A Compromising Position

by Carole Matthews

  ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘No.’ My lip wobbles. ‘It’s worse than that.’

  ‘What can be worse?’

  I eye my cases hopefully.

  Cara lets out the long, weary breath of defeat. ‘Let’s go home,’ she says, ‘and you can tell me all about it.’

  Chapter Four

  Cara is in the kitchen. I’m getting camomile tea when I’d rather be having a Tetley’s hairy-arsed brew and gin. My cases are ensconced in the spare room and I am lying prostrate on the sofa, having been given a hefty dose of Bach Flower Rescue Remedy, a lavender pillow for my neck and a rose quartz crystal to put inside my bra, for reasons I didn’t enquire into. There is a thick cloud of nostril-twitching incense hanging in the middle of the lounge.

  I don’t think Cara and I could be more different as people. I am normal. Cara is not. I look ordinary. Cara does not. I am tall, naturally blonde, apart from my intellect, curvaceous and have a chest that could have inspired Jordan. Cara is tiny, waif-like with crimped hair that veers between curls and dreadlocks in a variety of shades of burgundy and pink. I like business suits, button-up blouses and stilettos. Cara’s style is more Madonna meets Mother’s dressing-up box. This makes her sound like an ugly bag lady, but she isn’t. She’s stunningly beautiful but not in the traditional sense – a bit like Morticia Addams, who is, in her own way, utterly gorgeous.

  I believe in hard work, never going overdrawn at the bank and filling in Income Tax Returns on time. Cara favours the New Age approach to life, opening herself up to the divine benevolence of the universe and the healing power of Angels. Personally, I believe in the healing power of strong drink. I think the tooth fairy may well live at the bottom of Cara’s garden. If not, I’m sure she’d be made very welcome.

  Our taste in furnishings differs wildly too. I like pastels, stainless steel and natural wood, no fuss, no frills. Cara is more artistic by nature, which means every wall is a different colour and is festooned with ethnic artefacts – tat – from around the world. And she thinks I’m the untidy one! She mixes red with green, which was always a no-no in my book, yellow with purple, hot pink with deep blue. Sometimes I wonder if Cara has decorated with the sole intention of destroying the optic nerves of any visitors. Some may say it has a certain charm, but at the moment, it feels like I’m lying in a migraine.

  Cara lives in the heart of Hampstead village, just down the road from Keats – or where Keats used to live when he was writing Ode To A Nightingale. I know that because there’s a little brass plaque nailed to a tree that tells me so. It’s very posh and bijou. She has original, ornate wrought-iron railings, a blush of Virginia Creeper curling round the door and an original Victorian lamp-post on guard just outside the gate. It’s right in the middle of a conservation area – or if it isn’t it should be – and Cara can’t sneeze without someone complaining to the council. I’m amazed she’s allowed to get away with the colour of her front door. It’s painted a lurid mauve shade – the colour of people’s armpits who are suffering from Bubonic Plague. Cara says it symbolises the rich fullness of life. I say it symbolises someone with pretty awful taste in front-door paint.

  This isn’t strictly Cara’s house. It’s owned by her parents, who are currently away running a charity school to save young girls from prostitution in Thailand. Cara’s parents, Jade and Yang – not their real names, I suspect – have always been keen to support noble causes. I don’t think they’ve ever done a day of paid work in their entire lives. How on earth they came to own this house is a mystery. Even if you won a million quid on the lottery tomorrow, you’d be hard pushed to afford a place here. I think it was inherited by Cara’s father, Yang, from his grandfather, or so the story goes. The truth is he’s probably the secret love-child of a member of royalty, but don’t quote me on that.

  Anyway, property millionaires or not, Jade and Yang are sort of sixties throwbacks – which is so Hampstead. Despite their rather privileged upbringings, they wear kaftans and embroidered slippers and say ‘cool’ and ‘fab’, but in a very spaced-out and non-now sort of way. They dragged Cara round most of the hell-holes of the world when she was growing up, claiming that it was better than being educated in a bourgeois private school in bourgeois southern England (as they were, of course). That may be, but it left Cara totally without roots and a feeling that she never does enough for people, because she has sufficient money to eat and drive a capitalist bastard’s car – or a Citroën 2CV which, personally, I don’t think is anything to brag about.

