Tightrope

by Marnie Riches

  His expression softened and the doors unlocked. ‘Go on. Get in.’

  Amid a flurry of, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ Bev folded herself into the back seat. Breathed a sigh of relief when the doors locked. She jumped when Jerry suddenly slapped a hand on the passenger window, shouting something incoherent to her through the glass. Blowing him a kiss and miming that she’d call him, she caught the cabbie’s eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Just drive.’

  He pulled away from the kerb with a squeal of rubber, leaving swaying Jerry Fitzwilliam standing on the kerbside like an oversized abandoned child.

  ‘As long as you pay me in cash, love, I’ll take you wherever you want. Where to?’

  The adrenaline was coursing around Bev’s body, mingling with alcohol she shouldn’t have drunk. She realised how desperately close she’d come to being discovered, or else pinned down and raped by a man who clearly wasn’t used to taking no for an answer. And yet, she’d succeeded, hadn’t she? She’d caught her client’s husband in the act of extra-marital seduction. The melange of slowly abating panic and euphoria whipped up a storm inside her that only one thing could quell.

  She felt the bite of her other compulsion – the most intense one that she never brought up in therapy ; the one that was as close as she could get to trepanning to release the pressure inside her. Better than drugs. Better than origami. It was the perfect way to celebrate her small triumph. She couldn’t get back behind the wheel until she’d sobered up anyway. What the hell . . .

  ‘Earl’s Court, please. I’ll give you directions when we get nearer.’

  They sped away down Chelsea’s empty backstreets. She was heading for somewhere she hadn’t visited in a long, long time. But she’d checked online only days ago and knew it was still operating.

  ‘Live over that way, do you?’ the driver asked.

  ‘No. I’m going to a kind of club,’ Bev said. ‘Members only.’

  ‘Oh yeah? That feller’s face not fit?’ Eyes on the road. Eyes on her reflection. He was grinning. Was it conceivable that a devout Muslim man knew exactly the sort of things that went on inside the unassuming-looking, four-storey house on an unremarkable, double-parked street in backpacker-land?

  ‘I’ve got a birthday party to go to,’ she lied. ‘He’s certainly not invited. He’s just some drunken pest I went on a date with who forgot his manners.’

  She handed over her money as the Uber idled outside the Victorian terrace, where it looked for all the world as though nobody was home. Bev stared at the black, anonymous-looking door with nervous anticipation and a sizeable dollop of excitement.

  CHAPTER 14

  Bev

  The password had changed but Bev was not stalled at the front door for long.

  ‘Well, well, well.’ The tubby proprietor gestured to the young bouncer that he should step aside and let her in. ‘It’s a good long while since you last darkened the X-S Club’s doorstep. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  Bev gave Phillipe d’O a peck on the cheek. ‘You’ve barely changed,’ she said, linking arms with him. ‘You still look like Salvador Dali ate too many pies.’

  He twirled his moustache archly and raised an eyebrow. Slapped her bottom. ‘Looks like you’ve been on the pies yourself, hot stuff. Look at that arse! You’re going to be popular tonight.’

  ‘Everyone wanted size zero when I was last here.’ She strutted through to the back of the house, grabbing a carnival mask from the girl in the cloakroom. He followed.

  ‘Haven’t you heard? It’s all bootylicious these days, darling, thanks to Beyoncé. Anyway, why are you here? Is the North West too soggy even for you?’ He slid his hand between her legs. She pushed him away, laughing. Feeling like she was already playing her favourite role in a game where she was in charge. The perfect narcotic antidote to Jerry Fitzwilliam’s unwanted sexual aggression. She pulled at the plunging neckline of her dress so that her breasts jiggled. ‘No, Phillipe. There’s a positive drought up there. Come on. Let me get out of this lot and you can show me the fresh meat.’

  The X-S club was busy. High with anticipation, Bev eyed the clientele in the warren of rooms that the house boasted. Music played at just the right volume in the expertly soundproofed house, so that people could hear each other’s safe word and sex noises. Everyone wore masks, stripped naked in the main but for the odd piercing or item of fetish-wear. Bev had opted for nudity, not having planned to be here in advance. The only thing she carried with her was her phone.

