Forty-Seventeen Read Online Free Page A

pet, when you are sluttishly there you know you are there.’
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    Once after sex Belle began to cry and he was surprised.
    â€˜Hey! I thought expeditioners didn’t cry.’
    â€˜Even sluts get the blues,’ she said.
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    Belle laughed and said, ‘Good one!’ when in the film Outrageous a white drag queen who picks up a black man in a bar says to the man, ‘I’m an equal opportunity slut.’ Belle commented that sluts were into equal opportunity before any of the political people. You could say that a gutter slut was into affirmative action.
    The drag queen in the film befriends a schizophrenic girl who wants to have a child by a Yellow Cab driver – any Yellow Cab driver.
    â€˜For whatever reason,’ Belle said, after the film, ‘schizoids make good sluts – and I said schizoids not schizophrenics. And I’m not romanticising mental illness either. It’s a fact from my experience.’
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    Once in bed they were playing with a Luger pistol (Navy, Second World War). Belle liked the feel of the cold metal on her flesh, the gun-oil smell, the lethality, the sinister aura of German pistols. It had belonged to Belle’s German father and she had given it to him. He asked about the Nazis and what she felt when she and he played Nazi games.
    â€˜Oh,’ she said, choosing her words carefully, acknowledging the sensitivity of it, while, he thought, not wanting to leach away any of the game’s spirit, ‘oh Nazis are useful. They gave us a lot of good sadomasochistic imagery – they were good with costume, very good, they understood leather – but they didn’t invent the gothic. And they were into the barbaric – not the sensual – and therefore got it all very wrong.’
    â€˜How does it fit with sluttishness?’
    â€˜It fits with sluttishness because sluttishness steals from the Nazis. Sluttishness steals fantasies and paraphernalia from anywhere. It can take items of evil and make them accessories of sensuality, turn them to things of play.’

    â€˜I am not a tart,’ Belle said, playfully, when he asked her about the difference between a tart and a slut, ‘I’m a flan.’ And added, ‘I also possess flâneur .’
    She did not bother with the question.
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    â€˜A slut can never betray another slut,’ Belle announced over dinner at the Hydro Majestic Hotel.
    They were searching for psychic traces of his great-grandmother in the depressed, run-down, turn-of-the-century health resort district around Katoomba, ‘because between two sluts all things are permitted. To revel in the recounting of one’s deeds is an act of sluttishness itself. In a close relationship between two sluts it must be expected that each will want to now and then go off on an adventure. But the adventure must be brought back into the lore of the relationship.’
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    They were walking back along a Katoomba street past the once fashionable guest houses where his great-grandmother had operated. They saw a blonde woman checking her mail box.
    â€˜She’s a slut,’ Belle said, cautioning.
    The woman’s face was hardened by the Australian sun. Her long blonde hair was trained around her face to reduce the visible skin, to conceal the sun-damaged skin. But she used her hair tantalisingly like a veil so that it became an invitation to her suggested charms. The woman’s eyes slyly roved them, almost molesting them, as they approached. He saw immediately what Belle meant.
    â€˜She’s a beach slut,’ Belle said, sotto voce , ‘it’s not only the way she uses her hair but sunbathing makes people very aware of their skin. Beach sluts move differently inside their skin. And she’s aware of us – two other sluts. Like a dog she doesn’t have to look closely, she senses us.’
    Belle’s voice had dropped to a hush and she touched his arm in warning. ‘Avoid making