by Jeremy Reed
'Probably the next one,' Leanda took up. 'Towards the middle to end. Cellular degeneracy will become treatable. A whole synergistic cocktail of drugs will prevent our extinction.'
Betty fidgeted. The man with the emerald lenses began talking about virtual reality. Computer images generated by stereoscopic liquid crystal screens would become the new way of entering alternative dimensions. 'It would be just like wearing a pair of heavy sunglasses,' he was saying. He was explaining how the digitised input could lead to bizarre forms of auto-eroticism. The software man who wanted to have cunnilingus with Marilyn Monroe would develop a full-body suit which conveys sensation by pressure pads. In his high-tech wetsuit, and computer-accessed to the star, the sexual rite would begin. Object gadgetry like inflatable dolls, would disappear overnight.
The midget instructed the guests to remove their black gloves, and Betty followed the unspoken protocol of placing these wide of her plate, on the understanding that they would be used again later. She became aware that additional company had entered the room. Two masked women, both with the same poppy coloured hennaed hair were standing one on either side of the doorway. Betty guessed from their petite height that they were Japanese. They were dressed in black sequined leotards with seamed fishnet tights. They appeared to be observing a ritual, and before the midget served individual portions of the main dish, one of them took up a book and began reading. 'All mysteries are translated into images. Imagination means reinventing the world. There was once a penis fish, it was purple with black fins and a single blue eye. It was kept in the emperor's private aquarium, and was said to have originated from his brother who underwent a sex change. To stimulate his sexual appetite, the emperor would watch the missile-shaped fish propel itself round the large spheroid aquarium. One night in a perverse mood of sexual hunger, he ordered the fish to be caught and prepared for his dinner. He was convinced of its aphrodisiacal properties, and consequently had selected his ideal sexual partners for after dinner entertainment. The bed already had the curtains drawn to conceal those members of his private harem who were waiting for him. The emperor ate the penis fish, and experienced the rush of sexual energy he had anticipated. But as he got up from his chair and headed towards the bedroom, he felt his vision restricted. He was seeing through one monofocused eye, without side vision. His hands instinctively went up to his face. He still had hands, but the shape of his face was veined and tubular. He directed himself towards the mirror, and to his terror discovered that his body from the head down to his groin was one extended penis. He still had arms and legs for mobility, but otherwise he was totally changed. When his bodyguards found him, he asked to be placed in the aquarium, and there over a matter of months his arms and legs were transformed into fins. He became what he should never have eaten.'
The girl stopped reading, knelt down at the other's feet, kissed her on each pointed boot, before the two of them retreated.
By now the guests were served, and dinner began. Betty had imagined the dish would turn out to be poached turbot or trout à la hollandaise, but the delicate pink flesh laid on a base of vine leaves eluded sense detection. Boneless, and marginally sinewy, the taste imparted by the texture was salty — a sort of seafood conundrum — Betty couldn't quite get it, and pursued her serving more out of curiosity than relish for the food. Conversation was intermittently spaced between periods of eating. Betty had known so many weirdos, and their inventory of fetishes was inexhaustible. She had once been paid to spoon-feed a woman pistachio sorbet while she adopted a crucifixional pose, wrists and feet bound to an ebony cross by red silk cord. And there was the man who insisted on being placed in an open coffin underneath the dining room table, and in that position he liked to be fed the heads of red carnations which had been dipped in tiger's urine, procured at great expense from a zoo keeper. Betty had known them all, and her assignment at the château seemed like still another commission to entertain the terminally bored. She had a client, a man who liked to be whipped by strings of pearls, who insisted on reading out passages from Huysmans' A Rebours as he underwent correction. Betty was acquainted with all the memorable passages from that source book of decadence. She had been introduced to a world of perverse exoticism and role acting — her penthouse clients still resisting being desktopped into computer sex, and able by money to purchase their extreme needs. There was one man who liked to be brought off simply by the friction of her false eyelashes on his cock. The method was an agonizingly slow one, but earned her the notes she always insisted the client place in her shoes, subtly transferring the act of debasement to the punter.
