The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (15 page)

Mandy was busy with a customer. Holly could hear her voice, muffled by all the shelves,
insulated by decades of ideas. She was recommending a book. Holly listened carefully.
Orwell;
1984
. This is what you need
. She wondered why Mandy had never recommended
that book to her. Someone else on a different journey, some other reality operating
side by side with her own. This was the lesson that Angela Carter had taught her.
There are worlds within worlds and it is impossible to know what is the truth and
what is only a glint of our own desire sparkling like fool's gold in a lump of granite.

When Mandy rounded the corner of a bookshelf and saw Holly there she smiled, and
this at least was something real. A proud smile, the beam a mother would give her
child on her day of graduation. The louche grin of a lover who can make their loved
one come like a horse.

‘Good,' said Mandy. ‘I have your reading list ready.'

‘I'm scared,' Holly had to admit.

‘Not to worry. When you begin a quest you are bound to start out being nervous.'

Mandy took her by the hand and led her behind the counter. The door there opened
to the back room which—Holly felt herself blush as she entered—smelled like sex.
Her sex. The room held a memory and she inhaled it in a rush of musty air.

Mandy led her to the couch (their couch) and pushed the papers off onto the floor,
clearing a space for her to sit. She reached into one of the boxes and pulled out
a bottle of scotch and two glasses. Blew dust out of the tumblers and poured.

‘To your voyage,' Mandy said, clicking her glass against Holly's and downing the
amber liquid in one quick motion.

Holly sipped, shuddered. The alcohol burned all the way to her stomach.

Mandy rummaged among the clutter behind the couch and hauled up a bag. She rested
it in Holly's lap. ‘The consolations of literature.'

Holly opened the mouth of the bag. It was heavy, all knees and elbows, a sack of
miniature corpses. Holly peered inside. The fluorescent light gleamed off the lolly-coloured
covers of the books inside: emerald green, peacock blue, sari pink, a luscious cornucopia.
She saw names. Simone de Beauvoir, Miller, Nin, Apollinaire, de Sade.

‘When you discover your power you must bring it back to us.'

‘Oh god! Uni. I forgot to tell the university. What about my studies?'

‘Studies?' Mandy grinned, her eyes bright, as if it was her and not Holly who would
be stepping on a plane to adventure. ‘Here is the secret of the universe,' Mandy
told her, ‘the answer to questions you had never thought to ask.'

‘I can't take these books, so many, they must be worth a fortune.'

‘Ah,' said Mandy, ‘they are worth more than a fortune. You think you are holding
a bag full of naughty fun? Look again. Pornographic literature is multidimensional.
Really good erotic
writing uses sex to destabilise notions of how society works—on
many different fronts, the political, philosophical, psychological. There,' she winked
to undercut her own rhetoric, ‘you have the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Now, as Angela Carter would tell you, all you have to do is take it all apart and
rebuild from scratch. A quest. And when you have read enough, seen enough, interpreted
it through your body, then you will have your chalice, your magic sword, your rescued
princess, the treasure you have been questing for.'

Mandy pressed the bag of books with the palm of her hand as if touching the belly
of a pregnant woman, waiting for the foetus inside to kick. The books really did
move and shift. Holly could feel them settling. She cradled the weight against her
chest.

‘Take them,' Mandy told her. ‘Read them. Go where they take you. Stretch out into
the world. And if they're of some help, pass them on to someone in need. Leave them
in bus shelters. Scatter them around the streets. Abandon them in exotic locations.
Let them lead you away from what you have been told is true. Let them set the next
stage of your adventure for you.' She took Holly's hands in hers. ‘Go where they
lead you.' She leaned closer. Holly felt her heart quicken. She opened her mouth
and there were Mandy's lips, parting slightly, the soft wet slip of a tongue. Holly
gulped at the dampness of Mandy's mouth. She was trembling. She felt a swelling at
her crotch, the blood racing to the seat of her sex.

‘I don't think I want to leave you. I think I might be falling in love with you.'

‘Good.' Mandy nodded. ‘Go to Paris now. Collect more love. It isn't a finite resource.
You have mine, now go and get some more.'

