Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1

by Sonia Paige

  The hatch opens. ‘McPhearson, Nurse.’

  Beverly puts out her cigarette with her fingers and carefully stores the remainder in the pocket of her flowery skirt. As she lumbers to the door she mutters under her breath, ‘Sometime I feel angry. I feel vexed. I feel I’m gonna die.’

  After the door shuts, Debs comes back from the window and in passing spits out at me, ‘Fucking loud-mouthed bitch!’

  I decide to take that as a compliment. I think it’s partly meant as a compliment. I mutter ‘You can talk.’

  Debs climbs onto her bed and bangs her head against the wall three times.

  Mandy says, ‘Oh for Chrissake, I can’t stand this. Take my mind off it, somebody. Corinne, tell us about those blokes on the Greek island.’

  I turn to the wall and get back to drawing radial lines. ‘What?’

  Not more about those blokes. Can’t she see I’m busy?

  Mandy peers over from her bed next to mine. ‘Don’t you get bored of going round and round?’

  ‘If only I could get to the centre.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The centre of the circle,’ I say. ‘The centre of the web. Then I could slip through and be invisible. Freedom.’

  ‘How about getting to the end of the story?’

  I turn to her. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ says Mandy, ‘Sounds like the best bit was still to come. Put Debs out of her mood n’all.’

  ‘I don’t want to think. Just listen,’ says Debs. ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘You were in the tent with one of them’ says Mandy, ‘And then the other come in. Make it juicy, someone needs to lighten up.’

  I clasp my hand on my mouth. I don’t want to remember the rest.

  ‘Don’t muck us about,’ says Mandy. ‘Finish now you’ve started. Got a bit more life in you now n’all. You can do it.’ She gives me a wink.

  They are both looking at me. I feel cornered. I put my hand down and climb back onto my bed. Back to 1972. Back to that flimsy orange tent I would rather forget.

  ‘OK. It happened when I’d been living on the beach with Joris and Sigurd for a few weeks. There I was in the tent with Joris, in an intimate embrace…’

  ‘Busy at it, ‘ says Debs.

  The hatch slides open again. ‘Anyone for the list for massage class?’ I can hear the voice of the male officer leering through the small rectangle. ‘I’m told it’s very good.’

  ‘Put me down,’ says Mandy, ‘I’m going mad in here. I need to get out. I need something. What about you, Debs?’

  ‘They can stick their massage.’

  ‘Put my name down,’ I say.

  ‘Put down Bev too’, says Mandy. ‘That’s McPhearson, to you. It’s what she needs for her back.’

  After the hatch closes, there’s silence.

  ‘Go on, then,’ says Debs.

  I start again. ‘So it was one night on the beach. I was in the tent with Joris, when Sigurd put his head in round the door flap. I tried to protest, but Joris was on top of me and Sigurd just came in. He squeezed past us, and sat by my head. I didn’t know where to look. He bent down and started kissing the side of my face and blowing in my ear while Joris carried on ploughing away on top. I was confused, there were too many different messages. Then Sigurd used his tongue to get into my ear and I don’t remember much after that, though I know it was the first and only time I ever came with Joris.

  ‘Afterwards Joris slid away and lay beside me with his back to me like he always did. I should have felt satisfied but I didn’t. I felt I had been tricked into coming, against my will. I wished Sigurd would go away.

  ‘But he had other ideas. He slid down to lie alongside me on my other side and blew gently on my back. He planted raspberries between my shoulder blades. He ran his tongue down my spine. Then I felt something slipping in between my legs from behind and nosing its way into me. And he whispered in my ear “Can I?”

  Next minute he was inside, paddling in the pool Joris had left behind.

  I didn’t like it. But then I thought, what does it really matter? Might as well let him do what he wants. My body went limp. He slid around, in and out, teasing on the brink and then diving in again. He was playing with me. I didn’t protest.

