“Damn it,” I said when the machine gobbled up my coins without spitting out a packet in return.
“Need some help?” said Joel, emerging from the men’s. I caught a glimpse into the strange world of urinals.
I was drunk by this point. “All right, Mr. Practical.”
He looked at it thoughtfully before giving it a hard shove. He gave a silent scream and shook his hand out with pantomime exaggeration. I pulled out the cigarettes that this maneuvering had successfully dislodged.
“Thank you.” I smiled at him. The corridor was narrow and we were close. I was too drunk to feel angry at him any longer and, besides, I was grateful to him for getting me the cigarettes.
“You don’t like me, do you?”
I shrug. “What’s it to you, anyway?” I was very drunk. “Everybody else does. Everybody else loves Joel.”
He nodded. “I like being liked. What do you like then, my little fairy Mary?”
“Nobody’s ever called me that before. Scary Mary, that’s what everyone else calls me.”
“Redhairy Mary. No, that sounds wrong. It is beautiful, your hair.” He reached his hand toward it but stopped before contact was made. “What do you like?”
“I like…” I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything I liked. Well, anything other than the feeling of him being wedged so close to me with his huge physical presence keeping me warm and enclosed against the cigarette machine. “Whiskers on kittens.”
He laughed. “And brown paper packages.”
I nodded and tried to say, “Tied up with string,” but no words would come out. I just stared at him, my mouth agape, waiting for my voice to emerge.
Instead of words coming out of my mouth, I found lips coming toward it. He’s gay, I told myself. I felt a delicious contrast between his stubble and his surprisingly soft lips. I immediately found myself thinking of how that contrast would play out elsewhere on my body. He moved away and looked at me.
Finally I heard words come out of my mouth without really being aware that it was me who was saying them. They had a life of their own. “I like this.”
He smiled and kissed me again. He’s so not gay. I kissed him back, hard. I wanted to eat him up, he tasted so deliciously of smoke and crisps and beer and himself. I thought I could kiss him forever but we had to break off to burst into laughter. We looked at each other and laughed until tears came to our eyes, then we slipped out of the emergency exit and into the passageway, where empty kegs and the pub’s rubbish were kept. There, I leaned against the wall and we kissed some more—kiss, laugh, kiss, laugh. I felt him hard against my flimsy dress, harder still when I lifted my legs and wrapped them around that expansive waistline. I felt so drunk and so turned on that I had wanted him to lift up that dress and rip open my opaque tights and plain supermarket knickers and screw me there and then. Indeed, this might have happened were it not for a pub worker throwing out a bag of rubbish that nearly hit us, whereupon he sneered “Get a room.” We laughed some more and then went back into the pub, walking separately back to our party. Separately, but in a similar state of discomfort, my damp pants and throbbing thighs impeding my progress.
Around that pub table there then followed the most ecstatically excruciating hour of my life. We were pretending that nothing had happened so convincingly that I began to wonder whether anything had. But then he’d catch my eye and we’d swap those smiles that had been as much a part of our seduction as the kisses. I felt emboldened and stroked the back of his neck when I walked past him on the way to the bar.
When I got back to the table, the usual game of musical chairs had taken place and I was now sitting opposite him. I felt a socked foot in my lap. He always has worn nice socks, and these were silky, striped ones. His big toe probed and I felt my pants dampen still further and my mouth open in an involuntary “Oh” of pleasure. The toe pushed on. I wanted more than anything to remove that sock and put those toes into my mouth. I put my finger in instead and looked at him. He turned away and started fiddling with his phone. A second later, mine bleeped with a text message alert.
It was a single word: “OUTSIDE.”
I avoided looking at him and texted back: “NOW.” I tried to find the question mark but gave up and left it as an exhortation.
He stood up and said his goodbyes, swaying slightly. I counted to 60 and then did the same. I rushed out only to find that he wasn’t there. It’s all a joke, of course, he’s gay, he doesn’t even like me, Mitzi and he are probably looking at me and thinking, poor deluded drunken Mary. Then I felt a pair of arms around my waist.
“Quick, before anybody else comes out.”
“Speaking of coming out…” I was interrupted by the timely arrival of a taxi.
“Where to?” Joel asked me.
“I’ve got a flatmate,” I said.
He told the taxi driver an address in an area I’d long coveted but would never be able to afford. We indulged in the sort of frantic, drunken snogging that taxi drivers have to put up with and came up for air outside a large redbrick house.
“My mom’s.”
“She’s not there, is she?”
He laughed. “No, she’s away. Anyway, I’ve got my own flat bit thing.”
We walked through a large hall filled with ancient-looking vases of dried flowers and standard lamps with tasseled shades. I was torn between the desire to follow him or to explore these fantastical rooms with their tantalizing vistas. There was a kitchen with framed newspaper cartoons on the walls and piles of ancient Le Creuset, a study stuffed with books and a tatty armchair, a living room with an exotic drinks trolley. It was all so different from the house I grew up in—this was all faded Persians instead of fitted carpets.
