Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 6

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘We wear the same label—our lingerie—and it’s the same as my mother’s.’

  Lis looked down at herself, ‘Yes, of course.’

  She came over to him, ‘Lingerie tells us much about how we see ourselves and how we wish to be seen—I often think of asking my patients to show me their underwear—I suppose as a doctor I could ask them to undress.’ Her voice was now like that of a big sister coaching a younger sister. ‘You must not have ‘first’ and ‘second’ underwear—everything should be ‘best’. You know about the “housewives’ bra”?’

  ‘Nooo. I don’t know about housewives.’

  She was now standing before him and he could smell her, her groin. ‘Housewives is short-hand for those women who’ve given up on their looks and wear faded, tired, sexless underwear Lingerie says everything about our bodies and selves. Even men’s underwear.’

  She came down beside him on the chair, and reaching down between his legs, her fingers gently stroked his stomach and inside his legs. She adjusted the satin side-straps of the restraint, pulling them tighter on his erection: the tightness, her action, vitalised it in an extraordinary way. He arched himself to her as a gesture of submission, enabling her to tighten the straps, and wanting, yearning, for her to caress his confined pussy.

  ‘That’s nicely tight,’ he said, breathlessly. They were in an erotic play. He found the lines were written inside him, audacious, ‘but is it tight enough?’

  ‘From now on wear it this tight and think of me.’

  ‘Yes,’ he could hardly speak.

  She stood up, ‘There is not enough tightness in your dress,’ she laughed. ‘We must teach you the aesthetics of constriction.’

  She gave his shoulder a small push, ‘Stand up’.

  Sønny stood up.

  She turned herself around, ‘Undo my corselet.’ Her voice had again changed, no longer a big sister, now a masterful lover.

  ‘Take off your blouse and bra,’ she said.

  Sønny did as he was told.

  ‘Turn around.’ He did so, and felt her put the corselet on him. It was still warm from her body.

  She drew the laces of the corselet tight, constraining Sønny’s waist. ‘Breath in.’

  He did her bidding.

  She again tightened it.

  ‘I wear the lace-up corset for sexiness but also as an instruction to my body. It pleases my present male lover. And it pleasures me. And, incidentally, it pleasures your mother. You should wear one to give you more waist and to throw up your breasts and push out your buttocks which, any day now, will be the object of many ardent desires.’

  ‘It can be tighter than that,’ Sønny said, breathlessly. ‘If you want.’

  ‘It can, can it?’ Lis tightened it. Sønny let out a small gasp of pleasure from the tightness and her sexual severity. ‘The tightness creates in you a certain state of mind. As neither boy nor girl you will have a body screaming with desire in two worlds, giving out desire and creating desire around you.’

  ‘You never said that in session.’

  ‘This is another kind of session,’ she said, jokingly.

  ‘My cock, pussy, has swelled very tight.’

  ‘You should always feel a tightness between your legs and around your breasts and around the waist.’

  They embraced, then, into a full kiss.

  As the kiss finished, Lis eased him back in his chair and rose and went to her chair. She sat her buttocks on the edge of the chair and let her legs fall either side of the chair, her legs widely open, her shaved vagina displayed. Her clitoris swollen. He gazed at the clitoris.

  ‘You’re shaved too, between your legs?’ his voice was hardly there as he looked over at her.

  ‘Pubic hair is not sensual; it is only sensual if it’s not there. No one likes pubic hair. Would you like to milk yourself for me?’

  ‘Yes, oh yes, let me cum for you, Lis,’ he said, reaching down between his legs again.

  ‘But would it give me any pleasure?’ Her voice had a delicious, teasing, coldness to it.

  ‘I could pleasure you.’

  ‘How do you think you could pleasure me?’

  Sønny was silent.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I could tongue you.’

  ‘Tongue me? I’d like that.’

  ‘Kiss you there.’ Sønny pointed at her wet opening, displayed for him.

  ‘You’d like to do that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes.’

