Thirteen Stops Read online

  Barbara wasn’t into any kinky stuff, Paul had once confided to Laura. She wouldn’t wear the sexy lingerie or be naked in front of him because she felt self-conscious about her body after two pregnancies, and she’d refused point-blank to dominate him in bed. That kind of thing made her feel physically sick, she’d said. She’d made him feel like a bleedin’ pervert, he’d told Laura. He’d sounded genuinely surprised when he’d said it, too. So now Laura was stuck doing it, because she’d pretended to be fine with it in the beginning and now she couldn’t possibly tell him that she loathed it with all her being. It would make her look stupid, or as if she’d lied about it at first. But if it gave her the edge over Barbara, if it meant that Paul kept coming to her for the things he couldn’t get at home, then she’d bloody well keep doing it for as long as it took. She’d just have to put up with his weird fetishes for now and, once she was married to him and Barbara was history, she’d wean him off it somehow and they’d slip back into being a normal loving couple in no time. That was the plan anyway. It was the only plan she had.

  In the meantime, though, he’d be calling to her flat later on tonight and she had a surprise for him from Victoria’s Secret, paid for with the money he’d given her himself for that exact purpose. He’d love the kinky little purply basque thing, that left her boobs and backside hanging out – the box called it ‘tantalisingly uncovered’ but it really meant just plain old hanging out – while sucking in her stomach and pushing up her boobs to an unnatural but exciting degree. Worn with the obligatory stockings, high heels and suspenders, the whole get-up would give him the hard-on of his life. After they’d had sex and she’d slapped his face and butt and called him every bad name she could think of (sometimes it was hard to think up new ones to thrill and excite him and he often had to tell her what to say, but he preferred it when she came up with them herself – he said it felt more natural like that. Natural! As if anything about a man begging a woman to belt him one in the kisser could ever be termed ‘natural’!) – well, after all that she intended to ask him again when he was thinking of leaving Barbara. Soon, my love, soon, he always said, but then time passed, and yet more time passed, and nothing ever changed. Before she knew it, she was twenty-eight-going-on-twenty-nine, a whole two years of her life had vanished in a puff of smoke and they were no further forward, not so much as an iota.

  Yes, tonight she was going to ask him again and, this time, she would attempt to pin him down to an actual time and date. When she’d first started seeing him on the sly, Barbara had been pregnant with Lucy and, of course, he couldn’t have upset her then by announcing that he’d just met the love of his life at the office. The new girl, in fact, a girl called Laura, with silky blonde hair and blue eyes and a soft red mouth just made for kissing, which was how he always described her.

  But Baby Lucy was over two years old now and it was time to stop tiptoeing around Barbara like she was some delicate flower, a fragile little woman who needed protection from the real world. Barbara Sheridan was thirty-four to Laura’s twenty-eight. She was more than old enough to hear the painful home truths that Laura had been living with for so long – home truths about how Paul had found someone else and he didn’t love her, Barbara, any more. He’d see her right, of course, her and the kids, during the big break-up, but then he had to be free to live his own life, with Laura, the woman he now loved and wanted to be with.

  Tonight, Laura promised herself as she tap-tapped away on her computer for the afternoon, dealing with boring customer invoices and stupid customer queries with only half a heart. Tonight she’d ask Paul where she really stood with him, and she’d get it out of him as well, even if she had to threaten him with telling Barbara. She’d only do that as a last resort, of course. Something so drastic would be tried only in the event of a dire emergency, such as Paul trying to leave her (God forbid!), or Paul absolutely refusing to give her a straight answer about where she stood with him. She’d love for Barbara to know about their affair but, since Paul didn’t want that under any circumstances, she’d have to go along with it for now. But not for much longer. There was a limit to even her patience, and God knows she’d been patient enough with him these last two years.

  At the end of the seemingly endless day, she shut down her machine, chanced a quick glance across at Paul, who was deep in conversation with one of the other junior managers, grabbed her coat, phone and bag and headed out of the office to catch the Luas back to town.

