The Winner
Tread Softly by Wendy Perriam (Peter Owen)
She lay back on the bed while he positioned himself above her, then she slid her feet up his chest and onto his shoulders - Mr Hughes's shoulders. She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing downat her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, theuniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes's penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin.Enticingly rough yet soft inside her. The jargon he'd used at the consultation had become bewitchinglove-talk: '. . . dislocation of the second MTPJ . . . titanium hemi-implant . . . '
'Yes!' she whispered back. 'Dorsal subluxation . . . flexion deformity of the first metatarsal . . . '
They were building up a rhythm, an electrifying rhythm - long, fierce, sliding strokes, interspersed withgasping cries.
'Wait,' Ralph panted. 'let's do it the other way.' Swiftly he withdrew, arranged her on her hands and kneesand knelt above her on the bed. It was even better that way - tighter, more exciting. She cupped hispin-striped balls, felt him thrust more urgently in response.
'Oh yes!' she shouted, screwing up her face in concentration, tossing back her hair. 'Yes, oh Malcolm,yes!"
The Shortlist
The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru (Hamish Hamilton)
Luckily the asha dulls Pran's senses. The experience is still painful, like having a fallen log hammered upone's backside with a mallet, but at least it seems to be happening at one remove, the pain-messages arrivingat his brain like holiday postcards; brief, belated, and mercifully unenlightening about the sender's realfeelings. His head has been pushed down into the dusty black bedclothes, so he cannot see the purple face ofthe man toiling behind him. He is aware, however, that the pounding is punctuated by a rhythm of buttock-slapsand regular full-throated hunting cries. As the major's excitement mounts, 'tally-ho!' gives way to 'On! On!On!', and the bed groans with the effort of maintaining its structural integrity.
Godchildren by Nicholas Coleridge (Orion)
This was so wrong, it was all so wrong, but Mary's strength to resist was ebbing away; she was like a tinymeteor drawn into the orbit of some great planet. 'Don't fight it,' Marcus murmured. 'I can make you happyagain. Trust me, Mary. I understand how you're feeling, I can heal you if you allow me.' Slowly he moved herface towards his until their lips met. She was surrendering; even as she struggled against him, she felt herpowerlessness.
He scooped her up in his arms and carried her to his bedroom, still stroking and caressing her, and loweredher on to a vast bed, its sheets turned down in readiness on both sides. Very slowly and gently, he undressedher, covering her white skin with kisses while he caressed her back. To her complete astonishment, she feltherself becoming aroused.
'Shhh, shhh . . . ' Marcus was brushing her breasts with his fingertips, all the time shushing and strokingher like a groom reassuring a frightened foal. The palms of his hands were moving all over her now, strokingher buttocks, her pubic bone. She shuddered when he gently parted her legs with both hands because it felt sogood and she was so wet. Waves of guilt coincided with her orgasm; an extraordinary release of emotion washingover her like breakers across a tide barrier.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Bloomsbury)
Sometimes when I climbed on top of the Object she would almost wake up. She would move to accommodate me,spreading her legs or throwing an arm around my back. She swam up to the surface of consciousness beforediving again. Her eyelids fluttered. A responsiveness entered her body, a flex of abdomen in rhythm with mine,her head thrown back to offer up her throat. I waited for more. I wanted her to acknowledge what we weredoing, but I was scared, too. So the sleek dolphin rose, leapt through the ring of my legs, and disappearedagain, leaving me bobbing, trying to keep my balance. Everything was wet down there. From me or her I didn'tknow.
I turned the light off. I pressed against the Object. I took the backs of her thighs in my hands, adjustingher legs around my waist. I reached under her. I brought her up to me. And then my body, like a cathedral,broke out into ringing. The hunchback in the belfry had jumped and was swinging madly on the rope.
Ash Wednesday by Ethan Hawke (Bloomsbury)
Inside the Nova, with the windows blotted out from the fog of our breathing, Christy was naked from thewaist down, sitting on my lap, her black parka zipped up her chest, and that little diamond on her ringfinger. The sun had set on the Kingston bus station parking lot and we were making love, her vagina soft,silklike, encompassing, while I warmed up her feet by massaging them with my hands. Grace, the cat, was stillsitting undisclosed beneath the passenger seat of the car.