  Lis used both hands to open wide her pink vagina lips to Sønny. He was again transfixed by her large, swollen clitoris.

  ‘Please, let me.’

  ‘First milk yourself for me. I will watch you.’

  Sønny lay back in his chair achingly tight in the restraint as he stroked it, staring at Lis’s wide opening, seeing the wet lips of her vagina, and the moist opening; it seemed to glisten. It was the second vagina that he’d seen, his mother’s the first. He yearned for his anus to become as inviting and capacious and as beckoning an opening as hers was.

  ‘You’re ravishing,’ he said in the small voice. ‘Your vagina is superb, Lis—your smell is superb—I can smell you. I want to kiss your opening.’

  Sønny stroked himself through the silk cache. He was close to coming.

  ‘Are you close?’

  Breathlessly, Sønny said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘You may kiss my vagina, now.’

  Sønny, with his hand on his cock tight, left his chair and, kneeling, entered his face into Lis’s wide, open vagina. He was overwhelmed by the pungent odour and the wetness that was flowing from her opening. He buried his face in that private, dark, hot, wet place and felt close to oblivion as, at last, he came, the semen held in the silk of the restraint, the hot, wet semen bathing his pussy and groin. While Lis murmured, ‘cum, cum my girl-boy, cum for your Lis.’

  His lips kissed her vagina in a deep surrendering kiss. He came and came, and felt enfolded in the power of this woman and the power of his mother, ecstatic from now knowing that they had helped fashion him to be what he was, and he gave himself fully and absolutely to it, to being this, to being fully this which, through them, he now was.

  Dancing in the Dark: a prose album

  Zoe Fraser

  Fugue: Meditations On Wheels

  Subject: The Heroine on a Road Trip

  Opening Notes: Establish the beat, drive all night (a test of endurance)

  WOMEN OF SPRINGSTEEN SONGS: She’s The One

  Billie Lena Lisa Sandy Joan Lynette Ricky Beth Jean Delilah Missy Carol Wanda Candy Frankie Betty Leah Jane Jackie Sherry Charlotte Lorraine Fiona Dinah Mona Kitty Doreen Juliet Mary Caroline Sheena Nancy Gloria Margarita Anna Lou Angel Terry Isabella Contessa Rosie Angeline Lou Theresa Bobby Sally Louisa Eve Janey Suzy Cynthia Maria Lee Catherine Venus Annie Jenny Linda Bobbie Kate Cherry…

  Wendy... Wendy... Wendy...Wendy Darling, blew in from Neverland, to grit your grease, underneath her fingernails.

  You just turn on the engine and let your mind open. Let it wander. How well driving lends itself to roaming thoughts. Cruise control. Highway driving; eyes fixed on one point ahead, the tail-lights of the car in front. Like reading a book, you don’t study what is physically before you, the printed words. You see beyond it. Through it.

  Hitting all the red lights before the exit. If only Wendy hadn’t stopped to look in the mirror, turned back to undo an extra button on her blouse. Tight blue jeans; red sneakers. Form and function. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty. War paint, lipstick a little smudged, mascara flaked on her cheekbones like gunpowder. A little touch up and a little paint. Eyes as clear as a high note. In the slow pan of shifting streetlight, a clue is revealed, a red tattoo in the crook of her arm. A secret space; two hearts, intertwined.

  Scrapbook diary on the passenger seat, love letters, snapshots of all her leading men, her (invented) heroes; except one—his presence lingering all around. Next to the scrapbook, a red leather wallet. Peeking out over the top, a driver’s licence.
A name, just perceptible—Wendy. Every woman at once, upon a time.

  For some people, it’s the beat that snares, stops them in their tracks. Or the melody haunts, echoes in their mind all day, a hummed talisman. Sometimes though, it’s the lyrics, a poem untangled from the web of music. Hidden messages, haphazard divinity, communicated to you for a reason. Stopping at a petrol station to fill up the tank. Fuel type: fear of containment. There are only so many fuel stops in the one town, they become graveyards for memories: who she was the last time she filled up here, who she was with. More often than not, she was driving intoxicated men around. Always having to turn down her music, conceal the private messages from her secret sonic world. The same music playing now, the growl of Springsteen. ‘The River’.

