‘Me Tarzan …’ he said. I giggled and started to sit up, but I felt a firm hand on my shoulder, holding me down. ‘Stay where you are for five minutes and finish those reps. I know how you like to get out of them. Then come up to the dance studio. I’m going to teach you some very special chi gong moves.’
And then he was gone on those silent feet.
It felt like the longest five minutes in history, but finally the hand on the clock ticked round and I went upstairs, my heart pounding louder than the tramping feet on the treadmills downstairs.
The dance studio was empty and dark with just a few shafts of light from the streetlamps outside shining through the high windows. It was a bit creepy. I stood in the doorway for a moment until my eyes adjusted and then took a few steps inside.
All I could see was the wall of mirrors, the barre and the piles of exercise mats against the opposite wall. It smelled of sweaty bodies mixed with floor polish. I took another step inside and a hand suddenly grabbed my right arm and pulled me over into the darkness. It was James – real James, my James, bareheaded, barefaced and beautiful.
I started to speak, to tell him how happy I was to see him, but before I could get a word out, his mouth was over mine and he had pushed me back against the wall. There were no slow gentle kisses this time, his tongue invaded me, almost violently, and pinned my head back, while his hands went to work elsewhere. He didn’t say a word as he tugged up my top and sports bra with one hand, my shorts down with the other and entered me as suddenly as he had grabbed my arm.
It was rough, fast, brutal and utter bliss.
Afterwards we slid down the wall together and landed in a heap on an exercise mat. We just lay there panting and staring at each other in the semi darkness. He stroked my head.
‘I hope I didn’t hurt you,’ he said.
I shook my head, I was still trembling. It had flashed through my mind as he tore off my clothes, that he was behaving just as David Maier had at Suzy’s party, but the difference was that I wanted him to and he knew it. What a difference. He bent over and kissed me tenderly on the lips. Then on the cheeks, the forehead, the nose, the chin.
‘I couldn’t help myself,’ he said. ‘I’ve been going crazy thinking about you. There was no time to be nice.’
‘It was nice,’ I said. ‘Very nice.’
I lifted myself up, pushing him over and pinning his arms down onto the mat. ‘So nice,’ I said, pulling up his polo shirt and flicking my tongue over his nipples and down his flat, hard belly. ‘So nice, you’re going to have to do it again.’
And that was how it went on. I went to the gym just as I always had. Mostly James was there, sometimes he wasn’t, and when he was we made love like animals – or just like people who were crazy about each other.
Mostly it was in the dance studio – all over the dance studio – but we also found shelter in the ladies’ changing rooms, the steam room, the showers, in a cleaner’s cupboard and, on one outrageous occasion, very early in the morning, on the chair at the front desk. It was different every time, but it was always divine.
What James had told me about all-over fitness was true, I realized. Along with strengthening the muscles of my back and abdomen, I also seemed to have strengthened the muscles inside. I could make him come without moving visibly.
His breathing techniques made a difference too. I asked him about it and he showed me how I could use breathing to hold back my orgasm, which just made it better. He could hold his back for ages when he wanted to and he often wanted to. In short, he drove me wild. Frequently I would come back to consciousness with my teeth sunk into his hand, which he’d clamped over my mouth to muffle sounds I’d had no idea I was making.
But it wasn’t just sex – James had to work after all and he couldn’t leave the desk unless one of the other guys was there too. When he had to keep an eye on things I would stay on after my workout and sit behind the desk with him, just chatting and laughing together. The only thing we didn’t talk about was the King George Hospital, or anything to do with James’s investigations.
‘If you don’t know something, then no one can trick or force it out of you, can they?’ he’d said right at the start. And in all honesty I was quite happy not to have my little dream world shaken by the sordid realities of what James might have been uncovering. It also made it easier for me to be ‘normal’ with Dee. Most of the time, I did a really good job of not thinking about it.
