by Love, John
“Would you have asked anyone?”
“Of course not.”
“Exactly. I did what you do every day: leave people running around in your wake, clearing up after you.”
Again, without leaving his eyes, she spoke to Gaetano. “Hear that? It identifies with me. With my methods. Just because for once it does something a bit decisive, it thinks it’s turning into me.”
He threw out a hand, spread into a Verb configuration, at her throat. It stopped maybe a tenth of an inch before touching her. He was frighteningly fast. If he’d wanted to, he could have completed the blow and left her headless before Gaetano had even started to move. Before she had even started to register the shock she was now registering.
Molecules had rearranged to harden his fingers into striking surfaces. He allowed himself to brush her throat lightly, then withdrew his hand. He’d put his hands all over her before, over parts much more private than her throat, but this touch was different. It caused something between them to shift.
“That’s how easy it would be for me to put an end to this mission, and this conversation, and you. And the people I’m supposed to be protecting you from have apparently got something that kills people like me. And still you won’t tell me the truth about them.”
She seemed to be having trouble breathing. He turned to Gaetano, shrugged an apology, and turned back to her.
“You see, I really don’t buy what you’ve told me. Not all of it. These people who threaten you, they’re serious enough for you to get Rafiq to give you a Consultant, but not serious enough for you to tell me everything about them. Who, where, and why. All I’ve got is conspiracy theories. A cell of mega-rich movers and shakers operating indirectly through the founders, passing you handwritten notes. The rest of it, you just hint at. Almost coyly, like it’s some second virginity you might let me have one day.”
He paused, glanced again at Gaetano, and continued. He still spoke quietly, but his voice took on an edge.
“And there’s something else you haven’t told me. Not world-picture stuff about the founders, but something quite specific.Afinaldetailwhichoverturnseverythingelse.Iknow it’s there. What is it?”
“I never said...” She stopped, caught her breath, and began again. “I never said anything about some final detail.”
“No, you didn’t. That was me.”
“Then you’re putting words in my mouth.”
“No. Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth…”
She looked up at him, as if reminded of something she’d forgotten. An instant of scalding attention, then she turned to Gaetano. “Leave us,” she said hoarsely.
Gaetano was almost relieved to do so. He didn’t know what he’d been doing there in the first place.
As the door closed behind Gaetano, they faced each other.
“You still haven’t answered my question. After we’ve done here, I’ll ask you again.”
“After we’ve done here, I’ll give you an answer.”
They started circling.
“I should get showered and cleaned up first.”
“No you shouldn’t. I want it now.”
“I haven’t shaved or washed,” he told her, “in five days. Or cleaned my teeth, or changed my clothes.” They were only token objections. He was surprised at how much he’d been looking forward to returning to his routine. Nothing else with her was simple or uncomplicated, but sex was.
“Yes,” she said, “you smell like shit. The suit still looks good, though.”
“You get what you pay for,” he said, lifting her onto the table. He pulled up her skirt, carefully and tidily. She was wearing silk knickers which, with equal care, he pulled down and left around her knees; an encumbrance, but the essence was to disarrange, not denude.
She waited, patiently but uninterested, while he did all this, even while he made some final adjustments of her skirt upwards and her knickers downwards; then, after pausing to admire his handiwork, he entered her. That was his part done, and now she began hers, taking him inside her voraciously. Such particular intimacies, to a normal couple, might have meant something; but Anwar and Olivia were neither normal nor a couple. It was an arrangement, simple and self-contained, where each party did what he or she wanted, without regard for the feelings of the other. Masturbation for two.
By now she was well into her part. Where he’d been painstaking and obsessive, she was greedy. After five days, greedier than ever. For a moment he felt she’d never let him out again, at least not the way he’d come in. Eventually she did, but only to go another time, and another.
Who was it she was taking into herself like this? Not a real person but a device, a designer dildo. And who was it that he was entering like this? Not a real person but a container, into which he was pumping his contents. It suited both of them perfectly: only a Consultant would have the constitution and stamina to match her appetites.
Afterwards, they sat at opposing places on the table. She smoothed down her skirt; so careful had he been in his preliminaries that it looked no tidier rearranged than it had been when he’d pulled it up.
She usually looked at him without noticing, or noticed him only in passing, and he realised he’d been doing the same to her. But now he noticed. Her face looked drawn, as if she too had spent the last five days in the Signing Room. There was a feverishness in her stare and a downturn, accentuated by lines, at the corners of her mouth. A sort of desperation about her. Arden never looked like this.
“Not enough,” she said hoarsely.
He hoisted her up on the table again, and was about to restart his ritual, but she stopped him. “No. You prefer it naked, don’t you?”
Surprised, he nodded. They started undressing.
Of all the things I’d like to put in your mouth… He did put it in her mouth. Then her hands. And then her vagina, and that surprised him, because this time she took it less greedily. She’s trying to share, he thought incredulously. She was clumsy at it because it was alien to her, and it made him feel embarrassed; and also uneasy, at the apparent shift from their previous routine.
