Death or Sex

The rope burns stood out, livid against the skin of his neck. He had tattoos and peircings before anyone had even thought to pierce themselves. He smelled of tobacco and weed and mulch as if he had been sleeping under a pile of fresh cut grass. Here were bruises on the inside of his arm and I thought I could smell the chemical tang of the drug fermenting under the tender pale skin there. He was at the end of it. Gone past the end of it. The end of it should have been an hour ago when he dragged a chair up to the end of the noose and broke a rotten beam with the dead weight of his surrendering body.

I knew him a little, not too well. We had spent some gentle moments together, the eye of the storm. He had made me tea. I had served him coffee, forgotten to charge him for it.

There was something dangerous about his pale naked body, the veins that stood out too brightly against his midnight skin, the sepia colour of him as if he were an old photograph, already fading. I kissed him on the mouth and felt the wet of his tongue and thought about disease.

He wanted to be inside me, just for a moment. Skin on skin, which is something I refused to do. His tears were acid. Each one a pain for me to bear. I ingested them. I had some of him inside me. It was a little thing to ease myself into his lap. Just for a moment. I felt his jilted death skulking in the corners of the room. I chased the thought of it away with the heat of my body, slippery with life. When he clung to my hips it was more despair than passion. I let him rest there, at the brink of it, although it contravened my rules. I settled and gave him my stillness. I felt his body calm. I touched the red welts on his neck. He arched his back and it was over. I didn't expect it, but the fact of it was there between us.

"I'm sorry."

He had touched life in me and I felt his death too close. An unfair exchange. I wanted to be angry but there was his life, as it was, stretching uncertainly for another day, perhaps more.

"Well, we won't do that again." I told him and we never did.

She Was In the Pool with Someone Else

When I came back from getting the take-away she was in the pool with the boy, hiked up onto the edge of it and with her legs dangling around his ears. I knew what he would be tasting, caramel, burnt with a vaguely earthy aftertaste that was not altogether pleasant.

Her head lolled to one side when I came in with the takeaway containers and set them down on the cane table. I sat down with them and watched and a chemical taste settled in my throat. His finger in the place my own finger had been. His tongue replacing mine feathering the little nub of her clitorus. No difference for her at all, and what I tasted was a reflux of jealousy.

"Come on," she said then, "Join us." But there was nothing I wanted less than his tongue anywhere near me. I didn't like him. Never had. He was a skulking canker in the house and I did everything I could to avoid him.

I watched him working on her and ate palak paneer straight out of the container and the heat of it obliterated the taste of her cunt.

"Join us" and she held out her pale flat breasts as if they were naan. I had forgotten to get naan. I wondered whether I should go back to the shop and get some. It was just a short walk down the road. When I returned he might just have finished eating her out in the pool. Or maybe not. She took forever to come, but that was just with me. Maybe she would be quicker with him. Maybe he'd stop before his jaw started to burn with the effort of it all.

"Just going to get naan." I told her. Not him. But he nodded anyway.

"Stay," she said, plaintively, "I thought you'd want to join us."

It was unkind to change the rules like this. 'You can sleep with anyone you like except that creepy flatmate' is not a particularly open minded kind of relationship. I wondered whether I should tell her that I wanted her exclusively, but when I watched her sprawled across the cold concrete, the little towers of her nipples rising from the flat pancakes, her pubic hair a thin red haze rising up to tickle his nose, I knew I didn't like her enough for that. I didn't like her enough to even sleep with her again.

"I'll be back in a minute."

But I lingered just outside the gate, enjoying the sweet haze of mock orange staining the warm night, feeling the rush of air in the wake of every car. My mouth tasted of cumin and chilli and I could just smell her juices on my fingertips, but when I had the naan in my hands there would just be garlic there and nothing more.

Breathaliser on your computer

I can't write my blog today because someone might read it.

I think back on this life that is half over or half begun and the inadequacies leap up and snap at me. I think about my manuscripts. Words that I have poured over, hoarded, worried at. Worn words, and frayed. I think about the process of catching beautiful ideas, bright flashes of life, fireflies that I have secreted in my bottom drawer till all the light is worn out of them. My real writing. The stuff of my dreams.

But here I am each day, weeding the true stories from my past and piling the clumps of dirt and limp spines of grass and the occasional wild flower in a heap littering the footpath outside my apartment for all to see.

So now my green waste moulders on the internet, stale and unread, at best glanced at, one click in a dozen. I have no control over how you read it and little control over how I tell it to you when I have to post something every evening.

