Kiss and Tell

by Fiona Walker

  ‘She’s very beautiful.’ Lough had seen her compete many times on the international circuit.

  ‘Fuck off. She’s mine.’ Hugo’s brain was too addled to say much more. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘Christ I feel odd.’

  Lough watched him with fascination. Whatever they had spiked his drink with was fast-acting and potent, morphing the Brit’s usual sarcastic wit into belligerent confusion. Winding him up was all too easy. ‘So it’s okay for you to buy a high-class hostess for the night, but Tash can’t look at another man?’

  ‘She can look all she likes, but she can’t touch. Jesus!’ Hugo opened and closed his crossing eyes. ‘Besides which, I’m not going to “buy” a hostess.’

  ‘There’s a Maori saying, “Only the foolish visit the land of the cannibals”.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I should think most of the girls in here are on strict diets.’

  ‘Maori men treat their wives pretty badly too.’

  ‘Maori in haste, repent at leisure,’ Hugo joked in a slurred voice. ‘I do not treat Tash badly.’

  Lough glared at him. For a great horseman he rode over people too easily; Tash had been a much-missed face among the event riders at the Games.

  ‘If I had a wife as beautiful as yours maybe I’d keep her safely under lock and key at home.’

  ‘Lough and key,’ Hugo started to laugh at the pun. ‘A lock is better than suspicion, nanny used to say, but I have no reason to suspect darling Tash. And anyway, she has free will like me. If she falls for another man and wants to bugger off, she’s welcome.’

  Lough had seen the effects of drugs often enough to know that he shouldn’t necessarily mistake the arrogant bravado for Hugo talking from the heart, but his sense of indignation still flared.

  ‘So you’d be happy for her to spend a night with a gigolo in a bar like this then?’

  ‘Gigolo.’ Hugo laughed at the old-fashioned word. ‘Had a horse named that once. Bloody misnomer if ever I knew one; we were convinced he was gay.’ He swayed in his chair before righting himself and staring groggily at Lough. ‘Are you offering your services?’

  Lough shrugged.

  ‘She wouldn’t have you.’ Hugo let out a derisive snort.

  ‘Want to bet?’

  Lough knew men who would throw a punch for less than that, but Hugo was looking really spaced out, his eyelids heavy and movements cumbersome. When he tried to run his fingers through his hair it took several attempts for his hand to find its target, so that he looked like he was waving his arm around in a strange country dance. His voice was increasingly slow and slurred, but what he said next took Lough completely by surprise: ‘If she’d be willing to spend a night with you, you’re welcome to her.’

  Lough stared at him. ‘You don’t mean that?’

  ‘I’d like to see you try. I know my own wife.’ He shrugged, hair on end now, looking away, eyes half focusing as two sensational-looking women approached their table, the Angelina Jolie lookalike waitress bringing backup in the form of a curvaceous, cloud-haired Beyoncé.

  Lough drummed the table irritably as the hostesses closed in like sexual big-game hunters, now certain their medal-winning prey had been suitably tranquillised.

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere before,’ Angelina purred at Hugo, not realising that his handsome face was the one all over the tabloids that day, but scenting rich pickings nonetheless.

  Laughing at the absurdity of the situation so much he almost fell off his chair, Hugo put up no resistance as the hostesses joined the table, his sense of reality now totally abstract, his need for entertainment and sexual gratification stripped down as his brain slowed to basic instincts. He offered to buy them champagne. ‘We’re celebrating gold and silver, you know. Never thought I’d be in a place like this to do that, but when in Rome …’

  ‘The Rome Olympics were in nineteen-sixty, Hugo,’ Lough stood up and walked around the table to pull him to his feet, nodding curtly to the women. ‘Excuse my friend here, he has amnesia. Always forgets what a dick he is. I’ll take him outside for some air.’ But as he headed for the entrance, he heard the women squawk something about not paying their bill and saw his way blocked by a couple of heavies. At the same time, Hugo started to sag into his arms and he realised the man was about to pass out.

