Close Relations (12 page)

‘Your skin, it's wonderful,' murmured Erin.

‘Is it?'

‘Has nobody told you you're beautiful?'

Maddy shook her head.

‘You've been touched . . . but nobody's really touched you, have they . . .?' She moved her hands. ‘Here . . . and here . . . like this . . .'

Maddy shook her head. She sat on the bed, her shoulders and breasts naked, her shirt bunched around her waist. She felt like a fruit that had just been peeled.

‘Can you feel how lovely you are?' Erin murmured. She bent her head and licked Maddy's nipple.

A jolt shot through her. ‘I've never –' she stopped.

‘I know,' said Erin.

‘Kiss me.'

Erin kissed her – a slow, deep kiss. Maddy's heart opened. Shyly, she stroked Erin's face. She slid her hand beneath Erin's embroidered jacket, beneath her satin blouse, and touched her shoulder. How smooth her skin was! How strange to feel skin that was as smooth as her own! Tentatively, she stroked her.

‘Do you have a candle?' asked Erin.

Maddy stiffened. What was she going to do with it? She withdrew her hand.

‘It's just this room's so sad.' Erin pulled a shawl out of her bag, like a magician, and draped it over the lamp. The dingy room was transformed; it was bathed in a rosy glow. ‘You must learn to love yourself, my darling.'

She removed Maddy's shirt from around her waist. She took off her own jacket and blouse. Beneath it she was naked. She had large, heavy breasts and dark nipples. Maddy turned to her and buried her face in her, smelling the scent of her hair, the scent of oil on her throat. She moved her face down
and smelt the sharp, animal scent of Erin's armpit. She shuddered.

Erin laid her on the bed. She lay down beside her and pushed the hair from her face. ‘You're here at last,' she murmured. ‘Isn't it lovely that you never knew what you were waiting for?' Maddy thrilled to her voice. Erin kissed her skin with feathery kisses, light as butterflies. She ran her finger over Maddy's mouth. ‘All your loveliness . . . it's been waiting for me . . .'

Maddy lay there, trembling, while Erin unzipped her jeans. She pulled them down, with her knickers, and threw them on the floor. Erin took off her own clothes. The two women lay there, skin against skin. Erin stroked Maddy's belly; she stroked her thighs. She stroked her alive. Erin's hands knew her body, they were her own self caressing it, inflaming it.

Outside, darkness had fallen. Maddy lay still. Erin moved over her body, lighting each place upon which she landed. Maddy surrendered herself to Erin's hands and to her mouth, her fingers and tongue. Her breathing quickened as Erin's head moved down, between her legs.

Afterwards, Maddy sobbed. Erin gazed at her tenderly, and wiped her eyes with the edge of the duvet.

‘I'm sorry,' muttered Maddy.

‘Why?'

‘I haven't cried since I was a child.' She laced her fingers through Erin's. ‘I feel . . .'

‘What do you feel, my darling?'

‘I feel I've come home.'

Erin put her arms around her. Their skin was slippery with sweat. She enfolded Maddy, who buried her face in her shoulder.

‘I never thought it would happen to me.' Stephen drained his gin and tonic. ‘I read all these articles about it in the
Independent
but it was like reading about an earthquake in Korea or something.'

‘Who've you tried?' asked Prudence. They were sitting in a pub in Goodge Street. It was lunchtime; a week since he had left the office. ‘Have you made a list?'

He nodded. He longed for another drink but he felt Prudence's eyes on him, monitoring him. ‘Random House, Reed . . .' He knew people in most of the publishing houses, many of them he considered his friends, but suddenly a barrier had come down between them. Oh, they were sympathetic all right, they had read about his redundancy in the
Bookseller
, but they couldn't help and then their other phone started ringing. ‘People are always in meetings, all the people I want to talk to. It's most peculiar. I feel I've got an infectious illness. I feel ill, actually.' He silently urged Prudence to finish her glass of wine so he could get them both another.

