Quietly obscene, the taking of E here, where old women walk three-legged dogs along Loch Broom and you can order your fish dinner from the restaurant before it’s even been caught. As if the mountains could fragment, the Loch boil with the indignation of spurning their natural high for a chunk of synthetic.
Pippa’s eyes bloat black.
Blemishes are sucked into the TV colour of her skin. We talk too quickly, trying to keep a grasp of the mundane but even discussions of moored boats and gliding lights in the distance spawn gentle leaps into the fantastic. It begins. As does the rain, flecking her Gore-Tex and disappointing us with its intrusion. No soft-nosed needles bursting sub-apocalyptically on our flesh here: just rain.
Earlier, over open prawn sandwiches and beer at the Ferry Boat Inn on Shore Street (served by a tough, likeable ball of flab, hair like a razed band between tracts of Scots fir. The prawns had a glaze not unlike that of his right eye – which was glass), we wrote postcards home. Pippa’s fingers dabbed at the McCoy’s. My backside was blockish and numb from driving – we hadn’t stopped since leaving Dunvegan that morning. Loch Broom flat and dull as a blade. A boat, permanently tethered, cringed in the expanse upon which it was resting, its rust-orange hull gathering fire as the sun spent itself on a rind of mountain.
Hello Mum and Dad. Driving like idiots. Warrington to Oban in a day! And then on to Skye where we walked a beach of black sand.
“Here?” she said. “Shall we do it here? I reckon we should because if we leave it till tomorrow we’ll be fucked for the drive back.”
“But Durness,” I urged. “The North Sea. Fuck off waves. Imagine that.”
Pippa flipped the last corner of her ham sandwich on to the plate. Dug for a cig. Which pissed me off. Kissing her after she’s been kissing the filter of a Marlboro Light is like frenching an ashtray. Sometimes I wonder if she eats just so she can have a cigarette afterwards.
“Yes, chicken. Very romantic. But be practical. We have to be back in London in two days’ time. A long way. And I don’t want to be driving whilst wazzed.”
Eaten a full fry-up every day. I’m beginning to resemble a fried egg. I’ll try porridge tomorrow as long as they don’t put any salt in it!
“All right,” I conceded. I felt on edge. “Not too bad here, I suppose.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I love you,” I said, for want of a better.
She smoked like a novice, watching the coal as it frenzied, the gust of blue as she exhaled. I suddenly meant what I said. In that green, waterproof huddle she looked so damned vulnerable and soft, as if the ruthless career Dalek she became back in the Smoke had been smothered. Her breasts were under there somewhere, sweating up: dough introduced to an oven.
“I’ve got a hard on.”
Durness tomorrow, then back home via Inverness. Pippa is desperate for a fresh fish dinner and I’m going to make sure she gets it. See you soon.
“Do you reckon I could get both your bollocks into my mouth at the same time?” Another drag on the weed. Quite sexy, come to think of it. Bacall-ish. “I’ve never met anyone whose cock was so greedy before. You’d get a hard on at the drop of a hat. You’d get a hard on if I said ‘Bangladesh’.”
“Ooh, you sleazy minx. Take me now.”
“Finish your beer. We’ve got bags of time.” She gives me one of those smirks that brought me to my knees right at the start. Somewhere between a smile and a purse and a lippy shrug. Almost the kind of indulgent moue you’d give a child. I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m on about, but I can’t describe it. She has these moments when she is utterly, incontrovertibly, fucking gorgeous. Nobody can hold a flame to her. When she’s tired or angry or bored, she looks as compelling as an oatmeal cardigan. Spinning between these two poles, like a magnet torn, I’m kept on my toes.
Back at her Micra, we unload the bags. My briefcase looks conspicuous, absurd, but it’s got a combination lock on it. While Pippa goes through the pleasantries with the woman in the B&B, I dump our stuff and pootle down to the Post Office with the cards. Pippa’s handwriting is an object lesson in efficiency. Some of her letters are improbably joined due to a short cut she’s found over years of writing essays and exams. Her energy expenditure is minimal. Thankfully, none of these cost-cutting practices have found their way into our bed. If she ever downsized her double-handed Turbowank into some streamlined, eco-friendly two-fingered jig I’d be more than a little miffed.