There's something about the feeling of snorting cocaine till your brain freezes and you weep 'cause youcan't fall asleep that I enjoy - it's a fear of death or an awareness of life - and there was something aboutbeing near Christy, kissing her, feeling her wetness, that touched the same pulse, only with her it was theopposite of poison. It was more like some ancient healing elixir.
'Can you say all that stuff again?' Christy breathed above me.
'What stuff?'
'About how you want to get married?'
'I'm not sure I can remember it.'
Christy snarled, stopped moving, and tightened her vaginal muscles around me.
'I'm never gonna love anybody more than I love you,' I said. 'So the question is: Do I believe in love?'
'Yes, you do,' she answered for me, excited. 'You do.' She moved her hips again and continued to fuck mylights out.
I thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, the story goes, knew the instant he heard the name AdolfHitler that he had brushed up against the reason he was born. He had been living his whole life with thisnagging sensation that he was waiting for something, and the moment he heard that name the feeling subsidedinto nothingness. He had arrived.
Now it's different, and to me it was shockingly humble, but there with my girl in my arms and our child inher belly I knew I had reached the moment my life had been waiting for. I was going to be a father and ahusband.
I spanked her bottom and cranked up the tunes.
The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (Canongate)
Sugar pretending to seduce an invisible man, begging him in a voice almost hysterical with lust. 'Oh, youmust let me stroke your balls, they are so beautiful - like . . . like a dog turd. A dog turd nestling underyour . . . ' Your what? Shush had such a good word for it. A word to make you wet yourself? But Caroline hasforgotten the word, and now's not the time to ask.
(Passage 2) 'Yes, oh yes,' she whispers, and embraces the small of his back to take more of him inside; shekisses him tenderly; their sexes are cleaved together; they are one flesh. A swirl of cloud folds around theirconjoined bodies like a blanket as they drift through the balmy waves of eternity, borne along, like swimmers,by rhythmic currents and their own urgent thrusts.
'Who would ever have thought it could be like this?' she says.
'Don't talk now,' he sighs, as he shifts his hands down from her shoulder-blades to the cheeks of herbehind. 'You're always talking.'
She laughs, knowing it's true. The pressure of his chest against her bosom is at once comforting andarousing; her nipples are swollen, her birth passage sucks and swallows in its hunger for his seed. On a greatflank of cloud they roll and wreathe, until her passion rushes through her body like a fire and she thrashedher head from side to side, gasping with joy . . .
Shroud by John Banville (Picador)
Halfway through our slow-motion love-making she squirmed out from under me and made me turn on my back, andflipped herself upside down and lay with her belly on my chest and took me into her mouth and would not let mego until I had spent myself against the burning bud of her epiglottis. Then she swivelled right way up again -such an agile girl! - and balanced the length of herself along me, a sprat riding on a shark, and for a secondI saw Josette, with her bobbed hair and upturned small breasts, smiling at me in the fish-scale light ofHendaye, and something went through me, needle-sharp, that was surprisingly like pain.
Behindlings by Nicola Barker (Flamingo)
She was now all but naked, except for an old-fashioned bra (which looked like it was made from acombination of cream-coloured tent fabric and some coordinated boot-laces) and a pair of loosely-fitting,almost contemporaneous (1920s? '30s? - what did he know of historical trends in female undergarments?) cami-knickers.The knickers hung off her hips revealing . . .
Her body was hairless. She was white as a maggot. Her breasts - inside those hockey-shoe-lace-cricket-whitecontraptions - Oh shit - deliriously full and slack . . . . . . The tangle . . . . . . Then his teeth werepulling too, but only very gently, and the laces were dampened and the ancient moth-smelling, cricket-pad,English-lawn-green-wax-rubbing cotton and the flesh just to the left of it- and to the right of it - and thedamper flesh, pinkened by the pressure of fabric just under -
The tightness . . .
They were suddenly on the . . .
Tiles hot below the scrape of pale and the knickers loose as butter-fabric slipping with the ineluctablepleat of . . .
Five fingers each with . . . She had five fingers and they had that pressure-warm-push-and-determined forceof . . . of . . .
