No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Novel (28 page)

She unbuckles his belt and slides one hand inside his trousers. A promissory gesture. Right this minute she wants a cigarette. Even Clarice knows that there’s something to be said for a build-up.

‘What do you look like,’ she laughs.

‘Well? What do I look like?’

‘Like a cat that’s got the cream.’

She’s referring to his abandonment on the bench, his shirt open, his nipples red as roses, his dick magnetised by the moon – a pasha on an ottoman.

‘I sure have missed the cream,’ he says.

She pulls an oh yeah face. But there are no real problems of that sort between them. They were never a pair. They were always part of something larger.

But he would still like to pay her an individual compliment. ‘I often think about it,’ he lies.

‘Me too,’ she says. Then, after a long drag on a cigarette, ‘Does Mel?’

‘I don’t know. She doesn’t allude.’

‘Never?’

‘Never.’

‘You know she came to see me again.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘You didn’t know? I thought you’d cooked it up together. I thought you were waiting in the car to hear all about it.’

‘No. Absolutely not. I’m astounded. When was it she came?’

‘I don’t know. Three years ago. Maybe more.’

‘And what happened?’

Clarice laughs. Tell me, tell me. ‘Nothing happened. She came into the shop, just like you did. Asked me to meet her, just like you did. Asked me to fuck her, actually. You know Mel, no beating about the bush. She said I owed her one. I agreed to meet her up here. But she didn’t show.’

‘You weren’t late? Mel doesn’t wait.’

‘No, I wasn’t late. And the state she was in you’d have thought she’d have waited till Doomsday.’

The state she was in.
Frank looks at Clarice in her faded jeans and baby-blue cardigan, takes in her streaming hair, her
handsome but shallow face, and feels deeply insulted on Mel’s behalf. Could Mel ever have been
in a state
for her? Never mind could Mel,
should
Mel?

Curiosity, though – gross, indiscriminating curiosity – gets the better of him. ‘And then what?’

‘There was no then. She just didn’t show. I sat up here for an hour. Got cold and went home. That was that. She never came back. Never left a message. Never apologised. I suppose she got cold feet.’

‘Not like Mel.’

‘To get cold feet?’

‘To get cold feet or to ask for a fuck. Mel isn’t an asker.’

‘Not true. She asked me for all sorts of things that time. She woke me up while you were still sleeping and begged me to let her suck me. Begged me to tie her up and fist-fuck her.’

Frank’s stomach lurches. Floods with pancreatic juices. This is what he has come to hear. No point fighting it. No point being insulted on Mel’s behalf. Insult is where the thrills are. Insult is what he’s returned to Little Cleverley to confront, suffer, make friends with.

‘And I know how much you love being begged,’ he says. His voice is wheedling. Like Little Red Ridinghood’s making up to the big bad wolf. Little Red Frank. They knew, the vegetarian waiters who sculpted his portrait on the cappuccino, they knew what whipped importunings his voice was capable of. Disgusted, the moon allows a gauzy kirtle of cloud to cover her gaze.

Clarice responds with a further promissory squeeze. Yes, she’ll submit to his submissions. But first she has a fag to finish. And a few more discommendations of Mel to deliver.

‘What I love is having fun,’ she says. ‘You two take everything too hard. Especially Mel. She was so over-wrought,
Everything mattered too much to her. She took it all too seriously.’

Too seriously? So it was light, was it? Light, twining his fingers with hers and together making love-knots inside Mel’s cunt? Is there something wrong with him? Is he wrong to think that that was not an especially frothy thing to be doing, not an everyday occurrence, even for country folk, shaking hands with a third party inside your affianced’s cunt? And what about when Clarice inserted the fingers of her other hand into Mel’s anus so that she could make membraneous contact, feel through the wall how she and Frank were doing in the chamber next door – would it be altogether too heavy of him to say that that, too, was worthy of remark, an experience to treasure, one to tell the grandchildren?

And what about –? His memory tails off. If he is going to lie here going through it all, squaring his sense of it with Clarice’s, balancing his indignation as to then with his desire as to now, he’ll be here when the dawn comes up.

They’d gone back to the cottage, the three of them, hard on the heels of Clarice flashing him her fur. They hadn’t waited for Frank to catch up with their champagne intake, hadn’t lingered long enough for him to get even the teensiest drunk. He was a man. He was being offered cunt in more combinations than he had any right to hope for. What need had he of alcohol? As an estimate of a man’s erotic subtlety this was low, but who was he to say it wasn’t accurate.

