‘Hi,’ said Rollo, lifting himself up on to a bar stool.
And for that, at least, Jilly was truly grateful. He had said Hi, Rollo: Hi. Rollo had said Hi, just Hi, and nothing more. Good. It was a start (which could, of course, be half the trouble).
Rollo smiled at Jilly. Is that what he did? Yeh – in Jilly’s admittedly somewhat fevered judgement it had come over as no more than that. And yes I’m right, look – because now he’s smiling that smile over in Sammy’s direction, and to me there’s no change (a smile is just a smile, isn’t it?). So maybe I’ll just say, er … what shall I say? Must say something, and must do it now, because if I don’t – say something, say something – yes, if I don’t right this minute say something quickly, then someone else, well – they’re bound to, aren’t they? And what they say could be the wrong thing! So I’ll charge through the possibility of that, will I now?
‘Hi. Jilly. Your barmaid for the afternoon. What can I get you?’
And please don’t put on any sort of a knowing, and please God not a lascivious expression. Please don’t react as if here is some sly invitation to gnaw at and broaden some hint of secret suggestion – and please can you neutralize your beautiful eyes so that there cannot rise up even the faintest hot aroma of a hotter complicity? (If I could put it into words, both my fear and thrill-tinged yearning, then this is maybe how I would.)
‘Just a halfa lager, please,’ said Rollo, quite happily. ‘Hell of a thirst.’
Jilly rushed to attend to that (not only can I turn my back, but there’s something now to do!) – and while she was watching the more white than golden Heineken splatter down into the glass, she kept her fingers poised lightly on the tap while glancing sideways and simpering to Sammy: ‘OK?’ Which meant – Are You Off, Then? And not: Are You All Right With This? Which Actually Isn’t A This: It’s Honestly Nothing, Really. And not, most certainly not: How Am I Doing? Maybe Cool? Or Messing Up Badly?
Sammy may not have looked at Rollo (now hunched over the lager before him and apparently intent upon its depths). He may not even have looked at Jilly. But he did turn away – slip off his bar jacket, pick up his own. And then he wandered away, strolling as if on a country ramble the length of the pub to the very farthest tables – and then he turned and was out of it. And whether Jilly had been looked at or not could scarcely matter now (although still she was feeling drilled right through). Because quite suddenly – Rollo was staring full at her: now their eyes had locked – so nothing could matter at all, now, not a single bit. Her hands rushed to cover his – which lay there softly curved like paws – and only then did her eyes quickly dart about furtively, to check whether anyone had witnessed them doing so. And if they had, well so what? This too – even this – could not matter less. Exciting, mm, but also – so much sudden letting go, it’s scary too: scary, yes it is. And exciting, mm.
‘Last night,’ she whispered, ‘was just the best.’
Rollo let his struck-open eyes do all the nodding for him. Yes it was. The best. Had to be, really. On account of, for Rollo, it was also the first. The very first, yes oh yes. I didn’t tell her. Didn’t say so. Maybe she would’ve liked it, who’s to say? Certainly it might have explained away a good deal of my initial, uh – urgency, yes: urgency. But girls were funny, everyone knew that; well men did, anyway: somehow, always with you was at least that one small certain nugget of absolute knowledge, so terribly deeply ingrained. And maybe if I’d, you know – just looked sort of down and whispered Listen, Jilly – listen: stop ripping up my clothes for just a second and listen to me, OK? This is … God, I just can’t tell you what this is, this means to me, Jilly – because this thing, right? Is my first. Well … if I had – just say I had said that, what would she have done? Taken it as a gift? Would her fingers have touched my face so gently, straying away to softly probe the weary pouch beneath one of my eyes, as maybe a full fat and ready-rounded tear welled up in her own, before it burst its banks and ran away? Or could she have maybe come close to snarling? Whole face twisted up into a Who’s My Ickle Baby Boy, Then, cruel and nasty smirk, before laughing lightly and saying not to worry and promising then with quite cheap irony that, yes, she’d be oh-so gentle with me? You never know – not with girls, you don’t. And further – at a tender time like this one, you don’t want to be extending the boundaries of your vulnerability, already rubbed raw and nearly livid. Do you? So better, I think, I just stayed quiet and got it done. Which I did, oh God yes; and not even counting the first disaster (well – disaster for her, I had gauged by her sighing; for me, that sweet intensity and full charged rush of it made me lame and made me powerful) – I got it done it must have been three or four times, must have been all of that – yes it was, it was, at the very least three, it really must have been. (And after her gasps and choked-out rasping, there had come from her a sighing of a different order.)
