Before I Let You In

by Jenny Blackhurst

  ‘So what about you, Karen?’ Cat asked, following thirty minutes of bemoaning her latest victim, some bloke whose name evaded Karen instantly but whose penis she could describe as well as her lover’s. ‘Anyone special in your life?’

  She shook her head and they didn’t fail to hide their glances. Of course not; if she’d had anyone worth being with, she’d be with them right now. If only they knew. ‘I just don’t have time … I know, I know,’ she cut Cat off while her lips were only just parting. ‘I work too much. That’s why I’m here.’

  Cat smiled, obviously satisfied with her justification for her spinster lifestyle. ‘Well tonight might change that. Hawaiian by the bar has been eyeballing you since you walked in.’

  Karen glanced over. The man Cat was referring to – wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘Hawaii Nights’ and a backdrop of the ocean – looked no older than thirty, possibly slightly younger. He was in a group of five or six men who were taking it in turn to shoot pool and frequent the bar so often she couldn’t tell exactly who was in the group and who wasn’t. None of them looked familiar. They were exactly the right age group to have missed Karen and her friends at school, and it was unlikely even in a town as small as this that she’d know one of them from elsewhere. Perfect really.

  ‘He’s a bit young,’ she murmured, even as she tipped her glass slightly in his direction. He smiled, tapping the side of his pint, and she gave a small nod. Erin caught the exchange but said nothing.

  ‘Anyone want another?’ Karen asked, swilling down the last of her wine and glancing at her companions’ nearly full glasses. Erin shot another look at the man at the bar and threw her a small smile that Karen got the feeling was aimed at letting her know she wasn’t as green as their friends.

  ‘Rosé?’ At the bar Hawaiian slid the glass towards her, clearly pleased with himself that he’d noted what she was drinking. She smiled and nodded in thanks, her back to the three girls behind her so they wouldn’t see that she hadn’t bought her own drink.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ she asked, taking a sip and noting the fact that he hadn’t just plumped for the cheap house wine.

  ‘I’m not sure. We’re not from round here.’ Even better.

  ‘Do you know the Bellstone?’ It was amusing to watch realisation dawn in his dark eyes. He smiled, not the lazy, sensual smile that Michael gave her when she hinted at sex, but an eager grin, attractive all the same. It made him look even younger, and she resolved not to ask his age, certain the answer would change her mind. ‘It’s a bar just opposite the market hall. With rooms above.’

  ‘I think we passed it on the way up here.’

  ‘I have a room booked there tonight. If you want to join me, escape your friends at eleven and come and meet me there.’ She raised her glass. ‘Thanks for the drink.’

  ‘Wait.’ He kept his voice low enough not to attract attention, and she wondered if he was hiding their conversation for the same reason as her. She half turned back. ‘Which room is it?’

  ‘It’s under Mrs Jones.’ He grinned.

  ‘What’s wrong with him then?’ Cat asked as she sat back down at the table. ‘Married? Gay?’

  ‘Both, I think,’ she replied, and sipped her wine as the hyenas cackled.

  The room was, by Shrewsbury’s standards, quite posh. It wasn’t the Marriott, or one of the more exclusive hotels she’d stayed in with work or in the early days with Michael, but it was clean, and had a wide-screen TV they had no use for, and a king-sized bed with huge pillows, far more than a normal person could sleep on. The bathroom was the dazzling white of an operating theatre and boasted a stand-alone bath that had been placed against the wall, ruining the effect.

  Karen arrived at ten to eleven, having cried off from the singles’ night. No one had questioned her, but Erin had raised her eyebrows and checked her phone for the time. On the way to the Bellstone, she’d had the strangest feeling she was being followed, and spent the entire walk checking behind her surreptitiously, as though she had her gran’s antique silverware in her bag instead of her toothbrush.

