 Relief
Brian McCabe
The sins of the flesh are innocent, compared to some.
Who had said that? Somebody must have said it. Or
maybe the thought had just floated to the surface of his mind. Could you have thoughts
without thinking them in the first place? Maybe thoughts arose of their own accord, or
were set in motion by external forces. And what about beliefs? Maybe they too could rise
from the depths of one's being unbidden, like serene corpses of the drowned.
He doubted if they would be serene - they'd be
horribly bloated. All the same, it might be true about the sins of the flesh, and he
comforted himself with that thought as he hurried down the steps to the door of
Sensations, the sauna he favoured. Unlike the others he'd tried, it was discreet. Lurking
in a quiet lane just off London Street, in a basement with blacked-out windows, with the
barely legible name hand-painted on a board above the door, Sensations was tacky, but it
had a low profile. All there was was a door that was barely open, the padlock still
hanging from the bar.
He stopped a moment in the hallway to get his breath
and shake out his umbrella. There was barely a spit of rain, but the umbrella had been
useful as a shield against curious glances. For a city, Edinburgh was still a big small
town and there was always someone who knew your face and wanted to place it. And he had
the sort of face people felt the need to place. For as long as he could remember, people
had looked at him in this way, as if they remembered him from somewhere.
He suspected it was something that set him apart from
them, had always set him apart. But what was that? That he was too clean-shaven, and
smelled too clean? Maybe that was enough to set you apart from other people. It was a kind
of respectability people didn't trust. They could recognise the thin, astringent smell of
his ruined celibacy. He shook out his umbrella.
A delicious guilt ignited his innards, like the first
mouthful of a pakora. Later, when he was home, if things panned out the way he hoped they
would, he would lie down on his bed and feel that same sensation of mingled transgression
and satisfaction spreading through the cells of his entire body, like the afterburn of a
good lamb bhuna. A carry-out was definitely the next thing on tonight's menu.
He took off his glasses and wiped them clean with his
handkerchief, then he stepped through the doorless doorway into the inner sanctum.
The cubicle wasn't warm enough. The oil felt tepid on
his skin. She had strong hands, large enough to encircle his ankles. As she worked her way
up, he felt the unpleasant prickle of her nails against his calves. Although he felt cold,
he was sweatmg. As she spread the lukewarm oil up the backs of his thighs, he began to
feel peculiar, like some amphibious creature coated in slime. The music wasn t helping.
Usually they had some slow reggae stuff throbbing away in the background. Tonight it was
something harsher. Like a slowed-down tape of someone trying to howl while having a car
crash. Nothing was working. When she massaged the loose flesh around his middle, she
kneaded it too hard, like someone trying to squeeze the inner tube on a bicycle wheel into
the tyre.
'Would Sir like to, y'know, turn over?'
Her voice had a shadow of something in it, behind the
professional politeness. She slurred her words a little, not as if she was drunk but as if
the habit of drunkenness had sloshed over into her sober hours.
He rolled on to his back and looked at her through
halfclosed eyes. He had taken his glasses off before lying down, and he saw her as a
dyed-blonde blur in a low-cut top. Then, as she leaned forward, she almost came into
focus. Even without his glasses on, he could tell that her face was unnaturally puffed,
and her eyelids looked swollen under the mascara - as if she'd been crying, or had had too
much to drink, or hadn't slept. Or maybe it was a combination of all three. Her movements
seemed reluctant as she poured more oil on to her hands and began to rub his shins.
This wasn't how it should be at all. There was
something wrong here. She seemed nervous. If anyone should feel nervous, it should be the
client, not the girl doing the massage. But he could feel the tension in her hands as they
circled around his knees. Was she new? She didn't look new. Was there something bothering
her - the fact that he was at least twenty years older than her, maybe? His misgivings
didn't affect his cock which, despite everything, stretched and hardened in anticipation
as the tips of her fingers, slick with oil, coasted up the insides of his thighs and
skimmed his balls. Her hands hesitated around his groin and then travelled on up to his
stomach, where they began to fuss around his navel, as if they didn't know what to make of
it.
He sat up a little and cleared his throat, then
reached for his glasses. When he put them on, something lurched in the pit of his stomach
as she loomed into focus. He knew her face. It was shockingly blank of expression, but he
knew it. He didn't know where he'd seen her. Church? More to the point: if he knew hers -
wouldn't she know his?
She looked at the ceiling and asked: 'Any extras?'
She pulled her top open. Between her dangling breasts
swung a thin gold chain. She had tied it in a knot, and a small crucifix hung to the side
at an odd angle.
When she noticed him looking at it she said: 'I have
to tie it up so it doesn't get in the way when I, y'know, do this.' She lowered her face
so that her mouth was in position, then looked up and asked: 'Is that what Sir would
like?'
'Thank you, no. I just want . . . relief.'
'Sure. You want relief, right?'
She made a question out of the word as she went to
work on it, and he wondered why. It was what they called it, after all. Yet now the word
sounded odd to him, and faintly obscene. Relief - was that what he was coming for? Was it
just a question of emptying his balls? Or was it relief from his position, relief from the
instinctive distrust people felt towards him when they caught a whiff of his loneliness?
