I'm on the train! (6 page)

Draping herself over the edge of the bed, she unzipped the
exquisite
dress, imagining Jean-Pierre’s deft fingers slowly easing it down. Yes, his lips were on her naked skin, kissing every inch of her back, as the zip crept lower, lower. And now the dress had rustled to the floor and he was slipping his seductive hand inside her silky knickers and that hand, too, was gliding lower, lower, and….

She woke with a start, burning hot and soaked with sweat; lay for a moment, wincing, as the flush engulfed her in waves of breathless, clammy heat. Why in heaven’s name was she sleeping naked, when her sensible, all-cotton nightdress would have absorbed at least some of the perspiration?

Snapping on the bedside light, she peered at her watch. Three o’clock, for pity’s sake! Last night, she hadn’t thought to draw the curtains and the windowpanes looked menacingly black. Black as her mood. Wearily, she eased herself out of bed, dragged the suitcase from the wardrobe and heaved it up onto the luggage-stand. Having struggled with the straps and locks, she found her nightdress lying on the top and immediately put it on. It was totally inappropriate for a woman of her age and size to be wandering round in her birthday-suit. Next, she unpacked her medicines. She already had a raging headache, and would need a double dose of Ibuprofen to
ease the now savage pain of her arthritis.

As she limped into the bathroom to fetch a glass of water, she stared, aghast, at her reflection in the mirror. Her allergic rash was worse than ever: lumpy, red pustules had erupted all over her face and spread even down her neck and chest. She turned away, unable to endure the sight, and swallowed each medicament in turn, including the herbal potions, of course. And she had better take her laxatives, as well, since she could hardly count on All-Bran and stewed prunes for breakfast in a French hotel. The bulk laxatives required at least a pint-and-a-half of liquid, some of which she would drink in the form of tea – less unpleasant than gulping down more tap-water. Thank God for the travel-kettle and soya milk, both of which she now dug out of the case; also extricating the light-box. She knew already that she would never get back to sleep, so best to switch it on and sit in front of it, to help lift her jaded mood.

Having made the tea, she set the Litepod on the writing-desk and placed her Back-Friend ready on the chair, while she went to fetch the neck-support. She would need them both, judging by the way her joints were aching. However, before beginning her light-box session, she unpacked her clothes and put them all on hangers. They were already badly creased and she would have to iron the whole damned lot, as soon as it was light. While that murky night was pressing against the windows, she just didn’t have the energy for so onerous a chore.

Once her things were in the wardrobe and she had choked down all the laxatives, with the help of three large cups of tea, she
positioned
herself at the desk, in front of the Litepod screen. However, hardly had five minutes gone by, when she was overtaken by another flush, which galloped through her body, leaving her
breathless
and disoriented. One of the worst features of the menopause was the way it plunged the sufferer into uncontrollable states. She couldn’t choose
not
to flush or sweat – her hormones simply
overruled
her and went their own pernicious way.

On impulse, she rushed over to the window and flung it open, breathing in the cool night air, to counteract the surge of heat, still throbbing through her limbs. As the flush gradually subsided, she
remained leaning on the sill, drenched with perspiration and exhausted from lack of sleep. Tomorrow, she must have an early night. The minute dinner was over, she would sneak up here on the quiet and leave the others drinking in the bar.

Oh, my God, she thought, only now recalling that tomorrow she had arranged to meet Jean-Pierre. Out of the question! How could an overweight, rash-infested, arthritic, menopausal wreck even entertain the prospect of allowing a virile young lover to lure her into bed? First thing in the morning, she must ring his mobile and say she was unwell – all too miserably true. She now felt shivery and nauseous, as she often did following a flush. In fact, if she didn’t lie down, she might actually faint, as had happened twice before. The sheets would be disgustingly sweaty, so she had better resort to her Dreamsack. The smell of her unwashed body was odious, but she felt too defeated even to shower. All she wanted was to crawl into the Dreamsack, close her eyes and imagine being safely home; back in her steady job and regular routine.

