Creature, you’ve made me crazy. I ache for your dark passageways and serpentine corridors. Those coiled, labyrinthine, unlit spaces, saturated with mysterious liquors unknown to those who avoid the shadows, which are the antechambers to your underworld. A traveller returning from these places (and few do) can never be entirely happy in the sunlight again. Forever after he retains the scent and taste of his unspeakable adventures, which return to distract him in the normal course of his life, so he has to stop whatever worldly activity he’s engaged in (marking essays!) and close himself away in a dark room to pay sinister homage to the memory of where he’s been and what he’s known.
It’s a curious fact that quite ordinary incidents bring the flavour and perfume of his time in the dark country back to him: the accidental brush of a silk scarf against his skin, washing certain parts of his body (you know which), or merely tightening a watch strap around his wrist, causes the most acutely painful and (as he would describe it) exquisite recollection of the dripping pungent juices in which he was once submerged.
Sometimes in the subterranean traveller’s dreams, he returns and sleepwalks through the drenched corridors again. The danger and his secret hope is that he will drown and never wake. The dreams are so real and the desire to take in enough of the secretions of the place so great that he covers himself completely and fills every orifice—eyes, mouth, nostrils, ears, anus—with the fluids, which have become more than food and drink for him.
Of course, once all the entrances to his body are moistened, the creature which inhabits the dream labyrinth is free to enter them, probing all the secret places, inserting tongue and fingers into its hapless visitor, loving the tastes that emerge from the fusion of its own tainted secretions with his. It spreads the wetness all over the body of its prey, and then squats over it, showing the traveller what it was he came to find—the saturated source of its power—before lowering itself on to him, smothering him under its weight, covering him with the sweet and sour slime he longs for.
After that, the traveller is the creature’s thing, to do with what it will. And it does everything, leaving him and taking him at whim, a playful creature which loves to toy with its plaything, covering him with its juices and then very slowly licking them off with the tip of its tongue until every part of his body had been covered, and it can start to smear him with its filth again. There’s no escape, now, only waiting and repetition. But that’s all right because it is all the traveller in the dark land wants.
Creature. My witch. My Kentish whore. Do you realise what power you have? You never disappoint me.
About an hour after she’d seen the children off to school, the postman rang the doorbell with a parcel. It was addressed to her personally: Mrs. Susan Donahoe, 14 Paramount Close, Sidcup, Kent. She hadn’t been expecting anything. Sometimes, she received parcels when she ordered clothes from the Next Directory catalogue, or bought thermal underwear by post for the family, but she hadn’t ordered anything recently and, in any case, this parcel was the wrong shape for clothes. It was registered, so she signed for it and thanked the postman with a smile.
She put the rectangular package down on the kitchen table. Its brown wrapping paper was neatly folded into Vs at each end, their apexes just touching and held down with sellotape, the whole parcel being doubly secured with firmly tied and knotted string, which she cut with the kitchen scissors—once she’d found them in the cluttered drawer where the utensils were kept. The size and shape of the parcel was familiar, and when she pulled back the wrapping paper, she wasn’t surprised to find a shoebox underneath. It was also crossed with string, and rather battered as if it had been lying at the bottom of someone’s cupboard for some time: it wasn’t a new pair of shoes she’d ordered and forgotten about. In any case, Susan wasn’t one to forget things.
Still baffled, she severed the string and put the lid to one side without noticing a piece of paper, folded and sellotaped to its underside. The interior of the box was lined in several layers of black plastic, cut from a black bin bag, which overlapped at the top, covering what was inside. She lifted them away carefully, and saw a fastened package made from the lower half of another bin bag. Susan untwisted the wire closure tying off the opening, to reach, finally, whatever it was she had been sent.
When she peered inside, she gasped, and instinctively turned around as if to check that no one else was in the room, although she knew she was alone in the house. Then she turned back, and sank sidesaddle on to the pine breakfast bench beside the table, to gaze into the shoebox in front of her. Lying in a pool of its own blood was a whole, raw, pig’s liver of a red so deep it was almost black.
The rank smell of blood and offal, released into the air, billowed up, assaulting her nostrils, but she was too stunned to move her face away from the acrid scent. She stared concentratedly at the liver’s satiny bulk, noticing the way in which it graduated away towards its boundary to a fine edge, and how the light from the kitchen window made its sloping, slippery contour gleam. It was an extraordinarily substantial object.
Susan kept her eyes on the contents of her parcel, as she pulled the wrapping from under the box, but the label, when she looked at it, was printed and the postmark smudged. Reaching for the lid, she saw the paper taped to it. She dragged her eyes away from the offal to read the message. “Longing for you.” There was no signature.
Susan’s mouth compressed into a tight line, her teeth biting down hard on the inside of her lips, and the vertical frown lines of a face straining to compose itself appeared between her eyebrows. Then, in spite of her efforts, she lost control; her mouth opened, her eyes closed and Susan let go with a gale of delighted and wicked amusement as the laughter she had been trying to suppress snorted explosively through her nostrils.
