by Sarah Moss
engines above the clouds
There are highways in the sky. The shortest way between two points on our spherical planet is an arc, and so transatlantic flights follow the Viking sea road even between Istanbul or Dubai and Quebec or New York: over the Baltic, over the top of Scotland, Shetland, Faroe, the curve of southern Iceland and the arrow of Greenland and then the ragged edges of Canada. Some of the airborne people close their blinds against the sunlight, settle to doze their way across the Atlantic. Others crane to see outlines of treasured places once or never visited, names that conjure out of past violence exile and longing, glens and islands from which southern landlords drove the ancestors and burnt the houses behind them. There was no one looking from the sky then, no one to see smoke staining the clouds and a silence beginning in those places that has not ended since. Cairngorm, Glencoe, Loch Linnhe. Ardnamurchan, Laig, Rùm and A’Chill. South Uist.
If the winds are right, some people will keep looking, watching the windows at their sides as others watch the screens before them, reading the map on the water below. If the clouds are right, some people – children, mostly – will look up from the shore of the loch, tilt back their heads as the planes cross their sky, and imagine departures and arrivals. They will follow the passengers from the Old World to the New, imagine other children bound for sun-seared roads towards flat horizons, for prairies and big skies. Not today. Today you can hear engines above the clouds, in a blue and sunlit place, but down here the sky ends at the treetops.
Zanzibar
THEY ARE TRYING to have simultaneous orgasms.
If we can learn how to do it, Josh says, we’ll be like a hundred times more likely not to get divorced. I read about it.
Milly stops trying for a moment. Read about it where, she says, on the internet?
He shrugs, as if it’s obvious that that’s where everyone reads everything, and she sighs. He does read books, she wouldn’t be marrying him otherwise, but not the way she does; he likes wartime history and spy thrillers but takes so long to read them he can’t be that thrilled. Not that it’s not a plausible idea, the sex. She supposes she can see why you’d be less likely to leave someone with whom you have simultaneous orgasms. Coming at the same time suggests a perfect symmetry of desire. A simultaneous orgasm means that neither participant is trying not to judge the other’s facial expressions and thinking, for example, about bacon sandwiches to pass the time. Milly’s not sure she fancies that. They might be getting married, becoming one in the eyes of the state until death do them part, but she can still get off on her own, can’t she? She’s still a separate person. She closes her eyes and thinks about Don Draper, an old fantasy but a good one. Well, she was at an impressionable age, still has the box set on DVD it was that long ago, not that she’s actually watched it for ages, not that she even has a DVD player, but some characters, some scenes, just become part of your own world when you’re that young. She rather likes that scene in season two or three where he seems to be – well, forcing himself, his hand, on the woman in the floofy dress in the hotel corridor, though maybe the woman likes it, after all she has been sleeping with him, and though she doesn’t exactly give consent on this occasion she’s not objecting either and you can’t expect, can you, that couples in the ’50s in sharp suits and big dresses would stand in hotel corridors having conversations about consent before a married man puts his arm around a woman married to another man, leans her back against the wall and thrusts his other hand up under her big red skirt. Was it red? Probably. And Don Draper would know what to do with his hand, wouldn’t he— Gently, she says to Josh, meaning the thing has a hood for a reason, stop mashing it as if you’re shooting something on a screen, and while we’re on the subject, about a centimetre higher would be nice. Well, nicer. She read – in a book, in fact a book about maintaining sex in long-term relationships that she picked up just after Josh proposed – that it’s OK for a feminist to have a rape fantasy because the whole point of a fantasy is that the person doing the fantasising is in control, is both aggressor and victim, and anyway no one ever fantasises about being given a black eye or a split lip, so it’s not about violence against women so much as about a partner who knows what you want without you having to take responsibility for telling him, and also rape culture limits our imaginations which means it’s not really Milly’s fault if her fantasies are a bit retro. Women, the book said, should learn to be responsible for their own sexual pleasure and to communicate their desires straightforwardly; Milly wondered if the writer had thought about the extent to which responsibility and straightforwardness might be sexy. Or not. And she wants Josh to do things she hasn’t even thought of yet, isn’t that the whole point of having sex with someone else, let him make up what comes next for once, not have to be writing, directing and producing Don Draper and trying not to think about if there’s enough bread for sandwiches while simultaneously trying to have a simultaneous orgasm? Not to mention she’s willing to bet that someone somewhere does fantasise about having a black eye, if there’s one thing we’ve learnt from the internet it’s that however unlikely or stupid or downright dangerous the idea there will be someone and probably a community of someones out there who get off on it. And she does earn more than him, and he does the cleaning and she takes the bins out, so isn’t she allowed to think about Don Draper and the big red dress? What do you want, Josh whispers in her ear, tell me what you want.
