Gods Seest Thou by Christoper McCormack (shortlisted)
We’d run out of places in which to fuck.
She and her husband and their little girl and our foetus had moved out to one of those new estates that was halfway between town and the beach and right in the middle of nowhere.
It was well into the pandemic. We were colleagues at the same government office but were performing our jobs entirely from home.
My teenaged daughters were remote schooling and rarely left my family’s three-storey townhouse. My wife was an essential worker, but her usual hours were reduced.
I often imagined myself out on the street, looming freakishly and peering into our rooms as though they were those of a doll’s house. Nothing Ibsenesque mind, nothing too metaphorical. Just a diorama set up by a child who wasn’t satisfied until a living being was stuffed into every available space.
Even our Cavoodle oppressed me with his constant surveillance and morose sighs as I inexplicably prodded my keyboard hour upon hour.
Her home was also a problem.
As soon as they’d taken possession, her husband went nuts with expensive perimeter security cameras that he could check all day on his smartphone. When things were really quiet at the plumbing supplies warehouse where he worked, he would listen to the live audio picked up by the system’s built-in microphones. In week two of their residency, he thought it’d be funny to use the function that allowed announcements to be made from afar. He startled his wife at the clothesline and caused her to crick her neck. It was his first and final public address.
She discovered that if she switched on the porch light, it interrupted both the broadcast and the recording of the external camera feed. I would wait for a text, then scuttle up her driveway and duck under the partially raised garage door. Though it was never acknowledged, I think we both knew the reason our sex moved ever nearer the parts of the house closest to where his eyes and ears were bracket-mounted outside. I don’t know how much he could’ve heard, but I pictured the straining face of someone trying to study their own collarbone. The frisson from an occasional failure to suppress a cry or moan was a modicum of revenge against his totalitarian regime.
But then something changed, and she was no longer up for the risk.
The case he originally made for security was ostensibly reasonable. He’d joined the neighbourhood Facebook group obsessed with burglaries and home invasions and the sharing of number plates and other vehicular details. From the start, I suspected it was his chance to finally exorcise the cuckoldry that had for so long suggested itself – perhaps wholly subliminally – in a whiff of aftershave from a pillow or a tincture of seaside rising from the laundry hamper where semen was drying in scrunched panties.
It was definitely a winning move, whether he meant it or not. She was spooked. So then there were assignations in empty gymnasium car parks and quiet riverside reserves. I parked my big SUV beneath a deserted convention centre, and we put all the seats down and fogged up the windows like it was a panel van from another era. But we did prefer a bit of room. And besides, the imagined ignominy of coitus interruptus courtesy of Constable Plod – the police now had little else on their radar – was a passion killer. I mean, there was the isolation exemption for intimate couples who lived apart, but it probably wasn’t supposed to encompass lovers’ lane.
My townhouse was in a row of four, with retirees either side of us. The ones we liked were archetypal Grey Nomads, their domestic and international adventures a blessed absence for the better part of the year. Not that they were ever anything but lovely and possessed of a rare capacity to know when to look away. This was a form of divine knowledge in medium-density housing. Borderline saintliness.
Cannily, they grasped an opportunity between hard lockdowns and fled North with their tricked-up caravan. Previously they’d entrusted mail collection and the like to the other retirees, but it was clear that some unknown brouhaha had polluted the relationship.
Unceremoniously, they handed me their double-garage remote fob with which I could disarm their security system and gain access to the garage itself, but the internal door would remain locked. Although it was unclear exactly what I was supposed to do with my powers, I received them enthusiastically, despite picturing a tiresome series of unwieldy, ever-dampening packages jutting from their letterbox.
For months it all continued to mean very little to me, and the mail barely came. Then they watched a once-in-a-hundred-years storm lurch across the radar and pulse dark purplish-brown above our neighbourhood like a ragged carcinoma.
They requested an inundation check and told me the combination for the little key safe hidden behind the wheelie bins.
My whole life, my own moral code had remained a mystery. I don’t recall when the idea of entering their premises other than at their behest first announced itself, but, once it did, my prefrontal cortex took uncharacteristically long to decide what to do with it.
The delay might’ve been because of their furniture, their wall hangings, their puzzling objet d’art; the ambience was the antithesis of erotic. Where our low-slung
Scandinavian furnishings and spare decorative touches expanded room volume, all their decisions seemed determined to contract space.
Most shocking of all was their moss-green, five-piece lounge suite arranged in a semicircle like an inflatable homage to Stonehenge. The otherwise capacious living room was illusorily halved.
It wasn’t just aesthetics giving me pause. Disappointing them would be no less devastating to me than letting down my own elderly parents, who I’d vexed spectacularly and often.
