by Trevor Hoyle
‘Not for a definite fact, no.’
‘There you are then.’
‘Sounds idyllic to me,’ Jay said dreamily. ‘The sun and the beach and the sea.’
‘Rubbish,’ Gorsey Dene said. ‘He hasn’t told you about the flies and mosquitoes and ants. Nasty creepy-crawly creatures in your food and coming down the tap.’
Jay turned on him, ‘How would you know, you’ve never been. You’ve never been anywhere.’
‘I have,’ Gorsey Dene said, but quietly.
Rhet Karachi said, ‘I knew you reminded me of him; you actually do, you know.’
‘Oh piss off you,’ Gorsey Dene replied, this time becoming genuinely annoyed. ‘But for you prattling on none of this would have happened. She was perfectly content till you came along. And another thing: how any one person could have had so many sexual exploits is beyond me. I don’t believe half of them.’
‘I do,’ Jay said. ‘Just because you’ve led a dull life.’
‘I suppose you think he hasn’t.’
‘Not by the sound of it. The number of different jobs he’s had for a start.’
‘Whose side are you on? I’m giving him the lift in my car.’
‘Does he always get like this?’ Rhet Karachi asked.
‘More often than not.’
‘And what does that mean, “More often than not”? It’s a stupid, senseless phrase. I suppose you’d rather be alone with him – me out of the way so as not to disturb you. Then he could tickle your neck to his heart’s content.’ Jay and the foreign-looking man spoke up together, protesting their innocence. ‘I can damn well see you!’ Gorsey Dene exploded. ‘Do you think I haven’t got eyes? Why do you suppose I keep glancing in the rear-view mirror? I can see his expression, shifty, guilty, full of secrets. Nobody looks like that who isn’t on the make.’
‘He can be real mean and gingy, can’t he, when he wants?’ Rhet Karachi said. His marked face in the back of the car was a mask of ambiguity. Gorsey Dene felt vulnerable and threatened.
‘Don’t say that!’ he screamed, on the point of moral collapse. He was terrified, principally because he was better than Rhet Karachi at everything but couldn’t prove it; neither had Jay the sense to distinguish the gold from the dross. She would – as would all women – opt for the surface show, the easy alternative. His hands were clammily cold on the wheel. His forehead was hot. As for Jay, her body was tight as a claw, wincing in anticipation of the warm foreign breath and soft fingers on the back of her neck. Rhet Karachi had white, perfect teeth which he used to good effect. Nothing could phase him: the reward of obtuseness and cerebral palsy. And Gorsey Dene couldn’t rid his feverish thoughts of visions of Jay’s body stretched out on the sand, at the point where the surf heaped itself up and then collapsed in a frothy hiss. That was another score which had yet to be settled.
‘If you’re so unsure of your girl you can’t be very sure of yourself,’ Rhet Karachi said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Gorsey Dene said, though he knew very well. What he couldn’t fathom was the change in Jay. She hadn’t liked the fellow initially, even sniggering at his apparent discomfiture. Now all was different. Throughout his life he had been slighted and this was one more to add to the list. Who was to say when it would end?
‘You’re being very silly,’ Jay said, which was the wrong thing to say to him in his present condition. The knuckles in her back, the fingers on her neck, and the breath in her ear were hypnotic phenomena, their combined influence making her senses swim. Gorsey Dene was aware of all this – or at any rate, reckoned he was.
‘I suppose you thought it silly when I wrote you those letters. You were galivanting round the Continent, in France, Turkey, Cyprus or wherever, and there was I, prize chump, scribbling day after day, week after week, month after month.’
‘Nobody paid you,’ Jay said indifferently, screwing up her face against the glare of an advancing lorry.
Gorsey Dene said. ‘If that’s all the thanks I get.’
‘What thanks do you want?’
‘Some appreciation at least for everything I’ve done.’
‘Get him,’ said Jay.
‘Gingy,’ Rhet Karachi said.
Gorsey Dene touched the globular hairy protuberance below his left cheekbone: a hard, shiny, painful object about the size of a marble, the tip sprouting oddish-coloured hair. His head was aching; and the lights wouldn’t stop flashing in his eyes. He thought: if I close them, and rest, just for a little while, perhaps when I wake up the people of the world will strike me as human beings.
