Tiffany

‘But in your special school, he – ’

‘They,’ Tiffany murmured, suddenly pained and abstracted.

‘Tiffany, I’m sorry I reminded you – ’

‘Don’t be. You remind me that I’ve come out of that rock-solid normal, which they can’t have done. The worst is, it could have been some part of what you and me have now, ’cause they were educated men, quite likeable when they weren’t being perverts. They weren’t even child-molesters, strictly speaking, in my book, for I looked well-grown if you like the neater sort of boobs, and they weren’t going to corrupt my innocence, ’cause that bird had flown the coop long ago. I tell you, you might or mightn’t make that sort of fourteen-year-old into a happy young woman, but it’s a bloody sight more likely than leaving her alone, and hoping she’ll find a proper childhood to cram into the next year or so.’

‘You don’t think they were wrong to – ’

‘Wrong? Maybe, but what kind of good wasright going to do me? Fifteen more months as the quiet kid in the back, quiet kid in the dormitory, then be told I’m legal? God, I’d have bonked their brains out if they’d just asked – yes, and taught ’em things, even at that age, that would have done them a priceless amount of good with women, ’cause their style was appalling. But the bloody fools fouled it up. I try to tell myself, in my kinder moments, that they just ever imagined they could get any by tickling my fancy. But to be honest, I don’t think they’d have wanted me without the forcible bit. The school secretary, a lovely, kind-hearted little idiot of thirty, was really hot for one of them, God in His wisdom help her – romantic and ready-to-drop-’em both, just like she was a sensible person, but he wasn’t having any. I felt terribly smug at the time, but I’d the right to be immature, hadn’t I? And what on earth can you do with a man who prefers scared to hot?

‘So that wasn’t child-molesting?’

‘It was person-molesting, I’ll grant you that. And d’you know why they gave it up, eventually? I wouldn’t cry, and I wouldn’t act scared, and they never guessed a girl could be saving up all the fight that’s in her, until she could Pearl Harbour them and get clean away with it. Nobody in this world will ever make me cry. So they just got bored, and I turned sixteen. You can’t be in moral danger then, and that’s official. My mum had kicked my dad out, by that time, and she’d discovered that vodka doesn’t make your breath smell. So I got sent home – which was still worse than the school, in a lot of ways – and my can of petrol could be out there in the woods yet.’

‘You’re better off than every one of them. Or at least I hope so.’

‘Now I am, yes. But d’you see, there are two ways girls can go after all that? They can go off it altogether, and get their rocks off on how respectable that makes them, and how rotten men are, or they can turn into human spacehoppers that anybody gets to bounce about on. Well, you know which I came nearest to, don’t you? But if I were to wake up and find I’d dreamed you, I’d still have won my fight, for I’d have dreamed my way into knowing what was worth having in this world. So now d’you see why I wish we or the Halls or somebody could do for Louise what you’ve done for me? That what makes us so moral, though not everybody might see it.’

‘We did it for each other.’

‘But I needed it more. Just think how different we were.’

‘No, think about how alike we are now.’

‘Oh Matthew James, you shouldn’t say that unless you mean it.’

‘I do. I’m amazed how much like ordinary people we are, a lot of the time.’

‘We are, compared with some. Proper nymphos are a rarer article than a lot of people think, though they get themselves over-represented in the nick, which is awkward for them. In my opinion it’s a disease, completely different from a girl who just puts herself about a bit. In fact I sort of feel that some ugly little parasite in the brain has tossed a coin, to choose between that and frigidity, ’cause they’re two sides of the same coin. With sex just like food, there’s your anorexia and your bulimia, closely related, and a healthy chap shouldn’t want anything to do with either, ’cause a man needs warmth if he’s worth anything, and it just isn’t there. But I tell you, respectable women learn to pretend so much, they don’t know they’re doing it. If men had the brains of a good dog, most of ’em, they’d know there’s nothing to equal real friendship from someone a bit promiscuous. ’Cause it’s all real, pure longing, not trying to buy respectability, or a nest to go broody in.’

‘Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t know anyone promiscuous.’

‘Oh Matthew James… You don’t think I’m terribly wrong-headed about all this?’

‘No, I don’t. Besides, what if you were? You’d still have thought through exactly what it all means to you, and be capable of reciting your thoughts straight through, as you’ve just done, like a character in Shakespeare. Really gormless people can be right all the time, as long as they can stick to life at its simplest, but it doesn’t mean they’re half as likely as you to be right when anything tricky comes along.’

