Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  I hear her thighs. Actually hear them softly meet as she leans over me to prise open one eyelid, then the other, even though she knows the game by now. I see her clearly, even with my eyes shut. Savour her, sense the accidental mambo between her legs, scissoring to send taut ripples through the globes of her bottom, apricot pestles poised for our spice.

  I’ll have her just now, take her by the scruff with my teeth and slam her like a frenzied dog, burst her, fuck her dead. As she leans close I beg one of my hands to fly to her, cup her moist heat then furrow a wake between lips of toasted brown before she can blush. But no hand obeys, save the hand of my mind, or perhaps it’s my soul, this knotted rag alight with forgotten pudenda; snatch I could’ve, should’ve, never did have, save this one engulfing fish, wriggling frantic with life around me.

  Another voice rings through the door, a foreign voice. “Do you want them now?”

  “Give me a minute,” says my girl. “I’ll tidy him up.”

  The tips of her fingers flick through what’s left of my hair, she straightens the sheet across my chest, smoothes it with the flat of her hand. Then a warm, wet flannel scrapes over my face like a babe’s mother’s tongue. My body lays quiet, but I can’t contain the dream in which my soul arches glistening above the bed, crackling with shock. Oozing screams, it rips open her skirt from behind and parts her legs, breaks them like halves of a wishbone, daring the glossy whites of her eyes to flash abandon. Soft as air, the fingers of my hand develop tentacles every bit as soft and mossy as the fronds of her writhing sex, they attach to it and try to suck, suck her near, suck her onto the bed until she kneels astride my chest, takes the head of my cock into her mouth, but I feel nothing. I yearn for a fresh spike of heat, but having transformed into her own texture I feel nothing at all.

  At the height of my dismay, more feet shuffle through the door. Familiar perfumes approach. A whimper pops over my bedside.

  “Will he feel anything?”

  It’s my wife. Her voice is strained, and comes announced by the tinkle of 43 tiny charms on the bracelet made of years I assured her were golden. My son shuffles beside her, a sensible man charged, like all children, with dismantling a musty net curtain of family lies.

  “He won’t feel a thing,” says my woman, “you can be quite sure of that.”

  “But I read somewhere that they can still hear, and think...”

  My woman hesitates. “Although it’s unpleasant, this is quite a routine process. Our best knowledge is that there’ll be no change in his reception of stimulus.”

  There’s a pause. I feel another hand on my forehead, my wife’s. My woman steps to her side with a soft kind of briskness that serves to set the moment in a mould of everyday necessity. She speaks.

  “I’m so sorry. It might help if you accept that the person you knew has already passed away – he hasn’t responded to stimuli in over a week now. I assure you his vital signs will die within a minute of being unplugged. I’m afraid his injuries were just too serious. We’ve done all we can.”

  “He’s had a good innings, mum,” says my son, stepping closer. “Thank you, Nurse, we don’t need to stay any longer.”

  Nurse gives them a moment before speaking. “Let me walk you back to the lounge. Doctor Bowman would like to see you, and I’m sure we can organise some coffee.”

  As their footsteps recede, my soul stiffens with the guilty resolve of a nine-year-old plotting trouble. Throbbing flanges erupt from my body with a sticky screech, dirty wings with arteries and organs unfurl like fetid petals to gather and twist around a smoking purple tower of flesh, a cock raging, already in spasm to discharge my life’s dreams.

  Nurse’s footsteps approach.

  I wait, alone between life and death, and burn rabid with lust for them both.

  MEN AND MOTORS

  Helen Walsh

  Helen Walsh was born in Warrington, England. Her debut, Brass, won the Betty Trask prize in 2005, and her follow-up, Once Upon a Time in England, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 2009. Walsh writes with purity and precision, skewering contemporary constructions of race, class and motherhood while unintentionally encouraging the robust use of reliable contraception.

