Come Let Us Sing Anyway Page 10

  We have no co-ordination. It doesn’t matter. It’s play. We’re purring. Cleaning whiskers. They pull my panties off, ripping fabric. We are all laughing like children. Tails wave in the air. I am on the floor, blue music and blue smoke and blue arms cradling me in the queer light. Joshua spreads my legs and dips his head into me, licking me thoughtfully. I push my hips into his face. He slips his fingers inside me and rubs the moisture across my lips. Che leans over me, sucking my mouth. He groans against my cheek. He is naked too. His cock is shorter than Joshua’s, but thicker, and he pushes his erection away from his belly again and again, an odd urgency. I reach for him, wanting to feel him, but he pins my hands back to the floor.

  ‘You work too hard,’ he whispers into my hair.

  I can’t disagree; I can’t concentrate. Joshua’s tongue is so thick, inside me, up and down my thighs. I want to grab his head and fuck his mouth, but I can’t move. Che is kissing me upside down, his teeth are in my neck, his paws spread on mine. I am leaping up the rungs of a ladder, pussy wetter and wetter.

  ‘Tell him to suck me,’ I beg.

  ‘Suck her…’ Che whispers to his friend.

  Joshua groans into my crotch. He is tossing his head side to side. No one has eaten me like this before. I’m up the ladder. I am at the top of the fucking ladder, I am falling over the ladder.

  They have no mercy. None at all. I cum in Joshua’s mouth and minutes later Che is over me, sliding into me, one sure movement, bam, like a fireball. I cling to his back as he rides me, I can feel them turning me, like a sculpture. I am riding him now, just slow and easy. I can feel liquid clay dripping down me, down the crack of my ass, and I know what Joshua means to do. My shoulders freeze.

  ‘Let me,’ he breathes against my neck.

  ‘But… but…’ I have an absurd fear about cleanliness. Did I wash properly? Do I smell good? Che is bucking inside me, throbbing.

  ‘Just let me, Simone…’ Joshua murmurs. ‘Stop thinking.’

  I push my ass back into him and he begins to slide into me. I breathe. I think good thoughts, hot thoughts. I will myself to relax, as more inches invade me.

  Che stops, abruptly. He grabs my hips, makes me stop. Confused, frustrated, I look down into his face. Joshua has stopped too. Fear swirls in me. They are regretting it, regretting me.

  Then I understand.

  They can feel each other. There is only a thin layer of me between them, and a strange kind of confusion in Che’s eyes. I wait. I cannot bear the moment; my body is crying for movement. But I wait. They have never thought of going this far, and because of this, they are afraid. Of what it shows them. Of what it shows me.

  Che lets go of my hips and spreads his hands away from the sides of his body. Joshua’s hands are on my shoulders. We are all very still. The music has stopped. There is only the sound of us breathing.

  Joshua’s hand slides down to the floor as Che’s hand comes up towards it. They touch palms, fingers lingering.

  I watch, fascinated. It is so brief.

  Che pushes up inside me, just a small movement. My pussy grabs him, hard.

  Joshua sighs. ‘You like what he’s doing to you?’

  ‘Oh yes…’ I moan.

  Joshua pulls his penis out of me, halfway out. Then back into me again, so slowly, so gently, I can only gulp air.

  Che smiles up at me as his friend sinks home.

  ‘You like how he feels?’ he says.

  And they’re fine.

  They double-fuck me as if they have been doing it all their lives. In the minutes it takes, in the strange hours it takes, in the years that we all fuck and love each other, it feels as if a million hands are in my hair, a thousand lips on my skin. I am speaking in tongues, to the slap of thighs, I am calling out that old plea, the only thing right in this moment. I give in. I demand.

  ‘Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!’ I say.

  And in some part of them, they fuck each other too.

  *

  They dress me in the blue light, stroking every pubic hair into place, pulling my panties up my legs, scattering kisses along my back as they hook my bra, smoothing my skin, soothing my ass.

  We sit on the floor, look at Project X and smile at each other. They are not dogs. They are lions. I hold up my head in the face of their grace and their beauty. I can’t wait to tell Marcia.

