An Uncertain Grace

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘Pick up the soap,’ she tells me, gripping the side of the bath. There is no way I can override her resistance.

  I can’t do it when you try to stop me.

  ‘I suppose that’s a good thing.’

  I nod. And she is nodding.

  Was that me? Or you?

  ‘A bit of both, I think.’ Then she picks up the soap and rubs it against our stomach and it feels like I’m sliding through thick sweet cream. She rubs the soap against her breasts and the sensation is sublime. I feel my agency melt away. I am relaxing into her hands.

  ‘Do you want me to masturbate?’ she asks me, but she doesn’t wait for me to answer. She is already slipping the soap down between her legs, sliding the hardness of it across her hairless vulva. I am reduced to my senses as she expertly slips a finger into the soapy slit, rubbing small circles around her clitoris. She is good at this. Well, it is her job, I suppose.

  It strikes me now that this is the first time I have paid for the services of a prostitute, and I guess that makes me her trick. If this were one of my narratives I would begin here.

  The first time I paid a prostitute to masturbate me was when my body had died. I was nothing more than a collection of thought patterns, memories stored digitally, circuits firing like synapses, and yet this woman was slipping her fingers up and inside me.

  It would be a good story, an incorporeal story about corporeality. The possibilities excite me, but as soon as I have thought it, I let it go. I spend every waking hour thinking; always thinking. Now it’s time to let a body lead me. She slips a second finger into us, eases down further into the bath and stretches her elongated hand further still, teasing my, her, bottom with the perfectly manicured pink nail of her little finger. Three more circles of her thumb and I am not sure if the groan that escapes her mouth issues from me or from her.

  *

  Can you fake an orgasm when your lover is inside your brain?

  I should be thinking about my work but I am distracted. I have languished in an echo chamber of memory all morning. I have been remembering the times when my body pressed itself against a lover’s flesh. I keep thinking about the way I like someone to kiss the back of my neck, how it sparks goosebumps all over my skin, makes my vulva clench with pleasure. Next time I’m inside her I want her to have sex. I lose myself in a maze of this problem instead of writing the narrative that I am working on.

  My own work seems paradoxical, I am a brain pattern busy scanning through the brain patterns of others, making sense of them, finding words to describe to others the story that emerges. A brain viewing a brain, and yet I remember my body so clearly, more intensely now that I have piggybacked inside someone else’s flesh.

  I force myself to concentrate on the job I’m doing but this thought keeps returning. Did she really have an orgasm? Or was she pretending? Was it just me who came, while she expertly sent her compliant body through the motions? Isn’t that what sex workers do?

  I clock off. I am too distracted for work. I will rest now, think my way through my own conundrum before trying to concentrate on someone else. I sink into a resting state and this is what I needed. A little nap. Some time to immerse myself in memory. Her long pink-nailed hands, her sweet soft fingers, the sharp scent of bubble bath, the orgasm that came and came and came again. She wouldn’t let it drift off into nothing as I always used to do, she kept me there, endlessly tumbling over myself till the hour was up and it was time for me to log out of her body and let her go back to whatever else she does in her own real life.

  Can a sex worker fake her orgasm when someone else is inside her brain? That is the question that won’t let me relax into sleep. I nap and wake, enervated. Eventually I log in to a new file. I think the words and they appear on the empty virtual page: The first time I paid a prostitute to masturbate me was when my body had died.

  I have paid for six more hours this week. Starting this evening. I am aware of each slow second as I type the words describing what happened. I should be typing someone else’s story. I should be earning the money to pay the exorbitant cost of my body-worker, but instead, for the first time since I stopped writing memoir in my thirties, I am busy typing up my own.

  Laura takes me to a club. We wait in a long and sweaty queue. Her arm brushes the sequined back of a young woman. The feel of it, the sequins, the catching of flesh, all this is so sharp and focused that it would be enough. I would spend my five hours just here waiting in the queue having Laura brush up against one body after another and I would have spent my money well. This is what it is to have a body. I remember the feel of my skin dampening. The slow trickle of water carefully tracking the line of my shoulders and pooling at my waist.

