Utterly Monkey (19 page)

‘Do you want to stay?’

‘Have a sleepover?’ she asked, wide-eyed, all lashes.

‘Yeah. With a movie and jellybeans.’

‘Okay. But I get to sleep on
this
side.’ She walked over and sat down on the left of the bed.

‘Fair enough. Though that’s also my favourite side.’

They propped the pillows up against the headboard (Danny found two more in the wardrobe) and flicked through the channels. The fact they were both still fully clothed made Ellen’s feet seem even more brazenly naked. He had to make a move. His mouth tasted cigarette-coppery, though he’d only smoked three or four, and he was exhausted. When he lay down on his back at first
he thought he was about to lose it–everything swam–but then his focus returned. Ellen was facing forwards, intently watching the television. It was a late-night dating show: some girl who was all teeth was insulting some guy who was all nose. Using the remote on his bedside table, Danny turned the TV off without warning. She looked over at him. He leant forward and half-twisted round towards her, as if waiting for her to adjust the pillows behind him, and she stared blankly into his eyes, not receptive, not aggressive. She smelt of cocoa butter.

‘Your eyes are the most beautiful blue.’ She said it like she was confirming someone else’s opinion.

‘Yours aren’t so bad either,’ Danny said, and she closed hers, granting permission. He leaned a little closer and could feel the breath from her nostrils tickle his own nose. As their lips were about to touch she opened her eyelids again, to check, presumably, that he hadn’t disappeared. Her lashes brushed against his cheekbone.

‘That’s a butterfly kiss.’ She’d pulled away.

‘What is?’

‘
That
was, when my eyelashes touched your face, that’s a butterfly kiss.’

She was nervous Danny thought. But she didn’t seem nervous.

‘It was very nice.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what’s this?’ He kissed her on the lips, gently, chastely. She was completely still. He could hear someone running a bath in the room next door.

‘That was an orthodox kiss.’

‘Really? Greek?’

‘I think Russian.’ She smirked.

‘And this?’ He leant forward and placed one hand on her cheek, tilting her face up to his, and then moved closer, as if to kiss her again, but at the last moment rubbed his nose against hers.

‘I believe that one’s the famous Eskimo kiss,’ she whispered. Her breath was wine and jellybeans.

‘Bang on,’ Danny whispered back. Their noses were still touching.

‘Well what about this?’

He kissed the side of her throat and she moved her head back slightly, giving the faintest sigh, so he ran his tongue along her neck and, thumbing back the collar of her black shirt, tenderly bit the top of her shoulder. His legs were starting to cramp.

‘I think that’s nameless at the minute. I think you just made it up.’

‘Possibly.’ Danny’s tone was abstracted. He moved his hand down to the hollow of her waist and held it. It was hard and much smaller than he’d thought. He briefly considered whether he could enclose it in both hands but moved his fingers back up to her neck, brushing them against her left breast. He felt a stirring in his cock, its yawn and its stretch.

‘Hold on,’ Ellen said, and was up on her feet. She turned the lights off and yanked open the curtains, converting the room to a grey doughy world, moonless, and miles above the hellfire of the street’s sulphurous lights.

‘That’s better.’

Danny lay down on his back and Ellen curled around him. He felt her breasts on his chest and her thigh against his. He turned over so they were facing each other, with their heads on the same pillow, and kissed her, full on
the mouth. She smiled an enormous, shameless grin so he winked and kissed her again, edging his tongue in between her lips until it touched hers rising to meet it. Danny felt his cock pressing against his thigh, strapped in by his boxer shorts. He reached down and adjusted it, then undid a button of Ellen’s shirt. She was wearing a black lace bra. He licked the dark cleft formed by her breasts and brushed the strap from her shoulder.

‘You are incredibly beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’ Her voice was equally abstracted now, fading quickly into the physical. Danny kissed the small soft button of her nipple until it hardened and then gently took as much of her left breast in his mouth as he could. They were solid, pure creations of flesh, not those filmy breasts that are intangibly soft, that slip from under the touch.

‘Shall we take off our clothes and get into bed?’

‘Okay.’ Ellen’s eyes were facing the window and catching the only available light. They looked huge, and vaguely troubled.