He led me up a corkscrew staircase and then up again to the top floor, which consisted of a vast room with a kitchenette in one corner and a futon in another. The sight of the crumpled sheets made me feel both charged and alarmed. A small door led to a stunted shower room in the eaves. I looked out of the window to see the city sprawled and sparkling in the darkness. It felt like the middle of the night as we’d been drinking since five, but it was only nine o’clock. He rustled up an omelette with herbs cut from a window box that was kept on the roof of the house. I wolfed it down because I wasn’t so drunk not to know that I had to eat something, but I didn’t really want anything other than him in my mouth.
I suppose a thought might have flashed through my head about the wisdom of it all happening so quickly, but I was too drunk and too turned on to care. Normally I might have felt embarrassed by this point, but Joel made me feel like I had come home. In fact, his home felt like the one I should have always lived in, convinced as I was as a teenager that I had been adopted by these boring people and my real parents were arty liberal types engaging in lively debate in an exotic metropolis.
We kissed and laughed and then kissed some more. Then we drank and talked, hurriedly telling each other strange minor details of our lives that seemed suddenly so fascinating. I wanted to eat up him and his words, then I just wanted to eat some more, so we went downstairs to his mom’s kitchen and ate stale peanuts and cooking chocolate. The snack food sobered me up and I vaguely thought about postponing sleeping with him. But I think I already knew what would happen that night.
It was so glorious. He slipped inside me so easily and yet with perfect friction. I wanted to keep him there forever, but I wanted him in and out. He came quickly, a beautiful sight, naked but for one stripy sock and a condom. I hadn’t come, yet, but this was rectified in what seemed like seconds as he dove down before emerging with a glistening chin. Back in the days that I smoked, I used to sometimes think about the pleasure of the next cigarette even as I was smoking my current one. That was how I was that night as I came—I was impatient to make him hard again and to have him inside me, or to rub his cock gently against me until I was begging him to put it inside me. Even for the third or fourth time, I started to think about how good sex would be in the future, since it
had started so promisingly when usually the first night is something just to get through without disaster.
I surveyed myself, speckled with a red flush and stubble burn on my inner thighs. I surveyed the room, which was as disheveled as I was, with red wine splashed against the wall, the sheet coming off the mattress, a saggy bean bag molded to the shape of my bum where Joel had pushed against me from above.
I didn’t think that I had ever been so happy.
7
People in Glass Houses
Subsection E [living] number 5) Leaves me to do all the packing. Well, not all the packing, strictly speaking: he packs his own case (small, battered, belonged to his grandfather and is covered in glamorous Cunard cruise liner and early Pan Am stickers) with a few pairs of boxers and a toothbrush.
E6) Shouts “I’ve finished,” when he’s done doing E5) and then sits around sighing while I pack for two children as well as all the general family baggage.
E7) Says “Blimey” when he sees the quantity of detritus I’ve packed—the snacks for the journey, the diapers for Gabe, the potty, the four times daily changes of clothes, the all-weather options, the duvet that Rufus can’t sleep without—“I remember when you used to be able to do hand luggage for a fortnight’s holiday,” he sighs.
I [general ineptitude] number 12) Leaves all the drawers on his chest perilously open. Does he not read the freak-accident-killing-toddler section of the newspapers? The one that warns of decapitation by electric windows in the car, choking on dried apricots and being skewered by an up-ended knife in an open dishwasher?
“Can you at least help me get this stuff into the car?” I shout as I’m surrounded by a mismatched assortment of suitcases and rucksacks, with overspill barely contained by a couple of plastic bags. Why is packing like this? It starts days earlier with scribbled reminders not to forget various items on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes. Months later, I might find a cryptic clue inscribed on the flyleaf of one of the boys’ books, reading “monitor” or “rabbit.” I also do my best to siphon off the clothes that we will be taking with us in the week preceding departure, but still find myself washing all the favorite must-haves the day before, forgetting to put them in the tumble dryer and having to take them still wet in plastic bags. They then either get hung up to dry in the car (we used to let them fly in the breeze by rolling up the windows to trap them, until Gabe worked out how to unwind the windows on the M1 and liberated a flock of damp undies), or left in the plastic bag to mildew.
In my fantasy, packing involves going into a marvelous walk-in wardrobe full of neatly folded clothes which will be seamlessly transferred to a matching set of luggage on wheels. One day, I think, I shall be the sort of person who keeps my shoes in their original boxes with photographs on the outside to identify the contents.
Mitzi says she’s got packing for the second home down to a tee and can “bundle them into the car in just two minutes.” I think she has been helped in this by buying duplicates of everything, including assorted bicycles and favorite scooters, thus avoiding the pile-up in a toy shop effect that our car boot is currently sporting.
Gabe is hitting his elder brother with a wooden spoon. Rufus rolls around in exaggerated agony and then begins to whine, an oft-adopted tone. In any given hour of the day, a TV production team could easily compile enough footage for “The Tennant family are finding life with two boisterous boys hard-going” segments for one of those programs where a nanny comes and sorts out your dysfunctional family.
“Please,” I shout to Joel. We only ever use such pleasantries in unpleasant voices.
