by Clay, Josie
The ring of the angle grinder and burnt dust now supplanted by the hum of tiny buzzy bodies, at which Prudence leapt, applauding.
I licked my fingers and massaged the black sternum smear, oiled with sweat. Crunching on cucumber, a drop from her glass lead my gaze between her breasts. She watched the concrete pillar with focused cataracts ...I knew she was playing. She leant back on her elbows, still surveying the piece and drew boot heel to buttock; a casual gesture, but explicit in our language. Ruminating on her next cut, she was inviting me to choose a facet: breast, cunt, anything I wanted. Rocking her knee patiently like a metronome.
Taking a nub of ice from my mouth, I set it in the hollow of her throat. She didn't flinch. Roughly, I tugged down the neckline of her vest and lifted out her breasts. They stood proudly in the open air, jacked up, snake-goddess style, perfect and pert.
It occurred to me I may have given them short shrift, not bestowing them with the attention they merited.
“Tits first, I'm not a slag” we had giggled, frequently cutting to the chase. Dale's small congenial tits rose and fell in the sunshine and I felt an indignant disquisition coming on.
'Breasts, by Minette Bracewell.
Breasts (if you said it too many times, the word became weird and unpronounceable). Breasts – ubiquitous, exposed, displayed, purloined, enhanced, inflated; their chief purpose overlooked, for the sake of 'phwoar!' And here were Dale's, tacit yet meaningful, provoking a complex swell of emotions, which could be encapsulated in one word – phwoar!. The end'.
Her nipples budded under the ice.
The full reveal came two days later. While she remained assured of its excellence (she rarely failed to meet her own high standards), my approval was paramount. She snapped off the dust sheet like the table cloth trick and watched my face closely.
It must be a trick after all; other than its shape, the object before me bore no resemblance to the pedantic humdrum. The dull grey now sanded and polished, revealing the plebby pebbles of ballast as noble constellations of malachite and tourmaline, cast in an obsidian sky. On its top, insignia indicating the correlation of time and light, decoding the enigma.
“It's a sundial!” My hands flew to fondle its burnished surface and to trace the letters carved around its belly like a belt. 'Post nubila phoebus', each character a different font, charting an evolution from Heraldic to Helvetica and so inferring the passing of ages. The clockwork comings and goings of the sun.
Latin at school had seized me, an OCD language if ever there was one. “After...” I began. Dale nodded encouragingly. “After ...the clouds ...the sun!” I looked up, pleased in every aspect, and a millennium of love passed between us in an eye-blink.
Chapter 13
Dale's mobile sounding the lolloping chime which disturbed us frequently since her website had gone live. “Hello?'” (a pause). “Shut the front door, you're kidding Jason?” She went outside where she shut the back door, boots pacing distracted laps around the deck and she let rip that war laugh, often and loud.
My face darkened with Othello thunder. She re-entered, smiling from a portal where I did not yet exist.
“That was a friend from college, Jason” she said in disbelief. “I haven't seen him in over twenty years”. She clocked my sullen mouth and flinty eyes. “You'll like him, Minky,. He's a lot like you in some ways”.
“How?” I said, attempting to unruffle my feathers.
“Well, he's funny and kind and really intelligent”.
This did nothing to relieve me.
“Did you go out together?”
“No, not really”
“Not really?”
“We were friends and we got drunk one night, mistake, and then he got a thing for me. It was awkward for a while but we got past it. Come on” she said, “don't be like that”.
Just as my feathers were flattening, her brain whirred. “I know” she said, “let's have a party”.
Glasses now necessary to pluck the whiskers on my chin and some fresh hairy hell around my nipples. Dale downstairs, mixing marinade and singing excitement. Parties made me stern. At least it would be mostly my people; Dale only had three, two of whom lived in Australia but were in the country for a fortifying fix of drizzle, dark humour and historical hegemony.
“Am I OK in this?” She flumped on the bed. I peered over my glasses at her prostrate body.
