The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (6 page)

Michael tipped his glass to his lips and swallowed the last of his scotch. He set
the glass down on the coffee table and walked quickly towards her parents.

‘You'll be all right sweetheart?'

Holly nodded.

‘Maybe you should call Jennifer,' her father said. ‘Have a sleepover.'

A sleepover. As if she were still ten years old. She looked towards Michael to see
if he was amused by this childish image but he had already turned towards the door,
one of his hands resting gently on her mother's hip in a gesture that seemed halfway
between inappropriately intimate and politely affectionate. When the door closed
behind them. Holly felt herself relax immediately. She hadn't realised how tense
she had been. She slipped off the couch and picked up Michael's glass, the ice still
tinkling in the bottom of it.

She filled it with scotch; overfilled it, perhaps, because some of the ice had melted.
Holly held the glass up and peered at the edge of it. There was a partial fingerprint.
She placed her own finger over it. Her hand where Michael's hand had been. A smudge
at the rim. She put it to her mouth, tipped the glass and let the liquid settle on
her tongue. This is what it would be like to kiss someone like him, someone as old
as her parents, but not at all parental. Someone who could see right through her
clothing, through her skin and muscle, right down to the bones of her.

She was no better than that bad girl from high school. Her friends would be ashamed.
Jack would be ashamed. She took another big sip from the glass, her mouth on the
lip-print, now more hers than his. She grimaced. Harsh. Biting, but with a strangely
warm finish that sat nicely in her stomach and, oddly, pulsed a little. It felt as
if she had swallowed someone else's live and beating heart.

She opened her eyes and closed them again immediately. Her mouth felt sticky as she
ran her tongue around the furry inside of her teeth. She was being picked up, by
a huge bird, it felt like.
She was flying, but not on the strength of her own wings.

‘Jack?'

And even her voice sounded breathless, as if she were moving up towards an altitude
where the atmosphere was thinning.

She heard a shushing sound.

‘Stay sleeping, darling,' and she let herself relax into her father's arms as he
carried her up the stairs.

Two things. Firstly there was a smell to him when he kissed her, picked up the sheet
and settled it up under her chin, a riot of perfumes, sharp, cheap, sweet, the kind
of perfume her mother would never wear. And below that, a deeper note, the smell
of moss and freshly turned earth and dampness, a smell of caves and oceans and weed
tossed up on the shore. When he moved away from her she reached out to clutch his
lapel. The thick fabric of his suit jacket felt reassuring beneath her fingertips.
He stepped away and the jacket slipped out of her grasp.

She heard the door shut behind him and she opened her eyes finally. There was something
fine between her fingertips, a thread. She peered at it in the thin light from the
moon. A hair, a long pale hair. Blonde. Her mother was dark. She measured the length
of this hair between her hands. Long. It would stretch down past a woman's shoulders,
down even to her buttocks. A breeze from the open window plucked the hair out of
her hand and hid it among the blankets, a badly kept secret. She searched but couldn't
find it again. Holly glanced towards the clock on the bedside table. 3:05.

It wasn't Valentine's Day anymore.

1991: A Book of Dreams

The orgone is strong tonight. It feels to Nick as if he has lowered himself into
a jar of honey. His movements become slower, languid, the air is thick to the point
where breathing is like swallowing.

Downstairs, down through the living room with its vast wooden cabinets to the basement.
He is not allowed to go into this secret place, but the door was left so tantalisingly
open. Walls thick as secrets, carpet spilled on the ground to soak up any fear. Even
though he knows everyone is out, Nick looks around before he opens the heavy door
to the dark wooden box.

The Accumulator. The good rays come in, purified through the thick coffin-shaped
wood casing and the layers of fibreglass and steel wool. There is a jar of mung bean
sprouts on the seat, an experiment. Nick is not a scientist yet, although one day
he might become one. The mung beans are an experiment, behaving as you would expect,
shooting up enthusiastically from the damp layer of cotton wool: supercharged by
orgone. He can
feel the orgone energy envelop him as he climbs up onto the hard seat
of the Accumulator. There is a pillow and he pushes it behind his back and nestles,
pulling the jar of sprouts into the cradle of his arms.

