The Perfect 10 (17 page)

‘I’ll stay until you want me to go.’

A week later Cagney proposed, by the life buoy in the bay. Alice said yes as they reached the shore and Cagney lowered her off his back and on to the beach.

Two days after that they were married on the wedding boat, and the Greek captain threw rice as they sank ouzo shots, arms entwined, poured from a bottle kept below decks, reserved for special occasions. As predicted, Alice’s parents did not attend the ceremony, although she had invited them that morning when she had called to tell them they were gaining a son.

Cagney would have bet his life that he slept with a smile that first night, naked and without sheets, on a Lindion bed, with his beautiful new bride curled tightly in his arms.

It was the following morning that Alice’s parents did arrive, storming into the villa they were renting for Alice and three of her friends for the summer, banging on the bedroom door, demanding to know what was going on. Alice had wrapped herself in a discarded sheet and sloped off to confront them, telling Cagney to stay in bed for now, that she would come and get him when she felt they were ready to meet him.

Cagney waited all morning. Eventually, at 1 p.m., he ventured out of the bedroom, to find the villa deserted. So sure was he of his new bride, he chose not to question it, but instead to tug out the copy of Pushkin he was reading
before he met Alice, propping himself on the terrace, feet up on the wall, overlooking the bay, waiting for his new family to return.

At 8 p.m. they arrived back, with Alice dressed in her mother’s clothes. Alice’s parents chose not to introduce themselves, but sat either side of Alice as she placed herself opposite Cagney at a large wooden table on the terrace, lit only by a string of candles laid across the middle, throwing ominous shadows in the dark.

‘They want to know what you intend to do?’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘Supporting us,’ she said sternly, as if it were obvious, and he were painting them both fools.

‘Well, when we get back to England I thought I might apply for the police force,’ he said brightly. Who wouldn’t want a sergeant for a son-in-law, he reasoned, a pillar of the community?

‘No,’ Alice’s father said. Cagney could barely see his face in the candlelight, making out silver hair, and a strong nose that was high in the air.

‘No?’ Cagney asked.

‘Daddy doesn’t like that idea. What else?’ Alice said.

‘Or … I could go back in to the army, I suppose …’ Cagney floundered, so desperate was he to impress his new father-in-law.

‘What else?’ Alice’s mother asked, an older thinner version of her daughter, gaunt from gin and lettuce.

‘There is no … I mean … I have thought about security work …’ Cagney was flailing wildly.

‘Oh dear God,’ Alice’s mother muttered, covering her eyes with a bony hand.

‘If you aren’t even going to try, Cagney, you can’t expect them to like you,’ Alice said coolly.

‘I am trying! I don’t know what else you want me to
say!’ Cagney was desperate, wide-eyed, clawing for an answer that would illicit a response other than ‘What else?’.

‘Something better than that,’ she said.

Cagney turned to address Alice’s father. ‘The first time I saw your daughter I became love’s fool. It doesn’t matter what career I choose because my life, from that moment on, has been devoted solely to protecting her. I won’t leave her side unless she asks me to. I won’t speak unless she tells me to. She is my life now, and all that I need.’

He turned to face Alice. ‘I don’t chase thousands of girls, I’m no sexual circus rider. Honestly, all I want is to look after you.’

‘Ovid! Ovid? You quote erotic poems in front of my wife and expect me to let you marry my daughter?’

‘With all due respect, I have already married your daughter, sir …’

Alice’s father pushed back his chair, storming away from the table, and her mother followed moments later.

Alice and Cagney sat opposite each other in silence for the next half an hour.

Finally Alice said, ‘I doubt that will be enough,’ before going to bed.

Cagney slept on the terrace that night, and woke with the chorus of cocks crowing at 5 a.m. Walking in to their room, he saw his beautiful young wife curled up in a ball on their honeymoon bed and, peeling off his clothes, he had crawled into bed next to her, throwing his arm around her, breathing in her neck.

‘I didn’t think they’d come,’ she whispered to him.

‘Tell me I was more than that,’ he said quietly.

‘I can’t.’

‘How long will they stay?’

‘They’ll fly home today.’

‘And you?’

‘The villa is paid up until the end of the month. I shall stay until then.’

‘What was the right answer? In case there ever is a next time.’

‘Finance.’

‘What if I said finance now?’

‘They’ll know I told you. It’s too late.’

‘What if you told them you can’t be without me?’

‘I won’t tell them that.’

‘Why did you marry me?’

‘I didn’t think they’d come.’

‘What if I told you I love you?’

‘I know that already.’

‘Doesn’t it change your mind?’

