On the Edge

15

‘I can’t get over Sabine turning up here,’ said Peter, ‘with that unbelievable jerk I met in LA — the one I told you about who dumped me at the transsexual club. She seems so ghastly, I’m embarrassed to have given up so much time looking for her. I suppose I was really looking for you, or enlightenment, or a long holiday, or something. How do you feel about it? It must be strange for you too.’

‘It’s perfect,’ said Crystal. ‘It’s better that she should be here disappointing you, or delighting you, than not here, haunting you.’

‘You’re so grown-up,’ said Peter.

‘I’m grown-up when I’m grown-up, the rest of the time…’

Peter leant over and kissed her. They sat beside the waterfall in the late afternoon sun.

‘The trouble with that theory is that she wasn’t haunting me until she turned up, and now she’s just puzzling me for a minute or two. You’re the one who’s been haunting me. But you’re right, seeing her again is liberating. It makes me realize that what happened between us — which was extraordinary — wasn’t something contained in her, or in me for that matter. We were just the landing site for a strange ecstasy. It was a sexual ecstasy which didn’t connect with anything else. We were just in bed for three days, hardly even talking, and when we did talk I was rescheduling flights to London and she was saying something unfathomable about the universe.’

‘It’s a hard thing to say anything fathomable about,’ said Crystal.

‘Quite,’ said Peter. And then, changing the subject, ‘I wanted to clarify something that John said about ejaculatory control. This PC muscle, should you clench it without clenching your buttocks, or as well as?’

‘It’s a free country,’ said Crystal. ‘You can clench anything you like. I guess if you’re trying not to ejaculate you’d better use every muscle you’ve got.’

‘It’s hard to imagine that it would do the trick on its own,’ admitted Peter, experimenting. John had said that the PC muscle was the one you would use if you wanted to stop peeing halfway through. It seemed a feeble instrument to pit against the sense of manifest destiny which was the birthright of every ejaculation.

‘Maybe we should concentrate on the sacred spot massage,’ said Peter, ‘rather than the ejaculatory control.’

‘Let’s concentrate on everything,’ said Crystal.

‘Definitely,’ said Peter, getting up. ‘I just wanted to “process” Sabine with you.’

‘She’s in the can,’ said Crystal, accepting Peter’s hand and letting him pull her gently to her feet.

* * *

‘One of the sisters in our circle was raped at gunpoint,’ said Karen. ‘It was just so upsetting to hear her…’

‘Gee,’ said Stan solemnly.

‘One of the other sisters said that we should take a moment to grieve for all the women who had been raped in the history of the world. I thought it would be nice if we could take a moment to grieve for the woman who was right there in front of us, crying.’

Karen rarely allowed herself to question another’s path, but she had to admit that she had taken a dislike to the hawk-eyed sister, or stepsister, who had stolen and generalized the suffering of the rape victim. Her face was lean and angry and her jaw muscles spoke of an Olympic dedication to clenched teeth.

Now, nobody was more planet-minded than Karen, but sometimes you had to be practical, and so she had gone to fetch a Kleenex box, only to find that it had been emptied during John’s demonstration of the loosening and opening effects of the sacred spot massage. The empty Kleenex box now symbolized the perfectly liberated yoni, and the pile of tissues, which Karen soon located, stood for the discarded layers of shame, guilt and fear. She hesitated to offer this pile of toxic emotions to her weeping sister. Everybody else in the room seemed to be channelling the female predicament since the eclipse of the Goddess had cast the shadow of war, industrialization and rape over the Earth. Sensing the insult of this transpersonal sorrow Karen, heartbroken and precise, picked up a handful of pale-orange tissues and sat next to the crying woman.

‘I want to honour your courage in sharing that,’ said the muscle-jawed woman, noticing the counter-attack of personal sympathy. ‘It gives me hope for all the other women who’ve suffered a similar experience.’

‘There was a man in our men’s group,’ said Stan, interrupting Karen’s memory of this incident, ‘who was caught masturbating by his parents, and got sent to a psychiatrist.’

Karen came to a halt and let loose a deep sigh.

‘That poor man. Can you imagine the effect that had on him?’

‘I didn’t have to imagine it, I could see it.’

‘We are so privileged to be in this workshop,’ said Karen, shaking her head. ‘Just talking about sexuality in an open way is a healing process. Our generation was given such double messages. What was it that John said? “Sex is dirty: save it for the one you love.”’

‘Right!’ said Stan. ‘Can you believe that?’

Stan and Karen drifted back to their room, hand in hand. Stan felt the calm depths of a forty-year marriage being stirred by the influx of new perspectives. He loved Karen and had always been faithful to her (except that one time at the insurance conference in Oklahoma City) but the idea of sexual passion with his aged wife was a challenge he had barely considered. Now he felt ashamed of the rift between devotion and excitement which scarred his sexual nature. Could the tranquillizing familiarities of their marriage be transformed into the conscious intimacy which, according to John, was the fuel of sexual ecstasy? John had even deprived Stan of the painful refuge of his impotence, when he had talked about sex with no goals, and non-ejaculatory orgasms, and the pleasure a man could give his beloved with a soft-on.

Stan was confused and apprehensive, but also excited, as he opened the door of their room.

‘This isn’t our bedroom any more,’ said Karen.

‘It isn’t?’ said Stan, thinking his wife had planned a surprise.

‘It’s our love temple,’ said Karen.

‘Oh, right,’ said Stan bashfully, descending deeper into his mixed emotions.

* * *

Jerome was standing on his head in lime-green boxer shorts, his legs slowly scissoring the air. Standing on her feet in the bathroom, Sabine looked quizzically at her red and gold sari. That shakti red was guaranteed to make her feel like the ultimate temple dancer. On the other hand, Jerome had seen it before. The alternative, which Jerome had not seen, was a kind of tattered suede wrap, hardly big enough to polish a windowpane. Very cavewoman at the dawn of history, it was devastatingly sexy, with its rough edges effortlessly failing to hide her freshly groomed yoni. The trouble was that it lacked any obvious spiritual quality, and Sabine wanted Jerome’s soul, not just his lingam.

She finally made her decision and went through into the bedroom.

‘Shall we chant?’ she asked, walking past Jerome with a little spin.

‘Woah!’ said Jerome, leaping back onto his feet. The only mantra that goes with that rag is “Yabadabadoo”.’

As if inspired by the laws of cartoonland, he threw himself on to the bed in one smooth gesture, his head already resting in his palm as he hit the mattress. He raised one knee and lay there in the posture of a feasting Roman.

I knew I should have worn the sari, thought Sabine.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked, pretending to pull a few strands of suede over her pubic mound.

‘You bought your own nakedness at a clothes store,’ said Jerome. ‘That’s what I call capitalism.’

Sabine joined her hands together in prayer and bowed to Jerome.

