Back to Vanilla (4 page)

They smeared hummus
into the pittas, and, in a moment of total peace, Lyall asked if
his dad had a beer, because the orange juice wouldn’t quite hit the
spot at that moment.

“You’re sure?”
Alasdair asked, squinting one eye gently, to show his son that this
was not necessary, although the fact that he trusted him enough to
ask was appreciated.

“Sure,” he replied,
and the two cracked open a bottle of lager apiece, Lyall swigging
from the neck, while his father poured his into a pint glass,
adding some token lemonade, and sipping.

Lyall had talked a lot
that evening, and Alasdair bathed in his son’s confidence in him
and wished, as he had so often, that he had a panacea to hand. He
spoke of his girls, followed by a little of his own life, and the
running training he had taken up after it had been recommended to
him by a friend who had apparently actually strengthened his knees
through regular jogs, as well as curing, to a degree, his
depression. Lorna’s name came up a lot, always with a strong
undertow of defensiveness, which made Alasdair wonder what he had
said in the past to make his son so protective. But perhaps this
wasn’t one of his many faults, he thought, but that of his ex’s,
and this led him to ask after her.

“Lexi’s fine,” Lyall
said, calling his mother by her first name, as he always did when
speaking to his father since their divorce. Alasdair wondered if
that was the end of the discussion, but his son went on.

“They think Charles
might have Alzheimer’s. Very early to tell, but he’s had some mood
issues – Mum says she didn’t notice these at first, after years of
marriage to you…” They laughed… “But he gets disorientated and a
few other things Ma says just aren’t right.”

Somehow, the fact that
Lyall had slipped out of using her name made her seem immediately
like Alasdair’s family again, and he made a note to call her in the
next few days. Again, priorities, he thought, the beginnings of an
alcoholic self-loathing starting to permeate and, sensing this, he
added more lemonade to his cup. And then more beer.

“He’s got a bunch of
tests to get through, but as it’s California and he’s dripping in
hard cash as well as medical health care, that should all go
smoothly. Ma’s offered for us five to go over later this year,
maybe August, and, though we hate to take cash, she has plenty and
I’m thinking it’s the thing to do, right? I mean, I guess it’s one
of those family-counts moments, when you swallow your pride.”

They agreed that it
was, and Lyall stayed till gone 11, much later than usual. Lorna
must have perceived his need for connection with his father, and,
unusually, the 9.30pm, where-are-you text never arrived. After they
had finished Alasdair’s supply of six bottles of beer, he had been
tempted to offer up the whisky, but wasn’t yet drunk enough to
ignore his instinctive appreciation of the fact that it would a bad
move. He hugged his son goodbye and watched through his kitchen
window as Lyall got into the front seat of a taxi in the car
park.

Alasdair stacked the
plates neatly in the sink – tomorrow, he thought – and put the
bottles into a bag ready to go out for recycling in the morning.
Then he poured two fingers of whisky into a glass, which he downed
in one, before topping it up to a centimetre below the brim, and
walking through to the bedroom. Putting the glass on to the small
wooden table on the left side of his bed, Alasdair undressed his
long frame, crawled naked under the purple duvet, and slid the
laptop on to his bony knees.

Wow. Just wow,
Kindly_Meister. I can’t tell you how excited that makes me. I mean,
the thought of losing myself to that kind of intense high moistens
me immediately. Just wet. I mean, I’ve always been a really sexual
being, but, honestly, I fucked for the first time when I was 17,
and I kind of get the feeling, even now, that there’s more to it. I
mean, really, I want to get into tantric eventually… that whole
spiritual thing… but for now I want the sharp
in-the-moment-forget-the-world-around-me buzz that I see and feel
is out there when I connect with people on PhetX. I think
connection is the key to what I’m after.

