Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel (23 page)

I left the men and went through to the kitchen with two glasses of wine.

'What are you doing in here?'

'I came to help.'

'That's a first.' She glanced at the boxes of lasagne from Marks and Spencer's ready to go in the oven, then back at me. 'Now I know why my number's been wiped from your phone.'

'Have I been remiss.'

'Remiss. I'm going to write that down.' She filled a vase with water and peeled the cellophane from the flowers. She turned. 'He's cute,' she added.

'How are things with Ray?'

'He's still a good fuck, if that's what you're asking.'

'Lisa?' I queried.

She sighed. 'Agh, Lisa. She reminds me of you, in a way, when you were young.'

'And innocent.'

'Katie, were you ever innocent?' She stopped what she was doing and gave me a long stare. 'You look different,' she said.

'You usually say I looked pleased with myself.'

'That's because you usually do.' She looked me up and down. 'You're wearing jeans and flat shoes. You look like the proverbial woman who's just got out of bed and can't wait to get back in again.'

'It's true.'

'There, done,' she said, and adjusted the flowers. 'How's the writing?'

'Like a bicycle with a puncture.'

'You must write every day, every single day, even if it's just a few paragraphs. Write a blog or something. They're usually amusing.'

'You're right. I will. I've been…'

'Don't tell me what you've been doing. I know what you've been doing.'

'And you?'

'I'm turning you into a novel, you know that.'

'I'll get my agent to sue.'

'You don't have an agent.'

'That's not going to stop me.'

'Nothing's going to stop you, Katie. Not when you know what you want.'

Lizzie placed the lasagne in the oven, set the timer, and I thought about what she'd said as we joined the men. It is, I'm convinced, the secret of life: knowing what you want and then setting about getting it.

I sat on the arm of the sofa beside Tom. There was music in the background, Arabian, mournful; Lizzie had obscure tastes. I watched Ray top up the glasses, an intense look in his washed out blue eyes. The skin stretched over his cheekbones, hair prison short, a scar on his jaw. The reserve he'd shown when we'd arrived had gone, diluted by the alcohol. He leaned forward with an unnerving expression and took a breath. It's fucked. Everything's fucked. There's nothing we can do about it. No point trying. The enemy's not over there in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's behind our backs in Whitehall, in Washington.

'The real war starts when the boys come home without legs and arms and eyes. And the Ministry of Defence spends years fucking them. No psychological care, rundown houses full of rats, pensions they can't live on. All these poor fuckers are going to have to rely on the National Health for the rest of their lives, and what are they doing with the National Health, fucking that as well?'

Ray was a paratrooper with special forces. They went in first, readied the terrain for occupation, or tidied up some mess before scarpering and denying they were ever there. He spoke quickly in spurts, as if his words were stuffed in a paper bag and were bursting to come out. He was a proselytizer, a man hurt and obsessed.

There was a silence. 'Sorry,' Ray added.

'No need,' said Tom. 'I don't disagree. I just don't think we should give up.'

'You're not on the front line, mate.'

'There's more than one front line.'

Ray sniffed thoughtfully.

'I'll give you that,' he agreed and finished his wine. 'I'll tell you something, the boys coming out are fucking angry, and fucking embarrassed. Why do you think we fucked up in Basra? It wasn't the fault of the men. It was the lack of equipment, vehicles without armour, not enough safety vests, officers who come out for three months to get their war medal and sit on their backsides doing fuck all and knowing fuck all…'

'If that's true,' Tom said, and Ray waved his hand.

'You think I'm sitting here making it all up? Thing is, no one gives a shit. The Americans had to come in and clean up after us in Basra. Same in Helmand. We like to think we're punching above our weight. What a joke. Two wars, thousands dead, and what have we achieved? Fuck all. The Taliban's back in Afghanistan and there's a civil war in Iraq. How do you think the mums and dads feel knowing their boys got fucked for nothing?'

'But you're going back?' I said.

'Can't do nothing else, can I? Eighteen down, two years to go.' He took another long breath. 'Then what?'

He shrugged, offered the bottle.

'Thanks,' I said, and knew as he refilled my glass that I was going to be taking Nurofen in the morning, but you do it anyway.

'The blokes who aren't injured when they get out don't want to sit on their arses, they want jobs,' he said. 'What do they do? What can they do? Go into security so they can get paid decent money to piss on all the poor fuckers in the Middle East, in Africa. Or they join the police force. I'm not joking. Half of them are fucked up here,' he tapped the side of his head, 'and they're out there patrolling our streets. And, I'll tell you something else: you see a beggar with dead eyes and ten to one he's an army boy.'

