“Apparently young Ryan Fraser kissed her on the bus on the way home.”
“Cheeky devil.”
“It wasn’t easy. Three of her friends had to help her catch him and hold him down.”
We laugh and I pull her on top of me, letting her feel my erection against her thigh.
“Stay in bed.”
She laughs and slides away. “No. I’m too busy.”
“C’mon.”
“It’s not the right time. You have to save your fellas.”
My “fellas” are my sperm. She makes them sound like paratroopers.
She’s getting dressed. White bikini pants slide along her legs and snap into place. Then she raises the shirt over her head and shrugs her shoulders into the straps of a bra. She won’t risk giving me another kiss. I might not let her go next time.
After she’s gone I stay in bed listening to her move through the house, her feet hardly touching the floor. I hear the kettle being filled and the milk being collected from the front step. I hear the freezer door open and the toaster being pushed down.
Dragging myself upright, I take six paces to the bathroom and turn on the shower. The boiler in the basement belches and the pipes clunk and gargle. I stand shivering on the cold tiles waiting for some sign of water. The showerhead is shaking. At any moment I expect the tiles to start coming loose from around the taps.
After two coughs and a hacking spit, a cloudy trickle emerges and then dies.
“The boiler is broken again,” yells Julianne from downstairs.
Great! Brilliant! Somewhere there is a plumber laughing at me. He’s no doubt telling all his plumber mates how he pretended to fix a Jurassic boiler and charged enough to pay for a fortnight in Florida.
I shave with cold water, using a fresh razor, without cutting myself. It may seem like a small victory, but worth noting.
I emerge into the kitchen and watch Julianne make plunger coffee and put posh jam on a piece of whole- wheat toast. I always feel childish eating my Rice Krispies.
I still remember the first time I saw her. She was in her first year studying languages at the University of London. I was doing my postgraduate degree. Not even my mother would call me handsome. I had curly brown hair, a pear-shaped nose and skin that freckled at the first hint of sunlight.
I had stayed on at university determined to sleep with every promiscuous, terminally uncommitted first-year on campus, but unlike other would-be lotharios I tried too hard. I even failed miserably at being fashionably unkempt and seditious. No matter how many times I slept on someone’s floor, using my jacket as a pillow, it refused to crumple or stain. And instead of appearing grungy and intellectually blase, I looked like someone on his way to his first job interview.
“You had passion,” she told me later, after listening to me rail against the evils of apartheid at a rally in Trafalgar Square, outside the South African embassy. She introduced herself in the pub and let me pour her a double from the bottle of whiskey we were drinking.
Jock was there— getting all the girls to sign his T-shirt. I knew that he would find Julianne. She was a fresh face— a pretty one. He put his arm around her waist and said, “I could grow to be a better person just being near you.”
Without a flicker of a smile, she took his hand away and said, “Sadly, a hard-on doesn’t count as personal growth.”
Everybody laughed except Jock. Then Julianne sat down at my table and I gazed at her in wonderment. I had never seen anyone put my best friend in his place so skillfully.
I tried not to blush when she said I had passion. She laughed. She had a dark freckle on her bottom lip. I wanted to kiss it.
Five doubles later she was asleep at the bar. I carried her to a cab and took her home to my bedsit in Islington. She slept on the futon and I took the sofa. In the morning she kissed me and thanked me for being such a gentleman. Then she kissed me again. I remember the look in her eyes. It wasn’t lust. It didn’t say, “Let’s have some fun and see what happens.” Her eyes were telling me, “I’m going to be your wife and have your babies.”
We were always an odd couple. I was the quiet, practical one, who hated noisy parties, pub crawls and going home for weekends. While she was the only child of a painter father and interior designer mother, who dressed like sixties flower children and only saw the best in people, Julianne didn’t go to parties— they came to her.
We married three years later. By then I was house-trained— having learned to put my dirty washing in the basket, to leave the toilet seat down and not to drink too much at dinner parties. Julianne didn’t so much knock off my rough edges as fashion me out of clay.
That was sixteen years ago. Seems like yesterday.
Julianne pushes a newspaper toward me. There’s a photograph of Catherine and the headline reads: TORTURED GIRL IS MP’S NIECE.
Junior Home Office minister Samuel McBride has been devastated by the brutal murder of his 27-year-old niece.
The Labour MP for Brighton-le-Sands was clearly upset yesterday when the Speaker of the House expressed the chamber’s sincerest condolences at his loss.
Catherine McBride’s naked body was found six days ago beside the Grand Union Canal in Kensal Green, West London. She had been stabbed repeatedly.
“At this moment we are concentrating on retracing Catherine’s final movements and finding anyone who may have seen her in the days prior to her death,” said Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz, who is leading the investigation.
“We know she took a train from Liverpool to London on Wednesday, 13 November. We believe she was coming to London for a job interview.”
Catherine, whose parents are divorced, worked as a community nurse in Liverpool and had been estranged from her family for a number of years.
“She had a difficult childhood and seemed to lose her way,” explained a family friend. “Recently attempts had been made for a family reconciliation.”
Julianne pours half a cup of coffee.
“It’s quite strange, don’t you think, that Catherine should turn up after all these years?”
“How do you mean strange?”
“I don’t know.” She shivers slightly. “I mean, she caused us all those problems. You nearly lost your job. I remember how angry you were.”
“She was hurting.”
“She was spiteful.”
She glances at the photograph of Catherine. It’s a shot of her graduation day as a nurse. She’s smiling fit to bust and clutching a diploma in her hand. “And now she’s back again. The police ask you to help identify her and then you get that strange letter from her…”