She opens her eyes, considers the tartan curtains and pine walls, the smell of air freshener that she sometimes stops noticing. A cup of tea and a bacon bap, she thinks, would be excellent, but she says kiss me and reaches up to hold the headboard behind her head, which turns out to be slightly sticky. Probably just the effect of damp on varnish but this is – no, don’t think that – this is his parents’ lodge. Don Draper. The one where he ties her up. Well, there isn’t one where he ties her up but there could be, easily enough. A hotel room, one of those silk negligées but him still in his suit. The suit, she suspects, is a lot of the appeal, and what with all the drink and drugs and steak dinners it kind of tests your suspension of disbelief when he takes his top off and he’s ripped. He could tie her up with the tie. Josh is kissing her but he’s working on her hip, which is ticklish, and ignoring the breasts she’s pushing forwards. She should do something to him. She sits up and strokes his head, which means her legs open and his mouth moves around her thigh. They’ve already tried that and it didn’t work and she really doesn’t want to try it again, though you have to give him credit for effort. She pushes his shoulders to bring him back to sitting, face to face, and then she wraps her arms around him for a hug, which is more or less genuine. She likes the smell of his neck. She likes the muscles of his upper arms. She likes his bum and his dick and all of him, Milly likes Josh fine, it’s just that she’s hungry and it’s pretty cold when they’re not under the duvet and she’d kill for a cup of tea.
He bites her neck and she sighs, which he seems to take as a sign of pleasure. There should be flags you can raise, she thinks, like the naval signals her brother still had to learn even though they must have about a million high-tech ways of communicating between ships. Or maybe not, these days, maybe having sold all the weapons for the aerial bombardment of faraway children’s hospitals the nation is in fact protected by people waving flags and dispatching pigeons. Toby used to ask Milly to test him when he was in the cadets. You Are Standing Into Danger; Minesweeper On Active Duty; Man Overboard. Actually That Hurts A Bit; This Isn’t Working For Me; Please Get On And Finish Now. Not Tonight, Josephine. I Have A Book I’d Rather Be Reading. I’m Too Full Of Dinner. Though the book doesn’t agree, Milly reckons there are things best left unsaid in a long-term relationship. He’s moving down towards her breast, which is more like it. She leans back and makes an encouraging sort of sound, and as he flicks his tongue across her nipple she closes her eyes against the slatted pine ceiling and thinks of her last boyfriend but one who never did any housework and slept with at least two other people whil
e they were together but knew what he was doing in bed, not that he didn’t need to given how he behaved everywhere else. He was tall enough to pin her wrists above her head and at the same time kiss her breasts a bit like Josh is doing now only more tongue and less lip, and then he’d run a finger very slowly down her midline, following her cleavage and her belly button, slowing, sometimes making a U-turn and heading back up while she stiffened, waited, caught her breath. Hm, that’s nice, what he’s doing now. She should do something for him, though, he doesn’t like it when she stays passive too long, needs to feel wanted like anyone else, and she can maybe get the duvet back at the same time. Not that it’s a nice duvet, polyester filling, makes you sweat, and smells like air freshener but it’s probably fabric conditioner, Josh’s mum’s a sucker for all those cheap smelly things that put more plastic into the oceans and more of what you don’t want into the groundwater. Don’t be thinking about Josh’s mum.
She sits up, sees Josh’s eyes widen as she rolls him onto his back. She slides down the bed, pulls the duvet up with her and lies down beside him, her knee hooked over his thigh, her head on his chest where his heartbeat drums in her ear, her hand cupping his other shoulder. It’s warm and he smells good. Love you, she says, which is true and also something of a negotiating position: if I love you enough, maybe we don’t need to have a simultaneous orgasm, or at least not this morning. You’re gorgeous, he says, love you too, and he strokes the back of her neck where the hair is still buzz-cut from last week’s new style, and runs his hand down the bumps of her spine so she can almost hear wheels over cobbles. What time is it, she says. It doesn’t matter, he says, we’re on holiday, we don’t have to do anything we don’t feel like. I’m a bit hungry, she’s about to say, but he says, I want to remember this when I’m back in the office, I want to make you come again, we’ve got all day. She turns her head to kiss his chest. It’s not fair to be thinking of Will the Wanker, she wouldn’t like it if he was thinking about Shelley, so she tries Don Draper again.
Oh, Josh has gone soft, which isn’t surprising, with her lying around like this. And she doesn’t like the feel of it soft, you realise there’s no bone, so to speak, just a defenceless – well, not a slug, nicer than that, but some hairless new-born mouse or rabbit, something that really shouldn’t be out on its own, if she can’t sort that out she’s going to go make them both some breakfast, though as she gets to work on it – under the duvet – it occurs to her that when she has sorted it out she will have to follow through, they will be back to Project Simultaneous Orgasm. Wouldn’t it be totally worth it, he says, just to know that we can do this thing that most couples can’t, for the rest of our lives we’ll be able to look at pretty much anyone and be really smug. Shut up, she says, sorting it out down there with the smell of fabric conditioner and sex which is probably highly erotic for some, it’s not the fucking Olympics. I want to watch, he says, I want to see you, and he flips the duvet right off onto the floor. She sucks her stomach in but there’s not much you can do at this angle, gravity being what it is. Bloody hell it’s cold for August. One day, she thinks, sorting it out rather more briskly, one day maybe we’ll be able to go to a Greek island. No, to one of those tropical islands, Mauritius or whatever. The Seychelles. Or Zanzibar, she always liked the sound of that word. Zanzibar. Oh God, Josh says, stop it, babe, not yet, come here, come back up here.