  Doing an about turn, Lough dragged Hugo’s dead weight through the door marked Private and along a wide corridor that resembled that of a five-star hotel, complete with potted ferns in urns and reproduction Chippendale chairs positioned to either side of console tables with copies of Mayfair fanned along their tops.

  The third door along was open and Lough could see the room was empty. He dragged Hugo inside and dropped him on a vast bed draped with fake fur before quickly removing the key from the inside of the door and locking him in.

  ‘A lock is better than suspicion, as nanny used to say,’ he muttered. He was back through the door to the club before the heavies could even register what was happening. Moments later, they and the hostesses were distracted by an influx of Russian businessmen and Hugo forgotten.

  Lough settled at the bar with a beer, yawns ripping at his jaws. He knew he could just leave the Brit there, sleeping it off – God knows he probably deserved it – but a curious sense of loyalty kept him on guard. He couldn’t help thinking about Hugo’s beautiful wife waiting pregnant at home while her husband cavorted about with all the responsibility of Tiger Woods celebrating another Masters win. She didn’t deserve this.

  In the early hours the bar staff changed shifts and one of the new workers brought in the early edition newspapers to hang from wooden poles at the end of the bar. A tabloid headline caught Lough’s eye.

  ‘Jesus!’ He leaned forward to read the article. Hugo needed to be taught a serious lesson.

  The printing presses had started to roll while Tash walked around Haydown, willing the contractions to settle into a rhythm; the first editions were being arranged on the newsstands as she had another bath; and the tabloid containing Debbie’s exclusive interview was on sale in the hospital newsagents by the time Beccy took Tash again.

  The contractions still weren’t regular but the pain was getting impossible to bear, Tash told the midwife team almost apologetically.

  ‘I rode round Badminton with a broken collarbone once – that was nothing compared to this,’ she gasped.

  ‘Welcome to childbirth,’ laughed a cheery midwife, sharing a knowing glance with her assistant.

  ‘I’ve had one already,’ Tash reminded them anxiously. ‘She was a malpresentation. The same thing won’t happen again will it?’

  ‘Very unlikely,’ they patted her arms reassuringly.

  After they had put Tash on a slow drip to accelerate dilation, with gas and air at the ready, Beccy left her and went to buy chocolate. The streaker pictures were, yet again, in most of the day’s redtops, who knew Debbie Double-G was good for sales, but one had the story splashed all over its front page, with more ‘exclusive’ shots of the hotel foyer drink and an interview with GG inside. ‘Hugold Love Rat!’ shouted the headline. ‘It’s all a Cunning (Publicity) Stunt.’

  Beccy read it quickly in the corridor outside the delivery room, in which Tash was intermittently groaning and screaming. Even though they’d got half the details wrong – they called Hugo a show-jumper and said that he was the son of a Baron – Beccy couldn’t help believing there had to be some truth in Debbie’s hints that her streak was pre-planned with Hugo’s blessing. To her shame, she found the description of him flirting with Debbie at a polo match (‘he fixed me with those gorgeous blue eyes and said “I want to see a LOT more of you”’) made her jealous. The reporter insinuated that Hugo was well known on the eventing circuit for living dangerously, both in his riding and his marriage. Beccy couldn’t help hoping that was true. The thought of seeing him again made her light-headed.

  She forced herself to bin the paper, buying another bar of chocolate, her cheeks burning with discomfort. It was just too
surreal to be reading of Hugo’s bad behaviour while, yards away, Tash struggled to bring his son into the world.

  ‘Any news of that husband of mine?’ Tash asked when she wandered back in. She looked ghastly, her face pale and sweaty, with dark rings beneath her eyes.

  Beccy’s red cheeks flamed even brighter. She shook her head.

  ‘He’s got plenty of time,’ the midwife assured them as she checked the print-out on the monitor. ‘This baby’s in no hurry. You might as well go home for a few hours and get some sleep,’ she told Beccy.

  Hugo woke up completely disoriented, half-dreaming that he’d slept with a dead man’s corpse on top of him. Then he realised his own arm was slung across his face, totally numb and suffocating him. His body ached all over, his head pounded and his throat and mouth were bone dry. He had no idea where he was.

