The Bonk Squad (24 page)

Christ, am I turning
queer
? he thought in a panic.

Liz stood behind them, watching with
interest.

“
If he turns out as well as
Bobbie, he’ll be great,” she said.

“
Bobbie?” Ian asked,
momentarily distracted.

“
Fire in her flat. Her hair
got burnt. Best thing that could have happened. You should see her
now.”

“
Jeez—poor Bobbie. You
should have emailed. Is she all right? Not hurt or
anything?”

“
Lost all her stuff, what
there was of it. She’s staying with Meg. But no, not hurt, thank
heavens.”

Ian sat where Tony indicated and
thought about Bobbie while he watched Liz. She drew Tony away to
one side and began to talk and gesticulate. What the hell were they
going to do to him? But he had to admit she’d been good value for
the clothes. Hopefully the hair would be okay too.

Tony returned and lifted a hank of
sun-scorched fibre. “Split ends, man. No conditioner, I bet? You
spend a lot of time outside?”

“
Garden Center.”

“
Soooo…that explains it.
All this UV damage.” He ran a comb crosswise through Ian’s hair and
peered down at the darker roots. “We’ve got two ways to go. I can
give you some paler streaks or darken you up a bit. You’re caught
in the middle right now.”

Paler streaks? Did he mean blond? Ian
couldn’t imagine it and didn’t want it. “Dark,” he
muttered.

“
Tall, dark and handsome,
eh? Never fails.”

Was he being chatted up? He sank lower
into the chair, fists clenched over his groin. One of the salon
assistants wrapped a large silver cape around him. Tony snapped
some incomprehensible orders, and she nodded and hurried
away.

Ian waited with trepidation. Off to
one side, he saw Liz being shampooed, eyes closed, hair full of
bubbles.

The stylist returned with pungent
bowls of gunk and proceeded to part his hair into sections,
painting each tenderly with her disgusting concoctions, and
separating them with shiny silver squares which overlapped like
futuristic armor. Ian was way past embarrassment now. Total
humiliation was more accurate. He looked like a metallic porcupine
and smelled like a chemical factory.

He accepted a cup of tea and tried for
a re-run of the shipwreck scene, but today Liz refused to
co-operate. Instead, Tony leered at him, pierced nipples glinting
in a mat of dark green chest hair, beckoning him below decks. Ian
wasn’t going there!

At last a timer beeped, and he
twitched out of his brooding reverie. Tony strode over and
inspected various pieces of his hair. “Estelle,” he
called.

Estelle was blonde. In places. She was
also about sixteen, as far as Ian could estimate. She led him
across to one of the backward-facing sinks and positioned him to
her satisfaction. Bernie the barber didn’t do that.

Bernie also didn’t smell like vanilla
milkshake and hang a very pretty pair of breasts in his customers’
faces. Estelle leaned all over him as she shampooed and
re-shampooed and conditioned his hair, and then gave his scalp a
deep and very pleasurable massage.

Her low cut top was baby blue. Her
even lower cut lacy bra was violet, edged with black. As she rubbed
energetically, her barely encased breasts jiggled and bounced,
sending wafts of perfume past his nose. Through his not quite
closed eyes, Ian soaked up every shuddering second, and nudged Big
Willy into a more comfortable position, grateful now for the
all-concealing silver waterproof shroud.

“
Ready to become the real
you?” Tony asked.

Ian felt it was definitely not the
real him in the mirror yet. His hair had turned menacing midnight
shades.

“
Onwards and upwards?” he
hazarded.

Tony sensed his concern. “Yeah—don’t
worry about it looking so dark. The damaged stuff at the ends has
really soaked up the color.”

“
I look like an Elvis
impersonator.”

Tony grinned, and attacked with speed.
“Not for long.” He worked with such assurance Ian registered very
little—except that he’d have no hair left if the scissors didn’t
stop very soon.

Tony tilted Ian’s head forward and ran
a caressing hand down from his crown to his neck.

