Quiver

“Mummification.”

“Not now love, I’m watching.” He doesn’t even turn around. Doug had never used words much. For years Candy had projected a whole lexicon onto his grunts. And for years she’d been satisfied with that until now. The word “vilification” looms suddenly in her mind. For the past six months she’d progressed from the office edition of the Webster’s through to the Oxford Unabridged. But she had never succeeded in interesting Doug in even the shortest, most prosaic adjectives. The idea of using her newfound vocabulary excited her. It excited her sexually.

She switches on the dishwasher and listens for a moment to the water rushing down the pipes. Her feet ache from the high heels, her cunt is sore and she misses her mother. The sound of a cracking whip comes from next door. The video must have reached the S & M scene. A naive young countess marries a cruel aristocrat who forces her to commit bizarre sexual acts. Or was it the vampires? Candy can’t remember. It had been her fourth or fifth film and, as most of them took only a week to shoot, she’d learned to develop amnesia in post-production. Besides, if she was ever confused she only had to ask Doug. He’d watched every film she’d made at least ten times, which surprised Candy as he’d been on the crew of all of them. Doug Perkins: clapper loader. It was a clause she insisted on in her contracts. But lately…salacious, marmoreal, transmogrification…She stretches the vowels out with her tongue. Even sounding the words silently makes her horny.

She puts the kettle on and glances back through the door. Doug watches his wife being suspended. She swings gently in her harness, her brown hair cascading down onto the fur rug. A large man in an executioner’s hood and bondage harness, his belly bulging over his erect penis, raises his hand and flicks a small whip across Candy’s buttocks. Doug moans without realizing it. Candy sits down on the couch and ruffles his hair.

“Eugenics,” she whispers seductively using the lower descent she usually saves for the films. He moves closer to the screen, irritated. She tries running her toes down his back. “Inguinal, synergism, pianissimo.” Doug doesn’t even bother to turn around. On screen, her breasts bounce as she swings past the executioner. In the small lounge-room, makeup off and wrapped up in her favorite dressing gown, Candy tries to remember the last time they had a conversation. She can’t. He is always watching.

She looks at the back of his head. A short dialogue would be nice, something like “osculate,” “sonorously,” “viscosity” would be just enough to get her off. Followed by a cuddle. She liked that the best, just being held. Recently she’d really needed it. She stretches then gets up.

“See you in there.”

He grunts and fast-forwards to the climax, where Candy is being fucked by a man standing on a chair while she sucks off another. Jissom spurts across her breasts and face. The money shot.

It is only later, lying alone in the waterbed Doug had bought at a discount store, that Candy realizes that she can’t remember the last time Doug had even kissed her. Let alone made love to her.

Through the wall she can still hear him groaning to the sound of her own faked orgasm as Candy does Randy while meeting the whip. “Serendipity,” she whispers to herself and cradles the pillow, rocking.

THE PROMISCUITY OF BATS

There were ten of them in total: five men and five women, busy festive shoppers. All of them had left their purchasing until the last minute—Christmas Eve. Stacey and Deidre were the last to get into the lift—on the sixteenth floor, haberdashery and household appliances. Both were laden with bags. Stacey was carrying two turkeys, four Christmas puddings and a Super-8 video camera for Jock. She glanced around. The elevator was packed, making body contact unavoidable.

She noticed a small blond woman about five months pregnant. Next to her, pressed into a corner, was a tall, disheveled man of about thirty whose dress sense was still trapped in his adolescence. The way he nodded suggested that he was profoundly deaf. Next to him, clutching a roll of canvas, was another man, good looking, with pockmarked skin. Squashed behind him was an elegant woman in her late thirties, dressed in stylish European clothes. Stacey thought she might be a tourist; she was carrying a program advertising a series of concerts at the arts center. There was something smug about her that Stacey decided she didn’t like. She was talking to an older woman, a very statuesque blonde in her mid-forties, who handled herself with a great deal of confidence. Next to the elegant woman stood a handsome older man, obviously wealthy, judging from his clothes. He looked European and, from the territorial way he held the woman’s hand, Stacey correctly surmised that he was her husband. The large blonde turned to her companion.

“It’s bats. There’s a whole colony of them on the site. Apparently they have special mating caves scattered all around the city. Just my luck to have one right on site.”

“Mating caves?”

“Bats are very promiscuous. I researched it, fascinating stuff. Of course, it varies from species to species. This is just your ordinary fruit bat. But with giant flying foxes, the rutting males fly into a cave full of sleeping females and start to emit loud cries to att

ract them. They continue to scream and flap their wings until finally they produce a long series of shrill shrieks, and in the middle of that the male suddenly grabs the female, wraps his wings around her and takes her from behind.”

“I’ve had men like that.”

“Haven’t we all,” the pregnant woman chimed in.