  She stood in a doorway momentarily, watching a woman astride a man with a large gut. Judging by the slight sag of the woman’s flesh and the silver web of stretch marks that spanned her belly and hips, she was middle-aged. Her conquest, on the other hand, looked like an overweight younger man. She was riding him slowly, while a second man sucked her right nipple and masturbated himself.

  It wasn’t Bev’s scene. She continued into the house’s main salon, past rooms where it was man on man, girls kissing, cosy threesomes. She smiled. Anything went in here.

  ‘Hello. What’s your name?’ A man padded down the stairs. His head was clean-shaven with the ghost of male-pattern baldness showing on the shining scalp, but his body was covered in dark hair. He had a great body at that. Toned, but not muscle-bound. And a giant erection that bobbed about before him like it was a buoy, keeping him afloat in the house’s sea of depravity.

  ‘Whatever you want it to be,’ Bev said.

  It had been a week since her last conquest. Too long. She could smell lube and promise on this stranger, who’d clearly already been indulging elsewhere in the house. Pumped full of Viagra he may be, but he was the opposite of Jerry Fitzwilliam.

  Approaching him, she ran her finger the length of his torso, following the chevron of naval hair to his groin. ‘Want to go join the others in the lounge?’ she asked, looking up into the carnival mask. Amazing what you couldn’t tell about a person when their face was covered. He might have come across as a doped-up waster, or a lying, spineless idiot like Rob, without the mask on, but none of that mattered here. Everyone was in this club for the physical solace and release the other members offered, strings free. Nothing more. Here, you could be as ugly as a mule and still get laid. Here, you were desired without any conditions attached. Here, nobody judged your compulsion. And besides, she liked the set of this man’s chin and his clean, straight teeth.

  His caress felt good. ‘I don’t think I can wait.’

  No kissing. No information. No games. Just how Bev liked it.

  Within a handful of easy foreplay moves, she was being screwed from behind on the stairs, revelling in the other partygoers ascending and descending at their side, pausing to watch before moving on to their own adventure. She enjoyed the conquest and the thought of what they were doing more than the deed itself. Sexual daring, voyeurism and power were narcotic. They would have been enough to get her off had her phone not started to ring, vibrating between her elbows on the step.

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe this,’ she said, spying Doc’s name flashing on the screen.

  ‘Just turn it off,’ her partner said, still humping away at her rear.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry.’

  Bev prodded at the icon to reject the call, but her lover’s thrust was so enthusiastic that her hand slipped. Inadvertently, she found herself in conversation with Doc.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?!’ he shouted, his voice emanating from the phone, tinny and full of concern. ‘Did you know you were still filming after you’d ditched Fitzwilliam?’

  ‘Doc, I’ve got to go.’ Bev teetered between laughter and mortification that Doc might have seen her entering the world of X-S. Was her secret out?

  ‘Where the hell are you? Are you in . . . a sex club? There’s knobs! And boobs! Shitting Nora, Bev. There was a man . . . and his wang was—’

  Yes. Doc knew. Damn it.

  Ending the call, Bev bit her lip. Shelve it. It’s none of his business. You’re a grown woman and it’s your choice to shar
e your body with who the hell you like. She focused anew on the important work of anonymous sex with a hot stranger.

  In the main reception room, she enjoyed an encore with a girl who had the perkiest breasts she’d ever seen and two men who’d leave her sore for days. With every hole given due attention except the one in her heart, she got all the way to her parked car in an Archway side street before checking her voicemails. Six of them – all from Doc.

  ‘Jesus, Bev. Are you OK? I can’t believe that creep, Fitzwilliam. Call me back. There’s a problem with the footage.’ His concern for her was audible.

  Half an hour later.

  ‘It’s me again. Bev . . .’ Hesitation. What was he trying to say? Come on, Doc. Out with it. She realised, then, that this message had been left on her arrival at the club. ‘I think you need to turn the camera off. I mean, what are you up to? Are you safe?!’

  More messages, following the call she’d accidentally picked up :

  ‘Crikey, Bev.’ Crikey! Who on earth said, ‘crikey’ any more? ‘You never told me you had another problem apart from origami. Why’ve you never brought this up at therapy? You’re a sex addict, right? The guy who opened the door knew you. I googled him. It said he’s called Phillipe d’O, O short for orgasm! You nutter. Hit me back. I’m worried about you.’

