Op. 20
DECEPTIVE MOTIVES
OR
A SYMPTOM OF DELIRIUM
Long Prose
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
_____________
CONTENTS
Chapter One: A Birthday Favour
Chapter Two: Encounter with an Old Flame
Chapter Three: Mind of an Outsider
Chapter Four: Conversation with a Friend
Chapter Five: A Fatal Slip
Chapter Six: Anxious Husband
Chapter Seven: Disposal of the Evidence
Chapter Eight: On Morrison's Trail
Chapter Nine: A Most Unexpected Discovery
Chapter Ten: Encounter with Destiny
_______________
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By
each let this be heard,
Some
do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The
coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
Oscar
Wilde
_________________
CHAPTER ONE: A BIRTHDAY FAVOUR
Julie Foster knew herself to be a beautiful woman, and so she
was! Barely five-feet seven inches tall
and of slender build, she looked every bit the ravishing blonde that Dennis
Foster had considered her to be ever since that day, just over three years ago,
when he first laid eyes on her at a party thrown by some university
friends. This evening, she had
determined to enhance her natural beauty with the aid of make-up and clothes
which could only be described as tasteful, since it was her husband's thirty-eighth
birthday and they had decided to go out to dinner together in the company of
their best friends, rather than spend the evening indoors ... as they usually
did on birthdays - her own not excepted.
Thus she carefully
attended to her facial appearance in front of the dressing-table mirror, making
slight textual adjustments to the pale-brown eye shadow as she sat in the calm
glare of their brightly-lit bedroom. She
felt quite proud of herself, as women usually do, for looking so beautiful and
smelling so fresh. A bath had taken care
of any impurities that clung to her skin and rendered it free of stain. What is more, she had relieved both bowels
and bladder just prior to taking it, which meant that she felt even cleaner,
not to say purer, to herself than would otherwise have been the case - a
feeling which was very important to her, since she usually felt more pleased
with herself when she knew that she was clean not only outside but, in a manner
of speaking, inside as well!
Getting up from her seat
in front of the dresser, she next turned her attention upon her clothes,
checking to ensure that no stain or loose hair marred the purity of her
sartorial appearance. Her white cotton
dress, freshly dry-cleaned, was suitably spotless and, satisfied that
everything else was equally blameless, she switched off the bedroom light and
headed along the narrow corridor of their five-room flat to where her husband
reclined, reading a newspaper and sipping cognac, on the sitting-room's velvet
settee. He hardly looked up as she
entered the room, for he was too engrossed in the sports pages. But when Julie informed him that she was
ready to go out, he glanced at his watch and casually noted that, at
seven-thirty, it was still too early to set off for the
"But aren't we
supposed to be meeting John and the others at
"Eight-thirty
actually," he corrected, turning back to his paper. "Since we're not going to have dinner
till nine, I decided to postpone our rendezvous thirty minutes."
"Oh I see,"
said Julie, and she drew herself closer to the settee in order to scan the
front-page headlines. "Well, I
guess I'll just have to wait until you're ready, won't I?"
Dennis caught a fragrant
whiff of his wife's perfume at that moment and, to her surprise, put his
newspaper to one side. Then he cast her an appreciative glance, briefly scanning her dress and
facial appearance, before finishing off the rest of his cognac in one lusty
gulp. Next, to her greater surprise, he
proceeded to run his free hand up-and-down the back of her dark-stockinged calf muscles, commenting on the pleasure it gave
him to see her so nicely 'dolled-up'.
Blushing faintly in
spite of her self-confidence, she smiled down at him on reception of this
compliment. It was a slight reward,
after all, for all the trouble to which she had gone to perfect her appearance,
and somehow she didn't have the inclination or nerve to move away.
"One wonders
whether you're all dressed up for me or for someone else," he added, a
touch cynically.
"For you of
course," Julie automatically responded.
"It's your birthday, remember?"
Dennis nodded his
curly-haired head and smiled faintly through crowned front teeth. "Yes, and that being the case, I'm going
to demand a special favour of you this evening," he remarked, putting his
empty glass to one side.
"Oh?"
"I'm going to have
your sweet little arse before we go out rather than after we come back, so as
to experience you fresh and sober instead of stale and drunk for
once!" He had got to his feet and
was encircling her waist with his large hands, drawing their bodies together.
Instinctively, she made
an effort to repulse him. For she was quite taken-aback by this sudden change in his
demeanour. But he was too strong
for her and proceeded to shower kisses and caresses upon her without further
ado. He slid his hands down her back as
his lips pursued hers, hunting them down and squashing them against the front
of her sparkling white teeth as soon as he had ensnared them. Despite her misgivings, there was little
point in resisting him, especially since it was his birthday and she was
anxious not to spoil it for him. He would
just have to have his way, if they were subsequently to go out to dinner together
in anything approaching an amicable mood.
And so
she gave-in to his caresses as he slid his hands down to her rump and squashed
her buttocks in a powerful grip, violently drawing her groin against him in a
frenzy of newly-awakened lust.
She felt his penis expanding under his jeans at this crush of groins and
was less inclined to resist him now than before, especially since his hands had
got under her dress and were seemingly pulling her buttocks apart, showing no
respect for her panties but diving under them in order to get a firm grip on
her flesh, as he wrenched the one buttock apart from the other with a ferocity
which might have suggested he was intent upon tearing her in two rather than
simply exposing her sex to his avid assault.
But before he could get at the latter he would have to remove her
panties, which is what he next proceeded to do as, lifting her clean off the
floor with one hand, he grabbed hold of them with the other and tore them from
her trembling body with all the savagery of his pent-up lust. She screamed as the pain of this forcible
removal registered itself in her groin, but it was quickly eclipsed by the more
familiar pain of penile intromission which followed hard in its swift wake as,
clumsily unzipping himself, he thrust his newly-rampant organ into her with a
powerful incisiveness that seemed like the thrust of a knife or sword, cleaving
her in two. Entwined, they stumbled to
the floor, and it was there that she discovered her womanhood afresh, as he
thrust powerfully backwards and forwards with an almost maniacal determination
to bring himself to a peremptory climax, his lips chasing hers while his hands
abandoned her buttocks for the ample contours of her half-naked breasts, thumbs
pressing and rubbing against their nipples with an eagerness that could only
intensify their mutual pleasure.
She wailed and moaned,
as he rode her towards ecstasy, her hands involuntarily clawing at his back in
response to the mounting pressure of clitoral stimulation. Her eyes began to roll and she was beginning
to forget who or where she was, as she approached the thrilling destination
towards which her husband was compelling her through the increasing urgency of
his phallic thrusts. She had even forgotten
that she was spurring him on more ardently with each thrust and that, from
being wide apart, her legs had slowly climbed up his sides to a point where
they were beginning to encroach upon his back and crush him in a python-like
grip. But this was disturbing him and,
fearing that he might lose his rhythm, he felt obliged to grab hold of them and
hoist them up over his shoulders, as he drew nearer to the goal of his
quickening ride. And, sure enough, he
arrived with a flurry of rapidly spasmodic ejaculations which burnt the core of
his member as they streamed through its narrow pulsating channel, to enter the
much wider channel of Julie's gaping sex, which, convulsed in turbulent orgasm,
could only reciprocate his climax in synchronous submission. Proudly, he felt her spasms of sexual relief
engulfing his own, as her eyes rolled more violently in confirmation of
orgasmic fulfilment. Her body had become
as limp as jelly, it seemed to be melting into his own,
losing its density, becoming like wax in his hands. Ah, how good it felt to have her completely
at his mercy like this, completely under his physical domination!
However, much as he had
assuaged the brunt of his lust, Dennis was as yet nowhere near through with his
sexual pleasures. For his penis was no
less erect now that it had shot its fiery load than before and, taking
advantage of the fact that he still held her thighs over his shoulders, he
fiercely disengaged it from its temporary nesting-place and turned her onto her
stomach, squeezing her breasts in both hands as he forced it between the gaping
lips of her sex with a no-less incisive thrust than before, obliging her to
renew the by-now familiar patterns of her moaning-and-groaning as much,
seemingly, for his benefit as her own.
It was in this rear-entry position, curiously enough, that he sometimes
allowed himself the benefit of the spoken word, never in the more liberal one,
and this occasion was to prove fruitful in that respect as, withdrawing his
erection to a point where its tip rested against the tangled fleece which richly
crowned her gaping sex, he threatened her with a number of unorthodox
pleasures, boasted of what he had achieved, and even congratulated her on being
such an accommodating wife, the possessor of such a 'ravishing hole'.
"I thought I was
going to fuck the shit out of you," he went on, "but it appears your
arsehole has remained in control of its burden after all, even with the weight
of my cock to contend with."
It was modesty that
prevented Julie from confessing she had no faecal matter in her at present, but
she couldn't resist succumbing to a broad smile all the same, even though the
creamy tip of Dennis Foster's rampant phallus was tickling her anus and causing
her a slight discomfiture. She knew him
well enough by now, however, to realize he was simply teasing her. For, in reality, he was averse to sodomy and
only inclined to threaten her with a damn good 'rectal rogering'
as a means of further asserting his sexual power over her. Where her anus was concerned, his principal
interest lay in looking at and occasionally smelling it, as though to verify
whether or not she had taken the trouble to wash and perfume it, which,
incidentally, she usually had! Frankly,
it quite astonished him to think that she could make herself fresh and sweet
all over, not just in the obvious places, and if, from time to time, he gave-in
to the luxury of applying his lips to her rear orifice, it was more from an
overspill of gratitude for her beauty than from any inherent anal fixity.
If he had any specific
perversions to confess to, however, they were more in the line of sexual
curiosity or voyeurism. Such as that
time he had requested Julie to take a kind of hollow dildo, rather like the
cardboard core of a toilet roll, into her vagina. This cylindrical object once in place, he had
then proceeded to push a tiny electric light-bulb on the end of a plastic wire
along its length until, reaching the far end, its light gave him the necessary
illumination with which to survey what he took to be the interior of her womb -
a not particularly enlightening experiment, as it turned out, in that Julie
wasn't pregnant and therefore subject to an expansion of the womb area. But he reckoned that he had learnt a little
about the fallopian tubes which he didn't already know, at any rate, and so
concluded the experiment to have been moderately successful. Months later, he wondered how he had ever
brought himself to do such a crazy thing!
But by then he had acquired certain other sexual foibles and slight
perversions.
The worst he had ever
done, he reflected, was to get Julie to shit into his hands - an event which he
subsequently regretted more on account of the foul stench than the novel
spectacle which the opening of his wife's sphincter had afforded him. Thereafter he always confined this experiment
to his fantasy life, giving it an occasional place-of-honour in defiance of
Dean Swift, whose reproachful face he would endeavour to conjure-up at the
climactic moment. Contrary to the
well-documented anti-faecal attitude of that madman, Dennis Foster's attitude
to the fact that Julie shat was more usually one of contemptuous amusement than
existentialist horror. He would
occasionally tease her by averring that she got more pleasure from shitting than
fucking, and would remark, in Lawrence Durrell's
time-honoured phrase, that people were partly tubes of shit, no matter how
attractive or intelligent they happened to be.
"People will always be partly contemptible," he had once said
to her, "so long as they're obliged to shit. For shitting is contrary to the spiritual
life and a diurnal detraction from the dignity of man." And Julie had to concede that he had a point,
although she knew enough about her seductive power over him to know that his spiritual
life was neither particularly earnest nor advanced, and that he all-too-readily
succumbed to fleshy temptations - so readily, in fact, that at times it was
inconvenient to her, woman or no!
But tonight was scarcely
an exception! For, unknown to Dennis,
she had once again acquired a moral victory over him, obliging the smug dupe to
abandon his spiritual preoccupations - admittedly not, in the form of reading
the paper and drinking cognac, particularly elevated ones - and acknowledge her
seductive power. For the past thirty
minutes he had been her sexual slave, giving himself to her with an ardour
worthy of classical antiquity. She had
taken his loving gladly; for it was highly gratifying to her, making her feel
newly proud of herself and satisfied, moreover, that her campaign of seduction,
laid from the moment she evacuated her bowels to the moment she put the final
touches of eyeshadow to her brows, had paid off,
leading to an unequivocal, if at the time surprisingly swift, victory over
Dennis Foster's spiritual life. He would
think, in his masculine self-centredness, that he had got the better of
her. But, in reality, it was her
victory, and she knew it!
However, that victory
wasn't to last long, in her estimation.
For, with the termination of his carnal ardours
and the chiming of eight from the nearby grandfather clock, she remembered that
they were due to meet their friends in thirty minutes' time for dinner in the
West End. Almost panic-stricken, she
disengaged herself from the futile residue of her husband's attentions and
staggered to her feet, before casting a nervous glance towards the room's
solitary wall-mirror. Oh God, there was
pink lipstick on her cheeks and the eyeshadow had
somehow got smeared all over her brow!
Her hair was no longer presentable but tangled and greasy - in fact,
positively dishevelled! So much the
mirror told her. For she could see for
herself that her stockings were no longer quite straight, and that her dress
was slightly crumpled and stained.
Worse, her new nylon panties were lying on the carpet, torn in two
places, and her brassiere, no longer in its original position, was damp with
her husband's saliva. Alas, her
perfected appearance of a short while ago was ruined and, to such a deplorable
extent, that she figured it would take her at least another thirty minutes to
dress again, put her make-up to rights, and straighten out her hair, by which
time they would be late for their rendezvous and in no question of having
dinner at nine, as previously arranged!
And, to cap it all, Dennis fucking Foster was still lying stretched out
on the carpet, smiling to himself and showing not the slightest concern over
their predicament. Really, birthday or
no birthday, he might have shown some consideration for John and the
others!
"Dennis, darling,
it'll take me at least half-an-hour to put my appearance to rights," Julie
protested on a note of unfeigned concern.
"Which means that, if we're not to disappoint our
friends, you had better phone them straightaway and postpone our rendezvous
till nine." She waited for
him to make a move for the telephone or at least respond to her in some
way. But, to her consternation, he
continued to smile and lie where he was, showing not the slightest interest in
her suggestion. "Dennis, did you
hear me?" she pressed, raising her voice slightly.
"Naturally, my
dear," he replied. "But
there's no need for me to contact them, because we're not going anywhere. I cancelled our engagement over an hour ago,
on the grounds that I had a severe stomach ache and felt too sick for dinner. When I saw you all dressed-up and ready to
leave, I decided to lie to you rather than disappoint you with what, in the
circumstances, you would only have regarded as bad news. Besides, I wanted you to do me a birthday
favour. Had you not thought we were
going out, you would never have gone to the trouble to make yourself so
attractive tonight. My birthday favour
wouldn't have materialized, let alone been granted! However, now that it has, I have nothing
further to ask of you." Having said
which, he picked himself up off the floor, zipped-up his jeans, and returned to
the settee where, helping himself to another drop of cognac from the main
supply source on the adjacent table, he soon recommenced reading his newspaper.
For her part, Julie
simply hurried back to their bedroom, on the verge of tears.
CHAPTER TWO: ENCOUNTER WITH AN OLD
FLAME
Peter Morrison had just dejectedly collected another rejected
typescript from a cagey West End publisher and was feeling as glum as he
usually did when confronted by such negativity, the fruit, he reckoned, of the
extent to which most publishers had 'gone to the dogs' of heathenistic
commerce. His small leather bag now
contained three typescripts which the publishing establishment had seen fit to
reject, largely, he suspected, because they were too ideologically progressive
and hence insufficiently commercial to guarantee their publisher a substantial
profit. It was becoming more than a
little frustrating, especially as one knew that one was developing Truth to an
unparalleled degree ... where the more important subjects in life, such as
religion and culture, were concerned.
One had no option but to accept the fact that one was a literary
outsider for whom commercial criteria were anathema, a hater of the capitalist
status quo, with its market slavery. No
matter how much work one put into one's writings, no matter how technically or
thematically accomplished they became, there was scant prospect of publication
under the circumstances of continued market domination, least of all for
somebody who was about as far removed from influential connections as it was
possible to be, short of not being a human being at all, and a borderline if
not confirmed misogynist, to boot! One
was simply knocking one's progressive, unworldly head against a solid wall of
commercial reaction. And Peter
Morrison's head was severely bruised by now, after well over a hundred
rejections of more than eighteen different typescripts! Verily, life was no easy or laughing
matter. It was all too often an evil and
troublesome affair!
Gripping his burden to
his chest, the literary outsider crossed the busy road along which he had been
dejectedly walking and turned down a side street towards the little restaurant
where he usually ate lunch whenever he visited the West End on a
typescript-delivering and/or collecting mission these days. It was a decent restaurant, the 'Three
Lanterns', with a copious helping of tasty food at a very reasonable price. Greeks ran the place and, as he well-knew by
now, Greeks were usually a generous people - unlike the English, with their
stinginess and money-grubbing commercialism!
Ugh, how Peter Morrison
loathed
To some extent, it was a
combination of these and other qualities which had kept him solitary, since he
regarded himself as both culturally and intellectually superior to most of the
local people among whom he was obliged to live.
Women were rarely attractive to him in Hornsey, a factor which further
contributed to his solitude, since he was incapable of fancying a woman unless
she was both beautiful and, more importantly, intelligent with it, as few of
them in the neighbourhood ever were. And
coupled to a negative response to an uncongenial environment, solitude
inevitably led to depression, thereby strengthening the bars of the prison in
which he morosely languished, forcing him, against his will, to lead a sort of
psychologically crippled life.
Yet at least women could
be beautiful in the
Arriving at the 'Three
Lanterns', Morrison ill-temperedly pushed his way through the crowded doorway
where, as ever, people were queuing to pay their bills and, seeing that the
upstairs part of the restaurant was full, he quickly descended the stairs to
the basement. Once there, he
straightaway established himself at an empty table and gratefully disburdened
himself of the seemingly ever-increasing weight of his typescript-laden bag,
putting it to one side of himself on the elongated leather bench which
stretched beyond his table to the adjacent ones on either side. Almost immediately a waiter descended on him
with bill-pad in hand and, after a brief scrutiny of the menu, he nervously
ordered curried beef, which was about the cheapest thing on it. Then he poured himself a glass of water and
took a casual look round the tables in order to ascertain the approximate
nature of his fellow-diners. It was
pretty crowded down here too, for the most part with people in suits and
dresses, but it didn't take him long to recognize the face of a young woman
seated at the table almost exactly opposite his own. For a moment, he thought his eyes were
deceiving him. But there was nothing
about the sudden increase in the pace of his heart, or the equally sudden
nervousness in his hands, which would have confirmed that supposition! Rather, these all-too-real physical factors
combined to assure him that the woman with whom he had so tragically fallen in
love some nine years ago, the only woman with whom he had ever been deeply in
love, was now sitting no more than a few yards away, and talking to a female
companion who sat in front of her.