  There were thirteen stops on the part of the green Luas line that ran between Sandyford, where she worked, and St. Stephen’s Green, near where she lived, and she usually counted them off in her mind while she gazed out the window at the passing landscape: Sandyford, Stillorgan, Kilmacud, Balally, Dundrum, Windy Arbour, Milltown, Cowper, Beechwood, Ranelagh, Charlemont, Harcourt Street and finally, home, St. Stephen’s Green. Such lovely, dreamy wispy names. The automated female voice that intermittently requested passengers over the public address system to ‘please move down the tram’ counted the stops off too, in English and in Irish for good measure (‘Next stop, Windy Arbour. An chéad stad eile, Na Glasáin’) for the benefit of commuters, and Laura never failed to find the woman’s modulated, impersonal tones comforting, even soporific, as the tram chugged on its rhythmic way. Today, as always, her thoughts on the journey were full of Paul and, when she reached the Stephen’s Green stop, she alighted briskly and hurried home to get ready for the night ahead.

  Just as Laura was coming in the door of her flat, her mother phoned. She dearly wanted to ignore the call but her mother would only keep ringing and ringing until she answered. It was easier just to answer the damn thing straightaway and be done with it than to risk her phoning later, when Paul would be in the flat with her.

  “Hi, Mum,” she said, dreading whatever was coming next. “What’s up?”

  “I feel strange,” her mother whined. “I have new tablets and they’re making me feel dizzy and light-headed.”

  “Are these the ones for the depression or the ones for the anxiety? Or for the insomnia?”

  “How should I know? Her at the chemist just gives them to me from the prescription and I take them.”

  “Can’t you talk to her about them then? Or to Dr. Lee?”

  Laura sat down on her bed and eased off her shoes with an enormous sense of relief. They looked fabulous but were extremely hard to walk in and even to sit at her desk in, and her feet were sore now. She really should have changed back into her flat-heeled pumps on the Luas but she’d enjoyed so much the way her legs looked in the high heels that she hadn’t bothered. She’d even taken a few photos for her social-media accounts. Her poor feet were crippled now though. She rubbed them with one hand while holding her mobile in the other.

  “I can’t talk to Dr. Lee,” her mother complained. “I can’t understand a word she says and she can’t understand me.”

  Laura sighed. Her mother was always complaining about poor Dr. Lee, a Chinese woman Laura had met a couple of times when she’d accompanied her mother to the surgery. Dr. Lee’s grasp of English had seemed to Laura to be perfectly adequate but there was no pleasing Eleanor Brennan.

  “Her English is fine, Mum.” Laura, exasperated, began fantasising about the bath she planned to run the minute her mother was off the phone.

  “All right then, she’s an old bitch!” Eleanor burst out. “Are you happy now? She keeps telling me not to drink while I’m on the medication. The bloody cheek of her!”

  “You are staying off the drink though, aren’t you, Mum? And she has to do that. That’s her job.”

  The silence was all the answer Laura needed. She sighed heavily again, closed her eyes and wished for the umpteenth time that her father, who she had never known, hadn’t dumped Eleanor when he’d found out she was pregnant with Laura at the tender age of seventeen. Things might have been so different then. Laura would have had a father as she grew up, like all the other girls in school – might still have one – and the fragile Eleanor wouldn’t have
had a load of nervous breakdowns and become an alcoholic, leaving Laura to be mostly brought up by a succession of aunts and uncles who all had kids of their own to mind, and to whom Laura was just a nuisance and an extra expense they didn’t need. Some men just didn’t know, or care, about the damage they caused when they walked away from the women they had impregnated. Laura had lived with this depressing certainty her whole life.

  “Can I come over?” Her mother was still wheedling. “Or can you pop round here?”

