The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (29 page)

Lisa Tuttle

When she got Rachel’s text suggesting lunch, Imogen was thrilled into immediate agreement, although the short notice, and her friend’s choice of venue, meant a rush, and her colleagues’ displeasure that she was taking the full hour for the second time that week.

For once, Rachel wasn’t late; eye-catching as ever with her long, red hair and dramatic style, she waved from a booth at the back and announced that she’d already ordered for them both.

“You’re going to love the cauliflower cheese soup. And it gives us more time to talk if we don’t have to faff around with menus.” She was glowing, radiant, bubbling in a way Imogen had not seen in months. It reminded her of the old days, when they’d shared a flat, before Rachel married Andrew.

Marriage changed everything. Everybody knew how it was: married couples had different priorities, and when they weren’t alone together, liked to be with other marrieds. Add to their new status a starter house in a distant suburb and two demanding jobs, and there wasn’t much left for their singleton friends. Imogen had thought she might be the exception: after all, the three of them had lived together for nearly a year, so comfortable a threesome that they joked about their Mormon marriage, if too conventional to go farther than flirting with the idea of a sexual
ménage à trois
. Andy’s undemanding yet undeniably masculine presence had added a bit of spice to Imogen’s life, which she missed. She recalled the pleasures of lazy Sunday morning fry-ups over three different newspapers, late-night take-aways and horror movies viewed from the sagging, second-hand couch – even a boring, stupid thing like doing the laundry was almost fun as a threesome. But maybe that was only her. Maybe they would always have been happier without a third person in their life.

She looked at her friend through the steam of soup too hot to touch. “What’s up? I can see you’re dying to tell me something.”

Rachel compressed her lips. “I need you to promise you won’t tell anyone.”

She was stung by this distrust. “Who would I tell?”

“Not anyone. If it ever got back to Andrew—”

“Oh my God.”

“Promise?”

Imogen scowled. “Asking me to promise
now
is a bit stable-doors. You’re having an affair?”

Rachel grimaced. She could not deny it, only quibbled over the wording. It was nothing so definite as an “affair”. Love didn’t enter into it. It was just sex.

“But . . . why? Why take the risk?”

“Oh, Immy.” She shook her head and looked chiding. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t go looking for this. It just happened.”

“Yeah? Where, on the bus to work? Oh, I’m sorry, sir, it’s so crowded, I seem to have impaled myself upon your manly tool. As we’ve started, may as well continue.”

Rachel nearly choked on her soup, giggling. “OK, OK. I am a weak and horny woman who cannot resist temptation. I was feeling frustrated and half-dead – Andrew, bless him, is just not up for it that often. He’s less . . .
driven
by sexual needs than I am. I always knew it might be a problem someday; I just didn’t expect it to be so soon. But when Mr Hotbody came along and woke me up—” She gave a fatalistic shrug.

“Who is this Mr Hotbody?”

“You don’t know him,” she said quickly. “Nobody does.”

“That sounds spooky.”

“Nobody
we
know. There’s no reason Andrew would ever hear anything. He’s a total stranger I met in a pub.”

Imogen shivered, and took a careful sip of her soup.

“It wasn’t a pub I’d ever been in, either. A client had suggested it, and after she left, he came over and offered to buy me a drink. I’d noticed him watching me, and gave him the look . . . it was just like the old days, picking out the sexiest guy in the room, to see if I could pull.”

“So you can still pull. Amazing. Did you tell him you were married?”

“After he put his hand on my leg. He just smiled and said he liked married women the best, because they didn’t confuse sex with love, and he sort of walked his hand up my leg, right up to my crotch, and started to rub me there, through my pants, looking me in the eye the whole time while he brought me off.”

It was not the heat of the soup that brought Imogen out in a sweat as Rachel continued to describe what followed. “Sex in the toilet! I don’t know what possessed me – I hadn’t done anything like that since I was eighteen. And this was much, much dirtier.”

“And that wasn’t the end of it?”

She shook her head, eyes glazed over. “I didn’t even know his name. I told Andrew I had to go away overnight, on business, and booked a room in a Travelodge. He met me there. We were at it all night. Never slept. I did things I’d never done before. He made me do things—”

Imogen pushed her bowl to one side, her appetite gone. “That does not sound good.”

“Are you kidding? It was the best I’ve ever had.”

“Not good for your marriage.”

“Oh, no, there you’re wrong, my friend. Sometimes a bit of danger, the risk of another lover, is just what a couple needs. I went home and bonked the living daylights out of Andrew. He loved it! For a little while, I had my Randy Andy back. Plus, I’m so much nicer when I’m not feeling frustrated. I’ve stopped being such a bitch at home. What’s good for me is good for him.”

“Good for you. You’ve saved your marriage. End of story.”

“It’s not the end.”

“You can’t go on sleeping with this guy.”

“I have no intention of sleeping with him, or going out to dinner with him, or knitting little booties, or falling in love. This is just sex. So much spicier than I can get at home. A bit on the side. That’s all I want from him.”

“So what do you want from me? A seal of approval?”

“We need a place to go.”

“Oh, no.” Imogen’s stomach clenched. “You can’t go to his?”

“He lives with someone. And anyway, I don’t want to get involved with his life.”

“So rent a room . . . Travelodge was good enough before.”

“It would be good enough again, if I could afford it . . . or if he could. Please? It won’t be very often, I’m sure. Just a few more times, ’til I get him out of my system.”

“Or out of your pubic hair. Where am I supposed to go while this . . . delousing . . . is taking place?”

Rachel’s face tightened. “Don’t be nasty.”

“You’re the one talking about how wonderfully dirty it is.” Before Rachel’s hurt, angry glare, she caved. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand why you need to do this thing.”

