by Danny King
I spent the best part of fifteen minutes chanting things like these and slicing my way through the tangled nest of bodies before I made it back out to daylight with two gin & tonics and two more whisky singles.
“Wasn’t there any ice?” Tom asked when I handed him his.
“Oh piss off,” I snapped back.
“Cheers,” I told Elenor, tipping my glass against hers.
“Bottoms up,” she replied with a wink, causing me to shiver right through to my vows as I pictured her bottom bent over my hotel bed.
My God, was this really happening? Surely not? Surely… I stifled my shiver with a shot of warm scotch and sent two gulps of bitter after it to chase it through my system.
“So, will you be dancing later?” Elenor asked.
Tom rasped his lips in derision and looked to me to do the same but I turned his world upside down when I told her, “sure, I might have a dance later on. After a few more drinks, of course.”
Tom furrowed his brow in my direction and touched the start-up button in his brain. He’d been hoping not to have to use it tonight but suddenly something was afoot. He was cautious enough not to lend his questions a voice, but he did start taking notes.
I wondered if I should tip Elenor the wink to be careful around Tom, but then I remembered that we’d never actually come to any proper sort of understanding and I was somewhat reluctant to go wandering into uncharted territories without a nod of approval.
I decided the best way forward was fog, so I told Tom not to be such a misery guts and join us for a dance. Surprisingly, Elenor didn’t jump in to object. In fact, she even agreed and told Tom she wanted to see him shaking his stuff before the night was out, and I took a moment to fret over what this all meant.
I finally got it boiled down to six possibilities:
Elenor was playing along and being circumspect.
Elenor fancied Tom.
Elenor wanted to play us off against each other.
Elenor wasn’t bothered which of us she got.
Elenor wanted both of us – at the same time.
Elenor wanted neither of us and this was all in my head.
The last of these possibilities was possibly the most probable, but by that same token there had been a dramatic shift in Elenor’s behaviour towards me over the last month, of that there was no denying. I’m not an expert in these things, of course, all I could go by was my own experiences, but they were telling me she was definitely interested.
How did I know this?
By the way she looked at me. And I’d seen this look before, some fifteen years earlier, beneath the brim of a hat, in a dark and dingy Student Union bar.
“I like your suit, where did you get it?” Elenor asked, sliding her fingers into my jacket to feel my lapel.
“Nowhere expensive,” I admitted, and wondered if she’d let me do the same to her top. I concluded she would.
“Look at those wankers over there,” Tom hissed, staring at the Xtremers like a sniper who’s rifle was at the menders. “They’re doing it again.”
Me and Elenor looked over and sure enough the Xtremers were restocking their table after barely touching their cache.
“I’m going to say something because this isn’t on,” Tom declared, rising from his seat and taking a few determined strides towards their table.
“Come on Andrew, are you coming or what?” Tom asked.
Elenor’s eyes flickered across my line of sight and a faint smile glanced her lips when I told Tom I was fine where I was. Tom continued to stare at me before asking if he could have a quiet word “in private like”.
A guilty cloud quickly engulfed me but I was able to climb out from beneath it and shape my face into an innocent gawp before we found ourselves alone.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You tell me pal. What are you up to with her?”
“Who?” I attempted.
“Don’t give me that. Her. Elenor. Who d’you think I’m talking about?”
I built up my most convincing gasp of indignation then slammed on the brakes and toned it down at the last moment when I decided I shouldn’t know what he was talking about right away.
“What d’you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean, mush.”
“What?” I let that hang for a moment, then did a silver-screen double-take and demanded to know just what Tom was implying.
“Don’t give me that, you just listen to me; don’t be a fucking idiot.”
“I don’t know where you’ve...”
“I don’t care,” Tom slapped me. Yes, he actually slapped me, albeit a very quick, light cuff around the chops. “You just don’t be a fucking idiot, and I mean it.”
“Hang on a minute...”
“No, I haven’t got a minute. I’m sorry if I’m wrong, and I really hope I am, but you’d better pull your head out of your arse and think about what you’re doing, because this could be without doubt the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your entire fucking life,” he said, then added as an afterthought, “And that’s saying something.”
“Tom, you’ve got this all wrong…”
“Good, I’m glad. I’m really really glad I’ve got it wrong. Just you make sure it stays that way,” he concluded, then headed off to chin a couple of Xtremers while staring back at me over his shoulder.
“What was all that about?” Elenor asked.
Tom’s words had followed me back to my seat like a bad smell and they got stinkier the moment Elenor smiled up at me. I debated what to tell her and plumped for a spun and slanted version of the truth.
“Oh, it’s just silly really,” I faffed. “He thinks there’s something going on between us.”
“Like what?” she asked, shifting in her seat and twisting her legs around each other like a couple of pipe cleaners.
“You know,” I prompted.
“No what?” she maintained.
“You know!” I shrugged, nodded and flapped my eyebrows but Elenor still refused to fill in the blanks.
“What?” she insisted.
