The Boy Next Door

by Emlyn Rees

  The phone call I make is to Susan, who’s in the office working on the prospect profiles and current sales dollars stats we’re due to present on Thursday to our Virginian finance director, Michael. He’s flying over Stateside to the east coast next weekend for his monthly meeting with our American investors and, as always, needs ammunition in the form of optimistic graphware to demonstrate that our income streams are turning into rivers and that – yes, indeed – we will be out of the red by the end of the year (which, hopefully, we will).

  The call I make is to check that Susan, a good friend as well as my long-time colleague, isn’t going stir crazy in there with only the web-development team and customer support staff for company. This isn’t as selfless as it sounds. Like Susan, I’m incapable of logging into the office from home and working via the extranet (too many distractions: television, Sony and Eddie, to name but three), and I’ll be sitting exactly where she is now tomorrow, relying on her to break up my Sunday graveyard shift with a similar phone call of her own.

  ‘I’m melting, Dorothy!’ she screeches down the phone at me. ‘Get me out of here!’

  I laugh, picturing the scene of the dastardly Wicked Witch of the West’s demise at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

  ‘To wish today away,’ I reply, ‘all you have to do is click the heels of your shoes together three times.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I tease. ‘You can’t count that high?’

  ‘Actually, Einstein,’ she corrects me, ‘it’s because, in order to have shoe heels to click with, you need to be wearing shoes …’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they’re in the fridge.’

  ‘The fridge?’ I check.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ she confirms. ‘Cooling down.’

  ‘Cooling down?’

  ‘Along with my knickers …’

  ‘Your knick—’

  ‘Well,’ she asks, aggrieved, ‘what do you expect a girl to do? The air-conditioner’s broken and my thighs are dripping like a couple of spit roasts. Anyway,’ she adds in a slightly more conciliatory tone, ‘Germaine Greer says women shouldn’t have to wear knickers if they don’t want to.’

  ‘Down with knickers,’ I agree. ‘Good for her.’

  I hear the flick and hiss of Susan lighting a cigarette (Silk Cut) and taking a deep drag. Although it’s sadly no longer applicable to me, smoking at your desk is the only perk of working weekends. (Weekdays you’re restricted to Cancer Corner, a patch of flagstones beneath an artificial palm tree in the main atrium down in reception.)

  ‘Why don’t you call the service company and get them to send an engineer in to fix it,’ I suggest. ‘Their emergency number should be on Jimmy’s ROM –’

  ‘Been there, done that,’ she interrupts.

  ‘And?’

  Her voice drops down a notch. ‘They’re not answering. Or they are, but I’m not getting anywhere with them. I keep getting stuck in this labyrinthine voicemail system of theirs,’ she goes on.

  ‘How about e-mail –’

  ‘Their response times are a joke.’ She pauses as she sighs. ‘You know what? I probably would have more luck asking the Wizard of Oz for help.’

  She sniffs and I picture the drama queen pout she’s no doubt deploying right now, her white-blonde hair falling in wavy strands across her angular, elf-like face. I thank my lucky stars I’m not there to see it in person. It would involve, at the very least, a meltdown-stemming ice-cream run to the company café on my behalf; I’m helpless with her that way.

  ‘Forget it,’ I tell her, drawing level with a grumbling refrigerator van parked outside a butcher’s shop. ‘He’s a quack. Little guy behind a big screen. Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Thanks for sharing,’ she says; then, ‘Where are you, by the way? No, no, don’t tell me,’ she hurries on. ‘Let me guess. Sitting on a secluded beach somewhere on the Cornish coast, with a fishing rod wedged into the sand between your feet and an ice-cold bottle of beer in your hand?’

  I smile. Susan – a walk-up-a-mountain-and-contemplate-your-life-once-in-a-while kind of a gal – is always throwing updated Arcadian idylls like this at me. It’s part of her campaign to get me to overcome what she regards as an almost pathological reluctance on Rebecca’s behalf to leave the confines of the city for anywhere geographically closer and less Condé Nast Traveller than, say, Tuscany.

