by Kathy Lette
If Jazz, who was wearing what can only be described as Slapper Chic, had been a dog, she’d have been sniffing at his crotch.
I made my way towards them through the Boom Boom bar, which was full of sherbet-eye-shadowed teenage girls and their scrofulous, shaggy-haired male companions, dancing like things in pain, curling and coiling and jumping from foot to foot. There wasn’t a defined side-parting in sight. But past the dance floor, there was another breed prominent. The forty-year-old hottie. From their hipster jeans to the Justin Timberlake tracks on their iPods, these women were the opposite of the alcoholic Mrs Robinson. And Jazz was the most glamorous of them all.
My best friend patted the bar stool next to her and introduced Billy, whose opening remark was, ‘More posh totty, eh? I like youse birds from the big end of town.’ He crushed my fingers in a chiropractic handshake. ‘Youse talks so good, ja know? Youse have got articulate-ness.’
Then Billy moved off towards the end of the bar to buy me something called a ‘Slippery Nipple’. He walked as if on a trampoline, bouncing along, buoyant on his own hot air.
‘Isn’t he sex on legs?’ Jazz thrilled, readjusting her micro-mini for maximum stocking-top glimpses. ‘When I look at him, all I can think is “take me”.’
‘Really? When I look at him all I can think is “pubic lice”.’
It was clear to me that Billy was in his late twenties – and possibly always would be. But the prison poet friend Jazz introduced moments later was another case altogether. The Trinidadian who sidled onto the stool next to me, cocked an elbow on the bar and said hello in such a silky voice with lips curved into the most dreamy smile, that the overall effect, the voice and smile, so at odds with his stealthy eyes, was completely unnerving. I wasn’t sure whether his splayed nose was the original edition or had been broken, but it gave Trueheart Jones a certain devilish, dangerous charm. This was only accentuated by his opening remark.
‘I didn’t know angels could fly so low. But hey.’ He placed his large warm hand on my shoulderblades. ‘Here are your wings.’
To a sane woman, a woman who only used the word wings when it was attached to the other word ‘pantyliner’, this might have sounded trite. But to a deranged female whose husband was at a whipped-cream orgy, it was music to her neglected ears.
For the past fifteen years, a ‘stud’ had meant little more than a drawing pin on the school noticeboard. But here was one flirting with me. Things like this didn’t happen to married mothers of two. Let me just check my self-esteem-ometer. Yep – empty. Who was this delicious stranger? Jazz had been wolfing down men as though they were hors d’oeuvres and I was beginning to see why. I wanted some magical, mysterious hours, learning other men’s stories and inventing my own. That wild recklessness I could hear in the music, where was that in my own little life? My timid existence had all the excitement of a tin of tuna.
‘Are you flirting with me? I am way too old for you,’ I flirted. I hadn’t felt this excited since I went up to a 34B when breastfeeding.
‘I like to feel time passed in the skin. No less than I like to see it in the face. Where there’s no record of event, I can have no curiosity. And where there’s no curiosity, there can be no desire.’
Okay, so it was poetry on L-plates, but I found it oddly enchanting. I couldn’t even use alcohol as an excuse. I was just disarmed and charmed. He was all mouth . . . and all trousers.
‘So you’re a poet?’
He shrugged. ‘Won a prize. While I was in Pentonville. But in the tradition of all great Oscar acceptance speeches, I couldn’t be there to make it,’ he grinned.
I laughed. It felt like an age since a handsome young man had talked to me like this. ‘Poetry is a great literary gift, mainly because you can’t sell it. Am I right?’
He chuckled and I experienced an unexpected pang of pleasure as I realized with a jolt that it had been too long since I had felt amusing.
And then he placed a companionable arm around my shoulders. Goose pimples as big as acne erupted on my skin. I suddenly felt so hot I was worried the sprinklers might start gushing and the smoke alarm would wail. This was the sort of guy who knew how to wake a girl up smiling. Walking might be difficult, but smiling would be a cinch. And he was schmoozing me. I would have to keep my legs crossed for the entire duration of the evening. Actually, they were so tightly crossed, I doubted I’d get any feeling back for – oh say, the next two years.
