Samantha came up by Natalia as they rinsed paint pots under the tap in Art.
‘You’re smiley today!’ She lowered her voice to a whisper: ‘You were pretty upset on Monday. Didn’t the boys have a nudie pic of you?’
‘Nah, that was someone else.’
She couldn’t exactly tell Sam she was smiling because she was going home for dinner with the Headmaster, who last night had all the boys’ faces bashed in.
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ79LUyjLFdS
She skipped ahead as soon as the bell went, and downstairs, caught sight of a harried looking Neill weaving toward her through a trail of departing pupils.
‘Psst! …Curtain call!’
Was this to be a dinner date cancellation, not so discreetly delivered?
‘Good news,’ as he drew her toward the doors of the hall. ‘An officer from the government grant is coming to make a review tomorrow. But, bad news…’ He lowered his voice as he ushered her across the deserted hall. ‘I have to fast get rid of the old stage curtains because I claimed on the form that we don’t have any—’
‘I did not write that bit.’
‘I know darling. All Richie’s fault. Big Tits has been helping me. Loved watching her struggle with her tits flopping up and down whilst I smoked at the back door pretending to have a bad back. I’m just loading them into my boot now. The curtains, not her tits—’
‘Want me to help?’
‘Yes, come, come,’ Neill was motioning her through a door she didn’t recognise, then to an exit side door of the school she’d never seen before.
‘Tits has gone home now and I didn’t want to be late for our rendezvous…’
One brown curtain hung from the back of his Merc like the saddest car boot sale on record.
‘That to load me into?’
‘It would be perfect to wrap you up in but unfortunately the boot’s full.’ He’d opened his back passenger door and was thrusting car blankets and a hazard triangle, shunted from his boot, into the back seat.
‘What are you going to do with these curtains?’
‘Burn them probably…’
‘Can I watch? I’ve been staring at these moth-eaten things since Year 7.’
The wind blew, and she shivered as a raindrop fell on her hand.
‘Fuck,’ he glanced up at the clouds. ‘Get that other curtain in before it pisses it down.’
With a slam of the boot lid and a dusting of his hands, she stood in the drizzle, blinking at him.
‘Well, I’ll meet you at the usual place, in ten…?’
They stared at each other doe-eyed, clearly thinking the same thing. His head gestured very slightly, opening the back car door, as she wobbled forward like a lamb taking its first step:
‘Do you think… do you think this is—’
‘Quick. Now. In there.’ With a shove from both his arm and knee that would have felt cruel if it wasn’t anticipated, with a half-stifled laugh she found herself plunged down on her knees in the back footwell, the door nearly slamming on her heels if she didn’t pull them up fast enough, her face almost through the hazard triangle.
The driver door was yanked open; the car tilted with Neill’s weight as he fired up the engine, and jolted them out of there with the haste of a bank robbery.
‘Literal kidnapping,’ she peered out like a meerkat from the centre console. ‘Shall I stay here in the back?’
‘Might be for the best for now. Come out of the footwell though. Sit on the back seat, darling.’
She pushed away the items there, and lay down - sheerly from nervous thrill - pulling her coat over the top of her like a blanket, gazing at the roofs of the council houses as they sailed past against his cream Mercedes ceiling; the streets she had come to malign and associate with desolation, and danger, for over four years now, and she couldn’t have felt happier if she were gliding through supine in a bulletproof spaceship to the very abode of the saviour himself.
‘I’ve just got to make a call. Quiet in the back there, hostage. —Steve!’ on loudspeaker: ‘Yep, yep… they’re coming first thing. I’ll bring the papers to your office in the morning—’
As they rocketed round roundabouts - up toward the nicer parts of Leeds that she could tell from the increasing green of treetops flashing past - soaking up every second of Neill’s deafening guffaws and manly breaths till the otherwise boring phone call was finally finished, feeling as though she were a ghost vicariously following King Neill home.
‘I have steaks at home for dinner darling,’ he said now, addressing the ghost in the back that was suddenly his blanket-wrapped wife. ‘Do you like steak?’ The addition of that question was not so much to a wife but to his juvenile stowaway.
‘Sure!’ She hated steak, but would have cared less if he’d offered a tyre off his car for dinner.
‘I’ll need to pop in here for some bits to go with it,’ as he pulled into a Simply M&S at a BP garage. ‘Do you need anything?’
‘Oh, no…’
‘What do you normally eat for breakfast?’
She took a moment to digest the clarification she was staying the night. She hadn’t wanted to assume, but couldn’t have brought herself to believe it.
‘Oh! Cereal. Cheerios?’
Shit, does that make her sound childish? Too late.
‘Right, I’ll take a look,’ he answered, seeming extremely unbothered.
‘Oh, and—’ She thought of something distinctly more womanly, but worse, that she had to request.
‘What? Quick, come on…’
‘Well, sorry to ask this, but I’ve only got two pads, you know, cos I didn’t know I was gonna…’
‘Pads?’
‘You know, sanitary towels—’
‘Oh! Jamrags?’
‘Er, yeah. Could you. Sorry, I…’
‘It’s fine, fine. I once did buy them, well, maybe once for the first wife, about ten years ago. I might be a little rusty. What do I look for?’
‘Shop brand or whatever is fine, but regular, with wings… well, any, regular or super, just with wings—’
‘Wings? What, do they fucking fly off after they’ve done the job?’
She laughed.
‘I’ll try my best.’
‘And dessert!’ she called as he stood up out of the car.
He sighed, his face leaning back in. ‘I’m going to lock the car. So you have to lay absolutely still, ok, hostage? Don’t move a muscle, girl, which means no wanking. Can you manage that?’
She pulled a face at him.
The door slammed and the locks clunked. Shit, what if she gets an itch? Or what if the entire staff of Thornwood suddenly gawp through the windscreen and she needs to quickly duck into the footwell? Why didn’t he just give her the key? Maybe he preferred to make her keep still?
Her deep throb suddenly pulsed. Oh god, it’s like he’s remotely pulsing it with his key fob from inside Simply M&S. Shit, she’s staying at Neill’s tonight! All night, in the words of Jim Morrison! Steak in his Soul Kitchen, then ‘stay here, all night. …All neee-iiiiight!’ Oh god, she needs to go back home and wank.
