Blood and Arrows and Other Stories Read online

  I shrugged. I just wanted his hands on me again, but he turned away, sitting on the stool beside the chair and pulling his tray of implements towards him.

  “First the arrow,” he said. “Then…”

  I let the ‘then’ console me as he slid some slick gel onto his hand and then on my ribs. “You’ll have to hold up your breast,” he said, smiling, and then bent his head to suck gently on my nipple as I lifted it towards him.

  My head fell back and I closed my eyes.

  The next thing I knew was the wasp-like buzzing of the tattoo gun. I jumped, and his mouth tightened around my breast, then drew away, leaving a sensation of complete abandonment.

  The pain wasn’t bad, and he worked really fast. I was still wondering what the hell I thought I was doing when he lifted the gun away from my body.

  “Done,” he said.

  I opened my eyes. He was holding out a round mirror with a handle. I took it from him and used it to look at what he’d done to me.

  A tiny yellow arrow, very ornate, as if it had strayed from an ancient map to my body. It was faintly ridged as the skin beneath it swelled to take up the ink and a bead of blood, my blood, hung from its tip. It was beautiful.

  I grinned, catching sight of my own pleased smile in the mirror as I handed it back to him.

  “Now…” he said, and slid the mirror between my wide-spread legs, pulling my panties to one side so that by looking down I could see the mirror beneath me and my own dark cleft with his pale fingers vanishing inside. I arched again, letting him deeply inside me, and we both watched in the mirror as he thrust into me, his fingers as straight as an arrow, until I came.

  Then he kissed me again, gently and with what I knew was finality.

  “How much do I owe you?” I asked as I climbed from the chair and adjusted my underwear.

  “Nothing,’ he said, licking his fingers to catch every drop of my juice. “You’ve paid me in full.”

  I never went back to his shop. Why would I? I’d been given the perfect Valentine—you don’t spoil that by trying to work out who it’s from.

  Lapis Lazuli

  The day’s first customers were a pair of forty-something women, sisters from the look of them, one heading for the airport after a visit—you can always tell out-of-towners by their clothes. I was still pinning on my ‘Caroline’ badge when they walked in. Nobody calls me Caroline but it’s company policy to have full names on badges—I’m Carrie to my friends,

  I made their skinny macchiatos and half-listened in to them as I continued setting the counter up for the commuter rush.

  “It was lovely to see you,” said the one with the city clothes. “But it will be nice to have the place to ourselves again.”

  Out-of-town sister scowled. “I didn’t realise I was such a bad guest.”

  “Honey, you’re not. But tonight, me and Tom … well, we want our privacy.” Town-sister played with a chunky lapis lazuli and silver ring on a chain around her neck. She looked good for her age, and happy with it.

  Out-of-town smiled. “After six years, are you two still romping?”

  “Six years last month and still spending as much time in bed as out of it. Look what he gave me for our anniversary.” Town sister held out the ring.

  “Very … pretty.”

  I could tell out-of-town was as unimpressed as me. Cheap gift or what?

  “The chain’s platinum,” said townie, looking smug. “But the ring … now that’s the best gift I’ve ever had.”

  She so wanted her sister to ask why, and I so wanted to hear the answer, that I nearly asked her myself.

  “Why?” said out-of-town.

  “Well …” town-girl leaned over the table and I had to strain my ears to hear. “I wouldn’t tell anybody else this, but I’ve always told you everything … I like a little pain with my pleasure. Know what I mean?”

  Out-of-town looked puzzled, but I knew what she meant, did I ever!

  “You know!” Town-sister blushed. “A little slap, a little bite, something to push you over the edge into …” She put her hand on her chest, fingers splayed, and threw her head back, panting. It was a pretty good impression of orgasm I’ll admit – very When Harry Met Sally. Now her sister blushed and laughed.

  Town sister continued, “Well Tom doesn’t like to hurt me, but he sure likes to make me happy, that kind of happy. So this ring, see, with all its bumps and lumps? Well when I wear it around my neck, Tom knows that the same evening I’m going to slide it onto his finger and he’s going to press it against my …” she paused and lowered her voice even more. “… my love button, when we make love.”

