For whole weeks now Leo had skulked her, weeks whose
near utter barrenness at length yielded reluctant fruits of his prey’s name
Agnes, the name of her church group, Jaunters for Joshua, and the real lone windfall
of her routine tour from fellowships to night prep, a petty journey that saw
her ultimately without company through a lushly grass-flanked pathway to her
favourite study.
‘Agnes,’ he
accosted her at last.
‘Good
afternoon,’ she said fellowship courteous, visibly surprised at the stranger’s
knowledge of her name.
‘You too,’
he replied. ‘Don’t be so surprised, I had to find out your name.’
Accentuated
confusion. ‘You had to find out my name?’
‘Because I
wish to poke with you, only I have yet to decide when and how,’ with a curious
facial placidity.
She hadn’t felt
ever so sorely sqeamish. ‘You’re crazy, excuse me?’
‘Oh thanks!
That’s my stock charge really only you put it a bit more indulgently, that is, civilly,
so I take it a compliment. You see, the rest just say You must be crazy!’
Only the
overwhelming proximity of this gibberish-talking spectre assured Agnes her
senses were not impaired. And she was certain when he spoke again that he was
irreparably unhinged.
‘And since
you prove quite civil, you can’t miss the courtesy upon which my vouchsafing my
wish, beforehand, is founded.’
One of Leo’s more oracular tutors at Gaga
Highschool had called him a muddled mosaic, a result, whatever that meant, not
quite unhinged upon the cumulative effect on his exuberantly melancholy
temperament of the coarse negligence and fierce squalour of his early breeding.
A man-shout away from his boyhood home a brothel, whose purely hedonist if
mercantile inhabitants for want of
occupation during the less busy hours of their day had not enough
scruple to stop them making actionable passes even at mere boys. And once or
twice before he was to be a full decade old, one or other itchy-groined
neighbourhood female had smuggled Leo to a clandestine corner, tossed him off,
and taken his juvenile virginity afresh, till much later when he learned that
only the pioneer of these possessed that non-refundable heirloom.
And though
it can’t have occurred to his oracular tutor, the muddled mosaic got his
finishing bits right under, that is, despite, his care at Gaga where Leo
mingled with boys who somehow came to
desperately desire life were more as the fowls’s, so a boy roused laxly
libidinous, as often on many a morning, may flagrantly flap and flutter his
cock-wings in pursuit of whatever hen-tail that caught his salacious sight: a
desire doubtless bred from countless
similar cock-and-hen displays, a staple sight at Gaga Highschool tucked away in
the remote recesses of a hilly village; where he mingled with boys who while
yet fresh highschool men stared dreamily at the luscious laps of their English
mistress whose mindless mini-skirt, when turned to illustrate a point on the
chalkboard, can’t have divined the fresh fierceness of the puberty swiftly
overtaking the tiny little scoundrels.
Himself, Leo
had often caught a dream-Leo always a mere thrust away from consummate rapture
between the laps of the mistress, only always again to be thwarted by ‘this
cruel rising-bell!’
But he was
in higherschool now, had spent a half and one sessions there, and set himself a
mean if queer task, having concluded the category of girls, his prospective
victims since three weeks called the Agnes- species after the name of his
clearly inaugural victim, shared a similar ghoulish motive with the brothel
inmates of his tender days to torture men. Only to theirs the Agnes-species
gave a touch of courteous blatancy: what with the daily nude shows they staged
before their dormitories, the really born-again ones taking the show right
round the Campus, Christ Jesus having
saved them from the shame of sin and death, pitched his tent right in their
very hearts, their very spirits, so that they now worshipped him in spirit and
in truth, unencumbered by old demands of bodily, physical modesty, things that
have passed away with the coming of the
new.
Christ Jesus’s
tent was quite deeply pitched in Agnes’s soul; so that she had become a prime
inviter to Jaunters for Joshua’s fellowships of her friends belonging
especially to the still more ‘puritan’ church groups. And she had known some
‘blasphemous’ encounters with some ‘incurably orthodox’ ones, in her idiom.
Such was
Mary who dragged her back towards the entrance nearly choked with ‘This delayed
orgy…your fellowship…however do your male-members manage it. God!,’ ‘This
delayed orgy’ being a congregation of full girls, in wears whose transparent
opaqueness flaunted the sheer vigour of youthful femaleness, interspersed with
impossibly, Mary had sworn, congenital eunuchs.
And as Agnes
had insisted long on a notion of life as one big elaborate game whose delicacy
must be jealously guarded, like a gallant really after a girl’s body simulating
sincere care, such naked indelicacy of language often unhinged her, however
momentarily. And she had never known such another since three weeks that
gibberish-talking spectre accosted her. Now she felt an ominous link between
the two discrete events, so overwhelming she did not herself stay through the
fellowship, Mary having baulked soon as the blasphemy leapt from her. Agnes’s
strict schedule should see her from fellowship to night prep, but she must, she
decided, get some nap now before prep was due lest her present discomposure
rendered that, too, futile. Any mediocre score in her looming quiz just won’t
do!
Rare as the
sight was on Campus she spied on her way to her dormitory a ferocious cockerel
make swift courtship arcs with his left wing round a feebly coy hen, then a
brief dogged pursuit propped him atop his conquered mate.
Nearly the
flagrancy, a weird thought crossed Agnes’s mind, of that spectre the other day.
When she roused from her overstretched nap,
found her discomposure had defied the alarm she set to wake her in time for
night prep, the clouds were roaring fresh signs of the diabetes they had
suffered lately. But she’d rather the inclemency of the clouds than a flunked
quiz. At any event Christ Jesus had ensured she may dare snakes and scorpions
with impunity. Hastily she readied, books in schoolbag hanging from her left
scapula, rushed out onto the lushly grass-flanked footway towards her regular
study.
Barely had
she done half the solitary snaky path when two masked bipeds sprang out, each
from either of its flanks. A desperate
reflex convulsed her around to scream-run her way back, a convulsion as
reflexively rendered impotent by the vision of three similar bipeds right on
that lone escape front. And her stuck trunk was collapsing from terror-coma
when the bipeds closed in opportunely on her, gagged her, now only to be sure,
bundled her into the left arm of the grass-flanks to a clearing farther in
where they spread-eagled her, four of the five ensuring each the steadiness of
her limbs. Then the fifth stripped her frocks.
‘God, no
pants!’ The biped securing her left forelimb was thrilled, a disbelieving
whistle leaping from his lips.
The stripper
was hardly as tickled. ‘Don’t be such an ass man!’ his voice recognizable as
Leo’s had Agnes only enough sobriety at the moment. ‘Didn’t I tell you I
intimated her on this three weeks ago? She can’t have been entirely unaware
“she’s got a whole lot of loving she’s gonna give tonight,”’ and they picked up
the quoted portion of Leo’s speech in a most mischievous chorus.
