Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (30 page)

It was a lot to take in. I wasn’t convinced by a great deal of what she’d imparted but I had a handle on her dislocation. I’d been gearing up to ask her how long she planned on staying but it didn’t really matter if she stayed a few more days, if it meant she’d get back to full speed.

“A party,” I said, lightly, trying to dispel the intensity that had drawn in around us. “There’s a party tonight. Why don’t you come? It will do you good to kick out and relax.”

She appeared briefly reticent but agreed, her eyes hankering after some morsel of encouragement as we held each other’s gaze for longer than necessary. It was a look I’d once suffixed with a kiss or a touch of my finger against her neck. Don’t get back into that, I thought, pushing away from the table. I couldn’t understand why she’d want to get involved with me again if there was even the shred of threat she might return to the dire illusions of her mind.

The party was at a friend’s place in Hammersmith; we were to meet by the bridge at one of the pubs which snuggled up to the Thames. Benjie was there to greet us, a tall affable lad who didn’t care if he was thinning on top as long as there was a beer in front of him. One of those people who needs only the most rudimentary of introductions before getting on well with anyone, Benjie soon had Louise feeling comfortable and interesting; she soon relaxed into the evening. A fine evening it was, the sun losing itself to the strata of color banding the horizon. Great jets would lower into it as they nosed toward Heathrow. We stood and watched them halve the sky till it grew dark and cold.

For my part, I felt better now that Louise was being shared around a dozen or so other people. I could allow my anxieties to shrink within alcohol’s massage and see Louise as someone more than a chipped and faded signpost to my past.

Benjie lived in a first floor flat on a wide avenue behind King Street. When we arrived, stopping off en route to buy beer from a twentyfour-hour inconvenience store that didn’t sell Beck’s or Toohey’s, there were already around thirty people stuffed into the kitchen and living room. Overspill meant that the landing and stairs were occupied too, by flaky looking individuals wadded into sheepskin coats with excessively furred collars. They probably looked furtive because they’d crashed the gig; not that it mattered; Benjie was hospitable to all. I followed him into his room where a hill of coats and plastic bags swamped his bed. A couple were leaned across them, kissing each other with such fervor that it seemed his mouth must engulf the entirety of her lower jaw. His left hand violently kneaded the pliant spread of her right breast. She could have been dead. I sensed Louise stiffen beside me and squeezed her hand, understanding her revulsion. The union was void of any tenderness. Perhaps Benjie noticed it too, because there was a needle in his voice when he asked them to move over. They simply stopped kissing and staggered from the room, lobotomized expressions all round. The woman was wearing six-inch rubber platforms and a black cat suit. An exterior white leather corset battled to keep her chest in situ. She hadn’t even bothered to take off her heart-shaped satchel with its blunt rubber spines.

“Kids, eh?” said Benjie, plonking his sweater on the pile. I followed suit but Louise reused to take her coat off. “Actually,” Benjie continued, gesturing after the zombies, “that was Simon. Top bloke. Known him since school. Spacecat. Does a bit too much of the wacky baccy to keep him compos mentis but you can’t hold that against him.”

So, the party. Which was as punishing as any party I’d been to before.

We drank. And then there was a spot of serious drinking. And a post-drink drinking session and then a long stretch of complete and utter drinking.

Benjie’s windows in the living room had been sealed shut by whoever had last painted the flat. It grew so stifling that the ceiling eventually shed a thin, bitter rain of nicotian moisture. I ranged around the room, trying to find the door so that I might lose some of my own fluids but it appeared that someone had painted that in too. I started laughing till panic hovered but rescued myself by simply pissing my pants. It proved an excellent sobering technique. I poured what was left of my Budweiser on to my jeans and made like I was the clumsiest arse ever, but nobody cared a toss. I found the door where I’d left it and spilled on to the landing. Someone was playing Nirvana—“Drain You”—with the volume turned all the way up to eleven. I yelled a line from the chorus and dived for the toilet only to find a queue which, in all probability, was the longest toilet queue in the history of clenched bladders. I had the last laugh, though, when my brain caught up with the fact that I’d already been.

Simon’s disembodied head loomed in front of mine. “Where the fuck is the rest of you?” I almost shrieked, but it was all there, just slow in arriving. God, I was spannered. He grinned, showing off a gold pre-molar. He smelled of beer, smoke, and CK One but then, so did everybody else. His skin possessed a greasy olive hue; up close I could see that his lips were rugose and discolored. His rubberized partner, I guessed, was being trampolined elsewhere.

“Highayemsimon,” he said. “Hooeyoo?”

“Me no speaka your language,” I replied, suddenly cottoning on to his flighty Scots burr. I barked laughter and slapped him on the arm. “Sorry. I thought . . . I thought . . . oh, cocks to it. I’m Shhhhhuh . . . ean. Benj told me you were Simon but it’s good to have it confirmed.”

“Hoowazatlassyacuminwi ?”

“Her name’s Louise.” I came right back with that one, getting into the swing of it.

