Solomon's Keepers

by J. H. Kavanagh

  Eight

  Roman Barstow lies in an approximation of the recovery position, his heavy body almost filling the mattress on the floor of his room. From above and to one side, the perspective from which his mother, Adrienne, observes, there is a thin flange of crumpled white sheet around his black track suited body like the line the police draw on the floor before removing a corpse from a crime scene in one of her favourite lurid detective magazines. His head is completely encased in a close-fitting silver plastic helmet with a protruding pod where his forehead is presumed to be. Adrienne is not disconcerted, having witnessed this scene repeated regularly for months. As if to call off a pointless bluff, Roman indicates signs of life. He starts writhing, steadily, rhythmically, completely oblivious to her presence.

  ‘Hello,’ she says in the manner of a pantomime policeman and bends to plug in the vacuum.

  A pair of trousers lies in her path and she kicks them out of the way and scoops up the socks and pants they are incubating. The vacuum mows and nags up to the mattress and then gasps as she lifts its head to suck a line of cigarette ash from the creased edge a few inches from her son’s head. Roman, evidently in his own world, shifts suddenly as though electrocuted, throwing his head back and jerking his legs before subsiding into a kind of limbless swimming motion, something like a seal or a penguin underwater. This action stretches taut the thick wire that runs to the window ledge and twitches the electric cable that connects the back of his head to the socket his helmet shares with the vacuum. It occurs to Adrienne that Roman himself now looks like a rival appliance. Quite what purpose was served by his steady kneading of the mattress was beyond her but the breath of whimsy brought by this question helps lift her frustration. ‘Hey!’ she shouts, ‘the house is on fire.’ She knows full well that Roman will not respond. ‘Hey! The bin men have just been and guess what – they ran over your bike.’ She runs the vacuum up the narrow strip that separates the other side of the mattress from the bedroom wall, nudging a mobile, an empty packet of cigarettes and an intimately curved leather wallet into a heap a few inches from the blank face of her son’s helmet. ‘I’m talking to my bloody self, I know that,’ she yells, adding ‘randy bastard’ as he enters a new and, from this side, unambiguous bout of writhing.

  Inside the helmet, inside another world, as complete and real as your own, as mine, Roman’s brain recreates another environment and the sensations originated in another mind. This time, as it has been from the first time, the experience is as lifelike in every detail as any he has ever had unaided – and one which he takes to be as exact a facsimile of the original act as the physiology of his brain allows. To Roman, it is the experience of genuine and total control.

  The girl is naked on the bed. She lies on one side with her legs drawn part way up towards her, ankles crossed and fabulous bum at the perfect angle as fire lit cheeks and deep unpursing shadow. Beautifully contrived, she gathers her breasts in one arm as she turns and releases the generous coinage of her nipples, flashing an impish smile as she sizes you up. You stand close and she sprawls to the edge of the bed and tugs your towel until it comes away. Your cock is glad to be free and swings out to her. You are just vaguely aware of a greater participation, a greater sharing of the moment which is both intimate and also a sort of exhibition. There is an extra striving, an extra edge and an extra thrill. You can sense her awareness of it too. You look down at her bobbing head. She tosses her hair and turns her face to one side. You watch the rhythmic bulge and hollow of her cheek and feel yourself sway with distraction. Your head is back and your mouth drops open. In a moment you feel the springs tightening under her insistent attention and you want to come. But that would be too soon.

  She laughs and turns to show her bum spread open and wiggling. She’s looking round and smiling and backing towards you. Her head tosses back and hair tumbles on her shoulders. You grab her cheeks and plant your face between, tongue deep enough to find the tang. Then you’re standing against her, she’s reaching for you underneath, pulling you into place.

  Ouch! A sudden pain jabs in Roman’s back and the room goes dark. All sensation, warmth and fragrance drain away. All he has left is his heart pounding and the closing heat around his head.

  Roman juggles two interpretations in two alternative worlds and realizes that he is returning to the vastly more familiar, the excruciatingly less attractive option. The power has been turned off. Normally a scat ends with a warm down routine that deposits you back in your smaller, paler reality with a sigh and a gentle bump, like an expert parachutist. In fact, he now realises, his mother has trodden on his back and pulled the plug out. The connotation is that this is a fortnightly Friday benefit day.

