“Our eyes are frosted glass, the events of the world a blur which can only be interpreted by pushing them through a Tao of Physics, to separate the inseparable and make them contingent and yet separate.”
I am his. I am the one he wants. I am. I am she he wanted. There was only ever me. I was. I know my power. I am the temptress. I am mine. The mistress. The flesh he needed. Light. Bright. Gold and white. I am his flesh. The star he followed. In my light I watched him undress. Emerge the long unfurling flesh, unhinging. Falling from out the pressed clothes. Birthing this man for me. Exquisite as the first fragile wing. Watched him come over. Stands looking at me. Those strange eyes! I know he wants to feed on me, inside me. I wait for his touch. He comes. I open. Waiting. Waiting. I still wait for his touch. I still dream about his touch. Wake up, his name a cry. Have to bite my lip. He’s heavy in me. I carry him. I carry his memory, the memory of the flesh behind the flesh. He was mine. I watched him curl into me, the dark tan of his back entering my thigh. God, the strength of his weight! They are above me again, circling with their blades cutting the blue flesh. The crowds wait, drinking outside the door. They know what I need, what my body needs, what my mind needs. Need him. I am driven by my need for him. My hand drops and I am dripping. Always he could make me. Just a look. Across the room. Through the glass. Always. I am the one he wanted. He used to call me from the car. Always the first to open on his tongue. I am the one he named his own. Look at me. I am the woman he matched with his heart. Heart beats, beats, beats, it beats. His song beats.
Spring was opening the first time I saw Alli, the world forced into waking from its temporary grave, with bud, beast and bird adding to the rising chorus; another pilgrimage was unfolding. Alli was in the office she had temporarily invaded; she was redesigning the main sales room with her own desk throned against the top wall. A frosted glass partition divided us. But I remember her head turned as I walked past. She watched me as I strode along the corridor towards the exit, and feeling her gaze upon me I returned the look, caught her refracted fractured eyes through the glass briefly, the length just sufficient for that first impression to harden, bury itself in my memory.
At the time I was freelancing for a promotional company in Wembley. Its office was in the middle of a vast, concrete estate, one of many, lining the North Circular Road as it achingly wound its slow way to the Hangar Lane roundabout. The first trip there completely defeated me. The roads were a complex web, the secretary laughing as I explained on the mobile that I’d turned exactly where she’d instructed me to, the dead end in front of me not looking at all like the office she was describing.
-You should’ve a taken a left into the estate, then a sharp left and right, another right and we’re straight in front of you. You did take a left past the tower block, didn't you?
-Yes, I’m sure, I almost wept into the mouthpiece. I spelt it out to her; I am not in front of your building.
-It seems you’re lost. Is there someone you can ask?
I could have told her I was asking someone, the useless bitch, but I kept my mouth shut. This was not the moment to release my frustrations. Through gritted teeth I told her I would find someone, and as luck would have it an old man came tottering up towards me. The poor bastard looked as if he was on his last trip. But I stopped him anyway (my grandfather used to say that those astride the grave know the way to the ends of the universe).
He stood salivating for a minute, before pointing vaguely and saying, These roads, they’re a right mess they are, turnings everywhere, dead ends and bloody one way systems. His voice rose a notch, Fucking developers with their fucking loopy ideas. Who needs roundabouts? Fucking shits. He was now almost shouting, and I was beginning to regret having interrupted such an intellect just to ask for directions. Maybe the finer points of retarding nuclear fission would have been a better question? But, he then continued. In a calmer voice he said, Everyone gets lost in here, even the bloody cab drivers. What you're looking for I think is over there, just behind that building there. Try that way. His finger pointed uncertainly past the massed buildings.
He should have added ‘Good luck’ I thought as I tried first ‘that way,’ then another and then another. Finally when my head couldn’t distinguish one grey façade from another I was there, and that’s where it started, this story, in a grey building in a grey estate in a grey part of one of the most decrepit areas of London.