Someone at a table down there was very much requiring some service – Jilly could see this clearly (the man was contorting his upper body sideways, one finger poised if not yet flying, and the jerked-up eyebrows were practically hitting his hairline). Jilly was very aware of all of this, but she just had to do her best to ignore it for now because the thing she absolutely had to do next was lean in even closer to Rollo and whisper to him urgently:
‘Listen, Rollo – I’ve got us the most fantastic surprise.’
And however you cut it, Rollo was thinking, this could only be pretty good news.
‘Surprise? Yeah? What is it?’
‘Only – ’ and here was Jilly’s cue to narrow her eyes and hush herself down until she was only just audible ‘ – the Transylvania Emperor Suite. Tomorrow. I can get it for us tomorrow afternoon!’
Her eyes were egging on Rollo’s to join up and gel into a great and glittering part of this – and although he was eager as hell to fall in with this very palpable shiver of excitement of hers, he could only send flickering across the bar a tentative measure of his pretty much total lack of comprehension.
‘Uh-huh,’ he went. ‘Uh-huh …’
Jilly tutted out her impatience.
‘The Transylvania Emperor Suite, for your information, Rollo, just happens to be the absolutely top accommodation on the entire bloody ship. Do you know what people pay for the Emperor Suite for the whole of the World Cruise? Do you? Have you the smallest idea, Rollo?’
‘Miss! Oh – Miss!’ came the strained and hesitant enquiry from the table down there. ‘We maybe get a drink down here?’
Jilly raised up a hand, and slapped on a brand-new smile to help it on its way.
‘Right with you, sir!’ And then – hunkered down and whisperingly insistent again: ‘Well, Rollo – have you? Do you know?’
‘I, uh – well no. Not a clue. The very very best, is it? Well wait a minute – how come you – ?’
‘Three hundred and fifty thousand, Rollo. Believe it?’
‘Three hundred – !’
‘ – and fifty thousand. Yup. And tomorrow afternoon – it’s all ours.’
Rollo just gazed at her.
‘Well – well that’s just – that’s fantastic. Amazing. Jesus Christ, Jilly – right. Let’s go for it! Wow. But listen – how – ?’
‘Oh Miss? Yes – Miss? Excuse me? How bout we get a little service, huh?’
Jilly looked up – and naked irritation was all over her, this time – and the guy at the table was looking this side of spellbound with the way it was going.
‘Tell you tomorrow. Got to go now, Rollo. Kay?’
And Jilly scooped up her notepad and bustled away to fill this guy’s sodding order – and she was moving swiftly, now – not for the guy (fuck him) but because she knew, just knew that Rollo was on the point of coming right up with something on the lines of Yes well that’s just great, Jilly, marvellous – but what about today, yes? Later, yes? Or tonight, maybe – yes? And Jilly would have had to say No – sorry, Rollo, but no: I’ve just got to see to Sammy, haven’t I, later? Because I don’t know how he’
s feeling, but I do know that he’ll be turning it all over, and I’ve simply got to head off all sorts of thoughts before one of them actually arrives somewhere, see? Because I don’t, do I (be fair to me, Rollo), at all know where all of whatever this is might quite soon be leading?
‘So sorry about the delay, sir,’ she was gushing keenly – beaming fondly at the now quite mollified man at the table. ‘Fellow at the bar was feeling just a touch faint.’
‘Oh yeah? Sorry to hear that. He OK now?’
‘He will be soon, sir. He’ll be totally fine. Now – what can I get you?’