“You'll do” I said.
“Maybe I should wear my skirt”. Arching her back and unbuttoning her jeans. Before long, her taut torso arriving behind me in the mirror. “We got tahm to fool around, hunnapah” she drawled, deep south and dirty, suggestively twanging the elastic of my pants, which provoked in me a strange opposition, my psyche assuming the stiffness of a stout English bookcase, or perhaps a Canterbury.
“I think you should put your skirt on and we'll see”. I returned to my whiskers and secretly scanned the room …that would do, a length of dowel that controlled the broken Venetian blind, which remained open always. I tapped it on my palm testily, glowering over my specs in utter matronesse, my garniture gathering gravitas. Dale blinked, the kinky notion uncoiling.
“Minky” she giggled.
“Such insolence” I tutted, reviewing her contours with the stick. “Now, Miss Knudsson, would you be so kind as to assume the position?” She crawled onto the bed in sublime subordination, while I rifled through the knicker drawer, my hand falling on the next contrivance. Scooping back her hair, covering her eyes with an airline issue mask. “Tell me, Miss Knudsson”, my lips to her ear, “What punishment would befit such sass?”
“I don't know” she whimpered.
“Oh come now” I said, “visualise”. I lifted her skirt with the stick, forensically. “I excel in sniffing out trouble”. The stick trailed over her buttocks. “I like to nip it in the...” On 'bud' I hit her, startling myself, but she barely twitched. Unsure where I was going, but unable to reverse, I whacked her again. This time she flinched and if she'd had a tail, she would have swatted it in friskiness. Her bra slid down her arms as I unlatched it. “I have to check these” I said, cupping her breasts as if estimating the weight of prizewinning onions at a harvest festival.
This perfunctory manoeuvre bore fruit: a slow, pelvic dip and a raising of the chin. My folly shifted to surety ...she liked this game. Blind as to where I would strike next, she tensed rigid, like a pop-art coffee table, gasped when I took her nipple in my mouth, squealed when I twatted her twat. “Ouch!” when the clap of my hand on her buttock shocked the walls. A quenched groan when I fed myself to her on my fingers.
“You deviant” I hissed, spitting on her snatch, well into my stride now, greasing her like a horny handed cowboy on a brood mare. Giddy-up.
“Oh you fucking beauty” she rumbled into the pillow, jutting her gist. Smacking her again, her rump a cave of hands, my own hips rocking with the imprinted memory of a penis, though castrated in this incarnation. The bunt of her butt on my loins, my dominion, the sheer mutuality returned to me in a flood. And while fucking her in my woman's way, my retrograde driver remembered the sweet, urgent race and bucking, we came together ...tillsammans.
I anchored her convulsing body, my face in her hair and we drew apart in a sticking plaster sweat.
“Epic” she said breathing hard, the journey still playing out in her event horizon eyes. “You've killed me, Mink” she gasped. “You'll have to apologise to our guests ...you fucked me to death”.
At the door together, the downstairs now a flurry of fairy lights, Bryan Ferry dressed to kill, but dying to an empty room. The barbecue, a benign magma after the acrid fireball drama that singed the wisteria and created a choking black pall which was fended off by neighbours in a bout of angry window slamming. “Sorry!” I shouted into the evening.
“Minky, be nice” Dale said, unlatching the door.
“Hey Dale”. A very tall man stooped to kiss her and held her at arm's length. “You look just the same..”. He didn't, I thought triumphantly. His blonde
hair in retreat, his Dale-dazzled eyes darted to me.
“Hello” I said.
“Jason, this is Minette”. Dale seemed to swell. “My partner”.
“Oh” he said, “er ...you”, he motioned his finger between us.
“Yes” said Dale emphatically, drawing me to her side.
“Oh” he said again, “then I suppose a shag's out of the question?”
I liked him immediately.
“Dale!” I panicked, two unfamiliar shapes populated the squares of stained glass in the front door.
