1001 Nights Cast

She’s lying, nearly asleep, on an old piece of garden furniture in her ugly backyard. This terrible patch of mud that she hasn’t had time to get to. Pretty much the same as it was the day the builders left. Their quarter acre: the house, the concrete, the mud, the fence. And so on, beyond the fence: house, concrete, mud, fence, house, concrete, mud. All the way across the flat Keilor plains. Again and again and again.

It’s one of those long garden seats from the fifties, with faded blue painted slats. She’s in the sun. Letting it float over her body. There’s a slight breeze and it feels delicious. Maybe if she lies still she can be cleaned. Made new. Begun again. Maybe the terrible events of the last few nights can be erased. Maybe she’ll never have to feel that pain again.

And then, she is dreaming.

She and Leo are making love. They are in his old bed, from before they were married, with his sheets, those kind of satiny ones which he liked so much. Dark blue. And they are at peace. At peace with what is happening. She is on top of him, naked, and he is underneath her, naked, and he is about to enter her.

As he enters her, so softly, (and yes, that is one of the things which she so loves about him—that he is soft and hard at the same time. In himself and in his flesh…) she realises that instead of the bed being in his old apartment, on the middle landing of the undistinguished St. Kilda block, they are in fact in a hospital, under the lights, in an observation chamber. On all four sides of them there are walls with large glass windows, and the curtains are drawn back. There are nurses and doctors outside, in white coats, watching them, monitoring them. And it is she, Lillian, who has their particular attention.

She realises that she’s attached to a machine; that there is one tube going into her heart, and another coming out of her belly. That she has an electrode attached to one nipple, and another on her forehead.

It seems they are doing something to her blood. They are emptying it all out in order to cleanse her, to try and purge her of her illness, and she’s allowed to be here with Leo because as her blood warms up it comes out more smoothly and easily.

She is gradually moving closer to orgasm. They are fucking slowly, gently, deeply, as he knows she likes to. Her blood is getting stronger, pouring out of her body. Good, she thinks, good. But the doctors and nurses are starting to get anxious. Starting to get worried. They are moving around behind the glass, scurrying up and down like little creatures in the zoo.

And then she realises what has happened. There is a problem with the tubes. The connection is faulty, and so instead of the blood coming out of her and then being cleansed and replenished and then being pumped back into her system, it is just coming out of her, faster and faster, and collecting on the floor. It’s starting to pool up around them, around the bed. As they continue to fuck, and their rhythm gets faster, the blood starts creeping up the walls. All this blood coming out of her as she begins to orgasm and none of it going back in. They are in a sea of red, but they can’t stop, they’re too close, too close.

As she starts to come, feels the tremors move through her body again and again, she realises that all of her blood has come out, that her body is now totally empty and white, and just as she climaxes, she lifts up off Leo’s body and starts to float up into the air. She goes up and up and then hits the ceiling and starts bumping around, like a balloon attached to a ribbon, not being able to escape. She’s bumping and bumping, and the last tiny drops of blood are falling slowly out of her, she can see them curling through the air and landing one by one on Leo’s belly, until finally she wakes up, and she’s bumping her head on the back of the garden seat, crying. Bumping and crying in this ugly bit of earth.

And at that moment she wishes she were dead.

Something’s going on. And it doesn’t look good.