Telling Lies to Alice (6 page)

I said, “Was it a gas ring or something?”

“No, nothing like that . . . In fact, I was hit on the head by a burning dildo.”

I thought he was joking so I said, very straight-faced, “Well, each to his own. Spoils your hair, though.”

“No, that’s the truth. It was thrown over a fence.”

“A
fence
?”

“Yes, a garden fence. Jack and Val have got this place out in Cuffley, you see, huge great garden, and there’s a woman who lives next door, eighty-five and made of tweed, pillar of the community . . . anyway, it was her granddaughter’s twenty-first birthday and someone had given her this thing as a present so she took off the wrapping paper and waved it about, hey, look at this, but then she suddenly realised . . . what it
was
. . . The old girl had no idea—they tried to tell her it was an African votive object but she’d knocked about a bit in the colonies and she didn’t believe them because it was made of rubber, and apparently African stuff is usually made of wood. . . . Well, she caught on in the end, and she said, ‘Oh, we can’t have such a thing in the house, I’ll take it down to the long paddock at once and set fire to it.’ Which she did, in a dustbin for burning garden rubbish, and she got a big can of petrol, covered everything in it, and threw in a match. Well, there we were, playing tennis without a care in the world, and suddenly we were enveloped in this evil-smelling cloud of smoke and this great black thing came whizzing out of nowhere and thumped me on the side of the head. The smoke was getting out of control and the old dear had panicked, lobbed it over the fence and legged it. Jack ran up to the fence and saw her going hell for leather back to the house, walking stick and all . . . he rushed over to the barbeque for a pair of tongs, picked this thing up, saw what it was, bellowed ‘Jesus
Christ
!’ and marched straight round and rang the bell . . .

“Val put me out by dipping her jersey in the fishpond and wrapping it round my head, then we rushed after Jack because we could hear all this shouting and bawling coming from next door and Val was convinced he’d done the old girl a mischief . . . we got there just in time to see him plunging the dildo into one of the ice buckets—they were having champagne—the granddaughter was hiding in the downstairs cloakroom and the woman was in a terrible state, choking and rushing round opening windows because of the smell . . .

“At first she denied all knowledge, but of course her guests knew and there I was with this sodden jumper round my head, dripping on the Axminster . . . Jack said, ‘Madam, you should have the decency to restrain your depraved urges until you are in the privacy of your own bedroom,’ so of course she said, ‘How dare you,’ and her son chimed in, ‘Don’t speak to my mother like that,’ so Jack said, ‘Well, she’s the one who’s been throwing burning dildos at complete strangers, not me.’ Then she got even more upset because she’s a magistrate and people usually say your ladyship and offer her cups of tea and all the rest of it and there was Jack telling her what a pervert she was, and then when she did own up he pretended not to believe her . . .

“Val was terrifically embarrassed: She said afterwards she thought the old dear was going to keel over with a heart attack and Jack would be blamed, so she started being conciliatory and saying we’d remove the offending object for her. We practically had to carry Jack out of her house, and he kept shouting at Val, ‘Why did you offer to get rid of it? I don’t want her smouldering marital aids in my dustbin. Why can’t she use her own? What happens if the dustmen find it? I’ll tell you what’ll happen, we’ll have to pay them to keep quiet, that’s what . . . I can see it now:
JACK FLOWERS’S RED-HOT NIGHT OF LOVE MELTS SEX TOY
. . . He made Val wrap it up in so much newspaper and tape that we almost couldn’t get it in the dustbin. She told me afterwards that he’d made a point of asking her which day the bin men came so he could hide behind the curtains and make sure they’d pitched it into the dustcart without looking inside. . . . Are you all right?”

“Yes . . . fine . . . sorry . . .” I was laughing too much to get the words out.

“Here, let me help . . .” Lenny pulled out his handkerchief. “Wipe your eyes.”

When I finally got my breath back, I said, “You said . . .
Val
. . . is that Jack’s wife?”

“Yes, why?”

“He doesn’t behave as if . . . Are
you
married?”

“No . . .
No!
Don’t wrinkle your nose like that. You don’t believe anything I say, do you?”

“Bits of it. I want to ask you something . . . When you took me to Mirabelle, and Jack was there . . .”

