“A game of chess?” he asks.
I assume he’s asking someone else until I realize I’m the only person there with time on my hands. “Me?”
“Yes. You. You play?”
“Badly.”
“Come on. I let you win.” A gunmetal incisor tooth flashes between his corpulent lips as he smiles.
“Don’t do that,” I reply, shifting my chair to face the scarred-up chessboard. “Anyway, I can tell. You’re not the sort of man who enjoys losing.”
And he’s not. There’s a petulance, a temper in that meaty face. His pride, like paper bunting, is all pinned to the surface of his skin. So we play for a while as the rain buckets down and spatters the board with mist.
I stood
by the river of time
and waited for a word
but none came.
These days, time stalls like a cranky engine. On this sodden afternoon, when minutes are hours, Sergei opens with a classic Spassky sequence. I’ll let him beat me because he probably will anyway, and why draw out the inevitable? I’m such a graceful loser, having had so much practice at it.
“Check,” he grunts and grins.
How can you deny people the little things that mean so much to them?
I sat by the river and wept,
and let you float away,
because there’s no fighting
this mother of a river.
She’s too wide and too deep.
The Sisowath Quay is a river promenade gone wrong. The years and the weather have decimated the paving stones. They’re broken and sit unevenly in the saturated soil. As we walk back to his hotel, I delight in the petty cruelty of the Russian’s confusion. Will I change my mind and bolt? Will I demand money? Will I wait until he’s sleeping off his orgasm and rob him? Having been stationed in this festering backwater, I’m sure he’s had nothing but prostitutes for ages. He has no idea how to classify me. And, having spent so long in a state of suspended animation myself, I drink in the Schadenfreude.
The catlike boy behind the reception desk is also unnerved. After a moment of deep confusion, he reacquires the vacant stare of an unnamed native informant who hears no evil as long as it’s white. All the whores he’d ever seen have been Cambodian or Vietnamese.
The Russian kisses me with sloppy intensity in the cramped elevator. I suspect he feels he ought to. His thumb finds my clothed nipple, hard in the air-conditioned chill. He takes this for arousal and a prompt to kiss me again with extra passion.
I’m not aroused. I don’t like this man or the taste of stale beer and cigarettes on his tongue. It makes my stomach churn. But I believe he has something I want. Something so central to his nature, he doesn’t even know it’s there. A fundamental brutality of the soul and an inability to hide it in extremis. I think he could be the perfect locksmith.
I knelt at the river’s bank
and wept into its heartless brown waters,
carrying my salt out to sea.
It’s like every other mid-priced hotel room in Phnom Penh, with a creaking, rattling air-conditioning unit and frayed manufacturer’s stickers on the bar fridge. I eye the gaudy bedspread and ignore Sergei’s murmurs of unfelt but apparently obligatory emotion. He pulls off my tank top and pushes down the cups of my bra.
Where the fuck did he learn the word “succulent”, I wonder, unzipping my skirt. I don’t want all this preamble. I’m simply hoping that he’ll fuck me hard enough to jolt something loose inside me. That this raw act will uncouple me from the agonizing attachment I have to you.
Sergei stands still for a moment, his erection distorting the front of his rain-speckled beige chinos. If he thinks I’m going to undress him, he’s wrong. I may be a fucking whore, but I’m not “that” kind of a whore. If he’s getting laid for free, he can take off his own pants.
“Got a condom?” I ask.
“Sure. Of course. But I’m clean.”
I make a concerted effort to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Yeah? Me too. Put the bloody condom on.” Because he’s not going to have anything to complain about friction-wise.
As he tugs me down onto the bed and attempts to enter me, he gets it. I haven’t had a cock in seven years and I’m not wet. The tightness makes him hesitate. He wrestles a fat hand between us and tries to change my frame of mind via my clit. It’s not going to make a difference.
“Just fuck me.”
“But you don’t seem,” he searches his Russian brain for the word and comes up with something ESLish, “interested.”
“Listen, asshole. Just fuck me.”
