‘No,’ he said, grinning. ‘’Cause you know I’m just another Auchenlea scrote. It’s nothin’ to do with who I am or who you are. It’s who we used to be. They’re like gatecrashers tonight, disruptin’ the party. See, the guy I used to be fancied the girl you used to be, so he’s givin’ me gyp. You’re all right. The teenage you didnae fancy the teenage me, so she’s leavin’ you alone.’
‘Who says she didn’t?’ Simone asked, a tone of indignation preventing her from sounding coy.
‘Oh, don’t gie’s it,’ he protested.
‘I’m not kidding. If you’d asked me out back then, I’d have been walking on air.’
‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t,’ he said, laughing through a pained expression. ‘You could crush me to death here wi’ this stuff. No, please, have mercy …’
‘I’m sorry, but it’s true. It wasn’t a solitary distinction, if that makes you feel any better. Andrew Reilly would have done too. I even had a wee thing for Ally McQuade. But I didn’t imagine I’d a chance with any of you. Still, let’s not start on “if only”s, for God’s sake. I’ve got too much to regret in that department.’
‘No, agreed, absolutely. That way madness lies. Let’s look on the bright side. We’re here now and it’s not too late for us to be pals.’
Simone liked the sound of that. She turned to face him. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ she said.
‘Me too.’
‘In fact,’ she added, upon an impulse, ‘let’s go somewhere and share this stuff, just the two of us.’
‘That would be nice. Where, though? I’d suggest my room, but, you know, wrong connotations. It wouldn’t look good if we were spotted.’
‘Oh, fuck how it looks,’ she said, thinking of taking him up to her own accommodation. Let Gavin walk in on them, sitting on the terrace together, that would certainly rain on his parade. Then she remembered that bedside light, left on from Gavin and Catherine’s last little tryst, and the idea went sour. ‘No, you’re right,’ she decided, suddenly inspired. ‘Let’s not go back to the Laguna. I know. Follow me.’
Simone led him across a couple more footbridges, around the high-walled wave pool and up to the entrance of the Majestic Hotel. She had a quick look around to make sure they remained unobserved, then led him through the glass doors and into the lobby. Once inside, she handed him the bottle and ordered him to stay put as she approached the wide reception counter, flanked by staircases on either side.
‘First class,’ she said, pointing at the flight going upwards. ‘And steerage,’ she added, indicating its descendent counterpart.
Simone leaned over and unlatched the waist-high access gate, then walked behind the desks to where the reception PC sat, picking a plastic keycard from a box next to it. She toggled through some menus and selected a room on the first floor, then swiped the card through the computer’s encoding device, a smile widening on her face.
They walked up the stairs to the first floor and used her now-programmed keycard to enter one of the bedrooms, three doors along from the lifts. Matthew flipped a light switch to no effect. She explained that you had to slot your keycard into the NRG-Sava device to operate the room’s electricity, but opted not to do so in case any of the staff noticed the light from outside and came to investigate.
Simone went straight for the bathroom and unwrapped the Cellophane from two plastic tumblers, holding them up and clicking them together as she emerged.
‘Classy stuff, eh?’
‘Simply the best,’ replied Matthew.
Opening the sliding glass doors to the balcony, she discovered with a mixture of disappointment and amusement that there were no chairs out there. She had a look behind her at the room’s two-seater sofa. It looked just the ticket but it was going to be a job moving it.
‘Floor all right?’
‘Aye, grand.’
Matthew poured them a tumbler-full of champagne each and they sat down on the concrete floor, backs against the balcony, facing into the room. The submerged illuminations of the Lido caused rippling patterns of light to play on the building’s walls. The effect reminded Simone of dining-hall school discos, an impression enhanced by the Culture Club music booming from across at the Laguna.
‘Gavin’s special reunion-party Eighties compilation,’ she remarked. ‘He made it himself on recordable CD. It’s quite a line-up, let me tell you. Thompson Twins, Kajagoogoo, Howard Jones, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran – all the greats.’
Matthew laughed. ‘I think I experienced a different Eighties, musically. Probably just as embarrassing, but … different.’