Amazed, he continued to stare at her, forgetful of the glass of water he
held in his trembling right hand and only conscious of the extraordinary beauty
of this woman whose love he had sought in vain, all those years before.
Yes, it was Julie all
right, what with that unmistakably cultured and self-confident voice, but now more
beautiful than ever, her blue eyes brighter and her blonde hair blonder than
when he had last seen her. Oh God, what
a tragedy it had proved to be for him, not having secured her love and taken
her as his girlfriend, if not, eventually, his wife! No other woman had come to take her place in
his affections since that magical moment when he had fallen in love with her at
Victoria Station on his way home from work, one fateful evening in March or
April 1972, during the days when he used to commute up and down from Surrey by
train. And hardly a day had passed, in
the meantime, when she had not entered his thoughts at some time, no matter how
briefly, or played a star role in his fantasy life. At times it seemed as though he would go mad
from thinking about her, so tight a grip did her beauty still have on him. She was like a Solonge
de Cleda for him and he was her hapless Grandsailles, loving from a distance. No wonder he was still alone! It appeared that only a certain type of woman
could please him, and that once such a woman had got an emotional hold on him
he was incapable of taking an interest in anyone else. There was more than a passing comparison not
only with Dali's fictional characters, but with Dante's factual reality in his
life and experiences. Had not Julie
become a kind of Beatrice for him throughout these solitary, celibate years?
Inevitably, his
curiosity aroused her attention and in some degree obliged her to
reciprocate. He blushed violently and
lowered his eyes in shame, though not before he had noticed that she, too, had
recognized him and was becoming subject to more than a hint of emotional
confusion. Indeed, her expression
betrayed a momentary astonishment. But
she had recognized him, of that there could be little doubt, and, in spite of
the intervening years, was prepared to offer him a modest smile by way of
acknowledgement. His blush deepened,
though not before he had returned the compliment and made an attempt at
acknowledging her table companion, who, with some reluctance, had half-turned
around to see who or what had attracted Julie's attention. However, the arrival of his dinner precluded
him from getting to his feet and worming his way into their conversation - a
thing he might have felt obliged to do under different circumstances. For Julie was not now the woman she had
appeared to be a few minutes ago, prior to his appearance on the scene, but had
become strangely self-conscious and seemingly absorbed in her meal. He thought maybe she was regretting that she
wasn't alone at table. For he knew that she had always liked him, in spite of his failure
to secure her love. He still
believed her excuses, all those years ago, about already being engaged to be
genuine, and wasn't prepared to accept that he had been coldly snubbed. Besides, it was usually possible to tell when
a woman fancied one, and he had been given little cause to doubt that his
desire for her was the converse side of her desire for him, being but one side
of a two-way reflection. There was
always a basic logic to love, which made it natural for the attractiveness of
the persons involved to be mutually acknowledged. Comparatively rare was the fate of the man
whose tastes were not subject to a reciprocal response!
Meanwhile Julie had
finished her meal and was doing what she could to keep her attention to
herself; though Morrison could see that his presence in front of her was still
causing her a degree of emotional confusion.
He wondered if he oughtn't to carry his dinner over to their table, but
somehow that seemed out of the question, especially with the other woman
there. He had always been shy and
reserved, in any case, and never more so than in the company of female
strangers! There seemed to be no
alternative but to sit still and pretend that Julie wasn't there. Yet she wasn't making this easy, what with
her furtive glances and the occasional comment that passed between the two
women. On the contrary, it was becoming steadily
harder. So much so that when, less than
five minutes later, they both got up from their table and slowly headed towards
the stairs, it was quite impossible for Morrison to restrain the impulse to
follow suit. Grabbing his leather bag,
he staggered up from his table, leaving the curried beef less than half-eaten,
and followed them up the stairs. He had
waited several years for the opportunity of seeing her again, and now that it
had so unexpectedly arrived, he wasn't going to let it slip away from him that
easily. Rather, he wished to renew their
tenuous links of the past and, if possible, acquire what he had lacked all
these years - namely a girlfriend.
But Julie appeared not
to want to make the task very easy for him.
For she was already half-way up the stairs in close
pursuance of her companion. Only
when she reached the top of them did she cast a brief glance over her shoulder,
in order to verify whether she was being followed and, when this became
evident, succumb to a faint smile, accompanied by a fresh wave of
embarrassment. For his part, Morrison
was as nervous and self-conscious as he had ever been, but, at the same time,
strangely detached, like he had some imperative task to attend to which had to
be accomplished whatever the consequences.
That task was made more imperative now as he, too, reached the top of the
stairs and stood immediately behind her, behind that tantalizing rump and
wavy-blonde hair which had caused him so much frustration in the past! Today, as luck would have it, Julie was
dressed in a pair of tight-fitting pink cords which more than amply emphasized
the curvaceous outlines of her highly seductive behind, making it difficult for
him to restrain the impulse to reach out a hand and caress it. But restrain himself he did, if only because
he was holding his leather bag in one hand and searching for some money with
the other, in order to pay the bill or, at any rate, expenses (since he had
left his table before the waiter could hand him one) at the door. His tongue, however, was quite free, and he
used it to stammer a few words to the effect that he hadn't seen her for a long
time.
She turned briefly
towards him, smiled, but made no comment upon what was, after all, a
self-evident admission.
"You do remember
me, don't you?" he asked, feeling pathetic.
Again she turned and
smiled. "Am I supposed to?"
she evasively replied.
"Well ...” He
hesitated on the verge of an explanation, not knowing where to begin. It was evident that she wasn't particularly
happy to see him after all - possibly owing to the presence of her female
companion or perhaps even his down-at-heels look. "You might recall that I ...” But again
he couldn't bring himself to continue and, to his dismay, blushed crimson. Meanwhile her companion had paid her bill and
she was next in line. He didn't have
time to say anything further to her, under the circumstances, but nonetheless
edged a little closer, so that they were almost touching and he could
distinctly smell the scent of her hair, despite the immense variety of
conflicting aromas in the room.
"Next please,"
beckoned the white-coated waiter on the till, and now it was Morrison's turn to
pay, which he reluctantly proceeded to do, albeit with a shaky hand in view of
the state of near arousal to which the close proximity of Julie's body had
brought him. She, however, had left the
restaurant in silence, leaving him staring out onto the pavement while he
waited for his change.
Not to be rebuffed, he
hurried out after her, determined to follow whichever way she went, and was
more than a trifle surprised to discover her standing to one side of the
entrance, ostensibly staring into the window of an adjacent shop. Her companion, however, was walking on down
the street, apparently having decided to go her separate way. It didn't take much imagination for Morrison
to grasp that they had probably arranged to split-up in order to allow him to
renew his acquaintance with Julie and, basing his next move on that
supposition, he walked over to where she was standing and smiled a tentative
but engaging smile at her. "Yes,
what a long time it is since we last met," he remarked, without further
ado. "You were still a student
then, if I remember correctly."
"A teacher
now," Julie admitted, in a soft though firm voice.
"Oh,
really?" It came as quite a
surprise to the literary outsider, who could hardly disguise his relief at
getting a reply. Her subject, he
remembered, was geography, so doubtless she was teaching that now. "And where?" he wanted to know.
"In
"Oh ..." he
hesitated, blushing anew "... I'm a writer actually. Have been so for a number
of years - since 1976 in fact."
He almost regretted having said this.
For he had still not found a publisher several years on, as confirmed by
the typescripts in his leather bag.
"My, so that's what
all this is about, is it?" She was
eyeing the bag in question.
"Yes," he
shamefacedly replied, hardly daring to look.
"These are the typescripts of three recent novels."
She looked at him
suspiciously, almost mockingly, and then turned her attention towards the shop
window again. "Who's your
publisher?" she wanted to know.
He felt a lump in his
throat and a sort of sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Unfortunately, I haven't acquired one
as yet," he managed to confess, averting his eyes from her. "My attempts to find one have met with
no success."
"What, since
1976?"
"Regrettably."
She looked slightly
concerned, if not worried. "But how
do you manage to survive?" she asked.
"I have a part-time job," he lyingly replied, fearing that if he told her the shameful
truth about being on the dole and officially unemployed, she would simply walk
away.
"And presumably that leaves you enough
free time to write, does it?" she conjectured.
"Yes, three whole
days a week, plus some time at the weekends," he admitted.
"But don't you find
it depressing, being alone so much?" she remarked.
"Sure it is,"
he conceded, grimacing slightly in spite of himself. "But one learns to live with that fact
and to carry on as best one can, since one can't very well write in company or
with other people hanging around one all the time, you know. A writer's lot is mainly solitary, in any
case. Though, for me, solitude is
largely a consequence of exile in this city, not to mention country, and of not
having very much money to live on."
Julie blushed in spite
of herself and quickly lowered her eyes.
She felt momentarily sorry for him, since she could tell that he wasn't
bluffing. "Don't you have any
friends at all?" she asked, curious to discover something more about his
private life.
"None
whatsoever," he confessed. "I
lost the last friend I had about eight years ago, when circumstances beyond my
control obliged me to leave
Julie could hardly
believe her ears. "No wonder you're
depressed!" she exclaimed.
"One can't live alone all that time and not suffer the
consequences." Frankly, she was
almost afraid of him. For he suddenly
seemed, on the face of it, more like a monster than a human being. To be sure, there was always an element of
self-defence in ordinary people that drove them to scorn those more unfortunate
than themselves, rather than to help them or show compassion towards them, and
she was beginning to feel the pressure of this ignoble element now, as she
stood beside him, as beside an outcast from society who was likely to be more
of an enemy than a friend. Maybe he was
no longer capable of friendship, in any case?
She didn't know how next to speak to him and was surprised when she
heard him ask her if she wouldn't like to come back to his bedsitter,
since it was cold standing out here on the pavement and, anyway, they could
talk better in private. It was an offer
which also caused her a degree of trepidation.
For she didn't know whether she could trust him to behave decently or
considerately if she did by any chance accept his invitation, especially since
he couldn't have invited all that many people to visit him in the past. Nevertheless, since she had no specific plans
for the afternoon (it being the first week of the Christmas holidays), she felt
vaguely attracted to the idea, if for no other reason than simple
curiosity. "Where exactly do you
live?" she at length asked, blushing faintly.
He told her.
"Well, if you
promise not to detain me beyond four o'clock, as I have a friend to meet later
this afternoon, I think I can accept your invitation," she informed him,
doing her best to sound grateful. Her
heart was beating fiercely while she spoke, partly because it seemed to her a
betrayal, implicitly or otherwise, of her husband, whom she had never been
unfaithful to before. Perhaps, however,
now was the time, bearing in mind the deceitful nature of his behaviour towards
her on Saturday evening, when he had led her on under false pretences and then
forced himself upon her in such a callous manner? Of course, she couldn't be sure that this
Peter Morrison had sexual ambitions in mind, though it seemed unlikely, if he
still fancied her, that he would remain content merely with conversation for
very long. After all, he evidently
wasn't the kind of guy to go out of his way to establish purely friendly
relations with anyone. There had to be
some ulterior motive and, as she now knew, he had no shortage of serious
problems - not least of all where sex was concerned!
Despite her surface
misgivings, however, she realized, deep down, that she was agreeing to his
proposal not only out of simple curiosity or, indeed, the desire to avenge
herself on Dennis Foster, but, more significantly, as a means of atoning, in
some degree, for all the suffering she had unwittingly inflicted upon him in
consequence of his unrequited love. She
felt that a sacrifice of some kind on her part was long overdue, especially now
that the Christmas spirit had taken hold of her and made her more willing to
befriend someone. Besides, it seemed to
her that it was partly her fault that he was now in the fix he was in, hiding
away from people, and women in particular, out of a
fear that he might get dragged into another unrequited love-affair, and have to
suffer the bitter consequences all over again.
CHAPTER THREE: MIND OF AN OUTSIDER
All through the years of his enforced exile in
Ah, how one suffered
through the ears! There were times when
he wished he were deaf, so that he could forget about the damn neighbours and
get on with his studies in peace. Times,
too, when he reflected that it would have been better had man been endowed, at
birth, with a tiny switch on the side of his head which enabled one to switch
hearing on-and-off at will, as the occasion demanded. Being partly of diabolic origin, however,
nature had not supplied any such device, and so one was obliged to tolerate
whatever crude noise came one's way - assuming one hadn't taken the sensible
precaution of plugging-up with wax. For
his own part, Morrison was prepared to believe that 70-80% of his impersonal
sufferings were directly or indirectly related to noise, and that, without
hearing, life would be almost agreeable.
Almost! Because then one would be
deprived of the sound of great music, not to mention the possibility of
listening to the sounds, sexual or otherwise, of an attractive woman's voice
every once in a while.
Returning to his bedsitter with Julie, it was indeed the sound of her voice
that he was particularly conscious of, so pleasant was it for him to be hearing
her speak again, after so many years.
How sick and tired he had grown of proletarian voices, of cockney
accents laced with vicious expletives and snide denigrations! Whenever he ate lunch at the local café,
there would always be a group of men there whose conversation was copiously
laced with swearwords of an explicitly sexual nature. His cultivated sensibilities would be
offended by their coarse words and banal phrases, and he would turn away from
them in disgust, filled with a kind of Trotskyite loathing for their incessant
vulgarity. Paradoxically, however, he
had come to understand the logic of the proletariat's particular choice of
swearwords and to regard it, not altogether unreasonably, as manifesting a
basic moral superiority over the upper classes.
Of course, he knew
himself to be essentially upper-middle-class in his moral sensibilities, and
thus subject to the occasional use of words such as damn, bloody, bastard, and
so on. But, having lived so long in a
proletarian environment, he could to some extent empathize with the employment
of such typically proletarian expletives as 'cunt',
'fuck', 'fucking bastard', 'cock-up', etc., which testified, whether or not
their users realized the fact, to a contempt for sex. J.B. Priestley had himself remarked somewhere
that, in using such words, the people concerned were 'coarsely contemptuous' of
their sexual relations, and, by God, how true that statement was!
On the other hand, the
bourgeoisie, in living closer to nature in their suburban houses, generally had
more respect for sex, which is, after all, a natural act, and consequently
refrained from the use of swearwords expressing contempt for it. Yet this, ironically, struck Morrison as
representing a lower and inferior attitude to that expressed by the typical
proletarian, who was only too ready, at times, to accuse someone of being a
'fucking bastard', i.e. a bastard who fucks, or a 'fucking cunt',
i.e. a cunt which fucks or, alternatively, a cunt for fucking, and other such variations on an
accusatory theme. The proletariat,
instinctively or otherwise, could see the sexual act and parts of the body as
being intrinsically low and were prepared, in consequence, to brand them with
words designed to emphasize that lowness.
Not so the bourgeoisie, who had a much greater respect for such matters,
and would have been ashamed to use anything stronger than 'bastard' or
'bloody'. And so it generally was with
Peter Morrison, though he had on one or two past occasions given way to stronger
denigrations of his neighbours when circumstances had obliged him to lose his
temper and hurl retaliatory abuse at them - either directly or, more usually,
through their walls. Afterwards he would
regret it, but that was only to be expected.
He could never quite evade his idealistic conscience!
Julie's voice fell
silent, however, as soon as they reached the house where Morrison lived,
whether because she was becoming nervous at the fate she imagined probably lay
in store for her or because of some other reason, he couldn't quite decide. Perhaps it was simply the derelict appearance
of the old tenement itself, which now disgusted or depressed her? Yes, he had often felt that way himself when
approaching it. There could be no
question of one's identifying with the building or even the street as a whole,
no possibility of one's thinking: 'This is a community I'm an integral part of,
and this is where I'm proud to live!'
No, absolutely not! All one could
be conscious of, apart from a feeling of shame, was the thought that one was
simply isolated here, an outsider blown in from the provinces by adverse
circumstances who couldn't pretend that he had been brought-up in such a street
or had any real respect for it. It was
all somehow alien, other, distasteful. And one was obliged, through poverty, to
endure it, to live with it willy-nilly.
One was, in a very real sense, its victim. Just as, in living in a single bedsitter among noisy neighbours, one was a victim of the lumpen proletariat.
No question of one's loving them, under those
circumstances! One's socialism, largely
forced upon one through environmental conditioning, could only be tempered by a
loathing of their condition, by the hope that one day it would be replaced by
something higher.
And so we needn't be
surprised if Peter Morrison felt ashamed to be living where he was and, partly
on that account, disinclined to invite such women as would ordinarily have
appealed to him back to his room. The
thought of dragging a well-spoken, cultured young lady (assuming he could have
found one in the local milieu) up the dismal stairs, past the scratches and
dirt on the walls, along the bare floorboards of the carpetless
corridor, and into his dingy room, with its dirty walls, battered furniture,
stained ceiling, grimy windows, tattered carpet, etc., was too humiliating to
bear for long, and had always precluded him from making the experiment. So, needless to say, had the fact that, once
there, she would have been subject to both neighbour and environmental noises,
including, in the latter case, the malignant barking of several nearby dogs,
the screaming of vicious kids - not children! - in the next-door alleyway, the
hammering of nearby workmen, and a whole host of often indescribable
disturbances which would have contributed, he felt sure, to their mutual
humiliation and disgrace!
But as if that wasn't
bad enough, there was the even worse prospect, so far as Morrison was
concerned, of having his conversation and actions overheard by the nearest
neighbours, whose close proximity to him behind their all-too-thin walls, under
his floor in the ground-floor room or above his ceiling in the attic room,
would be bound to inhibit him and make him feel unpleasantly self-conscious,
what with his classy accent and studious interests. He couldn't even bring himself to play
classical music or modern jazz through his stereo speakers these days, but,
partly because he was afraid to draw more noise from his neighbours than he
already had to endure, and partly because he didn't want to unduly emphasize
his cultural superiority over them, habitually employed headphones for the
purpose, thereby keeping his musical tastes to himself.
