She could hear it, of course. This was what had alerted her to the act in progress in the flat next door. The man’s actorly groaning, the breathy high-pitched climb towards ecstasy of the girl. The sounds of simulated pleasure. And, underlying them, a background soundtrack of the wet, succulent machinations of the act itself. Her neighbour, naked on the couch.
She confirmed this with a small shift of her body. The spread of his chest suddenly slipping into the sliver of her
view.
A chest that could be his chest, her Aaron’s chest. An everyman’s chest and a penis as average as a size seven shoe. She watched as he stroked himself. On the internet the men were much closer to the camera. Their performances were for
her gaze. This was a less expert demonstration. Her neighbour stroked his penis, stopped, leaned forward, pressed a button on the remote control. The sound of the woman’s orgasm was suddenly repeated, the very apex of the crescendo rehearsed again and again, like a pianist mastering a new scale.
Susanna watched. The engorged cock lost just a little ground as its owner fast-forwarded or rewound the sequence of events on the obscured screen. When he leaned back into the couch and took himself in hand once more the sounds of sex had changed: guttural groaning from the woman, a quick leap of the penis in Susanna’s truncated
view.
She heard the male voice coaxing
just a little more, that’s right, almost there, relax, oh god, look at that, sweet fucking Christ look at that beautiful…ah there, ah there. Oh man if you could only see what you look like now spread out like this, oh fuck oh fucking hell, so tight, your sweet little hole is so fucking tight.
He shuddered, he twitched back onto the lounge and the sound of his skin was a rude rasp against the sweat-wet leather. He came.
If she’d had her own remote control she would have used it to rewind and play, rewind and play until she was sated, gorging on that one acute moment of pleasure. She was dressed in a cotton shift, white like the nightclothes of the little girl who used wake to the succubus groan. The child grown tall had long abandoned the use of frilly knickers, and now the juices dripped freely, drawing a slippery accusing line towards the place of her unrest.
She glanced around, scanned the darkened corridor, tiny down-lights dripping a treacle glow onto the brown furred paper of the walls. The doors were all shut tight. 2:25. Her knees ached from squatting, her back cracked when she leaned back against the door. The man was dabbing at himself with a tissue, pulling on boxer shorts, standing, shutting off the low guttural groans.
Wait! Wait!
pleaded the woman in the gravelly croon of a jazz club star.
Too big! You are too big, you’ll tear me apart.
And then the voice of her partner, warning,
You think I’m too big? You better get ready and relax because I’m going to show you there’s room in there for two.
A little shriek from the girl, the neighbour pausing with the remote control in his hand. His interest suddenly piqued, disturbing the flaccid little hang of the penis nestled inside his shorts.
This is my brother, Bob. Bob, this is Scarlett. Do you like what you see of her?
Another voice, a baritone.
I love what I can see of little Scarlett. Look how much I like you, little Scarlett. Do you want to see how much? Close up? Here right up close to your face? Better use lots of spit, little Scarlett, get it nice and wet deep down there in your throat and if it’s lubed up just right, then brother Bob won’t hurt you very much at all.
The sounds of feigned pleasure, the sounds of simulated pain. The neighbour turned the television off and all the play-acting was replaced by silence. Susanna watched him adjust his vaguely interested penis in his boxers and scratch
his chest distractedly, then her spyglass theatre was plunged into darkness. She stood quietly, tiptoed back towards her own front door.
She closed it behind her and leaned against it. Touched her breasts, feeling the steady thud of her heart. Then, when she was certain that the rhythm of it was no more aroused than usual, she let her hand slide onto her breast, massaging the nipple, feeling the comforting weight of flesh slip into her hand. She liked the feel of her breast in cotton. She liked the way the nightdress slid up with the barest caress, exposing the bright sheen of moisture on her thighs, the humid damp of the tangle of hair. She didn’t shave herself as the women on the internet shaved. There was no one to care that the
view
was obscured; no one to see how thick and forested her crotch was, to smell the gamy scent of it, like a wild creature gone to earth.
