He slows down the action as she wipes herself and stands up, pulling her trousers up as she goes, but the movement is so fluid, the dressing gown falling across her body beneath her arm, that he fails to see more. Nonetheless, just the thought is enough to make him feel a tiny stirring in his groin. One of the advantages of his peripatetic clientele is the constant chance of change. He’d been beginning to tire of Nikki, her red hair and her heavy breasts; she had heavy thighs to match, and they got in the way of his fantasies.
The Landlord’s fingers stray down, start to tickle at the hood of his penis; to tease his foreskin gently back from the tender glans beneath. Collette crosses to the bath, puts the plug in and turns the taps. The Landlord feels his breath begin to falter in his nose, to speed up. He licks a finger and brings it, spittle-lubed, down to rub in tiny circles around the outlet of his urethra. As she walks over and looks at herself in the mirror over the basin, takes her hair bobbles out and allows that mass of curls to tumble down about her shoulders, he feels another twitch as his cock begins to harden. He may not have seen it for a decade, but, with a little help, it all still works fine. The Landlord sinks down further into his sofa, and lets his knees fall open, the soles of his feet pressed together, as he takes the whole member in his hand and starts working it to full erection. To someone watching him he would look like nothing other than a frog pinned out on a sixth-form dissection table, but in his mind he is a king.
Collette lets the dressing gown slip from her shoulders, and comes over to the door, below his camera and hangs it on the hook on its back. She looks up for a moment and seems to be staring straight into his eyes. Creamy Celtic skin, dark eyebrows, lips clearly defined, full and strong; the sort of mouth that…
By his head, the phone rings.
‘Fuck!’ He considers ignoring it, but the mood is broken. As Collette Dunne turns back to the mirror and begins to wash her face with some product from a tube, he presses the answer button and holds the phone to his ear. ‘Hello?’
A pause at the other end and then a single beep. A female voice, old-fashioned London accent, the semi-refined cup-of-tea-luv sort of accent you only hear on old Ealing comedies these days, shouts down the line as though trying to be heard without electronic aids. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’
‘Mr Preece?’
‘Yuh,’ he says, though he still thinks of Mr Preece as his father.
‘Oh, good. Hello, Mr Preece. It’s Miss Collins, from number twenty-three. Vesta? Vesta Collins?’
The Landlord sighs and shifts and the sofa cushions fart in protest. He really must get that phone taken out of the hall. She’s the only one who ever uses it, and she only uses it for nagging. ‘Oh, right?’
Collette Dunne is testing the water in the bath with her hand and tugging at the back of her top. Trust that whiny old bag to spoil the mood. ‘I haven’t got long, Mr Preece,’ says Vesta. ‘Forty pee, you have to put in to these things before you call, these days, and I’ve no idea how long it lasts.’
Well, get on with it, then, you old bat, he thinks. If you weren’t so mean, you’d have a phone like every twelve-year-old in the country. ‘Fire ahead,’ he says.
‘I waited in when you came on rent day. You usually come down.’
‘And you usually complain when I do,’ he says.
‘No,’ says Vesta, ‘I complain because nothing ever seems to get done, no matter how often I ask. I’d be perfectly happy for you to come down if I thought for a minute you were going to mend something.’
Moan, moan, moan. ‘You can’t expect a new Schreiber kitchen every couple of years on the rent you pay,’ he says, resentfully. Vesta’s sitting tenancy has been a thorn in his side since they put paid to any new ones in the 1980s. Squatting there in the bowels of the house, rendering it unsaleable while paying less than he gets for a single room upstairs. If it weren’t for Vesta he would have sold up years ago. If it weren’t for Vesta he’d be sitting pretty, running a complex of maid-service holiday lets somewhere warm instead of trudging back and forth up Northbourne High Street. Letting her drain him dry.
‘You know perfectly well I’m not asking for that sort of thing. When have I ever? It’s those drains. You’ve got to do something about those drains. Every time someone flushes the loo upstairs, stuff comes up out of the area grating. It’s disgusting. I’m going to get ill soon.’
‘Didn’t that drain cleaner I put down work?’
Collette pulls her top off and he freezes the image while her back is still turned; a muscular back with a well-defined waist that suggests that she has, at some point in her life, at least, taken care of her figure. He wants to get back into the mood before she turns to face the camera. His genitals are still sensitive with interrupted excitement, and if he can get the old bag off the phone, stop listening to her ladylike vowels and her I-know-my-rights complaints, he might still be able to get there.