Sex in the City--London Page 20

  He responded to her grasp by sliding his hands beneath her buttocks, digging his fingers in. A feeling of masterfulness took hold of her, and she pushed him up and away from her, then stood up. Pushing him into a seated position on the chaise longue, she straddled him, slotting herself down over his smooth cock, coating him with her nectar. He began pumping, gently to begin with, and her clit rubbed against the hair on his lower belly, driving her into a frenzy.

  She threw herself forwards, and as he parted her buttocks with his hands once more, splaying her for all the world to see while he plunged in and out of her, she risked a triumphant little glance over her shoulder. She couldn’t be sure, but she imagined she could make out a pair of eyes trained on her from about twenty feet away, witnessing her in all her marvellous imperfection.

  About the Story

  HAVING MOVED TO LONDON after university followed by a long period of travelling, I spent nearly 15 years becoming ever-more intimate with my adopted city, reviewing restaurants, hotels and shops for guidebooks and local magazines. Whether reporting on the latest designer eatery, scouring the streets for undiscovered vintage clothes boutiques, or exploring the museums and art galleries, I came to know the city more closely than any other place on Earth.

  I’m no longer based in London full-time, but I still regard it as my true home and continue to set much of my fiction there. My first Black Lace novel, The Blue Guide, saw tour guide Alicia Shaw become embroiled in a love triangle while introducing flamenco star Paco Manchega and his wife Carlotta to the city’s sights. From luxury hotel suites to sybaritic spas to the erotic artworks in the Tate Modern, there was no end of sexy metropolitan locations to provide a sizzling backdrop to my story.

  After an excursion to India with my second Black Lace novel, Chilli Heat, my third saw a return to London. In The Apprentice, aspiring writer Genevieve Carter hopes to give her career chances a boost by taking a post as a live-in help for her literary heroine, Anne Tournier. Little does Genevieve realise that Anne, who lives in Bayswater, has a more complicated in role in mind for her assistant – one that will take Genevieve beyond any limits she ever imagined for herself.

  In real life, I gradually gravitated towards Marylebone from my first base near the Portobello Road, along the way renting a top-floor bedsit with an oblique view of Hyde Park on Moscow Road in Bayswater – an area that continues to exert a fascination on me. In Bayswater, the seedy meets the luxe and there’s a dangerous decadence to the air. It’s a strange, schizophrenic twilight zone between the full-on swank of Mayfair and the trustafarian faux-bohemianism of Notting Hill. Hence my choice of it as the setting for part of this tale, ‘West End Girl’, as the home of the Dinah’s mysterious voyeur.

  Dinah herself, of course, is both me and not me. For a time I worked in the beauty hall of a top West End department store, although to my chagrin I never graduated to any live window displays that might have taken place. As to whether I seduced or was seduced by one of its security guards – well, that would be telling …

  Strawberry Pink

  by Kevin Mullins & Marcelle Perks

  GARY CAN ALREADY FEEL the morning sun heating up outside. A compassionate glow envelopes the white walls and gleaming wooden floorboards of his small, tidy flat. It feels good, sitting there polishing off the last of the organic muesli that he has pro-vitamined with slivers of fresh strawberries. But then it needs to. At five hundred quid a week he wants it all ship-shape, in ordnung as his German colleagues would say. Although it costs Gary 70% of his net income to keep the overheads ticking on this Primrose Hill London pad, his persistence in holding out for just the right place has paid off. Ester, he thinks, is the one he’s been waiting for. And already she’s sleeping in the next room.

  Ester is a find. True, she’s a blonde, when really he prefers slinky redheads, but she’s got luminous very blue eyes that startle everyone that he introduces her to. They stare through you in the same way that Persian cat’s eyes do, almost spookily unnatural. It gives her the impression of knowledge. And there is so much he doesn’t know about her, yet. But she is captivating; everyone says so. His colleagues use words like enchantee to describe her. In every imaginable way she is extraordinary.