I lay down beside the river
and begged her to take me
somewhere, anywhere,
away from here,
away from now,
away from me.
I don’t scream at that first inward thrust. He’s big but not that big. Instead, I lie there with my teeth clenched and wait for my body to remember what to do. Sergei paws my breast and groans. His cock is only halfway in and the stretch hurts like a sonofabitch. But in that moment, when he thrusts again to hilt himself inside me, the world turns. He changes into something cruel, just as I become something acquiescent.
“This is what you want?” His voice is a croak. The hand on my breast tightens painfully.
The thrusts are punctuated with questions that at first I don’t feel the need to answer.
“And this . . . and this . . . and this . . . ?”
Until the fury of it makes me gasp. “Yes.”
Because this is what I want. Because I feel the hinges of my heart creak under the strain. The violence of it nags at the bolts that moor me to you. Boards rattle, age-rusted threads strip and shriek.
“Harder. Can’t you fuck me any harder?”
He makes a noise like a wounded dog and closes a hand around my neck. “Shut up, you bitch,” he hisses, showering me in spittle that smells of beer.
I smile and close my eyes. There it is. The umbrage. The brittle pride crisscrossed with stress fractures of doubt. The cruelty that can’t help but rear its head. I need him past the thin walls of his civility. And in him, I know, those walls are very thin indeed. This new paradigm does nothing to quell his ardour.
I dipped my hand into the river
and felt the warm, silty water
gritty between my fingers.
So much of the world
borne away on the flow.
My body inches across the bed under the pounding. As it produces enough lubrication to protect itself, my cunt stings. What traitorous things our bodies are. I still don’t feel the least bit aroused, but I’m wet anyway. And although I’m convinced I don’t much care if I never get up off this bed, still I gasp and claw for air as his grip tightens around my throat. We are all, in the end, such animals.
There are pale doughnuts of light behind my eyelids, throbbing in time to my pulse, blooming brighter with each vicious thrust, until the brilliance of it screams like a siren.
Poor Sergei, I muse. I hope he doesn’t kill me. It would be a bitch to get rid of a white corpse.
Not that I’m too worried about it. All I know is that the ancient wood inside me is splintering, the brackets snarling loose in the howling storm. The structure of every dream I’ve ever had about you is collapsing. And the Russian is going to come any second now.
I push you out with every hindered, rasping gasp. My cunt muscles spasm shut, my back arches and my spine locks. I’m coming. Teeth clenched and airless. It’s a roaring red rage of an orgasm that races outwards in all directions to occupy the cataclysmic landscape. Because it’s easy enough to do when it’s not you I’m holding inside. When it’s not you whose cock I imagine. When it’s not you fucking me.
Sergei collapses onto me like a side of beef. His pale flesh twitches in the afterstorm of his orgasm. He rolls off me with a small, embarrassed chuckle. I consider thanking him for his service, but decide it’s not his business or his burden.
“You,” he says,
wheezing and wagging a fat finger at me, “you’re quite the puzzle. But I have figured you out. You’re like another woman I used to date in Moscow.”
“Really?” I sit up and begin to dress, adjusting my bra, pulling on my shirt.
“Yes. A Georgian girl. Very beautiful. Some kind of refugee.”
“Funny,” I say, standing up and stepping back into my skirt. “So am I.”
I turned my back on the river of time.
Let someone else sit,
wooing it uselessly,
someone stronger than me.
I always knew
you’d make me wait too long.
Picking Apples in Hell
Nikki Magennis
“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”
William Butler Yeats
It was nearing dusk. Students, socialites and Europeans gathered below a broody August sky, drinking wine and staying very carefully blasé about each other. I blended right in. Frank didn’t. Yes, he may have been a native son, but after so many years something had changed. I couldn’t work out if it was him or Dublin.
“So what’s dragged you back, Frank?”
“Oh, c’mon now. Can’t a man visit his home town without good reason?”
“Don’t try telling me you were missing the ole place,” I said, keeping my voice nice and flat.
