The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (28 page)

When the hostess made her way down the aisle, pushing each of the masks back up into
its compartment, Holly pressed her knees firmly together once more. Kasia pushed
her mask up, snapped the compartment closed, and looked down into Holly's lap. Her
eyes glazed over as she reached down. She smoothed Holly's skirt with trembling fingers.

‘You don't want to do that,' Holly told her. ‘I am dangerous. I am a bomb.'

‘Yes,' said the hostess. ‘You are the bomb.'

‘Get me a blanket, please.'

The hostess reluctantly let go of her knee and reached for
a blanket in the overhead
locker. She tore it open using her teeth and Holly glimpsed a flash of tongue. She
felt her resolve waning and turned her face upward; the hostess leaned towards her,
her lips parting.

Nick. She thought of Nick. Poor Nick. Holly was the cause. She was the reason he
had been taken. And the dead man in the alley—she was dangerous. She needed to be
shut up tight, locked away somewhere where she couldn't cause any more damage. She
thought of de Sade scribbling away in his cell, using his own blood for ink. Not
even the most terrible prison could quell the pornographic imagination. Sex words
were powerful. Sex stories were so dangerous they could crash a plane, they could
tear a man apart, they could imprison her lover and threaten everything she held
dear.

Holly snatched the blanket from Kasia's fingers. She pressed it over her lap. ‘Move
away from me now,' she said, ‘for your own good. Move away.'

Kasia stepped back into the aisle. She shook her head and her golden bob swung prettily
back and forth. ‘Ah yes,' she said. ‘You are indeed the bomb.'

The Misfortunes of Virtue

by
MARQUIS DE SADE

Holly's ring was where she'd left it. She had thought it must be lost forever, abandoned
in the riot of mint and dill and oregano, but there it was: glinting, caught up in
the branches of the kaffir lime. She felt the sting of a sharp spike cutting her
finger as she reached for it. The blood dripped into her palm and she watched the
slow trickle, as if her body was weeping even when her eyes were dry.

There was a moment of temptation. The telephone booth stood bright and empty. She
could make her way down the stairs…But of course the moment she saw Mandy she would
lose her resolve. She had to promise to avoid the place. She had to take up her vow
of abstinence. Sex—Holly's sex—was a dangerous, powerful thing. She couldn't let
her sex loose on the world ever again. Even in sleep, the unblinking eye haunted
her, staring from its place in the rectum of the corpse, drenched by the fountain
of glowing semen. She would wake, gasping, and
reach for Nick, but of course he was
no longer there. He was gone and she was to blame. For
all
the terrible changes that
had crept out from these inflammatory books she had been stuffing herself with and
into the innocent, unsuspecting world.

So. No pornographic literature. No Mandy. No sex.

‘No sex,' she said aloud and slipped the ring back on her finger. ‘I take up my promise
of abstinence once more. I return to my state of ignorance to ensure the safety of
the world.'

The band seemed too tight; she must have put on a bit of weight in Paris. All the
croissants and creamy sauces and come. She vowed to start a diet today. She would
get back into her girlish shape. She would starve herself of sex and sweets. She
would return to her regime of powders and moisturisers. She had become sloppy with
her self-care, forgetting to wear makeup, forgetting to match her underwear, forgetting
to behave decently, in the way a nice young woman should.

She extended the handle of her suitcase, and dragged it clumsily behind her in the
direction of home.

Her mother and father were the same. Her house was as it had been. She stood in the
doorway in the hug of them, the familiar musk of their skin, her mother's sweet perfume,
her father's aftershave. The soap that they had used for years as a family. Nothing
had changed. She felt a wave of relief. She could become their baby again.

She extracted herself from the smother of their love and picked up her suitcase.
If she concentrated very hard on the here and now she could begin to forget the image
of her parents rattling in a sex dungeon. She could pretend that she was not forged
from original sin. She could, perhaps, see her own
parents once more as nature intended:
sexless, wholesome, chaste.

‘Oh, darling, we missed you so much. We're so glad you're home.'

Holly nodded, tears brimming in her eyes. ‘Me too.' She walked towards the staircase
as she had done almost every day of her life before leaving for Paris.

