Ralph's Party (3 page)

Except it felt different. The dynamics had changed. Ralph no longer felt comfortable walking around in nothing but his boxers; he became self-conscious about his toilet habits, which had always been protracted and unpleasant-smeling but which Smith had learned to live with a long time ago. And, more unexpectedly, Ralph was curious, very curious. Here was a stranger, in his home, a stranger about whom he knew no more than a first name, a strange woman at that, with al the exotic and delightful paraphernalia that surrounded women - knickers, bras, make-up, heels, rol-on deodorants in pink bottles, hairbrushes entangled with long, clean-smeling hairs, Pearl Drops, lacy things, silky things, fluffy things.

He'd spent many hours extracting varying degrees of enjoyment from the women in his life, but he'd never, in al his thirty-odd years, lived with one before.

And now there was one in his flat. His curiosity was aflame and, realy, he had only peeped into Jem's bedroom. He hadn't searched through her things or opened drawers or anything, just walked around a bit and

looked at stuff. He was sure there wasn't anything wrong with that.

If there'd been anything she hadn't wanted anyone to see she'd have put it away somewhere, out of sight. And besides, she'd left the door open. Ralph didn't like to think of himself as a snoop and was feeling slightly guilty now about his little investigation, especialy in the light of what he'd seen.

Ralph had intended to spend this week at the studio. He hadn't been for over three months now. He'd made that brochure-design job for the travel company last more than a fortnight when he could have finished it in a week and had spent the last ten days or so cocooned in his room working his way through al thirty-three levels of some computer game or other. He'd reached the end this morning and, after the rapturous programme of congratulations and flattery from the computer had died down, he'd sat back in his chair and realized with some sadness that he now, officialy, had nothing to do.

He'd persuaded himself that at eleven-forty it was way too late to make it to the studio but that he would definitely go tomorrow. He'd thought about the possibility of caling Claudia at work and decided against it — he always caled her at the wrong time: 'Not now, Ralph, I'm in the middle of something5; 'Not now, Ralph - I'm on my way out'; 'Not now, Ralph — I've only just got in.' He imagined Claudia, in one of her sily shiny suits, busily walking in and out of the office al day, endlessly, like a film on a loop. It made him smile to himself.

The usual cloud of boredom descended upon him, and he decided to go for a short walk. As he stroled down Northcote Road, past market stals of jewel-coloured autumn flowers and cheap plastic toys and joss sticks

and African beads he began to think about Jem. He realy hadn't wanted another flatmate — he liked his lifestyle with Smith, an easy life, watching tely, getting stoned — but it was Smith's flat and so he'd gone along with it, and anyway, Jem seemed quite nice and he trusted Smith's judgement.

The first week had been a bit awkward. Smith and he weren't very good at making an effort with strangers, and he'd felt guilty ordering that home-delivery Indian without asking Jem if she wanted any and then embarrassed when he'd heard her slipping into the bathroom moments after he'd made that festering rodent-corpse smel in there.

She'd offered to cook for them tonight, and although he appreciated the gesture he found himself rather selfishly resenting this disruption of his normal routine. Monday night was his staying-in night and he liked it to be as socialy undemanding as possible; when Smith was out he quite often switched on the answer-phone and ruthlessly screened his cals. But it was nice of Jem to offer and he would try to rise to the occasion.

To give his walk a purpose he went into his local overpriced 'corner shop', one of those ubiquitous upmarket chains which sel bags of imported tortila chips for extortionate amounts of money but never stock anything you realy want to eat, which sel only one kind of washing powder but at least twenty-two brands of Mexican chili sauce. Ralph didn't know why he frequented these places - they were so obviously designed to line the pockets of some youthful laughing-al-the-way-to-the-bank ex-City-boy types CEre, Paul, let's buy some retail space and flog the yuppies a load of wine and tortila chips for three times the recommended retail price') and they annoyed him intensely. He bought himself a packet of Marlboro, although he had two packs at the flat, and walked back to Almanac Road.

