Taming the Beast Page 9

  ‘I’m helpless to tell you the truth. She’s just…’ Mike mimed casting a fishing rod and reeling it back in, ‘…got me hooked, my friend. I’m at her mercy. Whenever she wants she’ll reel me in and then I’ll do whatever the hell she tells me. And she knows it too, the sly bitch.’

  Jamie felt like vomiting. It really was inconvenient the way that Sarah made him want to throw up. ‘Do you feel bad about Jess?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Mike rubbed his forehead. ‘Kind of. I mean, Jess is a sweetheart, but Sarah, man. Fucking Sarah Clark! You don’t turn your back on an opportunity like that for anything.’

  ‘Got any smokes?’ Jamie said, and Mike handed him a pack. Jamie lit one, ignoring the immediate tightness in his chest.

  Mike lit himself a cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘So here’s what I wanted to tell you. Last night, at your place, we got so dirty, right in front of everyone. No one had a clue!’

  ‘At my place?’ Jamie’s face flushed. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Me and Sarah were going for it, right there at dinner.’

  Dinner. Jamie ran the tape over in his mind. Nothing had happened at dinner. Before dinner Sarah had kissed Jamie and flirted with Mike. After dinner, Shelley had driven Mike and Jess home and Sarah had… God! What was Mike talking about?

  ‘There I am, eating the delicious meal your lovely lady cooked up, and suddenly my pants are open and there’s a hand on my knob.’ Mike shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it. ‘There’s Sarah, chatting away about variable loans or some shit, and all the time she’s pulling me off under the table. I returned the favour though. When I licked my fingers after the meal, it wasn’t just the chicken I was lickin’ if you get what I mean.’

  ‘Sorry, I have to–’ Jamie bolted for the toilets and made it inside just in time to vomit up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and drunk in his entire life. After a couple of minutes, he stopped and rocked back on his heels to catch his breath. Then he remembered her saying I’ve never been so wet in my life, and his stomach heaved again.

  When Jamie was sixteen, he wanted nothing more than to wake up one morning and discover that he had magically become his brother. Brett was everything Jamie wasn’t. Strong and muscular, while Jamie was weak and prone to broken bones. Tanned and rugged, while Jamie was pale and freckled with mousy hair that stuck straight up no matter how much gunk he used in it. Brett was a star athlete, while Jamie had been excused from PE all his life because of his asthma. And Brett had girls falling over themselves to get to him. He knew how to talk to them without stuttering and staring at his feet, and what clever things to say to make them laugh and look up at him with starry eyes. The only way girls looked at Jamie was with pity. Sometimes they called him cute and such a nice guy, words that were the kiss of death for an Aussie bloke who was meant to be rough, tough, rugged.

  It was Brett who told Jamie about the secret life of Sarah Clark. He said it was time Jamie knew that his little friend was the best fuck in Sydney. He said it was pathetic the way Jamie mooned around like a lovesick puppy dog while Sarah was giving it to every bloke who looked at her twice. Brett confessed, with a wide grin, that he had personally got his end wet three times in one night with her. Sarah Clark was, he said, a wild thing. A totally uninhibited, sexy as hell, wild-thing. Didn’t go on with that talking, commitment, take me out to dinner crap that other girls ask for. She just wanted dick.

  Jamie refused to believe it at first. He knew Sarah better than anyone – she’d said so herself. So many nights she had sat on his bed and talked until her voice was croaky and his neck was stiff from looking up at her from his position on the floor. She told him about Nietzsche and William Blake. She told him about her affair with Mr Carr, about how her parents ignored her, about the way she never slept more than two hours without waking. All night she’d talk, wild eyed and wired and brilliant, making him feel like nothing he’d ever thought about before was important. It was never until the sunlight came streaming through the window that she would stop. Then she’d look around as though just noticing where she was, laugh in an embarrassed way and slink off into the breaking day to be home before her parents woke up.

