The only thing which saw me through this long night of sexual frustration and insane jealousy was Damon’s appearance as DJ. It was horrific enough to have to sit through that hideous ‘suntime funtime’ routine again. But here was Damon, his self-confidence apparently undiminished by the events of the previous Saturday, decked out in a lemon suit of some hessian-like fabric, strutting and gyrating in the flashing lights like a demented banana, exhorting us all to boogey on down to his great sounds.
This alone might not have been sufficient to distract me from my main preoccupation, but a further and crucial dimension of horror was supplied by the arrival of Clara on the stage, wearing her pink bermudas and off-the-shoulder T-shirt, and acting as a kind of ornament-in-residence, posturing and clicking her fingers, mostly with an expression of studied vacuity, but occasionally flashing Damon—Damon!—a collusive smile.
‘Isn’t that your Clara?’ yelled Nita.
‘Yes!’
‘Mature for her age, isn’t she?’
‘They all look like that nowadays!’ I bellowed, glad that the necessity of shouting made it impossible to detect a tremor of uncertainty in my voice.
‘And there’s your Gareth!’ observed Nita. ‘Seems to be enjoying himself!’ I peered into the Dante-esque melange of bodies and spotted my son cavorting enthusiastically around a near-motionless Sabina Langley, like a cannibal with an oven-ready missionary.
‘All having a great time!’ repeated Nita complacently.
At this juncture Stan, who had been on the door, interposed himself between us and the ghastly prospect of my children’s rampant hormones. He wore the gear he considered suitable for discos, that is to say a powder-blue cardi-coat, tattersall check trews and Hush Puppies.
‘Hi, Stan!’ I cried. ‘Having a groovey time?’
‘About eight-thirty by my watch!’ he replied. ‘And watch out for alcohol!’ he howled, his cravat rippling over his agitated Adam’s apple.
The problem was a perennial one. Drink other than coke or squash was not sold at the Toms family disco, though adults could bring a bottle of wine if they so desired. But the fifteen and sixteen-year-olds under the auspices of Lance Lowe brought alcohol and fags, and set up a supply depot on the edge of the football field, where ragged clouds of cigarette smoke could be seen rising from behind a palisade of six-packs and cooking claret. Apoplectic with frustration, the committee would watch their older charges make regular sorties from crowded hall to fuel dump, have a swig and a puff, and return suitably refreshed and swaggering to the fray. Not that most of them had much to look forward to inside, for most of the girls of the same age were battle-hardened veterans of many such occasions, well beyond the reach of their peers, and content to shuffle in a cold-eyed group with their cronies and ogle (usually) the disco operators.
At nine o’clock, following Zorba’s dance, Damon took a break from his exertions and there followed a twenty-minute interval during which the loos filled up and fresh supplies of parental bouncers came to the door as insurance against the expected insurgence of bikers from Regis.
Now, for the first time, Constantine came into the kitchen. He had broken into a light sweat on the dance floor and looked especially tasty with his hair clinging damply to his brow, and his tie loosened and askew. Nita had gone to get some fresh air with Stan, and I was sitting perched on a stool eating crisps and turning curling sandwiches over the other way to straighten them out.
‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘How am I doing?’
‘Beautifully.’
He came and stood next to me, slipping his hand down inside my dress and massaging my bare back. Salt and vinegar crisps floated unheeded to the ground like autumn leaves.
‘Stop that,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘I like it.’
‘There you are then. Hallo, Nita, I was just trying to persuade Harriet here that a little glass of wine on duty is something she owes herself. You both do, how about it?’
As Nita beamed and bridled and said yes, I reflected for the umpteenth time on Constantine’s ability to cover his tracks at a moment’s notice. In the second that it had taken Nita to cross the threshold the touch of his hand on my back had subtly changed from a lover’s feverish caress to the amiable, asexual pat of a social acquaintance pressing me to a drink. It was quite chilling.
‘… I’ll go and fetch it from my car,’ he said, and went.
‘Isn’t he lovely?’ said Nita.