‘Yabadabadoo,’ said Jerome.

‘You are a silly man,’ said Sabine, beginning to be irritated. ‘This is supposed to be a meditation.’

‘Meditate on this,’ said Jerome, clasping the silken bulge in his boxer shorts.

‘Be serious,’ shouted Sabine, stamping her foot.

‘You come in dressed in a couple of moose sinews, and you want me to behave like I’m in church.’

‘My God,’ said Sabine, ‘what are you doing in a Tantra seminar if you are making a separation between sexuality and spirituality?’

‘Lighten up, will you?’ said Jerome.

‘I think you’re the one who needs to relax,’ said Sabine, getting up and stepping into a pair of jeans. ‘I’m going for a walk, maybe when I get back we can start again.’

‘Start what again?’ said Jerome. ‘Your process?’

‘My process? You know, John warned us about this: one person starts an argument because they’re afraid.’

‘So what are you afraid of?’ asked Jerome.

‘Don’t try that cheap trick on me,’ said Sabine, buttoning up her trousers. ‘You know, with you I’ve always had this feeling that Tantra was just a way of learning some fancy moves so that Mr Irresistible could go on getting cool young chicks into bed. For me, it’s part of my spiritual journey. Like John says, “Don’t be afraid of inviting God into the bedroom.”’

‘John’s the one you’re inviting into the bedroom,’ said Jerome. ‘Are you going to quote him all night?’

‘You’re jealous of John and you’re afraid of inviting God into the bedroom,’ Sabine taunted him. ‘What if somebody else was in charge of the energy? What if Jerome wasn’t running the show? You wouldn’t like that so much, huh?’

‘Cut the psychology,’ said Jerome contemptuously.

‘When you’ve worked out your little problem, why don’t you come and fetch me in the hot tubs? I need to be with my own body right now.’

‘I’m not afraid of inviting God into the bedroom,’ Jerome called out as Sabine swept towards the door. ‘I just don’t want Her to come dressed as Wilma Flintstone.’

‘How do you expect God to dress? In fluorescent green shorts, like some low-class gigolo?’

‘They’re Italian silk,’ shouted Jerome. ‘These shorts cost me a fortune.’

Sabine walked out, leaving the door open. Jerome collapsed onto the bed with a loud groan.

* * *

Both Brooke and Kenneth felt tense as they headed north on Route One. They had switched workshops. The drumming in their ritual workshop had been so powerful and transformational they had decided to leave and try sex again. Three years earlier there had been a fumbling encounter between them, initiated by Kenneth when he was first establishing the subsidy for his book. It had almost lost him Brooke’s support. She knew that he wanted to blame her unattractiveness for what she had described to Adam as a ‘catastrophe’, but if he found her unattractive, what had he been doing in bed with her in the first place? He had never really been honest about the confusion, his motives for taking her to bed, and the backlash of his revulsion. Perhaps it was too horrible to go into. Their friendship had survived with its sails torn, and now they were risking another storm. This time Kenneth had not taken the initiative. He had agreed, though, and agreed at a time when the subsidy he had first courted was in danger of extinction.

Brooke had taken a room in the Post Ranch Inn, a small house in fact, overlooking the ocean from a thousand-foot cliff. The rooms in Esalen, with their Ivory soap and their bewildering lack of maids, were just a little too alien for her to quest in.

‘So, what d’ya think of this non-ejaculatory orgasm?’ said Brooke, taking a hairpin bend.

‘I guess I’m pleased my father wasn’t a practitioner,’ growled Kenneth. ‘Why would Nature make it feel so good if we weren’t supposed to ejaculate? It sounds counter-evolutionary to me.’

‘According to John you’ll feel even better if you don’t ejaculate. Maybe Nature wants us to know that right now. Even evolution’s got to evolve.’

‘I’ve got nothing against delaying orgasm,’ said Kenneth.

‘For how many weeks?’ asked Brooke.

‘Oh,’ Kenneth pondered for a while, ‘just over half a per cent of one week.’

‘How long is that?’

‘Almost an hour.’

‘That’s not bad.’

Brooke paused and wondered whether to say what was on her mind.

‘You know, this is hard for me after what happened.’

‘I know,’ said Kenneth, with the alacrity of someone who has been dreading talking about a subject. ‘But it’s not the same,’ he went on. ‘We’ve been through a lot, and this is a way for us to explore a new level of intimacy.’

Feeling that he was drifting, he switched abruptly to declamation.

‘The point is not to try to sanctify the genitals by giving them foreign names like yoni and lingam, but to be able to say “cunt” with such a radical sense of wonder that the word is restored to its ancient … I want to say “virginity”.’

‘Well, try to resist,’ said Brooke, laughing.

‘But seriously,’ said Kenneth, removing himself further from the awkwardness of the personal. ‘For me this is connected with something that came out of Adam’s class: the point is not that sperm is like holy water, but that it’s sperm, which is quite wonderful enough. Lightning isn’t the emanation of some Divine mood, it’s lightning, which is quite wonderful enough.’

The road became more precipitous, a ribbon of perpetual vertigo carved in a cliff.

‘Well, Professor,’ said Brooke, with uncharacteristic boldness, ‘I guess the question I ought to ask, the one with the radical sense of wonder, is, “Do you want my cunt?”’

Kenneth coughed sharply.

‘Yes,’ he said, sympathizing with the view, ‘yes, I do.’

* * *

‘I don’t like the word lingam,’ said Jason. ‘It doesn’t rhyme with anything. Unlike “prick”, which rhymes with — well, “dick” for a start. Or “cock”, which rhymes with “wok” and, eh … “sock”.’

‘“My cock is in my wok”, is that the kind of lyric you want to write?’ asked Angela.

‘Well, it’s better than “My lingam’s in my wok”, isn’t it?’ said Jason with a lively sense of justice.

‘It’s hard to judge,’ said Angela. ‘It might be better to keep the wok and the cock entirely separate.’

‘In an ideal world,’ admitted Jason. ‘But sometimes the chemistry is just overwhelming,’ he said, grinning at Angela.

‘Like John says,’ said Angela seriously, ‘Tantra is about replacing chemistry with alchemy.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jason. ‘It’s certainly having an alchemical effect on my writing. Tantra, yantra, mantra.’

Jason had often written lyrics about himself in the third person. Now that he was with Angela songs were pouring out of him in the third person plural. That was love for you. ‘They’, the token of crowded anonymity, of paranoid conviction, of midnight grudges, the parasite of a beleaguered ego, had become the pronoun of confessed love.

‘You know, I’ve done a lot of personal growth work,’ said Angela with unquiet pride. ‘I’ve lived in communal situations, I’ve worn crystals and I’ve prayed to Navajo gods, but I don’t need to prove that I’m cool any more.’

‘Right,’ said Jason.

