by Wendy Holden
Cassandra switched off her Dictaphone and paused. Could cocks be both throbbing and tumescent? She wasn’t even sure she knew what tumescent meant. Was it a bit like fluorescent? she wondered.
Whichever way you looked at it, it certainly put the dick into Dictaphone. Which her machine wasn’t really, not in the strictest sense of the word; but cassette recorders were all they had had in Ullapool, the point in the journey where Cassandra realised the floodgates of literary inspiration were opening once more. Like a glacier in the sun, her writer’s block seemed to have melted. She was beginning to have ideas again.
This was a relief, explaining as it did the persistent and rather unpleasant erotic fantasies that had coloured her dreams over the two preceding nights. As it was, she certainly intended to use the scene involving the horse, the dog, and the masturbating hermaphrodites in A Passionate Lover, although, as she had left the protagonist in a Knightsbridge office block, it was difficult to see exactly where, so to speak, they would all fit in.
Although in no circumstances could the new flow of ideas be described as a torrent, Cassandra was nonetheless as puzzled as she was pleased by its advent. Perhaps the long hours she had spent driving the denim-seated Disco and poring, largely in vain, over maps had used up her conscious mind and freed up her id for creative activity? Maybe books conformed to similar physical principles as a watched kettle; a constantly monitored steamy novel constantly never got to the boil either. But this couldn’t be right—all the driving had, after all, cut her off from the gin bottle. The fact of her precious son’s being in the car with her had stopped Cassandra drinking anything stronger than the occasional Perrier or Diet Coke ever since the Scottish trip had started. Oddly enough, now she came to think of it, it had been around that time she had first been aware of the occasional plot idea struggling to get through. But that, Cassandra reasoned, must be impossible. Gin was the source from which all her inspiration had traditionally flowed. Wasn’t it?
Pulsating cock, Cassandra suddenly thought. That was it. She whipped out her Dictaphone and, still keeping one hand on the wheel, whispered fervently into it, whilst casting a nervous glance in the driving mirror to make sure that Zak was still asleep in the back seat. She thought she saw his eyelids flicker, but no, he was sleeping like a baby, bless him. As he had been, interestingly enough, ever since she’d started working this way. She’d never known him to be so tired. It seemed all she had to do to keep him quiet was get out her Dictaphone; something in the cadences of her voice, something redolent of the womb, she assumed, lulled him to sleep. At first, she’d been afraid he was listening but he’d assured her he wasn’t, and Zak was always a very truthful boy.
Oh yes, thought Cassandra as she bowled merrily past a passing place and forced yet another approaching farmer to reverse for miles to the last one. Some writers would find muttering erotic scenes into a tape recorder while driving around some island off the coast of northwest Scotland something of an eccentric way to go about one’s business. But it was working very well for her.
Time to celebrate, Cassandra decided. Nonalcoholically, of course. But it would be nice just to be near some real drink, just to look at it. Smell it, even. The small and rather ugly little village she was driving through—Orrible, it seemed rather aptly to be called, judging from the sign she had shot past at its entrance—did not, on the face of it, have much in the way of hostelries. But Cassandra could smell booze a mile off and, if she was not very much mistaken, that building by the side of the road that looked rather like a loo was in fact a pub. Deciding to leave Zak in the car—he looked so peaceful—she closed the door of the Disco as quietly as she could and tottered across the road in her skin-tight ponyskin jeans and leopardskin high-heeled ankle boots.
Cassandra had not, from the moment she had arrived in Scotland, seen any need whatsoever to drop her standards of dress. If Scottish women’s idea of style was something that didn’t show the cat hairs, that was fine by her, as long as she wasn’t expected to follow suit. Especially if the suit was tweed, a fabric hideously reminiscent of Mrs. Gosschalk. Cassandra was prepared to go as far as cashmere, but no further. Unless you were talking pashmina.
She pushed open the toilet-glass door. A fug of smoke and a deafening silence greeted her. Cassandra swallowed on catching sight of the occupants. She’d never seen such a collection of inbreds—at least, not since the last St. Midas’s sports day.
