Angela sighed. “There is such a thing as a clitoral orgasm, you know. You’ve just spoiled yourself with your maniacal use of that Superskin dildo I bought you for your birthday.”
“If you’d ever tried it, you would understand. It feels real.”
Angela’s face twisted into a sly smile.
“Oh God,” Persephone winced. “You did try it, didn’t you? Before you gave it to me?”
“No, I did not,” Angela protested. “But anyway, how do you know if it feels real or not?”
“Exactly,” said Persephone.
“Exactly,” Angela repeated with a very different emphasis on the word. “What you think feels ‘real’ might actually be far and away better than the real thing. How about that?”
“I’m not convinced.”
“Persephone.” Angela put on her serious face. “What do you want to get a man for?”
“Because I want something to stroke, and I can’t get a dog.”
Angela snorted.
“I’m going to get an English one,” Persephone elaborated. “One with some class, pedigree and breeding. They’re easy to get hold of. Since the Gaian fundamentalists took over the government there, the men have been banned from work and they’re just dying to get out.”
“Yes, dying by the laser as they try to get over the border into Wales. Sure, you’ll find hundreds that want to come over here but how on earth will you get him a visa?”
“How do you think I’ll get him a visa? I’m paying forty million bucks. You know, Angela, I just can’t understand it. Here we are in California with hardly any men at all since the plague, and there are all these fundamentalist states springing up around the world, rendering their menfolk useless with dogma but refusing to let us take them off their hands.”
“Men were useless to us long before the rise of the Gaians,” Angela said sagely. “I can’t believe you want to lumber yourself. Sure, we all lost a few loved ones to the plague, but in return we got our freedom. I mean, most of the women in our grandmothers’ generation, even though they had Margaret Thatcher and Madonna as role models, were as shackled to the kitchen sink as women two thousand years before them. And they would never have dared dabble in a same-sex relationship. Now you can be whatever you want to be. And you can be with whomever you want while you’re being it.”
“As long as they’re a woman,” Persephone sniffed.
“Well, yes... But I can’t believe you’re seriously hoping for a relationship with a man,” Angela continued in the face of Persephone’s dissent. “For a start, any man you meet through an agency will simply be after a ticket out of the UK. And more importantly, men just can’t love like women can. It’s no wonder they got the dog virus, because they are like dogs. They just follow their basest instincts. They go where the food and the sex are.”
“You’re being unfair.”
“And you’re being stupid. If you spend your bonus on a man, it won’t stop there. There’ll be medical bills and insurance for a start. And you’ll still have to buy that bloody Ferrari so that he can rev it like he’s planning to go into orbit every time the traffic moves forward half an inch,”
Persephone leaned over the side of her chair and pulled an untitled folder containing sheets of badly copied photographs out of the magazine rack. “If you take a look at these, I’m sure you’ll change your mind.”
Angela flicked through the pictures.
“Aren’t they beautiful?”
“In a traditional kind of way,” Angela conceded. “They’re all straight lines, aren’t they? Hard corners. It’s like ‘look at me firing on all cylinders’ just because they’ve got dicks. It’s old fashioned, sister. Get yourself a new girlfriend.” Angela folded the brochure shut and handed it quickly back to Persephone, though her eyes lingered on the cover picture just long enough for Persephone to notice that there might have been a spark of interest there.
“If I get one, you can have a ride. Since you’re my very best friend.”
Angela laughed as she stood up to go. “Don’t be disgusting, Persephone. I have a wife at home. Call me when you want to know more about the RTI.”
~ * ~
But Persephone was not about to be put off by arguments about the expense and ethics of it all. Lesbianism may have been the state-approved relationship style but Persephone could never shake off the feeling that she was missing out on something.
She had felt like this for as long as she could remember and while she had the money in her pocket she couldn’t hope to put the thought out of her mind. Besides, she told herself, she would be doing someone a favour. California was becoming more and more isolated from the rest of the world day by day, particularly since the big quake that made the roads to the rest of America pretty much impassable. If she waited even a week, Persephone panicked, she might lose the opportunity to scratch her life-long itch altogether. Plans to bring in instant DNA testing at immigration, to prove that incoming foreigners were really related to the people they said they were visiting, had already been approved by the Senate and there was talk that the tests might even be applied to Americans from other states. With that in mind, Persephone went to the agency that had done so well for Serena the very next day.
Persephone had never been so far downtown before. With the prices they were charging, she would have thought that “Intermates International” could afford to have offices on Rodeo Drive. In fact, they had once had offices at a much smarter address, but since the new immigration laws, these places were effectively illegal. And so, although their charges had soared by hundreds of percent in the two years since Serena had purchased her Peter, their premises had grown progressively seedier with each price hike. They needed to be inconspicuous, able to pack up and disappear overnight. Twenty years earlier and Persephone could have done all her correspondence on the Internet under the watchful eye of a body set up to make sure she wasn’t ripped off. Now, as Angela had warned her, being put in touch with a man was as dangerous as it had once been to score some crack.
