I suck her aftertaste from the crooks of my fingers; a delicate musk, sour-sweet, rosewood slicked with honey. Her smell lingers for hours after she leaves — my white linen sheets soak up the infusion of her body, the blend of sweat and synthetic tinctures. She saturates this space, as an unseen cloak smothering the stagnant air. She never wears the same perfume twice. Today’s polluted air had stripped her skin bare, and only the faintest whisper of cologne left it’s unmistakable trace nestled on the outline of her body sunken into the bed. Bergamot, lavender, patchouli, lemon, and salt. I breathe in dinner at a fish restaurant in Capri — sex in a lavender field — a failed 60s poet — empty revolution.
I never wash her clothes when she leaves them puddled on the floor. I scoop them up and bury my face in the folds of cotton, and breathe her in so hard it resembles sucking. I breathe in that golden miasma, the sweetest fruit that hangs onto each cotton fibre. I push the fabric against my nose and mouth. I speak fancies and whispers into the ribbons and straps. I let the waving wash of scents and colours lap against the shores of my senses, white and frothy — like a bundle of lambs. I breathe her in so deeply that the particles of her melt into my lungs. I want her smell inside of me.
The first time we met, I smelled her before my eyes held her. Civet, sweetened-sangria, strawberry, orange peel, maple sap, pomegranate, patchouli, tobacco, benzoin — deathly sweet, musky, and animalic. Eucharist. A smell like the Holy Mountain, like Suspiria, like Vertigo. Painted red-pink-purple flowers mutating into strips of ripped fabric, a dyed-red screen, unshakeable images. She smelled like a version of sex touched only through cinema; like a desire only produced through art, only made through making. She smelled like a time I don’t remember in a place never founded. She smelled like The Maiden.
We were at a house party hosted by a mutual friend, whom I had long held disdain but never dislike for. His lips were constantly seer-suckered, as if lemon rind coated the inner ring of his mouth. He spoke with a falling cadence wrung with a faux-insecurity, and he always wore a thin solid gold cuban link chain. He was always trying to convince me that I was wasting my time with psychoanalysis, it was dead thought, I was better than that sexually-maladjusted tripe, why not do real philosophy instead? He was undertaking a PhD at Kings, in metabolic thought in philosophy. When conversations at these parties inevitably turn to Marxism, he would bring up Marx’s ‘metabolic shift' awkwardly — as if he’s too worried to get the words wrong, or to breathe at the wrong points. Not for a lack of confidence, but for a fear of exposure. His parents are rich, I don’t know what they do, but he always hosts parties in flats dreamt up by some yearning architect.
Standing in the kitchen, with slanted ceilings punctuated with glass and wooden beams, I fiddle with a menthol cigarette brought back from a conference in New York. The French windows of his apartment house a view of London I’d rarely seen — the centre, with it’s beacons of trade, littered with firefly street lamps oozing a red-orange glow, a carpet of false stars — the wafting sounds of a new-age jazz band drift upwards from the nearby concert hall, embroidering the night-air. It would be beautiful if I could see it so, but instead it makes me nauseous. I step out, folding the concertina doors, onto the balcony. It stills does not seem beautiful to me. Through the wafts of menthol smoke, I smell her. That blood soaked eucharist, that choir of sexual depravity singing a hymn unwritten but felt in the vibrations of the air. I feel frozen by it. She stands next to me and pulls a rolled cigarette from an engraved silver box, gesturing for a light. We say nothing, and she makes no inclination that she will try. We puff in a suspended silence, accented by the whistle of nearby buses and the clamour of brass and drums. With a slight flicker of the lip corner, she throws the cigarette end off the balcony, and moves inside without glancing back. Her smell, that rapture, clung to the inside of my body like a worming parasite. Her smell left a trail of herself wherever she went like breadcrumbs to the witch’s house. And I could not but follow.