The boot hummed open as she almost jumped out of her skin. Cold air swarmed over her as she shivered with relief. With a couple more slams, Neill was back in the driver’s seat.
‘They only had the biggest box of Cheerios I’ve ever seen. Got spuds and greens to go with the steaks. Lovely ones from the local farm. You get to eat the one I was going to have at the weekend. Lots of iron and B vitamins which is what an anaemic looking thing like you probably needs.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Especially if you’re on the blob.’
‘Thank you. I think.’
‘Come sit in the front now darling. We’re in the sticks now so it’s safe enough.’
She climbed up precariously over the centre console like a tightrope. ‘Drive sensibly then, or my blob will be on you—’
She plopped into his front heated seat which hit up the scent of warm leather, mingled with that of her own sweat and blood - and tears, of that morning - all of which, she realised, she had little choice to be self-conscious about in Neill’s presence anymore.
‘So, are you going to tell me what happened to the boys?’ she asked.
‘Oh yes. Had a lady police officer drop by today.’
‘What! I didn’t see that?’
‘Just doing routine enquiries. We were cracking jokes by the end.’
‘God, if they knew you’re really the Mafia Man,’ she reached for her phone to hurriedly change his name back to N again. ‘Who beat them up? And how badly?’
‘My two trusted Anons nabbed them outside the Gibbons Off License on Tuesday. All three phones destroyed. Black eyes mostly. No hospital stays, although Luke’s got a broken arm, but that’s just A&E so doesn’t count—’
‘A fourth? Luke as well?!’
‘Er, yes. Clearly my Anons can’t count either. Still, buy three, drub one free.’
‘Oh well, he’s a twat too. Maybe the wanker wound them up. Did they break his wanking arm?’
‘He’s right handed I believe, so yes. Still, even with both arms in a sling, a boy would find a way. Haven’t you seen American Pie?’
‘I’ve seen enough of boys. Boys are fired.’
‘You can light my fire then… in the lounge,’ as he flicked on a Doors track, and the energetic keyboard and guitar opener of Light My Fire began.
‘Oh you have a proper one?’ she smiled. ‘Like a campfire?’
‘Yes, like a campfire,’ he chuckled.
‘I can’t wait,’ she grinned, rubbing her hands as though she was already by it. ‘By the way, you did say very emphatically not to go to Ryan’s house, and here I am going to yours…’
‘Oh, because boys’ places are stinkpits, even worse than you at the moment.’
‘Shut up. Life is stressful at the moment.’
‘I know darling. I need a wash myself. All that dashing around today and pratting about with the sexy police officer’s handcuffs has made my knob sweatier than manchego cheese.’ He glanced to her phone in her lap. ‘Have you let your mum know?’
‘How gross you are?’
‘And hospitable.’
‘Sleepover with Sarah?’ as she began typing.
‘You can give my couch that name if you like, yes.’
‘Do you think I should say I’m angry?’
‘Tell her you need some reprieve. But act blasé for now. Don’t sow suspicion you’re livid for she might get antsy.’
‘She’ll never call the police, I know that much—’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s just got a thing about it. A fear of it.’
He glanced to her. ‘Perhaps she has something to hide? Some past misdemeanour?’
Her finger hesitated, as her brow knitted, gazing out of the window at the passing fields. ‘She just wants to be unanswerable to anyone,’ she eventually said, ‘with a bit of booze and blokes thrown in for company. Reckon she’ll be happy to have the house to herself and I’ll be glad to one day oblige her full-time.’
‘You’re nearly a young woman,’ he sighed. ‘All you need is to get out of school with your flying colours and out of your quagmire of a home life, kept out of harm’s way with a scrap of dignity left…’
‘Oh fuck. I’m out of credit.’
‘Too late then—’
‘I can’t text her.’
‘How do you normally get money for your phone?’
‘She puts a tenner on every month for me. But last time she didn’t, so I made it last for six weeks—’
‘And you spunked it in one go watching Ryan do the same?’
She sighed.
‘Don’t worry, we’ll sort it out when we get to mine.’
They turned off the country lane into a gravelly driveway obscured by trees and hedges, through which Natalia could make out the white doorway of the cottage with its round brass knocker.
‘Chez moi,’ as he turned off the engine to the quiet lull of woodpigeons and gentle rustle of fir trees.
‘Looks lovely,’ said Natalia, not admitting she knew it well from Google Street View. Fairy Fir Cottage, in the flesh! She stared as though she may well have never seen it before.
‘Shall I just get out like normal? What about the neighbours?’
‘That house is deserted,’ he glanced to the left, ‘and there’s a blind and mostly deaf old bastard living in the other one,’ eyeing to the right. ‘Lovely quaint old couple living further down. So old and quaint, that thank fuck I never see them.’
‘Lively neighbourhood.’
Slamming the car doors and crunching along gravel through the oval duck-egg gate, there were Neill’s cottage windows coming closer as if in a dream. The pond, of which Google had only permitted a slither of of pixels, she walked past now in 3D! Lilypads; a stone duck; skeletal winter bushes that would soon spring back to life as they were on Street View. Beyond the pond, metal legs of a tiny garden table in front of gleaming French windows. With a clink of keys, and the nicest door creak Natalia thought she’d ever heard, Neill welcomed her in first.
‘Shoes off.’
The front door led to a tight hallway, two directions: one up a carpeted stairway, the other, through a barn-like wooden door into the lounge. She stepped in to the immediate sight of a stone fireplace in front of a mahogany coffee table and burgundy leather couches set around. Rustic floorboards, black beams running crudely across the ceiling, firewood stacked in one corner; a flatscreen TV nestled in the other. On either side of the fireplace were shelves up the walls loaded with literature going all the way up to the ceiling as though the elfin space was being maxed to hold as much as it possibly could.
‘Wow! So many books!’ gasped Natalia.
