MARGO LANAGAN
The Sheelas got on the train at Austinmer.
“Oh no,” said Don softly as they filed by, six or seven of them, to take the seats the schoolkids had just left, “Bugger me gently.”
“What?” Su did that old-biddy thing, tipping her head back to peer through her glasses, then forward to peer over them.
“Bloody Sheelas,” he muttered.
Su watched them settle, their ragged, fraying layers of black clothing, their silence. All the talk had died down behind them, and Don heard the rest of the carriage notice and fall silent too. Everyone sat poised a moment in the utter quiet after the guard’s whistle; then the train pooted and wrenched itself from the platform.
“Come on.” He stood up and grasped the handles of the duffel bag.
Su didn’t have chins, just some narrow pleats that gathered around her jaw when she pulled back like that. She raised an eyebrow, and the afternoon sunlight falling in from the top of the escarpment showed up every crinkle on her forehead. “Don’t be ridiculous, Don. It’s five minutes. For the bother of tracking down another seat? Another pair of seats? Just sit down and weather it.”
Hand still on the duffel-handles, he twisted to look at the Sheelas. They perched as they always did, feet on the seats, hugging their legs. They turned their faces aside, but not with embarrassment. They just didn’t give a toss about anyone else in the carriage.
Su had gone back to her Kindle. To Don’s mind, there was no way to read off one of those things without looking smug. Ooh, look at me. I’ve got all of Jane Austen in here, and everything Charles Dickens wrote, no bigger than a couple of CDs. I just love it!
He sat down fuming. He wished he’d had the courage to take their bag and go. But she was right; the train was packed. They would have made fools of themselves dragging along the aisles, bumping people with the duffel, tripping over feet and baggage and children.
The Sheelas squatted motionless, all black rags and pale made-up faces. Some of them went lipless, some painted on black mouths; this one here facing away from him had blacked out more than her lips; she’d painted a bigger, toothier mouth, all the way up her cheeks.
He gave a little laugh, heard the pain in it and stopped. “I knew we should’ve driven.”
“Yairs,” said Su. God, she was a bitch sometimes. She complained about his tone of voice and then farted out a sour note like that right under his nose. No, he wouldn’t think about where that sourness came from—the Road Rage Incident, as she called it very precisely. There was no point getting angry about that again.
He sent a vicious gaze over the Sheela he could see best, the one who was facing him between the gap in the seats. She was one of the lipless ones. He leaned closer to Su, muttered under the accelerating train-rattle, “Why would you do that?”
“Do what?” Su re-angled the Kindle, as if worried his breath would mist over the screen.
“Make yourself so ugly? I mean, under all that gunk you’ve got a perfectly nice-looking girl—’ Now Su was giving him that bridling look. “What?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you get sick of everyone expecting you to be decorative. Pervy blokes on trains included.”
“I’m not being pervy! I’m not expecting anything! Aah, forget it.”
“Yes, good idea. Why don’t you sit back and enjoy the scenery out the window?”
Such a bitch. He was close to saying it; if she hadn’t delivered that mad rant that time, against the word, and the word being used about her in particular, he would have said it out loud. It didn’t matter; she heard it anyway. It burst in the air between them, spittle flying onto them both.
He tried to see some sea-view, but the foursome across the aisle had pretty much blocked the window with their Heralds. Only a few bits of rail-side overgrowth bounded past above their heads. No chance of Su being decorative, he thought, eyeing the chins on one of the Mrs-Heralds, the big reading specs, the bad bright lipstick, the big scallopy perm. Su had been on the way to podging up like that, but then—it was partly his fault, all those jokes about big arses—she’d taken herself in hand, and not in any fun, sexy way. She’d ground off the weight, lived on fricking salad, stopped joining him in the booze every night, exercised like a maniac, and now she was the scrag she’d always wanted to be. She had! She’d actually said as much. Much rather be a scrawny old chook than a blob, she said. And she’d topped it off with that Auschwitz haircut, so that absolutely nothing took your eye away from her haggard face.
Crikey, that’s short, he’d said, when he first saw it. Zat so you can get the nit-comb through? Joking was all he could think of to do.