  She didn’t have to wait long for the rap at the door of the suite. She glanced at her phone: three minutes past eleven. Had he spent the last three minutes waiting downstairs, not wanting to appear too keen? Her heart hammered a hole in her ribcage as she opened the door, half expecting to see Erin and that irritating presenter of You’ve Been Framed. But no, there he was, Mr Hawaii, that eager smile fixed to his face.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here,’ he said. ‘Thought you might have been having a laugh, a bet or something with your mates. They looked the type.’ His cheeks coloured. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to slag your friends off.’

  ‘’S okay,’ she said, opening the door wider to let him in. ‘They’re not real friends. I barely know them any more.’

  ‘So what were you doing out with them?’ He stepped into the room and she saw him clock her handbag, no luggage.

  ‘I’m sorry, did you come for a chat?’ She stepped closer to him, watched him try to swallow without being obvious. She hooked her fingers underneath his T-shirt and began to lift it slowly, revealing the waistband of his jeans and a canvas belt.

  ‘No, I just … don’t you want to talk or something first? I mean, before …?’

  ‘You can talk if you want.’ Her lips were inches from his now, her hands working to unclip his belt buckle. ‘But I hoped our mouths would be too busy for that.’

  She leaned up to kiss him, breathing in the faint smell of lager and cigarettes that he’d tried to mask with chewing gum before he arrived. She closed her eyes, drawing the smell inside her, the fingers of her free hand reaching up to lace through the short dark hair at the back of his head. She moaned slightly into his mouth, just the smallest of sounds but enough to make him stiffen against her. The belt buckle released and she flicked open the top button of his jeans and unzipped his fly as their kiss grew more urgent, more intense. He pushed her away slightly and pulled the hem of her top from inside her jeans, lifting it over her head and letting out a groan at the discovery that she’d already taken off her bra. He pushed his jeans down over his hips and yanked at the zip of hers, both of them stumbling backwards towards the bed in a waltz choreographed over the years by lovers everywhere. His lips were on her breasts, his tongue circling her nipples and his fingers tracing the path of moistness it left behind. She pulled at his shirt and he lifted it over his head, what had started slow and unsure now urgent and feral.

  ‘You are fucking gorgeous,’ he murmured against her breast, flicking his tongue against her nipple and sending flashes of desire to her groin. ‘You are so beauti—’

  ‘Ssshhh.’ She grabbed his hair, not roughly, but hard enough to pull his mouth away from her skin. ‘You don’t have to keep saying that. Just fuck me.’

  He didn’t seem offended, or if he was, he was too turned on to let it stop him. He pushed her shorts down to her knees and they fell the rest of the way. Grabbing her hips, he turned her roughly around and shoved her forward so she was leaning over the bed, then spread her legs with his knee and shoved himself inside her with a moan of ecstasy. Now he was getting it.

  The harder he thrust, the more she moaned, gasping out for breath when it felt like he was as deep as he could get. He wrapped her hair around his hand and pulled her head backwards so she could feel his breath on her face as he fucked her, his thumb rubbing her clitoris in slow, rhythmic movements, then faster and faster as he struggled to hold back.

  ‘Not yet,’ she whispered, her voice urgent. ‘I’m not ready.’

  He rose to the challenge, thrusting faster and deeper inside her until it hurt, beautiful pleasure born from pain. She took his other hand in hers and placed it on her breast, his thumb and forefinger instinctively finding her nipple like a baby rooting for its mother.

  ‘Harder.’

  He grabbed, more fiercely this time, and pain shot through her, exploding into that familiar burst of pleasure between her legs, spreading up
wards into her chest and neck. Seconds later she felt him get harder, and he let out a guttural cry of release, then they both slumped forward on to the bed, sated.

  They had fallen into bed in a blissful post-coital haze and she’d fallen asleep instantly. When she woke, Mr Hawaii was snoring gently and her phone told her it was 2.43 a.m. Four missed calls from Michael, and a text:

  Tried to call to say goodnight. Miss you. Speak tomorrow. Xxx

  She gathered her things as quietly as she could and pulled the door closed with a click behind her, then stole down the stairs and out into the street. The room was prepaid; she’d used a false name and never mentioned her real one to the man she’d just screwed. It would be as if she’d never been there. There was still the odd Saturday-night straggler on the dark street, stumbling about trying to prolong their evening and avoid going home to the hangover and alcohol paranoia that awaited them tomorrow. It was a little while before the only nightclub on the main drag would let out and the last revellers scrambled for a way back to their beds. Karen headed to the local taxi rank.

