The Year of Dangerous Loving. John Davis Gordon

through the air. He went sailing over the handlebars, hit the bonnet, skidded along it, and smacked head-first into the windscreen.

      The windscreen was fucked. The bike was fucked. ‘And so am I.’

7

      That was Wednesday. Hargreave took it very easy on Thursday. He did not go to the gym. He did not ride his exercycle. He did not have a drink. He did not even go to his chambers – he stayed in bed. But he re-read Champion’s uranium file, finally making a note in the Investigation Diary that he recommended the expenditure of further police funds ‘in view of the international importance’. It eased his conscience that he had done some work.

      But when Friday dawned he felt wonderful. He still had some stiffness, but he was rested, he had been off the booze for thirty-six hours, his body felt wide-awake: and tonight he was going to Macao! He swung out of bed in the sunrise, to get the day by the tail good and early – and he winced. He had more than some stiffness: the wonderful feeling was only in his head. He walked to the bathroom very experimentally. His knees were still painful and he had a big bruise on his hip. He lowered himself very carefully into a hot bath and lay there, eyes closed, thinking of Olga.

      After a moment he felt as excited as a teenager again, his aches and pains did not matter a damn. He knew it was crazy, but that’s how he felt.

      It felt even more like that as, in the sunset, the hydrofoil sped across the South China Sea towards Macao. The whole world was exotic, the haze, the mauve islands, the junks, the Pearl River mouth, and he was going to the most exotic girl in the world. He was smiling with anticipation as he swigged his cold San Miguel beer in the first-class cabin, his first drink in forty-eight hours: it was going down into his system like one of Ian Bradshaw’s vitamin B shots. He was impatient with the delays at the immigration counters, but he loved the crowds, the noise, the smell of the place. He had a grin all over his face as his taxi sped and honked and swerved him along the teeming waterfront, then wound up the knoll to the gracious Bella Mar. He strode into the picturesque old hotel, and he loved every creaking floorboard and pillar and potted palm and smiling Chinese. It almost felt as if he had come home. He checked in with a flourish and hurried up to his suite with hardly a hobble. He dumped his bag, snatched a bottle of whisky out of it, poured a big shot, then picked up the telephone and dialled the Heavenly Tranquillity Nite-Club.

      ‘Hullo, darling!’ Olga cried. ‘Are you really here?’

      ‘In the flesh. In the hotel. In the bedroom. In the bed.’

      ‘Oh darling, do not go anywhere!’

      Twenty minutes later he heard her running up the staircase. He flung open the door as she burst into it. And there she was, even more beautiful than he remembered, her mass of golden hair piled up on her head, her big blue eyes sparkling, her lovely bosom bursting out of her dress, her wide laughing smile. Hargreave’s heart turned over at the sheer glory of her. ‘Olga …’

      He clutched her joyously, felt her fulsome young womanness against him; and he turned her as he kissed her and jostled her towards the bed, laughing into her mouth. She collapsed on to the bed, making giggling noises, and he fell on top of her, one hand wrenching up her dress, the other grappling with his belt. ‘The door –’ He scrambled off her, his trousers halfway down, hobbled painlessly to the door, slammed it and turned back to her. Olga was laughing, her dress up round her waist, her lovely long legs bent as she raised her hips and wrestled her panties down. As Hargreave blundered towards her she hooked them on to her big toe, pulled back the elastic, then let go. They sailed through the air over his head as he collapsed, laughing, on top of her.

      They had a wonderful time that weekend. For a week he had fed on the image of her beautiful body, and now he truly had her again. And despite his aches and bruises, his health-kick had paid off: it seemed he wanted to make love to her all the time. And it felt like love. It had almost felt like that last weekend when he left her waving on the jetty. For at least half the week it had still felt like that as he laboured at his exercises; only sometimes had he managed to convince himself that it was only a crazy case of lust. But this glorious weekend he knew that it was not just that, it was better – it was besottedness. He was besotted with her, her tumult of golden hair, her fragrant loins, her magnificent breasts – it seemed he could not get enough of her, there was no feeling more magnificent, more lovely than her body under his, her legs locked around his, thrusting, thrusting into the sweet hot depths of her. Every position she adopted was wildly erotic but the most magnificently important one was to feel her full naked beauty splayed out underneath him.

      But there was plenty of laughter, too, and plenty of other fun. She loved jokes. They had the same sense of humour, the same sense of the ridiculous. She thought his health-kick was a hilarious story, and when he came to the bit about writing off his new mountain bike she went into roars of laughter. That established him as a raconteur, and thereafter, whenever he started to tell her a joke she began to giggle, even before he reached the funny part, and when he came to the punchline she threw back her head and guffawed, her lovely eyes wet.

       ‘The way you tell a story!’

      He was a scream, apparently. Hargreave knew he could tell a good tale when he felt like it, when he was in the mood, but it seemed a very long time since he had felt like that; he had forgotten how entertaining he could be. Now he was happy, and it was lovely to be in lust with somebody who laughs a lot and thinks you’re very amusing, it was delightful to laugh at his own jokes again. She was a good story-teller too. She was a natural mimic, her imitation of the English and American accents was very good. She was a born actress, and told a story with her hands and eyes and face and body-language. He was delighted to find out that Russians and English laughed at the same things, that many of his jokes had Russian versions which were often funnier.

      ‘Darling, Russians tell lots of jokes because they drink so much because that is all there is to do, jokes and drink is all we have to laugh about.’

      And it was fascinating, exotic, that she was Russian; from behind that Iron Curtain, suddenly let loose in the big wide world. He wanted to know all about her life in Russia, about her parents, her home, her schooling, her work, her friends. He built up a long series of images of her, hoeing the collective fields in the spring, harvesting in summer, the sweat running off her, her lovely girl-thighs steamy, dust and grit in her flaxen hair, her sexy hands coarsened; he imagined her bleak schoolhouse, hot in summer, cold in winter, smelling of unwashed bodies and chalk and books.

      ‘I always sat at the very back of the class so I could cheat easier – everybody cheats all the time in Russia, darling, it is the only way to get anything –’

      He imagined her swimming with her friends in the muddy river in her underwear.

      ‘– and sometimes we swam naked, when there were no boys, that was great fun, oh that made us want to be free, to run away from Russia, swim in the lovely blue sea in the sunshine with palm trees on the beach, and Coca-Cola and icecream, and then dance and fuck like crazy, like the Americans do –’

      The image of a dozen Russian schoolgirls romping naked in the river was erotic, even if it was muddy. ‘What made you think Americans did that? Did you have access to American books and magazines?’

      ‘Of course, they were forbidden, but somebody always had some old magazine that had been smuggled, or from the black market, and of course we were taught at school that Americans were terrible people who only thought about eating food that makes them fat, and making money and making war – and that they fuck like crazy. Anyway, we studied the magazines and saw the fashions and the beautiful girls and the beautiful cars and the beautiful food and the white beaches with the palms and the Coca-Colas and the icecream and beef-steak, and the blue sea, and it looked pretty good to us.’

      He grinned: ‘And did you? Fuck like crazy?’ He was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

      She shrugged. ‘That’s all there is to do in Russia, darling. But we were only schoolgirls, we didn’t have much experience yet.’