Muddy Waters (24 page)

‘Hi. You OK?' Toby sat heavily down on the seat next to her and started swinging it to a different, more impatient rhythm.

‘Yeah. I'm fine. Couldn't be better,' she told him, wondering if he'd correctly interpret her self-satisfied smile, ‘What about you?' He looked down at the ground, picked up a couple of daisies and started shredding their petals. He didn't seem inclined to speak. ‘You look like you're doing “she loves me, loves me not,”' Ruth said, wondering if he'd got something he'd quite like to say along those lines. She knew he'd been out with Giuliana. If he told her about that, she could tell him about Bernard, see what he thought, see if he'd betray her with distaste crossing his face, or if he'd catch how happy she was and be willing to share it.

‘Giuliana?' she persisted, ‘How did it go? I know you went out with her. Probably the whole island knows. Peggy saw you driving off.'

‘Hmm,' he murmured. ‘We just went to a pub. Had a pizza, you know.'

Ruth laughed, ‘You took an
Italian
out for one of our English grotty
pizzas
? Have you got no imagination?'

Toby shifted on the seat, almost tipping Ruth onto the grass. ‘I didn't mean to take her there, we went to a stupid fucking great awful pub first.' He hurled what was left of the daisies onto the grass.

‘So what was so stupid fucking awful about it?' she asked.

‘
Nothing
. Sorry Ruth, just forget I mentioned it. Actually it was great being out with her, I really like her. But . . .' he sighed deeply and stood up, stretching as if he needed at least another twelve hours sleep, ‘What's the point? I'll be going away soon. Last thing I need is to get involved. When you really like someone, they're never the ones who'll wait around till you get back.'

Deep, Ruth thought, watching Toby stride back to the house, hands in his pockets, back unusually hunched. ‘Perhaps you should ask her to go with you!' she called up the garden. ‘Then you'd have it both ways!'

‘So, Samantha, how was dinner?' Stella looked up as the shadow of Simon fell across the table. She felt even smaller than before, sitting below him on the burgundy-striped sofa in the hotel lounge. In front of her were the ruins of coffee and the litter of silver paper from the stingy pair of chocolate mints. Abigail had gone off to the loo and Stella was alone on her sofa, watching the diners trail back out to the bar. She smiled up at him, habitually polite, which he took as an invitation to join her on the sofa. Her smile disappeared abruptly but it was too late, he was now leaning back comfortably, his legs manoeuvring themselves close to hers under the low glass-topped table. Any minute, she thought, suppressing the urge to laugh, he'd have his hand snaking across the back of the sofa behind her, like a nervous but determined first teenage date at the cinema.

‘Oh. Hello again,' Abigail returned and sat down on the sofa opposite from where she inspected Stella and Simon with obvious amusement. Stella glared.

‘I was just asking Samantha about the food here. We tend to avoid eating in – spend enough time in these places and all you want is a sandwich and a pint.' He looked across towards the bar and waved at his colleague, inviting him over. ‘Would either of you fancy a sticky?' he asked.

‘A sticky
what
?' Stella asked, her thoughts racing to various sexual rudenesses. She blamed Abigail's presence for that; at any other time currant buns and flapjacks would surely have sprung to mind.

‘A brandy?
Crème de menthe frappé
?
Parfait Amour
?' He leaned closer and smiled at her. He smelt of spearmint toothpaste and his skin was just lightly tanned and lined, like someone who played golf a lot and was careful to wear a hat and sun-screen. His ears, though, were as pink as sugar mice, as if they'd been left out of the skin care programme and were doing their best to let him know. They looked very vulnerable, those ears, she thought, and she had a shocking urge to kiss them better and tell them it was all right.

‘Or we could go on somewhere else,' Geoff approached and made the suggestion, standing behind Abigail and looking down at her. Stella watched her face swivel, and, Abigail's eyes being on a level with the man's charcoal-suited crotch, saw a look of interested calculation cross her face as she focused beadily on the fabric and assessed its possible contents.

‘Anna?' Geoff said, claiming her, his hands on her shoulders, looking down at her, ‘What do you think? There's a great little bar not too far down the road.'

