Surrender to Mr. X Page 15

  Lam will be Joan’s bodyguard. Alden will have to make do somehow without him. Financial survival is worth a bit of slumming. My inhibitions about remembering Lam’s involvement during the two weeks are strong. He is not in the Japanese Bondage snapshot though he is to be seen in the Violated Bride clip, hauling me out of a bath before I drowned. Suffocation fetishists tread a fine line, and can get carried away. The trauma from that mise en scène is one that has not been wiped from my mind: I guess their excitement must have just made them forget to say the exit word. So I must have made an impression, I must have been pretty good. The body remembers what the mind does not. I would find myself trembling during the day, or crying for no reason.

  A Weekly Routine

  THE DlVAN CLUB, IN Greek Street, Soho was in a basement which stretched under the whole block all the way through to Frith Street and, with a further emergency exit into an alley which led into Old Compton Street between where they each intersected with it. It was members-only, and security was efficient and professional. The interior was made over in a mixture of Ottoman Empire and Arabian Nights, all marble and mosaics, lanterns and feather plumes, jewel colors, reclining sofas and subdued lights. The barman wore a white turban and silk balloon trousers. The bar was glass: the stools traditional, the glasses you drank from were Venetian ware and elaborate to the point of folly. But the clients liked them, and they were paying. You could bring your wife here, but by no means everybody did.

  A man and a woman managed the place: an unpleasant couple called Clive and Audrey, about whom I have nothing nice to say. At all. Clive had a bouncer’s build, a bald head and a red mustache and looked very perverse to me when I first saw him—he wore an embroidered green silk blouson, golden slippers with curling points, yellow bejeweled turban and pantaloons and a scimitar tucked into the sash. Audrey had a big-jawed face, hard eyes, and dried-out blond hair with split ends. She wore heavy silk caftans embroidered with gold thread, in a different color every day. It didn’t matter what she wore: if she’d dressed like Mother Teresa she’d still look like the Madame she was, a dealer in flesh. She did not like me, I did not like her and we both knew what the score was. She had not wanted to take me on, saying I trouble, too well-spoken, it would put the clients off. But Alden insisted. He had more insight than her, for I was to prove so popular with the clients that she was able to jack the prices they paid for me, for my various services up, and up: and up. She hated me the more for proving her wrong.

  So who got the money? Not me: I didn’t, because Alden and Ray insisted that I worked for the simple love of sex. Under will, I was happy to participate.

  There was a lesbian night on Wednesdays, and every night was topless night. Loki would deliver me to the Divan, and collect me afterward. Sometimes Alden and Ray would come with me and sit beside me until a client asked me to dance or go with him to the Joy Room, otherwise known as the Dungeon. This was badly lit with optional glaring spotlights, painted in black and scarlet, and kitted out with every variety of bondage and fetish accessory.

  Sunday I was allowed off. Alden and Ray liked to have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and peas for Sunday lunch, and they liked me home to prepare it. I was happy to. They took its excellence for granted and I longed for them to ask someone else to lunch who would at least enthuse a bit, but they never did. Lam was a vegan and didn’t eat meat and wanted roast potatoes but not done in the beef drippings so these had to be done separately in oil.

  Roast dinners create a lot of dirty dishes, but none of them ever offered to help. They’d watch football or a film while I cleared up. After that I could get away and catch up on some sleep. In the evening I would go up to the studio and try and assist Alden and Ray with their sexual problems—as I often did when I got back from the Divan—but Alden remained in Tantric mode and couldn’t find a way out of it. Ray’s brush stayed in the turpentine.

  I slept in most mornings except Mondays, when I’d go to Harrods for hair treatment, facial, manicure, pedicure, eyebrow plucking and so forth. Before I set off for the Divan, at around eight, Lam would give me a massage. I grew to like them. His fingers were damp but strong; they seemed to feed strength into me. I told Ray once how restorative the massages were, and he just laughed and said he wasn’t surprised. I must remember Lam was a “multi-dimensional of the lighted realms.”

