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  He smiled, but was evidently shy. He placed his books down on the counter, and said to her, 'I'm Sebastian. I write novels of a particularly weird nature, and I live in the Covent Garden area. I'm often invisible for weeks, and then I come out to buy books.'

  Ruby looked at his pile of purchases. He had chosen a copy of Anais Nin's Delta of Venus, a number of books of poetry including John Ashbery's Selected Poems; at the bottom of the pile was a copy of Irene’s Cunt, the pornographic French novel which was usually ascribed to Louis Aragon, under the name of Albert de Routisie, although its true authorship was debated, and not properly known. Ruby had glanced into this book while shelving it a week ago, and had opened at the passage where the overexcited client shoots his sperm between the eyes of the prostitute who is intent on giving him head. She couldn't forget the details, and now tried to imagine the young man's solitary excitement when he came to read passages like this one. Maybe he wasn't as shy as he made out, she found herself speculating. Perhaps at this very moment he was imagining what it would be like to unclip her cobalt bra and begin circling her nipples with his lips. She couldn't tell.

  They stood there, she thumbing through the prices, hoping time would expand, and that a date would ensue from this meeting, and he placing his eyes on her in a way that reminded her of pinning jewellery to a jumper or a coat. His eyes seemed to tickle her although she knew she was imagining it. And Billie Holiday was singing 'I Cover the Waterfront', as the rain began to let up, and a dazzle of light jumped into the shop from the brighter sky.

  'I like your selection of books,' Ruby ventured. 'They're my sort of reading. In fact I've dipped into one or two of these, while they've been dormant on the shelves. Irene’s Cunt is quite a scarce book.'

  She could feel his eyes beginning to leave sun-spots on her navel. It was like those green irises left singe-marks on her satin skin. His eyes caressed her like a lover's fingertips, and she could feel them everywhere. They left a prickling sensation on her bottom, they got trapped in the sensitive spots on her shoulders. It felt like she had him in her arms, intimately, fluently, and that he was surprising her with his adventurous caresses. She had known men explore her body like a preconceived map, and others who had discovered places she hadn't realized were a part of her. Sebastian was definitely of the latter kind. He was finding nerve points in her that lit up like constellations. She knew that if she got this man into bed he would prove the most explorative of lovers. And already he was making love to her by eye contact.

  'It all adds up to forty pounds,' she heard herself saying, as she jumped back to the reality of the situation, implanting in her mind the truth that he was the customer and she the assistant. Billie's voice was turning a deeper shade of blue in the background. It was the blue of gentians and delphiniums. Time and the London crowds had started up again, and Ruby could feel the outside world breaking into the inviolable interlude they had established. She was desperate to establish a deeper connection with this young man, and suddenly and without her expressing the least surprise or resistance, he placed a tentative left hand on her right shoulder, and while he spoke to her of books, played with her blue bra strap as an indication of how he would slowly undress her. The gesture was playful but intended in its resolve. And Ruby kept thinking that she had never let a stranger make snapping sounds with her bra strap, or ever would allow one that liberty. This was an exception, and she found it hard to believe in the reality of the situation. It was all so sudden and yet it felt like he had made love to her through this intimate gesture.

  'I could meet you tonight,' he said, 'if you haven't got other plans. Seven o'clock outside Covent Garden tube station?'

  'I'll be there,' Ruby replied, without mentally daring to consult a prior engagement. She felt upended, and adrenalin rushed through her body. There were only three hours to wait. Sebastian left as mysteriously as he had entered. Ruby covered up her blue bra straps. Two customers had entered the shop, and she settled to the circumspect occupation of pricing. Her body felt like it was lit with stars. She knew tonight they would really blaze.

