by West, Sam
She resisted…just.
What the fuck is wrong with me tonight?
“What would you ladies like to drink?” Alan called over to them as Flick sat down next to Mary on the long, minimalist style, grey leather sofa topped with red cushions.
Flick couldn’t care less what he gave her, but she eyed a bottle of tonic and a nearly full bottle of gin next to a little silver dish topped with lemon slices.
“A gin and tonic would be lovely,” she said.
“What a good idea,” Mary said, settling back into the soft sofa. “I’ll think I’ll join you. So how’s the unpacking going?”
“Oh, you know, slowly but surely,” she replied, smiling and saying thanks to Alan when he bought their drinks over.
Alan and Tom sat down opposite them in the highbacked, leather armchairs on either side of the coffin-style fireplace. For some reason, Flick thought of two vampires – one old, one young.
A giggle rose up from her stomach, even though she wasn’t finding anything about this night so far remotely funny.
She took a big gulp of the drink, and fuck, was it good.
Gonna be needing a fair few more of these tonight, she said solemnly to herself.
“Moving is always such an ordeal,” Mary said. “The transitional period is by far the worst. But it won’t last forever, you’ll soon get used to things, isn’t that right, Alan?”
Alan chuckled. “Why, yes dear, you are absolutely right. They’ll soon get used to things.”
Tom appeared oblivious and relaxed, sitting there grinning happily.
Doesn’t he think they’re being as creepy as fuck? Or is it really just me?
The sound of a banging door reached her ears and Flick flinched in her seat.
“Ah, the others are back,” Alan said.
Flick forced herself to relax. Laughter drifted in from the hallway, getting louder as the footsteps approached the living-room.
Roger, and what must have been his daughter and her husband, appeared in the room.
Flick’s eyes bugged out in her head at the sight of them. Or rather, her. She paid the man little heed, her gaze irretrievably drawn to the woman.
No fucking way.
She glanced over at Tom, who was sitting up straighter in his chair, his face noticeably flushed. Her stomach twisted into a tight, jealous knot for she recognised that look for what it was: Arousal.
“So sorry we’re late,” Roger said, meeting Felicity half way as she stepped out of the kitchen. “Katie must have dragged us round every boutique in Brantom.”
“Oh, I did not,” she laughed, displaying her perfect teeth.
Bitch, came the most uncharitable thought. The woman – Katie – was perfect-looking in every single conceivable way. In fact, she was the dead-ringer for a young Kim Basinger. In her cute, knee-length white dress with the nipped in waist and high, scooped neckline, she looked like she had stepped straight out of the Batman move from eighty-nine.
She flashed a smile at them, although she didn’t make eye-contact with her, just Tom and the others. The beautiful woman ran a hand through her mane of brilliant blonde, crimped hair, and inside, Flick withered.
“Hello Everyone,” Roger said, raising his hand. “And hello Tom. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Roger strode over to Tom, who got up from the chair, and the two men shook hands.
“You too,” Tom said. “Thanks so much for having us tonight.”
“Oh, it’s our pleasure. Flick, Tom, I’d like you to meet my daughter Katie and her husband Brian.”
Katie went to Tom first, and Flick stared daggers at her. The bitch was completely blanking her, not once had she made eye-contact with her. Inside, she seethed with hatred for this woman. Did she not know that she was breaking the unspoken female code? The code being that thou shalt not flirt with another woman’s husband if said wife is in the room and you hadn’t even yet been introduced?
Then, to her horror, she kissed her blushing husband on each cheek.
The husband, Brian, came up to her, and for the first time, she properly took him in, tearing her eyes off her simpering husband and The Bitch.
“Hello, it’s nice to meet you, Flick,” he said, kissing her on each cheek.
He wasn’t that tall, five feet eight at the most, but still he had to bend to kiss her. When he pulled away and she gazed up at him, her stomach somersaulted like a school-girls because he was the spit of Gary Oldman. Her cheeks burned where he had kissed her, and her heart thumped against her sternum.
“It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Her voice came out high and squeaky, and she cleared her throat.
“How are you liking France?” he asked her.
The edges of his pale blue eyes crinkled most pleasingly as he smiled and she marvelled at the facial similarities to the Hollywood star. His hair was longish; a dirty, non-descript brown that flopped pleasingly over his forehead. It was hard to pin an age on him – he was obviously older than The Bitch, who was late twenties or so, but he could’ve been anywhere between thirty and forty-five.
“Well, we’ve only been here a few days, but I love France. I always have.”
He nodded, his smile broadening. It made his entire face crinkle in the most delightful way and she found herself mesmerised by him. His teeth were white, but also endearingly a little wonky, a front one chipped. An image of his cherry-red lips pressing down on hers flared in her mind and she pushed aside the wicked thought.
Alan and Roger meandered over to the two, highbacked leather chairs either side of the fireplace and sat down.
So entranced was she by Gary/Brian, that she didn’t notice that The Slag had come over to introduce herself.
“Hello, Flick, Mum told me all about you. She’s super excited that there’s now some young things in the village.”
Oh, fuck off.
The Slag bent down to kiss her, for she was the same height as her gorgeous husband, and Flick caught a waft of her perfume.
