Owning Jacob - SA

Chapter fourteen

“You can answer me any time today if you feel like it.”

Ben looked up from the reflector and stand he was dismantling. Zoe was waiting in front of him, a heavy tripod clutched in her arms, her face patiently exasperated.

“What?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes. “I said shall I put this in the car?”

“Oh, right. Yeah, please.”

Zoe continued to look expectantly at him. “And do I get the car keys as well?” she said in answer to his obvious incomprehension. “Or am I supposed to smash a window?”

He fished in his pocket and gave them to her. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Tell me about it,” she grumbled, walking away.

Ben rubbed the bridge of his nose. He felt gritty and tired. The shoot had been for an advertising campaign for a new range of jeans ‘to wear anywhere’, as the ad would claim. They had been trying to find the right location for it since after Sarah had died, and had only recently settled on a ninth-century chapel in Sussex with beautiful stained-glass windows behind the altar. A mock wedding had been set up, everyone in formal dress except the bride, who wore jeans and T-shirt with her veil. It should have been straightforward enough, except that he’d left a box of filters he needed back at the house. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he could have sent Zoe, but the box was in the darkroom, and the darkroom was full of prints of Sandra Kale. So he’d had to make the trip himself, leaving behind a chapel full of waiting models, make-up people and an apoplectic art director.

By the time he got back the man — who Ben usually got on well with — was almost cross-eyed with frustration and Zoe was seething because she’d had to stay and bear the brunt of it.

The shoot had run on till late at night. Ben had silently blessed the fact that they were using artificial lights to simulate the sun shining through the stained-glass windows, and so could continue when it was dark. Afterwards he and Zoe had stayed to clear up, but when Zoe had only just managed to catch the tripod and camera he’d knocked over, he decided enough was enough and called it a day. Only the rector had another set of keys, so Ben had broken his usual rule of not leaving equipment untended, locked the big wooden doors on the mess and driven back to the hotel.

Now he regretted not finishing the previous night. The hire firm had taken away the big Kliegs they’d used to illuminate the chapel, and without them the air inside was cold and damp.

The two of them worked with their coats on, breath steaming like ectoplasm within the dark stone walls. He knew he’d been unprofessional, and would have to come up with spectacular results if he wanted to work for the ad agency again.

More than anything, though, he resented the lost time.

He took the reflector out to the car. Zoe had the boot open and was moving the overnight bags to make room.

Her latest hair colour was a blond that made her dark eyebrows stand out to startling effect. As he approached, she straightened.

“What’s this?” She was holding the telephoto lens. It was in its carrying case, but there was no escaping what it was.

“It’s a lens,” Ben said.

Zoe snorted. “Yeah, I think I guessed that. Bit big, though, isn’t it? Can I have a look?” She was unzipping the case as she spoke, used to handling all his cameras and equipment without thinking. “God, what is it, four hundred millimetre?”

He felt caught. “Six hundred.”

“Six! Fucking hell, you taking up astronomy, or what?” She looked up from the lens, grinning. “What do you need a long lens for? Not turned into a paparazzo, have you?”

Ben’s face was burning. “I just felt like getting it.” He knew it sounded feeble, that it would have been better to have laughed with her. Instead he took the lens from her and put it back in its case. “Come on, stop wasting time. We’ve got a lot to do.”

She stared at him. “Well, excuse me! It wasn’t me who forgot the fucking filters yesterday, was it?” She stomped off into the chapel.

Well, you handled that beautifully, he thought, closing the car boot.

The drive back to London passed in a constrained silence.

He knew he should apologise but couldn’t bring himself to mention it. He told himself he had nothing to be embarrassed about, that it was only a lens, for fuck’s sake, and that in any case he was using it in a good cause. But his rationalisations had the feel of sophistry. He pulled up outside Zoe’s flat. She got out of the car without a word. Her expression was stony as she jerked her bag from the back seat.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

She slammed the car door without answering.

Shit. He was on the verge of going after her, but something was tugging at his mind, distracting him as he watched her go into the house. He looked at her bleached hair, the eyebrows that appeared almost black in contrast, and an image of Sandra Kale naked in the bedroom came to him. The sound of the front door banging shut registered, but only peripherally.

As he pulled out into the traffic, he’d already forgotten about Zoe.

It was after lunch when he arrived in Tunford. He’d made no conscious decision to go, but neither did he ever really question where he was heading. He just avoided thinking about the reason. When he reached the turnoff that brought him to the woods, he slowed, then drove past. The house would be empty, so there was no point in watching it. Jacob would be at school, Kale at the scrapyard and Sandra at the pub. His mouth dried at that last thought, and finally he had to admit to himself where he knew he’d been going all along.

He pulled into the pub carpark.

