‘James, don’t kick your brother, dear.’
Despite the fact she was talking out loud and had left the door ajar, Ian wouldn’t hear a word. For him, no one else existed except Tiger Woods, Angel Cabrera, Shingo Katayama and the rest. What bizarre names they seemed to have.
‘Angel, it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.’
‘Tiger, I’ve told you before, we don’t shovel in our food like that.’
‘Elbows off the table, Shingo!’
Extraordinary how her mother’s strictures remained jangling in her head, even ten years after her death; those maternal admonitions lodged in her mind as permanently as an inscription engraved in stone. But then, as an only child, the attention of both her parents’ had been focused on her exclusively: her deportment, manners, attitude, appearance, all matters of the gravest concern. If they didn’t curb, control and constrain her, she might end up ‘going to the bad’ – one of her mother’s favourite phrases.
Spearing a carrot onto her fork, she snapped its head off, viciously. She had been born a free, wild creature and they had turned her into a lap-dog. They had even chosen her husband, more or less; picked a nice, domesticated Labrador, whom, they felt, would guard her, and the house, and not harbour treacherous longings to run wild with the pack. Left to her own devices, she might simply have eloped, and selected a cheetah as mate, someone fast and fierce and dangerous.
Still chewing her carrot, she mooched into the sitting-room again. ‘Good match?’ she asked, noticing his untouched meal. He had offloaded the tray to the coffee-table, as if food were a complete irrelevance, in face of this life-and-death event. Sitting bolt upright, with fists clenched and furrowed brow, he might have been watching the fall of the Twin Towers, rather than a mere two-foot putt.
‘Christ, yes! It’s incredibly dramatic. Phil Mickelson’s just lost his ball in Rae’s Creek!’
Three sentences. She should be deeply grateful for such bounty, although it was clear she wasn’t wanted. Wives, comments, conversation, were invariably distractions when any kind of sport was in progress.
Drifting back to the table, she found herself counting peas, as if needing some sort of mantra to calm her jumpy state. Eight, nine, ten, twelve…. A million-and-twelve, if she totted up all the peas she had ever cooked for Ian. And why not add the Brussels sprouts and broccoli florets, the carrots, leeks and runner beans – all the things she bought to keep him healthy. Yet she was the one with the illness – the cause of her sell-out, in fact; that compromise she’d been forced to make with life, adventure, love – and at the age of just nineteen. A red-blooded cheetah would hardly want a mate with diabetes. While he was out on the prowl, she’d be tied down to her insulin injections; fussing about her blood-sugar levels; swallowing a whole cache of drugs to prevent those complications threatened by the specialist: kidney failure, eye-disease, heart attack and stroke. But, of course, her mother had been crucial then, as nurse, adviser, comforter. Indeed, she had clung to her, in gratitude; willing to lose her ‘self’ in the process, simply as the price she had to pay.
All at once, she snatched up her plate, strode into the kitchen and tipped the contents into the bin. She was sick of eating healthily; sick of drugs, injections and the strict, restrictive diet. All the pies and puddings she made for Ian were, for her, forbidden fruits.
‘Are you ready for your apple pie?’ she asked, venturing in to see him again. Pointless question, when he hadn’t eaten so much as a mouthful of his main course. Nonetheless, he gave a distracted nod.
She dolloped almost half the pie onto the biggest plate she could find and put it on the coffee-table, next to the congealing chops. The pie, too, would soon go cold, and a clammy skin would have formed across the custard, by the time he got round to eating it – at midnight, more than likely.
Wouldn’t it be better to go out somewhere and leave him to his golf? True, it was blowing a gale – last week’s blustery showers having given way to more tempestuous weather – but at least that would be in keeping with her mood. On-screen, all was calm; the Augusta sky serenely blue and cloudless, with not a breath of wind. And, of course, it was daylight there, not dark.
Back in the kitchen, she ate a tiny piece of pie, guiltily and standing up, then slurped some custard from the jug, envisaging her mother’s face – aghast with horror and distaste at so sluttish a departure from the rules. Neither pie nor custard satisfied. She craved more – and yet still more.
