The Seven Year Itch

by Emlyn Rees

  My eyes lock on Roland, who lurches into sight above me now, glaring down.

  ‘Ge–’ I say, which is about as much of the phrase, ‘Get away from me, you testosterone-tripping, ASBO-warranting, psychotic, sadistic, scumbag from hell,’ that my scrambled brain and mouth can string together right now.

  Roland’s not impressed. He continues to pose in what appears to be a mirror-practised pugilistic stance, with his manicured mitts clenched into fists.

  I then watch in shocked amazement, as he gently rocks from one foot to the other, and allows himself a cruel smile of satisfaction. Like he’s a pro. Like he’s just knocked out the Champ, and we’re actually in Vegas, surrounded by the strobing glare of camera flashes, with the referee counting me out. Like all that’s left to do now is wait for a bikini-clad glamour model to adorn Roland with his shining federation belt.

  Flash git.

  ‘Stay down,’ he snarls.

  As if I’ve got a choice. There’s a Jacuzzi hissing in my ears, and my legs are cycling feebly, like I’m doing the dying fly.

  That’s when she grabs him. From behind. Without warning. Like a Ninja. With a pincer grip to the scruff of his neck.

  Then she jerks his right arm up behind his back.

  It’s like watching a naughty schoolkid being yanked out of a remedial classroom by a no-nonsense PE teacher. Or the moment when the skinny, masked karate guy named Kendo Nagasaki flattens the seemingly unbeatable beardy giant in a wrestling match. Or Uma kicking ass in Kill Bill.

  It’s cool as fuck, in other words.

  This woman, she’s poetry in motion. And I’m her number-one fan.

  ‘You go, girl,’ I manage to mumble, feeling every inch the excited teenaged admirer, as I watch in awe as she frogmarches Roland from the room and out of sight.

  If I had a flag I’d wave it. Or cheerleader pompoms. I’d wave them too. I’m not proud. I’m a lover not a fighter. Whereas this woman clearly has nerves of steel.

  I owe her big time.

  And I’m so grateful that he’s gone.

  I’ve been hit harder, I suppose – by Sally ‘She Who Must Not Be Named’ McCullen’s ex-boyfriend, Jons, for one – but that was a long time ago, and these days, I’m out of practice. It smarts something rotten.

  Two minutes later, and my bra-and-pantied Amazonian saviour is back, helping me to my feet and leading me over to the rattan sofa, where she gently sits me down.

  As she pushes her wavy, espresso-bean-coloured fringe back from her face, I notice that beneath it her eyes are pretty and blue.

  She reminds me of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., and I feel my stomach perform a pancake flip.

  As she gazes down at me, her expression fluctuates between pity and anger.

  I, meanwhile, try not to stare at her impressive cleavage, which my peripheral vision has already flagged up as being absolutely corking and only inches away.

  In an attempt to focus my attention elsewhere, I tentatively touch my mouth and stare at my fingertips. They’re red with blood.

  ‘He’s split your lip,’ she tells me, ‘but don’t worry. It’s not too bad.’

  Now that she’s no longer hurling abuse, I can hear that this woman’s got a nice voice, a posh voice, but one that conveys intelligence too.

  ‘I’ll get you some ice. Wait there.’

  And just when I was about to run after Roly and teach him a lesson . . .

  ‘One question first,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are Jessie, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, good. Because I’d hate to be bleeding all over the wrong house.’

  She manages a smile.

  Less than a minute later and she’s back, wrapped – disappointingly – in a fluffy white dressing gown. I feel something cold and hard being pressed up against my lip.

  ‘Whu?’ I grunt.

  ‘It’s a Magnum ice cream,’ she tells me. ‘Your face might get a bit sticky, but it will help to keep the swelling down.’

  In spite of the ache in my jaw, I nearly snigger at this inadvertent double entendre. I take the ice cream from her.

  ‘And there was me thinking that frozen peas were more traditional,’ I say.

  ‘I don’t eat frozen vegetables,’ she tells me. ‘They’re common.’

  She’s speaking to the kid here who thought vegetables grew in plastic bags until he left home, but I let it pass.

