Inez’s stomach somersaults. Across town, Peytr’s does likewise, his hands fumbling at Amelia’s breasts and the many knots in his belt. This isn’t the first time he’s checked an address with her, and judging by how quickly she lifts-apron and unsnaps her jodhpurs it won’t be the last. But still, there’s the churn in their bellies. One part lust, five parts fear—no matter how many times Amelia shucks off her bloomers—that she won’t be there when he drops by. That the wriggle in her own guts will twist from excitement to rot.
Playing matchmaker, Inez hopscotches from Peytr’s chord to Amelia’s. Holding firmly to both strands, she sends more and more and more of herself down the second line, subtlety be damned. Peytr is riveted as Amelia groans, trembling with the full force of a medium-surge. Taken by surprise, the other woman is quashed, compressed to a tiny cavern behind their shared eyes. Huffing and panting in the solo and in the cabin, Inez spreads their legs and shows the Pigeon how very welcome he is and will always be.
Normally Amelia doesn’t use, but this afternoon she can’t resist.
While the three of them fuck, Inez puts a glass-bomb in their mouth and tells Peytr to tongue it out. The bulb is imperfectly round, the size and shape of a walnut. A rainbow sheen of oil and saliva smears its clear surface, dream-coating ready to be sucked off. Tentative at first, Peytr leans in. His hips are already pumping, rigid cock deep-buried, the moment for foreplay long past. Puckering, he gets so close Inez can taste his breath—then he swerves at the last second. Nuzzling the soft curve of their jawline instead of their lips, he fishes the bomb out with his fingers. A blink later, it disappears into his mouth. With a dull pop, it crushes between tongue and roof. Shards lacerate delicate ridges then quickly melt. Blood mixes with glass-syrup, lubricating the dreams’ passage into their lover’s system.
Peytr’s face instantly relaxes. The frantic tempo of his thrusting evens out, less herdboy now, more lap-dancing skingirl. On Amelia’s lips, the drug’s residue tastes like whimsy and release and the salt of far-distant seas. There’s a tang of rhubarb, a bite of fire-ants on the gums. All in all the flavour wants honey, but it isn’t sour. Even before meeting Rupe, who taught her everything she knows about cooking-up, Amelia had a knack for harvesting dreams from the happiest dead. No matter how many other glass-makers worked the nearest bone-orchards, her flannelette cloths always sopped up the freshest, sweetest serenity. And back home, her nimble fingers wrung gallons of the best fantasies into dust-silted pots boiling on Rupe’s camp stoves.
Since his death, Amelia’s trade has thrived. Unlike her once-husband, she isn’t stingy. Giving free samples, she knows, keeps the glass-blowers blowing and the dealers discreetly dealing. And if they steal an extra bulb every now and again—if they need the jump so fuckin’ badly—well, it’s no dream off her tongue. She can spare a few daybreak fancies for the beat-walkers, some afternoon delights for the Pigeons. She can afford much more than that. Lined in ranks on slate countertops, antique coffee tables, marble benches, the sugar-pots are ever-bubbling in her cabin’s spacious main room. Overhead, a frozen glass blizzard hangs from drying racks mounted in the rafters—more than enough to supply insomniacs and lonely mothers, bunker-bunnies and trench-jumpers, full-time escapists and weekenders teetering on the brink. She finds all she wants outside, where the near-dead persist in hoping, wishing, believing, dying. All the raw material she needs to survive in this business is abundant.
And Peytr deserves a bit of elsewhere, Inez thinks, popping another bomb into his gaping mouth. Jaw working as he sucks, his wordwind sloughs off in flakes. Eyes rolling back, he lets out a long, slow sigh. Ignoring the pounding behind her eye sockets, the screams thrashing at her temples,—Enough! that’s enough!—Inez adds their moans to his as heat builds in her borrowed nethers.
That’s it, she thinks. That’s it… . Inside the solo, Inez’s hand burrows beneath her waistband. Her palm cups the bulge of her sagging belly then pushes down, under lace and cotton, blunted fingers ploughing scant hair, slipping in and out of damp furrows. Back in the cabin, straddling Peytr on the living room floor, Inez grinds their slim hips as his inhibitions give way to dreams. Belly-to-belly, she pulls him closer, runs a nipple across his teeth until he nibbles. When he starts to shudder, she slides off and guides his hand to her wetness, letting his digits plunge and roam.
