‘Deborah thinks you are lying about the existence of her friend Miss Farquar, in an effort to prove her mad.’
I gave a decent impersonation of a snort of incredulity. ‘Why should I want to do that?’
He was squat and heavy and his pointed beard was a glossy black. He was devilish and swift and in a split second upon me, forcing me back against the cistern and thrusting that beard in my face.
‘I don’t mind if you do drive Deborah mad,’ he hissed. ‘Wouldn’t you like to replace her in my magic box?’
He chuckled greasily and kissed me as before. But when he drew back I surprised him. Kissed him back and thrust my tongue for good measure between his tiny, shiny teeth.
The magician’s eyebrows raised together and I could tell he was pleased. He licked his lips, sucked his teeth slowly, as if tasting wine. We tried it again and he released his grip on me, though it became no less ardent.
‘Carry on.’ He grinned. ‘We’ll get rid of my present assistant together.’
When I returned to my compartment the nuns were gone. The lino was peppered with depressions from their heels.
I flicked up the blind. The lions were gone.
Or rather, the lion was gone.
Sprawled in elegant torpor, exhausted in his heartless absence, the spent but regal lioness occupied pride of place in the ruinous calm of the glade. She was all but smoking a post-coital cigarette. Knocked askance on her beautiful brow—a wonder I hadn’t noticed it earlier—was a leopard-skin pillbox hat.
OCARINA
We were at this party after a poetry reading in Darlington. It was late and we weren’t planning to stay for much longer but we sat on the Tuscany patio for a couple more drinks. In the dark we struggled to find places on the wall, moving urns of flowers aside and feeling the concrete for spilled wine. As time got on, the patio started to fill up. It was the most popular spot.
The party was a surprise. One of the poets had flung her home open to all and sundry. Inside and out there were paper lanterns and nibbles. What made it exotic was the number of fish tanks Chelsea kept.
‘This evening I have come as a mermaid,’ she’d been telling everyone. She was a psychiatric nurse and was stretched into an indigo sheath. When the party was on she slunk about between poets and hangers-on, holding plates aloft and tantalising everyone with snacks. Lucky she’s got big hands, I thought. She put me in mind of a transvestite I’d had in a novel I wrote the previous year.
Chelsea’s teenage daughters and son had been roped in to pour drinks and serve gateaux. I noticed that after a certain point they had given up to sit on the staircase and pass a bottle of vodka between them, watching the proceedings with bored eyes. All up the tall staircase there were alcoves set into the wall. More fish, swimming.
The patio windows were slid back, gaping, and the whole house was fragrant with a summer night in Darlington. The woman who ran the poetry group—a poet in her own right—sat in a deck chair in the centre of the flagstones and sobbed into her wineglass. She waved her free hand as if ready to add something pertinent once she had finished crying.
We really had to go soon. There was quite a drive. You were driving so you only sipped your drink. You read well tonight, I thought. I wouldn’t touch the broccoli quiche. There was already some folded discreetly into the urn beside me.
Somebody smashed a glass and it sounded musical.
Inside Chelsea’s extension, beyond the spread french windows, two soft settees faced each other. Animated conversation, laughing, choking on crisps and bubbles. Pairs of tired feet tangled and toyed with their shoes and blocked the way back into the extension. Chelsea was perched on her new boyfriend’s knee, feeding him trifle with her fingers.
He had a green chin and laughed deep in his throat when she tried to stick a cherry up his nose. He wore a navy blazer and shiny shoes. His hair was cut short. Looked like he played sports. Off-duty policeman, I thought. Chelsea ruffled the stubble on his head.
‘Margaret,’ you said, smiling in welcome because Margaret had lurched through the ferns with her paper plate and glass to talk to us. You cleared a seat for her. She was struggling with her nibbles and drink and that walking stick.
‘I liked your work tonight,’ I said.
She looked at me long and hard. At first I thought she had a suspicious look about her. But she was just thoughtful and on something for her nerves. Then she smiled.
‘It was from my erotic sequence,’ she told us. ‘I wasn’t sure whether to give it an airing tonight.’
‘I think you made the right decision.’
‘I think so, too. Did I tell you I’ve been put into an anthology of erotica?’
She raised her voice to tell us this. Some of the poets nearby must have heard. They nudged each other and, in her deck chair, the poet in her own right briefly stopped waggling her hand.
‘I know I look old now,’ Margaret said to me. She had one of those disconcerting glimmers in her eyes. The young at heart addressing callow youth and hoping to shock. ‘But I’ve had a surprisingly rich erotic life in my time.’
‘Have you now?’ I lit a cigarette and noticed you had started talking to Chelsea and her friend. My filter had fuchsia lipstick on it, which surprised me. I thought it would have rubbed off already. I had come dressed as one of Genet’s sailors, which seemed quite a flash thing to do in Darlington.
Someone had changed the record, prompting Margaret to say, ‘Prokofiev. Listen. Nothing like woodwind to get me going.’ She used her cane to bang time on the flagstones.
You and Chelsea and the rugby player were pissing yourselves about something. The poet in the deck chair had gone
