Surrender to Mr. X Read online

  Ray would be upstairs in the studio painting like a man with a sentence of death hanging over him. Some half of the little squares were finished now, filled in with their manic, fiddly little hairlines, each single one of which seemed to fill Ray with trauma. The mirrors spat back their reflections, bouncing from surface to surface, back and back into apparent infinity. I was fascinated. He seemed to be constructing a new universe, a new virtual reality which would inform, reify itself in the real world. He was the Intelligent Designer: this was the beginning of some new metaphysical dispensation not of parochial import, but eternal, cosmological in scale, and in which I had my humble, but crucial part to play. Ray sang as he worked, a tuneless dirge, or sometimes listened to Alden’s CD, but not when I was in the room because then I just curled up and went to sleep, and neither fucked nor worked.

  Alden was working on ways of making the hum music not person-specific, and though he worried that there might be a technical contradiction in this, refused to give up. Joan had responded to the sound of her own heart beats, alas no-one else had. This was for Alden an unwelcome development.

  Sometimes they had people to lunch, or for pre-supper drinks, and then I was sent to my room. This increasingly irked me. I did not mind being the cleaner and the whore but I did not see why I should not be treated as a social equal. On a couple of occasions I was sent back to spend the night at Little Venice. I picked up my thesis and stared at it and couldn’t make head or tail of it, but my mind started its churning again and I thought my head would split, so I sorted drawers and hung up clothes instead. I had quite got into the habit.

  Whether it was Alden or Ray who had decided I would be the useful and passive kind of person who puts things in order and made things possible for others I don’t know. I do know I cleaned Alden’s house and Ray’s attic as they had never been cleaned before. I moved furniture and sculptures and swept beneath them: I cleaned round light switches and the loos were spotless—it was a big house; there were four bathrooms and two washrooms. I removed heat rings on tables, I polished, I stacked plates properly, arranged pans in height order, handles parallel. I washed paint. I wore gloves, and was sharply spoken to if I forgot.

  Lam shook out the rugs for me in the little yard at the back of the house. He had strong wrists: one whack and dust flew obediently. The brass fittings on the lift shone. The buzzer would sound from the studio and I’d whiz up to hand Ray a paintbrush, or find him a better one, or change his turps, or he’d up my skirts—I wore a kind of Victorian maid’s outfit, a real one, vintage, not fancy dress, a tough black drill with a little white lace apron and frilly cap—for a quick shag on the sofa. Ray could last for a good half hour now, having agreed to abandon his principles and take Viagra or Cialis, but didn’t want to lose good painting time so I could be on and off the sofa in fifteen minutes.

  And then he’d have to be packed off to Southgate—socks found, cigarettes, lighter—the more useful I got, the more hopeless he became—he was going to daily Golden Dawn classes. He confided in me that he hoped one day to become the foretold SDA or Sapiens Dominabitur Astris—Latin for “the wise one who will be ruled by the stars.” Lam would often go along too. They were all nuts but it was none of my business.

  In the afternoons there was time for me to go to the hairdresser and the beauty salons, where I would be colored, depilated, smoothed, oiled and generally toned up. The gym was disapproved of—muscles might develop: a soft helplessness was more attractive—and physical energy should be preserved for better things.

  After supper I would take a bath, go to my room and Lam would come in and do my make-up. With practice he was getting quite good at it. He could cover the range from healthy pony girl down on the farm, freckles and blue eye-shadow, to kohled Cleopatra, mysterious and sulky, and all stages in-between: secretary, bride, whore, factory lass, leather freak, hitch-hiking student, Sex and the City professional. It could be disconcerting because I would see a tentacle rather than a hand reach out for mascara or eye-shadow, and it was hard to keep in mind that this was an illusion, a post hoc suggestion from Ray, not a reality.

  Then it was time for the bed, for experiments, for cuffs, manacles, gag-balls, collars, lace corsets: incessant changes of clothes, a horrible metallic dental gadget which kept the mouth propped open wide, ever-changing music, or active non-music (“the hum”), hypodermics, breast clamps, jabbing needles—Lam took blood from time to time, which would be sent off by messenger for analysis of my hormone levels and God knows what else, the results being fed into his computer. Lam would heave Alden onto the bed, I would bend over the side of it to take him in my mouth, and Ray, emboldened and excited by new opportunities, with new and widened horizons, would enter my cunt and my butt with promiscuous caprice.

