by Sue Margolis
He let go of the rubber band. It snapped back into shape. “OK. Carry on,” he said, “but make sure you keep me briefed at every stage.”
She nodded.
“And, Rebecca,” he said, “on no account fuck this up. We don’t want you splattered against the wall in some St. Valentine’s Day mascara.”
He cracked a smile. She only just managed to resist saluting.
As Max had a telephone interview with one of his French contacts arranged for two o’clock, they decided to grab a quick bite at Nick’s, the Greek place a couple of blocks away.
As soon as they sat down, Max handed her the Marks and Spencer bag he’d been carrying. “Another little thank-you for the other night,” he said.
She opened the bag. Inside were four videocassettes.
“Copies of my top Seinfeld episodes,” he smiled. “Sorry I didn’t have time to wrap them.”
“Omigod. Max, you shouldn’t. This is fantastic. Must have taken you ages. Thank you so much.”
She began reading the sticky labels on the cassettes. “Ooh, it’s got ‘The Ex-Girlfriend.’ The one where Kramer becomes obsessed with cantaloupe. I love that one. You are kind.”
“Next time you watch it, you can think of me.”
“Oh, I will,” she grinned. Then she reached across and kissed him.
They both ordered the stuffed red peppers. Rebecca told him about Lipstick moving in and how she was worried that she might be planning to do the dirty on Stan. “Plus she is driving me mad. For a start she’s so bloomin’ upbeat and cheerful all the time. It’s like living with an escapee from the Brady Bunch. If this is all an act, it’s bloody good.” She told him about Harrison and the novelty teapots.
Max laughed and said at least it was only for a few weeks.
When they’d finished eating, Max told her how gorgeous she looked and how he really fancied her. He beckoned her toward him. She leaned across the table.
“OK, he whispered, “slide down in your seat.”
“Why? What for?”
“Just do as I say.” He grinned.
“But I don’t get it.”
“Just do it.”
She did it. “OK,” she said, “what now?”
He mouthed at her to open her legs.
“What?” She immediately sat back up again.
“Come on. Open them.”
“Max, we’re in a public place. Behave.”
She watched him lean down and take off his shoe, then his sock. His bare foot was forcing her knees apart. Giggling, she slapped his wrist with her hand, but he carried on pushing.
The place was packed. She looked around to see if anybody was watching. They weren’t. And they wouldn’t see a lot if they were. The table was covered in a long white cloth.
Hiding her giggles with her hand, she slid back down again and did as he asked.
“I hope you’ve cut your toenails,” she said.
He grinned and assured her he had.
A moment later it was all she could do to stop rolling her head in sheer delight.
“Aah. Oh, my God,” she whispered.
She wasn’t even vaguely aware of somebody coming toward the table.
“Ees everything all right for you?”
It was Nick, the restaurant owner, but since Rebecca was way past the point of no return orgasmwise, she didn’t care.
“Yes, great,” Max said to Nick.
“Aah, ummm.”
Nick frowned.
“The lady. She’s OK? She look a beet flushed maybe?”
Rebecca’s head was now in her hands as she tried to prevent herself making eye contact with Nick.
“No,” Max said, “she’s fine.”
“Tell you what, I got some freshly baked baklava. You want to try some? Look, eet’s over there on the counter. Just look at all that honey just oozing out. Mees, you sure you all right?”
“Oooh. That’s it. Yeah, there. Just there. Keep it there. Just like that.”
“We’ll just have the bill, please,” Max said.
“No baklava?”
“No baklava.”
“What about some halva? I got some wonderful chocolate halva.”
“Nope. No halva. Just the bill.”
Just then Nick’s wife started calling him. “Neek, are you coming?”
“Yes,” he said irritably, “I’m coming. I’m coming.” He started to walk away.
“Oh, God! Oh, God, me too!” Rebecca cried.
Nick swung round.
“It’s OK,” Max said, “I think maybe the stuffed peppers disagreed with her.”
Rebecca spent most of the journey home on the phone to Jess telling her about Max toe-fucking her. Afterward she wished she hadn’t.
