The Pleasure Quartet (2 page)

The next week, we had introduced ourselves, and from that day onward I began to look forward to Sundays and led my tutors to hope that this strange girl who had never before demonstrated a pious
bone in her body had finally found comfort in God.

I had not found comfort in God, but I had found a friend in Iris. The moments we shared were snatched between hymns or in the cover of darkened alcoves when we were supposed to be engaged in
confession.

I even started reading the Bible, but only the Song of Solomon, lying in bed at night in my dormitory and slipping a wettened finger inside myself until the King’s smooth words and the
rhythm that I played with my fingertip against the silky hardness of my nub created a roaring commotion inside me that rushed through my body like a storm. I thought of this magical sensation as
being like a wave. It began with my increasing wetness and gradually gathered pace, waiting for me to catch it at just the right moment, at the crest, and then ride it all the way down again.

One Sunday, I asked Iris about this feeling.

‘That’s an orgasm,’ my friend said knowingly.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

‘You’re meant to have them during sex. With a man.’

Iris had gleaned this precious information from her very liberal grandmother, Joan, who had once been a circus performer and worked in exotic, faraway places. It was rumoured that she could
swallow fire and insert a whole sword inside her cunt. The old woman now lived alone in a shack near the black sands of Piha Beach where every morning she walked the rugged paths through the
Waitakere ranges and then played piano so vigorously that the surfers said they could sometimes hear an eerie lullaby of plonking keys audible over the crashing waves.

When I was seventeen years old, I was unofficially adopted by Iris’s parents. My own mother had passed away suddenly of a heart attack and left behind neither income nor provision for
school fees and I became part of their family.

At the weekends, under the pretext of taking music lessons and keeping an old woman company, Iris and I were driven to visit Joan in Piha by Iris’s father in his new Plymouth Valiant with
its elaborate chrome trimmed fender and Ray Columbus and The Invaders crackling on the radio for as long as we could pick up reception.

The cream leather upholstery always felt cool against the skin of my thighs as I gripped Iris’s hand and tried to concentrate on not being sick. We’d be swung from side to side as
the car accelerated around the sharp bends of the tree-lined road that led to the beach with its sand blacker than the night sky and so hot in the sun it was near impossible to walk across without
scalding the bare skin of my feet.

Iris’s father would spend the afternoons drinking lager with the boys at the surf club as Iris and I plied Joan with questions about her previous life.

We girls would listen in fascination as she recounted tales of lewd events that had occurred in the back of hansom cabs when the twenty-two-year-old Joan had allowed herself to be wooed by the
rich men who watched her.

She was still able to lift her leg over her head she informed us one day, before nimbly clambering onto the piano stool and demonstrating this remarkable feat by wrapping one slim wrinkled arm
around her left calf and lifting it over her right shoulder as if her hips were hinged and swung open as easily as any front door.

The stories we loved to hear most were those that concerned the Ball, a bizarre celebration that occurred just once a year in different locations across the globe. Joan told us that she had been
recruited as a performer for the event by a tall and handsome woman who had waited for her in the shadows outside the Trocadero Music Hall at Piccadilly Circus. She had hair so long it reached all
the way to her ankles, Joan said, and it was so flame red that at first glance it appeared she was on fire. The woman had given her an enormous amount of money in advance to secure both her
discretion and a lifetime of performances just one night per year and from that evening onwards Joan had travelled with the Ball.

Iris was disbelieving but I listened with rapt attention as the old woman described a party on a riverboat in New Orleans where the walls had been set alight with flames that did not burn and
half of the guests were disguised as human torches. She described another held in a mansion on Long Island in New York that from dusk to dawn appeared to be underwater and all of the guests swam
from room to room in the guise of mermaids and tropical fish. And another in a vast underground cave beneath a frozen waterfall in Norway where a group of dancers had been dressed from head to toe
in diamonds that stuck to their skin and gave them the appearance of glittering snowflakes drifting gracefully from a shimmering ceiling of stalactites.

