Erotic Nightmares

by Erotic Nightmares (retail) (epub)

  Finally, Athelstan appeared, an improbable number of pints carried between his long fingers.

  ‘Don’t forgive me!’ he said, putting the pints down on the table, their contents slopping.

  ‘Oh, we won’t!’ said Lisa. ‘We’ll beat you with sticks until you beg for mercy.’

  ‘Oooh, kinky.’

  ‘Athelstan,’ Daniel muttered into his housemate’s ear. ‘I need to talk to you a minute.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do. Stand up.’

  Daniel navigated Athelstan away from earshot.

  ‘We’ll lose our seats,’ said Athelstan.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ said Daniel. ‘They obviously really like each other. You can’t stick… your oar in and try to sabotage it. It’s wrong. Just leave them be. He’s won. You’ve lost. Walk away.’

  ‘Walk away?’ Athelstan’s eyes went wide. ‘Walk away? What kind of love is that?’

  ‘Love? Oh, come on. Give me a break. This is nothing to with love. It’s just another notch on your bedpost.’

  ‘You really think that? If I wanted another notch, I could get one. It sounds like your sweet innocent Ed is ripe for the plucking. Maybe I’ll beat you to it. But no, I won’t, of course, because of that gelatinous mound of fun-bags over there. I love her, you see. And love knows no boundaries. I mean, really, if you won’t do something for love, just because it’s completely and utterly reprehensible, then is what you call love worthy of the name? I don’t believe it is.’

  ‘Well, I guess if you believe that, then you really are a rake. You love her like Lovelace loved Clarissa.’

  ‘At least he got what he wanted.’

  ‘Do you know how the book ends? Of course not, because to do that you’d have to stick with it and read the damn thing properly. Well, I guess Ed is right and you’re corrupting me, because I did a bit of flicking myself the other day in the library. You know what I found? After Lovelace does what he does to Clarissa, she gets weak from the stress and dies. He kills her. Is that love? Well, is it?’

  ‘Well, I – ah—’

  ‘And you know what happens to Lovelace? Just before he gets killed in a duel, he wishes he could have been a better man. That’s what being a rake leads to. Hurt and regret. No happy endings for anybody.’

  Athelstan said nothing for a second. Daniel thought he might have got through to him.

  ‘You’ve totally ruined the end of the book for me, you prick,’ said Athelstan. ‘I was actually enjoying it.’

  Daniel picked up his coat from the back of his chair.

  ‘Are you off?’ said Lisa as he passed. He didn’t answer.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Athelstan, following. ‘I need you here!’

  ‘You don’t need anybody,’ said Daniel.

  Daniel headed for the exit. He would get a taxi back to the house, he thought. There he would sit and watch TV, or stare at Tony Hancock and see who blinked first. He might try to get some work done. He would try not to masturbate and fail.

  He paused at the door. The night air was freezing. Even with the student mile lit up like a Christmas tree, it seemed dark out there. Too dark, too lonely.

  Hoping Athelstan didn’t see him double back on himself, Daniel turned and headed for the toilets. There he checked his pocket for coins and studied the condom machine selections.

  * * *

  The halls porter buzzed for Ed over the intercom, summoning her to reception.

  ‘Daniel, hi!’ said Ed, her face lit up with surprised happiness. ‘What are you doing here? Thought you were down the Union with your strange housemate.’

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ he said.

  ‘That’s great,’ she said, squeezing him tight. ‘What do you want to do? We could play pool, or watch telly in the common room, or—’

  ‘I want to see you,’ he said. ‘Just needed to see you, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, OK. Something on your mind?’

  He said nothing, and followed her down the corridors and up the stairs to her room. He closed the door behind him.

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on? Have some herbal tea or—’

  ‘I’m here because I want to have sex with you,’ he said, suddenly, too loud, looking at her more intently than he remembered ever doing. ‘I want to have full, actual sex with you tonight, and I think you want to have it with me. I think we’re ready.’ The words felt as if they had a life of their own, and he was just their mouthpiece.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m not sorry. I’m being very blunt, and not at all romantic, and I’m saying it wrong, but it’s what I want, and I think it’s right. I’ve, um, I brought protection.’ He took the condom packet out of his back pocket and waved it. Realising this must look odd, he stopped.

  She said nothing, and looked down at her hands. The moment dragged on, and Athelstan felt the blood drain from his face. He was about to make his excuses and leave when Ed looked up.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said softly. ‘I do want it, and I think it’s going to happen, and there’s no point in trying to stop it because if it doesn’t happen now it will happen tomorrow, or next week, or soon. But before we do. I need to know. Will it be an act of love? I mean, do you love me? You’ve never really said.’

  Now it was Daniel’s turn to be silent. No words would form in his mouth. Any potential answer seemed dishonest.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘I love you too,’ he said, and kissed her with as much of what he believed to be passion as he could muster. He felt her tongue in his mouth, and she undid the buttons of her shirt.

