Текст книги "The House on Fever Street"

Автор книги: Celina Grace

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

“Oh forget it.” Jake waved a hand. “It’ll be cool. You’re right, I do like her. Be good to have a woman in the house.”

Carl grinned. “As long as you don’t have her.”

“Dude!” Jake threw the red cushion at him. “What do you take me for?”

That was one of the conversations that would haunt him, later, one of the remembered verbal exchanges that convulsed him with horror. The terrible irony – the lost innocence – I was happy then, Jake thought. He addressed his questions to some careless, unheeding deity. Why can’t I turn back time and go back to those days? Why me? Why did you pick me to be there, at that party? Do I have to atone for the rest of my life? How long will I have to live this way? How long will I have to be punished?

Chapter Nineteen

Jake looked forward to Veronica’s arrival with an uneasy mixture of gloom and excitement. He wanted the vicarious thrill of knowing she was in the flat, seeing her every day, talking to her, watching her move about the place. Surely, he'd be able to catch a glimpse of her naked, or semi-clad, scuttling from bathroom to bedroom in her underwear? He’d been surprised to find out that she wanted her own room, with her own bed, and wondered at the strength of her attachment to his brother. But he soon came to realise that it was a quintessential part of her personality; this need for a bolthole, her desperation for a totally private place. In some ways, she was feline; a shy feral creature that tolerated affection but withdraw when the petting became too exuberant. During the first week she fitted a lock on her bedroom door, just a simple brass bolt, but Carl had sulked about in a way that amazed his younger brother.  With lowered brow, he’d stood outside the bathroom while Veronica showered, his arms folded, waiting until she unlocked the door and stepped out, swathed in a white towel, flushed and dewy from the steam. She’d smiled at her lover and pushed past him, lightly but dismissively.

“Why have you put a lock on your door?”

Carl said it in a low tone but Jake, standing awkwardly at the top of the stairs, heard him clearly. The two of them went into her new room and shut the door behind them. Jake hesitated for a moment, wrestling with his conscience. Then, the battle lost, he crept up to the door and pressed his ear against the cold paint of its surface.

He could hear the bass rumble of Carl’s voice and, less audible, Veronica’s softer tone. But what they were saying was muffled, as if he were listening to them underwater. After a moment, he stood back from the door, disgusted with himself. What was he hoping to hear? What was he trying to prove to himself?

In that house, though, it was too easy. Whispers rose from the hallway to the ceiling, coiling like smoke to the high ceilings, drifting up through the banisters. Raised voices bounced off the hard ceramic tiles of the kitchen. Lying in bed, Jake could hear blurred gasps and whimpers through the tiny holes of the ventilation bricks near the ceiling and would turn himself face down into his pillow, rigid against the sheets, shutting out the thought of what his brother was doing to Veronica in the room next door. Once, he’d not been able to stop himself from moving his hand to the rhythm of her gasps, his own climax reached as she cried out in orgasm. When his heart rate had slowed, he’d buried himself under the duvet, wincing at the feel of the cooling semen on the sheet, red with shame.

It wasn’t always like that, of course. Most of the time, it was just as it had been when it had been a bachelor flat, messy, cosy, a place to kick back and relax. Veronica did not fill the place with scented candles, cushions and flowers. She did only as much cleaning as he and Carl did – very little. With Veronica’s contribution, the already minimal rent had shrunk to something almost ridiculous. Occasionally Jake would feel guilty, especially when confronted with Mark’s moans about the state of the housing market. But he never felt guilty enough to move. Why would he move anywhere else when all he wanted was right here in this house?

They had a lot of fun, the three of them. They were young, comfortably off, good looking and healthy. They were nearly always out; beers after work in the old Victorian boozer three streets away; cocktails in Mayfair on a Friday night; languid, alcoholic Sunday afternoons in the gastro pub a tube stop away. There were parties, gatherings, summer barbeques; they spent hours slumped in cinema seats, lifting handfuls of popcorn to their mouths. They slouched around the Heath, smoked joints and, lying on a big tartan picnic rug, drank cans of sweet, fizzy cider.

