Authors: Kathy Lette
‘Jesus, Julian. You’re making me sound like an honorary Mouseketeer. Maybe if you tried a little foreplay first …’ I counter-attacked.
‘What are you saying?’ One of the things I like most about lawyers is the big shock absorber they have strapped to their brains. Put it this way, if a lawyer’s ego was hit by lightning, the lightning would be hospitalized. But I’d really hurt his feelings this time. ‘That I reach my peak with a little too much alacrity?’
‘Well, yes. You’re usually showered and shaved and dictating three legal opinions while I’m still taking off my bra.’
‘It’s not that I come too quickly, Rebecca,’ he said curtly. ‘It’s that
you
come too slowly.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You do. I have to tickle
this
. And stroke
that
. And nibble the left and lick the right and lunge and plunge and whisper sweet everythings … and still nothing. All the pressure on men to make it last … It’s time to put pressure on you women to crescendo sooner.’
‘So what are
you
saying? That I’m a lousy lay? … But how can you tell
in ten seconds
?’ ‘Oh thank you for sharing that with me, Rebecca.’
‘Well, you’re the one who was worried about us not communicating enough.’
‘Yes, but now I think we’re communicating too much. Wouldn’t it be an idea if we stopped talking about orgasms and actually started having some?’
I popped the champagne cork in reply, smiling suggestively. The other way to cover up the fact that you’re having an affair is actually have sex with your partner now and then.
‘Really?’ he queried timorously. ‘Right. Wait there.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I took to heart what you said about getting too middle-aged and predictable …’ his voice trailed off into the bedroom.
A few moments later, he re-entered the kitchen.
I think it’s fair to say that Julian wasn’t in his element in leopard-print lederhosen. He looked neither erotic or commanding. Just faintly ridiculous.
‘Don’t laugh,’ I silently instructed my mouth. I mentally rearranged the bedroom furniture, planned a menu for a dinner party and composed a way of asking for thrush cream without humiliating myself at the pharmacy.
‘There’s more.’ Fortified with Krug, he produced from behind his back a glow-in-the-dark condom in the shape of a Stealth Bomber called ‘The Penetrator’. Great. Now I could read during the dull bits.
I employed the old ‘thinking of unsexy things’ technique. Episiotomies, callipers, Newt Gingrich naked.
‘Well, what would you like to do? Whipped cream? Cling film? … Bondage?’
‘Julian! The only thing I want tied are my tubes.’
He pressed on, ignoring me. ‘We could do it right here on the floor.’
My body was starting to vibrate with pent-up laughter. I slurped at my champagne to disguise my erupting smile. But before I could swallow, a great guffaw escaped from my throat, jettisoning Krug all down his furry front.
Julian’s face collapsed like a soufflé. Oh good one, Beck. Well done. I was a truly terrible person. I deserved to go to a wife-swapping party and end up with O. J. Simpson. But try as I might, I couldn’t stop laughing.
Julian cocooned himself in his silk gown. ‘We seem to be having a misunderstanding about what constitutes a laughing matter,’ he said in an injured voice.
‘Oh darling, I’m sorry.’ I forced myself to stop sputtering. ‘Come here … You don’t need to perform any tricks. I love you just the way you are.’
‘You … you do still love me then?’
‘Of course I love you. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for me,’ I joshed, twanging a lederhosen brace. ‘But sweetie, the only thing which should get laid on our floor are those imported terracotta tiles we’ve been talking about. Let’s just finish this champagne, clean our teeth, put on our pyjamas and go to bed like a normal couple.
‘Nothing like striking while the iron is lukewarm,’ he quibbled, but joined me cosily on the couch.
‘You were right about those rock people,’ he volunteered a glass or two later. ‘I should never have taken the case … They’re philistines. Especially the juvenile delinquent …’
I smarted. ‘He’s not that young.’ Adding quickly. ‘Is he?’
‘Young? I’m amazed his voice has broken.’
‘The case is heard tomorrow, isn’t it?’ I enquired, casually. ‘I thought I might come down to court.’
Julian did a double take. ‘You? In court? You never come near the court.’
‘Forget lederhosen, my love. Seeing you strut your legal stuff – that’s the biggest turn on of all.’ Oh, that was subtle. I possessed the subtlety of a cable game-show hostess. God, who was I turning into?
Richard Nixon?
