Forty-Seventeen Read Online Free Page B

eye contact with her or the three of us will end up rutting right here and now in the gutter.’
    They kept their eyes averted and passed by.
    When they were clear, Belle said, ‘It would have happened in a flash if our eyes had met, we would not have known how it happened, it would have been a conflagration of souls. But I’m not up to conflagration of souls today.’
    â€˜I believe you,’ he said, feeling that he had passed by an invitation of unspeakable consequence.
    â€˜You’d better believe me,’ Belle said.
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    Belle and he stopped and peered into the run-down, vandalised lobby of a former guest house of the twenties.
    Flaps hung off the mail boxes, human turds littered the floor, and the place had the odour of human urine.
    A disused office with a frosted glass door with the word ‘concierge’ and wall lights behind picket panels of pink and green pastel glass – mostly missing – were reminders of the guest house’s time of grandeur.Declined grandeur in old buildings gave him a delightful apprehension. ‘It’s a door to the past which I feel I can almost squeeze through. Certain buildings and their contents should be designated to be left as they were, completely untouched.’
    â€˜These old “guest houses” are of course a metaphor for this great-grandmother who has so bewitched you,’ Belle said.
    She looked at him then, seductively, there in the lobby of the vandalised guest house amid the urine and excreta smells.
    â€˜Let me embody that metaphor.’ She raised her skirt.
    Leaning against the door they had sex, and after she wiped herself with a tissue and threw it into the lobby.
    â€˜In Egypt,’ he said, as they walked back out into the street of depressed curio shops and closed-up spas, clattering with his great-grandmother’s carriage and the last days of laughing tour parties, ‘I was carefully keeping my rubbish inside the car – in those Hertz rubbish bags – and I kept all my empty beer bottles and Evian water bottles inside the car. One day I stopped at what appeared to be a splendid Mediterranean beach but when I went onto the beach I found it totally littered. I looked around the countryside for the first time and realised that the whole of Egypt was a rubbish tip many thousands of years old. It is a completely littered country. I then took the rubbish from my Hertz bags and my empty bottles and dumped them out in the desert with allthe other rubbish. It gave me a liberating pleasure to be untidy.’
    â€˜I taught you the joy of throwing beer cans from car windows,’ Belle said, ‘I taught you that it was not only rule-breaking but also a simple expressive physical act of exuberant disorder. It’s physical haiku which says “we pass this way but once and to hell with it”.’
    â€˜But we do pass that way again, usually,’ he said.
    â€˜Oh don’t be wet,’ Belle said. But a little later added, ‘It must be done with a feeling of exuberance. Not habitually. If you feel no exuberance, don’t do it.’
    Belle told him that she had known he was a slut from the moment she had looked into his face.
    â€˜I knew you were too,’ he said.
    â€˜That did not require masterly powers of observation,’ she said, ‘women sluts have many more ways of displaying it. You have to be a master-slut to pick men sluts. Since puberty – before puberty! – men have been able to look at me and tell – and I knew myself from an early age. Always look for a puffy, bruised look around the eyes or lips – it’s a sort of tumescence – embouchement – an almost permanent tumescence of the labia which transfers itself to around the eyes and mouth. The pout. Do you know what the pout is? The pout is the face’s way of mimicking the tumescent vagina. Deportment. See how I sit? That’s the way a slut sits.’
    â€˜And choice