Flying Again

' Frances, I'm flying again…'

I stood on the terrace of her apartment, and let the wind play on the silk dressing gown, searching through its frayed seams like an affable pickpocket. As the sleeves filled with the night air I felt myself soar between the apartment towers of Marina Baie des Anges. The curving facades with their step-pyramid profiles seemed detached from the ground, floating above the swimming pools and marinas that lay between the causeways like sections of a stolen sea.

Three miles to the south-west was the Garoupe lighthouse on Cap d'Antibes, its beam tirelessly sweeping the shore. On the beach nearby, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had drunk their whisky sours at the Château of La Garoupe, but that had been another Riviera, as remote from this futuristic apartment complex as the casino at Monte Carlo was from the temple of Karnak.

Frances joined me on the terrace, setting the drinks tray on a table. 'Paul, view good enough for you?'

'All this curved space? We're coming in to land at Babylon airport. One day the whole Côte d'Azur will be like this.'

'On the drawing board it already is. Everything five minutes old is waiting for the clearance sale.'

'Everything? That's sad.' I slipped my arm around her waist and held her against the night. 'Memories, dreams…?'

'Yesterday's software. Lots of heavy discounts and knock-down prices. Sorry, Paul.'

She held the white-wine spritzer to her face, letting the wind carry the cool effervescence into her eyes. Tiny points of moisture glittered on the tips of her lashes. On the drive from Théoule she had been too distracted to talk, watching the rear-view mirror like a car thief. But when we left Antibes and reached the apartment complex at Villeneuve-Loubet she recovered herself and returned to the real business on her mind.

As we rode the lift to the fifteenth floor she leaned against my shoulder and pressed a hand to my diaphragm. Without turning on the lights, she stepped into the hall and led me straight to her bedroom. Still excited by the violence at the Cardin Foundation and the plaintive cries of the Japanese make-up girls, I quickly undressed her. But I was a poor lover, aware of Jane watching me from the back of my mind, and barely able to maintain the erection that had sprung to life so eagerly during the robbery.

When I came at last, an orgasm as faked as a bored housewife's, Frances had smiled the microsecond smile of an escort agency whore. She smoothed the damp hair from my forehead, already working out the next move in the game she was playing with me, like an older sister with a docile small brother who would end up trussed and gagged in the toy cupboard.

But the playrooms of the new Riviera were as large as the Cardin Foundation. The speed and thuggish efficiency of the fur thieves had impressed me. Standing at the rail as I sipped my drink, I thought of the swinging clubs, and felt again the blow across my shoulders in the Rue Valentin. In a reflex of anger I raised my right fist, ready to hit back.

'Paul…' Alarmed, Frances held my wrist. 'Calm down. You're safe here.'

' Frances… I was miles away.'

'You were going to hit me. Go on, if you need to…'

'It's the last thing I want to do. Frances, I like you… strange baggage and all. That robbery pulled a set of triggers I'd forgotten about.' I sat next to her on the wicker settee. 'I remember the hazings we used to dish out to new recruits at my RAF flying school.'

'Horseplay?'

'Hardly. They were brutal beatings. It took me years to admit I thoroughly enjoyed them.'

'So that's your special scene? I'll buy a riding crop.'

'Please… there's nothing special and it's not my scene. Memories jump the rails and speed off down the wrong track. All the same, why didn't I let you call the police?'

'I'd like to know.' She pointed to the extension phone on the table, sitting next to the manila envelope of Halder's photographs. 'I could call them now.'

She waited, cool as night. I liked her for the way she was still pushing her amateur conspiracy along, the big sister with baby brother in the pram, searching for a secret entrance to the park.

'It's too late.' I waved the phone away. 'Three hours after the crime – what do we say to the police?'

'Easy – we were so excited we had to go home first and have great sex. They must hear that all the time.'

'I bet. They don't need us – they have dozens of Japanese witnesses.' I took her hand, and tried to ease the blue shadows from her bruised wrist. 'It wasn't great sex – I'm sorry.'

'We'll try again. A different tack…' She leaned against my shoulder, but her face had darkened, as if I were tacitly blaming her for my failure. 'You think the gang came from Eden-Olympia? They looked awfully fit.'

'Off-duty security guards do the stick-work. Several vigilante groups are involved. The powers-that-be at Eden-Olympia aren't satisfied with the Cannes police, so they take action on their own.'

'Against a Japanese advertising agency? Why? For making a fur-coat commercial?'