  Roman’s broad and sparsely whiskered face emerges tentatively from his helmet and freezes like a frightened squirrel between the adjacent boles of his mother’s ankles and the hollow plastic stump of the vacuum. High above, his mother’s face looks down on him like a malevolent sun. ‘Shift,’ she says.

  ‘Whatcha do that for?’ he says, distractedly, unnecessarily. Mrs. Barstow takes a step back and steadies herself before moving off. ‘Dole’, is all she adds.

  Roman feels along the edge of the mattress and produces a watch. It’s ten thirty. That gives him another five minutes. He hears the vacuum lower its register as it passes from carpet to the lino of the bathroom floor next door. Fuck it. He unplugs and starts to coil the power cable. The helmet, alone amongst his possessions, will be carefully stowed again, by him, inside his wardrobe. There is a perfectly sized and appropriately cushioned aperture amongst the compressed aggregate of his lesser possessions on the top shelf. It is worth the reverence. This is a Nandie; a sleek silver sculpture with a domed top and a ridge at the front like a Neanderthal’s brow. Worth five grand retail and only three months old it is (as any of his friends would breathily confirm) the dog’s bollocks.

  Adrienne Barstow retreats to the landing and addresses herself to removing the trail of footprints that marks Roman’s last major movements and corroborates her reconstruction of his choice of return path across the back garden the night before.

  Adrienne was in fact no stranger to KomViva. She had herself been persuaded not by Roman but her friend Eileen, a near neighbour. She’d tried Eileen’s son’s headset. It wasn’t a Nandie but quite a fancy one nevertheless. It had seemed a cumbersome thing; much heavier than it looked and quite frightening to wear as you could see absolutely nothing. It was like a full face crash helmet with no hole for the face. It had been horribly claustrophobic at first. She had the strange sense as soon as she put it on that she had more than just left her body outside, that she had disconnected it. She’d insisting on having a switch in her hand, to turn it off if it got too much. But it didn’t have the wimps’ widget that the Nandie had so eventually they’d agreed that Eileen would sit by the socket and turn the power off if Adrienne raised her arm. It was an archive experience, not live, and Eileen’s son had already tried it and told her it was okay. Even so they had another drink each first. They’d both giggled as Adrienne suddenly said ‘Okay, let’s go for it!’

  The car is a hollow blade with tinted windows trapping dunes of leather. You fold into the muscular embrace of the front seat, twist the key in the chrome eye and feel the edge of pain in the ensuing roar. The back of the car shudders, the front bunches on metal knuckles. You rev it hard and fill the air with the smell of petrol, of fury as you lean forward and prod the stereo on. Loud. Bass stumbling in the footwells like a bison on boards, chopped chords and striving voices chiming on the windows. You palm the gear shift – yes please made metal. The smile is wide on your face as you stamp your right foot. A snarl trumps the music and the rear view jinks and darkens in smoke, concrete pillars leap past and the exit ramp dives under a churn of rubber. The entire view is concrete for a few scrabbling seconds and then you are airborne, exploding into light. Some of the light is a white van; the rest is a column of evening sky, orange and blue between tall buildings. You swerve enough t
o turn a head on crash into a smear and the rear wheel arch takes his front wing. The shock cascades through your body. Right foot. The street is pointing right into the sunset, four lanes wide. The blare of horns fades as you find a gap between tail lights and then twenty yards of pavement clear to the intersection. Two men in suits leap sideways like a grey splash as you jump the lights in front of a truck…

  That was enough. There was no way Adrienne was raising her hand but Eileen was alarmed by her friend’s desperate gripping of an invisible wheel and took that as the signal. She was trembling when she took the helmet off. To make matters worse, Eileen then said that her son said you had to train yourself to get the real effects of it. You needed to spend something like twenty hours inside it before your brain really reacted the right way. Only the week before there had been an alarming documentary on about how some people are spending their lives in these things. The programme likened them to artificial respirators. It said that if trends continued there would be a million kids spending up to five hours a day on them. Now she knew why.