She touched Holly's chin, stroked the line of her jaw. ‘You are special, Holly. You
don't even know how special you are. But we do. Come back to us when you know.'

And then she stopped speaking with her mouth and used it instead to communicate her
love more fervently.

PART 2

The sexual angels! They are wonderful because it is such a surprise, such a change.
You, for instance, with your appearance of never having been touched, I can see you
biting and scratching…I am sure your very voice changes—I have seen such changes. There are women's voices that sound like poetic, unearthly echoes. Then they change.
The eyes change. I believe that all these legends of people changing into animals
at night—like the stories of the were-wolf, for instance—were invented by men who
saw women transform at night from idealised, worshipful creatures into animals and
thought that they were possessed.

ANAÏS NIN

Little Birds

Little Birds

by
ANAÏS NIN

Holly could feel her hymen. She supposed it was just jetlag, but when she lay on
the tiny hotel bed and stretched out her legs she felt it humming. Vibrating like
a gumleaf when you hold it up to your lips and whistle through it. She tried to sleep;
the weariness of the flight was heavy in her bones, but every time she slipped into
a dream the sound of her hymen woke her. She had lost her virginity. She had had
sex. Her body felt snapped open, lewd, woken by the tongue and the fingers of an
expert lover, and yet here was this tiny piece of skin, intact like the wrapping
on a gift she had yet to open. If only Mandy had pushed her fingers inside her just
a little bit further, a little harder, surely it would have silenced this distracting
thrum. She sat up, harried, exhausted. Reached into her suitcase and pulled out a
book at random.
Little Birds
, Anaïs Nin. A naked young woman, shy on the cover, peering
cautiously over her shoulder. It was Holly herself, sitting there so full of trepidation,
staring
back at her. Coyness hiding the bold text within.

Holly divided her first day between reading and dreaming and didn't even venture
out for a meal. Her dinner was breakfast and she ordered expensive champagne to
go with it. She shrugged a small stab of guilt as she handed over the credit card
that was linked to her parents' account. They had plenty of money. They were always
offering her money and before this she had always refused to take it.

Well. But it was one thing to decide to fly to Paris and quite another to actually
find yourself here, a stranger in a strange city, exiled by language, with only one
goal, to learn about love. Holly glanced out of her window, and over a patchwork
of roofs and balconies and buildings she could just glimpse a small section of the
street below. It was morning and all the other Parisians were rugged up in their
thick winter coats, milling in the cobbled streets. Women strolled, men ambled, once
a small child in a blue coat stopped in her line of vision and picked an invisible
flower from between two cobblestones.

Holly could have marched out into the street too. Instead she retreated from the
view, threw herself onto the bed and curled herself around the slim paperback. The
pages were cheap and yellowed. Holly was surprised by the tiny scribbled writing
in the margins. Had Mandy annotated the text? Perhaps this was Mandy's personal copy
of the book. She remembered a kiss, a tongue, the heavy swell of a breast, the sweet
wet warmth of the woman's sex.

As Holly smoothed back the cover and began to read, she felt herself begin to glow.
Four little girls enjoying an array of exotic caged birds and a grown man in a state
of excitement watching their innocent play with a less than innocent desire to
expose
himself to them in the glory of his huge and growing arousal. In the margins Mandy
had written a few sentences as if she guessed what Holly would be thinking and wanted
to comfort her, urge her not to fly away from this lesson in subversive sensuality
as the little girls had flown away, skittish exotic little birds spooked by the sight
of an erect penis.

Remember the lessons of Angela Carter,
wrote Mandy.

So many ways of seeing the world. He sees sex, they see games, you see Paris. Look
out at the street. Look at the people there. The women are all dripping with sex,
the men are all in a state of arousal. They are waiting for you to take them. Take
them, Holly, take them all.

Holly stood. Restless. She looked out of the tiny window and glimpsed the street.
A woman stopped, shook her lighter, failing to light a cigarette. A man stopped to
help her, a stranger. He lit a match for her; she touched his arm. They walked on
together, talking, laughing. Out of the frame of Holly's vision.

