‘Oh, Jesus,’ I say, husky-voiced now, a voice Brian liked: Marilyn Monroe meets Medusa. ‘It’s so fucking huge and fat. I bet you’d love to push it inside my tight little pussy … I bet I know what you’d love more. I bet you’d love to tear into my ass with it.’ I take the pulsing tip and press it to my asshole so he thinks I’ll let him. He relaxes into the bed with relief and breathes out. ‘Thank you!’
I push on it just enough to give him a taste, make him think I’m going to sit right down on it, as though I’d let him impale me. Then I shake my head slowly and smile at him in a way that draws a high, wavering moan out of him. I touch my own nipples and pretend to enjoy it. Then I take it in for less than a second, squeezing my pussy around it, and slip a finger into his anus. I know just the spot. I massage it lightly. The mouth drops open. Round eyes. He didn’t know he had that there, that bundle of nerves. He comes in one long, shuddering anticlimax. He thinks he knows what it’s like to be fucked now. He has no idea.
As he pulls on his trousers he says quietly: ‘Hey. You’re the girl in the A|wear catalogue, aren’t you? You’d hardly recognize you. The hair is different.’
It’s only afterwards, in the shower, that I realize how much cum there was. He is younger than Brian, I suppose younger men have more. It glugs out in three lots, dribbling down my leg to the ankle, and suddenly I realize that I have not won. Despite my intentions, which were to violate him, I feel violated.
seventeen
Oisín had pulled it off after all. He had arrived at hers early, slipping in with one of her housemates. By the time she returned his encounter with Cassandra was over and he was sitting on Helen’s bed.
Helen didn’t greet him when she came in. She didn’t kiss him. As soon as she saw him she glanced at her dressing-table where there was a mirror. He liked this little vanity in her; that she cared how she looked for him. Then – it was something about the way she parted her lips and gulped a breath – for a flash he thought she knew what had happened in Cassandra’s room, for a moment he thought she just knew. People can know things. It happened. He knew it did because once he and Helen had dreamt the same dream at the same time. He had woken up to tell it to her and she had told it to him. Women could be so close, Helen and Cassandra had known each other for so long … what if all the while it was happening she knew? What if she could just feel it?
He hadn’t had time to think about it himself. It had happened to him. She had done it: Cassandra. He hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t wanted it. He felt completely uninvolved in the crime.
Helen fiddled with the things on the dressing-table, some pens and foolscap, and put on some bright pink lipstick, which somehow made her upper lip look as though it were shadowed with a faint moustache. She sat down beside him on the bed, and smiled. He touched her waist with one hand and with the other he pulled her closer, breathing her sweet, milky smell, pushing her teeth apart with his tongue. He kicked the door closed. When he parted her legs she kissed his earlobe and whispered, ‘Make love to me, Oisín.’ With every thrust she used her shins to push him more inside her. He could feel the little balls of her heels pressing his buttocks. He fucked her with all the intensity of the shock, the humiliation of being fucked by Cassandra. He fucked her as though to cleanse himself of the monstrous bitch by fucking something beautiful, sacred, loving.
Afterwards, when Helen had gone to make sandwiches, he had rustled quickly in her knapsack, found the book and removed the photo. He was amazed at how simple the damage control was, how he had failed, despite himself, to rupture their love.
In the calm aftermath of sex, the photo, because it had lost its only power to arouse him, seemed ludicrous. It seemed ludicrous that she would even have been jealous had she found it. Sex itself seemed a ludicrous thing to do with anyone but his girlfriend, who loved him. That swell under the skin, the shaven flesh of those lips. He had always heard that Germans were into hairy muffs, but maybe Petra had heard that Irish boys weren’t. He would have to deal with Petra. He would not let some fuck-buddy mess this up for him. Just because she thought he owed her, just because he had taken her precious virginity.
He booked a special-offer weekend break at The Radisson in Galway. Petra would be pleased with that. He rang and told her as though it was a surprise he had been planning for a long time. He told Helen that he was having a lads’ weekend in Galway. She frowned but he kissed her and smiled, ‘Baby don’t be silly. Lots of the lads have girlfriends. It’s not that type of lads’ weekend!’
