Shameless (11 page)

“What the hell was all that about?” he demanded.

Slightly shaken, she fought back as best she could. “Why don’t you tell me about Darren?”

“Darren? Darren who? I don’t know anyone called Darren.”

“Darren who left a message on your answering machine. Darren who you met at that group you went to on Friday night.”

“What do you know about Friday night?”

“Just that you went to some group or other, and that you met some guy called Darren who sounds as if he’s pretty keen on you. What does ‘C.L.A.G.’ stand for anyway? Closeted lesbians and gays? What is it? Some kind of coming-out group?”

Graham’s tone was one of forced calm, heavy with the threat of an explosion at any moment. “Have you been going through my personal stuff? Listening to my phone calls? Reading my diary?”

“You didn’t leave me much choice. You were so cagey, I had to try and piece it together for myself!”

“Piece it together? Piece what together? Who do you think you are? Nancy Drew?”

Caroline smiled triumphantly. “Nancy Drew? That’s a very camp reference!”

The expression on Graham’s face hovered somewhere between pity and contempt. “Well, let me tell you something, Nancy. You drew the wrong conclusion this time.”

And those were the very last words he had said to her. For the duration of the journey, he stared straight ahead, not catching her eye even once. She tried to break the ice by suggesting they could always find a man they both fancied, set up home together, and then sell their story to the
Daily Mail
. He didn’t laugh. By the time the car pulled up outside her flat, the atmosphere inside was cold enough to freeze the elderberry sorbet Pip had allowed to thaw slightly in preparation for dessert and which was at that very moment returning to the icebox. Graham sat in silence, waited for Caroline to step out of the car, and then drove off. In the days that followed, she tried calling several times, left messages, and waited for him to call her back and say he was ready to talk. He never did.

So here she was, a woman in her prime who hadn’t had sex in three months, alone in her flat on a Saturday afternoon, and without even the vaguest hint of a date lined up for a Saturday night. It was pathetic really. There was only one thing for it, she thought, reaching for her address book, picking up the phone, and dialing a number she hadn’t dialed in almost two years.

A man’s voice answered at the third ring. “Hello?”

“Hi, Dylan. It’s me, Caroline.”

“Caroline! Wow! Great to hear from you. How’s things?”

“Oh, you know. Busy as always. You?”

“Can’t complain. Well, I suppose I could, but it wouldn’t change anything.”

“No, I suppose not. Anyway, Dylan, I was wondering—what are you up to tonight?”

Martin was just leaving the gym when his cell phone rang. The cell had been a present to himself, a reward for all the misery and heartache he had been put through, and for the strength and determination he had shown in putting all that negativity behind him in such a short space of time. Besides, practically everyone he knew owned a cell. Gone were the days when any gay man seen carrying a cell phone was presumed to be either a drug dealer or a prostitute.

The call was from John. “Hello, daughter!” he said, sounding surprisingly bushy-tailed for a Saturday afternoon. Martin was finding it increasingly difficult to understand what John was talking about. Greater exposure to the club scene, coupled with the excessive amounts of drugs he took these days, seemed to have heightened his natural aptitude for finding ever more baffling ways of expressing himself. The fashion speak that had formed the basis of his conversation for years had gradually given way to a strange hybrid of club talk, old-fashioned double entendre and contemporary American street slang as evidenced on talk shows such as
Ricki Lake
and
Jerry Springer.
These days, John no longer danced—he “hookered it up” on the dance floor. He didn’t take drugs—he “larged it.” If he didn’t like what somebody was saying to him, he would invariably tell them to “speak to the hand.” And when he signed off at the end of a telephone conversation, the chances were his parting words would be something along the lines of “see you in the chill-out area.” “Daughter” was his latest term of endearment, picked up from a conversation with a journalist from
QX,
the gay-scene magazine, who was as famous for his flippant writing style as for the serious amounts of drugs he consumed. They’d met the previous weekend at a club in Green Park, squeezed into a tiny room adjacent to the DJ booth where the resident drug dealers and other assorted gay glitterati congregated to do lines of coke and bumps of Ketamine. The journalist referred to the room as “the broom cupboard of shame,” which Martin personally found funny but John seemed to have a problem with, possibly because he refused to entertain the idea that anything he regarded as a source of pleasure might be in any way shameful. Instead, he latched onto the term “daughter,” which would have been funny and possibly even rather endearing, had he not taken to using it at every opportunity and applying it to just about everyone he came into contact with. Still, it was marginally better than “girl,” which was the term he’d insisted on using until recently.

