Quiver

“Had a good night?” the concierge inquires.

“No, I was kept up for most of it. The couple next door, they were, well you know…and she just couldn’t stop screaming, shouting, thumping against the wall…”

“Growling?” The concierge has a broad grin on his face by now.

“Now that you mention it, yes, growling. Who were they? I thought I might be able to pick up a few hints from the man. To be able to make a woman sound like that, he has to be something special.”

“Oh he is, very special.” And with that the concierge bursts into laughter, irritating Karl even further. Is he being made a fool of? He turns angrily away.

“No, no, you misunderstand. Your room, it’s next to the President’s private zoo.”

“Zoo?”

“Yes, man. That was Jezebel and her mate Elijah you heard all night. Them lions, they make a terrible row when they’re making babies.”

“You mean, that was a lioness I heard?”

“North African and a real beauty.”

For the first time in two days Karl Pope starts to feel a little more optimistic.

PEEL

Candy Perkins closes her eyes for a moment as the huge black penis bumps stickily against her face. She is kneeling, her hands chained behind her and her long brown hair artfully arranged to look disheveled. The penis hovers hopefully for a minute, then gently inserts itself between her lips. She sucks enthusiastically, fluttering her eyelids in a parody of ecstasy. She is thinking about what she will cook that night.

Steak with creamy mushroom sauce. Doug, her husband, likes a decent steak—not that it is easy to find one in L.A. not like back home. The penis leaves her mouth, slides its head around both nipples then inserts itself between the cheeks of her ass. This time she hopes they’ve remembered to use enough lubricant. She is pushed onto the fake leopard-skin rug while two fingers worm themselves into her.

She can see Doug just behind the lights. He is staring at her, his face flushed. He’s started to look more like that recently. He looks too excited. It worries her.

“Cut! Goddamn! Wood problem!” Winston, a tall, shy medical student, whose athletic frame and outrageous college fees had landed him in the industry, is having problems maintaining an erection. The makeup assistant wraps a short white robe around Candy while the fluffer attempts to encourage Wins

ton’s cock into some semblance of verticality. Candy’s bored. The crew, used to temperamental members, light up cigarettes and huddle behind the camera, complaining about the union rates.

Doug checks that the reel is loaded properly, then hurries over to his wife. “You look great, darl, hot, hot, hot!”

“Do we have any mushrooms in the fridge?” she asks, hating to talk about her role on set.

It has only been three years since they left Tocumwal, Australia. “Exotic dancer” is what she’d told her mother, who was sensible enough to bank the checks and ask no questions. After all, Cheryl alias Candy had Doug with her, and Doug, although not the brightest, had the ferocious loyalty of a bulldog. Her Cheryl was going to be all right.

She’d made a couple of films in Canberra, low-budget, shot mainly in disused office space, a makeshift set and the obligatory bed. Her second film, Gone with the Whip, had suddenly taken off in America, winning her the title of second best butt in the industry. It was her ticket out. Besides, her American costar had told her that the money was better and you had some real status. Status is what Candy craved. She was a consummate performer who prided herself on her little tricks, the gestural hallmarks she had built up over the years. It had been Doug that had talked her into it. He had suggested that she audition in the first place. Both of them had been avid watchers of pornography in the early part of their marriage, and Candy had always boasted that she could do better than the pouting, buxom blondes who always looked vaguely bored. And she had.

“OK, let’s get this masterpiece under wraps!” the director, a failed documentary maker, announces, waving his arms uselessly in a vain attempt to boost the flagging morale. They saunter back to their positions and Candy leans across the ottoman.

Cock slides gracefully into ass. Cut to close shot of face, sweat on brow, full lips pushed forward, mouth half-open, tongue extending, spreading lips of cunt. Cut to close shot of other woman. Blonde, bigger breasts, shining, impossibly round and plastic, perfect moaning. Volume up. That’s it. That’s good. Moan louder.

“Are you coming to bed?” Doug is watching videos in the small lounge-room of their condominium. Candy stands in the doorway holding the dirty dinner plates, remnants of the mushroom sauce still clinging to the china. Doug doesn’t bother to turn away from the monitor.

“Later,” he mutters distractedly. Candy watches herself giving head to the blonde while being fucked by two men—one in the ass, the other vaginally. She remembers that at the time she’d been thinking about the sea. A dream she’d had about watching it dry up around her body. Funny thing was she’d been wearing her wedding dress. She glances across at the poster on the wall. They’d bought it just for a joke, at the last minute at the airport. “Discover the wonders of Tocumwal,” it boasts, above an image of a river with a platypus on its banks. Sometimes she misses home. Even the tedium of the one petrol station with the one pool table the kids used to hang out at. That was where she’d first met Doug, playing pool. He’d been on a delivery run for his uncle, from the next town up the highway, and he was handsome. Now she wouldn’t have said it was love at first sight, but she had thought so then. Above the condominium the whirling of a patroling helicopter startles her back into the present.

Doug slips off the couch and crawls toward the screen, staring steadily at his wife as the blonde parts the two cheeks to reveal one cock thrust violently into her asshole while the other nudges blindly between her legs. He presses the remote control and replays the image, the sound of Candy’s faked orgasm reverberating off the low ceiling.

“You’ll wake the neighbors.”

He doesn’t reply. Candy shrugs, taking the plates into the tiny kitchen and stacking them into the dishwasher. The dishwasher. Her mum had always wanted one, and it had been the first thing Candy had bought with the profits of her first American movie, Candy Does Randy. Stupid title, but Randy, a jovial man in his late forties, a veteran of the industry and renowned for his oral skills, had made Candy laugh as he parodied the director, a young film grad, desperate to make an artistic impression.

“Candy, make a killing then get out quick. Don’t become like me, a man on the end of a penis. It’s a living but it’s not a life.”

Randy was the first one to introduce her to dictionaries. He used to read them between takes. “To lengthen my vocabulary,” he’d say with a wink, then throw words at her like trajectory or munificent, rolling them around his mouth like lollies. Candy would watch fascinated as, naked, he’d illustrate the rounded vowels with a flick of his hips—his erection bouncing as his hands curved in the air like a demented Indian dancer. It was Randy who got her hooked.