She tied both my wrists to the headboard. She tied them well. I wasn't the only one learning knots at the foot of a master. The knots were secure, but not so tight as to cause me discomfort. Once I was fastened down, she took off her pyjama bottoms, but left her top on. Light caught in the glossy tangle of her bush. She unfastened my jeans and tugged them down my legs. She gave up with one leg off, and made a sort of 'oofing' noise as my penis sprang free of my briefs. It was pretty much the only part of me that had escaped injury, but it didn't seem to be at that moment. I was swollen and red and throbbing. I felt close to tears with anticipation and worry and pleasure.
'The baby,' I said, and couldn't find a way to finish the sentence.
'The baby will be fine,' she said. 'I'm getting it back for all the kicks it's been giving me lately.'
She paused as she reached for my penis. I saw her face harden.
'We don't have to do this,' I said.
'It looks to me as if we do,' she said. 'I can't leave you like this. You might explode.'
We laughed, but it was a slightly desperate, manic moment. She took me into her mouth and the moment changed into something else, no less manic, no less desperate, but different. Only seconds went by before I felt the familiar tightening in my balls, a gathering of sensation.
'Ruth,' I said. My voice was strangled. I fought against my bindings but there was nothing I could do. 'Ruth!'
She didn't stop. She recognised what was happening, but she didn't pull away. I came for what seemed like minutes and she kept her mouth on me. When it was over, she leaned over and discreetly spat my seed into an empty tea cup. She lay alongside me in the bed and kissed my shoulder. Her hand stroked my belly. She didn't move to release me and I didn't ask her to. My head was a thick jungle of dark greens, blues, purples.
Neither of us spoke. She kept stroking and caressing, pressing her breasts against me. Her hand kept returning to my penis; her hand did not remain still. I was hardening again. I felt both spent and fecund. She touched herself and her fingers came away shining. She raised herself and held my penis at an angle where she could impale herself upon it. She held herself open and slid down on to me. A deep, animal noise at the base of her throat. She moved slowly at first, finding how we fit each other. When she was comfortable with the arrangement, she increased the pace, finding a position and a rhythm that she seemed to lock on to, as if it might serve her the swiftest, most intense release. She fucked me harder and faster than I liked, but I had no way to calm her or alter the pace. I felt the firm weight of the baby denting my abdomen. I couldn't stop myself from imagining the body inside her, curled into itself like a leaf, being jolted and bounced against the soft womb walls. The pale swell of eyes. Hands held together as if in prayer. I heard the slosh of her insides and bit my lip. I felt the awful conviction that she was using me as a tool to terminate her pregnancy. She was surely moving too quickly, driving too deeply, for this to be anything other than an abortion attempt. Her face was a stiff mask of concentration, but this was no prelude to climax. She was not hunting the tail of her orgasm; there was no rising expression of ecstasy coming through. But I couldn't get through to her. I couldn't pull back. The ropes chewed at my wrists. And now I could hear a baby crying somewhere, a lusty shriek fuelled by hunger or pain.
Another button had slipped free on Ruth's blouse. She clutched the gap closed with her left hand, swept the lamp from the table with her right. Darkness rushed in like a guest at a sex show. I couldn't square her modesty with the almost violent way that she was fucking me. I couldn't take in the breath I needed to ask, not that she would have paid me any attention. She was focused beyond reason. She seemed to have forgotten my physical state, or chose to ignore it. Any tenderness was being erased with each stroke. There were more than two people in that bedroom now. It was as if she were using me to reenact the assault she had suffered. This was no confirmation of love, no act of passion. This was an exorcism.
And yet.
The sweat was flying off her. I felt drops of it hit my torso. Noise was building inside her, like something trapped, chipping its way free. In between, little mewls of contentment and arousal. She came with a long moan of exultation, which tapered off into deep gasps, as if she were in the delivery room already, the baby being coaxed from her.
Come on, you can do it. One last push. Breathe... breathe...
