here is something I learned from the Devil: in your life you can stay safe. If you stay safe you may live longer. But your spirit will shrivel and your heart will become a tight, dry little fist. Hard and wizened. But you can live with a shrivelled spirit, lots do. Or you can take a difficult way and die sooner. Though until that happens your spirit will be pumping full of life and you will die with a heart full and plump, full and plump as my blood-filled cunny-bulb!
Ah, Mica, my little darly. Mica. You looked forward so very very hard with all your heart. You looked forward to Attainment, always just around the corner, always just coming up, Four Years to Attainment, Three, Two, One (ah one diddly um-pum – pumpum!), when we’ll all be standing together in our naked rows – chookies for the plucking, birdies for the fucking – and you so proud, but never for yourself, no, for you are so good good good. You are so proud of all this ‘Perfection’ we have.
She knows me so well, does Mica, so she does! She knows me well, my temper and intemperance, how I go all hot and cold and need to run run run … But how can a girlie run when everywhere she goes are the eyes?
The eyes of the mothers and the soldiers and the Men of all the trades, the Bearers and the Ganders and all the idiot boys. And the eyes of the rest of you stupid breeders, my sisters.
My sisters: I loved you all through my childhood and I love you still for I am still a part of you – though now apart. But if you knew, you with your trimmed quims and your sweet neat ways, if you only knew how to wish, wish for the ache, that delicious deep corrupting ache, then you would! But you do not know what I know. I know because they cocked it up, cocked up the operation we all have at Minus-Eleven from Attainment, all of us, Oblation, Sacricunt and Dutilove – Stone and Dirt and Bark – bark bark and howl at the moon! Oh my lovely butchers – you missed a bit! You missed a bit!
I have a man and his name is Asa, thank all the ancient gods, whoever you were before the Big Dual One came and knocked you sprawling so that all that’s left of you is bits of broken limb and shattered ribs laid about the world. My gods – are you still breathing your dewy humours somewhere? Just over the lip of the horizon, some horizon somewhere! Where? Where are you now? Gone back to the heart of the sun that birthed you? Or deep in the ocean, in the cold, clean, salty sea, surging a hundred miles from the greasy greedy waters that lap at the shallows of Big River, choked with the filth from our godowns and manufactories?
Asa is mine. He is named after one of those ancient famous kings or kooks that the boys always get named for – and what do we girls get? Bark, dirt, and rocks. Let me pick up one of those rocks and throw it, throw it and hit you right between the eyes, you big old sunny Son Twin Resolved, Child of GodFather, you big old manny Man from the pictures in the DoppelBook, you with your right foot forward and a flower in your hand.
I took Asa by the hand and I said, ‘Let’s go down where it’s dark dark dark,’ and he was scared, dead scared. And so was I, but I said, ‘We’re all goners – don’t you know we’ll all be dead soon? Death is by your side, your faithful friend and mine, always there to remind you to love what you have, take what you can …’ And my boy Asa found my secret. He found it because he looked, looked and felt with his clever fingers, touched me all over, all over, for a long long time, and tasted me, tasted me with his slippery lips, slippery dip, dip and sway, dip and sway, against his lips and his questing tongue so that I cried to him, ‘Never stop, I love it, I love you!’ and he, he said, ‘I love you, Pearl of All, my prize Pearl, my soft gleamer, light beamer in the dark …’
And we met again, and again, and only ever where it was dark dark dark, out of sight from the eyes that pry and stare and look up and down quivering on their stalks, all wavery and damp, then the body follows, drawn along behind, drawn by the stalk. The eyes, the stalks, the stalkers.
In the deep deep dark was where Asa and I lay together, his lean sweet hard body propped up on his hands looking down into my face, and his sly worm of a thing that can gather in on itself, then summon its nerve, become all hard, then slip into the secret place – yes, secret, my secret. None of those other horny little rodents got at it, and they won’t. Our secret. Oh, I opened up to him and he moved like an angel, bumping up against that curious part of me, that little cunny-bulby thing that was so soft and now so tight and round and hard, bumping up against his sweet cock, so we moved in unison … and then, evil jez that I am – what did I do? I made like the original sinner, like the Hag from the stories, the foul harpy in her swampy hovel with her suppurating sores and her fiery loins and her burden of guilt! I did, I did! I rolled him over and climbed onto his body, his eyes widened with the shock and delight – yes, delight! He’s not normal, no, he isn’t! He’s a Man among Men, anyone else’d be screaming for the guards, but not Asa. Asa was screaming for pleasure, only silently, and his eyes were on mine, and he held onto me like I was his only prayer, but silent we were, we were silent … moving together, a soundless storm, a noiseless sea … and here comes another silent breaker, and another …
MICA
5.
A week passed.
I was not summoned to the audience with the Brother Ministers, though I know Anapaite had been. And Opal. Opal!
My Plea had not been accepted. I had not been chosen. How I wept when my name was not called! I supposed MaOblat had informed on me, told Tomander from Instruction & Destruction that I was yet to bleed regularly, or worse – told some other Propergander that I had been found wanting in one or more of the virtues of CHOM: Compliance, Humility, Obedience, Modesty. And I have tried so hard. Tried, and failed, imPerfect and still-fallen. Oh, what is wrong with me? Why Opal and not me?
I could – and can – only comfort myself with the knowledge that there will be other Beseechings. I am young yet.
And Pearl was gone. She said she would not Beseech, and if she had not, then how could she have been chosen for a vessel? Yet nobody has seen her since.
More weeks passed and no word. I could not rest and my eyes grew pouchy, the skin around them blue; I could not perform my duties well, so distracted was I with wondering and fearing. I needed to know for sure. So that is how I came to plan and then to commit this criminal transgression.
And now the last of the day’s light filters through the rain and the thick glass of the dome over the Orchid Nursery, its grace unequalled by any other of the marvellous works of Man. The soft pink falls upon me from above: the knowing touch of my GodFather – Blessed Be His Cock-and-Muscle, alive-alive-oh-oh ever amen – caresses the skin of my hand, my face, my throat.
The walls of compacted earth reach to just above my head. They are the colour of the underside of very mature mushrooms, not quite brown for there is the faintest hint of now perished pink, and it is sweaty to the touch. To my right is another heavy door, behind which I assume lie the inseminated vessels of the gravidly successful womanidols.
The wall opposite me, about fifty paces from the entry, is broken into a series of curtained recesses. This area is the one I seek. I know each recess contains a sacred object upon a pedestal: fecund but as yet unimpregnated womanidols who share the Sacrament of Creation with those Men chosen to bestow upon them the Seed-Bearing Elixir of Life. Womanidols, who live out their allotted time in perpetual and glorious sacrifice. O, paragons of grace! Exemplars of femininity!
But inexplicably, here in this sacred citadel, I feel only dread. I know this feeling is heretical. I calm my breathing and
