Make Death Love Me (21 page)

The fact was, though, that neither of them seemed very lover-like. Marty wondered what had happened between them on Saturday. Not much, he thought, but presumably enough for Nigel to be sure he was going to make it. Marty observed their behaviour. Joyce sat knitting all day, not being any nicer to Nigel than she had ever been, and Nigel didn't talk much to her or call her ‘sweetheart' or ‘love' which were the endearments he would have used in the circumstances. Maybe it was just that they fancied each other so much that they were keeping themselves under control in his presence. He hoped so, and hoped they wouldn't expect him to stay out half the night, for his stomach was hurting him again and he felt as if he had a hangover, though he hadn't touched a drop of scotch for twenty-four hours.

At just after six he went off. It was a fine clear evening, preternaturally warm for the time of year. Or so Marty supposed from the way other people weren't wearing coats, and from seeing a couple of girls walking along in thin blouses with short sleeves. He didn't feel warm himself, although he had a sweater and his leather jacket on. He stood shivering at the bus stop, waiting for the number 16 to come and take him down to the West End.

The two in the room in Cricklewood were self-conscious with each other. Nigel put his arm round Joyce and wondered how it would be if she were thirty-seven or thirty-eight and grateful to him for being such a contrast to her dreary old husband. The fantasy helped, and so did some of Marty's whisky. Joyce said she would have some too, but to put water with it.

They took their glasses into the living room.

‘Did you send my letter?' said Joyce.

‘Marty took it this morning.'

‘So that's his name? Marty.'

Nigel could have bitten his tongue out. But did it matter now?

‘You'd better tell me yours, hadn't you?'

Nigel did so. Joyce thought it a nice name, but she wasn't going to say so. She had an obscure feeling that some part of herself would be saved inviolate if, even though she slept with Nigel, she continued to speak to him with cold indifference. The whisky warmed and calmed her. She had never tasted it before. Stephen said it was gin that was the woman's drink, and once or twice she had had a gin and tonic with him in the Childon Arms, but never whisky. Nigel was half-sitting on the gun. It was beside him but not between them. She let Nigel kiss her and managed to kiss him back.

‘We may as well eat,' Nigel said, and he took the gun with him to the table. The wine would put the finishing touch to a pleasant muzziness that was overcoming his inhibitions. He liked Joyce's shyness and her ugliness. It meant she wouldn't know whether he acquitted himself well or badly. She ate silently, returning the pressure of his knee under the table. But, God, she was ugly! The only good thing about her was her hair. Her eyelashes were white – no wonder she'd nagged him to get her mascara – and her skin was pale and coarse and her features doughy. In Marty's tee-shirt and pullover she looked shapeless.

He started talking to her about the things he had done, how he had been to university and got a first-class honours degree, but had thrown it all up because this society was rotten, rotten to the core, he didn't want any part of it, no way. So he had gone to live in a commune with other young people with ideals, where they had a vegetarian diet and made their own bread and the girls wove cloth and made pots. It was a free sexuality commune and he had been shared by two girls, a very young one called Samantha and an older one, Sarah.

‘Why did you rob a bank then?' said Joyce.

Nigel said it had been a gesture of defiance against this rotten society, and they were going to use the money to start a Raj Neesh community in Scotland.

‘What's that when it's at home?'

‘It's my religion. It's a marvellous Eastern religion with no rules. You can do what you like.'

‘Sounds right up your street,' said Joyce, but she didn't say it unpleasantly, and when she got up to put the plates on the draining board beside Marty's whisky bottles, she let Nigel run his hand down her thigh. Then she sat down closer to him and they drank up the last of the wine. By now it was dark outside, but for the light from the yellow lamps. Nigel drew the curtains, and when Joyce came through from the kitchen he put his arms round her and began kissing her violently and hungrily, pushing her head back and chewing at her face.