I know, she’d said, busily putting the shopping away. I look like a bull-dyke. But better a bull-dyke than a frump.
I didn’t think you looked like a frump, he’d said cautiously, although that would have been exactly the word to express his dismay, the dismay he felt again now as he eyed this specimen in the carriage.
You didn’t think anything. Bag rustle. Cupboard-bang. You haven’t looked at me with the light on for about ten years.
The Sheelas shifted and Don steeled himself. But then they settled again, and he went back to staring at the white-faced Sheela opposite him.
Her chest, pressed out either side of her knees, was wrapped in such a mess of black bits, it was hard to know what was boob and what was curves of cloth. Still, there looked to be a fair bit of substance there. He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way.
“Keep still,” said Su. “Wriggling around like a bloody rabbit.”
He missed Su’s boobs. It seemed like a horrible joke on him, that she felt good enough about herself now to get on top of him, just as she lost the whole reason he wanted her up there. The light might be off, but sometimes the morning light showed him the undersides of what was left of her breasts, like sad little bags of cottage cheese, all the plumping fluid diet-and-exercised out of them. They jiggled and re-wrinkled, when they should’ve swung generously, towards his mouth and away. And her face above was clenched closed, as his own was when he wasn’t sneaking looks—did she sneak looks at him, and think the same things? God, it was Crumple City up there, the skin slipping forward at the sides of her eyes, her lips gone to fissures. She wasn’t whiskery, at least. No, she waxed her upper lip and a couple of places on her chin to down-free leather. But her tongue was scalded rough as a cat’s with years of the too-hot tea she liked. And he didn’t like to think about it, but there was this slight smell about her lately—
The Sheela straightened her back and stretched her legs wide. “Here we go,” he said, not to Su. “All the bajazzle on display.”
Sequins crowded around the girl’s black tights-gusset, tiny, shiny animals fighting for a place at the eye-shaped pool that was the sequin-free patch right in her crotch. They scattered out more loosely down her inner thighs, flocked up over her pubes towards the shelter of her rucked up black skirt, roamed away along the be-tighted cleft of her bum.
That was pretty restrained, really. That time on the train after the New Year’s fireworks, one girl had paved that eye-shape with pinhead-sized red lights; they’d flashed in circles, middle to rim to middle, over and over like a snake trying to hypnotise you. A lot of them did this shiny green thing, embroidered, or other cloth sewn on: a leafy face with the fanny as the mouth, and leafy arms or wings out along their thighs. Or they drew hands on, the straight fingers holding the fanny wide open, with all kinds of fancy stitching around—patterns, unreadable ancient writing.
Now that her knees were out of the way, the Sheela’s bosom had fallen forward more comfortably, and now it filled with the breath she took. Noise began from her and from all of them, suddenly and softly like a foghorn, on several notes that didn’t belong together. The girl he could see, she hummed out through her nose; this other one facing away from him, the curve of her cheek, with the black-and-white teeth painted on it, flattened as she opened her mouth and let the sound out of her throat, out of the depths of her.
The singing was always louder than he expected, and deeper than it should be from girls, deeper and creepier. Even though he’d been ready for it, still it sent a shock up the back of his head, and he suppressed a shiver. The two Sheelas let go their knees and dropped their hands to grasp their under-thighs. The black eye-pool widened among the sequins as the girl’s fingertips, black under the nails, pulled her thighs wider apart.
In the moment her gaze flicked across him, he felt how his lip had curled. He dropped his head forward, then looked up sideways at Su. “Gawd,” he said through his teeth. “How do they do that, make the whole carriage shake?” The windows would’ve rattled if they hadn’t been sealed in place. These girls knew the exact wrong notes to put together.
