Erotic Amusements

by Justine Elyot

  Cool evening air prickled goose bumps on Flipp’s bare arms.

  “I’ve only just got here and already I’m being warned off? I might change my name to Trouble.”

  “That’s already taken.” Rocky was devilish again. “It’s my middle name. No…just…keep clear of Cordwainer, as much as you can. Don’t get involved in anything extra—just do your thing with the tokens, collect your wage and get out of there.”

  “Extra? Like what?”

  “Dropping things off…picking them up…invitations to parties…”

  “Is Cordwainer a drug baron, then?”

  Rocky sighed, shifted in his seat, brushed stray hair from his eyes.

  “No. He isn’t into drugs. But he might be into you.”

  “What?” She almost leaped out of her seat. Cordwainer had to be at least twenty years older than her. “Get real.”

  “You don’t believe me? I’ve seen pretty girls come and go behind that change booth counter, Flipp. You’ve got a bit more about you than they have, but all the same…I don’t want anything to happen…”

  Flipp’s scalp was crawling, as if the mosquitoes beginning to buzz in the early summer dusk around them were landing in her hair. What could Rocky possibly mean? It seemed she was destined not to find out that night. He let go of her, stood abruptly and held out the leather jacket for her to put on.

  “We’d best get back. I’ve got to meet somebody in town at nine.”

  She stood up and let him leather her up. “Just to let you know,” she said, pulling the jacket around her to keep out the growing cold, “you haven’t freaked me out. If that’s what you’re trying to do.”

  “I don’t want to freak you out.” He wrapped his arms around her from behind, his hands clasped over hers. It felt so comfortable, so protective, Flipp could have been struck by lightning and rooted to the spot and she wouldn’t have minded. “I’m just trying to watch out for you. In my cack-handed way. Come on.”

  He led her over to the bike. The ride home was different. The country lanes were growing dark, and there was nothing to navigate by save the shadowy shape of the hedgerow until they reached the coast road. Up here, the lights of Goldsands twinkled beneath the sunken red sun, like fireflies. They rode into their inviting brightness, coming from dark to light, from rural innocence to urban experience. Flipp held on to Rocky’s waist, her knees clamped tightly to the seat, and whooped with excitement as he bombed along the downhill road, only slowing when the lights became denser and houses began to appear along the verges.

  Then there were cul-de-sacs, garages, supermarkets, schools; then bed-and-breakfasts, minimarts, takeaways. Then they were on the prom, rolling past strolling lovers and gangs of youths brandishing lager cans while shopkeepers closed their shutters over inflatable whales and racks of plastic sunglasses.

  At the pier, Rocky switched off the engine and deposited Flipp at the entrance. She could see the winking Caesar’s Palace sign at the far end.

  “Bye, then,” she said, undoing her chinstrap with all the bravado she could muster. “It’s been real.”

  Rocky took the spare helmet and tucked it under his arm. “It is real.” He tipped her chin with a finger and kissed her, fleetingly. She shook her head and shrugged off the jacket.

  “Don’t string me along,” she said crossly. “You don’t want more than a shag, you’ve made that clear.”

  “Did I say that? I didn’t say that, did I? I just can’t make any promises, that’s all. See you later, Flipp.”

  It galled her to hope so, it really did. But she hoped so.

  Chapter Two

  If he’s late this time, I’m dumping him. I mean, I’m totally serious. I’m not standing on these minging seaweedy back pier steps a minute longer than I have to—and I’m certainly not going to sit down on them. Eighty quid this skirt cost in Karen Millen, and I nearly lost a heel on the way down as well.

  It was getting dark now. They’d just switched the coloured lights on along the Esplanade, looping from one end to the other, making Goldsands look like a fairy-tale place instead of the bloody nightmare it was. Still, Laura would be out of there soon. And until then, she had Rocky.

  She could see why he always chose this place to meet. It was perfect for a secret rendezvous—hidden away and forgotten, invisible from the seafront. It creeped her out a bit, though, and it was cold and the water was too close—bits of spray washed over her feet every now and then, and she knew she’d have white salt marks all over the uppers of her shoes tomorrow. Fuck. They weren’t cheap either. Is he worth it? Is he really worth it?