*
I’m thinking two things, I suppose. What has mainly muscled its way to the forefront of my mind (well, it would have to have done, really: I’m selfish – yes and so what? My appetites are eating me up) is that soon, very soon – if I have not got these decks and levels all screwed up in my mind – I’ll be back to pinning down beneath me this wonderfully uncomplicated (yes – I think that, on balance, is kind) young American boy, who is, it thrills me to know, easily of an age to be Stacy’s little brother. He doesn’t know that, of course – nobody seems to realize I’m knocking on forty, which is, I suppose, a blessing (and my disguise). Earl did actually mutter something or other at some hot damp point about having been ‘sedooced’ by an older woman (‘I like, Jennifer’, he had gone, ‘your matooriddy, yeh?’) but would he be quite so sweet if he knew the true extent of the internal ravages of ripeness, here? Well – doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to know, does he? Ever. We’re just here for each other in the very much now – and soon, well fuck it. He goes one way, I go another – and that, my friend, is that. It happens, doesn’t it, in life all the time. It’s just that maybe, on this ship, all the customary courtesies and conventions, all the rituals and encounters that form us (the collisions that send us reeling elsewhere), are somehow impacted and condensed, the pappy juice of it so unbelievably concentrated. Everything here, it seems to me, either fleetingly brushes past in a way that is airy and bland to the point of quite vaporous invisibility, or else it shoots you up – so scorching and bloody intense that it fills you in and takes you over. I mean – quite apart from my rather wet and very warm eagerness to get to Earl’s cabin (let’s just for now – if I can, if I can – set aside that particular cauldron: let’s just have it bubblingly simmer, on that good old back burner), just consider the extraordinary anger that arose in me as a result of that merely irritating and wholly laughable tick that manifests itself in the form of Nobby. And the ferocity with which I met it, what? Head-on? Just stale air, hardly more. Things like Nobby surely cannot matter; and it’s a big ship, very: all I have to do is avoid – or, failing that, gently deflect. And now – because of Earl – I can see me easily avoiding with a hungry willingness most things and most other people for days and days and nights.
Which brings me to the other thing: Stacy. I didn’t know she liked girls: had no idea that’s what she went for. It’s not that she does that concerns or amazes me (whatever gets you through the night, right?) – no, it’s simply the fact that I wasn’t aware. Because look, with our relationship, I would have said … well, what I suppose I mean to say is that if some well-meaning friend (or even covert enemy) had one time taken me aside and said to me Well tell me, Jennifer (come clean) – what sort of a parent did you turn out to be? Reckon you’re a good mother, do you then, Jennifer? I would have come back with Oh Good Christ, No – no no, poor Stacy, God knows how she survived me. Because I didn’t bake. I never made her costumes for all those school plays, you know (well all right – no great shocks there). But I didn’t attend the plays either. Not one. Because I didn’t know about them. And Stacy would say What do you mean you didn’t know? Mm? How can you say that? I brought the piece of paper home that said, didn’t I? And it had a tear-off bit at the bottom so’s you could get tickets, and everything, so what do you mean you didn’t know? And I said … I just gazed at little Stacy quite implacably and said – I know it by heart (still I can hear my indignation) – Paper? Piece of paper? I never saw any piece of paper – what on earth are you talking about, Stacy? There was no paper: I think you are making it up. Because it was a funny thing – any sort of even semi-official communication, I simply couldn’t read it (still can’t, still can’t). Letter from the Council … bank statements, oh my God: never read one of those in my entire life on earth – never even opened one. So as soon as I saw Stacy’s school sort of crest thing on any bit of paper and the all sorts of, you know – typing going on underneath it – well … just couldn’t. Not couldn’t be bothered – it wasn’t an idleness thing, no: I just simply, utterly, physically couldn’t. You either get this or you don’t. And so of course this forced me into defensive mode, which in my case tends to come out as attack. And so therefore, you see (and please understand), the school never printed such a piece of paper – and if they did (which they might have) well then Stacy most certainly never brought it home to me; and if she did bring it home (which is a possibility) well then she obviously forgot to show it. To me. So how can you dream of criticizing me, actually, for not coming to see your poxy little play when I didn’t even know there was such a thing?!
