Before She Met Me Page 9

  He’d once read a motoring column warning drivers against wearing such glasses if their route took them through tunnels: the shifts of light were too sudden for the glasses, which took several seconds to adjust across their full range. Graham was fairly sure that Buck was not a great reader of motoring columns, and would be unprepared for this hazard as he headed north out of L.A. along the coast road. Frisco by nightfall, he’d promised the whore bitch tart splayed out over the front seat of his Coupe de Ville. The radio was tuned to Buck’s favourite bluegrass station; on the back seat lay a tray of Coor’s beer.

  Just north of Big Sur they reached a natural rock tunnel. For a couple of seconds Buck slowed, then his shades readjusted themselves and he picked up speed again. They came out of the tunnel into bright sunshine at sixty miles per hour. Graham hoped Buck would have time to utter a characteristic, ‘What in hell’s sakes is goin’ on here?’, but it didn’t really matter. Ten yards from the tunnel’s mouth the Coupe de Ville smashed into the lowered blade of a thirty-two-ton bulldozer. Graham himself sat in the control seat wearing oily denims and a bright yellow hardhat. A spurt of flame appeared above the top edge of the bulldozer’s blade, followed by Buck’s body, which hurtled high over Graham’s cabin. He looked round, kicked the dozer into reverse gear, and trundled slowly over the lifeless body, mashing its bones and rolling the flesh out as thin as pastry. He put the dozer back into forward drive, pushed the wreckage of the Coupe de Ville off the side of the road and heard it bounce down towards the Pacific. Then, with a final glance over his shoulder at the scarlet pastry-man on the road, he clanked back down the tunnel.

  ‘Can I ask you someone else?’ Graham said as they lay in bed the next night.

  ‘Of course.’ Ann braced herself. She hoped it would be better than last time; and the time before.

  ‘Buck Skelton.’

  ‘Buck Skelton? Christ, what have you seen? I can’t remember acting with him.’

  ‘The Rattler and the Rubies. Bloody terrible it was too. You played the cloakroom girl who takes the hero’s stetson and says, “My, we don’t normally get such big ones in here”.’

  ‘I said that?’ Ann was interested, as well as relieved. She also felt a stab of indignation at the misplaced accusation. If he thinks I might have fucked Skelton, who wouldn’t he suspect? For once, Ann decided to let Graham wait for his reassurance.

  ‘Afraid so,’ he replied. ‘You gave every word its full weight.’

  ‘And what did he say back?’

  ‘Don’t remember. Some balls about the red meat they eat in Arizona making everything grow bigger. Something subtle like that.’

  ‘And what did I say to that?’

  ‘You didn’t. That was your only line. You just looked dreamy.’

  ‘Yes, I remember having to do that often enough. My goosed-with-a-warm-glove look.’ She felt Graham tense at the phrase. ‘The way I did it was to concentrate very hard on the last really good meal I’d had. It would make my eyes come over all misty with lust.’

  ‘So?’

  The body beside her was tensing itself again.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So did you go to bed with him?’

  ‘Did I fuck Buck Skelton? Graham, Gabby Hayes would have had more chance.’

  Graham turned towards her and pressed his face against her upper arm; his hand reached across and laid itself on her stomach.

  ‘Though I did let him kiss me once.’

  His suggestion had been so ludicrous that she thought he was due total honesty in return. She felt Graham’s hand stiffen on her stomach. She sensed he was still waiting.

  ‘On the cheek. He kissed everyone goodbye—all the girls, that is. The ones that would let him, on the lips; the ones that wouldn’t, on the cheek.’

  Graham grunted in the dark, then gave a victor’s satisfied chuckle. Approximately three minutes later he started making love to Ann. He was thorough and affectionate, but she kept her mind elsewhere. If she had in fact fucked Skelton, she was thinking, Graham wouldn’t be making love to me now. How strange the ways in which the past caught up and tugged at the present. What if, all those years ago, when she was making The Rattler and the Rubies, someone had said, ‘Let that cowboy have his way with you and some years from now you’ll give yourself, and a man you don’t even know, a night or two of guaranteed misery.’ What if someone had said that? As likely as anything, she’d have said, Fuck the future. FUCK THE FUTURE. Get off my back; you’ll cause enough bother when you arrive without fucking me around beforehand. And then, to make the point, she might have just gone ahead and smiled at the cowboy, plump and vain as he was.

