Surrender to Mr. X Page 18

  Little bits of mirror shattered and fell. Where they fell more glass shattered. It was if a tiny tornado had streaked across a trailer park collapsing everything in its path. I was horrified. But it got their attention all right. The chain lay on the floor. Lam picked it up and handed it to Alden. I thought for a moment he was going to use it on me and wished I was back in the dungeon as a pony girl but all Alden said was, as if thinking of something else—“Well, that got a reaction.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I was trembling. The Audrey episode was fading into insignificance. What had I done!

  Ray was standing over his painting: he ran his finger up the jutting shards and there was blood on his finger. When he turned there were tears in his eyes. He looked wholly stricken.

  “It’ll be okay,” Alden said. “It’s only the mirrors. They’re the easy bit.”

  “But why did she want to?” asked Ray. “I don’t understand her. I thought she loved us.”

  “I do,” I said, “I do.”

  Alden moved his chair up to the painting and ran his finger down the sharp bits. He jabbed at the flesh until it started to bleed. He came back to me where I stood transfixed, wishing I could put the clock back, rewind, reset the computer of my life to a previous date, anything, to have my act of vandalism undone. How could I have done that! Alden made me kneel by his chair, to remind me that he was un-whole and I was whole and therefore owed him a duty, and put his finger in my mouth and I sucked the blood. It tasted pretty much like my own. “Now I own your soul,” he said. “By virtue of your own sin you become mine.”

  Now I knew this was sententious rubbish even as he spoke. Vanessa was tugging at me, warning me. More of the language of Crowley Mania: the chanting of mumbo-jumbo, as if words had more power the less meaning they had: the humorless mumbling of the would-be necromancer, from the witchdoctor to the Thelemite via Mme. Blavatsky. The use of ceremony, using blood, which is real, to control “soul,” which is an idea; the association of sex, the most loaded three-letter word of them all, which again is real, with another one, “sin,” or “virtue” which are notional—and Vanessa had lost me and I shut her off. I was too tired and upset to work it out. Alden repeated it. “By virtue of your sin you become mine.” If only it didn’t have the ring of truth. Some dark, stupid part of me believed him totally.

  I had played in to Alden’s hands. But the victim controls his oppressors by his passivity. It was like being in Japanese bondage: if you struggle even silk ropes begin to hurt. Better to stay still; and quiet, and consent. Submission leads to the Great Orgasm in the Sky. Yet I had thrown my chains at The Blue Box, and defied my masters. This would not be the end of it. When Alden said that tomorrow I would go back to the club, apologize to Audrey, and obey her as I would himself or Ray, and that would be my punishment, I meekly said I would.

  “Now clean,” he said, “this room must be ready for tomorrow.” And so I cleaned the mirror room and polished the glass, although it was all already clean as clean can be. I was on my hands and knees on the parquet when Ray came in and knelt beside me. He raised my head and looked into my eyes.

  “I forgive you, Joan,” he said. “I understand you. To need to love is to want to destroy. Love is the law. Love under will.”

  I wished he did not have a plaster on his finger. It destroyed the image of the master artist busy restructuring the he universe. He went away. Presently Lam came in.

  “Picture okay,” he said. “Lam mend.”

  Lam put me to bed and massaged me with his big fingers until the strength began to seep back into me.

  “Lam mend Joan too,” he said. I had a friend. I slept.

  A New Beginning

  NO MENTION WAS MADE the next day of the incident with the painting. I was to look my best. I was sent off for the morning to have my hair streaked and a bikini wax. I managed a secret hour at Little Venice just to check the e-mail, throw away the junk circulars and brush out a few cobwebs. The place felt so unlived in: fabrics had lost their texture and colors their depth, as if I had mysteriously and unknowingly withdrawn some psychic support, and what once had three dimensions was now reduced to two. The minor Picasso, the Klimt and the Chagall stayed vigorous and voluptuous, I was pleased to see: they could do very well without me; I was a bit part player in their drama. The Blue Box would survive, but God, I’d been a vandal, a desecrator. How could I have done that?

