The woman said to me, ‘Wait! I’ll come with you instead.’
She laid a warm hand on mine and smiled invitingly. She was breathing excitedly. A sheen of sweat lay over her breasts; her nipples pointed erectly. I felt a new erotic charge from the light touch of her fingers, but also a surge of guilt. The man lay there passively at my feet, staring up at me. I was confused by everything I was seeing.
I backed away from them, through the archway, back to the long, unlit corridor. The naked whore followed quickly behind me, seizing hold of my upper arm as I blundered along. At the far end of this corridor, past the door which I knew led back into Ste-Augustinia’s boudoir, I had noticed yet another door, leading somewhere. I reached it, put my weight against it and forced it open. It moved stiffly. Inside the room that was beyond, the endless throbbing beat of the synthesized music was louder but it appeared to be empty of all people. The musky perfume was intense. I felt sensual, aroused, eager to do the bidding of the young woman who had attached herself to me – but even so I was frightened, disorientated, overcome by the rush of sensations and thoughts coursing through me.
The young woman had followed me in, still holding my arm. The door closed firmly behind us, causing a decompression sensation in one of my ears. I swallowed to clear it. I turned to speak to this whore but as I did so two other young women appeared as if from nowhere, stepping out of the deeper shadows on the side of the room away from the door.
I was alone with them. All three were naked. They were looking at me with what I took to be great eagerness. I was in a state of acute sexual readiness.
Even so, I stepped back from them, still nervous because of my inexperience, but by this time in such a state of excitement that I wondered how much longer I might contain it. I felt the edge of something soft pressing against the back of my lower leg. When I glanced behind me I saw in the pale light that a large bed was there, a bare mattress of some kind, an expanse of yielding material ready for use.
The three naked women were beside me now, their lustful scents rising around me. With gentle pressure of their hands they indicated I should lower myself to the bed. I sat down, but then one of them pushed lightly on my shoulders and I leaned back compliantly. The mattress, the palliasse, whatever was there, was soft beneath my weight. One of the women bent down and lifted my legs around so that I might lie flat.
When I was prone they began to unbutton and remove my uniform, working deftly and quickly, letting me feel the light tattoo of their fingertips. Nothing happened by accident: they were deliberately provoking and teasing my physical response. I was straining with the effort of controlling myself, so close was I to letting go. The girl closest to my head was staring down into my eyes as her fingers worked to slide my shirt from my chest and down my arms. Whenever she leaned across me, or stretched to free my hand from the cuff of a sleeve, she did so in such a way that she lowered one of her bare breasts towards me and brushed the hard little nipple lightly against my lips.
I was naked in a few seconds, in a state of full and agonizing arousal, yearning for release. The women slid my clothes out from underneath me, piled them up on the further side of the mattress. The one beside my face rested her soft fingertips on my chest. She leaned closer to me.
‘You choose?’ she said, whispering into my ear.
‘Choose what?’
‘You like me? You like my friends?’
‘All of you!’ I said without thinking. ‘I want you all!’
Nothing more was said or, as far as I could see, signalled between them. They moved into position smoothly and as if in a formation they had rehearsed many times.
I was made to remain lying on my back but one of them lifted my knee that was closest to the edge of the mattress, making a small triangular aperture. She lay down on her back across the mattress so that her shoulders rested on my horizontal leg, while her head went beneath my raised knee. She turned her face towards the space between my legs. I could feel her breath on my naked buttocks. She took hold of my erect penis with her hand, holding it perpendicular to my body.
In the same moment the second woman was astride me with a knee on each side of my chest, her legs wide apart, lowering herself so that her sex touched lightly against, but did not enfold, the tip of my member, which was being held in position by the other woman.
The third one also straddled me but placed herself above my face, lowering herself towards, but not actually against, my eager lips.
Breathing the woman’s delicious bodily scents, I remembered Acizzone.
I thought about the most explicit of his paintings hidden away in the gallery cellar. It was called (another title, remembered how?): The Swain of Lethen in Godly Pleasures. This one was painted in bold pigment on a stiff wooden board.
All that could be seen of The Swain in reproduction, or from a distance, was what appeared to be a smooth field of uniform crimson paint, intriguingly plain and minimalist. One touch of a hand or a finger, though, or even (as I knew I had tried) the light press of a forehead, would induce a vivid mental image of sexual activity. For everyone it was supposed to be different. I myself saw, felt, experienced, a scene of multiple sexual activity, a young man naked on a bed, three beautiful naked women pleasuring him, one straddling his face, one his penis, the third reaching beneath his body to press her face into the cleft between his buttocks. All was bathed, in this intense imagining, in a lubricious crimson light.
Now I had become the swain himself, in godly pleasures.
I was surrendering to the imminent passions the women aroused in me. A lust for physical release was rushing through me even as the extent of the enigma about Acizzone surrounded me. I felt myself hastening to the moment of completion.
Then it ended. As swiftly and deftly as they had taken up their position, the women lifted themselves away from me, deserted me. I tried to call out to them, but my laboured breathing emitted only a series of excited gasps. They stepped quickly down from the bed, slipped away – the door opened and closed, leaving me alone.
