My God, she thought, Koos has cheated me.
Vassi had been outside the door, she’d felt his flesh with her mind and she’d embraced it. But Koos hadn’t let him in, despite her explicit orders. Of all men, Vassi was to be allowed free access, Koos knew that. But he’d cheated her, the way they’d all cheated her except Vassi. With him (perhaps) it had been love.
She lay on the bed through the night, never sleeping. She seldom slept now for more than a few minutes: and only then with Koos watching her. She’d done herself harm in her sleep, mutilating herself without knowing it, waking up bleeding and screaming with every limb sprouting needles she’d made out of her own skin and muscle, like a flesh cactus.
It was dark again, she guessed, but it was difficult to be sure. In this heavily curtained, bare-bulb lit room, it was a perpetual day to the senses, perpetual night to the soul. She would lie, bed-sores on her back, on her buttocks, listening to the far sounds of the street, sometimes dozing for a while, sometimes eating from Koos’ hand, being washed, being toileted, being used.
A key turned in the lock. She strained from the mattress to see who it was. The door was opening. . . opening. . . opened.
Vassi. Oh God, it was Vassi at last, she could see him crossing the room towards her.
Let this not be another memory, she prayed, please let it be him this time: true and real.
“Jacqueline.”
He said the name of her flesh, the whole name.
“Jacqueline.” It was him.
Behind him, Koos stared between her legs, fascinated by the dance of her labia.
“Koo. . .” she said, trying to smile.
“I brought him,” he grinned at her, not looking away from her sex.
“A day,” she whispered. “I waited a day, Koos. You made me wait —”
“What’s a day to you?” he said, still grinning.
She didn’t need the pimp any longer, not that he knew that. In his innocence he thought Vassi was just another man she’d seduced along the way; to be drained and discarded like the others. Koos believed he would be needed tomorrow; that’s why he played this fatal game so artlessly.
“Lock the door,” she suggested to him. “Stay if you like.”
“Stay?” he said, leering. “You mean, and watch?”
He watched anyway. She knew he watched through that hole he had bored in the door; she could hear him pant sometimes. But this time, let him stay forever.
Carefully, he took the key from the outside of the door, closed it, slipped the key into the inside and locked it. Even as the lock clicked she killed him, before he could even turn round and look at her again. Nothing spectacular in the execution; she just reached into his pigeon chest and crushed his lungs. He slumped against the door and slid down, smearing his face across the wood.
Vassi didn’t even turn round to see him die; she was all he ever wanted to look at again.
He approached the mattress, crouched, and began to untie her ankles. The skin was chafed, the rope scabby with old blood. He worked at the knots systematically, finding a calm he thought he’d lost, a simple contentment in being here at the end, unable to go back, and knowing that the path ahead was deep in her.
When her ankles were free, he began on her wrists, interrupting her view of the ceiling as he bent over her. His voice was soft.
“Why did you let him do this to you?”
“I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“To move; even to live. Every day, agony.”
“Yes.”
He understood so well that total incapacity to exist.
She felt him at her side, undressing, then laying a kiss on the sallow skin of the stomach of the body she occupied. It was marked with her workings; the skin had been stretched beyond its tolerance and was permanently criss-crossed.
He lay down beside her, and the feel of his body against hers was not unpleasant.
She touched his head. Her joints were stiff, the movements painful, but she wanted to draw his face up to hers. He came, smiling, into her sight, and they exchanged kisses.