Sleight of Hand (27 page)

I watch as his master unzips him and his pierced dick springs forth. I'm amazed that such a perfect porn-scene should be happening in such a mundane way, and barely out of sight of all those guys casually drinking their beer to my left.

As I watch, the master starts to squeeze his boy's nipples and the boy himself masturbates frantically. I
try to work out whether this is what people call sexual liberation, and therefore something we should be proud of, or man reverting to chimpanzee: our basest desires laid bare and an embarrassment to us all.

What I
can't
deny is how arousing the scene is.

I watch the cliché porn-scene for a moment and start to feel seriously horny myself. There's a reason, of course, why clichés are clichés, and the master ordering his more than willing boy around is intrinsically hot, especially when they are both so very, very pretty.

A hand slides over the bulge in my jeans and I look right to see Billy grinning at me. “They're sexy aren't they?” he says. He leans in and whispers in my ear, “I've had the little guy. He's hot, don't you think?”

“They both are,” I say, struggling to decide how to react to Billy who is right now pushing his hand down inside
my
jeans. How I
should
react of course is obvious enough, it's just that it feels so good … I'm rapidly losing control of whatever part of my brain needs to say ‘no' here.

Billy grabs my belt and I let him tug me further inside. He pushes me back against the wall next to the boy with the dog collar, and sinks to his knees to unbutton my fly.

Beside me the blond guy is crying out and wanking frantically as his master pummels his nipples. Daddy catches my eye and smiles dirtily, and removes one hand from his boy and slides it under
my
sweatshirt.

As Billy slips his lips around my dick, I'm momentarily lost in the moment, and it is heavenly. “Oh God,” I say.

I think,
“Shit, now that really does count as sex,”
and,
“you can't even say you were drunk.”

But then it is heavenly no more – his blow-job hurts more than any blow-job should. “Hey, be careful,” I say.

Daddy frowns at me and I open my mouth to say,
“not you,”
but then I can take Billy's teeth on my dick no longer. “Ouch! Fuck!” I say, which regrettably causes Daddy to release my nipple and return his attention to his own partner, who, I note, is still frantically masturbating. He seems, in fact, to be having considerable trouble coming.

“Sorry,” I say, pushing Billy's head away. “Sorry, but … this isn't working for me.”

Billy stands and smiles and shrugs before wandering off into the shadows.

I button my fly and re-enter the bar. Having to refasten my belt with at least five people staring at me makes me feel as cheap as I ever have felt, and sensing that to top it all I am now blushing, I head directly for the exit.

As I climb the stairs, I have a final reassuring thought. That maybe if you don't come, maybe
then
it doesn't count as sex?

It is almost one a.m. when I get back to Pevensey Bay so Jenny has already gone to bed.

Wide awake, I creep upstairs and check the wall in the spare room which, despite the downpour, seems to have remained dry, then I return downstairs to sleep.

But I don't sleep. Instead, I lie on one side and stare out at the almost full moon glimmering through the thinning layer of cloud and think about my evening, because what happened tonight doesn't feel insignificant.

The reason for that, I decide, is that it is an omen – a glimpse of the future. Unless I make a determined effort to engineer it otherwise what will happen is that I will slowly forget Ricardo – it's happening already – and then one night I will meet someone new and without ever really having decided it, my time with Ricardo will be over. It's clearly not beyond the realms of possibility that I could slip back into a relationship with Tom.

The fact that neither of these scenarios strikes me as unappealing demonstrates how far down this path I have already gone.

As a mental exercise, I force myself to think about Ricardo. I force myself to remember what he looks like and what his body feels like next to me in bed. I think about his qualities and all the reasons I love him. And as I fall asleep, I reaffirm that letting this relationship slip into the void – when it came after all at such cost – is not what I want. It's not what I want at all.

In the morning I half wake up as Jenny and Sarah, whispering loudly, slip out of the front door, but fall quickly back to sleep. It's almost ten when they wake me up for the second time.

