looking for a muse - or nine (closed)

[patrick1]

Patrick sits in the near-ruins of the house, the wine-bottle and the empty glass the only furniture in the room, the drips of rain plopping into buckets on the upstairs landing, and admits: I'm at the end of my tether.

Ah, but he can smile, even in despondency. How he would like to have someone – a woman – at the end of his tether. Why, even here she might crawl...

Don't think about it.

Agh. He pours himself another drink, and wonders how long it will be before night.

*

When he wakes the stars are at the window and he's back in the houseboat but can't remember how he got there. This has got to stop. Go to work tomorrow. Repair the house. Find a muse. Rediscover yourself and your profound creativity. Live happily ever after. Is that so much to ask of life?

Yes he can smile at himself, wryly this time, and decide it's time for camomile tea.

The boatyard is next to a couple of posh homes, and the man in the bungalow has given Patrick the password to his broadband, so soon Patrick is sipping camomile tea, checking the BBC News and his email, and logging in to the place where he's posted his 'MUSE – looking for a muse – or nine' personal ad. Only spam, as usual. He surfs the Net. The guy in WICKED LADY next door is playing old Clash and Specials music again. Soon the woman in DUNWYNGYN will whinge at the man in WICKED LADY. Patrick clamps on his headphones and asks Joni Mitchell circa 1971 to soothe him (Blue-ue-ue-ue-ue-ue) while he stares at images of strange women in bondage and reads random blogs and dreams of muses...

*

The music has stopped: outside, and in his headphones. Perhaps he should be sleeping, if he's going to make it to work in the morning that is almost upon him. Or perhaps he slept enough of yesterday to get by.

He finds himself reading women's words. How did he find his way here? A click, another click, another click. Desires...welts...not allowed... Yes his mind searches for keywords and he is drawn in. Dear Calliope, I know that's not the name you use online but I am looking for a muse. The estate agent thought I was crazy when I said I needed a house with at least ten rooms and she asked me why and I said 'For myself and the nine Muses'...

Face it: I was crazy then.

He doesn't send the message, and resolves to sleep a little before it's time to go.

*

Later, at the desk at the call centre, in a different set of headphones, in a lull between calls, he closes his eyes and sees nude Calliope, at the end of a rope, crawling through his derelict house, rubbing herself between her legs...not knowing that finally someone has answered his online entreaties...

 

[patrick1]

A reply. Well, well, there have been replies before, but all the same – a literate, literary reply.

It probably won't come to anything but...

The house is a fantasy, of course. The house of the muses. A real house, but a fantasy too. Rooms enough for the poet and his nine muses...even if the nine be embodied in one...

Straight after work he picks up the spare rope from the houseboat, collects the indian takeaway he ordered by phone en route, and drives the van up to the house, bumping over the last hundred metres of track. He is singing the song he hasn't sung for ages:

I am a brisk lad but my fortune is bad,
And I am most wonderful poor.
Oh, indeed I intend my life for to mend
And to build a house down on the moor, my brave boys
And to build a house down on the moor.

Soon he is patrolling the house, imagining, imagining, scoffing samosas and rice and chapatis, measuring with the rope how far it is from the middle bedroom all the way to the cellar, singing, singing.

It's only when he's back at the boat, and it's still not dark, that he allows himself, switching on his computer, to remember: Capture us all or only my first.........imprisoned we will do your will...... and grant your wishes...

First he finds the blacksmith's address and writes to him. The chain we discussed before, welded to a collar for the dog at one end, plastered into a wall at its other end, needs to be seventeen metres. What would be the locking device on the collar? I will confirm the collar-size when...

Capture. Imprisoned. Do your will. Grant your wishes.

Dear Muse-in-waiting, he is soon writing.

I have a thirst
for your first.

A captive Calliope
trapped under a dark stone canopy.

But I won't force the rhymes! he goes on, quickly deleting the exclamation mark. Tell me a little of yourself, if you would. I am a six-foot, gentle and secretly cruel, melancholy man who dreams of capture, torment - and inspiration, for I once wrote well and should like to do so again. And you?

Here's a fancy I have. Tell me the story of yourself, a little at a time, through your body. Would you indulge me in this? Begin with your feet: a tale of your feet.

And, if you dare, a fantasy of your feet: of what the master of a muse might do to your feet, if he were indulging your secret dreams.

And then, I will tell you of my feet; and of my fantasy about your feet; and so on, until I know your body in my imagination, and you know mine. And we will know one another's writing by then too, won't we? What do you say to that, Calliope?

Yours

Patrick

 

[patrick1]

He stares at his feet in the shower, he thinks about them while twiddling his toes inside his shoes in the long seventh hour of duty at the call centre, he closes his eyes and wonders about hers.

And wonders at the romance in her tale of the 'tall and dark and smiling' man in charge of the sisterhood and the man's surprising gentleness with the woman character's feet.

Ah, feet. That evening he makes himself a salad of leaves and the cheap cuts of smoked salmon he likes from the supermarket, and takes it up to the house. You wouldn't know it was a summer's day: the wind is whipping up from the south-west, the light rain feels less than light. When he gazes out across the valley, thinking about what to write, the rest of the world comes and goes in mist and rain.

Calliope. How lovely to think of Mediterranean climes, thanks to you, when I look out at the wild wind and rain of an English summer. But there is something in the wildness that reflects something in me.

