Page 26 of The Price of Love
‘What disillusionment? He hasn’t got a two-inch dick, has he?’
‘Jazz.’ I spluttered my wine.
‘Well?’
‘No!’
‘That’s all the disillusionment I can think of. Nothing worse than getting a guy into bed and finding out that he’s got a knob like a matchstick.’
Katie hiccupped. ‘I meant, like finding that he uses the sheets as a hanky in the middle of the night, and that he hums all the way through your favourite TV programmes, and that ifthere’s no toilet roll left when he has a shit he doesn’t bother to wipe, and—’
‘Stop!’ shouted Jazz and I, as one. ‘Jesus, Katie, we’ve got to look Dan in the eye again sometime.’
‘Oh. Sorry, yes. I didn’t mean . . . It’s not all Dan, if that’s what you were thinking. I kind of amalgamated previous fellers.’
‘So then, you two. Why the funny look when I mentioned Luke’s dad?’
Jazz took another enormous mouthful of beer, leaving Katie to answer. ‘You haven’t met Luke’s father yet, have you?’
Jazz swallowed noisily and then nearly choked himself trying to do a Darth Vader impersonation, hissing into his beer glass, ‘Luke, Iamyour father.’ He’d clearly reached the stage of drunkenness where we could expect him to start bursting into song. We’d been known to leave him to it and just put a hat down to collect a few quid.
‘No,’ I said, ignoring him.
‘Hasn’t Luke wanted to introduce you? Or hasn’t Luke told him yet that he’s got a fiancée bobbing around in York? And’ — she rounded on Jazz — ‘how doyouknow there’s nothing worse than getting a guy into bed who turns out to have a micro-penis?’
Jazz pointed at her with the end of his glass. ‘Ilisten to women. I am a New Man.’ Then he burped resonantly, grinned and fell off his stool.
‘Luke’s waiting until his dad has got over his heart surgery,’ I explained to Katie. ‘He’s been really poorly and Luke wants to wait, rather than mention it when everything is all oxygen tents and monitors.’
‘Fair enough.’
From under the table there came a warbled intro to ‘My Way’ and I stood up.
‘Right. I’m off. Going over to Cal’s tomorrow and I wouldn’t want to tangle with him if I was hungover.’ Beneath the tablethere was now the sound of an enthusiastic amateur Frank Sinatra impersonator doing a really bad job, at full volume. ‘He’s all yours, Kate.’
‘Gosh, thanks.’
Due to Jazz’s prodigious consumption of alcohol causing the evening to end a little earlier than usual, I found myself at a bit of a loose end. I could have gone home with Katie but, although I adored her twins, I frankly found them completely exhausting. So I found myself wandering around York, through the narrow, picturesque streets in the Shambles area, heading towards the river, along with most of the jogging population of the city. The smell of muscle spray filled the air, and the hissing and cracking of water bottles being sucked echoed off the concrete of the embankment like the sound of a Dalek life-support system.
I looked up at the windows of our flat-to-be. On impulse I crossed the bridge and went through the glass and metal foyer to stand in the hallway which led to the lifts. People had already started living in some of the flats. I could tell by the lights shining onto balconies and the shadowy figures moving about within. Anticipation nudged its way around my heart like a dolphin in an aquarium.
Soon two of those figures would be mine and Luke’s, cooking dinner together, flopping on the sofa with a glass of wine and a DVD, deciding on a colour scheme for the bedroom. All things I was totally unpractised at, comfortable, domestic things. Our lives to date seemed to run along parallel to one another, with occasional passionate collisions and exciting interludes in hotels or on beaches — very romantic, but hardly real life. I thought about Luke’s reasoning for not moving into the house with me, that it wouldn’t exactly be a gentle initiation into what married life could be, but more a baptism of fire — what with Flint, Ash, and the vagaries of our working lives — and we’d hardly ever see each other.
I walked outside, into the freshening breeze, and gazed up at the building. We’d got the deposit together between us and Luke was going to the estate agent on Monday to put in the offer. Once the flat was secured, we could go ahead and set a date for the wedding, and then the wagons would be rolling. Although rolling was probably not the word, more like accelerating rapidly downhill. After all, hadn’t my wedding been planned in great detail since my first boyfriend had twanged my bra strap? Now it really only remained to weed out the place settings for the relatives who had since died.
I was considering dress styles, lengths and appropriate materials (was raw silk a little toopasséor could I get away with it?) when I arrived home. The house was quiet, in that buzzy kind of way which meant that there was nobody else home, rather than the hushed-quiet-with-background-stereo which might indicate that Flint was hanging upside down in the loft, or whatever it was he did up there. Maybe he’d got a Friday night date. Or maybe he was roaming the streets, being all luminous and ‘fulfilling destiny’, sketching unwary buildings. Anyway, who cared? After being out almost every night this week, I was in the mood for a long, soapy bath, candles and an early bed.
There, accusingly, direct on the mat, sat another brown envelope. I felt a curious sense of violation, as my heartbeat sprinted blood through my veins and the back of my neck tingled with a feeling that something malevolent had put a dark mark on my home. After all, who thought they were entitled to tell my family we couldn’t have what we wanted?
I tore open the flap and flicked the single sheet open. ‘You can’t have everything you want.’ Again the same handwriting, the same graphic approach to indefinite one-liners. Did they think that this cloak-and-dagger approach made it better somehow, more palatable? And there was something laughable in the repetition. My stalker couldn’t even manage originality.
As I had done with the last letter, I scrunched this one up into a ball and dropped it into a drawer in the hall dresser. There was simply no point in getting angry over such vague hints which couldn’t be said to amount to a threat, was not much more than a simple point of view, unattributed and unattributable. So why did my thoughts keep coming back to it?
* * *
I was still shambling around the house in dressing gown and slippers when Cal turned up at the door next morning.
‘God, you’re early.’ I let him in and shuffled back through to the kitchen for more strong tea.