  Lima Blues (after Anais Nin's Mathilde)

  Mathilde was a hat maker in Paris, and she worked from home in a basement that her clients visited. Her diffidence, perfect figure, violet eyes, and the long line of her seamed stockinged legs, made her instantly attractive to her male clients. Those who had come to her to buy hats for their wives or girlfriends invariably attempted to touch her, or insidiously and persistently tried to look up her skirt. It was a sensitive situation. Mathilde would be reaching to take a hat out of its protective tissue, and to place it on a stand, and she would feel a finger trace the defined crack of her bottom through tight jeans, or a still tighter skirt, or a hand would reach round and cup a pronounced breast in a sensually affirmative grip. And the women were sometimes no better. One of her regular clients, a singer called Evangeline, had dared slip a hand up the back of Mathilde's micro-mini, and had quickly inserted a finger beneath her black panties.

  These were the embarrassments that Mathilde incurred as a devastatingly attractive woman working from home. And no one ever bothered to ask her if she was single, or lonely, or even remotely interested in a date. They assumed that for the space of time in which they were in the shop, her body was conquerable, and her mind manipulable. And of course the nature of her work with fabrics was sensual, intimate, and inspired in her the wish to find a man distinguished by poetic eloquence and a romantic heart.

  Mathilde heightened her attractiveness by resistance. The word had got out that she was unavailable, but that she wouldn't reproach those who made flirtatious advances. And for men who received gratification through a woman's indifference, Mathilde seemed the ideal partner. There was one man, a particularly rich and appreciative customer, who tirelessly bought new and bizarre creations for his wife, who had on one occasion unzipped, taken his cock out, and at a strategic point when she was bending over in a skirt that seemed sewn to her bottom, had mounted her from behind and come all over her skirt. Nothing had been said by either person, but Mathilde in a state of disgust had thrown the garment away, not even wishing to send it to the cleaners.

  And there was the incident with the schoolboys who had wanted to discover what colour panties she was wearing under a pleated mini, and one of them had devised an elaborate story about wishing to purchase a hat for his mother's birthday, and with her back turned, and straining up to lift a blue construct from a stand, the boy had darted forward, lifted up her skirt, and then to a collective cry of `Black!', had with his other friends run madly out of the shop, leaving Mathilde with the unwelcome reflection that her preference for tiny black panties would soon be known all over the neighbourhood. She imagined the boys feverishly wanking over what they had seen, and comparing their impressions of how tightly the black silk was moulded to her buttocks.

  It was when the Baron had told her that French women were highly prized in South America, because of their expertise in lovemaking, their pale skin, their vivacity, and their intelligence, that Mathilde had felt compelled to change her life for a time, and to go and live in Lima. It would be an experiment, and if it failed, she would return to her old life in Paris. The Baron was a peculiar one. He had once paid her double the price for an expensive cerise silk beret, had immediately taken it out of the black tissue paper in which she had wrapped it, had produced an unsparing erection and spent the next four or five minutes convulsively masturbating into the silk beret, before discarding the stained cerise fetish in her waste-bin, and without a word of explanation exiting from the shop. It was a procedure he had repeated on three other occasions, once in a mauve turban generously sprinkled with pearls, another time in a balaclava, squeezing his last drop out with vociferous satisfaction, and a third time in a leopard-spotted fedora, his left hand clamping the hat over his penis, while his right worked with a terrifying rhythm towards climax.

  Mathilde had wondered why she took these perverse demonstrations of sexuality so passively. Di
d all men jerk off into designer hats? she wondered; were her expert creations worth so little that her violet and scarlet silk linings had immediately to be defaced by scalding jism? Of course the hats were substitutes for her pussy, but Mathilde was adamant that she would never give herself to the wrong man.

  Even the flight to Lima had involved her in a quasi-sexual experience. She had found herself sitting next to a man with obvious aesthetic leanings; his long tapered fingers, transparent green eyes, and black cashmere suit had impressed on her his manifestly refined sensibility. They had begun talking, as is the way in the apprehensive excitement of transatlantic flights, and somehow, after considerable circumventions of the topic, the man (called Antoine) had arrived at the confessional secret he shouldn't tell her, didn't dare to tell her, but anyhow would. It turned out (with some embarrassment on his part) that he was the mind behind manufacturing latex sex dolls, or rather the most advanced life-like dolls, custom-made to the client's desired statistics, a Lolita, a Bardot, a Monroe, according to preference. A sixteen-year-old Chinese virgin, or the voluptuous proportions of a Spanish courtesan. Mathilde listened to Antoine relate the story of how he was no longer able to make love to either women or men — he had owned to propensities for both — and was now able to achieve sexual pleasure only through dolls. He was, he confessed, turned on by the tactile qualities of lubricated latex. He dared advance to Mathilde that he used the anal aperture exclusively, for he preferred the constricted fit. He had had a doll made for him which was hermaphroditic: it had a penis, vagina, and breasts, and of course the snug anal aperture.

