The Madness of Grief

by Panayotis Cacoyannis

  The secret of pleasure

  Aside from that minor misfortune, how well the day had started - how excitingly! In her weekend assignations among the bushes of that secret little wood somewhere north of Hampstead Heath, she had at last found the secret of pleasure: sex to be enjoyed needed to be casual and brief, practically anonymous and dangerously public.

  It was not that Lily desired to be watched; she was absolutely not into dogging, and far less into random joining in. Once or twice, when her one-on-one hook-ups had asked nicely and she happened to like them, she had strayed a considerable distance from the path of al fresco vanilla, giving in to some pretty unconventional requests. On one such occasion, after she had taken off her blindfold and unwound herself from round an ancient oak, green from top to toe in dewy moss, she discovered that Dick Turpin, as befitted his alias had run off with all her clothes, and she had had to drive back home wrapped in the emergency blanket she always carried in the car. Her one but quite enormous and abiding consolation was that Dick had been endowed with a namesake of really quite incredibly prodigious proportions that moreover had a very cocky mind of its own: while snaked around that tree trunk she had never been so entirely fulfilled from so many, and so unlikely, different angles. By comparison, the cheeky chav’s prodigiousness had been but a snack.

  In general men’s fantasies were lurid, and in Lily’s considered judgment, confirmed and further driven in by nearly every visit to the gloriously decadent North London Eden, they tended to be far more perverted than women’s. But, why deny it, it was fun to be occasionally wanton. What it really amounted to, however, this relatively recent kink she had developed, was more than just fun; rather it was an escape from her devastating history with men.

  It was hardly surprising, given everything that she had suffered, that she had never been happy in any of her relationships, irrespective of the frequency, type, or variety of the sex they had involved, which in her marriage to Frank Hayley had amounted to a fugitive and rather negligible non-event. Ron had been her lover at two different times in her life, and had it not been for the abhorrence she had felt throughout the first, ironically there might have never been a second. But that had been the story of her life; one bad decision compounding another in what had seemed like an endless and inevitable cycle.

  Well, the cycle had been broken. Supplementing her string of disastrous affairs with regular visits to the woods, Lily had managed to relieve the disappointment of the former by indulging in the casual titillation of the latter. She was still an attractive woman; a host of unsuitable suitors were longing to date her, while a motley assortment of rampant debauchees desired to engage in unspeakable things with her body. Her life since Frank had been littered with the consequences of bad choices ending in terrible break-ups, but now she was able to cruise through such mishaps with minimal fallout: after a single therapeutic visit to her secret wood, she would always be glad to move on. It was the wildlife equivalent of an enormous Bloody Mary.

  Her online journey to the profile on the exclusive, strictly-by-invitation-only come-to-woody.com had been colourful and hectic, but at last, after countless bumpy rides and some very close shaves, she had made it. And although it had taken her some time to shake him off, really she was grateful to the man who had given her secret directions to that overgrown garden of degenerate excess.

  ‘Why don’t I come and pick you up, I know your area well,’ Master Matador had offered.

  Lily was no novice when it came to online dating, and had always religiously adhered to certain rules. Chief among them was that final arrangements before meeting for the first time had to be confirmed by phone – in a call made by Lily from landline to landline, public phones excluded. Lily sensibly wanted to hear the men’s voices. If they came across as dangerous or creepy, they were immediately discounted; and in case she had been hoodwinked, a timely reminder that landline calls were logged would serve as a safeguard. It was true that no precautions were foolproof, but then nothing in life was risk-free. All was a matter of balance.

  ‘No thank you, the drive will be good for the car.’

  The last thing she wanted was for men like Master Matador to know exactly where she lived, regardless of whether or not they had passed the voice test. As a matter of fact, Master Matador was too polite if anything, and the plum in his mouth was off-putting. Lily too had her airs, but never in bed or in bushes - never during any kind of sex. And although she drew the line at heavy breathing, she did expect the men to be flirtatious when they called: “in character” already, so to speak.

