The Mistress's Revenge (12 page)

I lay there feeling him go in and out, and trying to distance myself from my own body, as Helen Bunion had once tried to teach me to do, so it wasn’t me on the bed but some other stupid woman, with her jeans around her ankles and her stupid going-out heels still strapped to her feet. But his rhythmic thrusting was impossible to ignore. I hoped it would at least be over quickly but he went on and on, scrotum slapping against me like a soggy tea towel. On it went and on and on, and each time he did one of his stupid thrusts I thought about you, and how it was your fault that I was there, in this stranger’s unmade bed, with last night’s cigarette ash pooling under my back. I hate you Clive, I hate you Clive, went the rhythm of his movements. On and on and on. Bed jerking, ash billowing.

“It’s not really going to happen, is it?” I said, when I couldn’t bear it anymore, and my voice sounded false and ridiculously loud.

That stupid man called Pete looked down then and seemed a bit taken aback, as if he’d forgotten I was even there.

Then he rolled off, clearly relieved.

“Too much to drink,” he said.

Well, I suppose it was nice of him to try to spare my feelings.

He lit a joint, and I noticed his fingers were covered in thick black hairs, coarse like the stitching in a wound. For a few seconds I stared at them, transfixed, then just as I was about to sit up to leave, all of a sudden, he put the joint down on the floor beside his bed and disappeared down between my legs.

Well, can you imagine? I went completely rigid. I was dry as the proverbial bone down there and his fat stupid mollusk tongue felt like sandpaper. For a few agonizing minutes, he gamely sawed away, while I stared, clenched and wide-eyed, at the nicotine-tinged ceiling, trying to pretend there wasn’t someone applying exfoliating scrub to my clitoris.

In the end, I put my hand down to touch his head and gently pushed him away.

“’S’okay,” I said, inarticulately.

His head stopped bobbing then, and he looked up at me slowly.

“It’s okay,” I repeated, excruciatingly.

“Oh. Right.”

He moved off back to the other side of the bed and retrieved his still-lit joint. There was a shadow of dark stubble on his back and it crossed my mind he’d probably had it waxed for his holiday in Sharm el Sheikh.

I sat up and pulled up my knickers and jeans, remembering too late about the ash in the bed.

“I’d better be going.”

Pete inhaled deeply.

“Do you want me to ring you a minicab? Only there’s plenty of black cabs driving past all the time, and it’d probably be a lot quicker.”

The thought of me and him sitting together waiting for the ring on the door, me with my coat on, him half dressed and desperate to be alone, clearly filled us both with horror.

“Oh, I’ll flag one down outside,” I told him, flailing around to find the armholes in my stupid floaty top.

“Probably best,” he said.

At the front door (at least he walked me down the stairs. And who said chivalry was dead?), he bent down and pecked me awkwardly
on the cheek, his stupid goatee rough and scratchy on my skin. Neither of us even bothered to go through the pantomime of exchanging numbers. I couldn’t wait to be out of there. And he couldn’t wait to see me go.

There were no black cabs passing. Surprise, surprise. So instead I walked to the next junction and waited on the corner there, out of sight of Pete’s prying, probing windows. When a taxi finally pulled up, the driver asked me if I was all right and I was shocked to find I was crying—thick, fat, slimy tears with a gob of shame in each of them.

And now I am back home again. Once more writing to you in this stupid fucking journal. I don’t dare run a shower, in case Daniel wakes up and wonders why I’m feeling the need to ablute in the middle of the night, but I long to wash away every trace of that man with his hairy fingers and gravel tongue. There you lie in your perfect house surrounded by your perfect family, while I’m sitting here with a rash on my clit and his snail trails crisscrossing my body.

I hate you Clive, I hate you Clive. Can’t stop that fucking rhythm pulsing through my bloodstream. I hate you Clive.