Imogen’s hand was seized and held in a warm, strong grip. “Of course you don’t, my sweetheart, because you’re
normal
. This is some kind of madness, but I can’t get over it without going through it. And you are the one and only person who can help me, who I can talk to. I don’t want to put you out. But you go to the gym and out for a meal with your friends from work every Thursday, am I right? What time do you get home?”

“About nine-thirty,” she said, although ten was closer to the mark.

“I’d want to be on the nine-forty-seven for home anyway,” said Rachel. “We’d be out by nine-thirty. I promise you, Imogen, you won’t know we were there. One evening a week, a time when you wouldn’t be there anyway – is that really too much to ask?”

She understood she could not refuse; not unless she was prepared to lose their friendship.

Rachel came by that evening to pick up the spare key, and Imogen was a little stiff with her at first, feeling she had been bullied into abetting a crime, but instead of hurrying away like a guilty thing, Rachel hung around, diffident and awkward, until Imogen thawed and suggested she stay for dinner.

“There’s a kebab shop just around the corner. I could run down for something—”

Rachel checked the contents of the fridge. “I’ll cook,” she said. “Spaghetti carbonara sound all right?”

“I don’t have any cream.”

“We never did, and I don’t recall any complaints in the past, so long as there was plenty of
this
.” With a wicked grin, she produced a bottle of wine from her capacious shoulder-bag.

Every remnant of ill-feeling vanished as she whipped up a quick supper. It was like old times again. She phoned Andrew to warn him she’d be home late, and put him on speaker so Imogen could hear and join in a joking, friendly, three-way conversation. When they were doing the washing-up, Imogen said wistfully, “We should do this more often.”

“I don’t know about you, sweetheart, but I wash up after
every
meal.”

Imogen laughed. “Idiot. I’ve missed you. Missed
us
.”

“Me, too.”

Walking through her front door on Thursday night (9.56 by her phone), although it was dark and still, Imogen felt another presence there.

“Ray?” she called sharply. “Hello?” Her skin prickled; what if it was
him
?

With the light on, she could see into every corner of the sparsely furnished, open-plan living room and kitchen. There was nowhere to hide, unless – looking one way – behind the half-open door of the bathroom – or, at the other end, in the bedroom. She scarcely breathed until she had checked both rooms thoroughly, even peering inside the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom, and the narrow airing-cupboard in the kitchen. But she remained tense, even knowing she was alone, so she phoned Rachel.

“How’d it go?”

“I’m on the train.”

“I wasn’t expecting the porno version.” At the familiar sound of her friend’s snorting laugh, Imogen relaxed at last. “I just wanted to check that everything was, you know, all right.”

“Mmm, good question. Not sure what to say.”

Suddenly suspicious, she demanded, “Is he with you?”

“What? No, of course not! I said, I’m on my way home. There’s the tunnel.”

“Catch up tomorrow?” She was talking to a dead phone.

The abrupt end to that unsatisfactory conversation left Imogen feeling on edge, but she went through her usual routines, tidying the already tidy flat, and put herself to bed before eleven o’clock.

She was tired, and her thoughts soon drifted into the surreal jumble that presaged sleep. Turning on to her left side, she snuggled deeper into her pillow, and caught a faint whiff of Jo Malone’s Pomegranate Noir – Rachel’s signature scent.

By now her own body-heat had warmed the space between the sheets, and with that warmth, other smells were released from the bedding: body odours that were not her own, sweat and musk and ejaculate, the unmistakable smells of sex.

And then she could hear them – laboured breathing, low grunts, the slap of flesh against flesh – and feel them, too, a woman and a man in bed with her, one on either side of her—

It wasn’t real, of course. It couldn’t be. If she’d suddenly found herself in bed with two other naked people she would have been repulsed by it, felt disgust, or fear. But instead, half-asleep and knowing she must be dreaming, it was safe to become aroused. These two people, so focused on their own sexual pleasure, stirred desires she kept buried, hidden from her conscious mind. The man behind her was a stranger – it didn’t matter who he was. The woman whose soft large breasts pressed against her own was Rachel.

This was Rachel as she’d scarcely dared to imagine her, yet knew she must be, powerfully erotic, sexually voracious. As Imogen allowed herself to be overwhelmed by the power of the fantasy, she heard her friend whispering to her, words she’d actually said once when talking about masturbation.

“You shouldn’t feel guilty. That’s crazy! It doesn’t matter
what
you think about while you’re doing it – whatever gets you off is fine; it doesn’t matter what crazy, sick thing turns you on, so long as it stays inside your own head. Nobody ever got hurt by a private fantasy. It’s the safest sex there is.”

In the morning, though, Imogen was not so relaxed. The first sip of coffee seemed to curdle in her stomach, and she felt sickened by herself, and then angry with Rachel. Why couldn’t her friend have followed her own advice, and kept her fantasies locked inside her own head? Why did she have to soil Imogen’s bed with them?

She poured the rest of her coffee down the sink and, although there was scarcely time for it, hurried back to the bedroom, intending to strip off the dirty sheets, rather than leave them festering with their alien stains and smells for another day. But as soon as she saw her bed she realized it wasn’t necessary. Rachel had changed the bed after using it. The dirty sheets and pillowcases were in the washing machine in the kitchen – a fact she had noticed before going to bed, and then forgotten.

She leaned down and sniffed the pillow. She could just about pick up traces of herself – skin oil, face cream, shampoo – but nothing remotely like Rachel’s perfume. When she put her head under the covers she smelled the lavender scent of her fabric conditioner, and nothing else.

Those smells that she thought had triggered an erotic fantasy had been part of the fantasy – part of the dream. It had been a dream, of course, with no conscious desires behind it at all. The knots in her stomach loosened. Dreams were nobody’s fault. You couldn’t blame yourself for what your unconscious got up to while you slept.