The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (17 page)

—Kneel on the floor and beg like a puppy.

The Cuban complied.

—Ask me! she snapped.

—What ees I ask you my lovely Golly?

—Ask me can you bury it up to my kidneys.

—Bury what—I don' understand.

She smacked him again.

—Golly is the queen—don't you dare to ask her questions! She's a thousand times better than Madam Blossom Foster! Take that!

She knew he liked it—but of course pretended not to.

—Each leel boy he like his mama—even when she smack him, no? she found herself thinking.

As she slapped him again.

—Up to my kidneys. Implore me can you do it, implore me now to do it, with the handle of your stomach!

—Pliss can I do it in up to your kidneys?

As Golly fell backwards on the massive foam-rubber bed, making a V of her legs as she squealed:

—In you go to them kidneys, my lover!

As in her mind, two bloodied corpses waltzed almost poignantly on the small dance area of the Fontainebleau bar—with Blossom Foster looking hopelessly disfigured, as she leaned against her husband for consolation which he could not give her.

—Kidneys, fuck! Kidneys, fuck! Pedro Gonzales kept on repeating—until he snapped like elastic and then lay there, groaning.

—Mama.

As, Golly, abstractedly, twined his curls around her finger.

The BBC night tune, “Sail Away,” was playing now. In a universe which cared only for the majesty of its own creation.

—Good night, said Patsy.

—Good night, replied his wife.

*  *  *

But the following day things did not go quite as planned. For a new, unanticipated bitterness once more overwhelmed Golly Murray. With the result that she almost forgot entirely the ecstasy which had been hers and Pedro's.

It had all begun while she'd been blackleading the kitchen range. Maybe, she considered, if she hadn't been so unlucky as to meet Blossom Foster directly after having been to the dentist's. With her wisdom tooth giving her unbearable pain.

What sort of a stupid idea had that been—asking Golly to another bridge session.

—In the middle of the day, for heaven's sake! hissed Golly. Her plans get stupider every time I meet her!

Just then—as she was finishing up—Golly heard the outside door close. It was Boniface, of course, arriving home from school. Listening with affection as she heard him skidding across the lino. Before bursting into the kitchen with a mighty yelp—tossing his schoolbag into the corner as always. But—to her dismay—on this occasion pushing right past her and flagrantly rejecting her affections, especially when she said:

—Give Babbie a kiss!

Embracing himself as he scrunched up his face, twisting his body as he hissed, ever so sourly:

—No want Dabby!

Which meant, of course, the boy wanted his father. And most likely, either, had no great desire to have another dessert spoon jabbed into his arm. As he ran upstairs and slammed his room door closed.

—I unnerstan', Golly Murray heard Pedro say, stroking the back of her hand as she poured out her troubles. But she knew that he didn't. How could he possibly? When, like Patsy, he was a man. A man who cared about nothing, only—kidneys.

—My husband would always understand, out of nowhere she heard Blossom say—you see, Bodley Foster, he really is so sensitive.

—Is that so? said Golly. Well, we'll see very soon just how sensitive he is!

Blossom had been coming out of the hotel when she saw Golly. It had just been unfortunate that they met at that particular time—literally only minutes after Golly had been to the dentist. Her neighbor told her she had just been for a perm.

—What do you think? she cried, doing a little twirl.

Golly found herself on the precipice of hysterical utterance.

—I've been to the dentist's, you see the thing is I've just been to the dentist's! My wisdom tooth—it's
ugghh!

—Do you know for years—I have had the exact same problem!

It seemed to Golly that Blossom Foster was probing the private and intimate spaces of her soul. And, against her will, like small hibernating animals, the words kept pressing from the darkness of Golly's mouth. As she said:

—O but your pain would be much worse than anything I could complain of. Why, mine is nothing, Blossom!

—Still, I'm sure when you get away on holiday you'll forget all about your wisdom-tooth troubles. So tell me, have you and Patsy made any plans yet?

—I don't know. I think there's talk of us going to the sea. Maybe Bundoran, in County Donegal.

—Bundoran in County Donegal, is it? Sure that in its own way is every bit as good as Miami! Well, lovey—honey—really must dash!