“Shizaspankinlassyamtellinyi.”

“Too right.” I sensed he was waiting for me to continue. “She’s not with me, if that’s what you’re wondering.” If I’d had my brains in properly, I’d have asked him to be tame on her; she wasn’t ready for some fast-talking shagmeister bundling her into his bed. Talking about Louise reminded me that she was here. I caught sight of her standing on the edge of an intense circle, watching the interplay. She looked—God, strange word to use but it summed up her appearance—she looked ripe. Her face was jutting and beautiful, her eyes hungry on everyone. Having finally divested herself of the coat, her breasts hugged the deep collar of her blouse like loaves in an oven besting their tins. No longer the ingénue I’d staggered into adulthood alongside, she appeared confident and armed with secrets, like a soldier returned from a killing field.

But that could have just been the alcohol, twatting around with my head.

I started toward her, eager to let loose some of the thoughts with which I’d been so circumspect that afternoon. I wanted to draw her into the crook of my arm and tell her I’d missed her. Tell her I was sorry.

But then Simon was locked on to her, their bodies flush with each other as they traded words. I watched them flirt, dipping heads against ears so that lips brushed lobes. Yoked together, I watched the tethered jewel at Louise’s throat move with each undulation they created. Violence spread through me. I wish I could have let it come. Louise’s capitulation and Benjie’s hand on my shoulder prevented me. In that moment, Simon was condemned.

Black out.

I surfaced from a terrible dream in which I’d been kissing a woman whose lips were sticky, whose tongue, whenever it emerged to roil against mine, was coated in a clear membrane. She worked my mouth with spidery endeavor, knitting it closed with her adhesive spit. Black eyes burning into mine. When she wrestled with her clothing, to reveal that yawning part of her which would dissolve and ingest me, I lurched away, opening my eyes to dawn as it drizzled the curtains. Bodies were sprawled around me. I hauled myself upright, shuddering with cold and the mother and father of all hangovers. The Fear unzipped its dark little bag and teased me with its contents but I couldn’t remember anything beyond Benjie, me, and a bottle of vodka. My jeans felt stiff against my legs. There was a smear of lipstick on the back of my hand.

I negotiated the snoring corpses till I was on the landing. Benjie’s door was shut. I remembered. Some time in the night I’d gone for a glass of water, opened his bedroom, mistaking it for the kitchen. Louise was straddling Simon in the bed; the hill of coats had slid to the floor. The first thing I saw was the last thing to follow me back to sleep. Her breastbone, slick with sweat, or his saliva, overlaid with a lozenge of pure white light which pulsed with every languid stroke of their lovemaking. There was light elsewhere on her, solidifying in clusters and then dispersing like minute shoals of fish only to coalesce once more on her thigh, her mons, her navel. But it was that oval of light on her sternum which transfixed me, even as her eyes met with mine and she flew toward a climax that terrified me for its intensity. Simon was paling beneath her, jerking around: a rabbit mauled by a stoat. His hand reached out, almost desperately. Froth concealed his mouth. Louise was keening, slamming down upon him and baring her teeth, eyes rolled back till I could see their whites. The light inside her intensified and gathered at her core, retreating from the surface of her skin till it was but a milky suggestion deep inside her. Then it sank to where he must have been embedded in her. I couldn’t watch any more, not when she drove her fingers into his mouth to allay his scream.

Was that really how it had happened? My sozzled brain painted a detailed picture, but my dream had seemed equally alive. If it had happened, how could I have been so calm as to close the door on them and get back among the dead in the living room? How could I have returned to sleep?

I thought of the first words Louise had mumbled to me after her abortion all those years ago. She’d said: “I was so close to darkness, it felt like I could never again be close to the light.”

She’d been chasing it ever since. I’d taken it from her and something as simple as a letter had given it back. A letter that had been as much a cry for help as an olive branch. I thought of the places she’d passed through over the years, alternate lands that had claimed her as she drifted, loveless. I thought of how easy it could be to consign someone to such torment. I tried to imagine the hunger that needed to be sated in order to forge a way back.

My hand on the door. It swung inward. The pile of coats was still there. Beneath them, the bed appeared not to have been slept in. The room was still, its occupants gone. I was happy to leave it that way but found myself entering the room. There was a scorched smell. A cigarette burn, probably. I dragged the covers off the bed. A thin plug of mucus, streaked with blood, stained the undersheet.

“Simon?” I said to it.

A sound drew me to the window. She was standing by the streetlamp, which died at that moment. Subtle light crept through the avenue. I heard a milk float play its glassy tunes far away. She was smiling as she waited, holding her coat closed on whatever it was that burned inside her. I sniffed and dug my sweater out of the pile, went down to hold her hand and send her a plea through my lips when I kissed her.

The painter grew wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from the canvas rarely . . .

Edgar Allan Poe

The chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Apennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticize and describe them.

Long—long I read—and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by, and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.

But the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed-posts. I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to gain time for thought—to make sure that my vision had not deceived me—to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting.