The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (17 page)

She timed her own hard thrusts to his. She plumped down onto the pounding of his
penis. She stretched her mouth wide, hoping that her cunt would widen in sympathy.
He fucked her hard and she heard the noise from her own throat as the tearing pain
of it hit her like a scythe. He was inside her. She reached down and felt the sticky
fluids of her cunt spilling out onto his
cotton-clad balls. She cupped them as they
began to pulse, as he began pumping his seed into her. They felt like jellyfish propelling
themselves through thick mud. She moved her fingers to her clitoris, a swollen slippery
thing. She slid her fingers around her own tiny shaft, pressed her thumb against
it, pinched it gently, pumped it like she had pumped his cock with her lips, like
he was pumping his come inside her. She felt his flesh pulsing in between the lips
of her cunt. His seed was shooting up into the condom.

Inside her.

A cock right up to the balls inside her. Her body began to twitch. She felt her swollen
clitoris twitch to its own frantic rhythm, her head snapped back, her mouth wide.
She felt as if all the air in the alley were being sucked into her. She was becoming
something other than flesh. She was a vortex, a universal conduit, the stars pumping
their uneven light into her mouth. Her body was swelling with starlight. Her cunt
ballooned, poised at maximum stretch, and then it burst. The sun and the stars and
the moon turned liquid inside her and burst out from the lips of her vulva, extinguishing
the heat of the man who was trembling beneath her. The contractions were so furious
that she was afraid she had damaged his cock. She fell back, exhausted from the release
of such great pressure. His penis slipped out of her with a disappointing sound,
the last little popper going off alone when the party is over.

She opened her eyes to see the glowing spoils of her orgasm glistening like liquid
diamonds on the floor of the phone booth. His lap was luminescent. His cock, now
completely wrung out, was a tiny curl of blue flame. There were swirls of dark blood
floating in the bright jelly of her spendings. His jeans would
have to be thrown
away, his underwear was nothing but a lurid bloody rag.

His eyes were too wide. His jaw was a hang of limp flesh. When she shifted to look
down at her vulva she saw the hymen, ripped with a lightning-bolt tear.

The man flinched as if Holly had suddenly been transformed from a lover into an assailant.
He scrambled away from her, cutting his hands on the broken glass. His blood mixed
with her blood as he bumped up to a squat, cowered in a corner. She was spread-legged,
her dress hitched up, her vulva gaping and burning, a bright blue O. The floor was
awash with the glittering galaxy of her spilled desire. The man leaped suddenly
over her legs and flung himself out onto the street. He looked back once and Holly
saw his fly still unzipped, his tiny flaccid penis bouncing inside the condom as
he ran, his wet footprints lighting the pavement, pointing out the direction of his
flight. The glow of his wet crotch was beginning to finally abate. But the naked
terror on his face was a small sad slap and she felt momentarily chastised.

Still, Holly pulled her labia aside and peered down into her unimpeded orifice. The
glow of her own desire was bright enough for her to see the sharp bloody edge of
the torn flesh. She slipped first one finger inside herself and then another. A little
tender, but the rubbing of her fingers made the glow brighten with an impressive
ferocity. She pressed three fingers in and out of her cunt and rubbed at her clitoris
with her thumb and a minute later she was shot through with a jolt of electric pleasure
that danced her body around the floor of the phone booth like a wind-up toy.

When this second orgasm finished she lay in the wet and
picked shards of glass from
her elbows. She would need to find a chemist and buy some Betadine. What was the
French word for Betadine? The glass and the dirt and the ruined dress were all worth
it.

She stood. She could feel the warm night air on her skin. Down the tiny alley there
was a main street, people walking, restaurants pumping out the smell of roasted meat
towards her on the breeze. She wanted a large glass of champagne. She wanted to celebrate,
but first she would need to change. Holly straightened the ruins of her dress and
strutted, strutted in the direction of her hotel.

