Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje Read Free Book Online Page A

I got so, with Bellocq, I didn’t trust any of that … any more. It was just playing games. We were furnished rooms and Bellocq was a window looking out.
    Buddy —
    She refused then to take off her clothes. She lay on top of him, kissing him, talking quietly to him. He could feel the material of her clothes all over his naked body, as if he were wearing them. His eyes closed. It could have been a sky not a ceiling above him.
    Don’t lean on that arm. Sorry. It got broken once.
    She was conscious that while they spoke his fingers had been pressing the flesh on her back as though he were plunging them into a cornet. She was sure he was quite unaware, she was sure his mind would not even remember. It was part of a conversation held with himself in his sleep. Even now as she lay against his body in her red sweater and skirt. But she was wrong. He had been improving on “Cakewalking Babies”.

Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky.

She. Again in the room, now in the long brown dress. Brown and yellow, no buttons no shoes and the click of the door as she leans against the handle, snapping shut so we are closed in with each other. The snap of the lock is the last word we speak. Between us the air of the room. Thick with past and the ghosts of friends who are in other rooms. She will not move away from the door. I am sitting on the edge of the bed looking towards the mirror. With her hands behind her. I must get up and move through the bodies in the air. To the first slow kiss in the cloth of her right shoulder into the skin of her neck, blowing my nervousness against the almost cold hair for she has been walking outside. My fingers into her hair like a comb till the hair is tight against the unused nerves between my fingers. The taste the pollen in her right ear, the soft circuit of her hearing wet with my spit that I send to her like a ship and suck back and swallow. This soft moveable limb on the side of her head.
    I press myself into her belly. Her breath into my white shirt. Her cool breath against my sweating forehead so I can feel the bubbles evaporate. I lift her arms and leave them empty above us and bend and pull the brown dress up to her stomach and then up into her arms. Step back and watch her against the corner of my room her hands above her holding the brown dress she has lifted over her head in a ball. Turns her back to me and leans her face now against the dress she brings down to her face. Cool brown back. Till I attack her into the wall my cock cushioned my hands at the front of the thigh pulling her at me we are hardly breathing her crazy flesh twisted into corners me slipping out from the move and our hands meet as we put it in quick christ quickly back in again. In. Breathing towards the final liquid of the body, the liquid snap, till we slow and slow and freeze in this corner. As if this is the last entrance of air into the room that was a vacuum that is now empty of the other histories.
    Lying here. Kept warm by her dress and my shirt over us. I am dry and stuck to her thigh. Joined by the foam we made. By the door, and the light and the air from the hall comes under the door. Sniff it. She hasn’t taken one step further into my room. Dear Robin. I remember when I shook against you. The flavour of mouth. We are animals meeting an unknown breed. The reek, the size, where to find the right softness. Against this door. Coiled into each other under the brown and white cloth. Trying to come closer than that. A step past the territory.

Webb had spoken to Bellocq and discovered nothing. Had spoken to Nora, Crawley, to Cornish, had met the children—Bernadine, Charlie. Their stories were like spokes on a rimless wheel ending in air. Buddy had lived a different life with every one of them.
    Webb circled, trying to understand not where Buddy was but what he was doing, quite capable of finding him but taking his time, taking almost two years, entering the character of Bolden through every