A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  After the dance Thirst set Mrs. Hawkley down under the oak and went back to the car. When he returned, he asked Daisy to dance.

  “I don’t dance,” Daisy said. “I have clods for feet.”

  Thirst pulled her up anyway, just a little roughly. She looked at me for a moment, but there wasn’t enough aggression in the action to merit a scene. His attitude, though, had none of the kindness he’d shown to her mother.

  He held her close, with his right hand pressed firmly against the small of her back. Suddenly she screamed, pulled away, screamed again. She pointed at Thirst’s dinner jacket, in the area of the left breast. The blood had drained from her face, and her jaw hung open. Mrs. Hawkley and I both stared at the large lump moving under the black cloth. Daisy backed away, stammering incoherently.

  “What?” Thirst said.

  A wicked grin spread over Mrs. Hawkley’s face.

  “Oliver, you bad boy,” she said, and glanced at Daisy.

  Thirst undid the top few buttons of his shirt. Lord Denning’s whiskers and nose appeared in restless animation, followed by two small pink eyes, a humped white back, and a stringy tail, longer than his body.

  “Oh, gross!” Daisy yelled, her hands to her face. She stood behind me.

  “Rattus norvegicus. Albino,” Thirst said, holding it so that it continually ran over one forearm after the other, as if on a treadmill. “Meet Lord Denning, my best friend.”

  “What a beautiful rat,” Mrs. Hawkley said. “Can I hold him?”

  Behind me, Daisy was standing close enough for me to feel the shaking in her knees.

  “Don’t mind Daisy. She has a problem with rats. Have a drink, dear, you’ll feel better.” Mrs. Hawkley looked up at Oliver while she fondled the rodent. “She’s really an American, you see, through and through. They don’t have the same attitudes and traditions as us.”

  “That’s not it, Mom, and you know it,” Daisy said.

  “Well, her father was a bit of a disciplinarian and shut her up in the boiler room when she was a child. Apparently there were rats in there. She’s got a bit of a phobia.”

  Thirst looked at me.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “About the rats, I mean.”

  Daisy was calming herself little by little. She sat next to me, her face distorted with revulsion, while her mother played with Lord Denning.

  “Phobia’s right,” Daisy said. “It’s the weirdest thing. Totally irrational. That small creature is perceived by my subconscious as a monster the size of a lion.”

  “Rodents can’t grow that big,” Thirst said. “Although they did once. A fossil rat in Uruguay was the size of a small bull.”

  Daisy shuddered.

  “How did you know that?” I said.

  “Rodents are the most successful mammals. Fifty percent of mammals are rodents. Did you know there’s one rat in America for every person? Over two hundred million.”

  “You’ve made a study of this?”

  “How interesting,” Mrs. Hawkley said. “When Daisy went into higher education, I hoped she’d be full of interesting facts, but she came out smoking drugs and talking about sex.” She beamed at Thirst.

  “You’ve got to admire them, rats,” Thirst continued. “They’re like miniature gangsters. They’ve developed a whole lifestyle predating on human beings. They eat anything we eat. Then when they’ve had enough of us, they hit us with plague. Knocked out twenty-five million people in the Black Death. They make Hitler look like an amateur.” He looked up from his musings, caught my eye. “Encyclopaedia Britannica. Got hold of a complete set quite cheap the other week.”

  “How cheap?”

  He winked.

  “In the early years of the war,” Mrs. Hawkley said, “I used to visit an army camp near where we were living in Dagenham. Sometimes the boys would play the old ferret-in-the-trouser game. They’d tie up the legs of their trousers with string and put a live ferret down the top. Whoever kept it there longest won. Of course, the secret was to keep still so the ferret didn’t get too terrified and do some real damage.” She covered her mouth.

  “You’re getting drunk, Mom,” Daisy said.

  Mrs. Hawkley giggled. “I daresay, my love.” She gave her best smile, which seemed to express unlimited tolerance for human foibles worldwide.