But what was I thinking? I was at the age where, if a man asked me to ‘slip into something more comfortable’, I’d put on Ugg boots and trackie bottoms. ‘You know, I have to go. I have a husband and kids and homework to mark and . . .’ I blustered, flustered. ‘I just came down here in a moment of irrational madness. I—’
But the poet saw straight through me. ‘So tell me, baby. Were these feelings of irrational madness prompted by anythin’ unusual? Or did they develop naturally in the course of a normal marriage?’
Here I was, a Guardian Woman’s-Page-reading, Simone de Beauvoir worshipper, yet I loved it when he called me ‘baby’.
I hurried home to Kilburn, to a house dull with despair. The children, sensing something was up between their parents, had become so clingy and whiney of late, and unruly when I was out. They’d put Jamie’s Red Ant Farm under the babysitter’s chair with the trap door left open and she was threatening not to come again. I was so guilt-riddled about having abandoned them for the Boom Boom bar I felt sure they’d grow up to write the sequel to Mommy Dearest. Rory’s dogs, also deprived of attention, whimpered to be taken for walks. There were piles of unpaid bills, unopened mail and urgent requests from irate pet owners. I tried to wait up for Rory, jealousy thumping in my head like a migraine, but fell, eventually, into a deep sleep. When I awoke at dawn to see his crumpled, rumpled head on our pillows, a wave of relief washed over me.
I stretched a tentative hand across the sheets. Men suffer not from ADD but EDD – Erection Deficit Disorder. Rory might forget birthdays and favourite foods, but he always paid attention when sex was on offer. However, he pulled away from my touch.
It was as though I’d been thrown headfirst into the cold embrace of the sea. Water filled my ears. The silence was unnatural.
‘Rory,’ I finally whispered. ‘I’m just so sorry I ever made you go to therapy. All therapists should be put on a spaceship and launched into a black hole with no booster rockets for earth reentry. Let’s forget her.’ I touched his arm, aching for the smallest gesture, the faintest softness in his voice to reassure me. ‘Let’s just go back to how we were. You can play air guitar and I’ll chase the hamster around and we can be happy again.’
I gently laid my cheek against my husband’s mouth, but his lips stayed stony. And cold.
‘I think you’re right, Cassie. Our marriage is lacking something. I think I should move into the surgery flat for a while.’
Every word burned me. ‘The flat?’ I repeated blankly. ‘Why?’
‘Because . . .’
I resolutely steadied my lips to stop from crying. I just didn’t think there could be a good end to that sentence.
‘Because I need some space.’
‘Space?’ Who was he, Buzz Aldrich? ‘What do you mean, space? Are you . . . leaving me?’
‘No.’
‘Has someone put you up to this?’ I steeled myself to absorb the blow. ‘What exactly went on last night? Did you have sex with some other woman? Was it B . . . B . . .’ I couldn’t stand the taste of her name in my mouth. ‘That woman?’
‘Who are you – the Crown Prosecutor? It was just tongue-reiki, that’s all.’
I buried my face in the pillow for a moment so that he couldn’t see what I was feeling for him. ‘I think you just officially forfeited your chances of winning Husband of the Year,’ I said, yearning for the miraculous comfort of his smile.
But no smile lit up his face. ‘I’ll be back for some clothes and stuff.’ His chilly monotone signalled that the conversation was over. Then he left.
>
It was that simple. It was that easy. To assassinate a woman.
16. Wet Adulteresses of NW1
‘Eeteezotorault,’ Jazz mumbled, pouring me a glass of whisky and cracking open an emergency packet of Green & Black chocolate.
‘What?’ In a state of numb despair I’d dropped the kids with their friends at the Sunday cinema club, giving me exactly ninety minutes to sort my life out. Like a creature in a nature documentary with homing instincts, I’d then driven on remote control to Jasmine’s place.
Jazz removed her tooth bleaching trays and tried again. ‘It is not your fault.’
‘Do you think he’s left me? God! What am I going to tell the children? I mean, how can they not notice their father is sleeping in the surgery flat? Maybe I could say he has to give pills to postoperative cats in the night or something? I’m so worried, Jazz.’