  I checked through the e-mails and fired several off in reply—reassuring my family I was alive and well, and telling friends I’d be in touch when time allowed. A letter from my college asked if I was going to enroll next term or not. It was to Vanessa, not to me. I screwed it up and threw it away. I prudently flicked through Wittgenstein to see if it made sense and thank God it didn’t, nor did Vanessa leap into my head and start telling me what was going on. That was good. Let her keep her nagging Bipolarism to herself. As Joan, I wanted none of it. I could look after myself.

  And let me not think about having to apologize to Audrey. Why should I have to apologize? She was in the wrong, not me. Why should I be “under will” to someone as crummy and naff as her? What did that make me? But then I had all but wrecked The Blue Box. It was all too complicated. I didn’t even want to think about it, so I didn’t.

  I came across some family snaps as I tidied up. I thought I’d show them to Alden and Ray. I wanted to be forgiven: I wanted to be included; I wanted them to realize I was real, had a family, a past, a history, a future. The snaps were of Robert, Alison and Katharine, larking about in the garden last time I’d been home. A garden is a garden and no-one could tell the pictures weren’t taken in some council house in Essex. Joan’s unemployable printer father might well have planted the odd hollyhock or clematis: such plants can be bought anywhere and are not reserved for vicarage gardens. There was no decking, mind you, which could be a giveaway but Alden and Ray were metropolitans—what did they know?

  When I got home to Hampstead everyone was still waiting for Lukas’s people to deliver the bed. The delay made them tetchy and nervous. I bounced and chattered and giggled and tried to make everyone feel better. We had a late lunch in the studio. The Blue Box seemed wholly restored; as if the time had been rewound to before the tornado happened. Except the chain and leather cuff was draped over the strong pegs which supported the work on the easel. Why?—was no-one to be allowed to forget the incident? Ray had barely touched the painting since the last burst of creative fire, the Daisy effect having long since worn itself out. I counted fifteen squares still undone.

  Alden and Ray seemed peevish because I’d been back to Little Venice without telling them, and I apologized; but I was beginning to resent having to check in all the time. I was family, wasn’t I surely, not staff? They were generally edgy that day, no doubt about it. But they took a quick look at the snaps and then Ray started scanning and Alden was at the computer and before I knew it there were my siblings large as life and twice as handsome up on the computer screen, transported through time and space to the virtual here and now. The marvel of it got to me, and I’d have liked to have talked about it, but I remembered in time Joan was a sex-and-shopping girl and that sort of thing wasn’t within her orbit. I’d have to be careful. Vanessa was hovering about somewhere, almost sane for once: perhaps her manic fit was over or at least easing? Soon it might be safe to let her back in, but not yet.

  Watching them magnified on the screen like this, I actually felt quite proud of my sisters. Beneath the twins’ Marks & Sparks navy sweatshirts and black tracksuit bottoms were hidden two rather graceful identical girls. They were certainly teen sized—it would take two of them to make one adult, but then there were two of them. Their eyes behind National Health owl glasses were wide and trusting as they smiled into the camera. Rather little mouths and thin lips but good regular tiny teeth, and clear, flawless complexions.

  We had been playing netball and their hair had flopped out from behind their head bands, all fair and curly. They were growing up�
�finally. They were hand-in-hand, and their heads were turned sideways and up, showing clean cut, very delicate features. It was always quite uncanny, the way they moved together, turned their heads at the same angle, as if you were seeing double. Alden and Ray studied them for a long time.

  “Don’t even go there,” said Ray to Alden, but I knew he already had. I should never have showed them the pictures. In some people’s heads innocence just exists for the plucking.

  “I’ll try hard,” said Alden. But he didn’t mean it. They pondered some more.

  “How old?” Ray asked me.

  “Seventeen,” I said.

  “Do they have boy-friends?” Alden asked me.

  “Of course they do,” I lied. Let them not for God’s sake know here was a pair of twin virgins, within reaching distance. “They started young.”

  “Call-center girls,” observed Ray. I had to work out what he meant. Of course—I’d told them that the girls worked in a call center, and Robert was at the local comprehensive. The trouble with telling lies is that one keeps forgetting one has.