They didn’t often have people round to Fever Street – they seemed to have an unspoken agreement that the house was just for the three of them. Sometimes, when Jake was home, and Carl was too, and they heard the click and thud of the door as Veronica walked in, there was almost a tangible, just-heard sigh of relief breathed by the house. Whenever they came through the front door, each one of them turned back to flip the lock before they moved away. World stay out. Carl, Jake and Veronica, stay in.

Before Veronica had moved in, Jake had allowed himself myriad fantasies. Veronica, surprised in the shower, glittering with water drops. Veronica, stumbling from her room on a Sunday morning, flushed and sleepy in her brushed cotton pyjamas and curling up on his bed to regale him with tales of her Saturday night. Veronica, swinging her narrow hips to Motown, as she prepared their dinner. None of these came to pass. The closest he got was when she was sitting next to him on the sofa, curled into the armrest, her legs tucked neatly beneath her. Carl was working late, immersed in some immeasurably boring finance deal. Jake was watching some piece of inanity of TV, pleasantly conscious of Veronica’s presence in the cosy, intimate warmth of the living room. He almost jumped as she suddenly shifted position, bringing her long narrow feet over to his legs. Disbelievingly, he felt her toes push under his thighs and flex themselves luxuriously against his jeans. He was almost immediately hard. He flicked a glance across to Veronica, not knowing what he was going to say.

She wasn’t even looking at him. Her head was bent, hair falling in a long golden sweep towards the glossy pages of her magazine.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “My feet are cold.”

“That’s okay.” His voice sounded quite normal.

She kept her feet there for the rest of the program, flexing her toes occasionally. After a while, Jake pulled discreetly at his jeans, hoping to ease the fabric that had bunched around his erection. He needed the toilet quite desperately by the time Carl came home but had been unable to get up, owing to the bulge in his jeans pointing outward like an accusing finger.

“Christ!”

Carl threw his briefcase across the floor of the living room and followed it with both of his shoes, eased and kicked off his feet as he moved. They scuttered across the boards like large black beetles, coming to rest against the legs of the coffee table. Veronica looked up, smoothing the hair back from her face.

“Hard day at the office?”

“You have no idea. The fucking muppets I work with…”

The rest of the sentence was lost in a hoof of exhaustion. Carl bent over his girlfriend and kissed her firmly on the mouth. Jake kept his eyes on the screen. His brother slung himself into an armchair, one long leg dangling nonchalantly over one arm. His black hair was raked back, thick with styling wax. It looks stupid, thought Jake treacherously and then berated himself for being an immature and jealous fool.

“What’ve we got to eat?”

Veronica smiled. “You know where the fridge is.”

“This is not good enough. I want my dinner on the table when I get home. Served up, by you, in a tightly strapped corset and black stockings.”

“I refuse to ruin my best underwear by filling it with spaghetti bolognaise.”

Carl stared at her for a moment, nonplussed, and then gave a great bellow of laughter.

“Come here, Stepford Wench. I’ll let you off this time.”

Jake looked away as Carl pulled his girlfriend on to his lap and kissed her.

The three of them spent so much time together but only rarely did Jake feel like a fifth wheel, the odd one out, a gooseberry. Partly it was Carl, protective of his little brother and trying not to make him feel awkward. Jake realised this and loved him the more for it. And partly it was Veronica’s distaste for public displays of affection, for overt sentiment and too-enthusiastic touching. She kept herself at a physical distance, even from her lover. With almost anyone else, such reserve would have been repulsive but she somehow managed to make her standoffishness seem right, natural, the way it should be.  It helped that her smile was warm – it softened the ice-maiden image.

Jake had hoped that living with Veronica might lessen his obsession. He’d assumed that by seeing her every day, in every domestic situation, constantly observing her very human characteristics and behaviours, that this might possibly knock her off the pedestal, both erotic and chaste, that he’d placed her on. He’d also hoped that by seeing her with Carl, by seeing the evidence of her love for his brother before his very eyes, might also persuade his heart, groin and head that she was not for him. That she never would be. A month after her little brass lock installation, he wasn’t convinced that it was happening. If anything, he seemed to be getting worse.

