Famine

by Graham Masterton

  She walked across the polished wooden floor, and the kaftan flowed all around her. She approached him as quickly as a train, almost as if she wasn’t going to stop, and she had unbuttoned his shirt in a matter of seconds, four quick twists of her long-fingered hands. She pulled the shirt open, and bared his chest, with its huge silver-and-gold cross. He was very tanned, as if he had been stained in walnut-juice, the way boys disguised themselves in childhood adventure stories. His nipples were as dark as berries.

  She kissed his chest, and then took one of his nipples gently between her teeth. ‘I could bite it off,’ she said. ‘Would one of your miracles glue it back on again?’

  He kissed her hair. He could smell the sun and the coconut oil on it. He kissed her blonde eyelashes, her nose, her lips. Then, as if he was a sculptor unveiling his latest work, he gathered her kaftan in his hands, and lifted his arms, so that she stood in front of him naked.

  ‘I’m looking for myself, you know,’ she said simply. ‘I’m not necessarily looking for you.’

  He said, ‘I don’t care,’ and bent his head forward so that their foreheads touched, blond hair against blonde hair, they could have been twins, erotic gemini. His hands ran down the length of her back, clasping the rounded cheeks of her bottom, and then he held her very close to him, so close that for a moment she wondered if she was going to be pressed into him completely, and become part of his body. Her friends, looking for her, would stare into his eyes, and see something that was elusively her for ever after.

  She unbuckled his belt, and he stepped out of his slacks. His plain white undershorts showed the rigid outline of his penis, the cupped curve of his balls. She pulled them down, and his erection rose red into the diffuse sunlight.

  ‘I never imagined priests could be like this,’ she said. ‘I never even imagined men could be like this.’

  ‘I’m not ordained,’ he told her.

  ‘No,’ she whispered, as she lay back on the bed. ‘But you’re holy.’

  The sheets were soft pink. She felt as if she were melting amongst them. Lying on her back, with her thighs slightly apart, and her knees slightly raised, she closed her eyes and imagined she was travelling through time and space, to a world where nothing mattered at all but rest and flowers and laughter.

  The first lick of his tongue on her bare clitoris came almost as a shock. But then he licked again, and again, and gradually she opened her eyes. She couldn’t believe the sensation of it. It made her body thrill as if she was watching something terrifying and exciting and stimulating all at once, and her muscles suddenly tensed in spite of herself. She raised her head and looked down, and there was Granger’s fair head moving rhythmically between her parted thighs, his tongue lapping at the flesh of her vulva, pink tongue between pink lips.

  She watched him in utter fascination as he licked her faster and faster. Sometimes he would play on her clitoris for half a minute at a time, stirring her deeper and deeper towards an orgasm. But then he would guide his tongue into her vagina, or around her urethra, playfully changing the tempo until she longed for him to return to her clitoris again and give her the deeper feelings she needed.

  It was strange. It was all technique. She wondered whether it made any difference to him what woman he did it to. After all, one cunt must be very much like another. She watched him lick, and lap, and tickle her, and the more she watched the further away her feelings of excitement receded.

  Three or four minutes passed. He kept on licking at her. She lay back, and stared up at the ceiling. She felt like another joint. Perhaps that was her problem. She wasn’t relaxed enough. Wasn’t spaced out enough. She idly wondered what would happen if Vee were to walk in through the door, and see Granger kneeling between her legs. Nothing, probably. She would say, ‘How was the studio?’ and Vee would say, ‘Okay. Do you want a glass of wine?’

  She was just wondering how long it would be before Sally got back when Granger slapped her. Crack! Across the face – so hard that it jerked her head to one side.

  She stared up at him, wide-eyed, shocked, her cheek blazing crimson and her ear throbbing with pain. He was glaring down at her fiercely, his eyes furious, and his jaws were working as if he was about to throw a fit.

  ‘You bitch!’ he hissed at her. ‘You high-and-mighty languorous boring bitch!’

  She whimpered, and tried to roll away from under him. But he clamped his hand on her shoulder, and shoved her forcefully back on to the sheets.

  ‘You hit me,’ she said, and her voice was trembling. It sounded like someone else’s voice altogether. ‘For no reason at all, you hit me. You total bastard.’

