The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine (9 page)

Holly blinked. The ginger-haired girl was just a smudge of colour at the very edge
of her vision; in a minute she would disappear completely. The iris now hung motionless
from the rear-view mirror. Just a flower fading away from the memory of its origin.
Sooner or later the girl would cut the shrivelled plant down from its thread and
throw it away. Holly re-shouldered her book-bag and climbed the steps towards the
buildings.

When a group of students brushed past her their short skirts caught a breeze and
tugged outwards. There was a hint of soap
in their wake, a delicate trace of perfume,
the schoolyard whiff of bubblegum, ‘—at 5 a.m. Can you believe that—' the scrap of
conversation as they passed. Holly was suddenly imagining this girl awake at the
first hint of dawn, 5 a.m., her bare arms colouring with the gorgeous amber light
of early morning, her hair a liquid measure of gold poured over her delicate shoulders.
The world seemed closer than it had ever been and it had something to do with reading
the illicit book.

It was different somehow. Something had changed since she had begun to read
A Sport
and a Pastime.
It was as if just reading the book had changed her relationship to
time and space
.
Holly steadied herself on the railing and felt it sharp and cold
on her fingers. The very steps had somehow become more solid and defined. As if some
exterior designer had touched the world with light and shadow, making everything
more distinct, sharpening the edges, smoothing and polishing every flat surface.

The Angels always sat on the hill beside the history block. None of them did history
and this place was like a small island of anonymity. The girls stretched gorgeously
out, their limbs tan against the lushness of the lawn. Holly saw her own group of
girls now as others must see them, a sweetness of perfection. The history students,
a shorter, stockier, more bookish breed, stomping past them in heavy boots and various
shades of khaki, glancing enviously in their direction, appreciating the apparition,
this glow of beautiful young female flesh.

Holly slipped easily into the group, folded herself into their greetings.

She leaned back on her elbows, propping herself up so she could look up at the sky.
The trees threw mottled light and
shade onto the ground beside her. Light like confetti.
‘Huge party,' someone was saying and Holly thought, ‘Fete'. In the novel by James
Salter they would call it that, a fete.

She wanted to talk about
A Sport and a Pastime
. She was confused by it, disoriented.
There was a rare break in the conversation and she could mention the book casually.
If only her friends did not find reading such an ugly chore, suitable only for nerds
and geeks. She could tell them about the passage where the man puts the pillow under
the girl's naked hips, a brief moment of being still in one room when all the rest
of the book is lurching from town to town, party to party, dinner to drinks to dancing
in Parisian bars. She had felt a visceral longing to go to Paris, now, without preamble,
to run into the fete. And then this one still moment when the lover is inside her,
driven to the rim with his balls brushing against her flesh. He reached down and
traced the wet circle of her cunt with his finger and ejaculated, so suddenly that
Holly was forced to put the book down for a moment, trying to calm the suddenly frantic
beating of her own heart.

Holly had fallen asleep, her head resting on the stockinged legs of the girl on the
cover of the book. She had dreamed the position. She was in his place, her own balls
swinging gently, slapping against the young girl's thighs. She reached down then
and felt the wet slit, not the one that her own cock was buried in, a second cunt,
thick wet lips. She traced them gently. The young girl lifted her hips and Holly
felt her own strange little penis gripped in the most delicate glove. The girl turned
her head to the side, her cheek down and pressed into the bed with each thrust of
her hips.

‘Don't worry,' the girl had said to her in her sweet French
accent. ‘
It is impossible
to control your dreams. The forbidden ones are incandescent. They burn through resolutions
like parchment
.'

The girl turned her head back into the sheet and began to grunt. Holly pushed forward,
into her, trying to stop the terrible sound, the sound of an animal, a pig perhaps.
She reached down to the second cunt and felt it wet, a perfect ring of muscle. It
came to her then, suddenly.

‘I'm in the wrong hole,' she said, a terror pouring down over her shoulders. A trickle
of ice dripping down her spine.

‘No such thing as wrong,' the French girl grunted. But when she turned her head it
wasn't the French girl at all. Mandy grinned up at her. Holly tried to pull out of
the woman's arse but her penis was held fast.