‘We don’t have to, you know. I just thought…we have these lovely clean sheets…’

‘And you thought we should dirty them?’

‘No, not that. But clean sheets on the skin. It’s a hard one to beat. I need to nip to the loo.’

When Danny came out of the bathroom she was in bed, sitting up, with the covers pulled comically up to her nose. Her clothes were tidily folded on the chair by the window.

‘Hello,’ Danny said. He was wearing his grey Calvin Klein boxers, and had rearranged his cock again so it was held down against his right thigh. A penny of wetness
darkened the crotch and he felt awkward, exposed in the bare light of the bathroom. He turned it off.

‘Hello.’ Ellen brought the covers down to her shoulders.

‘You are
fucking
gorgeous.’ The swearword sounded wrong, ungracious and almost angry. He tried again, ‘I think you’re the most gorgeous girl that I’ve seen.’

‘Hmpf…’

‘Hmpf?’ He had reached his side of the bed but the sheets were tucked in under the mattress. He tugged at them awkwardly.

‘You can manage it.’

‘I can.’

They were in bed, they were kissing. She kissed the raised bump of his cheek and black eye. He kept touching her face like a man feigning blindness. Then he couldn’t stop licking and sucking her breasts. The sensation of holding her waist and kissing them became an imperative, an animal pressure, and the singularity of his ardour seemed to cause her to tense up. She set her fingertips gently on his cheek and pushed his head up to her lips. The sheets came off the bed. Danny felt as if he was grazing on her. She was lying on her back, and he was above her. He moved down the bed, kissing her breasts and mahogany stomach and the hair of her mound. He wet his lips and kissed again, pushing his tongue further down.

‘What are you doing?’ Ellen asked suddenly, in a calm but loaded voice. Danny looked up the length of her. Her breasts lying lazy and full, her eyes on him.

‘I’m going down on you.’ Danny kissed her belly button lightly. It was like an eyelid, tightly shut.

‘Don’t do that…Why are you doing that?’

‘I want to.’ She was silent.

‘Just for one minute. If you don’t like it, I’ll stop.’

‘I feel a bit naked or something.’

Danny pulled the covers back up off the ground and over them. In his little tent he moved her legs apart and knelt in between them. Stroking her stomach with the tip of one finger, he leant down to kiss between her legs. She was already wet. He began to kiss the tiny part of her, and to work his tongue around it in wider and smaller circles. Eventually he took it all in his mouth and began to suck it. He pushed both his hands down under her smooth round ass. The sheet was coming off them again and he could hear her breathing. He lifted her up, into his mouth, her thighs pressing against his shoulders, and started, gently, to rock back and forwards. She pulled a pillow over her face. He worked his middle finger in until it touched the soft knot of her ass. Immediately she squirmed up off him.

‘Oi, don’t do that.’

‘Sorry, sorry.’ He readjusted and went back to kissing between her legs but Ellen gave a different kind of sigh. A pissed-off you’ve-spoilt-the-moment sigh. ‘Sorry,’ he said, lamely, again.

‘Just come here.’

Danny moved up the bed on all fours. He felt he was prowling suddenly, some big cat. He arched his back and purred. Ellen laughed.

‘Come
here
.’ She pulled him down to her. ‘Your face stinks of me.’

‘I know. It’s lovely.’

‘I’m not kissing you.’ She licked the side of his neck
and Danny realized his cock was pressing into her groove. Ellen felt it. Danny pushed very slightly, experimentally.

‘Gentle.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Stop saying sorry.’

‘Je suis désolée.’

‘Go slowly.’

They were both breathing rawly and she made little whimpers when he pushed too hard. He had to place his hands under her shoulders to stop her sliding up from under him.

‘Am I hurting you?’

‘A little. Slow down a bit.’

I can’t
go
any slower, Danny was thinking, but said, ‘Do you want me to stop?’

‘Have you got a condom?’

‘Yes, somewhere. Shit, hold on.’

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Danny jumped up and walked into the bathroom. He turned on the light over the mirror and pulled out the packet of condoms in his washbag. He grabbed one and returned to the bedroom, ripping open its blue foil cover. Ellen was watching him, grinning.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘No, you’re right. Stupid of me.’

