Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  She was sure no one was like him, and that she was being offered a never-to-be-repeated chance for a new life, a bold departure from the anxious, inhibited existence her parents had groomed her for. Polite old people who’d probably never had an orgasm, sleeping in separate beds, shuffling around their little suburban house, fearful of hearing a naughty word on television. Hugh would teach her that nothing was dirty, if she let him. He would cure her low self-esteem. He would bring out a new Helena in her, a confident young woman with a raunchy grin, who didn’t care what anyone else thought of her. Together they would live by their own rules.

  Helena padded into the bathroom, clutching toothbrush and toothpaste. Her feet were sweaty and chafed from a long day in pursuit of culture; it was an unexpected pleasure to feel the coolness of the bathroom tiles under her naked toes. She brushed her teeth and gulped cold water flavoured with spearmint, an agreeably fresh taste after all the alcohol.

  The en suite was tiny but spotlessly clean – not so much as a Swede’s blonde hair in the bathtub plughole. Midget soaps lay waiting in a variety of nooks and receptacles. There was a little light above the mirror.

  “Don’t be too long, true love,” he called out to her.

  She found him reflected in the bathroom mirror, visible through a gap in the door. Leaning close to the glass, she removed her contact lenses. He had already removed his clothing.

  *

  Next morning, they woke early, as sun streamed in through windows they’d forgotten to curtain off, and traffic hissed and hooted along Minto Street back into the Festival.

  “I love you,” he murmured, reaching across the expanse of double bed to stroke her face.

  She smiled; he wasn’t entirely in focus – a bit of a blur, actually – when she wasn’t wearing her lenses, but she felt self-conscious about putting them in now, when underneath the fleecy arabesques of the bedcovers she was naked from the waist up, and he was stroking her cheek so romantically.

  “I’m starving,” he said. “Let’s grab some breakfast.”

  She wasn’t really hungry. Last night’s dinner felt like it was sitting undigested in her system somewhere, and yet her stomach felt vacant and queasy. She decided she was hung-over.

  “I’m hung-over,” she said. It seemed like an earthy, self-confident thing for her to come out with – a comment you’d expect from a woman who was well accustomed to the occasional excess. She was shyly proud.

  “Well, come and watch me eat, then,” he said, throwing the covers wide and swinging out of bed – exposing her, too. “You’ll want it once you’re there.”

  Helena noticed the big stain on the sheet near her hip. A phallic shape made not by his phallus, but by the cleft of her buttocks, filled in with the blurred pastel colours of blood and semen.

  “Your autograph,” he complimented her, leaning across the bed to kiss her on the neck. “My sexy, sexy woman.” For a moment she felt like a movie actress, or some pagan goddess of love. Then she thought of Mrs Waddington doing the laundry.

  “We’re checking out this morning, yes?” she said.

  “Sure,” he grinned. “But we’ve paid for the sausages from hell, so let’s go down and get ’em.” And he stood peering at brass submarines until she was ready.

  The dining room was empty when they arrived, insofar as it did not yet contain the rumoured Germans or South Africans. It was burgeoning with clutter of other kinds: plastic flowers, jumbles of foil-wrapped jams, marmalades, butters and margarines, ornate silver toast racks, jumbo Tupperware containers of cornflakes and muesli, jugs of milk and hot water – all arranged on tablecloths with non-matching tartan patterns, all reflecting the brilliant sunlight flooding in from the street. On the walls, dozens of framed photographs of varying degrees of sharpness and quality chronicled the lives of two children, claiming almost every inch of space not already occupied by the fire extinguisher and the certificate of kitchen hygiene. A cheery male voice from the adjacent room called out “Good morning!”

  Jim Waddington hurried out to meet them. A wiry little man with massive hands and a face like an aged cowboy from the golden age of westerns, he wore a plastic pinafore that said MY OTHER APRON IS A VERSACE. Courteously, he addressed Helena first, swivelling his smiling head down to meet her face-to-face.

  “Eggs?” he enquired, his eyebrows bristling with excess fur.

  “None for me, thanks,” said Helena.