Alas, what a pity that
the downstairs neighbours couldn't do the same!
How often he had to endure the regular thump-thump-thump of exceedingly
banal bass parts to tedious rock or pop songs which the young couple underneath
habitually played, the volume of their radiogram at a level guaranteed to
disturb even someone half-deaf! Why, he
wondered, did responsible adults and irresponsible adolescents have to share
the same house? Surely a law prohibiting
the indiscriminate mixing of such disparate age-groups in lodging houses or
other communal buildings would have saved people like himself a great deal of
unnecessary hardship? Yes, but like it
or not, there were a thousand-and-one other non-existent laws which could have
been brought into existence expressly for that purpose too, but which, thanks
or no thanks to the existing political state-of-affairs in the country, failed
to materialize. That was simply the way
of things!
Fortunately for Peter
Morrison on this occasion, however, the room into which he led his female
captive wasn't subject to the intrusion of any such external noises but, to his
great relief, almost deathly silent. Even the huge shaggy dog, a few houses away,
was uncharacteristically quiet, probably because he was dozing or
sleeping. Good, let sleeping dogs lie,
as the saying went. Too often people did
their damnedest to disturb them!
"Well, this is it," he said with an air of enforced bravado,
after he had gently closed the door behind Julie's advancing form and freed
himself from the oppressive burden of his rejected typescripts. "This is where I live and work."
Julie gave the room a
brief if slightly condescending inspection, before removing her short leather
coat and, at Morrison's bidding, sitting herself down on the nearest chair
to-hand, which was neither hard nor soft but somewhere in-between, part of the
stuffing knocked out of it and the upholstery torn in a number of fairly
conspicuous places. This aspect of its
appearance, however, she preferred not to notice but, instead, focused her
attention on the modest bookcase which stood next to it, the top shelf crammed
with his typescripts, the middle shelf given over to his tiny collection of
favourite paperbacks, and the bottom one, which was the tallest, serving to
house his fairly substantial collection of LPs, most of which had been bought
second-hand and were now, like their owner, somewhat dated. "Gosh, what a lot of work you've
done!" she exclaimed, as her bright eyes alighted on the piled-up
typescripts. "And not one of them
accepted by a publisher?"
"No," Morrison
tersely confirmed, a look of embarrassment on his clean-shaven face. "In a sense, they're all too good to be
published."
"How d'you mean 'too good'?" she
queried, slightly puzzled.
"Too philosophical,
too progressive, too revolutionary, too serious-minded, too truthful, too
anti-Christian, too anti-bourgeois, too ... transcendental," he replied,
his tone-of-voice grave, his countenance stern, like he had just stepped out of
his natural self into some all-too-familiar professional persona with
world-shattering implications! "My
approach to writing is ... too idealistic, in a word, for the money-grubbing
commercial requirements of the capitalistic publishing establishment, who
require much less-elevated typescripts.
The publishing bourgeoisie live off adventure stories, war stories,
pornography, crime stories, thrillers, romances, the occult, etc., which I
would find it impossible, not to say undesirable, to write. My works, focusing on religious, political,
social, and cultural matters, are evidently insufficiently commercial to prove
economically viable, so far as the great majority of publishers are
concerned. No doubt, the bastards are
right to believe that! Most people are
probably either too base or too stupid to appreciate such writings, or have
been corrupted and brainwashed by the publishing establishment into only buying
the sort of commercial trash which tends to prevail!" Julie did her best to smile sympathetically
through the haze of embarrassment which engulfed her in the wake of his
bluntness, before dropping her gaze down to the middle shelf, where some thirty
or so publications were to be seen in order of author. They were all classical works and included
six by Nietzsche - The Will to Power being the most conspicuous on account of its
greater bulk. "I see you like
Nietzsche," she commented, by way of observation.
"Liked Nietzsche
would be nearer the mark," he corrected, looking at the battered spines of
the paperbacks in question. "All
those works were bought over five years ago and aren't particularly indicative
of my current tastes, which, for want of adequate money, are dependent on the
local library. Some idiotic impulse
compels me to hold on to them, as though to prove to any prospective visitor to
my room that I'm relatively cultured and not semi-literate, like the neighbours....
Not that I have any visitors as a rule, as I think I intimated to you
earlier. Still, one grows sentimentally
attached to certain books, whether or not one is no longer inclined to read
them. They were important to one once,
and that's the main thing!"
"Yes, I quite
agree," said Julie, offering him a brisk nod of her wavy-blonde head. "Where Nietzsche is concerned, one's
virtually on sacred ground. He's one of
those writers whose works didn't appeal to a very wide public in his own day,
either."
"Quite so,"
Morrison conceded, grimacing slightly at the thought of Nietzsche being sacred,
though he was quite the most Catholic Lutheran he knew and no mean
transcendentalist as far as the Superman was concerned. "Nietzsche didn't sell very many books
in his own day, and neither, for that matter, did Baudelaire and Schopenhauer -
two outstanding geniuses who also grace my shelf," he went on. "But that's usually the fate of
exceptional men, in any case. They're
too intelligent and noble for the broad masses, and not therefore subject to mass
appreciation. Only a relatively small
number of higher types ever appreciate them, and not always while their alive,
either!"
Julie had lost interest
in the books and was looking through his collection of records, which were
mostly modern jazz.
She was relieved to see that he shared a number of her tastes and
commented approvingly on various albums, including ones by Jean-Luc Ponty, Frank Zappa, Chick Corea,
John McLaughlin, Al DiMeola, George Duke, and Herbie Hancock. She,
too, was into modern jazz and progressive rock these days, especially when it
was of a transcendental order. "Do
you meditate?" she asked, during a pause in her investigations.
He smiled wryly and
emphatically shook his head. "I
used to practise a sort of Taoist brand of Transcendental Meditation in the
past," he confessed, blushing slightly, "but nowadays I'm
fundamentally too socialist to be much interested in it."
She wondered what on
earth he could mean, and accordingly pressed him to explain himself.
"Well, if I were
English, I think I'd be more inclined to practise meditation," he
averred. "But because I'm Irish, I
tend to look on it as an irrelevant pursuit at present."
Julie frowned deeply,
wondering what-on-earth he was getting at.
She had almost forgotten he was Irish anyway, his accent being passably
English.
"I mean, to
me," he went on, "
"You sound like a
revolutionary," said Julie, a shade nervously.
"Maybe I am
one," Morrison admitted.
"After all, these works ..." and here he pointed to his
typescripts, those in the leather bag included "... are fundamentally
revolutionary, pointing the way towards a brighter future. I don't have anything positive to say about
parliamentary democracy, and nothing particularly positive to say of its
puritanical religious corollary, either.
On the contrary, I look forward to the establishment of what I call the
transcendental civilization, the next and final civilization in the world,
which must surely follow on the heels of socialism."
"So you do believe
in transcendentalism!" Julie exclaimed, a distinct note of relief in her
voice.
"Yes, but with
certain reservations," Morrison conceded.
"I'm not a practising Buddhist or a radical Hindu or anything of
the sort, and neither can I envisage the future development of transcendentalism
in traditional Oriental terms, which are much too naturalistic to pass muster
in tomorrow's world. What we'll require,
for want of a better phrase, is technological transcendentalism, in which the
natural body will be superseded by an artificial support-and-sustain system for
the brain, for the self, which will then be able to cultivate an extensive and
well-nigh exclusive spirituality. Only
thus, with the most advanced technological assistance, will the long-awaited
goal of salvation from the flesh become transcendentally possible. Only thus will mankind be able to attain to
the heavenly Beyond in the spiritual perfection of the Holy Ghost."
Julie's face had turned
pale, then red, then back to pale again, or so it appeared. "Christ, you seem to speak with some
authority!" she remarked, her voice strained with nerves.
"That's because I
believe I have the truth," he confidently asseverated. "Because I have pursued the truth of our
future destiny further than any other living man and am consequently in
possession of ideas which are completely new to the world and, for that very
reason, suspect and even worrying to the publishing bourgeoisie! Now d'you begin to see why I've had my works rejected time and time
again? I'm a voice crying in the urban
wilderness, and this time it isn't the voice of Christ but, to all intents and
purposes, of the Second Coming - the Messianic figure who stands at the
cross-roads between Christianity and transcendentalism and, in rejecting the
former, points the way towards the latter! I'm not a materialist in any strictly Marxist
or, rather, Bolshevik sense. Rather, I
trace my intellectual lineage from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Spengler to Huxley, Koestler, and
de Chardin, with particular emphasis on Nietzsche,
whom I regard as the last great thinker prior to myself. I have carried the burden of enlightenment
beyond Zarathustra, with his concept of the Superman,
to a stage whereby the destiny of man is explained in terms of attainment to
the heavenly Beyond through the aid of technological progress and, consequently,
the gradual phasing-out of the natural body.
What the future will signify is not so much the East or the West ... as
the coming together of both East and West into the highest possible
civilization - the combining of the maximum technology with the maximum
meditation, until the goal of heavenly salvation is attained to in spiritual
transcendence. The endemic doing
of the West will be placed at the service, through technology, of the endemic being
of the East, so that, instead of remaining a largely mundane and ultimately
futile exercise, meditation will become the means through which spiritual
salvation can be achieved. By itself,
without technology, it's doomed to frustration and, ultimately, to failure. The body inevitably detracts from one's
spiritual potential, imposing so many sensual obligations upon one. The Asians, in their valiant endeavour to
overcome it, only succumbed to disease, poverty, and starvation. They lacked technology. In the future, we shall increasingly supply
that lack or, rather, they'll compromise with technology while we compromise
with meditation, albeit spicing it up, so to speak, with synthetic
stimulants. Eventually, once technology
has reached its peak, meditation will take over completely, freeing the whole of
humanity for the last leg of its evolutionary journey to the heavenly
Beyond. And this last leg I regard as
the post-human millennium, the higher phase of the transcendental civilization
when, with the gradual 'withering away' of the State, religion will completely
supersede politics, freeing man from materialistic concerns
once-and-for-all. It will be the 'open
stretch of realization' that Henry Miller describes in Sunday After the War."
Julie lip-smiled
half-heartedly in her bemusement, her blue eyes staring at the writer as much
out of astonishment that she was actually hearing all this from him ... as out
of respect that he was actually speaking to her. "So you're not satisfied that the
Millennium, the coming time of happiness on earth to which socialists look
forward, is the goal of evolution?" she deduced, after due consideration.
"No,
not by any means!" Morrison immediately confirmed. "That's why I'm not a socialist in the
narrow Marxist sense, but can see further ahead to a transcendental climax of
evolution, largely because I haven't dismissed spirituality and thereby reduced
everything to materialism. Our ultimate
goal must be the heavenly Beyond, as Christians have for centuries maintained,
though especially during the ages of faith.
They weren't fools or madmen to do that, and we would be grossly
oversimplifying the issue to imagine otherwise!
Rather, they looked upon it from a necessarily egocentric, and therefore
misguided, point of view, which led them to posit salvation in a posthumous
afterlife. This we can no longer accept,
for at death one simply dies, and that's all there is to it. Our evolutionary progress, over the past two
centuries of rapid industrialization and expanding urbanization, has ensured
that we don't fall into the same egocentric trap. For, living as we do ... cut off to a
considerable extent from the proximity and influence of exterior nature, our
psyche is no longer quite as balanced between the subconscious and superconscious minds as was formerly the case, but has
become increasingly lopsided on the side of the latter, and thus subject to a
greater influx of logical, rational thought than ever before. We must accordingly come to accept, now, that
salvation from the flesh is something which will take us centuries to achieve
rather than something that happens following death. At death, the spirit simply dies, it isn't
saved. But, in the future, the spirit
will be enabled to overcome the mortality of the flesh through our technology
largely having got rid of the latter, and thereby freed us for the privilege of
attaining to the heavenly Beyond. We'll
be elevated to so many static units of potential transcendence and consequently
live, as self-centred brains, for an indefinite period of time - until such
time, in fact, as highly-cultivated spirit detaches itself from the brain and
becomes truly transcendent. For
transcendent spirit doesn't at present exist in the world, but is only
potentially present in our rather mundane, flesh-clogged spirits. It's something which can only come about at
the climax of evolution."
Julie frowned slightly
and involuntarily bit her lip. It was
somewhat upsetting for her, a beautiful woman, to hear that the flesh would
have to be overcome through technology in the future. She couldn't resign herself to the idea but,
for the sake of avoiding argument, kept her misgivings to herself. Nevertheless, the contention that
transcendent spirit didn't exist at present prompted her to ask whether, in that
case, the world was devoid of God, as Nietzsche had maintained.
"Yes, I'm afraid it
is," Morrison replied. "For if
we equate God with the highest possible existence, it follows that such a
supreme existence, being dependent for its manifestation on the conversion of
mundane spirit into transcendent spirit, doesn't yet exist. We live in a world struggling towards God,
not in a world under God's protection."
"Then what has man
been worshipping these past two, nay, several thousand years?" Julie
retorted, her incredulity tempered by scepticism.
"If you want to
know the painful truth ... the Creator," Morrison averred. "And the Creator, whether regarded as
the Father, the Ground, Jehovah, the Almighty, or whatever, isn't really God in
any true and ultimate sense but, for want of a better word, the Devil. Yes, man has been effectively worshipping the
Devil! At first, in the earliest phase
of his religious evolution, more or less openly, in the form of sun-worship, but
subsequently, in the later pagan and early Christian eras, under cover of euphemistic
extrapolations from the Cosmos, like 'the Father'. Of course, true Christians put more emphasis
on Jesus Christ than His 'Father', the Creator.
But even they weren't entirely immune to Creator-worship, as any
Catholic will tell you.... I, however, don't worship the Creator, for I'm
opposed to unconscious diabolism. I wish
to see men creating God, doing what they can to further the development of pure
spirit in the world instead of worshipping some extrapolation from the Cosmos
which, rather than being supremely divine, is fundamentally diabolic, a sort of
powerful alpha rather than a truthful omega.
Thus I'm an atheist, but an atheist with this difference: I know the
Devil exists."
"As
the sun?" Julie asked.
"Yes, and not only
as our sun but, more pervasively, as all suns, or stars, in the Cosmos,"
Morrison confirmed, his voice stern and, for the first time that afternoon,
almost bitter. "At bottom the
Cosmos is evil, and so, needless to say, is life. But, as men, it's our duty to further the
development of civilization, which is an artificial phenomenon, and thus
attain, eventually, to absolute salvation in a supreme order of being. This, essentially, is what life's all about. Struggling to defeat nature and attain to the
Supernatural, no matter how difficult the struggle or protracted the
attainment! We can only go forwards and
up, not backwards and down, like some writers, including D.H. Lawrence and John
Cowper Powys, would evidently have us do!
However, they're unlikely to prevail over us."
"But you are,
though?" Julie surmised.
"Eventually,"
he averred. "Which
is to say, once I can find a publisher and acquire public recognition - a
thing, alas, which seems increasingly unlikely in
"It's a pity I'm
not Irish," Julie at length remarked.
"Then at least one could have some confidence in the future."
"Julie Phillips ...
you're Welsh, aren't you?" Morrison half-smilingly deduced.
Again Julie bit her lip,
but managed to nod all the same. It
would hardly have been appropriate, she felt, to admit now that she was
married, and married to an Englishman by name of Foster at that!
"That's probably
why I was able to fall in love with you all those years ago," he averred,
turning sentimental, "you being a Celt, like myself. As it happens, I've never felt drawn to
Anglo-Saxon women. Which is one of the
reasons why I've been alone all these years, I suspect."
It was a comment that
brought a deep blush out of Julie, for it confirmed her suspicions concerning
Peter Morrison's previous feelings towards her.
He had been in love with her after all, though she had never been
absolutely sure of it, especially since he had once sent a love letter to a
friend of hers. "You positively
sound like a racist!" she opined.
"I suppose it's
more a question of ethnic tribalism than racism," he replied, smiling,
"since I have no time for racists in the usual anti-black sense of the
word, and am all in favour of racial equality in the usual multiracial
sense. Yet I'm in no doubt that I've
experienced a degree of racial or, at any rate, ethnic prejudice at the hands
of various Englishmen and, more especially, Englishwomen over the years,
bearing in mind the number of rejection slips to my name, which only confirms
what I believe about their fear of ethnic subversion at the hands of radical
Irishmen like myself. But that doesn't
surprise me really, since, with due respect to the largely protestant Scots and
Welsh, only an Irishman of Catholic descent could have pursued Truth so intensely
as I did, and, as it runs contrary to the interests and beliefs of British
civilization, which is rooted in power and accordingly upholds a constitutional
monarchy, what else could I expect? The
amazing thing is that, having lived all but the first three years of my life in
England, I'm still an Irishman, still a person who attaches more importance to
Truth than to power, and accordingly to the inner than to the outer, to omega
than to alpha. It just goes to show that
ethnicity can't be discarded as an insignificant thing, not even in this day
and age, and that one's name is more than just a name. As a Jew to an Arab or a Greek to a Turk or a
Croat to a Serb, so an Irish Celt is to an English Anglo-Saxon, whether or not
he likes the fact. We don't belong to
their civilization, for our blood doesn't beat in time with theirs."
"And what would you
say I was?" Julie asked him, unable to suppress an involuntary smile of
complicity.
"A bit of a Welsh
Celt," he smilingly averred.
Julie nodded gently in
response to the apparent logic of Morrison's suggestion. "I suppose I'll have to concede you a
point there, though I must say you don't sound particularly Irish
yourself. They'd take you for an
Englishman in
"Until they read my
writings," he confidently retorted.
"However that may be, I've no desire to stay any longer in
She had almost forgotten
about his depression by now and felt momentarily sorry for him again. He had need of company all right, especially
from the opposite sex. But was she the
one to give it to him? She thought of
her husband or, rather, Dennis Foster's smug face came stealing into her mind's
eye, and she remembered that she would have to be back home by five if she
didn't want to arouse his suspicions. It
was already ten-past four - later than she thought. She couldn't afford to spend any more time
with Morrison and told him so, reminding him that she had a friend to meet.