Dearest Witchfinder—Of course, you’re never disappointed. How could you be? Since when was a dream disappointed by the dreamer? Don’t you know that what you dream is what I dreamt up for you, my dreamed-up lover, to dream? Your pleasure coincides precisely with my pleasure. How could it be otherwise?
Realise my power? No, you realised it. You found and recognised me, Witchfinder Very Particular. But now that I know, I’m working on a spell for turning literature lecturers into bats (selected ones, that is, not all of them) so that you can fly through a crack in my belfry late tonight and have your way with me. Alternatively, I’ll go bats myself and swoop down on you, and very quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, I’ll take your soft, sleeping cock in my hungry bat mouth and gorge myself, chirping at an inhuman pitch, until the dawn. You’ll only know I’ve been there by the strange dreams you’ll dream. Misty, murky things, like swamps, with smiles hanging from the trees.
I’m your thing, utterly, completely, for more and more, without limits. Sometimes I think I can still smell you on my pillow, even though we change the bedding. I carry on as normal, but I think I am really quite mad. I know I am. Be kind to bats. And leave your window open just a crack.
When the doorbell rang again, at midday, it was not unexpected. By then, Susan had bathed and washed her hair, taken her make-up out of the bathroom cabinet and applied it carefully, almost meditatively, to her cheeks, eyes and lips. From an M & S carrier bag tucked away at the back of a top shelf reserved for old clothes, destined (when she got around to it) for Oxfam, she extracted an elasticated wisp of a suspender belt, sheer black stockings and a pale silk slip, not destined for Oxfam, and put them on her newly pampered and lotioned naked body. She dressed herself in these undergarments slowly, with pleasure, and a half-smile on her face which once or twice broke into a broader amusement at the memory of her package that morning. When she had finished she opened the wardrobe door with the long mirror on the back of it and stood back to look herself over.
Susan was no stringy-limbed waif, but a sturdy middle-aged woman with what her mother had called “big bones.” She stood and examined her solid fleshy self in what she was amused to call her lingerie, to distinguish it from her regular M & S underwear, and decidedly liked what she saw. Susan Donahoe, who dressed as a rule for the life that was led in Paramount Close—practically in skirts and jumpers for the daily round, tidily in suits for parents’ evenings and “do’s,” comfortably in tracksuits for Sundays at home with the family—stood before herself with satisfied approval as the luscious, sexually shameless slut Mr. Donahoe had never known. Nor had Susan, if it came to that, not until recently.
The soft fleshiness of her upper arms and shoulders, and the ripe, dipping cleavage between her large breasts (maternal, was how she usually thought of them, big suburban boobs) was accentuated and made all the more lush by the fragile straps, slivers of oyster silk, and delicately rolled edge of the slip which barely seemed to contain the flesh it enclosed, and yet smoothed its contours with the fluid satin fabric. After a moment, she lifted the slip above her thighs, whose softly substantial nakedness, like her shoulders and breasts, was emphasised by the vertical line of the suspenders and the encircling tops of her stockings. Flesh and fabric alternated: offering more, offering less, leading the eye up towards the dark, curled mass of hair which concealed and emphasised what lay behind it. She loved the lewdness of it.
She loved how she looked, more than she had liked herself, firmer and somewhat slimmer (she had never been a sylph), in her youth. In those days, she might have admired herself for what others had admired about her: as a good-looking English rose, a blossoming buxom girl dressed for the world to see on her way to the theatre, or some party, on the arm of a pleasant if not exciting young man. Now, two decades and more later, she felt almost dizzy with excitement at the sight of herself, large, loose, her flesh lived in and entirely sexual, totally available. The silk and lace sheathed those parts of her which she most dearly wanted utterly exposed; they covered only as an invitation to disclose. She was an object, a contrivance entirely got up for the purpose of pursuing sensual pleasure. It was the artifice, the deceit of it she liked so much. The lie that barely concealed itself. The blatant falseness of a notional modesty which left breasts and nipples bra-less and free to be fingered beneath the flimsy silk, and vulva moist and knickerless under the slip, available to any searching hand.
Filled with desire at her image and lusting dreamily for herself, she watched her reflection slide her fingertips lightly down her body, from shoulder to breast, pausing to cup it softly and squeezing her nipple between thumb and finger before continuing down over her rounded belly, and under the pulled-up slip, reaching up between her thighs to part her saturated labia and run her fingers along the length of the valley between them, as silky and smooth as the satin covering her breasts, as slippery and wet as the liver she had donated to the cats. She withdrew her fingers and pressed them against her mouth and nose, taking in the pungent smell of her own desire. “Cunt,” she murmured to her image in the mirror, a word only she, it and one other had ever heard her speak. With an approving smile at herself she stroked her damp fingers behind each ear and at the pulse on her neck where normally she dabbed just a little Chanel No. 5. Efficient as always; it was twelve o’clock, and she was ready.
