Dead of Light (25 page)

I pushed myself up, hauled the T-shirt over my head and flopped down again, listening to the sounds of Carol snooping in Jacko's room. The suspicious silences I put down to her reading his Valentine cards, and why not? I'd done that too. If he didn't want people reading them, I figured, he shouldn't leave them on display in a room not locked.

And then she was back, and back on my case; back on my backside, indeed, a significant weight and warmth.

“That's better,” she said, patting my bare ribs.

“Did you find something?”

“Mm-hmm. Not ideal, but it'll do.”

“What is it?”

“Well, cocoa-butter, actually. Very good for stretch-marks when you're pregnant...”

Not useful information, that; but the stuff was good for rubbing into tensed shoulders also, or else Carol was just good at rubbing and never mind the lubricant. Feeling her thumbs press deep, yelping as her fingers suddenly plucked at tendons that sang in my body like fiddle-strings, so tight they were, I realised or remembered suddenly just how tired I was despite those hours in bed. Body and mind both poisoned with exhaustion, with a day and a night and half a day of bad living; I should be sinking now, she should be pushing me way, way down and her strong hands holding me under...

“Christ,” she grunted. “Did I say you were wired? Hot-wired, more like. Like a stolen car. Something riding you that doesn't belong...”

And then I guess she heard what she was saying, just about the same time that I did. I sniggered into my own armpit, couldn't help it; and she slapped me across the back of the head for being so obvious, and bounced on my back to underline it. And then we were both sober again, and God knows how far she could track my mind but I was all but engulfed in symbols. Something? Many things, more like. All riding me hard, as she was; and none of them belonged in my small and carefully-circumscribed world, as she herself did not.

After a mutual and mutually-respectful pause for thought and both of us making no offers for the other's, keeping our tarnished pennies to ourselves, I felt her slick hands once again on my skin and probing, coming back to what she knew. Or what she thought she knew, at least, what she could handle, though she knew for certain now what a task she'd taken on.

o0o

Fifteen, twenty minutes she must have worked my body over while I lay prone and passive beneath her, eyes closed and too weary now even to tell her that she wasn't really making any difference, she really wasn't getting through.

Fifteen or twenty minutes, where she took quick breathers but kept on coming back, kept on trying to break me down; and then she sighed, lifted her weight off me and said, “Roll over, then.”

Rolling over, I opened my eyes, all ready to smile at her shrug of resignation,
sometimes a mouthful is just too big to chew on but thanks anyway, thanks for trying, Carol love
— and what I saw instead of a shrug was two small, pale breasts hanging loose above me where she'd pulled her sweatshirt off during one of those wee breaks, and what I did instead of smile was gape.

Carol it was who smiled, light and ironic; and Carol's hands that had been so hard and so ineffectual on the close-cranked muscles of my back were light and teasing now on my chest and arms, and my skin was tingling and prickling for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the excluded sunlight, and I couldn't believe what she was at.

“My thumbs are knackered,” she said, and demonstrated her untruthfulness instantly, gripping my wrists and holding my arms down as I went to lift them in some awkward gesture of denial. “And don't lie to me, I wasn't getting anywhere near, was I? But if a bloke needs relaxing and massage won't do it, well, hell, there are better ways.”

“Carol...”

“What? Flatmate likely to barge in on us?”

“No.” I didn't know where Jacko was, but by this time — ten past six, the clock on the gas-fire said, which meant for sure that it was later than that but probably not yet seven — he was safe to be out for the evening, and Jonathan presumably with him.

“Well, then, what's your problem? Curtains are pulled, no one's going to be looking in at your humping butt.”

“Listen, I don't...”

“I know you don't. This is one of your problems, Ben boy, we discovered that at Percy's last night. Long time ago, I know, but I don't forget confessions. I mean, talking of long times, how long is it since you got laid?”