I bemoaned, as I realized I’d stayed completely composed while lying my bloody head off. I was a bad, evil woman. I was a paragon of vice. I was Caligula’s sister. I was the love child of Myra Hindley and Vlad the Impaler. I took back everything I said about fibs and rules of affairs and all the rest of it. I was a lowlife. I was lower than Pamela Anderson’s bikini line. I mean, God counts adultery as one of the worst ten things in the world. It had a hell-fire quotient, for Christ’s sake. Guilt – Life’s back-seat driver – nagged me remorselessly.
Soaping my face in the bathroom, I couldn’t look at
myself
in the mirror. I kept the light off, just in case I inadvertently caught my own eye. Which is why I didn’t notice that the toothpaste I was squeezing on to my brush did not come out in the usual iridescent peppermint curlicues. As I put the brush in my mouth and choked, Julian entered and flicked on the light. He raised a quizzical brow. Not wanting to arouse his suspicions, I was forced to keep cleaning my teeth in spermicide. It wasn’t until we were having sex that I realized, through my champagne induced torpor, that I’d also inserted my cap in the darkness, which meant that my fallopians were probably fluorided.
As we made love, all I could hear was the sound of my teeth decaying.
I was a worm. I belonged in a bait bag. But, like a worm, I was hooked.
14
Courtus Interruptus
‘DON’T YOU THINK
this is just a teeny-weeny bit completely bloody insane?’ Kate queried, as we hurried through Covent Garden to the Bow Street Magistrate’s Court.
‘Not at all.’ I ground the butt of the cigarette I still told myself I didn’t smoke beneath my heel. ‘Zack has promised not to tell anyone. He’s the soul of discretion …’
‘
Becky!
’ Zack screamed, discreetly. We wheeled around to gawp at the vehicle from which my lover was emerging as it was still cruising up to the curb. It was the standard rock impresario penis replacement – sixteen feet of fogged glass. The limo’s number plate read, appropriately, ‘EGO’. Zack hit the pavement at a trot, sprinted towards us, circled me in his Herculean arms and twirled me ozone-ward. Before I could reprimand him, he kissed me. When I say ‘kiss’, I
mean
he dragged me into his mouth, descaled my teeth, tickled my tonsils and became intimately acquainted with both sets of molars before detaching himself from me with the sound of a squid being prised off glass.
‘Zachary!’
‘It’s the only goddamn way I know to get you to shut the hell up,’ he grinned. The baggy black suit couldn’t disguise his lean-hipped, hard-muscled body, nor the nipple ring bulging beneath his tight cotton T-shirt. I was just tweaking his buttock cheek – when my Significant Other appeared around the corner of Long Acre pursued by a posse of press.
I sprang back as though electrocuted. Julian’s eyebrows leapt towards his hairline. A puff of steam emitted from his magisterial nostrils. And then he was lost from sight momentarily, as a leather-jacketed rock and roll behemoth levered himself from the interior of Zachary’s now stationary limousine. The bodyguard looked like the sort of swarthy fanatic who sits outside the Israeli embassy with an Uzi machine-gun in his hip pocket and a vest made from explosive plastique. He galumphed to Zack’s side, allowing Kate and me the dubious advantage of being able to examine him at close range.
Zack introduced him as Danny (the Dog Fondler) de Litto. The six-foot yeti with a face foaming with beard wore four-inch steel-reinforced combat boots. His hair was so oily that any flies coming in for a landing
would
just lose control and crash-land right into his ear lobes. He stood beside Zachary with his hands clasped in front of him in the obsequious pose of a maid-in-waiting.
‘You know, it’s not mandatory to flirt with my clients, Rebecca,’ Julian said sternly, taking my elbow.
‘I didn’t flirt.’
‘Flirt? You turned into a Plantation Belle before my very eyes …’
‘Sweet thang! Ain’t that imagination runnin’ away with ya’ll. Jumpin’ to conclusions is jest way to aerobic for
you
, honey-child,’ I said with heightened breeziness, wondering if he could hear my heart executing its frenzied drum solo.
Julian admonished Zachary, who was straining to hear our conversation above the bleatings of journalists, with a suspicious glare. ‘You look a little jumpy. Are you nervous?’ he interrogated coldly.
‘Does the Pope jerk-off?’ Zachary’s comment was accompanied by a primordial grunt and chest-puffed out swagger, neither of which exactly helped to suggest a Mensa qualification. Kate darted a disapproving look in my direction. I started to squirm.
As Julian, reassured, strode through the court doors, Zack and his bodyguard in tow, Kate shook her head in disbelief. I felt myself blushing. Toyboys really should be quarantined for six months until properly house-trained. This was proving excruciatingly embarrassing.