  He fumbled around the strange room in search of a light switch, knocking into furniture and blinking blindly as he crashed into walls. The only dim light source seemed to come from a red light winking in one high corner. At last he almost fell over a lamp and groped around for the switch.

  ‘Jesus.’

  It certainly wasn’t the Olympic village. He sat heavily on the bed and pressed his head in his hands, shaking it this way and that, trying to fill it with some facts and details, but it was a blank.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He stood up unsteadily and headed towards what looked to be a bathroom, desperate for a drink of water. He glanced up as he passed the corner where the red light had been flashing and froze. There was a camera up there, discreetly tucked behind a curve of antique cornicing.

  Hugo spun round, taking in the fake-fur counterpanes, the mirrors and props. He felt for his pockets and realised that his wallet had gone.

  He was in a brothel. And he’d been caught on camera. Somebody out there knew what he’d been up to, even if he had no memory of it whatsoever.

  At that moment he heard a key in the door and closed his eyes briefly, praying for salvation. To his amazement, it came in the form of Lough Strachan, throwing open the door and hissing at him to hurry up.

  ‘There’s a back way out.’ He beckoned for Hugo to follow.

  ‘There’s a camera in here. They’ve taken my wallet.’

  ‘Nobody here knows who you are, I’m sure if it. And I took your wallet,’ Lough held it up, already moving away from the door. ‘They didn’t get to look at your ID or copy your cards. I’ve had it all along. It’s cool.’

  ‘I don’t understand …’ Hugo staggered out into the corridor, still disoriented and ricocheting off walls.

  Lough was at the far end, heading for a fire door. ‘We have to get out before they come after you.’

  Following almost blindly, Hugo felt a blast of fresh, early morning air in his face before he found himself being hustled along narrow back streets towards an intersection with a bigger thoroughfare, where they hailed a solitary cab.

  He pressed his face to the cool of the window, fighting the urge to vomit. Dawn was breaking. The city looked drab and monochrome, its streets gleaming metallically, zig-zagging urban snakes of stone and steel totally alien to him. He felt like he’d woken up in another man’s life.

  ‘What possessed me?’ he breathed. ‘Whatever possessed me?’

  Beside him Lough said nothing, staring straight ahead.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Hugo turned to him. ‘I know I deserve no loyalty, but you got me out of there. I can never thank you enough for that.’

  ‘It was nothing,’ Lough said with feeling, eyes unblinking.

  ‘I swear I have never done anything like that in my life.’

  ‘They drugged you. That’s what happens. They wanted your cash. Your wedding ring was a giveaway.’

  Hugo looked at his ring and groaned, closing his eyes. ‘What if Tash ever finds out?’

  ‘Why should she?’

  He opened his eyes and studied Lough’s profile groggily, unable to work him out at all. ‘They had a camera.’

  ‘They thought we were South African rowers,’ Lough reminded him.

  ‘Did they?’ Hugo rubbed his head painfully.

  ‘Well we “rode” in the Games,’ Lough joked drily, but Hugo didn’t smile. ‘I won’t say anything, trust me.’

  ‘I must do something to thank you. You name it. Money, a horse, the job …’

  ‘I thought I told you I can’t be bought – or shopped.’

  Hugo winced, unable to remember. There was an awkward pause and he cleared his throat before trying to return to his default setting of flippancy. ‘So I take it the answer to the work rider offer is no?’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘And I really can’t offer you anything else by way of thanks?’

  Lough pressed his lips together. ‘I’ll stick to our bet, thanks.’

  ‘What bet?’

  ‘That Tash will turn me down.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Lough?’

  ‘Last night, you offered me a night with your wife.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Lough! She’s about to have a baby.’ He glanced at his watch, trying to fathom out what day it was and how long it must have been since he and Tash had spoken.

  ‘I know what you said, Hugo.’

  Hugo gaped at him in utter disbelief. Meanwhile, Lough fished in his pocket and pulled out a page ripped from a newspaper. ‘You’d better look at this.’

  Hugo scanned it before screwing it up. ‘Total pile of lies.’

  His arrogance stirred up more hot springs of anger in Lough.