The two women left the pub with their arms around each other’s shoulders. To hell with what anyone thought. Out into the grey slate street they’d rolled, a pair of drunken sailors, indifferent to the gawping emmets, careless of who they met, loudly derisive of the broken men weeping at Virna’s gate. What, weep for love? Frank followed behind them, his eyes on fire.

The finger twining was just the beginning of it. It was Clarice’s idea to start that way. Her cunt had been out, been turned this way and that in conversation, now it was Mel’s shift.

‘Let’s see it, then,’ Clarice said, as soon as they were inside.

‘I’ll clear the bed,’ Frank chimed in.

Mel looked at Clarice. ‘See?’ If they were going to have the kind of good time they wanted it would be in spite of a man, not because of him.

They threw cushions on the floor and Mel, undressed and tipsy, flung herself wide upon them. She was meatier then, and hairier. These were the pre-colon-hoovering, pre-Hitler moustache years. A journey up Mel’s Weimar cunt in those days still had an element of jungle risk to it, even if you did have a friend’s hand to hold.

The first two or three hours skipped to Clarice’s orchestration. She opened Mel up, played with her like a rag doll, rolled her on to her side, then on to her stomach, then on to her back again, grabbing handfuls of her hair, squeezing two tits into one tit, dividing one tit into two tits, plucking at her inflamed nipples, biting her, making her come with an ease that caused Frank to simultaneously grieve and marvel. Mel, who normally stood on such erotic dignity, acceding to this rough treatment! Mel, who kept one silver orgasm in her revolver as a last resort, exploding in all directions like a blunderbuss! As for him, he simply went where Clarice told him. He was there to help her expose and pry into Mel, not to help himself. He held Mel’s legs open so that Clarice could go to work unhindered. He separated her labia one from the other – splish, splosh – so that Clarice should not miss any of the far rippling effects of her labours, not one convulsion of the deep romantic chasm, not a single crimson cavernous pulse. He covered Mel’s mouth to stifle her cries. He covered her eyes to protect her innocence.

He might have been Clarice’s factotum – Figaro, not Frank – so busy did her curiosity keep him. First she wanted to see what Mel looked like with a dick going in and out of her cunt. Frank! You’re needed.

Then with a dick in her mouth. Frank! Over here.

And now with sperm running down her chin? Frank! Frank! Come on, Frank!

But if sperm was going to be running down Mel’s chin then Mel considered it was time she had a say in the matter. Yes, let’s do it, but let’s do it properly. No conventional kitchen come, thank you. A drizzle of Frank she could have any old time.

‘You two fuck on my face, then,’ she said. ‘It’s my turn to have something to look at.’

So Frank at last got to enter Clarice, like a dog entering a bitch, Mel’s eyes open beneath them, and Mel’s mouth open too, waiting to catch whatever spilled from either of them. And in time – in short time, to tell the truth, but that’s not so surprising is it, considering? – Mel got to see what sperm looked like, leaking out of Clarice’s cunt, and Clarice got to see what sperm looked like, running down Mel’s chin.

Satisfied, Clarice?

Frank too, by rearing up over Clarice’s extended neck and parting her mane, managed a look down. It sometimes happens, in the course of a long life, that a man beholds a sight he knows he was born to see, perhaps had seen before in an earlier, better existence. Mel bearded by Clarice was just such a sight. Frank had tumbled with women in numbers before, made the beast of as many backs as you could squeeze onto a Wythenshawe floor, but this was different. This time one of the women was someone he cared for. And as practioners of the arts of interpersonal healing are forever telling you, the caring is everything.

Mel was the first to tire mentally. Frank felt the air around
her begin to chill. Enough. He could tell that she wanted Clarice to go now. Time for sleep, and in the morning time for normal service to resume. She’d been visiting hell on a champagne quickie, that was all. She’d merely popped her head around the gates. She wasn’t intending to stay.

But Clarice was in no hurry to beat a retreat. She’d bunk down in the spare room if that was what Mel preferred. But she couldn’t go back to Elkin, not tonight. Elkin was going to have to worry about her for a little longer than that. Elkin was going to have suffer.

An hour later, sleeping the sleep of fallen angels in the spare bed, Clarice was woken by a tongue tracing circles on her thigh. ‘Mmm,’ she murmured. ‘That’s good, Frank.’

