Sex and Death (26 page)

*

For a couple of days after that everything is all right and we have a good time. We bring our sandwiches from the snack area and eat them together while watching the screens, scattering crumbs over the surfaces. Sally takes her turn making the tea, and remembers not to put too much sugar into mine. When we take our pills I make her laugh by cramming as many as I can into my mouth and then trying to talk to her, pretending to be unaware that my mouth's full. When things are quiet, we squeeze together in one bunk and watch old movies on the VCR.

‘Sally?' I say one evening, when we're curled up in blankets. We're naked and sleepy, a single, glowing heat. Our skins are pressed so closely together I'm no longer sure what is me and what is her. Outside there's a storm blowing, black and wild. The heather is whipping in the wind, and the wind is howling at the windows.

‘Yeah?'

‘What did you do?'

‘What do you mean, do?'

‘To get sent here, I mean.'

‘I did the usual thing. I applied.'

My mind bends in a way it wasn't designed for. ‘People apply?' I say.

‘Sure,' she says. After a few seconds she looks back at me with that frown on her face and says: ‘Wait. What did you do?'

*

‘That's all wrong,' she says, shaking her head firmly. ‘They can't do that.'

I shrug.

‘It's bonded labour,' she says. ‘That's practically slavery.'

‘It's kind of my own fault,' I say.

‘It's completely out of order.'

‘It's not, really. You don't have to be so critical.'

‘Oh, I'm supercritical,' she says, quickly. ‘You have to be.'

‘What?' I say. ‘Why?'

‘You need supercriticality,' she says, extra slowly, ‘to achieve fission.'

I gape at her. Her forehead crinkles.

‘Did you, like, study any science at all?' she asks.

‘It wasn't my best subject,' I say, defensively.

*

When I wake the next morning, something feels wrong. I lie in my bunk for a while, hoping that Sally will come in to wake me and everything will be okay, but Sally doesn't come. The unease coalesces as I doze, almost forming into nightmare, but just as I'm on its threshold something pulls me away, and I lie with my eyes open, feeling terrible. Eventually I become aware of a distant beeping sound. I'm not sure how long it's been sounding. I get up, get dressed and trace the beeping to the control
room. There's a message from Barbara on my computer, marked urgent. The beeping stops when I click on it.

Good morning, Todd
, it says.
I hope you're enjoying the good weather. Please reacquaint yourself with the contents of the manual ‘In Case of Nuclear Excursion'.

I think about this for a moment. I remember the manual. Barbara pointed it out when I started work here, though I never read it, just put it away in a drawer somewhere. I always assumed it was a prop. I always thought it was a joke related to the holidays I don't take.

The manual is where I left it. It begins:
In case of critical excursion, do not under any circumstances attempt to leave the facility. Ensure all bulkheads are firmly closed, then proceed to your station
. What the manual omits to mention is how I'm supposed to know if there has been a critical excursion. Presumably something will light up on the control panel, but it would be nice to be clear. I go to check, but there are no new lights, and I decide that reading the manual is probably just a precautionary measure. The first thing to do is to find Sally.

I look everywhere twice before I'm sure that Sally has locked herself in the reactor again. The thought of it makes me uncomfortable, and oddly sad, and that sensation runs in circles around my chest until I realise that I'm starting to panic. It's the exact same feeling I used to get when I had all that debt and I'd wake in a sweat with something twisting inside of me. I count back the days since Sally arrived, and get to twenty-nine. It seems an appallingly low number. How did everything go so wrong so quickly?

I make some tea to calm myself down. I drink it while it's still hot and it burns my tongue, but the warmth feels good in my throat. Then I fiddle with a panel in one of the cupboards until
it comes off in my hand. From a hook behind it I take the emergency key, and then I head over to the reactor chamber, my heart listing slightly in my chest.

The reactor chamber is empty. It's round and white and bright, with no sign of Sally. There's just the white-tiled interior, interrupted only by a single black tile in the centre of the floor. I go over to take a look.

The single black tile turns out to be a white tile that has been removed and placed neatly on the tile next to it. The black tile is an opening in the floor. Just below the rim is the top of a ladder. A breeze, slight and sleepily warm, breathes from it. My foot nudges against something on the ground and I bend down to find, neatly camouflaged, an empty white mug. It's cold to the touch. I look behind me, back to the door. I look at the mug. Then I take a few deep breaths and I lean over and look down the hole.

