The Oasis

That day, when I came up to give my aching tongue a rest, I discovered her fingers pinched about the mole, clawing at it frantically as if she was trying to rip it from her body.

I bent my mouth to her once again, blowing a stream of warm breath through my pursed lips on to her clitoris. I kissed away a string of thick white honey from the rim of her labia before taking its meat between my lips and suckling upon it like an infant nursing at the breast. She gyrated her hips in sync with the action of my mouth, a manoeuvre she called the perpetual desiring machine. ('The more I'm getting off, the more turned on you get, which gets me off even more and so on unto infinity. It's science.') Her thighs, whose girth and solidity she hated and which I adored, buffeted my head in her increasing agitation, their muscles taut as drumheads against my ears.

The contrast with the softness beneath my mouth and tongue could not have been greater. When I crawled on top of her, I felt my cock slip with ease through the wet slackness my tongue had wrought between her legs only for it to be pounced upon and gripped with ferocity upon entry. I leaned backwards into a sitting position and brought her with me until she was astride me in what was her favourite position. It brought us as close together as two bodies could be (which was really what both of us were after) and it gave her a degree of control over the tempo, which was necessary given my tendency to lose the run of myself and start pounding away. ('If you want to bang, then buy yourself a drum...') She could forgive most things but a lack of consideration on a lover's part was a cardinal offence.

She wrapped her legs around my hips and her arms around my back while I cupped either of her buttocks in my hands, guiding the undulation of her body upon mine. We hit upon a rhythm that pleased us both and we stuck diligently to it in an attempt to protract the bliss of the moment for as long as possible. Her lips were poised before mine, whispering incoherently and obscenely in a language that made no rational sense but which our ennervated bodies understood. She touched her forehead to mine and became still, shutting her eyes as if beset by an unsolicited and unwelcome memory, all of her weight suddenly bearing down upon me. She shivered and I heard the creak of her clenching teeth against my ear while I hissed endearments into hers. The force of her climax stunned me temporarily and she slipped sideways from my grasp for a moment before I regathered her, my mouth stopping the gasp that issued from hers. Her teeth took a piece of my lip as she snatched her face away from mine, breathing, 'Come.'

I lay back and let go, giving way to a pleasure that blotted out existence. Sitting upright, her body at a ninety degree angle to mine, she reached back and palpated my scrotum, her eyes sparkling with malicious approval, her loins squirming down upon my juddering hips. When my tension began to abate, and reality once again reconstituted itself about me, I experienced the connectedness and reassurance that only her body's presence against mine could bring about. We both recoiled from using the word love but such moments showed up our pseudo-amorality for the sham it was. For an all too brief instant we were allowed to luxuriate in the purity of our feelings for each other before familiar modes of behaviour reasserted themselves. Her glance at her watch signalled a return to normality.

'I'm starving,' she said, 'I'll have to pick something up on the way back. Did you eat anything?'

I shook my head sadly. She could handle post-coital tristesse, unlike me.

'What about this place, then?' she said.

I looked about at the peeling, smoke-blackened walls, the tangled venetian blinds hanging at an alarming angle in front of the window, a poster on the wall advertising what looked like some kind of Balkan liqueur.

'Needs a bit of work, as you said. But...' I put my arms about her waist. 'I think you and I could be very happy here.'

Her mouth twitched as she teetered on the verge of an utterance that would betray her shield of practical cynicism, but she managed to keep herself in check.

'Hand me my shoe, would you? It'll be fun doing it up. We can remain true to its former incarnation by maintaining the Ottoman brothel motif.'

'I'll buy a fez and a whip,' I said. 'Was it really a whorehouse?'

'I don't know. It is now..!'

...Four years later, as I approached the familiar blue hoarding now festooned with layers of posters advertising upcoming and past concerts, I reflected on how wrong my initial misgivings had been. She had been right in what she had said back then. I had been put out by her enterprise and spontaneity and the manner in which I reacted had been born of resentment. Moreover, in the ensuing weeks and months, as the apartment was licked into shape and I came to love it, she never once gloated or used my former hesitancy as a stick to beat me with. That was never her style...

I thought I smelled a faint trace of vanilla, clinging to the underbelly of the predominance of moisture-crumbled brick and ammonia, as I searched, by the light of my mobile, for the eye of the newly fitted mortise lock on the door in the lane. Once inside, I found the scent again, only stronger, drifting down from the top of the stairs whose upper reaches were warm with a faint, strange glow.

The boards of the first step creaked warily beneath my foot.

'...You know this can't go on....'

'...I've known that from the start...'

'...Then make a decision. No more sneaking around. Imagine that....'

The light from upstairs grew in intensity as I moved towards the curl of the stairwell. 'No more of this,' I thought, swimming upstream into a strengthening current of heated vanilla from above that filled my nose, my mouth, my eyes. My body felt as if it was filled with the same light I now stepped into, that of the hundreds of scented candles and tea-lights I saw beyond the half opened door of the flat. A galaxy of flames, black stem-borne teardrops, each one holding the promise of her body, all coming to a point of extinction, dying upon the air in a thread of oily smoke.

No more of this...

