Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  Greta stood up and went to stand by Niklaus at the window. Outside, the light was fading fast, but even so she could still see shadows passing between the trees, the dim outlines of couples parading up and down the neat gravel pathways.

  “This is only a game, remember?” she said, but Niklaus shook his head in denial.

  “It’s you who does not remember,” he replied, then once again started in with his memories: how they had played hide-and-seek within the hotel’s immense network of rooms, how she had been wearing an emerald-green dress and how she had finally surrendered to him in one of the drawing rooms. They’d made love on the floor while the other guests watched from the far side of the room.

  “You were so beautiful,” he said. “They all admired you, all wanted you, you held them in the palm of your hand. You sucked me off in front of them as though it were the most ordinary act in the world. You paraded me before them like I was prize meat, made me stand in front of the women while they inspected my body... Some of them laughed: they said I was too thin, too fat, they ran their fingers over every inch of me, made me bend over, slapped me...”

  Niklaus’s words continued apace. Greta could hear them, picture the images he was conjuring up and, despite herself, contrary to everything she had vowed, slowly felt herself being drawn in. “Perhaps we should lie down,” she said, slipping out of her dress. “Perhaps I’ll remember more clearly if you explain these things to me again.”

  Niklaus was happy to follow her lead. Scenes were played and replayed, blood drawn, skin stretched and welted. Greta took a handful of Niklaus’s hair and dragged him round the room on his hands and knees, made him lie prostrate while she trampled his spine. She forced him to lie spread-eagled, face down on the bed, while she whipped him with leather, then revelled in the sight of the blood that stained the sheets. Life and love, memories, dreams and reflections, everything merged into one.

  “You won’t forget this now, will you?” Greta whispered as she touched his wounds, licked blood from her fingers. “You’re not going to forget this, not after what I’ve done to you, tell me you won’t. This is one memory you’ll never obliterate. Say it, say you’ll never forget what I’ve done to you, how you begged me to stop...”

  But Niklaus did not want to acquiesce to Greta’s demands. Instead, he wanted to forget all about being treated so shamefully.

  “I can’t recall,” he stuttered. “Nothing’s occurred, has it? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Last night,” Greta said, “when I punished you. You remember, I know you do. You’re still bleeding – if I touched you, you’d wince.”

  “As usual, you’re talking rubbish,” he said, after which he closed his eyes, rolled away from his lover.

  “Maybe,” she said, “but I’ll always remember. I’ll never forget for as long as I live.”

  At dawn, the couple rose, packed their bags and left the spa. Speeding down the driveway, Niklaus took one last look back. The hotel glimmered in the morning light; a bend in the road and the whole place disappeared.

  CALIFORNIA STREAMIN’

  Geoff Nicholson

  Geoff Nicholson is the author of sixteen novels, including Bleeding London, and most recently The City Under the Skin. His non-fiction titles include Sex Collectors and The Lost Art of Walking. He lives in Los Angeles.

  At first, all the movies made by Gold-on-Gold Productions were pretty much the same. An attractive woman, a California girl to be sure (though California girls are a surprisingly diverse group), is discovered reclining beside a sparkling, sunlit swimming pool. We’re high in the Hollywood Hills, the city nestling below us in the blue haze. Palm trees and Spanish-style bungalows are visible in the near distance, but we’re not really interested in the scenery. We’re focused on the girl. Her bikini is tight against her flesh, and we suspect she’s going to be taking it off quite soon. And we’re right.

  The sun beats down. She feels the heat, removes the bikini, drinks deeply from the big jug of water conveniently placed beside her. She’s likely to spill a little of the water on herself in the process. That’s OK. She begins touching her body, stroking it, playing with herself in a lazy, Californian sort of way. Before very long at all she comes to an intense if (let’s face it) not all that convincing orgasm.

  Then she gets up and takes a pee.

  All right! This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is the unique selling point of a Gold-on-Gold movie. The girl squats down, the camera zooms in, the girl opens herself up, holds her pussy lips apart so you can see right inside, through the folds, right into her body, into this truly secret place. And as you, and the camera, stare in tense fascination, the pure pink flesh of the vulva twitches a little, tautens, pulses, and before you know it pure, hot golden urine makes its appearance.

