Chapter Ten
Quick and Dirty
She was lying in bed, blankets wrapped around her, reading a book bearing the title Alive.
'Shouldn't you be reading magazines telling you how to breastfeed?' I asked.
'Crap,' she said. 'How many thousands of years did we get by without that?'
'How's the book?' I asked. 'Rugby-playing cannibals going down well with junior?'
'He's fine,' she said. 'But I've got indigestion.'
We both laughed. The air felt instantly clearer, freer of the unpleasant electricity that seemed to have been arcing between us of late. That and the awful, smothering feeling I'd had at the museum, and the fruitless search afterwards.
'Where have you been?' she asked, as if she could read my mind. But I knew how I looked. My fingers were grey with cold, my shoes wet. I could find no position in which to get comfortable. My back felt like a thin bag filled with rusting, useless ironmongery.
'Out walking,' I said. I didn't tell her that I'd covered the entire beach, nor that I had patrolled every street in the village, spying through kitchen windows, trying to spot a child frowning over a plate of greens, or playing on a video game, or reading The Beano. I gave up when I felt myself becoming so agitated I wanted to rap on the doors and ask the people where the children were. Why don't you have any children? Where are the fucking children?
Here they were, or one of them, at least. I was with Ruth and I was calming down and it was a warm room and she was going to have a child, soon, and my God was I frightened for her. I was trying to find a way of bringing it up, this business of a childless beach - who had ever heard of such a thing? - and trying to understand the things I'd seen already that seemed to give a lie to my suspicions and fears. The naked toddler by the pier. An infant's romper suit washed up on the tide. But I couldn't be sure. Nothing was certain. Everything was riddled with meaning.
'Pour us a drink,' she said.
'Water?'
A brief shake of the head. 'There's a bottle of Talisker in the cupboard. Fetch us a scant millimetre.'
'What about the baby?' I asked.
'He'll have a double. Go on, panic-boy. A coating for the tongue is all I'm after. What do you think's going to happen? Junior's going to drop out trying to bum a fiver for a rock of crack? It's probably more dangerous for you, anyway.'
I got us both drinks. A dribble for her and a large one for me.
'Scant millimetre,' I said when I got back. 'Sounds like a French private detective.'
'In a science fiction novel.'
'Yeah. I feel as if I'm in a science fiction novel sometimes.'
She took the tiniest of sips, a mere dampening of her lips. They glistened in the caramel light. 'There's science fiction in you, for God's sake. You're the bionic man.'
'It's not just that,' I said. 'Don't you feel that this place is a bit... detached, sometimes? It's so far away from the main road. It's totally cut off. It's forgotten. It's like a different world. Like something out of Verne, or Haggard, or Doyle.'
I looked down at my glass. It was empty. I didn't remember drinking it, but the oily, hot taste was there at the back of my throat. I poured myself another.
'I suppose so,' she said. 'And there's also the sea. All of this will be gone one day. As happened to Dunwich.'
I'd read about Dunwich. Capital of East Anglia. A rival to London, centuries ago. Coastal erosion had meant that much of it had fallen into the waves over the past eight hundred years. Southwick had suffered a sea surge, or a seich, of equal proportions in the 1950s. Erosion, plus the sinking of East Anglia and global warming in general, meant this entire coastal region, the county itself, was at risk. In another eight hundred years the landlocked cities of today, such as Norwich and Ipswich, might well be coastal towns.
'You ever heard the bells?' At midnight, it was said that you could hear the bells of the eight lost churches ringing beneath the waves.
'Sometimes, although I can't help thinking that's just me, hungering after ghosts.'
A different sort of tension was unwinding between us. The heat of the room and the spirit in my belly were conspiring to make me feel drowsy, but in a pleasant way. The pills I'd taken that morning were enjoying one last hurrah, jazzed up by the Tallisker. My throat felt thick with something. Desire, maybe. It had been so long that I forgot what it felt like. She had put the book down. The blankets had shifted while she was sipping her whisky. She was wearing a chocolate brown blouse. It was drawn very cosily over the mound of her belly. She was tight as a tick. A slipped button allowed me to see the ice-white edge of her bra. I returned my attention to her face to find that she had been watching me watching her. I didn't look away. She didn't look away. She kept talking, as if there was nothing wrong; I hoped there wasn't. It took a moment or two to realise what it was she was talking about, and then I froze, barely breathing. I poured another drink. For her as well as me. The baby would survive. I just wanted to get tanked as quickly as possible now.
