As It Is On Telly (7 page)
Authors: Jill Marshall
Kat insisted on a complete low-down over a bottle of the same Chablis that Ben and Bunty had drunk, only this time they sat at the kitchen counter, both looking out at the view of the garden. Conveniently, the vista included Dan’s muscular arms feeding drainage pipes under the fence, once again aided by Bunty’s initial insertion. Casting aside the images of buckets and high colonics from some programme on the Living Channel –
How
to
Live
with
Your
Parasites
or some such – she’d felt instead like a nurse to his surgeon, taking the pipes from him, operating in the dank flower bed, which was now starting to rot down in the shade of the teetering fence. He’d thanked her effusively when she stood and brushed her hands on her jeans. ‘Mission accomplished, cap’n.’
‘You’re fantastic,’ he said, rubbing her shoulder. ‘What a woman.’
Kat observed all this from the window as she opened the bottle – it was Saturday afternoon, after all. ‘He has totally got the hots for you!’ she hissed as Bunty came back into the kitchen. ‘Working on a Saturday and everything, and completely checking out your butt.’
Bunty smiled a trifle immodestly. ‘I’ll wear my really short tennis shorts next time.’
‘Well, you don’t need them for tennis.’ Kat swirled her glass at Bunty, who ignored the tennis barb and sloshed another few inches of Chablis out of the bottle. ‘Anyway, tell me about all these men. These
other
men, I mean. What about Jammy Dodger?’
‘Him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was in the same class as Charlotte.’
Kat arched an eyebrow. ‘What did you say on your profile? Perhaps he had you down as one of those pumas.’
‘Pumas?’ Bunty ran through the archive of TV shows in her head and plumped for a Tyra Banks Special. ‘I think you mean cougars. Older women with younger men. Euw!’
‘Nothing wrong with younger men,’ said Kat. ‘Half the women at work are shagging a bloke half their age.’
‘He must be very tired.’
‘And both parties seem to like it,’ continued Kat pointedly.
Bunty sighed loudly so that Kat had to refocus her gaze from Dan’s flexing shoulders to her face. ‘That’s the thing though, isn’t it – they’re
shagging
. I don’t want shagging. I want a relationship. I need …
need
a husband.’
Kat leaned over and patted her hand. ‘Bun-bun, whether it’s a puma boy or a husband, there is going to be shagging involved.’
Bunty sighed again. Did Kat have a one-track mind at the moment, or was she being deliberately obtuse? Either way, sex was not the point. It wasn’t as if she didn’t like sex, for crying out loud. She had been rather enthusiastic about it at one stage, even in the early days of Graham. Oddly enough, that had been an improvement on sex with Adam. The aspiring rock god had often been too out of it, too tired, or possibly – once Bunty had dared admit the truth to herself – just too sated to be bothered with anything other than a token fumble. Or maybe he’d just turned really house-proud and didn’t fancy copulating in the crusty Bri-nylon sheets of the latest Devon B & B. Nah. That didn’t seem likely. But it had definitely had an impact on Bunty’s libido being able to lie in bed in a post-copulation glow knowing that the sheets were clean on, were good quality British Home Stores, and would not be visited by any woman other than herself in the near future.
And let’s face it, she mused, Graham had tried pretty hard. What he lacked in imagination he made up for in perseverance and willingness to please his new, exotic girlfriend. Bunty sometimes swore that her feet had been a size bigger prior to the nightly foot rubs that Graham had insisted on applying himself to, complete with exfoliant and Chanel No 5 body lotion, after a casual comment that reflexology could improve a woman’s orgasm. Of course, of late she’d have been happy to settle for just the foot rub. If Graham didn’t touch her anywhere above the ankle then that would have suited her just fine. It had all become a bit staid. A bit samey. A bit … well, a bit Grahamy. But with someone new, some new buffed paramour, Bunty reckoned it would be quite easy to regain that former vigour.
