in that merry green land

She’s done up like gingerbread, dripping with ribbon so white it’s as if no hand has ever touched it – white and barren as the Arctic, from the stark bony line of her throat to the ashy purple of her bare knees. Through the fine lawn of her shift, or whatever it is she stands before him in, the nipples of her breasts make little points. Hickey’s eyes itemize the pieces of trim at shoulder and hem, the strength of the stitching that holds them in place, the subdued glint of real pearl buttons at the woman’s throat. Cut the seams and repurpose the material, dismantle every little part and cut it down until it can be cut down no further. Practice thrift, sell the scraps, live to eat another day. Anything to keep from dwelling on who this woman is and why he is seeing her, why this is the intimacy into which he has been inducted. This is Captain Crozier’s woman, the woman he still dreams about.

Hickey has no especial use for women – he doesn’t hate them, or at least not half as much as the resentment he harbors for his fellow men, but he doesn’t want to stick himself in them either.

He is cut out for men, tailor-made for pricks and arses, this is what sets him apart from the common crowd. Man-fucking cannot be the only mark of an elevated mind; he’s known too many sweating pushing maryannes who blink at him like sheep after they’ve let down their tallow to flatter himself that such desire goes and in hand with intellect. It can only be that he is different from other men in this way as well as others, and the more different he is, the better. This is only a dream. Hickey takes the cue to hook his fingers in the fur patch between her legs and feel the soft sound she makes against him, like a sigh.

She could be any age, a hard twenty years or a soft life at forty; her breasts are small and shallow, her thin throat jumps with tendons. Without petticoats to blanket them, her hips are narrow. She turns her face away from him. Hickey kisses her neck.

Hickey has never fancied boyish fellows – give him hard angles to rut against, or thick undifferentiated muscle plumped with hanging fat, and everywhere coarse hairs bristling. The hairs on her legs prickle against him when she rubs her calf against his side – in this scene Crozier must be naked, for Hickey cannot see himself, he is a man without a body. Gibson’s smoothness and thinness and fineness had come as a surprise; the first symptom of this weakness that’s swept him had been longing for that slim delicacy even when they were not together. He’d caught himself thinking of Gibson’s curly-haired nape, or the dimpled hollows of his lower back, or the bony grip of his hands in the dark, and with that he should have known he’d thrust himself into danger.

That can only be how Crozier feels when desire for this woman seizes him – her milky skin and yellow hair, her fine bones, her luxurious uselessness like a china plate painted with fat blown peonies. Crozier dreams of these things lying in his narrow coffin-bed at night, and pleasures himself with the memory of these parts. Sharp small breast, wet thatch, cold lips that won’t latch on his own, pearly little teeth that will never bite – Hickey thrusts his knee between her legs and grudgingly permits himself to grow hard. He’s a young man still, and a healthy one, so his prick still obeys him gladly even when his heart is divided on the matter. It could be anyone here, yielding under him on a soft bed in a frilly white nothing. The woman is wet between her legs, and her hands flutter nervously against his back.

If Hickey had a woman, she would be sharp and canny, instead of this china doll he’s thrusting into – this unknown unnamed woman who is guileless and yielding under him, making soft huffs of breath as he fits himself into her and begins his task. His woman would be as accustomed to life’s hardnesses as he himself is, with flat reddened feet and coarse hands and muscles coursing under the skins of her arms. She would know her way with a knife, and brew her own beer, and not part her knees so readily as though Hickey were not an invader, as though every act of sex was not a transaction with its own cost. Hickey feels a dim embarrassment on her behalf, feeling the little open motions of her hips against his pelvis, though not enough to stop. He would rather be with a man, oh yes.