That was a lovely tale of your feet, thank you. It transported me to similar places. I remember a courtyard in Ronda, where I had arranged to meet my then partner. She was sitting at a cafe sipping iced coffee. When I approached her, she smiled. I was unable to speak, and still she didn't realize anything was wrong – until I pointed down at my left foot, which I had stubbed against a kerb, and it was bleeding profusely, and so painful that I was struck dumb.

My feet are odd, literally odd. The arch of the right one has fallen and of the left has not, so my gait is a little lop-sided. And the second toe of each foot is gnarled from birth, a relic no doubt of the monsters among my Irish ancestors.

When I imagine Calliope's feet, I confess...

He walks out into the rain, strides the mile to the pub on the brow of the hill in just his jeans and summer jacket, getting soaked, to drink one pint of lager, quickly, then return, this time the wind at his back (monsters), before he can continue:

When I imagine a fantasy of Calliope's feet, I confess, my dreams are less vanilla than yours: they are of capture, confinement, torment. I would not want us to (can't resist it) get off on the wrong foot. I see ankles in delicate silver chains. I see rope around individual toes. I see, in blue varnish, obscenities perhaps spelt out, letter by letter, across the nails. FUCKM YCUNT perhaps, even if hidden in your Mykonos shoes. Or I see your confined feet being lightly but persistently beaten with a thin switch, each blow in itself scarcely felt, yet the rhythm and repetition gradually an agony.

If, knowing this of my dreams, you are willing, indeed happy to continue, tell me of your legs. And a fantasy of your legs. That would be lovely, you write beautifully. But if you are now disinclined to continue, I will quite understand, and wish you all the best in your musing future.

Yours, Patrick.

 

[patrick1]

Splayed.

My legs are the sturdiest part of me.

Yes they are. Tonight he doesn't drive but walks, walks up to the house with ten rooms and no furniture, the house of his dreams. Unexpected rain creases a smile in his face. From the moor to the west a persistent angry bird sings at him.

Even when I'm in despair, drunk perhaps or desperate anyway, lost in the wind and the rain, I see myself striding, determined, some sort of mad goal in mind. Not fast, I don't value speed. It's resolution I value. There, look, there's your destination, however foolish: make for it.

She replied. In itself, that's so kind of her. He feels more than gratitude; he feels that, because he was honest, however evasive her own responses still are, it's all right to be himself, warts and all, dreams and all. Thank you. Yes, that's how he should begin, weave the sturdy legs in later. Thank you for answering at all. That's so gracious of you. As to my legs, they are the sturdiest...

He sees her long legs, in his mind's eye. Dancing. Ah.

He looks up at the ceiling. What could be set in there? Why is that damn bird still singing in the night?

Oh but.

Dance for me. Let us choreograph a dance, with whip and smile and instruction.

Ah. Should it be left there? Oh but - Sorry to say, I imagine you upside down, hanging by your legs, splayed, making love to yourself while I watch, noting scientifically how long it takes you to achieve orgasm. One could decide to spend the rest of one's life researching such a question, recording new data daily, couldn't one?

Splayed. Sometimes a word can take hold and not let go.

Ask. Ask more. Don't let the conversation die or you will never -

Hands. Tell me of your hands, please, a memory, and a fantasy. So I will love them as I already love your feet and legs.

Send. Now. Send.

 

[patrick1]

I would follow him to the ends of the earth…

Tappety tappety tap. The software drives me, the voices in my headset ask their usual questions. My hands, I gaze at them, seeing them in this unexpected light.

My own hands are a little stubby for a six foot tall man. I might take your left hand in my right. You (I would follow him to the ends of the earth…) would be a little fearful. After all, you know I have my cruel side. What if I suddenly squeezed, crushing your hand's bones?

No, no, I wouldn't do that. My tortures would be more sexual, more elaborate, more dangerous.

I might, for instance, tattoo your fingers. MUSE. MUSE. Stars perhaps on the thumbs. How terrible of me. Or -

Here. I imagine. I fold your thumbs over your palms. I bend your fingers over your thumbs. I have leather mittens which I pull over your hands, buckling at the wrist.

Oh, how helpless you are, when the second mitten is secured.

Helpless. This is a word I would like to use. We have not yet reached your eyes but what, if you were blindfolded and mittened like this, would you be desperately afraid? Excited? Enslaved?

Here. I know that logic says, I should now ask for the gift of your arms, but heck, let me relish for a little longer the helplessness of your hands.

I am reprimanded. Yes, I switched off my headset to dream of you. Don't swear at him Patrick or he'll sack you.

Helpless. Yes. The ends of the earth.

Oh but – now, Tell me of your arms. Hold me in them, please. I'm lonely. Don't say that. Ah, say that. It's all right to be truthful.

 

[patrick1]

There are phrases that linger. Encased in soft leather, cocooned in darkness.

There is a sleeve he has seen. He might confine her with it. A single sleeve, that would hold both her arms behind her. He would lace it slowly. It would, straight away, be a little painful. Gradually it would hurt, a little more, a little more. Forcing her to bend forward. Making her helpless in the face of whatever else he might like to do...

Perhaps in the end, she would beg to be released.

Would he consent, or refuse?

He would certainly refuse once. After that, it would be an arbitrary decision.