Inside their head, Amelia cries and rails. Jealous, Inez thinks, that her first time alone with the Pigeon had been so mundane. A quick rut on the chesterfield, clothes mostly still on. Life spurted into a handtowel because Amelia wanted Peytr to think she could still have children. Since then, she always made him pull out right when the pleasure was fierce.
Fuck that, Inez thinks while Amelia shrieks their sight spotty. “I was Awife, once,” she says aloud, the words running together, exactly the way Amelia thinks them. As if there’s no space between ‘a’ and ‘wife’. As if she’d been generic, back then. Not Amelia, just some nameless hole.
“What?” Peytr asks, thumb rubbing, rubbing.
“Awife,” Inez repeats. Then, laughing, gasping, “Don’t stop, don’t stop. Yes, you can—yes, do whatever—only don’t ask me to sing.”
“What—”
In reply, Inez shows him what a pleaser Amelia can be. Turning around, she leans their arse into a position gleaned from Peytr’s mind, putting him places she’s never had the nerve to go in her own body. Knees splayed in the solo and knees red on the living room floor, Inez thrusts and slides until the three of them are throbbing.
“Come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” she whispers, using Amelia’s voice but keeping her spirit suppressed. Though Inez’s body wipes its hand on her trousers, adjusts her clothes and tidies her hair, she only sends enough of her mind back down to the office to sustain local calls. Her heart—their heart—stays in the cabin, already anticipating Peytr’s return.
####
The next day he’s back, but not as Inez expected. Not toting dreams to the desperate nor shuffling from foot to foot in her office, claiming he’s lost an address that never existed. No, this new vision of Peytr is so much bigger than these. Suddenly, he’s a born-again soldier, a volunteer-hero, a near-husband and father-of-one. He doesn’t fuck strangers on chesterfields or weep in the darkness or shred his mouth raw on scraps of glass. This Peytr is stoic. This Peytr is private. He’s a museum-prowler. A lover of music, a constant-dancer. A man of small appetite, culinary or otherwise. One who eats only his family’s scraps. One who is often too stressed or tired—so he says—to have sex with the woman who loves him.
This Peytr lives between a caravan and a high-rise. He is blurred around the edges. An absence carried in the centre of Mimi’s being, buried in cotton wool, nestled in clouds of longing.
Love is a miserable trap, Inez thinks, smiling her best protective smile, deciding then and there to wrench the poor fool free of it.
“Clear your mind,” she instructs. “Think only of—”
“Peyt. Peytr Borysson.”
“Just so.”
As the girl’s thoughts descend into the trenches, conjuring an image of Peytr masked in the grey drudges of battle, Inez finds him sprawled on Amelia’s divan in boxers and socks, floating through the stratosphere in a glass balloon. His soul chord is hard to grasp; bird-pecked, worm-eaten, it soars then plummets, now a ragtime two-step, now a dirge. Inez soon gives up trying to tightrope its length, much less letting Mimi walk it with her.
“Now, when you’re ready, call,” she says, buying herself time. The girl does as she’s told, bleats for her love, though Inez knows there can be no response. “Again,” she says, watching Amelia through Peytr’s slow-blinking eyes. Her hair is a waterfall of molten rubies, her skin nacre brocade. Snowflakes flurry from her lashes and moon dust from her nose while she leans over wells of past-present-future, dipping pearls. She is, plainly, the answer.
Inez sags a little as she nosedives from Peytr’s heights, plunging into Amelia’s depthless sorrow.
; Better this betrayal than that, the medium thinks, mooring on the glass-seller’s channel. Better to break a girl’s heart kindly with partlies than pulverise it with the whole truth. Ringing bells in Amelia’s inner ear, Inez announces her presence before racing back to the office to collect Mimi.
“This was a complete waste of time.”
No, Inez thinks, holding fast as Mimi pulls away. Warping the line, heavy-footing the bass to offset the treble in Amelia’s voice, the medium shoves the call forward and makes the connection for her.
—Who is this?
Hold onto that joy, Inez thinks, as Mimi’s features resonate silver and gold, her word-filled aura pulsating, sparkling, performing loop-de-loops. Save that glad hope for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow …
“Peyt. Darling. It’s me.”