  ‘Joris turned around again towards me and watched, stroking my face and hair and breasts. Sigurd did his thing for ages. Then he rolled me onto my front and came in from behind on top of me. Suddenly it wasn’t a game any more. He didn’t hurt me, but boy did he ram into me and he yelled as he came. For a moment there was something exquisite like the scent of jasmine in an English garden, but it seemed far away. By that time my body was spineless, I could have gone on for hours, and when he pulled out I felt like a squashed peach. I fell asleep between the two of them, sandwiched in sweat and skin.

  ‘In the morning Joris put on his clothes and went out to stir the fire into life. Sigurd decided to stir me. I felt drained and a bit sore, but before I knew it he was on top of me again and I let him in. I thought, why not? He amused himself ’till breakfast.’

  ‘He was a greedy boy, that one’ says Mandy. ‘So was you just putting up with all this or was you really getting off on it?’

  ‘I don’t think I knew the difference then,’ I admit to her. ‘After that, they often came into my tent at night together.’

  One would watch the other and then take his turn. They were always courteous. I remember hours of stoned lust in that little tent through the hours of darkness. Sometimes I lost track which one it was. Not always sure whose finger or penis or tongue I was feeling. Filling me with their fluids. Blocking every orifice in my body. Holding the loneliness at bay. Stopping up the emptiness left by the man I loved.

  I remember how I got to depend on it. ‘Sometimes when they didn’t come I missed them,’ I say. ‘It was like a drug. I got used to sleeping squashed tight between them, then waking feeling drained and sticky. Stains of serial sex on the sleeping bag.’

  ‘You was putting out too much, babe,’ says Mandy. ‘You should have told them to fuck off.’

  ‘I’d been hurt badly by someone. I needed love.’

  ‘They were just after the usual thing.’

  ‘It was the closest I could get.

  ‘Usually when I woke I used to go and wash in the sea. The water was so cold it gave my body a shape again. I could feel its edges.’

  When you go in the sea, it connects you with every other time you’ve been in the sea. I remembered not being allowed in the water as a child. Mum not wanting to get wet because it would mess up her hair. Perhaps that’s why in Greece I so loved being free to swim any time. The waves came at me like Joris and Sigurd did – impersonal, persistent, tugging at my body, sucking, pushing, washing me out with healing liquids.

  ‘Even in the summer?’ asks Debs. ‘That cold?’

  ‘What?’ Again? She’s obsessed with these details.

  ‘The water was that cold? I thought it’d be warm.’

  ‘Freezing,’ I say. ‘Sometimes I used to walk to a little shingle cove further down the beach, and lie there on my own with the waves splashing up onto the pebbles and lapping at my naked body. It touched me without wanting anything, it pulled away without rejecting me. My body was open to the elements, but I felt safe. I felt I was free.’

  ‘You wasn’t free, mate,’ says Mandy, ‘You was a sex slave.’

  ‘I’ll take the job,’ says Debs.

  ‘Neither of them ever forced me to do anything,’ I say.

  ‘Then you were a bloody nympho,’ says Mandy.

  ‘I was young.

  ‘During the day we behaved like strangers. We cooked, we sun-bathed. Sometimes I made sculptures in the sand, got covered all over with it and felt that pleasure of being really mucky like a ten-year-old.’

  Like I had always dreamed of. Remembering how as a kid it was always me alone on the beach on summer holidays. Her idea of seaside was sitting on the verandah of an expensive hote
l, surveying the esplanade. Wearing sunglasses in case anyone recognised her from the TV. Life was never safe for her unless it was plastered with Max Factor, gold earrings, Chanel and Cordon Bleu. I longed to get grubby all over with sand, to roll in it, to feel it on my skin… And on that Greek beach I did. Nobody to call me back. Nobody to tell me off. Then I’d run in and wash it off in the sea.

  ‘Sometimes Sigurd played sandcastles with me. Or he did handstands and cartwheels. He liked to go swimming in my bikini.

  ‘Once Joris met some French blokes in the village and brought them back to share the hash tea. We all sat up late round the fire, they sang French songs, then people were humming. After a bit I started to feel their voices moving inside me. I slipped out of the ring of the firelight into the dark and began to dance barefoot on the sand. I couldn’t see my limbs but I could feel them lifting and turning. The humming moved them. The voices like different instruments talking to different parts of my body, drawing them in to reaching and revolving. I don’t know how long I danced, no-one noticed I had gone. Then I went to my tent, zipped it up so no-one would come in, and lay there aching for the man I loved.

