The Facts of Life (64 page)

‘Yes I do,’ she insisted. ‘You want me to make babies for the Fatherland.’

‘I want you to make babies for me. Just one would do.’

‘Well that’s big of you.’

‘Having a baby and breastfeeding it would reduce your risk of getting cancer. Everyone says so. And we do have a family history. Granny Sally’s mother died of it and Miriam had that bump taken off last year.’

‘Can’t I just get a puppy? They’re far cheaper.’

‘But I think you
should
.’

‘Have a puppy?’

‘A
baby
.’

‘Jamie please. Let’s drop it, okay?’ She stood impatiently. He was stabbing at a still bruised area of desire and there was something manic in his persistence. She hated the way he had taken to ranting sometimes. He caught her eye and saw she was in earnest.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘Come on.’ She glanced at her watch and held out a hand to help him out of the deckchair.

‘Time, hon,’ he called up to Sam, and followed her in, clutching his cushion.

Alison had never been a great watcher of television beyond the occasional old film or arts documentary relevant to her work. Since the revelation of their grandfather’s relationship with Myra Toye, however, she had become a guiltily faithful watcher of
Mulroney Park
. Its storylines were wilfully melodramatic, unconsciously absurd, its costumes grotesque, its standards of acting miserable, but it exerted a horrible fascination. The characters were uniformly unpleasant – grasping, lecherous, unprincipled. Even the acknowledged hero and heroine were capable only of self-justifying serial fidelity. Myra’s performance-in common with the rest of the country, they all referred to her by her Christian name, sure of being understood-Myra’s performance stood out among the dross; an over-blown bloom of Old Hollywood, transplanted into a cultural desert of lip-gloss and collagen implants.

Sam stepped into the room just as the title sequence was finishing, dusting off his hands on his trousers, his shirt draped over one naked shoulder. He sat on the rug, leaning against the sofa between their legs, instantly rapt in the observance of a weekly ritual. Even as she watched, Alison was aware of the strong scent of burnt paint and hot body he was giving off. She found herself staring at the screen without taking in what was happening, Jamie’s words about Sam revolving in her head. The telephone rang and all three of them ignored it.

Myra’s character – Louella – was overreaching herself as usual. She was blackmailing her former husband with a compromising photograph sold her by her private detective, she was pursuing a court case for custody of the children from her second marriage and, unable to help herself, putting herself in the hands of blackmailers by cheating on her third husband with the preposterously well-constructed tennis coach she had bribed from the bed of her vindictive but currently comatose daughter. Her steps were also being dogged by the son of her first marriage, crazed after a brain-washing at the hands of the desert sect he had joined when she had disowned him for being gay. None of this was out of the ordinary. Louella was trouble and incapable of opening her mouth without making mischief. But she had a god-like capacity for transformation and last-ditch escapes. She had outwitted hijackers before now, and a maniacal scalpel-wielding beautician. They all knew she would brush her plague of husbands from her like so many fruit flies and tire of the tennis coach too before the current series was done.

When the climactic scene, at a big anniversary party, came to a sudden end with Louella pumped full of bullets, marbling the waters of her vast swimming pool a shocking vermilion, it was as unexpected and shocking as if the actress’s own assassination had been broadcast live. Alison laughed at the bravura of the scene. She assumed that Myra had tired of the series and been offered a more exciting role elsewhere. Jamie, however, reacted as though to a personal affront.

‘How could they do that?’ he gasped.

‘Maybe she’s not dead,’ Sam suggested, softly concerned. ‘She wasn’t last time.’

‘Of course she’s dead. Look!’ Jamie pointed to the screen where, as the titles finished rolling, the traditional post-title shot – always the curtain-raiser to the next week’s episode – revealed a huge marble grave laden with orchids and chrysanthemum wreaths. ‘She’s dead.’ He zapped the television into silence with the remote control unit. ‘I’m never watching it again.’

‘Who do you think killed her?’ Sam asked.

‘I don’t care.’ Jamie was breathing fast, almost hyperventilating in his distress.

‘It’s not the end of the world, Jamie,’ he reasoned. ‘She’ll do something else. Something better maybe.’

