Коллектив авторов - Best of Asian Erotica, Volume 1

‘Andie,’ she said. ‘Like the actress, Andie Macdowell.’ She paused and waited for my response, as if I had flubbed a line of dialogue.

‘I wasn’t named after someone famous.’ I told her after some hesitation. I wished I was called Jacques as an alternative to my pedestrian moniker, Jack.

When I was young, I saw a documentary on TV about Jacques Cousteau, the French underwater explorer. But local mispronunciation would flub the Gallic inflection of Jacques, and make it sound more like Jock.

Andie laughed and removed her biker cap. Her black hair fell to the waistband of her jeans. She looked like a mermaid, the black tresses and their green iridescence shimmering above the scaly faux snakeskin.

We met under the fibreglass model of a whale shark in the aquaria in Kuala Lumpur City Centre. I suggested the trip as a natural progression of shared interests. The aquaria were divided into biotopes: coral reef, Amazon River, Malaysian rainforest and mangrove swamp. A tunnel lit by neon-blue track lights connected each biotope.

‘Arapaimas mate for life,’ I point out to Andie at the Amazon River tank.

Two behemoths drift past us in the green water, their bony heads etched with curlicues and ridged scars.

‘Fools.’ She set her lips together in a compressed line.

‘Sea slugs are hermaphrodites-but can’t self-fertilize. They still need a partner,’ Andie informed me as she pressed her palm on the reinforced glass of the cylinder tank for invertebrates. A specimen unfurled its fuchsia plumes as it clambered over a Venus’ Flower Basket, a glassy hollow sponge that imprisons a pair of male and female shrimp for life.

We followed yellow arrows plastered to the wall of the tunnel to the special aquaria exhibit of the month-Australian sea snakes. A large open tank was covered with mesh wire, flanked by signs that unnecessarily warned visitors not to put their hands inside the tank. I peered through the wire and saw two banded sea snakes entwined in a tight double helix, their bodies rippling together in gentle languor. Inspired by this demonstration, Andie slipped her arms around my waist and squeezed until I jerked in pain.

I guided Andie to the shark tank, expecting a little more tenderness from her. A nurse shark burrowed its snout into the sand, scavenging for leftovers.

The PA crackled and a voice announced feeding time. Kids rushed to the glass as a diver descended into the tank clutching a wire mesh bag of frozen fish. The diver dealt out the fish like an underwater Jesus feeding the five thousand; the food in the bag did not run out.

Aware of his audience, the diver let his hand linger in the maw of a black-tip reef shark to the shrieks of alarm from the children. Andie smiled at this spectacle, her lips stretched back, revealing teeth that overcrowded her mouth. She was all torpedo sleekness in a grey, sleeveless dress.

We exited the aquaria and flowed into the lunchtime crowd.

Andie stayed in a service apartment opposite KLCC. A basket of fruit on the coffee table enhanced the sparseness of the living room. I noted the absence of an aquarium.

‘What did you do with the wrasse?’

‘I bought it as a gift.’ She waved her hand around as if the question were lingering cigarette smoke and changed the subject. ‘Are you hungry?’

We phoned for sushi from a Japanese restaurant near KLCC that provided delivery. Our food would arrive in thirty minutes. Andie selected a pomegranate from the fruit basket. As she started peeling away the skin of the fruit, she told me a story.

A beautiful girl was born to a Thai mother and Swiss father. Her father left not long after she was born. When the girl came of age, she found out that she was different from her friends. She looked like a girl, but was not one on the inside.

‘How so?’ I asked Andie.

‘She can’t have children. She has no womb,’ Andie replied, and with the sudden shift to present tense, I realized she was talking about herself. Andie had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome; her body had resisted the development into a male by remaining stubbornly feminine. She was not a transsexual and she hated the term ‘intersex’.

‘I’m not a freak!’ Andie ranted, ‘I’m not caught between the two sexes.

Males and females are the ones who are strange, because they are the ones who are incomplete. Women are always searching for their other halves and all that magazine bullshit.’

Andie took a deep breath, piled the pomegranate seeds into a glass bowl and joined me on the sofa. She put her head in my lap and asked me to drop the seeds into her mouth. I asked her what I had done to earn this pleasure.

‘I just spent a whole afternoon with you,’ she smiled up at me. ‘And you’re the first guy I’ve met around here who doesn’t ask dumb questions about me. You live in the “now”. Suppose it comes from watching fish all the time.’

The seeds burst with a tart pop. As the juice spilled, it stained my fingertips scarlet. Like the diver with the shark, I let my fingers remain between her lips for a second too long. She sucked and nipped the pads of my finger, not quite playful. If she drew any of my blood, it mingled with the juice.

Over one of our sushi dinners, I mentioned mating to Andie, about how marine creatures did not go through the awkwardness of sex on dry land.

When she had cleared her plate, she went to the bathroom. Andie called for me after ten minutes. I heard the taps running from outside and knocked on the bathroom door.

She poured in the bath salts and the foam and issued me instructions:

‘Don’t turn around until I say so.’

I heard the taps running, water gushing out. Inspired, I invented a name for a new cocktail: ‘Sex in the Bath’. Foam spilled over the rim on the bathtub and drifted over to my bare feet.

‘You can look now.’

Andie had skimmed off a layer of thick foam and fashioned a bikini out of it: bubbles shining on her wet skin like sequins sewn onto a body stocking.

The water sloshed around as I climbed inside the tub. I lifted aside a handful of wet hair pressed against her shoulder blades, strands of kelp left on white sand at high tide. The strap of lather on one shoulder had split. I nipped and rasped my teeth along the ridge of a collarbone until I reached the notch at the base of her neck. I dipped my tongue in, the skin tasting salty the same as the mussels at dinner a few hours before. The rest of the makeshift bra had dissolved, exposing her tiny rosewood nipples. My hand reached between her thighs and sought out her niche, fingers discovering that her hole was as shallow as a navel. Andie gasped and shoved me back with the contained violence of a self-defence class. We slid in rhythm against the wall of the tub. Male sea snakes cannot disengage from females until mating is complete.

My livingroom had a built-in marine aquarium, equipped with backlit glass, harsh and vivid like a screensaver. The cleaner shrimp from my shop were servicing a blue-striped angelfish.

‘Humans think they can study animals in tanks and cages, and put them into categories.’

Dressed in a terry-wrap robe, Andie walked over to the window, her profile slashed into shadows by the Venetian blinds. Her rants began like our lovemaking, a sharp tangential stab in a random location, growing in intensity as she located an available target.

I tried to distract her. I pointed to the aquarium. ‘Are you talking about my fish?’

‘You make them sound like they’re your property.’

I went over and put my arms around her to soothe her displeasure.

‘You don’t own me-I’m not one of the fish in your shop.’

‘I have a duty to my shop.’

‘Your shop is your property, which has its own set of conditions. She loosed the belt on the robe and opened it before taking my hand and pressing it on her soft breast, ‘Duty is unconditional. When you’re with me, you are beyond all that.’