Smut: Stories (13 page)

Graham had decided to come straight to the point.

‘The thing is,’ and he leaned confidentially over the counter, ‘it’s a bit difficult. While I’m not exactly gay and am in fact happily married I’ve got myself into a bit of a fix and I’m being blackmailed.’

‘Dear me,’ said the desk sergeant. ‘There’s no need for that in this day and age. Blackmail! We aren’t living in the 1950s. Well, you’re in luck. I happen to know our community liaison officer is on the premises and you can have a little chat with him. I shan’t keep you a moment.’ And he went off down the corridor saying, ‘Blackmail! Dear oh dear.’

Heartened by his sympathetic reception and relieved at the prospect of sharing his troubles Graham resumed his seat in the reception area where he idly leafed through some of the literature scattered about the low table. Turning a page of the local bulletin he came upon a photograph of a young policeman, looking shy but fetching in his uniform as he was being presented with an award for services to the community. It was Gary.

Not having kept abreast of liberation and its advancements Graham was slightly startled to find the award had been given to Gary (whose name appeared to be Kevin) for services to the community and in particular in his capacity as gay liaison officer. Having come out himself, ‘as a policeman, an act of great personal courage’, Kevin/Gary had been giving talks in schools, churches and to community groups, and was thought to be personally responsible for a significant fall in hate crime in the neighbourhood.

He was about to read on when somewhere down the corridor a door opened and Graham heard the sound of voices. Not daring to look back or to check who it was Graham ran down the steps, waiting an agonised second or two before the doors slid open and he could flee the premises.

IT IS A FEW DAYS LATER and Betty is dawdling over her computer.

‘Did you ever wonder,’ she said, ‘whether Graham might be gay?’

Mr Forbes senior put on his glasses and considered.

‘It had occurred to me,’ he said, ‘only then he married you so I assumed I must be mistaken.’

It was the afternoon and they were in bed.

‘What about you?’

‘It worried me,’ said Betty ‘that he spent so much time on his fingernails, although men do moisturise nowadays, don’t they?’

‘They do,’ agreed Mr Forbes (who didn’t). ‘He was always fastidious even as a boy and he had an umbrella at a very early age. Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. He likes you, that’s the main thing.’

‘Yes,’ said Betty, ‘but he is gay. I’ve known for a while.’ (She’d followed up some of the websites he’d been visiting.) ‘I was just bothered that you didn’t.’

‘Is it a problem?’ said his father.

‘Not as such,’ said Betty. ‘And he does very well.’

‘Which just leaves Muriel,’ said Mr Forbes. ‘There’d be a problem there.’

‘Has she made any progress on the computer?’

‘What do you think?’ said Mr Forbes.

Betty frowned, her fingers scampering over the keys.

‘What’s the matter?’

Betty shook her head as she brought Graham’s personal account up on the screen. ‘I can’t work it out. He’s been making some very odd payments.’

Though Graham and (as he was still bound to call him) Gary now met regularly Graham never mentioned his visit to the police station or that he knew of Kevin’s respected position in the community…a role which even Graham could see rendered him as vulnerable to blackmail as his victim. How, though, could he turn the tables? Short of coming out and telling Betty and his mother for the moment there was nothing to be done.

A casualty of the heightened commerciality of the relationship between the two men was any pleasure Graham might have been expected to glean from their connection. He did what he was told glumly and with no joy, never able to forget that he was being physically humiliated and was paying for the privilege besides with, most injured, his pride.

His marked lack of enthusiasm, while entirely understandable, still managed to irk his tormentor who felt that some minimal rapture was owing. But it was not forthcoming and Graham was not a good enough actor to simulate it.

‘The spoilsport,’ thought Kevin. Still, and he trousered another grand, there were compensations.

In time, though, boredom took its toll even on Kevin and more and more when they met money changed hands but nothing else.

The hangover from these unwilling trysts affected Betty, too. The exuberance that had made Graham such an enlivening partner was now virtually extinguished. He came to bed and went to sleep, but often now she would wake in the night and find him awake too.

At first Betty thought this was what was to be expected, the shine going off the marriage as it was supposed to do. But there were other more disturbing developments. Undressing, Graham had always put his clothes neatly on or over the back of the chair, his shoes, socks inside, tucked cosily under the bed. This new Graham now left his shirt on the floor and his shoes all over the place so that Betty wondered at first if he was having a breakdown before deciding he wasn’t imaginative enough for that.

Something was wrong, though, and his fingernails were a disgrace.

Chaste as their life together had become, it was not wanting in affection. Indeed since Graham’s trouble he had become a far kinder and more considerate and appealing person than he had ever been before. He came to his wife for comfort and reassurance though over what he was never specific. ‘Life’ was the nearest he got to it.

‘Is it work?’ Betty asked.

‘Not really.’

‘You’re not ill?’

He shook his head mutely.

‘You’re so good to me,’ he would mumble before drifting off to troubled sleep. Tonight, though, he lay awake and talked about their future, saying he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in a bank and had she ever thought of Australia.

Betty had never thought of Australia, being quite happy with Alwoodley. So she was about to ‘talk it through’ as he put it when Graham leaped out of bed and peered through the curtains.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ said Graham. ‘I thought there was a car outside.’

