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Authors: Chris Killen

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BOOK: The Bird Room
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When Alice comes she pulls me tight against her, so I can feel the trembling of her body, her arms and legs wrapped around me, her hair in my face, her chin digging hard into my shoulder. This is what turns me on the most. It makes me come too. I'm not like Will, probably turned on by some kind of out-of-body sex image; a graphic full-on porno vision of himself ‘slamming it into some girl'. What I want isn't visual. What I want is cloudy and indistinct. It exists somewhere at the centre of her. It is the part of her that wants me too.

She stays lying on top of me afterwards, with her head resting against my head.

I feel safe, buried underneath her. If we could somehow just continue to stay like this – if we could find a way to never have to eat or drink or leave the room, and
if this was a goal we could realistically work towards and achieve, like we could somehow write off and apply for it, a kind of ‘sex bursary' or something – I think I'd be happy.

We don't talk for a long time.

It's Sunday. Early afternoon.

‘I'm going to ask you something,' she says.

‘Okay,' I say.

‘And I want you to think about it really hard and then answer truthfully.'

‘Okay,' I say.

A pause.

‘Do you love me?' she says.

Christ.

We've only been together two weeks.

We've not used the word before. I'd be scared to, but it sounds, when she says it, not strange or cheap or like something off the television. Maybe it's because she doesn't have to speak very loudly and her head is so close to mine and about 90 per cent of her speech is just soft warm breath in my ear.

‘Yeah,' I say.

I want to say the word ‘love', too. I want to really, really badly, but I can't.

‘How about you?' I say, instead.

I feel the muscles clench in her back.

I feel something change inside her.

I wait for her to answer.

‘I don't know,' she says, finally.

Everything seems suddenly not-moving and very far away.

‘Okay,' I say.

My voice has gone quiet and strange-sounding, like I'm speaking long-distance.

‘God,' she says, ‘I'm joking.'

But she feels about four hundred miles away from me.

I can't see her face. I can't see if she's smiling when she says this.

‘Bloody hell. Of course I do.'

She lifts her head up and looks me in the eyes. Her eyes are so clear and large and black, it feels as if my whole face could disappear into them. She props herself up on her elbow and brushes my hair with her hand.

‘Come here,' she says and kisses me. ‘It was a crap joke. I think I saw it in some film or something. Christ. Lighten up.'

Now she only feels about four hundred metres away from me, like we're standing at opposite ends of an empty field and waving at each other.

She starts to walk across the field by kissing me and biting my neck.

‘I'm sorry,' she whispers occasionally on the way. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘They're big,' she says with the toothbrush in her mouth. ‘They don't go hard.'

Then she spits, runs the tap.

My fingers are pinching her nipples. Her eyes look into mine in the mirror. We're going to bed next. We've washed our faces and in the morning she'll have to get up and go to work, and I will hang around all day in the house, missing her and looking at the clock.

The cold tap rattles. I put my fingers under the water and touch some more against her nipple; against the oval chocolate-red aureole and large puckered teat. She shivers but doesn't pull away.

‘Told you,' she says, a fleck of toothpaste foam on her lower lip. ‘I'm not that pretty. Sometimes I don't even know why you like me.'

I don't reply. I'm not here. I'm watching this on TV.

I'm watching my fingers touch the drips of water to her skin in the mirror.

This is someone else's hand, I think, not mine. This hand is acting out the mirror of my actions and her nipple is doing the opposite of hardening.

How in love we were.

One night in bed she tells me how an ex-boyfriend talked her into doing porn. He had this mate who worked for a website. It would all be completely anonymous.

‘It was a few years ago.'

She's whispering.

It's so dark I can hardly see her face, so quiet I can hear empty crisp packets wisping along the street outside our house. Two in the morning. Her breath smells acidic. My hand is on her hip.

‘I hardly knew him, really. We were only together for a couple of months.'

I want to know and I don't want to know.

‘What did you do?' I ask.

‘Just sex,' she says. ‘His mate lent him a camera and one night he filmed me, you know … as he fucked me.
It was for this amateurs' site. All he had to do was make sure he held the camera steady. It wasn't art. I didn't talk.'

I want to know the specifics. I want to know if she went down on him first. I want to know what positions they used. I want to know if he came inside her or if, like in most porn I'd seen, he came on her face or her tits. But I can't ask. Her voice is small and shaky. My hand moves from her hip.

‘Did you watch the tape afterwards?'

‘No. He did. He asked me if I wanted to see it and I said no. So he gave it to his mate and it got used, apparently.'

How about her? Did
she
get used? Did she get paid?

(Where is my hand going?)

More than anything, I want to ask what the site's called. Is the film still there? Is someone watching it as we speak?

‘Why did you do it?'

My heart is hammering. I can see stills, freeze-frames, flashes of her in graphic sexual positions. I can see her body splintered into a lurid sequence of thumbnail photographs. The images burn. They do not go away. I'm disgusted and aroused.