Wandering over to the window, she peered out at the windswept garden: the branches of the apple trees bending and protesting in the murky, curdled darkness, and the gypsophila quivering, as if it had an ague. She tried to imagine being the wind – untrammelled, unconfined; free to rage and roar, blast, explore, instead of cowering safe indoors. Sundays were always tedious; days sacrosanct to hearth and home, when most of her friends were involved with their children, or entertaining relatives. Sadly, she didn’t have those options – with both her parents dead, no siblings and no offspring, and her only aunt miles away in Wales.
Annoyed by her own restlessness, she debated whether to watch the match with Ian. So long as she kept silent and didn’t interrupt the game, her presence would be tolerated.
‘Bloody golf!’ she said, aloud.
Not that she was anti-sport in general. A rugger scrum never failed to excite her: all those muddy, muscly bodies grappling with each other, high on testosterone. Boxing, too, had a definite appeal; the deft footwork, lunging blows, the genuine risk of injury. But golf was so well-mannered in comparison; lacking pace, attack and risk, and determinedly middle-class – as she and Ian were, of course. Class had mattered profoundly to her parents, who’d built their lives around tennis parties, bridge evenings and membership of the Rotary Club and, when at home, were slaves to the whole rigmarole of tea-strainers and butter-knives, immaculately ironed tablecloths, even sugar-tongs, for God’s sake. She suddenly pictured her fastidious mother handling her father’s penis with a pair of sugar-tongs – if he had a penis, that is. Such a lustful appendage seemed totally inappropriate for a timid civil servant who had emerged from the womb already clad in pinstripes and carrying a briefcase.
All at once, a blood-curdling shriek pierced the silence of the kitchen. Alarmed, she rushed in to Ian. Had he suffered some sort of seizure, precipitated by the tension of the game?
No. He was still alive, still upright. ‘What on earth’s the matter, darling?’ she enquired, forced to raise her voice above the din on-screen: roars of approval, rapturous applause.
‘Sssh! Don’t speak. Cabrera’s just chipped in from a hundred yards!’
Although relieved he was unharmed, that shriek was still resounding in her head – a shriek of such intensity and passion, she wondered if she’d imagined it. In all his years of watching sport, her undemonstrative husband had mustered little more than an appreciative smile or sigh, however huge the triumph or appalling the disaster. Yet the noise had been so deafening, it must have reached to Augusta itself. She was all the more surprised, because chipping in from a hundred yards wasn’t that astounding – almost as rare as a hole-in-one, maybe, but hardly a cause for hysteria. As she stared at him, incredulous, a second yell issued from his throat; even louder and more dramatic than the first; the very walls seeming to reel in shock.
Abruptly, she left the room and slumped down at the dining table, still neatly laid for two. How, she thought, with rising indignation, could Cabrera prompt so blatant a reaction, when she herself could not? Ian was a silent lover. Even at the point of climax, not a sound escaped him. Good manners again, no doubt. Noise would disturb the neighbours; might even make him look debauched. Such a lack of self-control was excessive and over-the-top, and certainly wouldn’t go down well in the Rotary Club.
Suddenly, she was back with Stefano, her unruly Sicilian lover; flushed and naked in his rumpled bed. He was letting out a torrent of Italian – expletives, curses, love-talk, all jumbled and mixed up. Although she couldn’t grasp th
e words, her body understood – and more so, when he switched to gasps and moans. She, too, was yelping and growling – above him, underneath him; out of her own skin and inhabiting some new, wild world where Stefano was both beast and god. She was high – on him – all the colours brighter; every part of her opening in response: her mouth, her body, her infinitely voracious cunt. All boundaries were disappearing, between beast and human, him and her. There was only now; this extreme, excessive moment; everything tumbling and tumultuous and brutally ecstatic.
As she came, she bit his shoulder – a ferocious love-bite, drawing blood, since she was solely flesh and blood now. That was only fitting. She had left her spoilsport intellect behind; her whole rationed and restricted side engulfed.
Impetuously, she sprang up from the table, raced upstairs and stripped off all her clothes. Then, rifling through her wardrobe, she grabbed a black-lace négligé she hadn’t worn in years – see-through lace, with side-slits. Her feet barely touched the stair-carpet as, now clad in the diaphanous lace, she darted down again.
