by Robyn Sisman
More out of nervousness than anything else, Suze shook her hair over one eye and answered, “Come and get me.”
“Aah, so that’s how you want it!” Within seconds Nick was out of his shoes and jacket. He pulled her out of the chair, spun her around and rammed her against the high wooden end of the bed.
“Hang on,” she began, half laughing. “You could at least take off your clothes.”
He yanked up her legs and tipped her back onto the bed. She felt the fastener between her legs pop open. “You’ll like this,” he said, plucking at his fly.
But she didn’t. Not one bit. Her legs were in the air, her neck and chest squashed tight. “Nick, wait! I’m not—”
He wasn’t listening. He thrust forward, pressing her thighs painfully wide. Suze bit her lip with the brutality of it. “Please . . .” she begged. She reached out for him, thinking that it would not be so bad if they were somehow in this together.
Nick plunged in deeper. His hands closed over her wrists, clamping them to the bed. “You little wildcat, you.”
Suze began to get frightened. Her neck was so cramped that she could barely breathe. She thrashed back and forth, trying to get a purchase on the bed. Tears of pain and humiliation gathered in her eyes. Nick swayed above her, his face fierce with concentration on something she could not share. His eyes stared into hers, but they were blank, elsewhere. He might have been a stranger.
There was a sudden, piercing scream from next door. Suze heard a deep bellow of anger, then a horrible pulpy thud. Nick’s hold relaxed for a second, and Suze managed to raise herself on one elbow. “What was that?” she croaked.
“They’re having fun.” He pushed her back down. “Like us.”
There was more yelling, a crash of glass, then a much worse sound—a desperate, repetitive mewing. Suze couldn’t bear it. She drew back her legs and pushed and kicked until finally Nick staggered back, trousers open, T-shirt rucked halfway up his chest. He had the dazed look of a bull in the ring.
In an instant Suze had rolled off the bed, snatched up the dressing gown and run to the door. Pain stabbed her body at each step.
“Where are you going?” Nick slurred.
Suze didn’t even look around. Tying the belt tightly, she raced in bare feet across the prickly grass and rapped on the door of the cottage.
“Jodie, are you in there? Are you OK?”
Silence. Suze banged again, louder, pressing her ear to the door. She heard movement, a rustle. The door opened. There was the big Hollywood producer, eyebrows politely inquiring, formidable even in his paisley silk dressing gown, which he held clutched about him. The belt, she noticed, was missing. Across the back of one hand was a smear of scarlet lipstick. “Hi,” he said blandly.
“Hello,” Suze faltered. She became aware of her disordered appearance. The cottage was completely silent; the door at the end of the hallway was shut. Could she have made a mistake? She swallowed. “Is Jodie here?”
“It’s four in the morning. Goodnight.” He began to close the door.
Suze stepped forward. “I know she’s here.” She pressed her hands against the door, looking him in the eye. “I’ll come and get her if I have to.”
His small, scary eyes crawled over her face. Then he gave a big, phony smile and called over his shoulder, “You want to go home, girly?”
There was a stealthy sound from the end of the hall. Suze saw the handle turn, the door open, and Jodie appear, naked, holding a pathetic bundle of clothes over her crotch. Lipstick was smeared into a crude, baby-doll shape around her mouth and, as she crept nearer, Suze saw that someone had also drawn lipstick circles around her nipples. “Hello, Jodie,” Suze said, trying to sound normal. “Do you want to come next door with me?”
Jodie stood silent, afraid. The man swung the front door wide. “Well go on, if you’re going,” he said genially. But as Jodie scuttled past, he thrust his face into hers and whispered viciously, “Why didn’t you say you preferred girls?”