That was what had happened. That, essentially, was the wisdom-tooth incident. And now here she was—Golly standing cold and quivering in her very own kitchen. Motionless by the range with a single marrowfat pea in her hand. A marrowfat, of course, was a special kind of pea. Being of the type that her son liked to use whenever he was shooting at cereal boxes with his shooter.

The son who was now sobbing in the bedroom upstairs.

—Will you for the love of Christ stop it just for a minute! I'm your mother—I deserve more than this! she had snapped at him.

But deep in her heart she knew it wasn't her son's fault. Knew only too well whose fault it was.

Which was why she had gone against Pedro Gonzales's advice. When he had pleaded with her to follow the plan exactly as they had outlined it. What was wrong with her? he wanted to know. You can't go back there, he insisted. This could ruin everything, he pointed out. What was wrong with his Golly, he wanted to know—had she been drinking?

—It's none of your darn business! she had snapped, swinging her purse as she pushed the small man out of the way.

—You all make me sick, all of you—you and your damned kidneys! she had snapped.

It was the first time Golly Murray had sworn in her life. And did she care? No, because she only cared about one thing now.

As she mounted the embankment, making her way toward the freeway where the crumpled wreck of the Pontiac still lay, looking like an accordion and with the horn still blaring—the impact having taken place only moments before.

—Please! implored Pedro, but Golly didn't turn, didn't so much as pass Señor Kidney the time of day.

—It's over! she heard herself say. I'm going back to Patsy! But there's just one thing I got to do first.

*  *  *

As she pushed back the fine auburn curls of her hair and craned her neck forward—just in time to hear Blossom Foster. Releasing the softest and most plaintive of moans. Of something close to gratitude and pleasure, having just become aware that a familiar face—that of an actual neighbor!—had arrived on the scene to come to her assistance. Before, with mounting horror, as Golly's elongated shadow fell across the vehicle, she began to realize that assistance of that kind was not at all what was on her neighbor's mind.

For already Blossom's blouse had been torn open down the front, with the needle of her brooch glinting momentarily in the light, as Golly Murray's hands pressed vindictively into her neck—small as they were, possessing a quite unexpected, truly unearthly coldness.

It was to be some minutes before Blossom Foster realized the enormity of what had just taken place—and it was at that point she screamed. As Golly stumbled backwards, with warm crimson liquid now streaming erratically in small rivers from her lips, until she found herself positioned in the center of the freeway, with five lines of traffic perilously speeding past her. Her face in the moonlight showing a pallor and fixity truly terrifying as she flashed her incisors, wiping away a dribbling scarlet smear:

—See you on the shores of eternity, bitch!

It was 12:03
A.M.

Patsy, his wife noted, was frowning as he reached over to get his glass of water—but not at all anxiously.

—I just have this feeling Sheffield Wednesday might pull it out of the hat this weekend, he was saying, chewing on his pencil.

—Patsy dear, have you seen my
People's Friend
magazine? I could have sworn I left it on the sideboard.

—It's right over there, by the bed—where you left it, dear. But what happened to your other one—
Picturegoer
, is that what you call it?

—O, that's a silly old rag—I don't bother with that anymore, adding:

—O there it is! I really am such a silly—! as she turned back the covers and climbed into bed.

—A penny for your thoughts? asked the barber, smiling—marking an X as he chewed on his pencil.

As Golly replied, heaving as she turned the pages.

—All this talk about foreign holidays. There's times, you know, Patsy, when people get on my nerves.

—O now, foreign holidays. And all the places you can go to, here in our own little country.

—That's right, Patsy. Look, there's an advertisement here for Bundoran in County Donegal. Ten guineas, it says.

—Why, I'll go in and book it first thing in the morning!

Patsy leaned over and switched off the bedside lamp. As his wife, with the smallest of moans, thought one last time about Pedro Gonzales.

—
Tú eres muy hermosa,
she heard him repeat, thrusting inside her as she gently stroked his forehead. And mischievously whisper:

—What's that the Spanish for, pet—is it kidneys?

As her lover whimpered and shuddered as he bucked—with his handle going limp, for the last time, inside of her.

