Quiver (19 page)

“How tall are you, anyway? Six-five?”

“Close enough.”

“That’s a beautiful height for a woman.”

“I never thought so.”

“It’s a gift to be different, you can use it to your advantage. I learned to.”

“How?”

“I knew myself and I knew what I was capable of, and if people were going to dismiss me because of my height, it was going to be at their peril. What it comes down to is self-respect. Look, there are plenty of conventionally beautiful people out there who hate themselves. What is the point? Life is too short. What else are you good at, apart from being tall?”

“Mathematics.”

“Good, we can’t have you stuck at the TAB all your life, can we?”

She clutches onto her new handbag as they pull sharply into a car park beside a large butcher’s shop. The words
J. P. MOTHERWELL’S JUICY SHORT CUTS AND OTHER DELICIOUS MEATS
flash proudly above the huge front window.

He ushers her into the shop, an immense, old-fashioned hall of refrigerated glass cases. The staff, dressed in long striped aprons and white hats, stand behind each display. There is sawdust on the floor, some areas are stained with blood. The shop is crowded with mid-week buyers pushing ahead to get the bargain of the day.

“Afternoon, Jock!”

“Gidday, Mr. Motherwell.”

The staff stand aside as Jock ushers her toward the back of the shop.

“Wait here, I’ve got business. I’ll be back in five.”

He leaves her behind a partition. The area is empty except for a wooden crate and a small table. She sits down on the crate and eases her feet out of the stilettos.
I am crazy
, she’s thinking,
this man might be a murderer, a sexual pervert, anything
. But she wants him fiercely. All the years of obedience, of being invisible or, worse still, politely ignored, of being categorized as the single one, the spinster in the family, the one who will stay back and help Mum, the one referred to as Poor Stacey.
It all bubbles up inside her, like bile rising to the back of her throat. “Fuck them,” she says out loud, “fuck them all.” It is the first time she has ever used an expletive in her life.

“Shipment due in Iran in two weeks.”

“Lamb and some beef…of course it’s live…”

“Bugger customs, what they don’t know ain’t gonna harm them. Besides, it’s trade isn’t it?”

“All trade is good for Australia.”

Jock’s voice and a deep foreign male voice float over the wall. Their tones mix and dip into a low drone. Eventually they break into a foreign language. Stacey wonders vaguely if it’s Arabic. The sun filters in from a skylight, flooding down onto her, making her feel drowsy. Drowsy and sexy. She likes the authority in his voice. The power and the anger. There’s no hesitancy about Jock. She’s never met anyone so confident before. It excites her, inspires her. Besides, it’s the first time she’s seen anyone get passionate about meat cuts.

She wonders about the size of his penis. Are short men small? She’s only ever seen one penis before in her life and that was more felt than seen. She remembers being surprised at how big it was and how soft the skin was.

A door slams behind her, followed by hurried footsteps. Her heartbeat quickens.

“Here, doll, slip this on, you’ll need it where we’re going.”

He holds out a full-length mink coat. On her it reaches to just below her knees. “Present from a furrier mate of mine, for carcasses rendered.” He laughs. Taking her hand, he guides her down a pristine white corridor toward a thick metal door, built like the door of a safe.

“The freezer room, my favorite haunt,” he says, as a mist of frozen air drifts out of the open door.

“I’ve got this thing about extremes. Any extreme. They fascinate me—love, hate, tall, short, hot, cold. Anything but mediocrity. I reckon that would be living death.”

The light is dim, a soft blue. As her eyes adjust she realizes that the light comes from fluorescent tubes set into the floor. They run down corridors of hung carcasses. Huge sides of frozen cow hang from steel hooks, the smaller sheep carcasses swing opposite. A pig’s head looms up out of the dark. She gasps; he laughs.

“I like frightening you. It’s a turn on.” Again she wonders about the rashness of her actions. Remembering Jock’s words she decides that risk is something one must surrender to entirely, like religion.

They reach an open area, where a large wooden chair sits beside a small lamp and a blow heater.

“Sit down.” His tone is commanding, authoritative. She sits on the chair.

