by Lex Lander
‘Ready when you are,’ my opponent called with a fine touch of malice. Willie Scott, my brother-in-law, medium height and build, craggily masculine, was four years my junior and revelling in it. I cursed him under my breath and gave the ball all I had, which at this late stage in the game wasn’t much.
Five minutes later we emerged from the court, Willie having thrashed me three games to love. My sister Julie, thirty-five, blonde like me though hers was worn shoulder-length and she was altogether lovelier, came down from the viewing stage to meet us. A consolation peck on the cheek for me, a proper mouth-to-mouth job for Willie. After twelve years of marriage and two kids they still regularly behaved like a honeymoon couple.
‘You’re rusty as hell, Drew darling,’ she observed.
As an appellation I disliked Drew. It was Julie’s diminutive for Andrew, which was the name I would have been christened if my father’s choice had prevailed.
‘Och, leave the man be,’ Willie said, grinning, in his refined Edinburgh burr. ‘He’s getting on a bit, ye know.’
‘Bollocks,’ I rejoined, slipping the cover over my racket.
Julie feigned disapproval at my use of the vernacular.
‘I’ll get the drinks in while you two shower.’
Later, we sat around a table in the plasticky club bar and indulged in the easy, undemanding chit-chat of intimates. Yarning, trotting out hackneyed jokes, ragging each other harmlessly.
‘The girls keep asking when we’re going to visit you,’ Julie said. Her daughters, my nieces, Cathy, ten, and Christina, seven, were her recreation but not her vocation. That lay in her career as an advertising executive, in her wine importation business, and in the monthly article entitled “Women at the Helm” that she wrote for a national women’s magazine. How she packed it all in as well as managing a substantial home was a mystery to all, Willie included.
‘There must be another of her,’ he had once mused to me. ‘A secret clone.’
Busy, contented people. Lucky them. I was glad for them and any small envy I felt was benign. Two weeks ago, they had taken me in, absorbed me into their small family circle for the festive season, and given me the run of their sprawling Tudor pile. They had kept me on the narrow track of sanity. You might even say they saved me from myself.
‘Stay on as long as you like – just don’t get under my feet,’ Julie had said cheerfully and sincerely.
That night in the “cosy” guest bedroom I lay awake long after lights out. Julie’s and Willie’s house was of the kind that never sleeps, what with the mice scurrying in the wainscoting, and the creaks and clicks that always seem to be a feature of old buildings. When the wind blew, which it was doing now, the defoliated branches of the giant horse chestnut tree that sat in the centre of the lawn rattled and occasionally tapped at my window. Night talk. I didn’t mind it. Ordinarily I found it restful.
But of late my spirit was too busy to rest. It wandered still in search of Lizzy, wherever she was. Christmas had been and gone: vivid decorations, a sparkling tree that was too tall by a foot for the low ceiling, children laughing, adults making merry; food, drink; more food, more drink; still more drink. Drinking the blues away. I was well and truly back on my treadmill. At least I kept up my daily exercise regime, which helped while away the hours.
By New Year’s Day Lizzy had been missing for a hundred and sixteen days. A lot could happen to a missing person in a hundred and sixteen days. In Lizzy’s particular case none of it would be good.
In between exercising and meals I prowled around stuffy, insipid Royal Windsor, went riding on the downs with Julie, played more squash with Willie and kept getting beaten. I even took Cathy and Christina to Regent’s Park Zoo on a brittle-bright late January afternoon. On that occasion I also learned a bit about myself when Christina, who was contemplating an old and extremely bad-tempered baboon, whispered to Cathy, ‘That one looks as misbul as Uncle Drew.’
Cathy, older and more tactful, shushed her frantically.
‘It does, though,’ Christina insisted.
I squatted beside her to put us on a level. ‘Am I really a miserable old baboon of an uncle?’
Her stare was unabashed and unwinking.
‘You wasn’t before,’ she said consolingly. ‘Mummy says you must be in love. Are you in love? What’s in love anyway? Is love a place?’
Cathy, scathingly, ‘It’s when two people like each other very much, silly.’
‘Oh.’ Pause for dissection. ‘I mustn’t be in love with you then.’