  She asked herself this question a lot, especially when she was hanging on to this rail, listening to the wind whip up over the roaring and screaming from the waltzers halfway down the pier. She could smell hot sugar and slimy sea wrack; it made her stomach rumble. She hadn’t eaten tonight and one of those foul hot dogs they sold at the fairground was starting to look like an attractive proposition. Rocky could buy her one. Is he worth it? Yes. If only to imagine the look on Daddy’s face if he knew we were shagging in secret, yes, he is worth it.

  The minute Laura had seen him, she knew she had to have him.

  It was Carnival Day, and she was Carnival Queen. She’d spent all morning having hair, nails, face done with those two stupid bitch attendants of hers. They couldn’t handle the fact that they had lost the vote to a better candidate, and their mean-spirited whingeing was starting to really piss Laura off. As if either of them stood a real chance. Jules was a size ten at least, and Tiff was from Pleasant Crescent. Whereas Laura had a modelling portfolio and a decent education. I mean, duh.

  The three of them stepped out of the taxi and into the car park where all the floats were gathering, ready for the procession. In pride of place stood the Carnival Queen carriage, decorated to look like a floral bower, with Laura’s red velvet throne on a high platform and her attendants’ seats lower down at either side.

  “Oh, isn’t it beautiful?” Laura exclaimed, excited at seeing her tiara and sash laid out on the throne.

  “I expect your dad’ll buy it for you if you like it,” said Tiff sourly. “He’s already bought the tiara, mind you, hasn’t he?”

  Jules cackled along with her, and Laura saw red.

  “At least he’d buy it. What’s your father in prison for again?”

  It was a low blow, she had to admit, but Tiff had been winding her up for hours, and Laura still didn’t think she deserved the whirlwind of teeth and claws that followed. She remembered being on the ground, screaming and shielding her face, terrified that Tiff was going to scar her, and then Elite would never give her another job, when someone yanked the wildcat off and hurled her in the direction of a pair of security guards.

  Then there was a shadow leaning over Laura, a man’s shadow, tall and broad-shouldered, stubbly face and concerned blue eyes.

  “Are you all right, love?”

  “I’ve been better,” she panted, putting a hand to her face to check for bloody scratches. There didn’t seem to be anything major.

  “Can you stand?” Large, strong hands in hers, pulling her to her feet. He was some kind of biker, but no kind of biker she’d ever seen before. Not hairy and beardy with a gut fashioned from years of real ale festivals. No, this one had stepped straight out of her dreams and into his leathers. “Okay, come and sit down. Catch your breath.”

  He led her over to the lorry cab that was going to pull her Carnival carriage and helped her up the step, onto the worn leather seat.

  “What the fuck happened there?” Laura wondered out loud. Remembering something, she pulled a miniature of vodka out of her beaded bag. “I think I need a drink. Do you have a mirror?”

  He tilted the rearview mirror in her direction, and she inspected the damage as minutely as she could. Her elbow was skinned and her arm studded with grime. Some bugle beads had come off the dress and her hair needed drastic attention. Worst of all, though…

  “That’s going to be a shiner and
a half,” her rescuer said, reaching over to trace a thumb along her lower left eye socket.

  “Shit,” she said miserably, swigging the vodka and passing it to him. “I’ll have that bitch sent down for this. Who are you anyway?”

  He took a draught of the vodka and wiped his lips with the sleeve of his leather jacket. She watched the patch of wetness left there, transfixed by it.

  “I’m your guardian angel,” he said with a crooked grin that made her stomach lurch into a spin cycle.

  “You don’t look much like an angel,” she lied. “I thought they had halos and wings, not biker leathers.”

  “I’m the upgraded version,” he said. “Halos are so last century, sweetheart.”

  Laura giggled, liking him enormously, perhaps more than she was comfortable with. She tried not to like people too much until she knew them well.

  “No, I’ve been assigned to look after you.”

