Rob Doyle - This is the Ritual

It was while Alicia was seeing Halid that I got to know her. I used to take walks around that quarter of Barcelona at night. It was because of Alicia that I often wandered into the restaurant, drinking coffee as the prostitutes and drunken tourists filed in and out. I liked the look of her. Sometimes I would have a book with me and I suppose she saw me as a sort of kindred spirit. Once we had a staccato conversation about Ortega y Gasset while she was between orders. Alicia said she didn’t read much philosophy, nor feel the need to, because things were quite simple after all. One night I came in late and lingered while Alicia and Salim were closing up the restaurant. Then she and I went for a drink in a nearby bar.

We drank martinis and Alicia spoke openly to me about her past, the circumstances that had led to her leaving Ireland. She had been in Barcelona six months now, she said. I told her about my art and photography projects, my time spent living in New York and Tangier, and the residency I’d been granted in Barcelona for the next three years.

‘What are you working on now?’ she asked.

I told her about my project, which was inspired by Molly Bloom in Ulysses , and was divided in two parts. First,I said, I took photographs of my subjects as they slept, and made audio recordings of them. I explained that my sound equipment was highly sensitive, able to pick up even the most furtive and intimate noises the subjects made as they slept, including the gurglings and rumblings of their tummies.

‘You’re a creepy guy,’ she said, laughing, then sipping her martini. She had already eaten the two olives on the plastic stick. ‘Are they women and men as well?’ she said.

‘No. Only women.’

‘That’s even creepier.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve always been relaxed around women in that way. It’s easy for me to be with them, even to stay in the same bedroom as a woman without there being anything sexual to it. I slept in the same bed as my sister till we were eleven or twelve.’

She nodded. ‘And so what’s the second part of the project?’

‘That’s when the subject and I exchange beds. So, she spends a few nights in my place, and I sleep in her bed. I record myself as I sleep. I have cameras poised around the bed to take photos of me at intervals throughout the night. Later, I digitally merge the sounds of myself and the woman, the subject. Then I merge the photos. The faces blend together. So do the bodies. Finally I sequence the sounds with the photos. When people are stripped down to that level of intimacy, there isn’t much difference between men and women.’

‘Do you see yourself as a woman?’ Alicia said.

‘You mean in life?’

She laughed. ‘No, in the pictures.’

I smiled. ‘Something like that. It can, in fact, be a bit creepy. But that’s part of the fascination. Once, when I merged the photos, I looked exactly like my sister. It was uncanny. It was like. . I felt like I was seeing her ghost.’

I sensed she was curious enough to be my next subject, but I thought it shrewd to wait a while, let her come around in her own time.

Alicia kept seeing Halid, though still no more than once a week. The sex was exciting, yet she never felt any danger that it would lead to more than that, that they would fall for each other. She became friendlier with a short, dark-haired girl from the restaurant called Monica, who was working there for a while before moving to London, where her boyfriend had gone some months previously. ‘I haven’t been entirely faithful to him,’ Monica told Alicia one night when they were having a beer in the restaurant after closing up.

‘Has he been faithful to you?’ asked Alicia.

Monica shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t want to know. It’s something we talked about, that it might happen, and if it did, it’s better not to know. Anyway, I think about this question, and you know, I reached the conclusion that there is a higher law than monogamy. A higher law than monogamy and fidelity. Sometimes it seems to me that the sin is not to be unfaithful, but to not be unfaithful. I mean, in certain situations.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ said Alicia.

‘I don’t know,’ said Monica, laughing. ‘Sometimes.’

Monica took Alicia out clubbing. They would meet beforehand at Monica’s apartment to drink a couple of beers and smoke some grass with her friends, who gamely encouraged Alicia’s middling Spanish and fledgling Catalan. One night they took Ecstasy before they headed out to the club. Alicia had only ever tried the drug once, years earlier, but it had been an ugly night that ended in an awful fight with her ex-boyfriend, who had grown jealous. This time, with Monica, the drug carried Alicia on to a plateau of bliss that, at twenty-nine, she was astonished to have never before attained or even suspected was pos-sible. The club was a cavern of white lights, where beautiful bodies twisted to music that sounded richer and deeper than any Alicia had ever heard. She smiled at everyone, radiating goodwill. She forgave her ex all his lies and lack of self-control. She remembered Monica’s talk of a higher law and saw how it might be true. Dancing, she closed her eyes and felt herself into her ex-boyfriend’s body, into his mind, when he had made love to another woman. She felt very near to him. Monica appeared out of the crowd and put her arms on Alicia’s shoulders. Alicia turned to her, grinning, and they kissed one another on the lips. Monica laughed and merged back into the crowd. Later, the two of them were dancing with a tall, slim young man who had his shirt buttoned low and dark hair on his chest, a grey-black trilby on his head. The girls took more Ecstasy and gave one to the guy. Then the three of them were in a taxi, laughing, kissing, pointing out the window. Whenever the man had nothing to say, he laughed and slapped his thigh, and put his arm around either Monica or Alicia’s waist. He took a selfie of the three of them in the back of the cab. At Monica’s place, she put on some music and they all got into bed together. The curtains were open and blue light from the street illumined their bodies. As they caressed one another, Alicia found she mostly wanted to kiss Monica, but Monica kept kissing the young guy. Alicia either couldn’t remember his name or had never learned it in the first place. Grinning, the man asked the girls to kiss one another while he jerked off. Then he licked Alicia out while Monica sucked and kneaded Alicia’s breasts. He wanted to take another selfie of the three of them in the bed, but Monica chucked his phone on to a pile of clothes by the window and started to suck him off. At several points the situation became precarious as one of the girls began to laugh; the man then had to coax them into continuing through caresses and whispers. As the night trailed on in a pornographic blur, Alicia found that Monica and the young man were becoming exclusively concerned with one another. The man was now on his knees and licking Monica out while she clasped her tits in her palms, moaning softly. His dick had gone limp but he jerked it off till it hardened again. Alicia was about to get up to leave, but the guy reached out, not raising his face from Monica’s cunt, and drew her in. He guided her hand behind him, gesturing for Alicia to penetrate him with her finger. She did, and as he kept licking Monica out, the young man whimpered and growled, still pulling himself off with one hand. Monica came loudly. Then the young man came — Alicia could feel his sphincter throbbing against her knuckle. He folded down on to Monica’s belly with a shudder, sliding off Alicia’s finger. He and Monica lay coiled together like that, their fingers entwined. A few moments later, quietly rising from the bed to leave the room, Alicia saw that dark brown spots of shit were flecked over a portion of the sheets. They looked like blood.