Betty kept trying to imagine what demands would be placed on her here at the château. Would the two men share her, or would they pair off together leaving her to the two women? She imagined Nicole strapping on a mamba and entering her while she made love to Leanda. The food was ceasing to interest her, despite the studious manner in which the others were assessing its merits. A roast peacock stuffed with truffles and served on bread canapes followed, but Betty was bored. The conversation went wide of her. She would like to have earned her money quickly, and been driven back into town. It was too quiet for her. The midget came back in, his coat sparkling where it caught the light. He made a round of the table, and poured the wine.
Betty could make out fragments of a story that the man wearing emerald lenses was telling Leanda. 'I can assure you it happened like that.., it was in the mini-dungeon in the back of the Daimler. You know Dominic had a sex change in order to cater for Patricia's lesbianism. It was the condition of their marriage. And the Daimler. Really. Red curtains, studded black leather upholstery, button-operated dildos which telescoped from the front seat backs. Well this time, they went too far. I only heard about the arrest last week. Do you remember that time Patricia appeared at the Fetish Club and told everyone that her face powder was cocaine? Well it was. They were prepared to go that far.'
Betty drifted in and out of the fragmentary confidences imparted by the two. Her own experiences, confined strictly to the estate, led her to make comparative associations with clients she had known. She had attended parties at which the sorbet had been tinctured with Ecstasy or some other hallucinogen, and the effects had led to extravagant orgies. High, sensual and deeply responsive to the tactile, straight men had found themselves becoming sodomitical slaves — Betty remembered seeing a pistachio ice-cream, cone and all, slide neatly into a compliant asshole, while the man hungrily searched amongst swollen cacti for the right one to suck. Betty had watched the man's normally reserved Japanese wife look on with increasing lust, the three fingers of her right hand dividing a slit with aesthetic expertise. She had done it like parting the petals of a swollen orchid, a tiny lipstick dribble extending from a smudged nether lip like a suspended trickle of wine. In her life the bizarre was the norm. There was the woman who paid her each week to renew the necklace of blue love-bites that she liked to wear as a circle around her bottom and waist. Betty renewed the lozenges with meticulous concern for detail, never increasing the size of the bite, for to do so would have incurred the client's displeasure. Each bite was the size of a pout, the tongue working on a natural rather than extended radius. This woman would examine the surface bruises with a mirror to assure herself of Betty's accuracy. The client had discovered that inciting jealousy in men was an additional incentive to sexual performance. And besides, Betty's doing it, particularly from behind, excited the woman to orgasmic frenzy. She would ask to be tickled with a pink feather as the culminating gesture to the session.
Betty wondered how the four guests at table would respond to the woman who insisted on being placed in a cage, and denied the pleasure she desired. Betty was paid to place dark green drapes over the specially made cage. Constructed from bamboo with supporting steel bars, and lined with dark blue satin, the naked blonde inside would pay her to play a game of elusive provocation. Betty would have to brush the bars with her erection, always keeping the head wide of the woman's grasping bite, and only occasionally all
owing the woman's lips the briefest contact with her prepuce. Dressed in nothing but scarlet lipstick and a necklace worn at the waist, the woman would throw herself against the bars while Betty retreated towards a star-shaped bed, all the time simulating the act of serious masturbation. The performance would go on over a period of hours. When the blonde woman inside the cage grew too delirious, Betty as instructed, threw the green drapes over the cage, thereby heightening the intensity of the woman's pleasure. The cage would rock with her demonstrative frustration, with her hands tied in a silk cord behind her head, and unable to relieve herself, her need grew to an agonising ritual. Betty would then throw off the drapes, and the whole procedure would begin all over again until the client dropped from fatigue. When the captive was too exhausted to continue, she would open the cage with a large key, and the collapsed blonde would crawl out on all fours. Betty would have received her payment on trust, before the ritual began, and sometimes she was obsessed with the crazy notion of ditching the key and running. It was only the prospect of losing an assured income that had her side with rationality. And the client's kicks came from the wager.