“So what’s new?” John went on. “Anything to report?”

“Not really,” Martin answered, not exactly enthused by the conversation but still relishing the novelty of a cell phone. “I’ve just been to the gym.”

“Anything to see?”

“What?”

“No cute boys soaping up in the showers?”

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t looking.”

“Still playing hard to get, eh? Anyway, from what I hear, there’s nothing to see at the Y these days. I told you, you should have joined the Soho Athletic Club. Believe me, there’s always plenty to see there.”

“So what’s the plan for tonight?” Martin asked, changing the subject before John could start regaling him with tales of all the gorgeous men who had eyed him during the past week.

“Fernando thinks we should try Love Muscle,” John replied.

“I thought Love Muscle was finished,” Martin said.

“If you ask me, it is. But Fernando thought he might be able to drum up a bit of extra trade there. We can always go on to Crash later. So what’ll it be for you tonight? Still just the one E? Or are you ready to experiment a bit?”

“What do you mean exactly?”

“Well, nobody sticks to one drug for the whole night these days. It’s all about mix and match.”

Martin hesitated. “But isn’t that dangerous?”

John laughed. “Haven’t you heard of combination therapy? Leave it with me. Let’s just say we might be in for a bumpy night.”

Dylan Morris was the man everyone assumed Caroline would end up marrying. That is, everyone except Caroline. Sure, she’d had a bit of a crush on him for a while. But that was way back when she was fifteen. She’d had crushes on practically everyone when she was fifteen, including Simon Le Bon and several members of Spandau Ballet, so that hardly meant anything—to her, at least. To Dylan, it had meant a lot more. They started off as friends. Both bookish, both outsiders at school—Caroline on account of her weight, Dylan on account of the fact that he was named Dylan—it was inevitable that they would team up at some point. Their friendship was forged at Mr. Archer’s reading group, where Caroline would indulge her love of Oscar Wilde, and Dylan would brood quietly and strike poetic poses with the aid of his heavily gelled quiff. She made a point of ignoring him at first, thinking him arrogant and pretentious. But as the months went by, she found herself drawn to this strange boy with his troubled eyes and his Morrissey fixation. He was the nearest thing to a boyfriend she had ever had, or would ever expect to find in a place like Swindon. During Caroline’s last year at school, they were practically inseparable, and when Dylan suddenly confessed that he was in love with her, that Friday afternoon behind the bike shed, she felt it only fair to say that she loved him, too, regardless of whether she actually meant it or not.

She had loved him to a degree. Not in the way that he loved her perhaps, but enough to derive some pleasure from their fumbled attempts at sex, enough to make him the person she turned to when her dad died, and enough to carry on seeing him after she left school and he went on to study for his A levels. But things weren’t the same after that. He had a whole new world of higher education opening up in front of him, while she had a sudden urge to get as far away from her hometown as possible. Gradually they drifted apart. When Caroline was offered a job in London and Dylan was offered a place at Leeds University, they swore that they would stay in touch. But in reality the letters and phone calls became less and less frequent, and the distance between them grew and grew, until finally it seemed pointless pretending that they were still a significant part of one another’s lives.

So when they suddenly bumped into one another again, two years ago at a party in the Docklands, it was practically as strangers. She hardly recognized him at first. The Morrissey quiff had gone, together with his trademark black shirts and tortured look. He was dressed in a crumpled linen suit and a bright blue shirt and seemed remarkably at ease with himself, as if this colorful new ensemble reflected a happier outlook on life. He complimented her on her weight loss. She asked him about his job in publishing. They shared a joke about what ridiculous teenagers they used to be and how silly it was that they had never kept in touch. They swapped phone numbers and promised to make more of an effort in the future. Then, just when Caroline’s friends decided it was time to call for a taxi, Dylan offered to drive her home. She knew immediately that if she accepted his offer, they would end up in bed together. Part of her worried that it would all turn out to be hideously embarrassing. Part of her worried that it would turn out to be perfect and that she would regret never having made a go of it with Dylan all those years ago, the way her mother had always said she should. But she was a little drunk and more than a little curious, and she hadn’t had sex in quite a while, so she accepted.

