She took a breath and stepped out of her flat. She dragged the door closed behind her and locked it. Seven doors rose from the faded brown carpet. Seven doors stared morosely at the same flock wallpaper she and Aaron had borrowed for their sexy motel adventure. All the elements of her online chatting were around her at every moment; the pressed metal
ceilings that she passed under, the gardenia bushes with their blowsy petals dripping sweetness into the humid air.
She pushed the lift button and waited. The doors opened on a forbidding crowd, doubled in the mirrored walls and partly obscured by patches of rust and scratches and the remnants of spraypaint, the forlorn tag of some lost youth.
There were three women in the lift. Four including herself. She smiled at one of them, and discounted her. Three men, one with a tight belly spilling over his pinstriped pants. Two possible Aarons, one youngish, perhaps twenty-five, the other in his thirties. Both of them trim and well dressed and with equally anonymous fingers clutching a briefcase (the younger man) and a laptop bag (the older).
There was a cocktail of scents, soap, lavender, aftershave and, oddly, the smell of almonds. She tried to match each smell to one of the bodies but it was impossible. The lift stopped at the floor below and everybody shifted against each other. She felt the touch of a hand at her thigh. Her heart leaped. This could be Aaron, brushing against the fabric of her dress. But no. A sidelong graze from a small ginger woman who smiled cheekily and shrugged when Susanna caught her eye. The man who entered the lift was yet another Aaron, sandy-haired this time, hands free. She noticed the bulge of a wallet in his back pocket when he turned around to face the closing doors.
She had brought several of her men to this lift. In one scene the lift had broken down. Susanna and a torso were
already taking advantage of the enforced delay when a third participant was introduced, a maintenance man more like Aaron than the old gentleman of the ground floor, carrying nothing but a wrench and a hammer and a large grin to indicate his approval of the activities being performed on his watch. She had never been in the lift with so many people, in real life or in fantasy, and she blushed, wondering what kinds of scenarios might actually occur.
The lift doors opened again, but the woman who stood outside shook her head. ‘Too full,’ she said, ‘I’ll wait for the next one.’
Two floors later they were all expelled into the foyer, three Aarons and a handful of others wandering off towards their day jobs. She had half-planned to follow him. Now she was torn. She stood in the foyer as each of the Aarons walked off in a different direction.
When they were gone she moved out onto the street, turning the corner of the building. There was nothing left from the accident except a scatter of glass and a twisted scrap of metal that might have come off the bumper of the car. No blood, no painted outline of a body, nothing to prove it had ever happened. A critical turning point in her life and nothing for her to souvenir at all. She looked up to the building, thirteen floors, seven doors to a floor. There were ninety-one potential doorways; but she would find him. She was determined to find him. Aaron Fitzgerald, her Aaron, the second love of her life.
She turned and walked towards her bus stop, startling in
her blue checked dress. She saw them watching her, saw their heads turn and their eyes caress her calves, noticed this for the first time. For the first time she herself was looking, watching, wondering. Men streamed from her building. She had no idea that so many of them lived so close by.
She stood at the bus stop and four more Aarons joined her in her vigil. Women too, but they were not what she was looking for. A teenager in school uniform asked her for a light and she shook her head. Not what she was looking for at all.
The postman left mail in a row of wooden boxes on the ground floor. They all had locks, a metal clasp and a padlock; each was labelled with the name of a resident, but most of the residents named were long gone. If you were to believe the labels on the boxes you would imagine that Susanna was a Mrs Edith Long. In fact Susanna had toyed with using this name. She liked the juxtaposition: the properness of Edith against the lewdness of the task at hand.
There was mail for her today but nothing to become excited about. A bill, a sale catalogue, a small cheque for some freelance work she had been involved in, a balance of sorts. She took the envelopes out of the little wooden pigeon hole. The box next to hers belonged to her neighbour, her first Aaron, the man of the blue shirt and ordinary hands. The end of an envelope protruded. It was not difficult to pull the letter out of the box and even less difficult to conceal it among her own. This was not something she
had ever done before. She felt the sweat spring to her armpits and was grateful for the breezy sleeves of the blue checked dress.
