Oh bollocks, why did I come? I’ve been on the island too long now, that’s the problem—I can’t be with this many people at once any more. Not that I ever could. The problem is really . . .
He tapped the back of his skull experimentally against a low picture rail.
The problem is really that I had contemplated having other plans. Sad fucker that I am. First, get Mary here for the party, another educational trip—show her about a bit, now that her work’s getting known—do the needful and . . .
His patience with his self-deception tinned out like the element in an especially low-wattage bulb.
You were going to ditch Mary here and go off, weren’t you? You were going to weasel out Maura’s address and then scuttle off to see her, see her street, see the shine in her living-room window, bedroom window, how would you really know? You would never have the backbone to knock on her door and find out.
Or—as it turns out—the backbone to even get her sodding address. So you’ll just have to stay around here: one more for the evening’s running count of soured menopausal men.
He started to scrape his shoes clean on the skirting board while an aggressively jodhpured young woman stared at him. When he looked up again, she was marching across. “You’re Nathan Staples, aren’t you? I love your books.”
“That makes one of us.”
She released a delighted, animal bray. “No, really . . .”
“Yes, really . . .” He had absolutely never been less in the mood for this. Their conversation, Nathan feared, could only end with his grey-spattered figure being dragged from her twitching, headless body—his one fist still deep in her cranium, swinging it round like a hairy bowling ball. Or would it look more like a very bloated mitten?
She giggled and glistened up at him—every inch the sacrificial offering. “I saw you in the corner there—thinking.”
“I’d hoped it wouldn’t show.”
“In fact I was also thinking . . .” giggling, she suddenly muffled both his ears with weirdly smooth hands, “I’d like to . . .” tugging him down to meet her mouth, “kiss your brain.” She did indeed deposit a wet stamp of admiration on his forehead. “Your lovely little brain.”
“Um.” He reared back as politely as he could. “Yes. You haven’t seen Jack Grace, have you? I feel that I may need to speak to him. Right away.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t bother. Even if he’s here, by this time he won’t be making any sense.”
“That’s fine. I don’t want him to.”
“I’d really like you to stay.” She granted him another Campari and cocaine snigger.
“Mm, I know it. Bye.”
Jack was finding things difficult to believe. He loved it when reality slopped out of control this way. “Surely you’re not suggesting that you could accommodate that—not without reconstructive surgery, at least. Even a child’s stump . . . if they’d just lost a foot or a hand . . . you couldn’t get it in . . . you couldn’t take it . . . up you.” Good words, most especially when found together, up and you.
Lynda smoothed his hair behind his ear and smirked. “A stump doesn’t have to go up to be exciting. Even the look of them . . . soft and blind and hard all at once, the pallor, the scarring . . . They’re wonderful.”
“You are a very beautifully twisted woman.”
“That’s why I’m talking to you.” She whispered, “But I didn’t cross the fucking Atlantic for the amputees. They were only an optional extra—not the main event.”
“Do you think we should sit?” He had, in fact, already started a comforting slide down the wall. His back and head were both, no doubt, leaving a sweat trail as he sank.
“Well, if you really can’t keep upright . . .” She descended with him. The leather, or plastic, or rubber, or whatever black and glossy stuff her jeans were made of puckered and distended liquidly.
It was better to be on the floor, J.D. thought, much more private, and much more stable if he started to feel at all strange. Because, it had to be admitted, odd turns did take him, now and then. If he had another drink he’d be settled, absolutely fine, but this wasn’t exactly the moment for leaving to get one. He sat with his legs flat out before him and then reached to peruse the length of Lynda’s thigh, he hoped with a properly lascivious attention. “So if you weren’t there for the Freudian limb ends . . . ?”
“As I’ve said, I didn’t go for the amputees. I went for the amputators. I went for the Red Triangle—the zone of optimum risk. I went for the sharks. God’s oldest and most beloved and sexiest fucking fish.”