  I’m about to make the point that, only two weeks ago, Rebecca whisked me off to her parents’ place … when an articulated lorry blocking the crossroads up ahead sets off a deafening chorus of car horns. During this enforced hiatus in our conversation, I find my response changing. Rebecca doesn’t think of Thorn House as a real place, not really, I consider, remembering what she said to me the first time I went with her to meet George and Mary: ‘It’s like Kew Gardens: very pretty and great for a day out, but let’s face it, the shops are crap.’

  ‘Or then again,’ Susan cuts back a half-minute later, when the noise of the car horns has diminished to a level where communication without the aid of carrier pigeons is once again possible, ‘you could just be doing your usual and flogging that clapped-out, hunk of junk around town, unimpressing the women and getting burnt off by bath-chair-bound octogenarians at the traffic lights …’

  ‘Hey,’ I tell her, backing up my indignation with a Cosa Nostra accent, ‘show some goddamned respect, huh? Another fifty years and this clapped-out hunk of junk, as you call it, will be officially classified as a vintage vehicle.’

  ‘In fifty years, Don Corleone,’ she snaps back, ‘it’ll be landfill.’

  Smiling and surrendering at the same time, I stick my nose out of the window like a dog and inhale a lung-load of one part oxygen, ten parts toxins. With the thought of the countryside still fresh in my mind, before I know it I’ve managed inadvertently to free-associate my way from London, to Thorn House, to Rebecca, to Rushton, and suddenly I’m picturing myself walking away from Mickey’s shop once more.

  Only this time, I turn after no more than four steps and walk quickly back. There, in the window, I think I see her face for a second, pressed up against the glass … Then the sun breaks from behind a building across the street and the window-pane blazes fierce white at me, flashing like a camera, so that I can’t see anything any more.

  Was she watching me? I find myself wondering once more. Was she?

  ‘How’s everything else going?’ I hurriedly ask, cutting the image, and refocusing my attention back on the road ahead and the sound of Susan’s voice.

  Aside from the hangover she’s still sweating off from a product launch we went to on Wednesday night in Soho (when Susan somehow contrived not to go to bed at all), she tells me in jaded tones, she’s fine. She asks me whether I remember the conversation we ended up having just before I went home in the booth at Jay’s Shakedown around 2 a.m., but I don’t. All I remember is being exhausted and a few vodka and tonics worse for wear. Susan says she’s glad, making me immediately wonder if I’m missing something. A vague, drunken memory surfaces – something maudlin on my behalf about marriage and settling down and growing up – but then its gone again, dispersing into the ether, like smoke.

  It’s too late to check any of this with Susan, anyway; she’s already switched the subject back to work. She tells me that she’s chatted with the event organisers for the launch party we’re throwing next Saturday for newsasitbreaks.com’s new games channel in a warehouse in Brick Lane. Getting awareness up and running for the site’s games channel is what Susan and I have been working on for the last six months. We’re hoping it’s going to attract a lot of younger clients and visitors to the site and, because of this, it’s vital that the party goes off with a bang.

  From the look of it, she says, it is. Most of the clients, prospects and service providers we’ve invited have accepted. The skate ramp we’ve commissioned is ready to go, as are the giant games screens, where we’ll ge
t to watch hotshot pro-gamers and newbie kids from all over the planet battling it out live on new demos. Most important of all, the timings for the simultaneous event have been finalised with New York and Tokyo and – with the GMT evening slot confirmed – we’re not going to be the ones doing the antisocial hours.

  ‘In other words,’ Susan wraps up, ‘it’s going to be an awesome event and, touch wood, we shouldn’t have anything more harrowing to worry about than choosing what to wear.’

  ‘Imports a go-go, for you, then, my friend,’ I surmise. (Susan orders all her weird and wonderful teen labels fresh from Japanese and US web outfits.)

  We say our goodbyes and I click off, telling her I’ll speak to her tomorrow. Then, at that precise moment – just as I’m reversing into a parking space opposite the imposing grey mansion block which houses Rebecca’s flat – my phone rings again and I glance down at the LCD screen and see Rebecca’s name winking up at me. ‘Hi,’ I say, answering. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Up here, daar-leeng,’ she replies, her voice coming over all husky and Marlene Dietrich.

