The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

  The dance finished, one of Lou’s legs high on Gavin’s hip, the other trailing, her posture limp in surrender, and the audience erupted, clapping and whistling their appreciation. Laughing now, Lou hitched her other leg around Gavin’s waist and he spun her round, a gleeful child where moments ago had been a femme fatale. Sara clapped too and smiled, but she felt upset.

  She went in search of a drink and found Neil, reclining on a beanbag inside the gazebo; he hauled himself guiltily to his feet when he saw her coming.

  “That was awesome, wasn’t it?” He was grinning, in a slack-jawed foolish way. She realised he was stoned.

  “Yes. Very impressive,” she said.

  “Did you see that guy? Fucking amazing. His fingers were just a blur.”

  “You must have been the only one watching the guitarist.”

  “I might ask him if he could give Caleb a couple of lessons.”

  “He won’t want to teach Caleb. He probably doesn’t even speak English.’

  “Well I’m gonna see if he’s got a CD we can buy anyway. He’s gotta have a CD. Talent like that.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  He looked a bit hurt, so she slipped her hand into his. His palm felt clammy.

  The music had started up again.

  “Dance with me,” said Neil. He pulled her in towards him and nuzzled her neck.

  “I thought you wanted to get back,” she said.

  “Just one dance.”

  It wasn’t a good track; neither fast enough to pick up a beat and move, nor quite slow enough for a neck-encircling smooch. They revolved self-consciously on the spot, his hands holding her hips limply, hers clasping first his shoulders, then his elbows, in an effort to encourage him into some kind of rhythm. Fortunately, most people had gone back to refill their glasses, so their only companions on the lawn were a pixie-ish woman who danced with a strange wrist-flicking action, and a little girl wearing fairy wings over her pyjamas.

  The track came to an end and Sara kissed Neil lightly on the lips and lifted his hands off her hips.

  “Right then,” he said, looking around in a daze, “shall we say our goodbyes?”

  “I’ll catch you up,” she said.

  Sara stayed at the party for another hour or so, but she felt like a spectator. Lots of people smiled at her goofily, but no one offered her any drugs. She danced on the periphery of some other guests, who politely broadened out their circle to include her; one man even wiggled his shoulders at her in an “I will if you will” invitation to freak out to Steely Dan, but despite having consumed a whole bottle of wine over the course of the evening, she found she couldn’t commit to it, and drifted off to the kitchen. Here she stood by the table, absent-mindedly feeding herself parcels of home-made roti, dipped in lime pickle, until it dawned on her that Lou and Gavin had retired for the night, and she might as well go home.

  4

  Sara stood at the bedroom window watching the neighbourhood wake. She saw the man from the pebble-dashed semi walk his scary dog as far as the house with the plantation blinds and allow it to cock its leg on their potted bay tree before heading back home. She saw Marlene from number twelve, ease her ample behind into her Ford Ka and head, suitably coiffed and hatted, for Kingdom Hall. She saw a bleary-eyed man bump a double buggy down the steps of the new conversion and set off towards the park. She saw Carol’s front door open…

  “Where’s she off to,” she murmured. A faint groan came from under the duvet.

  Sara watched her friend cross the road carrying an envelope.

  “Oh, my God, she’s not… She is! She’s sending them a thank-you note.”

  Neil hauled himself up to a semi-recumbent position.

  “Can you believe that?” She turned towards him with an incredulous grin.

  “Christ yeah, good manners.” He shuddered.

  “Oh come on,” Sara protested, “they didn’t even enjoy themselves, you said.”

  With the pillows piled up behind him, wearing an expression of lofty tolerance, Neil’s profile might have been carved into Mount Rushmore.

  “Maybe it’s something else.”

  “What else could it be?” Sara eyed him sharply.

  “A birthday card?” Neil shrugged and picked up his phone.

  “Don’t be daft, they’ve only just met.”

