* * *
That week, we retraced our steps of the last few days, inquiring if anyone had seen our love. We asked our friends, our neighbours, our families. We placed an ad in the lost and found.
Most weeks, we had a steady routine: dinner out every weeknight, then taking in some kind of show – Indian and an art gallery on Mondays, Italian and a film on Tuesdays, Thai and the symphony on Wednesdays, Ethiopian and a museum on Thursdays, a meal at the jazz bar on Fridays, then weekends would be ours and ours alone: we sequestered ourselves with our love, and the rest of the world might as well have not existed so consumed were we with each other and with our love. Despite her passionate and steadfast devotion, I had known from the start that it was inevitable she would one day leave me. Such were the rhythms of life and romance. It was imperative that I protect our love – the most profound love I had ever encountered – from her eventual departure.
That week, the quest for our love overwhelmed our lives.
By the end of that week, our love becoming an ever dimmer memory, she was no longer sharing our bed. When she was at home, she rarely stepped outside her studio, rarely acknowledged my presence.
One late afternoon, I heard her sobbing, the door to her studio ajar. I was tempted then to falter, to succumb to her distress, to confess. To end this charade. But that would only imperil our love. I had to remain resolute, regardless of whatever pain or anguish she or I might experience.
Only our love mattered.
* * *
That year, I took a sabbatical. We travelled across the world. In search of our love. To cities we’d visited before – Paris, Barcelona, Casablanca, Rome, Venice, Trieste, Budapest, Vienna, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Copenhagen – and, when that proved fruitless, to countless cities in which we had never set foot. But our love was nowhere to be found.
Most years, we travelled to one city and stayed there for several weeks, a temporary home away from home. We loved discovering new places but were not fond of the stress and irritations of travelling. This way, we minimized the discomfort and maximized the stimulating experience of being somewhere new.
That year, if felt as if we spent more time waiting in airports and travelling in aeroplanes than we did in our intended destinations.
In Paris, we booked a room together, but, without our love to unite us, such proximity proved unbearable. From then on, our accommodations grew farther apart: first, a two-bedroom suite in Barcelona and again in Casablanca; then, as of Rome, separate rooms. By the time we hit Asia, we rarely stayed in the same hotel.
Neither did we explore together. I imagine that, as she told me, she spent her time in the cities of the world seeking our love. She was not the deceitful kind, and despite our changed circumstances I had no cause to mistrust her honesty.
As far as she knew, I, too, was searching for our love. That was what I told her. But I knew it would be a futile exercise. Thus, I lied. I was not as good a person as she was. I had never been, might never be. Only our love made me seem better than I truly was. In time, perhaps our love would truly make me a better man. But for now I had to make do without our love, as much as I yearned for it. What if some overeager customs official searched my luggage and found our love? No – I did not want to risk discovery and put our love in jeopardy.
While she quested, I, bereft of our love, diverted myself in the brothels of Barcelona, in the private apartments of Italian courtesans, in the erotic massage parlours of Budapest, in the FKK clubs of Frankfurt, in the sex hotels of Singapore, in the termas of Rio de Janeiro...
Flesh will be flesh.
* * *
That night, long after our return from that futile journey around the world, long after she had given up hope of ever locating our love, I was careless.
Most nights, I would wait until I was certain she had left (she was away from home with increasing frequency) or had gone to sleep. I would take out our love from its hiding place and taste it, play with it, caress it, enjoy it, nurture it. Without fail, our love would bring me to orgasm, and there were no sweeter orgasms than those our love granted me. There were no sweeter moments than those precious minutes of serene bliss following those climaxes, when I surrendered myself to the warmth and closeness of our love with blind, unthinking, animalistic trust.
That night, I was certain I had heard her leave. I built a fire. In the warm flickering glow of the fireplace, I lay naked on a blanket with our love. I was feverishly aroused – hard and wet, sweating and trembling with anticipation.
“How long?”
I heard her voice before fully registering her presence.
“How long have you been keeping our love from me? Was it from the very start?”