My own climax, seconds later, was lost beneath the weight of her and her moment. Secondary, weak, forgotten. I felt dirty. Regretted taking even a second or two of sour pleasure from this. It was not right. She pushed herself away from me and swept to the bathroom, leaving me locked to the bed.
I don't know when she came back because, miraculously, I'd drifted off to sleep. But when I awoke, minutes or hours later, I was clean and dressed and freed and she was sleeping beside me, wrapped in a thick towelling bathrobe and the protective circle of her own arms. Or that's how I should have seen it. All I took from that was that the barrier was back up. Keep out, those arms said. No entry.
'Pregnancy suits you,' I whispered to her.
Chapter Eleven
Error Chain
The night changed, became a different kind of blue. Riven. Unstable. Spastic flashes of electric light shivered and skidded across the walls of my room. I lay there, coming out of sleep, my fingers idling in the dried juices of lovemaking on my belly and pubes, trying to remember if it really happened, despite this physical evidence. It was unbearably hot in here. I got up, wincing at the twinge of muscles I'd forgotten how to use, and, rubbing my wrists, shuffled over to the window. The glass was opaque with condensation. Bursts of radio static from outside. Car doors slamming. Not good at any time of day, and certainly not now, at a couple of minutes shy of four in the morning. I wondered how long it would be before I slept through till dawn.
I opened the window and it was as if the words were waiting just beyond the frame for a chance to slip through and assault me.
I think she was trying to find her way home.
A police voice. Impersonal, male, tired. Who wouldn't be, doing this thankless job? Bodies in winter. I thought of Ruth and the guy who had raped her. Maybe he had returned for more fun and gone too far this time. And then I thought of Tamara and I was lashing out in the dark, trying to find something to wear, my heartbeat so strong and hard that I could taste it at the back of my throat: burned and broken and rank with old blood. I imagined her thumbing rides, trying to get down to me, her head full of apologies and hope, and I would kiss all that sorry away because I had plenty of my own now and together we'd sit and talk and thrash this out and move on together, stronger.
The blue light and the radios were nothing to do with Tamara, they couldn't be, so why was I stumbling out of the door, barely dressed, shoeless, tears standing in the wings, waiting for their cue? It wouldn't take much. They knew their lines back to front.
I was stopped almost immediately by a police cordon on North Parade. Yellow tape. Squad cars parked at jazzy angles to the road, doors open, the full-on disco lighting effect. A police constable took me to one side and asked me my name. I told him I owned one of the B&Bs on that stretch of road and asked him what had happened.
'Which B&B?'
'Tam's Place,' I said.
He referred to a sheaf of notes on a clipboard. 'Say again?'
'It's not called that now,' I said, feeling clot-headed. 'But it will be.'
He stared at me in that way the police do, endlessly patient, patronising. Waiting for a slip up, the tongue to wag too much.
'Seventy-eight North Parade,' I said.
He didn't glance back at his notes. He kept his gaze on me. I put my remaining nude arm into its shirt sleeve and did what I could about my corkscrew hair.
'Come with me please, sir.'
We moved beyond the cordon to a knot of men and women dressed in long coats. Beyond them, a white tent shivered under the smack of wind coming in from the north. I felt a nauseous little belt when I saw the members of a white-clothed, masked forensic team dashing in and out of the front door of my B&B.
Without seeing it happen, I had been passed on to this new group. One of them grinned expansively at me like a shark that has somehow learned the ability to dress itself in human clothing.
'Mr Roan?'
'Yes?' My voice was betraying me. I sounded weak and crumbly, right at the edge of things. All he had done was speak to confirm my name.
'I'm Detective Inspector Liam Keble.'
He pronounced it 'key-bull'. And then gave me another deep smile. I found myself looking at his teeth, checking for morsels of human flesh. His eyes spoilt this look. Instead of being flat and black and dead, they were animated, a pretty shade of blue. His hair was blonde, long enough to tickle the collar of his shirt. Surfer hair trapped under a fedora. He seemed a bizarre mash-up of
Dragnet
and
Point Break
.
