ROLEPLAY

It was February when Harriet proposed our first costumed lovemaking. Bushfires had decimated twenty thousand hectares, 12 homes destroyed, a staggering number of native animals and livestock incinerated. Lieutenant Trimble, the genetically blessed firefighter we’d come to know by his nightly televised updates, apprised a national audience of the situation in his smoke-stained uniform, helmet nestled under his bulging bicep. Trimble squinted in the camera lights, the white creases about his eyes pronounced beneath a slick of greasy ash, cheeks flame-braised the colour of roast chicken. He announced with an almost imperceptible croak they’d discovered a body in the scorched rubble of a house.

You could sense the nation’s collective despair.

I sighed and rubbed Harriet’s leg. She had always been an empath and tragedies affected her more than most. She was biting her bottom lip and I asked if she was okay.

‘Hmm?’ she said without taking her eyes off the TV.

‘Are you okay?’ I repeated.

Her lip popped out and she smiled mischievously. ‘There really is something about a man in uniform.’

The first fireman outfit arrived a week later; a cheap polyester number from an online costume store. When I presented at the bedroom door sweating in the creased, chemical-smelling overalls the effect was less than desirable. Ironically, the outfit was the biggest fire hazard in our apartment.

I spent five hundred dollars on professional-grade firefighting pants, braces, and a tight navy t-shirt, completing the ensemble by bronzing my face and smearing on streaks of Harriet’s mascara. I held a candle to the smoke detector and, with the alarm screeching, kicked the bedroom door off its hinges. My efforts were rewarded with the most passionate sexual experience I’d ever had. Harriet didn’t even care my helmet was a Fireman Sam toy.

As is often the nature of fantasies fulfilled, the potency wore off much like the body’s immunity response to certain viruses and the fireman character was relegated to the garage. It had, however, unbottled the genie of bedroom experimentation and I welcomed the thrill of playing the leading role in Harriet’s deviances.

We established a few rules to ensure things wouldn’t get out of hand. Number one: no partner swapping or additional participants. The motion passed after Harriet’s arousal while watching a benippled George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell in Batman and Robin. Number two: No more naked flame. I’d had to call the actual fire brigade after failing to extinguish a date night kitchen fire. Thankfully, the fireman itch had been scratched and no inappropriate advances were made toward the brave men and women of NSW Fire and Rescue. The third statute codified in our roleplay constitution was it would only be me who donned a costume. That was fine. It was Harriet’s thing, not mine. I’d tried to enjoy matching outfits, but Harriet couldn’t do any voices apart from a clunky Southern belle like some cowboy-era saloon strumpet and I couldn’t get into it.

Our first forays into role-play were, by r/roleplay subreddit standards, conservative. The scruffy but sufficiently hygienic motorbike vagrant; the mute MI6 agent who’d had his tongue cut out to cover for the fact that my Sean Connery was more Billy Connelly with a speech impediment; Jesus Christ during his handsome nomadic cult phase — short-lived due to my discomfort (my beard itched constantly, and the whole thing felt mildly blasphemous). It had been one of Harriet’s favourites though, presumably stemming from a transmogrification of Catholic guilt forged during her years at boarding school.

Harriet was right into the linen robe and staff thing and was at pains to drop it altogether. I made slight adjustments to the outfit and strode into the bedroom as a young Gandalf, sucking at a pipe. Harriet looked at the conical hat I’d crafted in grey felt and winced. She swung her feet out of bed saying, ‘Maybe we should just watch a movie tonight.’

I brought down the staff with a tremendous crack on the floorboards, proclaiming she shall not pass with such authority Mrs Fleming stamped on our ceiling to keep it down. Like the grey wizard himself evoking an incantation, my conjuring resulted in nothing short of Harriet’s metamorphosis. Though instead of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, she leapt at me with the primal intent of a sex-crazed orc, and she smote my ruin upon the floor.

Things changed when we discussed childhood crushes. At her insistence that I go first, I finally admitted to The Little Mermaid but declined Harriet’s offer to don clamshells and a tail. The mechanics of having sex with her legs pinned together seemed restrictive, only amplified by gravity and I, for reasons of safety, was unwilling to attempt water-borne intercourse. Even weightless, her inability to actively participate felt non-consensual. Inevitably, it would end with her tail being removed —a boner-killing defilement — eliminating the signature feature of a mermaid. Also, wasn’t Ariel like sixteen? It was all a bit ick and we moved on to Harriet’s earliest celebrity crushes.

‘King Kong,’ she said without hesitation.

Well past any feelings of jealousy by this stage, my first concerns were always ones of logistics, production, and practical execution. ‘Easy enough,’ I said. ‘I can get gorilla suits anywhere.’

She pressed her lips together and squinted. She sucked air through her teeth. ‘It’s not just the gorilla suit,’ she said. ‘It’s the scale.’

The first inklings of inadequacy tugged at my chest. ‘But,’ I said, stammering. ‘Just … how?’

‘I can’t explain it,’ she said, hands up in surrender.

‘The fundamentals don’t make sense.’

‘If you have to ask, you’ll never know.’