‘Let’s not open up that particular treasure-chest of memories, shall we? I was a pseudo-Goth. I had all the records but my hair was too fine for back-combing. Had to make do with a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt and bad eye make-up. I could pull that part off, but not necessarily by intention.’
‘I’ve a very vivid image of you going around in a Clash t-shirt,’ Matthew told her, causing a tingle down her spine. She remembered the t-shirt herself, even remembered buying it in the old Virgin in Union Street with a birthday record-token, along with the 12-inch of ‘Vengeance’ by New Model Army. But the fact that he remembered her wearing it made her feel, well, she wasn’t sure. Touched, flattered, regretful all at once. If onlys.
‘Oh Jesus, what’s this?’ he asked as another not-so-golden oldie began thumping from across the Lido. ‘I don’t believe it. “Break My Stride”. Christ. That skinny wee guy with the bad ’tache. Matthew Wilder, that was his name. This isnae nostalgia, this is recidivism.’
He began to sing along, moving his hands to the moronic beat. Simone was doubled with laughter, trying not to choke on her champagne. Then he got to his feet and began dancing, beckoning her to join him, the pair of them useless with giggling.
‘Oh, we’re away noo,’ he said. ‘Look, mammy, I’m dancin’!’
‘Oh God no, stop,’ she implored, unable to continue. She squatted on the floor once more. ‘It’s too awful for words.’
‘What? The music, or my dancin’?’
Matthew sat down again and took a sip from his drink, then looked across at her with the kind of easy smile she hadn’t shared with a man for years. It wasn’t too late to be pals, he’d said. She and Gavin had never been that. She leaned over and kissed him. It was soft, tentative, fragile. Precious.
Oh shit.
When she opened her eyes she was relieved to see that he didn’t look bewildered or appalled. Surprised, certainly. Even a little afraid.
This was the moment to put the brakes on and take stock, she knew. To say ‘Oh, sorry about that’, and make jokes about pretending it never happened. This was the moment you took your pleasure back to the shop and spent the refund on guilt.
A night charged with nostalgia, that least trustworthy of emotions; a marriage falling apart; the regrets and if onlys of a needlessly unrequited teenage crush; and not forgetting champagne on an empty stomach. Simone knew all the reasons kissing him was a bad idea, not least because of where it was likely to lead. But just once, couldn’t she do the wrong thing now and worry about the consequences later?
‘Are you sure you—’ Matthew began to say, but she stopped his mouth with another kiss.
Simone got to her feet and led him back into the bedroom, closing the doors and the curtains behind them. Then she turned around and kissed him again, putting her arms around his neck, pulling her body up against his, and noticing with some satisfaction that the comedian, not having previously had a microphone in his pocket, was extremely pleased to see her.
She pushed Matthew not-so-gently back on to the bed and lay on top him, shivering at the touch of his hands on the back of her neck. Pyrotechnics, thunderbolts, shooting stars, all that carry-on. A solitary note of doubt sounded somewhere in her head, enquiring as to the difference between passion and desperation; after all, marriage to Gavin would turn Ann Widdecombe into a fuckmonster. It was quickly silenced by the feel of his hand against her breast. Passion or desperat
ion, did it have to matter? Couldn’t she just enjoy it, for once in her bloody life?
She leaned on one elbow and began unbuttoning his shirt. At that point Matthew broke away from her kiss and restrained her hand from descending any further.
‘Hang on, hang on,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We can’t do this.’
Oh Christ, some luck, she thought. Finally unshackled from her over-developed sense of responsibility, she’d thrown herself at a known philanderer, only for the philanderer to choose that night to develop some moral responsibility of his own.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t have any protection.’
Simone caught the apologetic laughter in his face and joined in, mainly out of relief. They weren’t beaten yet.
‘All is not lost,’ she whispered. ‘This is a holiday resort, remember. There’s machines in all the public toilets. The nearest ones to here are on the ground floor.’
She reached to the bedside table for the keycard and handed it to him with a kiss. If he was quick enough, he might get back before her conscience kicked in.
