‘Romeo’s not Juliet’s type,’ said Fran, taking a seat, and the man offered her his hand.
‘I’m Bruno,’ said the man.
‘Bruno, your house is beautiful.’
‘Thank you, I’ve been very lucky. You’re very welcome here. You’re …?’
‘Benvolio.’
‘Ah, the method approach! But in real life you’re …?’
‘Charlie.’
‘Charlie, Frances, are you both at college with this one?’
‘That’s right,’ said Fran.
‘Not me,’ I said, baulking at the lie.
‘Although we don’t know that yet,’ said Fran.
‘So what do you do now, Charlie?’
‘I work. Part-time.’
‘Where do you work, Charlie?’
‘Well, in a petrol station.’
‘Oh. Which one?’
‘The one on the bypass.’
‘I go there often. I was delighted the other day to win some very nice free tumblers.’
At least I’d not stolen his scratch cards. ‘Well, don’t put ice in them, they explode in your face.’
‘That’s wise counsel; I’ll bear it in mind. And next time I buy petrol—’
I thought I ought to move things on, try my interrogation technique and use his name. This was something older people liked.
‘So, what do you do, Bruno?’
‘I manufacture and distribute home computers,’ said Bruno, and I wasn’t sure where to go after that.
‘We’ve got a home computer,’ was the best I could do.
‘Oh? Which one?’
I named the model and brand. ‘Dad got it off the back of a newspaper.’
‘Yes, they’re our main rivals. We’re Wang Computers.’
‘It’s not very good. Yours are much better.’
‘The right thing to say. You’ll go far, Charlie. I’m delighted you could make it. You seem like a lovely couple.’
‘Oh, we’re not really a couple,’ said Fran.
‘We haven’t known each other very long,’ I said.
‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. Look at you both. Get to it! No time to waste! Now – why is no one in the swimming pool?’
‘We weren’t sure if it was allowed,’ said Fran.
‘Of course it’s allowed. That’s what it’s for.’
‘And I don’t have a costume,’ said Helen.
‘Good God! Why are the young so prudish?’ said Bruno, and drained his glass. ‘Now, I’m going to go and push someone in,’ and he bounded up the terraced steps and out into the garden. Alex and Helen, grinning widely, clambered towards us.
‘Alex,’ said Fran, laughing, ‘are you sure he’s okay with us?’
‘Of course. Just don’t let on about this …’
He held out his fist and beckoned us closer, then opened his fingers as if he’d caught some rare bug. In his palm, a small pill, mottled and fat. ‘I’m prepared to split it four ways. It’ll hardly do anything, but who’s in?’
We looked at each other for one moment like musketeers, then Alex nipped the pill between his teeth and we each took a tiny fragment, like the loose grouting from bathroom tiles, chalky and damp with spit. We each washed it down with our cocktail. It was hard to believe something so small could taste so foul, like a blast of hairspray directly on the tongue, and so we drank more of the cocktail that tasted of lollies and went to find the heart of the party.
Queen Mab
The pill had no effect, and we confirmed this to each other every ten minutes or so.
Except that now the music seemed to sound amazing. With a dreary fustiness that we passed off as integrity, my friends and I had always been hostile to dance music, because anything without guitars had no craft, was boring and repetitive, just bang-bang-bang. Harper’s den was not a place to dance, it was somewhere to nod and bite our lower lips.
But then we had never been anywhere remotely like this. Outside, lights on the terrace marked out a dance floor densely packed to its edges like a life raft, a speaker stand on each corner focusing the sound the way a magnifying glass focuses light. Alex whooped, took Helen’s hand and bundled into the centre of the crowd, and Fran and I shared a look and followed. Helen was one of those surprisingly brilliant dancers, very serious and intense, angry almost, eyes closed, fists clenched, muttering to herself as if daring anyone to interrupt. For Alex dance was a form of self-seduction, constantly slipping his hand into his own shirt, undoing his own buttons, squeezing his own pectoral or buttock or groin, so that I half expected Alex to slap Alex’s hand away. I took my stance – feet planted, elbows tight in, hands pumping alternately in a milking motion, the kind of dance that would disturb no one in a crowded train carriage, while Fran went wild, grinning madly, her arms above her head, her hands dug into her own hair so that I could see the dark stubble in her armpits, and she caught my eye and laughed with her mouth wide, put her hands on my shoulder and said something.
