Rubber Gloves or Jimmy Choos?

by Faith Bleasdale

  Rubber Gloves or Jimmy Choos?

  Faith Bleasdale

  © Faith Bleasdale, 2000

  Faith Bleasdale has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2000 by Hodder.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Extract from Deranged Marriage by Faith Bleasdale

  He looked at me with his deep blue eyes. They sparkled like sapphires, and I melted inside. He stood so close to me, I could smell his sweet breath. I could hear my heart beating like a thousand drums. The air was potent with him, and I tingled with the anticipation of his touch. He was the most beautiful man in the world, tall, strong, powerful. His dark hair, glossy with sweat, curled and framed his angelic face. His nose, small, perfect, made me want to kiss the tip. His heart-shaped lips were full, red and moist. His taut body was defined by the T-shirt he was wearing; his muscles rippled beneath the thin fabric. My eyes wandered to his legs, long and lean; as though they had been made for the jeans he was wearing. He slowly leaned closer and closer to me. I could almost hear his heart beating. I could feel the intensity of his gaze and the electricity in the air. I was glued to where I stood, moist with anticipation. My breathing became louder. Our eyes locked in mutual understanding and I felt faint as he took me in his arms and lowered his full lips onto mine. I swayed back in his arms as if I was falling, as the kiss went deeper and deeper until I could feel it in my heart. Time stopped. I stopped.

  After a while the kiss just wasn’t enough. As he ripped at my clothes, his hands were searching my entire body, his strong hands, I felt safe in his hands. They moved expertly to my breasts, pulling me out of my blouse, my bra. Suddenly I was naked, vulnerable, wanting, hungry for more. As desire flooded me I pulled him out of his T-shirt, his jeans and he, too, was naked. I gasped at the beauty of him, standing in front of me in all his glory, hardly daring to look, hardly daring to look away. As we explored each other’s bodies, touching, teasing, probing, I felt I never wanted this moment to end. As lovers we were made for each other. Desire was all I could feel, love was all I wanted. He thrust himself deep inside me, and I was finally in heaven. Heaven. We made love as if it was the greatest of songs, and again and again I reached heights higher than I had ever thought possible. Moaning, arching, moving until we were one. As we reached the final crescendo, he moved his head closer to me until I could feel his every breath. Closer, closer, closer until he was almost touching my ear. Then he whispered the words I was longing to hear …

  ‘Beep, beep, beep, beep.’ Oh, shit. One of life’s greatest mysteries is why an alarm clock always goes off just when you’re getting to the best part of your dream. Every single time. Then it seemed even more cruel, for my dreams were the only place where I could find happiness. The man in my dreams could offer me everything I wanted. He would tell me he loved me and he’d take care of me for ever. I in turn would take care of him. He could give me what I needed. Reality couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Reality had nothing to offer. I dragged myself reluctantly from my bed and said a fond farewell to my dream. A few moments ago I had been in heaven; now I was in hell.

  I went to the mirror, not to see how awful I looked, or how great, but to see if I looked different. If I did, I couldn’t see it: nothing seemed to have changed. My eyes looked terrified, but the rest of me showed no sign of the impending danger, my doom. I looked the same as I had one day before, but I felt completely different.

  Today was significant to me. Not in a good way. Today my life would change, not a change I welcomed. I was moving to London. I was going to start my first ever job in a city I knew only from brief acquaintance. Life had finally taken me over and I had surrendered to it. I was constantly told by everyone that my life was about to start, at twenty-one years of age, with the world at my feet. The truth was that the only reason the world was at my feet was because somehow I had managed to fall off it. I had been ejected into space, rejected, cast out by the world I knew and loved. My world. Perhaps I had better explain.

  Chapter One

  I heard a gentle voice whispering outside my cave, ‘Come out of the cave, come out.’

  Tentatively I looked out, but it was so dark I couldn’t see anything. ‘No,’ I shouted, and looked again.

