'I hope so. May I have a packet of contraceptives, please?'
She glanced at Rachel. 'Certainly, sir. Lura, or Penex?'
'The Penex, please, if I may.'
Twenty-five or thirty pence?'
'Oh, I think the thirty, please, if possible.'
As she turned away I felt Rachel's hand slide through my jacket vents. A fingernail poked my vertebra, making me jerk. Rachel stifled a snort of laughter. The assistant looked up. I met her eye. And my voice was husky when I spoke :
'Better make that a two-pack, lady.'
'I beg your pardon ?'
'I'm so sorry. May I have two packets, please?'
'Certainly, sir.'
On the way back I entertained Rachel and kept things going with an account of my own sexual history. Now I had had ten girls. I considered doubling, even squaring, this figure. I ended up halving it. AH five, I stressed, had been important and serious relationships. I was sorry, but I had no time for the other kind. Excuse me, but I wasn't interested in purely sexual encounters, thank you, although it was true - one hated to say it - that most of the boys I knew were interested ... in precious little else - no, perhaps that wasn't fair. Of course I had tried it, more out of curiosity than anything, I supposed. It was odd, but - I don't know - it seemed that a girl's body was ... empty unless you liked its owner. Sure, the incredibly beautiful girls in these experimental liaisons had got in a bit of a state - what with being so incredibly sexed up at the time. Understandable. (One or two, I didn't mind telling her, had got pretty violent, pretty ugly, about the whole thing.) But I had had just to explain myself, as tactfully as possible. No - hell - they could keep their money; a boy can't fake it.
What was good sex? Well, good sex had nothing to do with expertise, how many French tricks one knew (how convincingly you munched on each other's stools, etc.). No: if there was affection and enthusiasm, that was enough.
With a heart-beat like a drum-roll I led Rachel down the stairs, past the bathroom, to the bedroom.
It smelled to me of every sock I had taken off, all the ear-wax I had pasted under its furniture, each bogey I had swiped across its walls, and the bouquets of cheap talc puffed into the air to disguise these. A Low-legacy, perhaps. Or my own stressed senses.
Rachel generously took off her coat while I subdued the lighting by means of a cotton scarf over the desk-lamp. We sat on the floor next to the fire and sipped the wine I had brought down. The pink glow flattered us. It made Rachel look extra Oriental, softening her features, ironing out the nose, giving her eyes a distant luminousness - you wouldn't call it a twinkle exactly. In strong contrast, my face became even more angular and shadowy, more hollow and ... sinister, my jaw-line more haunting somehow, my mouth - if anything -still more sensual. Let's get it over with, I thought.
'Charles,' said Rachel, 'when I talked about DeForest on the bus, I hope you didn't think I was being callous. I'm really very fond of him. I wasn't just poking fun. It's just that —'
'Ridicule is the only exorcist there is,' I said in a hypnotic voice, 'and laughter the only true deliverance. Don't trick yourself into guilt. - Let's get undressed.'
Balls-aching drivel, unquestionably - and poor tactics, too. One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues with a myriad side-turnings and cul-de-sacs - and there are no signposts but your own sincerity and good taste, and I've never had much of either. All I know is that I can go down any one of them and be welcomed as a returning lord.
Here I had gone and played the sage Frenchie, the crack-barrel artiste de la chambre; so 'let's get undressed' had seemed obvious, indeed unavoidable. I had pledged myself to stranded, lean nudity. People really ought to stick together at such a time.
Keeping my body well out of the way, I looked on as Rachel methodically revealed hers. She tugged the elasticized bust of the smock over her head, lowered her tights with an electric crackle, bent and turned to unclip her bra. I was still concealed behind the chair when Rachel went over to the bed, pantied, and slipped between the sheets. Leave them on, for Christ's sake; I needed all the vulgar stimulants I could get. For my knob was knee-high to a grasshopper, the size of a toothpick, as I skipped across the room and fell to a crouch by the side of the bed.
Only her little brown head was visible. I kissed that for a while, knowing from a variety of sources that this will do more for you than any occult caress. The result was satisfactory. My hands, however, were still behaving like prototype hands, marketed before certain snags had been dealt with. So when I introduced one beneath the blankets, I gave it time to warm and settle before sending it down her stomach. Panties ? Panties. I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scrib-blings.
Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work. The big moment came for Rachel when Charles, the runaway robot, sat up, leaned forward, placed a hand flat on either hip-bone, and literally peeled off her panties. As soon as she began to show vulnerable self-consciousness (symptomized as usual by raising right knee) I considerately turned my gaze on her face and bunged my fist in the triangle described by thighs and panty-band. Over her knees my reach ran out. Then, in a very superior move, I got hold of an ankle and pulled it towards me, doubling up the legs. In one movement the panties draped her toes. I swung them into the middle of the room.
'Hadn't I better put the thing on now?'
Penex Ultralite come in dull pink flip-top packets of three. On the bed with my back facing Rachel, who stroked it for something to do, I removed a sheath and peered at it: a florin-sized ring of elastic that gathered into an obscene bobble. I undid the elastic with twitchy fingers.
'Won't be a sec.'
But you seemed to need a minimum of three hands to get it on: two to hold it open and one to splint your rig. After thirty seconds my cock was a baby's pinkie and I was trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.
'Christ how do you get these things on.' I held it up accusingly. 'Just how, just how are you supposed to get these things on.'
Rachel took a look. 'Oh, baby,' she said. 'You don't undo it first.'
So it was more necking, strange and perfunctory necking, and more body patrol.
This time, under Rachel's supervision, I held the nozzle daintily between finger and thumb and pulled the greased wafer down with my other hand.
'Oh, I see,' I said.
After all that sweat and goonery, was there any point in trying to find the blighted hair of passion, a whisper of real desire, submerged in that tub of clotted vaginal fluid ?
Supported on elbows, I hoisted myself above her and brought a knobbled knee up between hers, through the thighs. Glancing downwards, my rig, in its pink muff, looked unnatural, absurd, like an overdressed Scottie dog. I watched with approval, though, as the knee bore downwards. Then I got to work on ears, neck and throat, and paid elaborate lip-service to her breasts, on the assumption that they were to be found in the immediate vicinity of her hazel-nut nipples.
'Yes,' said Rachel.
Oh, hi. You still here?
Of course. They have breasts, too. Quite slipped my mind. What have I been missing ? I bite a nipple experimentally; she wags her head. I brush the other one with my cheek; she grinds her crotch into my knee. I suck on it with stiff lips; her hands grasp my head.
A definite rhythm was now created in her. Time to consolidate it. My hands taking over from my lips, my lips taking over from my knee, I have swooped downwards. It was too dark there (thank God) for me to be able to see what was right in front of my nose, just some kind of glistening pouch, redolent of oysters. A sniper, through those hairy sights, I watched Rachel's jaw tense.
Finally, once her movements had begun to syncopate and turn in on themselves to produce new and altog
ether different rhythms, and once the secret shudders that have no rhythm started to superimpose themselves on the regular back-and-forth, side-to-side swing of her body ... then, I wiped my mouth on the napkin of her thighs, and surged upwards, cleverly hooking my elbows round the backs of her knees to bring them along too. My left hand, from underneath, aimed the uncooked sausage on the relevant opening. Rachel's head thrown back ? Check. Eyes tight, rictus smile ? Check. And, as I entered, she kissed me, no inhibitions, movingly and democratically partook of her own sour gelatine.
At that point - I swear - I honestly did try to get lost in her responses, to engage her motions, to crawl under the blanket of deliberateness between our bodies. No good. It's far, far too sexy. Real sexual abandonment, for the male, equals orgasm, and therefore he is never allowed to feel it except at the end. It exists, for him, only in indolence or in rape. (If this is so, then, surely, I'm in the clear.)
Seconds away, fusing every nerve in my body, I lurched backwards out of her. Rachel subsided, shaking. Eyes wetted by pain and shock, I placed my head on her breasts. For ninety seconds man and sphincter muscle were locked in combat. I won.
Here we go. An old-school repertoire of minimally sexy positions. Examples: I slung her legs over my shoulders; knelt, bending her almost triple; lay straight as an ironing-board; turned her round, did it from behind, did it from the side; I brought my right leg up, kept my left leg straight - I did the hokey-pokey, in fact. But, again, it is change of position that is sexy, not the position itself, and God forbid that I should feel sexy.