The arbitrary power of the one who binds.

And then -he was saving it up. But, tappety tappety tap, as he writes at work he suddenly imagines her arms, inscribed by his handwriting. CALL says her right arm. IOPE says her left.

Tattooed? No he mustn't be so cruel to her.

Oh, why not?

Yes: he knows he told too much of his feelings before, and now he is resisting the urge to say more. She thinks he would not want to damage his slave. Dammit, why not? Her buttocks would recover wouldn't they?

And so in the end he is abrupt: Thank you for your arms. Now tell me of your buttocks. I should like to spank and whip them. And caress them. No, no. Show you will sometimes be cruel. Admire the marks I make there, and photograph them, perhaps.

Send. Quickly before you regret it.

 

[patrick1]

Thank you for the gift of Calliope's buttocks. I'm sorry I've been slow in replying. Sometimes the black dog is at my shoulder and

He tries not to see the disorder rising around him – discarded food plates, half-read newspapers, scribbled notes to himself he doesn't understand – 'The passion at sunset on Kilimanjaro' – too many bottles – oh, but this is good: to know that he's trying not to see the mess. This is progress. Writing to her. This is progress. The muse. The pony-riding muse...

The electric storm last night cleared his head. Forked lightning across the moor, wild rain against the window. You could imagine a wild Bronte woman, caped, galloping across the moor in a fever of passion.

He remembers now lying back on his bed as the wind howled, imagining Calliope: her Mykonos-clad feet, her red hair, her gift for words, her tiny hands, her long legs – the melange of her words and his own dreams, oddly preoccupied with writing on her, perhaps because he has been writing to her – the surprise that no development seems to have disoriented her, not to be suspended upside down, nor written on, nor spanked nor whipped...

He remembers now, sleeping peacefully for the first night in days, as the storm abated, and he held small imagined hands.

There was such a storm, he writes, in my heart and in the world. There's a Nanci Griffith song...

Knowing he's being a bit sentimental but letting it run, he hunts out the song and plays it, but it's oddly disappointing, the real thing, not as good as in his imagination. Like his fantasies, probably: he smiles at himself wryly in the little mirror on the chest of drawers.

Storms. I have never kept a woman, as we have been imagining my keeping you – as a muse, a sharer of dark dreams. I imagine the man would have to be the sort of man who experienced storms in his heart, as I do. But that he would never be able to trust himself to show her his brutal side, when the storms raged in him. A paradox, I suppose.

It's not that he isn't thinking of what comes next, if their correspondence is to continue. He is. He sits on the edge of his bed, the disorder around him becoming more and more visible, imagining a smooth, smooth back.

Tell me of your back, would you? A dream of your back. I have been thinking a good deal of your buttocks, and your dreams of them, indeed just at this moment I've been thinking of your remarks, let me look them up to get them absolutely right, ' my most sensitive bit is just where the thigh and cheek join'...There are erotic pictures in circulation, French I believe, by a man called Loic Dubigeon. The buttocks are always extraordinarily sensuous. And sometimes that most sensitive place to which you refer is branded, with a number, or an initial.

Enough. The disorder is too great. He must set to, and place everything into heaps, and become organised, and clean every surface, and become a human being again. What is it that he's forgotten to do first?

Ah – Send.

 

[patrick1]

I see what I want. I want what I see.

There is a light breeze today, swirling a little, but mainly from the west. He walks into the wind, from the house, finding no storm out in the world in which to lose himself.

How the heather suddenly, while he is thinking of other things, gathers its pruple force into itself, and explodes with colour. Here: he might walk like this, gathering clumps of heather with which to perfume a muse by thrashing her back – the back she would give him, as she slowly might give herself to him...

There are corridors he goes down, when he thinks of her now. As if his house on the moors has a vast subterranean expanse beneath it, where great and terrible dreams are possible, each somehow a muse with feet he might beat, legs he might suspend her from, arms he might tattoo, buttocks he might whip, a back he might caress...and then pictures that he or she like line the corridors, which as corridors do in dreams can seem endless, leading only to new versions of themselves, or where he suddenly finds himself face to face with a mirror where he is only a melancholy, old man.

Ah. Look up, look out. He stopped, to rest on a jagged rock, and quite forgot the hills, the air, the wind, the soft clouds rolling across the valley.

He smiles, seeing what he must do. He turns back, stumbling a little in his hurry, back along the track, the wind at his back now (my own back, that I would have her massage, knead, kneel astride, surprisingly I suddenly see her astride my back, fucking herself, mouthing words that are like obscenities, but aren't, precisely, 'Cage,' she says, 'whip...bind...slave...torture...back...chains...rope...'

He gets back and goes to the kitchen, makes earl grey tea while he writes to her, quickly, this – these words – unadorned – adding...

Yes, I will ask you for more of yourself. But I have been neglecting you and it was foolish of me - for fear perhaps of the next steps, which must go to head and face, or breasts and belly and the rawness of sex – for fear of dullness, the ritual continuing – so, I will ask you for more of yourself on another occasion but here, here is me, feet aching from the moorland terrain, back in need of massage, just wanting to communicate with Calliope...

 

[patrick1]

There is a cellar in the house. Might he paint it, decorate it for his muse? She wants it to be a matter of pretense. He sits down there, with a glass of white wine, on a broken rickety yellow chair, smiling at the idea he's had: to transform the dank windowless cellar – there's just a slat of light, the old coal hole – into a real dungeon, and then cover the real stone with fake stone.