The sex was good. Not mind-blowingly, earth-shatteringly good, but pretty pleasurable and fairly satisfying, which was exactly what she’d hoped it would be. Dylan was gentle and considerate, and had obviously learned a few things since they were both teenagers. But he didn’t drive her wild with lust. He didn’t turn her world upside down. He didn’t make her feel as if she had missed out on something, the likes of which she would never find with another man ever again. So when Dylan suggested that they meet up again, maybe for dinner or possibly to see a film, Caroline could see no obvious harm in it and agreed. It was only on their third date that it became clear that Dylan was expecting rather more out of this relationship than she was. They’d been to Joe Allen’s for dinner and were in a taxi heading back to Dylan’s flat in London Bridge when suddenly he turned to her and confessed that he was falling in love with her all over again. She stopped the taxi there and then, jumped out, and, apologizing for not having made herself clearer at the outset, told him that it was probably best if they didn’t see each other anymore. The next day she sent him a letter, explaining at great length why she felt the way she did, how she didn’t want to hurt him, and how she wasn’t ready for a relationship. What she didn’t say was that she would never be ready for a relationship with someone like him, someone who reminded her too much of her past, someone who would have been perfect for an uncomplicated fuck but who always had to complicate things, someone who asked more of her than she was willing or able to give.

And that was the last time Caroline had any contact with Dylan Morris, until this afternoon when, on a sudden impulse she was already beginning to regret, she had picked up the phone and dialed his number. And now here she was, sitting in the back of a taxi dressed in one of the sexy black numbers she kept for Saturday nights, on her way to meet a man whose heart she had broken once, possibly even twice, but who—she kept telling herself—was just an old school friend.

Ten

I
t was Dylan
who suggested they meet in the bar at the Sanderson Hotel. Walking through the entrance hall with its chic minimalist decor and fashionably underweight receptionists, Caroline paused for a moment to consider her options. Dylan was perched at the bar with his back turned, chatting to one of the barmen. It wasn’t too late for her to back out. She could just turn around now and slip away into the mild October night before he even realized she was there. It wasn’t the most mature way of handling the situation, but considering the way things had turned out in the past, it might be the kindest option. Dylan was a nice guy—he deserved better than to be treated as her plaything.

On the other hand, who was to say that he didn’t derive some strange satisfaction from being toyed with in this way? There were plenty of men out there who liked nothing better than to have a woman walk all over them. And it wasn’t just the spike heels and nipple clamps brigade she was thinking of, either. You didn’t have to dress up in fetish gear to be a complete and utter masochist. You only had to look at the way some women cut themselves up over men to know that. In a sense, toying with Dylan’s emotions was simply a way of redressing the balance of power between the sexes. And if he happened to get off on it, then ultimately there was no real harm being done, was there? Satisfied that her decision to come here tonight was the right one, Caroline strode casually over to the bar and tapped Dylan lightly on the shoulder.

He spun around so quickly, she barely had time to register that he was drunk. “Hi, Caz,” he slurred, leaning in to kiss her cheek. As he did so, the glass he was clutching in his right hand tipped forward and roughly half an alcoholic unit of chilled export lager splashed down the front of Caroline’s little black dress. She let out a gasp and took a step backward, stumbling over a handbag that somebody had thoughtfully placed on the floor behind her and only just managing to maintain her balance. Realizing what he’d done, Dylan grabbed a white paper napkin from the bar, leaped forward and proceeded to attack the soggy patch at the front of her dress, rubbing so hard that the napkin quickly began to disintegrate, leaving a smudge of soggy white paper particles. “Sorry about that, Caz,” he said, still rubbing away. “You took me by surprise there.”

Caroline bristled. “It’s fine,” she said icily, snatching the napkin from his hand before he could inflict any more damage. She wasn’t sure which was worse—hearing someone call her “Caz” for the first time in fifteen years, feeling every eye in the room on her as the lager seeped down her stomach and into her panties, or seeing the mess Dylan had made of her dress. “Just leave it, Dylan,” she snapped as he reached for another napkin. “I’m going to the ladies’ room. Wait here. I won’t be long.”

It took her five minutes to find the ladies’ room, and a further twenty minutes to fix herself up and regain her composure. She removed her soggy panties and placed them in her handbag, sponged the stain from her dress, and dried the damp patch under the hand dryer. Then, just to give herself the confidence she needed to go back into the room, she touched up her makeup before ducking into a stall, taking out her Tiffany pouch, and snorting a quick line of coke. By the time she returned to the bar, Dylan was in drunken remorseful mode, and Caroline was no longer in any mood to spare so much as a thought for his feelings.

“I really am sorry about that, Caz,” he said as she arranged herself as elegantly as she could on her bar stool and accepted his offer of a champagne cocktail. Considering the embarrassment he had caused her, it was the least he could do.

“It’s okay,” she said. “But do me a favor, Dylan. Stop calling me Caz, okay? Nobody calls me that anymore.”