  ‘Every so often I put on my old blue cotton dress with the frill round the bottom and walked along the beach to the village. I did the shopping and I walked past the cafés where the old Greek men with moustaches sat for hours over their thimbleful of grainy black coffee. Past the tables where tourists in shorts and sunhats drank Nescafé and orange juice. Past the tables where well-off Greek families held court surrounded by their children and relatives. The Greeks were always polite. But often they looked at me strangely. Something separated me from all of them.

  ‘Once, in the shop, I bought a card to send to my school friend. She found it again recently and gave it back to me. It had a picture of ‘Hermes the God of Commerce’ as a Greek god in a loin cloth and a shirt collar and tie, with wings on his bowler hat and talking on the telephone. My friend worked as a translator for businesses, going abroad a lot, so I thought she’d like it. On the back I wrote, “Camping on the beach brings many unexpected pleasures. Weather is lovely. Wish I was here.”

  ‘Sometimes in the village I met the American boy from the boat, Walt. I swapped books with him so I had something new to read. There were days when the characters of the novels seemed more real than the beach I was lying on. Scott Fitzgerald fell through the bottom of the high life and landed on hard times. Ended up writing hack scripts in Hollywood, selling his soul and getting drunk. I remember reading The Pat Hobby Stories. They’re less elegant than his earlier stuff, but funnier, full of cynicism and despair, humiliation. They suited my mood.’ I look at the steamedup windows of the prison cell.

  Going nowhere. Like now.

  ‘So was you discussing books with them boys in between fucking?’ asks Mandy.

  ‘They didn’t read. I sometimes wondered what they thought about as they lay there. Then I gave up wondering, it wasn’t worth the effort.’

  The hatch opens. ‘Massage therapy session. Put your shoes on, girls.’

  Tuesday 18th December 2.30 pm

  Not far from the publisher’s office, Alex and Dora took their break in a café on Old Street. Although lunchtime was over, it was still crowded. The percussion of plates and cutlery was underscored by the grumbling stop-start of heavy traffic along the main road.

  ‘My problem is,’ Dora was perched at a high bar against the café window, eating a plate of Spanish omelette, ‘I’m not sure Giles really wants us to have a baby. Every time I mention it, he brings up money issues. Whenever it’s the right time of the month, he seems to avoid me.’ She swung her feet between the legs of the tall stool.

  Alex stared over her lunch into the misted window and the umbrellas passing on the pavement beyond. The snow kept falling. ‘The problem with you,’ she said, ‘is you don’t think strategically. Banging your head against the wall isn’t going to get you what you want. Confrontation isn’t always the most effective path.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look at the Soviet Union. They tried to legislate against religion and it didn’t work. People resisted and it just went underground. But in the West consumer culture has enticed people away from religion very successfully. Adverts and shiny new products did the job where repression failed. Capitalism is proof that seduction is by far the best way to impose your will.’

  ‘So what should I do about Giles?’

  ‘You have to work creatively on the material in hand.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Don’t pressurize him – work out how to bring him over another way. Have you tried titillating him, winding him up, making him jealous, making him feel insecure about you?’

  ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ Dora picked a pea out of her omelette.

  ‘It’s easy,’ said Alex, cleaning her plate. ‘For example, take him to see Almodovar’s Tie me Up! Tie me Down!, that might get him going. Leave frilly underwear around the house. Let him glimpse you naked at unlikely times. Wear suspenders. Go out when he’s not expecting it. Ring him from a pub where there’s loud music so it sounds like you’re having a riotous time without him. Let him think there might be another man in your life. That’ll bring him round quick.’

  ‘That won’t work.’

  ‘I was having trouble with Evan once,’ said Alex. ‘Years ago. He always had a wandering eye. So I got off with another bloke in the squat where I was living. Just a onenight stand. Evan was back like a shot.’

  ‘You could do that? Get off with someone you didn’t fancy?’