  Roman pads down to the kitchen in his socks, makes himself a grated cheese sandwich and exits through the front door, hopping on one foot whilst tugging the boot on to the other and with the sandwich clamped in his mouth. The day has an outline plan: He will meet Windy at the Benefit Office and do the necessary. Then the pair of them will go round to Roman’s brother Jake’s place to pick up their allotted switches of Escanol to offload. Jake will forward them twenty – enough for a couple of pints and a game of pool in the Bird in Hand. They can do the rounds and be done by the end of the afternoon in time for The Big Connection that evening.

  Roman climbs Dane Hill breathlessly. It is an overcast summer day, warm enough to make him sweat as he walks. Above him, the first city towers reach into a liquid sky the colour of unlit light bulbs. Below, the brown stone terraces and muddied playing fields gather like a sediment. The rumours are that tonight’s scat is going to be something very special. Usually, you had a few leaks and lots of internet bullshit in the run up to any live scat but this one was being cultivated as out of the ordinary. What was ever ordinary though? Roman is not easily moved. He is an old hand. He’s been in since the beginning. Because of Jake’s connections with the distributors he was on the private list before KomViva was even launched. In fact he’d been a trialer for the first headsets on Hypercable and has a precious golden badge for the initial sex scat with Jayleen Diamond. They only ever made five thousand of those, Windy told him that for a fact. About half way up the hill he starts to jog. In a few steps he thinks the better of it and resumes walking. He spits the last mouthful of the sandwich over a fence. The cheese is stale, like dried bogies. He isn’t bothered about being late for the dole office but he is anxious to get to Jake’s and pick up the Escanol before his brother gets up, around midday.

  Windy is being done when he gets there. Roman takes a seat in the row of red chairs facing the line of desks, each with its matched pair of one in and one out of work. Clients, as they now are. He watches Windy talking animatedly with the lad behind the desk. His hands are making sculptures, helmets around his head and they are both laughing. Has he done any work in the last two weeks? Course he hasn’t. Is he going to hook up tonight? Course he fucking is! The place is heaving. It seems to Roman that over the last year or so that he’s been coming here there has been a steady increase in the numbers on the dole. It’s a pain because if you miss your slot you can wait for hours to be seen. Pointless really. They ought to have pods you could hook into while you waited. Might as well be doing something useful. Some of the staff look like they could do with getting hooked up too. Probably don’t get paid enough though, poor sods. Roman scans the line of faces and tries to decide which ones would be coming on board. The thin woman on the very end is a definite no. Her face says she hasn’t smiled in a decade. A good scat would shatter her like a vase. The old guy with the grey comb-over and the blazer could become a convert. He has a wicked look. He looks the sort of bloke who would sneakily trade in a train set or an old car for a HiThrust, or hang in for the long awaited Sony maybe. The young lad talking to Windy? Well, the gestures speak for themselves. Not just a Hookie but odds on he’s already paying off a Nandie. The woman in the black suit and the pony tail by the dying cheese plant is difficult. Roman concludes that she could have tried a friend’s but isn’t a confirmed user. Then he sees her laugh and changes his mind to a definite yes. He reckons most people he knows between say fourteen and twenty-five are already sometime users and anyone with kids must surely have at least had their chance (Eileen said even his mum had once). You’d be amazed how many youngsters have hooked up. Windy’s brother is only twelve and half his mates are old hands. How many was that? There was something on the television about a grey market. The Nandie was even getting a seniors’ caution feature. They’d never put that on a box like that unless the marketing guys had the evidence. Clever move. To judge by the live rates and the way the adverts are directed on Network One, KomViva is really moving in on the middle-aged market, on the money. Roman’s eyes wander back to Comb-over. Follow the money. What choices does a guy like that have? What’s he going to do to top KomViva? Forget it.

  The woman in black looks at him. ‘Mr. Barstow?’ she calls. He smiles and walks over. It isn’t usually her that he sees.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. His name is on a list in front of her. She’s leafing through a pack of beige folders to find him. ‘Batchelor, Banner, Barlow…How are you, Mr. Barstow?’