  Wherever there are people in need, that’s where you’ll find Jade and Yang – Tibet, Nepal, Glasgow – pretty much anywhere but in their house in Hampstead. Cara is fiercely proud of them, desperate to live up to their bohemian ideals, and she fails on almost every level. They turn up once every two years, sleep on the floor of their own lounge because, presumably, beds are also a sign of being a capitalist bastard, empty their daughter’s bank account of her hard-earned savings and then swan off on another mission to save the world. The only needy person Cara’s parents don’t have time for is her. Sometimes, I wonder why Cara and I are friends. I think this is one of the main reasons. Without me, she’d have no one.

  If I were a product of my parents’ making, I’d be wearing a sensible cardigan, having lunch in the Wisteria café of the garden centre once a week, driving a Volvo 240 Estate with a fur cover on the driver’s seat to save it from excess wear, and I’d have no idea how to work my answerphone. Sometimes I get the distinct feeling that I’m heading that way.

  Cara comes in carrying a tray of tea and sets it down beside me. She has her sympathetic look on. ‘When did you last have your chakras cleansed, Emily?’

  ‘Er . . .’ I won’t admit it, but I’m not entirely sure where my chakras are. Or, indeed, if I have them. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had that pleasure.’

  ‘That’s probably why you have so much negativity,’ she says. ‘We must do them.’

  A lot of what Cara does involves wailing and candles and it isn’t usually pleasant. Perhaps her theory is: how can it be good for you if it’s not horrid?

  ‘Well, despite my negativity, I’ll be a great housemate,’ I say hopefully. ‘I’ll pay you rent on time. I won’t drink all your milk.’ Mainly because soya milk makes me want to throw up and Cara wouldn’t dream of drinking anything else. Am I the only one who thinks it smells like syrup and vomit mixed together? Cara is a strict lacto-vegan and I’m sure she wouldn’t even injure vegetables by eating them if there were a suitable alternative. If you could buy tofu carrots, Cara would be at the head of the queue. ‘I will also try very hard not to re-enact the ten-year-old leaving-the-lid-off-the-toothpaste scandal,’ I promise. ‘I won’t deposit hair in the plughole and I’ll always put the loo seat down.’

  ‘I’m not being fussy, Emily,’ Cara says sincerely. ‘That’s simply good Feng Shui. If you leave the seat up, all your money dematerialises down the toilet.’

  ‘See?’ I try a weak smile. ‘I’m learning already.’ I don’t bother to point out that my money dematerialises without any help from my u-bend, mainly on my mortgage and the contents of Sainsburys.

  Cara pours us both a cup of camomile tea and hands one to me. I feel as if someone should be soothing my fevered brow.

  ‘You still haven’t told me what’s happened,’ she says.

  I feel my jaw tighten. ‘We need to log onto your computer.’

  ‘Why?’

  I give her a knowing look. ‘You’ll see.’

  I dispense with the lavender pillow and hitch the crystal into a more comfortable place in my bra and, taking our tea, Cara follows me as I trudge quietly upstairs into her box room which serves as an office.

  Cara is writing a novel in her spare time. As she has no spare time, she’s been doing it for about ten years. I don’t ask about it any more because she gets very stroppy about its lack of progress. It’s a worthy novel, full of meaningful things, apparently. It’s also destined to be an unfinished
novel, I think. My friend sits at her computer and taps away until it springs into life with a series of beeps and whirls and happy tunes.

  Cara thinks her computer sends out bad vibes, radiation fields or something. Computers that aren’t turned off use up twenty-five per cent of the world’s energy resources, she once told me. I think she read it in Rainbow Warrior Monthly, so it must be true. Hippies don’t lie. She has it boxed in by bowls of little crystals and pretty stones, plants and other indeterminate objects that are supposed to protect her from it. I hate computers too. I don’t get road rage, I get computer rage. Five minutes on one of the damn things and I’m ready to throw it out of the window. I have barricaded mine in with pen-holders and computer manuals to protect it from me. What’s more, I’ve invented a whole new vocabulary while working on the computer – all of it obscene.

