The Year of the Ladybird (22 page)

She made a bee-line for Tony and he received her with great theatricality, kissing her on either cheek, hamming it up for the many eyes – male and female – tracking her movements. He
loved it. After all, they were celebrities of this tiny holiday camp world. She stepped over to me and gave me a peck on the cheek, drawing me into their aura. I found her a stool and Tony made an
extravagant gesture of ordering Sidecar cocktails, a drink I’d never even heard of.

While we fussed around and Tony made sure she got to sit between us, the cocktails arrived in glasses sugar-frosted at the rim and with tiny paper umbrellas. I know it was a small holiday camp
on an unfashionable stretch of English coastline but the way people stared at us made me feel like I was in a Hollywood VIP lounge amid star company. Somehow, inside the club we had become spot-lit
by the effects of glamour. I don’t know what was in the cocktail but I drank it too fast and Tony ordered up another round.

Luca Valletti was topping the bill and after midnight when he came on to do his set I was already feeling a little woozy. I’d noticed that Luca had stayed in his dressing room when he
might have been expected to join us out front at least for a few minutes. Tony, whose tongue had also been loosened by the alcohol, or perhaps excited by Nikki’s show-stoppingly glamorous
appearance, said some unprofessional things about his Italian co-performer. He described him as aloof and stuck-up, whereas I didn’t blame him for being distant after the way Colin had
roughed him up.

Anyway, I had to stay focused to finish my lighting job. Luca soared through his repertoire and like the pro he was, he gave the audience a few words about what each song meant to him
personally. ‘It means a few extra quid,’ Tony whispered in my ear as he was passing.
My Fair Lady
had recently had a revival and Luca sang ‘On the Street Where You
Live’ but before going into it he affected a cockney accent to repeat a little bit of business from the stage play. It got a laugh anyway. His beautiful tenor lit up the room as he sang some
unlikely words about how
she done him in
when she told him of her
father and the gin
.

I managed to operate the lights without mishap, despite being a little tipsy. When it came to his barn-storming ‘Autumn Leaves’ I opened with green and gold gels, subtly diffused the
colours and closed out with red and gold at end. I did it perfectly – to my own relief – but something strange happened on the penultimate line of the lyric. Luca looked at me, poised
at the side of the lighting rig. I don’t know what he saw. Maybe I was way over-focused on him, trying to make sure that my tipsiness didn’t screw up the operation of the gels. Maybe I
was staring too plain hard at him. But he failed to hit a note.

I’m not sure whether the audience even noticed. But when you’ve heard a singer repeat the same song in rehearsals and in performance several times over, you hear it immediately. It
didn’t matter. The boozy audience rewarded him with rapturous applause. The Italian tenor took his bow, and he left.

Unusually, Luca didn’t come over to say goodnight to Tony, Nikki and myself at the bar. Normally, he made a point of thanking me for the lights, and thanking Mike on the piano. Mike the
Beatle-haircut pianist came and had a drink with us and when I got a moment I said, ‘Did Luca miss a note?’

‘Luca never misses a note,’ Mike said. Then he arched his eyebrows and put a finger to his lips as if to say shush!

I remembered the sleeping pill I’d got from the doctor. It was a Mandrax. The doctor had told me to take it an hour before turning in to avoid tossing and turning in bed, so I swallowed it
discreetly and washed it down with a Sidecar and a glug of Federation ale.

We stumbled out of the club. Mike and Tony said goodnight and they kissed Nikki extravagantly on either cheek, leaving me alone with her.

‘Night’s young,’ she said. ‘Shall we go and sit on the beach?’

‘It’s two in the morning,’ I said.

‘But it’s a beautiful evening. And it’s cool and fresh for a change! Don’t be a party pooper.’

The fact was I didn’t want to go back to my bed. I was still nursing a dread of what nightmares sleep would bring. What’s more, Colin never seemed far away. I felt like he was
waiting for the moment I dipped below the surface of sleep.

We went up the sea wall. Nikki as usual wanted to go down onto the sand. She took off her sling-back heels and held the straps between her fingers.

‘You’ll wreck your tights.’

‘That’s a point,’ she said. She dropped her shoes and without taking her eyes from me she hitched up her skirt and slid her tights down her tanned legs, stepping out of them.
She opened her handbag, stuffed her tights inside and then laced her elegant fingers through the straps of her shoes. ‘Come on.’

