The Lover (Cuppa)

- a story by Darcy Moore

(from "Little Criminals", a collection of related stories set in a small Australian town)

Glen 'Cuppa' Milo was that rarest of performers, he never disappointed; which is to say he was never boring. His stage was a tour bus, a streetwalk, an Aboriginal midden; his audience drawn from the godless shifting mass of tourists. Every traveller returns at last to the familiar and the mundane, fleetingly ennobled by what they have claimed with their senses. Many claimed Cuppa. With his adhoc mixture of philosophy, irreverent humour and charm he left a strident enough impression to make the shopping list of kin and friends.
       He had another reputation, among a select group of his female patrons and many residents of Kasper, the overtures of which whetted or intrigued those not yet immune to Eros. That is to say, everybody.
       So, for one reason or another, his guided bus tours of Kasper Shire were always overbooked.
       That he should be satisfied with a half-sized coach when he could fill a concertinaed deluxe tourer rankled some of his Kasper acquaintances. "It's a gift horse Cuppa. Ride it man, ride it. They're bloody fickle and next year you mightn't fill the front seat."
       To such sentiments Cuppa responded in one of two ways. If philosophical he might quip, "Hasn't History taught you anything, boy? Cinderfella did just fine with a pumpkin and a few mice" or something equally apparent to himself. If bloody-minded he would pull out a five dollar note, then light and drop it. "You want it, you work for it."
       "Five dollars for pride," he would laugh as he watched hands grabbing for it. "Hope there's a serial number left." For some, it was a more self-respecting way of cadging money.
       Once he was cashing a cheque at the National Bank when Bill Cunningham, the gruff head teller, approached him. "I have reason to believe you're the one responsible for these burnt bank notes we're getting, Mr Milo. Are you aware that destroying or defacing currency is illegal?"
       Cuppa withdrew a $100 note from his wallet, and flicked his ever-ready cigarette lighter. The banker's hand shot out, clamping it and snuffing the fire.
       "Pretty quick. You've obviously handled a lot of fast money Mr Cunningham."
       "There are witnesses to this Mr Milo. The bank will prosecute you." The witnesses did not sound very sober.
       "For what? I was absent-minded. Thought it was a cigarette. Don't you smoke butts Mr Cunningham? Most people do."
       "What? This is ridiculous. You were clearly burning that note."
       "Well, you'd better make sure your witnesses see it the way you do, or you'll embarrass the bank. By the way, the bank note has been inadvertently damaged. Such notes, I believe, should be removed from circulation. Would you replace it please?"
       Cuppa knew it wasn't fair really, banks were so disadvantaged by their public self-consciousness. Still, he justified it as a small penitence for their private sins.
       After that got around, the Bill Cunninghams of Kasper watched Cuppa nervously. Others watched him like a long-running serial, liable to sudden twists. They didn't see or know of the indignities with which he tormented scavengers in the City where, from a vantage in a crowded mall, he would flick one and two-dollar coins into the crowd and watch the effect.
       But despite his reputation, he was careful with the money that counted. He realised intimacy was his forte, so for him a large bus was a brothel without doors. He could charge a premium price for his tours because, at day's end, his clients had their sense of individuality reassured. When Cuppa first assembled them he introduced himself, told outrageous lies and issued printed nametags. He gave each a blank sheet of paper and five minutes to write "What you would want God to know about you if he didn't know already" which was confusing enough to appeal even to the God-bloated.
       He collected the sheets and read them while the bus was being loaded. Within the hour he had them remove nametags. "We're not running a business convention. And you don't need them for your neighbours. You all come from the same place so you must know each other." That was time enough for him to match names and faces, which he did by quirky rhyming associations.
       It was early December and he had a dozen busy days ahead. Neither the bustle nor the heat outside the coach fazed him though, because passengers became increasingly jovial and even-tempered. And there was the occasional woman, frantic to leave an impression on the dying year to jingle among her memories.
       Today it was a North-American contingent of affluent whites who would be back home, stuffed with trifle, for a traditional Christmas. No children. He didn't encourage them. Children were too constant to be bothered with fickle words.
