Love...Under Different Skies (15 page)

I roll over onto my side and close my eyes, willing my penis to stop thinking about Laura all naked, sweaty, and nibbling at my neck. I eventually win the battle and start to drift off into a half sleep.

What brings me out of it is the soft moan of a woman.

Hmmm. Interesting.

Maybe Laura’s had a change of heart. Maybe the lure of my undeniable sexual magnetism has overcome her reluctance and she wants to throw caution to the wind.

I roll over and disappointingly see Laura’s back still facing me. I can hear her breathing in a deep, even way that’s clear evidence she’s asleep and in no way up for some rumpy pumpy.

I must have imagined her moaning. Damn my stupid penis and its ability to make me hear things. Then I hear the moan again. This time it’s louder and longer.

Laura hasn’t budged, though, so where in hell can the sound be coming from?

Then, the light dawns. It’s
Sandra
. I can quite clearly hear our female host in what sounds like the early throes of passion. Sandra moans a third time, this one ending in a throaty chuckle indicating that Bob has put something very important in
exactly
the right place.

This is confirmed when I hear Bob grunt in a self-satisfied manner.

The bed starts to creak in rhythmic fashion. I actually start to go a shade of crimson. They have no idea I can hear them at it, but it’s still very embarrassing all the same.

The creaking gets a bit faster. Sandra moans again, this time joined by Bob. When he does it he sounds like a malfunctioning garden weed whacker.

“Are they
fucking
?” Laura says from beside me in a voice half-full of sleep, half-full of incredulity.

“Yep. Bob and Sandra don’t appear to be worried about being overheard,” I reply. “I just hope he’s a fast mover and it’s over soon.”

“Agreed. I really need to sleep.”

So there my wife and I lie for the next five minutes or so, waiting for Bob to arrive at his destination. We’re expecting the creaking to speed up even more, climaxing in a fairly typical orgasmic series of grunts and moans before Bob rolls off and peace returns to the world.

This doesn’t happen, though. In fact, if anything the creaking is slowing down.

“I don’t think Bob can cut the mustard,” I say.

“He is in his sixties,” Laura apologises for him.

“True.”

Then the creaking stops completely.

“Poor bloke.”

Turns out the festivities aren’t over yet, though. Our eyes both widen when we hear the unmistakable sound of an electric buzzing device being turned on. If poor old Bob can’t keep the fun going, then Sandra knows another way, it appears.

Laura and I are now nearly frozen in combined mortification. We both subconsciously pull the duvet up under our chins in horror. The buzzing gets quieter…then louder. Quieter…then louder. Quieter…then louder.

I start to chew the duvet cover. Sandra, now really going for it, starts to moan so loudly there’s every chance she’s going to wake Poppy up.

She starts to say something to Bob. I can’t quite catch all of it, but she’s speaking loudly enough for me to pick up way more than I want to:
“Mumble mumble
on my back
mumble mumble mumble
up my arse
mumble mumble
jump on
mumble
.”

The bed creaks again, this time for longer, indicating the shifting of bodies into a new position—a new position that I can only imagine all too well thanks to twenty years of watching porn.

What’s playing across my mind’s eye right now is not two healthy, tight young porn stars assuming the position, but our good-natured middle-aged hosts, whose bodies probably haven’t seen tight in a good fifteen years. I don’t want to see Sandra on all fours with Bob’s beer gut resting on her bony bottom, but, God help me, I can’t stop it happening.

The creaking starts again, this time in a harder, sharper rhythm indicating that Bob is really getting down to business.

“What’s he doing to her?” Laura asks in a small voice.

“Guaranteeing she won’t be comfortable on their drive up to Brisbane tomorrow?” I whisper back.

Now Bob starts grunting in time with the creaking. Overlaid onto both sounds is the buzzing of Sandra’s little friend, in a symphony of awkward I wish I was ten thousand miles away from. The whole thing gets louder, faster, and more pornographic.

“Fuck me!” we hear Sandra spit quite audibly through the ceiling. “Fuck me in that ass, you big strong bastard!”

I feel Laura take my hand in hers, seeking some solace from the terror. My wife and I are locked in this horrible moment together, one that we will never be able to forget, no matter how drunk we get.

“It’s coming!” Bob exclaims, his voice muffled by creaking bed and roaring vibrator.

I’m hoping he means Armageddon, because after this night I don’t think I want to live in a world that would allow such horrors to be visited on me.

Laura grips my hand tightly. I let out a small squeak of fear.

