The Mammoth Book of International Erotica

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The sound of the door opening . . .

  A bit later, a cock thrusting up her arse, another forcing its way down her throat, the room is now full of men and women, all the guests from dinner, each and every one fucking her in every way, and from orgasm to orgasm she feels herself grow wider, dilate until she is just a set of openings, of holes, deep abysses where cocks are ejaculating before being replaced by larger cocks or more numerous ones. Now they are penetrating her two at a time, in her cunt, in her arse, they come in twos to tease her mouth, and innumerable pairs of hands roam across her body, pinch her, sometimes spank her, and above it all the voice of the Photographer encouraging them on and on, and the brightness of the flash, and that anxious feeling that she is now no more than an empty space being furrowed, a nothingness full of come, devoured, eaten from the inside by a horde of vampires. Soon there will be nothing left of her, just some long blonde hair matted with sweat, a white expanse of flesh torn apart by caresses, a set of pale eyes she holds tightly closed while all of her is being impaled and only the violent flashes of light make their way through to her dead eyes.

  Suddenly, they abandon her. From one moment to the next, it seems to her, there is no one left. She runs her hands in front of her eyes, as if she were blind and finally opens her eyes. The Commander stands in front of her and is watching her: the same cold marble eyes, the same early taste of the tomb. He gently applauds her, like earlier, but there is no sign of irony on his face.

  “Very good, my dear, very good indeed. I knew we could rely on you.”

  He comes towards her, takes her hands, invites her to rise from the deeply soiled bed of black satin.

  “Come,” he says. “There is one final thing for you to do.”

  Together they walk down the stairs. There are so many rooms, so many passages she will know nothing about, whose anonymous numbers will not be revealed. What masked ball or orgy in Room Twelve, what improvised concert in Room Eight? They find themselves on the steps of the castle. The cicadas are now silent, the night is still far from morning, but she hesitates. The moon has moved across the roof and a wide geometrical shadow now covers a whole section of the lawn. All that emerges, on the frontier of darkness, is the statue of the goddess, even whiter in the light of the moon.

  The Commander leads her to the statue. The grass is mown short and feels hard against her bare feet. She shivers, not because she is cold, as spring down here already has an early touch of summer, but because of the anxiety that always strikes towards the end of a night’s party, when all is done and loneliness is about to knock on the door again and all you are left with are memories . . .

  “Get up on the pedestal,” he says. “Yes, like that, with your eyes facing the eyes of the goddess. Take her into your arms – very good, now your hands on her rear, yes. Now, don’t move.”

  Methodically, he ties her to the statue with thin string. He ties her tightly, the rope biting into her flesh, her breasts crushed against the stone breasts of Venus – or is it Diana – then her legs are pulled up against the legs of marble, ankle against ankle, until she can barely move an eyelash, her face pressed against the stone head.

  “They’re the same colour,” says a female voice.

  “That’s true,” says another man. “Maybe it’s the statue that’s actually tied to her.”

  “Predator and prey,” jokes yet another.

  Are they all present?

  “Let’s begin,” someone says. “It’s time to end all of this.”

  The sharp whisper of the first lash precedes by a micro-second the blow that lands on her rump. She screams, or is it her tortured flesh that screams under the assault of the whip? But she is not surprised; she is already resigned, abandoned, being punished because she is innocent. Innocent of what?

  She screams, tries to wriggle out, but she is tied so tightly that the marble bites into her. She cries out as the whip keeps on finding her, with every new blow her skin opens up, like paper under a knife. Soon, her arse, her back, her shoulders have become the mad canvas of a mad artist, blood spurting in lines and blotches, spreading, merging. The blood now turning her flesh dark, woman of bronze tied to woman of stone. Pain begins to anaesthetise pain, she is an open wound, furrowed, overtaken by heat, by fire irradiating from the very centre of her belly and she is aware this unbearable heat rising towards her heart will soon kill her as assuredly as the cold poison killed Socrates. She no longer screams, just feels the heat rising, the whip opening up new valleys, Venus watching her in silence, and when the time comes a ray of moonlight reaches out to seize her in its grasp, and she dies of unbelievable pleasure, part and parcel of the immense fire of the whip.

