Sex is a mental thing and that’s way beyond the province of youth. A bit arse over tit maybe, but with me it’s nearly always the seduction and its delicious sense of anticipation that sets me off, rather than the act itself. What did Lawrence and I have over Damon ? The conspiracy of illicit lovers. That shared secret, that somehow we may have held out lording it over the overlord himself, only by definition, he must never know or realise. Infuriatingly, a withheld secret proffers no mastery over the unaware. And of course, when he did discover our glimmer of autonomy, he effortlessly garotted it into lifelessness. But what about the spice of stealing from the arch robber baron himself ? The prince of thieves ? That ought to foment some exquisite heat. Albeit immediately doused by the coolant that is the terror of discovery. Even then there is rank inequality. Lawrence’s booty was the crime boss’s wife, whereas my ill gotten gain was merely one of the hired hands. The chauffeur with a peaked cap. So no, it wasn’t about any empowerment.
Who am I kidding ? There never was any power to be had. For power is indivisible. Damon vitiates everyone he comes across. Like a King Midas, he petrifies everything he contacts. The car was our designated arena. It was foreseen and logged by the panopticon, that Lawrence and I would be coexisting in that shared space, for the mensurable duration of an excursion. Neither of us dared to flout those parameters, since no such stopover had been pencilled in the itinerary and we both superstitiously, (such is Damon’s abstruse omnipotence), felt that to challenge the phasing would irrevocably tilt our tiny portion of the cosmos from its orbit. Whereby astronomical Damon, or a keen-eyed black-holer like Terry, would surely rein us in with their telescopic reach. So we never got out and did it in a field, or a park, or some occluded public space. The car was our canopy and mantle. Restraint-abandon, abandon-restraint. I don’t know that you can usefully conjoin these two contrary impulses. There was just a single exception. We cavorted on the bonnet on a single happenstance. And do you know what informed this particular expedient ? Lawrence bequeathed it, on the day he knew he was responsible for ensuring that the car was washed and waxed. So the smear of our mutual trespass could be instantly wiped clean. Whither spontaneity ? Whither unprompted passion ? So there’s the epitome of Damon’s clout. How he could contaminate our fantasies and infect them with the coccus of nightmare.
From the first time I clapped eyes on Lawrence, I actually thought him faintly ridiculous donned out in the livery of a chauffeur. Grey was not Lawrence’s colour (is it anyone’s ?). His sturdy fibrousness obviously itched for some more cutting edge action, (sadly for him, Damon never did need the recourse of a ‘getaway’), since it bulged and surged against the fabric in unexpected little places. Offering its own remonstrance that it could not be contained therewith. The trouble was, the overall effect just made him appear crinkled. Like a tyre tread. A skidmark.
So, it is fair to say the attraction, that animal lure, was not eye-poppingly immediate. For some six years, Lawrence had been transporting me on my woman of leisure’s diurnal pilgrimage; shopping congresses, beautician assignations and restaurant rendezvous. All undertaken, without paying the slightest heed of him sat ahead of me. At best, if on the return journey home I ever flitted out of my limbering reverie, or my swooning expenditure, what sight befell me ? An insignificant fleshy mullion, foregrounding my view out on to the world. A dainty isthmus of neck, corrugated between sharp borders of grey jacket rimming white shirt collars and the tight furrow of close cropped hair. If the ventral display was all disorderly, thewy subversion, the dorsal, that view presented to me, was faultlessly bashful. That was intriguing. What could Damon make of this Janus-faced employee ? What could I ?
Gradually on each day’s sojourn, my advertence deserted internal recitation of liturgies from catalogue, brochure, menu and glossy primer. Instead I consecrated a new tierce, as idle distraction fanned into fervent obeisance. Sat re-upholstered at my rear-seated station, my devotion was an engrossed fascination. For across the week, I traced the serial derangement of his jacket collar into atony, until starchy reconditioning from a presumed trip to the dry cleaners of a weekend. I followed the similar, more rapid enervation of each crisp shirt collar, further tracking the advancing tide mark as the day waxed and waned. I stalked the creeping infraction of the descending hairline into the dermal savanna of his endangered neck. I monitored the patches of gauzy down succumbing one by one to the dark, septentrional colonisation. And then I witnessed the monthly incendiary clearing, of both scrub and thicket. How the scarified skin was arrayed with beacon red horripilation. Livid nodes of denudation protesting the lunar cull. Nonetheless, in the night, stratification had been reimposed, stark frontiers redrawn. A flirtation with unkempt chaos, redeemed by asperous ministrations. Daily I was witness to Damon’s grooming and yet it’s familiarity did not engender such goggle-eyed interest. But in one of his minions, the shadowplay of natural louche inclination, contending with regimented ambition, afforded me a squint into what the High Priest demanded of his votaries. With myself as one such. A cult of the contrary. Of partial inversion. Hard men feminised in the catamenial rhythms of their off-duty oscillations. Petticoat me, invigorated when I clocked on of an evening peregrined on Damon's arm. Here was an opportunity advanced to discover who I really had become. Tergiversation was complete. I was no longer a lady who lunched.