She was letting go the present, and colliding with images from the near past. Monsters rushed at her from a dark corridor, She had a vision of four poster beds floating down an underground river. On one of them, a woman dressed in a red negligée was doing a yogic headstand. The bed had navigation lights, and a green one winked at the bank. Betty couldn't break up the drift inside her head. It came on inexorably. Debased acts, and ones in which she had suffered real humiliation crowded into consciousness. There were so many. She had been degraded, and she had degraded others. Where did it all end? In her lucid intervals she found herself contemplating that question. Did it all stop simply because death pulled the plug? The past, as it was on recall, showed up at anytime. It could be on the stairs, nudge you from the driver's seat, blow you back out of an alley into the middle of a traffic-gunned road. Betty had often considered how those steeped in sex had undergone the major initiations into death. Abandoning the body to a partner's potential violence, or submitting to a particular fetish demanded a corresponding empathy with personal extinction. Anything could happen in those situations, the client resenting having to pay for the realisation of a need, and she often repulsed by their physical advances. Betty had so often prepared for the end. She had felt a blade caress her throat as a Lloyds underwriter had acted out his fantasy of equating sex with intended murder. She had entered leather dungeons in which the chances of coming out alive were minimal. And death for her had come to represent the light of a Thursday afternoon falling lazily through high attic windows overlooking a harbour complex. The sky dabbling blue and green along the coast.
She could hear them talking again. 'No it wasn't like that, John. She has reached E grade in the lodge. After that you risk death. But a number of them were chased off the ruin of De Sade's château at La Coste. They had to run naked, handcuffed, gagged, or in whatever state of bondage they were. But they caught X. He was still tied to an oak. He was wearing the red leather mask, the gold amphalang, and there's a sign somewhere on his body... it's never been disclosed. But they let him go. He says that he dematerialised. But they wouldn't have dared keep him. Imagine the scandal if his identity was revealed. Imagine it.'
From what Betty could determine, the four of them were initiates to a sexual cult. Names were never mentioned. And the obvious meeting-places were clearly code words for secret venues.
No-one was attempting to engage her in dialogue. Perhaps they were punishing her for her resistance to the company. She would have preferred the whip to tickle her back as an assertive gesture, rather than undergo this connived exclusion.
Somewhere in all of this there was a green sorbet served with pralines. Betty hardly considered it. The monkey had run into the hall once, only to be pursued by the midget. Betty wondered if there wasn't a mirror through which they would all disappear. Walking towards her own reflection she would find herself telescoped into a post-death state. The big one — the final earthquake to rock Hollywood's star belt had occurred. Instead of being here she was underground in a ferro-concrete bunker lined with gold discs. Someone was screaming to her, 'I'm dead, I can't get back. Help me, help me.' And this was the singer who was worth two hundred million. It could happen that easily, Betty told herself. Mirrors were there to walk through. Betty could hear voices coming at her. It was like her drink had been spiked. It was the two men who were in conversation. 'Do you think it was human or a tiger's? Nicole won't tell me, other than it was penis that we ate.'
There was a sustained silence before the other voice came in. 'I'm more concerned about whose it was. Cannibalism can have adverse effects on the gene pool. Was the castration self-imposed or the result of an operation? Was it got from a morgue or a theatre?'
It registered with Betty that she had eaten penis as the course over which the midget officiated with such respect for the gold foil and the decorative black crosses. The delicate, salty meat served on olive leaves was once the sensitive tissue of somebody's glans. There was no end to perverse gastronomy. She felt ill at the prospect of digesting human substance. The information must have been incorrect. She was dreaming it. There was a muzzy halo to her thinking. Her conscious perceptions weren't connecting. There were gaps, blank pockets into which she disappeared. She was suddenly a child again, holding a smoking firework in her hand like a pyromaniac, or discovering facts in the afternoon, like that thing adults called death, when someone who had a name went missing and wouldn't ever answer again. She used to think they had gone off to the coast and walked out across the sea to a castle on the waves. The one that had black flags flying in the noon. Bits of her life cut in and out of awareness. She could hear one of the men addressing Nicole, only it sounded a long way away, as though someone was trying to speak to her inside a dream. 'I don't even know if he's still alive. He was living at Nice. He built his own elaborate catafalque. He spent his life in mourning for his lost youth. They say that every night he prepared for death, and dressed up for the part using elaborate make up. And every night he wrote. a page of renunciation to life, a sort of book of the dead, but in the form of a novel. It's a remarkable story. His head slept within a circle of black carnations which were cut and dyed for the ceremony. I doubt if anyone would be qualified to carry out his final instructions. And no-one seems to know if he is dead, the fiction surrounding his life has turned him into a legend. He had contrived to teach his staff a secret language, so that leakage to the press would be minimal.'