I
’ve gotten out my laptop and pulled up the record company’s website. There’s the photo of you on the “about us” page, gazing straight out at me, face concertinaed into a smile. Do you remember you once told me you chose the photo deliberately so that any time I wanted to see you, even if you were abroad or somewhere with Susan, I could summon up your smiling face? “I want you to know I’ll always be there for you,” you’d told me. Always, it seems, can have different definitions. So I’m sitting here in my cubbyhole, with all those vodkas still sloshing around my system, looking into your eyes, and thinking how it’s your fault I was in that flat, your fault I was in that bed, your fault I thought I needed a man to make whole again all the broken, shattered pieces rattling around inside me. Your stupid fault. Your stupid fault. Stupid stupid stupid.

*  *  *

R
eally, Clive. You need to work on your anger issues, as Helen would say.

I mean, I can understand you being upset. It’s a horrible thing to have happened. But I really don’t see what it’s got to do with me.

As soon as I’d put the phone down to you just now (well, as soon as you slammed the phone down on me might be more accurate), I pulled up your company website to see what you’d been getting so hot under the collar about, but when I checked the comments section there wasn’t anything unusual on there. Just the normal pedants nitpicking about one of your more controversial acts. I assume you’ve already taken the offending comment out. Well, who could blame you?

Mind you, it sounds like the person who wrote it wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, doesn’t it? What was it you said they accused you of? Plagiarism and serial cheating? I mean, you might be able to understand one or the other, but to throw both in together is a bit, well, odd, don’t you think?

Still, I’m sure you managed to get rid of it before too many people saw it, so I don’t think you need to get quite so worked up. I do so worry about your blood pressure, after everything the doctor told you about avoiding stress. Just because we’re not together anymore doesn’t mean we can’t continue caring about each other, does it?

I must say though, I don’t appreciate you coming to me in that accusatory tone. It’s quite unnecessary. I empathize with your situation, naturally, but I had nothing to do with that nasty comment. I’m actually quite shocked you would think I might. What was that you said about the person using “the same language” as me? Well, don’t you think that’s just a little bit paranoid? Lots of people use those words, and they don’t all go around writing poison pen letters, do they? And I don’t think I’ve ever used the “c” word in your company (not in that context anyway), no matter how tempting it has been.

How lucky for you that you have the alert that tells you when a new comment has been added. And yes, I can quite see that you would be kicking yourself for not following it up immediately, but
at least Susan didn’t see it, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? All in all, I think you had quite a lucky escape really, Clive. You should be feeling quite sanguine, really, instead of ringing people up and accusing them of things.

“Don’t think you can get away with this, Sally,” you said, before you hung up on me.

I thought that was quite funny, the idea that I might have gotten away with anything. You see I feel as if my life has been systematically stripped of everything that once made it worthwhile, every last vestige of value like an unwanted, abandoned house. The lightbulbs are gone, the appliances too, even the antique tiles from around the fireplace. I feel I have nothing. So you tell me, Clive, what exactly have I gotten away with? I’d really, really like to know.

I
was thinking about your “don’t think you can get away with this” comment when I got your latest email this afternoon (incidentally, I’ve christened it the Blood Money email—in a post-ironic way of course). There was just that hint of menace in it, I thought. And I remembered that poor Romanian window wiper and the fear in his eyes.

At first I couldn’t quite work it out, why you were using such tough, uncompromising language (what’s all that about “leave Susan alone,” as if I’d done something to harm her instead of enjoyed her company on a couple of very pleasant social occasions) and yet at the same time offering me money. And quite a lot of money. £12,000 in fact. Knowing, as you do, the precarious state of our finances, I’m sure you appreciate how welcome a £12,000 “gift” would be. We could clear some credit card debts, pay a couple of months’ installment on the mortgage. No, it seemed like a very generous offer indeed on first reading, and even when I read it again and realized that it was in fact a bribe, my payoff for disappearing from your lives, I still couldn’t help thinking about what I could do with all that money, all the school trips it could buy. I did think your last sentence was a bit unnecessary
though, that bit about sending me the money through some indirect means because under “no circumstances will a face-to-face meeting be taking place”!! I don’t know why you felt the need for those two exclamation marks, really. One would have quite sufficed. “It would be a very retrogressive step,” you wrote, “at a point when we both need to be moving on with our lives. Separately.” That word “separately” meriting a sentence of its own.

