Surrender to Mr. X (22 page)

We're up in the studio again. Lam is juggling oranges again.

Fruit-bearing trees originate on Sirius, Ray tells me, according to a lecture on the Transcendentalists he'd just been to at the Southgate Centre.

“He must be missing home,” says Ray.

“But you said he was a Dogon,” I say.

“Same thing,” says Ray.

“Do stop all that crap,” says Alden. He makes a speech. “You're a natural hypnotist, that's all it is.
Fourth Path, my ass. Joan's a happy little sex slave, a sub to my dom, a bottom to my top, not a route to higher powers, not an approach to the transcendental, just a help in getting some rather important atonal music written. Stick with the lectures on Japanese rope bondage, leave the rest to me. You get more of a hard-on down the Divan than up at Southgate with the dreamers, not that that's saying much. Nor is Lam an alien, he's the guy who pushes my chair about and helps me organize my sex life. You haven't touched that fucking painting for days.”

But the oranges glitter their reflection into all the little mirrors on the canvas, ninety-three of them, and suddenly the whole room seems ablaze, throwing back flashes of color as the oranges whirl, reds and oranges, mixed with the blue of the base to add purples, from each to each, back and back into infinity. And even Alden seems quite awed and is silent.

And in the silence of my own head Vanessa is starting up again about the number 93. Why was Crowley so fascinated by it? Was it just because he happened to rent rooms on the fourth floor at No. 93 Jermyn Street, above Paxton's, the famous cheese shop? Vanessa's over-heated mind whizzes through the references. Aleister Crowley moved in to No. 93 with his new wife Rose on March 25th 1907, the Great Beast 666, founder of Crowleyanity and preacher of the Law of Thelema. He was 29. His life had already been marked by excess and odd events. He had written
peculiar but much-admired poetry, he had alarmed society with his odd views on sex and religion, he had gathered a crew of literary occultists round him—W.B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, Saki, Synge, Jepson, Wilde—and artists too—Marcel Duchamp, Nina Hammett, Epstein—and quarreled bitterly and publicly with most of them. He had already founded the Argentum Astri, Inner Order of the Thelemites: the Outer Order having become too petty and ordinary for its founder. He had won renown of all things as a mountaineer: in 1903 he had even been approached by the famous Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod to accompany him on the first expedition to Kanchenjunga, the third largest mountain in the world, in Nepal. He had accepted. The team used the Singalila approach. Crowley led the trek. Four of its members failed to survive, swept away by an avalanche at 25,000 feet. (According to Crowley; others said 21,000.) Rumors abounded. The porters had wanted to turn back: their mountain gods were thunderous and angry. But Crowley, having his own hotline to his own powerful entities, insisted the party went on. The mountain gods won. Crowley fled and left his men to die. And all he had to say about it was “their disobedience resulted in things going wrong.”

Vanessa's knowledge beats in my head like some frenetic bird desperate to get out. I wish she'd shut up. I want to concentrate on the dancing of orange light. Ray's tiny strokes of black have begun to cavort and tangle through the air. The hum is getting louder:
Alden has turned the volume up. These are my own shrieks and screams and
cries de joie
, my own terror and exultation, my degradation and my exhilaration, channeled and booming through the bowels of the earth, now vibrating the bluey-orange-purple air. I cover my ears but the whole room trembles. The light thrown back from the painting is now moving toward the blue glow of a billion computer screens, in the infinite complexity of their making, the darting of the synapses of the brain echoed in the darting of the pixels, a billion tiny sticks of black, the peoples of the earth, writhing and copulating, the Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors. They bring the Bride new gifts in the name of Bill Gates, Lord of the XXX sites, newly crowned king of the universe, God of Gods, whose servant and priestess I have become. I am the Scarlet Whore of New Babylon, the face of computer sex and my nation is Babel, and I am as mad as Vanessa. I cannot keep her split off from me for much longer.

She is pinching me, she is urging me. “Joan, Joan,” she is saying, “Aleister's wife Rose died in a mad house.”

“Well, that'll be your doing, not mine. You're the mad one, everyone knows, I'm perfectly sane. I'm the laughing, happy little one,” I snarl back at her. But she won't be quiet.