And now I add that to
your obvious personal experience… I just want to know more…

Squirting to one side
(the jury is still out on this one, as I have read papers
suggesting it’s a typically male way of dealing with the quirks of
the female body, turning something that only a few woman can
achieve – and, again, jury very much out – into a badge of honour
for the sexually adept man, etc), subspace fascinates me. I’ve
looked into hypnosis a lot as part of my psychology studies (I
graduated last year), and its supposed similarity to subspace came
up once. Well, I kind of asked about it in a tutorial, but was
swiftly hushed up by the overly staid sex-starved tutor – yes, LOL
– but I have never really met anyone who believes it so strongly.
Not that, I guess, I’ve really met you… Tell. Me. More!

You sound amazingly
interesting, Meister. I’d love to know everything, but like you
say, I need to sleep, so can’t really formulate my questions right
now. How about you just tell me what you think I might find
interesting?

That said, although
you mentioned that I might not want to chat to an old man, maybe
I’m too young for you – I’d hate to come across as an
over-inquisitive, tiresome child. Feel free to gently bat me off,
Meister. ;) xxx

The wee tease. She
was way too clever to be unaware of the effect her language might
have on him, he knew. Shoving the laptop on to the table next to
him, he took the drink from the other side of his bed, chugged it,
and passed out.

Three days later, and
there was barely a pause in their correspondence. His time was, for
the most part, his own, and by Wednesday evening LittleGirlLost was
Tamsin, a psychology graduate from the University of Kent in
Canterbury. And with a sense of inevitability, Alasdair had turned
this stretch of bunkering down into an excuse for a bender. He
considered it to be a controlled bender, for, although he was in no
doubt about his true condition as an alcoholic, he took immense
satisfaction in his ability to reach a point of semi-oblivion and
go no further, save for keeping himself topped up; it was more a
continual surfing of the wave than a messy descent into ethanol
anaesthesia.

LittleGirlLost lived,
as her profile said, in a small village near Norfolk, currently
with her parents, although this, she maintained, was purely a
transitory base while she organised herself to move to a city.
She’d chosen Manchester as her potential new home, based on a year
of weekend visits to an old friend, who had later become an old
flame, and in between had, Alasdair ascertained, educated
naughty-naughty Tamsin, on paper at least, in the finer arts of the
flesh.

LittleGirlLost
reminded him of his own youth and the girls he had gazed at from
afar. She had an appealing sense of assurance combining total
sexual self-confidence with an engaging credulity and candour that
left him palpitating for more. Yet as he reeled her lightly in,
Kindly_Meister was, uncharacteristically, faintly troubled every
now again by the murky nature of the game, by the thought that
there was something slightly suspect about the balance of power in
their relationship. He was always able to ground himself, to
re-establish his belief in his selfless benevolence, by topping up
his drink.

Ultimately seeking a
career in advertising, for which, LittleGirlLost had told him,
psychology might seem a strange choice but was in fact ideal in
terms of understanding the human psyche and how best to appeal to
it, her options in Norfolk were narrow and she was treading water
while gaining valuable relevant CV points in market research.
Again, he thought, an illustration of that naivety, for psychology
seemed to him an ideal base from which to hawk useless shit to the
doltish masses.

She was currently
employed gathering data for an infant-milk company, with specific
instructions to target only those women clearly in the baby-making
field at the moment. In the bluntness of youth, she had told him
she habitually found it hard to spot the bull’s eye, as, “everyone
over 32, maybe 35, looks the same to me”. And a breathing space…
“No offence.”

Alasdair had
fleetingly wondered why she hadn’t simply deleted the words from
her message, as this was not during one of their Skype chats (two
so far), but ultimately he recognised it as a vital part of their
emerging power play; it was important that he knew his place. In
those chats, though, he had been unquestionably in charge, and how
ambrosial an experience it was to observe, with the dispassionate
air of a true dom, her descent from self-assured and in command to
placid and domesticated little girl. And again, he licked his
lips.

