by Simon Brooke
Because everything’s different now. 2cool is unsafe, unpredictable and just a bit frightening. Modelling is safe, familiar, attractive. It’s also sensible and well thought of—even my parents were won round to it in the end.
Lauren is modelling. Nora is 2cool. That’s why I want Nora now. Like that moment at a teenage party when someone first hands you a cigarette and you know you shouldn’t because it’s dangerous and naughty and stupid and your mum and dad could so easily find out, but something makes you do it. Is it the environment, the mood you’re in or just an angry, rebellious desire to hurt and disappoint the people who love you and think they know what’s best for you?
I could argue that Lauren is pushing me into this but I don’t believe that. Perhaps I’ll feel better when I’ve done it. I’ll realise how much I love Lauren, how I don’t need or even want anyone else, and then I’ll go back to her and all will be well.
When Nora reaches up to me I kiss her, but I’m much taller than her and it feels awkward so she giggles, embarrassed and then leads me to the settee where we sit down and continue to kiss, our hands exploring each other’s bodies. I almost pull away a couple of times but something—that self-destructive, first-cigarette moment, perhaps—makes me want to carry on just a little bit longer.
I also want to get close to this girl, so close that I can see inside her, find out what makes her tick, see what else she hasn’t told me. I run my forefinger over her smooth, clear, pale skin. Her eyes are wide, expectant, intrigued, drinking me in.
As she takes off her top, I realise I’ve been wondering for some time what her body would be like. She looks at me, nervously, very un-Nora. She has full, milky white breasts and dark pink nipples. Her stomach is rounded, so unlike Lauren’s taught, tanned belly. For years now I’ve been sleeping with one of the most beautiful bodies any man could ever wish to see: that swan neck, those long legs with their lean thighs and gently rounded calves that have earned their owner a fortune. Those perfect, pert breasts that every woman who sees them under crisp, white shirts or soft, relaxed T-shirts in an advert would kill for—and most men too. Here I am with Nora, remembering what it is like to touch a real body, not a masterpiece of nature which has been carefully honed to perfection for commercial purposes.
I take her breasts in my hands and kiss one, then the other, running my tongue over her nipples, closing my eyes to give myself up to the experience but also to try to close off my mind from thinking about Lauren and how she would feel if she could see this scene taking place. Nora gasps and begins to run her hands through my hair, leaning down to nestle her face in it. I raise my head and kiss her again. She undoes my fly, massaging my erection. After a while I lift her away from me and stand up. She looks surprised, anxious. But when she sees me slipping off my T-shirt and jeans, socks and trainers, she takes her remaining clothes off too. We stand opposite each other. I’m so much taller than her that my dick is poking into her stomach. I lean down to kiss her again but she kneels and begins to suck my dick, working it gently with her hand.
Then she gets up and leaves the room, muttering, “I’ll be right back.”
If, if I was going to do the sensible thing, this would be the time to do it. Embarrassing, yes, ungentlemanly too, but she’d understand and I’d go home with only a mildly guilty conscience and we’d talk the next day. But instead I stand there, gently playing with my dick. I catch sight of my flushed face in the mirror and turn away quickly. Nora is back with a condom.
“I suppose we should…er…”
Silently I take it from her, tear it open and slide it on. I’d almost forgotten how to use one of these things. I realise that with the height difference she’ll have to sit on me, so I lie on the settee, chucking some superfluous cushions on the floor, and she carefully straddles me, groaning and biting her lip as she slides down on me. I reach up and take her breasts in my hands. She gasps some more and then, after a while, reaches down to kiss me.
She comes pretty quickly and so do I. Then she kisses me again, bumping into my nose and smiling with embarrassment before she gets off me and goes into the bathroom. I pull the condom off and hold it carefully to make sure it doesn’t leak. I’d forgotten how disgusting these things are. Not sure of what to do next, I wait there, holding the slithery manifestation of my wrongdoing in my hand until she comes back. Wearing a T-shirt and knickers, she smiles uncertainly at me and then sees the condom.
“Oh, right. Bathroom’s just through there to the left.”
It smells damp and slightly mildewy. There is a scummy ring around the bath and sink, and some of the wallpaper is peeling off at the top of the walls. Next to the loo is a huge pile of glossy magazines, crinkly with condensation. I pull off some loo roll, wrap the condom in it and flush it away. The bastard floats to the surface again so I wait for the cistern to refill, chucking more paper down so that at least I don’t have to see it. I shiver slightly, standing there naked in someone else’s flat.
Looking around me I realise that this is perhaps my only chance to see the real Nora. The toiletries themselves come from supermarkets—none of Lauren’s fantastically expensive French pseudoscientific stuff in white bottles, but everything else in the room has a girlish prettiness about it. It is packed with things like frames with shells stuck on them; on the walls and around the mirror are starfish and scallop shells. The shelves are filled with little ivory carvings, blue Islamic bowls, a mother-of-pearl box and other little toys and knickknacks.