“Mmm.” Something was scrabbling through the nerves at the back of Jack’s eyes, but if he pressed his temples fiercely, the sensation almost went away. “I’m going to prop myself here at an editorial angle—you let it all roll out, darling, just let it all roll out.” His mouth seemed bad again—oily, his tongue finding unpleasant places, soft gaps. The thought of them made him want to retch. But instead he worked his fingers wetly between Lynda’s and clung on.
“Ruth Alvey turned me on to sharks—back when I was on the island. Every other bloody sentence you could get out of her was about them—on and on and on—and I thought . . . I don’t know . . . why not have a shark of my own? And why not have all the rest—while there was still time, still the physical credibility, why not go and play with the great big fishies and all of those nice Californian boys in the sun?
“They were gorgeous—the boys—new, tight, ticky muscles and that honey skin—they’re generally about as bright as honey, too. But then I didn’t go out there for conversation. I was tired of having my bloody intellect stimulated, you know? Enough is enough.”
“Oh, yes.” He was trying to picture her splayed along some idiot surfer’s board, or tugging and sucking at him, kneeling . . . none of it kept back the uneasy tickle of bile in his throat.
“I found my perfect amputee—right hand missing, bitten off. His forearm stopped in just a lovely nub of flesh: tiny, feminine folds there, and the marks of stitches: adorable.”
“Good friction?” He prayed she would get more graphic soon and fingered a sting of sweat away from his eye.
“And good pressure. I’m sure I could feel, when we were really going, the way his radius and ulna moved—their cut ends were free to shift inside his flesh.”
That, Jack could visualise and didn’t want to, just at present. He was swallowing rapidly to keep pace with his own saliva: its sudden, sullen rush. “But the sharks?”
“I’m coming to them.” She pushed her hand flat between Jack’s legs where they were crossed at the knee. “My manually abridged young escort had been a diver. He had friends who still were . . . they took me out and taught me how to dive: dropping to thirty, sixty, ninety feet; buddy breathing, signals, orientation, depressurisation, what I should do if I pissed in my suit. The whole deal.”
“Congratulations.” He gripped his thighs together and was rewarded with her knuckles’ pleasantly insistent wriggle in between them. Things down there were becoming distinctly unsavoury—one slick heat raising another—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“It was all a means to an end, the messing around in kelp groves with sea lions and seals. They’re immensely sensual creatures, by the way—so fluid and self-possessed, even flirtatious when they’re underwater. They showed off the tucks in their fur where their flippers start, the innocent way they blink, the bubbles in their whiskers, their scars. Sometimes, we’d lie on the cliffs—myself and whoever—and I’d look past the boy and on down to the rocks, the seal pups sleeping like folded pocket knives and the adults hanging, turning, dark in the risen waves, just letting it happen. Watching them made me come fantastically.” She wedged her hand higher, but—sadly—not indecently so. “Are you really interested in this?”
“Fascinated.” But if he didn’t get even a tiny bit harder rather soon, he would pass out. He was getting far too sober, far too fast.
“Well, in the end, all this ducking,” her hand slipped highe
r, “and sucking,” and higher, “and fucking,” and higher, “paid off. I persuaded some of my companions to get in a boat and take me out where I wanted to go—to the Farallon Islands. To White Shark Heaven. I mean, if you’re going to meet a shark, you should meet the best, yes? Abalone divers do it all the time, dip in and risk it: get as deep as they can, just as fast as they can: it’s safer that way. And we risked it, too. Went looking for it. Asking for it. Mm?”
He flopped his hands across his crotch and her fingers as she finally reached the spot, palming him gently. “Hm.” It seemed he could no longer speak. But he could lift his hips just a little and sweat just a little bit more.
“It happened the third time we went out. The way I’d known it would. The Pacific was being pacific and only stroking, stretching up under the boat and teasing me to slip in and part it and find what it wanted to give. So I did. Over the side with a full tank while everyone else was dozing and then out on my own, which is strictly not allowed.