  Robert’s picture was up on the screen now, poor spotty lad. But the acne did not show up too badly in the pictures, and I could see he had the makings of a good adult male. He had the fine family features, hair like mine, but blond, and had been charging round the garden like a mad thing, playing football with our netball. He was naked to the muscled waist and sweaty. He was laughing and happy, smiling into the camera, and not at all his usual grungy, haughty self. He had a wide, full-lipped mouth and good teeth, like the rest of the family, but on a larger scale than the twin’s.

  “You’ve kept very quiet about him,” said Alden.

  “He’s such a pain,” I said. “I try to pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  They asked how old he was and I said nearly seventeen.

  “Bit old,” said Ray, and I asked if I could I have my snaps back, which was absurd because the images were now in the computer forever unless he chose to delete them, and then the front door bell made its sickly, new-age noise: the Lukas bed was back.

  It didn’t look the same at all. It was two thirds its original size—which was probably good because Alden would have easier wheelchair access to whoever lay upon it. The posts were no longer wooden with caryatids but smoothly post-modern, in some non-conductive metal. It looked graceful rather than imposing. Lights gleamed: there were almost as many touch pads on the frame as on Alden’s chair. And it had its own built-in mirrored ceiling. The mattress was a little harder than the one that went with the old bed: but no doubt there were now more sensors in it to go along with the direction-finding mikes on the posts.

  The workmen went.

  I lay upon the bed with my newly streaked hair, my new bikini wax, and thought happy thoughts and miserable thoughts to order, and faked the gamut of sexual sounds from orgasm to chokes to screams of rapture and terror. I thought I did very well but Alden was complaining of feedback and they fiddled around for ages, up and down to the music room where Alden worked, getting crosser and crosser with the technology that served them. It seemed to me totally fitting that the new process was called Bluebeard, inasmuch as Harold Bluetooth’s son was Svein Forkbeard, both Danish kings who raided England in the tenth century—Vanessa knew that, but I didn’t mind: she was being neither manic, nor intrusive, nor contentious. And I had never dared enter Alden’s music studio, because the door was always closed, it had no handle and could only be opened from his wheelchair—as far as I knew. It was one of the rooms in the higher reaches of the house, and he liked to keep it private, even from me. A secret room.

  Lam finally said, “No echo in flesh. Echo in heart of Joan,” and it was true. Something had happened to me. I was going through the motions of trust but I did not feel it. I had showed them the pictures of my family and then regretted it. I had said I would apologize to Audrey but I resented it. I lay upon their bed and made noises but I felt stupid. The feedback I was producing was in my own heart, and somehow they had picked this up. I was “under will” but jeering at myself for being so: I was double-emoting in response to everything I said or they did.

  Lam was perfectly right, though I wished he hadn’t said what he had, because now Alden and Ray looked at me coldly as if it was all my fault. But perhaps I imagined it out of guilt. I had reduced sections of The Blue Box to broken shards and they weren’t going to forget that easily. I would have to earn my redemption. I resolved to do so.

  The Pay Back

  AND THEN IT WAS time for the Divan and for once Alden and Ray came down to Soho with me, just, I supposed, to make sure I apologized to Audrey. I was surprised they could bear to leave their precious bed. Lam stayed home. I’d chosen a long red satin skirt with a little pink lace jacket that stopped short of my breasts top and sides and was elegant while being excellently indecent.

  Loki drove us in the black cab. I felt very comfortable and at home with Loki now. He knew everything about me and didn’t seem to mind, or judge. He was the eldest of five children—the others were still back home in Berbera. He was a bright boy who’d got a church school scholarship and was living in Enfield with an aunt. He was on my side: he had given me a chicken sandwich at a time when I really needed it. We chatted on a bit about this and that through the open partition until Alden said he wanted to think and would we be quiet so I shut up.

