by Clive Barker
"I came to see Charmaine."
"Oh." He seemed almost to have forgotten who she was. "She OK?"
"So-so. You sound as if you're doing well."
"I've had my hassles, you know, but then who hasn't? I'm all right though, you know." He lowered his voice to the barely audible. "The big money's in dope these days. Not grass, the hard stuff. I handle cocaine mostly; occasionally the big H. I don't like to touch it... but I've got expensive tastes." He pulled a "what a world this is" face, turned to the bar to order more drinks, then talked on, a seamless train of self-inflation and off-color remarks. After some initial resistance Marty found himself succumbing to him. His tide of invention was as irresistible as ever. Only occasionally did he pause to ask a question of his audience, which was fine by Marty. He had little he wanted to tell. It had always been that way. Flynn the rude boy, fast and smooth; Marty the quiet one, the one with all the doubts. Like alter egos. Simply being with Flynn again Marty could feel himself flung into sharper relief.
The evening passed very quickly. People joined Flynn, drank with him, and wandered off again, having been entertained by the court jester for a while. There were some individuals Marty knew among the traffic of drinkers, and a few uncomfortable encounters, but it was all easier than he'd expected, smoothed on its way by Flynn's bonhomie. About ten-fifteen he ducked out for a quarter of an hour-"Just got to sort out a little business"-.and came back with a wad of money in his inside pocket, which he immediately began to spend.
"What you need," he told Marty when they were both awash with drink, "what you need is a good woman. No-" he giggled, "-no, no, no. What you need is a bad woman."
Marty nodded; his head felt unstable on his neck. "You got it in one," he said.
"Let's go find us a lady, eh? Shall we do that?"
"Suits me."
"I mean, you need company, man, and so do I. And I do a bit of that on the side, you know? I've got a few ladies available. I'll see you all right."
Marty was too drunk to argue. Besides the thought of a woman-bought or seduced, what the hell did it matter?-was the best idea he'd heard in a long while. Flynn went away, made a telephone call, and came back leering.
"No trouble," he said. "No trouble at all. One more drink, then we'll hit the road."
Lamblike, Marty followed his lead. They had one more drink together, then staggered out of The Eclipse and around the corner to Flynn's car, a Volvo that had seen better days. They drove for five minutes to a house on the estate. The door was opened by a good-looking black woman.
"Ursula, this is my friend Marty. Marty, say hello to Ursula."
"Hello, Ursula."
"Where's the glasses, honey? Daddy bought a bottle."
They drank some more together, and then went upstairs; it was only then that Marty realized Flynn wasn't going to leave. This was intended to be ménage à trois, like the old days. His initial disquiet vanished when the girl began to undress for them. The drink had taken the edge off his inhibitions, and he sat on the bed encouraging her in her strip, dimly aware that Flynn was probably as much entertained by his evident craving as he was by the girl. Let him watch, Marty thought, it's his party.
In the small, badly lit bedroom Ursula's body looked sculpted from black butter. In between her full breasts a small gold cross lay, glistening. Her skin glistened too; each pore was marked with a pinprick of sweat. Flynn had started to undress as well, and Marty followed suit, stumbling as he pulled off his jeans, unwilling to relinquish the sight of the girl as she sat up on the bed and put her hands to her groin.
What followed was a swift reeducation in the craft of sex. Like a swimmer who returns to water after years of absence, he soon remembered the strokes. In the next two hours he gathered fistfuls of memories to take back with him: looking around from Ursula's amused face to see Flynn kneeling at the bottom of the bed sucking her toes; Ursula cooing like a black dove over his erection before devouring it to the root; Flynn licking his hands and grinning, and licking and grinning. And finally the two of them sharing Ursula, Flynn buried in her backside, making true what, as an eleven-year-old, he had claimed you did with women.
Afterward, they dozed together. Sometime in the middle of the night Marty stirred to see Flynn dressing, and shrinking away. Home presumably; wherever home was these days and nights.
