Whose existence no one else is aware.
Beauty.
Lost.
Enigma.
There is no more beautiful sight than those two rooms connected by a long, ornate walkway.
The atmosphere is electric. In five minutes, it will be Pelleas et Melisande.
I was dressed in pink, with orange seams.
But stark naked in the golden salon.
Spread like a saint, arms laid out like a cross, legs wide open, scarlet toed feet.
Outrageously on offer.
All that is missing is a cushion under my head.
“Here, take this scarf.”
“To cover myself?”
“No, for your head.”
The man is standing, shameless, his cock at attention, handing me the scarf.
His eyes are sharp, moving from my face to the upper area of my thighs. He bends over, moves closer to me, takes my head into his hands, squeezes me, approaches, bites my lips, caresses my face, pulls my hair back, holds me still, observing me.
The curtain rises. Debussy?
Mortal passion.
He holds my body high, makes me swirl, pulls me back beneath him, enters me, slips my shoe back on.
He’s killing me.
Despite it all, I feel relaxed, my face now obscured by the scarf I have replaced over me.
Then he picks me up again, pulling at my arm, drags me across the floor, ploughs me, hammers me, ties me with the scarf. He shouts.
“What about Debussy?”
I am dizzy.
He nails me to the ground.
I had earlier noticed the patterns on the floor, wooden squares mottled with red, black and brown washes.
I’m crushed by the weight of his body, I sway from one side to the other.
Have I been drinking, smoking?
Complicit.
I swivel over, find my own rhythm again, lose my soul, close my eyes.
He holds me tight.
Assault, tenderness, scandal.
To be doing “this” at the opera.
Like Melisande, I am lost.
Do not touch me or I will throw myself into the water.
He looks at me.
“Who hurt you?”
Does he think he is Golaud?
“I can’t say.”
And do I believe I’m Melisande?
I let myself go, I want to listen to the orchestra serenading me; I want to abandon myself to the seductive voices, the sound of the violins. I want to implode.
Obsessed, he turns my lips to fire, discards the scarf concealing my face, dislocates me, pulls me to his right and then his left, rises and places his foot on my breast.
His eyes are blue, ever so blue.
Half naked on the cold floor, I slip and he catches me.
There are shadows on the walls,
Maybe I could float if only I could hear him clearly, if I could gift myself to him fully, my hair falling wildly across my face.
I pull my knees together in an attempt to get my breath back.
“I like the way you move, I like your breasts.”
I am confused, I am on display.
He draws back.
“Get up on your feet.”
“Naked in front of the mirrors?”
Naked a thousand times, reflected, reshaped, wrong.
He approaches, touches me, feels me, takes my hand, lowers it to his cock.
It’s a part, I’m an actress, the camera is rolling, I am obeying the film director.
“Caress me.”
I stroke him.
Scandal.
I love “this”.
Bodies in lust.
Pleasure at its peak, sharp and true.
I am without reason, torn, asunder.
My pearl is dripping onto the wooden floor, I am gasping.
A gust of wind.
“Don’t fret.”
I’m trying not to rush, not to interrupt the flow.
“Stop.”
Like flowers…
CUCKOO by Brian Fawcett
FERRIS CAN’T QUITE decide why the first sight of the ferry dock makes him shiver. Is it fear or expectation, or is it simply the bracing spring air? With one hand, he grips the bouquet of yellow tulips he’s carrying a little tighter, pulls his jacket closer to his neck with the other, and the shivers pass.
He doesn’t expect the island to be the same after ten years. Islands change, people change, nothing remains the same. If it has taught him nothing else, travelling across four continents has driven home the ubiquitousness of change, although too often the specific message received is twisted between “Yankee Go Home” and “Everything changes – into a mall”.
Yet from a distance, the island is at least similar, and it isn’t until the ferry closes in on the dock that the changes become visible. Vince is waiting for him at the terminal, as expected. But he’s standing beside a nearly new Volkswagen Jetta, not slouched down comfortably in the seat of a battered GMC panel. From this distance, Vince could be mistaken for an ordinary middle-aged man, his face obscured by a beard that is more grey than black. To Ferris, he’s dead easy to recognize, and anything but ordinary. Vince is Ferris’s secret life – together with Ava.
Looking at him, Ferris shivers once again. That’s the most familiar feeling of all, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the weather conditions. Ferris has seen him waiting like this fifty, a hundred times, in every conceivable kind of weather, and the shiver has always been part of it. There is uneasiness and curiosity in it, and a tingling, what now? expectancy. But ten years have changed the shiver, too. The intensities have shifted. This morning, curiosity leads.
The ferry taps the dock, recoils a little, and the ramp mechanisms drop the heavy steel plates onto the decks. Ferris hangs back as the other passengers tramp across the plates and onto the wooden dock, an anonymous surge of eager human flesh that has debarked here the same way, in the same colourful chaos ten times a day since he was last here. How many crowds is that? Ferris tries to do the calculation in his head and settles at somewhere near forty thousand.
He leans against the ferry rail and makes an inventory. The mossy cedars and firs of the bay are more sparse than he remembers, and there are fewer of them. He glimpses several plush new buildings half-hidden among them, expensive homes defined by the unmistakable ostentation of wealthy people who want solitude, comfort, and convenience at the same time. The road leading down to the ferry slip looks more congested with cars and passengers than it used to be, but the sewery-salt odour of the marina is the same, and when he peers down through its murky iridescence, he can see neither improvement nor the bottom.
Ferris knows that the changes here, whatever they turn out to be, probably won’t be for the better. Everything gets uglier and more vulgar. This island and its contents more than most places, probably. Less nature, more people, more toxins and shit. The crabs and shellfish all up the coast, he recalls, were declared unfit for eating several years ago, a combination of pulp mill dioxins and too much sewage washing through to the beaches from the new developments.
He steps onto the ramp, continuing his gloomy inventory. In the marina behind the ferry slip, the boats are bigger than they once were, more of them Fiberglas. And there are houseboats. He wonders how that happened. The islanders had once been willing to form their own navy to keep them out. Somebody has paid a lot of money for the privilege of having their living room roll around like a toy boat in a bathtub every ninety minutes when the ferries come in.
Vince catches sight of him as he reaches the end of the ramp and booms out a greeting. “Hey, hey! Cuckoo! Over here!”
Ferris almost flinches. He hasn’t heard that nickname in a long time, not since the last time Vince used it. Trust him to bring it up before anything. He looks over and sees that Vince has a wide grin on his face – and that he’s waiting for Ferris to come to him. Some things don’t change.
They shake hands and then embrace, awkwardly. Vince glances at the tulips, but doesn’t acknowledge them. “You don’t change much,” he says.