The Naming of the Beasts

Juliet laughed. It had a chilling ring to it. ‘Who tells me that I can’t do these things?’ she asked, her voice caressing me roughly like the tongue of a cat. She has minute control over those harmonics, and she knows what she’s doing. She knew, right then, that she was bringing me to a painfully intense erection: a casual show of force intended to remind me of what else she could do to me if she had a mind to. ‘You, Castor? You’re giving me commands? I might be inclined to take that personally if your words were backed by anything besides insolence.’ She took a step towards me, those luminous eyes flashing like beacons in the dark. Another step and she was right in front of me, her head leaning in towards my throat. ‘But they’re not,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘Are they?’

She brushed past me, allowing the curve of her breast to press briefly against my arm in passing. The small area of my skin that had felt the contact tingled as she walked away, as though an electric charge had passed through me.

On the screen above and behind me Spacey opined that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was making people believe he didn’t exist.

My heart was hammering. My nostrils were filled with her sex smell and my mind with pornographic imagery. Something inside me was still rising, still opening, ready to meet her halfway as she feasted on me and threw me away, but the crisis was over. Juliet was just making a point, not actually moving in for the kill.

I sat down again - then slithered down onto my knees - as the crash hit me: all those homeless hormones, crashing against the walls of my veins and arteries like miniature tidal waves, my mind afloat on the flood like a pathetic Noah’s Ark preserving my last two functional brain cells.

When I was able to take stock of my surroundings again, I looked up and saw Juliet standing in the aisle at the end of the row, as motionless as she’d been sitting earlier. Her back was to me, her head tilted slightly down.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said, her voice suddenly flat and dead.

‘You mean you lost control?’ I translated.

‘I mean I don’t know what happened. I was hitting her. Hurting her. There didn’t seem to be any conscious decision involved. Or rather . . . the moment of decision was elided. The action seemed to take the place of the decision.’

I climbed to my feet again, partly to see if I could and partly because I felt a little stupid taking the moral high ground from so close to ground level. Juliet still hadn’t turned to face me. ‘Suppose you saw a man beating his wife or his lover,’ I said, ‘and he gave you that bullshit by way of an explanation?’

Juliet sighed, an odd and disconcerting sound. ‘It is bullshit,’ she agreed. ‘But it’s true all the same. I was like that when I was younger: I rode the impulse, because impulse comes faster than thought, and then afterwards I thought about what it meant.’

‘When you were younger?’ I repeated.

‘Your race hadn’t invented written language yet.’

She made a gesture, clenching her fist and then opening it again, as though she was giving up on the effort of self-analysis. ‘It’s strange,’ she said. ‘I imagine someone else hurting her, and I feel anger. A really simple, strong anger. It’s arousing.’

I thought I must have misheard that last word. ‘It’s what?’ I asked.

‘Arousing,’ Juliet repeated impatiently. ‘It turns me on to think of hurting someone who’s injured Sue. Making him pay for it, making him beg for his life, and devouring him while he’s still begging. It’s pleasurable to think of things like that.’ She made a move that I couldn’t interpret: a twitch of the shoulders, sudden and swift. ‘If I think there’s a danger I might really harm her,’ she muttered, ‘I’ll send her away.’

‘And how long do you think she’ll last after that?’

Juliet half-turned to stare at me over her shoulder: a silent query.

‘Come on,’ I said irritably. ‘You kissed me once, two years ago, and I still wake up sweating. She’s shared your bed for sixteen months. If you make her go cold turkey, Juliet, she’ll crash and burn faster than the fucking Hindenburg.’

She scowled. ‘It’s possible,’ she agreed. ‘Or else she might survive, as you did. I’m not reponsible for every man or woman who sniffs my crotch, Castor.’

She seemed to be waiting for me to disagree with her, but I thought there was a certain mileage to be got out of just letting the words hang in the air. It was kind of a resonant image, after all.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Juliet said, after a strained pause. ‘I don’t equate her with you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Or with any of those I hunted. What we have is different from that. It’s . . .’ She seemed to grope for words, but she was trying to explain something that was inherently inexplicable - not just for her but for anyone who ever went looking for a quick shag and got more than they bargained for. ‘It’s not a hunt,’ she finished testily.

‘Tell her you’re sorry,’ I suggested.

‘Mind your own business,’ she snapped back.