The man in the alleyway had been alive the last time Holly climbed these stairs,
that terrible eye still in a head that smiled at his wife. Able to defecate like
anyone else, without an eyeball corking his bum. Nick had been searching still, and
safe; still mercifully free from meeting her.

She was relieved to be in a house from a more innocent time. She climbed the stairs
and she was climbing backwards, back past the orgy with its entangled limbs and indistinguishable
groans and bodily fluids, back past Mary-Ann, past Nick, past book club and Mandy
and her first glance at a novel by James Salter.

She got to the top of the stairs and yes, it
was
a simpler world that she was moving
into. A chaste world, a time of abstinence and longing. A time of aching in her heart
and a cold, unfulfilled sensation in her loins. Well, maybe Jack had been the only
possible answer after all. Maybe she should forgive his transgressions, since she
had so many of her own to forgive now.

She heaved her suitcase onto the bed and unclipped it. The leather notebook was still
there on the top of the pile of neatly folded clothes. She had thought for a moment
that her fantasy of a return to childhood would make Wilhelm Reich and Nick and the
experiments with orgone cease to exist. But here was
the book, and beside it a huge
ivory dildo. Carved figures frolicked on its surface, men chasing women who chased
men, pricks hard, breasts bouncing and above them a row of glowing objects, the rays
of their light dripping onto the shoulders of the sex-crazed crowd. Where the rays
touched the skin there was smoke, and in some cases flames carved into the surface
of the dildo.

She picked up the book and sniffed at the soft leather and she could still smell
the faint scent of burning. She opened the cover.
How to make an orgone battery
.
She felt a slight tremor, like an earthquake beginning to split a fault line in the
earth.

She snapped the book closed.

The trembling stopped. She should burn Nick's book. She should make a fire and burn
it. That was the only safe solution.

‘Back?'

Holly flinched and dropped the book suddenly.

‘How strange. For some reason I thought you would stay in Paris forever.'

She turned to see him standing in the door to her bedroom. Michael, just as she remembered
him. Attractively grey at the temples, immaculately dressed.

‘Welcome home.' He stepped into her room, took her face between his hands, pressed
his lips to her forehead. She wondered if he could smell transgression on her skin.
If he did he said nothing about it.

Holly clutched the notebook more tightly.

‘Oh. Hello, Michael.' She refused to remember him with his mask on and his cock out.

‘Are you here for dinner?' he asked. ‘Mussels in broth.'

‘You're staying for dinner?'

‘I'm cooking it.' He grinned a little shyly and stepped back a pace, leaving a cautious
distance between them. ‘Actually I live here now.'

Holly looked quickly around her room, the posters on the wall, a glow in the dark
yoyo, a plastic doll, stuffed toys lined up on the windowsill. Nothing had been moved.

‘Oh, no,' he touched her arm reassuringly. ‘Not here, god no. I would never take
your room.'

He took her hand gently and led her out of her room and down the corridor to her
parents' room. It was a shock to see some stranger open their door without permission.
They were so careful about their privacy. Holly had been taught to knock and wait
patiently. But Michael just threw the door wide and ushered her in.

It was a new bed, that was the first thing she noticed, a huge king-sized four-poster.
The pale curtains trailed gently in a slight breeze from the open windows and the
bright Brisbane light scoured the shadows from the room. The room was spotlessly
clean, as she would have expected. Her mother's dressing table pressed against one
wall. Blue vials touched by a wisp of light, and a little stand for jewellery in
the shape of a tree. To the right side of her mother's table was a wooden roll-top
desk, a masculine antique with the whiskery trappings of a gentleman resting on
it. She recognised the ivory-coloured hairbrush she had given her father for his
birthday several years ago.

On the other side of her mother's dresser was another table, unfamiliar. A sleek
modern vanity with a large mirror reflecting all the accoutrements on it, the razor,
shaving brush, hair gel, a glass bristling with pens and pencils and a notebook beside
it.

‘You live here now?'

Michael nodded. ‘We would have told you if…Well, your parents thought you might be
upset. I thought you would be fine with it. I told them not to underestimate you.
Still, polyandry is a little difficult to explain, I suppose. There are so few examples
to use as illustration.' He indicated his vanity, the large wooden bed.

