The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (11 page)

‘You speak French?' I say this in a French accent and her eyes seem to focus. I have
somehow taken on a new shape, an unexpected substance. I see her smile. She has probably
drunk too much champagne. She shakes her head enthusiastically and her whole body
seems to sway with that one gesture.

‘Non,' she says. Her brow furrows. ‘No.' And it seems that even this simple French
word is only vaguely familiar to her. Perhaps, she is thinking, ‘non' is not the
right word to reach for.

‘You speak English?' she asks me.

And I say, ‘Non, no. A little, petit,' pinching my fingers together to none at all.

I have reinvented myself as someone more exotic, a francophone. A fabrication, and
yet I am just sober enough to stand by the lie.

She points to herself. ‘Jenny,' she says.

‘Pierre.'

‘Je t'aime,' which I assume is one of her only French phrases. I laugh and nod.

‘Merci.'

‘Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?' Another one of those French phrases people
know from a song, but it has taken the conversation in an interesting direction.

‘Ah. Oui,' I tell her and follow with some French I memorised from a poem. She isn't
to know it is a verse about donkeys
so she nods and grins and there is a little explosion
of her laughter. I do, of course, wish to sleep with her tonight. I recite some lines
from Flaubert. She nods, with no idea of what she is agreeing to. I take her hand.
Her fingers are tiny, like the porcelain hands of a Victorian doll. I take her to
the stairs. I don't really know what rooms are on the second floor, the party is
a friend of a friend's and I have never seen the bedrooms, but when I choose a door
to open, the room beyond seems familiar. Posters of bands I know, academic awards
framed and hung on the wall, textbooks strewn on the floor. It could be my own room
or that of any number of my friends. I lead her in and sit on the edge of the unmade
bed. I whisper a few more passages from Flaubert. I am running out of material and
wonder if she will notice when I begin to repeat myself.

She fumbles with the zip at the back of her dress and pulls it down enough to shift
the straps so they can fall into the cradle of her elbows. I cannot see her breasts
but there is a promise of them, the soft swell of skin suddenly revealed seems to
highlight all that cannot be seen, the rest of the picture is suddenly brought into
focus. I imagine she wants me to undress her.

When I lean in closer, her skin looks like the solid layer that forms on the top
of custard while it is cooking. She smells faintly of vanilla. She makes me hungry.
I open my mouth and breathe the taste of her. A hint of nutmeg on the top of my palate.
When I push with the tip of my finger her breast becomes exposed and I hold my mouth
so close to it that she must feel me tasting the air. Her nipple responds, reaching
into my mouth. It would be a small thing to close my lips and bring my tongue just
a little forward to touch the clench of dark brown flesh. Instead I sit back and
mutter a few sentences of irrelevant
French. It is the language, more than the champagne,
that has persuaded her to drop her clothes like the petals of a flower. She stands
and pulls her dress off completely and I look at her, the flawless skin, the perfection
of her nipples, the little creases where her panties have marked her thighs.

I pick up her knees and move them. Her body turns with them. I am steering a sleek
and gorgeous boat; her breasts point proudly towards the deep blue unknown. In English
I am far from a skilled captain: I steer the ship awkwardly in my native tongue,
buffeted by waves I have not anticipated. Somehow, in French, the whole thing takes
on a gracefulness I did not expect. When I move her elbow, her knees part. When I
touch her shoulder there is a tilting of her hips that will allow me to enter her.
I remove my clothing without the usual awkwardness. There is nothing to hinder me.
I push in and the passage is easy, her arousal has ensured this. She wants me with
a wet openness that is encouraging. My thrust is her parry, she folds herself into
the hug of my arms as if she were born to nestle there. She brings her feet up onto
my chest and there is the glorious gape of her flesh and all of me to fill it. My
climax is the call and her response is given with a short but sweet enough delay.
I am returning into my body in time to feel her leaving hers, the desperate clutch
of her flesh as she succumbs to the pleasure.

‘C'est magnifique,' I whisper into the pale plane of her neck. I hear her pulse beating
beneath the fine skin. My mouth waters. My flaccid penis is beginning to show renewed
interest in the task at hand.

