Refuge (8 page)

After the meeting he had watched her as she packed her papers away. While slovenliness was seen as a virtue among most students, her clean blonde hair had been brushed and styled, falling luxuriantly across the nape of her neck. He noticed that her slim fingers ended in neatly filed nails, painted with clear varnish. When she had argued with him, her eyes had been hard-set and her facial muscles firm, but when she saw him half-watching her she smiled. She walked across the room, put out her hand and said, ‘Amanda Greeves. Why don’t you pick up the pieces of your ego and I’ll buy you a drink?’

It was that edgy straightforwardness that had both attracted him and made him miserable in the beginning. She did not kowtow to him, did not let his unthinking comments pass by without being tackled. She demanded forthrightness in a manner that he found intimidating. He had passed his first few years at university by fudging views and substituting clarity with charm. Amanda demanded logic and sincerity instead, virtues that he had found hard to achieve. Their physical relationship had been equally challenging. She voiced her needs with assertion. She would tell him what she felt like doing, what she thought would be interesting to try, and expected him to have the same adventurous demands. Some days she would arrive home grumpy and tired, take off her clothes and lie down on their bed, saying, ‘Just fuck me, okay?’ Other days she would sneak up behind him in the cafeteria, pinch his buttock cheek and whisper something outrageous before wandering off in search of a plate of food as if nothing had been said, leaving him flustered and aroused.

Richard wondered whether having a child had been the turning point. They had carried on making love with vibrancy throughout the pregnancy. He had been unrelentingly aroused at the sight of her smooth, swollen belly and its sharp fall towards her pubic hair. The need for restraint in the last month had only made the sex more erotic and explosive. But when their daughter Raine had been born, he was overwhelmed by the responsibility and the required maturity of his new position as a father. Wanton sex seemed somehow out of place in a parent. But also, as that slimy body was pulled out, sucking, from inside Amanda, he became acutely aware that the swelling that had been the cause of such sensual closeness between them had suddenly become a separated entity, something that they now both owned, but which was no longer part of them. He had watched his young wife gaze at their daughter with soft eyes, filled with wonder and love, and he knew his world had shifted for ever. He did not resent the child, yet he felt keenly the loss of something only briefly held and now drifting impossibly out of reach.

Now they summoned up their emotional responses from an internal supply pool of accessible flotsam, where the right worn-out phrase could be sought and fished out. It felt like joining dots in a child’s book: the final picture was immediately apparent and yet he predictably etched one line after another until some absent artist’s ordained creation had been completed.

Recently, Amanda had insisted on buying two pedigree Labrador pups, complaining that she needed something to soak up her maternal energies. She showed a level of affection and concern for the dogs that left Richard feeling resentful. She kissed them on the sides of their mouths, pushing up their lips to expose pink-and-white gums. Her ice-cold demeanour would melt into little gushing sounds as they nuzzled their noses into her lap, their tails wagging frenetically. The dogs enjoyed pride of place in the living room and in the bedroom, looking up at Richard with hurt eyes when he shooed them out of the way and leaving a trail of silky hair wherever they went.

Richard turned off the highway and made his way along the dappled avenue towards the impressively high gates of the security complex. ‘Vineyard Heights’ was stamped in big brass letters on the white pillar. The red-and-white boom was stretched across the entrance and he stopped the car. A security guard stepped out from his small cubicle, clipboard in hand.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Calloway, sir,’ the man said. Richard couldn’t remember the guard’s name and nodded without saying anything. The boom jerked up and he drove into the manicured grounds of the estate. On one side, young chenin blanc vines ran in regimented rows along the shoulder of the narrow estate road, stretching into the distance. The other side was shaded by massive European oak trees, their gnarled feet gripping the ground. Between the trunks Richard could see the water spraying up in the middle of an artificial lake, splattering back down on the surface like rain. An ungainly swan waddled down the slope and slid chest-first into the water, sending a platoon of smaller mallards quacking out of the way. The home-owners’ association had seen fit to introduce peacocks onto the estate; the males divided their time between showy displays and chasing after the local hadedas that strutted about, eyeing the peahens and their nests with measured intent.