  Love button! It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. Did people still talk like that? But I looked at that ring, with its deep blue knobbly surface and imagined how cold it must be, and how hard, and my knees became so weak I had to hang on to the counter.

  The sisters left, chatting and laughing, and the morning coffee addicts began to roll in, but I didn’t forget what I’d heard.

  That weekend I took Doug shopping at the Flea Market.

  “What are we doing here, Carrie?” he asked, looking at the stalls. But I’d already seen what I wanted on a table laden with semi-precious stones and costume jewellery. A big ring, with a greeny-grey, nubby, softly-contoured stone that the seller told me was moss agate. It fit Doug’s middle finger perfectly.

  “I’m not wearing this!” he protested, but I paid for it anyway.

  That night I showed him how to push the ring against my clit as I rode him. I like a little pain with my pleasure too, quite a lot of pain in fact, and while Doug’s perfect in many ways, he’s never confident about hurting me enough. With the ring though, I could press myself down onto it, feeling its irregular shape grind and bruise my most sensitive flesh, feeling its cold hardness take on my heat and it hurt indescribably, beautifully, perfectly. I pulled my knees close into Doug’s ribs and bent down over him, forcing the pain into all the right places as he thrust and moaned underneath me, filling me with the pleasure he always knew how to give me. I kissed him deeply, pushing my tongue into his mouth as I pushed the ring into my clit, feeling his soft lips giving way beneath me as my soft flesh gave way to the harsh discipline of the ring. I came, panting, almost crying, as Doug put his hands either side of my head and pulled my hair – hard. Doug knows what I like, even if he doesn’t really understand why.

  When I’d got my breath back, I slipped the ring from Doug’s finger. I washed it and slid it onto a leather thing that I hung from the bedpost – no platinum chain for me!

  “See Doug,” I said. “When you see me wearing the ring around my neck, you know what you’re going to be doing that evening, don’t you?”

  He grinned at me, rolled over, and fell asleep. But when I woke up the next morning, the necklace was gone and in its place was a post-it saying ‘Who said you were the only one who could wear it? Guess what you’re going to be getting tonight!’

  The Meaning of Words

  Russians are turning up everywhere in my town. Some of them are actually Poles and it’s not good to confuse the two. Whichever they may be, they have become ubiquitous, from medieval French: ubiquité—to turn up everywhere.

  This doesn’t really matter to me. They don’t turn up by my desk, demanding to know the etymology of a word. Nobody does.

  Still, on days when I work late, walking home at dusk, I see them. Blonde women with harsh faces and bodies that make bargains with the night. Blond men with distant eyes and an expectation of trouble ahead. And I see the one who has got under my skin.

  Stanislav. Stash, they call him. He works as a bouncer. Before Stash, there never used to be early queues outside the local nightclub, but there are now—women, all wanting the same thing. They come prepared too. As they giggle and flirt with him, they moved their eyes meani
ngfully to the point where they have hidden their weapon: cleavage, thigh, back pocket. And Stanislav—I cannot think of him as Stash—so tall, so blond, so serious, runs his big hands over their bodies and recovers the steel tail-combs and disposable razors they have hidden for him. Nothing really dangerous, because then he’d have to call the police, but nothing that simply wastes his time, because then he might ban the woman and she’d never feel his fingers roaming over her again. It is a charade, from the Provencal French: charrada—a long talk, or chatter.

  Stanislav means Glory. I cannot think of him as “Stash” a verb meaning to conceal or hide, dating from 1797, criminal argot, possibly an amalgam of stow and cache. It’s an etymologist’s habit, this dissection of words, examination of meanings unknown to the bearer or user of the word. And Stanislav never looks at me, the mousy woman from the university English department. He doesn’t even know I exist.

  But he will.

  The letters went out this week, to every Slavic name on the electoral roll, inviting them to take part in a survey into name distribution. I can’t guess which of them is Stanislav, he may not even be on the roll, but if he doesn’t turn up as a result of getting a letter I’ll have an excuse to go and talk to him, push through those squawking perfumed women and invite him to contribute to my research.