‘I'm in the wrong one,' she said, her eyes tearing up, her hands brushing against
the great pale globes of flesh, tight as knees at her crotch. Her balls were poised,
tensed, she shouldn't spill, not here, not in a woman's arse, a dirty place, a place
for secret defecations. She shouldn't ejaculate here where it was so wrong. Her head
tipped back, she felt her balls tighten, her mouth became a perfect o, she was swallowing
the universe, stars and planets, hurtling past her teeth. But then she was awake
blinking in the dark, restless on the sweat-wet sheets. Only it wasn't dark. She
felt her flesh pulsing as if she was indeed ejaculating in time to the pulsing of
a pale blue light. Everything was illuminated by it. She lifted her cheek off the
cover of the book, felt the line of it branded on her face.

Her penis was gone. Or, more correctly, had never been there at all. She reached
down and felt her vulva twitching as if it were kissing the tips of her fingers.
When Holly held her
hand up to her face, her fingers were moon-bright.

Now, outside the history building, she blinked up at Jennifer's face, refocusing.

‘Are you OK?'

Holly was lying on her back. She glanced over to a group of students ambling by.

‘—their feet freeze to the ground and there's no way to save them without amputation,'
one of them was saying.

‘Yeah, I'm OK.' Holly lifted herself up to sitting. She took a deep breath to calm
herself. She smelled Jack, suddenly, the earthy musk of him. It was a smell so strong
that she looked behind her, imagining that he must be standing there. In a moment
the scent was gone and there was just the overwhelming sweetness of Jennifer's perfume.
She wondered where the smell of her boyfriend had come from. Perhaps she was losing
her grip on sanity.

‘Well? Are you?'

‘What?'

‘Coming to the party tonight. Holly, keep up, will you?'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘I don't think I was invited.'

‘Don't be stupid. Why wouldn't you be invited?'

Holly noticed the fall of light against her knees.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘confetti.' And she pointed to the little scraps of light with her
fingertip.

‘You need to get out more, Holly. We barely see you anymore. You didn't come to Diane's
yesterday at all.'

‘Yeah, Holly.' Becca flicked her hair back behind her ear. ‘What are you doing all
the time?'

‘Reading,' she said. The word was out of her mouth before she realised it was there.

Becca laughed sharply, knowing it must be a joke.

Holly tried to smile. She had been reading, and while she read something had subtly
shifted, the world tilting off its axis by a fraction of a degree. A tiny shift in
the universe, but the earth's trajectory had altered irreparably and Holly was afraid
that the very laws of gravity might buckle under the strain.

Lolita

by
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Same crumpled linen jacket. Same half-crooked smile, same intent stare that made
it seem that he could see right through her shirt. Michael tilted his head and looked
down at her bare feet, up a little to her tight, childish pleated shirt, tan coloured,
a little too short. She smoothed it down over her hips. In the daylight he seemed
less enigmatic. She could see that his skin was not luminous. His eyes squinted in
the harsh light streaming through the kitchen window. There were darkened creases
under them as if he were hung over, even though it was clear he had just come from
work.

He leaned against the kitchen bench and sipped black coffee and when she tried to
reach the refrigerator he didn't move aside and she was forced to step around him,
uncomfortably close. He smelled elusively of spices—cinnamon, cloves—and beneath
this a rich wild trufflish musk like the den of a fox.

He slipped his hand into the bag dangling from her shoulder
and plucked out her book.
It was a strangely intimate gesture, as if he had slipped his hand into the neckline
of her blouse. He stroked the dust jacket and she imagined him stroking her own flesh.

‘
A Sport and a Pastime,'
he said, smiling into the distance. ‘This is a great book.
I can't believe you're reading it.'

She was stony-faced, determined not to blush.

‘You know, Holly, when I read this it blew my mind. I wanted to run off to Paris
immediately.' He leaned a little closer to her, lowered his voice. ‘I wanted to find
a French girl who would let me try…anal sex for the first time.'

There was a little pause before the word and she knew he was gauging her reaction.
Holly was determined not to flinch. Her face was a mask, impassive.