Su lifted her face from the Kindle. She was one of those women, now, who go about in public with a smile half-prepared on their face, so that if they see a baby, or a dog, or they catch someone’s eye, they can boost it up into a twinkle. She turned this ready expression to the girl with the painted-on teeth. She’d have a better view of that one than he had; she’d be able to tell if her chest was as good as the other one’s—not that she’d look at that, of course. He didn’t like how the expression settled on Su’s face, as if she warmed to what she was seeing, as if she was in cahoots with them—yes, pleased that they were clambering into everyone’s heads and vibrating there. One of the voices was so deep, he felt it through his seat. Had they smuggled a bloke in here with them? Was some bloke in the carriage joining in?
Across the aisle a newspaper crumpled, and a petty little voice said, “Yoohoo, people trying to read here.” The other woman in the foursome muttered something too; racket was the only word he was sure he’d heard right. It was good to know someone else didn’t feel as holy and patient as Su about the sacred fricking rites of the Sheelas; at the same time, how thin the women’s voices sounded against the girls’ song! Their little peeps had no chance against this blast, this flooding, this noise of old, old grudges and pain. Su had read it all out to him from the Sheelas’ wiki page once; he’d half listened. It’s really interesting, she’d said, which had put him off. Bunch of bloody whingers—he hadn’t been game to say it, but he’d thought it. Miserable cows. They should just get over it, get lives.
His face was sore from holding the wince. The pitch changed and he drew up his shoulders more. A shudder took him by surprise. He hoped the bosom-girl hadn’t seen, out the corner of her eye. She’d be gratified by that, tell her friends about it afterwards when they went for cappuccinos and mochas and bloody frappés at the Cucina in Thirroul, to congratulate themselves on giving everyone nightmares. He clung to the thought of them there, ordinary again, foolish and young in their costumes and paint; he clung because the noise of them was ancient, horrible, more than he could deal with. He wedged his hands under his own thighs because there was nothing for them to do but tremble, or cover his face.
Su had been admiring the girl all this while—was she hoping she’d look over her shoulder so Su could smile at her? You go grrl? Give her the thumbs-up? Now she twitched her mouth at Don, the tiniest bit. It didn’t take much, with her near-bald head and brown lips, for her to be laughing at him. Laughing with them at him.
“Relax,” she said, as if to a panicking child. “It’ll be over soon.”
“Going right through my head.” His voice sounded as flimsy as the Herald-women’s across the way. He could hardly hear it for the swelling and falling battle of the hums, and the shouting, in his own head, for them to stop.
“It’s meant to,” she said.
“Oh good, then,” he squawked. “Great.”
She shrugged, waited for a song-wave to ebb. “It’s a free country. And this is public transport. They’re not begging and they’re not murdering anyone. I don’t see your problem.”
She might have organised this herself, so neatly were these girls punishing him for the Road Rage Incident. Either I drive, she’d said—knowing he wouldn’t be able to stand that—or you can drive down on your own, or you can come with me on the train. She was glad they were crammed in here with the paper-flapping oldies and the mad Sheelas; she could sit here with her tidy Kindle and her tidy body and her tidied-away-to-almost-nothing hair, and look out at everyone else’s suffering, and wonder why they hadn’t sorted themselves out, the way she had? Really, why would you live any other way?
Nice waist you’ve got there, he’d said one morning, hoping she’d stop dressing and come and have sex, and because he couldn’t bring himself to compliment her muscle-y bum with its under-frills of cellulite.
She’d turned to smile at him over her shoulder; one of her withered breastlets had poked out into view around her arm as she pulled up her full-brief undies. It had been a nice smile, maybe a bit tired, maybe a bit I’ve-got-the-measure-of-you, maybe a bit yes-well-I-worked-bloody-hardenough-for-this-waist. It had depressed him deeply. Cuppa? she’d said.
One by one the Sheelas’ voices eased off; there must be two of the deep-voiced ones—no one person could hold that note so long without a break. Then it ceased.
“Thank goodness,” said one of the Mrs. Heralds, not quite under her breath. The other woman peered at Don, her eyes swimming in her glasses frames, and the two blokes gave him blank, wary looks.
“I’ve heard this three or four times now,” he said across the aisle, trying for jocularity. “Nobody ever claps.”
One bloke looked at the Sheelas again, still blank faced, the other tried for some kind of matey tilt of the head. Su’s voice came faintly from behind Don. “Maybe that’s ’cause it’s not put on for your entertainment.”