24
He woke just before dawn, disoriented for several seconds until he heard Ursula's steady exhalations at his side. He said goodbye to her as she dozed, and found a cab to take him back to his car. He was back at the Sanctuary by eight-thirty. Exhaustion would hit him eventually, and a hangover too, but he knew his body clock well. There'd be a few hours grace before the debt had to be paid.
Pearl was in the kitchen tidying up after breakfast. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and he sat down to drink three cups of black coffee, one after the other. His mouth tasted foul, and Ursula's perfume, which had smelled ambrosial the previous night, was oversweet this morning. It lingered on his hands and in his hair.
"Good night?" Pearl asked. He nodded without answering. "You'd better get a good breakfast inside you; I won't be able to get you any lunch today."
"Why not?"
"Too busy with the dinner party."
"What dinner party?"
"Bill will tell you. He wants to see you. He's in the library."
Toy looked weary, but not as ill as he had when last they'd met. Maybe he'd seen a doctor in the interim, or taken a holiday.
"You wanted to speak to me?"
"Yes, Marty, Yes. You enjoy your night on the town?"
"Very much. Thank you for making it possible."
"It wasn't my doing; it was Joe. You're well liked, Marty. Lillian tells me even the dogs have taken to you."
Toy crossed to the table, opened the cigarette box, and selected a cigarette. Marty had not seen him smoke before.
"You won't be seeing Mr. Whitehead today; there's going to be a little get-together tonight-"
"Yes, Pearl told me."
"It's nothing special. Mr. Whitehead has dinners for a select few every now and then. The point is, he likes them to be private gatherings, so you won't be required."
This pleased Marty. At least he could go lie down, catch up on some sleep.
"Obviously we'd like you to be in the house, should you be needed for any reason, but I think it's unlikely."
"Thank you, sir."
"I think you can call me Bill in private, Marty; I don't see any need for formality any longer."
"OK."
"I mean..." He stopped to light the cigarette. "... we're all servants here, aren't we? In one way or another."
By the time he'd showered, thought about a run and discounted the idea as masochistic, then lain down to doze, the first signs of the inevitable hangover were on the way. There was no cure that he knew of. The only option was to sleep it off.
He didn't wake until the middle of the afternoon, and only then roused by hunger. There was no sound in the house. Downstairs the kitchen was empty, only the buzz of a fly at the window-the first Marty had seen this season-interrupted the glacial calm. Pearl had obviously finished whatever preparations were required for this evening's dinner party, and gone, perhaps to come back later. He went to the refrigerator and rifled it for something to quieten his growling belly. The sandwich he constructed looked like an unmade bed, with sheets of ham tumbling out from its bread blankets, but it did the job. He put on the coffee percolator and went in search of company.
It was as though everyone had gone from the face of the earth. Wandering through the deserted house the pit of the afternoon swallowed him. The stillness, and the remains of his headache, conspired to make him jittery. He found himself glancing behind him like a man on an ill-lit street. Upstairs was even quieter than down; his footsteps on the carpeted landing were so hushed he might not have had weight at all. Even so, he found himself creeping.
Halfway along the landing-Whitehead's landing-came the cutoff point
beyond which he had been instructed not to go. The old man's private suite was this end of the house, as was Carys' bedroom. Which room was it most likely to be? He tried to recreate the outside of the house, to locate the room by a process of elimination, but he lacked the imaginative skill to correlate the exterior with the closed doors of the corridor ahead.
Not all were closed. The third along on his right was slightly ajar: and from inside, now his ears were attuned to the lowest level of audibility, he could hear the sound of movement. Surely it was her. He crossed the invisible threshold into forbidden territory, not thinking of what the punishment for trespass might be, too eager to see her face, maybe to speak to her. He reached the door, and peered through.
Carys was there. She was semirecumbent on the bed, staring into middle distance. Marty was just about to step in to speak to her when somebody else moved in the room, hidden from him by the door. He didn't have to wait for the voice to know that it was Whitehead.
"Why do you treat me so badly?" he was asking her, his voice hushed. "You know how it hurts me when you're like this."
