No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (25 page)

‘I suppose you want some now, as well,’ Mel said to Frank.

‘Virna! Do me a favour.’ But he was only human. When a plain woman well past her prime starts swinging her abdomen, of course you want some.

That it’s a sort of death dance only intensifies your interest. You want some quick. This was what lay behind Frank’s surprise to find her here. Could she still be going? Was she
still managing to hang out against age, against the suck of respectability, against re-retirement in Bodmin? Can she still swing that abdomen?

All that’s visible of her from her doll’s house window is her purple crumpled face.

‘You here for long, Frank?’

‘I don’t know, Virna. A day or two.’

‘Be in The Poldark tonight?’

Virna’s first lover was a part-time barman at The Poldark. In the daytime an electrician. They’d opened their account in his van on the way back from a darts match in St Austell. ‘I could die for you, maid,’ he’d told her, as she gave herself to him on a bed of cables in the the back of the van, threw wide her legs at last and to hell with what they did to adulterers. ‘And I could die for you, Vernon,’ she told him. So determined were they to die for each other that they fell asleep with Vernon’s stubby dick still inside her, careless of who might find them, in a lay-by on the A390, right by the Little Cleverley turn-off. ‘But you know, Mel,’ she declared later, ‘in the morning you want to live again!’

Will he be in The Poldark tonight? He’ll be staying there, but will he be in the bar, that’s what Virna means. Will he be joining in the singing? ‘Going Up Camborne Hill Coming Down’? ‘Why, why, why, Delilah’? He can’t say. That will depend on Clarice.

By the time Mel had finished helping inland women from as far away as Liskeard and Redruth to ditch their no-good husbands and
de factos
by finding them a coastal cottage close to hers, the entire terrace had become a sanctuary for absconding beldams. Seven fishermen’s cottages, all but one of them occupied by rusting matrons looking for their last good time. Or more often, their first good time. The odd
one out being Mel herself, who, having got rid of Frank by proxy, as it were, still hadn’t got rid of him in the flesh.

‘Ironic,’ he observed, ‘that I should be the only man in residence.’

‘Don’t count your chickens,’ she warned him.

The terrace became a haunted little place. Not only the souls of the originally rejected husbands, but those of subsequently rejected lovers, flitted here, tapped on the window panes, pleaded to be let back in. They would come wandering late at night, in the heart-ache hours, as silent as wraiths. Sometimes, as Mel and Frank were sitting reading by the fire, they would see a face appear at the window, look in distractedly, fragment with pain, and then vanish. Sometimes, the light-sleeping Mel would jump up suddenly in bed, disturbed by the sounds of low male weeping in the street below.

Magic was afoot. One woman going to the bad attracts its own sort of curiosity among the men of a village. But a row of them raised a peculiar ire in the breasts of the jilted. What had happened wasn’t private, wasn’t individually about them. Someone was casting spells. The finger pointed to the outsider, Melissa Paul. The witch. And the village knew what to do to witches. Rubbish suddenly began to appear in her garden. Suggestive, systematic rubbish. Mel would come out in the early morning to stroke the worms and there it would be – the masticated carcass of a chicken, bones, gristle, parson’s nose, the liver and the kidneys still in their plastic bag; a party-pack not unlike the one Frank’s girlfriend number one had posted off to Frank’s girlfriend number two, only without the registered envelope. Then her cat disappeared. For a while she was frightened to be out late on her own. The village lights went off at twelve. Then the glorious silent starry blackness that stirred her soul became her enemy. A car drove her into a hedge. A can of beer was thrown at
her from an unknown window. She was threatened. She was mugged. Once, outside the cottage, a holiday maker walking her dog was punched to the ground and damn-near raped. In the dark the woman resembled her. A day later a card was posted through her letter box –
NEXT TIME IT WON’T BE AN EMMET.

‘Look on the bright side,’ Frank said, forgetting to go quietly. ‘They’ve accepted you.’

There was no point calling the police. The husband she had encouraged Virna to leave behind in Bodmin was a sergeant in the force.

Clarice was not among those Mel enticed to the terrace. Clarice was well established as a woman going to the bad on her own terms long before Mel turned up. And those terms did not include dumping your previous life and running for it. Why so emotional? Why be so either-orish about it? Clarice had no ambition to expire in the back of someone’s van in a lay-by on the A390. She wanted to laugh, not die. But then she had Elkin, and as long as Elkin had a pot of paint to piss in, his own tankard waiting for him at The Poldark, and Clarice to stick the price stickers on the slates and man the till, he left her alone. Elkin was the means to her freedom, not an obstacle to it.

