Chapter Two
Lilith
Santa Marita cosseted me like an indulgent maiden aunt. I had lived in this small town on Spain’s east coast for nearly five years: alone, self-reliant, content. When I was painting she allowed me to disappear, and for weeks on end I would retreat to my studio without speaking to a soul. In return for this misanthropy, my neighbours would leave baskets of fruit and bottles of wine at my door for when I was ready to face the world and be a grown-up again.
When I did emerge, on a high and thrilled with my own genius, the town would welcome me back into the fold, plying me with beer in Benedicta’s smoke-filled bar, protecting me from the lurking paparazzi yet proudly displaying every positive newspaper clipping that mentioned me, until the cycle began again. I jogged around Santa Marita’s streets, sketched every man, woman and dog, and swam in the secluded mill-pond bay, yet until the day I was forced to leave I never realised it was my home.
*****
On a bright evening in late May I stood at my easel, bare brown feet cool on white marble. Sunlight still streamed in through studio windows that opened out onto the cobalt sea, Johnny Buckle was nothing more than an unpleasant memory, and all was well with my world.
I painted to music. Gounod’s Faust tumbled and soared into the air around me as I added the final details to my latest work, but just as Mephistopheles arrived to announce Faust’s damnation my apartment buzzer sounded, and I reluctantly turned the volume down. I padded across to the doorway and stretched to reach my intercom. ‘Whoever you are, you’d better have a bloody good excuse for disturbing me.’
‘I’ve brought alcohol and food to appease the gatekeeper – will that do?’ a laid-back voice, tinged with a soft West Country burr, crackled over the intercom.
I grinned and pressed the button that unlocked the front door. Nat Carlin was a fellow expatriate, a feckless, easy-going surfer who ostensibly worked in an internet café in Santa Marita’s tiny centre. He was also a pharmaceutical genius who amused himself by creating his own extensive range of hallucinogenics and stimulants for personal use, and cultivating a splendid year-round crop of skunk that he sold to the local slacker population.
‘Hey, stranger.’ I wrapped my arms around my visitor’s waist and he bent down to kiss me on the lips.
‘Beware of geeks bearing gifts.’ Nat held up a supermarket carrier bag. ‘Reckoned you’d be too caught up in your creation to bother about such a trivial detail as food.’
‘Thanks.’ I broke away and unpacked bread, cheese and a sun-warmed bottle of Rioja. ‘I’m almost finished. Another day and I’ll be free again – nothing to do but divide my time between beach and bar.’
‘How dreadful.’ Nat was already opening the bottle. ‘And that’ll last for how long? I give it three days before your horrific work ethic kicks in and the unstoppable Lilith Bresson feels the need to start on her next masterpiece...’ He stopped his goading as he saw my canvas. ‘Fuck, that’s good, Lili.’
‘Lilith. And yes, I know.’
‘Sorry. Lilith.’ He peered a little closer at the two beautiful, onyx-haired young women who lay entwined and oblivious to his gaze. ‘Hey, isn’t that Rosario?’
‘Yup.’
‘But she’s your cleaner.’
‘Yup. She gave me hell for not giving her anything to do, and I had a commission, so I decided to ask her to do a sitting. With her girlfriend.’
‘Jesus.’ Nat stared at the painting for at least half a minute, and his thoughts were virtually audible. ‘Oh Jesus. You get paid to paint lesbians. Actually doing it, right in front of you. You’re making your goddamn living from painting hot women getting it on.’
‘Yup. And you don’t even want to know what I’m charging my client to watch me work on the webcam.’
Nat shook his head in disbelief. ‘I hate you. I really, really hate you.’
‘Thank you.’ I rubbed at my left shoulder, driving my knuckles deep into the joint. ‘Hell, I ache. It’ll take me a week just to stand straight. I’ve spent so long hunched over the bloody thing I feel like Quasimodo.’
‘D’you want me to work on it, lovely?’ Nat’s voice carried a note of hope that always made me smile. ‘I have special rates for lucky bastards who paint filthy women.’
