“Ayyyyyyye.” I got in on the act. “You’ll nae be stayin’ looong in our neck of the woods, I’ll be bound. D’ye hear what they say aboot the people who dare to stay in the old Smoo Cave Hotel?”
“Ye might gae in,” mugged Pippa, turning on me with a leer. “But ye shooor as heeell won’t come oooot!”
I creased up, trying to steer the car up a sheer portion of road which ran along the perimeter of the beach. It took but a single slow pass along the front of the Smoo Cave Hotel for us to sober up, ruffled by how accurate our badinage had proved. The hotel was little more than a single-storey B&B, scabrous and shallow as a Hollywood façade. There was even a door that wasn’t shut properly, slamming to and fro in the wind.
“You go,” I dared.
“My arse,” Pippa said. “Let’s see if there’s anywhere else.”
Small place, Durness, but we found a farmhouse advertising bed and board as soon as we U-turned out of the grounds of Castle Grim. A pleasant, open-faced girl of my age answered our knock and I thought, yes, this’ll do. Olivia led us to a room upstairs – a bit pokey – but I was so jiggered that a kennel would have sufficed. Pippa handed me a temazepam and I necked it with a glass of peaty water, watching her do likewise. We kissed and snuffled around each other for a while, until things became more serious, perhaps encouraged by the warm spread as the jellies kicked in. We undressed each other, revelling in the comfort of blankets which would have been starchy but for the downers.
She took me into her mouth, sucking just the head of my cock, her tongue lolling against it, eyes sexdrunk slits. Her hand worked me furiously. Occasionally, I’d slip from her lips with a Schpluh! before she plugged me back in. Reaching round, I felt for her sodden cleft and strummed gently at her from top to tail till she was trying to back up and swallow my fingers. I was losing myself, all of my feeling and heat racing to the purplish bulb which was being roiled around the delicious vacuum of Pippa’s mouth. She sensed the twitch and, in extremis, moved her head away, replacing it with her left breast, which was slick with my spit, pulling on my cock till I gouted a great jet of come over her chest. I pushed her back and chased the pearly glut around against her nipple with my tongue before turning her over and moving into her.
I fucked her with her head into the pillow. She yowled but I was past the point of caring whether it was pleasure or pain. She was too, her hips bucking, hands clawing the mattress till it tore. The edges of the bedsheet curled back like a smile and showed me a black hole beneath that appeared so deep as to have no end. I felt myself being gulped into it, as slickly and effortlessly as into Pippa. A vertiginous rush eclipsed the core of my pleasure and I thought I was going to lose my balance. It suddenly seemed important that I be able to see what was watching us through the window: it felt as though I was out there, looking in. When I came again, thrashing to free myself rather than out of any recourse to pleasure, my head was totally banded by darkness and I felt, with the conviction that only dreams can muster, that I was dead, or close to death, and I would never see Pippa again. On the edge of my dissolution, however, the night dissipated and Pippa was stroking my backside, asking me what I thought of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. The window was misted: sex ghosts. Something hulked beyond. I walked the three paces and placed my hand against the glass. A deeper mist sprang from the edges of my skin. When I removed it, I saw, through the black star that remained, an ancient man, hair rioting in the wind. His eyes were wetted black grapes thumbed deep into the dry dough of his head. Through the slit of his mouth, his tongue jutted a moment. He said something. I read the movement of his lips: Walk with me.
“Wassup, chicken?” Pippa’s voice syrupy with sleep and trancs.
“Nothing.” I went back to her. I wasn’t afraid. Sex worked its palliative magic, working at the knots in my muscles, and freeing my brain of worry. But I couldn’t sleep. Pushing through the comfort and the warmth was the cold prickle of something not right. I could sense something brewing inside Pippa. I wanted to unhinge the top of her head and peer beneath the lid.
