Whirligig (5 page)

Her hair was thick and untidy, possibly self-cut. Her skin was a lighter shade of brown than it had appeared in the photograph on Facebook, and she was not as thin as that image had suggested. Her nose was long and asymmetrical with a curious knobble on the end of it. Her front teeth were white, but the rest yellow and the canines more than a little fanglike. Her upper lip had vestiges of dark hair at the corners, and her lips were thinnish and slightly cracked. Were it not for one aspect of her, she might have been described as
conventionally unattractive. Her eyes, though, were extraordinary. A little tired-looking and quite deep-set, but of a violent blue – like a Mediterranean summer sky. Claypole had no time to decide that she was in fact unconventionally attractive, or to attempt to remember why or how she had got there, because he saw, with an extra fizz of panic, that she was wearing one of
his
t-shirts.

Except during his occasional and testy brushes with pornography, and when watching Wimbledon, Claypole had no time for thinking about sex. He was, after all, a fat, balding man, and very busy, so sex had no time for him. Women could not be expected to be interested in him, and if he had ever raised an enquiring eyebrow at one, disappointment (not to say rejection in the strongest possible terms) had been the inevitable result. Now though, as he found himself looking at Coky's breasts, bra-less but clothed by his own t-shirt, logic told him that these breasts must at some point have been naked in his flat. Sweat began to form on Claypole's upper lip and at his temples, and he suddenly felt as if he had too many arms.

‘Guh. Brr,' said Claypole, and saw the expression of concern on Coky's face change to one of suppressed amusement as he coughed violently into a corner of the bedsheet.

‘Hi,' said Coky Viveksananda. When he had finished coughing she added, ‘Better now?'

Claypole shuddered as he realised that if he could not remember
whether
they had slept with each other, he could not have performed well if they had. Furthermore, he would no doubt have blown any chance of repeating the act. Equally, if they had not slept with each other, surely he would never again get
the chance to do so. She would, unless she had some sort of mental problem, or was more desperate and weak than she appeared, avoid him from now until the End of Time. He had no choice but to find out from Coky herself what had happened the previous night. But he knew this much about women: he would have to make conversation first, lull her, and then discover the truth by stealth, employing the nearest approximation to charm that he could manage. Gently does it, he thought.

‘Lovely,' said Claypole suddenly, his eyes frozen on Coky's breasts.

Had Claypole not immediately averted his eyes, he would have seen that she was, although surprised, smirking. But he buried his face in his clammy hands and muttered ‘sorry' (meant for Coky's ears), and added ‘what the fuck?' (in self-admonishment).

‘I'll just go and…' said Coky, and stepped somewhat heavily from the bed, collecting a pile of clothes from the floor and moving towards the bathroom.

Claypole uncovered his face, hoping desperately that she had gone into the bathroom so that she did not have to see his shame; and, equally desperately, also hoping that she was in sight so that he could get a repeat view of her mostly naked legs. Was she tall or short? He could remember nothing.

She had disappeared, and Claypole sighed.

Then her head poked around the bathroom door. She was short.

‘You really didn't remember that I stayed over?' she asked.

Claypole's jowls shook as he nodded vigorously, and his head pounded afresh. He looked away, and added, gasping from under a fresh wave of nausea, ‘Course I
did. I was just…' Then he shrugged weakly.

‘Oh, well,' said Coky jauntily, ‘Can't say I'm surprised. You were pretty wasted.' And her head ducked back inside the bathroom.

Claypole rolled out of bed and angrily threw a lot of clothes around in the vicinity of his porky body until he could be said, by all but the most rigorous standards, to be dressed.

He was gulping at a much-needed glass of water in his sparse kitchen when Coky appeared again, fully dressed and apparently without embarrassment. She spoke with a west-coast Scottish accent, tempered with a little of the plain-vanilla Londonish whine to which Claypole's ear was so used, and suggested that they go and get some breakfast elsewhere. He found himself agreeing heartily despite the fact that his body was pleading with him to be placed on the sofa and lobotomised in front of an entire Saturday's television.

