by Tom Barry
“Yes Andy. The same deal you’ll see in other major tourist developments. Like I said back in The Candle. It’s totally legit.”
“Except we have no intention of paying them a rental income. And we’re going to do a runner as soon as our coffers are full, leaving everyone high and dry, with apartments they can’t give away let alone sell.”
“That Andy, is most certainly not what the intention was. And it is intent that is what is important. Everything was well intended, we’ve just run into difficulties. It happens all the time in business, as you well know. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not a scam and, frankly, I resent the suggestion that it might be.”
“Then what is the future for the scheme now?”
“There isn’t one. It will be closed down, and replaced with another that does not rely on tour operator contracts. The guaranteed rental scheme is, or rather was, essentially a marketing device to attract investors and make sales. It was not necessarily viable in its own right.”
“In other words, a sort of ‘buy to let’ scam, then?”
“No, not a scam at all, as I said, everything was well intended.”
“Come off it,” snapped Andy. “You are not telling me the people buying this week are not being partly induced by a guaranteed rental scheme? It’s trumpeted in all the literature. That is deception.”
“First, none of us want to be in this situation. It has been forced upon us. Second, it is not deception. Yes, it may be manipulation; that I grant you, but manipulation is very different from deception.”
“Help me understand that, in case I ever need to explain it to a man in a blue uniform.”
“It is not semantics. Everyone in life is manipulating those around them all the time. Trying to get things done their way. You manipulate Kate and Kate manipulates you. Businesses and newspapers and governments are manipulating people en masse all the time. They just tell you that part of the story that they want you to know. They leave out the stuff that doesn’t fit with their agenda. It’s how things work. Some people are just better at it than others.”
“Sorry, Jay, I’m not buying it. There is such a thing as integrity. Or at least I thought there was.”
Jay mustered every ounce of sincerity within him, looking Andy squarely in the eye. “Maybe some of the people who bought here have been naïve. And whoever said gullibility was finite probably didn’t sell timeshare. But it is not our job to protect people from their own naivety. Our job is to run a business and make a profit.”
Andy nodded in silent resignation, his eyes gloomy with the thought of Kate’s wrath. “Let’s just make sure everything we do is legal; losing money is one thing, we don’t want to lose our liberty.”
Jay put his arm round Andy. “Come on, let’s have some lunch. Unless my eyes were deceiving me, there’s a young woman with hazel eyes and raven hair who will be mightily disappointed if you stand her up.”Thirty-one
Lucy kicked off her shoes and spread her long legs across the bench seat of the café at Gatwick’s North terminal, and settled down to wait for Tessa to come through arrivals. She was soon lost in her own world, like any literary genius in the throes of creation, as her imagination ran wild and her thumbs worked feverishly to keep up with it.
“Caught you,” said a familiar booming voice, as two hands slapped down on Lucy’s shoulders, startling her and causing her to guiltily snap her phone shut over the graphic text she had just composed.
“About time too,” she said with a smile, leisurely flipping her phone open again and reading over her masterpiece with satisfaction. “What do you think,” she asked, offering the screen to Tessa for her literary critique, as her friend settled herself in the seat opposite.
“Very good, very good,” said Tessa, marvelling at Lucy’s inventiveness and her capacity to dangle and tease through cyberspace. “I really think you are beginning to get the idea of this guy thing and how it works.”
“I suppose you mean that Jay thinks with his dick?”
Tess drew herself up on the seat to embark on her unique brand of moralising. “A standing cock has no conscience,” she declared, “and you proved that by getting him to commit to going to the wedding, which you could never have done otherwise.” The two middle-aged ladies on the neighbouring table tut tutted their disapproval before falling silent, eager it seemed to have their ears offended further by Tessa’s vulgarity.
Lucy hated to dampen the look of victory on her friend’s face but she could not pretend any more that all was going to plan. “But he’s trying to back out of it, Tess. I’m in danger of being no better off than before, except that in the process I have given him the shag of his life. So he wins again.”
Tessa scowled and drew herself even higher. “Wrong! He only wins if you let him. Let’s go over how it works one more time shall we?”
Lucy almost felt she should take notes at what was fast becoming a regular lecture. She settled instead for a look of attentiveness, one that she convinced herself was feigned but often proved all too real.
“Jay, like all bastards, will say anything he has to in order to get you to spread those thighs, or get you to swallow when you don’t want to,” Tessa continued.
Lucy suppressed a smile and said, “I know I don’t have to Tess, but I like to swallow.”
“Then, Lucy, you are an exception,” she replied, her voice growing higher as she tried to understand how one woman could be so perfectly constructed to satisfy male desire. “And Jay is one lucky fucker. But what you need to understand is that you need to make everything a negotiation. Swallowing is a big thing and you need to take advantage of that. There’s no way that Texan tart will still be doing it, if she ever did in the first place. She’ll be spitting it into a Kleenex, and only then on his fucking birthday.”
“Still, I think it may be a little late to make that aspect of our relationship negotiable,” said Lucy, twisting a strand of hair around a slender finger as last week’s lovemaking replayed itself behind her sparkling eyes.