Rhet Karachi said something to Jay, who laughed. She said in a cold and callous tone to Gorsey Dene, ‘Why do you think I didn’t want to go to Cyprus anyway?’
PART II
THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
I
‘You did like him, didn’t you?’ Gorsey Dene said, Rhet Karachi having gone his own sweet way.
‘Not very.’
‘I saw the look in your eye.’
They were driving; but soon would have to stop to find an hotel for the night. On the outskirts of a city (Bradford, he suspected) they decided to look for one. But this was the strange thing: although Gorsey Dene knew for certain that such a place existed he knew too that he was doomed never to find it. The odds were stacked against him. It was futile even to begin looking for such a place, because with his luck – ! But, well, look they did, drawing a blank each time. The trouble was that the logistics of life were too complex for him to unravel. He marvelled, on his numerous train journeys, that identical portions of food could be (and actually were) prepared and served to countless passengers. This was Teutonic efficiency of a high order, for surely it was in the nature of things that something should go wrong. Indeed, it usually did: he was left without soup, or the last of the cutlet was cold, or his order for beer was mislaid – or failing these, and supposing the meal to be satisfactory – the train usually crashed. So on arrival in this city he had known in his bones the utter impossibility of finding, booking and securing a room for himself and Jay. Other folk would have sauntered into the first hotel they came to and registered in the twinkling of an eye, being shown to a warm, cosy bedroom, dimly-lit, in which a tray of fresh sandwiches and a jug of piping hot creamy coffee awaited them, before showering in tiled and fluffy-towelled luxury prior to creeping laughing, smacking and tickling into the huge downy bed into which they sank with contented sighs. While all that Gorsey Dene and Jay could achieve was a parked car in the forecourt of a fully-booked hotel. Not that it was fully-booked, Gorsey Dene reminded himself, only that the clerk behind the desk, on catching sight of them, had consigned them to that category of minor importance normally reserved for fools, dupes, morons and cretinous goons. In other words, people of no account. Others in the city on this dark autumn night were enjoying themselves in crowded bars, restaurants and clubs – an entire city involved in merrymaking – but for Gorsey Dene and Jay it was, as usual, the cold outer periphery of recorded experience: an alternative stratum of fearful dreams, premonitions and forebodings.
‘Did you truly miss me?’ Jay said, the flouncy sleeves of her dress fluttering in the gloomy interior. Her arms went round his neck. He felt the material scrape his chin. It was the signal for his organ to grow hard, which it did. But at the same time he was wondering if her body was brown.
‘You didn’t go with that photographer, did you?’
‘What do you think?’ Jay said softly, not asking a question but dismissing the suggestion by her tone.
‘But you did imply –’
‘It’s what your silly mind thought I implied.’
‘It is silly, isn’t it?’ Gorsey Dene had not yet fully recovered from the shock to his nervous system brought about by Jay’s supposed dalliance with Rhet Karachi. He was very susceptible to imagined slights. But, he consoled himself, her body would prove it once and for all. ‘I did miss you, as it happens.’
