The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (8 page)

‘We meet the first Wednesday of each month—next week, isn't it?' Mandy said, looking
up at the clock as if the date might be written there. ‘Our next book is by Salter.
James Salter. You have joined us at a good time. Salter is one of my favourites.
He will help ease you in, so to speak.'

‘You really think I should join your book club?' She held her finger up and let her
ring glint in the gentle light.

‘There's a difference between reading about something and doing it, right? You can
read about a sniper but it doesn't mean you are going to go out and shoot anyone.
True?'

Holly touched her finger to her face, traced a line across her lips, considering.

‘The Salter will be a kind of easy release, a valve, if you like, to let the steam
out before you explode. And you know, if you keep this abstinence thing up you really
will explode.' The woman touched her finger to the silver band
and tutted. ‘We each
bring something to Sex Club, too.'

‘A plate?'

‘Oh god no. Although Tania often brings a cake. No, you have to bring something you
have learnt, some story, some fresh adventure. But Sex Club is only a week away so
you will be excused for the first month.'

‘I don't really understand.'

‘Just come along next week. You'll get the hang of it.'

She turned to a shelf full of books behind her. Pulled a thick grey paperback off
the shelf. A pair of legs, stockings rolled halfway down over a knee, a dimly lit
drape, the edge of a bed.

‘Ten per cent discount if you are in the book club.'

Holly reached for it but Mandy held the book firmly on the counter.

‘Are you in the book club?'

Holly nodded and Mandy pushed the book into her hands. Holly paid cash and fumbled
the change back into her purse. She felt a little tipsy.

‘If you have any trouble with the Salter you have to come see me immediately. Promise?'

Holly nodded again, although she wasn't really sure what she was agreeing to.

‘My door is always open.'

Mandy gestured to the green door and shifted back onto the stool, pulling her needlepoint
towards her and settling it on her lap. She picked the needle out of the fabric and
jabbed it into the chalked nipple. Holly felt a prick in her breast, as if the needlepoint
were a voodoo doll, the fabric nipple linked to her own flesh. She pressed her fingers
to her chest. Mandy glanced
up at her gesture, her brow furrowed. She stared at Holly
hard, questioning. Embarrassed, Holly picked up the book and thrust it deep into
her handbag.

The fluorescent light in the telephone booth was a startling orange. She stood among
the herbs in the garden and looked back down the stairs. It was impossible to imagine
the bookshop below. The whole thing seemed like a hallucination. It was night outside
and the bright white glare of the streetlight thumped onto her full-fisted. She closed
her eyes and pressed her hand over them.

When she opened them again it was like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole, transformed
by what she had just experienced. The real world was mildly disappointing and yet
comforting at the same time. Her nipple still throbbed a little. She rubbed it, feeling
how hard both her nipples had become, pressing out from under the thin fabric of
her summer dress. She remembered her mascara suddenly and scrabbled for her sunglasses
in the bottom of her bag. She picked out the book by James Salter and held it in
her other hand while she searched.

A woman walked by with a little dog on a leash. The dog stopped to sniff at Holly's
shoe. The woman glanced at Holly's sunglasses and snapped at the lead to pull the
dog away. Holly quickly hid the book in her bag. She needed a mirror. She needed
to fix her makeup and do her hair. She needed a shower and, perhaps, the comfort
of her cool dark bedroom with her freshly laundered sheets. She felt changed, like
she had committed a crime, robbed someone, killed someone, and here she was out in
the world, walking free without any consequences at all. It was the book in her bag.
A book with sex inside it. The very thought of it made her skin prick with sweat.

Holly walked away from the scent of herbs and the spill of orange light that made
her think of the throbbing red light outside a brothel. She adjusted her frock and
headed straight for home.

