Before She Met Me (11 page)

Graham stared moodily at Buck, taking in the slightly ridged nose, the ox-blood tan, the spurt of hair at the fork of his open shirt. One or two of the hairs seemed to be turning grey, but this only made him more threatening to Graham: he was boastfully adding maturity and wisdom to his obviously colossal virility.

‘Now, first time I set eyes on that little Annie of yours, I knew she was gonna prove a real firecracker. “Annie,” I says to her, “you play your cards right, and maybe you’ll get my gun.” Haw haw. Always a little joke like that at the start, something to get them thinking what might come their way. Let them turn it over for a couple of days, then they drop into the palm of your hand like a rahp pay-yaych. That’s old Buck’s philosophy, any road.

‘So, stranger.’ The actor suddenly became more businesslike, more distant. ‘So, I were jest giving her the old couple-of-days’ routine, waiting for the sherry wine to matoor in the caysk, so to speak, when she comes right up to me and says, “How’s about finding a holster for your gun, cowboy?” So that’s what the chicks are like over here, Buck, I says to myself.

‘Now, I’ve known some spirited gals in my time, stranger, but that little Annie … Back at the hotel she was hustling me outa my duds in the elevator. And then she really took off. Fightin’, bitin’, scratchin’—I even had to
re-strain
her a bit. The studio might have wanted a tub shot or something, and I jest had to haul her nails outa my back. I hauled them out and slapped her down, but that only seemed to make her wilder, which I s’pose I should have anticipated, so I jest reached across to my pants and slid out my lizard-skin belt and tied her wrists out of harm’s way.

‘And after that, every time we balled she made me tie her wrists up. Jest seemed to excite her some more. Not that there was much room for more. She was right off that scale, stranger; hurricane force nine was a gentle breeze where she came from.

‘But what she really liked me to do—after I’d tied her up, natch—was to chew her ass. You do that to her, stranger? She
let
you do that to her, stranger? I’d get me down there and start eating her out; I mean, it was a carry-out lunch counter as far as I was concerned. Then I’d sorta slide down a bit further, and I’d feel her squirm, and that current went
raht
through her body. Then I’d eat some more, then slide back to her ass. I’d chew it some and diddle my tongue around, and then, when she was all wound up, I’d jest plunge my tongue right in, and when I did that she’d
ex-plode
. Never missed. Bang, like a mousetrap. She used to say, now she understood what a cowpoke was.

‘She ever let you do that?’ The tone became more taunting. ‘Mean to say, I bet you kiss a lot of ass one way and another; but you ever do it for real, stranger? Or does little Annie only let the other fellers do
that
to her? You wouldn’t know, would you? That’s jest the trouble with you fag fellers. You get all uppity about
unnerstandin’
chicks. Never met a chick yet who wanted to be
unnerstood
—least, not when getting balled flat was the alternative. Still, you carry on
unnerstandin’
the chicks, and I’ll carry on ballin’ them.’

In the pool behind Buck another shimmering bottom broke the surface. This time it stayed suspended there for a few seconds, and as Graham gawped the buttocks slid wetly apart. Graham, from his shoe-shine stool, looked across at Buck, who stuck out the tip of his tongue and ran it round his lips. Graham hurled himself at Buck, but the cowboy, with a swivel of the hips, made him miss his aim. As Graham lurched past, a Frye boot caught him in the thigh and twisted him into the pool. Though he normally swam strongly, the water proved so viscous that he progressed in slow motion. Eventually, after several minutes, he got both hands on the pool’s rim. As he prepared to haul himself out, a shadow fell across his face and a boot was placed firmly on the fingertips of his right hand.

‘Say, stranger,’ Buck spat down at him, ‘you still hanging around my prahpurty? Thought you’d been run out days ago. When I say kiss off, I’m gonna mean kiss off.’ And with that he took his glass of Pina Colada and threw the milky froth into Graham’s face.

Graham woke up in the dark. The fingertips of his right hand were jammed between the mattress and the base of the
bed. He had dribbled on the pillow and his face was wet with his own spit. His pyjamas were twisted tightly round his legs and to his surprise he found he had an erection.

He didn’t think she possibly could have. Surely not a tubby, bogus cowboy like that. But how could you know whom your wife might have fancied before she fancied you? For a start, women often succumbed for such odd reasons: like pity, and politeness, and loneliness, and rage at a third party, and, sod it, sheer sexual pleasure. Graham sometimes wished he’d had a go at succumbing for different reasons.

The next day, while his brain officially dealt with Bonar Law, Carson and the Ulster Volunteers, he turned over the question of Buck. Dreams couldn’t be true, could they: that was why they were dreams. There were supposed to be premonitory dreams—the wise man sees a vision of floods, and moves his tribe to higher ground; and in his own civilization, didn’t you have dreams before job interviews, warning you against making mistakes? So why couldn’t you have post-monitory dreams? It was, if anything, a more plausible concept. He could easily have picked up something from Ann at a subliminal level, and then his brain might decide to break the news to him tactfully in his sleep. Why not?

Of course, the Buck of his dream was very different from the Buck of
The Rattler and the Rubies
. In the dream, he’d been a threatening, coarse fellow; in the film, one of nature’s prairie gentlemen. Neither image, Graham assumed hopefully, would be particularly alluring to Ann; but then both of them were false images—one on a screen, one in his head. What was the real Buck Skelton like (what was his real name, for a start)? And maybe that Buck was the one to find favour with Ann.

Baulked, Graham’s brain turned, with scarcely any encouragement, to dreams of revenge. First, he drowned the cowboy in a swimming pool of Pina Colada: the final bubbles
from Buck’s failing lungs went unnoticed among all the froth on the pool’s surface. Then he bribed someone to put a rattlesnake in the path of Buck’s horse just as he was passing a giant cactus: the stallion reared, Buck was thrown, and as he clutched automatically at the cactus, two giant spines, as strong as steel, drove through his leather chaps and transfixed his balls as if they were cocktail sausages.

The final revenge was the best, though. If there’d been one thing Graham hated, it was the way Buck had used his sunglasses. He disliked people who wore them as proof of character; but he also felt rather primly aggressive towards the glasses themselves. He disapproved of inanimate things taking on a life of their own, trying to organize a fourth estate in the world, after people, animals and plants; it upset him, threatened him even.

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.’