The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (18 page)

Holly settled back into her seat, a little rattled, and opened
The Eleven Thousand
Rods
.

Just like other Romanians, the handsome Prince Vibescu dreamed of Paris, City of
Light, where the women, all beautiful, are loose too. While he was still at college
in Bucharest, he needed only to think of a Parisian woman, about the Parisienne,
to get an erection and be obliged to
toss off slowly, beatifically. Later he had
shot his come into numerous cunts and bumholes of charming Romanian women. Yet he
felt a powerful urge to have a Parisienne.

She lost herself momentarily to spankings and bitings and scandals at once humorous
and shocking. When she looked up she had missed her stop.

Remembering 1956: Listen Little Man

This is my father's story but I will tell it to you. It is a story about smoke, not
just any smoke but the smoke that is made when we are touching the most powerful
substance in the universe. It is a smoke that smells acidic, like the smoke from
an electrical fire, and the fire itself is blue and bright as starlight. Not starlight
from a distance, but starlight seen close up, dangerous as a thousand suns if not
treated with caution. If I had been there instead of my father I would have gulped
the smoke down, hoping to ingest some of the knowledge that was going up in flames.

My father told me that the thick plume was angry and shaped like a tornado. It opened
up at the top into a storm cloud and when he squinted, my father could see a flash
of lightning deep in the heart of it.

There were so many books in the pyre. The notebook my father stole from Dr Reich
was just the tip of a mighty inflammatory mountain. He looked down from his perch
in the tree on the hill and there was the rest of it, a craggy continent of
books,
some of them carefully bound by a proper publisher, some of them hand-bound in leather
like the one my father stole, and ripe with the scribblings of the great scientist
himself.

Dr Wilhelm Reich stood proudly, flanked by men in heavy overcoats. His hair was as
wild as the smoke cloud, shooting out at all angles and catching the glow from the
fire so it looked like his own skull was the source of the orgone energy. He looked
in that moment like Orgone Man himself, a superhero of catastrophic proportions.
But Orgone Man, surely, would have taken three running steps and leaped up and away
from the government officials who had come to burn his books and his accumulators.
Orgone Man would have flown into the flames and plucked the hidden lightning right
out of the cloud of smoke and used it as an electric spear to kill the men from the
FDA.

My father breathed in another full lungful of smoke and tried to hold it in without
coughing, as if it were a rare drug. They were burning Dr Reich's books all around
the country. Warehouses full of them. There was a rising cloud of information, a
black fug of his ideas sitting in the stratosphere above America. His books were
blacklisted and if anyone else tried to read them, government spies would swoop in
and arrest them. My father was glad he had stolen that notebook. It would be the
last holy relic of Reich's work. He had hidden it inside his mattress and he would
guard it carefully till the day, on my thirteenth birthday, when he would pass it
on to me.

My father exhaled, spluttering a little, his lungs stung with the heat of the smoke.
The bonfire raged up, reaching for the darkening sky. Sparks flew. There was a sound
like thunder, distant but approaching steadily. It was terrible but it was also
awesome.
He stared, unblinking, till his eyes watered.

I am the keeper of the flame. I am the bearer of the last book of Reich. I will never
waver, never let the book fall into the hands of those who still wish to destroy
it. I am a vessel for truth. I am a disciple and I will keep that flame alive in
my heart forever.

And now here, a lifetime later, I have found this girl. The sight of her, the scent
of her, like an electrical fire smouldering, about to ignite. My instrument is tipped
over and off the scale. I feel my heart racing along with it, the steady beeping
increasing, my own heart bounding.

Even trapped here on this train while she is outside on the platform, even here I
can still smell her, like a cloud of orgone smoke, like the acid sting of the burning
books. I see her. I must talk to her. I must.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

by
PIERRE CHODERLOS DE LACLOS

My lover's an explorer, he's busy whiling away his time stringing beads with negresses
on the Ivory Coast. You can come to my place, 214, rue de Prony—Culculine d'Ancône.