Letting the door slam loudly behind her, Cassandra crossed the thick, dusty, and hostile space between the threshold and the bar. “A glass of mineral water, please,” she commanded. From beneath brows so protruding they seemed almost to need scaffolding, the landlord shot her a suspicious look. Unbowed, Cassandra met it with a freezing stare.
“We daen’t have mineral water,” he growled. “This is a pub. Nae a health farm.”
“That,” Cassandra snapped back, “is obvious enough.” She fixed the landlord with a gimlet eye, aware that this was a trial of sorts, a test of nerve. High Noon, although her current Cooper aspirations were rather more Jilly than Gary.
“No mineral water—that’s ridiculous.” Cassandra’s eye did not move from mine host’s. “You’re missing out on a potential gold mine. Only last week I took my son to a restaurant where there was a mineral water menu. You could,” Cassandra blasted, “mix two or even three different waters in the same glass to make a cocktail.”
The landlord looked stonier than ever, but Cassandra did not flinch. Mine host indeed. Mean host, more like. She recognised this belligerent, macho, brazen-it-out stare. It reminded her of Jett, which, free association being what it is, also reminded her of Jett being so bloody inconsiderate as to hit number one at the precise time she had chosen to divorce him. The memory packed her backbone with ice and her voice with fire.
“Well, as you haven’t got any mineral water,” she hissed, “I’ll have a Diet Coke.”
Somewhere in the depths beneath the bar counter, mean host detached the tab from a can with a venomous rip.
A few minutes later, as she tottered, drink in hand, across the rickety, sawdust-and-fag-strewn wooden floor, Cassandra stopped dead. The room, which had started to murmur to itself again, immediately fell silent. The ice cubes clanked belligerently together in Cassandra’s glass as she turned and hit the landlord straight between the eyes with a glare like a laser.
“This is not Diet Coke.” She stalked back to the bar and slammed her drink down on its sticky surface. Mine host took an involuntary step back. “This,” Cassandra snarled, brandishing the glass, her face a mask of cold fury, “is fat Coke. Which means”—she leant over the bar, pressing her face as close to the alarmed landlord’s as she could—“that you have knowingly force fed me a total of one hundred and twenty calories I had not allowed for. Force fed me. Without my say-so, permission, or go-ahead.” She waited, then delivered the coup de grâce. “For all you know, I could be a diabetic,” she roared at the by now quite openly cowering landlord. “I could sue you.”
She’d forgotten how good it felt to reduce a man to rubble. Ten minutes later, Cassandra sat, satisfied and reflective, in an inglenook by the pub’s rather odd fire which seemed to be burning strips of lawn. A rather sorry-looking blaze, on the whole. But nowhere near, Cassandra thought triumphantly, as sorry as the landlord had looked when she’d finished with him. After the magic word “sue” had been uttered, he’d showered Cassandra with every gin bottle in the house in an attempt to placate her.
Cassandra had decided to limit herself to one sip only. Just for appearance’s sake. Just to be polite. It was the least she could do. After the way she had just humiliated him, the landlord would probably have to sell up and leave, or bear the tale’s constant repetition for the next thousand years or so. Probably nothing so exciting had happened since Mel Gibson had dropped by in the thirteenth century to raise his troops.
She took a sip. And then another. Was there anything quite like th
at powerful shot of juniper-infused spirit ricocheting round one’s empty intestines? It was, Cassandra thought, finishing her third double in as many minutes, like the blissful reunion of lovers after many months apart. Like herself and A Passionate Lover, in fact. With his pulsating, throbbing, tumescent, fluorescent cock—no, no, that couldn’t be right. Perhaps pulsating wasn’t really the right word after all. If only she had a tyrannosaurus to look it up in. Funny how she couldn’t seem to think anymore. Again.
Plastering on her best grin, Cassandra leant over and shook the ancient, shrunken character slumped the other side of the inglenook, a white river of saliva running steadily down into his beard. “Shcuse me,” she boomed in a loud, shrill voice as MacLoggie lurched, terrified, back into wakefulness. Silence dropped like a stone on the rest of the bar. “Wonder if you could help me. Could you tell me…have you notished…Doesh your penis ever pulsate, throb, swell, and tumesh all at the shame time?”
