Black Lipstick Kisses (2 page)

‘I've read your essay on evil forces in science fantasy, the one where you show the story as propaganda by the good guys, because they won so they get to tell the story, with the bad guys as defeated rebels. It gave me a whole new perspective.'

He grinned, flattered.

‘It was a bit tongue in cheek, but yeah, it works, for Tolkein especially. I feel that's been done though, and I want to move away from it, to take a less black and white perspective, even an irrational one.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘I want to get away from the idea of building a main character to suit the reader's preconceptions, which is what the magazines always want. Now I've got a bit of a name for myself I can afford to be somewhat bolder, to make people think, even disturb them.'

‘I think you manage that already!'

‘I try. I didn't in that sense though. I'm doing one at the moment, where my main character's a typical anarchist eco-warrior type, but at the end he'll turn out to have been telling the story as he looks back at how he came to be an executive in the very corporation he tried to defeat. That's when his ex-buddies burst in, but I'll leave the ending open.'

‘Well cool.'

‘It's not new. Have you read
Clockwork Orange
? Not seen the film, but read the book?'

‘Sure.'

He shrugged, looking a touch embarrassed, as if he had revealed himself as a charlatan, and went back to work. I felt myself warm to him, something in addition to simple physical attraction and the fascination of meeting somebody I admired. For a moment he had let his defences down, and it prompted me to do the same, allowing my mind to wander to more intimate possibilities.

As the drawing grew he paid more and more attention to the margins, filling them with fantastical
details. The picture was centred on the nearest of the great roof pillars, but he had left it as a faint outline, despite the real thing being decorated with a column of grotesque little faces, which I'd have thought irresistible. At last he spoke again.

‘I might even make this a cover. What do you think?'

‘Sure . . . great . . .'

‘It just needs a focus, perhaps not one of the characters, but something to get the essence of the story across.'

He turned to me with a disarming grin.

‘Would you mind posing? You really look the part.'

‘Sure. How do you want me?'

I'd tried to be cool, hiding my instant rush of girlish glee at being asked to pose for him, but my voice had cracked a little as I answered. He'd really got me flustered, in no time too. As he pondered my question, my wicked side was hoping he'd suggest I would be best naked – for all that my shy side was dreading exactly that. It felt nicer to be naked, shy or brazen. Finally he spoke.

‘I'll have you as a spirit, I think, brooding on her fate.'

‘I can do brooding.'

‘Great. Lean against the pillar. Put your cheek next to the stone . . . yes, like that. Raise your right arm. No, with your palm flat against the stone . . . yes. Put your left hand at the front of the pillar, fingers splayed, as if you're caressing the stone. Yes, perfect, just under a face. Now closer, and stretch up a little, onto your toes.'

‘Like this?'

‘Yes, ideal, but it wouldn't work if you were even a fraction less slender.'

Flattery, which from him nudged the balance of my feelings further towards taking my clothes off, at least some of them.

‘My clothes don't spoil your line, do they?'

‘Don't worry. I can work around that.'

He began to draw, his eyes narrowed in concentration. I stayed still, horny, wanting to impress, yet feeling something of a fluffy girlie for doing so. That's just not me. I like to take charge, to be the one getting into another's head, the desirable one. He should have been the one getting slowly steamed up, not me. Bollocks to modesty. Sometimes a girl just has to do it.

‘It would be better with my top off, wouldn't it?'

Before he could answer I'd pulled my top up, and over my head, leaving my necklaces. I resumed my pose, now with my bare breasts pressed to the cool stone, giving him no more than a brief glimpse of my nipples, hopefully not enough to show just how perky they were. His response was a cool nod, but he had gone ever so slightly pink. Again he began to draw, his concentration more intense than ever, only to stop suddenly and speak.

‘There, I don't think we can improve on that until I'm in the studio. Thank you.'

‘My pleasure.'

I stepped away from the pillar, pointedly indifferent to my partial nudity. He watched me come towards him, calm and appreciative, without a trace of embarrassment as his eyes moved down from my face. I stepped close, allowing the side of my breast to press onto the lean muscle of his arm as I inspected the picture.

