Becoming Strangers Read online

  How had this man become his keeper? The beer shook in Burns's glass.

  'Any-who...' said Missy as if to start a new subject. She flashed a dollar smile at each of them in turn, stepping between them. 'Let's just leave them to it, Jason, I'm sure Mrs De Groot can handle herself.'

  'I don't think so,' said Jason. 'She's weak right now. She's easy prey. Her husband is dying...'

  'Dying,' Burns repeated, looking peeved, his eyes elsewhere.

  'He's got terminal cancer. Weeks to live. Maybe days, she told us, no one knows. He pops morphine by the handful every morning...'

  Burns swallowed, 'I had no idea.'

  'Yeah, she's a target, you know. Easy meat.'

  'Where is her husband?'

  'He's gone out for the day,' said Missy, 'with Mr Moloney and Mr and Mrs Davis, to church.'

  'I see.'

  'I think we ought to know that she's safe before we leave for the day, sweets,' said Jason, turning to his wife, who nodded and raised her hands in submission.

  'It can't hurt,' she said.

  Burns looked at the many pendants that hung in the soft valley of her chest, like rock-climbers attached to thin golden ropes. He glanced down at Jason's wrist and saw the man was wearing the very Rolex that he had promised to buy himself one day, when he had the money. He nodded. His beer was all gone.

  'No, it can't hurt,' he sighed, relinquishing the empty glass.

  46

  'SO RUN ME THROUGH THIS ONE MORE TIME,' said Adam, holding down the 'close doors' button on the elevator as they entered it. 'You are going to pay me for sex.'

  'Yes.'

  'A hundred and fifty dollars.'

  'Yes.'

  'Okay.' Hunching his brow he felt his pony tail lift. The elevator stopped and the doors opened, 'But no, no, no, no, no,' he said, shaking his head and putting out his arm to stop her getting out, 'this is a wind-up!'

  She was holding out her room card.

  'Do you want to do this or not?' she asked.

  'You're nuts,' he said.

  'Why? To pay for sex or to pay for sex with you? For the latter, yes, you may have a point. We shall see,' a wild devilment shone in her eyes. 'I have never done this before,' she said, 'but I'm sure the less we speak about it, the better it is. For me.'

  A-non-y-mity,' he said, enunciating the word she had stressed at the bar as they sank their Bloody Marys.

  'I want anonymity,' she'd said, 'but more importantly I want to be in charge. I want to have sex with someone that I don't know very well, and I want to order it the way I like.'

  'O-kay,' he said slowly.

  'I'm entitled to a change. I have always had to have sex with people I knew.'

  He feared that she was going to get garrulous. And he struggled with himself, thinking, you sad bitch, on the one hand, but he also thought, this is a story, this is something to tell, she is a real character. There weren't enough weirdos in the world. And he saw too that he could also use this story with other more attractive younger women, to some advantage. He could make it a sort of confession, could claim to have been a male prostitute, women liked that kind of thing. So he started to laugh along with her. They would both be other people, desirable to themselves.

  'All right,' he said, 'your wish is my command,' and he stood behind her as she opened the door and he glanced up and down the corridor.

  When they were inside the room, he was a little depressed to see items of Jans about the place, a heavy book on the coffee table, a pair of khaki shorts on the back of a chair.

  'I shall go into the bathroom,' she said, 'and have a quick shower, then I would like you to do the same.'

  'Fair enough,' he smiled, taking the elastic band from around his hair. She looked at him critically.

  'Okay,' she said, 'okay,' and then she slipped into the bathroom.