       Brisbane was, as all cities are, a cynic's dream, and Cuppa had done his homework. It was pockmarked by the foibles and pretensions of Government, business and every generation of its inhabitants; riddled by scandal, confusion, holocausts of time and mortar, pockets of sudden charm. In this city the travellers happened unexpectedly on their own cities, with whitened eyes. The landscape seethed with myth and import like a face leaning over a cradle. Cuppa played with them, pulling first one direction then another until they were dizzy with the fun of it.
       So he entertained the Nams, as he called them, in his subliminal voice. The sounds and the stories it made seemed to come from the buildings, the parks, the streets themselves. They responded as eyewitnesses to the fall of Pompeii.
       As he spoke through the hand-held microphone he stood comfortably beside the driver, despite the rocking. He was lean, but substantial. Plain dark eyes and brown hair were distinguished by a sharp nose, high cheeks and a mongol moustache set in a swarthy face. His words and confidence said experience in life and facility in love. He spoke intimately to responsive eyes: a table, a bar top, a scented pillow in a mirrored room.
       They left the long suburban expanse, and the presence of the bush grew until it appeared to run to wilderness on either side of the highway. "No, you have not entered a primal landscape where adventures lurk for young virgins and old stockbrokers alike. Look behind a tree and you'll find a half-acre, a one acre, or a ten acre snapped off and rulered with ride-on mower, scrub cutter, chain saw and fire. Just so you don't get too frightened we have the comforting spawn of the metropolis all along the way." He directed their attention with anecdotes and appeared, to his charges, to know the history of every dwelling and byway.
       "The service station on your right is the scene of a double murder. A kid stepped into a video just up the road, and by the time he stepped out he was in South Australia, and the police of four states were willing to test his indestructibility. Unfortunately the cartoon characters he shot stayed in there. The garage proprietor has now added an Alsatian to the staff, it doesn't believe in videos. And it doesn't believe people who tell you they only want to tie you up so they can rob you."

"That cluster of shops was once visited by the present Premier, as a boy. He was caught shoplifting but his father paid to keep it quiet."
       "Where that mansion is among the trees used to be an even grander one, built around a magnificent moreton bay fig you could watch from an indoor swimming pool. The doctor and his wife split up. She kept the house and loved it so much he came back one night and set it on fire. She has to settle for another man now, unless she's found a replacement tree."
       "That row of run-down houses was built for speculation on slabs so thin they cracked with the first dry season. The timbers are rotted with white ants. Builder declared himself bankrupt and the owners got nothing from the self-regulatory authority because his registration was two weeks overdue. He's started up again, registered of course."
       "If you want real meaning in life sign on at that factory. It makes plastic caps for the ends of shoelaces, and can truly be said to be close to the soul of things. A story? Give it a few more years, one's bound to turn up. If it doesn't I'll invent one..."
       Ragged thickets of saplings, indicative of regrowth on poor soil, stopped abruptly on a ridge overlooking a wide plain; and with them the mirage of wilderness. Trees remained only along the river that greened the plain, except for isolated giants wilting with age and disease in paddocks where grazing animals crowded under the sparse limbs. Travelling irrigators moved through fields throwing water in wide arcs, much of it into the wind. Machines pushed through fields, unadorned houses stood bluntly beside storage sheds, rows of cylindrical hay bales taller than an adult and wrapped in protective green plastic lay along fencelines.
       "Can't understand," said a retired Saskatchewan oil driller who's passion was his three hundred acres and his beef cattle, "why they use the plastic. Bales were designed to be pretty well impervious to water and weather. Been using them myself for twenty years - ice, heat, Noah's flood. Water runs off them."
       His neighbour, a consultant in corporate takeovers from Birmingham, Alabama, smiled and answered secretively, as if a local might be listening, "Let them wrap it in lead if they want. We supply the plastic and we'll sell them anything else they're set on."
       Nothing Americans said or did could surprise the Canadian. They thought they had God all sorted out too, had bought and shouted their way into heaven which would be like the set of a sophisticated sit-com. No, the Americans lacked subtlety and humility. They were condemned by their brashness. He grunted, non-comittally.
