We had sex that night. The first time in – oh, I don’t know how long. Maybe three months. We’d got the news that morning that we’d been accepted into Sable Acres, and celebrated with a few glasses of wine at dinner.
The contract had to be seen to be believed!. What colours you could paint your house, how often you had to do it, the state you had to keep your front (and back) yard in, even the types of curtains you could hang in the windows. You couldn’t pin beach towels up to dry. Only certain types of clothesline were allowed, and they had to be invisible from the street.
“This is just like the Stepford Wives,” I giggled. And that must have been true, because later that night Peter came to my bed and we had sex. Afterwards he just rolled off as usual, turned over and started to snore.
Gated communities. They’re still quite a new thing in this neck of the woods.
“Keeping out the troublemakers and the scum,” Peter drawled, in his best Deputy Dawg voice, as we looked over the list of those who would not be allowed in: people with gang-patches, beanies – hoodies, even – door-to-door salesmen, of course (that one I had no problems with).
“What about guests? Can you only throw a dinner-party for people in the same street?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I guess you have to go and unlock the gates for them … or make an arrangement with the security guards. I mean, that’s all it is, really – just a security barrier, like in a parking lot. It makes definite sense to me. I mean, have you seen the burglary statistics around here?”
I wasn’t going to argue. He had a point. While our next-door neighbours were away in Greece, some kids broke into their house, smashed and spray-painted everything they could lay their hands on, then did number two right in the middle of the master bedroom.
After that, a community behind locked gates begins to sound okay. And what woman wouldn’t want a brand-new house?
It didn’t take long to move in. Peter’s business is doing really well. He’s an importer of used cars from Japan, and has to travel quite a lot. With the dollar the way it is, money’s not a problem.
So we didn’t even try to sell our existing house – just rented it as an investment property and bought a new one on the outskirts of Sable Acres. There was a view, of sorts, across the golf course to some rabbit-nibbled fields beyond.
I mentioned before that we hadn’t had sex in a long time. Peter was just too tired most of the time. And then he was away so much! To tell you the truth, I didn’t press it, was quite content just to lie there and … well, you know. Ladies are doing it for themselves, as the song puts it. Not very often, though, I just didn’t feel the need.
Until I found his stash, that is.
It was at the back of the garage, concealed behind a false panel in the far wall. He must have had one of the carpenters install it for him when they were fixing it up for us to move in. Just a prod at the corner of the fibrolite, and hey presto, a whole section of the tool rack came away, leaving quite a substantial space behind it.
I’m sure I would never have found it in a million years if I hadn’t had to hang a picture, and if the hammer that usually lives under the sink hadn’t gone walkabout. I thought of Peter’s tool rack, and walked out into the garage.
There’s a door from the house, so you can drive straight in on rainy days without getting wet. The front bit, where we park the two cars, is all concrete, but behind that there’s a little den which Peter uses as an office, with a couple of armchairs and a folding campbed. Very cosy.
There was a hammer there, but it was up high and I couldn’t reach it. I should have just gotten a stool to stand on, but instead I tried just climbing up on the bench, and – wouldn’t you know it? – lost my balance. I reached out to stop myself from falling, and somehow hit the catch of the secret panel.
“Open Sesame,” I should have said. “Ow!” was what I actually did say. I’d cut myself quite painfully on the edge of the freshly-sawn wood.
What wasn’t in there? A safe with a combination lock, for starters (there’s another one in the main bedroom upstairs for stuff like passports, deeds, and backup cash). I guess the original idea was to put everything inside it, but his collection had spilled out on all sides around it. Magazines, books, photos, stacks of stapled papers …
It took quite a while to register just what it was all about.
There were no pictures of children, and no pictures of people having sex with animals. At least, there may have been, but if so they were locked up securely in the safe. I just didn’t want to know what was so bad that he had to put it in there. The gems of his collection.
There were lots and lots of drawings, mostly printed out from the Internet, I should imagine, by a variety of “artists” who specialised in showing naked women being hanged, tortured, guillotined, and roasted on spits. There were piles of books and stories along the same lines. Some of them I’d even heard of: The Story of O, Nine Weeks, The 100 Days of Sodom, but most of them were just pulp paperbacks with lurid, sexy covers – and as for the magazines!
So my husband is a pervert, I remember thinking.
But the thing was, he wasn’t. I was sure. He showed – or at least had showed, in the past, an average amount of interest in sex. It all died down rather when it became apparent that we weren’t going to be able to have children. Not that either of us especially wanted them, but I guess, if I’d been able to conceive, that we would have ended up going that way eventually.
Was he really into Sadistic rape and torture, as all this crap he’d raked together suggested? I couldn’t believe he’d actually have the energy to do it to anyone, and yet, somewhere in his head, obviously the idea fascinated him.
