Courting Trouble (17 page)

I declined: ‘The hardest thing about cycling is trying not to spill your wine.’

He suggested waterskiing on Lake Como.

‘The art of knocking down a jetty with your face and hence the mainstay of neurosurgeons worldwide,’ I responded.

Jack (exasperated): ‘Bungee jumping over the Victoria Falls?’

Me: ‘Bungee jumping is just whoosh, then dangle upside down in acute agony for an hour, followed by death.’

When I’d rejected every conceivable sporting event from windsailing to abseiling, he resorted in desperation to bowling: ‘You can’t possibly object to this most innocuous of sports.’

Me: ‘Marbles for grown-ups.’

‘Okay,’ he electronically harrumphed, ‘why don’t
you
make a suggestion?’

What I wanted to say was that it was second on my list of priorities, right after a self-administered appendectomy, but replied instead, ‘I will. Let me think on it.’

That bought me some breathing space. In truth, the only way I would ever spend any of my leisure time with Jack Cassidy was if we were both kidnapped by Somali pirates.

When I didn’t get back to him for two weeks, he sought me out in person. I often escaped the chaos of my office life to work in the relative quiet of a nearby café. When I saw Jack, immaculately suited and booted, striding across the cobblestoned square, I made a valiant leap towards my bicycle, but I wasn’t quick enough.

He sat down, commandeered my macchiato, sugared it liberally, then downed it in one gulp. ‘You must have been writing to me in invisible ink, as I don’t seem to have received any date suggestions? It’s not as if I’m asking you to solve the riddle of the Pyramids or find the Bermuda Triangle. We made a deal, you recall.’

‘Sorry . . . I meant to get back to you, but I’m living with my mother, her aged model friend, the pensioner fugitive and her shell-shocked granddaughter, plus their ferret and a tortoise. Not to forget all my mother’s foster dogs and regular visits from her “Save the Bumblebee” society, and deranged locals dropping in for her home-made herbal remedies . . . which means that I’m seriously considering a DIY lobotomy,’ I ad-libbed.

‘If it’s driving you crazy, why don’t you leave Pandora’s?’ He rocked back in his chair. ‘My offer still stands.’ Jack’s strong legs were invitingly splayed as he said this.

I tried to avert my eyes but had to admit that it was a tantalizing view. Noting the drift of my glance, he gave a wide smile which increased his resemblance to a Cheshire Cat.

‘Roxy and I are staying together on account of our accountant. I don’t think she could handle the stress if we broke up.’

Jack looked at the chocolate brownie I was halfway through devouring. ‘Would you like the name of a good heart specialist to go with that?’

‘A new study has revealed that women who carry a little extra weight live longer than the men who mention it. The thing is, Jack, I’m a typical British woman, with European teeth and real, uninflated lips, a hundred per cent organic, home-grown hair, a proper appetite and serious chocolate cravings. You really don’t want to go out with a woman like me. The only reason you do is because I’m the only female in the world who doesn’t want to. Why don’t you just give up and go get yourself another trophy girlfriend? A supermodel or a double-jointed Olympic gymnast, or something?’

‘I don’t like a woman I can walk all over. Literally. Trophy girlfriends are so thin, they fall right through the pavement cracks.’ He gave a rich chuckle. ‘Pick you up on Friday night. At eight thirty. No plans. We’ll do something spontaneous.’

‘Oh, but . . .’ I racked my brain for a spontaneous excuse to get out of doing anything spontaneous.

‘I promise there’ll be no sacrifice of nubile maidens or ritual animal slaughter of any kind. Kisses on your bicycle seat till then.’ He blew a kiss in the direction of my push bike, which was propped on the wall behind me. With an insouciant wink, he sauntered off, like some clichéd Humphrey Bogart hero, got into his sleek, low-slung BMW sports car and barracudaed down the street with a roar.

There was no choice, I thought, pedalling furiously back to my office. The man had more nerve than an unfilled tooth. The only way I could avoid Jack Cassidy would be to move to a remote lesbian monastery and take up a little light whittling . . . But avoiding all contact with men looked less appealing when I saw what was waiting for me at Pandora’s.

The law of attraction states that the chance of bumping into the man you secretly have the hots for is directly proportional to how unattractively scruffy you are looking at the time.

