Jackdaw Fool

Familiar acts are beautiful through love

Shelly, Prometheus Unbound

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love

God, Song of Solomon

Numb gobbed and hung over, Coakes is crabby. The Rubrics are freezing this morning. The first frost has settled in, crusting his window pane with a thin murky wet. He walks down to the cricket pitch, watches finches fight the cold. Hidden in an old overcoat and a woman’s charmeuse scarf, he wanders the campus dodging the jogging scholars and hooting delivery vans.

Coakes felt his muscles tighten involuntarily against the chill. It was damp and cool, specks of frost floating in the faces of glistening puddles, gilded leaves startling in the ice bright European morning. He sat in the rose garden and took long slow draws on his musty pipe. He felt his age, the two day old hangover sandpapering his eyelids, the deep ache of night chilled bones - but he was satisfied, a grim satisfaction. For a moment he visualised kids snapping around his feet. Moon faced princes in their winter woolies; their pretty auburn haired mother, rosy and demure in United Colours of Beniton. Could he love again?

The sky was a blue grey slate cut through with shards of golden light. A girl approached. Coakes watched her as she crossed the grass. Her name was Stephanie, he decided. She was an undergraduate, an erasmus student from Bordeaux. She looked like Charlotte Gainsbourg.

See him there, great breast thrust against the cold. His hair, magnificent. Who could he be? His face, familiar, but why? A great violinist perhaps, or some Titan of German cinema. So ugly, that proud pockmarked maw, that great beak, and yet so solid, so powerful. I sense the epic in him, and approach.

‘Good day sir, is this seat taken?’
Coakes met the girls gaze. She was gaunt and pretty, one hand shading her eyes. Her pups were fiendish, squeezed and ripening under an azure sweater.
‘You’re not a reporter I hope?’ Coakes smiled, she clearly wasn’t, but now she’d know, if she hadn’t before, just what manner of man she was dealing with. The girl laughed, covering her mouth like a Japanese, and shook her head.
‘Well, sit then damn it.’
Coakes felt the garden draw in a little, the sky shrink to a ceiling.

Christ how the muscles move beneath his coat. He must be forty, but…so strong. Those arms could knock through solid oak. Can he feel me watching?

The girl looked away, and Coakes relaxed a little.

She can tell I’m money. Probably too classy to thieve my wallet from the night stand, but she’d get it somehow.

She took his hand, and he stiffened.
‘Look…a kingfisher I think. I did not know they flew here.’
Coakes watched her face again, took measure of that slender neck, those pine green eyes.
‘You’re a stranger here too I think, Australian is it?’
The girl laughed again, a charming sound, like sheets of rain through a forest canopy. She had still not let his hand go.

So resonant, so strong his voice. He is a Yank I think, but civilised, perhaps an artist. A brute, to be sure, but tempered by a tender soul. Buckowski in Armani.

‘Ah no, I am from le Gascogne. Stephanie Brun at your service.’
‘Very pleased to meet you Miss Stephanie. My name…’, he paused, savouring the words, ‘is Iago Coakes’.
She nodded, no flicker of recognition visible. Was it possible?
‘I regret…It seems that, perhaps that I should know… You seem disappointed.’

I smell him, damp and musky from the night, his eyes so gentle, piercing my cement garden. Christ how he reminds me of my father.

Coakes grunted. ‘Nonsense, it’s a relief not to be bothered by the pressures of expectation. No doubt you’ve heard of me, and are too embarrassed to admit it.’ He pulled his hand away, and the girl tilted her head as though puzzled.

Where’s the fucking camera? Either a gold digger or a blackmailing cunt, it has to be. Somewhere there’s a boyfriend with a digicam, and the bitch is doubtless underage.

‘Have you been in Ireland long Stephanie?’
She didn’t answer, but instead flopped down onto the bench, her feet straight out before her, and reached into her trousers, mans pants Coakes noticed, retrieving a lighter and cigarettes.
‘It’s so boring, don’t you think, to know such details?’
Coakes felt his balls retract. His teeth were painful, tingling and gritty from the antidepressants. A gust caught his hat and it rose straight off his head, as in a silent comedy, and settled once again, quick and gentle, and a little askew. Coakes took the hat into his hands, and they both examined it, started.
‘Coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘If we can find a decent cup in this Fenian backwater.’
‘Certainement.’

