Bill’s hand moved along his own thigh. He toyed with the buttons of his overalls, releasing their constraint at his waist. He stretched his legs forward languorously. As the man took her nipple into his mouth, Bill continued to watch, teasing himself desirously. As he knelt her before him, the man’s face was now in silhouette to the camera and Bill could see, for the first time, how his halo of curls was at variance with the harshness in his features. Not that the man was not good-looking, in a certain aggressive way that many find attractive, a way which denotes arrogance and brutality. Bill perceived that, in taking his pleasure, the man felt a need to watch, both himself and Dana equally; as though spectator and participator were for him two distinct, but identical pleasures of the same sport.
He also realized that Dana was disconcerted by the length of time the man demanded of her. In order to better observe his penis in her mouth, he held her hair in fistfuls above her head, so as not to miss a moment of his own event. Bill witnessed the look of desperation in her eyes. And then, as the man’s excitement grew, he forestalled her, time and again, postponing his pleasure, before finally lifting her to her feet and leaning her against his massive frame. Although tall, she was suddenly rendered tiny by his gigantic height. He still made no attempt to kiss her, but he began to caress her, running his swollen fingers between her thighs, making it clear that he wished to pleasure her, before claiming his own fulfilment. Under the scrutiny of the lens, Dana began to look troubled and exhausted. He heard the man’s voice say, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” as though he had transformed the prosaic into some modern riddle of profundity.
Bill was, himself, also excited by now, an excitement which combined the heady mixtures of concern and dismay. His penis now rested open in his lap, like a flower, its flesh a blush of anger and animation. He considered pursuing his own pleasure before the man fulfilled his. Usually he allowed his excitement to coincide with that of Dana’s partners, as though it was him and not them who made love to her; when, suddenly, the phone rang at his elbow, startling and disturbing him, his commander’s voice at the other end of the line. “Just until the weekend, Bill, and then I am putting you on another case.” The phone was replaced without room for debate. Bill’s thoughts shuttered distractedly through his mind, his penis fading in his lap. He held his head in his hands, contemplating how to deal with this blow. When he turned back to the milky screen, the girl and the man had vanished. The screen was flickering.
At first, Bill could not understand how they might have eluded him. He scanned the other cameras, focusing on the apartment doors and corridors, but still failed to find her. He became frantic. He ran from the concealment of his office as the lift was descending, fourth floor, third. It stopped at the second. Above him, he could hears the electronic sigh of the lift doors opening, followed by the sound of feet running on the stairs. A faint, familiar scent assailed him – chloroform. In a swift spiral of understanding, Bill deserted his post. As the man leapt the final few stairs to the foyer, Bill grabbed his calf, tripping him up. The two men struggled. The man was taller, but Bill the stronger. He rugger-tackled him, fighting with his full weight upon him to shackle his hands. The man fought hard. He was uglier than Bill had orignally noted, his veneer of suavity and good breeding undermined by the menace in his voice. Eventually, Bill won, his wrists cuff-linked behind his back, his feet tied with a length of rope Bill carried in his overalls pocket. Bill left him trussed up in the hall, whilst he raced to the first floor to check the lift. She was lying in a pool of blood, the smell strong. The man had cut her wrists. It was the same pattern as before. Distraught, Bill tore off his shirt, fretting at the material to improvize some rough bandages with which to tightly bind her wrists. He then made a call, requesting backup and an ambulance. The voice crackling at the other end of the line reminded him that the West End was almost static with traffic. There would be a delay. He spoke again to his boss, explaining that the murderer was downstairs, trussed up and finally detained. As he spoke, he suddenly remembered where he had heard the man’s voice before. It had been one of the unidentified voices on the answer machine of a prostitute murdered two months earlier.
The girl was weak, but still half conscious. She looked up as he cradled her head in his arms. “You are Bill”, she said sweetly.
“How do you know?” he asked, mystified.
Her reply was elliptical. “I have been waiting for you.”
“The ambulance will not be long,” he reassured her.
“Take me back to my flat first,” she begged.
He looked at her astonished. “You shouldn’t be moved . . . the evidence.” He stumbled. “More than my job is worth.”
“Please”, she pleaded.
He hesitated then pressed the button to the fifth floor. He carried her to her door. Her key, he knew, was on a long platinum chain around her neck. He had focused on it often.
He opened the door on to an apartment filled with white, beautiful light, empty except for an ornate brass bed, a wide white sofa, an easel and numerous canvases. On the bed, as if waiting for them, was a white poodle puppy.
“I wanted you to see my paintings before I die.”
The dog sprang to greet them, skidding giddily on the exposed floorboards.
“I shan’t let you die. You are very weak, but I have caught you in time.” Bill bent to gently kiss her, his big frame congested with conflicted feeling. They could hear the siren of the ambulance arriving.
“Will I ever see you again?” she asked. “Can you come with me in the ambulance?”
He looked up, scanning the clever intricacies of her magnficent canvases, something familiar. “I have fallen in love with you,” he replied.
