Читать книгу The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal - Sean Dixon - Страница 11

How do you describe the cave you lived in before you walked out of it? What did Hell look like before the angels were hurled into it? Was there anyone who felt bigger than life in sixteenth-century London before Shakespeare stepped onto the stage? Did the Meccans have any idea of the power their language contained before Muhammad walked down the hill?

The truth is, the two of us have had enough schooling that we no longer believe in these before-and-after visions of history. History is the history of marketing and publicity; which is the smaller way of saying it’s written by the victors.

And it was certainly not all glory and roses after Runner’s entrance, either.

We said earlier that Du and Anna and Runner were climbing the stairs to a bygone era. But not yet, because the Lacuna Cabal had not yet completed their latest book. Out with the old and in with the new then. Or, more to the point, out with the new and in with the old.

The book we were completing was Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. It was the only book we had tackled all winter, and it had borne the burden of having to distract us from daily life after the death of Ruby Coghill. Grief and loss were emotions that none of us had really experienced before, and we didn’t know what to make of them.

On the day in question, that is, 18 March 2003, just after 7 p.m., we initiated our farewell to this book with a standard ritual we called the Final Indulgence. Aline, with help from a reluctant Emmy, began to read a passage that was agreed to be beloved to everyone. It was about two women who were lovers who pledged to never leave one another, and it contained descriptions of the sea and of November. Everybody cried for some reason at the mention of that word ‘November’, especially Romy, who cried out loud. We cried too, though we don’t know why; we’re crying now, even though we can’t think of anything bad that has happened in November, other than it was only two months later than September. The truth is, we would have wept at the name of any month at all, the names of months being heavily weighted with the passage of time away from September and towards a sad and heavy future.

Emmy was weeping on the shoulder of Romy, quietly despairing that she didn’t have someone like that, someone to love who could love her like that. Nobody was noticing this except for Romy herself, naturally, and her heart was both melting and bursting. Emmy worried quietly to Romy that she was becoming repellent and unclean, that she gave off a scent that said to men, ‘Don’t come near me.’ She felt it went right down to her genes. She also proclaimed herself one of the last of the old-time nihilists, who would think nothing of throwing herself onto a scrum of sailors à la Last Exit to Brooklyn. Though she was also, she said, so fucking tired of her life experiences being governed by stories in books.

Romy wanted nothing more than to counter Emmy’s nihilism by paying homage to her stripes, which were, to Romy, the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and which seemed to pulse with her heartbeat in a way that could be discerned only by a person sitting as close as Romy was now. But she knew that Emmy did not want to speak of such things, so instead she breathlessly protested that no single man, not even a bevy of wild-eyed sailors, could possibly affect Emmy’s perfect genes and declared, perhaps a little too emphatically, that Emmy was as beautiful as she had ever been.

This was overheard.

There had been, thus far in the room, some unspoken tension, because the women of the Lacuna Cabal Montreal Young Women’s Book Club were not comfortable with giving themselves over entirely without criticism to a work of fiction, no matter how important or established it was. We tried to maintain a critical distance, so that only the most sublime portions of a given work would stick. But there had been something about this book that had gotten to us, and so we found ourselves, on this evening, ushering the author of Fall on Your Knees into the pantheon of the greats without so much as a whisper of protest regarding length or anachronism or political relevance or anything. And so there was a creeping feeling of embarrassment that perhaps the Lacuna Cabal was losing its edge. Still, though criticism was desired as an outlet, it had to be well-spoken and deserved, and woe betide the woman who let fly for the sake of venting alone. Nobody had dared on this particular evening, and so when Romy was overheard to be speaking quietly to Emmy about beauty and blue jeans, the collective Lacuna Id, in the person of founder and president Missy Bean, spotted an outlet. She turned to Romy and dressed her down for turning her attention towards issues of fashion and beauty at a time when attention had to be paid to more serious matters of literary analysis, to wit: ‘We are tonight attempting to recall the deepest and greatest values of this book, but Romy, it seems, would prefer to speak about … ’, et cetera.

To Romy, who was the perfect Lacuna Cabal member, this was a blow.

‘No, Missy, we’re not.’

‘Oh, Romy, you’re not? You’re speaking of more serious things?’

‘Yes we are.’

‘Could you share them with the group?’

‘Uh.’

‘Books suck, Missy, essentially, is what I was saying. Okay? Happy?’

