Walking with Ghosts

of these two physical bodies. Your laugh is an agony. A quick agony that inserts itself into the ecstasy of the moment.
    Smiley laughs as well, he laughs and growls again from the back of his throat. He pulls apart the folds of your dress and moves down your body. You groan and sigh in response to his movements. You quickly brush unwanted tears from your face and lift his sweater over his head, unknot the cravat, and pick at the buttons on his shirt.
    It is a game, Dora, and you enter into it like a child, like a pup in spring sunlight. Smiley’s body is smooth, and brown, and warm. The texture of his skin ripples beneath your fingers and you discover the spastic quickness of your movements as the heart in your breast heaves and throbs with an ever faster beat.
    Smiley tantalizes. He shows you where he will go, and then recedes, only to advance more slowly on his target. You play the same game, quick to notice every shade, every nuance of pain or pleasure in a stream of breath or half arrested movement. His finger catches the elastic at your waist and releases it. He moves over your thighs and takes your foot in his hands, holding it close to his cheek, brushing the surface of your skin with the tip of his tongue. In a moment he is traversing your thighs again, the heel of his hand grazing the mons Veneris, and then onwards to circle your erect nipples, your lips, your ears, your eyes.
    It is a game, Dora. A crazy merry-go-round in which your clothes and your emotions are flung away. The chaos of your consciousness is streamed, strained to a thin red line on which you are shunted and chuffed along, relentlessly, inevitably, to orgasm.
    Your teeth ring. Your eyes spin inside your head. Your arms thresh the pillows. A furred, animal rattle leaks from the folds of your throat. Below, somewhere deep below in you, a quake turns everything placid and still into tumultuous falls, which gush relentlessly downwards. You are a river, Dora. A river rushing, a river roaring towards oblivion.
    Subsiding now, quickly, into trickles. A rushing upwards, back into your head. Smiley, smiling. His tongue hanging out like a dog. Sunlight, pale, slanting into the room. Somewhere, far, far away, a car’s horn. Liquidation. The word, liquidation, like a mantra in your brain.
    Smiley says it was ‘Super’, and you laugh a laugh you have not heard yourself laugh ever. A laugh so earthly, so erotic, that the falls begin again and you avert your face and watch your knuckles turn white gripping the whiteness of the sheets.
    Has anyone ever been so grateful? In the history of human copulation, Dora, has anyone ever been so grateful as you were that day? Dressing, you move over to Smiley and nuzzle into his neck. You tell him how wonderful it has been, that it has never been as wonderful before. That you never dreamed it could be like that. Smiley smiles in his deferential way, a smile that disclaims all responsibility for your happiness, your gratitude. He has a tutorial which begins in precisely twenty-seven minutes.
    ‘I think it would be politic to leave separately,’ he says, standing by the door. ‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’
    After he leaves, you sit on the edge of the bed and count to two hundred and fifty, then you walk down the plushly carpeted staircase and out through the swing doors. It is getting late. You will have to rush to prepare food for Billy and Diana.
     

14
     
    Diana asked him: ‘Is she OK?’
    ‘She is today,’ Sam said, his face creased into a smile. ‘When she’s like this I think she could live for ever.’
    ‘Really?’
    There was an edge to Diana’s voice. Incredulity.
    Sam turned to her and let his smile drift away. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Do I look like a dreamer to you?’
    ‘Well, yes, Sam, you do. You look like a guy who’s been raging against reality all his life.’
    ‘All right. Point taken. But I know what’s happening here, Diana. To me, to Dora, to all of us. She’s gonna die. And in some ways it’ll be a relief when she does. But at the same time, when she’s gone nothing’ll ever be the same again. I’m looking for a miracle; and even while I’m looking for it I know it’s not going to happen. But in these intervals, when she’s not in pain, when her eyes sparkle, I let myself be carried away. I let myself be happy, for myself, and for Dora. I’m not fooling myself. I know reality’ll come booling along tomorrow, or the next day, or even five