  Laura thought frantically for a moment. Then the lies came bursting forth. “No, Mum. I’m sorry but I’ve got a friend coming over in a minute to stay the night. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend and . . . um, she thinks she might be pregnant, so we’ve got a lot to talk about and I really just need to be there for her right now. You – you do understand that, don’t you, Mum?”

  “Fine, leave me here on my own to rot, why don’t you?” Eleanor was in full sulk mode and snapping all around her like an alligator with a toothache.

  “Look, I’ll come over tomorrow, okay?” Laura was racked with guilt as she always was when she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) immediately comply with her mother’s frequent demands. “I’ll bring food and I’ll cook you a lovely dinner, and I’ll – I’ll bring you over a nice bottle of wine to wash it down with.” She hated herself for encouraging, even enabling, Eleanor’s alcoholism but tonight she really had to see Paul. Nothing, not even her mother, would be allowed to interfere with that.

  “You won’t forget, will you, love?” The pitiful neediness in Eleanor’s voice cut her to the quick.

  “I won’t forget, Mum. I promise.”

  After Eleanor had finally been persuaded to hang up, Laura sat on her bed for a long time, motionless, just staring into space.

  Laura wouldn’t have wanted Paul to know this, but she had a history of this kind of thing. Married men, attached men, men with girlfriends and children, men with baggage. They had to have baggage. She always went for the same kind of guy. Guys who were single meant less than nothing to Laura. They had to have wives or girlfriends, so that she could work hard to lure them away from their significant others. This made her feel good about herself. It made her inordinately happy to have a man prefer her to the woman he’d promised to love, honour and cherish until death did them part. If she thought about the psychology of it at all, she would have said that because she hadn’t had a father of her own, she felt the need to be close to men who were husbands and fathers themselves. She didn’t think that she was trying to deprive other kids of their fathers just because she hadn’t had one herself. That would have been horrible. It was more that she was attracted only to older men with families and responsibilities and that was just the way it was. Who the feck cared about the psychology of the thing?

  In her last job, she’d had an affair with the company’s managing director. That wasn’t as grand as it sounded because the company had been a small freight one with only a handful of employees. The affair had ended in disaster when Harry’s wife found out about her husband’s relationship with his new receptionist. She’d come charging round to the office and had screamed at Laura in front of everyone. It had been a truly demoralising experience. Harry had given her her notice then. She’d lost both her job and her lover on the same day – a new low – but nobody in that office had had any sympathy for her. No one had talked to her, not a single murmured word of encouragement or empathy, while she was clearing out her desk and doing the walk of shame out the front door with her arms full of her cardboard box, her potted plant and other small effects.

  The time before that hadn’t ended quite so publicly, but it had ended nonetheless, leaving Laura feeling unwanted, unloved and unlovable. It was bad enough that her own father hadn’t wanted her, and that he’d left her mother the instant he’d found out about the pregnancy. The feelings of being unloved were hard to bear. Laura hoped and prayed that, this time, she’d really found The One in Paul Sheridan. It had to be Paul. She’d put so much time and effort into making him want her and love her. It just had to be Paul.

  When Paul came over that night around six-thirty, they went straight to bed as usual. Much to Laura’s gratification, he practically salivated at the sight of her in the stockings and suspenders, and the tight purply basque thing that made her waist look waspishly tiny and her boobs round and full. The thing was as uncomfortable to wear as a bloody whalebone corset from the Victorian era and she felt utterly ridiculous answering the door of her flat while wearing it, but Paul’s reaction was all the reward she needed. Madly fluttering her heavily mascara’d eyelashes, she led him to the bed and helped him undress as if he were an emperor and she were his concubine. She went straight into her usual spiel when he was lying there expectantly, naked as a jaybird and semi-erect, waiting for her to start their regular procedure.

  “Have you been a naughty boy this week, Paul?” she asked him as she stroked his pale, hairy body. She could recite the words by heart at this stage, she’d said them to him so often over the course of their relationship. “Have you been thinking naughty thoughts, Paul? Maybe doing naughty things like touching yourself? Have you been touching yourself, you wicked, wicked boy?”