I took a deep breath and an even deeper swig of my pint then told her, “He thinks we’re... well... you know, sleeping together.”
Elenor threw back her head and laughed – a little too heartily for my liking – and said she thought that was hilarious.
“Honestly, how people talk,” she said, shaking her head and smiling out of the side of her face. She then leaned forward and said very huskily, “Well, we’ll have to be careful then, won’t we?”
Sally’s Diary: January 13th
While the cat’s away, the mice will play. But then those mice probably had other mice they could phone up at short notice and play with. My mice are all busy with their rats. This is one of the fundamental drawbacks about being part of a couple – you can't seem to do anything on your own anymore.
I called my friend Alison to see if she was doing anything and she told me she was going out with her husband for dinner. She qualified this by inviting me and Andrew along but Andrew’s at his January Christmas party and I’d feel funny about sitting down to dinner with another couple if it was just me by myself.
Debbie is equally tied up with her bloke and Sophie's tiling the kitchen (on a Friday night? Sounds like an excuse to me) and that's just about all my friends. Funny, I thought I had more than that.
I guess most of my friends now reside beyond that two-year barrier which always adds weirdness to out of the blue calls so maybe I'll get a DVD instead.
I hope Andrew doesn’t get too drunk tonight. I always fear for him when he is, particularly when he’s in the same room as Norman. He can be so impulsive at times although I know it’s not really him. Andrew’s a sweet man, who’s just given over to acts of foolishness, often fuelled by alcohol.
I just know he’s going to come home tomorrow morning kicking himself about something. I just hope it isn’t anything he can’t take back.
Chapter 9. Later That Same Evening
I didn’t know if Elenor had been joking or serious or flirting or what when she’d said we’d have to be careful. All I knew was everything about infidelity was infuriatingly vague. So vague in fact that even I didn’t even know if there was any infidelity even going on between me and Elenor. But then I guess that’s the nature of the beast.
We talked for another ten minutes or so but none of it went anywhere near anything too risqué and before it had a chance to we were suddenly inundated on all sides by work colleagues in paper hats.
A few of the more boring secretaries tried to entertain us with their old lady ventriloquist acts, which consisted of them talking non-stop while jamming a foot-wide slice of cake into their faces, so Elenor took the opportunity to slip away into the shadows.
I managed my escape a few minutes later, under the false flag of going to get some more food, and the whole table started handing me their plates.
“Here, bring me back a couple of those prawn things and some mini-sausages, would you? And some bread and a bit more cake,” one particularly repugnant and deluded eating machine called Rosemary instructed me. Rosemary was fifty-eight years old and a tediously proud grandmother of three who considered herself the matriarch of the company. In practical terms this meant she thought she could boss, nag and order everyone else about on account of her age even though she was only a secretary – and a fucking dreadful one at that.
Her plate went straight in the bin.
I spent the next hour circling the hall in an attempt to get near Elenor again without making it too obvious. I didn’t want to follow her around all evening like some love-struck teenager, but at the same time I didn’t want to play it so cool that I missed my opportunity – if there was even an opportunity to be missed.
The other thing I had to consider was Tom. Fresh from his triumph of confronting the Xtremers and calling them “a big bunch of gays with kites”, he was now shadowing me like Philip Marlowe on time and a half. It was getting a little wearing to be honest. Every time I looked around he was a dozen yards away leaning against a pillar or post and boring his eyes into me. Once or twice he’d give me a wink, but most of the time he’d just stare.
The bloody hypocrite, I thought to myself when I came out of the men’s room and almost walked straight into him. How many women had Tom boasted he’d shagged in the past? Half of them were married too, well not half, but a fair few and he’d just shrugged his shoulders and told me he could only screw what he could only screw.
Which still didn’t make any sense.
I went to the bar, ordered another drink and decided I needed to work on a plan of action otherwise I’d end up with the interfering git camped out at the end of my bed if I wasn’t careful.
“Oi, where were you?” a voice said behind me.
“What?” I replied, turning to see an angry Rosemary wagging a finger in my direction.
“Where were you? And where’s my plate? I waited for three quarters of an hour waiting for you to come back but you never did. By the time I got up there all those little prawn things had gone and there was hardly anything left! Where were you?” she demanded.
“What am I, your footman or something?” I asked, turning my back on her.
“Why of all the… you should learn a bit of respect, you should. I’m fifty-eight years old, you know and in my day if you was to…”
“Listen Rosemary, I don’t want to be rude or anything but… I’m going to be. So sod off.”
Rosemary had never been talked to like this before in her life. I know this because she told me so. And I also now know she had two big strapping sons who’d come down here and beat my brains in for daring to talk to her like that, but no amount of tearful phone calls could lure either of them away from the telly, so she had to settle for sobbing in the corner of the hall for twenty minutes and spilling her guts to anyone who would listen, including Norman.
Norman came to see me shortly afterwards to ask if I’d be willing to apologise, so I asked him what for. “She said you said something dreadful to her, something too terrible to repeat,” he tutted sadly.
“No, not really. I just told her to sod off.”