‘Fuck me!’ she demanded, charging in to Ian.
He stared at her, as if she had gone insane. ‘What in God’s name are you up to, Fay?’
Stefano had never called her Fay; always Fiammetta: ‘little flame’. With him, she was a flame; on fire for him; ablaze with every sensation he aroused. ‘Fuck me,’ she repeated.
‘Don’t use that word! You know I find it gross.’
‘Screw me, then; make love to me – call it what you like.’
‘Fay, what the hell’s got into you? I’ve never known you in such a crazy mood. But I’m afraid you’ve got your timing badly wrong. This is the most riveting match I’ve seen in twenty years, so if you imagine I’d miss the end of it, to gratify some whim of yours, then you’re very much mistaken.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
Quietly, she left the room; closed the door carefully, considerately. Why shouldn’t he enjoy his game? She knew the rules – not just of golf; of marriage. That wild Sicilian interlude had been an aberration, before the outrage of her mother summoned her back to duty and decorum; to butter-knives, net curtains, sterility, suppression. She could hardly blame her mother, though. The diabetes diagnosis had been the deciding factor; casting a dark shadow on her life – making it a half-life, as it doused all spontaneity, all sense of being free to seize the day. Fine for her contemporaries to be heedless and happy-go-lucky, but she was required to maintain a constant vigilance. Monitoring became a daily ritual, and everywhere she went she had to lug her test-kits, needles, glucose – unwanted and resented baggage. Once, love had kept her alive; now it was insulin. Of course, those short six months with Stefano had seemed all the more precious in comparison; a kind of brief eternity, when – despite her restrictive parents – romance, adventure, passion, had all been possible, all real.
Suddenly, on impulse, she hitched up her lace négligé, threw her thickest coat on top, fetched her shoes, and keys, and stampeded out of the house. To hell with syringes and test-kits! However reckless it might be to venture out without them, she didn’t give a toss. Who cared about dangers to her health? All that mattered at this moment was to be living at full flame again, if only for a day, a night.
The wind embraced her; a brazen and unbridled wind; running fevered fingers through her hair; tugging at her coat, as if to pluck it off and grope her naked skin; a violent force, tormenting the cowed clouds and tearing them to tatters; ripping branches off the trees, breaking them to bits. She was one with it; unruly, headstrong, subject to no law, throwing off the shackles of her constraining, lifelong illness. She broke into a run, revelling in the gale – its insolence, its zest; the way it slapped her face; thrust cold and lustful fingers down between her legs.
Soon, she had left the streets behind and began climbing the steep hill on the outskirts of the town – not climbing – soaring, like a creature of the sky. All boundaries were lost in the moonless, starless night; light and darkness fused; she and the wind intermingled, merging, as, fuelled by its explosive power, she flew.
At the summit, she surrendered; let it pummel and possess her; heard its orgasmic moan. She, too, was crying out; had escaped her skin, her universe; returned to youth and joy.
Somewhere, faint and far away, she heard Ian’s shriek re-echoing. Perhaps he had dared another shout, at some eagle, birdie, hole-in-one. She would never know; never discover who had won the match.
Because she wasn’t going back to him; refused to settle for a half-life.
Danger was her drug now.
BEGGARS
‘Talk about shopping till you drop….’ Sophie grabbed the last two seats and, having collapsed into the first, guarded the second for Laura. ‘I’m so completely knackered, I couldn’t even crawl to Selfridges if they offered me all the freebies I could grab!’
She was talking to empty air. Laura, hampered by her purchases, was still trying to fight her way into the carriage. The largest of the carrier-bags had caught in the wheels of a pushchair – to the annoyance of the harassed mother struggling to get out.
‘Kids!’ Sophie muttered, once her friend had disentangled herself and slumped, breathless, into the adjoining seat.
‘We were kids once,’ Laura retorted, anxiously checking the contents of the bag. Each item had been swathed in layers of tissue, so no damage had been done, thank heavens. She unwrapped just one of the tops: the Marc Jacobs cardigan. ‘Do you think I went overboard – I mean, buying this and all the other stuff?’
