The Blue Book by A. L Kennedy Read Free Book Online

mouth?
    Which is preposterous, naturally, but need not be mistaken. My insecurity may only signal that I am both ugly and right.
    Right about being wrong – romantically mistaken.
    Am I, for example, being kissed because there is something delicious on my face – my lips – possibly gravy, perhaps jam – it could be jam . . . Is he just hungry? Is this just to do with jam? I want to believe this is mainly about me, but I could be deluded.
    I can’t feel my irresistibility is likely.
    Then again, what I can feel is blinding, incandescent, and offers no names for itself and is eating, is swallowing, all of my names for me – and the more I keep doing what we’re doing – because he’s still doing it, too: we’re doing it together, in fact – except he’s doing it in the opposite direction – and this works, really works – and I wouldn’t have thought that a body, anybody’s body, could be that, well, entertaining – the more we do this, whatever it is, the less I know about it, the less I know about everything, and the less I am able to care about not knowing.
    I am perfectly happy and also evaporating.
    Who’d have thought?
    But eventually you’re wholly free of thinking and can begin to uncover who you are with him, touch against touch.
    And you make beauties together.
    You and whoever he happens to be.
    It does seem wrong to say so, but who he is can seem slightly irrelevant.
    Not in a bad way – although it does sound bad – the specific identity of the gentleman does not, to be honest, matter that much.
    This isn’t your fault. It’s nearly their fault: the number of – eventually a not excessive but still significant number of – gentlemen’s fault, because they have been, as it were, not that outstanding or differentiated and, therefore, in order to have any fun, any modest pleasure, you have become very differentiated. Your heart, your mind, your body, they have become discrete. You have separated into fragments that no longer communicate and which get curious and bored and stumble, and your condition is patently not ideal, but equally you’re never disappointed.
    You do sometimes have a sense of waiting by which you are almost overwhelmed, but this shows you are not pathological or numb. And you bear none of the gentlemen ill will. You would smile at them in the street, be quietly fond: you would commiserate should they receive unpleasant news. This isn’t love, though – this is not love, this is not in any way that word.
    This is safe.
    You are safe.
    You are lucky and not confined – not really – it’s rather that you enjoy prudent limitations, almost always have.
    You are not unaware of love’s damages, that chaos, and realise you have been spared, are sparing yourself. You get to pursue what are not relationships, more a series of hobbies, indoor games for rainy evenings and afternoons.
    So, on several legitimate levels, you are content.
    Only then, for instance – just for instance – you may stand beside a man, a not unfamiliar man, and – sharp and hard and for no reason – every shade of him will strike in through you: his angles and his musics and the subtleties of his scents: and you cannot touch him, but want to – cannot respond, but want to – cannot move, but want to. He has, in the course of doing nothing, suspended you in want and want and want. And through you come reeling these dreadful truths: that you respect him and fully intend to be proud of him hereafter and to see him both happy and well – and you’ll need him kept warm in the winter and cool when it’s hot and will let no ugly breeze come near him and no wanker be permitted to annoy him and you wish for him to be comfortable, at the very least comfortable, for ever. And these are desires that ache in you deeper than sweating, or bending, or sucking, or any of the thin