‘She
was Mulroney Park
. It’ll be nothing without her. How could they? Louella was just about to buy out Warnerco. I could tell she was. And I’m sure she was getting back together with Rex.’

‘Not now she isn’t.’

‘He still loves her, you know.’

‘Sure he does.’

Alison realised Sam was humouring him as one might a lunatic.

‘They cut her down in her prime,’ Jamie went on. He was ranting now. ‘Bastards.’

‘Don’t worry, Jamie,’ she was about to say. ‘It’s only television.’

The words died in her throat, however, because she feared his angry reply. The three of them sat in stunned silence, staring at the black screen, and she began to feel something of his horror at the arbitrary slaying. The weekly instalments of the series had been a discreet way of mapping out a future. Jamie’s refusal to follow it further inevitably carried fatalistic overtones.

In all these months she had seen him rage at the indignities of illness and joke hollowly about the accelerated pace at which he was now ageing, but he had never let her see him panic. The approaching certainty of his death was not something they had discussed, but she had begun to assume that he was confronting it with a kind of equanimity, a mournful acceptance. Now she was not so sure. They had all been so careful, but the television, in all its casual vulgarity, had provided an open window through which dread had slithered into the house.

Jamie couldn’t sleep. The day had been hot and from late afternoon the sky had hazed over and the atmosphere had thickened with a tension that only rain could ease. Though night had long since fallen, he found the charge on the air so tangible that the darkness enveloping the house was as unconvincing as a stage effect. His mind was as active, his body as restless, as if it were high noon. Slowly he rose from the bed, pulled his dressing gown about him and went to push aside the curtain. There was no moon. No stars shone. They had come to bed without remembering to turn out all of the lights, so a thin glow spilled from the kitchen windows down below picking out a few glossy rose leaves and the outline of a garden chair. Jamie opened the window. It had seized up slightly where Sam had painted it and the sash-weights knocked in their channels as it suddenly gave way. Sam stirred on the bed as he often did during the night. He mumbled, reached out an arm, rolled over, tugged the bedding newly about him then subsided back into sleep. Jamie could not remember when Sam had last done more than press a kiss to his cheek or hold him in his arms. He had liked to be held in Sam’s arms, had liked to fall asleep that way, in the happier months before he started dozing his days away, when he had still been sleepy at bedtime. Now however the somnolent weight of Sam’s arm across him felt less a secure embrace, more a securing restraint.

‘Be still,’ it said. ‘Thus far and no further. Sleep now,’ it said, when sleep was the last pleasure on Jamie’s mind.

As Sam treated him increasingly like a restive, fractious child to be stilled with soft words and the reassuring pressure of an unshifting hand, Jamie was increasingly reduced to enjoying Sam’s nightly company as one might that of a faithful hound-comforted by its neighbourly warmth, reassured by the occasional sounds of it stretching and resettling in the darkness.

He returned to the bed but, rather than lie down again, he sat at the opposite end from the pillows, leaning against the old quilt draped over the end board by Sam’s feet. His eyes accustomed to the darkness, he could just make out where Sam lay, saw his head and shoulders as a thicker patch of black against the deep grey of sheets and pillows. He knew his lips would be slightly parted, his hands spread, loose-fingered, where they lay, his legs stretched out to the mattress’s limits. Jamie replayed scenes of their lovemaking in his mind; Sam carrying him across the room to the windowsill, gasping slightly under the strain but determined to make it; Sam pulling a shirt off him so eagerly that buttons were sent skittering across the floorboards; Sam kissing him as though he would suck the life from his body and pressing a hot fist in the hollow behind his balls as though he would reach up through his bowels and clutch at his heart. He remembered desire in its seeming unquenchability and rude, spontaneous demands. He remembered as though Sam were gone from him forever and not lying mere inches away.

