The Stillness the Dancing

by Wendy Perriam

  Chris clutched at the wall beside her. Could the girlfriend be a boyfriend? She had never thought of that. Had her Mum shacked up with someone, left the Ocean View and gone to Miami or Florida (via Disneyland) for a veteran honeymoon? She had been pitying her mother back at Weybridge, slaving away at some tedious translation in a cold and empty house, yet she might in fact be sprawling on a sun-kissed beach beside a naked male in swim-trunks, rubbing oil into his back, sipping passion-fruit cocktails through one shared straw. Okay, that was embroidering it a bit, but even so, why should she torture herself with scruples over Gerry when her own self-styled virtuous mother was screwing around with some hermaphrodite?

  The scruples had got her nowhere—that was obvious. Gerry appeared to have forgotten all about her, turned his attention to more important things. He had cleared a space on the floor and was doing a series of sit-ups, face screwed up, eyes bulging, as he levered up down, up down, sweat beading on his forehead. Nice to come first for once, know you counted more than athletic trials or diving tests or golf medals or board meetings or even mysterious girlfriends. Only Bunny put her first. Funny, that. She had been wary of Bunny before she had even met her, hated her on first acquaintance, yet now she was confiding in her, divulging things she had never told her mother. That made for guilt as well. Even moaning about her periods to Bunny was somehow disloyal and ungrateful when Morna had taken her to two top men in Harley Street, as well as their own G. P. Bunny distrusted doctors and had suggested a Women’s Centre staffed by lay women therapists. They loved the word ‘therapist’ in the States. Everything was therapy—art, religion, screaming the place down while you bashed a pile of cushions with a tennis racket. (That was called Controlled Rage Therapy, though she couldn’t see where the controlled bit quite came in.) Even keeping pets was therapy—something about Dependency Relationships and Learning Trust from Faithful Friends. She had refused to go at first, feared they’d make her scream or pray, do ink-blot tests or buy a Pekinese. Bunny didn’t argue, just trotted out a few more of her famous statistics.

  ‘Listen, sweetie, the average age for the menopause is, say, forty-nine to fifty. You’re seventeen and three quarters—right? That’s roughly four hundred more periods, not counting gaps for pregnancies. If each one lasts five days, you’ve got two thousand days of pain and cramps and …’

  That clinched it. They had gone a week ago, when Morna was still at Ocean View. The Centre was new and glossy with pamphlets on contraception contradicting the pictures of smirking chubby babies on the walls, and luxuriant leafy plants which looked as if they’d been dosed with fertility hormones. Their (foreign) therapist, who had cold hands and a name out of Isaac Bashevis Singer, didn’t seem to match the place. She was far too tired and jaded, as if she had lost both her leaves and her reproductive organs long ago.

  ‘You like being woman?’ she croaked, once they had stripped her naked and stuck her on a couch, her feet yanked up and out so she was showing everything she’d got.

  ‘Yeah,’ she had answered, wondering if she did like. You didn’t have much choice.

  After half an hour’s grilling on subjects which seemed to have more to do with philosophy and politics than with menstruation, the therapist concluded that the painful periods were a result of anger at enforced submission and subservience, and a secret desire to be a man.

  ‘Balls!’ Chris had muttered, stomping to the door. She wasn’t submissive. Was she? Often scared of Martin, though. Well, not actually scared, but always worrying about what he’d say or think, and feeling she ought to be faithful to him—like now. Stupid word. Sounded like a spaniel. Men were never faithful. Look at Gerry. He already had a steady—a blonde called Shirlee (with a double ‘e’), and here he was trying to lay her too. He saw all women as subservient. They had only been created to be the chauffeurs or the cheerleaders, or to keep the dinner hot if you played extra time. Martin wasn’t like that. Martin wanted her to dive with him, hating leaving her behind on the beach or in the pub, only sharing the experience in fumbling words or out-of-focus photographs. It was she who had resisted—through sheer craven fear. Fine to dive in Putney baths with blue tiles underneath you and fully trained instructors all around, but the wide open sea …