I discharged my excitement at last, miserable and abandoned. I could still in one sense feel them, could detect the traces they had left behind of their exquisite and exciting perfumes, but I was alone in that dim-lit, sound-throbbing cell and I expelled my passion as a man alone.
I lay still to try to calm myself, all my senses tingling, my muscles twitching and straining. I sat up slowly, lowered my feet to the floor. My legs were trembling.
When I could I dressed quickly and carefully, attempting to make myself look as if nothing had just happened so that I could depart with at least an appearance of calmness.
As I tucked in my shirt I felt the residue of my discharge, cold and sticky on the skin of my belly.
I found my way out of the room, and walked nervously along the corridor into a large sub-floor area, filled with music and the sound of overhead footsteps. I saw a glint of bright red neon lighting, limned against ill-fitting doors. I struggled with iron handles, pulled the doors open, found a cobbled alley between two massive buildings under the tropical night, sensed the smells of cooking, perspiration, spices, grease, gasoline, night-scented flowers. Finally I emerged into the clamorous street by the waterfront. I saw none of the black-caps, none of the whores, none of my shipmates.
I was thankful the club was so close to the quay. I was soon able to reboard the troopship, check myself in with the marshals, then plunge into the lower decks and lose myself in the anonymous press of the other men who were there. I sought no one’s company during my first hours back in the crowded decks. I lay on my bunk and pretended to sleep.
The next morning the ship sailed from Muriseay Town and once again we headed south towards the war.
After Muriseay, my view of the islands was different. The superficial allure of them had diminished. From my short visit ashore in that crowded town I felt myself to have become island-experienced, had briefly breathed the air and the scents, heard the sounds and seen some of the muddle. At the s
ame time, though, the experience had deepened the intrigue of the islands. They still had me in their thrall, but I was careful now not to dwell on it. I felt I had grown up a little.
The whole pace of life on the ship was changing, with the army’s demands on us increasing every day. For several more days we continued to cruise our zigzag course between the tropical islands, but as we moved further into the southern hemisphere the weather grew more temperate and for three long and uncomfortable days the ship was buffeted by stiff southerly gales and rocked by mountainous waves. When the storm finally receded we were in more barren latitudes. Many of the islands here, in the southern part of the Midway Sea, were craggy and treeless, some of them only barely rising above the level of the sea. They stood further apart from each other than they had done near the equator.
I still yearned for the islands, but not for these. I craved the insane heat of the tropics. With every day that the islands of the warmer climes slipped further behind me I knew that I had to put them out of my thoughts. I stayed away from the exposed upper decks, with their silent, distant views of fragmented land.
Towards the end of the voyage we were evacuated without warning from our mess decks and while we crowded together on the assembly deck every recruit’s kit was searched. The map I had been using was discovered where I had left it in my duffel bag. For two more days nothing happened. Then I was summoned to the adjutant’s cabin where I was told the map had been confiscated and destroyed. I was docked seven days’ pay as punishment and my record was marked. I was officially warned that the black-cap escouades would be alerted to my breach of the rules.
However, it turned out that not all was lost. Either the search party did not find my notebook or they had not recognized the long list of island names it contained.
The loss of the map obstinately reminded me of the islands we had passed. In the final days on the troopship, I sat alone with those pages from my notebook, committing the names to memory and trying to recall how each of the islands had looked. Mentally, I compiled a favoured itinerary that I would follow when at last I was discharged from the army and could return home, moving slowly, as I planned, from one island to the next, perhaps spending many years in the process.
That could not begin until I had finished with the war, but the ship had not yet even arrived in sight of our destination. I waited on my hammock.
On disembarkation I was assigned to an infantry unit who were armed with a certain type of grenade launcher. I was held up near the port for another month while I underwent training. By the time this was complete, my comrades from the ship had dispersed. I was sent on a long journey across the bleak landscape to join up with my new unit.
I was at last moving across the notorious southern continent, the theatre of the land war, but throughout the three days of my cold and exhausting journey by train and truck I saw signs of neither battles nor their aftermath. The terrain I passed through had clearly never been lived in – I saw a seemingly endless prospect of treeless plains, rocky hills, frozen rivers. I received orders every day: my torment was a lonely one but my route was known and monitored, arrangements had been made. Other troops travelled with me, none of them for long. We all had different destinations, different orders. Whenever the train halted it was met by trucks that either were standing by the side of the rails where we stopped, or which appeared from somewhere after we had waited an hour or two. Fuel and food were taken on at these stops and my brief companions came and went. Eventually it was my own turn to leave the train at one of these halts.
I travelled under a tarpaulin in the back of a truck for another day, cold and hungry, bruised by the constant lurching of the vehicle and at last terrified by the closeness of the landscape around me. I was now so much a part of it. The winds that scoured the bleak grasses and thorny, leafless bushes also scoured me, the rocks and boulders that littered the ground were the immediate cause of the truck’s violent movements, the cold that seeped everywhere sapped my strength and will. I passed the journey in a state of mental and physical suspension, waiting for the interminable journey to end.
