Playing for the Ashes (13 page)

Two of my mates had already left the place, saying, “See you back in college, Liv,” which was their way of telling me not to wait round while they got themselves stuffed, when the band took a break. I leaned back in my chair and started to light a cigarette. Richie Brewster lit it for me.

How lame it seems now, that moment when the lighter spurted its flame six inches from my face and illuminated his. But Richie had seen every old black and white
fil
m in creation, and he thought of himself as something between Humphrey Bogart and David Niven. He said, “Mind if I join you?” Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw said, “Do what you want,” and arranged her face in a perfect display of b-o-re-d. From what I could see, Richie was old, way over forty, maybe closer to fifty. His skin was sagging round his jaw, his eyes were baggy. I wasn’t interested.

So why did I go with him that night when the band played its last set and Julip’s locked up? I could tell you that the last train to Cambridge had left and I had no other place to stay, but the truth is that I could have gone home to Kensington. Instead, when Richie packed up his sax, lit two cigarettes, handed one to me, and invited me out for a drink, I saw the possibility of excitement and experience. I said, “Sure, why not?” and thus changed the direction of the rest of my life.

We went to Bayswater in a taxi. Richie said to the driver, “The Commodore, on Queen-sway,” and he put his hand high up on my thigh and squeezed.

All the manoeuvring seemed so illicit and adult. An exchange of cash at the hotel desk, two bottles procured, a climb to the room, unlocking the door. Through it all, Richie kept glancing in my direction and I kept smiling conspiratorily at him. I was Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw, sexual animal, a woman with a man completely in her power, eyelids drooped and breasts thrust out suggestively. God, what a fool.

Richie unwrapped the plastic from the drinking glasses that stood on a wobbly chest of drawers. He had three short vodkas fast. He poured a longer fourth and drank that down before he poured me a gin. He snatched up the bottles between his fingers and carried them, along with his drink, to the circular table between the room’s two chairs. These were done up in pea-soup vinyl, and the pink Chinese lantern covering the ceiling light turned them the colour of dying leaves on a rose bush. Richie sat, lit a cigarette, and began to talk.

I can still recall his choice of subjects: music, art, theatre, travel, books, and
fil
ms. I listened, awestruck by his erudition. I made few replies. I later discovered that silence and the appearance of attention were all that were required of me, but at the moment I thought it was pretty bloody something to be round a man who really Knew How To Open Up To A Woman.

What I didn’t understand was that talking was foreplay for Richie Brewster. He had no interest in fondling female bodies. He got heated up by caressing the airwaves instead. When he’d worked himself up to performance level that night, he rose from his chair, pulled me from mine, put his tongue in my mouth, unzipped his trousers, and pulled out his dick. He wrapped my hand round it while he lowered my blue jeans and probed with two
fin
gers to see if I was ready. He backed me to the bed. He smiled at me, saying, “Oh yes” with great meaning, and took off his trousers. He had no underpants on. He told me later that he never wore them, they got in the way. He peeled my jeans and my pants off one leg. He said, “That’s nice, baby,” apropos of nothing. He took my butt in his hands. He raised my hips. He dived in.

He pumped with a lot of energy. He twined my legs round his back. He caught my hair in his fingers. He breathed, groaned, and sighed in my ear. He said
God
and
Jesus
a hundred times. And when he came, he shouted, “Liv Liv Liv.”

Afterwards, he went into the bathroom. The water ran, then shut off. He swaggered back with a towel, which he threw to me with a smile, saying, “You always that wet?” I took it for a compliment. He went to the chest of drawers and poured us both another drink. He said, “Hell, I feel good,” and sauntered back to the bed where he nuzzled my neck, murmuring, “You’re something. Some
thing
. I haven’t come like that in years.”

How mighty I felt. How insignificant seemed the sex I’d had before. Until this night at the Commodore, my encounters had been nothing more than sweaty clutching with boys, children who didn’t know the
fir
st sodding thing about Making Love.

Richie touched my hair. It was dun then, not blonde like now, and long and straight as a railway track. He fingered a length of it, saying, “Hmm. Soft.” He held my gin glass to my lips. He yawned. He rubbed his head. He said, “Shit, it feels like I’ve known you for years,” and that was the moment I decided I loved him.

I stayed in London. I realised I’d never
fit
ted in at Cambridge, surrounded by toffs, by poofs, and by clots. Who the hell wanted a career in social science—that was Mother’s idea in the first place, and hadn’t she pulled every string in the book to get Girton to take me?—when I could have a hotel room in Bayswater and a real man who paid for it and came round every day for some grunt-andgroan on a lumpy mattress?

Girton sent out the alarm after a week when my mates decided that covering any longer for my absence in college wasn’t going to go far in enhancing their status. The senior tutor phoned my parents. My parents phoned the police. The only lead they had to give the cops was Julip’s in Soho, but as I was of age, and since no female corpses bearing my description had been tossed into the Thames of late, and since the IRA had been developing a recent taste for planting bombs in cars, department stores, and tube stations, the police didn’t get on to the case like hounds. So three weeks passed before Mother showed up with Dad at her elbow.

I was thoroughly pissed when they got there. It was just after eight in the evening, and I’d been drinking since four. When I heard the knock, I thought it was the desk clerk coming up for the rent. He’d been up twice already. I’d told him the money was Richie’s business. I’d told him he’d have to wait. But he was one of those persistent West Indian types—half smarm and half bluster— and he wouldn’t give it up.

I thought, goddamn it you little nig-nog leave me alone. I threw open the door ready for battle, and there they were. I can see them to this day: Mother dressed in one of those sheaths of hers that she’s been wearing in one variation or another since Jackie Kennedy
fir
st made them popular, Dad outfitted in a suit and tie as if he was going on a social call.