Biting back a little flare of rage, at her shaming him so casually in front of these people, he sat back, looking straight ahead, back down the tracks to Sydney. His whole fucking weekend, that he would have liked to spend getting the yard in order, and watching the MotoGP on Saturday night, had been taken over by this party of Duff’s, by this obligation, and now his wife, who was supposed to be his support, his helpmate, was holding him up for these podges to laugh at, because a bunch of black-dressed cunts had come and poured out their great complaint into everyone’s journey.
He wouldn’t ask her what it was for, then. Either she’d explain it, calmly and with the university words that irritated him so madly, or she’d tell him to look it up himself the way she had—it wasn’t her job to teach him Feminism For Beginners. He stared at the seat-back and the black dreadlocks on the squatting girl beyond it. The silence was easing out of the carriage, though the chat was still a bit tentative, a bit frightened, from what they’d done.
“I’m going to the Men’s,” he said, and got up and left.
Don’s good at a party, better than Su. He goes from group to group filling glasses. You could mingle for Australia, says Su, anchored to the beach with a bunch of women he knows she doesn’t like. He fills her glass, kisses her ear just to hear the women say awww, floats on by. He was born to circulate this way, two-fifths full himself, greeting, offering, accepting thanks. The afternoon turns blue and the stars start, hardly noticeable; then he gets enmeshed in a conversation with Terry and Denise, and the next time he looks up the black sky is thick, thick with them, the Milky Way properly milky this far from town.
The ship that is the party sails on. The fireworks come and go, the oohs and aahs at those, and after the last explosion he’s marooned for a moment, smiling, by the fire, at the edge of a resumed conversation about Zumba classes. He waits for a chance to step in with his joke about things going off with a bang for the birthday boy.
She comes up to him then. Her name’s Bel—she gives it to him, spells it for him, straight off. Is that a bit aggressive, or should he like her for her straightforwardness?
She’s one of the very few singles here. She’s pretending to be cool about it, but he can almost smell that she’s feeling it. Tightly bound, she is, into a dress made of some stretchy cloth, big dark-bright flowers splashed onto a white background. She’s got a waist, too, though not Su’s sort. This one’s a statement, held in with a big broad belt. Everything springs out above and below it, cunningly smoothed and sculpted by some magical undergarment. Her breasts push towards him at her neckline like a bum-crack offered on a silver tray; he feels kind and honourable, watching her eyes and animation as she talks, never letting his gaze stray down there or his finger itch to run its tip along the crack, or his palms hunger to grasp the whole, slippery-elasticised size of her bosom, the bolster of her bottom. She’d be the same age as Su, but full-faced she looks younger. Her thick hair curls to her shoulders, dark—with red glints, he thinks, but that might be firelight. It might not even be dyed. She’s painted her face, but not so much that he’s repelled; she’s refreshed her lips since the buffet, and the glisten along the edge of them, well, it does what it’s supposed to do. He’s flattered that she’s taken so much trouble, and that she laughs so willingly at everything he says. She does that thing women sometimes do when they first meet him, of asking more and more personal questions as if they’ve got a perfect right to know, then laughing when he hedges and squirms. She smells great, despite his dislike of most perfumes—or perhaps it’s that the wafts take turns with gusts of bitter campfire smoke and the smell of several thousand bucks’ worth of spent fireworks.
He takes a break from Bel’s headiness. Look at Su over there, rocking, holding her elbows, her bored smile. She’s wishing she was tucked up in bed with Mr. Kindle, as she usually is at this time of night.
“Which house are you in?” Bel asks him. Duff and Kath have rented out half this tiny beachside town to put their guests in.
“The big ’un.”
“Ooh.” She all but curtseys, pushing out her plummy lips. “You’re one of the inner circle, are you?”
“Absolutely. I’ve put up with the old bugger long enough. Known him since tech. Gotta be some sort of prize for that, don’t you reckon?”
“Ooh, someone’s jealous.”
She returns his surprised look coolly.
