The Pleasure Quartet (3 page)

I could have watched these creatures endlessly, knowing that they appeared to be floating free from the burden of any kind of harness or suspension device, but I was aware that Iris and I were
expected in the kitchens so we continued onward, still following the whale song down to the shore line.

At first, the beach appeared to be empty. But as my eyes adjusted to the rapidly dimming light I realised that what I had at first thought were rocks were in fact people clad in a skin-tight,
silvery grey and glistening fabric and curled up on the sand as still as corpses so that they resembled sleeping seals. As we approached, two of the grey creatures unfurled and stood to greet us.
They were women, or at any rate they both had large breasts and erect nipples that were so prominent I found it difficult to meet their eyes as they spoke rather than staring at their chests.

‘Welcome,’ the women said in unison, before taking both Iris and me by the hand and leading us a hundred yards further down the beach to a screen of ferns which appeared from the
outside to be a flat covering over a cliffside. But as we all approached, the canopy of plants parted like a pair of curtains, revealing a high-ceilinged tunnel, as wide as a roadway. The sides of
the tunnel were lined with lit candles which stood in hollowed-out skulls set into the rock. Whether human, or animal, or realistic fakes, I wasn’t sure, but the effect was more restful than
ominous. It made me feel as though we were stepping into another world as we followed the dimly lit pathway.

Music reverberated so loudly through the rock walls that when I ran my fingertips along the damp stone I could feel vibrations as if I were inside a giant beating heart. I caught only fleeting
glimpses of the Ball’s guests through openings that we bypassed on our way to the kitchen and the sights that caught my eyes were so bizarre I could not be sure whether I was here at all or
if this was all part of some elaborate and mad dream.

Like the two attendants who escorted us and the acrobats who flew over the clifftops outside, the revellers were not properly garbed but seemed to be painted in such a way that their skin
appeared almost transparent, as if they were ghosts, travellers who had already been to the afterlife and returned. They were unashamedly naked and some of them were joined in passionate embrace, a
tangle of arms and legs and a corresponding cacophony of moans that were sometimes an utterly human expression of pleasure and at other times like the otherworldly cries of angels or demons.

Iris caught my hand and pulled me into an embrace, kissing me briefly on the lips. ‘It’s incredible,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so glad we came.’

We were ushered into the kitchens and were unceremoniously undressed before being ordered to bathe – not just our hands were to be washed but our entire bodies – and we did so in a
shower area that resembled an underground waterfall set into the rock wall. Then we were provided with filmy dresses that served as aprons and were shown to our work stations.

I was given the task of assembling brightly coloured sugar flowers. I was assigned a mountain of pre-made petals in every hue of the rainbow and shades unknown and required to turn them into
sprays of blossoms. The recipe card that served as an instruction manual did not contain the necessary steps to accomplish such a feat but rather advised me that I should concentrate on evoking a
mood of longing in order to fill the dessert and all who ate it with desire. With Iris squeezing cut mango, strawberries and banana between her bare hands on a bench in front of me and the curve of
her buttocks and small of her back visible beneath the sheer smock that she wore this was no difficult task.

The hours passed quickly and hypnotically, leaving me with no idea as to how many blooms I had actually created because as soon as I had finished a bunch a white-gloved attendant would appear
and whip my handiwork away on a silver tray to be consumed by the hungry guests. Eventually we were relieved of our duties and instructed to bathe and change again in preparation for the ceremony.
We had been working all night and it was now nearly dawn. Before bathing we were given a plate of food. There were perfumed jellies in the shape of skeletons and flavoured with coconut, jam-filled
pastries so light that they crumbled to pieces if I squeezed them too hard between my thumb and forefinger, a thin and bright purple soup that was supposedly carrot but tasted of blueberry, and for
each of us a bunch of the crimson flowers that bloomed on the Pohutukawa tree which I had fashioned with my own hands and a glass of the juice that Iris had squeezed.