“Don’t do that again,” he said afterwards. “It didn’t work.”
“The other way wasn’t enough.”
“That way was too much.”
She looked away. Then she gathered herself, like she’d done when he tried to stare her down. “I said it wasn’t enough! Go again. It’s not enough any more.”
Like the Reith Lecture, he thought, a small animal baring its teeth. But none of the attacks in the Reith Lecture had unsettled her like this. Not even the one on her life.
They went again, and it still didn’t work. Still trying to share, and she still wasn’t much good at it—her reciprocal movements were clumsy and unsynchronised to his, and she didn’t pick up quickly enough on what he liked her doing. He preferred it when she didn’t care what he liked. This way gave him nothing. He didn’t think to wonder what she might have wanted from it, only that gave him nothing.It didn’t work and it wasn’t the same. Something had shifted.
He stood up abruptly, and started dressing. After watching for a while the play of his almost nonhuman musculature, she too started dressing.
“What’s this about?” he asked, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“What do you...”
“Don’t say, ‘What do you mean.’ You know what I mean. Why isn’t it enough? Why does it have to be different?”
“Something you said in Brighton, about if I hated people less and understood them more.”
“What has that got to do with what happened here? I was talking about fundamentalists, about how you treat your enemies.”
“You were talking about how I treat everyone. I can deal with media and mass audiences, but not with individual people, whether they’re enemies or friends. I’ve never noticed them. I’ve never had a relationship that works both ways, not with any of them. So...”
“So you decided to practice on me?”
; “Not practice. Start.”
He laughed out loud. “Start a relationship, with a Consultant?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, not that kind of relationship.” She hurried on, conscious that she’d immediately backed down at the first sign of derision, and was now fighting only for her fallback position. “And I have to start with someone. And I got Rafiq to send you here, and I never really stopped to notice you. And when I asked you things about yourself, I’d forget your answers even before you finished speaking. And—” She was conscious of too many Ands, as if she was scrambling for anything she could find. She took a breath and began again. “—And you’d be only the first. I have to start somewhere.” She knew how lame it sounded, and added “After you I could go on to real people.” She’d meant it to cover her retreat, but it sounded worse; gratuitous, and ugly.
He stopped laughing. “Then skip the part with me and go straight to real people, because this didn’t work. It was embarrassing.”
He wasn’t merely embarrassed, he was burning with embarrassment.It was knotting his stomach. A woman in her thirties trying to learn the elements of courtship, of pleasing a partner. Sucking me into herself. Or, if he believed her fall-back position, trying to learn how to notice and value people. Either way she had years to make up, and he couldn’t see beyond mid-October.
He strode over to the full-length Boardroom window. The early evening view of the Brighton foreshore and the i-360 Tower was beguiling as always, but he wasn’t really looking at it; only turning his back on her.
This mission had threatened to overturn his life, and he’d staved that off by the change that had come over him since meeting Rafiq—the change that had made him take decisive action and let others do the worrying and pick up the pieces. And now that change, and her reaction to it, was in turn threatening to overturn his life. The same threat, from another direction.
“You’re different since you’ve come back,” she said, and immediately knew how fatuous it sounded; she’d only said it to avoid saying other things. When he didn’t reply, shea dded, “Was it your meeting with Rafiq?”
“Yes.”
“What happened there? Tell me about it.”
He told her. As with Gaetano, he omitted references to the names and number of Consultants, and left out the conversation with Arden Bierce, but he was grateful to be able to retreat into the detail. It stopped him saying other things.
“Well,” she said when he’d finished, “it checks out.”
“What checks out?”
“Gaetano told me all that yesterday, and his account was almost exactly the same as yours. He practices—” she hurried over the word “—eidetic techniques. He works very hard at it.”
He would, Anwar thought. Not like me, I was made. He has to work at it. And he’d work with quiet persistence and thoroughness. With near-obsessiveness. He’d make a good Consultant. In fact, maybe he was. Another labyrynthine move of Rafiq’s? A secret twentieth Consultant, unknown to the others? No, now a secret nineteenth. No, eighteenth.
He turned away from the window and faced her. “You said you’d answer my question about that final detail.”
“You started this. You shouldn’t have said that to me in Brighton. If Rafiq had sent someone else, I’d never have heard it.”
“Answer my question.”
“And you should go and get cleaned up. And I must go, too. I have an organisation to run, and a summit in seven days. And I need to eat.” She looked at him. “Alone.”
“My question.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t answer it.”
“You said...”
“I can’t. But if we survive this, you’ll know why I can’t.”
2
He walked through the early evening, across the Garden from the Cathedral to the New Grand. He walked through the lobby and up to his suite. He shaved, cleaned his teeth, took a long shower, and changed his clothes. It took him over an hour to clean off the last five days, particularly the last hour of the fifth day.
