An Uncertain Grace Read online

  ‘Well, she owes a lot to Yuknavitch. Writing the Silence is like a little cousin to that book.’

  I am putting the book back on the pile when a hand reaches out to still mine. Fingers touch, interlink. The book becomes an excuse for hand-holding, a finger gently stroking mine, and I am suddenly aroused. I turn my head and there is a tall man behind me. Just like with my bedroom, he is familiar, someone I have known. He reminds me of my father, same barrel chest, same grey and thinning hair. He leans closer. A twitch deep inside me like the slow rise of a penis, only one that is buried in the pit of my belly. The penis thickens and throbs as the man leans close and presses his mouth against mine and forces my lips rudely open with his tongue and stabs at my upper palate, snailing over the back of my teeth. The pulse in my belly might be lust or fear and it is too big, it is tearing a hole inside me. I am paused at the beginning of a sprint; my heart is too fast. I can’t breathe.

  When the man pulls away there is blood on his lip, and I realise that it must be my blood, my lip split in the violence of that kiss.

  But no. Not blood. Lipstick. It is my lipstick smeared onto his mouth. I can see a pulse beating at the base of his neck. I can see his trousers pulling tight at his crotch. I press the Yuknavitch to my chest. My chest. The breasts soft and warm under my fingers. A confusion of desire. I try to cup them, my breasts, but my hands will not let go of the cool chaste cover of the book.

  He cups them for me. He reaches out and shapes his hands around my breasts and pushes the hard lump in his crotch against me and tilts his head down, smiling. And I know him. I recognise him from the other world, the real world. It is me of course, this man. In the other world I see him smiling at me in the mirror, catch glimpses of him as I walk past shop windows, see him in photographs.

  Me. Of course it is me.

  And I am her. I am Liv. And this is my room and it is his room and he, I, put my hand up her, my, skirt. I push the cotton aside with his finger and it catches on the pubic hair, which stings sharply and his finger wriggling inside me is like sandpaper and I am trying not to wince as he finally gets the finger—sharp ragged nail—into the complication of folds and touches the very edge of her void. The horror and the beauty of it. The feeling of a slick damp finger, less pain, more pleasure in it now as he fingers me. I finger her. I remember fingering her that first time, standing in my bedroom, I am the subject of this probing, not quite enjoying it, not really sure if I should push his hand away.

  I push his hand away and my lips are slick with my anxious desire and I smell him, musky, strong, predatory, and he raises his finger to his face and sniffs it, touches it to his lips, wetting them, and there is a rush of saliva—not saliva, not come, but a wet warm spurt nonetheless and it dampens my underwear.

  I did that. I am doing it. It is me. I slip my finger into my mouth and I hold her hips, not her, my hips with the sharp, bruising fingers of his other hand. He holds me so hard that any pleasure dissipates as he pushes that spit-wet finger inside me and rams it all the way up. One, two, three times in quick succession. And it hurts. This little pistoning finger that I know to be the Auslan gesture for fucking. A furious triple fuck you.

  And I remember what is to come and I am struggling to forget just as I am struggling against his rough clamp of a fist. And I hear her in memory, an echo, as I say, ‘No.’

  And I say, ‘Stop,’ or is it my memory of her?

  No. And Stop.

  And it stops.

  I am sitting on a chair in my kitchen and I am breathing hard in the suffocation of the mask. The parallel pause lines glow in the middle distance. The story has stopped. I must have spoken aloud. The narrative responded to my words.

  I snap the headpiece off and the world comes back to me. My thick thighs, my masculine waist, my cock standing hard, stiff against the fabric. I unzip the suit and peel it off. The rancid smell of anxious sweat wafts from my sticky skin. I make my way to the bedroom. My bedroom. Here. In my house. My piles of books. The Yuknavitch there where it has always been in a pile of memoirs and biography.

  I touch the wall. My fingers stroke the flock wallpaper. I have never really thought about the wallpaper before. I press the palm of my hand onto it and feel a finger sandpapering its way inside me. The smell of my sweat, her cunt. The taste of her, first taste that time right here where I am standing. I take hold of my cock, slipping my fist down over it. Sandpaper-dry fist. But I pump it anyway, remembering the day as it happened. Remembering the next thing. The sharp surprise of her hymen. How excited I was by the discovery of her virginity.

