He was fucking around. Lydia could smell it on him. Guys like Nick, they hit their mid forties and couldn't help themselves. It was the last hurrah of a guttering-out libido.
She drew up a list of potential candidates. It wouldn't be hookers. Nick was too cheap to pay for it. Someone from work was more likely. Some needy slag he'd spun around with male angst and flannel.
My wife doesn't understand. You make me feel so alive...
So far, though, her detective work had drawn a blank. No suspicious numbers on his phone. No strange transactions in his bank details. She knew he looked at porn online but what man didn't? Lydia knew he wasn't that smart. He'd trip himself up somewhere along the line. But she'd have to work harder. Broaden her focus.
Rocky, for example...
He was Nick's best friend, a professional Scotsman. Lydia hated him, not to mention Gerri, his dumbfuck second wife, who, incidentally, was one of her main suspects. Provided the latter wasn't the case, Rocky was the one person who would know what Nick was up to
But how was she to approach him without raising a red flag? She'd have to be oblique and rely chiefly on female intuition. So when she ran into him one Saturday -- purely by accident, of course -- she made sure to keep the conversation as banal as possible. Yes, the girls were fine. Jen was doing her finals next year. And how's Gerri? And Lynn?
It was strange because there was no perceptible physical change in the man that Lydia could see. But the mention of either his wife's or his step-daughter's name did something to him -- a sort of psychic blanching. It was probably nothing to do with Nick. But it stuck in her mind, nonetheless.
On her way home, she stopped off at the gym to collect Jen.
'Lynn Warwick. Didn't you go to school with her?' she said.
'She was a year behind me. Total hosebag. Why?'
'I met her Dad this morning. He mentioned her. When you say "hosebag"...'
'Use your imagination, Mum.'
When they got home, Lydia checked out Lynn online. Her Facebook was a typical nineteen-year old's cavalcade of histrionic personality disorder. She was doing Media Studies at some degree mill. "It's complicated", read her relationship status. A complete fuckwit. Being the age she was, she had yet to learn that less was more when it came to make-up and resembled a drag-queen in most of her photos. Otherwise, she was nothing special to look at. A nondescript chip off the class-free old block that was her mother.
The more Lydia thought about it, the more plausible became the scenario. Nick was over there all the time, watching football or doing whatever the fuck. The girl would be in and out. Given what Lydia understood of girls from broken homes, she'd have daddy issues. Add to the mix an idiot's mid-life crisis and you had the perfect storm.
Of course, she had zero proof. It was time to get to work.
*
The boys were playing Sunday morning five-a-side. So far, their story checked out.
Lydia watched a game in progress from her stakeout spot in the Homebase car park. Caged behind chicken-wire, sweating out the previous night's beer and charlie, the bald, overweight players comported themselves with a kind of anti-grace. A theatre of nightmares. Somewhere in the city, a cardiac specialist was planning a long and opulent retirement.
The players were too far away for her to make out if Nick and Rocky were among them. Several times she hallucinated Nick's silver Pathfinder coming out of the leisure centre's driveway but on each occasion, it turned out to be a different jeep. All those crime novels she had read were right. Surveillance was a numbing pain in the arse.
It was after two when they emerged. Their tyres squealed as they drove on to the Airport Road and she wondered how much Nick had had to drink...
She gunned her engine and set off in pursuit.
Stopped at a level crossing, Lydia had a moment of clarity. Now what? They were obviously heading towards Rocky's for nothing more unwholesome than Sky Sports' homoerotic subtext. What was she doing? What the fuck was she going to do? Spy in windows?
A pair of boys in the car in front of her made faces in the back window. The arm of the level crossing rose into a fascist salute.
Gerri, Lynn...one or both of those whores was involved. The possibilities made her nauseous but she considered them anyway, mentally flipping through them as if they were a pack of dirty playing cards. Spy in windows? Yes. If that was what it took. She would uncover the truth, no matter how revolting it might turn out to be.
*
She parked her car in a shopping centre near Rocky's estate. Shades, tracksuit, iPod...just a middle-aged woman out for a Sunday stroll.
As she approached the estate's entrance, her phone rang. It was Nick.
'Are you out?' he said.
'Meeting Carol.'
'Nurse Ratchet got the day off from the cracker factory, has she?'
'You're slurring your words. I hope you weren't driving in that state.'
'I'm in Rocky's,' he said. 'I'll be back around teatime.'
'Don't drink too much.'
'Look who's talking.'
They hung up at the same time.
Lydia checked out her surroundings. There was a derelict petrol station next to the estate. It was closed off with razor-top fencing but she found a section that had been prised apart. She squeezed through, picturing herself being torn to pieces by Dobermanns, and ran across the forecourt to the side of the building. Around the back, amidst empty blister strips and Buckfast bottles, she found more fencing and another gap, one that led to an enclosed laneway running parallel to a wall at the back of the row of houses containing Rocky's. It was violently overgrown with brambles and giant hogweed, strewn with illegally dumped binliners, furniture and old engine parts. Alive with rats too, no doubt. A nearby bush rustled in confirmation.
She tucked the ends of her tracksuit pants into her socks and crawled inside.
It was impossible to proceed soundlessly. Every house she passed seemed to have a hyperactive dog in the back garden. She picked her way through increasingly thick and vicious brambles, scanning the roofs above the wall to the right of her in search of the skylight that would identify Rocky's. Some of the bags she stepped over had been torn open by scavenging animals. Most seemed to contain medical waste -- swabs, incontinence pads, bloody dressings. It was no kind of terrain for trainers, she thought, visualizing a Hep B dripping needle just waiting to pierce her foot. But a good place to dump a body. Hold that thought.
