Читать книгу The Girl Who Had No Fear - Marnie Riches, Marnie Riches - Страница 15

‘Oh, you’re not going to start going on about your bloody mother again, are you?’ Van den Bergen asked over dinner. ‘I thought we’d decided she’d done her usual disappearing act because the prospect of playing the second-fiddle mother figure in the drama of someone else’s life didn’t appeal. Isn’t that Letitia all over?’

George eyed her burnt mushroom risotto. It put her in mind of cerebral matter served up in a vintage dish. She put her spoon and fork together and pushed the plate aside. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘I don’t see you for weeks and you’re on my case the minute I set foot through the door. You asked me over, remember?’ Scraping her chair aggressively along the wooden floor, she walked into his kitchen and flung the dish on the side. ‘Not the other way round. And don’t give me that bullshit about you, Marie and Elvis running out of steam, because you’d only just inherited this bloody case. Face it. You’ve just been looking for an excuse to get me over here!’

She was aware of him moving from the dining area towards her. Kept staring at the splashback tiles, waiting to see if he was coming in to offer some placatory gesture or merely gunning for an argument at closer range. When his arms slid around her waist, she smiled. Turned around and craned her neck to look up into that familiar, handsome face. Appraising his large, hooded grey eyes, topped with those dark eyebrows. The sunken furrows either side of his mouth were back now that he had started to return to fitness. His skin, so sallow over the winter months, was now lightly tanned and reflected time spent outdoors.

‘You look well. Being a grandfather agrees with you. Give us a snog, old man,’ she said, smiling as she ran a finger over his stubble. ‘And you’d better grow a goatee or something while I’m here, because I can’t do with scouring my lips off on your five o’clock shadow.’

‘Don’t you like my risotto?’ he asked, kissing her neck gently.

‘You’re a shit cook.’ Stroking the soft navel hair beneath his top, she ran her fingers delicately over the long lump of his scar. ‘But I missed your hot stodge so badly.’ Giggling, George unzipped the fly to Van den Bergen’s work trousers and dropped to her knees. Yanked down his disappointing grey jersey underpants to deal with the contents, which were wholly non-disappointing. Van den Bergen groaned as she took him into her mouth. Brought him almost to the point of no return with a tongue normally sharpened on the egos of Wormwood Scrubs wide boys, overinflated Cambridge Fellows or Peckham’s finest players in their low-rise G Star Raw.

Van den Bergen buried his hands in her mass of curls, encouraging her steady rhythm. But George broke off, as he began to thrust too lustily, kissing her way up his abdomen. Teasing him with her abstemiousness so that he might afford her the same pleasure with that wry, acerbic mouth of his.

They never made it to the bedroom but they did engage in a clumsy, desire-driven tango to the sofa, where George flung her clothes on the floor, climbed astride his long, lean frame and hungrily lowered herself onto him. First, she relished his tongue on her. Then, she slid her body sinuously down towards his groin, manoeuvring him inside her. With his hands caressing her breasts, the lovers locked onto a familiar fast track that shunted and rocked them all the way to the end of their urgent thrill ride.

‘Jesus. I needed that,’ George said, pulling her pants and jeans back on. She clambered back onto the prone Van den Bergen and kissed him passionately.

‘You’re balm for the soul,’ he said, wrapping his arms around her and cradling her head on his chest.

His heartbeat loped steadily along. A comforting sound. She drank in his scent of warm skin, testosterone and sport deodorant. Committed it to memory.

‘I need a smoke and your hip bones are digging in me,’ she said, rising. ‘You’re a shit mattress.’

Taking the box of tissues from the sideboard and throwing them into his lap, she stumbled to the balcony to spark her e-cigarette into life. Exhaled her smoke and what was left of her tension onto the Amsterdam night air. Listening to the animated chatter of the neighbours in adjacent apartments to the side and below. A slice of Dutch life. Those clean-living citizens knew nothing of the depravity and violence that George and Van den Bergen saw week in, week out. Good. There needed to be some innocence in the world still. And there had to be more to life than death.

‘Do you know what? I fancy going dancing,’ George told the full moon.

When she returned to the living room, the steady buzz of snoring coming from the sofa told her she was either going to bed or going clubbing alone.

Melkweg draped itself along the edge of the Lijnbaansgracht, like an elegant old burgher with bragging rights to its slumberous, low-rise canal-side position. Dwarfed by the outsized glazed boxes of the modern theatre that it sat next to, the five-storey townhouses behind it and the ugly apartment block in front. In the daytime, George had walked past this place and barely glanced up at it. At night, with the neon lights that shouted this was where the hip-hop, R&B and deep house happened reflected in the almost still canal water, the whole scene was transformed into something Van Gogh might have painted on acid, had he lived in modern times.

Needing to feel the bass throbbing through the soles of her feet and reminding herself that there was no shame in going clubbing alone, George pushed to the front of the queue and marched up to the door.

‘Not so fast, girly!’ a bouncer said, putting his beefy arm out in front of her as a barrier to entry.