I blinked up at her, Ernest Dowson on my mind.
I have been faithful to thee, Laura! in my fashion
— and my chosen fashion was a monk's habit and no young man's. Point of fact, I hadn't slept with a girl since before Laura; since before I left the family, even. I could never be sure that it wasn't my name bringing them to bed, rather than my arguable charms. That had started to matter when I was what, eighteen or nineteen, somewhere around then...

“Precisely,” Carol said, though I hadn't said a word. “If you have to work it out on your fingers, it's too long. And what I say is, if not bonking is part of the problem, then a good bonk must be part of the solution. By definition,” with a tweaking little grin as she stole one of my own phrases; and then her fingernails closed and tweaked sharply on my left nipple, and I yelped and bucked a little beneath her.

“Just lie still, pet,” she said, her hands working to ensure that I could not. Something turned over in my mind, a stray line trapped in teenage memory from a book that my cousins and I had passed between us, Sven Hassel or some war-porn lookalike I'd pinched off my father's solitary bookshelf. A wounded soldier sheltered in a barn; a woman tending to him, peeling away his clothes and then her own. I had a bad feeling that I'd read it with my mouth open; I knew to my shame that I'd giggled, we'd all giggled over and relished and treasured the line and used it inappropriately for months after.

When rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it.

Terrible, evil stuff, classic Macallanthink and very much what I hated, what I'd walked away from — but ah, what the fuck. There it was in my head, unlooked-for and inescapable; and here Carol was sitting astride my hips, sitting on my groin indeed and sparing one hand now to unflip the buckle of my belt, and she also was unlooked-for and inescapable, it seemed, and I was just too tired to fight.

Too tired to bonk, also, too shagged to shag: or so I'd have thought. But bodies are perverse and Carol was experienced, much different to the clumsy and ignorant girls I'd clumsily and ignorantly bedded as a teenager. And yes, I had four or five years'-worth of celibacy banked up behind me like a great weight of hidden water, dark and passive and still until something comes to crack the dam.

Images of Barnes Wallis and Carol as a bouncing bomb, the original blonde bombshell; and Christ help me I was giggling suddenly, near naked now and almost hysterical on the carpet there, almost losing it altogether.

“What's funny?” Carol demanded suspiciously, halfway through losing her own jeans.

“Nothing,” I gasped, and tried to clench my teeth around the laugh and hold it; and succeeded only in snorting wetly through my nose.

“Oh, gross,” she said, stretching for my discarded T-shirt and mopping it at me like a mother. I pushed it away and she thrust back hard, her turn to laugh at me now; and then I wasn't doing what I'd been told at all, not lying still, pet —
not lying back to enjoy it
— and we were wrestling, rolling and straining against each other and all else was slipping away, the world was only bodies after all and symbology could go wank, there were no figures in this carpet: only crumbs and dust...

o0o

And when the little death of orgasm — mine, at least: far be it from me to speak for her on that — had crumbled to its own little dust, we lay apart and my mouth was dry and bitter, and there was grit sticking to my skin. I looked for Carol, and found her looking at me; and as if my eyes gave her the cue, she said,

“Well. You needed that.”

Maybe so, maybe I had. I felt as if the world had shifted on its axis, second or third time today; and maybe that was a good thing, maybe it would eventually come round to a point where it rolled more smoothly for me. Just now I found it hard to feel confident. Gratitude I thought perhaps I could manage; I shifted my shoulders against rough fibres, and yes, there was a tension gone from there. My bones sat more loosely within their sleeve of flesh, and that felt no longer ricked or twisted. Strange things, bodies, and hard to factor.

“Wouldn't want it, though, would you?” I said aloud, if only to see the puzzlement on her face.

“What wouldn't I want?”

“Gratitude.”

“Nah. Got no use for it.” She stirred, shifted onto her knees, then to her feet. “I could use your loo, though. Where is it?”

“Through the kitchen, and keep walking. When you bang your nose on the wall, you're standing in the bath.”