'It's the subject of biography,' Leanda asserted. ‘Have you heard the story about his wine cellar? He buys at auctions – first growth clarets from Napoleon Bonaparte's cellar and the last Czar's; wines from every extravagant lot, but apparently there is also wine tinctured with human blood, and re-corked. He is said to have vintages spiked with Aleister Crowley's blood, Elvis Presley's, a whole pantheon of occult and cultural icons.'
'It's an amazing story,' the man's voice resumed. ‘Information gets out, and I suppose that's because he wants certain things to be known. In order to exist, things have to happen. An identity is often the sum of accumulative events. You can't exist to the world without facts. There's the story of how he was supposed to have opened his hands out to a guest, and they were thick with ices. It's impossible to know what's true. At least since the time he has more or less permanently entered his death room.'
Betty caught at words and fragments of sentences she couldn't grasp. She was convinced that perhaps she too was dying, find that what she heard and saw belonged to the underworld. She had known that trance state in illness. There wasn't anything tangible to hold on to, just the mind's autonomous drift through hallucinatory clusters. She was nosing into grey zones through which pink fish floated. A gigantic mouth yawned open and shut. There was a city inside it. And suddenly there were white monkeys sitting on what appeared to be a cemetery wall. They were all looking in her direction. She could feel the power o
f that collective stare pushing her back into herself, until she blacked out in a slow motion somersault to nowhere.
*
Part II
The Dungeon
When Betty came to she was lying on leather. The black surface moulded itself to her body. Someone had sprayed her hands with gold body paint, for they became instantly visible to her as two fluorescent toads squatting on either side of her. She was lying face down, and the positional arrangement of her hands and feet was such that she couldn't move. But there was no crudity of handcuffs it shackles. Some sort of invisible adhesive tape secured her Immobility. Betty rested her head on the point of her chin. She was lying lacing a blank maxi-screen. The room was lit by two flaming oldies, one protruding from the mouth of a white statue, the other socketed into a kneeling marble form. The pervasive stillness was like being at the bottom of a lake. Betty imagined panthers, jaguars, pumas, slumped down beside her. Black on black.
What she recalled was the bizarre dinner table, the conspiratorial stretches of conversation that had been issued wide of her, the unnerving silence that pervaded the château — and green the man's lenses that had fixated her, as though she had confronted an alien with emerald VR contact lenses instead of eyes. Her mind was busy reassembling fragments of the narrative. The woman talking to her from behind the limo's partly open window, and the other one in the moulded leather skirt, the sexual liturgies delivered by the midget and the two oriental pashas, the hints at a menagerie contained within the house. Visuals flashed across consciousness. She had found herself in this position often in the past, but always voluntarily. Dungeon bondage was one of her specialities, an elegant cigarette drooping from her cherry gloss lips as she hung suspended from a chain, a man kneeling in front of her, blowing her engorged erection. It was so close to death, and the mutual stimulus came from this recognition. Betty regarded each S&M trip as a pre-death initiation. She often hoped to die in an act that was as flagrantly anti-social as it was self-debasing. Violating convention by bringing its administrative bureaucrats down to their gold-plated knees for her whip-hand was part of Betty's attraction to being a prostitute. It allowed her to undermine those proponents of political correctness — politicians, bankers, accountants, lawyers — the whole glitterati of moral pretence had opened wide for enemas, or shouted obscene imprecations as the whip had established slats like a blue venetian blind across delicate flesh.
