by Krissy Kneen
Holly turned the book over in her hands. She examined the lewd jacket, the open mouth, the string of pearls.
‘If you had read the Angela Carter then the truth would not have come as such a shock.’ Mandy was standing beside her. She rested a hand on Holly’s slumped shoulder. ‘Nothing will be the same after reading Angela Carter. But then nothing was the way you imagined it anyway. Am I right?’
Holly could not go home. Every time she closed her eyes the face of her father reared up, fierce, pained, pleasured, stark in her imagination. The shape of his cock, the size of it, the colour.
Mandy laid her down in the back room of the bookshop on a couch made of soft leather. She drew a fine woollen blanket over her, and when she tucked it up under her chin, Holly felt safe for the first time that evening.
Mandy picked up the novel that she had placed beside her pillow. She flicked through the pages, sniffed it as if it were imbued with the most wonderful perfume.
‘Take this,’ she said, pressing the book to Holly’s chest. Holly’s nipples responded, pricking up to rub against the blanket. ‘Take this in one gulp, all of it. When you have read it all, you will have gone some way towards recovery.’
Holly nodded. She pressed the book to the little darts of her nipples. She wanted Mandy to reach down and rub them, soothe them. She wanted so much more. Her love was broken. Jack, her friends, her family. All was broken as Holly herself lay shattered on the couch. Her finger was naked, the abstinence ring abandoned in the herb garden. She felt the wind whistling across the shards of her body and its strange caress aroused her.
Mandy leaned forward. She pressed her lips to Holly’s lips. A kiss. Holly opened her mouth. She tasted the colour of Mandy’s tongue; the velvet caress of the inside of her cheeks was a sound like birds celebrating the dawn. Her senses were all mixed up but that seemed right. She sighed into the confusion of that kiss. She sucked it down greedily. She fed on it. Her belly swelled. Perhaps she was floating.
The kiss ended too suddenly. Mandy stood. Nodded. ‘I’ll return.’
She reached for Mandy’s hand but the woman slipped away, out of her grasp.
‘Take it down. One gulp. I promise I’ll come back.’
Holly sank into the disappointment of her departure. She picked up the book.
She dropped it suddenly. For a moment she could have sworn that the mouth on the jacket of the book had moved. She had seen the lips form words and heard a whisper. ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ the mouth had said.
She was confused, she was hallucinating. It had been a terribly long day.
Holly picked up the book once more and stared at the jacket. A mouth, a string of pearls, beads of rain or sweat. She folded back the cover and there was a wet parting sound like a knife slicing into a melon.
Nothing is as it seems.
She knew that now, and so she was not shocked by the idea that the world was full of illusions. A machine that made dreams and let them loose into the waking world. She read, fascinated. When Doctor Hoffman built his terrible desire machine it became impossible to know what was real and what was fantasy. Holly nodded. Yes. It didn’t seem so fanciful, really. Already she had begun to understand.
Her finger had slid inside herself; now it was slippery. She had been rubbing it absently against the tight stretch of her hymen, she realised, testing the thickness and strength of this tiny flap of skin. She felt better now. She knew what she must do.
When Mandy opened the door to the back room of the bookshop Holly sat up, feeling the colour returning to her face. She had felt pale and sickly only hours before. She had been fretful. What would she do now? Where would she go? How could she continue on with a life that had been destroyed?
‘A quest,’ she said to Mandy and the woman tipped her head to a quizzical angle.
‘I will set out on a quest. Like the man in the book. When the city is so cluttered with illusion I must set out on a quest to see the world with fresh eyes. Another country. A foreign language. That is the only way to return with fresh eyes, don’t you think?’
‘When will you set out on this quest?’
‘Immediately. Today. Tomorrow. Before my family and friends have time to notice I have gone.’
‘Goodness. You don’t muck around, do you? Where will you go?’
Holly pursed her lips. She thought about the book that had started this transformation, A Sport and a Pastime. ‘Paris,’ she said, decisively.
Mandy moved to the bar fridge in the corner of the room. She opened it and extracted a bottle of champagne, plucked two glasses off the shelf and then settled onto the sofa beside her. Holly felt a little thrill plucking at the hairs on the back of her neck. She shifted restlessly, felt her thigh brush up against Mandy’s.
‘Well.’ Mandy popped the cork and poured them each a glass of champagne. ‘You will be where Anaïs Nin fell in love with Henry Miller, and James Salter fell in love with an entire city.’
As Mandy spoke, Holly glanced at her shirt, the top two buttons open, the soft swell of cleavage glimpsed. Holly felt the heat from her like a force field. When the woman pressed her leg against Holly’s she felt that same static zap and a tingling that spread up through her thighs and settled into the cleft between them. She pushed her knees more tightly together, but that just made it worse. She put her champagne glass on the table and pressed her hand against her cheek.
‘You can do a literary sex tour of Paris. I’ll get a collection of books together for you. Bataille, de Beauvoir, Duras. Take only the books that were written there, or about the city of love.’
Holly leaned forward and kissed her firmly on the lips. ‘I’m ready for this quest,’ she said. ‘I’m ready.’