I stared in dismay at the terrain. I found the dark landscape oppressive, the gradual contours discouraging. I loathed the sight of the grey, flinty soil, the waterless plains, the neutral sky, the broken ground with its scattered rocks and shards of quartz, the complete absence of signs of human occupation or of agriculture or animals or buildings – above all I hated the endless blast of freezing winds and the shrouds of sleet, the blizzard gales. I could only huddle in my freezing, exposed corner of the truck’s compartment, waiting for this deadly journey to end.
Finally we arrived somewhere, at a unit which was occupying a strategic position at the base of a steep, broken rockface. As soon as I arrived I noticed the grenade launcher positions, each constructed exactly as I had myself been trained to construct them, each concealed position manned to the right strength. After the torment and discomforts of the long journey I felt a sudden sense of completeness, an unexpected satisfaction that at last the disagreeable job I had been forced to take on was about to start.
However, fighting the war itself was not yet my destiny. After I joined the grenade unit and shared duties with the other soldiers for a day or two, the first frightening reality of the army was borne in on me. Grenade launchers we had, but as yet no grenades. This did not appear to alarm the others so I did not allow it to alarm me. I had been in the army long enough to have developed the foot soldier’s unquestioning frame of mind when it came to direct orders about fighting, or preparation for fighting.
We were told that we were going to retreat from this position, re-equip ourselves with matériel, then occupy a new position from which we could confront the enemy directly.
We dismantled our weapons, we abandoned our position in the dead of night, we travelled a long distance to the east. Here we finally rendezvoused with a column of trucks. We were driven in convoy for two nights and a day to a large stores depot. Here we learned that the grenade launchers with which we were armed were now obsolescent. We were to be issued with the latest version, but the entire escadron would need to be retrained.
So we marched cross-country to another camp. So we retrained. So, finally, we were issued with the latest armament and the ammunition for it and now at last fully prepared we marched off once again to fight the war.
We never reached our reallocated position, from where the enemy was to be confronted. We were diverted instead to relieve another column of troops, five days away across some of the harshest countryside I had yet encountered: it was a broken, frozen landscape of flints and glinting pebbles, devoid of plants, of colour, even of shape.
It didn’t sink in straight away, but already the pattern had become established in those first few days and weeks of aimless activity. This purposeless and constant movement was to be my experience of war.
I never lost count of the days or the years. The three-thousandth anniversary loomed ahead of me like an unstated threat. We marched at intervals from one place to the next; we slept rough; we marched again or were transported by trucks; we were billeted in wooden huts that were uninsulated and infested with rats and which leaked under the incessant rains. At intervals we were withdrawn to be retrained. An issue of new or upgraded weapons invariably followed, making more training essential. We were always in transit, making camp, taking up new positions, digging trenches, heading south or north or east or anywhere to reinforce our allies – we were put on trains, removed from trains, flown here and there, sometimes without food or water, often without warning, always without explanation. Once when we were hiding in trenches close to the snowline a dozen fighter planes screamed overhead and we stood and cheered unheard after them; at another time there were other aircraft, from which we were ordered to take cover. No one attacked us, then or ever, but we were always on our guard. In some of the coastal areas of the continent, to which we were sent from time to time, and depending on the season, I was in turn baked by the heat of t
he sun, immobilized by thigh-deep mud, bitten by thousands of flying insects, swept away by flooding snow-melt – I suffered sores, sunburn, bruises, boredom, ulcerated legs, exhaustion, constipation, frostbite and unceasing humiliation. Sometimes we were told to stand our ground with our grenade launchers loaded and primed, waiting for action.
We never went into action.
This then was the war, of which it had always been said there would never be an end.
I lost all sense of contextual time, past and future. All I knew was the daily marking off of the calendar, sensing the fourth millennium of the war approach ineluctably. As I marched, dug, waited, trained, froze, I dreamed only of freedom, of putting this behind me, of heading back to the islands.
At some forgotten moment during one of our route marches, one of our training camps, one of our attempts to dig trenches in the permafrost, I lost the notebook containing all the island names I had written down. When I first discovered the loss it seemed like an unparalleled disaster, worse than anything the army had inflicted on me. But later I found that my memory of the islands’ names was intact. When I concentrated I realized I could still recite the romantic litany of islands, still place them against imagined shapes on a mental map.
At first bereft, I came to realize that the loss of first the map, then the notebook, had liberated me. My present was meaningless and my past was forgotten. Only the islands represented my future. They existed in my mind, modified endlessly as I dwelt on them, matching them up to my expectations.
As the gruelling experience of war ground on, I came to depend increasingly on my haunting mental images of the tropic archipelago.
But I could not ignore the army and I still had to endure its endless demands. In the ice mountains further away in the south, the enemy troops were dug into impregnable defensive positions, lines they were known to have held for centuries. They were so firmly entrenched that it was conventional wisdom amongst our men that they could never be dislodged. It was thought that hundreds of thousands of men on our side, perhaps millions of us, would have to die in the assault against their lines. It rapidly became clear that my escadron was not only going to be part of the first assault, but that after the first attack we would continue to be in the heart of the fray.