Unsuitable Men

by Pippa Wright

  ‘Rory,’ he said, looking into my eyes very seriously as his leg pressed against mine. ‘Rory, I feel like there’s something between us.’

  ‘You do?’ I asked. It seemed rather early in the evening for him to be putting the moves on me. He shuffled a little bit closer.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Something tangible. Something . . . vibrating.’

  ‘Vibrating?’ I may have had limited experience with unsuitable men, but this didn’t seem like something that was in any kind of a romantic script.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, picking up his cider and taking a large swig. ‘I think it’s your phone going off in your pocket.’

  ‘Ohhh. Oh right.’ I’d felt my phone buzzing, but had ignored it. I thought you weren’t meant to look at your phone when you were out with someone – wasn’t it a bit rude?

  ‘Aren’t you going to check it?’ he asked. ‘Mightn’t it be someone interesting? Not more interesting than me, mind. But a little bit interesting. Of minor interest. I’ll go off to the bar while you have a read – same again?’

  ‘Thanks, that’d be lovely,’ I agreed. I had no expectation that it would be anyone of interest at all. Most likely it would be Auntie Lyd asking me to pick up some milk on my way home, or Martha having another try at getting me to visit Hartley House for her. But Malky didn’t know that, and I was rather enjoying the feeling of sitting in a pub with an attractive man, having my phone buzz away as if I was a girl in demand.

  I had three messages from an unknown number. When I read the first message, I gasped. When I read the second one, I blushed crimson. When I read the third, I began to have the distinct feeling that my teenage toyboy was trying to re-establish contact. I’d thought – I’d hoped – he’d given up on me; I hadn’t heard from him since I’d seen him running down the office corridor with his trousers around his knees.

  ‘Looks like that was from someone interesting, young Rory,’ said Malky, sitting back down next to me with two steaming pints of mulled cider. ‘You’ve gone all red – who’s been sending you dirty texts then?’

  ‘How – how did you know?’ I demanded. Had he read them over my shoulder? Might other people in the pub have seen them? How completely mortifying.

  ‘Ha – really?’ he laughed, his eyes sparkling. ‘No way, I was just kidding. Let’s have a look.’

  ‘No!’ I exclaimed, pulling my phone to my chest. I was going to press delete and pretend I’d never received them. It was best to just ignore Luke and hope he’d get the message.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ said Malky, putting his hands over mine and grabbing for my mobile. ‘Don’t be a spoilsport. I want to see just what sort of filthy messages a nice girl like you gets.’ He wrestled the phone away from me and stood up, holding it way above his head so that I couldn’t reach it.

  ‘Malky,’ I hissed, keeping my voice low. ‘Give it back.’ I didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself. I wouldn’t have put it past Malky to read the messages aloud to the entire pub garden. It was just the sort of thing he would find hilarious.

  ‘Oh good Lord, no,’ Malky laughed, holding on to his ribs. ‘Jesus, no, this is brilliant. You dirty bitch – who is he?’

  ‘I hardly know him,’ I protested. ‘He was one of the interns at work; he’s just a teenager.’

  ‘“Lyin on my bed thinkin bout u,”’ Malky read. ‘“Thinkin bout u”, hey? That’s romance right there, that is. Lyrical. Gorgeous.’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, pulling on his belt to try to make him sit back down. ‘Just shut up, this is mortifying.’

  ‘“Thinkin wot I’d do if u were here 2. Hard.” Now that’s beautiful, isn’t it? Almost poetic. Should I tell him that if you were there too you’d have set a deranged cat on to him by now and chased him out into the street?’

  ‘Oh God, don’t. Please just give me the phone back,’ I begged, clutching at his coat now.

  ‘“Wot wud u do 2 me, MILF?” Well, Rory,’ Malky sniggered, ‘what would you do to him? And why didn’t you tell me you had kids?’

  ‘I don’t! I don’t have kids. He’s just a ridiculous hormonal teenager.’

  Malky read through the messages again, his shoulders shaking. I let go of his coat and steadily drank my way through the cider, hoping if I drank more it would be less mortifying.

  ‘I’m going to answer,’ announced Malky.

  ‘No, Malky! You can’t. Just ignore it. Give me back the phone.’

  ‘Aw, come on,’ Malky said, sitting down again, but still holding the phone out of my reach. ‘It’ll be hilarious. He won’t know what hit him.’

