The People at Number 9

“It’s embarrassing.”

He looked a bit hurt, so she slipped her hand into his. His palm felt clammy.

The music had started up again.

“Dance with me,” said Neil. He pulled her in towards him and nuzzled her neck.

“I thought you wanted to get back,” she said.

“Just one dance.”

It wasn’t a good track; neither fast enough to pick up a beat and move, nor quite slow enough for a neck-encircling smooch. They revolved self-consciously on the spot, his hands holding her hips limply, hers clasping first his shoulders, then his elbows, in an effort to encourage him into some kind of rhythm. Fortunately, most people had gone back to refill their glasses, so their only companions on the lawn were a pixie-ish woman who danced with a strange wrist-flicking action, and a little girl wearing fairy wings over her pyjamas.

The track came to an end and Sara kissed Neil lightly on the lips and lifted his hands off her hips.

“Right then,” he said, looking around in a daze, “shall we say our goodbyes?”

“I’ll catch you up,” she said.

Sara stayed at the party for another hour or so, but she felt like a spectator. Lots of people smiled at her goofily, but no one offered her any drugs. She danced on the periphery of some other guests, who politely broadened out their circle to include her; one man even wiggled his shoulders at her in an “I will if you will” invitation to freak out to Steely Dan, but despite having consumed a whole bottle of wine over the course of the evening, she found she couldn’t commit to it, and drifted off to the kitchen. Here she stood by the table, absent-mindedly feeding herself parcels of home-made roti, dipped in lime pickle, until it dawned on her that Lou and Gavin had retired for the night, and she might as well go home.

4 (#ulink_64c81d0f-6a17-5a7c-9557-23eb5606b4a1)

Sara stood at the bedroom window watching the neighbourhood wake. She saw the man from the pebble-dashed semi walk his scary dog as far as the house with the plantation blinds and allow it to cock its leg on their potted bay tree before heading back home. She saw Marlene from number twelve, ease her ample behind into her Ford Ka and head, suitably coiffed and hatted, for Kingdom Hall. She saw a bleary-eyed man bump a double buggy down the steps of the new conversion and set off towards the park. She saw Carol’s front door open…

“Where’s she off to,” she murmured. A faint groan came from under the duvet.

Sara watched her friend cross the road carrying an envelope.

“Oh, my God, she’s not… She is! She’s sending them a thank-you note.”

Neil hauled himself up to a semi-recumbent position.

“Can you believe that?” She turned towards him with an incredulous grin.

“Christ yeah, good manners.” He shuddered.

“Oh come on,” Sara protested, “they didn’t even enjoy themselves, you said.”

With the pillows piled up behind him, wearing an expression of lofty tolerance, Neil’s profile might have been carved into Mount Rushmore.

“Maybe it’s something else.”

“What else could it be?” Sara eyed him sharply.

“A birthday card?” Neil shrugged and picked up his phone.

“Don’t be daft, they’ve only just met.”

All the same, she didn’t like the idea of Carol stealing a march on her. She was the one on the fast-track. Everything Carol knew about Lou and Gavin, she knew because Sara had told her. Their children’s ages and genders; the family’s recent migration from Spain; the medium in which Gavin worked; these nuggets she had doled out, with more than a frisson of satisfaction, keeping the confidences – the trout and the tears – to herself. The idea that the two women might have established their own rapport was ridiculous. They had nothing in common.

“What happened, anyway, after I left?” Neil didn’t lift his eyes from the phone, nor did his lightness of tone betray much curiosity, and yet he was eager to know, she could tell.

“Not much,” she said, returning to bed and yanking the duvet towards her. “Gavin and Lou disappeared. I talked to a couple of people, had a dance. Came home.”

“Disappeared where?” Neil said.

“To bed, one imagines,” said Sara, sounding a little prudish, even to her own ears.

“What,” Neil said, “bed bed?”

“You saw them,” she said, “that dance looked like foreplay to me.”

“Really?” Neil looked appalled and delighted, like a randy schoolboy.

“Bit much, don’t you think, at their own party?” she muttered.

Neil shrugged.

“Maybe they couldn’t help themselves.”

They lay there for a while in silence. The cacophony of kids’ TV from downstairs competed with the buzz of a hedge trimmer outside. Neil returned to his phone, but the theme of sex hung in the air between them. Sunday morning was their regular slot and she guessed from the intense way Neil was scrolling through the football results, that he had an erection. She felt aroused herself, but it was all mixed up now with Gavin and Lou and their stupid tango. She felt hungover and annoyed and horny. She sighed huffily and flopped a hand down on top of the duvet. With every appearance of absent-mindedness, Neil clasped her wrist and started to stroke it gently, whilst still apparently absorbed in the match report. It was the lightest and most casual of caresses, but he couldn’t fool her – he wasn’t taking in a word he was reading. She closed her eyes and tried to enjoy it, but she kept thinking of the party: the strange atmosphere; the music; the extraordinary behaviour of the hosts. Neil was nuzzling her neck now, burrowing his hand beneath the bedclothes, working his way dutifully, from base to base. A tweak of the nipple, a quick knead of the breast, then onwards and downwards. She threw her head back and tried to surrender herself to pleasure, but she couldn’t get in the zone. She moaned and wriggled, took his hand and, after demonstrating how and where she would like to be touched, closed her eyes, only to find her thoughts invaded once again by Gavin and Lou, this time, naked, Gav’s head at Lou’s crotch, her face contorted with ecstasy. Appalled, she banished the image, stilling instantly the butterfly quiver of her nascent orgasm. By now, Neil’s cock was pulsing against her thigh. To self-censor, she reasoned, would be to disappoint them both. No sooner had she given herself permission to go there than she was there, on the other side of the party wall, in their bedroom watching them fuck, like dogs, on the floor, Gav thrusting harder and harder, Lou’s hands beating the floorboards, head jerking back, sweat flying everywhere, groaning, screaming, coming, coming, coming.

“Oh God! Oh God!”

She opened her eyes and the room and the day fell back into their right order, but still there was a muscular twitch against her leg and a misty look in the eye of her husband. She touched his shoulder and, with the air of a family dog given a one-off dispensation to flop on the sofa, he clambered on board, and could only have been a few thrusts shy of his own orgasm, when the bedroom door burst open. Sara turned her head in annoyance, ready to remonstrate with whichever son had forgotten to knock before entering, but found herself, instead, eyeball to eyeball with a strange nappy-clad toddler, whose shock of blond curls and penetrating blue-eyed stare made her gasp in recognition.

***

“Well, that was interesting…” Sara called, breezing back into the house some fifteen minutes later and poking the front door closed with her foot. There was no response, so she followed the appetising scent of cooked breakfast into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, arms folded.

“They hadn’t missed her!” she said.

Neil continued frying eggs.

“No idea she was even here. Pretty shocking really. Poor little thing’s not even three. Hey, you’ll never guess what her name is.”

Neil didn’t try.

“Zuley, short for Zuleika,” she told his impervious back. “I can’t decide whether I like it or not.”

“You can get back to me,” he said.

“I wonder where they got it from…”

“The Bumper Book of Pretentious Names?”

“She must have tagged along with Dash and Arlo. Voted with her feet. It’s not exactly child-friendly round there. You should see the place – weirdos crashed out on every sofa, overflowing ashtrays, empty bottles… God knows what she could have put in her mouth!” Try as she might, she couldn’t quite banish a grudging admiration from her tone.