‘Safest place in the world,' he whispers across the neck of the jar.

He breathes the orgone in through his mouth and releases it out of his nostrils,
a circular breathing, a healing loop. He can feel the energy coursing through his
body, purifying his blood before it settles in his lap, a solid throb of orgone.
He is suddenly aware of the way his thighs are clamped together and when he looks
down, setting the jar of sprouts aside for the moment, a pale blue glow is highlighting
the little tent in his shorts. He closes his eyes and concentrates. Breath in, breath
out.

There is a smell like smoke. Nick's eyes are suddenly wide; he flinches and touches
the sides of the accumulator. Something is on fire. Perhaps the EAs have landed and
they are torching the place with their ray guns and he will burn to death…

But no, there is nothing but the comfort of darkness and the slight blue glow floating
around his hips. He waves his hand through the glow but it doesn't respond to the
movements as smoke would. He tries to catch some in the palm of his hand but it is
like trying to capture a spirit.

It is the orgone. Nick is sure that is what he is seeing here, the pure blue glow
of the orgone energy that has been attracted by the accumulator and captured. Pure
healing energy, and it is this same energy that is causing his penis to rise now.

He breathes in through his mouth, out through his nose. All he can do is sit and
enjoy the tingling sensation. If only he had superpowers. He could catch the orgone
and channel it like
in the comic books. He could mould the orgone into a ball and
hurl it at the enemies of pleasure. If Nick had superpowers he would gather the blue
glow and make it sharp and pointed like a spear. He'd throw it straight at the EAs
just like Dr Reich and his grandpopa used to do with their cloudbuster. His hands
would be smoking and glowing blue like lightning. Nick presses his hands down into
his lap where the blue glow is filling him with a nice tingling feeling, making his
penis fierce and hard.

He presses his hands against his penis to hold onto the pleasure just a little longer.
Somewhere, he is pretty sure, there is a superhero powered by orgone energy. His
dad has told him it is possible and although he is not allowed to have faith without
science he secretly, faithfully holds out hope.

Nick closes his eyes, presses his penis, concentrates. ‘I believe in you forever,
Orgone Man,' he whispers. ‘I promise I believe.'

Vox

by
NICHOLSON BAKER

Holly was seriously overdressed for
ENGL1500
: Contemporary Literature
.
Her
regular
law subjects had not prepared her for this change of aesthetic and she
was
suddenly
conscious of her flimsy summer dress. Her face felt masked by the makeup
she
was
wearing; her lemon yellow heels were stared at by girls in Doc Martens and
ugly
black
flats.

Holly had been hiding books all her life. It wasn't as if they were banned; no one
had explicitly told her not to read. But she knew that bookish girls were different
somehow: not to be trusted. Their skin dry and crisp like paper spilling from the
press, their eyes squinting behind the thick glass of their spectacles. And they
didn't waste time on grooming, electing presumably to finish a chapter when they
might have been getting their eyeliner just right. Magazines were more useful to
her group of friends. Magazines kept you in touch with fashion, taught you how to
apply rouge or how to avoid cellulite.

Holly nonetheless liked books. Sometimes she hid one behind the pages of the latest
Vogue
or
Marie Claire
. She left the television on in her room, relying on the characters
and plot of her current paperback to drown out the incessant noise, the relentless
colour and movement on the screen. Reading was Holly's secret guilty pleasure.

The course title had leaped out at her from the list of unit choices. A class devoted
to her secret passion. Her friends wouldn't get it at all. She wouldn't be mocked,
exactly, or ostracised; but there would be raised eyebrows. There would be gossip
behind her back. What had possessed her to tick that box?