The one time Elkin did play up, he delivered Clarice clean into their hands. Mel’s and Frank’s hands, that is. Hers and his. His and hers. In truth no one knew, the time Elkin did play up and subjected Clarice to either-orishness, whose hands were whose. And no one cared.

Did Elkin blow because he had reached the point where he could take no more, or was it a discrete one-off explosion, caused by the gossip that followed Clarice’s interpretation of Molly Bloom at the annual Little Cleverley Dramatic Society summer gala night? Impossible to say. What’s jealousy,
anyway, if it isn’t overheated love? The pan might boil over occasionally, but you can’t blame the flame for the soup.

Elkin didn’t see Clarice’s Molly Bloom with his own eyes. It was his domino night at The Poldark. And he probably wouldn’t have gone to see her had he been free. He never particularly liked going anywhere that he had to wash the paint out of his beard for, or change out of his shorts and smock for; but he especially never liked trudging up the hill to the village hall, where he had to sit on uncomfortable seats and listen to something arty. He made his own art. Out of soot, urine and slate. And when you’ve made art all day you want a break from it at night. For Frank, who watched crap all day, it was of course different. As it was for Mel, who wrote crap all day. For them the trudge up the hill was nothing but pleasure and relief. As was Clarice’s Molly Bloom, whether or not she put in twice as many yes’s as James Joyce had already given her.

Discussing the performance afterwards, Frank reckoned it was Clarice’s Cornishness that made her Molly Bloom unlike any he had seen before. The Cornish talk as though they have shingle in their mouths. You hear the tide pulling at the beach. You hear the whole gravelly content of the ocean bottom stir and shift. In Clarice’s Cornish mouth the familiar hopeful lyricism of Molly Bloom’s ribaldry was ground into the cold knowingness of the mermaids, more a dare than an affirmation, the shipwreck taunts of the rock-bound sirens, whose yes I said yes I will Yes is a diabolic act of ventriloquism, your words not theirs, yes to their porphyritic breasts, yes to their perpetual seaweed-embrace, yes to death by drowning Yes.

Who was Mel to demur from that? All she cared to add was that she thought Clarice’s writhings on the covered snooker table – doubling as the Bloom’s lumpy old jingly bed
and
the Alameda gardens – also played their part in
making hers a Molly to remember. As did the baby-dolly night attire Clarice wore, to suggest both the drawers into which the cuckolded Leopold would soon come tonguing
and
an Algeciras romper suit for kissing in, under the jasmine moon.

Perhaps she’d overdone it, that was Mel’s point. Not an accusation, just a wonder. Perhaps – in the name of dramatic verisimilitude, she didn’t doubt – they’d all seen too far down, then too far up, Clarice’s shorty nightie.

On this, Frank kept his counsel. He’d always seen the point of Clarice. Enjoyed the sight of her flouncing through the village, her horsey face never not decipherably eye-lined and unequivocally lipsticked, her red hair flying, her small breasts pushed out, her jeans cut tight into her cunt which she bore in front of her the way some men carried their dicks, as though it were an encumbrance not of their own making’ or desiring, a gift to others no doubt, but a sore trial for them. When he could remember to be envious, he envied the men who were said to have enjoyed her. But she wasn’t an erotic necessity to him. She was too the thing she was. Although not exactly a beauty herself, like beauties proper she left you nothing to add or subtract. If she’d suddenly gone deaf or developed a squint he might have gone for her. As she was, he didn’t. But the extravagance of her Molly Bloom changed all that. The extravagance of her Molly Bloom was akin to suddenly developing a squint. She’d flung herself full length from pocket to pocket of the snooker table and shown the whole of Little Cleverley – or at least that part of it that had crowded into the village hall – the inside of her thighs, and then she’d hung over the side of the snooker table, and showed them every blue-vein of her pink-tipped conical breasts. This was the flaw that showed him his way. He could, after all, add to her. He could fuck her into better taste.