  The gentle beckoning voice kept trying to coax me; ‘Come out, come out, come out,’ over and over again. It wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t see anything, only the darkness outside and the walls of my cave, which was my home. The cave had everything I needed, familiarity. I knew it, I knew my way around. I looked outside again, yet still could see nothing. ‘Take a chance, fool,’ the voice said. ‘There may be great things waiting for you out here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘or there could be many bad things.’ I retreated as deep into my cave as I could.

  ***

  I have had an ordinary life, not particularly exciting but wonderful. A wonderful, ordinary life. I grew up in Sussex, went to school, went to university. I finished university with a fondness for lager, a degree in politics, and true love. But then a bad thing happened. Education ended. Nothing had prepared me for that. I saw my university years as the best of my short life. Graduation was supposed to be a symbolic ceremony, a coming-of-age. It represented my success, it represented me. Where previously I had seen this as positive, all of a sudden I realised I had been tricked, duped, had. Suddenly my graduation marked the end of my life: in one fell swoop all my security was cruelly snatched from me. My life crashed, and when my world crashed around me, it really crashed. It fell apart so violently I could hear it – I could feel the force of its impact. My life was great one day, then totally destroyed the next. And I had been taken completely and utterly by surprise.

  Change is not always invited, sometimes it just gatecrashes your life.

  I faced a number of problems when I was kicked out of the womb of education and into the unknown. The first was losing my security. At every stage in my formative years I had managed to keep a security blanket: my parents, school, university. But when education finishes you’re on your own. Like any child, I didn’t cope very well with being parted from my security blanket. The second, interconnected with the first, was the realisation that I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life. All of a sudden Life had gone from being planned and fun, to something I had to fill. It seemed such a big thing to fill. And filling the rest of my life meant I had to finance it myself. So I needed to and was expected, to get a job. I had never had a job before and I didn’t know what sort of job I wanted. In fact, my knowledge on the whole job thing was limited. One minute you’re worrying about where your next pint is coming from, the next you’re wondering what council-tax band you’re living in. And I didn’t even know what a council-tax band was.

  One thing I haven’t mentioned in the ingredients of my life falling apart, the worst thing, was my broken heart. Oh, yes, on top of everything else, I had a broken heart. My loving parents, who had supported me all my lif
e (financially and spiritually), asked me when I was getting a job and moving out. My friends were acting like mad people in their enthusiasm to start their new careers. Then my boyfriend, Ben, whom I loved and adored, told me that he no longer loved and adored me. And I had been going to marry him. He had been going to save me from the real world, we were going to conquer it together, but now I was on my own with my conquering tools broken and blunt. I was filled with fear at leaving university, fear at losing Ben, and the horror that now my marriage prospects really didn’t look good.

  Ever since I read my first Jane Austen novel I had known what I wanted. Marriage. I wanted romance, courting, poetry, Mr Darcy. I had managed to find my Mr Darcy, although instead of poetry he had come with dirty laundry – but that was OK, you have to adapt a bit. My ambition was marriage, my life was love. Not very modern but there you go. So, suddenly I had found myself unwelcome at home, directionless, loveless. What did I do? I began to hate the future and would have given anything for the past.

  I remember my first day at university so clearly: my parents drove me to my hall of residence, my new home. I was filled with excitement. This was freedom. I could do whatever I wanted (and, believe me, I wanted to do a lot). I came from a small village and my life had verged a little on the sheltered side so I was eager to embark on a life of sex, drugs and rock and roll, or something like that.

  Driving with my parents to Wyatt Hall, my new home was exciting and scary. It was a huge modern building, ugly and uninviting. Seeing my new room for the first time was a bit of a shock. It wasn’t like my pink princess room at home: it was bare, with only a wardrobe, a desk, a chair and a bed. Immediately it made me think of prison. My mother was horrified – I think she’d imagined somewhere posher. Then she cried. My father tried to lift our spirits by putting up my posters, which improved things a bit. After each one he glanced at me triumphantly, proud to be transforming the room into a palace for his little princess. I loved him. The initial oh-my-God-do-I-really-have-to-live-here? feeling left really quite quickly and my excitement came back. So the bed wasn’t big enough for two, but where there’s a will there’s a way!