Sweet Witch, I’m very attached to more, too. More and more. This afternoon during a seminar, I remembered (viscerally, that is) the sight of your saliva between your parted lips, and me reaching up to take it from you. “Do you want more?” you asked. And I begged for your saliva, a river of it. “More. More,” I said. And you gave me a gift of more and more. So much of you inside me. I wonder if there’s a critical dose, after which I am more you than I am me? Or more us than either me or you. I adore your madness and desperately hope no terrible attack of sanity comes over you. I like you mad, my demented Kentish batwitch. You are with me, in that place (in all the places) where you live in me. I’ll keep you warm and watered and fed with all the right kind of delicious, dangerous food. Just lie back and enjoy yourself. What else is there for you to do? Or me? We make such fine spells together, what can we be but spellbound? Kiss me, sometimes, when you’re alone. I’m hungry to know more of you. I want to hear about your darkness. Whisper some of it to me. I want to be in the dark with you, whispering and playing in the mess of our minds. I miss you. God, the things I want to do to you.
When Richard arrived, their mouths met like a pair of magnets, too powerfully attracted, too needy to be used for the commonplace of speech. Their tongues greeted each other, instead, investigating their mutual state of desire, while Richard’s hand duplicated the exploration Susan’s own hand had conducted just a little while before. For a moment they remained like this, sucking in each other’s breath, until they had to break apart to take in neutral air. They looked at one another, like people in a state of shock, until Susan smiled a conspiratorial smile.
“You are a filthy bugger,” she told him.
“Mmm,” he agreed, sucking the taste of her off his fingers and sniffing the air. “You smell of sex.”
“You’re an animal,” she said with desire swimming in her eyes.
He followed her into the bedroom.
“You liked my present, then?”
“Loved it.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and Susan straddled him, sitting on his lap with her knees on the bed. He buried his face in her satin cleavage.
“Ahh. I want you,” he whispered as she surrounded him with her arms. “I want every morsel of you. I dream about your insides. The thought of your liver has been driving me crazy. In my dreams I try and try to get in there, but I can never get deep enough, never far enough into you.”
“Try harder. Keep trying,” she said, manoeuvring her naked vulva against his torso. “My liver aches for you to caress it. That is where I want you most of all. Slither through my organs like a serpent. I want your lips brushing against my liver, kissing my spleen. I want your tongue licking around my kidneys. I want you covered in my slime.”
“You filthy bitch,” he sighed. “Cover me with your stuff.”
Susan began to rub herself against his abdomen harder, raising and lowering herself on her knees. He held her tight, nudging one strap off her shoulder to free her breast and take it in his mouth, encouraging her excitement and building on his own, while narrative gave way to the inarticulacy of their moans and then sharp, staccato gasps, like cries of pain.
“You,” she breathed between her cries. “Take—everything. All of it. I’m yours.”
They made love for an hour, like an overland journey, moving to exhaustion, resting, beginning again with renewed energy. He didn’t enter her for a long time; they touched and stroked and mouthed. But each lover made forays into the other’s body, boring into each other with fingers and tongue wherever they could be inserted—for her, a foretelling of what was yet to come; for him, penetrated and submissive, as her most willing whore, craving more.
Susan Donahoe was not born to this kind of behaviour. For the greater part of her existence she had lived the life everyone, including herself, had expected of her. Indeed, apart from these afternoons, and at night, when she was lying beside her sleeping husband, she continued to fulfil expectations, and what was more, was pleased to do so. Tom thought of her as a good wife, and the children, when they thought about it at all, considered her a satisfactory mother. And she was happy to be thought of in this way. She was neither resentful of nor frustrated with her lot. Being a mother mattered to her, she loved her children—Corinne and Simon were ten and twelve, well adjusted, normally demanding and enjoyable. She took pride in them. Come to that, she loved Tom and was pleased to hear his key in the door when he got home from work.
It had been her choice to give up her job as a personnel assistant in a department store, to look after the children, and she had no sense of loss, either at the time, or later. On the contrary, her life was full. She had almost completed a degree course in literature with the Open University, and Tom had willingly taken care of the kids when she went off to the summer schools. She planned to continue with her studies, so that by the time the children left home, she would be ready to do a PhD, perhaps on a full-time basis.
She was not aching for anything, as far as she knew. Even the suburban life of Paramount Close was congenial to her. She liked their friends, the dinner parties and Sunday lunches. She enjoyed taking the day off with Margaret, her neighbour, to shop in the West End department stores. The quietness of the Close, its lack of drama, did not dismay her. Susan was no bored housewife. In the evenings, she and Tom discussed his work as a solicitor and what she was reading, as well as keeping a lively conversation going about world events. Neither was radical, but both had found the breath of fresh air of Thatcherdom had soured, and were not sorry to see her go. They were roughly Tory, but consensus Tories. “A touch of rising damp,” as Tom would joke to their more right-of-centre friends. When Harold Macmillan had spoken with alarm about “selling off the family silver,” they had been relieved to hear an old-fashioned, decent Tory view being stated once again.
Susan and Tom had a regular sex life. They slept in a double bed and made love, these days, once or twice a week, and neither of them felt their relationship was anything other than full and successful. Both knew that good marriages found their level over time, and that there was a great deal more to the long haul of partnership than fevered sexual activity. When they made love, they satisfied each other, and there was a warmth and familiarity about it which gave both of them pleasure.
