Dangerous Pleasures

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Uh-oh,’ she chuckled, familiar with the signs. ‘Pube patrol.’

  She watched him paw and scratch at his tongue. Aroused as she was, she was impatient for him to find the hair and get on with the matter in hand but then she realized, with a pang of relief that her own throat was no longer itchy.

  ‘Shit,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry. If I can just —’

  She watched guiltily as he climbed off the bed and padded through the shadows to the bathroom. She heard him curse, heard him try gargling, heard him curse again then heard the sound of a wash-bag being unzipped after which he made a series of unappetizing gagging and coughing sounds. Chafed to a pink of passion, her body was rapidly cooling in the breeze of conditioned air. She pulled the bedding up around her and stretched across the pillows to turn on her bedside light. She glanced at her little travelling alarm and saw that they were going to be late for their dinner reservation unless she started dressing now. Suddenly she felt a consuming thirst, brought on by wine at lunch and the undiluted succession of toffees.

  ‘Look,’ he was saying. ‘Look at this! What the hell…?’ He emerged from the bathroom triumphantly parading a cotton wool bud. He thrust it into the pool of light.

  ‘Come back to bed,’ she said, not looking. ‘I want you. Let’s eat somewhere else. Let’s order room service.’

  ‘Look,’ he said again.

  She looked. There was a fish scale on the tip of the bud; a sardine scale, translucent, charred at one end.

  ‘Did you have fish for lunch?’ she asked. Alvaro rarely touched fish, certainly not if it had skin on it still.

  ‘I had steak,’ he said indignantly. He glowered at the scale more closely, as though it provided some crucial piece of circumstantial evidence whose significance would be revealed to him if only he stared at it long enough.

  ‘These British restaurants,’ she said. ‘They probably gave you a dirty plate.’

  ‘I could have choked,’ he said. ‘I should sue. You didn’t have fish, did you?’

  ‘I told you,’ she sighed. ‘Charlie gave me soup. Carrot soup. And bread and cheese and some salad.’

  She pulled back out of the light because she could feel her cheeks warming at the lie. She took the cotton wool bud from him and laid it on the bedside table then coaxed him back into bed. After kissing and pawing her absentmindedly for a while, however, he fell to wondering about the fish scale again. He lost his erection entirely and, when they arrived at the restaurant too late for their table, lost his temper as well. Their evening was ruined.

  Lying in bed beside him — Alvaro had fallen asleep abruptly after complaining of a headache — Maud felt increasingly stifled. His heavy arm pinioned her on her back; a position in which she could never sleep for fear of snoring. The hotel bedding was at once too heavy and too short. Worst of all, Alvaro was obsessed with the mechanics of air conditioning, insisting that the windows be left hermetically sealed while the unit below them sighed its chilled, second-hand exhalations into layers of motionless net curtain. Maud could have coped if the machinery had gone about its business in silence but its constant, mournful whisper put her in mind of the sterile preservation of meat until she suffered a kind of panic attack and had to slip into her dressing gown and flee the room.

  She wandered the corridors, growing close to tears in her frustrated search for a balcony or an opening window. She fell in, at last, with two Colombian chambermaids who laughed at her, ushered her onto a blissfully windy fire escape beyond their tiny kitchen then soothed her with sweet tea and biscuits. They had been admiring Alvaro from afar but laughed when Maud told them he was sound asleep.

  ‘I love it when they sleep,’ one told her. ‘It’s the only time they leave you free to think!’

  There was no question but she must marry him, they said, divining the turmoil of indecision in which she found herself. He had the kind of good looks which would only improve with age, he would work hard to keep her in comfort and he would give her beautiful children. One of them read her palm and clicked her tongue at the happiness she saw there.

  Reassured by their envious certainty, just as she was calmed by their tea, Maud returned to her room, switched off the air conditioning and wrapped Alvaro’s sleeping arm about her like a valuable fur.

