Fools for Lust (6 page)

Until then, he would wait, he reckoned. And stay chaste, and shaven.

I had a history, a bad habit of always wanting what I couldn't have. This time it was her. You know how it is. You know how it goes, sometimes: the sad ending is already in the sights of your periscope, but you forge ahead regardless. Just in case. Hope against hope and all that.

It was the summer of 1997. Don't ask me about the weather, I can't recall it well, it was neither too hot nor too cold, that's all I remember of it. Because of the time we spent naked in alien rooms, I suppose. Just once I had seen her shiver and pass over my over-large grey T-shirt as shelter from the momentary chill. I still wear that T-shirt from time to time; brings back memories. Of the colour of her bare flesh. The concealed shape of her drunken body.

I was on a job. As it is, meeting her was wrong. Very wrong.

But then the rules of this private eye game are ill-defined. Even more so if you're British. We can't carry guns like the ones in America and all the books and movies. Takes some of the glamour away already.

I do my best, though. I don't do adultery, debt research or repossessions. My field's more refined: industrial espionage, corporate shenanigans. Pays well, limited risks. Quiet and unspectacular, just my style, I reckoned.

That's how I first came across her.

A customer called the agency. Labour had come in a few weeks before and were threatening the privatised utilities with the windfall tax. Basically, the agency is me. And a few freelancers. And lots of names in a computer database. People who could be bribed. British Telecom engineers, book-keepers for stockbroking firms, disenchanted clerks with city banks, underpaid and exploited staff in the despatch departments and postrooms of large corporations. The indispensable human tools of the trade in my business.

One of the larger utilities was mounting some form of legal defence against the government plan. But their counterplotting was somehow making it into the national press. As soon as something was discussed at boardroom level it soon arrived in print on the financial pages of one of the large national newspapers. Inconvenient. You can't play chess when your opponent always knows your likely response to his movements. I was hired by phone by a Mr Jones in Corporate Planning. Money no object. Find out who was leaking the minutes of the secret meetings, and stop them.

Piece of cake.

The annoying columns were penned by the business correspondent of the newspaper. One I used to read once, but had recently given up on. I soon had a tap on his South London mews house telephone and 24-hour surveillance in operation. He operated from his Canary Wharf newsroom; unfortunately, because of the other year's IRA bombing in the vicinity I couldn't get access to the paper's offices and his phone there. Not to worry. I would just have to be patient and more thorough than usual.

Motive was quickly revealed: the guy's wife was a member of the local Labour constituency. Bloody idealists. So now it was just a question of pinpointing who at the utilities was passing him the information. At first I assumed it was also a local party activist, passing information to the press for what he or she thought were all the right reasons. So I left a couple of freelancers to keep a close eye on the Canary Wharf and City jaunts of the damn journo, and decided to concentrate on the South London connection personally.

And met her. The wife. Callie.

And my problems began.

And the joy.

Turns out I was on the wrong trail, anyway. The division at the utilities that had called on my snooping services didn't know what another division on another floor was up to ... It seems that they were aware there was no legal chance in hell of reversing the government's new tax, even if they had spent months and mountains in cash taking their case to the European courts or wherever, so they had leaked the stuff to the newspaper themselves to put the frighteners on the politicians in the hope of discouraging the Exchequer to set the windfall tax too high. Manipulating the media, and my business correspondent target was just the patsy they had unwittingly used. He was fairly new to the job, an arrival from TV and radio who didn't realise he was being manipulated. Probably thought all along he was God's answer to investigative journalism. I never did like him anyway.

But I didn't know all that then and also thought I was doing a damn good job. Did I say patsy?