  Graham was getting more excited, pushing her legs out at a more open angle and sliding his hand flat underneath her shoulders. He’d even tensed up when she’d mentioned a farewell kiss on the cheek. If Skelton had kissed her on the lips all those years ago, would that have been enough to stop Graham making love to her tonight? It seemed a strange equation to make. Why were there so many unguessable connections around like this? And what if you ever were able to guess them all in advance: would that stop life turning nasty on you? Or would it find some other way?

  Graham held off his climax for a bit, tacitly offering her the chance to come if she wanted to. She felt no temptation, so answered by pulling rhythmically on his buttocks. As he came, she felt compassion and reflected excitement, as usual, but more distantly.

  And the same night, Graham had the carwash dream.

  The carwash dream was compared by Larry Pitter, with whom Ann committed adultery in The Rumpus, a street-gang movie Graham had managed to catch twice in the last few months, once at the ABC Turnpike Lane and once out at Romford. Ann played ‘Third Gang Girl’ and appeared in several inept mood-setting scenes where the gang members strutted and pranced before their greasy harem. Larry Pitter played the detective sergeant who, having beaten up not quite enough suspects to get at the truth, finally bed-bullies Third Gang Girl into splitting on her mates.

  Pitter sat behind his desk smoking; he was still wearing his soiled cream Burberry from the film.

  ‘Well, well,’ he began with a sneering curiosity, ‘look what the moggie’s returned with. Hey, boys,’ he shouted past Graham, who was seated in the suspect’s chair, ‘Hey, boys, come see.’

  The door opened and three men walked in. Each in his different way struck Graham as dirty and malign. There was the tall young one with straggling greasy hair and acne; the fat, surly one in a stained boiler-suit; and the lean, expressionless one with a two-day growth of beard, who looked like a photofit picture. They should all have been in the cells; but Pitter welcomed them.

  ‘Look, boys, look what’s turned up—it’s Mister Carwash himself.’

  The boys sniggered, and clustered round Pitter on the other side of the desk.

  ‘I think I’ve got some explaining to do,’ said the detective. ‘No point beating about the bush, squire, is there?’ Graham rather wished they would beat about the bush. ‘The thing is, Graham—don’t mind if I call you Graham, do you?—thing is, I dare say you’ve heard a little bit about me from your lady wife. Correct me if I’m wrong.’

  Graham didn’t speak.

  ‘Told you about our little fling. Our bit of extra-curricular. Very fine thing, a bit of honesty between husband and wife, I always say. I’m sure your marriage is the envy of most of your friends, Graham.’

  Pitter gave an insincere, teeth-together smile; Graham didn’t comment.

  ‘Course, there is such a thing as too much honesty, isn’t there? I mean, what’s more important, Graham, your husband’s good opinion of you, or telling everything just exactly like it was? Tricky one that, isn’t it?

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure Ann did quite the right thing at the time. Told you about me, didn’t tell you why we called her the Carwash Girl.’ The three villains behind him chuckled. ‘Now, stop me if I’m boring you, Graham, but you see, what she really liked wasn’t just me. It was all of us. All of us at the same time. Doing di
fferent things to her. I won’t be specific, I know these things can be hurtful; I’ll just leave you to imagine it. But the first time she got us all to do things to her at the same time, we were all sort of swarming over her, licking her and stuff, she said it was just like being in a carwash. So we called her the Carwash Girl. And we used to giggle about what would happen when she met Mister Right. Only we used to call him Mister Carwash. I mean, she made it quite plain that it was the more the merrier as far as she was concerned. And how would any husband cope with that, we wondered. Unless, of course, there’s more to you than meets the eye.’ Pitter grinned.