  For I am a lion, too.

  ‘Art,’ I say.

  We hold hands, all of us.

  THE WOMAN WHO LIVED

  IN A RESTAURANT

  One high day in February, a woman walks into a two-tier restaurant on a corner of her busy neighbourhood, sits down at the worst table – the one with the blind spot, a few feet too close to the kitchen’s swinging door – and stays there.

  She stays there forever.

  She wears a crisp cotton white shirt with a good collar and cuffs and a soft black skirt that can be hiked up easy. She has careful dreadlocks strung with silver beads – the best hairstyle to take into forever. There is no more jewellery; her skin is naked and moist. She keeps a tiny pair of white socks in her handbag and, in the cold months, she slips them onto her bare feet.

  She watches the waiters, puppeting to and fro, the muscles in their asses tightening and relaxing, thumbing coin and paper tips, tumbling up and down the stairs and past her to the kitchen, careful not to touch. The maître d’ has a big belly and so does the chef, who is also the owner of the restaurant. Nobody holds it against them; they work very long hours and the chef’s food is extremely fine; this is not fat, it is gravitas.

  ‘Smile, smile,’ the maître d’ says to everybody, staff and customers alike; he has been here the longest and she never hears him say much more in front of house, although you would have thought he might.

  She goes to the restroom in the mornings and evenings, to wash her skin and to put elegant slivers of fresh oatmeal soap to her throat and armpits. She nods at the diners, who bring children and lovers and have arguments and complain and compliment the food – and some get drunk, and then there’s the sound of vomiting from the bathroom that makes her wince. So many come to propose marriage she can spot them on sight: the men lick their lips and brandish their moustaches and crunch their balls in their hands. They all flourish the ring in the same way, like waiters setting down the pièce de résistance – fresh steak tartare or twisted sugar confections that attract the light. Their women – provided they are pleased – do identical neck rolls and shoulder raises and matching squeals. Like a set of jewellery she thinks, all shining eyes, although one year a woman became very angry and crushed her good glass into the table top.

  ‘I told you not to kill it with this lovey-dovey shit!’ she yelled at the moustachioed man, and stalked out. The man sat with the napkin under his chin, making a soft, white beard. The napkins are of very good quality.

  ‘Hush,’ said the restaurant woman, like she was rocking the small pieces of the leftover man. The people around them ate on, and tried to ignore the embarrassed, shattered glass.

  ‘What shall I do?’ he asked, rubbing his mouth with the napkin.

  ‘Love is what it is.’ She stretched one finger skyward, as if offering an architectural suggestion.

  He hurried out, his shoes making scuffling noises, like mice.

  *

  These days she must rock from cheek to cheek to prevent sores. But mostly she sits and waits and smiles to herself and her lips remind the male waiters of the entrails of a plum, so juicy and broken open. They see that she is not young, although she has good breasts and healthy breath. Watch how she taps her fingers on the table and handles the glass stem, they whisper. This is a woman of authority. She has been somebody. Some of the waitresses weep, but most of them hiss that she is a fool.

  ‘Mind the chef kill you,’ the line cook whispers.

  One waitress deliberately spills fragrant, scalding Jamaican coffee onto the woman’s wrist. The woman rubs her burned flesh and smiles. The waitress shudders at her happy brown eyes.


  ‘Stupid bitch,’ the waitress hisses. ‘Why are you here?’

  She is fired the next day, as are all waitresses who hate the woman.

  *

  A young male waiter fills the vacancy – three years and thirteen hours after the woman arrived to live in the restaurant. She sees him come in for the interview, nervous with his thick curly hair and handsome bow legs.

  On his first day, the waiter comes running to the pass to say that he has seen a woman bathing in the restroom sink, and that her body was long and honeyed and gleaming in the early light coming through the back window. He didn’t mean to see her, really, he says. He was dying for a piss and opened the wrong door.

  What he does not say is this. That when he opened the door, the woman was sitting naked, with her shoulder blades propped up against the wall between the cubicles. Her legs were spread so far apart that the muscles inside her thighs were jumping. She had the prettiest pussy he’s ever seen, so perpendicular and soft that he had to shade his eyes and take a breath, and then, without knowing he was capable of such a thing, he stopped and stared.

