The Journal of Dora Damage (37 page)

Unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears, which stream down my face, and he kisses them, each one, before returning to my mouth,
my neck, my chest. I forget about Peter in his grave, about Lucinda and Pansy and Nathaniel on the streets, about Sylvia and
Jocelyn, and about myself. Then suddenly I remember.

‘Stop!’ I stand up so fast that my chair falls backwards. I do not pause to see his face. I push the sewing-frame out of the
way and run to the door, find the key hanging round my waist, put it in the lock and turn it. Then I run back to him, and
he stands up to greet me, and we kiss all over again.

He kisses my lips, then across my face, and my ear, and he walks slowly round to my back, his lips keeping contact with my
skin all the way, and he carefully and unhurriedly unbuttons my dress, and slips it down over my shoulders, which he kisses,
each one, before I turn back to him, and do the same to his shirt. It is stained brown here and there, and smells of beer,
and sweat, and hedgerows. He takes my chemise off next.

My fingers trace the contours of the skin on his chest. I kiss his neck wound, which has almost gone, although I can see fresh
scars on his arms and on one shoulder. I press my body towards him, and slip my hands round to his back. They feel something,
and feel it again. A groove. It has me caught; I cannot move my fingers from it. Silky and smooth, a long groove, along which
my fingers cannot help but trace. And then I lift my head, and I stare at him. I turn him round, but he twists his head back
to look at me. On his back are deep, old welt-marks, like carriage wheels on mud, the entire length and breadth of his back,
and the backs of his legs.

‘Dare not pity me,’ he said sternly. ‘Have a look, have a good look. But come back to me, or we both stop now.’

I came back, but I kept seeing them in my head, and struggled to know whether to touch them, or not to touch them, and how
to show I didn’t care. He kissed me, and he pressed urgently against my hip bone, then towards my centre. The heat from my
body seemed to drain towards that one point; my head struggled to reclaim control, and in the conflict, my body lost. I was
feeling too much. I feared he would be more than I could bear. My breath was being overwhelmed by a sinister inflation, which
threatened to obliterate my ability to inhale entirely. Before it could engulf me, I had to close it off. Instead of feeling
too much, I made the choice to feel nothing.

‘Forsooth,’ I suddenly remembered, relieved that the last year’s toil had not been in vain. Then, ‘Verily sir, a mighty one.’
I lifted my head and strained to latch my mouth on to his ear, like I had read about. I bit hard.

‘Ouch,’ Din said.

I thrust myself forward and tilted the crown of my head towards the floor, and arched my back dramatically, but it was all
wrong. ‘Oh, oh, oh, sirrah.’ I struggled to remember a sentence from
The Lustful Turk
. Something about ‘a delicious delirium’. I stopped arching my back, and started to writhe around beneath him, then lifted
my head in search of his ear again. Our skulls clunked together, and our temples throbbed.

‘A tremulous shudder, an “Ah, me, where am I?” and two or three long sighs, followed by the critical, dying, “Oh, oh!” ’ That
was it. I tried all those, in turn.

Din pulled back, and for the first time I could see nature’s grand master-piece, only his seemed to be wilting. I had not
read of that, only of pillars, and engines, and skewers. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, perplexed.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Are you?’

‘Dora. Look at me.’

But I could not meet his eye. Oh, but the sham was more shameful than the real thing.

‘What is it? Have I misread you?’

‘No,’ I said quietly, then I sat up quickly, and hugged my knees into my chest, and sat there like a small curled thing, waiting
for the fear to pass. For I’d read of too many fantasies to feel anything other than fictitious myself right now.

‘I’m afraid.’

‘So am I.’

‘But not like I am.’ I couldn’t tell him of the waves of feeling inside me I had felt with my husband, after which Peter expressed
such revulsion of me that he never came near me again, except after vigorous scrubbing with carbolic and bicarbonate. I feared
that what I had experienced all those years ago was a cousin of the great explosions, those throbbing, Vesuvial orgasms that
I had encountered in close on a thousand erotic books since, which had told me more extraordinary stuff besides on how one
should expect to appear to one’s man in the throes of
firkytoodling
, or what you will.

But I think Din understood anyway. ‘You do not need to do this to yourself.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered back.

‘And don’t say sorry.’

But I was sorry; I deeply repented my behaviour.

‘Sorry.’

‘Let me help you,’ he said. He lay me back down. ‘Don’t move. You are not to move. You may only move when you can’t help but
move, but not before. If it takes for ever, so be it. If it happens now, so be it. But you are not to move until you want
to.’

‘I’m scared, Din. I’m not Sylvia.’

‘I am glad about that. Because I know where my heart is.’

And I did wait until the movement came over me, and then it was as involuntary as fainting, and infinitely more pleasurable.
I do not have a name for what we did; it was not the chaste embraces of popular novels, nor was it the tuneless organ-grinding
of Diprose’s catalogue of work. It was ferocious, and it was lyrical, and we did it, wordlessly and without name, without
‘verily’s or ‘sirrah’s or ‘forsooth’s, long into the afternoon, amongst the paper shavings and leather parings on the floor,
and I knew that I would never again be able to separate the smell of the bindery from the smell of him and what we did that
day.