The dream of a dream. She might wake one day, knowing that her tortures are only a shared illusion, to find she is trapped in the illusion, screaming.

A woman, dangling. Just here, where he could reach out and touch. Cage...dungeon...chain...rope...dangling...whip...cane...touch...scent...

The scent of desire. A woman, dangling. 'Inspire me.'

+​

At his desk, later, he realises the gifts of parts of herself that he is asking of her are ninefold, or could be made to be so. Like the muses, the rooms.

He likes the symmetry of it. He begins to write.

+​

I wonder, would you give me the gift of your breasts? I sat in the cellar earlier that might become a dungeon earlier and had a very clear picture in my mind of a woman, she might be Calliope. Behind each nipple was pierced a large gold ring, that would normally dangle in front of her breast. But in the picture I saw, each ring was attached by a thin golden chain to somewhere above her that she could scarcely see. She only knew that to her right somewhere the man stood, and he had hold a chain attached to something in the ceiling, and when he tugged on his chain, the chains to her nipple-rings tautened, stretching her, until now, she was on tiptoe, bare-footed, one of her feet cramping perhaps, frantically making love to herself because he said he would not lower the chain until she came for him, like this, her breasts painfully stretched upwards...

Quickly. Gulp wine. Send.

 

[patrick1]

If that is what it takes to become part of your life.

Castles in the air. He builds.

Out of the corner of his eye he keeps glimpsing her, a phantom. Each day there is something new about her. Today she has apple breasts.

He is tidying up his boat, dammit he can't even keep one place straight, let alone two, and what progress has he made with the house on the moors? The house with ten rooms, one for a master and nine for each muse? How much?

Castles in the air. Where his phantom-woman lives, shaping his dreams as he shapes hers, and isn't she already his muse? Inspiring him to write to her?

A passing barge comes close to his, making everything sway, he hurries out to protest and, just before he shouts at the complacent smiling bastard floating by -

- he stops himself. Who am I angry at?

Only myself.

And for what? Is it so terrible, to conjure up phantoms then relish the pleasure when they take on a life of their own, and speak, and begin to conjure you?

Once everything is shipshape again, tidied and dusted or hidden from sight, and he has found enough old salad in the fridge to raise his blood-sugar, he sits on the foldd-won bed and begins to write:

Thank you for your breasts like apples. The small scar. The erect nipples. I sat in my cellar, that could indeed be your dungeon, and imagined your imaginings.

There are three more gifts I will ask of you. After that I don't quite know what will happen. The second gift will be of your head – your face, your hair, your dreams. The third gift will be of your cunt – the raw centre of our imaginings.

But the first, it might seem strange, is of your body as a whole. I can explain it with a fantasy, of this narrow bed, in the boat, where I'm sitting. I imagine you naked, on your back, spreadeagled, on this white-sheeted bed, bound by your wrists and ankles with rope, so that you know you will suffer if you try to struggle.

And I sat, or kneeling, or crouched, will play with your body, with a feather, or a packet of twenty-four clothes pegs, or just my fingers, or ice from the fridge. And you won't be able to touch your cunt, and I will refuse to, even if you beg me. But I will play with your body – the places we haven't mentioned, your ribs, your belly, your collar-bone – and the places I already begin to know, your feet and legs, your arms, your back and buttock (I will turn you over when I'm good and ready). And there will be pleasure and pain in mild doses, for a long time, I might have to gag you if you're too noisy as I stroke you, pinch you, ice you, tickle you, hurt you, please you...would you like that? And me naked too? And you helpless to do anything but respond?

Send.

 

[patrick1]

The pale freckled canvas invades his daydreams. My own body he begins, and doesn't know how to go on.

He's up in the house, where the only place that's at all civilised, as his rare female visitors have been wont to say, is his bathroom, paid for with a fat fee just before the fat fees stopped coming, it was the last fat fee in fact. So he lingers, amid its fruits, after the shower, looking at his own body.

There's a melancholy poem he's written and he rubs the slight excess of his belly, saying it out loud:

There'll come a moment of great fragility:
Narcissus gazes at the waters he slurps from
and sees through fat his skeleton, flesh
clinging to carcass like rotting meat.

He sees in the mirrored tiles, as he turns, his crumbling spine, imagines his liver struggling for life, his coughing lungs...

My own body he writes a little later, fortified by a glass of something the liver may not welcome, has seen better days. But it would be bronzed against your paleness, I tan easily.

I smile easily. I am a cheerful pessimist, you can tell by the marks time has made on my face.

What do the marks time has made on your face say? And your hair? And within, I'm sure there are chapters, a whole tome on the dreams and imagination within. Tell me of your head, within and without!

How it cheers him, writing to this intimate stranger. Quick, Send before the Pessimist at your shoulder gets a look.

 

[patrick1]

I like the 'head of many compartments, each of which might fill a book'. The mind has so many dimensions: I remember being baffled for years by the idea from physics and maths of more than four dimensions. And then the Internet came with its hyperlinks, which seem to reproduce something interesting about how the mind words, and suddenly I felt I understood multiple dimensions: inside one of your compartments are other compartments (inside which are...), and cross-references to yet others, and a direct line to the loins and groin, and mysterious connections to other people.