  Being “under will” at the time, I took that on board, if only I daresay because the “lighted realms” sounded so much more cheerful than the dark shadows and guttering candles of the Divan’s dungeon. After that Lam seemed less alarming, less likely to be hiding tentacles, or to have one of those lizard faces people like David Icke believe many important personages who walk this earth hide beneath their human masks.

  Monday evenings and all day Tuesdays we would normally go out filming on location, though occasionally sets were built in one of the many spare rooms behind the Club. The place was a warren, and for years had been used to store imported foodstuffs from Italy. Still, from time to time, as you lay spread-eagled and tied with the red ball in your mouth and your eyes wide in alarm, or stood tied and cuffed to your cross in the Dungeon, you’d get the whiff of basil, oregano, marjoram, rosemary and so on, and the dusty smell of ancient pastas—but perhaps the place was haunted. I would not be surprised.

  For some scenarios, simple “under will” was not enough and I would be given a new persona. Alden had more narrative talent than Ray, though he was less good at the “under will” bit. Alden would explain to me that I was a naïve country girl on my wedding day, eagerly expecting her new husband—only to find he’d brought the best man with him to share her: or that I was the young student walking home when the bad boys leapt out of the bushes and set about gangbanging her—and I would believe I was whoever I was told I was. And then I’d be told I’d liked it, and I’d believe that also.

  Their theory was that if I believed the event was real and reacted spontaneously, the resulting film footage would have twice the impact of a simulated scene. You could of course claim that any real scene had been simulated, and prove it by the final shot of the participants all smiling cheerfully together: then the footage could be sold legally and distributed on the open market. And since I was under will for the purpose of the closing all’s-well-that-ends-well smiley shot (which would be filmed out of sequence) I would look happy enough.

  And then the memory would be removed, so what harm would be done?

  I would have asked Alden or Ray to remove the memory of my father’s affair with my best friend Jude, and I’m sure they would have obliged, but to do so would have been to disclose the existence of Vanessa. I was in far too deep for that by now, and nothing Alden or Ray had said suggested to me that they would easily accept the idea that they had been deceived. They had cast me as the one deceived: they were the designated deceivers. Vanessa was better educated than they were. They would not want to admit that in many ways their slave girl knew more and better than they did, nor that she was more confident in her sexuality than they were, and socially more at ease.

  Vanessa could tell a bad wine from a good one, a viable piece of contemporary music from one that was not. She could put The Blue Box in its historical context. She had probably read more around the Golden Dawn than Ray ever would. As for Lam, she doubted that he was even literate. Lam’s head sloped away so sharply at the back and sides there hardly seemed room for the left frontal cortex, or Borka’s area, where the reading and writing functions of the brain are located—any more than there was for the parahippocampal gyrus, which governs laughter and mirth. Oh mind of Vanessa, mind, mind, be still!

  A Family Episode

  SOMETIMES WHEN LOKI WAS driving me to the club I would look out from the dark of the cab at the bright streets of London at ordinary couples, at single people hurrying from jobs or to normal dates, and I would wonder how, why, I had fallen into this most questionable and exotic way of living. Did I fall or was I pushed? I was pushed, but then I must have wanted to have
been. Was there some buried incident in my life, or underlying hypocrisy in my family? To do with my father deceiving my mother, my mother for putting up with it? I despised her more than I blamed him.

  Mind you, it wasn’t easy for her. Lust my mother could have coped with easily enough: she had her early training as a counselor, she understood its passing nature. The Church had taught her about the sacramental aspect of sex. Life amongst the parishioners enabled her to keep her own problems in perspective. She had the great privilege and strength of knowing she was good—which I think was one of the reasons my father ended up in Jude’s arms: Jude being so bad in a sloppy kind of way, and thus needing no living up to.

  But love was a different thing. I think my dear, patient, peaceful father would have sat the unwelcome emotion out, but Jude went in for the kill, and seduced him in our summer house one Sunday afternoon: just to stop him looking at her with those awful, soppy eyes. That was the explanation she gave to the twins after they burst in and found Dad and their big sister’s best friend rolling about together on dusty rush matting: “Just to stop him staring at me, with those awful, soppy eyes.”