I could smell her, distinct, unmistakable, her scent an autonomous presence within the room's somnolent, narcotic fug; a delicious weakness, the prelude to a freefall from the battlements, swooped downwards over my limbs. My hand felt numb as I picked up and sipped from an unfinished goblet of white wine mottled with her smudged fingerprints. Spoiled with burnt perfume, it tasted sugar-sentimental and rancorous, like an abused child's remembrance of Christmasses past. And there, in that discordant contrast, I discovered the essence of our affair – the mad joy kitted out in the sober garb of rationality, the barely remembered admonitions against sinning perverted into hymns of sensuality, the unreason inverted and transformed to God's truth...

No more of this?

I reached for the blade of one of a pair of cod scimitars forming a St. Andrew's cross on the wall above the mantelpiece. The alternative was killing her and then myself. Death was infinitely more alluring than the endless, airless moonscape of that other life.

I found her, as I knew I would, in the bedroom. Two rows of alternating blue and red candles formed a pathway that led to the bed where she was lying on her side, naked except for a white scarf.

'What were you doing out there?' she said. A portion of the flesh of her upper arm was made like glass by the light of an adjacent candle. Her face ebbed and flowed within the shadowplay of flames.

'Contemplating suicide...'

'Oh dear. And just when I was becoming rather fond of you.'

'Now, about this present you mentioned...'

'All of it. Everything you see...' She swept an arm about. 'It's all yours.'

'Ours.'

'Come here.'

The dopplering bass of a passing car's stereo, pulsing in sequence with the beacon of a pedestrian crossing overlooked by the flat, provided the overture to my undressing. It felt unnatural, within this space, to be clothed, a fact whose self-evidence seemed to exasperate her. Her breasts, assailed by tides of gooseflesh, wearing their nipples as dark absences, felt cool and heavy in my palms. I moved my hands down her flanks to the borderland of her waist and the nascent flaring of her hips; she breathed against my collarbone, her hair trickling down, its stray tips electric like champagne bubbles upon my newly bared flesh. Although she had no children, I saw, nonetheless, in a range of tiny, almost imperceptible details – the angle at which her busy knuckle was crooked, the solicitude of the tiny lines at the limits of her mouth, the satisfaction expressed by the generous swell of her nostrils – the spectre of her unrealized motherhood. My fingers meshed together at the beautiful small of her back, one of many of her hidden and magical places, as I drew her against me. Her arms encircled my neck and my face came home to the junction of her neck and shoulder.

'Someday we'll be dead,' I said.

'No shit,' she said.

'How can this die? It's impossible.'

'If you go before me, I'll dig you up. Like that Heathcliff.'

'I'm serious.'

'That's your problem.' She took my chin in the V of her hands and kissed me on both eyes. 'There. Now do it to me.'

I did as I was asked.

'That's the Aztec kiss of eternal life,' she said. 'Now we're immortal.'

Her eyes told me she was only half taking the piss. And then, I realized that she was right. There would come a day, long after both she and I and these four walls were gone, here in the successor of The Oasis that would be amongst the buildings of a new city, one already rising like a sated vulture above the bone-stripped carcass of the old, that an as yet unborn citizen, on passing this spot or crossing the threshold, would, for an uncanny second, wonder after the source of the throb that had just dimpled their skin before carrying on and forgetting about it forever. Bodies die but energy persists and that of the ecstasy our union had engendered would surely prove to be deathless, persisting down the years in defiance of a physics that would need to recalibrate its parameters.

We did it, sweetheart. We defied space and time.

*

Carol sat in front of a makeover show wearing an expression of lobotomized astonishment. I stabbed at the backspace key to delete the contents of a spreadsheet cell.

'I met Eric in Marks' earlier,' she said.

'Eric shops?'

'Sue needed clotted cream, apparently. I don't know where she gets the time for all that fancy food she does. Or the energy.'

#NAME? read the error message in the cell.

'No wonder Eric always looks so chuffed with himself,' I said.

'You think?' She pushed up one side of her glasses and rubbed an eye. 'Haven't you ever wondered about the two of them?'

'I try not to.'

'They're a bit of an odd couple, don't you think? Her so accomplished and all. And Eric such a plodder.'

'All childless couples are odd.'

'I shouldn't wonder if there aren't those who consider us odd. Do you think so?'

Sometimes it was hard not to believe that Carol was being purposefully guileless, perhaps in the hope of wrong-footing me. She had a habit of saying these not so innocent-seeming innocent things. The best strategy was to remain unmoved and say nothing.

'I can't keep my eyes open. I could sleep for a week.'

She sagged as her slow puncture allowed a little more pressure to escape. I minimized the Excel window and opened Gmail. Spam: 15. Oxycodone; Cialis; Replica Rolex Watches; I grew 3 inches bigger in 10 weeks. New messages: 2.

'I'll probably go up soon,' she said. 'Read my book.'

'The Atwood? How is it?'

'Oh, grim, you know. Dystopia.'

I deleted the first message, from a locksmith, from both inbox and trash and opened the second. Attached was one of the self-portraits she had taken with her phone in The Oasis the night before. Underneath was a feline emoticon depicting a pair of x's sitting astride a question mark. She liked to play the sphinx. Two kisses and an enquiry or dead cartoon eyes above a sickle? A typo? Whatever its provenance, it was definitely female, perhaps another image of her, a cryptic counterpoint to the realism of the photo.

Carol came over and leaned forward to kiss me goodnight. And was it merely suggestion or did I see that symbol again, inscribed beneath the skin in the very bones of her face?