Read Online Dark Places by Kate Grenville - Free Book Online Page A

sighed and breathed ‘Yes yes oh yes’ in my ear.
    â€˜Fleshpots!’ I exclaimed, like stout Cortez on Darien, as I felt her warm slime around me. ‘Fleshpots!’ Even the English language, that I had taken for granted like air all my life, was made vivid in this moment: now I knew what a fleshpot was, and how it felt to be within the warm walls of one, the word made sense as never before. I was joined at this moment to generations of men before me who had made the same discovery, and from now on I, too, could use the word knowing just what it signified, unlike the innocents, who used it carelessly, as if it were nothing more inflammatory than chair or table.
    Under my body, Valmai became puny, a person who took up hardly any space, a person whose voice was as insignificant as the rustling of leaves in a tree, a person who only existed as an extension of my own urges. She twisted under me, and gasped more loudly as my chest forced her down further into the bed, and the feeling of her bird-like framework of bones between my powerful hands made me a giant.
    When I took hold of both her wrists and pinioned her to the bed, she could do nothing but turn her head from side to side on the pillow and breathe heavily: her physical strength was in no way a match for mine, and I was aware that it was not beyond the bounds of the possible that I could squeeze her hard enough to make her breathing stop entirely.
    Now I knew what it was that fuelled the confidence of all the other men I had ever seen, striding and straddling and gesturing, booming out small remarks in loud voices, delivering themselves of opinions on this and that without a qualm of doubt: it was this, feeling a female body writhe like a skewered beetle under one’s own!
    I felt myself grow huge within Valmai, and I cried out at last to feel myself open like a flower slowly within her. In that long moment of amazement my blood swelled throughout every cell. My being expanded within the shell of Singer and filled all the space so that he and I were truly joined, and there was no hollowness left. When I was returned to myself and the consciousness of lying on the bed, sprawled beside Valmai, who was scratching her scalp with a loud rasping noise, the world and myself seemed for the moment insufferable. ‘Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,’ I found myself repeating in my mind. ‘Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.’ I watched Valmai get up and put some of her clothes back on: now that I was feeling so weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, the flaccid skin of her belly, and the quivering dimpled flesh of her thighs, seemed like so much dead meat.
    â€˜Come on dearie, George,’ Valmai said. ‘Come along, dear, there’s work to be done.’ She laughed a short laugh, and handed me my trousers, and although I would rather she had not, she watched while I dressed with clumsy fingers: buttons would not go into their holes, sleeves resisted hands being pushed down them. She watched, and helped, but in a way that did not encourage further intimacies. My body was now simply a problem of physics to her: how to get a hand down a tube of sleeve as quickly as possible.
    As I entered the other room I was conscious of being the focus of all the eyes: what sort of fist of it had Singer made, I felt them asking themselves. How glad I was to be able to look them all in the eye, and give Ogilvie a triumphant wink! I would have liked Valmai to demonstrate some sort of admiration, but she plumped herself down next to the other female. ‘Look at me blooming stocking, love,’ she said, ‘fresh on tonight and laddered to buggery, don’t know why I bother.’
    Ogilvie went over and ran his hand up and down her leg, making a show of inspecting the damage, and it was not long before Valmai was primping and smiling and calling Ogilvie dearie just as she had me; and not long after the door closed behind them for the second time