The Man was a teacher. He taught English as a Foreign Language. He was 37 years old, greying but handsome. His students liked him. Indeed, some of the teenage girls took a fancy to him. They would jostle for position in the classroom merely for the privilege of being close to him, and then sit giggling in the front of the class, their eyes shining as they writhed about on the hard chairs, legs crossed, pretending to pay attention to the lesson. And he was aware of this too, though at the time he had a complex relationship with his own good looks. He would look at the girls - there were two or three in particular - and feel the thrill of their budding beauty, of their simpering sexuality, always knowing, of course, that they were professionally untouchable.
The Woman was an artist, a sculptress. She carved heads from stone, primitive heads, sharply delineated in a series of lines and curves to show the monstrous depths of emotion and imagination. She would run her hands over the dusty surface of the stone (loving the feel of the stone, the sheer crudity and the weight of matter it represented) as if to feel the shape inside, immersing herself in the depths of the stone as if trying to find a cure for some unknown disease. Her head, too, was sharply delineated in a series of lines and curves as if carved from some heavy, dark stone. She was dark skinned, with dark hair and dark, dark eyes.
At the time of this story the Man and the Woman had been living together for some months. It had not been all that successful. There was something in the Man that made him distrustful of the Woman's motives; and something in the Woman, too, that made her insecure and demanding. They were not a good couple. Also, their relationship was built on passion not companionship, on need rather than love. Well there was love, of a sort: a kind of primeval love, dark, fraught, violent, obscene.
They liked to play games: games of submission and domination. Sometimes she was the dominant one, sometimes it was he. If he was dominant he would make her wear strange clothes and go parading about the streets. One day he ordered her to take her knickers off, and then took her shopping. They had to wander through the ordinary shops like an ordinary couple, picking up the ordinary things from the shelves. He liked the way she was so submissive at this moment, so vulnerable and in need of protection. Then he took on a haughty stance, remaining aloof and distant from her, which only made her want to draw all that closer to him. She would be wet, he knew; wet with longing for him, for his seed, for his sperm. He pushed her into an alleyway, right there in the town centre, and, lifting her skirt, put his finger to the dripping lips to make sure. He was right. She was waiting for him. They went home and, dropping the shopping hurriedly in the hall, made love on the stairs. They didn't have time to make it to the bedroom.
Another time he dressed her in only stockings and suspenders and high-heels, with a PVC mac over the top. They walked the streets of a dawn morning - they'd been taking speed the night before - and into a squalid newsagent's shop. The proprietor kept dirty books: indeed, you felt that the only reason he ran a newsagents was to keep up his supply of pornography. He was fat and greasy with a rasping breath. The very sound of his breath seemed to soil the air. He called the Man "sir" and rubbed his inky fingers together as the couple flicked through the lurid contents of some magazine. It was glossy and the gynaecological details dissolved in neon reflections. They bought it anyway, not because they wanted it, but because they knew they were exciting the shop owner, whose breath was coming in soft, short wheezes. They guessed he'd be masturbating as soon as they left, and this excited them even more.
Then the Man led her down an alleyway, where he made her bend down, and took her from behind. First he undid the buttons of the PVC coat, and they embraced against a splintering wooden fence. It was good to run his hands over her, there in that sordid back alley, to see her near-nakedness. Then he turned her around and, lifting up the PVC coat, revealed her backside. This was the position he liked best: her leaning forwards in high heels, so that her cheeks parted. Maybe he liked it because he knew it hurt her. He went in far too deep that way. But then, she liked to be hurt. He began to caress her buttocks, pressing the thumbs into the dark, sculpted flesh, bruising the flesh, running his thumbs down the line of her buttocks, brushing her anus on the way, to the top of her thighs, massaging between her thighs till she parted for him, already wet, already wanting him. This was his trick. Unzipping his trousers (he had no underpants on) and taking his penis in hand he began to stroke it lovingly along the line of her cunt letting the honeydew drops of his passion mingle with hers, sliding it gently back-and-forth like a muscular finger. Her lips would part more and more; she would be gobbling at him, sucking at him hungrily while he teased her with his tenderness. It was not tenderness she wanted in these moments, only passion. He would keep this going, on and on, while she moaned with hunger, writhing her buttocks around, pressing her arms against the dark, stained fence, in desperate need. It was part of his sadism that he wanted to keep her waiting. Only when she had been kept waiting long enough, only when she was literally begging for it, only when he himself wanted it, only then would he enter her, thrusting into her with a violent surge that would make her scream with pain and anger and sheer, unadulterated need: pushing, pushing, thrusting, panting, pressing home to the goal of his own swift advantage.
Or rather, he would have pressed home his advantage in this moment, had it not been for the fact that he looked up to see a middle aged woman in her curlers and nightie, staring out of her bedroom window at them. He stopped and tapped the Woman on the shoulders. She was still leaning against the fence, head down, still moaning, still engrossed in her own liquid senses.
"Look up," he said, and she did. The woman in the nightie was just staring at them, unable to believe what she was seeing. The Woman screamed with laughter and they ran away, buttoning up and zipping up as they ran, but leaving the dirty magazine they'd bought in Mrs Curler's garden as a souvenir.