This from Emmy, who opted in her newfound self-destructive manner to deflect attention from Romy – possibly the only kind thing she will ever do for anyone in this story. She went on. ‘Because for me they don’t do what they’re supposed to do when they need to do them most.’

Missy, shocked, spluttered something about how books, in fact, ‘have no needs, Emmy’.

‘All I know is,’ Emmy continued, ‘and this is what I was telling the poor embarrassed Romy, all I know is, I lie in my bed at night, by myself, trying to read some cosy little book, but I can’t read them any more, because they’re too small, and they don’t matter, and I have to put them down and just get on with it.’

Missy, trying to affect a sympathetic tone, began to assure Emmy that we all knew about her ‘circumstances’, an ir resistibly vague term that prompted Priya to lean over and ask Romy, whisperingly, what those ‘circumstances’ might be.

‘Priya here doesn’t,’ corrected Emmy. ‘But you were saying?’

‘Emmy, if you’re not available for the necessary suspension of disbelief through these tragic circumstances of –’

‘Missy, I’m not saying my circumstances are tragic. God forbid thinking they’re tragic. I know they’re common, they’re so common that, who knows, they might even happen to you one day.’

To Emmy, Missy presented the image of manless perfection.

‘Can we get down to the next book?’

‘Sure, shit, whatever, shit, sure.’

But it was not as easy as all that. Missy had let loose the Id, and it wasn’t going to be so easy to allow it to slip back into the dark crevice from whence it had come.

Priya spoke up now – lovely, sunny Priya – suggesting helpfully that Missy ‘say what the book is going to be so we can get it over with’. To Missy’s explosion of protest, Priya countered that, ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle will vote for whatever you want them to, Missy … ’

Missy, mining a deep-core reserve of calm, asked, ‘What is this, a mutiny?’

‘I’m just telling it like it is,’ said Priya.

‘But it’s not even true,’ countered Missy. ‘Aline and Jennifer and Danielle can vote however they wish, and besides, it’s not my fault that our resident maverick, Runner Coghill, is missing today.’

Romy said, ‘Runner Coghill is always missing on decision days. It’s because she can’t stand the Final Indulgence. She thinks it’s stupid.’

Missy fixed Romy with a very frank look. ‘Well, I don’t have any sympathy for her then.’

‘Missy, she just lost her sister.’

‘What does that have to do with anything? Anyway, that was six months ago!’

‘It’s harder when it’s your twin.’

‘Oh, is it now?’

‘Yes!’

‘That’s just a crutch.’

Missy did say those words: ‘That’s just a crutch.’ It is recorded in the Book of Days.12 But she only said them because she didn’t want to lose control of the argument, and that depended entirely on her belittling Runner’s intentions. Romy was shocked and silenced by the monstrous assertion, and Missy’s work was done.13

And so there followed a moment or two when it seemed like the dark cloud of the Lacuna Id had passed. Until Romy, moving on, suggested they take up The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, a book about elephants.

12 When an actress in Emmy’s play about the Lacuna Cabal (which, last time we checked, bore the overblown title, The Girls Who Saw Everything) was asked to speak a line just like that one presented above, she protested that no one would ever be so cruel as to say such a thing: no one would ever claim that the expression of pure grief for the loss of a sister could be described as ‘just a crutch’. The actress reportedly demanded a line-change, which Emmy, to her credit, refused to grant, and the whole rehearsal ground to a halt, never to be recovered. The actors weren’t getting paid anyway and, since they were running on their own steam, felt they had the moral right to say lines or not say lines as they pleased. Only a well-paid actor, they all agreed, could be expected to spout lines that were not properly aligned with her own heart and conscience. The bigger the paycheque, the greater the possibility for emotional investment in garbage. Emmy reportedly had to spend two weeks after that filing down a shiny new set of horns that had popped out of her forehead.

13 Also, for the record, a vote by Runner with Romy, Priya and Emmy against Missy, Aline, Jennifer and Danielle would bring about a tie. Since the deciding vote in a tie goes to the executive and Missy was the execu tive, the power came in the end right back around to her. This she knew, perfectly well.