Joan had never married, but left the employ of the Ball after conceiving a child under a rosebush with a man whom she had met at a garden party. The life of a travelling performer was not well
suited to child-rearing, and so, with Iris’s mother growing in her belly, Joan chose a new life with the pioneers who were emigrating to the antipodes and she relocated to New Zealand where
she gave birth to a child who would inexplicably grow up to be conventional in every way aside from the genetics that had produced her mother and would eventually produce her own daughter,
Iris.

She had kept in touch with various other members of the Ball’s staff who continued to travel and perform and so it was, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, that Joan learned that the
Ball would soon arrive in New Zealand.

‘Are the stories true, do you think?’ Iris asked me that evening.

‘Every single word,’ I replied, my eyes no doubt shining with the joy of it all.

When the invitation came, it was on thick white card embossed with gold lettering and sealed with a large glob of candle wax. Joan had asked me to peel it open, complaining that her now
arthritic fingers were no match for the heavy envelope although just that morning her digits had flown across the ivories with the dexterity of someone half her age.

I slid my nail along the surface of the paper, peeled off the seal and examined it between my fingertips. It was soft and pliable and smelled of marshmallows.

‘Cape Reinga,’ I breathed softly as I pulled out the card and read the invitation aloud. I rolled the words in my mouth as if they were a benediction. I had long wanted to visit the
point that was often thought to be the Northernmost tip of the North Island, the place that in Maori was called
Te Rerenga Wairua
, the leaping-off place of the spirits. It was said that from
the lighthouse that stood watch on the Island’s tip the line of separation could be seen between the Tasman Sea to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east as the two clashed in a battle of
the tides. Along the way was a ninety-mile beach, a stretch of coastline so vast it seemed never ending to the naked eye.

‘And what is the theme to be?’ asked Joan, her bright eyes glowing with anticipation.

‘The Day of the Dead,’ I replied, reading further. ‘A little morbid, don’t you think?’

‘Not at all,’ replied the old woman, ‘and I ought to know, because I have one foot in the grave already.’ She lifted a wrinkled hand sternly to wave away our polite
protestations. ‘Death is just another step on the way of life.’

That night Iris and I lay side by side in the single bed in Iris’s bedroom in her parents’ ramshackle house on the North Shore. In another life we might have been sisters but in this
one we had grown to be something more.

I was in love with Iris. More than in love, I was consumed by her and consumed by the thought of losing her. Now that we had both finished school and Iris had begun working in the office of a
local motor dealership there were inevitable suitors. Older men, mostly, rich men, those who could afford to drive, and very occasionally I suspected that their wives too admired Iris. With her
thick bush of untamed dark brown ringlets that framed her face, eyes the colour of melted chocolate and wrists as delicate as a child’s, who wouldn’t?

Iris had a round doll-like face and a look of perpetual innocence that attracted people to her like bees to a honey pot. I felt myself to be the opposite. I wasn’t fat, but I was stocky,
my brown hair dull and straight, my eyebrows a little too thick and my features square and unremarkable. At least, that’s how I imagined myself. I rarely looked in mirrors because I found my
own appearance ordinary, and I often wished that I had been born a boy so that I did not need to worry about whether or not my hair was combed or my waist was becoming too thick. Most of all, I
wished that I had been born a boy so that I could propose marriage to Iris.

As soon as I heard about the Ball, I had wanted to be a part of it, and take Iris with me. There was something magical about the way Joan described it. I felt it in my bones as surely as I felt
that perpetual longing to be near the ocean and when I discovered that the Ball was to be held in Cape Reinga, the place where one sea laps over another, I knew that we must go.

We had no way to secure an invitation, or so I believed before another thick white envelope appeared through Joan’s letterbox this time addressed to Moana Irving and Iris Lark. I tore it
open with shaking hands to find that the old woman had written to the Ball’s organisers and recommended that both us girls be offered positions in the kitchens. Neither of us could cook
particularly well, but that, Joan said when we next saw her, was of little consequence.

