Just for the Rush. Jane Lark

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СКАЧАТЬ the evening wound up I walked upstairs to my room alone. A little drunk but not high on anything. I stripped off, then lay on the bed staring at the ceiling.

      I needed drugs or sex to sleep. I had neither thing to bring my constant adrenaline rush down.

      I got up and opened the window on to the street. The shop windows were still lit up across the road. It was past midnight but the sky seemed light. It wasn’t much past the longest day and to me this was the best part of the year. I liked being up in Cumbria when it was like this, maybe I would go up next weekend. Maybe getting away from London and the people and the life there would put my head straight again.

      Sharon hated the place I’d bought in the Lake District. It wasn’t her scene. There was no one else to have sex with when we went up there. It was quiet, peaceful and idyllic. To me it was better than the best trip I’d ever had on drugs, and it went on forever when you were up there. Nature was addictive. Life was addictive when I was there.

      I dropped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, which was grey because the night was so bright.

      Things churned around in my mind. The work I had to organise for clients next week. What Sharon would be up to in our bed back at the apartment. What I had got up to in that bed all week, and in the Jacuzzi, and the pool.

      I took a breath, longing for some weed to smoke at least, so my mind could come down from its height of activity enough to sleep.

      I couldn’t sleep. I never could. I’d been a raving insomniac for years.

      Victoria came into my mind and I wondered how different things would have been if I’d stayed with her. But that was stupid, because I hadn’t loved her, just liked her a lot, so we’d have split at some point between then and now, either in year thirteen or when we’d gone on to university.

      I slept for about an hour, maybe, I think, or maybe I’d lain there thinking all night, wishing I’d done what Sharon had thought I’d done and found an old school friend to fuck. One of the girls would have been up for it. I’d seen a few of them who’d used to sleep with me in year thirteen, looking.

      There was something about a woman’s eyes that gave the game away when they were up for it. Sharon had taught me that. She was good at spotting the people in bars who were cool for a night of naughty sex. She said it was because their pupils flared. The easier measure was who stared back at you when you stared at them.

      After breakfast everyone walked down towards the school. I walked beside Edward and his fiancée. None of the guys I’d kept in contact with had asked me why I hadn’t brought my wife. Every one of them who had a partner had brought them. I suppose they were used to me not taking her whenever I saw them. I guess they all thought I was just a bad husband. I think that was what everyone outside of the bubble I lived in with Sharon believed.

      What would happen if the bubble burst?

      The shit would fly.

      My hands were in the pockets of my trousers, pinning my suit jacket open as I walked. I had skinny- cut trousers on and a pale-blue shirt. My suit was a dark blue. We were probably meant to wear black, everyone else was in black, but I’d always liked to be different.

      I mentally heard one of the masters shout at me, ‘take your hands out of your pockets Mr Rendell!’ as we walked through the doors of the Harry Potter-ish school.

      It was an amazing place. The building made you respect it. It had always gripped at my soul but today it seemed to look inside me and prod my conscience. It didn’t like what it saw either. It didn’t approve of what I’d become. It was ashamed of me.

      We listened to speeches from the school heads about the achievements of our year’s alumni group and the achievements of the school since we’d left, as we sat in rows like we had as kids – only this time on chairs not the floor or a bench.

      My theory was we’d been brought back because we were of average child-bearing age and they hoped we’d send our kids here.

      Kids. That was one mistake I’d not made with Sharon and I had a very firm condom rule in our sex games. A child wouldn’t want the sentence of a life with me as their parent, or Sharon acting as mother.

      After the speeches, we were given time to wander about the ancient halls and rooms, re-familiarising ourselves with the place. It was weird. I could see myself at desks, talking to people in halls, kissing Victoria and some of the other girls after Victoria had left, up against the walls.

      Victoria had been three rows in front of me in the hall, but if she’d sensed me behind her, she hadn’t looked back.

      As I wandered around the halls alone, wondering how my pathway from here had ended up where it had, I saw her walk out of a room with a friend. When she saw me, she walked back in.

      I carried on, walking past the room she was in, as she clearly didn’t want to speak to me. I ended up outside on the lawn on my own, walking about the rugby pitch, wishing for a joint again. I hadn’t ever smoked cigarettes. I only smoked when the tobacco contained something with more punch.

      Hands in pockets, I walked along the recently re-marked white lines, viewing me then and me now in my mind’s eye. I suppose the two of us were not that different. I’d been a self-obsessed shit then too, only then I’d valued it as self-belief. But it had helped me create a successful business. It was not to be knocked too heavily.

      It was that cocky attitude that had made me tell everyone else they were wrong about Sharon when I’d met her. My parents and Em had warned me I was taking a wrong path. I’d told them to fuck off out of my personal business. But it was the wrongness and forbidden nature of the life I led that had made me get involved in it. It held a sense of risk and that made my blood pump with adrenaline. And, of course, anything that had pissed my parents off, and got my adrenalin raging, I’d been into it when I was younger. My self-focused attitude had made me rebellious and I wouldn’t have let my parents set boundaries around me when I’d just made a million. In my eyes, then, I’d been a genius and they’d been beneath me.

      I’d been a big-headed dick, and now—

      ‘Jack.’ I turned around to see Victoria walking towards me, in a pair of pale-pink stiletto heels that were sinking into the grass of the pitch. She had a light flowery summer dress on, one that covered her breasts entirely and fell down to her knees. One that showed the outline of her body as the sunlight shone through the cotton and made me want to guess what everything looked like beneath.

      I was more used to women who wore tops that shoved their breasts up in your face, or showed you the first curved edge in a dress secured by tape. While their skirts were so high you had no leg left to imagine, and if they opened their legs, which they frequently did deliberately, you had nothing at all left to imagine.

      Imagination was nice and Victoria’s simplicity and prim dress had me hornier than any of the half-naked women Sharon liked us to play with.

      I was glad Victoria had come looking for me. Maybe she’d been waiting for a moment to speak quietly. Just the two of us. Maybe I would do what Sharon expected me to do tonight and share a bed with Victoria, for old times’ sake.

      ‘Hi,’ I said, as she came closer. ‘I got the vibe you didn’t want to talk to me, otherwise I’d have come over and said, hello, last night. How are you? Is life treating you alright?’

      She gave me a faint smile and looked me СКАЧАТЬ