by Jenny Diski
Meg spent the first days of the holidays buying white towels, a variety of astonishingly expensive French designer foaming bath oils, and a chrome rack to place across the bath that had a place for soap, flannels, and a book stand attached with a small chrome tray next to it, just the right size to hold a wine glass.
Then, when everything was in place, she took the time to stand in the doorway—with a door and a lock—and inspect her new bathroom. Behind her, and to each side, the rest of the flat remained as derelict as the day she had bought it, but she didn’t notice, or care. She stared into the bright bathroom and her eyes almost ached with its gleaming whiteness. It was, for all the time and money lavished on it, quite spare. There was nothing in it except white tiles, a carefully-folded white towel and the white bath, washbasin and sink. The fittings were silvered chrome and glass. Meg had ditched her make-up—she had thrown away everything from her previous bathrooms. There was a square-edged black bottle of scented bath oil and some discreet pots containing face packs and washing grains on one end of the long glass shelf on the tiled wall above the bath, and a neat pile of books on the other.
New bars of plain white soap waited on the bath tray and the washbasin. There was a white electric toothbrush and a dispenser of toothpaste, from which she had taken off the label, so that it too was plain white on the glass shelf over the basin. Meg surveyed this bathroom that she had made, and found it good.
It was Christmas Eve, and Meg sat in the old chair she had brought from her previous flat, in her empty living room with peeling walls, eating a takeaway from the Chinese place round the corner. Tomorrow would be the loveliest day of her life. She listened to the boiler humming quietly to itself, in constant readiness to produce however much hot water was required. Nice. Something really special to look forward to. How many people had lived their lives up to the point Meg had reached and could say that they were about to fulfil their great ambition? Only a few, she suspected, among the millions, who would look back at the end and wonder how they had missed their moment. Meg’s moment had come. Tomorrow she would have the Christmas Day of her life. You only had to know what it was you really wanted, she told herself, wrapped in her duvet in the freezing, desolate room, with the smile of a cat savouring the prospect of tomorrow’s bowl of cream.
Housewife
Creature, you’ve made me crazy. I ache for your dark passageways and serpentine corridors. Those coiled, labyrinthine, unlit spaces, saturated with mysterious liquors unknown to those who avoid the shadows, which are the antechambers to your underworld. A traveller returning from these places (and few do) can never be entirely happy in the sunlight again. Forever after he retains the scent and taste of his unspeakable adventures, which return to distract him in the normal course of his life, so he has to stop whatever worldly activity he’s engaged in (marking essays!) and close himself away in a dark room to pay sinister homage to the memory of where he’s been and what he’s known.
It’s a curious fact that quite ordinary incidents bring the flavour and perfume of his time in the dark country back to him: the accidental brush of a silk scarf against his skin, washing certain parts of his body (you know which), or merely tightening a watch strap around his wrist, causes the most acutely painful and (as he would describe it) exquisite recollection of the dripping pungent juices in which he was once submerged.
Sometimes in the subterranean traveller’s dreams, he returns and sleepwalks through the drenched corridors again. The danger and his secret hope is that he will drown and never wake. The dreams are so real and the desire to take in enough of the secretions of the place so great that he covers himself completely and fills every orifice—eyes, mouth, nostrils, ears, anus—with the fluids, which have become more than food and drink for him.
Of course, once all the entrances to his body are moistened, the creature which inhabits the dream labyrinth is free to enter them, probing all the secret places, inserting tongue and fingers into its hapless visitor, loving the tastes that emerge from the fusion of its own tainted secretions with his. It spreads the wetness all over the body of its prey, and then squats over it, showing the traveller what it was he came to find—the saturated source of its power—before lowering itself on to him, smothering him under its weight, covering him with the sweet and sour slime he longs for.
After that, the traveller is the creature’s thing, to do with what it will. And it does everything, leaving him and taking him at whim, a playful creature which loves to toy with its plaything, covering him with its juices and then very slowly licking them off with the tip of its tongue until every part of his body had been covered, and it can start to smear him with its filth again. There’s no escape, now, only waiting and repetition. But that’s all right because it is all the traveller in the dark land wants.
