by JR Carroll
Florence regarded him thoughtfully, head to one side, then shrugged. She wasn’t into semantics. Instead she popped a couple of stubbies and handed him one. This was something they could both grasp. It was beautifully chilled and the froth was bubbling slightly at the neck and spilling over. He held it against his grimy face for a few moments, rolled it, then took a long swallow.
‘Flo Jo,’ he said. ‘Seriously. If I do happen to, you know, shuffle off this mortal coil and depart for that bourn from which no traveller returns while you’re here, don’t worry about it. Just grab your stuff and vamoose, fuck off, disappear, scram, maybe make a phone call down the road so I don’t stink the place up too much. You know how dead bodies go off in the heat.’
Florence shook her head. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
‘I mean it, Flo Jo. You’re not responsible. I don’t want you left holding the bag, so to speak.’
‘Robert. You sound as if you want to die.’
‘Worse things can happen.’
‘But … you don’t want to throw your life away as if it’s nothing.’
‘I know, I know, it’s not a dress rehearsal, it’s only once around the block, this is it. If so, I rest my case.’
‘Maybe. But it wasn’t always like this, was it. You told me about Italy and that, years ago. Those things must still mean a lot, Robert.’
‘Did I really bore you with that nostalgia trip? I don’t remember. Forgive me, Flo Jo. Sometimes I wax sentimental. It’s boorish of me. I hope I didn’t punish you too much. But all that hoary old stuff about Tuscan villas and the little man with his vineyard up the road, that’s … that was in another country and besides, the wench is well and truly deceased.’
Again she shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t understand what you’re raving on about half the time.’
He emptied the stubby, then looked at her straight. ‘It doesn’t mean jack shit, Flo Jo. It’s just noise. Noise. Isn’t that a stupid word? Noise.’
‘I think I’ll have a shower.’
Without thinking he said, ‘Top idea. Top hole. I might just have one with you.’
‘You can if you like. I don’t mind.’
‘I was only joking.’
‘I wasn’t.’ She was already on her way to the bathroom. He followed her. What the hell.
When they were in the shower recess he pulled the curtain closed, turned on the taps and adjusted the water temperature to suit them both. Florence seemed to like it hotter than he did, but soon a happy compromise was reached. They faced each other passively, letting the water pummel their heads and stream down their bodies. Despite his initial bravado, Robert felt embarrassed about exposing himself to her, but Florence gave the impression it was normal for her to shower with men she’d only known a few days.
‘Turn around and I’ll do your back,’ he said. When she had done so she raised her face and flicked her hair from side to side and then lifted it while he began soaping her neck and across her shoulders with the lemon-scented bar of soap she had brought with her. He progressed down the full length of her brown, tigerish torso with his left hand resting on her shoulder, soaping in slow circles all the way down to her glistening buttocks, even venturing slightly into the cleft between them. He felt a slight tensing of her muscles as he parted the cheeks, but then she relaxed them again and so gave him the green light to push on with his probings.
When he was done doing that, he wordlessly turned her around and met her gaze while soaping her breasts, sliding his hands all over their sleek plumpness and seeing the filmy suds form, only to be washed away. Instantly he could feel her skin pucker and her wide, dark nipples rising beneath his fingertips. Soon enough he had attended to her stomach, then, looking her in the eye again as if to serve notice of his intentions, he placed his hand between her legs and thickly lathered her pubic hair. He moved closer, putting an arm around her waist while continuing to massage her vagina with the bar of soap. Florence closed her eyes and leaned on him, spreading her legs a little so his fingers could reach further under, to the very lips of her liquid opening. While he was masturbating her, pushing the bar of soap in as well as his fingers, Robert pressed his flaccid penis against her body, desperately willing it to rise. He could feel her pulse quickening and her need becoming more urgent as he worked on her. Her vagina was hot and supple and full of juice. He allowed the soap to fall and just used his fingers, inserting three of them as far as they could penetrate and making her breath go short as she squirmed and writhed, gripping his wrist and driving all four fingers and some of his actual hand even more deeply into her cavity. Then she began kissing him all over his face. Robert moved her against the wall in case they should slip and fall, and when she was leaning back on it he kissed her open mouth, drinking the water that splashed from her lips. Then, forcing her head up, he turned his attention to her throat, licking it with long, upward strokes, then kissed and sucked her breasts and nipples, pushing as much as he could of each of them into his mouth while she raised one of her legs and thrust her pelvis frantically against his hand, panting and squealing with sensuous abandon and the anticipated orgasm.