The two men behind Stacey broke into laughter. She glanced around. From the look of his soiled, rough hands the taller man was obviously a gardener or workman of some sort. He stood grinning at the handsome man beside him. Stacey tried to guess his neighbor’s occupation but couldn’t place him; she noticed that he was holding a cardboard carton labeled ICE CREAM CONES—100. What a man like that would do with a hundred ice-cream cones, she couldn’t even begin to guess.

“At the height of the rutting season, the cry of a single bat can cause every other male bat to become sexually excited, in a kind of mood transfer, and before you know it, the whole cave turns into a screaming orgy.”

“Sounds like a great game of basketball,” the ice cream man, Jerome, interjected, grinning wickedly at Dee.

“Or war,” Humphrey wryly threw in, surprising the other men in the lift, who had him marked as aloof. Deidre, suffering slightly from claustrophobia, dipped her head in the direction of the sniggering men. Karl looked across. Australian men are so infantile, he thought, and was momentarily thankful for what he perceived as his European sophistication.

“Or just rampaging testosterone in general,” said Sandra, the blonde, as she glanced at Deidre. They were about the same age, but Sandra would have categorized Deidre as someone who was in need of sexual liberation—except for the red scarf that peeped out flamboyantly from under her very conservative suit. The facade is not what it seems, Sandra noted correctly. Meanwhile, her friend Katherine was acutely aware of Humphrey, whose intense gaze hadn’t left her body since the moment she had entered the elevator. Normally this would have irritated Katherine, but since she had become alienated from her husband, all kinds of curious emotional and sexual liaisons had infiltrated her life. She was convinced that some great spiritual patterning lay underneath these couplings, like a wonderful message. If only she could break the code. She returned Humphrey’s gaze, but found that she couldn’t continue to look into those eyes without an embarrassing sense of sexual arousal.

Jodie just wanted to sit down. The baby pressed down on her bladder and her feet were aching. Next year Adrian could do the Christmas shopping, she’d be too busy with the child. On the other side of the elevator, Quin was desperately trying to decipher the smiles and the moving lips around him. He liked the look of the tall, older blonde. She reminded him of his ex-lover; he liked mature women and she smelled good. Deafness had sharpened his remaining senses, and he was convinced that he could smell the faint scent of sex under her perfume. He calculated that an encounter must have taken place an hour before. Lunchtime.

And there was something about the middle-aged, well-dressed man that was familiar, as if he was a distant friend Quin had forgotten about. He glanced down at the man’s hands; beautifully maintained, they were the hands of a musician. Quin looked back at the face. With a start, he recognized him as Karl Pope. Quin had one of his early recordings on record. Carnegie Hall, 1973. He wished now that he could speak, but he didn’t trust his diction, knowing that if he formed words they would sound loud and discordant. He loved this man’s work, and basked for a moment in the presence of the famous. He glanced up at the elevator indicator, now traveling between the fifteenth and fourteenth floors. Something had changed in the way the elevator was descending, he had felt it in the floor through his feet. He was highly attuned to vibrations, not just of physical objects but also between people. It had been astonishing to discover that attraction between people could translate into slight dips in air temperature, or a sudden barely discernible acceleration of air movement. For example, there was a palpable concentration of heat between the tall blonde’s friend clutching the concert program and the artist in the corner. The elevator suddenly shuddered to a halt.

Stacey looked across at Humphrey, who glanced at Katherine, who in turn peered up at Sandra. Katherine was trying not to panic; there were too many people in the elevator to be comfortable, even if you did find one of them very attractive. Sandra always embodied such a sensible approach to life, Katherine couldn’t imagine her ever getting up to any sexually compromising situation, even when trapped in an enclosed space.

Dee glanced at Jerome’s crotch, then looked up at his mouth—blatantly sexual, with heavy lips that seemed to be begging to be corrupted. Dee’s hands tightened around the four bottles of champagne he clutched to his chest. In his jacket pocket there were ten tabs of ecstasy tucked away. He looked back at Jerome’s mouth.

Jerome was used to being looked at by men and women, and he returned Dee’s insolent gaze. Dee didn’t look homosexual; there was nothing feminine about his approach, just a sensual curiosity that intrigued Jerome. He liked Dee’s hands. The long, worn fingers seemed to suggest that his livelihood was working with the soil. He’d never had a man, but he’d fantasized about it and there was a similarity of physique between them that appealed to the narcissist in him.

Deidre was starting to quake internally. The elevator had been stationary for over a minute and she knew that Mischa was waiting for her down in the car park. She had the result of her blood test in her handbag. She was pregnant at last. She glanced down at her mobile. She could always use that if things got worse. The elevator jolted, descended a couple of feet and then with the screeching of metal came to another halt. Jodie, terrified, grabbed hold of Quin, who steadied her with an embarrassed grin.