The tea shop is caked with wood inside. A little dank, but dreamy with the oaky hiss of cafe au lait. Coakes watches the girl from behind his coffee. She is clumsy but lucky, wildly swinging her mug as she speaks, banging it on the sturdy table to emphasise her points, somehow never shattering the ceramic.

He is bored. I’m boring him. He is grumpish and improper, doubtless a genius, and I’m boring him. And in a minute I shall start to speak of dire boys and scare or kinky bedrooms and scandalise. He has had, perhaps I think, not a life so full of experience. He is so guarded, so innocent.

Coakes fooled with his pockets under the table, and listened to her speak of home. Of parents, sweet but dull, the fire of their youth faded to middle class convention, of her radical brother battling capitalism in Madrid and Genoa. Coakes despised hippies, gaunt throwbacks to the dark dreams of socialism, huddled wretched in drum circles, scraggy beards terrifying in the weak light of their failing camp fires. He kept his thoughts to himself, asking only the most gentle questions he call to mind.

‘Tell me Stephanie, do you like to be fucked?’

She looked away, running a hand through her kinky, shoulder length hair.

‘The pleasure of a woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.’

Coakes gripped his thighs unsteadily under the table. She turned to him, her gaze hidden behind that wild brunette tussle, and seemed to emerge slowly from the veil, grinning wickedly.

‘Why Mr. Coakes, I’ve scandalised you.’

Coakes submerged into his black coffee. When he broke the surface, scalded and panting, she was waiting for him, flicking at his nose with a mitten.

They walked the old Georgian streets side by side, fingers touching accidentally. Coakes barked a faux historic commentary, garbling eras, bumbling chimeric literary figures from half remembered History Channel biopics.

How he mocks his ignorance. So wry, so deprecating. He is I think, a baron of some vile industry, ashamed under the brusque impression of contempt.

They kissed beneath an old elm tree on the Rathmines road, and she left him, cradling a cold coffee, his long blonde hair tied neatly, his great chin hard.

Coakes began his woo, as he began everything, with extravagant aggression. He followed her everywhere, unspeaking, menacingly sexual. When he discovered Damien Hurst was her favourite YBA, he began to leave little gifts, pickled and sawn in half at the foot of her bed. Coakes saw to it he faced little competition, for weeks every man she spoke to found himself gagged, hogtied, and violated in a Saudi prison. Finally it worked, as it had to. Stephanie sensed him waiting for her, breathing heavily in the dark outside her window. She took his hand.

‘You have charmed me Mr. Coakes.’
‘And you me, my darling Stephanie.’

Coakes took her home to Gascony, to Bagnères-de-Luchon. He sat in the low roofed farm cottage and ate home baked Brioche and Entrecote, while her father regaled them with tales of Paris ‘68, and her much younger mother poured wine and flirted outrageously. They rode bicycles under the bare lime trees of the Allées d’Étigny, and bathed in sulphurous caves deep beneath the snow peaked pistes of Superbagnères. Coakes even picked up a few phrases en francais, and haggled with the merchants in the Allee de Etigny flea market, kicking over a fruit stall drunk on Cotes Saint-Mont. Coakes felt as though he had fallen from the sky into a Google map, lifted a new life from the pages of a story book. His training suffered as his palette expanded, Stephanie joking that he would soon resemble a middle aged Jim Morrison.

As they walked the foothills above Bagnères, Coakes wiped his brow and watched Stephanie’s petite behind. It had been almost three months since their first meeting, yet they had never once made love. At the farm, to the general hilarity of all, they slept in separate rooms. Each time she’d broached the subject he’d changed it, defensively boisterous.

Look at that arse, sweet Zeus the peaches, and the gruff screamer between them, guffing quietly as we climb. How my tongue could pummel her. But she’s too young, too innocent. Dear Satan, what am I doing here?

