Rachel King
Excepts from the novel, Alba
Originally published in The Evergreen Review Issue 101 in 1998.
From Chapter 13 of Alba
Keith encircles her tightly with his arms, the length of his body pressed against her. But it doesn't stop what happens next.
There is Alba, her breath all gone, not on the earth at all, not feet on the stone cold floor, not numb toes in the pinching high heels, but there! above herself, looking down on them both, swimming in the giant air of the cathedral, with no boundaries at all. Now she feels herself laugh, touch fingers she does not know. It is the flying we have in dreams. She takes a breath, she's not afraid. She can come back in like pulling herself in on a line. And it's all because Kirkwood is holding on to her. He will not let her go. He knows more than he reveals. He has control over these things.
Keith ... his grip is the very devil, the brown-eyed devil, the one who keeps us here. She takes a small jittered breath and leans into his warmth, feels their individual heats mate. Without him she would have been so afraid. Without him, she would have been lost. She hears his breathing fast and shallow in her ear. So he has been there before, he has seen this - she knows it - and that is the reason he clasped her so tight, to let her be blown through.
Sex ... with Keith, oh yes! When that comes, it will be the ultimate. Break the taboo. Yes. Yes. Break the taboo and screw the married headmaster. Laugh at Helen's secret. Laugh at her memory.
She'll have the man she deserves, even if she has to borrow him from his wife. She'll do it before any more empty years pass by. And she'll rub out both conscience and consequences. Oh, yes, this drug, sex, better found now than never ... She'd stay firmly on the ground with Keith and she'd be able to let go, too ... because he would have her thread wrapped firmly around his little finger.
When you experience the significance of something for the first time, its like you're re-born. Consciousness suddenly comes into the humdrum, the taken-for-granted, the asleep. At these times, when the lid's blown off your skull, the person you're with becomes the holder of the magic key. We don't like to go back again on our own ... if we do we'll see merely the monochrome, and leave disappointed, lifeless, full of dismay.
Keith moves round to face her, his eyes like coals, a look of triumph on his face. Here it is - the real unzipper. Even the most unmoved stolid unfeeling individual would catch their breath. He does not know what she has seen. He does not care. All he knows is she was taken over by something immensely powerful ... and that she will attribute the key to it to him.
'You knew that would happen. You've had the same experience yourself, haven't you?' Alba turns to him with wide, glassy eyes. He smiles, looks down at her.
'Why do you think I brought you here, hmm?'
'What is it? What am I seeing?'
He shrugs. 'It is not for me to say.' A memory shoots in. He bites his words. He has seen that look on her face before: pain, transparency, ecstasy. In the Quiet Room after Dutch had ... After Dutch had fucked her.
She walks slowly through the arch. 'I've felt something like this before,' she says quietly, more to herself than to him. 'When Dutch caught the hawk.'
And ... in the Quiet Room...? So that was what was going on. She looks up at Keith, thinking he hasn't heard her. But he has. A cold, dismissive stare spears shards into her new openness. She hugs her elbows, draws her arms into her chest, walks nicely on her heels again, follows him blind.
Keith walks away, mute from now on, with a cruel barely-a-pleasure feeling present. He's jerking an unseen lead, feeling her caught, running after him eager-eyed, wanting to please.
• • •
On the journey back, the same stop, the same woods, but the cavern sides sheer now, the falling faster ... Keith, silent, tense, his dark features pinched, gets out of the car. He lights a cheroot and walks out into the beech trees, looking into the canopy, seeing nothing. He'd had a girl up against one of these trees once, a long time ago. Which tree? Twisting on his heels he looks about, tries to translate the stuff of memory into the perspectives and distance that have changed with time, and now confound him. But he can remember the feeling of her soft body as he pushed her hard against the trunk.
Now these same trees mock him. They've grown so much in the thirty-odd years since that day. He knows the heartwood in the middle of the trunk will be of substantial girth now. It's one of nature's miracles. As tough and unmoving as a concrete core, it can nevertheless sway in a gale with wondrous uncanny flexibility. The heartwood can forget its rigidity, it can bend, stretch, give, survive. All these things it can do. He, Kirkwood, cannot. He cannot even forget the man he sacked. He cannot forget Dutch.
Alba watches him but does not get out of the car. She winds down the window and lets the cool early evening air blow in, faint with the sweet toasted smell of the changing season. Why has Keith been so tardy to take what she offers? Doesn't he want her? She's lost. She cannot begin to understand.
As he disappears into the beeches Alba gets out of the car. She's half-way to the edge of the wood when he suddenly reappears. He walks fast with intent towards her, dashing the cheroot end to earth behind him. She's seen him like this in school on rare occasions, when he's angry, when he's on his way to intimidate a group of troublemakers in the playground. Hell put his head down, bring his shoulders up, grow, fill out the suit, set his brow to charge.
'Give me some breathing space,' he shouts, blood pumping dark in his face. 'Don't chase after me all the time. I can't have you do that - d'you understand?' Get thee hence, crucifying anima...
'I'm sorry- I wasn't-'
'You damn well are.' Her apparent innocence maddens him. He seizes her, pinching her skin, pulling her against his body.