'It was a cold night. Much colder than this. Or maybe I'm twisting the memory. It was in the middle of summer, after all. I'd been drinking in The Fluke all afternoon, first day of my holidays. He said his name was Jimmy and he was looking for work. He was nice, in a kind of rough and ready way. Clean grime, if you know what I mean. Posh grunge... I don't know. Long hair and a bit of stubble going on. Biker jacket. Jeans. Old grey T-shirt. But he smelled good. Scrubbed.
'We talked for a long time. He showed me his motorbike. At one point he picked me up and sat me on it. I liked that. He was strong. There's something about being whisked off your feet that's pretty giddy. It doesn't happen when you're an adult. He did plenty of that later on.'
The hand that wasn't holding her glass snaked out of the blankets and wrapped itself around mine.
'He bought me drinks. Said he was travelling up from Dover. He'd been on the Continent, driving around Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France. Labouring on construction sites. Waiting tables. Sucking in life, he said. Sucking hard, like a vampire without teeth. He wanted to drain as much experience from everywhere he visited, whether it was Prague or Plymouth. He said he wanted to suck some life out of Southwick. And he did. He did that all right.
'But what I don't understand, Paul, is that we were getting on so well, we were flirting with each other like crazy. Too much cider. The excitement of meeting a new person you find attractive. That madness, summer madness in the air. I'd have, you know... oh God, no time for being prudish now. I'd have fucked him that night. No sweat. I'd have gone with him down to the beach and had him all ways if he wanted. But either he didn't get my signals, or he chose to ignore them. Maybe he could only take what he wanted. Didn't like submissive women. Christ, I think about how many of us there are, strung across the world, staring after his bike tracks with bites and bruises and dislocations. Babies growing inside.
'At closing time he walked me home. I asked if he wanted tea and he said no. He hung back, he said good night. When I said good night too, when I was closing the door, he kicked it in and knocked me off my feet. And then it all happened, so fast I couldn't keep up with it. He was punching me and kicking me and throwing me around. So fast I didn't have chance to take in breath let alone scream for help. He moved like he was used to it. He'd done this before. We ended up in the kitchen. He tore the trousers from me with such force that he almost skinned my thighs. He raped me while he had a kitchen knife pressed against the back of my neck. I daredn't try to lift myself up, he was too heavy anyway, in case it just slid right into me and killed me, or worse, severed my spinal cord and left me paralysed.
'He got off me, cleaned himself up, pulled his jeans on and left. I didn't see him again.'
Her fingernails were lightly scoring the tender flesh of my inner arm, becoming almost unbearably gentle when they encountered a fold or fissure of scar tissue.
'Come here,' she said. She was crying. I went to hold her and she held her hand against mine, a barrier. She reached for my neck
and drew me down. She kissed me deeply and confidently. Whisky fumes. Vanilla shampoo.
I lost myself to it. Her mouth was soft and firm at the same time, maddening. Blades of black hair swung into my face, bobbing with the ebb and flow of the kiss. Again my hands went to her, touching her lightly on her back. She jerked up and slapped my hands away. A silver wire of spittle looped between our mouths.
'Don't touch me,' she said. 'Don't you fucking touch me.'
She raised herself, tears threatening, and leaned over on one hip. 'Sorry,' she said. She supported her head with her hand and leaned in to kiss me once more. Her other hand slid between the buttons on my shirt and scored a line between my nipples. I felt the skin on my scalp tighten so swiftly I thought it might just peel away from my skull. There was something both carnal and lazy about the way she kissed. She kept her eyes closed. Our mouths, yoked together, worked separate orbits. Sometimes they lost contact, but she didn't mind, she just kissed what was there and slowly worked her way back. When I went to touch her again, the third time, her eyes snapped open and her hand gripped my wrist. She didn't say anything. She drew me on to the bed. My back was screaming, but the kiss provided a salve. I wouldn't allow pain to ruin this. She pressed me down on to the mattress and swung one leg over both of mine. I felt her belly press and graze against my cock and I drew in breath. I felt dizzy with need. It had been so long. Tamara came into my thoughts and I forced her away, with bitter relish.