“I got all the stuff for a proper cooked breakfast,” Jenny says. “We even found you some veggie sausages. Pevensey has everything.”

“Sausages,” Sarah says, “sausages!”

She sounds like a talking dog that was on TV when I was a kid. Sausages was all it ever said.

“So how was Brighton?” Jenny asks, once breakfast is served. “Did you have a nice time?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It was good. I met a really nice guy called Billy and we spent all night chatting.”

“Billy,”
Jenny says, as if trying the name out for suitability. “So? What's he like?
Billy.”

“Oh nothing, you know …” I stammer. “But, um, really interesting. He's a social worker so he had lots of funny stories.”

“Right,” Jenny says. “But not your type, or … ?”

“Jenny!” I protest.

She shrugs. “I just thought it would be nice if you had a bit of fun,” she says.

“So now you think cheating is
a good thing?”

“No, but it would be nice if you found someone who wasn't ten thousand miles away,” she says. “That's all I meant.”

“Five,” I say. “Five thousand.”

“OK, five.”

I frown and analyse this phrase as I eat my Quorn sausages. There is something so
wrong
about Jenny saying this to me but for a moment with my morning brain-fog I can't work out what exactly the problem is. And then it comes to me.
“He's only five thousand miles away because I'm looking after you,”
I think. It would seem too cruel to point that out to a woman with cancer, and so I attempt to look unruffled and change the subject instead.

“How was
your
evening?” I ask. “How was Tom's mystery boyfriend?”

“Still a mystery, I'm afraid. He couldn't come – work or something. So it was just the three of us.”

“Just me, Mummy and Tom,” Sarah says.

“Oh,” I say. “That's a shame.”

“Yeah, I was looking forward to meeting him. I'm quite intrigued really. Tom seems very in love anyway, so that's good. It's lovely the way he has unexpectedly stumbled on a whole new chapter like
that, don't you think? It means there's hope for the rest of us.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Did you see that the wall stayed dry?” I ask, rapidly changing the subject.

“Yes, I did! I checked it this morning.”

“It looks like my repair worked.”

“Yes. I thought I'd phone Susan today and ask her what colour she wants.”

“Just white again, hopefully,” I say.

“Well, it's up to her really isn't it?” Jenny says.

Of course I knew that I was playing mind games. And of course, part of me knew that it was wrong. But I couldn't seem to stop myself. My motivations were complex. On the simplest level, I was beginning to see Ricardo, rather than my cancer, as the cause of all the guilt I was feeling over Mark's forced presence. If Ricardo vanished, my logic went, then Mark would be perfectly happy to stick around, and Lord knows, I needed him to stick around.

But it wasn't only that Ricardo was an obstacle to satisfying my own and Sarah's needs. I had dated Ricardo, I
knew
Ricardo, I had myself
trusted
Ricardo. And I knew that he was an able liar and a deceitful cheat, and nothing in my new unexpectedly relaxed conversations with him convinced me that this was anything other than a permanent way of being for him. The holes in his stories, the gaps in what he would relate about the simplest of things were black holes within which sordid truths lurked – I was sure of it. This felt like a woman's intuition, but perhaps it was just my ego insisting that the failure of our relationship had nothing to do with me … Either way, I was convinced that he would make Mark no less unhappy than he had made me. I just kept waiting for Mark to see the same truth.

Try as I might – and perhaps through bad faith, I didn't try hard enough – but try as I might, I couldn't envisage a happy future for them together and I honestly did want Mark to be happy. It was just that every time I imagined Mark happy the image I created didn't include Mark dating Ricardo. I
imagined him dating the nurse in the cancer ward, or a guy I had seen at the fish and chip shop … I pictured him dating someone new he would meet on a night out in Brighton, someone funny, someone a lot more like Tom than Ricardo.

And so, on autopilot almost, I found myself trying to push wedges between he and Ricky; I found myself encouraging him to go out; trying to create a space where he too would imagine a better future for himself.