In English I would slip out of her body. I would lie politely in her arms until it
was time to dress and return to the party. In
French I am rising inside her, I am
reinvented as the kind of man you might meet in Paris.

‘Je ne suis pas moi-meme aujourd'hui,' I say.

When Rodney finished, Holly could barely breathe. This was not like any book club
she had ever imagined. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair; Rodney's story had
aroused her. There was a gentle throbbing at her crotch and she glanced down into
her lap in terror. In the semi-dark a faint but distinct light was pulsing. She looked
up. They were staring at her, all eyes turned towards her crotch. She held her hands
crossed over the light but her fingers glowed as if she were curling them around
a bright torch. Her abstinence ring was hot on her finger, too hot, she snapped her
hands away and stood. There was a puddle of blue glowing dampness on the chair where
she had been sitting, like the trail from a radioactive snail. She pressed her hand
to her mouth in shock and the heat off her ring hissed a burning line on her lip.

She fled. Her chair tumbled back and she ran past the shocked and staring faces.
She stumbled on the steps and struggled with the door of the telephone booth. She
was sobbing, her sweaty fingers slipping on the handle, her heels twisting under
her, she was unbalanced, tumbling backwards, her arms flapping at the air like a
baby bird trying to fly. She fell. She would break her neck on all those stairs.
This was the end of everything and at least she would not have to face her shame.

She plumped down against something soft, arms, the swell of breasts. She smelled
tobacco and cologne. Mandy.

‘Shhh, shhh, shhh.'

She felt herself lifted and carried. The relief of cold air
against her tear-streaked
face. The woman lowered her into a bed of mint, cradling her head on her robust thigh,
Holly took frantic breaths. Mandy stroked her hair until she calmed.

‘Shhh, shhh.'

‘Oh god,' Holly sobbed. ‘I should never have read that book. I should never have
let myself even think about sex.'

‘Shhh,' said Mandy, ‘shhh now. You don't know how amazing you are. In all my years
at the bookshop, I have never ever…'

She was staring down at Holly, her eyes wide.

‘I'm a freak.' Holly's voice was thickened by tears, she sniffed, coughed. She touched
her lip and felt the sharp sting of a burn.

‘I should never…' A wavering breath. ‘I will never read another book for pleasure,
ever, ever again.' The tears streamed down her face, she struggled to breathe, a
stuttering gulping of air. Mandy leaned closer, too close. Holly thought she was
about to whisper a secret, perhaps some motherly advice. Holly started to turn her
head, offering Mandy her ear, but the older woman clamped Holly's jaw between her
fingers, a tiny spark of electricity flashing blue in her hand, and pulled Holly's
face towards her lips.

A kiss. A gentle touch of mouth to mouth, a soft caress that was in itself an important
secret, one that could not be communicated through words. Holly felt her own lips
softening, her errant tongue sneaking out to trace the sweet curve of lip, the hard
surprise of tooth and finally the parting which let her into a wet warmth of soft
flesh, a damp fissure, a wound, and she kissed with her mouth and her tongue reaching
out to Mandy's body as an emissary of herself. When their tongues
touched it was
like her breast rubbing against a belly. When their teeth clicked together it felt
like the sharp shock of her hymen tearing. They lay fully clothed in a cloud of mint
and lavender yet their mouths were naked to each other. The kiss stretched out without
breath. A gorgeous suffocation. When they finally pulled away from each other, Holly
knew her face was red from the blood that had pooled in her cheeks. Not a blush exactly,
more a focusing of everything visceral into the place around her lips.

‘Here.' Mandy reached into her waistcoat and pulled out a book. ‘Our next book-club
book is important for your journey. You must keep reading. Angela Carter is the next
step for you. You must take this step or you will be lost. Believe me.'

Holly held the book, a mouth pressed against a rain-spattered glass window, bright
red lips, a string of pearls tumbling out from between the lewd gape of teeth. She
flicked her tongue out and licked the spit from her lips. She felt the sting of the
burn mark snapping her back to reality. She threw the book away into the thorny branches
of a kaffir lime bush. Struggled away from Mandy, sat up, her head reeling with an
odd dizziness. Holly scrambled to her feet.

