The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘Come in,’ she says. ‘Close the door.’

  Orgone Man would use his X-ray vision to see her here, even in the dark. I have no superpowers and all I have is the press of her hot limbs against mine. Our knees are touching, hers so solid and calm, mine trembling with my own terror.

  I am too tense to feel the orgone. It is like I am shielded by my muscles, the fear turning me into a stone statue, frozen for all time. I will never be able to crawl out of the accumulator.

  When she wraps her fingers around my ankle I cannot even flinch. I feel her fingers like a brand, the imprint of them burnt forever into my flesh. She leans forward suddenly and there are her lips, a quick kiss, and I feel bruised by the force of it, a kiss like a punch in the face. My top lip begins to swell almost instantly. There are other swellings too, my chest first as I breathe in but am somehow incapable of breathing out. And of course, because I am healthy—and in the orgone accumulator—there is the swelling in my pants. She places her hand onto it with surprising accuracy and when she feels the state I am in she laughs.

  ‘I—’

  ‘Shh!’ And her hand squeezes me for emphasis. I stifle the groan that rises in my throat. She is squeezing me through my shorts and I reach out blindly. I know I should do something in return, hold her flat chest or feel under her skirt. I touch flesh, something, an elbow? A shoulder? Some part of this wild and excitable girl, but even that quick brush against her soft skin is too much. I know she can feel how my penis pumps its muscles under her hand, the spasms, the damp ejaculation. An image of her springs into my mind, spread out like Dr Reich’s drawings, the words for things, vulva, urethra, anus, vagina, and a line to the place I am touching. Shoulder. I am touching her shoulder. I gasp and fall forward onto it. My face is wet and I suppose I am crying but it all feels like a part of my ejaculation.

  She sniffs. She is smelling the sudden dank smell, the mushroomy odour. Little snuffly animal that she is, she sniffs at my hair and my neck and her breath in my ear makes me hard all over again and she laughs because of this. She pushes me roughly back and takes my hand off her shoulder and drags it. My fingers are dipped in honey. She rubs them in the honey once, twice, and then she opens the accumulator and the light is blinding. I see a tumble of skirt and flesh and hair and then she is gone.

  The door slaps closed, open, closed.

  I bring my fingers to my face and smell the scent of earth and wet leaves, I taste salt and something…anchovy? The scent of my father’s pantry with its fat hang of salami and the hessian bags filled with dried beans. A scent of Europe, the garlicky food my father is fond of, the spiced wines and fermented fruit. I lick my fingers clean, the taste of a girl, the scent of her. I lean back against the cold wood of the accumulator. I turn my cheek and kiss the flat surface, kiss it with my bruised and swollen lip.

  I crawl out, shaky as a new moth, spreading my wings for the first time, swelling with a sudden sense of self. It is almost time for Amalie’s mother to drive up to our gate to take her home. I am wasting precious seconds where I could be standing with her, shoulder to shoulder, feeling her heat. I let the door of the accumulator slap shut behind me and I run.

  Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure

  by JOHN CLELAND

  What is real and what is only illusion? The machines of desire remake the world and who is to know what is true and what is only a ghost of our own imagination? Holly’s father is her dad and yet he is also the man in the dungeon, a stranger with an angry red cock. Jack is the gentle boy who flinched every time she tried to kiss him with her tongue. Jack is the naked beast, inflamed, aroused, pounding into her best friend’s cunt, withdrawing, spreading those globes of flesh and pressing his cock into her anus instead. Jennifer, beloved Jennifer who once held her hair back while Holly was vomiting into a toilet bowl. Hated Jennifer, who lifted her hips to every stroke, her vulva gaping terribly, her arse open and ready to be fucked. Everything turned all around. Little girls slipping rings onto their fingers and promising to abstain from sex. The same little girls pouting and preening on the pages of a children’s fashion catalogue, the same little girls dolled up like miniature Marilyn Monroes in weekend pageants, growing up all come-here, go-away. The world can be broken down to its atomically demonstrable parts and yet, look at it through a kaleidoscope or a rabbit hole or the lens of a prayer and it is unrecognisable. Look at it through the pages of a novel by Angela Carter and it is utterly transformed.

  Mandy was busy with a customer. Holly could hear her voice, muffled by all the shelves, insulated by decades of ideas. She was recommending a book. Holly listened carefully. Orwell; 1984. This is what you need. She wondered why Mandy had never recommended that book to her. Someone else on a different journey, some other reality operating side by side with her own. This was the lesson that Angela Carter had taught her. There are worlds within worlds and it is impossible to know what is the truth and what is only a glint of our own desire sparkling like fool’s gold in a lump of granite.

  When Mandy rounded the corner of a bookshelf and saw Holly there she smiled, and this at least was something real. A proud smile, the beam a mother would give her child on her day of graduation. The louche grin of a lover who can make their loved one come like a horse.

  ‘Good,’ said Mandy. ‘I have your reading list ready.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ Holly had to admit.

