The Good Girl by Fiona Neill Page B

barefoot and yet they still managed to exude a glamour that made Ailsa simultaneously envious and fearful. There were pictures of a vivid pink shower room with his and hers showers beside each other, a wall covered with vintage skateboards and teal-coloured lacquered furniture.
    She quickly decided that the magazine had been strategically placed precisely so that people would find it. She turned the page. It was a question-and-answer format. She began skim-reading. All thoughts of yogic breathing disappeared. The first question was about how long Wolf and Loveday had been running sexual healing workshops. Twenty years. Probably since the photo on the wall was taken, decided Ailsa. The second was about the most important lesson couples should learn. Wolf gave a one-word answer: the clitoris. He talked about it with the kind of precision that another man might describe the engine of a BMW. It was ten centimetres long. It stretched deep into the vagina. It could swell up to three times its original size. He recommended their DVD as the best method of learning about deep vaginal massage. Loveday was asked about celebrity clients. She said she couldn’t possibly comment but didn’t deny any of the names put to her. Wolf said that violent pornography was the biggest threat to human sexuality because it undermined the concept of female pleasure. There was a website address at the bottom of the page.
    At
the end the magazine asked them lifestyle questions. What’s your favourite holiday drink? Caipirinha. What music do you wake up to in the morning? Miles Davis. Ailsa snapped shut the magazine and carefully placed it back in the pile, carefully repositioning the dog-ear. Two thoughts struck her almost simultaneously: one, their intentions were honourable, and two, she really didn’t want to spend any more time with Wolf and Loveday than strictly necessary. Another good example of cognitive dissonance.
    Ailsa came out of the toilet and heard noises coming from the floor above. She remembered the purpose of her foray upstairs and followed a trail of laughter that led her directly to a room with a bright red door and a poster of London Grammar Blu-tacked to the surface. It was closed. She listened outside and recognized Romy. It was the kind of hilarity that made your stomach ache and squeezed fat tears from your eyes. A belly laugh, as Ben would say. She hadn’t heard Romy laugh like this since they moved to Luckmore. It was such a good sound it made her smile. She knocked on the door three times and thought she heard someone yell back. She noisily turned the handle before opening the door.
    But of course they didn’t hear. They were too wrapped up in each other. Later, Ailsa thought many times about what she saw when she came into Jay’s bedroom. The image was frozen in her mind like one of those Dutch paintings where every object contained hidden symbolism. She tried different interpretations of the same scene.
She viewed it from the perspective of other people who were in the house at the same time, wondering if they would have got it so wrong. She envisaged how she might have seen it if she had come at it from a different angle, say from the window overlooking the garden. She considered how she might have reacted had she bothered to imagine in advance what she might encounter. But she had been both overly distracted and influenced by her discovery about Rachel and what she had just read in the magazine.
    The room was as Ben had described. Blood red. The poster of the ridiculous pop star on her hands and knees, bum in the air, breasts pouring out of her crop top. A side lamp draped with a purple scarf so the bed was cast in a half shadow. The duvet crumpled at the foot of the bed. A pair of underpants lying on the floor. On the bed parallel to the door there were two figures. Jay was straddling Romy, pinning her arms above her head. Her T-shirt had ridden up so that Ailsa could see her belly button. The top button of her skirt