by Peter Marks
Simon was occasionally jealous of his demented mate and the girls Nathan somehow managed to get (got them by getting them pissed, drugged and bribed he guessed).
How the hell Nathan had collected so many nice, attractive women over the years Simon just couldn’t comprehend. But it was okay. Simon knew Nathan didn’t know what the attraction was either.
Now though, swivelling nervously, Simon glanced over Kelly’s shoulder to check that the wielding and lucky bastard Wright was completely disarmed.
Kelly reassured him.
‘It’s alright... I made him drop it,’ she said, pointing to the sod upon the lawn, turning to Wright.
‘You really are a child sometimes Nathan,’ she admonished, instantly regressing him. So Wright turned to Simon.
‘Now see what you’ve done! Now she’s insulting me because you refused to throw back... you throwback!’ Wright cackled, eyebrows raised. ‘God you’re hopeless... you can’t even defend yourself against a mere stripling,’ he smirked, threatening to excavate more earth. But stopped smirking, started hopping again when Kelly excavated more shin and watched approvingly as the boyfriend, clutching a recently plumbed limb, hopped about the lawn like an epileptic kangaroo, a silent scream imprisoned in a jail throat.
Satisfied with her footwork, she pirouetted back to Simon who was quietly telling her about the health of his wife; then his children; then his pets. Then every living relative so she was actually relieved when the limping Nathan returned.
‘Can I borrow your drill Nat? Mine’s karked and I have to finish the shelves in the cupboards in the bathroom...’
‘Or your wife’ll wash you,’ Wright sneered, holding his shin.
‘...before the kids make a playhouse under the sink,’ Simon said. ‘Little Susie’s already stashed half her toys there and Debra says I’ve got to do it by Saturday or we can’t go to the Ski Show.’
Wright groaned. ‘Jesus Simon... when are you going to stop letting your wife ruin your life! Stand up for yourself man! You damned wimp, don’t let her force her neuroses on our outings. Divorce her. Tell her you’re going to the Ski Show whether you’ve done your chores or not...’
Simon sighed. ‘Then she’d definitely divorce me,’ he mentioned, laughing uncomfortably.
‘Women will push you about if you don’t show them whose boss..’ Wright was saying when Kelly ordered him inside. Wright went inside.
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Shortly afterward with a borrowed drill shoved down the front of a pair khaki coloured overalls that had more pockets than a billiard table, Simon left. Grinning farewell, he drove off with a drill he’d borrowed from himself actually because Wright didn’t own one. Wright had stolen it some years ago from Simon to do some adjustments on his skis and had adopted it for so long now that Simon had forgotten it was his.
Anyway, ignorant but satisfied, Simon sped off into the sunset before his wife got home and started screaming that Little Susie had disappeared.
Simon knew where she’d be; she’d be in the cupboard where the shelves should’ve been.
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Peering out the expansive front room windows, Kelly was distant and preoccupied. Nathan, creeping up behind her, kissed her gently on the nape of an unguarded neck catching the faint trace of her fine mist perfume. Opium? Turning with the attentions, she saw him smiling at her so she returned the compliment.
Smiling sweetly at him, she kissed him, pleased by the unexpected attention. Was he pissed or just pleased to see her?
She didn’t care. Instead she felt vindicated that she’d decimated her credit card on these new clothes and accessories for they made her feel better about herself and her strange Nathan. They fed her confidence and made her dulled senses sparkle.
Holding tightly to him, she wondered if Nathan had noticed.
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He had. Did. Especially when she removed the expensive regalia that night before she dove into bed with him and he caught sight of a price tag she’d neglected to clip. After feigning fainting at such outrageous expense, he advised Kelly that she could have purchased a brand spanking new, just out of the crate, F-16 fighter bomber for an equivalent array of decimal points. She told him she was sorry. Said she regretted not getting the plane and advising him that she wanted it for the crate so she could shove him inside and send him to Iceland for eternity.