And yet one thought fills immensity.

Write, don't ponder. Don't drink.

How lovely to have remained more or less the same in appearance. My own face is most unlike the face of my youth. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled. I went back to a place I worked in my twenties, to a party celebrating the early retirement of my former boss, and she (never the subtlest of observers) startlingly said, 'Come and meet ----- (my real name) – see what he looks like now!' Bigger-jowled, fatter of face, more melancholy in between the laugh-lines, and with some indefinable shadow of something.

A silver-haired man who still strides across the moors...

No questions, no lasciviousness, but why not, for the sheer pleasure of it, Send?

 

[patrick1]

To meet.

Quickly, quickly.

Oh, I don't think we should merely, simply, just 'meet', do you? I think you should be kidnapped one day in broad daylight by a man with a tender voice but firm hands who, once he removes your blindfold to allow you to see him, has, you will see, blinking away your tears from the pain of the way your arms are bound behind you, a fine head of silver hair. Don't you think?

 

[patrick1]

So. A kidnapping then. Hm. Problem a. Materials. What's needed? Oh, rope, cuffs, sacking for a hood, choloroform? - no, it's said to be dangerous and anyway, she's only going to pretend to fight him off, isn't she? - some way of anchoring her in the boot of the car he'll have to devise, for even a friendly kidnapping ought to involve some discomfort for her...

Problem b. Destination. Well, the house on the moors, of course. Needs a bit of sprucing up though, and an added chain or two.

Problem c. How to find her.

Hm. Problem c's a tough one.

He rereads her emails but doesn't glean any significant clues to her whereabouts.

Well, well: he'll sit that out, and wait for her to reveal clues of her own, before asking outright which would be a gesture of defeat to a subtle man, and in the meantime stall her (lounging in the only bedroom of the house on the moors that's almost fit to live in, hm, maybe a carpet and curtains and something to lift the mattress off the floor would help) – so where were they on the body gift-exchange?

Head complete, nothing left but...

Hey Calliope. What do you call the place between your legs? Privates, vagina, clitoris, cunt, any other euphemisms or vulgarities? What quickens the nerves in that place? Tell me what you would be game to tell me of that place, those places...

 

[patrick1]

He's nervous. He's afraid. He's always afraid of being rejected. But of course, the fear of not being rejected is just as great.

Drinking one too many glasses of dry white that night, he writes back to her, 'Hey, I'm no great shakes you know.'

He laughs, and doesn't send it.

Drinking two too many, he images a vagina dentata, and has to have three too many.

In the morning, hung over, he walks the moor in unexpected sunshine. Late summer sun makes his skin gleam. Up on the ridge amid the blooming heather, he looks down at his ramshackle house and, below, the canal where his boat is moored with the FOR SALE sign now looking a little droopy on the side. You've come this far, he says to himself. It's how he persuades himself up hills steeper than this; by reaching base camp, then saying to himself, You've come this far...

Agh.

That night he does a late shift at the call centre. Just one large glass of wine when I get home, he promises himself, and I'll write to her.

Thanks you for all you tell me of your cunt.

I would like to watch your cunt. I wonder if there's a way of fastening a camera between a woman's legs, a camera with a magnifying lens, so her cunt can be watched 24/7. Imagine. I might be a man in a cafe, seeming only to consult my mobile phone, but actually I'm looking at...my muse...my muse's cunt...

The older I get, the more the centre of gravity of my desire seems to shift from my prick, that former citadel, to my mind, my perverse mind, using my eyes and my hands. I would like to watch; touch; manipulate. I would like to tell you to perform certain acts, and watch you do them, and test your cunt for evidence of desire after the performance, and treat you kindly or abominably in accordance with the evidence – or perhaps randomly, in the face of the evidence, so you understand that the control is not susceptible to rationality, it is a simple unreasonable relationship of submission and dominance.

And then, he's poured the second glass despite his resolution and knows he must click Send before, before...?

 

[patrick1]

It's a turning point. To the outsider his actions would perhaps seem dully practical but to him every step becomes strangely erotically charged. He visits the building society, and emerges with an addition to the loan on his house on the moors sufficient to acquire central heating for the place. Just up the road is the builders': he places the order.

He doesn't tell either of them that he's doing the work so he can keep a muse, naked, though he's tempted to.

A muse, kept naked, must be kept warm, if she is to inspire him.

How marvellously organised he suddenly feels. How right the world suddenly is.

Dear Calliope, This is the beginning of a journey. I am preparing the house for your arrival. It will take a little time. In the meantime...

A muse-in-waiting. Needs to be tantalised. Needs to be inspiring. Needs to be watched.

...there is, I have ascertained, a chain of stores of which you can find the nearest at www.simplypleasure.com

You are going to make a number of visits to a store or stores of your choice. What you have to do is tell me which store you are going to visit, on what date, at what time, travelling there and back by public transport.

I shall be there, watching. You aren't to approach me, or acknowledge me. You will find that I follow you home. I want you to feel watched; appraised; wanted from afar.

The items you are to buy on your first visit are a good quality leather blindfold with padding; cuffs of the same quality that will fit your wrists and ankles; a simple leather collar with D-rings set into it; and a vibrator that will stimulate both your vagina and your clitoris at the same time.

