Stranded (14 page)

My agent was in the middle of a very tricky negotiation with my publisher over my next deal. They were horse-trading and haggling hard over the money on the table, and my agent was naturally copying me in on the e-mails. One morning, I logged on to find that day's update had a file attachment with it. ‘Hi, John,' the e-mail read.

You might be interested to see that they're getting so nitty-gritty about this deal that they're actually discussing your last year's touring and miscellaneous expenses. Of course, I wasn't supposed to see this attachment, but we all know what an idiot Tom is when it comes to electronics. Great editor; cyber-idiot. Anyway, I thought you might find it amusing to see how much they reckon they spent on you. See how it tallies with your recollections . . .

I wasn't much drawn to the idea, but since the attachment was there, I thought I might as well take a look. It never hurts to get a little righteous indignation going about how much hotels end up billing for a one-night stay. It's the supplementaries that are the killers. Fifteen dollars for a bottle of water was the best I came across on last year's tour. Needless to say, I stuck a glass under the tap. Even when it's someone else's dime, I hate to encourage the robber barons who masquerade as hoteliers.

I was drifting down through the list when I ran into something out of the basic rhythm of hotels, taxis, airfares, author escorts. ‘Consolation Blonde, $500', I read.

I knew what the words meant, but I didn't understand their linkage. Especially not on my expense list. If I'd spent it, you'd think I'd know what it was.

Then I saw the date.

My stomach did a back flip. Some dates you never forget. Like the US Book Awards dinner.

I didn't want to believe it, but I had to be certain. I called Shula's girlfriend Caroline, herself an editor of mystery fiction in one of the big London houses. Once we'd got the small talk out of the way, I cut to the chase. ‘Caroline, have you ever heard the term “consolation blonde” in publishing circles?'

‘Where did you hear that, John?' she asked, answering the question inadvertently.

‘I overheard it in one of those chi-chi midtown bars where literary publishers hang out. I was waiting to meet my agent, and I heard one guy say to the other, “He was OK after the consolation blonde.” I wasn't sure what it meant but I thought it sounded like a great title for a short story.'

Caroline gave that well-bred middle-class Englishwoman's giggle. ‘I suppose you could be right. What can I say here, John? This really is one of publishing's tackier areas. Basically, it's what you lay on for an author who's having a bad time. Maybe they didn't win an award they thought was in the bag, maybe their book has bombed, maybe they're having a really bad tour. So you lay on a girl, a nice girl. A fan, a groupie, a publicity girlie, bookseller, whatever. Somebody on the fringes, not a hooker as such. Tell them how nice it would be for poor old what's-his-name to have a good time. So the sad boy gets the consolation blonde and the consolation blonde gets a nice boost to her bank account plus the bonus of being able to boast about shagging a name. Even if it's a name that nobody else in the pub has ever heard before.'

I felt I'd lost the power of speech. I mumbled something and managed to end the call without screaming my anguish at Caroline. In the background, I could hear Bob Dylan singing ‘Idiot Wind'. Cassie had set the CD playing on repeat before she'd left for work and now the words mocked me for the idiot I was.

Cassie was my consolation blonde.

I wondered how many other disappointed men had been lifted up by the power of her fingers and made to feel strong again? I wondered whether she'd have stuck around for more than that one-night stand if I'd been a poor man. I wondered how many times she'd slid into bed with me after a night out, not with the girls, but wearing the mantle of the consolation blonde. I wondered whether pity was still the primary emotion that moved her when she moaned and arched her spine for me.

I wanted to break something. And this time, I wasn't going to be diverted.

I've made a lot of money for my publisher over the years. So when I show up to see my editor, Tom, without an appointment, he makes space and time for me.

That day, I could tell inside a minute that he wished for once he'd made an exception. He looked like he wasn't sure whether he should just cut out the middle-man and throw himself out of the twenty-third-floor window. ‘I don't know what you're talking about,' he yelped in response to my single phrase.

‘Bullshit,' I yelled. ‘You hired Cassie to be my consolation blonde. There's no point in denying it, I've seen the paperwork.'

‘You're mistaken, John,' Tom said desperately, his alarmed chipmunk eyes widening in dilemma.

‘No. Cassie was my consolation blonde for the US Book Awards. You didn't know I was going to lose, so you must have set her up in advance, as a stand-by. Which means you must have used her before.'

‘I swear, John, I swear to God, I don't know . . .' Whatever Tom was going to say got cut off by me grabbing his stupid preppie tie and yanking him out of his chair.