The other thing we didn’t talk about was where James lived, or what his phone number was, but I’d stopped caring. Although he wasn’t always there, I saw him often enough at the gym to sustain my sanity and I figured it was all part of his least-known, least-risked professional philosophy. And while I didn’t know what most people would consider fairly basic facts about him and had never seen him outside the gym, apart from the night at the King George Hospital, I was getting to know him as a person, very well indeed.
Our backgrounds could hardly have been more different, but we had a lot in common. We were born six months apart in the same year and shared a lot of childhood cultural references, even though I’d grown up in a West Country vicarage and he’d grown up in an Australian industrial town.
He told me it was the way the huge multinational company had got out of paying his family compensation when his father died from asbestos-related lung disease, entirely related to his job – when James was ten years old – that had made him so fanatical about uncovering corporate corruption and injustice in his adult life.
So while the sex had rearranged the heavens for me, it was so different from anything I had experienced before, I loved spending easy time with him just as much. In fact, the more we made love, the more I wanted to talk to him and the more we talked, the more I wanted to ravish him. I hadn’t realized how the two worked together before. With Hugo, sex was something that happened occasionally and had very little to do with anything else in our relationship. With James the two were indivisible.
I was walking home from the shop one beautiful September evening, admiring a magnolia tree in full bloom and wondering if I would see him later, when the meaning of that occurred to me. It must be the difference between close friendship and true romantic love, I realized. Hugo and I had been inseparable best friends. James and I were lovers.
I did sometimes get worried that I was obsessing on him way too much, but it was only the second serious love affair I had ever had in my life, so – I told myself – it wasn’t surprising I was going a bit silly in the head.
One evening I was in the kitchen at home, stirring a risotto and thinking – guess what? – about James. I was just remembering how his wet body had looked the night before from my vantage point, kneeling on the floor in the ladies’ showers, when Percy appeared beside me.
He took the spoon from my hand and tapped the edge of the saucepan. I looked down to see a smoking pan of half-burned rice.
‘You put Tom’s plimsolls in his lunch box yesterday, Antonia,’ said Percy, into my left ear. ‘And his sandwiches in with his PE kit.’
I giggled in my new half-witted way.
‘I know what’s up with you,’ continued Percy, still whispering. ‘You’re spunk drunk. Somebody is rogering you senseless, you lucky girl.’
I turned and looked at him in amazement. How did he know?
He took the ruined risotto off the stove and filled the pan with cold water.
‘I’d just love to know who it is,’ he said. ‘Any chance of a night cap and a cosy chat with Uncle Percy later, when young Tom is in bed? Or are you rushing off to that gym where you spend so much time? Hmmmm?’
I’m fairly certain I blushed. Percy snapped his fingers in triumph.
‘Got you!’ he said. ‘I knew it. You’re being given a damned fine seeing-to by one of those fellows at Muscle City. At my gym too! You are a fast learner, you naughty girl. Now, I wonder which one it is …’
He paced up and down the kitchen with all his theatrical flair.
‘Couldn
’t be that awful Tristan,’ he was saying. ‘He’d be far too sentimental. He’s the kind who talks about girls as “ladies” and buys them padded Valentine cards. Can’t be the dirty biker, I don’t think you’re that depraved yet, still got a way to go. Although I rather like him, of course. Then there’s that very attractive Chinese Malay. Beautiful skin, but I think he’s my team rather than yours …’
I had the strong feeling he knew exactly who it was and was just enjoying teasing me. Percy could tease for England.
‘Perce,’ I started, seriously concerned that it had gone far enough, but there was no stopping him.
‘I’ve got it,’ he was saying. ‘It’s that nice chap who wears that silly hat all the time. The cap is very unbecoming, but the body underneath is knock out. Muscled, but not overdone. I believe he’s some kind of martial arts champion, am I not wrong?’
He snapped his fingers again. He was having such a good time.
‘That’s who picked you up here that night,’ he cried, triumphantly. ‘The time you didn’t come home, you filthy girl. That was him without the hat. I can see it quite clearly now. Well, good for you. I’ve had a big flirt with him myself, got me nowhere, of course, but I thought he was charming. Found me once in flagrante in the steam room, rather embarrassing really, but he just laughed. He has a good sense of humour for a muscle man, normally they’re frightfully dreary.’