Sometimes, as thoughtful people, they worried slightly that life was going so well for them. The Close had seen its share of domestic disruption. The Donahoes, everyone agreed, seemed to have the knack of making domesticity work. Susan knew that, while Tom might have had a passing flirtation or two, he had never been unfaithful to her. She, on her side, had never been unfaithful to Tom, not for fifteen years.
Then, eighteen months ago, at a retirement-cum-Christmas party given for Tom’s senior partner, Donald, she had met Richard, Donald’s son. Richard was a lecturer in English at a south London poly.
“We’re a university now,” he smiled at her when they first spoke.
“Who isn’t?” she answered.
He was in his mid-thirties—ten years Susan’s junior—and married to an aromatherapist called Jackie. They had a small child, Sara, just about to start full-time school. Richard and Susan had talked books and the Open University, where, it turned out, he was a visiting lecturer. He was not particularly striking to look at, his face was pleasant enough though a little nondescript, and he was slightly overweight.
“I’ll be seeing you at the summer school,” Richard had said pleasantly when she and Tom said goodbye.
Richard, keep on missing me. Stay obsessed. I dreamed you took me to pieces. Broke into me and cut the threads that hold me together. Then you replaced them with strange extruded stuff (cobwebbed latticework, brittle lace) made of your saliva and kisses. Miracle connective tissue that runs now through my bone marrow and keeps me in one piece, but all the time quivers me on your frequency. I vibrate with you, even when you’re not here. Do you know what you do to me, you devious, dirty man? I’m not just yours, I’m made of you. You liquefy me. I have never felt quite so much the sum of my parts, yet at the same time I sense each organ of my body in its right place, doing the right things. I hum with you, through perverse telegraph lines you laid in me when I was distracted. You last in me, not wholly ghost in my machine.
Oh, you do distract me. And you aren’t good: you’re bad, very bad, though saintly in your dedication to the pleasuring of you and me. For which, all must be forgiven. Just now, I conjured you, and you came to me so deliciously, so darkly that I thought, for a moment, that you were really here. Well, you are, of course. I’ve even come to love the silences between us while we live our other lives, even they speak to me of you.
About the things you want to do to me: the answer, so far as my imagination can stretch, and much, much further, is yes. What you want—yes. Over and over again. I love repetition.
And the things I want to do to you: I want to taste the tears that lubricate your eyes with the tip of my tongue. Your eyelids would resist, but wouldn’t be able to prevent my penetration. I’d lick each eye from corner to corner. And then as a prize for being so still, I’d dip my finger into my saturated privates and run it across your mouth. I want to watch your tongue gathering up the taste of me. I’m so happy to be your secret slut, slipping under your skin, into your interior, into the labyrinths where your perverse daydreams huddle. Can you feel me there? In your dark, damp nooks and crannies, nuzzling you and asking for more? I wonder if I should do my PhD in filth? Or limericks. Look, I wrote one for you:
A pair who were anal fixated
Could never entirely be sated
They weren’t just perverse
It was something much worse
Even God turned his back when they mated.
Susan had forgotten all about Richard by the time the summer came round. Except, in retrospect, she recalled looking forward to the summer school even more than usual. She was certain, though, that nothing had happened between them at the party, no special looks or anything, and she was sure he had not been on her mind as she packed, with such enthusiasm, for her week at Sussex University.
He was not her tutor, but they found themselves on the first evening sitting in the same group in the bar. They chatted about books, and he moved his stool closer to hers to make their conversation easier above the raised voices of the rest of the crowd, drinking and laughing their way into familiarity. When the others went off to bed, leaving the two of them alone, Susan had not thought anything of it. Even when he walked her back to the hall of residence, and then accompanied her to the door of her room, Susan did not consider it strange or meaningful. It was only when, having unlocked the door and, without a word being spoken, both of them were behind it, in the room, and still in silence they had locked together, fumbling desperately to get each other’s clothes off, that Susan realised what was happening.
They never got to the bed, or even fully undressed. He freed her breasts, pulling her blouse and brassiere down to her waist. She opened his flies and, dropping to her knees, grasped inside his underpants to get at his penis and fill her mouth with it, half-choking on its bulk so that the pressure on the back of her throat caused contractions, like swallowing movements, as if she would devour him. In a few moments, he withdrew it, and pressed her down on to the carpet, pushing up her skirt and dragging her knickers to her ankles, only getting one leg free before grasping both breasts between his fingers, and entering her. He drove himself into her, tightening his grip on her nipples with every movement, and spitting the word, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” into her face, and although she had no recollection of ever before using the word, she called it back to him with matching ferocity, until the two of them were so fiercely in unison that suddenly they both laughed out loud. He kissed her then, and the laughter died as his tongue reached towards the back of her throat, tasting her and himself at the same time, and he came with a cry that travelled down from the interior of Susan’s mouth into her abdomen and brought her to an anguished and frighteningly strange orgasm of her own.
