by Adele Parks
‘I didn’t know, absolutely know, but I thought the odds were with me.’
‘You are so cynical.’
We have fast become confidantes. This is entirely due to the copious amounts of alcohol we’ve consumed; still, I am quite unable to resist the illusion of companionable intimacy. Whilst I talk about work Fi is more keen to discuss her dearth of men in relation to my plethora. On one hand it is odd; after all, she is an extreme beauty. She’s also got that exotic twist of a Scandinavian parentage. If I were male I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. The matter is cleared up when she admits to me that secretly all she desires is a large family and a log cabin. Men can smell women who want commitment further away than they can smell those who wear Poison perfume. The odour is just as overpowering and off-putting.
Fi is looking through Tatler’s ‘ Little Black Book’. She throws it aside and picks up London Guide to Restaurants. She isn’t looking for somewhere to eat but she’s looking at the photos of the chefs. She fancies the idea of bagging a creative, temperamental kitchen diva. I’m sceptical.
‘I’d stick to the methods which are proven,’ I advise.
‘Like what?’ asks Fi grumpily.
‘Supermarkets or the company telephone directory. I don’t know. I never have any trouble meeting men.’
‘Yeah, you’d get lucky in a convent.’ She throws the guide to one side. ‘But it’s such a waste. You are never even grateful.’
I stare at her. Surely that is the point.
‘Why are you so eternally unimpressed?’ she asks. It is the drink that has given her the confidence to ask this. ‘Your first!’ She’s fallen on some inspiration. ‘Tell me about that.’
She’s looking for insight. I don’t normally indulge. But a bottle of Merlot has magically appeared from nowhere and we’ll have to talk about something as we drink it. Fi’s stories have dried up pretty quickly. I feel obliged to entertain.
‘My first.’ I cast my mind back through the numerous tangled sheets and emotions I’ve shagged my way through. ‘Maybe if he’d been faithful I could have believed in fidelity, even after my father’s rather poor attempt as a role model.’
‘He wasn’t, then?’
‘What do you think?’
‘The odds are definitely against it,’ admits Fi. She pours some wine into my glass. ‘What was he like?’
‘Beautiful,’ I admit. ‘I mean, I was just like the next seventeen-year-old. OK, my parents had gone pear-shaped, but you know I was seventeen. I was hopeful. I hadn’t been sitting at the dining-room table sticking a fork into my hand to see how much pain I could sustain, like some psycho.’ I sigh. ‘He was twenty-six. He was beautiful and shallow. And married, as it happened.’
‘No.’ Fi is shocked. I grin wryly. I remember being shocked. Now disreputable behaviour never shocks me, it doesn’t even disappoint me – I see it as an inevitability.
‘Yeah. Slipped his mind to tell me. Until his wife turned up on my mother’s doorstep. To quote the great Holly Golightly, ‘Quel Rat.’
Fi sits silently, trying to take it in. It’s true it’s not the conventional first lover story. That’s meant to take place in the back of your parents’ Volvo or at someone else’s house whilst you are babysitting. It’s meant to take place with some acne-ridden youth who is equally inexperienced and as smitten as you are.
‘Which made me a paramour at seventeen years old,’ I joke. But really it was no laughing matter at the time.
‘Inadvertently,’ says Fi, loyally.
‘Still.’ I inhale deeply.
‘Still,’ she admits, taking a large swig.
I’d cried for months and when I stopped crying I started hating. It took several more months for the hate to cool and when it did I was left in a pool of icy resentment. ‘So I figured I should try and turn it to my advantage. No more shocks. No more surprises. I decided to have a very low expectancy threshold on what should be gained from a relationship. I don’t think unconditional love is a possibility, never mind a probability, which guarantees no disappointment.’
Fi is concentrating on what I’ve just said as she taps out the tune playing on the jukebox with her fag pack.
‘Sounds a bit extreme. Couldn’t you have just dated someone your own age and sort of – she pauses – ‘I don’t know, muddled along like the rest of us?’
I raise an eyebrow and she shrugs, perhaps realizing how unappealing the alternative is.
