Chapter 12 – Curiouser and curiouser

The days flew through my mind as night-time wore on.

I could feel the dawn creeping up on me like one of the bulls in the machine shop, shiv hidden in his palm, ready to rip and tear as punishment for breaking his nose the last time he tried to take me. Dawn was no respite; only the horrendous repetition of what has gone before, only that much more mind-numbingly soul-destroying. For this was my way, this place my home, and I was never getting out.

Never.

I close my eyes for a moment and am back in her arms, enjoying the thin strands of her hair tickling, entangling with my curly chest hair. So much to say, but no time to say it in, as we lose ourselves in lips and tongues, fingers and holes, time and again, until the entire experience blurs into one long thrusting, sweaty, grunt.

But that’s not how it really was. There were lulls in between the rutting, where I could find the time to think. And it was those times, in between bouts of passion, where the seed of doubt would take hold, digging its tendrils deep into my psyche to prick at what remained of my common sense. (Too much time at university smoking too many drugs, taking too many pills, having too much fun – all good at the time, but leaving massive holes in my brain where memory and the normal passage of time should remain. All of those photos in the album of my life spinning down into the black hole left by excess partying, not missed or mourned until later, when I realised how much damage had actually been done. But that is for another day. For now, my mind was still chewing over something, a revelation, and I knew myself well enough to let the story take its course, for that was my way. As a story-teller, we are beholden to the stories in our own lives – never quite learning the easy way by being told and instead having to retell ourselves our own life stories, to understand the lessons found in the gaps between absorption and knowledge, seeing and understanding.)

She was all I had ever wanted; soft and supple, easy going and happy, with a ready laugh and a quick hand, not to mention a hot mouth and tight body in all the right places.

She was dirty in a way that I had never come across in my life before – a clean, innocent, downright twisted dirty that never ceased to turn me on. All it would take is the flick of her hair, or the trace of her fingernail down my arm or chest, and I would be off, sucking, licking, fingering, fucking, until we trashed out in a heap on top and within, wrapped around one another, until the next time.

Yet still, in these quiet moments, when the memory of her was still fresh as the taste of her in my mouth, and the stench of sweaty sexy filling my nostrils with each breath, the demon of doubt would come a-knocking, and I had nothing to do but to listen. Maybe I would be less stupid this time. A little less thick and slow. For all my cognitive powers, and without the substance misuse at university, I had always been a bit slow, or ‘innocent,’ as my friends like to put it. How shocked they were when they realised that I smoked. Imagine what they would say if they saw me now, banged up for murder, my life over before it began.

The black hole of depression sucks my energy down through the centre of me and out through the space where my spine should be, down through the hole in the atmosphere under my bed, where the demons crawl up and eat until I’m dead. Oh no. The rhymes have returned.

I shove these thoughts away and dive back into my memories, pulling at the gossamer thread my sanity holds on by, hoping to find a path back home to where I know I still live and thrive, somewhere deep inside. Stop!

She had been so sweet and caring; always saying sorry all the time as if she was afraid I would break in half if she didn’t tiptoe around me. And yet, when we were together, making love, having sex, or just plain fucking (that’s it, just fucking was all there was), she was hard and soft, sharp and kind, mean and gentle, all rolled into one writhing, shifting, constantly morphing being. And so my alarm bells rang on unnoticed, sounding as they did when I was mid-throes, high up on tiptoes. Shut up!

The time wore on, but I never tired of her. Sometimes I would wonder about things, like the necklace I bought for Lola. (Dear Lola, how did I lose you? But I knew the answer to that, and another piece of the puzzle slotted into place deep in my demon chest, unfolding even as my memory ran me down my love-life’s train-wreck history.)

The necklace was a fine thing – one of my better finds, all soft and delicate curves, surely mass-produced but one of a kind all the same, white gold and silver chain delicate as a butterfly’s wing. And there’s the thing. Fuck.
She couldn’t have. I know that. But she did. I had no idea at the time. Nor did I know about the money, or the cheques. I couldn’t have known. How could I? So wrapped up in her body, her mind elsewhere, conniving, and scheming. How was I to know?

