All I Have To Do
Nikki Magennis

REMEMBER HOME-MADE MIX cassettes? The ones that lovers used to make for each other, shyly choosing tracks that hinted at all their furtive desires without using the actual words. Songs that made you smile, made you swoon. A gift that you puzzled over, wondering if they really loved you or just wanted a little carnal adventure. One of those sweet little gestures that seems so innocent now, now we’re all grown up and too tired for games.

I found one today. With my name on the outside in red pen. The songs listed on the paper insert, your writing small and scratchy.

I remember getting it, that day in June, so long ago. The parcel in the post arriving with a delicious thud on the doormat. Before I was fully awake. Sticky with sleep, I bolted to the door to find what well-wrapped present you’d sent, heart fizzing with nerves, as hopeful and desperate as a kid on their birthday. I remember everything about that summer, even the light. It was as though even the sunshine had its own particular yellowy scent, the dusty stones warmed by sudden light that seemed to break open the city and promise endless, sweet freedom. I was living on air and white wine then, full of a vivid energy that carried me through my crummy office job and sailed me quickly from weekend to weekend. Yes, it was like sailing. A sea full of light, insubstantial water, a huge open vista of parties and dancing and smiling young men, eyes glittering with that electric look that meant sex.

Everything was bright, and everything was moving so fast you couldn’t touch the sides of your life. Dizzy. And in amongst the sweaty clubs and drunken grinding of a hundred lost weekends, I met you, with your white smile. Your chocolate-smooth voice. Your fine, long fingers and your delicate frame, built to craft melodies. I could tell from the way you moved the air around you that you were someone who created things. You seemed to promise something vast and expansive. We danced without speaking, lurching slowly round the slippery floor in that way that lovers do, trying to press body parts as close to each other as possible, feeling wonderful bulges that begged further exploration. Hanging round the dark corners, interlacing fingers in a gesture that means: as I push my hands into yours, so I will fuck you. On a wave of booze, lust and music, we swayed. Later, five in the morning, with the glow of dawn chilling us quietly, you sang to me.

The Everly Brothers. A song like honey, like being wrapped in sweetness. You held my wrist and stared into my palm, like you were looking for something. While my hungry young pussy was clamouring for attention, something in the way you sang reached deeper, turned even my heart into a puddle. After the song finished the room seemed changed, as though the low timbre of your voice had altered the world. Made a space. Wide with possibility, heavy with intent. More than fucking, your singing promised that I would be utterly explored, utterly turned on.

And then you were gone.

There were phone calls, and I’d tangle the phone cord round myself like I was wrapping myself in your voice, coiling it round my ankles and wriggling. Letting you tickle my ear with your laughter. Listening to the sounds in the background, the landscape of your life, so distant and alluring. You sent letters too, written in the same red pen, sheafs of creamy paper tucked in parcels that had the aura of relics, the sense of you folding them and slipping them inside like little secrets.

You were so far away, so unreal, that my whole body ached for you. I became super-sensitive, shivering at the sound of your voice at the end of the phone, as though you were touching me just by speaking. I pictured you moving around in your city, making songs in your room, trying out notes on your keyboard with those gentle fingertips, striking the keys with that suggestive weight, that playful touch. I wished so hard to feel you touch me that way that sometimes I felt the slightest bump against my neck or shoulder, as though some phantom hand of yours had reached out somehow across thousands of miles and made contact. I’d jump a little, and feel the warm tingling spread over me, like the liquid swell of post-orgasm. Like you’d turned your thoughts to me and made a mysterious, psychic fuck happen in my head.

Meanwhile, through my obsessive haze of your voice and words, I was hurtling through real life. I had the hysteric, vivacious hunger you get from losing something before you’d even got to play with it. I found a club that played soul, the songs so loud they warped the air and made the floor thud. I stuffed myself onto the inferno of the dance floor, squirmed through the tightly packed bodies till I found a boy with a cute face or a tight ass, thumped up against them and danced like a whore. The music was bottled sex, dirty and funky and delicious. You couldn’t listen to it, only dance, and dance like you were coming right there on the crowded floor.

Shooting fish in a barrel. I’d always leave with a boy’s arm draped over my shoulder, sometimes two. A trail of phone numbers was scrawled on hands, on beer mats, on flyers. Lipstick and eyeliner smudged the numbers – sometimes made up, sometimes real. And then there were hotel rooms, and foreigners. Sweat and body hair and tights with holes ripped in them. The kisses of starving people, so hard they made your head spin. Clothes shed like confetti, clumsy manoeuvres towards the bed, the shock and wonder of a strange tongue in your mouth, love bites tattooed down your neck. I loved that cocktail of tastes, the concentrated essence of men and decadence that was so heady and strong it was better than drugs. Almost addictive.