Neill went ahead into the kitchen just five steps away, muttering and clanging with something metallic, as she stepped toward a framed picture stretching from one end of the fireplace to the other, showing a detailed painted sketch across the Thames; uneven gold lettering ‘London’ beneath, and on the mantel, various glass-bowl candles she knew her mum would call overpriced nonsense: WoodWick Sand and Driftwood; hand-poured Juniper and Lime; Huxley Seascape diffuser sticks, the latter from which permeated the gentle, cool fresh scent through the lounge, fused with a mildly soothing aroma of posh brand clothes conditioner.
‘Well this is no stinkpit. You keep it very tidy here, sir,’ as she stepped toward the kitchen, where walls and drawers in rustic painted white reminded her of holiday villas in her mum’s TV travel programmes. Golden wooden worktops, hanging pans, and a compact oak dining table next to another fireplace with a wood stove, in the middle of which stooped a rather more unglamorously grunting Neill tying the handles of a bulging binbag.
‘I can’t take all credit partly owed to my cleaner lady,’ as he stood to full height again, unrolling a fresh binliner. ‘Three times a week but I still need to empty this bin she hasn’t done. Tea?’
‘Shall I boil the kettle?’
‘Yes please!’ he called, pacing out with the bin.
Natalia stepped up to fill the cream-coloured metal kettle at the sink, glimpsing through the window to spy the back terrace, leading to a long and narrow garden that seemed to lead directly into vast countryside with cows dotted on the horizon.
Neill came back in to find her feeling her hand over the top of the kettle as though looking for its pulse. ‘Just there at the bottom,’ his hand reached over. ‘Then grab the milk from the fridge just behind your bottom.’
She politely smiled, in this bemusedly mock-formal air between them, where suddenly she felt the strangeness of retrieving his pint bottle of Waitrose Organic Whole Milk from his cottage fridge was more surreal than being embezzled to London and snogged on the Embankment.
He clinked out two mugs whilst Natalia pulled out a reassuringly familiar Earl Grey packet from Borough. Unlit fag in his mouth, Neill began fiddling with the back door, which had evidently once been a stable door, as he unbolted the top half, stuck his head out, then undid the lower half.
‘Bring the teas out here. And your phone, so you can message your mum. Will it take card payment?’
‘Yeah, you can do it by text. I’ll just go grab it.’
She came back out to find him stood by a black garden table, clicking his lighter.
‘There’s the instructions onscreen,’ she placed it down. ‘Teas are brewing, I’ll just get them—’
She returned to him frowning and puffing smoke over her screen.
‘Done,’ he handed it back, as though he had just cast a wizard’s topping-up spell on it.
‘Fifty quid!’ she stared.
‘Serves you right for turning down the fifty note. Besides, it’s wages for being my tea bitch,’ as he sipped gingerly. ‘Thank you.’
Unsure whether it was adrenalin or the waning daylight of the last day of January that was making her shiver, she cupped her hot mug tight into her hands, steadying herself with her lips on the rim, and stepping back her shoeless nylon feet in a balancing act on the doorframe, venturing to ask:
‘So… you’ve never brought Joan here?’
‘Already said, I’ve never had a romantic interest here.’ He glanced up at the higher window. ‘Even my bed I bought new. It’s as pure as the driven snow. As pure as you,’ he squinted at her, mid-drag.
‘Oh? That’s… funny,’ she sipped. ‘With the reputation of its owner.’
‘Exactly why the bed must stay so virginal. It’s my only hope.’
She laughed.
Neill sighed and stared at a pot plant hung on the high, white painted wall that obscured the neighbouring cottages. ‘I used to have a woman in my bed every week back in London. It became a festering mattress of flange. When I came up here I wanted a break from all of that.’
‘You mean, shit on their doorsteps instead of yours?’
‘Exactly.’
He stubbed out, then drank his tea in one gulp. ‘Brr! Getting nippy. Let’s close this up—’
‘Can I see the rest of your cottage? Plus I need the toilet.’
‘Come, come…’
She followed him back through the lounge and with a creak up the tight carpeted stairway, to three more rustic wooden doors with black hinges. The first on the left was closed, evidently his bedroom; as they walked straight ahead into the bathroom, where she took in the sight of an old fashioned Victorian pull chain toilet and a freestanding clawfoot bath with traditional crosshead taps. The walls were olive green; at her feet was a shaggy green bathmat matching a glinting emerald vase on the sideboard fragranced with pot pourri.
‘Oh, your bathroom is lovely!’
‘Do you want to take a shower now? Or a bath if you want?’
‘I’d love to, mine’s still broken.’
‘Relax up here for a bit then, whilst I go drag those curtains into my shed and make dinner. I’ll grab you a t-shirt and robe and leave them by the door. Stick your clothes in this basket here and we’ll get them washed for tomorrow.’
‘Oh, thanks…’
‘Here, the hot tap takes a while,’ as he leaned over, ‘and only turn the cold tap on a fraction, otherwise it’ll be too cold… empty out when you’re done and I’ll take a shower after you.’
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡp3UtCcX35M
She spent the next hour melting in a bubble bath as deep as her satisfaction, punctuated by the distant dreamy jingle of someone’s garden wind chime and the muffled bark of Neill’s voice and laughter downstairs on the phone. Here she was, laying in the very place Neill’s naked body stood every day. She flipped the top of a bottle of a Bayliss & Harding ‘Cedarwood, Amber and Fig’ shower gel to take in its Neill scent like a smelling salt. Then later groaned when the blood of her period still lingered at the bottom of the toilet bowl after two flushes.
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNXBADRMjlW
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAeeJqmBS41
*
‘Well hello, Timotei,’ Neill purred, now in a white t-shirt and dark bottoms under a silk red robe, pouring a large glass of red wine as they sat down at the dinner table. His towel-dried blonde hair was combed back, whilst Natalia’s damp brown locks fell around the navy-blue fleece of her outsized Neill-sized robe.
‘Yeah sorry, I might smell a bit like your Amber.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your shower gel. Cedarwood and Amber and something else—’
‘Oh! Don’t worry, use away. As well as the OJ in the fridge if you want… or would you like a thimble of Châteauneuf-du-Pape? You are 16 after all, and in the company of an adult with a meal,’ he winked.
