Touchy Subjects (22 page)

"
What time's it now?
"

"
You don't want to know,"she told me.

I grabbed it. The hands said half past three. "It can't be
"

We sat staring into the field. "Nice stars," I said, for something to say.

"
Mmm," she said.

I stared at the stars, joining the dots, till my eyes watered.

And then I heard Sylvia laughing in her throat as she turned sideways and leaned over my seat belt. I heard it hissing back into its socket as she kissed me on the mouth.

When I came back from taking a pee in the bushes, the driver's seat was empty. I panicked, and stared up and down the lane. Why would she have run off on foot? Then, with a deafening creak, the back doors of the van swung open.

Sylvia's bare shoulders showed over the blanket that covered her body. She hugged her knees. Her eyes were bright, and the small bags underneath were the most beautiful folds of skin I'd ever seen. I climbed in and kneeled on the sheepskin coat beside her, reaching up to snap off the little light. Her face opened wide in a yawn. The frightening thought occurred to me:
I could love this woman.

"
You could always get some sleep, you know," I said, "I wouldn't mind." Then I thought that sounded churlish, but I didn't know how to unsay it.

"
Oh, I know I could," said Sylvia, her voice melodic with amusement. "There's lots of things we could do with a whole hour and a half. We could sleep, we could share the joint in the glove compartment, we could drive to Clifden and watch the sun come up. Lots of things.
"

I smiled. Then I realized she couldn't see my face in the dark.

"
Get your clothes off," she said.

I would have liked to leave the map-reading light on over our heads, letting me see and memorize every line of Lee's body, but it would have lit us up like a saintly apparition for any passing farmer to see. So the whole thing happened in a darkness much darker than it ever gets in a city.

There was a script, of course. No matter how spontaneous it may feel, there's always an unwritten script. Every one of these encounters has a script, even the very first time your hand undoes the button on somebody's shirt; none of us comes without expectations to this body business.

But lord, what fun it was. Lee was salt with sweat and fleshier than I'd imagined, behind all her layers of black cotton and wool. In thirty-four years I've found nothing to compare to that moment when the bare limbs slide together like a key into a lock. Or no, more like one of those electronic key cards they give you in big hotels, the open sesame ones marked with an invisible code, which the door must read and recognize before it agrees to open.

At one point Lee rolled under me and muttered, "There's somewhere I want to go," then went deep inside me. It hurt a little, just a little, and I must have flinched because she asked, "Does that hurt?" and I said, "No," because I was glad of it. "No," I said again, because I didn't want her to go.

Sylvia's voice was rough like rocks grinding on each other. As she moved on top of me she whispered in my ear, things I couldn't make out, sounds just outside the range of hearing. I never wanted to interrupt the flow by saying, "Sorry?" or "What did you say?" Much as I wanted to hear and remember every word, every detail, at a certain point I just had to switch my mind off and get on with living it. But Sylvia's voice kept going in my ear, turning me on in the strangest way by whispering phrases that only she could hear.

I've always thought the biggest lie in the books is that women instinctively know what to do to each other became their bodies are
the same. None of Sylvia's shapes were the same as mine, nor could I have guessed what she was like from how she seemed in her smart clothes. And we liked different things and took things in different order, showing each other by infinitesimal movings away and movings towards. She did some things to me that I knew I wanted, some I didn't think I'd much like and didn't, and several I was startled to find that I enjoyed much more than I would have imagined. I did some things Sylvia seemed calm about, and then something she must have really needed, because she started to let out her breath in a long gasp when I'd barely begun.

Near the end, Sylvia's long fingers moved down her body to ride alongside mine, not supplanting, just guiding. "Go light," she whispered in my ear. "Lighter and lighter. Butterfly."As she began to thrash at last, laughter spilled from her mouth.

"
What? What are you laughing for?" I asked, afraid I'd done something wrong. Sylvia just whooped louder. Words leaked out of her throat, distorted by pleasure.

At one point I touched my lips to the skin under her eyes, first one and then the other. "Your bags are gorgeous, you know. Promise you'll never let a surgeon at them?
"

"
No," she said, starting to laugh again.