‘Ooh, you’re such a nasty little girl,’ Cathy said, pushing her sister.
To avert all-out warfare I proposed ice creams and, with a small gloved hand in each of mine, went in search of a source of supply. A serious challenge in Regent’s Park in January.
I also resolved to put on a happy face in future.
By the beginning of February I was meandering further afield. A get-away-from-it-all weekend in the Lake District, for instance. It sleeted down without a break. The following weekend in Dublin, reviving an old flame, only to find the ignition was lacking. A disaster.
Mostly though, having used up all Royal Windsor’s attractions, I rambled around London’s West End. Aimlessly. Window shopping. Dropping in at pubs. Sometimes theatre-going in the evening. I sought no female company. After the Dublin fiasco, not to mention the fruitless quest to Edmond aan Zee, I couldn’t work up the zeal.
Of the pubs I frequented in the West End, I was especially partial to the Hog In The Pound Tavern, just off Oxford Street. It was there in the quaint triangular bar that, thanks to a chance meeting, the stopped clock of my life began to tick again.
I was ordering my third-too-many vodka, fast approaching that numb serenity that had again become the desired condition, when my name – my real name – was called.
‘It is you, isn’t it? Well, fuck me sideways!’
A curly head atop wide shoulders jutted beyond the row of bar proppers.
‘Stephen Bloore, by God!’
We advanced towards each other.
‘Look at you. Just like a bloody film star!’
‘And look at you. Just like a bookmaker.’ Which is what he was.
He guffawed. Hands were clasped, backs slapped.
‘Where the hell have you been these five years?’ he demanded, almost truculent.
I winked secretively and said. ‘Next question?’
‘Oh, right. Like that, is it? What are you doing in the Smoke? Not back in the spy business, are you?’
‘You must be joking.’
We took our drinks to a table by the door that a middle-aged couple were vacating.
Stephen Bloore was a Londoner by birth and temperament, and owned a chain of betting shops in the east and north of the capital. Our friendship dated from my marriage, when he and his wife had lived in the apartment building next door. His marriage had disintegrated, thanks to his philandering.
‘How’s the rip-off business?’ I said as we drank to mutual health, wealth, etcetera. ‘Still getting richer while your customers throw themselves from high places?’
His brown eyes twinkled. The wrinkles were more abundant than I recalled. He would be a year or so older than me.
‘And you?’ He had a knack of replying by turning a question back on you. Much like me.
‘Scraping a living.’
We chatted on until closing time. Reminiscing mostly.
‘Where are you staying?’ he asked as we were almost thrown out onto the street, last to leave.
‘Windsor.’
‘Christ. Nowheresville.’ He put on a thoughtful expression. ‘Tell you what, Andy, my old son, I’ve got a bit of a do going out in the sticks tonight. Nothing grand, just a buffet party with a some friends and acquaintances. There’s bound to be a few unattached scrubbers tossing their keys in the ring.’ He nudged my arm. ‘Know what I mean, wink-wink.’
Any company was better than my own. Even scrubbers.
‘Why not?’ I said,
and collected a slap across the shoulder blades that gave me the hiccups.
‘Good man. Be there at nine, no later.’ He scribbled on the back of a business card. ‘Here’s the address. Your car got GPS?’
‘Yes, don’t worry, I’ll find it.’
‘Don’t be late,’ he said as he tucked the card in my breast pocket.
With that we parted. Until nine o’clock, when, drawn by boredom, by the need to fill another empty evening, I rolled through the imposing, pillar-flanked gateway of Ranwyck House, to the south of the village of Iver Heath and within earshot of Heathrow Airport.
It was a considerable mansion, early Victorian, I guessed, size being its chief virtue. The cars carelessly parked before a terraced frontage like scattered toys were high-income bracket. So was the woman who came to the double-locked door, wearing more war paint than a Cherokee chief and a full-length mauve dress with splits and cut-outs all over.
Well, with keys in the ring on the agenda, what had I expected – a dowager duchess in twin-set and pearls?
‘Hell-oh,’ she said, upper-class to the last vowel. ‘And who might you be?’
‘André Warner,’ I announced and threw in a wide smile to ease her qualms.