In the sense that Frank and Mel had been together long enough to be married in the eyes of God, and in so far as man and wife are one flesh, Clarice was right to suppose that the tongue which was tracing hot circles on her thigh was Frank’s. Applying less spiritual criteria of ownership, though, the tongue in question in fact belonged to Mel.

Clarice had not been telling Frank anything he didn’t already know when she confided Mel’s secret visits to her bed. Frank’s eyes may have been closed but he wasn’t himself sleeping when Mel slipped out of their room. Sleep! He didn’t expect ever to sleep again. And the filthy adventure Mel was now embarked upon only proved why he
must
never sleep again. Close an eye for a second and you might miss perdition. He sat up and pricked his ears. In the normal way of things sounds carried preternaturally in the silence of a Little Cleverley night. You could hear a wave crashing half a mile away. You could be up on the cliffs and hear a husband sobbing into his hands outside Mel’s row of wayward matrons’ cottages. But tonight was no ordinary night. And why was this night different from all others? Because on this night Frank had fucked another woman –
noisily! – on Mel’s face and not been punished for it. No post-facto bitterness. No recriminations. No shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. Such a miraculous event did wonders for his hearing.

‘You have to let me,’ he heard Mel say. ‘You owe me.’ Her words couldn’t have been clearer had she been lying by his side. Except that lying by his side she never said you have to let me.

There was the awesomeness of it. Mel, his Mel, asking. Mel, his Mel, going begging.

He didn’t hear Clarice’s answer. Who cared about Clarice? In the course of the next few days Clarice took a sort of fairy tale control of their domestic arrangements, going about the cottage stark naked, her muff fluffed pugnaciously up, her conical tits pushed pantomimically out, sometimes with just a leather belt pulled in tight around her waist, sometimes with just a tie from Frank’s wardrobe knotted loosely round her neck, all the while muttering stuff about making a slave of Mel, locking her into handcuffs, putting her into a dog collar, burning her nipples with candle wax, all that soft gartery sadism which there was every chance she’d found originally in one of Melissa Paul’s own soft gartery sado-romances. But none of it cut much ice with Frank. Of course he was aroused. But when wasn’t he aroused? A flea in a brassiere would have aroused Frank. The thing that put a torch to his innards, heated his blood to twice its normal temperature, was not what Clarice did but what Mel didn’t. She didn’t put a stop to it, that was what was so extraordinary. She didn’t say hold. She didn’t say enough. No sooner did the the air around her begin to chill than it began to thaw again. She turned aside, fell asleep, then an hour later was on her knees to Clarice, asking for more. Of course it was disgusting, that was what refuelled her. She couldn’t disgust herself enough. She got them to fuck on her
face again. She got them to fuck on the old spring mattress in the spare room while she lay underneath clawing at her own cunt, shouting ‘This is disgusting,’ and laughing and grunting and crying and coming all at once as the springs crashed about her.

He’d have understood it better had it been him under the springs. He and his old pal ignominy. They had grown up together. Together, their sperm had failed to pass muster in a public gardens in Harrogate. Together, they’d come home from a shtuppenhaus in Wythenshawe and found a pair of fat girl’s knickers in their pocket. Under the springs was just the place for them. He was a man. Ignominy was his middle name. But in Mel it was shocking. Blinding. It was as though she was his idol, and had fallen.

In the end, of course, she threw the spell off. Enough. Enough. And this time she meant it.

But how were they, Clarice and Frank, mere babes in the woods of Mel’s measured degradation, how were they to know that this time she really really really meant it? They climbed back on to the spring mattress and began bouncing. Come on, Mel, get under!

Enough, she said.

Clarice went over to her and held her chin. Any more trouble and she would slap her face. Under the mattress, Mel.

Enough, Mel said.

Lick my cunt, Clarice told her. You and Frank. Together. Now!

Ten minutes later Mel was dressed, waiting for a taxi to take her to the railway station. Four hours after that she was back in London.

That was how Frank and Clarice got to spend one conventional night together, fucking like ordinary sublunary lovers, without having to worry about Mel’s special needs. But the following morning, early, Frank too was in a taxi.
And that, effectively, was the finish of Mel’s bolt hole, the place she’d bought to enjoy peace and quiet in, her last throw of the man-free romance-of-nature dice. An estate agent’s sign went up soon afterwards.