Smut: Stories (10 page)

‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with whether we’ve done it or not.’

‘When you are as old as Canon Mollison,’ Mr Forbes said patiently, ‘one of the few perks of the job is talking to young people about the sexual act. What in any other context would probably get him arrested, in the vestry passes for spiritual advice.’

‘It must be a very depressing job,’ said Graham.

Still, he looked wonderful and reluctantly taking leave of the mirror he briefly inspected his father. He would do.

So in due course Graham and Betty went to church and the banns were read and they had the session with the vicar. When they came out Betty burst out laughing, which she had been wanting to do inside (Graham had just been bored). Now she made Graham see the funny side of it so that Graham, who had never come across a woman who made jokes, realised, almost for the first time, that he might actually like her.

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE his wedding Graham was in bed with a youth called, he thought, Gary. Gary was well built. His smooth flesh was cool, hard and perfectly proportioned, and contemplating the silent back Graham decided it was like the flesh of heroes as described in classical mythology.

‘And they didn’t have much in the way of small talk either,’ mused Graham. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Mmm?’ murmured the youth, half-asleep.

‘Just thinking aloud,’ said Graham. Was his name not Gary but Trevor? Graham tried half-saying the name to himself. No response. The smooth back rose and fell. Of course many people (many boys he meant) didn’t thank you for saying their name. In these circumstances, names tended to be left off along with everything else.

Gary stroke Trevor had a silver chain round his neck from which hung a thin, oblong medallion. It lay now somewhere between his chest and the pillow. It was likely, Graham reasoned, or at least possible that this slip of metal would carry its owner’s name, so, stealthily stroking his way to a different district of the vast back he began to edge the medallion round into view. He was relying on the young man being asleep as such a manoeuvre was not easy to disguise, fiddling with someone’s identity disc hardly to be incorporated into, or interpreted as, any form of love play known to Graham, though curiosity about everything attached to his companion’s person must surely count as a compliment.

Graham lightly lifted the chain free of the young man’s neck, and gently pulling it round he eased it free of a low-lying curl. Even his ears were perfect, at any rate the one he could see, neat, simple, the lobe furred with a faint, fair down. Slowly the nameplate edged into view, faintly misted from the heat of its wearer’s body. One side was plain: Graham turned it over.

‘Shirley,’ the young man said. ‘I fuck her on Fridays.’

‘Is that nice?’ asked Graham.

‘She thinks so.’

‘Why Fridays?’ asked Graham.

‘Her hubby plays squash.’

There was a pause while Graham thought about Shirley and the young man.

‘You like that,’ said the boy.

‘What?’

‘Me and Shirley.’

‘Why?’ said Graham.

‘It feels to me you do.’

‘Actually,’ said Graham, ‘I was just looking at your back.’

‘Yeah. I swim. Stroke my bum.’

Graham did so though somewhat abstractedly wishing he could remember the name of its owner. Still, it wouldn’t do any harm, Graham decided, to make it plain that he too had irons in other fires.

‘I’m getting married in the morning.’

‘Ding dong the bells are going to chime,’ said the putative Trevor.

‘How do you know?’ said Graham, who was not into musicals. ‘It might have been in a registry office.’

‘Allow me to wish you every happiness. Actually, though, not there. Just where my bum joins my legs. It’s one of the lesser-known erogenous zones.’

At the word erogenous Graham decided he couldn’t be called Trevor and began to lose interest a little.

‘In fact,’ the young man went on, ‘I think I maybe discovered it. If my bum were an orchid it would probably bear my name.’

This was hardly the down-to-earth lorry driver ferrying a load of hard core from Rochdale to Penzance he had earlier claimed to be.

‘You seem very articulate for a lorry driver.’

‘I read, don’t I. In lay-bys. When you see lorries parked in lay-bys that’s what they’re doing nine times out of ten. Reading. What’s she like? Pretty?’

‘No,’ said Graham honestly.

‘Big tits?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Expecting?’

‘No.’

‘So what’re you marrying her for?’

‘There are other things,’ said Graham primly.

‘Oh sure. Don’t stop. I like it. It’s my favourite thing.’

Graham wearily complied but changed the subject.