“Great,” Jess had said, “you’re getting toe-fucked while I have to make do wanking with an electric toothbrush and end up flossing with my pubes.”
Then, when Rebecca asked her how the surrendered wife thing was coming along, Jess said fine, except Ed had just come home with one of those leather, fleece-lined airman’s hats with earflaps and booked them a weaving activity holiday in the Shetlands.
Rebecca commiserated and said if the no sex thing carried on much longer she’d go back to that sex shop in Covent Garden and buy Jess a Vibroclit.
The first thing Rebecca saw when she walked into the living room was the treadmill. Lipstick was standing next to it wearing a Day-Glo pink silk kimono and matching face pack. On it, scampering for all he was worth in gray tracksuit bottoms and a sweatband round his head, was Harrison. Star Trek was on in the background.
“Things are getting so busy at the salon, plus I’ve got all the workmen to check on at my flat, that I just haven’t got time to take him walkies. So I ordered the treadmill and I’ve put a dirt tray out on the balcony. Hope you don’t mind.”
Rebecca’s stomach turned. Her mind went back to Jess and the cat turd. “Well, to be quite honest, actually I do …”
But Lipstick wasn’t listening. Some alien had just bought it on Star Trek. “You know,” Lipstick said, “I think it’s so lucky the ray gun was called the ray gun. I mean the gary gun just wouldn’t be the same, would it?”
Rebecca said she had a couple of phone calls to make.
“Fine,” Lipstick said. “Dinner’ll be ready in twenty minutes. I’ve made a shepherd’s pie.”
Rebecca’s face lit up. She suddenly felt guilty about getting worked up over the dirt tray. “Wow. You didn’t need to go to all that trouble.”
“Oh, it was nothing. Except you didn’t have any mince. By the time I got to the butcher’s it was nearly six and he was closed. So I improvised with baked beans and cheese on top. Hope that’s OK. My mum used to do it all the time when we were kids, if she’d forgotten to go shopping.”
“Yummy,” Rebecca said. “Can’t wait.”
She went into the bedroom and dialed Mimi Frascatti, the Mer de Rêves PR. She’d been in a meeting all afternoon and was due out around now. She picked up immediately.
Rebecca told her the Vanguard had been having second thoughts about her offer of an interview with Coco Dubonnet.
“Oh, really?” Mimi said, her tone decidedly cool, which Rebecca supposed was understandable bearing in mind the way she’d given her the bums a couple of days ago. “Well, I’m afraid you’re too late. Coco’s in Mustique until the end of the month. She’s back in Paris for two days.”
“Ah, well perhaps I could see her then?”
“Sorry, she has meetings the entire time.”
“I wouldn’t want long with her,” Rebecca said, going into her very best sucking-up mode, “twenty minutes tops.” Pause for effect. “The editor would make it the cover story.”
“No can do, I’m afraid. She’s going to be tied up both days. Then she’s off skiing in Morocco. She won’t be back for at least another six weeks.”
Rebecca put down the phone. “Bugger.”
Then she thought for a moment. No, not bugger. She would try the Pa
ris press office. She looked at her watch. It was past six. They would have left for the day. She’d try them in the morning. Maybe they would be more accommodating.
She was just about to ring Max to tell him she’d managed to get tickets for Art, which he’d been desperate to see, when he rang. “Rebecca, do you know anything about spots?”
“A bit Doris Day, I always think. Mind you, I think you could just about carry off polka-dot pedal pushers.”
“Very funny. No, I mean real spots.”
“What, as in zits?”
“No, as in disease. I’m covered in them. They look like tiny blisters and they itch. I can’t stop scratching. And I’ve got a temperature.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
She couldn’t get over how cute and childishly pathetic he looked in the spots.
The emergency doctor said it was chicken pox and that he needed to rest, take plenty of fluids and keep the spots covered in calamine. Rebecca went straight out to Boots and came back with four bottles. “I remember getting through stacks of this stuff when I had chicken pox as a kid.”