  It’s a quarter to five in the morning. I can’t sleep. Again. So, for the fourth night running I find myself on 19th, hanging with the city’s insomniacs, cruisers and hustlers in the smouldering dregs of clubland. I’m in some all-night sex shop, wired on the free lattes, eyeing up the double-enders. Business has been slack this last month or so. A couple of femmes opened up a rival agency on Polk and recruited the meanest butches around – real mechanics with real stubble. I’m damn good at what I do but I’m not so devoted I’ll start shooting up testosterone like these other crazy bitches. However, the thought did drop into my head around three this morning, that if I want to hold on to my regulars I should at least upgrade my tools.

  I can’t quite decide between this sexy little stainless steel number and the standard rubber. The workman in me is browbeating me into the latter – the more durable, flexible and altogether more reliable model. Not to mention a whole $70 cheaper. But my aesthetic side won’t hear any of it. “Fuck reliability,” it’s saying. “If Hugh Hefner had’ve ranked reliability where the hell would he be now?” I kind of have to agree.

  I’m still trying to talk myself out of love with it when this big-breasted sales assistant rushes over, arms flailing wildly.

  “My God! It is! It’s you! I fucking knew it was...”

  I try to place her breasts. I never forget a set of breasts – least not a set as staggering as hers. This kind of thing happens all the time you see, clients accosting me, usually down the mall or the filling station. It’s true to say some of them seem genuinely betrayed when they see me out of my overalls. One crazy bitch even threatened to sue!

  “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

  “This is awesome! I can’t believe you’re in our shop!” she shrieks. “Can I just tell you that you completely rock! I like, totally dug your film. It’s my favourite of all the Men and Motors. Along with that one where they’re fucking in the truck? And that old lady from next door calls the cops ’cos she thinks she’s witnessing, like, a rape?”

  I wonder if some crazy club kid has spiked the lattes. I slap my cheek and blink my eyes real hard. She’s still there.

  She extends a slim brown hand.

  “Marie-Anne,” she says, grabbing mine and shaking it aggressively. “Big fan. Biiig fan.”

  A dozen eyes burn into me. I start to palpitate.

  “Look, I think you’ve mistaken me for someone.”

  “Ohmiggod!” she interjects. “Oh-my-fucking-God. You can sign them.”

  She scurries off, then returns seconds later with a clutch of videos. I just stand and stare. Shellshocked. It’s me. That’s fucking me – splashed across the jacket of a DIY porno. It’s me alright – or one of me. Lucky Strike hanging from my lips. Oil-sodden overalls unbuttoned to my waist. She plonks them on the counter and thrusts a pen in my face.

  “Jeez! This is, like, really starting to freak me?”

  And then it slaps me in the face. Hard, wet and fast.

  Hank...

  *

  “Hank,” I glower into the rear mirror. “Nice to meet you, Ma’am.”

  I turn down the corners of my mouth, snap the vowels wide open and give it my best Southern drawl. God knows why, but these women go crazy for a bit of redneck.

  “Haaank. Nice to meeet you Maaam.”

  I pull over on the hard shoulder, slap the hazards on, extract a battered street directory from the dashboard and try to figure out which end of Portola she lives on. South of the avenue, it’s all thirty-something soccer Mums who are neither sex-starved nor closets. They’re just looking for a quick, safe slam to break the monotony of school runs and housework. North Portola’s a lean stretch of cool lawns and long drives – sniffy old dames who don’t even like you taking a leak in their goddamn bathrooms, but who sure as hell do tip. Mr
s Piccioti – Ma’am – lives right spank in the middle, it’d seem.

  I check my teeth and gums for stray flakes of oatmeal, wink back at myself, then flip a U-ee onto the freeway.

  The assignment came at 7.00 this morning. Well, 6.30 if we’re being picky – that’s when my laptop hollered “You’ve Got Mail!” and wrenched me from my slumber just six yards from scoring a homer. But it was only when my cell phone started kicking off around 7.00 – some aggressive new kid from the agency threatening to take me offa their books – that I dragged myself out of bed to see what the story was.

  The job seemed easy enough and I figured I should be out of there and tucking into a big, dirty fry-up in time for the game. Some dames you see, they’ll send you these big crazy scenarios. They go way beyond fantasies some of these – they’re full-blown porn scripts. Some of them expect you to be word-perfect. Take crazy Mrs Cole up Nob Hill, for instance. I’m slamming her full force from behind with this big leather strap-on? It’s like tearing my goddamn snatch to pieces? And she signals with a wink just like it said in her script, so I start to crank the pace up, slap her ass and what have you, and I growl:

  “This how you like it, bitch?”