‘I see.’ A slight thaw set in. ‘How delightful. But I still don’t know you, do I?’
Then Stephen Bloore pitched up, drink in one hand, arm candy clinging, appropriately, to his arm.
‘Thought it might be you.’ He released the bimbette, a skinny piece with synthetic model-girl looks, to haul me inside. ‘Marcia,’ he said to the woman in the mauve dress, ‘this is my old mate, André.’
Marcia’s polar icecap now melted completely, and she reverted to her role of warm, welcoming hostess.
‘I should have realised such a lovely man couldn’t possibly be a gatecrasher.’ She attached her lissom shape to mine. I didn’t object. Nor did I feel a thing.
We joined a gathering some twenty-strong in a study of sorts, where the wallpaper consisted of books. Heavy drapes shut out the night, and in front of them was a home cinema TV measuring about five feet by two. A mixture of individual and twin seats, were arranged in rows. A long table against a wall was creaking under a vast buffet. Some of the guests were attacking it.
‘Are we going to watch a movie?’ I asked.
‘And a few,’ Stephen quipped. ‘You’ll enjoy them, mate, I guarantee it.’
His salacious grin was a clue to the kind of movie that would be showing. Not Walt Disney, for sure.
‘Come and meet everyone,’ Marcia said, and took me on a whistle-stop tour. The guest profile was upper-middle class, well-groomed, well-spoken, with a 6:4 male-female ratio. Most of the women were under-attired à la Marcia. All but a handful were smoking the kind of weed you can’t buy over the counter.
‘Who owns this place?’ I asked Marcia, as she offered me a drag on her splif. I accepted, to be neighbourly.
‘I do, dahling,’ she said, adding, with an exaggerated flutter of eyelashes, ‘I’m a Lady, with a capital “L”.’
I refrained from asking ‘What’s a Lady like you doing at a smut show?’ The assumption that the morals of the English aristocracy are higher than those of the proletariat was never valid.
When Stephen, raucous as any fairground barker, announced that the movie was ‘ready to roll’, I was steered by Lady Marcia to a twin seat. She then disappeared but returned in a matter of minutes to keep me company. She was breathing fast as if she’d just completed a circuit of the estate. A dusting of white around her nostrils told the real story, however. It came as no surprise that the non-liquid version of coke was among the refreshments on offer.
The lights went out and the noisy chatter dwindled. A light glowed on the front of the DVD box below the screen. The screen went from black-out to instant full colour. “Sex Spectrum” was the title, sex everywhichway was the theme. “All actors are eighteen and over” a tagline assured us. It might even be true. The plot proved to be negligible, just a parade of permutations: two girls together; two older women and a young girl; four men and a girl; two girls and a man; and within this shuffling of partners were performed acts of flagellation, bondage, bukkake, sadomasochism, oral sex, anal sex, fisting, bestiality, and so on, and so on. None of it entirely original. New variations, perhaps, of tried and tested formats, all proven marketable, all available and more on the Internet. The only difference between stuff on-line and tonight’s offerings was the size of the screen.
Initially mildly arousing, this ninety-minute long procession of close-ups of sexual organs in action ultimately became sexually deadening. Erotic overkill. My eyelids began to droop before we reached the halfway point. The audience was transfixed. Not a catcall was heard from opening to closing credits. The only vocal demonstration of any sort came from a bespectacled woman of about fifty, occupying a couch on my right, who let out a muted squeal whenever the camera feasted on a set of male genitals. Marcia was more reserved. Her shows of emotion were confined to the occasional squeeze of my thigh.
As the closing credits rolled up the screen she deposited a loose, wet kiss on my cheek. ‘Wasn’t that really something?’
‘I’ll say!’ I stretched, flexed my knees.
‘Wait till you see the next,’ Marcia said, giving an excited wriggle. Her thigh rubbed mine.
I wasn’t sure I could sit through another half-hour of coitus uninterruptus. As it happened I didn’t even need an excuse to absent myself.
The title said it all: “Naughty Nymphets”. Kiddy porn was where I drew the line. I stood up, startling Marcia, and left the room. Directly opposite was a doorway, beyond it a room fitted out as a bar, with a billiard table occupying centre stage. I marched in. Two grey-haired men were chalking their cues, preparatory to starting a game. Another, middle-aged, was at the bar counter, hunched over a drink. Beside it a bottle with a Dalmore stag’s-head label. Whisky, single malt, fifteen years in the ageing.
