Pleasant Vices

by Judy Astley

  As Ben walked, his right hand was clutched tightly round the clingfilmed three ounce stash of dope in his pocket. He couldn’t afford to be mugged for that, or there’d be no profits for him and Oliver to share. Crossing the main road in front of Sue Kennedy’s house, he took a deep breath and entered the estate, treading carefully round the mountainous heaps of dog shit from the estate’s enormous and free-ranging population of Dobermanns and German shepherds. Ben wished he could borrow Sue’s grouchy Airedale, just to get him safely across the open space ahead, where teams of circling boys with heavy-duty mountain bikes, state-of-the-art trainers, bandanas and backward-facing baseball caps eyed him with interest and suspicion.

  ‘You going to Mick’s?’ one of the boys called out.

  Startled, Ben looked round to check it was really him the boy was talking to. ‘Yeah you, you look like one of his brother’s mates.’ The boys were cycling closer to him now, starting to weave slowly and expertly round him, just close enough to intimidate. It was impossible, with the spotted, drug-runner style bandanas covering the lower halves of their faces, to see their expressions. His hand on the stash in his pocket grew hotter and he wondered if the stuff would melt.

  ‘Yeah, I’m going to Mick’s,’ he answered, as casually as he could manage. The kids were no more than Polly’s age, he reminded himself, wondering if the Right Guard was going to last out the evening.

  ‘Well tell him we’ve been waiting for him and we’re getting pissed off,’ another of the boys said.

  ‘OK, I’ll tell him,’ Ben replied, walking across the last bit of the square and wondering if they’d grab him as soon as he got to the deserted narrow passageway by Oliver’s house.

  ‘Cheers,’ the boys yelled, and cycled off across the square again. I’m getting like Carol Mathieson, terrified of anyone who isn’t exactly the same tribe as me, Ben thought, angrily correcting his politics from the safety of hindsight.

  ‘Going out’ for Ben and his friends mostly involved finding somewhere to gather where the maximum number of girls could be found. All places of teenage entertainment had been closed down either by people fearful for their furnishings, or those chasing fatter profits. Even on the estate they were banned after 7 p.m. from the community centre, which was taken over for bingo sessions. The two local discotheques charged £2.50 for a bottle of mild Mexican lager (including slice of lime) and wouldn’t allow in anyone under 25, or in jeans, trainers or leather. In the town, the police patrolled in pairs, separating groups of bored teenagers looking for fun from nervous proprietors of hamburger bars, where occasional knifings took place between groups whose sole difference was the chosen shape of their trousers.

  Ben and Oliver, each now also equipped with a night’s supply of booze, headed for the river towpath, beside the bridge, watching carefully to see if they were being followed by hostile raggas or goths. Both were aware that their hair was the unmistakable public school style – floppy, and over-long at the front, and their clothes, despite a fashionable hint of unkemptness about them, were too clean.

  ‘Do you think she’ll be there?’ Ben asked Oliver for about the fourteenth time, as the group of kids on the green next to the bridge came into sight.

  ‘She might, she might not,’ Oliver said, unhelpfully. His attitude, it seemed to Ben, was rather casual: if one girl wasn’t available, any other would probably do. The group by the bridge consisted of about fifteen teenagers with nowhere better to go. There was a homogeneity about them, the girls being a giggling, confident bunch mostly from Daisy’s school, and the boys a brash, showing-off contingent from Ben’s. By some form of consensus this was where they all knew to congregate, in the absence of a party or any other firm venue. A couple of dawdling policemen hung over the bridge parapet, just checking that no-one was yet about to fall drunkenly in the river, and being snobbish enough to think that from this group, at any rate, no real drugs or knife trouble could be expected.

  ‘No Daisy then?’ Oliver checked with Ben, before he could feel free to aim his one-night affections at a small, curvy fair-haired girl called Lucy.

  ‘No. Not for a while. Except that she’s got a plan to sneak out on the night of Sophie’s birthday party, even if she dies in the attempt, she says.’

  ‘Well as you know, ideally I’d like to save myself for her till then,’ Oliver said, grinning past Ben towards the foxy little face of Lucy. ‘But you know how it is, got to get the practice in . . .’ He shrugged, and left Ben to go and offer a swig from his cider bottle to the giggling Lucy.