Of course, the passing of time and the sloshing of the dangerously overfilled reservoir of lust that lay between us eventually delivered an ineluctable failure of impulse control.
A final plan was agreed after endless adjustments for reasons both complicated and banal. At 4PM on an overcast Tuesday, she would park down the street and text me as she approached the garage doors. From my position inside, having already disarmed the alarm, I would hit the button and give her the small amount of clearance she needed (she was 5’1 on tiptoes, me, 6’4 flat-footed), then I would promptly reseal Ali Baba’s cave.
It was her edict that I would be without underwear. She said she’d reciprocate.
Waiting in the darkened, silent house stirred memories of my transgressive habits as a thirteen-year-old living in a quiet coastal town where occasionally I would break gently into shuttered holiday homes, take my clothes off and explore the belongings until the weird derring-do of it brought about a hands-free orgasm. In Invariably, I would then steal something small. It was the mid-80s and home security was the stuff of movies and millionaires.
I disrobed and waited.
Having had a quiet day at the home office, I’d groomed mid-afternoon, showering long and lost in the steam and coyote howls of Grinderman thundering out of a portable speaker. I always liked to shave my torso for her, but since I had time on my hands and some ideas planted by a recently viewed French film, I slipped the razor below the plimsoll line and then some.
Given our age difference, I had a morbid fear of presenting to her hairily. Or more precisely, hairily grey. As soon as I started, I regretted it. So time-consuming and dangerous. So many nooks and crannies. So many unexpected angles. There was a need for a mirror. And lo, as I’d long suspected, previously tight contours had sagged while no-one was watching. It was no Chippendales green room. Never mind, my brief humbling cleared with the condensation as I began to vibrate with anticipation.
Just inside the door that connected the garage to the lower level, I waited with the fob in hand. In one hand, anyway. Before I could think better of it, the other slipped behind and under for some reflexive quality control. Jesus. Stubble. How? Worse than that, the aloe vera I’d slapped there had developed a vague and unpleasant stickiness.
At this point, going home for talcum powder was a deal-breaker. Equally, rifling naked through their sexless bathrooms was certain to shatter my now tenuous arousal.
I suddenly remembered a movie scene in which an old kitchen warrior shared a curious industry secret: the best way to ward off a sweaty crotch during a hot service was to dump a quantity of cornflour down there.
I scampered up the stairs to the middle level like a pranked skinny dipper, found the pantry and immediately spotted the prize. Two bright yellow boxes of cornflour, one open, the other not. Back down at my station, I removed the bag from the opened box and was dismayed at the precise manner in which the wire tie had been secured, more like the deed of a factory bot than a human. I required my phone-torch to even begin the unravelling.
The cornflour had a silky consistency not usually appreciated in utensil-driven cookery, and it was hard not to overdo it. Crevices were instantly velvety and frictionless.
Tumescence was restored. Nice. Then I took in the baker’s mess upon the floor. With my cast-off clothes I whipped and flicked at it, the dispersal hopelessly inadequate and the feathery striations obvious and disturbing even in the half-light. I turned my t-shirt inside out and mopped at it until it was mostly gone or at least indistinguishable from house dust that could surely look like anything after six months of slow-release.
I gave my attention to the re-fastening of the tie. No. Like asking a kindergartener to produce a sailor’s hitch with a pipe cleaner. There would be no choice but to dispose of the whole box. They were inveterate cataloguers and list-makers, but the thought of them noting the absence of a barely used pack of cornflour was less awful than that of my butchered knot exposing a pantry raid of the most pathetic kind. What kind of weirdo comes and takes a teaspoon or two of cornflour? I considered distracting them by also removing a cup of sugar.
My phone detonated in the artificial gloaming, and I scrambled for the fob and admitted my love. The metre and a half of light flooded blindingly like the depictions from my youth of Jesus’ empty tomb, and I cloaked myself in the door until darkness was restored and she was upon me. I enveloped her and muffled her delighted squeal as I inadvertently daubed silvery trails across her little black t-shirt dress. She offered me her upturned face, and our mouths came together in a design more perfect than history had ever known.
For the next hour or so there wasn’t any way in which we didn’t worship each other’s bodies, not that we’d been told about anyway. We stayed entirely on the ground floor, but we moved from easy chair to bottom stair to bedroom carpet. We ended sprawled across the floor, lost for words and sated. I lay an ear on her belly in the hope of a sign from our foetus that I wasn’t headed for some form of Hell. It seemed the kid would be an atheist like its dear papa, and I sighed with relief.
A couple of months passed, and we never again disarmed the alarm. As restrictions waxed and waned, we innovated. The panic subsided, people were starting to rehearse the things they’d say about the pandemic for the rest of their lives.
