by Clay, Josie
A cloud of hot ferment and her lips brushed mine. On my feet in an eye blink “No!”
“Oh please” she said, wrapping her arms around my buttocks, pressing her face to my crotch.
“Let go of me”.
“Don't be like that, I know I'm young, but I know what to do”, forcing her hand between my legs.
“Get off me!” Pushing her away, she fell, hand splayed on my eight inch gash and I winced at the violation. “It's not right” I said.
“Why isn't it? We love each other”. Her face the phantom of a child.
“Sasha, listen to me. I don't love you and I don't want to have sex with you. You should never have seen that film, it was private and now you've concocted this fantasy. It's not real, no matter how you feel”.
Back on her knees, hands laced, pleading. “It’s just a shock that's all, I didn't mean to shock you, just Dale. You'll get used to the idea, you'll see. Think about it” she said optimistically.
“I think you should go home and talk to your mother”, aware that I was livid with Nancy.
“No please, Minette, just give me a chance”. She began to cry, big disastrous sobs that despite everything almost moved me to comfort her. Dale from nowhere, down beside her.
“Come on” she said gently “Get up, I'll take you home”.
Sasha, sullen under stormy eyebrows. “I'm not going with you”.
Dale zipped the folio, dragging her to her feet. “Yes you are”.
I watched through the window as Dale slung the folio in the flat bed and grappled her into the cab of the Hilux, like a mother and her busted teenager. A passer- by would have thought so.
In the kitchen, lifting tea towels and oven gloves in search of my ‘phone, while swigging whisky from the bottle. Nancy answered on the first ring.
“Minette, how did it go?”
“Really, really badly, Dale's bringing her home now”
“What happened?”
“It's worse than we could have imagined, you need to see her folio”
“Why?”
I didn't want to pull the punch of it; she would have to suffer the assault as I had.
“Just look at it”.
“Minette, you sound angry”.
“I am and when you look at the fucking folio, you'll know why”.
A pause.
“Minette, I'm very sorry about this”.
“Me too, I can't be involved with her any more, but I don't think it's over. She needs help”.
“I don't understand why this has happened”.
She barely had an accent any more. The squeak of the Hilux's brakes down the ‘phone.
“I think they're here, I'd better go”.
“Call me when you've looked at the pictures”.
“Yes OK I will, take care Minette”.
“How do you feel?” said Dale, face to face across the kitchen table.
“Oh well, it was a slow enough crash” I said, “I had time to brace”.
Dale, on the other hand, had a torrential data stream she was keen to analyse; expecting to feel repulsion but she didn't, angry with herself for being jealous of Nancy and angrier still that she was a little turned on. It hurt of course, to see the hard copy of the past, which should have remained confined to the soft focus of fleeting and suppositional imaginings. The two dimensional woman whose breakfast bar we'd sat at only yesterday, now at large and 3D in our present. As for Sasha, pity and empathy. Recalling what it was like at that age – the crushes, the rage of frustration and longing, usually projected at aloof figures.
“But think about it” she said, “fixating on someone who is nice to you, it must be sweet torture, not to mention the fact this person has always had a sexual connotation. Who knows what weird drives that would awaken? Did you tell Nancy about the pictures?”
I explained why I hadn't. “She's in for a shock” she said, with more than a hint of Schadenfreude.
“Dale?”
“Yes, Minky”.
“I'm worried those images are burnt into my brain and they'll pop up when we're doing it”.
“Well” she said, “we'll just have to make sure they get buried under a big stack of our own, won't we”.
“She's in her room with her folio, crying” Nancy said, as I wandered round the garden for better reception. “What's in it? Why won't you tell me? I don't know what the fuck is going on and you're deliberately withholding information”.
“Look, I'm sorry, I think it's important you see for yourself without preconceptions, so she can understand how bad what she's done is”.
Nancy sighed into the receiver, the uninvited memory of her breath on my vagina surfaced.
“I'll try and talk to her again” she said.
Chapter 26
Dale, reclining on the sofa reading 'Metamorphosis' and half watching the comforting shunt and huff of 'The Railway Children'. Flopping beside her I buried my face in her armpit.
“I'm so tired” I muffled. Prudence stretched a reassuring paw on my leg. Dale, pulling me into her side, kissed my head. The telly chuffing and whistling and I rolled onto my back, eyes brimming.
“It's been a tough morning, Mink”.
“It's not that”, as the steam engine hissed, turning Prudence's ears backwards.
“What is it then?” she said, stroking my forehead.
“I know what's coming next”.
“What?” she said, intrigued.
“Daddy, my daddy!” Jenny Agutter and I cried in unison, succumbing to marshmallow tears ...it always got me.
“You're such a soft baby” she said.