‘You wouldn’t even be able to get your arms around it, let alone—’

‘I know, I know,’ she said, standing. ‘Just forget it.’

‘And the smell…’

‘I said drop it.’

After that baffling exchange, I was eager to move on but hesitant to discover more of Harriet’s depraved proclivities. Nervously, I ventured, ‘Anything else?’

She cleared her throat. ‘Promise you won’t laugh?’

‘I’d be very grateful for a laugh at this point.’

‘Snow White.’

I frowned. ‘You want me to dress up as Snow White?’

‘No, idiot. I’m Snow White.’

‘Oh,’ I said, relieved. “And I’m Prince Charming.’

‘No. It’s the seven dwarves thing.’

‘Oh my god.’

Harriet nodded with a thin-lipped smile. ‘Yep.’

‘Jesus. There’s no way.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘No extras.’

‘I mean, can you imagine the orchestration? What do I do — post an ad on our community Facebook page for little people willing to participate? We’d have to supply their outfits. That’s well outside the budget.’

Harriet was walking away, saying, ‘Let’s move on, please.’

I called after her. ‘I could do all seven roles; it’s a matter of clever stage and costume management.’

‘Not the point,’ she shouted from the kitchen.

I imagined the point was being ravaged by fourteen groping hands. Fourteen small but powerful hands rough and calloused from years in the mines, beards tickling her erogenous zones as if she were rolling naked in a pile of autumn leaves. I got it. But it was against our constitution and probably the law.

‘You want to do it with seven other men?’ I said, wounded.

‘No,’ she said, irritation making her movements indecisive and jerky. ‘It’s a dumb topic and I wish we hadn’t started it. I was young and everything was strange, hormones going crazy. I’m sure you had weird dreams about, I don’t know, your favourite footballer, or your best mate. It didn’t mean you were gay.’

‘Sure,’ I replied. ‘But I didn’t dream about The Wallabies running a train on me.’

Things were weird between us for about a week. A pall descended, neither of us certain how to proceed. It had the feeling of falling out with your high school best friend, walking past each other in the locker bay, forced into proximity, the atmosphere poisoned, no one willing to clear the air.

At last, one night in the formless dark of our bedroom, I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Why?’ she replied, her voice muffled in her pillow.

‘I know it’s all a bit of fun,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have gotten weird.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Harriet said, the blankets shifting as she rolled to face me.

‘I’m the one who made things weird with King Kong and the seven dwarves. It’s humiliating and now you think I’m a freak.’

‘It’s fine,’ I said, though, in truth, I was still rattled. ‘I like that you’re a bit kinky. It’s my fault for getting jealous about kids’ stuff.’

A hand made its way to my chest, and I took it, squeezing the acceptance of her unspoken apology. We made love uncostumed, out of character — as Mark and Harriet — for the first time in almost a year.

Inevitably, it wasn’t long before we were again discussing fantasy scenarios. I had long ago accepted that if I was to keep Harriet, I had to be willing to expand the comfort zones of mind and body. Relationships, we are told, are about compromise. I had very little in the way of unconventional requests, but Harriet was a generous lover and companion, and I loved her with a yearning that bordered on addiction. I was the one who broached the role-play subject again.

‘Come on,’ I persisted as she waved me away. ‘It’s important to you, so it’s important to me.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Last time we had this conversation it was a disaster.’

‘Fine. No more talking.’ I went to the garage and reappeared in my fireman’s kit.

We were back on.

It took us a little while to hit our straps again. We worked through some vanilla personas — pilot, soldier, plumber — until, at the bar after a movie date to see the latest ‘Halloween’ film, Harriet said she had a new fantasy.

She drained the last of her drink. ‘Order me another margy and I’ll tell you.’

***

In the dead of night some weeks later, having told Harriet I would be away for work, I pulled the black balaclava over my face and crept to the bushes below our bedroom window. Though I’d already removed the fly screens and unlocked the bolted windows, the rubber seals had fused to the frames from disuse, and I had to pry it open with the serrated hunting knife I’d bought. The blade slipped when the window suddenly opened, gouging the paint before plunging into my left hand. I stifled a shriek but could do nothing about the crackling disintegration of the plastic lawn chair as it collapsed beneath me. The knife came free as I fell, clattering on the concrete. A dog barked. A light illuminated the apartment above and Mrs Fleming pressed her wretched face to the glass. She bellowed, triggering several other lights in our building as if they were voice-activated. Harriet’s bewildered face, puffy with sleep, appeared at our window. Her scream put any of Michael Myers’ victims to shame.

The police arrived moments later. I considered legging it, but I’d corked my thigh landing on the handcuffs in my pocket. Mercifully, Harriet convinced the police it was a playful misadventure, so no charges were laid. For all my efforts, neither was I.

Our body corporate fined me 600 dollars for willful destruction of property and sent me a separate invoice for another fifty bucks to cover the chair even though I could have got one at Bunnings for twenty. They invited me to take it up with the Small Claims Tribunal and I am considering my options.

As for my hand, I have regained about 90% function and the physio assures me the cast will be off by the time Harriet and I get married this November.