The strange supper fed the hunger pangs that had arisen in our stomachs but left us with a new type of hunger, a longing for each other that raged so fiercely we barely made it back beneath the
water spout of the shower before we set upon each other. I carried Iris to the bathing area and in front of half a dozen other kitchen attendants I lifted my friend’s skirts up to her waist,
fell down to my knees on the wet floor and buried my face between her legs, lapping at her now engorged lips as reverently as if the juices that flowed there were a nectar fit for gods.

The sound of Iris’s moans were not dulled by the heavy trickle of the water that surrounded us and served only to urge me on. My arms began to ache from the effort that it took to hold
them and Iris’s dress up around her hips and my knees were now hurting on the rock floor but I ignored every discomfort. It was nothing in comparison to the joy that I took from orchestrating
my friend’s pleasure, running my tongue over Iris’s sensitive flesh, flicking the tip over her nub, worshipping each crevice and fold as if she were a chalice that held the sweetest
wine.

I could barely breathe as Iris wound her fingers through my hair and held me firmly against her, pushing my nose into her entrance and riding my face until she shuddered in orgasm and collapsed
into my arms.

Immediately we were both lifted and carried by a dozen hands who took us to one side, dried us with fluffy towels and with deft strokes painted every inch of our bodies in glittering silver so
that we each resembled slivers of moonbeam or spirits.

Iris was smiling and laughing as gleefully as a child and I felt as though I was drunk, intoxicated on the fluids that I had just licked from her entrance.

‘Dawn is coming . . . the ceremony . . .’ whispered voices who urged us on and we blended into a flow of shining bodies exiting from the underground caverns and moving through the
tunnels towards the beach and the growing light of day.

The sand was cool and soft beneath my feet and I nearly stumbled, thrown off balance by the change of texture underfoot. We had emerged from the curtain of ferns and joined the congregation of
revellers who gathered by the shoreline, all of them naked and all of them shining like a school of fish that had inadvertently slipped out of the sea and onto dry land.

They were staring in the same direction and some were cheering and crying out, ‘Mistress, Mistress . . .’ and I turned my head and gasped when I saw the carriage moving towards us. A
woman was sitting upright on a chair that had been made from the bones of a whale and was being carried on the shoulders of six men who were a head taller and twice as muscular as any man I had
ever seen before. They were practically giants, and each of them was nude and possessed a cock that looked a foot long and slapped against his thighs as they ran up the beach with their precious
cargo.

She was painted, but pure white rather than silver and in such a way that every bone beneath her skin was highlighted so that she appeared half angel and half flesh. Besides the paint, she wore
an elaborate costume of feathered wings that moved in and out from the centre of her spine as if it were not a costume at all but a part of her.

The crowd stepped back, formed a circle, and the woman was laid down in their centre. She spread her arms and legs like a crucifixion and for a moment I felt I might laugh as the pose reminded
my of afternoons spent on the beach as a child laying on my back and moving my limbs up and down to create the impression of a flying creature in the sand. An eerie silence fell over the
congregation and the only sound was the steady lapping and crashing of the waves behind us.

A man stepped from the audience. His hair was jet black and his body fit. Between his legs his cock stood erect, proud, aloft, like a compass pointing North.

Just as the sun began to rise over the sea the man fell to his knees in front of the woman and she rose again and pushed him onto his back and then lowered herself onto his hardened flesh. As
they were joined her wings began to beat and the crowd began to cheer.

I cried out in astonishment as something moved over the woman’s body. Her flesh was no longer pale but now covered with images that flashed as brightly as the sun’s rays roving over
the sea. A landscape of spirals, hieroglyphs, creatures winged and land bound, fishes and reptiles etched across her flesh and all of them joined by a pulsing vine that wound around her entire body
like a thin net crowding them all together.

‘The inking,’ said voices alongside her reverently. ‘It is done.’

Dawn broke that morning in the same way that it did every other day, but I knew nothing would ever be the same again.

The shore resembled a scene after battle. Bodies were scattered haphazardly across the sand, nude, lithe, breathing in unison as if the scene which we had all witnessed had unified the crowd in
some unearthly way.