  Antoine spoke of this particular doll with rapture. It was his idea of total erotic fulfilment, and although he informed Mathilde that such bodies were to be found on the streets of Paris, Rome, and Rio, he felt better accommodated by a latex version which would adopt whatever fetish he intended for a particular session. Even talking of the subject excited him, and Mathilde knew from the man's watery green eyes that he was stiff as he spoke to her, and that he was re-enacting erotic pleasures in his mind. 'This one's on board,' he confided, 'I call him or her Lauren. The flight crew would die if they knew she was eagerly awaiting me in an olive-coloured suitcase. Tonight I will be locked in Lauren's elastic embrace, cock up one passage, and a finger up the other.'

  Mathilde found Antoine's lurid descriptions of unilateral sex both repulsive and exciting. She was suddenly aware that het short black skirt, worn to match a suit jacket, was riding high, almost to her crotch, and for a moment she thought that yet another person was going to know of her preference for tiny black knickers. She corrected the potential danger, but felt moist, and her pulse was running away with a percussive beat. They were an hour from landing, and Mathilde kept hoping that Antoine would place a hand on her transparent thigh, for she was wearing silk stockings, and her skirt was too impossibly short to keep from riding up to the dark stocking tops, taut black suspender straps holding them in place. She had spent her life resisting the illicit advances made to her in her Paris basement, but she would have made an exception for this unusual man, and as she was wearing stockings and not tights, his finger would have immediate access to the gusset of her black panties. But Antoine was clearly too removed from the idea of a physical body to advance the caress that so many men would have offered in his place.

  In Lima, Mathilde viewed the men as invested with the romantic ideals and natural poetic eloquence that she had failed to find in their Parisian counterparts. She found herself rapidly descending into low-life. She took a small shop in the red-light district, and one day she stood in the window naked, dressed in nothing but a pair of scarlet stilettos. She spent a long time dressing the window, and placing exotically styled hats on the various mannequins. At other times she would be topless as she served customers, her only protection against their eyes being a high-cut black tanga brief. She had earned the reputation of being the untouchable one, and it annoyed and frustrated her that she had taken the image to such extremes, and that it had come to be accepted by her male clients that they shouldn't pinch or slap her bottom, or in any way make designs on her body.

  In the evenings she would visit opium dens, and artists' lofts, and lie on mattresses and smoke until all her sensations were heightened to the point of overload. If there was a couple petting or fucking on another mattress, she would indirectly experience both their pleasures, the delayed orgasm that the man achieved after making love to the woman in slow motion over a number of hours, and the magnified pleasure of her experiencing every thrust like a multiple orgasm. Their sensual thrills travelled through Mathilde's body like a form of osmotic telepathy, and sometimes she found herself coming without using her fingers or drawing any attention to the fact she was finding prolonged release through orgasm. Her face portrayed not the least ripple of pleasure as she underwent the slow build-up to a deliciously sustained crisis. She watched the dark-bodied woman on the couch with an art student arch her hips as she built to orgasm, kick her legs up high in a half somersault and emit a convulsive shriek as pleasure tore through her body again and again.

  Sometimes there were geometric orgies involving several couples, and one woman was being fed a penis into her mouth while she lay on top of a man who was fucking her, and another man was simultaneously having her up the back passage, while his balls were being licked by a Spanish girl called Anna, whose gold hooped earrings tinkled with the oscillating movements of her head as she worked dexterously at the man's enflamed scrotum. No one ever suggested that Mathilde should join in the fun, or tried to lead her by the hand to a bed, or attempted to take one of her violet nipples between his forefinger and thumb. She was left alone to lose herself in sensual reverie, and to undergo the permutations of image induced by the drug, which made her feel that she was watching a film inside her head.

