There was a woman who provided most of the props for the film, who also played one of the extras when we needed a flow of people. The woman had a lovely swaying walk that we were able to capture. It was when our protagonists had drawn apart in the middle of a steep village street, and other people became prominent, sharpened.
After the shoot we held her items behind one of the trucks, a heavy iron shelf tiered with pots of pale flowers, a green bicycle that the female lead had used, and a black cat someone had retrieved and placed in a plastic cage. The woman took some time to make her way back to us, when nearly everyone else had gone, and when she did her face was fresh and glad. She said she didn’t get much work and was happy to have been of use. We stood awhile, others finishing up around us, and she told me more about the area, so close to my city and quite unknown to me. The cobbled street dropping down from the hills led to a circle of earth where three partisans had been executed on their knees. Each one wearing a white shirt, each one a bullet to the left temple. Nothing had grown there since. She pointed out the building in the square below where the fascist leader had appeared on the balcony, dressed in a tight black shirt buttoned at the wrists. I was alarmed I knew so little, even though we were all sent off for military service as young men. The others gathered to leave and I said I would remain here awhile to enjoy this new acquaintance. There were laughs in the van. Theo threw me the keys to his motorbike leaning on its stand, beneath the trees. We’d agreed we had enough material for this scene and this was to be our last day here. I said I’d join them in town soon enough.
I helped the woman go back and forth to her studio in a side street where she lived. She carried the plants in a large basket, while I held the iron shelf. There were other objects she had provided, of which I hadn’t been aware. Blue bottles that she’d arranged on the windowsills of the façade where we concluded the scene, a swollen green glass vessel for wine that had stood at our protagonists’ feet, then a sun dial and some old, rusted farming implements that she had hooked on nails she’d found in the wall. As she gathered the smaller items in a box, she said her son had been meant to help her carry everything back, but was playing football in the village over the hill. She thanked me for taking his place. On our last trip she picked up the cat, an unresisting shadow at the bottom of the plastic cage, and I wheeled the bicycle beside her. She had asked me no questions, didn’t seem interested in the way our crew had overtaken the village that week and, as we wound through narrow streets, ceased to talk. I felt I had reached a dangerous precipice and it was time to withdraw, so I wished her well, dug for Theo’s keys in my pocket, and walked back to the motorbike.
In the city I met the crew in our regular bar. It was a loud evening. We all drank too much under the illusion that the filming was over, but there would be scenes that didn’t work and had to be reshot. When I could feel myself slightly reeling, I thought of the way the woman had cut across the frame, striding, the length of her thigh becoming a shape that caught your eye. A good, healthy shot, an indication that the sensuality we had sought to behold in the work could offer itself unabashed and unforeseen.
At the end of the evening I drank a double espresso at the bar. We all tumbled out into the street towards our cars. I drove around the city centre before heading to the edge of town. I began the winding ten-minute drive up into the hills, windows down, inhaling the night air laden with earthiness and dust. Halfway there I realised there would be a son in the house. I pulled over and looked for her phone number, which of course I did not have. I parked the car and returned to where we had been in the afternoon, walking down through the empty village. At her house I tapped on the front window where I could see a light. The woman drew across a curtain. There was some time before she opened the door to me, during which I trod backward into the street, thinking I had never been more foolishly entrapped by a few bare moments.
She closed the door behind her. I could see she had not expected my return, not now. It was nearly midnight after all. She looked up and down the street and suggested we go for a walk, which we did, through the square where the local fascist had delivered missives from the balcony, to the unknown end of the village which reached some sort of cusp, where I could smell there was a quiet waterway gathering and passing through. We spoke in a relaxed manner, much as we had in the afternoon, so I wondered if this were an intrusion that she politely chattered over, and we would circle back to where I told her I had parked my car. Which was no doubt what I deserved. I had intended to say something more direct, but the words would not come anywhere near the course of our conversation. She told me her son had scored two goals that afternoon. She said there’d been a plague of boars that winter, and they were expected to reappear in the autumn with their strange gobbling sounds. She said her father always brought home a good catch from the river here, though now the pickings were lean. She stopped speaking as we approached the rift in the land, where there were picnic benches by the body of water, and I followed her over the grass.
