Her head hangs down and she looks up coyly, the cigarette weighty on her lips. ‘Could I trouble you for a light?’
No one in the household smokes, and all Michael can do is offer a rolled-up newspaper lit from the gas-stove pilot.
This kind of blows his cool gumshoe exterior. She looks stricken as he holds up the torching newspaper. ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked if you smoked. How thoughtless of me.’
Michael reassures her, no, no, no problem, as he tries to put out the newspaper before it burns his fingers. Finally, he flips it into the toilet. The basin is still full of flame when he closes the bathroom door. He arrives back in time to slide the chair under her as she sits down.
‘I can’t tell you how awful it’s been. People simply don’t understand my relationship with Uncle Duck. Oh, I know he was older than I …’
He was also a duck, but then hey, you’re both cartoons.
‘People find it so hard to believe that you can love someone for their mind. Those terrible cheap parts the studio made him play …’
You mean the one where he keeps blowing off the top of the bald hunter’s head? Or the one where he drops an anvil on it?
‘This is a duck who dreamed of playing Hamlet, who read philosophy, who wrote poetry.’
Always tell an intelligent person that they’re beautiful. Always tell a beautiful person they’re intelligent. Tell a cartoon that they’re both.
Michael says, ‘It must have been wonderful for him to find a soulmate like you.’
Dreamily, she nods. ‘Reading the classics by firelight together. It was all I ever wanted.’
Except for your boyfriend Bruno Bruiser.
Taffy bursts into Hollywood starlet tears. All coughing sobs, hankies and dry eyes. ‘And to think that people could say that I am capable of … of … uh-huh uh-huh [sniffle]. Forgive me for carrying on like this.’
‘It’s understandable. Under the circumstances.’ Michael lays his hand on top of hers, and she gives his a quick warm squeeze. She feels warm, human warm, but smoother too, slick, no creases or texture to the gloved and perfect hands.
Michael. Do you really want to have sex with a cartoon?
She looks up, determined now. ‘We must find whoever killed my husband. I have money, Mr Shamus. I’ll pay every last penny of it to find out who killed Uncle Duck.’
And to prove you didn’t do it.
‘I warn you. I don’t exactly come cheap, Mrs Duck.’
She breathes heavily and leans forward. ‘People say that you’re the best in the business.’ Appreciatively, she takes his hand again.
‘Perhaps we can leave this difficult decision until later. Won’t you eat something? Starving yourself won’t help.’
Taffy looks wistful. She has a perfect tiny nose that is completely invisible except when she is in profile. ‘No, thank you. Cartoons are different from people. We’re fuelled only by our motivations.’
‘Your motivations?’
‘Our passions. They sometimes take us over. We like or don’t like. We love, or don’t love.’
OK, let’s go for it.
‘Then,’ Shamus says, still steely in his old-fashioned, white knight/tough guy pose. ‘Perhaps you know how I feel about you.’
Alarmed, she stands up. ‘No! Don’t say it.’ She flees to the window on little high-heel steps, and frames her face between her kid gloves.
‘Mrs Duck. Taffy. Kiss me.’
What does it mean when a homosexual wants to stick his face between two artificial breasts? It means that what he finds desirable about them is that men have thought of those breasts. Men imagined them and drew them and shaped them and shaded them. It means it is the male desire behind the image that draws him, the desire of other men.
‘No. We must wait.’
‘No one will know. It is our secret. Our love.’
‘But the court case. People will talk. You don’t know what it’s been like.’
Oh, Taffy.
Her lips are not human lips. They are better than human lips. They are like Juicy Fruit chewing gum: thick delicious mobile wads that respond immediately to pressure, yielding and flowing but never too wet. They are the best lips Michael has ever kissed. And no moustache.
Over the tiny pinprick of her nose, her eyes go wide, wider, big as saucers.
‘Oh. Oh, Michael. Hold me. Hold me close. Take away the fear.’
He cradles her. She has an invented nature and her invented nature is to respond in this way. Her mammoth breasts heave against him; the fabric of the pink dress stretches. She protests, but it is in the script, though normally after the fadeout. The breasts are unleashed from their pink constraints. They are Platonic breasts, breasts in the ideal. Large and firm, but also soft, peach-coloured with baby-bottle nipples. They are supported, protected by her crossed, fluid arms. She keeps changing shape, subtly, to embody the ideal.
Her nipple fills his mouth. She tastes tangy and slightly salty. He fondles a nipple with his tongue, and it engorges. Michael thinks of all those hairy arms that drew those breasts, the thick hands that outlined the nipples through the pink of the dress. Did they dream of supping where he now sups? Michael feels his lips move in unison with theirs. He lolls her in his mouth.
‘Oh my love,’ she gasps.
Her thighs are perfect and without pores. Her translucent panties shimmer their own way down. Michael sees pudenda as babyishly appealing and round-eyed as Bambi or Thumper. There is a button-cute clitoris under his tongue. Unlike the breasts, it tastes real.
A cartoon orgasm, as yet unfilmed, makes the cheeks of her face quake and ride up like a stocking. Her breasts not only heave, but swell. Her face is nearly the colour of tomatoes, and her eyes are huge and crossed. She looks like she’s drowning, desperately holding her breath. Suddenly the nipples blow off steam, clouds of it. The breasts whistle in unison like two trains in a race.
Taffy settles back, crumpling. She goes fluid and pours down over the sofa onto the carpet, as flexible as a shadow, taking the shape of whatever supports her. She lies there panting for a moment, then sticks one of her fingers into her mouth, and reinflates herself, puffing, as if she were an air mattress.
Later, she dresses, in a lady-like fashion, smoothing down her hair and pulling straight the fingers of her gloves. She expertly cups the breasts back into their impossible fittings of pink.
‘Michael, I want to tell you this. That was one of the finest moments of my life. You know so much about the needs of a woman. How to lift her up, away from the inelegant struggle to survive.’
No my dear, that’s what you know.
What you know is what the men who embodied you want. Elegance.
Adjusting the perfect pink dress.
Need.
You turn your back for me to do up the zipper and I see the strong back, with two ridges of muscle down either side of the spine. You lift up the mass of your hair to show what every man dreams the back of a woman’s neck is like.
Class.
What clumsy, sweaty, fat, balding men imagine they want from women. They want to merge with elegance and delicacy, gain it by association.
She fiddles with what can only be called an evening bag. She extracts from it a tiny, flat silver case and takes out of it a single white address card.
‘Call me.