Claypole refused to speak during the expedition out of his flat and onto the thrumming main street except to explain to Coky that he needed all his energy to remain upright and moving. Any resources used for talking might upset his precarious equilibrium. They seated themselves outside at one of those cafés that look forward to being a restaurant when they grow up, he in the shade, she in the sunshine. Having ordered a bucket of coffee and a meal containing the meat of many animals, both domestic and wild, he surprised himself by being the first to speak.

‘What did we… brr… talk about… last night?' Claypole asked.

‘This and that. I suppose I must have bored you…' She scowled at the table as she rolled a cigarette.

‘Eh?'

‘Well, I went on about climate change. I usually do. I'm told it gets in the way of good conversation.'

‘Oh.' Claypole was finding it almost impossible to make sense of her words. But he decided, like an exhausted trout must do, to simply let the river take him where it may. Coky continued.

‘I have this thing, you see.' Her speech was deliberate and thoughtful. ‘It's like a mental groove. I can't help thinking… about the cost to the environment of whatever it is I'm looking at… or thinking of…' She frowned.

Claypole gaped.

‘It's something of an affliction,' she said and sipped again. ‘Not like Tourette's or motor neurone disease, but it gets in the way of life. You know?'

Coky explained that she could not catch a bus, look at a view, eat a meal or dream, without thinking of pollution or the carbon cycle. She had done her best to avoid it, she said. She had tried to be stupid. She had tried not to care so much, but was always dogged by insistent voices asking her constantly to weigh one action against another in terms of its impact on the environment. She explained that she was no eco-warrior and certainly did not always make the Earth-friendly choice, but that just made the voices shout louder. It was, she suggested, a curse as debilitating as Midas's touch.

The coffee arrived. Coky added nothing to her strong black. Claypole felt sick just looking at his mocha choccolatto, but added his habitual three sugars nonetheless.

‘Sometimes I feel like an eco-accountant,' Coky continued. ‘Just weighing up debit and credit… And
when I was farting about in my rubbish job, I just thought: well, I'm not doing anything for the credit side, am I? Not exactly causing harm, but not exactly helping either… That's why I got involved with Peregrine's wind farm. Not that he gives a… I just thought I should take it upon myself to –'

Coky had stopped in mid-sentence, and Claypole looked up, realising that he had his head in his hands and was moaning gently.

‘Sorry,' he offered weakly. ‘Not you.'

‘You must feel like cack.' She licked her cigarette closed expertly but did not light it. ‘You kept the bottle of whisky I brought with me pretty close to you.'

Claypole tried to transmit shame, but just looked blank.

‘I barely got a taste of it,' said Coky, but without resentment. ‘Actually, you were quite… funny… when you did speak – which wasn't much.'

‘Oh,' said Claypole.

‘Yes. You kept going on about a “misfortune”, but I couldn't work out what you were talking about.'

‘Oh God,' said Claypole.

‘I tried to cheer you up, and said it sounded like you needed a bit of time out. That…' Coky's eyes crinkled in amused recollection. ‘That was when it got properly funny.'

‘Oh God.'

‘You just kept repeating “time out”, “time out”, “time…” ' Coky paused dramatically, in imitation, ‘ “…out”. Like that. Then you
really
didn't speak much after that.'

‘Oh God.'

Breakfast arrived and Claypole drilled into his meal like a starved hummingbird while Coky extolled the
benefits of wind power between mouthfuls of Eggs Florentine.

‘I mean it's clean, it's renewable. And the wind is free, so… what's not to like? And some people say they actively like the look of them. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that. And anyway, we really don't have much choice if we're going to reduce carbon emissions, right?'

Coky's cranberry juice silently shrank as she sucked at it through a straw. Claypole looked up from his plate briefly, his fat face full of protein. He wanted to show he was listening, even if he wasn't. She took off her shades.

‘Mm-hm,' he said.

It struck Claypole now that Coky was unlike any of the girls he normally came across, who were for the most part arch, resentful, sly or picky. London girls. Indeed, it was not just that she seemed that most infrequent of combinations, confident
and
pleasant. There was something rare about Coky, and it wasn't just that she was breezily non-judgmental. Like her strange clothing with its scatty collection of strings, wisps and loose ends, she appeared guileless and unmodern. Despite being somewhat buffeted by concern, she seemed… free.