  ‘I hit you and I’ll hit you again,’ he said. He seized her shoulders and shook her violently. ‘You think you can send your tedious mind off on some spiritual errand while the rest of your body lies around here and spends its time with me? I took you to bed, you bitch, not half of you. I took you to bed, and I want all of you!’

  She shrieked, a high, off-key shriek. He slapped her again, on the other cheek, harder.

  ‘You dare!’ she screamed. ‘Oh, god, you dare!’

  He turned her over on to her face, and twisted her arm behind her back. She could feel his heavy crucifix swinging against her shoulder. He was lean, but he was so much stronger than she was that she could scarcely move, and when his brown muscular knee wedged itself between her thighs, opening up her legs, there was nothing she could do to prevent it.

  Panting, cursing under his breath, he roughly parted the lips of her vulva with his free hand. Then he leaned forward, giving her arm another savage twist to prevent her from squirming away, and pushed the head of his erection up against her.

  ‘Granger!’ she begged. ‘No, Granger! Not like this! No!’ He grunted once, and his thick penis forced its way up inside her. She felt the prickly curls of his pubic hair up against the bare cheeks of her bottom, and his tight balls deep between her legs.

  He thrust into her relentlessly, harder and harder. Her twisted arm was agony, and he was hurting her vagina with every thrust. But he went on and on until she couldn’t resist the feeling of having him right up inside her again and again and again; and though she swore into the pillow in the filthiest language she knew, there was a moment when she could feel him approaching the edge of his climax, and when she was certain that it was going to be impossible for her to suppress an orgasm of her own.

  He came. She felt him fill her. And then her face was squeezed and her fingers were clenched and her nipples were rigid with overwhelming sensation. She said: ‘Ah!’ and then ‘Aaaah!’ and then she screeched out loud and shook like a woman in some nightmare convulsion. It took whole minutes before she could be still, before her nerves stopped jumping, before she could open her eyes.

  She was aware of birds singing outside in the garden. She raised herself on one elbow and looked blearily across the bedroom. Granger was standing a little way away, buttoning up his shirt. His penis, limp now, was still shining.

  ‘Granger?’ she questioned him, softly.

  He watched her without answering.

  ‘Granger?’ she repeated. ‘What happened?’

  He stepped into his undershorts, and found his slacks. ‘A miracle,’ he said, sharply. ‘A practical miracle. Something which you should have experienced a long, long time ago.’

  *

  Mary’s Drive-In Diner was a small green-painted building with a sun-bleached shingle roof and a hand-painted cut-out sign above the door that showed a smiling dark-haired woman holding up a plateful of amateurishly rendered sausages and beans. It was situated just off Highway 60, in La Lande, New Mexico, and it had originally been built in the 1930s to take advantage of the automobile trade that drove past on its way to see Billy the Kid’s grave.

  Mary, the dark-haired woman on the sign, was still running the place, although she was grey-haired now, and her husband had long since gone to join William Bonney under the hard-packed soil of De Baca County. On the Saturday evening that Ed Hardesty was
preparing to give his broadcast from Shearson Jones’s house in Kansas, and Season Hardesty was sitting at the kitchen table at Vee’s house eating an early supper with Sally, Mary was wiping over the top of her red laminate counter, opening up catering-sized cans of hot dogs, and setting out catsup bottles, salt, pepper and ashtrays, in readiness for her ‘Saturday evening rush.’

  Her ‘Saturday evening rush’ might be no more hectic than a single truck driver, stopping on his way to Fort Sumner for a cold Miller and a cheeseburger. Or it could be a bewildered California family in a Winnebago Chieftain, already unnerved by the wildness of the countryside, and now trying to find their way back to Route 66 and eventual civilisation. At best, it could be six or seven airmen from Cannon AFB near Clovis, all neat and polite and hungry as hell. Mary had switched on the juke-box, and it was playing The Very Thought Of You. Outside, the sun had just gone down, and the sky was the rich dusty purple of blueberries. There was a soft breeze blowing from the south-west, from Lincoln County and the Capitan Mountains, and the air carried that distinctively Western smell of dry aromatic weeds, and history, and dust.

