Free Lie With Me by Sabine Durrant Page A

repeated.
    ‘We’ll have so much clearing up to do.’ The waitress, a sweet little thing in a black miniskirt, shimmied over and Alice paid the bill. ‘Do you want to come back to Clapham for lunch?’ she said. She narrowed her eyes suggestively.
    ‘I’m on a roll, work-wise,’ I said coldly, and shoved off pretty sharpish. I regretted it later. I bought a sandwich in Subway at Victoria instead. Pathetic.
    I had ground to make up after that. It does no good to be petulant. I needed to increase the attack, and lighten it at the same time. An idea came to me a couple of days later. My mother had brought my bin bags down out of the attic and left them on the bedroom floor. I rummaged through until, tangled up in a stolen hotel towel, I found the purple T-shirt I had brought back from Elconda. ‘Let Zeus blow your mind’ it read in jagged black lettering.
    I wore it under my jumper the next time I was at Alice’s house. We were upstairs in her bedroom, and I did a slow striptease, disco-dancing while I undressed, until I was just in the Zeus T-shirt and my boxers. ‘Let me blow your mind,’ I said, pressing her up against the dressing table.
    ‘Stop it, stop it!’ she said. ‘I hate that T-shirt. It reminds me of that night. You were so drunk, you were so . . . awful .’
    I continued to gyrate. ‘God, you’d look damn good in a bikini,’ I told her, my hands running up and down her body. ‘That’s all I’m after.’
    ‘Oh Paul, behave,’ she said.
     
    It wasn’t until the first week of June that I had a breakthrough. Michael had passed on a couple of free theatre tickets he couldn’t use. The play, a political satire set in the former Yugoslavia, was at the National on the Southbank and I arranged to meet Alice there straight from work.
    She was edgy and distracted. One of her clients was up for deportation, and she was on her phone when I arrived. It wasn’t until the interval that she got the call she’d been waiting for. We were sitting at the bottom of a small flight of steps between levels. I was scooping at a honeycomb ice cream, using the tiny plastic shovel provided, waiting for her to finish. I kept having to jerk my shoulder out of the way to let people pass.
    She hung up and sighed heavily. ‘No joy,’ she said.
    ‘Poor old Alice,’ I said. ‘You really need a rest.’
    ‘I’m not the one who needs pity.’
    ‘Not long until your holiday now.’ I was hot in my jacket. I remember thinking I should have left it on the seat. ‘Maybe you’ll be able to forget about it for a bit.’
    ‘I won’t be able to forget about anything,’ she said. She’d been flicking through the programme, and she pointed at a photograph of the lead actor. ‘I knew I recognised him. He’s in Casualty .’
    ‘A drama I have never watched, and never intend to.’
    ‘Too lowbrow for you of course.’ Her voice was dark and heavy. ‘Paul Morris stooping to Casualty : as if!’ She cast the programme to one side. ‘Sorry. I’m tired. No. I’ll have too much to do. U-Haul are coming in September for the furniture, but there are clothes in wardrobes, food in cupboards to be cleared – for ten years we’ve just chucked stuff in.’ She sighed. ‘I could just leave everything for them to deal with – they’re bulldozing the land; they could just bulldoze the house with it. But . . . well, terribly British of me to think I need to tidy. Oh God, and there’s Hermes to sort too.’
    ‘Hermes?’
    ‘An old pick-up truck that came with the place. Hermes, the God of speed – ironic obviously. It hasn’t worked for years. I could sell it if I could get it going.’
    The bell went for the second act. It was all or nothing. I felt vertiginous. ‘What you need,’ I said, ‘is a professional mechanic.’
    ‘I do. If I can find one on Pyros – I suppose they must exist.’
    ‘Or a sexy handsome man who might just have got his hands dirty in his university holidays by helping out at McCoy & McCoy