21:00 fipr freestanding ventilation unit/faecal interface scenario
Matt quietly closed the bedroom door and stood motionless in the corridor for a few moments. He didn’t know whether to breathe a sigh of relief or punch himself hard in the face. That morning on the Baja, when he resolved to embark upon this turning-over-a-new-leaf caper, he’d envisaged the morality tests starting off a wee bit easier than the object of his teenage dreams popping up, looking twice as beautiful, and flinging herself at his dick. That he’d probably passed didn’t feel like much of a consolation.
He reached into his jacket for his wallet, removing the three-pack of condoms he habitually kept there, ‘for you know not the day nor the hour when the master needs to come’. He dropped them into a nearby bin. Whatever happened later, it wouldn’t be good for her to find them on him.
So, he’d lied. What you gonna do. He needed to get out of the room, buy some time. He needed to let her cool off. He needed to get his fucking head examined – he’d just walked out on Simone Draper.
Calm down, he told himself. This was about as spitefully unfair as life got, one of those Russian-linesman moments. Deal with it.
He had done the right thing, but not completely, and that was the hardest part. He didn’t say no, didn’t stop it dead; merely interrupted it in a manner that sounded plausibly temporary. He could tell himself it was letting her down gently, giving her time to contemplate what she was getting into, but that wasn’t the whole truth, was it? When he returned in five minutes, a huge part of him wanted to find her calm, collected, rational and completely unclothed. The question now was whether to fill that time by actually going downstairs to the condom machine. His options remained tantalisingly open. As John Cleese once said, it wasn’t the despair. He could handle the despair. It was the hope.
It wasn’t right, though, he knew that. She was vulnerable. The woman’s arsehole husband was knobbing someone else, and tonight the bastard was practically advertising the fact to his assembled guests. Matt would have been happy to oblige her with a revenge fuck if he believed that was all she needed, but no matter how hard his dick got, he knew he couldn’t convince himself that that was the case.
And maybe that wasn’t all he was content to offer her, either.
She was vulnerable. Not long ago that wouldn’t have meant a fucking thing, but it sure did tonight. And the scariest question was how much of that was down to him having changed, and how much was down to ‘she’ being Simone?
He began walking. He couldn’t go straight back in there and lay it down, not least because another of those kisses might vaporise his resolution in one exquisitely damning moment. He couldn’t give it too long, either; whatever was going through Simone’s mind right now, it would be a difficult time for her to be alone. He’d head for the ground-floor gents as instructed. A splash of water about the face might help, but not as much, he suspected, as a conscience-galvanising wank.
He padded quietly back along the corridor and down the main staircase, cushioning his footfalls. He didn’t want Simone to hear him and suss that he’d been hanging around outside, procrastinating.
When he reached the halfway landing, he heard the static burst of a walkie-talkie and reflexively lifted his eyes from the carpet. Down in the lobby there was a bloke in combat fatigues and a black balaclava, standing in front of the main doors with his back to the stairs. He was holding a radio to his face with his left hand, dangling a pistol by the trigger-guard with his right. Resting at his waist, suspended from a shoulder-strap, was Israel’s most successful and destructive export since Christianity: an Uzi 9mm sub-machine-gun.
‘Hotel B secured at ground-floor lobby. That’s a green from me,’ he was saying.
Large man bearing arms in lobby. ICI down four-and-a-quarter.
Matt had freeze-framed on the landing in mid-step and mid-breath, explanations whizzing through his head like path-names on a computer search-routine. File not found, it concluded. As the man’s head turned slightly, Matt could see that the balaclava was of the eye-and-mouth-holes design, as opposed to the simpler and more commonplace ‘child-humiliation’ model. As a fashion item, the former definitely made more of a statement. The statement was RUN LIKE FUCK.
Matt retained sufficient composure to be aware that he hadn’t been noticed – yet – and a spontaneous clatter of feet would be more than adequate to revoke that fragile status. The guy hadn’t heard him come down, so a similar stealth should ensure he didn’t hear him creeping back up, either. The glass doors and various polished surfaces throughout the lobby threatened to relay any sudden flash of movement, so his retreat would have to be slow as well as silent. It was like being in a class full of Mary-Theresa Devlins, all just dying to grass him to the teacher.