‘I trust my intuition now and go with what comes up, if it feels right.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Jason, daydreaming about his career.

‘When I heard about this Tantric workshop, I started getting this tingling all over my body and these little mystical events in my life. I hadn’t even met you, but I knew that I would be doing the workshop with someone totally appropriate.’

‘That’s me,’ said Jason, ‘Mr Totally Appropriate.’

‘It was like the first time I heard about the Goddess,’ said Angela.

Jason tended to glaze over at the mention of the Goddess. If there was one thing that worried him about Angela, it was this Wiccan trip she was on. He really had no idea what it was about but his imagination was seized by disturbing images of neo-pagan harvest festivals, of chicken’s blood irrigating blazing straw effigies on a rainy night, of body-painted mudwomen moon-dancing around windblown coals, empowered by the music of dry beans in a pig’s bladder.

‘What’s so great about the Goddess is that she has so many faces,’ said Angela. ‘I was into this Gaian model which identifies the Feminine with the Earth. I’m still totally into that, but now, thanks to Tantra, I’ve met her as a sky dancer. So she’s in the Sky too, which is really cool.’

‘She’s everywhere,’ said Jason uneasily.

‘Definitely,’ said Angela. ‘I really appreciate being with a man who understands that.’

She skipped around him laughing and waving the edges of her skirt.

* * *

Jerome had been darting through the garden with a pair of nail scissors and a torch, collecting flowers to garland himself for his beloved. He wore a bedraggled crown of Mexican daisies, a mayoral sash of Californian poppies, a couple of lupin bracelets and a snapdragon behind his ear. Like a heavily medicated King Lear, too serene to notice his own madness, he wandered naked through the baths, holding in each hand a fistful of petals to strew on the sulphurous waters in which he expected to find Sabine.

Instead, to his surprise, he found her lying naked on a padded white massage table next to a strange man. They were whispering conspiratorially.

Jerome was cool. He had lived through the sixties; he had an open relationship with Sabine; he knew that she had an issue with him that evening, and he owned his part in it.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he asked.

Sabine turned round slowly and looked at Jerome.

‘Oh, my God,’ she said, bursting into uncontrollable giggles, ‘you look so funny.’

‘I asked you what you were doing,’ said Jerome, letting the petals fall from his hands.

‘Having a great time,’ said Sabine. ‘This is Paul. Paul, meet Jerome. He’s not in a very good mood,’ she whispered to Paul.

‘I can’t believe you’re doing this,’ wailed Jerome.

‘Doing what?’ asked Sabine.

‘Lying here naked with another man on the night of our Tantric seminar.’

‘I sense I oughta leave at this point,’ said Paul.

‘Oh, don’t go,’ moaned Sabine. ‘We were having such fun.’

‘I take back my love,’ screeched Jerome, suddenly losing his temper and tearing off his lupin bracelets. ‘I take back my devotion.’ He threw his sash of yellow poppies to the ground. ‘I take back my passion,’ he concluded.

‘And why don’t you take that stupid crown off as well?’ said Sabine, flicking the Mexican daisies off his head. ‘You make a lousy King.’

‘You’re acting out your abuse issues,’ said Jerome coldly.

‘Don’t try that, you fucking man,’ said Sabine, pushing him on to the neighbouring massage table.

‘I sense that you have some personal issues to clarify at this point,’ said Paul. ‘I’m really going to leave now.’

‘Great,’ said Jerome. ‘Take a hike.’

‘For your information she told me she was alone,’ said Paul, pointing a finger at Jerome’s nose.

‘You said that?’ said Jerome.

‘I thought maybe the three of us could have some fun together,’ lisped Sabine, looking down coyly.

‘Oh, I get it,’ said Jerome, with a relief verging on glee. ‘Poly’s here tonight, isn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ said Sabine girlishly. ‘Poly wants more than one.’

‘Jerome knows what Poly wants.’

‘Yes,’ said Sabine, picking up the daisy crown and placing it back carefully on Jerome’s head. ‘Jerome is Poly’s hero. Jerome is King.’

Paul hesitated. Sabine was the most attractive woman he had met in years. On the other hand, there was a question mark over her mental health.

‘You’re a very lucky man,’ said Jerome, putting an arm around Paul’s shoulder. ‘This beautiful woman, this quintessence of erotic … I tell you, man, she’s hot.’ Jerome punched him in the shoulder a little too hard. ‘This vision of loveliness has chosen to share her shakti with you this evening.’

He looked deep into Paul’s blue eyes, his face paralysed with friendliness.

* * *

Crystal sat on the bed, cross-legged and naked, her brown hair falling in spirals down to her breasts. The darker curls of her pubic hair were half hidden by her heels.

Nervous in his underpants, Peter stood at the end of the bed, at once seduced and reproached by her physical ease. The atmosphere of giddy spaciousness that had surrounded her in the Dzogchen workshop radiated even more strongly from her nakedness. She wasn’t going to tell him to relax because she was so relaxed herself that she was immune to his nervousness.

How could he offer her his pale body with its tufts of wiry black hair? Was it bad manners not to be naked as well? Would it be better to have an erection, or should he be content with what he had learned to call a soft-on? His waist was not narrow enough, his cock was not big enough, his throat was too dry, his …

‘Hi,’ said Crystal.

‘Hi,’ said Peter.

Peter crawled across the bed and sat opposite Crystal.

‘You look as nervous as a virgin,’ said Crystal.

‘I’m trying to relax,’ Peter defended himself.

‘Why? It might be fun to be a virgin.’

‘The only time I tried I was confused and incompetent.’

‘Let’s get it right this time,’ said Crystal, placing a hand on Peter’s chest.

He felt his shoulders sink a couple of inches. She reached out with her other hand and cupped it under his balls. John had spoken about these funny hand positions which ‘ran the energy’ from one chakra to the other.

‘Is this a mudra?’ gulped Peter.

‘Yes,’ said Crystal. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Peter. ‘Only I feel like crying.’

Crystal smiled at him.

He felt a warm current flowing upwards between Crystal’s hands. She was definitely running the energy and now the energy was running him.

He smiled back at her.

‘You’re so lovely,’ he said.

* * *

Whereas Jason was well capable of getting depressed about his career, he had absolutely no worries about his body. His compliments to women were adjuncts to his self-congratulation as a lover. ‘You’re not bad yourself,’ he would say, or ‘It’s nice to be appreciated.’ He knew his wizzer was above average, and he offered women his genital confidence with the breezy conviction that it might blow their circuits if he were to offer them anything more. He certainly felt no need to give a woman his attention while he was making love to her. If she was lucky enough to be getting his pelvic thrust, his mind was free to stalk through the masturbatory routines which had drained him since adolescence. His sexual formation, like that of almost all his friends, had taken place among inaccurate rumours, dirty mags, clumsy gropings and hopeless hopes. Nothing had made him question the mental habits which grew from this thin soil.