"Oh forgive
me!" he responded, becoming embarrassed.
"I hadn't realized I was detaining you."
"Not to
worry," said Julie, as she stood up and began to put on her coat. "You made the time pass quickly
anyway."
It was only now, when
she was on the point of leaving, that Peter Morrison felt a tinge of regret
that he hadn't initiated any sexual relations with her but, on the contrary,
had kept talking all the time. If there
was one thing he really needed it was sex, and here he was, letting a beautiful
woman take her leave of him without having given her so much as a single
kiss! His intellectuality, born of years
of solitude and poverty, had got the better of him as usual, making him quite
overlook the sexual possibilities her presence afforded. And he had waited so long for the opportunity
of being alone with her, had tortured himself night and day with thoughts about
her body. Really, it was enough to make
one ashamed of oneself! However, maybe
there was still a way of saving the situation or at least of turning it to some
future account, and so he asked, albeit without any confidence of success:
"Would you like to come over here again some other day?"
'Like' was hardly the
word to Julie, who found the experience of being in his company something of a
strain. But, remembering that he was
desperately lonely and in need of what company he could get, she returned him a
positive answer, despite her marital qualms or, perhaps, because of them.
"Then how about
Thursday afternoon?" he boldly suggested.
It was now Tuesday.
"Yes, I think I may
be able to make it then," she agreed after a moment's deliberation, during
which her mind went through a plethora of calculations and permutations.
"Excellent! Then I look forward to seeing you
again." And, with that said, he
politely escorted her to the door.
CHAPTER FOUR: CONVERSATION WITH A
FRIEND
It was a day later that Julie Foster took advantage of her
husband's temporary absence, during the evening, to telephone one of her best
friends - a former fellow-student at her old university by name of Deirdre
Gray. It was Deirdre in person who
answered the phone, not her husband, John.
"Hi Julie!"
she responded eagerly. "How are
things?"
"Pretty
much as usual as far as Dennis is concerned, but new in one other
respect."
"Oh?"
Julie hesitated a moment
to formulate her thoughts, then asked: "Do you
remember a guy called Peter Morrison, by any chance?"
"Hmm yes, I think I
do. Wasn't he the freak who came to
visit us up North one time?"
"That's him!"
Julie confirmed, smiling. "Well,
you'll never guess, but he came into the restaurant that Tricia and I were
having lunch in yesterday afternoon.
Then, when we got up to go, he followed us out and asked me whether I'd
like to come back to his bedsit with him."
Deirdre had to take a
deep intake of breath here, so great was her surprise. "And did you go?" she at length
asked.
"Believe it or not,
I did," Julie replied. "I just
couldn't help feeling sorry for him, after the woeful tale he had to tell. I could see he needed someone."
"What was the
substance of it?" Deirdre wanted to know.
Julie did her best to
explain, placing emphasis on his solitude in
"And has he changed
much?"
"Quite a lot in
small ways," Julie opined. "But still fundamentally the same guy."
"Nothing much in it
for you, then," Deirdre joked.
"No, but plenty of
intellectual conversation that would have suited a man better," Julie
averred. "He's become a kind of
revolutionary ideologue with a desire to inflict some kind of transcendental
socialism, or socialistic transcendentalism, on
"I certainly can't
imagine him in the role of a revolutionary," Deirdre declared, still
patently amused. "He always struck
me as being essentially too much the gentleman freak to be anything but a kind
of intellectual outsider, a sort of potential Hermann Hesse. It was The Glass Bead Game he
was reading when he came to visit us that time, wasn't it?"
"So I recall,"
said Julie, casting her memory back to that January weekend in 1974, she
thought it was, when Morrison had dragged himself all the way up from
"Maybe because he
was disappointed by the fact that we already had sufficient male company,"
Deirdre suggested.
"Well, he ought to
have thought of that before he came!" Julie retorted, feeling, in spite of
the lapse of time, a twinge of regret.
"We could hardly have been expected to remain alone, under the
relatively promiscuous circumstances of college life. Anyway, to cut a long story somewhat shorter,
he has invited me back to his place again tomorrow afternoon, so I'm afraid I
shall have to cancel our arrangements, since I didn't have the heart to turn
him down. I hope you don't mind."
Deirdre did mind really,
but graciously pretended otherwise for Julie's sake. "I hope you'll find your second visit
more congenial than yesterday's," she remarked.
"Well, it's not as
though I have anything against him personally," Julie admitted, ignoring
the ironic overtones in her friend's comment.
"For he's really quite handsome and intelligent with it, as you can
probably recall. Indeed, judging from
what he told me about his religious beliefs, I shouldn't be surprised if he
were a kind of genius, since he seems to have evolved a theory of religious
development which has gone beyond any existing religion and put him in the
unique position of being a sort of Western guru and prophet. However, his writings have met with no
success vis-ŕ-vis London publishers, which doesn't particularly surprise me, in
that they're obviously pretty uncommercial in their
ideological earnestness, and therefore scarcely the kind of literature to
appeal to a mass public! If he writes
the kinds of thoughts he verbally conveyed to me yesterday, then I can't see
that he stands even a remote chance of having them published, particularly
since he's a total unknown with neither an academic nor a journalistic
background, and therefore could hardly be described as grist to the publishing
establishment's exploitative mill. He
flies in the face of the natural grain too much, which is only to be expected,
I suppose, from a die-hard paddy who is of the opinion that Britain is a land
of materialistic philistines with no real interest in the pursuit of Truth and,
consequently, scant regard for even philosophical literature, never mind
philosophy."
"Gosh, I had no
idea he was a writer," Deirdre declared.
"When did he start?"
Julie made an attempt to
explain most of what she had learnt from Morrison, which took her a good five
minutes. Deirdre listened in silence,
though with a tinge of jealousy that Julie had been party to his revelations
and confessions rather than herself.
After all, he had once written her a long letter and consequently she
had no reason to think that he didn't, at the time, also fancy her - perhaps
even more than he had originally fancied Julie.
For the theory was that, having gone to Newcastle all those years ago to
see and, if possible, get off with Julie, he had been sorely disappointed by
the fact that she already had a boyfriend and wasn't therefore accessible to
him. Consequently he had turned towards
Deirdre in the hope of establishing a sexual connection with her instead, only
to be disappointed on a similar count, since she had a boyfriend too -
something which he didn't at first realize.
There were, of course, other possible theories for the strange
turn-of-events, none of which, however, seemed as cogent as this one. Whatever the case, Morrison had gone away
disillusioned, never to return. But he
had sent a sort of love letter, and it had been addressed to Deirdre rather
than Julie. She still possessed it in
fact, though without her husband's knowledge.
Was it genuine or had it been simply designed to spite Julie for having
disappointed him? Despite no real
conviction either way, Deirdre preferred to think it was genuine, if only for
vanity's sake. After all, she had always
considered herself a better-looking woman than Julie, and more intelligent as
well. There was every possibility that
Peter Morrison had realized, in spite of his emotional loyalties to Julie, that
he was temperamentally and intellectually closer to Deirdre and could therefore
regard her as being more of a kindred spirit.
But now it was Julie who was going to visit him, having been party to
his deepest thoughts. It was slightly
annoying to Deirdre, even given her status as a happily-married young woman.
"Well, good luck
with everything," she commented, following her friend's monologue. "Perhaps, if he's as intellectually
precocious as you claim, he'll prove a useful guru to you."
"I rather doubt
it," Julie responded, smiling.
"But I can at least listen to one or two of his LPs and maybe get
him to fondle me. You never know, there
may be a man hiding under the surface of his ideological persona."
Deirdre gave vent to a
forced laugh, more to smother her jealousy than anything else. "I hope your husband doesn't get to find
out," she declared.
"Not if I keep it
to myself he won't," Julie assured her.
"Besides, you know how strained our relationship has become of
late. I'd be quite resigned to a divorce
now, especially in view of the foul trick Dennis played on me on his
birthday. I was all ready to go out,
unaware that he had already cancelled the rendezvous with you and John and the
others. Really, it was one of the unkindest
things he has ever done to me! I was
virtually in tears afterwards."
"We were pretty
disappointed too," Deirdre confessed.
"Particularly since we had made no alternative
arrangements that evening. But if
he was feeling ill ..."
"He couldn't have
been feeling that ill," Julie interposed, on a wave of ill-feeling towards Dennis,
"not to have had sex with me the way he did! At worst, it could only have been a slight
stomach upset."
"Oh well, no use
crying over spilt milk," Deirdre rejoined.
"Perhaps you'll get a chance to avenge yourself on him
tomorrow?"
With this implicit
reference to Peter Morrison, the conversation seemed to have reached an impasse,
so Julie terminated it, having arranged to meet Deirdre in the
Poor Peter Morrison, on
the other hand, seemed to have no room for either, and this fact saddened her a
little. He deserved better than he had
got from life, what with his depression and solitude. There ought to be something she could do for
him. Tomorrow she would wear a short
skirt and stockings, perhaps even a pair of high heels. She would show off her physical charms to
good effect and see if she could tempt him out of his celibacy. She would be fresh and sweet for him, and, if
he was really a man, he would respond to her, giving her a woman's satisfaction
in life. Yes, it would be one way of
paying Dennis back for the rotten trick he had played on her the other evening. And, besides, it would be highly flattering
to achieve a sexual victory over a man who was so obviously spiritually earnest
- more flattering to her seductive vanity than ever it could be with her
comparatively lecherous husband!
CHAPTER FIVE: A FATAL SLIP
Peter Morrison was waiting with mounting impatience for Julie to
arrive, as the small alarm clock in his room showed one-thirty on the Thursday
afternoon. That morning he had hardly
been able to concentrate on the essay he was writing, so much did her impending
visit play on his mind. He had struggled
for about two hours with the future transformation of man, but the prospect
that he would soon be seeing Julie again had continued to obsess him and
interfere with his concentration. He was
conscious now, as never before, of his great need of female company, and could
only half-heartedly attend to the business at hand. He realized - how poignantly! - that he was still in love with her and could think of no-one
else. The years of solitude may have
toughened his spirit, but they hadn't done away with the weakness of the flesh,
and his flesh was sorely in need of satisfaction. He was no saint to live all those years in
voluntary celibacy, and felt that much precious time had been wasted. He ought to have taken her for his wife from
the day he fell in love with her, instead of living alone all that time. Ah, what a misfortune was prolonged
solitude! It could only be to one's
detriment, no matter what countrified writers like John Cowper Powys happened
to think. Depression was its inevitable
corollary. And few men could have been
more depressed than him!
The minutes ticked by
and still she hadn't come. He began to
grow panicky, wondering whether she had changed her mind and decided to keep
her distance. How foolish of him not to
have taken her address or telephone number the other
day! Then he could at least have got in
touch with her. As things stood, he was
completely at her mercy, not knowing whether she would show him any. But then, just as he was on the point of
giving-up all hope, the door-bell rang and who should it be at the door but
Julie, looking every bit the beautiful woman he had always known her to
be. He was more than a little relieved
to see her again, and quickly led her up the winding staircase and along the
dark, carpetless corridor into his room.
"I'm so glad you
could make it," he impulsively declared, as soon as she was safely across
the threshold.
"I had no
intentions of deceiving you," she calmly assured him. "I was looking forward to returning
here." She removed her leather coat,
this time a full-length one, and, taking it from her, he hung it against the
door. Underneath, she was wearing a
pale-pink nylon blouse, which was semi-transparent, and a short black cotton
skirt with a gentle flounce. It was a
skirt she didn't wear very often these days, but had opted for partly because
she hoped it would remind him of how she used to dress when he first knew
her. Yet it seemed to have the desired
effect, since he quickly drew attention to it, remarking how it had always
excited him.
"In fact,
everything about you always excited me," he added, "including the way
you dressed." He stood back to
admire her. "Where women one is in
love with are concerned," he went on, turning philosophical, "there's
always this pleasure, it seems to me, in their clothing, a feeling that if one
were a woman oneself one would dress in exactly the same way. You never once wore anything that turned me
off, like the majority of women did and, for that matter, still do. I always admired your tastes."
Julie couldn't help
blushing on the reception of this generous compliment which, in any case, came
as a surprise to her, especially since she had only just arrived and not yet
made herself at home. Nevertheless she
returned him a grateful smile, which had the effect of making him feel even
more romantic.
"Come over
here," he coaxed her, leading the way to where his ten-bar electric fire
stood, just in front of the blocked-up fireplace.
She nervously obeyed him
and, when they were standing close to it, allowed him to place a delicate
exploratory kiss on her lips, closing her eyes in the process. Gently, ever so gently, he placed another,
then another, and, finally, a fourth one there, which lingered on to twice the
duration of the other three put together.
Then he drew her closer to himself and, holding her about the waist,
applied a series of gentle kisses to her cheeks and neck, noting all the while
the additional satisfaction this apparently gave her. For a moment they stood simply looking into
each other's eyes. There appeared to be
a faint glow of pleasure in hers, which was attributable to more than just the
warming effects of the electric fire, and he took comfort from it, steeling
himself for his next move. She waited
patiently, continuing to gaze at him, while he gently detached his hands from
round her waist and reached for the zip to her skirt, located on her right-hand
side. It slid down without too much
effort on his part and, kneeling down in front of her, he tugged at the skirt,
which came down even more easily than the zip, forming a small pile of material
around her feet. Curiously she made no
attempt to step out of it, and neither did he bother to free her. Instead he cast his attention over her legs,
noting, with quickening heartbeat, the enticing seductiveness of her thighs
which, though not too expansive, were sufficiently firm and fleshy to testify
to the beauty of a mature woman. They
were, for the most part, covered in black nylons, while pink suspenders
stretched from the stocking-tops to the matching suspender-belt above. Pink was also the colour of her panties,
which, like the stockings, were nylon and semi-transparent. There was a band of patterning around their
edges, but more eye-catching by far was the dark mound of pubic hair which her
panties evidently weren't designed to hide!
He stared at it in fascination awhile, before placing a firm kiss on
each of her thighs, to one side of the suspenders. A glance up her body revealed that she was
still gazing down at him, though beginning to blush ever so endearingly. He stood up to unbutton her blouse, a gentle
smile on his face from fear she might obstruct him. But she remained completely passive, as before.
Casting her blouse to
one side, he took an appreciative glance at the upper halves of her breasts,
decided he would like to stroke them and, having planted a fresh kiss on her
lips, betook himself to her rear, where he proceeded to unclip her bra
strap. With that removed, he gave-in to
his designs on her breasts, gently stroking and cupping them from behind. Then he kneeled down to allow his gaze to
wander over her rear, which had always struck him as being one of her chief
assets. Yes, it was still as beautifully
curvaceous as ever, and it wasn't long before his visual exploration gave way
to a tactile one, as he lightly played the fingers of each hand across its
nylon-clad expanse. Ever so gently he
slid the panties down her legs until they joined the little pile of cotton
skirt at her feet. It was a veritable
revelation for him to be looking at her thus, her flesh bare to his avid
curiosity, and, more from thanksgiving than anything else, he applied a kiss to
each of her buttocks, taking care to inhale the fragrance of her skin in the
process. That done, he once more climbed
to his feet and gently ran a hand between her thighs, backwards and forwards
along the groove of her crotch, as though to reassure himself, after all these
years of fantasy and solitude, that she actually had something there.
Yes, she evidently enjoyed
having it stroked, for she half-turned her head
towards him, and there was a cute little smile on her lips. He nervously kissed her on the cheek, as much
from gratitude as desire. Then, feeling
his lust quicken as his hands slid over her breasts, he turned her fully round
and passionately embraced her, obliging her to stagger free of her clothing as
she turned towards him.
"Ah, Julie, how
good it is to have you in my arms after all this time!" he declared, while
she gave herself up to his embrace. "So good!"
Nervously, he led her to his single bed and, pulling back the quilt,
requested her to lie down on top of it, her flesh against its nylon sheet. "Now open your legs as wide apart as
possible," he added, impatient to get a good look at everything.
She felt slightly
embarrassed at the prospect of completely exposing herself to his gaze, but
found herself obeying him even so, until her ordinarily private parts were
rendered as conspicuously unprivate as possible,
which was evidently all he needed to get rid of his own modesty and free his
rapidly-rearing member from its cotton prison.
He had never seen it look so positive!
For this was an erection with a purpose, whereas all
his previous erections had been futile because entirely divorced from vaginal
stimulation, even voyeuristically.
He felt, for the first time in his life, the pride of his engorged
masculinity with Julie's body completely at his mercy, and lost no time in
approaching her with a view to burying himself in it up to the hilt.
Once inside her, he knew
that he had found his long-lost companion, his beloved sweetheart. He rode himself to a pulsating climax,
reaching his orgasmic destination within barely four minutes of the starting
gate and causing her to squirm with unconcealed pleasure beneath him. Predictably there wasn't all that much
pleasure in the climax itself, since he had long been accustomed to rather
lukewarm wet-dreams and had grown to regard himself as virtually impotent. But the main pleasure, if anywhere, came from
the fact that he was actually riding the woman with whom he had long been in
love and was no longer technically a virgin.
The real pleasure came from the satisfaction of having sex in reality
instead of in imagination for once, and it was a pleasure he greatly
relished! It didn't occur to him to
wonder whether Julie had achieved orgasmic release, under the circumstances of
his relatively quick discharge, since she wasn't now being particularly
demonstrative and had more-or-less relapsed into squirmless
quiescence with the termination of his ride.
He took it for granted that a mutual agreement had been reached.
But he wasn't personally
satisfied that he had done everything he wanted to and, withdrawing his
inflamed and by-now quite sticky member from its nesting place, he requested
that she lick it clean for him, though not before he had repositioned himself,
so that they were facing in opposite directions. Would she respond, he wondered, or ought he
to take the initiative and plunge tongue-first, as it were, into her voluptuous
trench? Thankfully she obliged him by
lowering it to his mouth while proceeding to stroke and gently suck his member, licking away the stickiness which coated
the greater part of its glossy length.