Nathaniel Cavendish was leaning on a wall outside my office, casually scrolling through his iPhone messages. In faded jeans and those scuffed biker boots, fair hair fetchingly wind-tousled, I found myself wondering if the man could ever turn up anywhere looking just a little mediocre. I mean, did he have to look centrefold sensational at
all
times, especially when I was dressed like Iris Murdoch, in a grey cardigan, with flat shoes and even flatter hair. I was just contemplating diverting my bike down a side lane when he glanced up, saw me and stood to attention.

‘Sorry to drop by your office unannounced’ – his expression was sombre, ‘but I’ve just found out that two of the men in my rehabilitation programme are prosecution witnesses in a case against a client of yours – the grandma from the Tony Benn Estate who took revenge on two supposed rapists.’

‘Really?’

‘Their names are Basharat Kureishi and Peter Simmons. I’ve been mentoring them. They’re out on bail, but swear they’re innocent of rape. They came to me for a character reference, which, of course, I declined. Bash, the short one, well, he described the female legal eagle defending the grandma as, and I quote, “a feminist who slipped through the ugly net”. So I immediately figured it must be you.’ He smiled then, a smile which lit up the whole street. ‘Am I right?’

I’d never been insulted and complimented so confusingly in the same sentence. ‘Oh. Um. Bash. Yes. I remember him. He was definitely the brains of the desperate duo. I mean, the tall, hulking one . . . Have you ever looked at someone and just known that the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead?’

Nathaniel laughed. ‘Stretch. Yep. That about sums him up. Although, Christ. I thought I’d made such progress with those two. I try to monitor tension on the estate. That way I can predict violence and mediate disputes with my clients before they happen. But I totally dropped the ball with those two.’ He ran his hand through his thick, tangled curls. As he raised his arm to do so, I smelt something spicy and astringent yet lemony in his sweat, reminiscent of the whiff of a tobacco pouch – and it seriously stirred me.

‘I’m so sorry about the poor girl.’ He looked at me with a shy, delicate glance which belied his strong physique. ‘I read in the papers that the grandma’s staying with her lawyer, but is the girl okay?’

‘She’s living with me, too, but never ventures outside . . . A little something to do with people writing the word “Slut” on her door – in bullets.’

‘“Slut shaming”.’ He sighed. ‘An odious attempt to humiliate any woman for having sex, enjoying sex or looking like she might enjoy sex.’

When he uttered the phrase ‘enjoying sex’, the smoky, burnt scent of him entered my mouth and made it water.

He paced around the pavement a bit, giving me a delectable view of him from various angles. ‘I despair sometimes, I really do. In a year when sexual violence against women dominates the media, the endless rapes, gropings, grooming and trafficking of vulnerable girls, young women imprisoned as sex slaves in bunkers, Internet and Twitter trolls making death and rape threats against feminists . . . it makes me embarrassed to be a man. It really does. Why are members of my own gender doing so many vile things to members of yours?’

He put his hand on my arm and the warmth of his body radiated into mine. It struck me that I wanted him to do something vile to me, right then and there, involving much moaning and partial nudity.

‘Women are always so self-critical – “Am I too fat?” “Am I too old?” “If I go back to work, will my child grow up to collect Nazi memorabilia?” . . . It’s time
my
gender did a little soul searching. Eighty-five per cent of all crimes in Britain are committed by men. Why? I mean, what do you think about that?’

What I was thinking about was how whenever he touched me I just lit up all over like a pinball machine.
Ding! Ding!

‘Men’s brutality’s seen as a given, a byproduct of that dark Y chromosome and the rocket fuel of testosterone. But what turns innocent boys into dangerous men? I think modern man’s lost in a post-industrial landscape, functionless, porn-addicted, racked with performance anxiety in a Viagra and Jack Daniel’s culture, unable to articulate his feelings. Don’t you?’

I nodded, unable to articulate my feelings at all, which were totally R-rated and purely animalistic.

‘Yet men are leaving all the heavy lifting against gender bias to women. I mean, in the universal movement for human equality, there’s a big gap where the men should be. In the great civil rights struggles fifty years ago, there were white faces as well as black. Men have to engage with contemporary feminism to make a change. Don’t you agree?’

I wanted to agree, but I was feeling faint from holding my stomach in to look thinner.

‘I’d like to set up an anti-porn project on the estate. Porn affects how men look at women and think about sex. Men need to take our notions of sexuality back from these predatory pornographers . . .’