‘I did date someone my own age next. He was a fop. Lovable, I guess.’ I think about it, perhaps for the first time. ‘Yes, certainly. But his willingness to please, at first a novelty, quickly became tiresome. Why don’t we value those who most deserve to be valued?’ I turn to Fi, but she’s concentrating on drawing a loveheart on the table with drips of wine. ‘Answers on a postcard please. Before I knew it I’d sort of fallen into a series of one-night stands, mostly with married men or commitment phobes and, on one occasion, a homosexual.’
This gets her attention. ‘How did you know? Did he make you dress up and do funny things with strap-ons?’
‘No, Fi, he had an opinion on my wallpaper.’ I run through my sexual misadventures in my head and it could be the alcohol but this reminiscing is making me decidedly morose. I rouse myself into my more acceptable, tough, public persona. ‘Just take it from me it’s easier to enjoy the moment and not expect anything more because really there isn’t anything more. I heartily recommend the married man.’ I swallow and then refill both our glasses.
‘Doesn’t it bother you that someone else is getting the best bit?’
‘The best bit?’ I’m genuinely challenged to understand what Fi means.
‘The companionship, the stability, the history, the future.’
‘The dirty washing, the belching, the rows, the incessant football results.’
‘But it doesn’t make sense. You suffered first-hand because your father had a mistress. Why would you want to inflict the same pain on someone else?’
To be fair this is a pretty good question. Especially considering the units we’ve consumed on empty stomachs. It is a question I’d asked myself, once upon a time. The first time I fell for a married man it was purely accidental. I didn’t really expect it to happen again. I did hate the very idea of ‘the other woman’. Women who are compliant in this perpetuation of misery repelled me. After all, if there hadn’t been a Miss Hudley, there wouldn’t have been a deserting father and a deserted mother.
A deserted daughter.
The problem is, of course, you can take out Miss Hudley but a Miss Budley or a Miss Woodly would replace her. The choice is clear to me: become a Miss Hudley because the alternative role is worse – become the deserted wife. My mother’s face, worn and weary with clinging to her pride whilst losing her husband, her home, her name and her identity, burns into my consciousness. Fear flung me into relationships with men committed to someone else. It was safer. I should have been struck by lightning when I broke the taboo the first time. I sometimes wish I had been. With alarming ease I’ve broken every rule and never been punished – in fact, I’ve often been rewarded. It seemed that what I was doing was sanctioned. Whilst I collected compliments and Cartier, tenaciously avoiding commitment or Kleenex, my friends who hoped for the Happily Ever After were discovering that the road to fairyland was long and winding. And often heartbreaking.
Somehow I’ve developed secret signals that repel available men or men with a penchant for commitment yet simultaneously attract married men or any of the others who don’t want anything more than sex. Or maybe it’s just that the numbers are in my favour. I don’t say any of this to Fi. I turn back to her question and simplify.
‘I’m not threatening. I don’t want to be someone’s girlfriend, or, horror of horrors, wife. Therefore I’m not a risk. I never demand. I never call at inconvenient times; I never criticize his wife-slash-girlfriend. And in return he has no right to ask me where I’m going or when I’ll be back. He has no ability to make me fall in love with
him.’
Fi stares at me. It may be that she is impressed. It may be that she is horrified. It may be that she is pissed.
‘Christ, how depressing,’ she moans.
‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ I challenge.
We are both silent for a long time. Eventually Fi suggests, ‘Another bottle?’
I return from the bar with a bottle and, because we both need cheering up, a couple of bankers.
‘Fi, let me introduce Ivor Jones and Mike Clark. They’re bankers.’ Fi starts to giggle. ‘That’s with a “b”,’ I hiss through clenched teeth. I’ve seen Ivor and Mike in this pub before. Over the last couple of months we have nodded to each other and occasionally I’ve accepted a drink from Ivor. They’ve been watching us all evening. Then I started to watch them watching us. When it got to the point of them watching us watching them watching us I knew it was time to say hi. They are well and identically dressed. Dark Boss suits, striped shirts, probably off-the-peg rather than Savile Row, saffron Hermes ties. They probably don’t even know they are saffron – they probably describe them as yellow. Ivor distinguishes himself by having a killer Welsh accent that largely renders him incomprehensible but is very sexy. I don’t mind incomprehensible. Most importantly Ivor is wearing a wedding ring and so I leave Mike to Fi.
