Crystal Jeans - The Inverts

Bettina appeared at the end of the garden. She was jogging – towards him, seemingly. He took his cigarette packet from the table and leaned back in his chair. Her tits were jiggling around underneath her blouse and her knees were covered in a thick cake of black mud. She slowed to a fast walk. What the hell did she want?

‘Hello, Bettina.’

She planted her hands on the table, trying to catch her breath.

He lit his cigarette and smoked it, waiting calmly. His foot tapping the tiles under the table. Taptaptaptap – the body always found a way to betray you.

‘I need your help,’ she finally said. She pulled out a chair and sank into it, then reached out and grabbed his pint of warm ale, drinking half of it in one.

‘Steady on, woman!’

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Burped. ‘I’m in trouble.’

‘We’re all in trouble, Bettina.’

‘Please don’t – this is serious. Can we please, just for now, forget all our – this is deadly serious and I need you.’

A fly landed on his remaining sandwich half. He brushed at it with his hand and it flew away. ‘Surely your special lady friend might be of better use to you.’

‘Oh my God!’ She raised her hands in the air, fingers snapping out. ‘Why must you always be so bloody difficult? You’re such a child!’

‘That’s rich, coming from you.’

She pressed her hands on the table, fingers fanned out, and looked at him, breathing angrily through her nostrils. ‘Fine. I’ll deal with it myself.’ And she got up, shoving her chair back so that it squeal-scraped against the patio tile, and stormed off towards the house. She’d left a greasy lipstick stain on the rim of his glass. He drank from the other side.

She came back out and went right past him, walking stiffly with one hand at her side – she was holding a gun closely to her hip. A gun. He sprang out of his seat and rushed after her.

‘What the hell —’

She continued to walk, refusing to look at him. ‘I told you it was serious.’

He grabbed her by the arm and she spun around, wild-eyed.

‘Congratulations, you’ve got my attention,’ he said. ‘Now get back in the house and put that thing back where you found it.’

She stamped on his foot and he cried out, letting go of her arm.

‘Either help me or fuck off,’ she said.

Oh, you bitch, he thought, rubbing his slippered foot on the back of his calf and watching her run to the end of the garden. Oh, you bitch. He should just leave her to whatever mess she’d made – it wasn’t his concern, not any more. Imagine he ran up to her, begging for help! She’d laugh in his face. You want me to help you ? Oh, how delicious! Hahaha. You silly little man.

She hopped quite effortlessly over the wall and rather than veering left towards the path to the beach she ran straight for the woods.

‘Oh, for Chrissake,’ he said, running after her. He caught up a few yards along the path, cursing as his slippers landed in patches of soggy earth. ‘All right, all right,’ he said. ‘I’m here. Slow down and tell me what’s happened.’

‘You’ll see for yourself soon enough.’

The whole front of his foot got suckered into a boggy oval of mud. ‘Damn! I wish you’d given me the chance to put some proper shoes on.’

‘I’m sorry for not considering your footwear’ – she hopped over a low, overhanging bramble – ‘but I’ve other more pressing concerns right now. Keep up!’

She stopped at the marker tree – Lady Upsy-Downsy-Ooh-la-la… how silly… he’d forgotten all about that. She pointed down the path. ‘Look.’

There, lying in the dirt, was Henry. His shoes were off and he had only one sock on. His hands were tied behind his back with a grey cashmere cardigan – Bettina’s. His face was turned away from them.

‘What have you done?’

‘I knocked him out. He was trying to blackmail me, can you believe it? I bashed him over the head with a rock and I – well, as you can see, I tied him up and stuffed one of his socks in his mouth. He was trying to—’

‘You might have killed him!’

She looked at him with a sudden childish worry, then back at Henry’s pathetic form. He snatched the gun out of her hands and lobbed it far into the bushes.

‘You rotter! You fucking rotter!’ She smacked him hard on the chest and then kicked his shin. ‘He was trying to make me have sex with him!’

‘What?’ He rubbed his shin. ‘Ow, that— What did you say?’

‘He had his – willy out and—’

‘He tried to force you?’

‘Yes! He was blackmailing me. Last night he caught me and Ivy in bed, and he followed me here and said he wanted money. And the rest. He said he’d tell a Hollywood reporter. I said he didn’t have any proof, and he said that rumour was as good as fact in these troubled times. And he started undoing his trousers and he grabbed me – oh, it was horrible – and I managed to kick him in the privates and find a rock – it was awful , Bart, his thing was sticking up and, oh, it was—’

‘He’s a million years old, Betts.’

‘He’s only sixty or so! Are you going to stop wanting to have sex in fifteen years’ time?’

He looked at the man. Imagined him grunting away, his creaking cartilage and fuzzy grey pubic hair, his – but this was Henry! Certainly there was something unsavoury about him – sneaky, you could say. But that was just what butlers were like; they oozed out subservience almost like religious fervour, but secretly they hated your guts.

‘Imagine it’d been you,’ Bettina was saying. ‘It so easily could have been you. A different place and a different person, perhaps, but it might easily have been you in this situation. And what would you have done?’

He shook his head. He didn’t know.

‘Such a ghastly low-down thing, blackmail,’ she said. ‘It boils my blood. You remember that feeling, as a child? When your parents have this enormous power over you and they dangle things over your head and threaten you, and it’s just not fair, it’s just not fair – you remember feeling that way? That feeling of absolute powerlessness…’ She laughed suddenly, her hands massaging her hair as if lathering up shampoo. ‘Power is everything! Indeed it is.’

He reached for his cigarettes, but they weren’t there – he’d left them on the patio table. ‘What are we going to do?’ he said.

‘We?’

‘Don’t make a thing of it. This affects me too. It affects my whole family.’

She sat down on the stump of a felled tree and took her cigarettes out of her pocket. She threw him one and he caught it, just, between the middle and third finger of his left hand. ‘I was going to kill him. But you’ve thrown the gun away now.’

‘You weren’t seriously going to shoot him.’

‘I might have.’

‘No. You wanted me to shoot him. That’s why the whole song and dance in the garden, coming out with the gun.’

‘Must you always have such a cynical opinion of my motives?’

‘Oh, come off it! I know what you’re—’

‘Granted, I hoped you’d see the gun and follow me.’ She held up a finger. ‘ That bit was a manipulation on my part. But I think I was hoping you’d talk me out of it and find another solution that didn’t involve murder.’ She frowned, exhaling smoke through a mouth that was turning downwards at the corners – age. ‘You seem to view me as some sort of devil woman, Bart, and frankly, I’m getting a tad bored of it.’

‘That’s not true,’ he said. ‘ You’re the one who thinks I’m a terrible person.’

She shrugged. ‘Well, what does it matter now?’