I don’t care about the middles or the ends anyway. Middles: things are beyond the initial high, exciting possibilities are stifled by too much knowledge and so are starting to fade.
As for the end, who needs it?
As I clean the shelves and tidy the varnishes, snorting, cynical Francine tells me what the reality of my fantasy would be like in cold terms (she remembers Va-va-vance only too well).
The sex would be like some other bodily function that can be disgusting: blowing a nose and finding blood-filled snot pouring out of it all unexpectedly; passing a bowel movement when you have bad piles, or violently explosive diarrhoea full of chilli; bursting an abscess in a shock of pain and seeing strangely congealed matter fly out of your living body—as disgusting as a dead dog three days old. Probably.
It wouldn’t be worse, she promised me. To be worse than that it would require I care, and I wouldn’t care about it because I was Hardened and Smart.
Of course I did care, both real and unreal Francine because sex is the place where the insides are stripped bare, whether you like it or not, and yours and theirs get mixed up, whether you like that or not, and whatever it does to you it does without your permission and makes you different, even if you don’t think it does. And oh, what if you held nothing back and then . . . ? Then I think you fall in love whether you like it or not.
Ugh, I don’t want to think about that. Most people here do it like it was breathing, with about as much care and attention, I’m sure of it. And that’s a big disappointment too.
However, I have to pretend that I don’t care in my game with myself, which is two pretences in one. The double barrel of pretences is half the fun of course, and I like the idea of being lots of contradictory things at once. I imagined having the kind of willpower that overcomes all squeamishness and all biology. I imagined steely determination and backbone, like someone in a Jane Austen book. I dreamed that I could be that good, that cool, that strong in my ideas that the body doesn’t matter. I’d be the kind of person who proves that Heaven and Hell are real places, necessary real consequences of a morally fibrous world. My mere existence asserts it absolutely: I mean, I make it real because I act as though it is, which is how most real invisible things are made.
Giddy with the sudden sense of a gilt-edged future, I imagined myself as a great Diva, walking out with my head held high. Actually, scrub that. Romance like that is for the biggest idiots in creation. It’s a kind of superlie—a real whopper that involves seeing the entire world in a way that’s all about you. In reality the people who work here sell their bodies with the ease of shrugging off coats from their backs. Everything about life that bothers me has never crossed their minds. They’re either beyond giving a toss because they’re too junked, or above it because they’re already too rich, or have realized their UltraMe, or because they’re stoked on romance inside and have to carry on in spite of all the evidence life flings in their faces or else they’ll collapse.
Even though I hate all that, I sometimes think I’d accept it as an alternative to the stupid moralizing high ground I seem to have stranded myself on. Oh shit.
Anything but to have to get through the next second in my own body, as myself.
It was ten past six. Clean, Francine, you silly cow. Don’t let Damien down.
I glanced over the long room, assessing what I still had to do. Along the great white length of the dressing tables, half-hidden by the costume racks and heaps of rubbish, I could see a bare back. Vertebrae humped up from the bronze skin like a monster surfacing. The humps were moving very slightly back and forth, so at least they weren’t dead (cleaning trolley bins not big enough for dead people). I was glad they were asleep, because that meant I didn’t have to talk to them.
As I went up to them I imagined that I might steal enough cash from them to get out of this place and out of Katy and Ludo’s long, considerate reach. They might have recently been given considerable gifts by some grateful millionaire who’s rediscovered their libido. That wasn’t so uncommon. I prayed for it as I stood on tiptoe and peered over clothes rails laden with three centuries of fashion, and forgot money.
A young man, straight out of the catalogue of sexually unthreatening transvestites, was slumped comatose over the counter-top. He had long, straight black hair like the mane on those fancy Dutch black horses, and an athlete’s body—they all do. His arms were splayed out among a load of empty soft drinks cans, his head facing me so that his cheek was flattened and mouth open. He was asleep and drooling slightly.
