Falling Backwards. James Quinn

hard to pin down but it occurs to me now, without any sense of crudity, that it is their cunts. It is their boobs. It’s their big hips and bottoms. It’s their soft bellies, their nipples and their thighs. And it is a keen awareness of these things. My body, my man’s body, is a pale uncomplicated thing. My cock is an after-thought. It hangs between my legs or it stiffens. Urine and semen. Simple. But Mary and Faith and Eve and all the others seem to have a much more complicated relationship with their bodies. Their vaginas grow moist for lovers. Nipples stiffen at the touch. And they can cramp and bleed and betray as well. And the parts of their bodies that do these things can flick from sex toys to baby factories in the space of an ejaculation! And so my impression now is that, for the most part, the women that I knew were more comfortable with the primitiveness of the human body. And so it is rare, I think, to find a woman describing sex, as Gregory commonly did, as disgusting. And so I wondered at Donna, who used to find in these things such cause for horror.

      * * *

      Evie had her views on sex too, which is hardly surprising. One late afternoon, traffic growling past outside, she sat opposite me in The Mission focussing on the chocolate bar placed on the table between us. It had been there for ten minutes while she chatted away agitatedly. I could tell that something was up. She wanted to talk that evening, seemed worn out when she was normally so full of energy. Finally, she confessed that she just didn’t want to do it that evening. She shrugged and sighed, ‘Sometimes I feel I just can’t fuck another man.’ I knew better than to say what I was thinking. I knew better than to tell her then don’t, just stop. She would have just given me that look and shaken her head in wonder. Instead I asked her, ‘So how do you do it?’ Evie answered me readily enough. She explained matter-of-factly that she did it in all of the positions. I smiled at the confusion. ‘No,’ I said patiently, ‘I mean how do you do it, night after night, with men you don’t know.’ Evie laughed. I thought that she had twigged to the misunderstanding but I was wrong. She explained, with the hint of a blush and a lowered voice, ‘Well, actually, I think I find it easier than some girls because, just between you and me, I have a pretty big fanny.’ She wasn’t joking: there was a total misconnection. My question went to her spirit and her soul, the complex relations between her thoughts and actions. But Evie seemed only capable of interpreting my question in terms of her body. How do you do sex? She should have just said, ‘With my body.’ And everything else? ‘With me.’

      * * *

      A passionate love gone stale, a painful break-up, neediness then despair. Yes, God got me on the rebound.

      My relationship with Allison was a long garbled conversation at cross purposes, full of misunderstandings and unintended offence. It was five years of saying sorry and stumbling on in a state of confusion, not sure why she was angry, why I was upset, where it would all end up. There’s no joy in looking back on a formative five-year period of your life and seeing that you can really fuck another person up just by being yourself. In fact, being the best that you can ever be! And yet interleaved with the pain and sorrow I guess we found room to be in love with each other.

      What on earth convinced us to go to India for a holiday to patch up our troubled relationship? It’s beyond me. Three and a half weeks beating away carpet sellers and tourist touts with my empty wallet. Tears and more tears and desperate, harrowing, love-making under slowly spinning ceiling fans. And me looking into her face, lying there below me, and seeing it set, and her jaw tensed, and her eyes screwed shut tight, trying to find something in me and in herself that was worth the pain and the heartache. The emotion in our relationship was never more potent and visceral than in those hours of sex and after-sex holding. We knew it was dying. We were merely waiting for the cancer to run its course.

      We ended up in Pushkar, a Hindu holy city in Rajasthan. A romantic location, ghats stepping down to a picturesque lake and two tall jagged mountains looming over it all. Pilgrims would come to the lake and bathe in its cleansing waters. Westerners would unsuspectingly drink the same water in their tea later over dinner in restaurants, too cheap to buy the bottled variety. A serene, magical, dysenteric place. The full stop on that clumsy five-year conversation. We had slept together in the afternoon. I don’t know why. Afterwards she rolled on her side and willed herself to nap. I rose and dressed and told her I was going for a walk. She made a little sound in her throat to say that she had heard me but she didn’t open her eyes. I looked back at her from the door. Her shapely bottom, her boobs cradled in the crook of her bent arms and her eyes closed to make me disappear all the faster.

