Telling Lies to Alice by Laura Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

keel over with a heart attack and Jack would be blamed, so she started being conciliatory and saying we’d remove the offending object for her. We practically had to carry Jack out of her house, and he kept shouting at Val, ‘Why did you offer to get rid of it? I don’t want her smouldering marital aids in my dustbin. Why can’t she use her own? What happens if the dustmen find it? I’ll tell you what’ll happen, we’ll have to pay them to keep quiet, that’s what . . . I can see it now: JACK FLOWERS’S RED-HOT NIGHT OF LOVE MELTS SEX TOY . . . He made Val wrap it up in so much newspaper and tape that we almost couldn’t get it in the dustbin. She told me afterwards that he’d made a point of asking her which day the bin men came so he could hide behind the curtains and make sure they’d pitched it into the dustcart without looking inside. . . . Are you all right?”
    “Yes . . . fine . . . sorry . . .” I was laughing too much to get the words out.
    “Here, let me help . . .” Lenny pulled out his handkerchief. “Wipe your eyes.”
    When I finally got my breath back, I said, “You said . . . Val . . . is that Jack’s wife?”
    “Yes, why?”
    “He doesn’t behave as if . . . Are you married?”
    “No . . . No! Don’t wrinkle your nose like that. You don’t believe anything I say, do you?”
    “Bits of it. I want to ask you something . . . When you took me to Mirabelle, and Jack was there . . .”
    “Ye-es?”
    “Did you intend for the three of us to end up in bed together?”
    “Together?” The expression on Lenny’s face was so priceless I started laughing again.
    “What, then?”
    “Well, you know . . .” He wouldn’t look at me.
    “You meant . . . both of you, didn’t you? Ménage à trois? ”
    “Not at the same time! Just, you know . . .”
    I shook my head. “Not till you tell me.”
    “More, sort of . . . take turns . . .”
    I said, “Oh, take it in turns, I see . . .” all sarcastic. “What do you do, toss a coin for who goes first?”
    Lenny looked embarrassed, then he got all defensive and said, “Well, you’d be surprised how many women go for that sort of thing,” and he named a couple of well-known actresses and a model—I can’t tell you who they were for obvious reasons, but I was very surprised about one of the actresses, because she always looks terribly prim and plays these very straightlaced parts. The other one I’d have been able to guess, if I’d thought about it. “ Really? Is that true?”
    “Well, they get twice as much out of it, don’t they? Twice as much attention, twice as much—”
    “I’ve got the picture. You don’t need to colour it in. What do you get out of it?”
    Lenny thought about it for a moment, and said, “I suppose it’s a habit. When we were playing the halls, touring . . . well, we were always skint and we had to share a room, so we’d pool our cash and take one girl out instead of two, but we never . . . not both of us . . . Have you done that?”
    “Done what?”
    “Been in bed with two men at the same time.”
    I said, “No, do you want to try it?”
    “Two birds, I would.” He rolled his eyes. “Two blokes and a girl sounds a bit poofy to me.”
    Lenny was so different to how he was at Mirabelle, and I found myself telling him all about . . . well, all sorts of things. It made a real change from sitting there nodding away, yes, yes, oh how interesting, while some guy bored the pants off me. I hardly ate anything—too busy talking—and then we had coffee and Lenny started telling me about his dad. “He never said much because he had this problem where he could never remember the word for anything, what it was called, and when he got angry about something, that made it worse. The best one was when I was called up for National Service. I thought you could pick the service you preferred—which you could, in theory, but most people ended up in the army. I told Dad I wanted to be in the navy, and he looked at me