Posted by Jamie on March 19, 2000 at 23:37:04:
It is rather hard to write a story about and for the best story writer on the Net so I hope you all and barbanne will forgive the inadequacy.
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A Mutual Separation
By Jamie
For Barbanne
Why, for God’s sake, did it have to be in Melbourne, he thought wiping the cold wind blown drizzle out of his eyes.
Or perhaps it was a tear.
Or both.
Why would any half sane bastard place the Commercial Registry of the Federal Court of Australia in bloody Melbourne. Might as well have stuck the thing down at Herd Island in the Antarctic, and then he would have to tip buckets of water over himself to feel as cold and as miserable as he felt then.
Came from the North he did, been there for thirty years near enough. Good life too, made plenty, his own ’plane, decent boat, beach house, toffy BMW even, all that sort of stuff.
All gone now.
Should have stuck to the criminal law although the only clients you ever got were in as much or worse trouble than he was now at the time you saw them. Most wanted legal aid so you spent more time wringing some miserable fee out of some petty little bureaucrat than getting the guilty bastards off.
Better than this though, standing on a bridge looking down at the Yarra ooze past, when he could get a glimpse of it through the darkness and the sleet. ‘When I jump I will probably break me bloody neck on the stuff rather than drown in it,’ he thought.
And why won’t she bugger off, just standing there looking at the same slurry slurp at the bridge pylons as he. Of all the places to go to swallow a lung full of what she probably thinks is air, she has to pick the one bridge he chose to leap off.
The one just up from the new Federal Court.
‘Christ on his cross!’ he swore to himself then repeated the blasphemy aloud.
The woman jumped as if struck, her head darting around, her eyes huge and frightened amid a mass of what, if it were not sopping like every thing else in Melbourne that night, would be long wavy dark hair. As it was it was a mass of sodden strings clinging to her pale face, long ends wrapped in black tentacles about the whiteness of her slender neck.
‘Sorry,’ he said above the incessant hiss of the rain. ‘Didn’t mean to frighten you. The day has just been one great pile of steaming shit - sorry.’
The girl spoke then. He thought of her as a girl now, slim, seemed quite young, young by his measure anyway.
‘You were going to weren’t you.’
‘Sorry?’
Shit, how many times had he used the word “sorry” this day. Ten at least to that pompous judge alone, the one who finally told him that his misconduct would be referred to the Attorney General. Told the old bastard that he would have to refer it to the Law Society if he wanted his pissy letter to do any good. That did it of course. Cooked his goose real good that little outburst. Bloody weasels in the Society office were sniffing around his trust account as it was. This would do it alright. Ten years at least.
Should have stayed with the crims and snarling at penny pinching legal aid clerks is what.
‘Jump. You were going to jump.’
‘What, oh, well yes I suppose I was thinking about it. You could tell could you.’
‘You weren’t thinking about it, you were going to jump. I saw the way you were looking at me hoping I would go away so I would not see you. Really mess it up if I called the cops and they dug you out of that sewer wouldn't it?’
What the hell have I got here, he thought.
Shit!!
‘What makes you so sure I was going to jump, and who the hell are you anyway. Plain clothes Salvation Army or something.’
Be nasty to her, she might bugger off.
‘I was looking at you too, you see.’
‘That’s bloody obvious.’
‘No, I mean I was looking at you for the same reason, hoping you would go away.’
Then slowly, so very slowly, it got through the clutter of his self induced misery.
‘Oh dear God,’ he stammered, ‘you came here to take a jump too, didn’t you.’ It was a statement not a question.
‘Yes,’ she answered anyway. A tiny smile, almost a chuckle. A flash of lovely even white teeth. ‘I was here well before you, saw you come from over near Russell.’
‘You saying you have prior occupation rights to the spot, you found it first and I have come along and stolen your chance for a nice private exit,’ this said with a half grin. He liked her. What a shame.
Hey, he was twenty years older than she. What a stupid thought it was this suddenly wanting her to live, perhaps even wanting her that other way, he thought.
‘No,’ she said looking at her sodden shoes, ‘I had already found I could not do it, its just not me.’
‘Ending it, you mean.’
‘Oh no, I want to “end it” as you say. It’s the jumping, the cold impersonal water down there. Or whatever that stuff is. It is just not the sort of end I could bear, not the sort of final embrace I want to feel as I die.