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‘How was your day?’ Nathan enquired smoothly, moving from her neck.
‘Alright,’ she lied. ‘How was yours?’ She enquired politely.
‘Disastrous,’ he told her, eyeing the outfit, actually noticing then and there that it was all new and very becoming thinking how fantastic she looked and how the entire outfit moulded perfectly with her fluid curves. Cuddled her thighs. And tits and bits.
She was lovely he thought. And should have said so instead of just thinking so.
‘We lost,’ he mourned and went on to tell her about the game of hockey he’d played earlier that afternoon.
It was now hours since the final whistle had blown but he still hadn’t bothered to change out of the sweat soaked and exceedingly smelly blue and crimson uniform that distinguished him from his opponents. His face serious, his voice low, he told her that the first goal he scored he’d donated to the opposition.
Kelly said that was very sporting of him.
(Which wasn’t true, just clumsy). Actually he’d deflected a shot past his own goal-keeper, much to the surprised delight of the enemy who leapt up and down and hugged each other like latent Les Girls before rushing over to Wright to pat him on the back, thanking and congratulating him. It was a neat flick and a huge blunder, a deft piece of errant dexterity which went wholly unappreciated by his team mates who turned vicious and began to beat him with their sticks neither thanking nor congratulating him.
Fortunately, he’d later redeemed himself by scoring another two goals before the game concluded so his team-mates forgave him.
But they didn’t forget, mocking him unmercifully in the rooms after the game while he was chatting to his heart which was threatening to elope with his life.
Sick of their sarcasm and deaf to their derision, he took off believing that over-all, all things considered it hadn’t been a bad effort, just a temporarily embarrassing one. And a losing one 2-3. His goal had won the day. For the opposition unfortunately.
While Nathan was crestfallen revealing all this, Kelly was now giggling uncontrollably at Wright’s description of the seriousness of it all.
Kelly never failed to laugh at anything Nathan took seriously.
‘I fail to see the humour,’ Wright sulked, badly lacking any sense of proportion when it came to such public humiliation. Fortunately though, Richmond, (the Tigers, his football team nicknamed such because they played in uniforms of black and yellow) had won so all was not lost. (Wright had barracked for them ever since, at the age of eight, he’d discovered an identical yellow stripe down his back...)
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Wright was weird when it came to sport (weird period actually) but this was a personal peccadillo peculiar to Wright for when both his hockey and his football teams sank to defeat, he sunk with them, becoming sour and moody when-ever such a despairing double happened. Happened to make him unbearably grouchy for the rest of the weekend usually.
Sport was his alter ego and one had to win to sustain his precarious balance.
Wright was a bad loser.
And an obnoxious braggart of a winner though he preferred obnoxiousness to enforced humility believing winning was eminently superior to defeat and so lost all perspective when God conspired to inflict humiliation on both his sporting interests.
Wright coped with such losses stoically. Or so he claimed. Ha! Wright accepted defeat about as well as the Mormons coped with his failure to convert (i.e. appallingly).
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‘At least Richmond won,’ Kell
y consoled a surprised Wright, who was impressed by such knowledge. She’d done her homework even though her personal interest in the outcome was about as fanatical as Custer’s was in Indian welfare.
She grinned. ‘At least we can have a civilised evening out and you won’t sit brooding in the corner moaning all evening about the injustice of it all.’ she said somewhat relieved for she wasn’t so disinterested in his moods.
Mainly because she knew she’d be forced to share them.
Wright turned to her, jaw scraping the floor, a look of outrage plastered across a stubble face.
‘What do you mean! Brooding! I never brood. Only chooks and stockbrokers brood. Petty aggravations like defeat, failure or ignominious surrender never alter my cheerful disposition. Christ Kel, you know me, I’m renown for the gracious ease with which I accept loss,’ he stammered, knowing this defence was irrefutable. An irrefutable untruth as did Kelly so Kelly injected her big blue eyes into between Wright’s, hypnotising him into truth and forced a retraction.
