“So foolish,” she said more to herself.
“What is?” His voice came from behind her head.
“We don’t even know each other. I mean, all I know about you is your name, really. I don’t know what you do—or what you did. I don’t even know your bloody age!”
“Thirty-eight,” he replied.
“Well, that’s a start.” She lifted her own gaze away from his monstrous manhood, which was stirring more thickly beneath her touch and looked up at him. “But I want more.”
“Be careful what you wish for.” His tone was more clipped this time. A warning.
“But don’t you want to know about me?” she asked, pleaded even.
“Of course.” He raised both arms behind his head and looked down at her. She couldn’t decipher his stare this morning: though they had barely known each other for more than days, already his sudden mood shifts, from apparent passion to a cool appraisal, were disturbing her more than she cared to admit. “I want to know how you move, how you feel. I want to know how you cry out. I want to know what your animal self is.”
“But what about what I do? My art, for example? Where I work?”
“Your art I’m sure I’ll see—I’ll experience it when you produce it. As for your work—is that really important?”
She frowned at this, sulking slightly. “Well, I guess not. I’m a nobody, really.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
He sighed and looked back at the ceiling. “I really don’t appreciate these kinds of games,” he told her. “Fucking brilliant. I tell you to have a safe word, but I forget to reserve one for myself.”
“I just want to know about you, that’s all. Okay, if you won’t tell me about what you do, what about that photo that I saw on the first day I came here. It’s quite clear why you’re interested in me. Was she your wife?”
“Don’t do this.”
“But really. I’m interested. Tell me, please. What happened to her?”
He did not reply but continued to look up at the ceiling, his lips moving for a moment as though in silent prayer—or curses. For a moment, Kris regretted the question, but still she could not leave it alone.
“I don’t mind, really,” she told him, lifting herself up onto her front now, slightly above him, her breasts hanging down and the nipples brushing against his chest. She could not resist, but at the same time she was aware that something was shifting beneath her, like tectonic plates far away in his body. “Tell me, please,” she whispered, this time a little nervous but at the same time insistent. During the night he had begun to dominate her physically. Now she wanted her payback in whatever form she could get it.
When he gazed back at her, his eyes flashed and her anxiety became something more pronounced. There was a determined look on his face.
“You want to know about me?” he asked. “You want to fucking know about me, little girl? I’ll fucking let you find out all about me—here, now.”
So saying, he slid sideways. Sensing that something was not quite right, Kris attempted to pull away but he grabbed her with his strong hands, refusing to let her go. His mouth was clamped tightly shut, a vice of grim resolve, and the loving light that had been in his eyes only a little while before when she awoke was now completely gone.
"What are you doing Daniel?" she asked anxiously. "You don't have to be so rough."
"Oh, but I do, little girl, don't I. We both know you like it rough."
Something in Daniel's words made Kris freeze, a trigger. Little girl hurt, little girl lost. For a second, the merest moment in time, Kris's heart experienced a fatal ambivalence to his words and actions, a struggle for mastery in herself. Then the censor inside her came down, prevented her from fighting at all—and Daniel mistook her new passivity for submission.
His hands were strong as he pushed her around so that Kris’s heart was beating even faster now, a genuine panic and anger coming over her. She didn’t want to fight him, but this was wrong and so, finally, she started to struggle, her slender arms feeble in his powerful grasp. As she gave a gasp, he flung her sideways onto her front. She tried to push herself up but once again he took hold of her wrist, forcing her down and half rolling on her so that the weight of his body trapped her on the bed.
As he forced his knee between her thighs, her welt-marked, bruised buttocks pushed upwards against his belly, his thick, heavy cock pressing in the crease of her cheeks, she floundered beneath him, crying out.
“Please! Daniel! Please! Fucking stop! Will you stop it?” She was becoming furious now, and in her desperation her fear rose as she felt his erection stiffening even further, becoming something monstrous in her back.
He was on top of her now, his body much larger than hers. As she struggled to fight with her wrists, he held her down easily, pulling back one arm so that it was painfully pinned up behind her, the weight of his body on hurting her more when she struggled.
“Fucking hell, Daniel!” she shouted. “Just stop it now!”
He did not listen, however. Releasing her other wrist, she could feel him moving his hand behind her head. Her free hand flailed and sought for some purchase, some object or weapon even, and she screamed in panic when she felt his hand return to her buttocks, squeezing between the cleft, rubbing wet spittle around her anus.
“No! No!” she shouted, as much furious as frightened. “Not that! You bastard! Fucking hell! Just stop it!”
He paid her no heed, but pressed the head of his cock against her anus, began to use his weight on her. In desperation she had panicked, but now a moment of awful clarity emerged in the seconds before he could tear into her.
“Alfama! Daniel, Alfama! Please, stop! Please! Alfama, Daniel!”
The effect was almost instantaneous. He froze on top of her. She had begun to sob, but he did not console her, did not apologise. Instead, after a few moments lying above her, his body tense, he rolled off her and simply left the room.
