On the Edge A Novel (28 page)

He gazed up at her. She closed her eyes briefly and then they sprang open again, intensified. All the sadness and all the innocence she had ever known was distilled into a serious delight, and seemed to slide along the thread of her eyebeams and to fall, drop by drop, into his heart.

‘I’ve been waiting for you all my life,’ said Peter. ‘All my longings and all my fantasies have been about you, but I didn’t know you really existed. And now you’re lying in front of me in all your beauty.’

Peter, who usually choked on an ‘I love you’ before falling hastily to sleep, made this speech irresistibly.

He leant down and ran his tongue lightly over her belly until the tip came to rest on her navel ring. As he shook the ring with his tongue, the gold chimed against his teeth. Crystal moaned and rolled her hips.

‘You’re so open, you’re so alive,’ he said.

She smiled at him with unguarded eyes, her cheeks glowing in the candlelight.

She opened her legs wider and his chest pressed against the open lips of her cunt. He drew the wetness into his parched heart and, letting out a sigh of amazement, brought his head to rest between her breasts.

She ran her fingers through his hair.

‘You’re so sweet to me,’ she said.

‘You’re my whole reason for existing,’ he said, looking up at her again. His eyes in her eyes and her eyes in his, resting.

He was astonished by the innocence of his feelings. Just for now he was purely defined by making love to Crystal. There was no sense of debt created by the extravagance of his words, no sense that they were being converted into promises. With her, every gesture was made to give life to the moment.

Looking down at her body, he was filled with passion to see her open like a flower. He leant down and kissed her quietly on the lips of her cunt, as if he were kissing her sleeping forehead and didn’t want to wake her. And then he parted those lips with his thumbs and ran his tongue along the furrow between them, and when he reached her clitoris he arched his tongue and let it circle and slide over her softly.

Crystal pushed her hips further forward to show him that he could have all of her. Every movement was perfect, there was nothing to add and nothing to take away, nothing to quicken and nothing to slow down. How did he know her already? How did she already trust him? She could feel the clear glass of her meditating mind being stained by the sudden richness of her sensations, but clear or stained it remained translucent.

And now he was slipping his middle finger inside her and at the same time stroking her navel ring with his thumb, as if he were stroking the rim of a glass to make it hum. Their bodies were perfectly intelligent: they knew what to do; they had always known what to do. She breathed in deeply, drawing the excitement upwards, letting it rise through the centre of her torso like mercury in a thermometer. She let out a sigh of delight as Peter’s tongue quickened and flickered; she felt the ache in her third eye as the pleasure flooded her skull through the open gate of her throat, and then, fountaining against the inside of her crown, curled round and streamed back down through every nerve in her body.

And now he was slowing down, slowing right down. She relaxed all her muscles and subsided into his palm, which rested at the base of her spine, waiting to receive her. And then he touched her on the clitoris again with the tip of his tongue, as carefully as if he had crossed a wide desert without a drink, and was fetching the last drop of dew from the petal of a rose. And he rested his tongue there, and imagined all the love he was capable of – no, that was not enough – all the love he was not capable of as well, streaming into her.

And then they both lay still. But everything around them was streaming and everything inside them was streaming.

After a brief eternity, he looked up at her and they both laughed in astonishment at the intensity of the lightness they were feeling.

‘God,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing…’

Crystal’s cheeks were flushed. She looked rejuvenated and entirely beautiful. She ran her hands up the centre of her body and said, ‘Whoosh.’

‘Yeah,’ said Peter and, following the same line she had described with her hands, he kissed her belly, and kissed her between the breasts, and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat, and kissed her chin, and kissed her lips and, as he kissed her forehead, he slipped the head of his cock between the lips of her cunt.

‘Ahh…’

‘God.’

He held the head of his cock inside her, his eyes in her eyes, her eyes in his eyes, resting. Slowly, so slowly, because each millimetre was a new plane of intimacy it would be foolish to rush past, he moved further inside her. They gazed into each other’s eyes as if they were witnessing a miracle rather than performing an act.

Crystal felt him move from her swollen and sensitive lips up towards her womb, and she felt the same journey taking place from the excited part of her mind towards its silent centre. She felt the reconciliation of everything that was said to be deep and everything that was said to be high; the vertical dimension disappeared and she felt herself disseminated through an infinite horizon.

