Suzerain: a ghost story Page 3

  "Just once," Moira said, having dismissed Billy's objections with a wave of her hand. "And I don't want any goddamned gallantry. You pull the punch and Just Billy gets zero, zilch, nada. Fuck-all."

  Billy looked at her carefully. The fucking American grockle's lunatic (sexy and scary) fucking wife was serious. "You know," he lied, "Frank told me you were an interesting woman."

  "Aren't you going to ask why?"

  Billy shrugged. "Maybe you think you deserve it." What the fuck did he care? The question was, and the fact that she was a crazy bitch aside, did he want to damage a face as perfect as this one? This was a novel dilemma for Billy. "I don't make a habit of hitting women," he said. Which was true - things happen, but you couldn't call it a habit.

  She smiled, beckoned him to lean closer with one of those blue-painted nails. She whispered in his ear across the table. Her breath nestled in there warm and full of sex. Billy sat back. "Nothing to do with Frank?" he said.

  "No. Strictly my own business."

  "Well," Billy said, "I'm definitely interested."

  "Okay. That's good. Now you just need to show me a sign of good faith."

  "I'm still thinking," Billy said.

  "You're worried about Frank. Don't worry about Frank. I'm not going to drop you in the shit Billy. Scouts honour."

  She even did the sign.

  The deserted car park on the headland. Billy folds the wedge of twenties to slip into his pocket while Moira takes a good snort in each nostril from a small brown bottle. He can see her plainly enough in the moonlight, the shudder of pleasure which rockets through her, the glitter in her eyes. She recaps the bottle and puts it in her pocket. She surprises him then by gripping his lapels, forcing her mouth on his, her tongue darting and probing and somehow mocking him. He barely has time to respond before he feels a hand at the front of his jeans, kneading his cock to attention. Then, surprise number two, she jumps back and slaps him hard around the face. "Okay tough guy," she says.

  For just a second Billy watches her - her breathing hard - her face set, and then he cracks a good one into her left cheek. Her head snaps back and she staggers and hits the door of her black BMW. She slides down the car until she’s squatting in the gravel, her fist pressed against her cheek. "Oh my," she says. "Wow."

  Billy shuffles in the cold. His half-wakened cock curls back to sleep. He's embarrassed now and wishes he'd clung to his initial refusal. Tries to deny the thrill he'd felt hitting her. There are ship's lights out at sea. The wind stings the side of his face and makes his ear burn. He reminds himself to look up "paramour" when he gets home. "Are you all right?" he says.

  "Oh I'm just fine," she says. She tries to stand but has to sit again. She begins to laugh. "Well," she says, "that was certainly something."

  Billy leans down and takes her elbow to help her up.

  "Get your fucking hands off me!" she screams, slapping him away, scratching the back of his hand with her nails.

  Billy jumps back, hands off. Christ, what has he gotten into here? Was this bitch going to start yelling rape or what? You stupid cunt Billy. You just knocked the shit out of someone's lover-boy and then let them lure you into this. Asshole. He knows they're alone but he looks around nervously anyway.

  "Gimme a smoke Billy," she says. "Christ that's starting to hurt."

  Billy relaxes a little. He shields the lighter flame inside his jacket and hands her the cigarette. She takes it and draws on it. The cigarette end glows fiercely. "How was it for you Billy?"

  Billy doesn't answer. He rubs at his knuckles with the palm of his other hand.

  "Billy got a kick all right," she says.

  "Maybe Billy's more interested in what you're going to tell Frank."

  "I don't have to tell Frank a damned thing. Fuck Frank."

  "You're going to bruise."

  "So what? Who cares?"

  "You're bruising already is so what."

  "Let's not talk about me, Billy. Okay? Let's talk about what else you'll do for money."

  "Don't think there aren't lines I won't cross."

  "Is that how it is?" Moira laughed. "I hate to impugn your moral resolve Billy, but hey, I've known you for - what? - less than an hour, and I've already seen you cross one line. You ever kill anyone?"

  "You know what I think? I'm starting to think you've got the wrong feller."

  "Oh no, Billy. Believe me, you're just what I've been looking for. Couple of day’s time, Frank goes off for several weeks to scare up a budget for one of his dreary films - which I'm sure is something you know already, yes? I'll call on you when he's gone, Billy. We've got stuff to do you and me. Oh, and Billy, just so we know where we are," she says, "you ever hit me again, I'll kill you."