We picked our way down through the sand. I was stumbling a bit. We got away from the lights of the camp and settled down near the water’s edge. Though it was a balmy night the temperature
had cooled by a degree or two, and the sea was in a more aggressive mood. The waves were foaming, and they were rearing and whipping at the shore. Once again I saw that wrinkle of phosphorescence
and it made an illusion like white snakes rearing and spitting. It was exciting and alarming and it said that the weather was changing.

I recalled Tony on one of my first days at the camp saying, ‘We’ve had the party and it’s time to pay the cabbie.’ But the voice I heard in my head was Colin’s
gravelly cockney accent, not Tony’s. I felt woozy.

‘You okay?’ Nikki said.

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a bit chillier this evening, isn’t it?’ She wriggled closer to me and when she’d got comfortable she opened the clasp on her handbag and produced a half-pint
bottle of vodka. I remember thinking that I’d just taken the Mandrax and that I shouldn’t. I was already light headed from the cocktails and beer I’d drunk in the nightclub. But
when she unscrewed the cap and offered me the bottle I took a swig anyway.

What happened next?

I lost my soul, that’s what happened next.

Imagine a giant advertising billboard with a photograph of what happened next. Now tear off, at random, three tiny fingernail strips, thin fragments and carry them away with you as the rest of
the photograph goes dark. Now lay them out on a lawn and try to figure out all the bits that go in between.

That’s what I’ve got. I’m a dog howling at the moon. I’m a lion-tamer trying to control the waves. I’m staring at a little boy who is holding hands with a man in a
sparkling blue suit at the water’s edge.

I don’t know how much of Nikki’s vodka I drank but I suspect that I was hell-bent. People say, oh I’ve no idea how I got so drunk. Really.

But there is a gap in my memory, and then I have my head up inside Nikki’s skirt and I am removing her knickers with my teeth. She is laughing. And then I am moving across the sand on all
fours, barking like a dog and I look up and I see the moon and I howl. The howl is so fierce it frightens the moon. It goes behind a small cloud. For a moment I am a werewolf, all blood and
sinew.

I know there is a big chunk of time missing because in my next torn fragment I am stark naked and standing next to the tide, shouting at the sea. The mood of the sea becomes worse, angrier. The
surf boils and the waves whip and slap at the sand and retreat fast. It wants to get me. It wants to strike me, but it is afraid of me. I know it is afraid of me. The sea hisses and a huge wave
coils in the air and paws at me but I duck away from its claws. It has become a lion. The sea has become a lion like the one I saw in town. It roars, it hisses, it spits, it growls but it
can’t come any nearer. It bares its teeth and it arches its back, but I dance backwards as it lashes another watery paw at me and now I know I can control it. I have magical hands. If I raise
my right hand in the air a wave moves up, up, higher following the movement of my arm as if on a string until I am ready to slap it down hard. I can do the same with my other hand. I can conduct
the sea, like a man with a baton before an orchestra. No. I am a lion-tamer. I have tamed the watery deep. I will put my head in its mouth.

I hear Nikki come up behind me. She’s also a little drunk. ‘What are you doing?’

There’s another breach in time. Now the sea has gone quiet again. It is perfectly calm, like oil. I am standing at the water’s edge and I am looking at a man and a boy. They gaze out
to sea with eyes of clear-glass. The man’s suit is blue and it darts with watery phosphorescence. The suit is beautiful, alive, quivering like the scales of a fish. The man and the boy hold
each other’s hand. Their faces are dark, but their teeth are blue in the eerie light. Slowly the man begins to dissolve. His form becomes like wet sand and he slowly melts into the sand
itself, and the boy starts to cry. The man liquefies in front of me, leaving only an empty suit. His glass-eyes are the last thing to go. The water laps at the empty suit, almost as if feeding on
it, until the suit itself is covered by wet sand. The boy lies on the sand, crying, scraping at the residual form with his fingernails.

Nikki is behind me, trying to pull me away. ‘David, it’s just a log,’ she says. ‘Just a log.’

