Читать книгу Half Past Dead - Jane Clifton - Страница 8

MARTINI for me thanks,' Ronnie said and wondered why. She wasn't a spirits drinker these days; ordering a martini was a throwback to her twenties.

The crush-as-appetite-suppressor had kicked in soon after Lawrence had said the words 'Welcome back' that morning, so the gin hit her stomach like a ton of bricks, with only a stuffed olive to cushion the blow.

The Empire in Albert Park was a regular watering-hole for Arthouse Studios' South Melbourne-based staff. Once a notorious hangout for wharfies and small-time crims, the old pub had undergone a renaissance in the early nineties which saw so many interior walls removed it was a wonder the entire building didn't cave in. Its maroon-tiled exterior had been stripped away and replaced with glass windows. The warren of bars was rationalised into one vast room with a central bar at which you could barfly on a stool or from which you could transport your drinks and colonise one of the many circular tables, sprawl youthfully at floor level in a nook of pouffes, or even play sardines in one of the vinyl-upholstered booths that lined the walls.

On weekends The Empire was a crush of white jeans, halter tops, fake tan, big earrings, six-packed T-shirts, Ray-Bans, vodka and Stella Artois. But at 7.30 on a hot Monday night in January people were still at the beach and the place was reasonably quiet.

By the end of her second 007 Deluxe the room started to swim a little and Ronnie, both shaken and stirred, moved on to the next course: chardonnay and crisps.

What did they talk about? She had no idea. Lawrence was describing his time in South-East Asia: Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Malaysia, even a stint in the Philippines. Then something about working for the Australian furniture chain Angstrom Inc. that she had trouble following. It sounded as if he was trying to explain what he was doing in the employ of a textile design company, why he was so qualified and why Ronnie should be wary of the head of 2-SWAN, Ching Lee.

Did Ronnie care? Not in the slightest. Lawrence could have been explaining the Westminster bicameral system of government for all she cared.

He was so close and, as The Empire began to fill, the crowd noise and the music made it necessary to speak directly into each other's ears. Every breath in her ear evoking a longing for aural intercourse between the lips and the tongue and the lughole, every look and casual touch leaving napalm trails of desire along her skin. Her heart was pumped up, pushing her breasts out and upwards towards flinty nipples, with fairylights flashing at the peaks. She shifted on her stool, straining towards him.

Each time her shallow breathing allowed her to speak he would look at her mouth, then up to her eyes, then his gaze would drift downwards, sweeping her like spotlights mounted on a prison wall from which there was no escape.

To a soundtrack of sixties soul ballads, everything became velvet and honey. The smoky air, the bar, the glass containing the third and fatal chardonnay, his cheek lingering against hers and then his mouth moving towards her lips. Ronnie had fallen into his face as if her whole life had been moving towards that one point. Towards that kiss. That one kiss. That long, tender, orgasmic kiss. She let it happen. It was done. Her cards were on the table.

She could feel the graze of new beard pushing through his luscious skin, smell the tang of his sweat. 'I love you very much you know,' she whispered.

He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her to face him. For a few seconds he just looked at her. Then, he touched her face with the palm of his hand, let it slide downward tracing a line with his forefinger along her throat, slithering beneath her gold charm necklace, toying with the tiny pyramids and palm trees.

A burst of high-pitched laughter erupted from a few feet away as The B-52's 'Love Shack' came blasting through the sound system and within seconds everyone was singing along and air-punching.

'Let's get out of here,' he said as he kissed her ear. 'My place is just around the corner. I'll fix you a coffee and you can maybe call a cab.'

She looked straight at him and he looked back. There was no mistaking what was happening. This was the point at which she could have, should have said, 'No, it's okay, there's a rank on the corner.' But she didn't.

They plunged into the night outside, fast-forward, hand-held camera - unsteady-cam. Foot in front of foot through the sticky night. Arm in arm across the tramlined street, stopping every now and then to lock torsos. His key turning. Short, sharp kisses, a hand on her breast. A long arm pulling her long arm down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, into a room where she steadied against the door.