The truth came out later, after she disappeared, while I took a panicked call from her boyfriend (current boyfriend!). He was in tears, and I found myself consoling him, as if I were is solace, rather than the man who had been screwing his girlfriend in every possible position, in every available hole, for the past three days, pretty much non-stop (aside from driving her to and from the mall, where she seemed to spend the rest of her non-bed, non-sex time, although I began to wonder about this…what she got up to there. Was this mall a sexual palace of pornography, where twenty-something women went to join in salacious gangbangs involving all sorts of people under the harsh white light and flashing brands of today’s corporate conglomerate kings? Is there even such a thing?)

A sad smile splits my face and I settle back into place as the time slips away, faster now then ever before, and I realise that I am never leaving this hell hole I now call home. Even with a million memories to keep me company, the slow Chinese drip-torture of time eking away will eventually slow-burn me to the ground, leaving nothing but a stub of my former self. Is there even that much left of me now?

I push the question away, and force my mind back to its previous track. Down her downy pale hair of heaven, tracing the middle of her back, into the warm fuzz that lightens her anus, then forward to her lips, those gorgeous lips that I kissed and sucked for hours on end, or so it seemed.

But everything comes to an end. And every pleasure has its price. My price was a rude awakening, a reminder of how much of a dope I could be, whether smoked up on it or not. Maybe it was easy for everyone but me to see, but learn I did, in the end. For it all eventually comes out in the wash.

Lola’s necklace never did come back, and I doubted its existence, lost in the endless stream of natural pearl necklaces I was currently donating to my local beau. I was sure that I had tucked it safely into my rucksack for the trip back to uni where my lovely Lola waited for me, true as ever true could be. And yet still I was here, swallowing the angst of losing the necklace she never knew I bought, and never would – for I wasn’t about to tell her. Strange, that; I was more worried and upset about not being able to give her that shiny necklace, and less worried and upset about hiding the horrible truth of my cheating, lying self from her when I next held her in my arms. Only a few more days.

And therein lies the rub. I had been playing away, while away, and deep down knew how bad my ‘innocent’ rescued damsel in distress was. For who else would be wandering the freezing snow, under dressed, and distressed, but a dodgy person of ill-repute? That was never in refute. I think deep down, in the dark cellar of who I really am, I knew all of this from the moment her eye caught mine, and chose to mark the man behind the counter at the gas station as the bad person, when all he was trying to do was to warn me away from the folly of picking her up. And yet, I did, and I marked him as rude and mad, when I was sure that was not true. Just like nothing she told me was true.

It wasn’t until much later, back at uni, with Lola beginning to doubt my honesty (“Who would have thunk it?” – as Bill Hicks was wont to say), twisting and turning in her own mind against her own sanity as I sat there and barefaced lied about what I had done, by not saying anything had happened at all, my own lies my worst downfall, for I could feel the death of our life together deep in myself, long before I met that little fair-haired elf in the gas station. But recrimination is getting us nowhere. And I am jumping ahead of myself again.

On the phone, I was sweet, and kind. But when I found her, this lying Jezebel, I told her so to her face. At which point she broke down in tears, saying that she was lost, and confused, and just wanted to be loved. (Don’t we all?) I took her tears at face value, for that was what they were; tears. And I drove her home, or to her boyfriend’s house, I will never know.

Then I turned my back on my bit on the side, and sighed, for my life was about to get a whole lot worse. She not only had stolen the necklace, I came to accept in the end, but had taken cheques, and cash, and cards, from my family, and my friend (the one who had been visiting the night after we had met – but he wouldn’t realise it for a while yet).

She had cashed the cheques, bought drugs instead, stuck them in her veins, through holes in her head, and I am sure now sucks and screws her way to infamy, recorded on video for all posterity. Well, at least she never took a video with me. (I could just see that appearing in the farce of a trial I had had to sit through, with the grunting and prodding, and raw words of hard sex impossible to put back in the box of my life’s history, instead out in the open for all to hear and see.)

And so I dragged my sorry ass back to uni, back to friends and parties, drugs, and sex, but this time with the one I was meant to be with, the one and only Lola, my love, my life.

My lie.