by Kim Newman
You want to hurry the building sensation, but she guides you, keeping the pace even, slowing you down.
You always imagined this but never expected it.
Not in your bedroom, with your family asleep in adjacent rooms, with your college textbooks on the shelf, with your outgrown pirate hat in the back of a cupboard, with a Christmas star made by your mum stuck on the door.
You reach up further, feeling Victoria’s neck, sliding fingers into her sprayed nest of hair.
Her murmurs get louder. Tiny speckles of red dot her white throat and breasts, drops of blood almost surfacing.
A cooling wind, flowing in through the open window, rushes around your bed.
Your mouth is open. You are at the point of climax. Warm, white, melting, bursting.
Victoria swallows a tiny scream and bends like a bow. You have come almost together.
Her head comes forward, into the shaft of light.
Her face is a blank.
The next morning, your pyjama fly is stiff with dried spunk and your bedroom window is shut behind drawn curtains.
But you can smell her hairspray on your fingers.
This was more than a dream, if less than an experience.
The next night, again, you wake suddenly. Victoria is sitting in your chair. She’s dressed all in black again, with jeans and a T-shirt under her cloak. Her hood is up, but her white face is distinct, like a night-light.
‘Keith,’ she says, ‘you’re pathetic.’
You sit up in bed.
‘You don’t think we’re real, do you? Women? We don’t feel like real people. We don’t hurt or exult or break or change. We’re just objects of promise, of pleasure. Maybe it’s not just women you don’t think are real. Maybe it’s everyone outside your skull.’
Her face is bone-white, but it’s Victoria. Not something else in disguise.
‘Last night?’ you ask.
‘Was that the best you could stretch your mind to? Hammer Films and porn mags?’
She lights a cigarette and sticks it in a holder.
‘You’ll never let anyone in, will you?’
You are shaken to the depths, but a resolve is being born.
‘I’m sorry, Keith. Really, I am. But we’ll get on without you. The rest of the world, I mean. If you stay in this room, with your mum making tea and doing the laundry, you’ll be safe. No one can hurt you. But you’ll be waiting for death.’
‘Go away,’ you say.
She does.
A pattern has been set.
At university, you’re too busy to cultivate a social circle. But you still dream — real dreams, now — of the faceless Victoria. In your second year, you live off-campus, in Brighton. Because you study so hard, you often need to let off steam. You start using prostitutes. There are a great many available in town, especially during the off-season. Your habits are frugal, so you finance weekly women out of your student grant. Orgasm is just a necessity, like eating and bathing; and as easily bought, got over with, and forgotten.
Several women go with you two or three times, but you prefer whores you haven’t had before. As soon as you’re on the point of becoming a regular, you drop them. You discourage any intimacy beyond sex, always visiting your women in their lodgings, never having them back to your room, rarely giving any name, not answering casual questions. You sense the whores can’t make you out — you lose count of the times you are asked ‘haven’t you got a girlfriend?’ — but go along with you. That’s their job after all.
They are friendly, frumpy, hot-and-cold, overripe, chatty. They are mostly older than you and you wonder how they got to be where they are. Their hair is dyed but with a fraction of natural colour at the roots. They mention absent fathers, boyfriends, husbands, children. Names: Karen, Sharon, Margie, Ruth, Doll, Ginger, Babs, Debbie. With sex, you get a cup of tea-bag tea. You usually pay £5, in notes — enough to buy two cinema tickets and fish and chips on the way home — for half an hour. Oral sex (‘French’) costs a tenner, so you rarely demand the service.
Before you have a degree, you are recruited by a bank. Not a high-street bank, like the one your father works for, but a financial institution. You like to keep things neat and move money around, coaxing it into growth. With the job come the trappings of a successful life in the early 1980s: a large flat in west London, a flash but not sporty car, good clothes, fine wines, expense-account lunches, unusual foreign holidays. You don’t have girlfriends, fiancées or wives. You have colleagues, bosses and juniors. You don’t need friends. You can’t afford connections that would make you weak.