In the ensuing silence, they were strangers in shock: people meeting for the first time in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe, not knowing how to address each other once the intimacy of disaster was over. Someone moved slightly, Susan did not know who, and it cued their separation. Hesitantly, rather awkwardly, Richard kissed her on the lips, but it had about it the quality of a well-mannered gesture. You had to do something to recognise the person you barely knew, when you had just had tumultuous sex with them. She knew he would rather have dressed himself in silence and left, because that was what she wanted to do. It wasn’t that she felt that either of them disliked the other for what had happened, only that it was such an embarrassing situation they now found themselves in.
Neither of them found appropriate words—not surprisingly on Susan’s part, she didn’t know what they were, she had never done anything like this before. They dressed, turning their backs on each other for modesty, and then stood in the vacant silence.
“I’d better go. I’m . . .” Richard said. She could hear that he had been about to add an apology, but decided against it, not wanting it to be misunderstood.
“Yes,” she said, meaning nothing very much at all.
Again, at the open door, Richard turned as if to say something, feeling, Susan knew, that he ought to arrange another meeting, that it was not right to leave it like this; but instead he cracked a bit of a smile and closed the door behind him with elaborate care.
They continued to see each other in the bar, but never when there wasn’t a group of other students and teachers around them. There was no remaining behind when the evening’s socialising was done. When they passed each other on the way to lectures, he gave her a fleeting smile that suggested he remembered what had happened, but could not cope with anything more than that. Susan’s smile said the same thing. If it had been an adventure, it was one which both were happy to leave to find its place in the past.
A month later, he phoned her in the middle of the day.
“I want to see you,” he said. Just that, no greeting or explanation.
“All right,” Susan replied, and he arranged to come to her house at midday the following day.
They fucked immediately on Susan and Tom’s bed, as frantically as they had at the summer school, but this time they continued to lie in each other’s arms. When they’d rested in an easier and far more comfortable silence than after their first encounter, they began again, but now it was different, and they took their time, exploring their faces and bodies with delicate care, watching the response to every slight caress. They called each other by name, tentatively at first, and looked into each other’s eyes to judge the pleasure they were giving and convey the pleasure they were receiving.
After that he came to her twice a week, on the days when his timetable left him free before and after lunch. It was, to Susan’s surprise, extraordinarily easy to push past the limits of what she had once considered to be generally acceptable. The exploration of the boundaries—physical and mental—between them became the structure of their affair. On his second visit, while Richard moved slowly, thoughtfully inside her, Susan’s hand casually stroked his lower back and continued around the curve of his buttock. As a sudden spasm of desire ran through her, she gripped him harder, her fingers digging into the dividing slope, and for a split second the rhythm of his movements was interrupted. She looked up at him and saw some new longing in his eyes. That time, the moment passed, and they continued their slow and sensual reacquaintance, but Susan took note.
Each time they met, they tested the further possibilities of what was wanted of them and by them, and each time found they had not reached the innermost boundary of desire. When, cued by the look in his eyes on the previous occasion, she first penetrated him with her finger, he moaned and abandoned himself readily to her exploration. He breathed “Yes,” as if he had been waiting for it, and lay wide open and shuddering with an almost deranged pleasure at feeling himself invaded and caressed so deep inside his body. She discovered a new sense of power, a novel potency which made her heart beat fast and her eyes gleam, while she released his desire to be taken and used.
The increasing reification of each other’s body became a goal and a gift. Her body was put at the disposal of his every whim, to be his object with which he could do anything he chose, and she saw how he, too, wanted the pure physicality of being reduced (though this was not how either experienced it) to a sexual commodity. She had never felt so much herself as when she was utterly and explicitly his object, a thing with no other use than to gratify his impulses. Nor had she known such welling passion, and what she would have called love if it had not been so much more and different a matter from the love she felt for Tom, as when her existence was being annihilated by his unfettered desire to have everything of her. They were possessed by one another and the desire for total possession of the other’s body. Very quickly, it was clear that everything was allowed and wanted. But soon enough they’d reached the limits of the physically possible and they discovered they were not satiated. Their desire surpassed the accessible areas of their bodies.
Richard wanted to know, one day, who got up first in Susan’s house, who collected the post? The following morning the first letter arrived. When they met a couple of days later, they smiled at one another, but made no mention of their exchange of letters. The story they were weaving by post continued in parallel to their meetings.
And so it went on, almost daily by post, and twice a week, in reality. They detailed their daydreams on paper and without any sense of hurry, though with studied compulsion, acted them out on the flesh. They delighted and amused each other with the games they invented, the roles they played in both their modes of communication. They encouraged each other, urging each other on to go deeper into their desires, to say what had never been said, to wish for what couldn’t be wished for, to do whatever they liked.
Yet, all the while, life went on as normal. The families noticed very little change; nothing more than a slightly distracted air from time to time. Tom would smile when Susan failed to hear something he said while she sat and read a book in the evening.
“Too immersed in her studies to hear her poor old husband,” he joked at her on that evening when the two cats were lying purring at their feet, fat and sleek after a large liver lunch. Tom was pleased to have a wife with a lively intelligence.
“Mmm,” she said, looking up briefly, and smiling back.