Was he coming here and doing this, or rather having this done, as a way of humbling
himself, declaring himself to be no different from an ordinary man with ordinary needs?
But that was sophistry. An ordinary man, even if he frequented the sauna with the
monotonous regularity he practised, wouldn't always crave it on a Sunday.
The Sunday thing was, it had to be admitted, in the
nature of a turn-on. After mass there was the congenial afternoon drink with a few of the
younger Catholic intellectuals, all intent on trying to be liberal and loud, as if
Christianity was a new fashion, arguing the toss about whatever ethical dilemma had
surfaced in the papers that week, whether it was cloning or decriminalising cannabis or
that old favourite, abortion.
When he went home at night, he felt the need for
something else. For a long time he had simply made himself a meal and fallen asleep in
front of the TV; or while praying. He had gone through a phase of using videos, which were
easily obtained by mail-order from advertisements in Escort or Penthouse, but
they made him feel ashamed of himself, the shame of his loneliness, and of course he had
to throw them out or hide them. It worried him that he might have hidden something like
that somewhere in the house and forgotten about it. One day, somebody might find it. In
the meantime he had found a solution to Sunday night, and it was called Sensations.
The askew crucifix dangled on the knotted chain
between her breasts as she worked on him - too energetically for comfort.
'Slow down,' he admonished.
The blank eyes didn't look up from what she was doing,
but she slowed down. 'How's that feel? Is that slow enough, Father?'
He sat up and convulsed, as if he'd been winded by a
punch in the gut. Her hand tightened around his balls and he felt the sharpness of her
nails.
Her puffed face was an inch or two from his as she
spoke in a bitter whisper: 'Don't worry, Father. I'm not into blackmail or any of that
shit. Lie down, now, lie down.'
Although she was whispering, it sounded like an order.
Her grip relented as he sagged back on the bed. Not that it was really a bed. It was more
like a doctor's examination table. He felt too far from the floor. She spread her left
hand over his chest, as if holding him in place. Her right hand went on doing its work
down below. She had raised her eyebrows and lowered her eyelids, as if she faintly
disapproved of him.
He had to stop her. She knew him. She knew he was a
priest. 'My child…’
'Don't "my child" me, Father.'
'How do you know me?'
'Just you lie there and relax. C'mon, smile, Father,
smile.'
He obeyed, then felt the smile congeal on his face as
he looked at her: she wasn't smiling back. Her eyes had hardened on his mouth, and the
coldness of her look scared him.
She answered his question before he could repeat it:
'You came to see my dad. When he was dying.'
'Your father? Did he come to my church?'
'No, he was like - lapsed. He'd stopped going to mass
and all that years ago. I think he turned against it, y'know, when he got a book out the
library on the Spanish Inquisition and read about this scientist guy called Bruno.'
'Bruno?'
'I think it was Bruno. They tortured him.'
Bruno. He couldn't believe that the girl giving him a
massage was talking to him about a sixteenth-century scientist who had been burned at the
stake in the Piazza Campo di Fiori because of his belief that space was infinite.
'Bruno. The Inquisition. I see. The Catholic Church
has been responsible for many terrible things, but I'm sorry if that shook his belief in
God.'
'It didn't. He asked for a priest, one of you, on his
deathbed.'
The way she said 'one of you' made it sound like
something cheap and disdainful. As if priests were ten-a-penny, prostitutes working for a
pimp called God.
'What was his name?'
When she said it he remembered. A narrow living-room
in a ground-floor flat in Easter Road. A bed made up on the couch. A pale, gaunt man
watching the racing on Saturday afternoon, his newspaper and his tea and his cigarettes on
a coffee-table in front of him. He had heard his confession, unremarkable as far as he
could remember, and had recommended a hospice on the way out. That's when he'd met her -
she'd been looking after him.
She poured more oil on to her palm, rubbed her hands
together and smiled down at him.
'I'm sorry.'
'What for? You do your job, I do mine, right? Just
relax.'
Her hands resumed doing what they were doing -
stroking and restroking, pulling slowly and squeezing with a slow rhythm.
He looked up at her and tried to guess what she was
thinking. She was smiling, but he found it impossible to know what her smile meant. It
could mean she was going to phone the News of the World tomorrow and tell them her
story of the priest who came to her for relief. She didn't know where he lived, but they'd
sniff him out. Or maybe she was smiling because she was thinking of phoning him up any
time she was short of money. She'd said she wasn't into blackmail, but what if she changed
her mind about that? To get rid of her, he might have to involve the police. But no, he
was in no position to do that. Maybe that's what the smile meant.
'How's that feel, Father? Just relax.'
He wished she wouldn't call him Father.
She smiled down on him with her lipsticked mouth, the
crucifix dangling between her breasts.
She would never go away, this believer from hell. She
would watch over him whatever he did, this unholy Madonna, and he would pray to her for
forgiveness as he prayed to her now and heard her answer his prayer, calling him Father,
telling him just to relax.
He let himself dissolve into the orgasm as the fluid
catapulted out of him and spattered on his chest, like the first spots of a downpour.
There would be no relief.
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Fiction