Authors: Anna Stothard
David and I walked back from one of his favoured 24-hour Thai restaurants. It was around midnight, and the air was still, smelling like pollution and burning. On a balcony somewhere above our heads there was a baby screaming, and in the distance a car engine revved. There was some music from a nearby door, and cars going by on the main road. “Euphonious,” I thought to myself. We turned onto David’s block, and immediately saw a skinny coyote outside David’s gate, its body half-flooded by a street lamp and half in darkness. The coyote was in the middle of an almighty yawn when he saw us. He froze in mid-movement with his strong back arched, one knobbly grey paw stretched out in front of its body. He held himself still for a minute, his whiskers quivering in the lamplight and his ears pricked back. His tail was chopped off halfway, so it was more like a stump, but that was the only clumsy thing about the creature. After a drawn-out moment he drew his chest upwards with an inaudible sigh and stepped backwards out of the lamplight. I thought of a ballet dancer stepping out of the spotlight, or a reluctantly retreating thief in a pantomime.
“We interrupted his yawning,” said David quietly, neither of us moving a muscle, and we heard bushes rustle as the coyote disappeared back into the undergrowth. The coyotes had been smoked out of the hills by the fires, and were stalking rubbish bins like common foxes.
“In order of preference,” said David, “orgasms, ice cream or yawns? What do you think?”
“It’s an impossible question,” I smiled at him, but then at that same moment I felt like someone was watching me. I turned away from David’s smile and, sure enough, at the end of the road I saw the thug-faced man with the gold nose stud and schoolboy haircut. I stepped forwards, and he was gone before I even blinked.
“Hey!” I shouted after the man. “Hey!”
“What’s wrong?” said David, shocked by the sudden outburst and looking around the empty streets. “Shh... ”
“Did you see that Mexican guy?”
“Who?” he said, following my finger pointing towards the end of the road.
“That guy who just turned the corner? It was the guy who stole my rucksack.”
“Really?” David said, not believing me.
“Yes,” I said. We both hurried to the end of the road, in the direction I thought he’d gone. Of course, we couldn’t see the man anywhere. We could see the United Methodist Church on the corner, which looked like a factory building. We could see smoke from fires in the hills and a bunch of men at the bus stop, but not the one who stole my rucksack. There were people I might have mistaken for him, but I didn’t say that to David. I bit my lip.
“Maybe I imagined it,” I said, looking around.
“Maybe it’s just that you’re a horrible racist and all people with different skin colours look identical to you?” he smiled.
“I’m not a racist,” I said. “I saw him.”
“Racist,” David nodded, kidding. We stared around us, and then suddenly David became serious. He glanced sideways at me, and I turned towards him. “Sometimes I think you don’t always tell me the truth,” he said. “You can be very secretive.”
“I’m not secretive,” I said, and when he faced me I put my arms up over his shoulders. I had to stand on tiptoe to inhale him, along with the smell of sap in the trees and late-night air.
“I was driving around the other day and I saw you go into that hostel you stayed at for a while. Why’d you still go there?”
“I have mates there,” I said, without skipping a beat. “I made friends with the manager while I was staying there. Her name’s Vanessa. Were you spying on me?”
“You’re not keeping her clothes there?” he said. “The suitcase?”
“I said I got rid of them, didn’t I?” my heart sped up.
“Yeah,” he said, and I bounced up to kiss him on the corner of his mouth. He bent down to kiss me properly.
Later that night, when neither of us could sleep, David said: “You never told me the rest of your story, after you woke up covered in dirt.”
It was the hottest night of the year, and the fires were spreading, causing the air to taste thick and feel close. We’d kicked off the sheets, and both our skins were sticky inside all the sludgy air. We had two fans going, clacking away in the silence. I thought for a moment, turning stories over in my head.
“So I’m covered in dirt,” I said, “and groggy from the drugs they gave me in the cigarette. I can smell something funny in the air, like blood and mud.”
“Ominous.”
“And I can hear clucking.”
“Clucking?” he laughed.
“Clucking and mooing and naaing, all around me.”
“A farm,” he said.
“Will you let me tell the story?” I said, elbowing him, bad tempered and anxious in the heat.
“Why are you on a farm?” David asked me.
