Ruthless (10 page)

‘And you wanted this too,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you?’

She didn’t answer. She pulled his head down for another kiss. It became deeper, longer. Her head snapped back, but his hand was on her neck, holding her there. He came forward again. This time Orla drew away completely.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you like that?’

Orla shook her head.

‘OK, I won’t do it. No problem.’

His kisses were lighter now, fleeting, and she relaxed a little. He guided her hand down, folded it over his erection. She flinched again, jerking her hand away. Rufus looked at her.

‘You’re not ready for this, are you?’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ve rushed you.’

‘No! You haven’t, I’m just being silly.’ Her eyes were wild.

‘I can wait,’ said Rufus. ‘I’ll wait until you’re ready. I don’t mind.’

‘No. Do it to me, Rufus. I
want
you to. Just
do
it.’

Rufus pushed her back down on to the bed, easing her thighs open. He knelt between them. As he reached for the packet of condoms he was aware of her watching him, something like panic in her eyes. He hesitated.

‘Go on,’ she urged him. ‘Do it.’

He opened the packet and slipped the condom on. Then he lay upon her, pushing his penis down between her thighs, desire overtaking his caution, his concern. He found the place, but discovered to his dismay that she was dry. Quickly he spat into his hand and wetted his cock so that he shouldn’t hurt her. Overwhelmed with his love for her, he pushed at the place eagerly, wanting her so much.

Orla stiffened.

‘Relax,’ he urged, kissing her mouth, her neck, her shoulder.

Her hands were bunched into fists against his chest.

She was clenched shut – so firmly shut that he couldn’t enter her.

He pushed again. It was no good. He felt his erection wilt as his mind whirled with bewilderment. She was rejecting him, her actual
body
was saying no. He looked at her face and saw that her eyes were screwed up as if she couldn’t bear to even
see
what was happening to her.

‘I can’t breathe,’ she said, shoving her fists against him, starting to writhe in panic.

Instantly Rufus withdrew, flopping back on to the bed. He threw the condom aside. He was no longer erect. He turned his head and gazed at her.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

She nodded, her arm across her eyes.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

She said nothing.

‘I’ve rushed you,’ said Rufus. ‘I’m sorry. We can try again, later.’

Orla dropped her arm down on to the bed. Her eyes were wet.

‘Hey. Don’t cry. It doesn’t matter. We’ll leave it for tonight, OK? We’ve all the time we need, don’t worry.’

‘All right,’ she said faintly.

‘We’ll just sleep together,’ said Rufus. ‘Nice and cosy. All right?’

Orla nodded.

‘I’ll turn out the light,’ he said, and did so, pulling the sheets and blankets up to cover them both, snuggling in against her back. It felt so good that he almost forgot his worry at their abortive attempt at love-making. He drifted off to sleep, inhaling the sweet scent of her hair, his arm around her. When the morning light flooded in, she was no longer in the bed with him; he found her asleep on the chaise-longue under the window, wrapped in one of the blankets.

‘Hey,’ he said, nudging her awake. ‘You OK? Why are you over here?’

Orla stretched and woke. ‘It’s nothing. I find it hard to sleep with someone else in the bed with me, that’s all.’

But I’m not just someone,
he thought, hurt.
I’m Rufus. And I thought we were childhood sweethearts, adult lovers.

Clearly she wasn’t used to sharing her life, that was the problem. He reassured himself with that thought as he left her there and padded along to his own room to shower and dress. It would all come right, in the end.

22

He left it a while, let the dust settle. He was kicking himself because he’d charged at it like a bull at a gate, he should have held back. He finished chopping the wood, mended a leaking gutter, made himself useful. Then a week later, as the evening drew in, he said:

‘I thought I might come to your room tonight. If you’d like that.’

Orla gazed at him across the kitchen table. ‘All right,’ she said at last.

After that, his blood fizzed with anticipation. It would be OK this time. She no longer saw him as some threatening stranger. They’d laughed and chatted together these last few days, walking the banks of the Shannon with the salty winds buffeting them, relaxing after they’d finished their chores on the farm, sitting in the shade of an old apple tree. Becoming familiar with each other after all those years apart.

This
time, it would be fine.