At last a sheet of lightning transfixed the night. Like a brutal camera flash, it drove the image of Sam and the disordered bed-clothes onto Jamie’s brain in a fraction of a second, then left him blind in darkness that seemed denser than a moment before. There was a low rumble of thunder-nothing very dramatic. Trained by his grandfather, Jamie had automatically counted off the seconds between the two phenomena and judged the storm to be centred over the spires and domes of Rexbridge. The atmosphere felt more charged than ever, sending a creeping sensation over his scalp. He wanted to scratch, but a lesion had recently appeared under his hairline and he was fearful of what might happen if he broke its surface. There was another flash and again thunder sounded, closer this time. Untroubled by the first outburst, Sam stirred this time. Jamie felt him sit up just as rain began to fall on the roof.

‘What …?’ Sam murmured.

‘Listen,’ Jamie said, taking one of Sam’s feet in his hand.

The rain fell faster and harder forming a noisy cascade on the wall outside where Sam had yet to finish mending some guttering. The temperature fell. A breeze stirred the curtains, bringing a scent of moistened earth into the room. Jamie shivered and manoeuvred himself back to lying with his head on the pillows, wincing because leaning against the end board, even with the quilt to soften it, had made his back sore. Sam reached out to extend the bedding over him and Jamie smelled the warm night scents of his body.

‘I love that sound,’ Jamie said as the summer downpour drummed on the tiles overhead. ‘Don’t you love that sound?’

‘Mmm,’ said Sam, pillow-muffled. ‘Sleepy.’

And the restraining arm slipped over what remained of Jamie’s chest, commanding sleep and silence. Jamie held on to it with both hands, feeling hair, sinew, heat, the metallic shock of Sam’s watchstrap. He was wider awake than ever.

‘Kiss me,’ he said.

‘Mmm,’ said Sam and hoisted himself just far enough across the pillows to kiss him on the nearest part, which happened to be Jamie’s ear.

‘No,’ Jamie said and turned to intercept Sam’s mouth before it could be withdrawn again. He kissed it, once, twice, nuzzled it with his nose, then prised Sam’s teeth apart with an insistent tongue and, taking his head between his hands, drew him to him.

With small sounds of drowsy resistance, Sam began to wake to the matter in hand. His tongue stirred and slid across Jamie’s own. He brought a hand behind Jamie’s shoulders and, as he slid one of his thighs up between Jamie’s legs, Jamie felt his cock stiffen for the first time in weeks at the first touch of Sam’s. Then Sam pulled back suddenly.

‘You’ve been crying,’ he said.

‘No I haven’t.’

Jamie tried to kiss him again but Sam was touching fingers to his cheek.

‘Yes you have,’ he said, almost accusingly. ‘Your cheek’s still wet.’ He brushed the tears tenderly with his mouth, kissed Jamie on each of his eyelids. ‘Why were you crying?’

‘Nothing,’ Jamie protested in all honesty. ‘I didn’t even know I had been. Don’t talk. Stop being all nice. I want you. Come on. I want you.’

With a nervous chuckle, Sam stopped stroking his face and brought his hand down to Jamie’s hard-on.

‘So you do,’ he breathed and lent to kiss then, fleetingly, bite one of Jamie’s nipples.

For a few minutes it really felt as though they were going to have what Sandy, with hundred-weight irony, called ‘good, old-fashioned sex’. For a few moments, Sam threw off the torpor of sleep, Jamie, the patient’s melancholy. They were two bodies, ravenous for satisfaction from each other, nothing more. There was no kind pretence, no well-meaning effort. Then, tearing away from Sam’s mouth, Jamie slid down his body to taste his cock and felt it swiftly buckle and deflate between his lips.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sam muttered. ‘Don’t mind me.’

He pulled Jamie back up beside him-easily done, now that Jamie was so light – and began to bring him off with his hand. But he was at the wrong angle to do it properly and Jamie ended up by brushing his hand aside and doing it for himself. Sam did his best. He held an arm between Jamie’s thighs, even held Jamie back against the pillow by his hair, which he knew he liked, but Jamie, as he brought himself to a juddering, pleasureless climax, had rarely felt more alone in another’s presence.

He wiped himself dry on the tee-shirt he had been wearing earlier, then went to close the window because the rain was coming in and staining the floor and the room was growing cold. He had taken to keeping a candle on the bedside table to read by when he couldn’t sleep at night, because he found it less likely to disturb Sam than the reading light or a torch. He lit it now. Sam already had his face back in the pillows, sliding back into sleep.