Holidays were lethal – the uncertainty, the change of diet, the risk of illness and accident; the way you were thrown together with completely unsuitable people, who just happened to be members of your group. Fiona might be younger than the rest, but she was far too much of a hedonist to be counted as a friend. Tomorrow’s
shopping
trip must certainly be cancelled, otherwise the frivolous woman would only persuade her to lash out on absurdly unsuitable clothes: blatantly backless numbers, or outfits in some flagrant shade of puce. Besides, being out of doors in the glaring sun was bound to bring on another migraine – or worse. What her body actually needed was to lie down all day in a darkened room.

She mooched over to the writing-desk and switched off her trusty light-box. Whatever its merits, it could hardly alleviate her aching sense of isolation, as if she had travelled not just to France, but to the far reaches of the universe, where no other human being lived. She longed for company and comfort; for someone to confide in, someone who could understand. Illness cut you off from normal, healthy people, who either shunned you as a bore, or tried to jolly you along. Only fellow-sufferers could empathize – people like dear,
faithful Richard, with his haemorrhoids and sinusitis, his tendency to athlete’s foot, his need to rest after any heavy meal.

In fact, once she had rung Fiona and Jean-Pierre, she would phone him, too, tomorrow, and tell him she was missing him. More than that, she would give him the news he had been waiting months to hear: that she had made her decision, at last and, yes, she
would
move in with him, and on a permanent basis. Putting up with fungal feet and constant sniffles, day and night; with indigestion, stomach pains, messy cupboards and cluttered rooms; indeed, even with
pee-filled
watering cans, was an incredibly small price to pay for being accepted as she was: a fast-disintegrating crone.

Dispiritedly, she slumped down at the desk, hands outstretched, as if surrendering. But, as she stared down at her open palms, the exquisite sensations experienced last night suddenly came stealing back: the subtly insistent pressure of Jean-Pierre’s tongue, as he traced those ingenious circles; his tongue-tip like a touch-paper that set off deeper feelings; exploding her whole body into life.

All at once, she strode over to her case and began collecting up the things she had just unpacked: kettle, light-box, medicines and laxatives, Dreamsack, Back-Friend, neck-support, rail of dreary clothes. The travel-iron and weighing-scales were still lying in the case, so, having crammed the rest of the stuff on top, she hauled the thing off the luggage-stand and lugged it to the open window. The whole of Cannes was spread below: the beach, the shops, the
restaurants
, the enticements, possibilities….

Without a moment’s thought, she hurled the case from the window; heard its satisfying crash as it hit the flagstones below.

Only then did she freeze; appalled by such an unpardonable offence. Not only had she disturbed the whole hotel, she might have caused some fatal injury. And it was totally out of character, as if someone else had acted; someone dangerously irresponsible, completely cavalier. She must ring down to reception and grovel her apologies; even pretend it was an accident – except that no one would believe her.

She rushed over to the phone and snatched up the receiver. But, instead of dialling reception, her fingers started stabbing out a
different number entirely, as if they had acquired a will of their own. The phone-lead was coiling and snaking from the tremor in her hand – no wonder she was nervous at making such a blatant call. Heinous to wake a man from sleep – and a man she barely knew – yet, if it awakened her, as well, to passion and romance, her whole life might be transformed.

Or was that just an insubstantial dream; a mere holiday illusion?

As the muffled, husky voice suddenly pulsated in her ear, she
realized
, with a curdled blend of hope and trepidation, that, in a scant five seconds, her fate would be determined.

‘S
hut your trap, you sleaze-ball – or you won’t have a trap to shut!’

The gangster moved the muzzle of the sawn-off shotgun even closer to his victim’s mouth, threatening to ram it between his teeth. ‘Another word and you’ll be cats’ meat!’

But, as if involuntarily, the cowering Latino gave a yell of fear and, all at once, a shattering explosion reverberated through the hushed and darkened cinema. More swarthy-faced figures came darting from the shadows, in a bid to protect their leader, but the rest of the gang closed in on them and a hail of bullets ricocheted in all directions, amplified by the Dolby Digital sound.

‘I’m sitting this bit out,’ Alice whispered. ‘There’s been so much violence already, I’m feeling a bit queasy!’