“But it’s the wider point I’m making that you need to get your head around, instead of mooning over what you’ve been getting your mouth around,” continued Tessa, whose eyes were lit up by the chance to reiterate her principles.
“Jay has things that you want, and you have things that he wants. So what you did the other night was exactly right, and it worked. You held out giving him want he wanted, until he gave you what you wanted.”
Lucy dug her nails into the arm of the chair in frustration. “And as I said, now he wants to back out. He can’t leave Rusty over the weekend and he says that’s that.”
“Bullshit,” said Tessa, pounding her fist into her palm, “we know the bastard spends half his weekends in Tuscany anyway, so his wife’s needs on a Saturday afternoon are hardly his top priority, are they?”
“But if he won’t come to the wedding then there’s not really much I can do about it…”
Tessa shook her head vigorously, lashing her glossy ponytail like a whip. “The man has made a firm commitment, and you need to hold him to it. For fuck’s sake, girl, it’s damn near an issue of morality, and right is on your side. He’s made a promise, and he needs to stick to, it’s as simple as that.”
Lucy rolled her eyes. “So I just tell him that, the morality bit, and he will realise that he’s in the wrong, and it will all be sorted? Sorry, Tess, but I don’t think so.”
“True,” she acknowledged, “telling an arsehole like Jay what he should or shouldn’t do is completely useless. You have two weapons you should be reaching for and neither of them involve common sense — the carrot and the stick.”
“The carrot and the stick?” Lucy echoed as she slumped back into the chair in preparation for a simile the length of a blockbuster.
“It works like this,” Tessa began, “think of the carrot as Jay’s dick.” Lucy could have written a book on phallic metaphors — her text earlier proved that — and she sat even straighter as her colleague continued with considerable g
usto.
“That’s what you reached for the other night, and you got him to commit to being your escort at a wedding. Now all you need to do now is reach out those magic hands of yours for the stick.”
“And what is my stick?” asked Lucy.
Her friend let out a hint of a snort. “Some things you need to figure out for yourself. I can only help; I can’t tell you what you should be doing. But, if I were in your shoes, I’d be thinking about what it is that really scares Jay. Get him focused on consequences; the consequences if he doesn’t honour his solemn commitment to take you to this fucking wedding.”
She took a sip at her latte, studying Lucy across the rim of the glass and watching the wheels go round behind the soft emerald green eyes.
“You don’t mean threatening to call Rusty, or something like that?” she asked in a hushed tone, fear of the very idea of such a conversation written bold across her features.
“Well, maybe tone that idea down just a notch or two, Luce,” said Tessa, everything in her body language promising an idea that she wouldn’t share.
Lucy’s patience with her friend was waning. “Listen, we can play twenty questions here or you can help me out. What are you thinking about?”
Tessa shrugged. “That has to be up to you. But I don’t think we should be thinking about threatening anything, not least unless you are prepared to follow through on that threat if necessary. And if I recall last time we spoke on this, bringing things to a head with the Lizard was something you didn’t want to do, right?”
“Not yet anyway.”
“Ok, so think about something you could do that would put the fear of God into him. You’ve got a while to think about it anyway because you aren’t seeing him for a couple of weeks now, are you?”
Lucy nodded. “He’s tied up in Tuscany apart from next weekend, and he has to be home then, something to do with Rusty needing him to be at the kids’ end of term sports day.”
Tessa burst out laughing. “That’s the shittiest excuse I’ve ever heard.”
“Well,” said Lucy, glad of the chance to take some of the initiative from her friend, “from what I gather, it seems like things are a bit different up in Cheshire from where I went to school in Croydon. I got the impression from Jay that the school sports day is something else. The mums all dress up and try to outdo one another. It’s more competitive a day for the parents than it is for the kids. A big social get together.”
Tessa imagined what a sports day at an exclusive private school must be like. The enclosure at Royal Ascot came to mind, except with spoilt brats running around instead of preened horses.
“Perfect, Lucy, just perfect!” Tessa shouted, making the women at the next table shake their heads and finally pick up their cups and leave. “The last place anyone would want to see his mistress, right? Just imagine it for a minute; a possible scene in front of the kids, all those stuck up parents just lapping it up, teachers in their frilly cotton dresses gossiping. And it’s less than a week away as well.”
“So you reckon I should threaten Jay that I’ll turn up and make a scene at the sports day?”
“Better than that,” said Tessa, knocking the menu off the table with a gesture of triumph. “You do turn up. But you don’t tell Jay what you are planning. They don’t hand out printed invitations to the kids’ sports day, and there’ll be no security or anything at the school gates. He’ll be bricking himself from the moment he first sees you, which you need to make sure is when he is tied up with Rusty and her friends.”
“And make a scene?” asked Lucy, looking apprehensive.
“No need for that. In fact it’s almost better if you can arrange it so you don’t give Jay a chance to talk to you. Once he’s seen you, the job’s done. Then get the hell out of there, which will leave Jay shitting himself for the rest of the day that you will return and show up in the egg and spoon race.”
Lucy was warming to the idea. “Or the sack race, he’s used to seeing me in that.”