You still have whores. Not off the street, but elegant, hard, young callgirls with fashion-model wardrobes and Beverly Hills bodies. You meet them in hotels, scheduling appointments for convenience, consulting your Filofax. They lack the embarrassing sentimental streak of the Brighton women. If they think anything about you, they would never let you know. You find this cooling, comforting.
They are businesslike, glamorous, fire-and-ice, lean, unforthcoming. They are your age and going somewhere. Their bodies are artificially tanned, all over except for the soles of their feet. They have managers, drivers, maids, minders. Names: Judi, Coral, Nina, Suzanne, Julie, Tiger, Opal, Jacqueline. With sex, you get a line of cocaine. You usually pay £100, by cheque drawn on a special account — enough to be worth declaring as an entertainment expense — for half an hour. All night costs a grand, but the expense is not why you rarely exercise the option.
You become a partner in your firm, but stockpile clients and connections against the day, in the late ’80s, when you found your own business. You launch very successfully, in the wake of the Big Bang of 1986, which deregulates the market, and buy a house in Esher and a flat in the newly developed London Docklands. You see your girls at the flat. It is deliberately characterless. The nameplate is an alias. The stock market crash rocks the City, and you lose a considerable number of clients — many flee back to your old firm — haemorrhaging money as if from a cut throat. Despite your manoeuvres, your business goes under. No one tries to prop you up, underwrite you, take you over or buy you out. You’ve never needed anyone before, so there is no one quixotic enough to assume you need help.
With money tight, as you move from one temporary consultancy to the next, you take to kerb-crawling around King’s Cross station. Not callgirls, but whores from the north, from council estates. You pull them into your car and park somewhere dark so they can slip a condom on your penis and suck you off swiftly. Like McDonald’s staff, they have only a few set phrases — ‘Want a girl?’, ‘In the car or at a place I know?’, ‘Thank you, darling’ — but you sense hatred in every word.
They are desperate, drab, passionless, unhealthy, lost. They are much younger than you and dying. They have too much eye make-up to cover the bruises and pebble-dash needle-marks on their arms. They have pushers, babies, social workers, probation officers. They have no names, but many are black or mixed-race or the British equivalent of Poor White Trash. With sex, you get nothing. You usually pay £20, in hard, heavy pound coins — enough to fill a sock and use as a cosh — for as brief a time as it takes. A blow-job without a condom costs three times as much, which is an extortion you suffer when you think you can afford it.
In the ’90s, without the house in Esher, but with the flat in Docklands, you get your business back together. It is absorbed into the Derek Leech Group of Companies, mostly because your flat — from which you operate — is in a block Leech, the multimedia tycoon, has bought and converted. You have learned harsh lessons during your reversal — you have a police record for kerb-crawling and have been obsessive about blood tests — but feel you are fitter than ever to survive the next century.
As an experiment, because you’re bored, you refuse to pay a whore after an especially perfunctory blow-job. You hit her, push her out of the car, and drive off. She’s a nothing. She doesn’t count. Strangely, this retroactively improves your memory of the orgasm.
It’s 1994.
This is the first sex you’ve had without paying for it, since … What was her name?
Victoria. 1976.
And did that happen?
There’s a girl in the office called Vickie. She must have been born in the year Victoria came through your bedroom window, and her colouring is different.
You find yourself thinking about her a lot.
You pull her file and find where she lives. She has a flat not far from yours.
One evening, you wait opposite her building. She gets back at about eleven, from the cinema perhaps, with a boyfriend. He stays over. You go home.
The next evening, she gets back at half-past six, straight from the office, alone. You ring her bell, and explain that it’s important. She buzzes you up.
You rape her.
Your kerb-crawling conviction tells against you. Otherwise, the judge might have thought this was an office romance gone wrong.
You enter the new century — on 1 January 2000 or 2001, depending on how you read it — in prison.