  The final voicemail yielded a rather stern-sounding Doc. ‘Hey. When you’ve finished shagging yourself into next Wednesday, I’ve got news. I’ve found something out about Spartacus Holdings. You’ll not believe this. Call, dammit!’

  She was torn between wanting to hear his news and needing to treat his proprietorial judgement of her private life with the silence it warranted. Whatever it was, she decided it could wait.

  Bev knew she was doing wrong when she switched on the engine and tried to reverse out of the parking spot. Her spatial awareness wasn’t what it should be thanks to the alcohol. She was misjudging the unfamiliar car’s size and turning capacity. It took her a full five minutes to be free of the tight squeeze between a souped-up Subaru and a clapped-out combi van.

  ‘If you get pulled over, you’re in deep shit,’ she told herself, crawling up the A1. ‘You should go back. Sleep it off in the car.’

  And yet, she kept going. Bev felt the insistent urge to get as far away as possible from London and Jerry Fitzwilliam and the X-S Club. Normality. That’s what she needed. And familiarity, though it currently manifested itself as a mildewed, mouldy basement flat in someone else’s house.

  At 2 a.m. the roads were dead. No sign of the police – not that they’d be interested in a turd-brown Fiesta, trundling along the inside lane doing 65 mph. Two hours’ drive gave her liver time enough to process the alcohol. The last hour passed in a whirl of heavy eyelids, trying to sing along to PJ Harvey playing on her phone in a bid to stay awake. She grappled with jumbled recollections of Jerry Fitzwilliam – the professional politics-bore who quickly turned into a sex pest with one sniff of the proverbial barman’s apron.

  She pulled off the M56 near Manchester airport and crawled her way home past the mansions of the nouveau riche, the white-collar criminals and the quinoa brigade who, like Sophie, wished they were living in Fulham or Belgravia or some place with capital cachet. All she wanted to do was fall into bed and forget. She clenched her numb buttocks in a bid to kickstart the flow of blood to them. She tried to loosen her pants. The cystitis that had flared up since her visit to X-S demanded a couple of painkillers and a large glass of cranberry juice. To make matters worse, when she tried to pull onto the gravel driveway, her space had been taken by an old Volvo. She was forced to park badly by the kerbside.

  Almost falling out of her car, barefoot and clutching her killer heels, Bev was surprised to hear voices on the still night air.

  ‘Bev? Is that you?’ Giggling. The clickety-click of quality shoes.

  ‘Sophie? Tim?’ They were walking arm in arm. Or rather, weaving down the street. As they got closer, Bev could see Tim had had a skinful, to the point his eyes were slightly unfocused.

  ‘Have you just got back from London?’ Sophie asked, pulling her keys from her Mulberry bag with a perplexed look on her perfectly made-up face.

  ‘Who’s looking after the kids?’ Bev asked, deciding her comings and goings were none of her friend’s business.

  ‘My mum,’ Sophie said. ‘It’s date night. We’ve just been to a terrific dinner party at Abigail Gosport’s on Carrwood.’ Her voluble booze-fuelled response gushed forth. ‘She’s got a massive bloody house and the best live-in chef ever.’ She paused to look Bev up and down. ‘Gosh. You look . . .’

  Tim stumbled up to the doorstep. ‘Do us a favour, Bev. There’s a good girl. Don’t let the neighbours see you dressed like that, will you?’ He hiccupped. ‘You know how they gossip round here.’

  Wanker. Cheeky bloody . . . aaaagh. Even in her head, Bev didn’t have the right words for Tim’s put-down. She could see tacit agreement with his sentiments in Sophie’s well-meaning nod, too. What a pair. Best left until morning.

  They parted company in the hall, where her path led towards the mildew stink and down the cold-stone steps. Theirs led up, to the family area that smelled of wood floor polish and wealth.

  Once inside, Bev’s flat was cold. She shivered, but it was not just because the heating had been off for two days. It felt like somebody had been inside her personal space. Moving from room to room, she examined the positions of her origami models – always arranged in a specific way and in a specific relationship to one another that only Bev could know. One of her cranes – a delicate bird in flight that had special significance for her – hadn’t just been moved. It was missing.

