Quiver (5 page)

“Those too.”

“No!”

A cool hand curls around my waist. “Do it.”

Slowly I unhook my bra. As I turn I can see Humphrey sitting on a stool beside his easel. He stares at my body as if he has never seen it before. Elsa stands behind me, turning my body toward him for display. She touches the tips of my breasts until they become erect. I can hear Humphrey’s breathing become heavier. I shut my eyes. I feel Elsa’s hands as they slip down the contours of my body toward my underpants.

“Open your legs.” Like a sleepwalker I obey her. Parting my legs slightly, she pushes her arm roughly between my thighs and pulls the underpants down. I am damp. Humphrey lurches forward out of the circle, but Elsa swings around violently, yelling, “Move—and it’s over!”

She stands between me and the white chalk circle, teasing, knowing the full control she has over her spectators. She begins to peel off her clothes very, very slowly. I watch Humphrey’s face, pale and trembling, his mouth twitching slightly as behind me I hear the thud of her jeans as they hit the floor, her T-shirt thrown down carelessly, her white lace bra flung over the bed and finally her underpants, which she takes off and places so very daintily at the edge of the chalk circle. She stands for a moment in her nakedness, lifting her arms above her head and pivoting in the parody of a ballerina. Her long, firm legs lead up to two ripe cheeks. Her ass is small but firm, her waist tiny, her ribs ripples of light. The most
feminine thing about her are those full mother’s breasts, no hint of any sexual ambiguity there.

Humphrey looks as if he is about to spring but he remains within the chalk circle. Elsa sticks her tongue out at him, bending it back provocatively. He moves to the edge of the circle, his whole body stretching forward in an attempt to meet hers.

“One more step and you’re a dead man!” Elsa screams at him. He stops, his erection visible in his baggy trousers. “Want me? Smell me? Want both of us? Suffer, boy…”

Humphrey reaches over and dips his brush into a pigment. Lifting it out of the paint, it drips scarlet. He stands in front of the easel poised, ready for the first mark to be scrawled across the virgin canvas. Elsa moves across the polished wooden floor, her feet making soft thuds as she runs toward me. She lifts me up in her arms in one effortless movement. As she cradles me I can see the muscles strain in her upper arm. She carries me over to the bed and places me on it. I lie on my side, waiting, impassive under her fingers.

“Pose number one.” She gets up on the bed. Kneeling behind me, she pulls me up so that I face Humphrey. She wraps her legs around my waist. I can feel the fur of her sex against the small of my back, the tip of her clitoris a fleshy spot that sticks to my skin. She parts me with her feet. Wide. So wide I am forced to lie back onto her with my head resting between her breasts. She runs her hands around my back and under my breasts, cupping them between her thumb and forefinger. The pose I recognize from the Chinese etchings, pose number one. Elsa is enacting her favorite image. We sit like that for five minutes. An eternity lapses and I find myself wanting to be taken by both of them.

Humphrey sweeps in bold red arcs across the canvas; the
curve of the two backs arch over each other, the slash of my cunt between Elsa’s two feet. By pulling her feet farther apart, she pulls my lips back. I can feel my clit swell and lift, wanting to be touched. Tempting Humphrey. He crouches over, pathetic, holding himself, his wide-open eyes eating everything up.

Delicately, she begins to touch me with her toes, pulling gently at me as I become wet between her feet. She has me pinned. I don’t want Humphrey to see that I am close to coming, so I roll my head back, taking one of Elsa’s nipples into my mouth, tasting salt and feeling her grow erect as I tease with my teeth.

Humphrey bends over the easel, maniacally splashing paint in great sprays. He eases his cock out of his fly; it stands erect, absurd against the cotton of his trousers. He holds it in his left hand, running his fingers along the whole shaft, pulling down over the tip. The paint brush in his right hand pushes huge globules of paint over the surface in rhythm with his left.

Elsa lifts her legs away from me and kneels on the floor. I move forward so that I am curled over her body. She turns me around so that my pudendum is facing Humphrey.