She made him take all his clothes off and spent ages dabbing him. Of course she spent longer dabbing certain bits of him than others. When she’d finished, she made him a mug of TheraFlu to bring his temperature down. Then, fully clothed, she climbed into bed with him. Soon they were snuggling under the duvet, him telling her a whole string of daft schoolboy jokes. Where he was finding the energy to do this, she had no idea. Either his temperature was making him delirious or the TheraFlu had kicked in and he was feeling better. She decided it was probably the TheraFlu.
“OK, what’s yellow and swings from cake to cake?”
She was already giggling.
“I don’t know. What is yellow and swings from cake to cake?”
“Tarzipan!”
She couldn’t help shrieking with laughter. “Max Stoddart,” she declared between snorts, “you may be at death’s door, but you still make me laugh more than anybody else I’ve ever met.”
He propped himself up on his elbow and kissed her.
“Do you want me to stay, just to keep an eye on you?” she said. Her offer wasn’t entirely altruistic. She would have done almost anything to avoid Lipstick’s baked bean shepherd’s pie.
He thanked her but said he just wanted to sleep and would prefer to sweat it out on his own.
When she got back the lights were off. Lipstick must have gone to bed. She took off her coat and headed for the kitchen, contemplating Lipstick’s shepherd’s pie. How mean would it be to throw it away and pretend she’d eaten it? She opened the door. Uuurgh. Bloody Harrison was sitting on the counter. She began making frantic shooing motions.
“Oi, gerroff you filthy …”
As he jumped down she saw the Pyrex oven dish and realized what he’d been doing. Lipstick had left her the remainder of the shepherd’s pie to heat up in the microwave, but Harrison—probably suffering from an attack of the late-night munchies—had gotten there first.
“Oh, who’s a good boy, then?” Rebecca said, her face lighting up. “Who is a good boy? You know, Harrison, if you play your cards right I can see the two of us starting to get on.”
The ensuing head pat, although faltering, wasn’t entirely without affection.
9
As she climbed the stairs to Max’s flat carrying the bowl of frozen chicken soup (it was either freeze it or have it slop all over the car seat en route), Rebecca could hardly believe what she was doing.
As far as she was concerned, it was OK for a bloke to cook for a woman early on in their relationship, because that was sexy and new mannish (assuming his repertoire was limited to guy things like curry—or in Max’s case chili con Quorni. There was no way she could shag a bloke with a goatee who filed his herbs alphabetically and spent the evening fiddling with his ravioli.). On the other hand, a woman cooking for a man when they hadn’t known each other very long sent out all the wrong messages. It screamed desperation.
God, why didn’t she just go the whole hog and take him to Ikea to look at shelving systems?
It had been Jess’s idea to make Max chicken soup. Rebecca was convinced the suggestion wasn’t unrelated to her friend’s still hanging on in there with the surrendered wife thing (despite Ed having come home the night before with a green corduroy trench coat). Naturally Rebecca had said all the stuff about desperation and Ikea shelving systems, but Jess insisted that taking Max Factor chicken soup when he was ill was an affectionate, caring gesture that would ensure he fell in love with her there and then and had nothing whatsoever to do with desperation.
Rebecca found herself bouncing Jess’s theory off Lipstick. Even though she was struggling to work out how a person could adore a pooch quite the way Lipstick adored Harrison, Rebecca was continuing to warm to her. So much so that she’d decided that maybe having the heavy conversation about what happened at school wasn’t really necessary. Her personality appeared to have done a complete about-face since school. What was the point of upsetting her? On top of that Stan had phoned the night before to see how the two of them were getting on and he’d told her how much he loved Bernadette.
“I know she’s a bit over the top,” he said, “and a bit tactless, maybe, but apart from your mother—and you of course—Bernadette is the sweetest, most gentle woman I’ve ever met. And don’t underestimate her. She’s far brighter than you think.”
Lipstick said she’d never had a problem cooking for boyfriends. She’d cooked for Stan on their second date and it certainly hadn’t scared him off. Apparently he’d particularly enjoyed her apricot fool.
