Twenty one
The next day drags slowly. Mr. Nair stops by at ten a.m. with his mug. We have a little chat and he tells me about his family in India. Before he worked in the coffee shop, he was a Hindu priest in a temple in India. He is interesting, but his break time is quickly over and he leaves.
I am required to idle away my days, but idling alone in a sumptuous flat, I am quickly realizing, is no easy thing. There is not much activity in the part of the park that my balcony faces, and daytime television has always bored me. How many times can one watch reruns of Wonder Woman?
I am also terribly lonely. Without my mother, Billie or Jack I feel quite lost. I wander around the large flat alone and bored. Idling, I finally decide, requires thoughtful planning and effort—diligent effort. I begin by ordering some books from Amazon.
It is nearly five o’clock when I am able to Skype Billie. I sit cross-legged on the bed and look at Billie’s dear, excited face come alive on the screen.
‘Guess what?’ Billie shouts enthusiastically. ‘We flew first class.’
‘What?’
‘Yep, we arrived at economy check-in and we were bumped up to first class. Both your mum and me!’
‘How can that be?’
‘Must be banker boy. They said it was all arranged and paid for.’
I am speechless. Could it really have been Blake who paid the difference? But he didn’t even know which flight they were on.
‘Anyway,’ Billie says, ‘it was bloody brilliant. They called us by name and acted like we were celebrities or something. I drank nearly two bottles of champagne, and your mum got to sleep most of the way.’
‘How is mum?’
‘She’s here. I’ll put her on.’
‘Hello, Lana,’ my mother says shakily. She looks so white and fragile that I almost burst into tears. When the call is over I lie on the bed and wonder why Blake did that. He is a strange man. So cold and distant sometimes and so incredibly kind and generous at other times.
At seven o’clock, Blake arrives. I run out to meet him at the front door.
‘Did you pay for my mum and Billie to fly first class?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
He shrugs casually. ‘I like your mother,’ he says shortly, and sends me into the Jacuzzi bath.
‘Dinner is at seven thirty sharp,’ he says. ‘Don’t come out before.’
I climb into it and close my eyes. It is heaven. Blake comes in with a glass of red wine.
‘To get you in the mood,’ he says.
‘This is not in the scene, but impressive improvisation,’ I say as I accept it.
I take a sip and open Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Fifteen minutes later, I smell it. Burning. Before I can wrap myself in the toweling robe, the fire alarms go off. I rush to the kitchen dripping soapsuds.
Blake has opened all the windows, and is standing on a chair desperately waving a magazine at the smoke detector in the corridor. His hair is slightly wet, he is wearing a black shirt with two buttons undone, and a pair of stone washed jeans. He is also barefoot.
I begin to laugh. ‘Did you burn the salad?’ I shout above the racket.
He scowls down at me.
I go into the kitchen and bin the blackened pieces of meat. Shaking my head, I pop a piece of tomato from the salad into my mouth, and immediately spit it out. Mega salty. The salad goes the way of the steaks. The alarm finally stops blaring. I look up and he is standing at the doorway.
‘You’ve never cooked, have you?’
‘No,’ he confesses. ‘Do you want to go out?’
‘Why don’t we just have some chip butties instead?’
‘Chip butties?’
‘Oh. My. God. You’ve never had a chip butty? You don’t know what you’re missing. You have to have one.’
‘OK.’
‘Let me get ready and I’ll pop over to the shop and get the ingredients.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ he offers.
We walk together to the local fish and chip shop where I order a big bag of chips.
‘No fish?’
‘No fish. Now we need to go into the corner shop for some bread.’
‘Don’t we have some back at the flat?’
‘Nah. We’ve got the good stuff back there. This is poor people’s food. For this we need a loaf of cheap, white bread.’
I pick out a loaf of sliced white bread and Blake pays for it.
‘That’s it,’ I say.
‘Are those all the ingredients you need for our meal?’
‘The rest we have at home,’ I say, and with horror realize what I have said. I called the flat home. But he says nothing and I just hope he did not notice.
In the kitchen, Blake sits on the counter and watches me liberally butter four slices of bread, load two up with chips, squirt tomato ketchup in a zigzag pattern over them, sprinkle salt, and close them into two chunky sandwiches.
‘Voilà. The famous chip butty.’
‘That’s it?’
I push a plate towards him. ‘Taste it.’
He eyes it without desire.
‘Go on. I tasted caviar for you.’
‘That’s true.’ He takes a tiny bite and begins to chew cautiously.
‘No, no, that’s not how you eat it. You have to attack it. Like this.’ I open my mouth and take a huge bite. He follows suit. It is strange watching him eat with such abandon.
‘Well?’ I demand.
‘Not bad actually. Kind of satisfying.’
‘This is what a lot of kids on the estate live on most of the time.’
‘Did you?’
‘No, my mother never had a drinking or a drug problem so she didn’t have to dip into our food money to finance her habit.’
‘Did you have a happy childhood?’