  He looked at himself in the mirror and gave an apish grin in order to remind himself of who he was. Jauntily, he stepped out to the balcony to have a cigarette. It crossed his mind that he ought not to smoke, now the clock was ticking, he was on someone else's time. 'Ah, bollocks to it,' he said, propping himself up on the railing, with one foot swinging, the other supporting him. He squinted down below to the rhododendrons in the shade and tipped little bits of ash downwards. Jans book, open, resting upside down on the glass table near the balcony, looked like the roof to a Roman temple. Stepping forward, but keeping his cigarette-holding hand outside, he peeped down to read the back of it: 500 years of Western Cultural Life the cover read. He nodded. 'Good choice,' he said to himself. He noticed that the cover hung over the sides of the book, and with a single finger he poked the cover back, to make it neat. As soon as he did that, he caused the excess cover on the other side of the book to dimple and scuff a little, so with both hands, the cigarette gingerly held between two fingers, he attempted to turn it over and straighten it up. As soon as he turned it, he saw that the print was bold and black and minute and the pages almost transparent. A Bible. How weird is that?' Fumbling with the weight of it, he dropped some ash on to the page and leapt outside to blow it off the pages. It had made a mark, smudged the print, but it had not burnt. 'Bollocks,' he said to himself, closing the Bible, with the cover just about attached to it. He flung it back on the table as soon as he heard the bathroom door open.

  Annemieke was wearing a white towelling robe. Her hair was dry. She's probably just given her muff a wash, he thought.

  'Your turn,' she said, indicating the bathroom, and in he went, passing her between the bed and the dresser, saying, 'Sorry,' as he almost bumped against her and hearing her make some faint noise in return.

  In the mirror of the bedroom, Annemieke opened her mouth wide to check her teeth. She raised her arms to check that her armpits were smooth, and then she dropped her robe to look at her body. Glancing back up at her face, she saw she had the hang-mouth expression of a carp, her lips flaccid and glum. She shook it off and assumed a haughty air. She rubbed a hand across her breasts and stood sturdily with her feet apart. 'I can have whatever I want,' she said, and then she went to the balcony, naked, stood there briefly and pulled the curtains to.

  'Should I wash my hair?' Adam called from the bathroom.

  As you like,' she replied, hearing her voice ringing out in the empty room.

  'Shall I use the hotel shampoo or yours?'

  'I don't care,' she said.

  'Shall I do my teeth?'

  'Of course,' she said, about to mount the bed on all fours, wanting to stretch her back and legs a little.

  'Which one?'

  'What?'

  'Which toothbrush?'

  'Mine.'

  'Which is that?'

  'Oh, for God's sake,' she said to herself, as she pushed her arms out in front of her, lowering her chest and head to the bed. She sat up, 'I don't care. It doesn't matter.'

  'All right, all right,' he said with comic inflection.

  A German would have been perfect, she said to herself, all performance, no personality. A BMW Let's hope this man's not a Mini Cooper. She turned her head to look in the mirror past her rear. 'I'm like Cleopatra,' she said to herself, 'like a queen.' Reaching across the bed, she took the phone off the hook.

  Adam emerged with dark wet curls, and a towel around his waist. He ran a hand through his hair to stop the dripping on his face and chest. Here was the moment of truth, he told himself with forced bravado, dropping the towel.

  'Well,' said Annemieke, a single eyebrow aloft, 'we can work on it.'

  'Can I have a drink?'

  'Yes. Open some wine. There are some half bottles in the fridge.'

  She watched him walk over to the fridge, and bending over, select a bottle. At first he exposed his rear insouciantly and she saw the slightly spotty cheeks and the dark furrow between them. The muscles in his flanks twitched once or twice as he lowered his knees.

  'Red or white?'

  'Red.'

  'Okay. Here's the fellow.' All of this jolly repartee was to make him feel more
at ease but it made her feel uncomfortable. They were not what the English called 'mates'.

  'So, pour me a glass, take some for yourself, and then come over here and let's get started.'

  He glanced at her quickly in the mirror and saw the decline of the skin from her cheeks to her neck, the ragged skin tone of her upper chest. Her breasts were ample but looked elsewhere for their interest, they settled down low, ready for a bedtime story. Her stomach had runways of activity and although she was not out of shape, nor was she fat, there was something about her that failed to rouse him. He absolutely forbade himself to think about his mother. Or Jan. He could place himself in his mind's eye at a party or in a bar, telling the story. 'So did you get it up, then?' 'Well, it was a bit hit and miss but I came through.' Or, 'Well, after I nearly set fire to her old man's Bible, I fiddled about with the corkscrew, then I made my excuses and left.' Then for some reason, just as he whipped the cork from the bottle, he thought of George's wife Dorothy. He recalled the same facial expression—disappointment, underscored many times.