The iron bars of his cage bow under the strain but they do not give. It is as if only his arms can reach through the bars, with hands that futilely grasp the air for sustenance - as prisoners do. It is as if his face is smashed against the small barred jail window, trying to steal the outside world into his humiliating cell life - but he cannot. All that remains is incredible frustration. Intense desire bound back, locked up, rattling the bars of the cage.
And she doesn't move. Here she is, unconditionally open, absorbing all of him at that moment, compelling him by her stillness, by her white body, by the eyes that thirty years ago he would gladly have risked all for, jumped into, and drowned. Loss and shame spin around the tortured axis of himself, crabbing back into his lived life gone, showing him the wrong paths taken, the price of academe, the future that in reality he has absolutely no control over, the future that's already been all wrapped up by his own treacherous hands.
He shakes Alba now, throws her away, pulls her back, squeezes her arms, forces her up till her feet skim the ground. He is the black python wound around her, she the fragile white meat. His mouth hits hers, he tries to draw her in, squeeze-suck through his lips all of her ... her red mouth, her damn white skin, her form, her essence. His teeth pierce her bottom lip and meet. He tastes her blood, swallows the salt-purifying soul of her.
But she's still there, outside him still. Nothing she can do will ever let him move through her skin and take up residence inside her. He can't have the white heart. He knows it.
Still gripping her with one hand, he rips the belt from his trousers, doubles it, twists her round, and brings the leather down with force on her skirted buttocks. Her body twists, arches in surprise under his restraining arm. He hears the mewing sound stuck in her throat, but it's not enough. He wants something to show for . . . all . . . this. The woman wears a black skirt: to belt her over that would be like kicking a black cat in the night - you wouldn't see the damage. He wants to see his vengeance wrought clear on her white skin. He wants to sully, he wants to mark her white skin, to laugh at it, to throw purple and red onto its mocking purity.
He shakes Alba now, throws her away, pulls her back, squeezes her arms, forces her up till her feet skim the ground. He is the black python wound around her, she the fragile white meat. His mouth hits hers, he tries to draw her in, squeeze-suck through his lips all of her ... her red mouth, her damn white skin, her form, her essence. His teeth pierce her bottom lip and meet. He tastes her blood, swallows the salt-purifying soul of her.
But she's still there, outside him still. Nothing she can do will ever let him move through her skin and take up residence inside her. He can't have the white heart. He knows it.
Still gripping her with one hand, he rips the belt from his trousers, doubles it, twists her round, and brings the leather down with force on her skirted buttocks. Her body twists, arches in surprise under his restraining arm. He hears the mewing sound stuck in her throat, but it's not enough. He wants something to show for . . . all . . . this. The woman wears a black skirt: to belt her over that would be like kicking a black cat in the night - you wouldn't see the damage. He wants to see his vengeance wrought clear on her white skin. He wants to sully, he wants to mark her white skin, to laugh at it, to throw purple and red onto its mocking purity.
A few seconds of accelerated frenzy and he has taken hold of her skirt by the hem, and in three powerful jerks ripped it up to the waist. He flicks it aside. Underneath ... her stockings, the oh-so-milk-white above them, and the underwear, the loose-legged lace . . . With one violent tug he pulls them off, catches her as she loses balance, drags her back.
The belt cuts into her delicate skin, the strokes flay her and ... melt her. She has a mind that's become the empty sky, full of brightness, of tremor, where thought has ceased. All she knows is when he penetrates her, as he surely must this time, she will be an open kid-soft glove.
And what does Alba feel...? The part of her present does feel, very much. While the other part floats on, looks down with judgement suspended.
She squirms, writhes her hips, tossed by pain. (The floating Alba tut-tuts.) One second: nothing, the huge waiting silent moment. The next: the vast, shrunk, narrowed screaming towards a measured mark that sends accelerated leaps of current jumping from nerve axon to axon. She can swallow up the gaps between blows. Caverns, cathedrals - nothing in them. Empty. Space. Nothingness. A twisted smile floats there. A voice thinly howls - it's wrong this way, it's wrong. But Alba is not her own any more.
Kirkwood lays stripes and bands, belt-wide, across her buttocks. He cares not for the noise, the frap! frap! in the silent woodland. He cares not for the possibility of being seen. He can't stop. There's a whip-handed demon in his fire that has to obliterate the white skin completely, to lay on this bruised red-purple instead, and deny the existence of white in the world.
He looks at the brown belt, the dark olive hands that wield it, and the feminine frailty he assaults, and he could leap in the air and whoop Whoah! I am! I am! All the frustration, the twisting angst, all the sense of his thirty-year long self-betrayal, and the reined-in lust comes out now with explosive force. It crackles through the air as his arm descends and rises, over and over.
And then suddenly it catches him. He's taken. Consumed. Split. Torn open, as a convulsion shoots out from his groin and shudders through his body. Gasping now, he doubles up, half falls on her, drops the belt, wrestles with air, grapples with tears.
With a sigh that plummets through him and howls in the empty wood, he turns away, butts his forehead against the cold trunk of the ancient beech, and steadies himself with arms outstretched, fingers mutely gripping the bark. It is finished ...
Alba © Rachel King