“Pose number two.” She places me in the position of the young Chinese girl in the second picture; there is a precision to her actions as she orchestrates the making of the image. Her hands slide around the orbs of my ass. She pries me open, turning my secret parts into a visual feast. I sit over her face and can feel her breath on my thighs. One finger slides into my ass while two others enter my cunt, and she pulls me down to her mouth. Her tongue touches the tip of my clit, teasing, flicking. Humphrey groans, almost weeping with frustration. I can see his hands trembling, the sweat beading on his face.

Elsa lies spread below me. Tentatively I run my hands along her legs. Silk. Such young skin. Her jet-black pubic hair lies in wisps, almost Asian in its sparseness. I can see her lips through the hair. Gently, I pull back her outer lips and feel her moisten, her clit a cherry.

The room fills with our groaning. From between Elsa’s legs I can see Humphrey kneeling at the edge of the chalk circle, his back arched, his trousers down to his knees, his cock hard and shiny rising up through his fist. He leans forward, getting as close as he can to our bodies without crossing the chalk boundary. I can feel his breath on my back. Elsa shoves two more fingers into my ass, taking my whole cunt into her mouth. She licks my lips then pulls back, sucking my clit.

Slowly I lower my face into her sex, tasting her clit with my tongue. Salty. Clean. I want to give her pleasure. I take her whole clit and play it across my tongue. I can feel her stiffen. More. I dig my nails into the cheeks of her ass and start sucking vigorously.

Humphrey is close to coming, his cock enormous. A huge red pole rolling between his hands. Kneeling at the edge of the circle, he suddenly lashes his paint brush through the air. The yellow paint splashes up between our bodies. Elsa smears the paint across my breasts, drawing her own breasts across my belly. The paint feels wet and sticky.

Humphrey watches in anger. Impotent, he flings another dash of paint across my back. Blue drips down between my buttocks and onto Elsa’s forehead. She smears it down over my ass and down the outside of my thighs. The streak of blue across her forehead has transformed her into a frenzied warrior queen.

She massages the blue into the yellow, masking me. I can feel the paint solidify as it dries slowly, pulling back my skin. She has given me a mask. She has given me a license to be different.

We roll over and over, landing in a pool of green paint. She’s on top now, her cunt spread above me. She manipulates me so that I slip up and down in the pool of paint as she pulls at my cunt with her mouth. The paint oozes between everything, between my fingers, between my toes, between my legs.

Humphrey, now also naked and splattered with color, pulls at himself furiously. He rolls back his head in the way I know so well, in the throes of Pan. But I don’t want him to come, I don’t want him to come with us.

I push my fingers into Elsa and take her clit between my teeth. We both start to come, and I am barely able to keep her in my mouth when Humphrey suddenly spurts a jet of sperm over the chalk border and across the room. It spills across my skin in a thin, hot stream.

In the silence afterward we all start to laugh. Revenge—I was always lousy at it.

T
wo men. One, large, on the brink of middle age, leans against an open window, smoking. Outside the afternoon traffic roars past, sending up clouds of dust into the sunlight that cuts into the dingy lounge room. He flicks ashes on the carpet.

The second man, thin, crouches by a record player, his long arms wrapped around his knees. He rocks himself backward and forward over the worn rug, trying to stop himself from crying.

The fat man leans across and squeezes the other’s skinny shoulder.

The man in black denim stands slowly, swaying on his feet.

Q
UIN

My name’s Quin, “the Wolf” to some. They call me that because of my hair. I haven’t brushed it in years. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t clean. It is. I like to keep it clean for the ladies. They like to weave their fingers through it and pull hard, especially when they’re coming. I keep it matted, like an animal’s. A wild, untamed animal. That’s why they call me the Wolf.

I don’t say much. I don’t need to. When I’m standing at the
back of some gig in the dark with the music washing over me I’m in paradise. And the women sense it, they come to me without me even having to move a muscle. Instinct, that’s what they love, a man who knows his own pleasure.

M
ACK

I first saw Quin at a recording session. It was in the late seventies and I was twenty-six, young enough to still get excited when I heard those guitar riffs pounding at the studio window. I can’t remember the band now, but I remember Quin. He was curled up on the floor, crouching against the wall. His eyes were closed and that demented hair was snaking all over the large nose, the oily skin, the bat ears. Jerking rhythmically to the music, he looked like a gypsy violinist in a wedding somewhere in Prussia last century. I remember leaning across and shouting in the singer’s ear; “Get the fucking junkie out!” All the singer did was smile.