  Surely she would’ve told him if she’d slept with his brother. And surely he was close enough to know if she really was sleeping around. Surely. But Brett had no reason to lie. Brett was, in fact, the only person who ever talked to Jamie on the level. He treated him like a man, unlike their parents who treated Jamie as though he was five-years-old and made of glass.

  Jamie asked around and found that he had spent the last couple of years with his head up his arse. Every bloke he broached the subject with knew about Sarah, and many of them knew about her from personal experience. Jamie got to thinking that it really wasn’t fair that he was missing out. Why were his balls permanently blue while she was off doing every bloke and his dog?

  His opportunity to correct the injustice came the following week when his parents went to Melbourne for the weekend. Brett, always the party animal, invited half the university over to get smashed. Jamie invited Sarah, and she laughed and told him he was the tenth person who’d asked her.

  She arrived late, alone and drunk. She was wearing perfume and lipstick and a skin tone skirt that kept riding up her thighs. Jamie steered her away from the salivating hordes and told her she looked beautiful. She said oh my, wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed her whole body up against his and began to sway to the music. Jamie stroked her hair and pressed the small of her back, then after a minute he dared to brush his sweaty palm over her backside. She said oh my again, and he said Sarah, I really… and then she kissed him hard on the lips and said Wanna go upstairs?

  Jamie’s only sexual experience to that point had been with a girl he’d met the previous summer when his family rented a holiday house at Pearl Beach. She was seventeen with spiky blonde hair, calves the size of his thighs and a tendency to snort when she laughed, which was often. Jamie didn’t like anything about her at all, but she wanted to practice having sex for when someone she liked came along, and Jamie thought that was a damn good idea. At the end of three weeks she shook his hand, told him he wasn’t too awful and wished him luck.

  What Jamie and Sarah did in his bedroom bore no resemblance to what he did with the girl at the holiday house. What he did with Sarah was so far removed from that dry, determined rutting that he was amazed it could be considered the same act at all. What he felt could only be described as bliss, and incredibly, Sarah seemed to feel the same way. She pressed her face into his chest and said who would have thought? And sixteen-year-old Jamie had thought that was that, but sixteen-year-old Jamie had been an idiot.

  And, as it turned out, so was twenty-two-year-old Jamie.

  While he was washing his face, it occurred to him that he should actually speak to Sarah rather than unquestioningly accept everything Mike had said. A phone call wouldn’t cut it; he needed to see her face.

  Her door was unlocked. He pushed it open and stepped inside, turning cold at the thought that anyone could push this door open and step inside. ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Bedroom.’

  She was sitting on the windowsill, smoking, a paperback opened across her knees. She looked small and forlorn, so much like the abused and abandoned child he knew her to be. He wanted so much to touch her, to be touched by her, to feel again the tiny weight of her hand on his cock. He wanted to be close enough to smell the smoke in her hair, to taste the sweat trickling down the back of her neck. But how could he touch her when she had not even turned to look at him, had not acknowledged his presence in the room at all? He leant against the wall, as close to her as he dared. Still she did not move except to lift her cigarette to her lips, inhale, lower her hand, exhale.

  ‘You shouldn’t leave the door unlocked.’

  ‘No, I probably shouldn’t.’ She blew smoke out the window.

  ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Anyone could walk in. You’
d be trapped.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Jesus, Sarah! Do you want to have your throat cut?’

  ‘Stop being such a fucking nana. Why are you here?’

  He had never wanted to hit a person so much in his life. He took a deep breath and plunged ahead. ‘What happened last night, Sarah?’

  ‘You don’t remember? You must have been drunker than I thought.’ She threw the cigarette butt out the window, and they both watched it sail down and land in the alley, still trailing smoke.

  ‘You’ll start a fire doing that. You should put it out first.’

  ‘Yeah, guess I should.’

  ‘You don’t think much about the consequences of your actions do you?’