  ‘Get this straight, Hugo,’ he said. ‘I didn’t help you because I think you’re a great bloke. I helped you because your wife deserves better.’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ Hugo muttered, fingers raking his hair as he fought yet again to remember what he had said and done the previous night.

  Lough turned to him at last, dark eyes glittering with intent. ‘I take it the job offer still stands?’

  ‘Try not to push, Tash!’

  ‘I need Hugo. Where’s Hugo?’

  ‘The surgeon won’t be long. He’s performing another emergency caesarean, but he’ll be with you as soon as he can. Please stop pushing, love.’

  Another contraction ripped through her, a high-speed train crash scraping and tearing inside her body, pulling her along with it.

  Tash gripped onto the midwife’s hand and, gritting her teeth in an effort to deny nature and not push, she felt the engine scream through her, carriage after carriage buckling and roaring. When nature briefly won out and she strained to push she heard the regular little beeps from the foetal heart monitor beside her slow down.

  It was exactly the same scenario she’d had with Cora eighteen months earlier. Her baby boy had twisted around inside her during a long false labour until he was in an impossible position to deliver, despite the powerful contractions and full dilation that now told her exhausted body to work its hardest to get the head through the birth canal.

  As each contraction brought an ever greater urge to push, she felt unutterably terrified and desperately alone. Listening to those electronic beats drop again and again, she was isolated in a clean, scrubbed bubble of fear along with her tiny baby and his straining heart that was being weakened with every move that she made to try to bring him into the world and have him in her arms.

  At last the surgeon appeared and the delivery team went into an urgent huddle. Tash could hear snatches of sentences that frightened her more ‘… foetal distress …’ ‘… heart under strain …’ ‘… blood pressure dropping …’ An unfamiliar face appeared at her knees, chin hammocked in a surgical mask. She obediently opened her legs for her tenth internal examination in as many hours, now no longer caring if the entire hospital staff trooped by to take a look just so long as she could have her baby safely.

  Within minutes an anaesthetist had given her an epidural and she was being wheeled to the operating theatre, unable to hold back the tears. This wasn’t how it was su
pposed to be.

  Then somehow, from somewhere, Hugo appeared beside her in the hospital corridor, blue eyes blazing with love and fear. Tash had never been more relieved to see anybody in her life.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asked shakily, the epidural having made her teeth chatter like maddened castanets.

  ‘I got lost,’ was all he would say as he took her hand tightly in his and kissed the gold band on her ring finger. ‘Hopelessly, hopelessly lost, but I’m here now.’

  Quickly scrubbed, robed and masked, he sat at her head and took hold of her hand again. Her belly was hidden behind tented green cotton. She was already open, the surgeon delving around inside her as though she was a lucky dip.

  Then he extracted a very healthy, red-faced baby.

  While Tash wept with joy, Hugo blinked back rare tears and took his newborn son in his arms.

  Within half an hour Amery had been wiped, measured, weighed, placed skin-to-skin, fed his first toot of colostrum and was contentedly asleep on Tash’s chest.

  *

  When Beccy brought Cora in to hospital to meet her new brother later that day, she encountered Hugo marching along the ward towards her and it almost winded her with joy. He was her dream, from the true blue eyes to the long stride that turned all the female heads in the maternity ward. Never had the force of her self-destructive love for him felt greater, and never had it seemed more ill-fitting as he joined his young family. She wanted him to be the roguish rake who flirted away from home in the three day event lorry parks, not this tableau of doting fatherhood. She wanted to run away.

  ‘We’d given you up for dead,’ she managed to croak her first words to him in ten years, nothing like the long monologues she’d so often rehearsed in her travels. She couldn’t even look him in the face.

  His reaction was nothing like her rehearsals either as he hissed, ‘I got delayed. Now drop it.’

  Beccy quailed, glancing at Tash.

  But with Cora squeaking ecstatically at this strange new creature on her mother’s chest, and Amery starting to wake up again, Tash was too distracted to care where Hugo had been the previous night. It was irrelevant. There was another gorgeous, blue-eyed male distraction in her life now.