Alabaster Conjugal 4

Rita ran the only B&B I could find in X-On-Sea with a vacant room. She didn’t like the look of my black dog. “What’s it called?” she said.

It was a fair question. I considered the options. Perhaps Gauguin or Cezanne. I decided on a compromise between the two. “Paul.”

“Doesn’t look like a Paul.”

I wondered if I’d made a mistake. “You don’t think?”  

She called to him and he ignored her, preferring to sniff a crimson stain on the hallway carpet like a regular Gauguin.

Rita was suspicious. I hadn’t helped Paul’s cause by using a string for a lead and one of Marnie’s red garter’s as a collar. Not that I was any better. I’d done my best to wipe the mud from my hair and hands, but digging in a forest after a heavy rain was a messy undertaking. She could see the soil under my fingernails.

“Is he trained?”

“Absolutely. Paul could win Crufts.”

She didn’t believe me. I imagined Rita had seen and heard it all over the years. The whole sorry parade of humanity ghosting through the rooms of her little guesthouse. The entire place reeked of the lost hopes and shattered dreams of the people who had stayed there. I could picture a middle-aged man who had never left home to make a life for himself, on holiday with his elderly mother, eating sausages, eggs, bacon and tomatoes in the tiny restaurant and getting loudly told off by his mother for smacking his lips; in the cheapest room, on the top floor, a prostitute would have surprised her nervous punter by instructing him to wash his cock in a basin before allowing him near her, and she would be relieved that the act of washing took longer than it did for him to ejaculate into the condom she also made him wear; there were the dangerous liaisons of cheating lovers, lying to their respective spouses, excitedly coming to the guesthouse for a fun weekend romp, and trying to hide their dismay when Rita deliberately took them into a room scrubbed clean of romance, with two single beds pushed together to make a ‘double’, and a low glass-topped wooden table with a kettle that tinkled with loose limescale, the flex tied in a knot, and a brass-coloured tray with a plastic pot filled with sachets for tea and instant coffee, and the infinite desolation of the patterned perforations on a paper doily, and the view from the window was not of the sea but an opposing wall, green with moss and criss-crossed with pipes; and then there was the most despicable type of guest, the one who was followed through a forest by a stray black dog after burying his statue of a wife in the early hours, a man who wanted desperately to transform into stone with her, but had been denied by nature yet again and was compelled to use a shovel to fill in the hole and drive back onto the loneliest of motorways, through the pouring rain, the thunder and the lightning, a storm of tears in his eyes, to this forsaken seaside town, X-On-Sea, where his only comfort was the chance of finding complete anonymity.

“Crufts?”

“The tournament for dogs.”

“Your dog does tricks?”

I nodded.

“Show me.”

“What, now?”

“Show me a trick and the room is yours.”

I looked at Paul. So far, the only ‘trick’ he’d performed was to lick my balls with his coarse tongue after I dabbed them with cream cheese and uttered the words, ‘Good boy.’

I nervously traced a finger along the tube of cream cheese in the pocket of my jacket. “Are you sure you want to see this?”

She was adamant.  

As I reached to undo the strings of my tracksuit bottoms, Rita knelt down to Paul and held out a hand, saying in a high voice, “Shake.”

Paul stopped sniffing. He looked at me and then her.

She repeated her request.

He slowly raised his paw and they shook ‘hands’.

“Clever boy,” she said, patting his head.

I tried to hide my surprise. “He is a clever boy.” I joined in with the pats.  

She stood upright, smoothing her ankle-length dress. “How long do you want the room for?” she asked.

“The whole summer.”

“Well, let’s see about that. I’ll give you a week and then we can talk it through. I’ve had trouble with artists before.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “With what?”

“Artists. They’re trouble.”

“I’m not an artist.”

She folded her arms and took on a stern tone. “I know exactly who you are so don’t pretend otherwise or you and your dog can find somewhere else to stay.”

I had seen a banner for a Summer Art Expo when I drove into town, stretched across the road that ran parallel to the promenade. I didn’t want to vex her anymore by trying to set her straight. I craved a shower, a bed with clean sheets, and a long sleep.

I decided to go with it. “I suppose I am an artist of sorts, but with a small ‘a’.”  

“I don’t want any funny stuff.”

“You won’t know I’m here.” 

She led Paul and I to a room on the top floor. She must have been in her late forties. She had that air of insouciance some older women possess from having enjoyed many lovers. I half-listened to her telling us about breakfast, lunch and dinner, listing the various rules.

I had to pay upfront in cash. 

 

***

I struggled to doze off. I wanted Marnie beside me, the two of us cuddled together, bodies entwined, whispering sweet nothings and making plans for a synchronised future.

Paul must have sensed my sadness. He hopped onto the bed and nuzzled into me.

I hated X-On-Sea for its small-mindedness and bigotry. Rita nearly refused me a room for having a dog. I could imagine her reaction if I had brought a statue with me. I knew the other people in town would be carbon copies. Their filthy prejudice had forced me to bury Marnie under the ground in a watery grave, as if she was an object of disgust and shame.

Not that Marnie was entirely blameless. Everything would have been different if she hadn’t eaten my last scotch egg. She had form when it came to greediness. In some ways, it’s how we started dating.

It was near closing time in a pub and she came up to me and downed my rum and coke. “Why’d you do that?” I said.

“Why’d you keep staring at me? You’ve been doing it all night.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

She burst out laughing. “Idiot. You’re not supposed to apologise.”

I had thought she was good-looking from across the pub, but up close I saw that she was something else – on a whole other level. “Do you want a drink?”

“I’ve just downed one.”

“You’re thirsty.”

“I am thirsty -- let’s have two rum and cokes and shots.”

“Sambuca?”

She shouted out, “Tequila.”

And we twirled through the night, finding ourselves in a club where we owned the dancefloor and had our first kiss. And a few hours later, in her bedroom, she told me I was a “good kisser” and we talked about how important kissing was and how some people had no idea how to kiss properly, sticking their tongues in too deeply, or they seemed to want to eat your face, or didn’t use any tongue whatsoever, and she said that “kissing told you everything you needed to know about a person”. And we were so drunk and off-our-faces that we thought this was undeniably true. And I noticed the posters on her walls and books on her shelves and I knew she was smart and that we saw people from the same angle and I would crave more of her when we reached the end of the night. And when we had sex she told me what she wanted me to do and she moaned loudly and cried out when she came. And afterwards she asked me why I had been so quiet and had apologised when I came, but she said it in a way that didn’t sound like she was mocking me. And she went to the bathroom wearing a green silk dressing gown with prints of pink lilies and returned with a bottle of cold red wine and my boots, which I had left by the front door. “I don’t want my flatmate to see your boots,” she said, only I was more confused by the wine, wondering why she stored and chilled bottles in the bathroom, not realising she had gone to the fridge in the kitchen. And we drank the wine from mugs and through the thin curtains and window I could hear the birds singing in the trees and later the engine of a rubbish truck, the whine of its rear loader, and the voices of binmen as they emptied the street. And in the bed of her room she told me her mother was “a control freak” and had been against her doing a journalism course as “journalists never earn any money”. And I listened to her talking and it was like an album of tracks that I never wanted to finish and so would replay over and over. And when I left her flat around noon, smiling into the bright sunlight, I had her mobile number and, bubbling like frothy potions inside of me, were her stories, the sound of her laughter, the taste of her kisses and the lines of her body. And I headed to the tube station, hungover but happy from feeling present in the world for a change. And sitting on the train, shuttled through an underground tunnel, I realised I was in love with the girl who had downed my rum and coke without asking.

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