  I was never the nightclub kind of girl, even in my youth. The other students would spend each Friday and Saturday evening dancing to some band, pressed up against strange flesh, flirting and finding someone to end up holding their hair as their body heaved over a toilet bowl.

  I would take my things and head home. Studying, finishing assignments, reading the set texts; one day very similar to another. This proximity of skin, this heady mix of pheromones sharp in my nostrils: this is what I was missing out on.

  Laura has a body that gets noticed in a queue. The men are looking at her, their glances feel like moths. She is aware of their attention, or I am. I suppose it is the same. We turn our body a little when this man or that looks in our direction. I suppose she is using her body to encourage them. These subtle movements, flicking the hair away from our face, shifting her weight to one hip to set our torso at an angle, pulling her shoulders back and the burgeoning of flesh that happens when she does that. Our nipples are erect, poking through the thin fabric of her shirt, and this is something to watch. We are watched.

  The queue creeps forward but we are still a dozen people from the entry. A man in a red shirt open at the collar walks past the row of damp, bright-eyed people. He sweeps the column as if picking out a criminal from a line-up. He stops beside Laura. His gaze takes in the soft silver drape of her shirt, the fabric clinging to all the rising and falling-away of flesh, the prick of nipples clearly visible, held in place by the most diaphanous of undergarments. He looks at the short kick of her skirt and the stretch of stockinged legs beneath. I have never been looked at this way and it excites me. I feel the rush of damp slicking our vulva. I am sure this excitement is mine and not hers. There is no point trying to untangle one of us from the other because I am knitted into her senses. I am a part of the weave of her brain pattern. This kind of scrutiny excites me, and therefore she is excited.

  He holds out his arm towards us and I hesitate, but that impulse is far less strong than Laura’s firm reach forward to take hold of the crook of his arm. The red shirt is made of some sort of stiff cotton. My fingers rub back and forth over it, taking in the rough weave, toying with the folds of fabric before Laura purposefully makes a fist to stop my fingers. She is familiar with the role we must play in these circumstances and she takes over. It is a little like being a passenger in a car: watching the road ahead, anticipating the moves we will make, and every so often the driver takes her hands off the wheel and lets me take control.

  She is driving now, though, as we are plucked from the impatient queue and ushered towards the bright lights framing the door to the club.

  The bouncer is dressed in a shirt slightly too small for the bulk of his muscles. He smells gamey, like aged meat, as we brush past him. The red-shirted man nods, and smiles are exchanged before he is waved through into a sudden wall of sound.

  You should ask his name.

  This is my habitual politeness speaking. I am uncomfortable when the niceties are not exchanged. I can feel her thought-smile; her mouth remains a crimson pout. Then her voice comes clear and loud, cutting through the thumping of the music.

  His name isn’t important. Just wait. There will be other men tonight. We can pick whichever we want. You choose. It’s your night.

  It takes a moment for my eyes to ad
just to the darkness of the room. It is seething with bodies, but in the smoky gloom it is hard to determine gender among the gyrating figures. I wonder for a moment if the room is filled with twilighters, and feel a small pang of nostalgia for my brief time with M.

  When my eyes adjust, I realise my error: the revellers are all hypersexualised, like cartoon characters in a manga comic. The women are hyper-femme, squeezed into plunging dresses. Shimmering fabric is in this season and their beads and tassels catch the light and scatter it out to the edges of the dance floor. The men are all butch and top-heavy in their tight muscle shirts and thin cotton trousers.

  It is hotter than I remember, if this is even possible. Each year the temperature climbs and the club uses this, letting the dancers stew in their sweat till they are hot and ripe. At the edges of the main room there are recessed booths and the chill air spills out of them like breath on a winter morning, the way I still remember from childhood. These booths are a place to cool down after the bacchanalian dancing. A place to ease oneself into the arms of strangers in full view of the sweating, surging crowd.

  The man in the red shirt walks us straight to the bar and the waiter reaches across the other bodies to slip two drinks into his hands. He doesn’t put his chipped wrist out to pay and I wonder what the arrangement is. Is he the owner of the bar? A friend of the owner? Someone famous I have failed to recognise?