Ruth broke the kiss. I felt my face flush under her scrutiny. I had not seen her like this; I had not believed her capable of such behaviour. She wore a sleepy, sly expression. She kept her hand on the centre of my chest. She leaned over to her bedside cabinet and threw open the door. She withdrew two lengths of thin rope.
'Put your hands against the rails,' she said.
'Ruth, I -- '
'Do it, or go back to your room. You won't touch me. I won't be touched.'
'I won't touch you.'
'You will. You say that, but you will. You all do. Go on, put your hands against the rail. Now.'
'This is unnecessary, Ruth.'
'I'll decide that. This is a big fucking step for me. If I'm not in control, nobody is. It's me in the left-hand seat, Mr Pilot. Okay?'
She tied both my wrists to the headboard. She tied them well. I wasn't the only one learning knots at the foot of a master. The knots were secure, but not so tight as to cause me discomfort. Once I was fastened down, she took off her pyjama bottoms, but left her top on. Light caught in the glossy tangle of her bush. She unfastened my jeans and tugged them down my legs. She gave up with one leg off, and made a sort of 'oofing' noise as my penis sprang free of my briefs. It was pretty much the only part of me that had escaped injury, but it didn't seem to be at that moment. I was swollen and red and throbbing. I felt close to tears with anticipation and worry and pleasure.
'The baby,' I said, and couldn't find a way to finish the sentence.
'The baby will be fine,' she said. 'I'm getting it back for all the kicks it's been giving me lately.'
She paused as she reached for my penis. I saw her face harden.
'We don't have to do this,' I said.
'It looks to me as if we do,' she said. 'I can't leave you like this. You might explode.'
We laughed, but it was a slightly desperate, manic moment. She took me into her mouth and the moment changed into something else, no less manic, no less desperate, but different. Only seconds went by before I felt the familiar tightening in my balls, a gathering of sensation.
'Ruth,' I said. My voice was strangled. I fought against my bindings but there was nothing I could do. 'Ruth!'
She didn't stop. She recognised what was happening, but she didn't pull away. I came for what seemed like minutes and she kept her mouth on me. When it was over, she leaned over and discreetly spat my seed into an empty tea cup. She lay alongside me in the bed and kissed my shoulder. Her hand stroked my belly. She didn't move to release me and I didn't ask her to. My head was a thick jungle of dark greens, blues, purples.
Neither of us spoke. She kept stroking and caressing, pressing her breasts against me. Her hand kept returning to my penis; her hand did not remain still. I was hardening again. I felt both spent and fecund. She touched herself and her fingers came away shining. She raised herself and held my penis at an angle where she could impale herself upon it. She held herself open and slid down on to me. A deep, animal noise at the base of her throat. She moved slowly at first, finding how we fit each other. When she was comfortable with the arrangement, she increased the pace, finding a position and a rhythm that she seemed to lock on to, as if it might serve her the swiftest, most intense release. She fucked me harder and faster than I liked, but I had no way to calm her or alter the pace. I felt the firm weight of the baby denting my abdomen. I couldn't stop myself from imagining the body inside her, curled into itself like a leaf, being jolted and bounced against the soft womb walls. The pale swell of eyes. Hands held together as if in prayer. I heard the slosh of her insides and bit my lip. I felt the awful conviction that she was using me as a tool to terminate her pregnancy. She was surely moving too quickly, driving too deeply, for this to be anything other than an abortion attempt. Her face was a stiff mask of concentration, but this was no prelude to climax. She was not hunting the tail of her orgasm; there was no rising expression of ecstasy coming through. But I couldn't get through to her. I couldn't pull back. The ropes chewed at my wrists. And now I could hear a baby crying somewhere, a lusty shriek fuelled by hunger or pain.
