‘Dear Hassan, I have come to apologise. What I said before was unacceptable and shameful. I do hope you can forgive me.’
There was a giggle from inside his room, girlish and quickly muffled. Hassan was looking straight at her and his eyes were moist, so dark that the pupils seemed to disappear within the blackness. She was shocked at the weariness they expressed, the fatigue and sorrow.
He’s ashamed, she realised. He has some woman in this room and he is ashamed. She would not judge him, she refused to judge him.
He lowered his arm and offered her his hand. She took it, he clutched hers tight — it was as if a life was passed on to her in that grip — and then he released her. ‘There is nothing to forgive. Thank you.’
He was a bear of a man, he was a husband and father, but to her he looked so young, she could still see the boy in him.
‘We’ll see you in the morning.’
He returned her smile and closed the door.
Only then, only then did she allow herself a tremor of disbelief. For when he had dropped his arm to shake her hand, she had seen behind him. A pair of bright red shorts lay crumpled on the floor.
She turned back to the corridor and there was a short, thin-necked young man, with two long scars on his left cheek, smoking a cigarette by the cleaning trolley. She had to slide past him and as she did she felt his body shift and press hard against hers.
While she waited for the lift, she berated herself for not having shoved the dirty little pervert back against the wall. She was twice his size and over twice his age. He hadn’t scared her at all.
She glanced back and he was staring at her, his hand was sliding up and down the furrows of his jeans pocket.
She burst out laughing. ‘You stupid, stupid boy,’ she called down the corridor, ‘I am probably older than your mother.’
His quizzical expression, the lift of his head, the click from his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth, all said that he hadn’t a clue what she had said. She was still laughing when the lift doors opened.
In their room Daniela was reading her Margaret Atwood, naked on the bed, the top sheet crumpled loosely around her feet as the overhead fan whirred noisily. Amanda stood in the doorway, taking in Daniela’s pudgy body: the full roundness of her breasts, the almost lavender smudge of her areola, her stubby nipples, the rolls of fat around her belly, the wide inviting girth of her hips that always reminded Amanda of the sensuous contours of the guitar.
Daniela lowered her reading glasses. ‘Did it go well?’
‘Yes.’ Amanda sat on the bed, and gently kissed her lover’s nipples, her belly, buried her face in the salt and pepper thistles of Daniela’s pubic hair. She inhaled her lover’s odour: the sourness of her sweat, the bitter hint of urine, and the delicious pungency of her cunt. Amanda breathed her in, and the world of men disappeared.
‘Come to bed,’ whispered Daniela, throwing aside her book. ‘Just come to bed.’
The next morning Hassan drove them to Petra. That evening, writing a postcard to Eric, she tried to distil her wonderment at the vastness of the site; the terror of a city of such scale and endeavour built on the most inhuman and unforgiving of ground; the melancholy of the ancient city succumbing to the relentlessness of time. She had watched a Bedouin shepherd walk his flock over the decaying marble floor of Aphrodite’s temple; she had brought rainwater to her lips from a Roman aqueduct, still functioning in the desert millennia after the empire that had built it had gone. She tried, but words could not take the measure of such splendour.
In the end, across the back of the postcard, she wrote: My Darling Son, it is indescribable.
Porn 1
THE HARSH FLUORESCENT LIGHTS WERE A shock. She had been expecting the store to be dark and dingy, everything in disguising shadow. However, the young man nonchalantly flicking through the newspaper at the counter was an unremarkable, commonplace youth, with a mop of ginger hair and a rash of acne beneath his bottom lip. He was not that different to the bored young men who served her at the supermarket. Except that he was smoking a cigarette in brazen defiance of the no-smoking sign at the entrance; that was the first sign that she was indeed entering an illicit world.
She coughed and the young man looked up. His lazy pose snapped to deference. ‘Can I help you?’
She was suddenly flooded with shame. She shook her head, turned and quickly walked further into the store.
She looked everywhere and saw nothing, she had to will colour and light and shadow into form. In one of the aisles, a middle-aged gentleman in a suit was flicking through magazines. He looked up at her, stiffened, and quickly grabbed his briefcase off the floor. He walked to the back wall, opened a blue door — sunlight, true light — and rushed out into the alley.
She breathed in deeply, a moment of relief. She had almost laughed, so boyish had he been in his embarrassment.
She scanned the shelves. Everywhere there seemed to be images of women proudly pulling at their nipples or cupping their breasts and smiling lasciviously at the camera. Most of them were young, of course, girls really, but she was surprised to see quite a few older women on the covers of the videos and DVDs.
There seemed to be no faces of men. Instead there was a dizzying display of penises: short, long, thick, white, black, brown, erect, outlandishly enormous, even some puny and limp. At the age of fifty-nine, for the first time in her life, she finally understood that every man she knew and every man she had known, in fact every man in the world, had a unique and identifiable penis. And every one of them was hideous. She was overtaken by rage. Every one of them was ugly. She turned into the next aisle.
The homosexual videos and DVDs filled one narrow panel. She tensed and walked towards the shelf. These penises had naked bodies attached to them. Those bodies had faces. Without thinking, she blindly stretched out her hand and grabbed a video from the shelf. She turned it around, silently read the names on it, and then placed it back. She took the next one, then the next, then the one next to that. The actors’ names were all silly, all-American: Randy and Calvin, Lance and Kirk. If not all-American they were exotically European: Sven, Hans, Lazlo or Misha. As she methodically scanned the videos and DVD slicks, she refused to engage with the images. Of course she was aware of the naked bodies twisted around each other, the stark close-ups of genitalia, the carnal directness of the images, but she did not think about them, did not allow herself any emotion. She felt neither curiosity nor disgust. She was seeking a name.
Men would approach the shelf and then, spotting her, swiftly turn around and walk away. A portly bearded man reeking of tobacco and aftershave looked at her with undisguised spite, but he too did not dare come close. Let them wait. Let them bloody well wait before indulging themselves in filth.
When she found what she’d been looking for, she froze. The image on the cover was of a man in uniform, a grey sheriff’s attire. A preposterous erection strained the actor’s tight pants. His name was there, in red type: Ricky Pallo. She held the video cover in her hand, noting the baton in the actor’s hand, the deep black void of the sunglasses that hid his eyes. She willed herself to turn over the cover, to look. But she couldn’t; her hands were suddenly clammy, her breath restricted. She thought impulsively of praying, but it seemed blasphemous to ask for God in this place.
She took a breath. Foolish woman, she sharply reprimanded herself. She turned over the video cover.
She caught her breath. He looked so very handsome. She was unaware of it but her tongue fiercely ground against her teeth, her lips were suddenly parched. She carried the cover back towards the entrance.