The Eleven Thousand Rods

by
GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE

The weather turned suddenly, and now it really was cold. Last night Holly had skipped
down a balmy Parisian street, today she woke to the ache of frosty air in her lungs.
It was early, too early. The window was barely touched by sun. Winter had plummeted
to the ground like Icarus.

She stood in the tiny shower cubicle. The water was barely warm, no power behind
it. Everything was less modern and functional than at home, and yet it was wonderful
in its imperfection. She clothed herself in thermal underwear beneath a long woollen
dress. It would be even colder outside, the footpaths icy. She looped a scarf her
mother had knitted around her neck and pulled her new woollen hat down around her
ears. Gloves.

She felt like a snowman, plump and jolly. She slipped her wallet and book into her
bag, snugged her copy of
The Eleven Thousand Rods
by Guillaume Apollinaire in the
pocket of her overcoat. Standing at the top of the stairs she was a spy in the
house
of love. She was a character in a story, a femme fatale. Her black coat, her red
scarf. She grinned and began the descent down six flights of spiralling wooden stairs
so old that the grooves of other feet had left a permanent impression. She was standing
in the footprints of a long and varied history.

She felt worldly, no longer burdened by the straitjacket of her virginity. Under
her gloves she could still see the little indentation on her finger where she had
worn her abstinence ring for so many years. If any potential lover noticed it now
they would think she was getting over a brief traumatic marriage, finding her feet
in a new and wonderful world of sexual pleasure. Potential lovers both male and female.
Holly felt a little flutter of joy in her chest. She pushed out through the heavy
front door and into the world.

She had learnt to walk naturally on the cobbled streets, her ankles flexing with
each step. She moved seamlessly from a spill of light through a well of darkness.
Light like confetti.
The pages of the books she had already read pressed into the
patches of darkness. She entered a space between buildings, fountains wide-mouthed,
vomiting diamonds, or perhaps just a trickle of light, pooling in the cupped hands
of the friendly devils. Everything was more than you would expect; even the silence
was amplified. She was bludgeoned, suddenly, by the sound of a motor and held on
to her satchel tightly. A scooter roared by and turned up an alley. She was safely
alone with the sleeping dark.

She had flicked through a few of the novels that Mandy had given her. Each one was
tampered with, Mandy's spidery writing crammed into the margins. Little maps drawn
to indicate places where the action may have been set, or been written. One
famous
brothel after another immortalised in these classic books. Tricks turned, money exchanged.
A common economy, it seemed, at least for this quarter of the city. Holly, who had
only just discovered the pleasure of the heterosexual fuck, wondered how it must
be to lead a client up those winding stairs, knowing that the top of the climb would
lead to a climb of a different kind. The rooms listed in her books were all from
an older Paris. A debauched place where the streets would not be peopled at this
time in the morning. Holly slipped her hand into her right pocket, rested her frozen
fingers on the words of Apollinaire; slid the book out of her pocket. She ran her
finger over names, addresses, notated in the margins. Prince Vibescu: rue Duphot
with Culculine and Alexine.

There were places in these books that, like the Parisians, would not raise themselves
from sleep till mid-morning. Holly was intrigued by the mention of the Bibliothèque
Nationale and Mandy's scribbled references to Apollinaire's research in a section
called L'Enfer. Hell. A cabinet in the Bibliothèque Nationale where banned books
were stored.
Imagine
—Mandy had written beneath the address at rue Richelieu—
a cabinet
that is a larger version of your own suitcase
, and Holly smiled at this, suddenly
proud to be bearing such a cargo of inflammatory material.

The sky was beginning to fill with light. An early morning café welcomed her. Her
mouth chewed uselessly at some barely formed French words, enough to order coffee
and a sweet pastry she didn't really want. She would have preferred something savoury
but had no words to say so. She opened the book and smoothed the pages. She had just
finished reading
The Delta of Venus,
a welcome continuation from
Little Birds.
She
wished
the little pornographic stories had never ended. She missed their gentle flirtation
even now as she changed pace, astonished at the bawdiness, the sheer debauchery of
Apollinaire.