“Open your coat.” She opens the fur as he moves forward, staring intensely into her eyes. He moves so close she can feel his breath on her cheek. He undoes her buttons and slips his cold hands under each breast. Her nipples stiffen as they hit the cool air. Still staring into her eyes, he squeezes each one, hard.

“Beautiful.”

A wave sweeps across her body as she feels her sex clench in response. She shuts her eyes, rolling her head back, vulnerable just for a moment. She feels his hot mouth against her neck as he bites gently into the flesh. The contrast between his mouth and the freezing air makes her want him to cover her all over with this moist heat. He takes one breast into his mouth and guides her hand down toward his fly. Terrified of her innate clumsiness she fumbles for a moment at the zipper. He helps
her and puts himself in her hands. His cock, compact and thick, dwarfs him even further. It is erect, sprung and proud, transforming him into half-animal, half-man. He leans across and switches the blow heater on. Hot air blows across her exposed skin and up her skirt. He slips his hand under the silk pants and onto her sex, his fingers burrowing deep into her. She moans as he parts her, placing two, three, four fingers into her, forcing her to spread her legs. The tip of his cock is poised to enter her, brushing against the lips of her sex. Her face is freezing, her cunt hot from his fingers.

He strums her clit, making her legs shake with intense pleasure.

“Statistics. Height?”

“Six foot, five inches.”

“Bust?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“What cup? What cup!?”

“D cup.”

“Waist?”

“I don’t know.”

She is close to coming. The innocent in her cannot believe that a man would know how to pleasure a woman with his hands.

She feels as if she is completely under his power, his relent-less fingers, the strength in his broad muscular shoulders, the black hair curling around his nipples.

She leans forward and tastes him, licking the skin of his chest. He smells delicious, feral, musky. The rogue male.

“Waist approximately?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Hips?”

“Thirty-eight.”

“Shoe size?”

“You know it.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

He removes his hand and pushes his cock into her, filling her. He is a perfect fit. Skin on skin. A hot ember that spreads up through her freezing limbs.

“Say it!”

“Size twelve.”

He groans and thrusts vigorously into her, then pulls back, hovering tantalizingly close to her outer lips, teasing her, before plunging in again. And out. And in, again and again. She wants him deeper. She wants to swallow him up. He pauses for a moment and throws his legs over hers so that he is actually sitting on her. The end of his shaft, now bent, rubs hard against her clitoris. She moans. He buries his hand into her hair, and pulls her head away from him, wanting to watch her come.

“Does that feel good? Does it?”

“Yes.”

She drops her legs so that he is clamped between her thighs. He fastens his mouth to her breast and bites sharply. The pain intermingles with the intense pleasure of him moving hard inside her. The faint echo of some Negro spiritual resounds in her head. She thinks she is experiencing a spiritual revelation.

“How good? Say it.”

“Good.”

“Just good?”

“Ahh…ahh!” She screams as her first orgasm ripples through her and the Negro spiritual breaks into a chorus of demented angels, all of them under five foot three.

Somewhere in the vague distance she can feel herself contracting, the echo of her cry still bouncing off the walls of the huge meat freezer.

He smiles, still hard, still wanting more.

“What are your feelings on tripe?”

Before Jock’s next major shipment she had packed up her small bedsit with its one-bar heater, poster of Phar Lap, her hardback edition of
Black Beauty
, single narrow bed and dress rack with her four standard outfits. Under a pile of magazines she found the ankle binders, wrapped carefully in plastic. She threw them out, triumphant.

Jock’s mock-Palladian mansion was built conveniently close to his main warehouse. The swimming pool was designed in the shape of a lamb chop. She had never seen that much wealth, that much brazen luxury screaming look at me, I’m rich, I’ve made it!

She tiptoed around the first week, holding her breath, not quite believing that she was part of this lush landscape of thick carpets and quilted antique chairs. Jock teased her, renaming her his great silent Stance. At night in his emperor-sized bed he took to clinging to her like a child, his small torso tucked comfortably between her hips and breasts. She loved this contradiction, this utterly masculine man who was so much smaller than her. She loved looping her long arms around his belly, the fruit of his sex curled up, vulnerable, sheltered in her large hand. The smell of him sleeping made her feel safe for the first time in her life.