After which she left him to sleep like a baby, standing on the balcony of the Siesta Motel. Where now, as she'd somehow been expecting, on the stretch of white sand that reached out to the edge of the swaying blue ocean, she apprehended the image of the stumbling Blossom Foster, arrayed in what seemed as garments for the grave, with her arms raised up in pitiful mute appeal. With her hand tentatively hovering above the dark-stained ruffle of her torn nylon blouse, above her white bosom where her ickle nub had been. Staring as one bereft of sense.

—Please! she heard her plead, please give it back to me!

But the sound of the traffic coming from Ocean Drive drowned her out, and in the end she was faced with no choice but to turn and walk away. To haunt the boulevards of Florida forever, in the very place where Golly Murray, against the odds, had somehow found happiness.

As she remained there on the balcony, opening her small fist, revealing the shadowy circular outline of its contents. And which, in the moonlight, could easily have been taken for a marrowfat pea—one which a little boy might use with a cornflakes shooter.

But in texture Blossom's teat (“dugs,” she had read, they called them in America) was fleshier and more pliable than a marrowfat—for all the world, in fact, like an areoled rubber button. As Golly Murray choked, closing her fingers over its captured mauve softness weeping:

—
Tú eres muy Boniface,
as the Florida moon's rays bathed the apartment buildings across the bay, systematically creating a palette of tropical pastels, washing them in faded pinks and the softest of greens and royal blues—until they seemed like a magical bag of Toytown Assorted.

That somehow, for no reason, had been shaken out of heaven.

I've Seen That Movie Too

VAL MCDERMID

I
TRULY BELIEVED
I'd never see her again. That she was gone for good. That the virus she'd planted in my bloodstream would be allowed to lie dormant forever. Which only goes to show how little I really understood about Cerys.

Everybody has an ugly secret. I don't care how righteous you are. Saint or sinner, there's something lurking in your past that looms over every good thing you do, that makes your toes curl in shame, that makes your stomach curdle at the thought of discovery. Don't try to pretend you're the exception. You're not. We all have our skeletons, and Cerys is mine.

The world as I know it falls into two groups. The ones who fall under Cerys's spell and the ones who are immune to the point of bafflement. Over the past three years, I've discovered there were a lot more in the former group than I'd ever suspected. The list of people she'd bewitched ranged from the daughter of a duke to a celebrity midget, from a prizewinning poet to a gay male member of parliament. It mortifies me how many of them I now know she was fucking during the months she was supposed to be my girlfriend. What's extraordinary is how many of them were convinced they were the special one.

For the members of the latter group, the word
even
is crucial to their insistent deconstruction of Cerys. “She isn't even beautiful.” “She isn't even interesting.” “She isn't even sexy.” “She isn't even funny.” “She isn't even blonde.” But to those of us on the other side of the fence, she's all of those things. The only explanation that makes any sense is the notion of viral infection. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a computer virus as “a piece of code surreptitiously introduced into a system in order to corrupt it.” In every sense of the word
corrupt
, that's Cerys.

The one good thing she ever did for me was to walk out of my life three years ago without a goodbye or a forwarding address. I don't think her motive was to destroy me; that would presume my reaction even entered her calculations. No, the suddenness of her departure and the thoroughness of her vanishing had been all about her need to get free and clear before the answers rolled in to the questions other people had started asking. But at the time, I didn't care about the reasons. I was just grateful for the chance to free myself. Deep down, I didn't mind the anguish or the self-loathing or the shame, because it's always easy to endure pain when you understand it's part of the healing process. Even then, I knew that somewhere down the line I would get past all the suffering and resume control over my heart and mind.

And I did. It took me well over a year to drag myself beyond what she'd done to me, but I managed it.

Yet now, in an instant, all that healing was stripped away and I felt as raw and captive as I had the day she'd left. Here, in the unlikely setting of the Finnish consul's Edinburgh residence, I could feel the gears stripping and the wheels coming off my reassembled life.

I shouldn't even have been there. I don't usually bother with the fancy receptions that attach themselves to the movie business like barnacles to a ship's hull. But the three Finnish producers who had become the Coen brothers of the European film industry had optioned a treatment from me, and my agent was adamant that I show my face at the consul's party in their honor at the Edinburgh Film Festival. So I'd turned up forty minutes late, figuring I'd have just enough time for a drink and the right hellos before the diplomats cleared their throats and signaled the party was over.