‘Great flat.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Quite classy.’

‘I like it.’

‘And the shower is great.’ They had sampled the bathroom earlier. ‘Pricey?’

‘I manage. So,’ and he put his head on his arms, ‘no more of this then?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Graham. ‘I shall just have to play it by ear.’ See what I can get away with was what he meant. A good deal, he fancied, as the disparity between Betty’s looks and his own gave him plenty of room to manoeuvre; it would be some time before she ran out of gratitude; that was only fair.

‘I suppose in the circumstances this is your stag night?’

‘You could call it that. What kind of lorry is it you drive?’

‘A big one.’

‘Not a juggernaut, I hope. I disapprove of those on environmental grounds.’

‘Well,’ said the bum without a name, ‘we have to get the goods from Point A to Point B. This time tomorrow night I shall be in Penzance.’

‘I shan’t.’

‘You don’t have to stop at my bum. One thing is supposed to lead to another. That’s what it’s all about. I don’t think your mind’s on this, Toby. You’re thinking of Miss Right.’

Graham wasn’t. His thoughts were in the usual place and he was wondering why he should be the one to have to do the stroking.

‘On balance,’ said the supposed Trevor, ‘I prefer it straight. You get through more energy. It’s the post-coital rabbit I can’t stand. Turn over and I’ll do the same for you.’

As Trevor, whose name was actually Kevin but who had said it was Gary, stroked the back of Graham’s legs he wondered whether Toby thought this was for free. The question had not been discussed in the bushes where they had met but Kevin which was to say Gary got the feeling that Toby which was to say Graham thought he was doing him the favour and wondered how he might make this misconception plain. Still, as he lightly stroked the underside of his partner’s buttocks in the feathery way that he himself preferred he felt a glow of self-satisfaction that he was doing to someone else what he most liked having done to him.

‘I don’t like that,’ said Graham. ‘It tickles.’

Abandoning Toby’s ticklish bum the young man turned on his back, clasping his hands behind his head. His armpits were top scorers, too, thought Graham, though in what context he could not imagine. Butlin’s possibly, or Channel Five.

‘Do you like your name?’ Graham said.

‘Gary?’ said Kevin. ‘Yes. Yes I do like my name. In fact,’ and he raised himself on one elbow and looked down his body, ‘I like everything about me. My feet, my belly, my face…and, of course, that. I’ve never had any complaints anyway. And while we’re on the subject I think it’s about time you did something about that, Toby.’

‘All right, Gary,’ said Graham, now that the body beside him had a name, feeling his ardour rekindled, ‘what would you like me to do, Gary?’

‘Be my guest, Toby,’ said Kevin. ‘Oh, and in the circumstances, the wedding and so forth, this one’s on the house.’

THE WEDDING THE FOLLOWING DAY went off without a hitch, the vicar, having previously noted the disparity in looks between the bride and groom, pronouncing it a most Christian marriage.

The bride’s side of the church was only thinly populated even with some of those syphoned off from the over crowded pews on the groom’s side. Betty’s parents had been elderly and most of her surviving relatives were elderly too and reluctant to make the journey north. It was unsatisfactory but as Graham’s mother reasoned had Betty’s family turned out in force it might have confirmed her suspicions about her daughter-in-law’s racial ancestry.

There were no bridesmaids, what few women friends Betty had not really bridesmaid material. This was another blessing as the risk with bridesmaids is that they are prone to point up the inadequacies of the bride.

‘Not difficult in this case,’ thought Mrs Forbes. Or Mrs Forbes senior as she now was.

Where the best man and the ushers were concerned Graham was spoiled for choice and a bevy of high-spirited young men gave the occasion an element of whoopee it might otherwise have lacked.

Still, some of their reactions were unexpectedly heartfelt and at the climax of the service the best man was seen to brush away a tear, a gesture not seen by Mrs Forbes, who was too busy weeping herself, the happiest couple of all and wholly untearful not Graham and his bride so much as the bride and Mr Forbes, whom she had chosen to give her away. They were radiant.

At the reception both Betty and her new mother-in-law were surprised by what good dancers many of Graham’s friends turned out to be even if Graham himself took the floor reluctantly, doing a dutiful round with his mother and then with Betty but thereafter leaving it to his friends, many of whom seemed quite happy to dance on their own.