'I thought they were usually heroin addicts,' I said. 'I always feel guilty when I don't give them any money and feel stupid when I do.'

'Course they're addicts. After going to hell and back they want to escape from reality. Drugs help.' He held up his glass. 'You can see it when someone's lost their legs from an IED, you can't see it when they've got so much stress their brains have turned to shit. They can't put plating under our vehicles, but when it comes to talking bollocks, those cunts at the MoD are the best.'

'Why don't they put plating under vehicles?' I asked him and he shrugged his big shoulders.

'Because money's more important than lives, that's why. This country's been stolen from under our noses. We're owned by big business. London's a tax free zone for the mega-rich, the oligarchs, the oil barons.'

Ray had joined up because he was proud of being British and would come out in two years ashamed of being British. He was impassioned, convincing, he knew his subject, and it went through my mind like a lost piece of music that I wanted to write everything down, check the facts, write his story.

'It's hard to believe,' I said.

'That's what we're up against.'

The oven pinged. I helped serve the lasagne. Lizzie had made a bowl of salad with pine nuts. We sat around the table in the corner of the kitchen. Tom talked about Sri Lanka, South Sudan, and Ray was a good listener as well as a good talker.

'When you leave the forces, there's always work in the voluntary sector,' Tom said.

'I know that. One thing I really hate is land mines. They kill the women working in the fields. They kill children, not the enemy. Whoever the fucking enemy is? I'll go back to Afghanistan for a month every year, help the engineers clear the fuckers.'

'That's only a month, Ray,' Tom said. 'If you want to give me a call, I can find plenty of things for you to do.'

'I'm not a medic. I know how to kill people, not cure them.'

Tom put his fork down and sat back. 'Tell me something: have you ever built a temporary bridge?'

'Yeah, course, fucking hundreds.'

'Ever put in a water pump?'

'What's your point?'

Tom was doing his finger counting thing. 'Do you know how to wire up a bomb?'

'Yeah, and it's a lot easier than dismantling them.'

'Is there a difference from wiring a bomb and wiring a house? I don't think so. When you get out, you're not going to go and start killing bankers, are you?'

'When I've finished with those fuckers at the Ministry of Defence.'

'I'm going to put you on Médecins' mailing list.'

'You can do that. Don't promise I'm going to read them, though.'

'We've got four hundred kids, really bright most of them, they pick up English a lot faster than I can learn their language. We need people who can do things, make things, build things. We pay expenses, though a lot of volunteers pay their own. They come out for three months, six months, live in barracks, muck in, and almost every single one comes back for another tour. They see they're making a difference, and it makes a difference to their own lives.'

Lizzie cleared the plates. I helped. She cut up some pears with goat's cheese.

'I did warn you. He can't stop beating the same drum,' she said.

'What he's saying is interesting. It needs to be said.'

'Not when you've heard it all a thousand times.'

'It makes me feel as if I'm living in a bubble.'

'Course you are, Katie. But you know that.'

18

La Bohème

Tom produced a pair of tickets for the Royal Opera House and I wasn't sure whether to be moved or furious as I watched Rodolfo first seduce and then cast Mimi aside in
La bohème
. A tic pulsed in my neck as we walked through Covent Garden after the final love duet. The Opera House had been packed and I couldn't imagine how Tom had found eighth row seats at the last minute. He put his arm around my shoulders.

'You okay?'

'Yes…No. I'm angry with Rodolfo.'

'Rodolfo. What's he done?'

'When Mimi's ill, he doesn't want to know. He tells his friends she's
fickle,
that she's having an affair. Which she isn't. When he finds out she's actually dying, he's all over her.'

'It's just a story.'

I stopped. 'Yes, and you learn more from stories than you ever will from an encyclopaedia.'

'You should write that down.'

'No, you should,' I said and he laughed.

'You are so smart…'

I waved that away.

'Rodolfo dresses like a poet, but he's got the heart of a hedge fund manager. We never see him finish a piece of work. His best friend pawns his winter coat for food when Mimi's dying, Musetta sells her gold earrings to buy medicine.
La bohème
isn't a love story, it's a warning. What Puccini's saying is fall for a poet and he'll rip open your chest and eat your heart.'

'You really saw all that?'

'He didn't spend however long he spent writing the opera without thinking about the characters and what he wanted to say through them. That's what drove him to get up every morning.'

'Is that what drives you to get up in the morning?'

'No, it's the alarm on your phone.'

He laughed. He kissed me. People streamed around us like we were a rock in a river and we carried on, keeping pace with the crowds on Long Acre, girls in big shoes and bare shoulders, men with knotted scarves. Motionless cranes loomed over the new buildings going up on every free space, and I thought one day London will look like New York and will lose what makes it London.