‘Just what I think, only I never worked it out so well.’

‘Nor did I, before. But Tiffany, how do you really feel about last night? Not for Louise, and especially not for me. For you.’

‘Matthew James, it was… It was so incredibly erotic, for one thing, but that wasn’t all. There wasn’t any “for me” or “for you”, because I feel we’re so much closer now we’ve shared our big adventure. Or Episode 1 of it, anyway. And I think unfaithfulness must be a bit like an illness, or snake-bite, ’cause if you get yourself vaccinated regularly with harmless little doses, there’s just no way the big one is going to get you. Maybe some people would say I’ve taken some harm from the past, after all. But rude noises to the lot of ’em, say I, for I think we did right.’

I sat in silence for nearly a minute. There would never be an easier time to just let things go, as usual. So I bit on the bullet, which was a hard one.

‘Tiffany… I… ’

‘What, you aren’t feeling a bit off colour, are you?’ she asked, and for a moment I saw exactly the sort of mother she would be. A lot of help that was.

‘Tiffany… It isn’t really happening.’

‘Take your time, Matthew James. You’ll get it a bit clearer in a moment.’ She pretended to joke, but I had known her long enough to know she was suddenly, desperately tense.

‘There was never any jewellery. I mean there was, but I never intended any robbery. I tricked you.’

‘Go on,’ she said, very quiet and bland. I told her the whole story, just as I have you, and slowly, as I did so, her head sank on the table. As I reached the end, her body was racked by a sob.

‘Tiffany, I’m sorry…’

I reached out to raise her head, and felt her unseen face wet with tears.

‘Oh God, you said nobody would ever make you cry.’

‘I’m not bloody crying. I’mnot. Idon’t.’

I was nonplussed by that, till her body convulsed with another of those heartrending sobs, and suddenly I realised the crowning absurdity. That had been a laugh. Nobody, in my opinion, should find much consolation in any distinction between tears and crying, and the tears kept coming, but it was a relief nonetheless. Or could this be hysteria? She looked up at me, and her smile reached the roots of her hair.

‘Tiffany, what on earth…?’

‘Oh Matthew James, you silly, lovely man, don’t you know you couldn’t fool me? I’m a woman, I am, evolved by millions of years of men trying to pull a fast one. Know how it is so many women seem to get deceived by men, despite all that? ’Cause consciously or not, they want to be, and I didn’t. I knew all along.’

‘What, right from the start?’

‘Nearly. I wondered, then I decided to come to your flat to find out, that first time. And I found out. You might be able to lie to a real enemy, but not to a friend.’

‘What? So why did you want anything to do with me? I mean, you aren’t the sort of woman who stands for being treated like dirt.’

‘No by God, I’m not, but what does that have to do with anything? The robbery itself didn’t matter, for you must have realised that a fellow-criminal was just the opposite of what I needed from you. And I’m a modern girl, I am, with a very positive attitude to a man wanting to have his end away, if the rest of him’s all right. What matters is, you never expected gratitude or obedience or acts of contrition because I was some little bit of rubbish from the gutter, not once, when a real rotter always does eventually. I mean, what about the time I burned your non-stick wok, eh?’

‘I don’t think anybody’s ever proven a connection between the gutter and burning pans.’

‘Oh great, now you’ve brought logic to the problem. It’s the way people do react, though. Except the very best of them. There was just that one week when I didn’t know what to do, not for sure, then I knew. I knew you, you see, and that you never would give me worse, in the long term, than I gave you. It just wasn’t in you, see? So I just had to be really, dazzlingly good for you, and wait till I got dazzling goodness back again. I’m not a Louise, and you’re not a Peter, so it would have worked out, given time. Only I was terrified we’d run out of short-term before there was a long-term. That you’d get scared, I mean, and finish up with me because you couldn’t tell me. It had to come from you, you see, before I could be sure we were anything but friends with nerve-endings.’

The tears came faster again. I tried to hand her a tissue, and spilt the packet.

‘I understand… I think.’

‘Yes, and I got more scared when we got along so well, and I felt like I was your equal – ’

‘More. You’re a giant.’

‘ – for I was scared you’d ask me… well, what men do ask girls. ’Cause I’d have had to refuse if you hadn’t told the truth yet, and you were just about proud enough to stay refused.’