  “You game, James?” Thirst said. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. He took the rat back from Mrs. Hawkley. “Anyone got a watch?”

  “James, don’t,” Daisy said.

  “Ooh, yes, I’ve got one.” Mrs. Hawkley showed us her wrist-watch.

  I looked at the four perpetually gnawing incisors below the twitching nose of the rodent. Thirst undid the button at the top of his jeans and pulled the zipper down an inch. He thrust the rat in headfirst. Immediately he started jumping from foot to foot and yelling. Mrs. Hawkley began a guffaw with a spray of champagne. Even Daisy laughed, a hand over her mouth.

  “How long?” Thirst yelled.

  “One minute forty seconds.”

  He danced around under the tree for another minute, then pulled the rat out by the tail. He held it up for me to take. It seemed in a state of shock. Its whiskers were quivering in an unusual way, and I noticed that its body was contorting.

  “I think there’s an advantage to going first,” I said.

  “James, if you, I mean, damage yourself…” Daisy smirked at her mother.

  Mrs. Hawkley smiled. “Faint heart never won fair lady, James,” she said.

  I was wearing a fairly loose-fitting pair of corduroy trousers. As soon as the animal was inside, I started doing exactly what Thirst had done, jumping from one foot to the other, yelling “Ah!” “Oo!” “Eee!” while Lord Denning conducted a tour of my genital area. Luckily the rat found its way down my left leg and out into the open, where Thirst scooped it up with a practiced hand.

  “Oliver won,” Mrs. Hawkley said between guffaws.

  Daisy was rolling on the ground, shaking uncontrollably, her phobia and the cold suddenly forgotten. She had passed beyond laughter into a helpless gurgling that might have been life-threatening, to judge from the desperate intakes of breath.

  “What a wonderful day,” Mrs. Hawkley said.

  “Oliver’s a magician,” Daisy gasped when she could talk again. She looked at him from the ground. “You turned this into a real party.”

  Thirst looked at me. His eyes said it: not such a social cripple after all, eh?

  I smiled at him, then looked away. It had been a long while since I’d seen Daisy laugh like that.

  24

  Despite the mutual teasing and intermittent flashes of the old humor, I had to admit, sadly, that the texture of the relationship between Daisy and me had changed. She dedicated more time to her women’s group, was less dependent on me for company. We no longer argued about news items, because she stopped sharing her political views with me.

  A new member, named Mick, had joined the group, bearing greetings from a sister church in Sausalito, near San Francisco. Since I never met this person, the picture I have of her in my mind is almost entirely my own creation. I decided she was shorter than Daisy, attractive, with a habit of pulling up her sleeves when she spoke, as if about to fight.

  There was a hunger for challenging leadership that Mick was happy to supply, and so she became the de facto leader. Daisy was fascinated by Mick’s pilgrimage through the West Coast therapy ashrams: Primal Scream, Transcendental Meditation, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, a guru called Maharishi something who made microwave ovens precipitate out of the ether (“I swear I actually saw one of these things falling out of the sky”), and of course Mick’s very own personal reclusive Master, called simply Kroom, who happened to be in England at the time.

  “But make no mistake, sisters,” Mick said in her cute-gravel voice (I imagined her to have a cute-gravel voice), “there’s only one therapy that really works, and that’s hands-on sex therapy.”

  Kroom apparently was a Master of Tantric Sex as well as a
psychotherapist.

  —

  During the washing up one Saturday, Daisy said, “D’you know it’s been more than a year since you licked my cunt?”

  I had finished the last mug and was pulling off my rubber gloves.

  “Really? That long? It seems only yesterday—”

  “Don’t mock. You’re so damned English, the way you can only talk about sex in a mocking way. I’m making a significant point here. Cunnilingus is a very important way to please and satisfy a woman.”

  “Got it.”

  I threw the gloves into the cupboard under the sink. I hated washing dishes and would have preferred that feminist dogma not decree that I do it.