“And I with you,” she answered.
“But you have never seen me before.”
“Switch on the television,” she ordered weakly. “Quickly, before the paramedics arrive.” She stretched impotently towards the hand change. He reached and operated it for her. On to the screen came a four-piece view of his downstairs monitor room. “I have seen you every night,” she replied. Suddenly, he understood the familiarity of her paintings, abstract, grand, and yet they were all of him, based night after night in his monitor room, stroking himself gently whilst falling in love with a broken-winged angel, who always seemed to trust him.
Edge
Conrad Williams
Quietly obscene, the taking of E here, where old women walk three-legged dogs along Loch Broom and you can order your fish dinner from the restaurant before it’s even been caught. As if the mountains could fragment, the Loch boil with the indignation of spurning their natural high for a chunk of synthetic.
Pippa’s eyes bloat black.
Blemishes are sucked into the TV colour of her skin. We talk too quickly, trying to keep a grasp of the mundane but even discussions of moored boats and gliding lights in the distance spawn gentle leaps into the fantastic. It begins. As does the rain, flecking her Gore-Tex and disappointing us with its intrusion. No soft-nosed needles bursting sub-apocalyptically on our flesh here: just rain.
Earlier, over open prawn sandwiches and beer at the Ferry Boat Inn on Shore Street (served by a tough, likeable ball of flab, hair like a razed band between tracts of Scots fir. The prawns had a glaze not unlike that of his right eye – which was glass), we wrote postcards home. Pippa’s fingers dabbed at the McCoy’s. My backside was blockish and numb from driving – we hadn’t stopped since leaving Dunvegan that morning. Loch Broom flat and dull as a blade. A boat, permanently tethered, cringed in the expanse upon which it was resting, its rust-orange hull gathering fire as the sun spent itself on a rind of mountain.
Hello Mum and Dad. Driving like idiots. Warrington to Oban in a day! And then on to Skye where we walked a beach of black sand.
“Here?” she said. “Shall we do it here? I reckon we should because if we leave it till tomorrow we’ll be fucked for the drive back.”
“But Durness,” I urged. “The North Se
a. Fuck off waves. Imagine that.”
Pippa flipped the last corner of her ham sandwich on to the plate. Dug for a cig. Which pissed me off. Kissing her after she’s been kissing the filter of a Marlboro Light is like frenching an ashtray. Sometimes I wonder if she eats just so she can have a cigarette afterwards.
“Yes, chicken. Very romantic. But be practical. We have to be back in London in two days’ time. A long way. And I don’t want to be driving whilst wazzed.”
Eaten a full fry-up every day. I’m beginning to resemble a fried egg. I’ll try porridge tomorrow as long as they don’t put any salt in it!
“All right,” I conceded. I felt on edge. “Not too bad here, I suppose.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“I love you,” I said, for want of a better.
She smoked like a novice, watching the coal as it frenzied, the gust of blue as she exhaled. I suddenly meant what I said. In that green, waterproof huddle she looked so damned vulnerable and soft, as if the ruthless career Dalek she became back in the Smoke had been smothered. Her breasts were under there somewhere, sweating up: dough introduced to an oven.
“I’ve got a hard on.”
Durness tomorrow, then back home via Inverness. Pippa is desperate for a fresh fish dinner and I’m going to make sure she gets it. See you soon.
“Do you reckon I could get both your bollocks into my mouth at the same time?” Another drag on the weed. Quite sexy, come to think of it. Bacall-ish. “I’ve never met anyone whose cock was so greedy before. You’d get a hard on at the drop of a hat. You’d get a hard on if I said ‘Bangladesh’.”
“Ooh, you sleazy minx. Take me now.”
“Finish your beer. We’ve got bags of time.” She gives me one of those smirks that brought me to my knees right at the start. Somewhere between a smile and a purse and a lippy shrug. Almost the kind of indulgent moue you’d give a child. I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m on about, but I can’t describe it. She has these moments when she is utterly, incontrovertibly, fucking gorgeous. Nobody can hold a flame to her. When she’s tired or angry or bored, she looks as compelling as an oatmeal cardigan. Spinning between these two poles, like a magnet torn, I’m kept on my toes.
Back at her Micra, we unload the bags. My briefcase looks conspicuous, absurd, but it’s got a combination lock on it. While Pippa goes through the pleasantries with the woman in the B&B, I dump our stuff and pootle down to the Post Office with the cards. Pippa’s handwriting is an object lesson in efficiency. Some of her letters are improbably joined due to a short cut she’s found over years of writing essays and exams. Her energy expenditure is minimal. Thankfully, none of these cost-cutting practices have found their way into our bed. If she ever downsized her double-handed Turbowank into some streamlined, eco-friendly two-fingered jig I’d be more than a little miffed.
M+D. Ullapool beautiful. North tomorrow. Speak to you Monday pm. P.