“It’s more like a meat factory,” I replied. “A massive meat factory owned by a great Fat Rich Man with lots of rings on his fingers. He’s a vegetarian himself, and has taste in art and literature. He owns several Monets, a Van Gogh and a library of classic novels.”
“Who runs the farm?”
“Farm hands. Native of the unnamed jungle in the unnamed tropical country. He treats the natives well and considers himself not only a very just employer, but also a civilizing influence. He lends out books. He pays fairly. Before he started his empire of meat, there weren’t enough jobs. Now there are jobs for anyone willing to work. Even the animals live well in his empire, fattened with the best food, allowed to run around in what he considers a ‘free-range’ environment. He only has one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“He has a secret.”
“What’s his secret?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”
“I don’t like secrets,” he said, and looked at me.
“All right then,” I said. “When the Rich Man first started out in the meat business, he persuaded his childhood sweetheart to marry him and move out to the farm. Unfortunately she wasn’t used to the heat or the germs, and she died within a year. The Fat Rich Man was distraught, and although the meat business was thriving, nothing made him happy. The Fat Rich Man started to drink, and one night he was so lonely, so dizzy from the heat and the stench of blood, that he went down to the farm in the middle of the night, and guess what he did?”
“He fucked a pig.”
“A horse, actually, but good guess.”
“I’m a sick fuck.”
“This was a sick fuck,” I said.
“Very funny,” he said.
“Anyway, the horse became pregnant and bore the Rich Man a son, who grew up into the secret apple – and secret guilt – of the Rich Man’s eye. The Rich Man named his boy Enkidu, after the legend of Gilgamesh, and Enkidu grew up to be a brave, strong boy, who looked almost human if it wasn’t for how the boy walked around on all fours and refused to eat anything except milk and hay.”
“You really have the strangest imagination,” said David, stroking my hair.
“Now I’m self-conscious,” I said. My mind went blank. “You’ll never know how the Rich Man planned to civilize his son and drag him from the animal kingdom.”
“I’m sorry, go on.”
“No,” said.
“Don’t be bad-tempered. It’s the heat making you angry?”
“I’m not angry,” I said.
“What happened to Enkidu?”
“I’m not telling you,” I said. “Why did you follow me today, when you saw me at the Youth Hostel?”
“I wasn’t following you. I just happened to pass on my way to taking a photo of Mary Fodder coming out of the gym.”
“What did you do after you saw me?”
“I got the photograph of Mary Fodder. Then I drove around. Please tell me about Enkidu?” he said.
“No,” I said, and turned my back to him.
I couldn’t fall asleep though, and we both tossed and turned in bed for another hour before starting to talk again. When David tried to touch me, I batted his hand away. Another hour or so passed.
“When you masturbate,” David asked eventually, still stifled by the ridiculous closeness of the air and the rhythmic pulsing of the fans, “Do you think about me?”
I looked at him. David was staring at the ceiling, where the fan was catching nuggets of light from the rising sun outside the window and throwing them against the wall.
“Of course,” I lied, thinking of the indistinct strangers who populate my dreams. It has always upset me to see men in pornography. They look so painfully ridiculous, with their muddy shadows of prominent muscles that shout out like a biology diagram – Thorax! Abdomen! Gluteus Maximus! And those eager faces looking so pleased with themselves, nodding up there on top of clenched shoulders like one of those dogs on car dashboards. The men in my dreams and nightmares are so much less distinct: they are almost without edges, more like distant memories than anyone David could be jealous of. It’s strange that I’ll happily watch pornography involving women, and that in my dreams I am distinct down to the position of my legs and the taste in my mouth, but I will not watch men in pornography, and the men in my fantasies are ideas, not people.
“Really?” asked David, pleased. “What do we do?”
“It’s not like that,” I laughed, blushing in the dark. “I don’t know. Yesterday, when I was in the bath, we did it on a washing machine.”
“There’s a washing machine in your head? How domestic. Did you come?” He smiled. I loved his smile.