‘He’s okay,’ I said. ‘A bit smooth for my taste.’
‘You know your trouble, Harriet?’ chuckled Nita, the woman of the world. ‘ You’re too fussy!’
Constantine returned with a bottle of Betabise Tafelwein under each arm and Stan, Robbo and Eric in close attendance. Plastic cups were handed round and generous measures poured. Constantine himself had a coke.
‘You’re not having one, doctor?’ asked Robbo.
‘You forget, Robbo,’ replied Constantine, who was by this time well into christian names with all concerned, ‘ I’m not a local like the rest of you. I have to drive back to Parva after this and it’s more than my job’s worth to be breathalised.’
‘You’re so right,’ said Robbo, taking a deep draught from his own cup. ‘Just not worth it for a man in your position.’
‘And let me tell you,’ put in Stan self-importantly, ‘I know this wine, it’s one of our top sellers, and it has quite a bite in spite of its gentle appearance.’
Quietly, almost gingerly, Eric put his cup down on the draining board. ‘ Well,’ he said, ‘so far so good. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, and no trouble so far!’
‘Is there usually?’ enquired Constantine, and everyone immediately shook their heads vigorously.
‘Of course not!’ said Nita. ‘But you can’t legislate for unpleasant elements from outside the village, can you?’
Eric peered through the serving hatch into the murk of the main hall. ‘It’s really thinned out. Always amazes me where they all go to in the interval.’
This reminded me of something and I excused myself, reluctantly, and went through the swingdoors into the lobby of the village hall. Aside from Trevor, Tanya Lowe, and the bouncing fathers there were Damon and Clara and a few others, eating blobs of orange-coloured expanded polystyrene out of a plastic bag. The whole group surveyed me with the utmost phlegm and the hectic urgency of my arrival now looked ridiculous. I tried to give some point to it by elbowing my way to the Ladies but this was chock-a-block with sharp-haired little girls crowding the mirror and I retreated almost at once, to find that Gareth and Sabina had joined the group. So at least everyone was where I could see them.
‘So, Damon,’ I said, feeling like an early Victorian explorer trying to communicate with primitive tribesmen. ‘You’re a fully fledged disco-owner! I don’t suppose you’ll be needing to clean my floors for much longer.’
Damon chewed ruminatively on the curry-flavoured polystyrene and treated me to a slight lowering of the eyelids which I took to signify assent. It was noticeable how he had grown in stature in the estimation of his peers since this new venture. Though physically he could not compare with the massive, singlet-accoutred functionaries of the usual disco, there emanated from him a spurious but undeniable air of savoir-faire which acted on the teeny-boppers like strong drink.
‘Is Terry with you tonight?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Damon. ‘But no worries. It’s cool.’
‘He’s a roadie,’ explained Sabina unexpectedly.
‘What’s that?’
‘Does the heavy stuff, Ma,’ said Gareth. ‘Why don’t you stick to things you know?’
This seemed like sound advice. I looked at Clara. She wore that utter facial blankness which is the special property of the female pre-pube on the defensive.
‘I think we should get started again,’ I said. ‘ We have to pack up at eleven, you know.’
‘Okay,’ said Damon. ‘ Don’t get your knickers in a knot.’
I
was still smarting under this one when I re-entered the kitchen, and gulped down the rest of the Betabise special as if it were unpalatable medicine. Constantine at once replenished my cup. Eric was telling a story harking back to his Astec Electronics days.
‘… I had to dance with this woman for the rest of the evening as part of my company duties. It was a very confusing experience for a red-blooded young executive, I can tell you, like embracing an Ali Baba basket. She was held in by so many bones and struts I thought everything might suddenly succumb to the pressure and pop out of the top! As it was, one of the uprights in her bodice worked its way free and began to advance upwards in the direction of my right nostril—’ He demonstrated with his finger. His audience was hysterical. ‘ It wasn’t funny. I don’t know what you’re laughing at. I mean, imagine Yours Truly, painfully green and horribly ambitious, too polite to tell the chairman’s lady that her whalebone is sticking up his nose …’
Our appreciative hoots and cackles were drowned by the resumption of the disco, belting out something cacophonous at a volume which set up a species of molecular reaction in the plastic coke bottles on the hatch so that they droned and vibrated like tubular bells.