Standard directions, they usually brought a smile; but not this time. Only a contemplative nod and she was gone, naked and easy.

o0o

Me, I just lay there, moving nothing that didn't have to move: not even chasing down the itches on my skin that yearned for scratching. Too indolent or too much overused, my aching flesh and the slow recovery of my heart; this was the time to do what I'd been told, to lie back and enjoy it.

Did that, then, and nothing else. Asked myself no questions, even, though I knew they only waited with the world, for me to roll over:
turn again, Macallan
, and there would be nothing but bad questions and worse responses, and I didn't want to be Lord Mayor of anything. Didn't have a cat, either. Refused to keep one, in the flat here. Bad country for cats...

And then Carol came back with something just a little different in her, carrying a question in her eyes.
Can't trust anyone
, I thought, grossly unfair.

“You weren't fibbing, were you? When you said I got you out of the bath...”

Oh, right. I hadn't pulled the plug out, in my hurry to answer the door; she'd walked in on a bathful of cold and scummy water. Not nice, but I didn't see how it mattered.

“No, I wasn't kidding,” I said. “But I don't get many visitors, so I got out to see. Don't worry about it.”
Glad I did
, my naked, knackered body said in a whisper, that I hoped she could hear.

“Only you were
dry
when you came to the door, so I thought it was, you know, just a spur-of-the-moment thing to say...”

She thought I'd been having a wank, most like. I just shrugged, which felt silly lying down; and she said, “So how did you do that, how did you get dry so quick?”

Small thing, but it was worrying her, perceptive woman that she was, it obviously didn't fit with the universe she understood; and she'd seen me break the laws one time already today, so she was leaping to conclusions.

And dead right, too.

“You don't want to know,” I tried, the classic dodge.

“Yes, I do,” she said, managing to sound both doubtful and utterly certain at the same time. Neat trick.

So I rolled over and up, onto my feet and back into the world where all those questions waited, and this the first that would lead directly to all the others; and I took her hand for my own comfort as much as hers, and led her through to the kitchen where the late sun was still angling in over the back wall and through the window.

“Look,” I said, and pale little flames as cute as I could make them danced in rank and file over the hairs of my arm, and didn't singe a one.

She shook her head slowly, more in wonder than rejection; then she glanced down at our linked hands and said, “You tingle more when you do that, did you know?”

“One of the perks,” I said, winning a bubbling snort from her, and sweet revenge.

o0o

We dumped that old cold scummy giveaway water and ran a fresh bath, just deep enough still to be hot. Carol used it first, while I sat on the toilet and we talked; then she got out and I dried her, a trick I'd learned from Marty way back when. Not famous for his courtesies to girls, he did it because he liked to handle them, a dampening towel only an accessory and not much in the way. That they liked it too was a bonus, useful information that he'd passed on to Jamie and to me.

I'd brought her clothes through already, another small attention so that she didn't feel obliged to sit around naked as I had. I was just going to step into the bath myself when there was a second interruption, a second surprise knocking on the door.

This time I hesitated, and looked for Carol's permission before going to answer it.

Got that, with a twitchy smile and a jerk of the head, “Go on, it could be important.”

Sounded important, certainly, another round of thumping as I hustled into jeans and T-shirt in the front room.

o0o

And it was important, by any measure. Could even be crucial, though I couldn't get my head around it.

When I answered the door, I found Laura there, fist raised to pound again; and Jamie stood behind her, hands on her waist like a message, very loud and very clear indeed.

Me, I only stood and gaped. Laura moved, Laura did it all; seemed to be a day for that, for women claiming what they wanted from me, taking possession of selected aspects of my body.

She came one step forward and one step up, and we were pretty much eye to eye. Her dark beauty filled my world of sight, and that was all my world. I thought it tainted only by the muddy colours of her concern for me. Another day, an earlier day I'd have been so moved, to see her moved so much; today I felt all my skin fiery and my body suddenly awkward again, every muscle embarrassed and drawing back.

Or wanting to. No chance. Lovely Laura, not to be denied: she just kept on coming. From eye-to-eye she came too close to focus, and her arms wrapped hard around me and her face was in my neck as she hugged and rocked me.