Of course it was easier to pay attention when you got some new flesh, especially a dishy, turned-on, tuned-in girl like Angela. For a while his experience could map over his desire for conquest, novelty and accident. There was still a subtle gap. The contours of longing might be perfectly traced by his lived experience, but the tracing paper still intervened. Jason wouldn’t even have noticed this gap if it hadn’t been for something Angela had said the night before. It had really got on his wick at the time.

‘You don’t have to leave to experience pleasure, the pleasure is right here,’ she had said, and she had given him a little squeeze with her vaginal muscles.

Normally he would have found it dead sexy, but he was too pissed off. The truth was that he had been fantasizing. Not about anything gross like another woman, Angela would have to wait a few weeks for that, but about another version of themselves. He was a famous rock star, of course, and she was an adoring groupie. They were in his vast hotel suite, and she was overwhelmed that he had chosen her out of all the groupies and was having the most unforgettable experience of her life. And then she’d said, ‘You don’t have to leave to experience pleasure…’

Crash. That had really brought him down. He’d played all hurt and innocent, and he really was all hurt and innocent because he wouldn’t have noticed the fantasy if she hadn’t said that.

And now, when they were supposed to be having Tantric wondersex, they were sitting on the bed naked, talking about their feelings.

‘So give me a weather report,’ said Angela. ‘What’s happening for you right now?’

‘I was just thinking, “Girls aren’t for getting on with, they’re for getting off with.”’

‘To begin with I’m not a girl, I’m a woman. And secondly, that’s the most—’

‘Joke!’ said Jason. ‘What I was really thinking was that I used to enjoy sex, but now I’m worried that if I spice it up a bit the fantasy pigs’ll nab me.’

‘What fantasy pigs?’ asked Angela, thinking that Jason’s problems might be more serious than she had imagined.

‘It’s an English thing,’ Jason explained. ‘It means police.’

‘I’m not the police,’ said Angela. ‘I was just saying that you don’t have to fantasize to experience pleasure. And I also want to say that there’s an element of disrespect — you’re inside me, and you’re thinking about something else.’

‘That’s what sex is,’ protested Jason. ‘Doctors have proved that it’s all in the head. This is where the orgasm is,’ said Jason, tapping his skull.

‘God, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Consciousness is everywhere in your body, Jason. This is the wound of men, this is the Beast of Society that Barry Long talks about. It’s—’

‘Barry Long Dong,’ chuckled Jason.

‘Can’t you ever be serious?’ said Angela. ‘You know, I want what John was talking about, I want the amrita, the female ejaculate, but I’m not going to surrender to someone who’s jerking off inside me, thinking about another woman.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about another woman, I was just being a rock star, that’s all,’ said Jason. ‘It’s practically not even a fantasy.’

‘The point is I could feel your absence,’ said Angela. ‘Yesterday you had to be a rock star, tomorrow I’m going to have to be a movie star. Pretty soon, we’ll be a couple of fantasy pigs making out in a fantasy pigsty.’

They looked at each other, and luckily they burst out laughing.

Jason grabbed Angela by the waist and started snuffling around her body making porcine noises. He was secretly impressed by how much more focused Angela became when she was angry.

‘Can we just try it the way John suggested?’ asked Angela. ‘Plenty of eye contact, communication and conscious breathing. I want the amrita, Jason, I want to realize my sexual potential, that’s why I’m in this workshop.’

‘No problem, doll,’ said Jason. ‘There’ll be amrita dripping from the ceiling.’

* * *

‘LAM … VAM … RAM … YAM … HAM … OM…’ Karen intoned.

Stan got the RAM and the YAM the wrong way round and was lagging behind on the rest.

John had said you could tune your chakra system like a guitar.

‘LAM,’ Karen began again, tuning her base chakra and imagining the colour red.

‘VAM,’ she said, tuning her genital chakra. This time she could remember the yantra — the sacred shape — that went with the mantra — the sacred sound — because it was like a smile, a horizontal crescent. Yes, she was smiling from hip to hip. She could feel it!

‘VAM,’ said Stan, thinking how hard it was not to think of van.

‘RAM,’ chanted Karen, moving up to her navel. Wasn’t that the name of God? She had read somewhere that Gandhi had said ‘RAM’ when he was shot. Or had she seen that in the movie? What a wonderful person Gandhi was. It was a privilege to be a human being when there were people like Gandhi to show what human potential really was.

RAM, thought Stan. A male goat, that at least was more appropriate than van. They really oughta take van out, in his opinion.

‘YAM,’ said Karen and she felt her heart opening out and just pouring love into the room. The colour was green, like spring.

YAM, thought Stan. Was that a fruit or a vegetable? HAM, the next one up, was definitely a meat, like LAM. Stan started to imagine the LAM and the HAM and the YAM being driven round in the van, sort of like a grocery service. Gee, he really wasn’t entering into the spirit of the thing. These were sacred syllables imbued with thousands of years of practice. Maybe you could tune your chakras. Maybe he could tune the old second chakra and get a hard-on.

‘HAM,’ said Karen, imagining blue light radiating from her throat. She hoped she would find beautiful words to speak to Stan during their lovemaking, words to reassure and inspire him, and words to express her own needs as a woman.

‘HAM,’ said Stan. Where were they now? The throat? Nothing wrong with his throat. Mind you, John had said a lot about ‘allowing sound’, which evidently meant keeping your neighbours up all night, since John had described being thrown out of a couple of hotels for allowing a little too much sound. ‘Tell them you’re on honeymoon and they’ll cut you a lot of slack,’ was his advice. Maybe Stan could make the folks next door bang on the wall and beg for sleep!

‘OM,’ chanted Karen, visualizing a purple circle spreading from her third eye and then, as it rose over her forehead and hovered over her crown, turning into a thousand-petalled white flower.

Stan figured that OM was the most famous mantra. You knew where you were with OM. He’d even heard about it way back in the sixties when he was about as square as you can get. It also didn’t mean anything in English, which was a help. Now, he really must concentrate next time round. Tune the old second chakra. ‘LAM,’ they began again.

* * *

Brooke told Kenneth to go for a ‘quick vision quest’ while she prepared the room. She was relieved to find the fifty honey-coloured beeswax candles, twelve dozen red roses, and the punnets of tissue-wrapped fraises des bois she had asked Moses to send down from San Francisco. She already had some Guérlain L’Heure Bleue to put in the deep grey-tiled double bath.

Kenneth set off on the hotel’s little circular trail with the sad knowledge that he was going to be exposed to more ticks, midges, poison oak and sock-soaking streams, as well as the lethal rays of the setting sun winking at him through the branches of another gloomy redwood grove. He toyed with the idea of walking down to the highway and hitching a ride to LA. He could become an ambience manager again, pimping and scoring for rock bands; half-eaten sandwiches on top of his TV in the Château Marmont, a telephone like an injury permanently crooked in his neck. Those were the days.