So no, it wasn’t the shagging that was the point. It was the
not
shagging. Any old trout could get someone into bed. It took a different set of skills altogether to bag a rich husband, and even though the thought of leaping into a hammock with Ben was very tantalising, she had a vague feeling that the way to get a man in the Croesus Club would be to refuse to sleep with him. Not for ever, obviously. Just until the ink had dried on the marriage certificate.
Dan appeared at the window. ‘Would a cat be buried in a small cardboard box?’
‘Oooh oooh hooo,’ bleated Kat, leaning across the sink and crushing her enormous breasts together so that her cleavage ran up to her chin. ‘I certainly hope not!’
‘Dan, this is Kat,’ said Bunty, as Dan looked blankly from one to the other of them.
His face cleared. ‘Oh, I see, you’re Kat. Ha. No, I meant an actual cat. The camera’s butting up against some soggy cardboard with a label on it.’
Bunty would have imagined that nothing short of pure teak with brass handles would have done for Flinders, but then she recalled that Graham had been in charge of Flinders’ burial. ‘Can you tell what the label says?’
Dan checked his hand-held monitor. ‘Something like … Fiesta Fun, size … 3?’
‘Condoms?’ said Kat with a look of horror. ‘They put Flinders in a condom box? How many must they have
used
? And size 3, I mean, that’s probably quite big, isn’t it? Imagine, little old Mary and that randy old Colin.’
‘No, not condoms, Kat. Please!’ Honestly, Kat clearly did have a one-track mind at the moment. Must be time for another trip to Auckland. Bunty pointed at her own tiny feet. ‘Shoes. Summer shoes from the Clarks children’s department. Graham must have given them the box.’
‘Well,’ said Dan with a wince, ‘it’s not holding together very well. And neither is the cat judging by the smell.’
‘Oh God.’ Mary would be devastated on all fronts. Flinders decomposing. The indignity of a cardboard box coffin. The blocked drains caused by bits of cat and cardboard. ‘There’s nothing for it,’ she said eventually. ‘Mary goes to her sister’s on Saturday afternoons. We’ll have to take Flinders out and never, ever tell her.’
At which point Kat suddenly remembered an urgent appointment and beat a retreat. So it was Bunty who found herself, half an hour later, in a tracksuit recycled from the coffee group running club, wellies recycled from the coffee group gardening club, and a pair of brand new Marigold rubber gloves, far from recycled as she mostly managed to avoid doing the cleaning herself. She wasn’t sure why, on reflection; even with the prospect of coming across a dismembered moggie, it was really quite a lot of fun digging around in the dirt.
Dan leaned back on his spade. ‘Right, that’s it. If you just jump in the hole and lever it out, we should be able to get it out in one piece. Oh! Okay, two pieces.’
‘It’s only the lid,’ said Bunty. Ankle deep in stinking water, she averted her eyes from the deeply disturbing image of Flinders minus his eyeballs and wedged the lid back on with a squelch. ‘Quick, before Mary comes back,’ she added.
Dan yanked her out of the hole with one tug of his enormous hand. ‘You know, for a little person you’re pretty … What’s the word? Feisty.’
‘Little person? Isn’t that what you have to call midgets these days?’ Bunty bridled, fairly sure she had seen something like that on
Boston
Legal
. ‘I am not a midget. Just short, that’s all. With small feet.’
Dan grinned. ‘That’s what I said. Short. And feisty.’
For one awful minute she was reminded of Jammy Jason smirking at her across the champagne bucket. Was Dan possibly flirting with her? He was certainly looking her up and down in a fairly carnivorous way. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’
‘You’re sinking,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ It was true. Flinders’ grave was fast filling up with scummy brown water, and Bunty’s heels were sliding into the sinkhole. She was now only up to Dan’s waist again, and she averted her eyes politely from his crotch as he grabbed her under the armpits and pulled her clear of the mire with a loud and rather rude squelching sound.
It was in this tableau, Dan clutching Bunty under the arms, Bunty’s feet barely touching the floor, and a rotting cat squashed in between them, that Mary found them as she approached silently on her Scholl orthopaedics. ‘Oh, Bunty. Whatever are you doing?’