  My mother was upstairs nursing bronchitis. I was away in Oxford at an interview for a college—Brasenose. I had got four starred A’s at A level, Jude had got three ordinary A’s and a B. It was nothing to do with my father or his eyes: she was just envious and taking it out on me. And instead of having the sense to just shut up and forget about it, the twins, unforgivably, went running to tell Mum.

  She screamed, she wept. When I got home I scarcely recognized my calm, beautiful mother, raving and with her face mottled and swollen. Mind you, I’d had a glimpse of it, just a hint, the day she didn’t want to leave me alone with Dr. Barky: the day he told me about Bipolar Two and broke my hymen by mistake. She’d wept and shouted and he had told her she just didn’t want to let me grow up: she was a clingy mother and ought to know better, and I’d screamed at her that I wanted her just to go away: then she just seemed to deflate, and walked off. Perhaps she should have stayed. She gives in too easily, turns the other cheek.

  But so it goes: it’s over now—as far as these things ever are. My father was full of remorse, my mother’s bronchitis cleared up, the twins passed yet more exams and got their names and pictures in the papers as infant prodigies. The student medical center decided I had an eidetic memory, and fortunately a high IQ to go with it, so I could make sense of the reams of information which assaulted my brain, otherwise I might have developed serious adjustment “issues.” My case (anonymously of course) made the Lancet and a medical column in The Times. No mention was made of the gang bang scandal which so nearly got me sent down. And little Robert weathered the family storms and grew up un-traumatized, so far as anyone could see.

  My mother explained my father away to me by saying that men do strange things when their daughters leave home: they get panicky and think youth and freedom are running out. So? She can forgive him but, though I miss the friendship, I will never forgive Jude.

  Evenings at the Club

  MEMBERS PAID THEIR ENTRANCE fee and signed in, and leered at me as I sat topless in whatever threads or lack of them had been selected for my evening’s role. They bought drinks at extraordinary prices, and the club made a profit. They could dance with me and if they wished to pursue and upgrade the intimacy would consult Clive, or Audrey, or both, and pay the tariff, one half on demand, second half on delivery.

  A snapshot, a film still, then it starts rolling: the husband and wife team, Clive and Audrey talking to a couple of clients, father and son from the look of them, both big-boned, brash and confident. Parents’ Day, I thought? The father looks as if he might be from the working end of the oil industry.

  It must be Thursday, because Audrey’s wearing a violet caftan. They all look over to me. They’re haggling. I am suddenly self-conscious. No sign of Alden or Ray. It’s easier to sit around in public with naked boobs when they’re with me: I don’t feel so exposed. I particularly hate walking into the bar on my own when there are a lot of customers in there, and they all turn to look, and wonder how much I cost, and whether I’ll be worth the money or not.

  Clive beckons me over with a nod, and I get up and walk toward them. I am wearing a long flouncy skirt in transparent voile, and red sandals and that’s all. There is a moment’s hush in the bar as I walk by. Then everyone starts talking again. It is actually quite a lively place; a lot of people just come to talk and drink and hang out, and for some of them I’m just a sideshow. The casual boast, “I was at the Divan Club the other night” can make the most boring people seem more fascinating to most respectable company: or so the boasters told themselves.

  Another snapshot, and again the characters start moving: Father has shown son how it’s done. (Son knows pretty well by now how it’s done, or at least how he does it, but father doesn’t know that.) Girl on knees, grab hair, pull mouth onto cock, bang cock into mouth, choke if necessary. Girl onto bed, part her thighs wide, stare intently, lubricate with KY (lucky old me this time) and—in it goes. No time to spare for natural lubrication. Dad’s member is a monster: girl is meant to gasp in awe, girl does—and she means it. Fourteen inches? Son wants his turn. Now, and he means now! Dad tells him to fucking wait. Son tells him he fucking won’t. Dad tells him he fucking will. Dad turns me over, makes me kneel, and starts shoving up my anus. Son waves yet more monstrous prick before my eyes: sixteen inches—can such prodigies exist?