‘Tell me the truth,' I growled, dragging him towards the window. ‘It's not like it can be worse than I've imagined. How many of my friends has she fucked? How many five-hundred-buck one-night stands have you pimped for my girlfriend since we got together? How many times have you and your buddies laughed behind my back because the woman I love is playing consolation blonde to somebody else? Tell me, Tom. Tell me the truth before I throw you out of this fucking window. Because I don't have any more to lose.'

‘It's not like that,' he gibbered. I smelled piss and felt a warm dampness against my knee. His humiliation was sweet, though it was a poor second to what he'd done to me.

‘Stop lying,' I screamed. He flinched as my spittle spattered his face. I shook him like a terrier with a rat.

‘OK, OK,' he sobbed. ‘Yes, Cassie was a consolation blonde. Yes, I hired her last year for you at the awards banquet. But I swear, that was the last time. She wrote me a letter, said after she met you she couldn't do this again. John, the letter's in my files. She never cashed the check for being with you. You have to believe me. She fell in love with you that first night and she never did it again.'

The worst of it was, I could tell he wasn't lying. But still, I hauled him over to the filing cabinets and made him produce his evidence. The letter was everything he'd promised. It was dated the day after our first encounter, two whole days before I called her to ask if I could see her again.

Dear Tom,

I'm returning your $500 cheque. It's not appropriate for me to accept it this time. I won't be available to do close author escort work in future. Meeting John Treadgold has changed things for me. I can't thank you enough for introducing us.

Good luck.

Cassie White

I stood there, reading her words, every one cutting me like the wounds I'd carved into her body the night before.

I guess they don't have awards ceremonies in prison. Which is probably just as well, given what a bad loser I turned out to be.

Metamorphosis

F
ingers rippling down my spine. Lips nuzzling my neck. Trimmed fingernails leaving their marks on my skin like vapour trails in a clear blue sky. Teeth nibbling my shoulder blades, sinking into the long muscles of my back. Hands fierce on my buttocks, clawing and spreading them. A tongue rimming me, unimagined waves of pleasure spreading deep inside me from the tight scrunch of my anus. A fist forcing its way into me, so deep I think I'm going to split open. Like when I gave birth. The smell of sex and sweat and something more earthy. The sound of a voice I barely recognise as mine, moaning, ‘I'm your bitch, fuck me harder.' The moans that turn to cries as my body gives itself up to her.

How the hell did I get here?

I'm a stranger in my own skin. Nobody who knows me would recognise this wanton sprawled on a hotel-room bed, possessed by a desire I never even thought to conjure before. I never fantasised about having sex with a woman. I never fantasised about dirty, nasty sex. I've always been a soft-focus sort of girl. Candles meant romantic flicker to me, not hot wax on nipples.

Yet now this strange addiction has me in its grip.

I tell myself the story of how it came to this, and I am none the wiser. I list the chain of circumstances, as I am trained to do, and it still sounds entirely alien, something so far outside my life that it can have no connection to me.

Cause and effect, action and reaction, the steady building of a case. That's what I do for a living, and that is where the story begins. I am Jane Sullivan, barrister at law, called at Middle Temple twelve years ago. I am a criminal barrister on the Northern Circuit. I am a happily married woman with two daughters aged nine and seven. My husband David is a lecturer in philosophy at Manchester University. We live in a three-storey Victorian house in a quiet cul-de-sac in the part of Didsbury that hasn't been colonised by students and young graduates taking the first steps in their careers. We have two Volvos and a Labrador called Sam.

We are embarrassingly middle-class. And I like my life.

So how the hell did I get here, groaning with animal delight at the hands of a woman with six body piercings and three tattoos?

Stevie walked into my life and my chambers six months ago. The client was accused of attempted murder, the solicitor not one of my usual providers of briefs. They'd come over from Leeds on the recommendation of a local client who thought I'd done a good job in a similar case earlier in the year. Stevie was there at the con to give the client moral support. The story was broadly familiar, though not one I hear nearly often enough.

The client had been living in a women's refuge after her boyfriend had put her into hospital once too often. In spite of a restraining order, the boyfriend had tracked her down and burst into the refuge. He'd found her in the kitchen, and in his haste to attack her, he'd slipped and fallen. Simultaneously, she'd had the presence of mind to smash the milk bottle she'd been holding against the edge of the sink. As he stumbled to his feet, she'd stabbed him in the neck with the jagged edge. And now she was the one facing the full weight of the law. Stevie, it turned out, worked parttime at the refuge while completing her masters degree in psychology. The client trusted her, which wasn't something she could say about many people she'd met in her twenty-three years.