Only it wasn’t.

The same thing happened. She was so tight, he couldn’t get inside her. In fact, he began to fear that if he
did
manage entry, he would hurt her badly. And that dissolved his arousal like nothing else could.

They lay afterwards, him cuddling up to her, Orla stiff as a board. In the early hours, he awoke. And she was gone again.

He fumbled for the bedside light, turned it on.

The room was empty but he could hear a distant thumping, like someone hammering a nail into a wall. He wrapped himself in a robe and went and opened the bedroom door. Instantly, the sound was louder. He went downstairs and stood in the hall, trying to place the direction of the noise.

It was coming from
outside
.

He went to the front door: it was unbolted. He opened it, stepped outside into the cool night air: out here the din was much louder. It was coming from the barn beside the house. And it wasn’t hammering. It was
music
.

He opened the barn door and the noise almost smashed him backward. AC/DC were belting out ‘Highway to Hell’. The interior of the barn was awash with brilliant strip lighting, and there was colour everywhere. At first he thought it looked like blood, but there were dark blues, indigo-deep, and fiery oranges, great swirls of chaotic colour. And there in the centre of it, the boom box perched on a chair at her side, was Orla. She was on her feet, in her nightdress, and she was feverishly daubing paint on to a big canvas set up on an easel. The scent of linseed oil and paint assaulted his nose.

‘Orla?’ he shouted.

She didn’t turn: couldn’t hear him.

He shut the door, so as not to wake the old folks.

He walked forward, switched the music off.

Orla stopped what she was doing and turned, startled.

‘Orla?’ he said more softly. He looked at the canvases, back at her face, then again at the canvases. They were propped up all around the walls, in colours so vivid they were shocking. And . . . they chilled him, these paintings. There were swirls and huge great gouts of colour. The pictures were awash with an anguish that seemed to scream out at him.

‘Sorry,’ she said, turning away from him, back to what she was doing. ‘Did I disturb you?’

He looked at her. Everything she did disturbed him more, every day. He was getting a sinking feeling, and that saddened him. He’d been so thrilled to see her again. But . . . oh, something was wrong here. Something was terribly wrong.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, although it was obvious. He stared around at the paintings, the violent clashing colours, and he thought,
My God, what is this?

Every single painting was of a man – tall, slender, handsome and pale, with neat red hair. The man was enveloped in a swirling tornado of colours, or down a dark tunnel, falling; smiling out of a canvas here, screaming out of another one there. She was painting Redmond, her twin, over and over again, like a stuck record.

Rufus didn’t know
what
to say.

He was seriously spooked. Orla’s old dad had spouted nonsense ever since he’d arrived, saying things like
Redmond called today, while you were out
.

Ah yes?
his wife would say, with a smile that didn’t reach her sad eyes.
Is that a fact?

But of course it wasn’t. Redmond was dead, and so were Tory and maybe Pat and even young Kieron. All dead, all gone.

This is a haunted place,
thought Rufus with a shudder.

‘What do you think?’ she asked, and her smile had a manic edge to it that unnerved him. ‘Kieron was a painter, you know. Exhibited in Dublin and then in London, he was big news. Of course I don’t have
his
sort of talent, but I enjoy it. Whenever I can’t sleep, I come out here.’

Yeah,
he thought.
If someone’s in bed with you, someone you’re supposed to love, you can’t sleep. So you come here and do this
.

His heart felt chilled in his chest. This wasn’t right. This behaviour . . . it was beyond him. He couldn’t understand it.

‘That’s Redmond,’ he said at last.

‘Yes.’ She paused, gazing at the canvas she was working on, her eyes caressing it. ‘It is.’

He moved closer. ‘You’re very talented,’ he said. He didn’t mean it. He was . . . horrified. Yes. That was the word. Horrified, and trying to understand where this madness might have come from. He hated the paintings. They made him think of Van Gogh’s mad desperate eruptions of colour, and of that one they called
The Scream
. These canvases were evidence of her obsession with someone, someone other than him. A dead man, someone he could never hope to compete with.

‘So you don’t . . . exhibit?’ he asked.

‘No. Why would I? This is for my own pleasure, no one else’s.’

‘Orla.’