Now these recurring transitions across Lawrence’s skin, microscopic changes ranging beyond the quotidian, conceded a glimpse of other dramas being played out. Might this be what it would be like to rear a child ? My erstwhile experience of remote godmothering, (unsurprisingly, Damon was much in demand for covenanting to safeguard many children both within the official Church and the church of Satan), meant I got to see a lot of infants intermittently. “Oh, do you think ?” was the constant refrain of mothers, whose bloodshot wakes burrowing through scleras entrenched deep within orbital skin, still managed to disseminate a weak distress flare against the pallor of the rest of their face. Seemingly, being so close and proximate to your baby, connotes that is very hard to discern minute variations and incremental growth. My immersion in the mutable scruff of Lawrence gainsays this. The devil is in the detail. Desire’s deal-making circuit breaker. A mercurial trip switch.
Growth. Development. Progression. Expansion ... So having dedicated carriaged hours to musing, now it was ordained that I should venture beyond the narrow straits. No longer was it to be a restricted view. The partition glass had coalesced into a new identification suite for me. For his part, Lawrence had always been the consummate orderly. Never looking over his shoulder to engage with me. Our conversation light and borne on the air, as he addressed the windscreen in front of him with full transparency. Yet every occasion of him opening the door for me, or watching my form recede from the car, accomodated him plenty scope to appraise me if he so desired. A rear-view reciprocation. And came the day, that incipient instant of inroaded irruption, when I espied a gash in his freshly threshed stubble. The censure of a cutthroat razor. Nevertheless from its extraneous locus on the back of his neck, an innocent enough imprint. And yet, perhaps not. For here was evidence, that in his private time, his intimate, non-fraternal space, while being shaved (who shaved him, surely no woman would employ a cutthroat ?), he had indeed turned his head to converse with someone and incurred the blade’s scathing. The clock was ticking, the clouds blunting the sun and effacing the sundial. In my mind’s eye, I leaned forward in my seat and through the providential fissure in the partition screen, whispily blew the pappus on his neck. Trying to incise a clearing, to keep any strands of hair from draggling across the riven flesh and flaying it further. I did this day after day, healing without laying on of hands, until the volcanic relief of scar tissue resubmerged from sight. And I knew it was time. I had parted the waves. There was no more balefire red, of whatever source, warning me off.
And maybe Lawrence had also felt me perennially boring through his occiput, leaning lasciviously against the foramen arcades, impressing upon the grey matter within. Until its arrogation finally overrode any friction of fear and imparted him with misconceived momentum of his own. The resistable driving force, meeting the resolutely sedentary object. Convergence. Only there never was really.
That steers us back to the sex then. Well, spacious as the back of a limo is, it is still somewhat confining. We only ever partly undressed, not through impetuous passion, but due to restrictive turning circles given the low ceiling. I tended to plump for the reveal lying beneath bra and chemise, whereas he went for the sloughing of trousers and boxers. Complementary. It might have presaged how well we fitted together. In actuality it pointed up we were both off the meter. The required increased stretch for our limo, would have been widthways more than length. The seats weren’t the right height to access someone on the floor and though they were of a harder consistency than a bed, whoever was installed on them kept sinking further down into their concavity. In the end, we hit upon Lawrence having to stoop, while I squatted precariously on the flip up flunky seats, with every thrust threatening to upend me from my perch. Accordingly, the sex was simultaneously both stilted and vertiginous. My face was pressed up against the glass partition, seeing faint, indistinct impressions of myself veering up and slicing through my head. Half the time, if Lawrence torqued too firmly, or I relaxed my own braced tautness, I ended up kissing these riven me’s. There was enough slurped DNA across the partition, to clone me whole. Which Lawrence had already achieved single-handed. For all the sinewy aches of being bent, folded and manipulated, the sex was lordotic. Untrammelled access to my neck obliged this. But to me, post-coital admission was even better.