All of the food and drink created at the Ball was unlike anything else that we might ever have tasted or would ever taste and consequently the recipes were exotic and heavily guarded. All we
would need to do is supply the labour, peeling, cutting, chopping and stirring. It was believed that each dish would be imbued with the particular flavour of the person who prepared it and so the
Ball selected only a few trained chefs to supervise the catering. All the other kitchen staff were chosen based on the vibe that they would be likely to pass on to the diners. A combination of
personality, enthusiasm for the event and sexual libido. All things which Joan had advised the organisers Iris and I both intuitively possessed in abundance, each in our own way.

With the invitations secured, there was nothing else to do besides find our way there. Joan had declined to attend, stating that she preferred the memories of her youth to whatever inferior
adventures her worn-out body might now be capable of.

Iris had convinced her father to loan her the car. She had little experience of the open road but had learned to drive as part and parcel of her employment at the motor dealership and the
necessity of opening up and closing down the shop and bringing the vehicles in from display outside to the secure workshop indoors.

We had little idea of what might be required in the way of costumes, but from everything we had heard about the ball I guessed that any of the daringly short, brightly coloured shift dresses
that Iris and I usually wore to parties wouldn’t do. A brief note that had accompanied the formal invitation advised us that we would be provided with clothing appropriate for our work in the
kitchen and would then be expected to change into something more suitable once our duties had been completed and were free to enjoy the rest of the evening’s entertainment and would also be
expected to attend a ceremony which would occur at dawn.

The drive was long and slow. Iris was cautious behind the wheel and well aware of the eruption there would be at home if she caused any damage to her father’s prized
Valiant. The vehicle was so roomy and she so petite that she could barely see over the steering wheel and anyone coming the other way might have suspected that the car was somehow driving
itself.

At my insistence, we stopped just west of Kaitaia to swim in the sea.

I had never been able to understand the concept of a bathing suit. I always wanted to feel the lapping of salt water all over my body and particularly on the parts of my skin that a bathing suit
usually covered. So, as soon as we had traversed the desert-like dunes that led to the ocean, I tugged my blouse straight over my head without even bothering to undo the buttons and slipped my
skirt and undergarments down and over my ankles, tossed them aside and ran straight for the waves, not the slightest bit concerned whether my naked form was or was not visible to any bystander.
Iris followed soon after me, though she stopped to carefully fold her dress and place it neatly over a bit of driftwood so that it would not crease or be covered in too much sand.

My heart drummed in my chest as I watched my friend walk nude into the water. She had small breasts, her hips jutted out only slightly from her waist, and she had the long slim legs of a wading
bird. She was different from the majority of New Zealand pioneering stock who were mostly a hardy and rugged lot, accustomed to physical labour and rude good health. My friend’s slightness
evoked a protective urge in me as well as a lustful one and when she entered the water and was close enough to touch, I took her hand and pulled her into an embrace and our naked bodies tangled
together in the waves. We laughed and splashed and kissed beneath the salty waves until the cold forced us to swim back to the shore.

By the time we reached the Cape it was just beginning to grow dark. There were no buildings besides the lighthouse, and we had expected no formal venue as such. Joan had told us that we would
easily find the Ball once we arrived. The venues were always designed or located in such a way that the uninvited might walk right by them, but to anyone who was destined to be a part of it, the
Ball would prove unmissable.

I heard the Ball before I saw it. We had left the car parked on a grass verge near the point and as soon as we stepped out of it and my bare feet touched the grass I knew where we were headed.
The sound was a strange keening, like whale song. I took the lead, and together we picked our way carefully down the steep embankment to the sea that stretched out on all sides of us.

My mind leapt – it was exactly as I had imagined. Like standing on the end of the world. And there, by the headland where it was said that the dead begin their journey to the afterlife, a
hundred or more large white birds flew, their wings beating in unison, diving off the edge of the cliff and then reappearing moments later, twisting, turning, joining with one another in mid-air,
frolicking on the strong wind that blew across the Cape. But they were not birds, I realised, and I brought my hand to my mouth in shock. They were people dressed in elaborate feathered costumes.
Both men and women and all of them naked besides the luminous paint that covered their bodies and reflected the light of the setting sun in a million coloured shards so that they were almost too
bright to look at.