Another button had slipped free on Ruth's blouse. She clutched the gap closed with her left hand, swept the lamp from the table with her right. Darkness rushed in like a guest at a sex show. I couldn't square her modesty with the almost violent way that she was fucking me. I couldn't take in the breath I needed to ask, not that she would have paid me any attention. She was focused beyond reason. She seemed to have forgotten my physical state, or chose to ignore it. Any tenderness was being erased with each stroke. There were more than two people in that bedroom now. It was as if she were using me to reenact the assault she had suffered. This was no confirmation of love, no act of passion. This was an exorcism.
And yet.
The sweat was flying off her. I felt drops of it hit my torso. Noise was building inside her, like something trapped, chipping its way free. In between, little mewls of contentment and arousal. She came with a long moan of exultation, which tapered off into deep gasps, as if she were in the delivery room already, the baby being coaxed from her. Come on, you can do it. One last push. Breathe... breathe...
My own climax, seconds later, was lost beneath the weight of her and her moment. Secondary, weak, forgotten. I felt dirty. Regretted taking even a second or two of sour pleasure from this. It was not right. She pushed herself away from me and swept to the bathroom, leaving me locked to the bed.
I don't know when she came back because, miraculously, I'd drifted off to sleep. But when I awoke, minutes or hours later, I was clean and dressed and freed and she was sleeping beside me, wrapped in a thick towelling bathrobe and the protective circle of her own arms. Or that's how I should have seen it. All I took from that was that the barrier was back up. Keep out, those arms said. No entry.
'Pregnancy suits you,' I whispered to her.
Chapter Eleven
Error Chain
The night changed, became a different kind of blue. Riven. Unstable. Spastic flashes of electric light shivered and skidded across the walls of my room. I lay there, coming out of sleep, my fingers idling in the dried juices of lovemaking on my belly and pubes, trying to remember if it really happened, despite this physical evidence. It was unbearably hot in here. I got up, wincing at the twinge of muscles I'd forgotten how to use, and, rubbing my wrists, shuffled over to the window. The glass was opaque with condensation. Bursts of radio static from outside. Car doors slamming. Not good at any time of day, and certainly not now, at a couple of minutes shy of four in the morning. I wondered
how long it would be before I slept through till dawn.
I opened the window and it was as if the words were waiting just beyond the frame for a chance to slip through and assault me.
I think she was trying to find her way home.
A police voice. Impersonal, male, tired. Who wouldn't be, doing this thankless job? Bodies in winter. I thought of Ruth and the guy who had raped her. Maybe he had returned for more fun and gone too far this time. And then I thought of Tamara and I was lashing out in the dark, trying to find something to wear, my heartbeat so strong and hard that I could taste it at the back of my throat: burned and broken and rank with old blood. I imagined her thumbing rides, trying to get down to me, her head full of apologies and hope, and I would kiss all that sorry away because I had plenty of my own now and together we'd sit and talk and thrash this out and move on together, stronger.
The blue light and the radios were nothing to do with Tamara, they couldn't be, so why was I stumbling out of the door, barely dressed, shoeless, tears standing in the wings, waiting for their cue? It wouldn't take much. They knew their lines back to front.
I was stopped almost immediately by a police cordon on North Parade. Yellow tape. Squad cars parked at jazzy angles to the road, doors open, the full-on disco lighting effect. A police constable took me to one side and asked me my name. I told him I owned one of the B&Bs on that stretch of road and asked him what had happened.
'Which B&B?'
'Tam's Place,' I said.
He referred to a sheaf of notes on a clipboard. 'Say again?'
'It's not called that now,' I said, feeling clot-headed. 'But it will be.'
He stared at me in that way the police do, endlessly patient, patronising. Waiting for a slip up, the tongue to wag too much.
'Seventy-eight North Parade,' I said.
He didn't glance back at his notes. He kept his gaze on me. I put my remaining nude arm into its shirt sleeve and did what I could about my corkscrew hair.
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