‘I'm reading it for uni,' she lied, moving out into the lounge room, slipping her
shoes off onto the mat, manoeuvring a toe under each one to kick it free. She folded
her legs up under her, aware suddenly of her thighs, her short cropped top, the way
it exposed the tight, pale expanse of her belly. She tried not to squirm under his
gaze. She wanted to be as bold as the French girl in the book, as brave as someone
with experience of love and sex and life.

‘Are you waiting for my parents?'

He nodded. His eyes did not leave her. His gaze was constant and probing. She felt
completely exposed and yet it wasn't a leery look at all. It was the kind of long,
careful gaze you would use when examining a work of art, appreciative and respectful.

‘Work function?'

He grinned as if she had made some kind of joke. ‘Yes, of
course,' he said. ‘All
work and no play. We are terribly boring middle-aged folk. Never grow older, Holly.
Stay just as you are.' Michael took her hand, stroked her ring finger, grinned. ‘Or
perhaps not exactly as you are now.'

The door swung open and her father blustered in. He was carrying a satchel overstuffed
with paper files and a box of manila folders. He thumped the box down on the kitchen
bench and let the bag crash to the floor at his feet before flinging his arms around
his friend.

‘Why do we bring our work home, Michael? Why can't we run away back into the bosom
of our families? Ah.' He turned to Holly and bent to deliver the rasp of a stubbly
kiss on her forehead. ‘Here is the bosom of this family right here.' He winked and
Holly pushed him away, wishing she had worn more concealing clothes. She could feel
that appreciative gaze settling on her slightly indiscreet cleavage.

‘Ah, my little angel, Michael and I have to go out for a while. I'll be back home
with your mother before dinner. We'll be gone for a couple of hours at least. Are
you happy to forage for yourself until then?'

‘Of course I am.'

Her father bent once more and lifted her face and kissed her gently on the cheek
and she smiled.

‘I'll see you soon, darling. Mind the house.'

Holly watched as her father rested his hand on Michael's waist, steering him towards
the door. Another strangely intimate gesture. Michael glanced back once, peering
over his shoulder as he was ushered out of the door.

‘Enjoy the book,' he said. Holly felt herself blush. She waited till she heard her
father's car start up, the familiar engine
whine as he reversed it too fast down
the driveway, swung the beast around and sped off up the road. She stood quickly
and trotted up the stairs to her bedroom.

She had touched herself before, a little. Never for very long. Whenever she saw the
bright blue of her juices glowing on her fingers she would stop and breathe deeply,
waiting for the glow to disappear.

Holly stretched out on the bed. The door was closed and locked. Holly made sure of
this even though her parents were not yet home. She was alone and would remain so.
She touched the pillow, but was suddenly too shy to move it into position. How would
she look, she wondered, with her hips raised, her legs slightly parted like the girl
in the book? She raised her head and stared into the mirror that she had positioned
at the foot of the bed. She saw her own feet, the soles clean from her bath and slightly
wrinkled from soaking too long in water. They looked like the feet of a new baby.
She wiggled them. Above them were her nipples. In this position they seemed to be
resting just above her big toes. She moved her feet and the nipples disappeared behind
them. She was not here to see her nipples. She saw them every morning in the fogged
mirror in the bathroom. Today she would see the parts of herself that were still
a mystery.

She raised herself up in front of the mirror. The pillows were arranged as Salter
had described, a mountain of them piled one on top of the other, white, unblemished.
Perhaps the oils from her skin would ruin them when she settled her stomach on top
of the unseemly pile. They smelled of her face cream already. They smelled of her
hair, the faint sweetness of shampoo, the
mushroomy smell of sleep. In this position
she could see the globes of her rump as fruit, perfectly pale and round. The surface
of the skin was unbroken, but when she parted her legs there was a little glimpse
of the core. One vagina, of course, not two. Her dreams were still with her, making
her lift her arse, pull the thighs a little wider apart. There was hair there, dark
curls of it, and in the little thicket a fissure, the size and shape of a peach pit.
It almost looked edible. She strained her neck to look. Her head was pointing downward,
the blood rushing to her eyes making her a bit dizzy. She reached back to touch it,
this seed, this core, and found, of course, that it was nothing but an illusion.
Not a seed at all, but the space where a seed might go, an almond of space, warm
but not yet damp, not yet lit up with the glow of her desire.