and a fan. She left again and came back with a collection of boxes under her arm. There were clearly more than she could manage and so she had to stand at an awkward angle, and keep shifting them about to stop them from falling. I made no attempt to help her, I felt like my feet had sunk into concrete.
She made a little pile out of the boxes, constantly shifting them and rearranging the order in which they were placed. She was muttering under her breath, and seemed oblivious of my existence. When the boxes were ordered she placed the fan on top of them .
‘Come stand above it,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Yes, above it. And hold your dress down. Like Marilyn Monroe.’
‘OK,’ I said, and did as she asked.
She leant down and turned the fan on, adjusting it to its strongest output. It blew straight up my skirt and the cold air caused the sensitive skin on my balls to harden and the penis to curl up a little.
‘Yes, yes!’ she kept saying as she moved around the room. As I got used to it, I started enjoying the freedom of wearing no underwear, I even began to fancy the tickle of air against my scrotum. All the little hairs on my balls stood up and an involuntary smile made its way across my face. Yes, I do believe I was the happiest I’d been in ages.
But after we’d finished taking the pictures and I had changed back into my clothes I started getting nervous again.
‘I have dinner,’ I said.
‘Oh. I was going to. But you must come again. To see the pictures. Alright.’
‘Sure. Yeah. I’ll come.’
* * *
There was something about the way I’d felt standing above the fan, my feet had melted away, my balls felt free and I couldn’t help associating this freedom with her. I wanted more. And so, when she called me again and invited me back, I agreed, honestly.
Her property was quite high up the mountain, and because her flat was on the corner of the block from where I parked, I was able to see right down the steep road to the ocean. It was early evening, a Friday, and the sounds of the bustling Sea Point centre below came drifting up the valley. The sky was almost black but still had traces of blue and I was feeling a little cold, but in high spirits. On the inside of her security gate someone had stuck a note written in large black permanent letters: MAKE SURE GATE IS PROPERLY CLOSED. And below that: FOR YOUR OWN PROTECTION.
Below the notice a newspaper article had been fastened to the fence. The caption read: SEAPOINT WOMAN MURDERED IN FLAT. I skimmed the article, but didn’t pay much attention to the details. Such sensationalist bullshit had long since lost its effect on me.
I walked up the steps and rang Victoria’s doorbell.
She opened and hugged me. I put my arms around her body and could feel her ribs through the thin T-shirt, her thin flesh. I could smell the soapy clean deodorant scent. She seemed to favour subtle perfumes to scent her body. As she stepped away from me, she kept her hands extended: they were still wrapped in the purple gloves and felt smooth between my fingers. She smiled.
‘Why is that article on the gate?’ I asked her.
‘It’s just so – well you should be anyway, all the time – but it’s just so that people are careful, and lock, and that sort of thing,’ she said while closing the door and pulling the security latch into place.
‘Would you like?’ She pointed toward the green leather couch in the corner of her shoebox-shaped yellow lounge. I was feeling much more relaxed than on my first visit. The first time I’d been so preoccupied with hiding my feet that I’d barely taken in the surroundings. I noticed now that there were a number of large, framed pictures hanging on her walls. One of a naked black man, solid build, leaning against a stripper’s pole, another of a young girl in a business suit, holding a cellphone in her hand.
I sat down.
There was incense burning in the room, I saw the packet resting on the windowsill, it was opium-scented, and so I guessed – although I did not know for certain – the room now smelt like an opium den. I stood up and looked out the window, and was able to see the narrow side road where I’d parked my car. Some workers were making their way down the street, dressed in blue overalls and shouting loudly in a language I didn’t understand.
I sat down again, and she came in with a large brown envelope in her hands and a bottle of wine tucked under her armpit.
‘I’ll just quickly get the glasses,’ she said, then scampered out the room after dumping the contents of her hands next to a fruit bowl in the centre of the glass table in the centre of her lounge.
‘Would you like to see them – the photos, that is?’ she asked as she came back in with a glass in either hand.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She poured us each a glass of red wine, then sat down next to me on the couch, not close though, perhaps half a metre. I couldn’t smell her.
She took them out of the envelope and handed them to me.
‘They are small, well smaller than they will be when I blow the nice ones up. We can decide together.’
I flipped through them. There was Byron, holding his leather skins down against his legs as the wind blew up his skirt, and there was Byron running his fingers through his hair. But of course what I looked for was not Byron’s skins or his hair or his hands. Of course what I looked for was his feet. They were there, of course. I could not say that the size difference wasn’t noticeable, it was. But it was pleasing to the eye. The right was larger, the left smaller, but it looked somehow as if the feet belonged to two separate stages of development, as if the right belonged to the present, and the left to the past: to Byron the child. It looked as if the size difference was a deliberate artistic decision, instead of a subject deformity. She hadn’t violated the sacred, prenuptial understanding: the foot was there, and fine, and normal.
So we spoke, and she told me about the project, and how her father owned an art gallery, and how she was going to have her own exhibition with a collection of photographs, some of me, and some of the subjects on the wall – she pointed with her hand – and some that she had yet to take.
‘Do you like them?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She shifted her weight slightly on the couch, and for the first time, I could see, beneath the thin material of her white T-shirt, that she wasn’t wearing a bra. To be sure, her breasts were not large, but now from the angle at which she was sitting, and something that the light was doing, I was able to see her pink nipples against the pale top. I felt as if I were being rude to watch, to stare, when I had not been invited; but then I noticed that she was turning herself toward me, inflating her chest slightly, directing my attention to the exact spot that I wished my attention to be directed toward. She was wriggling her butt cheeks slowly on the couch as she spoke, and she laughed a little, and one of the strands of brown hair fell forward, and she tucked it back with her purple-gloved hands.
‘I need the bathroom,’ she said, and left the room. It was obvious where this rendezvous of ours was headed. I wondered at which point she’d decided that I was to be her lover. Or perhaps she hadn’t decided this yet. Perhaps she never would. Maybe I’d gotten the wrong end of the stick. I considered