‘Hey,’ I said defensively, ‘he’s from out of town, okay?’
‘Where? The Fifth Dimension? How can you even compare him to Julian?’
‘Before you start, the Great Civil-Rights Lawyer appeared last night in leopardskin lederhosen,’ I confided, defensively.
‘Leopardskin lederhosen? Julian?’ Kate snorted. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’
‘No. With zips and studs and stuff. He’s trying to be more of a groover …’
In the time-honoured tradition of best girlfriends, I was just about to tell Kate more things not to tell anyone, when we were distracted by the screeching arrival of a
super
-stretch limo. Until now, I’d always thought the word ‘stretch’ could only be twinned with the word ‘marks’. This ridiculous vehicle was as long as the portals of the Royal Opera House opposite. The number plate read ‘MEGABUX’. It was what Zach called Rotty’s ‘pick-em-up-truck’. Kate drew in her breath at the sight of the big Necklace Ape lumbering across the pavement towards us. Despite the suit and tie, Eddy Rotterman still looked like the off-spring of Quasimodo and a giant slug. Even the gargoyles on the surrounding rooftops seemed to shudder, involuntarily.
Seeing me, the yellow lozenges of his eyes lit up. ‘Good to see yer, sweet cheeks,’ he said with vote-winning sincerity. The man was so avuncular all of a
sudden
, I started looking around for long-lost cousins.
‘So,’ Rotterman said, heaving to a halt, a savage smile puckering his pocked face. ‘Whyja think white chicks go out with black men? … To get their purses back maybe?’ He winked implicitly. ‘Or do you figure it might have more to do with the old beef bayonet?’
Kate suddenly remembered something pressing she had to do back at the office – like change some vase water – and departed forthwith. I too, headed with alacrity up the stone steps.
‘I’ve got a good idea,’ I said to him over my shoulder. ‘Why don’t you go test the resistance of that limo wheel with your body?’
I passed my bag into the black maw of the rapid-scan X-ray machine at the door and walked briskly under the metal detector. I made for the court at a trot but the lobby was crowded and Rotterman seized my wrist by the stairs. ‘So, tell me?
Is
he the Pussy Master?’ I felt my stomach sicken. When I didn’t answer, he pressed on. ‘The problem is, baby, an’ I ain’t jerkin’ yer chain …’ Rotty’s eyes glistened wetly with secrets. My secrets. ‘Yer know what they say, once you’ve had black, yer can neva go back.’
My nausea intensified. Zack had repaid my trust by giving his slimey agent a blow by blow-job account. Typical man – no sooner done than said. It was my fault for thinking that the guy had a brain. A rock star’s brain is just that thing he thinks he thinks with.
‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying I slept with
your
meal-ticket?’ I dredged up as much indignation as my terror would allow.
‘Oh, ya read my mind. Yer such a clever chick.’
I looked at him with contempt. ‘Ah, actually that doesn’t follow.’
I stomped ahead, hoping to lose him amongst the policemen, prostitutes and dangerous drivers who thronged the corridor nervously rehearsing the perjury they were about to proffer in the witness box. I scurried through the door to the public gallery of Court One. To my intense irritation, Rotterman intimidated the man sitting next to me into moving, then squeezed into the vacated leather chair.
‘We have a sayin’ in the music biz,’ he whispered, clammily. ‘Get yer end in, get yer friend in,’ he hinted, his lips growing glutinous. ‘A team cream, we call it. Or killin’ two birds with one bone.’
His sidewalk brawler’s laugh was cut short by the usher’s cowering proclamation: ‘All rise.’
Three lay magistrates tottered into court as if fresh from their third heart bypasses. There was a ritual exchange of courtesies with the lawyers, before Julian’s opponent, a Marcia Clarke lookalike with the whiplash vowels of a young Margaret Thatcher, began hectoring the geriatrics on the bench as if they were wayward schoolchildren.
‘This is a most disgusting case, in which it will be your duty to order the destruction, under Section Three of the Obscene Publications Act, of 25,000
compact
discs seized by the police. The title of the album is, if you will excuse me,
Fuck the Cops
.’
She expelled the words with tingling pleasure – the high point of her career, the day she said ‘Fuck’ to a captive audience. For the next hour she spoke as rapidly as a sewing machine, threading words together, stitching Zachary up.
The beaks seemed ever so slightly to resent being told what to do.