Then finally, just when I think my mind is about to tip over into the chasm of insanity, Bob and Sandra let out a combined enormous grunt-moan, signalling the end of what would likely make the kind of porno only a very small, select audience would want to watch.

“Thank God for that,” Laura says.

The bed takes the strain of two spent middle-aged Australians flopping onto it in postcoital nirvana.

The buzzing noise abruptly disappears, proving that Sandra is most definitely satisfied for the night.

“That’s going to need a wash,” I hear myself saying and instantly regret it.

A dreadful silence now descends across the house. It’s like the aftermath of a particularly destructive tornado.

“Jamie?”

“Yes, Laura?”

“You know that we’ll never be able to have sex again after that, don’t you?”

“Yes Laura, I know. It was fun while it lasted, though.”

“It was.”

More silence. Then a horrible thought occurs: “If that’s the kind of sex they have when they know someone’s in the house with them,” I say, “what on earth do they get up to when they know they’re alone?”

“I don’t know.” Laura gulps. “And I don’t want to know, quite frankly.”

“They probably use a pedal bin.”

“Oh for God’s sake Jamie!”

“Sorry.”

“Can we just go to sleep now?”

“Yes, I think that would be a very good idea. Then tomorrow, we can pretend this was all just a dream.”

Our bedroom door creaks open. Poppy stands in the doorway rubbing her eyes. “Mummy? Daddy? Is somebody doing nasty things to Sandra lady upstairs?”

Yes Poppet, they are. But the kind of things you’re not going to know anything about until I’m dead in my grave if I get my way.

LAURA’S DIARY

Tuesday, July 18

It took us a good half an hour to convince Poppy that Sandra wasn’t being murdered upstairs, Mum.

“You just dreamt it, Pops,” I lie to her unconvincingly. “Sandra is absolutely fine, I’m sure. She was probably having a bad dream, too.”

My daughter gives me the most suspicious look a three-year-old can summon in a half sleep. “Don’t like bad dreams.”

“I know Poppet.”

“Wanna sleep with you.”

“Okay, honey,” I sigh. When Poppy climbs into bed these days it usually means a restless night for all concerned. She’s much like her mother in bed: a fidget. One night not so long ago she spun round a full 180 degrees. It was quite disconcerting to have tiny pink little toes waving around in your immediate field of vision at two thirty in the morning.

Poppy yawns, climbs in between her mother and father, sticks one thumb in her mouth, and promptly falls asleep.

“I guess I can look forward to getting kicked in the balls later, then,” Jamie says, knowing what Pops is like as much as I do.

“Well, it’s better that than she goes back to bed and has nightmares about Sandra being assaulted by a swarm of buzzing insects.”

“That fucker was loud, wasn’t it? I’ve had washing machines make less of a racket than that. It must be a huge one.”

“I don’t want to think about it, thanks.”

But now I have to, of course.

I’m a woman of the world, and I’m fully aware of what shapes and sizes vibrators come in. I can’t help but picture Sandra holding one of the ones at the upper end of the spectrum, the kind that have complicated machinery going on inside them and in a pinch can be used as an effective weapon of self-defence.

I don’t know what to feel sorrier for—her lady garden or Bob’s self-esteem. Still, at least it sounded like they were enjoying themselves. I have to confess I’m quite jealous.

Thanks to my workload and the fact that Jamie appears to be sinking further into an unemployed depression, our sex life is more dormant than a volcano that last blew its stack when sabre-toothed tigers were all the rage.

For the first time in the years we’ve been married, I have to actually try to remember when we last made love. It takes me a good minute or two to recollect the brief fumble we had last month after I’d put Poppy down for the night. And that was decidedly unmemorable for both of us.

The time before that was a further month back, and I have to confess that I was probably thinking more about Milo, the ute-driving hunk of young Australian and his rippling biceps, than I was my own husband.

This is a sorry state of affairs, Mum. I feel a combination of frustration that Jamie can’t find work and a severe feeling of guilt that I’m having such a good time in my job. I know damn well that he’s feeling pretty emasculated by the whole thing. Coming to Australia is proving to be the best thing to happen to me since Pops was born and the worst thing to happen to Jamie.

These concerning thoughts keep me awake for another half hour before I start to drift back into sleep. I only start to do that once I’ve resolved to put some time aside to helping Jamie find a job while also reining in my enthusiasm about Worongabba when I’m at home. That’s if we ever get back into our home, of course.

I very much hope we can pick up a key to the apartment tomorrow with no problems. The idea of spending a second night listening to Sandra impale herself on her weapon of mass destruction fills me with dread.