‘Do you have a thimble?’
He stood up and clinked out a shot glass. ‘Et voilà.’
She giggled as he poured two inches of wine into it.
‘Cheers,’ she mock-chinked with his.
‘Bon appetit!’
‘My mum never cooks meals like this,’ she sighed.
‘Well tonight you have homemade dinner for you like a good daddy should.’
He glanced at her peering into her meat as she sawed it.
‘This steak is… quite bloody,’ she grimaced.
‘As much as you left my toilet.’
Her eyes raised to his wine. ‘Which we’re now drinking too, by the looks of it. And we mock Laura for being Lestat?’
He shook his head. ‘Vile creature.’
‘Me or her?’
‘You. And like the steak, rare. As it should be.’
She poked the tip of her knife into the red flesh. ‘The Southern, proper thing is it.’
‘Oh yes darling.’ He swallowed a mouthful of steak and potato. ‘Much better for you, more primal, more flavoursome.’
‘Hmm.’ She continued eating round the edges.
‘You want me to cook it more for you?’
‘No, it’s ok. So what’s for dessert?’
‘Well you ought to be whipping those up, Charlie Bucket-cum-Willy Wonka…’
‘The only dessert I’ll be making is a beetroot brownie.’
‘Vile. Vile creature.’
‘Says the man who just said bucket-cum-willy.’
He chewed, eyes on her. ‘More eloquent than Ryan’s sext language, I’ll bet.’
‘Don’t even talk about that,’ her eyes narrowing.
‘Part of your penance, prisoner. What else am I going to tease you for all evening?’
‘After all my awful debacles, I need the kind of counselling you’re clearly so good at giving the female teachers. So did you call up Coleman the other day after I came upset to you? I hoped she wasn’t suspicious…’
‘Yes, we had a heart-to-heart. Her ex-husband announced he’s moving to America with some young blonde bird. By the end of her tears she was confident enough to apply for some beauty makeover television programme on E4.’
‘That’s confidence?’
‘Oh quite, knowing I’ll probably pork her when I see the results.’
‘And how have you consoled my Food Tech teacher, Mrs Clayton? In our first meetings you said you’d find out what’s bothering her—’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve given her a shoulder to cry on.’
‘More like to put her legs on.’
‘Purely counselling. I wouldn’t touch her with a beetroot brownie.’
‘Well whatever you gave her, it worked. She only loses her rag once a week now.’
‘I’m thinking I should do the same to your mum. Give her a call tomorrow and have a little chat.’
‘Hmm. She needs a heart for a heart-to-heart.’ Natalia looked down at her plate where the centre goriest part of the meat was left. ‘You can lend her this.’
‘Are you finished?’
‘With her, just about, yeah. But I’m still going with my thimble,’ as she guarded her wine.
‘Come on then, let’s start the campfire, Girl Scout,’ after Neill had scraped the plates and stacked them into the dishwasher, she followed him into the lounge, where he crouched by the firelights and began arranging the wood there.
‘The pyromania continues, I see, Mr Neill,’ as she stared curiously at his bottom.
He blew gently into the firelighters. ‘Your drops of tears I’ll turn to sparks of fire.’
‘Where’s my dessert?’
‘So demanding, these teenagers,’ as he stepped up from a now roaring fire. ‘Picked up a strawberry cheesecake earlier, it’s in the fridge. Cut us two slices.’
When she came back in, Neill was sporting a pair of reading spectacles and leafing through handwritten papers at the corner desk, as she placed his cheesecake next to him.
‘Et voilà. Manchego and beetroot.’
‘Mind worse than mine,’ he remarked, raising and biting half the slice in one go without even looking at it.
‘What are you up to?’ she peered down his shoulder.
‘Marking Year 7’s essays in lieu of Dinkey who was supposed to be doing them for Coleman.’
‘They spelt you’re as your,’ she pointed. ‘Idiot.’
‘I was about to take my red pen to it, thanks—’
‘Them, not you.’
‘Help me get them done then, you little nerd.’ He plucked out some sheets from the pile. ‘See the top one as a reference. Highlight any errors and then grade the essay at the end.’
‘Whaaat… really,’ she moaned, secretly a little chuffed. ‘Ok, I’ll give it a go.’
She took it to the single sofa chair by the fire and returned ten minutes later.
‘That was quick…’
‘Quicker than you in the stockroom.’
‘Blimey, there’s more red on it than you—’
‘I wish these would have wings and fucking fly off. Put all this boring stuff away now…’
His hand came to squeeze the back of her neck. ‘Ten minutes and I’m all yours, jam-ragamuffin.’
Cheesecake in one hand and spoon in the other, she danced off on tiptoes to the bookshelves, and Neill glanced up a minute later at her cooing at the spines.
‘Animal Farm, we read that in Year 9! And oh wait, what’s this…’ She picked up another and another book.
‘Natalia, you’ve very giddy,’ he glanced up on the fifth exhortation of a book she either detests or wants to borrow. ‘Happier than in London almost,’ he sighed back down to his paper.
‘Oh, Summerhill!’
She pulled out a book that had been dumped on the lower shelf of spines. ‘The school where kids run riot?’
‘Animal Farm, same thing.’
‘Penguin, it must be famous then!’ She held aloft the cover, showing a grey-haired man in glasses, smoking.
‘Is that your great, great, gr-gr-gr-gr-great uncle?’
‘Not that great. Three greats. I was reading it the other day when I was sick off school, or rather, sick of school—’
‘I know those days well,’ she laughed.
‘I didn’t know the old pervy bastard used to tell the kids smutty stories. Another unfortunate similarity we bear,’ as he rifled though more papers.
She flopped down next to him. ‘Come and tell me more.’
He shook his head amusedly at her.
‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘I doubt he was ever as smutty a hero as to have an Ofsted inspector sit on his face to higher the school’s grading…’
‘More like de-grading,’ he sighed. ‘This girl here’s referred to Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden as Annie Lennox,’ he jabbed the paper, plonked it down and arose to the fireplace. ‘I fear the school’s going down, and not like that.’