Susan, my Sidcup siren, let me tutor you in your PhD. I promise to give you very high marks, you’ll be a doctor of filth in no time, so long as you promise never to cure me. God, I wish I could mark you, and you me. It’s impractical, I know, but I long to trace the outlines of the bruises you would leave on me. The maps of pain and pleasure I know you know how to give. And your blood—what would it taste like?
It’s funny about the silences, isn’t it? But I love your sound and your presence, even more. I want to be drip-fed with your voice, your words. Even then, I’d fret when you took the time to breathe. I have such a need for you, such a hunger, and yet I want us to take our time. I want to go through in the flesh everything we’re going through in the story we’ve been telling each other by post (and the other, even murkier story which we haven’t dared commit to words: too dangerous), but slowly, deliberately. I want to kiss you for an age and toy with time.
I could swear that you are my invention. How else could you be how you are? I worked on your wishes just as I work on your body, making them real and solid. You are a monster conceived out of my own monstrous desires, for all your pretty floral curtains and blu-flush in the loo. But we’re angelic monsters, not fiends. The fiends couldn’t stand the heat we create.
The project of inventing you is going so well, though it’s slow, careful work. (Sometimes, Susan, I’m so scared about us, I can hardly breathe.) I’m starting from the inside: building from the centre and working out. (I don’t want us to stop. I want to go on. Is it OK?) I’ve got your delicious entrails in place, and they’re very beautiful, I wish you could see them. Soon, I’ll have your major organs mapped. Oh, I can’t wait to get to your bloodstream. I’ll carry on working on you for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow is dedicated to inventing your lungs and spleen. The next day I think I’ll devote entirely to your heart.
People don’t understand about repetition, do they? How it is at the heart (thump, thump, thump) of obsession; at the erotic centre (drip, drip, drip) of desire. You do, of course. Repetition is insatiability spelt sideways.
I love your ability to focus. Apart from repetition, focus is the main requirement of good obsessives. You are such a good obsessive. Do you know that, sometimes, when I see the word “you” in one of your letters, my heart stops for a moment?
My turn:
A batwitch who rode through the night
On a bookish young man did alight
She unleashed all her passion
In unspeakable fashion
When he thanked her, she said “That’s all right.”
In between lusting and family life, the subject of betrayal did, of course, occupy Susan’s thoughts. She knew that she was betraying Tom by any common definition of fidelity, but was she, she wondered, betraying Richard’s wife? This question engaged her for some time, seeming, at least at first, to be a different matter from her infidelity to Tom.
Richard had told her that he had had a couple of affairs during his five-year marriage, before his involvement with Susan, and it was clear to her right from the start that Richard was not a man who would be faithful to a wife. She was fairly certain that “a couple of affairs” meant more than two. She argued to herself that he would be sleeping with someone else if he were not sleeping with her. This was a statement of the particular situation, rather than a justification for her affair with a married man, but Susan discovered that she simply did not feel guilt about Jackie the aromatherapist. That marriage was entirely their concern: she did not discuss it with Richard, and would not talk about Jackie, even in passing.
“Why?” he asked when she stopped him telling her something Jackie had said about sending their daughter to private school.
“Because if Tom was in bed with another woman, whatever I felt about his infidelity, I wouldn’t want him chatting to her about me. It doesn’t matter what’s said. Your wife has a right to privacy. She’s none of my business.”
“You think the injustice to her is any less if we don’t mention her name?”
“I don’t know about the injustice to her. That’s also for the two of you.”
Richard privately thought this was a pretty thin way to deny her own responsibility. But Susan, for whatever motive, developed a rational view of her relationship with Jackie’s husband. What went on between them occurred, so far as she was concerned, in a vacuum which had nothing to do with his wife and family. Only if she intended or wanted to intervene, to break up their marriage, would she be participating in their family life. And she had no such intention, no such desire. She saw herself as harmless and neutral in relation to Jackie. When she and Richard met, it was during his working time, never when he might otherwise be at home, and she was clear that, astonishing and thrilling though their relationship was to both of them, it didn’t impinge on Richard’s marriage. She was providing an alternative sexuality, and Richard loved his family; these were two unconnected facts. He was not dissatisfied and looking for somewhere else to go. Jackie was family; Susan was fantasy. They were separate things. Therefore there was no cause for the guilt which, however much she tested for it, she did not feel.
“Do you do what we do, with your wife?” she asked when he questioned her argument for practical innocence.
“Never,” he told her, quite shocked at the idea. “It wouldn’t come up. I’m not unhappy with our sex life. It’s quiet but very good. I wouldn’t want it different.”
Susan had no difficulty understanding this and it satisfied her own reasoning.
The fact was, however, that betrayal of Jackie was very close to the centre of Richard’s and Susan’s activities together. For Richard, Susan knew quite consciously, his good marriage with Jackie had to be betrayed in order to remain good. Infidelity was essential as a balance to Richard’s loving-husband role, it was the culture in which their marriage survived, and she suspected that Jackie knew something of it, perhaps choosing to remain silent as her part of the good-marriage bargain. If Jackie was not betrayed, she would have had to take on the sinful Richard who was not a good husband and responsible father. Better for that Richard to remain outside the domestic sphere. Indeed, Susan sometimes felt, in relation to Jackie, that she was providing her with an essential service. Another woman might demand more of Richard than his sexual obsession. Richard and Jackie’s marriage was safe in Susan’s hands.