  CHAPTER 15

  Bev

  The smell of Doc’s flat drifted out to greet her before she’d even stepped inside the cramped hallway. Feet. WD40. Old pizza. B.O. beneath a top note of cheap deodorant – the kind the adverts insisted made you irresistible to the pneumatic, up-for-it members of the opposite sex.

  ‘You’re gross. Do you know that?’ Bev said, looking around at the trail of devastation that was his living room.

  ‘And you’re a hypocrite. Do you want a bag of Quavers? I’ve only got flat Dandelion and Burdock and Quavers. Soz.’

  ‘No, ta.’

  On his coffee table was a large cut-glass ashtray full of evidence. ‘You still growing weed in your loft space?’

  He grinned in answer. ‘Let me show you something.’ Flung himself onto a dog-eared typing chair. It was at a desk that was almost invisible beneath computer hardware that must have cost him a fortune, Bev assessed. While he tapped away, her eye wandered over the empty Pot Noodle packaging and abandoned pepperoni pizza boxes to a wall of colour.

  ‘Is this your collection, then?’ Shelf after shelf at the far end of the living room was filled with Lego models. Sports cars. Star Wars figures. Entire scenes, carefully built on green flat bases.

  ‘That’s nothing,’ he said, never taking his eyes from his giant computer screen. ‘Check out my spare room.’

  Wandering down the hall, Bev spied a bathroom that smelled of poor ventilation and strong toilet cleaner. Next to it was, she presumed, Doc’s bedroom. She walked quickly past that, unwilling to more than glance at his unmade bed and the mountain of clothes on a wicker chair. Finally, at the end, she found a closed door. She opened it to reveal a single bedroom crammed with display cabinets that sported not a speck of dust. Their glass had been polished until it shone, without a single fingerprint to mar the overall effect. Inside them, Lego creations had been arranged artfully. From the ceiling, there hung a giant Lego Star Wars X-Wing, the Millennium Falcon and several other airborne models, including a dragon and a rocket ship. Bev was surprised by an intense rush of happiness, as though she had stepped into a pristine, magical children’s museum that conjured the joy of her own innocent years. An enormous build – the kind you saw in the windows of Lego stores – took pride of place on the floor. Two life-sized Lego children were kneeling in a flower-strewn ga
rden, also made from bricks. Together, they were constructing an ingenious mill house with a large waterwheel by a river. Bev spied a switch on the periphery of the display. When she flipped it, the house lit up, the wheel started to turn and the blue plates of Lego that comprised the river started to move, as if attached to a hidden conveyor belt. Just like water.

  ‘Jesus, Doc,’ she shouted down the hallway. ‘You’re a genius! No word of a lie. Never mind Oxford and therapy and this foetid dump you call home in the arse end of Manchester. You should be in Denmark, being a Lego Jedi Master, getting paid by head office for designing their displays.’ She reached out to touch one of the little boy’s ears and balked when it came away in her hand. Desperately trying to fix it as she spoke. ‘I’ve been past the Lego shop in London and there was nothing this good in the window.’ Damn it. How the hell was she going to reattach the ear without causing more damage?

  ‘What?’ Doc’s voice from the living room. He hadn’t heard a single word of what she’d said. ‘Are you OK in there?’

  Bev could hear footsteps, advancing to where she knelt, desperately pressing the ear to its anchor on the side of the child’s face. Praying she wouldn’t make it worse.

  ‘Give me that!’

  Doc marched towards her from the doorway, holding his hand out for the dismembered body part. ‘I said you should check it out. I didn’t say you could maul it. Don’t touch my things, please.’

  It took him only seconds to reattach the ear. He flipped the switch, bringing the mill wheel and river to a standstill.

  The hurt and irritation was evident in the set of his jaw. Bev had been poised to repeat her high praise, but damn him, the silly prick.

  ‘You know, this stuff’s meant to be played with,’ she said. ‘I loved it as a kid.’

  ‘Yes. I’ve seen Lego Movie. I don’t need a lecture.’

  ‘Eh? There’s no need to be an arsehole.’

  ‘How would you like it if I came round your place and started messing with your origami models?’ He was glaring at her now. ‘I bet you’ve got them arranged just so. And they’re delicate like this.’ He waved a hand at his opus in brightly coloured plastic.