He kneeled on the bed beside her and put it on. She pulled him back down to her and said, ‘Now, where were we?’

‘Here. I think we were just here.’

‘Are you all in?’

‘Nearly.’

Danny tried to hold on. Their eyes kept meeting and
making a channel between them, a rushing of something like wonder. Her almond gaze. There was nothing left to protect or defend. Danny tried to hold on. He moved his right hand from under her shoulder to her breast and cupped it, kissing the nipple. He had suddenly misjudged it, whimpered, and came. She dragged a nail up his spine and he shivered, rested on his elbows and grinned at her. She grinned back. Danny couldn’t remember smiling as much in bed before.

‘You’re lovely,’ he said, and kissed her nose.

‘No,
you’re
lovely,’ she said, and lifted one hand to smooth down her hair.

Danny was lying behind her, one arm under her waist, his hand cupping her breast, and the other wrapped round her stomach. Her breathing was shallow: she wasn’t asleep. He was half dreaming, a voice in his head idiotically repeating
my blackamoor, my paramour
over and over when Ellen suddenly spoke.

‘It was Adam Vyse.’

There was a pause before Danny pulled back into himself.

‘
Who
was Adam Vyse?’

‘The guy I was seeing.’

Silence. Danny dragged his arm out from under her and slid across the bed. She turned over, onto her back.

‘You have got to be fucking kidding me.’

There was more silence. It settled on the room like snow. The bed was Antarctica, white and vast and desperately cold. Danny lay motionless. Then the ludicrous sounds of lovemaking, from next door, or above them perhaps, started up. A headboard mockingly banged on a wall.

‘Please tell me that’s a fucking joke.’

‘I wanted to tell you…I don’t know why I told you.’

Danny lay there, listening to someone else fucking within a few feet of them. He imagined a room identical to theirs but the bed was spotlit, raised like a stage and contained the robust and grotesque coupling of Ellen and Vyse. His trim body and fatuous grin and old hands all over her skin. Danny scrambled up from the bed and tried to turn on the bedside lamp but the bulb had gone.

‘I can’t believe this.’

He crossed the room and flicked on the main light. Ellen turned back to face the wall, the covers pulled up to her neck.

‘Put the light off.’ She was irritated and sad. He wheeled the padded seat by the desk round to face the bed accusingly and sat in it. Placing his elbows on his knees, he put his hands over his eyes. He could have been a man who can’t bear to watch the penalty shoot-out, were he not completely naked.

‘We have to talk. I can’t believe what you just told me. He’s at least fifty for fuck’s sake. You
fucked
Adam Vyse. Jesus Christ, Ellen.’

‘He’s forty-four. Danny, don’t talk to me like that. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about it.’

‘I know he’s got three kids and a wife. I know he’s a senior partner. I know you fucked him.’ Suddenly, out of the absolute blue, Danny started to sob. Ellen sat up, hugging a pillow. She stared at him, horrified to have caused his tears.

‘Danny, it was a mistake. I worked on something for him with Mark.’ She’d sat in Corporate with Mark Jefferson, an insolvency lawyer. ‘And then after the case ended the
whole team went out for dinner. Everybody got drunk. We ended up getting a taxi…’

Danny interrupted, ‘Jesus, Ellen, spare me the
fucking
details. I want you to go. Can you go? I want you to go now. I want you to get out.’

He was shouting. He knew he was being unfair and overreacting but the thought of her with Vyse just ruined everything. He went into the bathroom and leant against the sink. He could hear Ellen crying now as well, and the sounds of her dressing, the rustle of her jeans being pulled on, their zip, and then the door closing firmly behind her.