Holly returned to her bed and her book. Her thighs were slippery. Her cunt, pulsing
gently under her thin skirt, emitted a subtle light. She had the heating turned up
and she began to sweat. She would go out. She would walk boldly out into the streets
to join in. She was in Paris. City of sex. At each chapter break, further aroused
by the stories, she moved towards the door; once she even gripped the handle in her
trembling, sweating hand. Each time she fell back, overwhelmed by fear of the unknown.

What if sex with a man was a disappointment? Surely no man could be as skilled with
his tongue as Mandy had been. No man would be able to coax the same animal noises
from her throat. No man would smell like a briny feast of oysters
and mussels. Holly's
mouth watered at the thought of those delicate folds, the slip of thick juices, so
sharp and sweet at the back of her palate.

Would she be able to bear the pain of her tearing flesh? Would she fall pregnant
despite the little pills she had begun to swallow daily and the rubbers coiled in
their plastic wrappers? Would sex with a man fulfil the warnings that women are tortured
with? Unrequited love? Rejection? Rough, abusive treatment; rape, murder? Was it
worth the risk?

She shuddered and lay back in the bed to continue with Anaïs Nin's adventures, rather
than her own.

When she woke it was dark. She did not feel at all rested. She rolled over, picked
up the book again and read:

I don't know what there is about Paris but there is a sensuality in the air there.
It is contagious. It is such a human city. I don't know whether it is because couples
are always kissing in the streets, at tables in the cafés, in the movies, in the
parks. They embrace each other so freely. They stop for long, complete kisses in
the middle of the sidewalk, at the subway entrances. Perhaps it is that, or the softness
in the air. I don't know. In the dark, in the doorway each night there is a man and
a woman almost melted into each other. The whores watch for you every moment, they
touch you…

Go!
shouted Mandy in the margin of her page.
What are you waiting for? Go suck the
sex out of Paris. Go! Now!

And so, fluttering from the room like a little bird escaping her cage, she went.

The Lover

by
MARGUERITE DURAS

Holly's shoes were too light for the weather. They were gold sandals, a mesh of lamé
glittering from her perfectly manicured toes to her delicate ankles: shoes crafted
for seduction. They complemented the gold shift that she wore under her long tailored
coat. She could feel the uneven crackle of the cobbles under her thin soles, a deep
throb of cold climbing up from the ground, turning her bones brittle. She would need
a hat. Her hair lifted in the chill breeze, and shivered onto her shoulders. It was
only autumn but she was dressed for the tropics, for a warmer season. She felt her
nipples clenching under the thick drape of her coat, but of course no one would notice.
Her thin gold dress was completely hidden by a smother of wool.

It was too cold for love. Perhaps she could run back to her snug room and abandon
the hunt for sex before it had truly begun. She was frightened, she thought. It was
different with
Mandy. Mandy was a solid rock of a woman, a cliff to cling to. This
hunting for strangers in a strange land made her shiver.

It was just the cold, of course. Holly could hide her fear under the weather. She
thrust her hands into the great woollen pockets. She picked out each step carefully.
Walking on cobblestones felt precarious, like negotiating the deck of a ship, the
ground twisting and turning beneath her as she stumbled blindly down a spiral of
tiny alleys. She lost track of direction. Holly wished she had brought a map but
she had left with only her copy of
Little Birds
and her credit card. Beneath her
dress she was naked.

A man walked towards her, his hat pulled low over his face, his waisted overcoat
making him womanly. He walked with a slight lilt, like a catwalk model, and stared
at her as he passed. She turned to watch him watching her. She could open her coat
to him. She could lift up the flimsy golden silk of her skirt. She could be done
with her hymen right here in a nameless Parisian alley.

He stopped. He stared, unblinking, and Holly turned and fled. She tripped on a loose
cobble, righted herself, and hurried on around a corner into an alley lined with
little shops. Her heart was racing, urging her on, and yet she forced herself to
stop. She turned and searched for the man, panting, certain that he would be chasing
after her.