“Come on now, he’s my mate,” he says, just before the truth of her words hits him, how twisted out of shape his friendship with Duff has become, since Duff’s success, and the beach house, and the happy second marriage to Kath. And he hears, in retrospect, the tightness of envy in his voice. Across the way, Duff is mid-story with the smokers, all their eyes alight and blind-looking with firelight.
“What about you?” Don almost snaps.
“Me?” she says. “Oh, which house, you mean? Just here up on Shelly Street, the corner one.” She points a dark-lacquered fingernail up at the black motionless tangle of the bush behind them.
“Big green number?”
“Little yellow one. Oceanside,” she adds witheringly. “Just in case you couldn’t see or hear or smell this.” She flings out an arm at the view. Rather than burying his face in her moonlit, fire-lit, spandex-wrapped bosom, he obligingly takes in the sea view. It sits in rows like a theatre audience, its jewellery and spectacles winking under the moon, the stars crowding in the balcony overhead.
“Haven’t seen that house,” he says. “Went round all the others borrowing chairs, earlier. Got to sticky-beak everywhere; it was great. All these years of coming down to Duff and Kath’s, I’ve always wondered about the insides of these houses.”
“Pop up and have a look now.” She nods towards the path. “Here, take the key.” She unhooks it from her bangle.
“No, no.” Against unfocused breast-curve the keys shoot firelight, a sad worn Lockwood and a mortice key that must be for a back door or a laundry, swinging with a pink bulbous transparent plastic-sized ornament—maybe a fishing-float?—to make them unlosable. He holds back a joke about how much like a dildo that key-ring is. “I’ll check it out tomorrow.”
“We’ll be gone tomorrow. We’re all leaving at the crack of dawn to get back for choir and things—everyone’s got Sunday rituals.”
He’s not quite sure what’s going on, what the dynamic is, what it should be. Her eyes don’t give anything away, yet this is some kind of challenge, right?
“All right, I will.” He takes the key, careful not to touch her plump hand with its glossy nails. They both smile, and she nods rapidly, her eyes even brighter with that skillfully smudged dark makeup around them.
“Back in a tick, then.”
Carefully he tramps up the dryer sand, the whiskery grass. Steps and a railing lead him onto the path up the slope among the tall, slender, dreamy-headed trees. It’s quiet, all the usual noisy birds asleep, roosting around him disguised among the foliage like some kind of puzzle. At each turn when he glances back the fire’s smaller, taking up less of the night; Bel still stands at the edge, gazing into the flames. The party’s a murmur, and the wavelets fold themselves softly away along the sand. He should have asked her to come too. Show me, he could have said, easily. What was he frightened of?
At the top he crosses the car park, a clearing carpeted with flattened gum leaves. “Not the big green house,” he says as it looms into view. “The little yellow one. The little yellow—?”
Surely not. It’s across from the green one, right in the fringe of the bush, the dingy-looking one. He knows it well, now that he sees it. Whenever they’ve walked past it before, Duff or Su has shuddered or said All it needs is police tape, that one: fibro box, mean-looking windows, concrete porch with a sketchy ’60s metal railing, roo-bitten grass all around. The garage is scared off into the back corner of the block, too little for anything more than a Morris Minor. A flat-tyred trailer is chained up to the Hills Hoist.
But Oceanside it is, says the beaten-copper plaque on the front.
The outer screen door is as light as cardboard. He fits and turns the key, pushes the door open across the fat nylon carpet. He stamps the sand off his shoes onto the frayed doormat before stepping in.
It smells exactly as he expected it would: of mildew, with low notes of tom-cat and dirt. He stands, heart fluttering in the darkness, then reaches to the light switch. A fluorescent strip flickers, ticks, then lights up the lounge room, cruelly and with an ongoing buzz. A black vinyl couch slumps opposite; two chairs of once-green fabric, on pivot bases, wait about. Horrid nested tables lurk, hard against the walls; on top of a low bookshelf a John Grisham and a Stephen King lean, and on the bottom shelf cables and old game consoles have fought to a deadlock. There’s a laminex bar, one stool beside it with a split red vinyl seat. Perhaps as a kind of joke, someone’s collected tikis large and small, hung them askew on the stained walls, stood them in every corner. Dark with age, frosted with dust, they stare past him, past each other, blind or pearly-eyed.