‘I missed it,’ Jay moaned, putting her hand
on the hard bulge in his trousers. She inserted her pink tongue in his ear. Gorsey Dene clutched at her breasts. Swiftly she unzipped his trousers and rummaged for the slit in his underpants through which she might extract the stiff member, disentangling it from the folds of material and caressing its full-grown length into an erection that was the focus of her desire. Gorsey Dene released a long-held sigh of pleasureful anticipation, feeling the hard bulk of it rising up before him: free, mindless, but with deadly intent. Jay worked the covering foreskin back and forth, gently, causing him to lay back in the seat, weak and strong at the same time, the swollen protuberance enclosed in her firm yet understanding grip. ‘Nice,’ Jay said. ‘Big,’ to which Gorsey Dene could only swallow his saliva and touch the ends of her breasts with his fingertips. She shuddered with dreadful ecstasy at the intense hotness contained within her hand. It fascinated her. It terrified her. She could feel its hot, quick, living property through her fingers, an insistent, insatiable urging that was the true life force … and the nearest one could ever come in physical proximity to it. ‘Beautiful,’ Jay breathed. Its moist head was thrust temptingly near her own. She had never before dared to approach it thus; and now, inches away from her eyes, she smelled the sweet pungent scent of ammonia that repulsed and obsessed all her senses. Nothing on earth could have induced her to open her mouth and accept it – just as no power in heaven or hell could have prevented her from so doing. Gorsey Dene felt the loose swishing fringe of her hair stroke his thighs as she bent forward, and then the delicious sensation of her lips sliding full soft circle over the tip and encasing it in hot suck. Her tongue trilled dumbly over the end, tautening Gorsey Dene’s calves and arching his back until his throat ached with an unutterable scream. Could this be, he wondered in his exquisite agony, the first time she had performed this operation? How could she have possibly known what to do? and how with such expertise done it? It was less than feasible – to the point of incredulity no less – and he was reminded again of certain doubts and fears implanted by the swarthy gentleman who had lately departed the car. Supposing Jay had answered an advertisement, been vetted, chosen, and transferred across Europe to lie on a belt of white sand and be fucked in the rushing tide (wasn’t the Mediterranean tideless?)? Supposing it were true (ie: that he believed it to be true), what then? But oh shit, oh God, oh fuck, it was – being gobbled – fantastic. And she worked at it so assiduously, the smooth movement of her jerking head unceasing and machine-like; the slippery lips sliding up and down over the tender glans penis, the prepuce having been pushed back and folded upon itself like a pram-hood. As for Jay, she loved the choking bigness of it in her mouth, the straining gape of her jaws that signified the grotesque violation and subjugation of her sex. She wanted to take, to accept, to swallow all its several inches as far as the pubes and in this way hold him captive in an oral-genital embrace.
‘You didn’t go to Cyprus, did you?’ Gorsey Dene asked, stroking her hair.
Jay incorporated a shaking-of-the-head movement into the ceaseless up-and-down motion: an additional thrill.
‘I didn’t think you had, but I wanted to be sure. And I am right, aren’t I, in thinking you were momentarily attracted to him?’
Jay nodded on her way down, was brought up short by the blunt head of the thing hitting the back of her throat.
‘I thought as much,’ said Gorsey Dene, settling back smugly with a smirk on his lips. ‘Birds like you are always attracted by guys like that,’ he observed. ‘It’s the sense of mystery they carry with them, the ambiguity of their shiftless lives. Isn’t that so?’
On her way up, a nod.
‘I’ve tried to cultivate it myself, without success. Trouble is, I’m too open, too transparent; too honest, in fact. I can keep nothing hidden whereas by definition a man of mystery must reveal nothing. Usually this is because they have nothing to reveal, but the world doesn’t know it; false honours and spurious qualities are attributed to them through sheer ignorance and fear. And the pity of it is I cannot play that kind of game. I see too much, the most minute detail, to the very depths, everything. I perceive the shallowness of myself and others. Nothing is spared, nothing is sacred, everything is revealed. What a con-trick it all is, and yet the obtuse among us lead the most successful lives. If they knew one-tenth of it it would send them mad.’
Jay nodded her head vigorously, sending Gorsey Dene into paroxysms of delight. He came in her mouth and she swallowed the thick stringy spittle of his loins at a gulp.