He was quite pink with triumph, standing there with his hands on his hips, his various steel rings glinting as he quivered with satisfaction. I was equally pink with embarrassment and confusion. He reached over and tapped me lightly on my right breast with the wooden spoon.
‘Your nipples are hard, darling,’ he said. ‘Total give-away. You’d be a useless spy.’
18
Needless to say, I told Percy all about James. I could tell he was quite hurt that I hadn’t ‘shared my joy’ with him (as he put it) sooner and after all he had done for me and Tom, after Hugo left, I felt the least I could do was give him a vicarious thrill with lavish descriptions of James’s sexual attributes. I had suspected for a while that Percy’s stories about his wild goings-on at Lady Jane beach were largely imagined, or certainly not as frequent as he liked to imply.
‘Oh, do tell me again about when he grabbed your arm and took you,’ he said, pouring himself another brandy and lighting a black Sobranie – he’d abandoned the cocktail variety along with his mauve hair. ‘I adore that bit. Tell me how he didn’t utter a word.’ He shivered with pleasure at the thought of it. ‘Oh, I shall never look at him in the same way. It’s always the quiet ones, you know.’
He hardly let me get a word in edgeways, he was so overexcited. He reminded me so much of Tom sometimes it was extraordinary.
‘Tell me, darling,’ he said in conspiratorial tones, grasping my forearm and leaning towards me. ‘Is he terribly … big?’
I had to laugh. He was so serious.
‘Well, I don’t have much to compare it with, in all honesty, Percy, but I think he is more than adequately catered for by all accounts.’
‘Bigger than Hugo, eh?’ he said, wickedly.
‘Yes,’ I replied, happily. ‘Much bigger than Hugo. And Greg too, I should think.’
‘And girth?’ asked Percy, in his most genteel voice, creating a round shape with his middle finger and thumb, his little finger coquettishly raised.
I looked at him, puzzled. ‘What do you mean, “girth”?’
‘It’s all in the girth,’ he proclaimed. ‘Everybody gets hung up on length, nine inches, ten inches, all that nonsense, who cares if it’s four inches rampant, it’s width that matters. Diameter. Heft.’
I suddenly understood what he was getting at and made a hand gesture of my own. Percy’s eyebrow ring shot up.
‘Mmmmmm,’ he said. ‘Very nice, no wonder you’re smiling. I’m surprised you can walk. Mind you, I do think these Australian fellows are very well equipped, on the whole. No wonder they call it the Lucky Country.’
I felt extremely disloyal to James, discussing him in this crude way, but after Percy had guessed, I knew I had to tell him something, or he’d carry on digging until he found out everything – creating a lot of mess and trouble along the way.
But I certainly didn’t tell him the whole story. I told him nothing about James’s other life as a private investigator, what we’d been doing the night he had picked me up from home and of course nothing about the hideous complication of Frankie being involved. And I didn’t tell him that I strongly suspected I was falling in love with James as well. I wanted him to think it was a purely physical thing.
My only worry was coming up with a plausible reason for wanting to keep the whole relationship secret. I didn’t want him involving Dee, to try to find out more, it was all too close and too much was at stake. So, trying to use the kind of psychological tricks Percy loved to pull, I decided to appeal to his love of secret sin.
‘All this is strictly between us, of course, Perce,’ I said, holding up my glass to clink in a pact. ‘As I am sure you will understand, the sneaking around is a large part of the fun and it would ruin it if anybody else knew. I don’t want to have to try to explain it to Dee, or Antony, or anyone, they wouldn’t understand. Is that all right?’
‘Oh, noooo,’ said Percy, meaning yes. ‘I entirely understand. I had a six-month relationship like that with Halston’s Filipino butler. Dear old Roy – that was Halston’s name, did you know? No wonder he didn’t use it, what? – anyway, he didn’t have a clue what we were up to and that was the whole point, sneaking off to the coat cupboard for a knee trembler when everybody else was in the drawing room. Found out later he was doing it with half of the lady guests as well, but it didn’t matter in the slightest. No, the subterfuge is the main thing of it.’ He tapped the side of his nose and winked. ‘Secret squirrel,’ he said. ‘You can rely on Uncle Perky.’
