Human Remains

served him an extra spoonful of sauce. And the food was reasonable, I’ll give her credit for that.
    After dinner Audrey asked Vaughn to take the plates through to the kitchen and she led me into the living room with the second bottle of wine, topping my glass up as I sat on Vaughn’s leather sofa. As she leaned forward I had an excellent view of her cleavage, although I tried not to make it obvious. Her breasts were well-rounded, the fabric of her top stretched across them, and I caught a trace of her perfume – or maybe it was even the soap or the shower gel she’d used earlier this evening, readying herself for my arrival. I wondered if she’d thought about the prospect of me burying my face between her breasts, if she’d considered the possibility that I might want to have sex with her.
    ‘It’s nice, this, isn’t it?’ she asked then. She’d seated herself on the sofa next to me, even though there was another sofa across the room from this one. She’d folded herself into a comfortable, cat-like curl, her feet towards me, neat little bare feet, with toenails painted a pale pink. How had I ever thought she might be nearly fifty? She was thirty, if that.
    ‘What is?’ I asked.
    ‘The wine.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, although it tasted like vinegar to me. I should have brought something decent with me after all, something we could discuss properly. I could tell she was a woman who knew what she wanted.
    From the kitchen, the sound of Vaughn rattling plates and cutlery provided an encouraging percussion to the melody of our conversation.
    ‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘Vaughn’s never told me.’
    ‘I’m an executive performance analyst for the council.’
    ‘That sounds exciting,’ she said, and laughed, which was a relief to me, as it had been a clear lie. She was being ironic. A man could fall in love with a woman like this, I thought. Never mind fucking her, I wanted to marry her.
    ‘Anyone for coffee?’ called Vaughn, from the kitchen.
    ‘Yes, please,’ Audrey replied. She tilted her head back to rest on the cushions, exposing her throat to me, and more of that delectable cleavage. I wanted to run my tongue from the space behind her ear, down between her breasts, pushing the fabric out of the way.
    ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘What do you do?’
    ‘I work with Social Services,’ she said.
    My usual sharp conversational skills struggled at this, most likely due to arousal: too much blood flow diverted away from the brain and down into the more vital parts of my anatomy. What, after all, was the point in a conversation such as this? Surely we wanted to do away with it; surely we should just get rid of Vaughn so that we could fuck? That was what she wanted as much as I did.
    The moment the thought crossed my mind, I knew I had to do something about it.
    I cleared my throat and stood up. She looked up at me in surprise.
    ‘I – er – may I use your bathroom?’
    She smiled, relaxed. ‘Of course. It’s at the top of the stairs. I’m afraid the downstairs one is temporarily out of action.’
    I climbed the stairs awkwardly. At the top, I glanced to the left and saw inside Vaughn’s bedroom – something I would prefer not to have seen, to be honest – pale grey walls, the far one decorated with dramatic monochrome wallpaper. A ‘feature wall’, they call it, don’t they? It would give me a headache if I had to sleep in there.
    And the bathroom. I had no desire to use it, of course. I was waiting for her.
    I half-closed the door and stood inside, looking at the neat beige tiles and wondering how long it had been since Vaughn had grouted them – not long at all, judging by the faint smell of putty – and at the shiny chrome taps that had no doubt cost a small fortune.
Audrey, Audrey
, I thought, as though I could summon her up the stairs by thinking her name like a spell.
    I looked at the toiletries lined up neatly on the windowsill. They were, without exception, male: shampoo, shower gel, a razor and some kind of hideous supermarket own-brand gel shaving foam with oxidation around the base. No expensive hairstylist-only shampoo, no perfume, no cosmetics.
    I opened the door again and crossed the hallway into Vaughn’s bedroom. Again, it was a resolutely masculine room. There was even a multi-gym in the corner, which made me laugh out loud. I had a mental image of Vaughn working out here, sweating as he rowed his way to a muscular stomach. Not likely. I doubted it had ever