Josh gave her a distracted nod, clearly riveted by the carnage.

She squeezed past him, with some difficulty, stepping over his coat, which he’d left bundled up on the floor. Fortunately, they were positioned on the aisle, so there was no need to disturb a whole row of peevish strangers.

‘Back in a few minutes,’ she hissed, although her voice was drowned in the continuing bombardment. In any case, Josh was deaf to everything except the on-screen drama.

As she crept towards the door and pushed it open, the relentless gunfire echoed in pursuit. It was a relief to emerge into the basement foyer, which, in contrast, was mercifully quiet and deserted, save for the tall young guy who had taken their tickets, earlier. He was still perched on his high stool, but now deep in some book or other.

She sank into the squashy chair beside him. ‘Mind if I sit here?’

‘’Course not. But I see you’ve left the film. Are you OK – I mean, not feeling ill or anything?’

‘No, I’m fine. I just hate blood and guts!’

‘Well, in that case, you shouldn’t have chosen a film like
My Name is Vengeance
.’

‘My boyfriend chose it, actually and we don’t have the same taste. Though, to be honest, I’m surprised they should be screening such a shocker at the Curzon.’

‘Well, we’re not exclusively art-house,’ he explained. ‘We do show other stuff, and this particular film was selected on account of the director. But why did you let your boyfriend overrule you?’

She flushed. ‘I didn’t. We take it in turns to choose and, to give him credit, he did sit through a distinctly sloppy rom-com last week, for
my
sake.’

‘Nevertheless’ – he fixed her with his dark, reproving eyes – ‘it means half of the movies you watch you don’t enjoy. Compromise is a big mistake, you know. Why not see something you actually like and see it on your own?’

Incensed, she looked away. This guy was barely twenty and, as a total stranger, was hardly qualified to advise on her and Josh’s
lifestyle
. ‘Some of it’s quite gripping,’ she said, in her defence. ‘In fact, I’d better go back in now. The shootout should be over.’

‘No.’ He checked his watch. ‘It lasts at least ten minutes longer. The police turn up in force and there’s a vicious three-way
gun-battle
with the mobsters and the rival gang of drug-dealers. Then another gang moves in and all hell breaks loose and—’

‘In that case, I’ll stay put. But, if you want to read, don’t let me distract you.’

‘I’m glad of some distraction, to be honest. This book’s a bit hard-going – fascinating but best digested in small doses.’

‘What is it?’

‘
The World as Will and Idea
. You know, Schopenhauer.’

She suppressed a smile. Typical of a Curzon employee to be reading Schopenhauer, rather than some mindless pap. ‘I have to confess I’ve never read it, but I did get interested in Schopenhauer
at university – only via Samuel Beckett, though. Beckett seemed quite taken with him and absorbed a lot of his ideas.’

‘So you were reading English, I assume?’

‘Yes, at Bristol.’

‘What a weird coincidence! I was there, as well.’

At least ten years after
my
time, she refrained from pointing out. ‘Reading English, too, you mean?’

‘No, Philosophy. But I dropped out halfway through. I hated the way the course was structured – all in rigid modules that had to be covered in a certain order. I needed much more thinking-time and the freedom to study what I chose, instead of sticking to a syllabus.’

He had probably chickened out of his degree, she thought, with wry amusement, which is why he was taking tickets at the Curzon, instead of working at a proper job. And, if his shabby clothes were anything to go by, he was clearly underpaid. The blue-denim jeans had faded to a murky grey, and the battered black suede boots were worn down at the heels. Even his ‘Curzon’ T-shirt looked shrunken and ill-fitting. He was strikingly attractive, though: lean and rangy with longish, wavy hair as dark as dark molasses, and equally dark stubble accenting his strong chin and sensual mouth. Josh had sandy hair and less emphatic bone-structure and, if anything, his lips were rather thin. Horrified to be making such comparisons, she quickly resumed the conversation.

‘I never really got to grips with Schopenhauer. Apart from anything else, he’s such a thorough-going misogynist. In his view, all women are, without exception, superficial, trivial, subservient and second-rate.’