She said nothing: if she even heard him she made no sign of it.
"I don't ask so much of you, do I?" he appealed. Her eyes flickered in his direction. "Well, do I?"
Eventually, she deigned to reply. When she did her voice was so quiet Marty could barely catch the words. "Aren't you ashamed?" she asked him.
"There are worse things, Carys, than having somebody need you; believe me."
"I know," she replied, taking her eyes off him. There was such pain, and such submission in the face of that pain, in those two words: I know. It made Marty suddenly sick with longing for her; to touch her, to try to heal the anonymous hurt. Whitehead crossed the room and came to sit beside her on the edge of the bed. Marty stepped back from the door, fearful of being spotted, but Whitehead's attention was concentrated on the enigma in front of him.
"What do you know?" he asked her. The former gentility had suddenly evaporated. "Are you keeping something from me?"
"Just dreams," she replied. "More and more."
"Of what?"
"You know. The same."
"Your mother?"
Carys nodded, almost invisibly. "And others," she said. Who?"
"They never show themselves."
The old man sighed, and looked away from her. "And in the dreams?" he asked. "What happens?"
"She tries to speak to me. She tries to tell me something."
Whitehead didn't inquire further: he seemed to be out of questions. His shoulders had slumped. Carys looked at him, sensing his defeat.
"Where is she, Papa?" she asked him, leaning forward for the first time and putting an arm around his neck. It was a blatantly manipulative gesture; she offered this intimacy only to get what she wanted from him. How much had she offered, or he taken, in their time together? Her face came close to his; the late-afternoon light enchanted it. "Tell me, Papa," she asked again, "where do you think she is?" and this time Marty grasped the taunt that lay beneath the apparently innocent question. What it signified, he didn't know. What this whole scene, with its talk of coldness and shame, meant, was far from clear. He was glad, in a way, not to know. But this question, that she asked him so mock-lovingly, had been asked-and he had to wait a moment longer, until the old man had answered it. "Where is she, Papa?"
"In dreams," he replied, his face averted from her. "Just in dreams."
She dropped her arm from his shoulder.
"Never lie to me," she charged him icily.
"It's all I can tell you," he replied; his tone was almost pitiable. "If you know more than I do-" He turned and looked at her, his voice urgent. "Do you know something?"
"Oh, Papa," she murmured reproachfully, "more conspiracies?" How many feints and counterfeints were there in this exchange? Marty puzzled. "You don't suspect me now, surely?"
Whitehead frowned. "No, never you, darling," he said. "Never you."
He raised his hand to her face and leaned forward to put his dry lips to hers. Before they touched, Marty left the door and slipped away.
There were some things he couldn't bring himself to watch.
25
Cars began to arrive at the house in the early evening. There were voices Marty recognized in the hallway. It would be the usual crowd, he guessed; among them the Fan-Dancer and his comrades; Ottaway, Curtsinger and Dwoskin. He heard women's voices too. They'd brought their wives, or their mistresses. He wondered what kind of women they were. Once beautiful, now sour and lovelorn. Bored with their husbands, no doubt, who thought more of money-making than of them. He caught whiffs of their laughter, and later, of their perfume, in the hallway. He'd always had a good sense of smell. Saul would be proud of him.
About eight-fifteen he went into the kitchen and heated up the plate of ravioli Pearl had left for him, then retired into the library to watch a few boxing videos. The events of the afternoon still niggled him. Try as he might he couldn't remove Carys from his head, and his emotional state, over which he had so little control, irritated him. Why couldn't he be like Flynn, who bought a woman for the night, then walked away the next morning? Why did his feelings always become blurred, so that he couldn't sort one from the other? On the television set the match was getting bloodier, but he scarcely registered the punishment or the victory. His mind was conjuring Carys' sealed face as she lay on the bed, probing it, looking for explanations.
Leaving the fight commentator to babble on, he went through to the kitchen to fetch another couple of beers from the refrigerator. At this end of the house there was not even a hint of noise from the party-goers. Besides, such a civilized gathering would be hushed, wouldn't it? Just the clink of cut glass, and talk of rich men's pleasures.