  ‘Put simply,’ he says to his closest friend, that night, while drinking good beer and wine, ‘she was too far gone to stop.’

  They sigh, together.

  The woman, who had been rolling her nipples between her fingers before he came in, put a hand between her legs. At first he thought she was covering herself, but then he saw the expression on her face and realised that this was a lust he’d never seen before. The woman took her second and third fingers and rubbed between her legs so fast and hard that the waiter, who thought he’d seen a woman orgasm before this, suddenly doubted himself and kept watching to make sure. In the dawn, the woman’s locks could have been on fire and even the shining tiles on the bathroom floor seemed to ululate to help her.

  ‘Ah,’ said the woman. ‘Oh.’

  The smallest sound, so quiet. It was like a mouthful of truffle or a perfect pomegranate seed on the tongue: of an unmistakeable quality.

  *

  Weeks pass, and the new waiter is miserable, not least because he knows now that he has never made a woman orgasm.

  ‘What is she doing here, hardly ever moving from her seat? Does she not have a home?’

  ‘Mind the chef kill you,’ they whisper around him.

  Despite their warnings he rages on, making the soup too peppery and the napkins rough.

  Finally, the maître d’ tells him the story, in between cold glasses of water, changing tarnished forks and cutting children’s potato cakes into four pieces each. All through it, the waiter tries not to look at the woman under his eyelashes, although when he does, she still glows and when the chef sends her an edible flower salad for her luncheon, he can still smell the salt on her second and third fingers when he puts it down in front of her.

  The maître d’ explains that the story is in the menus, if you read them closely enough.

  The chef is the kind of man who is in love with his work. He has owned the restaurant for twenty-two years and it is everything. He creates ever more beautiful and tasty dishes; he admires the beams and wall fixtures and runs loving fingers over the icy water jugs and bunches of fresh beans in the kitchen. The mushrooms are cleaned with a specially crafted brush. Hours must be spent on the streets and in markets talking with butchers and local fishermen so that the restaurant has the freshest, most rare ingredients. Each tile in the floor has been hand-painted. Each window-sash handmade. He has been known to stroke the carpet on the stairs, and he knows the name and taste buds of every regular customer.

  He is a happy and most successful man.

  But then he met the gleaming, honeyed woman in a farmers’ market. She was buying a creamy goat’s cheese and several wild mangoes, and he wasn’t ever able to say why, but he stopped to talk and point out the various colours of the dying sun above the market. The gathering day drew purple shadows over the woman, like bruises, and he liked her very much indeed. He thought there was something missing from his life, and that he could get it from her.

  At first the chef did not worry, says the maître d’ to the young waiter. He knew that he could love, because he loved the restaurant, and though some might say one cannot love a restaurant the way one loves a woman, both take time and attention, so there we are.

  ‘There we are, where?’ snaps the waiter. ‘We are not anywhere. Why is that woman sitting there for years?’

  ‘You understand nothing,’ says the maître d’. ‘You should wait for the rest of the story.’

  The chef, says the maître d, prepared for change. He would do so-and-so at a different time, so he would be able to kiss the woman. And this or that ingredient – well, after he and the woman became lovers, he would not be able to rise quite so early to collect it, so they would have to make do with another version of the dish. And so on. The chef brought the woman to see the restaurant and she sat on its couches and chairs, and admired its warm stoves and brightly coloured walls. She brought several good and mildly expensive paintings, as obeisance, and very good flowers – bird of paradise and cross-breed orchids – and lovingly arranged them in bowls. But even then, it seemed, she knew something. She stayed out of the kitchen when the chef was busy, even when he smiled and called her in.

  ‘The steam will play havoc with my hair, darling,’ she said, for these were the days when she hot-comb straightened it.

  ‘We all knew it was coming, of course,’ says the maître d’, signalling for the boys to peel the potatoes louder and to bang the pots, so that the chef cannot hear his gossiping. ‘We all knew, for after all, which sensible man introduces his girlfriend to his wife?’

