Chapter 4

 

 

Lala woke up alone, as did Teddy, while Sèdonoudè was in bed with Linda. They had spent time talking after leaving Lala to Quentin and found in each other, a growing emotion shining in their eyes. Quentin left once he had satisfied himself, but not Lala, and returned in the early hours with stinking breath to the wife with only bedclothes tucked up against her chin, to protect her from his drunken verbal assault. She breathed easier once the brute fell into a deep, snoring sleep.

Billy woke, to his utter confusion, with the long, pale form of Jeremy Baden-Flogg lying next to him. Of the flood of ambivalent feelings which overcame him, the first and most stubborn was a feeling of shame. Once subsided, it was followed by a sense of relief, because he had known about this unfulfilled aspect of his sexuality for a long time. He had led a troubled life, and periods spent in young offender institutions, including as part of a gang of youths involved in the death of an old age pensioner in the blocks of flats in Ealing where he had spent his youth. His years of petty villainy, his willingness to humiliate and destroy for the sake of it, while not entirely caused by a repression and resentment, and indeed an inability to express those feelings - the abuse he had suffered at the hands of his own parents was the real contributory factor in that -, his vicious assaults upon animals and others, violent acts of assertion, revealed his self-loathing, and a brutal rage at a world he wished to revenge himself upon.

He had never allowed himself, or even had an opportunity for, a consensual same sex relationship, if, indeed, that was what he had just had. Such unorthodoxy in his bleak, orthodox world would have been insufferable. Not for Billy were the understanding of loving, supportive parents, and peers.

Last night had not begun like that. At first, he had joined Sèdonoudè and Linda as she pulled him towards and into her wet vagina, while her lips were squeezed tightly around Sèdonoudè. While he was fucking Linda from behind, Jeremy had knelt behind him, feasting his eyes on the firm, white, thrusting buttocks, before parting them with one hand, then sticking his thumb straight into his rectum. Billy gasped with surprise, but the ecstasy he had taken, the drink, the weed, the free sex, mingled with his immaturity and that long hidden receptiveness to the idea of male-on-male love making. It overwhelmed the hero in his own sexual journey. Shortly after, he allowed himself to be led away by Jeremy, politician, and television celebrity no less, into another bedroom, and allowed himself to be penetrated by the seemingly aristocratic man. He enjoyed every moment of the act.

Though from a distinguished family, Jeremy was more so through marriage than belonging to true aristocracy. He cultivated his over-the-top accent and made the best use of the power of his burgeoning position and fame, to claim his droits du seigneur. Now Jeremy got up. He stood over the bed while his conquest pulled the sheet up to his chin like a little old maid, or like Quentin’s long-suffering wife. Naked, Jeremy looked like Shakespeare's Robert Shallow, a forked radish, or, as Billy thought, a lollipop which had got stuck down the back of a sofa. Baden dressed quietly and quickly. He gave Billy a guilty smile as he put on his spectacles, then left. Eloquentia would be cross.

Billy’s ambivalent feelings about the adventure began to coalesce around the one familiar that had always been constant: hatred. He began to seethe at the thought that he had just been used by an ‘upper class ponce’ as he saw it, and the red glow of discomfort glowing from his anus made him tremble with fury as he too got quickly dressed, while the slow cogs of his mind whirred round as they so often did, with thoughts of revenge.

***

 

Teddy came down to the kitchen and put the coffee pot on to boil as he saw shadowy figures scampering away into the brightness of day. The remains of the night before lay in evidence: half emptied gins and vodkas, whiskies, and brandies, mixed with tonic or cola, beers and wine bottles, a few snacks in dishes like mouse trifles. It was early, but the sun was already up, and Teddy knew it would be hot.

He used to love such days in France. He could almost remember the exhilaration of crossing an imaginary line when holidaying there. Somewhere after Poitiers, everything seemed to change: the shapes of the houses, the terracotta roofs, the darker hair rinses, and skin tone, of floral tabard wearing women brushing the dust from their doorsteps. That warmth! Its first pleasure, like nothing he had ever felt in Blighty. A warmth that enveloped and cosseted. To slumber lazily in its arms.