  Although, of course, they are quite different as people. Mustn’t forget that. She likes to sleep late, and so even though she works from home she tends to be fiddling around with words for deadlines when he returns from the office. She only works part-time now and then, but still. You’d think she’d organise herself better. Sometimes when he leaves in the morning there is a faint odour of sour milk, or a furred moggy smell in the kitchen.

  Heading for the door, he senses the postman outside. He feels the invasion of privacy, even though he wants his mail. The hinges snap back aggressively and a brown envelope falls onto the mat. He can see it is an old-fashioned one, foolscap outsize, rather than A4, just like the other ones. His muscles involuntarily clench, and an acidic flame creeps up his stomach. But he must pick it up. Or she will.

  As before, the postmark is smudged and the address hand-printed. It doesn’t matter. He knows where it’s come from. Sweat from his fingers soils the surface. It’s getting more difficult each time one comes. He looks warily at the bedroom door, but he knows she will be asleep for another three hours yet. Can he resist opening it? He can’t help noticing that the new white leather sofa that they’ve just bought on Tottenham Court Road is pleasing. Why can’t his life be normal, like everyone else? Especially now that he has the found the right one. His hands are shaking as he opens the envelope.

  ‘Fuck!’

  It’s just a single photograph. A woman’s vagina, pink and swollen, framed by moist straw-coloured hair. From such an extreme close up, he can’t possibly tell who it is. But Gary knows. And he cries as quietly as he can.

  Ester is curled up cat-like in the broad divan bed. When the front door slams it prods at her consciousness.

  ‘Shit.’

  He’s banged it yet again. Just because he wants to slope off to the office for a 7 o’clock start, doesn’t mean that he has to wake up the whole street. Ever since the new colleagues arrived from Frankfurt and she’d had to run the gauntlet of meeting them, he’s been rising earlier and earlier, then coming home unpredictably mid-afternoon. Ester finds it weird and tiring, and it means that any work that she might have put off doesn’t get done. No matter that London’s creatives don’t even check into the office until 10 a.m. Or that, historically speaking, she’s done her best work at night. No, no, Gary assumes the whole world should stop when he steps through the front door. To add to her oppression, in his minimalist and dust-free flat, she has nowhere private to keep her stuff. No room to hide even her sprawling, innermost thoughts.

  The copy-writing work that keeps her going, not to mention her novel that she periodically returns to, falter in this environment. Their stable relationship seems to pare down her creativity to dumb shampoo slogans. Having to say ‘I love you’ too many times a week is robbing her of word power, weakening her somehow.

  Sometimes she wishes she had a private flat that she could keep as a secret location known only to her. No phone. No visitors. No unannounced guests. She would keep it as dark and inviting as a foxhole, all her mess unchecked. She could imagine retreating to it, holing up on junk food takeaways and chocolate in between failed romantic forays. It would be great. As she lay, nursing her broken heart, on a heap of cast-off clothes, she could smoke and read trashy magazines. Watch the weird Japanese action videos no one else wanted to see. No one would ever ask her to clear anything away. She could dump the remains of her old life and then emerge, like a rare butterfly escaping from her maggot existence.

  But Gary pays the rent, adores her and, as her friends constantly remind her, this is a nice place. They think the neo-Californian style, all white with wooden floors and no clutter, is cool. The feeling’s not mutual; he can’t cope with their cheerful two week-old dust and bit-choked rugs. He claims he has allergies, but she’s
never even seen him sneeze.

  Ester seems to spend all day doing nothing only to feel guilty about not clearing up before His Return. Even the bright sunshine stealing through the velvet curtains looks sour to her this morning. God, once upon a time she could only have dreamed of living in a place like this. Her life had been such a ragbag of existence before. It irks her that she can’t move over the sumptuous carpet without it reminding her of how shabby the one in her last place was. That even as her eye notes how everything is in its place, she is longing to see her usual inevitable mess spiralling out of control, her signature that had plagued every hotel room and cheap bed-sit she ever stayed in. It showed she was still alive.

  The closest she’d ever had to a home was in a rat trap in downtown Loughborough, right in the thick of the East Midlands ‘Ey up, me duck’ lilt. She’d had a boyfriend then, but not, as far as she was concerned, an exclusive one. He was a dumb blond who’d spent far too much time revising for his exams.