Behind me is a huge collage with photos of people taken at parties, in a jungle, outside a gothic school building (from her time at Vassar?) and what looks like a Middle Eastern city somewhere. Nora with girls and boys—one square-jawed guy with his arm round her photographed on a skiing trip, which might be her empty-headed, football scholar ex, I guess. There are older people who must be parents and relatives, even teachers and college professors.
I flush the loo again and, finally, my waterlogged tormentor disappears from view.
In the other room, I kiss her on the lips once, less out of lust or even affection than because I can’t think what else to do. I start to get dressed in silence as she watches.
“You can stay if…”
“Um, well, I’d love to but, well you know, I’d better…I’m sorry about this.”
“Oh, of course, yes. Do you want me to call you a cab?”
“No,” I say, too quickly. “I’ll pick one up in the street.”
“Right, sure. It shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s usually quite a few around this time of night in Ladbroke Grove.”
“I’ll speak to you tomorrow,” I say, tiredness, confusion and an all-embracing feeling of guilt and seediness preventing me from saying anything more romantic or meaningful. The sex should have brought us closer but somehow, afterwards, we seem to have nothing but small talk—a trivial conversation about transport. We share a final, awkward kiss and then I smile at her and leave.
Like I said, I’ve never had an affair in the seven years I’ve been going out with Lauren. Not once. But then again, in my case, the old joke about not bothering to go out for hamburgers when you’ve got steak at home really does apply. Which makes what I’ve done all the more inexplicable—and weird.
When I get home Lauren is just turning off the lights to go to bed. She’s opened all the windows and put the fan on to get rid of the smell of Sarah’s smoke.
“Hello,” I say in a quiet voice, putting my head round the living room door.
“Hiya,” she says without looking up. “Where have you been tonight?”
Luckily she doesn’t make a move to kiss me hello.
“Just out for a drink with…with the people from the office,” I tell her in a daze. If she’d asked any more questions I’d have been stumped, unable to invent any more innocent but fictional details of my night out.
Instead she just nods her head slightly in acknowledgement. One thing about Lauren, she hardly ever sulks, she just comes out and says it, but this time she
can’t be bothered: she’s just so obviously deeply pissed off with me—and us.
“I’m just going to have a—” I’m about to say “shower” but it sounds too suspicious somehow as I usually shower in the morning, so I say “bath” instead.
“What? Now?” says Lauren, looking at her watch.
“Yeah, I’m beat. I need to unwind a bit.”
She nods again and walks through into the kitchen with the glasses.
I have a quick bath, washing my dick well. If only my conscience was as easy to clean. When I was a kid we’d eat peppermints after we’d smoked at parties. Years later my dad said he knew exactly what we’d been doing and he’d actually have preferred the smell of Silk Cut to the smell of all those Extra Strong mints.
I get dry, brush my teeth, sloosh round two shots of mouthwash and slip into bed, lying very still at the edge. Listening to Lauren breathe and trying not to breathe loudly myself, I try to get to sleep.
So, this is what adultery is like.
I pour semiskimmed milk on my Rice Krispies, but instead of putting the empty carton back in the fridge as I normally do (oh, the bin’s right over at the other end of the kitchen) I find myself carrying it across the room and carefully putting it in with the rest of the rubbish like a good boy.
Lauren calls me from the bedroom. I freeze for a moment but she shouts again. “Come and look at this. Quickly!”
I go into the bedroom where she is watching TV in bed. My eyes sweep over the floor and the bed in case she’s somehow found some proof of my unfaithfulness, but she gestures towards the telly. Sir Josh Langdon, the ancient and debauched rock star normally known for doing royal command performances and marrying teenagers, is being interviewed.
“Yeah, of course, I’m really BLEEP, BLEEP, off with the whole thing. I’ve lost a lost of money, yeah?” he says, stopping for a moment between the front door of his Chelsea home and a large black Merc, two men in sunglasses shuffling around uneasily behind him. “I suppose there’s no fool like an old fool and it sounded kind of young and funky and cool so I put in a few hundred thou. But now of course, I’ll never see a BLEEP penny of that, will I?”
He gets into the car but before one of the heavies can close the door, the interviewer asks. “Will you sue?”
Langdon looks up from his seat. “Well, let’s just say I’m thinking about suing ’em. I’ve got better things to do with my time,” he snarls and pulls the door shut.
Then there are shots of Sir James Huntsman, as the reporter explains that many big names from the City have also invested and have had their fingers burned. The next shot is of me, leaving our office and walking down the road. Once I’ve got over the shock of seeing myself I begin to take in what is being said.
“Although the police are still looking for the two men who arranged financing for the site, attention has been focused over the past few days on Charlie Barrett, seen here. A former male model, Barrett has been very much the public face of 2cool and is also being investigated by the police. We asked for an interview with him or any other spokesman from the company but there was no response from the 2cool offices.”
There is a shot of a computer terminal with our home page on it. The camera pulls back to reveal a female reporter in a bright green suit and shoulder-length blonde hair sitting on the desk next to the terminal.
“Whether Sir Josh Langdon sees any of his money again depends very much on the eventual outcome of the police investigations,” she says, giving us a frowning, head-tilting look of genuine concern, “but one thing seems certain: what promised to be the coolest site on the web has suddenly become too hot to handle. Juliet Hargreaves, BBC News, Central London.”