“Jesus.”
Stiff-legged with horror, Don crosses to the kitchen. The spongy carpet gives way to sticky lino. The cupboards crowd out of the walls, each with a little plastic vent of an eye. The sink is coated with scum—did Duff and Kath not check this place out before they rented it? The counter-top stove looks as if it’s only ever cooked up drugs. The fridge clunks and shudders in the corner like an ancient, startled dog.
He ventures across the curling lino of the hall, to a tiny bedroom all leaning towers of boxes; one of the closer ones has split down one seam and sprayed National Geographics all the way to the door.
The bathroom? Less said the better. It’s like something out of a ’60s mental home, icy grey-blue bath and loo, blue and white-mottle tiles on the floor. This fluoro sings a different note from the lounge room’s.
With dread he creeps up to the master bedroom, pushes open the door, strokes the wall inside for the light switch. Gawd, what is that, 20 watts? The lampshade is curvaceous, crimson, fringed, some of the fringing parting from its braid. Somebody died here, says the chenille-covered bed with its dips either side of the centre line—or perhaps, Two people lay here year after year, despising each other. The pillows are so flat he could cry.
But across the bed corner lies a summery dressing-gown, dark pink and sumptuous. He can smell Bel’s perfume. A pair of black mules with feather-puffs on the toes lets out a little cheer on the carpet’s grey. Clothes half-pulled from their folds spill from a purple wheel-aboard on the floor to his left: something slithery and mauve-white, something flower-sprigged, a diaphanous thing that might be a sarong. He can’t help but imagine Bel getting her outfit together for tonight, padding about in her underwear, bending, breathing the way Su used to breathe before she got fit.
He doesn’t touch. To stop himself touching, he edges round the bed. In the mirrored nook of the wardrobe, Bel’s makeup bag bulges, new, soft, agape, its zipper twinkling, a gleaming badge on its side. The things she’s taken out lie like jewels around it, artifacts, gold and ebony, little cases of colour and brush, buds of foam that have stroked smoky glitter into the creases of her eyelids. His mouth waters. He picks up the nail-polish bottle. Inside is black, with only, as he holds it up to the poor light, the deepest ghost of red. He squints at the label; letter by tiny letter, Midnight in Moscow, it whispers.
Three footfalls on the porch, two in the hall. Sprung. He slips the bottle back in the bag, turns to the door just as she arrives.
“Haaa.” She leans against the doorjamb. Her top half is darkened red by the lightshade; of her face, he can’t make out more than the glitter of her eyes. Her skirt is clearer, her white curved legs, her neat-tucked ankles, her plump sandy feet, the nails painted Midnight in Moscow. He wants to fall on them, brush the sand off, lick away the salt.
“I thought of you up here in this room.” Her voice is muffled, as if from a worn-out vinyl record. “I got so turned on.”
“Jesus,” he says. “Jesus, this is a horrible place. What were Duff and Kath thinking, putting you here? A woman like you—” He takes a step towards the door.
“So hot.” He hears her cloth-covered hip make a little tremble against the doorpost. She takes the neck of her dress and pulls the stretchy cloth off her shoulders, off an amazing brassiere that even in this poor light goes to his head, and to his dick. Its cups curve full; the bold pattern of its lace squiggles on his brain. Not flowers—fronds, maybe. With thorns? He progresses to the corner of the bed, some dumb idea in his head of stopping her, but no command yet issuing from his mouth.
From the dress sleeves she draws arms so white, he startles himself with a longing to bite and mark them. She takes hold of the middle of the bra, unclicks it and spreads it wide. Her breasts release outward almost with an audible cry, that he almost cries back to. They’re glorious, pale, lighting up the dimness, big brown shiny nipple-rounds on them with little mouths in the middle, pushing out from the masses that jiggle and pant in their new freedom.
“I’m a married man,” he says in the smallest voice ever heard from a human throat.
