“I'm sorry,” I said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”
I was thinking about Sean and about Harry, but also about Ludo.
“Don't be sorry,” he said, stroking my hair. “You haven't done anything. You don't have to do anything. It's all right, it's all right. We won't do anything.”
But then I moved my hand. I brushed against the front of his chinos. I looked down. I could see that he had an erection. He looked down as well and said, “Sorry,” and laughed.
The very callousness of his arousal while I was weeping changed something within me. I knew that he was a good and a kind man, but his body was beyond morality, and it craved. I could feel the slow breaths, the gentle heaving of my sobs quicken. Tears still came to my eyes, but now my heart was beating more urgently. My hand stayed on his crotch. I felt and cupped his cock. I worked my hand down the top of his trousers and pulled the end, thick and blunt, clear of his waistband. But it was too tight for me to get a proper hold, so I undid his belt and unbuttoned him. I didn't want to kiss him or to look at his face. I slid off the bed and knelt between his legs, and then took his cock in my mouth. It felt like I had to stretch my mouth to fit it. I drew around him, down the shaft until I felt that I might gag. I could hear his breath, harsh and ragged. Still with his cock in my mouth, I pulled and pushed his pants down. There was no finesse here, none of the tricks that we learn, the fluttering, the teasing: this was simply a matter of getting as much of him inside my mouth as I could, gorging myself.
“Come up,” he gasped. “You don't need to do this. I want … your face here. Kiss me.”
He was shaking now, and I sensed that he would soon come. I didn't want that, yet, and so I drew the length of him from my mouth and pushed him onto the bed and kissed him. We kissed and pulled ourselves out of our clothes. I was wearing stockings, and when he tried to take them off, I told him to leave them. He wanted to go down on me, but again, I told him “no.” I pushed him down and sat across him, feeling his cock slide between my legs. My lips were parted, and I nestled him in the groove and slowly drew myself backward and forward. At the end of each pass, he brushed my clitoris, and I felt it swell in response, filling with blood, filling with the hardness it caught from him. Again, I felt that he was going to come, was reaching the point where he could never hold back. It had to be now. I reached down between us, took him between my finger and thumb, and put his tip between my lips. Almost for the first time, I looked at his face. His eyes were shut; his mouth was agape, but tight and tense as his cock. I knew that he was coming, that already his balls were beginning to pump, that his cum would be surging on its way, that no force on earth could now stop it, and I sat back on him, thrusting him deep within me. He groaned and made inchoate animal noises, and I felt his cock pulse, felt the ridges and veins thrum with energy. Of course, you can't feel the spurt of cum itself, but I sensed immediately the relaxing of tension, felt his cock lose its iron heart, begin its slow retreat. Now again I had to be quick. I changed my position, forcing my clitoris against his pubic bone. He opened his eyes. There was pain there. But I wasn't going to stop. I ground myself into him, beating my clitoris against the hard bone. He moaned again, and I moaned with him. I kissed him, bit his lips, bit his tongue.
“Help me,” I said, and he took my buttocks in his big hands, his rough hands, and pulled me yet more violently onto himself, working and grinding with me. It was a desperate race. I could feel him slipping from me. His face was anguished, and he groaned now in real pain. And then, just as the soft mass of him fell from me, my back arched and I came.
I looked down at his face. It was smeared with blood from his lips and tongue. And then I looked between us at the bed. There was blood everywhere, thick, viscous clots. On the sheets, on his thighs, on his stomach. For a second, I thought our fuck and the power of my orgasm had burst some internal organ, that I was going to die from sex, here, on this bed. And then with a laugh, a horrible, croaking laugh, I realized it was my period.
“Oops,” I said.
SEANJOURNALFOURTEEN.DOC
THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT TO THE RESCUE
I've been dreading this ever since we first moved in here. The apartment was big but needed things done to it. The “galley” (think slave rather than luxury yacht) kitchen was designed for some strange race of impossibly tall, impossibly thin beings. Opening any cupboard door would inevitably mean disabling some crucial part of the kitchen, and squeezing two people in there was only possible if they were having sex or fighting. There were places, hidden places, where years of fluff and sticky matter had accumulated, and reaching for a glass or plate or soup pot meant coming away with a smear of black, oily something-or-other on your forearm.