  The terraced house was dark and dusty; too many students were trying to exist there. The party wall meant the stairs veered to the left. She remembers it as a rat remembers a well-trodden run. The twists of the walls and corridors came to have their own meaning after so many mornings and late nights beating the same route.

  The entire house was carpeted in a sagging brown slash beige, which rather than not showing the dirt, embraced it. The other tenants had turned the living rooms into bedrooms, and so her world opened up after the steep stairs into a maze of rooms to the right. The ugly fire door, which they hated, kept locking itself shut when she saw out her various lovers.

  So then she’d had to climb through her flat mate’s window onto the porch in her nighty, trying to scramble back into her bedroom without showing the world her just-fucked vulva.

  Her room had been a strange shape with a little corridor inside that led to a built-in wardrobe. There was a small sink that she sometimes peed in, if she had to. Her bed was home-made by the landlord, who’d fancied himself as a handyman. He’d tacked plastic sheeting over wood and stuck an old mattress on top. It was hell to sleep on. For most of her time there, the only luxury that Ester had wanted was a decent bed. And, possibly, real curtains that were not orange relics from the seventies.

  In that room, she’d slept with young-looking locals, who said they were eighteen but were probably still at school. They were pink and enthusiastic, less prone to bad breath. But the place had got to her, she’d had no money and, after a long spell unemployed, the only thing she’d wanted to do was escape.

  Now she feels perhaps there was something wistful about the creaking student-filled house, where the residents could smoke joints with their morning coffee and never be asked questions. She’d liked the way the rain drizzled the grey-slated roof and made it shine, how the streets felt fresher afterwards. The way lovers only felt sincere when they were leaving with promises she knew they wouldn’t keep.

  But here she is, right in the heartlands of London celebrity territory, rubbing shoulders with Jude Law and Johnny Lee Miller, worrying about whether she should dust again before she showers. She thought that she’d left without looking back, and yet sometimes things here feel like they’re in the wrong place, even the furniture seems to face the wrong direction.

  After all her struggles, this is madness. Oh God, the time in Germany. And the pictures! Gary must never, ever find out about her past.

  It is shaping up to be a hotter day than expected. Gary wonders how his German colle agues manage to keep their long-sleeved shirts so crisp, how they can bear to keep their ties clenched in the unconditioned office. Some of them are still wearing full suit jackets while he sweats in short sleeves. The hot July day beats mercilessly down on the glass windows of their Upper Street office. Gary pictures Ester sunbathing delicately on their subtle square of neatly fenced grass, her body encased by her tight bikini. With all the posh money guys hanging around, flexi-time executives and in-between actors, he hopes that she won’t get too interested in someone else. It will be hard enough to hang onto her if the photos keep coming. Perhaps he should phone her and check what she’s up to. His stomach is still tense and he feels like he is going to have one of his headaches.

  In the office today he had a board meeting with five colleagues from the Frankfurt office. They betrayed none of the discomfort he was feeling, in fact their skin was totally resistant to the heat. Their faces seemed a uniform pink that never shined. And Gary wonders again how they really felt on the inside, working on a short-term contract in a foreign language. Living in a city they don’t know, asking for the simplest of things that they can’t buy like mett , the raw pork mince they eat at home on brötchen , hard rolls, which not even cosmopolitan London can provide. And yet, though they slipped up occasionally, they never failed to pronounce the silent ‘e’ in cloth e s for instance, for all this they seemed normal. Unlike him.

  They never mentioned their girlfriends or wives although he’d met them, of course. They were all trim and uniform, their dyed red hair a fashion statement rather than an unfulfilled promise (Germans these days were bottle redheads rather than Aryan blondes). His old boss had told him that they liked to keep their private lives separate. Private lives meant sex of course, crude desire. It was OK in Frankfurt to go naked in the park at the weekend, as long as you dressed in a suit weekdays and got up early. In London real sex is a foregone conclusion that becomes an anticlimax once you actually have it on tap. That’s why the escort industry is booming, why there is telephone sex, internet sex, encounters in every shade and form. But the problem is, when you have a need, it’s exploited. He should never have answered the agency in the first place.