'It could be racist, or some mad animal rights thing. Fanatical Greens always veer off-course, and end up trying to save the smallpox virus. On the other hand -'

'Paul, not now…'

Frances placed my hand on her left breast, setting my fingers over her nipple. Despite my lacklustre performance, she was trying to rouse me again. I looked down at her face, with its lips that were almost white in the darkness, reflecting the light from the opposite apartments. Her wet hair seemed darker, and for a moment she resembled Jane. As a lover she had worked hard, careful not to hurt my scarred knees, sitting astride me like a determined first-aid worker trying to revive a comatose patient.

' Frances, did David ever come out here?'

'Of course. That's his dressing gown.' She stroked the lapels with the back of her hand. 'Along with an old tuxedo, it's all he left me.'

'I'm sorry.' Concerned for her, I said: 'I still can't grasp why he put you on…'

'The target list? Does it matter? Don't always look for motives – they don't explain everything.'

'Even so.' I lifted Halder's envelope from the table. 'While you were in the shower I glanced through the photos again. There's one you ought to see.'

'No thanks. They're a new kind of pornography.' She shivered in the night air, and stared at the photograph of Olga Carlotti, the business park's personnel manager, slumped across her desk.

'Nasty… poor woman. Did David -?'

'Shoot her? I'm afraid so. But have a look at the applicants' snaps on her desk. She must have been checking through them when she died.'

Frances covered her exposed breast. 'They're amiable girls from small-town lycées. I hope they got the office jobs they wanted.'

'Some of the jobs weren't in anyone's office. More like the couch in the next-door sitting room.' I pointed to a row of polaroids set against the inkstand. In one of the prints a stout blonde in a low-cut cocktail gown leaned towards the camera, lips parted in a parody of vampdom. In the next a dark-haired teenager sat naked on the verge of a swimming pool, her small breasts in silhouette.

'Pretty, isn't she?' Frances stared at the miniature image. 'The office junior?'

'I hope so. It's a strange photo to send to a personnel manager.'

'That depends on the kind of personnel Olga was recruiting.'

Frances moved my hand over her nipple. 'Do you find her attractive?'

'Olga Carlotti? She's lying face down with her brains across her knuckles.'

'The office junior.'

'Attractive? Yes, but a little young. Fourteen, fifteen…?'

'Who's counting? She reminds me of Jane.'

'Come on…' I gazed into the block of night air between the apartment buildings. Logic and reality curved at Marina Baie des Anges, warped by a relativity that applied to more than time and space. 'Jane is twenty-eight.'

'With the body of a teenager. I almost fancy her myself.'

'Simone Delage got there first. Jane's found the head girl she always needed to look up to.'

'But you still have sex?'

'We live in a company house. I don't think it's allowed.'

'That's why I moved here. Is she faithful?'

'As far as I know. A month before we married she had a fling with a surgeon at Guy's. That shook me, but Jane coped with it very well. Unfinished business, she told me, very common among brides…'

'Let's not talk about Jane.' Frances traced the scars on my knees with a finger, as if rethinking the incisions. 'Will she be awake when I drive you back?'

'I doubt it. She sleeps soundly.'

'The sort of sleep that leaves puncture marks?' Frances took the glass from my hand and sat up. 'Let's go back to bed. We have unfinished business of our own…'

I followed her into the bedroom, and wandered over to the bookshelf as she slipped into the bathroom. There was a row of textbooks on French property law, and a single copy of Through the Looking-Glass. As I turned the well-thumbed pages, smiling at the Tenniel illustrations, I realized that this was the first copy in Greenwood 's Alice library that anyone had read.

I lay beside Frances, admiring her sprawled figure in the overhead mirror. She seemed to fly across a darkened sky, a nymph from a baroque ceiling asleep on a passing cloud. As she gazed at her reflection, hands behind her head, I ran my fingers over the hollows of her armpits, eddies in the smooth skin that flowed to her hips. Her body was still unpacking itself for me. The small scars below her chin, the erect right nipple that seemed to have a life of its own, the strong ribcage and blonde pubic pelt were a raid on my senses.

She turned to face me, tactics decided. She cupped a hand around my penis, fingers feeling for its root, and weighed my testicles like a stockwoman with an elderly breeding bull.

'You're still tense, Paul. Think about the robbery. If the mirror bothers you I can turn off the light.'

'Leave it on – I've got two of you to look at.'

'David liked doing that. Which was the real me, he used to ask… philosophy in the boudoir. The mirror was his idea.'

'David's?' My fingers paused as they grazed in the damp watermeadow between her thighs. 'I'm impressed.'

'At times he surprised himself. That's what I want you to do, Paul. I want you to shock yourself.'

'And what about you, Frances? What shocks you?'