This was unfortunate. Not only was Missy against reading a book about elephants or any other animals, but she was also, for the moment at least, against Romy. So in her argument against ‘the elephant book’, she matter-of-factly revealed some private information about how Romy had become distraught over the deaths of some rabbits in Watership Down, a book she’d read outside the auspices of the club. The deaths in this elephant book, she pointed out, were much worse than the rabbit deaths: they were harrowing, terrible, horrible deaths, and the entire, like, herd was always aware of it. ‘It’s a really depressing book.’

‘Wow, dead elephants,’ said Romy, mortified by Missy’s public revelations. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she wished that something would occur that might annihilate the memory of her suggestion.

And then something did. Miraculously, from the other end of the floor there came a most welcome interruption: a voice, high, piercing and clear: ‘Either I’m delirious or the essence of my vulva is filling the warehouse!’

(!)

(Well, that’s what she said!)

Runner would not have minded what we have written here. In fact she would have approved of our informing the reader that she had a great interest in gynaecological terminology, specifically those words relating to the menstrual cycle. She was obsessed with the idea of the streamlined cycle among women who worked together in groups for any length of time. Her enthusiasm over such matters was embarrassing but also understandable, since her frailty was such that there was probably nothing much going on down there. She had told Romy once that she hadn’t had any real activity since well before Ruby had died,14 and even then there had never been much. More of a trickle than a torrent. For her, PMS meant paltry month’s supply.

In other words, the scent of Runner’s vulva was most assuredly not filling the warehouse, though the scent of her language surely was. Before we had a chance to turn around, she had already moved on to the dreaded question.

‘How many have gotten their periods today?’

But then we saw. With Runner there was a man. A grown man. Neil was there too, but Neil was always there, by his sister’s side. No one, not even Missy, would have invoked the no-boys rule against Neil. But this was different. There was a grown man, and he was holding Runner in his arms, as if he were a combat soldier. Either Runner was engaged in some kind of elaborate practical joke that would take the rest of the evening to unfold, or she was seriously hurt. The man had a kind of half-embarrassed, half-apologetic look on his face, which would have been a very satisfying expression to observe if we weren’t all so totally freaked.

Beside the man there stood a chubby little rosy-cheeked girl who didn’t look too interesting or too bright.15 Except that she was carrying several slabs of stone, which looked to be interesting and so, arguably, endowed her with a veneer of the interesting. Although, on the other hand, they didn’t appear to belong to her. She was carrying them cavalierly, like she wanted to drop them and have a cigarette.

14 A lie. (Neil’s note.)

Still, during the conflict that followed, this girl, with the self-consciousness of someone who was not accustomed to negotiating fragility, managed to lower the stack to the floor and allow the stones to slide away into a harmless little heap. We’d have expected her to let them drop and break into pieces. She looked the type. But there was some deep current of delicacy in this girl that we could not see on the surface.

‘Ladies and ladies,’ said Runner, now that the arms of the man had given her our undivided attention. ‘I’ve come to propose a book.’

‘You’re late,’ said Missy.

‘That’s a great leadership skill, Missy: you can tell the time.’

‘That’s how I know you’re late.’

‘But it doesn’t matter because I’m hijacking the agenda. Neil, show them your rifle.’

Neil’s eyes widened as he looked at Runner, and a very familiar she’s-crazy expression flashed across his face. He didn’t have a rifle. Still, Runner continued as if Neil had flourished a semi-automatic and sent a hail of bullets over our heads.16

15 Sorry, Anna.

‘Now, there’s no need to panic; if we keep our heads when all around us –’

‘But you must know, Runner, darling,’ interrupted Missy sweetly, ‘that boys are not permitted to attend these meetings.’

‘He can if he’s got a rifle.’ (Runner’s baby poker face.)

‘Runner, darling?’ (Emmy, incredulous, her eyes stuck up inside her head.)

‘I’m not talking about that boy.’ (Missy, indicating the obvious and Neil.) ‘I’m talking about that boy.’ (Missy, indicating the boy in whose military arms Runner reclined.)

‘This boy?’ asked Runner, as if she were noticing him for the first time.

‘Yes, that boy.’

Runner looked at the boy again. And then, as if she had only just recalled it, as if it were all slowly coming back to her, she explained that, had it not been (or, rather, had it NOT BEEN) for the assistance of this boy (i.e. THIS BOY), she would still be lying in a pile of refuse on the first floor, having fallen through the ceiling, indicating the possibility that she had perhaps finally become too heavy for this world.