—And you are?
Quick as they flared, Mimi’s fireworks are snuffed. She knows something is wrong, but refuses to admit it. Tiptoeing behind her, Inez watches excuses and justifications sprout like weeds in Mimi’s mind, choking the path forward. He’s having an episode, he’s confused, he isn’t himself… . And the faster the girl justifies, the slower she walks; soon stopping altogether, stuck in a well-worn rut of denial.
“Come home, Peyt. Come home. There’s no shame in—”
A rut she needs to be forced out of. Abandoning her charge for only a second, Inez whisks into Amelia’s core and expands. They’ll have to reel Mimi in together, show her she isn’t alone—
—Enough! Why are you doing this?
Amelia’s screech knocks the air from Inez’s swell. The force of it shunts her back to the office, shakes her from the tremulous fishing-line connection.
“Well,” Inez says. That was close.
“That’s it? He’s gone?”
“Not quite worth the price,” she admits, making no move to return the sweater. “Make sure you see me next time. I’ll give you a discount.”
In the back of Inez’s mind Amelia is still shrieking, which she does too much nowadays. Peytr’s away more than he’s home, the demand for glass increasing with the number of sky-whales and jets bloating the air. There are too many bombs for him to deliver alone; Amelia has had to pick up the slack. The stress of farming, manufacturing, and supplementary shipping is too much for the poor woman to handle on her own. Lately she yells, it seems, at the slightest provocation.
“It’s all right, sweetie,” Inez thinks. “I’ll be back to help you soon.”
“What? Whatever do you mean? Virat?”
Across the desk, a man with black hair curling from beneath a snug cap blinks at her with confused brown eyes. A beard frizzes down to his collar but his upper lip and cheeks are bare; even shaped in molecule-riffs and chromatic echoes, the moustache-free look is a fashion that Inez has never liked. Let the beard take hold or shear it off completely—don’t leave the pathetic strands clinging. Steel rings band his furry fingers, digging into her joints as he squeezes, pulling her hands close. “Virat? Hello? You still there?”
“Apologies, Essr. Bartos,” Inez says, realising her mistake. Fixing her white stare on his dark one, she visualises the separate teeth-channels running through her head—a thin straw for Peytr, another for Amelia, a broad canal leading to her client’s far-distant listener—and firms their enamel, stiffens the glossy barriers between them. No more slips, no more voicing her own thoughts. Smiling her cheeks painful, Inez finishes the call with shield intact, reassuring Bartos in Virat’s rasping tones that yes, he is still here. No, of course he will not be back with him soon. Why would he? Yes, yes, he promises not to flee the field. What kind of question is that? He’s been here this long, hasn’t he? Indignant, Virat’s spirit is burning, red and orange on Inez’s tongue: he will stay that way, a remote blend of colours, an estranged brother, fighting a grey breach in a village Bartos hasn’t seen while awake for nearly forty years.
After he leaves, Inez needs a few minutes to collect herself. She flicks off the light. Softly pings Cora and asks her to hold all callers until the afternoon rush. Closes her eyes. Then, gripping Amelia’s chord, she slides along its length slowly, slowly pressing, slowly driving herself more fully in. It takes less effort today than it did yesterday, last week, last month—less force but more finesse. Amelia’s gumption hasn’t slackened one bit, and her instincts are raw. She’s crafty, determined to outwit or outwrestle the medium at every chance; even though, with a poke, Inez can make the woman’s spirit curl like a millipede.
Now they stand together in a stinking alcove on the ground floor of a high-rise, taking their finger off the buzzer to apartment 10E. The building’s glass picture windows and doors have all been painted black; through watery streaks, they catch glimpses of people ghosting up and down the lobby stairs. None look their way, even though Amelia is shouting. Again.
“Orfe! ORFEO!”
“He isn’t here,” crackles a woman’s voice through the speaker.
“Get the fuck out,” Amelia says, batting an invisible fly. “Get. The. Fuck. Out.”
The woman spoke over her. “He’s gone, okay? Please leave.”
“Listen, lady,” Inez butts in, “these double-dips aren’t going to fund themselves. Two days ago he promised, hand on fuckin’ heart, to pay in full on delivery. Even left his spade as collateral—can’t work without it, can he? And now, what. He just happens to be gone.” They make air-quotes around gone, though the sarcasm is lost on the listener. “Fuckin’ tunnellers, always reneging on expensive deals. Tell Orfe—”
“Just fuck off,” the missus says, throwing Amelia’s vitriol back through the speaker twofold, “before I call the Watch.”