  Driving home she grabs something to eat

  Turns a corner and drives down her street

  Into a row of houses she just melts away

  Like the scenery in another man’s play

  Streams, threads, like the weave of a flag, rivulets branching off but flowing to the same place, connecting and blending—to the source. You always go back, where you come from is always carried inside you. The track listing indelibly etched on her mind, she anticipates the opening notes of each song. Like recovering a forgotten self, who she used to be; like lost, or forgotten, lovers.

  There’s the you in my head I tell things to, Wendy muses. We work wonderfully together in that world. I know the feel of your body, your hair, your smell.

  The highway coming up fast—a woman, a mother figure. A lady river without a name. She purrs along, like driving a stolen car by night, going so fast, half wanting to be caught. Melting away, the cool of the night takes the edge off the heat. She’ll drive until she sees sun. Crescendo.

  Having no concept of the totality, the full body of others’ lives, we see them as beginning, coming into being, only when we are in contact with them. They are born every time we meet them. Like songs, they lie still, submerged, until they are played, conjured, sending them whirring into action, evoking their music.

  Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact

  But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

  Wendy murmuring questions into the dark. More questions than answers.

  Can you fall in love with someone you don’t know?

  Am I in love with you or an idea of you?

  A fistful of certainties.

  You can love someone for what they are or in despite of what they are.

  The disparity between love and romance.

  There’s the getting out of the place, and there’s the getting out of the holding pattern—wherever you go, there you are.

  The symbiotic heartbeat: “I wanna know if love is real... I’m gonna go out tonight, gonna find out what I got ...”

  A hand trailing lazily down the keys of a piano.

  None of this happened, but it’s all true.

  I’m on Fire: the First ‘Bruce’

  It is summer. It always seems like summer in childhood recollections. There is the morning light, the front yard, and my father. My father and his masterwork, a big old car. Every weekend, early, a creature of habit, he’d be out front working on that car, in uniform, an old red plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off. My dad wasn’t too tall. Dark curly hair; dark, whisky-coloured eyes. Later, at school, I’d encounter the word melancholy. I’d envision a stack of watermelons. The image bringing the taste of the fruit to my mouth.

  When Ifound out about melancholy, I thought of my dad’s eyes. He wouldn’t have described himself that way. The word would have been foreign to him.

  Dad played music while he worked—from a turntable inside the garage the sound of rock–and-roll wending its way out into the morning. That’s when I first heard I’m on Fire, the beat like a freight train coming, steady and heavy and ominous. A man’s voice, confessional.

  Hey, little girl.

  He was talking to me, about desire. I wasn’t sure what desire was but it did feel physical, like the melody and the voice and the beat itself. I huddled up against the speaker in the garage and that song was all I was aware of. I’m on Fire. It frightened me in a way, but I liked it. And the howling at the end. That spoke to something in me especially, something primal, something my subconscious seemed to know without ever informing me.

  Dad drove me to school in the mornings, in the car; different to all the other cars; nobody drove a brown car. The cars at my school were white, black, grey, blue, like bruises in varying states of healing. Sleek, young machines, trims shining, moving with quiet grace; when the doors opened the smell of the chemical new and the strains of demure, classical music. Mothers dropped you off at school, not dads. Some mornings that song would come on the radio, and I’d forget my small shame. Carried away. Carried through the day.

  Dad was a man of few words but he would give to me all the time; music, knowledge, affection: his presence. These gifts made me, built me, and I could quietly handle the trials which school and adolescence brought. Then he started to give things away, material possessions. He grew lighter, smiled more, gradually, then all of a sudden. Years later, when I dated a first-year psychology student, I opened up a little and spoke of dad. The student nodded, sagely, said these words were signs. Beacons in the night, flashes in the dark; someone should have seen them.