I was feeling suddenly energetic and optimistic beyond any logic to do with my circumstances, and I wanted Mark to feel the same way instead of simply resenting being stuck here with me. A new love interest would do that for him.

Perhaps, above all, I wanted a way for him to be happy that was compatible with my own needs and maybe that
was
wrong of me. But when I sat down and analysed it, I couldn't see much that was right about his current relationship either and so I thought, what the hell. I'll be successful and he'll be happy, or I'll fail and he'll go back to Ricardo. And no-one actually dies either way.

On Tuesday lunchtime, I send off my latest piece of translation work and begin to clear the spare room ready for redecoration. Both the mattress and the carpet stink of mould and so I resign myself to finding cheap replacements and dump them outside in the rain.

In order to enable me to carry it alone, I remove the drawers from the dressing table and in the final drawer, discover a photo album. I sit on the newly bared floorboards and, feeling something of a voyeur, flick through the pages.

These are typically poor quality snaps from that era: everything that happened to photography in the seventies – Polaroids, 110 compacts, – was to do with speed, size and convenience, and nothing to do with quality. This batch looks bad enough to have been taken with the worst of all formats, a Kodak disc camera.

There are blurred, low resolution photos of Susan and Ted looking young and surprisingly wealthy on Eastbourne pier, and another of Ted standing proudly in front of a shiny new car. There are photos of Ted giving baby Franny a bottle, and images of him opening the door to this house, presumably for the first time.

When I reach the end of the album, I flip it shut, but then, having spotted something wrong with the chronology, I frown, and open it up again.

At that moment, I hear Jenny open the front door, so I take the album downstairs to show her.

“God the garden looks like a gypsy encampment,” she says.

“I'll call the council and arrange to have it picked up,” I say as she removes Sarah's coat.

“Why is the bed outside?” Sarah asks.

“I told you,” Jenny says. “It's because it's smelly.”

“Why is it smelly?”

“Because of the leaky roof,” Jenny replies.

“Why is the roof leaky?”

“Hey Jen,” I say, interrupting what I know will be a never ending list of questions. “Look what I found.”

She takes the album from my hand and crosses to the sofa. Sarah and I sit either side of her as she flicks through.

“God that's
them
isn't it?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Who are they?” Sarah asks, pointing.

“The people from next door,” Jenny explains. “Franny's mum. But a long time ago. He was handsome wasn't he?”

“And she looked like Dietrich.”

“Yeah. And who's that?”

“It's too long ago to be Franny.”

“Yeah. These must be twenty years ago at least.”

“Thirty, I'd say.”

“Yeah, but at
least
twenty. God, look at that car. A friend of mine's dad had one of those.”

“Austin Princess,” I say. “Horrible huh?”

“But posh. They must have been loaded.”

“Well, yeah … buying second homes as well … So, who
is
that?” I say pointing at the toddler again.

“Yeah. She'd be twenty or thirty now.”

“I thought it was Franny for a minute.”

“It looks a bit like her, but, no, of course not. I always thought they seemed a bit old to have a six year old actually. I mean, I know people have kids later nowadays, but all the same.”

“So maybe Franny is their grandchild,” I say.

“Yeah, that's what I was just thinking.”

I am about to say that this leaves the mystery of the missing daughter, but it crosses my mind that she may have died. “Anyway,” I say, instead. “Are you gonna phone them and ask them what colour this room needs to be?”

“Sure,” Jenny says. “But you know we have to go to St Thomas' to pick up my chemo tomorrow?”

“Yeah. Precisely,” I say. “I thought we could buy the paint on the way home.”

“OK, I'll phone her today,” Jenny says, still looking at the photo. “Do you think I should mention these?”

“No,” I say. “No, I don't.”

“I suppose …” Jenny says wrinkling her nose and snapping the book shut, “if they left them here, well, it was for a reason, wasn't it?”

“Exactly.”