Chloe (23 page)

‘Morning. Didn't see you – or hear you. Been there long?'

She shook her head and then cocked it. She nodded towards the sculpture.

‘Nice work,' she said in a non-committal voice and with an almost imperceptible jut of her breasts.

‘Coming along,' he responded, heaving himself upright while his knee joints cracked loudly in the process, ‘finally.'

‘Gus told me to cast a watchful eye over you,' said Chloë with a coy smile. ‘He's gone to Belfast. And taken Mary to Ballymena. All day.' She took her hands from her pockets and slung them loosely on her hips.

‘Yeah?' said Ronan, ruffling his hair and wiping his mouth.

‘Indeed,' assured Chloë, lowering eyes ever so slightly.

Who made the first move? It was difficult to ascertain. They seemed to lunge for each other and soon Chloë found herself pressed against the rock while Ronan pushed his weight against her and sucked at her mouth as if he were starved. Fleetingly, Chloë praised the fact that Ronan's artistic style was undulating and curvaceous; had it been otherwise, the sculpture might not have been nearly so hospitable to her body. Its serpentines provided easy support for her and she soon let go so she could grab at Ronan's boiler suit and shove him closer. His buttocks were clenched and he moved against her, his erection defiant beneath the coarse material of his clothing. He cupped her breasts, pressing and kneading them, scratching at her nipples. She sucked in her stomach and elongated her trunk to enable him to slip his hand into the waist of her shorts and rip her T-shirt upwards and away. The movement was fluid and fast and, along with the trickle of a breeze whispering over her bare breasts, turned her on greatly. She looked at Ronan. His eyes were shut and his breathing was rasping and urgent.

Chloë grabbed at his arms and pulled her fingers over his flesh; the surface damp, slightly grimy, and she would not have had it any other way. He smelled strong but she filled her nostrils with it. They kissed and chewed at each other's mouths, chucking their tongues about until their faces were quite wet and Chloë's stung slightly from the abrasion of Ronan's bristles. Still his eyes were closed but Chloë did not mind, it meant she could ogle greedily, unchecked. As he sucked her neck hard and thrust his hand between her legs, she wondered why on earth she had chosen shorts over a skirt. He rubbed at her and she moved against him, the tufted fabric at the base of her zip catching fantastically on her clitoris now and then. He wrestled with her belt and fumbled with the button before snagging and tugging at the zip. She wriggled as he pulled but the zip had not finished its course and her shorts clamped themselves to the tops of her thighs. They pulled their mouths apart and Ronan took a step backwards. With a noise midway between grunt and growl he tore her shorts down with one violent swoop. The fabric burned at Chloë's skin but it felt only pleasurable. Ronan grunted again and smacked his hand up against the gusset of Chloë's knickers, pressing hard against the mound of her pubis while pinching the flats of his fingers against the soft flesh in between.

Don't let me come, don't let me come
, willed Chloë, thinking of her own needs for perhaps the first time ever, while Ronan's fingers busied themselves with the elastic and then burrowed under it, directly into the folds of her sex. And all with his eyes closed.

I want to build my appetite. Savour. Like with Carl. Saviour. Like never with Brett.

Keen to enjoy an orgasm of penetrative making, Chloë wriggled away from Ronan's fingers and spun behind him so that he faced his sculpture alone and she pressed herself against his back, wrapping her arms around his stomach. She let her hands drop to the easy knot slung from the arms of his boiler suit. A far sight easier than a zip. The loose trousers fell about his ankles leaving him in his now sodden T-shirt and a pair of Y-fronts that Chloë instantly disliked but refused to dwell upon. She eased his T-shirt up as far as she could reach and he then crossed his arms and tore it over his head, affording Chloë a wonderful feast of his back muscles mixed with the heady scent of male sweat. She crouched and licked from the small of his back to between his shoulder-blades before resting her face against him and encircling his torso with her arms. Her hands made a lingering journey over his pectorals, his abdomen and down to his groin. She too had her eyes shut, for it enabled her to see him through the very feel of him. Particles of limestone dust clung to his body. Her face was pressed sideways against his back. Her mouth was open and a viscous drool of saliva crept its way out and down his back. She reached her hands lower while grazing his skin with her teeth. Lower. Lower. There. Y-fronts. Isn't there an opening somewhere?

Yes. Here it is. And here it is – heavens!

You haven't said a word but your gasps and groans say it all. Is it me, Ronan? Am I your muse?