Ken, my business partner, and I had been there two months, our task to install a new streamlined ordering system, when the new MD, a friend and an old client of Ken’s, having swept the old company guard away, began his search for a new office manager.
Alli was a friend of Rachel, one of the saleswomen. Rachel was good at her job, her loud voice heard across the corridor in the accounts room, cajoling, beguiling, getting that most important first meeting with clients; in her first month she brought in more business than all the other sales staff combined. It was these monthly figures that filtered her into my attention. Apart from managing the computer systems I also had the task of analysing the sales returns and compiling then into numbers the MD could easily digest and her name was always at the top.
You couldn’t miss Rachel. She was a big woman, a crazy scaffolding of flesh. She reminded me of an African bush woman, carrying her fat on her backside, a store of food against the lean winter. A smooth round face, hair the colour of straw, and thick throaty voice. Her laugh, big and rounded like her flesh, completed the plantular package. She walked like an African too, her backside rolling crazily, threatening unilateral independence as she strode up and down the main corridor. Word around the company was that she’d lived in South Africa for a while; she certainly carried that look of inbred superiority which marked the brute features of the incestuous Afrikaaner. And she also possessed an arrogance which immediately shifted her into a box, for me at least, marked ‘Do not approach – If you do then at your own risk’. But she was an amazing saleswoman; women always are, and it wasn’t hard to imagine her in the veldt trekking to some remote village in the hope of finding new customers for a range of unwanted lingerie, hordes of native children opening and closing around her like fields of wheat.
My wife compared me to an African; not because I’m smoothly dark, or that I’m mythically endowed; there was another reason. We attended weddings, those of family, friends and some that we just gate-crashed. They were all loud Punjabi affairs. Once the religious ceremony was over, the floor cleared of the white sheets, and the Guru Granth Sahib taken away, the tables laid around the perimeters of the hall, the band would take the stage. They were invariably longhaired youths, invariably from Birmingham, and invariably without rhythm, musical and otherwise, the lack of which they aptly demonstrated while they slithered about on the smoking stage in their silver leotards. But that never mattered; the bride and groom would be pulled, or rather shoved, onto the dance-floor, the rest of the party would follow, and my wife would guide me onto the dance floor, laughing at my attempts to co-ordinate my rebellious limbs.
-You dance like a broken African, she told me as she smoothly sashayed around me, the way you wave your bum. Do this, she would prompt me, take hold of my hands and together we weaved across the floor my feet tripping over themselves in a desperate effort to imitate hers.
Who was my wife? How many wives did I have? My memory tells me Azurra was the first. I married her at 26, after prolonged pressure to sire a son, or soon, I was told, my seed would be of no use to any creature. I remember Azurra’s eyes and her patrician nose. Her father’s nose she carried. Proud. Italian empress, the mother of wolves. But her eyes! Strange they were, gold, green and brown, lit from the inside, the eyes of night animals, of hunters. And shit, could she hunt!
When I started working in Wembley I’d been married for nearly four years. It was a space full of turmoil, albeit constructive I should say, since I felt stronger within myself, almost complete, a state I could not have dreamt of when I first met her. Let me explain; I was the younger of twins; my brother (everyone called him the Elder, though he’d emerged into the world only a few minutes before me) was the jewel in my parent's crown, a chemical engineer who’d completed his PhD, and reached the peak of his profession while I (known to all and sundry as the Yunger, despite my protests that they use my legal name) still scrabbled with words, dreamt of that one word to finally lay me open before, and connect to, Him.
-You want to be a writer? My father made no attempt to hide his disbelief. Why? He left the question to hang for a moment before he continued; A bloody writer! He was shaking his head. No money in that. You can’t make money writing. No one’s going to buy your fantasies. And he emphasised “your”, holding it on his tongue as if it were a sour remnant from yesterday’s curry. Every fool with a pen is out there trying to write. Get a grip on your life!