Her heart was beating so fast that she could barely feel Mandy’s lips against hers. She felt the pulse of blood in her face. Her fingers crept up into Mandy’s hair and balled into a fist. She was kissing. This was the only thought in her head. She had made the decision to kiss and now she was kissing, not being kissed. She came away from it breathless, triumphant, a little disappointed that she had no actual memory of the kiss at all.
Mandy smiled gently, shifted on the chaise, reached out to stroke her head. Her fingers moved through Holly’s hair and Holly felt herself relax. Mandy leaned forward slowly. Holly smelled the sweetness of the wine on her breath before her lips were close enough to touch. When they did it was no more than a light caress, a faint feathering that did more to arouse her than the harsh, full-mouthed first kiss had done.
Holly reached forward, lips as hands, stretching out to catch Mandy’s lip, marvelling at the soft thickness of it, the moist underside, the dry outer rim. Mandy’s tongue flicked out and traced the line of her teeth and Holly opened her mouth a little to allow the tongue to venture further. The soft wet caress.
Mandy pulled away and Holly felt her tongue recede. A little disappointed sigh.
‘The mouth is like a cunt,’ Mandy said, barely a whisper. ‘The mouth is something to be opened like an oyster, savoured, explored. It hides its cuntish secrets, ducking behind a smokescreen of words and expressions, but basically it is an organ for fucking. Like this.’
And she leaned back into the kiss. Holly felt the hard little stabbing of
a tongue, testing the slit between her lips, parting them gently, slipping inside. She felt the saliva shooting into her mouth, just as a slippery spurt of juice escaped those other, hidden lips. She felt her hips rock forward, her chin press towards Mandy’s face. It was true. Her mouth and her cunt were somehow mirrored. She felt her mouth opening, and her vulva softened with it. She felt her lips part for the probing finger of the tongue and gasped suddenly as a finger slipped under the defensive line of her knickers and, aided by the slippery wet, found its way inside her.
‘Yes,’ laughed Mandy into the open cavern of her mouth. ‘I think you’re ready.’
A penetration.
Holly felt an involuntary moan bubbling up from deep in her chest and wondered for a moment if the sound had escaped her lips or her cunt.
A second finger. Holly felt her lips stretched apart. The tightness of the fingers slipping inside her, stroking against the rubbery surface of her hymen. Mandy’s fingers were small, dexterous, wiry from lifting piles of books, lithe from page-turning, flicking through the slick leaves of art volumes, the sticky matt pages of the classics. She parted the folds of Holly’s vagina as she might tease the uncut pages of an old volume of Cleland. Gently, deftly.
This would never have happened in the old world, the world where Holly was the chaste beloved, the world of mums and dads and parties and pretty frocks. The hand slipping into her pants, the tongue in her mouth, the scent of cologne high and spicy in her nostrils, all of this belonged to the pages of Salter and Carter. This was the stuff of literature and she opened her pages to it. Her hips spread wider, she pushed lewdly against the intrusion of fingers, her jaw softening, all of her body slack and open as a flower stretching its petals wide, displaying its inner self wantonly for the bee. She could feel the sweet honey bubbling up inside her. Mandy stretched her thumb up and out and a warmth spread from the place where her thumb made expert little circles. Holly felt it burning her thighs; her belly was a furnace tingling with the crack and pop of kindling eaten by a flame. There were sounds too, whimperings, gasps, low animal groans, and it was only after listening to them for a while that Holly realised they were coming from her own throat.
The tongue retreated. Mandy pulled her head away and Holly was left with her neck tipped back, her mouth open to a terrible emptiness. She wanted something to plug it, a tongue, a finger, or the luscious swell of Mandy’s breast. Her own breasts ached and throbbed. She pressed them against Mandy’s body but the woman was retreating. Holly felt the fingers slip out of her. She thrust her hips up to catch them but she was abandoned. There was a moment of disappointment in which her body was alone once more, not a tongue or a finger or the rub of a breast for comfort. Then she felt her knickers being dragged down over her thighs, felt warm breath between her legs then the warmth of a tongue lapping at her own copious juices. She felt her flesh swelling as if she had a penis of her own and it was rising up from her groin, thick and hard. She remembered her James Salter dream, the dreams of Doctor Hoffman let loose in the world. She couldn’t tell if she was awake or sleeping. She felt the tongue wrap around her new cock to lick at it. She looked down between her legs to where the top of Mandy’s head was bobbing gently, sucking her little cock. Not a cock, but her clitoris swelled till it felt about the size of Jack’s cock. The size of her father’s cock. And she stretched her legs as wide as she was able, lifted her hips to pump her little cock into Mandy’s mouth. The woman looked up, stared steadily with her wide dark eyes, her face smeared with a glowing blue. Holly’s cunt was iridescent. And as she watched, Mandy sucked her two fingers briefly, and plunged them up to the knuckle into Holly’s glowing virgin slit, sucking, staring. Holly was mesmerised. The sight of it seemed to buoy her up, lift her off the chaise longue as she raised her clit to catch the full force of Mandy’s tongue. It was an illusion, surely, but it seemed that Mandy’s face was poised above a cloud of blue smoke shot through with a glow like the fizz of sparklers. Then at the crest of the wave Holly’s head snapped back, her mouth stretched wide as her cunt, her feet pointed down like a dancer performing a pirouette. Her knees snapped closed, trapping Mandy’s head between them. Her vision clouded, it seemed that a veil of pale blue smoke was rising from her belly, her thighs. A sound, an electric hum, then a sound like a lawnmower starting up, a low, mechanical moaning and her body began to pulse. She felt her thickened cunt lips suck at the two fingers, eating them, swallowing as much of the hand as she could take. She felt her hymen stretched almost to breaking point as her flesh pulsed around the intrusion. She wanted to be cut, torn open. She wanted her pages to be severed, opened, read. She would drown. She could not breathe. She would suffocate.