Creature. My witch. My Kentish whore. Do you realise what power you have? You never disappoint me.
About an hour after she’d seen the children off to school, the postman rang the doorbell with a parcel. It was addressed to her personally: Mrs. Susan Donahoe, 14 Paramount Close, Sidcup, Kent. She hadn’t been expecting anything. Sometimes, she received parcels when she ordered clothes from the Next Directory catalogue, or bought thermal underwear by post for the family, but she hadn’t ordered anything recently and, in any case, this parcel was the wrong shape for clothes. It was registered, so she signed for it and thanked the postman with a smile.
She put the rectangular package down on the kitchen table. Its brown wrapping paper was neatly folded into Vs at each end, their apexes just touching and held down with sellotape, the whole parcel being doubly secured with firmly tied and knotted string, which she cut with the kitchen scissors—once she’d found them in the cluttered drawer where the utensils were kept. The size and shape of the parcel was familiar, and when she pulled back the wrapping paper, she wasn’t surprised to find a shoebox underneath. It was also crossed with string, and rather battered as if it had been lying at the bottom of someone’s cupboard for some time: it wasn’t a new pair of shoes she’d ordered and forgotten about. In any case, Susan wasn’t one to forget things.
Still baffled, she severed the string and put the lid to one side without noticing a piece of paper, folded and sellotaped to its underside. The interior of the box was lined in several layers of black plastic, cut from a black bin bag, which overlapped at the top, covering what was inside. She lifted them away carefully, and saw a fastened package made from the lower half of another bin bag. Susan untwisted the wire closure tying off the opening, to reach, finally, whatever it was she had been sent.
When she peered inside, she gasped, and instinctively turned around as if to check that no one else was in the room, although she knew she was alone in the house. Then she turned back, and sank sidesaddle on to the pine breakfast bench beside the table, to gaze into the shoebox in front of her. Lying in a pool of its own blood was a whole, raw, pig’s liver of a red so deep it was almost black.
The rank smell of blood and offal, released into the air, billowed up, assaulting her nostrils, but she was too stunned to move her face away from the acrid scent. She stared concentratedly at the liver’s satiny bulk, noticing the way in which it graduated away towards its boundary to a fine edge, and how the light from the kitchen window made its sloping, slippery contour gleam. It was an extraordinarily substantial object.
Susan kept her eyes on the contents of her parcel, as she pulled the wrapping from under the box, but the label, when she looked at it, was printed and the postmark smudged. Reaching for the lid, she saw the paper taped to it. She dragged her eyes away from the offal to read the message. “Longing for you.” There was no signature.
Susan’s mouth compressed into a tight line, her teeth biting down hard on the inside of her lips, and the vertical frown lines of a face straining to compose itself appeared between her eyebrows. Then, in spite of her efforts, she lost control; her mouth opened, her eyes closed and Susan let go with a gale of delighted and wicked amusement as the
laughter she had been trying to suppress snorted explosively through her nostrils.
Dearest Witchfinder—Of course, you’re never disappointed. How could you be? Since when was a dream disappointed by the dreamer? Don’t you know that what you dream is what I dreamt up for you, my dreamed-up lover, to dream? Your pleasure coincides precisely with my pleasure. How could it be otherwise?
Realise my power? No, you realised it. You found and recognised me, Witchfinder Very Particular. But now that I know, I’m working on a spell for turning literature lecturers into bats (selected ones, that is, not all of them) so that you can fly through a crack in my belfry late tonight and have your way with me. Alternatively, I’ll go bats myself and swoop down on you, and very quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, I’ll take your soft, sleeping cock in my hungry bat mouth and gorge myself, chirping at an inhuman pitch, until the dawn. You’ll only know I’ve been there by the strange dreams you’ll dream. Misty, murky things, like swamps, with smiles hanging from the trees.