Feeling freshly excited by
this unprecedented experience, he likewise applied his tongue to an oral
adventure, at first tentatively and with a twinge of disgust but, as he
gradually acclimatized himself to it, by degrees becoming bolder, proceeding to
prod between her inner labia in pursuance of her clitoris, that cynosure of her
sex. Ah, what satisfaction it gave him
to be looking up her from such close range, to be in such voyeuristic
possession of everything normally hidden to the eye! His tongue growing tired of prodding and
tasting her most secret flesh, he thumbed her labia as far apart as possible,
while his nose inhaled the musty spermatic odour which issued from the
cavernous depths in between them. It was
slightly disgusting and yet, at the same time, distinctly fascinating to be in
this advantageous oral position for the first time in his life, especially
since it was with the only woman who had ever really mattered to him, and she
was not only beautiful but intelligent and cultured as well - a lady, such as
his mother, with her plebeian instincts, had never been!
Yes, he needed the
company of a lady as opposed to an uncultivated woman. He would have been incapable of taking an
interest in an ordinary woman, for her lack of culture or interest in
intellectual matters would quickly have bored and offended him. Only someone like Julie could keep his
interest alive, making him feel that he was consorting with an equal or, at any
rate, a suitable companion. And if he
had an 'accident' with her ... well, he would know it was with the right
person. Indeed, an 'accident' would
hardly be possible where she was concerned.
He couldn't have begrudged her a child.
Removing his nose from
her gaping sex, he applied it, by contrast, to her clenched anus, which smelt
faintly excremental, although he thought he could also detect some perfume on
it. That being the case, he
involuntarily planted a terse but fairly firm kiss to one side of it, and
Julie, completely taken by surprise and forgetting herself for a moment,
exclaimed: "Why, you're almost as bad as my husband!"
The words shot through
Morrison's brain like a thunderbolt from the blue, causing him to break off his
oral explorations and open his mouth wide in horror. Had he heard correctly or was it simply his
imagination? Frantically he pushed her
body away from himself and sat up to confront her, obliging her to abandon her fondlings and lickings.
"What was that you said?" he imperatively demanded, on a
mounting wave of foreboding.
She immediately realized
that she had made a grave mistake, but pretended to treat it lightly. "Only that my husband is also given to
kissing my arsehole," she replied, modifying her response.
Morrison was beyond
himself with anger. "Why didn't you
tell me you were married?" he snapped, his voice breaking under the sudden
strain of the situation.
She stared at him
aghast. "But I couldn't ..."
was all she managed to say.
"Couldn't?" he
echoed, becoming even more furious.
"What d'you mean, you couldn't? You've a sodding
tongue in your bloody head, haven't you?"
"Yes, but you
wouldn't have been pleased to hear that I was married," she protested,
becoming distinctly nervous.
"That's not the
point!" he snapped, his face distraught.
"I'd never have invited you back to my room in the first place and
thereby ran the risk of getting sexually involved with you, had I known you
were married. I'd have said goodbye to
you outside the restaurant and gone about my own wretched business. But you tricked me and induced me to think
that you were still Julie Phillips, so that I was unaware of the exact
position. You just wanted to see what
you could get out of me, didn't you?"
"No, not at all,
Peter, I just wanted to help you," Julie protested, on the verge of tears.
"Help me? D'you think this
has helped me - obliging me to make a fucking fool of myself for your sexual
benefit?" he exploded. "Why,
you dirty little slut, you're nothing more than a base opportunist and
exploiter of other people's passions!"
"No, don't say
that!" cried Julie, as tears came into her eyes. "I love you."
"Love me?"
Morrison sneered. "Which is why
you're married to someone else, is it?"
He had reached the zenith of his anger and frustration by now, and was
trembling like a leaf in the autumnal wind.
All those years of solitude were crowding-in upon him, making him aware
that his depression was largely a consequence of the fact that he had suffered
unrequited love at the hands of this very woman, and become completely cut off
from congenial company. He had suffered
on account of her all right, but had she suffered on account of him? Not if her husband was anything to judge
by! And now she had the audacity to say
she loved him - as if he could be expected to believe it!
Furious, he struck her
across the face and threw himself upon her, gripping her throat in both hands
and pressing against her windpipe for all he was worth. It took her a while to wake up to what was
actually happening, so unprepared was she for anything so drastic. Yet when it became clear to her that he
wasn't bluffing or joking but was in deadly earnest, she put up a ferocious
struggle with him, bucking and twisting like a wild bronco. However, his hands were too powerful to be
dislodged and, slowly but surely, as the minutes ticked by, they squeezed the
life out of her. She gave a last pitiful
gasp, succumbed to a tortuous spasm, and was no more. He had killed the thing he loved!
There were tears in his
eyes as he bent over her dead body, and his heart and the blood vessels in his
head were beating in a wild frenzy of inverted passion. For a moment he thought he was dreaming, that he had become a prisoner of some ghastly
nightmare, caught-up in a sequence of unreal events completely beyond conscious
control. But this illusion was quickly
shattered by the sound of pop music coming-up from the nearest of the
downstairs neighbours, who was evidently at her usual inconsiderate and
irresponsible tricks again. She must
have been playing her radiogram for the past half-hour, he supposed. Though, for once, the novelty of his
preoccupations with another person had distracted his attention from it, making
him oblivious of external interferences.
Yet now they were patently back again, thus testifying to the resumption
of the noise-ridden hell in which he was ordinarily obliged to live - a
prisoner of circumstances beyond his control.
Even the Pyrenees mountain dog had started to bark gruffly from its
kennel by the adjoining alley behind the house, and that was just as bad, if
not worse, than the pounding drumbeat coming up from below, as though from Hell
itself. Really, it was enough to drive
one mad sometimes! What rotten luck he
had always had, being surrounded and thwarted in his work by such empty-headed
idiots as the neighbour in question! No
wonder he had often failed to concentrate properly and produce the sort of
literary results he knew he was capable of!
He frowned sullenly and cursed to himself but, remembering there had
been quite a lot of noise in his own room prior to the violent termination of
Julie's life, decided that perhaps it was just as well, for once, that the
adolescent's radiogram had been on, after all.
At least it would prevent her from having any untoward suspicions about
him, he supposed.
Turning back towards
Julie's lifeless body, he felt overcome by a wave of remorse and automatically
smacked a compassionate kiss on her brow.
He knew she was really an 'it' now, but he preferred to regard her as in
some sense ‘she’ for comfort's sake.
After all, her flesh was still warm and scarcely less beautiful in death
than it had been in life.
Goaded on by years of
celibacy, he decided to make the most of the opportunity for impersonal
curiosity and sexual experimentation which her corpse now afforded him, and so
lost no time in looking it over from head to toe, dwelling on its various
physical characteristics with the patient care for detail which only a lover
can muster. Her arms had always been a
highpoint of her physical beauty, being fleshy, smooth, and soft as well as
delicately shaped, and he found himself becoming newly conscious of their
feminine charm as he scanned them at leisure - something which her live
presence would probably have inhibited or even precluded. Likewise her legs still fascinated him,
especially her thighs, partially clad in dark stockings and rendered more
alluring by the pink suspenders. He
stared at them long and hard and, becoming aroused by their fleshy
seductiveness, duly decided to expose her sex to his scrutiny again. Thus he pulled her legs as far apart as
circumstances would allow, so that it seemed as though her clitoris would pop
out, like the bird of a cuckoo clock.
Giving way to the
perverse temptation to mount her, however, wasn't so easy. But after dismissing his moral qualms and
convincing himself that her body was now completely
his to do with as he liked, he forced himself upon her and entered it for the
pleasure of a fresh orgasmic assault.
However, he quickly grew tired of this and, turning her onto her stomach,
renewed his carnal assault from behind, gripping a breast in each hand and
pumping away like a piston-engine in full steam. Then, deciding on a spot of manipulative
adventure, he thrust a hand into her sex in the wake of his member, curious to
see how far it would go. But here, too,
he felt a qualm, this time on the basis of what he might encounter in the
depths of her womb, as it were, if he pushed the hand in too far, and
consequently was unable to bury more than the length of his fingers in her. He had always rather childishly, and some
would say irrationally, felt that a hand pushed too far into the vagina might
encounter some kind of obstacle or even bite from an insect-like creature lying
in wait at the mouth of the womb, like a temple guardian, and was still to some
extent a victim of this rather puerile notion.
Thus he withdrew the hand after a few seconds' tentative exploration and
contented himself, instead, with caressing her buttocks and back. His curious psychology, he reflected, was
probably shared by other men, too!
Later on, after he had
brewed some tea and listened to a couple of records through his headphones, he
began to wonder what to do with the corpse.
For in a day or two it would begin to smell most unsavoury and become
extremely disagreeable to live with. He
would have to set about getting rid of it tomorrow at the latest ... for his
neighbours' sakes as well as his own.
But tonight, at any rate, his only real desire was to experiment with it
and have what pleasure he could at its physical expense. He had lived long enough without any real
sexual satisfaction and could hardly blame himself for wanting to get what
pleasure he could from Julie's lifeless body while the opportunity
prevailed. And now he had an idea in his
head that he saw no reason not to translate into action. He would dress Julie in her clothes and amuse
himself by putting her body into a variety of alluring positions, treating her
as a model whom he was intent on making as seductive as possible.
He had long been
interested in soft pornography but, these days, could ill-afford to buy any,
not even from the local newsagents.
Also, he had grown to despise a majority of magazines for their
bourgeois advertising content and the unsatisfactory way in which models were
generally portrayed. He had long come to
the conclusion that the only magazine he would be tempted to buy, even at the
risk of being left short of money, would be one in which Julie was to be
seen. But, of course, he knew only too
well that she wasn't the kind of woman to go in for pornography, even when
soft, and that there would be no opportunity, in consequence, for him to buy a
magazine with her in it. Now, however,
he realized that, with her body at his disposal, he could make his own
pornography free-of-charge, as it were, simply by arranging her appearance to
suit his tastes and then taking photos of her.
He was still in possession of an old instamatic, a gift of several
birthdays ago, and had enough prints left over from his jerk-shy past to last
him through the evening. With a number
of snaps of Julie's body, he would have easy access to a private pornographic
world which would mean more to him than any number of glossy magazines ever
could. And if, in later years, he wanted
to remind himself of how beautiful she had once been, all he need do would be
to turn to the photos and reassure himself to his heart's content. And no-one else need ever know anything about
it.
Eagerly, he lifted Julie
off the bed and carried her over to the centre of his room, directly under the
powerful electric light which dangled, in shadeless
severity, several inches from the cream-coloured ceiling, like an inquisitive
spider. There he dressed her in the
clothes he had personally removed from her body no more than a few hours
before, putting everything back into place except for her leather coat which,
at this point, he preferred to use as a kind of rug beneath her. With that accomplished, he applied himself to
her hair, combing it down either side of her pallid face, so that she seemed as
if bathed in a halo of wavy-blonde light.
Then, free to attend to the erotic side of things, he hitched up her
skirt until the bulk of her thighs was exposed, leaving her legs stretched out
in front. Her arms he placed at her
sides, as though she were sunbathing. At
length, she was ready to be snapped!
The photographic aspect
of things was relatively straightforward but, not altogether surprisingly,
there were more than a few hitches to what followed, during the course of the
evening. For her body, becoming
increasingly subject to rigor mortis, would sometimes refuse to stay
in a given position, but had a tendency to flop down or back from the
increasingly erotic demands he was making on it. Nevertheless, through sheer perseverance,
Morrison succeeded in producing some fairly satisfactory results, and, by
midnight, he was beginning to regard his venture with a degree of almost
professional pride. One would hardly
have suspected that what he held in his hands were snaps of a corpse,
especially where the ones focusing on the middle to lower parts of it were
concerned! And these, naturally enough,
were the ones which predominated, since they served his pornographic purposes
the most.
There was something about
looking up a woman's skirt which had fascinated him as a young child, not least
in respect of his mother, and now that he was an adult this same tendency held
no less fascination for him than before.
In fact, its erotic element was now much sharper than it had been in
those distant days, when he was simply led by infantile curiosity to peer up
his mother's dark-stockinged legs from the floor with
toy car or soldier in hand, to ascertain what mystery her skirt ordinarily
concealed from him. By positioning
himself with camera in hand at Julie's feet, he could capture the subtle
eroticism of a pair of panties glimpsed under the shadow of a hitched-up skirt,
reminiscent in a way of his mother's beige knickers, and by parting her legs
slightly, as he now did, this glimpse could be expanded to include the dense
mound of public hair which lay compressed beneath the tightly-fitting panties
in question, something which his mother's knickers had always concealed from
him even when he had been bold enough to gaze up between her legs while
pretending to retrieve a toy car from under them, as on more than one
occasion. The one thing he couldn't get
Julie to do, however, was to stand up!
But he could turn her
onto her stomach and photograph her from the rear ... with particular emphasis
on her rump and thighs, as well as remove various items of clothing in order to
expose her naked flesh to his camera lens.
Of the dozen or so photos he took that evening, at least eight showed
her bare flesh to clear erotic advantage, some of them concentrating on her
vagina, others on her thighs and rump.
In one, he managed to capture all three together by pinioning her legs
back under the weight of a wooden chair, while he sat on it and photographed
them from above. That was such an erotic
position, that he felt tempted, in spite of his qualms, to indulge in a renewed
bout of oral sex with her.
Thus, freeing her from
the clamp-like hold of the chair, and putting his instamatic to one side, he
lifted her legs back until they were parallel with her ears and squatted down
on them, so that the slightly-upended rump was exposed to his eager hands. Her flesh had by now become somewhat colder,
though the heat of his electric fire partly compensated him for this
inconvenience and enabled him to proceed with his activities without undue
disgust. By swivelling her round, so
that her upended rump was directly in front of the fire, he was able to warm up
her vagina and thus make it more inviting to himself,
whether for purposes of kissing, prodding, or stroking. Not content with that, he permitted his
mischievous fingers access to her anus as well, tugging on the surrounding
flesh until its sphincter expanded sufficiently far in every direction to enable
him to peer down into a dark fleshy recess.
However, close-up the
smell wasn't particularly pleasant, so he quickly abandoned this experiment in
favour of a closer look at her urethra, pulling at and stretching the
surrounding flesh in like-manner. He
wondered whether he oughtn't to pour lots of water down her throat, to see if
she could be induced to urinate in due course.
But, much as it intrigued him to discover whether a corpse could be made
to pass water, on second thoughts the idea didn't really appeal to him all that
much and he easily abandoned it, fearing it would only cause him additional
inconvenience. After all, she might make
a lot of noise in the process, and that would hardly be to his advantage, what
with the neighbours to consider.
Besides, watching a corpse piss didn't strike him, on further
reflection, as likely to be a particularly interesting experience. It would be wiser to concentrate on her
vagina, as at present, and thereby save himself
additional bad smells.
And so he continued to
play with it, opening it out as far as he could and peering into its sticky
crevice. But soon this game tired him
too, and he gave up the pursuit of further carnal pleasure, resigning himself
to the fact that a dead woman could never match a live one where oral
satisfaction was concerned! A corpse was
simply something whose basic anatomy quickly bored or disgusted one. Wearily, and not without a degree of
self-contempt, he covered Julie's stiffening body with a few items of clothing
and retired to bed.
Under the circumstances
of having a corpse in the room, sleep didn't come too easily to him. But when at last it did, he was mercifully
spared any recollection of the terrible things he had done. The next morning, however, was to bring all
that back to him, and with a vengeance!
CHAPTER SIX: ANXIOUS HUSBAND
The grandfather clock in the sitting room of Dennis Foster's
Had she left him at
last, as she had on more than one occasion threatened to do? Was she taking revenge on him for all the
humiliations he had so selfishly inflicted upon her on his birthday? These and other such questions plagued his
worry-stricken mind, and no amount of brandy could dispel them. Supposing she had been involved in an
accident? He tried a more optimistic
line, but soon found a way of disparaging it.
An accident would surely have led to his receiving a telephone call by
now. Yes, how could he think of such a
thing! Desperately, he reached out his
hand for the telephone, since the connection with hospital gave him a new idea,
and at this late stage of the day he was prepared to try anything. He would phone Tricia Kells
and find out from her what, if anything, was going on
- assuming she would be able or willing to tell him. Tricia was, after all, one of Julie's closest
friends.
Wearily he rang her
number and waited out the intervening time with the aid of a few extra sips of
brandy. His nerves were still sharply
on-edge. Fortunately it was Tricia in
person, and not her ebullient fiancé, who picked up the receiver. She recognized his voice straightaway,
despite its circumstantial impediments.
"Hello Dennis! What's up?"
He made an effort to
explain, slurring and stammering all the while.
"Well, she's
certainly not here," Tricia declared, doing her level best to sound
sympathetic in response to Dennis Foster's manifestly distraught
tone-of-voice. "I haven't seen her
since Tuesday, when we dined together in the
"And the pair of
you were alone?" he asked, eager to glean every little scrap of
information from her.
"Yes, of course....
Although, now I come to think of it, there was someone sitting near us who
recognized Julie and decided to follow her out of the restaurant when we
left."
"Oh?" Dennis Foster's suspicions rose perceptibly
at this point, and so did his impatience to acquire new information. "Who was this someone?" he
demanded, suddenly becoming emboldened and seemingly free of inebriation.
Tricia automatically
shrugged her shoulders at her end of the line and privately wondered whether
she oughtn't to have kept the information concerning the stranger to herself -
for Julie's sake. But, since Dennis
Foster was pressing her to answer, she replied: "All I know for sure is
that he had originally met Julie while she was still a student, some years
before, and was apparently keen to speak to her again. He wasn't anyone with whom I'm
familiar."
"You're
certain?"
"Positive."
Dennis Foster's hopes sank
drastically. It seemed there would be no
way of tracing this man, since he knew little of Julie's past
relationships. "And did he get to
speak to her?" he asked.
"Apparently he
did," Tricia replied, after some nervous hesitation. "Since he followed us upstairs to the
till on our way out, Julie decided she would let him and, once outside the
restaurant, politely suggested we go our separate ways. So I left her to him."
"I see,"
sighed Dennis, who could only just manage to hold the telephone receiver up to
his ear, so much was his hand shaking.
There could be no doubt that she had cuckolded him by going off with
this former acquaintance of hers! He
felt doubly humiliated, what with Tricia on the other end of the line. What would she be thinking, he wondered? "Tell me, can you remember what this
fellow looked like?" he asked, endeavouring, as best he could, not to
sound too concerned.