‘Yes, but that wasn’t quite so shocking in his time. Women were often regarded, then, as essentially unequal and definitely the second sex. Besides, he had such a bad experience with his mother, that probably coloured all his views.’

‘Come off it! If you’re meant to be a philosopher, you can’t base a whole system of thought on what happened to you personally.’ She broke off, as a doddery old lady made her halting way towards them and handed over her ticket.

‘Your film’s in Screen Two, over there’ – the guy pointed to the right – ‘but I’m afraid you’ve missed the first half-hour.’

‘That’s OK, I’ve seen it twice before. I just want to see the end again.’

Barely waiting for the customer to shamble off across the foyer, he returned to his defence of Schopenhauer. ‘Look, forget about his mother and concentrate on his good points – his interest in Buddhism, for instance. He believed the best way of dealing with life’s traumas was to cultivate an attitude of acceptance, even resignation, combined with deep compassion for suffering humanity, and I don’t see how you can argue with that. He was also fervently anti-slavery and cared passionately about the rights of animals, which was quite unusual in his day. And I really like the way he said we should address each other not as “
Herr
” or “sir” or “
monsieur
” or whatever, but as “
Leidensgefährte
” – “my fellow sufferer”.’

‘That’s typical!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s such a fearful pessimist. In fact, the only two things I remember about him was his dismissal of the entire female sex and his view that we live in the worst of all possible worlds.’

‘We probably do.’

‘Speak for yourself.
My
life’s pretty good.’

‘We can’t just speak for ourselves. That’s no basis for morality. We need to consider all our fellow humans, especially those who find life intolerable – you know, people living in war-zones, or in crippling poverty, or those imprisoned for their political beliefs, or tortured by—’

She fought a surge of irritation. So immature a guy had no right to adopt this moralizing air of superiority. Had he attained a ripe old age, he could at least claim the wisdom of experience, but hardly at his early stage of life. Nonetheless, she did feel abashed by his mention of ‘crippling poverty’ and just hoped he hadn’t noticed her watch: a Rolex, worth a good three grand; made of
eighteen-carat
gold and set with diamonds. Her punishingly long hours of work surely justified a few rewards, although
he
would disagree, of course.

‘I think I’d better go back in,’ she said, unwilling to prolong the conversation, ‘or Josh will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

‘Please yourself.’ With a shrug, he returned to his book.

She stole back into the fuggy darkness. Josh had moved over, leaving his aisle seat free for her. ‘All right, darling?’ he whispered.

She squeezed his hand. ‘Fine. Have I missed anything important?’

‘Only another bloodbath!’

‘Sssh!’ reproved a man in front, turning round to glare.

They both subsided into silence and she tried her best to
concentrate
. The plot was so convoluted, however, she had long since lost all track of it. And the young dropout in the foyer had triggered emotive memories of Bristol University: the intense, in-depth
discussions
; the burning concern for global justice, which she had shared, once, long ago; the lack of any real pressures beyond handing in one’s essays on time. Her present job allowed little scope for reading or philosophizing. In fact, the only things she’d read in the last twelve months had been client profiles and company reports – or women’s magazines when she was too exhausted by her ten-hour days to tackle any book at all, let alone Schopenhauer or Beckett. Yet she could still recall her excitement at discovering both writers, and encountering new philosophies of life. In those days, even pessimism and nihilism had been bracing, and often the subject of heated debates in the wee small hours, over coffee and cheap plonk. Nowadays, staying up too late at night was something of a risk – she might be late for work next morning, or find herself too tired to concentrate.

All at once, shrilling sirens assaulted her ears, as a car-chase and more gunfire erupted on the screen; the sounds of screeching tyres and whining bullets resounding through the auditorium. The baddies were shooting indiscriminately through the windows of their Cadillac, not just at the cop-cars hurtling in hot pursuit, but also at innocent bystanders. Blood was gushing forth in lurid Technicolor, and shrieks from the wounded and dying only added to the uproar.

‘Josh …’ She jogged his arm, spoke right into his ear to avoid annoying other patrons. ‘This is really not my sort of thing. In fact,
I’m beginning to get a headache. Mind if I go upstairs for a minute, to get a bit of air?’

