From time to time he pinched his nipples, they itched rather pleasantly, then harder till it hurt.
He didn’t like to think about the old nipples of the woman playing with her cat. The girl on the beach had covered them up as soon as she saw you were looking at what was red and rubbery, sort of flowers cut out of a wet bathing cap.
Sandy skin. What if you sucked on a tit that had been making flowerpots in the sand …
Bruce knew a bloke who got the clap or siph or whatever it was from going with a woman down at Mrs Macquarie’s Seat.
Must be somebody who hasn’t got it.
In the street he was walking down lined with big fuchsias, tree fuchsias, it was already oily dark. The deep blue sky had begun prickling slightly with stars. In a lit window a man was grinding his mouth in a woman’s open one backwards and forwards like he was swallowing her down, all the while running his hands. Some of them had brown nipples (Bruce says they don’t have to be boongs).
Gilbert bloody Horsfall tore off a branch of the giant fuchsia and whipped the darkness. Tassels flew in all directions. The soft, fleshy, sticky stems.
He threw the mangled remains away.
Ohhhh he groaned, swallowing the warm damp sea air, gulping at the stars, he would have swallowed them down if he had been close enough. What was the point of anything at all? Run away, and join up and get killed. A hero on a memorial. Eirene Sklavos had seen killing, if you could believe her. Her father had been murdered. All bullsh probably. But what she had seen, done and knew stuck like splinters in his mind.
Less murders nowadays. Ma Bulpit said it was because there’s a war on. Not without a soldier murders some girl for holding out on him. There was the boy the sailor murdered. Pervs. There was that sailor at Neutral Bay who let down his apron and waved his dick at you. Like you were a perv. You weren’t — or were you?
He lurched round the bend, reeling, like on a ship in a rolling sea beneath the high swirling wastes of an ultra-marine, prickling sky, fell down at last on a bit of wasteland above a culvert, lashing out at lantana and the wiry trailers of morning glory as the stones ate into his back? Or were there others around him in the darkness?
Big boongs with coffee coloured nipples, blousy girls with cut outs of red bathing-cap rubber. Experienced guys in business suits and moustaches grinding into unwilling mouths. Sailor on sailor.
He was so hard he got to pulling it off, moaning for the stones, lantana smelling of cat piss and semen, the cold blue enamel of the sky. And lay wilting, not crying, it was sweat — or semen.
He had shrunk right into himself into a kind of guilty purity he had never experienced that he could remember. Wondering what Irene Sklavos would have thought. Why, for Chrissake, this Ireen, who was nothing to do with him. But might have been standing over him looking down, prissy lips pressed together, like she had just been not explaining the bleeding pneuma. Haunting him on this wasteland above the culvert.
He sat up presently, buttoned his fly, and started the walk towards Cameron Street. He felt drained. His legs could have been parcels of straw. As he brushed against the hedge of giant fuchsias, he was sprinkled with drops so cold and silver he shuddered for his own enormity. Were they eyes glittering amongst the foliage and fleshy tassels? What odds? She was nothing to him, another kid, a girl, a Greek reffo Lockharts said was her mother’s bastard.
* * *
When he got in there was no sound from the other side of her door. Must have gone to bed. He could see her lying on that ottoman like a queen on a tomb. He could hear the sounds of furniture and dry rot inside Ma Bulpit’s dunny.
His own room, under the warrant officer’s leaning portrait, was one big yawn tonight. Neither light nor darkness let him alone. He lay remembering forever all that he most wanted to forget. And Eirene Sklavos was advancing on him her plait trailing across the carpet behind her like a long black snake, its tail still had to enter the room when she had almost reached his bedside.
‘… running late … miss the bus if you’re not careful…’ It was Ma Bulpit’s voice twitching him awake.
To do him an extra favour she poured out his tea for him this morning. Her pink chenille had some egg in it.
Sklavos had had her breakfast. Her plate with the slops of crispies in it is standing on the table opposite.
‘Where’s Irene?’
‘Finishing something for school.’ The Bulpit had not yet put in her teeth, didn’t bother at that hour and for kids, her hair still had a sleepy look, she might have been rootling round in her head for something to start complaining about.
Finished his breakfast as quick as he could.
Ireen — she looked like Eirene this morning — was sitting at that table at the end of her room where the stored furniture thinned out and the empty space became hers. A clear light fell around her from the window. The ottoman-bed was already made. When she looked up she might have been suggesting he should have knocked, giving him the cold look of a grown-up woman.
‘What are you doing?’ he heard himself bleating as he advanced.
‘Work,’ she answered, colder than ever, and lowered her eyes.
‘You must have gone to bed early,’ he tried it out cautiously.
Had she smelled him out? The dry scales of it were rustling between his thighs.
‘What’s this?’
She sat colouring in the drawing of a spray of flowers. Beside the paper lay a fuchsia branch, the sap still fresh where torn off, the leaves only just beginning to wilt, tassels drooping.
‘We were set an essay on our favourite flower.’ The purple and cerise glowed deeper as she worked.
‘But a fuchsia can’t be your favourite flower! Nobody would ever think about the fuchsia…’
‘There are roses of course. You’ve never seen a Greek rose.’
He hadn’t but her voice conveyed proud blooms of a noble size.
‘You can like something all of a sudden,’ she said, returning to the flower she was giving life, ‘something you’ve never thought about before. Then you might forget about it.’
She got up briskly after that, gathered her drawing and the pages of her essay, and laid them in her case.
‘We don’t want to miss the bus.’
Her eyes seemed to have elongated, their whites glittered at him for an instant, as the light had through the branches of the fuchsia hedge.
‘Yair,’ he said, ‘the bus.’
And followed her plait out of the room.
* * *
That night, after they had shed the bus people, he couldn’t wait to ask, ‘How did you go with your essay and the drawing?’
‘They didn’t seem to think much of them.’
* * *
Viva said, ‘I’m gunner get off at your stop, Reenie, because Mumma has a message for Mrs Bulpit, who she hasn’t seen for a long while.’
You could not do anything about it. If you cut off one of Viva’s tentacles, she grew another. She was the Australian octopus.
She said, ‘Remember that droring of the fuchsia — I thought it was beaut, Ireen. My old dahlia — I can’t say I don’t like a dahlia but … fuchsias are different. Nobody would ever think of a fuchsia — the way they hang…’
Viva did not have a limp, her shoe only caught rather often in the cracked pavement as she slommacked along.
Mrs Bulpit wasn’t home. Gil must have escaped quickly from the bus mob, put together his bread and dripping, and vanished. The aluminium dripping bowl still looked to be rocking on the kitchen table.
Viva eyed the bowl while combating her saliva. ‘Isn’t this a spooky house?’
‘I haven’t noticed.’ Viva’s presence made you defend what had become once more your property, it was more yours than Mrs Bulpit’s and this afternoon, even Gil Horsfall’s.