by Krissy Kneen
‘You speak French?’ I say this in a French accent and her eyes seem to focus. I have somehow taken on a new shape, an unexpected substance. I see her smile. She has probably drunk too much champagne. She shakes her head enthusiastically and her whole body seems to sway with that one gesture.
‘Non,’ she says. Her brow furrows. ‘No.’ And it seems that even this simple French word is only vaguely familiar to her. Perhaps, she is thinking, ‘non’ is not the right word to reach for.
‘You speak English?’ she asks me.
And I say, ‘Non, no. A little, petit,’ pinching my fingers together to none at all.
I have reinvented myself as someone more exotic, a francophone. A fabrication, and yet I am just sober enough to stand by the lie.
She points to herself. ‘Jenny,’ she says.
‘Pierre.’
‘Je t’aime,’ which I assume is one of her only French phrases. I laugh and nod.
‘Merci.’
‘Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?’ Another one of those French phrases people know from a song, but it has taken the conversation in an interesting direction.
‘Ah. Oui,’ I tell her and follow with some French I memorised from a poem. She isn’t to know it is a verse about donkeys so she nods and grins and there is a little explosion of her laughter. I do, of course, wish to sleep with her tonight. I recite some lines from Flaubert. She nods, with no idea of what she is agreeing to. I take her hand. Her fingers are tiny, like the porcelain hands of a Victorian doll. I take her to the stairs. I don’t really know what rooms are on the second floor, the party is a friend of a friend’s and I have never seen the bedrooms, but when I choose a door to open, the room beyond seems familiar. Posters of bands I know, academic awards framed and hung on the wall, textbooks strewn on the floor. It could be my own room or that of any number of my friends. I lead her in and sit on the edge of the unmade bed. I whisper a few more passages from Flaubert. I am running out of material and wonder if she will notice when I begin to repeat myself.
She fumbles with the zip at the back of her dress and pulls it down enough to shift the straps so they can fall into the cradle of her elbows. I cannot see her breasts but there is a promise of them, the soft swell of skin suddenly revealed seems to highlight all that cannot be seen, the rest of the picture is suddenly brought into focus. I imagine she wants me to undress her.
When I lean in closer, her skin looks like the solid layer that forms on the top of custard while it is cooking. She smells faintly of vanilla. She makes me hungry. I open my mouth and breathe the taste of her. A hint of nutmeg on the top of my palate. When I push with the tip of my finger her breast becomes exposed and I hold my mouth so close to it that she must feel me tasting the air. Her nipple responds, reaching into my mouth. It would be a small thing to close my lips and bring my tongue just a little forward to touch the clench of dark brown flesh. Instead I sit back and mutter a few sentences of irrelevant French. It is the language, more than the champagne, that has persuaded her to drop her clothes like the petals of a flower. She stands and pulls her dress off completely and I look at her, the flawless skin, the perfection of her nipples, the little creases where her panties have marked her thighs.
I pick up her knees and move them. Her body turns with them. I am steering a sleek and gorgeous boat; her breasts point proudly towards the deep blue unknown. In English I am far from a skilled captain: I steer the ship awkwardly in my native tongue, buffeted by waves I have not anticipated. Somehow, in French, the whole thing takes on a gracefulness I did not expect. When I move her elbow, her knees part. When I touch her shoulder there is a tilting of her hips that will allow me to enter her. I remove my clothing without the usual awkwardness. There is nothing to hinder me. I push in and the passage is easy, her arousal has ensured this. She wants me with a wet openness that is encouraging. My thrust is her parry, she folds herself into the hug of my arms as if she were born to nestle there. She brings her feet up onto my chest and there is the glorious gape of her flesh and all of me to fill it. My climax is the call and her response is given with a short but sweet enough delay. I am returning into my body in time to feel her leaving hers, the desperate clutch of her flesh as she succumbs to the pleasure.
‘C’est magnifique,’ I whisper into the pale plane of her neck. I hear her pulse beating beneath the fine skin. My mouth waters. My flaccid penis is beginning to show renewed interest in the task at hand.
In English I would slip out of her body. I would lie politely in her arms until it was time to dress and return to the party. In French I am rising inside her, I am reinvented as the kind of man you might meet in Paris.
‘Je ne suis pas moi-meme aujourd’hui,’ I say.
When Rodney finished, Holly could barely breathe. This was not like any book club she had ever imagined. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair; Rodney’s story had aroused her. There was a gentle throbbing at her crotch and she glanced down into her lap in terror. In the semi-dark a faint but distinct light was pulsing. She looked up. They were staring at her, all eyes turned towards her crotch. She held her hands crossed over the light but her fingers glowed as if she were curling them around a bright torch. Her abstinence ring was hot on her finger, too hot, she snapped her hands away and stood. There was a puddle of blue glowing dampness on the chair where she had been sitting, like the trail from a radioactive snail. She pressed her hand to her mouth in shock and the heat off her ring hissed a burning line on her lip.