I turned to look at Iris. She was laughing, as if the events of the previous night had filled her with giddy amazement. The wind pressed a long lock of her brown hair against her lips and into
her mouth and she did not bother to push it away.

She turned, and kissed me.

I kissed her back, aware all the time that the taste of her still lingered on my lips. Kissing Iris was like biting into a fig. She was at once both firm and soft and the shape of her mouth
caused inevitable associations to rise up in my mind. I wanted to spread open her thighs again and drink from her well. I would have died for one more moment of her lips pressed against mine.

‘I love you,’ I told her, but she just laughed again and pushed herself to her feet and took my hand. Her fingers were slim and slipped through mine like silk. It was like being in
love with a china doll, caught between wanting to embrace her savagely and fear that I might break something.

She pulled me up.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Or we’ll get caught in a long line of cars behind everyone else getting back.’

It occurred to me then that all of the things that we had seen had been a performance. Already, the beach was littered with bits of costume, a solitary wing that had come off an angel’s
back poking up out of the sand, a set of false eyelashes that had peeled away sitting on a piece of driftwood, spider-like, still with the glue attached. A clean-up crew was moving slowly towards
us packing the debris of the previous night away into rubbish bags.

Had our lovemaking been a performance? I wondered. The thought cut a valley through my heart. It had not been that, to me. If I had been drunk on anything, I had been drunk on Iris, her private
river seeping over my tongue, leaving an indelible mark on the inner landscape of my flesh.

It took us nearly a whole day to drive back to Auckland. There was a slip on the road and we’d had to wait as the workers cleared it. Iris had been given a short summer dress by one of the
Ball staff, since her own garments had evidently been picked up by someone else or lost. It was shorter than the length that she normally favoured and bunched up almost all of the way to the top of
her legs. The pale expanse of her thighs was a vision that engrossed me for the full hour that we sat stationary. It was unusually hot and the tar seal was tacky, visibly slowing the steps of the
road worker who eventually waved us through. I watched Iris watching him, her gaze transfixed on the pattern of muscles rippling on his chest, shirtless beneath his bright orange hi-vis vest. He
was young like us, maybe eighteen or twenty, tanned and hairless. I imagined him navigating the waves that we drove alongside, cutting through the sea like a snapper. I wondered how big his cock
was.

The puzzle of my love for Iris caught me momentarily, like a prison of mirrors, each door supposedly leading to an exit but only reflecting another trap back. I could not ban from my mind the
vision of her making love to another, being made love to. I could not decide whether the reality of such a thing was something that I wanted or not.

Finally the man in orange turned his sign from red to green and we continued, stopping only once more, at a chip shop on the outskirts of Whangarei for our supper. We ate in the car, from the
newspaper that our dinner came wrapped in. Iris ordered a battered sausage and tore into it lustily. It was our first meal since the strange buffet at the Ball the night before. I watched her lick
the salt from her fingertips.

When we arrived back, we learned that Joan had died, the night of the Ball. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

Iris and I shared her single bed that night, like we had when we were children, and I held her head to my breast and stroked her hair as she cried. We found a mutual comfort in each
other’s nudity. There was a closeness in the touching of our skin, unbroken by the barrier of clothing. She was open against me, like a flower blooming. I woke to find Iris’s lips
around my breast, her tongue flicking my nipple. Her fingers delved inside me, spreading my folds gently as though she was searching for the right path on a map she hadn’t seen before.

‘I love you,’ she said softly, and slid up my body, making a sandwich of our flesh and pressing her lips to mine.

It was a revelation.

I still did not always believe her. I guessed that by making love with me she was exorcising her grief. Or was she? Iris was the flitting bird that I could never keep in the palm of my hand. I
must watch her fly.

If Joan had a vast fortune buried away somewhere as was rumoured, then it was either lost, or forgotten. Her will was sparse. She left Iris and me no money – not that
either of us had even thought of it – but an envelope that contained two one-way tickets and a note of white paper, folded twice, that contained one line of writing in black ink:
Go to
London, and find the ghost of me there
.