  Three months after meeting, the sweethearts decided to consummate their affair. On that fated night of intention, the woman arrived for dinner and stayed until one am, which was as early as the chef would close. The staff waited to be dismissed, glad for a break and glad for the lovers. The chef tried to stop looking like a cat with several litres of fresh cream – and tried to stop sweating. The woman, ah, so sweet she was, nervous and happy. They were transformed in their anticipation of the lovemaking, like young things, though neither of them young.

  They were leaving through the front door when the restaurant moved two inches to the right.

  ‘That’s correct. We all felt it, standing there,’ says the maître d’. ‘It is hard to explain, even today, and the architect who came to see the torn window frames and the shattered tiles said it was an earthquake, albeit a very localised and small one. Electrics twisted, stove mashed, water from burst pipes running down the coral dining room walls. They opened the crooked fridges and out belched rotted fish and fowl, blackened, sweet with ruin, filling the air, making them all choke. So much money lost! Smile, smile, I told them all, but the sound! The plumbers said it was the pipes, and the electrician, she said it was the wiring, but no one knew, except us. The restaurant would not be left on its own, so it was crying.’

  ‘Will you not kiss me,’ said the woman, tugging at the chef, but no, he was unable.

  ‘We could go far away from here,’ she begged, but he looked at her as if she was mad.

  ‘I would not hurt her,’ he said, almost stern.

  ‘A restaurant?’ she said, and she tried to fit all her pain into those two words.

  ‘It is a good restaurant,’ he said. And turned back to work.

  The newly hired waiter interrupted the maître d’. He was almost stuttering in his outrage.

  ‘So-so-so –?’

  The maître d’ pulled a pig haunch close to him and began to burn the bristles on the hot stove. It was not his job, but he liked doing it.

  ‘So, the woman came to live here,’ he continued. ‘She stays here so that she can see the chef, and the restaurant keeps watch.’

  ‘But-but…’

  ‘They sit together, between service, and talk. They do not touch.’ The maître d’ smiled, almost sadly, tossing the hot pig from palm to palm. He shrugged towards the restroom. ‘
We have seen her too, my friend. It must be terribly frustrating.’

  *

  The woman becomes aware that something has changed. Truly, she has seen staff appalled before this. Seen them lounging around her, trying to get her attention. But this young waiter seems more determined, in the way of youth, and he keeps touching her.

  ‘Will you not come to the front door with me?’ he says, over her porridge breakfast, sent out strictly at 9.31 am. ‘There are pink blooms all over the front of the restaurant, and ivy, and it is so very good.’

  ‘You can describe it for me,’ she says, smiling and ripping her languid eyes away. There is lavender, sprinkled in an intricate pattern, on top of her porridge.

  The next day: ‘Come for a walk with me upstairs,’ he says. ‘To the balcony. It will be good for you to have the air. The chef’ – she moves her shoulders in delight at the sound of his name and slices into the waiter’s heart – ‘the chef, he has gone out to buy vegetables.’

  ‘ I know,’ she says. ‘He tells me everything that he does. But I’ll stay here. It will be better.’

  ‘Better than what?’

  She laughs, shifts, pats his shoulder.

  ‘Better than missing his return,’ she says, as if he is a stupid child. She gestures to the front door, which is clear because it is too early for the madness of diners. ‘I will see him with the sun against his back, and he assures me that from that distance, he can see the purple shadows on me. It will give us much pleasure.’

  *

  One afternoon, the waiter can control himself no longer. He pulls the woman to her feet, feeling her burning skin beneath his fingers. He is surprised to find the chef suddenly there, standing between them, belly glaring, his best knife tucked behind him. The waiter need say nothing more; his job, perhaps his life, is in jeopardy.

  But still he thinks of her. At night, he pulls himself raw. He thinks of her over and above him, and in time the fantasies become vile and violent things. In his desperation he can think of nothing but defiling her, mashing her lips against the wall of his bedroom. He becomes a whisperer, appals himself by hissing at her, like others before him. At first she cannot hear him when he mutters under his breath.