, with a hint of saltiness, she ran her tongue backwards and forwards, she could feel from the sounds he was making, the grip of his hands on her shoulders, the bursts of breath, that she was tantalising him, and she loved the feeling as much as she loved the taste. She had him in her power, in her control, she was pleasing him, torturing him.

  Adoring every second of him.

  She took him, as far as she could, in her mouth.

  Oh Jesus Michael you are huge.

  She cupped his balls in her hands, squeezed them gently, felt him respond. His balls felt wonderful, the cold, sensuous skin, the soft hairs, she was entering a new space here, travelling through an uncharted trench deep inside her, or maybe she was travelling outside her body, ou
tside all time to some distant point that was the centre of the universe, the centre of all time, all existence.

  Then she was floating through air. She was being carried, swept, in Michael’s arms, and now she was lying on a bed, a huge bed, she could feel a shoe being pulled from her foot, then another incredible explosion inside her.

  She opened her eyes. He was naked on the bed, naked and covered in hair and holding her toes in his mouth, pulling softly on them with his lips, pulling deep shivers of pleasure like folds of silk down her body.

  Now his tongue was tracing up her calf. Then he was exploring the space behind her knee, then on, up along the base of her thigh, and then, in one space-time continuum, his tongue was entering her again, deep inside her.

  She clutched his head with her hands, some distant howl erupting around her, maybe it had come from within her, she didn’t know, she didn’t care, this was all existence, there was nothing beyond this moment, no past, no future, nothing else mattered, nothing else had ever mattered or ever would. She was in the clutches of some wild, primal force, this creature, half-human, half-beast, had her helplessly in his control. She opened her eyes for a moment, saw flashes of a wall with a painting of apples, of a dressing table, a painting of a naked man and naked woman touching each other, she saw a drawn curtain, a single bedside lamp that was on, then Michael’s face blurred through the fuzz of her pubic hair.

  Then her eyes were rammed shut as a wave of pleasure welled in the pit of her stomach, pushing outward, growing, swelling inside her, rippling her skin, her body, her brain . . .

  Now his face was right over hers and the pleasure that could not get any stronger was getting stronger.

  He was entering her. She was gathering him into her, clawing his back.

  Michael was trying desperately to hold back, he was trying to think, to concentrate, to remember all the things you were supposed to remember – not that he’d ever been that great, or that experienced, a lover – things like taking his weight on his elbows, entering slowly, trying to think of something to distract him, something boring or horrible, anything to turn him off, to try to contain himself for just a while longer, for a few minutes, to please her. He wanted desperately to please her, he didn’t care about himself, not at this moment, he just wanted to hold it, to make it special for her.