*

My trainers ring softly on the metal ladder, then pad down onto an invisible floor. It's dark at the bottom, the black filtered by a faint red glow. It takes my eyes a while to adjust, and when they do I can just about make out that I'm standing in a small alcove, with the ladder behind me and the outline of a door on the wall in front of me. My foot nudges against something again, and on the floor I find Sally's basketball trainers, the laces pulled loose, their cloth tongues lolling. Beside them, in a neat row, are her Geiger counter, a torch, and what turns out to be a small, cloth-wrapped case with tools inside. I don't recognise the tools, but it seems plausible that they might just be the kind – slender, pointy and precise – that would fit inside locks.

I stand and look at the door, which avoids my gaze. I run my
hands along it at the level where the handle should be, but the surface is smooth. I give it a push, but the door continues to ignore me, and I stop pushing.

After a while I realise that the red light warming the area is coming from a small LED in the ceiling. I look up at it and try to make out if it belongs to a camera. If it does, it wouldn't be one of mine, or else I'd recognise the place I was standing in. My brain eventually remembers I have Sally's torch, and with it I can see that there is indeed a concealed lens there. I stare at it a moment, stupidly, and it stares back. It doesn't blink. I wonder if the light is good enough for whoever is watching to see through my eyes, and along the nerves into my core. Deep inside, my heart is beginning a slow decay.

I look away. I look back. Then I give the camera a wave and a thumbs-up, collect up Sally's things and climb back out. I put everything away as tidily as I can in her locker, though I still need to lean against the door to get it shut. I avoid looking at the other lockers. There are a lot of them, it's true, but if we carry on at this rate we're going to need some more.

Back in the control room I begin to write an incident report to send to Barbara. I don't feel very good about it, and have to stop three times to make myself some tea, but eventually I get it done. Then I file a final work evaluation on Sally, giving her the highest marks I can. The numbers may get queried by Personnel, but I'm a bit past that point. After that I don't feel very well at all, and have to lie down for a while.

When I get back to my desk the chat box is blinking in the corner of my screen. Barbara is waiting for me to log in.

Hi, Todd. Sorry Sally didn't work out. I know you were getting on well.

That's okay.

Well, we feel bad about it. Like we let you down a bit, recruitmentwise.

That's okay.

You'll be all right on your own again for a while?

I'll be all right.

Chin up
, she types
. The weather should be picking up soon.

Barbara logs off, and I close the chat box. There's a warning light flashing on the control panel. Something has got stuck on the barbed wire again, and I'll have to check to see if it's a sheep, or a protester, and then find out if someone's free to go and cut them loose.

Halfway through the spa detox Brunhilda takes a lover.

This comes as a shock to all of us, including Brunhilda herself.

To state the plainly obvious: Brunhilda is not attractive. Realistically (if not statistically) speaking, few Brunhildas are. The name is too heavy, too thick in the waist. A sign of things to come. The things that came were: childhood teasing, weak-willed parents, excellent grades, a pitying husband, an underage mistress, a quick and expected divorce. On the bright side the weak-willed will often excel in the dullest of corporate contexts and Brunhilda's parents willed her all they'd saved before they died.

Quiet people. Suburban Germans. Thrifty, self-denying. Every time they saved some cash they bought a small apartment. One in Florence, two in Shoreditch, four in former East Berlin, together worth the kind of sum that lightens psychic loads. Even without the life insurance payout she'd have quit her job and booked the three-month detox at Espace Henri Chenot. But Brunhilda's parents, bless their hearts, died instantly in Munich when a tower crane collapsed: a painless, profitable way to go.

Hundreds injured, two struck dead.

Apology accepted.

In life they'd left her to fend for herself. In death they made amends.

At forty Brunhilda is single, childless, rich and overweight. For five and a half of their six years of marriage, Dirk was chubby too. Then, at his company's annual retreat, he met a personal trainer. Heiko is this trainer's name. A veritable Adonis. Sprayed
gold skin and dyed gold hair and gleaming muscles carved from marble, born and raised in Elmau, smelling still of fresh-chopped wood. That year, due to a global recession, the corporate retreat was not on Kos but rather at the luxe hotel, ten minutes from Dirk's office, where Heiko taught a morning dance-cum-fitness class called ‘Rise and Shake!' adapted from his disco days to suit his clientele. Who's to say why Heiko took an instant shine to shaken Dirk and offered him free access to the hotel gym on weekdays? Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, faithfully, Dirk lifted weights, returning home aglow with joy, a gleaming suckling pig.