Having ’fessed up to Percy, I had to do the same to James. To my great relief, he didn’t seem that worried about it. We were sitting behind the Muscle City front desk playing backgammon when I told him. It was two in the morning – just a normal night in the totally wacko life I was now completely used to.
‘I hope you aren’t cross, Jimbo,’ I said. ‘But I know Percy. He’d guessed right and he knew it. He can read me like a trashy magazine. If I hadn’t confessed, he would have dug away tirelessly until his suspicions were confirmed, which would have been a lot messier. He’s not a troublemaker by nature, but he really can’t bear being left out. As it is, he is enjoying the naughtiness vicariously.’
‘I’m enjoying the naughtiness too,’ said James, taking one of my pieces off the board. ‘I think you did the right thing. It was a good psychological move.’
I threw the dice.
‘But that wasn’t a good backgammon move,’ I said, putting my piece back on and removing two of his. I wagged my tongue at him and he bared his teeth at me, growling and pretending to be cross. I considered his reaction to my Percy confession for a moment.
‘I’m surprised you aren’t more concerned,’ I said. ‘You were so adamant about the secrecy before.’
‘Well, that was a while ago.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Six weeks, three days to be exact.’ He grinned at me. ‘After that length of time I’m satisfied no one has made a connection between you and me and the courting couple up at the King George, so I think we can relax a bit.’
He paused and looked up at me.
‘But I still think you should exercise extreme caution where Dee is concerned,’ he said. ‘Even if we hadn’t seen her husband that night I would have advised you to be careful around her.’
‘Well, it does explain something,’ I said. ‘I could never understand why she was so cagey when I first met her. She was like Bambi, she was so nervous and jumpy. She’s still very wary of revealing any personal details and I’ve never even been to their house. Percy got inside once, through his usual chicanery, but I’ve never been asked.’
‘All makes total sense
,’ said James. ‘When you’re playing high stakes like Frankie does, everyone around you gets infected with the paranoia. Dee wouldn’t know the details of half of what he gets up to, but she knows enough to be in danger. She can’t ever fall out with Frankie – she knows where too many of the bodies are buried, as they say.’
I looked at him, horrified.
‘It’s just a figure of speech, Antonia,’ he said, ‘I mean she knows enough to put Frankie and a lot of other people away, which protects her, but also puts her at risk. Men like Frankie always have a beautiful wife sitting around like a flower arrangement at all their sordid little soirées with their business associates. She’s his star witness, which makes her very valuable to him – but very vulnerable to other people.’
I thought back to Dee’s shopping mania. No wonder she wanted to take her mind off her life – and no wonder she wanted to get as much out of it as she could.
‘They pay a high price for their diamonds and their designer clothes, these women, don’t they?’ I said.
‘You’re damned right,’ said James. ‘And I wish more of them understood that before they got sucked into it all. Mind you, most of them have their own skeletons to hide as well.’
I waited for him to add more, but he got a look on his face which I knew meant the subject was closed for the time being and I went back to thrashing him at backgammon. I was learning a lot from my kung fu guru. A lot about waiting. He’d tell me when he wanted to.
I didn’t see James for a few days after that and it gave me plenty of time to mull over what he’d said. If we could relax about our relationship a bit more now, maybe it meant we didn’t have to conduct it entirely in a skanky gym in the middle of the night. I had been wondering for a while what it would be like having sex with him in a bed and was getting quite obsessed with the idea of waking up beside him.
I also wanted to see what it was like being out and about with him. I felt closer to him than anyone alive – apart from Tom – and I’d only been out in public with him once, when we’d had that breakfast. It hadn’t bothered me at first, it was all so amazing and new, nothing like that seemed to matter, but now I began to crave the more normal, mundane experiences with him – staying in with a video and a plate of pasta and all that. I also wanted him to meet Tom.
Mad About the Boy Page 21