  All the same, she didn’t like the idea of Carol stealing a march on her. She was the one on the fast-track. Everything Carol knew about Lou and Gavin, she knew because Sara had told her. Their children’s ages and genders; the family’s recent migration from Spain; the medium in which Gavin worked; these nuggets she had doled out, with more than a frisson of satisfaction, keeping the confidences – the trout and the tears – to herself. The idea that the two women might have established their own rapport was ridiculous. They had nothing in common.

  “What happened, anyway, after I left?” Neil didn’t lift his eyes from the phone, nor did his lightness of tone betray much curiosity, and yet he was eager to know, she could tell.

  “Not much,” she said, returning to bed and yanking the duvet towards her. “Gavin and Lou disappeared. I talked to a couple of people, had a dance. Came home.”

  “Disappeared where?” Neil said.

  “To bed, one imagines,” said Sara, sounding a little prudish, even to her own ears.

  “What,” Neil said, “bed bed?”

  “You saw them,” she said, “that dance looked like foreplay to me.”

  “Really?” Neil looked appalled and delighted, like a randy schoolboy.

  “Bit much, don’t you think, at their own party?” she muttered.

  Neil shrugged.

  “Maybe they couldn’t help themselves.”

  They lay there for a while in silence. The cacophony of kids’ TV from downstairs competed with the buzz of a hedge trimmer outside. Neil returned to his phone, but the theme of sex hung in the air between them. Sunday morning was their regular slot and she guessed from the intense way Neil was scrolling through the football results, that he had an erection. She felt aroused herself, but it was all mixed up now with Gavin and Lou and their stupid tango. She felt hungover and annoyed and horny. She sighed huffily and flopped a hand down on top of the duvet. With every appearance of absent-mindedness, Neil clasped her wrist and started to stroke it gently, whilst still apparently absorbed in the match report. It was the lightest and most casual of caresses, but he couldn’t fool her – he wasn’t taking in a word he was reading. She closed her eyes and tried to enjoy it, but she kept thinking of the party: the strange atmosphere; the music; the extraordinary behaviour of the hosts. Neil was nuzzling her neck now, burrowing his hand beneath the bedclothes, working his way dutifully, from base to base. A tweak of the nipple, a quick knead of the breast, then onwards and downwards. She threw her head back and tried to surrender herself to pleasure, but she couldn’t get in the zone. She moaned and wriggled, took his hand and, after demonstrating how and where she would like to be touched, closed her eyes, only to find her thoughts invaded once again by Gavin and Lou, this time, naked, Gav’s head at Lou’s crotch, her face contorted with ecstasy. Appalled, she banished the image, stilling instantly the butterfly quiver of her nascent orgasm. By now, Neil’s cock was pulsing against her thigh. To self-censor, she reasoned, would be to disappoint them both. No sooner had she given herself permission to go there than she was there, on the other side of the party wall, in their bedroom watching them fuck, like dogs, on the floor, Gav thrusting harder and harder, Lou’s hands beating the floorboards, head jerking back, sweat flying everywhere, groaning, screaming, coming, coming, coming.

  “Oh God! Oh God!”

  She opened her eyes and the room and the day fell back into their right order, but still there was a muscular twitch against her leg and a misty look in the eye of her husband. She touched his shoulder and, with the air of a family dog given a one-off dispensation to flop on the sof
a, he clambered on board, and could only have been a few thrusts shy of his own orgasm, when the bedroom door burst open. Sara turned her head in annoyance, ready to remonstrate with whichever son had forgotten to knock before entering, but found herself, instead, eyeball to eyeball with a strange nappy-clad toddler, whose shock of blond curls and penetrating blue-eyed stare made her gasp in recognition.

  ***

  “Well, that was interesting…” Sara called, breezing back into the house some fifteen minutes later and poking the front door closed with her foot. There was no response, so she followed the appetising scent of cooked breakfast into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, arms folded.

  “They hadn’t missed her!” she said.

  Neil continued frying eggs.

  “No idea she was even here. Pretty shocking really. Poor little thing’s not even three. Hey, you’ll never guess what her name is.”

  Neil didn’t try.

  “Zuley, short for Zuleika,” she told his impervious back. “I can’t decide whether I like it or not.”

  “You can get back to me,” he said.