Rue Duphot. She looked up, trying to orient herself. Finished her breakfast and stood,
reaching into her left pocket, pulling out the copy of
Venus
she had just finished.
She opened the book. There was an address written on the last page, Anaïs Nin's house.
Mandy had given her clear directions. She really should visit before she moved on
to the lessons of
The Eleven Thousand Rods.
She slipped the book back into her coat
pocket and walked on, feeling the uneven weight of two books, one in each pocket,
thumping against her thighs as she walked.

Holly came to the end of the street, the soft light dripping onto the cobbled surface,
the spill of it down the stairs to the Métro station.
Take the Métro to Pont de Neuilly:
even the idea of the Métro, the Paris Métro, made her heart race.

She descended, stepping down beneath the art nouveau Métro sign into the fluoro-lit
tunnel below. She would travel to Anaïs Nin's house. She felt like a pilgrim, slowly,
reverently, finding her way.

At 5 rue du Général Henrion Bertier there was someone standing by the great iron
fence. Holly wrapped her scarf more tightly around her neck. The figure was clothed
in a heavy coat, a knitted cap pulled low over his ears. He was standing beside the
stone fence, peering in past the barbed wire and spike-topped metal of the gate.
He reached up to touch the plaque fixed to the stone. Could this be a fellow pilgrim?
He took something from his coat pocket, held it to the plaque, the gate, peered at
it as if it held the meaning of life—although it looked exactly like
an old-fashioned
Walkman—then slipped it back into his pocket.

Beyond the gate Holly could see the peaked roof of a great but crumbling house, everything
leaning towards entropy. Just a run-down house after all, but a place nonetheless
where great books had been created. She filed the image—unpainted walls, cracked
stone paths, weedy garden—in her mind. There was something overripe about the place,
like a prostitute past her prime, languishing on an unmade bed.

Holly watched as the man in the beanie turned away from the house. It seemed he was
disappointed. He was walking towards the street corner where she was standing, looking
slump-shouldered, morose. She looked again. What was it about him that unsettled
her? He was thin-faced with the wan good looks of a musician, hollow cheeks over
good bones, long, slender fingers. His skin was so pale it seemed possible that he
had never seen the sun. Hair just a little too long under the black woollen hat.

He was walking towards her and it was too late to cross the road or pretend she had
not noticed him. She stood her ground until it seemed that he wouldn't look up to
see her at all, but then she heard a sound. A ticking, growing louder, faster. The
man put his hand into his pocket and pulled out the odd little machine. He held it
up towards her, peering at a dial on the front, tapping it, his brow furrowed. When
he looked up at her his eyes were wide, the pupils so large that it seemed there
was no iris at all. He seemed startled. He sniffed at the air as if the place was
on fire and he had just got a whiff of the smoke.

‘You.' He held up the strange little machine, which had begun to beep like an alarm
in a building warning of some
imminent disaster. He frightened Holly—something about
the force of desperation in his face reminded her of the junkies she stepped politely
around in the Valley mall.

Her pilgrimage would have to wait. Holly turned and walked quickly back towards the
Métro. She heard the click of her shoes frantic on the concrete stairs. She glanced
behind and caught sight of him, his coat flapping, his little box beeping with a
frantic insistency. She fled through a crowd of commuters who had just stepped off
a train, and ducked out of sight, pressing herself against a wall, hoping that he
would somehow miss her in the gathering crowd.

The train began to pull out of the station and she saw him then, his hands pressed
against the window, one of them clutching a black leather-bound notebook, the other
holding the strange machine. He was staring straight at her, tapping the glass with
the edge of the book. She couldn't hear his words but his lips made clear sentences
as he mouthed the words:
I've found you.
Then as the train began to gain speed,
I
need to talk to you. I'll meet you at…
and then the word
Rosy? Rolsey? Roysey?
Holly
shook her head. She had no idea what he was saying. Too late now anyway because with
a great rush of chilled air the train was gone. She waited for the next train and
stepped aboard.