I’m your thing, utterly, completely, for more and more, without limits. Sometimes I think I can still smell you on my pillow, even though we change the bedding. I carry on as normal, but I think I am really quite mad. I know I am. Be kind to bats. And leave your window open just a crack.
When the doorbell rang again, at midday, it was not unexpected. By then, Susan had bathed and washed her hair, taken her make-up out of the bathroom cabinet and applied it carefully, almost meditatively, to her cheeks, eyes and lips. From an M & S carrier bag tucked away at the back of a top shelf reserved for old clothes, destined (when she got around to it) for Oxfam, she extracted an elasticated wisp of a suspender belt, sheer black stockings and a pale silk slip, not destined for Oxfam, and put them on her newly pampered and lotioned naked body. She dressed herself in these undergarments slowly, with pleasure, and a half-smile on her face which once or twice broke into a broader amusement at the memory of her package that morning. When she had finished she opened the wardrobe door with the long mirror on the back of it and stood back to look herself over.
Susan was no stringy-limbed waif, but a sturdy middle-aged woman with what her mother had called “big bones.” She stood and examined her solid fleshy self in what she was amused to call her lingerie, to distinguish it from her regular M & S underwear, and decidedly liked what she saw. Susan Donahoe, who dressed as a rule for the life that was led in Paramount Close—practically in skirts and jumpers for the daily round, tidily in suits for parents’ evenings and “do’s,” comfortably in tracksuits for Sundays at home with the family—stood before herself with satisfied approval as the luscious, sexually shameless slut Mr. Donahoe had never known. Nor had Susan, if it came to that, not until recently.
The soft fleshiness of her upper arms and shoulders, and the ripe, dipping cleavage between her large breasts (maternal, was how she usually thought of them, big suburban boobs) was accentuated and made all the more lush by the fragile straps, slivers of oyster silk, and delicately rolled edge of the slip which barely seemed to contain the flesh it enclosed, and yet smoothed its contours with the fluid satin fabric. After a moment, she lifted the slip above her thighs, whose softly substantial nakedness, like her shoulders and breasts, was emphasised by the vertical line of the suspenders and the encircling tops of her stockings. Flesh and fabric alternated: offering more, offering less, leading the eye up towards the dark, curled mass of hair which concealed and emphasised what lay behind it. She loved the lewdness of it.
She loved how she looked, more than she had liked herself, firmer and somewhat slimmer (she had never been a sylph), in her youth. In those days, she might have admired herself for what others had admired about her: as a good-looking English rose, a blossoming buxom girl dressed for the world to see on her way to the theatre, or some party, on the arm of a pleasant if not exciting young man. Now, two decades and more later, she felt almost dizzy with excitement at the sight of herself, large, loose, her flesh lived in and entirely sexual, totally available. The silk and lace sheathed those parts of her which she most dearly wanted utterly exposed; they covered only as an invitation to disclose. She was an object, a contrivance entirely got up for the purpose of pursuing sensual pleasure. It was the artifice, the deceit of it she liked so much. The lie that barely concealed itself. The blatant falseness of a notional modesty which left breasts and nipples bra-less and free to be fingered beneath the flimsy silk, and vulva moist and knickerless under the slip, available to any searching hand.
Filled with desire at her image and lusting dreamily for herself, she watched her reflection slide her fingertips lightly down her body, from shoulder to breast, pausing to cup it softly and squeezing her nipple between thumb and finger before continuing down over her rounded belly, and under the pulled-up slip, reaching up between her thighs to part her saturated labia and run her fingers along the length of the valley between them, as silky and smooth as the satin covering her breasts, as slippery and wet as the liver she had donated to the cats. She withdrew her fingers and pressed them against her mouth and nose, taking in the pungent smell of her own desire. “Cunt,” she murmured to her image in the mirror, a word only she, it and one other had ever heard her speak. With an approving smile at herself she stroked her damp fingers behind each ear and at the pulse on her neck where normally she dabbed just a little Chanel No. 5. Efficient as always; it was twelve o’clock, and she was ready.