Ivor’s attractions are not what one would describe as classical. His face reminds me of a soundly slapped bottom. He is pale with a sprinkling of freckles and a small snub nose. On the other hand he is tall (six-foot-two-ish), ridiculously intelligent and appallingly arrogant. Besides which he is begging for it. It would be rude not to sleep with him. His hungry, alert eyes bore into me as he showers us with awful sexist jokes. As he hands round bottles of Becks he asks, ‘How many men does it take to open a beer?’ Without waiting for a reply he tells us, ‘None. It should be opened by the time she brings it.’ Mike and Ivor laugh heartily. I do too, even though I’ve heard the joke before. Fi scowls. Ivor is doing an emotional borderpoint check patrol. Just checking the amount of commitment I’ll require. If I take his blatantly offensive jokes seriously he knows he’s on dangerous territory. If I don’t nettle but counter with a few sheep-shagging jokes, he knows he’s in the clear. Ivor catches Fi’s scowl.
‘Oh, no offence. There’s nothing worse than a male chauvinist pig, is there? Well, except a woman who won’t do what she’s told.’ Again he laughs. Fi is obviously unimpressed. I’m refreshed to find a man who is honest enough to tell it as he sees it. However, for Mike’s sake I hope he tries a more conventional chatting-up approach with Fi. If I could, I’d advise chocolates and compliments.
Ivor is bored with trying to control the group dynamics and his interest now lies in drawing me into a more intimate conversation. He takes advantage of Fi going to the loo and Mike going to the fag machine to invade my body space. He’s sitting on my right and he edges closer. I have nowhere to move, even if I wanted to. He puts his left arm along the back of the scruffy tartan settee. It reminds me of being in the pictures, aged thirteen.
‘So how old are you, Cas?’
‘Thirty-three.’ I never hesitate here. I’m proud to be thirty-three. I think it has much more kudos than, say, twenty-six or eighteen. I certainly feel better than I did then. It’s only women who have a biological Timex who have a problem with saying their post-thirty ages out loud. Pointless really – it’s not as though denial will turn the hands back. Anyway, I know I don’t look thirty-three. As if to prove a point and somewhat predictably, Ivor raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t bother with the cheap compliment that I don’t look my age. He knows I’ll have been told this often enough. Instead he keeps the conversation on track.
‘So when are you going to settle down and make an honest man of your boyfriend?’
‘Honesty is not my thing. I don’t have a boyfriend and I don’t want to be a wife.’ I smile efficiently. So Ivor’s scored a hat trick, discovering the three most important facts in one conversational turn. He taps my leg with his right hand.
‘You’re a wicked woman, Cas.’
This isn’t strictly true. But for immediate purposes it will do as a character ensemble.
‘So what do you want?’
I could tell him that I want world peace. I want Issie to find the man of her dreams. I want Josh to stop having wet dreams. I want my mother to redecorate and I want massive ratings on the next episode of Sex with an Ex.
‘That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ I whisper as I move closer, allowing my breast to rub against his arm. I realize I’m not conforming to the traditional role of coy female. But playing hard to get is only useful if you want to keep the man in question, which I never do. I approve of the invention of paper knickers, cups, napkins, knives and forks. I adore the disposable. I smile broadly. He gulps his designer beer. Amnesia has hit. The words ‘for better, for worse’ etc. are temporarily erased from Ivor’s mind.
‘You know, just before you joined us Fi and I were discussing the fact that I make an adorable mistress.’ My voice is devoid of emotion and I could have just commented on the autumnal weather. The contrast between the piping hot statement and the Arctic delivery causes Ivor’s cock to stiffen. It’s just too much fun to resist. I look from his cock to his eyes, back to his cock. His gaze follows mine. He blushes and crosses his legs. But to be honest, he hasn’t a chance. ‘You see, I enjoy it. All of it. Dressing up, having food eaten off me. I never worry that the chocolate ice cream will stain the sheets.’
