Read Ralph's Party Online

Authors: Lisa Jewell

Ralph's Party (7 page)

BOOK: Ralph's Party
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Smith looked at her intently and rested his head on his hands.

'Please—go on. This is fascinating—I promise you.'

'Wel, it's not just the flat. It's the man. I know in my dream that I'm supposed to be with the man on the sofa - he's my destiny. Do you realize what I'm saying?'

Smith had no idea what she was saying, but she was getting cuter and more attainable by the minute. Al of a sudden he could imagine taking her face in his hands and kissing her sweet little red mouth, and then he thought about Cheri, imagined her upstairs now, while they spoke, elegantly tucked up between her ivory silk sheets (he'd never actualy seen them, of course, but they had to be, didn't they?), her lithe, supple body encased in a tiny slip of satin and lace, her perfect head ever so slightly denting her pilow while she slept.

He imagined her lace-clad chest rising gently up and down as she breathed, pictured her turning in her sleep, stretching and writhing slightly, the slippery sheet sliding off her body for a second and revealing one long, brown perfectly formed leg. She would sigh as, she turned, a long, deep, sensual sigh, and then drift back into sleep ...

You do think I'm mad, don't you? Shit. I knew it. I knew I shouldn't have said anything.' Jem was staring at the floor and wringing her hands.

'What? No! No. God, I'm sorry — I was just thinking, that's al.'

Smith smiled modestly and sincerely at her. He stil wanted to kiss her, and al of a sudden it didn't seem like too much of a chalenge.

He lifted his shot glass and nodded towards hers.

'Cheers, then,' he said, watching her as they downed the repulsive liquid and grimaced.

Teek,' scowled Jem.

'Bleugh,' shuddered Smith.

They fel silent for a moment, looking into their glasses and glancing at each other every now and then, both waiting for something to happen.

'Smith,' said Jem eventualy, 'I hope you don't think I'm being unbelievably forward, but - I've just had this overwhelming compulsion to hug you. What do you think?' She grinned nervously and put out her arms.

It had been a monumental hug, a coming-home hug. Jem had almost felt the energy flowing between them as she pushed her head into his chest and breathed him in deeply, his smel enveloping her in the same feeling of Tightness and safety and destiny as her dream, but better, because this was real.

Smith had gripped her tightly, unexpectedly enjoying the sensation of shared physicality; it had been so long, so bloody long since he'd had any kind of decent human

contact. He'd forgotten what it felt like to put your arms around another human being, without embarrassment, and share their warmth and their body. He'd always thought this moment would've happened to him and Cheri, but this was good, this was nice. Jem was nice. They had stood like that for what felt like hours, their arms around each other, Jem's head in Smith's chest, Smith's chin on her head, breathing deeply, sighing, alowing unspoken feelings to flow through them, a silent communication between two people looking for entirely different things and finding them in exactly the same place.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ralph could not believe it. He realy could not believe it. It was beyond the pale, it defied belief, it was rude and.. .and.. .and..

.unbelievable. He could not believe it. The girl had only been here two minutes and already Smith was ... was ... fucking her. He was fucking her. He was fucking wel fucking her. Unbelievable!

He could not understand how it had happened. One minute they'd al been sitting together having a nice chat and a laugh and breaking the ice very nicely, thank you, and they were al friends, al equals and then Ralph had taken himself off to bed and then - then what?

What the hel had old Smithie said or done to that girl to get her into the sack so fucking quickly? Maybe she was some kind of nymphomaniac who moved from flat to flat shagging her flatmates -

saved getting cabs home, he supposed. Jesus.

Ralph had lain in bed al morning with an achingly ful bladder, waiting for the other two to leave the flat so that he wouldn't have to bump into either one of them on his way to the bathroom. Smith was gone by eight o'clock and then Jem had got up and left at nine.

He was standing over the bowl now, watching the colourless jet of piss escaping gratefuly into the water below, and breathing a pleasurable sigh of relief.

Jem just didn't seem the type. A nice girl, a decent girl. He'd found her completely charming over dinner the

previous night and had been thinking how refreshing it was to meet a girl who was inteligent and funny and pretty, and drank lager from the can, and loved curry as much as he did, and who was a good talker as wel as a good listener. He'd been delighted and flattered by her reaction when he'd shown her some of his paintings. He'd been overwhelmed by her culinary ability and her highly impressive capacity for searingly hot food. He'd been entranced by her stories about her family and the strange characters she worked with at the theatrical agency. He'd found her Italianate hand gestures and scrunchy facial expressions beguiling and endearing. She wasn't like any of the girls he normaly met. She was special.