Since I could fold my head into a perfect nuchal cradle. My bated breath, barely ruffling the upstanding follicles which palisaded my face with resolute attention. Holding me together, when I smouldered and felt I was going to shrivel up. That feeling of being held, just like a baby in a mother’s arms. A feeling we’re are forever yearning to recapture, but the adult geometry always seems awry. It almost makes you wish to have been born into those cultures, whose matrons employ a papoose. Whereby the newborn unable to bear up its head, can naturally collapse forward to nestle in the curve of the mother’s nape. I always insisted on spooning him.
Lying there I could see the carotid cables pulse and whip with the exhalation of a long-resisted breath. Sinewy snakes, ever alert, sentinels on guard for the both of us while I duck out and dare shield my eyes from the world. As I press my whole ambit into his neck, the cords hoist me like elevator cables to a place of untouchability. It is a smooth ascension, without palpitation or tremor. It is the ultimate limo drive. It is the only pillow I could truly sleep on, without being pummelled and jabbed at by guilty dreams. The post-coital cocktail of hormonal somnolence probably helped, but if your crib fails to lend itself to repose -(sex out here not only effaces nothing of my surroundings, but rather amplifies shameful hotel decor, the mind-boggling clutteredness of transient tourists and their off-putting slovenliness). Lying there with Lawrence, I couldn’t help but fantasise cutting those cords and the two of us plummeting down towards an Icarian fusion. But this pyretic image was ever an improvement on my lonely vigil here, sat staring at the enticing veins in my wrists. Wrists and neck. Locii where I used to spray perfume. When I was formerly a woman, concerned with her feminine allure, not her female buffness.
Then, waxed and waned, the gathering comedown. Keys in the ignition and a turning of the engine. Lights on. At least one us us was itinerised to be someplace. One particular occasion I’d determined to wear lipstick. To spraypaint my manumission on the parted partition’s hoarding. Lawrence was appalled and wiped the crimson smile roughly from my lips with his hand. Oh he claimed that it was because it made me look tarty. But I knew the real reason was forensic. In the same way that the carapace of the car had to remain untainted by evidence, so the interior had to appear sterile too. Our love was doomed. On a road to nowhere.
The back of the neck. Like the arse, a region of the self you cannot catch. More so really, since a strategic looking glass will assist in your posterior viewing. But not the neck. You need two reflecting surfaces working in tandem to project that. And though the libidinous crackle was concentrated in his nape, really I was solely after a peek at my own. To regard what crested my spine. How my central nervous system was capped. What exactly tamped my passions back down among the Stygian darkness of my viscera. A simple neck rub might have sufficed, if I could have watched him operating on me in a mirror. But of course the house stakes were too high to return just a humble massage, so we went for broke. The whole body interaction. All over kneading. Genital focus as raising agent. And though I did arch the bow of my back and fire off fulgurant arrows, (in a manner I scarce did with Damon’s cock feather), I was really straining to ponder my own cervical curve. Lawrence’s lap a gantry, his neck a harness for my arms, as my skeleton tried to pivot so as to round on itself. But no matter how much he cranked his shaft, I was never able to attain full integration of course. I remained refluxed. Earthbound. Or carbound. The eternal pasenger. Passively driven along. Like a coffin on the treadmill that heaves its sedate progress to the crematorial flames.
Our relationship had feet of clay. Which was unfortunate, once we washed up shoeless, together on this sandy beach. With the tide rushing in. Pretty soon we were at each other’s throats, antipodal to the draw of each other’s pretty necks that had soldered us together. What sex there was, was desperate, rough and reproachful. Everything we did was braised in denaturing alcohol. And one stewed row too many, I launched a fusillade of insults, capped off with the leaden shot that “You’re showing your roots”. To which he rejoindered “Yeah, well so are you”. “I’ve never hidden where I’m from”. “No and it’s bleedin’ obvious where you’re heading to an’ all”, patting his head and rubbing his stomach at the same time, before transferring from the head, to mime knocking back shots, or maybe fellatio. It wasn’t exactly clear which. Then the parting depth charge as he stormed off down the beach, “For somebody supposedly brainy, you’ve fucked things up right royally” ringing in my cauliflowered ears. Has to be said, that for a boy with little formal education, he was remarkably prescient. Damon must have mentored him well to read people. For the disenchanted furrow he ploughed through the sand and right off the island, wasn’t too wide of my beaten track. My hair had been bleached to straw and any highlights were long gone. The sun had set on our relationship and left me with no end of split ends. A girl’s gotta eat somehow hasn’t she ?
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