Dark Places (35 page)

At the Show piglets squealed and bulls' balls hung low. There was rank animal carnality everywhere. My hopeless son squinted and blinked and would not look at the dangling bulbs, the hairy pizzles. ‘Observe, John,' I told him. ‘Observe: it is a visible fact that bulls are the most virile of creatures.' John only blinked and squinted more, and when I jabbed at him, to wake him up, he said, ‘What is virile, Father, does it mean hairy?' I would have hit him, but knew nothing more interesting would happen than him sitting on soiled straw, squinting and blinking and rubbing his pathetic bottom. ‘Virile, John—perhaps more forcefully than I intended, so a pair of women looked around and met my eye suggestively—‘virile, John, is what men are. Women are not virile, virility is what we men do to them.' John did not understand, but the ladies behind us did, and one tittered behind a glove. ‘Ladies,' I said, and would have gone on: ‘Enlighten my son, please, ladies,' I would have said. ‘Tell my son about virility,' but they had disappeared behind a cow, and were lost to me with their long lustful eyes.

It was easy to fob John off with a ten-shilling note, brown as dung. ‘It is time you had a good time, John,' I told him, but he did nothing but go on blinking at me like a parrot. ‘Go and run wild, John,' I told him, and he shuffled his feet in the straw. ‘It is time you learned to deal with life, John,' I cried at him. ‘Think of Dickens washing those bottles, and Dick Whittington!' My son seemed never to have heard of Dickens or Dick Whittington, but he went on crushing the ten-shilling note in his hand. ‘Here,' I said, and gave him another note. ‘For God's sake, go away, John.' My son was boring me, and the cows all around us were piddling into the straw.

Thirty

THE HARBOUR sang its sweet song before my feet at the jetty, and a gull bobbed smugly on a swell of green water, watching me with an unblinking beady eye. A smudge on the sky was a fact indicating another fact: that the ferry was on its way. The water appeared to be solid. It sucked in the most leisurely way at the hairy pilings of the jetty, breathing quietly. The gull floated with not a ripple and I was almost sure that I could stride out without so much as wetting my boots, straight across the water to the room where my daughter was waiting for me.

Behind me I heard silk rustling, clinging to some woman's thighs as she moved down to wait for the ferry. I felt her watching my fine manly back: her silk rustled again and I heard her face beating the air behind my head. ‘And shall you do it?' she asked in a clear languid voice, and I turned. There was not just one face, but two; two silk dresses, a total of four female thighs, and two mouths turned towards me. Four breasts thrust at me under silk and between those four thighs were two womanly clefts, moist and attentive, waiting. ‘Why, Mr Singer,' one of those mouths said, and showed its teeth. Between the teeth the tongue flickered an invitation, lewd, unmistakable. ‘Lovely day, Mr Singer, don't you think?' After the mouth had finished with the words it did not quite close over the teeth and that fleshy tongue, and between those thighs, hot under mauve silk, another mouth was also ajar.

‘Good morning, Mr Singer,' the mouth in blue said. ‘Oh, that water looks good enough to eat!' This other mouth was not as fleshy as the first but was moister, glistening as it formed the words and winking at me as it opened and closed around sounds. Open, close, open, close.

Our ferry was at the wharf now, and those mouths full of longing had to swallow their lust and trip across a plank and into the ferry. ‘Good morning, ladies,' I said, and bowed, and offered my hand to assist them on the plank, and felt the raging fire of their flesh through the gloves of the fingers that grasped my hands. My hand glowed from the scald of their passion, and I watched them walk to the bow, watched four buttocks move up and down against each other under their blue and their mauve. Those buttocks beckoned me to follow, but I smiled, knowing that I would leave the mauve and the blue still panting, longing for male flesh but unfulfilled.

Back at the house I did not simply stride in through the front gate. As quiet as the very air, I let myself in by the tradesman's entrance, holding the latch up with my finger so it did not click—I was deft, I could do no wrong!—and slipped quietly in past the dustbins. It was a limpid morning when every atom seemed a fact, when the air was of such a clarity that objects were for once indubitable. My shadow slid ahead of me along the path, up the back steps, and fell upon the door. This is a door, I told myself, and placed my palm flat against it. My shadow lay crisp and authoritative on the wood: today even the shadow of Albion Gidley Singer was a thing of substance.