Suze put her arm around Jodie and hustled her next door. Nick had disappeared. Jodie sat on the edge of the bed, eyes wide, teeth chattering. She didn’t seem hurt. Suze pried the bundle of clothes from her clenched fingers and drew in her breath. Around Jodie’s wrists was a belt of paisley silk, tied so tight that Suze could not work it loose. Looking around the room, her eyes fell on Nick’s jacket. Sure enough, in one pocket was his knife. She cut Jodie free, then got a warm, wet towel from the bathroom to bathe her wrists and wipe her face. “He put some white stuff, like sherbet, on his wrist and told me to sniff it,” Jodie said, in a shivery whisper. “I knew it must be some drug, but I felt great—for a while. Then I was in his room and—”
Suze stroked her hair. “Shh. Don’t think about it. You’re safe now.” She helped to dress Jodie in a pair of her own jeans and one of Nick’s shirts, and then got dressed herself, feeling a stab of disgust as she took off the black thing and left it on the floor. She was checking her wallet, wondering if she had enough money to get Jodie a taxi home, when the front door of the cottage opened.
It was Nick, immaculately dressed and in control.
“All taken care of,” he said to Jodie, with a smooth smile. He didn’t even look at Suze. “There’s a car outside, ready to take you back to the city now. I’ll make sure your clothes get sent over.” He came over and knelt down beside her, gently taking one of her hands. “OK, sweetheart? Mr. Zarg understands you just heard some bad family news and he’d like you to have this to cover your air ticket home.” Turning Jodie’s hand palm-upward, he closed her fingers over a wad of folded bills. Then he shepherded her outside, while Suze watched from the doorway. She saw how carefully he helped her into the car, and how he waited like a gentleman until it had driven away, and felt the beginnings of forgiveness. How would she have managed without him? As he came back up the path, she called out eagerly, “Oh, Nick, thank God—”
Nick put the palm of his hand on her breastbone and slammed her backward into the cottage, closing the door behind them with a flick of his foot. His face was hard. “Don’t you ever do that to me again!”
Suze reeled against the wall. “Do what?”
Nick’s eyes blazed. “You know who that is?” He jabbed his finger in the direction of the next-door cottage. “That’s the producer who Shrine wants to make his movie. I told you that.” He advanced on her accusingly, forcing her backward down the hall. “I even put you next to the goddamn writer at dinner. Shrine paid a million bucks for his story. The whole point of this weekend was to get the producer on board. Imagine how thrilled Shrine’s going to be to hear what happened tonight.”
Suze couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But that poor girl,” she reminded him. “We couldn’t just ignore her. He was hurting her.” Unconsciously, Suze folded her arms around her own body.
“She was OK.” Nick looked at her stonily. “What did she expect, going to a man’s bedroom in the middle of the night?”
“She bloody well was not all right,” Suze protested. “What’s the matter with you? Anyone could see she was scared to death. He gave her coke. She didn’t even know what it was!”
They glared at each other. Suze didn’t say anything, but her thoughts must have showed in her face. “Don’t you look at me like that.” Nick’s face snaked close to hers. “I didn’t give her the drugs.”
“You could have,” she said hotly. “You were happy enough to leave me alone and go off to get them for your precious Shrine. Can’t you see, Nick?” Her voice rose. She ached with pity and disappointment. “He’s not your friend. None of them are your friends. They treat you like—like some sort of pet poodle.”
The second the words were out of her mouth, Suze regretted them. But it was too late. Nick grabbed her by the arm and yanked her close, breathing hard into her face. “And what’s so great about you, huh? How come you get to look down that snooty nose of yours and tell me how to behave?”
“I’m sorry,” Suze began. “I didn’t mean—”
“You’re not rich. You’re not famous. You’re not even that great-looking. Jesus, I spend my life surrounded by beautiful models. Who needs you?” He flung her away. “Stupid English bitch, I only took you out in the first place because Sheri asked me to.”
The room went still. “What?” she asked wonderingly.
“You don’t think I’d pick you of my own free will, do you?” His voice was scathing. “Sheri said you were lonely, that you needed distracting. It was a favor, for old times’ sake.”
Old times? Suze felt her whole body cramp. She twisted away, wrapping her hands around her stomach.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Nick stood at her shoulder, vibrating with anger. “Sheri and I have been around the block a couple of times. And I’ll tell you one thing.” He jabbed his finger into the flesh of her arm. “Sheri knows who’s boss in the bedroom.”
Suze pressed her hands to her ears. “Stop it,” she sobbed. “Please.”
