The Touch

by Colleen McCullough

  “Where are you off to in that?” he managed to say.

  “Prince Sung’s village, which is why I’m dressed like this. But I should have taken the pony trap, it’s just too hot. So I thought I’d get a drink of water from Miss Theodora and go home.”

  “Miss Jay’s not here, but her door’s open.”

  For answer she put a delicate hand to her head, gasped and swayed as if about to faint. Sam O’Donnell caught her, held her, felt her trembling. Mistaking this revulsion for desire, he kissed her. Jade kissed him back in a way he had never experienced, for he was not a whoring man—was this what Chinese girls were like? What had he been missing all these years, thinking of them with contempt? A tight little cunt, if what they said about Chinese men was true—on the small side. What he couldn’t know was that Jade had worked for Miss Ruby in her brothel days, and had heard—sometimes seen—everything.

  “I want you,” he whispered. “Jade, I want you!”

  “And I want you,” she whispered back, fingering his hair.

  “I’ll finish for the day and take you back to my camp.”

  “No, I have a better idea,” she said. “I’ll go home in the cable car, while you follow me on the snake path. I live in a shed in the backyard of Kinross House, not far from where the snake path ends. The staff will all be inside, so all you have to do is use the backyard buildings as a cover until you see my door—it’s bright red, the only one that color.”

  “It would be safer at my camp,” he demurred.

  “I couldn’t walk that far, I’m too frail, Sam.” She put her tongue in his ear, then swept it across his jaw to his lips and invaded them. “I love white men,” she said at the back of her throat. “They’re so big! But I’m in service at Kinross House, so men are forbidden to me. Yet here I am, breaking the rules for you. Sam, I want you! I want to put my mouth everywhere!”

  That sounded as if she was indeed an amateur slut, but she was definitely sweet and clean; Sam O’Donnell suppressed his scruples and nodded. “All right,” he said.

  She put on her coat and turned drab, hair tucked inside it, legs concealed, breasts nonexistent. “I’ll be waiting,” she said, and hurried away.

  On fire with want of her, he packed up for the day and set off for the snake path, the dog slinking in his rear as if it knew what business he was on; it probably did.

  UNDER ORDINARY circumstances Sam O’Donnell was a continent kind of fellow who liked to be on good terms with women yet didn’t want to plunder them sexually. He was, as he phrased it to himself, a fussy bugger, and the one thing that flattened his desire was a virtuous woman over twenty—or, he amended, a raddled whore like the bitches in that house of ill fame on the outskirts.

  Born near Molong, a very small country town farther west, his destiny was decided by his circumstances: father scraping a living share-cropping or shearing, mother bearing babies. When he turned twelve he went to the wool sheds with his dad and learned to shear, a backbreaking, hideous job in the foulest of conditions. The shearers were housed in something euphemistically termed a barracks, slept on naked stretchers, and were fed food the feral dogs wouldn’t eat. No wonder that shearers were the most militant of unionists! He stood it as long as his mother lived, then went off to Gulgong and the gold mines, where he learned the trade. After that, closer to forty than to thirty, he drifted to Kinross and was hired by the mining superintendent; he had never met the high-and-mighty Sir Alexander Kinross, even when Bede Talgarth came to town.

  His head was filled with dreams of a better life for working men, of fairer conditions and considerate bosses, hence his joining the Amalgamated Miners’ Association. It was active in Gulgong, and he had expected it to be active in Kinross; that it was not was due to Sir Alexander’s cunning. Good conditions, good pay, a clean, cheap and pleasant town to live in. Which only made Sam O’Donnell hate Sir Alexander Kinross more. There had to be an ulterior motive, even if he couldn’t figure it out. When the Apocalypse employees took their dismissal tamely, he set off for Sydney and secured the best demagogue in the business, Bede Talgarth. Yet still the sheep wouldn’t turn into wolves! They took their redundancy pay and moved on. Why he hadn’t done the same, he knew very well.

