Their lips talk of misch.., p.20
Their Lips Talk of Mischief, page 20
‘No. Not Leeds.’ She smiled at me, then walked on.
I decided I would make money somehow and I would take Aoife to New York and Venice. We were back where the luxury toilet was. We’d left the lights on in there. She moved down the corridor and pushed open a door, reached out her hand and insolently slapped a light switch. It was a huge bedroom, very neatly kept, done in white and red with large red drapes over the windows. I could see a distant bathroom – another – through a door, in dark blue and white tiles.
‘This bastard has too much money.’
We could still hear the polka music away downstairs – but only faintly, his home was so large.
She said, ‘He’s rich but he’s lonely. You can tell.’
I jerked my head at the large bed. ‘I’m surprised to see no mirrors above the bed.’
She looked to me. ‘That means dirty, doesn’t it? So you can watch yourselves?’
‘That’s it.’
‘That’s what he likes.’
‘Pardon?’ I stared at Aoife.
‘Know what he said?’ She lowered her voice. ‘He said you and me were having an affair, so thirty to see my boobs or two hundred if you and me did it while he watched.’
I looked at her and repeated blankly, ‘Two hundred.’
She said, ‘Imagine, with him watching.’
There was an ambiguity which puzzled me. But then she looked sickly – and I didn’t know what part of the equation made her look like that.
I swallowed. ‘Want to get out of here?’
She nodded rapidly, still looking at the bed. I found myself passing the sparkling wine bottle to her. Why? She drank a very large-seeming gulp for her and handed it back, then she turned round.
I followed her down into the gathering polka music. He was still asleep. I was walking to the right, so I was between the wall and him in his chair. She moved straight up the wide lobby, heading for the front door, but as I passed behind him I signalled with my face to Aoife. She stopped, and so did I.
Between the padded leather cross-bar and the cushion, his jacket was ruffed up. His wallet was half birthed from the back pocket of his jeans. That would be just the kind of reckless place he’d keep a wallet. I never could figure out why men kept their wallets in their back pockets. Asking for liberation.
Kneeling behind him, I touched the leather with my finger to figure how loose it was. The wallet almost came away free. Using two fingers I plucked it out and I stood up.
Aoife watched: daunted, curious. The wallet was very fat, split, and it was stuffed with credit cards. In those days we were ignorant of their workings but there were also the purple and brown folds of cash. I tipped the wallet over to display to her. Aoife held out her hand and summoned with her fingers. I tossed the wallet and she caught it. She pulled out cash between her fingers then leaned and dropped the wallet into the mashed ice and water of the champagne bucket. With a fistful of notes she grabbed the hem and yanked up her blouse, revealing her bared breasts to me and to the sleeping Czech. She wore no brassiere, her tits were on the smaller side, nipples pink, sunk and restful, both breasts jumped once in rubbery obedience from the shirt fabric being suddenly drawn up across them. Her stomach was flat like Abby’s. She tugged the fabric back down and marched to the door, clutching the money. It had seemed as if I wasn’t there – or as if I was her eunuch servant. The polka music came out onto the street with us, then I pulled the front door softly behind me.
On the pavement, she put her jacket and scarf back on, took my arm and we walked forward together between the front gardens and the wing mirrors of parked cars. ‘I took sixty pounds cause I’ve two boobs and showed both.’
I chuckled, and passed the sparkling wine bottle to her. We stopped and she used both hands to gently manoeuvre and tip the bottle backwards beneath the street light. She suckled at that great chunk of green glass, the bubbles within it like some furious nest of disturbed insects. She smacked her lips, passing the bottle back.
‘We can tell Lou he was a pain in the ass but maybe we better not tell him all that.’
I said, ‘Yeah,’ wishing it was some other intimacy we had to lie to Lou about.
For a while we didn’t talk, just walked side by side. In her boots, her steps seemed quite fast and aggressive. She said, out of her thoughtfulness, ‘That was sinful what I did, but I was angry, wasn’t I?’
‘It was funny and justified.’
‘Was it? The sixty goes into the housekeeping, not the till at that Bells.’
‘I won’t say a thing.’
