Soul

Klaus, his black hair sprinkled with sawdust, picked up a chisel and continued his woodcarving. ‘America is like a woman who has lost her virginity in a gang bang. I’m still surprised it’s taken this long for the United States to experience a serious terrorist attack within its borders.’

‘Blame our foreign policy. Besides, we’ve had serious terrorist attacks before.’

Julia, showered and unpacked, caffeine pounding the last of her energy into a jittery wakefulness, felt herself being drawn into a reluctant discussion when all she wanted was to make love. But after she’d told Klaus about the job offer, he’d been uncharacteristically unsupportive.

‘You have got no idea,’ he said, looking up from his work. ‘Europe is made from war. Look at the Balkans, the Basque movement, Northern Ireland. My parents still remember famine under the German occupation. Europeans wade through centuries of vendettas, racism and battles over sovereignty every day on the way to the bus stop. A European can’t escape, unless he goes to the New World, and now it’s here too. You know you can’t take this commission,’ he concluded grimly.

Julia kissed

him across the wood vice, hoping to defuse his darkening mood. The sawdust slipping from his hair showered her cheeks.

‘Yeah, and I love you too. But if you can think of another way of making the mortgage, I’m open to suggestions.’

Klaus frowned. ‘Wonderful, you’ve been back for two hours and we’re already arguing about my inability to match your income.’

‘I have to take the job, baby, it’s a huge opportunity.’

‘Sweetheart, you always get so swept up you never see the broader implications. This will lead to genetic profiling.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Yes necessarily.’

Julia stood at the workbench that ran along one side of the tool shed Klaus had redesigned as his writing studio. Built at the back of the yard in the 1950s for a previous resident’s wayward teenage son, the small hut was made from pale pine that still exuded a sweet scent in the summer. It was Klaus’s sanctuary, an inherently masculine domain hung with icons from his Belgian adolescence: Anderlecht football club posters, a photo from a drunken student reunion, a battered hockey stick, a picture of an ex-girlfriend, blonde and toothy, on a horse.

Above the desk was a shelf packed with books on script writing; next to that stood a metal cabinet filled with television screenplays filed meticulously, the labels winking hopefully: sci-fi, crime, supernatural, comedy—all unproduced.

The workbench was where Klaus relieved his frustration with his career by constructing things—from small carvings to cabinetmaking. It was a form of meditation for him, this rhythm of the wood rasp, the tattoo and swing of the hammer. It was how the writer stopped thinking, and also how he assuaged his aggravation at the precariousness of the entertainment industry by smashing the occasional object he had created.

‘If there is a mutant gene function, and I don’t find it, you realise another geneticist will—eventually. So why not me?’ Julia caressed his shoulder. ‘Please, let’s not argue. I missed you, honey bear.’

Klaus turned back to his work without responding.

A half-carved head was clamped in the vice attached to the bench, powdery with shavings. Watching the chisel bite into the rose-tinged wood, Julia tried unsuccessfully to stop her mind crowding with the overwhelming myriad of ethical questions that always swirled around her research. How did her colleagues survive? They all held wildly different opinions. Craig Venter, the maverick who had shocked the scientific community by using a large percentage of his own genome as the first generic prototype, was an agnostic who believed all research was valid. His nemesis, Francis Collins, a born-again Christian, believed in strict ethical codes on research, but still alleged that the discovery and mapping of the genome fell under God’s plan. Then there was the actual pioneer of the genome, James Watson, whose original motivation was to prove that there was no God, no grand designer of man and nature.

Where did Julia stand among these three schools of thought? The ache of jet lag burned behind her eyes. She sank into a chair and stared over Klaus’s shoulder at the small window framing the sky. A zeppelin advertising Dunlop tyres floated across a corner of the blue canvas. For a moment the ground seemed to tilt slightly with it, as if Julia was still on the airplane, terra firma as insubstantial as the falling air beneath the jet.

The wood shavings curling back like thick locks of auburn hair, Klaus’s mallet tapping down onto the end of the carving tool in a ceaseless beat—both converged into a seductively familiar rhythm that pressed Julia’s recent experiences in the Middle East into a surreal pastiche that suddenly seemed to belong to somebody else’s memory. You’re home now, she reassured herself. Relax, this is where you belong; no more strange hotel rooms, 4 a.m. drives through collapsed, war-torn suburbs, the gallows humour of bored soldiers, no more ambushes.

Outside, the rain had stopped and the afternoon sun caught the top of the bench, transforming the wood shaving into a fine golden powder. Julia traced an outline in it with her finger—a small stick figure, a primitive man with a spear in his hand. She looked at the back of her husband’s neck, the soft feathering of his hairline, the tangible presence of him bringing back the sharp sense of missing him when she was away. Two months. They hadn’t made love for two months.

She moved behind him and gently bit the back of his neck. The beating of the mallet stopped as, groaning softly despite his irritation, Klaus arched his neck in response. Then, pushing back the work chair, he wrapped his long arms around her.

They kissed and he bit her lower lip playfully. Even after ten years of marriage, Julia still felt that tug of desire, as if Klaus were a new lover with each seduction. Nevertheless, they did not make love enough, and she had often puzzled over the awkward balance between domesticity and desire. She was a workaholic, and both of them were cerebral animals, easily distracted by anxiety. Sometimes Julia fantasised about a life where they could be more spontaneous. She’d even contemplated renting a room to recreate the excitement of a clandestine encounter, to eroticise the familiar.

Sliding her hand around Klaus’s growing erection, she slipped her tongue into his mouth, curling one leg around him. He kissed her back passionately, all annoyance evaporating.

He hauled her skirt up over her hips, his fingers between her legs, playing her. Groaning, she propelled him toward the dusty old couch against the wall. Pushing him down, she sank to her knees and took him into her mouth.

How she loved the scent of him. It was like coming home; the familiar rich buttery concoction, tinged with sweat and something a little darker, was overwhelmingly sexual to her, flooding her with a pungent masculinity that was completely his—his individual pheromone fingerprint.

He weaved his fingers through her long hair and she felt him growing harder, tremors of pleasure running up his cock, his thighs quivering under her hands. He pulled her face up to his and she mounted him, easing him into her, filling with a delicious sense of recognition as both their bodies relaxed into each other. She paused, the thickness of him causing her to gasp. Searching his face, she could find nothing but affection and the history of all their couplings reflected in his irises, a chronology of moments like these, their time together, their intimacy.

And then, their lovemaking grew more frenzied, the images of Afghanistan, of the spinning wheel of the Humvee, the blood on the stones, the eyes of the startled goats, all started to leave her as—with each gasp—she was drawn into the moment, into this homecoming, this union that was the core of the two of them.

Her swollen breasts brushed the stubble on his unshaven chin, his lips tugged at her nipples, as, closing her legs, she drew the ecstasy between them into a tight ambiguity, mounting higher and higher until both of them came—he, buried in the black wave of her hair, she screaming out loud in a tremendous release of grief and deliverance.

Afterwards, as she lay in the crook of his armpit, Klaus ran his hands thoughtfully across her breasts and down to her belly.