We headed towards Shaftesbury Avenue and turned into Old Compton Street. The snow in the air melted as it fell, sheening every surface. People spilled out of restaurants and theatres. I stopped at a shop with magazines and porn videos in the window.

'That's where I bought my mask, downstairs,' I said.

'You don't need it anymore.'

'I thought it rather turned you on?'

'It does, but you don't
need
it.'

Had I ever really needed it? What had I been hiding from if it wasn't myself? I caught the slight change in my voice as I looked back at him.

'How did you manage to get the tickets?'

He was about to answer, then stopped himself. His eyes glowed in the red neon from the shop sign.

'Katie, where do you think I got them?'

'I don't know.' My shoulders went up. 'Last minute, great seats. I suppose you must know someone.'

'Someone like who?'

'I don't know?'

'It's over. Dead. Buried. Relationships don't last in my world. People spend too much time apart. It takes over your life.'

I bit my lips. 'I'm such an idiot.'

'Very smart most of the time, very stupid some of the time, and rather beautiful all of the time.' He didn't smile. He shook his head. 'Jamie Doyle, you met him at the office. Poor bugger got the tickets for his wife, for their wedding anniversary, then she walked out. He was on a plane to Nigeria yesterday. He wouldn't even let me pay for them.'

'That's so generous.'

'He's going up to the border with Cameroon, where Boko Haram's operating. There's poverty and conflict…'

'People are killing each other?'

He thought for a moment. He knew what I was asking. Tom now seemed to know far more about me than I knew about myself.

'We're safe. Someone gets shot or slashed by a machete and we stitch them back together again, doesn't matter what God they believe in. You work in these places and your priorities change. Opera tickets are just…opera tickets.'

'Okay, tomorrow I'll work on my shoes.' I kissed his cheek. 'Come on, let's go and eat something. I know the perfect place.'

'One of your old hangouts?'

'That would be telling.'

My tummy was in tangles. I picked at a salad, abandoned my New Year Resolution and drank too much. Just one glass usually means two. Two always turns to three. Time was going faster. We made love slower, as if it would trick the inevitable. But making love has its own rhythm and time never cared about anyone. I wanted more of him, all of him, and it was like trying to hold on to that nice dream at the moment of waking. Marie-France was a flash of paranoia, a photograph in my head deleted from his phone.

He left early for the office: emergency meetings, recruitment, fund raising, and what it conjured up for me was a misty portrait of King Canute setting up his throne on the beach and daring the waves to defy him. The tide was rising with the flotsam of disaster and I couldn't help agreeing with Ray Fowles: everything was fucked.

I made a pot of Starbucks and went back to our warm sheets with a mug of coffee and my laptop. Taking Lizzie's advice, as I secretly do, I wrote a blog on Rodolfo's shallow love in
La bohème
and posted it on my website the way Bradley had shown me. I sent an update to my little band of subscribers, and checked back at Google Analytics every five minutes to count the hits. In the UK, a million people were using food banks, the Tamil orphans were growing older, and I felt an absurd stab of pleasure when the first comment appeared on my blog from a furious poet defending poets.

I clicked on Facebook; 53 messages. A man in New Delhi had invited me to be his friend. BarbaraLoveAuthor from Alberta wanted me to review the first part of her trilogy 'set in the black heart of the Athabasca tar sands.' There was a photograph of Matt falling out of a taxi at a stag night in Budapest and baby pictures of babies who appeared so alike they may all have been the same baby old Bashers were sharing. Facebook creates a universe where past and present connect as if our lives are an unending wall of mirrors in which we see limitless, indiscriminate reflections, a cello in the arms of an anonymous girl, Hemingway standing with a typewriter on a high shelf, a face that looked familiar illustrating a post about striking teachers.

When I made the image bigger, I recognized Bridget McKinley, another girl from school, and it struck me how fresh and young she looked with disorderly hair and a tee-shirt with the slogan
Free Schools Are Not Free.
She had a defiant expression as she stared at the camera and brown eyes in a face I recalled being thin and formless but had grown sculpted and intense. I had gone out of my way to be friendly with Bridget, I made an effort to like everyone so everyone would like me. But she was one of those girls who continually seemed as if she disapproved of something and, rationally or otherwise, I had the feeling that what she disapproved of was me.

While the other girls were checking to see if their breasts had grown bigger and nattering about boys, Bridget had become a vegetarian and joined Greenpeace. That year when we started our A-levels, in 2002, she became an object of envy and suspicion when she sneaked out of the back gate, got the train to London and joined the march against the War on Iraq. War was a good time for the church, it provided a reminder of its purpose, and a Bishop came one Sunday to preach a sermon on the bombing of Baghdad as 'a necessary evil.' I stared at the shapely carved thighs of Saint Sebastian and Bella sat at my side behind a pillar reading
Vogue
.

