We sat facing each other like statues; the tabletop that lay between us was littered with the debris of the last meal we would ever share together. Nora’s eyes shone like diamonds; mine looked like piss holes in the snow. I was just coming off the end of a three-day drinking binge, and everything around me had taken on a kind of brittle quality.
The waitress danced in big slow circles around the restaurant, bearing trays of pasta and soup and hot black coffee. Cigarette smoke gathered in the corners of the room, hiding prying eyes and muted sweet nothings. The waitress smiled at everyone, her face a big white shining star in its own little galaxy.
Nora just stared at me. Willing me to drop down dead on the spot.
“So. That’s it then?” I said, not really expecting an answer.
“Yes,” she replied, her voice as hard as those eyes. “The end. Full stop. No turning back. You sleep with whores, you’re not welcome back in my bed.”
It wouldn’t have helped to tell her that I hadn’t slept with anyone, never mind a professional. Nora had her own ideas on such matters, and to contradict them would lead only to another slanging match.
The waitress smiled at me as she did another flyby; her lovely mouth was a red wet promise, her comely figure some kind of answer to a question that could never be put into words. Or perhaps it was merely another unanswerable question. I wasn’t quite sure. Of anything.
And then, with a noisy sliding of her chair and a loud exhalation of air, Nora was gone. The last I ever saw of her was her hunched back as it disappeared between the glass doors.
I turned to the curvy waitress. Smiled. She returned the gesture, and sashayed over to me like a dancer on the West End stage. Eyes blazing like tiny suns, breasts heaving like something volcanic beneath the creased surface of her open-necked shirt. When she drew level with me I could smell hot grease and lavender.
“Hi,” she said, smiling from one side of her mouth.
“Hi yourself.”
“What’ll you have?” Her eyes blazed even brighter when I asked for her name. I was locked in the prison of her gaze before I even realised that I could never escape.
*****
Betty the waitress took me out back of the Crimson Cafe after she’d locked up for the evening. She didn’t even ask about Nora, and I didn’t feel like telling. My waitress had changed from her uniform into a pair of faded jeans and a red vest top: the night was humid, so she didn’t need much else to guard her from the climate.
“I have something to show you,” she’d promised as we exchanged kisses sprawled across the Formica counter by the till. Her hands were small and warm as they kneaded my erection, and the butterfly-wing whisper of her lips across my cheek promised of a heaven previously unknown to me.
So I followed her across the waste ground behind the building, picking my way over stones and bricks and broken timbers. Betty was nimble, surefooted; she crossed the space as if she did this every night. Perhaps she did.
Soon we came to a tall steel bin with little wheels on the bottom, the kind that always stand in places like these. There was a mild stench of decay, slightly sweet and very sickly. Betty smiled and took me by the hand. Led me behind the big grey drum of a bin.
There was a figure crouched there, down among the straggly weeds and empty beer cans that littered the ground around the receptacle. It was a man, dressed in dirty rags and covered in a thick layer of filth. And he was masturbating.
The man glanced up at me, grinning, and my heart lurched. His face, even though slightly crazed, was as familiar as my own; and that was because it was my own, looking up at me like a cracked mirror in the night.
When I turned to face her Betty was gone, but her parting words hung in the air like confetti: “It’s your turn now.”
When I looked back down at my doppelganger he’d vanished too. A pile of rags lay where he’d crouched, stained and torn and strangely alluring.
So I stripped naked, and put them on. Within minutes I was down there, squatting on my haunches with my limp penis in my hand. Nothing happened when I pulled at my member, and I started to cry.
Then Betty sidled up beside me, her tiny warm hands on my shoulders. She whispered things into my ear: words that at first seemed meaningless, but then planted strange and violent and erotic images in my mind.
Soon I had an erection. I started to pump at it, just as I’d been shown. Stars imploded and universes folded before my eyes; the air around me swelled, then was sucked away to leave me in a sterile vacuum. But still my hands manned the pump.
It wasn’t long before I heard Betty’s footsteps as she walked away, heading back towards the bright little restaurant to serve whoever she found there.
Soon, I know, she’ll bring someone out to me to take their turn providing fuel in her shadows behind the Crimson Café. And then I’ll get to leave: to go home and assume another form. Perhaps when that happens I’ll pay Nora another visit. And show her what I’ve learned.
THE END
By Zed