  I spit on my hand and take my cock again, remembering. Not quite remembering. All I can grab hold of is the memory of pushing, hard, trying to break it. Knowing I was the first and swelling up with that knowledge. A conquistador, an astronaut planting his flag. Splitting the cunt of her wide open and seeding her virgin field. All the old clichés.

  I rub myself hard. I am older now. I was so hard pushing myself against her. She was collecting it all. I’m not sure how, was there some device, some secret camera? How do the kids do that stuff anyway? First-person video games or whatever they call it now.

  But this isn’t a game, this is something else. Not a camera. She was naked. I remember or almost remember that first time with her. Was she naked? Did I let her leave some part of her clothing on? I rub, but my cock is deflating. I am squeezing the air out of that particular balloon. Did I let her keep her clothes on?

  It is the doubt that bothers me. The gaps in memory. And now with the limp curl of my penis soft against the palm of my hand I feel my anger flushing my skin.

  She recorded me without permission. I will sue her. This is my reputation here. If this thing got out, this file, this game, the first-person shooter or whatever high-tech thing. This skewed version of things. If this got out? If my students saw this…

  My cock leaps at the injustice of it. A little angry stab and I squeeze it again, once, twice, three times, remembering that first finger-fuck. That sweet fresh sap filling my nose. That tight first-fingered cunt hole. I remember she was a virgin, but I didn’t know that then. Popping the cherry they call it, because of the blood. No blood marring the first taste of her.

  My mouth waters, my cock swells anew but I rub without coming. Rubbing and rubbing, my cheek pressed against the flock wallpaper, my cock aimed towards Lidia Yuknavitch. Liv is a bitch, a bitch with a camera hidden somewhere.

  Bitch. Rub. Bitch. Rub.

  I let go of my penis, panting, sweating. I stomp back towards the kitchen. The suit is difficult to drag on. My hair catches; pulls. I remember the tug of my pubic hair, his (my) finger in my pants. I grunt into the suit and zip it up, gentling the fabric up to cover my penis, now fully erect.

  There is that momentary dislocation as I put the mask on. A moment of suffocation. The beat of her heart is faster than mine. I can feel the disconnect, a syncopation, that rise of the ocean and the sudden plummet but then my heart makes pace with hers and we are one. I am up against the flock wallpaper. I can feel it softly scratching against the cheeks of my arse.

  He is too heavy against my chest. The thud of his belt on my pubis is sharp and unpleasant. I struggle away but it is persistent like a dentist’s drill. This dull metal tapping against bone. His hands grab at my arse, push up, settle me onto his body. My knees spread wide, the lips of my vulva swollen and sensitive. I can feel them chafing. This is what it feels like? I shake my head, but of course I am not shaking my head in this moment within moments. I feel fear. Is it my fear? My real and present fear? Or is it her fear, has this program somehow plugged me into a recorded memory of fear? How do you do that, I wonder as he lurches across to the unmade bed with me, held too high and clutched too tight. How do you record a sensation of fear? Is it the heart rate communicated through the tiny receptors in the rubber? Is it a change of temperature, a tightening of the second skin?

  How is this story ‘written’? And what part of it is authored? What percentage comes from the rea
der? Am I afraid now because I have never experienced ‘the lips of my vulva’ before? Am I scared of the possibility of a vagina, of my body embracing this magician’s trick without missing a single beat? Or was she, Liv, frightened six years ago when I picked her up and threw her down onto the plump of my bed?

  I am shaking my head now, or she is, as he climbs between my spread knees and pins me with his sheer bulk. And I am shivering a little, clamping all those unfamiliar girl parts shut.

  This must be my fear, my masculine self responding to the idea of penetration. I struggle for distance from the feel of his hands on my knickers as he struggles them down. Part of me remembers how it really was. She was warm and welcoming beneath me. She was wet and ready for me, urging me on. Wasn’t she?