She was back at it again, flinging thick gobs of pure viridian green on to the canvas, smearing it about with a pallet knife. ‘Hm?’

‘We have to talk.’

‘About what?’ She didn’t even look round.

‘About why you tense up when I try to make love to you. About that.’

Her shoulder stiffened; there was no other sign she’d heard him.

‘Orla.’

She turned to him then, brightly smiling; there was a smear of yellow ochre on her cheek.

‘It’ll come right in the end,’ she said.

But it went on like that: nothing changed. Rufus tried to make himself useful during the long days, and every evening he sat with her and watched TV with the old ones, seeing Haughey elected for a third term as Taioseach, and Thatcher visiting Moscow.

Often he awoke to find himself alone, hearing faint the hammer-drill of Guns N’ Roses or Deep Purple coming from the barn. He persisted, spending the nights with her whenever she’d allow it. But it was useless.

He’d heard of this sort of thing, he knew what it was called: vaginismus. The woman he loved, the woman he
worshipped
, had been hurt somehow in the past, hurt so badly that a normal response to a man was impossible for her.

He was going to talk to her about it. He
had
to.

But then something else happened, and that problem was pushed aside.

23

He was out in the grounds as autumn sailed in with fierce gusts of wind wrenching the leaves from the trees. He was muffled up warm and sweeping up piles of the things. In summer, the place was marvellous, but as winter approached it was rough being buffeted by gales. The moisture from the water hit the windows, caking them so that they were diffused, and from inside it was like looking through gauze, as if you were trapped in a bubble.

It was a cosy enough bubble though. The old folks were no trouble. And Orla . . . well, he loved her. They sat sometimes in the evenings when the old couple had gone to their rooms, just curled up together on the big sofa, chatting or watching TV, and he thought
This is bliss
.

Only, of course, it wasn’t quite. He no longer even attempted to make love to her. He could see she hated it, that her body rejected it utterly.

So . . . here they sat, like an ancient married couple, comfortable, not talking about it. But still it bothered him. He noticed things about her that worried him greatly. When she saw babies on TV adverts, she turned her head, looked elsewhere. When he kissed her, she pulled away. And he didn’t even try to sleep with her any more. She didn’t like it. That much was plain.

So here he was, sweeping up leaves to put into the compost bins to feed the garden next year. Killing time. Wondering, with a heavy heart, what to do.

Next year,
he thought, and paused.

Would he still be here, then? He didn’t think so. Some people could settle for platonic love, but he wasn’t one of them. He was a passionate man. It would break his heart, but he knew that he would go, one day soon.

‘Hey! Rufus, you big bazoo!’

The shouting male voice startled him out of his thoughts. He paused, looked up. No one ever came here. Oh, the grocery van called by, and the postman and the milkman, but they never actually had
visitors,
as such.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. It was his old mate Rory, striding towards him. A battered Land Rover was parked up near the open gate.

‘Rory!’ Rufus’s big face split in a grin. ‘Is it really you?’

‘Who else d’you think it is, feckin’ Santa Claus?’ Rory ran over, laughing. He looked exactly the same, a little thinner maybe, his face with a few fresh lines. Rory hugged him and they both laughed.

‘Well, what the hell are you doing out here in the arse-end of nowhere?’ asked Rufus, pushing his mate back a step, his brow crinkling. ‘How did you know I was here?’

Rory shrugged. ‘How the hell would I? I didn’t. But I was down this way doing a bit of horse trading, and I remembered your relatives had this place and I wondered if they were still here, living in the grand style, and whether they could give me news of you. And here you are! Large as life and twice as ugly.’

‘It’s good to see you, boy,’ said Rufus in real delight. ‘Come away inside and let’s have a drink to celebrate.’

‘And how’s Megan?’ asked Rufus as they sat drinking late into the night. Davey and his wife had gone on to bed, and so had Orla. Rory had been amazed to find her there, but had said nothing. He’d heard Orla and her brother Redmond had vanished a while back, that they were dead by all accounts, or abroad and keeping out of the way of the law – yet here she was, in the flesh. He thought it best not to pry. Orla had been polite to him, but not effusive. She had cooked them all a good dinner, then said she was tired and gone off to her room.