I look again and there is no boy. It is indeed just a wooden log, washed up by the tide. But I can’t shake the feeling that in another world it really is a heartbroken boy, so I take the
log and I tenderly lift it – him – up onto my shoulder. I stagger up the beach, as if I want to take it – him – home with me. I don’t know why. But it’s too
heavy and the rough wood scrapes my naked skin and embeds splinters in me. I let the log fall to the beach.

Then there is a big gap again. A big, deep darkness.

I was woken in the morning by a sharp tug on my cock. I had a horrible thought that Nobby or even Colin had jumped on me but when I fought myself awake I found Nikki astride of
me. She took my hard cock out of her mouth and blinked at me.

‘Mornin’’ she said. Then she parked her long hair behind an ear before licking and sucking me again.

I felt groggy, disoriented and hungover. The pleasure of Nikki playing with me in this way was counteracted by the headache it triggered. I wasn’t going to stop her. But anyway I
couldn’t even speak to protest had I wanted to; bad as I felt about this infidelity to Terri I was unable to resist.

Nikki eased herself up and straddled me, and guiding the shaft of my cock with one hand she sank herself on to me. She gasped. She was a little dry. It took my breath away, and hers too. Her
black pupils dilated, searching my own eyes as she lowered herself down the full length of me. She sat back and put her hands on her hips, rocking me right inside her. Then she yelped.

Someone in the next cubicle along banged on the wall and shouted incomprehensible words. Nikki giggled and put her fingers in her mouth to stifle her own cries. Someone was still thumping on the
flimsy wall, making it shake. It only made her laugh out loud and fuck me harder.

In all of this I had a sudden flash of the blue phosphorescent light rippling on the waves and of moonlight foaming on the glass bottle of vodka in Nikki’s hands. Fragments of the
night’s events came back to me.

When we were finished she collapsed on me. I lay in a tangle of her raven-black hair. It made me think of the dark woods of fairy-tale; her sweat and the scent of her all over me. As we lay
there breathing hard I tried to remember more about the things that happened during the night.

‘You okay?’ she said in my ear.

‘Yeah.’

‘Hungover?’

‘Very.’

‘I thought I was never going to get you back here.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you remember any of it?’

‘Some.’

She reached over to the cabinet and picked up the small travel clock I kept there. She sighed. ‘I’ve got to get back to my place, somehow in these clothes. What a giveaway. I need to
get my Greencoat outfit and get back here for the briefing.’ I waited for her to get up. Instead she shimmied her way up my body, pressing her nipples against mine. Then she soul-kissed
me.

‘Stay here,’ I mumbled through mashed lips.

‘I don’t want to get up, but I have to.’ She hauled herself out of bed and found her dress on the floor. She checked herself in the small mirror behind the door. ‘Jesus,
I’m a wreck. God, I need a shower but I’m not taking one here.’

Well, her hair was a thrilling mess. Her eye make-up was smudged, too. But as she stood there naked, holding her dress in one hand and running her fingers through her dark hair she looked
wonderfully happy. Her tawny skin glowed.

‘You look beautiful, Nikki.’

She pulled her dress on over her head and wriggled into it and then she climbed into her heels. ‘I can’t even find my knickers. They’re probably still on the beach, you animal.
You threw them in the water.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes. And lots of things beside.’

‘Oh?’

‘I got a bit scared of you.’ She looked at me oddly. ‘A tiny bit.’

‘What happens now?’ I said.

‘What happens now?’ She held up her left hand. ‘You put a ring on this finger, that’s what happens now. Joke. No, I’ve had my way with you and I’m satisfied.
It’s done. Thanks. Ta-ra and all that. No, I’m still joking! Look at your face!’

What I wanted to ask her was: are we a secret? Are we an item? Are we open to the others? This wasn’t just because that had been the absolute pattern with Terri. Even asking seemed such a
statement, a declaration. The question itself seemed to contain a promise. She sat on the bed and leaned in for a kiss, slipping her hand under the sheets and running her fingers along my thigh.
Then she quickly withdrew. ‘No, I have to go. You need to get moving, too. I’ll see you at the briefing.’

Nikki went to the door, unlocked it and opened it just a crack. She peered through the gap and then opened it a little further so she could check up and down the corridor. When she decided the
coast was clear she blew me a kiss and slipped out, closing the door behind her. Almost instantly I heard another door open and someone else stumble into the corridor. Bad luck. I heard a loud wolf
whistle.