It got so easy to spread my legs for strangers I felt like a wild beast – a connoisseur of cocks and body hair, tasting their aftershave like vintage wine as they shoved their hands eagerly into my more-than-willing pussy.

Those brutish, fast and messy nights would leave me tender and satisfied, my body bruised like a piece of fruit and my skin all humming with the friction of men’s hands, stubble, cocks. I’d wake on a Sunday morning and pass the day in a happy daze, the dirty sheets and hangover a glorious reminder of each new conquest. I’d lower myself into a scalding bath and let the water sting at my poor chafed parts. Relish the humming sensation of a body that’s been well fucked.

In the evening, you’d call. The phone would ring gently like a cat meowing, and I’d pick it up carefully, take the receiver and hold it to my ear and receive your ‘hello’ like a kiss of benediction, a warm salve to wash away the night.

* * *

It was a slight, nothing-much of a love affair even in the beginning – both of us too shy to say anything blatant. A whole ocean to keep us apart. The more sweet and distant you got, the more wild and lascivious my weekends became. Booze, fellatio, cocaine, threesomes. One long summer of lust. I felt like that mythical woman the sailors used on long voyages – made of rubber; flexible; indestructible. And all along our chaste, dreamy conversations, little gifts, a longing that stretched out like aeroplane trails over the blue skies.

I racked up enough lovers to develop a kind of world-weary demeanour. Became so careless I didn’t even try to remember their names, or cherish the battle scars. A skilled slut, I learnt how to lose people and how to enjoy even the slight ache of loss, the possible heartbreaks. I’d think with pride how my tits had been fondled by an army of men, enough almost to make up for the lack of you.

Time’s passed, since then; the inevitable seasons come and go. I grew tired of debauchery and moved elsewhere. Your phone calls quietly stopped.

I got a house, a job. Took care of my lovely pussy and decided I would no longer hand it out to every cute guy I happened to dance with. After a long while, I hung up my dancing shoes altogether. I got a husband.

No more soul clubs, no more gut-vibrating beats to get my mojo going. No more long-distance phone calls and foreign parcels. No more love letters. Instead, I pay my bills and post thank-you letters. My hair got longer, and these days I wear less make-up. I still love fucking, but sex has become more comfort than dazzle. A way to knock ourselves out before sleep, grabbing for that pleasant buzz from each other like eating a slice of heavy cake. All those exotic and horny young men, left behind like my sweaty nightclub dancing clothes. Life built up around me like a piece of self-assembly furniture, surprisingly graceful as it fell into place. As I learnt how to be a human being. I watch the world pass now from behind large clean windows. I smile at the shopkeeper when I buy milk; I ignore his glittering eyes, the raised eyebrow. It seems you become immune to all the little signals, kind of dulled. As though there’s a secret world of signals and scent and glances that gets left behind as you age, overtaken by more important languages. Subtler, saner conversations. All my friends got fat. We got money and started sagging at the edges.

Sundays these days I wake up with a clear head and take a walk in the park. I climb the hill and look down on the city, lying there like a vast jigsaw puzzle: mapped, tattered, understandably complicated.

I live within familiar patterns. Supermarket. Kitchen. Chop spring onions with a matchstick in my mouth to stop the tears. Hoover. Wash. Consider the wall colours.

Still, no matter how organised my life is, I have shelves overflowing with junk, cupboards full of things that lurk in the dust and murmur to me. Make me feel guilty.

So this afternoon I started, gingerly, pulling open old boxes and sifting through the detritus. On my own in the bedroom, husband collapsed next door under the papers, I unfolded pieces of ancient history, touching them quietly so as not to disturb the patina of age, the weight of forgotten history. I found stashes of old love letters, cringeworthy teenage adulation spilling from the pages. The thousand lies of old boyfriends, recorded forever on blue onion-skin paper. Kneeling on the bedroom floor with the sisal rug making ribbed dents in my flesh, I got submerged in all the preserved pieces of time past. Stashes of photographs emerged. Pictures floated into my field of vision, images of a more colourful time. Those days I wore bright lipstick and listened to music so loud it infuriated all the neighbours. It was all brighter, harder, more desperate and more furious, days when you flung yourself into things. Your whole body. Your whole self.

I was lost in wry and pretty memories when I found that tape. Small and plain, it was a little bomb that set something off in me. All the blood rushed to my head and I felt my heartbeat pounding like I’d swallowed a clock.

Without making any more noise than I had to, I slipped it in my pocket and carried it into the study. Closing the door behind me, I walked straight to the Bang and Olufsen stereo and slid the tape in the slot. I settled in the big faux-leather chair and felt myself sink deep into the cushions. I put on the big padded earphones that smell faintly of aftershave. I pressed play.