  ‘Oh well,’ she remembered thinking. ‘I’ll just have to make sure he keeps his mouth shut. It’s not like we’re meeting for chitchat.’

  But there was no chance of her ever accepting a lift. As with all her online encounters, she would scrupulously follow the etiquette of anonymity and distance. She might have mentioned Covent Garden in passing, but giving her address and being collected was far too familiar. Master Matador was Master Matador and she was Barbarella. Fleeting fantasies that (literally) came and went. And before that, little more than mere imaginary seeds germinating in each other’s fancy. Addresses and postcodes could not but have broken the spell.

  ‘Ah, you drive.’

  ‘Just an old Mercedes-Benz,’ Lily had answered unpretentiously.

  ‘Really, what type?’

  ‘1969 280SE.’

  ‘Cabriolet?’

  ‘Coupe.’

  ‘Colour?’

  ‘Maroon. Really, Master Matador, you’re supposed to be a virile bullfighter, not a dreary car salesman.’

  ‘It’s a big car, the 280SE, with a back seat as wide as a bed. And I love the smell of leather.’

  ‘Al fresco, Master Matador, that’s what you promised.’

  ‘My darling Desirée…’

  Lily had almost hung up. But really the slip had hardly been cause to be jealous; she had never even met the man. In the end, the idea of what Master Matador and Desirée might have got up to had excited her.

  ‘Barbarella,’ she had reminded Master Matador firmly, sensually rolling her tongue as she spoke out the name.

  Master Matador’s breathing had shortened before crackling into a gasp. At that point Lily knew he would be putty in her hands, and for a brief time she had taken full advantage. But she hadn’t factored into her assessment his increasingly unhealthy obsession with her car.

  ‘Tasty auto for a very tasty lady,’ Master Matador had swooned while slobberingly licking the interior of the 1969 280SE, long after he had strayed off Lily’s flesh. The leap from al fresco had been a mistake, in spite of the rain.

  Well, that had been the final straw. She would not be an idle prop while Master Matador got off on her car. What was it about seedy little wimps and “Master”? Did it give them the illusion of power?

  ‘You must call me “Master” at all times,’ he had banged his fist to howl at her on Skype, while under the table Lily couldn’t help imagining his other hand dragging on a sagging sack of sad hairy balls.

  His eyes had goggled up, and the part of him that she could see was convulsing. Lily had struggled to keep a straight face; she had not found his performance a turn-on. The man was deadly dull, and now that she had found her way around it, come-to-woody.com offered far juicier cherries to pick from.

  Today’s Cerberus, for instance.

  Bob

  GRRR…

  Barely noticing the sour taste of sweat mixed with leftover lipstick and make up, Lily bit her lip as an awful thought suddenly struck her. Cerberus, a monstrous, multi-headed beast – after messages had been exchanged and a face-to-face on Skype had taken place, but before the obligatory landline phone call that served as a precaution and a final sizing up, the old Greek Mythology books she had scoured in her teens had confirmed that this particular fearsome creature stood guard by its entrance to prevent escape from Hades, and that Hades was another name for Hell. Lily had always been superstitious; one might say that life had made h
er so. And right now, driving on like an overheating robot in that maelstrom of microwave fever (would her hair ever manage to recover?) she wondered where else she could possibly be if she wasn’t in Hell.

  It was all nonsense, of course. Her brain was boiling over but it hadn’t yet gone bad. She had met Cerberus already, he had not been multi-headed, and there was no such place as Hell, at least not on this Earth. What she was in was a predicament, not Hell. And what she ought to do, rather than indulging in absurd extrapolations, was to simply pull over and turn the engine off. But if she did, it might not start again, and then what? Wait for hours in the middle of nowhere?

