Lie With Me (8 page)

I turned. Tina was standing at the top of the basement stairs. Had she seen me? No, she was smiling, but as if she didn’t want to be, and she was making a nervous action with her hands, splicing her fingers together and then pulling them apart, sharp cutting movements.

She said: ‘Are you serious about Alice? I’m sorry I have to ask.’

I let a beat pass. ‘Of course.’

‘It’s just you won’t hurt her, will you?’

I managed to restrain myself. ‘Of course not.’

She took a step forward and grabbed my sleeve. ‘I know you’re not the sort of man who usually . . . well, perhaps not what she needs. But . . . we . . . whatever happens, however it pans out, just don’t do any damage, will you?’

I made a small bow. My teeth were gritted, but I hid them with a smile. ‘My intentions, I assure you, madam, are entirely honourable.’

She looked at me for a long moment and then, as if she were satisfied with what she saw, said: ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. Andrew worries, that’s all. She deserves to be happy.’

‘And so do you,’ I said pointedly.

I smiled as pleasantly as I could and walked past her to the bathroom, hoping I’d unsettled her.

How dare she, or Andrew, make judgements about what kind of a man I was, or wasn’t? It was none of their business what I did. I had no intention of hurting Alice, and even if I had, she’d be fine. She was the one with the house, the friends, the money. I was the one who had
nothing
. I sulked for the rest of the evening, and, in the flurry of my own self-righteous indignation, managed to bury the thought that Tina might be right.

Chapter Six

Greece, after that, was all I could think about. It nagged away at me like a toothache.

I lay in my single bed at my mother’s house and churned with resentment.

I listened to the kid playing in the next door garden, the thock-thock of wet Swingball on plastic bat, the yapping of a Yorkshire terrier two doors down, my mother’s radio, Simon Mayo, up loud, and thought about ten years before. A package deal with a girl called Saffron. A cheap flat on the main drag, a hotspot of nightclubs (Let Zeus blow your mind) and pool-bars and Irish pubs; lights flashing neon outside the window, a smell of fried fish and diesel, mopeds screaming.

We bought tickets for a boat trip and I remembered the rough grip on your forearm as the captain helped you in, the tip and swell of the deck, the push of people, knees and foreheads, and sunburnt cleavage. The cold green bottle jolting against my lips, and the music, ‘Zorba the Greek’, loud and jangly and scratchy, that we took out of town with us, and onto the sea, the rising bouzouki, and the water, away from the scum of touristville, an extraordinary aquamarine blue: patches of clarity, between the dark rocks, moments when you could see down twenty feet to white sand, small fish flashing. And teenage girls in bikinis, and the nail-varnish-remover tang of retsina at the back of my throat.

The bad afternoon, the one I had tried to forget, came in fragments – drink and an argument, Saffron’s hand in the air, a bottle at my head, the naked limbs of another woman.

I opened my eyes and the room closed in on me: a box of Mansize Kleenex my mother had left helpfully on the bedside table, the three framed photographs of ‘Old Sheen’, nailed slightly too high on the wall, the small useless wrought-iron fireplace, painted gloss white, the spider plant in its grate.

Why shouldn’t I be part of Alice’s plans? Why shouldn’t I go to Pyros? I was her boyfriend now. Wasn’t it my due?

At Michael’s for Sunday lunch, I could talk of nothing else.

‘I can’t believe you want to go,’ Michael said. He had cooked roast chicken with all the trimmings in his Sunday uniform of sweat pants and slippers and was now picking at the bits in the pan. ‘You don’t like holidays, and you don’t like leaving London.’

‘I could do with a break. It’s been a tough winter. And now living with my mum. A small sojourn would suit me down to the ground.’

Ann, a solid, plain woman who was deputy head in a secondary school, said: ‘It’s a family holiday. By definition kids will be involved.’ She gestured to the garden where hers were fighting for possession of a plastic tractor. ‘Family life: isn’t it your idea of hell?’

‘They’re not small kids,’ I said. ‘They’re teenagers. Three boys, two girls – both seventeen.’

Michael stopped picking at the Pyrex and gave me a look.

‘They’ll be wearing bikinis,’ I added.

He grinned, and then looked at his wife, sheepish. She showed her irritation by getting to her feet, doing up the top button of her jeans which she had undone while we were eating. ‘Your pride’s dented,’ she said, filling the dishwasher. ‘You only want to be invited so you can turn it down.’

‘It’s the affront of having been invited once. She hasn’t repeated the invitation since we slept together. I don’t understand it. I thought sex was something I was quite good at.’