In the rest of the apartment, there were too many little rooms, and even I could see that brown hessian stuff that covered the walls was not, in any sense in contemporary or historical usage, good. (Is brown hessian stuff the same thing as brown hessian? What is hessian? Why do I think that the stuff is brown hessian stuff? Have I somehow absorbed some home-improvement/style-type information from Celeste's pile of magazines, even though I only ever flicked through them once to see if there was a problem page or bra adverts or anything about computers?)
This—the grunge, the crud, the cupboards, the hessian—wasn't why we'd moved, and so I knew that things would have to be done; I knew that walls would be torn down, that kitchens would translocate.
If that had been all that was going to happen, then my heart would not have been so heavy. But it wasn't all. It soon became clear even to me that we, I, couldn't cohabit with the destruction. The choice was stark: find rented accommodation or move in with Celeste's parents, who lived outside London in the quaint little commuter town of Amersham.
Looking at rental, the sums just didn't stack up. Every penny we had was being plowed into the refurb. Staying at Celeste's parents’ would, at least, keep us solvent. And only a train ride away from civilization.
And now the time had come.
We began moving things that we'd need on Sunday. I was a bit hungover after the late night of football. I woke up to find myself alone. Padding around the apartment, I finally found Celeste in the spare room, asleep. I brought her in some fresh coffee.
“You must have come in late,” I said, rumpling her hair.
“Yes. I didn't want to wake you, so I slept in here. You don't mind?”
“No, it was sweet of you.”
Packing's always a melancholy business. Throwing stuff away even more so. Everything we had was going to have to be stored away in the back three rooms: our bedroom, Harry's, and Celeste's dressing room. That meant that the clutter of our lives, the stuff that our lives were made of, had to go. I took three boxes of books to a charity shop. Good-bye the fruits of my attempt to find a decent work of science fiction, and farewell also the naval adventure stories that had kept me company since I was a teenager. Old shoes, coats of yesteryear, baggy shorts, buttonless shirts, all went the same way.
Harry toddled around, taking things out of boxes, putting things in boxes, putting boxes in boxes, putting himself in boxes. He cried savagely when he realized that some of his toys were being designated for community recyclement. Broken action figures and plastic crap from Happy Meals were fought over like sections of trench at the battle of the Somme. In the end, I had to take him out so that Celeste could complete her work of necessary destruction.
I decided to go swimming. Harry didn't like swimming: it involved getting wet, and that always made him cry. But he could be bribed into it with the promise of an Ed's Easy Diner malt milk shake—and no, not the kids’ one, but a full-size daddy version, bucket-big, thick as hot cheese. He was still sobbing when I got him into the elevator. It was warm, so he had on only a little blue jacket and some shapeless pants. Now that he's more or less potty-trained, his little bottom seems so sleek in his pants, without the ballooning mass of diaper giving him Hottentot buttocks.
“Helmet on,” I said, waving his newish Pooh-st
enciled protective headgear before him. We'd been cycling around as our preferred method of locomotion for about a month. It scared us all, but it was fast and cheap and gave me the thighs of a Titan.
It was also, however, the cause of my greatest-ever embarrassment, an embarrassment that towers above all the others in a life rich in humiliation. You have to bear in mind the fact that, from the front, shielded by my frantically pedaling form, Harry was invisible, and so I'd often get odd looks from pedestrians who thought I was a nutter, talking to myself loudly about wees and poos, about chicken nuggets, about Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po. Well, one day I was cycling along the Finchley Road—always a hair-raising thing to do, because of the thundering traffic, and all the more so with Harry wriggling and squirming behind me like an unfastened maggot. I put a hand back, blindly, to make sure he hadn't unhooked his straps, and he decided it might be fun to grab it.
“Monkey! Monkey!” I screamed, in a jokey way, at the top of my voice. “Monkey! Monkey!” I added, to drive home the point that he was a being a monkey.