Don't worry about price: I will refund you whatever it costs, as soon as you've purchased the items.

Look, we've begun. If you want to turn back you must tell me. Otherwise I await your plans for your first visit to the store.

 

[patrick1]

Calliope

I watched you. Did you feel me watching you?
You did everything as I hoped. You are everything I hoped for.

I dyed my hair to watch you. I felt marvellously alive, following you, watching you, and yet unfamiliar to myself. And I thought: this is how I should like her to feel. Both unfamiliar to herself, and yet more wholly herself.

I watched your window, the night you bought the articles I'd asked you to buy – did I ask? Or instruct? - until your light went out.

It had become a rainy night, I was soaked when I got to my hotel, I showered and sat naked and, sleepless, wi-fi was free. So I hummed Donovan's 'Sunny Goodge Street' as I researched the history of the estate where you live, how Yeats and Pinero and Pissarro lived there, how Godwin the architect lived with Ellen Terry, and although this information in itself was utterly unerotic, I realised it carried some kind of sexual charge – it meant I was beginning to want to know about you, and these were some of the flimsy clues I had.

Now, back north at home, I have been reflecting on what it will mean to have a muse. I use the word 'will' now. I looked at images of Calliope on the Web and among the traditional ones I found this: http://alphadesigner.com/blog/decorating-muses-part-1-calliope/ It provoked me. While the writer seemed to want to honour women in some way, he drew Calliope as an instrument: a marvellous instrument that he could play at will.

The work on the house on the moor is going slowly, the builder has some other job on and keeps giving me excuses and now it's snowing anyway. So I sit here, in the place where I would like to – where I shall - keep you as my muse, and I imagine you in it, naked, wearing the articles I instructed (let us settle on that word ) you to buy.

Here is another instruction. For an hour each day now, I want you to strip naked, write the word CALLIOPE somewhere on your body with lipstick, then wear nothing but the collar, cuffs and blindfold. Have the vibrator close to hand. Use it on yourself if you so desire. If you say something aloud, only say an obscenity. Do not use an alarm clock: try and imagine how long an hour takes. Imagine, if you like, that you have a Master who keeps you like this, naked, blindfolded, cuffed, filming you as he silently watches you, and he tells you to assess how long an hour will have taken before you remove the blindfold, and further imagine that he punishes you in some frightening but erotic way if you are wrong by more than a minute.

Write to me of how you feel during these hours. That's all I wish for the present.

Patrick

 

[patrick1]

The house is all but ready. He plays music he doesn't usually like: ecstasy-fuelled anthems. Incense burns. He has laid out on the floor emails from her, printed in different coloured inks. He is thinking red is her colour, for him. He looks out from the room she would occupy, if she were his muse, at the snow. For a punishment he might send her out there naked, but for a red collar, and have her beg, masturbating, through the window to be let in.

Of course he would never be so cruel.

He masturbates, in the room where he has set a heavy metal ring into the white-painted wall, a ring to which a chain might be attached, imagining his own cruelty, imagining rubbing the cream of his own pleasure into her hair like a humiliating shampoo.

*

I yearn for you. C*LL****. I play games with your name. C*LL**** - it might be Calliope, or Collette, or Callgirl. CallCunt, I imagine calling you, keeping you naked and tethered, making you pay for yourself, forcing you to answer premium phone calls all day, responding to obscenity with sensuous, startlingly-literate obscenity.

Next time, write C*LL**** on your body.

Next time, set a sound recorder going. I don't care if you send me an hour of silence. Simply send me a recording of the sounds in the room, while you are naked and blindfolded and collared and using the vibrator and imagining me watching you for an imagined hour.

When you send me the sound file, tell me if you're ready to come to me. For a weekend: I think we should experiment with each other in person, but only for a short time at first, to enjoy, and then to reflect. I have a chain the length of the far reaches of the house, and dreams to share. I would keep you naked, and be very tender and terrible to you.

In a day or two I have pre-booked a ticket to London. I will be watching you some of the time. You're everything I hoped for. Don't approach me yet. I am six foot tall, my hair is pulled back in a ponytail now.

Write to me as soon as you have recorded the sounds.

Master

*

In the dark, down on the boat, he thinks of her. The night is so quiet, except when the geese stranded by the ice complain again. Winged animals trapped out of their element. He thinks of her. Yes it's time to send her the message.

 

[patrick1]

He loops her sound file on to his mp3 player. Wherever he goes he can listen to her, fucking herself for him.

He rations himself, or it will be too much.

On the train down to London, he makes himself play Florence and the Machine and old Steely Dan tracks while he half-reads The Piano Teacher and gazes out dreamily at snow.

He stands opposite her flat, and walks the road between it and the tube station, until he's too cold to patrol any longer, listening to her orgasms while bodily she does not appear. 'Please let me come to you,' she says nevertheless. 'I'm ready to come to you,' she says. 'I want to come to you,' she says.

'Please,' in his hotel room she says in his ear. 'Please. Please.'

She doesn't emerge from her flat the next day, and the curtains are in exactly the same position, and he goes home, strangely not disappointed, nor even melancholy, at not seeing her. Something has been decided.