Queer chap, the dancer, Gorsey Dene reflected. His experiences, as related to them, put Gorsey Dene in mind of the drive with Tee when they too had stopped at an hotel for the night and been conducted to a room where he had made love to her long-limbed black body while he listened to the familiar sounds issuing from her throat. In the morning he had breakfasted alone, the hard-faced and solid-bosomed manageress striding through the dining-room in search of her kitchen staff. How strange that life should present one with these waves of coincidence as though working to a blind, inexorable pattern. Afterwards they had gone on to the Exhibition which even now, thinking back, depressed him, due largely to the amount of waste hidden behind the scenes. Had it really been worth all that spit and polish, that endless tuning of engines, the weeks of burnishing chrome, with the ultimate aim of deluding themselves (and others) that life was as clean, as uncluttered, as deodorised and hygienic as the glossy brochures made out? What about the tons of grease, the mountains of oily rags, the dirt lurking in the workshops? For every immaculate machine there was a waste tip to be taken into account. All very well Alan Kimber strutting about in his neat pale-green shirt and crisp cuffs, but there was a price to pay. Cleanliness could not be achieved without filth. Thinking back on it brought a smile to Gorsey Dene’s lips. They curved up in an attractive crescent. He caught a glimpse of his own handsome reflection in the glass over the speedometer. Tee had, in many ways, been the fulfilment of all his dreams. With her careless laughing ways she had been the first to teach him what sex was all about. In the back seat of the car with her legs spreadeagled …
There had been other times too, in Catford, and before (or after) that the nightdrive with its squashed bloody animals like patches of sticky black tar in the jouncing headlights. The dance, also, where he … had … hadn’t Rhet Karachi mentioned something about a dance? Hadn’t the Pakistani jackal reminisced in gruff pseudo-masculine tones about a similar experience? But who cared about that figment from a nightmare. Forget him, he had been and gone. Moving on to think about the forthcoming assignment, Gorsey Dene wondered how the devil he was going to research a paper mill. How can one possibly say anything interesting about a paper mill? Perhaps the photographs might give him a clue, for the photographer was reckoned to be good at his job. (Photographers, he had always found, were two-dimensional people, like their snaps.) Thinking even further back – the photographs having made the connexion – Gorsey Dene remembered the shot of himself leaning through the window of the van on the day of their return from Spain: tanned, shirtless, a faint smile playing about his fine features. He had driven three thousand miles with only one accident. The van had been a bastard but prior to leaving England he had been unaware of its fits and farts and sudden bursts of temperament. The night in the Coach, for example, three days after Jay’s departure abroad, when for the first time Pat had glued her eyes to his – little chubby Pat with the enormous dongers. Little had he known what lay in store for him that night! She had sidled across and engaged him in conversation:
‘You have the most attractive eyes.’
(He knew this already.)
‘Do you really think so?’
‘You know it already.’
‘Yes I do.’
As usual the narrow Coach was choc-a-bloc with bodies swilling ale and slipping on the floor. In the night outside the yellow lights cast a glow over the orderly town-centre, acres of clean tarmac gleaming faintly from the cinema to the bank. The van was parked in the street, steady as a tank.
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br /> Pat said, ‘Are you coming to the party afterwards?’ She had not, until this moment, affected him in any sexual way. It was her smallness that was so deceiving. But now he noticed that she had a regular pair of breasts and that her eyes were narrowed and watchful, ever-waiting for a juicy morsel to come her way. His several recent experiences with Jay and others stood him in good stead, for he was at the peak of believing in himself and his sexual prowess. Women, he had discovered, were not attracted by foppish sensitivity. The scrubbers of Oldham, for example, sought direct aggression in the form of a quick shaft behind the market stalls. Here in Rochdale the approach was no less violent if a trifle more circumspect. His problem (and didn’t everyone have problems?) was that he had never learnt to treat women as human beings: they were at one and the same time above and below him. Pat, of course, was below. He felt that he could wreak his vengeance upon her.
Alan farted by, a beery flush working upwards from his neck.
Pat said, ‘I’ve fancied you for quite a bit.’
Gorsey Dene didn’t know how to take this.
‘You do have transport?’ Pat said, leaning against him.
‘Sure,’ Gorsey Dene said, slitting his sexy eyes. The dilapidated Coach was in uproar as eleven o’clock approached. Across the way the Pakistanis were being thrown out of the White Lion. He had never felt so powerfully invincible. The secret potent penis would this night be given its head; she would bow before it.
Little round Pat said, ‘A number of people in this room are giving you stern looks.’
‘Let them,’ said Gorsey Dene with magnificent disdain.
‘Are they friends?’
‘Of a friend,’ he qualified, knowing himself to be a perfectly handsome specimen. (It was his life’s ambition to be constantly the centre of attention: it was no more than he deserved.) ‘You have a husband?’
‘He travels a lot.’
‘Is he as tiny as you?’
‘Smaller in fact.’