So I did this and I did that and none of it is particularly interesting. And isn't it just a little sad to think of the middle aged woman disgorging her secrets, her badly fading youth discarded in someones bed so long ago. I think of nightclub singers, impersonators, people who perform with monkeys and it makes me uneasy. Sometimes I see a reflection of myself in someone elses romantic fiction and I am ashamed. Then I read something beautiful, bitter-sweet. I want to hug the pages or eat them and some glimmer of hope returns.

So anyway, there will not be a sexy blog today because the writer has developed acute performance anxiety.

I will, instead, mention an invention that I would like to release into the world. It is a breathalyser attached to your computer. Before you write a blog post or send an email you must blow under .05 on your computer or the thing will power down. You just can't click 'send' or 'publish post' until your blood alcohol has returned to a reasonable level.

Until I have invented this and it is on the market, expect a post tomorrow night and tomorrow. An 'I did this and this and this' ad naseum. Then one day there will be a complete memoir and the whole will be greater than the sum of it's parts.

Avoiding being home alone

I go out to write at cafes. It is too easy to waste your time with pornography when you are home alone. There is that bottom drawer with the toys and the Internet. I try to write but I am forever distracted. They have given me an office and I sometimes work in there. There is no internal lock which is important, but something happens when I write and my skin becomes electric and leaning on the table, brushing up against the paper-bin, feeling the slight breeze from the half open window behind the row of metal bars brings me back into myself. Sometimes I push a chair in front of the door and do it quickly, excited by the idea that someone might just barge in and find me with my hand down my skirt. Mostly I put myself in public where I can be trusted to remain chaste. Distracted by the crowds and the chatter. Saved from myself by everybody else.

I wonder if everyone is like this, trying to place distractions in the way of masturbation, filling their lives with high tea and breakfast with friends and walks down the park to stop themselves from becoming permanently hunched over their excitement, frigging till their sore.

It eats into my time like acid and now that he is away there is no one to distract me from myself, no one to check that I have not shut tight the blind eyes of my apartment, turned the volume of the computer to it's lowest point. The neighbours hear the buzz of my vibrator, climbing quickly through it's limited range. I imagine that they think it is a some kitchen implement. I am blending sauces. Lots of sauces. Sauce after sauce after sauce.

With my husband gone I have become a saucier.

Three Girls and an Appology

I agreed to it because I wanted to sleep with them. Both of them. Who wouldn't. They were beautiful. They were my height, the three of us all under 5'2", blond and sandy brown and breasts so pillowy that it was all I could do to stop myself from burying my head in their chests every time we had a conversation.

I wanted to ease those breasts out of their twin plunging necklines right then at the very mention of it.

"But not until we find a man who will sleep with the three of us together."

Ah. You see, here was the sticking point.

We listed names one after the other. Men we all wanted (one name). Men we could all tolerate (two names). Men one or the other of the girls would absolutely refuse to sleep with (a whole list of names stretching out over four blank pages). I didn't veto anyone. I just wanted to sleep with the two of them together and whoever the man was seemed superfluous.

One of the tolerable two found himself at our kitchen table. There were only two of us girls there, the third was still at work. We discussed it. The boy seemed amenable to the idea, and he, like myself, wanted too ease my flatmates plunging neckline down just a little. I watched him fumbling with the sheer fabric and I wished I had just got right down to it without waiting to be invited. His head fit snugly between the rise and fall of them. I saw peachfuzz, a flash of nipple-pink. She giggled. She seemed to enjoy the attention for a moment till she slipped away from the kneading of his fingers and settled herself back inside her dress. She told him to wait until it was a complete contingent.

The boy leaned back in his chair and locked eyes with me and lifted an eyebrow. I knew what he meant and he knew that I knew and I had found an unexpected ally in all of this. I could already see us down at the pub for a post coital beer, discussing the ins and outs of the thing, comparing and contrasting notes as if we had just sat through a game of soccer.

When we were finally in bed, he gave me a wink as if to say 'how good is this?' It was indeed fine. The girls were like unwrapped presents, pink and drenched in perfume and with hair that spilled out over each other's chests. Every part of them was fragranced. Each strand of hair dripping sweetness, the smooth shaved skin under their arms, the underside of the necks, both blooming with scent.

I would be a contrast to them. I would underline their femininity by my musky skin. My nipples olive, my flesh a dark tan, my hair too rough and wiry to run your fingers through. I kissed them each in turn, soft kisses scented with Cointreau, orange blossom tongues, the hard line of their teeth, and suddenly it was his mouth against mine. The boy that we could all tolerate. A battle of lips and cheeks and the roughness of his re-emerging stubble. He measured the generous bulk of my breasts in his palms and I wondered suddenly if I was something alien to him, not a boy, but something other than the perfumed paradise of girl-flesh. I broke away from the kiss and returned to the promise of breasts, such an animal urge to suckle, such an overpowering urge to bite down on the pillowy swell.