She had very little feeling left, just enough to know from the feel of Nigel pressed like iron up against her, that it was going to happen. But she felt no panic or despair, the whisky and the wine had seen to that, and no compulsion to break a window or scream when, for the first time since she had been there, she was left quite alone and free to move. Nigel went out to the lavatory, taking the gun with him. Joyce got on to the mattress and took all her clothes off under the sheet. The third note was still inside her bra. She pushed it into one of the cups and hid the bra on the floor under her pullover. Nigel came back, closing the door on the Yale but not bothering with the other lock. He switched off the light. For a little while he stood there, surprised that the lamps outside lit the room so brightly through the threadbare curtains, as if he hadn't seen that same thing for many nights. Then he stripped off his clothes and pulled back the blankets and the sheet that covered Joyce.

Her head was slightly turned away, the exposed cheek half-covered by her long fair hair. He stared at her in amazement, for he hadn't known any real woman could look like that. Her body was without a flaw, the full breasts smooth and rounded like blown glass, her waist a fragile and slender stem, the bones and muscles of her legs and arms veiled in an extravagant silkiness of plump tissue and white skin. The yellow light lay on her like a patina of gilding, shining in a gold blaze on those roundnesses and leaving the shallow hollows sepia brown. She was like one of the nudes in Marty's magazines, only she was more superb. Nigel had never thought of those as real women, but as contrivances of the pornographer's skill, assisted by the pose and the cunning camera. He looked down on her with appalled wonder, with a sick shrinking awe, while Joyce lay motionless and splendid, her eyes closed.

At last he said, ‘Joyce,' and lowered his body on to hers. He too shut his eyes, knowing he should have shut them before or never have pulled back that sheet. He tried to think of Samantha's mother, stringy and thin and thirty-two, of Sarah in her black stockings. With his right hand he felt for the gun, imagining how it would be if he were raping Alan Groombridge's wife at gunpoint. But the damage was done. In the last way he would have thought possible, Joyce had taken away his manhood without moving, without speaking. Now she shifted her body under his and opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘I'll be OK in a minute,' said Nigel, his teeth clenched. ‘I could use a drink.'

He went out into the kitchen and took a swig out of the whisky bottle. He shut his eyes so that he couldn't see Joyce and tied himself round her, his arms and legs gripping her.

‘You're hurting!'

‘I'll be OK in a minute. Just give me a minute.'

He rolled off her and turned on his side. His whole body felt cold and slack. He concentrated on fantasies of Joyce as his slave, and on the importance of this act which he must perform to make her so. After a while, after the minutes he had asked her to give him, he turned to her once more to look at her face. If he could just look at her face and forget that wonderful terrifying body . . . She was asleep. Her head buried in her arms, she had fallen into a heavy drunken sleep.

Nigel would have liked to kill her then. He held the gun pressed to the back of her neck. Perhaps he would have killed her if the gun had been loaded and the trigger not stiff and immoveable. But the gun, like himself, was just a copy or a replica. It was as useless as he.

He took it with him into the kitchen and closed the door. Suddenly he was visited by a childhood memory, a vision from some fifteen or sixteen years in the past. He was sitting at the table and his father was spoon-feeding him, forcibly feeding him, while his mother crawled about the floor with a cloth in her hand. His mother was mopping up food that he spilt or spat out, reaching up sometimes to wipe his face with the flannel in her other hand, while his father kept telling him he must eat or he would never grow up, never be a man. The adult Nigel bent his head over the table in Marty's kitchen, as he had bent it over that other one, and began to weep as he had wept then. It was only the thought of Marty coming back and finding him there that stilled his sobs and made him get up again, choking and cursing. Reality was unbearable, he wanted oblivion. He put the mouth of the bottle to his own mouth, closed his lips right round it, and poured a long steady stream of whisky down his throat. There was just time to get back to that mattress and stretch himself out as far as possible from Joyce, before the spirit knocked him out.

Marty looked at the shops in Oxford Street, thinking of the clothes he would buy when he was free to buy them. He had never had the money to be a snappy dresser but he would like to be one, to wear tight trousers and velvet jackets and shirts with girls' faces and pop stars' names on them. A couple of passing policemen looked at him, or he fancied they looked at him, so he stopped peering in windows and walked off down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus.