‘Please,’ she said thickly. ‘Please. Fuck me now.’
But his penis would not respond.
He rubbed it against her. She took it in her hand, rolling the skin and tweaking it as if she were trying to milk a cow, but it simply refused to harden. He knew that the more he concentrated, the more impossible the situation would become, so he held her tightly and masturbated her with systematic determination, lifting her higher and higher, feeling the tension throughout her body become unbearable. She quivered, hovered on the brink, holding her breath, clutching him and biting his shoulder while he rubbed and fingered, whispering smut in her ear and feeling her warm slipperiness smearing his hand – and then at last came brilliant, blissful release. Thank you, God. Maybe you’re not such a bad bastard after all.
When they were on the tiled floor drying each other Florence said, ‘Don’t you fancy me, Robert?’
Feeling his face colour he said, ‘I fancy you all right, Flo Jo. You’re the raunchiest thing I’ve seen in years. But unfortunately the message isn’t getting through downstairs. I think it’s all over as far as that’s concerned.’
Florence thought about what he’d said while she rubbed his front with the flimsy towel, pushing it gently through his greying chest hair. ‘But surely,’ she said, ‘if you’re feeling horny …’
Evidently Larry – or whoever – had never presented this problem. Florence probably didn’t even know there was such a problem until now.
‘It ought to just happen automatically. Right. Trouble is, you can’t abuse your body the way I do for as long as I have and expect it to behave normally. There are limits.’
‘I suppose.’ She wrapped her arms around him and he kissed her forehead.
‘You’re a piece of work, Flo Jo,’ he murmured. ‘Sorry I’m so utterly useless.’
‘I feel like going to bed now,’ she said.
‘So do I.’
‘Maybe you’ll come good after a while.’
‘Maybe. Don’t count on it.’
He led her into the dishevelled room, pulled back the blankets and they climbed in, just drawing a sheet up. Robert tried not to think about how long it had been since the sheets had been washed. Tomorrow, definitely. Then they embraced and kissed. Soon he was fondling her breasts again while she played with his penis. To her it was obviously incomprehensible – inhuman – that her caresses failed to arouse him. It wasn’t long before she was hot again, squeezing and squirming her fluid curves into him and guiding his hand to the humid zone between her thighs, which he could feel pulsing like a bivalve. Robert, however, was reluctant to seriously stimulate her, knowing that when the business end came he would have nothing except a limp dick to offer. Fingers – or his tongue – could only satisfy a woman up to a point, he had always found, although lesbians seemed to manage somehow. So he just held her there and
hugged her, sending the signal through his passive body language that there wasn’t much future in building up her hopes.
Eventually he could feel her desire recede, then she became sleepy. When she was nearly under she snuffled and rolled over, presenting her back to him. Robert edged closer until her buttocks were nestling in his groin, then he fondled her breasts and stomach before entwining his fingers in her springy bush. How long, he wondered, since he had hugged a woman in bed? Two, three years? There had been this older broad, a randy, not unattractive lush known around the traps who fancied herself as a kindred spirit. She had attached herself to him in a pub, and they had finished up trying to have sex for half the night without success. In the morning when he woke up she wasn’t there, and then he found her on the floor next to the bed, where she had fallen out. He pressed his face against Florence’s back. She smelled so damned pure and fresh from the soaping he’d given her it was an insult to put her in this rank and diseased pit he called bed. If he wanted her to stick around he was definitely going to have to make more of an effort. Tomorrow he would have a shave, find some clean clothes – but who was he kidding. Surely she’d be out the door the minute she got a better offer, which would be any offer at all. There was still a strong chance she’d go back to Larry, of course, the devil she knew. Living with a drunk and a basher was one thing, she could probably handle that, but taking on a fucking junkie was sheer madness.