Was my confidence dented? No. The perfume of the words spinning within my skull rose intoxicating, birthing a syntax that could not be strangled by the dark snakes he threw at me. I sensed the world was quivering for my semen. But there was more to come:
-Stick to something solid; a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, or better still something in science. Just look at your twin. See how well he’s doing: a PhD, paid trips all over the world, people calling him ‘Sir’. He, the finger was raised to the heavens, is being pulled by a bright star. You, my shortsighted wordspit, have no focus. You need to concentrate, Yunger, have a direction. Forget this flighty art crap. Science is where the money is.
I listened, never reminding him of his own efforts at journalism, the weekly columns he sent to ‘The New Nation’ neatly stacked in his cabinets, and which he would read to his friends, standing next to the photographs of him opening the local temple, whenever they dropped by. I listened to him, never reminding him of those days when he’d stood me up on the table to recite the stories, that he himself had taught me, to these same friends while they drank and talked. This was not a fear on my part but rather a thought that the flower he was now trying to prune was of his own making.
Only my interest in computers and finance kept me a faded moon in the orbit of my father's ambitions – and I have to say now that all that I’ve done has been with his shadow hanging in the far corner of my room, a constant reminder that I was all he had wanted me to be, that I had never belonged to myself. I could have shrivelled and slept while I listened to him preach. But I did not. At the time it was my wife who gave me the focus, and the edge to deflect the barbs that daily flew my way. I listened to my father from within my skull, eyes focussed at the glittering centre of the universe that welled in her heart. I saw her bright shadow cut through the clouds my father carried with him. She was my shield, the hand that shaped my mould then and still continues to do so now. She is, was…..but back to the narrative, there will be ample time to explain. (A fly crosses my sight. Instinctively my hand reaches out and crushes it against the table top; that is all that’s needed to bury the past; yet time weaves criss-crossing into my eyes and I’m blinded by the glare. Let me see…..where was I?)
Despite Rachel's efforts the sales took a dive.
-No one’s bothering, Rachel explained. Have a look at the telephone bills; I’m the only one making any effort to call new people. And you can't blame them. Ken and you and your dear friend Terry are here to cut costs. You’re going to lay off half these people. They know that, they’re not stupid. So why should they bother picking up the phones? They don’t need to do diddly squat when they know their time’s come?
She, like us, was a freelance, the others on fixed wages with the odd commissions thrown in here and there. And she was right: the sales director and his assistant were sacked; they would have left anyway, the differences between their vision of the company and that of the new MD's irreconcilable. A new man was promoted from within the sales pool. But there was still something missing, a much needed cog which would have ensured the smooth running of what was now an all women’s sales' team.
-What’s needed is an office manager, suggested Ken. There’re too many women in that office. They need someone to push them, stop them chattering all the time. And it's got to be another woman. With a smile he added, A man hasn’t a chance in hell of controlling them. It’s got to be one of their own.
The MD took his advice and advertised for an Office Manager.
A stream of people came and went. None was chosen.
Rachel brought in Alli.
I’d taken no notice of the women in the office, acknowledged their presence in the mornings with the customary 'hello', was caught up in my webbed world, my marriage, the building of the great library slowly taking shape in my dome, and of course in the more mundane, the possibilities of making money. I saw the women; I couldn’t miss them, middle-aged, in their twenties, already old, faces dried channels filled with rotting powders. I saw them and yet I didn’t see them. They were simply there, part of moments whose significance I am only now unravelling. At the time they were simply shadows with Mona Lisa smiles co-existing with my shadow. Morning, I’d say and back came the reply: Morning.