Under cover of this aural onslaught Constantine put his arm round my waist and whispered, deep in my ear: ‘ Let me take you away from all this …’
It was what I’d been waiting to hear all evening, but now that he’d said it, I was programmed by my environment to respond like a good committee lady.
‘But I’m on duty!’
‘Now then, you two!’ shrieked the ever-vigilant Nita. ‘Put each other down. Doctor, you’re wanted on the door!’
I saw at once the advantage of being totally overt. ‘ He’s going to have a dance with me first!’ I yelled, and literally dragged Constantine on to the floor. Nita, poor unsuspecting cow, was paralytic with mirth.
‘Enjoy yourselves!’ she mouthed.
We joined the throng, writhing and cavorting like good ’uns. Where we infiltrated a group of teenagers they would part like the Red Sea, leaving a small but discernible no-man’s land around us, filled with a disparaging atmosphere of hostility and pity in about equal parts. I sensed that most of this was directed at me, a parent, and not at Constantine who had expended considerable energy on establishing himself as a bit of a card. It occurred to me yet again, as I toned down my gyrations, hypnotised by the suggestive lurching of my partner’s pelvis, that I was way out of my depth.
I was, however, happily and randily ready to drown. So happy and randy, in fact, that I did not notice we had homed in on the storeroom until the handle was boring a hole in my back.
‘What goes on in there?’ asked Constantine, executing a couple of quick twirls and a shimmy just to confirm what was on offer.
‘Storeroom!’ I bawled.
‘Sounds okay to me!’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s full of stuff!’
‘Not that full, I bet!’
‘It’ll be locked!’
In response to this Constantine steered me smartly out of the way and tried the handle, which gave, as everything did, to his touch.
‘See?’
I remembered that Robbo had taken folding chairs from the storeroom earlier in the evening, for the people on the door. ‘Shall we?’
My answer was immaterial, since he had already herded me into the crowded gloomth and was closing the door after us.
It was rather as I imagined being back in the womb—the small, enclosed, airless place, the hot, moist proximity of another’s vital organs, the muffled heartbeat of Disco-Operative. Apart from folding chairs the storeroom was jam-packed with gear belonging to Dilly Chittenden’s playgroup. Boxes of Lego and bricks, small tractors and rocking horses, dolls, bears, play-dough in polythene bags, garages and dolls’ houses stuffed with tiny plastic people staring at us from their little windows like crowds at a coronation. There was no room for even the most rudimentary considerations of comfort, but of course this did not bother Constantine. On the contrary, it seemed that the more inhospitable the setting the more sexual energy he drew from it, and, to my continuing surprise, from me.
So it was that with a trike balanced on my head, my shoulder-blades grinding into a shifting stack of farm animals, and one foot pedalling wildly on an errant felt-tip pen, I achieved in record time yet another glorious, if not lyrical, climax, in the knowledge that upwards of a hundred people were no more than four feet away on the other side of an unlocked door. It made Maria’s nocturnal union with the under-gardener look pretty small beer.
Unfortunately, as Constantine withdrew his head from beneath my skirt my legs gave way and the tricycle which I had been inadvertently supporting during our dalliance crashed to the ground behind me with a hideous jangle of metal, bringing with it a shower of tiny cows, horses, pigs and farmers’ wives.
‘Shit!’ I cried. ‘What the hell shall we do now?’
‘March out and look good,’ he replied. I knew now that he meant exactly what he said, but even so the speed with which he opened the door and strode back into the hall took my breath away. I stumbled after, smoothing my skirt, and hearing, with dismay, a final carthorse drop from its folds as I did so. But, of course, he was right. The crush of perspiring children and their watchful parents were not interested in us, nor, apparently, did they even notice us emerging from the storeroom. And the sound of the falling carthorse, though it seemed like the crack of doom to my guilt-sensitised ears, was completely lost in the din of Disco-Operative at full belt.