  ‘Anything free?’

  The man behind the glass barely looked up as he mumbled, ‘An hour, love.’ She didn’t plan to spend that long in the waiting room that smelled of lager and sweat, with its wooden benches and worn, vomit-stained carpet. She left without replying, the man in the booth not even registering her departure.

  The black cab rank was full of hopeful-looking taxi drivers. Even the drunkest good-timers were reluctant to pay three times the normal fare to avoid the wait.

  ‘Rangart Gardens,’ she instructed, climbing into the first one in the line. He swung himself into the front seat and pulled the door closed, pressing the meter and putting the car into gear.

  Ten silent minutes later, they pulled up to the kerb down the road from her house. Karen paid the man his extortionate fare, added a couple of pounds as a tip and climbed out with little more than a ‘Thanks.’

  The house was vast and empty, as it always felt when Michael was away. The silence was almost unbearable, mocking her stupidity. There was no one waiting in bed for her to ask if she’d had a good night, no one to be worried that she was so late or demand to know where the hell she’d been and why she smelt of another man. She felt exhausted, emotionally and physically, and wanted nothing more than to climb into bed and wrap her arms around the love of her life, but she couldn’t, and without him the bed seemed cold and uninviting. Instead she turned on the shower full blast until the water ran scalding hot, stripped off her costume and stepped in, welcoming the searing-hot spray that cleansed her of her sins.

  She stood there for what seemed like hours, her tears mixing with the water and swirling away down the drain. When she finally got out, she towelled herself dry, wrapped the towel around her hair and took her book from the bedside table into the huge comfy armchair in her office, where she woke five hours later with a stiff neck, freezing cold and alone.

  20

  There was a chill in the wind that blew through the trees lining the river. Even the murky brown water looked dull and discontented with its lot in life today, although I knew that tonight would be a different matter. At night this particular stretch of the river was lit up by the coloured LEDs adorning the theatre beyond, and street lamps on the bridge offered a warm amber haze, the effect of both of these coalescing on the surface of the night-blackened ripples almost making it possible to forget that you lived in a backwater town, one road in, one road out. You could be in Sydney or Vegas; you could be walking the banks with a lover, about to embark on an illicit affair, or you could be the loneliest person alive, waiting to throw yourself from the bridge into the calm, still blackness below. In the stark light of day, though, it was clear who you were. People in this town were defined by the clothes they wore, the cars they drove, the side of the river they drove them on. Everything painted a picture of you as surely as if it were laid out on a canvas in oil.

  I held up my camera and fired off shots, each one quietening the voice in my mind telling me that I’d better get back to work now, click, that I was screwing up my job and everyone was going to be saying I’d lost it, click, that I was never going to be able to manage a normal life, click, click, click. And with each click the pictures of those women faded from my mind, taking up less and less of the space they had occupied all morning – all weekend, in fact.

  The pictures, when I downloaded them on to my computer that night, were disappointing. Most of them were faded and out of focus, not quite managing to capture the elusive double nature of the river and the chameleon-like quality that I’d imagined it to have. That second side lay just out of reach, locked in my imagination and failing to translate to the screen. I refrained from deleting them, each one a reminder that something intangible lay beyond the image, something that wasn’t there to the untrained eye but remained very real to me.

  ‘Mum, is everything okay?’ I threw on my bright and breezy voice like a silk scarf, but my body was tense, braced for the reply. Within seconds I would be able to tell if it was a good or a bad day – before my mum had spoken even. I had long been used to listening for the ragged breaths that signalled a bad one.

  ‘I’m good, darling, how are you?’ Her words were crystal clear, with a forced casual tone that made it sound as if we had this kind of conversation all the time. Her meds must be set to the right dosage, and she obviously hadn’t washed them down with too much whisky today. I could usually tell exactly how many glasses she’d had as soon as I picked up the phone. Today must be a one-glass day; there weren’t any zero-glass days, hadn’t been for years.