The top of the portion of wall at the back of Rocky's bristled with broken glass. Lydia pulled a beard of goosegrass from her leg and sought after plan B. She hadn't come this far to give up so easily. The last dog fell silent as she looked around for something, anything. A secret door would have been nice. All she could come up with was an old blue pallet that she found in the ditch behind her. She dragged it over to the wall and propped it up at an angle, before testing its steadiness with her foot. The need to see what was happening on the other side had reached an uncomfortable pitch of urgency. Was this what stalkers felt like at a certain advanced stage of their obsession? All the wrongness of their actions rationalized into perfect sense or unsense.
She perched like a bird on top of the pallet, slowly extending her body upwards. Her hands found two relatively glass free sections of wall and she pulled herself up, keeping her head low as she squinted over the rim at the decked abomination that was Rocky's back garden. That would be Gerri's act of self-expression. A Versace lounger, for fuck's sake...Even her muses were chavs.
She focused on the patio door, looking for signs of life inside but there were none. At the top of the house the bedroom curtains were drawn. Lydia wasn't sure if what she was feeling was relief or disappointment. She did know that she was beginning to feel like a tit. Her cheeks started to burn and not only with hogweed sap.
Fuck
...She lowered her head quickly as someone walked through the kitchen.
'...take a power-hose to that moss,' she heard Nick say.
'Round-Up isn't worth a shite in the wet,' said Rocky.
There was the rasp of a lighter and more talk of garden maintenance. Lydia raised her head a fraction, just in time to see Lynn emerge. She bummed a cigarette from Nick and a light from her stepdad. All three had put down their drinks upon on the patio set table -- two cans of Strongbow and a bottle of watermelon Breezer.
'She's finishing her eyebrows,' said Lynn.
Rocky placed a less than stepfatherly hand on the girl's arse.
'Get off.' She squirmed away.
'That's no way to talk to your Daddy. Eh, big man?'
Lydia watched Nick look intently at Lynn. The girl looked back at him with a disgusted sneer.
'Like fucking dogs, the pair of you,' she said
'Got any ching?' said Rocky to her. 'That cunt let me down.'
'I got some. You shouldn't bother with that flaky sod,' she said. 'I told you.'
'I might have a bloke at work,' said Nick. 'Seems a good sort.'
'See him.' Rocky pointed his cigarette at Nick. 'Into the old lady's diet pills. Speedy fucking Gonzalez.'
Nick shrugged like it was no big deal.
The vibe was unmistakably carnal. Lydia wasn't sure yet of the exact configuration of the arrangement but there was something going on between the three of them. Four, if Gerri was involved, which, given the potential gruesomeness of the scenario, was highly probable.
Looking at her husband, Lydia found it difficult to reconcile the louche scumbag she beheld in the garden and the flat-lined dipshit she had shared a bed with for the past nineteen years. Where was the habitual lethargy? This Nick vibrated with obscene energy, like a fucked-up sex toy. One by one, the pieces slotted home in her head, a succession of past incidents, meaningless at the time, that now made sense. The disjoint between his ostensibly flagging libido and the porn he watched in secret on his laptop. A certain look that came over his face when he was on the phone to Rocky -- like he was tasting something both delicious and rancid. His recent mania for depilation. Everything was plain in hindsight, of course, but it didn't make her feel like any less of a mug.
Beneath her, the pallet slipped backwards an inch. She jumped down before she fell, her bad ankle protesting as it took the brunt of her descent. On the other side of the wall, they were laughing again. Squatting down in the weeds, as if making to piss, the old lady cupped her ankle, struggling to hold back her puke.
*
There were four of them; two guys and two girls. Doctors and nurses, apparently. Tattoos, pierced tongues, shaved twats, fake tits, roid rash, razor burn, crank jitters, Caverject boners. A collective mental age of about six and a half.
Lydia paused the video on a frame of a colossally magnified arse and balls in mid plunge as a door opened downstairs. The ticking of a bike chain let her know it was Lauren, her youngest.
She tapped the laptop's touchpad and the action restarted. The clip she was watching -
"many is the boss"
-- was from a site called Spunkbucket. She had copied the URL at random from Nick's browsing history and sent it to her own computer. The enigmatic title was a misprint --
"many"
was Manny, the name of one of the participants, a puce coloured psychopath who seemed thoroughly astonished by his own penis, as if he had just discovered that he had the thing. In fact, cock fascination was pretty much the dominant theme of the clip -- all long, lingering close-ups and flattering angles. Though it called itself straight porn, it was possibly the queerest thing Lydia had ever seen, even more so than that UFC Nick had forced her to sit through one night. Were heterosexual men really that oblivious to explicitly gay imagery or did they secretly get off on it on some level? Rugby, boxing, prison movies,
Top Gear
...they certainly watched enough of it.
The fucking on view left her cold. Gaping ass to hydrophobic mouth. It was all so predictable. Under different circumstances, she might have been able to see the funny side. But everything had changed since that afternoon. Everything had become pregnant with repulsive meaning.
She found herself thinking about Nick's method of jerking off while watching this shit. Did he whip it out or did he play with himself inside those dirty sweatpants he wore around the house...?