But he couldn’t stop. “Little Miss Sixties Wild Child, Siouxie with an X. You know what you are? You’re a fraud. ‘Ni-ick, look at me in my sexy underwear. Look at me playing peek-a-boo through my hair.’ ” His mimicry was unbearable. He pulled her around to face him. “I’m the somebody.” Nick thumped his chest. “I’m the one inviting you to great parties and introducing you to important people. What have you got to give me that’s so great?”
His face was ugly with dislike. Suze couldn’t believe that he was capable of looking at her like this. “I don’t give a stuff about the parties and the people,” she burst out. “I thought we liked each other. I thought we were equals. I didn’t know it was a contest.”
“Answer my question. What have you got to give me?” he repeated.
Suze bent her head, sobbing. “I gave you—”
“You gave me nothing,” he shouted, beside himself. “New York is full of girls ready to lay down their bodies at the lift of my finger. Girls prepared to just do it. There’s none of this crap about equality. I don’t need some little feminist bitch from London telling me how to behave.”
“Feminist?” Suddenly Suze was furious. Her head snapped back. “It’s not feminist to dislike old men tying up young girls. It’s not feminist to object to being practically raped. It’s not feminist to think men and women can treat each other like human beings.” She was spitting, gasping, smearing tears across her face. “You disgust me,” she shouted. “I disgust myself.” Her blurred vision focused on something small and shiny lying on a low table: Nick’s knife. She snatched it up and flicked it open. “Let’s just complete the image, shall we?” she shouted. She grabbed a hunk of her hair and slashed at it with the knife.
“Suze . . . don’t!”
It was horribly easy. The hair came away in her hand, soundlessly, like the stalk from a rotten apple. “Is this how you really see me?” She hurled the hair at his shocked face. It drifted harmlessly to the floor. “Is this feminist enough for you?”
One more slash; then the delirium left her. Suddenly she felt close to collapse. “I gave you—” Suze could barely speak now. She took a shuddering breath. “I gave you myself.”
Then she flung the knife on to the floor at his feet, snatched up her wallet and ran out of the cottage.
It was already light outside. Along the horizon a line of violent orange was seeping into pale gray sky. Suze ran blindly. She could hear herself panting. Suddenly she was in the car-park. A chauffeur was leaning against the bumper of his car, arms comfortably folded, waiting. When he saw Suze stumbling toward him he straightened in alarm.
“Are you going back to New York?” Suze shouted in desperation. “Could you give me a lift?”
“Excuse me,” called a petulant voice behind her. “This is my car.”
Suze turned to see a tall, skinny girl in sunglasses approaching across the dewy lawn. She wore skin-tight white leggings, cut off at the calf; her wet, newly washed hair was tied back with red polka-dot ribbon. Behind her trailed a Mexican houseboy, eyes lowered, carrying a gigantic suitcase in one hand and a set of brightly colored work-out weights in the other.
“Could I come with you?” Suze tried to sound normal. “I have to get home. It’s an emergency.”
“Impossible. I’m doing a fashion shoot on the top of the Empire State in two hours’ time. I require absolute privacy.”
“Please,” Suze begged. Damn it, she was starting to cry again.
The girl walked straight past her. Suze watched as she folded one long leg like a chicken, ducked her head and climbed into the car. She settled herself on the springy seat, big enough for four, shifting her tiny bum this way and that so that the ridiculous hair-bow bobbed up and down. It was the last straw.
Suze stepped after her and thrust her head into the car. “Who do you think you are anyway?” she yelled. “Minnie Mouse?”
There was a hiss of shock. Very slowly the girl lowered her sunglasses to examine every inch of Suze’s ravaged face. “I’m Bliss Bogardo, of course. Get in, honey.”
Chapter Twenty-two
My life is over, thought Lloyd, as he wheeled his trolley along the supermarket aisles. Now that he was unemployed he’d joined the underclass of sad failures condemned to drudgery. There were a surprising number of men doing the same thing: Lloyd felt sure they were all rejects like him. How long before he too was wearing tracksuit bottoms and zipped nylon jackets with ditzy logos on them, forced to live on processed food?