  The moon finally moves behind the house, the darkness drowns the statue and its victim. They leave her tied there and walk back to the house in silence, satisfied.

  There is but a bare sketch of dawn. A gentle breeze weaves across the pare, though the wind is not strong enough to lift the bloodied strands of blonde hair now slowly drying.

  In an hour or two, the cicadas will begin interrupting the silence again.

  Noon, Gare de Lyon. The young woman with brown hair, captivated by the sun, has walked on to the first train to depart. She will pay for her ticket on board, too bad about the likely supplement.

  There is almost no one in the compartment. Further down the aisle sits a man with steel grey hair but she can only see his straight neck. Closer to her are four men playing cards, already well into their game. One is black, very black. When she walked past them, she noticed they were playing with tarot cards, the black man was about to throw down a Fifteen: a Photographer, head buried under the cloth of an old-fashioned camera, is shooting an undressed model, a pale-skinned, long blonde haired woman. At his feet, an effeminate young boy is sucking him off with studious application.

  FROM CRASH

  J. G. Ballard

  I

  The harsh blue lights of police cars revolved within my mind during the next three weeks as I lay in an empty ward of the casualty hospital near London Airport. In this quiet terrain of used-car marts, water reservoirs and remand centres, surrounded by the motorway systems that served London Airport, I began my recovery from the accident. Two wards of twenty-four beds – the maximum number of survivors anticipated – were permanently reserved for the possible victims of an air-crash. One of these was temporarily occupied by car-crash injuries.

  Not all the blood which covered me had belonged to the man I killed. The Asian doctors in the emergency theatre found that both my knee-caps had been fractured against the instrument panel. Long spurs of pain reached along the inner surface of my thighs into my groin, as if fine steel catheters were being drawn through the veins of my legs.

  Three days after the first surgery on my knees I caught some minor hospital infection. I lay in the empty ward, taking up a bed that belonged by rights to an air-crash victim, and thinking in a disordered way about the wounds and pains he would feel. Around me, the empty beds contained a hundred histories of collision and bereavement, the translation of wounds through the violence of aircraft and automobile crashes. Two nurses moved through the ward, tidying the beds and radio headphones. These amiable young women ministered within a cathedral of invisible wounds, their burgeoning sexualities presiding over the most terrifying facial and genital injuries.

  As they adjusted the harness around my legs, I listened to the aircraft rising from London Airport. The geometry of this complex torture device seemed in some way related to the slopes and contours of these young women’s bodies. Who would be the next tenant of this bed – some middle-aged bank cashier en route to the Balearics, her head full of gin, pubis moistening towards the bored widower seated beside her? After a runway accident at London Airport her body would be marked for years by the bruising of her abdomen against the seat belt stanchion. Each time she slipped away to the lavatory of her provincial restaurant, weakened bladder biting at a worn urethra, during each sex act with her prostatic husband she woul
d think of the few seconds before her crash. Her injuries fixed for ever this imagined infidelity.

  Did my wife, when she visited the ward each evening, ever wonder what sexual errand had brought me to the Western Avenue flyover? As she sat beside me, her shrewd eyes itemizing whatever vital parts of her husband’s anatomy were left to her, I was certain that she read the answer to her unspoken questions in the scars on my legs and chest.

  The nurses hovered around me, carrying out their painful chores. When they replaced the drainage tubes in my knees I tried not to vomit back my sedative, strong enough to keep me quiet but not to relieve the pain. Only their sharp tempers rallied me.

  A young, blond-haired doctor with a callous face examined the wounds on my chest. The skin was broken around the lower edge of the sternum, where the horn boss had been driven upwards by the collapsing engine compartment. A semi-circular bruise marked my chest, a marbled rainbow running from one nipple to the other. During the next week this rainbow moved through a sequence of tone changes like the colour spectrum of automobile varnishes. As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds. The layout of the instrument panel, like the profile of the steering wheel bruised into my chest, was inset on my knees and shinbones. The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act.

  On the fourth day, for no evident reason, the anaesthetics were withdrawn. All morning I vomited into the enamel pail which a nurse held under my face. She stared at me with good-humoured but unmoved eyes. The cold rim of the kidney pail pressed against my cheek. Its porcelain surface was marked by a small thread of blood from some nameless previous user.