“
Nice-shaped skull,” he
said. “Hold it there.”

Ian flinched as electric clippers
buzzed up the back of his head. More hair cascaded down. “Jesus,”
he muttered.

“
We’re getting close,” Tony
drawled, swinging the chair around and crouching so he could
inspect Ian eye-to-eye.

He cupped Ian’s face in his long bony
hands, tilted it this way and that, then ran his fingers through
what remained.

“
Don’t look so scared, man.
You’re the ultimate bad-ass city-boy now. Lizzy’s gonna love
ya.”

He dug something sticky out of a gold
pot, rubbed it between his palms, stroked it into Ian’s newly
shaped hair, gave a couple of casual tweaks, and swung him around
to the mirror to inspect the final result.

Who the hell was staring back at
him?

The man in the mirror looked ten years
younger and belonged in a glossy magazine. He had razor-sharp
cheekbones, small neat ears, and dense chocolate hair cut close to
the sides of his head. Longer strands spiked on top and flopped
casually over his brow.

Ian took a deep breath and regarded
himself with disbelief. He angled his head to the left…to the
right. He sat up straighter.

“
Yeah baby—you’re
beautiful,” Tony teased as he removed the silver wrapper and shook
Ian’s trimmings onto the salon floor.

Meg ground her teeth
together and fumed. Al took up way too many of her evenings. Bobbie
lurked, pale and pretty with her new boyish haircut, in the writing
den, trying not to get in the way...being totally
in
the way. Only
lunchtimes were now available for writing—and scribbling on a
notepad in the staff-room was far from satisfactory. Meg had been
separated from her computer for a whole week. It was killing
her.

She turned into her driveway, parked
the Toyota, grabbed the groceries, and slammed the car door to get
her own back on the unfairness of life. It caught the seatbelt and
didn’t latch. Cursing, she set the bags down and tried again. A can
of mixed bean salad intended for Bobbie tipped, escaped and rolled
off down the slight slope. Meg heaved a very deep sigh.

“
I’ll get it,” Bobbie’s
still-husky voice assured her from where she waited by the front
door.

“
You’re up and about then?
Feeling better at last?”

“
I went to work this
afternoon. Just half a day. But yes—I’ll be okay now. People were
so nice.”

“
About the fire? I should
hope so.”

“
The fire? I suppose. But I
meant my hair really. And Liz’s clothes.”

“
The butterfly has come out
of her chrysalis,” Meg said, hoping the butterfly would soon
flutter off and set up home elsewhere.

“
Is it all right if I’m not
here for dinner tonight?”

She asked so shyly that Meg’s radar
pinged onto Supersensitive. “A date?”

“
Oh, not really. Not at
all. I mean...” Bobbie’s confusion became more delicious by the
second. She took a deep breath. “My old landlord Mr
MacArthur...um...well, his son really...called by just after you
left. He brought me here the night of the fire. I was so dopey and
shocked I didn’t know who it was at the time. Well...”

Her face was a study in embarrassment
and hope. After long practice with a teenage son, Meg stayed silent
until Bobbie continued.

“
I’d only ever seen him out
the window. Never spoken to him at all. And in the dark...” She
trailed off again, dropping her eyes from Meg’s and gazing out over
the street.

“
He always looked nice. And
he
was
nice,
bringing me here when he should have been helping his parents with
all their mess that night.” Bobbie rocked from foot to foot, eyes
down, cheeks blushing. “Anyway, he found some photos in his car.
They must have slipped out of my album. He brought them around this
morning.”

“
And asked you out for
dinner?”

Bobbie nodded. “Only at his parents’
place,” she added in a hurry. “They’re renting a house until the
insurance gets sorted out, and so on. We’re going
there.”

“
You could go somewhere
else for a drink first,” Meg suggested. “Or to a movie
afterwards?”