Snout
Busy as any kind of sharp-nosed wild white woodland creature you might care to mention in the ice-snow-coldof winter with the searing-hot-scarlet of . . . of . . .
Snow Fox!
Teeth!
Fur!
Claw!
Arthur Young - Man of History - lay there, pulsating, whipped and panting, eyes without irisespurple-flowering, calm as a log split and crashed into the moss-sodden forest of infinite languor, while shebit and tunnelled and dug him over.
Dorian by Will Self (Viking)
In one fluid movement Herman rolled forward on to his knees, grasped Dorian by the shoulders, and kissedhim. Such suction. They were like two flamingos, each attempting to filter the nutriment out of the other withgreat slurps of their muscular tongues. Adam's apples bobbed in the crap gloaming.
White Mice by Nicholas Blincoe (Sceptre)
After a long while, when the pattern of her breath has let me think she is asleep, Louise says, 'It's aboat.'
'Not a boat.'
'It's a boat and the covers are the sails.'
'It's not funny, Louise.'
'Little pearls inside oyster shells.'
'I'm not, Louise.'
'You are. I can feel you. Put it inside me.'
She can feel me: the eye pushing through the fly of my underpants. She even presses against it, thesoftness of her bottom dissolving as she keeps up a slow, slow pressure. The cotton of my underpants firstgives and then tightens, sliding to become a tourniquet around a bare neck, the artery gulping in fear beneaththe skin.
'We can't do this, Louise.'
'Shush, baby. You're already inside.'
Only by a millimetre, less than a millimetre. But a soft muscle seems to pop out of place inside her andbefore it readjusts I am all the way through. It's just like we are back on our boat bed again, and we aremaking waves. As she rocks, the waves pass from her skin across mine. And soon the waves have their ownmomentum. We aren't doing anything, only letting them slip through us in warm trembles . . .
Her little belly shimmies under my touch, more waves that push my hands up to the sealskin tips of herbreasts and down to the spiral of her navel. The movement breaks us apart and, before we lose ourselves,brings us back together. Louise is riding on top of me. The hard thing between us isn't really a penis anymore, it is something that holds us together: something that she needs to push against the swell.
(passage 2)
There is a flip-down table below the cabin window, mounted on hinges on a bracket only ten centimetreswide. It is just large enough for Louise's bottom. She perches there, her back against the steamed-up glass,her arms and legs wrapped around me. I stand, buried deep inside her, my hands on her thighs and my nose inher hair. The cresting and falling of the train does half the work, not all; we keep stroking in together,stroking away, stroking back. When our orgasms come, it's like a naked electric cable dropped into a fishtank.
Wild Ginger by Anchee Min (The Women's Press)
He leaned over and said, 'Take off your shirt.'
'No. Why?'
'I hunger only for you.'
I began to laugh. 'Go chew Mao quotations! Fill your stomach with them. Come on! Chairman Mao teaches us. .. '
'"A thousand years is too long, seize the moment."' He grabbed me. 'Chairman Mao also teaches us,"A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."'
'Chairman Mao again teaches us' - I put down the buns and wrestled with him - '"The situation mustchange. It is the task of the people of the whole world to put an end to the aggression and oppressionperpetrated by imperialism."'
He went wild. '"If the US monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggressionand war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world."' I couldfeel my body blooming. I was unable to continue the reciting. 'Don't you stop, Maple! Show your faith inChairman Mao! Demonstrate your loyalty! Page one hundred fifty-six. "Speech at the Moscow Meeting ofCommunist and Workers' Parties." Come on now!'
'"It is my opinion,"' I began, '"that the international situation has now reached a newturning point."' I stopped, my thoughts suddenly scattered - the pleasure was too overwhelming.
'Go on, Maple, go on. "There are two winds in the world today"' - he caressed me, his handscupping my breasts from behind - '"the East Wind and the West Wind. There is a Chinese saying, Either theEast Wind prevails over the West Wind or the West Wind prevails over the East Wind."'
We were breathless. He insisted we continue reciting. I tasted his sweat as I went on. '"It ischaracteristic of the situation today that the East Wind is prevailing over the West Wind. That is to say, theforces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism. . . "'
Our bodies came together again. . .
He groaned, 'Oh! Chairman Mao!'