For the most miniscule of seconds, she recoiled in surprise, her nostrils flaring in disgust. For that brief second, she had caught a waft of pure shit. Shit and something else; something sweet and rotten and utterly foul. Something like the stench of rotten meat baking in the heat of the sun. But no, it wasn’t quite like that – it was so much worse than that.
Just as quick, the olfactory illusion passed, and all she smelled was a perfume that she easily recognised with its notes of orange and jasmine; Coco Mademoiselle.
“Are you staying for long?” Flick asked her just to make polite conversation.
“No. Tonight is our last night.”
“Oh. So you’re leaving tomorrow, then?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking.”
In a manner of speaking? What the hell kind of answer was that?
“What my wife is trying to say that we just won’t be here tomorrow, but we’ll still be in France.”
“Oh. I see,” she said, although she didn’t see at all. Were they going to stay with friends, or something?
She pushed aside the strange feeling, because it wasn’t like she actually cared where they might be going to stay.
“Is someone going to help me dish up?” Felicity called over from the kitchen.
“Okay, Mum,” Katie smiled, flouncing over.
There was no mistaking the way Tom’s eyes followed her shapely little arse all the way to the kitchen. Flick took a big gulp of her gin and tonic, surprised to find that she had drained the glass.
“Do you need another pair of hands, dear?” Roger asked, striding over to join his wife and daughter.
Their voices drifted over from the kitchen. On the face of it, the scene was so ordinary as they discussed plates, champagne flutes, wineglasses and the amount of mats they were going to need on the table as Katie banged shut all the drawers in the kitchen, huffing with her mother because she couldn’t find the serving spoons.
Yes. So ordinary.
But still the in
definable bad feeling clung to her, stirring up a misplaced sense of dread. It almost felt as if she were watching a scene from a stage-play, like they were a bunch of actors following a set script.
Like the scene playing out before her was completely and utterly false.
She frowned, completely bewildered by her turn in thoughts.
I’m being so bloody weird tonight.
“Do you want us to sit down at the table, Felicity?” Mary called over to her friend in the kitchen.
“Yes, good idea. You just all sit where you like.”
“Shall we?” Brian asked, extending his arm for her to go before him in a gentlemanly fashion.
Her stomach did a little flip at the gesture, and when she glanced over at her husband, he was frowning at her.
Fucking hypocrite.
Smiling sweetly at Brian and blanking her husband, she made her way over to the oblong table.
CHAPTER NINE
The table was laid up for eight; there were three places on either side with one place set at each end.
Flick was the first to sit down, choosing the end chair in the row of three that was furthest away from the kitchen, figuring that she and Tom were best off out of the way.
Soon, everyone was seated and there was no disguising the way her heart fluttered when Brian sat down next to her. Much to her irritation, Tom sat opposite her when he was supposed to sitting on her side, and when Katie sat next to him, she inwardly fumed.
Felicity, who was sat at the end of the table between her and Tom, raised her glass in a toast.
“Cheers, everybody. Salut.”
Everyone around the table picked up their champagne flute and echoed the sentiment.
The champagne was good, and she already had the beginnings of a pleasurable buzz on. Next to their glasses of fizz, each of them also had a glass of red to accompany the roast lamb dinner. Resisting the urge to knock back a healthy slug of that, too, she picked up her knife and fork. Rather than dump everything on the table, Felicity had dished up in the kitchen, and Flick stared down at her plate of food, her stomach growling.
Piercing a piece of the tender meat on her fork, she popped it into her mouth.
The juices exploded on her taste-buds, making her mouth-water flow. God, it was just so good.
“Felicity, this lamb is cooked to perfection,” she said most sincerely.
“Why, thank you, dear, I’m glad you like it, it’s my special recipe.”
At the other end of the table, Mary chuckled. Yet again, that strange feeling of detachment, that something was really, badly wrong, washed through her.
“Well, it’s delicious,” she said again, plastering a bright smile on her face.
“Good,” the woman replied, tucking into the food on her own plate.
“Mmm, it most certainly is,” Tom said. “Thank you so much for inviting us round tonight.”
Roger, who sat at the other end of the oblong table opposite his wife, laughed heartily. “Believe me, young man, the pleasure is all ours.”
For the briefest of seconds, Flick was sure that Felicity and Roger exchanged a look. There was laughter in their eyes, but it struck Flick as somehow cruel.
She rested her knife and fork on the edges of her plate and reached for the wine, taking a generous slug. Yes. Much better.
Alan, who sat on the opposite side of the table on Katie’s right, started talking:
“So I was watching something on the news about Brexit this morning, God, England is such a mess, I’m so glad to be out of it.”
“Don’t even get me started,” Roger replied, obviously gearing himself up ‘to get started’. “All those nonsensical slogans I keep hearing, like take back control and give Britain back to the people. Utter fucking bollocks.”
“Roger!” Felicity admonished.
“But it’s true, dear, and you know it. Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. When its Cambridge-educated champions invented the appealing slogan, take back control, what they really meant to say was, control by and for the elite.”
“Daaaad, we’ve heard it all before,” Katie said, rolling her eyes.