Kenneth stood halfway down the path, conflicted and uncertain. The dark wood lay ahead. Maybe he should go back to the bar and have a drink. Maybe he should think about what he was doing, maybe he shouldn’t. Yesterday he had felt inspired, not by charlatanism, his usual source of seriousness, but by that gratuitous vitality which had filled his body during the drumming. The trouble with this inspiration was that it made it impossible for him to cheat Brooke. She so longed to be treated with enthusiasm, rather than the cheap deference commanded by a plutocrat. Some gallant part of him, buried under the ambience manager and the sterile guru, wanted to give her exactly what she needed. Tonight he must delight not in what she was but in how she was.

He pressed on into the wood, alarmed by the task he had set himself. With her thin hair and her tired face and her expensive clothes, and that unstable combination of imperiousness and diffidence, it was easy to overlook the passionate woman asleep inside Brooke’s body. When he thought of the awful simplicity of the question she had asked in the car, ‘Do you want my cunt?’ he couldn’t deny that the obvious answer was ‘No’. But when he considered her courage in asking the question at all, the opposite answer shimmered into view. There was no way to resolve this conflict, he thought, inadvertently stepping into a puddle, except to revive the vitality he had felt the day before and share it with Brooke.

Back in the room, Brooke had found that twenty candles were already a fire hazard and she put the last thirty into a drawer, unlit. Taking Kenneth’s vision quest into account, she had run the bath scaldingly hot, until thick wisps of steam curled on its surface. With an oil spillage of L’Heure Bleue in the tub, the seething and wobbling refulgence of the golden candles on all the walls and ceilings, the bedroom floor ankle-deep in red rose petals, and logs burning silently behind fireproof glass, the cottage had taken on an exotic appearance. Heaped on a plate beside the bed were the wild strawberries she would feed Kenneth as they lay in post-coital calm among the moistened sheets.

It was pre-coital calm which eluded her grasp. Her secret aphrodisiac, and her most brilliant act of long-distance shopping, was the CD of Mtumbe’s Drums of Africa, the very sound which had transported Kenneth the day before. She had found the perfect volume, tested the remote control from every point in the room she could reach without climbing the walls, and finally put the disc on ‘pause’. Now, there was really nothing left to do, except to stand in front of the mirror and adjust her bathrobe for the twentieth time.

Kenneth approached the cottage along a manicured forest path. If he was going to do this thing he must do it right. He stopped to watch the bloodstained fingers of the sun drag the slaughtered day below the horizon. He breathed deeply a few times, walked the last few yards, and knocked on the artistically rusted door.

* * *

Jason leant forward, caught one of Angela’s breasts in his mouth and gave her nipple a little bite. Women loved that, didn’t they? He was already shagging her and rubbing her clit, so she ought to be well happy. Get them every way at once, that was his policy. It blew their circuits. And she couldn’t complain that he was fantasizing either, because he was totally in the present, thinking about what a great time she must be having thanks to him. What really turned him on was the thought of how much he was turning on the women he was with. The truth was that unless he hadn’t come for ages, he really didn’t feel that much physically. His record for not coming was ten days. It was a sort of experiment to see if it made him more intelligent.

Until a couple of days ago, Angela had been dead keen on his performance in the sack. Then she had been exposed to a bit of Tantric propaganda and suddenly she was the Teacher, with a capital T, going to show him how to have a totally spiritual shag. Of course he wanted better sex (who didn’t?) but he hated being patronized. The horrible thing was that Angela could tell if his mind was wandering. Luckily, he wasn’t making up a fantasy at the moment. Unless he was fantasizing that she was having a good time. Fuck, this whole thing was a nightmare. She was ruining his life.

Jason pumped away indignantly.

Angela could feel that Jason’s energy was blocked. She prayed to the Goddess to release the block and let the shakti flow between them. She really wanted Jason to feel that connection, that beautiful connection, to the Goddess.

‘Let go,’ she whispered.

Jason released her breast and fell back onto the pillow.

‘I didn’t mean let go of my breast,’ said Angela. ‘I meant let go inside, inside yourself.’

‘Just stop ordering me about, will you?’ snapped Jason. ‘If you wanna let go, let go. And you can let go of telling me to let go while you’re at it, because half the time I have no fucking idea what you’re on about.’

‘You have a lot of anger around this issue,’ said Angela, abruptly disconnecting her genitals from his and kneeling some distance away.

‘Oh, so you’re letting go of sex as well, are you?’ said Jason. ‘Great.’

‘No, I just thought we should try yab yum.’

‘What’s that, then?’ said Jason wearily. ‘Sanskrit for “processing”?’

‘No, it’s a position where all the chakras are aligned opposite each other and we can really balance the energy, and become a channel for the Goddess.’

Jason hovered on the edge of rage, but something restrained him and tilted him towards honesty.

‘I’d like that. I mean, I can see the problem now, but I can’t even imagine the solution. For me, during orgasm, that’s when the body takes over from the mind and there’s zero fantasy, or whatever you want to call it.’ Jason struggled to make progress without the crutches of facetiousness and aggression which usually swung him forwards. ‘The ideal would obviously be some permanent state of orgasmic freak-out,’ he suggested, ‘but that’s not possible, is it?’

‘I believe it is,’ said Angela, ‘although that’s not exactly how I’d put it.’

‘Well, let’s go for it, then,’ said Jason, all charm. ‘What exactly is this position?’

‘Just sit up cross-legged like you are meditating.’

Jason followed her instructions.

Angela, noticing that his erection had dwindled during their discussion, made a ring out of her thumb and finger and rubbed his cock up and down. As it stiffened she bent down to meet it, put her lips around the head, and let it slide gradually down her throat. With her middle finger she searched for his perineum, the stretch of skin just beyond his balls. She loved that part of him, the buried root of his cock. It was thick and hard under the softness of the skin. She scratched him lightly there while her head rose up and down on his cock.

Jason groaned appreciatively.

‘You like that, huh?’ said Angela, looking up.

‘Don’t stop!’ cried Jason.

Angela ignored his command and sat up.

‘Oh, no,’ said Jason. ‘That was great. Your throat was so tight.’

‘Wait,’ said Angela. Kneeling above him and taking his cock in her hand, she parted the lips of her cunt, and then, guiding it inside her, sank slowly down. She settled comfortably in his lap, wrapped her legs around his back and sat still.

‘This is yab yum,’ she said. ‘You see all our chakras are facing each other.’

‘Fantastic,’ said Jason, feeling something like wonder. ‘Yab yum, eh? Make a great title for a song.’

* * *

‘Spring has returned to the mountain!’ roared Stan. ‘I’ve got a hard-on.’