Ronnie had got her niece drunk. They’d gone through to the kitchen at the back of the house, keeping all of the lights at the front off. After unscrolling the blind, Ronnie turned on the telly and got out three wineglasses, the corkscrew and a bag of crisps the size of a cushion. She was always like this, as if she’d been expecting you, and when you turned up out of the blue, you’d actually arrived precisely on time. They sat round the table and her mum explained it: how Jan was to stay for the night, how they were to pretend not to be in if Budgie called round, and how sorry they were, how tired they felt, how awful it was to have a son who behaved like an animal. Mrs Johnson left after the first bottle of Hungarian Cab Sauv and after Janice and Ronnie had finished the second, the two of them moved on to tumblers of vodka and orange juice before stumbling off to their beds. Ronnie
slept at the front of the house and Janice had the single bed in the small yellow room at the back. Fat Andy and Ronnie had earmarked that room for a nursery just after they married and moved here, ten years ago back before what Ronnie called
their disappointment
. The canary yellow of the walls was now faded out to a dull jaundice. Ronnie was barren. People never used that word any more.

Janice slept but was woken at 2.32 a.m. by her mobile ringing. The time was displayed on its face, flashing above HOME, the code word for her mum’s raspy whisper.

‘Jan, Budgie’s been back and he’s gone off to find you. I said you’d left but there was no talking to him and he broke one of the kitchen chairs, the one with the wicker seat. He kicked the leg clean off it.’ Her mum started coughing. Jan waited until she swallowed the phlegm.

‘Are you two all right? Is ’Landra all right?’

‘Your dad’s at the end of his tether. Malandra’s crying in the bathroom. Make sure you tell Ronnie not to turn the lights on if the doorbell goes.’

Janice, in a purple T-shirt and a pair of navy boxer shorts, knocked gently on Ronnie’s bedroom door. No response. She pushed it open and for a second watched the breathing heap of her aunt in the duvet, the lump’s tiny bloat and contraction. Janice was thinking how vulnerable everyone was when they slept.

‘Ronnie…’ She moved across to the bed and pushed at the bulge. A groan whistled from it and then Ronnie sat up, very quickly, and took hold of Janice’s forearm.

‘Whass wrong? What is it?’

‘Nothing, nothing, but Mum rang. Budgie might be on his…’

Comedically on cue, there was a banging on the front
door. Ronnie’s hand tightened its grip on Janice’s arm and she whispered, ‘Juss keep quiet.’ Ronnie pulled back the duvet and slid across the bed so Janice slipped in beside her and they sat against the headboard, listening and waiting. The banging started again, insistent, malignant. Each bang echoed up through the tinny hall. If he thumped it much harder the door would go in.

‘JAN.’

‘JAN.’

‘JAN.’

Budgie was walking around the front of the garden. They heard him scoop up a handful of gravel, cursing, and throw it at Ronnie’s bedroom window. The stones smacked and grazed the windowpane, skittering off. Ronnie whispered again, ‘If he puts that window in Andy’ll go through him. They’re only redone the year before last.’

Janice couldn’t imagine Fat Andy, Sweet FA as Chicken called him, going through anyone, particularly Budgie, unless perhaps he sat on him, or suckled him to death.

‘JAN.’

‘JAN, I KNOW YOU’RE FUCKING IN THERE. COME BACK TO THE HOUSE. I’M SORRY. ALL RIGHT? YOU CAN’T GO TO ENGLAND.’

So he’d reached the stage of apologizing, of trying to make good the damage. This always happened with Budgie. Janice didn’t know which was worse: the lunatic anger or the childish attempts to curry favour. Ronnie’s bony hand was still squeezing hers, as if to say
Don’t worry, we’re safe
. Janice didn’t feel worried though, not really, just a little tired and abstractedly interested like she was watching all this on TV. She was still a little drunk. Budgie had picked up more gravel and was now pinging
single stones at the bedroom window. One tapped on the brickwork, another off the wooden frame, and a third plinked the higher register of the glass pane. The room was dark but ribbed by the streetlight that sliced through the Venetian blinds. Janice watched a fly come loose from a pattern on the wallpaper. It buzzed around restlessly, incredibly loudly, and then re-attached itself to the chest of drawers. Budgie was banging the front door again.

‘JAN.’

‘JAN.’

The pixel of the fly flicked off the drawers to the deep grey screen of the portable telly. Then they heard Mrs MacNeill’s bedroom window open, just to the left of theirs, and her broad, booming voice.

