Quiver

The next morning I come in around six. Something’s bugging me about the way the speakers sound in studio two. So I’m stumbling down the corridor, hungover, with my jeans dragged over my pajamas, smelly teeth and bare feet. Times like this I wish I was married. I check into studio two, switch the lights on and activate the desk. I glance in the direction of Quin’s

studio.

I’m peering through my bloodshot retinas and what do I see—Quin, head slumped over the controls. Apparently lifeless. Listen, if you’ve handled as many overdoses as I have you go into automatic pilot. In a flash I’m in there, pulling Quin’s head back by the hair, contemplating the risks of mouth-to-mouth, when the bastard wakes up with a scream. I nearly pass out with shock.

“Don’t do that again, you hear me!”

“Do what?”

“Play dead like that!”

“I was sleeping, for Christ’s sake!”

You know, sometimes these encounters are fated. Like at that moment I felt there was some kind of weird acid flashback. Like I said, at times like this I wish I was married.

As for Quin, he was the walking dead. He just grabbed his cassette and stumbled out into the morning, his shades wrapped around that white face of his. And something goes stop him, keep him here. But I don’t do it. I don’t act on my instinct.

FELICITY

He lies face down, fully clothed. One arm is wrapped across his eyes, the other hangs off the edge of the bed. His hand twitches spasmodically and forms a fist in his sleep.

I am crouched on a chair watching him. It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I’ve been watching him like this for hours. My face is stiff, I can feel my mouth tighten with fury. I’ve been up all night.

He’s been making love to a younger woman. The woman of my fears. Of soft young skin. The girl I can’t be for him. Younger, foreign, who has his silence, his distance. The deception squeezes my heart. It stops me from breathing.

Anger has removed me from my body and made me into a different woman.

I move silently across the floor. I have license to do anything. I gently lift his arm away from his face. He smiles in his sleep.

Traitor, serpent, betrayer.

I will not be treated like this. His face is soft with sex, a half-smile twitches as he dreams.

QUIN

In a strange way I can imagine what she must have been thinking, sitting there. Love does that, it makes you one person, one mind. I see her lifting the flowered pillow and pressing it down over my face. My neck suffuses with blood, turns black-red. My arms flail blindly as I fight for my life. She presses down harder, holding on with all the strength of her anger. A superhuman strength, the collective venom of generations of deceived women. Felicity is taking revenge. For fear. For jealousy. For the Fool. I see myself falling back, legs limp, fist rolling open, lifeless. In Felicity’s mind. But I cannot reach her because I am asleep, struggling blindly with my dreams. Sensing her there beyond a cloud of crackling static. Turning on the bed, I believe I am safe.

FELICITY

Standing over him, watching him, his breath sour-sweet, cigarettes and hash, the hair on his chest curling defiantly, I find I still want him. Want him more with the strangeness, the lust of another.

I want to slip my hand under the bedcovers to find his warm penis. He would be half-erect, still damp, fragrant with strange. I stand there paralyzed, debating my next move. My eyes move over the disheveled terrain of his body. His leather jacket is spread across his feet like a faithful dog. The cassette is half hanging out of the red silk-lined pocket. I reach for it.

The valves flicker for a second and slowly begin to glow. The needles on the dials escalate wildly for a moment, then settle down to mid-point as I adjust the volume. He still sleeps upstairs. I don’t want to wake him.

I sit down carefully on the battered leather couch and place the headphones over my ears. The leads spiral down like deranged umbilical cords. I am terrified. Frightened my suspicions will be confirmed in an avalanche of evidence. My hand shakes as I push the play button. The orchestrated sound of a woman’s orgasm sweeps through me. A tidal wave of groans, grunts and breath. For a moment I am swept along by the sheer majesty of this human cacophony. I forget myself. I am rolling naked in a landscape of tongues, of lips, of taut skin, on the borderline of pleasure and pain, the music sweating beads of ecstasy. I become wet, I can’t help myself. Quin dances before me, a whirling dervish with a lithe, naked succubus wound around his sweating buttocks. By the first crescendo he is above her, entering her, filling her. Sotto voce and he is buried between her legs, drawing from this witch the sweetest of notes. One minute it is red hair that is thrown across a white back, next minute it is shorn pale blond pressed up against a full bruised mouth. Nowhere do I find myself. This voice is not mine. Nor this body, that can bend in one smooth descending octave.

I stand over the stove. Bubbles rise in the boiling oil, burst and then course through the thick liquid. I am there and I am not there. It isn’t my hand pouring the boiling oil into the turkey baster, it isn’t my trembling fingers struggling with the plunger of the icing-sugar syringe.

Still deeply asleep, his head lolls as I prop him up. Carefully tilting his face, I insert the turkey baster into his left ear, then the end of the icing-sugar syringe into his right. There is no doubt in my mind, just the cry of that orgasm, the sound of the woman who betrayed us echoing again and again. I squeeze.

QUIN

People think deafness is a sound. It’s not. It’s snow, static snow. A constant blizzard in the back of the head. An ice age of silence. I am a polar bear stumbling through shards of frost.

I see Mack waving from the other side of a frozen lake. He is trying to tell me that he loves me, that he still wants me to work for him even if I’m totally deaf. I swing my heavy neck and look back toward the blinding white terrain that stretches into infinity. Polar bears are solitary creatures.

Two men. One, large, on the brink of middle age, leans against an open window. Outside the afternoon traffic rattles past, sending up clouds of dust into the sunlight that cuts into the dingy lounge room. He pushes back his thinning hair and lights another cigarette.