‘Yeah, I guess so. Until my mother got sick I was very happy.’
‘How come you never had a boyfriend?’
I wipe my lips on a paper napkin, swallow, and grin. ‘All the boys were scared of Jack. And after my mother got sick and my father left, any thoughts of boys were gone.’
‘Who’s Jack?’
‘He’s the closest thing I have to a brother.’
‘Why were they scared of him?’
‘Because Jack was not only big and strong, he was also utterly fearless. When we were growing up there was nobody he was scared of. Everybody knew Jack had taken me under his wing, and nobody wanted to mess with him. Once Billie, Leticia, Jack and me went to a club, and a guy there wanted to dance with me. He wouldn’t take no for an answer so Jack said, “You heard her. Now scram.” Of course, he didn’t take that too good so he waited with his mates for us outside the club.’
I stop to pop a fat chip into my mouth.
‘And surrounded us. One of them had a knife. I was so frightened. I remember Jack looked at me and said, “Shhh… you know I got ya,” and then he smiled. That Jack smile. And I knew it would be all right. I walked out of the circle and they closed in on him. I can still see them now. Tattoos, broken teeth, rings where there should be none. But what shocked me was Jack. He was like a stranger. I couldn’t recognize him.
‘All those years I thought I knew him, warm and friendly, an unshakeable rock, and suddenly I see this fiend turning on himself, snarling, “Come on then. Who’s first?” They advanced in a group. He kicked the one with the knife in the throat and another he punched in the nose, bled like crazy. Then he felled another two guys, I don’t know how, it happened so fast, and then it was over. The last coward ran away. It was like watching a movie. And you know what the first thing Jack said to me was? “Are you all right?”’
‘Unusual guy,’ Blake says quietly. ‘Did you never want to go out with him?’
‘No, he is my brother. My safe harbor. I’d do anything for him.’
He nods. There is no expression in his face. ‘How long has your mother been ill?’ he asks, and takes another bite of his sandwich.
‘Just before I turned fifteen. And that was also when my dad left. I was so scared she was going to die. If not for Jack, I don’t know how things would have turned out. He came around every day and did what my father should have done.’
‘And you’ve never seen your dad since he left?’
I shake my head.
‘Did you not want to?’
‘No. I heard he married again and had more kids, but he really doesn’t interest me anymore. He ran out on us. He thought my mother would die and he would be saddled with me.’
‘Hmmm… You’ve never had an orgasm until you met me, have you?’
I am certain my face must be astonishingly red. ‘Was it that obvious?’
‘A bit. You never had a boyfriend but you must have masturbated while growing up.’
‘You don’t know what my life was like. For most of my life I’ve been terrified of losing my mother. Whenever she was ill, I slept with her. And when she was not—which was not often, and I returned to my own bed I could never do anything—my mother is such a light sleeper. She will wake up if a pin drops.’
Blake takes his last bite and pushes away from the stool. ‘Got some work to do. Can you amuse yourself for a bit and meet me in an hour’s time in the bedroom?’
‘OK.’
In the bedroom I reach for his trousers. I want to give him pleasure the way he taught me.
‘Easy, tiger,’ he says and spreads my legs. Watching me intently he latches onto my clit covered in its juices and begins to gently suck it. The sensation is indescribable—delicate ribbons of pleasure rise from his mouth and enter my being. I tremble against his mouth. I forget to think and become an extension of my sex, my core. He is teaching my sex, what it can be. Soon my nails become claws that dig into his shoulders. My mouth opens and my muscles begin to contract with anticipation of the explosion that is coming.
But when he judges the train wreck is almost upon me he deliberately slows his movement, brings me back down only to begin again on that velvet-soft swollen flesh. His eyes monitor my reaction. Again and again until I am holding his head in my hands and begging him to let me climax.
‘I can’t take it anymore,’ I plead.
And this time he relents. He lets me come and it shocks me by its intensity. I scream his name, but strangely, he refuses to take his mouth away from my painfully sensitive blood-engorged sex. I try to wriggle away but his grip is steel. Then, suddenly I am no longer pushing his head away and begging him to stop, but pulling him back in; the waves of ecstasy are coming back. And again. Three times in total I jerk, shake, tremble and soar before I fall from my great height.
My hands flop to my sides, spent.
I feel him take his watching eyes away from me and lay his cheek for a moment on my stomach and listen to my ragged breathing.
Then he bounds up, full of coiled energy and picking me up lays me on the pillow. I am so spent I look at him with hazy, passion-filled eyes. I want to tell him that I have never experienced such a thing before. I want to tell him how beautiful and awesome it has been, how complete he has made me feel; perhaps I might even have blurted out that I am in love with him and have been for some time now.
There is no one but him for me—I would take the bad, the good, even the indifferent—but he places a silencing finger on my lips. He does not want words from me. He wants only claim of my body and only when he wants it.
All he was doing was defining me as his. As my eyes flutter shut I hear him step out of his trousers and feel the mattress give under his knee.
Ah, it’s not over yet.