Every day, he struggled not to open her door and plunge himself into her possessions, rifle through her underwear drawer, prostrate himself on her bed. So far he was winning, but how long could he hold out? He spent too much time already mooning over the lacy frivolities she left drying on the radiators. Things had got to a bad point when he found himself rubbing the ball of his thumb over the splayed bristles of her toothbrush, thinking that’s been in her mouth, next to her tongue…

Most of all, though, he was afraid of Carl finding out. Not so much because of the retribution that would no doubt be meted out to him in some violent and prolonged fashion – more that he couldn’t bear to see his brother hurt. Nor could he bear to break the closeness that seemed to exist between the three of them, despite the roiling emotional tension bubbling under the surface. Things were so easy in the house; he would hate to be the one to change that. Better, by far, to swallow down his own feelings in the hope that one day he’d be able to rise above them.

He loved to look at her, though. He’d perfected the art of the sideways glance, the use of a mirror to observe while being unobserved himself. He loved to watch her read, flicking his glance over her face as she turned the pages. She always frowned slightly as she read. He loved to watch her eat, to watch her long neck undulate as she swallowed. She liked to swathe herself in Carl’s dressing gown as she ate breakfast, her long toes flexing away from the cold kitchen tiles. The sleeves hung down past the slender tips of her fingers, trailing in the marmalade on her toast. Jake would watch as she’d laugh and lift the material to her mouth, licking the smear of jam away with a crumb-strewn pink tongue.

At the same time, he was too nervous to look for long. His eyes seemed super-charged with the weight of his passion and it seemed impossible that Carl would be blind to the significance of his gaze. So he watched her in snatches, grabbing glimpses here and there.

He found her long blonde hairs in the bathroom, trailing from the taps, twined around the neck of the shampoo bottle. Once, from the bottom of the bath, he picked up a crinkled pubic hair, softer and lighter than the ones that fell from him and his brother. Holding it in his pinched fingers, thinking about where it had come from, he pulsed and stiffened with blood.

He grew to savour the moments of standing in the doorway to her room, talking to Veronica as she lay curled cat-like on bed. The room smelled of perfume, warm female skin and the scent of the dying flowers drooping in the vase on the windowsill. Once or twice, he daringly went over and sat on the bed next to her, wondering what she would say if he lay down beside her. Wondering was about as far as he ever got. She had a battered old teddy bear that shared the pillow next to hers – whenever Jake sat next to her, he could see it staring accusingly at him with its black button eyes. When she sat in bed, she wore cream satin pyjamas that fell in luscious, shiny folds across her legs. Once, she wore a black nightgown with a tight lace bodice, through which her nipples protruded in tiny pink points. He’d masturbated furiously over that nightdress for nearly a fortnight.

Jake knew he wasn’t the best at facing reality. But after Veronica had been there two months, he had to reluctantly face the fact that he was getting worse, not better. Every evening was a struggle; the weekends were two days of sweet agony. He tried his own version of aversion therapy. He savoured the moments when she said something stupid (not often but they did occur) and repeated them to himself again and again. He tried to mentally freeze-frame a picture of her face when it was startled or screwed up in laughter and in anything other than its normal, beautiful repose. He tried to think of her in negative terms; he told himself that she was cold, skinny, flat-chested. He even tried deliberately listening when she was in the bathroom, straining his ears for the sound of a fart or the splash of a turd. Then he’d hide himself away when she flushed and left the bathroom, only to race back inside to take deep breaths of the fading pungency that remained, only half disguised by the odour of synthetic flowers. He hugged these moments to himself – it was as if he knew a secret about her that she didn’t, that he’d discovered something about her she was desperate to hide – the tell-tale fact of her own animal being.

It only partly worked. In some ways it made things worse. He was more aware of her than ever – she was more there in the house; more physical, more real. At times the whole house seemed full of her scent, the very rooms filled with her breath, the walls warmed by her skin and the ceilings lit up in the flickering golden light of her hair.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want a girlfriend, a proper girlfriend. Someone to come home too, someone to call up when you wanted to moan about your day, someone to read the papers with in bed, breaking off from the review section to indulge in sleepy Sunday sex. All the sort of things that single people thought a relationship was all about. Despite Veronica’s adherence to separate rooms and minimal public contact, there was still enough heat between her and Carl to make Jake sometimes feel superfluous to requirements. Sometimes they were curled cosily on the sofa when he came in from work and although they disentangled themselves fairly sharply, he could never see the dents in the sofa cushions without feeling it as a little blow to his heart.