The woman at “Intermates International” didn’t look as though she had ever been lucky enough to sample her own merchandise. When Persephone appeared at her office with the banker’s draft for forty million dollars burning a serious hole in her pocket, she was shown through to a poky “assessment room” as though she were coming in for a visit to the dental hygienist after six years of not flossing her teeth. Had Serena’s endorsement of the end product not made Persephone so determined, she might have walked out there and then and looked into buying an RTI.
“Call me when you’re done,” the agent said.
Persephone sat down at the dusty console and picked up the battered VR helmet which sat alongside it. It was an ancient system, hopelessly out of date. When the helmet was fastened firmly in place, the selection process began with a synthetic rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory” accompanied by a graphic of two fluttering flags. The Stars and Stripes for America and the Union Jack for the UK (though it hadn’t been United since the Welsh fundamentalists blew a channel down the border with England ten years before, which confirmed the age of the VR system). After that burst of nostalgic patriotism, Persephone chose her avatar for the session. The choices were several great women from Queen Boudicca to Chelsea Clinton, ex-President of the United States, none of whom exactly touched Persephone’s heart. She chose Cleopatra in the end, but not without a frisson of embarrassment. It seemed such a pretentious choice. But on the other hand, she could hardly identify with Mother Theresa when it came to the matter of choosing a man, could she?
In her electronic form, Persephone progressed into the heart of the programme. She quickly found herself in a white-washed virtual hall, with doors to the left and to the right of her, and strolled straight past all doors referring to female mates until she found the opening that she was looking for. MEN, the sign proclaimed in shimmering golden letters. Persephone’s hand, connected to the circuit by a dubiously worn-looking glove that she hadn’t expected t
o work, pushed against the unnaturally shiny handle until the door gave way... and she was in a corridor again, sighing with disappointment, as though she could honestly have expected to open the door onto a room crowded with guys.
Blond. Dark. Under six feet. Over 180 pounds. The labels on the doors categorised the candidates as simply as if they were jars full of spices. Persephone regarded these choices with bewilderment. She had planned to specify someone along the lines of Serena’s Peter, but now she was scared that by making a decision about one characteristic she might be cutting out Mr. Wonderful just because he had the wrong colour hair.
Persephone’s hand hesitated on the handle of the door marked blond. Historically, Latin-looking lovers were supposed to be more passionate, weren’t they? As door gave way to door, Persephone realised that there must be simply hundreds of combinations of physical appearance. You could specify almost everything, right down to the number of moles on his back, though it was pretty hard to get worked up about the shape of a guy’s fingernails. Persephone answered each choice with the description that she thought closest to the way Peter looked. After all, looks were secondary really.
The personality part came last.
Her interest renewed, Persephone first let herself into the corridor labelled “placid.” A good quality, she thought, the kind of thing you looked for in a Labrador. From there to “humorous.” She didn’t want him to be too deadpan around her friends. Persephone was about to look for “romantic” when she suddenly became aware of a whirring noise in the background. The corridors quickly gave way to the flags again. The test had stopped.
Persephone hurriedly took off the glove and then the helmet. It couldn’t be over, surely? She had only specified two personality characteristics. The machine must have broken down, she thought. But it hadn’t. When Persephone turned around on the creaking swivel chair, she saw that the agent was standing behind her again, leaning over an ancient laser printer as if by staring at it viciously she could make it spew something out more quickly.
“Is that it?” Persephone asked the woman’s back. “I mean, I didn’t even get to see any pictures of the men on your books. And there weren’t many questions about temperament and personality, were there?”
“Most people don’t even notice that,” said the agent. Persephone thought the woman’s hard face almost broke into a smile when she saw what Persephone’s three hours on the machine had produced. The printer spat out a kind of photofit image of the wanted man. Six foot plus. Blond and handsome. Of course.
“We don’t promise a love match,” the agent added pointedly. “I know how romantic you Cleopatras are. Though it is still a big commitment you’re entering into. You realise that if we send you someone you’re not happy with, you will still be liable for all costs incurred while getting him through immigration, including bribes, and have to pay an allowance to him until he finds an alternative sponsor? And even if he does, he might not tell you. You could go on paying him forever and never get any action.”
“Of course,” said Persephone.
“If you’re fine with all that, we should have someone for you in about a week.”
“A week?”