  These days, teachers are expected to be computer literate and we’re sent on expensive courses to learn about the delights they can offer by people who work with them everyday at a lofty level and cannot understand why they strike terror into a real person’s heart. ‘Real people’ being those who can’t programme video recorders, get toasters to work and even have to resort to giving the channel changer a hefty whack on the arm of the chair before it will change channels. I’m so not in the computer age that I don’t even have my own email address – Declan has to do it all for me. He persuaded me, once, to do my supermarket shopping on-line. What a disaster! It took me about two hours to fill my virtual basket, by which time I could have whipped round Sainsburys with my eyes closed. And when, several light years later, my shopping finally arrived, I got twenty-seven packets of Penguins, ten iceberg lettuces (I hate iceberg lettuce!), an industrial-sized tomato ketchup that would take even the most dedicated of chip lovers about five years to use up and a Tweenies video. None of which I had ordered. I didn’t, however, get the cheese, butter, tea bags and loo rolls that I had ordered. Grrr. Give me a manky wire basket and a tatty list to stomp round with any day. Though preferably not Saturday.

  I wish we didn’t have computers. I could live without one. We all managed well enough without washing machines and faxes and microwaves and mobile phones. Didn’t we? Although I wouldn’t be quite so willing to dispense with those now. Computers, however, are nothing but trouble. Like men.

  Declan works with computers. He is what’s commonly known as an expert. Declan is going to be a dot.com millionaire. Or so he keeps telling me. He has his own string of Internet companies, strung out, presumably, in cyberspace just waiting for the pounds to roll in. Except they aren’t. And that’s pretty much where I come in.

  Grabagadget.com, a site advertising loads of useless gadgets you never knew you needed and probably never did, sadgits. com, a sad site for sad gits everywhere, and datewithastar.com, where you can have a virtual relationship with a celebrity of your choice, are not quite the cash cows that my other half had dreamed they would be.

  I run my fingers over Cara’s bookshelf. She has titles such as A Woman Empowered Is A Woman Set Free and The Complete Guide To Becoming A Serenely Magical Being. She’s obviously not read that one yet. It’s heartening to see that the majority of her books are covered in dust, as are my bookshelves. Mine contain mainly English set texts and the odd well-thumbed Jackie Collins novel left over from when I was fifteen. I would like to read some of Cara’s life-changing books when I have time and, in the light of what has happened, maybe I should have done it sooner.

  Cara twizzles round on her chair. ‘OK,’ she says, flinging her crinkles of hair out of the way. ‘It’s all yours. We’re on-line.’

  I take over her seat. ‘You’re going to be shocked,’ I say.

  ‘Nonsense. I’m a rufty-tufty News Editor,’ she scoffs. ‘Nothing shocks me.’

  ‘As you like it,’ I sigh and reluctantly tap a web address into the appropriate box. The search engine does its bit, creeping and crawling across space until it finds the right site. I have a vague feeling of distorted reality as I wait for the images to appear. This is a shock to me too. I only found out a couple of hours ago and, even now, part of me hopes that it is all a big mistake and that Declan couldn’t really have done this.

  The computer grinds away. Site located. Transferring document. 10%. 30%. 50%. Chunter. Chunter. Chunter.

  ‘Sorry it’s so slow.’ Cara is chewing her fingernails.

  It’s that time of night when children are closeted into their bedrooms jamming up the airways surfing things they shouldn’t be, when instead they should be downstairs watching EastEnders.

  60%. 80%. Done. Bingo! The page opens. The banner heading reads: SAUCY SANTA SHARES HER FESTIVE JOY! and a little box with a cross in it appears where soon a picture will be.

  ‘Christmas was ages ago.’ Cara looks puzzled.

  ‘Four weeks,’ I say, monotone. I’m not likely to forget in a hurry.

  A hazy, pixelated image appears and quickly clears into a startlingly clear, full-colour photo. And there I am on the page. I have a bare bottom, directed at the screen, and bare breasts, although I am not totally in the nip. Oh no. I am wearing a red, fur-trimmed, flimsy Santa costume fashioned in chiffon, a red hat with a flashing light on the end, dominatrix stilettos and a very stupid grin. I also have HO-HO-HO written cheekily in marker pen on one buttock.

