In my mad mind, I became a kind of performer. Many of my friends have been actors, singers or dancers, men and women who used their bodies in the service of art, or as art itself; people who were looked at for a living. Those of us who cannot perform, who imagine from the audience only an examination of our faults, can have little idea of the relationship between player and voyeur, of how the audience, like a sea of feeling, might hold you up, if you can use it. What do you see and hear out there in all that blackness? What are the watchers doing to you? What was the stripper or any celebrity doing but increasing and controlling envy and desire? This was a splendidly erotic activity, it seemed to me.
It had been years since I had danced, and now, since I didn’t need much sleep, I danced every night in one or other of the town’s discos, with women from the Centre. Most of them were older than forty, some were over fifty. They knew the chances of their being loved, caressed, wanted, were diminishing, even as their passion increased, in the sun. I danced with them, but I didn’t touch them. If I’d been a ‘real’ kid, I probably would have gone to bed, or to the beach, with several of them. I was their pornography, a cunt teaser. But at least everyone knew where they stood with me.
Usually, while I danced, Alicia watched me, or sat on a chair drinking and smoking. She never danced herself, but took a lot of pleasure in others’ enjoyment. Oddly enough, the music most people preferred originated in my day: 1950s rock ’n’ roll, and 1960s soul. I knew every note. It sounded fresher and more lasting than the laboured literary work of me and my contemporaries.
In one of the town’s discos, while dancing with my ‘coven’, as I called them, several of the local men started to taunt me. They didn’t like this spoiled kid dancing with and hugging these happy women night after night, as well as looking after their bags, fetching them drinks and making sure they all got safely back to the Centre. One night, they gathered around me at the bar and said they wanted to see what sort of man I was. They could find this out only on the beach, where we would be able to have ‘a good talk’. Alicia and the other women had to escort me out of there in a group. Looking back, I could see the men standing at the door, smoking and sneering.
Why did this happen? How did they see me? I enquired of Alicia. As someone who had everything, and a future, too. There was nothing I couldn’t do or be, she seemed to think. They hated it and wanted it. They could have killed and eaten me.
There were other fantasies about me. A woman in her fifties had told Alicia that I made the women feel inadequate. I was a problem-free rich kid bumming around the world before going to work for a bank. ‘We’re trying to restart our troubled lives here. He’s just passing through,’ she said.
‘Maybe that is what you are,’ Alicia continued, after she’d told me, throwing down her roll-up and rubbing out the stub with her sandal. ‘You have the confidence, poise and sense of entitlement of a rich kid. Isn’t that right?’
I didn’t answer; I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t anticipated this much envy. I had, though, known actors who’d become movie stars and been made paranoid and withdrawn as much because of the pressure of imagined spite as that of fame.
I laboured over Patricia’s crumpled and folded flesh, humming and thinking. I was good at this; at least I’d learned to love giving comfort and pleasure.
I said, ‘How can I deal with this? I am beginning to feel like an object. It is not pleasant, it’s persecution.’
‘You are supremely enviable,’ she said, her voice muffled by the towel. ‘You’re like the woman everyone wants but no one understands. What you require is support and protection.’
‘Who from?’
‘That is up to you. But you must ask for it.’ She went on, ‘It doesn’t sound as if you’ve done the wrong thing, Oddjob. You’ve made her and some of the others love-sick but you haven’t misled anyone. You’re a good lad. Women of Alicia’s age — they’d fall in love with a plank of wood.’
I was working hard at Patricia’s body. To my dismay, as I punched and pummelled, she didn’t seem to relax, but began breathing harder.
She turned, put out her hands and untied the string which held up my trousers.
‘Please, Patricia,’ I said. ‘Don’t —’
She was holding my penis. ‘That’s a mighty fine thing you’ve got there. Know how to use it?’
‘No, I guess you could show me.’
‘You haven’t slept with Alicia?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re a good boy, then. Now, be an even better boy for me.’
Her eyes were glazed with desire.
I said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be a wise woman?’
‘Even the wise need a prick now and again. You’ve been fluttering your eyelashes at me for days, don’t think I haven’t noticed. I’m very intuitive. Now, can you follow through?’
I didn’t want to disappoint her; I didn’t want her to feel her age or resent me.
Her hands were rough, and at one point I wondered whether she might be wearing gloves. I remembered that for exercise she liked to build stone walls. But, to my surprise, I became excited.
Her noises were honest and forthright. I was sitting facing her. We were rocking. I must have been holding my breath. ‘Breathe, breathe,’ she ordered. I did what she said. She went on. ‘Relax and breathe from your stomach, that way you’ll hold out longer.’
It worked, of course. When I’d relaxed, she said, ‘Now, continue.’
Patricia howled, ‘Adore me, adore me, you little shit!’; she dug her fingers into me, scratched and kicked me, and, when she came, thrust her tongue into my mouth until I almost gagged.
‘I needed that,’ she said at last. She was lying on the bed, legs apart, almost steaming. ‘Dear boy, do fetch me a glass of water.’
I took it to her.
‘Thanks, Oddjob. A job well done, eh?’
I sat on the end of the bed and said, ‘Now you’ll be able to give an orgasm workshop.’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘a lot of the women here think you’re a haughty little kid. I don’t mind that. I like it. I could humble you, you know.’
‘Thank you, Patricia,’ I said. ‘I think you just have. I’d better go now.’
‘One more thing,’ she said.
Patricia opened her legs and, from the end of the bed, had me look at her masturbate busily. At times her entire hand seemed to disappear into her body, as if she were about to turn herself inside out.
‘Bet you haven’t seen that before,’ she murmured.
‘No,’ I said sourly. ‘One lives and learns.’
She was about to fall asleep. She waved me away, but not before saying, ‘You come back here tonight. Bring your things. Everything will be better if you come and live here.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘This is the best room in the village. See you tonight!’
I scurried away across the square. Alicia called after me, caught me up and put her arm through mine.
‘You’re still here?’
‘But why not?’
‘Alicia, I’m on my way to the beach.’