He blushed slightly.
‘Alright, okay,’ he dribbled, ‘so I’m a little more subdued after such calamitous events but you should be the last person to complain. Usually you’re the first one to tell me settle down. Or shut-up.’
‘Do shut-up,’ she said, securing his lips between hers to ensure he did. Indeed, she’d found that this was about the only way Kelly knew of shutting him up. (Wright was a cunning bastard).
Gropus Interruptus. Suddenly there was a verbal red light.
‘Stop that you two!’ Some-one yelled at the lip locked who were couple busy stealing breath or throat infections from each other. Nathan and Kelly were now huddled in the dark quiet of the hallway where they’d managed to wander during Wright’s waffle.
‘What would the neighbours say about such a sinful display, what would your mothers’ say?’ The voice chided.
Wright knew precisely what his mother would say, she would say it was shameful. On the other hand her ex-husband, Wright’s father, would tell him to go for it. Say like father, like son. He was a proud man. Proud of his son’s perversions.
‘You two are disgusting,’ the voice reverberated, agreeing with Wright’s mother’s view of proceedings before leaving unidentified.
Wright paid scant attention to the assessment and continued with Kelly before leading her back into the privacy of the front room. And hopefully away from any prying voices or sensitive neighbours.
Resuming the clutch, he held her close. Silently relieved, Kelly realised something. She realised that when she was actually with Nathan everything seemed alright. Suddenly, she understood that it was only when she was alone that she’d run the audit and find that this love didn’t add up, that some-times it lacked even interest for more and more she found that the debits of this relationship with Nathan were inexorably outweighing the credits.
Nathan was doomed.
Finding though that she, for the moment anyway, still enjoyed his attentions, she stopped the inquisition in her head for the moment. When she finally came up for air, she noticed Nathan was fiddling in his pocket.
‘Stop playing with yourself, you’re supposed to be concentrating on me,’ she cooed steamily in his ear, obviously not cogniscent of the fact that this was precisely the problem. That she was precisely the problem. That he was indeed concentrating on her so every lascivious gland in his entire body was on alert because of her so that a certain collection of tissues between his legs was currently undergoing a blood transfusion entirely because she was there with him.
‘I’m not playing with myself!’ he defended, playing with himself.
Kelly stared at him and the hand in the pocket that seemed to be all thumbs save one thick finger.
‘Then what are you doing?’ she enquired, as if innocent to the goings on in his pocket. Which she wasn’t.
‘You if you’re not careful,’ Wright warned, taking her in both arms. And leaving her there. Kelly responded by gently glazing two red lips with a moist tongue before sending them forth to find Nathan.
Closing her eyes, she enjoyed the trip as their lips met. Slowly, gracefully, weight distributed on her left stiletto, she slide an elegant calf between Nathan’s legs, softly caressing his inside thigh with her outside leg. The effect was soothing, then enervating as he squirmed in tortured delight.
‘Hmmm,’ he gurgled. (Wright’s idea of a mating call).
‘Hmmm,’ she matched, enquiring if the mound in his jeans was a threat - or a promise. Or a handkerchief or salami, blithely measuring its dimensions with an outstretched palm and five active fronds. It was obviously a promise. A lengthy promise she’d be on if he got her horizontal, or vertical. Or in a phone box. He didn’t care where. Or how. Or how discreet they were, and waving the guardian blonde strands from her ear, he blew softly then nibbled a lobe until her breathing rose in rate to synchronise with his rapid in and outs.
His chest heaved, hers heaved ho.
‘Martin was right,’ she breathed throatily, one leg engaging Wright’s regional disturbance. ‘We are disgusting,’ she giggled sexily, continuing the stroke rating as her fleshy oar paddled his private’s.