As much as a girlfriend would have been nice, there just didn’t seem to be one in the offing. Perhaps it was his nurtured passion for Veronica that blunted his attraction to other girls – perhaps they could sense, in some dim feminine way, that he wasn’t playing the mating game with a full deck of cards. He was spending less and less time with his other friends, now that Fever Street was generating its own little club of three. He still caught up with Mark for the occasional drink but the cord of their friendship, woven back in college, was fraying ever more slightly every time they met up.

It was almost inevitable, what happened on that night. Looking back, Jake could see that – it stood out a mile, it was something waiting to happen. Not everything that happened that night, obviously, not the worst, the most awful thing that happened. But the other, the precursor to the horror – it was inevitable. Why do I see that now, thought Jake. Why couldn’t I have seen it then? Why can I only see now what a dangerous game we were all playing?

Chapter Twenty

It started innocuously – perhaps momentous days always did. Afterwards, Jake was to think back with a kind of incredulity to the complete and utter normality that had reigned all day, right up to the moment where Candice Stanton turned around and said ‘yes’. It was such a normal Friday night, such an average, everyday end of the week.  At times, he still couldn’t quite believe what had happened later that evening. For morning after morning once that day had passed, he would wake up and in the first thirty seconds of consciousness, he would have forgotten. For thirty seconds every morning, it was as if it hadn’t happened. Then with full wakefulness, back would come the remembrance, crashing back into his skull, again and again, undulled in all its horror. It was unbearable. More than once he considered whether not waking up at all would be better in the long run. But he was scared. He’d always been a coward, that was his problem. If he hadn’t been such a coward then, he wouldn’t have fallen in with their plans and things would be very different now. He could scarcely bear to think of it, how his weakness had brought him to this moment. If he’d just said something then…. If he’d just stuck to his guns and stood up to his brother, for once…

The morning of that day had been so humdrum. It was a Friday, which always put a little bit of a spring in Jake’s step. It was early July, a beautiful morning, the sky pearled with cirrus clouds, the sunlight already warming up the streets. As Jake came down the stairs, buttoning his shirt, Carl was clattering irritably around the kitchen in search of his keys.

“Fucking keys, keys, keys…”

“Have you looked in the bowl?” Jake slung himself into one of the kitchen chairs and reached for the cereal packet.

“Of course I’ve looked in the fucking bowl, Jake, not having had a full frontal lobotomy overnight. Fuck’s sake…” Carl swept a copy of Maxim off the table and gave a cry of triumph as the glint of a car key was revealed.

Jake rolled his eyes.

“Man, you get tetchy when V’s got a day off.”

“What?”

Jake felt a sudden tiny lurch.

“Hasn’t she got the day off?” How am I going to explain remembering that when her boyfriend hasn’t?

Luckily Carl was too irritated to notice.

“I get tetchy when anyone in the world has got a day off. I never get days off. I never get minutes off.”

“Weighed against that, you do earn about a million quid a day.”

“Well, how come I’m always so broke then? Where does it all go? I think you steal it. I think you break into my bank account and salt it away slowly, note by note.”

He was grinning by now and Jake felt the tension in the room dissolve. He pushed past his brother to get to the kettle.

“Doing much tonight?” said Carl.

“Nah. Not much. You?”

“We’ve got some moribund party to go to. Wanna come?”

Jake kept his face turned to the slowly boiling kettle, if only to hide the grin that was struggling to make it onto his face. A whole evening with Veronica, and a party too – where Carl might find others to talk to and then he would get her to himself for almost all of the evening.

“Sure, why not?” he said, pleased at the casual tone of his voice. The kettle boiled, flicking its off button with a sharp, condemnatory click.

“See you later then. The party’s in Mayfair but we won’t schlep until about half ten or so. Alright?”

“Cool. Have a good day, bro.”

His good mood continued for the rest of the day, dampened only slightly by the myriad little annoyances of crowded London streets and public transport. Fridays were always a good day at work – they all knocked off at one for a pub lunch and a pint and spent the afternoon in a slightly alcoholic haze, messing around, emailing the better of the week’s spam to each other, and waiting for it to be five o’clock. Then the glorious moment of switching off the computer; rolling back the chair; heading out into the streets wrapped in the heady expectation of two days of relaxation, lie-ins, heavy drinking and a whole lot of lazing around. The whole working week is worth it for the Friday night feeling, thought Jake as he struggled through the crowds to the tube station. He felt like bursting into song. The weekend and a party with Veronica – it didn’t get much better than that. The good weather had held and the evening streets were drenched in golden light.