  The girl does it right there beside the pool, on the pale terracotta tiles, which darken as they get wet. The pee is just a trickle at first, then a stream, then a growing puddle that spreads out like a deep reservoir of gamily scented sexuality. OK, I exaggerate, but I’m trying to convey my enthusiasm here. Eventually the girl finishes peeing, looks straight into camera, winks, blows a kiss, and that’s the end of the movie.

  You have just seen a Gold-on-Gold Production, conceived, produced, directed and shot by Pat Reynolds. “Golden Showers from the Golden State” was their motto. Still is. And as you see, it was pretty harmless stuff back then. No humiliation, no peeing on other people’s bodies or faces or genitals, no drinking the damn stuff. That would have been disgusting.

  The story starts, as many do, in a bar in LA. That was where I met Pat Reynolds. I was working there semi-legally as a bartender. When I’d arrived in Tinseltown, six months earlier, I thought I’d have no trouble exploiting my breezy English charm and my two years at film school to get some cool job in the movie industry. Well, you can imagine how that panned out. I found myself working in a dive off Hollywood Boulevard (so much less cool than it sounds), doing my best to mix martinis, manhattans, cosmopolitans and all those other all-American painkillers.

  On this occasion I was also trying to be a good, genial bartender and I was reading out a news item from some tabloid. It was about a town in Sweden where they have an annual “pee outdoor day”. I think it had something to do with saving water by not flushing toilets, which is a big concern here in LA, too.

  A woman sitting at the bar listened and laughed and said in a deep, dry twang: “Where I live, every day is pee outside day.”

  I was already aware of her, because I’d served her a couple of margaritas. She was a good-looking older blonde, tough, tanned, only lightly tweaked by plastic surgery.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “I’m Pat Reynolds,” she said. “You’ve probably never heard of me.”

  But I had. Of course I had. It had just never occurred to me that Pat Reynolds was female.

  “I know your work,” I said. “I love it, but I never knew...”

  “Yeah, I’m all woman,” she said, and she was mocking both herself and me. “Make me another margarita, will you honey?”

  I admit that when I said I really loved her work, it had less to do with her film-making skills, which were modest, than with my passionate interest in the subject matter. What’s the big attraction of water sports, golden showers, piss play, toilet sex, whatever you want to call it? Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s got something to do with watching the forbidden, with naughtiness, dirtiness, the breaking of a small taboo. You’re publicly seeing something that’s supposed to be very private. Whatever. Basically I don’t analyse it too much. I just enjoy.

  So Pat Reynolds and I got talking and we got on pretty well. I guess she didn’t meet too many people who knew who she was and treated her like a celebrity. And we talked about me, and how I wanted to be in pictures, and she said: “All right, be at my house on Thursday morning. You’ve got yourself a job.”

  Even then I don’t suppose I thought this was going to be the big movie break
I’d been waiting for. I always knew she’d be employing me as a gofer, a dogsbody. On that first day, for instance, I learned that one thing I had to do was keep the girls well supplied with fluids – you only get out what you put in. There was beer and wine if they wanted it, but most of these girls were surprisingly clean-living. They only drank water, gallons of the stuff, and they could be very bitchy if they didn’t get precisely what they wanted. It had to be the right brand, at the right temperature, still or sparkling, with or without ice, with or without a slice of lemon or lime. I did my best to make the girls happy, told myself it was important for a would-be filmmaker to know how to deal with difficult performers.

  But that was only part of the job, and not the most important part as far as Pat was concerned. The really vital thing I had to do was mop up the pee and make sure none of it went into her precious swimming pool. It was a dirty job and I was really quite pleased to be the one doing it. I liked the girls. I liked their pee. I had my bucket and my sponge mop and I did what was required of me. Pat liked my work. I was efficient, enthusiastic, unobtrusive. I became a more or less permanent employee.