“What? Oh yeah. Right. Well, Caroline, like I said, I really am sorry. And just to show how sorry I am, I’d like to buy you a new dress. If you’d allow me to, that is.”

Despite herself, Caroline felt her mood lightening. “There’s no need for that,” she said, smiling at him. He really was a sweet guy, for all his faults. It was hardly surprising that he’d had a few drinks before meeting her here tonight. He was probably as nervous as hell.

“But I’d like to,” he insisted. “I don’t know how much these things cost. Would a hundred quid cover it?”

The smile vanished from Caroline’s face. “Hardly,” she snapped, insulted by the suggestion that she would turn up for a date on a Saturday night wearing anything less than a designer dress. Then, remembering that Dylan was a straight man after all, and that straight men generally had little grasp of fashion, least of all those who worked in publishing, she softened. “I can’t take your money, Dylan,” she said. “It wouldn’t be fair.”

There was a long pause before he spoke again. When he did finally speak, he looked at her strangely, with a crooked smile and a glint in his eye. “But what if you weren’t taking it exactly?” he said. “What if you were to give me something in return?”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“Well, say for instance that I take out my wallet now and I give you a hundred pounds. And say that I was to suggest something you could do for me in exchange for that hundred pounds. What would you think of that?”

Caroline took a sip of her champagne cocktail. “I really don’t know what you’re getting at, Dylan,” she said, though in reality she was beginning to get a pretty good idea. He couldn’t really be propositioning her for sex, could he? He didn’t really think that she was the kind of woman who would have sex with him in return for money? It was such a disgusting thought, such an insult. On the other hand, she had called him up today with the express purpose of getting laid tonight. She had been planning on having sex with him anyway. And if paying her for sex gave him some sort of kick, or made him feel that he was in control in some way, then at least it removed any fears she might have about hurting his feelings.

Dylan must have been reading her mind, because at that precise moment, he took out his wallet and discreetly removed five twenty-pound notes. “Here’s the money for your dress,” he said, pressing the notes into her hand. “Now, provided you’re willing and you think it’s a fair deal, I’d like you to finish your drink and follow me into the toilets, where I propose to go down on you. What do you think?”

Caroline felt the hairs on her neck stand on end. She couldn’t believe she was hearing this. She couldn’t believe that this man she had known since she was fifteen years old, this man she had long regarded as sweet and kind and just a little too soft for his own good, this man she would have been perfectly willing to sleep with tonight if it weren’t for the fear of breaking his heart again, that this man was actually offering to pay her to have sex with him. And more important, she couldn’t believe that the mere thought of this excited her as much as it did. It wasn’t even as if a hundred pounds amounted to a lot of money, not for someone in her position. But somehow the thought of it turned what promised to be an otherwise dull fuck into something rather dangerous and thrilling.

“Well?” Dylan said. “What do you think?”

Caroline casually slipped the money into her handbag, stood up, and drained her glass. “Well, Dylan,” she said. “I hope I don’t live to regret this. But I think you’ve got yourself a deal.”

John was busy baking. As a rule, cooking wasn’t an activity he found enjoyable. In fact, he hated it. John was the kind of person who tuned in to Delia Smith’s
How To Cook
and marveled at her ability to boil an egg. Tea and toast was about as far as his culinary skills went. When he wasn’t faced with the promise of a tray of airline food, he tended to dine out or order takeout from the local Chinese.

But then this wasn’t cooking in the usual sense. The oven was set at 250 degrees Celsius, which was the temperature Fernando had specified before going out to make his regular early evening drop-offs in the West End. He had been gone for just over an hour. Soon it would be time to remove the Pyrex bowl from the oven and allow its contents to cool before scraping the white residue onto a cool plate, grinding it into a fine powder, and then weighing it into little plastic bags with the scales Fernando kept for such occasions. But not just yet. Peering through the oven door, John could still see a trace of liquid in the bottom of the bowl. How much longer it would take for the remaining liquid to crystalize was anyone’s guess. One thing John had learned over the past few months was that there were no hard-and-fast rules about these things. Fernando was right. Cooking Ketamine was a complicated business, more an art than a science. Smiling to himself, John wondered what Delia would make of it.

This was the first time Fernando had entrusted him with cooking the K, so naturally he was feeling a little apprehensive. He’d watched Fernando doing it dozens of times, and had helped with the weighing and the bagging up. But to be left in charge of the cooking felt like a real honor. It was a sign that their relationship had progressed to a different level. A new bond of trust had been established. And despite the slightly worrying overtones implicit in the fact that Fernando was currently out striking deals while he was at home slaving over a hot oven like a dutiful wife, John couldn’t help but feel a warm glow of contentment, the likes of which he had never experienced before. After years of sleeping around, and insisting that relationships were only for fools and lesbians, he was finally forced to admit that he was in love.