1996: A Book of Dreams

My father is waiting but Amalie stands in between me and our car. It is my birthday.
The teacher made the class sing to me and I was embarrassed but just a little proud.
I looked up at the last bit, the bit in the birthday song where they say my name,
and there it was on Amalie's lips, Nick. Happy birthday dear Nicholson. Dear. She
is prettier in the sunlight because of her hair, which is wispy and curls upwards
in the heat of the afternoon. Her pleated skirt is just the right length. Her knees
peek out from under it, the pretty curve of her calves. The other kids are running
to the bus or wrestling each other on the lawn or milling in groups erupting in occasional
laughter. Amalie is alone, shyly kicking her heavy black school shoes in the gravel.

She steps forward, blocking my path and I smile, trying to lift my eyes up to her
face, but her chest is beginning to puff out under her shirt and the light is pouring
down in such a way that you can see the outline of her little bra under the thin
cotton fabric. There is a tingling in my groin. I will have to tell my father that
my sexual health is perfect. He will be proud. I can
feel the orgone swelling all
the places it is meant to.

‘Are you doing anything for your birthday, Nick?'

There it is, my name on her tongue. I can almost taste the little nip of the N in
her teeth. One day, soon I will taste it in her kiss. I know I can make it happen.
I just need a little time and the right combination of elements. Privacy, familiarity,
patience.

I shake my head and grin. ‘If I was I would have invited you to come.'

When she blushes the orgone takes my penis and lifts it inside my school shorts.
I am flooded with the tingling pleasure of the energy coursing through my body. Perhaps
she can see the lump there but I don't care. I am healthy, potent, sexually powerful
already and I have only just turned thirteen.

‘But maybe at the weekend I can have a party. Would you come if I had a party?'

She looks down at her dusty feet. Her face is blotched with red, but it's a pretty,
breathless colour. Excitement rather than shame. She nods.

‘Saturday?'

She hesitates. Maybe she has something to do on Saturday.

‘Hang on,' I tell her, ‘Sunday. I think Sunday is when I was going to have that party.'

She smiles and nods and her voice is shy and strained when she says, ‘OK, that would
be lovely.'

I want to hug her but that would ruin it. I shoulder my satchel and grin.

‘Ten o'clock? See you Sunday at ten.' I try to sound as casual as I can, as if this
is something I always say to the prettiest girl at school. I walk past her towards
my father, waiting
across the road in the car. He would have seen me talking to Amalie.
He would have seen how pretty she is. When I open the door of the passenger's side
he is grinning. He reaches over to ruffle my hair.

My father is older than the other fathers, but he has more muscles than some of them
and he is smarter so I don't mind.

‘Can I have a party on Sunday?' The words are out of my mouth before he can even
say hello.

‘Sunday? I thought you—'

‘I changed my mind.'

‘Well, that isn't much time to organise a whole party. Invitations, decorations,
food…'

‘Oh no. It isn't for a bunch of people. It is just for me and Amalie.'

‘What, only one friend?'

I nod and point down into my lap where my penis is still just a little tingly. ‘I
felt the orgone energy, Dad. I felt it when I was talking to Amalie.'

He nods, sagely. He knows all about orgone. He learned from Dr Reich. He reaches
across and for a moment I think he is about to pat my groin to feel the swelling
of my penis, but instead he pops the glove box and a spill of red paper and black
curling ribbons falls out into my lap.

‘Your mother would be so proud of you.'

‘What's this?' We don't have money like the other kids. I am here on scholarship.
Birthdays are a time for cake and lasagne, but never gifts. It has been a rule in
our house since Mum died.

‘An artefact,' he tells me. ‘The changing of the guard.'

I am ripping the paper off too roughly, but I can't control
my excitement. It has
been a great day, the best day, and when I see the leather cover exposed through
a tear in the paper, the letters WR pressed into the soft skin of the notebook, I
feel like all the air has been punched out of my chest. My fingers are trembling
and I force myself to slow down. WR. Wilhelm Reich.

An artefact indeed.

‘I thought they burned all Dr Reich's books.'