  I had to bite my lip to keep from asking why she was calling; even on a good day she was hypersensitive, and the smallest perceived slight could send her spiralling towards bad before I’d realised what I’d done.

  To the outside world, she was a reputable widow with a daughter to be proud of – the picture of respectability. But just like most pictures, the image she presented was a still life, a snapshot of what her marriage, our lives might once have been, frozen in time. It didn’t show what happened even moments before everyone plastered on their fake cheese. Careful lighting and heavy make-up hid the lines on my mother’s once youthful face, carved there by years of loss. Did I want that for myself? No, that was a pain I could live without.

  ‘I’m fine, Mum, just a bit busy at the moment.’

  Despite my breezy tone I heard her sigh. This was the part where our conversation would go one of two ways – neither particularly appealing. It was a toss-up between abusive or suicidal. Sometimes it would be both. I suppose that’s the one thing I had in common with her, both of us with screw-up parents we so wanted to admire but couldn’t. I closed my eyes and braced myself for what was to come.

  21

  Eleanor

  Eleanor hadn’t sat down since Karen had walked through the door; she’d flitted from room to room, throwing toys into boxes and bundling washing into piles on the kitchen floor. It was a mark of their friendship that she didn’t feel the need to give her guest her full attention – with Karen it hardly felt as though she was a guest at all. Lesley, Eleanor’s cleaner, was fantastic, but the idea of it being just a case of wiping the surfaces between visits had been slightly optimistic.

  Karen had boiled the kettle and made them both a cup of coffee, moving around her friend’s kitchen as though it were her own, knowing exactly where to go for cups and spoons. As she waited for the kettle to boil, she’d busied herself washing breakfast bowls and sweeping up crumbs. If anyone else had presumed to start cleaning her kitchen, Eleanor would have lost her shit, but with Karen she just felt grateful. Her friend helped without fanfare as she’d always done, ever the mother, looking after her friends in all the ways she was needed, sometimes without them even knowing.

  ‘Shall I pop this recycling out back?’ She had pointed at the last few days’ worth of plastics – everything that had accumulated since Lesley was last in.

  ‘Great, thanks, the ba
ck-door keys are on the sofa. Or the TV table maybe.’

  Now Karen sat on the sofa with Noah snuggled into the crook of her arm.

  ‘He’s getting so big,’ she said, gesturing for her friend to sit down and relax.

  Eleanor picked up her cup of coffee – black, no sugar, and as strong as a caffeine injection directly into her veins – and folded herself into the chair.

  ‘It’s all those bloody feeds he has.’ She smiled without complaint. ‘I feel like an all-you-can-eat buffet.’

  Karen smiled briefly, then her face grew serious. ‘How are you doing? Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly? It’s hard,’ Eleanor admitted. ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s rewarding and wonderful, et cetera, but it’s bloody tiring. Half the time I feel as though my senses have deserted me. I’m losing things, forgetting things … My keys went missing for a week, I got new ones cut, and do you know where I found them? In my underwear drawer. God only knows how they got in there. It’s enough to make you question your sanity.’

  ‘And Adam? Does he help?’

  Eleanor sensed the change in her friend’s tone. Were they about to get to the reason she was here? It was unlike Karen to drop by midweek without a million texts arranging times and synchronising schedules. And without Bea. It wasn’t that Karen and Eleanor weren’t close, but it was rare for them to be missing their third; if anything, it was more usual for Bea and Eleanor to meet for a casual catch-up. Karen’s job kept her busy, and with Michael working away on the weekends, it was rare to see her in the week.

  ‘He’s just Adam, you know. He’ll do what I ask him to. It’s not like he’s lazy, but it’s almost as though he’s yet to notice our lives have changed. He just expects Noah to fit into our schedule and we’ll barely notice his arrival. And then there’s the fact that I’m off all day – I swear he thinks I just sit around drinking coffee.’ She looked at her cup and laughed. ‘Which I usually don’t.’