Michael gave me an indulgent look. ‘Come to Wales with us,’ he said. ‘The twins would love to share a tent with Uncle Paul.’ It was a fiction we all indulged that I was a favourite with their boys. ‘I know camping’s not quite your thing, but in my experience Greek accommodation can be pretty basic too. I’m talking about loos.’

‘Knowing Alice,’ I said, ‘it’ll be luxurious.’

‘So, Paul Morris,’ Michael said. ‘What first attracted you to multi-millionaire Alice – what’s her surname?’

For a moment I couldn’t remember, then it came to me. ‘Mackenzie.’

I saw him and Ann exchange a glance – almost pitying.

‘Maybe she doesn’t realise you
want
to come,’ Ann said. ‘I love you, Paul. You know I do.’ (I didn’t actually. She had always seemed uniquely impervious to my charms.) ‘But you aren’t exactly a big one for commitment.’

‘She’s too old for you!’ Michael said, standing up and wrapping his arms around his wife. He buried his chin in her hair. ‘Forget it! Find another young floozy to entertain us with.’

I shut up after that, piqued at being misunderstood, at being patronised. Maybe I had long played up the part of the roué, but I still felt cross, indignant, as if they weren’t taking me seriously, and left their house early.

In case Ann was right, I made it my mission to make it clear I wanted to come. I dropped endless hints. We had drinks one wet night at a trendy bar in Brixton. Swags of blossom lay sodden on the pavement. A tarpaulin over the entrance sagged and dripped. ‘British weather,’ I said, as we shrugged off our coats. ‘Don’t you just hate it? If we could depend on a month of sun – two weeks, even – we’d be a happier nation.’

‘Vitamin D,’ Alice said.

I put on a self-pitying voice. ‘You’re lucky. You’ve got Greece. I don’t know how I’ll bear it.’

No dice. ‘Poor you,’ she said.

I met her for a coffee in Covent Garden the following Saturday. She had been shopping for Phoebe’s birthday present and began pulling out items for my inspection – itsy bitsy pieces of fabric – a frilly top and a short denim skirt, a pair of gold-studded corduroy shorts, a tiny orange vest, and then,
pièce de résistance
: a bikini! The bikini was green, with yellow palm trees and pink umbrellas slashed across the pattern; 1950s in style, with a halter-neck and well-upholstered cups. Not sexy enough for my taste.

‘Very nice,’ I said, sounding out my appreciation. ‘For you?’

She slapped my hand. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘For Phoebe to take to Pyros?’

‘Yup. Holiday gear masquerading as birthday presents. I’m shameless.’

I stared into her eyes. ‘So who is going this year?’

‘Yvonne and Karl will be staying in a hotel, so in the house it’s just us lot.’

‘Just you lot,’ I repeated.

‘We’ll have so much clearing up to do.’ The waitress, a sweet little thing in a black miniskirt, shimmied over and Alice paid the bill. ‘Do you want to come back to Clapham for lunch?’ she said. She narrowed her eyes suggestively.

‘I’m on a roll, work-wise,’ I said coldly, and shoved off pretty sharpish. I regretted it later. I bought a sandwich in Subway at Victoria instead. Pathetic.

I had ground to make up after that. It does no good to be petulant. I needed to increase the attack, and lighten it at the same time. An idea came to me a couple of days later. My mother had brought my bin bags down out of the attic and left them on the bedroom floor. I rummaged through until, tangled up in a stolen hotel towel, I found the purple T-shirt I had brought back from Elconda. ‘Let Zeus blow your mind’ it read in jagged black lettering.

I wore it under my jumper the next time I was at Alice’s house. We were upstairs in her bedroom, and I did a slow striptease, disco-dancing while I undressed, until I was just in the Zeus T-shirt and my boxers. ‘Let
me
blow your mind,’ I said, pressing her up against the dressing table.

‘Stop it, stop it!’ she said. ‘I hate that T-shirt. It reminds me of that night. You were so drunk, you were so . . .
awful
.’

I continued to gyrate. ‘God, you’d look damn good in a bikini,’ I told her, my hands running up and down her body. ‘That’s all I’m after.’

‘Oh Paul, behave,’ she said.

It wasn’t until the first week of June that I had a breakthrough. Michael had passed on a couple of free theatre tickets he couldn’t use. The play, a political satire set in the former Yugoslavia, was at the National on the Southbank and I arranged to meet Alice there straight from work.