There was muffled applause from the room next door and a cry of ‘Way to go!’

‘Oh, my love,’ said Karen, ‘I’m so happy for you.’

‘So is half the building,’ chuckled Stan. ‘Evidently my throat chakra is in pretty good shape too.’

Stan pressed his palms on the bed and arched above Karen. He looked down into her eyes. For forty-two years he’d been looking into those kind eyes and for forty of them they’d been the eyes of his wife. They were glittering now, with tears, and with a mischievous look which hadn’t changed since the day he’d met her.

‘You’re a good woman,’ he said.

She laughed and the tears spilt out of her eyes and ran down the side of her face.

‘I guess I won’t be needing Walking Eagle’s special ceremony now,’ said Stan breezily.

‘That’s right,’ whispered Karen.

She had secretly arranged for Walking Eagle to perform the ceremony during their trip to Esalen, but she wouldn’t have told Stan that for all the world.

* * *

Kenneth and Brooke lay breast-deep in the bathtub, inhaling the fragrant steam, sweat tickling their cheeks and brows.

Kenneth felt himself sliding into some kind of collective male exhaustion. For a thousand years he had been fighting in the salt marshes, hacking with a blunt sword at other angry and exhausted men. His body was covered in cuts, there were purple bruises on his ribs. He was tired from shallow sleep, from a thousand years of sleeping with a sword in his hand. His arms ached from hacking at shields and shielding himself from hacking blows. He wanted to rest, he wanted to surrender; victory lay in surrender. He wanted to stop pretending to be anything except tired, stop pretending to be competent, stop pretending to know what was going on. Brooke was here to accept his surrender, to disarm him and to kiss those buckled muscles, to kiss that grazed skin.

Brooke was beginning to think that Drums of Africa might not be the perfect music for the occasion. Thanks to the grey pallor of his complexion, his gaping mouth, his closed eyes, and his appearance of being crucified against the side of the bath, Kenneth looked extremely drunk, perhaps dead. She slid across to the other side of the bath and leant towards Kenneth, not quite daring to touch him. Hearing the water swirl, he opened his eyes and smiled wearily.

‘I’m so tired,’ he said. ‘I mean really tired, tired in my marrow. Not just physically, either. I’m tired of all pretences.’

He’ll be telling me he’s got a headache next, thought Brooke, but she could see that Kenneth was not preparing her for sexual disappointment, he was telling her something essential. His defences were unravelling irresistibly, he was falling apart in the heat of the water. She also sensed that there was more trust in his helplessness than in any sexual act he had ever performed. She suddenly felt touched by the survival of their friendship, despite all the misunderstandings about sex and money. Besides, what else was there to do with sex and money except have misunderstandings about them? They were there to liberate the rest of life for some loftier purpose than bickering, lying and sulking. For the moment she didn’t care whether Kenneth desired her, she just wanted to heal him, to touch him where he was helpless, and to enjoy the trust which his helplessness revealed.

She reached out and pressed her fingers into his shoulders and his neck. Kenneth groaned and sank deeper into the water. She knelt in front of him and massaged his shoulders. She could feel his body shuddering involuntarily under her touch. Kenneth reached out blindly and wrapped his arms and legs around her torso. She felt his beard grazing her chest, the panic in his short breaths, the tension in his arms, the contraction in the muscles around his neck. Poor Kenneth, the booming guru, was just a wreck. Running her hands over his back, she could feel emotional collisions piled up in a scrapyard of twisted muscles, and a thousand knots, each telling the story of an unreconciled contradiction.

Everybody was a wreck, but Kenneth was more of a wreck than most. What could you do but heal and be healed? Yes, we’re all wrecks, thought Brooke, pushing deeper into Kenneth’s troubled flesh, and we must help each other make it through life.

They got out of the bath and Brooke dried Kenneth while he stood swaying with his eyes still closed. She realized that she was in a trance of service. For someone whose napkin was usually caught by a servant before it hit the ground, there was novelty as well as expertise in this role reversal. Stepping through the mirror, Brooke gave away the things she had so often received. The memory of ten thousand massages emerged from her pampered shoulders and rushed solicitously into her hands.

Lying on the bed, Kenneth whimpered pathetically as Brooke pummelled the back of his legs and, finding his exhaustion answered with sympathy, passed through exhaustion into excited gratitude. Brooke, who was by now transformed into the Mother Teresa of Big Sur, was astonished when Kenneth rolled over and presented her with a stubborn erection.

‘I love the way you do that,’ he said, clasping her by the waist with a manly grip.

She leant forward and they kissed.

* * *

‘Tight-arse!’ said Jerome.

‘You’re way outta line,’ said Paul, putting his clothes back on.

‘Poly wants more than one,’ said Sabine in a little girl’s voice, writhing on the bed.

‘And you,’ said Paul, turning to Sabine. ‘You may be attractive but you’re one sick chick. I’m a pretty go-with-the-flow kind of person, but the stuff you guys are into…’

Paul shook his head and started to leave.

‘Poly thinks Paul is boring,’ sang Sabine, sticking her tongue out.

‘And so does Jerome,’ added Jerome.

Jerome and Sabine rolled around on the bed together, sticking their tongues out and laughing. Paul left with quiet dignity.

‘Maybe Peter would like to play,’ said Sabine.

‘Peter?’ said Jerome. ‘You don’t wanna bother with him.’

Sabine rolled onto her back, bringing her knees up to her ears and pulling her legs open.

‘Poly wants all the men to come inside her,’ she groaned.

‘Yeah,’ said Jerome encouragingly.

He hoped he hadn’t blown it by trying to put her off Peter. Poly was the pure lust in Sabine, a surprisingly separate personality and the hottest lover he had ever known. She couldn’t be bridled and if she wanted Peter she must have him.

The Tantric group, because of the sound they might allow, had their rooms in the same area of the property. Sabine used her intuition to home in on Peter’s room. She tested the handle and, finding the door open, burst into the room.

‘Hello. Who’s there?’ said Karen, turning on the light. ‘Oh, it’s you, dear,’ she said, recognizing the woman she had comforted in the afternoon. ‘I hope we haven’t been making too much noise — I mean, allowing too much sound,’ she corrected herself.

‘What’s going on?’ said Stan sleepily. ‘Are we going to have group sex?’

‘Stan!’ said Karen. ‘I’m sorry, dear, he’s a little overexcited, he just had his first erection in eight years.’

‘Let’s go,’ said Jerome, who was standing behind Sabine.

‘Poly wants to stay,’ whispered Sabine.

‘She does?’

‘It would be kind of original, no? With these old people.’

‘Too original,’ said Jerome.

‘But Poly wants to,’ said Sabine, stamping her foot.

‘OK, OK,’ said Jerome.

‘It’s the woman I was telling you about, the one in my group,’ Karen whispered to Stan. ‘I think she’s upset about something.’