Even though it was a Sunday, Jazz was waiting in once more for another valuation expert for a second quote on their property for insurance purposes. When I enquired why Studz couldn’t wait in, she replied, ‘Oh, he’s off at Number Ten. Winning some award for his humanitarian work. No doubt they’ll reward him with an even bigger stethoscope.’ But there was a bitter edge beneath her jokey bonhomie. She poured herself a whisky now and downed it in one wincing gulp. ‘Billy’s been invited to a writers’ festival in Australia and he’s asked me to go with him.’
‘If you really are in love, why don’t you just run away with the guy?’
Just then Josh strolled through the kitchen. He was so manly in his build, yet grinned impishly as he handed his mother his washing. There’s a peculiar indeterminacy to teenage boys; Josh was simultaneously childish, yet prematurely adult.
‘He still needs me,’ she shrugged, after he’d sauntered off.
‘And is Studz still cheating on you left right and centre?’
She sighed. ‘Well, he does get a lot of odd calls. You remember that Sylvia Plath expert? She’s just getting bolder and bolder. It’s mind-boggling. She texts him all the time. It’s textual harassment. Stuff like: Was your father an alien? ’Cause there’s nothing like you on earth. She also sends postcards. I know her writing now. ‘What’s your favourite position on extramarital sex?’ She slugged down another hit of Chivas Regal. ‘Which is why I go revenge-fucking. As should you. Billy’s poet mate, Trueheart Jones – isn’t that the best name ever? He’s sooo cute and he really, really fancies you. If anyone could cure you of bore-gasms, it’d be a Trinidadian poet named Trueheart.’
I looked at my best friend in alarm. Dating at forty is like being a teenager again. Then you avoided bright light because it showed up spots. Now because it shows up wrinkles. I was just way, way too old for this. ‘I am not at the age where I grope at parties then rush home and write about it in my diary, Jazz. I couldn’t cheat on Rory. It’s just all so . . . slutty.’
‘Oh really? Well, next time you go to a dinner party, take a close look at the sluts – sorry, married women – sitting around the table. Latest research? Half of them are having affairs. They’re easy enough to spot once you know the telltale signs. She’s given up her trouser suit for a Moschino mini. She’s not eating any carbs. Her arse is two sizes smaller, her tits two sizes bigger. She’s suddenly an expert on things she knew nothing about before – hang-gliding, ghetto rap, Mahler, mountaineering, Tibetan nose flutes – whatever her new lover’s into. Her teeth are as bleached as her hair. Her Manolo-Blahniked legs are now as long as the tales she spins about working late at the office. Having been chronically under-valued, she’s suddenly full of self esteem.’
‘Really?’ Oh God, how I craved letting off some esteem. ‘But I’d be betraying the person with whom I’ve shared my life, my children, my greatest confidences . . .’
‘Yeah, the husband you’re now sharing with your marriage therapist.’
‘Rory is not cheating on me, okay? So he kissed Bianca. Big deal. Maybe it really was just tongue-reiki. Maybe he just does need some time alone. He would never be unfaithful to me.’
‘Get real. Men will shag anything. Including body-temperature pies or tethered, reasonably domesticated livestock. You just have to make him jealous. You’re so pretty, Cass. Our dreams may have collapsed but not our faces. Why don’t you just work out a little more?’
‘Hey, at my age, I just try to be neat and punctual.’ It was my turn to slug down a gulp of acidic Chivas Regal. ‘What I hate about gym classes,’ I gasped, my throat searing, ‘is the instruction to wear loose-fitting clothing. If I had any loose-fitting clothing, I wouldn’t have to come to the gym now would I? But that’s also the reason I can’t have an affair. I mean, say we go to bed at eight? If I stay the night that makes it twelve hours. I just can’t hold my stomach in that long. Besides, what would I say to him?’
‘“My, what an enormous cock you have” seems to work wonders.’
‘I just couldn’t do all the lying and cheating, Jazz, I’d feel like, I dunno, Iago! Anyway, there’s nothing serious going on between them, I know it.’
‘Anything unserious is serious enough. And you can lie. Good God, it’s not like you’re testifying under oath. Look, you weren’t searching for an affair. It’s just that you’re sexually frustrated and emotionally famished.’