The answer must have been written on my face.
“So – our love was never lost. You hid it. You hid it from me. Why?”
There were tears on her cheeks and unforgiving fury in her gaze. It had been a long time since she had tasted our love.
“Talk to me! Tell me!”
But I had no words for her. I owed her no explanation. I no longer cared what she thought or felt. I had long ago accepted that our marriage could never be eternal. But our love ... Our love could be everlasting. Only our love mattered – not our marriage. And so I set out to protect our love from our marriage and its unavoidable disintegration.
She advanced toward me; her body radiated violence. Naked, on the floor, I curled into a ball, shielding our love from her potential brutality.
She growled at us. “You’re pathetic. I should take our lo— I should take that thing from you and destroy it.”
Her fists were tightly coiled, ready to strike at us.
“That thing was ever only a lie. I see that now. That thing disgusts me. I don’t ever want to touch it again.” The violence seeped out of her. She said, “I’ll go now. Just stay there – you stay here with that thing. That filthy thing. I’ll pack essentials for now, but I’ll move everything out tomorrow. Make sure you and that thing are out of the house for the whole day, and then I’ll be gone forever. But for tonight ... don’t budge until I leave. You’ll know when; I’ll slam the door on my way out.” She laughed, injecting palpable disdain into her mirth.
Within a few minutes, I heard the outside door open and slam shut.
Yet, I lay still for a long time. I kept drifting in and out of sleep. Eventually, our love sheltered within the palms of my hands, I sat up and shivered. The room was cold; the fire had mostly died out, with only a scattering of embers struggling to maintain a faint orange glow.
The shivering intensified, fuelled not only by the cold but also by a maelstrom of unexpected, unwelcome emotions. My first impulse was to turn to our love; it would – as it had always done – restore me, bring me to serenity. But I was afraid to pry open my clasped hands. The thought of looking directly at our love was, at that precise moment, odious, repellent.
Driven by an urge I could not control, I hurled our love onto the dying embers. Immediately, the fireplace erupted into a conflagration the intensity of which I had never beheld. The wild flames burned with colours of subtle, complex, ever-changing shades, releasing a rich blend of intoxicating aromas, redolent of sex and brine and ripe fruit.
Heedless of the passage of time, I sat contemplating the fire as it consumed our love. It burned long, bright, and deep.
Sliding Down the Slippery Slip
Maynard Sims
I bought the bottle from a back street shop at Ponders End. Elvis Presley served me. I thought it was odd at first because he short-changed me, and the King hadn’t been known for that kind of thing, not in any of the books or TV programmes I’d seen anyway. I assumed he was on some of that medication he was noted for in his latter years, but he should still serve the customers properly. It wasn’t until I’d loaded my groceries into the car and was checking the store receipt that I realised he’d given me fifty pence too little in my change. I would have gone back and made a scene but I remembered the look in his eyes as he hande
d me my money. He knew he was dead, I’m sure of it.
I mentioned it to Jimi when I got back, but he just shrugged and gave one of his modest little laughs before drifting off into a Voodoo Chile riff, that was all muffled fuzz and high string beacons of sound.
I buried the dog and made some sandwiches for lunch, which I ate, with a nice bottle of Vouvray, on the patio in the garden. I felt like Hannibal Lector when I said that to myself, ‘a nice bottle of…’ just like in the film, although I hadn’t eaten the dog; or anyone else, not for a long time.
My friends were coming round in the evening and I liked to prepare something special for them. We’d known each other for years, though not from school. I hadn’t enjoyed school, with the name-calling and the crush of people everywhere, meaning there was never any space that one could call one’s own. I didn’t think I would have wanted to keep in touch with people from those happiest days of my life and so I hadn’t, which was just as well as none of them seemed that keen on making arrangements with me after the last day. The last day was emotional as Vinnie Jones said in that film, but for me it seemed a little false to promise to not lose touch with girls I had spent years trying to avoid, even going to the extreme of spending morning and afternoon breaks and lunch hours in the toilet cubicles so I didn’t have to mix with them.