  This went on for some time, and then one day I had my big idea. I’d just cleaned up after a beautiful Valley girl called Bobbi, and I realised I had a whole sponge full of nothing but her pee. Instead of squeezing it out into my bucket, thereby diluting it, I squeezed it into the now empty water jug. Then later I poured it into one of the empty water bottles, and I took it home with me.

  I did it furtively so that nobody saw what I was doing, but I really needn’t have worried. I was just the guy with the mop. I was invisible as far as Bobbi was concerned. And Pat was far too busy to pay attention to what I was doing. The next day I did it again, and the next and the next.

  I suppose I’ve always been a bit of a collector: books, magazines, DVDs, the first 50 movies released by Gold-on-Gold Productions, but I’ve never collected anything with the enthusiasm and passion that I brought to urine. From that day on, every time I cleaned up after one of the models, I did the old mop-jug-bottle routine, and before long I had quite a little collection of samples of female urine. I labelled them carefully with the date and the girl’s name, and then I kept them in my fridge so they wouldn’t deteriorate. They looked great sitting there in neat rows on the shelves. You’d be amazed at the subtle variations in colour, from dark amber to the palest yellow, from soft wheat to saffron blond, and all the shades in between. The women, just like the urine, came in all types too; a huge range of ages, looks, ethnicities: classy older women, tattooed punks, Goth-chicks, Latino babes, co-eds. Some nights I’d just go home and gaze into my fridge and get horny as hell. For a while I was a very happy boy indeed.

  I didn’t spend much time hanging out with Pat. Ours was a strictly professional relationship, and director/producers really don’t fraternise much with their urine-moppers. But from time to time she did ask me what I liked about water sports and I told her pretty much what I’ve already told you: secrecy, intimacy, taboo. Nothing very original. And in any case, I thought, what could I possibly tell her that she didn’t already know?

  “You’re Pat Reynolds,” I said. “You make the best water sports movies on the planet. You know what it’s all about. Why are you even asking me?”

  “Because I don’t know what it’s all about, honey. Basically I just don’t get it, and it kind of disgusts me if you really want to know. I’m just into making the movies. And I’m into making money. Which is harder than it sounds. Sales have been pretty flat lately. Something’s going to have to change around here.”

  That’s when Pat had her big idea. She decided she’d have pairs and trios and groups of women in her movies. They’d pee in series, in sequence, alone and together. Gold-on-Gold Productions seemed to be mutating. Some of it, of course, was pretty hot. Women being dirty together is always good. But as far as my collection went it was a dead loss. All the various urines got mixed together, like badly thought-out cocktails: two parts Geena, one part Lexis, five parts Tawnee. What was the point of that? It offended my sensibilities and my collecting instincts, but I tolerated it.

  And then Pat came up with another idea, a really bad one. She introduced men to her films, and that changed everything. Now there was humiliation, peeing on breasts and faces and genitals, pee drinking, the works.

  I was really offended. Worse than that, I was still expected to do the mopping up. Wiping up women’s pee was one thing – a nice, sexy, appealing thing; wiping up men’s pee was just plain revolting. I was really angry with Pat. I felt like she’d let me down, betrayed me. She’d been telling the truth. She really didn’t get it. I worked on one shoot featuring men, did some perfunctory mopping, and then I quit.

  Pat said she understood. “Hey, we’ve all got our limits,” she said. “See you around. Have a nice life.”

  “Yeah right,” I said. “I’ll always have my memories,” but what I didn’t say was that I also still had a fridge full of urine samples.

  My great career in the movies was over and I went back to working in the bar. After a while Pat even started drinking there again. She behaved like there were no hard feelings, but I had plenty of hard feelings. I’d had the perfect job and she’d ruined everything.

  I used to go home at night after my shift at the bar, open up the fridge and stare at my collection. Where once it had been a vital, living sexy thing, it now seemed inert and finished. Then one night I did what anyone might do in the circumstances. I opened up one of the bottles, from a Korean girl who called herself Sapphire, and I filled an ice cube tray. Before too long I had enough, slightly yellowish, ice cubes to make quite a few margaritas. Next day I took them to work in a cool box.