She lifts the breasts and pushes them at him, her face almost swooning above them, her mouth raised and open, perfume and heat coming off her into this mausoleum of a room. “That makes it all the hotter. Oh!”
She drops them, reaches up, pulls him down and presses their lips together, thrusts into his mouth a tongue so juicy and soft that his eyes roll back in his head. He sinks forward, onto and around her. She gives—just her fleshly self yields, but then her knees give way, and in a swarming collapse he goes with her down to the bed. She is hot, and downy-smooth, and soft, great soft armloads of her, the cushion of her back warm against his wrists and the softer skin inside his forearms. Groaning, he squeezes up and down her, squeezes her arse tight-packed in its smoothing elastic, presses her to his erection. Gasping back from the kiss, he dives down her, sucks a nipple deep enough into his throat to gag. She puts her head back and makes wonderful noises, high, desperate, yearning, and she shudders and grasps and flails with her hands so much, she might already be coming.
He surfaces. Her face flings back and forth against the pink silk garment, her open lips like black sheeny pillows, breath shaking them in and out. “Oh, look at you,” he breathes.
Muzzily she meets his eye. The lampshade lights a crimson fleck deep in her wide black pupils. She lifts her legs, hooks her ankles together behind him and pushes him hard against herself. Her underwear seams rub; he feels them very precisely through his trousers, hears the creak of her wet crotch against his tightened trouser-cloth.
“Oh man. Ohmanohmanohman. Hold on—I don’t wanna go off yet—”
He lets her fling him off, push him flat onto the bed, jump aboard his thighs, attack his pants. Now would be the time to stop her, but she arches her back above her fallen dress-top, thrusts out her breasts—No, he must not look at them, so white, so wonderful, not now that he knows the feeling of that giant nipple on and in his mouth, the warmest warm, the smoothest smooth.
She gets him out of his trousers. “Aaaaah!” She beams down on his fellow leaping there, stained-looking in the crimson light. He could go off from just her watching him, her great breasts rising, falling, shaking with her speeding pulse.
She hoists up her bottom and reverses off him, stands, lets the dress drop to the floor, unfastens the dim-coloured underlayer and lets loose the rest of her full white self with a gust of perfume into the poisonous room. Trapping him in her smudged crimson gaze, she pushes her hands all over herself, kneads a breast, splays her other fingers through her black pubic hair, clutches there, closing her eyes, biting her lip, twitching her hips back and all the bottom-flesh on them.
“Come onto me,” he says raspingly, propping himself on his elbows. She gets astride him again, dark-faced, glowing-breasted under the swinging light. Her wet self, all her hot slippery interleaved folds, rubs at his penis. He grasps after self-control. Her eyes might be open or closed in that shadow, her whole face might be bruised, her mouth the worst bruise of all.
She slides up, leans forward, brings her face down, shows her teeth. She presses the tip of him deep into herself, and slides back slowly, taking the rest of him in, grinning and letting out a growl. She’s hot in there, scalding hot, and wet and tight and many-folded. With a low roar (it’s weird, but he likes it; the change in her excites him; he loves everything about her in this moment), in a few strokes she brings him off, clenching onto him, keeping him pinned as he otherwise convulses.
It eases, but his bowels are still half in spasm when she starts again, rocking and rubbing. She’s tight, her muscles hard as rocks in there, and the nub of her that seeks satisfaction in the jammed clammy hairs at the root of him is hard too, a nub of stone, nearly painful, rubbing and rubbing—no, really painful now, and she’s going to crush him inside there. She’s fierce and fast and seems to have forgotten him.
Frightened, he grabs for her, to remind her and to reassure himself. But her breasts shrink in his hands, the skin wither-and-pinching like a dying balloon’s. He lets go with a shout. His hand-prints show in the flesh; one of her nipples folds into itself, blurring as she rocks, harder and faster than any woman should be able to. She’s like some kind of manic monkey on him, the foolish mouth on her, wider and wider, smeared across her cheeks. All of her shrivels, and the well-filled sheen of her skin dulls, darkens; she turns crêpey, then sags to outright wrinkles, hanging, flapping in places, from the new angles of all her bones. Frazzles of greying hair thin and retreat across her spotted scalp.