The air in the house was hushed when I entered, and I slipped from room to room without creating a single ripple. It was a silent house, but it was not an empty house: the silence was full of my daughter. Somewhere, in one of these rooms, she was waiting for me. I had only to go from room to room, systematically, and I would find her.

The air in her bedroom tried to stifle me as I investigated. There was her narrow white bed, that held her large animal body; but it showed nothing. There was no evidence of writhing passion on the virginal white cover, there were no tear-tracks on the pillow. I opened her wardrobe, where filmy frocks hung wistfully, empty, and I thrust my face among them, but there was no one there, no scent, no shiver of self. My daughter's frocks were not what held her: only her skin did that. Her shoes meant more. The leather had been creased and distorted by her feet, and smelled of animal. I put a pair on my hands and walked them across the floor, and for a moment I was my daughter, filling her shoes.

In the drawers of the dresser, smelling of lavender like poor Norah's, lay the things that were secret next to her skin, flesh-coloured snakes of garments with lace and straps that slithered through my hands like living things. Oh, bloomers that held my daughter's secrets! My fingernails caught in these garments and their lavender coolness frightened me.

A curtain tried to take me by surprise, shifting sideways at me in the draught. I jammed the drawer in haste, and caught my wrist in it when it abruptly closed. I saw myself leaving my hands in the drawer, lying cool and wax-like among my daughter's underclothes, lying there like the bags of lavender, my fingers and palms and the hairy backs of my hands forever sliding among the camisoles and bloomers. I thought of how I could go handless to my study and sit thinking blessedly of nothing, of my hands nested and coddled in fine cambric, waiting for my wrists to grow new hands so that I could fill all my daughter's drawers with them, my hands everywhere.

It was a seductive idea, but there was another that beckoned, and I obeyed. I moved through the waiting halls of the house, nothing more substantial than a puff of air floating between the walls, and around each corner I drew closer to the beating heart of my house. There were sounds going on, somewhere: small sounds, but to my knowing ears, large enough.

I stood at last outside the door of the bathroom. Within were rustlings and snappings, a slap of fabric on flesh, a sigh of silk slithering over itself, a dry sound of foot-sole on tile. Inclining my head, I found I could see through the gap where the door was not completely closed, and I drew closer. I did not allow a single rustle or heartbeat to give me away; I was nothing but silent cells moving over each other.

I had expected to see Lilian, naturally. But I had not expected three of her, reflected in the three-faced pier-glass, and I had not expected her nude. Her flesh in the mirror was greenish and massive, the light falling on it in soft shadowed ways. Staring-eyed nipples swung around majestically on the points of her bosoms as she moved; the bosoms themselves trembled and shifted, ripples of movement passing across them. They were as soft as water, yet were the most solid and undeniable things I had ever seen. They were like bags of fruit, or skins of water, or sea creatures: formless, globular, faceless, bursting out of their skins, yet each one swung and hung, pointed and lolled, with a weighty will of its own.

Naturally, I had seen bosoms before: the pert titties of Agnes and Una had flirted at me often enough, and Norah's emptied bags had flattened under my grip. But bosoms like this, gigantic, vigorous, bold-eyed, alien! Six of them would be too much for any man.

Then there was the belly, another shock, not like the little belly of Agnes or Una, a neat tame mound under a man's hand. Nor was it that soft belly of Norah's, with the meaty stripes made by her corsets lurid against the white flesh as she lay stretched out on the bed with her face turned away. This belly was a type altogether foreign: much too big for a man's hand to encompass, not flecked and striped, but gigantic, unabashed, sitting up high and round with a smooth glowing complexion like a happy face.

It appalled me to know that all this flesh had always been underneath her clothes. Norah had poked and prodded, and tried stripes and pintucks, posture exercises and deep-breathing, but under all the expensive fabrics and all the tricks and trompe-l'oeil there had always been this flesh: uncompromising, solid, immovable, flesh simply there, flesh that could not be denied, flesh that was not prepared to come to any kind of accommodation with pintucks or dropped waists.