  “Really?” The thought of this big, bad man with his cheekbones and perfectly grabbable head of hair looking after her was breathtaking. She might have licked her lips; she definitely began primping with her hair, not that it didn’t need a bit of urgent repair.

  “By your father. He thought your float should have motorcycle outriders. In case of…troublemakers.”

  “What?” Old footage of the assassination of JFK reeled into Laura’s mind—did Daddy think she might be the target of an assassination attempt? What the fuck?

  He saw the disturbance in her eyes and took one of her hands reassuringly. “Not serious troublemakers, sweetheart. I’m sorry if you thought…No, last year there was a bit of trouble with kids pelting coins at the floats, that’s all. Your dad didn’t want you getting hit in the eye by a stray twenty-pence piece. Sensible man. That’s quite a face you’ve got.”

  “Are you flirting with me?” Laura cut to the chase. She couldn’t be bothered with the subtle approach. “Did Daddy tell you to do that?”

  His laugh covered embarrassment. “No. The opposite. He said, ‘Keep your hands off my princess, Rocky, or you’ll be looking for a new place to live.’ After I get out of hospital, I gathered.”

  “Really?” This was getting more and more titillating. “Your name’s Rocky?”

  “What? It’s a perfectly good name.” She could hardly concentrate on speaking. His head was tilted, resting on an arm, his whole body stretched out and languid. She wanted to touch it so badly, even more so now that he was forbidden fruit.

  “Do you box?”

  He laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. His voice was dark and low—not Barry White low, but still deep enough to create a vibration all over her.

  “No. Do you?”

  “I don’t mind a little bit of sparring.” The loudspeakers out on the Esplanade crackled into life and Laura remembered, reluctantly, what they were there for. “Anyway. You’ve already saved my life once—but we’ve still got an emergency on our hands. How are we going to fix my hair and this eye? God, it looks awful.”

  “Here.” Rocky slipped a comb out of his inside pocket and handed it to her.

  “It’s no good—the mirror is too small. I can’t see what I’m doing. Can you…?”

  He took the comb back and put a hand on Laura’s shoulder, swivelling her round to face him. “I’m not a hairdresser,” he cautioned her. “So don’t sue me if it ends up worse.”

  She simply held her face up to him, staring unblinkingly while he steadied her chin with one hand and used the other to tidy up the locks that had strayed from their clips and pins.

  “Don’t you have any gel or spray?” she asked, slightly regretting having to break the look of fierce focus in his eyes. It was unsettling in a way to have this amazing man concentrating on her so intently—but also more exciting than anything she could remember. More than roller coasters, skinny-dipping, sneaking wine coolers into the youth club, her first kiss, all the sex she’d ever had, getting the call from Elite. More than anything.

  “You’ll be fine,” he tutted, fixing a clip to the side of her head and reversing a little to examine his work. “That’s tidy now.”

  She put her hand to the coiled sweeps of hair. It did feel right.

  “But what about my eye?”

  “Do you have any of that skin stuff you rub in? What’s it called?”

  “Foundation? Concealer? Actually, yes, I do have a concealer stick.” Laura fished it out of her purse. He popped the lid off and waved it dangerously near her eye. She recoiled but he grabbed the back of her neck and held her in position. His hand was firm and warm on her nape; the pads of his fingers felt like rough velvet pressing into her skin. He might do this if he was going to kiss her. Was he going to kiss her?

  Her lips hung open and her breath was escaping in uncontrollable little sighs while he worked at blotting out the signs of the fracas. He applied the concealer gently, careful not to hurt the bruising areas, almost too lightly to be felt, but he was doing a very thorough job, underneath the socket and then at the crease and then gliding gently over her eyelid, with his glacial blue stare boring into her.

  “Hmmm,” he murmured. The tip of his nose was a fraction of an inch away from hers. “Not sure it’s working.”

  It’s working for me. But she didn’t say it. “I can’t get photographed for the local rag with a massive black eye,” she mourned. “What are we going to do, Rocky?”

  Laura put a hand on his knee and he flinched, just a little.

  “You’re my guardian angel. Guardian angels always have a plan.”