Brunhilda thought, and delighted to think, that Dirk was in the closet; that her rapidly shrinking husband had become his trainer's lover. It aroused her intensely to picture this, Dirk's pale and fleshy buttocks offered up like heaping mounds of clotted cream on fork-split scones. She'd always preferred (and still prefers) gay male porn to other genres. She particularly likes the nomenclature: Bear, Twink, Daddy, Verbal, Dominant. Such meticulous categorisation. As if, devoting his life to research, a taxonomist had classified all sexual fantasies, pinning them down like butterflies.

‘Verbal Daddy' is Brunhilda's favourite. In truth, she doesn't know why. She never felt anything close to lust either for or from her actual father, a kind but physically distant man who rarely hugged or kissed her. The only time she ever felt his fingers on her body was the time he placed her sixteenth birthday gift around her neck.

‘Almost . . .' he'd murmured, standing behind her struggling to do the necklace up. (Her father always murmured, as if shamed by making noise.) Her mother was waiting in front of them beaming and holding a camera, obscuring her face, while recently blown-out candles wept their wax tears on the cake. As Brunhilda had no friends at school apart from one young teacher, Mr
Engel, who taught classics and wore tweed suits every day, the party was small: just the dinner at home for her and her parents and Fido their cat. She'd invited Mr Engel but, surprisingly, he'd declined.

Like her, Mr Engel had no friends. His colleagues found him awkward. Nervously huddled and painfully shy; it pained them to engage him. Brunhilda often ate lunch in his classroom, the two of them chewing and reading in silence. She liked the soft sound of their turning their pages, waves lapping shore or else breeze stroking leaves. ‘But a male teacher's attending a female student's sweet sixteen', he'd said, ‘might raise some awkward questions.' Brunhilda said she understood. There was the awkward question of why said student had no better options than said teacher: skinny, fidgety, a sad old man at thirty years old. (When, years later, she learned that Mr Engel, a raging paedophile, had been sent to prison she wasn't stunned but palpably offended. On all those sunless afternoons he'd never paused to lower Ovid, lift his gaze and leer from where he sat, across the room. She had, and often, glancing up to see if he was glancing too. No. Just nibbling crackers, snowing crumbs on his tweed coat.)

Bittersweet sixteen. Fido sleeping. Mother beaming. Candles weeping. A gift of atypic extravagance from her penny-pinching parents. Brunhilda opened the velvet box and shyly drew the necklace up: a white gold chain from which hung, catching light, a diamond heart. Her mother wanted a Polaroid. Her father could not close the clasp. Brunhilda touched her chin to her chest as if to give him room. Between curtains of hair she closed her eyes and prayed that he would fumble on, that the magical tingling at the back of her neck would carry on for hours. He succeeded in seconds then reached around to nudge the pendant into place, his fingertips brushing the broad expanse above her heavy breasts. ‘
Alles gut
,' he murmured as he drew his fumbling fingers back.

‘Look up, let me see,' her mother said. ‘Oh darling, why are you crying?'

Whatever its root this penchant for the Verbal Daddy category really can't be traced to anything her father ever did. In thirty-nine years she never saw him touch her mother lustfully, nor she him for that matter. Here again she couldn't say why. Both were plain- and pleasant-faced, much slimmer than Brunhilda is, the sort of harmless couple found in medical brochures. Each one seemed to like the other. They often went on nature walks. They called each other
Schatzi
and they rarely disagreed. But she never saw them clasping hands, barged in to find them nude in bed or watched her father's fingers idly graze her mother's ass. She'd presume they were asexuals if not for knowing better – for the world presumes the same of her and look how much she masturbates.

Her favourite position is prone in bed, a toilet roll between her legs. The roll must be approximately seven-eighths finished, the width of a so-called Monster Cock. She'd mastered the method at fourteen years old, having previously used her pillow, faithfully, bunching it up in a ball at her groin and grinding down against it. The problems were two. The pillow was soft and she, its lover, heavy. Her mother also wondered at the faint stains on the case. Like an underage mistress the toilet roll was soft yet firm, would hold its form, and when it lost its usefulness could simply be discarded. In six years Dirk never thought to ask why the cardboard cylinders never showed brown, why they always vanished, an eighth left to go, replaced by fresh and fluffy ones.