Lunchtime television consisted of a selection of cookery programmes and Australian soaps, and Ralph found himself mindlessly absorbed in some frenetic shopping-channel programme, watching a camp guy with a tape measure around his neck feverishly extoling the myriad virtues of a horrible acrylic tunic with beading around the neck: 'Not just one, not two, but three,
three
different types of beading. You've got the bugle beading here, the button beading around the applique and, look - this
beautiful
tear-drop beading on both sides!'

Ralph wondered what planet these presenters came from and what drugs the channel fed them to make them sound so sincerely and genuinely excited about the naff and uninspiring products they were being asked to pay homage to.

He switched off the television and felt silence engulf the room. He felt empty and useless. He had nothing to do. He picked up a mug of lukewarm tea he'd made earlier and a packet of Tuc biscuits and walked aimlessly into the hal. It was then that he found himself, almost subconsciously, pushing open the door to Jem's little room.

It was strange to see the spare room ful of someone's things. He'd only ever seen it empty before. It already had an unfamiliar smel.

Jem's belongings lay semi-unpacked in boxes around the edges of the room - empty boxes had been flattened and folded and left near the door. The bed was unmade and there was a blue cotton dressing-gown draped across it with a white Chinese dragon embroidered on the back.

Ralph stepped further into the room to examine a pile of C D s balanced on the table next to Jem's bed. He was impressed with her taste in music, like his, stil stuck somewhere in 1979: the Jam, Madness, the Cure, Generation X, the Ramones —

he might ask if he could borrow them. Next to the CDs was a framed photograph of Jem in a thick winter coat, her nose reddened by the cold, crouching to hug a handsome golden retriever. Ralph looked closely at the photograph, realizing that he couldn't realy remember what Jem looked like - he hadn't paid her much attention

— and that she was extremely pretty. Not particularly his type, though. He always went for blondes, blondes with long legs and designer clothes and attitude problems, blondes with names like Georgia, Natasha and, of course, Claudia, blondes who worked in PR or for art galeries or fashion houses, blondes who wished he was wealthier, trendier, tidier, smarter, earlier, later, cooler —

someone else.

In contrast, Jem was tiny and quirkily pretty. She had good taste in music and she kept a picture of her dog by her bed. She was also nice and polite and gave the impression that she'd be a pleasure to be with. Not Ralph's type at al.

He bit into a biscuit and a large chunk fel to the floor. As he stooped to pick it up he noticed a pile of books under the table, worn and battered looking, with various years inscribed down their spines in gold blocking, or handwritten in pen and marker. They were diaries — and, by the look of them, not impersonal desk diaries but proper, from-the-heart, highly personal girls' diaries.

They stretched from 1986 to 1995. He wondered what had happened to 1996, the current diary, and then he saw it just peeping out from under Jem's dressing-gown.

It was open but obscured by the gown; he could see the date - it was last Thursday's - and snatches of

handwriting, smal and curly like Jem herself: '... beautiful flat... might be shy - I'm sure they're not ... this be my destiny — I'm so excited

... Smith could be him but seems a bit ... Ralph...' Ralph stopped abruptly. What the hel did he think he was doing snooping around in this poor girl's room looking at her fucking diary, of al things?

This realy was very, very sad indeed. He almost left at that point, but his interest had been stimulated to boiling-point.

His heart was racing as he puled the dressing-gown out of the way and his jaw dropped as he read the entry in ful. It seemed Jem thought she was here because of some dream or other, she was folowing her destiny, she was excited because she thought that either Smith or himself would be the man of her dreams — literaly.

Ralph was inclined to think that Jem was some sort of fruitcake, but as he read on he found himself warming to her dream, her destiny.

Not only was he in the running, he had the advantage. Look, she'd written it; 'Smith seems a bit uptight, and he's not realy my type to be honest. Ralph seems more likely — very lean and sexy and sort of dangerous looking' — Ralph's stomach tingled pleasantly as he absorbed the compliment - 'he seems like he'd be more fun to be with. The problem is, he's got a girlfriend.'

This was al true, thought Ralph — apart from the bit about Claudia being a problem. He
was
more fun to be with than Smith these days. That hadn't always been the way, but over the last few years, since his obsession with Cheri had taken over his life, Smith had lost some of his old sparkle and self-confidence.