She’d gone too far, even for coastal Little Cleverley. The Yacht Club with its louche professional membership would have supported her of course, but the Yacht Club was too preoccupied with getting drunk in the evening to think of turning out to applaud James Joyce. All the next day, and all the next, those who had been there described what they had seen to those who hadn’t. And then those who hadn’t seen but at least had heard, described it to those who hadn’t seen or heard. One or two of the older village women hissed when they passed her in the street. Even the rampaging harlots in Mel’s terrace felt it behoved them to be censorious. ‘I can forgive adultery,’ Virna said, in a purple fluster, ‘but I can’t condone exhibitionism.’

‘A flogging, do you think?’ Frank wondered.

Virna thought about it. ‘No, not a flogging,’ she said. ‘It would excite the men too much.’

But the men already were excited. Like Frank, there wasn’t one of them who didn’t see a way of adding to Clarice now. Or subtracting from her.

And Elkin? No one knew what Elkin knew. He had the gift of withdrawing into himself. He could sit smirking into his beard in his corner of The Poldark, sipping his favourite bitter from his special tankard, and not notice that Clarice was sucking off the whole pub. But the morning when Angie, who ran the National Trust Shop, popped her head around the door of the Slate Gallery and called out ‘Slut!’, Elkin did look up quickly from his painting. He looked up, looked around, pulled his right eyelid, greeted Angie – ‘You all right, Angie?’ – then looked down again.

What happened subsequently – subsequently being, by Elkin’s slow-moving clock, some six hours later – Frank heard from Mel who heard it from Clarice. Mel was out on the cliffs with her notebook. She loved the early evenings of late summer, when she felt she was stealing light from the
seasons. Just one more long afternoon. Just one more eked out sunset. Little Cleverley was suiting her. She was getting her quiet. Frank had never seen her look better. She clambered among the rocks in her climbing boots and her no-sexual-nonsense dungarees, the bib unfastened, her arms brown but her chest soft in a faded blue singlet. Workman below, goddess above. A sort of centaur: half brute, half angel. Maybe that was what Clarice thought when she saw her, too. Only it would have been the angel half that attracted her. She’d done with brutes.

The surprising thing from Mel’s point of view was not the sight of Clarice sitting on a bench on Deadman’s Point holding a handkerchief to her eye, but the sight of Clarice on the cliffs at all. You never saw Clarice up here. She didn’t dress for cliff walking. Her frocks were too airy to go anywhere near the sea in. One gust of wind and she’d have been over the side. And her jeans were too tight for climbing. You could cut a deck of cards with her cunt, but you couldn’t negotiate a cliff path with it. In fact she was wearing one of her airy frocks today, an ankle-length butterfly print which she’d secured to the bench with a couple of small rocks. Hence Mel’s greeting. ‘You look like a reluctant kite, Clarice. Is anything the matter?’

She’d thought Clarice might have been weeping. But then that could have been wishful thinking. Who doesn’t want to see a slut getting her desserts? Even a pornographer craves justice. But Clarice wasn’t weeping. Her eye was bruised but her soul wasn’t. What she was doing, sitting weighted down on the bench, showing her long horsey nose to the sea, nursing her injury, was laughing. It was too funny, she told Mel. It was too ridiculous. Elkin angry. Elkin inflamed. You should have seen his face. All pinched like a rodent’s arse. No mouth left. Just a scar where a mouth had once been. And his dick so thick. Elkin with his dick out.
In the shop.

It was a good job she’d secured herself with rocks, else she’d have laughed herself over the edge.

What had happened was this. Elkin had suddenly and without a word of explanation risen raging from his easel, cleared the shop of stunned emmets – ‘Out! Out!’ he’d yelled, ‘Just fuck off out of here!’ – switched the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
, emptied the till (’Emptied the till first, note’), bent her over the counter, pulled up her dress, ripped off her pants, entered her rudely, come inside her with more despatch than he’d shown in ten years, turned her around, belted her in the eye, thrown her out of the shop, and bolted it behind her.

If it wasn’t so funny she’d have been annoyed.

‘And this was when?’ Mel wondered.

‘Just now. Half an hour ago. I’m still dripping with him. I’ve not been able to get back into the flat to have a shower. He’s locked that as well.’ Then she removed one of the rocks and lifted up her dress. ‘Look, he didn’t even give me my pants back.’

A high bare thigh, marbelled blue, shaved deep into the trench, then a controlled fringe of sprouting black hair, for Mel to think about.