It was Sunday afternoon. Betsy had sent him out to do the shopping. “Since you’re not contributing financially,” she had said briskly, “you might as well help me with the chores.” She was right, of course. No law laid down that shopping was women’s work. In the pre-Betsy days he’d enjoyed nothing more than dropping by Balducci’s and emerging with more cheeses and salamis and weird-looking fungi than any sane person could eat. Nevertheless, he now felt demeaned. Hypnotized by Muzak, dizzied by the bright assault of thousands of products, he shuffled along at a depressive’s pace. Coffee. Check. Cereal. Check. Butter. Check. Flour—hmmm. Plain? Wholemeal? Self-raising? Lloyd clutched Betsy’s neatly written list at eye level as he studied the packages on the shelf. In the end he decided to take one of each.
All week he had floated in limbo, confused and defeated. For the first time since he’d been a teenager he had watched television indiscriminately, one program after another, until news bulletins and car ads and hospital dramas and the mating habits of marmosets created a cacophony in his head, loud enough to silence the anxieties that came in the night. He had taken to walking at random through London, sometimes for five or six hours, exhausting his body.
He still couldn’t grasp what had happened. He’d heard nothing from anyone at Schneider Fox, not since a motorcycle messenger had dropped off a box containing his few personal possessions from the London office on Wednesday afternoon. After Harry’s threat of legal action, he dared not initiate contact himself. Sheri’s reaction to his one telephone call had been mortifying. She thought he was a traitor. They all did. What hurt was how easily everyone seemed to accept his guilt. Dee Dee had not called. No one was interested in his side of the story. No one seemed to believe he might have a different story to tell.
The life he had thought was his had been sliced clean through. A strange thought occurred to Lloyd. Could his father have felt this way?
Betsy was doing her best to be supportive. She had begun to suggest job opportunities elsewhere. “I’m sure Daddy could get you a position at Champs to tide us over,” she offered one day at breakfast. Betsy’s father was a taciturn workaholic who had more or less cornered the market in a new kind of dog food that came in odorless pellets. “A little while back they were looking for someone just like you in their New Jersey office.” The walk that Lloyd had taken after that remark held the record.
Jay was the one person whose faith in him was absolute: “Get yourself a lawyer, man. Fight back! Beat the bastards!”
But Lloyd couldn’t. He didn’t have the will. He di
dn’t know any English lawyers. What could he prove anyway? He had not even dared to call Susannah Wilding about the apartments. She was sure to be wondering if he and Betsy were returning early; it was bad manners not to put her mind at rest. But he kept putting it off, almost as if he were embarrassed. Why, for heaven’s sake? This was a woman he hadn’t even met. He knew nothing about her except that she was messy, wore black garter belts, couldn’t cook, liked Bessie Smith, went out with men a lot and was one cat short. Betsy had made him promise to call her this afternoon. He was not looking forward to it.
After an hour and a half Lloyd had been up or down every aisle at least three times, backtracking for missing items. Curiously, he still couldn’t find any English muffins. Instead, he bought a bag of something labeled American doughnuts—clearly a luxury item from its classy packaging and stupendous price. Waiting in the long checkout line, he opened the bag and drew out the smallest doughnut he had ever seen. He took a bite. Tasteless, dry, larded with fat, drenched in powdery sugar: yup, they were American, all right. How delightfully unpredictable the English were.
At the store exit there was a large area lined with magazine racks. As Lloyd carried out his bags, he noticed the latest issue of Admag and steeled himself to take a look at the job ads. You never knew, they might need copywriters in Outer Mongolia. He thumbed through the back pages, recoiling from the usual inflated vocabulary of “key postholders,” “aggressive initiatives” and “strategic targets.” There was nothing suitable. It chilled him to see that practically every post stipulated an applicant under thirty-five.
As he let the remaining pages flip past, preparing to return the magazine to the rack, Lloyd was horrified to catch sight of his own photograph. The caption underneath read: “Rockwell . . . Did he jump or was he pushed?” Lloyd clutched the magazine closely, as guilty as a murderer confronted with his own “WANTED” poster, and scanned the article with mounting trepidation.