When he and Amanda had first visited the estate, the pretence of rural isolation seemed quaint. It offered an environment in which nature would be presented to their child in a neatly fenced and tamed package. But the homogenous architecture and pleasing colours had started to feel claustrophobic. The sense of fabrication and dislocation intensified over time; now Richard suspected that the estate was in essence no different from the Western compounds that he had seen in Riyad and Islamabad, a bastion of familiarity shored against the world that lurked beyond the sandbags and watchful soldiers.

He pulled in alongside Amanda’s BMW X
₃
. Someone had left the gate open and the two Labradors bounded out at the sound of his car. He swung the door open and roared at them to get away before they scratched the paintwork. The dogs turned and fled inside, their tails carried low between their legs. Amanda gave him an accusing look as he walked up the stone path.

T
HE FLASHING STROBE
light made the dancer’s movements jerky and disjointed, like a mannequin strung up on a shooting range. The victim of a cruel hoax, her slender arms moved too suddenly from one position to the next and her head snapped from side to side. She strode across the floor towards the audience. The interrupted sequences made her approach menacing and unpredictable as she loomed out of the alternating dark and light. Suddenly, she was at the edge of the mock-catwalk, towering above her audience. The carefully applied eyeliner gave her big eyes a stylised and androgynous appearance, and her lips were smeared with iridescent lipstick. The front row of men gazed up with fixed grins, caressing her legs with fidgety eyes. She looked over the tops of their heads, staring into the fog of cigarette smoke and soft lighting. Her nipples pressed out beneath her white schoolgirl shirt and a fluffy pompom wiggled in front of her snatch, held in place by a transparent plastic thong. On cue, the strobe faded and a red-and-yellow wash lit up the stage. The frenetic introductory music changed to a slower, anticipatory beat. Some men started clapping in time, watching her expectantly.

Richard sat away from the stage, slouched in a black paddedleather booth. He observed the display on stage absently, sipping his frothed beer and grunting in occasional agreement as David Keefer prattled next to him. Richard had not been in such a club for years, not since he was a student, drunk and confident. When he had arrived with David, he had felt the thrill, alighting from a taxi outside the imposing city block and nodding to the stocky bouncers standing outside. But the initial exhilaration had quickly faded and was replaced with smutty boredom. There was undoubtedly something risqué and unnervingly lustful about the mix of men, alcohol and naked dancers. But the tease, the unattainable fiction of erotic dance, was depressing, and ultimately as demeaning to the audience as it was to the dancers. Richard could not shake the sense that he did not belong. When he looked around, he saw powerful and wealthy men; this was not a gathering of boilermakers and diesel mechanics, but one of the respectable middle and upper classes, wearing suits and fashionable labels. Yet he was still nagged by the thought that his presence imparted a special credence that the evening would otherwise lack, as if he came from a caste of especially honourable men – a caste to whom such a scene would be unfamiliar and distasteful. He turned away, bothered that they might see the condescension reflected in his eyes, and brand him with their scorn.

A waitress walked past with a tray of empty glasses and bottles. Her pointed breasts perched just above the wet plastic rim. The combination of her unashamed nakedness and the spilt remains of beer was disquieting, and Richard could not help but stare. She met his gaze briefly, but did not acknowledge him; he supposed she was used to being watched. At another circle of couches, a tall, willowy dancer was giving a group of boisterous suit-clad men a private show, draping herself across one man’s lap and pressing her damp skin against his face. The others were hooting and cheering her on, smacking each other boyishly on the shoulders. She noticed Richard watching and licked her top lip with a pink tongue. He quickly looked away, mortified. The two fleeting encounters – the unsmiling waitress and the lap-dancer – focused the rift for Richard: it was not that he judged these men; it was that he was unable to suspend disbelief and enter the fiction. Instead he paced the perimeter like a chained predator, hungry and unfulfilled. He envied the others’ ability to find satisfaction in their constructed affairs and imagined interactions, and he berated himself for his self-righteousness.