Persistent, murmuring voices in the room abutting this one I used as the reason for my insomnia. At one point they became heated, although I couldn’t make out what was being said, so muffled was their anger. I slipped from bed, but Pippa was too dead to the world to notice. Opening the door a crack, I spied a sliver of light bleeding through the bottom of the door next to ours. Pacing shadows disturbed it: a man and a woman. Something terrible in their voices, not so much anger as misdirected passion which twisted them into gross human spoofs. Yet there was something in their spiteful gainsaying which made something in me feel liberated. I don’t know what it was. I could hear only fragments of argument: plosive words such as betrayed and bitch and kill from him and blistered reason from her: on the cards, I heard. And, in a moment of clarity: don’t be such a fucking stupid childish bastard.
I left them to it, hoping it would blow itself out before any of their dark promises were kept.
Sometime after midnight. Me, eyes wide as peeled eggs. Pippa says, in a voice thick with desire: “Oh, Jeff. Suck it. Come on.”
“What are you having for breakfast, chicken?” she said. “How about my tits on toast, hmm?”
I slid away from her yawning legs and ducked my head under the tap, blasted my tired, tired face with cold reality. She didn’t notice my standoffishness and that suited me fine, because I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I didn’t know how to talk about it. Or whether I should talk about it at all – it was just, apparently, a dream. But that specific name. Jeff. Fucking Jeff. Jeff-rey. I hated the cunt. And I didn’t even know anyone called Jeff-bastard-rey.
Olivia was preparing toast when we came downstairs. “No breakfast for us,” I muttered.
“Great,” she returned. “I suppose I’ll just eat all this by myself.”
“Give it to the folks in the room next door. They wasted enough energy bawling at each other last night. They’ll need a good breakfast.”
Her frown disarmed me and I hoped I hadn’t heard her properly as I hurriedly shepherded Pippa outside:
There are no other guests.
Despite being wrapped in thermals we kept banging our heads against a wall of frigid air built by the seafront. Huge boulders in the sand provided enough shelter for my ears and from prying eyes while Pippa lit a huge spliff. Her hair was savagely drawn back from her scalp, tamed by a simple green hairband made of elasticated fabric.
She took a few tokes and passed the J to me. I shook my head. Soft grey shapes emerged on the horizon, like thawing fossils from ice. Oil tankers probably. Pippa took a last drag and stuffed the roach into a crack in the boulder.
“Lets go and check out the cave,” I said. A figure had breasted the prow of land to our left, next to the shell of a burned-out Allegro. He was looking towards us, hands deep in the pockets of a mackintosh, hair like a wreath of white smoke. Even from here I could see him hook his index finger. Beckon me. On his wrists, a curve of green. The detail made me wonder for a minute if there were still traces of MDMA sprinting around my brain but then I heard Pippa’s measured tread on the stone steps down to the beach and I dismissed the thought.
There are 88 steps down to the shingle beach which provides access to the cave. I counted them to give me a distraction: black words were ganging up in my head. I didn’t want to unleash them before she had a chance to defend herself against my initial question, which I asked as we reached a rusted winch, bolted into the ground like a sculpture. A few sheep watched us from the hillside upon which rocks had been placed to make messages. “LIAM LOVS LUCY,” I read. “KOL+FIONA DID IT HERE.”
“Jeff?” she said. “I don’t know . . .”
She’s a fucking abysmal liar. I just looked at her. Her face changed, losing its expression of doughy victimisation and finding instead a resilience. OK, it seemed to say, let’s thrash this out then. I’m probably more fucking ready than you are.
“Jeff’s someone I met at a conference
in Brighton. We meet sometimes. We go to bed. That’s it.”
“That’s it? As if there’s nothing wrong in what you’re doing?”
“Whats wrong? I fancy him. He fancies me. We fuck each other. Big deal.”
“So why pretend you don’t know him?” My hands were fisting like I was testing someone’s blood pressure.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
“You’re fucking right I can’t fucking handle it. You’ve been coming home to me, filled to the fucking brim with some other fucker’s seed?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, using the Grade A patronizing tone a teacher will reserve for a dimwit child. “Jeff and I obviously use a condom.”
“Jeff and I,” I mimicked, not giving a shit if I was being cruel or puerile. “And I was speaking figuratively, anyway.”