Bunty took in her appalled and wrinkly face. Goddamnit, she had to be the one who looked like the adulterer, didn’t she? Why hadn’t Mary caught Graham
inflagrante
in the flower bed? ‘Mary, believe me this is not what it looks like.’
‘It’s not Flinders?’ Mary’s relief was palpable. ‘Only I thought I recognised the shoe box.’
Dan let go abruptly. Clearly Bunty was on her own in this one. ‘Ah. No. No, that is, in fact, Flinders. In the shoe box. You see, the hole …’ Bunty looked around desperately. ‘The hole was filling up with water because of this blockage … further down. I knew that Flinders was under there. And I know how he hated water.’
A small light appeared in Mary’s opaque eyes as she fished in her handbag for a handkerchief. ‘He did.’
Bunty stroked her arm. ‘Remember that time he chased Charlotte’s paper plane up in the tree and wouldn’t come down because he was right over the pond?’
It had all been quiet sweet really. Charlotte was three, possibly four – certainly not school age at any rate – and it was a glorious early autumn afternoon, mellow as a peach. Graham had come home from work early to surprise them both, spurred on by the unexpected sunshine, and while Bunty sat at the kitchen table (it was before the renovations, the bar stools, the granite worktop) with the magazine he’d brought home and the cup of tea he’d offered to make, Graham had pushed Charlotte around the garden on her Teletubbies trike. When that descended into an argument, as Graham wanted to take the stabilisers off and Charlotte flatly refused to get on it again without its special La-La wheels, Bunty had stepped in, and the magazine was reinvented with her botched origami until, finally, one of the planes flew. And after it flew Flinders. When had Graham stopped doing things like that? Not arguing with Charlotte, which occurred on a fairly regular basis, but the little gestures. The magazines. The cups of tea. Did he just not do them any more, or did she not notice? Hard to know. All she did understand was that the little gestures were no longer enough. His gestures needed to be bigger, more pronounced. Anyway, she remembered, it would no doubt be Lycra-bottom getting his big gestures from now on. And his big everything else. Well, she was welcome.
Bunty’s snort of contempt brought her back to the present. Mary, luckily, took it to be an emotional reaction to the Flinders story.
‘He was up there for hours until Graham stood the ladder in the pond and got him down.’ Mary smiled tremulously at Dan. ‘Do you have cats?’
He shook his head, then said, ‘But Bunty told me how much you loved Flinders, and how he would have hated to get wet, and she … she insisted on coming to get him herself. Said she’d help you find a nice spot for him somewhere else.’
Nice one, Dan, thought Bunty as she gave Mary a hug with her free arm. ‘Let’s dry him … I mean, leave him out here while we have a cup of tea and think of a new spot for him.’
‘For Dan?’
Bunty passed Dan the box and herded Mary inside. ‘Both of them.’
‘You’re a very nice drain man, young Daniel,’ called Mary over her shoulder. ‘I shall recommend you to all my friends at the bridge club.’
‘I do general plumbing as well,’ he shouted back hopefully.
‘He is nice, isn’t he?’ said Mary to Bunty.
And Bunty smiled back at Dan as he brandished his spade and she flicked a hand surreptitiously towards the other side of the garden. ‘He’s very nice, Mary. A very nice drain man indeed.’
But then the phone trilled in her tracksuit pocket, and the deep rumbling of a Kiwi voice in her ear distracted her from drains and Dan and errant husbands in nanoseconds.
*
From: [email protected]
Priscilla, I am having a second date with Ben the Kiwi, and thought I should tell you, even though it’s a weekend and I’m sure you’re out doing something fabulous.
Cheers
Bunty
From: [email protected]
I am doing something fabulous, Bunty. I am doing my job. We have just instigated a three-date policy before charging the Love Lottery finders fee, so you’ll be glad to hear that you won’t have to pay it.
Yours,
Priscilla
From: [email protected]
So … you don’t think we’ll get to a third date? That’s a bit defeatist of you, if you don’t mind me saying, Priscilla.
Bunty