Of course it helped that the object of his affection was a drug-dealing Brazilian with a body to die for, whose arrival in John’s life had made him the envy of all his friends. But there was more to it than that. The sex was the best he’d ever had, and after three months showed no sign of letting up, either in its intensity or its frequency. Fernando had a voracious sexual appetite, and not only when he was coked up to the eyeballs. Some nights they barely touched the stuff and still they were at it, hammer and tongs. And on those rare occasions when the coke did its worst and it was difficult to maintain an erection, help was always at hand in the form of Viagra, the illegal sale of which Fernando had recently added to his drug-dealing activities and which was proving every bit as popular at home as it was in the clubs. It was a wonder they hadn’t exhausted their curiosity in one another, the number of times they’d done it and the variety of positions they’d tried. Their sex life was like a porn movie—so much so that these days John rarely felt the need to watch porn at all.

He had also cut down dramatically on the number of hours he spent on-line, cruising the gay chat rooms. True, he had enjoyed the odd encounter with “CuriousCute28.” In fact, over the past few months their little cybersex sessions had become a welcome distraction from the boredom of long afternoons, and one that John enjoyed with increasing regularity. But masturbating over your computer keyboard while some hunky straight fantasy figure sent you dirty messages didn’t really count as sex. And given that Fernando was the classic strong, silent type in every respect, John could hardly be blamed for getting off over an anonymous stranger whose way with words wasn’t so much a threat to his relationship as a complement to it. No, all things considered, John was satisfied that what he got up to in the privacy of an Internet chat room was nobody’s business but his own. And unless you counted one very minor indiscretion with a Cuban go-go boy during a stopover in Miami, he hadn’t had actual sexual contact with anyone other than Fernando in three whole months. Really, it was amazing what love could do.

Not that he had mentioned the
L
word. Fernando was rarely given to outbursts of emotion. The exception was when he was at the point of orgasm and would sometimes mutter unintelligible things in Portuguese. But declarations of affection weren’t in his nature, and John knew better than to spoil things by coming on too strong. Besides, he didn’t need soppy talk to know that he was in a solid, loving relationship. It was enough that he was here right now, carefully grinding up the K, while the man he loved was out making money in preparation for tonight’s dance-and-drugs marathon.

Smiling to himself, John put the latest dance compilation on the CD player and turned the volume up to full. Then he helped himself to a bump of K and waited for the familiar syrupy sense of being suspended in time, in a place quite like the one he had left, but at the same time strangely different. He was living the life he had always dreamed of, and loving every interminable second of it.

Caroline left the Sanderson Hotel with a spring in her step and a warm glow in her groin. Hailing a black cab in Berners Street, she climbed in the back and instructed the driver to take her to Hampstead.

“Off home already, love?” the driver asked. He was the kind of cabdriver she usually went out of her way to avoid—aged around the fifty mark, with greasy, nicotine-stained hair and one eye in the rearview mirror constantly scanning the backseat for the slightest glimpse of flesh. Paranoid that he could tell she wasn’t wearing any panties, or worse, that he knew exactly what she’d been doing for the past twenty minutes, Caroline squeezed her knees tighter together and stared purposefully out the window, hoping he’d get the message.

He didn’t. “You off to a party or something, then, love? Only it seems a bit early to call it a night, a pretty girl like you.”

“I’m going to my boyfriend’s house, actually,” Caroline replied, thinking off the top of her head. “Now if you don’t mind, I’m really not in the mood to chat.”

This caused the eye in the mirror to narrow slightly, but the voice remained irrepressibly chirpy. “I don’t mind at all, love. I was just making conversation. If you’d rather I didn’t, that’s fine by me. After all, you’re paying.”

Relieved at the prospect of a few minutes’ silence, Caroline sank back in the seat and cast her mind over this evening’s events. She couldn’t believe that she had let Dylan go down on her—in the toilet of all places. She had never had sex in a public place before. Of course she’d thought about it, many times in fact. But whenever she did, she tended to picture herself lying next to a stream or rolling around on the beach with some hunk as the waves crashed around them—not squatting on the cistern in a hotel lavatory with Dylan’s face buried up her skirt, his penis poised to enter her and his hand ready to pull the flush and drown out the sound of her moans.