Chapter Seventy-One
Charlotte Drig drank at the bar, Aloysius serving her. She’d had no training in this sort of thing, but assumed, correctly, that if it were as difficult as all that, our species would never have propagated to the extent that we have, to the tyranny over every continent and the subjugation of the more ingenuous life forms, today. She decided not to speak, merely pointed to the drink she desired, squinted smirkingly at his eyes, made a point of shifting her bosom when shifting her position on the stool, and let him feel her stare on the back of his neck. When the sole other customer had left to go cry himself to sleep, Aloysius did not even ask her to accompany him to his room, but merely locked up, took her gently by the arm, and led her off.
Within seconds of entering his room, she was face-down on his bed, all her clothes removed. Gas crept up from her stomach, on account of the alcohol, to which she was hardly used, she’d imbibed, scraping its way up her throat. She stared into the stains on his pillow, left there from the hair cream he used, but, close-up, terrifying ovals mawing toward her. She heard him unhurriedly unbuttoning his clothes, and she regretted the whole thing, before it had begun, but her loathing of her husband swelled up in her, a workable substitute for lust.
No one had ever seen her naked except Arthur—and then, in occasional snatches of mouldy moonlight leaking through the curtains while the children slept—and now, this stranger was staring leisurely at her unveiled backside. What must he be thinking? What flaws must he be registering about her body? How disgusted he must be—by her body, and by her brazenness! She tried to compact herself, squeeze herself together, close her orifices so as to preserve a crumb of dignity, but now his hands were spreading her, and all she could imagine was Arthur in the room, so she might distil a drop of pleasure from the pain she would behold on his face.
Fluttering stars of pain danced behind her eyelids as he entered her, and she heard herself moan profanely, and he pushed through her—she felt he would break through her ribs, puncture her organs and exit through her mouth. Impaled humiliatingly, she strove to raise herself on her elbows and knees, to somehow lessen the agony, but found her limbs paralysed, as if her body had shut itself down from shock. Spit dribbled from her lips into the pillow, then soaked back into her forehead and cheeks. Every muscle in her body tightened and held its breath in protest at being allowed to be so besieged.
No one had possessed her, save for Arthur, and the ruthless ferocity she was currently enduring was a world away from her husband’s tender solicitude. Aloysius’s impersonal grunting from above her ears left her in no doubt that his heart, if he had one, was elsewhere, and she was but a day-old hunk of meat left in a desert for instinctual picking by vulture’s beak. His fingernails clawed into her haunches like spurs into a nag’s flank; she felt a perforation in the skin, and wondered if there was blood, and worried if Arthur would see, but then remembered he would not.
Aloysius’s groan was utterly self-involved, and its bestial tinge revolted her, and yet, despite herself, she contracted around him, and echoed his groan, the commiserating face of Arthur graven indelibly on the pillow before her till it dissolved.
She’d dreamt as a girl of becoming an acrobat and travelling the world, gazing down on the assembled masses from her bird’s-eye vantage, imagining all to be peaceful and still, frozen, even in the midst of fleeting motion, up there; but when, as an adolescent, the time came to don those rosy tights, her parents refused, presenting her with the consolation prize of a job in a fish shop with as many haddock lunches as she could stand. She could have run off on her own, but something wilted within her, so she took the job, married a timid boyfriend, filled the house with ungrateful kids, and ended up with this stranger’s manhood fully up her rectum. She would have to go back to Arthur, she told herself. Now that she’d cuckolded him and re-established her pre-eminence in the household, she would go back. And yet, now, Arthur, her children, their life before this holiday—it was all receding from her like the facial features of waving well-wishers below an ascending hot-air balloon. Who was this man, lying atop her? Why did she wish he would never roll off?
Aloysius’s vision embraced the death of his mother, at the moment of his birth; the love with which his father raised him, until the last financial crash, when he broke down and was hustled off to an asylum, raving passionately in the language of stock market abbreviations, the sole tongue he would henceforth boast; his aunt and uncle, childless, and undesirous of children, raising him out of stoical duty; his first fumblings with the female sex, seduced by an older cousin whose ugliness and deficient hygiene were legendary in the family; learning the ropes properly from prostitutes, with his earnings from working in a shop, and liberty to indulge every perverted whim which might present itself to his inquiring mind; and the infuriating cul-de-sac of his position at the hotel. Yet now, in the quiet aftermath of his lust, the anonymous hunk of meat onto which he’d, once drained, flopped, seemed to be gifting him a new sensation; one he’d never found amongst all the trollops of his youth. Instead of the disgust for the flesh he’d ritually feel the moment after completion, and the violent shove away of his co-fornicator, he felt no less at peace lying atop this woman than would a fatigued frog belly-down upon a lily pad. What was this? What was this he was feeling? His first impulse was to treat it as a joke, and yet. . .