(My hand's between her legs.)

She doesn't answer. Instead, she kisses me and I taste the acid on her tongue. We don't mention it again.

She chooses the time and place for these admissions, not me.

She chooses how much or how little she tells me.

This is not her first whispered, two-in-the-morning confession.

In the morning I lie in bed and listen to the sound of her getting ready for work. Just before she leaves, she comes back into the room, leans over the bed and kisses me on the forehead.

‘I think you're prime rib,' she whispers in my ear.

Then she's gone.

I get out of bed and put on my dressing gown. I go into the second bedroom, the empty one. I redraw the curtains and sit down at the computer and log onto the internet.

The clip is out there, somewhere.

A thousand grubby old men are clicking on it right now.

It's just a process of elimination.

I will find that clip if it kills me.

I will not give up.

It will be my new job.

I will find the clip.

I want to watch it. I want to see Alice's face. I want to see if she looks different with someone else, if she enjoys it more. I want to see her without her seeing me. Then I'll destroy it; somehow I'll remove her from the internet. She should just be with me now, not me and anyone else who accidentally clicks on her.

So I begin to Google my way through hundreds of amateur porn sites.

Babes movies – real amateur babes!

young british amateur first timer girls – webcams – videos – this is the real deal! These girls are young and …

www.britamateursexmovie.com – 33k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

Hot British Fuck Movies

Free Preview Pictures and Movies of British couples in amateur sex situations. Couple on bench – Couple in the woods – Couple …

www.uksexsituations.com/preview.html – 18k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

Hardcore Amateur SEX!

I filmed my ex! 100% real amateur footage, submitted by bitter ex-boyfriends! These girls are horny and wild! No credit card needed …

www.ex-sex-frenzy.com/Alice.html – 44k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

Red Hot Action With British Amateur Babes

These young beauties will do anything … Helen, 16 pics, 5 vids (mpg) –

Chloe, 22pics, 2 vids (mpg) – Alice, 0 pics, 1 vid …

www.babes-amateurs-xxx.com – 21k – Cached – Similar pages – Note this

I go through page after page, finding nothing, as a thousand other men around the world stumble unwittingly across her image. They hover their cursors over her thumbnail and double-click. They download her. Sat in dark musty rooms, they squirm in their seats as she pants and pouts for the camera.

Alice stares out of the screen; not at them, not at anything. Her eyes are wide and black and blank.

She throws back her head and yelps with pleasure.

I meet her after work at this vodka bar just off Market Square. Walking into town, I feel as delicate and raw as new skin after a plaster is removed. I can still see images from websites, hundreds of girls staring out blindly from my computer screen.

My head is filled to bursting with other people's amateur ex-girlfriends.

She's slouched on a sofa next to another girl. They spot me and Alice gives a loose-wristed wave. They're both drunk off the 6 o'clock cocktail happy hour.

It's just gone seven, so I buy a pint and swig it quickly, trying to catch up.

I'm introduced. William, this is Lauren. Lauren also works at the optician's. Lauren thinks working at the optician's is rubbish, too. Lauren wonders what
you
do for a living.

‘I work from home,' I tell her.

‘Oh yeah?' Lauren says, raising her eyebrow. ‘What do you do?'

‘It's really dull,' I say. ‘You wouldn't want to know.'

‘Try me,' Lauren says.

So I say that I do something with ‘systems' – trying to drop in vague technical words like ‘protocol' and ‘analysis' and ‘statistics'.

Lauren furrows her brow. Something doesn't sound quite right about this. Something doesn't add up, and Lauren can't put her finger on it.

‘How was your day?' I ask Alice, trying to change the subject, putting my hand on her knee and rubbing it, feeling the static-y friction of my thumb against her tights, trying to act normal but feeling way too conscious that everything I'm doing is an act.

Lauren's still looking.

Lauren will not stop looking at me.

Lauren thinks I'm a liar, a dirty perv.

It's written all over my face. It's obvious what I did all day.

And Lauren will tell Alice this the next time they're alone – the next time they go off to the toilets, maybe – she'll tell Alice what I really did with my afternoon and Alice will freak out and leave me.

At eight the bar starts filling up. Big blokes in Ted Baker shirts. Shaved heads. Ibiza tans.

Alice kisses me, forcing her tongue into my mouth. She tastes of Seabreeze. Her teeth are as cold as crushed ice.

I open my eyes for a second and Lauren's staring at us. She looks uncomfortable.

Once we've finished, Lauren makes a show of looking at the clock, at her mobile and suddenly remembering something.

‘Oh god,' she says, ‘I'd better shoot …' standing up with half her cocktail still on the table.

‘Alright,' Alice says, smiling. ‘See you tomorrow.'

Before Lauren's even out the door, Alice has taken my hand and put it under her top. She's not wearing a bra. She buries her head in the crook of my neck and mumbles something.

She gets like this, usually once she's had a few. She gets turned on, I think, by the idea of people watching.