“Ye-es?”

“Did you intend for the three of us to end up in bed together?”

“Together?”
The expression on Lenny’s face was so priceless I started laughing again.

“What, then?”

“Well, you know . . .” He wouldn’t look at me.

“You meant . . . both of you, didn’t you?
Ménage à trois?
”

“Not at the same time! Just, you know . . .”

I shook my head. “Not till you tell me.”

“More, sort of . . . take turns . . .”

I said, “Oh, take it in turns, I see . . .” all sarcastic. “What do you do, toss a coin for who goes first?”

Lenny looked embarrassed, then he got all defensive and said, “Well, you’d be surprised how many women go for that sort of thing,” and he named a couple of well-known actresses and a model—I can’t tell you who they were for obvious reasons, but I was very surprised about one of the actresses, because she always looks terribly prim and plays these very straightlaced parts. The other one I’d have been able to guess, if I’d thought about it. “
Really?
Is that true?”

“Well, they get twice as much out of it, don’t they? Twice as much attention, twice as much—”

“I’ve got the picture. You don’t need to colour it in. What do you get out of it?”

Lenny thought about it for a moment, and said, “I suppose it’s a habit. When we were playing the halls, touring . . . well, we were always skint and we had to share a room, so we’d pool our cash and take one girl out instead of two, but we never . . . not
both
of us . . . Have you done that?”

“Done what?”

“Been in bed with two men at the same time.”

I said, “No, do you want to try it?”

“Two birds, I would.” He rolled his eyes. “Two blokes and a girl sounds a bit poofy to me.”

Lenny was so different to how he was at Mirabelle, and I found myself telling him all about . . . well, all sorts of things. It made a real change from sitting there nodding away, yes, yes, oh how interesting, while some guy bored the pants off me. I hardly ate anything—too busy talking—and then we had coffee and Lenny started telling me about his dad. “He never said much because he had this problem where he could never remember the word for anything, what it was called, and when he got angry about something, that made it worse. The best one was when I was called up for National Service. I thought you could pick the service you preferred—which you could, in
theory,
but most people ended up in the army. I told Dad I wanted to be in the navy, and he looked at me and his mouth started working, and then he said, ‘What do you want to join that lot for? It’s all . . . all . . .
ram, jam, and buggery!
’ He meant rum, bum, and concertina. I’ve never forgotten that—ram, jam, and buggery . . . it sounds like what would happen if the Women’s Institute gave the homemade wine a thrashing . . .”

“What did he do, your dad?”

“He used to do cleaning at an industrial chemists’ . . . they used a lot of phosphorus, and they gave you more money if you’d work with it, because it was dangerous. If you don’t keep phosphorus underwater it bursts into flames, and they had to deal with it when it was out of the water. All the workers had to wet their hair and clothes before they started, and when they finished work they had to shower and change into other things. My dad was mad about cowboy films—God knows why, I shouldn’t think the old boy had ever ridden a horse in his life, let alone kissed one—but if they had a western at the Rialto he’d move heaven and earth to go and see it.

“One night they had a Tom Mix, but the problem was, it started at six o’clock, and he couldn’t think of any way to get there on time so in the end he decided to skip the shower and jump on his bike just as he was, with the clothes still wet. So he pedalled like hell and got there just in time and found a place smack in the middle of the front row where he always sat because he had bad eyesight, you see. So he watched the film and of course all the time his clothes were drying out. . . . Well, the climax of this thing had Tom Mix behind the boulder, one arm round the girl, blasting away, and the redskins chucking these burning arrows at him . . . you can probably guess what happened next. Dad’s clothes were covered in little flakes of phosphorus, and they started to ignite—not all at once, but more like matches, flaring up . . . They’d positioned the camera so the Indians appeared to be hurling these fire-arrows straight at the audience, and that was the point when Dad’s arm burst into flames. Of course the audience thought the film had come alive, everyone screamed and there was a stampede out of the cinema, with Dad running after them shouting for water. Some parts of his clothes were still damp enough to be all right, but different bits of his jacket and trousers kept igniting as they dried out, and all these people just took one look at him and—I don’t know if they thought it was witchcraft or something, but they all scarpered. . . . Eventually he got to a butcher’s shop and the man was flinging pails of water at him, but it wasn’t enough. In the end, the butcher went and called the chemist: ‘We’ve got a man here keeps bursting into flames, can you come and put him out?’ ”

There was a pause, and I was sitting there with my hand up to my mouth, and then Lenny said, “You’ve got that disbelieving look on your face again . . .”

