The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (31 page)

‘It's OK,' Holly said. Her voice raked at his skin. She made words, at the same time
still singing, a weird quartet in an unknown key, with the dripping sexes above her.
She was pure fuck. He wanted to find his end in her.

He stepped around her, behind her, into her. Her buttocks were like butter. He could
feel the woman's fist pounding against
his cock through the thin membrane of Holly's
body. He reached around to hold her breasts. His hands squeezed them roughly. It
was impossible to be gentle. The pulse of her energy seemed to demand this kind of
gorgeous violence. He felt her breasts swell beneath the pounding of his fingers,
a jet of liquid spurting out of the great round globes. He looked over Holly's shoulder
and saw the electric-blue sparks shooting from her nipples and falling onto the backs
of the revellers where they settled into radiant white-blue puddles.

‘It's all right,' said Holly, her voice crackling like an exposed electric cable.
‘We figured out how to direct the energy. Now everything is as it should be.'

Around them he could hear the phrases spill from the mouths of the readers, who managed
to keep their voices steady as they held their books in one hand and frigged each
other at the same time. He heard the voice of de Sade, of Nin, of Boccaccio, Sacher-Masoch,
Anon, Anon, Anon, Anon…

‘Oh god,' Nick groaned, ‘I'm going to split in half. I'll die.'

‘I know,' said Holly, calmly. ‘This is how it is supposed to end. Beautiful, isn't
it? Come inside me, Nick.' She rested her hands on the head between her thighs, ‘Mandy.
It is time. Come with me now.'

He felt Mandy's hand begin to slip though Holly's flesh. Her fingers surrounded his
thick pulsing shaft. She took hold of him as if Holly was insubstantial, nothing
more than smoke. The three space-cunts began to spray like taps turned on full. The
ground around them began to dissolve. The people thinned out, their flesh became
amorphous.

Nick felt himself falling forward as if Holly had liquefied and his ejaculation exploded
through the phantom spectre of
his love. His come hit his own cheeks with the force
of tears. His cock pulsed, Mandy's hand pulsed, the writhing bodies all around them
pulsed. The world was the contraction of his balls, its death the expiration of his
seed, his come dissolving into space like a galaxy being born. The force was cataclysmic.
A shout like the beginning of things, and when the final echo of the climax was resolved
there was not a thing but silence where it all had been. A silence so beautiful that
nothing in the clutter of the past or in the wonderful peaceful emptiness of the
future could ever be as perfect as this moment, this little death.

Now.

Acknowledgments

Quoted material used with thanks.

The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
Copyright © Angela Carter 1972. Reproduced
by permission of the estate of Angela Carter, c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd,
20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

A Sport and a Pastime
. Copyright © 1967, renewed 1995 by James Salter. Reprinted
by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Quotation from Anaïs Nin's
A Spy in the House of Love
used by permission of Sky Blue
Press.

Other Anaïs Nin quotations used by permission of Tree Leyburn Wright.

The Story of the Eye
by Georges Bataille, translation copyright © 1977 by Joachim
Neugroschel. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

Thanks

To:

Michael Heyward, who pitched me an idea for a novel. Sorry I am terrible at sticking
to a brief and I do hope you enjoy the crazy book that eventuated in place of the
one you were hoping for.

Mandy Brett, for agreeing to go on this crazy journey with me. Thanks for your wonderful
and tireless editorial work and for laughing at my jokes.

Katherine Lyall-Watson, always my first and closest reader. I would be lost without
your amazing eye.

Anthony Mullins, your structural notes on this project were invaluable as were your
constant love and support. I hope you know how important you are to my work. I could
not continue to do this job without you.

Emerald Roe, for your generous gift of a shack by the ocean called Bliss, in which
I wrote most of this book.

Barry Elphick, beloved father, and Denise Elphick, who made my writing retreats possible,
topping up the wood for my fire, lending me a vehicle and making sure I was safe
and comfortable whilst working.

The Avid Reader Good Sex Book Club who joined me on this reading journey and allowed
me to pillage our conversations to write this book. I love Sex Club and I love you
guys. And with particular thanks to Naomi Stekelenburg, philosopher of sex, who helped
me understand my own philosophical bent.

My first test readers, Benjamin Law, Helen Bernhagen, James Butler, Trent Jamieson,
Chris Somerville. You guys are my sexy entourage.

Maureen Burns—thank you for Wilhelm Reich. You turned this book off the safe and
narrow path and into the energetic world of orgone.

Tim Coronel, who loaned me a stack of reference material. I promise I will send your
books back before you read this. Promise!

Thanks to my orgiastic buddies Tom Brown, Nicholas Ib, Steve Watson, Ronnie Scott,
Ann-Frances Watson, Martin Chatterton—it was pretty fun wasn't it?

Thanks always to my families, Wendy and Sheila Kneen and to my sister Karen. And
thank you to my writerly family in particular, Steven Amsterdam, Kristina Olsson,
Ashley Hay, Nigel Bebe, Ellen Van Neerven, Scotty Spark, Michaela McGuire, who joined
me to co-work or co-whinge about this book and to the Cosiers, Becca Harbison and
Kasia Jancewski and Jason Reed.

Excerpts from earlier drafts of this book appeared in
BUMF
magazine,
Scum
and
The
Lifted Brow
. My gratitude to the literary journals and magazines of Australia, who
keep the wheels turning.

Holly White finds her sexual power through reading the erotic classics. This is something
that she and I share. I owe a debt of gratitude to those who have boldly gone before
me, leaving a trail of crumbs for me to feast on as I picked my way out of the woods
and towards to the completion of this book. The books I devoured in order to produce
this book include the ones referenced within. These are…