The Eleven Thousand Rods,
Guillaume Apollinaire

In Paris, shops close for a long and languid lunch. In Brisbane people eat on the
run, at their desks, in the street, the faster the better. In Paris lunch breaks
are for afternoon siestas. Leisurely dining on the footpath with a glass of crisp
white wine. Or, as both Nin and Apollinaire propose, a quick dash to the house of
a lover, there to climb the narrow stairs and tangle with them on their marital bed.

214 rue de Prony is no longer a residence. It is a corner building in a charming
street, now converted into a shop. Holly looked around at the gorgeous parquetry.
This alone reminded her of the building's sordid past. Once it had been the site
for
cavorting. One randy gentleman and two willing female libertines lost in an
orgy of spanking and fucking, finding themselves lying spent on the floor in a mess
of shit and piss and come. She sniffed. Not even a whiff of past debaucheries.

The shop would be closing soon. It would be shut up for two hours, maybe three. Holly
took her time over the bone china. Little egg cups perched on a chicken's foot, tea
cups designed to be lifted by the curl of an iguana's tail. She liked the surreal
crockery on display. More than this, she liked the shop assistant, her hair pinned
severely up on her head in a tight bun, her glasses dark and heavy and serious, her
brows beneath them darker still and left to mark a single line that dipped in the
centre, nodding to the bridge of her strong hooked nose. When she was sitting behind
the counter on a stool, her legs crossed elegantly one over the other, Holly had
noticed the lace edge of her stockings and the snaps of her garter belt.

Holly lurked by the stuffed head of a giraffe mounted on a bed of moss. Her interest
had been piqued. She wanted to see if the woman was wearing anything else under the
short silk skirt, which seemed a little flimsy for the chilly weather outside.

‘Puis-je vous montrer quelque chose?'

‘Je suis désolée, je ne parle pas du tout français.' Holly knew that French was supposed
to be the language of seduction but in her mouth it seemed to be the language of
comic relief. The woman smiled but restrained herself from giggling at her terrible
pronunciation.

‘Can I let you to look at something?'

Holly looked at the woman's skirt, the black lace garter and stockings just a shadow
beneath the fabric. It was an involuntary action but it seemed to have the appropriate
effect on the
pretty stranger. She shifted her weight, sized Holly up, gauging her
proportions with her gaze. The woman picked up a stuffed chicken and held it between
them.

‘You are interested in something, yes? A coq perhaps?'

Holly shook her head brusquely. ‘Not today. No. But I am certain you could tempt
me with some of your finely crafted wares.'

‘Yes,' said the woman. ‘That is the certain. A cup for the egg perhaps? Or,' she
rested her hand lightly on a ceramic octopus, ‘the fish. The, how you say, mussels?
Oyster? You may crack the shell and find the inside jewels?'

‘I am very keen to find the inside jewels,' Holly said.

As if to test their shared understanding the woman reached out with one pointed finger.
Holly noticed that her nails were long and perfectly lacquered with a white crescent
at the tip of each one. She rested her finger on Holly's lips. Then when Holly continued
to meet her stare she slipped her finger between them as if to test her temperature.
Holly met her probing finger with a tongue and with this gesture an understanding
was reached.

‘I am Culculine.'

Holly's eyes widened. ‘Culculine? At this address?'

‘Oh. You have read
Les Onze Mille Verges
? I rented this exact address because of
my namesake, Culculine.'

Holly nodded approvingly.

Apollinaire's libertine sauntered over to the door and locked it. She turned the
sign over
.
She pulled a cord and the blinds covering the windows turned till the
room was thrown into darkness.

‘My husband will expect that I am home for his coq au vin in an half hour.'

Holly nodded. ‘I am sure we will be done by then.'

The woman stepped towards Holly, leaned closer, brushed Holly's lips with her own.
Holly felt her mouth softening, felt her knees become loose as she opened her teeth
to accept the gift of a stranger's tongue, laced with the delicate lilt of rosewater
and waxy sweet lipstick. She felt the woman reach around her to the zip of her heavy
woollen dress.

Holly broke the kiss to tut her displeasure.

‘Only one rule,' she said to Culculine. ‘You must not look at me. You must be blindfolded
the whole time.'