‘GOD’S SAKE WOULD YOU EVER SHUT UP?’

‘Fuck off.’ Budgie’s response was slow and half-hearted: he’d taken too much drink.

‘You shut yer friggin trap Budgie Johnson. I know who you are. You need to push off. Go
on
. I’ll be ringing the police.’ Mrs MacNeill’s tone was almost kind, as if she was saving him and he just didn’t know it.

‘FUCK OFF,’ Budgie tried again, rousing himself, ‘I’LL BREAK YOUR FUCKING WINDAYS.’

‘You do that son, you do that, and I’ll let Gerry use his Christmas present.’ Janice could hear something metal and heavy being banged against a window frame. It had to be an air rifle. Or even a real one.

‘I’m looking for my sister. You seen Janice, or Ronnie?’

‘Just clear off. You have me scunnered. I mean it now. Get away from the house.’

‘I
said
HAVE YOU SEEN
RONNIE
?’ They heard Budgie scoop up more stones from the gravel path.

‘You throw one more stone at that house and Gerry’ll shoot you.’ Mrs MacNeill sounded interested by the prospect of this occurring. There followed a confirmatory tap of gun against wood.

‘Have you seen my
sister
?’ Budgie was almost screaming. In a minute he would either break something or begin crying. They heard his shoes scuffle over the wall: he was in Mrs MacNeill’s garden now, under her window, performing an unlikely serenade.

‘Just tell me and I’ll go. Have you seen Janice? Do you know who I mean?’

‘I do, and I saw her today.’ Janice moved, to get up and cross to the blinds and peer out, but Ronnie touched her arm to hold her back. Mrs MacNeill was talking again.

‘She was walking up the street after finishing work. She works in the chemists, doesn’t she?’ They could have been standing at a bus stop or in a checkout queue, just chatting to pass the time. Ronnie made a face of disbelief at Janice, as if to say this is much too surreal. Someone was giggling. Gerry. Pointing a shotgun.

‘What about Ronnie?’ Budgie sounded despondent.

‘I haven’t seen Ronnie for weeks. I think she went to Tenerife.’ She pronounced it Ten-er-ree-fee. ‘Now you get gone. The boy needs his sleep.’

There was a long pause, and then the bang of a gate. Mrs MacNeill clanked her window shut.

Elsewhere, in London, in the Lord Gregory Hotel on Kilburn High Road, Ian had closed
his
window after listening, at first with interest, and then with mounting despair, to the outdoor symphony of traffic, and the contralto and bari
tone of a drunken street argument, and then to its crescendoed finale: the smashing of several bottles. He was three floors up but the noise was too much for him to sleep. He would rather suffer the slow heat that seemed to build in the room when the window was shut. If only he’d brought earplugs. They should be part of his basic kit. Earlier someone had tried the door handle to his room and it had unnerved him. He’d shouted a deep-voiced
Hello?
but there’d been no reply, even though a minute or so later the handle had been turned again. He hadn’t crossed the room to the door to check the spy hole because the floorboards creaked. You saw people do that in the films and then get shot through the door. Basic mistake. Nothing else had happened for more than an hour but he still felt edgy. He lay naked under the sheet, on his back, and set his stubby hands over his chest, then tensed and relaxed his pectoral muscles. He breathed out through his mouth and in through his nose, slowly. Your standard relaxation procedure. No good. He was bothered by the idea that he wasn’t fully ready for Monday. He had to cover all the bases. He thought of his Auntie Florrie in her Elim Pentecostal home in Larne. How she would feel if…well, it wasn’t worth considering. But he should write her a letter in case something went wrong. He sat up, shifting the ridged plates of his chest and stomach, and turned on the bedside light. Its yellow lampshade threw neatly trimmed shadows on the wall and turned the room a warm sepia. The exercise book would do for paper and he lifted it off the chest of drawers beside the bed. There was a Biro clipped to it. He sat and stared heavily at the pad, before writing, in tiny stabbing movements,
Dear Florence.
He was old enough now not to call her Auntie Florrie.