  Was this what women wanted? Was this really any sort of recompense? Or was she, as she said, like a man? No chance of a stiffy now. He barged into the chair with the shorts over it.

  'Come over here,' she said, shifting on the bed. She looked a proper hausfrau with a frown and her nose like a chewed toffee.

  He drank back his own glass and handed the other to her. Standing on her left side, his penis hung down like a bell pull, she could use it to summon room service.

  She sipped her wine noisily and handed him the glass to put down.

  'You sure you want to go through with it?' he asked, putting his own glass alongside hers on the bedside table, then added, 'Hang on; there's a noise out there. Maybe it's Jan?'

  Her chest rose and she said, 'I want you to give me oral sex now.'

  A great tidal wave of laughter rose in his chest and he slapped his hand to his face, covering his mouth, dragging down the skin below his eyes. Opening his eyes again to look at her he discerned fear in her eyes and he knew what this was all about—hope.

  All right. He would go along with it. God help the pair of them. The money would come in handy. He could get his next flight with it. Move on. He went to the end of the bed and knelt there, looking up at her as she parted her legs. He squinted upwards with an appraising eye like a chimney sweep and cleared his throat, twice, before starting to kiss her lower legs gently and ruefully as he made his ascent. Fortunately she smelt of soap. It could have been anyone. Not Jans wife, not his mum, not Dorothy...

  He pretended a sudden fit of delight at the discovery of her lower thighs and threw himself into kissing them, making the appreciative noises of a dinner guest. Her legs spread further apart and her mons pubis loomed before him, a dead end. Hastily, he felt down between his own legs to see if he couldn't give himself a bit of a hand, and was comforted by the warmth and familiarity of the connection made. With his other hand, he began to stroke and tap her pubic hair and his mouth continued to kiss her thigh but, unable to think straight, he kissed the same place repeatedly.

  Annemieke was anxious; she was beginning to feel unlovely. With a sudden jerking action she opened her legs further.

  He could ignore it no longer. Adam fell upon her and did his manly best, his spare hand still at work below. 'It's not her, it's someone else,' he was telling himself, but the smell of her took him elsewhere, not to previous girlfriends, nor to anywhere else organic, but to the smell of the Bible he'd opened.

  Annemieke lay quite still, as if she were at the spa, and he supposed he should continue until she told him otherwise. He had no idea whether she was enjoying herself; her pubic mound rose a little, at one point, and then lowered again. He kept at it in a reasonably conservative way. When, at last, he had a hard-on, he held on to it firmly. Suddenly her back arched and she started to mumble something about 'wanting it,' he felt a shudder through his cheeks as she pushed his face against her, both hands on the back of his head, and then she said to him, 'That's it.'

  He understood. He rose on his knees and entered her, the back of his hand wiping his mouth, and he didn't look at her until he was in full rhythm. She was silent. When he looked down she had her head way back, she'd thrown the pillow aside, and her tits moved sullenly and out of time but her body seemed grateful enough, and yes, at last, it could have been anybody. But just for safety's sake, he kept in mind Charlotte, the tall, endlessly-legged, perpetually amused young Caribbean mother.

  When he came, he sighed with relief and slumped a little but did not fall on top of her into an embrace and opening his eyes after a moment he saw her looking at him.

  'Get off me now,' she said, looking aside.

  'What's the matter?' he said, whisking himself aside, his tongue touching the tip of a hair between his teeth.

  She didn't answer. Oh Jesus, he said to himself, removing the hair surreptitiously. He'd been here before. He knew what it meant.

  There was a sudden noise at the door, a card was inserted and removed from the lock and the door shook a little.

  'That's Jan,' said Adam.

  'No,' she said, 'it can't be.'

  The door scuffed and stuck on the carpet but eventually gave way and she heard a voice saying, 'Hello? Hello? Anyone at home?'