This is not to say I didn’t notice the interest in some of the eyes. I was, after all, only a man. Man and dick can’t be separated. Stirred the muscle whenever a fuckable piece of ass went past; the eyes might not have been looking but that levered eye was certainly sniffing. There was one woman, deep purple dyed hair in her forties, very attractive but with a hunger in her eyes that pulled and repelled me with equal measure. Whenever I went into the sales office she looked up, hooked me, called me over – this new system, she said, when’s it ever going to work? Will it ever be as good as the one she was used to? – and asked me to massage her shoulders, said she had heard how good I was with my hands and oooh, just there, love, just there; I felt her through her blouse, the flesh, soft with suppressed desire, trembling under my fingertips, transmitting its urgency, wave after wave of a thousand year old dry music of loneliness, the song of a dry cunt, and I told myself this passion was not for me; I stayed my distance.
I allowed the women to stay just women. I was not ready for their damage; I was still being constructed by Azurra, we were still trying to discover all of the two hundred and eleven orifices the Incas had documented, and the Indian had illustrated. I allowed the women to remain ghosts. Our lines mingled only briefly as we walked through the corridors and having passed resumed their separateness; we touched without touching, talked without talking, were there under the same roof without being there.
Life continued: Spring began to edge the roads in green, push back the days so the sun could warm the corpses sprouting green past the dark winter hours; eyes closed to everything I went about the business of ensuring the systems were running smoothly, the accounting ledgers functioning properly, the reports producing the relevant figures, and generally assuming, as usual, that I was one of the more important cogs in the organisation.
The MD hired Alli.
Alli made her presence felt immediately.
Her perfume, even at this distance in time, was different to that of the others, was altogether more sensual, possessed the allure of the rarest orchid, an iciness contradicted by its subtle heat. She looked like the phalaenopsis that sits now on my window, the buds straining to be kissed by the diluted morning sun, exploding as the light penetrates into the blood greening in their thin stems. But this is on hindsight - at that time she was just one of the women who I saw through the haze of that dreamy summer. Every time I look at these flowers I am reminded of her mouth, the soft curve of her – Is there a cure for the past? I think not and even though I do not want to have her memories rise they are everywhere around me, moved into my present by my present - the swirling dust of the bedroom shot through with her name, the shadows filled with her laughter - and I need those memories to tell this story. This story is about her, a portrait of her and her and her, the women who have built me with themselves, their flesh mine, and mine theirs.
Alli carried the look of one used to getting her own way.
Now every morning she was the first in the building. Before the door had always been shut when I arrived, but now the lights greeted me, the heat beating gently on my face as I passed into the grey building, the rooms warm as I entered and the dank desperate smell of the place hidden under the mask of her perfume. And she, this siren casting her song so early in the sticky day? She was seated at her desk, throned, the room having been reorganised; she, with her furniture, now occupied one whole wall, the head just looking up as I passed, just a cursory glance.
For a week, maybe two, that was all, a glance, a look, no more, nothing to stay the eye, have it linger.
The next time I looked, really looked, was when she came wanting to use my laptop; ‘to write some letters,’ she explained - all the other computers were in use (looking through the glass I saw the truncated heads of the women, eyes fixed onto their screens) and these letters were urgent, and she knew that one of my ‘duties was to help in the smooth functioning of the office.’ I did not recall letter writing being listed in my contract, but I stayed silent. Sitting in the office, the door closed, blinds down, the reports were highly confidential, she told me, I spent five minutes explaining the basics of the word-processing software on the machine. She leant over my shoulder as I did so, and I smelt her, turning noticed her fully for the first time. Her eyes were grey-green, specks of yellow floating in them, the hair the gold of sunset, her nose sharp, the skin on the bridge slightly peeling, the lips full. I knew she had not slept for days. There were the faintest of circles beneath her eyes. And she looked old, worn out, thin lines cracking the skin - this woman could hold no attraction for me, I thought, but already the pressure of her breath upon my neck was forcing me to breathe carefully.
-Show me how to print these letters.