‘By the sounds of it, more than you like to do?’
‘Not unless you’re referring to pouring this.’ He kneeled down and filled a glass of wine from the bottle warming by the fire, and sat down in the chair with a contemplatory gaze into the flames.
She set her shot glass on the table and curled up into the chair opposite, smiling.
‘Doesn’t Joan like being… licked?’
‘I haven’t and I don’t intend to. Not after what happened with Shipwreck, and not after Joan of Arse implied last night that if Thornwood gets a Good, it’s down to my association with her…’
‘Hmph! Really?’
‘If anything it makes me want to take my anger out at the gall of these whip-wielding suited women,’ he frowned as he sipped his wine. ‘The best thing is seeing them stripped and bouncing on the end of my tool and smearing their thirty quid mascara on their own sheets you know they’ll be dabbing with Vanish when I’m miles down the dual carriageway.’
‘Vile. Vile creature,’ she smirked.
‘Thank you. Although I didn’t mind licking my ex-wife, the second one, like a dog.’
‘Hannah?’
‘How did you know her name?’
‘Claire said it in London. Caribbean with Han.’
‘Which is where it truly ended in a Nah. I caught her on our pure white hotel sheets being rutted by this African bloke with a cock as long as chorizo.’ He sighed. ‘Well, I might as well be honest with you. I paid the guy to try it on with her so I could annul the flailing marriage with photographic evidence to boot. Paid him a lot less than I’d have lost if I’d divorced her the normal way.’
‘Oh my god,’ she followed his stare into the fire.
‘What darling?’
‘That explains how you’re not broke after two marriages. What about the first one, the pre-Raphaelite?’
‘Oh, Rose was richer than I was, so I was quids in from her.’
‘And where did it go wrong with her?’
‘Ah, well. Incompatibility of lifestyle. She wanted to be a mumsy drudge and I wanted to be young, free and spirited so I fucked off.’
‘Well done.’
He paused, eyes on her. ‘I can’t help but like that you seem barely sentient to how contemptible I am.’
‘I’m in full sentience and support of how refreshingly contemptibly honest you are.’
He chortled, then he blinked a little soberly. ‘Your own father did a runner, didn’t he?’
‘From a mother and child, yes. But you left an incompatible relationship before it got to that.’
‘Mmm…’
‘Besides,’ she continued, ‘all those women probably are sitting somewhere now making an equally disparaging anecdote about you. Hearing yours is as entertaining as reading Fanny Hill’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, except it’s… Mammaries, Felt By a Man of Filth.’
‘Ha!’ His face livened. ‘So you read Fanny Hill then?’
He now arose with his glass in hand, glancing up his bookshelves.
‘I have, since my spirited Headmaster recommended it so highly.’
‘It went down as well with you as he did with Shipwreck?’
She mused. ‘Probably in the same way, I found it just as exciting as repulsive for its overtone of force and violence.’
‘The book’s a Priapic fantasy. Greek God of the phallus. Cleland seemed to rather like the idea of obliterating a virgin over and over again with his penis.’ He pulled down a book, flashing the cover. ‘Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. In his words: ‘The women I clubbed with sex! I broke them up like meringues!’’
‘At least more exciting than sexting.’
He laughed, put back the book and tossed a log onto the fire. ‘So what was the attraction to that? How is a photograph on a phone as good as the real thing?’
‘Well I guess they hope they can get there…’
‘Like licking a photo of the cheesecake before you got it out of the fridge?’
‘Kind of. At first I liked it. He was saying flattering things to me and it made me feel good—’
‘Of course,’ he stood sipping his wine, watching the fire. ’Flattering a woman to get into her pants is time-old connivery.’
‘Yeah, but that misses the point that women, I think, want to get naked and dirty as much as men do, but the way that sexting does it, puts them off.’
He sat back down. ‘You are quite erroneously referring to Ryan as a man, but carry on. What do women want then, miss sweet sixteen virgin?’
‘They want more than a cock, or a photo of a cock, floating in space.’
He chuckled.
‘They want the person with it.’
‘You mean, the bit of skin on the end of a cock… called the man?’
‘Yeah. That’s how they view themselves. As an optional appendage to their cock. And the more they flash it, contextlessly, coldly… the more the rest of them becomes a cold flappy bit of skin, struggling to say interesting things anymore, even ignoring your attempts to. It’s like they become incapable of even uttering the flowery bullshit they began with.’
He looked bemused. ‘You’re judging a lot of the world by one little boy on his iPhone.’
‘That’s what the world is,’ she pouted, holding her shot glass aloft. ‘A little boy on his iPhone, brandishing his cock to the camera like it was gonna save the world. Oh, wow, it’s a cock! Look at my cock!’
‘And have you ever seen a cock for real? Or was that the first time?’
She paused. ‘How beaten did Ryan get?’
‘Mm? Barely a black eye. They said he did a runner once they got his phone. Lad’s got legs like beanpoles. …why?’
She pulled out her phone from her bag, tapped it and slid it over the table.
He peered over. ‘Jesus!’ he guffawed. ‘Fetch that magnifying glass!’
‘Well it’s the first cock I’ve seen, so I’ve no idea…’
‘Seriously! It’s about half the size of most men’s and a third the size of mine. And I’m not being a Priapic prick. Get rid of this before I mistake it for a worm and crack your phone in half with my garden shovel.’
She squealed in laughter. ‘Well, it’s no advertisement for me. Not ‘cause of what it’s a picture of, but the way it was thrust upon me— I mean…’
‘Now you sound like Fanny Hill—’
‘The way he foisted it on me in conversation,’ she smirked. ‘Unsolicited, empty…’
‘I’ll bet it was empty after you reciprocated.’
‘Shut up. It separates sex from what it should be part of… part of conversation, feeling. Feelings off, camera on.’
‘Rather like porn.’
‘Worse than that. Like you said the other day, it’s live porn, gratuitously subscribed to…’
‘And how much did he… not pay to view?’
‘Half a nipple.’
He laughed.
‘Maybe slightly more than half. But never again. All the boys and their stupid cocks can go fuck themselves. Reckon he’d have done fine without me on the other end.’