  Sometimes, Mathilde would go and sit in front of a large mirror in the corner of the room and just stare at herself. She had dyed her pubic hair blue, and the curiosity that her triangle aroused in her own eyes seemed to demand no immediate attention from the others. They were lost in their pipes, or distracted by staring at a beauty-spot on a buttock, or dotted just above a lip or nipple. Mathilde filled in her own time with abstract reflection, but often went home at dawn with a feeling of sexual relief. She had come indirectly and through arousal generated by watching a woman undergoing protracted cunnilingus. The man would lap the woman like a cat its milk. Now and then she would think of Antoine. She hoped she would meet him again in the city, and she knew instinctually that she would give herself to him like she had never before offered herself to a man.

  Business flourished. Mathilde produced extraordinary creations for prostitutes and local beauties, and there was a generous transsexual clientele, who brought her outrageous drawings of the ostentatious designs they wished to have made. One of them wanted a black felt hat shaped like an erect penis, with a ruby for an eye, and the word death embroidered on the base in pearls to symbolize her being an artificially created woman without the encumbrance of a cock. The hat had to be made according to the size of the transsexual's severed penis, for he had paid a taxidermist to preserve his genitalia. Mathilde was open to anything. She fashioned hats that looked like roses, seashells, UFOs, and any number of elaborate French pastries.

  And sometimes she worked in transparent bodies, bikinis, fishnet lingerie, and once in open-crotch black panties, but still no one dared to touch her, or even ask her out. Her reputation as inviolable and invincible had strengthened independently of her, and she began to wonder if she was under a spell, or had been cursed by a local witch. At night she would lie on her bed, legs interminably open, and give herself the attention that men so assiduously denied her. Her bed would rattle and creak with her efforts, and an ear trained to the wall would have assumed that she had an eager lover who was riding her with the persistence of a stud. Her bed would squeak periodically until dawn, and in the morning she would appear with mauve rings around her eyes, and an expression of jaded sens
uality on her lips.

  It occurred to her that perhaps word was out that she was married, or entertained a secret lover at night, one whose sexual drive was indomitably obstinate. It occurred to her that men might be apprehensive that they would not live up to her insatiable demand for erotic torment. And the days hurried by with her vivaciously enthusiastic clients at the shop, and her occasional visits to opium dens at night, or to brothels in which she would pay to observe couples through a system of two-way mirrors.

  One day Antoine came into her shop, looking coolly debonair and sartorially correct. She shut the door and the blinds after him, and served him tea, and was glad that she was a little more formally dressed in her green top and a tight black mini. He was carrying a valise, and she imagined the intersexual doll was inside and conveniently deflated. But this time Antoine was visibly interested in her, and as Mathilde strained to reach for a number of boxes up high, so he let his hand trace the curve of her bottom and come to rest at the point where back meets front. His finger lingered there, and Mathilde felt herself flush moist. She wanted this man to lay her catastrophically, and to fuck her so hard that all her sexual frustration over the years would find incandescent release in orgasm.

  Mathilde turned around and fitted her mouth over Antoine's like a sweet poison, and for him it was like rolling his tongue into a ruby pomegranate as he reciprocated her passion. His hands were soon alerted to her erect nipples, and were busy lifting the back of her short skirt, as he fitted his thumbs into the elastic of her minimal panties. 'This has got to be special,' Antoine whispered into her ear, and she led him up the stairs to her bedroom above the shop, and as she did so, her movements constricted by the tightness of her pinched skirt, she felt like a tart leading a client to her room. She thought of the old Cole Porter lyrics: 'If you want to buy my wares/Follow me and climb the stairs', and sang these lines to herself as Antoine followed her into a bedroom all done out in black and purple drapes, with the bed curtained off by chiffon hangings.