  ‘Malky, please don’t,’ I said weakly.

  ‘Rory,’ said Malky, pleading. ‘I won’t if you really don’t want me to, but come on, this is genius. We can write it together. Let’s wind him up. He’s not going to know what hit him.’

  His face shone with barely suppressed laughter. I wondered how it must feel to be like Malky, only really interested in the here and now, never worried about consequences or the future. For once, after nearly three pints of cider, I thought it looked like it might be fun. It wasn’t like I’d ever see Luke again anyway.

  I picked up my cider and finished it. ‘Go on then,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

  ‘Brilliant. Let’s keep it simple,’ said Malky, his eyes shining. ‘What about licking – something about licking – will that do it?’

  ‘I don’t know! I’ve never sent sex texts to anyone in my life!’

  ‘Sexts,’ corrected Malky, waving an admonishing finger. ‘I believe the youth call them sexts, Rory. I think licking, definitely licking.’ He’d no sooner tapped out a reply than an answer from Luke arrived.

  ‘Nooooo!’ exclaimed Malky. ‘“Treat my cock like an ice-cream cone.”’

  ‘What? How absolutely revolting.’ I grabbed the phone out of his hands to check he wasn’t making anything up.

  ‘Right,’ said Malky. ‘Your turn. Come on.’

  ‘Ice cream,’ I said, tapping the phone on my chin as I considered my response. ‘Ice cream. Hmm. What about something to do with a rock-hard Magnum?’

  I suspect that if Luke could have seen the giggling and jostling and fighting for possession of the mobile phone that ensued, he would no doubt have dismissed me and Malky as hopelessly immature. And completely unerotic. But no matter how ridiculous we got, Luke replied immediately and filthily. The more we drank the more hilarious it all seemed, until Malky and I were almost sobbing with laughter on our shared seat. My phone vibrated once more and Malky grabbed it.

  ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! We’ve got a penis!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A penis! A picture of an erect penis!’

  ‘No, you are not serious,’ I shrieked, snatching for the phone. ‘Argh, no, full frontal! That is absolutely disgusting!’

  ‘What shall we send back?’ asked Malky, his eyes bright with hysteria. ‘Wait, wait, I know.’

  He took the phone back and opened up his shirt, exposing his hairy chest. He brought the phone in close to his chest. ‘Let him guess what this is,’ he said, burying the phone camera inside his shirt.

  ‘No, no, stop,’ I begged. ‘I can’t bear to see what he’d send after that. That’s enough.’

  ‘Oh go on, just one little picture. Are you worried he’ll think you’ve got a bushy old seventies beaver?’

  ‘I might have known we’d get back to talking about bushes.’

  ‘Come on, Rory,’ pleaded Malky. But the picture message was enough for me. I put the phone down on the table and he left it there, glancing hopefully at it every now and again, but it remained silent.

  ‘Do you have a bushy old seventies beaver?’ asked Malky, squinting his beautiful eyes as he tried to focus on my face.

  ‘Oh shut up. Wouldn’t you like to know?’ I snorted with laughter. My ribs were actually aching; it felt like a long time since I’d laughed like that. Not since my last date with Malky, to be perfectly honest.

  ‘I would, actually,’ said Malky
, running his hand up my leg. He hooked a finger under the hem of my skirt as if he’d tear it off right there. ‘And I don’t have my dog with me tonight, so I think I should, don’t you?’

  I looked up at him. It felt right. If earlier I’d thought the universe was keeping us apart, tonight it felt like fate had brought me past the pub. Fate had made Malky see me, had made Luke send the stupid messages that had made our evening so hysterical, like a winged pervy Cupid with a bow and arrow in one hand and a red-hot mobile in the other. Malky was the man who was going to get me over Martin. This time we wouldn’t be interrupted.

  ‘Do you promise not to text me a picture of your penis at any stage of the proposed sexual encounter?’ I asked, as seriously as I could manage.

  Malky placed a hand on his heart. ‘How many times, Rory, must I remind you that it’s “sext”, not “text”? But you have my word. No digital penises, I promise.’

  ‘Let’s go back to yours,’ I said, casting my eyes down towards the table, suddenly a little shy despite the revolting suggestions we’d spent the evening texting to Luke.

