‘No, I’m following Graham!’
‘You don’t have to whisper, Bunty, unless you’re following him in the back seat of the Mondeo.’
They veered left towards the sports hall. ‘Sorry. Oh, he’s pulling in.’
‘Where?’ squeaked Kat.
‘At the sports hall.’
Long pause. ‘The sports hall where the squash courts are?’
Bunty peered around her bleakly. It was, in fact, the very same sports hall with squash facilities that Kat had just mentioned. Graham actually was playing squash. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, watching Graham gather his battered squash bag from the boot. ‘He can’t be just playing squash.’
‘Why not?’ said Kat, not unreasonably.
‘He just can’t … Oh! Wait. He’s not going in. He’s waiting in the doorway. He’s meeting someone. Kat! It’s a woman! A bloody blonde woman and he’s getting in her car. Shit!’
‘Take a photooooo,’ screeched Kat.
But Bunty was in too much shock to remember that she had a camera on her phone, let alone how to use it. He actually was having an affair. Her wild imaginings were right on the button. The tart even looked like Bunty had imagined, although the bottom was more firm and twangy than big and wiggling.
‘Bunty?’
‘Bastard!’ Bunty threw the car into gear.
Kat’s voice sounded extremely hopeful. ‘Are you going to follow them?’
‘No bloody way. He thinks I’m just going to take it while he pokes some blonde bint, does he?’
‘So what are you doing?’
Bunty grinned viciously. ‘Operation Shug D. I’m going to meet this Jason. And he won’t know what’s hit him.’
Kat giggled. ‘Call me after. Or during if he’s really creepy and you need an escape call.’
‘Over and out,’ snapped Bunty.
She fumed all the way to the Pig and Cauli, for the first time feeling hurt and trying to tot up all the times Graham had said recently that he was off to play squash. He’d even started going on Sunday mornings. That should have told her! Sunday mornings were sacrosanct to Graham – lying in bed too late, optimistically nudging Bunty’s thigh with his half-erect penis, giving up and eating too much bacon on buttered toast. Such had been their routine for years, ever since Charlotte had turned into the hormonally driven wreck that she now was and needed to sleep till midday.
‘Squash. Ha!’ muttered Bunty, walloping the car over one of the tree-filled concrete diamonds in the car park and berthing it diagonally in a disabled space. It was the only remaining parking spot under a light – that’s what she’d say if anyone complained. Get Priscilla onto them maybe.
As she got out, she checked the other cars in the vicinity, hoping for at least a Silver Ghost, but finding only the usual selection of sales rep cars and more ladylike, hot hatches, including a rather flash-looking Golf in electric blue with a personalised number plate: JAMMY 23. She entered the pub, nerves masked by the outrage still pulsing through her courtesy of Graham’s blatant betrayal.
There was no sign of Jason, just the usual collection of besuited twenty-somethings, notching up enormous tabs on their expense accounts. Bunty looked around. To her surprise, one of the twenty-somethings, stationed on his own in the corner of the pub, raised a hand.
‘Hi. Bunty. You look just like your photo,’ said the boy, wiping champagne out of the bum-fluff on his chin.
‘You don’t … are you Jason?’ Now that she looked again, there was a resemblance to the photo she had seen on the Croesus Club email, except that this version was only half the age of the person she’d imagined she’d be meeting.
‘Yeah!’ He laughed delightedly. ‘Photo was of me dad. Thought it might go down better, you know.’
Bunty sat down with a bump. ‘So you’re not a city trader, dynamic, earning lots, looking for … well, me?’
Jason shrugged lightly, the thin wool of his suit creasing over his shoulders like vulture’s wings. ‘Oh yeah. I am. I’m all of those things. Super rich and all that. Jammy bastard, the other traders call me.’
He poured Bunty a glass of champagne – Moet, she noticed, doubtless the very best the Pig and Cauli had to offer – while the details sank in. ‘Jammy. That’s your Golf outside?’
‘Jammy 23. My name, my age.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Bunty upended the glass, trying hard not to burp as the bubbles rushed down her gullet. ‘You’re twenty-three? That’s …’ That’s what, she thought. Not much older than my daughter? Younger than my babysitter? Downright ridiculous?
