Write like I’m stretching (I want to), or like when the dog stretches, when it makes itself long and swims or crawls across the lawn, one long free movement, (the skin wrinkles sensually near the base of the tail) such a delight, then it rolls onto its back, then it continues swimming, the long white dog on the large lawn. Edward has given it to Camilla, I was so tired of it wanting to crawl into our bed. Camilla sleeps alone for the most part.
It stings, what Alwilda told Edward when she left him. He told me about it. She expressed it so hideously: that he was not much fun.
Alwilda has no sense of boundaries, we all know that. There was even a time when she flirted with Charles, with large flower arrangements and jams (she makes jam to calm her nerves, keep the anxiety in check, preserve, preserve, all year long, she has a freezer full of berries), she sat on the edge of his bed (low-cut top, her breasts right under his big nose), ‘I love you,’ she wrote to him, why didn’t Camilla send her packing?
‘Alwilda is like an insect that gets carried around by the wind,’ she simply said, ‘she’ll be off somewhere else soon.’
‘She wants to see how much power she has,’ I answered, ‘the queen is bored.’ (Queen of the Jams with the Sticky Legs.)
(I don’t know why I picture her making jam with her entire body, her feet down in the preserving jar stomping up and down like with grapes.)
Camilla has always been slow on the uptake, ‘sometimes I wonder which world you actually exist in,’ Charles once said to her, ‘the same one as you – as all of you,’ she said to us, wounded and on guard. But I think that business with Alwilda destroyed Camilla’s love for Charles. She stopped wanting to be with him, to be by his bedside. She hid in her office behind the kitchen. She hid behind busyness and obligations. Behind her tears and angry roars.
Alwilda dragged Edward along to places where people copulate in public while watching porn; clubs. And he did not care for it. Room after room, left in darkness, only these glaring colours and sounds from the screens on the walls. He told me about the time he was in one of those rooms, banging away on top of Alwilda. Then a young man came in and sat down in an armchair next to them and started to wank while watching them.
‘The idea of having to get up and put my trousers on while he was looking at me,’ Edward said, ‘was unbearable. I stopped moving. “Are you dead?” Alwilda said and wriggled out from under me and got up and smiled at the man on the chair, who incidentally looked practically in awe of his erection which he grasped with both hands. He looked like someone holding a divine statue. Fortunately he was not looking at me.”’
I prefer what I call primal sex (primal as in screams, not numbers), and apparently Edward does too, with only the darkness and the humming of flesh; like a swing where you are flung back and forth between the other person and yourself, and you never want it to end.