2 12 13

At the home of Felicity (my daughter’s friend from school), which is cluttered and teeming with ‘things’ – antiques and objects with animal faces that I remember from my own childhood – a duck, in particular: rusting. Everything is very close. Felicity’s mother and father loom large wherever I look – she: furtive; he: hardly bothering to mask his desire (towards/for me). Inside, it smells of roasting meat and outside there is a festive buzz of mainly hushed chatter with occasional bursts of promiscuous laughter. My daughter and their daughter are playing happily together whilst her father (his bulging face and body always so close to mine) is attempting to offload mirrored picture frames onto me. They are like boxes but without glass. He seems to manifest the curious narcissism of a ‘hoarder’ like me, which I tell him and he enjoys; we are thus bound together by our shared obsession.

Dog-attack? No, misunderstanding-elicited-by-over-zealous-dog-owner. My daughter climbs into the grey buggy that currently rots in our cellar, lays back and immediately falls asleep. I am stuffing my things into the buggies’ undercarriage basket. Boxes and the like: parcels and packets - objects that fit together. Then the mirror frames, which I slide satisfyingly atop the small heap of unsteadily stacked oblongs.

The district has morphed into a market town, and the wheels of the buggy into those of a car, which is being driven hesitantly by Felicity’s mother; she is hunched over the wheel and I am beside her, the husband/father character hovering between us. He disgust me but I realise I am starting to appreciate his object-status – his use-value in a potential forthcoming exchange.

My daughter is playing on the street outside our home. I plan to wait for her father/my lover to call/materialise. Asa is standing in the doorway to my kitchen where the bead curtain hangs (it is currently tied to one side by the waist-tie of my apron), and I approach him, and we embrace. We embrace deeply, as if he is a healer or as if the chemical reaction produced by our bodies pressed together releases a transcendent elixir. All distractions dissipate. For a moment it is bliss – he is tall and broad-shouldered and his embrace envelops me totally, until ‘I’ ‘disappear’. I detect the quickening of his breath and come to realise that the embrace is arousing him, which in itself, the thought of it, arouses me. We move into the kitchen, standing by the sink; the kitchen table and chairs are to our left and the window is directly behind us. I unzip his jeans and remove his erect cock, which is gigantic. He pulls my dress up and pushes it against my opening and I am afraid he might injure me, in spite of having given birth, a point that seems to have receded into my unconscious, so that fear corresponds instead with the loss of my virginity (like in ‘A ma Soeur’ – “just one hard thrust is the best way, trust me”).

I pull myself away before he penetrates me and flee to the space behind the bead curtain (now untied) and watch from this position of partial obfuscation as he uses two hands to lift his obscenely tumescent cock over the sink. He ejaculates a stream of greyish semen that spurts of out him in propulsive bursts in tandem with the squally waves of his orgasm. Peace follows: then shame/guilt.