‘You’re late,’ she says, beckoning him over with her fingers as one might call a servant.
He concentrates on being slow in his strolling across to her, so as not to appear completely biddable; pauses on the way to take a final drag on his cigarette before flicking it onto the gravel.
‘How can I be late if I was here first?’
‘I was out here fifteen minutes ago. I don’t like to be kept waiting. That’s something you’ll have to learn if we’re going to work together.’
Already, at these words, his penis is stiffening. He chooses not to mention that he made a pit-stop to his room: splashes of water on key locations, quick rubs of soap, more splashes, towel. He jumped into a fresh pair of jocks, heart thumping, while his mind pondered what moves she might expect of him, how to play the opportunity, whether his performance would meet her requirements. Now that the event is running, he feels a lot better. It helps that he is still under the good influences of the beer and wine consumed over the course of the evening.
She beckons him to come in close, which seems odd until he understands that she wants to take off her shoes. She holds onto his arm for balance and removes one high-heel, then the other. She drops the shoes onto the gravel below the first step. She seems much smaller now, like a miniature version of her previous self, but her relief at having her feet flat on the smooth stone of the step is obvious, and from this she derives fresh strength.
‘Fucking high-heels. They’re killing my back.’
‘So why do you wear them?’
‘You wouldn’t understand. . . . Let’s walk.’
Avoiding the gravel, she steps directly onto the narrow grass verge that runs in front of the house. Between the sash windows the verge is planted with bushes, including some climbing varieties that have colonised the masonry, in some cases reaching almost as high as the first-storey windows. They walk side by side. He allows her to set the pace, which is slow to begin with, then quickens as she gains confidence in walking on her bare feet. She has left her shoes behind her. As they proceed, the tiny green leather bag hanging from her shoulder swings rhythmically, catching his attention. He finds something beautiful in the arc of its movement, and wonders why so small a bag should have such a long strap. They reach the front corner of the house and turn inward, down by the side wall toward the fire escape. The grass verge ends after a few yards with a large bush in exuberant flower (lilac-coloured in the light of the day, greyish now). Beyond the bush begins a line of parked cars, including Alexander’s Honda.
‘I suppose this will do,’ she says, hurriedly grabbing his hand. She misses her grip and ends up with a handful of his fingers, compensating by holding on too tightly. Her hand is surprisingly sweaty. She tugs him to the far side of the bush, then pushes him forcefully – both hands on his ribs – against the pebble-dash wall, where he bangs the back of his head, producing a moment of agony.
‘Owa, what the hell—’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ she orders in a curiously alluring whisper, and again pushes him into the wall, though with much less violence. Alexander is gently rubbing the sore spot at the back of his head, wondering if there is any blood flowing or brain damage. Two plus two equals four, he thinks to himself, to make sure that his faculties are not impaired.
‘Shhssh,’ she says, in a soothing voice. Her warm hands reach inside his jacket, and instantly his sexual interest is reawakened. She lays her hands on his rib cage, runs them up and down his shirted torso, right up to the top of his chest, down again, pausing at the nipples, which she searches for roughly with the sides of her thumbs, down then to his abdomen.
‘Bit of flab there. You should work out more.’
He has yielded to her now, completely. She takes two fistfuls of his shirt and pulls it up out of his trousers. She finds the cloth flap across the waistband of his trousers and tears it out. He hears the button popping. She pulls down the zip with such force that it catches and the stitching rips loudly under the continued pressure she applies. Alexander is frightened, fascinated.
‘Let me see your cock,’ she whispers.
He doesn’t have the will left to make any response. She moves in closer to him, threateningly. She reaches up and grabs his throat, tightly enough for him to find it unbearable. He is unable to breathe. He feels that the veins in his head must burst with the pressure. She squeezes further. ‘Do what I tell you. I know your type. You will do what I tell you.’ She spits slightly in her forced anger. ‘Now, show me your cock.’ She eases her grip. His hands find his trousers and jocks, and he pushes them together down over his hips. He pushes his pelvis outward, offering his erection for her inspection, conscious of the paleness of his thighs under the spilt lighting from around the front.
‘Good boy,’ she tells him mockingly. ‘That’s much better. I like what I see.’
Ensuring first, with an automatic sweeping gesture, that the strap of her bag is securely lodged on her shoulder, she takes his penis in one hand and his scrotum in the other. For a short instant she squeezes his sack with her fingers, not using her nails, but implying that danger. He gasps in shock rather than pain, arching away from her, his scalp once again grazing against the pebble-dash surface behind. She laughs. She is pumping him now. Her grip is tighter than he would choose, her hand movements rougher and quicker. But to be in her hands in this way, cock and sack, to be fully in the hands of this woman is exquisite to him. She is fucking his very personality, wanking him off, and his overwhelming response is: Yes.
She stops. Hand behind the base of his skull, she roughly draws his head down and reaches up to whisper breathily into his ear.
‘Here’s what we want the consultants to say on broadband: the state should invest. A hundred and fifty million, two hundred million. With that sort of money, we can pay . . . contractors . . . to lay optical fibre wherever it’s required. All those neglected provincial towns. . . . Do you understand what I’m saying?’
