Read Online The Pornographer by John McGahern - Free Book Online Page B

teachers, there’s a girl who works on the radio, a solicitor, an accountant, that kind of person. I’m afraid I don’t know much more about them.”
    “Aren’t you ever curious?”
    “Of course I am but I make sure to restrain myself. We meet on the stairs. Sometimes they run out of salt or sugar, mostly the girls, or they cut their hands washing up. It’s all very polite.”
    “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be long here till I’d know everybody. Do you ever wish you could go into another flat and sit and talk?”
    “No. Because I’d be afraid they’d come into mine. And bore hell out of me. There are times when you can’t stand even the best company in the world. Why I avoid getting involved with anybody here is that I know myself too well. This place suits me. If I got involved with someone and they turned out boring or bothersome. I’d not get out in time—because I can’t stand the tension that sets up—and I’d wind up having to do something violent like leaving the house altogether.”
    “You sound a very unsocial person,” she laughed, “but I don’t think you’re unsocial at all.”
    You’re the sort of person who needs a woman, I thought I saw behind the words; you’re the sort of person who’s ripe for plucking. And I’m the one for the job. “I don’t know what sort of person I am,” I said and took her in my arms.
    There was no need of caution any more. If the seed was going to its source it had already gone.
    The night was set for drinking. Whether we would drink more or not, the day was already useless and hungover. Pour the bottle out.
    And so we took our bodies till the sweet mystery of the wine turned to the glass of vinegar we flinched from lifting in the fuddled light. And we towelled our dank bodies and walked to the taxi rank at the bottom of Malahide Road.
    “When will we meet again?” she nuzzled close to me and shivered in the cold light.
    “In three days’ time, say.”
    “All that length of time?”
    “There’s this aunt I have to go in to see. And the next evening I have to bring stuff into the paper. That’s the two evenings in between gone.”
    “Come with me in the taxi, then.”
    “What’s the use?” I was reluctant.
    “I want you to,” she pressed her lips on mine.
    The house she lived in was in a tree-lined road, detached and prosperous, surrounded by gardens. She seemed to wantme to see it, even in this impoverished light, and I got out of the taxi and walked her to the gate.
    “I’ll see you in three days,” I said.
    “In three days,” she raised her lips a last time. There were no lights on in the house.
    She left off from fumbling in her handbag to wave to the taxi as it came out of a turn on the empty road. I waved back and saw her lift a key cautiously towards the lock. I watched to see if she’d take off her shoes but the taxi had taken me out of sight before the door opened.
    “I’ll get out anywhere here,” I said to the driver soon after we had left the road. I needed to walk.
       
    I ended the Majorcan holiday with a simple ringing of the changes Maloney had asked for: the Colonel with Mavis; Mavis and the bullfighter Carlos; the Colonel and Carlos’ sixteen-year-old girl friend Juanita —all four of them in delicious, unending revel—cunt and tongue and tit and rod and sperm. At the end of the story they all take a taxi together to the airport, addresses are exchanged, promises made. I had finished so early in the day that I decided to walk the five miles across the city to the hospital but it was still an hour too early when I got there. I bought an evening paper, read it over a hot whiskey in the pub closest to the hospital and got the bottle of brandy there too. It was night when I came out, starlit, with frost. I paused at how beautiful the chrysanthemums were—rust, yellow, pink—under the naked bulb hanging from the canvas of the flower stall in the cold-steel light. I knew she’d hardly like the flowers but on impulse