Ronan grabbed her wrist and they rubbed him jointly for a few moments. Then he pulled her hand away from his cock and yanked hard at her arm so that she was hauled from behind him and they faced each other again. His eyes were open and locked on to her breasts. He dropped to one knee and pushed his tongue into her navel before travelling it upwards and over to each breast in turn. Chloë looked down on the top of his head, his shoulders, and tried to stop herself wondering if his prick had a dusting of limestone particles too. She couldn't quite see. Ronan was breathing heavily through his nose. As he sucked at each nipple, he closed his eyes and steadied himself with a hand on each of Chloë's buttocks. She bucked her groin forward and kept it pressed against his stomach. She could feel a pulse but was unsure whose it was. He gripped the tops of her arms tightly and pulled himself upright. Chloë removed her knickers from one leg and let them fall around the boot on the other.

Ronan put his hand to her throat and pushed, gently but insistently, until she yielded; letting her body tip back until it rested against the sculpture. He eased her legs apart and then, with his hands either side of her waist, lifted her slightly so that she was spread-eagled and supported by the sculpture. She stared at him, his gaze travelled between his cock and her sex. Chloë was holding on to a mound in the limestone with her right hand and grabbing at a deep dent in it with her left. Ronan loomed over her and, with his arms taut either side of her face, his hands catching sharply on her hair, pushed his cock deep and fast within her.

She came immediately and was sorely disappointed. He came soon after with a long and curiously high moan. It was the first true sound she had heard from him. His eyes, however, remained closed.

‘D
ead or aloyve, aloyve-ho?'

Chloë flung her eyes wide open and blinked hard against the glare of the sun, wondering momentarily where she was. Ah! The Causeway. She could make out a silhouette but it acted as an eclipse and caused her to blink more to restore focus and vision.

‘Pardon?' she said, still unsure to whom she said it.

‘Aloyve,' said the voice, ‘aloyve-ho!'

Chloë dropped her head a little and her gaze came to rest upon a pair of glinting eyes. They were very green and set deep into a ruddy face with ball-like cheeks and fizzy fair whiskers. Blush-red lips furled away from a haphazard set of large teeth; a tongue, unseen, clicked away behind them. A final blink from Chloë set the picture in focus and she saw that the features made up the face of a very small man who peered at her with his hands on his knees and a grin that was at once both lascivious and harmless.

‘Hullo?' responded Chloë at last.

‘B'jayz!' he responded. ‘So ya'ar aloyve!'

‘Indeed,' she assured, taking stock of his vehemently checked suit.

‘Had my een on ya! Still as a doll, were ye!'

Chloë noticed that his tiny feet were laced to perfection in a pair of highly polished brogues.

‘I'm fine,' Chloë declared with an embarrassed smile and fixed her eyes on the glinting shamrock on the man's tie-pin. The tie itself was green, woollen, and didn't surprise her.

‘I was just miles away,' she explained, ‘having a think.' She nodded at the man, and then out to sea, and then to herself.

‘Down in the nyrps or up on the pig's back?' It seemed he could not speak without inflecting it as a song.

‘The where on the what?' laughed Chloë who felt utterly at ease with him.

‘The nyrps,' he moaned in a low, sad voice pulling an appropriate face of gloom, ‘or the pig's back!' he cried, smiling inanely while flinging his arms about his head and skipping from foot to foot.

Chloë said ‘Ah-ha' silently.

‘Well,' she started, ‘I came here because I had indeed a bad dose of your so-called nyrps but,' she stopped momentarily to solicit her senses with the sights and scents around her, ‘but I suppose this place puts you firmly on the pig's back.'

The man stopped his gambolling and regarded her quizzically.

‘And what'll I call ya?'

‘I'm Chloë,' she said with an easy smile, ‘Cadwallader.'

‘Well, Cadwallydy, I'm Finn. McCool. But call me Finn if you please!'

Finn entranced Chloë with tales of the land. He pointed with conviction across the water to where the Scottish island of Staffa lay beyond the horizon, and spoke of the legend of the giant who built his causeway to reach his love living on Staffa.

‘Of course!' said Chloë, playing Mendelssohn's
Hebrides Overture
in her mind whilst remembering more from her geography lesson about basalt columns at Staffa. ‘What was the giant's name?' she asked Finn. He cocked his head this way and that, ruffled his whiskers and rubbed his eyes.

‘Bugger me if I cannot recall!' he said exasperated.

‘And was the lady at Staffa a giant too?' asked Chloë.

Finn snorted and sighed, wiped his brow and whistled, long and low.