“Of course,” I said, and didn’t mention that in my fantasy I was left naked on the washing machine for a full cycle, my hands tied behind my back. It wasn’t domestic, or even funny. The backdrop of the washing-machine fantasy was actually a Laundromat near David’s office, where I washed lots of Lily’s clothes while I was looking for him. Another problem with my fantasies, which I didn’t tell David about, was that they often ran away from me and didn’t result in my touching myself at all. They also often involved me being left alone and scared. Like my dream of the beach where I wash goo out of the baby’s mouth while someone drowns on the horizon, I’ll begin somewhere perfectly reasonable and end up all alone, in tears, not turned on at all any more, but horrified at my own mind. In reality I won’t be crying, because I haven’t cried in years, but in my imagination I’ll be watching my fantasy self in floods of unattractive tears, tied to a damn washing machine. I often think that if I could make my mind do what I wanted it to do, if the girl in my dreams sat up straighter and smiled more and did what I told her to do, my life would be easier.
“What sort of washing machine?” asked David playfully, turning his head to me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Fast or slow cycle?”
“Fast.”
“Colours or whites?”
“Whites, for sure. Higher heat,” I said.
“Would your clothes be in the machine?” he asked.
“Of course.”
We paused, sleepy as the sun was rising outside the win dow.
“What happened to Enkidu, then? I won’t be able to sleep until I know.”
“I was brought into the farm in order to drag him into the human world.”
“To make a man of him, like in Gilgamesh,” said David.
“Exactly,” I yawned. “But I’m too sleepy to make a man out of anyone tonight.”
“You live in a state of perpetual unreality,” he said.
“Says the alcoholic,” I replied.
“Harsh,” he said.
“Pots and kettles,” I kissed him.
“Let’s run away somewhere,” he said.
“Sure,” I smiled.
“Let’s run away somewhere tomorrow,” he said.
“Where?” I said.
“Rio, Mexico, the moon?” he said, “I really don’t care. I just want to get out of here. That woman from downstairs keeps telling me that things are going to fall apart.”
“She tells me that too,” I smiled.
“Are you as good at lying as you are at story-telling?”
“What do you mean?” I said, confused by the sudden change in tone and subject.
“Are you a good liar?” he said.
“My Dad could always tell when I was lying, cos my left eye twitched,” I lied to David with a small smile. He held his thumb under my eye.
“Do you love me?” He asked.
“I really do,” I said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, watching my eye for a twitch.
We didn’t go away the next day, of course, although I wish we had. Instead we woke up in the heat and had a few hours together before Sam picked me up for work. David and I walked up to Griffith Park Observatory. The city and the Santa Monica Mountains stretched out glinting below us like a saucepan of water that was just about to boil. When we got to the top, through all that thick dry heat we could see the bald patches of burnt earth where the fires had been put out only a few days ago. Smoke was still rising, not even very far away, shattering the blue sky into grey and shifty pieces. I watched a dehydrated fly swim in delirious circles and then land on a metal railing, which must have been insanely hot, because the fly fell dead to the floor a few seconds later. David wore a pale-blue T-shirt, slightly torn, and got a triangle of sweat on his back as we climbed. I could smell him. He told me about how one day when he was twenty-five he woke up outside the observatory at nine in the morning with no idea how he got there, surrounded by Dutch tourists who were poking him with their guide books. I laughed, although it was a pathetic image.
“You ever woken up in weird places?” he asked me.
“I don’t think so,” I shrugged, “I don’t like getting drunk much.” David laughed. “But I did have a brief love affair with drowsy berry-flavoured cough syrup – but that’s about it.” I smiled.
We were silent for a bit, walking around the circles of the building. David said he was going to spend his afternoon out on some photographic mission or other, stealing private moments from famous people. He said he might develop the photos he’d taken of me a few weeks ago, the ones of me posing in my bikini around his living room.
“Ah, no, don’t,” I cringed. “Please don’t.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll be silly,” I shivered.
“They’ll be lovely, I promise,” he said, smiling, and held my hand as we made our descent back down the hill. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me, and contemplated how much dishonesty there was in perception, anyway. He might not know my real age, but he still saw me. He might know things about Lily that I didn’t, but I still loved him. He turned to me and said: “I might try to find the roll of film from ages ago, the photos I took when we first met, when you were a thief asleep on the beach,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I might look ugly.”
“You never look ugly,” he said.
“Liar,” I said.