Oops. Sorry to keep you waiting… The rest of the year galloped by and I’ve only just caught my breath. I assure you I wasn’t so much neglecting my website…as simply prioritizing my 10th novel, which I finally finished in late August. Now that my website-wizard (James Beechinor Collins Esq.) has taught me how to do my own updates, my intention is to do precisely that! I hope you’ve been enjoying the new-look website and my blog but I intend to keep the Journal section going too because it gives me the opportunity to blether on at length. JBC is very strict about keeping blogs pithy and short – but I’m having the final say on Journal length! So…here am I, in cold-snap January, thinking back on the last twelve months. Over the months, the Romantic Novel of the Year Award followed me like a dancing butterfly – with so many people continuing to congratulate me, even now! Each time someone says ‘well done’, I re-live the thrill all over again!
The Spring and Summer I devoted to Secrets. Do you like the title? I know it doesn’t have my usual quirkiness, but I think it’ll be a hard-working title. And it does what it says on the packet…because both hero (Joe the bridge-builder) and heroine (Tess the runaway) have more than a few secrets between them and the book charts their journey on whether to conceal…or reveal…! I hasten to add, it all ends happily ever after. Would you ever speak to me again if it didn’t?
(more…)
‘I know your mother ran off with a cowboy from Denver,’ Django McCabe reasoned with his niece, ‘but chasing through France after a bunch of boys on bikes – well isn’t that taking the family tradition to new extremes?’
Cat McCabe, sunbathing, eyes closed, in her uncle’s Derbyshire garden, smiled.
It feels funny smiling with eyes closed; like you can’t really do both.
So she opened her eyes, stretched leisurely, sat up cross-legged, and picked blades of grass from her body, fingering the satisfying striations they had left on her skin.
‘Lashings of lycra!’ her elder sister fen offered from her position under the pear tree.
‘Oily limbs a-plenty,’ connived her eldest sister pip, suddenly cartwheeling into view.
Cat tried to look indignant but then grinned. ‘The Tour de France is the World’s most gruelling sporting event,’ she said defensively, hands on hips, to her audience. ‘It demands that its participants cycle 4,000k in three weeks. At full speed. Up and over mountains most normal folk ski down. Day after day after day.’
‘And?’ said Django, rubbing his knees, bemoaning that the sun wasn’t doing for his arthritis what it did last year.
‘And?’ said Fen, an art historian who was much turned on by bronze marble renditions of Adonis than their pedal-turning doppelgangers her sister seemed so to admire.
‘And?’ said Pip courteously, more interested in perfecting her flikflaks across the lawn for her new act.
Cat McCabe regarded them sternly.
‘A Tour de France cyclist can gave a lung capacity of around eight litres, a heart that can beat at least 200 times a minute at full pelt and then rest at a rate at which most people ought to be dead. They can climb five mountains in a row, descending them at up to 100 k per hour.’
‘Wow,’ said Fen with sisterly sarcasm, I bet they’re really interesting people.’
‘Greg LeMond,’ countered cat, ‘won the tour de France in 1989 by eight seconds on the final day.’
‘Bully for him,’ pip laughed , doing a handstand and wanting to practice her routine right the way through.
‘And that was two years coming back from the brink of death when he was accidentally shot by his brother-in-law in a hunting accident.’
Now you’re impressed!
Fen nodded and looked impressed.
Pip executed a single-handed cartwheel and said, ‘Mister LeMond, I salute you.’
Django said, ‘bet the bugger’s American.’
Cat confirmed that indeed he was.
‘In what other sport would you have participants called Eros? Or Bo? Or teams called BigMat or OiMe or chicky World?’
‘Topless darts?’ Pip proposed
‘They can also pee whilst freewheeling,’ Cat slipped in before anyone could change the subject. ‘In their shorts?’ Pip asked, quite flabbergasted.
‘Nope,’ Cat replied in a most matter-of-fact way. ‘They just whip it out, twist their pelvis and pee as they go.’
‘So,’ said Django, ‘you’re off to France to experience a great sporting spectacle performed by superhuman athletes with great bike skills and no sense of urinary decorum?’
‘Partly,’ said cat with dignity, ‘and because hopefully there’ll be a job at the end of it.’
Fen raised her eyebrow.
Pip regarded her youngest sister sternly.
Well aware that her sisters continued to stare at her, cat looked out over Darley Dale and wished she had her mountain bike with her.
‘Oh, all right!’ she snapped whilst laughing and covering her face. ‘I’m not pursuing the peleton because there’s a job at the end of it if my freelance work is good enough,’
I wish I had my bike. I could just ride and ride and be on my own.
‘You are pushing the peleton-’ started fen.
‘Because there’s a-’ continued Pip.
‘Hope of Adventure?’ Cat tried contemplatively, still covering her face.
‘Lashings of lycra,’ Fen shrugged as if resting her case.
‘Silky smooth shaven thighs,’ pip said in utter agreement. ‘Big ones.’
‘over the sea and far away,’ Django mused. Everyone mused.