The smell of mints carried to me on her breath. She came with a full bag every morning. Every time I passed her office she was popping another into her mouth. Now that I can shift through these moments I cannot recall her eating anything else in the office. And now her breath was beating onto my face. Wings. Dark fingers. Searching, piercing, pulling at the nails that kept me together. Dark and darker, her breath.
I tried to ignore it, but behind it was her heat. That burnt me. I was surprised. It was similar to the heat of Delhi in high summer, a burning furnace. Stripped the soul bare, leaving the flesh smoking in its wake. I felt the first knock on the bars surrounding my heart, but I concentrated on the screen. My fingers stretched across the keyboard like spindly threads. Behind me I sensed her smile.
-I want them perfect, she said. Must be the right font, the right weight, the right spacing.
Her words, word after word, weighted beyond words tiding hit the side of my face. In the glass Medusa stared at me. I was stone and flesh. I let myself be touched. Delicious, the heat, the branding, the smell of flesh being scorched and shrivelled. My cheeks were aglow. I looked straight at the screen. I felt her stare – I wanted to turn and return her look but instead I fixed my eyes on the letter.
I sent the job to the printer convinced her needs were captured.
-That doesn’t look right, she laughed retrieving the paper and holding it up for me; a gabble of mischievous letters stared back at me, a script scrambled by the barrier between the laptop and the hammer.
I tried again. Showed her the preview. It looked perfect. She said it was perfect. But that bastard printer would not obey, refused to print what the screen showed, what she wanted, the fraudulent letters betraying me.
-It’s just a matter of the set-up, I told her not wanting my skills to be questioned and she nodded in agreement, the yellow flecks in her eyes dancing before an unseen storm.
Once more, then again, and again.
She stands at my back touching me without touching me; her breathing, her perfume, her shadow, the rustle of her clothes crept into me and nested beneath my brow, and I could hardly breathe (even now I rest my head in my palms and try to ease the pain in my chest). I spent an hour, more, printing the letters to her satisfaction, all the time a small voice in my head telling me I should leave, let her complete the job by herself, that I was entering a space belonging to Scylla. But there was nothing urgent requiring my attention elsewhere, nothing that could not be put aside for another hour, and besides she was just a woman, I told myself, just another ghostly body in an office full of ghostly bodies. There could not be any harm in staying an hour in that closed office with her.
That night, on the way home, I was waiting at a set of traffic lights on Farringdon Road, had just passed the Guardian building, when the scent of her breath once more assailed me. I remembered the heat of her closeness. The sudden touch of mint and sweat! The flowering was so vivid that I turned expecting her next to me. Cars blossomed and died. An impatient honking broke through her perfume. The lights were green and obviously I’d been stationary for a millisecond too long. I moved past, hurriedly opening the windows; my wife was expecting me outside her office and I wanted nothing of Alli in the car, nothing to bend the straight road I saw ahead of me.
A thread of guilt rippled along my back, scurried inside my stomach when I saw my wife; she was indistinguishable from the grey stone, a thin line only I could have recognised, the other cars speeding past without notice. The lights in her office were still on and I could see the figures of her colleagues scrabbling behind the counters finishing the day’s reckoning.
In the four years of my marriage no other woman had stepped, had been allowed to step, into my eyes. There had been women into whose eyes I had stepped – male colleagues aghast at my indifference later castigated me for not taking up the chances to slip my dick into the proffered flesh - and I, blissfully ignorant, had let my image dry in the moist breasts. Watching Azurra, waiting for the traffic to allow me to swing the car onto her side of the road, I felt guilty for allowing another to creep into the space reserved for her; it was almost as if the first creaking of the door leading to another world was weighing on my mind, but I was not to know what lay on the other side; the door was still firmly shut.
I loved her, I loved her, I told myself as she walked over to the car. I loved this woman and no other. I love you, I voiced to the figure approaching the window, I love you.