And then I saw where we were. Right on the Finchley Road, there is a Baptist chapel. At just this time on a Sunday morning, the respectable matriarchs and patriarchs of the local Caribbean community emerge from their worship. And there they were, in their smart suits and bright dresses and big hats, the children well behaved and as neat as their elders. A spectacle to make you glad that there was still decency and respect in the world. If they were to start building a barn, you'd want to go and help them, bringing water for the menfolk, laughing with the women doing the baking.
And here I was, some punk, some godless hooligan, riding by, screaming “monkey monkey monkey monkey” at the top of my lungs. I managed to catch the look of forbearance on the face of one old gentleman, a man who'd spent, I imagined—oh, how I imagined—his life serving his country, his community; taking care of his family, seeing that his children were brought up the right way; taking on his once broad back the lashes of a society that had summoned and then spurned him. Well, he had seen the promised land, but no, he wouldn't be making it, not now, not when this could still happen, right here in front of his own church.
I should have gone back and explained. Instead, I found my now familiar place on the kitchen wall and pressed my head against it for one full episode of Sesame Street.
Where was I? Swimming. His helmet. The helmet was still way too big for him, and I put one of his bobbleless bobble hats underneath it to help the fit.
“Now Daddy first,” he said.
My helmet was considerably less cool than his. There was no mirror in the bike shop, and I had picked the cheapest they had in stock. It was an inoffensive gray, but the mirror at home showed it to have an extraordinarily high dome, which made me look like the passenger in a 1950s motorcycle sidecar. But Harry would only wear his if I wore mine.
We emerged out of the elevator at the bottom, and the crazy woman who lives on the ground floor was there, as she usually was, smoking in her dressing gown. She had the biggest hair of any human I'd ever seen. I pointed to my ludicrously well protected head and then at the elevator and said, “Can't be too careful.” She fled and slammed her heavy door behind her.
I strapped Harry into his seat. He had gone from despair to placid neutrality, comforted by forcing his daddy into the Helmet of Shame.
“Shake,” he said, or possibly, “Sheikh.”
“Swim first.”
“Milk shake.”
“Swim first. Then milk shake.”
He nodded decisively.
“Then milk shake okay.”
And then we were trundling down West End Lane, swerving around recumbent buses and lazing cars. I felt behind me with one hand to make sure he was really there. I felt a face, soft mouth, brushing lashes, little ears.
“Ow ow.”
“Sorry.”
I knew if I looked deeply enough in my pockets, I'd find some honey-coated peanuts. Fluff-coated honey-coated peanuts, that is. It's one of those truths. You know, the universal ones. If you ever eat peanuts (any of the kinds: plain, dry-roasted, fancy-coated), and you empty them in your pocket (either for ease of access while cycling or because you're at a party and you think you might need some for later), then no matter how many times you think you've eaten the last of them (and this may stretch over weeks or months), there'll always be a couple more, if only you dig deep enough.
And so there were. I passed them back, trying first to find his mouth, and then, when I hit only helmet and ear, his hand. If you've ever seen courting white-tailed sea eagles pass carrion from talon to talon in midflight, you can imagine the procedure. Not that I have—Ludo told me all about it.
We parked in the bike rack and took the escalator up to the first-floor level of the local mall. It was built a couple of years ago and has some kind of rain forest theme going on, which means the world's biggest fake plants, and fish tanks full of sad-looking tropical fish, and everywhere an eerie recorded birdsong, like the keening of lost souls. I don't know if it was part of the original plan or just some kind of indictment of modern society, but apart from the sports center, a discount bookshop, and the supermarket, the place has nothing but fast-food outlets.
I hated being a member of the private health club. It seemed to me that it meant that I had become one of Us, one of the ones who didn't want to have to be in the same water or even breathe the same air as the grim moving mass of humanity. I'd always prided myself on retaining my Themness, my place among the toilers and the strugglers, my face pressed against the glass, looking in. But the council was closing down the local public pool, and my sciatica needed its thrice-weekly aquatic workout. Plus Harry and the touted benefits of swimming for toddlers. We actually felt quite guilty about not taking him as a baby, and he was sure to be weak and mentally retarded as a result.