“And he was there, a prickle in the water, a quiet heat. Nothing to see yet, but he was there. And he made me . . . ready. You know how it’s possible,” Lynda ran her thumb around the outline of Jack’s cock, “to be made ready. Properly.”
Jack raised a sigh of agreement, hard with the certainty that he would now be perceived as having definitively, absolutely disgraced himself. He could feel the gossip washing warm around him. The occasion could only be more perfect if some ignorant bastard tried to intervene.
“Well, Jack. You’re a bad, bad boy. Which means you’ll understand the way I felt with him.”
She continued to lightly trace and retrace Jack’s length. His peripheral vision turned pink. “Hnuh.”
“I pushed it, went for depth, twisted while I sank. Looking. Clear water right around. And then he was there.” She let her hand rest still, making Jack’s whole pelvis jolt with ungodly frustration. “There’s nothing more like itself than a shark. At first I couldn’t believe in him—worrying through the bars of light, dappled, as if he were crossing a clearing, all pulse and flex and neat intensity.
“He swung by, above me and to my right, quite far off. For a moment I had his perfect silhouette, the smoothed brow and the tricking out of fins, the sleek shape of his claspers, clearly marking him as male. So languid and so hard—he was perfection. Perfection heading away. And I believed that he was going to leave me then, that we were done before we’d even started and, for the first time since I’d seen him, I felt afraid.”
Jack, no longer remotely circumspect, shut his eyes and listened to the drift and glide of Lynda’s voice while moving his hips against her hand. If she noticed the plaintive rub of his crotch, she gave no sign. He ground on.
“His speed, his thrust, they emptied him out of numb blue and he’d barged me before I knew it, torn my hand and my forearm raw. Not with his teeth, with the rip of his skin. Close to, it looks like velvet, from the darkest to the palest grey, and you want to touch it, you do want to touch it, the ruffle and gape of his gills, but just a brush will draw your blood. All I saw was the stripe of the muscles in his side as he slammed in, huge, and then was gone—a fist of angles shrinking out of sight.
“He didn’t give me the time for terror, just pushed me through it before I could think. I felt almost sleepy while I watched my bleeding cloud out and streak, greenish in the salt light. I tried to think of my breathing and check my tank and I realised I had no idea of how long I’d been down there. Minutes or days: I couldn’t have told you and I couldn’t have cared.
“A thick, charged tension at my back made me turn. And, of course, it was him, closing. Again. In the time that it took me to know I was going to die, he didn’t kill me. He was there and he let me be. He left me. Every night, I remember everything: the silver preoccupation of his painted eye, blaring, the naked race of his belly above me, and his mouth. His mouth. Powder pink.”
Jack slowed, let his efforts drop, but Lynda’s hand took up his rhythm, at him again.
“It was plush, his mouth, and rippled, like the lining of a box. You’d think it delicate, imagine it was warm, a place to slip into: one long, muscular, saline fit. And there to close on you, keep you tight, are the white blade and bristle of teeth upon teeth. I see them in my sleep. Sometimes, I need only blink and I will see them. But they did no harm to me.
“The whole half moon of his gape grazed past me, over my head, and he was finished. Away.”
Jack knew he was shrinking fast, failing, nausea punching in his neck. Meanwhile she was scrubbing at him, pinching the head of his prick through layers of cloth, making a fool of him while his mind belched up ghosts of—it seemed—every cunt he’d known and fitted every one of them with infantile, peggy teeth.
“I rose to the surface with a practically empty tank and blood streaming into my eyes. At our last meeting, he’d taken a strip of skin from my scalp. I knew I was in much more danger at the surface, but I was equally sure that he was gone. I had no understanding of why he hadn’t taken me. I was just left without him. To meet so large a life and then have it leave you . . . the want that makes in you . . . I can still feel it.” She pressed her lips to his ear. “I can still feel it in me.”
A bitter wad of liquid filled Jack’s mouth and he gagged it quietly down again. “Ahm.” He swallowed once more. Coughed. “You know . . .” There was still a chance for this. If he got out of here, he could still make it. Get a drink and get out of here, that’s what he should do . . . “We really should leave now. If we want to make a night of it.” He made a good effort at a suitably raffish—if rubbery—grin.