"
No to which?
"

"
No promise.
"

When Sylvia was touching me I didn't say a single one of the words that swam through my head. I don't know was I shy or just stubborn, wanting to make her guess what to do. The tantalization of waiting for those hands to decipher my body made the bliss build and build till when it came it threw me.

There was one moment I wouldn't swap anything for. It was in the lull beforehand, the few seconds when I stopped breathing. I looked at this stranger's face bent over me, twisted in exertion and
tenderness, and I thought, Yes, you, whoever you are, if you're asking for it, I'll give it all up to you.

In the in-between times we panted and rested and stifled our laughter in the curve of each other's shoulders and debated when I'd noticed Lee and when she'd noticed me, and what we'd noticed and what we'd imagined on each occasion, the history of this particular desire. And during one of these in-between times we realized that the sun had come up, faint behind a yellow mist, and it was half five according to the strapless watch in the glove compartment.

I took hold of Lee, my arms binding her ribs and my head resting in the flat place between her breasts. The newly budded swollen look of them made my mouth water, but there was no time. I shut my mouth and my eyes and held Lee hard and there was no time left at all, so I let go and sat up. I could feel our nerves pulling apart like ivy off a wall.

The cows were beginning to moan in the field as we pulled our clothes on. My linen trousers were cold and smoky. We did none of the things parting lovers do if they have the time or the right. I didn't snatch at Lee's foot as she pulled her jeans on; she didn't sneak her head under my shirt as I pulled it over my face. The whole thing had to be over already.

It was not the easiest thing in the world to find my way back to Galway with Lee's hand tucked between my thighs. Through my trousers I could feel the cold of her fingers, and the hardness of her thumb, rubbing the linen. I caught her eye as we sped round a corner, and she grinned, suddenly very young. "You're just using me to warm your hand up," I accused.

"That's all it is," said Lee.

I was still throbbing, so loud I thought the car was ringing with it. We were only two streets from the hostel now.

I wouldn't ask to see her again. I would just leave the matter open and drive away. Lee probably got offers all the time; she was far too young to be looking for anything heavy. I'd show her I was generous enough to accept that an hour and a half was all she had to give me.

I let her out just beside the hostel, which was already opening to release some backpacking Germans. I was going to get out of the car to give her a proper body-to-body hug, but while I was struggling with my seat belt, Lee knocked on the glass. I rolled down the window, put
Desert Hearts
out of my mind, and kissed her for what I had a hunch was likely to be the last time.

I stood shivering in the street outside the hostel and knocked on Sylvia's car window. I was high as a kite and dizzy with fatigue.

I wouldn't ask anything naff like when we were likely to see each other again. I would just wave as she drove away. Sylvia probably did this kind of thing all the time; she was far too famous to be wanting anything heavy. I'd show her that I was sophisticated enough not to fall for her all in one go, not to ask for anything but the hour and a half she had to give me.

When she rolled down the window, I smiled and leaned in. I shut my eyes and felt Sylvia's tongue against mine, saying something neither of us could hear. So brief, so slippery, nothing you could get a hold of.

Women's Housing Coop Seeks Member. Low Rent, Central Manchester. Applicants Must Have Ability to Get On With People and Show Comittment To Cooperative Living. All Ethnic Backgrounds Particularly Welcome To Apply.

I tore stripes off Carola when I noticed that ad, taped up in the window of the newsagent's next door to our house. She said I could hardly complain if I'd missed the meeting where the wording of the ad was agreed on, but I should feel free to share my feelings with the policy group anyway. "They're not feelings," I said, "they're facts."

Dear Policy Group,
I typed furiously.

Re: Recruitment Ad. I suggest we use a hyphen in Co-op, if we don't want the Welcome Co-operative to be confused with a chicken coop. Some other problems with this ad: "Seeks Member" sounds like we don't have any members yet. Do you
mean "Seeks New Member"?—and, besides, it sounds rather like a giant dildo. Also, I'm just curious, why should the applicants HAVE "Ability To Get On With People" (and is People a euphemism for Women, by the way, given that this is a women-only co-op?), but only SHOW "Commitment To Co-operative Living
" (commitment
being spelled with two
m's
and one
t,
not vice versa, by the way, in case anyone cares)? Or are you suggesting that an applicant might claim to HAVE such a commitment but needs to be forced to SHOW it, e.g. through housework? And if so, why not say so?