“As if those desk-jockeys can touch me,” Inez brags while Amelia silently rants about discretion, secrecy, keeping her business on the down-low. “They’re just clerks playing dress-up, you know. Too weak to be real soldiers …”
A long shadow thrums across the entrance of Inez’s cubicle as, miles away, the intercom disconnects. With one hand, Inez adjusts Amelia’s satchel, heavy with unsold glass; with the other, she fumbles for the light switch. Straddling both chords—high notes in the city, low strains in the office—she gives Amelia her head, lets her rant and swear herself sweaty. While Amelia runs away, stupid-scared of police without any force, Inez straightens in her seat. A gentle rapping on the doorless wall facing her is followed by a polite throat-clearing.
“I thought I asked you to hold my calls.” Cracking an eyelid, Inez sees a familiar swirl of boot-shaped atoms lingering on the threshold of the thick white shag. Well, well, well, she thinks, looking up at Mimi.
This time her smile is much more than a shield.
“Welcome back.”
####
“How long was I out?” Inez always asks, innocently, when Peytr comes back to Amelia’s cabin and finds her there instead.
His replies are always vague. “Not long,” he’ll say, or “No more than last time,” or, unconvincingly, “You were gone?”
Peytr is a terrible actor.
His relief when Inez returns is palpable. Whenever she’s away—sleeping, say, or dealing with a particularly demanding client—Amelia is wild. The woman sobs like a child, begs for Peytr’s help, claims there’s someone else in her head, someone making her do things …
Nonsense, Inez feels Peytr think, though she knows he doesn’t mean it. Witnessing Amelia’s deterioration, he is shaken. He sympathises as she rants and cries and fabricates lies. He is shaken, seeing her this way. He shakes.
From all sides, Inez is buffeted by whitecaps of desperation. Amelia crests at being trapped and disbelieved. Peytr peaks at just being trapped. And now this—
“I’m sorry, Mimi. There’s nothing. No one. No one is there.”
This is love, Inez thinks, grimacing and grinning, mouthing It’s okay to her colleagues. But it isn’t okay. Look at this girl. Just look at her. Stripped by grief, naked in love. Howling in a stranger’s office, soul-bare and wrung.
There’s noth
ing okay about her self-delusion.
“I need to talk to him,” Mimi says. “Please. Find him.”
Nothing okay about willingly suffering loss after loss after loss.
Nothing okay about pretending there’s hope.
Make-believing she hasn’t always been alone.
How can I convince her? What will it take to make her let go? Inez shrugs. “Everything.”
Mimi’s size-small dignity piles up on the desk, her need shed in scraps of acrylic and cotton. With each piece discarded, the girl’s determination grows. Inez doesn’t interrupt—words ruin the best lessons—but when Mimi reaches for her underwear, she decides, “That’ll do.”
Get dressed, she wants to say. Take your love letters and go home. There’s nothing but hurt for you here.
Knowing Mimi won’t leave without some consolation, Inez admits that Peytr is there. He’s unavailable—but he’s fine. And though not entirely true, this silence is kinder than honesty. Mimi doesn’t actually want to see her born-again soldier with another woman. She doesn’t want to see her rival smashing a harvest of living room glass, cutting Peytr off until he listens, really listens to what she’s been saying, drying him out until he believes. She doesn’t want to see him on hands and knees, bloodied from a hundred tiny scrapes and cuts, half-baked among the mess. She doesn’t want to see her volunteer-hero apologising, groaning, grovel turning to snarl as he tackles Amelia and pins her dream-wrecking arms to the floor. She doesn’t need to see this father-of-none brought so low.
She only thinks she does.
“You had to have seen something,” Mimi says feebly. “Show me.”
And knowing there’s really no other way to convince the girl, Inez does.
“Knock knock,” Taheer says, posh accent fitted as his tailored suit, neither more than a couple years old. On a small pewter tray, he’s carrying two cups of tea. The pale green liquid steams up his glasses. Without invitation, he puts them down on Inez’s desk, turns a handle toward her. “Quick word?”
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