She fled. Her chair tumbled back and she ran past the shocked and staring faces. She stumbled on the steps and struggled with the door of the telephone booth. She was sobbing, her sweaty fingers slipping on the handle, her heels twisting under her, she was unbalanced, tumbling backwards, her arms flapping at the air like a baby bird trying to fly. She fell. She would break her neck on all those stairs. This was the end of everything and at least she would not have to face her shame.
She plumped down against something soft, arms, the swell of breasts. She smelled tobacco and cologne. Mandy.
‘Shhh, shhh, shhh.’
She felt herself lifted and carried. The relief of cold air against her tear-streaked face. The woman lowered her into a bed of mint, cradling her head on her robust thigh, Holly took frantic breaths. Mandy stroked her hair until she calmed.
‘Shhh, shhh.’
‘Oh god,’ Holly sobbed. ‘I should never have read that book. I should never have let myself even think about sex.’
‘Shhh,’ said Mandy, ‘shhh now. You don’t know how amazing you are. In all my years at the bookshop, I have never ever…’
She was staring down at Holly, her eyes wide.
‘I’m a freak.’ Holly’s voice was thickened by tears, she sniffed, coughed. She touched her lip and felt the sharp sting of a burn.
‘I should never…’ A wavering breath. ‘I will never read another book for pleasure, ever, ever again.’ The tears streamed down her face, she struggled to breathe, a stuttering gulping of air. Mandy leaned closer, too close. Holly thought she was about to whisper a secret, perhaps some motherly advice. Holly started to turn her head, offering Mandy her ear, but the older woman clamped Holly’s jaw between her fingers, a tiny spark of electricity flashing blue in her hand, and pulled Holly’s face towards her lips.
/> A kiss. A gentle touch of mouth to mouth, a soft caress that was in itself an important secret, one that could not be communicated through words. Holly felt her own lips softening, her errant tongue sneaking out to trace the sweet curve of lip, the hard surprise of tooth and finally the parting which let her into a wet warmth of soft flesh, a damp fissure, a wound, and she kissed with her mouth and her tongue reaching out to Mandy’s body as an emissary of herself. When their tongues touched it was like her breast rubbing against a belly. When their teeth clicked together it felt like the sharp shock of her hymen tearing. They lay fully clothed in a cloud of mint and lavender yet their mouths were naked to each other. The kiss stretched out without breath. A gorgeous suffocation. When they finally pulled away from each other, Holly knew her face was red from the blood that had pooled in her cheeks. Not a blush exactly, more a focusing of everything visceral into the place around her lips.
‘Here.’ Mandy reached into her waistcoat and pulled out a book. ‘Our next book-club book is important for your journey. You must keep reading. Angela Carter is the next step for you. You must take this step or you will be lost. Believe me.’
Holly held the book, a mouth pressed against a rain-spattered glass window, bright red lips, a string of pearls tumbling out from between the lewd gape of teeth. She flicked her tongue out and licked the spit from her lips. She felt the sting of the burn mark snapping her back to reality. She threw the book away into the thorny branches of a kaffir lime bush. Struggled away from Mandy, sat up, her head reeling with an odd dizziness. Holly scrambled to her feet.
‘Honestly, Holly, you need the Angela Carter.’ Mandy’s tone was measured, soothing. ‘Nothing is as you expect it to be and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman will prepare you. They will help you make sense of the new world you are about to enter.’
Holly shook her head furiously. Her heels sank into the ground as she backed away, she stumbled but regained her footing. When she felt the solidity of the footpath under her shoes she turned and she ran.
Jack. She needed to see Jack. She spun her ring on her finger as if it was her only hope of salvation. Her bag flapped on her shoulder, lighter. She had left the James Salter novel on the table in the bookshop. She was free of it. She was free of everything. She was free now to run into her boyfriend’s comforting arms.
The paperback copy of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by Angela Carter settled on the ground between a curry leaf plant and a patch of dill. Its back jacket soaked up the gathering dew. It became damp. The pages curled, the letters of the last chapter blurred and swelled. Under the gloss of the dust jacket there was movement. The words of the denouement began to stretch and push down through the acknowledgments, down to the loamy soil, tendrils of sentences curling towards new life, ideas arcing out in search of enactment. The text took root in the rich humus of decay. Worms ate the soil from the roots of thought, shat out their rich waste to feed them, a coprophilic frenzy burgeoning out from the restrictions of language, finding a foothold in the pure physical pleasure of the faecal mud.
If Holly had waited to watch this transformation she would have seen the bright red mouth of the book’s cover stretch, the lips parting, the curl of a frond pushing out from between the hidden teeth. The story breaking free of its pages as a beanstalk might crack the earth to reach for the sun. There was no sun now, but the moon had risen and the stalk arched up towards it. Asparagus spear, bamboo shoot, fern frond, the story continued to shift shape and form. Part plant, part flesh, the great throbbing stalk shrugged off its coy hood and stretched to a purple reach, trembled and thickened and split to reveal two more shoots within the flesh. It snaked up, spat, shifted, hissed. Branches split from its slippery side, buds formed and filled with juice and opened their lips, mouths stretching out secret tongues.