‘Gee,’ said Stan.

‘Why don’t you come and sit down, dear?’ said Karen.

‘Thanks,’ said Sabine shyly.

‘Yeah,’ growled Jerome. ‘Thanks.’

* * *

With gentle bites, Peter traced the tendon that ran from Crystal’s knee up to her groin. She spread her knee outwards and made a hollow in the smoothness of her thigh. He bit the tendon harder as he moved upwards, and then he kissed her in that hollow and pressed his lips to that soft crease of skin, rubbing his cheek against the tangle of her pubic hair.

He gazed up at her. She closed her eyes briefly and then they sprang open again, intensified. All the sadness and all the innocence she had ever known was distilled into a serious delight, and seemed to slide along the thread of her eyebeams and to fall, drop by drop, into his heart.

‘I’ve been waiting for you all my life,’ said Peter. ‘All my longings and all my fantasies have been about you, but I didn’t know you really existed. And now you’re lying in front of me in all your beauty.’

Peter, who usually choked on an ‘I love you’ before falling hastily to sleep, made this speech irresistibly.

He leant down and ran his tongue lightly over her belly until the tip came to rest on her navel ring. As he shook the ring with his tongue, the gold chimed against his teeth. Crystal moaned and rolled her hips.

‘You’re so open, you’re so alive,’ he said.

She smiled at him with unguarded eyes, her cheeks glowing in the candlelight.

She opened her legs wider and his chest pressed against the open lips of her cunt. He drew the wetness into his parched heart and, letting out a sigh of amazement, brought his head to rest between her breasts.

She ran her fingers through his hair.

‘You’re so sweet to me,’ she said.

‘You’re my whole reason for existing,’ he said, looking up at her again. His eyes in her eyes and her eyes in his, resting.

He was astonished by the innocence of his feelings. Just for now he was purely defined by making love to Crystal. There was no sense of debt created by the extravagance of his words, no sense that they were being converted into promises. With her, every gesture was made to give life to the moment.

Looking down at her body, he was filled with passion to see her open like a flower. He leant down and kissed her quietly on the lips of her cunt, as if he were kissing her sleeping forehead and didn’t want to wake her. And then he parted those lips with his thumbs and ran his tongue along the furrow between them, and when he reached her clitoris he arched his tongue and let it circle and slide over her softly.

Crystal pushed her hips further forward to show him that he could have all of her. Every movement was perfect, there was nothing to add and nothing to take away, nothing to quicken and nothing to slow down. How did he know her already? How did she already trust him? She could feel the clear glass of her meditating mind being stained by the sudden richness of her sensations, but clear or stained it remained translucent.

And now he was slipping his middle finger inside her and at the same time stroking her navel ring with his thumb, as if he were stroking the rim of a glass to make it hum. Their bodies were perfectly intelligent: they knew what to do; they had always known what to do. She breathed in deeply, drawing the excitement upwards, letting it rise through the centre of her torso like mercury in a thermometer. She let out a sigh of delight as Peter’s tongue quickened and flickered; she felt the ache in her third eye as the pleasure flooded her skull through the open gate of her throat, and then, fountaining against the inside of her crown, curled round and streamed back down through every nerve in her body.

And now he was slowing down, slowing right down. She relaxed all her muscles and subsided into his palm, which rested at the base of her spine, waiting to receive her. And then he touched her on the clitoris again with the tip of his tongue, as carefully as if he had crossed a wide desert without a drink, and was fetching the last drop of dew from the petal of a rose. And he rested his tongue there, and imagined all the love he was capable of — no, that was not enough — all the love he was not capable of as well, streaming into her.

And then they both lay still. But everything around them was streaming and everything inside them was streaming.

After a brief eternity, he looked up at her and they both laughed in astonishment at the intensity of the lightness they were feeling.

‘God,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing…’

Crystal’s cheeks were flushed. She looked rejuvenated and entirely beautiful. She ran her hands up the centre of her body and said, ‘Whoosh.’

‘Yeah,’ said Peter and, following the same line she had described with her hands, he kissed her belly, and kissed her between the breasts, and kissed the hollow at the base of her throat, and kissed her chin, and kissed her lips and, as he kissed her forehead, he slipped the head of his cock between the lips of her cunt.

‘Ahh…’

‘God.’

He held the head of his cock inside her, his eyes in her eyes, her eyes in his eyes, resting. Slowly, so slowly, because each millimetre was a new plane of intimacy it would be foolish to rush past, he moved further inside her. They gazed into each other’s eyes as if they were witnessing a miracle rather than performing an act.

Crystal felt him move from her swollen and sensitive lips up towards her womb, and she felt the same journey taking place from the excited part of her mind towards its silent centre. She felt the reconciliation of everything that was said to be deep and everything that was said to be high; the vertical dimension disappeared and she felt herself disseminated through an infinite horizon.

And then he drew back slowly and she felt herself drawn back into a zone of crowded sensations, of pleasure and the habit of deciding what was pleasurable. But by then she was not herself any more, she was just a woman, and he was a man, and they might as well have been fucking for a thousand years, because she couldn’t remember doing anything else.

He got up onto his knees and she hooked one leg over his shoulder and tilted sideways, and he started to fuck her hard, looking down on the spread of her legs and seeing his cock disappear into her wet cunt and reappear glistening and slide back in again. And he became just fucking, not a thought in his head except fucking, and the feeling was so meant to be, first of the tribe lay there, yes, there, yes, there, and he was there, and she was there, and it was there, and there it was, fucking.

He was, he could feel it, he was going to, he could feel it, he was going to come. Stop everything. Breathe in hard. Clench everything. PC muscle, buttocks, arms, pectorals, abdomen, chin lock. Breathe in further, the last sip of air through taut nostrils. Just in time. He felt the desire reversing and rushing up the centre of his body and flooding his head. He sat back on his heels and closed his eyes.

She felt the walls of her cunt softening and expanding, and then in a series of contractions she gushed amrita onto their intermingled pubic hair.

* * *

The yab yum had been a big success. Jason still couldn’t help thinking that it would make a great title for a song. ‘No need to rush/ No need to run/ Just stay where you are/ And yab yum/ ya-ba-di yum.’

He could just imagine himself on MTV with a touch of the Kama Sutra art direction and the whole band in soft-focused yab yum. It could be huge. A little ripple from the sitar, a pelting from the tabla, and his gravelly and laid-back voice singing, ‘Yab yum/ ya-ba-di dum.’ It would be bigger than ‘Be Bop A Lula’ and ‘Do-Do Run-Run’ put together. A world music sound with a neo-sixties message. Perfect.

‘I’ve got to write it down,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Angela sweetly.

‘I’ve got this song running around in my head,’ said Jason.

‘You see,’ said Angela. ‘Sexual and creative energy are really from the same source. Stimulate one and you stimulate the other.’