       In the distance a skyline stood the border ranges.
       "Ahh the unbreachable horizon! Over those mountains lie, what, Shangrila? Do you really want a place soppy with wise, measured Aborigines that have given up cannibalism and kangaroos that eat from your hands? Or a lost world of natural perversities, oddities of selection where the DNA has been doing devilish duets with RNA of which only the CIA has an inkling and that, mind you, because of its links with the CWA who run things hereabouts."
       "What's the CWA?" asked a professor from MIT who was assembling material for an authoritative book on the aberrant personality. Fifteen years of research so far. He worked on having ten years left to him. In the event he died before his magnum opus was completed and published he had primed his wife, Ethel, to see it through. (For her part Ethel planned the ultimate revenge for his consuming neglect - to destroy every trace of his work.) He traveled extensively and, as aberrant subjects were to be found in every group of two, argued for and successfully claimed tax deductibility.
       "Contrary Wives Association. Always sniffing in dark corners for their husbands' misdeeds."
       A belly laugh from the driver aroused suspicions.
       "At last the focus of our day heaves to on the front side. A country-killed education is in order. The land we now sashay o'er once waltzed with spotted gum, and red gum and red cedar and a hundred other flaunting floras. They fell, like a king or two, to the axeman and the sawyer. Has anyone here ever been sawn to death?" He paused, and began again in a suitable mimic of Lorne Greene, Our Father who art now in Heaven. "It all started long, long ago - in 1841 or six human generations. Konrad Kasper was among the first white settlers in the area. He drove his flock of sheep overland, through a gap in the border ranges onto the rich river floodplains. Then, having selected the best available land, he paid the local Crown Lands Commissioner 6/- an acre for 10 000 acres. A typical enterprising capitalist." The Arkansas banker could not comprehend sarcasm, much to the annoyance of his wife, and glowed proudly with affinity.
       "When the aborigines, who'd hunted there since they were spawned by their Dreamtime totems, ate his sheep he ordered his shepherds to shoot on sight. He also poisoned flour and left it for them, an early advocate of negative population growth. Young Konrad was speared to death in an ambush, the first local pastoralist to have that honour. He left no descendants (though later pastoralists spoke of pale-skinned natives in the area), but Kasper's name has a regional immortality. Until the Japanese change it."
       On cue, a large road sign appeared around the bend in the road. They clapped. One woman, public relations officer for a Las Angeles fashion house, returned his next eye contact with a shake of her head. He held her gaze and grinned. She took out a jotter and began to scribble.
       "The country is still barely a sniff away, especially when the winds blows from the north west and heats the pigs in their piggery, the chooks in their eight week turn-around boarding houses, and the dairy cows getting pleasured by four stainless steel gums. Life is so sweet and short for animals nowadays.
       "The town of Kasper has a population of 4673, unless Elaine Ridgeway has delivered." He looked at his watch. "Or old Mr Bethany grew a little too excitable with Nurse Hurley taking his temperature." The bus passed a collection of lowset buildings. The passengers saw white uniforms, wheel chairs, and bored, rusted faces above drab dressing gowns. "They're the boarders."
       He spoke efficiently now, a much-used patter. "Once Kasper was a stop for bullock drays on their odyssey from properties as far south as the border to the city. Now, it's a convenient way station, for petrol, cigarettes, nose powdering, for people on their weekend pilgrimage to mountain, beach and country. It services a wriggling mix of rural industries and its own inhabitants, many of whom are descendants of refugees from the land." They passed garages, cafes, car yards, and houses. He addressed the men with frankness, "Farming isn't easy anywhere." They nodded solemnly. The public relations officer laughed unpleasantly.
       "Unfortunately for Kasper, the townsfolk and farmers watch their pennies at the local shops while they spend pounds at the suburban hypermarkets down the highway. So it lives the uneasy life of many small towns wallowing in the wake of a metropolis.