What I didn’t say was – “tell me you were missing me, tell me you couldn’t forget me, tell me you’d cross the sea just for one more shot of that filthy, mind-blowing fucking we used to do.”
Frank looked around the plaza. He shrugged. The leather of his jacket was so worn it didn’t even make the ghost of a creak. Lines were folded deep into the hide, like the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes. Oh, there was a glimmer of the same old Frank. Eyes as black as ale and as potent. Skin the colour of rain-washed bronze.
“I can hardly recognize the place,” he said, shaking his head kind of sorrowfully. “It’s just as full of shiny shite and fecking foreigners as any other city.”
We were sitting out in Meeting House Square, watching a film they were playing on the wall. I couldn’t tell you what it was, other than it had subtitles and real sex in it and took itself deadly serious. I was trying to show Frankie how different it all was now, how I’d changed and the city had changed and how I was no longer the kind of woman ye’d fumble with in the back of some spit-and-sawdust ole pub. How we were sophisticated, you know, and avoided talk of politics and religion and all those embarrassments.
“Christ, would you look at the state of that,” Frank said.
Beside the art gallery, a gaggle of Liverpool girls screeched. One of them was throwing up in the corner. They’d matching pink cowboy hats with fluffy trim, and bras over their T-shirts, and they were shedding glitter in cascades.
Inevitably, it attracted the attention of a handful of local lads, who stood and catcalled, oblivious to those of us pretending to watch the movie. A chorus of tutting tourists couldn’t put a dampener on the boys’ spirits, and the to and fro of young lust continued as bawdy and desperate as ever.
“Sure some things never change, eh?” Frank said, smirking. I wondered if he was looking at my haircut, the exact copy of that I’d seen on Cate Blanchett, only not as blonde on account of my scalp trouble; my shoes that were knock-off Louboutins from eBay and only a little scuffed around the heel, and the red shift dress I’d put on to look casually thrown together, after changing, of course, forty or fifty times over in the effort to hit on the look that would show just the perfectly right mix of indifference and old-fashioned allure to ensure a night that satisfied not only my loins but my tender, hopeful ego, too.
I expect it was mostly lost on Frank. He was more of a split-crotch panties man, after all. I watched him checking my tits to see if they were still there. He chewed his lower lip. His knee was jiggling twenty to the dozen, and I didn’t miss a furtive glimpse at his watch.
I tossed my hair.
“You’d be surprised, Frank. Some of us are different people now.”
“S’that right? Well, yer eyes are still as blue as the sea, Niamh.” He leaned in close.
“And I’ll bet your sweet cunt’s still as wet between your legs.”
I’d have kissed him or slapped him, no doubt, had the crowd of young lads not distracted us at that moment, shouting out sing-song taunts at the cinema ushers, playful like, but with that ragged edge that meant anything could go pear-shaped at any moment.
Friday night in Temple Bar. Oh, it was dressed up with fresh paint and flower boxes in the windows and the bartenders may polish the fecking cobblestones daily, but when the night drifted in from the docks and the beers started to flow there was little you could do about the panhandlers and the prostitutes and the skangers loitering with intent and the overall tide of floating human flotsam that washes up in a city looking for the craic, and possibly crack, if not absolute gallons of strong drink, and, at last at the end of the night, looking most intently for the solace of a nice warm crack to sink their dirty flutes into – whether it belonged to man, woman or something in-between.
A couple of Garda rocked up and tried to skirt around the fracas without actually getting overly involved, and Frank decided it was time to retire somewhere with a better view, that is, somewhere he could smoke one of his foul European cigarettes without being coughed at.
“Come and see where I’m stayin’,” he said, and I smiled.
“Somewhere nice?” I said. Him an international traveller now, I’d visions of room service perhaps and clean sheets. He’d try it on, of course, expect to have me on my back within ten minutes. No doubt I’d be happy to oblige.