  ‘Not to worry. When you begin a quest you are bound to start out being nervous.’

  Mandy took her by the hand and led her behind the counter. The door there opened to the back room which—Holly felt herself blush as she entered—smelled like sex. Her sex. The room held a memory and she inhaled it in a rush of musty air.

  Mandy led her to the couch (their couch) and pushed the papers off onto the floor, clearing a space for her to sit. She reached into one of the boxes and pulled out a bottle of scotch and two glasses. Blew dust out of the tumblers and poured.

  ‘To your voyage,’ Mandy said, clicking her glass against Holly’s and downing the amber liquid in one quick motion.

  Holly sipped, shuddered. The alcohol burned all the way to her stomach.

  Mandy rummaged among the clutter behind the couch and hauled up a bag. She rested it in Holly’s lap. ‘The consolations of literature.’

  Holly opened the mouth of the bag. It was heavy, all knees and elbows, a sack of miniature corpses. Holly peered inside. The fluorescent light gleamed off the lolly-coloured covers of the books inside: emerald green, peacock blue, sari pink, a luscious cornucopia. She saw names. Simone de Beauvoir, Miller, Nin, Apollinaire, de Sade.

  ‘When you discover your power you must bring it back to us.’

  ‘Oh god! Uni. I forgot to tell the university. What about my studies?’

  ‘Studies?’ Mandy grinned, her eyes bright, as if it was her and not Holly who would be stepping on a plane to adventure. ‘Here is the secret of the universe,’ Mandy told her, ‘the answer to questions you had never thought to ask.’

  ‘I can’t take these books, so many, they must be worth a fortune.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mandy, ‘they are worth more than a fortune. You think you are holding a bag full of naughty fun? Look again. Pornographic literature
is multidimensional. Really good erotic writing uses sex to destabilise notions of how society works—on many different fronts, the political, philosophical, psychological. There,’ she winked to undercut her own rhetoric, ‘you have the answer to life, the universe and everything. Now, as Angela Carter would tell you, all you have to do is take it all apart and rebuild from scratch. A quest. And when you have read enough, seen enough, interpreted it through your body, then you will have your chalice, your magic sword, your rescued princess, the treasure you have been questing for.’

  Mandy pressed the bag of books with the palm of her hand as if touching the belly of a pregnant woman, waiting for the foetus inside to kick. The books really did move and shift. Holly could feel them settling. She cradled the weight against her chest.

  ‘Take them,’ Mandy told her. ‘Read them. Go where they take you. Stretch out into the world. And if they’re of some help, pass them on to someone in need. Leave them in bus shelters. Scatter them around the streets. Abandon them in exotic locations. Let them lead you away from what you have been told is true. Let them set the next stage of your adventure for you.’ She took Holly’s hands in hers. ‘Go where they lead you.’ She leaned closer. Holly felt her heart quicken. She opened her mouth and there were Mandy’s lips, parting slightly, the soft wet slip of a tongue. Holly gulped at the dampness of Mandy’s mouth. She was trembling. She felt a swelling at her crotch, the blood racing to the seat of her sex.

  ‘I don’t think I want to leave you. I think I might be falling in love with you.’

  ‘Good.’ Mandy nodded. ‘Go to Paris now. Collect more love. It isn’t a finite resource. You have mine, now go and get some more.’

  She touched Holly’s chin, stroked the line of her jaw. ‘You are special, Holly. You don’t even know how special you are. But we do. Come back to us when you know.’

  And then she stopped speaking with her mouth and used it instead to communicate her love more fervently.

  PART 2

  The sexual angels! They are wonderful because it is such a surprise, such a change. You, for instance, with your appearance of never having been touched, I can see you biting and scratching…I am sure your very voice changes—I have seen such changes. There are women’s voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change. The eyes change. I believe that all these legends of people changing into animals at night—like the stories of the were-wolf, for instance—were invented by men who saw women transform at night from idealised, worshipful creatures into animals and thought that they were possessed.

  ANAÏS NIN

  Little Birds

  Little Birds

  by ANAÏS NIN

  Holly could feel her hymen. She supposed it was just jetlag, but when she lay on the tiny hotel bed and stretched out her legs she felt it humming. Vibrating like a gumleaf when you hold it up to your lips and whistle through it. She tried to sleep; the weariness of the flight was heavy in her bones, but every time she slipped into a dream the sound of her hymen woke her. She had lost her virginity. She had had sex. Her body felt snapped open, lewd, woken by the tongue and the fingers of an expert lover, and yet here was this tiny piece of skin, intact like the wrapping on a gift she had yet to open. If only Mandy had pushed her fingers inside her just a little bit further, a little harder, surely it would have silenced this distracting thrum. She sat up, harried, exhausted. Reached into her suitcase and pulled out a book at random. Little Birds, Anaïs Nin. A naked young woman, shy on the cover, peering cautiously over her shoulder. It was Holly herself, sitting there so full of trepidation, staring back at her. Coyness hiding the bold text within.