Richard became aware of the continued drone of David’s conversation next to him: ‘It’s not that I don’t love … you know. I mean, I do … love her, you see. I really do, and I don’t know what I would do without her.’

Richard grunted in acknowledgement again, surveying the scene from over the rim of his glass as he took another deep drink. The cold beer rushed down his throat and he felt his body tingle. He longed for the blur of inebriation.

David was a tall red-headed man with a fierce outbreak of freckles covering his entire face. As a student, his hair had been a wild mane that shook and thrashed as he moved. He had been irresistible to the women around him and had had a series of disastrous relationships. He had a naive honesty that was endearing in smaller doses, but proved too intense for most of his girlfriends. He behaved as if he were perpetually stoned, asking earnest questions, often inappropriately, but genuinely transfixed by the conversation. In fact he had experimented very little with drugs and most of his excesses were limited to alcohol. His appetite for life, and female companionship in particular, was legendary. He rushed, puppy-like, from one adoration to another, crashing through people’s lives and leaving well-meaning swathes of destruction in his path. It was with some relief to his friends when, later on, Charmaine had agreed to marry him. She was seemingly inured to his quirky nature, but her loyal presence had done little to change his disastrous habits, and their marriage was pockmarked with extramarital loves and infatuations.

‘It’s just that … well, we all need something different from time to time. If this is the only life we’re going to have to enjoy, you know, then surely, it’s only natural, to want to experience everything in it.’ David was rambling as if deeply intoxicated, whereas in fact he had only had a beer or two. Richard was used to the directionless agonising of his friend, particularly when he was troubled or wanted to divulge something personal. ‘We all need it, Richard. Even you,’ David added.

Richard looked across at his companion for the first time. ‘What do you mean by that?’

The question was a cold dare and David hesitated before replying. ‘Well, so … at least you’re listening to me.’ David looked forlorn, like a chastened adolescent. ‘Okay, well, I just mean that we all, you included, we all need something different now and again. To keep our interest up. It’s just part of who we are. Men. Hunters. All that, you know …’

Richard flushed with irritation. ‘Keefer, just because you can’t keep your dick in your pants doesn’t mean that we all have to be lumped in your pathetic camp. I’ve had no problem remaining faithful to Amanda and I don’t intend to change that any time soon. So by all means tell me about your latest problem, but don’t pretend that your problems are in fact also mine. Because they’re not.’ Again he felt an uncomfortable flush of piousness.

David mumbled something inaudible in response, glumly draining his glass and staring into it as if hoping to discover the answer floating like a dead fly in the layer of beer at the bottom.

Richard did not want to get into a drunken debate about his friend’s emotional and sexual needs, not with David and least of all in the middle of a strip club. But blunted as David’s comments may have been, they still managed to strike at Richard’s increasing despondency. He felt as if he was skipping across his life like a stone across a lake, bounding in short, predictable hops, little splashes here and there as he shot along, never diving beneath the surface to experience the brackish depths. Drunken moments of altered consciousness felt like living, but they were poor substitutes. He longed for the sublime mixture of misery and euphoria, the desperate emotion that new love evoked. He remembered the fierce agony of his love for Amanda, the intensity of the excitement at being together. Animation had been surreptitiously replaced with numb dependency; their relationship had aged, losing its texture like a crisp wine that had become tiresomely bland. If he spent time travelling away from home, he missed Amanda in the way he missed the other familiar comforts of his home. If they fought, he longed for them to make up, but only because friction forced him to assess their life together, exposing the weaknesses.

Richard was suddenly aware that David had stopped talking. He turned to his companion to observe him gaping at an approaching figure. The woman was tall, with defined arms and toned thighs that plunged into high black boots. Every move she made oozed sexuality and her tight outfit accentuated her curved waist and large breasts. Richard was about to wave her away when David half-rose to his feet.