‘What?’
‘I said this is mad.’
‘It is mad.’
She spoke again.
‘Pardon?’
She pulled me close, and put her mouth to my ear. ‘I said I’m really glad you’re here,’ and we danced for a while like this, drifting away from the others to the edge of the raft, pulling each other close. It’s hard to mention someone’s smell without sounding like a psychopath, but I’d noticed her scent before, something warm and green like summer. Some years later, on a terrible, sad date, I caught this scent again, so vivid and precise that I thought Fran must be hiding in the room. ‘My God, what is that?’ I asked. ‘“Grass”, by the Gap,’ she said, and I felt slightly disappointed that such a natural smell was in fact a body mist, and that Fran no more smelt naturally of grass than I smelt of Aztecs. Still, in that moment, on the dance floor, I thought it was quite the greatest, most sophisticated scent, and I resisted the temptation to snuffle at it like a badger and instead rested my forehead against hers, her arms on either side of my neck, locked at the elbow, something I’d seen in movies.
But the music was too fast, and our foreheads kept rapping painfully against each other, and so we broke apart and pushed back through the crowd to its centre. Now Alex and Fran fell into each other’s arms, dancing closely, their legs intertwined in a corny Latin style, and I felt a little stab of envy that we hadn’t danced like that. Helen tapped me on the shoulder and rolled her eyes, and we laughed and danced together for a bit, joke-dancing until it stopped being a joke and we also put our arms around each other. The thump-thump-thump felt like a soft mallet tapping on my chest and soon I even dared to raise my hands above shoulder height, to let my feet leave the floor.
Helen said something in my ear.
‘What?’
‘I said are you feeling anything?’
‘Nothing at all,’ I said.
The pill had no effect, though it was true that time had taken on a strange quality so that I couldn’t tell if we’d been dancing for twenty minutes or two hours, and I decided that I should step out for a moment and get another drink. The dancing had made me light-headed and light-hearted so at the bar I found that I could talk to complete strangers, something I had never done before. I talked to a nice woman in her twenties who was training to be a nurse, and I said my mum used to be a nurse, and we talked about nursing for a while and mothers too and then I spoke to her boyfriend, really nice, who worked for Bruno and we talked some more about computers and for some reason I mentioned that I’d screwed up all my exams except maybe Computer Science and Art and he said, hey, well do that then, do Computer Science and Art, why not, if that’s what you’re good at, if that’s where your talent lies, everyone’s got a talent you’ve just got to find out what it is and go for it and use it and this seemed incredibly wise to me, the idea that you should do what you’re good at and enjoy, as opposed to what you’re bad at and hate, and although it hadn’t worked out for Dad, had been a catastrophe, it m
ight for me, because it was computers not jazz after all, and I resolved to do exactly what he said, and I thought how strange it was to be having all these very frank and easy-going conversations with people when I wasn’t usually very good at these kinds of things, so that when this wise man left to find his girlfriend, the nice nurse, I found that I was even able to talk to the woman in the red PVC catsuit who looked amazing, I said, and she said thank you in a thick, low Italian voice, and we talked about the difference between north Italy and south Italy and, more interestingly, the difficulties of getting in and out of a PVC catsuit, which wasn’t PVC in fact but latex, and then the differences between latex and PVC and what happens when you want to go to the loo, which she said hardly ever happened, it’s so strange, she said, you become like an eskimo, if you can’t go, you don’t go, and besides, you sweat so much inside, you see, and she unzipped the suit a little and invited me to run my finger along the neckline, which was silky with sweat and talcum powder so that it was both wet and dry at the same time, and this, I thought, was by some way the greatest conversation I had ever had in my life, accompanied as it was by the squeak of latex, like little yelps, until it took another turn when she said have you ever been tied up? and I said no, only with my best friend Harper’s dressing-gown cord so he could fart on my head but it wasn’t sexual, and she said, no, my friend, you just think it wasn’t sexual, and while I was wrestling with that one, Helen was behind me, with her arms around my neck, saying is this man bothering you? Charlie, where