  Glancing across at her building, I see her standing there, framed by her kitchen window on the fourth floor. In the background, even though it’s only a blur of silver and green from this distance, my brain fills in the familiar array of Clifton Nurseries plants and Harvey Nichols pots and pans behind her. Rebecca’s wearing what looks like a white dress and has her neck crooked to one side, holding the phone there, as she pulls the sash window open. I’m pleased to see her and I’m relieved that this is indeed the case: maybe all those weird thoughts concerning Mickey were just a result of too many sunny summer vibes.

  ‘How was Oslo?’ I ask.

  By way of a response, Rebecca leans forward, hands on hips, and shimmies at me provocatively. ‘I wanna be loved by you,’ she sings down the phone at me, ditching Marlene for Marilyn, continuing to shimmy and running her hands over her hips.

  A smile spreads across my lips and now, sincerely, my attention is one hundred per cent Rebecca’s. It’s not the first time I’ve witnessed this act, not by a long way, but still, the sense of anticipation it inspires gets me every time. Not taking my eyes from her for a second, I switch off the engine and pull the key free from the ignition. I give myself up, to her and to the moment.

  ‘Just you, and nobody else but you,’ she continues sweetly into my ear, her arms now wrapped round her bare shoulders. ‘I wanna be loved by you …’

  Slowly she rotates until her back is to me. Her fingers, appearing like another person’s from this angle, wander sensuously up and down the sides of her back. I release my seat belt and shift around in my seat so that I can get a better view.

  An exhibitionist fiancée was never something I actively sought in life, but hell, we’ve all got to make sacrifices from time to time. And if the source of my sacrifice happens to be five feet nine and a perfect eight, then surely it would be churlish of me to complain.

  Her hips flick from side to side as she continues to work it. ‘Al-ow-oo-own …’

  Then her hands pull swiftly at the corners of her dress (which I now see for what it is: a huge white bath towel), opening it out into a rectangle that screens everything bar her head and neck. No, I think to myself, turning away would be wrong. I have a responsibility to Rebecca here. If she has a psychological need to tease and taunt me from time to time with these lewd and lascivious displays of naked flesh, then the very least I, as her fiancé, can do is support her. It’s a care in the community issue, as simple as that.

  ‘Boop-oop-ee-do!’

  She releases the towel and I watch it drop to the floor. Then, before another word can be spoken between us, or her buttocks can wiggle another millimetre, the phone cuts dead and, without so much as a backwards glance or a stitch on, she strides out of sight. I wait a few seconds for her return, but the window remains empty.

  Then I’m moving, scrabbling out of the car and locking the door behind me (naturally more out of habit than any real fear of theft). I hurry across the street and let myself in to what I’ve come to regard as my second home.

  There’s a stack of mail on the small table in the communal hall downstairs – takeaway menus and bills (one for the gas in both mine and Rebecca’s names) – but there’s no time for such trivia now. Upstairs is a naked and brazenly wanton woman who’s mine for the taking. I bound up the four flights of stairs, pausing only to catch my breath briefly on the fourth-floor landing, before reaching out for the handle of the front door of Rebecca’s flat.

  I find Rebecca in her African-slated, sandalwood-scented bathroom. Mirrors cover two of the four walls from floor to ceiling, and the whole place is alive with the flickering light of aromatherapy candles and their accompanying dancing shadows. Rebecca is down on all fours on the rug next to the bath. Her skin is golden in this light, and her bottom is pointing in my direction, quivering expectantly. She turns her head to one side and stares at my reflection in the mirror. ‘Come here and fuck me,’ she tells me. ‘Hard.’

  Two minutes later and I’m walking dejectedly through to the bedroom. I flop down in the middle of Rebecca’s continent-sized continental bed. It’s wooden and French and, according to the Chelsea dealer who swapped it with Rebecca for a month’s salary, an antique. I avoid Rebecca’s eyes as she comes in and lies down beside me. Instead, I stare deliberately at her body. Away from the kind light of her bathroom of sin, her skin is creamy white and flawless. I stare at her nipples, as small and as brown and as hard as hazelnuts, but still my body refuses to respond. Finally, I pluck up the courage to look her in the face. ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumble. ‘I don’t know what –’

  Rebecca presses her finger to my lips. ‘No need,’ she whispers.