  ‘Oh, er, not really possible tonight,’ said Malky, scratching the side of his face and looking away. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you there, honest. It’s just a bit of a tip where I live; I wasn’t really expecting anyone to come over tonight, you know. I haven’t tidied up or anything.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. I didn’t. My body fizzed with desire. I honestly thought at that moment that I’d happily have shagged him by the pungent wheelie bins outside the Duke of Wellington.

  ‘Come on,’ begged Malky ‘I live miles away – and your house is just around the corner. Don’t make me wait any longer; let’s go there.’

  I checked the time on my phone. Eleven-thirty. There was no chance of seeing Auntie Lyd tonight. All the signs were auspicious. ‘Let’s do it then,’ I said.

  Malky stood up and offered me his hand. When I rose to my feet I realized just how much I’d had to drink. The ground pitched beneath me and I had to reach for the table to steady myself. I hiccupped.

  ‘Oops, hold on,’ Malky said, scooping up my things from the table. He linked my arm through his and I leaned on him gratefully. We left the pub garden with only one slight detour into the shrubbery, which, given the quantity of cider we had dispatched between us, was pretty good going.

  26

  All the lights were off at Auntie Lyd’s and there was no sound to suggest that anyone was awake apart from us. I warned Malky to be quiet with a tipsy ‘Sssh’ that came out far louder than I’d intended. He shushed me back by placing his finger on my lips. I started laughing, and he covered my mouth with his whole hand to muffle the sound, looking wildly up the stairs as if he expected Auntie Lyd and Mr Bits to come thundering down at any second. Which of course just made me laugh all the more, remembering him prostrate on the hall carpet last time. Malky’s green eyes crinkled up as he started to laugh himself, and then he pulled his hand away and covered my mouth with his own.

  He tasted of cider and roll-up cigarettes. There was a part of me that felt like I would never get used to kissing someone who wasn’t Martin; Martin who smelled of Smints breath fresheners and clean laundry. Clean laundry that I had always washed myself, come to think of it. The thought of Martin just made me more determined to exorcize the role he had taken up in my head by supplanting him with someone else. I kissed Malky even harder.

  ‘Steady on, young lady. Time for bed,’ he whispered, pulling away. Before I knew what he was doing he’d dropped his knees and hefted me over his shoulder into a fireman’s lift. For someone so lanky he was surprisingly strong.

  ‘Oof, Malky, ow, put me down,’ I giggled, as quietly as I could while dangling down his back.

  ‘I’ll put you down on your bed and not before, young Rory. Where’s your room?’

  ‘Malky, it’s right at the top of the house, you don’t have to do this,’ I hissed, kicking my legs enough to offer a protest, but not so much that he might drop me from his unsteady grasp.

  ‘Jesus, it would be,’ he sighed, and started off up the stairs, my head narrowly missing the wall with every step upwards. ‘Here we go, Rory, on the stairway to heaven.’

  There was no corridor of uncertainty this time, and not just because we were in a stairwell instead. Perhaps Malky and I had got all the awkwardness out of the way the first time he’d come round, or perhaps I was just too inebriated to question anything. This time, as we went up the stairs, instead of finding it funnier, I felt myself becoming quieter and more serious the nearer we got to my attic bedroom. Malky, too, had stopped his whispered commentary, but judging by his wheezing breath this might have been because the effort of climbing to the top floor with me on his shoulder was more than he’d anticipated.

  He pushed open the door to my room and instead of throwing me on the bed as I’d imagined, he laid me down very gently, as if I was terribly fragile and delicate. His face quite grave, he smoothed my hair away from my face and carefully laid himself on top of me, both of us still buttoned up in our winter coats, with scarves wrapped around our necks. Malky rested his head in my hair, his cold cheek on mine, and I could hear the sound of his breathing slowing as he recovered from the climb. I lay staring at the ceiling, unsure what to do, as I heard his breath soften and settle into a rhythm. I didn’t want to pounce on him before he had recovered, but this sudden change of mood, from giggly and foolish to quiet and still, had thrown me into indecision. Just as I had decided to try to wriggle out from underneath him, a snore ripped out of his throat right next to my ear and I leapt into the air.

  ‘What? What?’ said Malky, rolling off me and rubbing his eyes. ‘What’s going on?’ He stared about him wildly as if he had already forgotten where he was.