Again, I wanted to agree, but I was feeling quite predatory and pornographic myself. Nathaniel smiled then, a smile with his whole face in it, like before, and especially his eyes. The sun rested on the back of my neck like a warm and friendly hand. An involuntary shiver shimmied up my thighs. I smiled back at him.

‘Christ, I’m rabbiting on, aren’t I? If I bore any more, I’ll strike oil! But I’m just so angry! And I feel so guilty that two boys on my watch could do this terrible thing. Anyway, I just came around to apologize on behalf of all blokes.’

‘Oh, well, gee thanks’ seemed the only appropriate response, other than ‘Let’s run away to a tropical island, big boy, where you can lick the roe of virgin sturgeon from my navel ’neath a tropical palm.’

‘Anyway, I’d like to take you out to dinner to apologize properly and so we can discuss the case. Maybe I can be of help? Friday? Eightish?’

I must have nodded my consent, because he was now straddling his motorbike and peeling off down the street. I felt a huge sense of relief as I finally stopped clenching my stomach muscles. I feel about Spanx the way some people feel about fox hunting – that they’re a travesty and a disgusting example of the deceit and decay of contemporary life – unless I’m on a first date with a gorgeous bloke, that is, and then they’re a miracle of modern engineering.

After Nathaniel had disappeared around the corner, I retraced my steps to the high street to buy some control underwear. It seemed the only thing in my life I could have any control over, these days.

Last time we’d met, Nathaniel had told me that the best things in life were free, like sex and oxygen. Well, what
I
was thinking is that sex actually is a lot like oxygen – no big deal unless you’re not getting any.

The worst thing about a car bomb is the gaping hole it leaves in your social life. This was the thought that came to mind shortly after I woke the following Friday evening from a quick nap before my date with Nathaniel. I’d had an exhausting day, reading witness statements and affidavits for Phyllis’s case, in between food shopping, bill paying and driving Portia to her doctor, dentist and dance-class appointments. You deliver your child once vaginally, and then forever after by car. I’d finally collapsed fully clothed on the bed about 7 p.m., only to be woken shortly after by the sound of waves breaking on shingle. I imagined for a moment that I was back in my mother’s homeland, about to dive into the Bondi breakers, until I groggily realized it was the sound of glass shattering. A rock lay on the carpet, surrounded by glass shards. There was a note attached.

Slut protectors. That chantelle slag is a fuckin worthless waste of female flesh. gonna blow yer to fuckin bits unless youse bitches back off.

My befuddled brain rallied instantly. A cold dread hit me in the pit of my stomach. I lurched on to the landing outside my bedroom and stumbled over a pair of sprayed pink go-go boots. ‘Roxy!’ A trail of clothing led like a sartorial version of fairy-tale breadcrumbs up the stairs to my mother’s room.

I banged on her door until a dishevelled head appeared. ‘It’s time we talked about protection.’

‘At my age? Don’t be silly. It’s the only upside to the menopause.’

‘Not
condoms
, Mother. Police protection.’ I unscrunched the note which had been chucked through my bedroom window and held it up to her face.

Roxy drew her silk kimono about her body and took a step into the hall to scan it more clearly. ‘Crikey. He’s not exactly plagiarizing Shakespeare, now is he? Just ignore it. It’s all bluster. I mean’ – she shrugged – ‘what kind of hopeless psychopath would let you know beforehand that he’s going to kill you?’

‘Um . . . I believe that the clue is in the term “psychopath”. We’re not talking logical here.’

The tousled head of a young man bobbed up behind Roxy and mumbled hello. My mother attracts unsuitable men like iron filings to a magnet. I noted the boy’s tattoos and Rasta dreadlocks, set off so nicely by a light scattering of acne.

‘So tell me, Mother, are you going to date him or adopt him?’ I started picking up Roxy’s discarded clothes. ‘What kind of example are you setting Portia?’

‘A bloody good one, I reckon. To live life to the full.’ She illustrated this statement by taking a drag on his joint. I recognized him then. He grew dope on the allotments where my mother grew her veggies.

‘Living life to the full might be a tad hard when you’re, you know,
dead
.’ I snatched the bomb threat back from her manicured talons. ‘Just tell me the number of your favourite taxidermist so I can get your blown-up remains reassembled and stuffed. Then you can be mounted for eternity!’ I wheeled around and made for the stairs. ‘I’m calling the police.’