On the top of Bollo Lane, she looked at me and suddenly dropped my looped arm so that if Lou was watching us from the high windows above, he wouldn’t see us like that. We walked on side by side, but she moved slower as if she wanted the night to last longer. I swigged at the bottle, held it to the street light and said, ‘I should save some of this for Lou.’
She held up her nose and stared high, toward the top floor of Almayer House, as if the night hands of some gigantic, illuminated clock face threw forth the hour up there. The bone structure of her face was so perfect, her skin was completely horizontal under her chin. If she stood on her head you could have placed a glass securely on the tight, delicately inverted jaw. She took a long couple of swigs from the wine, which popped and swished when she moved the bottle away from her lips then handed it back to me.
As we went into the lobby of the Almayer House stairwell, Aoife said suddenly, ‘I’ve got the keys. Will we check on poor little Lamborghini?’
‘Lamborghini?’
‘Will we both go down and check him; that he’s all right?’
‘He’ll be fine.’
She stood still. ‘Oh. We could just check quick. Five minutes.’
I frowned. ‘I’ll check on him tomorrow.’
‘Okay.’
I suddenly changed my mind. ‘Oh, okay then, let’s go and check.’
She nodded and she put her hand down to mine but she took the bottle from me again and drank from it. Then she said, ‘Nope. C’mon. I need the loo.’ She turned. We both began to climb the stairs slowly – her ahead of me – without speaking. I studied the weave of her wine-red tights just above the knees. I could almost feel the heat wafting back from her living body. On the second floor, she passed the bottle back to me so she wouldn’t be associated with it in front of Lou.
Lou was impressed by the quarter-full bottle of sparkling wine and he alternately held it away from his face to study the trophy, then drank from it as he listened carefully to my sketches, analysis and descriptions of the fat Czech, his big house, both of us sneaking out whilst the beast slumbered. ‘The licence payer’s reactionary’, Lou rather brilliantly christened the Czech.
Aoife and I said nothing about the money.
Lou looked at his watch. ‘Christ sake, you lunatics. Do you think the Slavic loon’s woken up yet? Let’s get a hand cart and take Lily’s buggy, go back and strip his bloody house out. When he wakes, he won’t have a light bulb left and Acton will divide the spoils amongst its citizenry.’
Aoife stood above Lily’s buggy, looking down on her child as if she did not remember giving birth, then she bent quickly at her waist to peck with a kiss. Both Lou and I turned to amiably witness Aoife’s ass as she did this. Then she swayed toward both of us, ‘Hoi. You. Smithy,’ and she snatched the wine bottle off Lou. She stood above us. Still with her boots on, which, by custom, she normally zipped off at the front door. Her waist was inches in front of both our noses, the bottle tipped back and earrings hung down. We both looked up at her from the sofa as if we were to sail between the legs of the Rhodes Colossus.
‘So, did Cunningham keep you entertained, my darling?’ he leaned forward, freely taking both her slim thighs in his grip, and I wanted to do the same. I watched how his fingers moved a little into the soft, burgundy-coloured material.
‘Yes-he-did. Charming and a gentleman, as always. He protected me from that creepy guy.’
‘You two nymphs have been talking about me, haven’t you? How can you pass so many hours together without talking about the great Svengali?’ His head shot toward me. ‘Do you know Her Majesty’s Theatre was built only on the proceeds of the play adaptation of Trilby?’
‘We talked about you okay, mister.’ Aoife laughed above him, ‘You’re a holy terror, Lou Smith.’
‘I’ve retired from the class struggle for a period of theoretical reflection. Nice to know you two have been out, following in my footsteps, creating bloody havoc.’
‘I. Am going. To bed.’ She turned her bum to us and, still carrying the wine bottle, stepped away and off down the corridor.
Lou clicked his tongue and leaned privately towards me; he whispered, ‘Good show, boyo. She’s blotto! Sloshed.’ Then he talked about what had been on the telly and the political news, to which I nodded, not listening to a word he said. I heard only the taps and hot-water tank going in the bathroom. I heard her come out there and cross into their bedroom. After a spell I said, ‘Got to take a leak.’