I’m sure Mother can see me to this day as well: in one of Richie’s shrunken T-shirts and nothing else. I don’t know what she expected to find in the Commodore when she dropped by that evening. But it was clear from her expression that she hadn’t expected Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw to open the door.

She said, “Olivia. My God.” Dad looked at me once, dropped his eyes, looked again. He seemed to shrivel inside his clothes.

I stood at the door with one hand on the knob and the other on the jamb. I said, “What’s the problem?” and sounded like a victim of terminal ennui. I could see what was coming—guilt, tears, and a round of manipulation, not to mention an attempt to get me out of the Commodore—and I knew it was going to be dreary as hell.

She said, “What’s happened to you?”

“I met a bloke. We’re together. That’s the story.”

She said, “The college phoned. Your supervisors are frantic. Your friends are making themselves sick with worry.”

“Cambridge isn’t part of the picture any longer.”

“Your education, your future, your life,” she said. She was speaking carefully. “What on earth are you thinking?”

I pulled on my lip. “Thinking? Hmmm… Of fucking Richie Brewster as soon as he gets back.”

Mother seemed to grow taller. Dad lowered his eyes to the floor. His lips moved on a reply that I didn’t catch.

I said, “Wha’s that, Pops?” and arched my back against the doorjamb. I was still keeping my other hand on the knob, however. I wasn’t a fool. Give my mother access to that room and life with Richie was over.

But she appeared to be heading for a different course, featuring reason and the hope of Bringing Olivia Back To Her Senses. She said, “We’ve spoken to the master and the senior tutor. They’ll take you back on probation. You’ll need to pack your things.”

“No.”

“Olivia—”

“You don’t get it, do you? I love him. He loves me. We’ve got a life here.”

“This isn’t a life.” She looked left and right, as if evaluating the corridor for its potential to contribute to my education and future. She sounded reasonable when she went on. “You’re inexperienced. You’ve been seduced. It’s understandable that you think you’re in love with this man, that you think he loves you. But this…What you’ve got here, Olivia…” I could see she was trying not to lose control. She was trying to seem like Mother of the Year. But she was coming on the stage too late with her maternal act. Faced with it, I could feel my hackles rising.

“Yes?” I said. “What I’ve got here?”

“This is nothing more than cheap gin in exchange for sex. You must see that.”

“What I see,” I said, squinting at them both because the light from the corridor was beginning to burn my eyes, “is that I’ve got a hell of a lot more than you can imagine. But we can’t expect miracles of understanding, can we? You’ve hardly got experience in the passion department.”

My father said, “Livie,” and raised his head.

My mother said, “You’ve had too much to drink. It’s distorted your thinking.” She pressed her fingers to her temple. She closed her eyes briefly. I knew the symptoms. She was fighting off a migraine. A few more minutes and the battle was mine. “We’ll phone the college and tell them tomorrow or the next day. Right now, we need to get you home.”

“No. We only need to say good night. I’m through with Cambridge. Who can walk on the grass. Who wears what gown. Who’s going to pick apart your essays this term. That isn’t living. It never was. This is.”

“With a married man?”

My father took her arm. Clearly, this was the trump card they’d been holding.

“Waiting for when he has time off from his wife?” And then, because she knew how to use the moment, Mother reached for me, saying, “Olivia. Oh my dearest Olivia,” but I shook her off.

I hadn’t known, you see, and Mother damn well knew it. Foolish little twenty-year-old, full of herself, sexual animal, Liv Whitelaw the Outlaw with a middle-aged man eating out of her hand, I hadn’t known. I should have put it all together, but I hadn’t because everything between us was all so different, so new, so down-and-dirty exciting. But when the facts flashed before me in the way facts do when one’s had a shock, I knew my mother was telling me the truth. He didn’t always spend the night. He claimed it was a gig in another city and in a way it was: in Brighton, with his wife and his kids, at home.

Mother said, “You didn’t know, did you, darling?” and the pity in her voice gave me the bollocks for an answer.

“Who gives a shit, anyway,” I said and followed up with, “Of course I knew. I’m not exactly a cretin.”

But I was. Because I didn’t walk out on Richie Brewster then and there.

You’re wondering why, aren’t you? It was simple enough. I saw no choices. Where could I have gone? Back to Cambridge to play at being a model student while every eye watched me for one false move? Home to Kensington where Mother would act noble as she ministered to my emotional ills? Out on the street? No. None of that was on. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was in control of my life and I was about to demonstrate that fact indisputably. I said, “He’s leaving his wife, if you need to know,” and I shut the door. I made sure it was locked.

They knocked for a while. At least Mother did. I could hear Dad saying, “Miriam, that’s enough,” in a low voice that sounded far away.

I rooted through the chest of drawers for a new packet of cigarettes. I lit up, poured myself another drink, and waited for them to give up and shove off. And all the time I thought of what I would say and what I would do when Richie showed up and I brought him to his knees.

I had a hundred scenarios, all of them ending with Richie begging for mercy. But he didn’t return to the Commodore for two weeks. He’d got the word somehow. And when he finally showed his face, I’d already known for three days that I was pregnant.

OLIVIA

I
t’s a clear sky today—you can’t see any clouds—but its colour’s not blue and I don’t know why. It rises like the back of an unpolished shield behind that dreary monolith of wet-sand flats they’ve built where Robert Browning once lived, and I sit here looking at it and letting my mind play with reasons why it’s lost its colour. I can’t remember the last time I saw a truly blue sky and that worries me. Perhaps the sun’s eating the blue away, scorching the sky along the edges first the way
fla
mes burn paper, then sneaking inward with gathering speed until all that ultimately will be left above us is a spinning white
fir
eball hurtling towards what’s already become an ember.