I remember as a child, waking up to the smell of a hung death that clung to the air of my bedroom. A fouling wisp of flesh, an ember of the once-living permeating every inhalation. A rotting stench, obscene in every conceivable manner, that rose from the hidden geometries of cheap wood nailed together haphazardly in the shape of my bed frame. It was painted white. After some time battling through the smell with each breath, I curled up from bed, sliding my little body out from the starched sheets. I wanted to find the source. It appeared to me as a beating heart, clutched from a chest, pulsating and ululating with a mutated scream dissolved into odorous malady. My bare feet, already littered with callouses from the summer’s sun-soaked liaisons, touched the dark wooden floor. Bent at the knees, my bones felt weakened with a rising fear — a sunrise bruised and bloody pushing itself through a dense thicket of black clouds, scorching the network of my arteries. I felt fear. Fear without sight is a carnal primal thing. A dark corner, a deep recess, an unknowable copse of cluttered corpses violently entangled at the unseen edges. Sweat pooled at my base of my neck. I bent down to croon beneath the half-broken slats that supported the mattress. There it was, in the far corner where the walls touch, in a flattened heap of half-dissolved flesh. Gelatinous matter seeped from a deep cut that split it’s pouchy stomach in two. It’s rosy-coloured tail spiralled inwards like the shell of mother-of-pearl, delicately resting on the wood beside the gaping wound. Vomit rushed to my throat. How did I not notice this before slipping into bed? Did the sun’s beating pleasure whip me into such a youth-cozened frenzy that my brain could not comprehend such a scent? How long had this thing been decaying underneath the very pillow that my dreams sink into every night? I swallowed the bile back down. I left my bedroom and with urgency went into the kitchen. I searched for a vessel in the heaps of rubbish that had accumulated by the backdoor, and found a brown paper shopping bag. Returning to my bedroom, I grabbed a wooden hanger from my cupboard, and leant down once again to see the thing. With the hanger, I reached underneath the bed and fished it with the hook. It came back to me, leaving a thick stream of sludge like the viscous underbelly of a slug or snail. It was now at my feet. It’s eyes had turned milky at the edges, and whitened tears collected at the ducts where flesh became fur. A strip of white hair collared the creature. I laughed at the sight, as I imagined the thing donned with the finest set of pearls passed down through generations of royalty. I reached my finger out to stroke the length of it’s back, and the flesh gave way to the soft pressure of my touch — leaving a rivet in the rotting shape of it’s body. What a thing, to see death. To hold it in your hands. To feel the viscid knots of flesh. To imagine what it’s life had been, before it’s torturous end. I leant closer, and noticed the lattice of nipples that dotted down the length of it’s stomach. A Mother Rat. Vomit rose again. I pushed it into the paper bag, and rolled it up tightly, leaving no space for air. I sat with the bag huddled in the gap between my crossed legs for some time. What a thing — to have her death leaking from underneath me. After a while, I rose with the bag clasped between my pudgy fingers. I moved silently through the house, and left through the backdoor. Sitting on the grass, I begun to dig and scoop the dried out earth with my fingers. Night still grasped the cloud fettered sky, obscuring the clusters of stars. Who knew how far away they really were, and who knows how small I am right now, and how small she is, dead in my garbage. I dug a hole. Carefully unrolling the paper bag, I tipped her out into the hollowed gouge of earth. She landed with a thud. Her eyes, black and white, milky and pearled, gazed up at me. I quickly covered her with the dug earth, piling and piling and piling earthen mud and stones upon the form of her body. Mud and earth, worms and beetles, garbage and crushed coca-cola cans, and now her — with her whitened eyes facing the stars that behind those thick clouds, could not shine back.
