He kissed me. Deep, long, slow. My body relaxed against his. He was really very good at this stuff. I linked my arms around his neck; he was fantastic at this. Slowly, I was aware that he was hitching up my denim skirt.
‘What you doing? We can’t. Not here,’ I said, pulling away. I was drunk enough to kiss Matt on the cheek, but not that drunk. Suddenly he was kissing me harder. More urgently, still pulling up my skirt. This was bad. Very, very bad. And illegal . . . And, and bloody great! I’d never been this bad before. Ever. I was good Amber, after all. And this was . . . This was like being Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction; this was being so damn sexy my lover couldn’t wait to get me home before trying to screw me. Be bad, a voice inside said. For once in your life, be bad. Everyone else is naughty at least once in their lives. I was suddenly unbuttoning his trousers.
‘You really want to?’ Greg asked.
I nodded, tugging at his trousers.
He grinned, produced a condom. I really have to have him. To do this. How come I haven’t done it before?
Greg slipped the green condom wrapper between his lips, ready to tear it open with one hand. Come on, come on, I was screaming inside, but my Gregory was evangelical about safe sex. He always used condoms, even if his partner was on the Pill. Faster, faster, I urged him as I stuck my hands down his pants.
Suddenly we were illuminated.
Somebody switched a light on us and a deep, authoritative voice said, ‘That’s quite far enough, sir.’
chapter fourteen
history lesson
This is why you need to be good.
Why I am good. Always. This is why I don’t break the rules, do drugs – not even cannabis – or cheat. When you do, it ends up like this. With you being sat in the back of a police car.
The thought punched me in the head every time I blinked and opened my eyes to discover I was, in fact, sat in the back of a police car. Thankfully, they’d held off on the handcuffs. I could just see the WYIFF GATE headlines tomorrow: ENTERTAINMENT SCREWS! ALLEY SEX SHOCKER FOR WYIFF!
Greg would be all right, the papers were hardly going to stitch up one of their own, were they?
When the policeman had caught us attempting to break a few public decency laws, my heart had fluttered as though it was going to expire right there and then. This heart flutter had been swiftly followed by an urge to hurl. I’d only eaten biscuits in the ten hours since lunch and I’d drunk far too much. To stop myself throwing up, I buried my face in the folds of Greg’s jacket.
‘Would you mind coming with me,’ the policeman said when neither of us moved.
Didn’t know about Greg, but I minded coming with him. On every level I minded coming with him. Not only because we were going to be arrested, but also because if I moved, even a fraction, I’d throw up and I had a suspicion it’d take direct intervention from the Almighty to stop me.
Greg opened his mouth and the condom fell unceremoniously to the ground. Right then I was grateful he was so fanatical about safe sex. If he hadn’t been, we’d have been much further into the law-breaking process. He rather gallantly pulled down my skirt before straightening himself out.
I moved then, folded my arms across my chest, lowered my head and followed Greg out into the main street. There was only one thing worse than being caught trying to have sex in an alley, I decided as we stepped out onto the pavement. And that was hearing a voice state calmly and politely: ‘Mr Walterson.’
I glanced out the window. (Yes, I’m still in a police car.) Greg was talking to the police officer who knew his name. And how did she know his name? From the time he’d been arrested for indecent exposure and breaking and entering, of course. There were no other policewomen in Leeds. In the whole of Yorkshire, there were no other policewomen, which was why she had to catch us.
The second I realised who she was, the beer, biscuits and bile hit the back of my throat and my mouth flooded with saline. I inhaled deeply through my nose to stop myself projectile-vomiting over the officer who’d once listened to me promise that Greg was of good character.
‘It won’t happen again, officer,’ I mimicked myself in my head.
She’d recognised me, of course. It’d registered in her eyes, but she said nothing except to order that I be put in the back of the car. (Yup, I’m still in a police car.) She’d then gone off a little way to talk to Greg alone while her colleague stood by the car in case I decided to bolt. Not that I could – there are no handles in the back of a police car.