‘Really and truly, Cagney, it would seem I like my aimless life.’

‘Won’t you even say you’re sorry, for us?’

‘Why should I? You knew it would end this way all along. I was just playing. I’m still just a child. You’re no fool.’

‘You’re wrong. I’m the biggest fool there is.’

Cagney fell asleep then, waking three hours later, disentangling himself from his new bride, and leaving his father’s address on a piece of paper under a rock at the end of their bed. He had hitchhiked up to Rhodes that day, working in a bar for another month to save the money for a flight home, sleeping on the beach every night.

He got back to England and stayed with his father for a while – he wasn’t even sure how long. He existed in some kind of waking stupor, utterly perplexed, occasionally pinching himself to check that he was real. Eventually he heard back from Brighton and Hove Constabulary, who had accepted him as a trainee. His father forwarded him
the divorce papers when they finally arrived, and he signed them the next morning, after one final tortured night’s sleep. With the final ‘S’ of his name, he determined to move on.

For she had only been playing …

Cagney whispers to the darkness, ‘God help me, not again.’

And falls asleep in his chair.

I yawn halfway through a gulp of coffee and spill it down my gym top. My day is not going well. I woke up agitated and tired at 6 a.m., but couldn’t persuade myself to go back to sleep so I just laid there, thinking about what my therapist had said to me yesterday.

Maybe I don’t want Adrian, I just want somebody, and he’s the easy option. I know what I’m getting; it’s not so risky. But I know, if I can reach inside myself and yank out the admission, that my intentions are stained by almost thirty years’ worth of rejection. I don’t know why I find this so shaming. Why shouldn’t I let Adrian’s feelings for me bolster my vanity for a while? Everybody else is doing it.

But just the thought sends a shiver down my spine, a spiteful acknowledgement of something that has started to rot inside me, deprived of nourishment or chocolate. If the beauty of the body is the corruption of the soul, I need to find another anchor to replace the fat and hold me down, before I float off into cloudless skies of self-obsession and moral vagaries.

Everything that I thought I believed is slipping through skinny fingers, in the face of nothing more than an
increase in my options. I never dreamt, at the start, that my moral measurements might change along with my vital statistics. I am finding that it is a lot easier to believe in black and white, right and wrong, when you don’t have any options yourself. Once new paths present themselves, everything gets a little grey. My beliefs have dissolved in my head, and the crazy hazy liquid they have left behind is swimming around behind my eyes, and making me feel a little sick. At some point I need to decide what I believe now.

With so many more plausible things to worry about, not least my concern that the devil wears a size ten and I’m getting ready to fill her shoes, I am not even going to entertain my therapist’s ludicrous notions about Cagney James. I don’t believe there is a fine line between love and hate, in this case, at least. Sometimes you meet thoroughly nasty individuals. Realising that and reacting to it are nothing to do with sexual chemistry, just good character judgement. If I was hateful towards him, it’s only because he deserved it, not because I wanted to mount him. Sometimes, it would seem, my therapist gets it very wrong.

The thought of tonight’s dinner party flicks at my nerves with vicious fingers … I sigh and look at my list of things to do. A batch of silk Japanese bondage underwear was supposed to arrive two days ago, but hasn’t. I have spoken with the manufacturers in Turkey this morning, and they assured me it was shipped from Adana as usual and on time. Which means they have either been stolen by kinky pirates, or they are stuck in Customs. My instincts tell me that it is the latter, as much fun as the kinky pirate story sounds. Everything is always getting stuck in Customs, and with it the promise of yet another painful telephone conversation. ‘Have painful telephone conversation with Customs’ is actually the first thing on my to-do list.

Number two on my list is ‘Call Adrian, see if he is backing out of tonight.’

I check my phone for texts from Adrian. There aren’t any. As there weren’t five minutes ago, or half an hour ago. If I get a text, I will be alerted to it by the glorious little noise my phone makes when somebody has bothered to type in possibly four words, and send them to me. But I have no texts right now, I haven’t missed the noise, it didn’t just forget to bleep this time. I don’t hate the noise, I love it; it is the sound of a tiny starburst, or a fairy wand, or a sweep of delight. It is a beautiful jingle, full of hope and excitement, and when I hear it, my belly fills with a tiny fizzing of expectation. Until I click the buttons to unlock my phone and realise the text is from my mother, telling me about her flowerbeds, and spelling ‘great’, ‘gr8’. Or from my osteopath, reminding me about another fifty-pound appointment I have made to get my pelvis realigned. The only texts I want now are from Adrian. It’s that moment, when his name pops up on my phone, before I read what he has to say, that I could bottle and live on for ever. It’s the possibility, it could be anything: he could say anything! One of these days one of his texts may even leave me feeling as good after I’ve read it as I did when it first arrived. One of these days one of his texts might even deserve my excitement. The fact that he rarely actually calls me, so rarely that his voice down a phone line still surprises me a little when I hear it, doesn’t matter that much either.