  Billy believes her. This is the start of something alright, he's just not sure what.

  "One other thing, Billy," she says, "I want you to call me Moira."

  "Whatever," Billy says.

  "Say it."

  He turns to look at the moon above the town.

  "Say it Billy."

  He turns. "Moira," he says, and knows it to be an act of submission.

  Karen (Summer 2004)

  It was Suzy's idea to cross the Yarl. From the cottage balcony she had spied a ledge in the rock on the far side of the river, where, she enthused, we could picnic in the last of the sunlight, from where she could swim naked without embarrassment. Come on Karen, she'd cajoled, it'll be fun.

  The tide is rising as we inelegantly launch the small boat from the beach adjacent to the cottage. We are both barefoot; the legs of our jeans rolled up to the knees. The water stings and numbs my skin. Fearing crabs most of all, I am nevertheless able to conjure adjunctive worries concerning creatures with venom, pertaining to fish that bite.

  There is a basket in the boat containing wine, along with bread and cheese tucked beneath a bath towel. Our cigarettes are in there also, and we are careful not to wet the basket. Suzy leads, towing the boat with the mooring rope over her shoulder, a wet patch on her purple T-shirt, the rope plucking down the material to reveal her freckles. I push ineffectually at the stern of the boat, my hands either side of the out-board, the smell of petrol in my nostrils. With the boat afloat, we change positions, and I climb nervously into the prow, while Suzy, already in the stern, begins to pull on the engine's draw-cord. Did you prime it? I say. The instructions said to prime it. Yes Karen, Suzy says, I primed it. I see that a drop or two of petrol - a swirling patch of rainbow colours - is spreading over the surface of the water as evidence of this. On the fourth pull of the draw-cord the engine rattles into life and settles into a deep throb which I can feel through my seat. After an initial, experimental, S-shaped manoeuvre, we head out across the wide river.

  Suzy, who swims like a seal, has wet the front of her T-shirt and I see where the fabric is stretched over her nipple ring. The evening sunlight fires the auburn in her hair. It's wonderful hair. When we bounce off the wind-ruffle I tighten my grip on the trim. Not usually the nervous type, I’m nevertheless trussed inside an orange life jacket. Some small part of me suspects revenge, and I silently curse myself for allowing Suzy to talk me into this. If Suzy swims like a seal, then I swim like an anchor.

  Calm, calm, calm, I think, careful not to mouth this mantra, until I feel calmer, calmer, calm. Looking back at the cottage, I can see the empty wine bottle and the un-washed glasses from last night still standing on the balcony's white balustrade, as if placed there for target practice. The balcony doors are open to air the cottage clear of the cigarettes we'd smoked in the bath. Suzy's 2CV is parked on the slip between the cottage and the beach - bright green, headlamps like eyes, it looks like a cartoon car. I remember the over-heating engine; Suzy's over-heated response to this; the implied question mark over the car's fitness to make the journey home. The seemingly endless miles of motorway at a steady fifty-five, steadily working through Suzy's collection of Stones tapes. Better- cook-cook-cook-cook- cook-cook- cuk-cuk, the engine said in its cartoon voice when Suzy
- muttering about pre-ignition - had switched it off. Which was yesterday. Saturday. Arriving at mid-day, we'd spent the afternoon making slow, drunken love, before emerging like moths in the gloaming.

  Once we have cleared the cove, I look up-river: the ice-cream-coloured houses - mint and vanilla and peach melba - the sun setting behind the slate roofs of Yarlmouth, the tug-boat ramming the car ferry across to Kingsbrook. Down-river, the river mouth and the open sea. The headland shouldering the castle, shading into silhouette against the various strata of blue, an incremental darkening down to the horizon. From the castle back to the cottage, a lush green tree canopy along the cliff-tops. The black cruciform of a cormorant hunching its wings on a rock.

  Devon agrees with me; Suzy doesn't. Suzy wanted exotic travel. Excitement. Cocktails on a Brazilian beach. Scuba-diving in the Indian Ocean. A sex-tour of Thailand. We argue. Back in my apartment, we argue. It's a beautiful, brain-cooking, global-warming morning in May - a post-orgy Sunday in our brave, new, post-democratic age. Suzy, I say (massaging my temples), we talked about this, didn't we? I don't want to fly. Not this year. Especially not this year. I don't want airport tax, airport security, baggage thieves, exchange rates, international fucking terrorism. I'm tired of all that. I'm tired full stop. I just want to relax. You might not realise it Suze, but I really need to relax. Plus, I'm going to have to work.