‘Okay.’ I sat down at a kitchen chair and pulled my vest top over my head. ‘Just try and keep your eyes on the job, sex pest,’ I warned as he began to knead at the tight knots between my shoulders, his practised hands avoiding the hard nub of jagged bone on my left scapula.
After ten minutes’ dutiful massage, Nat’s hands began to wander, as I knew they would, and he let his fingers drift softly over my left breast. I glanced at the canvas, then at my watch. It was past seven o’clock, so technically I was finished for the day, and there were perhaps two hours’ work still to do at most on a piece that would be completed a week ahead of schedule. Nothing one last early morning wouldn’t fix, and the closest I ever got to slacking.
Nat began to make lazy circles around my nipple and as I leaned back I could feel his erection pressing into my back. I shook my head in mock disgust. ‘You’re just a walking hard-on, aren’t you, Mr Carlin?’
‘So? It saves you the hassle of dating and other pointless social interaction.’
I tried to remember how long it had been since my last decent fuck and thought back to two weeks ago and a doe-eyed young bank teller who had wandered into Benedicta’s. Too damn long: I decided to allow myself this. ‘Let’s take this to the bedroom,’ I suggested. ‘We don’t want to knock anything over in here do we?’
*****
My bedroom was a study in minimalism. It was nearly as big as the studio and dominated by a king-sized bed that was covered in white linen sheets and pillows and placed dead centre on the marble floor. An abstract canvas hung above the headboard, a set of industrial metal drawers held clothes folded as if still on display in a boutique, and a single orchid stood in a vase fashioned from a test tube. Nothing out of place, nothing excess to need: my life summarised in a single room.
Nat’s sun-bleached blond curls bounced across a bank of pillows as I pushed him back onto the bed. In one move I pulled his shorts down and threw them onto the floor, releasing his eager erection. As he scrabbled at a condom wrapper I crooked my thumb into the waistband of my jeans and G-string, stepped out of my clothes and kicked them under my bed to be retrieved and folded when I’d finished.
‘Oh God, you’re gorgeous. Don’t think this is going to last very long,’ Nat gasped as I straddled his hips, parted my damp labia with paint-stained fingers and slid onto his erect cock, suddenly desperate for a quick, hard fuck.
‘Go for it.’ I dropped my left hand to my clit and rubbing gently as Nat began to thrust his hips upwards in a race to see who might come first.
He won, pushing deep inside me and climaxing in moments, but before his cock began to soften I had brought myself to my own silent, contained orgasm. I fell across his chest and placed a lazy kiss on his cheek. ‘I needed that. Thank you.’
Nat returned the gesture, planting his kiss into my hair. ‘Used and abused again,’ he murmured, already heading towards sleep. ‘Good job I like you.’
*****
I stood with my head bowed under the pounding force of the shower, letting the scalding water continue Nat’s work on my shoulder. My visitor would sleep like a reclining Adonis for an hour or so, before reluctantly leaving for an evening shift at the café. We might meet again later that night if I still felt like his company, or it could be days or weeks before our paths crossed again. Whatever, Nat would be flirtatious and benignly opportunistic and the threads of this easy, low-maintenance friendship could be gathered up without issue.
I was just starting to consider a more leisurely repeat performance when I heard voices. At first I assumed Nat was calling to me and I was just about to reply when the second voice drifted through. In that instant, my warm, tidy world froze and cracked around me and I reached into my bathroom
cabinet to grab an inhaler that hadn’t been used in months. I pulled my bathrobe over my tensed shoulders and stepped out to meet my unexpected guest.
Nat sat on the bed, a hastily grabbed t-shirt just about covering his modesty as he faced the intruder. ‘Sorry mate. Didn’t think her next client was due for another hour.’
I stood on the threshold. ‘Nat, I don’t think you’ve met my father.’
*****
Sir Simon Montfort CBE sat at my table in his crumpled, grubby linen suit and polluted the air with his presence. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’ he asked. I made a note to count my cutlery once he had left.
‘There’s mineral water in the fridge. Help yourself.’
‘I’d appreciate something stronger.’
‘That’s reserved for invited guests. How the fuck did you get into my apartment?’