There ensued a short
pause while Tricia gathered her impressions together. "Well, I only took a brief glance at him
while we were having lunch, since I had my back turned to him," she
confessed. "But I'd say he was in
his late thirties and of slight to medium build, with dark-brown hair. Quite a good-looking chap
really, although not a particularly smartly-dressed one, if the worn state of
his jacket was anything by which to judge!
That's the best I can do, I'm afraid."
"Thank you,"
said Dennis. "You've been a great
help."
Tricia smiled to herself
and wondered whether Julie would have said the same. "But you don't actually think she's with
him now, do you?" she rejoined, by way of incredulous curiosity. "I mean ..."
"I don't honestly
know," he wearily responded.
"She might be."
"Oh no, don't think
that!" the young Irishwoman protested in a gently reproachful manner. "Julie's simply not that kind of
woman. Why, in all probability, she'll
be at Deirdre Gray's house, having a pre-Christmas
party."
"You think
so?" Dennis Foster was almost
hopeful this would indeed prove to be the case.
But in his heart-of-hearts he rather doubted it! Tricia was probably just trying to help him
save face with her.
"Yes. Why not give her a ring?"
"Okay, I'll do
that," he agreed thoughtfully.
"Thanks for the suggestion."
And, bidding her a terse goodnight, he returned the receiver to its slot
and straightaway rang Deirdre's number.
He was now feeling even more nervous than before, especially since the
last time he had phoned her it was to cancel the prior arrangements made for
his birthday dinner. He felt sure the
cancellation had been resented!
Knocking back the last
of his brandy, he heard the response of a man's voice at the other end of the
line. It was Deirdre's husband,
John. "Good evening mate, it's Dennis here," he stammered, unconsciously letting
the glass fall from his hand. "I
wonder, is Julie there, by any chance?"
"Julie? Good heavens no, of course not! Why do you ask?"
Deirdre Gray, who was
sitting next to her husband on the settee by the telephone, pricked up her ears
and simultaneously turned down the volume of their television, the better to
overhear his conversation.
"It's just that, er, she's been out all day and still hasn't returned
home," said Dennis. "I'm
beginning to wonder where-on-earth she could possibly be, since she gave me no
advance warning or anything. In fact,
it's the first time that anything like this has ever happened."
Realizing that something
was amiss, John Gray adopted a suitably sympathetic tone-of-voice. "Well, all I can say is we haven't seen
her since before your birthday. By the
way, are you fully recovered from your sickness now?"
"Oh, much better
thanks," Dennis responded, becoming all of a sudden embarrassed, as well
he might. "I'm sorry I had to
cancel our engagement."
"No trouble,"
John Gray assured him. "We were
both rather concerned for your health."
Deirdre Gray smiled to
herself and wondered whether Julie's absence from home might not be
attributable to her visit to Peter Morrison's place. She might have put the suggestion to Dennis
via her husband but for her feelings of jealousy concerning the probable
implications of Julie's behaviour.
Besides, she thought it best to keep the business of Julie's own phone
call, the previous day, to herself, since it would have unduly compromised her
in their affairs, as well as compromised Julie in her husband's eyes, since
Dennis was evidently more than a little suspicious that something adulterous
was afoot. After all, Julie had made it
perfectly clear, over the phone, that she was intent upon getting her own back
on her husband for the gross humiliations he had inflicted upon her on his
birthday. It wouldn't do for Deirdre to
betray their confidence, not when her long-standing friendship with Julie,
dating back to college days, was at stake!
Rather, it served Dennis Foster right for having behaved in such a
deceitful manner!
And so she maintained a
discreet silence, content to keep what little she knew about Julie's affairs to
herself. Tomorrow, when they were due to
meet in the West End, she would doubtless find out exactly what Julie had been
up to with Peter Morrison the previous night, and if possible would then
wriggle her own way into his life to see if he still felt attracted towards her
- as, on the strength of his one and only love-letter to her, he once evidently
had been. For why should Julie be the
one to have all the fun, she thought, especially in view of the fact that she
was both less attractive and less intelligent?
Smiling inwardly again,
Deirdre Gray relapsed into television-viewing.
What John had to say to Dennis about his birthday didn't really interest
her. It was what Peter Morrison would
now be doing with Julie that did!
CHAPTER SEVEN: DISPOSAL OF THE
EVIDENCE
Disposing of Julie's corpse wasn't a problem that Peter Morrison greatly
relished, and scarcely one he felt competent to handle. Yet awakening, early next morning, to the
sight of it lying half-naked on the floor, he knew he couldn't afford to waste
any time in the matter. Already, grown
stiff and cold, the body was beginning to smell somewhat disagreeable. In a day or two the smell would be even
worse, and that was a prospect he could ill-stomach! Consequently he determined, there and then,
to begin disposal operations that very morning, once he had acquired the necessary
tools. It would be a disgusting, not to
say frightening, task, but at least he could be confident that no-one would
interrupt him and expose his crime. As
things stood, the landlord wasn't due to collect the following month's rent for
another two weeks. Since there were no other visitors to expect in the meantime, that gave
him plenty of time to set about the task of dissection. For once, he was almost grateful that he
lived in solitude, without obligations to friends or relatives. The corpse would certainly be safe from
prying eyes, so long as it remained in his room.
Resigning himself to the
difficult task ahead, he repaired to the local hardware shop for the purchase
of a large carving knife and a medium-sized hand-saw. He had determined, meanwhile, that the best
way of disposing of the body would be to remove all its internal organs, chop
them into tiny pieces, and wrap the pieces in newspaper or hide them in empty
tins and cartons, which he would then deposit in the dustbins behind the front
hedge. The rest of the body he would
simply saw into small pieces and dissolve in sulphuric acid, reducing it all to
a thick scum which he could then dispose of either down his sink or down the
toilet bowl. And with that done, he
would be free of the corpse and thus of any incriminating evidence for his
terrible crime. Life would gradually
return to normal or, at any rate, to what it had been prior to Julie's brief
and catastrophic intrusion.
Once he had secured the
necessary tools it was time to tackle the problem of dissection, so he lifted
Julie's body onto the single table in his room and prepared himself for the
ordeal ahead, covering his clothes in a white overall and squeezing his hands
into a pair of old rubber gloves which he sometimes used when washing up. He reflected that it was a pity he didn't
have a peg for his nose, as, steeling himself, he stood over the body with
carving knife in hand, his nerves distinctly on edge and his heart beating more
fiercely than ever it had done when he was making love to Julie or indeed
strangling her, the previous day. But he
did at least have some air-freshener to-hand and had taken the precaution,
moreover, of opening one of his four windows as wide as it would go. Fortunately for him, the view from his
first-floor room gave-on to an abandoned factory at the back. Only with the left-hand window, which, like
its right-hand counterpart, was set at a thirty-degree angle to the middle two,
would the interior of his room be exposed to some of the people who lived in
the tenements across the far side of the intervening alley. But ever since first moving into the room he
had availed himself of a thick curtain there, which remained permanently in
place. Light, however, there was no
shortage of, since the sun shone in through the other three windows during the
greater part of any day when the sky wasn't overcast, which, luckily, it was
far from being on this occasion. All he need worry about was a lack of nerve and the possibility of
making too much noise.
Thus after a little
preliminary blood-letting, during which he drained what he could from a number
of incisions into various limbs, including her right-hand wrist, into some
empty milk bottles, he plunged the knife into her abdomen and began to carve an
opening there which would give him sufficient access to the interior
organs. The smell, as he carved the
flesh apart, was more revolting than he had expected, causing him some
involuntary retchings, but by periodically turning
his nose away and inhaling large gulps of fresh air from the nearby open
window, he found that he could survive its oppressive effects on himself and
continue with his task without serious mishap.
Her flesh once opened up
in this manner, he was obliged, in the absence of wedges or supports, to carve
a contrary opening to the first one in order to get leverage on it and slowly
tear it apart, thereby exposing her internal organs to his horrified gaze. And yet even then he was obliged to carve a
further opening in her flesh, to have access to both bowels and bladder. His nerve almost failed him at this point, as
blood poured over his gloved hands and sullied his overall, some of it even
dripping down to the plastic sheet and bowl he had judiciously placed, at the
last moment, under the table. What, he
wondered, would the nearest neighbours think he was up to? However, for once he had determined to play
some classical music on his record-player in order to smother the noise he was
making, and this now streamed out of the twin speakers at opposite ends of the
room in full stereophonic oscillation.
And so, between retchings and near faints, qualms and curses, he slowly
succeeded in removing, one by one, each of the internal organs, which he
carefully placed in a second and somewhat larger plastic bowl ... preparatory
to carving them up. He was particularly
ashamed, when the moment came, to handle her heart, since he felt it to be in
some sense associated with her former love for him and therefore inherently
sacred. Yet that, too, would have to go
the way of the kidneys, bladder, lungs, spleen, bowels, and appendix, not to
mention everything else. That, too,
would have to be carved into numerous fragments and wrapped in newspaper or
deposited in empty cans. There was no
sense in keeping it. Now it was no more
than a broken pump.
The morning being
dedicated to the unsavoury task of disembowelling Julie's corpse, the afternoon
was given over to the even more unsavoury task of sawing it into separate
pieces, to make possible its eventual liquidation through sulphuric acid. Here, too, he found it necessary to take
intermittent breaks from the stench which the dismembering of the corpse
engendered, and even though he worked damn hard at the task all afternoon, it
was still unfinished when, tired and revolted, he committed his vulnerable
stomach to an evening meal, which, for once, he took in a local café. But his appetite had completely failed him
and, returning dejectedly to his room with little more than a third of the food
eaten, he plunged anew into the dissection of what remained of Julie's body.
The following day, after
a restless night's sleep, during which he dreamed he was making love to her all
over again, he felt so faint and weak that he could barely stagger out of bed,
let alone attend to the terrible business of carrying-on from where he had left
off. Yet he knew there was no
alternative but to go through with it to the bitter end, and so, after a
mouthful of tea and a little light porridge, he began to busy himself with the
reduction of the internal organs to so many tiny pieces of offal. Of all the organs, the bowels were
unquestionably the most disgusting to handle, since weighted with a day's
excrement which had to be squeezed out of them before he could proceed to slice
them up. How he now regretted that he
had ever invited Julie back to his room in the first place! How foolish he had been to involve himself
with her and thereby run the risk of doing what he did! Murder was the last thing he would have
considered himself capable of, and, now that he was saddled with the sordid
consequences, he deeply regretted having committed it, regardless of the
outraged state-of-mind which seemed to justify him at the time. The body he had once loved above all other
things in life had now become for him the source of his deepest loathing and
disgust! Reduced to its basic
components, it was no better than a cow's or a pig's carcass - maybe even a
shade worse. And he still hadn't got rid
of it!
By mid-afternoon,
however, he was ready to attend to the delicate business of acquiring himself a
large quantity of concentrated sulphuric acid, and when, after much haggling
and pleading with the nearest purveyor of industrial chemicals, he eventually
succeeded in this nerve-wracking objective, nothing remained to be done except
to dissolve the severed limbs of Julie's body and dispose of the tiny sliced-up
parts in the outside dustbins. How he
would survive over the Christmas holidays on what little money he had left,
after the expense of buying the acid and acquiring, on loan, a couple of small
non-corrosive metallic drums in which to pour it ... he didn't honestly
know. But so long as he could completely
free himself of Julie's remains in the meantime, that was all that really
mattered.
And so, having wrapped
up the fragmented organs and disposed of them in the half-full dustbins which
always stood, well-hidden from public view, in the narrow front-garden of the
old lodging house, he applied himself to the task of destroying what remained of
the dismembered body in the sulphuric acid, taking care not to splash or soak
his hands in the process. One by one,
the severed limbs were prodded down into it with the aid of a metal rod and the
drums then covered over and left to do their grisly work. There was still a lot of mess to clear up in
his room, however, and this he next attended to, being especially careful to
wipe away the stains Julie's blood had made on both the table and plastic
covering on the floor. Even the nearby
chest-of-drawers had got spattered with it, thereby requiring the application
of a damp rag, followed, in due course, by a fresh coat of polish. Hardly anywhere in the immediate vicinity of
the 'operating table', as he somewhat euphemistically thought of it, had
escaped untarnished, despite the unremitting care he had taken to ensure the
avoidance of unnecessary mess. He had
completely underestimated the difficulties of disposing of a corpse, never
having tackled one before!
At last, the final
patches of tell-tale evidence having been wiped away, he turned towards his bed
and heavily slumped down on it with an almighty sigh of relief! It seemed that the worst two days in his life
were behind him, never, he hoped, to return.
The drums of sulphuric acid might still be in his room, safely hidden
from view under the table, but at least they were clean and metallic,
sufficiently impersonal not to be of any great personal inconvenience to
him. In a day or two, following a little
intermittent prodding of their increasingly nondescript contents, he would be
able to dispose of them too, first pouring away the scum and then returning
them to their owner. If anything
remained partially undissolved, he would wrap it up
in newspaper and dispose of it some other way, if not in the dustbins then in
some other suitable hiding place, possibly behind the fireplace cover or under
the floorboards. But knowing the
strength of this particular type of acid, he was convinced that almost
everything would be taken care of the way he wanted - without any further
risks.
That Saturday evening he
went out to dinner again, and this time, free of the oppressive smells in his
room, he ate a good-sized meal, helping it down with a few glasses of sweet
wine. Afterwards he took a leisurely
stroll round the local streets before deciding that, for a change, he would
drop-in on his aged mother, who lived only a couple of miles away. Actually, he had never enjoyed visiting her
address, which was even more decrepit than his own, but, for once, the prospect
of doing so gave him a welcome reprieve from his room and enabled him to think
of other things.
His mother seemed
concerned about his health, saying how pale and tired he looked, but he
persuaded her that it was only a mild attack of influenza and nothing particularly
serious. She had never really bothered
herself all that much about his health anyway, and he couldn't understand why
she should suddenly want to take an interest in it at present. Perhaps the horrendous activities of the past
two days had taken more out of him than he thought, making him seem positively
cadaverous to her? Yes, that was quite
possible. However, he accepted a glass
of sherry and, when he had watched to the end of a film on television and
played with her cat awhile, he betook himself back home on the bus, relieved to
get away again. If there was one thing
above all others that prevented him from getting involved with local girls, he
reflected, it was his mother. She had
somehow inoculated him against following in his father's unfortunate footsteps
and marrying intellectually and culturally beneath himself. He was determined, even at the continuing
price of prolonged solitude and depression, never to associate with ordinary unintellectual women.
If he couldn't meet with anyone on his own cultural and intellectual
wavelength, not to mention fundamental ethnicity as an Irish Catholic, he would
simply stay alone. That would at least
save him the humiliating prospect of fostering children he could only despise!
Once back in his room,
however, his thoughts unaccountably turned to pleasure, and he began to sort
through the various photos he had taken of Julie's seductive body on Thursday
evening. Not satisfied with that, the
perverse idea of dressing himself in her clothes duly entered his mind and,
removing his own clothing, he eagerly gave-in to this new experience and betook
himself, newly attired, to his wardrobe mirror, where, availing himself of its
elongated shape, he proceeded to admire his dark-stockinged
legs, having first hitched up the black cotton skirt to expose them. The skirt, however, wasn't a particularly
good fit, being rather too tight about the waist, so he quickly removed it and
contented himself with contemplating Julie's underclothes on him instead. But this, too, soon bored him, and before
long he felt obliged to step out of the rather tight-fitting panties in order
to free his semi-erect member from their material constraint. He wasn't, he realized, greatly taken with the
experience of dressing-up in women's clothes, not even when they had once
belonged to his only love.
However, now that he was
in a state of semi-undress and feeling slightly aroused by the spectacle of his
dark-stockinged legs, with their pink suspenders, he
decided he might as well avail himself of one or two of the erotic photos he
had taken the other night to do something he hadn't done in months - namely
masturbate. So masturbate he duly did,
holding a photograph of Julie's scantily-clad body in one hand and rhythmically
massaging his engorged member with the other.
The fact that he would almost certainly regret this act, in due course,
didn't seem to bother him. What
particularly mattered to him, at this moment, was to test the erotic potential
of his home-made pornography and relieve himself of a
quantity of sperm in the process - in short, to give-in to a temptation which
might otherwise have plagued him for several weeks. For he knew from experience that once a
temptation had been given-in to, it didn't usually come back, at least not in a
hurry!
Thus it was that the
combined effect of the photos and masturbatory stimulus, in tandem with the
inhibition-reducing factor of being slightly drunk, produced the desired
result, as he frantically brought himself to orgasmic fruition and ejaculated
various-sized globules of milky-white sperm all over the wardrobe mirror, their
substance partly adhering to and partly sliding down its shiny surface onto the
carpet beneath. Satisfied that the
experiment had been brought to a successful conclusion, though not particularly
thrilled by it, he replaced the last photo in his free hand among the others in
his collection and duly applied a paper tissue to the mirror and carpet,
reserving for Julie's panties the necessity of wiping the remaining sperm from
himself. Then, on an impulse, he put
them to his nose in order to discover if he could detect any traces of her
vaginal odour on them, but, not surprisingly, there was little to be
encountered in that respect. Rather, he
noticed a urine stain there and, disgustedly, he tore them apart and threw
their tattered remains to the floor.
Originally he had intended to keep them as a souvenir of his sexual
conquest, but now that seemed out-of-the-question. One thing he realized, there and then, was
that he must also get rid of Julie's clothes, not just her body. Her leather coat, skirt, blouse, shoes,
stockings, suspenders, and underclothes simply couldn't be left in his room to
gather dust. He would take everything
along to the local Oxfam shop with the excuse that his wife no longer had any
use for them and wished to bequeath them to charity, or something to that
effect. The old woman who usually ran
the shop would be bound to welcome such a gift, since she was often short of
attractive clothing to sell. The leather
coat alone would doubtless fetch her a tidy little
sum.