“
He’s called Jamie,” Bobbie
murmured. “Jamie MacArthur. He’s lovely. He’s a university
lecturer. He has a dog he rescued from the fire.” She looked down
at her feet. Meg glimpsed shiny red toe-nails. That was
new!

“
We had coffee this
morning,” Bobbie added. “I was all ready to go to work, but somehow
I stayed here. And he didn’t seem to want to leave. We sat in the
sun for ages.”

Meg knew an opportunity when she saw
one. “Would you mind if I had a session at my computer while you’re
gone?” she asked, seizing the first opportunity in a week to
transcribe her scribbled pages.

“
No—of course not. I’ll go
and take my flash drive out.” Bobbie drifted inside, forgetting the
can of bean salad she’d offered to rescue.

Meg’s heart expanded. It was Al’s
night for Rotary. Ben had early evening cricket practice. Bobbie
would finally be out of the way at last. A little more progress
with Carlo and the nanny might be possible.

She disposed of the shopping, made
coffee, grabbed a slice of bread and honey, and headed up the
stairs.

“
If you’re out and about,
you’ll need a key,” she called through Bobbie’s doorway. “You can
come in late then and you won’t disturb Ben or me.”

She rummaged in the odds and ends
drawer for Gary’s old front door key—the one she always put under
the big plant pot for electricians or plumbers when she needed work
done on the house.

“
Yours for the duration,”
she said, dropping it into Bobbie’s outstretched palm.

How long would ‘the duration’ be? When
could she have her computer back full time?

Bobbie wrestled the key onto her
Amnesty International key ring. “I won’t be very late.”

“
Stay as long as you like,”
Meg encouraged, hoping to gain as much time as possible for her
three chapter partial.

The moment Bobbie trotted downstairs
Meg shot into her den and settled herself in front of the keyboard
like a mother hen fluffing herself down over a brood of chicks. The
goldfish in the screen saver image swam to and fro through waving
fronds of waterweed.

Good
, Meg thought.
She’s left it
on
.

She jiggled the mouse, and surprise
hit her as she found writing not her own. Apparently the can of
mixed bean salad wasn’t the only thing Bobbie had
forgotten.

The cave lay eerily dark;
candles flickered in the far-most recesses, but illuminated almost
nothing. Mordilla crept forward, ears straining to catch the barely
human sounds that had drawn her there.

The noise came again. An
anguished grunt. Then the sharp metallic jingle of chains bumping
against solid rock. Something—someone?—lurked deep inside the
granite prison, confined by god-knows-what cruel method.

A huge shadow swept over
the wall nearest to her, and she reared up in terror, feet glued to
the spot, biting back her instinctive scream and somehow staying
silent.

Another deep grunt.
Another rattle of chains as the shadow retreated, as though a giant
beast had lunged forward to test his bonds and then slumped in
defeat.

Mordilla’s heart thumped.
Although her footfalls were silent, she was certain the prisoner
would hear the thundering pulse that filled her ears with its
hectic beat. She stood stock still for long minutes, listening,
detecting only the faint inhalation and exhalation of hoarse and
desperate breathing.

All her senses were honed
super-sharp now; her eyes accustomed to the gloom...her delicate
nostrils flaring at a disturbing musky scent carried on a wafting
stream of air. The hairs lifted on the back of her neck in
anticipation of danger ahead. Yet something drew her on.

The beast was apparently
restrained and could do her no harm. But what of his captors?
Surely the candles indicated another recent presence?

With infinite caution she
crept along, pressed to the chilly wall, until she could peer
around the final protrusion of rock.

She froze.

A naked male god was
crucified there. Tall, lean, muscular, and the most beautiful
creature Mordilla had ever set eyes on. A dark blindfold covered
his eyes. Emboldened by the knowledge he couldn’t see her, and
seeing no other person in the cave, she stepped away from the wall
and inspected him.

Leather thongs bound his
wrists to rings set high in the granite. Too high for her to reach
yet. But it was the chains which grabbed her complete
attention.