  Next to me Cara has turned white-faced. ‘Oh my giddy aunt,’ she gasps.

  Again, I feel stronger language might have been appropriate in the circumstances.

  ‘It’s you!’

  ‘Yes.’ I know that.

  ‘You look ridiculous.’

  ‘Yes.’ I know that too.

  ‘This is the sort of stuff the guys at the office look at all the time.’ Cara points in disbelief at my bottom on the screen. ‘Why did you put it there?’

  ‘I didn’t, you wombat! Why on earth would I want my arse on the Internet?’

  Cara stares wide-eyed at me. I can feel the tears welling again. ‘Declan?’ she asks in hushed tones.

  ‘Of course, Declan. Who else would have access to pictures of my bloody backside?’

  ‘I didn’t know that Declan did.’ There seems to be a grudging sort of admiration in her voice and she nudges me out of the way to get a better look.

  There is one main photo and four small ones, artistically arranged, underneath.

  ‘Oh golly,’ Cara breathes.

  From whatever angle you look at them, they are still undeniably me and my bottom.

  ‘I gave Declan a digital camera for Christmas.’

  Cara zooms in for a close-up. ‘Looks like he’s been using it.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ I snarl and grab the mouse, clicking it over the Exit button.

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I was going through the desk drawers looking for my cheque book and I came across a print-out.’

  Cara snorts, heavily. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Do?’ I snort a bit too. ‘I’m going to put the house on the market and sod off with my share. If we were married, I’d divorce him.’

  ‘Not about that,’ Cara tuts. ‘About this.’ She flicks her thumb at the now blank computer screen.

  ‘Declan said he’d take it off. Immediately.’ It occurs to me that it is still very much there.

  ‘Why did he do it in the first place?’

  ‘For a laugh.’

  ‘For a laugh?’ Cara looks deeply sceptical. ‘I take it you didn’t find it very funny?’

  ‘About as funny as Declan would have found being hit round the head with the frying pan.’

  ‘Which is what you were trying to do to him moments before you left.’

  I nod.

  ‘Emily?’ Cara sips at her camomile tea, which must be stone cold by now. ‘What on earth possessed you to let him take photographs of you tarted up like that?’

  I might have the exterior of a cool, in-control professional, but beneath this breast (these breasts), I throb with unrestrained passion. I haven’t been blessed, or cursed
, with a glamour-girl chest for nothing. ‘It was a bit of adult horseplay.’ I can feel myself glowing with shame.

  ‘You look like a two-bit whore.’ Cara likes to be comforting. ‘Making love should be a spiritual experience. Prancing round like that smacks of desperation. It’s the sort of thing that couples do when they’ve been married for twenty years and are bored to death with each other. I thought you were a feminist?’

  ‘I am.’ My red cheeks burn.

  ‘And you let your boyfriend take pictures of you in a see-through Santa suit with no knickers?’

  I can hear my guilty gulp. ‘I was expressing my sexuality.’

  ‘You can do that without taking your knickers off.’

  ‘Declan has always appreciated my adventurous side.’

  Cara narrows her eyes. ‘And now hundreds of others can too.’

  Hundreds? I hadn’t actually considered that. My redness gives way to blanching. ‘What if someone I know sees it?’

  Cara shakes her head, a look of extreme frustration on her face. ‘Get Declan to take it off. Now. Before it does any more damage.’

  This could actually be a lot worse than I thought. And I thought it was pretty bad before.

  Cara heads for the door. Clearly being in the same room as me is bringing on a need to meditate. She turns to face me and she has her schoolteacher’s expression on. I know because it was me who taught her it. ‘And next time you feel like being adventurous, Emily, try white-water rafting. With your clothes on.’

  Chapter Five

  The local pub, the Jiggery-Pokery, could only be categorised as a dump. But, in its favour, the Jig was a hop, skip and a jump from the office, it churned out good bacon rolls all day until they finally remembered to turf the clientèle out, and the beer wasn’t bad. There was very little else that the average journalist required in a watering hole. Stencilled flowers, sponged walls and designer distressed furniture – rather than distressed by aeons of abuse – largely went unnoticed by members of the press.