Quiver (10 page)

I don’t recognize the way he is moving around the bed, his step so controlled, as if he knows exactly what he’s doing—so different from his usual clumsiness.

I close my eyes. I can feel the blind head of his penis as he trails it up the back of my legs, starting at the sole of my left foot, nudging for a moment against the hollow of my toes, then up, up the back of my calf, barely brushing the skin, and up the inside of my thigh. He stops just before the flesh dips
into the Mount of Venus. My clitoris is pushed against my panties, which are pulled tight into my damp crotch.

I can feel the gush of air as he brings the riding crop down sharply across my buttocks. I gasp, the pain a map of vibration across my skin. Then a numbness floods in as he strikes, again and again and again. I lose count. The blood rushing to the surface brings with it an incredible heat.

He stops and I lie there, throbbing. Something cold and wet is poured over my skin. Slowly it slips across my back leaving a sensation of soothing whiteness in its path. He rubs the cold olive oil down between my cheeks, spreads my lips and runs his oily fingers over them.

He then sits over me, kneeling between my thighs, and fucks me violently, his fingers tugging at my clitoris as he slides in and out, the cold oil trickling all the way into my womb, cooling my insides as it oozes between the skin of his cock and my cunt.

I stare into the mirror, but Adrian’s reflection is cut off at the neck. I watch the movement of his buttocks as he slides in and out. A shadow is thrown by candlelight across the back wall, and I stare as he throws back his face, his profile etched clearly against the stippled white wallpaper. But the shadow is wrong—this isn’t Adrian’s nose, this isn’t Adrian’s chin. And something inside of me crystallizes in shock.

Sitting alone the next day I started to panic. I couldn’t tell whether I was imagining or seeing things. I decided to cook and clean the house—it’s my way of dealing with anxiety. The girls at work always know when I’m nervous because I’ll spend twice as long making sure that every last hair is pulled out of the client’s legs. After gathering up all the sheets and putting them into the washing machine I started to prepare a casserole.
Anything to make things normal between us again. In the middle of chopping up the beef I realized that I’d run out of paprika.

Mrs. Harris let me into that dark front room of hers, with the fifties furniture and old rugs. There was an older woman sitting with her back to me, staring absentmindedly out at the overgrown garden visible through the French doors. I couldn’t help noticing the way she was crumbling a biscuit into her tea. Neurotic.

“Jodie, this is Maude Billinger, she’s from number six. Jodie’s from number nine. Mrs. M!” Maude was obviously deaf, but she swung around at the mention of number nine.

“I know that house.”

“Jodie was asking about Mr. Mantilli. Remember him, dear?”

“What?”

“Alberto Mantilli!”

“There’s no need to yell, I’m not a half-wit! Of course I remember Alberto, his wife Leonie used to make dresses for the girls. Lovely woman. Beautiful too.”

I leaned forward, not wanting to betray too much curiosity in my voice. “What happened?”

“What do you mean, love?”

“Why did she disappear?” Maude and Mrs. Harris exchanged glances. Maude gestured vaguely toward the garden.

“What harm can the truth do? They’re all off with the angels now.” Maude looked carefully at me as she spoke. She had a narrow face, with a web of heavy wrinkles around clear green eyes. She must have been beautiful once herself.

“She didn’t disappear, love. She died, just after Alberto got back.” Mrs. Harris, now keen, moved forward dramatically.

“He was in the war, you know, fighting for the other side. Oh, it was a terrible scandal around here.”

“The other side?”

“The fascists, love.”

“That’s beside the point. Trouble was, by the time he got back Leonie was pregnant…”

“…but not by him, see.”

I was reeling now. I remembered staring into the bathroom mirror, my black eyes full of pain, my belly swollen under my white tunic. I didn’t want to know anything else. But the two old women were insistent, the truth must be told.

“Harry Whittle, that’s who the culprit was.”

“A bit of a lad, was Harry, a smooth talker. He always got the ladies in.”

“Poor Leonie. Not talking the lingo, she thought he was for real but when Alberto got home…”

“It was terrible!”

“You’re not wrong there, it was gossip for years afterward.”

I couldn’t hold back. “What happened?”

“Well, Alberto had only been back a day and…”

“She tried to get rid of the baby, you know, the ignorant way.”

“Alberto found her in the bathroom.”