  “Sausages? We’ve got Linda McCartney in there, if you’re vegetarian.”

  Hugh laughed. “Somebody else can have the pleasure of eating Linda,” he said. “I’ll have a couple of regular sausages, a poached egg, toast, whatever. We’ll let you know if Helena here perks up, won’t we?”

  Helena nodded, blushing. She fumbled for her little glass of orange juice and drank from it gratefully, closing her eyes. When she opened them again, the old man was gone.

  Hugh had already finished one cup of coffee, and had left his seat to examine the photographs hung on the walls. They were evidently of the Waddingtons’ son and daughter, each caught at every significant moment in their lives – birth (well, very soon after), first steps, primary school, graduations, sporting events, overseas travels, marriages. In fact, the daughter seemed to have two marriages hanging up there in frames, a disconcertingly honest feature of this pictorial chronology. Helena thought this over, found it sort of touching. Sheer intensity of pride in their offspring had given these old folk, conservative though they were, the courage to admit a few modern mishaps along the way. As long as the children didn’t mind their lives being displayed this way on the walls of a B&B, it was really quite nice, wasn’t it? They probably had a sense of humour.

  Everybody had more sense of humour than her, let’s face it.

  Helena was just about to fetch herself some cereal when she noticed that Hugh, who was standing with his back to her, hands clasped loosely behind his back, had her blood all over his fingers.

  “Look at your hands,” she hissed at him in a tiny shrill voice when he sat down. “You didn’t wash them!”

  He appraised his fingers calmly, then smiled at her, a beautiful young man with the self-assurance of a cat.

  “Sure I washed them,” he murmured seductively. “But not enough to get you off them. You leave a potent mark, don’t you?” And he stroked his head against her shoulder, as if in obeisance to her sexual power.

  Mr Waddington was emerging from the kitchen with the hot stuff on a plate.

  “Don’t let him see,” begged Helena in an urgent whisper.

  Surprisingly, Hugh did as she asked, keeping his hands below tablecloth level as the eggs and sausages were served up before him.

  “Are you all right?” said the old man to Helena, fatherly concern wrinkling his already intricate features.

  “Yes, thank you,” she said. “I – I have a bit of a hangover, I think.”

  The old man smiled forgivingly.

  “We’ve got some aspirin through there, or Alka Seltzer.” He spread his palms theatrically. “We’re the B&B with everything.”

  “That’s very kind,” demurred Helena, shaking her head in embarrassment. But he scurried off, and returned seconds later with a glass of fizzing antacid which he placed in front of the pale young lady. Mercifully, he couldn’t stick around to watch its effects on her, as two dishevelled South Africans shambled into the dining room looking hungry and confused.

  “This is the place for breakfast, yeah?” one of them enquired.

  Mr Waddington, plainly a veteran of every conceivable brainless question that could issue from human lips, hastened to put the newcomers at their ease.

  “Any table, any table,” he gestured. “Sausages?” And so on.

  “He’s a nice old man, isn’t he?” Helena asked Hugh a minute later as she sipped a little milk to chase away the taste of the medicine.

  “Probably a nutter,” Hugh smirked. His blood-tinged hands were out again, nursing a coffee cup. “What a life, eh? His wife stays up all nig
ht in case people set fire to the place, and he gets up at the crack of dawn to fry sausages. They probably haven’t slept together in years.”

  “They’re very proud of their children.”

  “They’d have to be, wouldn’t they? Living vicariously.”

  “He’s got an amazing face...” mused Helena. “Like a piece of driftwood. Wouldn’t you like to take a picture of it?”

  Hugh winced slightly, reluctant to go too deeply into the complexities of where the art of photography was at just now.

  “Well, you know... there’s this kind of... fallacy of truth in high-resolution, deep-focus images of the elderly. It’s been done to death. And half of these wizened old characters are playing up to the camera anyway. There’s nothing secret being captured at all, no real disclosure, it’s an act.” Staring into the recesses of his own creativity, he went on: “Me, I’ve been kicking around some ideas for a new photographic project, sort of an infrared thing, done digitally. The heat that people give off... colours... almost abstract relationships...” He shrugged his shoulders, a shadow on his brow. “I don’t want to say too much about it yet.”