“And if you can’t find apricots—”
“Don’t tell me,” Rebecca cut across her, “herring works just as well.”
“Herring?” Lipstick screwed up her face. “Don’t be daft. I was going to say peaches.”
Rose had sent Rebecca to Geoff’s Kosher Meats in Hendon for the chicken. “And make sure you ask for a boiling fowl. You don’t want a roaster. You don’t get the flavor with a roaster.”
When she got home she followed Rose’s cooking instructions to the letter. She even remembered to leave the skins on the onions “to give it color.”
Rose didn’t stop going on about how happy it made her to see Rebecca starting to take an interest in her culture.
“Tell you what,” she’d said, “next I’ll teach you to do klops.”
Rebecca’s knowledge of kosher cookery being sketchy at best, on account of Judy having been not so much a Jewish mother as a Jew-ish mother, she assumed this was either a Dutch folk dance or some form of bowel disorder.
Rebecca had almost reached the top of the stairs when she saw Max’s front door open and a woman come out. She instantly clocked the gleaming shoulder-length black curls, the treacle eyes and full crimson-stained lips that would never require “Lip Plump for Lady Woman.”
Rebecca suddenly became acutely aware of her eyebrows. Since Lipstick’s comments these had now—in her mind at least—assumed Noel Gallagher proportions.
Rebecca knew she recognized the woman, but it took her a moment or two to place her. Then she got it. Lorna Findlay. She presented Tonight, the heavyweight, up-its-own-arse, late-night news program on Channel 6. Five nights a week, the formidably brainy Findlay, whose interviewing skills were such that she made Peter Jennings look like Barney Rubble, threw intellectual googlies at government ministers, reducing them to stammering, sweating—and on one memorable occasion with Anne Widdecombe—weeping wrecks.
Lorna turned to shout, “’Bye, wish you better.” Then she closed the door and began walking briskly toward the stairs. The two women passed on the landing, Lorna shooting Rebecca a brief, rather standoffish smile.
Although Max was up and dressed and pretty much on the mend, he was still covered in pox.
He couldn’t get over her having made him chicken soup. “You know, Rebecca,” he said, hugging her to him, “that is possibly the most thoughtful thing anyone ha
s ever done for me.”
“Really?”
“Really.” (OK, she owed Jess one.)
He smiled at her with his pathetic scabby face. Soon they were kissing. Rebecca was vaguely aware of his hand disappearing down inside his joggers and moving briskly up and down. She pulled away, half frowning, half laughing.
“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I mean if you’d rather be alone.”
“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said, his hand still going at it like mad, “but I’ve got this really humongous pock on my right ball. The itching’s driving me insane.”
“So,” she said, doing her best to sound like she didn’t care, “what was Lorna Findlay doing here?” She turned to face the kitchen counter and began taking the plastic wrap off the soup bowl.
“Oh, you saw her?”
“We passed on the landing.”
By now she was chipping away at the frozen chicken soup with a bread knife. Every so often she would spoon up a few meager ice shavings and drop them into a saucepan.
“Lorna and I are working on the nuclear story together. The idea is I’ll write the piece for the Vanguard, she’ll front the documentary… .Rebecca, you’re being incredibly violent with that knife.”
“I am?” she said. “I hadn’t noticed.” There was no way she was going to admit she was jealous of Lorna Findlay.
He asked her if she was OK.
She explained about her conversation with Mimi Frascatti. “Tried the Paris office this morning. Still no joy. I’ve got to come up with some way of getting into the Mer de Rêves HQ.”
He kissed her again and said he was sure she’d work something out.
When he saw she wasn’t making much headway with the chicken soup he suggested leaving it to thaw and that he’d have it for supper.
Max made tea, which they took into the living room. They sat on the hearth rug, him stretched out, his back against an armchair, her with her knees drawn up under her chin. As they sipped their tea they talked about nothing in particular—family stuff, places they’d been, places they wanted to go, books, films.