As the distinctive
blips and bloops of the Skype ringtone echoed around his tiny
lounge, he had momentarily been convinced that she wouldn’t answer.
This was a frequent occurrence with first-time calls, and he was
girded for this, although desperate to hear her voice, which he
assumed would be devoid of the idiosyncratic Norfolk vowel sounds.
If they’d ever existed, he suspected they would have been smoothed
out by the university years. He smiled as he heard the excited,
rather breathy tones that eventually greeted him.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,
Gentle, erm, Alasdair. I thought you’d been distracted and I
strolled off to feed Toots… erm, my, erm, cat.” There were no
images, their having opted for a voice-only conversation, which
thoroughly suited Alasdair, who by this point had been topping up
for 52 hours straight, and was definitively in the zone where he
sounded better than he looked.

“Are yer wet, lassie?”
He knew his voice, deep and resonant, to be an unmistakable crowd
pleaser, and his words were greeted by an emphatically
unsophisticated series of giggles, accompanied, he visualised quite
clearly, by a slight squirming brought about by a blend of
trepidation and passion.

“Are yer wet?” he
repeated, slower this time, same tone though – calm, in
command.

The giggles died down.
His breaths were unhurried and casually measured, a counterpoint to
her shallower, lighter not-quite-pants but getting there.

Weeks later, as they
lay, strangely separate considering the ardour of their recent
coupling, in that king-sized pine bed of his, her wrists and ankles
freshly released from the leather restraints that were a permanent
attachment there – indeed, his anticipation of this had been his
reason for purchasing that specific spindle headboard – she
confessed that she hadn’t actually heard much of the detail of his
words.

Skype had shrouded his
salacious mumblings in odd, Tardis-like pulses of noise, but the
tone – serious, imposing, dominant – had come through clearly. It
was this that had brought her, with the aid of a small gold-tone
vibrator that lived in her tartan purse, to a fairly speedy and
intense orgasm, irrespective of the content. He could, she told
him, have been reciting the menu from the local Chinese to her, so
compelling was the timbre of his words. She hoped it had been as
powerful for him.

This was not a
question and therefore he was not obliged to share the fact that
his own tool had remained in a stubbornly inebriated and enfeebled
daze so predictable that he hadn’t even bothered to unmask it from
beneath the flannel dressing gown that had been hanging flaccidly
around his increasingly emaciated frame.

********************

It had seemed
natural when they settled on Manchester for a first rendezvous; a
place they both knew well, having both had relationships that
involved the city.

For Alasdair, it was
where he’d met and conducted much of his affair with Ella, lasting
slightly over two years. She had been, he would slur down the ear
of anyone who cared to listen in the wee hours over the tail end of
a night on the pish, the one and the only great love of his life.
He tended not to share much detail beyond the fact that he had, of
course, fucked that one up royally.

Tamsin’s had been with
a guy she’d met at a party in Canterbury – a little older, 27 to
her then 19; enough of a difference for her to feel that here was
something different. He was the brother of a guy she’d been
flirting with for several weeks, without much
counter-encouragement, and was considerably more seasoned sexually,
with an effortless sensuality that whited his comparatively amateur
younger brother out of Tamsin’s thoughts.

Tom worked as
palliative social worker, an exacting and exhausting job. He grew
and smoked in copious quantities his own Thunderbud, a strain of
cannabis that helped to fuel both his need to connect with nature
and his commitment to obscuring the pain and suffering of around 10
patients and their families every week.

She had travelled to
see him once a month for just over a year, unless asked otherwise,
although he never returned the visits. Tamsin simply didn’t care.
All pride vanished and she had been, she suspected (but never asked
as the answer might have meant needing to change a mutually
beneficial situation), one of a stable of “sluts”, although she
liked to think she was his very special one. He was, she told
Alasdair, the first man ever to use the word slut to her as a term
of endearment, and she clung to the title then and now.

He lived alone in a
flat near the station, although more often than not, there were two
or three other people there, generally passing through, rarely the
same faces twice, mixed gender. She would potter, make tea, order
the odd takeaway online when instructed and sometimes empty the
oversized dishwasher which came with the rented home and without
which the kitchen would have been a jumble, for food, certainly
while she was there, was a constant feature. She suspected he
didn’t eat during the week and made up for it, snake-like, during
his days off.