  Ester is hot; in fact the flat feels unbearably stifling. After stumbling into the fridge for the umpteenth time and picking at an over-ambitious breakfast (she really must keep her weight down somehow) she has decided to go to the park to work on the new Whiskers cat food ad she had to finish by 4 p.m. With a fully charged-up laptop, towel and sunscreen she is free to go and work out of doors. As long as she can be bothered to get on with it once she gets there.

  She stuffs her bag with notes, folders and even a few hidden cigarettes in case she gets just too frustrated. An old habit, she’s a non-smoker now.

  Ten minutes walk and she is there. The park is the raison d’etre for the popularity of the three-times-standard expense of Primrose Hill. As usual, even on a workday, demi-celebs and professionals throng in twos and threes, walking their dogs and talking loudly. Such leisure here is only a display of extreme wealth.

  Ester positions her towel and lays out her ‘office’. The air is so still there is no need for makeshift paperweights. All she has to do is make sure the screen is positioned to avoid a glare and try to work out why this particular version of Whiskers should be more enticing than the rest. She is up against it because this one is rabbit flavour, and really even though the customers don’t eat it themselves people don’t like to think of giving other pets to their cats. For the hundredth time Ester wishes she could work in the production of consumables rather than trying to sort out the nonsense at the other end and make people desire what was best left alone anyway.

  She can’t seem to concentrate here either. The sun’s too hot. After five minutes she eases down the straps of her stripy blue top to get a more even tan. After all, she might as well get a little colour. Using the same rationale, she rolls up her skirt and bares her belly button. Once she’s run out of areas she can reasonably expose (thank God she isn’t famous) she gets into the flow. She’s found the invisible hook she can fasten her angle on to. Finally in control, her fingers start typing faster and the background buzz seems to have been drowned out, as if someone has taken a remote control and turned it off.

  Click .

  But there is something. A hard, metallic sound. The first one she hears could have been the hundredth. She comes to the end of her sentence and looks up.

  A tanned shaven-headed man is standing a couple of
yards in front of her, his large camera pointing in her direction. He is lithe but wiry, there is something pleasing about the way his muscles are a touch too visible through his tight white T-shirt. He smiles apologetically. His brown eyes seem pleasant enough. Ester is startled by the attraction she feels. He lets his camera dangle on the string around his neck as he approaches her.

  ‘Do you mind?’

  His voice is softer than she expects. She can’t place his accent. The camera looks broadcast quality standard, making her more suspicious than flattered.

  ‘Er, depends on what you are doing.’ She says, trying not to sound too wary.

  The man squats down in front of her. His designer jeans crinkle in all the right places.

  ‘Artistic therapy. Usually all the pictures I take are posed to death.’

  ‘So, you’ll lose interest now I’m in the know, will you?’

  He isn’t put off.

  ‘It just changes things.’ He digs into his back pocket and pulls out a business card. It’s gun-coloured, rather than white. ‘I could do with a model. Somebody who doesn’t snort coke for breakfast.’

  ‘I bet you could.’ Ester tries to look interested in her laptop. ‘I’m a bit busy right now, I’ll let you know once I’ve finished doing my day job.’

  The man’s expression doesn’t fade. He stands, looking clean and tanned, as if he’s ordered the sunshine personally.

  ‘Phone us sometime, then.’

  He winks then walks away. She watches him go. No more photos. He just goes out of the gate.

  Twenty minutes later and she is finished. She lies back to enjoy the sun. After a while the sky clouds over and Ester packs up, leaving the man’s card on the grass for some other model to find.

  Because Ester has met her mid-afternoon deadline, and Gary’s meeting has gone on longer than expected, supper (in the shape of heated up Marks and Spencer components) is warming up nicely. Expensive Hermes aromatherapy candles flicker over spotless white linen. Ester feels relaxed, looking around the bright white room; this is how it is supposed to be. Is that the timer going off? Oh, just her Dior bag beeping. Gary probably. To say when.