  Did she even know where she was? Well, did she? She seemed to be driving uphill, and the winding narrow road was unfamiliar. Lily slowed down and looked around for any landmarks that might help her to reorient herself. On the right she could see only hedges and trees merged together into impenetrable hedgerows, and on the left… just more hedges and trees, probably the same hedges and trees she had seen on the right just some minutes before. It was as if she were driving in a cul-de-sac of curves that snaked in and out of themselves like intestines.

  Clearly she was driving in the wrong direction. Back at those crossroads she ought to have turned right, not left, and now she had to find her way back to where she and Cerberus had parted. They had enjoyed themselves immensely, and holding on to that thought made it easier to continue to endure her ordeal. Sooner or later it would come to an end; she would walk back if she had to. By 6.30 pm, when Bob was coming round in his van, to pick her up from Covent Garden and drive her to a surprise destination for dinner, she would be rested, relaxed, and ready.

  ‘And on Monday you’re toast,’ Lily mouthed at her Mercedes unconvincingly, her mind already drifting back to Bob.

  A magical thing had happened, there was no better word to describe it. No sooner had they had their first kiss than Cerberus had metamorphosed into Bob, shedding the pretence of his alter ego to reveal himself to Lily as the wonderful man that he was. This enchanted transformation had happened right before her eyes, and the spontaneous effect it had had on her had been profound; it was as if at that same moment Lily had gone through her own metamorphosis. It wasn’t Cerberus but Bob, the plain, unprepossessing man-next-door that Lily had given herself over to so entirely.

  Really they had given themselves over to each other, with a passion that went far beyond lust and had caught Bob by surprise as much as it had Lily. She had a nose for these things. Even at the slenderest inkling that Cerberus had from the outset been a sham, and his amorous advances a lonely man’s bait to entrap lonely women, she would have known to walk away there and then. But Bob had not been in the market for “love” any more than she had, or he wouldn’t have been smutty. She had seen the twinkle in his eye as soon as he had set it upon her; no one could have faked that. That was what the magic had been, their mutual unguarded surprise.

  ‘Bob.’

  By then they had gone far into the bushes, and his deep, resonant voice had taken Lily aback; it was raw, so entirely natural that it had seemed out of place. Gone was the fakery of role-play.

  ‘Lily,’ Lily had answered plainly, pushing the foliage aside.

  If Bob’s voice had taken her aback, her own had left her astounded, stirring in her something she had thought long dead.

  ‘Hello, Lily.’

  His thick arms had wrapped themselves around her, and she had rested the side of her face against his chest. The rhythm of his heart was pounding to the beat of reassurance, tick-tock, tick-tock, but somehow not monotonous at all, and soft, like the lapping of waves as they washed against the shore... It was then that she had known that in this ordinary man she would at last find redemption. Her life would never again be the same.

  ‘Lily,’ she repeated without thinking. ‘It makes me feel so silly.’

  It was funny, feeling silly being Lily when she had never felt the least embarrassment at being Barbarella.

  ‘You’re blushing. Would you rather I still called you Barbarella?’

  Already Bob was reading her mind, and as he stroked to one side the dry wisps of deadened hair that had made her so self-conscious, Lily could see the apprehension in his eyes – a large expanse of brownness, clear and unblinking, fixed as though yearning for her to say no. He was tall, muscular and uniformly thickset like a bear, with greying black hair and a well-tended goatee. Words laughed themselves out of his mouth as he tenderly spoke them.

  ‘No, I think I’d rather blush,’ Lily had retorted. And then, as though the words had been planted in her mouth by someone else, infinitely braver than herself: ‘I hope this is the end of Barbarella, and of Cerberus, too!’

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ said Bob.

  In his polo shirt and shorts, he looked like a builder.

  ‘I’m a middle-aged woman.’

  Lily too was simply dressed; at the very last minute she had fought her way out of the far-too-skinny jeans and tight-fitting top that had been Master Matador’s favourite outfit (he had unflatteringly likened her to an Amazonian delicacy bursting at the seams), and thrown on instead an oversized blouse that she often wore in bed. It buttoned (and unbuttoned) in the front, easily, and underneath it she had put on neither panties nor a bra. Invariably they got in the way and were often torn to shreds.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ Bob said again.

