The Bold Receptionist walks lightly into the room. He watches her wonderful, worldly toes work their way across the wood, and idly traces the name “Polly” on the bottom of the bath. Polly polly polly. Pollyanna. Pauline. Polikwaptiwa. Appolonia. Polly.
“I brought you a towel in case you were getting wrinkly.” And she has, a giant bath-sheet in dignified brown. “It’s warm.”
Joe expects her to put it down and walk out again, but she doesn’t. Instead, she faces away from him and extends her arms so that the towel spreads behind her like a superhero’s cape. John Wayne does this for someone, he’s pretty sure, probably Katharine Hepburn, to spare her blushes. He gets out of the bath, noticing with pleasure that from his vantage point he can see the V of her robe reflected in the mirror, and that—as with the business of putting on the safety harness in the car—this awkward position shows off her arms and shoulders beautifully, and just a whisper of her chest. He leans forward to take the towel, wondering what she can see in turn in the mirror. When she turns around, though, her eyes are screwed tight shut. He could reach down and kiss her. She’s easily close enough.
He doesn’t. She opens her eyes and looks at him for a moment.
“Come with me,” she says, taking his hand, and leads him, not to the guest bedroom with its sofa bed, where he has carefully laid out his clothes, but through the door to the back, and to her own room.
The Bold Receptionist’s bedroom is almost a cave. The back of the house is dug out of the embankment, and the rear wall is bare stone—not brick, but something coarser and thicker, quarried and cut and set in place here. The carpet is deep and wine-red. There’s a small television and a nightstand piled high with books, a small Victorian railway clock, and against one wall, the most remarkable double bed Joe has ever seen.
It has an iron frame and a thick, iron bedhead, and it appears to rest on two vast metal tines or prongs driven deep into the stone wall. A cantilevered bed: heavy engineering in the bedroom. Something deep down in him grabs onto it, devours the sight. Wonderful.
Polly pokes him sharply in the flank. “Sit,” she says. “I want to talk to you eye to eye and I don’t want to stand on a chair.”
He sits on the cantilevered bed. It’s quite high. She nudges at his knees until she can stand in between them, and yes, they are on a level. This appears to please her.
“You, Joe Spork, are the sort of man to give a girl trouble. I see it in your eyes. And do you know what sort of trouble?”
“I’m not—”
“Exactly that sort of trouble. Wilfulness. Constant backchat.” She rests a finger on his nose. “Hush. Pay attention.”
He nods: yes, ma’am.
“I shall now explain my plan. You may then speak, but only to amend the detail. The broad outline is not subject to negotiation. Are you ready? Good… I propose to have sex with you. I believe it will be excellent sex. Your obedience on one particular issue of timing will be required to make it unforgettable sex. I will explain that issue as we go. At the moment, I wish to hear your inevitable objection to the general sex part of this plan.”
“I… you’re very… you don’t think we should know each other better?”
“Ah. Yes, I’m familiar with that question. Tell me, you feel we might do better to wait until we know each other so that we can ascertain whether we do, in fact, want to have sex?”
“Er… yes.”
“And if we don’t, then we won’t?”
“No.”
“And if we do, we will?”
“Yes.”
“I find your logic extremely strange. I want to have sex with you now. You—I’m reasonably certain of this, and I can…” Her finger traces down the towel. “Yes, I can, in fact, say it with some confidence owing to certain evidences now in my possession—you want to have sex with me. Yes?”
Hard to deny. So to speak. “Yes.”
“So if we follow my plan and discover tomorrow that we do not like each other, we will still have had exceptional sex. On the other hand, on your pattern, we will have rejected sex when we want it in favour of no sex now and no sex later. Alternatively, we will have missed an opportunity for sex when we could have had it if we later decide we do, in fact, want to have sex.”
“That’s true, but—”
“Your plan is a very bad plan. What is more, you know it is a very bad plan, in the first place because you want me very much and you know that I know this, and in the second because I want you very much and you now know that, too, and in the third because you do not in fact believe that we should not have sex right now, you simply believe that some people believe that you ought to believe it and although they are not here you do not wish to offend them. I say they can find their own damn entertainment.”
She kisses him, firmly, on the mouth. He does not resist, so she does it again, and makes a happy little squeak when he grabs her head and returns the kiss, then wraps one arm around her back and half lifts her against him.
“Back!” she cries, as soon as she can struggle free. “Back! We now come… hmm, mm-mmm… stop it! We now come to the issue of timing of which I spoke. Ah! Mmm. Oh, God, you awful man. You have roving hands. Mm-mmm-mmh.” She gives a lewd, throaty chuckle. “Stop! Now. The timing is to be my department. So. Up on the bed.”
Polly’s bathrobe is now in a state of considerable dishevelment, and Joe’s towel is mostly around his left thigh. He scoots up the bed to the position she indicates, then pulls her firmly to him. The bathrobe remains where it is, so that by the time she is in his arms he can feel every bit of her. She wriggles deliciously and draws back for a moment.
“Ah! Ah ah ah! Do as you’re told! (Typical man.) There. Now… Oh, it’s like that, is it? Very well, Mr. Spork. I can fight dirty too.” He’s too late to trap her or baulk her intention. Her head vanishes beneath the towel. He reaches for her, and her left hand slaps his away. Stop it. Busy now.
And indeed, she is.
Thirty minutes later, the 12:14 Chemical Waste Train from Chichester Paints goes past Polly’s house at ninety-one miles per hour. The vibrations from the train’s passage shudder through the embankment and into the cantilevers which hold up Polly’s bed. Polly, lying on her back, grabs hold of Joe in desperation and says “Now.” The instruction is quite redundant, and the two of them, pummelled by the energy of hundreds of tonnes of evil liquid freight passing by them and juddering them against one another, do indeed experience unforgettable sex.
Initially, Polly explains a few moments later when she can speak again, it was just a matter of opportunity. Her iron-framed bed rested on bare wooden boards, and the five-fifty-one train (it’s actually the three-eleven from the Fitzgibbon Chemical & Organics plant in Clyst Martington) sent strong, enjoyable vibrations through the whole house. Her internal erotic clock began to set its alarm for five fifty-one a.m., and she woke, ecstatic and bleary-eyed, every day at five fifty-three. (Chemical-waste trains are more regular than commuter trains. If a few people arrive half an hour late at work, it’s a normal day, but governments and safety executives get tetchy if a boatload of lethal swill goes off the map for twenty minutes.)
By the end of the first year she had arranged to be in the house for all four trains whenever possible at weekends. She obtained long-term timetabling information so as to be present on those special days when eight trains ran, at which times she would loll, exhausted, in her iron-frame bed, and eat pizza between gut-wrenching orgasms. From time to time, she would acquire a boyfriend and have actual chemical-waste sex, which was even better. But as with all addictions, she began to want more. The vibrations through the mattress were strong, but not vigorous. She looked with envy at the plates on the dresser in the kitchen, clattering and screaming in china bliss. So.