Claypole had finished his meal but felt no better. The meat and coffee were lapping at his tonsils and he had begun coldly to sweat.

‘So when you came round last night, I was…?'

Coky lit her cigarette and told Claypole that when he had opened the door to his flat, he had initially been disappointed that she was not an enormous box of pizza. She was now gracious about this, and claimed to be amused rather than frightened by his drunkenness
and his inept bumbling about the flat, ‘tidying' for her presence. When the pizza did arrive, she had watched Claypole and made herself at home while he accelerated through the spicy, meaty feast. Then, with all the food thoroughly assassinated, they had sat about on Claypole's gaudy, dusty sofas. Coky had spoken of her uncle and his wind farm, and of having worked in public relations, or interior design, or something, here in London before returning recently to her uncle's Highland home for a ‘career re-think'. But she revealed nothing about why she had come to see him, or indeed how and why she had joined him in his bed.

‘Coky,' he said, his tone wavering just a little and the ‘k' of Coky getting slightly hampered with spittle, ‘what… er, happened then?'

She squinted at him, scrutinising. ‘Gordon,' she began.

‘It's just Claypole,' he said.

‘Hm,' she said. ‘What's the last thing you remember about last night?'

Claypole winced.

‘I dunno,' he said helplessly, ‘we were… talking… on sofas…?'

‘You don't remember our last conversation, do you?' Coky nibbled her thumb while Claypole wondered what on earth he might have said to her. He put his hands up in extravagant protest.

‘No. No, no. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.'

‘Mm,' she said. ‘You said you'd like to do a bit of… saving the planet.'

‘Saving the planet?' Claypole was incredulous. He took out his recycling, bought organic food when it was available and didn't fill the kettle for one cup of tea, but he was preparing for imminent climate change
by doing precisely what the majority of people were were doing: getting on with his life.

‘Yeah. Wind farming is a Good Thing, right? Capital “G”, capital “T”? You said you'd been wasting your time doing kid's TV, and… this wind farm is something that you and me can actually do to make a difference. To the big picture.'

Claypole closed his eyes and breathed heavily. Understanding whether he had slept with this woman seemed as far away as ever, and manipulating the conversation was becoming harder as his nausea developed.

‘Right, yeah,' he said, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘Of course if you were just being polite…' Coky looked at her fork with interest.

‘No, but –'

‘Oh. Good,' she said. He couldn't tell whether she was truly satisfied with his answer because she had put on her shades again.

‘Good,' he echoed. It was time to grasp the nettle. ‘But, brr… did we…?' He began. ‘I mean, sorry about being so drunk and everything, but…' But that was all that he could manage. He was suddenly feeling very tired.

‘Doesn't matter,' said Coky, relighting her cigarette. ‘I did what I set out to do.' She smiled and blew smoke.

Claypole heard her words and immediately froze in panic.

No one had ever seduced him before, and he didn't like the idea. He went back over the facts as he now assumed them. Coky had come to his flat, drunk him under the table, talked him (or dragged him?) into bed, had her wicked way with him, and he didn't remember
anything about it. Had she come to his flat with the sole purpose of sexual assault? This seemed so unlikely. A broad range of women – clever, beautiful, ugly, daft – had let him know that he was physically repulsive. Then, with a further grind of horror, he suddenly wondered if she had raped him in order to get at his money. Perhaps she had even used drugs to do so! That would certainly explain the memory loss.

‘I mean,' Coky continued, ‘you didn't exactly say yes, but you didn't exactly say no either.' And she smiled. ‘At least we agreed that we should not talk about money. Not yet anyway!'

With this, Claypole's panic doubled and he wiped sweat from his forehead. He had heard of rich men being preyed upon by unscrupulous women. Trapped either by pregnancy or false emotion, these hapless chaps were forced into sham marriages, then blackmailed for their millions in divorce settlements. Was this what it was like being wealthy? He cursed himself. How could he have been so naïve? If he escaped this predicament, he would forever be on his guard against harpies and sirens. But might it already be too late?