  I leaned my forehead against the nurse’s strong thigh as I vomited. Beside my bruised mouth her worn fingers contrasted strangely with her youthful skin. I found myself thinking of her natal cleft. When had she last washed this moist gulley? During my recovery, questions like this one obsessed me as I talked to the doctors and nurses. When had they last bathed their genitalia, did small grains of faecal matter still cling to their anuses as they prescribed some antibiotic for a streptococcal throat, did the odour of illicit sex acts infest their underwear as they drove home from the hospital, the traces of smegma and vaginal mucus on their hands marrying with the splashed engine coolant of unexpected car-crashes? I let a few threads of green bile leak into the pail, aware of the warm contours of the young woman’s thighs. A seam of her gingham frock had been repaired with a few loops of black cotton. I stared at the loosening coils lying against the round surface of her left buttock. Their curvatures seemed as arbitrary and as meaningful as the wounds on my chest and legs.

  This obsession with the sexual possibilities of everything around me had been jerked loose from my mind by the crash. I imagined the ward filled with convalescing air-disaster victims, each of their minds a brothel of images. The crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union. The injuries of still-to-be-admitted patients beckoned to me, an immense encyclopaedia of accessible dreams.

  Catherine seemed well aware of these fantasies. During her first visits I had been in shock and she had made herself familiar with the layout and atmosphere of the hospital, exchanging good-humoured banter with the doctors. As a nurse carried away my vomit Catherine expertly pulled the metal table from the foot of the bed and unloaded on to it a clutch of magazines. She sat down beside me, casting a brisk eye over my unshaven face and fretting hands.

  I tried to smile at her. The stitches in the laceration across my scalp, a second hairline an inch to the left of the original, made it difficult for me to change my expression. In the shaving mirror the nurses held up to my face I resembled an alarmed contortionist, startled by his own deviant anatomy.

  “I’m sorry.” I took her hand. “I must look rather sunk in myself.”

  “You’re fine,” she said. “Absolutely. You’re like someone’s victim in Madame Tussaud’s.”

  “Try to come tomorrow.”

  “I will.” She touched my forehead, gingerly peering at the scalp wound. “I’ll bring some make-up for you. I imagine the only cosmetic attention given to the patients here is at Ashford Mortuary.”

  I looked up at her more clearly. Her show of warmth and wifely concern pleasantly surprised me. The mental distance between my work at the television commercial studios in Shepperton and her own burgeoning career in the overseas tours section of Pan American had separated us more and more during the past years. Catherine was now taking flying lessons, and with one of her boyfriends had started a small air-tourist charter firm. All these activities she pursued with a single mind, deliberately marking out her independence and self-reliance as if staking her claim to a terrain that would later soar in value. I had reacted to all this like most husbands, quickly developing an extensive repertory of resigned attitudes. The small but determined drone of her light aircraft crossed the sky over our apartment house each weekend, a tocsin that sounded the note of our relationship.

  The blond-haired doctor walked through the ward, nodding to Catherine. She turned away from me, her bare legs revealing her thighs as far as her plump pubis, shrewdly summing up the sexual potential of this young man. I noticed that she was dressed more for a smart lunch with an airline executive than to visit her husband in hospital. Later I learned that she had been badgered at the airport by police officers investigating the road-death. Clearly the accident and any possible manslaughter charges against me had made her something of a celebrity.

  “This ward is reserved for air-crash victims,” I told Catherine. “The beds are kept waiting.”

  “If I groundloop on Saturday you might wake up and find me next to you.” Catherine peered at the deserted beds, presumably visualizing each imaginary injury. “You’re getting out of bed tomorrow. They want you to walk.” She looked down at me solicitously. “Poor man. Have you antagonized them in any way?”

  I let this pass, but Catherine added, “The other man’s wife is a doctor – Dr Helen Remington.”