  ‘Chipper,’ he says, suddenly realising how hot he feels. He feels chipper all right, just probably looks like shit.

  The woman looks at him and smiles again. Little flecks of crimson lipstick have attached to her teeth. She has a black blouse on that exposes a generous triangle of roasted skin below her throat. A shoal of brown and tan freckles swim there, putting Roman in mind of a colour blindness test he once failed. She hands him a sheet with a column of his previous signatures like a petition of clones. ‘Have you done any work in the last fortnight?’ Nah. Still looking in the local papers? All the usual stuff. When she’s done he looks at her and asks her cheerfully if she is going to hook up to The Big Connection tonight. He has a feeling. She turns quite mischievous and twinkly. ‘Oh I don’t go in for that sort of thing – he’s very naughty, isn’t he?’

  Told you so, he thinks.

  They get to Jake’s and he’s making breakfast; beans on toast, Worcester sauce, thick white bread and a Special Brew. They watch him eat it while they have a tin each and a couple of roll ups. Jake’s friend Sooya counts out the phials of Escanol from a rattling but hidden fold of her sari. She doesn’t smile. Roman knows her from the electronics showroom. She’s moving up. Jake has her drive the deliveries in the new development the locals call the Khyber Pass.

  From Jake’s you can take a short cut across the edge of the new Tesco site. There’s an island of condemned old terraced houses behind grey weld mesh fences. A pair of JCBs is caged there like yellow dinosaurs and every day they munch off another piece of ugly history and leave a new ragged edge of bricks and wallpaper hanging above the old street. The buildings have been empty for years and it’s strange to see the preserved intimacy of a living room or a bedroom suddenly exposed to the elements. You half expect to see some old dear in slippers and a floral wrap totter up the stairs with a cup of tea and drop off the ripped boards. You there, dear? Splat! You could make a war film there. For some reason nobody is working today and the big JCBs stand idle. The boys wait to finish Windy’s joint before they squeeze between the fence panels at the far end and cross the street to the Bird in Hand. The pub is a big old three storey blockhouse and on either side there are little dark cottages that open directly on to the street. They look like a string of children holding a parent’s hand and leaning forward before crossing the road. The whole lot is on borrowed time. Six months, the landlord said. You couldn’t see anything behind the grimy nets in the windows but every now and again people would
come and go through the little doorways. It was hard to imagine the way it would all be when the artist’s impression of the new site that he’d seen in the papers, with its clean red bricks, watercolour trees and suggested shrubs, became a reality. He and Windy would probably switch to The Granby.

  They sit at the bar; watching American football and drink a lager each. The pub is doing sparse custom and the landlord eyes them cautiously but says nothing about dealing. Two brickies are taking forever over one game at the pool table. The bar is loud with the clicks of the cues and the dope makes it even louder and accentuates the comic rigmarole that passes for expertise; all the pointing at pockets, the leaning and straightening, calculations, rethinks.

  ‘They’re never going to finish. And look at the clink on the side. We’re fucked,’ Windy observes, gloomily.

  ‘Tossers,’ Roman snarls. ‘Fancy a bap?’

  Roman doesn’t understand American football. The players hardly ever get anywhere. It’s all stop start. He likes the atmosphere though. It is definitely charged up. ‘They must all be on something,’ he says, ‘America tablets.’ Actually, that would be a good idea. They’d go like hot cakes, in fact like hot dogs. ‘Dargs,’ he mutters.

  ‘What’re you on about?’ asks Windy.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The barman brings Roman’s bap. The ham is the real stuff – a thick fibrous wedge – but the bun is soggy with marge and covered in flour like talc, as though it had just got out of the bath. Windy sticks to crisps.

  Roman watches Windy get another round in. He’s older than Roman. Maybe twenty-two but so thin he looks younger. He’s done some roofing. He wasn’t good with heights though – hence the name. His legs are like tent poles in his baggy denims, his shoulders sharp in his black leather jacket like a coat hanger. He has a long noble face that deserves better than the crew cut and meagre earrings; deserves something dashing. His blue eyes flicker like a sword fight.