As soon as I crossed the threshold, I knew something was off-kilter. Cerys had always had that effect on me. Whenever I walked into a room where she was, my senses tripped into overdrive. Now my head swiveled from side to side, my eyes darting round, trying to figure out why I was instantly edgy. She saw me at the same moment I spotted her. She was talking to some guy in a suit and she didn't miss a beat when she caught sight of me. But her eyes widened, and that was enough for my stomach to crash like a severed lift cage.

I felt a ringing in my ears, stilling the loud mutter of conversation in the room. Before I could react, she'd excused herself and snaked through the throng to my side. “Alice,” she said, the familiar voice a caress that made the hairs on my arms quiver.

I was determined not to be suckered back in. To put up a fight at least. “What the hell are you doing here?” I tried to make my voice harsh and almost succeeded.

Cerys reached out, circling my wrist with finger and thumb. The touch of her flesh was a band of burning ice. “We need to talk,” she said, drawing me to her side and somehow maneuvering me back through the doorway I'd just entered.

“No,” I said weakly. “No, we don't need to talk.”

She turned to me then and smiled, the tip of her tongue running along the edge of her teeth. “Oh, Alice, you always cut straight to the chase, don't you?” She made a determined break for a staircase at the end of the hall. I couldn't free myself without drawing the wrong kind of attention from the other people milling round in the hallway. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to make a connection between me and Cerys. I'd kept my nose clean on that score and it had saved me from enough of the consequences of our association for me to want to keep it that way.

So I let her lead me up the broad, carpeted stairs without obvious protest. Somehow, she knew where she was going. She opened the second door on the right and pulled me into a small sitting room—a pair of armchairs, a chaise longue, and an antique writing desk with matching chair. She used my momentum to spin me round like a dancer, then closed the door briskly behind her, turning a key in the lock.

“To answer your question, I've been working with the Finnish film agency,” she said. At once I understood her apparent familiarity with the layout of the Finnish consul's house. And that the chances were I wasn't the first person she'd been with behind that locked door.

I opened my mouth to protest but I was too late. Cerys took my face between her hands and covered my mouth with dozens of tiny kisses and flicks of the tongue. Her fingertips brushed the skin of my neck, slipping inside my open blouse and over my shoulders. The heat that flushed my skin was nothing to do with the Scottish summer weather. I despised myself even as desire surged through me, but I didn't even consider pushing her away. I knew I wouldn't be able to follow through and I'd only end up humiliating myself by begging for her later.

“This … is not … a good … idea … ” The words came from my head while every other part of me was willing my mouth to shut the fuck up. Cerys knew this so she just smiled. Her hands moved under my skirt, the backs of her fingernails grazing the insides of my thighs.

“I've missed you,” she murmured as her hand moved higher, meeting no resistance. I felt myself falling, the chaise longue behind me, the certainty of pain and trouble ahead.

Not love, not at first sight. I don't want to elevate it to something it wasn't. But it was something, no doubt of that. I'd emerged late one summer evening from Inverness rail station, hoping that someone from the Scottish Film Foundation would be there to drive me to the remote steading where I'd be spending the rest of the week. I'd been supposed to arrive with four other writers for a screenwriting master-class course that morning, but my flight had been canceled and it had taken the rest of the day to travel the length of the country from the West Country to the Highlands by train. I was not in the best of moods.

The woman leaning against the car in the courtyard caught my attention. Her languid pose: long legs crossed at the ankle, right arm folded across her stomach, hand cupping the left elbow, rollie dangling from the fingers of her left hand, a sliver of smoke twisting in the warm evening air, head at an angle, eyes on the middle distance, thick honey-blonde hair cut short … She made my breath catch in my throat. It was an image I suspected I would never forget. I feared I would keep on writing scenes for women in that precise pose for the rest of my career. I didn't even dare to hope she was waiting for me.