But there was also an aspect of her affair which Susan did not so readily confront. There was Susan’s own separate and particular betrayal not just, obviously, of Tom, but, in truth, of Jackie as well. It was a betrayal which was not related to Richard’s agenda at all. Consciously and socially, Susan had no wish to bring Jackie into her affair; but half-consciously and sexually, Richard’s wife was fully, if subtextually (as her English tutor would say), present. There was a frisson she rarely chose to define, but which was ever-present in her passion during her love-making with Richard, written and performed. It was Susan’s thrill at her awareness of The Wife’s ignorance of what her husband was up to at that moment—at this very moment—with her. Often the image of Jackie (just glimpsed at the Christmas party), working away in her white coat on some pampered body, or in her car, driving the child to school, would surface, while Richard was expressing excruciated pleasure at what Susan was doing to him with her hands or tongue. Her own orgasms were enhanced by the fleeting glimpse of an oblivious Jackie peeling the potatoes for supper.
Eventually, Susan could no longer suppress her knowledge of how much Jackie’s ignorance and betrayal added to her excitement. She admitted to herself that her enhanced pleasure at the deceit of her affair made her, by any standards, not a nice person, but she found herself surprised (and perhaps a little relieved) rather than distressed at this discovery of her true nature.
She never voiced anything of this to Richard, but again it was not because she felt ashamed. On the contrary, her silence provided a double gratification: not only the original deceit against The Wife, but also the dishonesty of her dialogue on Jackie’s rights with Richard, which amounted to a secret betrayal of her lover as well as Jackie. She cherished the silent lies that lived only in her heart. She suspected it was the same for Richard, though she had no wish to share her insight with him. She did not believe that he got no pleasure from the fact of his infidelity to Jackie. His protestations that he loved his wife differently though deeply and therefore was not betraying her were the same lies that she told and created for him, she supposed; the same private multiple pleasure in deceit that she experienced. And then, of course, there was her own husband. The spare bedroom in their house, with its made-up bed, might have been designed for an illicit afternoon affair, but Susan always led Richard to the bed she and Tom slept in every night to fuck him.
With everyone who was not her deceived and ignorant of her unfaithfulness to them, Susan had created a secret and secluded pool of pleasure to dip into which was for no one but herself. It felt necessary to her, as if some essential part of her was strengthened—fed and nurtured into solidity—by her solipsistic knowledge. It was not that she wanted anyone’s pain, not at all, only that she wanted to enjoy the benefits of a sequestered Elysium that was hers alone, and which added no actual suffering to anyone’s life, as far as she could see.
She did not transform this into a moral somersault and consider herself ethically justified. She understood quite clearly the moral position which declared that people were injured just by being betrayed; that broken trust was betrayal whether it was exposed or not. Innocent parties did not have to participate in the infidelity by their knowledge of it to be the victims of it.
But she was not taking a moral position. She did not feel the moral position to be the slightest burden on her conscience. Mrs. Donahoe, suburban housewife and mother, contributor to the profits of Marks & Spencer and John Lewis, Parent Governor of Sidcup Junior School, practising owner of the Delia Smith wipe clean cookery cards, found herself to be a woman without the faintest remnants of a conscience, and she was considerably surprised. Try as she might, she could find no guilt, towards anybody, about her behaviour. She required no forgiveness, for she had not the faintest sense that there was anything to forgive. Unconsciously, surely? Well, how would she know? She slept well enough and lived through her days without the slightest difficulty. The situation pleased her in its entirety. She had no hankerings to sabotage it by confessing anything to anyone, or leaving clues as to her guilt. She was meticulous about changing the sheets, airing the bedroom, and showering the scent of Richard off her body before the children and Tom returned to the house. There were no accidental Freudian absent-mindednesses that put her affair at risk. All the parts of her life seemed to be working fine.
“Big case next month in Lewes. I think I’m going to have to stay there for a week or so.”
Susan looked up from her book, this time, giving her husband her full attention.
“When?”
“Second week, definitely, and possibly into the third. Will you manage all right?”
“Of course I will,” she told him. “Anyway, I owe you some time from the summer school.”
“I don’t think about it like that,” Tom said, feeling hurt.
“Oh, no, of course you don’t. I didn’t mean it like that. Really, it’s all right. It’s not even school holidays.”
It had been a while since Tom spent time away from home on business, but every now and then a case came up which he felt was important enough to need to be there throughout.
“I was thinking,” Tom added, with a smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes, “when I get back, why don’t we take the kids to my mother, and spend the weekend in the country? A nice break. Treat for us both.”
Susan looked pleased. She was pleased.
“That’s a lovely idea. Book it up. Somewhere quiet with very good food, darling.”
She could tell they would be making love tonight. This pleased her, too.