  “It sounds intriguing,” said Helena, reassuring herself that whatever Hugh came up with had to be better than some of the stuff they’d seen at the Edinburgh Festival. Feeling marginally better, she wondered if she should eat something after all. “What are the sausages like?”

  He grinned, relieved to be back on a subject he could share with her.

  “There’s nothing like a B&B banger,” he enthused in a mischievous whisper. “It’s weird, but you can’t buy them in shops, butchers, anywhere. Only in B&Bs. They have this distinctive, totally homogenous filling and a kind of a... sweaty texture on the outside. You can’t work out what sort of meat it is. That’s because it’s dog, y’see. There’s a special top-secret factory in Walthamstow where they make them.”

  “Hugh, please,” she sighed, losing her appetite even for cornflakes.

  He saw in her eyes that he had overstepped the line.

  “I’m sorry, true love,” he said, deciding that the witticism about Auschwitz for dogs could wait till another time, or different company. “A whole week of Edinburgh Festival stretching the limits of good taste has finally got to me, I think. It’ll be a relief when we’re back to normality, eh? Or at least, what’s normal for us.” And he kissed the traces of her on his fingers, affectionately, with his gorgeous lips.

  She nodded, tried again to smile, but this time she didn’t manage it. Instead she looked away, at the photographs on the dining-room walls. The Waddingtons’ daughter was beaming in the first of her wedding pictures, all fired up to be happy ever after. But it was the wrong man. The wrong man.

  *

  When Mr and Mrs Brown had checked out, Mr and Mrs Waddington caught up with each other in the B&B’s living room. Guests weren’t invited in here, unless they showed so much interest in the Waddingtons’ children that they were in the market for the home movies as well.

  The living room was furnished in much the same taste as the rest of the house, though one wall was bare and the sofa, obviously much-loved, was in somewhat shabbier repair. Sheep’s wool rugs dyed pink and blue were scattered on the browny-purple carpet. Mr Waddington drew the curtains, filtering out the harsh sunshine. Frying fat made his eyes sore, even after all these years.

  The breakfast things had been cleared away now. The bedlinen was in a huge basket in the hallway, ready for washing. There was no big rush. The Germans were staying for another night, but they were out sightseeing already. The South Africans were on their way back to South Africa. The Browns hadn’t said where they were going – back to the futon, probably.

  “Put the answering machine on, Jim,” said Mrs Waddington, falling back into the pillowy velour of the sofa. “We’ve made enough money for one week, surely.”

  Jim fiddled with the telephone while his wife fiddled with the controls of the video machine. By the time he came to sit beside her, a vivid picture had materialised on their state-of-the-art TV screen, replacing the snowy white of static.

  “So,” he said, “what did you think of those last two – Mr and Mrs Brown?”

  Nora leaned against his shoulder, tired and underslept.

  “They’re not Mr and Mrs,” she said. “Nor will they be, ever.”

  “Well...” he murmured, rubbing his eyes as she fast-forwarded the video, “that’s in the lap of the Gods, isn’t it?”

  Nora leaned forward in the couch, concentrating on the buttons of the remote control now, trying to find the bit she wanted to show him.

  “They’ll never get as far as the altar,” she prophesied. “She’s trying to convince herself she loves him. But she hates him really. And deep down she knows it already. I’d give it three weeks at the most, from the time they set foot outside our door.”

  Jim Waddington chuckled, resting his great gnarled hand on his wife’s knee.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to know?” he said. “To follow them and find out?”

  “Control yourself, Mr Super Spy,” cautioned Nora teasingly. “You see enough as it is.”

  As if to prove her point, she snuggled up close to him and drew his attention to the TV screen: she’d found the bit that had particularly struck her last night.

  Together they sat in the dimness and watched Mr and Mrs Brown having sex, in crystal-clear footage chosen from among the three video cameras hidden behind the submarines.