By the time you are eligible for parole, tough new laws on sex offenders require that you be medicated to suppress your ‘urges’ and be tagged by the police. Your name, photo and Vickie’s shadow-faced account of your crime are broadcast nightly on Cloud 9 cable TV’s Crime Channel — owned by Derek Leech, of course — and you are frequently recognised and abused in the streets.
Several times, you are arrested and grilled simply because it has been assumed that you are looking lustfully at a woman or a girl.
You are found low-grade employment. In prison, you have learned computing skills. You do the Century 21 equivalent of addressing envelopes, organising electronic mail-outs for special offers.
Cloud 9’s Home Fantasy Channel offers all manner of legal sexual services. No-contact, debit-card exchanges. The women are computer-generated, morphing to suit your tastes as you input desires on a touch-pad.
Because of your medication, exchanges with these virtual whores are unsatisfactory. You go into debt, racking up minute after minute of line-time as you fail, in the terminology, to sustain or achieve.
You lose interest.
In the end, whatever you do, you do alone.
And so on.
Begin again?
56
You open the window and Victoria explodes into your room. She is lithe, in black and white. She wears knee-high black boots, elbow-length black gloves, a hooded black cloak fastened at the neck, and some sort of much-buckled leather corset. Her hair is permed out in a Bride of Frankenstein frizz, with an electric white streak.
She doesn’t say anything, but angrily slaps you in your mouth, and viciously clamps her hand on your erection.
You don’t wonder how she came to be outside your window.
She shoves you back towards your bed, forces you down and pins you with a spike-heel. Her cloak tents around her and she grinds her heel into your soft, yielding belly. She unfastens her cloak and lets it fall behind her. Her slender body shines black like a whip. Moonlight dapples her as she gouges you, slowly. You reach up and she slaps your hands away.
Her face is in shadow. She growls, throat pulsing.
You want to stop the pain in your stomach, but she stabs at you, spreading the hurt, dragging out the agony.
You always feared this but never expected it.
Not in your bedroom, with your family asleep in adjacent rooms, with your college textbooks on the shelf, with your outgrown pirate hat in the back of a cupboard, with a Christmas star made by your mum stuck on the door.
You struggle, grasping Victoria’s neck, sliding fingers into her sprayed nest of hair.
Her growls get louder. Tiny speckles of red dot her white throat and breasts, drops of blood almost surfacing.
A cooling wind, flowing in through the open window, rushes around your bed.
Your mouth is open. You are at the point of screaming.
Hot, black, grinding, bursting.
Victoria swallows a tiny cackle and bends like a bow. You have collapsed almost together.
Her head comes forward, into the shaft of light.
Her face is a blank.
The next morning, your pyjama top is stiff with dried blood and your bedroom window is shut behind drawn curtains.
But you can smell her hairspray on your fingers.
This was more than a dream, if less than an experience.
The next night, again, you wake suddenly. Victoria is sitting in your chair. She is dressed all in black again, with jeans and a T-shirt under her cloak. Her hood is up, but her white face is distinct, like a night-light.
‘Keith,’ she says, ‘you’re pathetic.’
You sit up in bed.
‘You don’t think we’re real, do you? Women? We don’t feel like real people. We don’t hurt or exult or break or change. We’re just objects of threat, of pain. Maybe it’s not just women you don’t think are real. Maybe it’s everyone outside your skull.’
Her face is bone-white, but it’s Victoria. Not something else in disguise.
‘Last night?’ you ask.
‘Was that the worst you could stretch your mind to? Hammer Films and porn mags?’
She lights a cigarette and sticks it in a holder.
‘You’ll never let anyone in, will you?’
You are shaken to the depths, but a resolve is being born.
‘I’m sorry, Keith. Really, I am. But we’ll get on without you. The rest of the world, I mean. If you stay in this room, with your mum making tea and doing the laundry, you’ll be safe. You can only hurt yourself. But you’ll be waiting for death.’