‘But … but you saw how old I am and everything,’ she stammered at length.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Jason, folding his arms across his chest and leaning back in his seat. He looked like he was appraising a racehorse.
‘So … why?’
Jason laughed, flashing an impressive set of expensive veneers. They were the most attractive thing about him. ‘It’s your age. Well, and you look good too. I like women your age. You’re the capital of China, incha?’
Bunty shook her head. ‘I’m … Beijing?’
At this, Jason tutted. ‘Well, they would go and change it, wouldn’t they? No, you’re the old name for the capital of China.’
‘Peking?’
Bunty was totally lost, but even more so when Jason leered distinctly at her crotch. ‘That’s right. Thirty-five. Peking, mate.’
Peking. She was Peking. Peeking? Or … ‘Ohhhhh,’ she said after a short period of tugging at her skirt to deflect Jason’s lecherous glance. ‘Peaking. I’m thirty-five, so I’m peaking.’
‘Sexually,’ said Jason with a nod and the faintest hint of a dribble.
She’d heard the myth, of course. Women reached their sexual peak at thirty-five, men at …. nineteen, was it? It didn’t seem likely, somehow, bearing in mind the slightly spongy nature of her breasts and stomach. Her sexual prime had to have been before her boobs turned from Pippin’s apples to small bananas. Surely someone younger, Kristiana for instance, was ‘peaking’. Bunty was over the summit and down the other side. In fact she was fairly sure she’d read somewhere that Watchit and Perv, or whoever had done the survey in the fifties, had come to this conclusion because the only women they could get to talk about sex, even admit to knowing anything about it, where in their mid thirties. Now people struck up casual conversations about it on the bus, opened up their blogs for all to see, even broadcast documentary accounts of their lurid and tasteless foragings on YouTube. Netnurse. Must get Netnurse, she reminded herself. Even that sounded vaguely tainted.
‘I lied,’ she said eventually. ‘About my age. I’m thirty-eight. Peaked. Completely peaked. Over the bloody hill and in a pit at the bottom.’
Jason didn’t look perturbed. Nor did he look like someone who could get a shag by normal means. ‘You still look pretty lusty to me.’
Bunty covered her mouth in an attempt not to giggle. Bloody Priscilla was going to die. ‘But Jason, or can I call you Jammy? Jammy, you must have known from my profile that I’m actually looking for a husband, not just a … a fling.’
To her great consternation, Jason leaned over the table and squeezed her fingers. ‘Well, I was thinking we might do ourselves a little deal. I’m a trader, see. I know my markets.’
‘Your markets?’ Bunty slid her hand out from under the boy’s sweaty fingers, hoping desperately that nobody she knew ever came into the Pig and Cauli. She fumbled furtively for the speed dial on her mobile. Come on, Kat.
‘It’s just like a business deal, isn’t it?’ Jason winked. ‘I got the money, you got the looks and the … peaking, sexual, grrrrrr stuff. Thing is, I’m always going to have the money, and you’re not always going to have the looks, so it’s not much of a deal for me if I end up being your husband, is it? So I thought we might treat it like a sort of … leasehold venture.’
Bunty spluttered champagne right down her front. ‘You want to … to rent me? There’s a name for that, you know?’
‘No
, not like that.’ Jason held up a hand. ‘You’re making it sound, you know, cheap. What I’m proposing is an old-fashioned, mutually beneficial business deal.’
Kat, call me back, call me back, thought Bunty desperately. So this was what she had to look forward to – youths barely out of puberty expecting ping-pong tricks from a desperate older woman. It might work for men, copulating with women half their age who still had firm high breasts, manuals on giving blow-jobs and vaginas like a length of hose pipe, but the prospect of clambering into bed with someone who still had regular wet dreams was too depressing by half. So depressing, in fact, that she wasn’t going to stand for another second of it.