The only danger was that Petra wasn’t able to transfer the flights to Galway. He met her at Dublin airport. Of course she wanted to go back to his flat. She loved his flat. ‘It is so Ushin. Exactly the home you should have. I can see you in everything here.’ Having her in his flat though, where Helen slept so often, would have been a betrayal. He felt he would be caught that way. Petra would leave some sign of herself, perfume, or a German condom wrapper or something. Galway was different. Galway was none of Helen’s business. They took the bus from the airport to the Bus Éireann station and from there to Galway. Altogether the journey took them three hours. She complained of needing to piss the whole way. She didn’t say ‘piss’ though, she said ‘pee pee’, which repulsed him.
Travelling always made him restless. He was horny by the time they got there, which was just as well. He had almost forgotten the pleasure there was in fucking someone he hardly knew: the wonderful isolation that there was in it; the privacy of his own arousal. He had no idea what Petra was feeling and he didn’t care. All the same it occurred to him as he removed the brand-new underwear – transparent pink bra and thong, still smelling of shop – that Petra might not have had sex since he last boned her. That he was her first and only.
The room was spacious and clean with a wide bed. The weekend package had cost him seven hundred euro, including meals. At reception he had tried to look as though he was used to this sort of thing. He had leaned against the marble reception desk, his arms folded beside a bowl of limes. He felt like a phony. He was probably doing something wrong. The receptionist was a hotty from Eastern Europe. Her hair was unnaturally white-blonde and her eyes were a little bloodshot from trauma or exhaustion. The hair was eerie. It was cut to her jaw, completely straight, with a fringe that boxed her face like a gift. She was like the sexy mad girl in a movie.
‘Thank you very much.’ His voice came out all wrong. It was the voice of Marlon Brando again, deep and mumbly. He smiled and winked as he took the room key, smacking a five-euro note onto the reception desk. The receptionist raised her eyebrows and grinned, but she wasn’t flirting, he could see that. She was laughing at him.
As he went up with Petra in the glass elevator he watched the foyer shrink away; the fountain in the middle, the leather couches where couples lounged and read the paper, the vast, clean marble floor.
After sex with Petra he took a long, powerful shower. There were four towels each in the bathroom, a shower head the size of a beach ball and a deep, broad bath. A sign said to leave the towels on the floor if they had been used and needed to be cleaned. He took an uncomfortable pleasure in doing this. Imagine doing that at home, expecting his mother to bend down and pick them up. He never would. He looked at himself in the mirrors. There were two, a normal mirror and then a smaller, magnifying one on the end of an extendable wire. He hated the sight of himself with wet hair. It made him look weedy. ‘I’m a good guy,’ he thought, ‘I’m a good son. I’m nice to my mam. I’m good to my girl. Galway is none of her business.’
There were two soft porn channels in the hotel room that you had to pay for. There was a thirty-second clip before the sign went up asking that they call reception and give their credit card details, but Oisín and Petra flicked between the stations for half an hour, taking in the thirty second clips. One channel was of a man wearing a devil mask entering two different women in turn, one blonde and one dark. They were both dressed in lacy slips – one white and one red – and tied with ropes to a church alta
r. The other channel was tamer again, a man lying down, a woman kneeling on top with her curly black pussy in his face. He was licking and they were both groaning. The camera took in every angle. Petra had never seen porn before so she giggled and wanted to play out the scenes, but Oisín didn’t like girls sitting on his face.
‘Do you ever watch pornography?’
‘When I was younger.’
A massage each was part of the package he had bought. Oisín gave his voucher to Petra and she exchanged it for some other treatment. While Petra was down in the spa he rang Helen. He missed her, he said, but he was having a great time with the lads. Her voice sounded as though she might burst into tears so he got off the phone as quickly as he could. She loved him too much; he was beginning to feel that. She was giving him too much.