‘Do me,’ he said in a tone which sounded nasty, which he at once regretted. He did not want to be nasty to her anymore, did not want her to bugger off.
‘Could you help me,’ she asked.
‘Honey I am in it so deep I could’n help my mother in law out and she’s been dead for fifteen years so wouldn’t need much.’
‘No, not help me out with money. Help me to-to die.’
‘Good grief,’ he said incredulously, ‘you want me to chuck you over the bloody side’?
She looked at him for a moment, wondering if her first impressions were astray, whether her instincts which she had always been able to trust may have mislead her. No, she would not turn aside from her own intuition now. Not now.
She laughed. He loved the sound, loved what it did to her face, highlights reflecting wetly in the faint glow of the guide lights along the railing. She is too sweet and young to die, he thought. Wonder what could possibly have brought her to this.
He decided he probably did not want to know which was good for she would not have told him if he did. She had always kept things important to her to herself. Always was a little secretive. She had told a cyber friend once, teasingly, that mystery was part of her allure.
‘No I do not want you to chuck me anywhere and I do not want that sort of help. Please, come away from here and let me explain, let me talk to you somewhere where we won’t catch our deaths as my Gran used to say,’ this again with that chuckle he was getting to like too bloody much. He was supposed to be here to rid himself of problems, not take on more in the form of a girl the age of his daughter.
Well, plus a bit, but still….
They walked up Swanson then along to Collins where he had a fancy room at the Novetel once the Regent and as good as Melbourne had, some said. He had flat refused to go anywhere with her until they got cleaned up. ‘Just because it might be my last day on this rotating dump, a man still has pride you know,’ he joked. Besides, he still had a gross of credit cards which were good.
‘Mind you,’ he told her, ‘they might not be all that flash after a night in the Yarra.’ She laughed again at that as she sat on the side of the bed drying her hair which was, as he had surmised on the bridge, long and wavy. And lovely because it was wild, of a mind of its own. Like her.
God, he should send her away. This was not good.
But he knew he would not.
‘Ok lady from the night,’ he said, ‘if this pub has one thing it is very good and very expensive boutiques which do not know when to close. Let us give them some custom and Diners a headache when they try to collect from a bankrupt deceased estate.’
‘YES!’ this with a high five hitting his and they were gone to do monetary mischief.
Two hours later, 10.37 on the wall clock, they were in a dim corner of the hotel’s a la carte.
It is Melbourne’s best and that is saying something.
He had eaten well, enjoyed it. Enjoyed the company. She had picked at her food, did not tell him much about herself, just little things like where she went to uni up in New South wales; he knew she had done Arts/English or some such just by listening to her, but never found out where she lived although it was not in Melbourne. She had come down here to kill herself, she said. Did not want to do that where she lived although she could not say why really.
Strange, yet fascinating girl, he thought. Such a shame if she did kill herself one day.
He had just lifted his glass of fine single malt to his lips when she said, ‘Richard, I want you to do it for me please.’
She did not drink much. He suspected drink might have caused some bad patches in her memory.
He was amenable to her requests for assistance now, would have done anything he could to help her. Nice to do something decent on his last day on earth, he rationalised. Rubbish, you have fallen for her, you fool.
‘Sure, love to, just ask, so long as it will go on a credit card, he joked,’ then, ‘seriously, if I can do any thing for you I will.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said biting her lower lip and pausing. ‘I did not express that very well did I. Richard, I want you to do for me what I cannot seem to do by myself, that is die. I want you to kill me.’
This wasn’t the movies or a story on the web, it was reality so he never choked on his drink or anything like that. He was a trained, experienced criminal lawyer and heard and understood exactly what she said.
That did nothing to diminish the shock, of course.
He looked calmly at her for his mind told him that all that was rational demanded he tell her that what she wanted was impossible, that he could not do that.
‘I cannot do that, honey, its just not possible.’
She hated the endearment, “honey”.
‘My name is Barbanne and yes you can. Let us just think about it for a moment, discuss it.’
‘Is Barbanne an amalgam of Barbara Anne?’ he asked. Once a lawyer always a lawyer.
‘Stop being a damn lawyer,’ she said. ‘Barbanne means just that. It is my name and there is absolutely no reason at all why you cannot kill me.’
He wondered absently whether she ran ideas together like that normally or only when she was asking a man to kill her.
Barbanne got in before he could start on some circuitous burst of logic as to why he could not go around killing girls.