I nuzzle my cheeks into her breast bone, the soft curves of her breasts smothering my face. Her skin smells of synthetic mango, sweet but juiceless and flattened with chemicals. A slightly milky tone sits soured beneath the sweetness. The cold metal of her St. Christopher’s pendant touches my forehead with each shake of her neck. She never sits still. She wriggles and worms beneath me, whether through awkwardness or pleasure, I can never tell. I place my mouth on the outline of her nipple, and dance my tongue around it’s centre — that little mountainous zone, dotted with raised mounds and protruding skin. She squirms compulsively, her breath coarse and jagged, sandpaper thin. The curves of my breasts rub against the folds of her stomach, as I suck and kiss, leaving trails of glistening skin upon her. I notice the flat-earth between her breasts is beaded with sweat, slicking the soft-brown downy hair to the skin. I breathe her in, her fleshy impasto forming inside my nose and throat. Her hands, dotted with gold-and-green jewelled rings and bracelets, make their way to the sides of my face, clasping onto the shape of my jaw. She pulls my face up to hers, and our eyes link. An expression bleeds inside of me, traceable only through the small quivers that seep out from the corners of my lips. My inward face, that uncontrollable edge, writhes in a cringing discomfort. My body, suspended in some unknown shape, locked in borrowed time, floating some thousands of feet above us, dancing atop fighter jets nestled in the toothed notches of their tails, shooting poisonous gases from my mouth. I laugh — I am laughing with the doves, pigeons, and parakeets, who preen my scaled skin dutifully. I fight — no, I am dogfighting — dogfighting in the waning of the moon amongst derailed satellites, careening into distant edges and corners, tangled in a thicket of mechanical debris. Muzak from the downstairs bar seeps into the single-glazed windows of her barren bedroom, a lilting jolt, a context-less mass of notes strung from a simulated instrument. The language of a secret proof filters through my caught breath. Awkwardness shifts into my fingers and mouth with an anxiety that rips my body from my own touch. I feel severed in two as my body plunges back to earth, to this shallow bed frame, to her soft palm reaching it’s way towards my epicentre. I place my head above the site of her heart, curl my arm around her waist with my nostrils perched on the soft edge of her armpit. Salted mango.
‘Have you ever wanted to be someone else?’
A pearlescent glow hangs in the room as filtered sunrise seeps through the gauze of the netted curtains. I wrench thought after thought from folds in my memory, and cast them out with heavy blows of breath. Curled in the corner of my kitchen, knees pressed to my chest, I pick the dirt from underneath my fingernails. A slick film of icy sweat puddles at the corners of my body. Soft butter, cocoa, vanilla. A lingering sourness from yesterday’s bread dances through the house. I cup my head into my little hands, and trace the outline of my features with a bloodied finger. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, lashes and brows. All mine. An unknown feeling tears into my skin — something like sulphur bubbling on my surface. Tomorrow casts a bleeding edge into the dotted corners of my vision. An unreachable itch in an untouchable place, a darkened burden bundled into the fibrous bunches of tightened muscles forming across my chest. How small I am, how small my body is, how weak and feeble. I raise my head and take in the shapes of the kitchen. The terracotta floors, cold and always dirty. The white oven, always broken yet never fixed. The amber wooden cabinets filled with pots, pans, plates, bowls, cups, glasses, forks, knives, spoons, eggbeaters, scourers, lemon juicers, measuring jugs, rolling pins, plastic bags, elastic bands, pens, paper, dish-soap, receipts, vouchers, phone numbers scrawled on ripped up envelopes, bulk-ordered toilet roll, olive oil and salt, arranged and re-arranged, put back together and torn apart. A projection of myself glimmers in the shadowy angles of the kitchen. A glittering holographic membrane, a silhouette, a shiver. Oh that pudding face, soft and unbroken! A plush fabric stretched across stone atop a shrinking mound of dirt. How small she is. Somewhere in the rusting grass of the garden, a fox screeches, high-pitched and unruly as the sunlight thickens into dawn. I suck on an ulcer forming in the soft wound of my mouth.
I start wearing mascara and dark kohl eyeliner smeared half-heartedly at the corners. My professor’s face is stained with a mixture of confusion and disappointment. This is not who he thought I was — not the strong, individualistic, hard-headed, unwavering inverted image of himself. Before I was an impenetrable Venus, now I form a shoddy Sheela-na-gig, masked in a thin veil of someone else’s body. I start wearing vintage dresses cinched at the waist, covered in ugly flowers and patterns, layered with cardigans and coloured tights and mismatched jewellery. The confusion steeps. My work slips into unrecognisable pretension, completely useless and formally defunct. I start layering garish perfumes — bitter upon sweet upon musky upon floral. Languid jasmine sits sweet on a bed of dirtied tobacco. I can never get her balance right.
We sit in his dark and cluttered office in silence for some time. I run my fingers through a matted lock of hair collecting at the base of my neck. After spending the last two years visiting this place, I’ve come to understand it well. He believes that the contents of his office chart the corners of his inimitable mind, a psychological cartography of his impressive ingenuity. The fingered and bent books, carefully arranged in order of preference and cultural weight, hang on the shelves above eye-level but within his reaching distance. Don DeLillo sits atop his head, either as a crown or halo. He sits like dust clinging to his treasured trove of words and letters. Shuffling in his wooden chair and stroking the ribs of his olive-green corduroy trousers, he asks me in his pockmarked tone, how I am preparing for my viva. I pause for a breath that never seems to make it up from to lungs. I say, I haven’t. A pitiful and pathetic downturn of his yellowing eyes strikes me harshly, and I feel the prickles of goosebumps rise on my sternum.