The weekend went off quite well, even though the weather was bad. They walked on the cold beach and ate nice meals in the hotel restaurant and Petra told him about herself. ‘Me, I do not think money is important. One must do what makes one happy in life. My Vati keeps a job he hates. All for money … Me, I prefer paper packaging to plastic, you know, it is easier to recycle … Me, I think travel is so important for the mind, you know? The piple who do not travel are ignorant, you know? I can see that from the piple at in my Uni.’
He went with Petra to the airport on Sunday night. She kissed him and said, ‘Oh I will miss you hüny. Dis was perfect.’ He would have to clear things up before he saw her again, or next time she came over she’d be wearing a wedding dress. He’d compose a funny email to the lads about her: the hot-but-scary German girl who was big into porn.
The journey from the airport to Helen’s house was too long. He had never missed her more. It seemed impossible that he would really see her soon, touch her. She seemed like a fantasy. He had showered before they left the hotel room so that he wouldn’t smell like perfume or like sex. They texted each other for the whole bus ride from the airport.
‘U on ur way?’
‘Yeah can’t wait 2 c ur cutie face.’
‘U want dinner? Got steak.’
‘Wow i missed u baby!’
She had bought fillet steaks and pressed chili and cracked black pepper into them. They were frying in butter by the time he got up the stairs, the smell filling the tiny kitchen. There were roast potatoes as well, with salt scrunched over them, and fried onions with sage, and broccoli, which she made him eat because she said it was full of antioxidants. She said this cautiously, and he knew she was thinking of cancer and his mother.
He wanted to make love to her as soon as he saw her, but he was afraid he wouldn’t have enough cum after the weekend, and she would know. Anyway it made it all the sweeter to prolong it, to sit eating the fortifying steak and anticipating her naked skin, her taste, that thing she did with her tongue as she went down on him. She had bought dessert, expensive stuff from Marks & Spencer. He was full, and anyway he couldn’t hold out any longer. He pulled her pelvis towards him and whatever it was that their bodies did to each other happened again: a magnetism, a feeling like falling into something wonderful, sinking into each other, fainting and running at the same time. He could feel her body become softer, more malleable. It was the effect he had on her. Her pupils widened. He began to open the belt on her jeans, and she flinched. He touched her chin.
‘What’s wrong, baby?’ She didn’t answer. Her eyes were wide and moist.
‘Are you worried about Galway baby? The lads are good guys. We didn’t do anything dirty you know. We met some girls but I said, why eat hamburgers when you can have steak at home?’
She smiled but still she wouldn’t look at him. All he could do was keep kissing her and then inching the belt of the jeans open slowly. At first it irritated him, but then he began to enjoy the game. It was like seducing her for the first time again. She wanted it, of course she did, he could tell – he could almost smell the wetness of her pussy – but she was shy for some reason. It made sex an achievement and he liked that. He pulled her to him and growled in her ear: ‘Oh baby, you’re so fucking hot do you know that? Don’t do this to me, I missed you so much.’ He was starting to sweat. The intensity of his own arousal, his own urgency, surprised him.
‘I love you, Oisín.’
That was all she said, over and over in a high, trembling voice. He got her into her bedroom and managed at last to pull her T-shirt off. Down on his knee he pulled down her jeans. He didn’t particularly fancy going down on her – he was too tired – but it looked like he would have to work for this one. He slid a hand over her taut abdomen, over the familiar curve of her perfect ass. The contours sent a wave of crippling pleasure over him. His temples were throbbing. As he reached her panties she held his hand firmly, stopping him from taking them off. ‘Oisín.’ She put the other hand up to his face and made him look at her. ‘Look at me. I love you. Do you understand?’ He nodded. He was going to blow in his jocks if she didn’t let him at her soon.
‘Baby, I love you too, you know that. I want to make you feel nice baby, please.’
She was wearing new underwear. White and lacy with little pink strawberries embroidered on them. The bra made her breasts look bigger than usual and the panties were the type he liked: little shorts with the curve of the bum peeking out.
He looked up at her and smiled, ‘Are these for me?’
‘It’s all for you baby.’