A gold-sequinned evening dress was fitted to him like a second skin. He was a real work of art, the heart of a sacred mystery, Shiva and Shakti reunited, beauty personified. It was the kind of thing that was so beyond me in every way I felt quite free in my staring. I thought I was immune to this . . . you see a lot of it in Genies and Stuffies, but there was a weirdness to this one. He looked as if he’d been born that way.
Whoever he was he slept like a princess, his tongue protruding slightly, an unlikely pink against the crimson glitter of blood-and-diamonds lipstick. The effect was only mildly spoiled by a long red scratch across his forehead. The emptiness of his abandoned face filled me with tenderness and jealousy.
I cleaned around him briskly, hoping he’d wake up, and also that he wouldn’t. I sorted the clothing that needed to be sent away for repairs and threw the destroyed garments into the rubbish. I picked up hair and gum and gum wrappers, discarded pep-patches, and TempTek that had become hard and crinkly when it died, just like the skin it mimicked when it hauled in all that fat, plumped out all those voids, sagged, wobbled, perked and defied logic to present bosoms and cocks at peerless angles.
I inspected the refrigerators and replaced used stocks of drinks and snacks. I ate the leftover bits of snacks from discarded bags, the last quarter inch of drinks out of cups, but they only made me feel hungrier. I looked at him but he hadn’t seen me stealing.
I used plastic tongs to collect the self-adhesive clothing that wasn’t disposable, and put it all in a sealed plastic container for decontamination. I took an air sample, and samples from all surfaces, to test them for viruses, bacteria, macrophages and alien proteins in the Trolley Testbox. I downloaded the data to the office on the top floor where they care—or not. I sprayed the sinks and showers with Nano-Fresh (“Cleans at the flick of a switch!”) and swept the floors old-fashioned style with a push mop. I cued the self-polishing mirrors to dump their waste into the dry sluice, and pumped the sluice into the trolley’s bin.
I licked the vinegar taste of cleaning spray off my hand, hoping that it might clean out my intestines a bit and do me some good, and thought for a second or two of the seafront because it reminded me of fish and chips. Then only the princess was left, his feet still strapped into their six-inch stiletto sandals beneath the chair.
I sat down next to him and wished I had something strong to take. I laid my head on the table-top just like his, put my arms in the position of his, opened my mouth and slackened my tongue to see what it felt like. I wondered what his name was and what he was doing here, and had been doing before he got here, and why he hadn’t gone home. The position we were in told me nothing, except that he must be more concussed than asleep because my cheekbone was already getting sore against the hard surface.
I stared at him resentfully, hating my own feelings because they were ugly.
He looked all right now: transvestite pussycat, he looked all pretty and nice. But as soon as he woke up, he’d change.
Nobody was the way they ought to be below the surface, especially people like him. He ought to be lovely if you only went on looks; a true friend, a wonderful lover, a great-spirited advocate of everything light, a fighter with attitude and a wicked sense of humour, a hero who didn’t swagger and annoy the shit out of everyone with the burden of being good. He should be as empathic as god would be if anybody generous-hearted had made god up.
There’re many people I’d seen like this princess: all miracle surface
. No surgery or treatment proves too extreme to serve their vanity (check my mother out), and their desire to enslave everyone. All have been bastards. Even I’m a bastard.
I stared at him and wished he was the real deal. Shame on him if he wasn’t. Shame on me because I wasn’t, because I can imagine it but not be it. Why the hell is that?
I looked at his perfect lips, thought of my own predictable face with dislike, and wondered if he had sex, and what with and for whom, and if he liked it or only pretended to and meanwhile had some stupid behind-the-scenes thing going where he was only doing it to finance a career in Solar journalism or a degree in one or other tedious legal subject that came with a whole package of fabulous futures. Perhaps he was only touring misery and I’d be some special stop on it, not a tart, not a heart.
His eyes opened as I was staring at them.
A thousand locked doors swung wide.