‘Oh, why not?' Abigail said, looking across intently at Stella, ‘A bit of sea breeze on the way – what do you think, Samantha?'

‘Oh, I don't mind. I could do with some air,' Stella said, breezily, thinking that at least they'd be out of this stifling place and she could breathe again. She was quite drunk, she realized, and needed at least a couple of hours before she went to bed. If she lay down now, there would be the inevitable whirling pit feeling, and if she sat still just where she was much longer she might doze into an unattractive dribbling, slumped heap among the cushions. Carefully, she stood up and with the others following, made her way towards the main door.

‘I hope no one comes in and sees this,' Ellen commented nervously.

‘Would it matter that much if they did? It's only your body,' Willow replied grouchily. She sounded as if she'd prefer silence, which Ellen felt uncomfortable about. She'd rather have the kind of conversation she got at the hairdresser, meaningless questions about holiday plans and weather, anything to distract them both from what was going on down at Ellen's lower back end.

Willow felt she'd got it all wrong. She realized now that she could have had any of them, just as naked as this stupid slack-bummed woman, lying on her table being smothered with Vaseline and vitamin E cream (in case of skin reactions) prior to the spreading of the plaster. They'd all been as terrified as each other. So terrified she could even, at last, have had Bernard. Not that there was much point in having him like this, she thought as she slapped on the goo – the only way she wanted Bernard lying naked and face down on her big table was if she was naked and face up beneath him. This Ellen, and she slapped a little more viciously, gritting her teeth against the resulting apologetic squeak of ‘ouch!', was obviously the prissy type. who referred to her underwear areas as Mrs Fanny and Mr Bottom, all that going into a corner to take off her clothes and then scuttling on to the table with her hands flapping. She ran a cruelly jagged fingernail down Ellen's spine, apologizing without sincerity as she did it, and wished she'd even got Ruth there instead. Ellen was such a waste of good angry spite.

Philip Porter was getting to like sitting in his car in the dark. He could use the miniature light that attached to his clipboard. His sister had given it to him for Christmas and this had been his first chance to have a go with it. He'd been fretting about that, hating to have something that had no apparent purpose, hating to have an item that had generated a thank-you letter and good intentions but which had still managed to languish untried in his glove compartment, next to the gloves and the folded duster. Now it perched triumphantly just to the left of the bulldog clip, in the half-dark successfully illuminating the page where the day's list of island visitors was neatly catalogued. He no longer parked outside the pub, not since the girls-only night when the police had come along and suggested that his presence there could be misconstrued to an unfortunate degree. Now he was further along by the rowing club, where his view of the ferry was only bettered by his view of several of the scruffier cabins on the island. The ridiculous bright blue painted one was blindingly spot-lit inside, which was unusual and potentially interesting. Most of the time, this particular house was lit like a dead hippy's shrine with dark red, slowly swirling lights, wobbling, jelly-like globules of colour reflecting on the main room's purple walls. Now the whole place looked as bright as a TV studio and, if he was not hallucinating, he could swear he'd seen a completely bare person, a woman, scampering across the room. He reached into the glove compartment and took out his little, but so handy, binoculars. This was the home of a very odd woman, he knew (Wilma Doreen Ellis), so he didn't feel in the least bit guilty, more that he was doing his duty as a good citizen.

If only Ted Kramer could see
this,
he thought excitedly, his binoculars almost twitching out of his shaking hands. If only he hadn't gone native and taken to spending all his time guzzling tea in the smelly depths of that old biddy's barge. What on earth was going on
now?
What was this woman doing to the other, the naked, one? What was she smearing on to her body? The only thing he could come up with was that Wilma Doreen was
icing
her neighbour, icing her bottom like a birthday cake, white and smooth and sticky. A smutty giggle rose up as he speculated on where she might put the candles. He felt a surge of unaccustomed sexual commotion – the kind of uncontrolled rush that had usually happened only in his clammy adolescent waking moments. And when the awful, heart-stopping knock on the car window came, he was right back there in his fuggy teenage bedroom with his mother interrupting (‘time for school, our Philip'), as absolutely bloody ever, the very best moment in the day.

