Sometimes I had to backtrack, or dig deeper, but tonight I knew that I had scored an indescribably satisfying direct hit. I thought Good Old Johnny Buckle was about to have a coronary in front of his adoring viewers.
The studio fell silent, then there was a collective howl of laughter from audience and crew alike, so loud that Johnny struggled to be heard as he yelled, ‘And on that load of bollocks, we’ll be back after the break.’ As the studio lights dimmed he leaned forward so that his florid face was only inches from mine. ‘I’m going to
bury
you, you fucking bitch,’ he hissed, and stormed off to the sanctuary of his dressing room.
Jarred rushed up to re-powder my nose and cheeks. ‘I brought you a drink.’ He pressed a glass into my hand.
‘I don’t need water, thanks.’
He gave me a conspiratorial smile. ‘It’s vodka, darling. Forget everything I said. We’ve been waiting two years for someone to do that to the fucker.’
I was only half-watching the television. It flickered silently in the corner of the room and sheer novelty drew my eyes to it as
Blaine
trailed a line of cocaine across the hollow of my stomach.
I thought at first she was some child prodigy or other; some precocious little twelve-year old shit explaining how she’d been playing the violin or piano or ukulele since before she could walk. I almost didn’t give her a second glance. Almost.
Then, ‘Whoa.’ That’s all. Not even
said
, to be honest: just made some soft, breathed sound of appreciation to myself, at this slip of a woman in an evening gown the colour of storybook mermaids. She sat there, as still as the eye of a storm, while some fat, sweating bastard gesticulated and bounced around her and the camera, seemingly as captivated, suddenly pulled in so that the whole screen was filled with her face: a sleek, severe bob of midnight-blue hair sculpted around eyes that were carved from fragments of glacial ice, clever and unblinking. In that moment, I didn’t know whether I wanted to fuck her or be her.
‘Do you like that little girl, sweetheart?’
I was a stupid bastard. Still hadn’t learned that nothing was ever to myself.
Blaine
caressed my face. ‘It’s all right, you can say ‘yes’, you know. I promise not to be offended.’ She raised her head to kiss me, and I cursed myself for giving so much away. As the commercial break began I returned the kiss with as much passion as I could muster in the hope she would forget all about my moment of weakness.
I returned to my seat for what was about to be my shortest interview ever.
‘Now, what some of our younger viewers might not know is that my guest here wasn’t actually born Lilith Bresson.’ Johnny spoke directly to camera as if I were some inconsequential onlooker and I felt my heart rate quicken and my fingers clench into damp palms. ‘In fact, fifteen years ago, she was a bit player in one of the biggest scandals ever to rock the Conservative Party.’ He paused and smiled at me for effect. ‘Weren’t you,
Clarissa
?’
Johnny had been busy during the break. This time the monitor showed an entirely different picture: a blurred close-up of two figures huddled on the back seat of a speeding taxi. A hysterical, skeletal woman clutching the shoulders of a wild-eyed child, both faces turned pale as death masks by the glare of countless flashbulbs.
This was my once-beautiful mother. This was me, thirteen and furious as we were driven away from our home, human sacrifices in my father’s futile rite of purification.
The pictures weren’t hard to find, even for Johnny Buckle. I’d done it myself once, in an act of destructive curiosity, and knew that if you typed ‘Montfort + scandal + wife + images’ into any search engine this was the number one hit: the money shot that had no doubt bought some bottom-feeding paparazzo a timeshare in
Marbella
.
My triumphal host swung back to face me. ‘So, shall we talk about your mad mother, then?’
I still clutched the vodka that Jarred had handed me. Apart from one mouthful the glass was still full, and I flung the contents straight at Johnny.
He gave a suitably porcine squeal as the neat vodka splattered over his face. It must have stung like hell – especially when the alcohol began to dissolve his spray tan and trickle into his eyes in lurid orange rivulets.