‘Meet me outside in ten minutes,’ he says, leaving before he’s finished his beer. I wonder how he’s going to hold his erection for ten minutes, as he looks fit to explode. ‘I need to call my wife. It’s just—’ I stop him saying any more. I don’t need his excuses.
‘Save it for her.’
He shows willing, in fact much too willing. His enthusiasm briefly battles with his ludicrously macho self-image. The enthusiasm wins. Ivor manages to restrain himself in the short cab ride that takes us to a hotel, and whilst he checks in. If ‘restraint’ can be used to describe a man who is intermittently swilling out my ear with his tongue. However, somewhat disappointingly for us both, he shoots his load in the hotel lift. I have very little to do with the act. Besides being there. It’s a depressing thought, but I have to face it. He could have downloaded some images from the Pamela Anderson website. His premature ejaculation has sobered both of us. I’m left frustrated. Hardly the culmination to the evening celebrating my ratings that I was expecting. I stare at Ivor, who can barely face me. The lift stops.
‘I haven’t spoken to my wife for eighteen months.’ Inwardly I sigh. If I’d realized this I wouldn’t have touched Ivor with a barge pole. I look at him. He’s grinning. ‘I don’t like to interrupt her.’
Another one of his jokes. We are both relieved and indulge in juvenile sniggers. His humour, for what it is, has saved the day. It’s not that I think this man is particularly irresistible but I do admire an ability to laugh in the face of adversity. Although I no longer want carnal knowledge of him I am aware that he has just shed out £185 for a hotel room. The least I can do is help him attack the mini bar. By the time he unlocks the hotel bedroom door it’s pretty clear that neither of us wants sex. We do both, however, need a bit of a confidence boost. I’ve never had the Pamela Anderson thought before but now I can’t shake it.
‘I’ve never done this before,’ he offers as an explanation, justification and apology all at once.
‘You don’t—’ I plan to say, ‘You don’t say,’ but I catch a glimpse of Ivor sitting on the edge of the bed. His head is in his hands. It could be the alcohol, but I think he is genuinely upset. I change tack. ‘You don’t have to apologize. There’s a first time for everyone.’
‘It’s just that recently my wife and I haven’t been getting along too well.’
‘Married long?’ I ask as I light a cigarette.
‘Four years.’
Ah, the seven-year itch. Everything is fast-track in London. I inhale deeply.
‘Oh.’ I’m engrossed in the mini bar. The hasty offload I can forgive, but if it’s marriage guidance he’s after I’d prefer it if he got a counsellor. I pour myself a brandy and try to change the subject. ‘Know any more jokes?’ It appears that the sexist and irreverent jokes have dried up. He’s insisting on showing me that he’s a decent bloke. He’s wasting his time; it’s an oxymoron and it’s late. He fishes in his wallet and pulls out a picture of his wife.
‘This is Julie.’ I hate this name and face business. I light another cigarette and realize that I haven’t smoked my first one yet. Irritated I stub it out.
‘Very nice,’ I comment, after taking a cursory glance at the picture. Julie looks like a pleasant enough woman, curvaceous, jolly, uncomplicated. She looks like a wife.
‘I do love her,’ pleads Ivor.
I take pity. Which is unusual. Am I due? It could be that. When I’m hormonal I’m moved by Heartbeat
‘Look, it’s OK.’ I sit next to him on the bed and stroke his head as if he is a Labrador. I am practised at letting them off the hook. Admittedly it’s usually post coital rather than pre. Normally I use the gentle let-down as an efficient way to get them to vacate my bedroom. ‘Nothing happened,’ I insist. I consider sharing my Pammie theory but I’m not feeling that charitable. I wonder if he’d have resisted me if I was an ex of his. I doubt it. It’s the uncharted waters that are scaring him. ‘It was the combination – availability and alcohol. My availability and your alcohol. It gets them every time.’ I try to grin. ‘Now go home to your wife.’
He readily accepts my suggestion and scrambles to his feet. He pushes his arm into the sleeve of his jacket, which, I note, he hadn’t let go of. His readiness to leave me momentarily stings, so just before the bedroom door slams closed I yell, ‘And don’t get mixed up in capers you can’t handle.’
It’s useful advice.
6