  He was fresh, unperspiring; a middle-aged man but so youthful!

  Lily was sixtyish and plump. She had nearly always been plump, but she wore her plumpness well. Her height (tall but not too tall), by giving her plumpness elongation had guarded her from dumpiness and furnished her with pleasant definition. Neither squat nor square, she was, on the contrary, solidly curvaceous (the gym had kept her firm), and the fullness of her face, so perfectly unblemished and wholesome, not round but proportionately ovoid, gave it a remarkable glow, with features that basked in understatement.

  In her own estimation, which had often been confirmed in the most effusive terms, she looked at least ten years younger than she was. At its best, her very fine hair, an expertly concocted shade of dark silver blond, had an almost imperceptible curl, washing over her shoulders like a Japanese wave. And her eyes, impenetrable wells of luminescence whose depths had claimed so many unwary souls in the past, could still, if Lily wished, by dint of just a flutter become utterly beguiling.

  ‘I lied in my profile,’ said Bob, looking more contrite as he set about unbuttoning her blouse than in Lily’s lax opinion was called for.

  ‘About your age?’

  She felt her breasts explode into a million different tingles of sensation.

  ‘I’m not fifty-five.’

  Bob’s entire body – his hands, his neck, his hairy legs, had not so much enveloped as swathed her, and his contortionist’s hardness – robust, fierce, determined – pressed itself as though on every part of her at once.

  ‘Sixty?’ Lily managed to ask, her breath now so heavy that she found it a struggle to speak.

  That would make him almost the same age as her.

  ‘Fifty.’

  That made him the same age as she looked, and she had answered by slipping both her hands under his polo shirt, massaging him with extra vigour as she inched towards his chest. Then as her eyes fixed onto his by a rapid, deliberate movement, instantaneously a mutual yielding up had occurred.

  ‘My toy boy,’ Lily said in a soft exhalation.

  Her eyes now lightly shut, she had tilted her head backwards and half-opened her mouth, to offer Bob the tip of her tongue. The truth about her age could wait.

  ‘Your man,’ Bob had answered emphatically, before his mouth took in Lily’s and the wetness of their tongues became as one.

  GRRR…

  Over the boom of the windy air-con heat wave, Lily heard herself laugh, but what had started as the chuckle of delicious harking back had soon taken on the nervous crackle of something more akin to hysteria. In a foreshortening so sharp that for a moment Lily too
k it for an optical illusion, the stretch of road ahead narrowed abruptly as it ended in the blue of the sky. Lily hit the brakes, and the wayward Mercedes jerked to a stop. With the engine running and the handbrake up, Lily collapsed over the steering wheel and burst into tears.

  They were unnecessary tears, easily stemmed. All roads eventually lead somewhere. As long as she drove on, inevitably at some point she would come across someone who could tell her where she was, and then she would be able to call for a recovery vehicle to come to her rescue. Over a stiff drink and then dinner, tonight she and Bob would merrily make light of her adventure, before driving back to her apartment for more, much more than just a nightcap.

  GRRR…

  Lily thought about stepping outside, just for a breath of fresh air, but in the end she decided against it. “Stay inside your vehicle,” wasn’t that the official advice? She opened her door just a crack, but the deathly still solitude frightened her, and she closed it again. In the rear-view mirror she could only see a blur of grey and green, and ahead a slope of grey that led to the sky. She felt like a transgressor, a trespasser in a forbidden land.

  GRRR…

  It was as if her car had been afflicted as a punishment.

  Really, what nonsense! What she needed was some water, but today of all days she had not brought water with her. Her mouth, already dry from kissing, was parched. To moisten them a little in an effort to prise them apart, she dabbed her lips with sweat by running them over the length of her forearm, and when she had succeeded, she sucked along the other arm too, at last managing to also wrench her tongue off her palate.