  My parents tried to stay with me as long as possible, but after a while I really wanted to be alone with my new life. So after some tears (my mother), and a speech about how proud they were of me (my father), they eventually left, I started unpacking, trying to feel confident but failing.

  Being alone was scary and strange. Someone knocked on the door. I opened it to find a tall girl with long dark hair, great cheekbones, a huge chest and bright red lipstick. It was my new neighbour: Jess. She was really confident and insisted on us going to dinner together. That suited me fine: it was imperative to have that first friend and I don’t think I would have cared if she’d had three heads. Before dinner we decided to have a look round, really only to be nosy and see what the other girls were like. Our block was all girls, the opposite block was where the men lay in wait. We found a kitchen, made some coffee and started talking about ourselves, our schools, A levels, homes, etc. It was a conversation I had about a million times in the next few weeks.

  While making coffee, we met Sarah and Sophie. Sarah was small, with short blonde hair and glasses. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone with eyebrows as thin as hers. She was almost as confident as Jess, but in a quieter way. Sophie was tall, slim, breathtaking. She looked like a china doll, with long curly dark blonde hair and pale blue eyes, which looked terrified. We did the conversation again by way of introduction, and Sophie started to relax a little. We all went to dinner together, sharing a bond that was really necessity. At that moment we needed each other as much as we ever would in the future. I had a feeling that we’d all stay friends and I thought the others felt it too. Jess, larger than life, Sarah, who organised us, Sophie, beautiful and nervous, and me, Ruth: who was beginning to feel more excited than I had first thought possible.

  The first few weeks of university passed in a haze of parties and on the whole it was fun. At times I felt homesick, at times insecure, but I had my friends to reassure me. Many, many things changed in the three years of university, but the one thing that didn’t was my best friends. University quickly became my home. By the end of the first year, it had become a home I loved. When it ended as quickly as it had begun I felt as if I had lost my structure.

  Let me tell you about Ben, the one true love of my life. He was good-looking, in a floppy-haired little-boy way. He had such beautiful light brown hair, the sort you couldn’t help but touch. Actually Ben always hated me touching his hair but, well, I just couldn’t resist. His physique was that of a rugby player although he was a hockey player. He didn’t smile much, but when he did I just melted: he had an amazing lazy smile, which spread slowly over his entire face. He could never be accused of talking too much – he was a man of few words – and, in fact, I spent most of our relationship talking at him. When he did talk, it was usually about hockey or law (his course). He never talked about us, but as we were perfect he didn’t need to.

  I was attracted to Ben the first time I saw him: he looked like he needed taking care of. I have always been the type of person who needs to take care of things – hurt animals, then Ben. I saw him first in our hall of residence and I knew I wanted him. It was love at first sight. To win him, or so I thought, I needed a plan. I told my friends I had found the man of my dreams and I pointed him out at dinner.

  ‘Why?’ Sarah asked, but I ignored her. Then, being the dramatic person I was, I sat in my room, cross-legged on the bed, for hours, with Jess fidgeting to find a comfortable position next to me, Sophie at my desk smoking, and Sarah on the floor hugging a cushion, plotting how I could get him to notice me.

  ‘I just need a foolproof plan to get that man to fall in love with me.’ I sighed. It sounded so simple but love was such a complicated process.

  ‘How about asking him out?’ Sophie suggested.

  ‘God, no, I can’t rely on that working.’ I was appalled.

  ‘What exactly are you going to do then?’ Sarah asked.

  I gave her a dirty look. ‘Shush, I’m thinking.’

  The first plan I came up with worked on the principle that if you save someone’s life they belong to you. I think I saw it in a film, or maybe it was a book. Anyway, that was a good way of getting the commitment I was after. I explained this to my friends.

  ‘You’re mad,’ Sarah said.

  ‘How romantic,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Can you please explain how you think this is going to work?’ Jess said.