“He came out of the house with her in his arms, screaming he was.”

“I remember the way her hair was hanging down. She had beautiful long black hair.”

“She bled to death, poor thing, never had a chance. Alberto grieved for months. See, he loved her. He would have had her. Child and all.”

“So he said, after the event. Men are like that, afterward.”

Leonie. I had dreamt through her eyes. My womb had become hers. I went back into the house clutching Mrs. Harris’s paprika, my stomach heaving.

Adrian was waiting for me, naked with just the bath towel wrapped around his waist. He held the dripping bath soap in his right hand. “What’s the meaning of this?” He held out the yellow cube. Long black pubic hairs were stuck to it.

“They’re not mine.”

“I can see that.”

“Adrian, I haven’t got a lover.”

“Then how did they get there?”

“I don’t know!” He swung back into the bathroom and slammed the door. The mirror in the lounge room rattled with the crash.

I gazed into the pot of stew, and shook in the paprika. It descended like red snow, settling onto the thick bubbling gravy. Leonie Mantilli must have been at least four months pregnant. A pain shot across the front of my womb, making me fall against the stove.

Adrian is silent over the meal. He picks through the casserole like he is picking over a corpse. I want to tell him about the Mantillis, I want to tell him about the first time I saw someone from the other side. But as I form sentences in my mind I falter. Adrian is a fact man, he can only deal with reality. He puts his fork down.

“It’s the same man who used my razor, isn’t it?”

“Adrian, I am not having an affair.”

“Was he over here when I went to Canberra? Is that your little arrangement?”

“Please believe me, I am not having an affair!”

“Then how do you explain the hair and the grease!?”

“What grease?”

“I found some kind of disgusting pomade all over my comb,
and it certainly wasn’t mine. Or have you taken to using Brylcreem recently?”

“Look, this is going to sound really stupid…” I ventured.

“Try me.”

“It’s a ghost. I think this house is haunted.”

“That is pathetic, Jodie. Surely you can come up with a better story than that!”

He storms out, his plate crashing down to the floor as he leaves. I sit staring into my glass of wine. It looks so cool and calm in there, if only I could just dive in. Outside there is the sound of his car starting up. I don’t want to be left alone. I don’t want to be left alone in this house.

I sit naked on the edge of the bed. I tell myself my name is Jodie. I run my hands through my hair, my shoulder-length blond hair. I trace the planes of my face, feeling the bridge of my short nose which disappears into the full curves of my cheeks. I press the palms of my hands against my breasts, feeling their weight, feeling them sitting high on my chest. I clutch at my abdomen. I know that my womb is empty.

Something moves in the shadows. I freeze. Only my eyes shift, peering into the dark recesses. A man stands by the bedroom door. He is short and dark, his eyes a warm brown in the greenish shadow, his hair a shining helmet. He is in his late thirties, and is wearing an old-fashioned suit with a crisp white shirt peering above a waistcoat. He is holding a battered leather suitcase in one hand and a Trilby hat in the other. He winks at me, a languid batting of the eyelid, then smiles, the arch of white teeth splitting his tanned face.

I swing around. Adrian stands there looking sheepish. “I drove around for hours before I realized I had no place else to go.”

I hug him. His body, resistant, eventually softens against mine. His hands creep up to my breasts. We fall onto the bed. Frantically I pull his shirt free and undo his trousers. I bury my face in the fur of his testicles, his penis, still soft, rolls across my cheeks. He smells fantastic. I take him into my mouth, feeling him grow hard. He pulls me up to his lips and we kiss. His tongue traces the inside of my lips. He sucks my tongue as if I am the man and he is the woman.

My ankles are resting on his shoulders as he holds my calves and pushes my legs even farther apart. He plunges into me. I feel my whole body rotating around the swollen head of his cock, savoring every grain of his skin as he slowly slides in and out. Someone is sucking on my clit. I crane my neck to see if Adrian is touching me, but his hands are firmly around my ankles. I gasp—a tongue is slowly caressing the tip and then sucking hard on the tiny shaft. I am delirious with pleasure. It isn’t rational; nothing is touching me there, and yet I can feel a man’s breath blowing across my hips, his lips over me, as Adrian’s cock gains rhythm. Paroxyms of bliss tear through my belly. I am coming, contracting wildly. The scream of my orgasm breaks out from my throat, and it echoes in the dark.

