This Other Eden (33 page)

‘My
God, that Paddy’s
Scotch whiskey
is
lethal,’
Max shrieked. Max
had judged his man well. The constable shuddered slightly. He was not a great
fan of the love that dare not speak its name at the best of times, but when the
homosexual in question also turned out to be a complete whoopsie who thought
that Paddy’s was Scotch, then the less time spent with him the better.

‘Well,
sir, as I say, I was informed that you had a woman with you, but since it’s a
fellah, I suppose … that’s all right, isn’t it?’

Max
allowed his eyes to moisten and his voice to quiver with emotion.

‘Officer,
may I remark that that is the single most lovely thing I have ever heard a
policeman say.’

‘Yes… well … sorry to have bothered you then.’ The policeman had got himself
a little confused. ‘Uhm, I hope your …friend…’

‘Lover.’

‘Yes,
well, I hope he recovers… Good day to you, sir… and sir,’ and with a
slight nod at Rosalie’s prostrate form, the constable and his companion left.

As she
heard the door close Rosalie opened her eyes and they shone with wonder and
excitement. In all her experience of living the life of an outlaw, in all the
daring stories of escape she had heard around camp fires
—
or whilst
bobbing about in inflatable boats, or sitting waiting in the bellies of
helicopters, none had ever come close in audacity and flair to the trick of
which she had just been a part.

Max was
at the window.

‘They’ve
drawn a blank … I think they’re going to chuck it. Don’t break character
yet, they may decide to bring their pals up for a laugh at the gay guys.’ He
stood watching for a while, watching the cops in the street, while Rosalie
watched him.

‘They’re
bringing their truck up … Man, they’re going!’ Max spun round to face her,
completely thrilled, triumphant. ‘We did it!’

‘You
did it, Max.’ Rosalie was a fair-minded girl and gave credit where it was due.
‘I can’t believe it, but you did. What a concept! What a performance! You saved
my neck and you were completely bloody wonderful.’

Yes, he
had been wonderful. Max could scarcely demur, it had been a masterpiece of
aggressive bluff, and what, after all, was great acting, but bluff?

Rosalie’s
eyes, which had been fixed upon Max’s face, dropped slightly. She could not
help but notice that Max was reacting to his own brilliance in his customary
manner. Max followed her gaze. Beneath his towel was a stiff you could have
flown a flag off.

‘Oh
dear,’ said Max, genuinely embarrassed. ‘I’m not really such a vain guy …
honestly, not in normal life … It’s just, when I do a really great show I .
.

‘Hey,
Max,’ Rosalie said, and her soft, soft Irish voice would have made lush green
pasture of a desert, ‘don’t apologise. You were great, and if anyone’s entitled
to a celebratory hard-on, it’s you.

This
was it, and they both knew it. The excitement of being so nearly busted, the
adrenaline rush of escape. The intimacy that the need for survival had already
forced upon them. It was so right. They were even already naked, Max would not
even have to take his socks off.

‘I’ve
got a laminate spray in my bag. Would you get it?’ Rosalie said, and as the
gentle music of her voice drifted out of the open window and into the street
all the milk in the village turned into rich butter. Max found the spray.

‘I use
it to seal my gun in wet weather,’ Rosalie added.

‘No
woman should ever apologise for carrying protection,’ said Max.

‘Yes,
well that’s all very well, but as a rule spontaneous love-making is not my style.’

‘Nor
me,’ said Max, spraying on the stretch laminate. He sort of believed himself
too, for he had given all that up now. He made a mental note to tell Rosalie
about his past some time, but not now.

He got
into bed. They embraced.

‘Would
you mind removing your moustache?’ Max inquired. Rosalie removed the offending
disguise and they embraced again. Max’s hands stole down Rosalie’s naked body.

‘Would
it be OK if I took your penis away as well?’ he said, having encountered the
little putty tube that had served them so well.

‘OK,
but don’t spoil it,’ Rosalie said. ‘I want to keep it. No prick has ever done
me better service.’