  ‘I don’t think about the consequences of where I throw my ciggie butts, no.’

  ‘Must be nice to not care about anything or anyone else.’

  Sarah was quiet for a very long time. No matter how long it took, how sweaty and shaky and sick it made him, Jamie would not leave this room until she faced him. He watched her hands as she lit another cigarette. Her stubby little girl’s fingers topped with a serious young woman’s neat, rounded nails.

  He couldn’t help touching her, just resting his palm on the top of her arm. ‘Sarah? Please?’

  She looked up at him and her face was unutterably sad. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, touching a fingertip to his chin. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  Jamie steeled himself. ‘Was it no good?’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Was it that bad? Was I that bad?’

  She stood up, still holding his chin. For a second he thought she was going to kiss him. His stomach lurched. But no.

  ‘It was wonderful. But it shouldn’t have happened. You’re having a baby, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I know, it’s just–’

  ‘Shit, Jamie.’ Sarah stroked his face. ‘I’m such a selfish cow. I felt as though… it’s hard seeing what’s happening to your life. I needed to be with you, to be close to you. I didn’t think about what would happen afterwards, I just… Can you forgive me?’

  ‘Nothing to forgive,’ Jamie said, with bitter acid bubbling in his throat.

  Relief washed over her face. Or it could have been exhaustion. ‘I love you, you know that?’

  ‘Sure.’ And Mike? He couldn’t make himself say it. Her arms were around him, her head on his shoulder. He had her spine under his palm. How could he ask her if… ugh, he didn’t even want to think about it. But he knew he would think about nothing else unless he knew for sure.

  ‘Sarah? Um, I saw Mike this morning and he said–’

  ‘Mike. Oh dear.’ She held Jamie tighter. ‘He’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Sarah, no, please tell me you haven’t…’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But you’re–’

  Sarah broke out of the embrace. ‘Jamie, don’t.’

  She was too much. Just too fucking much. He started to cry, which he could tell pissed her off, but… God, she was too much. Fuck.

  ‘Go home, Jamie.’

  ‘Sarah, how can you–’

  ‘Go home.’

  8

  The last few months of the year were always busy for Sarah. There were final papers to hand in, exams to prepare and sit for, and as many extra hours at the steakhouse as she could handle. Her only relaxation was having sex with Mike, who turned up at her house every couple of nights whether she asked him to or not. She didn’t complain; he suited her. She didn’t have the time or energy to pick up men; Mike got into it, got her off, and got gone. The perfect man for the moment.

  Jamie, on the other hand, seemed determined to punish her for the huge mistake of fucking him. He spoke to her only if she called him, and even then he was cold and distant. When they saw each other in the company of others he was his old friendly self, but the minute they were alone together he found somewhere else to be. If she let herself think about it, she felt unbearably sad at the damage she had done to Jamie and at the damage he seemed determined to inflict upon the friendship. Fortunately, she had little time to think these days, and so the pain, although gut wrenching, was infrequent and fleeting.

  On Christmas Eve she went to the Leagues Club after work to find some young stallion to ride, but then she got talking to a bouncer named Bob who revealed that he volunteered to work right through the Christmas period because it was better than being alone. Sarah was flattened with empathy and self-disgust. She spent all night hanging in the doorway talking to him, ignoring the disfiguring acne that covered his face and thick neck. When he knocked off work at three o’clock on Christmas morning, Sarah gave him a blowjob in the front seat of his car and he cried.

  The restaurant was closed until the New Year, there was a month and a half until uni started again, and everybody she knew spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s with their families. She would have gone out clubbing but she was broke, and also, now that she had slowed down enough to notice it, remarkably tired. So she slept twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day, and missed Jamie, and wondered if she would ever get out of Sydney, and reread all of her books, which didn’t take that long because she only owned the twenty-three she had had when she moved out of home.

  And reading this way – with no deadline, no agenda – she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.