To be honest, I didn't pay much attention to Stevie that day. I registered the black hair, the dark brows, the blue eyes and the creamy pale skin that signals a particular set of Irish genes, but I felt not a flicker of attraction. My focus was on the client, my mind already racing through the possibilities of having the charge reduced to a Section Eighteen wounding.

I took instructions, gave as much reassurance as I could, then went home to read my children a bedtime story and eat supper with my husband. I didn't give Stevie another thought until the case was called at Leeds Crown Court.

The client was shivering with fear and Stevie was rubbing her hands when we met outside the robing room. The client was beyond sensible discussion, so I directed my points at Stevie. I explained that I'd already seen the prosecution counsel and he wasn't inclined to reduce the charges. However, I thought that might paradoxically work in our favour; a jury would be more reluctant to convict on the greater charge once they had heard the evidence of what the victim had done to my client in the past. I was intent on running the selfdefence line. Anyone who had suffered what my client had suffered at this man's hands would have reasonable grounds to be in fear of her life.

The trial didn't go well. My client was the worst kind of witness; defensive, contradictory, inarticulate. The victim cleaned up well and managed a good stab at the heartbroken remorseful lover role. But I was determined not to lose this one, and even if I say so myself, I delivered the kind of closing address to the jury that barristers have wet dreams about. The judge summed up late on the second day, and I fully expected the jury to be out overnight. That's why I'd kept on my hotel room.

But to my delight, they came back inside half an hour, and with a not-guilty verdict. I congratulated the client, who was a soggy bundle of tears by then, shook hands with Stevie and headed back for my hotel to pack my bags and catch a train back to Manchester.

I'd barely thrown off my suit jacket when there was a knock on the door. I opened it, expecting housekeeping, or the man who recharges the minibar. Instead, Stevie was lounging casually against the doorjamb, a bottle of champagne dangling from her hand. ‘I thought you might fancy a little celebration,' she said.

‘I was just about to check out.'

One corner of Stevie's mouth lifted in a half-smile, a dimple creasing her cheek. ‘Go on, you know you want to,' she said. ‘That was a helluva performance in there. You deserve the chance to rerun it with somebody who knows you're not bullshitting.'

‘I really should . . .'

‘Besides, nobody's expecting you back in Manchester, are they? We all thought this was going to run into tomorrow.' She raised the bottle and waggled it gently. It was, I couldn't help noticing, rather a good marque.

In spite of myself, I was smiling back at her. I opened the door. ‘Why not?' I said. If I'd known the answer to that question, I'd have slammed the door in her face.

I got a couple of glasses out of the minibar and we sat in the armchairs on either side of the little round table in the window. The last of the light glinted on the tiny fragments of diamond that crusted the outer rim of her eyebrow ring. Stevie opened the bottle with remarkably little fuss and poured the champagne into the tilted glasses. ‘Here's to crime,' she said. We clinked and sipped. ‘You were fantastic in there, you know. I thought we were goners, but you turned the whole thing round.'

I shrugged. ‘It's what they pay me for.'

She shook her head. ‘It was a lot more than that. I've seen enough barristers in action to know the difference. You were very special today.'

I felt mildly flustered; I could sense an edge of flirtation in her voice and I wasn't sure whether I was imagining it. ‘I'm supposed always to be special,' I blurted out.

She gave her crooked smile again. ‘I don't doubt you manage it.' She nudged the ashtray on the table with a long, slim finger. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?'

‘Feel free. It's not as if I'm going to be spending the night here.'

She opened her shoulder bag and took out a tobacco tin. To my astonishment, she started rolling a joint. ‘You've been walking around in the court with a pocketful of dope?' I knew I probably sounded like her mother, but I couldn't help myself.

Stevie grinned. ‘Hardly a pocketful. About a caution's worth, I'd say. Jane, nobody was interested in me today. I could have been shooting up smack in the ladies' loo and they'd never have noticed.' She must have caught my look of horror, because she added hastily, ‘Not that I touch the hard stuff. Only joking.'

She lit the joint and took a deep drag on it, holding the smoke for a good fifteen seconds, her eyes closed in pleasure. Then she held it out to me, her eyebrows raised in an amused question.

I don't know why I took it. Perhaps I wanted to show her I wasn't as straight as she assumed. Perhaps I wanted to revisit the carefree student I'd once been, before ambition and its satisfaction had given me too much to be willing to lose. Or perhaps I had the first subconscious inkling that there might be something lurking beneath the surface here that I'd require an excuse for afterwards.