Lynda winked back obligingly. “Oh really, Jack, what on earth made you think that we’d be doing that? Have you looked at yourself lately?”
“What made me think—?”
“And have you smelt your breath?”
“I have a . . . something with my teeth . . .” A mosquito whine had kicked up in his ears—appropriate for this heat, but even so . . . he couldn’t help but object. It seemed an imposition . . .
Lynda stood with an elegance which quite surprised him. Then she leaned down towards him, in a way that he hoped to find encouraging, but which actually only scared him. “Yes, you certainly do have a something with your teeth. And the rest of you.” She patted his head. “Go home, darling. Will you? Don’t be embarrassing.”
J.D.’s vision cramped with fury, he couldn’t breathe, his thinking Stanley-knifed across every word of fucking cunt disparagement, every dyke wanker denigration, every knob-loving easy slapper sagging witch ring-licker slack-gapped fuck invective that he had ever pronounced.
But nothing was enough, not nearly enough, and Lynda was, quite naturally, already absent when he looked up to tell her all of those wicked and wounding things that he couldn’t exactly grasp but would any moment, any moment now.
If he possibly rested first, that would do the trick. Unquestionably that would work the magic and then a tiny vodka and then perhaps another and then there’d be plenty of time thereafter to tell her—bitch.
“I’m looking for Jack Grace, have you seen him?” Nathan was having no luck.
A neat man, discreetly inebriated, stopped and swung sleepily in his tracks. “Jack . . . I think he was upstairs. But I couldn’t say. He’ll be very, ah . . . tired by now, though.” He nodded for no obvious reason and then seemed quite content to stand, awaiting any further enquiries.
Nathan did his best to oblige—slightly tired, himself. “Has anyone ever mentioned how very closely you resemble James Haigh?”
“Mm?”
“The acid-bath murderer—Haigh?”
“I’m sorry? I don’t think . . .”
“No, that’s fine. Thanks for your help.” Nathan swam himself off up the stairs, the man peering at him as he climbed—clearly trying to decide if he should take violent offence.
“Oh, you. That’s nice.” Nathan was working his way round a clotted landing when an unexpected surge to the wall dodgemed him softly into Mary. “It
really is too hot for all of this.”
She leaned into him. “Yes, I’d like to have some air that no one else has breathed already.” At some point today she’d had her hair cut rather shorter than he would have liked. Not that she wasn’t still the most attractive person here. With some difficulty, she threaded her arm through his, nudging him sideways against the crush. “Still, I suppose it’s fun.” Mary hadn’t touched him this much since they’d had what he tended to think of—delicately—as their temporary derailment. “I mean, they’re having fun.” She nodded her head towards the body wall behind him. “Lots of fun.”
“Some of them . . .” This, while warily squeezing her arm, he hoped in an only friendly way. “I would imagine there are also people who are appearing to have fun, because everyone around them is doing the same. If we all just relaxed we might actually like it here.”
“Like life.” She squeezed him back and made him think he ought to withdraw, perhaps, drift politely away.
Sod it, if I can’t be with her when I’m with her, then what’s the point? We might as well be apart again if it’s going to be . . .
He staggered slightly, partly in response to a solid battering at his back and partly within the preliminary, sodden grip of a burst of melancholy, late-night thinking.
No matter what happens now, I never will have been with her long enough. And I could die soon . . .
He examined the warm dark, the brandied honey, of her eyes.
I could die. My lung’s all right—so they tell me—but anything can happen, these days—I might—even now—for instance, be infected with mad beef . . . my neurones gently unfastening and casting my self adrift. And if I die without having told her.
Ach, fuck it, I shouldn’t tell her. It would just be an imposition. I want her to be my daughter to please my ego, not to please her. Now she likes me because she likes me, not because she feels she ought to.
Everything You Need Page 39