  You see, Suzy says, this is what I mean. You're going on holiday to fucking work? How can you relax and work all at the same time?

  By getting the balance right, I say, not adding that just lately, the balance has been very wrong indeed, not wishing to explain that it is the commitment (the re-commitment) to work, rather than the work itself, that is the issue here.

  You never want to just have fun, Suzy says. How many times have we been dancing?

  You know I don't dance, I say.

  Karen, you love to dance. You're just always so - okay, let's recap shall we? A visit to Tate Britain. Italian Futurism. American Transcendentalism. (I'm grateful for the lecture Karen, but Jesus!) Oh, wait, we kiss on the embankment. Then, oh, let's see … A shared visit to the hair-dresser's. You lose your nerve and don't go for the crop which I didn't want you to have in the first place. Two trips to Donovan's wine bar - and what a pretentious piss-hole. Second trip, Karen gets drunk and abuses the staff. Threatens to bite the barman. A single dance in the Cellar Bar. An evening at the Prince of India. Sum total, Karen, of our leisure activities. Outside of the bedroom that is, which, I fucking notice by the way, there always seems to be enough time for.

  I don't want to fight. I really don't. I have yet to say (that is, I've bitten down on it), that Suzy herself was allied with the forces, both external and internal, which had hemmed me, ever tighter, into the solipsistic world of my own breakdown. My downfall. Which, started, almost arbitrarily, with Gerald, a sweet man with an ego like a squashed frog. Gerald worked in Classics. Occasionally he'd hold his nerve until the close of a lecture and on such days he was impressive. He was older than me by ten years but he'd been kind and solicitous and he possessed a shy sparkle which I liked. He was in every way possible unlike Steve, which was answer enough to the grapevine question, "Why Gerald?” Towards the end of a two week courtship (which we conducted off-campus in quiet bistros, supplemented by long walks along the river) just as I was beginning to conclude that - despite his protestations and denial to my outright enquiry - the very private Gerald was gay after all, he'd made love to me as if I might break as readily as a black figure vase, circa 500 BCE. Oh Karen, he'd said, you have such beautiful hair. Evidently, Gerald, so academically expert in Dionysian revelry, refused to take his work home with him. Soon after, there had been complications. Gerald had wept. It was awful. Never fuck within the faculty, I had once told myself, before ignoring that advice and embarking upon this ill-starred affair. (Not that Gerald's gentle, considerate fumblings had amounted to anything like fucking. He had barely stayed hard enough to keep the condom on, and then not for long enough for it to fulfil its chief function.) Following the return to a more professional relationship with this poor, broken Classicist, I amended my own advice. Never fuck within the faculty - but if you do, then make sure it isn't with a man in a same-sex relationship who is prone to weeping. Poor Gerald.

  Then came Paul. We were smokers on the crowded balcony of a crowded apartment. There was a bucket of sand for an ashtray. A party at which I knew nobody except for the host, Lisa, who I'd met in The Dragon's Lair (formerly the Mash Tun) where I'd gone to drink alone on Steve's last birthday. It was to have been his thirty-fifth. He was absent, of course.