  Is it safe to drink? I ask Laura as she brings the glass to her lips.

  Nothing is ever safe. Isn’t that the wonder of having a body? Laura asks and this time when she laughs the sound, the stretch of laughter touches our actual lips. Red Shirt steers us towards a booth already occupied by six people, leaning into each other, hands resting on thighs resting on other thighs. A nest of restless young flesh all a-slither. A young man with a moustache shifts across to allow us to perch beside him. His knee is pressed up against Laura’s thigh.

  Red Shirt clicks his glass against mine and we are drinking. The alcohol burns warm and sweet down to the stomach. I raise the glass quickly back to our mouth but she pulls it away. She is taking the wheel again, easing my foot off the accelerator. She will not let me get drunk too quickly. Instead she lifts her face up to the man with the red shirt and he leans forward to kiss our lips. And I remember this. He reaches out with fingers cooled by his glass and slips them into the cowled neck of our shirt and pinches the nipple. Laura is too late to stifle my groan. He takes the little noise as a provocation and wraps his fingers around our breast. I want to open my mouth, to take his tongue against mine. I want all the sensation of flesh against, around and inside flesh but Laura’s mouth remains firmly shut. She takes our hand and squeezes the man’s crotch and I can feel how hard he is. She stands then and tilts her head to one side, blowing a kiss through the humid air.

  ‘Thanks for the drink,’ she says and then she walks us both away.

  I have never been so desirable. It is probably best that Laura sticks to the same glass of warm gin; I am already drunk on the way men look at me. Their eyes describe my body to me. Without this constant attention it would be easy to forget I am in a different body now, as I kept doing yesterday in Laura’s flat. She would walk past a mirror and there was her body instead of mine. Here in the bar it is just me, and all their eyes drawing a Laura-shaped line wherever I go.

  Is it okay to have sex with one of them? I ask her and she turns our head to scan the room.

  Which one would you choose?

  I look past the dancing bodies to the standing drinking bodies to the seated caressing bodies. They are a different breed of people from the ones I’ve known in my real life. All the bespectacled men I spent time with, all the poets and coders and software developers, all the interactive filmmakers and the novelists experimenting with form. None of them looked as glossy or as fit as these people in this room. But then none of them ever looked quite the way this body I am in does now.

  I don’t really care, I tell her honestly. I don’t really like any of them in particular. I just want to feel a body next to mine. How about you pick?

  She presses out on to the dance floor and we are swaying to the music. I think it’s up to you to pick, she tells me. It will be like musical chairs. We dance and then when the music stops…

  But when her body starts to bounce to the pounding thud of the music I know that I won’t ever want this particular dance to stop.

  She is on top of him. She perches so easily on his lap. Her legs are longer than mine were and in this body it is easy to kneel over him and settle onto his lap.

  The music stopped and he and Laura found themselves together. Okay. He isn’t anyone I would have given a second glance in my real life, but he smells all right, like spiced aftershave. There are Celtic knots tattooing his upper arms, spreading when he stretches his muscles, the undulation of an ornate mobius strip. I would have drawn the line at a Southern Cross tattoo. If I’d had time—the transaction was over in a minute. She leaned forward, tall enough on her stilettos that she had to bend a little to speak directly into his ear.

  ‘You want to come back to my place?’

  And he did no more than nod.

  So this, now, is what it feels like to slip down onto a firm young cock. I focus all of my attention on that one place, the opening and parting. The feeling of stretching, the chemical high of pure pheromone breathed in too quickly too deeply as she surges up and down. I let her do what she is doing without interference and for the first minute it is enough. I am in my body at last. I am truly at one with the flesh that I am in.

  But there is no elevation of the rush. I need my clitoris engaged and the way she is bouncing is doing nothing for that sensitive part of our anatomy. I move her right hand to touch us. The gorgeous shock of stimulation. We tilt our head back and close our eyes. I make small beautiful circles.

  ‘What—’ she catches herself speaking aloud and thinks the words instead, What are you doing?