The big small thing. Me, a feather or a burr, an inconsequential remnant anyway, attached to the fibres of a massive, washing powder Dale. Snuggled to her, already in my jimjams, thumb in mouth, Prudence finding harbour behind my knees. The tick of the clock the turn of the page the only sounds, until the polyphonics of my ‘phone spinning in a war dance. Specs mislaid, unable to read the caller display.
“Hello?”
Outside noises, birds, a helicopter, the distant whisk of traffic. “Hello?” about to abort (probably a handbag dialler). Then the stilted puncture of weeping. I sat bolt upright and Prudence sprang away. “Hello, who's that?”
Dale put down her book. Someone trying to speak, throat full of sorrow, breath abbreviated.
“Sasha, is that you?”
“Mint...Minette”, a voice wracked with ruin.
“Where are you? Listen to me, where are you?”
“No ...where ...I'm nowhere”. And then, “I yuv you”.
Dread eyes at Dale. “Tell me where you are, sweetheart”.
The drama of breaking glass and then nothing but birds and wind in the trees. Dale opened her mouth and I stopped her with a finger, listening hard, sending out my eye. The helicopter retreating in waves, a seagull and then a shrill, emphatic peep peep, like a referee drawing out a red card.
“She's at the reservoir”.
Dale floored the Hilux, me redialling to 'Hi, this is Sasha, unless you're tall, blonde and gorgeous, please fuck off'. We bumped along the dirt track as far as we could, knowing it would be the unambitious East Reservoir. Dale scanned the perimeter while I crashed through a scrub of elder and bramble.
“Sasha!” Of course she would have hidden herself away like a wounded animal. Dale tracked me .
“Sshh” I said, redialling. A sound astray in nature, the scratch of tinny music. Redialling, the nonsensical scrapes, forming themselves into the strident opening bars of Astrid Apple’s 'Fist of Love’, soaring then snatched. I dialled again, 'ching, cha ching, ching ching, cha ching'. Spinning to my left, a golden fleece against a log.
“Here, I'm here!” I shouted, batting through lashes. She lay unconscious in peaty leaves; shards of empty vodka glittering dangerously, ineffectual attempts on her wrists.
“Sasha” . I lifted her head and pulled her to sitting. She spasmed and shouted a copious liquid response, splattering her leather trousers and
my pyjamas.
“Sasha, wake up”. Dale shook her shoulders, her head reeled like a bladder on a stick and her lips parted cherubic.
“Should we call an ambulance?”
“No” said Dale, “save it for proper emergencies. We'll take her, there's no traffic ...everyone's watching the Cup Final”.
Sasha, slung between us, her feet in mechanical motion, then toecaps scoring furrows in the spring grass as we dragged her to the car. Another yellow eruption, bibbing her black t-shirt. Sitting sideways in the passenger seat, I stopped her head as we bumped over speed pillows.
She sensed me. “Ayuvoo, Nette”.
They took her in a wheelchair. Nobody asked us who we were, assuming I suppose we were her parents.
“Can you hear me, poppet?” A nurse (one of us). “Can you drink this for me? Good girl”.
“Oh shit, Nancy” I said.
“Nooo!” wailed Sasha into a plastic bowl.
The sun refusing to set on this birthday, I paced the car park, retrieving a voice mail in procrastination. Nancy telling me that Sasha had sneaked out and she'd seen our rehashed past in her daughter's homework. Pressing 'Call back', I brought more bad news.
Her economical walk breaking stride as she grabbed us and then the nurse, before disappearing behind a green curtain.
Dale and I in the Hilux, blasphemously blowing smoke into the hospital car park.
“And the fun just keeps coming” she said.
Drinking bile inducing polystyrene coffee in the medical bergamot while Nancy chewed her fingers. I'd never seen her pensive and wanted to put my arm around her. Should I? Definitely not. All concluded it would be better I wasn't there when Sasha came to.
“Thank you for finding her” Nancy said. “It's a miracle you did”.
Standing awkwardly until she embraced me, my face in her hair, and then Dale. Like blood, my fucking freaky, beautiful, corrugated family.
Dale loved me that night, her mouth holistic. Too impatient for protracted foreplay, we usually fell upon each other in gluttonous, energetic binges, but in recent weeks our pattern changed. We took our time, articulating; no longer a declaration, more a conversation. We spoke throughout but sometimes the penetrating hush would infer more.
She travelled over and around, preparing me for her exquisite brutality, crafting our story, collating our collection until all that had gone before was out of sight under layers and layers of fresh falling rapture, bone white and silent.
