Free The Intimates by Guy Mankowski

unbreakable!” Franz jeers.
    “Georgina,” Francoise instructs. “It is your turn.”
    Franz sits back, conscious that he must not judge Georgina's acting superior to her mother's. The clock starts.
    “I knew you couldn't do it,” Barbara says, when the alarm eventually sounds. “She never could act,” she whispers to Franz. Georgina stops and looks over at me, a look of humiliation playing on her face.
    “That's hardly fair,” James says, as Georgina passes wordlessly behind him.
    “Carina, your turn. Franz, please make the music louder,” Francoise orders, keen to extinguish the sudden and rather painful silence.
    “I'm sure you'll manage to get this in seconds,” Elise says, as Carina steps to her feet.
    Carina dances drunkenly to the music for a few moments, as if steeling herself, before setting down her glass as the clock starts. For the full minute she holds the same pose, her arms held aloft as she moves her hips, as if slowly wading through treacle. Graham and I flounder for guesses, Elise retaining a determined silence until the alarm sounds. “I was trying to be Anita Ekburg in La Dolce Vita ,” she says, as she steps back behind Graham.
    “Could you have been any less creative?” Graham asks, and Carina lifts two fingers up at him.
    “I'm surprised you weren't a better actress,” James whispers. “I'd have thought you'd be good at selling illusions.”
    “Graham might have been better suited to that part. It's his favourite film,” I say, as Carina tucks a lock of hair slowly behind her ear.
    I look over to the gramophone as the music starts to fade.
    A hand reaches out and replaces the record with one that hums and crackles for a moment, before erupting into a galloping rhythm. The guests cheer loudly.
    An Egyptian man in a white suit enters the room, acclaiming us with one hand as the lights go up. He is holding a long, elaborately decorated drum under one arm. A second, louder roar greets his accomplice, a belly dancer whose long body shimmers in gold and scarlet sequins as the butlers make space for her. In moments the man is drumming out a pulse-quickening tattoo that drowns out the gramophone. He bites his bottom lip and sweat builds on his forehead as the dancer shimmies to the front of him.
    The drum is soon accompanied by enthusiastic clapping from the guests. The man's head is bowed, all of his concentration channelled into the wonderfully earthy sound of this drum, a lone instrument with which he seems to pummel the world into sense. I wonder if he isn't burrowing to find some essence that he himself has lost, some link to his past. Or if he is in fact tunnelling towards a more sensuous future by creating a canvas for this Turkish woman to move her hips over. It startles me that a man can commit such unbending passion to so simple an instrument. But the simplicity of the drum beat makes perfect sense as it inspires the bouquet of sensations the dancer provokes.
    “It looks as though the party has taken a sordid turn,” Elise says. “What is this, a Middle Eastern striptease?”
    “It's a Raqs Sharqi belly dance, and this woman is one of its most famous exponents,” Carina says, in an awed voice.
    “She looks like a lap dancer. Bit fat for it, isn't she?”
    Carina looks at Elise as if confused. “She's amazing, watch what she can do.”
    The dancer swirls her hips in time to the building drumbeat, which seems keen to accelerate her into a state of abandon. But with a composed, warm smile the dancer resists the temptation, her searching fingers finding new texture in the brutal drumming. This ability to absorb a man's frantic passion and express it sensuously, defines the beauty of femininity, played out in a timeless dynamic before us.
    Barbara hoists her glass into the air and mimics the dancer's movements. Fortunately the dancer seems oblivious to this, as if she is somewhere else entirely. Franz copies Barbara for a few moments, before craning a champagne bottle towards