  Or Ray would be in my mouth while I rode astride Alden: and the cuffs on my wrists and no doubt the seams in my corsets, tight under my heart, would be feeding back to the oscilloscopes, pulse generators, frequency counters, logic and spectrum analysers, plotter loggers, signal generators and all other necessary equipment, the complete story of my sex life, video to be translated into audio, to be incorporated into Thelemy: The Silence of the Senses, designed to send Radio 3 listeners aroused to their beds. It was a noble task or an absurd one; I could never be sure which. Joan thought the first, Vanessa the second.

  And Lam would photograph and film: cameras round the room, darting here and there. And still Alden never came. Perpetual sexual arousal without end leading to a greater spirituality, the wisdom of Tantrism—perforce—added to Crowleyism, every desire gratified, every impulse expressed, through free experimentation in drugs, sex and physical excess: that tragic explosion in the school lab, once upon a time, creating the second coming of the Beast 666: Alden X.

  My unavoidable readings had led me to the conclusion that all those annoying early avant-garde painters, Vorticists, Futurists, Cubists, Surrealists and so forth were trying to create a new reality through the “infinite complexity” they kept on about. Their friends the musicians were after the same thing. And lo, it had all born terrible fruit, in the form of the computer. And now Alden and Ray were trying to move the whole thing on a stage or two: I, the living me, sex, beauty, warts and all, was being sucked into their audio and visual machinery and being computerized. I was muse to the new computer age; I was hertz instead of music, I and all humanity were reduced to tiny lines upon a canvas, mouse clickers, nothing else. I didn’t like it, of course I didn’t. No wonder I was bipolaring along like mad.

  So far as Joan knew I was in my right mind, and this was not even a variant of normal life, just normal life. This was how I spent my days. But then most people think that of their lives. When I watch people on I’m a Celebrity or reality shows, my life as the Whore of Babylon seemed no stranger than theirs.

  And then things entered another phase.

  I am not quite sure what happened. Some gadgets on the Lukas bed failed: both mechanical—one of the poles wedged and could not be moved—and something to do with his having to put up with incompatibilities between the primitive midi configuration Lukas had used and that which Alden was using in his other apparatus. There was also a failure of “granular synthesis” to cope with the required intensity of orgasmic sound. Lam clucked and whickered sympathy. Alden swore and cursed all technology, damned the bed as cheap and out-dated, and Lukas for ripping him off, got his wheels tangled in wires, and cursed Lucifer.

  “You Hertz 111 girl,” said Lam, giving me a severe pinch as I lay there bound and helpless. “You trouble. You not 93.”

  Thelemy was overdue by three weeks and still Alden was nowhere near completion. Which you could see as the story of his life, but that was not a joke I was prepared to make. The bad mood went on for days: I was getting the blame now for failing to produce the required category of sound. My experiences were intense but not intense enough. Ray rashly said but only 1% of people could tell the difference between the excellent and the adequate, and that sent Alden into a su
lk—a hissy fit, as Ray described it.

  As if this was not bad enough, depression—which I know to be catching—moved in on Ray, like a weather front on a satellite chart. You feel it approaching. It was no more romps on the sofa for me but straight back to the intensity of work: he moaned on again about his erection problems—for which he blamed potency pills; they had “disturbed his energy harmonics”—and was back to the old humiliating premature ejaculate days. He could contribute nothing to Alden’s sex sessions; he did not have the heart to pick up a paint brush. The Blue Box stood on its easel untouched. Ray took to his bed and would not have me near it. It occurred to me that he was Bipolar One, a sorrier state to be in than mine. Bipolar Two can find its own resolution in everyday life—though this remedy could be drastic, as I had found out—but Bipolar One can do nothing when depression sweeps in. Ray had just to sit it out, and especially avoid answering the phone to Lady Daisy O, who kept wanting to come round and inspect The Blue Box, which, as she accurately pointed out, she had put up a down payment for. Snotty bourgeoise bitch, I thought. Joan was on Ray’s side.

