Collected Stories (58 page)

It had been years since I had danced, and now, since I didn’t need much sleep, I danced every night in one or other of the town’s discos, with women from the Centre. Most of them were older than forty, some were over fifty. They knew the chances of their being loved, caressed, wanted, were diminishing, even as their passion increased, in the sun. I danced with them, but I didn’t touch them. If I’d been a ‘real’ kid, I probably would have gone to bed, or to the beach, with several of them. I was their pornography, a cunt teaser. But at least everyone knew where they stood with me.

Usually, while I danced, Alicia watched me, or sat on a chair drinking and smoking. She never danced herself, but took a lot of pleasure in others’ enjoyment. Oddly enough, the music most people preferred originated in my day: 1950s rock ’n’ roll, and 1960s soul. I knew every note. It sounded fresher and more lasting than the laboured literary work of me and my contemporaries.

In one of the town’s discos, while dancing with my ‘coven’, as I called them, several of the local men started to taunt me. They didn’t like this spoiled kid dancing with and hugging these happy women night after night, as well as looking after their bags, fetching them drinks and making sure they all got safely back to the Centre. One night, they gathered around me at the bar and said they wanted to see what sort of man I was. They could find this out only on the beach, where we would be able to have ‘a good talk’. Alicia and the other women had to escort me out of there in a group. Looking back, I could see the men standing at the door, smoking and sneering.

Why did this happen? How did they see me? I enquired of Alicia. As someone who had everything, and a future, too. There was nothing I couldn’t do or be, she seemed to think. They hated it and wanted it. They could have killed and eaten me.

There were other fantasies about me. A woman in her fifties had told Alicia that I made the women feel inadequate. I was a problem-free rich kid bumming around the world before going to work for a bank. ‘We’re trying to restart our troubled lives here. He’s just passing through,’ she said.

‘Maybe that is what you are,’ Alicia continued, after she’d told me, throwing down her roll-up and rubbing out the stub with her sandal. ‘You have the confidence, poise and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. Isn’t that right?’

I didn’t answer; I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t anticipated this much envy. I had, though, known actors who’d become movie stars and been made paranoid and withdrawn as much because of the pressure of imagined spite as that of fame.

I laboured over Patricia’s crumpled and folded flesh, humming and thinking. I was good at this; at least I’d learned to love giving comfort and pleasure.

I said, ‘How can I deal with this? I am beginning to feel like an object. It is not pleasant, it’s persecution.’

‘You are supremely enviable,’ she said, her voice muffled by the towel. ‘You’re like the woman everyone wants but no one understands. What you require is support and protection.’

‘Who from?’

‘That is up to you. But you must ask for it.’ She went on, ‘It doesn’t sound as if you’ve done the wrong thing, Oddjob. You’ve made her and some of the others love-sick but you haven’t misled anyone. You’re a good lad. Women of Alicia’s age – they’d fall in love with a plank of wood.’

I was working hard at Patricia’s body. To my dismay, as I punched and pummelled, she didn’t seem to relax, but began breathing harder.

She turned, put out her hands and untied the string which held up my trousers.

‘Please, Patricia,’ I said. ‘Don’t –’

She was holding my penis. ‘That’s a mighty fine thing you’ve got there. Know how to use it?’

‘No, I guess you could show me.’

‘You haven’t slept with Alicia?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You’re a good boy, then. Now, be an even better boy for me.’

Her eyes were glazed with desire.

I said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be a wise woman?’

‘Even the wise need a prick now and again. You’ve been fluttering your eyelashes at me for days, don’t think I haven’t noticed. I’m very intuitive. Now, can you follow through?’

I didn’t want to disappoint her; I didn’t want her to feel her age or resent me.

Her hands were rough, and at one point I wondered whether she might be wearing gloves. I remembered that for exercise she liked to build stone walls. But, to my surprise, I became excited.

Her noises were honest and forthright. I was sitting facing her. We were rocking. I must have been holding my breath. ‘Breathe, breathe,’ she ordered. I did what she said. She went on. ‘Relax and breathe from your stomach, that way you’ll hold out longer.’

It worked, of course. When I’d relaxed, she said, ‘Now, continue.’