  ‘It’s okay, Malky, you’re in my bedroom. I think you just fell asleep,’ I said, rubbing his shoulder reassuringly and trying not to be offended at his apparent lack of interest in tearing my clothes off.

  ‘Fell asleep?’ said Malky, rolling towards me with an irresistible grin. ‘Impossible. Not with you right here. What kind of a chump do you take me for?’

  ‘The kind of chump who snores in my ear,’ I teased. Malky rolled on top of me again, and brought his mouth close to my ear. He took the lobe between his teeth and pulled at it gently. I could feel from his breath on my face that he was starting to laugh again. He began to place delicate kisses all along the shell of my ear from bottom to top, and then, just as I was beginning to think that things were progressing nicely, he let out another tremendous snore.

  ‘Malky!’ I hissed, hitting his shoulder, but he was creased up with laughter.

  ‘Joke, joke,’ he insisted, holding up his hands in defence. ‘Jesus, Rory, just a joke this time. Now why don’t you get out of those clothes and show me what you wouldn’t show to that poor young hormonal teenager earlier?’

  So I did.

  When I woke up in the morning, he was gone. I wasn’t sure if I should have been grateful or sorry not to see him next to me in bed. I felt a momentary sense of outrage that he should have left without saying goodbye, but that was replaced almost immediately with a fear that he had sneaked out as quickly as possible out of horror at finding himself in bed with me. And then there was, above both of those, a sense of relief that at least I would be spared the possibility of a morning shag because honestly, last night had been just appalling.

  I had thought my sex life with Martin was fairly pedestrian – after eleven years together it was never going to be swinging from the chandeliers every night; I could have predicted his every move on the rare occasions we didn’t go to bed wearing pyjamas and reading our books side by side until we turned out the lights. Right hand on my right breast, crush and squeeze a little (actually quite painful, but it was far too late to tell him so), move to left breast, then a hand on each breast, squeeze together as if trying to create one large 34F breast instead of two 34Cs, move right hand down below, fiddle for thirty seconds, cursory lick of left
nipple, entry, thrust, thrust, ‘Are you nearly there?’ and then that was it. But compared to Malky, Martin was a master of foreplay; a bedroom Baryshnikov.

  I hadn’t realized it, but Malky’s lying prone on top of me fully clothed was merely the precursor to phase one of his seduction method: lying on top of me naked. Which he seemed to believe was sufficiently erotic to drive me into a frenzy. After five minutes I had become embarrassed just lying there doing nothing – but there was nothing to respond to except the sound of his heavy breath in my ear and all that did was make me tense myself for another loud snore. So I’d started to try to move and make encouraging noises, but Malky had tensed and hissed, ‘Stop distracting me,’ and the next thing I knew, he had moved on to phase two, the pressing his groin against mine. Although it was having no effect on me, it was evident that this technique was working perfectly well on him.

  Phase three lasted a merciful matter of seconds, and then Malky rolled off me.

  ‘Amazing,’ he sighed. I didn’t know how to answer, certain he couldn’t have imagined it was amazing for me. I’d hardly had time to compose my face in an expression of interest, let alone ecstasy.

  ‘Amazing,’ he said again, nestling his head in the pillows and pulling the covers right up to his chin. ‘Thanks, Rory.’

  Thanks? Thanks?! Before I could answer, Malky had let loose another snore, fast asleep already.

  I lay staring at the ceiling as he rumbled noisily beside me. I wondered if he had used up all of his sexual energy in texting and flirtation and cider-drinking. When it came to, well, coming, Malky had nothing left at all.

  So it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to wake up and find myself alone. I rolled over to reach for the bedside table where I kept my phone – what time was it anyway? I felt around without raising my head; my fingers negotiated a glass of water, a paperback book lying opened with the spine up, an old tissue and a magazine. But no phone. Sitting up made my head swim horribly but I managed to quickly look on the table, and on the floor. Still no phone. I lay back on the pillows, trying not to feel sick. From downstairs I could hear the sound of the new power shower as someone used the bathroom. If that was Percy then it must be around six. Further downstairs I could hear a door open and close, and the gently bubbling voice of Eleanor floated up to my bedroom. With great effort I turned my head towards the window, where a faint light filtered through the thin curtains. It must still be early. Not time to get up yet. My phone was probably in my coat pocket or something. I pulled the duvet up over my head and went back to sleep.