‘Look, you are going to off yourself tonight. You are quite set on that and you are mentally able to do it. I want to die, but cannot do it to myself, at least not out of hand. So you have absolutely nothing to lose by helping me. Absolutely nothing. And I will find a way or someone else to do it for me tomorrow. So will still die, but probably miserably.
‘Let us just enjoy each other’s company calmly where we are for a while, have another of those,’ she said pointing at the cut crystal tumbler. ‘I know you have been doing a mental fidget over our age difference on and off all night, but I like you. I like you a lot and that, truly Richard, is just not said to con you to what I want. I mean it.
‘Now, don’t get that out of kilter. I think I like sisters better than brothers for a start if you are with me, but I would like you for my last lover if that lover can give me what I ultimately want of him.
‘You mean if I kill you after we have sex together. Murder for fee? It sounded nasty again and he did not mean it to.
‘No, not after. It is not going to be some kind of poor taste reward for you agreeing to kill me. I thought it would help me endure it if it was during.’
‘During! Good God, Barbanne, how do you propose that I do this thing, kill you during sex I mean’? I would have to, have to….’
‘Strangle me,’ she whispered long slim finger to lips. ‘But if you don’t stop shouting, you will have to do it between the bars down at the Russell Street Watch House.’
The irrelevant thought occurred to him that he should wonder how an out of town girl knew where the Watch House was.
‘But that would be awful for you. Hell the photographs I have seen forming part of prosecution cases. It must be a dreadful way for a girl to die.
‘But a feminine way for a girl to die?’
‘That might be true, but the pain, the look on their faces in death.
‘How were they killed, tell me.’
‘Strangled of course, that is what we are talking about, or had you forgotten.’
‘Shouting about,’ she scolded him as she worried at the looks they were getting.
‘Listen to me Richard,’ Barbanne said leaning close to him. ‘The girls or women you saw in the pictures were all killed in rage or for hatred or revenge or for greed, anything but love, anything but during an actual act of love. Not sex, but love. Love me for a few minutes Richard, just for a few minutes and while you are loving me kill me in that love, slowly and gently, just enough pressure to strangle me. Just enough to help me do what I cannot do for myself. To die tonight.’
He just could not believe, could never have conceived the effect this was having on him.
‘Where, where do you want this to happen, back to your place?’
‘What place silly. Hell, for a lawyer you worry me. Do you think I paid a month in advance then went out to leap into the Yarra! Anyway, don’t you think it would be nicer to do it on your king size bed upstairs than on what I had to sleep on last night?
‘Hell, just think of it,’ she chuckled again, enjoying the image, ‘just picture the look on their faces when they find me all nice and dead on your bed in the morning and yabbies nibbling on you in the Yarra.’
‘Barbanne, you are bent!’ he said grinning and again too loudly although by now other diners thought they both were and so studiously tried to ignore them.
He also found himself smiling for the first time then giggling at the thought.
She liked that.
‘Bent? Yes. Always have been,’ she said, theatrical leer on her lips. ‘I was given a coffee mug once, loved it. It said “I am not suffering from insanity - I rather like the feeling”’.
He laughed out loud. ‘Reminds me of mine at home, shame I will never see it again. Home I mean. Anyway the mug has this old fellow, given to me on my fiftieth it was, sitting on the side of his bed looking at a big poster on his wall which proclaims “Trousers first, then shoes”’
‘See Richard,’ she said taking a sip of the fifty dollar glass of French fizz which to her tasted like aerated salt water, ‘we have it, both of us now, the right mood, the right vibes between us. I want no more seriousness between us now. None.
‘Enjoy me and make love to me and while you are doing it all you have to do is let your hands love me too, make love to my neck, just let them take it in love and with that love take my life. Make my death a gentle thing, a thing natural and beautiful, make it a thing which was meant to be, and I promise it will be exquisite for you as it will be a perfect end for me.’
It was near two in the morning when he entered her, when the final act of her life began.
They had played delicious games with each other for thirty or more minutes before it began and had talked quietly of how it should be.
It was his way which won. He wanted Barbanne to do nothing but totally surrender to him, to lay arms at her side and do nothing, not speak, to try not to move until the pain said she had to.
Her first instinct was to protest this surrender of the terms of her life’s end for Barbanne was anything but anyone’s slave. But in the end the idea began to sound attractive, then intriguing and then, finally, utterly erotic.