She was crying—more from anger than fear, and when at last she climbed from the bed and pulled on a shirt and jeans, her whole body was trembling.
Daniel was outside the front door of the cottage, utterly naked and staring at the distant hills. His broad back was turned to her, a dark silhouette as she approached the bright outline of the doorway. She was shivering, watching him as he turned his gaze to her from the far off horizon. At last she spoke.
“Would you have continued? If I hadn’t... hadn’t said it?”
“I don't know.” His voice was brittle, restrained. “I lost control then. That's... unusual for me. A first time, in fact, but then, you just being you brings up things that are dangerous for me to know. I told you how to stop me. If you hadn’t the wit—nor the will—to understand it is what you want...” The rest of his sentence faded away on the air.
At this, her anger and rage suddenly boiled up inside her. “Who the fuck are you, Daniel? What gives you the fucking right to do this?” Leaping forward from the doorway, she hit him as hard as she could on the back—making him stagger slightly more by luck than by force. “What gives you the fucking right?”
As she continued to punch him, for a while he stood with his back to her and absorbed her blows silently. Then, as she drew back her arm for a final ineffectual blow, he suddenly turned and grabbed hold of her wrist, making her suck in her air in fear and surprise.
“You do,” he told her. “You do, if you want it that way.” His voice was quiet. “Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you’re not the one after all. But you give me the right to do everything—if you want it.”
He released her hand and strode back into the house. She fought back the tears, her head a maelstrom of emotions as she heard him moving about upstairs. When he returned down a few moments later, dressed in trousers and a shirt of his own, she had not shifted from the spot where he left her.
“I told you I’d push you,” he said to her, his voice calm, assured, though she did not look
at him while he spoke. “And I gave you the key to stopping me. If I surprised you... perhaps I am sorry, though that’s not in my nature. It’s just the way it is. I’m going for a little while. If you want to leave... well, you know where your car keys are. Don’t worry. I’ll make sure all your belongings are returned to Dalrigh. There’s no need for you to come back here.”
She kept her head faced downwards, not out of shame nor even fear of him, but once more full of the feelings of frustration and anger that were so familiar to her. As she heard the Land Rover driving away, she did not look up but, instead, stared down at her left hand, curled as it was in a fist. It felt to her at that moment as though her whole arm was sheathed in steel, a thick, immobile carapace that refused to allow her to move even had she desired to do so.
Chapter Nine
Returning to the croft, Kris stared for a few moments at her car keys hanging by the door. Her Toyota was still outside, the only vehicle now on the dirt track that led up to the house.
She felt numb. That in itself was not so much of a shock. What was perhaps so surprising to her was how calm she felt. Her anxiety was gone. It was not simply a realisation that the immediate threat had now departed, but also her armour was spreading across her whole body. This is what it did so often—it was her protection against real life, her apathy, her defence.
With a shrug, she raised her left arm and lifted her keys from the hook. Everything sensible told her to leave. It had been fun while it lasted, perhaps, but it was clear that Daniel was fucked up in some way and the chances were that she would get hurt if she stayed. She’d been hurt too many times.
Entering the interior of the house, she decided that she might as well get as many things as she could. She was not entirely sure where Daniel had deposited her phone—probably in the wardrobe in the bedroom, which was the only locked place she knew of for certain in Comrie, no doubt stashed away there with his precious photograph. Well, fuck him. She’d find some way of getting it back.
Crossing the living area, she paused by the table. Her pad still lay out on its wooden surface, open at one of the drawings of the birdman. Loplop. She paused. Loplop. Damn that bastard. He’d seen it when she couldn’t, and she suspected that sometimes—just sometimes—this stranger who had only come into her life barely a half dozen days before could see aspects of her more clearly than she could herself. She also had a suspicion that the mirror into Daniel Logan was more fascinating to her than she cared to admit.
Leave. Go. Get out.
Instead, she crossed to the shelf and picked up the volume of Yeats’s poetry that she had seen there. Flicking through the index, she found the page she was looking for.
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs...”
She nodded to herself, her mind balanced between amused cynicism and darker desires. She remembered something about Yeats, some lines that she had read long before and which had taken her fancy. Turning the pages, she found them again—ah, yes! There they were: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Was there some revelation at hand, a second coming?
Kris had stopped being surprised at her premeditated actions now. It was hard to explain, but she simply didn’t feel scared any more. A line had been crossed—a line that should never have been crossed—but she understood perhaps what had happened. She had poured fuel onto Daniel’s stifled conflagration, yes: this was not blaming herself—no, she had no intention of being a victim, but it was the realisation by a woman who so often acted according to necessity that desire, when finally given free reign, could be a dangerous thing.
She looked down at her left hand, lifting it from the book and rotating it in the air before her eyes like a foreign object. That was how it often felt to her, her drawing hand. Something alien, a body attached to her own, something with which she struggled and that refused to accept her will, no matter how hard she tried to control it. Sinister, literally. The hand of the devil refusing obedience, demanding rebellion. Like so many artists, she had followed the easy get-out that she had to wait for inspiration to strike, but Daniel was right about one thing: she needed discipline to let her desire flow freely. Necessity was not the enemy of desire, but its absolute condition.