One of them got cold feet and it was over, almost before it had begun. The boy had submitted to the disappointment of a condom reluctantly, found his way inside me with more enthusiasm. They were lying down, the two of them, four breasts in a row. I was completely occupied with flesh. I suppose I was the easiest beginning for him. I was his place of entry and he took it. No preamble, no negotiation, just a sliding inside, a reaching over my shoulder. I felt his finger pinch the nipple that I was licking, I felt a thumb in my mouth. He was reading my actions like braille, touching the hard nipple, the soft wetness of my tongue. He was there at the point of our connection. I could feel him moving inside me and I wondered if I would be able to feel them through his body as well, lie on his back and edge his hips closer to theirs, force his thrusts to follow my preferred rhythms, slip my finger into their bodies beside his penis just as his thumb was nudging in to my own mouth in the wake of a nipple. He was moving towards this. I could feel him withdraw suddenly, shift to one side. I was ready to sidle over, on top of him when one of them told us to stop.

They left us alone in bed. First one of them, suddenly teary. Gasps of pleasure replaced by sniffing and sobs. The second was up and after her and the hot space where her body had been touching mine turned icy in a second. I lay in the bed and listened to the conversation playing out in the kitchen. The boy lay facing me. His brow a knot of complicated muscles flexing and relaxing in their confusion. I shrugged. If I was a real girl I would have understood. I would have explained the complex web of their emotional shifts and changes.

I just shrugged and rolled my eyes and knew then that I was different to them in some fundamental way.

The evening was over. I could tell by the little sniffles and the sound of the kettle being filled. I was all wound up and I wanted to finish what we had begun. I climbed on to him quietly. I didn't want them to know. I wanted to be in the kitchen with the girls, all female solidarity, but I had to finish this off first. He seemed to understand and he was ready for me. This in silence as if we were having an affair and the wives in the next room drinking tea and debriefing (endlessly debriefing) what we had begun together but were finishing without them.

We both closed our eyes and I was imagining the swell of breasts and the soft moist places that I had barely touched but that were livid in my memory. I buried my head in the pillow when I came and there was the smell of flowers and of fruit and somewhere, a hint of the true smell of them, something clean and earthy.

We rolled apart and listened. It was over, and we knew it. We dressed quietly and paused in the doorway.

"I feel like a beer," I told him, "and a cigarette."

He nodded, "The pub is just down the road."

We snickered. We steeled ourselves. We walked into the kitchen where the girls stopped and stared at us, and pulled their satiny robes around their soft pink bodies. I wondered why I didn't have a satiny robe. I sat beside the tolerable boy and listened as they explained the impossibility of it all to us. We nodded and made calming sounds, little grunts and sighs that made us seem understanding and sympathetic. They started from the beginning and explained it all again and again.

Eventually I yawned. "I should walk him to his car," I told them, placing an understanding hand on on of their shoulders.

We sat at the pub and I lit his cigarette from the end of mine and we drank beer.

"Well, that was something." he said and I grinned.

We sat and drank beer and said nothing until I remembered something I'd read in the paper about experiments with rats and mazes and he had read it too and then we talked about that until our glasses were empty. We hugged awkwardly, like blokes hug, stiff bodies bouncing off each other, and then he got in his car and drove home.

This Morning I Stepped on Someone's Abandoned Breasts

Reading and walking. There is an art to it. My feet skitter, twisting on cracked paving, the toes of my shoes thumping against tree roots thrusting up through the pavement. This morning, reading and walking I slipped and my heart sank. It could have been tragic, a dried little puddle of vomit, some Monday morning dog excretion in the middle of the path, an abandoned nappy, a bulging condom tied in a knot.

I stopped and looked back. I paused. I could feel the little furrow along the ridge of my brow deepening. Breasts. Someone's abandoned breasts tipped out onto the footpath and I had unwittingly stepped on the little latex cups.

No one would believe me, Krissy of the furious vagina. It was too perfect a fit. Sinisterly snug.

I took out my phone and cleared a space, deleting photographs of rotting fish and weed and the flash of a salmon jumping. I aimed the camera and snapped them up. Two perfect breasts, nipples kissing the dirty concrete, their lurid pink cups scooping sunlight out of the air.

Fisting.

see:

http://www.nerve.com/PersonalEssays/Kneen/Early-Exposure-Remembrance-of-nudie-pics-past/