  ‘But anyway,’ he went on, taking an avuncular tone, ‘women change. They do, don’t they? Maybe she’ll get back to liking one fellow at a time. Then you won’t need to feel so inadequate, will you? Won’t need to feel that however good you are she’ll always be dreaming of that extra oomph. You never can tell, it might work out like that. So what I’m really saying, Mister Carwash, is that the boys and me wish you the best of British. We really do. We think you’ve drawn a pretty short straw, and we just hope you manage to play your cards right.’

  Then all four of them leaned across the desk and shook him by the hand. He didn’t want to accept any of the outstretched palms which had once caressed the racked body of his wife, but found himself unable to draw back. The men seemed full of sympathy for him; one of them even winked.

  What if it were true? Graham had woken up in a silent, taut-muscled panic. What if it were true? It couldn’t be true. He knew Ann too well. They’d even—haltingly—discussed their sexual fantasies with each other, and she’d never mentioned that. But then, of course, if she’d already done it, it wouldn’t be a fantasy any more, would it? No, it couldn’t be true. But what if it referred to a sort of truth? Did he feel confident that he satisfied her? No. Yes. No. Yes. Don’t know. Well, what about tonight, for instance—that was all for you, wasn’t it? Yes, but there’s no rule that you both have to come every time, is there? Of course not, but she didn’t exactly seem overwhelmed by your caresses, did she? No, but that’s all right, too. It may be all right, you may have talked about it and agreed it was all right, but that’s not how sex works, is it? It’s where the unsayable is king; it’s where madness and surprise rule; it’s where the cheques you write for ecstasy are drawn on the bank of despair.

  Graham slowly debated himself to sleep again.

  But Larry Pitter, as he might have guessed, didn’t go away with waking up. He hung around in some back alley of Graham’s brain, a half-seen figure slouched against a lamppost, taking his time, smoking a fag, ready to saunter out and trip Graham up when he felt like it.

  Graham decided to drive to work that morning; he had only two hours’ teaching and could leave the car on a meter. As he set off, rain began spotting the windscreen. He turned on his wipers, then his washers, then his car radio. Something bracing and carefree emerged; perhaps it was a Rossini string sonata. He felt a surge of gratitude, a paperback historian’s thrill, for living at this particular time. Easy travel, protection from the weather, button culture: Graham suddenly felt as if all such benefits had only just arrived, as if only yesterday he’d been a berry-eater on Box Hill who ran for cover at the gentlest goat’s bray.

  He drove past a garage on the opposite side of the road:

  FOUR STAR

  THREE STAR

  TWO STAR

  DERV

  CARDS

  TOILETS

  CARWASH

  and the day was gone, destroyed. Larry Pitter had sidled out of his alley and slyly removed a manhole cover; Graham, head up, whistling, feeling the sun on his face, had walked straight into it.

  The Rossini continued but Graham thought only of Ann lying on her back encouraging the four men. They were lined up side by side at right angles to her body, each licking a swath, like four motor mowers moving over her. Graham shook his head to expel the image, and concentrated on driving; but the picture, though rebuked and diminished, continued mockingly at the edge of his vision, up in the rear-view mirror.

  He found himself watching the road for garages. At each he instinctively flicked an eye down the rows of signs, looking for the one that said CARWASH. Mostly, they didn’t; and each one that didn’t made Graham feel elated, as if all his suspicions of adultery had been proved false. Then he would pass the eighth or ninth garage, with its contemptuously informative sign, and the image in the rear-view mirror would sharpen. Now, he could see his wife urging the four men to make their different uses of her. Three took the obvious channels; the fourth squatted in the corner of the mirror like a distempered satyr and pulled on his cock. Graham forced his attention back to the road. The rain had slackened off, and with every sweep the wipers were now depositing some of their own dirt back on the screen. Automatically, Graham reached out and pressed the windscreen washer. A burst of bubbly opaque liquid hit the glass in front of his face. He should have known better. Up in the mirror the satyr was coming.