It's hours before he gets home though a snowstorm. In the boat, iced in, the wood fire crackling, finally he allows himself sexual release. It's always furtive, the way he makes love to himself, but this time he listens to her, making love to herself, and it emboldens him. He stares at himself in the mirror, naked, as he comes. He stares down at the semen in his hand, imagining rubbing it into her flesh, not to humiliate her, not precisely, but like massage oil, into her shoulders, or sensually, rubbing it into her breasts, so that she will smell of him, stink of his desire, if he were to send her out into the world.

C*LL****

Your sounds are lovely. I carry them with me.

There is even another name hidden within C*LL****, Collette, CallCunt, Calliope – I've been reading of Callisto, and of the painting by Titian, do you know of that? Here, look. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TitianDianaCallistoEdinburgh.jpg The goddess Diana discovers Callisto is pregnant by Zeus, and turns her into a bear.

Shall there be other muses – or you yourself in a different persona, to instruct C*LL**** – or shall I myself turn you into an animal? Clothe you in animal skin from which you can't free yourself and have you make only animal noises?

Perhaps you'd like to dream of this in your next self-confinement. An angry, lustful, confined animal. I sometimes think those who desire to be slaves must be very angry, to know that their fury has to be contained by bondage, will and force.

- You'll no doubt have matters to arrange before you come to spend a weekend with me. Tell me when the Friday will be. The place is ready for you. I should like to meet you from the train at Manchester around 5, and take you somewhere splendid to eat, and have our conversation not even touch on the secret sado-masochistic nature of our relationship. I should like to discover a little about your life, and your other pleasures. Then I'll drive you here, and once at the door you'll give yourself up to me until the moment on Monday morning I open the door again to take you back to the train.

Will you like to agree to that? You had better be clear about any pre-conditions you would like; I'm sure we can come to a mutual accommodation.

I look forward to your reply.

Master

 

[patrick1]

Dear Calliope

You won't need a change of clothes, for at my house you'll be naked all the time, so travel light. But bring all the erotic accessories you bought at my behest.

The 3 pm train gets in at 5:07. I'll be in the upstairs bar, nursing a tonic water, working on a difficult sudoku. I'll wait till 6 pm, unless I hear the 3 pm train is delayed even later than that. I have a restaurant booked for dinner en route for my home.

It will be a delight to meet you. I hope a voluntary meeting, rather than the kidnapping I imagined earlier in our acquaintance, isn't too much of a disappointment to you.

Patrick, or Master

 

[patrick1]

She has apple breasts and small hands. Her legs are elegant – so she will probably wear a skirt – and her hair is red. The place where her thighs meet her buttocks is -

SUDOKU. Don't have an alcoholic drink. I am old and foolish but there's no going back now. And why would I want to?

She has told me extraordinarily intimate details of her erotic fantasies and sent me sounds of her pleasure yet -

Yet what?

123456789. The constituents of a sudoku. The conventional number of Muses in Greek mythology.

Calliope. Collette. Call...

Her breath on his cheek. His name in her whispered voice. Don't blush. Be masterful.

'Hey.' He gets up, something clatters on something on the table. He catches only a glance at her – she is shockingly attractive, conservative in appearance, he wants her straight away and realizes he was afraid he wouldn't, close up, not viewed from a distance – before enfolding her in a hug of an embrace. Only a light scent of something. He makes three seconds pass before releasing her. Taking her hands, which even in his small hands do seem small. He smiles at her without seeing her properly. 'Cally-oh-pay,' he says, 'let me call you that, for the present, and you must call me,' beat, so she knows what he's thinking, 'Patrick, for the present. How was your journey?'

His drink abandoned, her left hand in his right, he leads her from the bar, down the escalator and then another escalator while she talks about her journey and he says 'Really?' and 'Gosh?' - not taking it in, not even taking her in, just enjoying the sensation of her hand in his, of her presence beside him, of the possibilities as manifold as stars in the clear night sky that open up with her beside him.

'This is mine, the blue 205.' He holds the door open; she has a small bag. 'Here, I'll put that in the back.' He takes the bag. There is a glimpse of her leg as she gets in. He opens the rear door to put her bag on the seat, then goes round the car and gets in himself. Takes a deep breath. She has belted up, half-turned towards him. He takes her face between his hands. 'Hey,' he says, hoping his grey-green eyes look as honest as he feels, hoping his crow's feet aren't horribly ageing and unattractive on him. 'Hey. We're both bound to be shy. I'm not good at talking while I drive. So you, Calliope, you tell me, while we drive to our restaurant, about things you like. Unerotic things. Tell me especially about poetry, and music, and when we eat I'll tell you about them too. Hey?'

And he leans to kiss her lips lightly, then lets go. He starts the car. He watches for a space to steer into the traffic. His heart quietens at last, as she begins to speak...

 

[patrick1]

He leaves the car running. To keep them warm while he says -

Says what? 'Hey,' he says. 'Thank you. You are a romantic, aren't you?' He squeezes her hand then, reaching over into the back seat, he retrieves her bag. 'Thank you. Thank you for telling me about you.' He sees her react to the proprietorial way he is rummaging in her bag. Well, yes: let her feel that. I am not your kindly lover, a sheep in sheep's clothing.

In my heart of course I fear I am but -

He finds the collar and takes it from the bag. 'And when we eat I want to talk about music and poetry myself. But, bend your head a little would you?'

And he unclips the simple necklace from her neck, and puts the collar there, buckling it at the back, tight round her neck. He feels her shaking. He gestures to the restaurant: 'We could go eat. If you've got the nerve for it. Wearing a collar round your neck.'