Patricia howled, ‘Adore me, adore me, you little shit!’; she dug her fingers into me, scratched and kicked me, and, when she came, thrust her tongue into my mouth until I almost gagged.

‘I needed that,’ she said at last. She was lying on the bed, legs apart, almost steaming. ‘Dear boy, do fetch me a glass of water.’

I took it to her.

‘Thanks, Oddjob. A job well done, eh?’

I sat on the end of the bed and said, ‘Now you’ll be able to give an orgasm workshop.’

‘You know,’ she said, ‘a lot of the women here think you’re a haughty little kid. I don’t mind that. I like it. I could humble you, you know.’

‘Thank you, Patricia,’ I said. ‘I think you just have. I’d better go now.’

‘One more thing,’ she said.

Patricia opened her legs and, from the end of the bed, had me look at her masturbate busily. At times her entire hand seemed to disappear into her body, as if she were about to turn herself inside out.

‘Bet you haven’t seen that before,’ she murmured.

‘No,’ I said sourly. ‘One lives and learns.’

She was about to fall asleep. She waved me away, but not before saying, ‘You come back here tonight. Bring your things. Everything will be better if you come and live here.’

‘Why would that be?’

‘This is the best room in the village. See you tonight!’

I scurried away across the square. Alicia called after me, caught me up and put her arm through mine.

‘You’re still here?’

‘But why not?’

‘Alicia, I’m on my way to the beach.’

‘Are you okay? Can’t I come with you?’

I didn’t like to make her run behind me, but I needed to wash myself. I knew she was still there because she was shouting out poems – not her own – as we went, to remind me of the good things.

I stripped off and ran into the sea. I swam and jogged on the beach until I was exhausted. I lay down next to her with the sun on me. Soon, I’d dozed off. When I opened my eyes, she was sitting there wearing just a cigarette, her arms hugging her knees. Unlike the other women at the Centre, she never removed her clothes but always wore a long-sleeved top and ankle-length skirt.

‘What is it?’

She said, ‘You slept with her.’ Her hands shook as she drew on her cigarette. ‘Everyone in this hemisphere will have heard.’

‘But you didn’t cover your ears.’

‘I listened to your music. Every note.’

‘What will you do with what you heard? Write about it – or is it too human for you?’

‘If that was all I was capable of, I’d hate myself!’ She took my hand and placed it on her foot. ‘Will you look at me? We can’t have sex. You don’t want to. Perhaps you’ve had more than enough for today. I have never had an orgasm, and I am a virgin. Touch me, if you feel like it.’ She lay back. ‘Would you?’

After my earlier experience, I couldn’t claim to be erotically absorbed. I did begin to rub her with the palms of my hands; then, when I began to stroke her with my fingers and her eyes closed, my mind began to wander.

‘I need to borrow this.’

I took her notebook and pen, and began to make an inventory of what I found on her flesh. I did this, as they say on television, in no particular order. I went to what interested me.

The first thing I noticed was a light brown eyelash on her throat, one of her own. On her forehead there was one hard spot and one pus-filled, with several others under the skin. Her hair looked as though it had been dyed a while ago; parts of it had been bleached by the sun. It was hard to make out its original colour. Her lips were a little ribbed and sore, the bottom more than the top.

I found a purplish bruise, recent, on her side where, perhaps, she had knocked into a table. On her knees there were three little childhood scars. I ran my fingers along the still-livid scar where, I guessed, she’d had her gall-bladder removed. She had five painted toenails, all chipped, and five, on the other foot, unpainted: I guess she must have got bored. There was a lot of sand, mostly dry, between her toes, on the soles of her feet and instep.

She wore cheap silver ear-rings, but I didn’t feel she was interested in personal adornment. One ear lobe was slightly inflamed. I also found a leaf on her leg, several insects, dead and alive, in different places, and dirt on her leg. The skin around her fingernails had been pulled and torn. Her cheap watch told the wrong time. Her teeth seemed good; perhaps she had worn a brace as a child, but they were stained, now, from smoking, and one was chipped. There were random and quite deep scratch-marks on one arm (left), which I had noticed before but hadn’t attended to. They appeared to have been done with an insufficiently sharp object – a penknife, say, rather than a razor-blade – as if she’d decided to doodle on herself on the spur of the moment, without preparing.