  She ought to have phoned him again, or at least have sent that letter, but every time she scrawled another paragraph, the ones before seemed wrong—either sloppy or too cool, or plain untrue. She kept crossing them out and starting afresh, writing two or three more pages, only to tear them up the next day, then deciding to phone instead. That wasn’t simple, either. She had to find a call box somewhere private and make sure she had lots of change and that she’d worked out the time difference so that it wasn’t three a.m. in Wandsworth. The second time she had rung, Martin was out again, and she’d got his kid brother, Phil, who probably never passed her message on, since he regarded girlfriends in general as pure Yuk and Slop, and Martin’s as Betrayal. So she had gone back to the letter which was now ten and a quarter pages and every page more fatuous than the last. The trouble was, the longer she was away from him, the more distant Martin seemed, so she wasn’t sure who exactly she was writing to, or even why it was so damned important that she did write. He had written to her, though—three times in a fortnight—intense impatient letters which didn’t seem to fit their cheap lined notepaper and which had left her so confused, she’d only sort of skimmed them, then shoved them in a drawer, tried to pretend they’d never come at all.

  She checked on Gerry again. He was doing leg-bends now, grunting with exertion. It made her tired to hear him. She slumped against a crate to rest her back, stared down at her hands, waggling the fourth finger of the left one—wedding finger. She was engaged to Martin, more or less, and had let fifteen days go by without contacting him. Worse than that, she was locked in a room with another man—one she had met just three short days ago and who might leap on her at any moment if he could spare the time from his workout. Was it really wrong, though? Bunny said she needed more experience, owed it to herself, and that she shouldn’t say no to sex just because of guilt, but only if the encounter wouldn’t nourish her—which made it sound like vitamins. The whole subject was confusing. Half the world made you feel a monster if you went to bed with more than just one bloke, and the other half kept urging you to try out every possible man and variation. She had only slept with two men—Pierre and Martin—and Pierre didn’t really count because he was what the women’s magazines called a holiday romance. Girls like Bunny had probably had dozens before they settled down. She ought to make it three. Three would be more representative.

  ‘Gerry!’ she called. He was back to sit-ups now, but he turned the last one into a stand-up, vaulted over a box of light bulbs to reach her side.

  ‘Changed your mind?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ That was Bunny’s phrase and actually meant ‘no’, but sounded far less final than a straight refusal. She stared around at the brooms and brushes, the cartons of toilet paper and crates of detergent. The room smelt musty with a faint whiff of disinfectant. Why were men so unromantic? She might have said yes if he’d booked a suite at the Biltmore and was wearing a black tuxedo instead of a white singlet soaked in sweat.

  ‘Come on—just a kiss.’

  ‘Okay.’ She owed him a kiss at least. He had brought her two Budweisers and a king-size hamburger for lunch—even offered her crabs’ legs as a starter, although they cost six dollars for just four. She opened her mouth. The kiss went on so long, she had paid him back for double crabs’ legs, plus fillet steak and cocktails and was still in credit. He kept pressing himself against her through the running shorts. It wasn’t fair to get a man excited and then let him down. Martin had told her that. And Bunny had urged her to feed herself and love herself and give herself permission to enjoy things, so long as they were enriching. This was. They were on the dessert kiss now—triple scoops of strawberry ripple with whipped cream and cherries.

  She pulled away. Strawberry was Martin’s favourite flavo
ur. Martin was saving for their future. Hell, though, a kiss was nothing, really, and she owed it to her father to give Gerry some encouragement. It was Neil who had introduced them in the first place. Gerry belonged to his tennis club and played in all the tournaments. His own father was an attorney and his mother shopped at some place in Beverly Hills which was so damn swanky you had to have an appointment before they even let you in and then they bought you cocktails on a silver tray to help you endure the tedium of trying on thousand-dollar dresses.