Removing the rest of
Julie's clothing from his body, he made a neat little pile of it on the floor
and then hid it away in the bottom of the wardrobe. He would dispense with it all on Monday
morning - all, that is, apart from the torn panties and matching brassiere,
which, carefully wrapped, could be thrown in the dustbins. The home-made photos, however, he would most
certainly keep, and these he now decided to hide away in various parts of his
room, putting the majority in his bedside locker, safely out of sight, and
reserving a few as bookmarks, just for the privilege of being able to look at
Julie's image from time to time during the course of his studies. Indeed, on second thoughts, he would also put
one in each of his favourite novels, not only to keep them hidden away, but
free of dust and stain as well. No-one
ever came into his room to look at his books, so what did it matter? The photos would be perfectly safe there -
safer, in fact, than anywhere else, including the locker, which, in a sense, was a more obvious hiding-place. People would never think you kept photos in
books.
Smiling to himself, he
disposed of his private pornography accordingly and, once properly dressed again,
settled down to listen to a record via his headphones. Earlier in the evening it would probably have
been modern jazz. But at this time of
night it could only be classical. He was
generally a man of inflexible habit - like Schopenhauer, his favourite
philosopher.
CHAPTER EIGHT: ON MORRISON'S TRAIL
Impatiently, Deirdre Gray ordered another coffee and cast a rapid
glance at her tiny gold-plated wristwatch.
The coffee arrived and
she wearily thanked the waiter, whose less than respectful smile was personally
abhorrent to her; although she couldn't exactly blame him, under the
circumstances, for thinking what he might be.
Not many young women of her sexual calibre made a point of hanging round
in coffee bars at this time of day, periodically glancing at their
watches. Oh well, another five minutes,
the time it took to drink her coffee, and she would be gone - before the rather
insolent-looking waiter got any worse ideas into his lewd head. She could take no real pleasure in the
experience.
Another man, a fellow
customer, was staring at her reflection in the wide mirror in front of them,
and this also annoyed her, despite the fact that she was well-used to such
things by now. Sometimes she wished she
were a man in order to escape her beauty for a day, take a holiday from
it. Being under constant facial and
bodily scrutiny was, at times, a somewhat oppressive experience, more a burden
than a pleasure. The man next to her
duly looked away, however, and she almost heaved a sigh of relief, thankful
that he hadn't said anything. He wasn't
particularly good-looking anyway, and would only have caused her additional
inconvenience. Fending off bores and
louts was just one more depressing aspect of being an attractive woman!
She was nearly through
with her coffee by now and would soon be gone.
Julie, it seemed, had failed to keep her word - not, incidentally, for
the first time - and wouldn't be turning up, after all. Perhaps she had forgotten or had decided, at
the last moment, that Peter Morrison's company was more important to her? Yes, that was probably the case, thought
Deirdre, as she recalled Dennis Foster's concern over her absence from home the
previous evening. The little bitch had
evidently found herself a worthier companion in life or, at any rate, acquired
more immediate obligations. She might
even have eloped with Peter. To think of
it! Left her wicked husband in the
marital lurch! Well, to some extent that
could only serve the pompous bastard right, especially in light of his recent
behaviour towards her!
Yet Deirdre was
determined to find out for herself exactly what Julie was up to and, now that
her watch showed ten-past two, she decided to return home and set about tracing
Peter Morrison's address with the help of such information as she had on him -
namely the love letter, or professed love letter, he had sent her back in her
undergraduate days. But, before that, a
telephone call to Tricia Kells would be in order, to
see what she had to say.
However, as things
turned out, Tricia could tell her nothing she didn't already know, and this
disappointed her. The fact that Dennis
Foster had rung Tricia, the previous night, came as no real surprise. But the fact that Tricia knew no more about
Julie's whereabouts than herself most certainly did! That meant she would have to start from
scratch and hunt them down herself. With
that in mind, she thanked Tricia for her co-operation and, after a quick lunch
in the
Arrived home, she set
about unearthing Peter Morrison's letter from its hiding place, tucked away in
a vest at the bottom of one of her drawers, and quickly read it through. There was nothing in it with which she wasn't
already thoroughly familiar, including the silly little poem he had enclosed
for good measure, which had simply added aesthetic insult to emotional
injury. She must have read each of them
at least ten times before. Now, however,
she was chiefly interested in its address, which happened to be a nearby north
London one, and, noting the absence of a telephone number, she immediately set
off for the address in question, availing herself of the nearest bus routes to
it. An hour or so later she arrived at
its dark-blue front door, and, to her relief, the bell was duly answered by an
elderly woman who lived in the front room.
"Excuse me, does a
Mr Morrison still live here?" she asked in what she hoped would sound like
a reasonably optimistic tone-of-voice.
The elderly occupant scratched
her wiry head. "Not that I'm aware
of," she replied hesitantly.
Deirdre swallowed hard
and tried not to look too displeased.
"You're quite sure?" she insisted.
"Yes, I am,"
the elderly woman admitted. "I know
all the tenants who live here."
There was another
possibility and Deirdre immediately seized on it. "Is this the landlord's only
house?" she asked, automatically assuming the probable relevance of the
male choice of gender.
The old woman reflected
a moment, scratching her head in the process, and answered that she thought he
let out another property somewhere nearby.
"But, unfortunately, I don't have its address," she added, a
shade apologetically.
"Do you by any
chance have his private phone number?" asked Deirdre, who was prepared to try
anything to trace Morrison's current whereabouts.
"Why, yes. Just a tick." The elderly tenant shuffled back into her
room and reappeared, little over a minute later, with a crumpled strip of paper
bearing both the landlord's surname and telephone number, which she handed to
Deirdre, who gratefully accepted it and was soon on her way again - this time
to the nearest public phone-booth.
However, Mr Stone couldn't be reached during the afternoon and so,
having decided it was pointless to stick around, she returned home to
As it happened, it was
about
"Oh really?"
cried Deirdre, breaking into a smile of relief at her end of the line. "Could you give me the address,
please?"
Mr Stone duly obliged
and, thanking him for his help, she set about hunting through her London street
atlas for the street or, rather, avenue in question. (Her husband was having a
bath, so he was safely out-of-earshot.
She didn't want him to intrude into her private affairs, especially when
there were personal interests of a romantic nature at stake.) As it happened, the address given her by
Peter's landlord was very close to the other one - a mere stone's throw
away. What a pity the old lady couldn't
have told her it in the first place! She
could then have gone straight there that very same day. As it was, she would now have to wait until
Monday at the earliest, since the weekend was too risky, what with her husband
prowling around, and, besides, they had a number of Christmas engagements to
honour. Whether or not Julie would still
be with Peter on Monday remained open to doubt, but at least she would have a
chance to see for herself exactly what, if anything, was going on between
them. Curiously, she still remembered
him as a rather shy, reserved, outsider type, with no real interest in women,
and Julie's phone call on Wednesday evening had done little to cause her to
modify that impression. Indeed, it had
simply been reinforced, since Julie had spoken of his intellectual conversation
and absence of sexual interests. Perhaps
instead of having found herself a new lover, she had simply found a new guru -
the type of man for whom she seemed to have a special weakness? Perhaps Peter Morrison's conversation was
more enlightening to her than that of her previous spiritual masters, who were
often enough more interested in instructing their female devotees in the Karma
Sutra than in the path to divine salvation?
The mind boggled - especially where a woman like Julie Foster was
concerned! Why, she was virtually
capable of falling in love with just about anyone who had a spiritual
reputation! Anything less wouldn't have becomed her, apparently.
With the gurus, on the other hand, sex was somehow rendered clean and
respectable, not to mention highly pleasurable, through mystical
elevation. No doubt, she relished their
physical-cum-metaphysical intimacies as only a woman with her spiritual vanity
could. A conquest of them was worth any
number of lesser males!
CHAPTER NINE: A MOST UNEXPECTED
DISCOVERY
At last Monday arrived and, having attended to some outstanding
domestic business in the morning, Deirdre Gray stood poised for action at the
door to the house where Peter Morrison lived, her heart beating expectantly for
the footsteps in the hall that would answer her mechanical summons and bring
her face to face with someone she hadn't seen in years. It was a pleasantly mild day, bright and dry,
which made a change from the recent spate of inclement weather. She hardly needed to wear the long fur coat
she had automatically resorted to that morning, more out of habit than
premeditated response to the weather.
Nevertheless she always took a special pride in looking lady-like and
feeling smug. To some extent a
distinguished appearance kept the monkey-rabble at bay, and when one was
visiting a largely lower-class area like this, it was just as well to have an
expensive-looking coat on one's shoulders.
At length the doorbell
was answered, and Deirdre found herself confronted by a young woman of
extensively raffish appearance.
"Oh, excuse me, but does a Mr Morrison live here?" she
automatically asked, although she already knew the answer.
The raffish young woman
nodded vaguely. "First floor, room
six," she replied, with a hint of condescension in her voice.
"Thanks," said
Deirdre, closing the door behind her in the wake of the retreating tenant, who
evidently lived downstairs. Ugh, what a
depressing hovel she had stepped into!
She almost shuddered with disgust as she turned to the left and began to
mount the grubby grey-carpeted, creaking stairs which led to the first floor. No wonder Morrison suffered from a severe
depression! No intelligent man could
possibly live in such a dingy hovel with impunity!
Arrived at the floor in
question, she passed through a heavy fire-door, which slammed noisily behind
her, and halted at the top of the dingy corridor which apparently led to Room
6. There was no sound coming from within
and she found herself half-hoping, in spite of her determination to get to the
bottom of Julie's mysterious disappearance, that its
inhabitant would be out. Nevertheless
she duly advanced along the bare corridor and applied the knuckles of her right
hand to the cream-painted door at the far end a number of times. Her heart was now in her mouth, or so it
seemed. Anxiously she waited with baited
breath for a response, but nothing came.
Surprised, she knocked again, this time longer and louder. Ah, success at last! The door jolted open with a creak and a
pale-looking man of average height but rather less than average build stood
before her. At first he didn't recognize
her, since she was standing in partial shadow, but as soon as she spoke his
name and asked whether she could talk to him a moment, his face brightened and
his mouth shot open in wonderment.
"Deirdre!" he
cried. "What a pleasant
surprise!" He stood back to admit
her to his room. Smiling, she crossed
the threshold and was shocked to discover that it was otherwise empty. No sign of Julie. Only a rather sharp smell in the air, like
acid or disinfectant or something, and this in spite of the fact that one of
the windows was wide open, like in the middle of summer. Baffled, she blushed suddenly and stammered
something to the effect that she had half-expected to find Julie Foster there.
"What makes you say
that?" he asked, as he gently shut the door behind her.
"Only that she told
me she was intending to visit you last week," she nervously replied.
"Yes?"
Deirdre's blush
deepened. Could she have been
mistaken? "Well, I just thought
that, since she hasn't been at home these past few days and her husband is
worried about her, she might still be here with you."
"Really?" Morrison's face turned grey with apprehension
and his hands began to tremble slightly.
"Julie told you?" he repeated, in subdued astonishment.
"Why, yes,"
Deirdre confirmed. "She phoned me
last Wednesday to say that she had visited you the day before and had been
invited to do so on Thursday as well.
Since then, I haven't heard anything from her."
Morrison had gone across
to the open window in order to close it.
"Are you sure you're not imagining things?" he queried,
turning round. "I mean, are you
absolutely certain she mentioned me personally?"
"Yes,
positively."
There was a moment's
shocked pause while he endeavoured to gather his thoughts and steady his
nerves, which were fast becoming something of a serious liability. At length, he drew attention to the room's
only armchair and requested Deirdre to take a seat, which she reluctantly did,
not bothering to remove her fur coat.
"And you think I may have hidden her somewhere, is that it?"
he commented, almost insolently.
"Well no, of course
not," Deirdre responded, blushing some more. "Only ... it does seem rather odd that
she should be missing from home all this time, with no apparent
explanation. Her husband phoned us - my
husband and me - late last Thursday evening, wondering what could have happened
to her and, since we had no idea, we weren't able to be of any real help to
him."
"Yet you apparently
knew she was with me," he remarked.
"Indeed,"
Deirdre admitted. "But I could
hardly allow myself to betray her, under the circumstances."
"And what
circumstances would they be?" he asked.
There was a distinctly suspicious note in his voice.
"That she wanted
her visit to you kept a secret," Deirdre revealed, becoming flustered
under pressure of her mounting embarrassment.
Morrison smiled to
himself. Yes, how feasible that
statement seemed, the dirty double-crossing bitch! "And her husband presumably phoned you
again, over the weekend, to inform you she still hadn't returned home, is that
it?"
"No, in point of
fact my husband phoned him," Deirdre corrected.
"Oh, I
see." At which point Morrison
paused to reflect, before asking: "So how did you get my address - through
Julie?"
Deirdre blushed anew and
swallowed with difficulty a ball of saliva which was threatening to choke
her. "Actually, I traced it through
your landlord, Mr Stone, by first referring to the address you had once sent me
in a letter, remember?" It cut a
long story drastically short, but seemed better than nothing.
"Am I supposed
to?" he rejoined, conscious of her marital status.
There ensued another
pause while Deirdre tried to figure out whether or not the question was
rhetorical. At length, undecided what to
make of it, she opted for a question of her own. "You did mean what you said in that
letter, didn't you?" she ventured.
"I mean, you claimed to be in love with me." The words virtually spoke themselves, despite
her evident embarrassment at saying them.
"I guess I was to
some extent," he unsmilingly admitted.
"Or perhaps it would be truer to say that I'd had my love for Julie
severely compromised by the discovery of her musical tastes - the records in
her collection being anything but compatible with my own record-buying
predilections. At the time, I would
hardly have considered myself a fan of the Monkees,
let alone J.S. Bach! The spectacle of
those records in her room, coupled, I might add, to the fact that she already
had a boyfriend whose presence I could hardly ignore, was sufficient to dampen
down my enthusiasm for her. And since
you were the only other attractive woman to-hand, and one, moreover, whose
musical tastes I subsequently discovered to be more approximate to my own, I
automatically gravitated to you, though hardly as a man head-over-heels in
love. For I was still
emotionally involved with Julie, despite my cultural disillusionment. It was more an act of defiance, at the time,
than an amorous craving ... which goaded me in your direction."
A further blush erupted
from Deirdre's face, this time with every justification. For she had quite
misinterpreted the motives for his behaviour, not to mention the letter that
followed it. She had simply
assumed, out of vanity, that he was genuinely in love with her. "And the letter?" she asked, now merely seeking confirmation of his duplicity.
"Written in part to
establish my position in your eyes and in part to avenge myself on Julie,
though I don't suppose she ever saw it," Morrison replied.
"No, I kept it a
secret," Deirdre confessed, with lowered eyes.
Looking at her thus, he couldn't
deny that she was a beautiful woman, even if a little on the thin side. She struck him as a ballet-dancing type, a
nimble ballerina, what with her slender physique, aquiline nose, piercing blue
eyes, and fine dark-brown hair, tied-up, as it now was, in twin plaits on the
back of her head. She could also have
been taken for a nurse, if an unusually pretty one! Of course, he knew from experience that,
unlike most nurses, she had an element of the bitch in her character, an
imperiousness coupled to an impertinence which could prove unnerving, not to
say socially offensive, to anyone unfortunate enough to fall foul of it. Of aristocratic temperament, she wasn't above
whispering or even saying false or deprecating things about one in the presence
of others, and then under the mistaken assumption that one wouldn't overhear it
or take offence if by any chance one did, presumably because one was too stoned
or stupid or deaf or something. This
public openness and apparent lack of social tact had more than once been
directed against Peter Morrison himself, and although he pretended to not
having heard it, he was by no means immune to its malign consequences. No doubt, it had played a part in ensuring
that his relations towards her remained relatively cool, even after he had
turned away from Julie in disgust at her musical tastes. She wasn't the most warm-hearted of persons,
in any case. Yet if one thing more than
any other had led him to take an amorous interest in her in the first place, it
wasn't so much her looks, unquestionably good though they were, as her
temperamental and intellectual compatibility with himself. She was like an alter ego to him, reflecting
his own cultural predilections not only in her choice of records but, just as
importantly so far as he was concerned, in her choice of books as well -
literature being her principal study while still an undergraduate. With Deirdre a mutual appreciation of the
arts would have been both possible and feasible. With Julie, on the other hand, such a thing
would hardly have been possible or feasible at all! In some respects, Deirdre was a freak, an
exception to the female rule, a kind of Irish Simone de Beauvoir. Julie, on the contrary, was more the
typically sexual and maternal woman, unsophisticated to the point of
philistinism. No woman could ever be
less guilty of philistinism than Deirdre.
In her cultural sophistication, she was virtually a man!
But
what of her body? Morrison was
beginning to wonder if he hadn't been mistaken, previously, in considering it
too slender to be particularly seductive.
Perhaps there would be something sexually compensatory about it which he
hadn't as yet envisaged - an ardour or intimacy which transcended Julie's
calculated reserve. To be sure, there
was little of the Rossetti-like wounded deer or
hunted Beatrice about Deirdre, as with her friend. Au contraire, the chances were
that, where Julie had been passively submissive and almost begrudging, she
would be actively encouraging, shamelessly involved in the sexual act and
providing every incentive she could, short of actual copulation, to attain her
ends. Struck by this speculation, he
wondered whether he oughtn't to attempt having it verified that very day. After all, Deirdre was there for the taking,
despite her ostensible concern over Julie's welfare. Would not a convenient excuse or false
explanation on that score put her mind at rest?
Yes, he didn't see any reason why not.
Taking advantage of the
opportunity afforded him by the silence, he said: "You know, there was a degree of sincerity about my letter, whatever
else may have prompted it. I was
becoming romantically interested in you at the time. Still am interested, for that matter, in
spite of Julie's presence here recently.... By the way, if you want to know
what she's doing, I sent her on an errand."
Deirdre pricked up her
ears. "Oh, what sort of
errand?" she asked, clearly baffled.
"A political one,
actually," Morrison declared, frowning.
"If you must know, I have some political contacts in
Deirdre felt somewhat
nonplussed by this, since it was quite unlike Julie to involve herself in
political affairs, whether or not on anyone else's behalf. Indeed, despite what her friend had told her
on the telephone last week, she couldn't believe that Peter Morrison was involved
in politics anyway, least of all in a revolutionary capacity. And yet if he was, then it could only mean
that Julie was determined to do what she could for him in order, presumably, to
worm her way back into his affections.
