'Don't be such an old perv.'
'But I'm very aroused.'
'Bob,' she said.
On her knees, leaning on the front seats, she brushed back her fringe.
'Look, I like you. I really do. But I can't.'
'Can't? Won't?'
'Don't!
'Aha. Don't. Don't implies that class values are struggling with more basic desires. Did you come, just now?'
Elise laughed at Bob's audacity.
'No.'
'Would you like to?'
Quick as a fish, Bob's hand darted between her legs. He slipped two fingers inside her. Elise flinched.
'You cheeky bastard.'
She said it three times. Each time it sounded more like a compliment.
She moved her narrow hips in a figure of eight.
Nathan met Bob's eye. Bob's eyes were blank.
'Nathan won't mind, will you, Nathan?'
Nathan was becoming aroused again. But he pulled up his trousers and said, 'Of course not.'
Bob said, 'Mate. I think we'd better swap places.'
Elise lay back in the seat.
'I'm going to regret this in the morning.'
'I promise you,' said Bob. 'You won't.'
Nathan gathered his clothes, his jacket and shirt. They were damp.
Big and intent, Bob began to climb on to the back seat. Nathan opened the door and edged out, his shirt and jacket bundled in his arms.
Elise reached out for him as he left. She grabbed his wrist and squeezed, as one might at the apex of a rollercoaster. He squeezed back, he hoped encouragingly, and let go.
There was a blast of cold, December air. Nathan hurried into his clothes. His hands fumbled at the buttons.
Inside the car, Elise said, 'Oh my God..'
The Volvo lurched on its springs.
Nathan decided to get in the front seat and watch. But first he needed to piss. He walked behind the car. It was difficult to piss in the freezing cold, especially with a growing erection -- and the noises she made, the grunts and yelps. It took a long time and when it came, the wind whipped at the pale stream and scattered it over the rear windscreen of the Volvo.
Accompanying the car's increasingly violent movement, he could hear muffled, profane voices. Elise's voice rising in pitch and urgency, calling alternately on God and Jesus. A kind of bitten-back scream.
Nathan wanted to make her scream like that. Bob's voice was lower and insistent. Nathan wondered what she looked like, locking her white legs around his broad back. He stopped pissing and zipped himself up, not without difficulty. He opened the front passenger door and got inside. It was warm, and musky like a bedroom, undercut with cigarettes and leather upholstery.
By then, the car must have stopped rocking on its springs. Because when Nathan slammed the door and turned in his seat, Elise was already dead.
Nathan never seen a dead person before, but he knew it immediately.
Something had left her - whatever it was that a few moments before had made this fresh cadaver a girl named Elise.
A flock of starlings erupted in Nathan's chest.
Bob was sitting on the back seat - shirt-tails askew, naked from the waist down. His horse's cock hung thick and wet and glinting. Elise lay naked and almost face down, her feet on his lap.
Nathan stared at her.
There was only the sound of Bob's breathing. Elise's feet twitched.
An old joke, filthy, rose unbidden and popped on the surface of Nathan's mind - Now you're fucked. He shook it away.
He said: 'What the fuck have you done?'
His voice was girlish, and hearing it -- hearing the rise of panic made him still more afraid.
Elise's Adidas quivered at Bob's thigh. Bob stared at it, then shoved her legs from his naked lap. She let out an extended exhalation, like a post-coital sigh.
Nathan's sphincter loosened.
Bob said, 'She cramped. Down there. You know. I couldn't. I couldn't get it out.'
Nathan vomited into his mouth. He threw open the passenger door and let the vomit slap on to the road. He hacked up for a long time.
Then he ran away.
He ran and ran. His arms pumped. He felt no friction or resistance.
His breath came in hot and cold rasps. There were only the slow-shifting trees to the side of him, twisted oak and silvery ash, the twinkling sky above him, the pounding of his feet, a white cloud of breath.
He slowed to a wavering jog and then to a halt. The exertion caught him and he vomited again. He stood holding his knees.
Branches shifted in his peripheral vision. He leaned against a tree. He spat.
He didn't know if he'd run towards the road or away from it. But now he imagined himself, breathless and drunk and hopelessly wired - mad-eyed, unkempt - somehow managing to flag down a passing car. What would he say?
What would he say to Sara?
He stood there, getting his breath back. Then he trudged back towards Bob's car.
It took a while. He began to wonder if Bob had gone. Perhaps he'd dumped Elise by the side of the lane and had left Nathan alone with her, here in the woods. Then the white Volvo began to emerge from the night.
Nathan walked up to it. He opened the door and sat down.
Bob was still there, on the back seat. He didn't seem to have
moved, except to have pulled his trousers up. His belt lay unbuckled in his lap and his flies were unzipped.
He said, 'I think she had a fit.'
Nathan wanted to kill him: to cave in his skull with a tyre lever.
Then he'd make his way back to the party. He'd find Sara: he'd tell her everything was all right, and they'd go home. And in the pearly grey, late-winter dawn he'd immerse himself in the cotton-fresh duvet and wake late in the bright December morning and he'd go and get the newspapers, and a bacon sandwich for them both. And they'd eat the sandwiches and read the newspapers and drink tea and watch the EastEnders omnibus, and everything would be all right. He wished so ferociously never to have come to this dark lane with this man and this girl, that it seemed impossible the wish would not come true.
He said, 'We have to call an ambulance. Right now. Or they'll think--'
Bob pushed aside the hair which overhung his bloated cherub's face. 'They'll think what?'
'Christ. Surely not. She had a fit!
'While I was fucking her. I don't know what happened. Maybe she had a weak heart. Maybe it was the cocaine.'
Nathan gagged, and this time brought up only stomach acid. 'I can't believe this is happening.'
'We weren't to know.'
'But it wasn't my fault.'
'We don't know that. Not for sure. What if it was the drugs? What if you supplied her with the drugs that killed her?'
'Oh, Christ. What are we going to do?'