I hope all is well at Five Oaks. I’m sorry not to have been to see you recently. I have been very busy.
He would have to explain the situation to her.
It is right…
He put a line through that.
It is meet and right…
He didn’t know what that meant really, but it was what they’d said at church. Still he shouldn’t write it if he wasn’t sure what it meant. He put a line through it. Mervyn would be able to explain it better than him. Tomorrow he’d write the whole thing out again neat.
I have done a far far better thing than other people. I tried to protect my birthright and homeland. They have asked us to accept government by terrorists who have not handed in their weapons, not ONE, nor halted their illegal activities.
He crossed out
asked
and wrote
expected
above it.
It is too much to swallow. The only thing left is to play a game they understand.
He crossed out
play
and wrote
beat them at
above it.

Yours sincerely,

Ian

Or maybe this was all too much. What
were
his reasons? He knew all the facts that Mervyn came up with but sometimes it wasn’t a question of reasons. It was the third law of Newton’s they’d learned in Mr Carson’s class.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
If something was pushed in one direction, an equal force in the opposite direction appeared. And the day his dad was killed in front of him–
mowed down
was the phrase the newspapers used, turning his father to grass–he had become the opposite force. It was the way of things. It wasn’t about choice or about reason. The opposite force just appears. He should destroy the letter. He scored lines through it, until he’d forced the point of the Biro
through several pages. Florrie was almost senile anyway. His problem was, he told himself, hyper-alertness. He was trying to make sure every eventuality was prepared for, because that was the key to success. What was Sun Tzu’s line in
The Art of War
?
Appear at places which your enemy is unable to rescue; move swiftly in a direction where you are least expected.
Well, he wasn’t expected by anyone. They’d all be surprised by him. Even Budgie would be fucking surprised.
The enemy must not know where I intend to give battle.
It was a question of adjustment. Ian had realized, had been in fact the only one smart enough to realize, that it made no difference to the English whether the loyalists in Ulster laid down their weapons or not. It made no difference whether they meted out punishment beatings to joyriders or dealers. It didn’t even make much of a difference if they kidnapped the odd Catholic (all Catholics
were
odd, Ian reflexively thought), shot them in the back of the head and dumped their corpse. The English didn’t give a fuck. There was only one way to make a difference to the English, and that was to cost them money.

Sun Tzu talked about it in terms of water. As its flow was shaped in accordance with the ground so an army would manage its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy. And as water has no constant form, so warfare has no constant conditions. You had to melt, flow, and eventually immerse the enemy. Ian was staring at the ceiling. At some point in the past a leak upstairs had created a brown tide line that ran the whole way across it. Absolutely everything was tidal. Sun Tzu believed that of the five elements (Ian tapped his fingers on the slab of his chest as he thought of them–water, fire,
metal, wood and earth), none is always dominant. And he knew that none of the seasons lasts for ever, that some days are long and some are short, that the moon both waxes and wanes. Well, it was time enough, Ian thought, for the wheel to turn. Their day is over and ours has come. He put the light out.

Danny’s telephone rang at 7.30 a.m. He was lying face down on the bed, and wrapped, pupa-style, in the patterned coverlet. He reached out his arm and lifted the mouthpiece, simultaneously croaking
Hello?
The voice was automated, American, and callously cheerful:

‘Good morning. This is your wake-up call.’

Never a truer word, Danny thought, as he lay there and remembered last night. Ellen had
slept
with Adam Vyse. He unwrapped himself from the blanket and showered. He would go down to breakfast and if she was there, he would be civil, non-committal, and wholly uninterested in discussing either last night, or Adam Vyse, or any question relating thereto. They’d have to collect Janice in a couple of hours anyway. Funny how he should be thankful now for having to collect Janice. He just had to make it to Heathrow and then he wouldn’t have to see Ellen ever again. It would be simple enough: he could avoid the canteen and her corridor, and get someone else to help on the case.

He packed with BBC World on the telly. A global terrorism expert was being interviewed. There was terror everywhere now. Danny felt an unkind thought rise in him like bile: now everyone else would know what it felt like–to live with the backdrop of bombings and guns, with murderers sharing your doctors and schools,
your restaurants and surnames. Feeling destructive and sad he decided to walk down the twelve flights to breakfast.