Altar Ego (31 page)

‘It’s a
look
, doll, it’s a
choice
.’

‘But I got a message! From you! Saying it was fancy dress!’

‘Revenge, dag-features,’ purred Kate, materializing eerily at my side, ‘for the panty liners.’

‘Yeah, well, I hope you’re wearing your bullet-proof bra, Kate, ’cause this is war!’

Anouska gestured toward the tanned and taut entourage of men hovering around her husband. ‘If I had a sex change so I could go out with all those delicious men over there, would that make me gay?’ she asked plaintively.

But Kate and I still had our invisible antlers locked. ‘
You’re
the one who told me to get laid,’ my ex-best friend rebuked. ‘You did everything but coat me in vasso and heli-drop me, starkers, into a maximum security-prison for men! You told me to change. And I have. And what’s more –’ she flicked her hair coquettishly ‘– a whole new world is opening up to me.’

‘Yeah … Like Sharon Stone’s legs.’ I snagged my finger through her fishnet stockings. ‘You know who you’re turning into? The very sort of woman you’ve always loathed.’

But my train of spite was derailed by the appearance of Julian, bursting in from the garden through the French windows in a flurry of other guests caught in a sudden summer downpour. His hair, slicked wet from the rain, was brushed back, giving him the appearance of a Mafioso. This new, devilish air was enhanced by a fringe of five-day growth accessorising his top lip. He looked, I thought sadly, like a perfect stranger.

‘You’ve got Julian growing a moustache?’ Anouska commented redundantly.

‘Why?’ I said curtly to Kate. ‘
Now nobody will be able to tell you apart
.’

‘Why don’t you two just duel with pistols at dawn and get it over with?’ suggested Anouska, so irritated that she rushed off to greet old, old friends – whom she’d never met before.

The party, much like the marriage, seemed to be operating in parallel universes. The couple’s friends regarded each other with counterfeit enthusiasm. While Anouska’s monied chums compared the springiness of their sprung ballrooms, Darius’s friends were discussing nipple-chafing and penis-piercing.

Cast off into sartorial Siberia, I spent a fascinating evening watching a bowl of guacamole go black. I examined the art on the wall with a slight tilt to my
head
and an absorbed facial expression. Pretty soon my nerves were in a blender and switched on to Fine Chop. I crouched out of view behind the couch and tried not to cry.

‘Dah-ling.’ Darius stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of me and my wilted sausage string. ‘Why don’t you pop upstairs and put on something of Anouska’s?’

‘Um … As you’ve never seen her naked, you probably haven’t noticed but your wife is actually a size “anorexic”.’

Darius chortled. ‘This is killing you, isn’t it?’ he chortled.

‘Not quickly enough.’

‘Borrow something of mine. I do have the odd frock, dah-ling. Well, what can I do?’ he replied to my raised brow. ‘I was born with the sort of legs that simply
demand
mesh stockings and high heels. Help yourself.’

‘Thank you.’ Inching my way towards the staircase, I made a mental note to tell Anouska not to kill him off. Darius really was much nicer gay than straight. I nearly made it to the first step, except for a Rolexed wrist tentacling out of the throng and suctioning on to my upper arm.

Nobody knows who invented marriage counsellors, but the Devil is the chief suspect. Simon, leading the ‘I’m So Sorry I’m Not A Woman Brigade’, was always on the look out for an oppressed female to whom he could offer his solidarity.

‘I heard about the break and enter.’ Simon tightened
his
grip on my arm until I yelped in pain. ‘You need physical pain to cauterize the emotional pain. It’s symbolic. Remember the Sioux Indians? Hanging upside down with bear claws through their chests in order to make a request to the Gods?’ He squeezed again. Tears were springing to my eyes. ‘Now you can make a request to be free of emotional pain.’

‘The only request I’d like to make is that you stop self-medicating.’ I stomped on his toe, forcing him to pogo backwards.

By a curious combination of snow-ploughing and side-stepping, I ascended the stairs in my long pointy slippers. Once changed, I could slip past Julian into the night, with a shred of self-respect …

If ever I am a contestant on
Mastermind
, social humiliation will be my specialist subject. This was my only thought when I bumped smack bang into my Significant Ex, on the first-floor landing.

When Julian saw me, his scowl was on autopilot. The caviar spilt off the cracker in his hand and on to the white rug, a little congo line of black dots in search of a stave. We instantaneously launched into one of those sub-titled conversations between exes.