‘Jason, let me tell you a bit about the business you’re trying to get into.’ Bunty planted her hands on the table. ‘First of all, all the money in the world would not persuade me to sleep with you. In any kind of deal, as far as I’m aware, your business partner needs to want something out of it too. And by the way, men – boys – peak at nineteen, so you’re already past your sell-by date.’ Jason’s mouth fell open as Bunty picked up the champagne and tipped it neatly into his crotch. ‘Furthermore, if you’re not very, very careful, you’ll end up with warts on your willy, and nobody will want to do business with you, ever, ever again. Good night.’
And she stalked off across the pub, hardly aware of Jason’s admiring stare and his cold-crotched groan: ‘I like your style! Come back!’
*
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Priscilla
I think you should be aware that ‘Jason’ is actually a little boy wearing his dad’s suit, and a sex maniac to boot. If I hadn’t found it quite so funny I’d be highly offended at what went on at my rendezvous. Please tell me they’re not all like that!
Bunty (which Jason/Jammy obviously thought meant ‘Bounty’)
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Dearest Bunty,
I am disappointed that your meeting was not to your liking. Jason was rather taken with you and was hoping to meet with you again. If he does not meet with your approval, however, we will move on to your second rendezvous.
Priscilla
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
But Priscilla, he’s 23!
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
And you’re 38, I believe. Age is not a barrier to love, in our view.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Okay, okay. So I cut a couple of years off my age. He cut off a couple of decades! And it’s not all he needs to cut off. Could the next one be someone who doesn’t live with his mum?
CHAPTER FIVE
Bunty lay in bed, one eye open, eyeing up Graham in as surreptitious a fashion as she could. One of his Shrek ears had a red weal across it where it had been folded against the pillow, and she had to resist the unbearable urge to get the scissors out of the bedside table and cut along the line. It looked like one of those paper cutouts that with a few deft folds would turn into a pyramid, or a swan. Maybe a small pig, given the porcine nature of the wobbly top of Graham’s ear.
There was much less of him that wobbled though, she noticed. The mounds under the duvet were definitely lower in profile – the Pennines instead of the Cairngorms. Or more like those things they use to talk about in O-level geography – drumlins, was it? Little hills like a basket of eggs. Bunty’s mind went off in two directions at once, one part visualising Graham’s body as containers of various eggs, all shrouded by the duvet. His legs and feet were links of half Easter eggs, like the Flower Pot men; his body a washing basket like Mary’s piled high with ostrich eggs; his head one enormous dinosaur egg, the ridiculous ears stuck on too low, too much at right angles.
Her other train of thought chugged through the mystery of adolescent exams. She doubted very much whether anyone Charlotte knew remembered O-levels, ‘A-levels, and even S-levels for the uber-clever like Cally had been. In fact, she doubted whether any of Charlotte’s teachers even remembered O-levels. It was all rather worrying, as she wasn’t entirely – no, not even slightly – au fait with what had taken their place. GCSEs seemed to be some combination of the exams Bunty had done at school, but there was so little emphasis on them these days. Charlotte, she was sure, could get a high grade just from turning up most days and avoiding getting arrested at the mall, yet she clearly wasn’t lacking in intelligence. She’d hacked into the computer like a pro, for Christ’s sake. Netnurse. Remember the Netnurse.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ Graham had the matching eye open and was now watching her across the pillow. ‘Fancy a bit?’
‘Since you put it so nicely,’ said Bunty, deepening the duvet valley between them, ‘no thanks.’
‘Bunny,’ crooned Graham. ‘Come on, it’s been ages. And you’ve got that look in your eye.’
How little he knew her, to somehow mistake parental concern for lust. ‘You’re sick,’ she said, then stopped.
It wasn’t entirely fair to assume that he’d known what she was thinking; sometimes she hardly knew herself what she was thinking these days. Too much time on her own had somehow turned her into Walter Mitty. What would the female of Walter be? Waltette? Walta? And there she went again, inventing a new persona for herself – borrowing an old persona and turning it into her own, in fact. Whatever the case, she was back inside her head, not in bed with her husband, whose increasing libido seemed to be snaking through the duvet valley and nibbling at her thigh.
‘Graham, no,’ she said softly.
He looked at her once, wounded, and turned onto his other side.