  “I mean, I’m a much more generous lover than you are. Look how many times I suck you.”

  I cursed inwardly. I had missed a mug that Daisy had left on a high bookshelf, no doubt when she was stoned. How long had it been up there? Mildew left a scum. I fetched it.

  “How can you compare?” I said, putting the gloves on again. “Fellatio for you is a displacement activity. You do it when you’re bored with your book, or you’ve run out of dope. It’s very hard for a man to have the same relationship with a vagina or a clitoris.” Did one have relationships with vaginas and clitori? Was clitori the plural? Curious how seldom one needed the plural form. There was nothing for it, I would have to use a scour. I rummaged under the sink.

  “Why? Will you stop doing the goddamn dishes for one minute so we can deal with this?”

  I scratched my head and left off looking for the scour. The mug on the shelf reminded me to look under the bed. Despite my regular remonstrations, it was still a hiding place for cups, glasses, electricity bills, important letters from her employers. I found a dish with the remains of granola set like concrete. I stood up again, about to complain, thought better of it. Her sleeves were rolled up, hands on hips.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “You bet I’m serious. What’s the big difference between cunnilingus and fellatio?”

  I gazed into the treasure chest of facetious answers, resolutely closed it again. I was in a generous mood. My trial at the Bailey was going well.

  “Must we discuss it like this, yelling across the room? Why can’t we talk about it in bed tonight, while we’re making love? This is so…I don’t know…clinical.”

  Daisy nodded. “I’m just targeting one of your hang-ups. It’s probably a sansara from a previous lifetime.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind. Will you answer my question, please?”

  “Daisy, why are you doing this? We have the best sex life of anyone I know. You love it and I love it. Even our worst arguments can’t shake it. And now you come out with this. D’you think it’s a sensitive way of doing things, to lecture me into licking you?”

  “Lecture! Look who’s talking, the lecture king of North London. I try to make one little point, try to communicate a personal need, and he accuses me of lecturing. Will you stop doing the washing up!”

  “All right, I’ve stopped.” I took the gloves off, threw them on the draining board, faced her. Better, anyway, for the mug to soak. “I can’t believe you’re actually complaining about our sex life.”

  “Well, I am. It’s time you realized how complacent you’re getting. You’re becoming a very self-satisfied man.”

  “Complacent? Just because I don’t like that?”

  “Ah!”

  “I mean, I have liked it, I will again, I suppose.” Why was I blushing? “But it’s a very private thing, somehow; so much depends on…”

  “On what?”

  I hesitated. We discussed just about every aspect of copulation except that. It had remained locked away in some libidinous vault carefully protected from corrosion by words.

  “I just can’t talk about it.”

  “Ah! So you are hung up about it.”

  “Daisy, this is so destructive. Why are you letting them do this to us?”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “Mick. The women’s group.”

  “So now you’re saying I haven’t got a mind of my own?”

  I sat down on the bed, bewildered, while she maintained her warlike posture. Outside, it was a pleasant day, one of the first of spring. On such spring days, when my father wasn’t working, he used to take my mother for a stroll by the canal, pick daisies for her, ask her to recite something from Tennyson while he listened, enraptured. They held hands but let go if they saw anyone coming.

  Suddenly a cushion came flying across the room in my direction. Then another. When the third hit me on the head, I remained immobile.

  Daisy stood next to the bed, put a hand in my hair.

  “Poor Jimmy, he’s embarrassed.”

  “Get stuffed.”

  “Tch, tch. Never mind, it’s part of your learning curve.”

  “Pompous bitch.”

  “It’s what you say to me—all the time.”

  I looked up. It was true.

  She crawled over the bed to lie behind me, her back against the wall. She started to tickle me with her toes.

  “Jimmy.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go to sex therapy.”

  “You really think we need to?”

  “It’s what people do when there’s a blockage. You have this English wall of privacy. It really does frustrate the hell out of me sometimes. It won’t hurt. It’s not like going to the dentist.”

