Free Back to Vanilla by Jennifer Maschek Page A

ago.
    The one-bedroomed flat
was pleasant enough, although as a permanently temporary resident,
Alasdair had done nothing with or to it in the six years he’d been
there. It was not exactly a shrine to his mother, yet it was
distinctively an old woman’s flat in décor. The only significant
contribution Alasdair had made was the tangle of bikes and piles of
bucolic magazines that Lyall had to thread his way through,
stirring up a midge-like cloud of dust flecks.
    The mood was
melancholy, dark, although Lyall was aware that this was probably
more a manifestation of the heavy shoulder slump he invariably felt
on walking into the place than anything to do with a lack of light,
and on this occasion, he hesitated a little and didn’t yell out his
normal warning greeting.
    The glowing screen
visible from the lounge door as he entered showed a naked girl…
woman really (although at 37, and with daughters, anything under 20
had become absolutely sacrosanct for Lyall). Her hair was scraped
into two perky dark blonde bunches, and she was widely and
incongruously splayed on an antique red velvet chaise longue,
buzzing vigorously with a mammoth black dildo, the sculptured head
of which kept disappearing into her silky folds. Lyall found
himself momentarily paralysed by the change of timbre in the
vibrator’s hum as it retreated and re-emerged. The fact that she
was pink and shaved smooth added to an illusion of childhood, and
Lyall could see now that she was clearly playing to a market, with
freckles dotted on to her pouting face; he then saw, from an
awkward side angle, the punter for whom she was performing.
    Humped in the swivel
chair in which he currently spent most of his waking hours sat his
father, blue and red checked flannel dressing gown cord dangling
down so that the garment hung loosely on either side, a vodka
bottle minus all but two fingers of spirit on the table by the
laptop.
    The curtains were
closed and, with the table at the far end of the small room
littered with empty beer cans, the flat had the musty smell of an
old pub after a busy weekend. The only light radiated from the
screen on which the girl-woman sighed and panted and egged Alasdair
on as he bowed in to towards her a little. He looked old; unshaven
and bristly, exuding a desperation that reminded Lyall starkly of
his grandmother’s last few days on this planet, when he’d visited
her in the nursing home that had replaced this as her final
dwelling.
    Alasdair’s left hand
was placed at the edge of the desk, those long gnarly fingers laid
on the wooden surface, while the right moved slowly and coaxingly
over his semi-covered groin. His mouth slightly open, he spat small
white flecks as his incoherent mumbles echoed the girl’s
encouragement with an enthusiasm that lapsed, in the few long
seconds while Lyall watched, into semi-despondency.
    He walked out of the
flat and closed the door feeling profoundly sad, aware that his
name was being called in the background, but no desire had ever
beat so strongly within him as the need to get the fuck out of that
place.

4. Jane
    She did, of
course, know precisely why Alasdair wasn’t about to darken her
grandchildren’s doorstep for a while yet. Considering what her
daughter had just told her about the unfortunate scene Lyall had
walked in on, she just felt sorry for both father and son. And when
she added this to the collection of stories Lorna had shared over
the years, the repercussions of what looked like a desperately
lonely descent into the bottle, she could not in truth say she
wouldn’t have done the same at that stage of motherhood.
    She understood the
depth of that maternal instinct to insulate your children from the
nastinesses of the world. She was also aware, though, that her
daughter had always seen life in more black-and-white terms,
whereas for Jane the boundaries were invariably and increasingly
prone to merging. Added to this, she knew, there were more
dimensions to Alasdair, to anyone, than