In a half doze the next morning, I hear Bob and Sandra leave the house.

I lie in bed with an exquisitely strange and uncomfortable feeling. We’re now completely alone, undressed and half asleep in the house of two people who were complete strangers twenty-four hours ago.

They’re not complete strangers now, it goes without saying. Once two people have put on an audible sex show for you in the middle of the night, you probably know them in a more intimate fashion than you do your best friends.

“Do you think we should get up?” Jamie says from beside me, and over his daughter’s wriggling toes.

“I suppose. This bed is very warm, though.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Can’t you wait until we get back to the apartment?”

“Probably not. The last thing I ate was tea before I got us locked out. If Sandra and her buzzing friend hadn’t woken us last night, I think my growling stomach would have done it instead.”

“I don’t feel right about eating their food.”

“But Sandra said help yourself. It’d be rude not to take her up on her kind offer.”

This is an argument I’m not likely to win. Men are quite happy to capitulate on any number of subjects if it means an easy life, but the state of their stomach is not one of them. It even seems to take precedence over their sexual appetite in terms of importance a lot of the time, which, when you think about it, must be some kind of miracle.

“Okay, we’ll have a look at what they’ve got, but we’re making sure we leave the place as clean as we found it, alright?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“You say that Newman, but your idea of cleaning up and mine are completely different. We’re going to do more than wipe a kitchen towel across the kitchen counter and half-fill the dishwasher.”

I shift in the bed and catch a whiff of myself. It isn’t pleasant.

“But before all of that,” I say with a wrinkled nose, “we’re having showers. I may have to wear yesterday’s clothes again until we get home, but I don’t intend to spend another minute wearing the rest of yesterday as well.”

The shower is glorious and invigorating. It’s one of those enormous walk-in ones that you usually only see in posh spas. Were it not for the fact that Jamie is preoccupied with Poppy, I might have dragged him in here for some vigorous soapy sex, thus ending the recent drought. Then I remember Sandra ordering Bob around in bed last night and my desire is instantly extinguished. I may have been only half-joking when I told Jamie we’d never be able to have sex again.

If there’s anything worse than having to put on dirty clothes after you’ve just had a cleansing shower, I don’t know what it is. Yet this is my fate on this hot, sunny Coolangatta morning.

I grimace as I pull on my shorts. I frown as I slip the T-shirt back over my head. All I can say is thank God we’re living somewhere hot so I don’t have to wear much.

By the time all three of us are cleaned up and dressed, the day’s heat is really starting to gear itself up. Having all these glass walls may look aesthetically very pleasing, but it does rather turn a house into something you’d usually grow tomatoes in.

We creep downstairs to the cooler environs of the kitchen and dining area. Why we’re creeping I have no idea. We have permission to be in the house, but it still feels weird to have the run of a place you’ve spent only one night in at the behest of its owners.

The blast of cold air from the enormous double fridge is wonderful, as are the contents. I’d be amazed if there were any pigs left in Queensland such is the amount of bacon Bob and Sandra have got stacked up on the shelves here. They also appear to have completely cleaned out the local farmers market, given the piles of fresh fruit and veg on offer.

I’ve never looked into the fridge of a rich person before. It’s enough to make you feel quite inadequate. I always like to think I keep ours pretty well stocked with a wide range of perishable foodstuffs, but when presented with a layout that resembles the entire refrigerated section of the average Walmart, I can’t help but feel I might be letting my family down a bit.

My husband doesn’t appear to be having any of my reservations about using Bob and Sandra’s belongings as he’s got the kettle on and has hunted down the tea bags before I even get over the shock of seeing a whole watermelon the size of a basketball in the crisper.

“I wonder if they have any porridge?” he says, banging and clattering his way around the fifty or so cupboards that ring the kitchen area. “Pops likes a bowl of porridge, don’t you Pops?”

“Yes Daddy!”

God bless childhood. It’s the only time in life you can get truly excited about oats.

“You want a bacon sandwich, Jamie?”

I can tell by the way my husband’s eyes light up that he’d like nothing more in the world right now. I decide to have the same. We couldn’t put a dent in the mountain of smoky back Bob and Sandra have collected at the rear of the fridge, so I feel a bit less guilty about eating their food.

I join my husband in the grand kitchen cupboard search and am pleased to discover the frying pan just before Jamie lays eyes on the porridge. It’s these small competitions that keep a marriage interesting, I find.