‘Go away,’ you say.
She does.
A pattern has been set.
At university, you’re too busy to cultivate a social circle. But you still dream — real dreams, now — of the faceless Victoria. In your second year, you live off-campus, in Brighton. Because you study so hard, you often need to let off steam. You take to drinking quite a bit. When you drink, restraint evaporates and your temper lets loose. You frequently get into fights which you eventually lose. You pick arguments with groups of men, older and harder, men who naturally dislike students. There are lots of pubs in Brighton. You get banned from quite a few of them, but you are nondescript and often barmen don’t connect your sober self with the violent drunk.
To supplement your meagre students’ grant, you occasionally mug people. Late at night, on the sea front or in the Lanes, you find someone drunker than you are, thump them a time or two on the head, and snatch their cash, their watches, their wallets. Sometimes, you wrestle off rings. You strike fast, hit hard and get away quick. You are never picked up by the police and none of your assaults gets more than the barest report in the Evening Argus. You start out by just using your fists, but your knuckles get badly bruised so you experiment with a coin-filled sock before settling on brass knuckles.
As your violence becomes more commercially oriented, you drink less. You take classes in martial arts and boxing, though you’re always expelled before you complete a course, for overstepping the mark and really hurting someone. Sometimes, to teach you a lesson, the instructor gives you a public beating to pay you back. You win a few amateur bouts and spectacularly lose one, and realise you’re too smart to rely on this as a way of making a living. But you will keep it up.
Before you have a degree, you are recruited by a bank. Not a high-street bank, like the one your father works for, but a financial institution. You like to take control and wrestle money around, forcing it into growth. With the job come the trappings of a successful life in the early 1980s: a large flat in west London, a flash but not sporty car, good clothes, fine wines, expense-account lunches, unusual foreign holidays. You get ‘engaged’ several times, always ending the relationship well before you give in to the need to hit your ‘fiancée’. You work well in the firm, but you need a life outside it.
At your gym, you take up kick-boxing and repeatedly thrash junior executives and financial
consultants. Once or twice, you put friendly opponents in hospital. You go through the formalities of apologising, but they’ll always remember you in the frenzy of the clinch. Strangely, this is good for you in your job, giving you an underground rep that helps you close deals and see off rivals. You still mug people, not for the money but for the night thrill. You are extremely cautious, always operating well off your home ground and selecting victims who are too drunk and disoriented to remember much.
You become a partner in your firm, but stockpile clients and connections against the day, in the late ’80s, when you found your own business. You launch very successfully, in the wake of the Big Bang of 1986, which deregulates the market, and buy a house in Esher and a flat in the newly developed London Docklands. It has its own gym, and you sometimes invite people back for ‘a bit of a punch-up’. The stock market crash rocks the City, and you lose a considerable number of clients — many flee back to your old firm — haemorrhaging money as if from a cut throat. Despite your manoeuvres, your business goes under. No one tries to prop you up, underwrite you, take you over or buy you out. Everyone knows about your tendencies and too many remember specific instances. No-one is inclined to give you any help.
With money tight, as you move from one temporary consultancy to the next, you take to serious mugging. You specialise in foreigners — Arabs or Japanese — and work around the West End hotels. You learn how to convert jewelery, traveller’s cheques, top-of-the-line watches and calculators into cash. But these efficient, brutal encounters don’t take up all the slack. You need to receive as well as give, so you hire women and men to provide the service. Often, you pay them off with merchandise lifted from your victims. Not many of these professionals will deal with you more than once, because you like to break the rules and fight back.
In the ’90s, without the house in Esher, but with the flat in Docklands, you get your business back together. It is absorbed into the Derek Leech Group of Companies, mostly because your flat — from which you operate — is in a block Leech, the multi-media tycoon, has bought and converted. You have learned some harsh lessons during your reversal — you have a police record for aggravated assault — but feel you are fitter than ever to survive the next century.
