Surrender to Mr. X (24 page)

“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.

A
ND 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.

Loki was sent for; I was bundled up and taken home in the taxi, in disgrace. “Whore! Slut!” said Alden from his wheelchair. Well, I was glad he cared. “Alden, be reasonable,” pleaded Ray from beside me. “She does as I say,” says Alden, “not what she wants.” And still I thought it was funny.

I was to learn otherwise.

“Find a dark street,” said Alden over the intercom to Loki. We made a detour here, a short cut there: we ended up somewhere behind the British Museum where the streets are quiet and a parked black cab will attract no attention.

Loki seemed to know what was expected of him. He got out of the front and came round to Ray's side at the back. Ray got out to let him in—suddenly panicked, I made a dash for it—and it was Loki who caught me and hurled me back in while Alden helped drag me around until I was sprawled opposite him with
my neck cricked into the corner of the cab. Loki, my friend, always punctual, always polite, who gave me a sandwich when I was hungry, now pushing up my long red satin gown with businesslike hands as if he'd been thinking about this for some time and had every move worked out.

“Only business, Joan,” said Alden. “This way we recoup some transport fees.”

But what he meant was that I should see that he controlled even my friendships; that Loki thought more of getting his bill paid than he did of me. See how I liked that! And he was right. I didn't. Not one bit.

I struggled some more. Ray was somewhere in there too, bleating in my ear. “Joan, enjoy: Joan, enjoy,” and Alden was saying “Why the fuck should she enjoy, the disobedient little bitch?”

But then I thought, well, at least I'm getting to fuck Loki, who is much better looking than either of you two, and almost certainly better at it: that's what I did, that's how I won, I decided to enjoy. I stopped struggling—a matter of indifference to Loki, I thought: he was so strong and lithe he probably didn't notice I had been—and of annoyance to Alden, who was bending his face into mine, only inches away. My white skin, Loki's dark torso—Alden trapped there by his stupid legs, no Lam to help him: he was pitiable. Loki, silhouetted in the light of the antique gas street lamps which they have in the British Museum area, was gorgeous. It is a softer light than halogen, almost romantic. He didn't
kiss me when we had finished—and I didn't come—of course he wouldn't: this was not kissing territory; but he did thank me, as though I had given him a really good tip.

And then we all went on home as if nothing had happened, except that Alden was really quite frighteningly furious.

Lam was waiting up for us.

“Joan not behave?” he asked.

“Joan very, very bad,” said Alden. “Joan taught lesson.”

Ray went straight upstairs to the studio. No doubt he got at least two or three more squares done. It must have been quite an intense evening for him too, from his voyeur's viewpoint.

“I'm not responsible for what happened tonight,” he said, as he went. “I won't be. Joan, please consider yourself no longer under-will.”

“She soon will be,” said Alden. “But my way, not yours.”

There were two of them, and one of me. One might be in a wheelchair but the other had big strong hands and was from outer space. Being “under will” is not a one-sided game. I was enough Vanessa now to be kicking up a storm, but I still had many residual Joan beliefs, including that Lam was from the Dog Star Sirius, and not only that: Ray was on the Seventh Path down in Southgate, treading the way of the mighty which meant seventh level as well as seventh path, and
trod in the steps of the holy Tathgata, whose face was the rising sun of thought eternal. What nonsense it all was, yet here I was, crouched on the floor of the mirror room, the cuff which had adorned the pegs of the easel back round my left ankle, and the chain—nasty rusty old thing it was—fixed to a thin metal ring in some smart new metal on the smart new bed post. The new bed was not going to be all that different from the old.

And I had been left alone to contemplate my sins. The mirrors threw back a sorry portrait of a willful, disobedient, ungrateful girl. I had endangered everything by a single, lustful, vengeful act. The reputation of the Divan, the ego of the smug man, the contentment of his wife: I had betrayed and upset both Ray and Alden, abandoned the power of my dependency, complicated my relationship with Loki, and there was no health in me. And I had tried to damage
The Blue Box
. And—now I could see—what was almost worse, that I had damaged the quilt with the ninety-three patchwork squares. It was too big for the new bed and its hems trailed on the floor. Three of the squares were coming adrift; they needed to be mended. My fault. I had been told to take it down to the cleaners but I had thought that was a waste on money and wedged it into the washing machine and put it through. Another thing to be guilty about.

Lam came in, the alien from Sirius the Dog Star—the follower of Tathgata, who is universal. And oh God,
not again: I'd thought she had improved, but Vanessa was in full agitated flood again as Lam padded around, fetching props, selecting whips, waving his tentacles: Vanessa was now quoting from the Great Parinirvana Sutra, the gospel of the four paths, in which the Buddha talks about the noble truth of suffering, an eternally abiding, unchanging, fine and essential awareness. Suffering is bad enough, shrieks Vanessa, but if they say Lam is on the Seventh Path then it's Dark Zen he's into, the worship of the self (Satanism) plus pure productive energy
(The Blue Box)
and once that ties in with Crowley mania and modern technology—
The Blue Box
being the outer and visible form of the triumph of the infinite complexity of all things, in other words representing the computer—why then, says Vanessa, we're in real trouble. It's bound to end up with someone wanting a human sacrifice—because this stuff is escalating: they're children, children, playing with fire like Alden playing with fireworks, and the black mass in the chapel was a mere early rehearsal—why won't I realize? She snaps away in my head. But what can I do about it? All I know is that this bed has a steel V-frame to which I am tied, facing the door, and a spreader bar for my feet and all directional mikes are pointed my way. Again I am left alone to contemplate. If that was Lam with the tentacles than I am definitely under will again. Vanessa doesn't save me, she makes things worse.