      With a heavy heart I strolled down to the lake’s edge, past the cow with the genetic deformity (a floppy ill-formed fifth leg growing out of the back of its head, hoof and all, and his owner touting photos for a dollar), and found a quiet spot to sit and think. I had the ghat I had chosen all to myself except for an old Indian man in rags sitting about 15 metres away. As I walked to the water’s edge and took a seat on the steps he called out to me in slow, drawled but perfect Indian-English, ‘Will you give me some thing?’ His beggar’s cry had the tone of suffering and anguish. He gave voice to my own feelings of loss and need. But I ignored him. Over three weeks in India you become hardened to this stuff. In the mood I was in he’d need another leg growing out of his head before I gave him any money. A reflective minute gazing across the rippling lake’s surface. ‘Pleeeeease, sir. Will you give me something?’ My friend again. I ignored him again. Then every thirty seconds for the next couple of minutes he’d try again. ‘Please, sir. Something’. Then silence for ten long and peaceful minutes. A young pilgrim walked down the steps of the next ghat and stripped to his cotton underpants. He walked into the glassy cool water up to his navel and, letting his knees give beneath him, he slipped vertically down into the water, his head disappearing and reappearing again as he stood upright. He did this four times in quick succession, held out his cupped palms, muttered a prayer and turned solemnly before walking back up the steps and out of the water. I watched the whole performance as if it were for my benefit and I looked across at the old beggar who had done the same thing. The pilgrim dried himself and dressed and left us alone. Another five minutes silence then suddenly the old beggar’s plaintive voice again. ‘For God’s sake,’ he cried, ‘Do something!’ I did. I left the lake’s edge and walked back to the hotel, to Allison, where we agreed to end it. Allison cried and hugged me but there was relief in her tears, mingled with the sadness. Three months later I was in a church praying. Nobody was more surprised than I.

      * * *

      Mary in the shower after sex: her soft hands move delicately across her body and I recall my own hands fifteen minutes before crimping her nipples, pinching, clumsy and graceless, greedy in the face of bounty. She turns her face into the falling water, eyes closed, head tilted back and turning again she washes between her thighs, lathering the soap in gentle motions over her groin and through her dark pubic hair. She reaches behind and washes her bottom unselfconsciously. More circles under her arms. With her hands she raises and lowers her heavy breasts, soaping the lovely skin underneath as I watch her from the bathroom sink, toothbrush in my mouth like a gormless twit. From time to time she looks up and watches me watching her, pauses, and resumes. I remember thinking, ‘What in God’s name does she see in me?’

      * * *

      The telephone woke me at 5am on a mid-week morning and I rolled onto my back and lay there for a few seconds in that unreal sunless light of dawn toying with the idea of closing my eyes on it. In the end I answered on the seventh ring and instantly recognised Jenny’s panicked voice. Jenny from prayer group. Jenny, worshipper of the spiteful God. Jenny, abused wife, beaten with the bread board by a drunken husband the previous year. Her voice was a breathy whisper, a mix of fear and embarrassment, and I could hear her shushing one of her children gabbling beside her but the hush was a hissed rebuke, not soothing mummy-talk. She begged me to come over, pleading before I had even begun to respond and through the rush of sobs she whispered that Patrick, her husband, had come home drunk, and had collapsed in a stupor on the lounge. ‘I’m frightened for the children if he wakes up’, she told me. ‘Please come. Please come. Please come.’

      I dressed quickly and ran to the car. Twenty minutes later, the sun still low in the sky, I pulled up in the street outside Jenny’s house in time to see her burst through the front door shrieking in fear. She held her youngest against