  Emma arrived with Sophie about ten minutes later. Ben, who had been feeling pretty big-time, having sold all his stash except a bit for himself, suddenly wished he had Daisy there so he could be artlessly chatting to her, and Emma could join them. Now, with only himself to rely on, he felt overheated again as he watched her picking her way down the grassy slope. She was wearing a floaty, translucent flowered long shirt over black leggings. As she came closer, Ben could see through the frail fabric that she wore a cropped black top that left a tantalising strip of naked flesh round her middle. It’s about a hand’s width, he caught himself thinking, feeling that his own hands were becoming flopping, uncontrollable lettuces on the end of his ape-like arms. The evening was fairly cold, Emma had obviously chosen fashion over comfort and would be needing to be kept warm later. Ben could hardly wait

  Carol and Paul took the twins to an early showing of Jungle Book at the Odeon.

  ‘It’s important we give them something to take their mind of this afternoon’s events,’ Carol told Paul after the fiasco on the Common. Paul had been hoping to start some bowling practice with the boys in the garden, ready for the summer. He looked forward to sitting in the sun outside the school pavilion, proudly watching them star in the first eleven, and had vague fantasies of a queue of leading public schools offering sports scholarships to the twins, renowned throughout the English prep school world as, perhaps, ‘those marvellous Mathieson boys’, regardless of their efforts in Common Entrance a year or so ahead. Half-lost in a dream, he flexed his bowling arm and caught sight of himself in the hall mirror, looking strangely twisted and odd. Reflected behind him was one of the Siamese cats, sitting complacently on the table next to Carol’s militarily precise arrangement of scentless carnations. Strange that the cat was allowed to shed its fur over any surface it chose, whereas he, a grown-up human, could only expect a hail of abuse if he so much as left a stray hair in the shower. He looked closer at his reflection and ran his fingers carefully through his hair, checking to see how much of it fell out on to his hand. Quite a lot of it did these days. He had another go at his bowling position and felt a twinge in his shoulder that hadn’t been there the previous season and hoped he wasn’t in for a painful and expensive spell with the demon chiropractor up at the Club.

  ‘So we are going out then?’ Carol did not wait for the inevitable gesture of agreement, and was already reaching into the cloakroom for her coat. ‘Something undemanding and light. I think they ought to laugh.’

  You can’t laugh to order, thought Paul, rubbing his shoulder blade.

  You had to be fit to be a policeman, Ben reflected as he ran, wondering if his rugby training would be up to enabling him to escape. It was all Luke’s fault, trying to make a greedy profit, selling on the ounce of dope he’d scored off Ben and Oliver to a bloke they didn’t know.

  ‘Raggas know when they’re being ripped off,’ Oliver had warned him, and this had proved to be horribly true.

  ‘What’s this garbage cut with?’ the boy wearing the world’s hugest trainers had demanded, sniffing suspiciously at the wodge of dope.

  ‘Nothing, stupid,’ Luke had replied riskily and somehow, magically, about ten of the boy’s mates had appeared from the towpath beyond the arch of the bridge, their oversized clothes giving them an alarming illusion of bulk.

  ‘Run!’ Oliver had yelled, unnecessarily, as he and Ben and the others in their group took off up to the top of the bridge and across into the Saturday
night crowd in the town. Police, alerted on the way by the sudden frantic flurry of movement, joined in the chase.

  Ben seized his chance, the moment and Emma, dragging her into an alleyway at the side of the Odeon. Looking back briefly over his shoulder, he could see one of the ragga boys hesitating on the corner back at the main road, his baseball cap clutched in his hand for better running power, Fearful that the boy was about to spot him, Ben pulled Emma into a doorway and started kissing her thoroughly. As she broke away to protest, he put a restraining finger to her soft lips and glanced over her shoulder.

  ‘It’s only till they’ve gone. They’ll think we’re just another couple,’ he explained, wondering if he’d get away with that one. Thankful that he could put his heavy breathing down to the exertion of running, Ben started kissing her again, thrilled that she was now enthusiastically joining in. Suddenly, just as Ben was edging his thumb under her cropped tee-shirt, a door opened next to them and a family of cinema-goers rushed out. A young boy was noisily sick on the pavement.