I accidentally gaze into the black piss-hole eyes of a bloke at the bar.

He doesn't blink.

I look away, but I can still feel him there, staring at me.

It feels like everyone in the bar – everyone in the world – is looking.

I feel sick and cold.

She's almost sitting on my lap.

She's winding herself around me, kissing my neck and tonguing my Adam's apple.

‘Get a room!' the bloke at the bar shouts and a few people cheer in agreement.

So, after one last vodka shot, we do. We take a taxi home and I have to help her out of it. She slings her arm across my shoulder and leans in heavily.

I walk her to the bathroom.

She locks herself in.

‘You alright?' I call through the door after a while.

Inside I can hear crying.

I switch on the telly.

I turn it up.

She comes out and sits next to me on the sofa. I turn down the telly. She leans her head against my shoulder, smelling of soap, her eyes red and raw. I put my arm around her. We watch a news story about Third World debt. My hand is near her boob. She sniffs. I reach down and cup it in my palm, feeling its sad quiet weight.

‘Don't,' she says, so I drop it.

It isn't her, but it's close. She smiles at you. Her teeth are neat. They are bleached a high-contrast white. She shakes the hair out of her eyes. She is moving slowly, sliding a bra strap delicately off her shoulder. Her eyes are wide and black. She isn't nervous. There is no sound except your breathing. Off slides the other strap. This isn't her. It isn't. But it's the closest yet. She licks her lips and laughs to herself. Then she reaches behind her back, unclasps the bra and holds it to her breasts. She pouts like a Marilyn Monroe photocopy. She moves closer, smiles again and lets the …

She freezes. Frantically, you click on the next file. You're fumbling because the mouse is in your left hand. Four in the afternoon. The curtains are drawn. The room smells warm and musty. A toilet roll stands next to the computer.

… bra fall to the floor. You lean up close to the screen and squint. Her nipples are too small. They're a pinky-red colour. She takes them in her fingertips and pinches. She giggles silently. The camera moves down her belly. Her fingers follow it towards her knickers. She hooks her thumbs under the strip of flimsy black elastic and wiggles, rubbing her thighs together. You can see fine down on her skin. There is no chicken-leg birthmark on her thigh, though, and no mole next to her belly button. She bends forward as she slides off the knickers, the top of her head obscuring …

Again, she stops. You grope for a wad of toilet paper with your non-mouse hand. Was that the letterbox in the hall? Quickly, you check the curtains for gaps. It's just the free paper, the paperboy walking back down the path. Alice won't be home for another hour yet. So you click on clip three (which is all Virgin British Beavers will give you without a credit card).

… the view. She steps out of her knickers and sits back on the bed. The camera moves between her thighs. You inch your nose up against the screen. Her pubic hair is black. It's clipped. Her lips are shaved. She prises them apart with shiny lacquer-pink nails and sinks in a middle finger. The screen is warm. It buzzes against the tip of your nose and up this close she pixellates and distorts. She begins to look like a game of Tetris. So you pull your head away again, just enough, but wish you could force it past the plastic and into the volcanic red of her cunt.

Alice, Alice, Alice, you think, as your eyes close, and the curtains and the free paper and the headache are swallowed in a warm, swelling, consuming nothing.

I button my jeans and stand. My spine crackles. I open the curtains and have a look into the street. An old bloke stands at the end of our path, waiting for his dog to finish crapping on the pavement.

In the bathroom, I try to piss without catching the reflection of my red-raw, semi-erect dick in the mirror. This is impossible. The mirror faces you. It confronts you. It is a gaping glass eye, streaked with stray toothpaste spittle and the wet flicks of her hair from drying. It sits just next to the toilet, reflecting me. Pissing should be enough, surely? Pissing and shitting and being an animal should be enough without having to watch yourself as you do it. The mirror was there when I moved in. It has something to do with feng shui, Alice reckons.

My dick looks how I imagine a bloated drowned body might look.

I take down the mirror and carry it into the yard. I lean it against the wall, the one where the child of a previous tenant drew a Ninja Turtle in chalk. I stand back to admire my work. That's more like it. Let nature have its stupid cock reflected back at it. See how the leaves and slugs and bottle tops like it for a change.

I do nothing the rest of the day.

I watch TV.

I eat Rich Tea biscuits.

I am repeatedly haunted by the image of a blonde girl fucking herself with a shoe.

At a quarter to six Alice gets home from work.

‘Good day?' I call over my shoulder.

She doesn't answer. She takes off her coat, steps out of her boots and goes into the bathroom.

After a pause, the toilet flushes.

‘Where's the mirror gone?' she says.

‘It's in the yard,' I say. ‘I put it there.'

I wait for her to ask why.

I almost
want
her to ask why.

(I don't know what I'll say if she does.)

But she just puts on her boots, goes into the yard and carries it back to the bathroom.

BOOK: The Bird Room
5.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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