‘Oh Steve . . .' She stroked his fingers. She gazed at him with her frank, clever face. Prudence was his sorrowful and sympathetic friend – far more of a friend than his wife – but even she couldn't understand. She was safe. Her brown hair was pushed back with a velvet snood-thing – her office hairstyle; she wore her businesslike blue blouse and jacket, unembellished by fripperies. She was a working person. He was out in the wilderness. He had been thrust into a cold, windy place that was in the outside world but not part of it. Of course, other people were out there, too – the unemployed, all those statistics. He knew many people who had lost their jobs. Strangely enough, this didn't help. He still felt utterly alone. It was terrifying.

‘Where's that food?' He glared at the counter. ‘They only have to bung it in a microwave.' He picked up her glass. ‘Let me get you another while we're waiting.'

He went up to the bar. Prudence watched him. From the back he seemed to have shrunk. His shoulders drooped. Maybe it was because he wasn't wearing a jacket, just a sweater. He looked, literally, as if the stuffing had been taken
out of him. Poor Stephen. What on earth was he going to do? He would be paid some redundancy money but it wouldn't amount to much, he had only been working at Beveridge and Bunyan for three years.

The question was: would he get another job? Only that week, Viking Penguin had announced that another thirty staff were to go. She looked at Stephen; he stood at the bar, scratching the back of his neck. She suddenly saw him clearly, as others might see him – a man whose chief asset was his charm, but where did that get anyone nowadays? A man with an only-average track record, who had never stayed anywhere long and who had muddled along with the help of efficient assistants and his old boy connections. A man who was good at lunch.

Stephen ordered the drinks. He looked at the other men standing at the bar. Were any of them in his position? Could they tell, just by looking at him, that he had lost his job? It showed; he was sure of it. Prudence would soon have to go back to work but he could stay here all afternoon. There was no shape to the day any more; it was as if the elastic that had held his life together had been snapped. It took him a moment to remember what day of the week it was.

He tried to rally himself. After all, he had only been out of work for a week; he had hardly started looking yet. But already he felt demoralised. How did other people stand it month after month, year after year, filling in application forms that asked them how many O levels they had got, for God's sake, and then getting the polite rejections. ‘
Unfortunately other candidates more closely matched our requirements . . . but we wish you good luck for the future
. . .' He knew what those letters were like because he had written them himself.

Stephen paid for the drinks. He counted the change and put it in his pocket. His attitude to money was already changing. Instead of flooding into his life on a regular basis like the tide flooding into a harbour, replenishing then ebbing, money was now a finite substance whose level sank with
each transaction, as if run by a newly privatised waterboard which never repaired the cracks in the pipes. He thought: don't panic. Don't think about school fees. Don't think.

He carried the drinks over to Prudence. She told him about some crisis at work – a Cabinet minister was making a fuss about his book jacket. Stephen's attention wandered. Strange how involving all those books had once been – the biographies, the novels, even the celebrity cookery series. Now that they were somebody else's responsibility they were utterly irrelevant. All those books being published, week after week; the world could exist quite happily without them. He had suspected this in the past, and now he was certain of it. In fact he had forgotten about them already.

‘Has anybody been offered my job yet?' he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I think they'll get someone from outside.' She stroked his cheek. Now that they were no longer working together she had grown bolder in public. Maybe she was just sorry for him.

‘What's it like at home?' she asked.

‘She tries to be nice but I feel I'm getting in the way. I
am
getting in the way.' He pushed the lemon about in his gin and tonic. ‘She's used to being alone during the day. She's doing these huge messy collages, she needs the space. I think she wants to hoover me up. High spot of my day is getting the boys from school.' He looked at her. ‘I miss you so much.'

She said: ‘I wake up with all these things I want to tell you, things in my head. Only an hour, I think, and I'll be in the office. Then I realise.'

He took one of her cigarettes and lit it. After twenty years, he had taken up smoking again. ‘Look, on Friday we're taking the boys to my mother's for the weekend. I'll make an excuse for the Friday night and meet them on Saturday.'

‘What are you going to tell her?'

He gazed at her tenderly through the smoke. ‘I love you so much.'

She laughed shakily. ‘You're going to tell her that?'

He shook his head. ‘I'll tell her I'm going to Nuneaton for the night.'