‘’Course you did – you always do – but what the hell? Considering what you’re paid, you can afford to splash out a bit.’
Laura heard the note of envy in the comment. True, advertising creatives earned twice as much as beauticians, but Sophie might eventually catch up, were she to open her own salon. And the King’s Road would be the ideal spot, to attract the ideal clients. Having just spent most of the day there, in and out of the shops, they had both been struck, as always, by the number of well-heeled Sloanes, constantly whipping out their credit cards for yet another ‘must-have’.
As the train rattled into South Kensington, a crowd of people pushed into the carriage, including a pathetic-looking girl, with a thin, pinched face and long, greasy, unkempt hair. Despite it being unseasonably cold for April, the poor creature was bare-legged and clad only in a skimpy skirt and a distinctly threadbare blouse. Struck by her air of abject misery, Laura studied her, with sympathy. Her head drooped; her shoulders sagged; her whole posture was one of defeat. Perhaps someone really close to her had died, or she’d been uprooted from her home or—
Sophie snapped her fingers. ‘Wake up, Laura! You’re miles away! I asked if you’d like to join us in Giovanni’s. Jake said he’d love to see you, and he’s bringing all his friends along, so it should be a fun evening.’
‘I’d rather get back, if you don’t mind. I’ve loads of stuff to do.’
‘Like what? Trying on all that gear and admiring yourself in the mirror?’
Laura flushed. ‘No. Other stuff.’ In truth she wasn’t overly keen on Jake – or his friends, for that matter. Admittedly, she could do with a new man, having just broken up with Alex, but she didn’t yet feel ready to put herself about. Why risk another rejection?
Her gaze returned to the girl, now positioned directly in front of her and holding on to the handrail, as the train lurched and jolted along. As she watched, the poor thing raised her head and spoke to the older woman standing beside her. The latter’s well-coiffed curls and smart camel coat only emphasized the girl’s bedraggled state. As the two began to talk, Laura strained her ears to hear. The girl was obviously upset and seemed to be pouring out her life-story; kneading her hands together and looking close to tears, although the words themselves were impossible to catch.
‘Mind you, Jake’s in a bit of a sulk. He’s had another run-in with his boss and—’
‘Sssh!’ Laura interrupted.
‘What do you mea
n, “Sssh”?’
‘That girl’s in quite a state,’ she whispered, ‘and I’m trying to hear what’s going on.’
‘Which girl?’
As Laura pointed upwards, she saw the older woman open her handbag, rummage for her purse and extract a twenty-pound note.
‘Oh, Lord!’ Laura hissed. ‘She’s touting for cash.’ She watched, amazed, as the woman pressed the note into the outstretched small, grubby hand. £20 was a hell of a lot to give a total stranger.
‘I hate these beggars,’ Sophie muttered, ‘especially on the tube, where we’re all just sitting targets.’
Laura barely heard; too absorbed in watching the girl, who appeared completely overwhelmed by her unknown benefactor’s kindness and was thanking her repeatedly; each heartfelt thank-you accompanied by a subservient little bow.
‘There was this weird guy only yesterday, going from carriage to carriage, telling everyone his hard-luck story – not that I believed a word. All they want are hand-outs to splurge on drink and drugs.’
Sophie’s voice was drowned by the rattling of the train as it pulled into Gloucester Road. The minute the doors shuddered open, the girl darted out of the carriage and dashed full-pelt along the platform.
‘See!’ Sophie jeered. ‘She can’t wait for her next fix.’
‘She did look truly skint, though. She wasn’t even wearing tights, let alone a jacket.’
‘Oh, that’s just a ploy. They deliberately dress in rags, or even borrow dogs or babies, in order to tug at your heartstrings. I saw a woman the other week, sitting on the pavement, with three babies, would you believe – and so close in age, they couldn’t all be hers. Yet a few suckers were tossing her coins and even five-pound notes. But, you know, it’s actually wrong to encourage them. Any cash you hand over simply feeds their habit.’
‘We don’t know they’ve got a habit, Soph. I mean, it’s equally wrong just assuming they’re all addicts.’
‘Why don’t they find themselves a job, then – slave all hours, like we do?’
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