My first impulse, I must admit, was to drag it all out into the yard and burn it. Then I remembered that you weren’t allowed to have bonfires, or even an incinerator or a smoking chimney in Sable Acres. That made me laugh. You couldn’t burn a pile of filth, and yet there was nothing to stop you carefully collecting and labelling it and laying it out on tidy little shelves.
What to do with it then? Rip it up? Leave a blizzard of white paper inside the wall so that next time he opened it up it would spew out all over him?
Or – close it up and forget about it, pretend it never happened. He is a man, after all. It’s just so strange the way they’re so totally ruled by their dicks. Without exception, it would appear. You don’t know how tempting that was – to sweep it under the carpet and just look the other way.
And yet, I felt so curious about it. It was as if I’d suddenly been given an opportunity to look inside my husband’s head, to see all those little naked squirming things whose existence he probably hardly even acknowledged to himself. Under other circumstances, I’d have felt a bit ashamed. I was certainly embarrassed to see a human being laid so bare, so totally naked, without reserve.
The thing was, I also knew that I had to: that whether we stayed together or not, if I closed up this hole in the wall today our marriage was effectively dead.
Maybe it was dead already – probably , in fact. But for once in my life I was positive that the thing I had to do and the thing I secretly wanted to do were the same. I had to go through his stash and show him I’d been there.
I used a big red marker pen to write the comments. After a while it grew a bit faint and I switched to black. I would actually have liked to go out and buy a whole range of different colours for highlighting different things, but I just couldn’t spare the time. Once I started I just kept on going, scribbling and underlining and drawing in arrows and exclamation marks and extra bits and pieces on the models. I even smeared blood from the cut on my hand on some of them.
So what would you like to happen next?
If this was one of Peter’s stories, obviously I’d greet him at the front door with nothing on but a layer of cellophane, turn around to show him my wrists neatly bound behind my back, then kneel down and beg for forgiveness for having been such a bad wife. He’d condescendingly agree to let me suck him off with my pouty young mouth, then fuck me in the arse after giving me a bare-bottomed spanking over his knee.
Our life after that would be one long round of sensational, sobbing orgasms as we successively seduced the neighbours, the local pastor, and the manageress and clientele of the local stripjoint.
If it was the 1970s I’d sit him down with a cup of coffee, quickly jam a couple of knitting-needle up his nostrils into the brain, then roast him in the oven and serve him up to a group of his oinking friends (with strychnine mixed into the gravy, of course).
Then I’d head for the hills in my new punk girlfriend’s V-dub van.
If you prefer Social Realism, we could fade out on me sitting grimly in the kitchen, waiting for Peter to come home and discover the devastation I’d sown through his little private kingdom. “She [or, in this case, he] walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all,” like that poor dumb sap Rose in Brighton Rock.
If I wanted to be all clever and postmodern, I could present you with a series of alternative endings, and invite you to choose between them.
To tell you the truth, though, I don’t really know what we’re going to do. I know there’lll be a lot of shouting and screaming – from both of us. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
I think there’ll be the smoke of a great burning going up from Sable Acres – and to hell with the stupid fucking rules! After that, though, we’ll have to do a lot more talking and counselling etc. before all of this goes away. It never really will, to tell the truth.
Or the twist could be that I’m the one who’s the secret sadist, and that I’m tickled pink to have him finally in my power …
“She waited, a strange smile on her face, fingering the lash that had striped so many hapless naked male victims, awaiting his return.”
Or even the full H. P. Lovecraft: – “Hark, he is at the door! What shall I do! My God, his eyes are burning red as he advances on me … those talons! …. AAARRRGHHHHH ….”
The rest of the manuscript is torn off, its edges bloody and stained as if torn by the teeth of an turbulent foaming beast …
Or …
As I sat there among all those stacks of glossy newsprint and dogeared paperbacks, I remembered my dream.
It’s a dream I had first as a small child, then again – on and off – at odd intervals ever since. The last time was a couple of months ago, just before we moved.
In the dream I’m running through a huge green field, bright and empty, on a summer afternoon. I don’t seem to have any clothes on, but the sun is warm and the breeze soft and there’s no-one there to notice or poke fun at me. I feel like I can run on forever without getting tired. I don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed or anything but perfectly, beautifully free.
There’s a house in the distance I’m running towards, a tall white two-storied farmhouse. I’m in no real hurry, though. I know I’ll get there sooner or later, and that everything – cool fruit, soft bed, well-water, smiling faces – will be waiting for me when I do.
Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt (2010)[29/9-15/10/2005]
[3849 words]
[Published in Kingdom of Alt (Auckland: Titus Books, 2010): 93-103]
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