       "It's evolved piecemeal, like any demand-oriented structure. It began with a general store and grew to five pubs, a sawmill and a rambling commercial area. Houses were tacked onto these enterprises and marched outwards in a series of straight, interconnected lines." The bus topped a rise and ran along a crest from where they could see the small urban web. "When services like a school, a hospital, doctors' surgeries, a library, a swimming pool, a fire brigade, a police station and a court house came to ease the burden of the human condition... And monitor its excesses," he added darkly, " they resumed the plots of dead houses and failed businesses." He smiled and lowered his voice, "I warned you folks this would be a warts and all tour; and isn't it funny how you especially remember the ones with warts and all."
       "The concept of town planning made a late appearance. Politicians quickly raised their own monument in the form of the Shire Hall. And incurred a debt that savaged their indifferent finances for the better part of seventy years. Then they set about institutionalising civic pride. They planted trees along main thoroughfares, converted a swamp to a fair-weather park." Out their windows lay a children's playground, now partially submerged because of recent heavy rains. "Much pride in that piece of conservation," he added as a quiet aside. The PR lady's smile said, "That was better."
       He waved his hand. "An area was designated for light industry." They passed single story factories and storage facilities set among Cinderella landscaping. "Chicken houses disappeared from back yards as the pioneer stock became more effete and dependent - street lights for dad to stumble home by, inside toilets and a town sewerage system, rubbish pickups, meals on wheels, supermarkets. The early morning in Kasper no longer carries sounds of the home dairy and the proud cock. Only the grind of the milkman's van, the thump of the newspaper and the staccato of radio. But if you travel the outer fringes, where street runs into paddock, you may hear the sporadic mourning of hens condemned to spinsterhood."
       "So, why bother with Kasper?" He let the question hang. Was the PR lady counting? She looked too smug.
       "First there's our statue." The bus braked so abruptly the passengers gasped. It pulled into a kerb and settled in a wide verge designated for coaches.
       They saw a stone soldier, missing a right leg and half his chest, standing guard over a crater. Weeds over a metre high grew up through buckled slabs and hid much of what remained of his pedestal. The guide watched them. As always he saw revulsion and fascination, much more of the first. "Our soldier's memorial was .. savaged, defiled... blasphemed some like to say, by person or persons unknown last year in an incident that could have claimed many lives. The IRA has been blamed for, as you may not know, a Great War was fought fiercely in the streets of our cities and towns on the issue of conscription. Many of Irish descent saw it as a tool of British Imperialism. Now before you accuse I assure you I am not of Irish descent, neither was I around then.
       "But no one has claimed responsibility - for the statue that is. The Kasper Chamber of Commerce denies it was an initiative to boost tourism, and the Boy Scouts' Association rejects the suggestion the incendiaries were unexploded fire crackers from the 1935 State Convention. The shop fronts you see immediately behind it were destroyed, but have been restored. Commerce is such a resilient beast!
       "Initially most townspeople wanted to rebuild the memorial, but our Shire Chairman pushed the line that it should be left as is, to shame the perpetrators. He was so stubborn about it that by the time his opposition had the numbers, it didn't have them anymore. People became fond," he shrugged, "empathetic, or perhaps, as some uncharitable persons suggest, people allowed themselves to be persuaded by Mr Taylor; not least because this is not a wealthy town and it would have meant an increase in rates. Altruism can be quite flexible.
       "What was unexpected out of all this was its long-term effect on people. The memorial is far more significant now than it ever was. Even Harry Murphy who likes fermented hops better than his dear swelling wife, can't ignore it on his way home from the pub on Constable Street. He's been found asleep in it three times. Perhaps married life is no bed of roses."
       Then he spoke seriously. "To many people it epitomises the waste and destruction of war. Last Anzac Day we had over eight thousand around it, not counting the cattle. By the time the chairman finished speaking you could have filled the hole with their tears. And the young kids, the teenagers, relate to it. If you come here on Friday and Saturday nights you'll find them just staring at the broken names; sitting; maybe talking about God, or death, or making a better world. You know how young people are always into that stuff. And they never leave rubbish. You see, many of them had ancestors who died in the wars. This," he pointed at the blasted statue, "seems to make the tragedy it represents more human. Oops, wrong choice of word. More tangible?"