She had lain like that, utterly still, for minutes before it began, feeling his fingers trace lightly over her body, felt him playing so gently upon her senses from her feet up to the more sensuous, but not more sensitive parts of her. She had never dreamed of the sensitivity of her extremities when used to play upon her emotions and physical arousal, the touch on toes, the kneading by thumb and forefinger along a single finger of hers to then torment the space between.
Then the longest of these exquisite tortures had been inflicted, not on the areas supposedly famous in the realm of eros, but where the person, Barbanne, resided.
Her head.
His fingers traced gentle little tracks around and in her ears, passing from one to the other over the softness of her face, pausing a while to torment her lips, the finger probing into the wetness inside, transferring the moisture to the outside of those lips, using her own fluids as a lubricant for her flesh, to generate another wetness in preparation for the pleasure before the pain.
And to prepare her for death.
His movements in that wetness were slow and gentle, the way both he and she intended this whole play of tragedy and of pleasure and of pain to be.
He held himself on his elbows, up from her. It was hardly a position one would learn from the “Perfumed Garden” but perfect for their needs.
He looked down at her, into her soul through her eyes, looked at his own fingers as they played in the shadows formed by her high collar bones. He looked at the sweep of her pale throat, the shower of freckles faintly pretty in the window light. A throat, pulse visible and rapid beneath the smooth skin beckoning his thumbs to touch it, a long slender neck laying there vulnerable and tantalising and inviting of the embrace of his fingers.
Those fingers then began their journey to the place where they had to go, skimming slowly, gently over her shoulders, so softly it could have been the flutter of a butterfly she felt move along the sides of her neck, the thumbs just, only just in the lightest touch against the smooth dry surface of her throat.
He felt Barbanne shudder then, a tiny tremor passing through her and he wondered if it was from her passion which was real or from some little burst of fear as the thumbs came to rest just above the centre of her throat.
Barbanne felt it too, of course, and knew its cause was both.
She was suddenly acutely aware of the fingers at the back of her neck, strange she would be so aware of them when it was the thumbs at her throat which would kill her.
She realised the thumbs were not moving, but the fingers were and it dawned on her he was adjusting them, settling them into the grove at the back of her neck so that they could assist the real means to her end which lay still and softly in contact at the front. Fingers at the back, tips against her spine and hands now fully encircling her neck so he could control her head, her neck as he strangled her.
She knew when the fingers and hands stilled the thumbs would come to life at her fragile throat and she could begin to die at last.
And she wanted the fingers and the hands to still, feel the thumbs intrude into her flesh despite her fear of the pain and the unknowns of dying. Of her death.
Of actually being killed.
The hands stilled as she knew they would.
She waited.
She felt him withdraw almost his full length from her, afraid she might loose him and the moment with it, but it was only so that he could find her lips with his to kiss her wordlessly goodbye and, as the hardness again filled her, Barbanne felt resumed activity at the back of her neck, hands now firm around the long arched column to hold her still against the pain to come.
And his thumbs then began their invasion of her throat.
He looked again into her eyes, knowing that they would tell him first of the things happening to her. He lowered himself to lightly rest his weight on her body waiting for it to respond with the movements it would have to make when her agony came to her as it must.
He waited, watching her eyes, feeling her body under his as he in turn felt his thumbs, almost of their own accord, as if it was meant to be, sink deep into the fragile softness of her throat.
The first sign of Barbanne’s distress was a little frown, then a kind of squinting of her eyes, a sort of “Oh God!” look. Then he heard her make a tiny sound, felt it under his thumbs, a sound that reminded him of a whimpering puppy, no, a kitten seeking succour.
She felt the thumbs press into her throat and with so little intrusion and almost no pain the first real difficulty in breathing set in and the sensation sent her to the very edge of panic.
‘Stop it!’ Barbanne ordered herself. ‘Stay calm and let it happen to you. Welcome the feeling, welcome the pain, too, when it comes, welcome it because it can only mean you are starting to die. It is what you want, welcome it.’
She fought down the panic.
Then the pain started indeed, started in her neck, the flesh in her delicate throat bruising as she felt the thumbs force their way deeper and deeper into her, deeper until she could only get the tiniest morsel of air, hearing it rasping through her throat, forcing its way under his thumbs.
Then the other pain, that of needing air, of her body demanding it and her mind losing the battle of ascendancy for she had told her mind over and over not to listen to her body but her mind was not heeding her.