  As the reply slips arrive, I sort them into piles. Families and married men don’t really interest me. I know Stanislav is single because the women tease him about his non-existent girlfriend. Each single man who replies is given an appointment time with a family or couple on either side. That way, if one of them turns out to be Stanislav, I can extend his time, cutting short the subsequent interview.

  In the first week, none of the men is Stanislav. In the second week, none of the men is Stanislav. By that Thursday, I am preparing myself to approach him, but I decide to give it until the following Tuesday, when the nightclub is at its quietest, before asking him to take part. And on the Friday afternoon, at four o’clock, Stanislav appears.

  There are two reasons I’m surprised. The first is that he’s not in the black bouncer uniform I’m used to. Instead he wears pointy-toed snakeskin boots, faded jeans and a brown leather jacket buttoned to the neck. He looks like Moscow Mafia. The second reason is that the name on my list is Isidor Maslov. He sits. I stare. He shifts in his seat, releasing a wave of aromas—cigarette smoke, rye bread, masculinity—that free me from my stupor, by tipping me into lust. It manifests, from the Latin: manifestus—clearly revealed, caught in the act, plainly apprehensible, clear, evident, as a wave of heat from between my thighs to the hollow of my neck, where it burns as a blush, a rosy fire around my throat that makes my voice crackle like a flame when I ask his name.

  “Isidor Stanislav Maslov.”

  “Interesting,” I say, ignoring the urge to lean across my desk and unbutton his jacket. His hair is longer than that of many Russians, and flops into his eyes. I want to push my fingers into it and guide his head to my breasts. “People must try to give you things all the time.”

  He blinks, a sudden constellation of white lashes, and then frowns.

  “Excuse?”

  I’m thrilled even further by his inarticulate nature. We don’t share a language—anything we do together will be pure, instinctive, unsullied by the transactions of grammar or any lingua franca. Or perhaps I’m fooling myself.

  “Your names, they combine to mean ‘the one who is offered many gifts,’” I say, smiling at him. It’s not true. I’ve no idea what his names mean, but I’ve always known what I would say at this moment, if it should ever come.

  Just thinking that word “come” makes me shiver, the fire increasing its temperature to furnace proportions—licking up my neck and caressing the underside of my jaw with fiery insinuations.

  “Of course you don’t take them, the things you’re offered.” He’s still looking confused as I stand up, walk to the door and turn the key. “You always refuse.”

  I’ve watched. I’ve seen how those women push their breasts and buttocks into his hands, and how he never slows, or hesitates, staring into the middle distance even when what’s in front of him is a barely restrained cleavage, vibrating with lust as its owner tries to entice him.

  Now he nods slowly. “This is true,” he says.

  “My name is Isabelle Anne Verland.” I walk towards him, until I am standing over him as he twists uncomfortably on the too small chair.

  I lean over him and smell leather, tea, cigarettes and, underneath it all, the smell of male flesh washed in cold water and plain soap. Stanislav stares up at me.

  “I offer you no gift,” I say, slipping off my blazer and dropping it to the floor. “Instead I set you a challenge.”

  His eyes are round and surprised but his mouth has quirked to one side. Stanislav likes a challenge, a proper challenge, not the silly game of hide and seek that the women outside the nightclub play.

  “I challenge you to make me come.” I wonder if he will understand my colloquialism, but I needn’t have worried; it seems he’s familiar with the phraseology and no wonder—who knows what those women whisper to him as he pats them down?

  “And do you give me a gift if I do?” His voice is remote, as if carried from his icy northern home.

  I nod. “I give you the gift of setting me a challenge.”

