Final Demand by Deborah Moggach Read Free Book Online

anyone.’
    â€˜They’ve got to know, sooner or later.’
    â€˜She’s taken it very badly. She’s still got some stuff in the flat and she just pops in, without warning.’
    â€˜Sounds loopy to me.’
    â€˜If she saw you, she’d go berserk.’
    â€˜Why don’t you change the locks?’
    â€˜I’ll get it sorted out, I promise. You don’t mind, do you?’
    With the generosity of the victor, Natalie shook her head. She was still drugged with love. She smiled at the security guard in Reception; she sent Phillip an e-mail when he was in the middle of a meeting with some people from Stuttgart. She pictured hisface as he read it.
Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen
, he’d be saying, rising to his feet.
I have to check some data in the other office.
She waited for him in the ladies’ cloakroom, her knickers draped over the cubicle door. How thrilling, the danger!
    â€˜What if someone comes in?’ he whispered.
    â€˜Shut up.’
    She unzipped his trousers, sat him on the toilet and, straddling him, fucked him with a furious passion. Afterwards they slumped against each other, limp and laughing.
    He gazed at her, wiping her damp hair from her forehead. ‘Oh Natalie Natalie, where have you been all my life?’ He zipped up his trousers. ‘Listen, sweetheart – don’t tell anybody about us, OK? Don’t want any gossip, you know what offices are like.’ He kissed her. ‘I want to keep you all to myself.’ And then he went back to his meeting.
    The new, compliant Natalie went along with this. She lived for the night. The flat was no longer desolate for her, with its relics of Kieran’s occupation – his scrawled writing on her video cassettes, his
Teach Yourself Spanish
from his short-lived evening class. So potent once, they were now defused and could no longer upset her; Kieran had gone, and simply left objects behind. Her flat was transformed by erotic anticipation; for two weeks it became a palace of love as if it had never known a normal, hair-drying, telly-watching evening. She was a terrible cook but she bought prawns and mangoes and put wine in the fridge to chill. She bought scented candles and stuck them around the bathroom, as one does in the early days of love; she and Phillip sat in the bath together, their jack-knifed knees draped with foam, her toes caressing his balls.
    As they sat there, the mirror steaming up, she told him about her childhood. She had worked it up into a series of anecdotes by now; they gained in drama with each telling. By now her past felt as if it had happened to somebody else.
    â€˜Shredded Wheat?’ he asked. ‘For three days?’
    â€˜I was only little. I didn’t know how to work the tin opener.’
    â€˜What about the baby?’
    â€˜I gave it to him too. He liked it, actually.’
    â€˜Didn’t the milk go sour?’
    â€˜I nicked some from outside the flat next door. And then my mum came home so that was all right.’
    â€˜Doesn’t sound all right to me. The woman was an alcoholic.’
    â€˜Is. She’s still around, somewhere.’ Applying the word ‘alcoholic’ to her mother was as startling as applying ‘arranged marriage’ to Farida; it made her into a case, something no doubt her mother would cheerfully admit. Janey, when she wasn’t boozily weeping, was a cheerful woman. You could say that for her.
    â€˜Weren’t the social services involved?’ he asked.
    â€˜They took away two of the younger ones but we kept moving around, see. They couldn’t catch up. Halifax, York . . . I knew it was going to happen when she told me to keep my clothes on when I went to bed.’
    â€˜You’re a survivor, aren’t you?’
    She scooped up water and spilt it over his knees. ‘You’ve got to look after yourself in this world. Nobody else is going to do it for you.’ She could