“No, no, it’s not that . . . but . . . your dad, didn’t he get burnt?”

Lenny frowned. “Do you know, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that before. They usually just take it as a funny story and leave it at that.”

“Sorry . . . but—did he? Get burnt?”

“Yes, his arms. He was all right, though. They patched him up . . . don’t look so worried, Bunny Alice. Tell you what, why don’t we go back to my place and forget all about it?”

So that’s what we did. It was lovely. Not quite as exciting as the first time, slower, but in some ways it was even better. Lenny kissed me right down the middle of my stomach, and then he said, “Now I’m going to find out . . . exactly what it takes . . . to make you blush.” No one ever did that to me before, and it was wonderful.

Afterwards I was hungry so we went down to the kitchen. I made sardines on toast and Lenny found some champagne in the fridge so we took it all back up to bed and had it there. We were licking our fingers—well, licking each other’s fingers really—and I said, “You didn’t, by the way.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Make me blush.”

“Well, if at first you don’t succeed . . .”

“Have a sardine kiss.”

“We must smell like two cats who’ve just raided a dustbin . . .”

“You know in cartoons, when there’s a dustbin, they always draw a fish bone, don’t they? Always very big . . . as big as . . . as a cat . . .”

“Alice?”

“Mmm? . . .”

“Shut up.”

The second time was even better. Lenny said, “
Now
you’re blushing.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes, you are—see?” He handed me a very small mirror.

“Hardly . . . You nicked this from a budgie, didn’t you? Did you get the little bell to go with it?”

“Ha, ha.” Lenny took it out of my hand and tried to look at his hair. “It’s not too bad, is it? We’re filming next week.”

“Can’t you position yourself so the camera won’t see it?”

“I can hardly do the whole thing in profile, can I . . . well, not the whole show . . . maybe we could do something with it.”

“You mean . . . what you told me?”

“My dear child, can you imagine what would happen if one of us went on television and told a story about a dildo? We’d never work again. We’d certainly never get Mrs. Whitehouse off our backs.”

“I am not your dear child. I’m twenty-two.”

“As old as that? I never would have guessed.”

“Oh, stop teasing me. How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.” He peered into the mirror again. “If the worst comes to the worst, I could always get Wardrobe to find me an Irish . . .”

“Eh?”

“Irish. Irish jig.
Wig,
you fathead. It’ll all fall out soon, anyway. That’s what happened to Dad.” He stopped grimacing in the mirror and turned to face me. “He told us he had to put his arms in a basin of water while they scraped out the phosphorus, and then they took him in a dark room to see if his arms were luminous because that’s how you tell a phosphorus burn, it glows in the dark. Must have been agony . . . It was phosphorus that killed him, being exposed to it all those years. Poisoned him.”

“Oh, Lenny . . .”

A week later I realised from something Jack said that Lenny’d lied to me about his age. He wasn’t thirty-four, he was thirty-seven.

I didn’t care, though, because I’d already fallen in love with him.

I meant to do some weeding after I’d seen to the animals, but I spent the afternoon sunbathing instead. I’ve got no excuse because it’s so hot that I’m browner than I’ve ever been, even from holidays. I always take everything off—any unexpected visitors can just get an eyeful, can’t they? I don’t care. When I was married to Jeff I used to sunbathe topless on the roof of his studio until one day he came up to talk to me and spotted this bloke’s binoculars glinting in the sun. I thought it was funny—I stood up and waved to the guy—but Jeff did his nut and practically dragged me down the stairs. He kept losing hold of me because I was all slippery with Ambre Solaire and wriggling like mad. In the end he had to let go and I ran down the corridor and straight into a guy from an ad agency who was one of his biggest clients. That’s when I realised Jeff really didn’t have a sense of humour, because he refused to speak to me for about a week, but in the end he had to admit it was good for business, because the ad man gave him even more work after that.