  ‘Well, it’s simple. All we need to do is to get him in a life-threatening situation. For example, Sarah could get into her car and try to run him over and I could push him out of the way.’ I smiled triumphantly.

  ‘Ruth, I am not prepared to try to kill him or you or anyone in the name of love.’ Sarah folded her arms defiantly. I tried to protest, but in vain.

  ‘I know, we could follow him, find out his daily routine. Then when he leaves for lectures Jess could wait on top of a building with a large brick and when he walks past she could drop it and I could push him out of the way.’ I smiled again. I was sure I’d seen that one in a film, and things like that always worked in films.

  ‘Ruth, I’m not prepared to get arrested for throwing bricks. Anyway – God, what am I saying? That’s the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.’

  I looked pleadingly at Sophie.

  ‘No way.’

  Back to square one. I came up with plan B, which cut out the saving-him stuff and concentrated on following him. If I found out his regular haunts and I was always there, he would definitely notice me. I could become his very own stalker (but a nice stalker, of course), I told my friends.

  ‘Well, trailing him is a lot better than trying not to kill him,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Oh, yes, he’ll notice you really quickly and then you can ask him out,’ Sophie added.

  ‘What if he realises you’re stalking him and thinks you’re mad?’ Jess, ever-practical
, asked.

  ‘Um, yeah. OK, Jess, you can come with me. Then it won’t be obvious.’

  She rolled her eyes dramatically. ‘All right, as long as I don’t have to throw any bricks, I’ll do it.’

  Plan B was ready for operation.

  I found out where his room was and I followed him to lectures, I followed him to the bar, I followed him everywhere. One day I had cleverly manoeuvred myself behind him in the dinner queue. I smiled at him, asked him if he was looking forward to the appalling stew we were about to sample, then somehow, as we were in a conversation, we sat together. A combination of my looks, my brilliant strategy and my jokes seemed to do the trick. So I congratulated myself on a successful campaign because that night we arranged to meet at the hall bar, got drunk on lager and had our first snog outside my room.

  The following day I nursed my hangover with the hugest grin stuck to my face. Ben had lived up to all my expectations. Cute, oh, so cute, funny (well, his nun jokes were), cute – did I say that? And those lips, the kiss. It was the most wonderful kiss in the world. Actually, I think it was but it’s all a bit fuzzy now. It definitely made my head spin. We fell into a relationship pretty quickly. And I took care of him pretty quickly. I did his laundry (in the launderette), I tided his room, I made sure he got fed, not quite cooking for him but getting him to dinner on time. I cheered him on when he played hockey, in the sun, the wind and the rain. I celebrated with him when he won and let him sulk for hours when he lost. And he loved me. He was affectionate, he held my hand in public (even in front of his hockey mates), which to me meant he loved me. He never actually told me he loved me, except in a Valentine card, which, come to think of it, was printed ‘To the one I love.’ But I knew. I made him happy and he made me happy. It was a most perfect relationship.

  Hockey was Ben’s life, therefore it became mine. When the hockey team won we went to the student union bar to celebrate. I usually dragged my friends along, because it could be a bit scary. The boys would all get drunk, play drinking games, sing rude songs and show their bottoms to passing girls. Actually they were quite disgusting. Ben didn’t show his bottom to anyone. Instead he would find me, kiss me, then go back to the singing. On the way home we would have curry or a kebab. If we had curry, my friends would feel they had done their friendship duty and refuse to come – the boys were a little badly behaved: they would steal the crockery, sing more rude songs and someone always fell asleep in their dinner. If we had a kebab, Ben filled it with chilli sauce (apparently it was a manhood test), then suffered all the way home while he ate it. It was horrid. But whenever we got home, whichever culinary delight we had experienced, he’d pass out fully clothed, stinking of beer and curry/kebab. That’s when I first realised I loved him: when I woke up in the same bed as him and could smell the whole of the previous evening on him. The fact that I could look at him then and think him adorable proved it all, in my opinion. My friends all liked Ben, but thought I was slightly mad in my commitment to his life. They thought I should be more independent, like they were – but, then, they weren’t in love.