  And next thing you know she’s lunging a fist at me:

  “That’s not what it said!” she’s yelling. “The script is specific! It’s, ‘Is. This. How. You. Like. It You. Cock. Sucking. Ho!’”

  And then there’s the ad-libs, which most of the time is really just dames wanting to be raped or roughed up, but they’re too shy to say so. And I guess, when I’m spunky and upbeat, when I’m not nursing a hangover, I kind of get a kick out of the ad-libs. Yeah, those’ll definitely be my favourite gigs.

  Ma’am, though, I gets the feeling she just wants plain old Stanley Kowalski. The agency gave me the following brief:

  “She’ll address you by the name of ‘Hank’. You’ll address her as ‘Ma’am’. You’ll attend to an imaginary oil leak. She’ll invite you in to wash your hands. You’ll fuck her. No goddamn strap-ons, no rape heists. Nothing. Just good clean fucking, God love her.”

  She’s perched on a veranda swing – all honey-hued limbs and corn-coloured locks. An inch of skirt. My hangover just leaks away. Most of the time you see, it’s just a means of keeping the landlady off my back. Graft. Goddamn messy graft when you’ve got some arthritic old dame jamming your head between her legs, trying to coax an orgasm from her stubborn snatch. But, every now and then, some little slice of eye candy will sway into your life and punch the air from your tummy. And boy, just the sight of her naked calves swinging to and fro sets my loins reeling and my heart thumping. The realization that I’m going to touch her and taste her and carry her scent all the way back to my apartment – it’s enough to send a girl crazy.

  She walks over and I’m suddenly conscious of the stench of metabolized liquor on my breath and I’m wishing I’d used a mouth rinse. But BO and late-night breath, that’s how these dames like it, crazy bitches.

  I slide the window down.

  “Hello Ma’am,” I say, my eyes burning moodily in a classic James Dean grimace. I stroke an imaginary patch of stubble.

  She leans right in and dunks her cleavage on the ledge.

  “You must be Hank,” she purrs.

  Her voice is all husky and smoke scorched. It gets me right between the thighs. She steps back and opens the door for me. I jump down onto the gravel and light a Lucky. Our eyes crash above the flame. She rakes a hand through her locks and grins.

  “Okay Ma’am, let’s take a look at her.”

  I drop to my haunches and run a hand across the bonnet. I take a conclusive pull on the half-smoked cigarette and stub it out on the wheel. She smiles.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything, Hank.”

  She repositions herself, widening the distance between her feet and dragging my gaze up her legs and under her skirt. She’s wearing no panties and her snatch is all neat and shaven, just like the broads down at Lusty Lady.

  “Well, I’ll be in the kitchen I guess...” she says, then turns on her heels and floats off, leaving the sweet scent of pruned Portola snatch lingering in the breeze.

  *

  “All done, Ma’am,” I say when I step into the kitchen. She’s sitting at the table, naked, rolling a rubber onto a big, mother-fuck of a strap-on. It still kills me whenever I see a woman bagging up. I suppress a smirk.

  “You can wash your hands now,” she says and gestures with her eyes to the sink.

  I fill a bowl of hot soapy water and plunge my hands in. Outside, her gardener is driving a mower up and down the lawn, and on the pavement beyond, good decent folk are walking their dogs.

  She comes up behind, pushes her tits into my back and begins rubbing my crotch just like I’m a guy.

  “That feel good Hank?”

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “This what you’ve been hankering after all morning?”

  The quip’s there, sitting up and pointing its chin at me, but I let it go.

  “Yes Ma’am.”

  “Yeah, I seen the way you been looking at me, you dirty son of a bastard.”

  She unfastens my overalls, wrenches them down to my knees and prises my thighs apart. A brief pause, the sound of spitting, and of spit being smeared onto her cock, and then she enters me. Up the ass. Hard and fast.

  “That’ll teach you, Hank,” she gasps. “That’ll teach you, you goddamn son of a bitch.”