Chapter Twenty-two
Stretching away on all sides, the wiry russet grass made the island seem like the broad back of a massive Highland cow. Anna had been walking for hours now, higher and higher, striding furiously so the pounding of the blood in her brain would be louder than the cacophony of her thoughts. She paused, panting.
Below her, the loch opened up like a giant silver oyster; beyond, the sea stretched into misty infinity, the horizon hidden by a grey stretch of storm cloud. It was, as usual, raining. Anna sat down at the summit and peered into the distance. She could see the village from here, the odd person—very odd person probably—moving about, and wondered if what Robbie had told her the previous day was true, about the island being cut off from civilisation for the first half of the century and its inhabitants having to mate with whatever came to hand. “They screwed anything. Animal, vegetable, or mineral.” Anna had wondered aloud what mineral Nanny’s mother had screwed. Robbie’s claim that she had been a Gloucestershire Old Spot didn’t quite ring true. Had he said Lincolnshire White, though, that would have been quite different.
She twisted her lips in what was half-smile, half-grimace. Geri’s lack of sympathy made her feel both vulnerable and foolish, her despairing stride round the island seemed increasingly the self-aggrandising act of a drama queen. Lear, of course, had strode the blasted heath in a much more convincing manner, but he had lost a whole kingdom and he did have Shakespeare arguing his case, which obviously helped. He’d never had to cope with Geri telling him to pull himself together and concentrate on the business opportunities.
But, loath as Anna was to admit it, in some ways Geri was right. Nanny was an annoying old monster but she was hardly life-threatening, even if she undoubtedly represented a higher than usual risk of salmonella. Even more irritatingly, Geri was right about Jamie. He hadn’t deliberately lied to her, there had just been facts he hadn’t bothered to reveal. Economical with the actualité, if you liked. As well as everything else. She hadn’t felt warm since she’d got here. And there had been bottles on the drinks tray whose only known exact contemporaries were in the wreck of the Titanic.
And it was pointless to blame everything on the engagement. After all, she’d been willing enough to go along with it; she, too, as Jamie had pointed out, had had her agenda. They were quits then, in a sense. And it was probably just as well she had found out that she was about to plight her troth to a pile of old stones before she did so. The love of Jamie’s life was undoubtedly Dampie; last night, he had been wildly excited by Geri’s increasingly drunken suggestions—about the castle, of course—especially her recommendation that he try and turn Dampie into the Glastonbury of the north and promote it as a rock venue. “Imagine,” Geri had shouted up into the chilly rafters of the sitting room, which no heat had penetrated since the great summer of 1538, “you could have floating stages in the loch.” Floodlight the castle in pink and purple. Have fireworks. It would be amazing.”
And then there were Geri’s other suggestions. The ones she had made to Anna over the cold egg on toast. It might be possible to stay at Dampie with Jamie and just be friends. But could she really settle for so little?
As for the taking lovers proposal, well, that really was foolish. Only someone, like Geri, who had been on the island a mere matter of hours, could have failed to notice the howling absence of suitable partners on Skul. The bearded poet suddenly slipped into her mind; yes, Robbie might have been a possibility. Witty, sensitive, poetic; she could tick all those boxes, but there was the problem of that permanent bad hair day on the end of his chin. Try as she might, Anna could never love a man with facial fungus, especially grown to that extent. It was impossible to imagine kissing him—she’d probably come out in a rash with the friction. Still, it was probably very useful for scouring pans.
Yes, thought Anna, looking over the wide, low-lit, sea-girt land around her, I should definitely stick to writing books rather than trying to live them. Somewhere along the line she had, quite literally, lost the plot. Whatever spanners Fate had thrown in her works in the past, at least she had always had her writing. It had comforted her through Seb, encouraged her through Cassandra. But since becoming engaged to Jamie, it had disappeared altogether. She thought ruefully of the diary buried in the rubbish bin.
Once she was writing again—and this time she planned actually to finish the wretched thing—everything else would fall into place, even if she had doubts that that place was Dampie. But that all lay in the future. Time now to get herself back on track. She would write, she needed to write; all she required was a little prod in the right direction. A little encouragement. She looked at her watch. She’d been here hours. But if she hurried, she could get to the village hall in time for Robbie MacAskill’s afternoon class.