'Nothing about sex ever shocks women. At least, men's kind of sex. We clean up after you, like those charladies with brooms who follow the coronation coach.' She kissed my mouth, curious about the taste of my lips, and then tested my still-flaccid penis, nodding like a serious-minded child with some difficult homework. 'Let's concentrate on you. We'll open a few doors. That robbery excited you. What else is there?'

'Try me. Turn a key.'

'I will… do you want to beat me?' She lay on her stomach, looking over her shoulder at her image in the mirror, and smacked her plump bottom. 'I've got a nice rump – deliciously spankable, David used to say. There's a dressing-gown cord in the bedside table.'

' Frances…' I caressed the white skin, glad to find no trace of weals. 'The last thing I'm going to do is hurt you.'

'Do you want to tie me up? We'll go into the bathroom, you can rope my wrists to the bidet taps and bugger me. Some people like fucking in bathrooms. All that baptism and absolution. Paul?'

'Not for me. No religious streak. Frances, I'm sorry – it'll come back.'

'It hasn't gone away.' She lay beside me, the moisture from my lips glistening on her breasts, talking in a low but firm voice. 'We're relaxing, Paul, so you don't need to worry. What about stealing? That was something you did as a boy. And those hazings in the RAF that got you going? Think about flying your first solo, and the big erection in the cockpit. Do you want to see me fucked by another man? Maybe it's too soon for that. We'll wait till you need me more. Do you want to watch Jane being fucked? It's every husband's dream. Yes, Paul, you're waking up… think about Jane being fucked by Halder or Alain Delage. Fucking someone else makes her a stranger again, stranger and more interesting. There are things between them you'll never know. Not the old bathroom smells and the sheets stained with your cock. Someone else's semen lying between you… yes, you like that. Paul, do you want me to pee or shit on you? A little warm sprinkle?'

'Frances, dear…' I held her breasts as she squatted across me, and felt the warm urine on my thighs, hotter than I expected from her cold hands. A quick scent, sweet and ammoniacal, rose from her pubis. ' Frances, give up…'

'No, we don't give up.' She blew the damp hair from her eyes.

'Let your mind drift… you're on the taboo coast, there are dark harbours here. We'll find the door, the special one…'

She stopped, and stared with a look of frustration at my limp penis, then sprang from the bed towards the bathroom.

'Don't move. I'll be back.'

' Frances, please – no shit.'

'No shit, don't worry.'

When the door closed I heard her rooting through the laundry basket. I moved from the urine-damp patch. Beyond the terrace the apartment buildings of Marina Baie des Anges made their curved passage through the night. I had disappointed Frances, though she was taking my failure in good part. Jane still hovered somewhere within my mind, but she had begun to fade from me. My visceral response to the Cardin robbery seemed to justify infidelity. The contingent world, as always, rewrote the rules and sanctioned everything.

I heard Frances switch off the bathroom light. The door opened, and her hand reached to the wall switch, dimming the bedside lamp.

'Right…' Frances stood beside the bed, swaying to the faint North African music that came from an apartment above us.

'Don't tell me you're asleep.'

'I've never been more awake.'

I sat up and leaned against the quilted headboard, feeling its buttons in my back. Frances raised her arms to the ceiling mirror, as if about to join her second self among the clouds. She wore a zebra-striped cocktail dress that exposed her crutch, a parody of a gun-moll's gown in a gangster musical. The cheap fabric clasped her hips and waist, and the plunge neckline almost bared her breasts. Her legs were sheathed in a tattered pair of fishnet tights, holes as large as my hand around patches of pale skin. A slash of two-tone lipstick, scarlet and mauve, turned her mouth into a lurid grimace, a tough-teen fad I had seen in the bars of La Bocca, a convent girl's notion of a streetwalker's smile, alienating and alluring.

'Paul? Still here?'

I placed my feet on the tiled floor. Clasping her hips, I drew her towards me. The acrylic fabric slid like oiled rubber in my hands. I felt the torn mesh of her tights, searching for the pools of smooth skin among the nail-catching threads.

I pressed my lips to the gusset, inhaling the odour of adolescent hormones and cheap perfume that clung to the fabric, the heady, derailing reek of pubescent girls that had filled the refuge, the smells of dust and the ancestral dirt of dormitories, the jarring clash of unwashed underwear discarded by the Alice-reading girls.

'Paul…' Frances stopped me when I searched behind her back for the zip. Holding my now erect penis, she waited as I pressed my face to her pubis, breathing the stale scents on the stained fabric. 'I'll leave the dress on – it took a miracle to get into… How are you?'

'Young again…'

Дата добавления: 2015-09-07