“Quin, what were the last four bass chords?”

Quin didn’t even bother to open his eyes. “A, E, B and F sharp.”

That’s my man, best ears in the industry grafted onto the body of a spider.

Q
UIN

I don’t like to say much in case I miss something. I like listening—to every nuance, every tonal gradation. I live through my ears. The first thing I can remember is the sound of a beer can being ripped open, my Irish father celebrating my birth with a toast. In the background I could detect the rat-tat-tat of Yiddish
as my mother, Esther, organized my circumcision with my grandfather. Some people have really sharp eyesight, others can feel emotions with their fingers. Me, I hear everything. Sometimes I think I can hear the ants in the soil. Mack thinks it’s a gift. I think it’s a handicap: I hear too much.

Music is different: It’s color. It’s blue laced with silver. It’s lightning in a storm. It’s an orgasm through the veins. When I’m listening to music, I shut my eyes and pretend that my body is cat-gut stretched over a drum. In moments like this I am nothing but pure vibration. In moments like this I forget thought.

That’s why I’ve dedicated my life to music, to the recording and preservation of acoustic beauty. I put that in my résumé when I applied for the job at Mack’s studio. That’s why he employed me, so he can point me out to visiting artists and say, “That’s Quin. Mention digital audio technology around him and he’ll cut your balls off, but if you’re into acoustics he’s the best in Australia.”

Mack’s a victim of history. He solidified years ago, but he respects me. I like that. It gives me somewhere to touch down.

M
ACK

Digital audio technology. Yeah, been around for a while and it ain’t going away. Quin loathed it with a vengeance. He said it minimized sound, flattened it and spat it out onto a disk at the other end. He blamed the media giants and fabricated his own conspiracy theory. But what could I do? I’m a businessman. I had business to do and the clients wanted the latest. So I converted all the studios to DAT—all except Quin’s. Maybe I have a soft spot for the past. Superstition has always been my
weakness; my old dad used to say, a little bit of the past will help with the future. Dad used to sell clothes wringers under Central Station. Then they introduced washing machines and he went bankrupt. Anyway, Quin had become a mascot for the studio, and mascots have their uses.

Q
UIN

My homemade record player has twelve valves that all glow in the dark. Little red throbbing beacons. It takes half an hour to warm them up before I can put the needle down on the spinning black disc. I only listen to records. They really knew how to record bands then—now it’s all sound reproduced by computers, no soul, no space between the musicians.

Women? It’s simple: I’ve never had a problem.

Every encounter is sonorous. On the skin, on the lips, on the cock. Like sediment it builds up, and the women can smell it on you. Of course, working in the rock ‘n’ roll industry helps. Like, you’ve been in the studio with the band for a week running, day and night, and the girlfriends, well, they start to feel neglected. So I play this tune in my head: You-poor-little-furry-thing-you-need-some-loving-I’m-here-for-you-I’m-here-to-serve-every-part-of-your-delicious-body-yes-I-will.

Over and over; mantra-like. And the women, they start quivering. Their antennae spin frantically and bend in my direction. Before they know it they’re leaning toward the mixing desk, those low, silent frequencies converging, drawing them closer and closer. The boyfriend, the singer, disappears into the toilets to do a line of coke. I balance the descent as she slips me her telephone number written in lipstick on the back of a matchbox.

Later at my place, I lay her down between the speakers, undressing her on the lounge-room floor. It’s my ritual. There is a great symmetry in repetition. If I have any musical talent it is this, drawing out pleasure through the skin. A tattoo of rhythm. Of timbre.

After the crescendo, the woman lies like the hull of a ship, lit by the glowing valves of my record player. Buttocks pushing up octaves, nipples cutting through the descent. She is pinned by the music; her wings bash against the bass like a dying butterfly that has burst into color before its final fatal flight.

M
ACK

Quin had this thing about the female voice, the alto to be precise. Shirley Bassey, Nancy Wilson, Barbra Streisand—all were tonal pleasure for Quin. Just as some men are tit men, Quin was a voice man.