She lies on her back, opens her knees and cranes her head to see him, to see his face as he kneels between her thighs. He holds her gaze as he – oh, she says, ah, and she tugs a pillow – his pillow, she’s not stupid – under her hips and lifts her legs. It’s pleasant, she likes to see him too, eyes closed, concentrating. Pelvic floor, she thinks, clenches, and his eyes open and he closes them again as he smiles. OK, she thinks, now then, Zanzibar, we’re in a cabin with one of those wooden ceiling fans and a low bed with really crisp white linen sheets on a teak floor and there are French windows open onto a white beach with palm trees and bright water and he’s tied my wrists to the bed. Oh god but it’s colonial though, isn’t it, that one, she shouldn’t be objectifying the places that were red on the map. Gender-based domination is one thing, at least for women, in the privacy of your own head, but the whole Orientalism business is not on. Not that Zanzibar’s in the Orient, obviously, but she knows what she means. Objec-tification, though how you can have a fantasy without – still, it doesn’t have to have geopolitical implications, does it? Transpose it to the Mediterranean, then. Greece. She went to Greece, once, years ago, same colour scheme as imaginary Zanzibar. Olive trees, sun-bleached marble ruins, a whitewashed house with blue balcony doors open onto sea and sky, scarlet geraniums in terracotta pots. If it’s OK to have a sexual fantasy about a country whose economy collapsed. Not to mention the refugees on the beaches, who will end up in the terrible camps. Like the ones on the American border, she did give money for that, but it’s not money that’s needed, is it, it’s voting, a whole lot of voting and there’s bugger all she can do there. How can anyone— Let’s try a different position, Josh says, come to the edge of the bed, it’s higher than at home.
She wriggles obediently. No point in thinking about those children, not just now, it doesn’t do any good, thinking, but she can’t help imagining if it was her class, the little P1s last year, could barely cope without their mums for a school day. How can anyone – well, people do, don’t they, given the chance, just think about the Holocaust. Well, not now don’t think about the Holocaust, obviously this is not the moment for thinking about the Holocaust. Or any other atrocity, European genocide isn’t more important than anyone else’s. The Middle Passage. The Cultural Revolution. The Khmer Rouge. Oh dear. Is that good, he says, and she says, mm, which is probably true, or would be if she wasn’t thinking about – Don Draper. No, Josh. Why don’t we try thinking about Josh for once, with him actually being here and all. If we’re into islands, how about trying Barra where they’re planning to live after the wedding? Let’s have, hmm, a Scandi-style new-build or old stone, the ones with flagged floors and whitewash? There are a fair few abandoned croft houses, roofs fallen in and grass growing through rusting iron bedframes, crying out for rescue, though Josh says they all belong to someone and people can be funny about selling and anyway you have to do actual crofting which wouldn’t be her scene. A wood-burning stove only there aren’t many trees on Barra and anyway those stoves are terrible for the environment, though you’d think with the wind there the particulates are going to be halfway to Greenland before they get anywhere near your lungs. Not that Greenland needs any more pollution either, the polar bears – anyway, the here and now. A little being in the moment, hmm, you can’t expect a man to give you an orgasm if you keep thinking about particulates and genocides. Josh likes this position because he has a good view, which makes her want to perform a little, though with her legs in the air like this she doesn’t have much purchase.
No, she promised herself when they got engaged that she would never fake again. What kind of basis is that for a lifetime together, lying about the one thing she’ll never do with anyone else? (Never again, not in her whole life, not if she lives to be a hundred? Well, things happen, don’t they, not things you plan, who’s to say?) This does feel good, it wouldn’t be entirely fake, just a little emphasised. Surely you can’t expect to get through what could easily be sixty years – sixty years! – without the odd bit of emphasis, a little storytelling. Mm, she says, ah, but she’s getting cold again and she feels a bit silly laid out like this. No, hold me, she says, let’s try like this, and they move around again. She touches his face, his eyebrow’s arch and the plane of his cheek. His lips kiss her fingers as they pass.
Right, then. OK. So there’s a tall, slim man in a well-cut black suit. Linen, since it’s a summer’s day in – in Italy. Bit fascist, Italy. Oh shut up. White cuffs with cufflinks and tanned wrists and she’s watching his hands on the steering wheel as he drives his posh car up the loops of the mountain road towards his house, and he’s driving f
ast and he’s locked the doors so she couldn’t get out even if she wanted to and he’s telling her exactly what he’s going to do to her when they arrive, how she’s going to go into the villa and up the curving staircase to his bedroom which has a balcony looking over the terraced hillside and down towards the terracotta roofs of the village and she’s going to take off everything except her underwear and – almost, now, try not to be trying – he expects to find her on the silk sheets, white silk— oh, she hears herself saying, yes. More. Yes. Oh, oh, there. And Josh, ah, he says, ah yes, yes.