I watched Greg and the officer talk. Neither of them made many hand gestures; Greg’s body language was, as you’d expect, contrite. His head was lowered as he stared at the ground, hands clasped behind his back. She stood, favouring one hip, her hand resting on the favoured hip, the other hand fingering her truncheon.
She said something.
Greg nodded, looking very penitent.
She talked some more, Greg raised his eyes to look at her, held her gaze for a second, then looked away, talked, said his piece.
Eventually, after what seemed like forever, they came back to the car. The policewoman opened the door. ‘You can go. You can both go,’ she said. ‘You’re both obviously of good character.’
Bitch.
‘Thanks, officer,’ I said. And before I could stop myself, ‘It won’t happen again, I promise,’ was coming out of my mouth.
‘It’d better not,’ she replied. ‘Because for some people, it’ll be third time unlucky.’ She flashed me a fake smile and for one moment I thought about punching her. Right in her smug little face. I could probably take her. Probably. Are you simply out of your mind? I asked myself. Or are you developing a taste for police cars and police stations?
Greg slipped his arm around my shoulders as we walked down the road to hail a taxi.
‘You slept with her, didn’t you?’ I said, between huge gulps of water. I slammed the Hoegaarden glass onto the table and leant on the table glaring at Greg who, having taken a seat at the dining table, was staring down at the table top. All we needed was a uniform and a solicitor and we could be in a police station. I immediately straightened up.
Greg stayed silent, knowing that anything said would be used against him.
I shook my head incredulously, stalked back across my red and white lino to the sink and refilled my glass. I was so traumatised I was drinking tap water, the fact it seemed to have a slight beige hue to it forgotten under all the pressure.
I leant back against the sink counter top, glaring at the thick, liquorice-black locks that hid his face. What self-respecting man had hair longer than his girlfriend? Longer than most women he knew? When the fashion was for men to have shaved heads, Greg had long hair. He didn’t even have the decency to be balding, which would explain the need to cling to every follicle. ‘After everything. Me going across town when I was knackered, reminding you she was married, destroying her number, getting grief from Sean, you still slept with her.’
Greg’s head snapped up, his Minstrel eyes flashing with indignation. ‘If I hadn’t we’d both be sat in cells right now.’
I glared at him, not willing to concede this point. ‘Are you going?’
‘Going where?’ he replied.
‘Are you going to meet her?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Don’t. Just don’t, all right?’ I warned, my South-East London accent suddenly asserting itself. ‘I know you weren’t stood there getting a lecture on public decency. She wants to meet you, doesn’t she? I just want the truth. Are you going to meet her? The truth. That’s all I want.’
Greg shook his head. ‘No. I told her that you’re my girlfriend.’
‘Awww, course you did. Oh, sorry, dear, I’m a thick cow, aren’t I? There I am, all worried about you once again shagging some woman to whom the binding vows of matrimony are clearly so important. I should’ve known all you had to say was “I’ve got a girlfriend” and she’d not think it was a possibility. Actually, let’s circulate that on the In
ternet. “Women, don’t worry, if your bloke is about to cheat on you, all he has to do is say to the woman he’s about to screw, I’ve got a girlfriend and it’ll be fine.” We’ll win awards for that, we will. A genuine public service announcement. Come on, I’ll boot up the computer, you use your journalism skills to tart up my language.’
I could’ve said, ‘She’s married, why would she care that you’ve got a girlfriend?’ but that’s not me. If I’m going to make a point, I’ve got to labour it into submission.
‘I told her that it’d taken me a year to get you to go out with me so I didn’t want to screw it up,’ he said quietly.
I gulped down more water. ‘And she was all right with that, was she? This married policewoman was all right with that?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know. She said to call her if it doesn’t work out.’
‘Only she said something like, “If you change your mind, you know where I am. Call me any time,” didn’t she?’