‘Well I would say I completely agree with you, but I would be as much a hypocrite as a man who deploys a virgin bed to airbrush the old one that has more notches than the White Mountains range.’
She paused to sip a millimetre of her wine. ‘So… how many women do you think you’ve slept with?’
‘I really don’t know. At least a hundred. I don’t stay with anyone for longer than this wine. Clearly not the case for yours,’ he motioned to her shot glass, now standing like rejected child’s medicine. ‘You could surely do that in one swallow.’
‘Is that what you say to Joan?’
’That’s the third time you’ve mentioned her tonight. Clearly you’re smitten with her more than I am.’
‘I think you’re smitten, sheerly from the fact you’ve knobbed her more than once, and actually know her name without my note on your fridge anymore.’
‘Who needs a note when the author’s my hostage tonight?’
‘Wasn’t that a Stephen King film? And hostage for… the lesson you still owe me?’ she giggled.
‘Not a good idea tonight. You’re in the wolf’s cottage. I’d eat you up, Little Red.’
‘Well, I’m quite literally red…’
‘Oh, I never do it with women during that time.’
‘Little Red is safe then.’ She smirked, picking up her glass again.
He drew a breath and got up. ‘I’m nipping out for a fag darling… are you staying here? Watch the fire then. I’ll throw another log on—’
‘I’ll find that film!’ She drew out one of the remote controls from a porcelain dish on the table. ‘What was it? Where the writer is taken hostage by the mad evil lady who smashes his ankles with a sledgehammer?’
‘Misery,’ as he plucked the remote from her, took a different remote and flicked it on. ‘Here. Search under M in the film library… you’d be better off watching Matilda where the lovely teacher takes the schoolgirl home for innocent tea and life talk—’
‘Found Misery.’
‘Get cosy right on Sarah where you’re going to sleep,’ motioning her to the main couch. He tossed a maroon blanket over her. ‘There we go - right on theme, Little Red. Back in ten.’
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpgjVVtsujJ
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzrlHPTQG9w
*
‘Sorry,’ Neill breezed back in twenty minutes later. ‘Turned out to be a double fag break. Dinkey called.’
‘Again? The teachers are obsessed with you.’
‘It’s the grant lark. The officer is coming literally first thing. I’ll need to get in early to spruce up, or rather down. Too late to rub out those dinner queue lines I had laid for Ofsted.’
‘Running a school, or in your case, a ruse, sounds complicated,’ she sighed, as she flicked the TV screen black again.
‘Given up on the horror film? Not the inspiration for a budding novelist?’
‘Smiley psycho Annie Wilkes makes me feel like I’ve been abducted by Mrs Williams. If I’m going to lay here like a pampered Paul Sheldon I’d rather look at you.’ She sighed and shuffled her body in line of sight with him.
He laughed modestly. ‘Well, it’s eight o’clock. Past your bedtime isn’t it?’
‘Bedtime story then,’ with a mock-smug face, cuddling the blanket up to her chin.
He sat back into the chair with a husky sigh like a harangued father, and began: ‘Once upon a time, there was a very handsome Headmaster, quite tired, and ready for bed before another day of smut and subterfuge…’
‘Stop it. Have more wine and talk smut and subterfuge.’
‘Ok one glass. But I’ve talked enough smut to you. I’d make old uncle Neill turn in his grave—’
‘Let’s have him spinning like that bottle.’
He chortled as he poured his glass. ‘Is this the effect my claustrophobic womb of a cottage room has on you? Are you the dangerously lewd drinker here or I?’
‘Listen… you’re going up to your miserable virgin bed in a minute. You may as well stay and talk to this one before she goes back tomorrow to the dangerous and lewd drinker whose claustrophobic womb she came from.’
‘Eloquence for this time of night!’ He stood over her, bemused. ‘Let me ask you a question then, miserable virgin. There’s something I’m curious about, with everything I’ve heard from you, quite literally…’
‘Oh no, what…’
He nodded down her blanketed body. ‘When you masturbate herself to high heaven, as you did in London—’
‘Oh my god, you’re actually mentioning that…’ she pulled the blanket up to her eyes.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s embarrassing!’ The blanket fell from her face.
He reached and grasped her fingers in earnest. ‘Do I ever look embarrassed about anything?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, learn from me. Never be embarrassed. I know by now that you’re a little wanker, and the red streaks in the cuticles of this hand’ - he pressed on her knuckles to spread her fingers aloft like a kitten’s claw - ‘tell me you probably popped one out just then when I was having a fag—’
She curled her hand away into a fist.
‘In fact,’ as he walked to sit back down opposite, ‘I would venture to say that despite all your most awful debacles, being on the blob and tired from a long school day, and a lingering shyness at being in the sex fiend Headmaster’s house, in fact despite the inappropriateness of this entire situation, you want to wank there on Sarah even more than you normally do at home, more right now than all the itchy-fingered, fetid boys in your form class put together, because you pretty much can’t control yourself.’
She stared and bit her lip. ‘You can talk, Mr Twitch.’ Her eyes flickered down momentarily to his crotch.
He mirrored her glance down into his crotch, blinking with amusement.
‘Twitch?’
Her smirk grew.
‘Twitch is not the word for what’s between my legs. A twitch is what you have. Twitch is what your face is doing right now—’
‘Stop it. That’s your fault—’
‘And twitch is what your twitch will be doing when I ask this question. Now help me to understand this. When a girl self-pleasures, is she thinking of sex, as a man would, or by something more abstract? You claim you want more than the thing in a boy’s pants, so what specifically draws you to want to self-pleasure? Because even whilst you sit there denouncing dick to the depths of your doldrums, you have this eternal look in your eye that I cannot fathom, but somehow tells me that once I’ve disappeared upstairs you’ll crack out more spasms than a man with Parkinson’s disease.’
She stared. ‘I actually don’t know what to say…’
‘Self-pleasure thinking about Ryan, after our talking about bad boys on the Embankment, is about fantasising of sex with him, isn’t it?’
‘Sort of,’ she shrugged.