Whatever the reason, I shared that joint. And the next one. The champagne slipped down, and we began to unwind, our public faces unravelling as we shared something of our stories. It seemed to make sense to order another bottle of champagne from room service. We were halfway through the second bottle when Stevie said, ‘I should be going. If you're heading back to Manchester, you'll need to think about getting a train.'

My dismay startled me. I didn't want her to go, and that shook me. But I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so relaxed. She got to her feet and moved towards the door. I couldn't think of a way to stop her, so I followed. She opened the door and turned towards me. ‘I'll say goodnight, then.' She stepped forward and kissed me.

My mouth was open under hers. I felt the flicker of her tongue inside my lower lip. Then my hand was in her hair, pulling her into me, the blood pounding in my ears. Suddenly we separated. I couldn't read her eyes. I had no idea if she could see the darkness of the desire in mine.

‘I don't think it's a very good idea to stand snogging in a hotel doorway,' she said coolly. ‘Don't you think you'd better close the door?'

A wave of mortification brought a red flush to my neck. ‘I'm sorry,' I said, every inch the stiff lady barrister again. I stepped back to shut the door, but before I could, she was inside the room.

‘You do want me on this side of it, don't you?' It was, we both knew, an entirely rhetorical question.

A tangle of clothes and limbs, a stumble of legs and hands, a mumble of words and lips, and we were naked on the bed. There was nothing seductive or sensual in it; we'd performed the foreplay with our earlier words. This was simply a total carnality I'd never known before. It was appetite fed, satisfied, then fresh hunger aroused purely to be appeased. Time slid past us in a chaos of glutted lust. She did things to me I had never known I desired. And without giving it a second thought, I acquiesced.

More than that, I gave as good as I got. I discovered instincts I didn't know I possessed. My mouth, my hands performed with a sureness of touch I couldn't have believed possible. Language was reduced to a primal state. ‘There . . . oh yes.Harder . . . Please . . . Oh God . . .'

Somewhere around dawn, I think, we slept. I woke to find her sprawled face down next to me, the tail end of a sheet across the hollow of her back. The room reeked of sex, with a sweet base note of marijuana. The clock read 7:34, and I remembered my life. David would be getting the girls up, ready for the school run. He'd wonder why I hadn't called the night before, but not in an anxious way. He knew that when I was absorbed in a case, I didn't always want to be dragged into a different, distracting mental space.

I knew I should be consumed with guilt, but it was entirely absent. All I felt was a kind of grateful wonder, an astonishment that there was room in my life for something so remarkable.

Stevie stirred and lifted her head. Her eyes opened a crack and she laughed softly. ‘I thought you'd be long gone, beating yourself up all the way to Manchester,' she drawled.

‘I want to see you again.' The words tumbled out before I could consider their wisdom.

‘I know you do. And you will.' She propped herself up and kissed me. ‘Like the song says, we've only just begun.'

I travelled back on the train, understanding for the first time the notion of the body electric. I was tingling in every limb, invigorated and exhilarated. I'd thought I understood the power of sex, but I'd been seeing a coloured world in monochrome.

Of course, I had already convinced myself that this was an entirely physical thing. It belonged in the domain of the senses, not in the heart. As such, there would be no real and present danger in seeing Stevie again. We would be occasional lovers, it would gradually lose its glamour and we would drift apart. My only real concern was whether Stevie would fall in love with me. If that were to happen, it might pose a threat to my life. But somehow, I didn't think that was probable. I couldn't see Stevie picturing a future with someone as conventional as me.

What never occurred to me was that I would be the one who would become besotted. I saw her again the week after the Leeds trial, down in London. This time, the sex was more extreme, more rooted in the exploration of outrageous fantasy. This time, there was cocaine to sharpen the edge of desire and loosen my non-existent inhibitions. It enraptured me. I was hooked on her.

I found myself seeking out briefs that would take me away from home so I could spend the nights with Stevie. I couldn't get through the day without talking to her on the phone, conversations that always revolved around sex and usually ended in orgasm. I knew my advocacy was suffering, because I was spending more time mooning after Stevie than I was absorbing my briefs. I was taking the kind of risks that could have destroyed my life and the lives of the people I had, until Stevie, loved more than anything in the world.

That, then, is the chain of circumstance that has brought me here, brought me to my knees again before a woman who is clearly tiring of me. She makes excuses now where before she made plans. Sometimes, when I call, there is someone else there and she won't talk. And I cannot bear the thought of her lying in someone else's arms, this woman who has stolen my comfort and ripped a hole in the fabric of my life. A day without the sound of her voice leaves me hollow, picking at my food, snapping at my children.