Sweet Witch, I’m very attached to more, too. More and more. This afternoon during a seminar, I remembered (viscerally, that is) the sight of your saliva between your parted lips, and me reaching up to take it from you. “Do you want more?” you asked. And I begged for your saliva, a river of it. “More. More,” I said. And you gave me a gift of more and more. So much of you inside me. I wonder if there’s a critical dose, after which I am more you than I am me? Or more us than either me or you. I adore your madness and desperately hope no terrible attack of sanity comes over you. I like you mad, my demented Kentish batwitch. You are with me, in that place (in all the places) where you live in me. I’ll keep you warm and watered and fed with all the right kind of delicious, dangerous food. Just lie back and enjoy yourself. What else is there for you to do? Or me? We make such fine spells together, what can we be but spellbound? Kiss me, sometimes, when you’re alone. I’m hungry to know more of you. I want to hear about your darkness. Whisper some of it to me. I want to be in the dark with you, whispering and playing in the mess of our minds. I miss you. God, the things I want to do to you.
When Richard arrived, their mouths met like a pair of magnets, too powerfully attracted, too needy to be used for the commonplace of speech. Their tongues greeted each other, instead, investigating their mutual state of desire, while Richard’s hand duplicated the exploration Susan’s own hand had conducted just a little while before. For a moment they remained like this, sucking in each other’s breath, until they had to break apart to take in neutral air. They looked at one another, like people in a state of shock, until Susan smiled a conspiratorial smile.
“You are a filthy bugger,” she told him.
“Mmm,” he agreed, sucking the taste of her off his fingers and sniffing the air. “You smell of sex.”
“You’re an animal,” she said with desire swimming in her eyes.
He followed her into the bedroom.
“You liked my present, then?”
“Loved it.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and Susan straddled him, sitting on his lap with her knees on the bed. He buried his face in her satin cleavage.
“Ahh. I want you,” he whispered as she surrounded him with her arms. “I want every morsel of you. I dream about your insides. The thought of your liver has been driving me crazy. In my dreams I try and try to get in there, but I can never get deep enough, never far enough into you.”
“Try harder. Keep trying,” she said, manoeuvring her naked vulva against his torso. “My liver aches for you to caress it. That is where I want you most of all. Slither through my
organs like a serpent. I want your lips brushing against my liver, kissing my spleen. I want your tongue licking around my kidneys. I want you covered in my slime.”
“You filthy bitch,” he sighed. “Cover me with your stuff.”
Susan began to rub herself against his abdomen harder, raising and lowering herself on her knees. He held her tight, nudging one strap off her shoulder to free her breast and take it in his mouth, encouraging her excitement and building on his own, while narrative gave way to the inarticulacy of their moans and then sharp, staccato gasps, like cries of pain.
“You,” she breathed between her cries. “Take—everything. All of it. I’m yours.”
They made love for an hour, like an overland journey, moving to exhaustion, resting, beginning again with renewed energy. He didn’t enter her for a long time; they touched and stroked and mouthed. But each lover made forays into the other’s body, boring into each other with fingers and tongue wherever they could be inserted—for her, a foretelling of what was yet to come; for him, penetrated and submissive, as her most willing whore, craving more.
Susan Donahoe was not born to this kind of behaviour. For the greater part of her existence she had lived the life everyone, including herself, had expected of her. Indeed, apart from these afternoons, and at night, when she was lying beside her sleeping husband, she continued to fulfil expectations, and what was more, was pleased to do so. Tom thought of her as a good wife, and the children, when they thought about it at all, considered her a satisfactory mother. And she was happy to be thought of in this way. She was neither resentful of nor frustrated with her lot. Being a mother mattered to her, she loved her children—Corinne and Simon were ten and twelve, well adjusted, normally demanding and enjoyable. She took pride in them. Come to that, she loved Tom and was pleased to hear his key in the door when he got home from work.