  ‘Who said I didn’t fancy him? It was a good night. Once he’d got his rocks off and the serious business started.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Dora.

  ‘I let him do his thing, then I kept him going for hours. I got him all steamed up until he didn’t know where he was. It was quite a night. Chest hair can be very useful for keeping a man awake.’

  ‘You’re a sadist,’ said Dora, ‘Did you enjoy that?’

  ‘Not half. He was an obliging soul, anyway. Just self-obsessed and incompetent outside the sheets, like most men. He didn’t complain. He had a night to remember too. He didn’t even seem bothered about his girlfriend, Ute.’

  ‘Strange name.’

  ‘She was German. She lived in the same house. At some point we heard her and the others coming in the front door. We hid under the covers and I got the giggles.’

  Dora put her knife and fork down on her unfinished meal. ‘“You are aawful,”’she said. There was a mixture of mock and genuine disapproval.

  ‘I could almost forgive him for never doing the washing up,’ said Alex. ‘But not quite. I think he believed the plates washed themselves. He’s the only man I know who managed to injure himself on a tin opener falling off a mattress. As my Dad always says, some people don’t have the sense they were born with.’

  Dora sipped her tea. ‘When my Mum put the Christmas decorations in the cake… I did eat one of the bits of plastic holly, by mistake.’

  ‘Like any marathon,’ said Alex, ‘it became an end in itself. But it did the trick and got Evan back. There’s nothing like another man’s attention to get your man to appreciate you.’

  ‘Mum did manage to call an ambulance for me before they came to take her off. They said with that and the other stuff she’d done she was a danger to herself and others,’ said Dora. ‘What about the bloke’s girlfriend?’

  ‘Ute? She was German, very polite about it. She was peeved, but after a while she took him back. She never said anything to me, but she didn’t thank me for it. Nobody likes a woman who takes what she wants.’

  Dora shook her head. ‘I couldn’t do anything like that.’

  ‘More fool you.’ Alex climbed off her stool, and picked up Dora’s things from the floor. ‘Shall we get back to work? I’m telling you: if you want what you want, you have to fight for it. In the 70s they used to say: “Make love, not war.” My version was: “Make love, join the war.”
Sex is a battle zone.’

  In the doorway of the café, Alex pulled her hood over her head. ‘Your mum never did get back to making ordinary cakes with normal ingredients, did she?’

  ‘No,’ said Dora.

  ‘Must have been tough,’ Alex said, and gave Dora the umbrella. ‘You’re going to get wet. Put it up then.’

  ‘Shan’t,’ said Dora, grabbing the brolly and setting off down the slushy pavement. She looked up at the sky, which was lighter. ‘Anyway, it’s clearing up. I’d say the sun might come out.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m Chairman Mao,’ said Alex, following her. ‘I’d say you’re imagining things. Not for the first time.’

  Dora stopped on the corner by the Hat and Feathers pub, framed against the fluted decorations etched into the glass of the doors. She put her hand out. ‘It’s not coming down any more,’ she persisted.

  She swung the brolly from her wrist and did a Charlie Chaplin walk along the pavement. As they approached a newsagents, a tall Asian man coming out with a bottle of milk stopped to stare. Dora didn’t notice him. She twirled the umbrella some more and pretended to wobble on the kerb. Just then a white office cleaners’ van pulled away from the traffic lights at speed, driving straight through a puddle at the side of the road and dousing Dora’s leopardskin trousers with dirty water.

  Dora stopped in her tracks. Alex cackled with laughter and collapsed against the newsagents’ window. Dora raised her umbrella to the sky in a gesture that said ‘What did I do?’

  At that moment, clouds shifted and a small gap showed in the thick grey cotton wool covering the sky, as if a giant had put a finger through. Briefly, a pale sun appeared.

  ‘Look!’ Dora cried to Alex, ‘I told you so!’

  She looked down at her soaked trousers and smirked. She pulled them away from her skin with mock disgust and waddled with bandy legs as if she had peed herself. Alex pointed and pulled a face. Dora guffawed, and clutched her stomach as she too fell against the newsagents’ window.

  The tall Asian man shook his head and walked away.