The Glamorous Couple Next Door

flash fiction

They were in a hotel not far from the Spanish Steps. The place was filled with American tourists, including a Mr and Mrs Franks who had sat with them at dinner and asked them to explain various British idioms in their coarse, braying voices. ‘I don’t know how you stand them’ said Jane.

‘Me?’ said Barnaby, rootling through a suitcase on a chair with a broken crossbar. ‘You’re the one who caused them to glom onto us at bridge last night.’

‘I only said that she looked just like me in that hat when I was here last year.’ She threw up her hands. ‘Bah! You just don’t understand women. It was a false compliment. I was being kind. You saw how fat and ridiculous she looked.’ Jane took a cigarette from her handbag and walked to the gay little balcony, set out with dahlias in the English style, not hanging baskets but earthenware pots. Their window rose above an alley down which a group of monks were walking, their backs exposed to the evening sun and covered in red welts.

‘Good grief!’ she said. ‘What are we doing here?’

‘Reinvigorating our marriage’ remarked Barnaby dryly. Jane turned and looked at him. ‘Suppose we keep up the charade and try making love tonight?’

Barnaby snorted, reclining on the bed with a muscle magazine that he’d buried at the bottom of his suitcase. ‘You’d hate that as much as I would.’

It was true. Jane had never cared for sex. No desire stirred in her, and that was why she’d married Barnaby, who needed what he called a beard. She supposed that other wives would have been shocked near death on seeing their husband made love to by another man, but Jane was just happy that he had a hobby to occupy him. They led their lives companionably, he with his beard and she with her taste for sightseeing, hotels, champagne, and breakfast in bed. No one could call her frigid, at least.

She sat on her side of the bed and smoked. ‘They’re right next door, you know… the Franks.’

‘So?’

‘So? Haven’t you heard them at night, all those weird sucking sounds, as if they’re constantly slurping soup or… God knows what?’

‘I’ve been distracted.’

‘I know you have’ she said, narrowing her eyes. ‘This morning you addressed your coffee order to Giuseppe’s crotch. If you were a woman I’d call you a slut.’

Barnaby laughed at that. He’d told her the many codes that gay men use to identify each other, even in a backwoods part of the city like this, where the churches cluster together like sadistic children above a bird with a broken wing.

Suddenly the sucking sounds began, and this time he noticed, wrinkling his nose as if someone had presented him with a delicacy that he was convinced was just a dried turd. The noise, as of slurping, was interspersed with strange giggling and sighing. Both Jane, who had a repulsion for all sex, and Barnaby who couldn’t conceive of desiring any woman, let alone one as old and obese as Liza Franks, turned green.

‘How do they even manage?’ he asked, ‘he must weigh at least 20 stone himself…’ Ernest Franks described himself as a salesman and Barnaby’s first thought had been that it can’t be door to door.

Jane sat in rapt attention, her cigarette’s paper sleeve dwindling down to her knuckles as the stalk of ash grew longer. A vision had come to her, crisp and Damascene. She pictured those two fat Americans shedding their clothes and human skins, their glamours, to reveal two bulbous demons consisting solely of ugly red muscle. Sucking the blood and the pus from each other in a grotesque, alien form of lovemaking.