His book, the replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, was on his bed where he’d left it. He picked it up and held it in his hands. He thought, I’ve only really known two women, and in the space of five days I’ve refused them both. I had to. One’s a colleague, and the other’s an obscenity. And a threat.
Relationships could kill you, he knew, or at least rape you. Being that close to someone was a kind of violation. They’d suck you dry, or touch parts of you nobody else should be all owed to touch. But he wished he hadn’t laughed out loud at her. What she’d said was embarrassing, but laughing out loud was worse.
He looked at the book for a moment longer, then did something he’d normally have thought impossible: he tore out a page.
It was the page with Sonnet 116. He ringed the first four lines, and wrote I want you to have this. A. His handwriting was a neat italic, done with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Hers, he remembered from random documents where he’d glimpsed her annotations, was large and untidy, with strong loops and vertical downstrokes, done with any old pen which happened to be at hand.
He’d often thought that getting to know someone’s handwriting was one of the opening stages of intimacy. But that was appropriate only for simple sexual relationships or complicated loving ones, or perhaps for close friendships. He sensed that the first had ended and knew that the other two would never begin.
He went up to the next floor. He walked past the door leading to her apartments, nodding politely to the guard (not Proskar this time), and on to Gaetano’s office.
Gaetano looked tired, but stood as he entered and greeted him courteously. The office was tidy as always, but in the last five days it had become crowded. Several monitor screens had been added, some free-standing and some fixed to the walls. They showed readouts and status reports for various aspects of the summit preparations. The first members of the delegations would start arriving tomorrow—not VIPs but support staff, and not in New Grand suites but in smaller hotels in Brighton. Anwar recalled the exhaustive and painstaking description Gaetano had given him of his, Gaetano’s, involvement in the security for the summit: a huge edifice, for which he was solely responsible. Meatslab or not, he’s there by his own efforts. Me, I was just made. Enough. I must stop telling myself that. It’s his problem, and he knows what he’s doing. I’ve got other concerns.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Gaetano, “what did you say?”
“I said something changed tonight between you and her. I didn’t like it.”
“Neither did I.” But neither of them felt disposed to elaborate. After a brief but uncomfortable silence, Anwar went on. “And what was all that about, speaking to me through you, and calling me It? Has she ever done that before?”
“No. I didn’t like that either. And when you made that play of striking at her...”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“I couldn’t see any other way you could shut her up. You seemed to know what you were doing.”
Thanks, Anwar thought, but didn’t say. It would have sounded like over-egging the pudding. His working relationship with Gaetano was satisfactory, but not exactly comfortable, and delicately balanced.
Another silence ensued, which Gaetano broke. “What’s that bit of paper you’re holding?”
“Something I want to her to see. Will you take me to her apartments?”
“She won’t be there, she’s in meetings.”
“I know. I’d like to leave it for her. On her bed.”
“On her bed?”
“I’ll explain when we get there. Will you take me?”
Never look surprised, was one of the maxims from his training.When he saw her bedroom for the first time he managed to mask his surprise, but only just. The one interior, on the whole of the New West Pier, that wasn’t pearlescent white and silver. And what it was, was even more surprising than what it wasn’t.
It was like the bedroom of an upmarket whore: deep-pile carpe
t and shot-silk wallhangings, deep-buttoned velvet upholstery and satin sheets, all in voluptuous dark purples and blues and reds, the colours of her dresses. And her untidiness was daubed over it like slogans: an unmade bed, clothes left over chairs and on the floor, chocolate wrappers strewn everywhere, and scraps of paper with notes scribbled in her large handwriting with its loops and downstrokes.
Her ginger cat was there too, fixing him with a baleful amber glare and hissing furiously. “Yes,” he agreed, “and Fuck You too.”
They’d walked through some of her other rooms—reception, library, office, sitting room, dining room—to get here, and all were exactly like rooms everywhere else on the New West Pier. It was as though this was her last personal refuge. He felt like he shouldn’t have seen it.
Anwar gave the page to Gaetano, who read it and handed it back. Carefully, Anwar put it on her bed; then, in case it got lost amid the tumble of unmade bedclothes, he put it on her pillow.
“I don’t like this, it’s wrong,” Gaetano said.
“It’s only a gesture.”
“I warned you before: don’t read too much into how she behaves with you.”
“I’m not. Particularly after tonight.”
“I think you are. That Shakespeare quote is hardly ambiguous.”
“Ambiguous is exactly what it is.”
“Then I’ve got another quote, just for you. ‘The verb To Love is hard to conjugate. The past isn’t simple, the present isn’t indicative, the future is very conditional.’ I read books too.”
Or perhaps just quotation dictionaries. “Yes, Cocteau knew he was being clever when he wrote that, but in this case it’s irrelevant. I’ve got another quote too: Velvet Bag of Shit. That’s what I think of her, Gaetano, that and nothing else. I’ll protect her because it’s what my mission says and I don’t walk away from missions, but otherwise...”