  “Look at the expression on her face,” said Nora as the well-tanned, well-muscled, plainly drunk young man was shuddering to orgasm, his lover staring up over his shoulder.

  “She doesn’t look too happy,” admitted Jim. He didn’t like to judge people harshly. “Although she wasn’t so well, you know. I had to give her Alka Seltzer at breakfast.”

  “It’s more than that.” His wife leaned over the remote control, fast-forwarding again. A heavy lock of her hair swung loose from its elastic band, dangling over one eye, and, in annoyance, she clawed the whole lot of it free. A mass of lush grey hair tumbled over her shoulders. “Look here,” she said, pointing at the screen.

  The young man seemed to be asking the young woman something. She half-smiled, awkward, evasive. She stroked his hair, as if to say that he was wonderful, and she wouldn’t have expected an orgasm anyway, not when she was so sleepy and exhausted. Manfully, he pulled the covers back from her naked body and refused to let her accept less than she was entitled to. His head dipped between her legs, and she cradled it in her hands uneasily, as if it were a stranger’s lapdog she couldn’t slap away.

  “What lovely breasts she’s got,” remarked Mr Waddington wistfully.

  “Keep your eyes on the face, Mr Milk Jugs,” his wife reminded him. “Look now!”

  “She flinched,” observed Mr Waddington.

  “Damn right she flinched,” said his wife. “This fellow hasn’t got a clue. He thinks he’s ducking for an apple in a barrel.”

  Mr Waddington raised his prodigious eyebrows in gentle censure.

  “Anyone can lick the wrong spot once...”

  “Always sticking up for the men!” she teased him bawdily, patting his erection through his trousers. “Look again!”

  Mr Waddington looked again, for the duration of the young woman’s orgasm, if orgasm it was.

  “Poor thing,” he said at last, converted wholly to his wife’s view. “She might as well’ve been at the dentist’s.”

  But Nora had already let her attention wander from the video replay, knowing he’d see it her way soon. She was stroking her cheek against her husband’s thigh, nuzzling her nose against the bulge of his penis.

  “Put the Olssons on,” she murmured softly.

  “The Olssons?” he responded in mild exasperation.

  “I’m in the mood,” she crooned.

  “Bloody heck,” he complained. “It’s on Super 8.”

  “I know that,” she sighed, pulling up her dress, exposing the acre of thigh he’d always loved.
>
  Grumbling theatrically, Jim Waddington got up and fetched the ancient Super 8 projector out of the cupboard. The Olssons were still spooled onto it from the time before. With his big clever hands, he had them up and running in no time – if running was the right word for it.

  “This old machine isn’t going to last for ever, you know,” he said, sharpening the focus on the two young lovers writhing on the bare wall.

  “Get it transferred to video, then,” said Nora, pulling him back to her, unfastening the belt of his trousers as she did so.

  “Some snooper in the video lab would report us for sure,” he muttered. “Privacy isn’t what it used to be.”

  As ever, his prophecies of technological and sociological doom made little impression on his wife. She’d taken up her usual position behind the projector, her face glowing orange in the light reflecting back from the young lovers fucking each other’s brains out in 1973, when the B&B was new.

  “Come on,” she growled, wiggling her naked behind, as flushed and wet for him as on the night they’d first made love.

  He shuffled up close, his knees furrowing the plush of the sheepskin, and slid his penis into her.

  “What does it feel like?” she asked. In all their years together, they’d never got around to using words like “cunt”, “prick” and “fuck” themselves; they were from a more old-fashioned generation.

  “Like an angel’s mouth,” he said.

  She laughed, gripping onto him tight as the lovers of a bygone age arched their glowing young bodies in mutual ecstasy.

  “You always knew what to say,” she purred.

  NEVERTIRE

  Nikki Gemmell

  Nikki Gemmell is a bestselling Australian author who has written nine novels and four works of non-fiction. Her work has been internationally acclaimed and translated into twenty-two languages. Her distinctive style using the second-person narrative has earned her critical and popular acclaim in France where she is seen as a female Jack Kerouac. She has been hailed as one of the most original and engaging authors of her generation.