Early bright late May morning, parked fifty yards from the couple's semidetached, I munched on a chocolate biscuit in lieu of breakfast, aware that this job was playing havoc with my expanding waistline. Mark, the journalist, had left half an hour ago for Canary Wharf, and a reliable acolyte had followed him. I'd planned to keep on the wife's trail. Already knew quite a bit about her. Second generation Irish, Epsom grammar school and Cambridge, a second in English, a few dead end jobs on regional newspapers and now a reader in the drama department for one of the new television cable channels; married eight years, in the chapel of the Cambridge college where they had both been undergraduates. No children. Canvassed for the local branch of the party. Must have had her first orgasm in months on the night Labour won and they fucked whilst blinding drunk. On paper, a common type. Somehow, I hadn't summoned a mental picture of her, wasn't really expecting anything surprising. She was just a pawn in another very ordinary case.

The house's front door opened.

I was blinded.

Within a week, I had contrived to meet her at a launch party for a balti curry cookery book in a central London art gallery. Her voice, the way the thin material of her blue dress hung over her shoulders, her dark eyes peering inside me as we spoke inconsequential gossip, it all made the longing reach unthought-of agony.

Within two weeks, we were in bed together.

I had crossed the line.

Cookie, my old mentor, had always warned me never to mix business with pleasure, get personally involved in a case. But all the wise precepts were quickly forgotten as her lips engulfed my vile meat in a kiss of fire, unabashed by the fact I had just retreated momentarily from the wet furnace of her innards and was still dripping with her juices.

On the first hotel bed, it was lust. Extraordinary. Venting frustrations of our respective lives. Reinventing the lovemaking intensity as before. Drinking at the tap of life all over again. Reminding ourselves that our bodies still held untold beauty that was elsewhere being taken for granted or perused for growing imperfections.

Oh, my Callie.

Crossing the thin line. She had never been unfaithful before. Accidents hadn't happened. I had. Opportunities. Not very often. One-night stands. The job made it easy. But none of the affairs had lasted long; enjoyable distractions on the journey to middle-age. She was younger, the thought had sometimes occurred, there had been other men making passes, she was pretty in her unconventional way, but it had never been the right time or place, she supposed.

But when I asked for details of her nearly past adventures, she was always reticent and invariably changed the subject quickly. And I had more immediate priorities. Mapping the pale colour of her skin until the morning came when we would have to go our own way. Using her shocking pink lipstick to enhance the blood-engorged colour of her private parts before I licked them clean. Manoeuvring her body into impossible contortions and positions to make my thrusts ever deeper until she screamed loudly, scaring me, ‘No, it's OK, it's pleasure, not pain. More, more!' Tracing the bumpy texture of her cunt walls with the probing tip of my tongue. Inserting my fingers past the resistance of the invisible muscles protecting the heart of her moon-shaped arse.

Think of hardcore pornography and add unthought-of perverse trimmings and we did it.

She brought out the worst and the best in me.

And vice versa.

‘Do you know? I've never done it that way ...'

‘We can try it, I suppose.'

‘I'm not sure it's even possible.'

‘No harm in trying.'

‘I'll be careful.'

‘I know you will.'

And as we sunk in free fall to the very depths of uncontrollable lust, my heart broke. Just like that. One moment we were fucking without abandon, our wetness mingling, our bodies intimately joined in at least three different areas, blissfully unaware of the world outside the pulled calico curtains (we were in her bed; Mark had gone to Oxford for the day: ‘Remind me to put the sheets in the washing machine as you leave;' I had parked a few streets away by the Park). I could feel the sweat bucketing down my forehead onto her cheeks, my tongue embedded inside her mouth, my cock growing harder with every forward movement and her insides melting as she “Jesus-ed” away while the pleasure grew within. Just then, I opened my eyes. And looked into hers.

And I walked with the angels as I realised right there and then, that she was the one, the one I had always been looking for without knowing if she even existed. It was love at secondhand sight, no longer lust. I knew, as I fucked her with untold rage, that I had to have her. Not like this, mere copulation, sweat and secretions, but for ever. She could belong to Mark no more. I wanted all of her. Sharing was no longer in question, or a mere affair of the flesh.