He understands perfectly the connection she is making, but finds the interruption rather ill-timed. Her intense little speech is an absurdity to him. He wants to laugh in her face, but doesn’t dare.
‘Whatever you say,’ he mumbles unconvincingly.
‘Say please,’ she tells him in a more playful tone, apparently thinking her point has been sufficiently made, which surprises him.
‘Please,’ he says.
‘You can do better than that.’
‘Please,’ he implores her, almost meaning it.
She takes him in her hands again, begins to work his erection. He regrets that the spell has been slightly broken, and tries to rebuild it, groaning lightly, thrusting himself forward.
‘Aaah,’ he says, in his best sex wheeze. ‘Aaaah.’
She is pumping harder. He overcomes the interruption. The sensual sexual thrill once again hits a peak of painful ecstasy, which spills over naturally, quickly, voluminously, into ejaculation. But the experience is broader than this mere localised physical orgasm. Cynicism shed, his entire person is transported in these final moments. It is his magnificent pleasure to come for her, however she chooses. And how she chooses is mechanistic, humiliating. She arranges it that he comes on his own shirt, and afterward she wipes her hands on his tie.
Again she draws his head down, reaches up on the tips of her toes.
‘We have a beautiful future ahead of us,’ she whispers into his ear, then bites him on the lobe, which hurts sharply. She drops to her feet, turns away, disappears around the bush, and makes silent progress over the grass on the other side.
‘That was . . . interesting,’ he says to himself quietly with a giggle.
He reaches down and lifts up his jocks and trousers in a single movement. The zip and button are destroyed, and he hasn’t brought a spare suit. He’ll have to improvise. He tucks in his shirt, which is stained slimy-wet, and the slimy-wetness is already cold against his belly. He c
alculates: with his jacket closed and his hands in his pockets, he can make it to his room; then he’ll ring room service for safety pins. It’ll be fine. He can hand the suit into the dry-cleaners at the weekend for a repair job and clean. Julia will never notice the shirt. He washes his own.
He reaches into his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and lighter.
By half past two the following afternoon he is driving back to Dublin with the sodden outskirting hills of the Wicklow Mountains on his left. It rained heavily during the night and throughout the morning. Now the roads are drying quickly, mist rising off the tarmac.
He is always exhausted after Council meetings, particularly the overnight ones. It is the coming down from the higher gear of preparation and performance, the hangover from the drinking, the consequence of sleeping poorly in the unfamiliar hotel bed. On this occasion, he is taxed also by his encounter with Grace Sharkey, the recollection of which is regularly surfacing to the top of his mind, occasioning mixed emotions of elation and shame.
As ever, the fun part of the Council meeting was George. Toward the end of dinner the previous evening he was already very well oiled. Alexander caught his eye at one point across the table. George was listening – but not really – to a self-loving speech from the Department of Finance drone sitting beside him. To Alexander, he raised the corner of one eyebrow, saying: Isn’t this a hoot? Later, when the thin ageing after-dinner speaker had finished his ardent but curiously uninspiring speech, George was first in when the Chairman opened the discussion to questions.
‘Chairman, can I suggest that we move our consideration of these excellent propositions to the bar,’ George said, with real appeal in his voice, since they had stopped serving wine a good while earlier. ‘Or else we could bring the bar in here.’
George – as he might have put it himself – had a goo on him. Restraint forgotten, tie off, sleeves rolled up, he was on a mission to get seriously plastered, displaying – Alexander felt – admirable vision and commitment.
As a consequence of this mission, George missed the eight-thirty start of the morning meeting by a cool two hours. Too late to be in a hurry, he entered the room in grand fashion. He was washed and properly dressed, his hair still wet from the shower. He was also clearly still drunk from the night before, his eyes bloodshot, pickled in gin. Bowing and waving his arms flamboyantly, he made a declaration through the Chair: ‘Chairman, I apologise,’ he said, his voice ridiculously thick and throaty. ‘I abase myself before you. . . . My alarm clock didn’t go off. . . . You know me of old, Chairman. You know that there is none more enthusiastic than I to get up early for the Council. . . . And I should say as well that those of us who soldiered on in the bar, till three or four in the morning, devoted ourselves exclusively to affairs of state, and I believe we worked out some solutions to a number of the problems that this august body, ably led by yourself, sir, has been considering. However, I cannot guarantee that we remember the solutions. . . . I abase myself.’
By this point the Council was delighted. In the first moments, George’s late entrance and his condition were appalling, embarrassing; but as he proceeded eloquently, the members woke out of their torpor like school kids excited by an unexpected diversion. They hid their enjoyment for as long as possible, until finally they were openly grinning and laughing. It would have been impossible for Banner to be hard on him.
‘You have abased yourself sufficiently, George. Take your seat.’
Alexander is stuck now behind a Land Rover towing a horsebox, with a well-groomed athletic backside sticking out the rear. The horse lifts its tail and calmly shits out several dollops of tasty-looking light brown material.
Alexander lets his speed drop off and swings across slightly into the other lane to get a view for overtaking. A rigid truck, racing bumpily along the road in the opposite direction, barely twenty yards away, looking unsteady on its wheels, gives two sharp blasts of the horn to clear him out of the way. Alexander swings back in behind the horse-box, chastened, his quickened heart skipping beats.