I stood up without knowing what I was doing except that I was very frightened, and just an instant before I had been in a state I couldn’t name, where every part of me was seen and called uniquely beautiful.
The sound of the music systems being tested upstairs brought me round. I picked up the floor brush and quickly pretended to be cleaning.
The princess slowly peeled his face away from the table. He put one hand over his chest for a moment and rubbed it back and forth, frowning, looking like he’d misplaced something. He swallowed and clearly didn’t care for the taste of his own tongue.
I swept the same two metres of floor again. I felt this unaccountable kind of energy in my bones, as though my body itself was laughing and wanted to dance. After another second or two the princess looked at himself in the mirror and scowled, peering into his own eyes for a long time, carefully, cautiously. He touched his cheeks and chin tentatively. Then he glanced sideways at me, then back at himself. He took a few breaths, then drew himself up to his full height with a single gesture, like a conductor lifting their baton for the first bar of a mammoth opera.
I tried to drink him in as much as possible, so I’d always remember and always be able to see him in my mind’s eye. Right now, before he ruined it all. He held out his right hand imperiously towards me. The nails were half a finger long, crusted with false jewels and unknown substances. He raised one eyebrow in a perfect arch and batted his fake eyelashes, inviting me to share the joke with him because beneath the pretence he was smiling a slightly shy, delighted smile.
“Cadenza Fortitude,” he murmured gently, just like a real queen, abruptly shifting gender in some undefinable yet exact manner. “A pleasure, Francine.”
I glanced down at my bright orange tabard and the name tag on it. Suddenly I noticed the mottled skin of my chilly hand on the handle of the broom, my bitten nails. I couldn’t look back, couldn’t believe I’d been about to smile that smile of recognition, the way I’d smiled at Damien days ago, as if I knew this guy and he was special to me from a long time ago and had returned from a long journey, as if he was the one.
God, he had to be a Stuffie, of course. Some new one I’d never seen before.
I said, “Piss off, will you. You’re in my way. I want to get home by seven.”
Cadenza Fortitude grinned, dropped her hand and got up. She was well over six feet tall in the high-heeled shoes. She rolled her eyes in their smoky black sockets and sighed in an exaggerated way at my rudeness and stupidity, smile undaunted, actually charmed as though I was playing along. Her sigh became a giggle, which she stifled with the back of the same hand.
Every pretty thing I’d ever seen I forgot about.
I said, struggling to keep hold on reality, “You can’t have a shower. I just cleaned them.”
“Really?” Cadenza examined herself more closely in the mirror and dabbed the scratch on her forehead, examining her fingertip for blood. “Christ.” For a moment she looked as though she was going to collapse and I took a half step forward but she corrected herself with a jerk and I leaped back, flushed and hot and angry with myself.
Well, that was that. “Really.” I finished wiping the table and stuffed all the cleaning gear rapidly back onto the trolley.
Now I wished Marion would hurry up. I bit my nails, but they were long gone. I bit the skin on my thumb instead, really hard so that it hurt, feeling fresh compulsiveness wash across me—the need to be somewhere else, doing something else. I tried reverting back to sensitive Francine instead of bolshy Francine, but no dice.
“Stop that!” Cadenza turned, reached across and yanked my hand out of my mouth with a finesse worthy of a prima ballerina.
I jerked backwards, almost spitting. I hadn’t been prepared for her to touch me. Nobody’s touched me in ten months, except for Damien’s hand holding. Nobody.
I saw that she was cross with me because I’d been hurting myself. My hand burned where she’d touched me. In her eyes the thousand doors, open.
Her expression softened and became gentle. She drew my hand to her mouth and kissed it. I pulled free and folded my arms. I was so hot, I didn’t know where to look.
“You can wash your hands, all right?” I snapped. “But I’m not doing those bathrooms again.”
Suddenly she took one stride forward and stood towering over me. I looked up and bit my lower lip until it was painful because I wanted to touch her so badly.