There was no one in at the house on Fever Street when he got back home, but in his joyous mood, that was no hardship. He whacked a CD in the stereo and boogied around the kitchen in his socks, clattering out the drumbeats on the table with two wooden spoons. He took his first beer from the fridge, the glass bottle lusciously beaded with condensation. The first swallow tasted so good it almost brought tears to his eyes. Jake glopped a can of spaghetti into a saucepan, skidded over to the bread bin and threw a couple of slices into the toaster. He yelled out the song lyrics as he stirred the spaghetti, thinking once again how fine it was to live in such a big house that you never even had to worry about annoying your neighbours.

Three songs in and the spaghetti wolfed down, he heard the front door close and the clop of high heels on the wooden floor of the hallway. Immediately his heart leapt. Veronica. When would this feeling ever stop? He had a sudden, horrible vision of himself at forty, still mooning around deep in calf-love, following her around like a gangling, six-foot shadow. He forced his face into nonchalance as she came through the door.

She looked tired but just as beautiful, in a strained and drowsy way. Her eye shadow has smudged a little, giving her the look of a sleepy-eyed panda, and her hair was pinned up carelessly.

“Hi Jake.”

“Hey.”

“How was your day?”

Veronica slung her bag into the corner of the kitchen and flopped into the chair opposite him. Jake smiled at her, hoping he didn’t have any remnants of spaghetti caught between his teeth.

“My day was fine. Friday’s are always good. Thought you had a day off?”

“Hah, I wish. That’s next Friday. Are you coming to the party tonight?”

Jake popped the top of another beer, as casually as he could.

“Sure. I mean, if that’s okay with you and Carl.”

She gave him a glorious smile. “It’s fine with me.”

Jake hoped she hadn’t noticed the way his face lit up at her smile. He watched her covertly as she moved about the room, getting herself some supper. When tired, she moved in a kind of languid, sensual sway, stretching her jaw occasionally in a slow, luxurious yawn. Jake gripped his slowly warming bottle of beer. He watched Veronica’s reflection in the twilight-smudged glass of the kitchen window, telling himself that he should leave the room and stop torturing himself.

What happened later that evening was horrible. There wasn’t another word for it. It was horrible. Part of the reason it was so horrible was that the whole early part of the evening, the entire time they were getting ready for the party; having drinks in the bar, walking towards the house listening to the music throbbing from the windows; in the whole of that time, Jake didn’t believe the three of them had ever been so easy with each other, so casually affectionate, so relaxed in each other’s company.

After he and Veronica had eaten their respective dinners, they opened a bottle of champagne. No real reason – it just felt as if it were the right thing to do. They’d clinked glasses and sipped, toasting each other in love and success. Jake was amused to see how she wrinkled her nose as she drank her glass of fizz.

Carl had come in about an hour later and found them flushed and a little giggly from the alcohol. He’d wasted no time in joining them and had set the scene for the rest of the night by immediately racking up several neat, snowy little lines on the back of a CD cover. Veronica had tutted but at his grin and shake of the head, she’d shrugged and taken the tightly rolled banknote that he’d held out to her. Jake had followed suit and felt the numbness in his throat through his entire hot shower.

They’d started off in Bar Twenty, rejecting the local Irish bar as being too rough for their attempt at Friday night sophistication.  The place was jumping but Carl’s quick and practised eye soon spotted a vacant two seats at the bar. Veronica, of course, got one of them and Carl and Jake alternated, swapping as their feet and backs began to ache from propping up the bar.

They drank cocktails, just for the hell of it, daring each other to try the most lurid concoctions on the menu. Because of the coke they’d had earlier, Jake didn’t feel drunk ‘til much later in the evening. He felt invincible then, packed into the crowd at Bar Twenty, feeling the warmth of Veronica’s thigh against his hip as they chatted and laughed and joshed each other. And amazingly, he didn’t once get tongue-tied and stammer – indeed, he seemed to be on top form for once, sending Carl and V into hiccupping fits of laughter again and again. Carl even mentioned it to him, once he’d finished coughing his Sex on the Beach across the bar.

