She walks to the back door and puts the bolt on it. She scans the windows and closes the curtains. She turns off the light and leaves on a small lamp.
The best way to explain it is if you try it yourself. Here up you go. Lift your hips.
— No, no, he resists, no, no. He starts giggling.
— Really it’ll be easier than explaining it. I’ll demonstrate it to you.
— Back you go, she pushes him playfully.
— Lift your backside, she sticks two cushions under him.
— Now she says politely … I’ll need your leg. She elevates his left leg at the thigh and calf and pushes it up and gently back so his knee is heading towards his ear. He cranes his head up to see what she’s doing.
— No, no lie back there now or you’ll ruin it. Your trousers might be a bit tight but sure we’ll give it a try. Right. She pushes his leg back to give him the idea. Then lifts his other leg up to the back of the couch.
— Leave your leg up there, she instructs.
Then resumes with the left leg pulsing it backwards until his tendons begin to protest. Once it is as far as it will go and the seams of his trousers look endangered, she says lift your head and breathe. Then with her spare hand she presses down on his belly gently. This is where your womb would be and then her hand skirts the air in a circle below at his groin, this, she indicates, is where you feel dreadful pressure like the most bulging constipation you could ever imagine, like your hips will blow off and a giant concrete ball replace them.
He erupts in laughter, leg collapsing from the top of the couch.
— Let me up, he squeals, please let me up. She retreats politely and the two of them laugh in a different way.
— You asked.
— I did.
— And so now you know.
He reaches across for her. You are funny. He kisses her cheek, it’s thankful more than presumptive.
— You are funny, he repeats.
— Have you a child somewhere?
— No, he says, I haven’t.
*
Sacred Heart he’s still curious.
How long she was married before she became pregnant? Tell him did it happen the first month? How many times did she do it with her husband, before she became pregnant? Did her husband do it in a special way each time she found herself pregnant?
It is time to excuse herself to the toilet. On the seat she allowed the run of urine extra time to give her space to think. What might possess a man to be overflowing with such concerns. He must be looking desperately for a woman to reproduce with. Do they teach the menopause in Syria? There are a lot of rumours about that country.
*
When she returned he has an even stranger proposal for her.
— You have sexed with a man who gave you three children.
— I have?
— I want you to sex with me and tell me do you find any difference between him and me?
She is perplexed.
— What? What are you saying?
— There must be a difference between the man that gives children and the man that does not. I want you to try to tell me what it is. I must know. He unbuttons his shirt.
— But I wouldn’t be qualified to tell you a thing like that, she’s distracted by his lovely sleek arms. She cannot get away from his youth and when she sees a hint of it, she wants it. She calculates which is left and right, and before he can say another word, leans over the way she saw Jimmy lean over the watery fella, and plants a long kiss on his nipple, as though all that stands between a man who makes a baby and who doesn’t is such a missed kiss. He murmurs something in his language and drops his hands around her back. He cannot do very much else, since she has the monopoly on his chest, so patiently he waits ’til she’s lifted her head.
— A woman has never done that to me before, he says pleased. It’s precisely the kind of compliment she’s received about her baking. They are on the right track. Hurriedly she queues up all the images she caught of Jimmy and his men and tries to choose which one should be next. She has no desire to sleep with him in the traditional sense. She only wants to experience that which her son gave and received.
*
Halim had his own ideas and they’re nice traditional, pleasant ones too, unwrapping the various layers of her clothing, discarding them like onion skins, he’s particularly attentive to the inside and outside of her thighs, but she will not give herself up to be flattened and submissive underneath him, so allows a bit of time at that malarky before she moves to the main thrust of her plan. Let’s go out to the barn, she suggests, rising. He’s startled. Semi-naked and startled. Barn? Barn?
*
In the barn she’s not sure this is such a grand idea because she’s anxious vermin might scamper over her feet. It’s dark, very dark, once the door is shut, stinky, and not even a shaft of light between the two of them, they can barely find each other. It’s cold, she regrets not bringing a blanket and there are objects to negotiate that she’s forgotten about, but she’s a plan. She must know what her son experienced that day and here is the man to show her.
— Like this, she pushes on his shoulders, encouraging him down to her hips, and he commences precisely what she has come up here for. Biology somewhat absent from the original equation. She dragged his hands to the back of her, but he began to wobble on one knee.
Technically speaking, it did not work as well for her as it had for Jimmy that day. She’d never had a man’s tongue, her husband’s, between her legs that way and though she found plenty to recommend it, with the bale of straw scratching her backside and the tickling out front, it required an extreme balance and itching concentration act, with an increasing number of goose pimples on both their shivering flesh. She never stands still in a barn, she is in, out and about to the animals. She has a moving purpose entering the barn. Plus she’s aware of the sounds outside and realizes this is an utterly lunatic arrangement. Is that a tractor passing along the road? A wheelbarrow coming up the path?
She’d inverted the positioning: she should have had him receive her sucking, since it was that sucking action that had bothered her the most. The hungry gobble of that young fella pulling at her son.
She’d ruined a recipe.
*
His awkward attempt within this arrangement to penetrate her failed. She’d resisted saying it’s all wrong, not this way, and he complained of the uncomfortable prickle at the top of his thighs from the hay, which was lacerating her lower back. He suggested a return to the house to reunite with the comfort of a bed, but on exit Halim tripped on a spade and fell rather badly.
Back in the kitchen the bloody graze his elbow took on falling led to medical repair and since she did a good nursing act, which he lapped up, that led to the kettle rather than further flesh and they sat drinking tea together as though nothing had ever happened between them. In the harsh light of the bulb, she was terrified to touch him, for this table was where she sat with her husband, watched him sigh over the salt pot and where she recorded the deaths of soldiers and civilians. Another problem was whenever Halim sat down with no purpose, he began complaining vociferously about all aspects of his life.
The strangest things happened when men sat down around her.
*
That night she doesn’t sleep well. All Halim’s questions about childbirth confuse her as to their purpose. And she must stop this nonsense. When she looks in the bathroom mirror, she sees only how worn out her own face is, and how age has ravaged her and suddenly he looks tauter and younger and newer and polished, more elastic than he is. She doesn’t smile when she thinks of him tonight. When she looks at her husband in bed, his nose just above the covers, she belongs here beside this relic, where they’re drooping in unison.