A part of me thought that this could go either way: an episode of regrettable outdoor sex, or another hour of trailing conversation in the night. I was no longer aroused. We were standing above the bank when she came close, not in a way that suggested she wished to kiss, and began to unbuckle my belt. She tugged my jeans down my thighs, and cupped my genitals with cool hands. A searing vulnerability came through, the type you feel as a boy when you find yourself in larger circumstances, preyed upon. This had happened to me, and had not been disinterred for decades.
She knelt. I knew I could have urged her, No, not that, but I did not. My genitals were in her mouth, my cock already pealing to life. She had a way of making a long seam with the point of her tongue, along my inner thighs and lower belly, lifting my balls. I saw she had been devoted to another man once, and every lick and nuzzle was haunted by that, by him. After a time her hands landed on my buttocks, and she crammed my body into her face so she could consume. I might have toppled over in my delirium but for a warm palm that slid up to my lower back, holding me there, delivering complicity.
As I came I forced her head onto me, I know I did that, grasping her skull and a clutch of her hair.
She wiped her face with her dress and we remained there, standing and kneeling, until I closed my trousers and helped her to her feet.
On the way back up the hill she began to speak in a different tone, saying she didn’t like penetration, or being touched, that she had problems after things that had happened to her, and now her son was the centre of her world. I caught a vein of anger or resignation in her voice, as though the ways of all men had brought her to this moment, walking after midnight with a stranger’s sperm on her cheeks, and I felt a sorrow greater than I could remember. The fact that she spoke of her son so promptly uncloaked my own vulnerabilities, and I saw myself, saw my small boy’s body. I had opened to no one about that.
We arrived quickly at her house, as though those moments were accelerated and lost. There was a pause at her door where neither of us spoke or moved, so I left, turning back to see her pass inside, thinking that I had misjudged, misunderstood. I sat in my car going over what had happened. Her moist exploratory tongue, my cock taken, brought to violent life. Apart from grasping her scalp I had not touched her, had not drawn a finger over her skin, and it was done now, I embodied all of her aching. I turned around and began to drive.
My own son arrived from Antwerp the following afternoon, with a brutal hangover. We hugged at my front door and I could smell it on him: the smashed city odours of grog, sex, sleep. He had a new hungry tattoo around his bicep, red hair more ragged than before, and I adored the way he paused in the foyer, swinging slightly, checking things were in their place. Some of my concerns about him over the past year had eased. His contract at a small film studio had been renewed, he had found a steady girlfriend and made the discovery of being loved, he was drinking less and his body was leaner. He said they’d gone out the night before because his girlfriend, a composer, had been invited to a major electronic music festival in Amsterdam. Though there was a line drawn around this new and vivid rapport. Before, when he had been single and forlorn, my son had told me about women he slept with, mostly online finds, which meant obsessions and body parts, a couple of infections and an odd lump on his penis, the idyll of female orgasm. I had listened to his stories in the kitchen as I cooked, pleased his mother would be as good as clueless about the sexual life he led. But he shared nothing of his new girlfriend, nothing of their intimacy. Which was healthy, I knew, but was a small wound confirming he had grown away from me.
My son went out with his cousins that first night, shaking off his hangover, giving me a glorious hug before locating his set of keys and taking the lift downstairs. I found myself alone in the apartment. I sat down to dwell upon what had happened the night before. I realised I had been quite drunk myself, and it showed as the car looped around the steep curves. In the darkness the village where we’d filmed had lost its bustling, historical quality and was a brown nub on a hilltop. You reached the ramshackle city walls – there were modern blocks on the lower slopes – and there was a portal to be passed through, two dark jaws of stone. I looked back and saw myself locking my car, finding my way to the woman’s street, and wondered if I should have behaved differently: inviting her for a drink or a future outing, disallowing what was about to occur. For even as we set out and she had been candid and relaxed, not flirtatious, making the efforts of the day feel worthy, I had known she was taking me to the village rutting ground. I had smelt that within her body, I had absorbed her exquisite strides.
Then, there had been a stretch when it seemed this anticipatory moment had slipped away. I had listened with declining expectation to her circuitous chatter and begun to think of the drive back.
Until we reached the riverbank where the impromptu act had abruptly taken place. My hands holding her head as a vessel, the softness of ears and rim of bone under her hair. Her gluggy sounds that I heard, ignored. Now I worried I had alerted some behavioural spasm in her. Her darkness, her damnation. And that, representing all she fought against in herself, I would be abhorred. As we walked back I knew I should have found words to soften her bitter admissions, but the pleasure still bucked through me and I had been almost mute.