  He thinks it over, slowly. Stanislav is not the type to rush into things. Finally he nods, stands, takes off his jacket, lays it over the back of the chair, smoothing its shoulders out as though it’s one of the women he must search. He picks me up by the waist, as easily as I would lift a vase of flowers, and sits me on the edge of my desk. The heat runs through me like fire, pouring down my arms and into the palms of my hands so when I press them against his flat chest I expect to see steam rise from his shirt. I expect him to separate my legs, but instead he takes my ankles in one of his big hands and lifts them so that I tip up, and back, up and back… until I am lying on my back, with my ankles high above my head, which is hanging down so that my neatly-pinned bun is brushing the seat of my chair, on the other side of the desk.

  I feel the index finger of his free hand hooking itself into the crotch of my knickers and then, with a short grunt, he rips my underwear right off my body. It stings! The snapping of the cotton cloth on each hip is like a rope burn. I gasp and Stanislav leans over to peer at me. His eyes, so pale, so distant, have a tiny icy gleam to them—he wants to savour my reaction.

  Then his fingers move to my skirt and I realise that he’s quite prepared to rip that apart too and start wriggling my way out of it. I don’t get such a fantastic salary that I can afford to have my suits torn off me, even by Stanislav. I kick the skirt to the floor and pull the pins and bands from my hair. He almost smiles as he lifts its coppery length between his fingers.

  “Warm,” he says. I don’t know if he means the colour or that my hair is hot, although if it’s half as warm as my skin, it’s probably burning his fingers.

  I don’t know what I am to expect. My mind has developed every possible scenario that nature would allow me and Stanislav to explore, from oral sex to exhibitionism, but I don’t really know what Stanislav is capable of, or interested in. Perhaps he’s just a pump-and-jump-ship kind of guy, or maybe he can only perform when he’s being beaten with birch twigs—it’s possible that he’s a masochist, although I think that’s unlikely—or perhaps he has a fetish about rubber, or rhubarb, or rum. It turns out that Stanislav is simply a quiet, competent man. A large, quiet, competent man. A large, quiet, competent man who doesn’t like to lose a challenge.

  He continues as he has begun, now that he has got my full attention. He spreads my hair out across the desk, then spreads me out too, parting my legs, pushing my knees up and out so that I am as exposed as a impaled butterfly, impaled from the Latin where in = in and pallus = pole, which is a good omen, although, as yet, I am not impaled on
anything.

  Stanislav smiles. He presses down on me, lowering his clothed body onto my semi-naked one, so I feel his weight pressing me into the desk. My bones are crushed between him and its old oak surface. When I inhale, I am breathing him in, when I exhale I am breathing him out. I hear something close to my ear. It is Stanislav laughing gently.

  “Are you ready?” he asks.

  Only then do I understand that, for him, this has all been simply preparation. While I feel stripped, splayed, already invaded, Stanislav has not even begun on the challenge I set him. And, now that it is too late, I wonder if I am equal to the challenge myself.

  But Stanislav has stopped laughing and steps away for a second, removing his clothes with the economy of a man used to dressing and undressing in the dark. The next thing I know is a change in the quality of the light and he has moved to stand behind me, between the desk and the small second-floor window that lights it. There is a strange coolness on my wrists and when I tilt my head to see why, Stanislav has already bound my hands to the corner of the desk with sticky tape. I’m impressed by his resourcefulness, but frightened by my situation. What have I done?

  I wonder whether to resist when I feel his hands on my ankles, but the tape around my wrists is unbreakable. Even if I stop him from binding my legs, I can’t free myself and I discover, to my surprise, that I think I would rather die at Stanislav’s hands than be discovered like this by one of my colleagues. Either my vanity, from the Old French, vanité around 1320, meaning that which is vain, futile, or worthless, from vanus = empty, is stronger than my self-preservation, or my instincts still believe that Stanislav will not harm me.

  So I allow him to fix my ankles to the corners of my desk, using my own sticky tape dispenser.

  At last, he stands where I can see him, and I gaze up at his glacial body. He has widely spaced nipples, small and pale, and a long, light torso as sinuous as the white belly of an eel. His shoulders are like snowy cliffs, high and broad above me, and finally I let my eyes drop to the tangle of light hair at his groin, from which his cock is standing, patiently waiting for me to notice it.