As Near as I Can Get Read Free

brickwork, while her legs, running obliquely to her stiletto-heeled shoes, pressed her plump bottom against the wall. Soon, if she were lucky, one of the solitary men passing through the district would pause in response to her murmured endearment , stand gazing past her as if only half aware of her presence while she elaborated her offer, and ultimately perhaps stalk rapidly behind her as she turned a corner, crossed a street, marched purposefully up an unexpectedly gloomy defile and disappeared into a dim doorway set in a sooty façade.
    And a few moments later we had been alone in a sickly, first-floor room. Or were we alone, I had wondered warily, noticing a door just wide-enough open to show that the chamber next door was unlit.
    â€˜Are we alone?’
    â€˜Now come on, you haven’t hired a life companion. Here——’
    Brusquely she manipulated my ardourless person, insulating it from any but the dim illusion of carnal contact. She was naked from the waist down, I noticed, having removed her skirt. When? While I’d been glancing dubiously at the parted door. Her dumpy, stockinged legs, medalled with suspenders, and tufted abdomen, seemed strangely detached from the brisk, commercial lady above them.
    â€˜Well, come on!’
    Now she was on the bed, lower half a pair of legs splayed submissively, upper half an impatient and uncongenial person whom I scarcely knew.
    â€˜Are you going to get started?’
    â€˜No——’
    â€˜No?’ (rearing up).
    â€˜Yes—why can’t you be more——’
    More like memory, selective memory, more like anticipation . More like the doting imagination, endlessly elaborating voluptuous phantasy. Less like life. For Rosyon the street corner, with tightly drawn bodice and short skirt, the patient girls in doorways as we stride past, the elegant, youthful professionals strolling in expensive neighbourhood s , the girl-cluttered parks under the streaming lights, resolve themselves long, too long, before the critical moment into just you and a stranger. And the mighty gland is sensitive to personality, although it soon forgets.
    â€˜Aren’t you finished yet?’
    Just about. There! The minor physiological flurry subsides and, while the untouched mind gloomily directs the hands to fasten buttons and adjust clothing, Rosy bounces swiftly up, buttons round her skirt, re-reddens her lips and waits impatiently to return to her corner. And you pat volume two of Anna Karenina in your jacket pocket and follow her out into Rocket Street.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ said Milly. ‘I suppose so. Do you think so? What do you think?’
    â€˜I think that it’s—something. Can you afford it?’
    â€˜Come and see my place?’
    Her place was a little nest, muffled with carpet and curtains and cushions, that became bathroom, bedroom, kitchen or lounge depending on which direction one faced. Nowhere in that compact ‘flatlet’ was one out of reach of a wall or partition.
    â€˜Faster!’
    And we had walked faster after turning into Slipsy Row, with its young, caged trees, its slick young cars, its converted houses, some with the original façades in stucco and tile, with its attentive, swarthy students in narrow bed-sitters struggling with prepositions, with Lady Sugar MacMahon ….
    â€˜Isn’t that her name? I don’t know.’
    â€˜Who? Who?’
    Milly squeezed and re-squeezed my hand and massaged my back. And she was indeed very thin, disclosing it inadvertently , as she impatiently undressed behind the bathroom partition without drawing its curtain-door, appearing soon in billowing gauze just verging on transparency in the mellow light.
    â€˜I could make some coffee? Oh, let’s not bother——’
    â€˜Can I stay the night?’
    â€˜Kiss me.’
    Milly seemed charming, her incoherence freshness and originality, her emaciation an appeal to protectiveness and an