the fuck have you been, remember why you’re here, this is your chance, Charles Lewis, but we were talking about the difference between PVC and latex I said, and Helen said I bet you were, you dirty sod, but come on now, you’re wasting time and when I turned to say goodbye the woman had disappeared but that was fine because Helen dragged me back to the dance floor where Fran had been all this time and she screamed and laughed when she saw me as if I’d been gone for years and held her hands out and we danced together just like she’d danced with Alex, her fingers linked behind my head, my hands on her waist, the slip of the fabric, the fabric of the slip, legs intertwined, her breasts pressing against my chest, the soft mallet thumping beneath my ribs, and over her shoulder I could see Alex talking to a guy and then kissing him and leading him from the dance floor towards the pool and when I stepped back to look at Fran her eyes closed, her damp hair sticking to her forehead, laughing and I said are you feeling anything and she opened her eyes and said no, not from the pill and I said what do you mean? and she said oh, Charlie, I don’t think I can stand this any longer, come, and she took my hand and pulled me out through the crowd and across the lawn towards the trees until we were at the edge of the light—
—and then she stopped and turned and even over the music I could hear our breathing and the blood pumping in my head as she took it between her hands and said kiss me and so we kissed, gently at first, her mouth very soft and tasting of alcohol and lemon, and then more intently, her mouth opening just a little but with no teeth grinding together this time, no sense of anything being wrong at all, here or anywhere else in the world, and oh, that, that was by the book.
After a while she pulled away and looked at me, breathless, her hand still on my neck. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ We found a wall to lean against, an unlit, unglazed part of the house near a door where the caterers sometimes stepped out to smoke. I heard someone point us out in the darkness and laugh. ‘Don’t stop,’ she said and I placed my hands higher, on either side of her rib-cage where the silk of Mrs Asante’s nightdress came to an end and Fran’s skin began, and she took my hand and placed it on her breast and here I thought my heart might stop. All this time we kissed, more passionately now until Fran laughed and pulled away and rubbed her lips with the heel of her hand.
‘I think they call this “hungry kissing”.’
‘Is it all right?’
‘What do you think?’ My hand was still on her breast, which seemed strange while we were having a conversation. What was the etiquette? Should I take my hand away and put it back later when we stopped talking? Would she notice? Instead she placed her own hand over mine and held it there.
‘Has my lipstick gone?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘You’re wearing it now,’ she said and we kissed some more, my thumb slipping inside the nightdress and then, with some contortion, into her bra. Again, I waited for her to move my hand away and instead she pressed herself harder against my leg, but I couldn’t quite lose the awareness of the contortion of my arm, my elbow sticking out to one side as if leaning on a mantelpiece, and when one more waiter saw us, laughing and shouting ‘Go on, my son!’ she stepped away.
‘We should …’
‘I know.’
‘I don’t want to though.’
‘One more minute,’ I said and while we kissed, I wondered – should I tell her that I loved her? I’d not said this before, or rather I’d spoken it to Harper, dead drunk, and to inanimate objects, a pizza or a birthday present, but never in a situation where I might actually mean it. I’d come nowhere near. Now, suddenly, as if remembering a forgotten word, one that’s been in your mind but just out of reach, I wanted to say it out loud.
Still I hesitated. Partly this was shyness; even in all this passion, I couldn’t quite shake off the cheap familiarity of the phrase. Embarrassment aside, I had an old-fashioned, almost chivalric sense that those words should not be scattered around. Like a wish or a runic spell that summons up demons, the phrase had to be used with absolute care, and though I might then say it a thousand times, I could say it for the first time only once. Not yet though. Instead I leant back to look at her. Her face had changed somehow, her features differently proportioned, sharper even in the soft light, like in an eye test when the optician drops a lens into the frame. Nothing I’d ever seen came close to this and I said the other thing that I felt strongly.
‘You’re so beautiful.’
She didn’t laugh or jeer. She looked quite serious. ‘You’re drunk,’ she said.