  Graham spent twenty minutes of his first class looking at his male students and wondering if any of them wanted to go into films and commit adultery with his wife. Then this struck even him as comical, and he went back to expounding a tentatively revisionist view of Balfour. After a couple of hours he emerged, walked to his car, and gazed at the windscreen washer nozzles on the bonnet as if they were instruments of adultery. An enervating sadness began to creep through him. He bought a racing edition of the Evening Standard and checked through the films. Maybe he should see something that didn’t have his wife in for a change. What about the new Jancso not starring his wife, the new inter-galactic battleorama not starring his wife, or the new British road movie about hitch-hiking to Wrexham, definitely not starring his wife?

  Not a single one of his wife’s films was showing. Not one. Graham felt as if a branch of the social services which particularly affected him had suddenly been withdrawn. Did they realize the effects of their cuts? He couldn’t, today, go to any cinema in London or its immediate suburbs and see a film in which his wife committed adultery; nor could he see any film in which his wife, though remaining chaste onscreen, had committed adultery offscreen with one of the actors. The two categories, he noticed, were beginning to get blurred in his head.

  That left two further categories of film he could still catch up on: other films featuring actors with whom his wife had committed adultery onscreen (but not off); and other films featuring actors with whom his wife had committed adultery offscreen (but not on). He checked through the Evening Standard again. This time the choice was limited to two: Rick Fateman in Sadismo at Muswell Hill (on but not off); or Larry Pitter in a remake of The Sleeping Tiger … Graham suddenly realized that he couldn’t remember whether or not Ann actually had committed adultery with Pitter. Onscreen, yes, of course, that was what had driven him, turbulent with jealousy, to Turnpike Lane and Romford in the last few days. But offscreen? He knew he’d asked her, months ago, but found he simply couldn’t remember the answer. This struck him as very strange.

  Maybe The Sleeping Tiger would help him out. He drove to Swiss Cottage in a state of vivid curiosity. In the remake, Pitter played the psychiatrist who brings home a green-haired girl punk and employs her as an au pair; the girl seduces his wife, tries to rape his ten-year-old son, slashes his cats’ throats with a razor, and then unexpectedly returns home to her mother. The wife has a nervous breakdown and the husband discovers he is homosexual. A sort of truth is attained through the experience of deep pain. The young English director displayed his homage to the early, pseudonymous Losey with several caressing shots of banisters and staircases. Pitter at one point attempted to dally with the object of his research and, to Graham’s delight, received a swift kick in the balls.

  Graham came out of the cinema as excited as he had gone in. Realizing that he didn’t know whether or not Ann had committed adultery with Pitter made him feel keenly alive. As he drove home, one or two methods of killing Pitter sauntered into his head, but he dismissed t
hem as idle fantasies. What he was on to now was much more important, much more real.

  At home, he carefully stabbed the steaks and poked pieces of garlic into the incisions. He laid the table, adding candlesticks at the last moment. He got out the rarely-used ice bucket and broke some ice into it for Ann’s gin and tonic. He was whistling as she opened the front door. When she walked into the dining-room he kissed her unambiguously on the lips and handed her a drink, followed by a bowl of shelled pistachio nuts. He hadn’t been like this for weeks.

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘No, nothing special.’ But he looked a little furtive as he said it. Maybe something had happened at work; maybe Alice had done well at school; maybe he just felt unaccountably better. All through dinner he remained in good spirits. Then, over coffee, he finally said,

  ‘What happened today hasn’t happened before.’ He sounded as if he were slowly unwrapping a present for Ann. ‘Never before. It was most instructive.’ He smiled at her with puzzling gentleness. ‘I forgot whether or not you’d gone to bed with Larry Pitter.’ He looked across at her, expecting approval.

  ‘So?’ Ann felt her stomach beginning to contract with apprehension.

  ‘So. So, it’s never happened before. Every one of … of the others I’ve always remembered. Everyone you … fucked.’ He used the word with deliberation. ‘Whether you did it on or off. Even when you did it neither, like with Buck Skelton. Every minute of the day, if someone stopped me and said, “Give me a list of all the other men your wife has fucked,” I could do so. I really could. And then I’d say, “And there are some more, the other categories.” I could remember all those as well, all of them. I once found myself automatically marking up a student simply because he was called Kerrigan—because Jim Kerrigan never made a pass at you in The Cheapest Place in Town?’