M+D. Ullapool beautiful. North tomorrow. Speak to you Monday pm. P.
But for the cheap WH Smith turquoise ink, her only indulgence, it’s brutal and lizard cold. That’s it with Pippa. She’s got something of the robot, the replicant about her. On the way back, I toyed with the idea of asking if she’s ever seen Demon Seed but I didn’t think she’d appreciate the joke.
In our room. She’s propped up against the pillows. One breast is free of her halter-top. Her legs are in a loose pincer shape, feet almost touching each other. One hand is sprawled over her mons, middle and index fingers spreading herself so I can see flashes of her liquefying cunt, like moments in a zoetrope, as her other hand blurs over her clitoris. Slowly she arches, her left foot twitching, mouth folding from stiff oval to flat, thin line and back. Eyes disappear to black slots. On the cusp, her features slacken to something like surprise, to the kind of surprise characters in films adopt when they’ve been shot or stabbed without warning.
“Some welcome back,” I say, homing in.
And now.
I can feel the lobes of my brain fizzing. Every breath becomes cleaner, colder, more congealed, as if soon I might be able to chew on the air. We’ve had a Dove each. I want to go and run up Ben Eilideach, all 1,800 feet of the fucker. It’s like a huge, beautiful dick. A dick tenting a bed sheet. And the sky is the mother of all cunts. A wraparound cunt mocking the cock with teasing, unattainable distance. I tell Pippa this and she falls about.
“How do you feel?” I say, through clenched teeth.
“Absolutely wazzed.”
We leg up and down the loch front like we’re trying to plough a furrow. But no matter how ripped off my face I might feel, I’m buggered if I’m walking to the end of the terrace. Something is rustling there and it isn’t an empty bag of Golden Wonder.
“Look, chicken!”
I heard it before I saw it. The schuss of waves and a backbeat throb of engine. Then rounding the crown of land came the ferry; its lights pearlescent, like underlit smoke in the windows. If there wasn’t a figure at the prow of the boat, twisting himself in and out of extravagant knots, slithering like oil along the railings, expanding like a blot of ink on bandage, there ought to have been: it was a gorgeous sight. Just the night though, no doubt, wanking with my mind. The night and the pill.
The rain on Pippa’s face was a thin matting, like hoar frost. She was so still, my heart spasmed as if she’d died on me, while I was chuntering on about bush shapes lunging for me like servants carrying trays of food that they were zealously getting me to sample. Then she moved, holding my hand and pulling me towards the B&B. Inside, we held each other so tightly, it seemed I’d just open up and fold around her. The heat coming from her settled, a layer against my skin. She made glottal noises and shuddered occasionally. Her jaw spasmed against my cheek. She was off somewhere I couldn’t yet know, despite the almost unbearable rise of the drug: a balloon inflating in my head and threatening to take off with or without me. I licked her gullet. I pulled her head down and kissed her. The kiss developed rhythms independent of us. Mouths melded, it felt I could slowly melt into her, without pain, until my mouth quested from the back of her head. I tasted, very acutely, her black stream of words which squirted on to my tongue.
We shall go to the very edge together.
“What do you mean?” I said, breaking away, a thin rope bridge of saliva looping between us.
“I didn’t say anything.”
We’d reached our ceiling. A few minutes later, I was reluctantly controlling things, even though great pollen-like clouds of wow were still softly exploding. We walked back to the pub and sipped beer by the fire. I couldn’t look into the flame: it was too much like staring at ripped flesh.
I drove the next day, knowing that Pippa was always drubbed out after a trip. We made excellent time, bisecting the mountains while the tape looped The Breeders’ Hag over and over till we got tired of it and played Radiohead instead. Pippa read out loud to me: Steve Erickson or Joel Lane or Patrick McGrath. She told me what she’d do to me once we arrived in Durness. We watched the fighters make languid arcs over Kinloss and Lossiemouth.