I know that’s two references I’ve made to films and so it may seem they are a particular interest of mine, but really they aren’t. I just have the kind of mind that relates things to quotes sometimes, and at other times to passages I might have read in books. I like to read as well as to watch films. My mother used to say I lived too much in my mind and not enough in the real world, but if the characters I watched and read about seemed alive to me where’s the harm? It was better for me to distance myself from people I met by assuming the identity through a few words and phrases of fictional characters; was better, and still is. Anyhow, mother is dead now so it doesn’t matter.
My friends were due round at a little before eight, for our regular bridge, dinner and drinks evening. It was harmless enough though we occasionally had a wager on the results. Competition was often quite fierce, though I could rarely raise the level of my enthusiasm for that side of it beyond mild interest. I enjoyed the company, as I was trying very hard to get back into what was termed normal society now that my medication had been deemed unnecessary.
Lists are a typical symptom of the chronically obsessed so I was making a real effort not to list everything I did. Obviously there were still issues that had to be logged, but if I kept it to essentials I felt better and believed I could see the way to true recovery. At my worst I didn’t even have to write things down. The lists reverberated around inside my head, like an ever-revolving tape loop, a perpetual motion of checking and re-checking, of mentally filing things away, only to spread them out again in my brain and begin the process of scheduling them all over. I would list my possessions by category, and then break those down by area of the house in which they were placed. That doesn’t sound very clear so I’ll give an example. Say it was my bathroom things, a little personal I know so I shan’t go into full feminine hygiene detail. I would list, in my mind of course, bathroom, and then go into smaller perspective by listing, flannel, soap, then bottles of perfume, talcum, toothpaste. Usually after a few days of this the list was so practised that the items stayed in the same place within the list. Though if I was tired or was interrupted, things got displaced and it might be necessary to start again. After a few months I added a failsafe procedure so that if I was stopped before I had got to the end I didn’t have to begin at the very beginning and list every room; that idea saved a lot of time, though it did mean I listed the whole itinerary more often each day, because the task took less time.
The bottle was full, of course, and properly sealed, which is perhaps the reason behind the enigmatic glance Elvis gave me. He may have suspected my purpose, possibly even shared my anticipation, but I suspected he was more likely to be planning his comeback than bothering with the secrets a thin, sandy-blonde haired woman in her late thirties was going to take to fill her bottle, her own bottle.
Why mother called me Thujone I have no idea, but it served to increase the isolation at school, and in early adult life as well. People couldn’t spell it, forever making it into ‘two-john’, or ‘through-joan’, neither of which made any sense. Not that the real spelling or pronunciation used to make any sense to me either; not until a doctor in the first hospital told me about the green goddess. My purpose was set in those few moments, and no manner of treatment, no amount of electrode activity could divert me.
Jim Morrison used to write of ‘weird scenes inside the goldmine’, but goldmines produce a substance of beauty and value. The scenes inside my head were more industrialised than artistic, the repetitive lists infinitely more stark than attractive. My scenes were a fool’s gold of stifled emotion. I mentioned this to Jim once and he issued an expletive that I took to be an offer, but I declined. It was during his bloated and bearded stage, and while his whiskies and lime were green, it’s true, they were not as vividly so as the substance.
My apartment in Notting Hill is considered to be quite desirable nowadays, but when mother and father owned the shop around the corner it was merely convenient. They meant to have more than one child but mother said it never worked out. I know she suffered at least five miscarriages, both before and after me, and for years I blamed myself for them. I must have jumped on her at the wrong time, in innocent childish play, but harmful nonetheless. I couldn’t have influenced the ones that preceded me, naturally, unless what one doctor had told me was true and my need to be wanted overshadowed all else, even producing physical symptoms alongside the psychological ones. Those physical implications could easily have been the nature’s terminations that mother suffered – brought on by an anticipation of my overwhelming desire to be needed, all day and every day.