  When she read how Emma Bovary believed ‘she was entering into something marvellous where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium…’ Sarah remembered her own hopes of escaping her existence through sexual passion, and in her mind she saw Mr Carr throwing her across that dingy hotel room. She felt as though a layer of skin had been ripped from her body, and so pulled off her pyjama pants and fucked the corner of the hardcover book until she felt better.

  For light relief she read Huckleberry Finn but the image of the pubescent white boy and the rugged black slave, naked and drifting on their raft, had her on all fours, rubbing her book-battered clitoris with her palm. Then Donne’s Songs and Sonnets was so unbearably erotic she had to put it aside before she did herself real damage. Next, she chose Jane Eyre and got through comfortably until the last few pages, which made her squirm. If there was anything in the history of literature more erotic than the moment when Jane kisses Rochester’s blinded eyes, she had yet to come across it.

  Then while reading the scene in Richard III where Richard seduces the newly widowed Anne, Sarah became so frenzied she fell of the sofa, overturning the ashtray and hitting her head, hard, on the floorboards. As she sat amongst the scattered ash, rubbing her forehead, she wondered whether Jamie was right. Maybe her interest in sex was abnormal, her hunger excessive. Maybe falling off the furniture while reading Shakespeare was perverse. She read the passage over:

  Your beauty was the cause of that effect–

  Your beauty did haunt me in my sleep

  To undertake the death of all the world

  So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom.

  No, her reaction was entirely appropriate. Anyone who read that scene and was not aroused must be dead from the waist down. Still, she wished Jamie was around to contradict her. She wished he was around.

  New Year’s Eve also happened to be Sarah’s twenty-second birthday and the occasion of a party at Mike and Jess’ new place. Sarah would have skipped the party altogether and spent the night in the city with the rest of Sydney’s drunk and horny singles, but Jamie would be at the party and so she had to go. She would get him someplace he couldn’t get away from her, and she would make him be her friend again.

  But before she could think of a way to separate Jamie from the swollen thing at his side, Mike whisked Sarah upstairs and into the spare room. He had spent the last week with his family and was, he said, ‘about to pop.’ Sarah was going to tell
him that this was not her problem, but then he pushed her back on to the bed and tore her underpants right through the crotch, and she was about ready to pop herself.

  ‘Guess what happened at Jess’ parents’ place on Christmas Day?’ Mike said after they were done.

  Sarah was brushing her hair. She looked at him in the mirror and smiled. ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I met the lovely Jocelyn Clark.’ Mike came up behind her and kissed her neck. Sarah stared straight ahead. ‘Had a chat with her over lunch.’

  Sarah kept her face blank. She wondered how long it would take her to get the money together to disappear. Probably not long if she put her mind to it. She could go to London or France or New Zealand. Anywhere would do, as long as no one knew her.

  ‘How come you don’t see your mum anymore?’

  She smiled at his reflection. ‘I like your shirt. Blue suits you.’

  ‘Because I thought she was really nice. She asked about you.’

  ‘You should wear blue more often, it brings out your eyes.’

  ‘She looks a bit like you. You have her eyes and her chin. The nose must come from your dad. I didn’t get to meet him. He was working apparently.’

  ‘Did Jess buy it for you? She has good taste in clothes, I’ll say that much for her.’

  ‘He must be a really hard worker. Imagine going to work on Christmas Day! He’s an accountant or something isn’t he?’

  ‘An actuary. To the best of my knowledge he has never taken a single day off in his life. Maybe his wedding day, I’m not sure.’ Sarah stepped away from Mike. ‘If I ever find out you have been talking to my parents about me, that will be the end. Not just of this sleazy little affair, but of any contact between us at all.’

  Mike reached for her. ‘Sarah, they’re your parents, you–’

  ‘Stop!’ Sarah took several deep breaths, holding her arms out in front of her with the palms out. ‘If you ever want to even speak to me again, you will shut up about them immediately.’