There were other mailboxes. She realised this just as she found herself beside the lift doors. Some of the boxes were locked, of course. But some had letters sticking out and some of them had lost their padlocks over the years. A couple had lost the top of the box altogether.
She let the lift doors slide open and stood, staring back at herself in the mottled mirror. The lift doors closed with a tired old rattle and she was walking back around the corner to where the letterboxes were. A treasure trove of coloured envelopes. Susanna walked the length of them as if she was momentarily unable to find her own. She glanced over her shoulder quickly as she moved from box to box. Speed was important. There were a few that would not yield their multicoloured treasures and she scrambled at the tiny openings, her fingers sweating, her heart a-clatter. Enough envelopes to fill her handbag; more tantalisingly out of reach.
The sound of footsteps and the chatting voices of young women. She turned and walked past them, two spike-haired beauties, and Susanna trembled as she passed, raking the ground with her terrified stare.
She pressed the button for the lift, clutched the bulging handbag to her waist.
‘…yeah but he doesn’t know what’s good for him.’
‘You’re
good for him.’
‘Exactly. Exactly what he doesn’t know.’
The girls had checked their letterbox and stood empty-handed behind her. There were letters peeking out from under Susanna’s elbow. She turned her body to one side, angling her handbag away from the girls.
‘I wish I was gay,’ said one of the girls. Green gelled hair, a band T-shirt, ripped at the neck. ‘I’d show him what he was missing.’
The other girl shushed her and laughed. They were looking at Susanna, she knew they were. She felt the blush rising in her neck. When the lift doors opened she hesitated. Wondered if it would be conspicuous to change her mind suddenly and take the stairs.
The girls pushed past her, she followed. The mirrored walls reflected her handbag, letters pushing at the mouth of it, a name poking out that was not her own. She shifted her elbow but that revealed a different name on a manila envelope, the letters too large to be concealed. As she reached past the girls and pressed the button for her floor, there was an awkward juggle with her satchel and several of the letters spilled out onto the floor.
Susanna rushed to pick them up but the green-haired girl was already on her knees.
‘It’s cool,’ she said and scooped up a bill for Mr A. Lee on 6 and a postcard for Julie McKinnie in 12D.
‘No one writes letters to me,’ green-hair said without seeming to notice that the letters in her hand belonged to
several people, none of them Susanna herself. ‘It’s just text me or email me. A valentine’s SMS, can you believe it?’
‘It’s just work,’ said Susanna. ‘Nothing too exciting.’
‘I get excited if there’s junk mail in my box, you know what I mean?’
Susanna took the letters from the girl’s hand, among them a catalogue from a local dress store with no address at all. ‘Here,’ she said and handed the catalogue to the girl. ‘Have some of my junk mail. I have too much already.’
Green-hair laughed, then shrugged as the lift doors opened at her floor. ‘Catch you round the lifts sometime.’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
The girls stepped out, the lift doors juddered closed and Susanna relaxed into the joy of sudden silence.
The envelopes were laid out across the floor. It was a reconstruction of the building, a core sample, the letters representing the names of people inside, the virtual units laid out one above the other. Susanna wandered through her building, stopping to check on Amy Evans in 2B, Jeff B. Gibbon in 7F, Tim Bachellor, Greg Davies. Not a single Aaron among them.
There were, of course, missing pieces of the puzzle. Apartments that were not represented. Not a single piece of mail for floor thirteen. There were also men who might have been another incarnation of her Aaron Fitzgerald. Alan Francis was a likely candidate, as was Andrew F. Lane. Susanna perched up on her kitchen stool and looked down at
the paper representation of the building arranged before her. She could see her own flat, a bill, a cheque, a catalogue.
He would be waiting for her to log on. Somewhere in the building he would be waiting for her.
I missed you.
Did you?
It is unlike my Susie-su to be so late.
Big day,
she told him,
and then I had to go through so much mail.