  Chris glanced down at her own bargain-basement jeans, touched the shabby leather belt she’d nicked from Martin before she went away. She had tried to tell her father about Martin, though she had seen from his expression that he wasn’t all that thrilled. She’d decided to leave out the engagement bit, rambled on instead about the diving, and how Martin would make it in the end, even though he’d left school at sixteen and had lumpish sort of parents. Neil hadn’t said a lot, in fact, but the next day he had invited her to the club for drinks and somehow hoovered Gerry in, until he was sitting at their table listening to how smart she was and how she had turned Cambridge down (instead of vice versa) and was more or less trilingual. She had felt a perfect fraud, but Gerry seemed impressed and had then started on his own achievements which were still resounding when her father sort of slunk away and left them on their own.

  Gerry hadn’t mentioned touching in his list of accomplishments, but he was good at that as well. He had found her nipples and was rubbing one broad palm up and down against them, down and up. He didn’t seem to mind small breasts. Perhaps he was used to female athletes who were on those drugs and things and were probably semi-bearded as well as flat up front.

  ‘Want me to get that towel?’ he whispered.

  ‘N … No.’ If he went away, she might lose her nerve again, lose the erection in her nipples. She pushed her shirt up. ‘The … er … newspaper will do.’

  She could tell he was a hurdler by the speed with which he dashed across the room, leapfrogging bales and boxes in his way and returning with the paper. She squinted down at it as he spread it on the floor.

  ‘Redskins Fight Back All The Way,’ she read. ‘Return match draws six thousand.’

  ‘Take your jeans off.’ Gerry made it almost like an order.

  ‘Y … You take your shorts off first.’

  She hadn’t realised how tanned he was until she saw the pale private strip the shorts had hidden. He was big—bigger than Martin. That made it worse, like stealing a million bucks instead of a dime. He was pulling off his singlet now, revealing blondish chest hair tangled with two silver chains. She looked away.

  ‘C’mon,’ he said. ‘Your turn.’

  ‘Close your eyes, then.’ Somehow, she had to get the Tampax out and then dispose of it. There wasn’t room for both of them inside her. It was worse than trying to get rid of a mouthful of chewinggum when a boy suddenly decided to kiss you. That had happened too, with Gerry—the night they met.

  ‘And turn your back as well.’

  ‘What you doing, for Chrissake?’

  ‘Never mind. Just promise not to look?’

  ‘Okay, okay, but don’t take all night.’

  She didn’t answer. She ought to clean herself up before they started and she had only one mingy Kleenex in her bag. She slunk across to the carton of toilet-rolls, reached up on tiptoe, tried to ease one out without him hearing. At least he had his eyes closed. The rolls were jammed tight together and all she succeeded in doing was breaking a nail. The box was too high up, piled on three other crates and set at an awkward angle. She tried to tug it towards her, dodged away as it suddenly keeled over and fifty toilet rolls cascaded to the floor, some of them unravelling in a tangle of pink ticker tape.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Gerry.

  Chris lunged to the floor to stop them rolling further, leapt up again as Gerry strode across. She was naked from the waist down, with bloodstains on her thighs. She snatched up her jeans, used them as a loincloth.

  ‘Don’t look!’ she cried. ‘You promised.’

  ‘What d’you mean, don’t look? I’m in charge of all this stuff. They’ll take it out of my wages.’ Gerry was swearing to himself as he righted the box, a shit for every toilet roll. Chris tried to help with one hand, still clinging to her loincloth with the other.

  ‘Fuck!’ said Gerry, which was at least a change from shit, though they seemed further from actually doing it than they had been all afternoon. ‘Some of this paper’s dirty from the floor. My supervisor’s gonna go out of his mind.’

  ‘Tear it off, then,’ Chris suggested, ripping off a few grubby sheets herself. She made Gerry close his eyes again while she mopped between her legs with it, hid the debris in an old tin bucket, dragged her pants back on.

