|
MENOMADNESS (extract)
 Approaching fifty, May Duggan was taken aback by her vigorous sexual response. At a time of her life when most other women bowed to the inevitability of warm flushes and waning libido, by some strange quirk of nature May seemed to have been given an additional blast of hormones. She became prey to sexual fantasy. It took very little to set her off. A fleeting glimpse of a young cadet’s cheeky little buttocks encased in tight pants was enough to feed her lust for a week, by which time some other eroticism became fuel for her lascivious imagination. She was a woman of Brunhildan proportions – breasts, belly and buttocks formed after the fashion of a more voluptuous age. Her own milky reflection dimly seen in the pocked mirror over the washstand was an add incitement. She began to explore her body in a way previously foreign to her. Sometimes it was the plush feeling of her inner thigh, which mesmerised her. She would stroke her satiny flank, imagining how it would feel to a lover’s hand. With fluctuating hormone levels, her breasts became tender and bursting as overripe mangoes. Palpating her nipples lazily, she would stare down at them, livid and erect, and wish it were anatomically possible for her to taste them as her husband and children had. It was as if a fire had ignited in her bloodstream. She accepted that her metabolism was disturbed. She waited for it to right itself.
She took to wearing lighter garments and impulsively flinging wide the windows. But, as the weeks passed, she became so highly charged that even the rub of cotton against her flesh was a sensuous delight. One particularly humid night in June, while her husband lay, an inert lump, in their featherbed, she restlessly threw back the covers and stole out to the wooded slopes behind their house, avid for the cool currents of air on her bare skin. The thought of discovery heightened her excitement and she quivered expectantly, naked except for a pair of wellington boots. Sounds distorted by the night startled her. A wood pigeon rising with clashing wings form its perch, the jeering call of a nighthawk from the topmost tree. On hearing voices nearby, she stealthily made her way between the boles of trees, always within earshot of her unseen companions. She shadowed them to the outer perimeters of the sylvan mass and crouched, hidden by an overhanging fern, as they passed close by. She felt the ground tremble beneath their tramping feet, heard the staccato snapping of twigs grow faint as they drew further away. Careless of encounter, she openly travelled home by the main track, a pale blob in boots, an ageing wood nymph. She crooned a song. Her hormones were in riot.
THE HOUSE (extract)
‘Only two thousand pounds for a house like that,’ my mother would say, casting a vengeful look at Father lost to the world in a book, ‘But we couldn’t afford it, so your father said. It’s all I’ve ever heard since the day I married him.’
And my father, wincing as the familiar words cut through to his subconscious, would slink lower in his armchair and fix his eyes more determinedly on the printed page. With a sigh, I would take up a book myself in defence although I knew the gesture to be futile. Once mother was in the toils of her house demon it was impossible for anyone to remain uninvolved for long.
Ever since I could remember the house had been a bone of contention between my parents. As a small child, hearing mother’s continual references to this house, it seemed to me it was the house she never had, the house of her dreams, the one that was almost in her grasp and in which we would all be living now ‘if it wasn’t for your father!’
Over the years we became all too familiar with this refrain. Father, she insisted, had held her back just as he had done on so many other occasions in the past when she had tried to make something better of their lives. From her we got the impression that life in those far-off days had been a series of wonderful missed opportunities because of him. ‘He had no vision,’ she told us often, ‘God bless the man, but he could never see beyond the nose on his face.’ She, on the other hand, she claimed, had an innate ability to recognise the vast potential of any given situation and the courage to follow through. The house was a once-in-a-lifetime chance the pair of them had missed.
All of us knew the story by heart.
The house had belonged to an old schoolfriend of mother’s, Nan Morrissey, who finding herself suddenly widowed was forced to sell and offered it out of friendship to mother for a mere two thousand pounds. ‘Only two thousand!’ mother would cry despairingly, and her disappointment, keen as ever after all this time, became ours, for although none of us could have been very old at the time and had no recollection of ever actually being in the house, she painted such a vivid, heart-stirring image of what might have been that we experienced the same sense of loss every time. I have often thought since that no children of our first parents could have felt more cheated on learning about the Garden of Eden than we did in those days on hearing about that house.