  ‘I run an organic veg stall in Queen’s Park,’ I tell her instead. For my boss, I’m about to add, but then I think better of it, and let that slide as well. Because as far as Jessie knows I am my own boss.

  ‘Perfect. Will you be able to give me a delivery here once a week?’ she asks.

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  ‘Half fruit, half veg.’

  ‘No problem. No problem at all.’

  ‘You can drop it round when you next come over,’ she says.

  My heart thuds.

  ‘You mean you want me to work for you?’

  ‘Absolutely. I want you to manage the garden, and all the indoor plants as well.’

  ‘But we haven’t even discussed it yet.’ What I mean by this, of course, is we haven’t discussed the money yet.

  ‘We don’t need to,’ Jessie says.

  ‘We don’t?’

  ‘No. Not after the way you tried sticking up for me just now. And I’m happy to pay whatever your going rate is . . .’

  There is, of course, no answer to this, and so I keep my trap shut.

  But still, I can’t help a painful smile.

  Because here it is. My first solo gig. Just like that. Branching Out has begun to grow. I can see the business card already.

  ‘Take your shirt off,’ Jessie then tells me, starting to unbutton it without waiting for a reply.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s blood on it. If I soak it now, it’ll come straight out.’

  So not only is she a highly paid radio DJ and expert martial artist, but a provider of handy household hints as well. Is there no limit, I wonder, to this woman’s skills?

  As she continues to strip off my shirt, without even thinking it I find myself breathing in self-consciously and straightening my back. I’m aware that this is inappropriate behaviour, to say the least. I’m meant to be gratefully receiving the caring medical attentions of my new employer, not acting like a teenager parading his fledgling torso on a beach for the very first time.

  But there’s no denying it. There is something exposing, something sensual about all of this. As I look down and watch Jessie’s fingers working my buttons free, right down to the waist, I can’t help thinking that she’s clearly experienced at this sort of thing. They move with the speedy efficiency of a crab’s claws underwater, as fast as knitting needles – and when I glance up, I notice that she’s looking at my face, not her hands. What’s she’s doing is all in the touch . . .

  She only fumbles once, right at the end – and I can’t help vainly thinking that this is deliberate – when one of her fingernails (painted vamp red) brushes inadvertently across the smooth patch of skin, just above my hip, the bit that Amy always ends up absent-mindedly stroking after sex.

  Amy.

  The word slams into my conscious like a whip crack. I actually flinch.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Jessie asks.

  I feign rubbing my jaw. ‘Sure,’ I say, ‘just a twinge.’

  Of guilt, I’m thinking. I mean, if Amy was to walk in now, she’d . . .

  But what, exactly, would Amy do? What, exactly, could she do? OK, so admittedly there is an incredibly attractive woman who’s currently circling round behind me and slipping my shirt off my shoulders. But there’s also blood on my lip and blood on my shirt. There’s hard evidence, in other words, that everything going on here is strictly above board.

  And even if Jessie, with the sunlight filtering down through her hair and on to my face, does look like an angel to me right now, that’s probably just a symptom o
f whatever mild concussion I might have sustained. Or some kind of Florence Nightingale Effect. Which means it’s natural for me to think kindly of her. Perfectly natural. And perfectly pure.

  Nothing to feel guilty about at all.

  Jessie comes back round and stands in front of me, gazing down at my bare chest.

  ‘So do you work out a lot, or is it just the job?’ she asks, dabbing at my lip with a tissue, before enfolding it in my hand.

  ‘Er, a bit of both,’ I lie.

  In truth, the last time I went to the gym, I was wearing Dunlop Green Flash trainers, a John McEnroe tricolour headband, and The Human League were still in the charts.

  But judging by Jessie’s astonishing physique, she’s clearly a fitness fanatic, and even I know that the number-one rule of sales is to bond with people, because people like doing business with people like themselves.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, ‘for trying to calm Roland down back there.’

  ‘I’d have done the same for anyone,’ I say modestly.

  ‘You should call your gardening firm “Sir Gawain”,’ she tells me.