And then he drew back slowly and she felt herself drawn back into a zone of crowded sensations, of pleasure and the habit of deciding what was pleasurable. But by then she was not herself any more, she was just a woman, and he was a man, and they might as well have been fucking for a thousand years, because she couldn’t remember doing anything else.

He got up onto his knees and she hooked one leg over his shoulder and tilted sideways, and he started to fuck her hard, looking down on the spread of her legs and seeing his cock disappear into her wet cunt and reappear glistening and slide back in again. And he became just fucking, not a thought in his head except fucking, and the feeling was so meant to be, first of the tribe lay there, yes, there, yes, there, and he was there, and she was there, and it was there, and there it was, fucking.

He was, he could feel it, he was going to, he could feel it, he was going to come. Stop everything. Breathe in hard. Clench everything. PC muscle, buttocks, arms, pectorals, abdomen, chin lock. Breathe in further, the last sip of air through taut nostrils. Just in time. He felt the desire reversing and rushing up the centre of his body and flooding his head. He sat back on his heels and closed his eyes.

She felt the walls of her cunt softening and expanding, and then in a series of contractions she gushed
amrita
onto their intermingled pubic hair.

*   *   *

The yab yum had been a big success. Jason still couldn’t help thinking that it would make a great title for a song. ‘No need to rush/ No need to run/ Just stay where you are/ And yab yum/ ya-ba-di yum.’

He could just imagine himself on MTV with a touch of the Kama Sutra art direction and the whole band in soft-focused yab yum. It could be huge. A little ripple from the sitar, a pelting from the tabla, and his gravelly and laid-back voice singing, ‘Yab yum/ ya-ba-di dum.’ It would be bigger than ‘Be Bop A Lula’ and ‘Do-Do Run-Run’ put together. A world music sound with a neo-sixties message. Perfect.

‘I’ve got to write it down,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Angela sweetly.

‘I’ve got this song running around in my head,’ said Jason.

‘You see,’ said Angela. ‘Sexual and creative energy are really from the same source. Stimulate one and you stimulate the other.’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ said Jason, getting up to find pen and paper. Under his breath he composed. ‘Line up your chakras/ It’s time to have fun/ Yab yum, ya-ba-di yum/ Yab yum/ Ya-ba-di dum.’

*   *   *

‘Gee,’ said Stan, admiring the perfection of Sabine’s body, her small voluptuous breasts, her wide tanned belly, and her artfully trimmed pubic hair. Awestruck as he was, he noticed that her wonderful body did not entirely make up for the impression of mental illness which pulsed from her like a lighthouse beam.

‘This is your lucky day, old man,’ she said, sprawling on the bed and stroking her thighs with her fingertips.

‘It was already my lucky day,’ said Stan calmly. ‘I got to make love to my wife for the first time in eight years.’

‘Oh, that’s so sweet,’ said Karen.

‘Well, it’s the truth,’ said Stan. ‘I don’t even know this young lady’s name.’

‘My name is Poly,’ said Sabine.

Jerome had stripped down to his lime-green silk boxer shorts. Strangely orange skin hung loosely on his bony frame. From a chaos of serpentine curls, he leered angrily at Karen. He figured that Karen was the price he had to pay for the demented intensity of Sabine’s alter ego.

Karen drew strength from the thought that she was not only deflecting the blow of Jerome’s sexual attention from poor fragile Poly, but also giving Stan the opportunity to celebrate his rediscovered potency with a beautiful, if mad, young woman. The only thing that could make this blossoming of self-sacrifice utterly perfect would be to avoid any physical contact with Jerome. Perhaps she could find some tactful way to let Stan have his fun while she chatted with Jerome.

‘Would you mind if I just watched?’ she asked Jerome.

‘Watch the three of us?’ said Jerome eagerly. ‘That’s cool.’

‘Or the two of them,’ said Karen, trying to protect Stan from Jerome’s competition, or worse still his contribution.

‘I’m not the one who’s dropping out,’ said Jerome. ‘It’s up to us to satisfy this sexually devouring woman,’ he said to Stan. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Well, gee,’ said Stan, ‘I don’t want Karen to feel left out.’