No wonder she hadn't told her husband anything.... "Well,"
said Deirdre, after Morrison's explanation had begun to sink in and establish
something like a credible niche for itself, "if that's the case, then I
guess I'm simply wasting my time here.
Now that I know where she is and am in possession of the knowledge, at
long last, as to why you once wrote me a long letter, I may as well leave you
to your own devices again."
She stood up and was on
the point of exiting the room when he approached her and put a restraining hand
on her shoulder. "I said there was
a degree of sincerity in that letter, and so there was," he averred,
blushing faintly. "If you must
know, I think you're a better-looking woman than Julie and would be interested
in winning your friendship and keeping you here a bit longer. Besides, since you took the
trouble to come here anyway, why not prolong your stay an hour or so, eh?" He moved closer to her and, putting his arms
about her waist, ever so gently placed a kiss on her lips. She stared at him blankly a moment, as if a
kiss was the last thing she had expected, then briefly smiled and relaxed a
little. He unbuttoned her fur coat and
drew her against himself, causing her to encircle him with her arms. "I used to like the way you'd
occasionally move up really close to me," he said in a low voice, "until
our bodies were virtually touching, like you wanted to give yourself to me
on-the-spot, wherever it might be. You
had a peculiar knack of being physically intimate without necessarily
committing yourself or saying anything."
Deirdre smiled
coyly. "Still have," she
admitted.
"And I was tempted
to take advantage of it," he confessed, smiling in turn.
"In what way?"
she wanted to know.
"Like this,"
he said and, applying his lips to her mouth, he pressed a long hard kiss upon
it, a kiss which mysteriously had the effect of inducing Deirdre to wrap a leg
around his legs in order to increase their intimacy.
Yes, there could be no
denying that she was a very different kind of woman from Julie, not one to hold
back when sex was at stake, and now that Morrison felt sexually aroused, he
lost no time in gaining the quickest possible route to her affections ... as he
lifted her off her feet and tumbled to the floor with her, kissing her
violently while groping for her panties.
There could be no question of undressing her gently and slowly, like
with Julie, for she was no hunted Beatrice but an accomplice at inflaming
passion. What did it matter that she
still had her skirt on, if he could get the panties off her in double-quick
time and thus speed-up their sexual coupling?
Once they were out of the way and she had opened her legs, pulling them
back in order to facilitate his entry, he would be free to remove his own
sartorial obstacles and drive himself between them with lustful vengeance, like
a battering ram assailing the gates of a besieged citadel.
She cried out from the
sharp pain of his phallic onslaught and turned her head to one side, as if to
hide it from him, but put no physical obstacle in the way of his rapid
advance. Rather, she opened her legs
wider to ease the passage of his rampant organ and so reduce the pain of
phallic intromission. He was already
riding her fiercely, like someone on the point of orgasm. For this was the way he had decided to deal
with her - in complete contrast to Julie.
He wanted to drive his member in as deeply as it would go, to use it as
a lever with which to lift the interior of her womb up to the wall of her
stomach, or somewhere nearby, and just as eagerly he wanted to take it right
out and ruthlessly drive it back in again.
But this wasn't to be, since Deirdre was doing everything in her power
to facilitate his ride and keep him mounted, now that she could sense the rapid
approach of their destiny. And not only her but he could also sense its approach, which further
prompted him to intensify his ardour and quicken his ride. They were both heading for an orgasmic
collision somewhere further along, and nothing short of disaster could have
averted it. Within seconds he was
feeling the tension rise precipitously towards the tip of his erection, and
then, suddenly, fierce spasms of ejaculated semen surged through it with a
forcefulness he hadn't known with Julie and would never have suspected himself
capable of, triggering off a return broadside from Deirdre. He had put a lot of effort into this
coupling, though hardly to no avail, and now he realized that he wasn't
impotent after all, but simply dependent on the right kind of woman - like
Salvador Dali, who, if what he'd read about him was true, could only reach sexual
fulfilment with his wife, Gala, and with no other. Peter Morrison had certainly reached such
fulfilment with Deirdre, and, unlike Julie, she had simultaneously arrived at
it with him. He could hardly believe his
luck!
Withdrawing himself from
her, he flopped over onto his side in physical exhaustion, the sweat streaming
off his brow. He had found sexual
satisfaction at last, and with a woman whom he would previously have considered
too slender to be capable of giving him any! Now he realized how mistaken he
had been, in the past, to think that; for his speculations of the minute before
had indeed been verified. There was
certainly nothing passive about Deirdre's approach to sex. She was liberated all right, and a pussy to
boot, the kind of female for whom he had a special weakness. Why, with her fur coat still relatively in
place, despite the exigencies of their joint coupling, she was every bit the
classy, dark-stockinged, suspender-wearing feline
woman of his dreams, even down to the fine texture of her tied-up hair, which
complemented the rest of her seductive appearance and highlighted the slender
beauty of her nape. There was perfume of
an alluring sweetness behind her ears, although that wasn't, by any means, the
only place where such a sweetness could be smelt. There was plenty of it elsewhere, too!
He sat up beside her, a
warm smile on his face, and began to stroke her hair. Then he crouched down by the tip of her toes,
in order to get a better look at her crotch.
"Lift your legs up and pull it apart for me," he demanded, his
curiosity growing.
Obediently she did as he
wanted, her hands coming round from under her thighs to assist in the business
of exposing, to his avid gaze, the hitherto buried treasure of her sex. He was well pleased by this performance and,
as much to tell her so as to satisfy a nagging desire, he crawled forwards on
hands-and-knees and tenderly placed a kiss on it, which briefly caused her to
titter, in spite of her customary serious tone of mind. Julie would have been frightfully
self-conscious and bashful here. Not
Deirdre! She rather revelled in his
sexual curiosity. After all, it had been
a long time since husband John had shown anything similar. "Do you like it?" she teasingly
inquired.
"Sure I do,"
he admitted, before proceeding to stoke her.
"You're pretty all over, just as I had always suspected you'd
be. Women like you generally are. Their cute little faces suggest as much. Still, I'd long been curious to discover
exactly what sort of a pussy you had between your legs - whether it would be of
the elongated or squat variety or something in-between, how much pubic hair it
would sport, what it would smell like, and so on. Now I know and am well satisfied that it
matches up to my previous high expectations.
Little diamond-shaped pussies like yours I find particularly alluring,
as should be evident by the avid response of my cock."
He got to his feet and
lifted her legs up, pulling them back as he straddled her stomach with his back
to her face in order to survey her sex from above. She made no attempt to resist him but allowed
him to stand astride her, like a colossus, as he held her inverted feet against
his groin and continued to stare down the length of her legs to the hairy
cynosure of sexual commerce beneath. She
was both intrigued and slightly amused by his stance, and when he pulled her
legs right back, so that her knees were pressing against her breasts, and
proceeded to squat down on them ... she could do no more than wriggle a little
and titter anew. Yet squatting was no
less a temporary measure than standing, and before long he was transforming his
voyeuristic curiosity into oral sex, as he gently slid himself down upon her
and applied an exploratory tongue to her upended orifice - a thing she had
never experienced before, since her husband was fundamentally too shy and
morally squeamish to indulge in oral, especially from such a dominating
position as the one Peter Morrison had now adopted! She liked the way his tongue caressed her
most tender flesh and, for his part, he was in no doubt that the identical
experience with Julie would have been more satisfying, had she been alive at
the time of his succumbing to it.
Deirdre was proving this point to him in no uncertain terms, as he
orally manipulated her and listened, with mounting pleasure, to the non-verbal
responses which were involuntarily issuing from her mouth. He would make her quiver with ecstasy before
the afternoon was out - of that she could rest assured!
And so time passed and,
wearily, his lust fully sated, Morrison picked himself up from Deirdre's limp
body and slowly started to get dressed.
For her part, Deirdre had only to put her panties back on and straighten
out her skirt, which she quickly did; though not before she had taken off her
fur coat and realigned her nylon stockings.
Then she sat down in the armchair again while Morrison, having put
himself sartorially to rights, decided he needed to visit the toilet, which
happened to be situated between the ground and first floors to one side of the
main stairs. This left her alone for a
minute or two and, since she was sitting within easy reach of his bookcase, she
casually scanned the titles on display there, all or most of which were on the
middle shelf. Before long her eyes
alighted upon a rather worn Australian reprint, dating from 1971, of Tropic of
Cancer, and, curiosity aroused, she fished it off the shelf in question and
began to flick through its yellowing pages.
Almost at once, a photograph tumbled out of it onto her lap. Surprised, she picked up the photo and cast
its garish colours an inquisitive glance.
Automatically her hands began to shake and, involuntarily, she dropped
the Henry Miller novel to the floor. Her
eyes were virtually popping out of her head, as she stared aghast at the
half-naked body portrayed there in instamatic colour. With legs wide apart and skirt hitched-up
round her waist, arms to her sides and a ghastly white face, Julie Foster's was
the body stretched out on the floor of this very same room, the very same
electric fire burning behind her head, the same wallpaper above it, the same
carpet hugging the contours of her prostrate form. It took Deirdre no time to realize that, when
this photo was taken, Julie had been anything but a live woman. A live Julie Foster would never have allowed
anyone to photograph her like that!
Horror-stricken, Deirdre
felt like vomiting, so ghastly was the impression the photo made on her. Instinctively she staggered to her feet,
gripping her stomach in one hand and the incriminating evidence of her friend's
murder in the other and, just at that moment, an unsuspecting Peter Morrison
casually returned from the toilet.
"What have you done
with her?" she cried, as he approached her with a surprised look on his
face, a look that was soon to turn to dread and dismay when he realized what
had happened.
"Done with
whom?" he responded, feigning puzzlement.
"Julie!" came her immediate almost hysterical response. "Tell me at once!"
He attempted to snatch the
photo from her hand, but she backed away from him in one swift movement. "Give it to me," he demanded,
holding out his hand.
"What have you
fucking-well done with her?" Deirdre repeated, this time in a much louder
voice.
"I told you, I sent
her on a political errand," he replied, trying to contain his nerves and
fearful of what her voice might reveal to the nearest neighbours.
But she simply repeated
her question yet again, as if incapable of saying anything else, and this time
so loudly that he felt compelled to hurl himself upon her in order to silence
her.
"What I'm
fucking-well going to do to you, you nosy little bitch!" he snarled,
dragging her to the floor.
She struggled bravely,
putting up more resistance to his assault than ever Julie had done, but he held
her throat in a powerful, two-handed grip, and nothing she could do would
release her from it. The life was slowly
ebbing out of her as her struggles became more desperate and involuntary, her
face turning crimson. She was losing
strength by the second and, inevitably, she too went the way of Julie Foster,
the tensions in her body suddenly dispersing as she choked to death in the
throes of one last terrible spasm.
Only after five minutes
had elapsed did he loosen his grip on her throat, and by then there was
absolutely no life left in her. It was a
ghastly experience for him and, as he turned away from Deirdre's prostrate
body, tears once more welled-up in his eyes and came flooding down his cheeks. Ahead of him lay another terrible ordeal in
disposing of a corpse, and that no sooner than he had got rid of the previous
one!
CHAPTER TEN: ENCOUNTER WITH DESTINY
For Tricia Kells the New Year was to
prove of special significance. Not only
did she get married to her fiancé, an Irishman from
Ireland
was altogether more to Tricia's liking than England, especially since the last
few months of her stay there had been marred by the mysterious disappearance of
her two closest friends, presumed dead, and the corresponding grief of their
bereaved husbands. Poor Dennis
Foster had more than once sought her sympathy in the ensuing period of his
bereavement, and so, too, had John Gray, whose own precious wife had shared the
same mysterious fate as Julie. How
Tricia regretted that she hadn't been able to offer them more help at a time
when they so desperately needed it! She
almost felt personally responsible for the fate of the two women, whom she had
grown accustomed to regarding as the best friends she had ever had, since,
without her suggestion that she and Julie dine together in the 'Three Lanterns'
on that fateful Tuesday in December, none of what followed would have happened.
But what exactly had happened? That, alas, she had been
unable to establish, in spite of her presence with Julie on the day in
question. Her uninquisitive
nature, coupled to the understandable reluctance which Julie had shown to
divulge any information to her concerning the handsome stranger seated behind
them in the restaurant, had left her in some doubt as to the nature of the
proceedings which followed. She hadn't
even taken a good look at him, and what little information she could
subsequently impart to Dennis Foster about his physical appearance was another
source of shame and guilt to her, insofar as a more detailed description would
probably have led to his arrest by now.
As it happened, the police hadn't been able to trace him on the basis of
the scant information she provided, and so everyone, including her husband, was
in the dark as to what actually became of both Julie and Deirdre over the
ensuing few days. The fact that they had
probably met with a violent death ... was certainly the chief supposition on
everyone's lips. But since conclusive
proof of it had yet to be established, there was still the possibility that
they had been brainwashed into joining some out-of-the-way religious cult, in
which they were now hiding. And yet,
knowing them as she did, it was rather difficult for Tricia to grant this
possibility much credence, even though it had a certain paradoxical appeal to
each of the bereaved husbands, if only because it kindled a faint hope of
recovery and rehabilitation of their missing wives in due course. Somehow the thought that the mysterious
stranger, with his shabby jacket and leather bag, was an abductor of young
married women ... didn't seem plausible.
Yet neither, oddly enough, did the idea that he was a murderer. The enigma continued.
In
For Tricia Keenan, the
influence of Coughlin's books was hardly less keen than with her husband, and
she, too, had come to the conclusion that Ireland's future salvation to a large
extent depended on the implementation of his teachings, which made no bones
about the need for a new religious stance, one centred in self-realization and
scornful of traditional Christian criteria of worship. She, too, had come to acknowledge his
Messianic status and was anxious to hear him speak in public, as he
increasingly did these days, to sympathetic audiences up-and-down the
country. As yet, she hadn't seen a
photograph of him and was therefore curious to discover what this man, whose
books were already a part of her daily life but who scorned media publicity,
actually looked like. Consequently an
opportunity such as the one that now presented itself ... in the form of an
appearance Coughlin was making in Dublin to address an audience on the future
of religion ... was not to be wasted, and, in her husband's company, she set
off by bus, one Friday evening in July, from their suburban Inchicore
home to attend the lecture in person.
When they arrived at the
venue - one of the largest public halls in the city - there were already
several hundred people inside and, although not quite filled to capacity, it
was impossible to obtain a seat near the front, where the speaker would be most
visible. Resigned to an inferior
position, the Keenans took seats a few rows from the
back and waited, with baited breath, for the coming man to make his appearance. Tricia was especially excited since, unlike
her husband, she had never heard him talk before. She wondered what kind of an accent he would
have.
At last, however, the
moment came when James Coughlin appeared on stage from one of the wings, striding
purposefully towards a waiting lectern in the centre. An expectant hush suddenly descended on the
audience, as he stood before them with a gentle smile on his face and a folder
of notes in his hands. These he duly
placed on the lectern and, following a brief personal introduction, proceeded
with his lecture, which he delivered in a soft
Suddenly the thought
assailed her that this same man, who under a pseudonymous name was now
delivering his messianic lecture to the crowded hall, must be the reason behind
both Julie's and Deirdre's subsequent disappearances, and therefore if not
their killer then almost certainly their abductor. But how could one man abduct two women,
especially two such intelligent and self-willed women as them? Automatically, as if by a miracle, the scales
of doubt fell from Tricia's eyes and she realized that the man on the stage was
none other than the murderer of her former friends, that the whole idea of
abduction had been a gross mistake. For
Peter Morrison, alias James Coughlin, had been
described, on the flyleaf of his latest book, as a married man, and his wife's
name was Moira. There could be no
question of his having abducted anybody, least of all for sexual reasons.
Horror-stricken, Tricia
rose to her feet and, without saying a word, hurried towards the rear
exit. Her husband, hardly noticing her
swift departure, turned round in his seat in order to see what was happening. But, before he could call after her, she had
already pushed her way through the exit door and dashed out into the street
beyond.
Once on the pavement,
she began to run towards a bus that was slowly heading in her direction. It stopped some thirty or so yards back and
she was able to climb aboard, although she had started to shake like an October
leaf and could only just manage to pay her fare. She realized that she would have to get home
as quickly as possible, no matter what her nervous condition. A minute's delay and she might break down,
confess there and then that Coughlin was a double murderer, and thus put the
ideological future of her country in jeopardy.
She continued to shake all the way home, and when, finally, she got
indoors and staggered up the stairs, it was with the sole intention of killing
herself that she approached the bathroom cabinet for the necessary means. To delay would be fatal, since she would
eventually have to explain to her husband why she had run out of the hall in
such a panic. And if he didn't then call
the gardai, which seemed unlikely, she knew that,
left to herself, she most certainly would, thereby bringing ruin and disgrace
upon a man who had already become something of a national hero, and whose
continual freedom appeared to be of the utmost importance to the future deliverance
of Ireland from its moribund past!
Arriving home in a
perplexed state of mind himself, Michael Keenan called after his wife and then
rushed straight upstairs, to find her lying unconscious on the bathroom floor
in a pool of blood, an open razor and a half-empty bottle of sleeping pills at
her side. After a failed attempt at
reviving her, he rushed back downstairs and phoned for an ambulance.
At the hospital he was
allowed, after the doctors had done what little they could, to sit by her side,
although she was still unconscious and seemingly beyond recall. Once or twice she seemed to revive and to
recognize him, but then she would relapse into her private hell again,
oblivious of anything anyone, including the doctors and nurses, said to
her. Only on the point of death did she
momentarily revive, and it was then that her husband made a last, desperate
attempt to communicate with her.
"Trish darling,
it's me, Michael," he said, in his most compassionate voice.
"No, it's
him," came the feeble semi-conscious response
from the dying woman.
"It's me,
darling," Keenan insisted, more hopeful than surprised.
"No, it's him, he's
the one," Tricia faintly repeated, and, with a dying gasp, she turned her
head away and expired.
A doctor placed a
consoling hand on Keenan's shoulder as he bowed his stricken head over Tricia's
body, unable, in his deep misery, to fathom what her last words could possibly
mean. Evidently they had been a symptom
of delirium!