She was out of earshot in the garden. The letterbox rattled again.
“Hell-lye?” it said.
Two soft but substantial women cleaved me to an abundance of bosom. “Daaling, you must be La Minette” said Lola, taking my arm.. She blinked through miniscule specs with kind, Kermit eyes, tufted bleached hair a kooky pink at the ends.
“And oim Tat”. Clearly the result of a genetic coupling of Alice Cooper and Mrs Tiggywinkle. “And oim doying to see the gaadn!” Their marzipan and Marlboro aroma briefly overpowering the residual petrol ponk. They jostled me to the kitchen. “Where's our baby girl?”
The overlapping flapping of shrieked greetings, the house now a hubbub. Sandy Randall, an old flame who would always be Randy Sandals in my book, inexplicably dressed as Charles II, colluding with M8 and Tove over the CDs. Santa strolled up spivvy and tapped her nostril, indicating cocaine and that I should keep it under my hat. A hapless Jason chatting up Frances and Dale's rackety laugh peeled up from somewhere I wasn't. A corrected boom disregarded as M8 adjusted the volume on Patti Smith.
My social minuet to the garden rewarded. Dale on the long bench, the meat in a Tat and Lola sandwich, legs spread wide, unaccustomed to skirts, chewing on a rib like a lonesome cowboy cupping his harmonica. A resolute Prudence heading for the flowers with something in her mouth. Santa caught my eye “Bring Dale” she mouthed.
In the bedroom, three fat lines running parallel to Madame Bovary's dead white body.
“Ladies” said Santa diplomatically leaving after her toot as Dale and I placed our hands on each others' thudding hearts, Dale's eyes like dog stars.
We descended the stairs to a middle-aged mosh.
'Want you! Freaky! Speedball!' We chorused in synchronous pogo, paying no heed to screaming knees and juddering flesh. Afterwards, we all had a nice sit down.
“Any requests?” shouted M8.
“Do you have any Purcell?” enquired Charles II.
An inevitable shower herded people indoors, except for the spliff quorum who blessed me for the half-roof.
My above-average girl, easy to spot, her scrimshaw head a good way above most. But sometimes she sat or squatted, obscured by denim, leather and legs. If she was rapt, my sonar could detect her gentle pulsations. If boisterous, her hoarse klaxon alerted me. Unlocated for a while, I watched her skip down the stairs ahead of Santa, sniffing in stutters, a different dust describing her nostril. I stuck out like a sore thumb, easily floodlit by her super troupers.
In the bathroom, consumed by an imperative, the only light diffuse from the hallway. Her breath tainted formaldehyde, she filled my mouth with her tongue and when I tasted the sour drug in her, she pulled back.
“I'm here” she said, caressing my cheek. “I'm so here, you're so beautiful Minky”. Her eyes, solar eclipses.
“You're so off your nut, baby”, not unkindly.
“I know”. She passed her thumb over my teeth, fascinated. “Forgive me” she said. “You have to because I need you to fuck me ...forgive me”, peeling off her pants. “Forgive me”,bracing her hands against the bath, the favoured position for getting the job done. She flicked her skirt up her back and shook out her shoulders like a sprinter in the blocks. “Forgive me”, presenting herself.
Someone had said that to me once before. “Forgive me”, as I wound a hank of curls around my hand.
“Enough with the forgive me, already” I said, handling her hankering.
“For...” she began, trapped in a chemically induced mantra. I yanked her mane and pulled out, the lips of her cunt twitched outraged.
“Uh uh uh, don't say it” I warned.
“Come on Mink, just take me over”.
So I did, whipping up a storm of guttural expletives, cooing whimpers and demonic growls. “You dirty fucking bitch” she hissed, so un-Dale-like I had to laugh. She slowed to a canter, riding it out. “Förlåt mig” she gasped. My stubborn, magnificent animal.