Holly turned and walked quickly out of the room. Her parents' room: Michael's room.
The chaste normalcy of Brisbane now hanging slightly askew.

‘Will you be in for dinner?' Michael asked her again. She turned to see his clear
intelligent eyes trained on her.

‘Yes,' said Holly. ‘I suppose I will.' And then she shut her bedroom door in his
face, put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes.

When Holly was sure Michael had gone she picked up Reich's notebook from the bed.
She was exhausted. A man was dead in a back alley, Nick was missing and all this
was just the tip of an iceberg in which a hundred thousand corpses were frozen by
the grief of all their friends and relatives and lovers. All of it connected by
the wiggly lines in Wilhelm Reich's diagrams, the wiggly lines that originated from
the vulva of a woman who looked like her. The wiggly lines that came down from the
UFOs. EAs, they were called in Reich's notebook, Energy Alpha, but whatever you called
them they were still UFOs—which, despite the events in the alleyway, she was pretty
sure she didn't believe in—and the wiggly lines were still orgone—which she had no
choice but to believe in. Orgone tying every death to every life, flesh decaying
or pulsing with sexual pleasure, children becoming lovers becoming parents becoming
mulch and earth and grass
and trees and weather and sadness and joy and children.

She didn't want to think about it any longer. She picked up her phone, brought up
Jennifer's contact, added Rachel, and Becca. The sweet innocent children of her abstinent
youth.

‘I am back,' she wrote. ‘I would love to see you.' She pressed send.

She ran a bath and sat in it and it was only when she had sunk up to her chin in
bubbles that she could exhale. The phone buzzed. She reached for it, dripping sweet-scented
foam.

Jennifer had replied.
Welcome home. Meet us at Jamie's Espresso Bar in the Valley.
Tomorrow. 11:00.

She submerged herself and gazed up towards the air above but all she could see was
bubbles and pure white rose-scented light.

Eat Me

by
LINDA JAIVIN

Steam escaped the slightly parted shells of the mussels. Scraps of onion clung to
the
stark
black lips, slices of parsley, all this bathing in the blood of juicy fresh
tomatoes.
It
was a sensual feast for the eye as much as for the tongue. Holly watched
her
father
manoeuvre the tongs in the large white bowl, saw the mussels drip their
vivid
soup
across the white tablecloth, staining it the colour of blood. He ladled
mussels
into
her mother's bowl, into Holly's own. She heard the clack of them as
they
settled.
She looked down into the little black slits to see the plump of flesh
inside.

‘Here's to you, Holly.' Michael was raising his glass, clicking it against hers.

‘Yes,' her father joined them in the toast. ‘To our extraordinary child. We have
always known you were special.'

Her mother reached over the debris on the table, clasped her wrist, squeezed it.

‘From the moment we saw your genitals so swollen and oversized.'

‘And the colour,' her father tutted, ‘The colour nature reserves for crayfish, crabs,
tropical violets, hothouse flowers.'

Holly winced. She felt her cheeks becoming flushed. She tried to swallow the mussel
that she had been chewing. She was suddenly uncomfortably aware of its cuntish shape
and flavour. She coughed.

‘To Holly!' Michael almost shouted her name and gulped at his champagne. ‘And her
incredible adventure.'

Holly took a sizable mouthful from her own glass. She knew her cheeks were bright
red. She had never heard the story of her birth. It was odd for her parents to speak
so intimately in front of a stranger.

But of course he wasn't a stranger.

Holly dipped her spoon into her mussel broth. She didn't want to follow that train
of thought back to its natural conclusion. She heard a click as her father prised
a shell apart, inserted his fork, plucked out the briny flesh.

‘Did you know,' said Michael, licking his fingers before fumbling in his bowl. She
watched him grab a mussel between his fingers, crack the shell open and scoop the
flesh out with his bare hands. ‘Did you know that female mussels frown at monogamy?
The very idea of one sexual partner is anathema to all molluscs.' He popped the curl
of flesh into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed. He slipped the tips of his fingers
into his mouth, reached into his bowl for another.