‘So when a female self-pleasures, she’s touching herself thinking directly of a penis, but isn’t necessarily desiring a penis - in fact in your protestation against a picture of it, a rather pathetic one of course - are even repulsed by it? Is that just you or, a…’ he coughed, ‘widespread thing, so to speak?’
‘Well, you’ve had all the women so you should know. Haven’t you asked any?’
‘No. And you are the perfect source, if not the only source I’ve ever encountered, to ask it. You’ve yet to have sex, but that night in London you were paddling the pink canoe for the length of the Thames on that painting—’
Her eyes clamped closed. ‘Oh shit, you are so—’
‘Marathon style, without a break…’
Her eyes opened wide. ‘Oh my god, you were listening—’
‘Natalia, I could not avoid hearing it. I even put the duvet over my head.’
She squinted. ‘You mean a glass to the wall?’
‘…Out of modesty—’
‘Thought you never get embarrassed.’
‘And still it went on…’
‘Oh, fuck—’
‘And I think you said that.’
She made a long moan.
‘And did that—’
‘What!’
‘This undulating, nymph-like sigh at the end that even perked up the concierge downstairs—’
‘You’re unbelievable!’
‘And that’s exactly what I thought, once you were on a count of seven.’
She blinked, and gazed softly now, her eyes moving to the fire. ‘Seventh heaven, let’s make eight eleven.’
‘What?’
As though her shame had suddenly hit zero, she inclined forward, and with a schoolgirl smirk recited straight at him:
‘One for fun, two for a boy;
‘Three makes it slippy; on fourth oozes joy;
‘Five for kicks, six for dicks;
‘In seventh heaven… let’s make eight eleven!
‘Nine, ten; lost count of the men,
‘That twelve times coming, I’ll fuck all over again.’
A look of mesmerised bemusement had cooked on his face on each line, now ending with his slow shaking head as the best applause she could hope for.
‘I take it that’s not Yeats from your English Anthology?’
‘Benjamin Zephaniah.’
He guffawed. ‘One for fun! Two for a boy!’ he drummed in an African accent.
‘Cock like chorizo! Who needs a sex toy!’
They both cawed in laughter.
He sighed. ‘You made up the poem on the spot?’
‘No, I think my fingers were on a pen when I wrote it.’
He shook his head. ‘So that’s what you’re really doing in English.’
‘Mm, nah. Hard to reach down there without Coleman seeing.’
He stared at her, lips parting.
‘So to answer your question, of what I think about during a wank…’
‘Come now, that’s too crassly concise!’
‘Oh don’t be embarrassed, sir!’
He bit his smiling lip.
‘The answer is, excitement for things I’m not ready for... as you claim.’
He paused. ‘And are you saying you are ready?’
‘No.’
‘So… you get off on imagining doing something you don’t want to do?’
‘Yep.’
He screwed his nose. ‘I don’t get it. And there’s me thinking women were mysterious enough, but girls?’
‘I don’t get it myself.’
He shrugged. ‘Then we’re all fucked.’
‘Or not.’
They both laughed.
‘This conversation…’
‘Don’t go all prudish now, girl. You started it.’
‘You did,’ she retorted. ‘I wanted a bedtime story.’
‘Don’t tell me you’d prefer The Three Little Pigs…’
‘No, the wolf already blew all those down for me.’
‘The wolf did, of course. Just for you.’
He looked back with such a look of paternal tenderness she wanted to jump up and hug him. She blinked away, adding:
‘Well, even more pigs threatened to blow my door down last night of course.’
‘And here you all safe are in a house of bricks with the wolf himself, Red.’
He held his gaze on her whilst she held a pregnant pause, as if she was scrutinising his face in readiness to say something else.
‘Ok my turn to ask you something… or, can I tell you a secret, and you won’t think I’m weird?’
His eyebrows raised. ‘Yes to the first question, not sure to the second.’
‘Just promise.’
‘Well I already know how weird you are, so it doesn’t matter. Go ahead.’
She scoffed. ‘Hmm, I’ll maybe accept that response. So when I self-pleasure, it’s called self-love, right?’
‘Yee-es?’
‘So when I self-pleasure,’ she hesitated, ‘why would a woman imagine being taken, you know, against her will?’
‘Taken, as in, fucked?’
‘Yee-ah.’
‘Mm. It’s news to me. You mean like a rape fantasy?’
‘Maybe. How come I get pleasure from imagining myself not having pleasure? I don’t know if it’s just me. But if females admitted this they’d be accused of legitimising rape. Of course we don’t want to be raped—’
‘Well it’s just a fantasy isn’t it. By definition you’re not turned on by rape but hot lustful sex.’
‘Hmm. It’s supposed to be self-love but it’s more like self-hate.’
He sighed. ‘I don’t know darling. Social conditioning perhaps? I mean, I never use the words make love. So I’m just as guilty. Not of rape, obviously. But maybe there’s something rapey in our evolution. Caveman.’
‘Sometimes I feel like I fantasise about sex through a male perspective.’
‘You imagine you have a cock?’
‘No, but my orgasm comes from imagining the pleasure it would have in me. It doesn’t make sense though because when I—’ she paused.
‘When you what?’
‘Uh. Think I’m going too far now.’
He looked blank.
She cleared her throat. ‘When I… touch my… you know… the part, where a cock goes…’ She scoffed at her sudden absurd inability to say the word after photographing it for Ryan. ‘My vagina.’
‘Right.’
‘I don’t feel as much there as in the clitoris.’
‘You mean you like flicking your bean?’
‘Hmph, yeah, in your language. Oh! Until the other night…’
‘What? With Ryan?’
‘No, no, before that… one morning…’
He looked even more confused.
‘I felt… oh, well, it doesn’t matter.’ She bit her lip. She needed to stop talking before she ended up saying that coming to his cottage was bringing the same feeling back into her vagina.
He shrugged. ‘You’re only young. You’re on the garden path and there’s a whole country beyond to behold.’
‘So, when you’re… with a woman…’ she began.
‘Mmm?’
‘She gets pleasure from more than… flicking her bean?’