  I shake my head but I remain silent as he wrenches the tangle of underwear off one of my trembling feet. He lifts his hips off me for a moment and I hear the sound of a zipper. His face is on my face, his closed eyes, the wrinkles beside his nose, a close-up of open pores. His tongue missing my mouth entirely, a wet line across my cheek until he finds his target and the tongue darts hard between my lips.

  Hard between my lips.

  Is this how it feels, the slip of cock missing its mark? He shifts and my knee is pushed wider from the weight of him and the buckle of his belt cuts at the flesh of my thigh. He thrusts again and there is no way that thing is going in me. It couldn’t. I try to wriggle my hips away, I twist but his hand is down there, I can feel his fingers hooking into the meat of me. Yes. I am wet. He slips on juices and fumbles. Can a woman be wet when she is afraid? I would never have expected this physical contradiction. There is lubrication all around the area and it is only this that allows his finger to slip past my tight clenched lips. He pauses. I wriggle, but he presses down to hold me still. His finger pokes away down there. He is feeling the surface of my hymen, exploring it, plucking it like a string on a guitar, playing a hiss of air out of me, a grunt escaping around the slug tongue.

  His fingers retreat and he is breathing heavily onto my cheek, into my hair. I have excited him, or the barriers of my body have. My mouth is free and I speak for the first time since hitting the bed.

  ‘I…I’m not sure…’

  But the words are interrupted by a punch. It feels like a punch although I’m not sure if you can call a cock barrelling towards a cunt a punch exactly. A pounding is the right expression as the thwack of it speeds up, bruising the sticky lips, numbing them with thump after thump and then a sharp pain, a cutting, and I cry out. And he stops. He is lodged a little in me. Part of him finally settled inside my flesh.

  He pauses. We pant. The pain is less sharp. I can bear it. I suppose I am losing, have lost my virginity. I wasn’t ready, but it is done.

  Hang on, are these my thoughts? Her thoughts? I try to surface, slide back down to the place where I am shaking but I let relief flood through me because it is over and I have survived.

  Then he lifts his hips and I feel the cock sliding out of me and just before it loses contact with the sting of my flesh it slams down once more and I have never felt pain like this. I whimper uncontrollably and maybe the sob of pain is like a sob of pleasure because he is encouraged by it. He lifts and drops and there is more of it inside me. A big fist of gristle lodged in my skin. Lift and drop, lift and drop further. I grit my teeth at each new humiliation. Then he picks his weight off my chest and props himself up and looks down at what must be the bloodied pulp of my sex and he puts his hand down there. I can feel him measuring his own girth.

  Then the fucking starts, fast pumping thrusts as I lie spread and bleeding and growing mercifully numb beneath him. He fucks and there are words on his lips and some of them slip out in counterpoint to his pumping.

  ‘…right…up…up…fu…tight…first fuck…first…’

  And then his eyes become wide and white, the irises disappear completely and he stretches his lips into a grin before grunting the words ‘There you go’, and rocking, jerking, stopping, jerking and falling with a grunt onto my face, chest hair in my mouth. Another sharp twitch into me and a stinging like alcohol poured on an open wound.

  The only sound from me is a sharp, pained hiss.

  ‘That was fucking wonderful,’ he says, slipping his hand down again and checking that he is still lodged there. He bounces his soft cock in and out a few times, paddling in the shallows. Then he pushes a kiss into my cheek and looks down at my pale face and says it:

  ‘You’re a woman now.’ He really does. Another pressing of the lips. ‘Did you come?’

  I close my eyes and in the darkness words, my voice, her voice in my head. They are clear and certain. This is what you would call a voiceover. My voiceover. But no. I shake her off with difficulty. I struggle to remember myself within her. The voice says: And in this way it begins.

  There is come in the suit. I don’t know how it happened, even now, thinking back on the scene I am becoming aroused again. It is horrifying. How could so much pain and fear make me come? Make the sticky relief of my penis start to get hard again?