'Aren't you cold, Mr Roan?'
'I don't feel it,' I lied. 'Scar tissue has its uses.'
'I see. Can we get you a hot drink? Would you like to sit down?'
'What happened here?'
The smile lessened; this was his smile of sympathy, it was conspiratorial, it drew you in. He was a master of that mouth, I realised. He acted with it constantly, I could tell. And despite the prettiness of his eyes, they didn't sparkle after all. He was dead, north of his cheeks. Sharks' eyes after all.
'A body was discovered on the premises of this bed and breakfast establishment about an hour and a half ago.' He said 'establishment' with relish, or irony, as if he was toying with the supra-formal speech that was common to his ilk. The smile returned. He reminded me of an actor. I scratched my head, internally, while he played with me, digging for a name. It helped to combat my nerves.
'Where were you...' he said, clapping his hands together, then steepling the fingers, bringing them to his mouth. His forefingers rested against his bottom lip. He had large, thick fingers. Killers' fingers. The nails were shaped and polished. He must have had them professionally manicured. I liked the guy, no matter that he was trying to get me on the sharp tines of his fork.
'... Oh, let's say, an hour and a half ago?'
'I was in bed.' Better. My voice had found its muscle again. He noticed it too. His eyes widened a little, the humour leapt about the corners of his mouth like electricity. I could tell he'd seen this before. The liar returning to the script. Confidence in his own lines.
He lowered his chin, and the shadow from the brim of his hat concealed the top half of his face. Just the teeth now. Jesus, he was good at this. I thought:
William Devane,
that's it.
'And where would bed be?'
'Bed would be in the rear room of the Vulcan book shop, just around the corner from here. On Surt Road.'
'And you're up and about. Why?'
'It's a free country,' I said, lamely. 'And anyway, I told your friend over there,' I pointed at the PC who had taken me over to him. 'I told him I own a property on this road.'
'Many people own a property on this road, Mr Roan.' He spread his arms and looked around him in mock surprise. He gasped. 'Where are they?' He gasped again. 'Oh no, there's a party on the promenade and everyone is missing out.' He put his hands together and pointed his forefingers at me. A child pretending to aim a gun. He said: 'Except you.'
'I don't sleep too well,' I said. 'The lights disturbed me.'
He nodded. There might have been an expression of concern on his face, or sympathy, even. 'I'll tell you what disturbs me,' he said, and gently clapped me on the shoulder, propelling me forward in the direction of the B&B. 'Skeletons in the cupboard,' he whispered.
I flinched from his touch. I glanced at his hands as if I might see some evidence of his putting sordid little boxes of bad secrets together for me to burn.
He leaned in to me, conspiratorial. 'I don't mean figurative skeletons, in case you were wondering,' he said. 'Not the panties and Dear Johns and death threats. Yeah, I've heard of you, what you get up to. You get paid for doing any of that shit? No? Christ. One of those people who's doing their bit for the community, hey? Otherwise known as a cunt. Anyway, you want to be that to those people and there's no skin off my nose, et cetera. But I'm talking about real skeletons. Dem bones, dem bones. El bonio. Calcium cowboy. Real. And guess where we found him?'
'I've no idea.'
'Yeah you do. You've saved us an hour or two's work, you know. We'd have tracked you down before breakfast but it's difficult at that B&B. Nothing there to link it with you at the moment. It's a bit, what's the word? Quiet? Business a bit slow?'
'I had an accident.'
'That's quite an alibi.'
'It's no alibi. I wasn't aware that I needed to provide an alibi for anything. Are you arresting me? Charging me with something?'
'It might happen.'
'Well until it does,' I said, not knowing how angry I should allow myself to be, or how angry I would be allowed to get, 'you can dispense with all the tough cop routine. I've done nothing. I was explaining why the business hasn't taken off. There is no business. Not yet. I'd like to see you get any work done lying six months in a coma.'