‘It was quite simple, really.’ My father gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘I told the concierge I was your adoring daddy – armed with a few old school photographs as proof – and I needed to tell you your grandmother was dead.’ He surreptitiously brushed the dandruff from his shoulders; whatever dye he was currently using to keep his hair a hideous shade of chestnut clearly wasn’t agreeing with him. The dust spiralled and floated across my kitchen on a shaft of light from the setting sun and I felt sick.
‘I know. Three years dead. The first time you told me she was gone I cracked open the Bollinger and stayed pissed for a week.’
That my father didn’t reproach me spoke volumes. Yet again, he clearly needed me far more than I had ever needed him.
‘So. What do you want?’ I finally asked.
‘This might just be a social visit. Perhaps I thought it was time to rebuild bridges. Did you consider that, Clarissa?’
‘Not for a second. And if you call me that again I’ll throw you back onto the street myself.’
‘I’m sorry. Lilith.’ My father said the name as though it were a profanity. He narrowed his eyes and I knew he was choosing his next words. He gave a nervous gulp of air as he worked up enough courage to explain his sudden reappearance. ‘You’ve, ah, heard of a Lady Albermarle?’ Under pressure, he returned to the same bumbling style he had adopted as an MP.
‘No. Why? Are you fucking her?’
He actually winced at my words. ‘There are times when you disgust me. And no, I’m not. Actually, she runs an exclusive island retreat -’
‘What, some ridiculous nursery for spoilt bastards exhausted from too much wealth and privilege? A couple of weeks of yoga and wheatgrass to recover from being a millionaire?’
‘Don’t be so bloody facetious,’ my father snapped, his Adam’s apple bobbing with nerves and irritation. ‘I’ve recently been a guest there myself.’
I widened my eyes. ‘Really? You never struck me as the joss-stick type.’
‘It’s nothing like that.’
Ten minutes of his malodorous presence and I was tired of him already. ‘Look, as delightful as this conversation about your holiday is, I’ve got a life I’d like to get on with. So why don’t you just tell me why the hell you’re here?’
‘Well if you insist on being so direct, I need a favour.’
‘For fuck’s sake. How much do you owe this time?’
‘It’s not a debt as such. There was a slight misunderstanding over my hospitality bill, that’s all.’
‘And this ‘misunderstanding’ – it wouldn’t be of the ‘left without paying’ variety, would it?’
‘I had every intention of settling my debts. There was some difficulty in processing my credit card.’
‘That’s because they only bloody work if there’s credit there,’ I snapped. ‘And I told you last time, I’m never bailing you out again.’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that on this occasion.’ My father’s cold, predatory smile returned. ‘I’ve got you some work.’
‘I don’t need work, for fuck’s sake. I’ve got a waiting list that could take five years to work through.’
‘You don’t understand. I’ve committed you to this, Lilith.’
I shivered. There was a sudden victorious look on my father’s face that I hadn’t seen in years. ‘Go on.’
‘Lady Albermarle has refused late payment. She’s decided that she would rather have a portrait by the notorious Lilith Bresson. Painted in situ at Albermarle Hall.’
‘Well golly fucking gosh how terribly delightful for her. Now get out.’
‘That’s enough.’ My father held up a hand that was prematurely stippled with liver spots. ‘You will let me finish.’
‘Or?’
‘I’ll be forced to adopt a more formal approach to a request that, to me, appears to be perfectly reasonable.’
‘Oh God, you talk such shit. And if I say no?’
This was his big moment. ‘I pull a few of my remaining strings and get this enforced.’ Like some third-rate magician he produced a letter from his jacket and handed it to me with a flourish. ‘And this, my beloved daughter, is a restraining order that bans you from setting foot within five miles of your half-brother. It cites your unreasonable, threatening and frankly unpredictable behaviour as a threat to the safety of a disabled, vulnerable child. I must say, after your ridiculous performance live on air, it was easy to find the necessary legal chaps to draft the thing.’
‘You bastard.’
This man, who had willingly abandoned his damaged, fragile wife and his tainted daughter, who had lied again and again and betrayed any value he had espoused in his inglorious political career, gloated whilst I read the litany of petty fabrications.