I peered into her ears and mouth, between her legs and then her toes, where I discovered another insect; I looked up her nose – surprisingly hairless, compared to mine. On her chest she had scored what I guessed to be the word ‘poet’. On her thigh, there were other words which had been recently bleeding.

I wrote, in the fatuous modern manner, ‘This is a Person in the Here and Now Lying Down’, and jotted it down, forensically, working in silence for an hour. I kept the dead insects, the leaf, a couple of public hairs, an example of the dirt, a smear of blood and vaginal mucus, and a record of the words, inside her notebook. Mostly her eyes were closed, her breaths deep and long.

I awoke her from her ‘dream’, and showed her what I’d been doing.

‘No one’s ever done a nicer thing for me,’ she said.

‘Pleasure.’

‘You said to me once, what people want is to be known. Can I ask you: what is that scar you have?’

‘What scar? Where?’

She looked at me as though I were stupid, before pointing it out to me. It was under my elbow, in the soft flesh.

‘You don’t know what it is?’

‘I probably do,’ I said, irritably. ‘I don’t even remember where I got it.’

‘You don’t want to know yourself. You don’t know yourself as well as you know me. I don’t understand that. If you knew yourself you wouldn’t have done what you did with that woman.’

‘I don’t see why we have to know either ourselves or each other.’

‘But what else is there?’

‘Enjoying each other.’

‘Knowing is enjoying, for me.’

These were the sort of wrangles we liked. After, we walked back in silence.

I noticed, out at sea, a large yacht with little boats carrying provisions out to it. I’d forgotten that everyone from the Centre had been invited to a party on it that evening. I hadn’t taken much notice at the time, but there were numerous rumours about the owner. He was either a gangster, film producer or computer magnate. I wasn’t sure which was considered to be worse. I was surprised when Patricia announced at breakfast that we were all going. I was intending to miss it; I couldn’t see that Patricia would even notice my absence. How things had changed since then! Hadn’t she said to me, a couple of hours ago, ‘See you tonight!’

I couldn’t defy Patricia and remain at the Centre. If I was going to leave, I’d have to know where I was going.

I said goodbye to Alicia and went to the roof to think. I discovered myself to be even more furious than before about what Patricia had done to me, and furious with myself for having failed to escape untouched. I would insist on sleeping alone tonight, and leave for Athens by the first boat. I packed my bags in readiness. I was young; I could run.

I went to eat in a taverna in town, reading at the table. After a few pages, I thought ‘I can do this.’ I pulled some paper from my rucksack and started on a story, which offered itself to me. It was something seen, or apprehended as a whole – almost visual – which I felt forced to find words for. My hands were shaking; without literature I couldn’t think, and felt stifled by a swirl of thoughts which took me nowhere new. But writing and the intricacies of its solitude was a habit I needed to break in order to stray from myself. Some artists, in their later life, become so much themselves, they go their own way, that they are no longer open to influence, to being changed or even touched by anyone else, and their work takes on the nature of obsession. Margot once said to me, ‘When you think or feel something important, instead of saying it, you write it down. I’d love it to rain on your computer!’

It did. I put away my pen and paper, paid, and left.

At the Centre the voices, usually so quietly fervent, were almost raucous. Everyone, apart from Patricia, who had yet to appear, had gathered in colourful skirts, dresses and wraps. Some wore bells on their ankles; many wore bras. The night air, invariably sweet, vibrated with clashing female perfumes; jewellery flashed and jingled. Excitement about the party on the yacht was so high that some people were already dancing.

I was wearing my usual shorts and white T-shirt. I’d bought this body because I liked it as it was, a pure fashion item which didn’t require elaboration.

I laughed when I saw that Alicia had attempted to comb her hair, making it look even more frizzy. With the light behind her, she looked as though she had a halo. She also wore lipstick, which I’d never seen on her. It was as if she were trying out being ‘a woman’.

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ I replied.

‘We’re on the trip, then.’

‘Looks like it.’