So on that level, hopeless. And nor did I read to her stories, as she was tucked up in bed (but on the plus side, here, if ever she asked me a question, I told her no lies). I don’t recall there actually was such a thing as ‘bed time’, per se. And nor was I great at getting her up. The odd thing is I cleaned quite a lot – which yes, I know, is frankly amazing, in the light of just everything else. But I’ve always had a bit of a thing about that – which I’m sure, oh yes, is no doubt terribly unhealthy and symptomatic of some or other dreadful phobia or underlying denial … or maybe it’s just that I like things clean? (As that old fraud Freud once said – sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, you know?) Well I do like things clean – yes I do. But making things clean – I like that too: the operation.
So where are we so far? Well, there’s poor little Stacy cooped up with just her bloody awful mother with not much to eat and often late for school (although I do remember getting her there more or less on time on the first morning of half-term, on one occasion: well look – was it my fault? Why didn’t they tell me it was bloody half-term? They could have written to me, or something). But everything was clean, right? Clean and … fairly wholesome. But the point I’m making here is that we talked. I could never afford to go out very much (unless some man was both on the go and solvent) and neither of us was ever too great on the television side of things – so we talked. Not dull little Tell Me Everything You Learned At School Today type talks, no no – and nothing very positively educational, or edifying in any way at all, really. I’d just, you know – say something, and Stacy’d react to that and then she would come up with some other bit of whatever and I’d put my tuppence worth down on the table, and so we passed the evenings and years.
And the odd boy came round. I didn’t enquire. Didn’t frankly think it was my place to (because God – I was quick enough to slap her down if ever my private life came up for any hint of schoolgirly nose-twitching and more than faintly snotty scrutiny). I didn’t pry. Did say once to her Stacy – you’re not being a bloody fool, I hope: I mean you are fitted up, right? In some way? And if not, let’s Christ’s sake get it done, OK? And she just looked at me, wide-eyed – that usual teenage sort of mix: I-cannot-believe-you-actually-said-that, gently mingling with a deep-seated unease at the nudged-at intrusion of grossness – all leavened with pity for one so old. So sod it, I thought: I’ve said my piece, so let her bloody get on with it.
And now this. Well of course it needn’t be a this – I do understand that. I mean – it was terribly late, and girls are very pretty, I do of course see this (although I’ve never gone down that particular route myself, I have to say – unless you count threesomes). And being on this good ship Lollipop, as I’ve already said – it makes one do the oddest things (and I can’t, can I, be the only one who feels that?). It’s just that
I had no idea that any sort of inclination in that direction lay within her. And this makes me feel stupid. Which I really, really hate.
‘Well good afternoon, there!’ was now the noise that grated first and then filled the air. Well, here was one more ‘good afternoon’, and so what? All the decks and bars and corridors and staircases rang and throbbed with greetings constantly – largely, I think, so that the felicitator could relentlessly impress upon whoever that he for one, at least, was most certainly having a whale of a time and the time of his life – and now it is up to you, please, to grandly reassure me if you will that all is truly wonderful at your end. (Did you ever see The Prisoner? Remember that at all? That weird and endless Sixties TV thing set in that funny little village in Wales? Well I honestly do think sometimes that it’s a bit like that here, God help me: everyone seemingly suspended in a state constantly and precisely balanced between a childlike excitement and more or less total sedation: ‘Lovely day!’ ‘ooh yes – lovely day – just another lovely day’). So yeh, like I say (hee! Just wait till Earl sees what I’m wearing underneath) … uh, like I say … sorry, completely lost it for just a second, back there – mind on other things. Oh yeh – all the happy-clappy stuff, yeh. Well anyway, look: this particular ‘good afternoon’ – could have been launched by just anyone anywhere (odd, nonetheless, that it has not yet been met by a beatific chorus of practically gaga reciprocation – nearly a full second has already passed, after all). So what do I do? Slow down? Rush on? Or just be deaf and blind?
‘Well …’ drove on our anonymous compère, ‘someone’s in a hurry! Fun, I hope! Yes? Fun and games?’
And so she did – had to – pause a bit, this time. Jennifer stalled her headlong and compulsive dash and looked about her briefly for the source of all this garish nuisance. And now she had found it (oh – that’s it, is it?) and it meant to her nothing – absolutely nothing whatever. So – blink, do we? Half-smirk tossed over to a passing idiot, bit more blinking and then off very swiftly and away?
S.O.S. Page 20