The cave seemed to deepen as we breached the lip; a muscled gullet distending as it drew us in. Our voices bloated and took on an echo to make it seem no pause for digestion had followed any sentence. Behind it all, a frenzy of water helped keep my adrenaline pumping.
“So where does that leave us?”
She shrugged, made a bow of her lips and looked at me with a kind of pleading scrutiny as if trying to both examine my feelings and get me to draw my own conclusions. When I simply stood there, like all the pathetic pieces of shit in the world stuck together, she shrugged again and took a Marlboro Light from her pocket.
“Is this it?” I finally snapped. “Are you finishing it?”
“I think so. Yes. I am.”
“How can you do this? How can you betray me like this and then act as if it was such a fucking drag, a real bore for you?” Funny how, despite the beefy acoustics, my voice sounded wheedling.
Another shrug, another suck on her stupid little tube of grass. “Dunno.”
“So are you going to go with this Jeff?”
Shrug. Suck. “Might.”
“Aw, you bitch,” I spat. “You miserable, heartless bitch. I should fucking kill you for what you’ve done to me.” I went into the cave, relishing the cold that swarmed at my shoulders. A small bridge led to the waterfall which was causing such a racket. I walked it, squeezing past a tethered dinghy. Wondering what the hell use that was in a little pond like this; I didn’t hear her step up beside me.
“It was on the cards, honey,” she said. Soothing sentiment but it might have been Davros delivering it. I watched the water till its constant motion seemed so unchanged that it froze: wax ropes. I backed away, not least because I saw, filling the hole in the ceiling of the cave, his head as he leaned over to watch us.
Green lamps bolted into the heights painted the limestone an eerie hue. A boom, like thunder, filled the cave and I ran, not caring if Pippa was anywhere near me. I kicked at the stone messages as I climbed the incline. Sheep, tolerant of humans to the point of boredom, moved desultorily out of the way.
Another boom echoed moments later by a larger, nearer explosion.
The sea’s limit hove into view above the severed foreground of land. I rushed to meet it, enjoying bitterly Pippa’s beseeching yells. I stopped at the crumbling edge of the cliff and turned round. The Smoo Cave Hotel’s doors clapped as if part of a participating audience. The old man had moved away from the hole and was drifting down the steps to the winch; his face turned up to mine. Any shiver he might have generated in me was lost to the general discomfort of cold.
“What are you doing?” she asked, in a wavering voice filled with either panic or ire. I couldn’t guess which and I couldn’t give a monkey’s uncle.
“I’m going to toss myself off, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, don’t talk cock,” she said. “Don’t be such a fucking stupid childish bastard.”
Another boom. Those grey shapes had found their form: battleships on training, firing shells into Cape Wrath. Dangerous Area. Keep Out. War Games.
She reached out to me and clasped my hand. “OK then,” I whispered. Turned. Grabbed her throat and her hair. Swung her over. Let her drop. She didn’t make a sound. Her hairband came off in my hand: I let it slip over my fingers. Something to remember her by.
“Suck on that, Jeff,” I said, and sent an unexpected, fiery jet of vomit after her.
Trudging back, through the tears of my nausea, I saw him moving up the incline towards me. He paled as we neared each other, misting before my eyes so that, as we softly collided, the weight of his arrival became nothing but a sigh, settling against me.
We went for a walk.
Essence of Rose
Poppy Z. Brite
The city of Nashville straddles its polluted stretch of the Cumberland River like a lover, nestles into its fertile patch of Tennessee land like a cluster of rhinestones sewn onto a rich cloth of earth brown and malachite green. The streets of the downtown area are brick, dating from the early days of the city. Above these cobbled paths, towers of glass and chrome soar up and up, some for 30 storeys or more, elegant hotels and shopping centres and temples of commerce, catching the southern sunlight by day, reflecting the million coloured fairy lights of the city by night. Many of the tallest buildings have glass elevators that can be seen from the street after dark, ascending the sheer faces of the buildings like shimmering insects climbing towards the moon.
Or spiders, thought Anthony, going up to spin a web between the few stars that were faintly visible through the haze of city light. Yes, he could paint that: white and silver spiders, spinning gossamer threads between points of light in velvety purple-blackness.