  It went back to the day after he was dismissed, at the very beginning of July; Sir Alexander had laid off his men in groups, and Sam O’Donnell was in the first group. The furious Sam cooled his ire by hiking up on top of Sir Bloody Alexander Bloody Kinross’s no-trespassing mountain. And there, not far from the cable car terminus but in the opposite direction from Kinross House, he stumbled upon a vision. The most beautiful very young girl he had ever seen, wandering through the ferns humming to herself. Old Rover, usually averse to people other than Sam, made a sound of pleasure, bounded up to the girl and leaped at her. Instead of screaming and pushing the dog away, she squealed with delight and accepted its embrace. Then as Sam O’Donnell approached, a conciliatory smile on his face, she looked out of her grey-blue eyes at him and extended her welcome to him.

  “Hello,” he said, and to the dog, “Rover, down! Down, Rover!”

  “Hello,” said the vision.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her, astonished that she seemed to feel none of the fear that was inculcated into all young girls at sight of a strange man in an isolated place—a fear that had foiled his intentions more than once in the past.

  For answer she crouched down to pat the fawning dog, rolled over on its back and groaning.

  “Your name?” he asked again.

  She looked up, grinning.

  “Your name?”

  “Anna,” she finally said. “Anna, Anna, Anna. I Anna.”

  Light dawned; this was Alexander Kinross’s mental daughter, a poor dim-witted creature who, they said, went to church on Sunday with her mother but otherwise was only seen in Kinross when she had wandered too far. But he had never laid eyes on her there, had no idea that Anna Kinross was so beautiful, so desirable, so lush—and yet the very personification of innocence. No wonder they had the word out to pick her up whenever she went too far! She was every man’s most fabulous, impossible wish.

  He hunkered down beside her, some instinct of preservation telling him that he mustn’t give her his name. But he had used the dog’s name when he commanded it down, and Anna, instantly in love with the animal, had one of her rare attacks of memory.

  “Rover!” she said, still patting the dog. “Rover, Rover!”

  “Yes, that’s Rover,” he said, smiling.

  It went from there, the most exhilarating and triumphant experience of Sam O’Donnell’s life, interrupted only by a two-day trip to Sydney to fetch Bede Talgarth.

  Patient and calm, he gradually coaxed the girl into small indecencies—a kiss on the cheek, a kiss on the mouth, a kiss on the side of her neck that evoked a grown woman’s response. The gentle unveiling of her breasts, her gasping pleasure when he kissed and sucked their nipples. A hand sliding delicately into her drawers, and she curling up to arch and writhe like a cat in heat. And slowly, slowly, slowly he brought her to an almost slavish willingness; every day she appeared in the same place, eager to pat Rover, then eager to be kissed, fondled, caressed, aroused to a beating frenzy that turned her into some glorious big moth desperate to immolate itself in the fire it didn’t know. Breaking her maidenhead was a nothing; she was so excited that she didn’t even notice, and when he came to climax, so did she.

  What made the seduction of Anna Kinross so amazing lay in who she was, who he was, and the exquisite secrecy that enfolded them. And the identity of her high-and-mighty father.

  Early in July he remade his life in a way that he found, to his surprise, suited him perfectly. Self-employment! No more bosses, no more thankless toil in a stinking shed or confining mine, cut off from the sun and the outside air. Since Scripps the painter had become a drunk no one wanted to hire, he took on painting house exteriors—no big jobs that would turn him into a boss, however!—and doing odd jobs in between. He also began to go
to Evensong at St. Andrew’s every Sunday night. Helped the minister out with his rats. Always very polite. Never going inside a woman’s house. He moved out of his boarding house and camped at the dam to give no one any idea of his movements, and held his odd jobs, painting jobs and good deeds as part of the secret of Anna Kinross, making out to one woman that he was just going to another woman’s house to do something—oh, he was clever! In fact, Sam O’Donnell felt invulnerable. Did Sir Alexander Kinross delude himself that he was smart? Compared to Sam O’Donnell, he was less than a slug crawling in the slime. Anna was his: his private property, his groveling bitch-dog, his sexual heaven. Absolutely no inhibitions, yet as pure as the driven snow. Anna was the answer to a highly fastidious man’s wildest fantasy.