Serves you right, she thought viciously. Expecting me to come up with the goods when you’re porking some Lycra-bottomed bimbo from the squash club. It was quite possible that it was last night’s indiscretions that had given him this extra boost in the first place. She distinctly remembered Kat telling her in the throes of an affair with her married boss that she could take the claim for reviving their love life. Not hers and the boss’s, but the boss and Mrs Boss’s. ‘I was so happy after shagging you and it all going so well that I actually went home and boffed my wife!’ he’d told her in tones of great pride. Needless to say, the affair didn’t last much longer, and Kat quickly said goodbye to the boss, her bonus and ultimately her job.
So maybe this was where Graham was at right now. Some blockage had been cleared. It had, after all, been some months since they’d got round to anything other than a cursory kiss on the cheek in the morning. He’d got his plunger out, cleared the drain, and he was off. Which reminded her. ‘Oh my God, Dan will be here in five minutes.’
Graham sat bolt upright. ‘Dan? Who the hell’s Dan?’
And who the hell’s Lycra-bum, Bunty wanted to retort, but instead she smiled mysteriously. ‘Just a man I need to see. Isn’t it time you were going?’
Graham’s eyes narrowed, then he threw back the duvet in a huff. Bunty watched, bemused, as he made a huge show of putting on his shirt, stowing his arms in the sleeves bicep-up, slowly, one arm deliberately after the other, sucking in his gut so the outline of his ribs was the last thing to disappear under the white cotton as he buttoned his shirt from the bottom up.
She propped herself up on her elbow. ‘Have you been at that lap dancing club again?’
‘I’ve never been to one,’ said Graham, throwing a sly glance in her direction. ‘Why, was that sexy?’
At which Bunty howled with laughter as she clambered out of bed. It had actually reminded her of shoving a pillow into its case. ‘Yes, darling. You red hot lover, you.’ She patted his stomach – definitely smaller – and headed for the ensuite.
When the bell rang a few minutes later Charlotte beat her to the door. Bunty could almost hear her hormones surging from halfway up the stairs.
‘Hi, I’m Dan.’
‘Oh, hi-i-i-i-i. I’m Charlotte, but call me Charlie.’
Charlie? When had that come about? She’d been Lottie as a little girl, then Charlotte since seven or eight (and an introduction to Charlotte’s Web). The heaving-bosomed teen version of her daughter was reinventing herself yet again. She had a genetic predisposition towards it, after all.
‘Thank you, Charlotte,’ said Bunty, throwing open the door to a slightly pink-faced Dan, studying his bucket rather hard in an attempt to avoid Charlotte’s appraisal of his shoulders and lightly stubbled chin. ‘Dan, why don’t you go down the side path?’
‘Sure.’ Dan took off with alacrity down the gravel path at the side of the house, while Charlotte chewed on a piece of hair.
Bunty slapped her fingers out of her mouth. ‘Shouldn’t you be at the bus stop?’
‘I’m too late. Can I have a lift?’
‘No.’ It was too bad, and a hard lesson to learn, but Charlotte was already far too willing to wait for everything to be handed to her on a plate, preferably in metallic fuchsia pink. Where she’d got that attitude from was hard to establish. ‘You’ll just have to be late. You’ll get in trouble, maybe even get a detention, and then you’ll know that next time you have to get yourself ready in time.’
‘You’re growing up now, Charlotte. We won’t always be here to pick up the pieces, Charlotte. You have to start to do things for yourself, Charlotte,’ whined her daughter, finishing Bunty’s lecture for her with almost the exact words she had been about to use. ‘Thing is, Mum, you don’t like it when I do things for myself really, do you?’
‘Don’t talk rubbish. Go to school,’ said Bunty abruptly.
‘I’ll take you, Char,’ said Graham, wafting down the stairs in a breeze of some new aftershave. Some expensive new aftershave, unless she was very much mistaken. She’d only just trained him out of the overpowering astringency of Lynx, and now he was shopping at the Gucci store? She felt a grudging admiration for Lycra-bum.
‘Graham, I’m trying to teach her a lesson.’
As It Is On Telly Page 4