  She stares at me for a second or two, before shuffling a little closer and peering at me sidelong through narrowed, sultry eyes. As she blinks, her painted eyelids blaze momentarily, as perfectly varied and designed as a peacock’s feather. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to …?’ she softly asks. ‘You never know,’ she continues, brushing her hand across my thigh, ‘I might be able to’ – her eyebrows arch – ‘help you rise to the occasion …?’

  If only, I think. But at the same time I know that she’d be wasting her time. The numbness that filled my loins in the bathroom is as lasting, I’m certain, as any dentist’s injection. It’s like my genitals no longer exist. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’d really rather we didn’t.’

  I gaze up at the minimalist chrome and brushed cotton lampshade hanging from the simple plaster rose at the centre of the bedroom ceiling. Rebecca traces her finger along the arc of my shoulder, but I don’t react. If I’m feeling this wretched now, having failed to rise to the occasion once, imagine how much worse it’ll be if it happens again.

  Slowly, I roll over on to my side and push my nose up close to her neck and breathe in the double nasal whammy of Vidal Sassoon Hair Wash and Clarins Body Lift. It’s a combination that’s always provided nothing but enticement in the past, but today it just smells like soap. I roll away again.

  ‘I’m sure it happens to everyone from time to time,’ Rebecca says comfortingly.

  She watches me for a reaction to this. This is something she’s always doing, as if one of my main duties in our relationship is to provide confirmation of what she thinks she already knows about me. Then, as soon as my face has betrayed whatever it is that she’s looking for (in this case, abject gratitude over her understanding nature) and I’m about to speak myself, she quickly carries on. ‘Not with me, though,’ she adds. ‘This is definitely a first for me.’

  I groan and, grabbing a couple of pillows, prop myself up in a sitting position at the head of the bed. ‘God,’ I say, ‘I feel so embarrassed.’

  ‘You feel embarrassed. How do you think I feel?’ she asks, visibly put out. ‘It’s hardly the kind of behaviour you hope for when you set out to seduce the man you’re going to marry …’

  It’s at times of spiritual isolation like this that I do wonder abou
t the sheer sexual nature of our relationship. Not that I’m against having sex with Rebecca. She’s exceptionally gifted at it and, physically, is exactly the kind of girl I always fantasised about ending up with. But if we were unable to … what then? What would we be left with? What would be left of us? What would we talk about and what would we do?

  ‘Is it me?’ she asks. ‘Don’t you find me attractive any more?’

  ‘You’re incredible,’ I react. ‘This has got nothing to do with you. It’s me.’

  I mean this one hundred per cent. Her bits are all in exactly the same places they were when we bade one another a fond and frisky pre-Oslo farewell on Thursday night. Nothing about her has altered, or looks different in any way.

  She looks at me expectantly, as if this explanation in itself is not sufficient.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I begin. ‘It’s probably stress. Work’s been tough and, well, you know, there’s the wedding coming up, too – not’, I hurriedly add, ‘that I’ve got any doubts or anything, but still, it all adds up, doesn’t it?’

  Rebecca doesn’t reply. She doesn’t need to; I already know what she’s thinking. She’s thinking that she works hard, too, and she’s getting married, too, and she’s still capable of having sex. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she says.

  ‘It is all right,’ I reply, suddenly wanting to terminate this conversation. ‘It’s a blip, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s nothing else on your mind?’ she enquires after an awkward silence. ‘Nothing you want to tell me?’

  ‘Like what?’ I ask. This comes out as a challenge, but only, I reason immediately afterwards, because her question sounded like one, too.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says innocently. ‘You tell me.’

  I do have an answer for her, but it’s not one I’m prepared to voice. I hardly even dare acknowledge it to myself. At the same time, though, it is difficult to avoid. She was there in the bathroom. Mickey was there. Not in the flesh, obviously, but here, in my mind. I was looking at Rebecca, but I was thinking about Mickey, and not even thinking about having sex with Mickey, but thinking about how euphoric I felt after seeing her today. And I was thinking, too, of another night, years ago, when Mickey and I had lain side by side on the floor of a deserted building, surrounded by candles and in love. And then I was looking at Rebecca and I realised where I was and the guilt kicked in. Loyalty, I suppose that’s the answer I should give to Rebecca now. Emotionally, I’ve been disloyal to her. Emotionally, I’ve allowed myself to be mugged by a loyalty to another woman that should have become redundant years ago.