She let her fingers slip into herself, this torso, this new torso a real man’s body, this real man sleeping in a real bed a matter of metres from her own. She fingered herself and touched her breast and her mind was aflame with a real man pulling his cock in her very real apartment building, with the invented pleasure echoing out like a soundtrack to his ministrations.
She came too quickly, an unsatisfying end to such a vivid first experience. It could have been Aaron working himself to orgasm in the brash light of a television screen, it might have been her Mr Fitzgerald. But the spasms of pleasure were sharp
and dissipated quickly. If that man had been her lover—surely her orgasm would have shattered her world. She felt sure that her body would have responded more fully to a brush with the familiar.
She wiped her hand on the cotton of her nightdress and pushed away from the hard wood of her door. It was coming up to 3 am. She drank water, splashed some onto her flushed face, and slipped quietly between the crimson sheets. There was a sound, some low drone. Perhaps it was her neighbour tripping into a deep sleep, the succubus climbing up onto his bed,
you think I’m too big? You’d better get ready and relax because I’m going to show you there’s room in there for two.
Susanna wondered if his sleep was restless, if he sensed her sleeping through the thin dividing wall. How easy it would be to drill a hole between their rooms, the kind of glory hole they might make in one of their scenarios: a place for the occasional protrusion of his penis, anonymously grand and angled perfectly for her own separate pleasure. If this was Aaron in the apartment next door she might suggest it, but it was not Aaron. This was some other stranger, snoring quietly in the room next door.
Most of the residents of the building were sleeping. She knew so many of them by now. She had read of Angela Loon’s debts and the possibility that a company might repossess her car. She pressed her hand against Angela’s door, sleepless at 2 am, wishing for some end to her worries. She had seen the letters
to Henry Cleckheaton from his eight-year-old son, the photographs of fish dragged, boy-sized, from rough seas. Looking forward to my birthday breakfast when I get back. Mummy says I shouldn’t ask what you have got me but I think it is a fishing rod of my own but one that works on the beach because mummy doesn’t have a boat like Uncle John.
The cute row of kisses at the bottom of the page did not dissuade her from crouching low to peer through the keyhole while Henry Cleckheaton walked from his kitchenette and back to the table—trailing the glorious scent of buttered toast. Susanna clutched her stomach with a wave of hunger; she was hungry also to see more of Henry. Another potential Aaron and, after days of wandering through sleeping halls, finally she’d found an Aaron awake when all the other Aarons were asleep.
He opened his laptop, a good start. She saw his face illuminated, his fleshy pout, the pale, almost white shock of hair, the startlingly blue eyes. Her breath made the paint of the door bead with condensation. It seemed he would stare into the computer forever without making a movement or a sound. She wanted him to take off his pyjama pants; this at least, just a quick look at his penis, the presence or absence of a foreskin, might eliminate him.
Just when she imagined that he would sit forever like this, frozen in a pose of concentration, Susanna heard a thin voice, cracked with sleep.
‘Henry?’
A man’s voice, a high-pitched bluebird of a voice, sweet and musical. She had imagined from Henry’s correspondence that he lived alone.
‘Henry? Come to bed. You are always on your computer. It is bad for your eyes.’
Henry turned to the place beyond the scope of Susanna’s keyhole. He smiled, a smile that lit up his pretty face and made her heart and her loins ache a little. Such a gorgeous smile, angelic. He was, perhaps, in his forties and therefore just outside her target group. Most of the men over forty she had encountered on the internet were circumcised. Most had the odd grey hair around their nipples or peppered through their pubic hair.
‘You are not playing that godawful game again, are you?’
‘Perhaps, my pet.’ The angel glowed with a screen-blessed halo.
‘But I am disappointed. You should be looking at porn like a normal red-blooded male. Not running around some deserted pretend island like a child.’
‘This game is not for children, Dimitri.’
‘I know another game that is not suitable for children.’
‘Is it hard?’
Henry was. She could see the outline of his cock tenting his pyjama pants as he stood and gently closed the screen.
‘I’ll teach you. There aren’t very many rules.’
‘Oh. I am fond of rules, though. Without rules we have nothing to push against.’
‘I have something for you to push against. And so do you, I can see it from here.’