A paper trail. I long for the days of a paperless society. Almost upon us. I rarely get any mail at all.
She squirmed. It would be so simple just to ask him— but when you do get mail, where does it go to? What is your address? Your unit number? But all of these questions would break the veil of anonymity they had woven between them, Magritte’s blind lovers, the exquisite braille of the internet.
Perhaps I should write to you.
Start a letter now, here. Begin it, Dear Mr Fitzgerald.
And then how do I send it?
Simplicity itself. You just press the enter key.
And what if I wanted to send you a lock of my hair, a tribute to the romantics?
Oh? Then you would press it between the pages of a webcam. But that would be a shame because, Suse or Susanna or Susie-su, you are my blonde Venus, my dusky Moor, my Eurasian delight with skin as fine as calf leather slippers. Even a lock of your hair
would pin you down like a butterfly, diminish you, corral you. You were right, my divine smorgasbord of S. I remember how I used to beg you to lift the edge of your scarf just an inch. I wanted to defile just a little fraction of your breast, peer into your dusky hollows, touch my tongue to my computer screen where the wide-spread glistening vision of your sex would be revealed to me in exquisite detail. All this I longed for, and you resisted my advances sagely. You are the wise prophet of my fantasies and because you have hidden yourself from me you will be so for eternity, never to be diminished by the truth.
So, Aaron, do you feel you have been diminished in my eyes? I have seen your chest, your cock, your balls. I have seen the fountain of your emissions and the pleasure that you conjure from your body with your own pretty hand.
How sad for you, dear S. I have allowed myself to become a thing of two dimensions, flat and trapped forever. You will never truly believe that I am dark and muscular, bending you roughly over the rocks on some secluded beach, thrusting the dark thick meat of my engorged penis into the delicate flower of your body. I have destroyed the chance that you might see me as some nervous boy, my tiny cock so shy that only your teacherly lips will draw the tentative semen from my loins. You will never believe me when I tell you that my fingers are soft and so finely formed that when you place them, trembling, at the entry to your cunt and slide your hips forward onto my virgin touch, my whole hand will slip inside with barely any resistance.
The truffly feast of your chest
—average chest—
and the
juicy meat of your cock
—everyman penis—
and your hand, the careful rhythm of your hand
—which could be any hand but so expertly manoeuvred, she had noticed—
these things delight me, and despite the fantasies that we have indulged in, despite all of these well-played games, when I am finally alone in my single bed it is your hand that comes back to me, your real and corporeal penis that enters me where my own fingers are preparing the way.
Fantasies.
The pause following the word betrayed his disappointment.
Oh wonderful Susie-su, my love, my treat. For you they are fantasies but for me they are the very essence of the thing itself.
Susanna squatted by the door.
She had always had a particularly intense relationship with the hour between two and three in the morning. This was the time when she woke from restless dreams, her legs clamped around her pillow, the damp muskiness of her juices staining the red pillowcase even darker, the last pulse of her pleasure rippling through her body. When she was a child she had believed that nocturnal visitors climbed through her window at this witching hour. Perhaps it was the men watching Artemisia’s Susanna from their position above her bed, but in dreams it was always a succubus or an incubus—she didn’t care which, but a visitor of some sort anyway. The evidence would be spelled out in the dampness of her budding breasts, the ragged red welts on the insides of her thighs,
marks of a dream lover scrambling for purchase at the lip of the virgin well.
As an adult Susanna began to see that the incubus was nothing but her own hand, working hard against her skin as she slept. The power of her lust, once piqued, seemed unfathomable, and she would fall between sheets still slippery, dewy from her last encounter, only to be ravaged by the astonishing force of her own imagination.
She checked her watch. 2:05. Perhaps he would slip up next time they met; reveal some small detail of his life, his sleeplessness, the shape of the moon at precisely this time of night. She could see very little from where she crouched by the door. The arm of a couch, leather, dark leather; black or perhaps midnight blue. The only light spilled, pale and tinged with blue, from a television outside her line of sight.