Travelling north seemed to be cleansing us of all the city dirt and impatience. Pippa looked more relaxed than I’d seen her for weeks, the lines and shadows round her mouth gone, a rose bloom to cheeks which had been waxen and livid for too long. We hadn’t discussed work (or in my case, the lack of it) since the first ten miles of our holiday. Her irritability where I was concerned had been sucked back into its shell.
It seemed almost feasible that we’d spend the rest of our lives together.
On the final stretch of road, a stream at the bottom of a glacial valley beneath us caught a lozenge of sunlight which chased the car: a blip on an ECG. A T-junction loomed; beyond was a bluff of land and little else, save for the ocean which unfurled towards a whitish, ill-defined horizon.
“Welcome to Durness,” said Pippa. “End of the line.”
We parked by the information centre, which was closed for the winter. Luckily, the souvenir shop opposite was open and, while I picked out a pair of gloves, Pippa asked about likely accommodation. Outside, she took on a grotesque approximation of the shopkeeper’s accent and repeated to me what she’d heard, dressing it up and sounding more like a hysterical Frazer from Dad’s Army the more she progressed. “Och, ye might try the Smoo Cave Hotelllll the noo. Mind how ye gooo.”
“Ayyyyyyye.” I got in on the act. “You’ll nae be stayin’ looong in our neck of the woods, I’ll be bound. D’ye hear what they say aboot the people who dare to stay in the old Smoo Cave Hotel?”
“Ye might gae in,” mugged Pippa, turning on me with a leer. “But ye shooor as heeell won’t come oooot!”
I creased up, trying to steer the car up a sheer portion of road which ran along the perimeter of the beach. It took but a single slow pass along the front of the Smoo Cave Hotel for us to sober up, ruffled by how accurate our badinage had proved. The hotel was little more than a single-storey B&B, scabrous and shallow as a Hollywood façade. There was even a door that wasn’t shut properly, slamming to and fro in the wind.
“You go,” I dared.
“My arse,” Pippa said. “Let’s see if there’s anywhere else.”
Small place, Durness, but we found a farmhouse advertising bed and board as soon as we U-turned out of the grounds of Castle Grim. A pleasant, open-faced girl of my age answered our knock and I thought, yes, this’ll do. Olivia led us to a room upstairs – a bit pokey – but I was so jiggered that a kennel would have sufficed. Pippa handed me a temazepam and I necked it with a glass of peaty water, watching her do likewise. We kissed and snuffled around each other for a while, until things became more serious, perhaps encouraged by the warm spread as the jellies kicked in. We undressed each other, revelling in the comfort of blankets which would have been starchy but for the downers.
She took me into her mouth, sucking just the head of my cock, her tongue lolling against it, eyes sexdrunk slits. Her hand worked me furiously. Occasionally, I’d slip from her lips with a Schpluh! before she plugged me back in. Reaching round, I felt for her sodden cleft and strummed gently at her from top to tail till she was trying to back up and swallow my fingers. I was losing myself, all of my feeling and heat racing to the purplish bulb which was being roiled around the delicious vacuum of Pippa’s mouth. She sensed the twitch and, in extremis, moved her head away, replacing it with her left breast, which was slick with my spit, pulling on my cock till I gouted a great jet of come over her chest. I pushed her back and chased the pearly glut around against her nipple with my tongue before turning her over and moving into her.
I fucked her with her head into the pillow. She yowled but I was past the point of caring whether it was pleasure or pain. She was too, her hips bucking, hands clawing the mattress till it tore. The edges of the bedsheet curled back like a smile and showed me a black hole beneath that appeared so deep as to have no end. I felt myself being gulped into it, as slickly and effortlessly as into Pippa. A vertiginous rush eclipsed the core of my pleasure and I thought I was going to lose my balance. It suddenly seemed important that I be able to see what was watching us through the window: it felt as though I was out there, looking in. When I came again, thrashing to free myself rather than out of any recourse to pleasure, my head was totally banded by darkness and I felt, with the conviction that only dreams can muster, that I was dead, or close to death, and I would never see Pippa again. On the edge of my dissolution, however, the night dissipated and Pippa was stroking my backside, asking me what I thought of Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. The window was misted: sex ghosts. Something hulked beyond. I walked the three paces and placed my hand against the glass. A deeper mist sprang from the edges of my skin. When I removed it, I saw, through the black star that remained, an ancient man, hair rioting in the wind. His eyes were wetted black grapes thumbed deep into the dry dough of his head. Through the slit of his mouth, his tongue jutted a moment. He said something. I read the movement of his lips: Walk with me.