Greg looked down at the table top as he nodded.
‘Whore!’ I whispered against the rim of the glass, teetering on that precipice of insanity, midway between getting things out of proportion and reality. Who, in all of this, was the real whore? And who was I mentally shoving in tar and sprinkling with feathers?
‘What is your problem?’ Greg demanded, getting to his feet. (Think it was the ‘whore’ comment that did it.) He sounded much more Yorkshire Boyish now – probably a defence mechanism against me suddenly becoming a London hard girl. ‘It’s not like you didn’t know what I was like before. You of all people know what I was like.’
‘You want to know what my problem is?’ I said, raising my voice a notch.
‘Yes,’ he said at the same level.
‘You really want to know what my problem is?’ I cranked my voice up another notch.
‘Yes!’ His voice matched mine.
I slammed the Hoegaarden glass onto the dining table. Another of my points was about to submit under the weight of its labours.
‘I want to go somewhere and not meet someone you’ve slept with. If they’re not ringing me up at work, they’re taking my place in the pub. If they’re not taking my place in the pub, they’re arresting me in the street. I can’t go into half the pubs in Headingley because you’ve slept with some member of staff and to get you out of a jam I’ve made out I’m your girlfriend. We can’t go into half the pubs in Hyde Park because you shagged some landlord’s daughter and now he’s issued a death warrant against you, me, Jen and Matt. And let’s not even start on the uni bars.
‘My problem is, I can’t turn around without bumping into one of your conquests.’
Greg let my words stain the air, aware that he had no magic cleaner that would remove them. Nothing would erase the truth that he was, in fact, a tart. And that I was, in fact, a hypocrite because I didn’t have this monumental problem with it before I started sleeping with him.
He’s going to leave me, I realised as he stared down at the table in silence. He’s going to tell me to fuck off because I’ve raised my voice and got cross.
‘With Mimi,’ Greg’s other gift, apart from being good at sex, was to remember the names of every woman he’d had sex with, quite a feat, ‘she made me realise that you’re the most precious friend. You risked your job for me and the way you got so angry made me wonder if you weren’t a little jealous. That gave me hope, made me think that I did maybe have a chance with you.’
Greg came around the table to me. ‘When I met Alyson, the policewoman, as I told you before, that was the first time I realised that I wanted something special with you. With her it was only sex and we both knew it.
‘And with Nina, I tried to make a go of it with her because when I realised how I felt about you, I knew it’d cause all sorts of problems. I thought I was probably missing the security of a relationship, so I tried to make a go of it with her, but when she wanted a commitment I panicked because I knew deep down I wanted you.
‘That night she attacked me, I kept thinking, I have to get to Amber, she’ll make it all right. And you did. You patched me up and didn’t once say, “I told you so” or, “You deserve that”, even though I obviously did.
‘So, to be totally honest, I don’t regret those three because all of them, in their way, played a part in me and you getting together.
‘With the rest of them . . .’ he paused. His Yorkshire accent wasn’t as strong when he said: ‘There’s nothing I can do. I can’t change the past, I can only promise that I’m not doing it any more. And as long as we’re together I won’t do it. There’s nothing more I can say. Except I’m sorry. And I’ll hate myself if it’s going to cause us problems.’
I had no comeback for that. You can’t change the past. You can rewrite it for your own convenience, you can retell it so it sounds better, feels better, seems better. So that you are the hero of the piece and not a bona fide bastard. But you can’t change the events. If you made a pass at someone, you made that pass at them – telling them it didn’t happen won’t change the fact you did it. If you shagged around, you shagged around. Pretending you’re as pure as the driven snow isn’t going to change that. For that matter, you can’t change the future. All you can change is the here and now. That’s why people are always banging on about living in the moment because that’s the only thing you have control over.
But all this theorising was too much for a night that started off being a birthday celebration. ‘Tonight never happened, all right?’ I said to Greg, my way of saying we weren’t going to row about this any more.
