Dust and Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘What kind of private party is it?’
    ‘Swingers,’ he said, giving birth to a smirk. ‘You look like you could do with a little fun.’
    I let that one glide by me and went inside. There was a table with a bunch of leaflets for something called The OneOnOne Club . Next to it was a small photocopier and a girl with a Polaroid camera slung around her neck. There was a loose dress slung around her boobs and bum, and she was slinging wine down her shouter with the kind of enthusiasm you just can’t fake.
    ‘Ickle piccie,’ she said, as I made to walk past her. ‘Gotta have a ickle piccie.’
    ‘No thanks,’ I said.
    ‘So we can circulate it. Anyone likes your face can write their number on the back, and you get your ickle piccie back at the end of the night with lots of lovely dates to look forward to.’
    ‘I’m not a swinger,’ I said. ‘I’m a plumber. There’s a blockage in the pipes.’
    ‘Oh,’ she said, then took a fucking ickle piccie anyway.
    It was pretty busy. The tables in the dining area had been pushed to the perimeter, and a mass of people, who had clearly spent for ever getting ready, were demonstrating the admirable skill that is standing the maximum distance from everybody else in a confined space. No milling, no mingling, just lots of people looking as though they were at an audition for a new play called Rabbit in the Headlights . At least the lighting was subdued, so the sweat of fear didn’t show up too much.
    I grabbed a glass of champagne from a stooge with a tray and found a quiet spot against the wall that gave me a good vantage point over the fun and games, as well as a view of the staff door which I guessed was the entrance to the cellar.
    I wondered what Geenan’s brother did here. She hadn’t expounded and I hadn’t pressed her on it, but now I wished I had. Maybe he worked here, maybe he swung here, but I doubted it. If anything, I reckoned he scraped his knuckles off on other people’s faces in Danny Sweet’s bear pit. I was itching to get down there for a look around, but it looked as though match-making alone was on the menu tonight so I relaxed and sipped my champagne.
    Gradually, the alcohol did its work and the gaps between the assembled loners shrank. Soon the restaurant was filled with the cacophony of people asking ‘What do you do?’. The photographs soon followed: Xeroxed copies of faces in various degrees of mortification. There was one that didn’t look at all bad, although she was probably only here because she had false teeth, or was married to her job, or she shat herself when she humped. Emboldened by another glass of Piper-Heidsieck, I scribbled my name and my mobile phone number on the back of it and dropped it in the large glass bowl where everyone else was now feverishly doing the same.
    I made the mistake of smiling at a woman who was on her way to the toilet. She banked hard left in my direction and sucked the oxygen from my immediate vicinity with a ferocious air kiss.
    ‘What do you do?’ she asked.
    ‘I make jewellery,’ I said.
    ‘Wild,’ she said. ‘Silver? Gold?’
    ‘Human bone,’ I said. I was just spouting now. I didn’t mean to shut her up, but I’d just seen Danny Sweet leading a posse of phenomenally ugly men around the outside of the flirtathon and through the cellar entrance. I forced my eye to fall on each and every one of them, and wondered which one was Geenan’s brother. What was their fucking problem? Wouldn’t Kara be embarrassed when I turned up with her brother, who would be perfectly within his rights to tell her to bugger off out of his life until she stopped behaving like a first-class arse?
    ‘I… I wouldn’t mind seeing some of your jewellery,’ she was saying.
    I lightly squeezed her arm. Another snap-happy dolt took a photograph of me over her shoulder. ‘That’s awfully sweet of you,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to try that hard, though. Believe me, save it up for someone who