‘Oh, we do. But the magazines just pay the fines, which aren’t much compared with how many sales a big story can put on their circulation.’
She finished her cigarette, swept the box and the novelty hairdryer onto the floor, lay back on the bed and fixed me with a steady, blue-eyed stare that could have unzipped my trousers, had I been wearing any. If I could have read her mind I think I would have said that she wanted me to fuck her again. Paolo Gentile had been right about that, too. It had been a while since anyone had fucked her.
‘So, what’s your next move?’ she asked.
‘My next move?’ I rolled on top of her, pushed her long white thighs apart and nudged inside her. She gasped as I flexed my pelvis and swiftly found my way right up against the neck of her womb. ‘My next move is this.’
‘That’s what I hoped it would be.’
Which just goes to show that when it comes to sex a man and a woman can read each other’s minds pretty well, really. There won’t ever be an ebook that can take the place of all that.
14
On the long plane journey from London to Antigua I watched a recording on my iPad of the Paris Saint-Germain game against Barcelona in the early stages of the Champions League, last September. It was the match which PSG had won 3–2, and counted as a pretty stunning result for the French although the actual game seems to have been more immediately famous as the one when David Beckham turned up with guests Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé, neither of whom looked as though they were much impressed with what they saw. Looking like Charlie Brown in his dorky, flat-brim baseball hat, Jay-Z couldn’t have seemed less comfortable if Beyoncé’s sister Solange had been sitting right behind him just waiting to give him another kicking in an elevator.
No one had expected PSG to win without the talismanic Zlatan Ibrahimovic — he had an injured heel — who must have regretted a chance to prove to his former club, Barcelona, that they had been wrong to let him leave on loan to AC Milan, in 2010. Frankly, anyone who saw the Swede’s thirty-yard wonder goal for Sweden against England in November 2012 knew that this was always a mistake. The French were also without their captain, Thiago Silva (thigh problem) and the Argentine striker Ezequiel Lavezzi (torn hamstring). And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Barcelona had fired six past Granada the previous weekend with a hat-trick from Neymar and two from Lionel Messi — the little Argentine’s 400th and 401st career goals. On the same weekend, PSG had struggled to get a 1–1 draw against the no-hopers from Toulouse. Even PSG’s manager, Laurent Blanc, had seemed to recognise the impossibility of the task ahead of him when, in a pre-match press conference, the former French captain had spoken of Barcelona as his side’s ‘near masters’.
But on the night against Barcelona, PSG played out of their skins and it was plain to see that this was the match that had persuaded the Catalan side to make a mid-season move for Jérôme Dumas, because while PSG’s goals had been scored by David Luiz, Marco Verratti and Blaise Matuidi, the man of the match was, without question, Jérôme Dumas. In and out of possession he had been the spirit of PSG’s impressive display. Having played for much of the previous season as a holding player, the young Frenchman was moved forward into the No. 10 role for the game against Barcelona, although his workrate did not seem to suffer in the least. Brimming with two-footed invention, he was a great example to the Parisians and on several occasions he managed to turn like a scalded cat in the tightest spaces and get his team out of pressure, creating chances where none had seemed to exist before.
Dumas was equally irrepressible in defence, frequently dropping back deep to aid David Luiz and Gregory van der Wiel, who were hard to break down, although Messi and Neymar tried hard enough. Halfway through the second half, Dumas had briefly looked tired, as if he might have to be taken off, but Laurent Blanc’s decision to keep him on proved inspired when Verratti nodded in a perfectly weighted ball from the Frenchman. At times the sheer verve he brought to his work seemed nothing short of miraculous: in one fifty-yard run deep in the second half begun after he’d easily dispossessed no less a figure than Lionel Messi, Dumas dribbled, swerved, pivoted and almost slalomed, before succumbing to a hard, scything tackle from Dani Alves which would have had many a footballer crying foul, before getting up again with a smile instead of an accusatory stare of goggle-eyed incredulity at the referee.
He was like this for the whole game: an unruly, hyperactive, runaway child. Messi and Neymar — who both scored — must have wished that someone would put Ritalin in his half-time water bottle. Even Dumas seemed to recognise that he’d surpassed himself.
When the match was over Jérôme Dumas finally left the pitch with his socks rolled down his wobbling legs and wearing a euphoric grin like some footballing d’Artagnan from the pages of The Three Musketeers, that great French novel written by Jérôme’s more famous namesake, Alexandre Dumas. On the strength of the performance I saw in this match it didn’t seem too much to expect that this young footballer would soon stand alongside the writer in the pantheon of French glory.
15
There are two things that strike you as your plane comes in to land on the Caribbean island of Antigua. The first is how small the island is. It’s not much bigger than the city of Birmingham. The second is how like an emerald the green of the land is against the lapis-lazuli blue of the sea which seems to extend forever so that you can hardly tell where the sky ends and the sea begins. Darker blue patches of coral reefs surround the island like submerged thunderclouds and almost every inch of the meandering coast is gilded with the sand of some perfect beach. Nearer to the ground there are more houses than you anticipated and these are mostly white as if a green coat had been studded with the shiny buttons of some eco-minded pearly king. And then there is the airport, as pink as candyfloss with the name of the island helpfully spelled out in large green letters under the seven arches of the building’s roof which resemble alphabetical trains sitting in a railway siding, awaiting dispatch to various parts of the island. But this is the last time on Antigua you ever stop to think about something so urgent as a train because as soon as you are off the plane life drops a rusty gear or two. Enveloped by warmth and confronted everywhere by almost fluorescent smiles, you even blink more slowly as if you’d just had a hit on a big spliff and were trying to remember your own name and something like a name actually mattered. Nothing on Antigua seems to matter all that much. There’s not even a drink-driving law which — in spite of the many wines I’d sampled in Club Class — hardly mattered either since the hotel had sent a man with a car to drive me to a jetty, and from there by boat to an even smaller, more exclusive island where there were no cars at all. I might have normally baulked at seventy-five bucks, US, for a ten minute airport transfer but already I was feeling as laid-back as the fellow with cornrows in his hair who drove the boat. Besides, that’s the thing about travelling on someone else’s dollar: suddenly everything seems quite simple; only the best will do. If you ever win the lottery then come straight here; that’s the Euromillions lottery, not the smaller, British one; two weeks at the Jumby Bay won’t leave you much change from a British lottery win.
As I arrived in Antigua’s airport a photographer took my picture which irritated me as I had hoped to remain as anonymous as possible. I hardly wanted to talk to anyone about being hoodwinked in Shanghai or, as the Sun had put it, Manson’s Chinese Fake-Away, which I have to admit was rather good.
But I was keen to talk to almost anyone about Jérôme Dumas. I decided to get started right away, and by the time the boat guy picked me up to take me to Jumby Bay, I’d already asked questions of the airport police and my driver. I thought the sooner I found out what had become of the guy the sooner I could get back to looking for a proper job in football. And there was something about the boat guy I liked which encouraged me to think he might be a bit more forthcoming than the cops and the chauffeur.