And then he's out of the car, and at her door, holding it open, waiting for her reply...

 

[patrick1]

In the restaurant they are guided to a secluded alcove. The seat is a continuous curved bench. On the table is a single winter red rose. He orders for both of them, straight away, without consulting her: a glass of dry white wine for her, sparkling water for both of them, a salad to share to begin with, he says smiling to the prickly-haired young waiter, and a single mushroom pilaf to share for the main course. Then he turns to her:

'I wanted to tell you about my own tastes in poetry, and music, oh, Carol Ann Duffy, Billy Collins, I like clever poets, clever but clear-speaking nevertheless – but' dropping his voice 'I find I'm just thinking obsessively about – about our correspondence. And about the weekend to come. Indulge me, would you?'

The drinks have arrived. He lifts her wine glass just as she's reaching for it, and takes a little in his mouth, and cups his left hand behind her head.

He kisses her with wine.

He smiles, licking his lips. 'Thank you,' he says. 'The house is ready for you. It's warm, well-stocked. In your room, Calliope's room,' and he leans in to murmur in her ear, 'there's one end of a chain set into the wall, and the other end, with an open padlock ready,' leaning away, as if he'd said nothing remarkable, 'is in the vestibule, waiting to be attached to something. Yes, that's fine,' this to the waiter, 'we're sharing.'

The salad is a thing of beauty: leaves of many colours, feta, cherry tomatoes, cubes of cucumber, vinaigrette. He reaches across, and takes the cutlery from in front of her, and puts it to one side. He makes a forkful of salad, and offers it to her: 'You might as well begin to get used to different ways of eating.' And as she eats he whispers: 'In the house there are pet bowls for you; or my hand to lick from.'

And he feeds himself a mouthful, and then her another: 'Organ music,' he says, 'that was a surprise, you'll have to educate me in that, and in the joys of Keith Emerson,' smiling, as he eats, then feeds her, eats, then feeds her...

 

[patrick1]

There is room in the house for nine muses: or for her as all nine.

He wipes the last of the food from her lower lip. He takes the last gulp of wine in his mouth, and kisses her with it.

He raises his arm to the waiter and offers his plastic card, then turns to Calliope. She is so quiet, her eyes so intent and intense, and he has babbled a lot of nonsense probably about the house and the moors and poetry and oh yes all that about Keith Emerson how he was born just a few miles from here over in Todmorden...

...and of how much he is looking forward to what is to come...

Walking to the car he puts his arm round her shoulders. A shiver runs through her. He wonders if she is going to cry.

It's chilly and clear. They stop beside the car, thigh against thigh, as he looks up. 'Between Mars and Jupiter,' he says, 'sorry if you know all this, is the main belt of asteroids. There's one called Kalliope with a K. A hundred miles along. With a satellite known as Linus. It's known, the asteroid is known as 22 Kalliope. Sometimes, I don't know about you, I like terrible fantasies where slaves are given numbers not names. Here...'

He opens the door and she gets in. Diffident man. He takes a deep breath before going round the car and joining her. He starts the car without another word, and drives, sensing her beside him uncertain whether to speak.

After a quarter of mile, in the darkness beyond the lake that the restaurant was beside, he pulls the car over in a lay-by and leaves the engine running. He's reaching into the back seat for her bag again. 'I loved to see you there, in the restaurant, in your collar, your eyes brimming. No,' his finger on her lips as, after her long silence, she seems about to speak, 'thank you for your silence. I love your voice. It will howl for me soon. Here.' He has the blindfold. He secures it quickly over her eyes. 'I want there to be a little danger. The police might pull us over and ask what I am doing, driving over the moor, with a woman next to me, blindfold, with her panties in her mouth.' He puts the car in gear. 'Pull off your panties, please, and put them in your mouth,' he says, as the car pulls away. Music begins: Stravinsky's 'Firebird'. 'Taste your own desire. Then place your hands on your knees, palms up, and imagine what is to come. It's only ten minutes or so to the house.'

The car thrums as it accelerates, as the music makes its first wild crash...

 

[patrick1]

'We are here.'

He has stopped the music but she still moves in her seat. 'Here.' He circles her right wrist with a cuff and buckles it there. And then, cuffs her left wrist, as her face, distorted by the voluntary gag of her own panties, moves blindly as if to try to see him.

The cold air: the driver's door opens and slams, and in a few moments the passenger door opens beside her. There's a clink, then a tug at her neck: he has attached something, a leash perhaps, to her collar.

'Up, Calliope.' He guides her, his arm on her shoulders, so she doesn't hit herself against the door frame of the car. The air is bracing, but there is only the slightest of wind, and no sound at all. Perhaps a very distant dog barking. Their own breathing. The leash dangles in front of her, he has gently pulled her arms behind her and is clipping her wrist-cuffs together with something.

Then, blindfolded, still half-gagged, wrists cuffed behind her, a chain to the collar at her neck, she feels herself enfolded by him in an embrace.

But only for a moment. 'The house is some way from the road. We must take the track. I have your bag. I'll keep you on a tight leash.'

And then there's the crunch of snow beneath her shoes. She bumps against him, so short is the leash from her neck to his hand.

He leads her, bound, into the darkness.