This man sat at my table and smiled, because he knew he had won. I sat opposite him and wished him dead as he feigned indifference to my fury.
‘Under the circumstances, Lady Albermarle has been extremely understanding. She appreciates that you must have commitments, loose ends so to speak, that need attending to.’ He picked up his vile document and slid it back into its envelope before tucking it into his breast pocket with a smug pat. ‘You have a week. Blaine expects you no later than nine, on the evening of June the third.’ He stood and brushed the fresh layer of scurf from his jacket. ‘Feel free to call at Foxrush for drinks once you’re finished, won’t you? I’m sure your stepmother will be delighted to see you.’
Chapter Three
Lilith
On the morning of June the second, I went for my final run in Santa Marita. The Plaza del Cristo, with its towering plane trees and puddles of dappled shade, marked the close of my eight-mile circuit, and I had already begun to slow my pace as I rounded the final corner and pounded past Benedicta’s, past the memorial to the town’s legion of Civil War dead, and past @, the internet café where Nat pretended to work as he honed the perfect programme to hack MI5.
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue thundered in my ears and I could feel my pulse throb in my temples as I touched the sun-warmed bench that marked my finish line. I placed my left foot on the peeling green paintwork, pushed the heel down to stretch my Achilles tendon, swapped feet and repeated. My daily ritual.
I turned off my MP3 player and gave my head a moment to deal with the sudden silence. I knew I was courting deafness if I continued to listen to music at a volume that would make anyone else’s eardrums bleed, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned, it was only real music if I could still hear a phantom beat echoing in my skull three hours after I’d switched it off.
‘I’m surprised the pigeons haven’t issued you with a noise abatement order.’
To my dismay, Nat had seen me run past the café window and came to meet me with a bottle of mineral water. ‘Thanks.’ I took the water and wiped away the crystal beads of condensation with my thumb before taking a grateful drink.
‘I was going to call when I’d finished my shift. There’s this cool gig at Ben’s tonight – thought you might fancy it if you weren’t busy.’
I shook my head, and sweat spattered down onto the pavement. ‘Sorry. Stuff to do.’<
br />
‘Maybe tomorrow, then?’
‘Won’t be here. I’m flying back to England in the morning.’
‘Oh.’ His warm, hazel eyes widened in surprise. ‘You never said.’
‘No, well you never asked.’ I didn’t have to add that it was none of his damn business. My expression said it all.
‘Okay, okay.’ Nat held up his hands. ‘So, what is it this time? Another TV show?’
‘No, it’s not another bloody TV show. It’s work, if you must know.’
‘How long will you be away? Only, if it’s more than a few days, I’ll water your plants if you want…’
‘There’s no need. For God’s sake Nat, what is this? Twenty fucking questions? If you must know, Rosario’s taken my plants. I could be away for a couple of months.’
‘And that’s it?’
The fury I still felt at my father spilled to the surface before I had chance to check it. ‘What the fuck’s that meant to mean?’ I snapped.
‘You weren’t going to tell me, were you? If I hadn’t seen you today, you’d have buggered off without saying a word. I thought you and I were friends, Lilith. Maybe even more than that.’
‘Oh you have to be kidding me. You really are the last person I expected to turn into a needy bastard.’ I began to walk away, but to my surprise Nat fell into step beside me.
‘Needy? A woman I thought was my friend decides to fuck off to the Motherland for a few months and doesn’t even have the courtesy to call in and say ‘see ya’, and that makes me needy?’
I had never heard Nat raise his voice in all the years that we had known each other. Now the early morning market-goers stopped in their tracks to watch our scene and guilt-fuelled indignation swelled inside me. ‘We were never friends, Nat. I don’t know your birthday, your shoe-size or anything about your childhood. I couldn’t give a toss about your favourite film, and I really don’t see us settling down by the fireside with a sweet sherry to reminisce about the good times.’ I aimed my parting shot. ‘And if the separation anxiety really kicks in, try thinking of us as acquaintances who had the occasional mediocre fuck because you were too lazy to get off your arse and find a real girlfriend.’