‘Honestly, Holly, you need the Angela Carter.' Mandy's tone was measured, soothing.
‘Nothing is as you expect it to be and
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
will prepare you. They will help you make sense of the new world you are about to
enter.'

Holly shook her head furiously. Her heels sank into the ground as she backed away,
she stumbled but regained her footing. When she felt the solidity of the footpath
under her shoes she turned and she ran.

Jack. She needed to see Jack. She spun her ring on her finger as if it was her only
hope of salvation. Her bag flapped on her shoulder, lighter. She had left the James
Salter novel on the table in the bookshop. She was free of it. She was free of everything.
She was free now to run into her boyfriend's comforting arms.

The paperback copy of
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
by Angela Carter
settled on the ground between a curry leaf plant and a patch of dill. Its back jacket
soaked up the gathering dew. It became damp. The pages curled, the letters of the
last chapter blurred and swelled. Under the gloss of the dust jacket there was movement.
The words of the denouement began to stretch and push down through the acknowledgments,
down to the loamy soil, tendrils of sentences curling towards new life, ideas arcing
out in search of enactment. The text took root in the rich humus of decay. Worms
ate the soil from the roots of thought, shat out their rich waste to feed them, a
coprophilic frenzy burgeoning out from the restrictions of language, finding a foothold
in the pure physical pleasure of the faecal mud.

If Holly had waited to watch this transformation she would have seen the bright red
mouth of the book's cover stretch, the lips parting, the curl of a frond pushing
out from between the hidden teeth. The story breaking free of its pages as a beanstalk
might crack the earth to reach for the sun. There was no sun now, but the moon had
risen and the stalk arched up towards it. Asparagus spear, bamboo shoot, fern frond,
the story continued to shift shape and form. Part plant, part flesh, the great throbbing
stalk shrugged off its coy hood and stretched to a purple reach, trembled and thickened
and split to reveal two more shoots within the flesh. It snaked up, spat, shifted,
hissed.
Branches split from its slippery side, buds formed and filled with juice
and opened their lips, mouths stretching out secret tongues.

If Holly had stayed and watched she would have been able to peer inside the petals
of the mouths. She would have seen a little tableau detailed on each tongue. Here
a baby slept. It smiled, cooed, reached with chubby fists that glowed like tiny silvery
moons. A moth fluttered around the infant fists, settled to suck at the edge of the
baby lips. The infant's mouth opened on teeth, sharp and razor-edged. The child's
head whipped forward. The teeth snapped shut. There was nothing but a dusting of
moth wings like icing sugar powdering the innocent lips. Another flower opened itself
to reveal a sweet little miniature donkey. Soft as soot, restless hooves stamping
against a succulent petal. The donkey turned and raised its brush-tipped tail and
beneath it there were lips where its anus would be. The lips grinned, opened, laughed
their loud flatulence. The voice of the donkey's arse cut through the night like
a whinny. ‘Nothing is as it seems,' said the equine arse.

Flowers burst forth, a shark twisting in a bubble of juice. ‘Nothing is as it seems,'
said the shark. ‘Nothing is as it seems,' whispered the pages of Angela Carter's
book as they sucked up mud as if it were fine wine.

The door of the phone booth slapped once, twice. The book-club members emerged one
by one, their faces turned towards the new whispering plant that had sprung up so
suddenly.

‘Nothing is as it seems,' brayed the arse of the donkey, and the members of the book
club moved towards the plant, their faces lit by a dozen lying flowers. ‘Nothing
is as it seems,' snapped the baby, plucking a mosquito from the air and stuffing
it into its tiny cherubic mouth.

‘Yes.' Mandy pushed through the crush of bodies, making her way to the front of the
group. ‘That is the lesson of
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
.' She
plucked the baby flower from the vine. The infant screamed, began to wither, its
face collapsing to become the face of an old man, and then fell away as the flower
transformed into the squat rectangular shape of the book. Mandy flicked through
the pages. ‘Angela Carter,' she said, ‘
The Infernal Desire Machines.
We finally have
need of her wisdom. Our next book-club book is a transformative one.'