  It was one of those evenings (the party, not the Dragon's Lair) when I was glad just to be outside of the academic milieu, drinking wine on a mild, early October evening while premature fireworks burst over the city skyline. Here was talk outside of the textual, the meta-textual, the inter-textual and (last but not least) the intra-textual. I was to be spared, for the evening, from the canon-formation conspiracies of the dead white patriarch. From the cut and thrust of the "ism" wars. Neither (a further mercy) was I to be viewed by these strangers through the distorting prism of projected grief, forcing my defiance against the terrible shadow of Steve's absence. There were no speculative whispers gathering in my wake as there had been while walking the faculty corridor, emotional year zero. Here, in fact, were conversations on house prices, schools, children, kitchen units, Farrow and Ball paints - the usual verbal alluvium of the middle-class gathering. And whereas being cornered by a pot-bellied forty-something man, exasperated by the lack of available properties with a double garage attached, would, under more normal circumstances, induce in me the urge to pull out my own teeth, these were not normal circumstance, and so I (whose father had gutted rabbits in the kitchen sink; whose father had been a quiet fury of hard-graft odours: turpentine, sweat, and linseed oil) was happy to listen to this polite chat while I drank wine and tried not to appear too aloof. If the occasional reference was made to the principles in the on-going global lunacy then I was happy to ignore it. I was in no mood for one of my own rants - in fact, I was pretty ranted-out - and besides, on this Friday evening with fireworks, there seemed little left unsaid. No, my more pressing concern had been finding someone to sleep with that weekend. Someone to fuck. Gerald was kind. Gerald was solicitous. But Gerald had not been a fuck. Perhaps he'd been some kind of buffer to protect my grief, my sense of fidelity to Steve's memory, from the brute animal fact of what was to come. Does that make sense? It's equally possible that Gerald was less a buffer, and more a stopper for a bottle that was brim full of fuck-me-fuck-me-fuck-me. In the end, after a late flurry of decorum-sanctioned flirting, I'd decided on Paul. Paul three years my junior. Paul muscular in a white shirt. Paul who avoided standing beneath the light so that you couldn't see how badly his gelled hair was thinning. Paul who Steve would not have stomached. A man who, though old enough to know better, had fallen victim to the current trend of ending each sentence with an interrogative rise which made him sound like a wannabe Aussie. He was an asshole, in short, and just what I needed. So instead of responding to his statement-turned-questions in the way they deserved (which would have been, for example: Yes, I know what a fucking car is; do I look like a three year old to you?) I suffered his interminable self-promotion for at least fifteen minutes before I retaliated. Football, I said, call the ball a toy and what have you got? Flicking ash over the parapet. The remark had galvanised his forces for a full assault upon my body. Paul was fond - oh so very fond - of the bellicose metaphor. He was something or other in business. His talk was of strategic thinking, tactical bids, aggressive take-overs, front-line finance, rear-guard actions - even, god help us, company regime-change. His sensitive side manifested itself in ethical finance and oral sex - though he possessed genuine expertise in only one of these areas. Unsurprisingly then, he took me like an invading army (which is not necessarily - fuck-me-fuck-me-fuck-me - a complaint). Though Gerald would have no doubt wilted at such violent physicalit
y, he might also have allowed himself a rueful appreciation of this living embodiment of militia amour.

  Paul had two things going for him as far as I was concerned. One) he had a great body, and two) he was busy enough so that I could keep our relationship on a strictly recreational footing. Which is to say we met (usually at my apartment) for sex once or twice a week. It was good for a while, as long as he didn't talk too much. My patience was wearing thin on that score. When Paul talked too much, I actually missed Gerald, who, of course, was brilliant. Missing Gerald was easier than missing Steve.

  When I finally sued for peace, Paul took back the mandolin he'd bought me. I hadn't asked for it in the first place. The mandolin tucked under Paul's arm had somewhat ruined the martial swagger of his exit. To make matters worse he'd forgotten not to stand under the landing light as he turned to offer a final something which stuck in his throat and I could see the shine of pink scalp beneath his hair. The Ice Queen he'd called me, that first night.

  Heinrich. A PhD student writing a thesis on Deconstruction (stifled yawn) and the Picturesque. Heinrich had read my famous essay, Nietzsche, Red in Tooth and Claw, and had apparently fallen in love with me on the strength of it. A strange boy, Heinrich. He told me that I had beautiful syntax before he told me I had beautiful hair. He wore round-rimmed spectacles on a face of almost alarming intensity. He also had a huge cock which made me gasp in exquisite terror when he entered me for the first time. The problem with Heinrich was that he could seldom forget the student-tutor relationship. He would pause during sex for my guidance as if he couldn't trust the evidence before him (or beneath him), his clipped Teutonic enquiries breaking incongruously into my delirium of shrieking, gasping pleasure. Like Paul, Heinrich was a pounder by nature (with, of course, a bigger arsenal) and when I finally managed to shut him up for long enough to get on with it he was like a magnificently efficient machine. I don't know much German, but enough to know that Heinrich's orgasms took him very close to God for such a nihilist. I tired of Heinrich before I tired of his big cock. As with Paul, I kept conversation to a minimum and always ushered him out of my apartment after my third orgasm. Once, after he had asked me for bus fare, he wrote out a receipt for sixty-seven pence. What could you do with a boy like that? Professing a fondness for Austen, he had proved to be a highly intelligent bore, with none of Gerald's wit and charm. Not only that, but that big cock of his was starting to make me sore. I also feared for the structural integrity of my bed. More than anything, I wanted Steve. I wanted to be held by Steve.