  Shortly before nine o’clock, an ageing lime-green Cadillac pulled off the blacktop and circled around Mary’s stony front yard. It stopped, and out clambered a family of five – Mr and Mrs Donald Abbott, of Portales, New Mexico, and their three young children – all on their way back from a visit to Mrs Abbott’s mother in Santa Fé.

  Mr Abbott was slight, stooping, and bespectacled. He had celebrated his forty-second birthday a week ago, and he worked for the Roosevelt County health department. At his age, he should have been a district supervisor, except that the county’s chief health executive didn’t particularly like his face. What’s more, he had held out for better medical facilities for underprivileged families at a time when it was politically embarrassing.

  Mrs Abbott was plain and friendly, with a face that was as forgettable as a single bagel in a bagel bakery. Their children – Duane, ten; Norman, eight; and Betsy, six – were no more memorable than little bagels. A police officer later described them as ‘Mr and Mrs Average, and Average Kids.’ But it was better, in a way, that they were. Fewer people would have been shocked if it had been a Spanish family, or a black family, or a family of Mescalero Apaches.

  Mr Abbott opened the screen door of Mary’s Diner and held it back while his family trooped in. Mary said, ‘How are you, folks?’ and came around the counter in her blue checkered apron, carrying the dog-eared menus that her six-foot nephew Stephen had Xeroxed for her at his used-car office in Las Vegas. The Abbotts sat a corner table, and ordered hotdogs all round, with onion rings.

  While they were eating, Mr Abbott told Mary that they were hoping to take the children to Los Angeles later in the year, so that they could see the ocean and Disneyland. Mary told them that her late husband, Morton, had lived in New Mexico all of his life, and had never once seen the ocean. He had seen John Slaughter once, in 1919, when he was a small boy, but that was all.

  Mr and Mrs Abbott drank two more cups of coffee, while the children played Osmond songs on the juke-box. At a quarter to ten, the family left, and Mary stood at the diner door to watch them drive off towards Clovis. Then she went back inside to clean up.

  Shortly after dawn on Sunday morning, a trumpet-player who had been entertaining the previous evening at a party at the air base came across the lime-green Cadillac parked beside the road about a mile and a half east of Floyd. He would have driven past it in his Volkswagen without stopping, except that he badly needed a first cigarette, and his car had no lighter. He could see that the Cadillac was occupied, so he pulled in just in front of it, and walked back. It was a cold morning, and the windows of the Cadillac were partially misted up.

  The trumpet-player knocked on the driver’s window. There was no response so he knocked louder. They were probably all asleep. He shivered in the morning air and chafed his hands together.

  It was only when he knocked a third time that he realised something had to be wrong. Twice, he shouted, ‘Hey in there! Hey, open the door!’ but there was no answer. He could vaguely make out a man and a woman and three children, but they were all lolling back in their seats as if they were dead.

  Frightened, the trumpet-player ran back to his own car and took out a tyre-iron from under the seat. He took it to the Cadillac’s door, and tried to prise it open, but the lock was too strong for him. He stood panting beside the car, unsure what to do, and he was still there when an air force truck came past. He flagged it down, and it crunched to a halt a little way down the road.

  ‘There’s something wrong!’ he shouted out. ‘It looks like they’re dead in there! I can’t open the door!’

  A tall young airman in a peaked cap and fatigues jumped down from the truck and walked over to take a look for himself. Then, without a word, he loosened a shovel from the truck’s side panel, swung it back, and smashed the Cadillac’s side window.

  The children in the back appeared to be dead. They were curled up like fumigated baby mice, their eyes closed, and their faces white. The broken glass lay on them like splinters of ice. In the front, the driver was alive, but barely conscious. His wife was face-down on the seat.

  ‘Doctor…’ whispered the driver. ‘For God’s sake… doctor…’

  The young airman loped back to his truck, and unclipped his radio microphone. The trumpet-player heard him saying, ‘… whole family, that’s right… no, I can’t see what’s wrong with them… just about a mile or two outside of Floyd… you know the road?’