Relief washed over his face, relaxed his body before he laughed a sunshine laugh. ‘You should’ve seen your face when you were sat in the back of the police car, though. Classic.’
‘What police car? I’ve never been in a police car in my life,’ I replied, my London accent had subsided now.
‘Oh, yeah, sorry, never happened.’
chapter fifteen
done shagging
Who knew you could get so many different coloured sex toys?
Not me, that’s for certain. Jen bought me my fluorescent pink vibrator as a joke when I’d hit the sixth month of celibacy. I wasn’t naive, but it was a shock to find rows and rows of the things. Different shapes, sizes, colours. Boxed ones, ones in cellophane, ones just stood there. My eyes couldn’t help but gawk at them. And the prices . . . Jen’s joke had been quite expensive.
I was standing in a sex shop looking at sex toys. Why? Because Martha needed ‘marry me’ underwear and I preferred looking at the toys to the underwear because with my imagination, I could envisage Martha in every creation she picked up. I could see her in those crotchless knickers and peephole bra. There are some things you can go to your grave without conjuring up about the people you saw five out of seven days a week.
Renée had the day off so Martha had persuaded me to come shopping with her. Even though I was in charge, and therefore should know better, I’d leapt at the chance because I hadn’t done it with Jen in yonks. I was missing girly company . . . I was missing Jen.
She had fallen off my world. It was like going to the local shop and discovering they were out of Mars bars. And they would be for the foreseeable future. You kept going in, just in case, but always found they were out of stock. Same with me and Jen. I’d constantly ring her in the hope we’d have a deep conversation or a laugh, but it didn’t happen. Any chat was forced, punctuated with, ‘So how are you?’, the preserve of small talk. Small talk with my closest pal, now there was something alien. Rather than confront it, though, I kept pushing it to the back of my mind, hoping it’d sort itself out. Most things did, didn’t they?
‘Surely “marry me” underwear would come from John Lewis or La Senza,’ I said to Martha over my shoulder.
‘No, that’s “propose to me” underwear,’ Martha said.
‘And the difference is . . .’
‘A wedding ceremony.’
Martha came to stand in front of me. She’d slicked her brown hair
back and up into a high, dominatrix-style ponytail, heavily kohled up her eyes and put on a shiny black plastic mac to suit the occasion (those probably should’ve been clues we weren’t going to any old shop to get her undies). Currently, she held red crotchless knickers in one hand, red bra with chain mail where the cups should be in the other.
I averted my eyes. Martha stepped into that averted line of sight. I averted my eyes to the right; she stepped there too. I caught another glimpse of the red undies. Swift as a bullet, an image of her in it, standing at the end of the bed, whip in one hand, her man on his knees, bolted through my head.
‘You see,’ Martha explained, ‘you can buy your pretty, rosecoloured lacy bits, and sure the guy’s gonna propose. But things like these little beauties,’ she thrust them into my face, I flinched back, ‘will make him realise that he’s got a sex goddess and a friend and a good laugh and a woman to make love to and someone he can take home to his parents all in one. In short, when you’re wearing this kind of gear, he has to find a reason NOT to marry you.’
Martha’s logic had some logic to it although I wasn’t sure it was so simple. I’d never worn such underwear.
‘I’m glad you’re knocking off Greg,’ Martha said, going back to her underwear.
‘Could you please say that a bit louder? I don’t think my best friend, who I haven’t told yet, heard you that time.’
Martha laughed in a carefree, ‘it doesn’t matter to me if this irreparably damages your relationship with Jen for keeping this from her’ way. ‘You’re so much more fun now,’ she continued at the same volume.
‘Oi!’
‘Well, it’s true. Before, you were so uptight. No, that’s not the right word because you were a laugh before. Now, it’s like you’ve chilled out a bit. Even when you were going out with that other bloke . . .’
The Chocolate Run Page 15