  Two Women

  ALDEN, NEVER ONE TO stand idly by for long, took matters in hand, not so much the bull by the horns, as the cow by the udders. He took the initiative and invited Lady O round. Better for Ray to face her than to hide. If the worst came to the worst Daisy O would just have to change the date of the exhibition, though this would do nothing for Alden’s cash flow problems at Arts-Intrinsick. The important thing was that pressure was taken off Ray.

  I heard him confide in Lam that he did not think much of the Southgate crew.

  They were amateurs. Renegades. They had advanced Ray too fast along the paths. Now Ray was suffering. He was using “the Will” when he had not necessarily built up the proper resources of power, and he was paying the price. As a result The Blue Box was suffering too. It was a disaster. I had the feeling I was somehow being blamed for this, too. But then men did that. When things go wrong they turn to the nearest woman and blame her. My father would do it to my mother. He’d poke his nose out the door and say “it’s cold,” as if it were her fault and she would automatically say “I’m sorry.” So I took not too much notice.

  “You bad girl,” Lam said, poking me with his finger. “You 111 hertz girl. You try be 93.” He might or might not be an alien, might not have private parts like Barbie’s friend Ken or Action Man, but his insensitivity was entirely male.

  Alden wanted me to dress and act the secretary for his meeting with Daisy O. He did not want Ray upset any more than he was already. He wanted me to stand by and take notes. He supposed I could do that? He suddenly sounded doubtful. I said of course: I was secretary to the parent-teacher association at my nursery school and no-one had so far complained. With me present, Alden went on, Lady Daisy would be less likely to be abusive or nasty.

  Loki whizzed me back to Little Venice, which seemed by now a strange and humdrum dwelling, piled high with frothy and thoughtless tat, ungraced by artistic aspiration, or any of the things which give meaning to life, and was the natural territory of someone far, far sillier than me.

  I came back in the clothes I wore for the Olivier—navy knee-length skirt, court shoes, white blouse and a string of pearls—looking very much the secretary. A raised female voice came from Ray’s studio, brisk, stern and displeased, but resigned, like a nanny talking to a naughty child. Lady O had arrived early. Ray’s voice in reply had an edge of whinging self-pity: Alden’s, which interrupted and replaced it, was fluent, reassuring and phony.

  “You brought me here to show me this?” Daisy O exclaimed. “He’s barely started it!”

  Daisy O was an heiress from a Silicon Valley family. She had married an English peer and now entertained herself shooting grouse and buying art, in which she was genuinely interested. She was a connoisseur, unlike Matilda Weiss, who, as Alden explained to me, saw art as way of buying influence and showing off. I had Googled Daisy and found 182,000 references. (Alden clocked up 98,000, Ray 726,000, having lately gone on the syllabus of a leading art school.) Daisy was certainly not interested in her appearance, any more than is the Queen of England. She was very tall, around 6ft, and slouched, and her fair hair was scraped back savagely from her face and held by a rubber band. She had no time for frivolities. Her shoes were flat, her elasticised skirt did nothing for her figure, bunching round her waist as it did. She wore a white shirt splodged with great yellow chrysanthemums. I thought she had buttoned it up wrongly until I realized it was purposefully asymmetrical. I had seen one like it in Liberty’s recently—by a Japanese designer—and thought I had never seen anything so hideous, and wondered who on earth would spend £3,750 on such grotesquerie. Now I knew.

  Yet Lady Daisy was not without allure, in her natural, healthy, big-boned, energetic way. I always knew when someone who came into the Olivier was from California. They brought sunshine and confidence with them, even though as now, they might be in a fury.