  Crossing her legs, she began the business of lighting a cigarette, fumbling with an unfamiliar lighter. From which new lover had she borrowed this ugly machine, all too clearly a man’s? Tooled from an aircraft cannon shell, it was more like a weapon. For years I had been able to spot Catherine’s affairs within almost a few hours of her first sex act simply by glancing over any new physical or mental furniture – a sudden interest in some thirdrate wine or film-maker, a different tack across the waters of aviation politics. Often I could guess the name of her latest lover long before she released it at the climax of our sexual acts. This teasing game she and I needed to play. As we lay together we would describe a complete amatory encounter, from the first chitchat at an airline cocktail party to the sexual act itself. The climax of these games was the name of the illicit partner. Held back until the last moment, it would always produce the most exquisite orgasms for both of us. There were times when I felt that these affairs took place merely to provide the raw material for our sexual games.

  Watching her cigarette smoke move away across the empty ward, I wondered with whom she spent the past few days. No doubt the thought that her husband had killed another man lent an unexpected dimension to their sex acts, presumably conducted on our bed in sight of the chromium telephone which had brought Catherine the first news of my accident. The elements of new technologies linked our affections.

  Irritated by the aircraft noise, I sat up on one elbow. The bruises across my chest wall made it painful for me to breathe. Catherine peered down at me with a worried gaze, obviously concerned that I might die on the spot. She put the cigarette between my lips. I drew uncertainly on the geranium-flavoured smoke. The warm tip of the cigarette, stained with pink lipstick, carried with it the
unique taste of Catherine’s body, a flavour I had forgotten in the phenol-saturated odour of the hospital. Catherine reached for the cigarette, but I held on to it like a child. The grease-smeared tip reminded me of her nipples, liberally painted with lipstick, which I would press against my face, arms and chest, secretly imagining the imprints to be wounds. In a nightmare I had once seen her giving birth to a devil’s child, her swollen breasts spurting liquid faeces.

  A dark-haired student nurse came into the ward. Smiling at my wife, she pulled back the bedclothes and dug the urine bottle from between my legs. Inspecting its level, she flipped back the sheets. Immediately my penis began to dribble; with an effort I controlled the sphincter, numbed by the long succession of anaesthetics. Lying there with a weak bladder, I wondered why, after this tragic accident involving the death of an unknown young man – his identity, despite the questions I asked Catherine, remained an enigma to me, like an anonymous opponent killed in a pointless duel – all these women around me seemed to attend only to my most infantile zones. The nurses who emptied my urinal and worked my bowels with their enema contraption, who steered my penis through the vent of my pyjama shorts and adjusted the drainage tubes in my knees, who cleansed the pus from the dressings on my scalp and wiped my mouth with their hard hands – these starched women in all their roles reminded me of those who attended my childhood, commissionaires guarding my orifices.

  A student nurse moved around my bed, sly thighs under her gingham, eyes fixed on Catherine’s glamorous figure. Was she calculating how many lovers Catherine had taken since the accident, excited by the strange posture of her husband in his bed, or – more banal – the cost of her expensive suit and jewellery? By contrast, Catherine gazed frankly at this young girl’s body. Her assessment of the contours of thigh and buttock, breast and armpit, and their relationship with the chromium bars of my leg harness, an abstract sculpture designed to show off her slim figure, was open and interested. An interesting lesbian streak ran through Catherine’s mind. Often as we made love she asked me to visualize her in intercourse with another woman – usually her secretary Karen, an unsmiling girl with silver lipstick who spent the entire office party before Christmas staring motionlessly at my wife like a pointer in rut. Catherine often asked me how she could allow herself to be seduced by Karen. She soon came up with the suggestion that they visit a department store together, where she would ask Karen’s help in choosing various kinds of underwear. I waited for them among the racks of nightdresses outside their cubicle. Now and then I glanced through the curtains and watched them together, their bodies and fingers involved in the soft technology of Catherine’s breasts and the brassieres designed to show them off to this or that advantage. Karen was touching my wife with peculiar caresses, tapping her lightly with the tips of her fingers, first upon the shoulders along the pink grooves left by her underwear, then across her back, where the metal clasps of her brassiere had left a medallion of impressed skin, and finally to the elastic-patterned grooves beneath Catherine’s breasts themselves. My wife stood through this in a trance-like state, gabbling to herself in a low voice, as the tip of Karen’s right forefinger touched her nipple.