‘You stupid cow!’ he howled, and staggered to his feet to take a blind lunge at my head. Six million viewers watched their corpulent hero swing at me and I saw the floor manager and the warm-up guy and even one of the camera operators rush forward to pull him away.
But I was closest. Johnny got the heel of my right hand to his nose and my left knee hard into his now-infamous genitals before I stormed from the set.
With the sound turned down I couldn’t tell what he had said to her, only that it had made her furious and that fury had instantly transformed into this magnificent explosion. I had never seen anything like it, and this time I didn’t even need to speak.
‘Oh my God, you really do find her attractive, don’t you? Just when I thought you were dead from the waist down.’
Blaine
ran her hand down my thigh. ‘Next thing we know, she’ll actually manage to invoke a spontaneous hard-on.’
‘She’s pretty, I suppose. In an odd kind of way.’
‘And such a tiny little thing. She’s very different from me.’
I could see where this was going. ‘You’re beautiful. There’s no comparison.’
‘My poor Finn. So paranoid. But how very sweet of you to say so.’ She held a cocaine-laden fingernail to my nose and as I inhaled she hit me with the question. ‘So. Would you?’
Hypothetical pillow talk. Harmless banter between lovers. And not a cat in hell’s chance of the answer being correct, whatever I said.
Santa Marita cosseted me like an indulgent maiden aunt. I had lived in this small town on
Spain
’s east coast for nearly five years: alone, self-reliant, content. When I was painting she allowed me to disappear, and for weeks on end I would retreat to my studio without speaking to a soul. In return for this misanthropy, my neighbours would leave baskets of fruit and bottles of wine at my door for when I was ready to face the world and be a grown-up again.
When I did emerge, on a high and thrilled with my own genius, the town would welcome me back into the fold, plying me with beer in Benedicta’s smoke-filled bar, protecting me from the lurking paparazzi yet proudly displaying every positive newspaper clipping that mentioned me, until the cycle began again. I jogged around Santa Marita’s streets, sketched every man, woman and dog, and swam in the secluded mill-pond bay, yet until the day I was forced to leave I never realised it was my home.
*****
On a bright evening in late May I stood at my easel, bare brown feet cool on white marble. Sunlight still streamed in through studio windows that opened out onto the cobalt sea, Johnny Buckle was nothing more than an unpleasant memory, and all was well with my world.
I painted to music. Gounod’s
Faust
tumbled and soared into the air around me as I added the final details to my latest work, but just as Mephistopheles arrived to announce Faust’s damnation my apartment buzzer sounded, and I reluctantly turned the volume down. I padded across to the doorway and stretched to reach my intercom. ‘Whoever you are, you’d better have a bloody good excuse for disturbing me.’
‘I’ve brought alcohol and food to appease the gatekeeper – will that do?’ a laid-back voice, tinged with a soft West Country burr, crackled over the intercom.
I grinned and pressed the button that unlocked the front door. Nat Carlin was a fellow expatriate, a feckless, easy-going surfer who ostensibly worked in an internet café in Santa Marita’s tiny centre. He was also a pharmaceutical genius who amused himself by creating his own extensive range of hallucinogenics and stimulants for personal use, and cultivating a splendid year-round crop of skunk that he sold to the local slacker population.
‘Hey, stranger.’ I wrapped my arms around my visitor’s waist and he bent down to kiss me on the lips.
‘Beware of geeks bearing gifts.’ Nat held up a supermarket carrier bag. ‘Reckoned you’d be too caught up in your creation to bother about such a trivial detail as food.’
‘Thanks.’ I broke away and unpacked bread, cheese and a sun-warmed bottle of Rioja. ‘I’m almost finished. Another day and I’ll be free again – nothing to do but divide my time between beach and bar.’
‘How dreadful.’ Nat was already opening the bottle. ‘And that’ll last for how long? I give it three days before your horrific work ethic kicks in and the unstoppable Lilith Bresson feels the need to start on her next masterpiece...’ He stopped his goading as he saw my canva
s. ‘Fuck, that’s good, Lili.’