“Listen to me, listen to me, Joan. It says here the Scarlet Woman, Crowley's whore, was slain by constant copulation with a he-goat!” and at that I, Joan laugh. The nearest thing round here to a he-goat would be
Ray, and Ray is not exactly going to make me die from sexual exhaustion. And Alden can't be a goat: he hardly has the legs for it. If only he were. But his plunging and plunging, and his lack of coming is, I decide, oddly unsatisfactory for me and a source of resentment. Which is I guess why Vanessa keeps making her manic entrances: that, and the lack of shopping. I haven't been shopping for ages. There hasn't been time, I've been too busy whoring.

The lights stop circling, the room stops vibrating. Lam has put away his oranges. Silence. Then Alden's cellphone beeps, which breaks the trance and he answers it and it's someone from the Lukas workshop saying the bed will be delivered on Friday week. Such is Alden's pleasure at this news that he is delivered to my bed again and continues plunging but to tell you the truth I'm so bored I fall asleep mid-thrust and have to be woken by Lam's long poking finger prodding my shoulder.

T
HE
D
IVAN'S CAMERAMAN WAS
fired, I don't know why. Perhaps pure professionalism got the better of him and he started producing good films. The outings stopped and I was back to the more humdrum and immediate duties at the Divan. Ray and Alden seemed to have lost interest in what I was doing and seldom came along. I was sorry about that: I preferred it when they were around. Clive liked me: Audrey increasingly didn't. I put it to Alden and Ray that I needed a rest and a holiday, and anyone could do what I was doing at the Divan but they said I should work out two weeks' notice like anyone else. After that the bed would be back and we could go back to the old ways.

We were now at the end of August. People were coming back from holiday: the clientèle at the club changed: fewer foreigners looking for holiday excitement: more businessmen who'd spent dull weeks abroad with their wives and families: gays with their hearts broken looking for solace, in particular looking
for Phoebe, though many straight men liked her as well.

Also, Health and Safety officers were sniffing around the Divan. As a precaution activities in the annex were being more discreetly arranged. No-one objected to bare bosoms, so long as they were properly licensed, and dancing was okay, so long as there was no live music, only canned: it was just that fire exits had to be in order, and there could be no cockroaches in the kitchens or we'd be closed down overnight. So far as the authorities were concerned there were no back rooms to the club at all: the annex simply didn't exist, and I daresay money changed hands to make sure it never had and never did. But everybody was being very careful. Perhaps that was why Ray and Alden weren't around so much—busts could happen and they wouldn't want to be there when they did.

My arguments that nobody paid me, I worked for fun and love of the trade, or that I was “under will” and liking it, wouldn't cut much ice with raiding police. And there'd been an incident a couple of weeks back, when they'd been called out to us, which made everyone nervous. An alarmed punter, bursting in on what he thought was a genuine group rape in the bar after hours, had dialed
999
.

It was actually a scenario in which Phoebe and I played victims, the sex was consensual and no-one underage, so would be legal enough in a private home. It was just that the Divan wasn't one, and they took
entrance money. We were two innocent young tourists to be dragged from our bar stools by football hooligans, tied up and set upon to cries of “let them have it”; “give it them good and hard”; “down their throats,”; “cream their faces”; “roast 'em on the spit”; “slam their shit holes,” and so on, while Phoebe and I moaned with pleasure or alarm—“oh that's good, so hard, so big”; or conversely, “don't, don't, please, it hurts”: whatever in fact seemed to be required.

The police took two hours to come, by which time the participants had climaxed and calmed down, rearranged their clothing, folded and put away their football kit—scarves, woolly hats and T-shirts—Manchester always a favorite—and gone home. There was nothing to hide and nothing to be seen but the police are not fools, and there was a lot of writing notes and taking of numbers.

These days, alas, I could turn up at the club merely to bare-breast dance with the punters, while even wives and girlfriends looked on, and that would be as far as the action went. On other nights the back rooms would be opened up and business would be much as usual, just less public. A couple of nights a week there was lap dancing: the game then was for the men to hide any overt sign of desire. The girls waggled their bums in men's faces, and taunted them, and the men had to keep their hands to themselves and disguise their erections, and the wives and girlfriends pretended not to be embarrassed. It seemed totally dishonorable
to me. We'd show our breasts just so the men could demonstrate to partners or friends how little we stirred them: we, the loveliest girls in the world. Phoebe did not even flash her cock—that would have been vulgar, though sensational.