‘I stole this when I was your age. Perhaps I shouldn't be proud of that, but I am.
All the other notebooks ended up in that pyre. I was there, watching the burning
books, the orgone accumulators, the orgone shooters, the cloudbusters, all the equipment
that Dr Reich used to gather the sexual energy. All his notes and his research…well,
you can imagine the flames, Nick!'

I am imagining the flames. Bright blue, the colour of orgone, crackling with phosphorescence.
I wrestle the bow off the book and press my hands against the cover. I can almost
feel the energy throbbing against the soft leather.

I open the book and run my fingers over the paper. The indecipherable scrawl. The
pen that Reich held in his thick fingers. An artefact indeed. I feel like Moses has
just come down from the mountain and presented to me the tablets from God's hands.
This is better, though. This is the original power, the one true thing connecting
us all. The origins of orgone energy, the source of sexual health. I know my eyes
are damp when I look up to my father.

‘You have come of age, son.' My father's voice sounds strained. He is as emotional
as I am. He holds out a key and presses it in my hand.

‘The key to…? The cellar door?'

The one room that I am not allowed to open, the mystery of my whole childhood. I'm
overwhelmed. I can feel the tears spill over my lids and track a wet line down my
cheeks.

‘You are thirteen, Nicholson. A magic number. You have reached full sexual maturity.
You are ready to test your power.'

I close the book and press it to my heart. The key is clutched so tightly in my fist
that it will leave an imprint on my skin when I finally place it on the desk beside
my bed. I lurch forward and hug my father. He smells like pipe tobacco and aftershave,
soap and sunlight. I breathe him in and whisper into his chest, ‘This is the best
day of all my life, Dad.'

He hugs me back so hard that my ribs hurt. ‘Remember this day, Nicholson. Today is
the beginning of your adult life. Happy birthday. Now you are a man.'

I can feel myself inflating with joy. My father, Amalie, even Wilhelm Reich all conspiring
to bring me happiness. Did Dr Reich know that his work would live on in the body
of a young man some day? Was he all-seeing? I can feel the beating heart of his notebook
against my chest, an echo of my own excitement.

A Sport and a Pastime

by
JAMES SALTER

University. Lecturers in shabby ill-fitting jackets, with hacked-into hair, blinking
like moles as they raced from battered old cars to shiny halls. Students mocking
them in faux vintage chic, the jeans carefully faded and custom torn. Shiny cars.
Cars waxed by employees. Daddies' cars. Cars that were gifts for graduation from
private schools.

Holly walked through the car park and waited for a blocky black vehicle to edge in
front of her. There was a dead flower hanging from the mirror, a withered reminder
of a kiss, perhaps, now shrivelled and no doubt smelling slightly of decay. She could
imagine the girl at the wheel looping string around the single bright iris. The colour
of it singing in the harsh light. Now, with the passing of a day or two, the purple
was almost grey. The girl at the wheel shifted a lock of orange hair behind her ear,
bit the corner of her lip. Holly was startled by the immediacy of everything, the
scent of exhaust buffeting her. Her
own shadow draped on the asphalt in front of
her. The dead iris swinging back and forth as the girl parked the car inexpertly,
a little crooked, a little too close to the car beside her. She had to squeeze out
of the vehicle with the door half closed. She slid along the side, throwing the locks
with an unconscious flick of her wrist. The car barked like an abandoned pet.

The dead iris mesmerised Holly, the way it turned its languid circles, petals tipping
into and out of a small patch of sunlight. The iris was somehow significant, special
enough to be singled out for preservation. Some story behind it, some hint of love.
A vision rocked Holly, sudden, brutal, the girl with her thighs spread wide like
the woman in Mandy's needlepoint. The single still-fresh flower outlined with a blaze
of orange pubic hair, the stem electric green with life dipping between the almost-hidden
folds of the girl's vulva. A man's hand pulling the flower slowly from its makeshift
vase of flesh.

There's enough passion in the world already. Everything trembles with it.
The words
had leaped suddenly from the page as she read them. She heard them now, not in Salter's
voice, which she imagined to be soft and wise and masculine, but in the deep treacle
of Mandy's tenor.