I look at the third and final entry on my to-do list.

It reads simply, ‘Finish up notes.’ For my talk. My sex talk. To the children of La Sainte Union Convent, Sutton. I have been asked to spend an hour with 10B, by their teacher, Mr Taggart, who called me last week. He is their form tutor. He is three years younger than I am. When he said he was
a teacher I thought he was lying, because he sounded like a teenager, so I asked him how old he was, and he said, ‘Twenty-five,’ a little defensively.

And twenty-five sounded like a lifetime ago. A world away from twenty-eight. A lot has happened to me since then.

He called me on my work line, and initially, of course, I thought he was some schoolboy, giggling with his mates, with his hand over the receiver, phoning up to say the word ‘dildo’ to a woman and then slam the phone down in hysterics.

‘I got your website information from my flatmate,’ he said. He sounded arrogantly nervous, in the way that very bright people can. The ones who are almost too bright. Who skipped a social gene and got an extra brainy one for good measure.

‘OK …’

‘I teach maths and physics, and sometimes geography as well, at La Sainte Union Convent in Sutton – maybe you know it?’ His voice had broken twice in that one sentence, once as he said the word ‘geography’, and again when he said ‘maybe’. I wondered if he was picturing a dominatrix on the end of the line, glistening in leather, with bright red pasted lips the colour of tomato purée, and stilettos so pointed and high they would leave pinpricks in the pavement as I walked. The truth, of course, was yellow golf socks, purple running shorts and a big red jumper, no make-up, but a face shiny with moisturiser and tea tree oil. I didn’t tell him that.

‘OK …’ I said again, about to tell him this wasn’t one of ‘those lines’ – a ‘chat’ line.’

‘My form class, 10B, are fifteen-year-old girls, and part of my remit, as their tutor, and deputy head of year, actually, is sex education.’ He hadn’t quite coughed, but only because
he had fought it. He had not been comfortable saying that word. Saying ‘sex’. ‘And I want to do something a little different, you know; it’s the twenty-first century, for Christ’s sake! I’m not just going to show them the bloody tampon diagrams and talk to them about the Pill. They’ll think I’m a twat.’

‘OK …’ I was starting to get the gist of it. He wanted to be the fun teacher. He was still a student himself, in his mind, still living with his mates, still fresh out of university. He still thought it acceptable to use the word ‘twat’ in what some would say was a professional call. He wanted to show them that sex could be fun. He wanted to share his idealism, really teach, you know? Really teach! He still wanted to change the world, or help the world, or mould the world, or mould Sutton at least.

‘Do you want me to send you some stuff through? Have you seen anything in particular on the site?’ I said.

‘Not exactly … I’m sorry I didn’t catch you name,’ he said.

‘Sunny Weston.’

‘Sunny?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re speaking to Rob. Rob Taggart.’ His name, when he announced it, was seeped in confidence, unlike every other word he had said. Some of what he was made him proud at least. The Dungeons and Dragons of ten years previously were almost forgotten. Very few teenage geeks grow up to be mature geeks. In adulthood, everybody seems to merge. Mostly, people find themselves and they settle. The harsh category system of schooldays is quickly forgotten once wives and kids and friends and holidays and jobs and promotions and company cars and ski lodges come along.

‘Hi, Rob. What is it that you need exactly?’ I said.

‘Well, firstly I hoped that I could speak to somebody
in acquisitions, I guess … the person who sources the products.’

‘That would be me. I run and manage the site myself.’

‘You do?’ He sounded surprised, like my Uncle Humphrey had been. But, of course, Rob Taggart didn’t know me, hadn’t known me all of my life. He didn’t and wasn’t commenting on me. I was a one-man band, that is all that surprised him.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s wonderful. Here is what I was hoping – you buy all these sex toys, you know what’s available for girls, women, these days. And if we are ever going to tackle teenage pregnancy, you know, we need to meet it head on. It’s no good burying our heads in the fucking sand, is it?’