  Holly divided her first day between reading and dreaming and didn’t even venture out for a meal. Her dinner was breakfast and she ordered expensive champagne to go with it. She shrugged a small stab of guilt as she handed over the credit card that was linked to her parents’ account. They had plenty of money. They were always offering her money and before this she had always refused to take it.

  Well. But it was one thing to decide to fly to Paris and quite another to actually find yourself here, a stranger in a strange city, exiled by language, with only one goal, to learn about love. Holly glanced out of her window, and over a patchwork of roofs and balconies and buildings she could just glimpse a small section of the street below. It was morning and all the other Parisians were rugged up in their thick winter coats, milling in the cobbled streets. Women strolled, men ambled, once a small child in a blue coat stopped in her line of vision and picked an invisible flower from between two cobblestones.

  Holly could have marched out into the street too. Instead she retreated from the view, threw herself onto the bed and curled herself around the slim paperback. The pages were cheap and yellowed. Holly was surprised by the tiny scribbled writing in the margins. Had Mandy annotated the text? Perhaps this was Mandy’s personal copy of the book. She remembered a kiss, a tongue, the heavy swell of a breast, the sweet wet warmth of the woman’s sex.

  As Holly smoothed back the cover and began to read, she felt herself begin to glow. Four little girls enjoying an array of exotic caged birds and a grown man in a state of excitement watching their innocent play with a less than innocent desire to expose himself to them in the glory of his huge and growing arousal. In the margins Mandy had written a few sentences as if she guessed what Holly would be thinking and wanted to comfort her, urge her not to fly away from this lesson in subversive sensuality as the little girls had flown away, skittish exotic little birds spooked by the sight of an erect penis.

  Remember the lessons of Angela Carter, wrote Mandy.

  So many ways of seeing the world. He sees sex, they see games, you see Paris. Look out at the street. Look at the people there. The women are all dripping with sex, the men are all in a state of arousal. They are waiting for you to take them. Take them, Holly, take them all.

  Holly stood. Restless. She looked out of the tiny window and glimpsed the street. A woman stopped, shook her lighter, failing to light a cigarette. A man stopped to help her, a stranger. He lit a match for her; she touched his arm. They walked on together, talking, laughing. Out of the frame of Holly’s vision.

  Holly returned to her bed and her book. Her thighs were slippery. Her cunt, pulsing gently under her thin skirt, emitted a subtle light. She had the heating turned up and she began to sweat. She would go out. She would walk boldly out into the streets to join in. She was in Paris. City of sex. At each chapter break, further aroused by the stories, she moved towards the door; once she even gripped the handle in her trembling, sweating hand. Each time she fell back, overwhelmed by fear of the unknown.

  What if sex with a man was a disappointment? Surely no man could be as skilled with his tongue as Mandy had been. No man would be able to coax the same animal noises from her throat. No man would smell like a briny feast of oysters and mussels. Holly’s mouth watered at the thought of those delicate folds, the slip of thick juices, so sharp and sweet at the back of her palate.

  Would she be able to bear the pain of her tearing flesh? Would she fall pregnant despite the little pills she had begun to swallow daily and the rubbers coiled in their plastic wrappers? Would sex with a man fulfil the warnings that women are tortured with? Unrequited love? Rejection? Rough, abusive treatment; rape, murder? Was it worth the risk?


  She shuddered and lay back in the bed to continue with Anaïs Nin’s adventures, rather than her own.

  When she woke it was dark. She did not feel at all rested. She rolled over, picked up the book again and read:

  I don’t know what there is about Paris but there is a sensuality in the air there. It is contagious. It is such a human city. I don’t know whether it is because couples are always kissing in the streets, at tables in the cafés, in the movies, in the parks. They embrace each other so freely. They stop for long, complete kisses in the middle of the sidewalk, at the subway entrances. Perhaps it is that, or the softness in the air. I don’t know. In the dark, in the doorway each night there is a man and a woman almost melted into each other. The whores watch for you every moment, they touch you…

  Go! shouted Mandy in the margin of her page. What are you waiting for? Go suck the sex out of Paris. Go! Now!

  And so, fluttering from the room like a little bird escaping her cage, she went.

  The Lover

  by MARGUERITE DURAS

  Holly’s shoes were too light for the weather. They were gold sandals, a mesh of lamé glittering from her perfectly manicured toes to her delicate ankles: shoes crafted for seduction. They complemented the gold shift that she wore under her long tailored coat. She could feel the uneven crackle of the cobbles under her thin soles, a deep throb of cold climbing up from the ground, turning her bones brittle. She would need a hat. Her hair lifted in the chill breeze, and shivered onto her shoulders. It was only autumn but she was dressed for the tropics, for a warmer season. She felt her nipples clenching under the thick drape of her coat, but of course no one would notice. Her thin gold dress was completely hidden by a smother of wool.