“Sure. There’s no problem getting English men these days. They’re desperate to get out of there. Country’s full of fundamentalist nuts who want to have them executed for having dicks. But,” she placed her hand professionally on Persephone’s arm in a gesture calculated to inspire confidence, “you can rest assured that we still screen for quality despite the influx, Ms. Rayfield.”
“A week?” Persephone repeated disbelievingly. “What about immigration?”
“As I said, there’ll be bribes. Forty million dollars is still quite a lot of money to some people.”
The agent handed Persephone her jacket and showed her to the door rather hurriedly, as though she wanted to get out of there herself. “Oh, I almost forgot,” she said as Persephone was stepping outside. “We’ll need a deposit.”
Persephone authorised the transfer of twenty million dollars to the account of “Intermates International,” which traded under the innocuous name of “Inter-office Services,” and went away feeling slightly hollow.
~ * ~
That night, she called Serena.
“Of course you feel hollow, my dear. I’m not saying that it isn’t a great deal of money but believe me, it will be worth it. You’ll be the most popular girl on the block.”
“What if I don’t like him? I’ll still have to pay for him.”
“You could hire him out.”
“Serena!”
“Where’s your problem with that? You would lend me your car for a fee, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, I suppose. Oh, I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing. It would be so much easier if I could have a dog.”
“No-one can get a dog. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got.”
“I don’t know. I was reading something in the paper today. One of the left- wing senators from upstate is lobbying for the reintroduction of certain breeds. They reckon that the culling and neutering policy during the Parvo crisis succeeded in wiping the virus out. No reason why they shouldn’t reintroduce some of the dogs now it’s gone.”
“What? It’ll never happen, Perse.”
“I think it might,” she said hopefully. “With such a shortage of men it doesn’t seem fair that so many women should be condemned to grow old without even so much as the occasional lick.”
“Ha ha ha. But what about all those grannies who still remember how their sons died? They’re a powerful vote, you know.”
“I suppose,” Persephone conceded.
There were indeed grandmothers like Persephone’s own, who had taken the family Labrador outside and shot it after her son and grandson caught the fatal canine-carried disease. The dog had been Persephone’s birthday present, but Grandma Rayfield had placed a single bullet between the puppy’s eyes while it was still wagging its tail.
Persephone refused to visit her dying brother in the hospital after that. After all, it’s hard to choose between your dog and your brother at the age of five.
“Anyway, what did you go for?” Serena was trying to steer the conversation back into cheerier waters.
Persephone looked at the printout the agency had given her to take away, then pushed it across the table to Serena. “Pretty similar to yours, really. Blond. Muscular. English.”
“Great. They can be playmates. Pity we can’t mate them together and start a line of our own,” she added.
“Yeah,” Persephone laughed. “I suppose we could always mate them with us?”
“What? Are you kidding? And get varicose veins. And haemorrhoids. Not to mention getting as fat as a house.”
“Would that bother you?”
“No,” Serena lied. “But why risk birth defects when you can get sperm from your friendly gynaecologist that’s been more rigorously tested than the air bags in your car? I’m having mine done surrogate and I’m having a girl. Who’s going to look after me in my dotage otherwise?”
“I thought you were going to go for euthanasia when things got that bad.”
“I know. But right now I’m enjoying life so much. And I have to outlive Peter, don’t I? I mean, who’ll take on a fifty-something love muffin that’s already been trained in all the worst habits? He’d starve without me.”
“It’s one hell of a commitment, isn’t it?” Persephone said gravely.
“Well,” sighed Serena. “It’s certainly not just for Christmas.”
~ * ~
A week later, Persephone’s doubts dissolved when she saw her very own man step off the plane from Heathrow. The woman from the agency had called only that morning to let Persephone know a match had been found and would be flying into Los Angeles that very afternoon. The boy had been given special permission to leave Britain to visit his dying cousin (a number of false birth and marriage certificates had linked him to Persephone), and Intermates had to get him on a plan
e before it was discovered that he had no such American relation. The agent gave Persephone the option to have him lodged in a hotel until she was ready to receive him, but Persephone would hear of no such thing. She wanted to see him straight away.
She recognised him the second he strolled out of Immigration. It seemed as though every head in the arrivals lounge turned in his direction. Persephone had suspected that the agency’s faxed picture of him had been enhanced, so she was delighted to discover that in actual fact it was almost true to life. Only his hair wasn’t quite so blond. But that wasn’t too surprising. Even since they got a decent climate it seemed that the English preferred to stay indoors.
The boy recognised her too, and he instantly switched on a smile that lit up his face and made Persephone feel like she was the only girl in the whole airport. When he was close enough, they shook hands quite formally, but Persephone was sure that she could feel the first tremors of an orgasm at even such a fleeting touch.
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