‘You’d have wanted to accept?’

‘Matthew James, when we talked about erotic films once, I wanted to tell you about the most erotic thing I ever saw, or ever will I think, and it would have those little green men cheering for us and going native. It was a film done with fibre optics, inside a woman’s… a woman’s body, as she was having an orgasm. She was shaped to hold a little pool of… Well, she hadn’t got there all on her own, that was plain, nor with the kind of loony who does the Onan thing. And do you know what makes all those little convulsions you like? They’re the cervix vibrating up and down, dipping itself in that little pool, just to make sure she gets properly fertilised. It’s amazing she ever doesn’t. I thought of telling my public about it, that night at the university, ’cause it’s a tremendously… a tremendouslyinspirational thing to know. They’d have been pairing off in the foyer afterwards, if they’d the sense. But I might have got dragged off with a hook.’

‘I’d never have imagined – ’

‘Imagined? I’m amazed you haven’t felt it.’

‘I’ll try to, next time. I mean if…’ I hadn’t intended to say that much, but her smile was like the rainbow.

‘If there is a next time? Matthew James, there’s a bit ofthis time left. I could get a bus home, when you go to work in the morning.’

‘How long do pills take to wear off? Probably long enough to be within lawful wedlock.’

‘Oh Matthew James, what an elegant proposal! I’ll have it framed, you see if I don’t, and if you ever get famous I’ll have it put in the dictionary of quotations.’

‘Well, you started it.’

‘Pill or no pill, a bit of practice tonight is plain good sense, to let my cervix run through the new rules of engagement. God, it may have taken to vibrating from side to side for all you know, you unobservant thing, you. Oh but James, have you forgotten the big question? Do we do… the last night thing, ever again?’

‘Not with any Hamilton-Hammonds, that’s for sure. I don’t think we’d have liked them. But otherwise… What do you think?’

‘I think, James, a person has to be a bit sick to really need anything weird, so of course we don’tneed it, not as a regular thing. We both know there are people who can’t handle what we’ve done, not even once, and there are people I don’t intend to handle any part of, either. Saw a bit of that, didn’t we? But it didn’t kill us.’

‘It could have killed Louise, eventually.’

‘But not now, I think. And we aren’t the sort to get fed up with the monogamous old straight and narrow, not ever, as long as we can keep the lights on. But for just a few times a year, if you don’t mind…?’

‘Ifyou don’t mind.’

‘Well then, I still think it’s the Big Adventure, and too much part of us to give up. We’ve got to keep up with the Halls, of course, and keep showing Louise what life’s got in store for her, because she’ll be just as capable of a good life as anyone living, once she’s straightened herself out. But our real life’s work will be to bring together two or three couples who really, truly are what we are. I mean, with the time we’ll have later, if we have our daughter pretty soon – ’

‘Daughter? It could be either, you know.’

‘It could but it won’t, you’ll see. I’m a giant, and I can make things happen. Oh yes, and the rainbow’s end will fall upon her cradle, and the birds will light upon her shoulder, and we’ll bring her up straight as a die about sex, better than a princess. She won’t know a bit more of our big secret than she can handle, nor a bit less if the time comes, and she won’t have a clue why her friends or their parents get themselves into such horrible messes, with respectable boredom the very worst of them. And it won’t matter twopence whether she does what we’ve done, because she’ll be happy, and tough enough to kiss a frog or two if she has to, and someday her prince will come. I never told you you were a prince, ’cause it doesn’t do to lead a man on, but you are… Now, d’you suppose there will be anywhere in the next few miles where we can stop the car?’

‘What? You don’t have an upset stomach, do you? They might have some tablets here.’

‘No, I’m fine. But I feel I could go off pop, without a few minutes’ world-class snogging.’

I convinced her with logic, and she convinced me with events. They wear matching moss-green a lot, and a time will come, somewhere around 2020, when they will cause traffic accidents by going out together. Tiffany is a pillar of the community, and finds the Open University far too easy, and I think I am going to carry my age a lot better than I could ever have done on my own. It was my marriage, I am convinced, that brought the men in grey suits, who came and talked to me, the other day, about being a councillor. I won’t, of course, but it’s nice to be asked. One of them was Phillip Hamilton, with a paunch, and I nearly called him Pip. What does it take to be so lucky? Nothing very unusual. Everybody has it.