I thought, reframing the night, of my son as a witness, standing somewhere on the hillock watching us. Which felt ghastly. His father tapping on a woman’s window. His father given a blow job in an unlit park. These were territories that did not intersect.
My son came home late but I had not gone to bed, having received the rushes as I pondered. I’d started to study these on my computer, my brain quickened and clear. My son opened the fridge, drank cold water and ate from whatever I had stored in there, then came to sit by my side, smelling of smoke and beer and sweaty youth. He took the mouse from my hand and swung from scene to scene, making quick visual notes as his eyes circled each frame. His eyes were different lenses from my own, faster and critical, and I thought that I should use his skills more often. We reached the last scenes we had shot in the village, of the protagonists in the middle of the street. He noticed the actor’s sleeve pushed up towards the elbow then, a moment later, drawn down to his wrist. There was no way around such a blunder and, while the weather lasted, it would have to be reshot.
Someone in the team would contact the woman who had done the props, and it was probable we would be in the same space again. I recalled the warm palm that had crept up to my lower back last night, flattened and heated, pushing hard. I had forgotten that flare.
I knew my son had taken something, he moved off and visited the fridge again, swooped down to deliver a hug, said that without his girlfriend he felt like a blind mute man, like some of his senses were encrypted and inaccessible to him. He said she’d be finished work now and he’d been waiting all day to video-time her. He closed his bedroom door and I heard a bright young woman’s voice. Together they began murmuring, laughing, murmuring.
I spoke with my wife in the morning while my son slept. She couldn’t get a flight out of Brussels until the next week, and said she was disappointed she’d miss out on the reshoot. She knew more about the village than I did, and said she would have liked to have seen the place where the partisans were executed, witnessed by their spouses, one of whom later hung herself from a nearby tree. My wife had initially worked as a university researcher, so it seemed that knowledge unearthed itself to her. We met on a ferry when I worked at a bar on the islands and, younger than her, screwed everything that moved. With her fair fleshiness, her bold breasts and calves, I had wanted her over and over, the shape and smell of her, cried every time she flew home to study for her degree. Much older now, we were steadfast, and she was rarely deceived. She asked if our son had disclosed much about the girlfriend and I replied that he hadn’t opened up a lot. She said I should keep an eye on him, as he was walking a highwire with this one, and the fall would be hard. I said that yes, he seemed over-devoted, but that was his way. My wife often saw what was noxious in the state of things, and saw me as an aesthete who did not. She loved her only boy. They shared a language I understood but used without comfort or sophistication. It was theirs and never had been my own. My wife was facing funding issues at the hospital where she was a psychiatrist, dealing with the great brutality of domestic violence. She had also fallen recently, and broken a wrist. There were many practicalities in our frequent conversations, and my mind would drift far away. To close, she said once again she regretted missing out on the reshoot, as it would have been pleasant to explore that area.
I made myself coffee, not expecting to see my son anytime soon, and the phone began to ring again, a follow-up to all the messages I had sent off late last night. They were in the process of retrieving everyone, the actors who were fortunately still in town, the extras, the guys with the dolly and the lights. They had spoken to the mayor’s office in the village, who would relay our request to the local traffic wardens. The zone where we filmed was pedestrian so our permit was easily renewed, though today it was market day and the main square would be full of vendors and stalls, fruit and colour. This would be detrimental to our story. By afternoon, it was hoped, this activity would have died off. We had deliberately chosen a side street without distractions, and in that way the props woman had done her work well, enlivening a bland palette, understanding the calibration of each frame. Theo called once more and said the woman who had done the props could not be reached, and he saw a vast hurdle ahead. He said he would call me back if he got onto her.
This had me panicking. I was certain something had happened, derived from what we had done. I thought of our dark composition by the darkened riverbank.
Ten minutes later Theo called back and said it was okay, she’d been in the shower. She upped her fee as she’d had to move an appointment, but she would be at the site in the afternoon.
A tumbling down.
The warm hand on the small of my back.
I forced myself to sit at my desk, resuming my checking of the rushes for further flaws in those scenes. There was nothing that I could see, but now I knew the team would have scoured them afresh. When the protagonists parted in the street the extras became apparent, carrying out their diverse actions across the frame, and I watched their movements. Among them was the woman, pulling in your eye. I saw her limpid, swaying walk, sensing that my judgement was no longer reliable, for I could only see her for what she had become, hours after this.
