The Pure

Under the orange light from the streetlamps, she looked different. Her hair wasn’t as good as it had looked in the club, she had a few spots on her cheeks, and she wasn’t slim at all. She was bordering on plump, and that inflamed him. She was visceral. She waited while he finished his cigarette, then they got into a cab.
    ‘Give the driver your address,’ he said. ‘We’re going to your place.’ On the way he started to kiss her, which she accepted unhesitatingly, and then he began to knead her breast, pushing himself against her thigh, smelling her. She made not a sound, accepting everything, instigating nothing. He no longer cared where he was, or what he was doing, or to whom. It was just him, the taxi, and a girl; nobody to see or hear him.
    By the time they arrived at her house, a long, grey dawn was beginning to break, fat with moisture. Uzi paid the driver and followed her to the door. He didn’t know where they were, he hadn’t been paying attention. He felt intoxicated, reckless. She fumbled with her keys in the lock.
    ‘I have night-blindness,’ she said, ‘sorry.’ Unusual phrase, he thought. In a strange way, it moved him. And then they were in, through a brief catacomb of hallways. She was shushing him; he had his hand on her hip, he wouldn’t take it off. His other hand was straying unconsciously to the empty space where his weapon used to be.
    She led him into a studio flat, incredibly neat, with a faint smell of plastic, like a toyshop. She offered him a drink but already he was on her. He pushed her to her knees, pressed her face into his crotch. He had a feeling like clouds of insects were being released from his brain, and he gasped and looked up at the ceiling. She made no sound, just knelt there, face in his crotch, not moving. Her phone was still in her hand. He pulled off his shirt and fell awkwardly on the floor, pulling her on top of him. The bed seemed untouchable, so neat, he couldn’t do it. He rolled over, trapping her beneath his body. He wanted her to moan, to make a sound, to respond to him. But she did not; she simply accepted him, whatever he did, and it made him want to fuck her desperately. One of her hands slid over his shoulder, and she did not flinch when she felt the cyst on the bridge of the muscle. He clawed off his jeans but before he could penetrate her he came, and they lay side-by-side on the floor, the white mess strung over them both. For a while there was silence as the dawn began to hum outside.
    He thought about a battle from the Lebanon campaign. His unit had been staging a counter-attack. As they advanced he had felt so strong, part of a single massive being made up of air support, artillery, tanks, infantry units. Invincible. Together they had gone forward, firing like madmen, scattering the enemy, reducing them to the occasional flash of machine-gunfire here, a cluster of isolated silhouettes there, a solitary truck trying to turn back. But then – suddenly – at a certain indefinable moment, the tables had turned. He had looked around and found that he was alone. His comrades, his air support, were nowhere to be seen; his artillery was nothing but a distant thudding. And all around him swarmed the enemy. The flashes of machine-gunfire had become unified, coordinated, and figures with RPGs were materialising everywhere. He had stumbled backwards, firing as he retreated, ducking to protect his head, his eyes, his jaw, as bullets whined past him, kicked up the ground beneath his feet. On his own, disorientated, dislocated from his system of support. No comrades, no back-up, no security. This was how he felt now, with a girl he didn’t know, in a flat somewhere in London.
    ‘Let’s get into bed,’ she said quietly.
    ‘I’m fine here.’
    He looked at her, this woman from another world, this person he did not know, her breasts splayed and her pubic hair a dark tangle against his leg. He wondered who her parents were, if she had siblings. He wondered how her life would end. Her fringe was at all angles, she looked ridiculous. Her hand was cupped over his belly, and like this she fell asleep.
    When her breath was deep and rasping, Uzi got silently to his feet. He felt sorry. He went into the bathroom and washed among the unfamiliar toiletries, all covered in Hungarian script. The toyshop smell was stronger in here, perhaps it was shampoo or something. For a long time he looked at himself in the mirror, his grizzled, worry-furrowed face with its