  I found a newspaper article on Google which told me more. That Lady O was opening up the lower half of her London residence—one of those huge dull houses near Belgrave Square near where Lady Thatcher lived—as a non profit-making gallery. It was to be called the En Garde, and be open to the public from mid-September. The design firm Arts-Intrinsick had won the commission to refurbish in a highly competitive market. “Arts Patronage Devolves To Private Hands As Government Provision Fails,” went the headlines. “The New Face Of The Arts: Saatchi Mark Two—But All Proceeds To Charity” ran below. Centerpiece of the opening exhibition was to be a commissioned piece, The Blue Box, by up-and-coming artist Ray Franchi. Another feature of the opening would be a first performance of Thelemy—The Murmur of Eternity by noted composer Alden X. Readers who were listeners to Radio 3 might already have heard his striking piece in the Minimalist Maelstrom. I had been promoted to an eternal murmur, I was happy to discover, rescued from the Silence of the Senses.

  Lady Daisy was busy counting squares. She told Ray there were twenty-nine left undone.

  She had to have his guarantee that the work would be completed in the next three to four weeks. Let him not try telling her this timing was intentional, she knew perfectly well it was not.

  “Of course it’s not intentional,” said Ray. “My brain just won’t currently do the translations.”

  Lady O said she had been working with artists too long not to know when they were having her on, screw the translations, Ray had her over a barrel and wanted more money, was that it?

  Alden said he bitterly resented her attitude and not to use that language, please. It upset Ray.

  Daisy said Alden was another one, she supposed she’d find now the music had run into a creative block and magically wouldn’t be ready unless she handed out some more funds. He’d played the disability card once too often.

  “Disability real,” said Lam. “Disability no card.”

  “Tell that creep of yours to shut the fuck up. Get him out of here. And her too,” she said, looking at me. “What is said in here is confidential. I don’t want her taking notes.”

  Lam stayed where he was. I took my cue from him and went on busily writing. Alden attended to his touch pad and barely audible music came out of the walls. Daisy didn’t seem to notice at first.

  “Just get on with it,” she said, literally stamping her big flat foot at Ray, “and hurry the fuck up.” I’ve stamped my foot in my time, but it makes an impatient little tapping sound with heels: Lady O’s just made a dull thud.

  “My integrity?” he pleaded.

  “I won’t tell you where you can put it,” she said. “Fuck integrity. What about my gallery? What about my fucking integrity?” Which was more or less what Alden had said to Ray many a time, but it was different when a woman said it.

  “Bad language,” said Lam. “Bad.”

  Daisy told Lam that if he had issues with direct language, she had no objection to him stuffing himself right up his own ass if he had one, and told Alden that since the pa
rquet floor was rising she had already arranged for it to be re-laid by someone competent, and that she hoped he was looking forward to getting the bill. Alden’s music was louder now. It seemed to confuse her. She looked this way and that.

  Daisy said she had half a mind to ship The Blue Box out then and there as she was perfectly entitled to do, and hire some hack art restorer just to fill in the squares. But even as she spoke in her flat, nasal tones, her voice faltered. The midday sun shone straight down from the skylight and for once the whole ensemble was without shadows. Seen like this it had what I can only describe as a kind of thickened density: it stared straight out, not just reflecting back from the universe into itself, but inwards, down and down into its own soul: a gateway of sympathetic magic between macrocosm and microcosm. Awesome.

  “What’s that noise?” she asked. “Are there insects in this room?”

  She seemed really distressed. I wished Alden would turn the hum off. It had been added to and enhanced in complexity since last I heard it. Now I knew it was so personal to me, I didn’t want it shared amongst strangers. Ray crossed over to her and took her hand, which was brave of him. He was half her scale: puny. I felt defensive of him. It was the sheer force of creativity which denatured him: carried some of his strength away as it washed through him. He sacrificed himself for us.

  “Look in to my eyes,” he said, “I so want you to be pleased with me.”

  I saw Daisy’s face soften, and grow trusting. He told her how much she had done for the Arts in this country and the corners of her mouth turned up a little and she actually looked pleased.

  “We in the avant-garde have so much to be grateful to you for,” Ray said. “We in the Thelemic movement are so proud to have you with us. Be sure your support is important to us.”

  Your call is important to us—the voice was artificially soothing, ingenuous: Daisy might as well be through to a call-center. I started to giggle, out of sheer nervousness, but Alden darted me such a look I shut up. I was not forgotten: I was part of a plan.