Her vagina made a wet sucking sound as it pulsed, the shock waves of the orgasm settling slowly. Her muscles relaxed. She felt the fingers slipping out of her, felt Mandy’s tongue retreat. The woman sat back, her nipples clearly erect under the fabric of her shirt, her face glistening a bright blue, slick with Holly’s juice, her smile glassed with it.
‘So,’ said those wet glow-in-the-dark lips. ‘Paris. City of love.’
Holly could say nothing at all. Her own face was moist. She could feel it, and wondered if it was the dampness of spit or tears. She took a shuddering breath. She felt something course through her veins like a drug. She felt exhausted and yet invigorated all at once. She could run a marathon or curl up contentedly to sleep. She closed her knees slowly. Mandy caressed her thigh. She realised that in this moment she was supremely content. Nothing mattered. This was a moment she wanted to keep. She wished she could lie here forever.
‘You are going to love Paris,’ Mandy said, stroking her knee, her calf.
‘Paris,’ Holly managed. She barely recognised her own voice.
‘The Comté de Lautréamont, André Breton, de Sade, Henry Miller, the Olympia Press.’ Mandy’s litany soothed her. Strange names, some she recognised. Others like a breath of French country air bearing the scent of foreign flowers.
She was almost asleep then, dreaming of a field of poppies, poppy-red lipstick on parted lips, on the parted lips of another sort entirely. Flowers and women and sex and French language playing like a lullaby.
‘Ah,’ said Mandy, bringing her suddenly back to her place on the chaise longue. ‘A customer.’
She leaned forward, kissed Holly gently on the mouth and buttoned her shirt, which had come undone in their glorious tussle.
She wiped her lips on her hand and grinned.
Holly tasted her own cunt on Mandy’s mouth, smelled a faint briny odour like a holiday by the sea. She smiled back at Mandy and then she was alone. She searched for her knickers, abandoned at the foot of the chaise, a little damp. She slipped them in her bag, smoothed her skirt down over her thighs. Patted her hair.
She needed to find her passport. She needed to buy a ticket. She needed to leave, immediately, before she had to face her father, her mother, Michael, Jack.
When she slipped out past Mandy, the woman grabbed for her hand, linked her fingers with Holly’s, squeezed.
‘Come back before you go,’ she said. ‘I will have a reading list waiting.’
1996: Of Orgone and Girls
Amalie is so pretty. She runs her hands along the varnished wood, presses her face against the accumulator and breathes in. Amalie wants to smell everything. I have noticed this about her at sch
ool. She picks things up and brings them to her face and buries her nose in them. She is not like the other girls. She is a little snuffling animal. Her fingers are always caked in dirt, or honey, or, right at this moment, my birthday cake. She didn’t seem to mind that she was the only guest at my party. She helped me blow out the candles and she didn’t even wait for a plate, just lifted the slice of iced sponge up to her mouth and grinned, her lips covered in cream.
We played pass the parcel together in the garden and as a result her hair is so matted and decorated with leaves and twigs it could attract a flock of birds to nest in it. Her dress is pretty, with a full skirt and tight bodice, but the scatter of flowers on the cotton are growing in a paddock of dirt and crumbs. Amalie smells like cut grass and ploughed fields.
When I asked my dad if I could take her to the bunker, he sized her up—from the top of her grass-filled hair to the tip of her muddy shoes. A girl who knew how to throw herself into life, rolling out of a day, breathless and grubby with pleasure. He smiled and nodded.
She presses her nose to the dark wood of the orgone accumulator and breathes in the scent of it. She flattens herself against the front of the box and peers inside through the metal grille. I walk behind her and rest the palm of my hand on the wood in the place where her chest has just been: surely there will be some residual heat from her body. But the lacquered surface is cold. She scares me a little, there is too much life in her. She is always being called up to the prinicipal’s office. She is always in trouble.
She opens the door of the accumulator and slips inside. She tucks in her skirt and pulls her knees up to her chest and taps the back of the box.
‘The US government banned these accumulators,’ I tell her, as if I am reciting my history assignment to the class. ‘They took them all and burned them along with all of Dr Reich’s books. It was the last, biggest book burning in America. My dad had the plans, though, and he made this one to Dr Reich’s measurements. This might be the only orgone accumulator in existence.’