  “Oh yes, mistress!” he panted, taking her hand and moving it with his own over his engorged penis. “I need to be punished, mistress! You will punish me, won’t you?”

  “Oh yes, of course I will, you wicked boy!” Laura sneaked a glance at the clock on the bedside table. If she wrapped this up pretty sharpish, she’d still have time to talk to him about the very important matter of Their Joint Future. She wasn’t spending all night walloping his flabby arse and pretending to give out stink to him for thinking about naked women while he wanked. Trying to disguise the boredom she felt, she continued: “Yes, you’re certainly going to be punished, you disgusting boy! I’ll teach you to touch your filthy – thing without my permission!”

  She slapped him smartly across the face three or four times in quick succession.

  “Now will you learn?” she shouted at him as he frantically pulled at his willy. “Now will you learn to do as I say, you filthy little maggot?”

  “Oh yes, mistress! I’ll learn, I’ll learn, I swear!” he gasped, the sweat breaking out all over his forehead. “Hop on,” he added, frantically indicating his swollen member. “Hop on fast while it’s hard! Come on, come on, hop on, will you, before it goes down!”

  Hop on? thought Laura irritably. What is this, a stiff willy or the 46-fucking-A bus? She had a sudden mad vision of herself tapping her Leap card against something bendy and fleshy and had to turn a stray hysterical giggle into a cough. She hated when he talked like that. It was about as romantic as a bout of diarrhoea or a heavy period. Suppressing a sigh, she dutifully climbed aboard and rode the bus into the station, thinking about other things the whole time, like a new fashion website she’d seen that had some gorgeous boots for sale. She might go online after Paul had left and order a pair. She could justify the expense if she was going to be the official girlfriend of a junior manager soon.

  After the sex, Paul lay on his back panting, bright red in the face, scratching at his armpits. “That was amazing, love!” he said when he’d got his breath back.

  “You’re not going home already, are you?” she said in dismay, when she saw him heaving himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed, prior to scrabbling about for his trousers. He always left a load of loose change on her bedroom floor after sex, when the contents of the pockets of his carelessly discarded trousers spewed out and scattered everywhere in his haste to get her into bed. It made her feel like a hooker, picking his money up off the floor after he’d left.

  “Um, no, of course not.”

  Liar, liar, pants on fire, thought Laura.

  He fished about for his socks. “I’m just getting dressed so that you can make me a nice cup of coffee before I head off, that’s all.”

  “Good,” said Laura firmly, “because I need to talk to you before you go
. It’s about time you told me where I stand with you, with this relationship. I mean, after two years I’m still your bit on the side? Like, what’s all that about?”

  She hadn’t meant to bring this stuff up while they were still basking in the afterglow of sex but, what harm, it was out now. And what difference did it make whether they talked about it here and now, in the bedroom, post-coitally, or when they were sitting down at her kitchen table over a cup of coffee? The questions to which she wanted answers, would demand answers, would still be the same, regardless of the venue or how careful she was about the timing. Anyway, she knew there was never really a good time for this kind of thing.

  “You know you’ve always been so much more to me than just a bit on the side,” Paul said.

  He was crouched down tying his shoelaces so she couldn’t see his face, but it sounded as if he was uncomfortable with the topic of conversation. It was always the same whenever she tried to bring up the subject of Their Relationship, or Their Future. Well, this time she was going to push it and she didn’t care how uncomfortable Mr. Paul Sheridan became. He was just going to have to man up and grow a pair and that was all there was to it. She hoped.

  “When are you going to tell Barbara about me?” she persisted.

  When he straightened up, his colour was high and he was running his fingers through his dark hair, making it stand on end, a thing he did every time he was stressed.

  “Babes . . .”

  She gritted her teeth. She hated when he called her that because it invariably meant that a big fat fobbing-off was coming.