He took one delicate step back and was about to edge sideways out of sight when his stomach, slighted by his decision to eschew the buffet in favour of more sentimental appetites, traitorously avenged itself. It sold him out with a sonorously gurgling rumble; betrayed him with borborygmi. The man turned around immediately and they stared at each other for a mutually indecisive second. Matt was seldom stuck for an opening line, but the prospect of lead-heckling instantly caused him to dry. He decided to exit stage-left as Action Man raised his pistol and pointed it up the stairs.
‘Stop right there,’ he shouted, sending a couple of bullets along with the words in case they proved insufficiently persuasive. Matt didn’t hear any reports as he ran, just dull slaps as the slugs tore into the plaster behind where he’d been standing. He figured he could now plausibly abandon the theory that Gavin had booked a military-themed male-stripper cabaret. Ski-masks. Radios. Uzis. Silencers. Something extraordinarily bad was happening.
Matt could hear the thump of the guy’s boots in pursuit, which was when that philosophical conundrum confronted him, as it inevitably did all who ran away: where was he running to? At that stage he knew only where he couldn’t run to: the first floor, where Simone was sitting in a bedroom, oblivious to what was going on. He ran around the lifts and continued up towards the second storey, hoping to Christ that Simone didn’t stick her head out the door to investigate the noise just as Action Man went past.
On the second-floor landing, as with the first, there were corridors leading off in two directions. Locked doorways lined up grimly on either side, unable to offer any assistance. Matt kept climbing, both thighs beginning to grumble their discontent. From below he could hear the rattle of metal as the spare clips, and whatever else the man was carrying, shook on his pursuer’s belt. He was talking into his radio again: ‘Stray subject in Hotel B. I’m dealing.’
The grumbles of discontent had escalated to a threat of mutiny by the time Matt approached the fourth storey. His lungs remained loyal to the cause, but he knew that if he kept climbing he’d get slower with every stair. At some point he was going to have to run along one of those corridors and pray he m
ade it around the first corner before Action Man reached the landing and lined up a clean shot. His efforts so far had bought a few further seconds on the more burdened gunman, but as he tired he’d lose them again soon enough. Now would be the best chance he’d get. It occurred to him that there might be a dead end around that vital first corner, but as there would definitely be a dead end when he ran out of floors, he had to go for it anyway.
Matt’s thighs applauded the decision with a pumping burst of speed along the flat, making him understand why the late Jock Wallace used to run Rangers players up and down sand dunes all day. He suddenly halted two-thirds of the way along, having encountered a set of double swing-doors and noticed electric light shining upon a stairway beyond. It was a tight, zig-zagging affair with a railed banister, offering faster ascent or descent than the wide spiral encircling the lifts. This was what he’d been relying upon, having as a child spent many a wedding reception playing hotel-tig, a more strategically complex variation on the simple cat-and-mouse game, due to the randomising element of having two staircases. Where the plan fell down was that this guy’s parents weren’t going to show up and take him home after a while.
Matt went through the swing-doors, gripped the banister and resumed climbing. Simone had mentioned something about there still being work in progress on the upper levels, so with nothing but locked doors further down, it sounded like his only chance of somewhere to hide. He burst back through the corresponding swing-doors on the fifth floor and looked in either direction: the tiny red lights of more card-locks twinkled at him along the passageway.
He turned back and climbed the final storey, reaching the top landing as the double doors flew open two floors beneath and the gunman charged through, aiming up the stairwell with his silenced pistol. A bullet struck the banister two feet away, another embedding itself in the ceiling above. Matt jumped backwards and fell halfway through the swing-doors – legs on the landing, head and torso in the corridor – as the crunch of boots on concrete reverberated around the narrow shaft. There were no card-lock lights on this level, but that was because there were no lights at all, and as far as he could see, no doors either. Nonetheless, as he turned around on to his front he could make out the identifiable shape of a fire extinguisher, sitting in a niche just inside the corridor. He ripped it from its Velcro strap and lugged it through the double doors with both hands.
One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night Page 18