The noise in her throat as she works is dry now; her tongue is white sandpaper between her teeth. Her eyes pop wide, staring at a point beside his face. She jags back and forth, digging at the base of what little is left of him. Her breasts are no more than slipped crumplings on her chest; her kneecaps are pearly in the crimson light, the fronts patched rough and white. Her limbs are bone and sinew, loosely covered with that paper skin.
Her eyes roll up. She straightens out like a praying mantis. She slides cold fingers under his arse and claws him steady while she bears down on him, mashing his penis it feels like, stabbing the base of it through with that pulsing nub-stone. A coldness spreads back around his balls, across the shrinking flesh there, across his fear-clenched bumhole. She finishes that pass, gasps forward greyly, grinds down on him again, juddering like a truck on air-brakes, beating, buckling, her breath loud in her teeth in their leather cave. The room’s cheap surfaces—fibro, laminex, MDF, the thin glassed window in its aluminium frame—throw back at him the abject sounds he makes. He covers his face to blub, but she wrenches his arms aside and laughs at him. Still grinding, still pulsing, she forces her kiss into his face, the breath stuttering in her gnarled nose, her narrow lips like bands, her tongue knocking like a bone-end in his throat.
And then she’s done. She springs off him, up by his head; even as she goes he’s slithering out from under, checking himself. There seems to be no blood. She’s dug no cavity, no gouge-marks in him. All’s familiar there, bunched and dangling bedraggled, as far as he can see in this terrible light.
Smacked against the far wall he hauls up his pants. The woman squats gloating on the pillow, propped against the wall. Only her fanny and feet show uncrimsoned by the lampshade; only her teeth gleam and her eyes glitter from the shadowed part of her. His pants fastenings have never seemed so perplexing, his fingers so useless among them.
“Cover yourself up, woman!” By contrast with the black window, with the red gloom all around, the only thing bright lit is her grinning wet under-mouth. Her hands are dirt-dark and greasy-looking, her skinny thighs dirt-wiped too; the lips between, that she holds wide proudly, are fat as a grouper’s, goose-fleshed, purplish, sparsely haired white and black. Between them other lips, unspeaking and unspeakable, part and show others that open on others again, in and in like the circles of a cyclone’s eye, and shifting upon themselves in just that way. Don tips towards the sight of them, catches himself, fights to the door.
He falls out into the lounge room. When did she kill the light? But the song picks him up from his stagger, taking him by the head like a claw. The noise he thought was his own alarm is a real sound outside him, a roomful of humming, all dis-harmony. What he thought were tikis—hung from the walls, crouching on their perches in the gloom—have taken on flesh. He can smell it, unwashed, intimate; he can hear limbs shifting under the sound of the voices; their foul-earth breath ghosts over him in the stirred air.
They begin to turn and shine their eyes towards him, tiny white discs bobbing in the grey. Still clutching his pants closed, he dives for the open front door. He whangs up against the railing, bounds from the steps, flees across the lawn.
At the lookout above the beach, he backs up to the wooden fence and tidies himself, his eyes on the house as if to keep anything from following. The trees tower over him, hissing slightly in their sleep.
He’s caught his breath. He thinks he’s ready. He turns towards the stairs. The party’s down there just as he left it, milling in amber firelight. At the edge of it a buxom woman, her white dress splashed with flowers, cradles a glass of wine. Pushing her dark hair back over one ear, she casts him a long look up through the trees—and then is gone, as if she never stood there, on the party-muddled sand that slopes away to the sea.
Note: Sheela-na-gigs are stone carvings, many quite crudely made, found on various medieval structures (often religious buildings) in Britain and Europe. They depict women of different ages and degrees of ugliness, with their legs spread to show their genitals. Often the woman’s hands are carved to touch or hold open the vulva. No explanation for these figures or their location has survived from the Middle Ages, but it is speculated that they had significance as guardians or fertility symbols, or to avert evil or bad luck.