The chilly night, punctuated by cab doors and a misguided blackbird broke into song. All dispersed to their respective reflections, except Tat and Lola who had retired to the spare room some hours ago toting a wine bottle. We waved off Randy Sandals and Susie: walking to Dalston before the dawn, dressed as a Stuart monarch took some brass neck.
Dale, a hot duvet depth charge, all flail and fidget.
“Anchor me” she pleaded. I surrounded her, pinning her leg jerks and gripping her wrists, my face in her autumn smoke hair, charnel and incense. I dreamed she was a water baby and I, the sheltering fairy with my diaphanous gossamer wings, spiriting her away from an approaching hovercraft (a persistent police helicopter hanging over Belfry Road, hijacking my dream). Surfacing to a bed, cold and Dale-less, stippling rain draining the light from the morning.
Their voices discernible from the kitchen, I sat above their heads on the toilet. Lola's sonorous drone, Dale's post-carousal huskiness, coffee percolating. I hoped they couldn't hear me weeing. I shifted the blind to spy on the dismal day. Tat, in a shawl, armed with a brolly and a cigarette, stalked the garden with Prudence. Her Mrs Tiggywinkle side more prevalent in the cold light of day.
Silence; they were waiting to see if the flushing toilet was my harbinger. I knew these things and hovered behind the kitchen door. Dale continued, not only hoarse but hitching with difficult emotion. She was crying. My heart struggled like a sack of kittens.
“It's crazy, Lo. I can't bear to be away from her”.
“That's love, baby girl, I think it's wonderful”.
“It is” Dale conceded, “but I love her so much it's almost like grief, do you know what I mean?” A deep sigh. “Can you love someone too much?”
“Aah, it'll settle down and then one day you'll wake up to find you've turned into two fat old farts like me and Tat”. Dale giggled. “Sorry, Lo, it's just cocaine comedown. I'm going to see if Mink's awake”.
But before she had the chance, my arms around her and we took on the sway of three days in marathon dancers, her face in my neck.
“I love you too much too” I whispered.
Lola looked on fondly. “Aaah, that's noice”.
“I wonder what we'll be like when we're old?” Dale skinned the pillow and chucked the case at my face, smiling faintly.
“It'll be ace” I said, doing the same back. “We can start drinking after the crossword and spend all day fucking”.
“Do you think we'll ever get fucked out?”
“Nope”.
The bedclothes Tat and Lola occupied retained that odd marzipan smell, maybe something to do with diabetes. They'd moved to their next port of call via Fortnum and Mason, leaving us a signed edition of Tat's latest book, concerning the little known subject of Victorian female pugilists – 'Ladies that Punch'.
My toe nudged something dead. Dabbing about under the bed my hand alighted on my suspicion, its unique bulk and pliance unmistakable.
“What have we here?” I placed the tacky tool on the mattress like a totem.
“Oh my God” giggled Dale. “Go Tat and Lola”.
A large, glittering purple dildo.
“They'll miss this” I said.
“I wouldn't be surprised if they left it on purpose” she chuckled.
I examined the moulded male mimic. “Hmmm, well, it's not my bag. Besides, it's fucking huge”.
Dale's sirocco swept over me and the polymer playmate.
“Oh God Dale, at least wash it first”.
Safe in the car, shielded from the sizzle streak night. The wipers griping irksome, insufficient rain. She kills them instantly, nothing should irk me.
Her brown hand on the gear stick tremor, idling at the lights, her face underlit blue dash, watching the picture, her left thigh contracting to amber green, her right a fraction later. A wing mirror wince and easing through the cogs (courteous hang back for a hell bent cyclist). She knows I'm watching and she takes a love sick curve, squeezing my thigh when she can between manoeuvres, every minute with her an unbearable wonder, every minute without her unbearable.
She puts her shoulder to the wheel and turns us to the kerb. The car, all turned off now and we sit in the ticks as if we've come a long way. We must unload the shopping before we can fuck, a rule we make and break often. “Oh Mink, we're getting worse” she says.
