After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

“Be … gentle.”

  He nodded. His naked body seemed thinner and more threatening than I had ever seen it. He was like the room, full of dark, dangerous angles.

  Slowly, he moved a hand towards my breasts. I waited for it to grab, to twist my arms behind my back, to bridle me with my hair. Instead, it hovered over me, uncertain almost, touching down like the slow, shy antennae of a moth. I could hardly believe it was still Leo’s hand. He had taken all the teeth out of it. It was fawning on me, begging instead of brazening. My mouth relaxed. We couldn’t kiss, but Leo turned his fingers into lips and tongue, whispering over my body, finding little dips and niches to trickle in and out of. There was no danger now. He had taken off his armour, laid his weapons down. We weren’t even separate people any more. Our bodies were merging in a peace treaty, arms entwined, thighs overlapping, my long hair binding us together. He was using his tongue across my nipples, his lips behind my knees. The light in the room was fading, as if it were almost embarrassed to watch this new submissive Leo. Even my cold seemed better. I no longer had to sniff or cough or rasp. It was as if he had healed me simply by the laying on of hands.

  My own hands were stroking up and down his back, across his chest, in and out of all the shadowed hollows of his body. Normally, he never gave me time. He was in me, on top of me, before I had barely touched him, forcing me to buck, jump, thrust, gasp, plunge. But now, I ran long, slow, teasing circles around his thighs, moving my hand in closer, closer, and then idling it away again, back to his belly — taunting him, abandoning him — making him think I’d never quite get there.

  My face was hidden against his neck, my eyes closed. I wanted to savour this new, slow, coaxing ritual. Leo fidgeted. He seemed restive, almost nervous. Or perhaps he was just impatient with so long a build-up. I moved my hand in closer. He had indulged me long enough. It was time for him to thrust and slam again, bang into me like one of those hard wooden shapes which children hammer into holes. Through my closed lids, I saw a fist again, a man’s brute powerful fist, rammed right inside me, punching in and out between my legs. I realised, suddenly, all penises were fists, smashing into women, pummelling blow after blow on to bruised and flinching cunts. I wanted to sneak away, melt into nothing, sticky-tape my hole. I was too raw, too weak, too small, too scared, for any man to barge and trample into — Leo, least of all.

  Yet how could I refuse him? It would be a second, worse rejection, a total act of war. All I could say was, “Careful”, and open my legs as slowly as I dared.

  I reached out my hand and trailed my fingers down, still lingering, still teasing, as if to show him what I meant by careful. I dawdled through his pubic hair, caressing it a little, then back between his thighs. Another inch, another centimetre. I was almost, almost there. I felt him tense. My hand moved in, ready to snap around him like a bracelet. The fingers closed on air. There was nothing there, no clenched and hammering fist, no brutal weapon. Leo was limp.

  He was never limp. We never screwed without him looming up and overpowering me. He was often stiff when we weren’t even thinking about it — stiff in the kitchen, stiff in the auction rooms. I shifted my head a fraction and peered down. Instead of the fist, the cudgel, the battering ram, was a soft pink cringing thing, coiled in on itself like an embryo. I longed to scoop it up and put it in an incubator on a bed of cotton wool, and then feed and nurture it until it grew again. It didn’t look like Leo — it was too small and shy for that. It was a child’s thing, a baby’s, weak and gentle and vulnerable. I felt an almost power. I had tamed and softened Leo, turned force into flower.

  “Bloody sodding hell.”

  I jumped. Leo was lying rigid now, arms across his body, eyes shut, dead below the navel. I had to resurrect him. I stopped teasing and used my hands more boldly — both hands — every way I knew. Nothing happened. I turned the other way and rubbed my breasts against it, the pressure of my nipples. I wound it in my hair. Still nothing — except Leo grew more tense. He couldn’t even look at me. His eyes were blind, his mouth a thin sharp line.

  He pushed me off, and started to rub himself, almost savagely, as if he were punishing a disobedient child. He was bawling at it, forcing it up, commanding it to stand when it couldn’t even crawl.

  “Gently, Leo … you’ll hurt yourself. Look, it doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter, for Christ’s sake.”