Well, if he could see into her soul, then she would show him that she could see into his. Sitting down at the table, she dropped the book of verse by her side while placing her car keys on the wooden surface before picking up one of her charcoals that, she noted, Daniel had left so conveniently to hand. This, she knew, was not a mistake: after only a few days in Comrie, she realised that everything meticulously had its place.
Her first attempts to sketch were a failure. Her hand simply refused to obey. She tore out the pages and threw them to one side. Usually, this would be an admission of abjection, an excuse not to go on. But not today. Today she was not weak, like she usually was, but strong.
The breakthrough came when the birdman transformed into a more swanlike form, his head curving round towards the woman in his wings, those wings themselves ending in Ernst like preternatural fingers. And it was another Ernst painting that filled her imagination as she forced her left hand to work, The Robing of the Bride, a virgin in luxuriant, red-feathered robe, her round young belly pointed forward, pudenda covered and threatened by the rapacious spear of another bird man. He visits me every day, she thought to herself, recalling long lost words. He presented me with a heart in a cage, two petals three leaves, a flower and a young girl.
No need for symbolism in her own sketches. The thickening black lines of grit on white curled into a phallus of more Picasso-esque proportions, Minotaur mixed with the bird superior, a huge erection threatening and enticing the Leda caught up in her birdman’s wings. Her sex was hungry for its own ravager, but it was also strong enough—plenty strong—to devour the fragile spear that rose from the birdman’s loins. With a few careful, delicate flicks of her wrist, she threw down her own spears across the birdman’s face, marking him with precious scars.
So lost was she in her vision, she did not even notice how, at last, her left hand had become one with her. It was enough, rather, to draw.
This was how Daniel found her. She did not even hear him enter. As such, he was able to stand there for a few moments in complete silence, watching her sketch image after image of the birdman and his bride, a strange conflict of emotion in him as his eyes flickered between her intense expression, the curve of her pale neck and the way her hand moved effortlessly across the paper.
At last her conscious mind deigned to acknowledge him. As she looked up, she could not resist a smile—a knowing, utterly fearless smile, a little contemptuous even. Here, that smile seemed to say. I know who you are, with all your secrets. I’m not scared of you anymore. She said nothing.
“I thought you would be gone.”
She looked at her keys on the table. “I did consider it. It would probably be the most sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it.”
He nodded but didn’t reply.
“Where did you go?” she asked.
“Towards the hills. I walked for a while. It’s what I often do.”
“How romantic.” Even he could not ignore the sarcasm in her voice, and for a second his jaws clenched, one of his scars rippling.
“May I?” he asked, extending his arm towards the pad she held on her lap.
“Of course.” She passed it towards him, watching him intently with her blue eyes.
Neither of them spoke for a while until, at last, he said: “You capture me better than any photograph.”
She nodded. “I thought so too.” As though in surprise, she lifted up her left hand and stared at it, the finger tips blackened from the charcoal. “I thought I’d lost it, but evidently not. It looks as though I finally managed some mastery over this wayward bastard.”
Daniel’s own hands fell to his side, still clutching the image
s of the birdman. He turned to the window and looked out. “Mastery, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it. We meet another, in ourselves our outside the self, and we know it will be a fight till the death unless one submits. The master wants the slave to acknowledge, and the slave will be saved from death.”
“What a sweet worldview you have,” Kris observed ironically.
This made Daniel laugh, despite himself. “And of course, it never works. The master really wants to be acknowledged by an equal, and when the slave understands she can control the work of the master, then she is no longer a slave.”
“Is that what the world comes to for you?” Kris was genuinely curious for a moment. “Masters and slaves?”
“I... I thought so. But I’m not so sure.” He looked back at her. “I fucked up, didn’t I. Too much, too fast.” He shrugged. “It’s been a long time. Too long, really...”
Realising this was going to be the nearest she would receive to an apology, Kris simply nodded. She was quiet for a moment and then said: “She was your wife, wasn’t she.” It was a statement rather than a question.
It was Daniel’s turn to nod.
“What happened to her?”
“She died.”
“I’m sorry.” Kris paused. “How did it happen?”
“I would rather not say.” Daniel slowly turned and placed the drawings on the table, before lowering himself to the sofa across from Kris. His face was implacable, but she understood that this was to prevent a display of grief rather than to impose any control on her.
“How long were you married?”
“Ten years, nearly. I’m sorry. I’ld prefer not to speak about it at all.”
“Of course.”
Both of them sat there in silence for a while. It was Daniel who finally spoke.
“Do you want to go?”
By way of reply, she picked up her keys and handed them to him. “You can put those up by the hook again. I’ll take them if I need them, but for the moment I think I’d prefer to stay here and draw. It’s been a long time, a very long time.”
Fractured Crystal: Sapphires and Submission Page 8