  47

  WHEN LAURIE LAUGHED, she laughed hard and bright, her teeth exposed, 'Har, har, har!' They were sitting on the stairs of the church, side by side.

  Jan had been to Hong Kong with Annemieke and had been repulsed by the Cantonese with their spittle hawking, their brutal way of addressing each other, their constant stewing of all the worst smells in the world. He had felt as if he bathed in the steam of a bubbling pot of congee when they toured the streets. When he thought of Hong Kong, he recalled the fetid smell of the dried shrimps, little maggoty orange things, loaded into baskets and left in the carbon monoxide air of the streets outside the stores. He'd not been well at the time, having just come out the other side of some chemotherapy, nausea had been constantly at the back of his throat. While he was in recovery from early surgery on his chest, she'd come to his bedside, flicked through some women's magazines she'd brought with her and pointed out an article which explained that pain was formally described in hospitals on a scale of one to ten, with ten, the worst, being described as that of labour. He had probably got towards a four, she conceded.

  Laurie was still laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. He had made her laugh by offering her his impressions of Hong Kong. But his mind had scuttled crab-like out of the alleyways of Hong Kong and along the hospital corridors of Brugge.

  'Where there is dirt, where there is disorder, where there is noise, there is life,' she told him. 'This is a well-known saying among the Cantonese. It is a very colourful people, you are true. We have bad language and we shout it. If we can use a bad word, we do so. One gweilo, he asked me to translate a meeting we had with some of his suppliers, he was a client of mine, and I told him what had been said, more or less, He said he recognized a bad word, and I told him they'd said I would be a toothless old bitch sucking white men's dicks before they dropped their prices and that it was well known that my mother got fucked by dogs.'

  Again she laughed as hard as a boy.

  'I miss Hong Kong,' she said, as if she were confiding in him. 'I came to Europe to forget Hong Kong for a few weeks and then I could not be bothered with Europe so I came to America and then I did not like America so I came here. Now I know I will go back to Hong Kong next. To face the music.'

  'What music?'

  'This is a British expression,' she said, moving across the space between them to sit next to him. She scratched her knee tentatively, causing a thin white mark.

  'I have missed Chinese New Year,' she said, lowering her face on to her hands, her elbows on her thighs. 'Crazy place,' she said in a whisper, 'tchi-sin.'

  They looked across the brick path to the dried grass of the lawn before the church gate, part of a white picket fence. Dust bl
ew in little effete gusts and settled back down. Across the main street, a spring-loaded windowless door opened and a man stood as if about to leave the makeshift bar there, then changed his mind. Suddenly a woman emerged, swaying with evident pain in her hips and went down the wooden stairs to the small store below, opened it up and disappeared inside. She re-emerged with cigarettes and a bottle and went back up the stairs with the same slow discomfort. It was hot and airless.

  'I left my husband, you see,' said Laurie, 'and I started a relationship with an Australian, a client of mine. But my children, who are at secondary school, they would not speak to me and they stayed with their father. Hong Kong is very conservative and we bring our children up to be the same, to fit in, to work hard, to honour their parents, so this is not strange. My parents also would not speak to me; my mother, she closed the door in my face. Soon, all the things that made me love that man seemed to be like nothing at all. I crashed my car driving down from The Peak one night. I was hurt and went to hospital. After that I ordered my plane tickets for Europe and as soon as I was able to walk I left for the airport.'

  'Oh,' he said. 'What are you going to do when you get back?'

  'Maybe I won't go back.'

  'But you seem to miss it so much.'

  'True. But I don't know if I can go back. Because the people I love,' she paused, 'are not able to love me. Nobody, not him, the Australian, not my husband, not the children, not the parents, nobody came to the hospital. The Australian, you see, Brett his name was, horrible name, I had just finished my relationship with him and was moving out. So that's why he did not come. But the others could have come.'

  'But Laurie, perhaps they knew that you were fine or perhaps they were told not to visit because you were not well...'

  She shook her head and looked at him momentarily, then the pupils of her eyes rose up to the sky like dark kites.

  'No,' she said.

  'They are angry with you, but if you say sorry, they will forgive you.'

  She nodded without conviction.