***
“Fuck me. Fuck me. I want you to come inside me, big boy. Fuck me hard.”
Anna, about to push open the door of the village hall, drew back in embarrassed astonishment. The voice was a woman’s. Soft, Scots, and urgent with lust.
“That’s fantastic, Mrs. McLeod. Don’t stop.” Robbie. Anna’s stomach plunged with disappointment. For some reason, possibly the beard, it had never occurred to her that there might be a woman in Robbie’s life. Yet here he was with Mrs. McLeod, going at it like a steam train. A steam iron even. It might only be—Anna glanced at her wrist—a quarter to two, but presumably on Skul one had to get ones kicks where and when one could.
“I’m wet,” the voice continued. Anna felt white-hot knives of jealousy plunging into her stomach. There was, she realised, nothing like competition to make you realise you liked someone. And what competition. “Just feel how wet I am,” Mrs. McLeod panted. “I’m a river down here. Taste it, here, lick it off me. Oh, fuck me. Harder. I want you to come like a fire hose.”
Well, it certainly gave a whole new meaning to ironing board cover, thought Anna. What on earth did Mrs. McLeod look like, she wondered—a wild-haired Hebridean Carmen, no doubt, full-breasted, with a lusty glint in her eye. I should go, Anna thought as the Hebridean Carmen began once again to speak.
“Panting, running her tongue round her wet lips, and staring at him through hazel eyes glazed with lust, she ripped off her shirt. Her breasts sprang out like dogs let out for a walk—”
“Hang on a minute, Mrs. McLeod. I’m not sure that’s working. The image of dogs being let out for a walk is slightly at odds with the rest of the passage. And I’m not too wild about that fire hose either.”
“Are ye not, Mr. MacAskill?”
“No, well, the whole point of this exercise is to read aloud to see what works and what doesn’t,” said Robbie, completely matter-of-factly. “The problem with very erotic passages often is that they can sound slightly, well, excessive. The trick is to err on the side of believability. Otherwise you end up being awarded things like the Literary Review Bad Sex Award, which I don’t think you’d appreciate, Mrs. McLeod. Not least because you’d have to go to London to receive it, and you know what
you think of England.”
“Particularly when you lie back,” Anna murmured as, grinning in relief, she pushed the door wide open.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said, “but better to come late than never to come at all. As I’m sure Mrs. McLeod would agree—” she stopped short in amazement. “You’ve shaved your beard off.”
He looked so much better, she thought admiringly. Years younger. The excavations revealed a firm jaw and a wide, full-lipped, sensual mouth in the context of which the tombstone teeth looked considerably less fearsome. Rather than a handsome face, Robbie’s was a strong and a rather heroic one. The sort that remained set in the midst of the most violent hail or blizzard. The sort you could imagine rocks bouncing off.
Robbie clamped a hand to his naked chin and grinned sheepishly. “Yes. Thought it was getting a wee bit out of control. Any longer and I’d have needed a chainsaw to do it. Used up the village shop’s entire stock of Gillettes as it was. No one’s going to be able to shave their legs for a week until the new delivery comes over from Inverness. Sorry about that, Mrs. McLeod. Oh, have you met Mrs. McLeod, Anna…”
Hearing his low, warm voice pronounce her name was unexpectedly delicious. Suddenly aware she was gawping at Robbie like an idiot, Anna turned to shake hands. Mrs. McLeod was not the expected hair-tossing femme fatale, thrusting of breast, flashing of eye, and bent on removing local underwear for purposes entirely other than ironing, but a small, neatly-dressed woman, the only flashing thing about whom were small mauve-rimmed glasses. The only hint of Carmen about her was her hot-rollered, home-permed hair; to Anna’s amazement, she looked well over sixty. Her prose, it would seem, was just as blue as her rinse. And, far from being an avid leg-shaver, her lower calves were covered with thick stockings. In short, Mrs. McLeod looked as if she thought a leg wax was something one did to the nether regions of a dining table. She was also blushing violently.