She gave me a death-ray stare that quite clearly said Well, if you’re going to play stupid I am too, held up her hands and snapped off her long fake fingernails, one after the other. She dropped each one individually into the trolley trash, as though she were dealing out tokens to minions. Then she stepped out of the ludicrous shoes, shrugged off the dress and kicked it under the table.
Looking directly into my eyes, the person who’d been underneath Cadenza all along thumb-keyed the tags on his corset and cast it aside. He was so close that if I leant forward even one degree I would have touched him.
I wanted to cry because he was so lovely and I wished I were too. I braced, waiting for the hit to happen to me, when it would all change, this haze destroyed to prove my earlier, uglier fantasy to be the brutal truth.
His expression softened and became serious as he looked at me with such concern that I had to look away. “Frannie?”
I stared furiously at my hideous, dirty tabard, then I looked up at him again, ready to kill him if I had to.
He bent down to look into one of my eyes, then the other, with a play-acting scientist’s serious scowl.
I stared at the centre of his bare chest, waxed smooth, all glittery. I didn’t know what to do.
“Uh-huh.” He turned, crossed the room, went into one of the showers and rubbed himself against the walls, covering himself in the part-foam part-slime of the Nano-Fresh. He didn’t bother to pull the curtain. “Flick the switch.”
I just stared at him. How could anyone just clean themselves off with industrial nanocyte compounds meant for scrubbing toilets?
“The remote. The remote for the cleaning stuff,” he repeated with tangible irritation.
I pressed the button on the trolley. The greasy cleaner suddenly became droplets on his skin. The droplets ran into each other and scurried quickly downwards, attracted by gravity and their software imperatives to gather in the drains ready for collection. They took with them everything that wasn’t attached. I was still puzzling about how he’d managed to keep the top layers of his skin as he came out of the cubicle. He rifled through several lockers, and emptied each one until he located a set of worn denims and bike boots, which I was sure weren’t his own.
He dressed and looked at himself in one of the mirrors again, shaking his head with a look of rueful resignation I couldn’t begin to understand. His expression became guarded for a second, then transformed into the smooth flat planes of determination, at the same time gaining in acuity like light being focused through a lens. His chin dropped a fraction as he turned back towards me and started to walk purposefully towards the exit. Within two strides his walk had assumed a monumental inertia s
o great I felt myself borne backwards on its invisible pressure wave and I had to take a step back. As he passed me he reached through this tidal front and caught hold of my hand. He twisted the broom out of my hand, tossed it, and tugged me along at his side, sliding his fingers in between mine with the easy confidence of the oldest friend I might have had in the world. He glanced at me and blushed very faintly. His smile was wicked. “Come on, don’t stand there with your mouth like that or a tram’ll drive into it.”
I thought of a lot to say: that Marion was about to arrive, that I had a lot to do, that he was only going to make fun of me, that I needed to get another shift sorted out or I wasn’t going to manage the rent on a new apartment, that he should go fuck himself.
“Look at the state of you.” He shook his head. We were still walking.
“I’m fine,” I said.
He was still holding my hand. We had passed the door. The street came rushing in at me, all twilight and shadows, the smell of the onshore wind as it freshened, the hot spicy odours of frying food at the delicatessens on the Forum, where people had started to order dinner, the busyness of commuters quickening their pace towards home, the hum of traffic crowding the roads, bicycle bells and rickshaw horns blurts of sparkle and glare, the clatter of a knight’s horse and his heavy armour as he turned off the main street and onto the green strip of parkway that started just beside us at the Circle’s edge, the flaring torches of Aelf 2 making every shade leap and dance, elemental fires tearing free to run up its massive trunk and gather with others among the leaves and gutters at the levels of the first roofs so the whole building was dripping upwards with light. Night was falling in Sankhara. Far away on Floating Mountain the deep, earth-toned boom of the monks’ ghost-calling horns sounded the sun down from the sky.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 7
