Lothoria

I had been in her home for only 3 days but already restless suspicion caught hold of my conscious and begun goading my curiosity. Such a swift transition it had been. Gill’s face had the look of man who had just had his snag snatched by an Emu.

“Mate, what are ya doin? You’ve only just meet her for fucks sake”

He had a valid point. I was a lousy friend and housemate, leaving him to flip the bill for a two-bedroom joint, while I upgraded from ashtrays and slab boxes, to a single unit with ocean views up on Abattoir Heights. Her Father owned the building and all the other flats were empty save hers, filled with cold black leather couches and large paintings of bullfighters bordered with rust blown spiked iron frames. A massive bed commanded the bedroom; the heavy metal posts on each end nearly grazed the ceiling.

She had approached me in the Ginza Lion two weeks ago. I was between pints with Gill when I felt a high heel in the small of my back and I turned to face a grinning girl, her long ink black hair shot straight down her elongate neck and an angry scarlet streak ran through her fringe. A red feather in a crow’s wing.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but sometime in the early hours of the following morning I awoke in her bed, clamped in her thighs, fastened in her grip like a pink pickle in a bull clip. And that’s where I am… sexually and somewhat anxiously involved with Brenda Lothario.

Brenda often worked interstate. She was a sale rep for Le Gland Acier which she told me was a French bra company. I guess that explained her exotic underwear, knickers with fabricated bullet holes and sports bras with an aluminum breastplate. I guess it’s whatever boils your eggs and I couldn’t say much against anyone’s breadwinning…I hadn’t had a job since Tony Lockett had scored his 1300^th goal... and I think I’d pulled a sicky that day too.

So I was held up in her apartment with only Manolete and Ordonez for company, watching me mid veronica as I paced the living room.

The apartment was small and I had acquainted myself with all but one detail…a small cupboard in the bedroom. As I sat on the bed staring intently at the midgets door with its polished silver knob shaped in rather a phallic guise, I gave a brief thought to what Brenda had said when I first commented on her peculiar little hatch.

‘I trust you Robert with my heart, even my apartment, all ask is that you leave this little door locked…always. It holds my deepest secrets…ones that I am not ready to share with you…yet’.

She had smiled queerly as she spoke and fanned her long caked lashes at me.

‘Bugger this’ I muttered, and using some BBQ prongs I found on the deck I levered the door open. The lock made a shrill pop like a tin bean pod in hot coals and as I reached into the dark compartment my hands touched cold steel and tightly bound leather, a cold snake and manacle in waiting…

And then came the sound of a door opening, muffled. My eyes flicked to the bedroom door, then back to the crude implements of bawdy arrest buzzing in my

shaking hands.

‘Tut, tut…tut’, her tongue clicked like a flint striking wet stone.

‘Someone’s been a wicked boy’.

A lascivious rendition of Bluebeard