  * * *

  It was morning. Daniel opened the front door of the house, and went into the living room. He sat on the sofa, not bothering to clear the food wrappers that Athelstan must have coated it in just the evening before, or the ever-present pile of topless women. Tony Hancock stared his usual dead-eyed stare.

  There was a noise on the staircase. Athelstan appeared in the doorway, his kimono well-tied. He too looked beaten. He crossed the floor towards the kitchen.

  ‘Well?’ said Daniel, finally.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘You know what.’

  Athelstan paused. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘I just couldn’t. In my head, I knew exactly what I needed to do, what I needed to say, when I needed to do it, to make him look small and silly, and for her to want me instead. In my head, all my techniques were working to perfection. I would keep on seeing the exact points when I needed to up my game, throw a spanner in the works, turn things round to my benefit. But I missed every opening. I was there for hours, having a jolly little conversation with the pair of them. I just couldn’t stand it, the thought that she might end up unhappy, because she blew off some nice guy just for one night with me… Well, they never come back, do they? None of them. I’m not a keeper, as they say. Anyway, they left together, very happy to have been entertained all evening by Spencer’s funny little friend.’

  He reached into the fridge and downed half a pint of milk.

  ‘So I guess that’s settled,’ he said, milk dripping from his chin. ‘You were right. I am no rake. Just a silly libertine.’

  ‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Maybe not. It is an idea that it will take me a while to get used to. How was your evening?’

  ‘I had sex with Ed last night,’ said Daniel. Athelstan went in for a hug, the milk carton still in his hand and sploshing, but Daniel put his hand up to stop him.

  ‘She asked me if I loved her before we did it. I lied. I said I did to make sure we did it. Now, what does that make me?’

  An answer formed on Athelstan’s lips and disappeared.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ he said, and disappeared, quickly, taking the milk with him.

  Alone on the sofa, Daniel felt Hancock’s gaze burning him. The sound of Athelstan having loud, anxious sex with himself drifted down fro
m above.

  No more. Daniel jumped up, tore the poster from the wall, and ripped Tony Hancock into several large pieces. They dropped to the floor, adding a new layer to Athelstan’s sea of rubbish.

  Above him, Athelstan orgasmed and sobbed. Checking his wallet for the remaining condoms, he made a path through the mess, and headed for the front door.

  ALISON

  Alison,

  I’m not sure how to introduce myself. You don’t know me but I live across the road from you. You’ve seen me in the street but you haven’t really seen me – if you know what I mean. I know your name isn’t Alison. You look like an Alison to me. I’m hoping you’ll open this even though the name’s wrong. This will sound bad, I know, but I’ve been watching you for a long time, since you moved in. You and your husband or boyfriend (I think your boyfriend) don’t have curtains. I guess you’re modern. Or you don’t think anyone can see you on the 2nd floor, but I’m on the 2nd floor too so I can see you. (I have curtains)

  You are beautiful. I like to watch you put out the bin on Mondays. And I wait all day for you to come home from work. And then (I think) you have a shower and you wear pyjamas after that if you’re not going out again (which you do quite a lot) and I wait for you to come back. I never fall asleep until you’re back even if you’re out all night.

  I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen you paint your nails and I’ve seen you pick your nose. I’ve seen you throw things at your boyfriend and make love to him on the couch. And I saw it when you had that man over, the other one, those times, and afterwards you vacuumed and cleaned until your boyfriend came home. I’m not jealous. I think it’s wonderful. All of it is. Every decision, every gesture, the tiniest movement, the slightest breath. It is all perfect because it comes from you and you are perfect.

  Don’t worry, this is not the beginning of anything unpleasant. It is already the end. It isn’t good, peeking through curtains all your life.

  I love you

  HETEROTOPIA

  It was only when he suggested the hotel room that it stopped feeling wrong. Up until then, in her car, in the fields in the long grass under the bright summer sun, or just holding hands in the country lane, she had always felt the weight of the transgression. Like a skipped school lesson spent at the bottom of the sports field, she knew it came with a price.

  And though the feeling had not stopped her, it had not let go for a moment: hissing in the background as she had gone on, step by step. I am kissing a man who is not my husband, she said to herself, but that is all. Then, I am letting a man who is not my husband touch me… but that is all. She repeated this formula, until there was no until, until she had gone as far with this man as she had with anybody, with nothing held back except declarations of love and gifts of time.

  Not that she thought of him as a man really. He was more of a boy to her. Only seven years younger, but it was like he had barely lived. A PhD student at the university, teaching in return for tuition fees. She didn’t understand his subject. He’d tried to explain, but it was just words: nothing for her to grasp on to. He wasn’t a virgin, he said, and she tried to believe him, but there was little in his technique that suggested much experience. He lived in a rented room in a house, but his landlady didn’t allow overnight visitors. While she…

  She had been married for four years, and had until recently felt like an adult, with a job at the university library, a house in a village some miles out of town, a husband in it who didn’t make her unhappy, and a vague plan to have children soon before it was too late. And so the car, and so the field, and so the hotel room.

