Free Bête by Adam Roberts

she lay on her back, panting, whilst I rummaged in my pack for the condomspray. This took longer than usual, since for some reason my hand was trembling rather, but I was able to coat my member all over. Then I moved myself closer to her and she embraced me and herheels came up to bounce against my arse. ‘When I come once I’m drowsy,’ she told me, ‘but make me come a second time and I’ll fall dead asleep for eight full hours. It’s the guaranteed effect double-orgasm has on me.’ This struck me as a testable hypothesis, so we went at it full tilt until she came again, this time marking her own climax with a quiet series of spontaneous, owl-like hooting sounds.For my part I grunted like a bear, as men do, and fell to one side.
    I got up and went back to the bathroom to peel off the prophylactic, and have a piss. All that whisky. Then I washed my hands, and drank some water from the tap. I came back to the bed. None of this disturbed Anne who was, as she had promised, deep, deep asleep.
    Her cat was combing its tassel-like whiskers with a craftypaw. I turned out the light and fell asleep myself.
    It wasn’t being in a strange bed that woke me, so much as being in a bed at all. But wake I did, at (the bedside clock said) 3:24am. The window was mauve with moonlight, and a trapezoid of watery silver illumination lay on the carpet. The room was a cubist collage of shadows: blacknesses and indistinctnesses.
    ‘I know you’re watchingme, you bastard,’ I said, into the dark.
    Two eyes, like holograms of silver coins, were momentarily visible in the corner of the room. Then the creature averted its retinas and purred. ‘You ought to be asleep,’ it murmured.
    ‘You could have had the decency to have gone into another room,’ I said, speaking low. ‘Instead of sitting there like a pervert. Peeping tomcat.’
    ‘There’sno need to whisper,’ said the cat, in its creaky little voice. ‘You could sing the hallelujah chorus full tilt and she wouldn’t wake. Believe me, I know whereof I speak.’
    ‘This clearly isn’t your first time, tommy-peeping,’ I said, sitting up in the bed. Although to be honest, the cat’s words unnerved me. They conjured a vista of God-knows-how-many gentlemen visitors thrashing about in thisvery bed with this very woman, and all the time the cat sitting rubbing a paw across its whiskers like a nineteenth-century villain twiddling his moustache. I told myself not to be foolish: her husband had been gone three years. Nobody would expect her to live like a nun. Still, the ghostly presence of all those other men: younger, stronger, taller, thinner, better lovers every single one of them,made me itchy.
    The gloom of the room was very slowly clarifying, like a foggy old photograph developing. I could see where I had dumped my pack. Levering myself carefully out of the bed, I crouched down and pulled my half-drunk whisky bottle from it. Then I settled myself, naked on the carpet with my back against the foot of the bed, and took a swig.
    ‘I have no interest in your eroticfumblings,’ squeaked the cat haughtily. ‘So why should I move, when I’m comfy? What, move to accommodate your prudery? Pff.’
    ‘Oho!’ I laughed, without mirth. ‘Cats not interested in fucking? Hold the phone.’
    ‘What you have to remember about my kind ,’ said the cat. He sounded wheezy, but that was just the way his voicebox vocalized I suppose. ‘And by my kind I mean all the loquaciousbêtes, not just cats—’
    ‘Aren’t you the long-winded one,’ I growled.
    ‘The thing you need to remember about us is that we represent a different solution to the mind-body problem than do you. For your kind, there really isn’t a distinction between mind and body. Not only is your mind a part of your body – being generated by the physical organ, the brain – but your body is part of yourmind, in terms of the way you self-perceive, and therefore rationalize, purely physiological urges. Point in case: your