  Early in December, when they had been meeting for five months, Sam O’Donnell realized that Anna was pregnant; she had the same look his mother used to, and her belly wasn’t quite flat anymore. Oh, Jesus Christ! That was his last trip to the mountain; he had no idea whether Anna still looked for him, just prayed that he and she never came face-to-face.

  His luck held. When, early in the New Year, the news hit Kinross that some mongrel had gotten at that poor child Anna Kinross and made her pregnant, Sam O’Donnell resolved to ride out the storm. If he left town, they’d wake up to him, so he would sit pat. Not that he changed his habits. He was too crafty to cease those sudden “Back in three hours, Mrs. Nagle, got to give Mrs. Murphy a hand!” excursions. Simply, they became realities rather than fabrications. Sam O’Donnell had no illusions. If they pinned the guilt for Anna Kinross on him, he would be lynched.

  SO HE WALKED the snake path to Jade Wong’s shed feeling all the eagerness of a starved man glimpsing a loaf of bread. Maybe day-old bread compared to Anna, but nice bread nonetheless, and urgently needed; Sam O’Donnell was genuinely starving for, as he had put it to Bede Talgarth, “a bit of slap-and-tickle.”

  Even so, he took his time. He had worked hard for most of the day and didn’t want to expend any more of his strength than was necessary on climbing a thousand-foot slope back and forth. So the sun was perched on the summit of the western hills when he reached the top and saw immediately that Jade had told him the truth. The backyard was deserted; Chinese talk and gales of laughter came clearly from the kitchen. With a curt gesture that told the dog to stay outside, he lifted the latch on the red door and slipped inside. The place smelled peculiar, of exotic aromas overlying something more unpleasant; the smell of a Chinese room, he supposed. Why couldn’t she open the window shutters? Because light would be seen? That made no sense if she lived in this hovel.

  “What’s on the walls?” he asked Jade, staring at the padding.

  “I don’t know,” she said, replacing the lid on a teapot. A steaming kettle on a spirit stove sat nearby on the same table.

  “Why are there bars on the windows?”

  “This is the home of a tiger.”

  A swift look around convinced him that she was joking—why didn’t she open the window shutters instead of burning a lamp? She was odd, but he concentrated on how she looked without that overcoat—beautiful, really beautiful! As if reading his mind, she put a foot shod in a high-heeled slipper upon the chair and adjusted the seam of her stocking. His hand was there at once, moving across the tissue-fine sheath, then up above the garter to the naked flesh, even silkier. Probing higher, to discover a moist bare slit. No prim drawers for Jade Wong. She leaped and jerked, smiled at him with a pout, and gently removed his hand.

  “No, Sam, everything in its place. First we drink tea—a part of custom,” Jade said, lifting the teapot and pouring a straw-pale liquid into two small bowls. One was held out to him.

  “It’s got no handle, I’ll burn myself,” he objected.

  “The tea is cooled to the right temperature. Drink, Sam,” Jade cooed, sipping at her bowl. “You must drink it all or there will be no magic in our night together.”

  Oho, a Chinese love potion! Though it didn’t taste as good as proper black Indian tea, it wasn’t too bad; Sam drank, even swallowed a second bowl when she poured it.

  After which he got his reward. Jade unbuttoned a placket in the side of her dress and gathered it in pleats to pass above her head. Awed, he watched the unveiling of her body from legs on up: downy black pubic hair, lovely belly, delicious breasts.

  “Keep your stockings on,” he said, fumbling with his own clothes, fingers clumsier than usual.

  “Of course,” she said, stalked to the bed and stretched out on it, one thumb in her mouth, its lips forming a crimson O as she sucked audibly, her doelike eyes fixed on him without blinking.

  “Let me see your cunt, China girl,” he said.