There was a hissing noise, and it suggested the sound of that summer, the interference pattern that played as background music to all our coy telephone conversations. The sound of distance, of hunger and of unspoken, aching, aching longing.

When the piano chord struck, it hit me right in the chest, with a strong taste of bitter pleasure, like you’d laid your hand on me. That stereo is so perfectly tuned it seems that the music originates inside your own head, delivered straight to the most tender part of the mind. The part that responds instantly, overwhelmingly to sound. As though you were right next to me, close enough to touch.

And though the tape had lain untouched and silent for years it played with such ripe and vivid melody I could have wept.

Resonating, playing slowly up the scale, I felt your touch running over me again, fingertips brushing the side of my face as softly as new spring beech leaves. My lips were buzzing to feel you, to taste you. That lemon-tinged flavour of yours that echoed so faintly – I knew it was just on the edge of my tongue – then the song started, the words, and it was as though your voice was in my mouth, like a deep kiss. I might have expected to be moved – the bittersweet pang of long ago is one I’m accustomed to. What I hadn’t counted on was that I’d be aroused. Eyes closed, I felt the song as much as heard it, felt your voice like silk over me, creeping into my ears and lulling me with those sweet words. ‘Baby …’ you crooned, and it was pure hell, pure hell and pure heaven all at once, as you insinuated yourself into my body all over again. I felt the lack of those lost days so strongly it hurt.

You sang about wrapping me in your arms, and I hugged myself, rocking, feeling at the same time the low beat of the drum bump along like you were bumping your hips against me, felt my nipples stiffen up as though you were nuzzling into my neck. I was leant back in the chair, the afternoon sun lying on my legs, warming me slowly, and the rest of the house started falling away, obscured by the lush and seductive sound of the music.

The strangest of feelings, being fucked by a song. My breath was heaving. Between my legs my cunt was undeniably buzzing, getting the slippery way it does when I’m anticipating sex. The desire was growing in me again, all the hazy, delicious desire of that long summer unfolding from within and multiplying like a psychedelic dream of pornographic detail. I felt myself swell and fall, my limbs grow heavy, my knees weaken. That wanton, reckless girl I dimly remember as my younger self seemed to awaken. The tug of sex stirred under my clothes, and I shifted in the chair. An old touchpaper was lit, burning quickly from my pussy and rising in my chest. I was sure that somehow I had grown young and juicy again, lips redder, tits magically prouder and as full as a bowl of fruit. I rubbed my thighs together, letting the crotch of my jeans agitate my clit. For once I felt mischievous, inflamed, vivacious again.

By now my clothes were all starting to itch and all I wanted was to strip and somehow bathe in that song, be naked in the sound and let it penetrate me, soak into my skin, pour into my ears and cunt. While you played, I could hear the deep breath you took before singing a line, and I swear I could feel a cold draught of air as you did so, your inhalation brushing over the back of my neck. With one finger I traced a line from my throat to my breasts, to the outline of my jutting nipples, crying out to be tweaked.

Just the way you would twang a guitar string, I flicked at myself, coaxing little shocks of pleasure from the hard tips. I pictured you doing it, with that half-smile of yours, the lazy lopsided way of looking at me with your head tilted and a splash of black hair over your eyes. When you wrote this, I thought, you were standing, one leg half bent to hold the guitar. Your hips angled forwards, and every note would send a vibration down the neck to shudder against your cock. I wondered at the thought of that sensation, the feel of the instrument between your legs, making you a little stiff, a little horny. At the image of your cock hardening, I let my legs spread wider, like you’d gripped my ankles and tugged them gently apart.

Was this what you’d wanted? When you wrote this song, were you imagining me lying back and slipping my hands down the front of my knickers? Was that low note you sang a way of courting me, like a songbird singing his mate into a state of readiness? Maybe you knew that the ache of this song would seduce me, maybe you wrote it with your cock in your hand while you imagined fucking me across oceans. Knowing that the notes would turn me liquid, would send me, writhing, on a voyage of erotic intent.

It was working. I was working on myself. One hand crawling inexorably down my belly towards my sex, my hips bucking in time to the suggestive drumbeat, biting my own lip to give it the stimulation of pain, if not the blessing of your warm skin.

It occurred to me that all the excesses of that summer might have been prompted by your innocent-sounding voice – the undercurrents of sexual want propelling me towards those dark basement clubs, into the arms of a different man every week. All the time I’d been enthusiastically sucking and writhing in the beds of strangers, I’d had the maddening want for you, for a night in your bed with you whispering dirty words in my ear. I worked my way through all those various cocks in a search for your elusive, beautiful presence. An echo of your melody-soaked possibility.