  “I wonder where they got it from…”

  “The Bumper Book of Pretentious Names?”

  “She must have tagged along with Dash and Arlo. Voted with her feet. It’s not exactly child-friendly round there. You should see the place – weirdos crashed out on every sofa, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles… God knows what she could have put in her mouth!” Try as she might, she couldn’t quite banish a grudging admiration from her tone.

  “Anyway,” she said, her mouth pursed against a smug grin, “upshot is… we’re invited round for dinner later.”

  “Can you set the table, please?”

  Coitus interruptus seemed to have rendered Neil selectively deaf.

  Sara shuffled aside the Sunday paper, clattered plates and cutlery onto the table and called the boys. They hurtled into the room – a tangle of limbs and testosterone, jostling each other for the best chair, the fullest plate, the tallest glass. Dash won on all counts, even snatching the tomato sauce out the hands of his younger brother and splurging a wasteful lake of it onto his own plate, before Arlo had a chance to object.

  “Er, we take turns in this house…” Sara said firmly, and was met with Dash’s signature smile – sunny and impervious – more chilling, by far, than defiance. He was a handsome specimen, no doubt about it, and possessed of an easy, insincere charm, but she wondered that she could ever have mistaken him for a girl. Neither his physique nor his behaviour struck her, now, as anything other than self-evidently Alpha-male. Arlo, on the other hand, had the unhappy aura of the whelp about him. Slight of build and weak of chin, he had his mother’s rabbity eyes, without her intelligence, his father’s thin-lipped mouth, without his redeeming humour. He was the kind of kid, who, even as you intervened to stop sand being kicked in his face, somehow inspired the unworthy impulse to kick a little more. She was touched therefore, and not a little humbled that, long after the older boys had left the room, Patrick sat loyally beside this “friend”, whose friendship he had not particularly sought, prattling cheerfully, while Arlo chased the last elusive baked bean around his plate.

  “So that’ll be quite nice, don’t you think?” Sara said to Neil when they were alone again and she was stacking the dirty plates in the dishwasher, “dinner tonight. Just the four of us?”

  “We were only round there last night,” said Neil.

  “Yeah, us and fifty other people.”

  “I just don’t get what the hurry is.”

  “There isn’t any hurry, but nor is there any reason to say no. Unless we want to say no.”

  “And in fact you’ve already said yes.”

  “Well, not yes as such. I said I’d ask you.”

  “Thanks very much. So now if we don’t go, they’ll think I’m a miserable bastard.”

  Sara raised a meaningful eyebrow.

  With a sigh, Neil returned to his task of scraping the leathery remnants of fried egg from the base of the pan.

  “Neil, they’re nice, interesting people and they want to be our friends. I’m trying, I really am, but I’m struggling to see anything negative in that.”

  Neil shrugged resignedly. He was a simple soul really – affable, straightforward, curious. He had constructed a credible carapace of manliness, which, on the whole, he wore pretty lightly. When he picked up a work call at home (which he seldom did), it was impossible to tell whether he was talking to his PA or to the Chairman. This, really, rather than the recent improvement in tenant satisfaction ratings, or the number of newbuilds completed under his jurisdiction, was the reason he was a shoo-in for the big job. The downside of his instinctive and wholly laudable egalitarianism, however, was, in Sara’s view, his reluctance to recognise that some people just were exceptional.

  “Eleven o’clock, absolute latest, okay?” he muttered to Sara, as they stood on Lou and Gavin’s doorstep for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  “Hell-o-o-o!” Neil said, as Lou opened the door and you would have thought there was nowhere he would rather be. He handed his hostess a bottle of wine and kissed her on both cheeks – a little camply, Sara thought.

  “I brought dessert,” Sara told Lou, when it was her turn, “I thought, you know, with all the clearing up you’d had to do… it’s nothing fancy, just some baked figs and mascarpone.”