‘AT FIRST,’ said Betty, ‘I thought he was just stealing from the bank, only why I couldn’t think as there’s always plenty of money in his account.’

They were in bed again, the laptop eponymously open on her lap, Mr Forbes reading.

She didn’t say this to Mr Forbes but what shocked Betty wasn’t the peculation itself; it was that the amounts involved, while not trivial, were relatively small. Acquisitive though Graham was and bold though he thought himself he had always been modest in his aspirations and limited in his ambitions, how limited he himself had never appreciated. He had never realised, for instance, that what he took to be Betty’s fortune was actually only the accumulated interest from her real fortune which lay elsewhere. In the light of this the amounts that Graham was embezzling from the bank were negligible, but they would need to be repaid and repaid quickly before an audit showed them up.

Actually she was doing Graham an injustice. He was modest in his assumptions, it’s true, but so, too, was Kevin and it was his demands that dictated the withdrawals, each as limited in his expectations as the other.

‘So where is the money going?’ said Mr Forbes.

‘Give me five minutes,’ said Betty.

Simpler, of course, would have been to ask the man himself, ‘Are you being blackmailed?’ but several considerations made this course of action unfeasible. For a start it blew Betty’s cover as the simple but adoring wife, knowing nothing of money or accounts or the world in general. Bad enough that she would have to reveal that she had been poring over his bank statements and in the process had sufficient know-how to spot payments that were dubious or inexplicable; but more generally undesirable in Betty’s view would be the transformation of their relationship that must come about were Graham to realise she knew that he was gay (if even occasionally). Lacking in intellectual stimulation though it was, their set-up seemed to Betty pretty well satisfactory. The adjustments consequent on either of them coming clean were too radical (and too tedious) even to contemplate…his bluster, her forbearance, no: cards on tables was not a solution. ‘I’ve found him,’ said Betty…

GRAHAM’S MOTHER was just thinking of having an early sherry when the doorbell went. It was a policeman.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs Forbes. I am the Crime Prevention Officer. There has been a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood and we’re conducting a survey of home security.’

He showed her an identity card.

‘May I come in?’

‘Of course.’

But then he didn’t, just waiting on the doorstep.

‘No offence, Mrs Forbes, but you have already made two mistakes. One, you opened the door straightaway without putting it on the chain before ascertaining who the caller might be. Two, you didn’t even look at my identification. Check it out.’

He showed it to her again and she looked more carefully. It was a card for a swimming club, the policeman…if he was a policeman…half-naked in swimming trunks.

‘It’s a lovely photo,’ said Mrs Forbes, ‘but it’s not the legal one.’

‘Quite so,’ said the Crime Prevention Officer. ‘You sometimes have to commit crimes in order to prevent them. This is the one you should have been shown,’ and he handed her another card with a (clothed this time) photograph and which attested to his status as Crime Prevention Officer.

‘Now, Mrs Forbes, having established my credentials, may I come in?’

‘Certainly,’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘I was just going to have some tea.’

‘HE COULD HAVE BEEN ANYBODY,’ said Mr Forbes later.

‘Yes. He told me that, only I know a policeman when I see one. And if you’re so concerned for my well-being you should try being at home more often. How long does it take to put up a shelf?’

‘The shelves are finished, I’m doing the draught excluders now.’

‘WHAT DID HE LOOK LIKE?’ said Graham.

‘Very handsome,’ said his mother. ‘He showed me a picture of him in swimming trunks.’

‘The policeman? What on earth for?’

‘To test me. Then he showed me the proper one with his clothes on. He’s the Crime Prevention Officer.’

‘So you keep saying. What did you tell him?’

‘I didn’t have to tell him anything. He knew it all. It’s on the internet, apparently.’

‘The internet?’

‘The computer. One of those things.’

‘What you don’t realise,’ said Graham, ‘is that now I’m higher up in the bank we’re all much more vulnerable. Bankers’ families get kidnapped on a regular basis as a way of getting into the safe.’

‘Not in Alwoodley, surely. I said to him, I don’t like the police knowing all our details and he said it was just to be on the safe side. Though he had one or two things wrong. He thought your name was Toby. I said, “Toby?” I said you’d once had a dog called Toby when you were little, do you remember? That smelly little article that we had to get rid of…that was the only Toby I knew. We laughed.’

‘NICE WOMAN YOUR MOTHER,’ said Kevin. ‘Adores you.’

‘Yes,’ said Graham. ‘That’s the only reason I’m here.’

It was another bleak car park.

‘Shame you got married, though. She wasn’t expecting that.’

‘Leave her alone.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘What’s my mother got to do with you? I’m paying, aren’t I? Leave her alone.’

‘I have to do my duty. The premises are inadequately protected. They don’t even have an alarm bell.’

SO IN DUE COURSE Mrs Forbes senior’s policeman made what he called ‘a follow-up visit’, bringing the homeowner the latest literature on laser technology in the service of crime prevention. She had poured him a sherry and they were in the lounge discussing where, should she invest in some sensors, they could best be positioned. His standing on a chair to point out the preferred locations gave Mrs Forbes a chance to admire the same well-muscled back that her son had had occasion to stroke the fateful night before his wedding. Now, though, it was filling out a crisp white uniform shirt, set off by epaulettes, a pager thrust into the back pocket.