By now, I knew she wasn't involved in the leak of information from the utilities company, of course. I had reported accordingly to my paymasters and my sidekicks were still tailing her husband, although there was also little evidence of him being in contact with anyone suspicious. At any rate, it was useful to know his whereabouts at all times. Maybe I was secretly hoping he was conducting his own affair somewhere. Would have given me the right impetus to force Callie permanently into my arms. Sadly, he was a boring man and never strayed. Too ambitious and mindful of his career prospects, I assumed, from what Callie had told me of him.

Later that evening, we were having a drink in a pub somewhere along the South Bank, far enough from her home, we thought, to be safe. I couldn't tell her that I was aware Mark was still on his assignment in Finchley where a large theatre chain was opening a new multiplex.

‘I love you,' I said.

‘I know,' she said, sipping her gin and orange.

‘No. I mean, for real, I want us to be together. Leave him. I'll move out, find us a place. We could travel together.'

She knew I was married too. Somehow, I'd have to explain what my job actually was, explain earlier white lies. I was confident I could.

‘You're going too fast,' she replied, surprising me. ‘We've got to give it time.'

Right then I had the awful feeling we were not going to make it.

That things would not work out.

And it began to kill me inside.

Back home, I carefully composed a letter to her husband, revealing our affair. It was illogical, I knew, but it was a compulsion I could not resist. I slipped the letter into an envelope, and the next day at my office, stuck the letter at the back of a drawer, knowing that one day I would use it as a weapon of vengeance.

We stayed together, so to speak, another three months. Every time we made love, I drew a small star with the letter C in my diary. Looking back at those pages today, it's like a monotonous parade of distracted graffiti strung out between cryptic notes of things to do or telephone numbers, a private milky way leading to my own death by a thousand shards of longing.

The sex became even more frantic, as the despair inside me took a firm hold and her coldness became more apparent every time the subject of our future was broached.

All the time, the ticking bomb inside my desk was on its fatal countdown.

But the sex was good, oh yes, Callie. As if the contact of our skin turned us into incredible two-backed beasts capable of reinventing the flesh like no one had ever done before. With all the energy I was putting into our encounters, I no longer had to worry about my waistline. And sweet Callie bloomed into a sensuous flower of the night, sex vibrating all around her as she walked away to her night train, still full of my seed, her long legs eating up the station concourse, the eyes of every man in the immediate vicinity automatically turning towards her, this creature of sheer lust. Mine.

One day. Summer coming to an end.

Another pub somewhere in the no man's land that separated both of us from our real lives and relationships.

‘Joe?'

‘Yes?'

‘It's still going too fast ... I need some time to think. I don't want us hurting anyone, you know.'

‘What do you mean?'

I had carefully not raised the subject of our getting permanently together for a few weeks now, hoping she would come naturally to the idea.

‘I think of you too often. It's not good. It's affecting my work. I just don't know how to act when Mark's around. We don't talk much any more. He's going to suspect something soon ...'

‘So what?'

‘We must spend some time apart.'

‘No.'

‘A few months maybe. Then we'll see how we feel about each other.'

I knew all too well this was a recipe for disaster.

We negotiated. I pleaded. The time apart, its length, remained unsaid. I begged. We agreed on a final fuck the next evening. Sentimentally, I even asked her to wear the same outfit she had on the first time we met. Well, if this was to be the last time ...

That afternoon, I posted the letter.

It was after the final postal pickup from that particular letterbox. Mark wouldn't get it until the morning after next. Or later if the mail room at his newspaper was slow in distributing things.

Which left me one evening to make love to her so well, so badly that she would change her mind and stay with me for ever. I had to find the imagination, the words to sway her. Usually, I work well against deadlines. A sad gamble, I realise now.

She never appeared for our clandestine assignment.

There was no answer from her phone. They had no answer machine, but even if they had I wasn't in a position to leave a message.