If Holly had stayed and watched she would have been able to peer inside the petals of the mouths. She would have seen a little tableau detailed on each tongue. Here a baby slept. It smiled, cooed, reached with chubby fists that glowed like tiny silvery moons. A moth fluttered around the infant fists, settled to suck at the edge of the baby lips. The infant’s mouth opened on teeth, sharp and razor-edged. The child’s head whipped forward. The teeth snapped shut. There was nothing but a dusting of moth wings like icing sugar powdering the innocent lips. Another flower opened itself to reveal a sweet little miniature donkey. Soft as soot, restless hooves stamping against a succulent petal. The donkey turned and raised its brush-tipped tail and beneath it there were lips where its anus would be. The lips grinned, opened, laughed their loud flatulence. The voice of the donkey’s arse cut through the night like a whinny. ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ said the equine arse.
Flowers burst forth, a shark twisting in a bubble of juice. ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ said the shark. ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ whispered the pages of Angela Carter’s book as they sucked up mud as if it were fine wine.
The door of the phone booth slapped once, twice. The book-club members emerged one by one, their faces turned towards the new whispering plant that had sprung up so suddenly.
‘Nothing is as it seems,’ brayed the arse of the donkey, and the members of the book club moved towards the plant, their faces lit by a dozen lying flowers. ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ snapped the baby, plucking a mosquito from the air and stuffing it into its tiny cherubic mouth.
‘Yes.’ Mandy pushed through the crush of bodies, making her way to the front of the group. ‘That is the lesson of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.’ She plucked the baby flower from the vine. The infant screamed, began to wither, its face collapsing to become the face of an old man, and then fell away as the flower transformed into the squat rectangular shape of the book. Mandy flicked through the pages. ‘Angela Carter,’ she said, ‘The Infernal Desire Machines. We finally have need of her wisdom. Our next book-club book is a transformative one.’
Rodney plucked another flower from the vine, marvelling as the same transformation occurred. He weighed the book in his palm and said, ‘Holly hasn’t read it yet, she doesn’t know.’
Mandy nodded. ‘She’ll be back. When she is ready to see the world for what it is she will come back to us. Go home now. Read the text. Make your own adjustments to the world.’
‘But Holly…’
‘I’ll be here.’
If Holly had stayed and watched she would have seen Mandy lift the book absently to her mouth and bite into the pages. She would have seen the spill of juices, thick, sweet and red, oozing over her lips and down her chin. If she had stayed and watched she would have felt her own mouth water at the sight of the elixir. She would have felt her own loins begin to spill their juices at the thought of it. But Holly had not stayed and Holly did not watch, and therefore Holly still had a lot to learn.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
by ANGELA CARTER
Jack. The idea of him was like something hard and smooth she had swallowed. Holly ran away from the bookshop and her heart was pounding. She felt small tremors under her feet, as if the book club had opened a fault line beneath them and at any moment the earth would crack and she would be swallowed by it.
Only something as solid and pure and untainted as her love for Jack could right the tilt of the world. Holly ran till one of her yellow heels snapped and even then she skipped
along as fast as she could on her uneven keel. She was running fast enough to leave the books and Mandy and the very memory of arousal behind. Ahead of her was a chaste embrace.
She loped around a corner and there was Jack’s house. His parents’ mansion. Marble steps, pillars, a perfectly clipped hedge, the curtains all drawn. That was odd. It was as if the house had closed its great sleepy eyes. A light glowed in the kitchen. Just one curtain warm orange when all the others were sliding into evening haze. She pictured him at the kitchen table, flicking through the TV guide, checking the sports results on the internet.
This was the image in her head when she saw the car. Not in the driveway, which was empty—his father’s Discovery significantly absent—but almost hidden in the adjacent street. Holly would not have noticed if it wasn’t so distinctive. A car not much bigger than a motorcycle, a squat little thing, yellow and black. So new that if she glanced at its roof she knew she would see the stars reflected there.
Jennifer’s car.
She wondered why Jennifer would be here, at Jack’s place. Why she would choose to park so close and yet not by the gate or in the driveway.
Holly skidded to a breathless halt. She worried at the ring on her finger, touched her lip and felt a blister forming there. She bypassed the gate; it would squeak. They could always tell when Jack’s mother was arriving home, although of course they were never doing anything untoward. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly affectionate, Jack would hold her hand while he sat beside her on the couch and the squeaking gate would make them jump apart as if they had been doing something to betray the pledge she had made with the Angels. Holly stepped around the gate, entering through the driveway. Manicured lawn, manicured hedge. She crouched at a window so earnestly clean that it might have been a mirror and saw herself in reflection.