In the neighbourhood of Leicester Square he visited a couple of amusement arcades and played the fruiters, and then he wandered around Soho. He had always meant to go into one of those strip clubs, and now, when he had wads of money in his pocket, was surely the time. But the pain which had troubled him on Monday was returning. Every few minutes he was getting a twinge in the upper part of his stomach, with cramps which made him break wind and taste bile when the squeezing vice released. He couldn't go into a club and enjoy himself, feeling like that and liable to keep doubling up. It wasn't his appendix, he thought, he'd had that out when he was twelve. Withdrawal symptoms, that's what it was. Alcohol was a drug, and everyone knew that when you came off a drug you got pains and sweats and felt rotten. He should have done it gradually, not cut it off all of a sudden.

How long were those two going to take over it? Nigel hadn't said what time he was to get back, but midnight ought to be OK, for God's sake. He hadn't eaten since breakfast, no wonder he felt so queasy. He'd best get a good steak and some chips and a couple of rolls inside him. The smell in the steak house made his throat rise, and he stumbled out, wondering what would happen if he collapsed in the street and the police picked him up with all that money in his pockets.

He'd feel safer nearer home, so he got into the tube which took him up to Kilburn. Luckily the 32 bus came along at once. Marty got on it, slumped into a downstairs seat and lit a cigarette. The Indian conductor asked him to put it out, and Marty said to go back to the jungle and told him what he could do to himself when there. So they stopped the bus and the big black driver came round and together, to the huge glee of the other passengers, they put Marty off. He had to walk all the way up Shoot-up Hill and he didn't know how he made it.

But it was too early to go back yet, only a quarter to eleven. Whether his trouble was withdrawal symptoms or a bug, he had to have a drink, and they did say whisky settled the stomach. His father used to say it, the old git, and if anyone knew about booze he should. A couple of doubles, thought Marty, and he'd sleep like a log and wake up all right tomorrow.

The Rose of Killarney was about half-way along the Broadway. Marty walked in a bit unsteadily, wincing with pain as he passed between the tables. Bridey and the licensee were behind the bar.

‘Double scotch,' said Marty thickly.

Bridey said to the licensee, ‘This fella lives next to me. Will you listen to his manners?'

‘OK, Bridey, I'll serve him.'

‘In the same house he lives and can't say so much as a civil please. If you ask me, he's had too much already.'

Marty took no notice. He never spoke to her if he could help it, any more than he did to any of these foreigners, immigrants, Jews, spades and whatever. He drank his scotch, belched and asked for another.

‘Sorry, son, you've had enough. You heard what the lady said.'

‘Lady,' said Marty. ‘Bloody Irish slag.'

It was only just eleven, but he was going home anyway. The light in his room was out. He could see that from the street where he had to sit down on a wall, he felt so sick and weak. The stairs were the last phase in his ordeal and they were the worst. Outside his door he thought he'd rather just lie down on the landing floor than go through all the hassle of waking Nigel to let him in. He peered at the keyhole but couldn't see through because the iron key was blocking it. Maybe Nigel hadn't bothered to lock it because things had gone right and there was no longer any need to. He tried the key in the Yale and the door opened.

After the darkness of the landing, the yellow light made him blink. From force of habit he locked the door and hung the string the key was on round his neck. The light lay in irregular patches on the two sleeping faces. Great, thought Marty, he's made it, we'll be out of here tomorrow. Holding his sore stomach, breathing gingerly, he curled up on the sofa and pulled the blanket over him.

Joyce hadn't been aware of his arrival. It was three or four hours later that she awoke with a banging head and a dry mouth. But she came to herself quickly and remembered what her original purpose in going to bed with Nigel had been. She looked at him with feelings of amazement and distaste, and with pity too. Joyce thought she knew all about sex, far more than her mother did, but no one had ever told her that what had happened with Nigel is so usual as to be commonplace, an inhibition that affects all men sometimes and some men quite often. She thought of virile confident Stephen, and she decided Nigel must have some awful disease.