The way I see it, there's not a lot of point having policies on Equal Opportunities and Accessibility and Class and Race Issues if we're going to keep on writing our ads in politically correct gobbledygook that would put off anyone who's not doing a Ph.D. And speaking of Race Issues, what on earth does it mean to say that ALL ethnic backgrounds (members of all ethnic groups, I think you mean) are "Particularly Welcome To Apply"? Who's not-so-particularly-welcome, then? Or do you mean white people don't count as an ethnic group? I can't believe one four-line ad can give such an impression of confusion, illiteracy, and pomposity all at once. Why can't we just say what we mean?

My hands were shaking, so I left it at that and printed out the page.
Yours, Luce,
I'd added at the bottom, as if it weren't obvious who'd written the letter from vocabulary alone. As Di was always telling me, "It's like you've got the
Oxford English Dictionary
hidden up your arse." She had a point; some days I sounded more like eighty than eighteen. I suppose I'd read too many books to be normal.

It was only when I was sealing the letter into the envelope that I remembered: in my absence, at the last co-op meeting, they'd decided to rotate me from the maintenance crew to the policy group, because, as I'd been pointing out for ages, my syntax was a lot better than my plumbing. I was meant to replace Nuala, who was moving back to Cork, and if Rachel made up her mind to go off for three months to that organic farm in Cornwall, it occurred to me now, there'd be no one left in the policy group but myself and Di, and I'd end up handing her my letter like some mad silent protestor. Or if Di happened to be away that evening, on one of those Buddhist retreats her boyfriend ran, it would be just me having a one-person meeting, and I'd have to read my own letter aloud and make snide comments about it.

Arghhhh. The joys of communal living. After two years in the Welcome Co-op, I could hardly remember living any other way.

I ripped the envelope open and went downstairs. In the kitchen I pinned my letter up on the corkboard over the oven—the only place you could be sure everyone would see it. I went back down for a prawn cracker five minutes later and found Di reading it as she stirred her miso. "The ad was appalling," I said defensively.

"Yeah. Carola wrote it after the rest of us had gone down the pub. You know you use the word 'mean' four times in the last paragraph?" she asked, grinning.

I ripped the thing down and stuffed it into the recycling bin.

"Temper, temper," she said, tucking away a pale curl that had come out of her bun.

I licked my prawn cracker. "What's wrong with me these days, Di?"

"You know what's wrong with you."

"Apart from that." I shifted uncomfortably against the wooden counter.

"There is no apart from that, Luce. You've been a virgin too long."

My head was hammering; I rubbed the stiff muscles at the back of my neck. "Why does every conversation in this house have to come back to the same-old same-old?"

"Well Jesus, child, take a look at yourself."

I glanced down as if I'd got food on my shirt.

"You came out at fifteen, but you haven't done a thing about it yet. For years now you've seen every kind of woman pass through these doors, and you haven't let one of them lay a hand on you. No wonder you've got a headache!"

I was out the door and halfway up the garden by then. Di was fabulous, but I could do without another of her rants about regular orgasms being crucial to health. Nurses were all like that.

The June sun was slipping behind the crab apple tree. My courgettes were beginning to flower, a wonderful pale orange. I picked a couple of insects off them. When I'd moved into the Welcome, the week after my sixteenth birthday—the date chosen to ensure my mother would have had no legal way of dragging me back home, if she'd tried, not that she did—anyway, at first I found the constant company unbearable. I'd been used to spending all my after-school time locked in my bedroom with a book, living in the world of the Brontes or Jung or Isabel Allende; just about any world would do so long as it wasn't the one my mother lived in. And now all at once I was supposed to become part of some bizarre nine-woman feminist family. The housing co-op was what I'd chosen but it freaked me out all the same. In the early weeks, digging the garden was the only thing that kept me halfway sane. The vegetable plot had been strictly organic ever since I'd taken it over, but sometimes I got the impression that most of my sweat went into providing a feast for the crawlies.