At the end of the first week, after a particularly vigorous love making session, she told him in a small voice about the ankle binders. He listened intently while stroking her long flanks, his piercing blue eyes clouding over in empathy.

“It was stretching machines for me. Johnson’s height extenders, then the illegal growth hormones. God, did Dad give me a hiding when he found out about those.

“‘Son,’ he said. ‘It’s not how much you’ve got but what you do with it.’”

He buried his head in her hair and whispered into her ear. “And look at us now, eh? King and Queen.” She pulled him closer, wanting to be inside him, wanting a fusion of their two bodies, spirits and hearts.

It was as if her subconscious had been waiting for this opportunity to submit, to relinquish the martyrdom of her earlier years. She knew this was love.

The habits of their lives began to fall in with each other. Every morning Jock would get up at five thirty, work out on his home gym for half an hour, then meditate in the pool, floating on his back with his eyes closed, wearing only a pair of sun-glasses while his collection of inflated plastic pigs bobbed up and down around him. Stacey, on hearing the familiar sound of the water filter, would press her face into his pillow, his scent comforting her as she drifted back off to dream until seven. Then she would get up, and check the Dow Jones faxed in by Jock’s stockbroker, Deidre.

Deidre had become a great friend, advising Stacey on her dress sense and on how to manage Jock, who was one of Deidre’s more challenging clients. Secretly, Deidre was thankful that she had found a way of influencing him. Jock was renowned for playing the stock market as fiercely as he played the horses and he usually lost. Stacey, by contrast, was naturally cautious and Jock had discovered that she had an innate gift when it came to the share market. He arranged for her to leave the TAB and put her in charge of stocktaking at his main branch.

Slowly, as the weeks passed, they both began to open up to each other. As weeks turned into months Jock’s vulnerabilities and fears revealed him to her not as a diminutive god but as a fallible equal. The complexity that lay beneath the cocky bravado endeared her further. If anything it was his energy, the essence of his ego, that began to swamp her. She was constantly swept up by his desires, his career. She felt like a planet in orbit. And, although she was falling deeper in love, she began to feel the strength of his personality hijack her own fragile persona, as if he was seeping into her through a process of strange osmosis.

Yet at the same time she was delighted to discover a kind of silent resourcefulness within herself.

Every day Jock would get her to chauffeur him to his main office, preferring to finalize deals on the mobile phone while Stacey, an excellent driver, maneuvered the Mercedes through peak-hour traffic.

“Two thousand sheep, direct to the port of Dubai. You heard me, mate…Dubai, Saudi Arabia. Ahmed el Hassam, yeah, that’s the bloke.”

He started taking her to the society events he engineered invitations to. He was determined to legitimize both his money and his status. They caused quite a sensation: Stacey, tottering along in her high heels, with her quaint old-fashioned English and demure manner, escorted by Jock, overdressed in pink silk and linen, striding along beside her. When a photo of Jock grinning broadly, his face practically buried in Stacey’s cleavage, appeared in the social pages, he was thrilled, and had the photo blown up and sent to all his clients. To him, this was the pinnacle of success and he reveled in it.

He made love to her every night; his sexual energy seemed
linked to his generally hyper state. She noticed that his body temperature was always higher than her own, as if his whole metabolism operated in a different time frame from the world around him. She was secretly frightened that he might burn out one day, stop suddenly and drop like an insect.

His sexual imagination was limitless. He taught her how to clench her muscles so that she could pick him up, even when he was limp, and make him hard inside her. He taught her how to pleasure him with her mouth. He would pry open every orifice, every part of her body with his butcher’s hands. He would describe the individual beauty and function of each part as if it were an act of God. She grew to love her own body through his eyes. She began to see the long stretches of white freckled flesh as a genetic luxury, a largesse of opulence. She started to exercise and lost the characteristic stoop she’d used to make herself smaller. With Jock’s help she discovered the waisted outfits that accentuated her bosom and hips, exploiting the shape she was born with. Stacey was transformed.