‘She likes to watch,’ growled Sabine. ‘Everybody can do their own thing.’

She reached inside Stan’s white pyjamas and wrapped her fingers around his unconcerned cock.

‘I’m not sure what my thing is,’ said Stan. ‘But, right now, I think I’d like to be with my wife.’

‘You could watch us,’ said Jerome, leaping astride Sabine’s writhing body.

‘We’ll just go out on the balcony,’ said Karen discreetly. ‘You make yourselves at home.’

‘This is
stupid
,’ shouted Sabine, banging the mattress with her fists. ‘We might as well be in our own room.’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying all along,’ said Jerome.

Sabine leapt to her feet, and Jerome hastily gathered up his clothes and turned to say goodbye.

‘We’ll see you guys tomorrow,’ he said cheerfully.

Karen and Stan remained silent while Sabine strode proudly out of the room, and Jerome shuffled through the door with a presidential wave.

‘I guess we’ll never have group sex now,’ said Stan with a touch of melancholy.

‘We could start a group of our own,’ said Karen. ‘Let’s talk to Walking Eagle about it.’

‘He’s bound to have a ceremony,’ said Stan.

‘No doubt about it,’ said Karen.

*   *   *

Brooke had fallen asleep and was dreaming that the sea was an oriental merchant unrolling bolts of lace at her feet, and with every wave she bought another acre of lace because each pattern was too beautiful to refuse. And then he said he had some silk to show her, and she agreed, and he pointed behind him and the whole ocean was stretched silk. She said she would take the whole thing, but he laughed and said it was not for sale. Couldn’t he make her a little dress? she asked. Not even a handkerchief? Nothing? And at that moment all the bolts of lace streamed back into the ocean, and the silk turned into churning sea water and it rushed over her naked body and she was completely free.

Kenneth was standing on the balcony feeling exhilarated and distinguished when Brooke came over to join him.

‘I’ve just had the most beautiful dream and I know I have to give away all of my money,’ said Brooke sleepily.

‘Make a foundation,’ said Kenneth.

‘OK, darling,’ yawned Brooke. ‘But anyhow, I don’t need any new dresses.’

‘We can make that one of the terms and conditions of the foundation: no new dresses for the director.’

Brooke hooked her hand over his shoulder and rested her head on his chest.

‘The ocean looks like silk, but the wonderful thing about it is that it’s the ocean.’

‘That’s right,’ said Kenneth.

‘And lightning is lightning, and sperm is…’ She paused.

‘Don’t say holy water,’ said Kenneth. ‘Don’t give up on me now.’

‘I wasn’t going to say holy water,’ said Brooke. ‘I was going to say, yummy.’

‘Yummy is OK,’ said Kenneth. ‘Yummy is allowed.’

*   *   *

Peter lay on the bed, completely still, listening to the whispering sea. An intermittent draught cooled the sweat on his skin. He was immersed in the richness of his own body and yet barely in touch with the bed. He could feel his body coursing with blood and enzymes and glandular excretions and, at the same time, feel nourished by the pulse of the faintest star.

He saw all the causes from the unknowable edges of time which, for all he knew, had no edges, converging on his body in that moment to make it no other than it was. And then he saw that his body was itself a cause dispersing its effects into the future. He saw time rippling in and, caught in the revolution of a moment, rippling out again. History and all possible futures were just the interference pattern of those converging and diverging waves of causality. And then he saw that what rippled in and what rippled out were the same thing, because his body was no more focal than any other point and this moment was no more focal than any other moment. It was as true to call the stillness rippling as to call the rippling stillness, or the stillness stillness, or the rippling rippling …

‘Far out,’ he murmured.

‘What?’ whispered Crystal.

‘I’ve seen how the whole thing works.’

‘What? The
yoni
and the
lingam
?’ said Crystal. ‘You didn’t know that before?’

Peter laughed. ‘No. The universe,’ he said.

‘Oh, the universe,’ said Crystal, relieved. ‘Sabine’s favourite subject.’

‘Now you’ve ruined my mystical experience,’ said Peter.

‘It was that easy? It just disappeared at the mention of a woman you don’t like as much as you used to?’

‘Yup,’ said Peter. ‘I guess we’re going to have to painstakingly reconstruct the moments that led up to it.’