The pain swelled and raged and with it the need to stop it, to breath, to live.
She knew she could not fight the pain so she had to force her mind to use it.
He felt Barbanne’s slim body heave under him and he knew she was suffering terribly now. He could see it in her eyes, in the knitted brow, on her lips as they opened and closed as if trying to form words which might beg relief from her suffering.
He wanted to release her, to let her live, but knew that would solve nothing other than either have to start all over again or, worse still, loose her to another.
And Richard wanted to be the one to do it for her, to kill her as she wanted.
Barbanne concentrated on the pain then, on nothing but the pain. She centred her mind on it and around it and it began to fade, to give way to the other sensation, the one she really wanted to surrender to.
So she concentrated on the other thing the one intruding into her lower body, the thing inside her femininity and she made that feeling beautiful, dominant, regain its proper place within her.
She started to move again, but not this time in response to the pain, but to the pleasure she was going to use to defeat it.
He felt her body writhe again but this time to a different rhythm, the one he knew to be borne of life’s ultimate pleasure. It never occurred to him how ironic the thought was given what he was doing to the girl under him, around him.
As the end came, Barbanne had the funny thought flicker through her mind that she must write down in one of her much read stories the unearthly and beautiful sensation she was feeling at that moment, the moment during which she was both in sexual ecstasy and dying, one seemingly indistinguishable from the other.
The girl under him had gone suddenly very hot, her skin taking on a pale glistening sheen in the light filtering into the bedroom window from the street far below. It made a sight unbelievably erotic to him, her slim naked body dancing in a ballet of pleasure, pain and gathering death, her face shining white, with little red spots forming prettily amongst the darker spots the sun had bequeathed to her whiteness, the flreckling he loved from the moment he saw her in full light all those five hours ago.
He could not remember what those red spots were called, but he remember enough from forensic science lectures to know her temperature rise came with advanced asphyxia.
He added a final ounce of pressure feeling his thumbs come to rest at the back of her windpipe.
Barbanne knew she was dying and welcomed it, hoping only to stay long enough to reach that peak she knew her eternal lover was already attaining.
He was above her in a shimmy of images, nothing clear, nothing real except the dreadful hurt blessedly subsumed, at least in part, by her all consuming passion.
Barbanne heaved up to him and he down into her, both reaching their climax at the same instant, he one she two for amidst the last contractions of bliss as they radiated up through her belly came convulsions triggered by her now rapidly dying body.
And the second last thing Barbanne thought as the world she had had quite enough of faded, as Richard above her faded, was that it did not hurt any more.
And she would have sworn she could still feel him in there for several seconds after her heart fluttered and stopped.
Except she was dead so she could never tell of it.
He remembered, would remember for at least the next hour the feeling of her as she died under him, he still in her, still loving her as she went.
God, the fusion of reactions deep in her dying body as her sexual climax ran headlong into the subdued violence of her convulsions, the convulsions known only to come from approaching death by strangulation. Then the unmistakable onset of her death throes as they pushed all other body movement aside to dominate all for at least two long decaying minutes.
And all the while as he lay on her, in her, he savoured and delighted in this his last exquisite, carnal repast.
He did not know nor care how long he lay on her still, lifeless body, but when he left her she was still warm so it could not have been too long, he supposed.
Richard did not want to leave her as she was, to be found bearing the results of death by strangulation, so he took her to the shower in which they had both laughed and teased and cavorted when she was still alive and he bathed her incredibly limp dead body with a tenderness he did not think was in him.
He laid what was Barbanne naked on the floor to dry her lifeless, matt white flesh for there was nowhere else convenient to do so and when that was done he draped her sideways across the bed on which he had loved and then killed her, letting her head hang over the edge to swing briefly on that poor long, slender neck, so pale where it was not dark with the bruises which had come to her with death.
And there he dried her hair with the fancy rechargeable Sunbeam from the bathroom, leaving it clean and wavy and silken to the touch.
Happy, he placed her now cooling dead body between the fresh, clean white sheets on the second bed where she could wait in peace until found in the morning.
He looked down at her a last time before departing.
She was still beautiful and he still loved her.
And if one understood the language of Yarra River yabbies, and listened when they found him in the murk a little over an hour later, one would have been surprised to hear one feasting crustacean say to the another that their breakfast was still smiling.