As I thought of this I was still pawing at the front of my pants, feeling the rough scratch of hair at the V of my thighs and knowing I had to bring myself off or go crazy listening to this heart-rending music.

A three-minute song wouldn’t give me the drawn-out mindfuck I really craved and, realising I was halfway through the middle eight already, my dirty hands suddenly plunged right in, desperate to wring an orgasm out of this song, to come while you breathed a melody in my ears. It was burning heaven to feel fingers against my clit, frantic, hot as lava and as resounding as C major clanged out on a Steinway. Reviving. At the same time, I felt weirdly as though you were present, watching me, cheering me on with the rising chorus of your song. A performance as intimate and shocking as masturbating in public, and I felt my cheeks burn as though I were onstage, exposed as a slut yet unable to stop.

I rubbed that hungry pussy like I was strumming chords, loving the feel of it but still craving more. I felt the huge absence of your cock within me as I tensed my muscles. Panting, I rolled from side to side on the recliner in desperation to press myself against a firm surface, to feel friction, heat, the thud of satisfaction as the song rushed towards the climax. I knew it was foolish to think the bass beat was some priapic, rutting creature that had me impaled on its rhythm but believed it still in my delirium. Hanging on to your voice and the smooth growl of your lyrics, I spun myself tightly, thrusted upwards onto my hand and twisted, pressing, bringing at last and just in time a long, swooping rush of sweet gunfire hammering through my head and breaking open in a full-on orchestral clamour – you screamed, the last refrain, I moaned, I made a sound like I was breaking into tears as the guitars clanged, clanged, clanged. I came like a car crash, full speed and so hard I forgot to breathe for a minute, gasping, convulsing, curling over and letting the song carry me with it as it unravelled in a glorious, tangled crescendo.

And faded. I was holding tightly onto my pussy with one hand as the last chords softened and faded, a little reverb echoing sadly in the way one clings to a lover’s neck, like the tide going out.

So I was left lying there like something washed up on the beach, flushed and mildly ashamed of my stolen tryst. How would one explain something like that? I just got fucked by a guitar, by a bass and a piano. True, what sent me spinning into lustful fantasy was mostly your honeyed voice, but in a way I felt I’d just wanked with a crowd of strange men as they played their instruments. Had a sordid fling with an imagined lover. Was this a common perversion? Teenage girls screaming at The Beatles, wetting their knickers with excitement. Kissing the pin-up posters on their bedroom walls. I felt like some obscene groupie as I pulled my clothes straight and let my heart thump out the last post-orgasmic beats. I’d given in to that old lust, the voracious appetite that used to send me spinning out to find a conquest. Still there, after so long. The desire for that pageant of sex. The fast motor of my libido had suddenly been jumpstarted so hard I was shocked by my own feelings. Like a wound-up teenage nymph, not a sober adult doing her Sunday housework.

The shakiness of afternoon sex made my movements uncertain, and I staggered to my feet with the headphones still attached, like a tethered animal, disoriented, suddenly come to from a lurid daydream.

It was when I turned to switch off the stereo, which was playing a hissing wail of white noise, that I realised I’d been caught. A shadow caught my eye.

Husband, hands in pockets, leaning against the radiator. His eyes fixed on me, on my crumpled clothes and flushed face.

Awkward moments between a married couple are something to savour. When you’ve spent so long deep in each other’s lives, breathing the same air, it’s almost a gift to find yourself suddenly screaming with shame, humiliated in such a thoroughly shocking way. What did he see? Me writhing on the recliner, hands in pussy, face twisted in painful ecstasy, lips bitten. I searched wildly for an excuse, for a reason to explain why I was locked in rapturous union with the headphones, a thief caught red handed. Stealing a fuck from the distant past, committing adultery with my own memory. I was guilty as sin.

He could have left me hanging there, stewing in my own painful embarrassment while I tried to recompose myself. But it’s at times like this when I realise one of the reasons I marched up the aisle with this man. One of the reasons I hang around and play house with him. Standing there, acres of space between us on that Sunday afternoon, he gifted me with one of those beautiful lopsided smiles of his. A splash of black hair in his eyes.

He traversed that vast space like it was nothing more than walking across the room. Pulled at my dishevelled clothes and laughed at me. With his voice like chocolate, like silk in my ear, he put his mouth to my ear and sang to me. It’s always taken my breath away, how he forgives my lurid excesses with a shrug and a tease. How he can turn me on just by talking to me, but most especially by singing to me. Those Everly Brothers songs. When you sing ‘Dream’, it still turns my knees weak.

Nikki Megennis’s short stories have appeared in numerous Wicked Words collections. She is also the author of the Black Lace novel, Circus Excite.