In no time at all, the kitchen is full of the smell of frying bacon, and I’m already worrying about leaving a stranger’s house stinking of dead pig. Poppy is happily munching her way through a bowl of hot, oaty goodness, and Jamie is merrily burning some toast, adding to the stench that will greet Bob and Sandra on their return later that day.

I knew this was a bad idea. We should have just left straight away. Now I’ll have to spend a good hour hunting through this ridiculously big house for the air freshener.

The bacon tastes wonderful, though. Jamie wasn’t the only one who woke up starving this morning, I realise as I tuck into my second half. Such is our combined hunger that we decide to go back for more.

Now chez Bob and Sandra smells like somebody’s firebombed a meat factory. I would feel even guiltier, but I’m too busy eating Miss Piggy to notice that much.

With two bacon sandwiches in me, I’m completely stuffed. I nurse my full belly with a second cup of tea while Jamie does his level best to fill the dishwasher. I know how bad he usually is at this, so I watch carefully as he puts the plates in the rack. He’s doing it with an unusual level of delicacy, it has to be said. I give him grief a lot of the time for being careless, but he’s treating Bob and Sandra’s belongings very well, to give him his credit.

The same can’t be said for Poppy. “Stop banging the spoon on the table and give it to Daddy, young lady.” I chide gently and take another sip of warm tea.

I then watch a game of wills between my husband and daughter for a few moments in a warm haze of bacon and tea. Pops has taken a real liking to that spoon and is refusing to hand it over to her father. I’m assuming this is her way of berating him for getting her locked out of the apartment all night and having to hear Sandra being molested by a noisy battery-powered device.

“Come on Poppy, give me the spoon,” Jamie says, holding out one hand.

“No!” Poppy shrieks, giggles, and skips just out of her father’s reach.

Jamie is trying his best to remain serious, but—as ever—our daughter’s innate charm and downright cheekiness is hard to resist. He can’t help but laugh as he pursues Poppy across the kitchen.

The war of the spoon comes to a climax over by the fridge, with the plucky young upstart being finally bested by her older, heavier opponent when he distracts her by turning a nearby oven glove into a puppet. This is a decidedly underhanded tactic. No small child can resist it when an everyday item is given a silly speaking voice.

“Oooh, why don’t you give me the
spooooon
, Poppy?” The oven glove says from Jamie’s right hand. “I eat
spoooons
and am very, very hungry…”

Pops giggles again and holds out the object of their combined attention. It seems that her desire to see Oven Glove Monster fed overrides her need to retain the spoon for future use.

Oven Glove Monster grabs the spoon and starts to make overblown chomping noises, causing further giggly emissions. I have to laugh, myself. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a happy, silly thing, and it warms me even more than the cup of tea, which I’m sadly getting to the bottom of. Time to leave, methinks.

“I’m going to write a thank-you note,” I say to both husband and daughter.

“Good idea,” Jamie agrees, slotting the spoon into the dishwasher and shutting the door. “You do that, and Pops and I will go make sure we’ve got everything from upstairs.”

To the sound of the gurgling machine I start to construct a short but heartfelt note using the pad and pen sitting on the counter next to the fridge:

To Bob and Sandra,

Thank you so much for letting us stay the night. We don’t know what we would have done without you.

Best wishes to you both, and we look forward to seeing you around the apartment complex.

We must take you out for a meal to show our appreciation properly.

Many thanks,

Laura, Jamie and

Oh dear. I have to stop writing as I’m overcome by a rather insistent stomach cramp.

The combination of bread, bacon, and hot brown tea appears to have woken up my bowels. They gurgle at me again in no uncertain terms, indicating that I should retire to the nearest convenience as soon as possible. I hadn’t factored in this development in my decision to eat breakfast on Bob and Sandra’s dime. The unlovely realisation that I’m going to have to take a poo in their house becomes apparent.

Oh dear, oh dear.

While I am not what you’d call a nervous pooer (despite what my idiot husband may claim to any Australian hippy who might be passing by), the prospect of having to go number two in Bob and Sandra’s house is not one I take any pleasure in. Still, needs must and all that.

I leave my note having not quite finished it yet and head in speedy fashion over to the downstairs bathroom that sits just off to one side as you come in the front door. Inside, things proceed rapidly and in time-honoured fashion. So healthy are my bowels this morning that I deliver a single, large package to its intended watery destination. I clean myself and stand, flushing the toilet as I do so.

Embarrassingly, the flush in this toilet isn’t all that effective and my contribution refuses to make itself scarce around the U-bend. I wait a few moments for the cistern to fill and press down on the flush again. This second attempt also ends in failure. As does the third.