But she was. Cerys Black, Screenwriting Development Director for the Scottish Film Foundation. It was a fancy title, implying more than a department of one, but I soon learned that Cerys did everything from picking up late arrivals to pitching which projects should win the SFF's backing. That night, though, I wasn't interested in her job description. Only that I'd found myself in the company of a woman who made me dizzy for the first time in years. My grumpiness evaporated in less time than it took to stow my bags in the car boot.

She took me to a bistro by the river. “Everyone's eaten and you won't feel like cooking this late,” she said. We ate pasta and drank red wine and talked. I've never been able to piece together the route of the conversation. I only remember that we talked about the women in our past. I now have an inkling of how severely Cerys edited her history, but at the time I had no reason to doubt her tale of a handful of youthful affairs and a single grand passion that had taken her to Hungary before it had finally died a couple of years before. It was the sort of conversation that is really an extended form of deniable flirtation and it kept us occupied until the waitress made it abundantly clear that Inverness had a midnight curfew and we were in danger of breaching it.

We drove out of the city along the side of the loch, the rounded humps of high mountains silhouetted against thin darkness shot with stars. We turned up a steep road that took us away from the mountains to a high valley surrounded by summits. We barely spoke but something was moving forward between us.

The cluster of low buildings that was our base for the week was in darkness when we arrived. Cerys led me to a cottage set to one side. “You're in here,” she said. “Downstairs there's a computer room and library and upstairs there are two suites of rooms.” We climbed the narrow stairs and Cerys dropped her voice. “Tom Hart's on the right and you're on the left.”

She ushered me in and put my backpack by a table facing a pair of long windows. I swung my holdall onto a chair and turned to thank her, suddenly shy.

There was nothing shy about her response. She moved closer, one hand on my hip, the other on my shoulder, and kissed me. Not the air kiss of the media world, not the prim kiss of a distant cousin, not the dry brush of lips friends share. This was the kind of kiss that burns boats and bridges in equal measure.

Time played its tricks and made it last forever and no time at all. When we finally stopped, Cerys looked as astonished as I felt. “I don't think snogging in an open doorway is the most sensible move,” she said. “You should shut your door now.”

I nodded, numb with disappointment.

Then she smiled, a crooked grin that lifted one side of her mouth higher than the other. “Which side of it would you like me to be on?”

If I could say that sex with Cerys was the most amazing experience of my life, it might make more sense of what happened between us. But that would be a lie. It was enthralling, it was adventurous, it was sometimes dark and edgy. But it never entirely fulfilled me. She always left me not just wanting more but feeling obscurely that somehow it was my fault that I hadn't found total satisfaction in her arms. So I was always eager for the next time, quick to persuade myself that the electricity between us meant the wattage of our sexual connection would rise even higher. I was addicted, no question about it.

I knew by the end of that master-class week that I loved her. I loved her body and her mind, her reticence and her boldness. We'd hadn't spent that much time together—she had other responsibilities, and by the third night, it was clear we both needed some sleep—but I was under her spell. I wanted to see her again, and soon. Her work tied her to Edinburgh, my life was at the other end of the country. But I couldn't see this as an obstacle. We could make it work. We would make it work.

Looking back, I can see all the cracks and gaps of lies and deception. But at the time, I had no reason to mistrust her. I believed in the meetings, the conferences, the working dinners, the trips to film festivals. I was just amazed and grateful that we managed to see each other one night most weeks. We spoke on the phone, though not as much as I craved; Cerys was only comfortable with the phone for professional purposes, she told me. And we made plans. I would sell my house by the sea in Devon and buy a flat in Edinburgh. Not with Cerys—that would have made her claustrophobic. After the disastrous end of her relationship with the Hungarian, she didn't ever want to live with someone else without her own bolt-hole. Given what she'd told me about their last months, I understood that. I'd have felt the same, I thought.

I was anxious about the move, though. Prices in Edinburgh were astronomical. I couldn't see how I was going to afford somewhere half decent. I'd tried to talk to Cerys about it, but she'd stopped my worries with kisses and deft movements of her strong, gentle hands.

And then one night she met me at the airport in the same languid stance. Only the cigarette was missing. As always, my heart seemed to contract in my chest. “I have the answer,” she said after she'd kissed my mouth and buried her face in my hair.

“The answer to what?”

“How you can afford a flat.”

“How?”