Nicola Griffith - The Blue Place

Dornan blinked a little more rapidly. “Through the penis?”

“Through everything: penis, scrotum, nipples, labia, tongue, nose, eyebrows, navel, clitoris. It made me feel so…old. The only holes I have are the ones I was born with, and one in this ear, two in this.”

“That’s one more than I have,” I said.

“Well, you’ve both had me beat since birth,” Dornan said mournfully, and Julia laughed. I had not heard her laugh before. It was subtle and warm as swirled brandy.

“And then there was the cutting,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, have you, Aud? They had this stool, just an ordinary wooden stool on stage, and Cutter got this man to sit on it and strip to the waist. He only looked about twenty. She washed his pecs with surgical alcohol and picked up a scalpel. It was like watching someone cut into a radish to make those fancy patterns. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated. They looked like children playing with red paints. At least she wore gloves. And he smiled the whole time she was cutting this big spiral round his nipple, cutting through his lovely soft golden skin. Cutter said that skin like that is prized because you get a nice thick white raised scar. And then she taped gauze to his chest, he put his shirt back on and everyone just chatted normally. People do very strange things for kicks.” She stood up. “Excuse me a moment.”

She walked like a thoroughbred towards the bathroom. I turned back to the table to find Dornan smiling slightly. “Very nice, Torvingen.”

“It’s business.”

“You’ve never introduced me to one of your business acquaintances before.”

I shrugged. “Always a first time.” We sat in companionable silence until Julia came back.

“So,” Dornan said, looking from her to me, “you paid good money for the privilege of watching this primitive blood ritual?”

“Ah,” I said. “Cutter was just like the previews you get at the start of a video, an unexpected bonus. The main feature was truly strange.”

I told him about Diane Pescatore and her performance, about the banks of video screens showing tapes of various operations she had undergone to sharpen her cheekbones, clip out her floating ribs, remove her molars, shape her nose, fill out her lips, carve her belly and lengthen her legs. Throughout the tapes, she had chanted peculiar verse about the subjugation of women, their hopeless quest to look like the women of men’s dreams, to look like Barbie. “Yes, the doll,” I told a disbelieving Dornan. “She said, quite seriously, that she’s trying to find a surgeon who will try to narrow her shoulders and maybe even shave her pelvis down.”

“But what does she look like?”

“Crazy. As though the only thing holding her together is this fierce will to show people, to make them understand what it’s really like, in the face of the realization that her audiences only come to see her because they’re horrified by what she’s doing to herself. I think she knows she’s made a terrible, irreversible mistake but she can’t stop because if she did, she’d have to acknowledge the mistake and the fact that people really don’t care. They just think she’s a freak.”

“Do you?” Julia had her chin on her fist and was looking at me intently.

I shrugged. “Who am I to judge?”

She decided to dig in another direction. “So how long have you two known each other?”

“A long time.”

“You mean she hasn’t told you how we met?” Dornan shot me a sly smile. “It was a summer afternoon, at ten thousand feet. You see, it was in the nature of a bet I had with an old girlfriend…”

He loved to tell this story. I excused myself and headed for the bathroom. He was still telling it when I got back.

“…hurtling through the air and nothing was happening, nothing, and I thought, Mother of God, I’m going to die, and I was spinning around like a top, one minute seeing the ground rushing at me like a drunken rhinoceros, the next seeing the sky and all these tiny dots that were open chutes, and I was tugging on that bloody parachute cord and nothing was happening. And then I saw one of the dots…split, and this body came bulleting down at me. It was Aud. She’d cut her chute loose and was swooping down on me. She didn’t even know me!”

“I knew you were a fool who was panicking and had forgotten he had an emergency backup chute.”

“I hadn’t forgotten, I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that, but I hadn’t forgotten: I’d never been told about it in the first place! So there I was, and she came bulleting at me, arms all folded in like a human cannonball, and smacked into me hard enough to take my breath away. And you should have seen her face! Lips skinned back and eyes like a demon. I swear she was laughing. She clamped her legs around me so hard she broke two of my ribs.”

“I fractured one, slightly.”

“It’s just that the doctor at the hospital didn’t look at the X rays properly. So, anyway, she had her thighs clamped around my chest like a vise but did she pull the cord straightaway? Oh, no. She had her mouth to my ear and was yelling, ‘Do you feel it? Feel it, feel it!’ and I thought I was going to die. But then she tugged on something and flump , we were floating. It seemed to last forever, but it was only about eight more seconds before we hit the ground, she’d cut it so close. And then we landed. She left me all tangled up like a kitten in a ball of wool and strode off to find the instructor, who was screaming at her for being a dangerous lunatic. She talked to him—”

“You were only half trained. He should never have let you up.”

“—but she never raised her voice, she rarely does, you know. And that’s when he made his big mistake. He smiled. She broke his jaw.”

Julia’s expression gave nothing away, but she did try to sip from her empty coffee cup. “And how long ago was this?”

I never got to answer that. The door banged open and in breezed a woman of around twenty-five with black hair, lips as red as her press-on nails, and an astonishingly pneumatic figure. Dornan jumped to his feet, and all the intelligence drained from his face to be replaced by an idiot grin. He held out his arms. “Tammy, darlin’!”

I sighed and stood up, too.

“Mmmn, Dornan, I’ve missed you. Mmmn.” Then she stepped back and smiled her heavy-lidded smile—“Aud, how nice to see you”—and raised her eyebrows at the table.

“Julia, this is Tamara Foster. Tammy, this is Julia Lyons-Bennet.”

Julia stood and they shook hands in that brittle Southern girl-girl squeeze of limp fingers; the one that says, When did they start letting people like you in ? Dornan, of course, noticed none of this. His world was full of Tammy, his girl, his fiancée, the light of his life. “Sit, darlin’, sit. We were just swapping stories. Aud and Julia here have had an extraordinary evening. Jonie, Jonie!” he shouted at the barista. “We’ll have another carafe of this red, and bring four fresh glasses.”

“No, Dornan, not for me. I’m sure you and Tammy want some time on your own. Julia and I will be getting out of your way.”

Julia stood up. “I had a really good time, Dornan. Thank you. And it was lovely to meet you, Tammy.”

Dornan merely beamed.

In the car, Julia drove as though she had not been drinking at all. “You don’t like Tammy.”

“No.”

“Let me guess. She’s really a multiple murderer.”

“She’s a manipulative schemer who picks Dornan up and puts him down whenever she feels like it. She flies hither, thither, and yon doing what she calls business development for a local company and is only ever in town for four or five days at a time. Sometimes less. Dornan thinks they’ll get married one day.”