Max
knew he could not equal that, but he resolved to do his best, and he and
Rosalie made love.

It
wasn’t like in the movies, there were still elbows to get stuck under backs and
hair to get in mouths, but suddenly that didn’t matter. There can be few things
better on Earth than to go to bed with the someone you have been dreaming
about. Someone for whom you have been yearning. Max had imagined himself
kissing and touching Rosalie’s small soft but hard body a hundred times.
Rosalie, although otherwise occupied, and somewhat less of a drip than Max, had
also been thinking of him. Scarcely even realising it, they had fallen in love,
and now, in each other’s arms, they acknowledged it.

Chapter
Twenty

New Lovers, old lovers

and screams from beyond

a rocky grave

Limping
out.

Jurgen Thor sat naked on
his cushions, sipping his peach schnapps. The sun was dipping down behind the
mountains and his tanned blonde skin was growing shadow dark. A young woman lay
on the bed. She too was naked, her body as near perfect as Jurgen’s. A golden
couple, silent in the setting sun. It was as it had always been. The stunning
surroundings, the young, starstruck beauty. The man, great and good, unlocking
the door to her heart and letting the passion out. It was as it had always
been, a thousand seductions, a thousand grateful girls. Just the same. Except
it was different. More different than Jurgen could ever have imagined, for
instead of the sounds he usually heard emanating from the bed on these
occasions
—
sometimes breathless, coy, half-finished sentences filled
with wonder, sometimes gentle sobs as emotions became too much
—
instead,
Jurgen heard something he had quite literally never heard before.

‘Please
don’t worry about it,’ the young woman said, ‘I hear it happens to all guys
sometimes. Really, I don’t mind.’

Jurgen
struggled to maintain his self-control. That this
little girl
should be
trying to comfort him! Assuring him that she did not
mind!

‘My
penis was recently blown off by a bomb, you know,’ he said, trying to seem
casual. ‘That bitch of a surgeon must have sewn it back on wrong.’

‘Yes,
that’s it,’ said the girl, whose name was Scout. ‘She must have sewn it on
wrong.’

But
they both knew that the surgeon had not got it wrong. Jurgen had been fine and
upstanding during the protracted foreplay. He had undressed Scout in his usual
accomplished manner, her clothes disappearing as if by magic. He had deposited
her near-naked upon his great bed. Stayed her hand as she made to remove her
bra, because, as with all things sexual, he liked to do it himself… the
removal of underwear being something which he particularly liked to dwell over.
Yes, everything had been running along familiar lines. As usual he had knelt
down on the bed beside her, feasting his eyes upon her whilst he spirited away
her flimsy final garments and all the while the surgeon’s work appeared to be
holding up superbly. His erection was as proud and vertical as it ever was, you
could have chucked horseshoes at it. Scout’s eyes had grown wide with nervous
but eager anticipation as she contemplated the miracle of natural engineering
upon which she was about to allow herself to be impaled.

‘Good
Lord,’ she had remarked, her voice betraying a childhood spent at a posh
English girls’ school. ‘You will take it easy, won’t you, sweetie? The last
time I saw anything hung like that, it had just won the three-thirty at Epsom.’
Scout snorted with laughter. She was a jolly girl and like many English girls
of her class found demonstrative passion a bit foreign and embarrassing. She
found sex altogether easier to cope with if it was treated as something of a
joke. This could, of course, be rather disconcerting for any poor fellow
nervously attempting to engender an atmosphere of lustful abandon. Nothing
spoils a grunting, groaning, bed-wobbling approach to climax like a loud giggle
followed by the comment … ‘Sorry, I was just thinking how
funny
we must
look from behind.’

But
Jurgen had encountered slightly gauche English girls before and it was not
horsey giggles which had led to his surprising sexual collapse. Far from it. He
usually liked this type. He knew very well how a really grown-up rogering could
quickly wipe the silly grin off these girls’ faces. He had, in fact, been
hugely looking forward to seeing Scout’s nervous jollity turn to that look of
complete surprise which comes when a girl realises that all of her inhibitions
have been expertly removed and are now lying in distant corners of the room
along with her knickers and her hairclips.

