The Birthday Present Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cravery. Before we left, Iris changed the sheets on our huge low bed and, though I said not to bother, covered up the coffee or birthing stain with a rug from Nadine's room.
    It was a lovely day, the first really fine day of spring.

4
    I started writing this down because I had a premonition. It was when Hebe asked me to give her an alibi. She has been asking me to give her alibis for a long time and I always do, but this one was different. It was more important than any I had given her in the past. For one thing, I would have to provide it for longer than usual and the occasion was her birthday. I mean that where she was going and what she was doing were her birthday present.
    When she said that, I had a sense of foreboding. Things would go wrong. My premonition told me things would go disastrously wrong. I would have to be careful. That was when I decided to record events. I am not going to use a notebook but sheets of paper and clip them together as I go and put them in a shoebox, which I shall keep in the only real cupboard I have in this tiny flat. And if I move one day I shall take it with me. Shoeboxes are a nuisance and these days most shops ask you when you buy a pair of shoes if you want the box. Hardly anyone does want it, which makes onewonder what the shops do with all those hundreds, thousands, millions of boxes. The last pair of shoes I bought they made me take the box—I shan't go there again—and that's how I happen to have one to keep this record in.
    Using this box is quite appropriate, because when I bought those shoes Hebe was with me and she bought a pair of boots. Maybe I should say I was with Hebe, because that's the way it always felt. The boots were black patent leather with very high heels and they laced all the way up the front to the knee.
    “You won't be able to walk in them,” I said.
    She laughed. “I don't want to walk in them, Janey. I want to lie down in them.”
    Remarks like that embarrass me. I don't know where to look.
    We went to have a coffee and that was when she started telling me about the kinds of things she did with Ivor Tesham. Dressing up, acting out fantasies it was mostly, and that was all right, I suppose, but her descriptions of what after all amounted to S&M made me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps it was partly because it all seemed so distant from Gerry, who is a rather proper sort of person. Or so I thought then. I didn't really know. But nothing that's happened since has made me change my view. I asked her if she was in love with Ivor.
    “I don't think so,” she said. “But would I know if I was? I do fancy him like crazy. But as for love—I thought I was in love with Gerry when I married him and maybe I was, but it didn't last.”
    I asked her why she stayed with him.
    “I tell myself it wouldn't be right to take Justin away from his dad, but I don't know if that's really the reason. I'venever had a job, you know. Well, of course you know. I married Gerry straight after finals and then Justin came along. What could I do?”
    “Your degree's in media studies,” I said, another obvious remark.
    “Like a million other people's. I wouldn't know how to get a job on a paper or in TV or whatever. I'm only good at one thing. I'd be a great whore, but I'd rather go on as I am.”
    I reverted to the boots. Surely she wouldn't let Gerry see them? They had cost three times as much as my shoes.
    “Oh, Ivor will pay for them,” she said. “After all, they're for his pleasure,” and she drew out the soft sibilant of that sensual word, rolling it on her tongue. “So would you be an angel and give me an alibi for May eighteenth?”
    I said I would. “But your birthday's the seventeenth.”
    “I've got to go out with Gerry that night.” She made a face. “You're babysitting—remember? It's a bore, but marriage is a bore. You have to face it.”
    I had nothing to say to that. “I've got a feeling that something bad is going to happen. Can't you make it another