  I had to go into the office and say sorry to Audrey. She was wearing red and gold culottes which did nothing for her figure, a Goddess top which showed her fleshy upper arms to disadvantage, and stupid pointy green silk slippers. She wasn’t at all gracious. I had slapped her: I could be arrested for common assault, as she pointed out. She seemed to have quite forgotten that she had slapped me first, and that after having handed me over to the mercies of a sadistic madman. Let alone that if I chose to go running to the police I could nail her on a dozen different counts. One of the annoying things about trying to work for people on drugs like cocaine is that they forget so much, other than believing in general you’re in the wrong and they’re in the right and can get away with anything. I very seldom take drugs myself, so I keep forgetting how much of so many people’s behavior is due to a chemical reaction in the brain. I tried to forgive her.

  Ray usually took care to put me “under will” before I went down to the Divan but tonight, what with the bed and the new sound system and the feedback he forgot about it. Alden always said it was unnecessary anyway: someone on the Fourth Path shouldn’t be so insecure. “Under will” was “under will,” it wasn’t like an aspirin that had to be taken every four hours. But what with one thing and another I guess some of my normal passivity had deserted me.

  Tonight, after being dismissed to the bar after a lecture by Audrey, and waiting for what would happen to happen, a smirking man in his fifties, well-built if a little paunchy, beautifully-suited and satisfied with himself, asked me to dance. He gave a backward glance at his wife, who smiled bravely and tried hard not to look hurt, insulted and humiliated. Which she was. She was in her fifties: I was in my twenties. There is nothing much a woman can do about that. I stood up. I’d had to change. Audrey had told me to class myself up a bit, and now I just looked absurd. I was wearing her version of “class”—which was a rather short pleated Burberry skirt, thick stockings and lace-up brogues, and a leather belt with a buckle which dug in to the bare flesh. Clive, who had taken over as the club costumier, had tightened the belt an extra notch so it made me look fat. Above that my bare breasts: not for the teeny-fanciers really, who like a girl body to be narrow and skinny, so the cock is more the master, proportionately, when it enters—but clearly just right, alas, for this particular client. Audrey is naff, but she isn’t daft: you can’t underestimate the public’s taste, is as true about sex as it is about films.

  Once on the dance floor my punter was erect within the minute and letting me know it. “I just called to say I love you, I just called to say I love you,” droned the canned music. My nipples rose under his gaze. I couldn’t
help that either. Desire does not go hand in hand with liking. Far from it. He kept looking round to see how his wife was taking it, and grinning. I hated him. I hated the hypocrisy of it all. I hated her feebleness, how she just sat by and let herself be tormented. And I wanted to be fucked.

  Alden and Ray seemed to have forgotten me. They were sitting at a table busily looking through the menu. I wouldn’t be getting anything to eat. That made me even snarkier. That and being excluded. It was pathetic, the way I wanted to “belong.”

  “I have something in my eye,” I said. “Can you take it out?”

  “We’d better go where there’s more light,” he said.

  “Let’s try the cloakroom,” I said, and we danced our way casually into the darkness outside the circle of light beamed onto the dance floor and out into the corridor and into the cloakroom. I knelt at his feet and zipped down his flies and his cock stuck out, and I wrapped my lips around the end, but he pushed and pushed deeper inside, over-excited, not settling into his own pleasure at all. I took my mouth away for air and he stood me up and leaned me against the wall and shoved my skirt up and was inside me in a second. He was hateful but it was wonderful.

  But within the minute Alden’s chair was there, and Alden’s strong arms were battering at him, tearing him off me, hitting him round the head, with Ray bleating “Don’t, Alden, don’t!” It is a fearful thing to be attacked out of nowhere by a man in a wheelchair; one doesn’t expect it. My punter let out a fearful yell. I rearranged my Burberry skirt, and got a stray swipe from Alden which left my ear ringing. Audrey and Clive were there at the double, in their pantomime Ali Baba clothes, and the security man, and now the wife too, quite hysterical, and my poor punter wondering how he’d got into this. And now his wife was at him too, slap, slap, slap. Good for you, I thought. It was wonderful. What an uproar! What can happen if you act out of turn, of your own volition! Fuck Ray, I thought, and his ninety-three squares, and the flashing lights of the universe, fuck the Thelemites; this is real art; this is creativity, something where there was nothing before, and I’d done it.