  ‘Ready?’ Gerry asked. He didn’t look ready himself, not any more.

  ‘You mean you still want to …?’

  ‘Sure I want to. Let’s go, okay?’

  Chris removed the pants, lay down gingerly on the West Coast Reveille. If she moved too fast, the bleeding might set off again. The floor felt cold and hard. She was lying on two Redskins in full gear.

  Gerry crouched beside her, touched her breasts. ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘I’ve never done it with an English girl.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I doubt if God made us all that different.’

  ‘You’re quite a tease, aren’t you?’

  ‘Am I?’ She suddenly wanted to call it off. She didn’t like the feel of his skin, the stupid things he said. Anyway, she was worried about the blood. She had never done it with a period before, not even with Martin. That made it more of a betrayal. She pushed his hands off, struggled up.

  ‘Look, I … don’t think it’s going to work.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I’ve … er … changed my mind.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Christ almighty! Listen, nobody fucks me around like this. I take you out to lunch, I take time off without pay, I’m risking my job by even bringing you down here, and then you have the nerve to say …’

  He had grabbed her by the arm. She tried to shake him off, but he was far too stong for her. They were wrestling now, she a flyweight, he a slugger. It was terrifying, terrifying. She hit out as hard as she could, yet even her fiercest blows hardly grazed his steel-hard muscles. She kicked, punched, let fly with arms and legs, hardly caring now that she was naked so long as she could hold her own. She wasn’t doing badly. In fact, shouldn’t he be hurting more, have her down by now? She stopped for a moment. He stopped. He wasn’t even fighting. All he’d been doing was dodging her blows, kidding her along. He ran a hand along her thigh. She shook it off, enraged. He was just using the tussle as an excuse to touch her up.

  ‘Fight properly,’ she shouted. ‘Fight me as if I’m a man.’

  ‘Want me to kill you, then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He suddenly pitched her to the ground, sat on her feet to stop them flailing, pinioned her arms. ‘I’ll kill you afterwards,’ he whispered. ‘Okay?’

  ‘O … Okay.’

  He seized both her wrists in just one hand, used the other to steady her face while he lowered his lips towards it. Both hands were hurting now.

  ‘Still want to chicken out?’ His lips were almost touching hers. She could feel his breath, hot and lager-flavoured, smell the rank sweaty odour of his armpits.

  ‘N … No.’ A drool of blood was seeping out between her legs. She tried to press her thighs together, trap it somehow. ‘Just d … don’t be too long. I’m worried about the mess.’

  He kneed her legs apart. ‘Okay, if you want it quick …’ He was big again, big and red, as if he had swollen up in anger. He climbed on top, forced in.

  ‘Ow! You’re hurting, Gerry.’

  He took no notice, just went on thrusting, circling his body at the same time as he pistoned up and down. She closed h
er eyes, moved with him.

  ‘Hurting now?’

  She didn’t answer. It was fantastic, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. He had forced her, more or less, so she shouldn’t be enjoying it. If she were a true feminist and believed all that stuff they’d spouted at the Women’s Centre, she should be kicking him in the balls rather than stroking them with her one free hand and making grateful gaspy noises underneath him. She couldn’t stop herself, that was the trouble. He was sort of corkscrewing on top of her, jab-jabbing his body right against that bit of hers which counted. The blood made it feel different, wetter and more slippery, and with a bit more room inside her as if someone had stretched her to fit another prick or two. Not that she could cope with more than one. Gerry‘s was in training like the rest of him, super-fit and tireless, showing off its paces, winning medals. She was winning them herself, part of the act, his team mate, his goalkeeper. Yet one part of her was horrified, shocked that she was cheering him on, shouting ‘Yeah!’, ‘More!’, ‘Great!’ as he pounded into her. If only she could stop thinking, be just a body and a hole, a dumb broad without a conscience who could shut out all the accusing voices.