Beneath the Earth Read Free

I could hear her breathing. I’m lonely, she said eventually. They’re all fucking lonely. Yes, I said. Are you clean, she asked me.
    She didn’t want me to come to her home. She said she’d book a room in a hotel where the elevators didn’t require a key card and I could come straight up.
    I followed the corridor around to her room. I knocked on the door. I could hear her standing on the other side. I waited. She opened the door. Hello, she said.
    She was wearing a heavy white bathrobe, the kind you only find in hotels, and smelled of bath salts. I could see steam on the mirror of the bathroom through the open door and knew that she had prepared herself for me. I feel ridiculous, she told me. Don’t, I said. I’ve never done something like this before, she told me. I have, I said.
    She sat down on the bed. She was trembling. I felt irritated. She should have come to terms with her decision before calling me. She beckoned me over and asked me to sit next to her. She stroked my face and ran a hand through my hair. She kissed me. Her mouth tasted of white wine. I thought of Rachel. She took my hand and placed it inside her bathrobe. My hand settled on her right breast. My fingers reached underneath to cup it. Her head moved slowly back and she closed her eyes. She moaned a little, a sound filled with a mixture of despair, shame and longing. I felt no excitement. I worried that I would not be able to perform.
    She lay back on the bed and asked me to take my shirt off. She loosened her bathrobe and I understood that she wanted me to help her untie the knot. When it came apart I stared at her body for a few moments before looking at her face again. Whatever unhappiness had brought her here, she was very beautiful. I began to feel aroused on a purely physical level. I stood up, undressed and began. She did not, I think, enjoy it very much. She was too nervous. She was on the edge of excitement but could not quite bring herself there. I ran my tongue across the indentation on the fourth finger of her left hand and she pulled away, shaking her head. Don’t be cruel, she said.
    Afterwards, she didn’t invite me to take a shower. She went into the bathroom while I dressed and only when I knocked to say that I was leaving did she come out. She had been crying. She handed me my money. You have my number, I told her and left. I went for a beer in a nearby bar where I saw a boy from my schooldays sitting in the corner with his arm around a girl. Once, several years before, he had approached me at a party and told me that I had beautiful eyes.
    I met a girl and tried to like her. She worked in a café I often visited. She told me she was from Hiroshima. I didn’t know people still lived there, I said. Oh yes, she told me. Has your family lived there a long time, I asked her. No, she said. Her parents were both from a city called Masuda in the Shimane Prefecture. But they moved to Hiroshima in the 1980s after their marriage. I was intrigued by this idea. I asked her would she like to come for a walk with me some evening and she said yes.
    I’m not accustomed to dating. I’m not even accustomed to sex, outside of my job. I have no interest in it. The boys in my class at the university talk of little else, perhaps because they get so little. The girls hold back, not for moral reasons but because they enjoy the power they have over the boys. I can understand this. Feeling desired can be a very potent force.
    The girl’s name was Hamako, which, she told me, meant child of the shore. She had come to Ireland to study medicine but discovered quite early on that she had no aptitude for the subject. She was frightened by the cadavers. She hated the smell of formaldehyde. She didn’t care for blood. She wasn’t even particularly interested in helping people. She said that she couldn’t tell her parents she had left the course because they would be furious with her and insist that she