‘From there and from a lot else darling. Didn’t Freud say the clitoris is the infancy of a female’s sexuality?’
‘I wouldn’t know what to believe of one limited man’s mind.’
‘But you’re here asking one.’
She giggled. ‘Not you.’
‘You take my word more than Freud?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re adorable.’
She blinked away. ‘I guess it all makes sense when one falls in lurve, right?’ She put on a dubious face to detract from the gorgeousness of the way he looked at her right now.
‘I couldn’t tell you on that one darling.’
‘Didn’t you love your wives?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought I did and I told them I did, obviously. It’s just painful honesty of retrospect, and I wouldn’t tell anyone but you.’
‘I appreciate your candidness that enables mine,’ she smiled. ‘Did they er… love you?’
He pursed his lips.
‘I think you’ll find in life, like most people in this world, that love is a rather complicated word. With my wives I fell into mad lust and called it love. Eros, they’d call it. There’s many different types of love, it boggles the mind.’
He looked away. ‘To put it frankly, all I know is I loved sex with Rose and Hannah enough to sustain the marriages for as long as they lasted, and so really I’ll love a woman as long as I love sex with her.’
‘You… love sex, but not the woman?’
‘I love a woman through the sex. And sex ismaking love, to that woman, for the time that we’re together, whether it’s one night or five years.’ He sighed. ‘I live and breathe it, after all, what is there but sex?’
She blinked. ‘Well, other things too—’
‘What?’ He looked genuinely sceptical.
She shrugged. ‘I dunno… careers, children, travelling, so many things in the world…’
‘Natalia, there is nothing more important in this life than sex.’
She stared like a child behind a stairgate as he continued:
‘Having children is a side effect of sex, to replenish the planet so we can go on having sex. Our careers keep the bills paid and the ego fed but never hits the spot as sex does. Making art is all about expressing sex. That’s all I can say from my male perspective. And one day you,’ he nodded vaguely at her body, ‘will experience pretty much the same from a female perspective. A man, but not a smutmonger, who deserves you, and cares for you, so much that his love turns you on more than your teenage fantasies did. A man you really want in your vagina, for one night, five years, or maybe even your whole life.’
She was bulldozed into contemplatory silence, then her voice came softly, as if thinking out loud:
‘So what I don’t get, is… why so much pain then?’
‘Where? What do you mean?’
‘In your stories. The clown-act. The desperation, the resent. Why?’
He paused. ‘The girl with rape fantasies is asking that question?’
Her eyes shifted to the waning fire.
There was a silence for a few moments till he looked up at the clock.
‘Well that was over an hour-long bedtime story and I don’t know who was entertaining who more, but you can take the mantel as poet.’ He rose from his chair with a groan, then stopped. ‘What was that line again? Do you really lose count of the men, all doing things to you that you don’t want them to?’
‘Men, fragments of men, the thoughts can go on forever.’
‘Forever?’ he remarked as he pulled over the fire grate. ‘With a man, we see it through and it’s done, till the next time.’
‘Oh, with me, it goes on, and I’ll only stop because there’s…’
He looked at her expectantly.
‘…Too much… to paddle in,’ her eyes gleamed to the painting, as his followed.
‘Bit like the fire,’ he exhaled. ‘No wood in there but the embers will keep crackling on for a bit while you’re laying there.’
He jangled keys at the garden door, closed the kitchen door and snapped off the lamps. ‘Right, young lady. Have you cleaned your teeth?’
‘I don’t have a toothbrush.’
‘Look in the bathroom cabinet. If there’s no spares then borrow mine.’
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡs7fKCkT0nV
She couldn’t find any spares. What a pleasure to use his! Did she care it bore his faint tobacco taste?
Neill was approaching the foot of the stairs sipping water.
‘I’ve left you a glass of water on the table. Goodnight Natalia.’ His free arm pulled her softly for a kiss on the forehead.
She flung her arms around his neck. ‘Goodnight!’ and squeezed him so hard that he was forced to scoop her midriff right into him, as he buckled with surprise.
‘Steady on! I’ve splashed you with water, here, let me put it down—’
‘Put it down… you haven’t given me a hug…’
His two free arms now embraced her as she murmured: ‘Thank you so, so much for everything…’ and pushed herself up him high enough to carry a fervent whisper across a prickly jaw into his ear:
‘And, I think you’re wonderful…’
He seemed to sigh back for a few seconds, holding her with a consistent pressure, till he finally murmured’sweet dreams,’ and she dropped down again, and saw him blink away from her lips, and felt a kiss land on her forehead. ‘I’ll be waking you 7am, if you’re not up,’ with a concluding squeeze from his hand now withdrawing from hers, unbeknownst of the moment their hands had connected.
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfCAmDGDS8H
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡuBI1WnYxHq
*
She felt now in Neill’s absence, a new private exhilaration to be laid like a worshipper at the foot of his towers of books, listening to the creaks and door hinges of his movement upstairs till they finally ceased, and then the last fire crackles and the whirr of the dryer - audible motifs of his caring, his looking after of her - till they even ceased. Rain pattered at the window, as she smiled to be ensconced here inside the house she had long so wondered about, here in the impenetrable, mysterious night.
And what of the flagrantly forbidden fireside talk, where she found herself a full-fledged proponent of the oh-so-Neill attitude to ‘never be embarrassed’? The way he poked the flames, like he poked her audacity to come flaring out with a burst of embers he had to step back from in surprise. Shielded by the soft plushness of both her blanket and her shedding womb she felt a new power that she could make his eyes widen, his lips part and his head shake when she rattled off her poem that up to now, she had no-one to share with, and had the perfect moment to perform its well-timed debut, as if with her best friend, who likewise bestowed in her his secrets that ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone but you!’
And now huddled into the cosy nest of her couch bed Sarah, it would be rude not to honour what he said she’d do once he disappeared upstairs, wouldn’t it? Without a sound, with barely any movement; and with barely any thought than simply, that eternal look in his eye that she can’t fathom.
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFNHistVBbv
Follow The Headmaster's Flame on Instagram at @headmastersflame
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfZDGJIrgX9