The sports center changing rooms were certainly warmer than the stinking clammy chill of the municipal pool, and you didn't have the constant sensation of verruca viruses, fungal spores, and bilharzia worms trying to bore their way into your feet. And the pool did have a slightly lower piss-to-water ratio, although that in turn was counterbalanced by the fact that it was often coated by an oily slick of makeup from the posh women who sidestroked tortuously back and forth and who clearly felt themselves too perfect to require a pre-swim shower.
Harry played hide-and-seek in the lockers as I got myself suited up. There were usually a few dads with kids on a Sunday, doing their duty. I'd noticed that the men with kids were always loose-fleshed, pasty, spindly of leg, contrasting with the taut and muscled forms of the preening, childless figures around them. Their genitals seemed oddly shrunken and formless, as though reduced now to the purely excretory part of their earlier dual functionality. I couldn't help but look at myself in the mirror. I was in transition. I was becoming one of the dough boys, one of the old men at the pool.
I don't think that I'm a vain man, but this slow dissipation was cruel and sad, and it pierced me. Perhaps even worse was the loss of elegance. I'd noticed that my movements now were coarse and angular, where once they had been fluid and sinewy. When I ran for a bus, the former harmony of levers and pistons had deteriorated into a random flapping, like a shot crow. I sometimes felt as though all my bones had been removed and replaced in the wrong order, and so everything was too long, too short, too narrow, too thick.
“Let's shower,” I said to Harry when I finally found him. He was around a corner staring hard at a short man I assumed to be Greek, hirsute as a teddy bear from neck to ankles.
“Hairy,” said Harry, and I smiled at the man. Rather than smile back, he scowled, Greekly. Perhaps he had hair ishoos. I hoped the miserable fucker's life was ruined by his self-consciousness about his disgusting hairy back.
I held Harry in my arms under the shower. It was always his favorite bit. He clung to me tightly, his arms around my neck, his legs monkeylike around my chest.
“Hot.”
“I'll cooler it.”
We took his G.I. Joe scuba diver into the pool. It was as warm as a bath. Wealthy divorcées cruised slow as old lava, straining to keep their face-lifts clear of the water. Plumbing the depths of aquatic uncoolness, I had to keep my glasses on—an annoying but necessary precaution if Harry were not to drown, even in the kiddie bit of the pool, semisegregated down at one end.
“Home now,” he said, once we were in. At least we'd made it into the water before he decided he'd had enough. It came up to his neck, and I had to kneel to play with him.
“Let's do some swimming.”
I pulled him around by the arms, and he screamed out in misery. People stared at me. I tried hard to look like a kindly father and not a child murderer.
“Don't do dat,” said Harry.
It was his new favorite. He accompanied it with a finger-wagging gesture. Quite cute, really. Where had it come from? School? Celeste?
So I stopped pulling him around, and he waded off slowly, curiously regal with the water his robe, to take a toy boat from another child. I said “Sorry” to the mother or nanny, who blinked at me. We went on to collect a bucket, a ball, and a duck, leaving a trail of misery behind us, literally in our wake. Harry now had more than he could carry, which was wearisome for him. I tried to help by giving back some of his booty, but that made him wail along with the victims according to some polyphonic system of his own devising, but not unrelated to the twelve-tone scale employed by Schoenberg in such masterworks as Moses und Aron and Shut Up, You Fucking Noisy Tuneless German Bastard.
Then Harry decided that he wanted to climb out of the pool and career Ben Hur-style around the perimeter. I thought it might be more dignified to try to track him from the water, so as he skipped around the shore, I waded below him, ready to catch him should he slip. He took the corners at a terrific speed, hopping on one leg to maintain his balance, and it was all I could do to keep up. Trying to keep at least one eye on Harry, I had to surge and swerve and barge past the adult swimmers at berth between their laborious lengths.
The Marriage Diaries Page 16