By now my head is lodged dourly between her shoulder and the pillow - no flair, no finessing, just cock to the grindstone. Two times two is four. Three times two, moreover, is six. Stop kissing her mouth, work on ears. Let me come. Stop all movement and kiss her meditatively, in slow motion, so that she differentiates it and realizes what is happening: here I am kissing you. Ninety per cent withdrawal, prod her clitoris with my male reproductive organ, feel her contract, smile potently in the half-light. Withdraw to irreducible helmet depth feel her muscles clench and arms tighten pleadingly on my back withdraw till almost out - then - wait - boof. She goes stiff then floppy. Pound like an engine, go dog go. Hand on stomach between shuffling webs of pubic hair, take pressure off, pull legs up too sexy slacken calm down. Fast for three strokes then slow for three then fast. Slow and good, then quick and nasty, then slow and good. Suddenly she shouts, lifts and widens her legs, calls from the end of the world, hands knead my buttocks don't do that. Two thirteens twenty-six, three thirteens forty-nine, thirteen twenty-sixes forty-two. (As regards the physical aspect, by the way, this is all utterly intolerable.) Industrial accidents, pimples, bee-keeping, pus crapping Tampax exams ... Pick a poet - Because I do not hope to turn the mermaids round from the back singing because I do not hope to keep your hands off me I do not think bloody sheets that they will sing because there can't be anything left I do not hope to turn the pain the pain. Body strung out on a giant whip, the buckled praying mantis soon to be eaten. I grow old I grow old shall I feel her fingernails hear her neigh give me strength O my people affirm before the world no more and deny between the socks not long for the garden where end loves all ten more five more the bathroom in the garden the garden in the desert of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed. (I come now, a token sperm in the rubber nozzle; but that's hardly the point.) Tossed along with the strength of ten men, every second lucid agony, grating thrusts, the crunch of genitals. Then I surfed helplessly on the wave of her climax, pounded and tugged at as it broke by a thousand alien currents. And she came under my dead body.
Rachel's eyes were streaming. She smiled a shamed, apologetic smile. I tried to say something but had breath enough only to mouth it. She saw, though, in the half-light. 'Oh. I love you, too,' she said.
I feel steadier now. Perhaps The Rachel Papers aren't in such a mess after all. With some interleaving of Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis, and an index... ? When I'm twenty this will be a thing of the past. The teenage boy is entitled to a certain amount of disorder, and, anyway, I'll mellow tomorrow.
'Something particularly revolting gone wrong ?'
'Jesus,' said Mr Alistair Dyson, fanning his face with my dental card. 'What did your mother eat when she was having you? Custard and sugar cubes?'
'Bananas and ice-cream ?' I joined in.
'No.' He lit a cigarette. There's calcium in ice-cream.'
That bad, eh?'
I knew my dentist quite well. I knew him quite well because I had been coming down from Oxford about six times a year since I was ten so that he could put in and take out all the lousy braces and plates and other crap with which he tried to tame my mouth. Alistair was one of the youngest cosmetic denticians in the Wimpole Street area you know. (At his surgery he had the newest and most awesome equipment, including the retractable white space-ship sofa-chair which had now moulded itself to the contours of my body.) I liked him; he made me laugh. I respected him, too, for being (I imagined) the only British dentist to have exploited the choric, demonic-artificer aspect of the modern dentist, so popular in recent American fiction. Accordingly he poked all his least hideous women patients. But he was pushing thirty-five now.
'Nothing new, no. That front lower might need another support and there's the usual ... dozen fillings. No. Nothing new. You've just got crummy teeth, that's all. Fillings don't stay filled. Stay off the hard foods, won't you. Don't try any carrots or apples. Particularly no apples.'
'But isn't an apple a day supposed to —'
'That's all balls. A ginger-beer every other year will keep me away just as effectively as far as vitamins are concerned, and as for hardening them up, you're past all that.'
'Fascinating.'
'Watch the steaks, too. And don't get any ideas about chewing-gum, unless you want it to turn crunchy.'