Florence was sleeping soundly. Robert was tired too, but wanted to stay awake as long as he could to fully savour the experience of being close to her. He ran his finger down her spine, dwelling for a moment on each of her vertebrae, then cupped one of her buttocks in his hand and snuggled up. Faint vibrations, a tremulous kind of fluttering, came through her back. For a few seconds he thought about how nice it would be if he could only make love to her, but it wasn’t long before his weariness and the radiating warmth from her deliciously smooth curves sent him on his way to the most restful slumber he’d had in a long time, and the last conscious thought he had was that Florence was right: he would definitely give away the heroin.
He woke up at dusk, feeling disoriented as usual. Because his sleeping patterns were so jagged and irregular, brought on by drunkenness or drugs at all kinds of hours, he more often than not came to feeling isolated and out of phase with the normal world and his own body clock, as if he were constantly suffering from jetlag. He would get up, check to see if it was day or night, and if it was night wonder how much of it was left to run while he sat up, wide awake and trying to drink himself into another stupor to make this appallingly empty time pass. Being up all night after he had slept during the day made him terribly, suicidally depressed. But now, with the lightly snoring Florence alongside him, and not being hung over or strung out, he felt relatively sound, apart from the clammy mask of sweat on his face. Even his bowels seemed to have picked up. He brushed a hand lightly over Florence’s hair. How he envied her ability to sleep for long periods – that was a gift possessed only by the young.
Without disturbing her he slid out of bed, put on his clothes, freshened up in the bathroom, then went to the fridge and breached the new cask. It was fruity lexia, shithouse stuff but alcohol nonetheless. Standing at the fridge door he drank the first glass straight off, then poured another and, sipping, sat down, staring at the blank walls. Be nice to have some music, he thought. Music. There was a time when he owned a prized collection of jazz albums: Coltrane, Baker, Brubeck, Mingus, Ellington. He gulped more wine, grimacing at the foul, sickeningly sweet taste. Soon it was dark. He played with the idea of going out, sitting in a bar for a while, but had no money. Florence’s handbag was on the floor next to the couch. There would be money in that, and he could repay her with the next dole cheque. He’d only want ten or maybe twenty bucks. Feeling a bit grubby he felt in the bag, found her purse and zipped it open to find a fifty, three twenties and a couple of fives. He lifted one of the twenties, thinking, Christ, she’s living here for free, surely I’m entitled to something. She probably wouldn’t even know it was missing, anyway, so what was the problem exactly? No problem at all. He stuffed the note in his shirt pocket and headed for the door, but stopped in his tracks, lowering his face and squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, then shaking his head. Fuck it. The note went back in the purse and he resumed his seat, drinking the shitty wine and chainsmoking and giving himself up to another night of pathetic reminiscence. Going to be a long one.
Robert Thomas Forbes Edmund Curlewis was in fact thirty-nine years old, not thirty-eight as he had told Florence. It was an honest mistake. The miracle was that he got that close. In fact he looked a good bit older than that with his prematurely grey, matted hair and his chapped skin and the dark rings under his fading, almost ghostly bluish eyes, making them look as if they’d been used for punching practice – although a discerning observer would be able to see, despite the ruined features, that this human wreck had once been a very good-looking man. And so he was. There was a time when Robert had been a rapidly rising star in the academic fraternity, when the mention of his name made people sit up and take notice. Now, a decade or so later, he was hard-pressed to name the day, date or his own address. At least he still had one. There had been promise of so much more, however.
