The Tin Men by Michael Frayn

Author:Michael Frayn [Frayn, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

17

Rowe shelved his novel about Lisbeth and Howard until he had had time to read the subject up a bit in an Encyclopaedia of Sexual Deviations he had bought. In the meantime he started work on a straightforward comic novel called Take a Bloke like Me.

‘It’s nothing, really,’ he told Goldwasser one afternoon when he dropped in to see how things were going. ‘It’s just about well, perfectly ordinary chaps.’

‘Like you and me?’ said Goldwasser.

‘Exactly. There’s nothing special about them. There are four of them, and they just drink beer, and try to lay this perfectly ordinary girl. She’s called Annie Crumpet.’

‘What are they called? Graham Standish, Patrick Melhuish, Dick Cornish, and Jim Parrish?’

‘No – Patrick Cornish, Jim Standish, Dick Parrish, and Graham Melhuish. Would you like to read it?’

‘It’s finished, is it?’

‘No. I’ve just done the first seduction scene so far. I thought I’d write all the seduction scenes first and then fill in the rest after­wards.’

‘That’s ingenious.’

‘Anyway, in this one Graham Cornish – no, I mean, Patrick Parrish – has taken Annie back to his bed-sitter. I hope you can read the writing. I mean, you’re not forced to stagger through it if you don’t want to.’

‘No.’

‘But if you’d really like to . . .’

‘Oh, of course.’

‘I mean, tell me what you think of it.’

Goldwasser took the manuscript and read:

Graham made a noise which sounded remarkably like the bath-water running out of a particularly dirty-minded plughole. Annie was not sure that she liked it. It put her in mind of the noises made by the geyser in the bathroom at home. That was emphatically not something she wished to be reminded about just at present, thank you. She did her best to pretend not to have heard.

‘My God,’ said Graham, ‘they shouldn’t let girls like you loose. They really shouldn’t. You agree to come up to a bloke’s room, and then you come over all hard-to-get, while the poor bloke or chap, in this case yours truly, languishes with his tongue hanging out.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Annie, sitting down on the sofa as far away from Graham as she could without appearing to be prim.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ yelped Graham. ‘I’ll get a cold in my tongue, that’s what’s wrong with it, young lady.’

She could not repress a small gerk of laughter at this. There was definitely something endearing about Dick’s sense of humour, she decided, even though he was Not the Sort of Young Man One Could Take Home to One’s Parents, and was very probably just about to say something pretty off-putting like: ‘You Do Something to Me, Baby.’ His hand, she realised, was already moseying along the sofa in the general direction of her right knee. She picked it up with the idea of chasing it off the premises, and found that Dick had put in a spot of overtime during the diversion and got his other arm round her shoulders. Having Graham’s arm round one’s shoulders, she decided, was definitely nice.

‘You’re a hot bit of stuff,’ he breathed, nuzzling her ear for good measure.

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