I’d all but forgotten my trespass until one mid-morning I was returning from the school run that had replaced the trauma of the bus now my girls had measured the intensity of my work-life and found it indolent at best. I swung recklessly into the common driveway, a rallying spirit having gradually taken hold of my driving due to the long lack of it. I braked hard. Ali Baba’s cave was unsealed, the stone was rolled from the opening of Jesus’ tomb. A Grey Nomad was trotting in and out of his garage with spanners and a drill and a post-vacation fizz.
I knew how to do this sort of thing; you had to just throw yourself into it like a winter swim, all hail fellow, well met and the steady eye contact that would’ve come naturally had I not so recently cavorted in their space like the village amadan.
I pulled it off. Though the fob felt like it was glowing hot with my crimes as I dropped it onto his outstretched palm.
Our smooth relations resumed. They presented me with a not inexpensive Malbec for my caretaking. We listened to our quota of travel stories that were only occasionally uninteresting. Our household marvelled anew at our good neighbourly fortune. On any level, literally or otherwise, I didn’t begrudge the loss of proximal emptiness. It was truly nice to have them around. My girls began to distinguish them from the other retirees, even by name.
A month or so later, I was illegally downloading the latest Woody Allen movie, a process which, as usual, flooded my Mac with ever-multiplying browser windows full of ludicrously moaning women promising all manner of unfeasible delights. I was efficiently closing each one down like tin ducks at a shooting gallery when a flash of something caught my eye. The graphics of “Hidden Amateurs” pulsed gaudily like a Marvel comic gone wrong. And there, in the horrible powerlessness that only a boomeranging GIF could evoke, her unmistakable legs were akimbo as she bucked against the easy chair and licked her lips in ecstasy and yanked at the hair on the back of my head while I attended to her delta with a glitchy ravenousness.
I convulsed in pain for hours, unapproachable to all comers. For days I would succumb to sudden fits of writhing, hiding in the ensuite as visions of undeliverable revenge
forced my bones against the constraints of my musculature, my fascia. Occasionally, when alone and nearby a party wall, I would quickly shadow box some diverse violence in the dim light. I plotted my evasive comings and goings like Hollywood capers. I laid low and eventually gave up on divining the logic of their actions.
Time passed. I ingested dark web ketamine every other day. I don’t know. Somehow something in me hardened. Ah fuck it, above all else was I not participating deeply in the problem of modern life? Did this not make me truly alive in my time?
On reconstruction, the camera’s point of view must have been that of an ersatz Indonesian deity which, more fool me, I’d sneeringly dismissed during my wait. It was perched on a shelf halfway up the wall, surveying the comings and goings of mortals not so stonily after all.
I did a lot of work before I could deal with the Grey Nomads unflinchingly. Sometimes I doubled down gregariously to test my resolve, moved in really close and rummaged in their irises for any kind of hint. They held their nerve as bloodlessly as their stupid little camera-god.
I couldn’t bear to measure how far our humiliation had metastasised through the internet’s infinite lymphatic system. All courses of action were futile anyway. No Pyrrhic deferral of the inevitable interested me. I didn’t tell her and hoped that no-one who mattered would ever stumble upon it. I tried to console myself with the one inbuilt protection, flimsy as it was: Oh, by the way, how did you come to be on the nudist beach when you tripped over the ambergris?
Soon enough, the Grey Nomads began to show all the signs of their next departure. The van came out of storage, and they fussed at it like chefs at the pass, nervous about their long-held Michelin star. It looked like it was going to be another long expedition. I expected not so much as a honk and a wave this time as I muttered expletives up in my work eyrie and watched their final ministrations in the reflection on my computer screen.
When the knock came, I was penitentially rolling my forehead from side to side on my wooden desk like it was a poorly inked bank stamp as I half-listened to a man-child webcasting wellbeing tips and tricks with an upward inflection to make an 80s soapie star wince. I thought it was more ketamine and I bounded downstairs in my pyjamas.
It was the Grey Nomad, and he was wearing a shit-eating rictus of a grin. With the screen door barely ajar, rhetorically I asked if they were off again. He reached around, and I involuntarily proffered my hand. It might not have been the delivery I was expecting, but as a drug handshake it was textbook. Instead of ketamine though, it was a warm garage fob. His hand lingered and pressed; for a man of action, his touch was tender.
“You know what to do, right?” he murmured.
I’d never really seen his tongue before, now it quested at the corner of his smirk like a garden slug after a night of heavy rain.
I withdrew and slammed the door, the fob clattering across the tiles outside. I slathered the nearest hand sanitiser up to my elbows. I wrung and wrung until my nostrils burned.