The following day Richard arrived at twelve o’clock. After they had lain sweating in each other’s exhausted embrace for a while, Susan spoke.
“Tom’s going away for a week next month.”
“Oh? But you’ll have the kids won’t you?”
Susan detected slight alarm in his voice. Did he think she was going to ask for a whole night together? Or more?
“Do you remember what you said in one of your letters, about wishing you had the marks on you we can’t make because it would be indiscreet?”
He looked at her half-sexual, half-anxious.
“Jackie isn’t going away.”
“I want what you want. Remember how our dreams fit on top of each other. A bruise or two, or marks on my wrists from a tight knot . . . they’d be gone by the time Tom came back.”
Richard’s anxiety flew away.
“Whore,” he whispered in delight.
“Your whore. I’ve got a selection of scarves you can use.”
“What are they made of ?” Richard’s voice was curiously husky.
“What difference does it make what they’re made of ?” Susan laughed.
“Silk chiffon is best, though a slightly rough, silky viscose does nicely, too.”
Susan rested on her elbow and stared, amused and excited, into her lover’s face.
“Tell me.”
“I use scarves sometimes on my own.”
“Your wife’s scarves? To do what?”
“My scarves. I keep a small collection in my room at college. When I’m alone I use them to masturbate.”
“Tell me,” Susan insisted.
“I’ve never told anyone about it before.”
“Tell me! Tell me!”
“There’s a way of tying them, it’s incredibly—exciting . . .” He was a little abashed. Not certain what reaction he would get.
“Details. I want details, please.”
“Well, I tie one side around my waist, and then hook the remainder hanging down the back—it’s got to be a long scarf—between my buttocks . . . and then you spread it out over your balls and cock.”
“Your balls and cock.”
“You’re very strict. My cock and balls—which I stroke, very slowly, through the material—God, you’ve got no idea how it feels—and, as an extra treat, while I’m stroking, I hold the loose end with my other hand . . .”
Susan jumped out of bed and began rummaging about in her closet.
“It’s no good, I’ve got no visual imagination. Does the colour matter? Show me.”
She whisked out a couple of long silk chiffon scarves and threw them across to Richard where they settled on him like fairy clocks blown by the wind.
“You aren’t bothered by my confession, then?”
“No, I’m thrilled. Richard, you must tell me everything. Every detail of your desires. I’m going to take all your secrets.”
He took a scarf and knelt on the bed, tying it around himself as he had described. He was as efficient and practised as a man doing up his tie. All the while, Susan lay along the foot of the bed and kept her eyes unblinkingly on his activity. He watched her watching him doing what no one had ever witnessed before. When he was ready, he lay back on the bed and began to stroke himself. Susan kept her eyes fixed on him while she took the second scarf and, wrapping it around her waist, draped it between her parted legs. She ran her fingers softly over the fabric.
“Here, let me tie it properly for you.”
Richard stopped and tied her scarf around her so that she had a similar tension between her buttocks and could manipulate the loose end with her free hand to increase the pressure.
“Oh, Richard,” Susan whispered, and while working gently on herself, reached out to do for him what he was doing himself.
“Is that good? Is that how you like it?”
He reached out to her, and they worked on each other until Richard moved towards her.
“Keep the scarves between us,” Susan whispered as she opened her legs to receive him, and they made love between two layers of chiffon, chaffing sweetly and pulling against the tenderest places on their bodies and into climaxes quite beyond anything they had ever known before.
“I wish I could keep the smell of us on them,” Susan said when they’d finished, gathering up the scarves for washing. “When Tom’s away, we’ll have to use something else to tie me to the bed, so we can get them in this state again and I won’t have to wash them. I can sleep with them on my pillow for a week, my love, my lover, my whore.”
Richard lay astonished at his good fortune in finding the mirror of his dreams. He wanted to hold her tightly and tell her he loved her, which was true, though only in a way specific to her. He was almost sure she would understand, but she had gone into the bathroom and was running the shower for the washing of the scarves and their bodies back to respectability.
“And you,” Richard said, soaping her in the shower. “I want your secrets. All of them.”
“Of course you do. They’re yours. My plans for when Tom’s away: they’re much more detailed. I’ll write to you about them—with details and exact instructions as to how you are to be my master. And you’ll follow them to the letter, won’t you?”
“Of course, I’m your slave,” he said, and bent to bite her breast, but gently enough not to show any marks.
“I love you,” she said, taking his wet head between her hands and pulling him close against her breasts.
He knew exactly what she meant.
“Nice meal,” said Tom, scraping up the last of the raspberry coulis.
“Delicious. And we’ve got a whole day and night to go.”
“Breakfast in bed, tomorrow.”
“Late breakfast in bed,” Susan hummed.
“Mmm,” Tom agreed. “Mustn’t miss lunch, though.”
“We might,” she said, with a smile.
“Yes, we might,” her husband agreed, wiping his mouth and pushing back his chair. “Come on, time for bed, old thing. Not feeling too sleepy, I hope?”
Susan shook her head, dreamy with good food and wine. She knew exactly what he meant.