But he thought Rose might paint it better. The image was more suited to her style.
He stood naked at a window on the 31st floor of a grand hotel, pressing his body to the cool glass so that a foggy outline began to form around him – his body heat made visible – and gazing out over the city. Only the faintest shadow of his reflection was visible in the glass: sharp-featured, big eyes staring, skin very pale and hair paler still. He was backlit by the Christmas lights strung around the room, the candles burning, the tiny orange eye of an incense stick smouldering here and there. A room lit by juju.
From what Anthony had seen, the hotel staff consisted of impeccably dressed black men with gleaming bald heads and big-haired white ladies who wore their make-up like an extra face, so thickly applied that it seemed to hover a fraction of an inch above their actual features. They would certainly suspect juju or worse if they saw the room now. But they never entered, nor did the housekeepers, not during this week. Anthony met them at the door to receive towels and soap for the long, steaming baths he and Rose took. The bed could not be changed because it was in constant use, so that by the end of the week it would be a swirled, jumbled confection of sheets and pillows and small creamy stains, rich and ripe with the many scents of love. And, this year, with the faintly sour tang of spilled champagne.
All the rest of the year Anthony was a sherry drinker. He had never been able to make himself like the taste of beer, and liquor mutated his personality, made him a mad thing, unable to paint. Rose always drank champagne. This year she’d begged him to drink it with her, and he had given in. It produced a strange drunkenness he’d never known before, balloon-headed, almost numb. It made him want to obey her, to please her more thoroughly than ever, no matter what it was she wanted. Yesterday she had wanted to urinate on him in the empty bathtub, and though every fibre of his fastidious being shrieked its revulsion, the very dirtiness of the act made it more thrilling.
You’re mine, she had whispered as the recycled champagne flowed out of her, over Anthony’s chest and stomach in a pale yellow stream. You’re mine, no one else’s, not hers, only mine now.
Her words, as much as her act, had given him a jolt. Rose never referred, even so obliquely, to the uncomfortable fact of Anthony’s marriage.
He placed his hands flat against the glass – two perfect, long-fingered handprints limned in a nearly phosphorescent mist – then pushed himself away from the window and reached for the ice
bucket. A half-full bottle of champagne was chilling there. Magie Noir, the strange brand Rose always brought with her. She said it came from a winery near New Orleans, where she spent the rest of her year.
“Cajun champagne?” he’d asked, a little nervously, the first time she had poured it for him.
“You’d really have to call it sparkling wine, I guess,” she’d said. “But that sounds as if it ought to be pink and served in Dixie cups. Magie Noir is a potion.”
Now Anthony poured some of the potion into a tall fluted glass and sipped slowly. Bubbles exploded against the roof of his mouth. There was an underlying spiciness, a slight burn like the essence of Tabasco without the garlic and vinegar, like oil of cinnamon, a subtle heat stitching across the tongue. Still, he could not detect all the flavours Rose said were in the bouquet; she knew the names and tastes of herbs he’d never heard of.
Anthony drained his glass and turned to look at the woman who shared this room and this week and this city with him. The woman who slept the sleep of the sated, sprawled across the white expanse of the enormous bed. Every year the beds seemed to grow huger, softer, more enticing. Every year their bodies seemed to fit together more precisely, their hearts seemed to bleed into each other more willingly.
Rose LeBlanc.
He knew so little about her, knew not even whether that was her real name; the symmetry of its syllables seemed too perfect. But he could imagine no name that would suit her better. And that was what it said on her Louisiana driver’s licence, next to a tiny snapshot, all disarrayed hair and fierce, camera-hating eyes: Rose LeBlanc of New Orleans.
They had met in Nashville, two up-and-coming young artists invited to exhibit paintings in a museum show. Anthony’s wife wasn’t with him; his career did not interest her. He’d been at some cocktail party sucking down the free sherry, and suddenly there was Rose wrapped in black lace and silk, hair in a wild purple cloud around her head, a glass of Magie Noir already in her graceful, gloved hand. When he saw her work, Anthony knew he had to sleep with this woman.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 2 Page 15