Well, that was true. The encounter in the bar lingered in my memory with a crystalline clarity, as though I’d taken a drug which intensifies the senses. The feeling of Trueheart Jones’s hand on my back burned on warmly in my mind. Despite my denials, oh how desperately I wanted to explore the sweet empire of sexual satisfaction.
‘At our age it’s probably wise to stock up. I mean, we never know where the next penis is coming from, right?’
‘Gosh, Jazz, if I’d known I was going to have an affair, I wouldn’t have let my legs grow together,’ I replied facetiously. ‘Besides which, I just don’t have the underwear. Victoria’s Secret is that nobody over size eight can bloody well wear them.’
‘We’ll go to Agent Provocateur. They have lingerie for all sizes.’
‘Actually, I was thinking of something more substantial. Say, a ski suit. Or the Turin Shroud.’
How could I get naked in front of a twenty-nine year old? How could I get naked in front of a strange man for the first time in twenty years? Because that’s the trouble with cheating – sooner or later you have to take off your clothes. Jazz advised me to leave the heating off and the windows open, and then suggest we both undress in bed, because it was soooo cold . . . But what if the cheap motel we’d no doubt end up in had no opening windows? No, no, I would just have to engineer situations where I only met him whilst lying on my side – the only foolproof position guaranteed to make a woman’s post-breastfeeding boobs look bigger . . . I could just walk with my arms crossed to push my cleavage out . . . But the only look this achieves is of an insane asylum escapee contorted into a permanent straightjacket position. And I suspected that neither option was particularly conducive to seduction.
‘By the time you’ve got him into bed, none of that will matter. The trick is getting him in there. And for that you can just cheat,’ Jazz suggested. ‘Men lie about their sporting feats and childhood heroics all the time. So, why can’t we lie a little? Silicone-gel bras, padding . . .’
‘Okay! Bring me my breasts!’ I demanded.
‘Oh goodee!’ she thrilled. ‘You soooo need a stint in image rehab.’
Her first attempt involved insertible bra pads, only they kept working their way out of my bra, so that I left a trail of white miniature petal-shaped cushions wherever I went. Mind you, this was very handy when people were looking for me. Especially my husband. I would just lead him, Hansel and Gretel like, to my wanton whereabouts.
Gel inserts were her next technique for making mountains out of my molehills. These are silicone pouches you wear in your bra, only I’d no doubt forget they were there – until, that is, Trueheart found one during foreplay.
‘Shit, what are these?’ he would ask, holding the illicit quiverin
g jellyfish between forefinger and thumb.
‘Um . . . would you believe, an innovative way of defrosting poultry?’ No, this was ridiculous. I was not going to sleep with him.
‘I know you’re not going to sleep with him, sweetie, but you might as well pop on a party thong to be prepared. Just in case you’re in an accident or something,’ Jazz replied, steering me into the lingerie department of Selfridges.
Now personally, I favour 100 per cent cotton knickers the size of a small emerging nation. You know, pants you could also use as a spinnaker on a yacht. But Jazz soon had me in teddies you need an engineering degree to operate. After ten minutes of wrestling with a frilly teddy, my head was sticking out of the crotch slit, one breast was in the neck hole and my pudenda tufts were fetchingly framed in lace portholes.
‘What are you up to in there?’ Jazz knocked on the changing room door.
‘Oh just busily flunking femininity.’
‘You certainly are not!’ The next thing I knew, I was in the beauty salon being waxed. Believe me, the pain of waxing will kill you – and there’s not much point in being smooth and hairless, if you’re dead. Then I was coiffured, after which my bouffant was so heavy I could hardly move my head, such was its cargo of hairspray. Bouffy the Vampire Slayer looked back at me from the mirror. Finally, I was plucked. ‘They’re not chin hairs. They’re just eyelashes which fell down.’ Men are so lucky. Not only do they need only one pair of shoes, and in one colour, for their entire adult lives, but they also have an option about growing a moustache.
Determined to spin gold from straw, Jazz’s sartorial Rumplestiltskinning began with her trying to squeeze me into the latest designer skin-tight trousers, but found the space already occupied with legs.