“Did you take a funny pill today, or what, bro? You’re on fire.”

“I’m always this funny – it’s just you’re never listening.”

Carl punched him gently on the shoulder.

“You’re just trying to impress the lady.”

Jake laughed, hoping his voice hadn’t betrayed the sudden tremor. “Lay-dees.”

“Too bad, V,” said Carl. “Looks like you’re not enough for him.”

Jake laughed again, more shrilly. He was relieved to see Veronica laughing too, and shaking her golden head.

“You’ll spoilt for choice in here, Jake,” she said. “I feel quite outclassed.”

He made a too quick denial and she laughed again. He realised she was much drunker than he was. As Carl ordered another round of drinks, he wondered whether to mention the fact and almost as quickly, dismissed the thought. Veronica was a big girl – she could take care of herself. And if not, he was there to take care of her instead.

They slipped easily into another topic of conversation, the words running freely from their tongues. Veronica’s face was flushed; her eyes glittered under the dim lights of the bar. Carl looked more saturnine that usual, the sharp line of his jaw smudged with five o’clock shadow.

“Tell me about when you were little,” said V, slurring just a little. Jake thought it made her sound even sexier.

“Like what?” said Carl.

“Like anything. Like, what’s your first memory of Jake? Do you remember him being born? What was he like as a little boy? Did you used to have lots of fights?”

“Course we did.” Carl ruffled Jake’s hair in a patronising fashion and Jake cuffed his arm away in annoyance. “He was just a little, screaming girly wimp at school and I always had to jump in and stop him getting twatted by the bigger kids. It was so embarrassing.”

“Fuck off,” Jake said, half irritated, half amused. “I didn’t even answer to the same surname as you at school, I was so mortified that you were a blood relative.”

Veronica giggled. “Come on, I bet you were both really cute. I’ve seen those photos of you both, butter wouldn’t melt in your mouths.”

“Butter wouldn’t…” Carl left the sentence unfinished and they all sniggered.

After another round of drinks, they were keen for a change of venue but there was something they all had to do before they left. They squeezed into the one tiny cubicle in the men’s toilets, giggling and shushing each other. Jake was pressed so close to Veronica he could smell the heady orange tang of Cointreau on her breath. He fought against the impulse to lick her tongue with his own.

Carl had loads of coke, three grams worth in a smudged plastic bag. Jake bent low over the toilet seat, trying not to look at the urine-splashed floor. This is such a glamorous drug, he thought ironically, grimacing as the powder hit the mucus membranes high up in his nostrils. He straightened up, sniffing and pinching his nostrils together to kill the burn.

Veronica went next and Jake took the opportunity to gaze at the curve of her spine, at the way the fabric of her dress pulled taut about her hips. For a moment, he stared intently at the rounded contours of her buttocks, wondering what underwear she was wearing. Then Carl cleared his throat, just a little too loudly and too close to Jake’s ear and he looked away, feeling his face heat up.

“Where next?”

“What about that party?”

“Nah,” said Carl unexpectedly. “Let’s not bother. It’ll be full of City boys and I’ve had enough of that at work today. Let’s find some real dive and get down and dirty.”

Veronica giggled.

“Sounds good to me.”

They stood in the street outside the bar, pondering the possibilities. It was one of the very few warm nights of an English summer, warm enough for bare feet and shoulders, the merest hint of a breeze lifting hair and light clothing. All at once Jake felt invigorated by excitement, positively fizzing with it. He bounced a little on his toes. Suddenly, the realisation hit him – that he was young and fit and good looking, with money burning a hole in his pocket, his cool-as-fuck brother and a gorgeous girl standing beside him. It suddenly overtook him and it seemed that nothing, but nothing, could bring him down. He almost whooped aloud.

“Let’s walk,” he said, feeling the grin on his face but unable to control it.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. Somewhere. There’s another bar up here…”

The three of them sauntered off down the road. There were people everywhere, walking, shouting, darting across the roads to the blaring horns of the cars that sped along the street. Jake walked behind Veronica, watching the swing of her hips, the swaying curtain of blonde hair above the curve of her waist. Carl had his hand resting on her hip and Jake watched his brother’s fingers, imagining what it must feel like to feel the flex of Veronica’s haunch beneath your palm, the warmth of the skin beneath the cloth beneath your hand.