“Can’t we just pretend that we’re ill?” he says.
“Don’t start that again. It will be fun.” This is said in the same bright voice that I use when I’m telling my children about our forthcoming trip to a stately home.
“It will be about as fun as a botulism cocktail with an anthrax chaser.”
“Have you got any better suggestions for the bank holiday weekend?”
“I wish it were just a weekend. I can’t believe you’ve said we’ll stay until Wednesday.”
“Think of it as a long weekend.”
“A very, very long weekend.”
“It’s half term. Have you got any better plans?”
“I’d be very happy to stay here.”
“You know we’d drive each other mad by tomorrow and you’d mysteriously find a reason to go into the office. Look upon it as a free holiday.”
“You know that nothing’s ever free with Mitzi.” He sighs. “At the very least we’ll be expected to wax lyrical about, oh I don’t know, the wonderful original features and aren’t you clever to have found flagstones made from the bones of real organic orphans, and a bath hand-knitted by a thousand Hindu priests and filled with holy water from the river Ganges.”
“It’s a small price to pay. Have you seen the cost of renting in the school holidays?”
“All those ghastly friends…”
“Becky’s staying nearby and will be coming over. You’ll have one kindred spirit.”
“Thank the lord.”
“Come on, let’s get this stuff into the car.”
“I thought we were going for a few nights, not relocating our entire lives.”
“Very funny. Now get it into the car before I decide to go without you.”
“Now we’re talking.”
We have exceeded the maximum time that our family can be in the car without fear of violence. Joel and I have argued about whether we should have music or speech radio, the boys have argued about who gets to hold the portable DVD player.
“So how long did Mitzi say it would take to get there?” It is rare that Joel gets noticeably irritated, but a long car ride to an undesirable destination is enough to rile even him.
“A couple of hours.”
He snorted. “We’ve already been in the car two and a half. Why is it that people with second homes always feel the need to lie about how long it takes to get there?”
“Maybe they’ve got some cunning route.”
“In their time machine.”
“More likely Michael’s Ferrari.”
“That’s it. Once, Michael will have done the journey in two and a half hours at one in the morning 30 miles over the speed limit and now Mitzi feels it’s completely truthful to chirp that their dear little place in the country is just ‘a couple of hours away.’ It’s what people with country houses do. That, and tell you it’s only an hour by train and ‘It can take you longer than that just to get across London.’ And if they move lock, stock and barrel to the country, they’ll always use the phrase ‘You must come and stay. We’ll probably see more of each other than we do now.’ Those are the three immutable laws of buying a house outside the M25.”
Joel’s experience of people with country houses is far more extensive than mine, given that most of his mother’s friends had “little places” they’d inherited or picked up for a song in parts of Suffolk, Sussex or Dorset, back in the days when being an intellectual seemed to afford one the life of a banker.
A full three and three quarter hours after we set off, we arrive at a large flint and brick converted barn surrounded by fields, and beyond that marshes, and beyond that the sea. Its rustic charm is only slightly marred by the look-at-me solar panels, wind-power generator and about half a million pounds’ worth of cars on the front driveway. That and the sound of two small boys whining from the back seat of our battered Volkswagen Golf and my leaden heart at seeing the wet patch on Gabe’s trousers.
Mitzi comes out, wearing a sailcloth slop, very fitted jeans and a pair of unmuddied Hunters. Two of her offspring follow her, wearing children’s approximations of the same outfit, trailed by a Labrador and a terrier. I quickly realize that neither I nor my children have the wardrobe nor domestic pet necessary for an English coastal retreat.
“I’m so sorry we’re late, it took us longer than expected.”
“Almost four hours, in fact,” adds Joel.
It’s started already, that snapping at each other that he and Mitzi engage in.
“What, did you come via Scotland?” says Mitzi.
“No, just via the same old boring time-space continuum that most of us live in.”
“Well, if you’d helped me pack then maybe we’d have been able to leave a bit sooner and not got into all that caravan traffic.”
“I wasn’t the one who said it was going to take two hours.”
“This place is amazing,” I say, turning to Mitzi.
“Isn’t it? Do you want to have a look around?”
“I’d rather have lunch,” mutters Joel.
“Don’t mind him, I think he may be a bit hypoglycemic. Why don’t you get some cereal bars out of my bag for you and the boys?” I sigh. “You know what they’re like, they need carbs and/or sugar every two hours.”
“So we opened out the hall to make a more imposing entrance and it doubles up as a dining room,” Mitzi begins. “And then of course the kitchen was so poky that we knocked it all through.” We come into an expanse of light that looks out to all that flatness and all that sky.
“Wow, look at this granite,” I say, stroking an island unit that’s as large as most mortals’ kitchens.
“Not granite, 80 percent recycled glass. And the floor you’re standing on is made from old tires, melted down and woven. Stunning, isn’t it?”
“Look at those views,” I say, though in truth my eye is more taken by the twelve-foot-high sliding doors that divide us from the outside. They must have cost a fortune. “Was it difficult to get planning for this extension?”
The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs Page 18