       "Now, to the vertically upright. The people. You walk the streets of our town and you get the Australian character, right between the eyes." The bus door suddenly opened with a hiss. "Right, everybody out. We're going to do a Queen Elizabeth and a Pope John Paul ... - what is it Rod?" he turned to the driver, "the second or third?"
       "First stop this one, me mate."
       They laughed ecstatically - Cuppa assured his patrons that Rod's surname was Dundee and he only had to look the least bit sideways to start an uproar..
       "I'll fire you Rod, when I find someone who knows the right answer. Right, my left side first. No, Millie from Milwaukee - my left side, not yours."
       He stood at the bus door and offered a hand to each female and the more unsteady of the men.
       "No heart blockages yet Mr Benson? Good, the bumpy highway has its merits then."
       "And, Annie Cuthbert, what are the boys back home doing to cheer themselves up? It was very cruel of you to leave."
       "I hear there's a cold front moving down Mr Hardcastle. Got the cattle indoors?"
       "Now Mrs Barrett, God doesn't know enough about you yet to give you a report card."
       "Yvonne." The PR woman spoke boldly. "Cuppa? You said we can call you that."
       "Please do, it makes me feel loved. It takes me out of your airway bag and right onto your sofa." As he took her arm she pressed her palm into his. When they'd assembled under the shade of a shop awning he read "Park Royal. Floor 7, Room 16. 07 4000987. Tonight and tomorrow night from 9:00." He looked at her. About 29, attractive, fit, married, confident, well-organised. too. Yes, but he would do it his way. He walked directly to where she spoke with a girl in her late teens. "Yvonne." Quite aware of his every action, she turned, slightly nervous.
       "On sabbatical from your husband."
       "Christ," she muttered. Then took a breath and faced him directly. None of these people knew her. "That's right."
       "Well it's not Sunday, or even Saturday. So tonight's fine?"
       Her embarrassment changed to excitement. She smiled. "Yes. Is the time ok?"
       "Seven's better. For dinner. I have my public reputation you know." He changed to an American accent. "But jeez honey, I'll pay for it. Love is it's own reward. Doesn't your husband think so?"
       She looked around. People were straining forward, like sunflowers. She spoke so they could all hear, "My husband thinks with his dick."
       "So!" he laughed, warming to her. "What's new?"
       That afternoon when the others, deftly primed, pored over the significance of a largely-erased Aboriginal bora ring, she approached him. "You're a bastard."
       "And when was the last time you got such an all-over blush."
       "You'd better live up to it then."
       "The Americans. So concerned about value for money that was never theirs. You rob the world blind and we're supposed to smile." She laughed.
       "Cuppa. That's a ridiculous name. And why are you in such a deadend job, why a tour operator, a crappy guide? You could be anything."
       "Do you have to justify your hormones lady? Just put it down to the whore in you. But gypsy's the preferred word these days, isn't it?"
       She laughed again. She wanted to hit him, to rip his strong face.
       Cuppa laughed too."Under that hardened American heart, lies a soft, fleshy, pink lung - an exquisite bellows formed by five million years of proto-human fucking."
       "You sound more and more contrived," she traded.
       "A dung beetle doesn't thrive on clover flowers."
       "A penchant for the country image too."
       "Country image! I'm a country boy through and through, and proud of the whole half generation of it. In the best Shakespearian tradition."
       Yvonne determined, then, to rearrange her travel schedule and Cuppa relished the familiar itch.

       It was a quiet week, between Christmas and the new year, when Cuppa always shut the tour business down, and when he went exploring with a clear conscience. This year Cuppa flew to Sydney, rented a car and based himself in a hotel on the Cross; but he stayed there purely for the atmosphere, the pickings were beneath contempt. He made sure that one window overlooked the converging roads, and the fountain so that if he could manage to be back by then he could watch the streets come groggily to life in the early morning.