Below was her secret mound, but it was not covered like Norah's with demure little fuzz. Nor was it plucked bald, like the mound of the current Agnes or Una, for the greater enjoyment of her gentlemen friends. This mound was hidden by a great black bush springing out, lush, feral, shocking against her pale skin. Lilian seemed to find it wonderful. She pinched it between her fingers and pulled it out to its uncoiled length, she twisted it around, she fluffed it up, she stroked it down. She played with her own dreadful growth of hair as if it were a pet.

All at once she was gone from the mirror, and I was blinded by the sudden blankness of the glass. I blinked, and she was back, those lolling things on her chest pivoting around on themselves, staring in all directions, and she had my nail scissors in her hand. She bent over double, breasts hanging, belly bulging, and snipped off a pinch of that wiry hair between her thighs. As the scissors closed over the hair she screwed up her face as if she thought it would bleed, but when it was done, she winked at herself in the mirror as if at a lover.

Oh, she loved herself ! Her six hands lifted her six great globes of breasts as if weighing them, and she laughed aloud at all the cleavages she could make by pressing them together. She sucked in all her bellies and ran her hands up and down herselves, hands everywhere caressing, congratulating, relishing the way the flesh went in and out. She swept her hair up with her hand, and three heads tilted this way and that, ogling themselves with a leer that showed six sharp eyeteeth. She postured and posed, and blinked her eyelids at herself; she smiled and pouted, frowned and simpered: she tried herself out on herself as if she had never seen herself before.

As perhaps she had not. Lilian's room was the room of a clean-living young girl, who only needed a mirror to tell her whether her hair needed brushing or her face needed washing, and no child of mine was permitted to dally in bathrooms getting up to mischief. I watched my daughter going through this grotesque exercise in self-adoration and realised that this day, with everyone gone from the house, may have been the first time she had ever been alone in the house with a mirror.

As I watched, she lay down and spread her knees apart, opening herself up like a nutcracker, and pressed back the flesh of her thighs with her hands: the girl was actually trying to see in! She could not, of course, no matter how she strained and jerked her hips at the mirror; I could hear her panting from the effort, but a woman's secret place has been designed by Mother Nature to remain unseen by its owner. But Lilian was unstoppable: now she was poking around with her finger, actually probing up inside herself; now she was sniffing at the finger, and now, my God, she was pushing out the tip of her tongue until it came in direct contact with that same finger: she was actually tasting her own slime! It was enough to make anyone sick.

Perhaps my disgust crackled with audible sparks: Lilian froze, and she raised her head so that I could see her face in the mirror, very still, listening. When she rolled over onto her knees and started to get up, clutching at those slippery bosoms, trying vainly to hide their bulk behind her hands, I knew she had seen me.

I opened the door to its full width and came up close to her.

‘You are vile and degenerate,' I told her quietly, but she only shook her head and cringed away from me. ‘You are disgusting,' I told her, more in sorrow than anger, and joined her in the mirrors. Next to such a crowd of sprawling flesh on display, thighs and titties everywhere you looked, the other person in the mirror with her was large and dark, tightly packaged, bound around with layers of garments that revealed no flicker of flesh.

Lilian met my eyes in the mirror: for a moment all that bulbous flesh dropped away, and it was just Lilian and myself, eye-to-eye in the mirror. If she had spoken to me, or smiled into that private moment, just the two of us, I could have forgiven her everything. But she turned away, and scrabbled on the floor for her clothes, holding them up against her like rags. I laughed aloud, and glimpsed out of the corner of my eye the three laughing mouths of Albion Gidley Singer showing their teeth. ‘It will take more than that, my girl, to hide yourself,' I thought, and the men in the mirror stripped the shreds of cloth off all the soft maggot-shapes, and wrestled them to the floor. But as Lilian fell she snatched up Norah's corset from where it lay, and she got it in front of her so that as we all fell together the thing had its whalebone ribs hard against mine. The dark men in the mirror did not seem to feel it, but I did. I ripped it out from between us and threw it across the room: it was a white bird arching through all the mirrors before it fell against the door with a silly twittering of its suspenders.