  I think he blamed me for ever having used words like gentle and careful. By begging for mercy, I had somehow crippled and unmanned him. He was either steel or nothing, and I had made him nothing. I must build him up again, turn him back to steel. Fingers weren’t enough. I would have to use my mouth.

  I didn’t have a mouth, only a wounded, flinching thing, wrapped in cotton wool. For almost a week, it had been cherished and cosseted. No one had asked anything of it except to rest and heal. Nuns’ hands had tiptoed over it, dentists’ probes apologised for any pain they might have caused it. But now that was over and it had work to do. It must stop being an invalid and turn into a whore.

  Slowly, I moved my head down to his thighs, flicked my tongue across his tip, forced my lips to forget they were stitched and bruised, and slipped them slowly round it. He was so soft, he didn’t even hurt. He was only a mouthful of petals, a spoonful of pink blancmange. I tried to use my tongue, even the pressure of my gums. It did hurt now. Tiny black rockets of pain were exploding in my ears and through my head. I wanted to stop, to slip into bed and have my mouth pampered and coddled again, to be cordoned off by nuns. But Leo’s need was greater. He was out-of-action, invalided. I tried everything I could. I used my fingers and my hair at the same time as my lips, teeth and tongue. I cupped his balls and licked them. I tongued a path from his navel to his tip; down, then up again between his buttocks. I made little coaxing noises. I remembered the Russian peasant words which always turned him on, and whispered them between his thighs.

  Nothing happened. If anything, he was even smaller now. The flower had shrunk into a bud, the embryo into a single-celled amoeba. My mouth was screaming out with pain. It was as if it had been bashed again, gums bleeding, lips torn, the whole thing throbbing and unravelling. My cold had come streaming back. My nose was red and puffy, my throat scratched like wire wool. I sat up and mopped my face. Tears of pain and shame and failure were streaming down my cheeks. I often cried when we made love, but always with the exultation of it. Leo’s comes were the sort that made you cry. A friend once told me all men’s orgasms were more or less the same, but she hadn’t slept with Leo. He wasn’t like the rest — just a gasp, a spurt, a shudder, followed by a “thanks, love” and eight hours slumped and snoring sleep. Leo’s comes started slowly, somewhere deep down in his feet, and spread up, up, and out, as if there was some huge, dark, lashing animal trapped and raging in his body, fighting to get out. All those tired clichés about seas and earthquakes and volcanoes had never made any sense till Leo screwed me. I’d always assumed they were invented by frustrated virgins whose only sex life was Mills and Boon. But Leo was the sea, thwacking and pounding into me, sweeping away whole continents, snapping ships in half. When he came, I understood how the earth was formed a billion trillion years ago, life and flame leaping out of slime, God’s finger shuddering into man’s.

  Not now. There was only slime now, his thing wet and sticky from my mouth, and a cold, clammy fury creeping through the room like the filling in the blinis, settling damp and sour on everything. Even the clock was limping — missing ticks, hiccuping on others. I could hear walls fidgeting and yawning, Karma jeering at our double impotence.

  Leo suddenly turned over and punched his fist against the pile of cushions. “Stupid sodding bloody useless thing …”

  His adjectives were scattering like the cushions. I suddenly wanted to laugh. We were both so sort of tragic. Men always take their pricks too seriously, and Leo was worse than any. He was rampaging about the room now, like something in a Greek tragedy, rending his garments and plucking out his eyes merely because six inches
had shrunk to one. I felt we had mourned enough. It was time to see the funny side, shrug it off, even change the subject. We could always try again this evening. Perhaps if I made tea, offered him a let-out …

  I got up, took a step towards him — stopped. In front of me were the broken remnants of the phoenix vase, lying on the bureau holding down some music. It wasn’t mended, it wasn’t even a feng huang any more, just a few random pieces of weeping porcelain, doing duty as a paperweight.

  I backed away. The room had looked so smug and sleek before, but now I could see the cracks. Leo was right — of course it wasn’t funny. I realised, now, I might never have a mouth again, just some flimsy milksop gutless cringing thing, unable to kiss or bite with any real force or passion, wailing always, “careful, gentle,” seeing fists instead of pricks. And that in turn would render Leo powerless — had already. Some terrible justice had descended and disarmed him, so that by maiming me, he had somehow maimed himself. He was dragging on his clothes, as if to hide the damage. His body looked smaller, almost scraggy. He stormed across to the piano, opened it up, flung the cover off.