Top Girl (extract)
Selena held up her favourite suit against her and wondered if she could possibly wear it one more time. One last time, she corrected herself, before her swelling figure proclaimed to the world her undoubted pregnancy. She was at the stage when she could still fasten her skirts before midday but, by evening, her stomach asserted its right to blossom independently. It had become a game of mix’n match. Extending her skirts with pins and bridging the gap with blouson tops. Fortunately the prevailing fashion was with her. The layered look was in. Even figure-conscious teenagers had adopted it. Yes, she thought, I will wear my favourite suit today, regardless of consequences. All too soon she would be one of that vast, invisible army of pregnant women, dependent on acts of kindness from total strangers, ignored by men and pandered to by husbands. And not only that, the thought continued, one of the vast army of the unemployed.
But even if her condition, when discovered, had not carried with it the threat of dismissal she had no wish to don maternity wear before time. All sail and no ballast, she told herself, like women ten weeks pregnant with barely discernible bumps rushing into sensible shoes and voluminous dresses, near-sightedly trodding ground as though childbirth was imminent. If only, she thought, someone would design intelligent outfits for mothers-to-be rather than winsome smocked garments more suited to corpulent infants. Surely pregnancy did not have to signify an end to good taste. She sighed at the thought of being condemned for the next five months to a wardrobe of floppy bows and page-boy collars. Her figure was gone, she thought, not her mind.
In Nerja (extract)
Three girls away on holiday together worked out better than two, especially when one was disappearing off all the time as Millie was. Once or twice she had stayed away from the apartment all night, not returning until the sun was high in the sky and the lizards running over the terra-cotta tiles. She had not been apologetic either, only rather secretive and withdrawn.
Since the evening she and her friends had wandered into his disco in the arcade, Jose Luis had been giving Millie a big rush. Earlier in the holiday she had fallen hard for Pierre, a muscular life-guard she had met on the Burriana Beach, but the nightclub owner had quickly replaced him in her affections and now Spain was clearly winning hands down over France.
The Spaniard was the perfect foil for Millie’s fair prettiness, a robust young man with fine dark eyes, a mop of lustrous black curls and a permanent five o’clock shadow on his thrusting chin. A truly masculine hirsute man, Millie’s friends, Treasa and Carol, agreed, admiring and envious by turn.
It was the girls first time to Spain, indeed their first time abroad. All three were art students and eager to fraternise with the olive-skinned youths they encountered in the discos, or lounging about the cafes in the town square; Millie, perhaps the most eager of all. She made no secret of the fact that she was susceptible to the Mediterranean male and might even marry one some day; if she met the right one, she airily stipulated, though not intending to give up her freedom, not for a very long time yet.
The others were familiar with Millie’s often expressed pre-nuptial ambitions which ranged from climbing the Pyrenees and painting them at first light, to learning Japanese calligraphy, and perhaps the most challenging of all (and which they were most in sympathy), of seeing her paintings hanging in the Royal Hibernian Academy.
The trio were sojourning for the month of August in the Costa del Sol by courtesy of indulgent parents. They had chosen Nerja, or to be precise Millie had, her fancy captured by all that she had ever read about El Balcon de Europa. So called, because of its sweeping coastline and panoramic views. It sounded ideal, they agreed. And so it had turned out to be.
From the first moment of setting foot on Iberian soil Millie had been their natural spokeswoman, confidently bargaining (in atrocious Spanish) with the conserja of Los Patios Apartamentos for a better rate, exerting her charm (which was considerable) on the woman’s husband and sons to help carry their portfolios and other paraphernalia, up the narrow stone stairs to their apartment. On settling in and getting to know their immediate neighbours, a Chinese businessman who kept everyone awake into the small hours playing honky-tonk music and two serious-looking Spanish youths who worked in a local Cambio, Millie led the girls confidently through the town in search of amusement, much as she had done during their first months at the art college when she had rapidly become the leading light of all the student parties and rags.
That first week they had roamed the town, absorbing the foreign scents and sounds, and pausing often in the open-air cafes over coffees and sketch-pads to capture the pulsing life about them. Millie’s talent lay in portraiture and she made dramatic use of charcoal and pastels, inspiring one proud senora to offer payment for an enchanting sketch of her little daughter.
When, after a few days, the girls changed location to the Burriana Beach, Millie’s brief romance with Pierre blossomed and died, Treasa enjoyed a fling with an American engineering student travelling through Nerja on a college grant, and Carol survived a traumatic two-day relationship with a Swedish poet who, at the end of it, took her gold watch along with her virginity.
|
