Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

Joanna held them even higher. The waitress started to walk towards them. When she was about five steps from the table Selina said, ‘OK, I promise to wear them, I promise, all right?’

Joanna switched the balls off immediately. It seemed very quiet without their buzzing.

On her way home Joanna passed John in the tractor. He stopped so that she could overtake him then waved his arm so that she would pause for a moment. She wound down her window. ‘Yes?’

He shouted from his high seat, not bothering to switch off the tractor’s roaring engine, ‘Did she take them?’

Joanna nodded emphatically. ‘Yes. It worked like a dream. She was really shocked when she thought that I was wearing them. It was a real effort not to laugh.’

He smiled. ‘You must be a great actress then.’

She shrugged. ‘I did all right.’

She crossed her fingers down by the steering wheel. He frowned — although he couldn’t see her hands — ‘Joanna, you were just acting?’ Joanna guffawed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’d probably have crashed the car if I’d worn them driving … Of course I wouldn’t dream of wearing them anyway, why should I?’

She winked. He smiled. He obviously believed her. She uncrossed her fingers, waved at him and then drove on.

She negotiated the turn into their driveway with special care; she’d almost driven off the road there on the trip out.

One of the favourite pastimes in Grunty Fen is Chinese Whispers. People whisper gossip like it’s going out of season. They also discuss what’s happened in all of the major soaps and mini-series on television. Mostly though they prefer to gossip because it’s a tiny place and everyone knows everyone else’s business.

John got pissed in the local pub on Saturday night and told several of his cronies about Joanna’s dare. The men all laughed loudly at the notion of someone as staid and strait-laced as Selina experimenting with sexual gadgets. They knew she wouldn’t do it, but they enjoyed thinking about it just the same. A couple of them went home in their cups and told their wives. The women were shocked, interested and surprised on the whole; a small proportion were slightly jealous.

After Sunday lunch Selina was doing the washing up in the kitchen and Tom was sitting at the dining table in the next room doing the Sunday Telegraph crossword. Occasionally he read out loud to Selina any of the clues that had completely eluded him.

Selina washed the soapsuds from the final plate and placed it with the others on the drying rack. Tom seemed busy and preoccupied so she took this opportunity to clean out the sink and refill it with very hot water and a squirt of bleach. She went and found her handbag and took out the Dual Balls which she had placed inside, wrapped up in a tissue. She opened the tissue and removed the Dual Balls then placed them in the hot water and bleach, still wearing her rubber gloves. As she rubbed the balls with her hands she felt like a fetishist.

At the sound of Tom’s voice from the next room she jumped guiltily and her heart lurched; then in a split second she had grabbed the washing-up cloth and had dropped it over the balls, covering them completely. Tom was saying, ‘Thirty-one across. Vulgar Cockney squeezes ends of these into tube. Six letters. I think it’s an anagram. Any ideas, Selina?’

At this exact moment, a mile or so away, Joanna and John were still eating their lunch of beef and roast potatoes. John had a slight hangover. Joanna had prepared a meal for four but neither of the children had bothered hanging around for it. This made John even more ill-tempered and grouchy. He kept saying, ‘It’s such a waste of good food. Those two don’t know what it’s like to do without. You spoil them.’

Joanna ignored him. She was thinking about Selina and the Dual Balls. She wondered whether she would use them or not. Selina rarely broke her word, if ever.

She cut into a potato and watched the steam rise from its hot centre. She speared a bit of it on to her fork and prepared to put it into her mouth. Before she had done so, however, John said, ‘I told a couple of the fellas about your joke with Selina last night.’

Joanna stared at him, dumbstruck. ‘You did what?’

Her voice was sharp and strident. He shrugged. ‘I know I promised not to but it sort of slipped out.’

She put down her fork. ‘I don’t know why I tell you anything. You’re totally unreliable. I’m sick of you spreading my business about and sticking your nose into everything. This was none of your affair in the first place.’

He frowned. ‘Well, why did you tell me about it then?’

She pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. ‘I didn’t tell you about it, you opened my bloody mail. You have no right to open letters and parcels that are addressed to me.’

He shook his head, confused. ‘You don’t have anything to hide from me, Joanna. What’s the problem all of a sudden? This isn’t like you.’

Joanna slammed her hand down on the table, rattling the plates and glasses and cutlery. ‘I am a woman, John, women have secrets. That’s one of the few good things about being a woman as far as I can see. Now that you’ve told everyone about this thing with Selina she’ll be a laughing stock. She’s my friend, for God’s sake.’

John stood up and moved around the table towards Joanna. His head ached with every twitch of his body. ‘Everyone knows that Selina won’t use those things. She’s not like that. It was a silly idea in the first place really.’

Joanna felt tearful. She shouted, ‘Well, it seemed like a good excuse at the time!’

Then, grabbing her plate, she marched off into the kitchen, where she threw her lunch into the bin.

John sat down at the table again. He felt somewhat confused.

Felicity Barrow received a telephone call from her friend Janet Street on Sunday afternoon. Janet was extremely excited because she had a bit of amusing gossip to impart about one of the teachers at Felicity’s school. Felicity liked to call it ‘my school’, even though she was only the headmistress.

Janet had a rather puffy, breathy, light voice, and the scandal in her news almost extinguished it altogether. She gasped down the phone, ‘Jim told me that Selina Mitchell has been wearing some sort of sexual device to school and using it while she’s teaching classes.’ Felicity interrupted, putting on her best head-teacherish voice. ‘What on earth are you saying, Janet? And do speak clearly, I haven’t adjusted my hearing aid yet.’ On concluding this sentence she sipped her tea and took a large bite out of a mint-flavoured Viscount biscuit.

Janet gulped. This noise travelled all the way down the telephone line and into Felicity’s ear. Then she whispered, ‘Well, Jim said that it is a sort of vibrating machine which is shaped like the female sexual organs, but convex. It is attached by elastic to the two thighs, I think the elastic goes around the buttocks at the back … anyway Jim says it’s very discreet. What happens is that it is battery-operated and it presses into the vagina while methodically rubbing at the clitoris. Apparently after several minutes this stimulates a sexual climax.’

Felicity tried to suppress the impulse to laugh, but finally gave into a throaty chuckle. ‘Janet, I think what you’re saying is untrue. We both know Selina Mitchell, we’ve both known her for years. I was headmistress at Grunty Fen Primary when she was a pupil at the school herself. There has never been anyone in the school whose dignity, discretion and professionalism I have held in higher regard. Just the other day I sat in on her class and assessed her performance. My only advice to her was that I thought her techniques too staid, perhaps a jot unimaginative …’