‘Yeah, definitely,’ said Jason, getting up to find pen and paper. Under his breath he composed. ‘Line up your chakras/ It’s time to have fun/ Yab yum, ya-ba-di yum/ Yab yum/ Ya-ba-di dum.’

* * *

‘Gee,’ said Stan, admiring the perfection of Sabine’s body, her small voluptuous breasts, her wide tanned belly, and her artfully trimmed pubic hair. Awestruck as he was, he noticed that her wonderful body did not entirely make up for the impression of mental illness which pulsed from her like a lighthouse beam.

‘This is your lucky day, old man,’ she said, sprawling on the bed and stroking her thighs with her fingertips.

‘It was already my lucky day,’ said Stan calmly. ‘I got to make love to my wife for the first time in eight years.’

‘Oh, that’s so sweet,’ said Karen.

‘Well, it’s the truth,’ said Stan. ‘I don’t even know this young lady’s name.’

‘My name is Poly,’ said Sabine.

Jerome had stripped down to his lime-green silk boxer shorts. Strangely orange skin hung loosely on his bony frame. From a chaos of serpentine curls, he leered angrily at Karen. He figured that Karen was the price he had to pay for the demented intensity of Sabine’s alter ego.

Karen drew strength from the thought that she was not only deflecting the blow of Jerome’s sexual attention from poor fragile Poly, but also giving Stan the opportunity to celebrate his rediscovered potency with a beautiful, if mad, young woman. The only thing that could make this blossoming of self-sacrifice utterly perfect would be to avoid any physical contact with Jerome. Perhaps she could find some tactful way to let Stan have his fun while she chatted with Jerome.

‘Would you mind if I just watched?’ she asked Jerome.

‘Watch the three of us?’ said Jerome eagerly. ‘That’s cool.’

‘Or the two of them,’ said Karen, trying to protect Stan from Jerome’s competition, or worse still his contribution.

‘I’m not the one who’s dropping out,’ said Jerome. ‘It’s up to us to satisfy this sexually devouring woman,’ he said to Stan. ‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Well, gee,’ said Stan, ‘I don’t want Karen to feel left out.’

‘She likes to watch,’ growled Sabine. ‘Everybody can do their own thing.’

She reached inside Stan’s white pyjamas and wrapped her fingers around his unconcerned cock.

‘I’m not sure what my thing is,’ said Stan. ‘But, right now, I think I’d like to be with my wife.’

‘You could watch us,’ said Jerome, leaping astride Sabine’s writhing body.

‘We’ll just go out on the balcony,’ said Karen discreetly. ‘You make yourselves at home.’

‘This is stupid,’ shouted Sabine, banging the mattress with her fists. ‘We might as well be in our own room.’

‘That’s what I’ve been saying all along,’ said Jerome.

Sabine leapt to her feet, and Jerome hastily gathered up his clothes and turned to say goodbye.

‘We’ll see you guys tomorrow,’ he said cheerfully.

Karen and Stan remained silent while Sabine strode proudly out of the room, and Jerome shuffled through the door with a presidential wave.

‘I guess we’ll never have group sex now,’ said Stan with a touch of melancholy.

‘We could start a group of our own,’ said Karen. ‘Let’s talk to Walking Eagle about it.’

‘He’s bound to have a ceremony,’ said Stan.

‘No doubt about it,’ said Karen.

* * *

Brooke had fallen asleep and was dreaming that the sea was an oriental merchant unrolling bolts of lace at her feet, and with every wave she bought another acre of lace because each pattern was too beautiful to refuse. And then he said he had some silk to show her, and she agreed, and he pointed behind him and the whole ocean was stretched silk. She said she would take the whole thing, but he laughed and said it was not for sale. Couldn’t he make her a little dress? she asked. Not even a handkerchief? Nothing? And at that moment all the bolts of lace streamed back into the ocean, and the silk turned into churning sea water and it rushed over her naked body and she was completely free.

Kenneth was standing on the balcony feeling exhilarated and distinguished when Brooke came over to join him.

‘I’ve just had the most beautiful dream and I know I have to give away all of my money,’ said Brooke sleepily.

‘Make a foundation,’ said Kenneth.

‘OK, darling,’ yawned Brooke. ‘But anyhow, I don’t need any new dresses.’

‘We can make that one of the terms and conditions of the foundation: no new dresses for the director.’

Brooke hooked her hand over his shoulder and rested her head on his chest.

‘The ocean looks like silk, but the wonderful thing about it is that it’s the ocean.’

‘That’s right,’ said Kenneth.

‘And lightning is lightning, and sperm is…’ She paused.

‘Don’t say holy water,’ said Kenneth. ‘Don’t give up on me now.’

‘I wasn’t going to say holy water,’ said Brooke. ‘I was going to say, yummy.’

‘Yummy is OK,’ said Kenneth. ‘Yummy is allowed.’

* * *

Peter lay on the bed, completely still, listening to the whispering sea. An intermittent draught cooled the sweat on his skin. He was immersed in the richness of his own body and yet barely in touch with the bed. He could feel his body coursing with blood and enzymes and glandular excretions and, at the same time, feel nourished by the pulse of the faintest star.

He saw all the causes from the unknowable edges of time which, for all he knew, had no edges, converging on his body in that moment to make it no other than it was. And then he saw that his body was itself a cause dispersing its effects into the future. He saw time rippling in and, caught in the revolution of a moment, rippling out again. History and all possible futures were just the interference pattern of those converging and diverging waves of causality. And then he saw that what rippled in and what rippled out were the same thing, because his body was no more focal than any other point and this moment was no more focal than any other moment. It was as true to call the stillness rippling as to call the rippling stillness, or the stillness stillness, or the rippling rippling …

‘Far out,’ he murmured.

‘What?’ whispered Crystal.

‘I’ve seen how the whole thing works.’

‘What? The yoni and the lingam?’ said Crystal. ‘You didn’t know that before?’

Peter laughed. ‘No. The universe,’ he said.

‘Oh, the universe,’ said Crystal, relieved. ‘Sabine’s favourite subject.’

‘Now you’ve ruined my mystical experience,’ said Peter.

‘It was that easy? It just disappeared at the mention of a woman you don’t like as much as you used to?’

‘Yup,’ said Peter. ‘I guess we’re going to have to painstakingly reconstruct the moments that led up to it.’

‘That never works,’ said Crystal. ‘We’ll have to approach it from a new angle.’

Infolding and outfolding at the same time. She smiled as the phrase returned to her from Jean-Paul’s letter.

Leaning forward she sucked one of Peter’s nipples. The sensation pierced and soothed him like a hummingbird.

Crystal knelt astride him and held his face between her cupped hands.

‘A new angle,’ she repeated, her knees spreading outwards and backwards as she slid down the sheets to join him.