“You will need to look your best, like a proper tart; a see through blouse and legs showing right up to your arse. Just so you get noticed. Think about it —all those dads with their eyes out on sticks wanting to fuck you. And the mums trying to figure out whether you’re bonking their husband or one of the six formers.”
“He’ll go ballistic,” whispered Lucy in tentative glee.
“Yes, he will. And then he will go to the wedding. But that’s not where the game ends; it’s where it starts.”Thirty-two
The view from Maria’s porch was the very picture of serenity, the gentle incline of the driveway falling away into olive groves and vineyards, stretching into the horizon like an ocean of green. Isobel felt a part of it as she enjoyed a light breakfast with Maria, the nearpermanent tension in her body eased by the knowledge that Peter was three thousand miles away. The silence was only interrupted by her own gentle humming, an almost unconscious noise that seemed to throb from the very centre of her body, resonating happiness into the morning air.
“So all is well in the world this morning, despite the cat having taken your tongue?” Maria asked with a smirk, unable to restrain herself any longer.
Isobel looked up from her toast. “I’m sorry, I was miles away.”
“I know where you were,” said her friend with a smile, “now are you going to tell me what happened there?” She looked almost wicked in the morning sun, her eyes sparkling in anticipation of Isobel’s fall from grace.
Isobel held back her laughter at Maria’s transparency. “I’m sorry about not coming back here yesterday; it was very selfish of me. I hope you aren’t too mad at me.”
“Don’t be silly, Isobel; it’s not as if you left me in some bar while you made off with your catch for the evening. And if it helps your guilt, let me tell you that while you were with Jay, I was catching up on lost time with Angelo. So we both did ok.” Even though Maria wasn’t asking any questions her voice was laden with expectation and Isobel had only to lean back and wait for her patience to exhaust itself once more.
“Now come on, I want all the juicy bits,” Maria burst out, bouncing on her chair in anticipation. “Nothing too graphic…” she added, grinning so widely her face threatened to tear in two, “unless you feel you must, of course.”
Isobel kept her expression blank as she appeased her, giving a matter of fact account of the events of the day before; how she and Jay made love in the open, and then spent the rest of the evening and the night in his flat.
“And everything went ok?” asked Maria with a suggestive lifting of her eyebrows.
“Yes, I think so. For me, anyway. And I think for him too.”
“So he is not just a charmer with a big smile and good looks, he also knows how to make a girl feel good in bed?”
Isobel frowned, hating how Maria turned everything beautiful into a cliché.
“Yes, he does,” said Isobel, stiff and emphatic, as if Jay’s sexual prowess was testament to her own discerning tastes, an area too sacred to mock.
Maria allowed herself a quiet smile of vindication. “So, it was once in the wood and then about twelve hours straight in his bedroom?” Isobel nodded, bracing herself for further questions. “So more than once in the bedroom then?”
“Yes, Maria, more than once.” Her words came out as a series of sighs.
“So twice, three times, four times? Come on, Isobel, you’ve got to let me have some fun here too.”
Isobel acknowledged her excitement with slight displeasure but indulged her nonetheless. “Three times, I think.”
“And lots of different ways in the process?” Maria reached over and flicked her arm, the answers not coming fast enough for her voraciousness.
“A few different ways.”
“What sort of different ways?” Her hand now grasped Isobel’s arm, tightening with suspense.
Isobel opened her mouth to speak but somehow couldn’t; she wanted the night to remain inviolate, untouched by Maria’s interrogation.
&nb
sp; “You know, different positions, that’s all,” she said, her words lacking conviction as she turned back to her toast.
“Oh please, stop being so coy, we are grown up girls. For all you are telling me you might as well be describing a night with Peter. And I know that deep down you are longing to tell me how it was different.”
Maria’s final words stirred Isobel and she steeled herself to reveal the details, happy in the belief that her initial reticence had established her as different from Maria, shown that they still sat at the breakfast table, an angel and devil in alliance. She took a deep breath and revealed everything, hesitant at first but then lost in the memory of it all.
“What was strange,” she said, “was that in the wood he was so tender. As if it was my first time, which in a way it felt like it was. But then in the bedroom it was different. The things he did. The things he encouraged me to do. I did things I haven’t done with Peter in ten years.”
“And how did you feel about all that?” Maria asked, the words of a counsellor falling from her seductive mouth.
“I don’t know, my mind is all mixed up about it. On the one hand I felt like I was being his whore, doing those things. And at the same time I knew I wanted to do them. He didn’t make me. It felt like I wanted to try everything, do everything, all the things I’ve never done before, the things I’ve just read about.” She was tentative and anxious, looking to Maria to pierce the dream with her claw-like nails.
“Wow, this is more like it,” said Maria, leaning in closer. “Do tell more. And can you please be a bit more specific?”
Isobel twisted her fingers in her lap, wrenching them apart and forcing them together again and again. “Well, at one point he was running his tongue all around my belly button, and the next thing I knew I was pushing his head lower.”
“So lots of oral?” Maria was almost salivating at the mouth as Isobel nodded, her face tinged a cherubic pink. “And not just one way of course?” Again Isobel nodded, the pink darkening to red.