16 The following was written in the Book of Days immediately under today’s date: ‘Salam Pax has not posted today regarding the situation in Baghdad. Why not? We can’t help but fear the worst for this courageous bear of a man.’ The authors of this account did not recognise the handwriting, but it has turned out to be from Aline, who managed to keep his obsession with the Iraq war and specifically the Baghdad Blogger a secret from everyone else in the Cabal.

At the mention of Runner’s surfeit of heaviness, Missy placed the tips of her thumb and forefinger on either side of the bridge of her nose, pressing hard in a believable display of martyrdom. Runner continued.

‘He carried me here, and I have yet to hold up my end of the bargain, since I promised to blow him if he got me up all those stairs.’

Now we all had our faces in our hands. Even Priya. The boy, we think, would also have had his face in his hands, but for the matter that he had his hands full of Runner, so he had to content himself with casting a suffering look towards the chubby-cheeked girl who stood beside him.

The girl beside him, it should be noted, did not have her face in her hands either. She was looking almost amused behind her fulsome mug.

‘Still,’ Runner continued fearlessly, ‘the boys aren’t nearly as effective a hijacking tool as the Girl. Ladies and ladies, I present to you: the Girl.’ And then, sotto voce, to the girl, ‘I didn’t get your name.’

The chubby17 girl flashed a flicker of a smile, which passed as swiftly as a sparrow round a street corner, and replied too quietly for us to hear.

Runner continued. ‘Anna. First order of business, and necessary for the historic tie-break between the two distinct factions of the Lacuna Cabal, is: Anna here must be received as a new member.’

17 Sorry … sorry …

After a pause, Missy inquired whether Runner had gone out of her mind. Runner ruminated on the question for a moment or two before Missy just said, ‘No.’ Runner asked if we could vote on it. ‘No,’ said Missy.

‘Well, as it turns out, Missy,’ said Runner, ‘Anna owns the building we’re standing in. So if this were the Notre Dame Cathedral – and Missy, I’m not suggesting that if this were the Notre Dame Cathedral you’d be the Hunchback of Notre Dame Cathedral – but if this were Notre Dame Cathedral, Anna here would be the bishop, not to mention a devoted supporter of my book proposal.’

Missy was looking flagrantly at her watch and not panicking.

‘It’s seven thirty anyway. We can adjourn for now and meet somewhere else tomorrow. I will not tolerate this kind of mutinous –’

‘Missy, I’m in the process of proposing a book.’

‘You’re in the process of conducting a MUTINY!’

‘Outrageous!’ said Runner with delight, as Missy continued.

‘Proposing a book, any book, using threats, using coercion that undermines the sanctity of and that stamps and spits and trammels our constitution – you’re … the Pony Palimpsest!

Now Runner was overjoyed. ‘Don’t you call me a Pony Palimpsest.’

The reader, like Priya, might turn to Romy and ask, ‘What does it mean?’ and be as unsatisfied as Priya by Romy’s response: ‘It means the gloves are coming off.’18

Missy continued to berate Runner in a manner that might require more footnotes.

‘But I’m not sure you’ll accept the book any other way!’ protested Runner.

‘I will not accept any book this way.’

‘But you have to accept it whatever way will work!’

‘What’s the book?’

‘That’s the book!’

And Runner pointed to the heap of stones at Anna’s feet.

What did we see? We saw a pile of stones covered with small notches, some kind of writing. If there was a palimpsest there, it was literature written over archaeology. Any pony prints in that hard clay would have been left thousands of years before it was ever dug up, baked and written on.

Still, impressive as the individual stones might have looked from an archaeological standpoint, there was nothing to suggest we were looking at a book.

Runner had anticipated our ambivalence.

18 A palimpsest, of course, is a document that has been written over a pre-existing document, a holdover from the days before printers, when paper was precious and writing took a long time. So the image of a Pony Palimpsest, in the mind’s eye of the members of the Lacuna Cabal, is a skittish young horse mucking up a pre-existing document, preferably printed on beautiful medieval parchment inscribed by monks. ‘You are the Destroyer’ would be a synonymous statement.

‘I assure you: it might appear cumbersome, but it’s a real book.’

‘Um,’ said Missy, who never said ‘um’. ‘What’s it called, Runner?’

Runner bit her lip. ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

‘Runner, I’m not going to choose a book that looks like that and has a title that is “a matter of opinion”.’