Verbal Daddies and toilet rolls.

Brunhilda's chest of secret joys.

To which at the end of her sexless marriage she added: homosexual husband.

Imagining Dirk on his hair-dusted back in a happy baby yoga pose, his small cock resting sweetly on his stomach, out of use;
imagining Heiko plunging in, his buttocks taut (from her bird's eye view), his broad back flexed and rippling – made Brunhilda come in seconds. The more explicitly violent the fantasies were – the harder the thrusts, the louder the squeals – the more aroused Brunhilda became. Soon she abandoned her laptop. She no longer needed the visual aid and so became more mobile. She masturbated madly whenever alone and once while Dirk was sleeping. If after she came she always felt an overwhelming flood of guilt, she couldn't let the sex scene go; it felt so thoroughly
right
. At last her husband's uselessness – his passivity, his inferiority, his fundamental weakness as a man, his flab – had been put to good use.

Brunhilda had never been happier. Dirk had never been happier. A balance had entered their daily lives, the tenderness born of guilt. Couples keeping secrets are remarkably affectionate (‘Would you like a bit more clotted cream on your fork-split scone, my love?'). Brunhilda was keeping two secrets, mind: the one the sexual fantasy, the other the peace and the sense of relief that she felt when she thought
Dirk is gay!
This was a secret she kept from herself.
Why else had he married her?

Brunhilda is brilliant and wickedly funny and told, as heavy women are, what lovely skin and hair she has – but what was this to Dirk? There are men who value intellectual agility over physical attractiveness. In Brunhilda's experience such men are unusual and unusually intelligent. To recognise brilliance is easy. To enjoy it requires native brilliance. As Dirk has none, Brunhilda never knew why he'd proposed. Her reasons for accepting were clear enough. He loved her repetitive cooking. He kissed her goodnight on the back of the neck. He loved his repetitive job. To know
his
reason finally and to relish it in secret she now felt for him a love-like blend of loyalty and pity.

And so to the violent sex scene Brunhilda added her own healing hands: cradling Dirk's head in her lap as he squealed, pinned
and wriggling with pleasure. Heiko, thrusting athletically, was not her competitor but her avatar. Through his perfect body flowed her scorn, her pudgy hands her love.

Never had she felt such honesty. Such equilibrium. Such euphoria. Believing Dirk in love with Heiko, Brunhilda fell in love with both. We can imagine, then, what she must have felt when Dirk came home one Wednesday night and kissed her neck then backed away and said to her, ‘I'm leaving.'

Brunhilda was frying pork chops in their American-style kitchen, meaning the sound of sizzling onions rather drowned out Dirk's announcement. When she heard again, ‘I'm leaving,' she said, ‘Good. Please buy a tannic red. And try to be back within thirty minutes? The chops are better warm.'

‘No, I mean I'm leaving you,' said Dirk, now sweating badly. He rested his bag on the island counter but didn't remove his coat. ‘I'm leaving you for Heiko.'

Brunhilda laughed. ‘What fun! At last.'

Dirk was virtually dripping wet. Brunhilda was facing the stove. He raised his remarkably high-pitched voice. ‘I'm leaving you, I said!'

‘I heard you, dear.' She wiped her hands. ‘I'm happy for you both. May I just ask: do you plan to leave me after dinner or before?' As we said, Brunhilda is funny. But Dirk lacks native brilliance. He looked at her, sweating and blinking and red, a lost and bobbing apple.

‘I'm in love with Heike,' he blurted out and still Brunhilda heard
Heiko
. A timer went off. She lowered the flame. The kitchen fell suddenly quiet. ‘I'm in love with Heike.' Dirk started to cry.

‘Who on earth is Heike?'

Heike is a hotel receptionist, a deep tissue masseuse, and Heiko's best friend. Heiko is gay. Dirk, alas, is not.

Two days later Dirk moved out. He had lost ten kilos. He left the clothes that did not fit. Months later they divorced. Three
weeks after her parents staged their apology-death in Munich, Heike left Dirk for an ageing masseur and Brunhilda made haste for Merano.