It was me, but transformed into an impossibly slender creature, half merged with the pillar and with the
tiles of the floor, naked beneath a gossamer shroud. The contours of my body, the lines of the pillar and the black and white check of the floor blended, light and shade. Even my hair seemed to flow into the surroundings, my face alone distinct, with an expression hard to read, maybe grieving, maybe remorseful, maybe defiant. At first glance my breast had seemed to show clearly, yet looking closer it was hard to pick the lines from those of my shroud, while another fold might or might not have suggested the lips of my pussy.

It was beautiful and flattering, yet I felt as if he'd stripped me bare, and again caught the need to exert myself. I stepped away, wondering what he'd do if I simply pushed him down on the tiles and ravished him. My wicked side wanted exactly that – him inside me as I rode him on the floor, amusing myself with his body, taking orgasm after orgasm until he was begging to be allowed to do the same. Drunk, I might just have done it, even if I did have a suspicion he'd have rolled me over after a minute or two. Sober, my shy side came to the fore and I found myself walking away from him, towards the rood screen.

He came behind, with Lilitu trotting after, now as seemingly indifferent to his presence as Michael was to my nakedness. The rood screen was extravagant even by the standards of the Victorian craze for the high Gothic, the seven faces yet more so. Isaac Foyle was said to have taken a cup of laudanum each day before beginning work, and I could believe it. The rood itself was unusually macabre in detail, and supported above eight arches rising to over twice my height, the central two joined. Each was fantastically carved, the pillars six slender caryatids, supposed saints but looking more like demons, with their hair rising in asymmetric coils from
which six of the faces peered. The seventh, wrath, peered out from among flames, directly beneath the rood itself, a Hell to the Heaven above.

I admired them as Michael began to sketch, immediately impressed by his understanding of what had been going on in Isaac Foyle's head. His wrath projected fury, hatred, fear and pain, surely enough to terrify any sinner, but among the others there were hints of less orthodox attitudes, or so it seemed to me. Pride and avarice flanked wrath: the one a long, haughty face, the great hooked nose lifted high in disdain, pompous but also comic; the other shining with greed and normal enough save that it was known to be a caricature of his own father. Sloth showed a somnolent, drooping expression, the least human of the seven, but had one eye cocked slightly open, as if the slumber were merely a pretence. Envy radiated spite and yearning, but was shown with a necklace of sovereigns and skin marked with the ravages of disease. Gluttony was huge, twice the size of the others, a great moon face with bulging cheeks and pig's eyes, food running out over the lower lip. Lust was finest of all, a beautiful female face, the mouth slightly open to reveal tiny, pointed fangs, twin horns protruding from among luxurious curls. I had always wanted to be her, at least to have her fearsome sexual aggression, something I imagined Foyle, and his audience, had feared the most.

Michael had never seen them before, and was fascinated, sketching the whole screen then each face individually. I watched, delighted, yet soon biting down a growing sense of pique as he maintained his indifference to my half-naked state. Yet to dress would have broken the moment, and I stayed that way, as if it
were quite unimportant. Only when he finished the last page of his sketch book did he stop and turn to me, in doing so revealing his watch. It was ten minutes to four, far later than I had realised. At four o'clock I had to be at the community centre, urgently. He smiled, and reached out, to very gently run one finger up the curve of my breast to the nipple. I felt myself flush hot, and my mouth came open in reaction as instinctive as the sudden hardening of my nipples.

His smile grew a little broader, arrogant and certain as his fingers fanned out across my breast, each one flicking over the nipple. I stood still, letting him touch me, although I wanted to throw him to the floor, unleash his penis and feed him into me; to hold him down as I rode him, to make him beg for release, to punish him for treating me so casually and for being so damn cool. I didn't, but gently detached his hand from my breast, speaking as I did so.

‘Sorry. I have to go. I mean, I'm late already, for something really important. Sorry.'

