It wasn’t really ironic, but I was playing my game.
“I work in a bank too!” my lady cries.
“Really? What a coincidence. Anyway, the woman in my ugly lottery man story wanted to stay out and have a good time, but now she was going to have to go back to her room all by her lonely self and cry. Except, this ugly lottery guy sidles up to her and says, you don’t normally talk to guys like me, and you’ll probably slap me in the face, but today I became richer than I ever thought I could be, and I want to do something really special, I want to make love to you. He told her she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and that he knew that under normal circumstances she would never look even once at him, but he had seen her being abandoned by her man, and observed her checking her purse for money she did not have, and now he wanted to make her an offer. He told her he had thirty thousand pounds in cash in his jacket and that he would give her all of it in exchange for one hour in bed with her.
Her first instinct, naturally, was to call security, but she hesitated, and she started to think about how awful her boyfriend was to leave her like that, even though she still loved him, and how much thirty thousand was, and how nobody would ever have to know what she’d done for it; she could say that she had won the lottery, and in some ways she had.
And I pause there and take a sip of my drink.
“Well, did she do it, did she?”
The Derby woman is well and truly sucked in.
I nod.
“Oh, the little... and did she... did she enjoy it? You know what they say about ugly men. Did she fall in love and...?”
“She hated it. He did all sorts of despicable things to her, but she didn’t think she could protest. She kept thinking of the money.”
“And I’ll bet he ran off without paying her!”
“No. He paid her. Thirty thousand. And an extra five for her tears. But before he handed it over, and when he was still lying on top of her, he said, just one more thing. Kiss me and this time use your tongue.”
She hadn’t used it at all. She was keeping it for her boyfriend. Using her tongue somehow seemed more intimate than any of the unspeakable acts she had so recently partaken of.
I ask the Derby woman if she understands why the woman in my story was so reluctant to use her tongue.
The woman from Derby nods. “But did she, in the end? Did she give in and use her tongue?”
“She did. She did. And he gave her the money, and he left and she never spoke of what had happened, never told a living soul.”
“Gosh,” the woman from Derby says.
It is not a word you hear very often these days.
Gosh.
“What kind of despicable things?” is her next question.
Despicable is another word you don’t hear very often.
The chances of somebody coming up to you in a courtroom, after the verdict has been handed down, and saying, “Gosh, you are despicable,” must be extremely remote indeed.
I tell her about his despicable acts in considerable detail, and she pretends to be shocked, but it brings colour to her cheeks and there’s a coy look to her as she murmurs, “Still, thirty-five thousand pounds.”
I smile, and pat my jacket pocket, and her brow furrows, and I raise an eyebrow, and there’s a sudden sparkle in her eyes and for a long, long moment she believes that I have thirty-five thousand pounds for her.
She whispers, “You’re not ugly at all,” and she’s right, because as we have already established, for the purposes of this story, I am gorgeous. But then I laugh and tell her that I’m a writer and the story of the lottery winner with the cash for sex offer is from one of my short stories. She looks disappointed. I say, forget the money, I’m still capable of despicable acts. And that gets her laughing, where really, it shouldn’t. She asks me if that’s really how the story ends and I tell her no, that after the lottery winner left the woman went back down to the bar and ordered a bottle of champagne, being thirty-five thousand pounds better off, but when she tried to pay for it the bar man held her twenty up to the light and said it was counterfeit, and upon further examination, they all were. She took the thirty-five thousand pounds out of her bag and threw them on the ground and stamped and tore at them, and just at that point her boyfriend returned, all ready to apologize, but such was her rage that she blurted out what had happened, and he stormed out again, this time for good.
My woman goes, “Oh!” and “Oh!” and that’s just a horrible story.
She’s quite drunk now, and she is relatively easily persuaded to her room. She finds it exciting, at first, the tearing off of the clothes and the fumbling and tumbling, because her boyfriend might return at any moment, but when we make love she seems disappointed that I do not perform despicable deeds upon her, and she urges me to hurry up and finish, which is difficult now that I can sense her regret.
As I lay upon her, I say there was an alternative ending to that story about the lottery winner and the woman of easy but expensive virtue.
And she says, “What?” as in what are you talking about the short story for while you’re supposed to be finishing off.
And I say, she didn’t really go down to the bar and find out she’d been fobbed off with dodgy banknotes. Didn’t you pick up on the fact that if she worked in a bank, she would probably have recognized straight away that the twenties were fake?
She sighs and says: “Well, what then?”
My lips move to her ear and I whisper, “The reason she never spoke about it again was that she couldn’t. When she put her tongue in his mouth, he bit it off. She bled to death there beneath him, and he stared at her the whole time she was dying, and she couldn’t move because of the weight of him upon her, and the fact that he was still inside her.”
I think it is unlikely that she will have an orgasm now.
“What kind of a writer are you anyway?” she hisses as she tries to get out from under me. “Who would come up with a nasty, disgusting sort of a story like that?”
And I tell her that when I was learning how to become a writer, the best piece of advice my tutor ever gave me was to write about what you know.
He was a good creative writing teacher.
He came to our prison every week.
But he always had a problem with my unhappy endings.
Run, Rabbit, Run
Ray Banks
Terry Davies started on the beers around kick-off, and continued through final whistle until his knees felt loose. Now he held on to a table, a fresh pint in his free hand, nodding as Marto gave him the lad’s name.
Billy Lewis.
Didn’t ring any bells; could’ve been anyone. But the way Marto told it, nobody called the lad Billy, anyway: to him and the blokes Marto had been talking to on Terry’s behalf, the lad’s name was Rabbit, and Rabbit was a smackhead on licence with priors coming out his arse. It was juvenile odds and sods that put him in the big boys’ nick, and Marto wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t Keyser fucking Söze they were dealing with here.
“Lad’s done some shite — breaking and entering you know about. Handling stolen goods. Got done for possession with intent, and that’s the most serious, like. But I don’t want you to think he’s owt worth getting scared about.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Nah, I know you’re not scared,” shouted Marto against the noise of the pub. “I didn’t mean it like that. All I’m saying, you want to do something—”
Terry waved his hand, looked behind Marto at the people lining the far wall, but didn’t really see any of them. “I haven’t made a decision yet.”
“You were the one wanted us to keep an ear out.”
“I know. I appreciate it.”