‘Ooops.’
It’s not that the Land Rover is going too slowly. He hates not being able to see what’s coming on the road.
Faced again with the horse’s arse, two things come to mind.
The first is that Helena will have been out riding the night before in Thorny Valley Riding School, where they take their weekly lesson. He wonders which horse she got. He himself always accepts what he is given. Helena is pickier. She used to ring in advance to lobby, but stopped when she suspected that this was becoming counterproductive. The rule is: you take the horse that is assigned to you; you read your name across from the horse’s name on the neatly written list that is pinned up on the arena door; you go to the stable and fetch your horse, unless it is already in the arena with the lesson just finishing.
Alexander wonders why he is less enthusiastic now about this pursuit than he was a year ago. In fact, he knows why, but hasn’t yet articulated it fully to himself. He had reached a particular point in the sport where the weekly lesson and occasional weekend excursion were no longer enough; where he would have needed to start riding a few times a week in order to satisfy his appetite, to achieve the curve of improvement that he knew was possible, that he wanted to achieve; where it would have made sense to start thinking about buying a horse, while at the same time it was also clear that owning a horse would be impossible for him, given the required commitment of time and money. And so the point he had reached turned out to be a peak, and now he is cruising downhill, running off the intensity built up in the preceding period. In all matters, motion is unceasing. This appears to be the only law.
The second thing that comes to mind is less obviously linked with the horse box in front. It is an image or stream of images, pre-verbal, not word-thoughts. The subject-matter feels important to him, weighty, coming from the dreaming place where truth is symbolic rather than logical, the submerged twisted undergrowth of personality. He cannot discern the significance of this image, but he fears it.
It is the truck full of sheep that he would sometimes see as a child on his way to school, parked in front of Tom Kearney’s butcher’s shop in Malahide village: the smell of sheep shit; the animals bleating, their light hooves dancing on the metallic base of the pen; horribly crowded, confused, individual sheep trying to turn around; their dirty woollen pelts and skinny black legs visible between the horizontal wooden planks; little snouts sticking out, trying to get a glimpse of what was going on.
In the afternoon on the way home, the truck would be gone, but he would be reminded of what he had witnessed by little streams of blood and water running out of the side alley, out onto the cracked uneven pavement, down the hill. Unsentimentally, carefully, he would enjoy making sure that he didn’t step in the blood.
Why is it again that people have children? Why do so many people couple off and reproduce? It’s remarkable really, Alexander thinks. When there are so many other possibilities in life. He corrects himself. All the other possibilities can be summed to one. You have children or you don’t. That is the choice.
The youngest of George’s three children has Down’s syndrome, a boy of ten called Pádraig. Alexander doesn’t know what difficulties this creates above and beyond the usual challenges of child-rearing. George himself has never mentioned the subject. It was Marilyn, their secretary, who told Alexander, in a whisper, as though it were a crime.
He is back in the office before four. There was no work reason for him to return; no one would require him to be there after the Council meeting. It would be very surprising if George turned up. Moreover, Alexander is certainly too tired to bother with anything other than checking his emails. He has returned because the prospect of going home depresses him. In his hangover from the Council meeting, he longs to chat to someone and has returned to the office for company.
Rounding his desk to sit down, he picks up three or four sealed envelopes fr
om his in-tray. He leafs through this post, gleaning in a few glances that there is nothing here of any interest, nothing that requires immediate attention. He drops the unopened letters back into his in-tray, swivels in his chair to face the computer and hits the go button.
While the machine is booting up, working through its tedious routine of whirring and clicking, generating mysterious messages of system errors that the IT people have told him to ignore, chugging its way through the start-up of anti-viral software, Alexander checks the voicemail on his phone, on which the red light is flashing. The voicemail software has its own long-winded sequences, presented by a sing-song American female voice. She tells him he has three new messages, then forces him to listen to a comprehensive menu of available actions before letting him hear these messages. The messages do not deliver on the promise of the flashing red light. The first two are hang-ups – the sound of a phone hitting the receiver, then the beep-beep-beep. The third is Imelda, telling him that she will be late that morning. Dozy bitch. It is typical of her to forget that he was away at the Council meeting. She could have breezed in at lunchtime with impunity.
By now his PC is running. He opens his mailbox and finds that he has nine new messages, lovely little sealed yellow envelopes, with cheerful bold script explaining what they are about, who they are from, when they were sent. He scans the sender column to see if there is anything interesting, anything personal, which there isn’t. He then re-scans them to see if there is any he wishes to open, which there isn’t. He also has a large number of opened messages in his inbox. The emails he leaves in his inbox are the ones that require action of some sort on his part. He doesn’t bother to scan through these now, but slips out the top sheet of A4 paper from the feed-tray for his printer, finds a biro from the mess in front of him on the desk, clears some space for the sheet, and writes the word Monday across the top. Underneath this, indented a little, he draws an asterisk and after it writes Do emails. This makes him feel better. It feels like the first step in re-establishing order from chaos.
Being Alexander Page 7