We were only allowed out of school for three hours on Saturday afternoons. One time, I walked back from Broadstairs with Bridget when I had just bought a new pair of shoes, which I promptly showed her.

'How many pairs of shoes do you have now, Kate?' she asked.

'Not many. Not more than twenty.'

'If you have more than two pairs of shoes it means someone else is going barefoot.'

I put the shoes back in the bag. 'That's not true,' I said.

'It's not a mathematical equation. It's true as a concept.'

'So, how many pairs of shoes do you have?'

'Far too many,' she replied.

'Well, then…'

'The thing is to realise it, to think about it. We're lucky. Most people in the world are the opposite.'

'We can't help that. We haven't done anything…'

'No, we haven't. But that doesn't mean we can't.'

'I don't see how my shoes are going to make any difference.'

'It's like I said, Kate, it's just a concept, an idea.'

'I think you're just trying to be different.'

'Is that really what you think?'

'Yes, it is,' I said, but deep down I didn't think that at all.

I don't recall that we spoke again, but I always tuned in when she was talking to someone else. Bridget studied law. She now worked for the teacher's union, and her face in the photo that morning had a similar look to those friends with babies, the contentment that comes, I imagine, when you have chosen your path and are happy to be following it.

I quit Facebook and opened the closet. I was relieved when I counted my shoes that there were less than 100 pairs. I lined them up like aircraft in three squadrons, ready for combat. The kamikazes in the vanguard were ready for the Oxfam shop. In the second chevron were the old favourites with heels worn down in the cause, their future in the balance. In the rear, with medal ribbons and fancy tooling, the Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks went back in the velvet bags and boxes they had come in.

There, Bridget, are you happy now?

My phone buzzed with a text. A double xx. Two kisses. No message. I flicked through my clothes, it was easier now the closet was half empty. I chose with more care than usual, usual in those last few days, hung the outfit in a suit bag and went to the gym. I sprinted on the walker, swam in the pool, showered and brushed my hair under the dryer. It was a white underwear day. I zipped myself into the fitted green dress that matched my eyes, a green satin jacket embroidered with silver dragons and spiky green heels that had survived the clear out. I read the
Guardian
, phone at my aside. It was something I'd sworn I would never do: hang around waiting for a man. But this was different. It felt different. It felt acceptable.

Another message came just before midday and I rushed out to search for a taxi. The winter sun over the New Year had gone. The sky was pale with rain not falling but in the air like mist. Christmas trees, like a felled forest, littered the street with an air of spent good will. He was leaving in a couple of days and it wasn't enough time to look back to see where we had come from or forward to where we were going. It was like a piece of music ended half way through. A taxi did a U-turn. The wind whipped my hair about my face and I bundled into the pack as if escaping from something.

Tom was waiting outside his office.

'The Hurlingham Club, please,' I said to the driver as we settled into the back.

'Now it's my turn to be inspected,' he said. 'You look great.'

'It's not for you' I replied. 'Don't take any notice if Mother's rude, she says things to sound fascinating.'

'Perhaps she is.'

'To herself she is.'

'You've already made her sound interesting and I haven't even met her.'

I glanced out the window. It had started to rain, a kept promise.

'I hate this weather,' I said.

We were holding hands and I couldn't work out how this had happened. Had I reached for his hand? Or had he reached for my hand? Or had our hands reached for each other?

'How's your finger?' he asked; I had stopped binding it in tape.

'Better,' I said.

The traffic parted. The taxi whizzed along the Fulham Road.

Daddy had booked a table for four. Matt would join us if he could for coffee; people with little to do are always busy. His rowing obsession had turned to music, but his band never moved beyond the local pubs in Canterbury, where he'd quit uni in the second year. He now mixed cocktails in a hotel and was taking acting classes.

The taxi slowed as we entered open gates watched over by two men in uniform. The road narrowed through bare wintry trees clutching handfuls of frost and The Hurlingham rose up like a colonial outpost on the banks of the Thames. Everything was clipped, neat, painted, the open patio facing the lawns with an air of waiting for spring when the daffodils edged the path and waiters in white jackets curved among tables pinned with umbrellas.

The bar was full, glittery with the lights over the optics, the burnished brass and wood, strident with the sound of laughter. It crossed my mind that I'd got the day wrong when I didn't immediately see my parents. Then I spotted Father where I should have looked to begin with. He was in the corner hunched over a book, frameless round glasses perched on the end of his nose, the gin and tonic at his side like an ironic gesture. He stood as we approached his table.