“Not everyone,” he replied, dropping Flick a wink.
“Yep, this is what happens when phony populism collides with politics,” Alan said.
Flick frowned. That was weird. She had been saying the exact same things the other day, like, word for word.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” Felicity said.
Next to Flick, Brian laughed, and her lower stomach did a little somersault at the deep timbre of his voice.
“Just ignore them,” Katie said, her blue eyes sparkling. Except she wasn’t speaking to her, of course, but to Tom.
“Yes,” her mother agreed. “When Roger and Alan get going, there’s no stopping them.”
Tom just sat there grinning, his face flushed. She glared over at him but he steadfastly refused to catch her eye. What the hell was up with him, anyway? He hadn’t drunk that much.
“So, tell me, Tom, do you believe in God?” Katie asked.
Of all the questions in the world to ask, she went and picked that one? She could feel her mouth hanging open in surprise and promptly shut it again. Tom looked confused, like he was surprised that anyone was talking to him at all. He laughed awkwardly, and blushed like a schoolboy.
Oh, for goodness sake.
“Oh. Well, I… No.”
“And your beautiful wife? Does she believe in God?”
Surprise gave way to downright indignation; this bitch really was the bloody limit.
“No. I’m an atheist,” she replied in as level a voice as possible. “And how about you, Katie? Do you believe in God? Or are we just here so you can try to convert us to Scientology, or something?”
“I’ve never met God. Or the devil. We all exist in our own little micro-Universe, do you not think?”
At the other end of the table, Alan, Roger and Mary seemed oblivious to the strange turn in the conversation as they got into a heated rant about Brexit.
Flick blinked, looking from Felicity, to her husband, who was still so acting so damn spacy and weird, and then to Brian. He was smiling at her, in that moment looking more like Gary Oldman than she could ever think possible.
“What my dear wife is trying to say, is that she believes in Absurdism, that she thinks there is no meaning in the world beyond what meaning we give it. There is no such thing as a good person or a bad person, and what happens, happens.”
“It’s the only way to think, don’t you agree, Flick?” Felicity asked her.
“I… I don’t know,” she replied honestly, knowing how dumb she must sound but at the same time, truly boggled by the seismic shift in the conversation.
Katie nodded solemnly, her chin resting daintily on her folded hands, looking at Flick properly for the first time since they had sat down to dinner. “It is the only truth I know and accept. The meaninglessness also encompasses the amorality of the world, whatever happens in life, or in death, may just as well happen to a good or a bad person. If you’re in the wrong place, at the wrong time, then you’re fucked.”
Flick just stared at her in confusion. She had Katie pegged as a bimbo, but this University-level Philosophy she was coming out with left her truly flummoxed. Slowly, she did her best to gather her thoughts – she was no stranger to Philosophy either, having done a term of it at Uni. But that was almost twenty years ago, and right now she was too bamboozled by this dinner party and her life in general.
Don’t let this bitch get one over you. Play along, put her in her place.
“So you’re saying that human-beings have no free-will? That they do nothing more than bumble along, victims of their own life?”
“Are you saying any different?”
Flick honestly didn’t know. Was she?
“I believe that man has free will, yes,” she said slowly, hating the way she couldn’t organise her thoughts properly.
Katie giggled, but to Flick, the so
und was like glass shattering on a tiled floor: “Human-beings experience disorientation, confusion, and dread in the face of a meaningless and absurd world. And even those emotions are not their own.”
Flick looked helplessly around the table. Only Brian seemed to want to come to her rescue.
It suddenly occurred to her that maybe he wasn’t helping at all; that maybe he was just toying with her, helping his wife to dig her grave a little deeper.
“Free will is an illusion. There is a higher plan for all of us.”
Flick stared at him, her heart sinking. Something was seriously off about this conversation – she didn’t like it one little bit.
What is he, a Jehovah’s Witness, or something?
“Do you believe in God, Brian?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “That is a more complex question than you could ever imagine. Absolutely yes, and emphatically no.”
Flick’s disorientation gave way to anger. It flared up from her stomach, bloody sick as she was of Katie and Brian talking in riddles.
“Where is this conversation going, Brian? Either you do or you don’t. Are you religious? Is that why we’re here tonight?”
“Like my wife, I am an existentialist. An existentialist can be a religious moralist, an agnostic relativist, a religious moralist or an amoral atheist. Keirkegaard was a religious philosopher, Nietzsche an anti-Christian, and Satre an atheist.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Katie said happily, her exquisite face still resting on her hands. “And they all were right and they all were wrong. It is much more simple and complicated than that.”
For fuck’s sake.
Felicity laughed, and Flick turned to glare at her. Across the table from them, the others continued to discuss the ins and outs of Brexit, and it struck Flick how softly they were speaking, how they were very much in the background, like extras in the background of a movie scene. She frowned at this thought, reaching for her wine. Without realizing it, she had drained both the champagne and the red wine. Brian reached out for the bottle of red in the middle of the table to refill her glass.
She tried to catch Tom’s eye, but he was still acting like a space-cadet. His half-smile seemed glued on his face, his eyes gleaming with a vacancy she had never seen before, not even when he was really drunk.