But for the cheap WH Smith turquoise ink, her only indulgence, it’s brutal and lizard cold. That’s it with Pippa. She’s got something of the robot, the replicant about her. On the way back, I toyed with the idea of asking if she’s ever seen Demon Seed but I didn’t think she’d appreciate the joke.
In our room. She’s propped up against the pillows. One breast is free of her halter-top. Her legs are in a loose pincer shape, feet almost touching each other. One hand is sprawled over her mons, middle and index fingers spreading herself so I can see flashes of her liquefying cunt, like moments in a zoetrope, as her other hand blurs over her clitoris. Slowly she arches, her left foot twitching, mouth folding from stiff oval to flat, thin line and back. Eyes disappear to black slots. On the cusp, her features slacken to something like surprise, to the kind of surprise characters in films adopt when they’ve been shot or stabbed without warning.
“Some welcome back,” I say, homing in.
And now.
I can feel the lobes of my brain fizzing. Every breath becomes cleaner, colder, more congealed, as if soon I might be able to chew on the air. We’ve had a Dove each. I want to go and run up Ben Eilideach, all 1,800 feet of the fucker. It’s like a huge, beautiful dick. A dick tenting a bed sheet. And the sky is the mother of all cunts. A wraparound cunt mocking the cock with teasing, unattainable distance. I tell Pippa this and she falls about.
“How do you feel?” I say, through clenched teeth.
“Absolutely wazzed.”
We leg up and down the loch front like we’re trying to plough a furrow. But no matter how ripped off my face I might feel, I’m buggered if I’m walking to the end of the terrace. Something is rustling there and it isn’t an empty bag of Golden Wonder.
“Look, chicken!”
I heard it before I saw it. The schuss of waves and a backbeat throb of engine. Then rounding the crown of land came the ferry; its lights pearlescent, like underlit smoke in the windows. If there wasn’t a figure at the prow of the boat, twisting himself in and out of extravagant knots, slithering like oil along the railings, expanding like a blot of ink on bandage, there ought to have been: it was a gorgeous sight. Just the night though, no doubt, wanking with my mind. The night and the pill.
The rain on Pippa’s face was a thin matting, like hoar frost. She was so still, my heart spasmed as if she’d died on me, while I was chuntering on about bush shapes lunging for me like servants carrying trays of food that they were zealously getting me to sample. Then she moved, holding my hand and pulling me towards the B&B. Inside, we held each other so tightly, it seemed I’d just open up and fold around her. The heat coming from her settled, a layer against my skin. She made glottal noises and shuddered occasionally. Her jaw spasmed against my cheek. She was off somewhere I couldn’t yet know, despite the almost unbearable rise of the drug: a balloon inflating in my head and threatening to take off with or without me. I licked her gullet. I pulled her head down and kissed her. The kiss developed rhythms independent of us. Mouths melded, it felt I could slowly melt into her, without pain, until my mouth quested from the back of her head. I tasted, very acutely, her black stream of words which squirted on to my tongue.
We shall go to the very edge together.
“What do you mean?” I said, breaking away, a thin rope bridge of saliva looping between us.
“I didn’t say anything.”
We’d reached our ceiling. A few minutes later, I was reluctantly controlling things, even though great pollen-like clouds of wow were still softly exploding. We walked back to the pub and sipped beer by the fire. I couldn’t look into the flame: it was too much like staring at ripped flesh.
I drove the next day, knowing that Pippa was always drubbed out after a trip. We made excellent time, bisecting the mountains while the tape looped The Breeders’ Hag over and over till we got tired of it and played Radiohead instead. Pippa read out loud to me: Steve Erickson or Joel Lane or Patrick McGrath. She told me what she’d do to me once we arrived in Durness. We watched the fighters make languid arcs over Kinloss and Lossiemouth.
Travelling north seemed to be cleansing us of all the city dirt and impatience. Pippa looked more relaxed than I’d seen her for weeks, the lines and shadows round her mouth gone, a rose bloom to cheeks which had been waxen and livid for too long. We hadn’t discussed work (or in my case, the lack of it) since the first ten miles of our holiday. Her irritability where I was concerned had been sucked back into its shell.
It seemed almost feasible that we’d spend the rest of our lives together.
On the final stretch of road, a stream at the bottom of a glacial valley beneath us caught a lozenge of sunlight which chased the car: a blip on an ECG. A T-junction loomed; beyond was a bluff of land and little else, save for the ocean which unfurled towards a whitish, ill-defined horizon.
“Welcome to Durness,” said Pippa. “End of the line.”
We parked by the information centre, which was closed for the winter. Luckily, the souvenir shop opposite was open and, while I picked out a pair of gloves, Pippa asked about likely accom
modation. Outside, she took on a grotesque approximation of the shopkeeper’s accent and repeated to me what she’d heard, dressing it up and sounding more like a hysterical Frazer from Dad’s Army the more she progressed. “Och, ye might try the Smoo Cave Hotelllll the noo. Mind how ye gooo.”
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