  ‘As in the Green Knight?’ I guess.

  ‘A gardener with a classical education,’ she says with a smile. ‘I have got lucky, haven’t I?’

  ‘More like I just watch too many movies . . .’

  I consider telling her the real reason behind my heroic stance was because of my relationship with my dad, not her, but I don’t. Why ruin a good thing? What’s the point in owning up to the fact that my assumed heroism was nothing more than a spontaneous bubbling up of Freudian rage? Jessie has me down as her knight in shining armour, when I’m more used to being regarded by Amy as a peasant knee-deep in shit. It’s an altered image I could grow to like.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ she says. ‘You were very gallant.’ She says this stressing the second syllable, which somehow makes its application to me sound even cooler in my ears. ‘Roland’s got a black belt in tae kwon do,’ she explains.

  More like moron- do, I think. ‘You didn’t do so badly yourself,’ I say. ‘Slinging him out of the house like that. If you ever get bored with the radio, I’m sure you could forge a great second career as a bailiff or bouncer.’

  A smile crosses her face, but then it’s gone again. ‘It was he who got me to take up self-defence,’ she says. ‘Kind of ironic that I ended up using it on him.’

  ‘Is he always like that?’ I ask.

  ‘Like what?’

  I wipe at my lip with the tissue. ‘Like someone who needs a restraining order put out against them.’

  ‘No, and anyway,’ she adds, ‘he gets quite enough restraining as it is. That’s what we were rowing about in the first place. I found a business card in his pocket. Here.’ She picks a small rectangular card off the floor and passes it to me.

  There’s a picture of a young Oriental woman on it, dressed in a PVC catsuit, with a mortarboard on her head and a cane in her hand. Widow Spankee’s Detention Centre For Naughty Boys, reads the legend underneath, next to a mobile phone number.

  ‘I rang the number,’ Jessie continues, ‘and asked what services they provided. I had to look half of them up on the net, they were so weird . . .’

  ‘And you confronted him with this?’

  ‘Of course. He never was a very good liar, and it all came out. He’s been seeing hookers for the whole six months we’ve been together. The shit.’ I notice tears in her eyes. She wipes them angrily away.

  ‘I can come back,’ I say.

  ‘No. It’s all right. I’m fine. I’ll just get dressed and fetch you a T-shirt. Make yourself at home.’

  As she hurries away, it’s hard to tell whether she’s actually crying or not.

  36DD

  Waste not, want not, I think, unwrapping the Magnum, and taking a bite.

  Mmm. It’s quite an unusual taste sensation. Blood and chocolate. Blocolate. Not as bad a combination as one might suppose. I might even send an e-mail to Ben & Jerry and suggest they add it to their range.

  I realise I’m feeling a lot better and risk standing up. Yep, I think, taking a couple of tentative steps forward, I’m definitely on the mend.

  Idly, I pace out the room. My kitchen at home, which is by far the biggest room in the flat, is eight paces long. This, I now calculate, is twenty-eight.

  This is the kind of house, in other words, I always dreamt of ending up in when I was a kid, but somehow never did. And I can’t help myself: I keep seeing glimpses of that other life I might have had.

  There’s the dinner parties, with Jude, Sienna, Keira and the gang; and the half-finished canvases, scattered across the floor; and the best-mate rock star, unconscious in the corner, after a night out on the lash. And, of course, there’s my triumphant return from the Turner Prize award ceremony, and being led upstairs by the nanny to see the kids in their Peter Pan-style dormitory room, where they’ve all been lined up to kiss their papa a fond goodnight, before he heads back out to the Ritz . . .

  But before I get too depressed by this lost other life, I start picking up the broken plants, and cradling them in my arm like they’re babies, carrying them to some empty pots in the corner of the atrium and bedding them in.

  ‘You’re obviously a father,’ Jessie says, when she returns.

  If she was crying when she left, there’s certainly no sign of it now. She’s dressed like she’s off out for dinner, in a strappy black top, long white trousers, and rope-soled mules.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘And you? Have you got kids?’

  ‘No, I’m more the career type.’