(So that’s who’d owned the voice, Wright deduced retardedly, his brain temporarily rarefied - temporarily deserted by courier corpuscles that normally bore oxygen to his upstairs. Most of his blood had, it seemed, fled elsewhere to prop up another head of state who was currently mounting an insurrection in Wright’s pants).
‘That turd is always right. Martin’s a seer whereas I’m simply disgusting,’ Nathan laughed, scurrying back to her ear. Whispered: ‘Do you want to be bored too, or screwed, or just rivetted to the spot?’ he offered. ‘Or should we just find a wall and fuck?’
She declined, tearing herself away from him and his generosity. God, he’d done it again.
‘Christ Nathan, you really are gross sometimes! You make it sound like something one does in a hardware shop,’ she harangued, badly wanting a fuck but wishing Wright wouldn’t refer to the act in such a coarse and vulgar manner.
Kelly was perpetually pleading with him to be a little less obvious and a little more romantic, requesting ever so politely that he call the act something less grotesque.
Like making love for instance.
She hated his crass euphemisms for such a sharing indulgence for whereas Kelly made love, Wright fucked.
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Fucked himself sometimes for sometimes Kelly would get so angry with him for calling the copulating coupling such names that she’d deny him the experience. Kelly was convinced he was ill. Nathan said it was just an allergy but Kelly knew better. She knew it as an obsession; a strange pollen that made him allergic to anything incorporating the word, term, allusion, illusion ‘love.’
Nathan had been infected with it for as long as she’d known him and she simply couldn’t make any sense of Nathan’s warped logic when he tried explaining the aversion. She merely became more confounded and confused each time he attempted to explain his reasons for such a peculiar ailment.
Why the word LOVE so disturbed him.
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Nathan hated love (the word, not the emotion). Having suffered so with its careless usage he felt that it was the most abused word in the English language so he refused to debase it, or use it when he damn well should have. Nathan now took it as a personal insult when it was used casually or without thought and spat verbal venom at any who did for he loathed the way people used the word so casually when a more appropriate expression was available. Like lust for instance.
Not that he hadn’t known genuine love. Quite the contrary, he had and had suffered grievously for such an error of belief. Even now, many years on, he still hadn’t forgiven the woman who’d stolen its honourable emotions from his dictionary. Now he was careful with the word and frugal with his affections for he knew love wasn’t trivial. Or friendly.
These days, Nathan treated it with t
he same fear and trepidation he’d adopt to a ticking package left on his doorstep. Not that he couldn’t be loving when the mood materialised it was just that the sound of the word got hijacked in his throat and so he rarely ransomed it. Just couldn’t get it approved by his larynx and only occasionally was there an escape and the word ‘love’ manage to furtively sneak out.
It was usually when he wanted something, like money, or credit, or affection.
Or love.
Occasionally, Kelly would catch him off guard (or off his face) and the larynx got lazy. Then he’d actually tell her he loved her. But not usually.
Usually he’d tell her he wanted a fuck.
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‘Well ....what’s wrong with a hardware shop, the screws are cheap.’ Wright argued, trying to atone for his sins by making things worse.
‘Anyway, it’d be more like a bull in a China Shop,’ he imagined, leading her back to the people empty front room busily trading metaphors before spending the next five minutes grovelling and apologising for although Kelly was quick to rile she was easy to placate and he soon had her back where she belonged, back on her haunches and glued to his lips reimmersed in the carnal mists.
Before Jenny came surging through the door behind them.
Knitting in hand, moccasins on feet, she looked like a refugee from the local supermarket, having seemingly adopted the attire of the check out girls who thought Wright was fair game when-ever he went shopping there so habitually overcharged him.
‘Ugh, you two are disgusting,’ she proclaimed in passing, immediately leaving the room through the large stained glass double doors that led to the hall.
Wright couldn’t help but laugh. Turning to Kelly he said that if this went on for much longer then the verdict may well be unanimous, laughing because he lived in a household full of people who’d never before reached agreement on anything previously.