  When I first served Pat Reynolds with a urine-enhanced margarita I expected her to choke and spit it out. I really did. In reality she knocked it back and didn’t even notice. She still hasn’t. She comes in all the time, drinks margaritas, and more often than not she compliments me on the way I make them.

  And you know, the funny thing is, whenever I see her drinking those margaritas, it’s the sexiest, dirtiest, most arousing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Go figure, as we like to say in LA. Of course, my collection is gradually being depleted, but under the circumstances, I think it’s well worth it.

  LUST

  D. B. C. Pierre

  D. B. C. Pierre is best known for his work, Vernon God Little, which won him the Booker Prize in 2003. Pierre used the prize money to repay his debts, which he incurred during his twenties while suffering from psychological issues and drug abuse. In 2007, Vernon God Little was adapted for the London stage. To date, the work has been translated in more than forty countries worldwide, and produced as a play by at least four theatre companies. More recently, Pierre returned to Mexico, where he spent his youth, to explore and document the downfall of the Aztecs.

  In my room there’s a woman I can’t see or speak to. But I can taste her. Taste her coming my way. My ragged little snotbox. I entice her with my mind, scrape a dirt clearing on its floor for her to blare sticky and languid like melted brass music dripping genital sweat. My chutney bacchanal.

  My sin, but like all sins she poisons me slowly, insufficiently. So I love her. To possess her I’ve only to scrape the right sounds from my tongue. The buff gasps, the stinging red cheeks we’d enjoy if only I spoke, but I don’t, can’t speak to her at all. So I pelt kernels of aching smut from my mind knowing that one of these, ingested, will explode through her, spit her ribs in bloody splinters like sperm from a gun. I’ll fill her with my fury.

  She knows this. She feels me call to her. And I know she’ll come to me. In time.

  So here you find me. My life of carefully matched socks, awkwardness with family, my reliance on stand-ins for my mother, has been reduced to this rude throbbing thing, admitting no other thought than the dew on this woman’s pouch, no other plan but to live like a worm in her nectar.

  She’s close by me now. I sense her as she bends forward beside m
e, oyster bed pleated into damp marmite silk beneath nylon beneath cotton, a taste of nuts chewed with butter burnt in blood. Then footsteps. Now voices.

  “Are they ready?” asks a man from the door.

  “I’ve prepared them as best I can,” says the woman. “They should be all right.”

  “Sort out that hose before they come in, will you? I’ve checked the pressure twice, but it’s given different readings.”

  The routine in my room is different today. I don’t know why. I don’t dwell on it either, being more concerned with her seeming detachment from me. I ache with her detachment. Her voice gives no hint of this fever, the cholera set to seal us in an aspic of burst veins and drumbeats when I’m hers. Instead she slides tidily around the room, not moaning with succulent anticipation, but serving words as crisp and ordinary as cups of hot tea. Wasted little trout. She always plays this game, battering me with the swish of her boyish gait, fetching me an odd chirp of plimsoll on lino, or a breath of dark air from the ruptured rose cloud of her sex. She moves lightly, humming, sometimes singing softly and tunelessly, always pop hits of the kind designed to stimulate blood flow in the very young. It drives me insane for her. She’s fucking life itself. I rage to reach out and smack her gap with the flat of my hand. But I can’t.

  “Oh, and – signatures?” the man asks from the door.

  “Uh-huh,” she says.

  “All yours then. Let me know if you need a hand with him.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be fine.”

  She’ll be fine. She’ll be fine when I suck the fucking womb out of her. I track the man’s steps as they move away up the corridor. Then we’re alone.

  She moves closer still. Her taste overwhelms me, I hear her sleeves concertina to blow the hint of cheap deodorant that so embodies her rangy presence. This is a girl from the suburbs, a could’ve-been-a-lawyer who lost her early twenties to romance, holiday repping, anything to avoid life with her parents. A liberal, if not bohemian young woman who’s baked a conservative crust around her steaming wet drives and now delights in the effect of their vapours escaping. My little pheromone barb. Her breath blows me pictures of her drenched in our sweat, losing sobs from her mouth with delicious, deliberate inadvertence.