We walked down towards Trinity, skirting buskers and drunks, the backs of our hands grazing occasionally, casual, like. Even that was enough to make my heart beat like a pattering clock, and the fact of us, Niamh and Frank, walking together again through the old haunts. Those streets, they were layered up with so many half-remembered stories they were like fly posters pasted over one another, dissolving pictures I caught out the corner of my eye.
How fine we looked back then. Me with my Madonna-bleached hair and his leathers brand new and shiny. Our legs scissored alongside each other’s in perfect time, when we were running from Grafton Street up towards the green. We always seemed to be running.
I could hear echoes, too.
Us laughing, spraying the sound all over the cobbles like frothing beer. The thrum of his old scooter’s engine, the fury in his voice. The high breaking note in mine as I shouted after him. All the anger that rained down around us.
I can hear, still, the silence the day after he left. The long, endless grey hush of it drifting in from the quay – “The air so soft that it smudges the words.”
“Brings back memories, eh?” Frank said, and he was smiling into the breeze like he knew exactly what I was thinking. Cocky shite. Always had been. But I’d always fallen for it, likewise. As he grabbed my wrist and pulled me out the way of a stray skateboard outside the Central Bank, I got that roaring all over, the itch and the hunger for him. To be enfolded in him. Jarred by him. To scrape against the rough of his cheek and to fire up the blue in his eyes and to taste the diesel, the cigarettes, the other women on his fingertips.
We pushed through a crowd of miserable-looking black-haired, black-eyed teenagers and I glimpsed them turn to look after Frank. He’d trouble written all over him, you see. Irresistible to the young and foolish. And part of me must have still been those things, buried under my well-educated, socially mobile, culturally aware self. Yes, part of me was still the culchie, redneck girl from the bogs of Galway, entranced by the street lights, by Frank, by everything in the great, dear, dirty city. Blushing despite myself as he ran one finger over the pale skin on the inside of my wrist. Reading my skin like Braille.
There was a cluster of buskers planted on every corner and we were serenaded along the streets by fiddles, bodhráns, an out-of-tune guitar and a chorus of straining, echoing voices,
the rough edges of them chafing my ears. Frank’s hands slid around my waist. I only pulled away for a moment before I gave in and let his hip bump against mine. It felt good.
We passed the woman with the harp at the empty spot where King Billy used to stand. Frank let his hands drift lower. He traced the outline of my knickers through my skirt, lightly, like he was playing the stringed harp himself – it could have been almost angelic the way he twanged that elastic against my arse.
“Light-fingered, still, are you?” I said to him, but I couldn’t help smirking as we swerved and slid down a wee lane, heading towards a squat, grubby pink building. Yes, now he’d pulled me off the street and away from the traffic my heart was beating a jig in my chest and I thought for a moment he might push me up against the wall like he used to, fire into it straight away. Have me with my back to the graffiti, under the blue streetlights, one leg lifted and my well-oiled crack swallowing him gladly.
But there was something nervy about him. He looked all about as we reached the corner and I thought to myself – first, where the hell is it we’re going, and second,
“God, are you ashamed to be seen with me? You, Frank McAuley, a once-upon-a-time pony kid from Finglas with dirt under your nails?”
I was about to shout him off when he tugged me into the narrow gap between the Germolene-pink roughcast and this big ungainly crate of a van that was parked arse backwards on the pavement.
“Hoy!”
The voice, spraying out of the darkness, was dog-harsh, and all my skin swarmed with sudden fright. But Frank was patting me down and nosing towards the sound. For a moment I wished he were less of a swaggerer. He’d always been inclined to get us tangled up in mischief, and never one to shy away from a bare-knuckle scrap, either.
“S’dat you, Eddie? How’s it going?” Frank sounded oddly cheerful.
There was a low grumble, and the sound of someone clearing their throat and howking a great gob into the gutter.
“McAuley. Where the fuck’ve yow been?”
The voice was fat, and as my eyes adjusted I saw that it belonged to an appropriately gigantic great fucker standing in a doorway. One of those that manage to menace just by the set of their shoulders. Frank shrugged.
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