Ian McDonald - River of Gods

She was back in Oxford again, running. It was a city she loved to run in. Oxford was generous with paths and green spaces and the students had a culture of physical activity. It was an old route from her Keble time, along the canal path, through the meadows of Christ Church, up Bear Lane on to the High and then dodge pedestrians to the gate of All Souls and through on to Parks Road. It was good, physically secure, familiar to the foot. Today she turned right past the back of Merton through the Botanic gardens to Magdalen where the conference was being held. Oxford wore summer well. Groups of students were encamped on the grass. The flat thump and yell of soccer carried over the field, a sound she missed at KU. She missed the light also, that peculiar English gold of early evening with its promise of seductive night. Set in her evening were a shower, a quick squint at the completely unsuspected mass extinction in Alterre’s marine biosphere, and dinner at High Table, a formal thing of frocks and jackets to conclude the conference. Much better to be out in the streets and people places with the gold light moth-soft against bare skin.

Lull was waiting in her room.

“See you, L. Durnau,” he said. “See you in those ridiculous, clingy little lycra shorts and that tiny tiny top and your bottle of water in your hand.” He stepped towards her. She was glossy and stinking with woman sweat. “I am going to take those ridiculous little shorts right off of you.”

He seized two fistfuls of elastic waistband and jerked down shorts and panties. Lisa Durnau gave a small cry. In one motion she peeled off her running top, kicked off her shoes, and jumped him, legs around waist. Locked together, they reeled back into the shower. While he struggled with his clothing and cursed his clinging socks, she showered down. He barged in, pinned her against the tiled wall. Lisa swivelled her hips, wrapped her legs around him again, trying to find his cock with her vulva. Lull took a step back, pushed her gently away. Lisa Durnau flipped back into a handstand, locked her legs around his torso. Thomas Lull bent down, went in with the tongue. Half drowned, half ecstatic, Lisa wanted to scream but fought it. More enjoyable to fight it, half asphyxiated, inverted, drowning. Then she pinned Lull again with her thighs and he took her dripping and wrapped round him, threw her on to her bed, and fucked her with the quad bells ringing curfew.

At High Table she sat next to a Danish postgrad, starry eyed at actually talking to an originator of the Alterre project. At the centre of the table Thomas Lull debated the social Darwinism of geneline therapy with the Master. Other than glancing up at his words, “kill the Brahmins now, while there aren’t that many of them,” Lisa did not acknowledge him.

Those were the rules. It was a thing of conferences. It had begun at one, it found its fullest expression at them. When it came to its allotted end, the rules and terms of disengagement would be drawn up between conference items. Until then, the sex was glorious.

Lisa Durnau had always thought of sex as something that was all right for other people but was never part of her lifescript. It wasn’t that fantastic. She could live pretty happily without it. Then, with the most unexpected of people, in the most inconvenient relationship, she discovered a sexuality where she could bring her own natural athleticism. Here was a partner who liked her sweaty and salt-flavoured in her beloved running gear, who liked it al fresco and al dente and seasoned with the things she had locked up in her libido for almost twenty years. Pastor Durnau’s sporty daughter didn’t do things like play-rape and Tantra. At the time her confidante was her sister Claire in Santa Barbara. They spent evenings on the phone going into all the dirty details, whooping with laughter. A married man. And her boss. Claire’s theory was because the relationship was so illicit, so secret, Lisa could unfold her own fantasy.

It had begun in Paris in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle Terminal 4. The flight to O’Hare was delayed. A fault in Brussels air traffic control had backed up planes as far out as the East Coast. BAA142 was on the board with a four-hour delay. Lisa and Lull had come off an intellectually gruelling week defending the Lullite argument that real and virtual were meaningless chauvinisms against heavy attack from a cadre of French neorealists. By now Lisa Durnau just wanted to climb her porch steps and check if Mr. Cheknavorian next door had watered the herbs. The board clicked over to six hours delay. Lisa groaned. She had done the e-mail. She had updated her finances. She had looked in on Alterre, going through a quiescent phase between bursts of punctuated evolution. It was three o’clock in the morning and in the boredom and the tiredness and the dislocation of the limbo of the brightly lit lounge between nations, Lisa Durnau leaned her head against Thomas Lull’s shoulder. She felt his body move against hers and she was kissing him. Next thing they were sneaking into the airport showers, with the attendant handing them two towels and whispering vive le sport.

She liked to be round Thomas Lull. He was fun, he could talk, he had a sense of humour. They had things in common; values, beliefs. Movies, books. Food; the legendary Mexican Friday lunches. All that was a long way from fucking doggie style on the wet tiles of a Terminal 4 shower cubicle, but in a sense not so far. Where else does love start but next door? You fancy what you see every day. The boy across the fence. The water-cooler colleague. The opposite-sex friend you’ve always been especially close to. She knew she had always felt something for Thomas Lull; she had just never been able to give it a name or an action until exhaustion and frustration and dislocation took her out of her Lisa Durnau-ness.

He’d had them before. She knew all the names and many of the faces. He’d told her about them when the others went back to their partners and families and it was just the two of them with the jug of margarita and the oil lamps burning down. Never student flings, his wife was too well known on campus. Usually one nighters on the conference circuit, once an e-mail affair with a woman writer from Sausalito. And now she was a notch on the bedpost. Where it would end she could not say. But they still kept the thing about the showers.

After the dinner and the drinks reception they extricated themselves from the knot of conversation and headed over the Cherwell bridges to the cheaper end of town. Here were student bars that had not succumbed to corporatisation. One pint turned into two, then three because they had six guest real ales.

Halfway down the fourth he stopped and said, “L. Durnau.” She loved his name for her. “If anything should happen to me, I don’t know what, whatever happens when people say, ‘should something happen’: would you look after Alterre?”

“Jesus, Lull.” Her name for him. Lull and L. Durnau. Too many Ls and Us. “Are you expecting something? You haven’t got. anything?”

“No no no. Just, looking ahead, you never know. I could trust you to look after it right. Stop them sticking fucking Coke banners on the clouds.”

They never made it through the rest of the guest ales. As they walked back to the halls through the warm, noisy night, Lisa Durnau said, “I will, yes. If you can swing the faculty, I will look after Alterre.”

Two days later they came in to Kansas City on the last flight of the night and the staff closed up the airport behind them. It was only jet lag that kept Lisa Durnau awake on the drive to the university. She dropped Thomas Lull at his sprawling green place out in the burbs.

“See ya,” she whispered. She knew better than to expect a kiss even at three in the morning. By the time she got up her steps and through her screen door and dumped her bag in the hall the accumulated bodyshock rolled over her like a semi. She aimed herself for the big bed. Her palmer called. She thought about not answering it. Lull.