“Wassup, chicken?” Pippa’s voice syrupy with sleep and trancs.
“Nothing.” I went back to her. I wasn’t afraid. Sex worked its palliative magic, working at the knots in my muscles, and freeing my brain of worry. But I couldn’t sleep. Pushing through the comfort and the warmth was the cold prickle of something not right. I could sense something brewing inside Pippa. I wanted to unhinge the top of her head and peer beneath the lid.
Persistent, murmuring voices in the room abutting this one I used as the reason for my insomnia. At one point they became heated, although I couldn’t make out what was being said, so muffled was their anger. I slipped from bed, but Pippa was too dead to the world to notice. Opening the door a crack, I spied a sliver of light bleeding through the bottom of the door next to ours. Pacing shadows disturbed it: a man and a woman. Something terrible in their voices, not so much anger as misdirected passion which twisted them into gross human spoofs. Yet there was something in their spiteful gainsaying which made something in me feel liberated. I don’t know what it was. I could hear only fragments of argument: plosive words such as betrayed and bitch and kill from him and blistered reason from her: on the cards, I heard. And, in a moment of clarity: don’t be such a fucking stupid childish bastard.
I left them to it, hoping it would blow itself out before any of their dark promises were kept.
Sometime after midnight. Me, eyes wide as peeled eggs. Pippa says, in a voice thick with desire: “Oh, Jeff. Suck it. Come on.”
“What are you having for breakfast, chicken?” she said. “How about my tits on toast, hmm?”
I slid away from her yawning legs and ducked my head under the tap, blasted my tired, tired face with cold reality. She didn’t notice my standoffishness and that suited me fine, because I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I didn’t know how to talk about it. Or whether I should talk about it at all – it was just, apparently, a dream. But that specific name. Jeff. Fucking Jeff. Jeff-rey. I hated the cunt. And I didn’t even know anyone called Jeff-bastard-rey.
Olivia was preparing toast when we came downstairs. “No breakfast for us,” I muttered.
“Great,” she returned. “I suppose I’ll just eat all this by myself.”
“Give it to the folks in the room next door. They wasted enough energy bawling at each other last night. They’ll need a good breakfast.”
Her frown disarmed me and I hoped I hadn’t heard her properly as I hurriedly shepherded Pippa outside:
There are no other guests.
Despite being wrapped in thermals we kept banging our heads against a wall of frigid air built by the seafront. Huge boulders in the sand provided enough shelter for my ears and from prying eyes while Pippa lit a huge spliff. Her hair was savagely drawn back from her scalp, tamed by a simple green hairband made of elasticated fabric.
She took a few tokes and passed the J to me. I shook my head. Soft grey shapes emerged on the horizon, like thawing fossils from ice. Oil tankers probably. Pippa took a last drag and stuffed the roach into a crack in the boulder.
“Lets go and check out the cave,” I said. A figure had breasted the prow of land to our left, next to the shell of a burned-out Allegro. He was looking towards us, hands deep in the pockets of a mackintosh, hair like a wreath of white smoke. Even from here I could see him hook his index finger. Beckon me. On his wrists, a curve of green. The detail made me wonder for a minute if there were still traces of MDMA sprinting around my brain but then I heard Pippa’s measured tread on the stone steps down to the beach and I dismissed the thought.
There are 88 steps down to the shingle beach which provides access to the cave. I counted them to give me a distraction: black words were ganging up in my head. I didn’t want to unleash them before she had a chance to defend herself against my initial question, which I asked as we reached a rusted winch, bolted into the ground like a sculpture. A few sheep watched us from the hillside upon which rocks had been placed to make messages. “LIAM LOVS LUCY,” I read. “KOL+FIONA DID IT HERE.”
“Jeff?” she said. “I don’t know . . .”
She’s a fucking abysmal liar. I just looked at her. Her face changed, losing its expression of doughy victimisation and finding instead a resilience. OK, it seemed to say, let’s thrash this out then. I’m probably more fucking ready than you are.
