Muddy Waters by Judy Astley

Author:Judy Astley [Judy Astley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 1997-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

If Stella had been in the bed next to him, she’d have been seriously concerned at the level of dream-twitching Adrian was doing in the early hours of the morning. In his half-sleep he groaned loudly, thrashed his arms around and knocked the clock so hard off the table beside him that its battery and innards fell out and lost themselves under the bed. He muttered and grunted and twisted the pillow, trying to escape from what was going on in his head. He dreamed about being back under the willow tree with Abigail, observed by too many stars in a sky that was far too big, moonshadows criss-crossing the grass by the lake and casting great beams of wild light on the dead black water. There were carp down there as big as alligators, weed long enough to choke an elephant. Under Abigail, this time, was not his souk-scented Afghan coat but the classy tartan picnic blanket he took annually to Lords and unfolded for a champagne lunch on the Coronation Lawn behind the Warner Stand. Her unexpectedly schoolgirlish underwear in pink gingham was strewn beside her and she lay spread naked beneath him making gratifying gasping noises. There were daisies in her hair and the scent of summer-dry grass all over her skin. He could feel the skin, tight across her bones, through his sleep. Adrian writhed and turned in his chaotic bed, trying to get the dream to end. ‘You see, there’s still something there,’ she was now purring to him.

His wits blunted by lust, he assumed she meant his penis. ‘Of course there is,’ he protested, ‘it doesn’t just shrivel away with time.’

He turned over again, and attempted mumbling different words to cancel out the others but his voice had forgotten how to make sounds. His head wagged from side to side, like a spaniel with a sheep-tick in its ear as he tried to cast out the awful mental pictures, and his hand flew up and hit the light switch on the wall, grazing his knuckles. Thankfully, at last his eyes opened on his familiar soft-edged blue and white bedroom and he stared, wide-eyed and frightened, at the ceiling, waiting patiently to unravel the comforting fact that it was, after all, only a dream. His conscious mind sorted itself out slowly and as it did he rubbed harder and harder at his sore hand, wishing he could numb his entire dreadful self. The whole sordid thing, every pink-and-white, earth-scented, moon-beamed, groin-nuking image, was only too horribly, detestably, obscenely, treacherously true.

‘Are you feeling better?’ Stella asked Abigail over the Chameleon breakfast. She eyed Abigail’s plate as she asked, noting that the headache the night before couldn’t have been one that involved much nausea, considering Abigail now felt able to eat scrambled egg, toast, tomato and mushrooms – cooked the no-fat way, according to the menu, though still surely several thousand calories and fearsomely unwelcome in a queasy stomach.

‘I’m fine now, thanks. I expect I was just feeling a bit premenstrual or something.

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