‘Lil
ith
. And yes, I know.’
‘Sorry. Lil
ith
.’ He peered a little closer at the two beautiful, onyx-haired young women who lay entwined and oblivious to his gaze. ‘Hey, isn’t that
Rosario
?’
‘Yup.’
‘But she’s your cleaner.’
‘Yup. She gave me hell for not giving her anything to do, and I had a commission, so I decided to ask her to do a sitting. With her girlfriend.’
‘Jesus.’ Nat stared at the painting for at least half a minute, and his thoughts were virtually audible. ‘Oh Jesus. You get
paid
to paint lesbians. Actually doing it, right in front of you. You’re making your goddamn living from painting hot women getting it on.’
‘Yup. And you don’t even want to know what I’m charging my client to watch me work on the webcam.’
Nat shook his head in disbelief. ‘I hate you. I really, really hate you.’
‘Thank you.’ I rubbed at my left shoulder, driving my knuckles deep into the joint. ‘Hell, I ache. It’ll take me a week just to stand straight. I’ve spent so long hunched over the bloody thing I feel like Quasimodo.’
‘D’you want me to work on it, lovely?’ Nat’s voice carried a note of hope that always made me smile. ‘I have special rates for lucky bastards who paint filthy women.’
‘Okay.’ I sat down at a kitchen chair and pulled my vest top over my head. ‘Just try and keep your eyes on the job, sex pest,’ I warned as he began to knead at the tight knots between my shoulders, his practised hands avoiding the hard nub of jagged bone on my left scapula.
After ten minutes’ dutiful massage, Nat’s hands began to wander, as I knew they would, and he let his fingers drift softly over my left breast. I glanced at the canvas, then at my watch. It was past seven o’clock, so technically I was finished for the day, and there were perhaps two hours’ work still to do at most on a piece that would be completed a week ahead of schedule. Nothing one last early morning wouldn’t fix, and the closest I ever got to slacking.
Nat began to make lazy circles around my nipple and as I leaned back I could feel his erection pressing into my back. I shook my head in mock disgust. ‘You’re just a walking hard-on, aren’t you, Mr Carlin?’
‘So? It saves you the hassle of dating and other pointless social interaction.’
I tried to remember how long it had been since my last decent fuck and thought back to two weeks ago and a doe-eyed young bank teller who had wandered into Benedicta’s. Too damn long: I decided to allow myself this. ‘Let’s take this to the bedroom,’ I suggested. ‘We don’t want to knock anything over in here do we?’
*****
My bedroom was a study in minimalism. It was nearly as big as the studio and dominated by a king-sized bed that was covered in white linen sheets and pillows and placed dead centre on the marble floor. An abstract canvas hung above the headboard, a set of industrial metal drawers held clothes folded as if still on display in a boutique, and a single orchid stood in a vase fashioned from a test tube. Nothing out of place, nothing excess to need: my life summarised in a single room.
Nat’s sun-bleached blond curls bounced across a bank of pillows as I pushed him back onto the bed. In one move I pulled his shorts down and threw them onto the floor, releasing his eager erection. As he scrabbled at a condom wrapper I crooked my thumb into the waistband of my jeans and G-string, stepped out of my clothes and kicked them under my bed to be retrieved and folded when I’d finished.
‘Oh God, you’re gorgeous. Don’t think this is going to last very long,’ Nat gasped as I straddled his hips, parted my damp labia with paint-stained fingers and slid onto his erect cock, suddenly desperate for a quick, hard fuck.
‘Go for it.’ I dropped my left hand to my clit and rubbing gently as Nat began to thrust his hips upwards in a race to see who might come first.
He won, pushing deep inside me and climaxing in moments, but before his cock began to soften I had brought myself to my own silent, contained orgasm. I fell across his chest and placed a lazy kiss on his cheek. ‘I needed that. Thank you.’
Nat returned the gesture, planting his kiss into my hair. ‘Used and abused again,’ he murmured, already heading towards sleep. ‘Good job I like you.’