He turned off the car engine but made no move to get out. The Cannon stood on the street corner, a few hundred yards from where the Kales lived. It was a squat block of dun brick, newer than the rest of the estate but still the worst sort of 60s architecture. A badly painted sign hung above the door. Ben looked at it and wondered what the fuck he was doing. His heart was thudding. He knew the sensible thing would be to drive off before anyone noticed him. But now he was there that would have seemed like cowardice. Not giving himself time to think about it, he climbed out, locked the car and went inside.

The carpet in the entrance was threadbare and sticky. There were two doors facing each other inside — one to the taproom, the other to the lounge. Ben went into the lounge first. The room was long, with a brown carpet, upholstery and curtains, and a pervading smell of stale beer. No one was about and steel shutters were drawn over the bar. He let the door swing shut and went into the taproom.

A blue haze of smoke hung in the air. A handful of men nursed pints at the Formica-topped tables. The solid crack of ricochet came from the pool table where two middle-aged skinheads played with stubby cues. The bar was lit but he couldn’t see anyone serving.

One or two men glanced incuriously at him as he hesitated in the doorway. No one seemed to recognise him. He tried to appear relaxed as he walked in. There were only scuffed, non-coloured lino tiles on this side instead of carpet. An upbeat Elvis song was blaring from the wall-mounted jukebox, giving the room a semblance of liveliness.

“Bar, Sandra!” a man playing dominoes on a nearby table shouted as Ben reached the varnished wood counter. Suddenly what he was doing seemed like a very bad idea. In fact he couldn’t even recall how he could have thought there was anything good about it. He made up his mind to leave, but before he could a door behind the bar opened and Sandra Kale came through.

She stopped when she saw him. Her mouth compressed into a thin line that matched her plucked eyebrows.

“What do you want?”

No reasonable answer presented itself, except the obvious one. “A pint of bitter, please.”

She stared as if she wasn’t going to serve him, then took a glass from below the counter, put it under an electric beer pump and pressed a button. She didn’t speak as the glass began to fill, and Ben guessed she was trying to come to terms with the situation as much as he was.

Or perhaps she just had nothing to say.

She set the full glass on the counter. “One eighty.”

Ben reached into his wallet and gave her a note. On impulse he said, “Would you like one?”

Her eyes flitted to the room behind him. “No.” She handed him his change then folded her arms below her breasts like a barrier. She wasn’t wearing lipstick and her lips were pink and chapped.

A wayward regret that he hadn’t seen her getting dressed that morning blew across Ben’s mind. He brushed it away.

She regarded him, unsmilingly. “Why’ve you come here?”

It was odd hearing her speak after the dumb-shows he was used to. He took a drink of beer to hide his confusion. It was chilled to tastelessness. He put it back down. “I was passing. I thought I’d see how Jacob is.”

“Steven’s fine.”

“How’s his cold?”

“Comes and goes.”

“I suppose it’ll probably come when I’m due to see him again and go straight afterwards, won’t it?”

Something that might have been a smile touched a corner of her mouth. She shrugged. Her breasts lifted, then settled again on her folded arms.

Ben took another drink of beer and wondered what she would do if he told her he knew she had sex with men for money. The thought strengthened him. Whore, he thought. Slag. Slut. Tart. He realised he was growing hard inside his jeans and felt a rush of pure lust that left him light-headed and faintly shocked. Jesus, what do they put in the beer in this place?

As if she had caught the drift of his thoughts, he sensed an imperceptible shift in the currents between them. The casual antagonism he’d felt from her was replaced by a sort of awareness.

She tilted her head slightly to one side and moved her arms, pushing her breasts closer together and so out towards him. “Have you any idea what he’d do if he knew you were here?”

There was no need to say who ‘he’ was. Ben drank some more of the tasteless beer. “He doesn’t, though, does he?”

“Supposing I tell him?”

He put the glass down. “You don’t tell him everything, do you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It was his turn to shrug. He saw uncertainty touch her face and felt a corresponding throb in his groin. There was a movement next to him at the bar.

“Any problem, San?”

It was one of the pool players. He glared at Ben as he asked the question.

“No. It’s all right, Willie,” Sandra said, but the man stayed where he was.

He was short and thick-set. He grasped the cue around its middle in an overhand grip as he looked Ben up and down. “You’re that cunt who had John’s kid, aren’t you?” he said, loudly.

The music didn’t stop, but Ben could sense everything else in the room grinding to a halt; the desultory conversations, the domino games, all breaking off at this new entertainment.

“Suddenly, it’s fucking Deadwood.”

“I don’t want any trouble, Willie,” Sandra snapped.

The man ignored her. His head wasn’t completely shaved, Ben saw. It had a fine fuzz of pale stubble on it. His partner, also with a cue, came and stood behind and to one side of him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Having a beer, what’s it look like?” Ben heard his own tone of voice and marvelled at it. On the jukebox Matt Monroe began singing ‘Born Free’. He felt giddy with an unexpected recklessness.