  “It is. That’s exactly what it’s going to be like for me.”

  —

  During the journey from Belsize Park to Mick’s place, Daisy was comforting and even confessed to wondering if it was really such a good idea. I felt nauseous. Did it really solve problems to share one’s sex life with strangers? Where did it end? Were taboos necessarily wrong? Did a sense of the sacred not enhance a relationship? Could anyone genuinely love Mick, whose vagina was apparently as public as a subway?

  “We don’t even know this guy,” I said.

  “I know, but Mick says he’s just amazing, and he has all these qualifications. He spent five years studying names.”

  “Names?”

  “Yes, names people use for each other.”

  “Like James and Daisy? For five years?”

  “Don’t take the piss out of him, Jimmy; you always do that when you can’t control something. This isn’t going to work if you try to control it.”

  “Well, I’m not going to lick you in front of him, even if he did study names for five years.”

  I had rather expected Kroom to be a diminutive Indian with terminal enigmatism. Daisy was disappointed that he was a North American. A New Yorker who had spent much of his adult life in California, he now lived most of the time in Sausalito. He and Mick shared a houseboat when they were home.

  He was a giant, six feet seven at least, with a long body and short legs. His receding gray hair was tied back in a ponytail. Around his neck he wore the kind of leather boot-lace tie that cowboys used to wear in B movies. He and Mick were living in a quiet North London suburb that had not yet been gentrified. Stooping, he filled the doorway of a small prewar semi smelling of sandalwood and mold growth. I discounted the foolish smile on his face; he was a psychotherapist, and therefore the foolishness of his smile must have a purpose. Daisy stayed close to me. I sensed she was uncomfortable with his being so tall.

  We sat down on a sofa in the tiny front sitting room. He sat in a chair, wrapping his arms around his knees, perhaps to try to make himself as small as we were. Daisy smiled sweetly at him, raised her hands as if to say, “Well, here we are.” Kroom, apparently much impressed by this semaphore, smiled back in a way that told Daisy she was delightful. I decided to smile, too. He nodded sagely. So far no one had spoken. Daisy finally said, “Ah ha!” apropos of nothing.

  “What is your question?” Kroom said.

  He wore thick spectacles. The myopia was clearly worse in the left eye, magnified by the lens to Cyclopean proportions. I found my
self addressing his left eye.

  “What is your real name?” I said.

  Daisy dug me painfully in the ribs. “It’s English humor,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “There are no real names,” Kroom said. The left eye blinked with peculiar slowness.

  “Well,” Daisy said, “we’re interested in sex therapy. Mick told us about you.”

  “Mick is very advanced.”

  The left eye dilated when he looked at Daisy and contracted when he looked at me.

  “The therapy usually works one on one. That means I would work with Daisy for an hour, and then I would work with James, maybe tomorrow. Sometimes we work dyads, though.”

  “Dyads?”

  “From the Greek duads,” I said. “Two.”

  “That is correct.”

  “I think we’d like a dyad.” Daisy pressed my hand.

  “For dyadic therapy we charge seventy-five percent of the double fee. Fifteen pounds per hour.”

  He took us into a large upstairs room full of sofas with stuffed Disney toys sitting on them. I had the impression that the curtains were permanently drawn.

  “Sex is a game from infancy.”

  The odor of sandalwood was stronger. In one corner there was a plastic bucket, apparently to catch water from a leak. In the center of the room, two upright chairs faced one another. One was red, the other white.

  “The red one is the hot seat. With dyads, one half of the dyad watches and listens while the other half is in the hot seat. I think James wants to go first.”

  I sat in the red chair, Kroom in the white. Daisy sat in a sofa and hugged Mickey Mouse.

  “During the session you may wish to take off some of your clothes. Feel free to do so. There are only myself, whom you should regard as a mirror, and the other half of your dyad in the room with you.”

  I looked pleadingly at Daisy, who looked down into the stuffed toy. I undid the top button of my shirt. Kroom turned down the lights until it was almost dark.