The unlikely king of the floor, though, was Mr Forbes. He had always been a good dancer; indeed it was one of the reasons why Mrs Forbes had picked him out. These days he seldom got the opportunity to show off his talents but as he waltzed his wife elaborately around the floor it was plain that, despite having overfortified himself with champagne, he had lost none of his skill and together they made an impressive couple.

This was deceptive. The drink had emboldened Mr Forbes and made him uncustomarily combative and he used the freedom of the dance further to explore the permitted limits of his sexual vocabulary.

‘Balls?’ he quickstepped. ‘Scrotum?’

Mrs Forbes stony-eyed gave no indication of having heard but maintained throughout a fixed and ghastly smile as her now foxtrotting partner remorselessly plied her with smut. ‘Pussy? Fanny? Arse?’

He might have been murmuring endearments in her ear and it could have been a touching spectacle. Certainly as the number ended the guests broke into spontaneous applause which Mr Forbes acknowledged as holding his wife’s hand she gracefully curtseyed. She had never been so unhappy in her whole life.

HAVING JUST BOUGHT a flat into which they were anxious to move straightaway the happy couple had forgone a lengthy honeymoon in favour of a weekend at a country-house hotel.

What Graham chose to call their ‘fooling around’ had been virtually unrestrained and surprisingly enjoyable and all with some sort of vehicular setting…the front or back seat of the car, his or the more commodious model belonging to his father. That they had never, in Graham’s words again, ‘gone all the way’ was partly because he was, if only in regard to the opposite sex, quite old-fashioned but also because he had never even in the alternative sphere been into penetrative sex and wanted to put it off as long as possible.

That apart it might be thought strange, his sexual inclinations being what they were, that Graham had never had any worries about the physical side of things. This, though, is to forget how much in love Graham was with himself. True, a mirror was always a help…a real mirror, that is; Graham did have his own full-length mirror that travelled with him wherever he went. No one else could see it, of course, but without it he was nothing whereas with it all things were possible: he could have faced a firing squad if he could have watched himself doing it. And though this wasn’t quite the spirit in which he approached his wedding night he was looking forward to seeing himself perform. However, when he surveyed their sumptuous quarters in the hotel he realised this was not going to be easy.

In many of the hotel rooms Graham had stayed, not always alone, an artfully located mirror afforded a reflection of the bed, the vision of himself naked on the sheets sufficient in itself to excite him with or without a companion. Here it was plush; grand and lavishly furnished with genuine antiques, the side table piled high with copies of
Country Life
,
Tatler
and
The Field
; one lacquer box contained after-dinner mints, another a selection of the Prince of Wales’s biscuits, plus, courtesy of the management, a basket of fruit and a huge bunch of peonies. What there was not was a mirror. There was a massive wardrobe, it’s true (bird’s-eye maple, French, nineteenth century), but there was no mirror.

Nor were there, as Graham swiftly ascertained while Betty was in the bathroom, any porn channels on the TV. On his travels for the bank Graham was used to staying in hotels a notch or two down from this palatial establishment where, though the accommodation might be less well accoutred, porn was always on offer. There, too, the rooms were smaller and the walls were thinner so that one could sometimes catch the occasional hint of what might be going on next door. Here the swagged drapes, the damasked wall covering, the refectory table, the royal biscuits all proclaimed the establishment’s indifference to such unworthy considerations. Honeymoon suite though it might be and the lap of luxury that it certainly was, good taste prevailed and sex was not catered for.

The reflection problem (of which Betty was unaware) was unwittingly solved when hanging up some of her clothes she opened the wardrobe to reveal that the interior of the door was backed by a full-length mirror, so once she was in the bathroom Graham with a little experimentation worked out that fully opened the wardrobe door would give a decent account of what, all being well, would be taking place on the bed.

So when Betty emerged from the bathroom it was to a ready and waiting Graham with the role he chose to play that of the stern and unsmiling husband now at last taking possession of his territory. ‘This,’ he said as he cast aside his towel, ‘this is when the marriage begins in earnest.’