Jonathan Raban - Foreign Land - A Novel

The girl took his coat. He parked Vera’s bag on the side of the bed furthest away from the door. The parcel of money was lodged safely at the bottom, under the Leoville-Barton. George looked questioningly at his hostess to discover the next move. He thought, I don’t know the ropes here at all. The last brothel that he’d visited was in Accra, where they did things quite differently. He wondered just how much time he had in hand before his trousers would have to be removed. At least he’d put on a clean pair of boxer shorts that morning.

The girl came to him. He felt her standing on tiptoe, trying to match her pudendum against his pelvis, and he had to bend his knees rather a lot before they fitted. She gripped his right buttock with one hand and fingered his spine with the other. He sought for likely handholds on her and was surprised to find how fat she was. In her raincoat, she’d looked appealingly skinny; in this loose print dress the flesh around her waist felt like handfuls of pastry dough.

Her tongue was in his mouth. Darting, hard, expert and distinctly unfriendly, the strange tongue was probing George’s gaps and fillings. He pushed it back with his own tongue. It flickered for a moment between his lips, then their two faces parted.

“Chéri,” the girl said politely, and made a little simulated moan of pleasure that came out as an unaffected note of impatience. Her fingers on his backbone seemed to be trying to play him like a flute, in a series of rapid and mildly uncomfortable arpeggios.

Then she said, “Je connais. Que t’aime—”

“Quoi?”

“Moment—” She opened the door of what George had taken for a closet but which revealed itself as a bathroom. He could see a wall of stained tiles and a bleached strip of floral shower curtain. She called, “ … des boissons dans la glacière.”

He opened the fridge. There was a saucer of green olives long past their prime; a shrivelled and nutty half lemon; six red-and-yellow packs of Kodachrome; and several dozen airline miniatures, ranked on the shelves like toy soldiers. He couldn’t find a Chivas Regal and settled for a Johnny Walker Black Label.

“Qu’est ce que vous voulez boire?” He couldn’t tutoyer her.

“Pour moi? Rien.”

He heard water running. He hoped she wouldn’t be long. With every moment that the girl was out of the room, George felt self-consciousness thicken in him like a muddy sediment in his veins and arteries. Soon he’d be gorged by it. Sipping the whisky, he found the smell of her toilet water on his fingers. Petrol and roses.

The girl who came back was a perfect stranger. She’d tied her hair in a short ponytail with a black velvet ribbon. She’d swapped the print dress for a plain white blouse and brown gymslip.

“English—” she said, touching the skirt of the gymslip. “You like?”

“Very good,” George said.

“All the English like this very much. An English gives me this. From Londres. En Angleterre, toutes les jeunes filles sont habillées comme ci.” She sounded serious and sociological.

In costume she was quite different. She’d changed from a tough little stormtrooper on duty in the action zone into an actress proud of her art. She pouted at George and ran the tip of her thumb slowly round the rim of her wet upper lip. Shrugging, she turned her back to him, then regarded him through half closed eyes. He saw immediately why she kept films in her refrigerator. It was obvious that her clients usually came with cameras. After each movement, she froze for the shutter and the flashgun, then relaxed between takes to wipe her nose with the back of her hand.

He was enjoying the show. “Vous êtes une bonne danseuse,” he said as she stood, feet wide apart on stilletto heels, arching her back and reaching behind herself to undo the zip on her gymslip.

“Ssh—” she said. She came towards him, her arms held high over her head. George held the shoulders of her gymslip while she wriggled down and out of it like a quick trout from a bank of waterweed. Her blouse had ridden up over her breasts; she tugged it down and, pouting, froze again for the camera. Absorbed in her own performance, she sucked her thumb, her eyes on George not for himself but for his act, as her audience. His father used to do exactly the same trick in his sermons. His eyes would sometimes lock on George’s face. Whether he was scourging a folly or promising salvation, he always bellowed his best lines straight at George, and George would know that his father wasn’t actually seeing him at all. He was just the aisle seat, left, seven pews from the front — and he was chosen simply because he was the least important person in the whole congregation.

Watching the same unseeing stare in the girl’s eyes, George was rapt and excited. She made him feel deliciously invisible, a keyhole-man. In secret, he felt himself begin to rise to the occasion. He’d been fearing disgrace in that quarter; no need to worry now.

Looking over the top of his head, she undid the top button on her blouse. Imitating a little girl’s dragging, bedtime footsteps, she shuffled across the floor and allowed George to undo the rest, blowing mockingly on his face as he bent forward, all fingers and thumbs, to snap the buttons free. Then she stepped back, holding the ends of her blouse close across her chest. There was another long photo-call. George sat easy, waiting for more.

She exposed first one breast, then the other, peek-a-boo style. She sulked, her arms limp at her sides. She looped a thumb into the elastic top of her pants and tweaked it down, exposing a sliver of shaven skin that looked as if it had been sprinkled with pepper. With an irritable squirm, she shucked off her blouse. Even her fattiness now seemed part of her act: it made George think of jellies and cream cakes. She was so much in character that when she sat on his lap, her arm crooked childishly around his neck, and planted a sloppy kiss on his jowl, her stale cigaretty breath came as a shock. She was very heavy. George feared for the circulation in his leg.

He heard the zip on his fly go, and felt her hand, cold and dry, fasten round him. He was lost in the girl’s game. Clumsy, gasping slightly, he reached his hand inside the back of her pants. Her mouth was against his ear now; he could feel its wetness and the sudden, sweet, deafening pressure of her tongue.

“Papa—” she was saying. “Papa … Papa … Je t’aime, Papa—”

“No—” he disentangled himself from her, feeling wretched and foolish.

“Papa!” It was a schoolgirl squeal.

“Excusez-moi. Pardonnez moi. Je ne suis pas …” He was flailing in the language now. “Je ne suis pas bien portant. Merci bien.” It was like the oral part of the School Certificate exam; he’d failed that too. “Il y a toute ma faute. Excusez-moi.”

She was in a dressing gown. He’d been mistaken all along: she wasn’t a girl, she was a dumpy woman of thirty with a tired face and a cigarette pouched in her mouth in place of an expression. She didn’t say anything but blew a long, contemptuous jet of smoke at the ceiling.

His fly was open, and a triangle of shirt-tail showed at his groin. His white flag. He tugged at the zip too quickly, and it stuck halfway. The woman watched him.

“Vous voyez …” he began, but couldn’t find any more words, in French or English, to keep the sentence on its feet.

“Oui, chéri, je vois.” She was looking at her watch.

“I rather think I had a … bag,” George said, rescuing it from beside the bed. He clambered into his coat. “I’m terribly sorry … my fault entirely … nothing to do with you at all …”

Standing by the window, she looked at him for a moment, too bored even to shrug.

In the hall, the managerial woman put down her newspaper and let him out of the front door.