She wanted the invisible stranger to wander out into the diningroom. She wanted the coupling to occur in the tiny fragment of the room available to her prying gaze. She wanted so much to see this combination of male flesh, something she had not yet seen on the internet, the kind of game she and Aaron might play with some unsuspecting torso. But the intensity of her desire would not make it so.
She was treated only to some creaks which must have come from the loose or overstretched joints of Henry’s bed. There were a few grunts and at one point a little giggle, muffled by bedclothes or perhaps a pillow. And after this, little easy settling sounds.
Susanna stood and walked slowly past the other doors of other apartments. No one awake now but herself. Henry was still an option for her. Despite his Dimitri it was clear from the letters of his son that he had once been with women too.
You are always on your computer. It is bad for your eyes.
Perhaps this was all the hint she needed. A man of average build with a computer habit and a fluid sexuality, easily aroused.
Back in her apartment she pinned his letters to her cork board of possibility. It was thinly populated: her direct neighbour, who still remained anonymous because the lock on his mailbox was still firmly in place, and Henry Cleckheaton. The definitely-nots were laid out on the diningroom table. Women, older men, the very fat and the very thin. She sat
at her kitchen bench and ate buttered toast and opened her laptop, but of course he was never online at this time in the morning.
Hi there,
typed a big swollen torso with a tiny sausage of a penis.
Hi,
she typed back.
Female? Male?
Female.
Age?
Old enough.
Turn your webcam on, let me see your pussy.
No. But I assure you I have one, and if you touch yourself for me I promise I will be touching myself too.
James Bacon was reading
Lolita.
It was not much to go on, but as she stood beside him in the lift her senses clicked over to high alert. She noticed the caramel smell of his aftershave, his smooth jaw, his over-long eyelashes and the little grin that kept flicking up to kiss his perfectly formed lips. She had read the book a dozen times and wondered which part of the narrative was resonating, which literary touch was making this young man smile. James Bacon lived on the floor above hers. The room directly above, in fact. Sometimes, not often, she heard his footsteps. Once she heard something fall and shatter on her ceiling.
James was young, a potential Aaron if there ever was one. She had read his phone bill and seen that his internet usage
rivalled and sometimes surpassed her own. Apart from this his mail was sparse, bills mostly, a card from his mother on his birthday:
Dear James, enjoy your day. Love from Mum.
He subscribed to magazines she liked, the
New Yorker, Gourmet Traveller,
and surprisingly, because it was really aimed at girls,
Frankie.
Once there was a letter from the library: a reminder to pay his overdue fine.
The boy was a reader. He was clean. He liked at least one of the books she loved. She stayed with him, missing her own floor, allowing the surging tide of the lift to deposit them both on his floor. She laughed a little awkwardly.
‘Oh dear. I didn’t press the button. I’ve missed my floor.’
James Bacon smiled and winked in quite a winning way. ‘Do you want me to walk you home?’
She would like that, she thought, she would like that very much. But instead she found herself blushing, holding the old, uncooperative lift door open as James Bacon stepped outside and onto his own floor.
‘I live up here, if you ever get lost again,’ he told her and Susanna was sure she detected a quick flicker of his eyes up and down her body. Just a glance, but she felt herself respond, her nipples pushing back against the pressure of his gaze. She let go of the lift doors and retreated back into the mirrored gloom.
‘9F,’ he told her quickly and then mouthed the words again, gesturing behind him back into the dingy corridor before the lift doors clattered shut, abandoning her to the astonishment of her own reflection.
I have to go now.
He cut off their meeting abruptly, and this wasn’t the first time. Sometimes Aaron disappeared for hours at a time, returning with one or another invented sexual exploit to charm her with. He wasn’t hers exclusively and Susanna wasn’t here expressly for his purposes. She had other people to talk with, the passing parade of the torsos, but tonight she found their endlessly reiterated masturbation tiresome. She prematurely ended a tryst with an older man and snapped shut the laptop. Stood and paced about her apartment, glancing up at the ceiling with its old pressed-metal curlicues. She listened, but there was nothing but silence. She ate cheese and crackers, drank one glass of wine and then, possibly too quickly, another. She lay on the couch, but there was the ceiling, mocking her.