  “Yes Ma’am,” I say and, steadying myself against the lurch of the ride, smile politely at the gardener who has paused to wipe his brow.

  I guess I never did find out just why Hank was being taught a lesson. She came in me real quick, offered me some wet wipes and a piece of fruit cake, then sent me on my way with a bow leg and a $20 tip. She never mentioned no goddamn skin-flick though.

  *

  “Hey listen,” I say to the star-struck sales assistant. “So just how popular are my videos?”

  “Hell, these are selling like crazy. This is our sixth re-order in two weeks.”

  I sign all twelve of them, then exit the store with a couple tucked under my arm and the germ of an idea fluttering about my head. When I’m certain I’m out of earshot of any of my fans that may have followed me out, I get right on the phone to an agent friend of mine over in Santa Monica.

  “Hi. Cameron. How’s it going?”

  “How’s it fucking going? It’s five in the fucking morning!”

  “Yeah I know, but listen. D’you have any contacts in the skin trade? I’m thinking of branching out.”

  YOU’VE BEEN FRAMED

  Helen Walsh

  Helen Walsh was born in Warrington, England. Her debut, Brass, won the Betty Trask prize in 2005, and her follow-up, Once Upon a Time in England, won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 2009. Walsh writes with purity and precision, skewering contemporary constructions of race, class and motherhood while unintentionally encouraging the robust use of reliable contraception.

  Charlotte stood in the centre of the living room sizing up the new woman in her husband’s life. She eyeballed her for a long, bold instant, dragging her gaze across her breasts and along her thighs which spilled out of violent green stockings. Her legs were parted in such a way as to suggest dissoluteness, yet her eyes looked upwards from heavy sunken orbits and hinted at compliance, servility even. Charlotte felt conflicting emotions – hatred, jealousy, pity. She raised an eyebrow at her, sighed, then left for work.

  It was a birthday present from his mother – a Schiele print she’d “tracked down” in Vienna. She’d encased the poster in a ludicrous gold splintered frame and presented it as though it were an original canvas. Charlotte shook her head as she remembered the roguish grin her mother-in-law wore as she watched Jack plough through the intricate layers of wrapping.

  “It’s a sharing present,” she simpered. “You know, a house-warming and a birthday thing?”

  Jack had been pathetically pleased. He had sat there for a long time,
beaming at the woman and then at his mother.

  “She’s... It’s striking!” he gushed, squinting at the signature.

  “It’s a Schiele,” his mother declared, then turned to Charlotte: “You’re probably not au fait with him, darling. A bit before your time. He was an Expressionist. Fiercely anti-Classical. Renowned for giving his women great bulging vaginas, and truncating the penises of his males. Such a tormented soul, God bless him.”

  Charlotte bit hard on the flesh of her cheeks and forced a smile. She contemplated pointing out that every gauche undergraduate at St Martin’s had a Schiele tacked to their wall. That that wretch appeared on more of her students’ T-shirts than Che Guevara. But instead she said thank you, and erected it centre stage above the fireplace.

  Jack was a junior doctor working the graveyard shift at Bart’s. Each morning, when he arrived home, he’d crack open a beer, switch on the TV and digest the dregs of yesterday’s news. And only when the drama and discord of the hospital had leaked from his head would he retire to the bedroom. Often Charlotte would be waking as he was crawling into bed and they would meet in a hazy fumble of adolescent groping and delving that nine times out of ten blossomed into full-blown intercourse. Since the woman had arrived in their living room though, Jack had found himself body-swerving their pre-dawn bedroom gymnastics and devoting himself wholly to the solitary and selfish vocation of masturbation.

  It started the day after his birthday. He’d stumbled through the door, snapped on the TV and drifted off. When he woke it was past midday. The curtains were drawn and a blanket had been thrown over him. The first thing he saw was the woman’s alabaster thighs, lit up in a lash of colour from the TV. Lying flat on the sofa afforded him a new vantage point of the woman, and he noticed for the first time the gentle swell of flesh between her legs. Instinctively, he unzipped his trousers, took out his cock and luxuriated in a slow, languorous wank.