       If he was very early he saw the dregs of the night swished along gutters by a street cleaner. Odd people shuffled about. Cars with males of all ages and a sprinkling of women drove slowly along the roads. Edgy prostitutes pushed for one more client. But as the lights turned watery they faded into taxis or down side streets. Then would come a moment, Cuppa had seen it enough times to anticipate it, with no traffic, or walkers, or sounds. Like a crease in the day. A cafe would open and the smell of coffee deodorise the pavements. It was run, no doubt, by a clean-living Greek with a large wife and half a dozen girls who were schooled at the best convent in the city. The new traffic was tentative, but soon bustled with cars that appeared now were tradesmen, transports, taxis bound for airport and station; and walkers with a wholesome look and gait who embraced the day's newness.
       But it was rare that Cuppa was back in his hotel room by then, for he loved the morning after. He sat in a foreign bed and watched a strange face, a strange body - their helplessness and dignity in repose. It was a fascination, never more. With the awakening came a surprise, though the surprises were dimmed with each new face and body - he could predict most now.
       There were the dewy-eyed who had to fall in love to justify themselves, even for a night. They were the ones who believed in, and given a chance would work for, a relationship. Upon awaking they invariably mistook Cuppa's vigil for affection, and pressed him with whatever skills they had. Some had few, beyond permutations with their bodies, and would proudly present him with burnt toast and indifferent tea, and an invitation to shower. As Cuppa did not press some did not offer themselves, believing in the morrow. Those that did took his polite refusal, in the light of their recent memories, as respect. By the time he left they were buoyed with words and promises he never uttered.
       There were the discomfited. Naked, now that the drugs and desperate passion had withered in their systems, they clothed themselves quickly in brusqueness and annoyance. Cuppa charmed them to the point of uncertainty and a guarded hopefulness, then left.
       There were the functional or, as he called them, the Germanic. Sex was good for their bodies and they felt neither shame nor pain. They had no illusions about love, though they were disposed to appeal, with the energy but without the passion of a cheer leader, for future mutually-therapeutic sessions. In their refrigerators were a good representation of the five food groups with a predominance of fruit and vegetables, unless they were on a cleansing or special-purpose diet. They cooked well, exercised regularly and, Cuppa was sure, carefully examined their faeces to vet internal cleanliness.
       And there were the individualists who suffered from unique hybrid neuroses. These were the most interesting being the least predictable with their minds, their bodies and their wakings. Only these ever got the better of him.
       Though not strictly confined to nights his trysts depended on availability and willingness. It was easier then. So when Cuppa returned to his hotel he slept until early afternoon, when he would set himself impromptu projects. Each year he liked to squeeze in two priests.
       Cuppa figured he hadn't seen the church for a dozen years, since Bob Wishart's wedding. All he remembered was that it was brick. He certainly couldn't remember the priest, priests were transparent in those days.
       Set among rows of brick houses, in the city's brick belt, it was distinguishable mainly by its cross, and "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not!" billboarded on the front lawn. Everything was memories today. He wiped an imaginary tear from his eye and smiled at the ghost of Shirley he had lately taken to conjuring.

Aah, Bob Wishart's woman, the dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-voiced Laurie. Reformed for the day. Shining eyes, love and faithfulness bursting from her pores. Many of the boys claimed to have had her. That was rubbish. They mistook her aggressive maternal instinct for lust, and fuelled the tradition out of frustration. If you complained of being sore Laurie ordered off your shirt, stripped down to her knickers and knotting a thin scarf over her breasts, massaged you exquisitely from shoulders to thighs, all without raising a nipple. You would struggle off the couch, crouching low, and aching with ingratitude. Laurie either did not know, or pretended not to. "Oh that Laurie," Gerald used to say. But he kept coming to her with his aches in the hope she would succumb to his young almost virginal flesh.
       No, at the most there were only a few who got more than a massage, going back a couple of years. Well, at least two! Her parents hugged the delusion of a virgin bride. For sure they died with it, despite Laurie's year in Sydney. She told them she was living with a girlfriend. What would she look like now?
       Years weren't kind to most women, even those, like Laurie, who deserved it. When she kissed him after the wedding she squeezed his hand in her intimate way and then, for a second, he felt special for having 'known' her.