The woman's smile carried the hint of a pout. ‘Each has his own, how you say it,
kinked? The twist? But I would have enjoyed the looking.'

‘No looking. But I encourage you to touch.'

She unwrapped the scarf from her neck and looped it around the woman's face, tying
it in a firm knot beneath her tightly secured bun.

Then Holly took her hands and guided them back to the zip. She felt the delicious
lick of cold air travel down her spine and across her bottom as the zip was pulled
downward. She returned the favour by lifting the woman's thin skirt. Her black lace
knickers had been pulled up over the delicate garters and Holly wondered if this
woman was used to a quick tryst in the afternoon. She was certainly dressed for easy
access. Holly gazed at the neatly trimmed patch of pale brown hair spelling a V between
her thighs. Her own hair had grown out to a wild bush of curling tendrils. She let
the woman slip her dress off, down over her hips. She stepped out of this discarded
skin and stood in only her bra and stay-up stockings. She took a step closer to Culculine
and looked down at their twinned pubises,
the dark wild forest and the neatly clipped
lawn. She moved her hands up to the woman's shirt. The top buttons were already dealt
with and when she unclipped the four lower buttons she could push the fabric away
to reveal the sheer mesh of an expensive bra, the nipples within already tight. Holly
dipped her head and let her tongue explore. She executed three pointed laps around
the nipple before leaning in and opening her mouth to suck the tip of the breast
between her lips. She could feel the excitement of sucking. Her own breasts responded,
her nipples snapping tight. She remembered Mandy's full breasts, darker, softer,
all-consuming, and she found herself moaning. Holly was grateful when Culculine slid
her hands up the curve of her waist and cupped Holly's pendulous globes in the palms
of her hands, reaching her fingers up to pinch at the puckered flesh at the heart
of her desire.

This woman's breasts tasted of powder. Holly was reminded of a summer day, the sticky
sweetness of Turkish delight, that first bite and icing sugar drifting like snow
onto her cleavage. She wondered if Culculine's cunt would taste equally sweet. She
slid her hands down, lifting the skirt once more, dipping her finger into the pot
of honey, making little circles at the place where she herself would want a finger
and, edging the cup of the bra down under her full breasts, painted first one aureole
and then the other.

Holly pulled this sweet body closer to her, using the woman's buttocks for purchase.
She opened her mouth and let her tongue slide over the sticky wet tips, first one
then the other. Cinnamon, chocolate, cloves. She sucked one breast into her mouth
as far as she could take it. The hard point of the nipple rubbed against the top
of her palate. It was a rich, complex
flavour, but this little taste was less than
an entrée. She fell to her knees, wincing at the tenderness of the fresh cuts under
her stockings. She reached out with her tongue, stroked the fur of a fragrant animal,
tipped it up and around till she felt the edge of the slit, the little nub of a clitoris.
Pushing past it, further, where the flavour was strongest, the briny taste of oysters
indeed, the fluted edges of a mussel parting at her tongue's insistence. She sucked
at the sauce, covered her lips in the consommé. It took all her will not to bite
down on the fleshy parting of the woman's labia. Her teeth were tingling with excitement.
Culculine was making little snuffling noises.

Holly thought of Mandy. She remembered her two friends glimpsed through a window.
She knew now the extent of their pleasure. She understood the excitation of a pair
of cunt lips swollen beneath your probing tongue. She pressed her nose against Culculine's
clitoris, inhaling greedily, stimulating her with a little nod of her head. The woman's
knees buckled, she almost fell. Holly held her thighs up with her own hands as Culculine
bucked her hips down onto the point of her tongue. The cunt began to quiver. Holly
quickly thrust her tongue up into the slippery tunnel as far as she was able. The
lips began to palpate. They squeezed around her, strong hard contractions and the
sound from the woman's throat was a high strained note like a violin about to snap
a string. This was how Holly had sounded when Mandy first licked her to pleasure.
This was how she had shaken and trembled. Holly clung in place, letting the sudden
gushing juices fall into her open mouth, catching the last of the palpitations with
the sensitive probing of her tongue.