I slouched down the corridor. Their bedroom door was open and Aoife must have been in bed, with the light switched off. I stepped into the bathroom and could feel humidity from her washings at the sink and with a lumpiness underfoot I looked down and saw that I was standing on her discarded blouse – the actual one she had lifted thoughtlessly in front of me. Her skirt and the crumpled red tights were kicked in against the skirting board. Halfway through my peeing, I twisted my head round and saw there were no towels blocking the window on the bathroom door behind me. I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. Then, fingers still wet, I bent to pick up her blouse. I tried to resist and I held it as if it were an injured animal, then suddenly I buried my face in the cloth and breathed as deeply as I could: both that perfume and what else? Fabric that had moved against the skin of her body. I breathed in again, then I held the garment with my hands and looked down upon it. Pathetic. I hung the blouse on the hook, unlocked the door, but as I did so there was a shadowy movement to the right within their bedroom.
From the corridor I saw the weak night light fixed to the side of Lily’s cot had been illuminated and its angle corrected. Aoife had crossed the bedroom to do that. I gritted my teeth.
*
Over two hours later I was still awake on my camp bed. I’d heard the sounds of Lou carrying sleeping Lily to the bedroom cot in his arms, placing her in there while he muttered. Later he washed himself then moved to the bedroom. The exhalation not of human breath but of the soft mattress as a new pressure was put upon it.
A sound I had never heard before in all my nights of listening and pretending to myself I wasn’t listening. Unconfirmed then definite came the rhythmic movement, then a reaction and a sudden whipping of sheets. Then silence. Long silence. Lou grunted once and the rhythm began again. The creak of a floorboard from a foot. A faster rhythm and the rapid but almost silent breaths of the mattress. Then Aoife’s voice, new-sounding and thick with determined intent, said, ‘On my— bit.’ (Or possibly even ‘butt’?) She began to groan almost immediately. Then, maybe through the shield of her own fingers, I heard the tight gasp.
I woke, illuminated my digital watch, and it was an hour and a half later. There was no sound next door. Then out of perfected silence my relief vanished in the slowly pained cry of her once again, calling out as she ranged forth in the dark.
17
There was tension I could feel in the flat. It was nothing specific and difficult to tell if it emanated from one or all of us. It was an ambient change – as if a huge new building had been built next to an old one and the atmosphere, the light and sense of enclosure within specific rooms, had permanently shifted.
There were the furtive and snatched phone calls going on – by both of them; when Aoife was down at the Co-op for nappies, or Lou popped over to visit his gran. Sometimes Lou would bring back a large frying pan of chops or a pot of soup from Myrtle, covered in tin foil, which he’d openly carried for a mile through the streets. Then we’d re-heat it. He’d often return smelling of beer, so he’d also entered The Five or Six Bells with the actual pot or frying pan and openly sat with it placed on the pub table in front of him, enduring ridicule from the old fellows for a sly pint.
Neither Aoife nor Lou wanted the other to know about their phone calls, yet both privately kept me abreast of their purpose. Aoife was arranging interviews at modelling agencies and while Lou was in the toilet she muttered to me in the gloom, both our faces lit by the television, that she had secured an interview with LTM – the biggest agency.
To my amazement I learned that – despite his drunkenness – Lou had been in touch with a language school somewhere near Worcester. He’d been asking about the possibility of a teaching job and the wage there. Things seemed to be stirring just beyond the reaches of my subtle influence and perhaps I was a little uneasy on account of it.
We were summoned by the belle Belle and, once settled in The Gertrude, Lou and I were impressed to hear Toby Hanson say, ‘Ah, Yeats. Last time I read old Yeats was sat with a paperback in a strip bar on Isla de Margarita off the coast of Venezuela. Don’t think poorly of me chaps. Every bar on the Isla de Margarita is a strip bar. Now. I’ve brought the chariot today. Parked round the corner; so give us a hand one of you.’
I accompanied Toby out to his car. It could only have been his. It was a shit brown – once grand – 1976 Mercedes Benz 350SL. I noted the distinctive Mercedes Benz gunsight above the radiator had been broken off; a wooden cocktail stick with wind-ravaged tinsel from some country-house soirée was now lodged there instead. Through the windscreen, his leather driving gloves were on top of the dashboard amongst an archive of ignored parking tickets. I don’t know why, but at that moment I looked up the Kings Road and felt like just walking east to Euston and Scotland and away from everything. And I should have. Instead I lifted the box out of the boot and carried it back into the pub.