Robert had been captain and dux and a track blue at his school, a very fine and expensive one, and gone on to university with the world at his feet. His family, of substantial nouveau riche stock, lived in a two-storey neo-Georgian mansion complete with pool, grass court and the curved, raked gravel driveway in the blue chip suburb of Malvern, quite close to Haverbrack Avenue. His father Atholl was an uneducated, hard-nosed man, a battler who had come back from the war determined to make a fist of life after nearly being killed by the Japs in Borneo, where he had fought alongside the legendary Tom ‘Diver’ Derrick, VC. On the crystal cabinet in his lounge-room there was a framed photo of himself, Diver and a few other diggers sitting around at a camp on the island of Tarakan, all bare-chested and grinning under their slouch hats. The shot was dominated by the bewhiskered, boyish face of Diver who, having already earned the top medal many times over, first against Rommel’s Afrika Korps and then against the Japs in New Guinea, was killed by machine-gun fire several days after the picture was taken. There were other photographs of him too, a whole shrine of them, most notably the famous one – enlarged and colour-tinted – of a battle-weary Diver soon after the capture of Sattelburg, a vital Japanese stronghold in New Guinea, in which he was seated, smiling at the camera with his slouch hat pushed back on his head and holding his .303. Atholl Curlewis revered Diver’s memory so much he gave his name to young Robert and could barely talk about him without his eyes filling with tears.
When he returned from the war, Atholl Curlewis worked as a truck driver, then went about making his fortune from an Australia-wide cartage contracting business, starting with a second-hand Kombi van in the mid-fifties and, with the help of an army mate, Cec Pratt, building up a massive fleet of vehicles over the next twenty years. There was a time when it seemed every prime mover on the road belonged to Curlewis-Pratt National Haulage. Then he sold his half-share in the firm and went into investment, chiefly in finance, commodities, real estate, restaurants and catering. There was always the feel and smell of abundant luxury in the imposing Curlewis residence. And Robert had it all to look forward to, since he was the only child. His mother Marguerite, a small-boned, delicately featured woman, had more than her share of trouble delivering him and was devastated when the doctors advised her that any further children were out of the question. It had always been Marguerite’s wish to have a big, noisy clan around her. Still, there was always the money to fall back on in times of acute depression, to which she became increasingly subject.
Robert was deeply attached to his mother who, from early childhood, he addressed by her first name. Marguerite had been a teacher in that inspired, quite eccentric tradition. She was a passionate, even manic virtuoso performer in the classr
oom who always reserved the best parts in Shakespeare for herself. She was quite simply a born lover of literature. It was a heartfelt, abiding love that came from her Irish roots and which transferred to her son as naturally as her mother’s milk. Robert, it seemed, had inherited his father’s fair Scottish complexion, and his mother’s flamboyantly creative temperament. When he was a child she called him her Little Prince, Young Lochinvar or Sir Gawain. When putting him to bed she would mesmerise him with Gaelic songs and poems she knew by heart, and when his eyelids were closing she would stroke his brow, whispering, Goodnight, Sweet Prince, Goodnight …
At university Robert studied for an Honours Arts degree, majoring in English. He had no plans other than to pursue an academic career for the rest of his life. He found he was made for university. From the beginning he cut a dash in his fine raiments, all from Henry Buck’s and Georges, and both men and women trailed around after him like an entourage, wanting to be his friends, or at least supplicants. In his crowd people called each other ‘team’: ‘Let’s go, team; How’s it, team?’ He was wittily intelligent and insightful, never took notes during lectures or read the critics. He was confident and comfortable with the teaching staff and, despite his privileged background, was not in the slightest bit arrogant or vain. Robert Curlewis was a fun guy to be around, as fond of pub crawls and pranks and cool jazz as he was of brainstorming sessions on the poetry of Browning, Hopkins or the Scottish Border Ballads on the sunny lawns, taking on his tutors and demonstrating on a break who had the better mind; debating, running, boxing, playing tennis, going to cocktail parties, black-tie gala events and all the rest of it. He also happened to be killingly handsome with wavy, flaxen hair and playful blue-green eyes; quite boyish, almost fey, vaguely resembling the actor Michael Caine as a young man. And, like Caine in his early film Alfie, Robert was very much one for the ladies. In fact he was addicted to them – to the Judys and Janes, as he called them. They were all his for the taking, and take them he did, by the bunch.