  She throws me a Close Encounters of the Third Kind T-shirt and I pull it on. Then she nods towards a cobwebbed glass doorway in the corner of the atrium.

  ‘Let’s go outside,’ she says.

  ‘Sure,’ I say, going over to join her. ‘This is a great house, by the way.’

  She unlocks the door. ‘It was my mum’s. She died last month. Which means it’s mine now. I don’t know anything about plants myself. Roland said I should get rid of them and modernise in here, but Mum grew all of these herself and they remind me of her, which means I want them to stay. Besides, Roland’s gone, so who gives a shit what he thought?’

  She pushes open the door, so that the sunlight floods in. I follow her through.

  It’s like the Eden Project outside, or one of the illustrations from that Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady book that my sister used to read as a kid. It’s the kind of garden that people in the ’burbs and the countryside take for granted, but in this part of the capital might as well be paved with gold.

  ‘So what’s the prognosis?’ she asks, as we walk around, and I trail my fingers across the plants. ‘Is it terminal?’

  We stop by a bench next to a potting shed that, like the rest of the garden, has seen better days. Jessie sits down and then blinks, staring up at the evening sun.

  ‘No,’ I answer, ‘I think it’ll pull through.’

  Jessie gets up and stretches, and then, kicking off her shoes, does the weirdest thing: a sun salutation, elegant and graceful.

  There’s something so serene about it, so private, that I end up having to look away. (Although this might also have something to do with her peach-shaped ass, which is upturned less than a foot in front of me.)

  ‘You’ll be able to take care of all this for me, then?’ she asks, standing with her hands on her hips as she surveys the garden.

  ‘Sure.’ I do a quick bit of mental arithmetic, and then promptly double my estimation. ‘It’ll probably take six hours a week to keep everything in check,’ I say.

  ‘That much?’ she momentarily queries, before adding, ‘Oh, well . . . I suppose it’s always good to have a man about the place.’ She flicks a glance at me. ‘After all, you never know when you might need one.’

  I don’t know what to say, which she seems to find funny.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I’ll show you to the door.’

  That’s what I love about this place, I t
hink, as we meander back through the house. If I said that to her at my home, then all I’d have to do was point. Here, it takes us a minute to get there.

  ‘Well,’ I say, closing the deal as I stand outside, ‘I’m looking forward to doing business with you.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I’m a great fan of the show, by the way.’

  She looks at me archly. ‘More like you’re a terrible liar.’

  I feel myself begin to blush. Talk about rumbled.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jessie says. ‘My show’s not meant for people like you. It’s for bored people who are stuck at home.’

  I’d take this for false modesty, but she looks like she really means it. I think of Amy and the way her eyes sparkled when she told me how much she enjoyed doing her slots on Jessie’s show. I wonder what she’d say if she could hear Jessie now. But she can’t. And I won’t tell her. Why spoil her fun?

  ‘I want to say sorry again,’ Jessie tells me. ‘For what happened earlier. Roland’s a horribly jealous man, and I think seeing a good-looking young man like you calling round . . . well, it just tipped him over the edge.’ She flashes me a smile. ‘But well done, you, for not letting him scare you off.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘It’s been lovely meeting you, Jack,’ she then says, reaching out to shake my hand with mock formality.

  As we shake, I feel something cold in the palm of my hand and, looking down, I see a silver Yale house key.

  ‘It’s for the side entrance,’ she says. ‘The alarm panel’s just inside on the right.’

  ‘What’s the code?’ I ask, both taken aback and gratified by this display of confidence and trust.

  ‘36DD,’ she says with a smile. ‘Just like me. Feel free to come round whenever you want.’

  Smiling, I think quickly. I normally knock off from Greensleeves at five. ‘I’ll probably mostly be round early evening,’ I say. ‘Seeing as it’s summer, there’ll still be plenty of light, and it’s the best time to water the plants.’

  ‘Oh good,’ she says. ‘That means I’ll probably get to see lots of you as well.’

  The phone rings inside and she frowns. ‘It’s probably him,’ she says. ‘Trying to make up.’

  ‘What will you tell him?’ I ask.