‘Nuneaton? Nobody goes to Nuneaton.'

‘I do. This chap I know, Edmond, he runs a desktop publishing company there. I'll say I'm going there to ask his advice.'

‘You mean – we can have a whole night together?'

He nodded.

She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Suddenly I'm ravenous.'

Stephen went to the bar to chase up the food. Prudence was letting him do everything that day. She wanted him to feel manly – in charge of something, even if it was only lunch.

He waved his ticket at the man behind the counter. ‘Any chance of number twenty-four? A lasagne and a chicken tikka?'

The man went away. He returned a moment later. ‘Sorry, mate. The cook says he never got the order. Bit of a backlog now. You'll have to wait.'

The man turned away to serve somebody else. Stephen stood there. His brief moment of optimism drained away. The man knew. He could sense that Stephen had all the time in the world, that other customers should be served their lunch first. Stephen was a non-person now, and he had better get used to it.

He went across to Prudence and told her. She looked at her watch. ‘Hell! I've got a meeting at two-thirty.'

‘Go to it then.' His voice rose with self-pity. ‘Don't mind me.'

She put her hand on his arm. ‘Don't be silly. Of course I'll stay.' She smiled at him. ‘Let's talk about Friday.'

‘I always thought it was my fault,' said Maddy. ‘With men.'

Erin shook her head. ‘It was theirs.' She stroked Maddy's breasts. ‘Ah, what they're missing. You're as sexed as a panther . . . you're wonderful.'

‘I've never felt like this before.'

‘Know why?' She took Maddy's hand. She breathed in the scent of her fingers and kissed them one by one. ‘Because your fingers are my fingers . . . and mine are yours . . . my honey.'

They were lying on the bed. Around them, candles flickered in saucers. Maddy rested her head on Erin's belly. She stroked the damp, wiry bush of her pubic hair; she ran her finger over the tattoo on Erin's thigh. It was a small blue dolphin, leaping upwards.

She marvelled at Erin's body. Through it, she marvelled at all women's bodies. These past two weeks had changed her profoundly. She gazed at women in the street through different eyes. She noticed their breasts, their hair, the way they moved. She felt as if she had had a blood transfusion. Until this moment, however, she had been living on borrowed blood; now she was filled with her own, down to her fingertips – how sensitive they were, how sweet their explorations! Anything was possible now, for Erin had set her free. Men suddenly seemed so limited, their lovemaking poky and focused. She pitied women who had only experienced that. ‘Lying there like squashed beetles,' said Erin, ‘being drilled. Being pumped full of something so dangerous they have to protect themselves against it. Sad, isn't it? They don't know what they're missing.'

Erin talked a lot about power – men's power over women. She talked about true sisterhood, where women liberated themselves through their own bodies. For Erin, no doubt, Maddy's two sisters were sexual slaves. Prudence was in thrall to her boss. Louise traded sexual favours for a home and security. It was strange to think of them like that, but Maddy saw everything anew now that she had been awoken from her long slumber.

Erin stroked Maddy's eyebrows. She licked them like a cat licking her kitten. ‘Can you feel the blood-beat of yourself?' she murmured. ‘Aren't we lucky? We're controlled by the moon. Each phase, new moon, full moon, there's a part to be awakened . . . here . . . or here . . .' She kissed Maddy's
forehead, the lobe of her ear. ‘We'll discover them together . . . Our own moonwalk across your lovely skin . . .'

Erin's words, like her fingers, thrilled Maddy. She used scents too. She rubbed oil into Maddy's toes; she lit joss-sticks and stuck them around the room. Her lovemaking opened up Maddy's senses; there was no time when it began or ended, it seemed to exist in all dimensions. Maddy was learning, too. She had bought and lit the candles; she had scrubbed out the bathroom and bought bottles of oils for when they bathed together. She had converted this place into a temple of love for Erin's visits. She hadn't been to Erin's flat yet; the daughter was there, Erin had so far kept that part of her life separate. Because of this Erin seemed mysterious, arriving for a few intoxicating hours and then disappearing into the night.

Erin rolled over. ‘Shall we have a bath before I go, my sweetheart?'