  She couldn’t explain why it had started. He was funny yet earnest; nervous but endearingly so. Still, that described so many of the post-graduate students she helped every day, and she had barely given a thought to their sexual nature, let alone considered them as someone she could go with. And she was not the sort of person who casually cheated on their partner. At least, not since she was a teenager, back when it was just fumbles at parties and she was still learning and none of it mattered anyway. She took commitments seriously now. She did not get easily bored. And yet, here she was. Unserious, uncommitted. And it was certainly casual. This was laughably far from love; at least, on her part.

  The room was cheap. She had insisted on paying for it – she knew how small a grant the university gave him – despite the incriminating evidence it would leave on her credit card bill. There wasn’t much in it, and what there was looked worn and grubby. With the curtains drawn, and the sun still creeping in, it should have felt seedy and sad. But when their clothes had slipped away and she was down on the bed and he was kissing her body and he was inside her having trouble keeping rhythm but still she unexpectedly came despite her never being able to do it that way before, it was as if she had found something she had forgotten could be real. For a moment she was a child again, connecting with a memory from before her memories began. Everything in between those two points didn’t matter, there in that hotel room.

  * * *

  ‘Do you feel it?’ she said, lying in the position he had left her in after he had lifted himself up. She felt the semen drip down and onto the sheet, and it made her happy. She did not have to wash it.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, laughing slightly. He lay, spent on the other side of the bed, his hand loosely clasping hers, her wedding ring impotent on her finger. ‘Everything’s light in here. I mean, it’s not heavy. I mean…’

  She kissed him. She knew she probably bored him, despite his infatuation, when she talked about her husband, and her guilt, when they were outside the room. He would say they should stop if it was hurting her. That he no doubt thought this was honourable would make her want him more.

  ‘Why do you think it’s like that?’ she said.

  ‘Because…’ He paused, and thought. ‘Because it’s a heterotopia.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s an idea of Michel Foucault. The philosopher. Post-structuralist. French. You probably wouldn’t— Anyway, the idea is that there are places that are sites of… well, he calls it ‘alternate ordering’. Places on the margin, where the usual rules don’t apply. A cemetery would be a good example. Because in most places, everything’s about life, but in a cemetery, it’s all about death. Or a fairground, which is this disruptive thing where nothing’s serious that pitches up on the edge of town. Or hotel rooms. He mentions them, actually.’

  ‘And why are they so special?’

  ‘Because you can do things that you shouldn’t, and no one sees or knows.’

  She caressed his face. He didn’t even realise what he’d said. She knew she should have felt shame at that moment, but she had felt none. She kissed her way down his body, and made him hard again. They had sex a second time, with her on top and in control this time, and her orgasm was still stronger than her first. She remembered being a baby being held by her mother. She remembered being born.

  * * *

  For some months, through repeated visits, the hotel room (it was not often the same one, but they all felt the same) was a womb – warm and dark and wet. Their hearts beat together in time with the room’s heart. His rhythm soon righted and became perfect, their movements synchronous. When the allotted hour allowed by a fake evening exercise class was up, and she showered with him still lying there in the bed, where he would stay until morning (‘You may as well get the money’s worth,’ she had said the first time), it made her think of the toxic removal of an abortion.

  The womb gave way to open sky. Sometimes they were in a field, in the long grass, not unlike where they had first had sex. Other times it was a forest, water dripping from the leaves of the tall trees above them. Forest became jungle, giant insects fluttering around them as they sweated, words giving way to grunts and howls in the sticky heat. More and more, they were by water, on the bank of a river, and then on the edge of land itself, the waves crashing at their feet.

  * * *

  Her marriage ended. Her affair was never discovered. The anxious dis
traction that overcame her the moment she stepped outside the room pushed her husband towards someone else; they were happy together. He’d moved out, and she was alone in the house.

  He received his doctorate, followed by a permanent post at the university. He no longer lived in a single room, and she could come over any time she wanted. She never did.

  They carried on renting the cheap, grubby hotel room, one night at a time. She always departed after one single hour, leaving him there.

  * * *

  They swam deep in the ocean, their bodies riding the currents side by side. No longer even amphibian, they would quickly die if taken out of the water.

  She didn’t think any more during these meetings. They acted on instinct from the moment they arrived until she habitually knew it was time for her to leave. But for one second, a thought sparked across her primitive brain: a pre-language desire for a limit, an edge.

  She didn’t think again. She was already less than she had been a short while before – smaller, less evolved – as was he. They became microscopic, reaching out for food with limbs they summoned up from their shapeless bodies. Their limbs found each other. And they were one.

  * * *

  She awoke in the hotel room. The dark of the summer night told her it was many hours past the time for her to leave. She was alone.

  She turned on the light; the hotel room looked seedy and sad. The cold damp patch underneath her made her squirm with disgust. The sight of her wedding ring, which she still wore, sparkled with shame for the first time in that room.