‘I think we've had cause to speak to you before, haven't we, sir?' the policeman said, putting himself and his cap firmly between Philip Porter's binoculars and their extraordinary view.

It was years since Stella had danced this close to a strange man. It felt quite unreal, swaying slowly and with no particular direction in the dark as if the two of them were in a bad romantic movie. Anything that either of them said could only be false and corny dialogue and she was grateful for silence. She leaned against Simon's body and was back at the school dances, youth club parties, and college balls of her teens – the pre-Adrian days when every male she danced with had been simply an erection to squash against and feel slyly triumphant about. Even the music was the same, late night bluesy stuff that she'd liked then and still did. Just now she felt she rather needed Simon simply to prop her up. Tiredness had crept up and got at her and the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the stench of left-over alcohol. Most people had left and the few pairs mooching around the dance floor looked as if they, like her, were too exhausted to make a move to anywhere else. The right side of her face was steaming where Simon had his pressed against her and she could feel gusts of his hot breath in her ear, and her back was feeling overheated where his hands were splayed against her body. She wondered if the linen dress would be showing damp patches, hand-shaped. Turning her face towards his, she could see a sugar-mouse ear glowing in the dark. She no longer, she decided, had any urge to fondle it.

I'm not comfortable, she thought suddenly, and she pulled away a little to look around, peering through the haze, for Abigail.

‘Samantha? Are you all right?' Simon's eyes were looking into hers and she tried to focus properly. Maybe I'm beginning to need reading glasses, she thought, as her eyes slowly adjusted to having his right in front of her. He was smiling, just a bit, just enough to make him look pleased with himself, as if the evening was going
exactly
as he'd expected – and would continue to do so.

‘Mmm, fine,' she told him, unable to locate Abigail either on the minute dance floor or in any of the mostly empty velvet-seated alcoves. She was probably at the bar, or gone off to the loo, or even, she thought with envy, getting some air outside. This suddenly seemed a highly desirable option. ‘I think I'll just go and . . .' she began, but, as if he'd sensed her reaching for the escape hatch, Simon's mouth swooped and landed with skilful accuracy on hers.

Well, this is interesting, Stella thought with detachment, joining in for the sake of politeness and to avoid an unseemly scuffle. It now felt even more like the youth club days, snogging a stranger simply because that was what happened next. Of course, unlike a teenager, it suddenly dawned on her that Simon was going to expect her to do a lot more about
his
erection than simply go to the bar for another Coca-Cola. She simply didn't fancy him
that
much. What would I advise the problem-pagers, she thought, as she felt his hands meandering down her back and pressing her more firmly against him.

‘You can always say “no”,' she remembered writing countless times, frustrated that they should still be asking, after the times she'd spelled it all out for them. ‘The choice is yours. It's as easy to say as yes,' Extrication wasn't quite so easy though, she thought, peering over Simon's shoulder, still in search of Abigail. Perhaps she'd already escaped and gone back to the hotel to bed. Perhaps she'd gone to the hotel to bed with Geoff.

‘I'll be back in a minute, promise,' Stella announced, unwinding herself clammily from Simon and making for the door marked Ladies before he could comment.

‘Oh, there you are – I saw you all wrapped up with Mr Software.' Abigail was sitting on a rickety little chair smoking a cigarette underneath a machine that sold condoms. She looked like a doorkeeper in a brothel. ‘Time to go?' she asked, before Stella had said a word.

‘Time to go,' she laughed, ‘Mr Software has become seriously Hard. How do we get out of here on our own? I really don't want . . .'

Abigail cackled and took a last deep drag on her cigarette before shoving it down the grubby sink's plughole. ‘There's a window in that end cubicle,' she said, standing up and pointing to a graffitied door (‘If you're into timewasting – shag Darren').

‘A
window
? What, climb
out
?' Stella looked back at the door she'd come in through. Just beyond it lurked Simon, perhaps waiting with a result-clinching final drink. ‘Of course he might have done a runner too, we could meet him legging it down the road . . .'