The apartment is special to me and always will be. Mother died here, and although father struggled on for a few months afterwards, he was eaten away by his grief, or guilt, I was never quite sure which. Eaten away, a strange phrase, but apt because that is the best description of what happened to him. Gradually there was less of him; he shrivelled on a daily basis, until I thought I would soon be able to fold him into the pocket of my coat and take him for a walk in the park. Perhaps pop him out if it was a nice day and let the sun warm his bones and the diaphanous skin that covered them.
The kitchen opened out onto a small terrace that was the head of the small garden. It was a lovely place in which to prepare food. I could have the terrace doors open and let the sun and the busy noises from the streets around waft in as though they were scents from a Parisian evening. I could close my eyes and imagine the Eiffel skeleton, the cafes and the boulevards, the elegance and the mystery.
My bottle was empty by now, and yet next to the new and untouched one it beckoned like a stranger from a black windowed taxi parked along the pavement by the Seine. It was alluring but dangerous, promising excitement but at a cost that might be too high a price for me.
I took a glass from the cabinet, a crystal tumbler, poured ice into it and swilled the cubes around, wallowing in the sound they made as they connected. The bottle opened freely, as if it was already prepared for me. I placed my perforated spoon over the glass where it fitted perfectly; it was a beautiful object, crafted from the finest silver, and bought from Camden market many years ago. The sugar I spilled onto the spoon, leaving the actual liquid until last. The green liquor flowed mystically through the sugar, and where it touched the already melting ice it was tinged with an opaque milky white colour that offset the beautiful emerald green. Then the sip, that first taste on the tongue. I have to confess that, coupled with the medication, a single glass of absinthe does set my imagination in turmoil, and the damage to my carefully constructed lists is bloody. I pay for it for days after a binge, but as I have become older the logic of drinking each day has become obvious.
Ther
e are some that prefer the traditional method of pouring water through the sugar and into the already waiting liquor but the resultant colour is so absent of green that I feel it becomes another drink altogether.
With the glass fully drunk, and the bottle re-sealed, I can begin to prepare the food for the evening. But, no, the initial glass is, naturally, never quite enough, the essence not wholly absorbed. And so another, the ritual repeated and the new bottle is now well on its path to oblivion. I arrived there many a long year ago.
By the end of the evening the new bottle will be empty, ready to be filed away until the next time, while my own bottle, my trusted friend, will be full to the overflowing.
There are friends that find the décor of my home a little overwhelming. I like green. The dreams that are caught by the colour are the most vivid of all. I lay asleep and by morning the images and thoughts that escape from my head at night are held by the spider’s web dampness of the greenness. It is as though the dew that caresses the grass outside is translated into my rooms as an invisible filter, coating the walls with a rainbow of ideas and trapping my unconscious dream world as though the fantasies are poured into a bottle and sealed for later use.
The bedroom mirrors the green fairy in its sharp emeralds; the sitting room is paler, an attempt at faded elegance; the hallway a whiter shade of green; the bathroom is different shades of the colour, from the dark tiles to the pastel fittings; and the kitchen has washed effect cupboard fronts, dark green cooker and fridge, and lighter green tiles on the walls and floor. I feel as if I am held safe by a field, by a forest, by the contents of the bottle itself.
The dog did not enjoy absinthe, what can I say. He had been with me for a while, since I was finally signed away from the hospital, even the outpatient clinics. I hated taking him for walks and so the garden had to suffice. He soon bored of its restrictive perimeters, and so one evening, while the darkness invaded yet the night was warm enough for nakedness, I shared with him some of the liquid from my bottle. Perhaps he would have been safer with the pure liquor but I was in a capricious mood – there were many inside me that night, and I wanted him to join me in the special fluids. He convulsed fairly quickly and, well in a human the phrase would be ‘he wasn’t feeling himself.’ He certainly wasn’t himself after the drink, which he lapped up like water in a desert. He died within the hour.
Of Devils & Deviants: An Anthology of Erotic Horror Page 8