  That’s down my throat now, really stretching my lips, pumping in and out with the use of my hair as the handle. I gag. Dad tells Son to get the fuck off his case, can’t he see Dad is trying to fucking concentrate. Son says what’s the matter, Dad, got a prostate problem? Dad says Son’s a little douchebag compared to his elder brother, always was: no class, no fucking manners. Son sloshes on some more lubricant and tries to drive his monster dick in next to his dad’s. I cry out, I wasn’t expecting that; I wriggle my bum away from them both. Son tries to drag me back. Dad flies into a fury and begins to beat Son up.

  “You’re gonna fucking learn to fucking wait your turn!”

  The son is silent. I look round. “You stupid old prick, you’re past it!” he says, but he’s waited too long. Bleats of reassurance from me, roars of rage from dad. Squeals of defiance from son. Bam, crash. Happy families! Father and son together get me on my face on the bed. Enter at speed Lam—to whom I attribute the knack of walking through walls, being of the Higher Light Realms of Sirius Two, the Dog Star—and he lightly tosses both men against separate walls. So he’s an alien, so he’s not: maybe this is some Tibetan martial art, or not—I’m not about to quibble.

  Enter Clive and Audrey at the run: they blame me for “making a fuss” and being “unprofessional,” tick off Lam for “direct physical intervention action against clients,” and offer father and son a full refund and another girl. Dad just goes for a refund.

  Cut to postscript: I am relating this vignette to Alden and Ray over a full English breakfast I’ve cooked for us. Alden takes particular care with the application of a dollop of mustard to a grilled organic chipolata rather than meet my eye. But my tale quite stirs Ray up—he actually goes to his canvas and starts adjusting the little mirrors. Though I notice he doesn’t quite pick up his brush, it looks like progress.

  What was meant to take two weeks stretched into four. The Lukas workshops are waiting for the prototype new generation of post-Bluetooth widgetry to be delivered: Bluebeard. My days, and even more so my nights are a blur, sharpened into focus by more sporadic snapshots. There’s one of me walking through St. James’ Park with Phoebe, being happy. The sky is striped red to the west: starlings wheel. In the next we’re sitting having coffee by the bandstand, watching Sergeant Pepper’s baton coaxing euphony from glinting trombones.

  I had not recalled Phoebe’s existence at all, until a fleeting memory was triggered by the first picture. Phoebe the transsexual, the she-male, the man-woman. She was another permanent hostess; she had a de
licate smile, and looked wholly female with her straight dark hair, luminous blue eyes and pretty C-cup breasts, but she had male genitalia. She was very popular with certain of the clients, mostly the closet bi and gays, but on lesbian nights she really came into her own. It all comes back. I strapped on a dildo; they are awkward to use and always made me feel slightly absurd, and lunged, while Phoebe just glided about proudly, charmingly, bestowing pleasure, a reassurance to nervy women who were soothed by her breasts and fascinated by her member. Good times were had by all. All sex toys demonstrated by Phoebe and me could be purchased after the performance.

  Phoebe was serene, a walking, living revelation of how it is possible to be all things to all men, and women too. She delighted in herself, in her all-things-to-all-people-ness. She was kind to me, and she explained human nature to me; always generously, and with forgiveness. I told her about Jude once, and she said, “It must have been hard for her, because you had everything, and she had so little. You were pretty and she wasn’t. She thought having your father might right the balance.” I didn’t tell her that I was really Vanessa, because all that other world of Oxford and Kant and PhD’s would have been so alien to her, it would have frightened her off and spoiled our friendship. But I could see that Vanessa’s world wasn’t all that much to be proud of. Phoebe was just as beneficial to mankind, and womankind, as I was.

  Things she said come back. That she was an important part of God’s creation. That gender ran in a straight line from extreme male to extreme female, with room for all sorts and mix ups in the middle. That people like her enjoyed short life expectancy, no-one knew why, other than that those the Gods love die young. “The flame burns brightly and quickly,” she says, “and then burns out.” She shrugs. “Who wants to grow old anyway?”