It sounded pathetic, the reaction of a scared and insecure virgin, but my excuse was genuine, for all I badly wanted sex with him. My protests didn't stop him either, and his voice was wonderfully gentle as he took me in his arms, his fingers going to the nape of my neck and the curve of my bottom. I pulled back, embarrassed and thoroughly cross with myself as I tried to explain.

‘I'm sorry, not now, Michael. I mean . . . I'd . . . can we take a rain-check on this? I really do have to go.'

‘Now? Really?'

There was just a touch of temper in his voice, no more than that, but it was there. I shrugged and kissed him, then made a dash for the vestry door, praying he
wouldn't follow. If he did I would have given in and had him then and there. As it was he simply slipped a card behind the carved ear of St Peter. His voice followed me as I closed the door.

‘Call round if you want to.'

I was really cursing as I struggled on a new top and substituted my boots for my rollerblades, angry, bitter and very cross with myself. It was not the mood I needed to be in. We had a new MP, Stephen Byrne, some up-and-coming junior minister determined to ‘do his bit for the community'. Being a politician, and therefore both soulless and a busybody, he was not content to allow All Angels to continue its elegant decay. Instead he was proposing a scheme to bid for Lottery money to have it converted into a community hall, in which people would play bingo and watch big-screen football. It was unthinkable.

Unfortunately it was all too likely to become reality. He was just the sort of person to get it done, pushy, smarmy and above all self-righteous. I hadn't met him, yet, but I'd read enough, and seen his fatuous physog staring out from enough local papers. He was a clone, undoubtedly manufactured in a factory somewhere in the Midlands, handsome but as cold as a fish: grey-haired, grey-suited and grey-minded.

I wasn't at all sure what I could do, when I was sure to be a lone voice against the creeping blandness. Even the local anarchic types weren't likely to support me, not when I'd threatened to set Lilitu on so many of them. My only real hope was that there would be objections to the desecration of the interior because it was Grade Two listed, but the council were firmly on his side. It looked hopeless, and I even considered making a detour through the market to see if I could
pick up a few rotten tomatoes. It would not have helped my cause.

My intention had been to spend a couple of hours on the roof to achieve real calm, then dress sensibly, or rather, dress as he would expect a sensible young woman to. At the hall I'd have done my best intellectual young student impression and put a clear and well thought-out case for the preservation of the rood screen, the pew ends, the panelling behind the altar and other fine details of Victorian Gothic carving. Thanks to Michael Merrick and my own capricious nature, I was now going to have to make my case as mad Goth girl on rollerblades, not an image a stuffy politician was likely to be impressed by.

The community centre was as bland as All Angels was glorious, a concrete box built where a string of bombs had taken out three terraced houses in a row, dull and unimaginative as Stephen Byrne's ideas, a temple to conformity and dumbing down. It was also only two streets away, but even with my blades on I managed to be late, pushing through the heavy double doors with my head full of determination, to find it very nearly empty.

Well, not that empty, but it was a big hall and the dozen or so people there looked pretty lost among the ranks of bright-red plastic chairs. Most were nondescript suits, local councillors or something, and they were milling around any old how. A group of three were together at the far end of the room. One had the look of a site manager or something, in a blue boiler suit with a big bunch of keys in one hand. The second was a smart young woman, looking somewhat offended. The third was Stephen Byrne.

I was either very late or very early, because I'd got
the time wrong, because Michael Merrick's watch had been wrong, because the meeting had been changed, whatever. It didn't matter. I was going to speak my mind anyway, even if a firm decision had been taken. Ignoring the caretaker and the woman who was presumably a secretary, I rolled straight up to Stephen Byrne. He fixed me with a bland smile, just as one blade slipped sideways on the polished floor, to put me in a whirl of arms and legs and hair, clutching madly at the air. Then I sat down hard on my bottom, right in front of him, legs splayed, skirt up, the crotch of my black silk knickers on show.

My face was burning as he helped me up, but I let him, feeling a complete idiot and very sorry for myself. I could see he was trying not to laugh as he stood back, and it was impossible not to smile in response. He mastered himself very quickly though, and as he did, so did I. When he spoke, it was with exactly the neutral, carefully controlled tone I had expected.