  I waited for the crash of chords, the furious stampeding down the keyboard. This was his revenge. I had smashed his strength, his sex, his golden age, and now he would make me suffer. The room would quake and shudder, the piano roar. My mouth was already flinching with the assault of it. I tried to sink into the sofa, steel myself against this new bombardment.

  Through the stretched darkness, I heard slow white notes fall like flakes of sorbet. The music was so frail, so unbearably sad and unassuming, it was like the print of a bird’s foot quivering on my hand. It was the moment when a leaf falls, or a chrysalis stirs in sleep. It was fields greying, trees bending, things growing old and wise and wounded before they turned young and gold again. It was white healing sound, like nuns’ fingers laid upon my mouth. Pain stopped and bruising faded. London crept away, and outside were only wisps of cloud and drifts of smoke and thin mists weeping into slow white rivers. It was so simple, it was child’s music. Leo was the child he had never been, small and quiet and gentle, dwarfed by his own piano, practising for his second grade exam, with God and his parents smiling down at him.

  The piece ended, faded. There were no rude chords, no crashing furious finales. Just a sigh, a ripple, a last ghost petal drifting to the floor. Not once had Leo stormed and raged, used his piano to deafen or outshout me or shriek his potency. I got up and stood beside his shoulder. His hands were on his knees, his back bowed. He could have been praying to some old white smiling God.

  As usual, I had no idea what he had been playing, but this time it didn’t matter. It was enough that he had made the piano sigh instead of scream. He had ground the music down for me until it was only a soft white purée gentle enough for my mouth, cut off the gristle, taken out the stones. I could hear the notes still whispering through the room, returning me to the same white simple world of Ray and Sister Aidan, lilies and ambrosia. And now he himself was part of it.

  I kissed his neck. He turned round on the piano stool and laid his face against me, hiding it as if he were ashamed. He was still limp — I could see that from his jeans. I suddenly knew it was me who should say sorry. If Leo could play like that, he was a god, a seer, a conjurer, and had no need to make amends. I was the one who had inflicted all the damage — wounded his pride, disabled his prick, turned my knife in his limping self-esteem. I fell on my knees in front of the piano, paying homage to them both.

  “I’m sorry, Leo,” I sobbed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Lineham and his crew welcome you on board this BAC 111. Will you kindly fasten your seat-belts and observe the no-smoking sign …”

  I almost burst with joy. We were just two minutes from takeoff! In one hour, twenty minutes, we would be touching down at Lourdes, and in less than one short day, I would be making my First Communion in the largest Catholic basilica in the world, with my new Catholic family thronging and rejoicing all around me. Thirteen weeks had drifted away like feathers. The Christmas holidays had merged into the Easter ones, winter into spring. Blood-red holly berries had given way to bridal almond blossom. My soul was no longer bleak and bruised and purple, but shining singing white.

  The plane blazed into action as if someone had set a match to it. I sat and burned. I could feel the engines throbbing through my body, as it slowly turned, paused, inched, stopped, and then suddenly, astoundingly, roared along the runway — fast, faster, faster, the tarmac under it only a streak of grey hurtling speed. My stomach somersaulted, my ears screamed, as the runway wrenched itself away from us and dropped down, down, and all around was space, nothing, shock. We were up. We were flying. I was flying — not that heavy, lumbering, overloaded plane. It was my own joy and power which had lifted us off, flung us fifteen thousand feet into the air and kept us soaring, soaring through dazzling banks of cloud.

  I turned to the man beside me. I wanted to fling my arms around his neck, tell him I loved him, show him my huge shining wings.

  Unfortunately, he was a Ukrainian with no English except, “Yes, ‘allo”, which he’d already said three times. Now we stuck to smiles.