‘Tobias,’ asked Lou, ‘how are we meant to get all this bollocks home? We’ll need a taxi fare,’ he quickly added.
‘Carrier bags from the grocer’s across the road and split them among four plastic bags? Yes. That should do the trick.’
‘What do we do after we’ve read them?’
‘Dump ’em.’ Toby brutally shrugged.
Lou had leaned forward and stared down on one of the white volumes bound together with staples, and he drew it from the opened top of the box. The cover read: Roland C. Matterhorn. The Vampires of Smithfield. Lou looked up at Toby as if he’d betrayed his own family to the Gestapo. ‘Do you actually publish this?’
‘No, no. An imprint of ours does. Sells like hot cakes. Horror, erotic stuff, true crime, all to shifty fellows in garages, railway stations, airports and all these sorts of places; you can forget about bookshops for the hard stuff. This is all horror.’
‘You can say that again.’ Lou was leaning over the box, flicking the top pages as if he were positioned on a toilet pan, with a pained expression. His tone had an outraged, metaphysical objection engrained in it. ‘This is about cockney vampires, working in the meat market in Smithfield.’ He looked up at me, agonised.
I picked a volume myself. Another of Mr Matterhorn’s works, The Werewolves of Wandsworth.
Toby let his eyes flicker down, ‘Oh he’s just completely ridiculous,’ he said, revealing he knew more about this material than he was letting on.
Underneath was Brothel of the Vampire by Vanessa Lather. I pointed it out. ‘Bags me this one.’
Lou flapped the volume in his hand. ‘What are these, proofs?’
‘Printers’ galleys stapled together. We don’t bother with bound proofs for work of this nature. No one to send it to. So you chaps dream up the back-cover copy. Hundred words max. Make them seem irresistible. Art department will concoct some gruesome front covers.’ He clapped his hands together. I could tell by his sudden jauntiness we had just freed up his weekend. I had an intuition he was banging beanpole Belle. ‘Good work; I’ll get you eighty nicker. Those beers are on me,’ and he was out the door with a raised arm of farewell.
Lou dropped the stapled block of paper back in the box.
‘Eighty quid,’ I said. ‘C’mon, get some plastic bags from across the road.’
He nodded. Literature was fading away and beer was triumphing – and surely this had long been the true golden balance?
There were seventeen of Toby Hanson’s horror novels to read and to write the back-cover copy for. As with most endeavours in this life we set out with some sincerity. I sat in my room at 506 Almayer House, looking down on Brentford, during my grateful pauses from Brothel of the Vampire. Lou sat in the living room, dealing with the bloodsucking at Smithfield. Lily cried and then Lou became peripatetic, shifting between the kitchen stool and their bedroom, fleeing Lily’s noise in balloons of cigarette smoke. Lou was reading slower than me, because I soon noticed that – using a sharpened pencil – he was making outraged grammatical and anachronistic corrections in the margins of the text: WHAT is the subject in this sentence??!! This is a MIXED simile. There were no MACHINE GUNS in the eighteenth century. I had to tell him to stop doing it or he’d never get through.
After another hour of vampires, Lou came to the door of my room. ‘How much money do you have?’
‘Three pound seventy-two pence.’
‘I’ve almost a fiver in coppers. Know where I found two pounds?’
‘Where?’
‘I went through every pair of jeans and trousers bloody Abby has stored in this joint.’
‘Where is Abby this weather?’
Lou said, ‘I’ll need to ask her round. From what Eeef tells, candle painting has taken precedence over La Moda.’ He called out loudly, ‘Aoife, darling. We have to go to the pub. It’s just impossible to read this stuff sober.’
We arrived in The Bells with the stapled proofs in Co-op bags which Lou occasionally shook as if there were something living in there. We settled in our usual spot beneath the windows with our pints. Lou sighed and wrenched open the middle pages of a new work: A Virgin Grows Sharp Teeth, by Tamara Cleo.