Then, as she watched him sitting on the end of a bed, taking off his shoes, his head bent to the task, Ronnie began to unravel.

What did she think she was doing? Had she gone mad? She realised with a sickening jolt that she was about to have sex with a man who was not her husband. She wasn't just going to have a quick pash: she was about to commit adultery! Yes, mother, the seventh commandment!

In the fractured light of the street lamp shining through the cracks in the blind, Ronnie watched as Lawrence smoothed the bed a little and continued removing his clothes, without a glance in her direction. She saw him stand and walk to the bedside table, pull open the drawer and take something out, his back towards her.

She wanted to run from the room, screaming, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I've made a terrible mistake!' But she was paralysed somehow; paralytic, in fact.

There she was, in the bedroom of a man whom, Ronnie suddenly realised, she didn't know all that well. A man she had just kissed in a bar and professed her love to, a man to whom she had given every indication of availability and interest, a man who was, right now, standing naked in front of her, vinyl-sheathed and ready to take up the offer.

Was it just the light or did his shoulders slope more than she had been aware? And were they covered in fine, soft, curly hair? As was his chest and, she somehow knew, his back.

Black hair. He was not a natural blond. (Faith would have a field day with this!)

She'd never noticed any black roots! He must have bleached the regrowth every week! What kind of a man spends that amount of time at the hairdresser? There must have been times when some tell-tale hairs had pushed through the fibres of his shirt or fell out of his cuff or peeped out at the top of his tie? Why hadn't she noticed? Women notice those things! What kind of a man is so alienated from his black furry self?

It was strangely unsettling. What did it matter what colour his hair was? It wasn't simply because she didn't like hairy-chested men with weak, sloping shoulders; it was that she had spent the last two or three months having a fantasy relationship with a blond man with broad shoulders.

She'd been shafted! The man standing in front of her was an impostor!

And hung, furthermore, like a Mapplethorpe. Jokes about babies' arms and elephant trunks rolled helplessly around the floor of her gin-soaked brain.

Had she fantasised about him naked at all? She must have done but, for the life of her, she couldn't remember. The odd naked arm might have strayed into the picture a couple of times, but not the full torso festooned, as this one was, with nests of armpit hair, alongside pectorals barely visible through the early-primate-style coverage. All her fantasy scenarios had been romantic rather than hardcore, Erica Jong-style zipless-fuck mode. They had been all head and shoulders, with kissing and soft words and the touch of a hand and a warm embrace - like some 1950s doo-wop love song. All the ingredients that were missing from her long-term relationship with Boyd.

Whether her fantasy had been sexual or not, however, was immaterial at this point, because the fantasy object had evaporated. Cold, motherless reality was now staring Ronnie in the face.

Not so much staring, as looking at her quizzically, almost impatiently. She realised that she was still dressed and rooted to the spot. A nervous giggle escaped her lips at that particular pun as he continued to stare. You're on your own now kiddo, she thought, as her clumsy fingers struggled with the buttons of her blouse, and all desire seemed to drain from her as if someone had pulled out a plug.

He slid the blouse from her shoulders and cupped her breasts as her bra fell away. Exploring her throat and the back of her neck with his lips, using his tongue to switch on long-forgotten erogenous zones, his hands ran the length of her arms and locked fingers with hers as their bodies connected; soft skin to fur coat. Kneeling in front of her he eased her skirt down, caressing her thighs, encountering no resistance as he slid down her panties, kissing her belly, her hips, his hands running circles round her buttocks; his mouth was everywhere.

Ronnie stood in front of him on a little pile of her own clothes, a bare-arsed, married mother-of-one, golden brown all over except for the ghostly flesh in the shape of a swimsuit, with a puckered navel and a belly full of acid. There she stood, in front of the naked ape.

It was too late for a polite refusal. Or a headache, or a bout of tiredness, or anxiety brought on by belated marital guilt. Too late even for a declaration of herpes.

She had fucked up.

She was shepherded without further ado to the turned-down bed and pressed gently but firmly onto her back. Every girl's putative dream - the moot point of all feminine desire - was suddenly looming with intent between her thighs: the man was on a missionary.