So what was a lovely girl like Jem doing, leaping wily-nily into bed with a prat like Smith? Ralph was intrigued. He was confused. And he was also a little jealous.

He headed for the kitchen and a pint glass of tap water, gulping greedily. It was a filthy day, just visible outside the kitchen window; the sky was uniform paper-flat white, and a fine drizzle was slowly moistening the bricks and concrete of South London, turning the crunchy leaves strewn messily around the streets into mulch. The combination of bad weather and bad hangover was rapidly making the journey through London to his draught-ridden, rat-infested studio in Cable Street seem unlikely.

Maybe al that stuff in her diary was rubbish and she'd wanted Smith from the first moment she saw him. Maybe something had happened between them that night when she'd come to see the flat and Ralph had been in his room. Maybe the air had been thick with the scent of unbridled lust since Jem had moved in and Ralph just hadn't noticed, like some sad insensitive bastard. Maybe (Ralph hated to think it) maybe the dinner was only realy intended for Smith, and they'd both been waiting al night for him to go to bed, giving each other looks across the table every time he'd opened his mouth to say something else, thinking Tuck off, Ralph, Fuck off, Ralph.' Ralph felt stupid.

For five years he'd had to listen to Smith droning on and on about that God-awful woman upstairs, that snotty, stuck-up bitch with the attitude problem from hel, who didn't have even the slightest awareness of Smith's existence. And now, the first time an eligible woman set foot in their flat and showed a little interest, he'd bedded her. Just like that. That realy was the epitome of laziness.

The post landed on the doormat and Ralph padded down the hal.

A cheque from the travel company—£540. Just enough to clear some of his overdraft so that he could start building it up again.

Ralph could not remember the last time his account had been in credit. He put the cheque on the hal table - he'd make a trip to the bank later in the day. He noticed that the door to Jem's room was ajar again. He remembered the tantalizing passage he'd read in her diary yesterday and, his resolve and sense of honour weakened yet more by curiosity, he pushed open the door and scanned the room for the book. Maybe there would be a clue in there, something to explain the extraordinary goings-on of last night.

The room was stil in disarray. Jem's bed had been slept in, so she'd obviously managed to find her way out of Smith's bed at some point, the curtains were drawn and the weak light outside struggled through the thick

fabric, casting a pink glow over the room. Ralph reached for the light switch and the little glass star lit up. The diary sat with its predecessors under the table by the bed.

Ralph was caught off guard by his reflection in the wardrobe mirror

- so, this is what he looked like, snooping in someone else's bedroom. He was wearing a pair of old grey longjohns and a baggy grey V-neck jumper, displaying a spray of dark chest hair and a silver chain he'd bought in Bangkok. His hair was short but disheveled, receding into two gentle dips of baldness, which seemed to retreat at exactly the same rate of acceleration as the hairs on his chest, back and shoulders advanced. His blue eyes were looking a little dul this morning, as they always did when he'd been drinking.

But, on the whole, not at al bad for a totaly unfit, twenty-Marlboro-a-day, very nearly thirty-one-year-old man.

Ralph wasn't a vain man, just one who appreciated how lucky he was not to have to worry about being unattractive - life was difficult enough without being ugly as wel. His image looked after itself; he didn't need to cultivate it. He never put on weight, and the muscles he'd developed during a summer spent labouring on a building site when he was twenty-two had somehow lasted him almost a decade. Losing his hair suited him, and hair care was just a matter of going to the same barber's he'd been frequenting since art school and asking for a number two. And girls always seemed to buy him clothes. Especialy these PR fashion types who got discounts al over the place and half-price designer samples. The jumper he was wearing had been bought for him by Oriel, a beautiful but tedious girl with an obsession with handbags and a smal dog caled Valentino. He'd seen the same jumper in a shop a few weeks after they split up and had been shocked to see it sporting a price tag of

£225.
That hadn't stopped him wearing it at least five times a week without washing it; it was now peppered with smal burns caused by hot rocks faling from spliffs, and smelt at close range like an ashtray ful of curry which had been stuffed up someone's armpit for an hour during a heatwave.