He lies with his back to me, curled up against the hollow of my belly. I am staring out at the wall, my mind skipping backward and forward in waves.

I remember the figure I saw against the sky that morning with Robin in the mountains.

I see red streaming down my thighs. I see a bathtub full of blood.

My lover stirs. “
Leonie, sono a casa
.”

And I find myself replying, “
Sí, Alberto, sí
.”

T
he long old-fashioned bus gleams a steel gray in the sunshine as it waits outside the redbrick gates of the school. Cicadas echo shrilly in the summer afternoon. The fifties fender painted scarlet and blue runs the whole length of the bus. Above the grid of the radiator sits a tiny statue of a silver ballerina. Tinkerbell, the little girls call her. One side of the bus is opened up to display the tubs of ice cream sitting just out of arm’s reach.

Above the advertisements for double-chocolate whips, vanilla scoops with raspberry, and choc-and-nut supremes is a hand-painted sign embellished with dancing clowns and luminous red balloons: Jerome’s homemade ice cream, the finest in Illinois. Underneath, visible through the two windows flanking the open hatch is Jerome himself, busy filling up huge plastic containers of ice cream, ready for the three o’clock rush.

Jerome lifts the large silver trowel and digs it into the freezer of ice cream. It sinks with a crunch. He, cooled by the air lifting up from the open freezer, transfers the ice cream into the plastic container sitting just below the counter. His arms, muscular and tanned, strain against his thin cotton T-shirt as he
lifts the heavy scoop. His neck, strong and sculpted, rises up from the swelling curves of his shoulders. His chest hair etches a black wispy pattern between the cushions of his breasts and over his white T-shirt. Beads of sweat hang suspended, momentarily arrested by the gusts of frozen air. Bent sideways in concentration, Jerome reveals small ears set closely against his skull. The translucent perimeters are flushed deep red with the heat. If you traveled across from his ears, you would find yourself walking up the steep incline of his cheekbones. Two jutting mountains, delicate in strength, perhaps betraying some past Mongolian ancestry. They swoop and dip across the breadth of his face. Set below heavy black eyebrows, his large and oval eyes switch from blue to green depending on the light. Today they are a definite sea-green—swirls of light around jet-black pupils that bleed into the green like oil on the ocean.

His nose flares out from under the eyebrows, widening slightly at the bridge then streaking down to a defined point. The tip is divided into a subtle cleft, a sublime reference to a lower, more pronounced beauty.

His mouth is a dark red gash that splits the angular planes of his face into a rude asymmetrical beauty. His lower lip is fuller than the upper. It swells out, almost threatening to burst open like a fig. The upper lip is narrow and lies in elegant submission against the decadence of its companion.

A droplet of ice cream melts and runs down the edge of his lower lip before dripping onto the floor. A second earlier, Jerome had licked his finger. The finger he had plunged suddenly into the ice cream and brought up to his chaotic mouth. As if on cue, there is the screech of brakes as a car pulls up behind the bus. Jerome’s hands tighten imperceptibly around
the handle of the silver scoop. He doesn’t need to crane his head out of the glass hatch to see who it is. He steadies himself for a moment against the wooden paneling that lines the interior of the bus. He is fighting his heart that has betrayed him with its sudden acceleration. His penis, which until now has been lying curled against the warmth of his thigh beneath the heavy jeans, thickens. The head, a sleek helmet of velvet flesh, stirs against the rough material.

Jerome stares down at the container of ice cream, at the streaks of raspberry jam swirling through the thick yellow cream like strata of rock. He is reminded of flesh, of the webbing of busy veins carrying life from brain to heart beneath pale skin. There is the slam of a car door, the distant hooting of a horn as another car approaches. In a nearby street a mower starts up.

Jerome looks up at the large clock hanging over the cartons of sugar cones. Two fifteen. He loosens his belt. Another car pulls up on the opposite curb behind the bus. Jerome opens the bar fridge set up on the wall. He plunges his hand into a bucket of ice and delicately pulls out something between his fore- and index fingers that flashes for a moment in the light. It is a large silver ring, too large for a finger, too small for a wrist. He holds it up to his eye. The silver encircles the green. Like this, he has the eye of a bird of prey. Like this, he imagines he can see beyond the bus.