'When I'm twenty-five,' I said, 'I'll be living off soup.'
'You'll be fed through a straw.'
'Or intravenously.'
'They'll stop decaying soon, though. You just wait till your gums recede.'
'Don't even talk about it.'
We laughed. He sat on a stool by the washbasin and flicked his cigarette out of the window. 'Don't you mind?'
'Not much. Not in the end. Do most people mind much?'
'Yes, and in a solemn kind of way. That's why you make a change. You get tired of telling these trenchy old girls that their mouths are apple-pie when they know as well as you do that the quicker they switch to chompers the better for all concerned. Especially better for me." He went over to the desk and took out his prescription pad. 'Mandrax?'
'Please.'
'Thirty?'
'If that's okay. And could you fit me in early for those fillings? Just do the more gaping ones. The rest can wait, can't they?'
'It's your mouth.'
'Yes. Well, I've got Oxford Entrance next month.'
'Oh? Watch the Mandrax, in that case. Tell Judy about the appointments. You'll need two, for the time being. Seen the doc about the asthma and things recently?'
'Yes, a couple of hours ago.' We exchanged shrugs. Dr Budrys had simply listened to me breathing, chucked my balls, got me to hawk on to a slide, and delivered a verdict rich in dotard optimism. I never believed him, anyway.
'Nothing spectacular. He winced now and again when he was stethoscoping me. He writes to my mother about it. I think he thinks I'm still about nine.'
Irrelevantly I thought of the time I came down to London for a dental appointment just after I started wearing long trousers. I delayed the visit as long as possible because I thought I would no longer be able to cry there - which I had invariably done, without feeling incongruous, when I wore shorts. I had cried, all the same.
'I'm twenty quite soon. Perhaps he'll level with me then.'
Alistair opened the door for me. That'll be nice,' he said.
Twenty past: 'Celia shits' (the Dean of St Patrick's)
Charles looks at the clo
ck out of the corner of his eye. Things start happening faster now.
'Hello? Western 2814? Hello? Is anyone there? Who is this?'
I hung up and redialled.
'937 2814. Hello? Hello. If this—'
I hung up and redialled.
'Hello? Gordon...'
'Now look here. I don't care —'
I hung up and redialled.
'If you—'
I hung up and redialled. Engaged. I hung up and redialled.
This is the operator. We —'
I hung up.
'Well, thank you, Mrs Seth-Smith. And how are you ?'
'Very well. Why don't you go on upstairs ? Rachel is in her room.'
'Thank you. I shall.'
And on the way there I wondered how Rachel's mother contrived to take so little trouble with her appearance and yet exude so much vanity. The old black party-dresses she always wore looked as though they had been showered in fag ash and dabbed with powder-puffs. Her hair was like my father's in his I'm-not-going-bald period. And what stopped her shaving off that handle-bar moustache? It couldn't possibly have got that way without patient husbandry: pruning, clipping, waxing the ends. Perhaps she thought she was being foreign (hence the equatorial armpits), or perhaps Harry made her do it as a foil to his paunching-gigolo good looks.
Rachel wasn't in her room. I sat on the bed, in between all the crappy gonks and teddy-bears and dolls arrayed there. I had to pretend I liked them, and especially liked Rachel for liking them, so I took the welcome opportunity of doing them over now. 'How's Wollidog den?' I said. 'Where's your mummy, Winstonchester? How would your fwend Munchy like his fucking face—'
To a tuneless hum, Rachel entered the room, brushing her hair, swaying and dipping her head to let it all hang down. I found that in my enthusiasm I had twisted off the ear of a minor golliwog. I put it in my pocket as I stood up. Rachel screamed briefly, quite without alarm, and ran over.
It was more than a week since The Pull, and, for the second Thursday running, I had come on to Rachel's after my class with Bellamy. (Bellamy now tended to be in a stupor of pink gin and sexual excitement by the time I arrived; the class consisted of his pleas that I should not do any work, because I was so brilliant and marvellous, so fucking handsome, etc.) I didn't mind coming here, and Rachel said it solaced her mother. Mrs Seth-Smith was 'very fond' of DeForest and had been 'very upset' when I made Rachel cool him (but, in fairness, not half as upset as DeForest had been).