Coakes paused, planted his hiking pole in the rocky earth and looked down over the great ice age valley. Stephanie joined him, wrapping herself about the barrel chest, slipping her head under his crook of his arm, her cheek pressed against the rough brickwork of his jaw.

That evening the call came, Coakes’ summons back to Trinity. Questions had been raised in Nature about the quality of his research. Rumours on the net suggested an illicit arrangement with Dawkins, who’d been discovered floating, hanged and daubed in Wildebeest, off the Galapagos. Coakes took the first flight out of Bordeaux, settled back into his icy rooms, throwing himself into the shower, scrubbing off the sweat of the journey. In the mirror, his eyes were hollow. When he emerged from the bathroom, there was a message on his answering machine.

‘Iago, it is stupid, all these lies. I miss you, I’m coming over.’
Coakes slept better that night than he had in years.

Coakes took Stephanie to Acquisition, a hip bar he knew which served cocktails at five euro a pop. Half way through his fifth Atomic Dog, as the Pet Shop Boys struck up the opening chords of ‘You were always on my mind’, he began his confession. Nuzzling in a darkened cubby, he whspered terrible secrets one after another. An hour in, she shook her head and hushed him.
‘Iago, Iago, it’s OK, I understand.’
Coakes’ face was streaked with snot. His eyes bulged huge and lacy with veins.
‘I’ve never told anyone…’
‘That story about the Scalextrix?’
He put put his head between his hands and began to weep openly. ‘How was I suppose to race… one bloody car?’
In bed, he craddled her, whispering, ‘Et je n’ai plus songé. Qu’à te couvrir de feuilles. De mains nues et de feuilles. Pour que tu n’aies point froid.’
They tore at each other, Stephanie tugging Coakes’ cotton shirt off over his head, her lips eager, lapping at his neck, Coakes’ hands gentle under her blouse. A rustle and snap and she was naked, and purring, coquettish, shameless and giggling in the dim gold from their antique candle flame.
‘Come to me Iago.’
Hands shaking, he untied his pony tail, hair tumbling about his shoulders, vivid yellow in the crowning dark. He paused at his trousers, slipped his fingers inside her instead, kissed her deeply as she squealed in French, kicking her legs into the air.
He tugged and pummelled at her with his fingers, till she pulled away and moved her hands down to his pants, kissing his bare and sweaty chest.
‘There’s something I should…’
‘Hush,’ she’d stripped him to his boxers, retro baggy numbers, racing green turned septic in the dark. Coakes lay back panting as Stephanie rose above him, a flickering silhouette, lowered her eyes to remove his pants. Froze, groped about in the space between his legs, puzzled.

Christ no, the cock, the tiny tiny cock, how could she ever love it, how could she bare to touch that crippled, ugly knot.

Coakes choked with shame, a warbling fragile sound, raised up on his shoulders, pressed himself desperately to her chest.
‘It’s ok,’ she whispered, pushing his ludicrous soft between her legs, his tears forming a cool river down her chest as he suckled her breasts.
‘You have a scar down here.’
Coakes sniffed, raising his face from the soppy tits.
‘An accident, a long time ago. Could, could you suck it a while?’
‘Certainement,’ she replied awkwardly, climbing down him, kissing tenderly, as he dried his face on the cheap hotel’s dirty pillows.
The moment when her lips touched his unresponsive prick was lost in the numbing pool of her vaginal juices. He groped at Stephanie’s damp hair futily and thought of his lost love, her lips of salty sea and rotting gull. Hours drifted by in the bleak of night, Coakes moaning in a vain imitation of pleasure, Stephanie lapping and tugging heroically, her lips chapped and peeling, her eyes dead.

In the morning, they lay awake, side by side, unspeaking. Coakes raised a hand to her chest, fooled with one cold and unresponsive nipple. After a moment she turned her back to him, the sine wave curve of her bottom, perfect in the reddening dawn. Coakes wrapped himself around her, one hand under the smooth hard belly, another tussling her hair.

‘I have to go.’ The words were brittle, distant.

Coakes watched her dress, her back to him, each action careful, hands straightening and tightening. At the door she turned.

Look at him. That pig, naked and oily. How dank, how old he is.

‘This was mistake, I think.’

They never spoke again.