George was aware of the complaints of the scantily clad teens standing behind her that she had jumped the queue. Speaking English and clearly on some sort of parent-funded mini-break, judging by the cut-crystal public school accents. Ridiculing her attire of ripped jeans, studded high-tops and the size and shape of her arse.

Turning around, George quipped, ‘Have you fucking finished, children?’ She sucked her teeth at them, taking in every detail of the taut white skin on their waxy faces and the glazed look in their stoned eyes. ‘Or do you want me to tip off the bouncer here that yous are all underage and off your tits already?’

The group of dissenters fell silent, glancing nervously at one another. George flashed her membership card at the bouncer. Perhaps he saw some of the thunder in her expression.

‘Sorry, miss. Go ahead.’ Respectfully ushering her inside.

‘That’s more fucking like it,’ George said under her breath. ‘Dick.’

Inside the giant laser-lit space, the crowd heaved as one writhing organism. The smell of dry ice and alcohol was thick on the stifling, sweaty air. Music throbbing rhythmically like a beating heart. George imagined she could see sound travelling in waves from one side of the venue to the other. Losing herself in the middle of the dancefloor, she closed her eyes. Started to dance. Tried desperately to shake the feeling that she was being watched. In here, of all places, she could hide in plain sight. Wearing an invisibility cloak of young clubbers, she could free herself from surveillance. Because surely, whoever had sent that email from her father and stolen her mother had set out with the nefarious intention of getting to her. Whether her parents were lying dead somewhere or not, she was the target. She had received the eye. The metaphor that said her every move was being scrutinised. And what she hadn’t told Van den Bergen, for fear of pissing in his new-grandfather’s chips, was that she had had another email, purporting to be from Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno. Daddy Dearest. The image of the email started to take shape in her mind’s eye. Along with it, a memory of her stalker. She’d omitted to tell Van den Bergen about him, too.

Stop fucking obsessing, George told herself. You came here to drown all that shit out and hide from the eye for a couple of hours. Listen to the music. Let the bass heal you. Nobody’s watching in here.

Trying to dispel the mounting tension, she forced herself to dance to the compulsive, lazy beat of a hip-hop track. Shaking her thang. Arms in the air. Except she couldn’t relax. Her movements were out of sync with the rhythm, embarrassing the ghosts of her ancestry who almost certainly, as stereotype demanded, had had all the moves. Adrift in a sea of gyrating kids, all at least seven years younger than she was, she realised she had become stiff-arsed, like some middle-aged housewife from Staines. The music started to irritate her. Then, she got annoyed at the misogynistic lyrics.

And skanky Nasser Malik is in a fridge in a Maastricht morgue. Am I going to end up in a fridge in a morgue, with Van den Bergen grimacing at my cadaver?

Forcing her way to the bar, she decided she would get a cheap beer and just people-watch for a while. Wait for her mojo to return. But the queue for drinks was five deep and George lacked the height of the Dutch. Perching at the end of the bar, she realised a peacock of a boy in a tight T-shirt, who clearly had cash to splash, had ordered a large round of bottled Belgian beer. Waving his €50 note, he was too preoccupied with barking orders at the harried barman to notice George swipe a single bottle of Hoegaarden.

‘Thanks, arsehole,’ she said under her breath, grinning.

Perching upstairs on the balcony, George watched the revellers below, debating whether she should just go back to Van den Bergen’s flat and admit that she was getting too old for this. Maybe Van den Bergen was making her feel prematurely too old. Fifty wasn’t far away for him, after all, and then there was his granddaughter, little Eva, on the scene now.

Eyeing the younger men that buzzed nearby, all sweaty from the dancefloor with their going-out-best clobber clinging to their firm bodies, George’s attention was pulled in the direction of a dealer, stealthily palming a baggie of white powder onto a boy of about eighteen. The dealer could have been a clubber. Nothing out of the ordinary, apart from the tattoo just visible in the stubble of his hair. Like Nasser Malik’s tattoo. Suddenly George had become distanced enough from her own woes to really notice what was going down.

‘It’s snowing in Amsterdam,’ she muttered.

Pushing the clubbers aside, she walked up to the dealer. He smiled down at her. A greedy, rotten-toothed smile of a seasoned junkie, earning to fund his own addiction, no doubt. Either that, or he had really shocking dental hygiene, George mused. She suppressed a full-blown grimace. Ensured there was space between them in this packed temple to hedonism.

‘What you got?’ she shouted above the music, careful not to come too close to his ears. They were greasy-looking with hardly any lobes, punctured by an oversized stud. She shuddered. ‘You got any good coke or E?’

‘Coke? No, love.’ His eyes darted everywhere. Checking for the long arm of the law, no doubt. ‘Crystal meth, miaow miaow, G. Might be able to get you some E by the end of the night.’

‘I’ll leave it thanks,’ George said, backing away. Annoyed with herself, she realised she had started to lose touch. The inevitability of being closer to thirty than twenty. Too much clean living.

As George hastened out of Melkweg to wake the sleeping Van den Bergen and tell him her theory about the canal deaths, she failed to notice that she was followed home.