Tipsy, tripping down the alleyway. Both of them pretending at being far more sober than they are. At the door of her building, she keeps dropping her keys. Several tries are needed to get them functional. This might be because he’s holding her other hand stalker tight, pressed shadow close against her back. Afraid that if he lets go, she might change her mind and abandon him in this godforsaken neighbourhood. No metros make it out here. The bus stop they got off at is a warren of streets away.
She’s in, finally. They do a four-legged stumble up mushroomy stairs. Feet sinking rather than sticking. She murmurs something: “Shhh…there’s a dying woman downstairs,” Or dead. Or something. Hugo doesn’t care. He keeps his mouth suckered to her neck. Up and up they go. No elevator. Instead, an empty shaft gapes in the centre of the stairwell. A one mis-step death trap. What a building.
She has the attic apartment. Sixth floor. The door bleeding paint, like several openings have bypassed a key. She pulls away to struggle with the lock.
“It’s a bit cramped in here. I’m using it as my studio right now,”
“Mmm,” Nothing needing a response. He leans in, reclaims her. Amanda? Amy? It was something stranger…Amara?
Shit.
The door shrieks open. They just about avoid falling through. Once inside, she separates herself, mumbling something about the lights not working. Hugo is left adrift in the gloom. The drinks and several lines of several somethings have left a sway on him.
Lights click on. Electricity does make it here! Although shagging a sculptress by candlelight in the attic of a building one strong breeze away from collapse would have made a story. He turns, reaches for her again.
“Fucking hell!” It’s not quite a squeal. But it’s close enough to be mortifying. “What the–?” Back in the bar, she told him sculptress. That meant clean marble curves or quirky clay formations, right? But these things hooked onto the back wall of the apartment were deformations.
“I can’t cover them, sorry. They’re too fragile,”
A row of female torsos. Industrial grey, lips puckered mannequin style. But what had been done to them? Brutalised. Skin torn or stripped back, exposed veins and muscles glinting hard like cyborg circuitry. Bruises spread in oily sheens.
They were decorated with accessories. Shoes in scraps. Growths of earrings, erupting all over. One had eyes forced shut by bulging plastic gems. A lump shoved suffocating across its lips. The one closest to Hugo had a hot pink wig, hacked ragged, lips parted in a should be enticing way but –
“Are they real flies?”
Shiny blue-black bodies clustered at the corners of the mouth, scuttling down the neck.
“Yeah. They’re varnished on.”
“Oh.”
“Just ignore them,” she says, arranging a pile of blankets and cushions she must use as a bed. “It’s for a festival. It expresses how women are viewed as accessorizable items by today’s society. How we are damaged by pressures of appearance. Then use all these beautiful things to cover it up,”
“Oh. Right.” He looks around. Was she reading this off of something?
She seizes him, drags him away from the dungeon wall. She kisses hard. Harder than necessary. Those hands that had burnt and torn and ripped slide under his shirt, across the vulnerability of his skin. Hugo is immobile, unsure now. Does he really want his pants pulled down in front of those mutant harpies?
Too late. She’s forgone her dress and is pulling him down too.
It might be the worst sex ever. He has never been so unaware of his own body and so hyperfocused on those around him. Those things were going to move once his back was turned. A pop-pop of glued fingers tearing loose, reaching out. He wants to stifle her noises beneath him, hiss: “Shh, you’ll wake them.” Because he is sure he can hear jewel blind eyes splintering open. A buzz of insect wings suddenly unvarnished.
It’s only afterwards that he’s properly stiff. Lying there lockjaw rigid, willing morning to come tapping at her mildew-veined window. Sleep is an unwise decision. He’ll wake up in multiple parts. She’s disarmed, drowsy. One hand gentle on the inside of his thigh.
“If you’re such a militant, feminist artist –” Hugo talks to keep her awake too. “Why are you letting strange men get you drunk and follow you home?”
A sleepy giggle. She shifts closer, lips warm against his ear as she whispers: “Maybe I’m just waiting for you to pass out so I can harvest your balls for my next project.”
He laughs. But that hand on his thigh tightens. Savage red nails, points he hadn’t noticed before, embedding in his skin. Teeth close around his ear. His voice gives up. Mouth contorting, beached fish helpless.
“Ha!” She slaps him, playfully. “Idiot. It’s just a commission. The festival organizers are on the extreme side. You’ve done better than the last guy who was here. He took one look, practically shat himself, and ran.” She stands, drapes herself in something floaty that under normal circumstances he’d be begging to drag off again.
“Want another drink if you’re not going to sleep?” She says, throwing him a bottle. “When it’s light, I’ll walk you back to the bus.”
“Oh. Yeah, thanks.”
“I can scribble and sign something for you. Then in 15 years, you can sell it for a ridiculous sum and have proof that you encountered the renowned artist, Amara May.”
Amara! That was it. Hugo relaxes back, feeling less of a dick
“Sure. I’ll treasure it.”
She hunts in the chaos around the bed for some paper, then a pen. The beer she gave him is properly labelled and unopened, but he still takes a cautious sniff before drinking. She sketches quick, bold strokes. A self portrait, presumably. A body reclined in elegant, sensual lines. Finished, she looks up.
“It was Matthieu, right? Or was it Leo?”
“Matthieu,” he concedes after a moment. What was the point in correcting her? And it has an exoticness to it. It slithers off her tongue.
Morning takes an achingly long time to come. His beer is finished too quickly. Amara rolls and smokes something that Hugo doesn’t dare ask to try. She dozes, leaving him alone with those things watching from the back wall. The one that had eyes, at least. It made his own impossible to close.
Once it’s definitely light, Hugo gets up to collect his scattered clothes, hoping his movements might wake her. His trousers have somehow ended up beneath one of the sculptures. He has to bend right under it to retrieve them. Its nails scrape along his neck on his way back up. Well, not nails – just the ragged beds she’d glued on where nails should be.
His badly-stifled scream succeeds in waking her. She swears when she sees the time, disentangles herself from the sheets, stumbles around for her own clothes.
“Hey, we need to hurry. I have an appointment this morning,” she says, unlocking the door, letting in the sounds of someone raging from a lower floor, the unmistakably fresh smell of urine. Hugo doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s out the door before it’s fully open.