Everyone mused.
Cat nodded. ‘It’s time to move on,’ she said thoughtfully. Everyone agreed. No one had to say anything more.
The attendant smirked and raised his eyebrows at Adam and Eve clasped in ecstasy. ‘Is that art, then?’ he asked James.
‘God no,’ said James, ‘pornography.’
Matt and Otter both knew why Fen had refused sandwiches with them. They knew exactly what her prior arrangement was. And, though they knew that she obviously wanted to keep her lunch-time lecture secret, they couldn’t resist going.
‘We’ll keep out of sight,’ Otter reasoned.
‘We’ll be silently supporting her,’ Matt justified.
‘We’ll be fleshing out the audience,’ Otter continued.
‘We’ll sit at the back and sneak out before the lights come up,’ Matt concluded.
Only Fen’s lecture was of course conducted not in an auditorium but in the sculpture hall, so Matt and Otter found pillars to hide behind.
‘My God!’ Otter exclaimed. Matt, though, was speechless.
There was Fen, sitting on the lap of a large stone man whilst a stone woman pressed her back against his, her head thrown back, one arm extended down with her hand firm over her pubis, the other arm stretching above, her fingers enmeshed in the male’s hair. Fen sat very still, having positioned herself so that the male form seemed to be nuzzling her neck, his right hand masked from view by her body but apparently cupping his cock. Or wielding it. Or touching Fen’s bottom. Or delving right in. The sight was quite something. Quite the saucy threesome. Matt’s jaw dropped. Otter giggled involuntarily. James felt his trip to London was already proving well worthwhile.
Judith St John arrived late. She coughed when Fen was about to speak. Fen swiftly told herself that perhaps Judith simply had the beginnings of a cold. Judith St John had no interest in Julius Fetherstone, whom she considered a second-rate Rodin. But she was interested to hear just what this Fen McCabe had to say. Bloody double distinction from the Courtauld Institute. The true distinction was that she was deputy director of Trust Art. And look at Matt Holden, all mesmerized. Oh for God’s sake.
‘Julius Fetherstone,’ Fen started, stretching her arm above her, stroking the male’s cheek before placing her hand over that of the female, ‘was obsessed with sex.’
Fen slid from the lap of the sculpture and, with her hand on the male’s hand which, it transpired, was indeed lolling over his cock, she ran her fingertips up his arm while she continued. ‘Fetherstone seemed to delight in capturing in stone, or bronze, and in a frozen moment, all the heat, the moisture, the movement and, most of all, the internal sensation of the sex act.’ She brushed the cheek of the man with the back of her hand and then rested her head gently on his shoulder. The women in the audience wanted to be where Fen was, wanting to touch and clasp and grapple with the awesome sculpture. Many of the men in the audience, however, just wanted to touch Fen. Apart from Otter who was transfixed by the male sculpture. And by a rather athletic-looking tourist a few yards away.
‘This work is called Hunger,’ Fen said, standing back from it though it meant her all but pressing herself against two young women listening. She gazed at the stone and then faced her audience. She made eye contact with all of them, with Otter and Matt and James and Judith. ‘But the couple themselves seem quite sated, don’t you think?’ The audience bar James was staring at the sculpture. ‘Don’t you think?’ It was a question. James wanted to answer but could not establish eye contact and didn’t really want to raise his hand. Anyway, the lecturer was staring directly, almost at point-blank range, at the two young women near to her. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Definitely,’ one whispered. The other could only nod. They were both flushed. Not from humiliation or embarrassment. But from the effect the mass of copulatory stone had on them.
‘Just look at them,’ Fen implored, turning back to the sculpture, ‘just look at them.’ She gave her audience a tantalizing few seconds of silence. ‘Now, this portrait bust of Jacques Lemond,’ she said, moving to a plinth nearby, ‘is not just conventional in conception, it was staid and boring even for the time in which it was executed.’
Fen’s talk ended ten minutes later, after a look at two oil sketches by Fetherstone (which James was most pleased to deduce were inferior to his in execution and subject matter). She’d answered the obligatory questions and then she’d left the gallery. Briskly. She knew well what would be going on in the sculpture hall. Most of the audience would remain. They’d potter about half glancing at other works. Some would linger at Rodin’s The Kiss. But all would gravitate back to Hunger, however long it took. For a deeper look. To feed their hunger.
Judith had left noisily midway through the Q&A. Matt left the gallery unseen, leaving Otter to chat up the athletic young tourist. Matt’s semi hard-on disconcerted him.
It’s not just the look of her. Not the sculptures, for Christ’s sake. I think it’s that she’s so damned passionate. I don’t know!
‘There’s really not that much difference between lap dancing and doing what I do,’ Pip proclaimed in a very matter-of-fact way over a robust but imaginative dinner that her uncle Django had spent the afternoon preparing in celebration of his three nieces’ weekend visit home to Derbyshire. Django spooned a large portion of something alarmingly beige on to his plate and appeared to contemplate it at length. In fact, he was considering his eldest niece’s words, wondering if he’d misheard, wondering if Pip had changed jobs; wondering, basically, what on earth he was going to do with her. Pip’s two younger sisters, Fen and Cat, sniggered into their semolina. Django had proudly called in ‘polenta’. But that was imaginative both with the truth and with the ingredients of the dish itself.