  I smiled and smiled. He was part of my elation. The fact that even Ukrainians should journey to Lourdes only proved to me what a fabled spot it was. I’d read books and books about the place since leaving hospital. I knew, now, that a hundred different nations paid their homage to it. I wasn’t sure whether that included the Ukraine, or whether the man beside me was a vital new statistic. There were five of his fellow countrymen flying with us, as well as Poles, Cypriots, Scots, a large contingent of Irish, and even two Japanese. Two or three package tours were sharing the same aircraft. Ours were the ones with the blue and white striped labels on our baggage and the blue badges of Our Lady pinned to our coats. Pax Pilgrims, we were called. I’d have chosen the tour from the name alone, which I remembered from school meant “Peace”. But Ray also knew the man who owned the company, so they were allowing me to fly with them at a special rate, and yet arrange my own (cheaper) lodgings instead of staying at one of their block-booked hotels. Ray had cut through all the difficulties. He’d even approached some (Catholic) Lady Bountiful who raised money for things like Threatened Species, and although I wasn’t a blue whale, she’d rustled up some cash.

  There were fifty-two other Pax Pilgrims, fifty-two mothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, aunts — my new Catholic family — all of us wearing identical blue badges, united by the same faith, travelling to the same destination. We had already mixed and chatted in the departure lounge. It wasn’t like an ordinary package tour — the badges seemed to break down barriers. A lady who introduced herself as Bridie had called me “darlin”’ twenty-seven times before our flight was even called. I was one of the youngest in the group, bar a sprinkling of children. Most of them were middle-aged or over, and three-quarters of them women. The outnumbered males looked grey and rather sheepish and wore chain-store raincoats over sticky nylon shirts. The women had tried harder. There were a lot of new crispy perms and white vinyl handbags, but the general effect was a wash of pastel crimplene enlivened here and there by a splash of poppies on some large floral bottom.

  I felt slim and almost exotic in comparison. I’d washed my hair in henna and it hung dark and thick and coppery to my waist. I was wearing black velvet jeans which I’d bought in a good-as-new shop at a special rate. I’d chosen black because it was still a time of penitence. Although the Lenten fast was over and today was Easter Saturday, I’d decided to continue my own penances until the actual moment of my Communion on Resurrection Sunday. I’d been reading up about the sacraments as well as about Lourdes and I knew you needed to prepare yourself. Ray had taught me about mortifying the flesh. I’d seen him only half a dozen times since leaving hospital, but on every occasion he’d been shabby, sleepless, serving, burning and obviously half-starved. During Lent, he’d almost wasted away. He never made a song and dance about it — h
e was holy with a small “h”.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Lineham speaking. We have now reached our cruising height of twenty-five thousand feet and are passing over the English Channel. To the right, you can see …”

  I grinned to myself. I knew he’d got it wrong. We were far far higher than twenty-three thousand feet and his so-called English Channel was simply one of the paddling pools in heaven. I could see tiny toy boats chuntering across it and God trailing his fingers in the water, leaving little lines of foam. Some of the clouds had fallen in, or were floating just on top like white waterlilies. The English Channel was another world away. Ray would have crossed it yesterday, holding the heads of his retching handicapped. He’d never held my head, but he’d gripped my hands for hours while I’d sat quaking in the dentist’s waiting-room, a month or two ago. He’d taken me to the surgery himself for all the major onslaughts on my mouth, which was just as well, since the dentist’s gentleness and courtesy stopped abruptly with his private bills. On the NHS, it was a brusque, “Open wide”, or a stream of idle chatter to his blond dental nurse across my slumped and wincing form.

  At least I had two new teeth. They were only temporary fixtures until the final operation on the adjoining two, but they made me look normal, even quite appealing, instead of like a witch. Mind you, I hated wearing that slimy foreign contraption in my mouth which skidded about and couldn’t cope with apples. But Ray had helped again. He’d given me a point and purpose in my life, so that things like cut-price dentures and supercilious surgeons shunted into second place. We were both preparing for Lourdes. He didn’t know, of course, about my intended First Communion. He must have assumed I’d made it twenty years ago, as a tot at my mother’s knee. But he’d helped get me back into spiritual training, so to speak, and on top of his lists of prayers to say, and books to skim and sudden eccentric little sermons on God or Love or Lepers, I’d added my own private religious instruction as a second secret subject. I’d mugged up saints and sacraments and refreshed my memory on all the rules and rubric of the Church I’d known at school. Then I had stood outside it, nose pressed greedily against the window. Now I was already almost in the sweet-shop, and tomorrow God Himself would lay the bonbon on my tongue.