‘He Who Saw Everything. That’s what it’s called. It’s Mesopotamian. It’s pretty much the first book ever written. And if we are to hold on to our status as the premium book club, then we should be interested in reading the first book.’

There was a pause. And a sigh.

‘I was going to propose Possession.’

‘That book is fifteen years old!’

‘Your book isn’t even a book. It’s a bunch of rocks.’

‘And I’m willing to bet we’ve all read Possession already! Every single one of us!’

‘Not as part of the group.’

(Aline and Romy agreed quietly that Possession was an amazing book.)

Runner shifted in Du’s arms. ‘I can’t argue right now. I’m in pain.’

‘Well, suffer,’ said Missy and immediately regretted it, since it had become clear in that moment, to her as well as the rest of us, that Runner’s leg was hanging strangely off the soldier boy’s forearm. The truth was, Missy didn’t want Runner to suffer anything but defeat, but it suddenly didn’t sound like that. She was, for this rare moment, tongue-tied.

We were all looking at the leg. Aline finally ventured what she considered to be a reasonable argument, expressed in a tone of compromise: ‘Runner, I’m just not sure the Lacuna Cabal should be reading, like, unpublished material –’

Unfortunately for Aline, this was the argument Runner had most hoped to receive. ‘Just fuck off, Aline, okay? Why should the Lacuna Cabal be a carbon copy of other book clubs, reading only material that has been copied ad infinitum? I just want to try this book, okay? It’s my most favourite book in the whole world and just because it’s carved in stone and it’s written in an ancient language and there’s –’

An ancient language?

‘– only one copy and it looks funny or weird or whatever, doesn’t mean it sucks, Aline, okay? I bring the true experience of the prehistoric reader straight to your door. But if it sucks, we’ll switch, okay? We’ll just switch if it sucks we’ll switch, okay? Okay?’

Aline had switched her attention entirely to her sneakers, which had both suddenly come untied, and she was carefully rethreading the laces so they would all be of equal length. Runner watched for a moment, fascinated by the totality of Aline’s absorption in something so meaningless, and then she laid down her ace.

‘You’ll love it, I swear, on the grave of my sister who’s added her weight to my own.’

This maxed everyone out. Suddenly the pressure was unbearable and we were all desperately in need of escape. Runner sensed it. She paused and let out some of the steam. A beat. A breath. Then she offered to read a bit – just the beginning, just the beginning of the story. He Who Saw Everything. Literature as escape. It was deftly done.

‘Just let me read a bit. Just a little bit. A little bit of the first words that anyone ever thought to write. Just let me read a few of the first words of the first book. And then we can see if I’m crippled for life.’

We accepted it. It was allowed, though Missy was the only one who said, ‘Okay.’ There was no vote. Runner looked to Neil.

‘Neil, put down your gun.’

Neil looked at Runner.

‘Now get me the first stone.’

He did as he was told, as his sister spoke a brief editor ial preface:

‘There is, incidentally and for your information, Missy, a goddess at the top of the heap in this book who might sound familiar to you.’

Neil poked around the heap and finally pulled out one of the irregularly shaped stones. What indicated its status as first among the slabs was by no means apparent, though it was certainly believable that these stones were old. We could see that there was writing, if you could call it that, on both sides, and also that there were small patches of blank space, roughly textured, as if the text had been eroded. We, or some of us, found ourselves wondering how Runner would make the leap over these gaps, these … and the word occurred to Missy alone: these lacunae. With a sense of dread as pronounced as anything she felt about her own womb, Missy caught a flickering moment of import, as if something here were being fulfilled – a prophesy, like Herod first hearing of the baby Jesus.

What’s more, Missy realised, whatever was to come, whatever this prophesied, she herself had been the inadvertent origin of it, the namer of it. She wished she knew what it would be, this gap that held the future. This perfectly obscure lacuna.

Had she named the Cabal for this?

Neil handed the stone up to Runner, who sat up a little in Du’s arms and slowly began to translate the alleged first words of this alleged first book:

In the very old days, back when years were long, like the first year of a child’s life, only this is the way things felt to adults and children alike, because it was the beginning of the world, the future was full of everything and there was nothing in the past–

‘I wish I could feel that way,’ murmured Emmy.

– there was a time when everyone was happy in the beautiful city of Uruk, with its strong walls and its proud goddess Inanna –

Neil interjected, as if on cue, ‘Who was like Missy?’