  DANGEROUS PLEASURES

  for Audrey Williams

  THE BREATH was now coming so slowly from Shuna’s mouth that Shirley found herself beginning to count in between each painful, creaking exhalation.

  ‘Not long now,’ she thought and found she had said it aloud. She shook out her hanky and pressed it gently to her daughter’s sweating temples, first one, then the other. If there was any feeling left in the poor child’s body, she thought she might enjoy the cool sensation of the well-ironed cotton on her fevered skin.

  ‘Go on,’ she added, as Shuna took another spasmodic breath. She might have been encouraging her to jump into a swimming pool or let go at the top of a playground slide. ‘Go on. I’m here.’

  And then she found she was counting past thirty, past fifty. She allowed herself a little cry. Shuna’s eyes were already closed — Shirley had not seen them open in the four days since the phone call — but she reached out and gently closed Shuna’s mouth. The lips were cracked and looked sore. She took the jar of Vaseline from the bedside cupboard and rubbed a little on them with her forefinger. Then. she opened the window and walked back along the corridor to the visitors’ room, the crepe soles of her light summer shoes squeaking on the vinyl floor.

  Karl, the nice boy from the charity, with the earring, had finally persuaded Arthur to stop pacing, sit down and drink a cup of tea. He sprang up as Shirley came in. Arthur merely raised frightened eyes.

  ‘It’s over,’ she told them. ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Arthur.

  Karl came over and gave Shirley a hug, which was nice. She had not been hugged in years. He was a polite, clean boy and probably good to his mother.

  ‘Arthur, do you want to go in for a bit? Say goodbye?’ she asked. Arthur merely shook his head, swallowing the tears that had begun to mist his eyes.

  ‘Need a fag,’ he muttered and pushed out of the swing door and onto the balcony.

  ‘Do you mind if I do?’ Karl asked.

  ‘Be my guest,’ Shirley told him. ‘She’d have liked that.’

  ‘Have you told the staff yet?’

  ‘No,’ she told him. ‘Would…Would you mind, Karl?’

  ‘Course not,’ he said.

  As he padded sadly out, she admired again his leather boots with the funny little chains and rings round the heels. She sighed, made herself a cup of tea at the hospitality table and joined Arthur on the balcony. He too, she could tell, had indulged in a little cry. She was glad. Men could be so bottled up.

  Shirley stood beside him in companionable silence for a while, admiring the view of Chelsea stretching away from them. She could see the pumping station in the distance and, beyond that, just before the view melted into summer haze, Westminster Cathedral.

  ‘She picked a beautiful day to go,’ she said. It was a thin, silly thing to say, she knew, but it was true and she felt it needed saying. The remark slipped into the silence between them which absorbed it like dark water about a stone. When Arthur finally turned to her, it was with a face like thunder.

  ‘Why’d she have to get such a dirty disease? As if what she was wasn’t bad enough.’

  ‘Now Arthur, you remember what Karl told us: it’s not dirty, it’s just a —’

  ‘What’s a pansy like that know?’

  ‘I think he knows rather a lot, actually. I think he’s already lost several of his friends.’

  But Arthur was not listening.

  ‘Why’d she have to do it to us?’

  ‘She didn’t do anything to us, Arthur. She caught a virus and she died. If anything happened to us, we did it ourselves, as well you know.’

  He rounded on her, his face suddenly tight with fury.

  ‘S
hut your fucking hole,’ he hissed.

  Shirley turned away, angry in turn. He knew how she disliked unnecessary language. He was not really angry. He was upset. Perhaps he had not had a little cry after all. Not a proper one. He would tell it all to Bonnie when they got home; he had always told his Jack Russell the things he could not tell his wife, mostly things to do with the mysterious workings of his heart and a few others besides. She would send the two of them out to the allotment, say she needed the house to herself while she organized funeral cakes and sandwiches and so on. Death always made people want to stuff their faces. And drink. Juno at the Conservative Club could probably find her way to slipping her a case of that nice sherry cut-price.