There was only one free seat left and she moved quickly towards it. The boy beside
her shifted a little to make room. He stared at Holly, pushing his wire-framed glasses
further up his nose. It wasn't a menacing stare but there was no warmth in it either.
The glasses were held together by gaffer tape, the black edge stuck against the side
of the lens. Holly thought that the impediment to his vision would bother him but
he seemed not to notice. His hoodie was loose but too short, the sleeves riding up
to expose lightly furred wrists. His eyebrows met in the middle and she felt an urge
to take her tweezers to them. She stared back; there was nothing else to do. He smiled
as if an unblinking stare in this world was equivalent to a friendly wave.

She had seen bookish types at high school—they sat in the front row in class and
gathered under the jacaranda at lunchtime—but she had never really interacted with
any of them. She had certainly never sat among them, the only girl of her own tribe
thrust into the habitat of these furiously intelligent, belligerently unstylish
aliens.

Holly smoothed out the reading list on her desk and comforted herself with the words
there. McEwan, Coetzee, Adamson. She had read some of the set texts already, secretly,
under the cover of MTV. They felt a little like friends she would soon be revisiting.

She put an asterisk next to the Adamson, which she didn't know. She would have to
track it down. The boy with the monobrow watched as she did it, staring intently
at her pen as if she were writing the original commandments. He watched her underline
the title. He shuffled awkwardly through the books and papers heaped in an untidy
mess on the desk in front of him, and pulled a book from the pile.
The Clean Dark
by Robert Adamson.

‘You can have it,' he whispered.

‘I can't take your copy.'

‘It's OK. I've got the e-book on my iPad.'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘Thanks.'

He must have seen the disappointment on her face when she opened it to find it filled
with neat stanzas. He shrugged. ‘Poetry is good for you. It teaches you about language.'

‘OK,' she said, slipping the book into her bag.

‘I understand,' he said, reaching across to pat the cover of
Atonement
as if it were
her hand. ‘I was disappointed too when I saw there was no Patrick White on the list.'

Holly nodded as if she was equally disappointed, and they settled back to listen
to their lecturer, a thin pale man with the same thick-rimmed glasses that half the
group were wearing. The uniform seemed to be ill-fitting hoodie and skinny jeans,
and not just for the boys either.

When she'd signed up for the course, Holly thought she
might struggle with the content
but it seemed simple enough. He read a passage from the book and they discussed it.
When the hour was over he made them write some page numbers in a book. Holly gathered
her papers.

‘I'm Rodney,' the boy with the wild eyebrows said. His hand was damp and it trembled
slightly.

‘Holly.'

‘A bunch of us are meeting this afternoon to discuss the Stella Prize. You want to
join us?'

Holly glanced nervously around the room. One girl had her hair so short she had assumed
from behind it was a boy, another wore hers in tight plaits that pulled her scalp.
Holly thought they must have hurt just a little.

‘I have to catch up with my boyfriend this afternoon.'

‘Oh,' he said and she was flattered by the disappointment in his voice.

‘But if you guys are doing anything another time it might be fun to tag along.'

He was zipping up his backpack and he paused as if unsure about the contents. He
stared intently into the dark interior, scanning the huge pile of books inside. So
many books. No wonder he was so hunched; she worried briefly about the curvature
of his spine. He straightened, and zipped the bag up decisively.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Actually you could come to our book club.'

‘Like for the reading list?'

‘No. Not at all. Nothing to do with uni. This is a special book club, a secret book
club, and you can come, but only because I said you could.'

He was beaming as if he had just handed her a pile of jewels.

‘I've never been in a book club,' she told him. There was something adventurous about
the idea of a group of people meeting to discuss a book. It was something she could
never expect her own friends to participate in. She smiled, shyly. ‘Are you sure
it would be OK for me to join? I mean if it's so secret…'

‘That's OK. I asked you to come so they'll let you.'

‘They?'

‘Mandy, mainly, but the rest of them too.' He opened the bag again and pulled out
his own copy of
Atonement.
She noticed the pages with their turned-down edges and,
when he opened it, some words scribbled in a margin. Rodney ripped the title page.
Holly held out her hand to stop him but it was too late. She heard the blunt tear
of the paper, saw the damage there. He wrote on the page and handed it to her. An
address. Not far from her house, in fact.