She looked over me, passed around me, without noticing the soundless whisper of my love; the song, a voice whispered inside me, of an out-of season bird. She waited on the other side. I stepped out, and walking quickly to her opened the door, and watched her slither into the seat. My hands had wanted to touch her, but they stopped short. Straightening I waited for my ghosts to disperse.
Our eyes still had not met. Inside the car I watched her close her eyes. I heard her breath soften. I waited for her scent to bring her into me. I waited.
-Are we going home? Her voice carried the tiredness of the day, was tinged with the colours of autumn.
To alleviate my guilt I stopped at a Chinese restaurant in Greenwich, one we’d discovered in our continuing quest for the perfect take-away, and ordered a plate of spare ribs - the first time it’d been laid in front of us the size and the quantity truly astounding, the second time slightly less so, had diminished each subsequent time, but still it held an attraction and continued to do so. Sipping the house white wine discussed our respective days while waiting for the inevitable chicken curry with cashew nuts, the special fried rice and the deep fried beef, succulent strips coated with honey (a personal addiction) that never failed to relax us.
She talked about the week’s cashing up, how she was ten pounds short, and how she suspected it had been the black woman she’d served two days before. The woman went laughing, looking back as if expecting to be called back.
-There’s no honesty left in the world, Azurra said. Me, I’d have given the money back. It doesn’t belong to her. And now it’s my problem. I’m short this week and it’ll go into my record.
To the traces of her I listened, the groove she’s played these last four years. Master of my song she had become, mistress to the voices that threatened my fall every moment. Each of my days was yesterday; each day was tomorrow. I wanted to be here now, and by listening to the animated voice I was. I listened to her, I watched her.
Her eyes were brown and green and yellow, a startling colour of mixes - her father called them ‘dog eyes’. The eyes of a huntress. They glowed in the day and were my moon at night. The days slumbered when I looked into them, the nights were shaded by their light. These were the eyes that had hunted me down, chased me through the London streets, come searing to my desk in north London when I joked that she was not for me. I had been made hers, her animal eyes growling at my timid retreat. She chased me down, that woman, this wife of mine; she chased away the rivals grazing on my borders, bringing light to the sleeping spores of my flesh. With her they breathed, I breathed, my life was coloured green.
Much of her face had been inherited from her father, especially the large Italian nose, and I could see his influence in the way she moved and talked, a masculinity barely tamed by her femininity, yet possessing the same unfettered joy for living. I watched her as she finished her food and leant across the table to maraud into my plate; so she had entered into my life, ravenous, a hunger that burst the umbilical tying me to my twin and my mother. This woman lived in my heart; there’d been no room for any one else; her blood was the river I took my oxygen from. Yet, sitting there in the restaurant, as her hand reached for a honeyed rib I saw another’s face spring into the plate. The glazed meat suddenly transformed into the reclined form of Alli; she lay there in the bowl, glistening with oil and fat, her flesh, rippled by my eye, whispering to be held. My hand rose involuntarily. It fell back. I bit my lip to keep from crying out. I watched, bizarrely fascinated, as Azurra reached out and took up a piece, broke off a portion of Alli’s breast, the honey, dripping from it, rising with it, still attached to the plate, pulling my eyes up the shining thread, past her mouth, past the sharp teeth, the tongue, the throat, the white bone, into Alli, the white shore whose soft voice was surfing into me, bringing to me the scent of strange spices. Voices circled looking for dead meat inside my head; I looked at my hands and could no longer see where I ended and she began, where they, the black tongues, began, there were so many shadows cutting the light from my eyes.
Then Azurra was touching me, I felt her reaching into my dry well, telling me we must be leaving, her eyes still hungry, the sharp glitters promising.
I shook my head clear and left Alli half-eaten in the restaurant, her minty breath forgotten in the chill of the evening by the urgency of Azurra’s fingers.
I held her close all night, lay awake until I heard her breathing soften, felt her heat increase and soften into me, and burning I lay with her till the early hours of dawn when sleep finally closed my eyes.