  ‘When do you think we can go?’ Arthur asked her in a softer tone — the nearest he would come to an apology.

  ‘There’ll be forms to sign, probably,’ she told him. ‘That’s all. And she’ll have some things for us to take away or throw out or whatever.’

  ‘Well, let’s get it over with then we can catch the three-thirty before the rush hour starts.’

  ‘No, Arthur.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve got to sort out her flat.’

  ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘It’s Shuna’s flat.’

  ‘She only rented it. Anyway, it sounds like more of a bedsit.’

  ‘Yes, but she lived there for eight years and I’ve never seen it and there’ll be things to be sorted out there.’

  ‘Leave it, Shirley. Leave it all. She didn’t have anything valuable. You can be sure of that. And what there is the landlord can have in case she was behind with the rent.’

  ‘Shuna was always meticulous about debts. That nice friend of hers said so that visited yesterday.’

  ‘That mangy tart, you mean.’

  ‘Arthur!’

  He snorted, holding open the door for her into the visitors’ room. Ordinarily Shirley would have sighed and acquiesced, but not today. Her mind was made up.

  ‘Well you can do as you please,’ she said. ‘She’s our daughter and I’m going to do right by her. Honour her.’

  ‘Honour?’

  ‘You catch the three-thirty. I’ll come home when I’m ready. I might even have to spend the night.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’

  ‘I’ll do what I have to do. There’s food in the fridge. You know how to work the microwave. You’ll survive. You’re a cold bastard, Arthur, and one day it’ll catch up with you.’

  ‘Shirley!’

  ‘You can sign all the forms for me and bring back her overnight bag and whatever. You’ve done nothing else of use these last few days.’ Shirley was utterly calm in her rightful fury. Karl was waiting for them at the nurses’ station. ‘Shall we be off, Karl? I need some fresh air.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Gilbert.’

  She turned as they waited for the lift and took a short, hard look at her husband. She would never leave him. They fitted together now like two old shoes and divorce was grotesque in a couple over fifty. There were times, however, when she blithely contemplated murder.

  She had taken the keys earlier. They were lying in the bedside locker beside an unopened carton of long life fruit juice and a bottle of Chanel No. 5, which may have suited Shuna, but which Shirley had never greatly cared for. Keys were important, personal things, unlocking secrets, disclosing treasures. She had picked these ones up instinctively to distract her while Shuna was having a long needle pushed into her arm and had forgotten to replace them. They had an interesting fob — a big, silver hoop, like an outsize curtain ring — which felt pleasingly heavy and cool in the hand. Now, as they travelled down in the lift, Shirley’s fingers clasped on the bunch of metal as on a talisman.

  ‘Shall I give you both a lift to the station?’ Karl asked when they reached the lobby.

  ‘Mr Gilbert’s going to the station,’ she told him. ‘I’m not. I want to see her flat. Would you take me?’

  ‘Of course. But I haven’t got keys.’

  ‘I’ve got keys,’ she said and he gave her a quiet but twinkly little smile and she knew at once how his young life was probably rooted in small, harmless deceits and acts of sly kindness. ‘Thanks,’ she added. ‘You’re a good boy, Karl. Are you going steady with someone?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said and blushed a bit. ‘Three years, now, but he’s in the army, so I haven’t seen much of him lately. He’s out in Bosnia.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, adding, ‘that’s nice,’ foolishly, because she was uncertain what to say.

  Karl’s car was a Mini, black as sin with zebra-striped fur covers on the seat.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her when he saw her hesitate at the open door. ‘They’re ironic.’

