The ribbed edge upon which it moves glistens with slime. You’d like to take a lick of it with your tongue. Looking at it makes you shiver, a shiver you feel all the way down to your sex organs. The skin is dotted with suckers, wet with desire and longing for the damp cave that might be the house where it can come. The slug moves forward, shrinking, expanding. Throbbing and growing to the rhythm of a heartbeat, the tissue becomes engorged, as if, shivering with its sensitive feelers, it is groping ahead, in search of a sheath to contain it. In search of the other, preferably something that is just as shiny and sticky, that will envelop it in its windings, that it can press its glistening skin against, filling up the space from inside until it bursts, fertilizing itself.
The hermaphroditic animal glints greyish-pink, a mother-of-pearl oil slick of colours shimmering through the gleam, as if all kinds of ice cream have been stirred in together, every flavour tingling the tongue at once. Winder would like to feel it in his mouth, would like to taste if it is sweet. Would like to feel if it grows in his mouth when he sucks on it.
He learned how to love from his lover, certainly not from his brothers or father, who was also called Winder, but from her soft hand moving and rubbing him across her vitreous bulge and between her pink folds until she trembled and then leading him inside and absorbing him. She was always the first to come.
Winder spits to wet his fingers and the skin between life line and heart line, reaches out his hand to the slug and lays it tenderly in his palm, curls his fingers around it. He sees the dark cracks in the horny surface of his nails. He has been living in this park for twenty years now, under the lonely thuja, which has grown wild. He never washes his hands; he thinks that protects him, here under the tree of life where he has made his nest. One time they kicked him out; the council burned his boxes, the plastic bags with his clothes in, the sleeping bag and the down-feather pillow that she brought him when he no longer wanted to live at home. There was a pillowcase around it with finely embroidered snails, like slugs with little houses on their backs, which had once belonged to her grandma. Come back, she whispered, pointing at the short fate line on her hand, as if a fortune-teller had told her something he could not ignore. It was already too late for him to go home. But still she had taught Winder how to love.
But not how to love her.
He slept at the Salvation Army for a short while, and then came back to the thuja and has never been chased away again. He lives at the edge of the park, far enough from the big stretches of grass where the children play football and families have their barbecues. Sometimes a dog comes over to sniff at him. Then he quickly pets it and sends it away. Behind Winder is the canal with the houseboats. The boat people know him and say hello. He is their own tramp. In the summer, when they eat outside, they sometimes give him a pancake or a bottle of beer.
The slug crawls on, growing bigger and harder in his hand. Now Winder’s fingers close tightly around the slug like a house and it slithers inside. On his back, Winder can feel the bark of the giant tree of life. He has broken off the bottom branches at the trunk, the branches that begin above his head hang down to the ground with their needle-like leaves, creating a cave where he is unseen from outside. He has used pallets to build a tent-shaped shelter around the trunk, with extra plastic to keep it dry in the rainy seasons. He pushes hard, at the same time squeezing his hand until the white of his knuckles shines – that is how he likes it. He holds his slug in his hand and keeps pulling the ribbed edge over the wet tip; after twenty years, he knows exactly how to delay it, how to give himself pleasure at the moment he chooses.
You love yourself more than me, she sobbed when she gave Winder the pillow under the thuja. It was about four metres tall back then; by now, it must be at least twelve. The thuja is dense and when the male and female cones are growing among the foliage, the tree lets hardly any water through. Winder hides there when it rains, so that he doesn’t accidentally end up getting a wash. His hair is matted and hangs in strands over his shoulders; he treasures his layer of fat, which keeps him warm, like an animal’s fur. His face is as dark as his hands, and his eyes glow white and red between the streaks of black. It is as if he works in a coalmine, the boat people say. They once gave him a bar of soap, which was eaten up by the voles that same winter, paper and all.
The thuja is self-propagating, as Winder remembers from his biology studies back in the days when Winder Senior expressed his expectation that his son’s career would develop promisingly. The wind spreads the pollen from the male cones, the female cones form egg cells. Like the slug, the tree is a hermaphrodite.
Living here is not ideal, the park is becoming wetter and wetter. According to the people from the houseboats, this has something to do with the artificially high level of the water in the canal. The moisture seeps out of the ground and into everything. Winder once had an old cigar box with a few photographs and an expired passport inside, and even an address book; all decayed and gone. There was a photograph of her as a girl of twenty, in a short skirt and ankle boots with legwarmers. That was how she looked before they moved in together. First the damp took hold of them, and then the mould.
He lives here under his dry green roof on the wet black earth, but when Winder comes he is in seventh heaven. His fingers drip. He releases the slug and lets it hang between his legs, limp and flesh-coloured. With his left hand, he wipes the seed between the planks of the pallet that forms his floor. Winder does not need her; he needs only himself.
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