  As she spread her legs obediently he shuffled to the bed, naked himself, but not as stiff and upright as he ought to be—oh, Jesus, what was wrong? The air seemed to gush from him as he slumped on to the side of the bed and collapsed as if pricked. He struggled to keep his eyes open, tried to pinch Jade’s nipple, couldn’t. His eyes closed—a bit of a nap first, then he’d ram her until her teeth rattled. Yes, a nap…

  Jade waited for several minutes, then reached into the tiny drawer beside the bed and took out the gauze muzzle and the bottle of chloroform. When she put the muzzle over his mouth and nose and started to drip the fluid on to it, he began to struggle, but the laudanum held him still enough until the anesthetic took effect and he went completely limp. A few more drops to make sure, then Jade let the muzzle slip from his face, busy unearthing a heavy leather jacket from beneath the bed. Working with the wiry strength of a woman in the pink of health, she maneuvered his arms and trunk into the device, buckled its straps tightly across his back and attached it by other straps to the iron struts connecting the top of the bed to the foot. After which she took stout leather cuffs and wrapped them tightly around his ankles, buckled them and tied them to the bed frame.

  All of this was done in a way that saw Sam O’Donnell fixed in a semi-recumbent posture, his shoulders and upper chest elevated on several hard bolsters so that, if he had been conscious, he would have looked down on himself lying on the bed. One last task: Jade took a needle and thread, picked up one eyelid, pulled it back until it touched the brow, then sewed one to the other with a dozen quick stitches. She sewed the second eye open.

  Around the room she went to light all the lamps, their wicks trimmed to give off brilliant flames without any smoke. She dressed herself in her ordinary black trousers and jacket, and sat on the chair to wait. He was breathing, but stertorously, and the open eyes were oblivious, unseeing. It took half an hour for him to rouse, which he did retching. But he hadn’t eaten since lunch time and his digestion was excellent, so the retching remained dry.

  He came to stupidly, thrashing vainly for leverage until his eyes encountered Jade sitting on the chair. Quietening, he let his hands and fingers fiddle inside the home-made straitjacket, wondering fuzzily why he couldn’t seem to free them from restraint. In all his life he had never seen a garment like the one that now wrapped him around from neck to waist and confined his arms inside sleeves that crossed over each other, blind ends sewn together so there was no way out. Nor could he free his legs, their ankles tethered to the bottom of the bed. Or blink his eyes—why couldn’t he blink his eyes?

  “What?” he gasped, trying to focus on Jade. “What?”

  She rose to her feet and stood over him. “You have to answer, Sam O’Donnell.”

  “What? What?”

  “It is too soon,” she said, and returned to the chair.

  Only when he opened his mouth to scream did she move again. She popped a little cork ball between his lips, then tied a piece of cloth across his mouth to keep the ball inside it. Screaming was impossible; he had to save all his energy to breathe through his straining, flaring nostrils.

  Back to the bed came Jade with a thin filleting knife. “You ruined my baby,” she said, fingering the knife. “You took an innocent little child and raped her, Sam O’Donnell.” She sneered. “O
h, yes, I know what you’d say! That she asked for it, that she wanted it. And her with the mind of a little child. You raped an innocent, defenseless child, and you will pay.”

  Frantic mumblings poured from his gagged mouth while his head rocked from side to side and his body heaved, but Jade took no notice. She lifted the knife, passed it many times in front of his gaze, and smiled the smile of the tiger.

  His horrified, bulging eyes could only watch—what had she done to them, that he couldn’t close them? Instead of closing them, he had to follow her movement as she went down the bed two feet and picked up his genitals in her left hand. She took a long time to perform the amputation, teasing his flesh with the knife, beading a red bubble, withdrawing, teasing again, cutting off the scrotum first, then the penis as he thrashed and silently howled his anguish to nothing, to no one. Jade let her grisly trophy bleed out on to his chest, then stepped back, penis and scrotum in her left hand, the knife in her right dripping blood on to the floor. Blood spurted, but not with the crazy jet of a severed arm or leg; powerless, Sam O’Donnell could only look at the red pit in his groin where his genitals had grown and watch his life force drain away until sight was stripped from his still open eyes.

  All night Jade sat holding her sticky prize while Anna’s seducer slowly bled to death. Only when light stole through the cracks in the shutters did she move, get up from the chair and go to the bed to look down on the ravaged face of Sam O’Donnell, his eyes rolled back in his head, the gag soaked with his saliva, tears and snot.

  Then she left the room, closed the door behind her and looked for the dog. There! Stiff and stark, it lay beside the poisoned meat she had left for it. Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Rover.