‘Join the club,’ he said to me, indicating the empty stool next to him.
I hesitated, then accepted the invitation. From the billiard table came the clack-clack of balls ricocheting as the game got under way.
Across the corridor the movie soundtrack was still audible. Monosyllabic dialogue, a few squeals, bland background music; occasional whoops from the audience. I crossed the room and shut the door.
‘I like to see a naked woman as much as any man,’ my drinking partner muttered as I rejoined him, ‘but that stuff with kids turns my stomach.’
I didn’t ask why he was here then. He might ask me the same. He poured me a generous dose of the Dalmore. Scotch wasn’t my favourite spirit. I downed it anyway.
‘Did nobody warn you what was on the agenda?’ I asked.
‘No. Some friends brought us.’ He jerked a thumb at the open door. ‘My wife’s still in there. Either pissed or stoned.’
One of the billiard players wandered over, cue resting on his shoulder.
‘It’s all very well you chaps sitting there with a holier-than-thou attitude. The trouble is, some children are just as immoral as adults.’
Maybe he had a point but I wasn’t open to conversion. Kids were precious. My nieces came to mind. Innocent, trusting, inviolable.
‘It’s obvious you don’t have any kids of your own,’ I said nastily.
His face closed up. The billiard cue twitched. In case he had ideas about using it on me I got ready to counter attack. Another twitch and he would be kissing carpet.
‘And you do, I suppose,’ he snapped, and stalked off back to his game.
Touché.
The next half an hour passed in desultory conversation with George, my new friend. It was close to midnight. Stephen hadn’t mentioned an all-night session, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t. I decided to slip away without saying goodbye.
The door opened and two women came in giggling.
‘This one is really special, folks.’ Stephen’s voice from the movie room drifted in with them, the words slurre
d with drink or drugs or both. ‘Hot from the darkrooms across the water, only arrived this morning.’
‘A world premiere!’ some woman whooped.
‘Invite the Queen!’
Cheering and whistling. The ever-present background music cranked up. On-screen dialogue, too loud. Coarse laughter. Once more into the sewer. My glass was empty. So was I.
‘I’m off,’ I announced to George. Well and truly smashed, he waved his glass at me.
As I exited from the bar the screen was visible through the movie room doorway in front of me. I glimpsed a girl in a woolly red hat with a yellow pom-pom on top, arching and writhing like a speared fish, as several guys manhandled her to a parked car.
Some inner compulsion fixed my eyes to the screen, made me linger. As the girl was thrust through the rear door the red hat fell off, releasing a streamer of long pale-blond hair. Inside the car another camera took over, dwelling on her face.
It was a youthful face, of course, if heavily made-up. It was, even in its simulated terror, sensationally lovely.
It was also familiar. Heart-stoppingly familiar.
‘Oh – my – God, ’ I whispered. ‘Lizzy.’
Twenty-Seven
Every fibre in me strained to leave. What had so far been revealed – flashes of pale thigh and white underwear – was only an appetite-whetter, designed to warm up the punters. All too soon titillation would degenerate into total exposure, and from there to hardcore action, sickeningly explicit, lingeringly recorded by the camera.
The detachment with which I had viewed the earlier showing was gone, superseded by a hollow, gut-churning dread.
A yell, meaningless, incoherent, escaped me. I rushed at the TV unit like a crazy man. Over it went with a crash, to howls of outrage on all sides. I whirled around hurling curses. The TV was on the floor, screen upwards. The movie was still running, the dialogue, Lizzy’s squeals, manufactured or real, the hooting of the male participants now unnaturally loud.
I kicked out at the DVD box. It fell off its shelf, still running, seemingly built to take punishment. I stamped on the toppled screen. It went black, and the room with it. Arms reached for me out of the darkness. I struck out, connected with bone. A shout, a curse. Fingers clawed at my face. I swatted them away and two-fistedly cleared a space. Then somebody tackled me rugby-style and I was dragged, still swinging, to the floor.