The Three sisters tactfully referred to it as ‘polenta’ because they, too, were being imaginative with the truth as well as heedful of the chef’s sensitivities. Having been brought up single-handedly by their uncle Django, the McCabe girls were well accustomed to his eccentricities and loved him all the more because of them. He devoted the same imaginative attention to idiosyncratic detail in his dress sense as to his cooking. The sisters saw nothing untoward about pea soup with tuna and stilton, or rhubarb crumble with Jelly Babies instead of rhubarb. They had never gone hungry and their taste buds had developed a commendable and valuable robustness. Nor did they think it odd that a man in his late sixties should dress in the souvenirs of his colourful past. Today, as Django dollaped polenta on to his plate and enlivened it with a hearty slosh of Henderson’s Relish, he tucked his paisley cravat (he’d partied with the Kinks in the 1960′s) into his cambric shirt, and loosened the enormous buckled belt he’d acquired at some free festival or other, currently holding a pair of jeans Clint Eastwood would have coveted for a Spaghetti Western.
‘Philippa,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully, ‘I implore you to elaborate.’
‘Not much difference at all, really, between lap dancing and my line of work,’ Pip mused whilst mastiCating. ‘Same attention to make-up, same use and abuse of one’s body. Strutting one’s stuff for money. Having often ghastly punters to deal with. Always being gawped at. I’m pretty much a painted lady, too – quite literally.’
Her family regarded her. Everyone chewed. They all thought to themselves that they were sure polenta was meant to melt in the mouth, not glue the hinges of the jaw together. If Jamie Oliver was to be believed. It tasted good, though, and surely that was the point.
‘It’s a new take on polenta,’ Django reasoned out loud. ‘A polenta for the Millennium.’ Privately they each wondered how long he could credit (or blame) his experiments in the kitchen on the Millennium. As his jaw worked energetically, his mind turned to the vagaries of his niece’s career.
‘The main difference between my work and lap dancing,’ said Pip, holding her fork aloft for good measure, ‘ is the working hours. Because, of course, I tend to work days and not nights.’
The McCabes observed with awe how the polenta on Pip’s fork defied both gravity and her expressive hand movements to adhere with such determination.
‘Surely the main difference,’ Django said, sipping sherry from a teacup because he had used the sherry glasses earlier to measure olive oil and Tabasco, ‘is that you wear substantially more clothes when you perform.’
Django, Fen and Cat were momentarily unnerved by the fact that Pip’s confirmation was not immediate.
‘Yes,’ she responded at length, ‘and no.’
‘No?’ Fen asked.
‘No?’ Cat echoed but with a raised tone.
‘No!’ Django boomed as an order, not a question.
‘I’ve modified my motley.’ Pip shrugged. ‘Somewhat skimpier – it’s spring, after all.’
* * *
‘God, I wonder whether to move back,’ Cat said, with an audible lump in her throat, as the sisters journeyed by train away from rural Derbyshire and Django, back down to their lives in London.
‘Listen, it’s still very early days for you,’ Fen, thinking that actually Cat’s split from her odious boyfriend hadn’t come a moment too soon. ‘Why don’t you see how you feel after the summer? After all, it’s been a long-held ambition for you to follow the Tour de France as a journalist – give it your all.’
‘God,’ Cat sighed. Her dream-come-true was now more like a nightmare-in-waiting, such was the low ebb of her self-esteem.
Pip regarded her youngest sister and decided in an instant that humour was essential. ‘Think of all those bronzed thighs, all that testosterone, the lashings of Lycra!’ Cat couldn’t help but giggle. Pip felt she could now introduce a little common sense. ‘You’ve wanted to get up close and personal for years. Here’s your chance. It’ll be an excellent opportunity for someone in your position – further your career as a sports journalist plus get over BastardWanker. And, of course, you never know whom you might meet.’
‘I’m off to Paris soon myself,’ Fen announced, ‘also to be surrounded by mouth-watering male physiques. Not in Lycra on bicycles, though,’ she all but apologized to Cat.
‘You’re a weirdo,’ Pip teased. ‘The men you salivate over are all marble and bronze sculptures.’ Fen, an art historian, found nothing remotely weird in her penchant for the work of Rodin and his followers and she screwed up her face and poked her tounge out at pip in protest.
‘Well, I have no plans for Paris or pedallers,’ Pip said in such a tone as to suggest that she wouldn’t want to cross the Channel anyway, ‘but I, too, am due to be surrounded by men.’ She opened a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps and offered them to her sisters. ‘Holloway, actually,’ she said, with such gravitas that she might well have said Hollywood.
‘I’m doing a show for a young man called Billy. And all his mates.’
Follow Me!