Ralph turned away from the mirror. He wasn't used to studying himself— it wasn't unpleasant, just vaguely unsettling. He pushed open the dark wooden doors of the wardrobe.

The floor was lined with shoes, lots and lots of shoes, little tiny shoes. Some were flat and some had heels, but they al looked as if they had been worn; unlike the impulse buys that constituted the extravagant shoe colections of other girls, these were old friends.

Her clothes formed an eclectic kaleidoscope of rich browns and reds and greens, and floral prints on chiffon, velvet, suede and silk.

They emitted a sweet odour, perfumed with subtle undertones of pubs, cooking oil, wood smoke and spicy food; an aromatic diary of her social life. Ralph puled out a particularly pretty dress, ankle-length diaphanous georgette printed with smal red roses, with thin straps and a stream of impossibly smal buttons down the back. He could picture Jem in it, her black curls studded with flowers, her abundant bosom pushing upwards, running barefoot through the grounds of some imaginary grand house, a pink-cheeked Renaissance babe.

No no no no no
no
NO! Ralph stopped himself abruptly. He hadn't come in here to sniff Jem's clothes and form elaborate Mils and Boon-style fantasies about

her. He hadn't come in here to get a crush on her. Jem was not, was most definitely not,
not,
NOT, Ralph's
type.
No. Blonde, tal, whippet-chested, cool, arrogant, wine-drinking, label-wearing,
Elle
-reading, bal-attending — that was Ralph's type.

Time to get down to business; time to find out what was going on here. Yesterday he'd been in the running, had been, in fact, ahead of the game; yesterday he'd been 'lean' and 'sexy' and 'more fun to be with'. Yesterday he had been the object of Jem's strange and mysterious dreams. Yesterday he'd been Jem's 'type'. One day later and he was a spare part.

Al of a sudden he could see the future mapped out before him, and it wasn't pretty. Jem and Smith were going to become inseparable; he would have to spend hours listening to them having sex, sitting on his own in the armchair while they snuggled together on the sofa.

They would decide to get married, and Smith would approach Ralph nervously after the engagement party to broach the subject of him moving out. He'd end up in a cardboard box (no one else would be as understanding about Ralph's sporadic rent-payment style), and he'd have one Tennents Super too many and be set on fire by hooligans while he lay unconscious in a doorway.

Why the hel had she gone for Smith? What had he, Ralph, done to put her off? Maybe it was al those smely shits he'd done; she always seemed to walk into the toilet moments after he'd exited. Or it could be because he hadn't fussed around her, offering to help when she was cooking, like Smith had. She must have got a fair idea last night of how much money Smith earned - that was always attractive in a man. And Smith had bought her flowers as wel, the smarmy bastard - that had to

be it. Girls liked flowers. God, if only he'd thought of that. Why Smith? Why not him? Why not him when she'd fancied him more to start with? What was wrong with him? Smith already had a flat and a great job and loads of money, he didn't need a girlfriend, too. And besides, he was in love with someone else. Ralph felt suddenly nauseous with rancid jealousy, rising to the surface of his soul like lumps of wet toilet paper in a blocked toilet bowl.

His pulse racing, his resolve and sense of honour now absent, Ralph sat down on Jem's bed and puled the diary from the top of the pile.

He began to read from the beginning, from January 1996, when Jem had been somewhere else, non-existent, someone he was yet to meet. If Smith was going to go out with her and sleep with her, then
he
was going to get to know her.

Lunchtime came and went, and elsewhere people with jobs went out, shopped in Boots, ate sandwiches, bought the
Evening
Standard,
walked around town in suits and shoes and coats. Ralph read.

By mid afternoon the people with jobs were on the phone, in meetings, making cups of coffee, flirting at the photocopier, immersed in the safety of office life. Ralph read on.

As the light died at five o'clock and the people with jobs rushed to meet deadlines, tidy their desks, switch off their computers and frank the mail, Ralph stil read.

BOOK: Ralph's Party
4.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Fate and Ms. Fortune by Saralee Rosenberg
A Wind of Change by Bella Forrest
After Dark by M. Pierce
The Night Crew by John Sandford
Bastion Saturn by C. Chase Harwood
The First American Army by Bruce Chadwick
His Majesty's Child by Sharon Kendrick