She was edgy and distracted. One of her clients was up for deportation, and she was on her phone when I arrived. It wasn’t until the interval that she got the call she’d been waiting for. We were sitting at the bottom of a small flight of steps between levels. I was scooping at a honeycomb ice cream, using the tiny plastic shovel provided, waiting for her to finish. I kept having to jerk my shoulder out of the way to let people pass.

She hung up and sighed heavily. ‘No joy,’ she said.

‘Poor old Alice,’ I said. ‘You really need a rest.’

‘I’m not the one who needs pity.’

‘Not long until your holiday now.’ I was hot in my jacket. I remember thinking I should have left it on the seat. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to forget about it for a bit.’

‘I won’t be able to forget about anything,’ she said. She’d been flicking through the programme, and she pointed at a photograph of the lead actor. ‘I
knew
I recognised him. He’s in
Casualty
.’

‘A drama I have never watched, and never intend to.’

‘Too lowbrow for you of course.’ Her voice was dark and heavy. ‘Paul Morris stooping to
Casualty
: as if!’ She cast the programme to one side. ‘Sorry. I’m tired. No. I’ll have too much to do. U-Haul are coming in September for the furniture, but there are clothes in wardrobes, food in cupboards to be cleared – for ten years we’ve just chucked stuff in.’ She sighed. ‘I could just leave everything for them to deal with – they’re bulldozing the land; they could just bulldoze the house with it. But . . . well, terribly British of me to think I need to tidy. Oh God, and there’s Hermes to sort too.’

‘Hermes?’

‘An old pick-up truck that came with the place. Hermes, the God of speed – ironic obviously. It hasn’t worked for years. I could sell it if I could get it going.’

The bell went for the second act. It was all or nothing. I felt vertiginous. ‘What you need,’ I said, ‘is a professional mechanic.’

‘I do. If I can find one on Pyros – I suppose they must exist.’

‘Or a sexy handsome man who might just have got his hands dirty in his university holidays by helping out at McCoy & McCoy Motors Ltd, Mortlake’s premier car service facility. MOTs and general maintenance.’

‘Really?’

‘No repair too big or too small.’

She let out a gurgle of laughter; more genuine than anything I had heard for a while. ‘You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.’

I stood up. ‘Often, while U’ – I drew the letter in the air with my finger – ‘wait.’

‘Are U’ – she made the same gesture – ‘offering to mend my truck?’

I shrugged and reached back to put my hands in my back pockets. ‘Perhaps you’ve got me wrong. Perhaps I’m not so highbrow after all.’

She stood up. She was standing on the step above me and our eyes were level. She said, ‘I know we’ve all been talking about what fun it’ll be, but it won’t, not really. I’ll be feeling sad at leaving. Plus, as it’s the ten-year anniversary since Jasmine went missing . . . Yvonne and Karl . . . It won’t all be roses. You might not have that good a time.’

The second bell rang. I put my hand under her elbow and steered her back towards the auditorium. I couldn’t stop smiling.

When we reached the end of our row, she turned again to look at me. An elderly man and two younger women scrabbled to their feet, pushing their bags and coats out of the way, to make room for us to pass. Alice still had her back to them. She didn’t move.

‘I’m in,’ I said.

She considered me for what felt like a long moment and then she bent forwards. ‘Good,’ she whispered. ‘I’m glad.’

She kissed me lightly on the lips. And then she turned and edged, with small, dainty steps, along the row ahead of me.

I followed, shuffling sideways. I tripped over a coat, smiled at one of the women, wobbled, made a face, apologised. I must have looked as if I were too big for the space, like a clumsy oaf. But I felt as if I could soar. I had
won
.

September 2015

I didn’t sleep much last night. The itching has become almost unbearable. My whole forearm is red and inflamed, but the area halfway along, the site of the original bite, is pallid and hard, the entry wound long absorbed by the flesh around it. I’ve lost all sensation there – it’s as if a peach stone has grown under the skin. Everywhere else, I’ve scratched so hard I have blood under my nails. The cycle – the stinging pain, then the itchiness, then the stinging pain – is driving me half insane.

I was allowed to see the prison doctor one morning, a middle-aged man with large hands and heavy lines etched into his face. He didn’t speak much English and my Greek is no better, but there was a tangible sympathy coming off the man that almost made me weep. He gave me a cream for the infection – antibiotic, I suppose – and an ointment for the psoriasis on my face and hands. He showed me what to do, miming a dab with the thick tip of his enormous finger, and a more general window-cleaning-style rub. But where those medications are now, I don’t know.