Dark Places by Kate Grenville Page A

was a sickness that could have no relief: my passion was a fever that could not break, although if I had been able to forget myself enough to tear those arms out of their sockets, I might have felt some relief from what pressed against my being like a flood against a wall.
    I shot my pulsing seed into her receptacle and lay panting and weeping beside her, feeling my own tears run into my moustache and be lost there. I was at my hollowest then, drained into the Norah-person beside me, and I wept at my emptiness. Life was not in my hands, there was nothing in my hands, it was this woman who had it all, now that she had been filled with my being. ‘I am nothing, Norah,’ I said, in a voice thick with tears, and felt her listening. ‘I am a dry husk, an empty shell.’ Around me and in my head the voids were beginning to spin and hum and I was full of nothing but fear: my being was whirling in great blasts of the wind of nothingness. ‘I am nothing, Norah,’ I said. ‘My soul is all alone,’ and I was seized with the panic of my emptiness and aloneness.
    There was no way I could stop being alone except by a warm touch on my spirit, and I turned to the woman who was full of me, the woman I had filled from my own store of need and fear, and tried to warm myself at her flesh. ‘Oh Norah,’ I whispered through tears. ‘Norah!’ I could not find the words for my anguish of soul, and could only hold her against me and say, ‘I am here, I am here,’ to stop my soul sinking into blackness.
    She lay, a minx ashamed. She did not speak, but wept. ‘It is the pleasure,’ I told her. ‘You are a minx, and wanton, for all your titters and laces.’ I laughed when she said, ‘No, no!’ and pushed at me with the palms of her hands. The tears ran down those cheeks of hers and into her mouth.
    But Norah was a woman, and women’s tears did not seem to well up from any dark and hissing void. Norah was a woman and an animal, and lived only at the level of her greedy flesh. ‘Oh no, Albion,’ she said, ‘enough!’ and she pushed at me with her palms, and thrust me away from her as I tried to comfort myself against her, thinking that I wanted to fill her again, not seeing that in my agony of emptiness I needed her to fill me. ‘No, Albion, no!’ she said, and I licked the salt tears off my moustache and swallowed them.
    It was myself I loathed then, for my weakness, that she had seen and rejected. ‘It will not happen again, Norah,’ I said with dignity, tasting the salt on my lips, and I let her think that I meant I would not fill her again for the moment. ‘Thank you, Albion,’ she whispered, and I heard her sigh with pleasure, and curl into the bed, filled, replete, powerful, while I felt myself beginning to spin away into the panting fear again.
    I felt my being shredding apart, and I seized my wife, because she was going to join me in fear if I had to suffer, and I shook her shoulders until she was gasping and trying to say ‘Albion,’ through teeth that rattled together, and her fear at last met mine, and I forced my way into her fear, and at last we were joined: she was weeping and fearful as I was, and my fear was divided by being shared with her. ‘You are afraid,’ I whispered into her ear as I thrust into her. ‘You are afraid, afraid, afraid,’ I felt her fear greasy under my palms on her skin and I could reject her then, roll away, thrust her away from me, and hear her sob and gasp beside me, and I felt no fear now myself, and could sleep at last. ‘Flesh of my flesh,’ I said just before I slept. ‘You are my wife, flesh of my flesh.’ Her tears soothed me like a lullaby into warm sleep.

Ten
    THE BOOKS had warned me that a houseful of women is like a cageful of monkeys , but in the end, a houseful of women did not eventuate. Shortly after Norah and I were wed, Kristabel finally