  “Laura,” he said. She loved the way he said her name, especially the touch of hoarseness in his voice. “I’m trying to help…”

  “I know you are.” She could see the top of a pair of sunglasses peeking out of his jacket pocket. She reached forward to swipe them and put them on. Not perfect—far too big—but better than being the object of salacious gossip all the way along the parade route. “You don’t mind, do you? I’ll give them back to you afterwards. And I owe you one. More than one.”

  Rocky shook his head. “What will you do if I decide to collect, Laura?” he asked, and for a moment she could not breathe or think.

  “Anytime. Collect anytime,” she said, not quite able to string the words together properly.

  “I will. Come on, then. Let’s go and find the First Aider and get some antiseptic on that elbow.”

  Outside the lorry cab, they snapped back into their real selves—the bad boy biker and the Carnival Queen—as if the vehicle was some kind of Narnia-style gateway to a different reality.

  Laura put on her sash and tiara, posed for photographs, did a couple of local radio interviews, chose a replacement for Tiff, and then did the long and boring trip along the seafront, moving at a funereal pace past hordes of scruffy dirty-faced kids and their fat slobs of parents. She waved at them automatically, whilst looking at Rocky, riding slowly on his flashy red bike, his body fitting those tight leathers to mouthwatering perfection. She felt on edge, alive, shiny with possibility. She was going to find Rocky and give him his sunglasses back and then…what then? Oh, anything could happen.

  But when the procession ended, she was held up by bloody hacks from the Gazette and various snotty kids wanting their photographs taken with her, and by the time she was able to escape from them and from Daddy and from her friends, Rocky had gone.

  Laura spent the next few weeks trying to track him down. She looked for his head and shoulders over every crowd, checked the side of every street for his streamlined beauty of a bike. Sometimes a figure in leathers would pass her, but it was never the figure she was looking for. Sometimes she thought she saw a flash of blue eye or a hank of black hair, but they were always on the wrong person.

  Then the day came. It was August Bank Holiday Monday, the fag end of the season, but the sun was out and the beach was heaving. Laura was taking advantage of the high temperatures to keep her tan topped up, lying on a sunbed, reading a trashy book alongside a couple of friends when the roar of a motorbike
engine caused her to sit up and crane her neck around to the seafront—a reflexive reaction these days.

  It was his bike. It was him. Pulling up outside the Fairview Hotel. She could see flashes where the sun glinted off his polished chrome fittings, and by the time she had jumped off her sunbed, grabbed a sarong and galloped up the beach, he was inside the building.

  The Fairview was a large bed-and-breakfast place with a public bar on the ground floor and a few tables outside; it used to have a smart reputation but had gone steadily downhill since Laura’s childhood and was distinctly seedy now.

  Laura shuddered a little on walking into the bar; it seemed that the manager was pretty lax about enforcing the smoking ban and the place was blanketed in curling blue smoke. A gaggle of ugly poor people stood at the bar, but Rocky was not among them. She returned to the reception area—nobody was on the desk. He must be in one of the rooms. She ventured farther back, glad of her flip-flops on the dirty carpet, trying not to inhale the rank odour of stale frying that hung in the air. Voices were coming from the breakfast room, loud, male and somewhat belligerent. One of them was Rocky’s.

  “You knew the terms. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”

  Laura stood by the half-open door, peering in at the scene. Rocky and another biker type were standing over a sweaty-looking man in a dining table chair, who didn’t look very happy to be there.

  “The insurance company aren’t playing ball,” said the seated man in a strangulated tone. “I’ve been on and on to them…”

  His voice trailed off—he had seen her.

  Rocky and his companion whipped their heads towards her.

  “What the—” snarled Rocky, making a move towards Laura.

  She was nervous, but she pushed the door fully ajar and fumbled in her beach bag for the sunglasses she had been carrying around like a talisman since Carnival Day.

  “I’ve got something for you,” she said, holding them out.

  “I’ve got something for you too,” Rocky replied, reaching for her wrist with grim purpose and catching it up in a tight, almost painful grip. “Excuse me just one moment,” he said to the other two before marching her up the stairs and into a vacant bedroom.