  A white-painted fighter-bomber thundered above them as it came in from a dawn exercise. The trumpet-player shielded his eyes against the sun, and then turned away, his hands on his hips in a gesture of helpless resignation. The driver of the Cadillac had closed his eyes now, and was lying back breathing harshly through his mouth. The trumpet-player didn’t know whether he ought to take the man’s spectacles off or not.

  The young airman came back and said, ‘They’re sending an ambulance from the base. They said not to touch them, in case they have something contagious.’

  The trumpet-player nodded. He was glad he had decided against taking off the spectacles. ‘The kids, too,’ he said, indicating the back seat of the car. ‘Whatever it was, it really must have hit ’em hard.’

  The airman said, ‘Suffocation, maybe. They could have had a leak in their muffler. When that carbon monoxide gets into the car, boy, you don’t even realise what’s happening to you. A friend of mine killed himself that way. You know, with the rubber hose.’

  The trumpet-player held his hand over his mouth. There was no sound out here except for the whining of the wind in the Cadillac’s antennae, and the laboured breathing of the driver. There were a few brief rumbles of jet engines from the air force base, but they died away as quickly as summer thunder.

  ‘Some place to die, huh?’"said the airman.

  The trumpet-player nodded. He was beginning to feel very cold now, and he was wishing that he had never stopped. It was so incongruous and so tragic to see this family sitting in their car that it brought tears to his eyes. ‘Do you have a light?’ he asked the airman.

  The airman shook his head. ‘Don’t smoke. Easier not to, you know, with all that airplane fuel around.’

  ‘Doctor…’ whispered Donald Abbott.

  ‘A doctor’s coming,’ said the airman, loudly. ‘Don’t worry, old buddy, you’re going to make it.’ Then he looked at the trumpet-player and pulled a face, as if to say, what does it matter? The poor guy’s going to die anyway.

  *

  Under the tepee-like roof of Shearson Jones’s hallway, the television lights had been set up, and the cameras fixed into position. The whole morning had been chaos, with television people rearranging the furniture and reeling out hundreds of feet of cable and leaving styrofoam cups of coffee wherever they went. Shearson, in his mahogany-panelled study, had stayed well out of their way, except to talk for a half-hour to the director about how he was going to prese
nt his appeal, and how the broadcast should look. ‘Quiet and simple, with folksy dignity, that’s what I want,’ he had insisted. ‘There’s no way we should look like we’re rattling a tin cup under anybody’s nose.’

  Peter Kaiser had spent five harassed hours mapping out contingency plans for handling all the money the appeal was going to bring in, and he had taken up so much of Karen’s time with typing and telephoning that she hadn’t even been able to get away for a swim. The fund had now been sub-divided into geographical regions – east, central, and west – so that contributions could be handled more efficiently. It would also make the money more difficult to trace, when accounting time came. Karen had spent most of the morning calling San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, briefing Peter’s regional office staff. None of them had been particularly helpful and happy about being disturbed on a Sunday, even this Sunday.

  Ed had felt tense all day. He had woken just before it was light, and he had sat out on his balcony, wrapped in his bathrobe, smoking a cigar and watching the grey waters of the lake. Behind him, in his bedroom, Della McIntosh had lain sleeping on his bed, her red hair spread out over the pillow, her knees drawn up like a child. She had knocked on his door at midnight, and he had let her in without a word. They had said nothing to each other at all – nothing about motives or betrayal or politics. They had made love three times, and the last time she had sat on top of him, while he had reached up with his hands and cradled her heavy breasts. They had kissed once, almost a chaste kiss, and then slept.

  After breakfast, Ed had watched the television technicians for a while. Then he had swum up and down Shearson’s triangular pool. He had thought of calling Season in Los Angeles, but somehow he had felt disinclined. There was too much on his mind. Della was no substitute for Season, but Season was so much more complicated. The day was sunny but cool.

  At three o’clock, after everybody had sat around the lunch table for a gargantuan lobster salad, and Shearson had retired to his suite of rooms to doze and belch for an hour in private, the TV director had introduced Ed to his make-up lady and his continuity girl and the silent, elegantly-dressed black prompter who was going to hold up his short speech for him on large idiot boards. Then Ed had been given a plaid shirt and a pair of jeans to put on, his hair had been washed and blow-dried, and a small touch of blush had been rubbed along his cheekbones.