‘B'jayz,' he whispered, shaking his head incredulously, ‘if she wasn't
huge!
'

They heard the impending visitors long before they saw them anting their way down the path. Finn hastily bade her farewell and scurried away, blending with the stacks and then the scraggy cliff. Chloë left the Wishing Chair to make room for the squeals of children and the chiding of parents, and to make some space for herself.

Off she goes. She takes the path past the Causeway which leads her to a cliff spliced in two with great basalt columns at either side like curtains to usher her through to the quiet bay beyond. When she turns, she half expects them to have draped closed behind her but of course they have not. The bay is a perfect horseshoe shape and as the waves saunter in, they seem to join hands in a perfect semicircle of spume. Chloë veers from the path to the water's edge and lays her hand gently on the surface of the foam. It fizzes against her skin and feels lovely. She takes her fingers to her mouth and tastes them. Salty. So salty that it surprises her though it really should not.

The sun is that of early summer, it catches her eyes without stinging them and sends a glow throughout her body. She turns back for the path and heads for the distant cliff. There she can see a patch of land peeled back to reveal an infrastructure of more basalt columns. It is the Organ. It is famous. She will have it all to herself. Close to, the columns soar upwards and again Mendelssohn booms out. Chloë knows she ought to reserve him until Scotland but as she does not know where she will be, she lets him ring out here. Just in case.

Unlike the stacks of the Causeway proper, these great towers are slightly segmented, mossed and lichened; they seem older, sad somehow. Chloë starts to feel contemplative. Ahead of her, the cliff head blooms rock of rose and terracotta. The gentle breeze fans the longer grass on the downy tussocks up and over like quiffs. She walks on. Planks of wood bar further entry with warnings of crumbling rocks.
Danger!
But Chloë can see a small, natural seat in the side of the cliff just a few yards on and feels strongly that she must reach it. She picks her way carefully under the barrier and treads cautiously onwards. She takes her time and makes it there on a lot of adrenalin. She concentrates on calming her breathing. When she has done so there is little else she can do with her mind than to cast it back again, into the heavy shadow of the consuming and depleting two weeks.

She watches the gannets hurtle and plunge into the sea. To the side of her, yellow birdsfoot trefoil smiles bravely from the tufted grass and herb Robert clambers out from behind a rock.

Sex with Ronan, she considers, was perhaps the most exciting she has ever had. And yet something so fundamental was lacking that, even if it hadn't later manifested itself in the ugly way it had, she doubts whether they would have had sex together again. From her experiences with Brett, she discovered that sex without love was possible though not pleasurable. It was all she had known. Until Carl. Only by having sex with Ronan has she realized that, in retrospect, the messy, noisy, laughter-strewn session in the insalubrious surroundings of the combie-van with Carl was lovemaking. Unequivocally.

‘I think I did love Carl,' she says, under her breath to whoever will listen out on the cliffs, ‘in a way.'

That silent, violent, self-absorbed morning she spent in the workshed with Ronan two weeks ago had been, initially, supremely erotic. But the lack of any reciprocal emotion to accompany it soon stripped any sensuality from the memory. They had fed themselves with no thought for the other's taste, or diet. Both had been starving. They had their fill and dissipated their hunger but they would not be going to that restaurant again. The menu was bland. Rather like
nouvelle cuisine
– the thought of it was exciting, it looked appetizing but was over quickly and forgotten even more so. And the price of it.

And yet she does not regret it. She thinks perhaps it is sometimes quite good to crush the mystique of something essentially inflated, overrated. Afterwards, Ronan and she managed fairly easily to restore their previous formal interaction. But she had rarely visited the workshop over the past fortnight. And Ronan had taken to working through the night. Or behind closed doors. Anyway, sculptures had been arriving daily and Chloë immersed herself in their siting. Abstract constructions in reclaimed timber and humorous pieces created from
objets trouvés
, shared the Ballygorm estate with more classical pieces and wholly figurative compositions. A giant snail carved from Purbeck marble nestled in the long grass while a totem pole stood proud in the woods. A small herd of red deer knitted and knotted out of wire, made their way into and out of the pond; their backs to the aluminium pyramid and sphere which lay enigmatically on the lawn. The five urns by the Cornish potter stood in a warm crowd of burnished hues, humming to themselves, while the sound of wind chimes trickled out from their camouflage in the horse chestnut trees. Chloë was busy, flat out, had too much to do to warrant lengthy periods in Ronan's workshop. And if she wasn't so busy, she soon found tasks to preoccupy her. Mary always welcomed assistance in the vegetable garden and Gus did not object to her reorganizing his library thematically and then alphabetically.