‘Hell no!’ I couldn’t help but be a little taken aback by Mr Taggart of 10B. Passion is so rare these days, that when you experience it first-hand your impulse is to smirk and snigger. But Rob firmly believed he might make a difference, might stop the unlucky slut of 10B getting knocked up at fifteen if I showed her a Rampant Rabbit or a Two-Fingered Fondler. If I chose instead to point out that losing her virginity to an eighteen-year-old boy with a souped-up Fiesta and a wicked stereo system is all that really mattered to young Denise, or Rebecca, or Samantha from 10B, I might dampen his ardour, and I desperately didn’t want to do that. If I had said, ‘Rob, it’s not about an orgasm, at fifteen, it’s about the not-quite-concealed lovebites on your neck,’ I may have dented his dreams. And I have realised that naïvety can be a beautiful blessing. I feel it burn the palms of my hands as it is ripped away from me daily. And I am not going to be responsible for ripping it from Rob’s hands.

‘So, you want me to send you some stuff?’ I ventured.

‘No, not me! I mean, you have to be careful. I can’t be seen to be … I mean these girls aren’t kids … no. I meant
for you to come and talk to them, show them some stuff.’

‘What … like … ?’ I waited for him to fill in the blank. Did he just mean sexy underwear? Or porn? Or handcuffs? Or a strap-on?

‘You know! Dildos … vibrators … sex aids … you know, the lot …’ Mr Taggart’s voice trailed off slightly.

I wanted to reach out and hug him, and whisper in his ear, ‘Don’t feel bad! You don’t have to know! Why would you know? You could just be really good at loving sex. You might not need the “let’s keep it interesting” toys! Of course you aren’t, but I don’t necessarily know that! Of course I do, but I might not! Don’t feel so bad!’

But what I had actually said was, ‘So you want me to come in, to your classroom, and talk to the girls about the sex aids that I sell on the site?’

‘Exactly. Can you do an hour two weeks on Monday at one fifteen?’

‘Goodness, that’s specific! I think so … I guess, but what do you want me to say?’

‘Just tell them how they work, how fucking great it is to have an orgasm!’ he laughed.

I laughed, I felt so horribly awkward, that he must have felt it too.

‘Rob, one other thing. Will you be buying the stuff I bring along? I mean, will there actually be any sales in it … for me?’

‘Oh …’ He sounded deflated. Talk of cold hard cash dirtied his idealism, but I am a business woman …

‘I could bring some catalogues for the staffroom perhaps? And maybe you could let the girls know to bring some cash with them, in case they want to buy any of the stock?’ I helped him out.

‘Yes, let’s do that. I can’t guarantee any sales, of course, but I’m sure they’ll be well up for it!’

‘I’m sure they will. OK. Can I take your number, Rob?’

‘Oh … OK, yeah, why not?’

‘In case anything comes up, and I can’t make it …’

‘Oh, right, I see. Of course.’ His voice had broken again, for the tenth or eleventh time in the conversation.

‘Or you could just drop me an email, through the site, with the details?’

‘It’s fine, take my number,’ Rob said.

‘No, actually it’s probably best if you email it, so I don’t misplace it.’ We both backed away at speed from the implication.

And I had received an email that afternoon, signed ‘Mr Taggart’. Maybe Rob thinks of everybody as his students. Maybe Rob thinks he has a little something to teach us all.

I rifle through my bag now and pull out a couple of sheets of paper full of crossings-out and doodles. I don’t know what I’m going to say to 10B, apart from not allowing any questions about actual sex. Or sexual positions. Or anything. Just no questions. My phone vibrates, and starts to ring. I pick it up and see Adrian’s name, and I get a tingle that feels like the time I covered my belly in six electro-pads, hoping they’d give me a six-pack, despite having twice as much body fat as I should have had at the time. Optimism and desperation can often be confused.

‘Hello, handsome,’ I answer my phone.

‘Hey, you all right?’ Adrian’s voice is so distinctive. It is a northern drawl. No, it’s more than that: if I am honest he always sounds drunk. Not hammered, just a bit pissed. The wrong side of three pints. I have only noticed it recently, and now I can’t get it out of my head.

‘Yeah, I’m fine. Just having a coffee, doing some paperwork. You?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine. Look, I need to talk to you, Sunny.’

‘You aren’t coming tonight?’

‘What?’

‘The dinner party – you aren’t coming. But you said you’d come, Adrian, and now I have nobody else to take – it’s fine, of course, but you should have just given me more notice … for God’s sake …’ My words are getting faster, and I can feel the tears in my eyes, and he must be able to hear them in my throat. And of course I’ve said ‘it’s fine’, which is the biggest most obvious most frequent lie of them all. If you say ‘it’s fine’, it is never fine. Fine should come out of the dictionary, so we are forced to search around for alternative words, and maybe even say what we mean.