‘There
is no need for the worrying,’ Jurgen assured Scout, as he assured all the
girls. ‘For me, there is only pleasure in the pleasure of the woman. I make
love to make women happy. That is the only reason I do it.’

‘Oh,
don’t worry about me,’ Scout said with a jolly snort, ‘you just carry on. The
only place I ever get an orgasm is in Louis’s Pâtisserie in Hampstead.’

But it
looked as if tonight was going to be different. Because as Jurgen applied his
considerable skills, Scout’s body began to respond in a manner entirely new to
her.

‘Oooh,’
she said as Jurgen played delicately with her breasts. Stimulating them in a
manner that was very different to the maulings that chaps had given them in the
past. So different, in fact, that had Scout not been absolutely sure, she might
have imagined that Jurgen was caressing a completely different pair of tits
altogether to the ones she normally wore to bed.

‘Gosh,’
she gasped as Jurgen’s smooth jaw slid down between her thighs, his lips upon
hers. How she shivered as he kissed her where previously she had only been
gobbled, and even then, rarely, since Scout had always harboured a vague
feeling that vaginas were things into which no chap had much business sticking
his face.

By the
time push came to shove, so to speak, Scout could not have been any hotter if
Jurgen had set fire to the bed.

‘Go on,
then, screw me,’ she astonished herself by saying. Up until now, the most passionate
comment she had managed at this stage of the game was, ‘I suppose I don’t mind
if you really want to’. Now, however, she wanted to be screwed and she said so.
Jurgen Thor needed no further prompting. He sprayed on the laminate and plunged
in.

‘Wow!’
Scout shouted in gay abandon, unaware that she had such hidden depths … and
then only moments later, a muted, ‘Oh’.

The
seemingly impossible had happened. For the first time in his life, Jurgen Thor
had gone the way of all flesh. For a moment, confident in his conquest, he had
allowed his mind to wander. Having realised that his mind was wandering, Jurgen
had reflected that he had better concentrate on the job in hand or else the
unthinkable might happen. At which point, of course, the unthinkable did.
Jurgen discovered, later than most men, that once you start worrying about it,
you’ve lost it.

Reflections
on erections.

Jurgen sat on his cushions
in moody contemplation. His mind had wandered. Why? It had wandered a lot of
late. He was becoming more and more distracted and he did not really know why.
Except, perhaps, that times were changing and even his legendary energy, both
physical and mental, must surely ebb some day. It was a curious sensation for
Jurgen to be so bothered about something. Very little affected him emotionally
in his life, nor had much done so for years. He had lived for so long with a
full and profound knowledge of the real extent of planet death that
conventional emotion had been rather lost to him. Every single day, he was confronted
with statistics so terrible that he had become numb. Jurgen found it difficult
to care about anything very much. But he did still value his sexual powers. To
Jurgen, virility was a symbol of life in a dying world, and now even that was
collapsing. A sense of mortality cloaked him like a contraceptive laminate. The
end was nigh. Even his beloved mountains had changed for ever. There was no
snow or ice at all on them now, not even on the highest peaks. The last ice had
melted five years ago and it would never return.

Dirty
Snow.

Jurgen had always loved
the cold. Snow and ice appealed to him far more than sun and sand. But it was
gone. The only ice remaining lay at the poles, and Jurgen knew better than most
how soon that too would disappear. It was not because of the famous greenhouse
effect that the ancient ice was finally giving up the ghost, but by dint of
something much less complex. Straightforward dirt was in the process of
liberating four-fifths of the world’s fresh water. Airborne pollutants had
begun to dirty the shimmering white that lay at the hub of the world. Darkened
as it was, it no longer reflected the sun’s rays with the efficiency it had
once done. Soon it would actively absorb them, and soon after that it would be
possible to go surfing in Surrey.