  ‘You should have told us you’d already had junk food for lunch!’ Ben heard the outraged voice of Carol bleating at Sebastian. Paul was standing around, shifting from one leg to the other, worrying in case Carol ordered him to clear up the pavement, the way she would have done if Sebastian had been a dog. Ben peeked over Emma’s shoulder, watching Carol bend to wipe the face of her son, her pale pink leggings stretching taut over her bottom. For a moment, in the dark, she gave the impression of being naked below the waist and Ben felt a familiar lurch in his already over-stimulated groin. He sighed deeply into Emma’s patchouli-scented hair. So many women, he thought, so little time.

  It had been a tedious evening. Jenny had found nothing to interest her on TV, had finished the crossword and couldn’t face straining her eyes doing needlepoint in the lamplight. Daisy made sure everyone knew she resented being still grounded, flouncing around the house, sighing and unsettled, ostentatiously writing her diary on the sofa and glaring at her parents as if thinking up new and vitriolic ways to describe their cruel treatment of her. Alan had drunk most of a bottle of priceless claret and fallen into a deep and unattractive stupor. Jenny wished she’d taken Polly to see Jungle Book, even though they’d both seen it before. Eventually she decided sleep was the only interesting prospect, and on her way to the stairs opened the front door for the miaowing Biggles.

  ‘You’ve got a perfectly good cat-flap in the kitchen,’ she told him, bending to give his velvet-soft marmalade ears a rub. Looking out into the chill night, she noticed Alan’s car parked too near the front door. It reminded her of the conversation with Serena about the scarf. In the confusion of the afternoon, the ‘murder’ of Mrs Fingell and the bickering of her children, Jenny had forgotten her plan to confront Alan about the phone call. She stepped out into the cool air and opened the driver’s door and looked in both glove compartments, finding only a map book, a hotel guide and a torch that didn’t work. She flicked through the guide, wondering if she was looking for little intimate country inns, marked perhaps with a damning asterisk, but there was nothing. The scarf was in the back of the car, just under the edge of the front passenger seat. Jenny picked it up and held it by a hand-hemmed corner with the tips of her fingers, as fastidiously as if she’d come across a used condom. In the warm sitting-room Alan, sprawled plumply on the sofa, was starting to snore. Impatiently Jenny shook him and held out the scarf.

  ‘A friend of yours, Serena I think she said, called, wanting her scarf back. She left it in your car.’ Jenny let go of the scarf and it floated delicately past Alan’s face and draped itself across his chest. Grunting his way out of a doze he picked it up, then dropped it abruptly on the carpet as if terrified of leaving incriminating fingerprints on it.

  ‘Whose did you say it was?’ he blustered, rubbing his sleepy eyes. Jenny watched him calmly, trying to be objective about whether he was reacting guiltily or not. She was too tired to tell. There was a brief and thoughtful silence. ‘Oh right! Serena!’ Alan suddenly stated, as if he’d not quite worked out who she was. ‘Hardly special enough to recall’, was the message he seemed to be trying to convey – how many women was he used to chauffeuring around? He reminded Jenny of Polly when confronted with something mysteriously broken: ‘Oh that plate! Oh now I remember!’

  ‘Yes. I gave her a lift home from work the other night.’ He got up quickly, too quickly and staggered slightly. What did that mean? Jenny wondered, low blood pressure or lack of concentration? He was picking up empty glasses from the coffee table, not looking at Jenny. The scarf lay like a pool of something colourful and spilt that no-one wanted to clear up.

  ‘Ah. You work with her, do you?’ Jenny asked, casually conversational as she fluffed up the cushions on the sofa, almost as unwilling as Alan to have honest eye contact. Alan yawned and stretched languidly.

  ‘She’s a trainee, Bernard’s niece. Shameless nepotism, don’t you think?’ Alan grinned brightly at her, picked up the glasses and the empty wine bottle and took them to the kitchen. So Serena was simply a mere junior colleague.

  ‘I’ll put it back in the car, then you won’t forget it,’ Jenny called to him as she picked up the soft silk square. She went quickly out to the car and shoved it onto the front seat, then went back into the downstairs cloakroom to wash the scent of Serena off her hands, rubbing and rubbing at them like Lady Macbeth. Two things bothered her more than slightly, in fact they made her heart beat with alarming heaviness. The first was why had the scarf been in the back of the car? Would it be charitable or naïve to pretend it fell from the back of Serena’s sleek pony-tail (if indeed she had one), silkily and unnoticed as Serena travelled innocently in the front seat? Or would it be more realistic to assume that Alan and Serena had been frolicking, teenager-style, in the back of the car, parked, like Sue did, in one of the many lanes on the Common?