This surprised Norman. “Really? Is that all? Oh.”
“Why, what did she say I’d said?”
“She didn’t, so I just assumed you’d called her a… a… well you know,” he said, raising both eyebrows to indicate he was talking worse case scenario here. “Or maybe told her to go and stick something somewhere.”
“No, just sod off.”
“Oh. Well look, would you apologise to her anyway please, just for the sake of appearances? You don’t have to mean it or anything,” Norman coaxed.
I sighed heavily and sagged my shoulders. I could see there was no way out of this palaver without one of us making some sort of contrition and seeing as Rosemary was the sort of person who wholeheartedly believed she’d never done anything wrong in all her life, I knew it had to be me. This kind of went back to Tom’s “being a man and taking the blame” theory, though at the time I’d assumed this only applied to women you fancied.
Naturally Rosemary accepted my apology with all the good grace of a seven-year-old being told bedtime had been brought forward three hours and did her level best to build the biggest mountain possible out of the materials available until finally even Norman had had enough and we left Rosemary and several other elderly secretaries to it, to strains of, “an apology’s not an apology if he doesn’t mean it, and he doesn’t mean it… whahh boo-hoo” etc.
This was triply annoying because it focussed all sorts of unwanted attention on me when I wanted to tiptoe through the party unnoticed and manoeuvre myself into pole position with Elenor. There was suddenly fat chance of that now that I had Norman bending my ear, Tom tailing my every move and an assorted dozen secretaries and suits scolding me or slapping me on the back respectively.
“Well, I guess it wouldn’t be a party if someone didn’t get upset,” Norman eventually concluded. “Anyway, how’s that lovely wife of yours? Sally? Is she keeping well?”
“Yes, she’s fine,” I replied.
“You know, I’ve always liked her, on the occasions that I’ve met her. Charming lady, Andrew. You’ve got a real good one there,” he congratulated. “What’s she up to these days?” he then asked.
“Oh, you know, same old same old,” I frowned, a trifle reluctant to launch chapter and verse into a gushing eulogy about the charming lady I was considering doing the dirty on.
“Is she still teaching, at all?”
Christ Norman, here’s her number. Just go and phone her and ask her yourself, was what I felt like saying but in the event I just mumbled something about classrooms and kids and such like then told him I had to go to the loo.
“I’ll get you another pint in for when you come back,” Norman said, completely taking it for granted I was coming back. This just served to annoy me further, because I hadn’t even really needed the loo, I was just trying to put a page break between me and Norman and shake off one set of meat hooks. Now I was going to be stuck with him for at least another twenty minutes and possibly longer if he started to look like he’d quite like a pint back.
In which time anything could’ve happened to my plans.
“I might just have a short,” it suddenly occurred to me.
“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea.”
“Scotch straight up.”
“Make that two, and make them doubles,” Norman told the barman, then he stopped me in my tracks when he added, “And get us a couple of pints too.”
I decided to go to the loo anyway, just to regroup my thoughts, though I was stopped three times on the way there by different people all wanting to know what I’d done to upset Rosemary.
“Did you really call her a ‘fat boring old bitch?” Roger from accounts asked – a blend of Chinese whispers and Rosemary’s popularity at work there no doubt.
When I finally shook off the last of my admirers I walked out into the ho
tel reception and almost fell over myself when I saw Elenor and Godfrey near the main stairs. They were talking in hushed tones but I could tell, even from this distance, that whatever it was they were talking about the discussions weren’t going well. Godfrey’s demeanour was that of a man desperately trying to make a woman understand something, whereas Elenor’s body language cried I understand, I just don’t care. I backed up a few steps and tried spying on them through the gap in the door when Tom tapped me on the shoulder.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Look, why don’t you just clear off and stop following me around?” I demanded, pushing him back into the hall before Elenor and Godfrey spotted us.
“Not until you tell me what you’re up to,” he replied, jabbing his finger into my chest.
“I was going to the toilet, if you must know.”
“Funny place to do it. They’ve got bogs just across reception, you know.”
He was about to say something else when one of the Xtremers walked past and told me I was a “bad bad boy for talking to a little old lady like that”.
“Can everyone just fuck off and leave me alone?” I asked, exacerbated.
“Well manners cost nothing and a woman of that age…” he started but Tom cut him short and told him this was a private conversation and suggested he go and fly his “fucking kite” in some other playground.
“Oh, it’s you,” the Xtremer then realised, taking a step into Tom’s face. “You want to go outside or something?”
“After you fun boy,” accepted Tom, squaring up to him like the heavyweight Camper Van Magazine editor he was.
“Hang on a minute…” I started, but Tom told me it was fine, he could take this “idiot” no problem and backed that statement up with a wink.
“Let’s go then,” the guy said and started walking towards the main exit, only to stop and turn when he realised that neither me nor Tom were following.
“I told you this is a private conversation, I’ll be out in a minute,” Tom said.
“I’ll be waiting,” the Xtremer growled, pushing his way manfully through the revolving door.