Engrossed, he shook his head; his entire focus on the screen.

‘Is that OK with you?’

‘Yeah, fine.’

Having grabbed her coat and bag, she emerged into the foyer again, where the tall young guy was now busy with a pencil,
underscoring
passages in his book.

‘Sorry – shan’t disturb you. I just hate the racket in there!’

He flashed her a disarming smile. ‘In that case, Schopenhauer would have approved of you. He said the amount of noise anyone can bear stands in inverse proportion to their mental capacity.’

‘Really?’ she said, uneasily aware that Josh always turned his music up full-volume.

‘I’m Daniel, by the way,’ he added. ‘And you’re
not
disturbing me. As I said, my brain needs a rest every now and then, in order to absorb this stuff. So sit down, relax and tell me about yourself.’

‘Well, I planned to go outside for—’

‘It’s noisy out there, too, with all the junketings for Chinese New Year.’

She nodded. Before the film, Josh had taken her to lunch at an upmarket Chinese restaurant, so jammed with native revellers, they could hardly hear themselves speak. ‘OK,’ she said, subsiding into the chair again. ‘I’ll opt for peace and quiet! And it’s as quiet as the grave down here.’

‘It’s either one thing or the other,’ he explained. ‘Manic when a film ends or one’s just about to begin, but otherwise completely calm.’ He swivelled round on his chair to give her his full attention. ‘So, what’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Alice,’ she said, wondering how Josh would view this extended tête-à-tête with a young, attractive stranger.

‘And what do you do?’

‘I work for Roebuck-Rayner – a big PR firm in Belgravia. My main client at the moment is a luxury car-boutique and—’

‘A
what
?’ He looked aghast.

‘Well, that’s what they like to call themselves, although I suppose
it’s a sort of dealership. They sell specialist sports cars – top-of-
the-range
ones, mostly: Ferraris, Aston Martins, Maseratis, Alfa Romeos, all that sort of thing – and my job is to get them into the media spotlight in any way I can.’

‘But that’s immoral. Cars are seriously bad for the environment.’

‘We can hardly do without them,’ she retorted, bristling at his rudeness, not to mention his
naïveté
. ‘Or would you prefer us to go back to the horse and cart?’

‘Sports cars are particularly evil. They use too much fuel and they’re extremely dangerous.’

She forbore to tell him that it was Josh’s dream to own a Lamborghini – not yet, of course; no way could he afford it, but, having just been made an associate director, the prospects looked more promising. In truth, she had only got her own job on account of Josh’s influence. In the PR world, personal contacts were crucial and string-pulling a fact of life. ‘How about you?’ she asked, keen to steer the conversation away from poverty, the environment, or his narrow view of morality. ‘Do you work here full-time?’

‘No, twenty-one hours a week – long days on Sunday and Wednesday and a shorter one on Thursday. We get lots of breaks, though, and we’re often not that busy, so I manage to wangle quite a bit of reading time. Actually, I’ve only been here since Christmas. Before that, I used to help out at an arts complex and I also did a spell at the British Museum. I may move on yet again – to a gallery in Bethnal Green, but not unless it’s very much part-time. I consider it unreasonable to give away the whole of your life to work, even work you enjoy.’

His views really were exasperating and she felt duty-bound to put him right. ‘Unreasonable or no, most of us need to earn a living, so that we can pay the rent and keep ourselves in food and clothes.’ Not to mention handbags, she thought, glancing down at her latest acquisition: a mulberry-coloured Mulberry, which, even in a sample sale, had been something of an extravagance.

‘We own far too many clothes,’ was his rejoinder. ‘And eat
excessive
amounts of food. And, as for rent, I don’t pay it. I’m sleeping on someone’s sofa at the moment and I have an option to join a
squat. A guy I know called Boyd is squatting in what used to be a Museum of Antiquities in Shoreditch. It closed down in 2007 and it’s been empty ever since, so Boyd moved in to prevent the local council nabbing it for some nefarious purpose, and he wants me to give him moral support.’