A lot like Missy: always ready to leave if she didn’t get her way, march straight out of the universe …

But like rabbits in the warrens of Watership Down –

Romy forgot Emmy, for a moment.

– for a thousand years the people were happy.

And Runner paused and looked down at everyone from the arms where she wanted to spend the rest of her life.

Look at the walls of the city. They surround you. They were built for you, to protect you from the rain. These walls were built by one man, and he made them well, although in other ways, all other ways, he was a tyrant, with a stride as long as a league and eyes the rarest, rarest shade of …

She paused and paused some more. She would have paused forever and Missy would have let her, quietly praying for everyone to remain silent. But Romy, with her weakness for colour, took the bait.

‘Of what?’

Runner smiled, as sweetly as anything Missy might venture.

‘Can we vote on this?’

Romy could not believe it. She had been manipulated once again into taking the rap for the whole group, only this time it was at the hands of someone she trusted probably more than anyone in the world: ‘Runner Coghill!’

‘I’m sorry, Romy. I do what I have to. Can we vote on this?’

Missy sat stoically with eyes downcast. Calmly demurred. ‘I’m not ready to.’

Runner’s turn to panic: ‘I have to get to the hospital!’

‘So we’ll take you to the hospital.’

Romy demanded to know what was the colour of the tyrant’s eyes, but Runner kept her focus on the Missy stopgap.

‘But you’re interested.’

‘Whatever.’

‘You are!’

She was. It was obvious from the hesitation that followed. This proved enough for Romy, who was holding the Book of Days and so was entrusted with proclaiming the calls to vote. She shouted the motion as Neil quietly bent over his notebook and wrote, On this very day …

‘The proposal is to do Runner’s stone book and also to accept the new member Anna so we can keep coming back to this building. And also learn the colour of the tyrant’s eyes. All in favour?’

Romy, Priya and Emmy all raised their hands with Runner, who almost broke her bearer’s nose. Aline raised her hand, tipping the scales in Runner’s favour. But then Missy raised her hand too, taking our breath (the breath of the two of us) away. And as our hands (the hands of the two of us) shot up as one, faster than the speed of thought (because it was true: we were curious too), Romy shouted in tones of joy, ‘The motion carries us!’

And Missy, standing and pulling her fists to her hips in that exquisitely Wonder Woman pose: ‘Carries. The motion carries, Romy.’ Then, turning the full weight of her attention toward Runner and her injury, she managed to take her into her arms without acknowledging the presence of the boy.

‘Let’s get you to the hospital, you stupid, crazy girl.’

And she swept across the floor to the stairs, the rest of us following, like all her little dogs.

Dumuzi would have been relieved to be alone again with Anna, were it not for the anxious revelation that Anna did not wish to be alone with Du. She was following the crowd and he couldn’t shake the thought that it was mostly to get away from him.

In a flurry of semi-words that came out in an improbable series of W’s and B’s, he tried to inquire politely where she was going. He had longed for nothing more than to be alone with her again. Instead he got this: Anna, always moving on, always heading towards some future that did not include him, leaving him with his anxiety spikes. It was amazing how swiftly they came on. Just amazing.

‘I just want to see her to the hospital,’ said Anna, annoyed.

‘But you don’t even know her.’

‘I don’t know. She reminds me of … somebody.’

‘Who?’

‘Somebody.’ And then she flushed with her subtle anger, wounding him, as Priya might say, with the lash of an eye: ‘I don’t know who. That’s why I want to go. So that I can figure it out, you know?’

Dumuzi felt there was only one way now. ‘But I thought you wanted to, uh.’

A glint came into Anna’s eye, transforming all of Du’s anxiety in an instant to basic, focused arousal. ‘I thought you didn’t.’

His flurry of B’s and W’s again.

Anna put him out of his misery. ‘Meet me here tomorrow – next floor up.’

‘When?’

‘Same time.’

‘Okay.’

‘You sure?’

From Du a single W, half a B, and then a gesture of assent, and then Anna was gone. This was much more pleasant. An uncertain road, rife with even bigger spikes, land mines even. But for the moment everything was great. Sex. The feeling of possession. He tried to stop thinking, blowing out from puffed cheeks, blowing out again, waiting, allowing Anna to get far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t catch up and tell her he’d changed his mind or have her tell him the same. Then he followed.