During the four and a half minutes which ensued, between entry and exit to the giggle palace of love, several strange things occurred; stranger even than making love to a donkey. Incapable of either closing her eyes or of concentrating on the floral design of the pressed metal ceiling in order to file it away for future use, Ronnie tried to imagine what the ancient Greeks would have made of this encounter.

Would fair Kylie Mairassass of Tzatsikia have convinced herself - once her Adonis had un-toga'd and proved to be more hirsute than the rear end of a satyr - that her lover was none other than that naughty old polygamist, party animal and omnipotent Olympian, Zeus, disguised as livestock? At this revelation would her fellow Tzatsikians have cried out as one 'All hail the beef'?

While her mind swirled with Doric columns, serpentine dreadlocks and swansdown, Lawrence told her, not once, but several times and in a monotone, that he loved her and that they would be together For Ever: an announcement which came as a bit of shock to Ronnie who had just that minute made up her mind to make her mother eternally happy by entering a convent.

Another strange thing was that the minute they hit the mattress he never laid a hand on her. His palms remained planted on either side of her shoulders, feverishly massaging the manchester. His mouth, however, before and after his professions of undying and eternal love, clamped itself over hers, not so much kissing but rather what the boys of her youth had so aptly described as 'sucking face'.

Sounds emitted from his throat as the moment of shuddering (his), body-wracking (his) climax approached. Was he moaning with pleasure, Ronnie wondered, or crying? Please, she prayed, don't let him be dry-retching. Mercifully, he rolled off and away from her without so much as a 'thank-you mam' to, as they say in downtown LA, 'assume the position': the foetal position.

Ronnie gazed at the corpse of her fantasy inert beside her, breathing peacefully and resisted the urge to stroke its fur for fear of waking the beast and inviting a repeat performance. She lay as still as possible, waiting for the moment when she felt safe enough to get out of there. To go home.

Within minutes, however, overcome with alcohol and passion well and truly requited, she was comatose.

By the time she surfaced the following morning the sun was well and truly up, magnifying the funky air in Lawrence's upstairs bedroom. Ronnie guessed it must be after eight. Time to get out before he reappeared with an engagement ring and a slab of condoms. Her pile of clothes were where she had shed them the night before, on the perimeter of the field of shoes. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up.

A big mistake.

The movement was too sudden. A cold clammy hand of nausea gripped the back of her neck while burning fingers of pain scorched her forehead. Together they shook her skull until the contents throbbed. At the same time she became aware of a fire between her legs, not the flames of passion, however, merely the smoking remains. The pain made her gasp and she put a protective hand there, expecting to find blood. There was none but she felt sore.

She walked unsteadily to her clothes, as nausea used her stomach as a skipping rope. The woman who had put these clothes on a hundred years ago yesterday morning was a stranger to her. These were expensive, tasteful, business clothes. A beige, sleeveless cotton blouse with a V-neck and large plain buttons down the front, a matching, long, loose linen skirt and low-heeled summer sandals. The kind of clothes a responsible, grown-up woman with a future wears to work.

The woman stepping into them this morning should have been squeezing into leopard-skin tights, a pink satin bustier, white patent-leather pixie boots and a fringed denim jacket, all while lighting a fag and chewing gum.

Ronnie dressed as quickly as her throbbing head would allow. Her clothes smelled of stale sweat and smoke. There was no mirror in the room, no way of assessing what she looked like (as opposed to what she felt like). She needed to drink several litres of water and to find a toilet. Kitchen, bathroom... Was Lawrence still in the building or had he dashed out to buy papers and coffee for the new love of his life? Did he live alone? Maybe someone was using the shower at this very moment, or making breakfast in the kitchen? There was only one way to find out. She took a deep breath and opened the door.

She was at the top of a narrow flight of stairs facing an identical door across a small landing. There was no handrail to steady her descent and no carpet to cushion her step. At the foot of the stairs she looked to the left, not really knowing how the house lay in relation to the street, and then to the right. Red and green stained-glass panels framed the front door, and in the short distance between it and where Ronnie stood lay the body of Lawrence Konitz.