  Shuna had run away from home after one flaming row too many with her father. It had been time for her to leave anyway — she was eighteen — but Shirley was not ready to be left alone with Arthur and the girl departed in anger with no plans and no future, so it was a kind of running away. For three weeks they heard nothing. Then a postcard came, pointedly addressed only to Shirley. It showed a guardsman in his busby (Karl’s friend had a busby, apparently), and said she was alive and well and living in London now. She asked that they do what they liked with the things she had left in her room. Arthur threw most of them out and made a great, purgative bonfire at the bottom of the garden from the rest. Shirley had retained a few things, however, retrieved from the dustbin bags without his knowledge; Shuna’s old school cap, purple with yellow piping, a photograph of her as a sheep in a nativity play and a Saint Christopher medallion. Finding the medallion casually abandoned along with all the ragbag litter of youth, Shirley had felt a momentary panic that her child should be braving the big city unprotected and she had put it on herself at once, shielding Shuna by proxy. She had worn it constantly ever after, hidden from her husband’s incurious gaze under slip or nightdress. Glimpsing its cheap silver plate the previous night as she gave herself an unrefreshing top-and-tail in an overheated hospital bathroom, she reflected that she had picked quite the wrong patron saint for the girl, as redundant in Shuna’s life as a cake slice at a witches’ Sabbath.

  More postcards followed the first, all addressed to Shirley, which pleased her hugely, though she said nothing. Shuna found a job as a waitress then as a secretary. She found a flat. She only paid one visit home, two Christmases after she left, and Shirley knew at once what her daughter had become. Shuna brought them champagne and absurdly generous presents and wore clothes she could never have afforded on a typist’s income. This in itself would not have signified much — her daughter might simply have fallen in with a louche crowd or acquired a lover with criminal connections. There was no talk of boyfriends, only the constant if hazy implication of a gang of nameless, party-loving friends. What clinched it for Shirley was that something had died behind Shuna’s eyes. The old, girlish desire to please men in general and her father in particular, had withered. Correspondingly, as if answering some age-old, unconscious stimulus, Arthur spent the festive season following Shuna around, looking at her with a new, indecently saucy brightness in his eye and he talked incessantly of how well she was turning out after all.

  ‘Yes,’ Shirley had thought, ‘after all. After all your sarcasm, your slaps and put-downs, your relentless, stunting prohibitions, your liberty-pruning.’ She had said nothing to him of what she had noticed. He, needless to say, was too dense to draw conclusions. She held her counsel, accepted the presents with embarrassment and forced herself to be glad, at least, that Shuna had found a way of making ends meet, was proving more resourceful than her father ever had. Subsequently, when Shuna refused to return home for either his fiftieth birthday or silver wedding parties, he turned against her memory again, calling her a whore, but it was only at her deathbed that he came to see the truth in his words.

  They received a phone call from the lad, Karl. That was the first they knew of it.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You don’t know me and officially I sho
uldn’t be contacting you, not without her permission, but she’s too sick to talk now and I know she’d want to see you. And I think you’ve a right to see her too before it’s over. She doesn’t have long, you see.’

  They could not stay at an hotel because neither of them liked being away from home and now, more than ever, they needed the comfort of a nightly return to the familiar, so they came in on the train every day at some expense. They had spent the night this last night, however, marking out the long vigil with cups of watery tea from a vending machine and mournful bars of chocolate. Karl had done all the talking. Arthur was struck dumb, first with grief at the sudden fait accompli of her terrible condition, her wasted skin hanging on her protruding bones, her death’s head eyes, and then with his understanding of what she had become.

  Karl was diplomacy itself. He spoke strictly in terms of the disease and how it was only a disease and not a moral judgement. He illustrated from the depressing scrapbook of his recent memories the deadly impartiality of its appetite. He encouraged Shirley to talk too, asking her about Shuna’s youth.

  ‘There’s so much she never told me,’ he said. ‘So much I’d love to know.’ He was skilful, well-trained at drawing people out. He was a volunteer assigned months before to befriend Shuna. Shirley thought it strange and rather sad that her daughter had so few friends that new ones had to be trained and assigned to her.