16. to make one muse watch the other masturbate — from annis, if u’d like!
"Annis! Why I would scarcely have known you."
"It has been: my word, five years?"
"Five years would make us accomplished women."
Cordelia moves over. They sit together.
Cordelia looks forward and nods, her handbag in her lap when Annis enquires about her ring. "Two years now. There is hardly room for my paint pots on the table."
Cordelia whitens. "Are you married?"
A wagon rattles past and both women watch it go.
"Then," it is difficult, "there are things no one has told you."
Annis looks up. "What things?"
Cordelia hesitates. "The marriage bed."
"I know what a marriage bed is."
Cordelia's gaze drops to her lap. "Before the wedding, there was always this talk, this: duty and obedience. Not a soul explained"
"No one said what it would feel like. The pain sometimes. But now I suppose I don't feel it at all."
Annis' expression changes, and Cordelia cannot now swallow her omission. "-I thought there must be something wrong with me."
"Have you spoken to your husband?"
"My doctor tells me there is nothing amiss. Only my disposition." Cordelia continues to smooth an invisible crease from her skirt. "He said I think too much of myself. I am doing it now. That if I would stop examining every feeling, it should become natural. He has prescribed children."
"I thought there must be something wrong with me," Cordelia repeats. Annis touches her hand.
The Kendall dancehall shuts its doors and dies before midnight. Someone had decided a man's life was worth less than a song. The crowd scatter, then fly back, like smoke funnelling up a too-tight chimney-draw to the nearest tenement stairhead. The band migrates with them: horns and drumsticks rapping and bashing at the chipped walls, chasing noise from one cramped floor to the next.
Girls fresh off the factory floor wandering where the party will go, cheeks bright with sweat, tin-foil flowers pinned in their hair like meadow girls from the future charge into Annis to follow the tail end of the carnival. A girl grabs Annis by the wrist mistaking her for a man by her cap and breeches. Annis twists free and tightens her grip on the handles of her basket.
Later, Annis washes the plates and there is light across the courtyard where the dancing has landed. A woman dangles out the window. Annis presses her stomach to the sink, watching as the others surge around the disaster drenched with delirium. Then a man grips her roughly by the waist before she can tumble backwards into the street. Her heels are skyward, her blouse is open, her pale breasts barely bundled. She erupts into laughter and hooks her legs around her partner's waist where gravity can't hold her.
Annis's stomach churns in a sudden revulsion: as the pair exaggerate the rescue into a pantomime for her viewing, play-rutting and then the man 'striking' her face to knock some sense into her. One shoe slips from her dangling foot into the dark without consequence. Then she is hauled upright and swallowed back.
Her door suddenly near shudders off its hinges with a sudden knocking.
"Best let me in, Eddy, afore I lose the run of masel." Michael. Bang bang bang. "D'ye hear me? Open this door or the devil'll have the close an every soul in it'll ken to blame." Bang bang bang. "I'm no standin' oot here all the night so you'd better shift yer backside and let me through."
She opens the door but only as far as the chain allows. "Eddy isn't home," She tells him.
"Do you think I believe that?"
She slips the chain free and he steps inside without waiting to be asked. He brings the smell of drink with him.
"Will was rough wi yer boy. Afore Eddy sees the bruises, we'll get it settled." With bleary vision he draws a bundle of notes from his pocket and counts them with his thumb before laying it on the table.
"You were shouting for Eddy." She observes distantly: Michael, of all the men in the world, know exactly where Eddy is on a given weeknight; he would also know that she is here alone.
Michael, understanding she understands, gets closer where the space is owed. "Well I wasnae aboot tae stand in the stair calling another man's wife."
"But you would buy her soon enough."
"I've bought you before." She doesn't reciprocate. His pulse jumps, irritated. "He's no a bad lad."
"But you were thinking it." The words land harder than he intends, that there is nothing wrong with him - Michael - and not Will. "I am trying to make it right."
...She picks up the money, weighing it like the night of Callum's indiscretion before folding it.
Not sure how to take her acceptance, he sniffs, keeping a rigid pinch around the dead end of his dead cigarette. "We're agreed?"
"If this is commerce," she says, tucking the notes into the front pocket of her pinafore. Then she unties the pinafore and hangs it neatly over the cooker rail. "Take off your belt."
He cannot understand. The transition. He has misheard her.
"Take off your belt and touch yourself."
His hands don't move. He sways. "This a wee joke?"
She gives nothing. "You're a man, aren't you? I know what men buy."
"Now: take off your belt."