I sit down heavily on the bed. “Oh, fuck.”
As soon as I come up out of the tube station at Piccadilly Circus my mobile rings.
“Hi, it’s me,” says Nora.
“Hiya,” I say gently, wishing I was somewhere that I could talk more easily.
“How are you?”
“All right, you?”
“Yeah, okay. I’m sorry you couldn’t stay last night.”
“Yeah, so am I.”
“I’m so glad you came back, though, and we made love.” She sounds like she has rehearsed the comment.
“So am I,” I say. But I’m not, absolutely not. If you start to deceive your partner, you soon have to start deceiving the other woman too, I suppose. And yourself for that matter.
“Perhaps I’ll see you tonight or tomorrow then.”
“Sure, I’ll give you a ring later.”
“Bye.” I’m just thinking that at least I didn’t mention love, when the phone rings again. “Hello?”
“Charlie, it’s me.” For a moment I hardly recognise the voice.
“Lauren?”
“The police are here.” Her voice is cracking; she is almost in tears.
“What?”
She swallows hard. “The police are here. They’ve got a warrant and they’re searching the flat, our flat.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“Could you please come home and deal with this?”
“I’m coming, I’m coming. Let me find a cab. I’ll be right there.”
I find one coming down Regent Street and leap in, ringing Scarlett to tell her what has happened. She’s had more calls from journalists already but promises to handle things till I get back. Almost as an afterthought she gives me some other news that is either terminally bad or quite a relief—I can’t decide which.
The traffic is mercifully light at the end of the rush hour and I’m home in twenty-five agonising minutes.
Lauren is waiting in the hallway, arms folded, eyes red, motionless. She is wearing a cream V-necked pullover and jeans. Her hair is up. She looks gorgeous even in distress and I feel worse than ever—for putting her through this, for Nora, for everything. I put my arms round her and say, “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, okay. They’re in the bedroom.” She doesn’t move, unresponsive to my embrace. I go into the bedroom and a young policeman who has been searching under the bed looks up at me, enquiringly. I’m enraged. This is my bedroom.
“Oh, hello, sir,” says Slapton, who is wandering about, ostensibly supervising but also just poking around our personal things, I can tell. “We won’t be long.”
“Why the fuck couldn’t you do it while I was here?”
He looks at me impassively. “You’d left for work.”
“You could have called me.”
“Not our practise to call every time, sir. For obvious reasons. But we’ve got the necessary paperwork and we showed it to your girlfriend.”
“What are you taking?”
“A few papers and things. We’re going to have to take your computer away with us, I’m afraid,” he says, nodding towards it.
“What else?”
“We’ll know when we see it,” he says, his rubber-gloved hand poking at some of Lauren’s neatly folded clothes which are sitting on the bed. “You’ll get a receipt.”
“You bastard,” I tell him. “You’re enjoying this.”
He half-laughs then steps up to me and his smile tells me that I’ve guessed right.
“Oh, don’t try and get tough with me, pretty boy. It’s pathetic to watch. You just stick to selling your Prada handbags and your trendy champagne glasses. Leave the tough-guy stuff alone, it doesn’t suit you.”
I sense some of the policemen sniggering.
After about half an hour, during which time they’ve even been in the bathroom, they leave and I go into the kitchen to find Lauren.
“Have they gone?” she asks without looking at me.
“Yes.”
She bites her lip.
“Can I make you a cup of coffee?”
“No.”
I wait for her to say something.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“I’ve never felt so dirty in my life. The police searching my flat.”
“I know.”
“H
ow is this happening to us? I don’t understand.” Her lip trembles. “I was in the shower when they knocked on the door. I was terrified.”
“I’m so sorry, babe.” I put my arms around her but she is still unresponsive.
“When are you finally going to let it go?”
“The truth is, I have let it go. There’s nothing left to hang on to. We had to give up our computers so we can’t put in any more content. Worse still…when I rang Scarlett from the cab on the way over here she told me that the company that runs the site on the net has cut us off. There is no such site any more. That’s it. Finito.”
“Really?”
“Yup. RIP 2cool.” I repeat the phrase over to myself to see what effect it has on me. I suppose it hasn’t quite sunk in. Or else I just don’t care any more.
“Good,” says Lauren. She takes a deep breath. Her face and shoulders seem to relax. “Good. That’s that then.” I can see her pulling herself together. There’s not much that fazes Lauren, so she finds not being in control of any situation even more frightening than most people would. “You’ve got a receipt for what they’ve taken, haven’t you? If I’ve lost any work or anything because I can’t get on to the computer I shall expect them to pay.”
I laugh. “So they bloody well should.”
“It’s not funny. Anyway, I think you’re right going back to modelling. At least it’s safe and you know how it works,” she says, picking up a cloth and wiping down the already immaculate work surface.
“Yes. The only problem is that when I spoke to Karyn at Jet yesterday she said Penny won’t take me on again because of the adverse publicity.”
“That’s her loss then. You’d have no problem with any other agency, not with your reputation and your book.”