Lost Between Houses by David Gilmour Read Free Book Online

pair of dolls. Sex dolls. They were out of my league, I knew that, I mean there was no point in even trying, although one of them, I have to say, smiled at me sometimes. I think she either felt sorry for me or she thought I was real interesting because I never talked to her. Who knows? Maybe she was just nice. I turned back to watch the band. He could do some pretty fancy footwork, that drummer, he knew I was watching him and every so often he’d look over and give me a nod. With these little round sunglasses and cowboy boots, he was just about the coolest looking guy you’ve ever seen. I mean he had it all. But I didn’t want him to think he had to perform for me all night long, so after awhile I moved across the floor and went upstairs.
    From up there I could watch the girls dancing. There’s nothing like a girl who can really dance. It’s like watching God. Up there you could watch and watch and watch and nobody knew you were staring, or what you were thinking about. The smell of those dancing bodies floated up through the heat and the smoke and the coloured lights. I wondered what those girls did with their sweaty shirts and underwear when they got home. Did they leave them all lying on the bed, did they hang them up in the washroom? I sort of wished I could take their sweaty clothes home, just have them to myself in my bedroom for a little bit. Just thinking like that gave me the most awful kind of plunging sensation. I had to step back and take a deep breath. Otherwise I’d have gone over the balcony.
    I saw one of the French Canadian girls, the dark-haired one, standing by the railing and I gave her a sort of formal hello. And when she didn’t call the cops on me, I stopped for a second andasked her how she was. Pretty good, she said, bending her head down and taking a sip of her coke. It made me sort of ill, just how good-looking she was. She asked me how it was going and I started to tell her, I mean I started to say that everything was okay, but it didn’t sound very interesting, I was afraid she was going to bugger off, so I said I had a little problem, my parents had gone away for the weekend and I’d thrown a great big party and now the house was a mess, there were stains on the carpet and I was sort of in trouble.
    “What sort of stains?” she asked.
    “Oh, you know,” I said, all mysterious, implying, I guess, that there’d been some great big fucking orgy and there were like shot spots all over the house. I couldn’t shut up. And the funny thing is, she sort of listened and made suggestions, you know how to get the carpet clean, add some, I forget what, something and cold water and a sponge, but really, while I was talking, I had this sensation, it was just hanging over me like a cloud of dread, that maybe I was coming across like a big fat creep, or just the biggest fucking liar in the history of mankind.
    “I think one of them might have had her period as well,” I said, going completely into orbit.
    “You mean there was more than one?”
    “Just the first night,” I said.
    Even after that she didn’t leave. The band came back on, and we kept talking, you know, how to get my house clean, and it was getting bigger and more complicated. Finally a slow song came on. I looked over the railing and I said, get this, “Nice song.”
    Great eh?
    And she said, “Yeah.”
    And I said, “It’s nice to dance to this stuff.”
    “Yeah,” she said.
    “But I don’t like asking people to dance.”
    I mean obvious or what.
    She gave her drink a final little slurp and put it on the floor against the railing.
    “I’ll dance with you,” she said. So we went down the stairs and out onto the floor, everybody sees me with this great-looking chick, and she put her hand up on my shoulder and I put my hand on her back, I could feel the sweat coming through her shirt, and I could smell her perfume, it didn’t smell like great perfume, sort of like the cheap stuff, as my mother would say, but I liked it