Constantine threw himself back into the swing and in this manner we made our way back to the kitchen.
‘I’ve brought her back, you see,’ he yelled at Nita, who was counting the takings.
She wagged a finger at him, then pointed at me. ‘I saw the two of you diving into the storeroom!’
I flushed, burned, sweated and turned to ice in the space of about a second, I swear, but Constantine was composure personified.
‘Yes!’ he replied. ‘Your turn next, Nita! No, actually I wondered if there were any roller skates, so that the youngsters could have a roller-disco competition! But no! Perhaps another time! Another dance, later?’
He waltzed off to join the others on the door and I took up my position once more at Nita’s side. She was shaking her demi-wave with an air of amused indulgence.
‘What a lad he is …!’ she reflected, pinching a pile of fifty-pence pieces. ‘ He’s got an answer for everything!’
I crossed my legs. I’d have plaited them if it had been physically possible to do so.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘hasn’t he just?’
Chapter Thirteen
I travelled first-class to Fartenwald. I knew this was not only to enhance my image as an author who basked in Era’s high esteem, but also to separate me from any Eran stragglers who might be on the other side of the curtain.
After the organisational marathon of the past few days I was looking forward to the three-hour flight for a spot of shut-eye, attended, perhaps, by lubricious, anticipatory dreams. But I hadn’t bargained for the ceaseless ministrations of the first-class stewards (I’m Gary—Cruise Me), who waved steaming cloths with tongs, plied drinks, newspapers, menus and canapés, and enquired continually after my comfort. I hadn’t had so little peace since I was in Barford General having Clara. Every time I closed my eyes to conjure up Constantine rampant in the lift of the Dynamik, my arm would be gently touched as if by some kind, firm nanny and yet another salver of glistening rolled vine leaves—not a happy choice in view of my erotic preoccupation—would be passed under my nose. Erans notwithstanding, I began to long for the cramped slave quarters at the rear where I might have hunched up and dozed off without interruption.
I fancied that I had left matters at home in good order. The dog I had taken to 55 Tennis Court Road, where tempers were a little strained. Arundel did not care for animals and had obviously attempted to put his foot down over the matter of Spot, whom Bernice always took in and spoi
led horribly in my absences. But the days were long since gone when Arundel’s foot had inspired any respect in Bernice. By the time I got there she had taken the offensive and was telling Arundel con brio that if she couldn’t do a little thing like looking after a friend’s dog, then things had come to a fucking pretty pass and what the hell could she do? Barty and I stood in the hall, united in our role as non-combatants, with Spot between us, lips drawn back in an amiable grin, tongue lolling, sublimely unaware of his key status.
After about five minutes, during which Barty inspected his dentures and treated me to gummy, conspiratorial leers, the protagonists emerged. Arundel came first, sweeping past us on an icy wave of extreme pique. His aquiline nose, with its curved, fastidious nostrils, seemed clenched with disfavour so that he resembled a human Concorde. As the front door slammed behind him Barty, Spot and I quaked in his slipstream.
Then came Bernice, the complete antithesis of her husband. She was flushed and expansive, warmed both by the heat of conflict and the satisfying afterglow of victory.
‘Bollocks to him!’ she remarked genially. ‘Hallo, darling Spot. Barty, take Spot to the kitchen and give him some of that cold goulash, there’s a dear. And you—’she pinched my cheek affectionately, ‘get you to your doctor, and make sure you have something worth reporting when you come back.’
‘Coffee madam? Mrs Blair, coffee?’
I started violently and found Ricky (or Julian, or Denzil or Gary) hovering over me with a coffee pot.
‘Yes—thank you.’
Ricky poured coffee with many flourishes, whirled a bonbon dish of bittermints out of thin air and moved on, like a priest taking communion to the sick. I stirred in my whole packet of brown sugar as a V-sign to Basset Magna and all its work, and fell back on my reflections.
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