  The other thing which crossed Jenny’s mind was a simple matter of mathematics. If Alan was intending eventually to keep Serena in Chanel accessories, there would be precious little income left over to support his family.

  Chapter Ten

  Alan knew he was in trouble; he’d known all night, ever since just after he’d cleaned his teeth and started automatically packing his wash-bag and realized he’d completely forgotten to tell Jenny about the audit in Leicestershire, and that he’d be staying away from home for two nights. It had been a very edgy Sunday, too. Polly had refused to eat the beef he’d so painstakingly cooked, simply because he had reassured his family that he was protecting them from mad cow disease by announcing that this particular joint was from a herd of guaranteed BSE-free Red Polls.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Daisy had grumbled at him as Polly burst into immediate anguished tears out of solidarity with the cattle that shared her name.

  ‘Oh the poor, poor things!’ she had wailed, pushing the succulent slices of beef messily off the edge of her plate.

  It wasn’t his fault he forgot the audit either, Alan thought. With all that business over Mrs Fingell on Saturday, and the rebuilding of the wall (and had anyone been appreciative? congratulatory? grateful?) things that mattered had slid from his mind like roof tiles in a gale. The office hadn’t yet said who they were sending with him. He hardly dared think about that. Jenny didn’t usually fuss. She’d always joked that his absence gave her an opportunity to have a quick couple of days dieting and to do all those woman-things like root-retouching and pussy-waxing or whatever it was they were supposed to pretend they never actually did. She’d never been the kind of wife who minded about having to be alone at home, and in fact had always scorned the ones who did. Carol Mathieson used to complain she was too nervous to sleep at all unless Paul was in the house, though she hadn’t been heard to say this lately, since George Pemberton, drunk at a Christmas drinks party, had sidled up and quietly offered his services as night watchman. This time, though, Jenny had looked at Alan as if he was planning a permanent absence from home life, or sneaking off to Brazil for a doz
en years, perhaps with the takings, meagre as they were at the moment, from the office bank account.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Jenny had said. ‘A bit sudden isn’t it?’ as if he was sliding off on the spur of the moment to get up to no good. All he was doing, he reflected dolefully, sliding quietly out of bed on Monday morning, was yet another depressing analysis of an under-employed musician’s finances, another attempt to persuade a client that his rapidly diminishing income would no longer cover a stay at the Ritz every time he popped into London to buy a shirt or two. Alan had to go, it was how the ever-increasing bills got paid. He didn’t want to wake Jenny, but feeling sudden guilty fondness for her soft and sleeping body curled up warmly into the centre of their bed, leaned over and kissed her.

  ‘What time is it?’ she mumbled, half-opening her eyes.

  ‘Only 6.30. You’ve got ages yet,’ he whispered, reaching under the duvet and squeezing her warm thigh, and wishing he could stay longer.

  ‘Oh God! And it’s Monday!’ she exclaimed loudly, sitting bolt upright and holding her head which was spinning from the abrupt movement. ‘Laura’s film people, they’re doing the stuff in the kitchen today! I promised we’d all be out of the way by 7.30!’ Jenny was clambering out of bed, Alan’s imminent departure suddenly of no importance at all. ‘I could do without all that today, with Polly’s exam as well and everything.’ She grabbed her dressing-gown and hurtled towards the attic stairs to wake Ben, then whirled in and out of the girls’ rooms, tugging at their duvets, opening curtains, and leaving them in no doubt that it really was time to get up. Back in the bedroom, grabbing leggings and underwear from drawers, she caught sight of Alan complacently naked in the bathroom, noisily peeing in his favourite pose, no hands, pelvis thrust forward and his hands occupied with pulling his hair down over his forehead towards the style he had favoured in his youth. He was watching himself in the mirror set into the tiles behind the loo and cheerily whistling Honky Tonk Women. I hate it when he does that, she thought, what does he think he looks like? Bet he doesn’t do that when Serena’s around. And if he does, she thought, with a grin and a dash of merry spite, I hope her loo is carpeted in pale pink – the very worst thing to have on the floor when there’s a man of unreliable aim around the place.