  And then Dad gave away his car. Randomly, without warning. And then me. I kept still for most of the day—but when night came, I rode my bike—until I reached the beach. The edge of the world. I walked down to the water and howled at the moon.

  I still have the red flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off. Sometimes I put it on, crawl into a small space. The song is about desire, for the ones we can’t have.

  TRACK #1 BORN TO RUN

  Walk with me out on the wire

  ’Cause babe I’m just a scared and lonely rider

  But I gotta know how it feels

  I wanna know if love is wild; I wanna know if love is real

  Warm summer sun cascading down upon her back, upon a time of moving at high speed, an exposed passenger on his bike, high noise, all the signs of smothering the chaos of the mind. Senses drowning out thought. Just feeling. Trajectory, quicksilver pace. Her long blonde hair streaming in the wind, small hands wrapped around his waist, denim legs embracing him against the side of the machine. Seeing whirling-by world via a visor, the heaviness of a helmet on her head.

  She’d worked on his mind all day, worked like the sweat wending down his back, slick skin simmering in the sun. On the road; on the road but unmoving. Unnatural, disorienting. A road purpose-paved for fleeing. All day the seduction, of the heat rising in waves from the road, from the cars moving past; the smell of petrol and escape.

  When evening came, so would she. That small hand slide into the back pocket of his jeans and a body sliding around his side, the flash of a smile, then lips against his.

  Even better than this: two wheels orbiting the known world. The familiar, contemptible world. The inexplicable terror of this landscape juddering inside him. A boulevard of pretty girls and hardened, sweet-cheeked boy faces, suiting up in the inevitable. The amusement park a glowing distress beacon; lovers huddled in the mist on the beach. He can envision the end of the road, through the mist, the haze. Through the tunnel. Something like red love, belonging, walking on the surface of the sun as a purpose, a tangible destination. Now there is just this grace of movement, two bodies blending with the bike, turning with it, churning the night. She is speaking, screaming, and he swears he hears, keep going.

  Restless Rituals: a Dance In The Dark

  I find myself, late at night, after being with you, restless; with an urge for going. I stare from your apartment window out into the night. Bright lights reveal no human movement, all is still, only trees flickering in the gentle wind. A collective winding down of consciousness. The stars are invisible, the sky is streaked purple. I can see my small red car gleaming under a streetlight—beckoning.

 
You want me to stay. I feel like I’m hurting you, that my reluctance is palpable. My shoes are already on.

  I remember reading Kundera: he says that love is felt in the desire to share sleep, a desire limited to one woman. Beginning with the end in mind, I imagine this with you, am seduced by it; bodies curled together, dreams in proximity. A vision unadorned, unsentimental, just the natural ebbing away of two minds, bodies remaining close. The beauty of it frightens me. I wonder who you will be in the morning. Dishevelled, unprepared, waking up to someone feels like the true intimacy. I can look right into your eyes in the moment, let go completely; I can touch you and breathe in your scent, bear sole witness to your sounds, your requests and confessions. But to wake up with your eyes on me, means truly losing control.

  So I go. Pulled, seduced by a different force. Another man. He comes to me in the car, conjured, his voice moves with the night, in and out, the window down, my hair caressed by the wind and his voice in my ear. He is a companion, his presence feels like bliss. Engaged in a dance. Light and shade. Nights when I struggle to keep my eyes open, driving, his voice grows louder, as the music does in my body, moving to the beat. My moves mirror his. My heartbeat, my pulse, my internal unheard melodies, vibration moving particles in the atmosphere, burrowing into my ears, my mind. I am wrapped up in the theatre of his song. Safe. My hands move across the steering wheel, gripping the hard curl, like fingers making chords on a fret-board. His songs seem imbued with new significance in the night, they are cleaner, brighter, in relief against the dark. Just him and I.