  The scene lacked all the things I usually need to push me to orgasm. The sight of a girl, particularly the tits. Where were her tits in all of this? He, I, didn’t suck one tit into my mouth in the whole experience. That can’t be possible. I don’t remember it like that at all, but to be honest I don’t remember much about it except that first realisation that she was a virgin and how my knees trembled when I knew I was about to help her be rid of that childlike state. I do remember needing to wash the sheets twice, soaking them in a bucket of bleach between washes. I almost remember it as a sweet, tender moment between us. I almost remember it.

  I lie now, naked on the bed and my cock standing and I lather it with lube from the bedside table and although it is hard I can barely feel it in my fist. Instead I feel the push of a cock. I feel cunt. I feel sharp pain. I feel ill. Bile rising from my gut. Come rising from my balls. I spasm, shooting a second time. I turn my head and vomit. It sprays, yellow as jaundice across the sheets. I roll onto my knees and my body is racked with the purging spasms as my cock still pumps the last of its bitter seed onto the sheets.

  I stand up, dizzy. Seasick. She has poisoned me. Bitch, I think, but without heat. If that was really how it was, that first time with Liv…

  I rip the sheets from the bed and throw them in the bathtub. I turn the shower on above them and fall back to sit on the toilet.

  If that was real, then I am implicated in it.

  It felt real. I felt what Liv might have felt. Or was it some trick? Surely what I have just experienced was like falling into someone’s unreliable memoir. A lie. A very cleverly drawn one, but a lie nonetheless.

  I wash the come out of the suit. There is a special protective coating on the inside, thicker around the crotch area. Pornography drives innovation. I suppose it must be so.

  I fall pale and shaking onto the fresh sheets. I will have to rewrite the dossier. This more than anything bothers me. The fact that my course outline for Memoir 104 will have to be updated. Not now, but sometime soon. If this is a future for narrative, I will have to be at the forefront of teaching it. I cross my arms over my breasts, only I have no breasts. I try to remember the skin that I am in. I have ‘read’ three chapters. If it wasn’t for the 8 a.m. lecture I would have finished the whole thing, staying up to experience my own life retold to me, by her but in my skin—or no, in her skin. I have never felt so unsettled. Tomorrow’s lecture will cover the rise of the sexual memoir, from the pseudonymous memoirs of female prostitutes (written by men) to modern accounts of web affairs, second-life sex, and last year’s bestseller, Recollections of a Proxy Sexxer. All of it superseded now. Soon the page will not be the place for it. I will have to look more closely at the lecture on ethics in light of this new thing, this unrecognisable version of myself.

  I close my eyes and roll over onto the fat of the pillow and remember the softness of the skin I have been inhabiting. I could sue. Surely defamation laws cov
er this. I wonder if she could mask my identity somehow, some CGI technique, another body over my skin. Even then I would not be protected. Some people knew about us, our affair. Sometimes she would step out of my car wearing one of my shirts, her own shirt lying in my washing basket stained by my jism. Sometimes she sat in my class, her eyes averted but with all eyes on her. They knew. They would know. I could sue. But then I would have to admit it was me who held her down and forced myself upon her, who humiliated her.

  I have lived through a chapter where I critique her essay in front of the class, sneering at the lack of analysis, at the gush of subjectivity. Then at home, making up for it with sex that I assumed was mutually pleasurable. I have struggled to contain my tears while lying powerless beneath the bulk of my own body, faking an orgasm just to get my weight off my own chest. How could I stand up in court and say, Yes, that was me. That was all me, but despite what you have seen, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it wasn’t like that at all. Not at all. Honestly. If you could see inside my head you would have a different story. As the officers of the court approach: No. Please. I am innocent. And they take me by the arm, one on each side. No honestly, it isn’t like that. She has remembered it all wrong. And they half-drag, half-carry me down the aisle and I catch my shin on a pew and I wake up.

  I have slept. I groan and ease my legs out of bed, dropping them over and onto the floor. My head throbs. I stumble into the bathroom. The dirty sheets are still bundled in the bottom of the bath. I let the cold water run through them, rinsing away the smell of vomit and the memory of a bad night. When they are clean enough I bundle them into the washing machine and watch the slow sudsy spin begin. I step under the shower. I will be similarly cleansed. I can feel the water outlining my body for me. I am me. I am in this body. I am surrounded by water. I am the person I always thought I was, not her vision of me.