‘Would that we could bottle this, and keep it for ever,’ I sighed, in his arms.

‘You would make a captive of love?’

‘No. Just that I am more used to safety than you, and prize it more greatly. If all we had in the world was a square of cloth,
you would stick a post up the middle, hoist sail, and ride the wide oceans a-whooping. What would I do? I would grab the edges,
tuck them in at the sides, and huddle down beneath it.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, kissing me and stirring me inside again. I wanted to tell him to stop, to never stop, to go
away, to stay for ever. ‘Why you, Mrs Dora Damage, you’re nothin’ but an outlaw, just like me.’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Oh, but I have seen you battlin’ bravely in that world out there.’

‘Only because I want to be safe. Safety is an unknown quantity to you.’

‘To me, yes, but I want it for my children, and my children’s children.’

‘And yet I believe you are all the better for disregarding it. I admire you, Din.’

‘No you don’t. You pity me.’

‘I do not. Well, not entirely, at least. And I’m learning not to, besides.’

‘Then I admire you your application to your lessons. You are an outlaw, but a highly educated one.’

I laughed. ‘You are talking about yourself.’

‘Face it, an’ embrace it, Dora. You’re a fighter. Only you just don’t know it. You even earn a livin’ from outside the law.’

‘No. I have only swapped one set of rules for another. And curiously enough, they’re set by the same people. I hope you never
meet Sir Jocelyn Knightley. I fear
he
considers himself an outlaw.’

‘I should relish the challenge. Becoming an outlaw is the best response to tyranny I know of. I shall consider him my brother.
I have heard you call him a libertine. What is that, other than someone who has been freed from slavery?’

‘You do him too well, Din,’ I snorted. ‘I am afraid he shall consider
you
a scientific curiosity.’

‘And what does he consider you?’

‘Please don’t ask, I beseech you,’ I said, knowing that the answer was quite simply, and quite probably more accurately than
I had realised, little more than a whore. ‘Spank me,’ I said instead, surprising myself as I heard the words come from my
mouth.

‘What?’

‘Spank me,’ I repeated. ‘Here.’ I stood up, without wondering for a moment whether I was presenting to him my best angle,
and seized the strop from the wall. ‘The leather side, not the emery cloth,’ I added, as I lay myself across his lap, although
this was no time to fear for my tender behind.

‘I don’t want to hurt you, Dora.’

‘Just give it to me. I want to know what it feels like.’

He patted the strop against my bottom, and I giggled.

‘Go on, harder,’ I said. He raised the strop higher in the air, then landed it against my skin.

‘Ouch,’ I shrieked, and thrust my pelvis into his lap.

‘Did I hurt you?’

‘Yes!’

‘I’m sorry.’

He rubbed the palm of his hand over my bottom, and kissed it gently.

‘Don’t be. I asked for it.’

‘You have a perfect bottom,’ he said tenderly. ‘Do you want me to hit it again?’

‘No,’ I said, wriggling myself around to kiss his face. I think my face must have been redder than my rear. It felt naughty,
but appropriate; it was in many ways what I needed, combining both sensation and punishment in the one act, answering my desire
and my guilt at once. I was a woman in mourning; I was betraying my husband, and deserved to suffer. I took the strop from
him, laid it on the floor next to us, and locked my limbs in his. ‘It’s just – it was in the books. I was curious.’

‘You have to pity the men,’ Din said gravely. ‘Why is it they think they’re bein’ dangerous lookin’ at a black man with a
white woman? Why is that more horrorsome than a fifty-year-old man with a ten-year-old child, or a woman with a goat? Cos
it’s seen to be the wrong way round; the wrong balance of power. White over black, man over woman, that’s the right way, ain’t
it? Black man, white woman, though, stirs it all up, causes bother.’

‘Are you saying they seek out sensation? They want the thrill of possibility?’

‘Right.’

‘Just like me with the strop.’

‘Just like. Cos
they
never lost their dignity,
they
know they’d want revenge if they’d been treated like us. They know what they’ve done to us, and they’re scared that if we
get a little power we’re gonna get some guns and come runnin’ after them.’

‘Which is precisely what you’ve said you want to do!’

‘Have to, not want to. I want to live in peace. Ain’t no such thing as a free revolution, Dora.’

‘Ain’t that the truth,’ I agreed. I was starting to realise our loving would have a heavy price, although it felt worth every
penny. What did Adam and Eve think of their punishment, having tasted the tree of knowledge? I could only remember the wrath
and indignation of the Almighty; we were not told whether His first minions felt it was worth it. Was I a white Eve with my
black Adam; or was he the black serpent hiding in the tree? I looked around at the bindery and became aware of a crawling
feeling across my skin, which sat uneasily with the warmth of his embrace. We had perpetrated a terrible sin; we had violated
every moral, social and religious taboo, yet my shame mixed curiously with a wondrous, golden sensation of glory, and I wondered
to myself how something so wrong could feel so good. Or was that, how could something that felt so good be so wrong?