There was no entry after that. Ralph put down the book and took a deep breath, resisting the urge to turn

back the page, to read more. He placed the diary on the bed at the same angle he'd found it, painstakingly rearranging the blue gown over it and hoping she hadn't left a hair draped across it, to trap sad, snooping diary-readers.

He sat on her crumpled bed now, so unlike Claudia's, which took ten minutes to make, with new bedsheets every day and complicated throw and cushion arrangements that had to be just so, otherwise she'd complain. One of Jem's bras was folded into the sheets. It was black and plain and old looking. He picked it up and examined the label — little Jem was not so little: 34D. Where the hel had she been hiding those? Claudia had breasts that complemented her wilowy stick-insect frame, smal and pointy and incapable of forming a cleavage even when pushed firmly together from both sides. Ralph realized that he missed breasts, he missed that projection of soft voluminous womanliness that moved when it was touched and was always warm and welcoming. Other bits of women's bodies sometimes felt like they might bite or strangle or constrict, but never the breasts — they were friendly and relaxed.

Ralph was disturbed to find himself running the strap of Jem's bra across his top lip and smeling the thin strip of worn black elastic.

He removed it quickly and placed it on his lap, turning his hand into a fist, which he inserted into the cup. It fitted easily, leaving plenty of room for a second fist. My God, he thought, Jem is what Claudia would describe as a 'clever dresser'. Whenever Ralph disagreed with Claudia's assessment of another woman as fat she would explain that he had been fooled by clever dressing — underneath that strategicaly placed scarf or sweater the woman was realy a vast roling mound of fat, he just couldn't see it because he was a man and oblivious to the tricks that women played. Maybe she was right, he thought now, admiring the capacity of Jem's bra.

He certainly hadn't noticed those before.

He placed the bra back into its crevice in the bed-sheets. He was beginning to feel a bit seedy and uncomfortable with himself and was relieved to note that he didn't have an erection.

Ralph was tempted to stay in Jem's room; he was enjoying its snugness and femininity. He wanted to see what she kept in the drawers, take the top off her deodorant and smel the bal, read al her diaries and find out what she was doing on specific days years ago, he wanted to climb into her bedclothes, under her duvet and between her sheets, his head on her aquamarine-cased pilows, to smel her and feel the echo of her warmth.

Instead, he stood up slowly and ruffled the duvet back I into shape, checked there were no traces of his visit, left the door ajar as he'd found it and stepped back into the hal. Tonight could be quite interesting.

As he sat back down at his desk, trying to think of something constructive to do which didn't involve leaving the flat, using the phone or expending too much energy, his thoughts kept returning to the tantalizing snippets he'd read in Jem's diary, and he felt an overwhelming wave of intrigue and curiosity. What was al this about dreams and destiny? What else had she written about them? And more to the point, what else had she written about
him?
He couldn't quite explain it, but for some reason Ralph suddenly had the feeling that life was about to become very complicated.

It seemed to Siobhan that her body was just one big hair-sprouting machine. She'd expected to wrinkle as she aged, she'd expected her hair to lose its pigment, her skin to lose its tautness, but she hadn't been expecting the slow but insistent arrival of so much bloody body hair.

Starting from the bottom up, she had developed little lawns of mousy hair on the fleshy bits on her big toes. Then of course there were the legs, but she'd always had- hair there — that was socialy acceptable. Even supermodels had hairy legs, and there were aisles ful of products in Boots that you could buy without shame or embarrassment.

It was what happened at the top of her legs that bothered Siobhan the most, the dense jungle of coarse hair that seemed more and more intent as the years went by to find its way out of her underwear and join the party taking place on her thighs and creep up her stomach in a thin arrow pointing to her bely button. The line looked particularly unpleasant in the winter, standing out starkly against the now-spongey white expanse of her stomach.

But it didn't stop there. She had noticed lately, among the pale soft down that slept between her breasts, a few renegade hairs growing longer, darker and thicker than the rest. Why? And nipple hair, spidery legs forcing

their way through the otherwise unblemished surface of her breasts to spoil the aesthetics and make her feel ugly. Hair on her upper lip, too, that made her self-conscious when people stood too close to her, and even the odd whisker growing quietly but determinedly from cheeks and chin.