‘Hi,’ I said, ‘How’s my waffle-iron?’ Which meant –
Oh God, I miss you
.

‘Fine. How’s my non-stick wok?’ Which meant –
Please get the fuck out of my life
. He glanced at my costume and said ‘That’s a bold choice.’ Which meant
–
What the hell are you wearing? And How Could I Ever, Ever, Ever Have Married You?

‘I’m sorry. About the other night,’ I said, which meant –
Oh, oh, I love you, I love you, I love you. Please, please, please, take me back
.

‘Look. I’m sure in time we can still be friends, okay?’ Which meant – Y
ou are nothing but an inverted image on my retina, detected by light-sensitive cells. Consequently you exist only as a series of impulses and you will cease to exist when I close my eyes
.

He made to move past me. It was a now or never kind of a moment. And I now-ed. ‘Julian.’ In a clumsy attempt to clutch-start a reconciliation, I wrapped my fingers around the small, exquisite patch of exposed skin beneath the cuff of his shirt. ‘Can’t you ever forgive me?’

‘Forgive? Well actually I wasn’t planning to
speak
to you for, oh,
the rest of my life
.’

Remembering that I was probably not at my most alluring, I wrenched off the false beard. ‘As they say in the marriage guidance business – you now have the whip hand, Julian.’ Despite his air of weary nonchalance, one of his caramel-coloured eyebrows crept up his broad forehead. ‘I was weak. I thought it was love. But it was only lust, after all. I’ll never make the same mistake again. Promise … Cross my legs and hope to die.’

Julian gave a tetchy sigh. ‘Rebecca, infidelity is not exactly where it’s at, troth-wise, you know.’

I felt a hot pang of desire. My Prince Charming had got his swashbuckler back. ‘You’re so attractive when you’re angry, Jules.’

‘Well I must be
irresistible
now. Infidelity hurts deeply, Rebecca. Forever. And in ways that can’t be rationalized away. You weren’t just my “wife”. You were my best friend. How do you think that made me feel?’

‘I know I behaved abominably. But so do lots of other people,’ I pleaded. ‘Cheating on your spouse … it’s so common, it’s
un
original sin. I mean, you said that marriage brings into play the lowest impulses … But you also said it brings into play the highest aspirations. Like forgiveness …’

‘But I don’t like you any more.’

‘That doesn’t preclude loving me.’

‘I did love you once,’ he admitted, in a tone of jaded chagrin.

‘Only once?’ I smiled sheepishly.

‘… But not now. Besides, I’m kind of in the middle of someone.’ He prised my fingers from his arm and manoeuvred me out of his way. I held on to his belt with both hands and, in my felt boots, slalomed after him along the polished wooden floors.

‘Okay, you don’t love me. But who exactly is it you’re not loving?’ I stem-christied, forcing him to stop and face me. ‘Certainly not the woman in front of you because you don’t know this person.’

‘Oh,
please
. Let me guess. You’re a Born-Again
Human
Being? … You’re a Born-Again Human Being trapped in a gnome’s body.’ He looked me up and down reprovingly. ‘I imagine those clothes have some kind of pharmaceutical explanation?’

‘Kate told me it was fancy dress. I’m so embarrassed …’

‘Really?’ he scoffed. ‘I thought you’d be numbed to shame by now.’

‘Oh, Jules. I’ve changed. I have. I’ve grown up. I’ve got a Ph.D. in guilt. When it comes to remorse, we’re talking encyclopaedic knowledge.’

‘Abridged.’

‘Well, we’ll cross that abridgement when we come to it.’

When he smiled at me again, it was like opening up the windows of a locked-up house; light rushed into dark corners and the smell of rich earth filled my senses. At the sound of Kate’s voice ascending I nudged him into the spare bedroom decorated in textbook Ye Olde English. The quilted, canopied four-poster was bathed in light from a pale, lopsided moon. The July air was warm as bathwater.

I closed the door behind me and darted a soft-focus glance in his direction. ‘The truth is, I’m madly in love with a married man.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. My husband.’ I trembled in anticipation of his touch like some wan heroine from a Mills & Boon
novel
– except that I was emitting lust rays visible to the naked eye.

‘That’s downright kinky … and a shame,’ he replied in a silky voice. ‘Because I’m completely over you. I haven’t given you a moment’s thought for, oh, minutes at a time.’

His hand on my waist was warm and familiar. We melted into a romantic embrace worthy of the frilly décor.