‘I’m really not,’ I said. ‘Or if I am, then I still mean it. I’ve never known anyone remotely like you, not anyone. You are … the greatest thing.’
She kissed me again, lightly this time as if to calm me down. ‘Let’s go and find the others,’ she said, then she took my hand, and we walked back into the light.
The drugs had no effect, but it is true that the rest of the night had the feel of a montage even while it was taking place. We could see the question in our friends’ eyes as we approached the dance floor and so we answered it, Fran pulling me towards her, holding my face and kissing me. ‘There – happy now?!’ she shouted, and they laughed with Helen rolling her eyes, and we fell into a four-square huddle before breaking apart and dancing until our clothes stuck to our skin with sweat. ‘Pool!’ shouted Alex, somehow pulling the shoes from his feet even as he ran, and tripping straight into a splashy dive. Helen went in fully clothed, lowering herself in down the steps, and for the second time that day I pulled my shirt over my head, less self-conscious this time, and laid it reverently out on the damp grass. ‘You can’t swim in those,’ said Fran, and so I turned my back and took off my jeans and found myself grateful that I’d put on my best and plainest underpants, the pair I thought of as somehow classic. We held hands, took a run-up, whooped and landed in water that felt crisp and delicious, with a silver-blue, viscous quality like gin. For a moment we stood together soberly in the centre of the pool, unsure what to do next. I was a pretty strong swimmer at that time and, wanting to advertise even the smallest of my talents, displayed a few strokes. But it didn’t seem right, pounding lengths in front crawl and backstroke.
‘Of course, it’s basically all these people’s bath water,’ said Helen. ‘All these sweaty old people.’
‘Helen, don’t be gross,’ said Alex.
‘So we just stand here, shivering?’ said Helen. ‘Is that it?’ She slapped the water and, as if this was a signal, Fran rolled and twisted aw
ay towards the deepest part of the pool, where I followed, diving and forcing open my stinging eyes to see her somersaulting in slow motion once, twice, three times, the black of the nightdress spooling around her like squid ink. I took another breath, pushed off and swam closer, affecting a kind of merman grace but scraping myself on the pool’s bottom. We surfaced, took another breath, submerged again and kissed underwater, closed-lipped then opening our mouths and laughing at the fizz of bubbles. We surfaced and I went to kiss her again but there are limits to all passion—
‘You need to wipe your nose,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘You’ve got something –’ and I indicated the green emerald of snot that had found its way onto her upper lip.
‘Okay. Sorry about that. Pretty sexy.’ She swiped at her face with the back of her hand. ‘Did you notice it?’ she said. ‘Underwater?’
‘Notice what?’
‘Okay. Listen to this music!’ Unfamiliar disco played, orchestral and lush. ‘Now go under!’ she said, and as we sank below – nothing changed. Some finely tuned speaker system had made the water disappear, the music as loud and crisp as before. Amazed, we tried to dance, spoofy disco moves, grabbing at each other so that we might remain in the deepest part of the pool for as long as our lungs could bear, her nightdress black and slippery, her skin cool and dimpled with goose-bumps. I placed my hand at the top of her thigh and, just for a moment, felt hers cupped between my legs before she laughed and pushed herself off to the surface. I grabbed at her ankles, but she was gone, and now I was faced with the new problem of getting out of the pool without drawing attention to myself. ‘No petting, no running, no bombing,’ called Alex, and so I stood, cool and pensive, and pressed my erection hard against the pool tiles, hoping to cut off the circulation like a finger trapped in a door.
Somehow the four of us found ourselves back in the house, shoes in hand, clothes still damp, hair clinging, finding drinks and padding from room to room. The other guests continued to regard us with tolerant amusement as we arranged ourselves on low modular seating, as if this was just another Friday night, Fran’s head on my shoulder, her hair scented deliciously with chlorine. The pill had no effect, but I had a fantastic sense of benevolence and open-mindedness, so that I felt no embarrassment at all when Alex recited the Queen Mab speech to a small silent crowd, quietly and plainly, and was surprised to find that I understood every word.
Sweet Sorrow Page 23