Running late, clattering into the classroom; the girls would be here soon and I hadn't set up. I stopped in my tracks. Everything spotless: stacks of gleaming white palettes on the dazzling draining board, a line of shining stainless steel beakers on the scrubbed workbench, the ailing claggy brushes now bristling with vitality. Twelve boards against the wall, displaying stretched watercolour paper, pristine and wrinkle free. Six flat tins of pencils, pin sharp and arranged in the spectrum. The spaghetti of paper around the guillotine gone. I put on my glasses. Each drawer of the plan chest neatly labelled: crepe, tissue, coloured card, newsprint, cartridge. The slovenly tangle of green aprons stagnating in a bin bag, now washed, pressed and folded into perfect squares. My notebook on my desk in front of my chair, pen and pencil each side like cutlery. A beaker of water, prolonging the life of a single lime green carnation. The room somehow brighter; she'd even cleaned the windows.
I saw myself in this; how as a child I'd tried such gestures of love for my mother which had gone unnoticed.
“You poor little darlin’”.
After the session I found Rosamund to tell her Sasha wouldn't be coming back due to family difficulties. She stared through me as if picturing Sasha sweeping up smashed crockery.
“What a shame” she said, “I expect you'll miss her, won't you”.
“Yes” I said, “I will”.
Chapter 27
'Are they finished? x' I texted Dale.
'Yep' she replied, 'come and see x'.
Our first proper artistic collaboration. Dale's only steer from the New North Arts Centre had been to produce a frieze depicting the nine muses anyway she saw fit. A brief like this, not always helpful; constraints often provide a framework, a starting point from which to push off. So she had consulted me. We worked in a kind of shorthand on the kitchen table, conveying ideas in words and marks, sometimes our pencils colliding on the paper, me taking up her unresolved line and vice versa. A creative Siamese twin affair, involving a wavelength of acute inspirational harmony. It was a breathtaking new language for us with no ego, no body and a broad vocabulary; one sustained, combined, explicit train of thought which neither of us had experienced before. The temptation to abstract had been strong, but we agreed to play it straight and ended up with a classical/expressionist hybrid.
The red door cracked open. Dale, eyes spangled with sorcery, stopping my breath.
“Are you pleased?” My lips on hers.
“Uh huh” she said.
Over her shoulder we were not alone, a confluence of women, their movement and exchange belying the fact they were made of stone.
“Fucking hell!”
Nine figures on tablets taller than me, androgynes but favouring the female, canted to each other like interchangeable lovers. The hands we had both modelled now holding mask and staff, quill and flute. The stylised concertina pleats of their garb did little to preserve their modesty. My breast and Dale's thigh revealed in motion. My arm clutching a lyre.
I fell in love with Urania, for she was Dale, arms outstretched, balancing globe and compass, stars and moons suspended in the zodiac of her hair, beside her sister Clio – me, but altered. Eyes closed in reflection, between my hands a twisting thread of water that measured the flow of time. Passing my fingers over all of them, I knelt and kissed the flawless foot of Melpomene, which was also Dale's. She had sculpted the shapes of our mutual eruption: spellbinding, authentic, magnificent and profoundly sexy.
“Wow” I gasped, “look at our girls, they're beautiful. You're the daddy”.
Dale stood, elbow on hip, cigarette cocked in striations of smoke, studying my reaction. Sun streaming through her fibre-optic hair, twinkling particles drawn by her static. The tenth …my muse. Her eyes narrowed in reckoning. “You're turned on aren't you”, exhaling a plume.
“Like you would not believe”.
She brought the cigarette to my lips before grinding it beneath her heel. Standing before me, our nipples touching, she looked at them as if they'd posed an impertinent question, the answer to which was obvious. She recaptured my gaze and blinking long lashes twice, undid my belt with necessary roughness. My heart on the brink of attack as she pulled down my jeans and manhandled my coco to confirm my assertion. Massaging it beyond all doubt, she lifted her chin in approval.
“You're the fucking daddy” she said.
We attended the launch of the New North Arts Centre in our suits, “Gilbert and George” Dale sniggered.
Plaudits and whistles for our muses and I stepped back and clapped mine.
Joint commissions followed. We cherry-picked, exploring new catacombs, illuminating rich veins, her flint to my tinder ; our internal processes, sacred and singular, now fused. A bond so complex, extraction impossible, wrecking both our circuitry. Conjoined now, the power of procreation was ours and impregnating her my pleasure.
We discussed our future in the wooden house by the sea, imagining our offspring.
“It'll be like we've died and gone to heaven” she said.
“Supposing we don't get the house?” I said, always mindful of potential pitfalls. She confessed she'd bought it already, saving it as a surprise, but telling me to dispel my anxiety.
“We can sell it if we don't like it” she shrugged.
“Bloody hell, how rich are you?”
“I don't really know” she said.
Chapter 28
She had enough clothes and jewellery. More books and ornaments and the like were banned until we'd moved, so thinking of a birthd
ay present was proving tricky.