He used one finger to pull them down. He loved this moment, the moment when he saw her pussy, waiting for him. But it was different. There was a little patch of hair and then bare lips. They looked long and dangly. They were red. There were small scabs along the more delicate parts and a few lone hairs here and there that were too short for the wax to take. It reminded him of a pubescent beard with pimples. ‘Baby what happened?’ She didn’t answer. He touched the tender sores, pulled back the lips and saw that the damage was inside as well. She stood facing ahead with her eyes shut, her hands in his hair.
eighteen
I watch the streets rolling by, empty except for an Asian man with a loudly whirring pavement polisher, an immigrant hired by the state to pick up chewing gum and crisp packets, and wash the footprints off the brickwork. He must hate this country.
I catch my reflection in the wing mirror of the taxi and wonder why anyone would pay to let them take pictures of this jaded face.
The driver is full of chat but it’s too early. I feel ill. I had a stale croissant for breakfast and some strong coffee and they’re both sitting stagnant in my tummy. I’m too tired to digest them.
I think it’s imprudent to give a model a call time of 5 AM. It decreases her chances of looking attractive. It wastes money on concealer.
I say this to the make-up artist, who is hungover and old-school camp. This kind of man makes me anxious to impress. I want him to like me because if he doesn’t he will talk about how ugly I am with the other models. He will make me feel like shit. If he really doesn’t like me he will make me look like shit too. I have ten minutes to struggle against the early morning crankiness and build up a rapport. Self-deprecation is usually the way to go, or at least the only thing that has ever worked for me. I don’t know how to make friends at a shoot. It is a theatre of insecurity in here – the men who hate their gayness so much they parody themselves, hanging their hands as though their wrists are broken; the girls whose bodies are betraying them moment by moment, all the time wrinkling, growing dryer, greyer, fatter. In the make-up chair I look at my reflection mockingly. ‘Lots of Touche Éclat please!’
Touche Éclat is a miracle concealer thing, particularly useful for photography. All the make-up artists I’ve met claim it as their secret. It deflects the light so that if you put it under your eyes and on your cheeks everything glows and the flaws are blurred. That is what most beauty products are; an attempt to deflect and conceal. The word ‘enhance’ is nonsense.
The make-up artist rolls his eyes and opens his mouth in mock-horror. ‘Oh sweetie!’ The smell of alcohol from him is enough to
make my head throb like a drum. His voice is so loud, so high. His eyes are dancing and his skin is ruddy like a child’s. ‘No, no, no! Who told you to use Touche Éclat? It is really so over-used! Really, people think it covers anything. Well sweetie – it doesn’t.’
He looks me earnestly in the eye when he lands the final affirmation. Only he is standing behind me so he is looking me in the eye through the mirror. It’s disarming really, all this reflected directness. He is holding the make-up brush like a cigarette, ‘Oh sweetie!’ He touches my cheek as though it’s dirty, ‘What – is – THIS?’
In a sudden wave I feel nauseous. It’s a kind of sickness I have never felt before, like the worst hangover I have ever had. I cannot talk or move. I stare at the mirror but I can hardly see for the nausea. It has overcome me completely. This sickness has gripped me by the stomach, the bowels, the throat. It is even in my ears. The thought of speaking makes me want to vomit. He goes on though. At first I am not sure what he is talking about and then I realize. Sometimes I get pink blotches on my cheeks. He touches them again.
‘Oh sweetie – what night cream are you using? This must be product build-up.’
‘I don’t use …’ I really cannot speak. This is not in my head. I am ill.
‘You’re pale sweetie. Have you been to bed? This is the problem with the industry, you know? The girls destroy themselves …’
I vomit. It does not resemble the coffee and croissant I had for breakfast. It does not resemble half-digested food at all. It is a colour I have never seen before. Luminous yellow liquid that just keeps coming out. It tastes like acid.
* * *
In the morning you wake very early. You can hear Cassandra rushing out to some modelling gig. You know that’s where she’s going because you hear her in the shower room and she spends a long time with the water turned off. That’s because she is shaving. She has to remove all body hair before a shoot.
Between Dog and Wolf Page 17