‘You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Katherine. I know it is the moon, then it is the blessed sun, but the sun it is not if she says it is not. Who am I if not the moon or sun? Who am I? Who are you?’
He suggests I should seek counselling. I feel a throaty laugh start at the base of my chest, but it dissipates before reaching my mouth. I look down at my hands, and see the dirt and blood encrusted under the rims of my fingernails. I see that glittering presence of my childhood body, held in the upper corner of the room, gazing down at me with doe-eyes and a docked tail. She blocks the sun, moon, and stars — she chokes the air, she punches my stomach and shoves her fingers down my throat. I am eating myself like a dying snake.
She wears green and so do I. She is wrapped in a silken chiffon dress tied at the waist with a ribbon. Her mascara and eyeliner has smudged in the infernal downpour that cloaks the morning-bell city in a shroud. Vetiver, oak-moss, and juniper. An astringent chemical odour from the rain soaked concrete hangs like a sodden cloth in the air of my apartment. A fresh garden slicked with varnish. I’ve let my hair grow long, and whilst mine matts and knots in protestation, hers falls and sways faithfully. I toy with the matted texture engulfing my hair like a trellised weave of browning shoots. She places the loose strands of her golden tinted hair behind her ears as a weak smile rises through her face. We sit on my unmade bed, as our hands move over the contours of each other’s shapes — guiding fingers and palms to forgotten clefts. The silken folds of her dress fabric billow under the movement. With our eyes not meeting, we kiss. I feel the sublime energy of my skin melt under the pressure of her touch. The dance of fingertips across my drying skin, the flutters of wet kisses planted on the crevices of my neck, the deepening pleasure filtering up from the base to my crown. I feel weakened. The wretched September wet-heat claws its way in the spaces between our mouths. A fistful of blood rushes into the darkened parts of my system. My bones sit heavy in the pudgy sack of my flesh. The air is saturated with the eroticism that coats all that which lives and dies on this infertile earth, and I breathe it in. The air is colourless, the colour of everything and nothing, the colour of my body. That unseen poison enveloping the membranes and sacks and fluids and cells and fibres and vessels that make myself ‘whole’. But my wholeness is an antithesis of her wholeness, full and ample, glittering and twinkling with the prickles of the first mottled light that pokes through broken curtains. My wholeness means nothing. I breathe her in, and breathe in the mossy undergrowth of a woodland clearing — I breathe in green and yellow.
And I breathe out sticky black tar. I breathe out gasoline, I breathe out butane, I breathe out diesel. I breathe out the death that perches on the hook in my throat. I expunge all that festers within me, and replace it with the subtle sweetened greenness of her flesh. I wrap myself in the grip of her grin, and feel the elastic blades of my limbs dissolve. I turn myself into dust. A blossoming garden blooms from the rippling fabric of her untied dress — an artificial orchid entombed in a glass case. I reach for it. I want to perfume my insides with that unfolding purple corolla locked inside it’s own death chamber. I want that bud of ecstasy. I want it to be mine. Her eyes, brown-and-green with a golden ring, are downturned and filmed with a melancholic sheen. Those eyes meet mine, and an lagging awkwardness hangs in the distance between us. A vituperative venom pierces that melancholic film, and bleeds into the soft muscles of her plump cheeks, stained red with recent pleasure. An attempt to burrow the emotion bubbling behind the glassed curve of her eyes is betrayed by the wilting corner of her lips. Tears form a silver puddle at the corners. She reaches her jewelled fingers out to me, and smears the dark eyeliner from my eyelids.
I melt, and I mould, and I make.
I sit in the deepened nook imprinted on the bed for some time after she leaves. The dark thick clouds of imminent thunder wrestle over notches of blue. I am covered in her still. After some time, I move over to the mirror that sits covered with a dusted white bedsheet. I have forgotten. I rip the cover, and I stand in front of the mirror to see her in the place of where I should be, or where I once was.
I put on my pearl necklace.