O
f course I knew the £12,000 would come from that stash you’d been given for making that dire rushed single in Holland (“they’re paying me in cash,” you’d explained, embarrassed, when you called from your Amsterdam hotel. “That’s the only reason I’m doing it.”)—the stash you’d been so nervous about having stolen that you’d ended up hiding it in a plastic bag in the fridge. I know all about that money from the time we managed a four-day break together and I booked a ridiculously expensive hotel on my credit card, which you insisted on repaying in cash, peeling off £1,000 from a wad stuffed into your back pocket and explaining how you’d grabbed it from the fridge earlier that day. “Tell me if you need more,” you’d said, pressing the creased notes awkwardly into my hand. “There’s plenty more where that came from.” (Not until afterward, when I stuffed the money down into an old UGG boot in the bottom of my closet, did I feel a little compromised by that transaction, that wad of grubby notes pressed into hands still smelling of sex.)

But you know, as I started thinking it through, I began adding up what this whole thing might be worth now we were thinking in purely financial terms. Funny amount, isn’t it, £12,000? Anyone else would have rounded it down to £10,000 or up to £15,000, so I wondered if you’d used some kind of formula to work it out—added up my different grievances since York Way Friday, affording more weight to some than others. I started to do the same. For instance, those endless, sleepless nights, lying in bed while my heart threatened to explode clear through my chest and the movies of you and Susan played out endlessly
through my restless mind—those must be worth a few hundred quid each, surely? And what about the prescription drug–induced anxieties, the dry mouth, the shaking hands pouring out the kids’ tea? The loss of income owing to days spent hunched over a computer obsessively checking and rechecking for emails that never came? The cracked teeth ground down to the exposed nerves during the nights, requiring potentially years of expensive dental work. The loss of self, the children asking why Mummy’s so different and once, pricelessly “has Mummy been turned into an alien?”

I went through it all, quite fairly I have to say, totting it all up, making a tally. But you know, even before I finally gave up counting, I knew I wouldn’t be taking your money. You see I realized something interesting, Clive, as I was doing all that adding—that all the money in all the fridges in all the world can’t come close to making up for what I’ve lost.

I
really don’t want to get heavy with you.

That’s an interesting turn of phrase, don’t you think? “Get heavy.” Because, of course, you are a heavy man. A weighty man. Sometimes when you were lying on top of me in one or another hotel bed with the quilted bedcover bunched up uncomfortably against the back of my legs and a dull ache spreading out from the arm pinioned to my side, a sensation of not being able to breathe would sweep suddenly over me and I’d shove you violently off, gasping for air.

“Did I hurt you?” you’d fret. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

T
he women among our group of friends inclined to the view that you were a “softie” really, a “pussycat.”

“It’s hysterical that he has this reputation as a tough man,” they’d scoff. “Susan says he wells up at a Yellow Pages ad.”

The men, though, were far more circumspect. I’d seen the way a group of locals standing at the bar would eye you warily when you walked in, raising themselves up almost imperceptibly, pulling abdominal muscles in, following your progress as you went to sit down, alert to you.

“There’s something about him that I just don’t trust,” my old friend Jack had said on first meeting you.

Ironically Daniel had jumped to your defense. “Oh, he might look like a criminal, but he’s got a heart of gold,” he’d said. But I’d seen the way men instinctively hardened themselves up when they saw you and I wasn’t so sure.

“I can be very hard when I want to be,” you’d told me again when I’d teased you for crying after we’d had sex, or during World’s Strictest Parents. I’d smiled, imagining you were trying to protest your macho credentials.

Now when I read that line in your Blood Money email—I really don’t want to get heavy with you—and I remember the fear on that Romanian squeegee man’s face—I wonder if you might actually have been issuing a warning.

T
he young blonde doctor was dressed head to toe in blue today. Blue shift dress, blue cardigan, blue tights, and blue medium-heeled shoes that clicked loudly as she came out into the waiting room to call my name. Do you think I should have read something into that? All that blue?