‘I have to tell you that my intentions are strictly dishonourable.’ I ran my hands down the bony Braille of his spine and squeezed his buttocks. Gone were the customary buns-of-custard, replaced with mouth-wateringly taut musculature. ‘I want to perform serious and wilful misconduct on your corpus delicti … An indictable offence, no? May I kiss you?’

‘Objection.’ He pulled me towards him. The best thing about body language is that it doesn’t need any subtitles. Even for exes.

‘Overruled,’ I said, as we dissolved into a swirl of limbs and wet kisses; coiled and knitted together by longing. I think it’s fairly safe to say that it was the first time Julian had ever made love with a garden gnome.

And so it was that I began an affair with my husband.

35
The Three Of Us Make A Really Good Pair

FROM THE MOMENT
I started cheating on my lover with my husband, events in my life took on the speed and danger and out-of-control quality that required runway foam.

All the clandestine thrill and general gusset-marinating I’d once enjoyed with Zack, I now shared with Julian. My once strait-laced spouse became a heat-seeking moisture missile. He was no mouth and all trousers.

When Zack accused me again of seeing someone, I lied: po-faced, no fidgeting. ‘Who the hell is it?’ he demanded. I must have hesitated a fraction too long, or maybe he picked up on my nervousness – Nervous? Hell. I was smoking
during
sex – because he added, ‘Hey it isn’t like I’m asking you the identity of Watergate’s Deep Throat.’

Gratifying Zack sexually (in between discussing the linguistic dangers of a dangling participle) was the only way to alleviate his doubts. Which is why I was soon twirling from partner to partner in a sexual cotillion which was burning holes in my soles and other parts of my anatomy.

Anouska, tweezing my eyebrows one night, casually informed me that Kate was eaten up with suspicion that Julian was having an affair.

‘
What?
’ I squeezed open one eye and looked up at her from my prone position upon a pillow in her lap.

‘We were discussing Darius – he’s just laughing in the face of death, doll. It’s terrifying. He survived catapulting, hang-gliding and micro-lighting. Cave-diving, that’s next. You’re wedged in a damp, dark crevice …’

‘Sounds like something he might enjoy,’ I knocked the tweezers impatiently to one side. ‘Could we cut to the chase here?’

‘All right … All right … Anyway, then she told me she was convinced Julian had a woman on the side and did I have any clues.’

I made a split-second decision that telling Anouska would be bad. It would be like swimming after you’ve eaten. Under no circumstances would I breathe a word.

‘It’s me,’ I dived right in. ‘He’s having an affair with me.’

‘
You?
You mean … a
ménage à trois
. Why?

I shrugged. ‘Well, it gives me a chance to practise my French accent.’ Anouska made a moue of disgust. ‘It’s great,’ I elaborated glibly, slightly peeved by her disapproval. ‘I now have two men around to fix fuses and change car tyres.’

‘Yes, doll, and there’s now twice as many men to be amused by your big bum.’ Her upside-down face was a mask of censoriousness – it was as though I’d told her I was eating seal-pup sandwiches.

‘Relax. We’re not actually having sex all at the same time.’

‘Well, why not? You’d save on sheets,’ she snapped uncharacteristically.

‘Why is the spectre of women having their cake and eating it so unbearable for those who aren’t?’ I said bitchily. ‘And what do you mean by “big bum”, exactly?’

She flopped my head out of her lap as though it were a rancid cabbage. ‘It’s just not very nice, Becky.’

‘Oh, and where had being nice got women, huh?’ I propped myself up on one elbow on Anouska’s four-poster. ‘Still no equal pay. Still doing all the housework … You should stop being so nice all the time, Annie. Being nice all the time is best left to moonies, monarchs or heirs-a-bloody-pparent.’

‘Nice?’ she squealed before flouncing towards the door. ‘I’m currently deliberating whether to send my husband white-river rafting – which offers maximum
cranial
damage, or shark-diving – that’s the art of keeping one inch of rubber between you and 670 ravaging incisors. Yes. You don’t get much nicer than that, doll,’ she said bitterly.

‘And I do not have a big bum!’ I called out after her.

Julian didn’t think our arrangement was all that ‘nice’ either.

‘I’m glad in a way that Kate got back in touch with her sexuality,’ I purred post-coitally one afternoon, smugness fuelling my magnanimity. We’d tumbled into an orange-chenille-bedspreaded Bloomsbury Hotel within staggering distance of a luncheon restaurant named, appropriately, A Wok on the Wildside.