My son appeared and I joined him in the kitchen where he sat down with a creased face. He said he and his girlfriend had talked for ages. He looked happy. He told me he had some online work to do in the morning, but wanted to make himself useful and come up to the village for the reshoot. I said he didn’t need to, it would be over in a couple of hours. With regard to work my son often had his mother’s sheer comebacks and could be unyielding, which would only slow things down. He drank water at the sink, then looked to see if any coffee remained. My son had once been betrayed by a girlfriend he loved. He had been beaten up over this. At the time, he’d asked me if I had ever betrayed his mother, my wife. That was easy, because I believed I had not. A small snort. You know I love your mother. Yeah, I know.
I offered to take a couple of the guys in my car as we were only taking up one van, which was burdened with equipment. We were already over budget, with payments due. The actors had retained their hire car for another day. Theo would wind up on his bike again. By the time we arrived (one of the guys in the back instantly became carsick and had a spell along the roadside) everyone was onsite and we were ready to rehearse. The woman doing the props had arranged the same items as before, the blue bottles on the windowsill, the shelf full of pale flowers; the glass globe on the flagstones marking where the protagonists would have their last conversation. The green bicycle was on its stand in the middle of the road, ready to be taken up by the actor who would wheel it out of the frame. I could not see the woman anywhere, and made a comment to Theo saying it was great that she had been found. Theo let out a dirty laugh, saying that if I needed the motorbike, it was there.
The woman appeared when we were ready to rehearse the crowd scene. She performed her slow, swaying walk across the frame, identical as before, as far as I could see. Pitch perfect.
The scene was shot. The market that took place in the morning had not created any interference, and there were no more onlookers than last time. Similarly, the sky, at altitude, was the exact same enamel blue invoking hardiness, cleanliness. Even the clouds seemed well-composed, holding off along the surrounding ranges. I could see why my wife had wanted to explore the area. There was a plaque upon the house next door, commemorating one of the partisans who had been executed. A mouldy photo was pressed against moist glass, within a tarnished oval frame. In our story we had made no reference to the context of the war, or the lives and souls buried up here. I now felt some regret about this, and curiosity, feeling we could have amplified our concerns, though it was far too late now. The actors came across to say they would be driving back to town, they had flights booked out for the evening. Theo walked over to me after them, tired, he’d had enough of bending, crouching, lifting, as had I. Many times over we had said this would be our last collaboration, and then an idea would swim through us, a proposal would be made, and we would find ourselves in the much-repeated act of supplication and collusion. We had been lucky, our stories had been heard. And this story would lead to another, I knew.
I lost sight of her. The onlookers thinned, equipment was gathered and arranged with difficulty in the single van. Her items were grouped at the side of the road, the bottles placed in the basket she had left there, the cat in its cage and the iron shelf folded. Someone had gently parked the green bicycle, which leaned on its stand. I expected her to arrive from the direction of her house, perhaps holding the hand of a young boy, with that unique ripeness, that blessing, upon her face. She did not appear. Theo waited, then asked if he should proceed to town in my car with the others, holding out his keys. I took them, thinking that I would go to her house, tap on her window, at the least offering to help with her things. I told Theo I would take care of that.
I began to walk down the street and ended up meeting her halfway, she was full of apologies, saying she had to check on an ill neighbour and had lost all track of time. She chattered on as we turned back up the hill, so that my intuitions were overturned and the darkness of our act became threaded with vitality, rapture, complicity, stealth. I knew then, before we began, everything that would befall us.
Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write, ended up co-running a bar in Ghana where she lived for nine years, and now lives in Venice. Her short fiction collections are The Carnal Fugues (shortlisted Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2024), The Cartography of Others, Love Stories for Hectic People (Winner, Best Short Story Collection, Saboteur Awards) and Pelt and Other Stories (semi-finalist, Hudson Prize). She was Guest Editor of the 2024 Best Small Fictions Anthology and has had stories published in Craft Literary Magazine, Ghost Parachute Anthology, Best Small Fictions (2022, 2024), Lunch Ticket, The Collagist, Wigleaf and others. Flesh Songs will be published by Text Publishing Australia in June 2027.
Instagram: @catinitaly
Website: catherinemcnamarawriter.com