The one called Willie stared at him. “We don’t fucking want you.”

Ben stared back, gripping the pint glass like a weapon. “I don’t give a fuck.”

Part of him stood aside from himself, watching this stranger with amazement, but the rest of him was borne up in the thick, hot gorge of aggression. His limbs and head felt pumped full of blood. Only a thin membrane of sanity restrained him. He pressed against it, feeling it give, wanting an excuse to break through.

“You’re already on one warning, Willie. Any more and you’re fucking barred,” he heard Sandra say, and later he would wonder at her apparently taking his side, but right then her words didn’t mean anything. He and the man faced each other, on the lip of violence.

The man spat on the floor.

“Fucking London ponce,” he said, turning away.

The tension in the room was released. The other customers went back to their beer and dominoes.

Ben watched the two skinheads go back to the pool table, laughing at some muttered insult, and felt as if he’d woken up on top of a precipice. He put his beer glass down on the bar with a hand that was suddenly shaking.

Sandra Kale shook her head. “If you really want to kill yourself you should come here on a Saturday night.”

He didn’t say anything. He would have asked for a brandy, but that would have made his weakness obvious. The thought of the pool players coming over again terrified him. He drank half of the beer left in the glass. It had warmed up but didn’t taste any better.

Sandra was still watching him. “So what did you really come here for?”

I don’t know. Reaction from the near-fight was setting in. He wanted to get out of the pub very badly.

“I’m not going to give up,” he said.

He immediately regretted the pointless bravado. Sandra Kale’s face closed down again, but not before he saw the tiredness that stole across it.

“Please yourself,” she said, and walked out through the door behind the bar.

Ben finished his beer. He didn’t want it, but he didn’t want to be seen to be rushing out either. Putting the empty glass down on the counter, he walked out past the pool players without looking at them.

No one followed him out, but by the time he had unlocked his car and driven away he was clammy with sweat. He went past the Kales’ house, noticing that the scrap in the front garden had also been added to and moved around since the last time he’d seen it, and followed the road up to the wood that overlooked the town. He pulled into the gateway where he usually parked and turned off the ignition.

“You fucking idiot.” He shut his eyes and rested his head on the steering wheel — Jesus Christ, what had he been thinking of? The thought of how close he’d come to being worked over by two pairs of boots and pool cues made him feel sick. A pub fight was a different proposition to a scrap on a football pitch. Yet he hadn’t just been ready, he’d wanted it to happen. That wasn’t courage, it was fucking madness. But he hadn’t cared. Even more incredible was that he had got away with it.

Perhaps that’s the trick, he thought, you just have to not care.

A sudden spatter of rain against the windscreen made him lift his head. Fat drops the size of pennies were flattening themselves against the glass. The blue-black clouds bellied overhead like a water-filled awning. The rain came down more heavily, obliterating his view of the world outside. He looked out at the transient, spun-glass strands it formed as it bounced from the bonnet and told himself how stupid he’d been. This time, though, the self-flagellation lacked conviction.

He was more relieved than surprised when he realised he didn’t regret what he’d done. Not even the confrontation with the pool players.

You’re getting as bad as Kale, he jeered, but he couldn’t deny he was glad he hadn’t lost face in front of Kale’s wife.

She’s just a fucking whore, he thought, angrily. Then: I want to fuck her.

It was like lancing an abscess. He felt he couldn’t breathe with the sheer pressure of lust, the need for rut.

The rain beat against the car. Condensation had steamed the glass, making a dry, private cave of the interior. His fingers trembled with haste as he unzipped his fly and pulled his erection free. He gripped it and closed his eyes. He pictured Sandra Kale undressing in the bedroom, the man’s penis in her mouth. With his eyes still shut Ben looked down and saw her sitting on the bed in front of him. She stared back, her plucked eyebrows mocking and callous as he thrust himself between her lips. He threw her on to the bed, ramming himself into her, and with a choked cry he came, arching his hips as the scalding white stream spurted over him, splashing the steering wheel, dashboard and the door panel until he felt he was pumping out his entire self and it would never stop.

Then it did. He slumped in the car seat. Gradually, his heart slowed to something like normal.

The rain drummed on the car roof as he looked down at the sticky mess he’d made. He felt disgusted with himself, but not as disgusted as he probably should. Or guilty, since it was the first orgasm he’d had since Sarah died. He thought about the last time they’d made love, but it seemed unreal and long ago. A solitary ejaculation in a steamed-up car with the vision of a cheap prostitute for company seemed infinitely more real now. Far from bringing any sort of release, though, it had left him only with a dull and heavy sense of depression. With a sigh he began searching through his pockets.

He hoped he had some tissues.