It was at the age of forty-nine that Teddy began to be old. To find the furnace of the canicule too much to bear. Age and his wife's sharp descent into madness overwhelmed him, all of a sudden so it seemed, and his body began to rebel against the abuse he had inflicted upon it for so long. Although that was nearly fifteen years ago, it was a time he remembered well. It was before he realised his arteries were furring up, but the tell-tale signs of mortality presented as if upon a post card from the grim reaper. He put on a lot of weight during the ten years he had lived too well in France and ignored Lala when she told him he was getting fat, and the shortness of breath on those days he could be bothered to do the gardening. Drink was always far too comforting a balm to ignore.

Then, after that summer (was it 2003?), he lay on the bed in his Bordeaux pied-de-terre after a good night's drinking, naked, sweating, gasping for breath like a carp chucked on a riverbank. A change in diet and some pills from his cardiologist had put paid to that, albeit temporarily, for nothing deceives the mind so much as the habits to which one returns like a homing pigeon.

Still, looking around him like a sugar-hyped child sad his party friends had gone home after his big day, he felt that sadness in what remained of his life. He had no children, had achieved nothing of note, just pleased himself for many, many years. What was there to look forward to? Lala's fucking? He thought not. Then again, neither had he ever had any inclination to do himself in. Of course, perhaps, like many people, on his worst days he imagined a noose, or some other melodramatic way of sticking two fingers up at the world. But he could never shake the feeling that the only one he would be cheating was himself. The coffee pot began steaming and the smell of fresh coffee felt like a small reward. He knew how to make it a bigger one. He rinsed a crusty old mug in the sink and filled it with steaming black coffee. Then he scoured the bottles of booze in rows of disarray on a shelf above it. Whisky, J & B Rare. He was not fussy about the good stuff which was up there somewhere. He poured a slug in and added a yellowing sugar lump from a bowl beside the stove.

He never had the shakes like Lala did. Drink just did not seem to do that to him. Instead, that warm, golden, blunting, mixed with the hot, black liquid, merely spread instant relief from his thoughts. He had one of those cast-iron constitutions, rarely had hangovers, but just felt irritable and a little sweaty palmed after a heavy session. Even on those days that he felt the metallic dryness of his tongue, the disembodiment of his mind, he was able to get up and do things if he did have anything to do.

It was an imagination Teddy lacked, and the worst thing was is that he knew it. He saw his old school friends in the papers some days. Right wing, and some left, political whingers, who made their names indulging peoples' prejudices and fears. Now there was all this talk of the European Union. It was all nonsense. Teddy knew, even if he did not, could never practice, that such business was about slow, hard, pen pushing work, and that that was how problems, in commerce or in law, were always solved. Uppity bastards like Jeremy: liars, hypocrites, full of themselves (human all too human), pretending to care about the poor while eternally angling to keep them that way, were not people he ever had time for. They were just part of the furniture. Neither did Teddy himself really care about the poor, or foreign disasters for that matter. He took people as he found them. It was a voice that sold someone to Teddy. An earnest voice like Sèdonoudè's, or a clever one like Lala's. Lala. What have we done to ourselves?

Just then she came in. Her face was askew, and from that lop-sided expression, which drew itself fast into a concrete mask, glared two evil little blue bullets. Those eyes had the unnerving knack of seeming both to be piercingly focused and, abstracted. Teddy wanted the ground to swallow him up when she looked this way. Who knew which way the wind would blow today? Her shakes were so violent that, when she gripped the table's edge to steady her hands, her body bent double every other second with the force of a nervous system out of control. She picked up a glass of something. Flat cola and whisky with a dead, browning lemon slice in it. She drank it, then picked up a half smoked spliff from the ashtray.

'Teddy, let's do something different today. Go to town or something. I want to feel normal.'

Teddy smiled. The words gave a bit of relief. He, also, wanted to feel normal.

'They've re-opened the musee des beaux arts, shall we go and look at the pictures?'

'That would be nice.' It was a nice idea. Though they both knew that such an option - a successful outing to look at and understand pictures and nothing else, no drink, no drugs - was unlikely to be achieved, they could pretend for a while, if Lala could behave, that they were like any other aging couple clinging to life and love through thick and thin.

Teddy had a shower while Lala did not bother. Instead, she took a few of the pre-rolled spliffs from a box on the kitchen’s mantelpiece and put them in her purse. They then climbed into Teddy's fiat ready for an outing.