  Pleasuring us.

  It’s strange that she had to ask. I pause, but she doesn’t resist as I start the tiny circles again. The man is thrusting up too hard, too deep. I reach down with my left hand and wrap two fingers around his shaft, keeping his movements shallow, slowing his rhythm, thinking it’s odd that Laura doesn’t think to do this. And then, just as my arms are becoming sore and cramping up I feel the wave overtake me. I press my thumb hard against her clit and release his cock. Here in the last throes of the orgasm it doesn’t really matter how hard or fast he moves. I am as soft and flexible as a rag doll and I let him roll me over so that he can pump into me with more vigour. He thrusts again and again and again and then he is jerking into her, shaking, losing his rhythm. I pull her knees up to my chest and roll away.

  You do that? She manages the words, although I know she is winded, startled by the intensity of the orgasm we just shared.

  Do what?

  Isn’t it rude to do yourself when you are with a man?

  What?

  Toss off…

  We had sex.

  Yes, but you were wanking. Taking care of yourself without any respect for him.

  I…I just wanted to come. Don’t you make yourself come when you are having sex?

  Her silence is telling. I want to reach over and hug her curled body but I can’t. It is our curled body. The man reaches over with one heavy, exhausted arm and tweaks our nipple instead.

  Why do you have sex if you don’t come?

  If I’m working?

  No. When you do it for pleasure.

  I don’t know. I go into the bathroom after and then I think about what we just did and then I try to come.

  I vaguely remember that. Always too nervous to come during sex. Each new partner seemed overwhelming; I couldn’t focus on the task. She isn’t so unusual. And god, she’s young. When I was her age I sometimes used to wait till afterwards myself.

  Life’s too short, I tell her now. If there’s one thing I have learnt in one hundred and thirty years, it’s that if you don’t give
yourself one nobody else will.

  I feel ourselves blushing. The heat is rushing into our cheeks. A sex worker who is bashful. Maybe there are some benefits to aging. I have learnt to take what is not forthcoming; even in my short and unwieldy body I could give myself everything I wanted.

  Didn’t you like it? I ask.

  Sure.

  Do you want to do it again?

  She rolls onto her other side and looks at the man. He is still young. Capable of taking us both one more time before my night in her body comes to an end.

  Is it okay if I blow him? she asks me. Just to get him going again?

  By all means. I have no problem giving head—as long as he gives back.

  She shakes her head and leans down towards the full condom still dangling on his limp cock. She snaps it off and clumsily rolls a second one onto the wilting hang of flesh. When she puts her mouth on him I feel the blood expanding his cock between my lips.

  For some reason, she says, I didn’t expect someone as old as my grandmother to know her way around a man.

  Well, if I was your grandmother I would tell you not to talk with your mouth full.

  She laughs out loud but it is muffled as he pushes his swelling penis towards the back of our throat.

  Slow down, cowboy, I say, but there is no way he could hear. I place her fist around the base of his cock again to stop him pushing so hard, and I can feel her awareness of my actions. She is watching my technique. She is taking it all in. I like that I can teach her something. I grin and suck, and touch myself a little at the same time. I still have at least an hour before time’s up but I suspect she’ll forgive me if we go a little overtime. She pulls our head away from him and licks her lips.

  She is grinning cheekily as she tells him, ‘Okay, cowboy’—my word, not hers—‘now it’s our turn. You ready to go down for some peach?’

  She looks at the queue lining up for tickets. It’s not the money that’s bothering her, since I am paying the extra. It’s the unfamiliarity of the venue. There will be no one here to pluck her from the line and ease her through in front of everyone else. Half the line is a rattle of children, hopping from one foot to the other, making sudden dashes out to press their hands and cheeks against the window, staring out at the fistfuls of hail pounding uselessly against the augmented glass. A little boy dances on the spot before rushing back to his father in the slowly progressing line. A girl of about seven thrusts her way through a series of set moves, judo classes perhaps, or tae kwon do. Laura watches her go through the careful mime, then put her head down and her arms out and aeroplane back to her mother, standing in front of us in the queue.