I said to Audrey once that it seemed daft to me: you could eat the dinner but not have the girl. Why not have the girl, and be forbidden the dinner; smell the garlic in order to resist the food? It would make as much sense. It was probably a Vanessa kind of thing to say and Audrey took added exception. Now she really had it in for me.

Until now I had been able to exercise a degree of choice. A slight distasteful shake of the head when a man came into the club was enough for Clive to steer him away from me. But now Clive, under pressure from Audrey, stopped doing that. Instead, he seemed to take pleasure in interpreting my “no's” as “yes please's.”

There is a certain kind of man I simply do not fancy: mid-fifties usually, self-satisfied, jowly, whiskery, flabby, smiling mouth and mean eyes. They're the ones who like to go for the Dungeon, and then try to take over from the dungeon master. They'll want you to bend over the leather “master's horse” with your ankles wide apart along a spreader bar and your wrists handcuffed to it and leave you like that for too long so it really hurts: and only then fuck you. In actual fact not all that much fucking goes on in the Dungeon: it's usually a matter of situation, and the eroticism of a
tied girl which people appreciate, women as well as men. In Japanese bondage sex is the ultimate aim, but in the West it's the idea of helplessness which appeals: what might happen, not what does. A skilled dungeon master, for all his cruel looks and bare torso, supervises carefully and will make sure the bondagee is safe and more or less comfortable.

Tonight the dungeon master was not in: so far as I was concerned this was an evening of drinking with the boys and should I end up in one of the bedrooms the Frith Street end of the complex then so be it. On the whole, membership of the Divan costing the earth, we had very few rough and unpleasant types in. Over-ingenious, yes: but seldom ignorant or rough.

I daresay one of my objections to going out filming with Clive and Audrey was simply snobbish—they were, frankly, people's films, and “the people,” as I found them in what were euphemistically called the suburbs, were often crude and competitive or simply dull and brutish in their sexual habits.

But tonight Mr. M, of the smiling mouth, mean eyes and whiskery chin came in about ten-thirty, ordered a drink, sat down beside me and looked me up and down with lecherous eyes. Well, after all, that was why I was sitting there topless and smiling, in order that others should look at me speculatively and lecherously, and if they were lecherous enough, why then they would hand over money to the management. But he came too close and without invitation or permission tweaked a
nipple with none too clean fingernails. I moved away pointedly and sat somewhere else. Audrey saw and shook her head at me. That was being rude to the clients: it was my job to be nice to them.

I moved yet further away. Audrey went and had a word with Clive. Clive went over to Mr. M and had a brief conversation and Mr. M simpered in my direction and nodded and Audrey went behind the bar, got the key to the dungeon, handed it to me and asked me to open up and bring back a pony girl mask. Pony girls and pony boys get harnessed up, the bit between their teeth, and asked to trot round and do their master's bidding, turn left and right and do what they're told, but it is a fairly soft option for down there.

True, the more decadent of the Russian aristocrats used to have naked peasant girls to pull their carriages, but I don't think they fucked them, it was just a pleasant sight. And even Aristotle was rumored to be a pony boy and liked to be ridden by women. This may be, as Vanessa pointed out, beacuse there is in existence a 1420 etching of him by one Hans Bedlung Grien—
Aristotle riding Phyllis
, and they're both naked—but I reckon Phyllis is the Greek Goddess of the spring, trees, wisdom and women's secrets, not just some girlfriend, and that's how the rumor originated. At any rate ponyism tends to be out-doorish and to do with display and consensus.

So I trotted along the dark passages in my little red and white spotted rah-rah skirt and heels and nothing
much else. I daresay I am by nature over trusting, but in my view this is preferable to expecting the worst of everyone. If you expect the best sometimes it happens. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights—red and spooky—and went over to where the gags and bits and saddles were kept. But of course Mr. M was padding along behind me as I pranced along, and before I knew it I'd been pushed to the ground, and was tethered by the ankle to a chain, the other end of which was padlocked to an iron ring in the floor.