       The current priest looked like Spencer Tracy minus the cassock in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", just before the cancer got him. Cuppa liked that. He was sure he and Tracy could have set sail together and caroused and cried as they braved the Outer Hebrides. Pity he had overshot by fifty years.
       The priest was in his evil days with eyesight clouding, joints aching, the brain muddling more the dulled messages from the senses. He fossicked in the church - arranging prayer books, standing before one of the two stained-glass panels, fingering the flowers beside the altar - as if hoping to discover his god in the quiet slag left after the fool's gold of congregational fervor. Prayers and scripture, etched into his tongue, ran in a low constant babble, and his hand occasionally whisked across his chess in the shape of a hoary cross. Cuppa imagined him running on automatic, his mind spilling out the detritus of a life of studied submission. It was five minutes before he saw Cuppa who, admittedly, was standing in brilliant light thrown over the doorway by the summer sun.
       "Oh!" The old man considered whether it might be a divine presence. "Can I help you?" he said cautiously.
       "Yes," Cuppa said in the godly voice of a newsreader. "I believe you can."
       "And what can I do for you, Sir?' The old man was hopeful.
       Cuppa stepped forward, plainly human in the plain light.
       "Oh!" the priest said with disappointment, the gates of death were as inscrutable as ever.
       Cuppa approached him slowly to better see the signs of age. The eyes were loose in their sockets, and the flesh on his face hung heavily. Pushing ninety and an embarrassment to the church. Very stubborn to still be on public display.
       But Cuppa didn't hold it against the memory of Spencer Tracy, or Laurie.

When he had absorbed Cuppa's face the priest showed signs of excitement, a twitching of the fingers and a hardening of the eyes. Then his hand moved and pressed against his thigh. This old fellow can hardly keep it together. Instinct getting the upper hand. Cuppa put on the smile he had once had to work at in the mirror, the one that made gold liquid.
       "I would like to make a confession."
       The priest became bustly, and business-like.
       "Yes my son, follow me."
       The cubicle was like a broom cupboard, and that was part of its charm. The soul could be squeezed to give up its juiciness, and Cuppa imagined the tang in the air from a thousand crushes. He breathed deeply, wanting to suck in the marrow of the self-damned; he wanted to feel sinful, to be choked with sin. Guilt was a passion that alluded him though logic assured him he had much to be guilty about. The air had a faint tang of pine-flavoured air freshener.
       The priest coughed, impatient for the ritual.
       "Forgive me Father for I have sinned."
       "How long is it since your last confession my son."
       "About twenty-one females and," he lied, and let it hang. Whether or not he was of the faith was never challenged. They were so grateful to have anyone walk through their doors and need them. Some challenged his irregularities, insisting on protocol. Others, either afraid he might walk out or cowered by his boldness, took whatever he gave. This one was like a dog deprived of meat.
       The priest played it straight. "And, my son. "
       "And," with as much shame as he could contrive, "three males."
       "Three males!" The fellow was silent, searching for neural connections. He sighed.
       "How old .. were they?" The old fellow betrayed himself, a pederast with an old hand groping ineffectually now. "Son, you had better unburden yourself." Already he was forgetting his patter.
       "I will Father, I will."
       Cuppa had read enough books on the subject, teased and baited enough gays, and, he knew how easily passion could be translated undiluted from one situation to another. Only the faces and the body configurations changed. As he spoke he listened, to every change of the breath, every sound. Seduction was the ultimate game, seduction by words the ultimate method. With words alone he overpowered logic, principles, the colour of the sky, intimations of a god. The words first brushed the skin, then quickened the blood. They licked that part of the brain that jellied on catalytic cadences. Mouth fell open, tongue wandered distractedly, the portcullis was raised and the body exposed to marauding. Here he did not have his reputation, the construct of his confidence, the animality he could exude with a focused thought. Only a few, like him, realised how simple it was. Only a few saw the Queen panting for the call from the gold-tongued beggar.

Do you want to read more Kaspar Stories? Click on a link below.

The Heretic (Shirley)

The Thief (Gracie)

The Mistress (Alison)