“Jeff’s someone I met at a conference in Brighton. We meet sometimes. We go to bed. That’s it.”
“That’s it? As if there’s nothing wrong in what you’re doing?”
“Whats wrong? I fancy him. He fancies me. We fuck each other. Big deal.”
“So why pretend you don’t know him?” My hands were fisting like I was testing someone’s blood pressure.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
“You’re fucking right I can’t fucking handle it. You’ve been coming home to me, filled to the fucking brim with some other fucker’s seed?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, using the Grade A patronizing tone a teacher will reserve for a dimwit child. “Jeff and I obviously use a condom.”
“Jeff and I,” I mimicked, not giving a shit if I was being cruel or puerile. “And I was speaking figuratively, anyway.”
The cave seemed to deepen as we breached the lip; a muscled gullet distending as it drew us in. Our voices bloated and took on an echo to make it seem no pause for digestion had followed any sentence. Behind it all, a frenzy of water helped keep my adrenaline pumping.
“So where does that leave us?”
She shrugged, made a bow of her lips and looked at me with a kind of pleading scrutiny as if trying to both examine my feelings and get me to draw my own conclusions. When I simply stood there, like all the pathetic pieces of shit in the world stuck together, she shrugged again and took a Marlboro Light from her pocket.
“Is this it?” I finally snapped. “Are you finishing it?”
“I think so. Yes. I am.”
“How can you do this? How can you betray me like this and then act as if it was such a fucking drag, a real bore for you?” Funny how, despite the beefy acoustics, my voice sounded wheedling.
Another shrug, another suck on her stupid little tube of grass. “Dunno.”
“So are you going to go with this Jeff?”
Shrug. Suck. “Might.”
“Aw, you bitch,” I spat. “You miserable, heartless bitch. I should fucking kill you for what you’ve done to me.” I went into the cave, relishing the cold that swarmed at my shoulders. A small bridge led to the waterfall which was causing such a racket. I walked it, squeezing past a tethered dinghy. Wondering what the hell use that was in a little pond like this; I didn’t hear her step up beside me.
“It was on the cards, honey,” she said. Soothing sentiment but it might have been Davros delivering it. I watched the water till its constant motion seemed so unchanged that it froze: wax ropes. I backed away, not least because I saw, filling the hole in the ceiling of the cave, his head as he leaned over to watch us.
Green lamps bolted into the heights painted the limestone an eerie hue. A boom, like thunder, filled the cave and I ran, not caring if Pippa was anywhere near me. I kicked at the stone messages as I climbed the incline. Sheep, tolerant of humans to the point of boredom, moved desultorily out of the way.
Another boom echoed moments later by a larger, nearer explosion.
The sea’s limit hove into view above the severed foreground of land. I rushed to meet it, enjoying bitterly Pippa’s beseeching yells. I stopped at the crumbling edge of the cliff and turned round. The Smoo Cave Hotel’s doors clapped as if part of a participating audience. The old man had moved away from the hole and was drifting down the steps to the winch; his face turned up to mine. Any shiver he might have generated in me was lost to the general discomfort of cold.
“What are you doing?” she asked, in a wavering voice filled with either panic or ire. I couldn’t guess which and I couldn’t give a monkey’s uncle.
“I’m going to toss myself off, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, don’t talk cock,” she said. “Don’t be such a fucking stupid childish bastard.”
Another boom. Those grey shapes had found their form: battleships on training, firing shells into Cape Wrath. Dangerous Area. Keep Out. War Games.
She reached out to me and clasped my hand. “OK then,” I whispered. Turned. Grabbed her throat and her hair. Swung her over. Let her drop. She didn’t make a sound. Her hairband came off in my hand: I let it slip over my fingers. Something to remember her by.
“Suck on that, Jeff,” I said, and sent an unexpected, fiery jet of vomit after her.
Trudging back, through the tears of my nausea, I saw him moving up the incline towards me. He paled as we neared each other, misting before my eyes so that, as we softly collided, the weight of his arrival became nothing but a sigh, settling against me.
We went for a walk.