  “Oh thanks.” Her hostess looked surprised and faintly amused. In truth, she didn’t appear to have done much clearing up. The house looked only marginally less derelict than it had when Sara had delivered Zuley back that morning. Empty bottles were stacked in crates beside the front door and a row of black bin-bags bulged beside them. A wet towel and a jumble of Lego lay at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen was chilly and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. No cooking smells, no piles of herbs or open recipe book hinted at treats to come. If it weren’t for the fact that Lou had obviously taken a certain amount of care with her appearance, Sara might almost have thought they had come on the wrong night, but Lou looked gorgeous – like a sexy sea lion, hair slicked back with product, eyes kohl-rimmed, in a tie-necked chiffon blouse and jeans, which could not have contrasted more sharply with the eye-popping maxi dress she had worn the night before. She had the enviable knack, Sara had noticed, of making every outfit she wore utterly her own.

  Lou ushered them in and Sara and Neil sat down a little gingerly, on grubby chairs at a kitchen table still littered with half-eaten pizza crusts and spattered with juice.

  “Shall I open this?” Lou asked, waving their wine bottle at them. “Or are you in the mood for more fizz?”

  She flung open the door of the fridge and pulled out a half-full bottle of Krug.

  “A party with booze left over,” Neil said. “Must be getting old.”

  “Or more catholic in our tastes,” said Lou with an enigmatic smile. She filled three glasses and handed them round.

  Watching her hostess pad around the kitchen, to the strains of John Coltrane, the grimy lino sucking at her bare feet, Sara found herself at once repelled by the squalor and intrigued by Lou’s indifference to it. She wondered what it might be like to live like this – to dress how you pleased and eat when you felt like it, and invite people round on a whim. There was, after all, a certain charm in the larky informality of it all, in stark contrast to Carol’s well-choreographed “pot luck” suppers. Lou cheerfully admitted to being “rubbish” at entertaining. She had once, she said over her shoulder, arms elbow-deep in washing-up water, served undercooked pork to Javier Bardem and given him worms. Once again, Sara found herself at a loss for words.

  By the time Gavin bounded into the room, at 8.05, wearing jeans and a creased linen shirt the colour of bluebells, dusk had darkened the windows and Lou had brought about a transformation. She had cleared the table and put a jug of anemones and a squat amber candle on it. Around this centrepiece, she had placed terracotta dishes of olives, anchovies and artichokes, as well as a breadboard with a crusty l
oaf. All it took was for Gavin to draw the blinds and pour more wine and suddenly the atmosphere was one of gaiety and promise – the room felt like a barge or a gypsy caravan – some ad hoc combination, at any rate, of home and vehicle, in which the four of them were setting out on a journey. Now the informality of their reception felt less like negligence and more like a huge compliment. Gavin caught his wife around the waist and kissed her neck, glugged back most of a glass of wine, changed the music on the stereo and began to cook.

  As the candles burned down and the alcohol undid the kinks in the conversation, Sara stopped worrying about her choice of outfit and Neil’s unappealing habit of sucking the olive juice off his fingers, and started to enjoy herself. The tone of the evening became relaxed and confessional. She heard herself admit, with a careless giggle that she’d been intimidated when Gav and Lou had first moved in.

  “By us?” Lou looked askance. “Why on earth…?”

  “Oh, you know – the car you drive, the way you dress…” Sara said, “… the stag’s head above your fireplace!”

  “That’s Beryl,” replied Lou, dismissively, “no one could be intimidated by Beryl. She’s cross-eyed and she’s got mange on one antler. As for the Humber, I can’t even remember how we ended up with that…”

  “Damien was getting rid of it,” Gav reminded her, “and we were feeling flush...”

  “That’s right!” said Lou, “because you’d just won the Tennent’s Sculpture Prize. So you see, pretty random really. Anyway, Madam,” she said, leaning forward in her seat and fixed Sara with a gimlet eye, “it cuts both ways, let me tell you. That day you first spoke to me, remember?” Sara did. “I was a nervous wreck!” Lou glanced at Neil and Gavin, as if for affirmation. “There she was, all colour-co-ordinated and spiffy from the school run, and me looking like shit in my filthy work clothes and, what’s her name? Carol, watching me like a hawk from across the road. I felt like I was auditioning for something. And then you invited me round for a drink and I was, like, yesss!”