Well, fuck them all, he thought. Whitehead and Carys and all of them. It wasn't his world and he wanted no part of it, or them, or her. He could get all the women he wanted anytime-just pick up the phone and call Flynn. No trouble. Let them play their damn-fool games: he wasn't interested. He drained the first can of beer standing in the kitchen, then got out two more cans and took them through to the lounge. He was going to get really blind tonight. Oh, yes. He was going to get so drunk nothing would matter. Especially not her. Because he didn't care. He didn't care.
The tape had finished, and the screen had gone blank. It buzzed with a squirming pattern of dots. White noise. Wasn't that what they called it? It was a portrait of chaos, that hissing, those writhing dots; the universe humming to itself. Empty airwaves were never really empty.
He turned the set off. He didn't want to watch any more matches. His head buzzed like the box; white noise in there too.
He slumped down in the chair and downed the second can of beer in two throatfuls. The image of Carys with Whitehead swam into focus again. "Go away," he told it, aloud; but it lingered. Did he want her, was that it? Would this unease be pacified if he took her to the dovecote one of these afternoons and humped her till she begged him never to stop? The wretched thought only disgusted him; he couldn't defuse these ambiguities with pornography.
As he opened the third beer he found his hands were sweating, a clammy sweat he associated with sickness, like the first signs of flu. He wiped his palms on his jeans and put the beer down. There was more than infatuation fueling his nervousness. Something was wrong. He got up and went to the lounge window. He was staring into the pitch darkness beyond the glass, when it struck him what the wrongness might be. The lights on the lawn and perimeter fence had not been put on tonight. He would have to do it. For the first time since he'd arrived at the house it was real night outside, a night more black than any he'd experienced in many years. In Wandsworth there was always light; floods on the walls burned from twilight to dawn. But here, without streetlamps, there was just night outside.
Night; and white noise.
26
Though Marty had imagined otherwise, Carys wasn't at the dinner party. There were very few freedoms left to her; refusing her father's in
vitations to dinner was one of them. She had endured an afternoon of his sudden tears, his just as sudden accusations. She was weary of his kisses and his doubts. So tonight she'd given herself a larger fix than usual, greedy for forgetfulness. Now all she wanted to do was lie down and bask in not being.
Even as she lay her head on the pillow, something, or someone, touched her. She came around again, startled. The bedroom was empty. The lamps were on and the curtains drawn. There was nobody there: it was a trick of the senses, no more. Yet she could still feel the nerve endings at the nape of her neck tingle where the touch had seemed to come, responding, anemone-like, to the intrusion. She put her fingers there and massaged the place. The jolt had snatched lethargy away for a while. There was no chance of putting her head back down until her heart had stopped hammering.
Sitting up, she wondered where her runner was. Probably at the dinner party with the rest of Papa's court. They'd like that: to have him among them to condescend to. She didn't think of him as an angel any longer. After all he had a name now, and a history (Toy had told her everything he knew). He'd long lost his divinity. He was who he was-Martin Francis Strauss-a man with green-gray eyes; with a scar on his cheek and hands that were eloquent, like an actor's hands, except that she didn't think he'd be very good at professional deceit: his eyes betrayed him too easily.
Then the touch came again, and this time she distinctly felt fingers catching her nape, as though the bone of her spine had been pinched, so, so lightly, between somebody's forefinger and thumb. It was absurd illusion, but too persuasive to be dismissed.
She sat down at her dressing table and felt tremors moving out through her body from her jittering stomach. Was this just the result of a bad fix? She'd never had any problems before: the H that Luther bought from his Stratford suppliers was always of the highest quality: Papa could afford it.
Go back and lie down, she told herself. Even if you can't sleep, lie down. But the bed, as she stood and turned to walk back to it, receded from her, all the contents of the room withdrawing into a corner as though they were painted on linen and had been plucked away from her by some hidden hand.
